hsu, 'spew: the queer punk convention', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-hsu-spew.txt spew: the queer punk convention by bill hsu <hsu@csrd.uiuc.edu> university of illinois, champaign-urbana _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by bill hsu, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. spew. the first queer punk fanzine convention. may 25 1991. randolph street gallery, chicago. "no panels. no workshops. no keynote address. vanloads of noisy dykes and fags." [1] while hardcore in the early '80s was mostly a straight white male phenomenon, gender-bending had often been a feature of punk in the '70s. queer punks were ostracized by both the mainstream gay communities (for being punks) and the mainstream hardcore communities (for being queer). letters from queer-identified punks began appearing in punk fanzines in the mid-80s, usually provoking responses from homophobic punks. queer versions of the traditional punk fanzines started soon after. [2] _maximum rock 'n' roll_, the bastion of politically progressive hardcore culture, has occasional columns by tom jennings of _homocore_ (one of the first queer punk zines), and gave some coverage to the queer punk scene in its april 1989 "sexuality" issue. the original plan was to devote a full issue to queer punks, but apparently lip service is all the hardcore establishment is willing to give. [3] queer punks built their own network, with their own fanzines and events. there are still relatively few openly queer punk/hardcore bands, but some established bands are supportive; fugazi and mdc have played at _homocore_ benefits. queer punks have encountered only limited acceptance in the hardcore establishment. some have found more support from gay activist groups such as actup and queer nation, and the more radical arts communities. [4] the queer punk "movement" is not as strong in europe as it is in north america, perhaps because the punk fanzine network is stronger in the us and canada, and it was through this network that queer punks started organizing. also, the european hardcore scene has strong ties to anarchist youth movements and tends to be less homophobic; perhaps queer punks in europe have found a more supportive environment in european hardcore communities, and do not feel the need to establish their own network. most of the queer punk fanzines that i'm aware of (and that attended spew) are based in the us or canada. [5] for spew, randolph street gallery was divided into a display area for zines and merchandise, a video area and a performance area. most of the major queer punk zines were in attendance: _jds_ (one of the first and most visible, usually featuring g.b. jones' stylish photographs and graphics and bruce la bruce's gritty and affecting writing), the exuberant and ornery _bimbox_, the campy and literate _thing_, vaginal creme davis' hilarious _fertile latoyah jackson_, etc. most zines that were not attending sent recent issues and merchandise for display. chicago's actup and queer nation both had tables. [6] the performance area buzzed all afternoon with readings and music. novelist dennis cooper, who had performed earlier that week at club lower links and medusa's, read again from his brilliant new book _frisk_ and from older work. he was a nervous reader, shuffling his feet around and stubbing his toes on the floor ("from a distance people think i'm a kid.") the delivery was mostly deadpan and lowkey, and he was charming and funny. [7] the other readings were not as interesting. many of the readers are excellent writers, but they were not very careful about how their texts came across when read, and what kind of delivery was necessary for good effect. drag was once again subversive and dangerous rather than merely polite: joan jett blakk (chicago "mayor" in drag) and elvis herselvis (the female elvis impersonator) performed to backing tapes, and vaginal creme davis (a 6'6 african-american self-styled "blackstress") did her usual hilarious cabaret song-and-dance routine, with boisterous gospel and blues wailing. club lower links regular andy soma was a religious icon almost with that pierre et gilles gloss. [8] i missed most of the videos (spending more time in the performance room and at the tables), except for bruce labruce's _no skin off my ass_, which has been making the rounds at gay film festivals all over. unfortunately the sound was very bad and i couldn't understand much of the voice-overs. the film is in grainy black-and-white and very well-crafted. bruce plays a hairdresser (gb jones is his "sister") who has a fling with a skinhead with the usual attitude ("i can't be a fag, i'm a skinhead" etc etc). the usual comparisons have been with warhol but the camera in _no skin_ is much more active: there are some really nice tracking shots and very effective montages. more a punk _mala noche_ with ear and nipple-piercing sequences than, say, _flesh_ or _chelsea girls_. [9] the post-convention party at hot house gallery featured house and hiphop grooves from thing dj's, and performances from joan jett blakk, vaginal creme davis and toronto all-female post-punk band fifth column. fifth column was without a guitarist and the first few songs with g.b. jones on guitar and guests on lead guitar and drums (and supporting drum machine) were a little ragged, but the band really came together when g.b. jones switched to drums. fifth column started sounding like their tight, vicious first album. at their best, they recall a raw garage-y throwing muses with more interesting rhythms. the set ended with their strongest songs, _kangaroo court_ with the nervous jerky rhythms and their "hit", _fairview mall story_ (about police entrapment of gay men in toronto bathrooms). [10] the event ended on a sour note: steve lafreniere, one of the main organizers, was stabbed in the back by passing gay-bashers. (he has since recovered.) [11] i found it interesting that very few people from the traditional hardcore crowd were at spew. instead, more of the attendees were from the "new allies" of the queer punk movement: actupers, queer nationals, and radical queer artists and performers. apparently, despite all the rhetoric about liberal/progressive politics, the hardcore establishment still has to come to terms with its homophobia. hart, 'graven images', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-hart-graven.txt graven images by henry hart the college of william & mary copyright (c) 1991 by henry hart, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.1 (january, 1991) karen mills-courts. _poetry as epitaph, representation and poetic language_. baton rouge: louisiana state univ. press, 1990. 326 pp. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. [1] it might seem strange that a book erected on the deconstructionist foundations of jacques derrida should take its title from that celebrated advocate of hierarchies, t.s. eliot. since titles foreshadow unities of theme and stance, at first glance it would appear that karen mills-courts's _poetry as epitaph_ courts the courtly values of eliot, authorizing and ordering her own critical principles by locating them in eliot's authoritative shadow. eliot's presence certainly haunts much of her book, most noticeably at the end of the introduction where she quotes from "little gidding": "every poem [is] an epitaph." she also provides the longer passage which sketches eliot's belief in poetic propriety, "where every word is at home / taking its place to support the others, / the word neither diffident nor ostentatious, / an easy commerce of the old and new. . . ." for mills-courts, this endorsement of a poetic language that is decorous, humble, and unified, organically lodged in tradition yet politely asserting its modernity, mixing memory and desire, ends and beginnings, dead and living, is the gist of "t.s. eliot's remarkable moment of insight." [2] the moment is also an end and a beginning for her own investigation into poetry's ability to either present or represent, incarnate or imitate the mind's inspired thoughts. her attitude towards eliot typifies the theme of the book. if she supplicates eliot's ghost, engraving his words on the gray, tombstone-like cover of her book, she also argues against and periodically expels his presence and the platonic and christian notions of spiritualized language ("tinged with fire beyond the language of the living") that during privileged "timeless moments" supposedly incarnate the poet's visions. she explains her own stance as poised between "heidegger [who] thinks of language as presentational or `incarnative'" and "derrida [who] thinks of language as ungrounded `representation'." through her bifocal lenses she examines representative texts from the beginning of what she would call, with derrida, the logocentric tradition of western culture, and proceeds to map a gradual disillusionment with the capacity of the logos to embody or present intended meanings. she moves from plato, the bible, and augustine through george herbert, wordsworth, and shelley, and finishes with a lengthy discussion of john ashbery. in some ways, however, eliot remains her shadowy guide, her principle example of the poet torn between an ontotheological conviction that poetry is the living incarnation of the maker's divinely inspired conceptions, analogous to god's creation and incarnation, and the more sober recognition that word and world are always already fallen, that "words strain, / crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / will not stay still," as eliot said in "burnt norton." to this disillusioned view, words are simply dead or dying marks on the page, representations of representations that are continually losing their representational power and slipping into a confusion of tangential meanings. [3] although heidegger and derrida provide most of the theoretical framework for her debate, dividing the book between a logocentric viewpoint at the beginning and a deconstructionist one at the end, mills-courts shies away from taking a firm, dogmatic stand on one side or the other. she is critical of plato for his denigration of writing as a paltry substitute for speech but she is also critical of derrida for his repudiation of authorial intentionality. if plato is too idealistic, derrida is too skeptical. in the end she sides with the poets who shy away from factional positions, who, in contrast with the ideologues, vacillate in the tense no-man's-land between rival camps. referring to heidegger's and derrida's conflicting linguistic views, she says: "caught between them, the poet creates a poem that is overtly intended to work as `unconcealment,' as the incarnation of a presence, the embodiment of a voice in words. yet, he displays that voice as an inscription carved on a tombstone. in other words, he covertly acknowledges that the poem is representational, that it substitutes itself for a presence that has been absolutely silenced. for the very words that seem to give life simultaneously announce the death of the speaker." although mills-courts acts as a moderator to the two sides, occasionally stepping aside to note inconsistencies or biases in the views propounded by her theorists, the procedures and preoccupations of her book--the way she progresses from one major figure to another in western tradition, outlining and evaluating their attitudes toward speech, writing, being, and meaning--it readily becomes apparent that she favors one over the other, that her largest debt is to derrida. in _poetry as epitaph_ she has written her own _grammatology_, although in a less eccentric style and from a more compromising point-of-view than derrida's. still it is derrida's deconstructionist perceptions and tactics that captivate her most overtly. [4] the problem motivating the sort of linguistic discussion that attracts derrida and mills-courts arises from a promise or ideal that language, on close examination, fails to fulfill. ideally, language would mean what it says; it would communicate an unambiguous message and reveal in unmistakable terms, like a clear window, the being and intentions of its author. but because signs are not what they signify, because there is always a gap between mark and meaning, sign and signified, and because signs usually trigger off chains of significance rather than one, intelligible reference, all sorts of strategies have been concocted to circumvent linguistic imprecision and attain a more fulfilling way of communicating. plato and socrates advocated discovering the logos of reason, thought, and spirit through the logos of speech. writing, they argued, distorted and distanced the mind's meaning through dead representations which could not be questioned because the author was absent. meaning and intention were veiled by the text rather than revealed by it. only the voice through dialogue could present and clarify authorial truths. as a result, socrates spoke rather than wrote. christian and other religious ideologies frequently sought to dispense with the cumbersome medium of language altogether, associating it with the corrupt body or the fallen material world. the transcendental silence of meditation provided a more felicitous way to commune with inner spirit and external divinity. frustrated by the circuitous way words refer to things, jonathan swift's professors at the academy of lagado came up with their own way of short-circuiting traditional communication. according to them, it was "more convenient for all men to carry about them, such _things_ as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on." swift is obviously ridiculing the linguistic idealists and their schemes to contain the sign's ambiguous proliferation of meaning--what derrida calls dissemination or play. in this case the linguistic purists must bear the burden of their rectified language on their backs. like mills-courts, swift favors a more realistic attitude. behind her praise for derrida, ashbery, and the postmodernists is the same desire to expose and demystify linguistic idealism. she too criticizes the various tribes of lagado that fail to accept the way language actually works. [5] her culminating chapter posits ashbery as derrida's closest cousin among postmodernist poets mainly because his poetry expresses the epitaphic way in which she feels language works. throughout the book she argues that language, and specifically poetry, resembles a gravestone marking the presence of its absent author and the absence of its author's presence. it is a dead representation haunted by the presence of a dead but somehow living person, one who once intended meanings though they are now obscure (not unfathomable or nonexistent, as some deconstructionists would maintain). in short, poetic language is derridean as well as heideggerean. ashbery bridges these contraries, mills-courts believes, like no other contemporary poet. he is radically skeptical of language's power to present or incarnate the spirit of the authorial logos, but still he believes--and this is why mills-courts celebrates him--in "poetry as performance, as an epitaphic endeavor that displays both the absence and the presence of an intending `i,' poetry that does not delude itself into believing that it has captured self-presence in a privileged moment, [but still exerts] . . . hope against all odds." for mills courts ashbery is heroic and exemplary because he deconstructs the sacred tenets of the logocentric tradition, yet he never bottoms-out in nihilistic despair. his poetry keeps questioning and questing, tracing an elegant, quixotic path toward self-representation that never completely arrives. it resists the death of all conclusive representations and resolutions, all its temporary domiciles along the romantic way, in order to generate the desire for new ones which, in turn, must be deemed tentative and dismantled in order to keep the ongoing quest going on. [6] in her acknowledgements mills-courts pays homage to one of her teachers for showing her "the elegance of theory." like ashbery's poetry, her book manages to be elegant and theoretical at the same time, which is quite a feat, especially when one considers the plethora of theoretical books which equate turgid style with profound thought. deconstruction, she argues, does not necessarily entail stylistic butchery. this is one of the ironies she insists on: deconstructing often requires the most careful and rigorous constructing; it tears apart old, petrified conceptions but erects elegant scaffolding and newfangled equipment in the process. its judicious reordering of hierarchies which have imprisoned though and oppressed conduct in the past does not simply scatter all thought, being, and meaning to the winds. instead, it offers different systems for consideration and most notably advocates a tolerance of differences where intolerance and hierarchy were the rule. she makes this point in an examination of ashbery's "self-portrait in a convex mirror": "the irony involved in writing words that `are no words' has its roots in a gesture in which language is employed to convey even as it declares the impossibility of containing meaning." although ashbery and mills-courts elegize the death of traditional concepts of meaning, presence, self, author, and so on, as in most elegies they acknowledge an afterlife for the deceased. their elysium is the haunted house of language. their deconstructionist styles do not demolish the graveyards and empty tombs in anarchic revolt but, by contrast, reembody the remains in epitaphic valediction. [7] while mills-courts musters her theoretical arguments with a judicious clarity rare in academic books, and applies her tools to a wide variety of texts with great skill, the book would be even better if more writers were investigated or at least mentioned. after reading _poetry as epitaph_, for instance, one might assume that ashbery is the only postmodernist poet concerned with such things as authorial status, linguistic dissemination, and logocentric myths. yet these preoccupations are shared by dozens of other postmodern poets, some conservative and some radical, some formalist and some antiformalist. geoffrey hill, seamus heaney, philip larkin, james merrill--to name just a few of the `neoformalist' heirs to the new critics and modernists- as it turns out, address the same grammatological issues as the language poets, although they are stylistically and often ideologically different. it is odd that none of these poets is mentioned in _poetry as epitaph_. the last word in her book, which is taken from ashbery, is "guidelines," and mills-courts is probably as aware as we are that her book, which surveys so much, has its limits. her chosen guidelines contribute to the book's strengths, but as she says of ashbery, "longing" surfaces when guidelines are delineated, and our natural response to her own book is to long for more. heise, 'becoming postmodern?', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-heise-becoming.txt becoming postmodern? by ursula k. heise english department stanford university <uheise@leland.stanford.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by ursula k. heise, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: ermarth, elizabeth deeds. _sequel to history: postmodernism and the crisis of representational time_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1992. [1] elizabeth deeds ermarth's _sequel to history: postmodernism and the crisis of representational time_ addresses a problem that has been all too long neglected in studies of contemporary avant-garde art and thought: the concept of temporality. although postmodernism's relationship to and construction of space, time, and historicity has been discussed with some frequency in more general accounts, there has not so far been any book-length study focused in particular on postmodernism and temporality. in its attempt to fill this theoretical gap, ermarth's book must be welcome to any reader interested in postmodern theories and practices. [2] ermarth analyzes the problem of temporality within the general framework of poststructuralist theory as well as the more specific one of narrative structure. the three theoretical chapters that constitute the bulk of her book explore the ramifications of her central thesis: postmodern theory and postmodern art replace the %historical temporality% which has dominated western thought since the renaissance with the concept of %rhythmic time%. chapter one, "time off the track," defines historical temporality as a convention that emerged in the renaissance and came to inform all the most important forms of western knowledge. as a "realistic" or "representational" device, historical time [is] a convention that belongs to a major, generally unexamined article of cultural faith . . . : the belief in a temporal medium that is neutral and homogeneous and that, consequently, makes possible those mutually informative measurements between one historical moment and another that support most forms of knowledge current in the west and that we customarily call "science." history has become a commanding metanarrative, perhaps %the% metanarrative in western discourse. (20) postmodernism radically subverts this convention by relying on a "rhythmic time" which is no longer a transcendent and neutral medium "in" or "on" which events take place as in a container or on a road stretching to infinity. rather, rhythmic time is coextensive with the event and does not allow the subject to distance itself from it, but collapses the two and binds both of them in language. it is a "time of experiment, improvisation, adventure": because rhythmic time is an exploratory repetition, because it is over when it's over and exists for its duration only and then disappears into some other rhythm, any "i" or ego or %cogito% exists only for the same duration and then disappears with that sea change or undergoes transformation into some new state of being. what used to be called the individual consciousness has attained a more multivocal and systemic identity. (53) [3] this new type of identity, the topic of ermarth's second chapter entitled "multilevel thinking," renders humanist and cartesian notions of individuality obsolete, since the subject now exists in an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives and moments of awareness and becomes indistinguishable from the object. ultimately, it turns out to be a construct of language, as ermarth details in her third chapter, "time and language": if time is no longer a neutral medium, a place of exchange between self-identical objects and subjects and "in" which language functions, then the language sequence--especially in the expanded theoretical sense of discourse--becomes the only site where temporality can be located and where consciousness can be said to exist. (140) in one of her most interesting theoretical moves, ermarth describes this innovative linguistic constellation in terms of the medieval notion of %figura%, in opposition to the modern concept of %image%. in contrast to the image, the term %figura% for ermarth emphasizes an understanding of the linguistic sign as reflexive rather than as representational, as a value within a system rather than as an indicator of some external reality. in the medieval as in the postmodern figura, the sign attains an "absolute" status insofar as it is not separate from the reality it is linked to, but coextensive with it. "[in postmodernism] [t]ime and subject %are% the figure," ermarth concludes, "and there is no 'other side' to it, except in some other figure" (181). [4] each of the three theoretical chapters is followed by a "rhythm section" which illustrates the theory through an interpretation of a postmodern novel: alain robbe-grillet's _jealousy_, julio cortazar's _hopscotch_, and vladimir nabokov's _ada_. in all three, ermarth emphasizes the amount of reader involvement that is required for the construction of the narrative sequence, to the point where readerly construction comes to form part of the text itself. rather predictably, she focuses on the repetition and variation of key scenes in _jealousy_, the varied reading itineraries of _hopscotch_ and the repetition and superimposition of themes and motifs in "alternative semantic contexts" in _ada_, but all three novels are well chosen to give an idea of how rhythmic time in narrative differs from the traditional linear and "historical" plot. one wonders, however, whether the concept could have been shown to work equally well if ermarth had included examples of those maybe more typically postmodern texts whose narrative is structured by formal principles not so easily accounted for in terms of repetition and semantic multivalence: walter abish's _alphabetical africa_, for example, the texts produced by the ouvroir de litterature potentielle (oulipo), or some of the novels of ronald sukenick, raymond federman, or christine brooke-rose, in which the layout of the printed page comes to play a crucial role for the understanding of narrative progression. neither is it clear how the notion of rhythmic time would apply to the novels of, for example, ishmael reed or kathy acker, whose "storylines" are far more radically disrupted than those of _jealousy_ or _hopscotch_. ermarth here seems to have chosen her examples from that particular brand of early postmodernism that can be made to serve as support for her theoretical approach, to the exclusion of later, more radical experiments that present a much greater challenge to any notion of rhythm. [5] nevertheless, ermarth's general claim that postmodernism implies a reconceptualization of time is in itself an innovative and promising one. but it is also obvious from the start that her definition of historical time as a realist convention dependent upon the cartesian %cogito% leads her straight back to two of the most well-beaten tracks of postmodern theory: the critique of subjectivity and the critique of representation. the strength of this approach is that it makes the entire methodological and terminological arsenal of poststructuralist theory available for the study of time. but precisely as a consequence of this, time turns out to be just another metaphysical convention, another meta-narrative to be dismantled in terms that are by now familiar. i am not objecting to this on the basis of those reproaches that the more "historicist" camp of postmodern theorists has frequently leveled at the more "deconstructionist" camp--for example, that an account such as ermarth's, which opposes postmodern temporal notions to earlier forms of historical reasoning, relies on historical reasoning even in the process of announcing its demise; that the radically discontinuous "rhythmic time" she describes seems to preclude any notion of individual morality and any possibility of meaningful political thought or action; and that such a temporality makes it impossible for socially repressed groups to articulate their "histories" against the dominant "history" of the elite. ermarth is aware of these objections, and answers them--tentatively, as she herself concedes--by arguing that social reform in the postmodern age must proceed through the construction of new forms of discursive mediation, and that the reformation of language is itself a political act (112-14, 156-57). to repeat the arguments against such a view would be merely to rehearse once more one of the most well-worn--though admittedly crucial--controversies over postmodernism. instead, i would like to discuss briefly three central points of ermarth's account that seem to me to weaken its theoretical grasp: the absence of any discussion of already existing literature on temporality, the construction of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and the connection of time and language which, according to ermarth, underlies the notion of "rhythmic time." [6] whereas the strength of _sequel to history_ lies in its familiarity with and survey-presentation of various theories of postmodernism, especially feminist ones, its maybe most serious shortcoming lies in its failure to engage any strand of previous research on temporality. ermarth mentions ricoeur's _time and narrative_ and fraser's _voices of time_ in passing, but does not once refer to david carr's or hayden white's explorations of the connection between historical time and narrative.^1^ there is no reference to any of the recent studies of time as a social dimension by eviatar zerubavel, michael young, david landes, paul halpern or stephen kern, nor to any of the more specific studies of the contemporary experience of time by jeremy rifkin or david harvey. none of the classical studies of literary and narrative temporality by jean poulet, georges pouillon, hans meyerhoff, a.a. mendilow or frank kermode finds its way into her study, not to speak of much more recent ones such as gerard genette's, peter brooks's, or suzanne fleischman's. ermarth does not quote roland barthes's critique of narrative time as a purely representational convention, or thomas docherty's recent concept of a postmodern "chrono-politics," both sources that are highly relevant to many of her considerations; neither does she mention philippe le touze's claim that in the %nouveau roman%, temporality has shifted from story to discourse, a hypothesis that anticipates her own claim that in the postmodern novel, time becomes a function of language. but maybe most surprising, given ermarth's attempt to develop a non-transcendental concept of time, is the absence of any engagement with derrida's suggestion that time itself is an irrecuperably metaphysical concept, and david wood's extensive discussion of this hypothesis in _the deconstruction of time_ (1989). in a book which justifies its existence by the absence of theoretical considerations of time and postmodernism, this large number of omissions cannot but weigh heavily. [7] it does so not only at a purely theoretical level. practically, ermarth's lack of concern for earlier analyses of time leads to the disappearance of high modernism from her historical map. the only current of pre-world war ii literature she discusses is surrealism, but the more crucial precursors in questions of temporality--joyce, woolf, wyndham lewis's rebellion against the "time school in modern literature," and gertrude stein's experiments with narrative time and timelessness, to name only a few--are left out of consideration. in fact, since ermarth defines as "modern" the period from the renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century, one is left with the impression that novelists such as proust or faulkner would have to be considered postmodernists in her terminology. is there any difference between them and the postmodernists she discusses --robbe-grillet, cortazar, nabokov? nowhere does ermarth spell out whether she sees any fundamental break between the high modernist and the postmodernist conceptualization of time, or whether she views them as essentially homogeneous in their break away from cartesian rationalism and realist forms of representation. [8] this is more than quibbling over labels, since her central theoretical notion, "rhythmic time," can be applied to a number of modernist novels as well as postmodernist ones. rhythmic time, according to ermarth, manifests itself in narrative as a structure that no longer consists of linear plot development, but the repetition of identical motifs, details and descriptions with slight but disturbing variations, or as repeated and incompatible accounts of what the reader must take to be the same events. these variations and distortions make it impossible for the readers to construct a rational, representational picture of the novel's world and events. rather, they are invited to perceive the text as a figural pattern of elements which can be arranged and rearranged, "[e]mphasizing what is parallel and synchronically patterned rather than what is linear and progressive" (85). thus, ermarth argues, the structuring principle of the postmodern novel is paratactic rather than syntactic, relying on a style which "thrives by multiplying the valences of every word and by making every arrangement a palimpsest rather than a statement, rather as poetry does when it draws together a rhythmic unit by means of repeated sound or rhythm" (85). this is, on the surface, a valid enough account of the functioning of many postmodern stories and novels. but the emphasis on synchronicity, multiple meanings, and a structure closer to poetry than to traditional narrative also characterizes the late novels of, for example, joyce, woolf or stein. in what way, then, is rhythmic time typically postmodern? [9] furthermore, ermarth's definition of rhythmic time raises the question of why one would even insist on still calling this kind of narrative "temporal" at all in a sense other than the superficial one that it takes time to read. one cannot but remember that joseph frank used a very similar argument when he characterized the novels of proust and joyce as "spatial" in his influential essay, "spatial form in modern literature": overcoming the linearity of the 19th-century plot, frank argued, the modernist novel invites the reader not so much to follow an evolving story, but a gradually spreading network of images which must be perceived in simultaneity. this simultaneity of perception he calls "spatial form." like ermarth, then, he sees a paratactic patterning to be perceived in parallel or in simultaneity as the structuring principle of the 20th-century novel--only ermarth does not call this "spatial form," but "rhythmic time," a concept she herself explains by means of other, sometimes quite distinctly spatializing terms such as "pattern," "arrangement," or "figura." in this context, she quotes robbe-grillet's programmatic statement from _for a new novel_ to the effect that "in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. it no longer passes. it no longer completes anything" (155; ermarth 74). but she seems unaware of how easily this could be used to support a concept such as "spatial form" rather than any specifically temporal approach. [10] ermarth's reference to poetry adds another twist to this: if the postmodern novel is configured on the basis of rhythm, repetition and patterns, then indeed how %is% it different from poetry? given this affinity, could one not argue that postmodernism's rhythmic time constitutes no real "reformation of time" at all, but simply the extension of a concept of time that has been present all along in the poetic tradition? i hasten to add that this is not at all a conclusion that i find satisfactory; i am quite prepared to accept that postmodern narrative does innovate our construction of temporality. but ermarth's account does not really explain why and how we do still read postmodern narratives as narratives rather than as extended poems. _hopscotch_ is %not% like long poems such as pound's _cantos_ or hejinian's _my life_, but one cannot tell by ermarth's theory why that is so. [11] even discounting these difficulties of applied narratology, though, ermarth's theory of time remains problematic. it follows logically from her critique of historical temporality as a representational convention that she ends up describing both postmodern time and consciousness as anchored in the differential signifying system of language. this final emphasis on the crucial role of language may appear at first like a staple of much poststructuralist theory. but the exclusivity which ermarth attributes to language as the ground and site of all discursive formations, be they philosophical, esthetic, or ethical ("all thought is discourse and all discourse is language" [156]), turns into a serious problem for her theory of temporality. let us assume for the sake of argument that our conception of time, and in general our cultural, social, and political practices do indeed "take place" principally in and through language, and that changes in these practices must be based on changes of or in language. but then how does language change? how do we get, for example, from the discursive formation that grounds historical time to the one that opens up the possibility of rhythmic time? how do--or did--we become postmodern? i do not see how ermarth's account can solve this dilemma: by situating time "in" language, she makes it virtually impossible to situate language "in" time. [12] this question cannot be brushed off by saying that it is a "historical" one of the kind ermarth condemns (and even if it were, this would not eliminate the necessity of an answer, since ermarth herself admits that her account cannot in all respects avoid historicity). rather, it is a question regarding the very nature of change, of becoming- that is, regarding the very "processual" character of time that ermarth herself considers crucial. possibly, ermarth would argue that this question cannot be answered in general terms, since we would in this case be again reduced to a "neutral and homogeneous" temporality of some sort. but this is really conceding that there simply can be no non-metaphysical concept of time--a conclusion which leads ermarth's idea of a non-transcendental "rhythmic time" %ad absurdum%. a concept of time that is coextensive with the event cannot explain the process that leads from one event to another, and hence evades one of the most central questions in any theory of temporality. [13] these, in brief, are some of the difficulties ermarth's account of postmodernist time encounters, and which might have become, if not solvable, at least more manageable through an engagement with those texts that have already discussed them. my own prediction would be that a successful reformulation of the concept of time will only become possible once we rethink the postmodern notions of "metaphysics" and "transcendence." time will tell. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ i am indebted to shirley brice heath for pointing the latter omission out to me. heilbronn, 'sliding signifiers and transmedia texts: marsha kinder's _playing with power_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-heilbronn-sliding.txt sliding signifiers and transmedia texts: marsha kinder's _playing with power_ by lisa m. heilbronn <lhei@slumus> department of sociology st. lawrence university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1991 by lisa m. heilbronn, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without the express written consent of the author and advance notification of the editors. kinder, marsha. _playing with power in movies, television and video games; from muppet babies to teenage mutant ninja turtles_. berkeley: u of california p, 1991. [1] what are we talking about when we talk about media "effects"? this may be one of the most pressing questions to face those who want to approach the media from an interdisciplinary (and in the case of communications studies one might also say intradisciplinary) perspective. are we addressing behavior? ideology? psychology? _playing with power_ is an ambitious attempt to discuss children's media use in the broadest possible theoretical, social and economic contexts. marsha kinder attempts to connect the behavior effects of these media (absorption in the video game or television program, consumption patterns, eye-hand coordination, etc.) with their ideological effects (consumerism and patriarchy chief among them) by linking both to the psychological and cognitive effects of video on developing children. she does this using an approach which combines consideration of entertainment industry policy and decision-making with the decoding of cultural texts. this is laudable, particularly when the analysis also attempts to take into account consumer interaction with the text as both commodity and symbol system. [2] the book has five chapters and a substantial appendix detailing two field study/interview situations with children. the subject matter covered in the chapters spirals out from a core of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural theory through increasingly complex media situations to break off with a consideration of global political economics. its fundamental goal is the exploration of "how television and its narrative conventions affect the construction of the subject" (3). the structure is designed to represent the "strategy of cognitive restructuring" it studies. [3] this is, to a degree, a personal quest. kinder uses her son victor's development of narrative and involvement with interactive video as the keystone of her study, and includes his friends among her interview subjects in the appendixes. her son and other "postmodern" children value the interactivity of saturday morning television and video games, and the commodities associated with them and are bored by the unified subject represented by conventional film. this interests and concerns kinder. much of her discussion is implicitly organized around the contrast between "the unified subject, associated with modernism and cinema; and the decentered consumerist subject, associated with postmodernism and television" (40). she weighs each subject in terms of its position relative to this dichotomy. transmedia intertextuality, for example, "valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject" (120). [4] kinder suggests that "readers who are less interested in theory" skip over the theoretical section of the first chapter. this section is only a scant twenty-three pages as it is. this may represent a bid for a popular audience more interested in reading about the toys which fascinate their children and the industry which produces them than in the differences between kristeva and piaget. however, this leaves the reader with a slim foundation for much of the later analysis. for example, the theoretical section states that "intertextual relations across different narrative media" (2) are the primary focus of the book, but the reader is given only one paragraph with quotations from bakhtin and robert stam on intertextuality. there is even less information provided on the meaning of signs, signifiers, and what kinder calls "sliding signifiers." there seems to be an implicit assumption that the reader is already familiar with such concepts, and with the work of beverle houston and susan willis which informs the discussion. [5] more space is devoted to stitching together piaget's theory of genetic epistemology, (6-9) and psychoanalytic theory (9-15). however, kinder leaves certain key questions unresolved. after pointing out that cognitive theory "does not perceive gender differentiation as the linchpin to subject formation within the patriarchal symbolic order," and that she believes this "`naturalizes' patriarchal assumptions" (9), kinder states that she will "position this cognitive approach within a larger framework of post structuralist feminism" (10). how will she do this? by appropriating "from both models . . . ideas particularly useful for theorizing this dual form of gendered spectator/player positioning at this moment in history" (10). this begs the question: kinder makes a flurry of allusions to the work of david bordwell, edward branigan, louis althusser, and jacques lacan, but there is no sustained argument to demonstrate that her two theoretical models can be reconciled. [6] without a strong theoretical foundation, kinder's claim in chapter two--that saturday morning television creates a gendered, consumerist subjectivity--becomes problematic. her analysis of the intertextual content of shows such as "garfield" and "muppet babies," and the programming strategies behind them is very enjoyable. but does a commercial for a building set specifically for girls really imply "that all other similar toys are intended exclusively for boys," so that "if the young female viewer already owns a set of building blocks, then, it instantly becomes inappropriate and therefore obsolete" (50-51)? [7] kinder also develops the concept of "animal masquerade" in which we alleviate anxiety and gain an illusory sense of empowerment by bestowing our conception of human individuality onto animals . . . by letting them substitute for missing members of the dysfunctional family and which she claims "help[s] us see beyond the waning nuclear family and the growing influence of the single mother by 'naturalizing' alternative models for human bonding" (73-4). the discussion as a whole is often quite compelling, but disturbingly ahistorical. what of aesop, winnie the pooh, uncle remus, coyote trickster and other names associated with animal tales throughout history? how much can we hang on consumer society and postmodernism? the argument would be stronger if it differentiated between earlier types of animal masquerade and the particular type of commodified animal figure she is discussing. [8] the strongest chapters are three, on the nintendo entertainment system, and four, which focusses on the teenage mutant ninja turtles and their transmedia success. kinder gives a lucid and gripping account of the development of the video game and particularly of nintendo's success in implementing "`razor marketing theory' . . . a strategy of focusing on the development and sale of software (whether a game cartridge, a barbie outfit, or a razor blade) that is compatible only with the company's unique hardware" (91). the cognitive perspective works well here. kinder's discussion of vygotsky's "zone of proximal development," and her argument that video game-playing can cause cognitive acceleration, are convincing (111-119). the feminist psychoanalytic theory in the section on "oedipalization of home video games" is less convinving. kinder jumps from the highly qualified assumption that the "marketing of video games seems to be primarily to those with, potentially, the most intense fear of castration" (102), to a unqualified assertion that video games are "oedipalized." by this she seems to mean that their violent content appeals more to boys than girls because (although she offers no evidence) it "can help boys deal with their rebellious anger against patriarchal authority" (104). but the "oedipalization" becomes causal--it "accounts for certain choices within its system of intertextuality" (104). although kinder states her belief that "within our postmodernist culture and at various developmental stages of this ongoing generational struggle between parents and child, other media situated in the home such as television and video games substitute for the parents" (22) the book needs far more evidence before it can support this claim. [9] kinder then turns to the teenage mutant ninja turtles supersystem, defining a supersystem as a network which must cut across several modes of image production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster `collectability' through a proliferation of related products; and must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively comes a `media event' that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system's commercial success. (123) she makes excellent use of journalistic sources, and makes the phenomena comprehensible. the gender analysis in this section--discussing male and female masquerade and the ways in which tmnt as "the ultimate sliding signifiers" (135) reveal masculinity to be culturally constructed--seems well supported. [10] the final chapter, which discusses the growing "network of commercial intertextuality" (172) formed by cnn global news coverage, japanese acquisition of american "software," and hdtv was interesting. it is subtitled an afterword, and as such seems somewhat tentative and tangential to her argument. it lacks discussion of the claims that international marketing leads to a declining emphasis on dialogue and a focus on the visual and violent as the commodities reach a transnational audience with little in the way of a shared culture. [11] kinder includes two appendixes which cover small "empirical studies" she conducted in july of 1990. although she states explicitly that the studies (one based on eleven interviews with children from five to nine, the other on twelve interviews with children from six to fourteen) "provide neither a solid basis for the ideas expressed in this book nor an adequate test of them" (173), she notes that they are included because they "raise new issues (such as the effect of ethnic, racial, class and gender differences on children's entrances into supersystems like the teenage mutuant ninja turtle network)" (173). in fact, there is nothing in the interviews themselves which raises issues of ethnicity, race or class. these dimensions are raised by kinder earlier in the book when she introduces the concern that if video games do contribute to an acceleration of certain stages of cognitive development, the middle class who are better able to afford nintendo systems and other computer systems in the home, will be differently advantaged. i would say that, as presented, the studies supply no information on this point. (for example, there is no information on how the class status of her second group of subjects, approached at a video game arcade, was collected.) gender differences are more apparent from the data. were i the researcher, i believe i would have opted to omit the material. [12] this book is extremely ambitious. it is to be commended for its open-minded approach to what some observers find the greatest item of concern regarding interactive video--the child's absorption in the system and the commodity culture which surrounds it, and for its attention to the "latent" effects which are less commented on--reinforcement of patriarchal gender roles and global economic systems. it contains some excellent references, provocative theory, and excellent program and film analysis. it raises interesting questions, and should stimulate the reader to review and challenge the assumptions s/he holds about children and media. schultz, 'voicing the neonew', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-schultz-voicing.txt voicing the neonew by susan m. schultz university of hawaii-manoa copyright (c) 1990 by susan m. schultz, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). review of "postmodern poetries: jerome j. mcgann guest -edits an anthology of language poets from north america and the united kingdom," _verse_ 7:1 (spring, 1990): 6-73. [1] postmodern poetry, especially language poetry, is coming in from the cold. not so long ago, postmodern poets published their work exclusively in small journals and disseminated it through small presses. their radical differences from members of the deep image, confessional, new york, and new formalist schools probably condemned them to the margins of the publishing and the teaching worlds. but so, it seems, did their desire not to take part in (or to be co-opted by) that world. the climate is changing, however; a poetic greenhouse effect has lured well-known language poets, among them bob perelman and charles bernstein, into the academy. susan howe has a book forthcoming from the well-established wesleyan university press. and the generally conservative pages of _verse_, a journal published in great britain and the united states, have opened to their "neonew" (the word is perelman's) attack on traditional versifying. the shepherd for this latest assault is jerome mcgann, long a lobbyist (or apologist, depending on your sympathies) for language poetry. [2] language writing is at once post-structuralist and interested in history, power, and leftist ideology. language poetry bears an acknowledged debt to the modernists' style, if not their substance; it also shores fragments against ruins, although it means to revel in that fragmentation. this issue of _verse_ seems geared more toward the demands of the initiated than toward those of the merely curious; as mcgann notes in his introduction, no anthology of postmodernist poetry is complete without postmodernist prose (these writers, like the modernists, are poet critics). the lack of a critical background hurts, as does mcgann's teasing introduction. i will dwell a bit on the introduction, because its paradoxes seem to me central to the movement that mcgann describes in it. [3] if editors are a species of literary parent, mcgann is a benevolent father who neither instructs his progeny nor leaves them to fend entirely for themselves. his introduction takes the middle ground between these options, hinting at purpose, yet refusing at all turns to name it. and a tenuous middle ground it is, at least for readers not already privy to postmodernism's concerns--and perhaps also for those who are. for mcgann does not so much mediate between the reader and the texts that follow as write an introduction that consistently fails to introduce. his various indeterminacies would not be so frustrating were he not to promise something more specific. "[t]he aim here is to give a more catholic view of the radical change which poetry has undergone since the vietnam war" (6). "from a social and historical point of view, this collection aims to show certain features of the contemporary avant-garde poetry scene which are not apparent in [other collections]" (7). mcgann never makes clear what he means by "radical change" and the "certain features" that distinguish his anthology from those that come before (ron silliman's _in the american tree_ and douglas messerli's 1987, _language poetries, an anthology_). [4] mcgann's prose imitates the postmodern poetries he has chosen, and begins to define them by unravelling the kinds of definitions that we still like to believe govern the selection-process for any anthology. curiously, however, mcgann subscribes to his own set of definitions. according to mcgann, these are not just language poems, though "all the writing here is language-centered, whether the work in question is 'language writing' properly so-called (e.g., the selections from hejinian, bernstein, and mccaffery) or whether it is not (e.g., the selections from howe, bromige, or d.s. marriott)." the secret to the difference between language writing and language-centered writing lies, one assumes, in the names here mentioned. rather than witness the move from the "authority" of blake and shelley to the nonauthoritative postmodernist realm of language, we move from one set of big names to another. the proclaimed gulf between "vision" and "language," the romantics and the postmoderns, is not so wide after all. [5] mcgann's introduction, then, for all its principle of uncertainty, violates its own code. for mcgann describes postmodern poetry as poetry in which "the [decentered] i is engulphed in the writing; not an authority, it becomes instead a witness, for and against" (6). this jibes with charles bernstein's attack on poetic voice in "stray straws and straw men," in _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_: "'the voice of the poet' is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood . . . as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner" (_lb_ 41). this emphasis on voice "has the tendency to reduce the body of a poet's work to little more than personality." and finally, "voice is a possibility for poetry not an essence" (42). several of the poets in this issue go to fascinating lengths to disrupt our expectation that we will be hearing poetic voices. their strategies are often formal; the disjunction between form and content has become as much a critical standard these days as the new critical junction was some forty years ago. [6] the most dramatic attempt to deflect us into language, away from the poet, is by tina darragh, in her sequence, "bunch-ups." darragh gives us four rectangular boxes in which she has drawn long pipe-shaped lines; it's as if the reader looked at what she knew was the page of a book, but found that the lines were empty of words. at the bottom right section of each page, the lines "bunch-up"; below them one sees the portions of several lines of what looks like the oed: a number here, the beginning of a latin term there, parts and wholes of english words. the piece effectively dramatizes the way in which the reader of a dictionary becomes--at random--the writer of an incomplete text. as she has written elsewhere, "reading the definitions is like reading a foreign language developed specifically for english" (_lb_ 108). and yet readers suspicious that nothing any writer sets down is, in truth, random will note that the seemingly haphazard glimpses from a dictionary that she gives us are in fact fragments about the self, about a network, a definition that includes a reference to "sense," and one that reads "post in a statio" and is the 17th, archaic sense of a word. she makes connections, in other words, between dictionaries and selves, between networks of language and of people; her final fragment also suggests historical depth, even as it argues against the possibility of understanding history. [7] there are other notable attempts to foreground language and downplay the author, instances when, as bernstein puts it, "the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality / fantasy / experience / event" (_lb_ 41). christopher dewdney, for example, whose "source text" is a museum catalogue, describes his method as follows: "in _the beach_, _the city_, _the theatre party_ and _the self portrait_ source lines alternate with interference lines which are generally permutations of the adjacent source lines. the permutation lines echo the line before at the same time as they preview the line after them. this profoundly skews the semantic valences of most of the reading subsequent to the first interference line (which is the second line in these four poems) [two of which are printed here]" (21). the two poems printed here reminded me very much of john ashbery's "finnish rhapsody" (from _april galleons_), which ashbery based on the repetitive style of the _kalevala_. but dewdney's procedure is, in its way, more radical; where ashbery writes, and then rewrites his own text, dewdney's contribution to a pre-existing text is his "interference" in it. [8] bob perelman's poem "neonew" experiments with stanzas, the shapes of which are reflexive of the shape of history. each section, until the end of the poem, is numbered "1," which reminds us that history exists always in the present. in the second section "1" perelman writes about the way in which a change in spelling affected the "poor tatars." backwards into the body into the body of the poor the body of the poor tatars body of the poor tatars roman of the poor tatars roman history the poor tatars roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter tatars roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter they continue tartars roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter they continue tartars of fell tartarean nature to this day (41) political power does not just give the victors the power to rewrite history; it also governs the empire's spelling books. as foucault knew, power operates everywhere, even when its effects seem accidental. perelman's limited text is also an open one, because it eschews poetic "voice" in favor of "writing" (like derrida, language poets reverse the traditional narrative, according to which voice precedes writing). in his talk, "the rejection of closure," perelman notes that, "the open text often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification" (quoted in hartley, 38). this conception of the text is radically utopian; are we not able to describe the passage about "poor tatars" in story-form? can we not "interpret" this poem as we do "closed" texts? i suspect that we can, and that what perelman--like any good poet--gives us is a new style in which to say what we already know. that the style is impersonal--that it does not reflect back on a subjective "i"--aligns it with the modernism of t.s. eliot and marianne moore. that this impersonal style works in the service of leftist politics does distinguish perelman and his cohorts from the "great modernists." thus, the line: "'polis is eyes' 'o say can you see' 'police is eyes'," conveys the sweep of history from the greek polis to the united states, and joins them through the connection of sight and authority. [9] yet mcgann's reliance on names to define postmodern poetries is revealing--not for anything it tells us of mcgann, but for what it tells us about this --and other--anthologies of postmodern verse. many of these poets do have recognizable styles. in that sense, to paraphrase stevens, every disorder depends on there being an ordering consciousness in the background. if not voices, then, these poets have idiosyncratic ways of placing words on the page, individual means to distort syntax and to break "the basic assumptions of bourgeois subjectivity," as george hartley phrases it in his cogent book on the language poets (34). as bernstein writes, "the best of the writing that gets called automatic issues from a series of choices as deliberate & reflected as can be" (43). or, one might add, the best of postmodern writing issues through the filter of a mind that makes choices. [10] charles bernstein and lyn hejinian, identified by mcgann as "proper" language poets, and susan howe, an "improper" language poet, all write with a lyricism that argues against the "decentered i"--or at least works in tension with it. bernstein's "debris of shock/shock of debris" is a collage of mixed cliches (like mixed metaphors) that engages political concerns: never burglarize a house with a standing army, nor take the garbage to an unauthorized junket. (69) he satirizes the capitalist's conflation of art with money, authority with seductiveness, as well as his "style," which formalizes capitalist politics: yet it is the virile voice of authority, the condescending smugness in tone, that is thrilling. what does it matter that he hasn't any . . . "creative goals and financial goals are identical: we just have different approaches on how to research those goals, and we have different definitions of risk." (71) yet the comedy of pastiche that bernstein creates melts into a lyricism that recalls john ashbery's "soonest mended," where that poet moves abruptly from talk of brushing one's teeth to a lush keatsian conclusion. we move from satire to a sense of loss: the salt of the earth is the tears of god, torn for penitence at having created this plenitude of sufferance. so we dismember (disremember) in homage to our maker, foraging in fits, forgiving in forests, spearing what we take to be our sustenance: belittling to rein things in to human scale. a holy land parched with grief & dulled envy. the land is soil & will not stain; such hope as we may rise from. (73) here lyricism operates against what we think of as lyrical vision; this is a post-apocalyptic, post-romantic vision. it is not bernstein's only register, and yet the elegiac tone of the poem--the poet's grief for a wasted earth--suggests a new direction for postmodern poetry. such poetry might acknowledge more fully its double desire to be jarring and lyrical, iconoclastic and reverential, skeptical and faithful to what land we have left. it might at least tease us with the possibility of an integrated self, even as it testifies to its loss, and the dangers of our nostalgia for it. [11] let me add that there are moments of good fun in this anthology. after all, the deconstruction of established canons and styles is more often dionysian than apollonian. consider david bromige's "romantic traces," which proclaims its purpose in empurpled keatsisms: it is time i pledge some vows, apart from those, that is, i've taken to the lyre, to be as true to it as chainsaw is to boughs ready to make a widow the next forest fire- and suddenly i hear i'm to be retired for failing to accumulate sufficient fans and denied a seat with the olympians because i sang and wrote when by democracy inspired! (51) now that poets like bromige and his fellow postmoderns are "accumulating sufficient fans," anthologies such as this one should provide an important link between poets and whatever "common readers" remain. _______________________________________________________ works cited andrews, bruce and charles bernstein, eds. _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_. carbondale: southern illinois up, 1984. hartley, george. _textual politics and the language poets_. bloomington: indiana up, 1989. aycock, 'post-literacy', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-aycock-postliteracy.txt post-literacy by alan aycock <aycock@hg.uleth.ca> department of anthropology university of lethbridge _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by alan aycock, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: tuman, myron, ed. _literacy online: the promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers_. pittsburgh: u of pittsburgh p, 1992. 300 pp. + illus/fig. $34.95 (us) cloth, $14.95 paper. (review copy was an uncorrected proof; please note that quotations below may be inexact). [1] this work comprises a collection of essays originally presented in 1988 at the sixteenth annual university of alabama symposium on english and american literature. its intent is to explore (1) the new forms of literacy made available by electronic technology; (2) the opportunities that "literacy online" affords those who teach and study literature; and (3) more broadly, the implications of new literacies for key cultural ideas, such as authorship, the textual canon, and critical thought, that are strongly associated with traditional print technology. the articles are integrated by myron tuman's introductory and closing remarks and by short roundtable discussions that appear at the end of each section. [2] most of the articles take as their focus the notion of the "hypertext," a multi-layered congerie of literary works, critical commentaries, and contextualizing materials that render immediately accessible to the online reader the expertise that would otherwise be restricted to a narrow elite of professional scholars. many hypertext programs have been written over the past decade for pedagogical and other purposes, and there is a substantial technical literature on the topic (for instance, the online catalog of the university of california libraries lists more than thirty recent books with the word "hypertext" in their titles). [3] i shall first consider the range of issues- hypertext, pro and con--that the authors confront in their articles, then attempt to present a somewhat more radically sociological view of these matters, from the perspective of pierre bourdieu. [4] one apparent advantage of the hypertext is that readers may participate actively in its development by manipulating its databases in diverse ways, and by contributing their own writings to it: george landow argues that to deploy the hypertext as an "open, changing, expanding system of relationships" permits the contextualization of an otherwise fixed central canon of texts, and encourages interdisciplinary team teaching. this he believes to be a "major strength of hypermedia." similarly, jay david bolter contends that "[t]he reader's control of a hypertext can be expressed as the ratio between looking at and looking through the text, between the experience of reading the words and the new experience of choosing the path." while "open relationships" and "new experience" tend to be disproportionately privileged in north american cultures, this seems to be a promising avenue of approach. [5] another feature of value is the new nonlinear styles of thought that are putatively encouraged by the hypertext. as helen schwartz suggests in her essay, the hypertext may offer both graphic and verbal components, potentially integrating "left-brained" and "right-brained" styles of knowing with the hypertext as "prosthesis." pamela mccorduck echoes this: "knowledge of different kinds is best represented in all its complexity for different purposes by different kinds of knowledge representations," such as those afforded by the computer. indeed, mccorduck surmises that the new forms of knowledge implied by the hypertext portend a revolution fully as significant, in their own way, as that of the neolithic. again, though one may be justifiedly sceptical about the grounding of computer literacy in terms of neurophysiology (a naturalizing gesture that adds little to its understanding), or about the actual, as opposed to the ideal, cognitive effects of secondary orality (%pace% mcluhan), it cannot be gainsaid that there may be something here worth pursuing. [6] more contentious, however, are the political implications of hypertext. some argue that hypertext is politically neutral; victor raskin, for instance, states that "[a]ll hypertext does is to present a format, a methodology, a tool for recording the already-established links." similarly, richard lanham suggests that "the computer with its digital display is no technological %vis a tergo% but the condign medium for expressing how we nowadays think of ourselves and our world." yet matters are not so simple. [7] by contrast, in support of the non-neutrality of hypertext, bolter points to the dissolution of standard author-reader relationships, landow (citing barthes' _s/z_) to the new roles that are implied for teachers and students, and stanley aronowitz to the effects of the introduction of computer technology upon management-worker relationships. ted nelson, along the same lines, wrestles with issues of copyright ("transclusion"), the propertied infrastructure of authorial presence in print-based technology. one cannot really doubt that online literacy may contribute in various ways to such familiar postmodern trends, and indeed as the contributors argue, hypertext may accelerate such movements. [8] a number of the essays also consider the political non-neutrality of critical writing in hypertext mode. tuman and schwartz both wonder whether the virtual reality of hypertext is too unstable, too diffuse or multiplex, to sustain the project of literary criticism. and as ulmer seems to propose, deconstructive techniques such as grammatology may be inherently fostered by the hypertext. whether the impetus lent new modes of critical thought is desirable is a concern that is initially broached by the volume, though the contributors fail to take this obvious opportunity to examine hypertext in terms of lyotard's search for "new presentations . . . to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." (curiously, neither lyotard nor baudrillard makes an appearance in these essays.) [9] eugene provenzo invokes foucault's panopticon to drive home more troublesome political issues, however: apparently trivial acts of consumption, such as buying a pizza or renting a video, may install the purchaser in databases managed by anonymous corporations or by government agencies whose autocracy may be thereby intensified. thus greg ulmer, in a rather striking and double-edged metaphor, likens the mastery of a database to "the colonization of a foreign land": though he does not say so, one is reminded in this context of the claims and counterclaims ferociously debated with regard to the surveillance and offensive technology of desert storm, and its wider considerations for "the new world order" unreflectively pronounced by george bush and his cronies. [10] the politics of hypertext itself aside, i retain some doubts about the manner in which the contributors deal with their own political stances %vis-a-vis% hypertext. to suggest something of what i think may be at stake here, i will allude briefly to the sociology of pierre bourdieu. [11] to begin with, bourdieu's "habitus," a structured, structuring disposition to cognize, evaluate, and practise the logic of lived experience, calls to account the new modes of critical thought, contrived as agencies in specific arenas of struggle, that might be said to devolve from "literacy online." it is in this vein that one could wish for a more reflexive attention to the roles that the authors themselves enact in witnessing the procreative agonisms of hypertext: are they part of the solution, or part of the problem? [12] further, the material and social conditions of technoculture represent ("re-present") an aspect of bourdieu's "symbolic capital," the instrumentalities of domination that constitute "the stakes of the game," and that manufacture the means for its pursuit. symbolic capital engages, in this specific instance, the textual labors which influence the production of substances amenable to the realization of yet more texts and hypertexts, and the officiants who produce them. shall we draw a line of diminishing returns, and if we do or do not, isn't that part of the political agenda of hypertext? [13] finally, the authoritarian nature of pedagogy is highlighted by bourdieu's discussions of the manner in which educational institutions produce and reproduce the conditions of their dominance, and the relationships of class which sustain them, and are in turn generated by them. tuman responds to this general issue, indirectly and perhaps too inconclusively, in his closing remarks: "the attitudes collected here constitute a time-capsule--preserving for future students of literacy a record of what the thinkers, so successfully acculturated into print culture (possibly 'the last [such] generation'), had to say about the profound impact, for better or worse, that nearly everyone agrees computers are about to have on our practice of reading and writing." hype aside, what is the value of archivally oriented texts? the construction of tradition is a complex and politically loaded task, yet it passes unexamined, and largely unacknowledged, in the tuman collection. [14] beyond this, i can suggest only three criticisms of real substance. first, the frequent references to "preliterate" cultures rely perhaps too heavily on eric havelock's (undoubtedly seminal) work, supplemented by some rather vague generalizations; the extensive west african work of jack goody, sylvia scribner, and michael cole on the oral-literate interface is not cited. second, the "writing culture" debate of the 1980s (e.g., james clifford, george marcus, clifford geertz) has no counterpart in tuman, though it seems quite pertinent to any attempt to discern a post-oral, post-literate cultural milieu. third, the lapse of four years between the initial presentation of these essays and their publication in this volume is somewhat vexing, since the intervening period has seen at least two works, one by michael heim and another by mark poster [and a third, _hypertext_ by george landow, reviewed in _postmodern culture_ 2.3--ed.] which have somewhat reshaped the relevant field of discussion. [15] on balance, however, this is a fascinating and clearly written collection, and i would not hesitate to use it as an upper-level undergraduate text, or as a scholar's introduction to hypertext. those already familiar with the concept of hypertext, however, would do rather better to turn to mark poster's _the mode of information_ for an account of the significance of computing in the postmodern age. altman, 'review of _making sex_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-altman-review.txt review of _making sex_ by meryl altman and keith nightenhelser depauw university <maltman@depauw> <k_night@depauw> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by meryl altman and keith nightenhelser, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. review of: laqueur, thomas. _making sex: body and gender from the greeks to freud_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1990. [1] _making sex_ is an ambitious investigation of western scientific conceptions of sexual difference. a historian by profession, laqueur locates the major conceptual divide in the late eighteenth century when, as he puts it, "a biology of cosmic hierarchy gave way to a biology of incommensurability, anchored in the body, in which the relationship of men to women, like that of apples to oranges, was not given as one of equality or inequality but rather of difference" (207). he claims that the ancients and their immediate heirs--unlike us--saw sexual difference as a set of relatively unimportant differences of *degree* within "the one-sex body." according to this model, female sexual organs were perfectly homologous to male ones, only inside out; and bodily fluids--semen, blood, milk--were mostly "fungible" and composed of the same basic matter. the model didn't imply equality; woman was a lesser man, just not a thing wholly different in *kind*. [2] however, since the enlightenment, laqueur argues, males and females *have* been seen as different in kind, and many social and political consequences have followed. where theorists of the "one-sex" model saw all human bodies as if resulting from arrows aimed at the target *human*, before which the arrows producing females fell short, the new "two-sex" model supposed that *male* and *female* were separate, opposed targets. laqueur first noticed this paradigm shift while examining "the question of disappearing orgasm": once thought biologically necessary for the conception of a child, female orgasm after the appearance of the "two-sex body" became a contingent or coincidental matter bound up with various political interpretations of "women's nature." he does not claim that one model definitively supplanted the other at a given historical moment. traces of the "two-sex body" can be found in aristotle, and the "one-sex body" lives on in popular myth even today. and he cautions against giving a causal account of the shift, one that relies on social or political explanations of it, since "the remaking of the body is itself intrinsic" to such explanations (11). nonetheless laqueur redraws the map of western sexuality in a breathtakingly grand gesture. [3] laqueur describes his book as a history of "bodies and pleasures" (foucault's phrase), and begins by situating his work amid current debates about the epistemological status of scientific and historical narratives. still, his main techniques of inquiry remain those of traditional intellectual history. he combines a chronological tour through the usual philosophers (beginning of course from aristotle) with ultraclinical discussion of changing anatomical knowledge and medicalizing fantasy, accompanied by startling illustrations. the argument is sweeping, the narrative lumps centuries together, and national differences are given little importance. scholars of each subspeciality will be kept busy commenting on his work for years, no doubt, and the common reader who has absorbed it will perceive gender-switching plots differently than before.^1^ [4] laqueur often seems more interested in how literate europeans thought about (and pictured) sex than in how most people actually lived sex and gender. of course, such experience is notoriously difficult to find out about. so like most recent work on the history of sexuality, _making sex_ operates within the foucaultian claim that "discourses" --sets of culturally maintained representations--organize lived experience and human perception. this stance, by implication, narrows the gap between intellectual and social history. [5] laqueur's work also follows foucault in finding metaphor where we most expect the literal--in biology, on the body--and in often making a "negative case," showing that advances in the state of medical knowledge haven't driven ideological change (though he is sensibly coy about exactly what *does* drive it). "no set of facts ever entails any particular account of difference"--since, given the wealth of detailed evidence for both similarity and difference between "women" and "men," any model of sexual difference must always choose to highlight some issues and ignore others. his account of the renaissance "poetics of biology" is particularly effective in showing that people didn't make cultural use of what they might have scientifically known, if only they had cared to know it. every era, he shows, has invented the science it (politically and culturally) needed within the boundaries set by prevailing epistemologies. nonetheless, he realizes that actual bodies exist and have existed, and acknowledges "scientific progress"--for example, in fixing the relationship of ovulation to pregnancy and the menstrual cycle. to speak, as he does, of "scientific fictions" is not to say all science is somehow bogus, done with mirrors, purely in the service of ideology. [6] on the other hand, new scientific discourses may determine which cultural questions can be asked, but they don't legislate any one answer. so, for example, around the time of the french revolution the recognition that female orgasm was a contingent, not a necessary, part of reproductive intercourse made possible theories of women's "passionlessness," while female organs received new and differentiating names, and woman took on a whole character derived (in one way or another) from her ovaries, her experience of menstruation, and so forth. because the testes were different, woman was a different creature on all levels, from the cellular to the moral-philosophical. but these theories could be and were put to use by anti-feminists and feminists alike--though agreed to be *different*, woman might still be either physically weaker (unfit for participation in the public sphere) or morally stronger (more suited than men to duties of political governance). in political culture as in science, discourse determines the terms and the vigour of the debate, but not the outcome. [7] the argument that scientific explanation of the body is socially contingent leads laqueur to freud's revisionary anatomy. it is no news to most of us that freud's account of progress from clitoral to vaginal orgasm as a sign of female "maturity" does not correspond to any biological reality. but laqueur demonstrates conclusively that freud must have *known* his progress narrative was social/cultural rather than physiological/biological--must, in other words, have known that it was either fanciful or coercive--because biologists had routinely discussed the centrality of the clitoris to female sexual pleasure, and the absence of physiological bases for sensation in the vagina, for literally centuries. we can now be sure that what laqueur rather kindly calls freud's "aporia of anatomy" was a result of active repression rather than simply a primitive state of medical knowledge; and this has obvious consequences for current feminist debate about freud. [8] laqueur's perspective relies heavily, as he acknowledges, on developments within "women's history" and on feminist theory--particularly on the distinction between "sex" and "gender" first made by simone de beauvoir in _the second sex_, and developed memorably in gayle rubin's influential essay "the traffic in women."^2^ within the second-wave of twentieth century anglo-european feminism, the concept of "gender" denotes those "observable" differences between women and men that could be argued to be culturally constructed (and thus mutable) rather than eternally, biologically given. such a division between natural "sex" and cultural "gender" was absolutely crucial in combatting the myth of women's natural inferiority, of the appropriateness of their subordination to men, and so forth--it was a way of naming and undoing sexual essentialism. [9] _making sex_ explicitly revises this dualism, asserting centrally that "sex, as much as gender, is made" (ix). under the discursive regime of the one-sex body, it is asserted, there was not (as today) a base-superstructure relationship between sex and gender. rather, gender was "real"--was constitutive of social relationships--while sex was contingent, an epiphenomenon. laqueur suggests a paradox: that for the ancients, sex was socially constructed, gender "naturally" given--for example, through an insistence that hierarchical relations between men and women, as between free men and slaves, were eternal, immutable truths to be actualized in social roles, not in anatomical structures. [10] does this make a complete hash, then, of the sex/gender dualism? not necessarily. feminist theorists donna haraway and judith butler have both argued that the recent success of feminists and cultural historians at distinguishing "sex" (biological givens) from "gender" (cultural constructions) has had the unfortunate side effect of letting anatomy off the hook, leading us to ignore the potential dangers (and pleasures) of cultural construction within the biological sciences and other discourses about "the body."^3^ laqueur's work advances this project, and further unsettles biologistic arguments about the differences between women and men.^4^ it is not clear, however, that unsettling the sex/gender dualism--which has after all proved politically quite useful under the two-sex model we have to live with now--is the best way to criticize biological essentialism. what would be lost if we said, not that "sex" is socially constructed *too*, but simply that we need to move the boundary a bit--that we've been calling some things "sex" that are really, after all, gender? [11] we might well lose the title of the book, of course, which plays on the equivocation between sexual difference and sexual activity, and (coupled with the naked women on the cover) gives a rather false impression of forthcoming titillation, since the subject of _making sex_ is actually quite a sober one. in fact, there is very little discussion here of pleasures--and even less attention to pain. one thing that strikes a feminist as odd about this book is its tone: the emotional distance and the absence of horror while recounting rapes, clitoridectomies, ovarectomies performed for no medical reason but curiosity, death sentences meted out to those of ambiguous gender (or is it sex?), and the general subjection, manipulation, and domination of female bodies by male doctors and other "experts" throughout the long period the book covers. laqueur does acknowledge, early on, that "the fact that pain and injustice are gendered and correspond to corporeal signs of sex is precisely what gives importance to an account of the making of sex." he also acknowledges an absence in his book of "a sustained account of experience in the body." (this he suggests is perhaps appropriate in a man writing about women; it is probably inevitable anyway given his broad schematic approach and his reliance on the methods of intellectual history.) but overall, laqueur has clearly chosen to write a history of *difference* rather than a history of *oppression*. [12] this is more than a matter of tone: it leads frequently to what we might, borrowing laqueur's own term, call an *aporia* of political consequences. feminists undertake to study the history of sexuality, for the most part, to understand women's subordination in order to see whether and how it can be undone. laqueur does note, from time to time, the social applicability or function of various conceptions of the body. the one-sex model served male power by explaining why men were needed for generation, and established the centrality of paternity; the two-sex model served male power by enabling discourses of female inadequacy. but since (for example) we know already that ancient greece was an extremely sex-segregated and misogynist society in its social practices, its physicians' specific conception of the body seems almost irrelevant to the major issue of power. one might contrast laqueur's approach to the sex/gender question in ancient greece with anne carson's in her essay "putting her in her place: women, dirt and desire."^5^ carson deals with some of the same medical and philosophical texts as laqueur, but she begins with a discussion of lived *gender* relations as they can be reconstructed from historical, literary, and juridical sources. this provides a fuller social context for discussion of, say, why women are considered "cooler" and "wetter" than men, and what follows from this in the social sphere. [13] laqueur's underlying point still stands, that ancient relations of gender provided the base for which "anatomy" was the superstructure. but we wonder whether, in directing his attention so exclusively to the "scientific" discourses of the ancient world--rather than to, say, the pre scientific ideology reflected in hesiod, semonides of amourgos, and aeschylus, which *did* elaborate differences of kind between two sexes--laqueur has been anachronistically motivated by the modern assumption that sex differences really do come "first," that sexuality is the key to identity. [14] it also strikes us as curious that laqueur did not find it important to address alternatives to procreative heterosexuality in any systematic way--either as a history of repression or as a (foucaultian) history of "incitement to discourse." "lesbianism" (the word does not appear in the index, though "tribade" does) is discussed only as it may or may not apply in cases of hermaphroditism; male homosexuality is discussed almost exclusively in sections about ancient greece. the discussions of hermaphroditism suggest that doctors until quite recently were concerned purely to assign male or female sex to a body, rather than to assign male or female gender to a person--or to lay down moral injunctions about how such bodies might be permitted to behave. these are significant observations, and particularly interesting in light of the recent work on ancient greek sexuality done by david halperin and john winkler.^6^ but the sketchiness of the discussion is another byproduct of laqueur's own decision to focus on bodies rather than people. [15] none of these criticisms need prevent laqueur's argument from being useful in political debate, as a further marshalling of evidence for social constructionism generally. but there is something paradoxical--even when foucault does it--about "marshalling evidence" for the conclusion that the facts didn't matter. laqueur ends with the following sentence: "but basically the content of talk about sexual difference is unfettered by fact, and is as free as mind's play." we are uneasy about the use of fundamentally positivist historical argument to make this foucaultian point.^7^ we also wonder how to understand his (truth-)claims about the great divide between "one-sex theorists" and us, after he observes that "the play of difference never came to rest" (193). such endless play of signifiers can disarm the counterexamples to his narrative of historical change, such as the eruption of the one-sex theory into "dear abby," or a pattern of ambiguities in aristotle. the question is whether this freedom is compatible with saying that "in or about the late eighteenth [century] . . . human sexual nature changed" (5). [16] twenty years ago, the raw materials of _making sex_ would have made an amusing book about the odd persistence of sexual misconceptions. after foucault, "misconception" might seem a misconception, and such a book would look antiquated and politically naive. laqueur's book is more sophisticated and politically aware, but equally lacking in polemical edge. he suggests in passing that _making sex_ might be used against sociobiology and against the "science of difference" (21). that he himself does not do so, however, indicates what the history of sexuality has lost in becoming academically respectable. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ laqueur notes how one-sex theory makes possible some new readings of classic texts (23ff), and others are already producing such readings, notably stephen greenblatt. see also susan mcclary's discussion of "erotic friction" in 17th-century vocal music, which cites both greenblatt's _shakespearean negotiations_ (berkeley: u of california p, 1988) and an essay by laqueur (_feminine endings_ [minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1991], 37). ^2^ a full and helpful genealogy of this distinction can be found in donna haraway, "'gender' for a marxist dictionary: the sexual politics of a word," in _simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature_ (london: routledge, 1991). rubin's "the traffic in women" can be found most conveniently in rayna reiter, ed., _toward a feminist anthropology_ (new york: monthly review, 1975). ^3^ donna haraway throughout the book cited above, and judith butler in _gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity_ (london: routledge, 1990). ^4^ as a historical realist, laqueur does, however, seem to believe in *some* immutable sex differences, though he doesn't state what they are, and in this he may differ from butler and haraway. ^5^ anne carson, "putting her in her place: women, dirt, and desire," in _before sexuality: the construction of erotic experience in the greek world_, ed. d. halperin, j. winkler, and f. zeitlin (princeton: princeton up, 1990). our comment on carson's essay applies as well to the other essays in that collection, and to carson's _eros the bittersweet_ (princeton: princeton up, 1985). ^6^ david halperin, _ one hundred years of homosexuality: and other essays on greek love_ (london: routledge, 1990), especially "the democratic body: prostitution and citizenship in classical athens"; and jack winkler, _the constraints of desire: the anthropology of sex and gender in ancient greece_ (london: routledge, 1990). ^7^ ironically, laqueur clings to his conventional methods of intellectual history even as he demolishes other foundational structures, such as the sex=nature/ gender=culture system. if we think of these *methods* as natural to him, the foucaultian conclusions become a culture built (unsteadily?) upon them. but this paradox has no easy solution, and we'd rather have our history with evidence than without. ross, 'fragmented thinking', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-ross-fragmented.txt fragmented thinking by susan ross <sxr5@psuvm> department of speech communication pennsylvania state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by susan ross, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. flax, jane. _thinking fragments: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism in the contemporary west_. berkeley: u california p, 1990. [1] in the opening chapter of her book, _thinking fragments: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism in the contemporary west_, jane flax states that "the conversational form of the book represents my attempt to find a postmodern voice, to answer for myself the challenge of finding one way (among many possible ways) to continue theoretical writing while abandoning the 'truth' enunciating or adjudicating modes feminists and postmodernists so powerfully and appropriately call into question." flax does many things with her book, but she never attains such a voice, a problem which i think is related to the difficulty of resolving the relationship of the chosen themes and to the absence of personal experience within the book. [2] what it seems flax wants to do is something akin to what chris weedon did in her foundational book, _feminist practice and poststructuralist theory_--explicate and critique the three schools of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism, and show how they interrelate to achieve a kind of cohesive whole. what flax lacks, particularly in comparison with weedon, is any political agenda that spurs the arguments in some positive direction. her aptly named final chapter, "no conclusions," seems sadly accurate as she weaves aimlessly in her "search for intelligibility and meaning." [3] flax's seeming lack of focus is, ironically, rooted in the strength of the book, which is the comprehensive treatment of the writings of freud, winnicott, lacan, chodorow, lyotard, derrida, rorty, dinnerstein, and foucault to show how each has contributed to western thinking and culture. _thinking fragments_ is exhaustive in fleshing out the basic tenets and contradictions of each thinker. flax also understands and reminds us of the tension of the postmodern writing task: the tendency, in the process of presenting theoretical constructs, of reifying them in the very way postmodernist thinking encourages us not to. [4] if flax wishes us to use the book as a basic primer in the origins of poststructuralist thinking, it would be helpful for her to provide more explicit signposts for the reader, such as chapter/book part headings that match the chosen theoretical categories, and more guidelines for the reader as to what purpose the incessant questioning serves. in other words, if the sections "the selves conceptions," "gender(s) and dis-contents," and "knowledge in question" carried the more explicit and accessible titles of "psychoanalysis," "feminism," and "postmodernism," then the book would serve as a more useful reference and less like a wandering journey. if the book is indeed intended to be an open-ended, less organized journey of sorts, then the form needs to be opened up more completely. flax swims somewhere in between, and it is not always clear what the issues are, except that she allows each sentence to bounce off of itself--the book is riddled with disclaimers of "yet," "however," and "but" that follow firm assertions. [5] flax claims in her early chapter on "transitional thinking" that her muddiness results from the fact that when she discusses one theoretical category "the other two voices will interrogate and critique the predominant one." thus, she excuses herself from rigorous, decisive explication of the "voices" and of inherent issues. how psychoanalysis fits into "transitional thinking," given its conservative tradition of biological focus, seems an important issue to address--feminists have been questioning such essentialist viewpoints for awhile. the tension of enlightenment-based theories and the feminist deploring of rationalism and its rigidity needs also to be addressed. it is not that flax is unaware of these tensions, but she assumes that they have been addressed elsewhere, finished, and discarded. her assumption, for instance, that the reified categories of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism justify themselves as a chosen framework for such a book is unspoken and suspect. why do they represent "our own time apprehended in thought" and why are they the crucial "voices" necessary to address issues of self, gender, knowledge, and power? [6] one of the most important questions for women, and yet one of the hardest for them to answer, is what do you want? since the impetus of feminism originally grew out of women's need to have choices and options in response to that question, any book that claims to be feminist should follow that spirit without resorting to what may look on the surface like an appropriately postmodern, open-ended, but actually despairing uncertainty of purpose. flax's final chapter, "no conclusions," is so convoluted and directionless that it is difficult to pull any sound philosophical or even interesting basis out of it. she says, "a fundamental and unresolved question pervading this book is how to justify--or even frame--theoretical and narrative choices (including my own) without recourse to "truth" or domination. i am convinced we can and should justify our choices to ourselves and others, but what forms these justifications can meaningfully assume is not clear to me." that's a good question. does the reader have the right to call flax to account and try to answer it? while her admission of her own lack of clarity is healthily postmodern, it lacks commitment. does a dynamic, pluralistic sense of self imply that it disappears totally? the implications for women, whose selves have long been absent from discussions of society, history, and thought, seem ominous. [7] perhaps my insistence on such a goal-oriented focus might be rooted in comparison with other postmodern articles where women's issues don't disappear under the rubric of seemingly "neutral" categories that actually themselves carry baggage resembling the "absolute" forms of knowledge and power flax supposedly denounces. flax herself wrote, for instance, an essay in 1980 which appeared in _the future of difference_. the essay described mother-daughter relationships, and offered a personal case history which excitingly showed the political implications of private struggles for women. the article also matched in form as well as content the feminist notion that personal struggles are indeed political realities. similarly, teresa ebert's recent article in _college english_, "the 'difference' of postmodern feminism," describes the search for an ideal feminist model, one that incorporates the notion of social struggle within language, and serves to demonstrate the global implications of combining feminism and postmodernism. ebert discusses the exciting potential for using language and all its inherent significations to dissect social conflicts. ebert's skepticism of the "uncritical rejection of totality" because of its lack of global perspective seems more productive for feminists than flax's reluctance to look too far beyond established postmodernist categories and discussions, seemingly in order to avoid any hint of totalization in her discourse. in short, flax lacks the necessary political element of a feminist work, perhaps because of her stated lack of belief in "inexorable, inner logic," or more ominously, perhaps because her commitment to the idea of "these transitional times" leaves no room for any overarching sense of meaning other than the endless open-endedness of things. [8] in these exciting times of theoretical upheaval, a book like flax's should take advantage of its multidisciplinary grounding and move beyond the level of explication of theoretical bases, particularly since her explanations are not clear-cut enough to serve the beginning user (she isn't strong on definition of terms, for instance) and are too stream-of-consciousness to be of much use to seasoned fans of postmodernist thinking. since deconstruction seeks to unearth the nature of power relations, a postmodern work is allowed the loose style of flax's book only if it adapts a future-oriented focus necessary for any feminist work--that of reclaiming power and creating alterantive sources of knowledge/power relations. postmodernism should not be used as an excuse to avoid commitment to a political vision, nor should its emphasis on absences be used to side-step the validity of our own personal experiences (particularly a %feminist% project) or our responsibility of coming to terms with crises in our society. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited ebert, teresa l. "the 'difference' of postmodern feminism." _college english_ 53 (december 1991): 886-904. flax, jane. "mother-daughter relationships: psychodynamics, politics, and philosophy." _the future of hester eisenstein and alice jardine eds. boston: g.k. hall, 1980. 20-40. weedon, chris. _feminist practice and poststructuralist theory_. oxford: basil blackwell, 1987. dolan, 'crisis in the gulf, by george bush, saddam hussein, et alia. as told to _the new york times_', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-dolan-crisis.txt crisis in the gulf, by george bush, saddam hussein, et alia. as told to _the new york times_. by frederick m. dolan university of california at berkeley copyright (c) 1991 by frederick m. dolan, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) . . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions. -paul de man in the life of a nation, we're called upon to define who we are and what we believe. sometimes the choices are not easy. as today's president, i ask for your support in the decision i've made to stand up for what's right and condemn what's wrong all in the cause of peace. -george bush [1] the crisis in the gulf, as today's president acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self definition: a matter of identity (as in defining america's role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and control of "the world's largest oil reserves," or as between the civilized and the uncivil). following a long orientalist tradition, the west feels compelled to go _elsewhere_ in search of its defining characteristics, even if this means, to use president bush's own metaphor, drawing lines in the sand. as his image forces one to reflect, sand--especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the arabian empty quarter--is a most unstable medium, and a line drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in weather. the contours of the boundary lines and identity president bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat murky. at the same time, for those who have followed literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over what meaning to assign iraq's invasion of kuwait possesses an uncanny familiarity. the seemingly anarchic spin-doctoring of american officials charged with formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory, symbol, and irony. [2] at first glance, the debate in congress and the media appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical reading of the gulf crisis, with the bush administration insisting on the pre-text of world war ii and the lessons of munich, and its critics favoring the script of vietnam. to much of the public, the bush administration's deployment of nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in terms of the story of america's tragic and ambiguous "involvement" in vietnam. as in vietnam, it is said, the united states is taking the lead in fighting somebody else's war; as in vietnam, the middle east is figured as a "quagmire" in which american troops will become--what else?--"bogged down." the middle east will be transformed into a huge lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the manichaean american mind. american morale will gradually be destroyed, and america's standing in the world will once again be diminished. [3] against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis, officials, media pundits, and a farrago of "experts" on matters from national security to middle eastern politics insist that the events taking place in the gulf bear no relevant relationship to vietnam. our commitment in the gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and shifting in vietnam. as opposed to the gradual escalation that characterized vietnam, plans for war in the gulf, in so far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out, all-or-nothing operation. more importantly--though for ideological reasons this point, _qua_ allegory, must remain tacit--the campaign against saddam hussein involves "big principles" and "vital interests" (the tacit point being that vietnam involved neither). the vital interests are variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive war, and respect for united nations resolutions. the allegorical pre-text for the persian gulf crisis, in this optic, must be world war ii, in which economic interests and unassailable principles fortuitously combined to produce a "good war." indeed, the invasion of kuwait was allegorized almost from the beginning of the crisis. the first reported invocation of the munich analogy is attributed to "senator claiborne pell of rhode island, the democratic chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, [who] called mr. hussein `the hitler of the middle east' and criticized mr. bush for not having moved earlier to forestall an invasion."^1^ [4] the significance of the crisis was more fully articulated the next day in a column by flora lewis entitled "fruits of appeasement."^2^ characterizing the takeover of kuwait as a "blitzkrieg invasion," lewis notes how it caused "european commentators to remember hitler," whose lust for power also provoked a "dithering argument over whether it was wiser to indulge him or try to isolate and block him . . . until it was too late." like hitler, hussein's aims are not regional, but global: "he is determined to become the great leader of the arab nation, and not just another nation but a world power based on guns and oil. his relentless drive for a nuclear weapon is not only to threaten his neighbors and israel; it is to change the whole balance of power." the day after lewis's column appeared, a.m. rosenthal confirmed her reading, characterizing the invasion as "a declaration of war against western power and economic independence" and asserting that "western leaders have failed in their duty to prepare action against the plainest threats of aggression since adolf hitler."^3^ a few days later he rounded out the picture by placing the invasion of kuwait within a larger narrative whose plot is driven by anti-semitism: "hussein's dream of dominating the arab middle east was never separate from his vision of ultimate duty and destiny--the elimination of the state of israel. [...] for all other arabs who long for israel's extinction, saddam hussein's passion against the jews is what counts. . . ."^4^ [5] bush quickly caught on. although in his first statements he invoked hitler only obliquely, describing how "iraq's tanks stormed in blitzkrieg fashion through kuwait in a few short hours,"^5^ and attempted to justify possible war by reference to u.s. economic and energy interests, by the middle of august he was relying heavily on the allegory of world war ii. in a speech to the pentagon, for example, the president reminded his audience that "a half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor," and went on to vow that "we are not going to make the same mistake again."^6^ over the next few months, bush struggled to make u.s. policy in the gulf allegorically intelligible through reference to world war ii. iraqi aggression, bush said in early november as he announced new troop deployments, "is not just a challenge to the security of kuwait and other gulf nations, but to the better world that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the cold war. the state of kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be jeopardized."^7^ in december bush was still offering this theme. in hussein, he insisted, like hitler, we find "a dangerous dictator all too willing to use force, who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who desires to control one of the world's key resources. . . ."^8^ indeed, hussein was at one point alleged to be _worse_ than hitler. [6] what _is_ the allegorical significance of world war ii? the obvious meaning has to do with the dangers of appeasing tyrants, of course, and this is the interpretation supplied by the bush administration. but i think i can discern in the speeches and pronouncements and debates another meaning as well, one that becomes accessible through paul de man's interpretation of the ideological function of the "symbol" in romantic literature.^9^ the symbol was understood by the romantics as a privileged representation whose meaning derived from its evocation of an extra-linguistic relationship as opposed to significance generated through linguistic conventions or relationships, such as allegory, where the meaning of a story depends upon a larger narrative. for de man, the appeal of a symbolic understanding of representation is to allow the time-bound, finite subject to "supplement" himself with nature's eternal laws: the temptation exists . . . for the self to borrow, so to speak, the temporal stability that it lacks from nature, and to devise strategies by means of which nature is brought down to a human level while still escaping from "the unimaginable touch of time." (de man, 197) wordsworth, for example, represents the "movements of nature" as "endurance within a pattern of change, the assertion of a metatemporal, stationary state beyond the apparent decay of a mutability that attacks certain outward aspects of nature but leaves the core intact" as in "the immeasurable height / of woods decaying, never to be decayed / the stationary blast of waterfalls. . . ." (_the prelude_, quoted in de man, 197). through such privileged signs, the subject moves beyond temporal limits to a confrontation with the eternal real. for de man, however, the very idea of a symbol, as a figure, relies on an act of "ontological bad faith," a mystification of language that suppresses the dependence of _all_ linguistic figuration on a range of pre-texts or pre-existing literary signs. [7] the utility of de man's analysis is that it enables us to grasp that the official allegorizing of the gulf crisis is not _put forward_ as allegory; rather, the intent is to establish iraqi aggression as a _symbol_ in the romantic sense. world war ii was the "good war" because it rescued us from our finite, mutable, temporal concerns and put us in direct contact with the real: the eternal, unchanging moral and political principles that define us as a nation. president bush hopes to convince us that iraq's invasion of kuwait offers an opportunity to step outside the everyday administrative concerns of politics and business as usual, and renew our commitment to the principles that make us who we are; it is in this sense that, in bush's words, the gulf crisis calls us to "define who we are and what we believe." according to de man, the way out of the bad faith of the symbolic leads through irony, but he is quick to warn that irony carries with it its own potential for mystification. through irony, he argues, the self is led to recognize its constructed rather than original character: the reflective disjunction [characteristic of irony] not only occurs _by means of_ language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language--a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. (de man, 213) it is too crude, however, to say that irony subverts the claim of symbolic language to have accessed the real by exposing and foregrounding the lack of closure between the linguistic sign and its meaning, because the latter is characteristic of figural language generally: the "structure shared by irony and allegory is that, in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving an extraneous principle that determines the point and the manner at and in which the relationship is articulated" (de man, 209). what is unique about irony is its dynamism: irony is unrelieved _vertige_, dizziness to the point of madness. sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimulation, just as social language dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual relationships between human beings. once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." (de man, 215-216) for this reason, irony can operate as a trope of demystification, replacing the reassurance of interpretative conventions with the madness of endless interpretation. yet as the current contest of allegories suggests, a mere plurality of competing perspectives, however healthy for politics, does not suffice for the purposes of demystification. and it is demystification--the sifting and evaluation of truth claims, the establishment of a reliable account of the world--upon which the institutional privilege of journalism thrives. in this context it is noteworthy that the press has resorted to irony in its attempt to cast doubt on official explanations of policy. in a world of agonistic interpretations--literally, a _polemical_ public sphere in which no absolute ground is recognized or can be discovered--the press can fulfill its pledge to deliver the real only through ironizing the public agon, that is, only by analyzing it in terms of meanings which are different from and displace those signified by the public discourses themselves. to place itself on the ground of the real, journalism must constantly foreground the discrepancy between the public claims and the "real" meaning of these claims. thus the press forces to self-consciousness the constructed character of public discourse, in part simply by highlighting the availability of differing allegorical readings of the event. bush's munich analogy never quite took, and the public and press continued to find in the stories of vietnam allegorical meanings of a more relevant nature. a few days after bush's november escalation of the u.s. troop presence in the gulf, doubts about the munich analogy and fear of a "repeat" of vietnam were front-page news: "in a joint statement, the house speaker, representative thomas s. foley, democrat of washington, and the majority leader, representative richard a. gephardt, democrat of missouri, said, `we urge the president to explain fully to the american people the strategy and aims that underlie his decision to dispatch additional forces to the region'." the article moved quickly to frame the issue in terms of the appropriate allegorical reading: on explaining the motives for american action, president bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies, an issue he once cited along with the need to resist aggression. he now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing mr. hussein to hitler. there are critics of both rationales, and a fear of repeating the vietnam experience--suffering great loss of life for little purpose. [...] one-third of voters surveyed on election day opposed american military action that would produce heavy casualties, a level of opposition reached during the vietnam war only after several years of fighting. the survey also found the clear beginnings of the sort of partisan division that tore the country during vietnam: two-thirds of those opposing american action in the gulf, and in particular, black americans, voted democratic. but more than half of those who say the nation should persevere even in the face of many casualties voted republican.^10^ a few days later, the public's insistence on allegorizing the gulf crisis through vietnam was again front-page news: "as americans confront the possibility of another war, history seems to present a troubling multiple-choice question: would this be another world war ii, or another vietnam?"^11^ [8] amidst the clash of allegories, the bush administration reeled to-and-fro from one explanation to another, to the point where narrative incoherency itself was explicitly thematized as a public concern. in early november, a week before the escalation, bush tested the waters by issuing more condemnations of iraq. the result was hysteria among republicans running for re-election in the senate and house, who attacked bush for deploying confusing messages: "republican strategists continued to express their disdain for the performance of the white house in this critical week before the election. `they don't have their act together,' one counselor to the white house said. `they're living in a fog. they're confusing the american public.'"^12^ the inability to tell a coherent story quickly became a public, not merely partisan, issue: "a common complaint . . . [among the public] was that the bush administration seemed unable to come up with a consistent--and compelling--account of what the united states was preparing to fight for. was it to protect oil sources, they wanted to know, or to prevent further aggression, or simply to maintain the status quo?" (kolbert, a10). indeed, within a few weeks it began to appear as if journalists were more concerned about the incoherency of the narratives on offer than with the substance of policy itself, and by mid-november, the inability of the administration to construct a satisfying story had become a source of frustration within bush's cabinet itself: "mr. baker, mr. bush's former campaign chairman, is said to have grown exasperated with white house speech writers' inability to present the president's gulf policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that it will have the sustained support of the american public."^13^ bush himself was eventually forced to acknowledge widespread fears of ambiguity and lack of closure: "if there must be war . . . i pledge to you there will not be any murky ending" ("excerpts from president's news conference" 4). in effect, bush promised that the war would be fought in such a way as to allow for the telling of coherent realist narratives, with endings implicit in their beginnings and unambiguous resolutions. [9] but the press also emphasizes the difference between sign and meaning by undermining in its own voice the coherency of the proffered explanations and justifications. very early in the crisis, thomas l. friedman drew attention to the vagueness of the bush administration's justifications of policy and attributed this to u.s. officials' unwillingness to state publicly the real rationale for the policy.^14^ "[s]peaking privately," these officials list "three interests at stake in the gulf. one is the price of oil. another is who controls the oil. the third is the need to uphold the integrity of territorial boundaries so that predatory regional powers will not simply begin devouring their neighbors." but friedman goes on to question even these "private" reasons as valid explanations for the policy, suggesting at one point that, for bush and his advisers, u.s. control of the persian gulf is such a deeply held assumption that they may be incapable of explicitly defending it. the real explanation, friedman suggests, is that the united states wants to preserve the status quo in the persian gulf, a desire prompted by economic interest: "troops have been sent to retain control of oil in the hands of pro-american saudi arabia, so prices will remain low." anna quindlen bemoans the discrepancy between sign and meaning in a similar vein: our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause while their women wait staunchly at home and provide security and normalcy for their children. we have become more complicated than the scripts of old movies. now we have brave women going out to fight and die for a cause none of us is sure of while their children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or aunts and uncles. we are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. the president trots out his hitler similes to convince us otherwise.^15^ at times, the general public awareness of this discrepancy, fueled, of course, by the rhetorical strategies of the press itself, acquires a news value of its own: "what marks the current crisis is the way americans are talking openly about the president's inability to `sell' war to a wary populace" (kolbert, a1). [10] the reader will have noticed that in these examples, the "dynamism" or "madness" that de man attributes to irony is conspicuously lacking; instead, irony is presented as yet another journalistic factoid, to be objectively represented. as practiced by _the new york times_, ironization has the opposite effect of demystification. de man cautions against seeing irony as "a kind of therapy, a cure of madness by means of the spoken or written word": when we speak . . . of irony originating at the cost of the empirical self, the statement has to be taken seriously enough to be carried to the extreme: absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself. but this reflection is made possible only by the double structure of ironic language: the ironist invents a form of himself that is "mad" but that does not know his own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus objectified. (de man, 216) this, de man says, makes it easy to see irony as a kind of _folie lucide_ which, in allowing "language to prevail even in extreme stages of self-alienation," might be viewed as a remedy for the mad displacement of sign and meaning through rigorous self-consciousness about the irony of language. this indeed seems to be precisely the claim of the press, which, under the circumstances of a phantasmagoric public sphere, maintains its claim to a privileged surveillance and objectivity by delivering the truth that all public representations are false. [11] but to construe irony in this way, de man argues, is the ultimate mystification. to illustrate, he discusses jean starobinski's reading of e.t.a. hoffmann's _prinzessin brambilla_. in hoffmann's tale, an acting couple who confuse their own lives with the "meaningful" roles they play on stage are "`cured' of this delusion by the discovery of irony," after which they find happiness in domesticity. but as de man insists, "the bourgeois idyll of the end is treated by hoffmann as pure parody . . . far from having returned to their natural selves, [the hero and heroine] are more than ever playing the artificial parts of the happy couple" (de man, 217-218). de man concludes that "at the very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to order and cure the world, the source of its invention immediately runs dry. the instant that it construes the fall of the self as an event that could somehow benefit the self, it discovers that it has in fact substituted death for madness" (de man, 218). for de man, then, "true irony" would be "irony to the second power or `irony of irony.'" through continual invention, such ironizing would state "the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world" (de man, 218). this is achieved only by refusing to see irony as a trope of mastery or reconciliation; and yet it is precisely as a sign of mastery that irony is deployed by the press. ironically--i use the term advisedly--the bush administration occupies the vanguard when it comes to the impossibility of reconciling world and text, in its insistence on the impossibility of knowing what the u.s. constitution says about the authority to use force, and hence of knowing precisely how the constitution is to be applied to the real world. while congress insists on the text's legibility (only congress, congress says, has the power to make war), bush insists on its ambiguity: on tuesday, influential lawmakers pressed mr. bush to call a special session, with many members of congress saying that the president would be usurping their constitutional power to send american troops into combat if he acted without congressional approval. mr. bush responded today by pulling a copy of the constitution from his suit pocket at a meeting with congressional leaders from both parties and telling him that he understood what it said about the responsibility of congress to declare war. but, he added, "it also says that i'm the commander in chief." later, baker had a two-hour meeting with congressional leaders and held a news conference: while agreeing that only congress has the authority to declare war, mr. baker said, "there are many, many circumstances and situations indeed where there could be action taken against american citizens or against american interests that would call for a very prompt and substantial response." mr. baker said that mr. bush would follow the constitution, but added with a smile, "it's a question of what the constitution requires."^16^ [12] but bush's insistence on the ambiguity of the constitution should not lead us to assimilate his conduct in office to ronald reagan's postmodern presidency. while reagan taught us to celebrate, and above all to exploit, a political and social world in which distinctions between the simulated and the real were simply irrelevant, bush, it would appear, intends to lead us back to the real, to invent a politics beyond that of reagan's handlers--which, of course, means war, since death, as always, is the union card of the real, the one "event" that escapes the handler's grasp. bush, we might say, is romantic where reagan was postmodern. arrayed against bush's romantic symbolism is the weak irony--that is, the mystified lucidity--of the press. indeed, lucidity--in a precisely defined official sense--is fast becoming a condition of death as well as life. in the issue of _the new york times_ that featured the report on widespread public awareness of the discrepancy between political sign and political meaning, an editorial referred to the louisiana supreme court's ruling that a murderer who became insane after he was condemned to death could be forced to take a drug that would render him "mentally competent" to undergo execution. the weak irony cultivated by the _times_ may well involve a similar economy: we must be just lucid enough--that is, just skeptical and uncertain enough--to feel that we master the world, so that we may sacrifice ourselves to its truths, and in particular to the truths of who we are and what we believe. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ r.w. apple, jr., "invading iraqis seize kuwait and its oil; u.s. condemns attack, urges united action," _the new york times_, august 3, 1990, a1, a8. ^2^ flora lewis, "fruits of appeasement," _the new york times_, august 4, 1990, 24. ^3^ a.m. rosenthal, "making a killer," _the new york times_, august 5, 1990, e19. ^4^ a.m. rosenthal, "saddam's next target," _the new york times_, august 9, 1990, a23. ^5^ "excerpts from bush's statement on u.s. defense of saudis," _the new york times_, august 9, 1990, a18. ^6^ quoted in r.w. apple, jr., "bush says iraqi aggression threatens `our way of life,'" _the new york times_, august 16, 1990, a14. ^7^ "excerpts from bush's remarks on his order to enlarge u.s. gulf force," _the new york times_, november 9, 1990, a12. ^8^ "excerpts from president's news conference on crisis in gulf," _the new york times_, december 1, 1990, 4. ^9^ see paul de man, "the rhetoric of temporality," _blindness and insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983), 187-228. ^10^ michael oreskes, "a debate unfolds over going to war against the iraqis," _the new york times_, november 12, 1990, a1. ^11^ elizabeth kolbert, "no talk of glory, but of blood on sand," _the new york times_, november 15, 1990, a1. ^12^ maureen dowd, "bush intensifies a war of words against the iraqis," _the new york times_, november 1, 1990, a1. ^13^ thomas l. friedman, "u.s. jobs at stake in gulf, baker says," _the new york times_, november 14, 1990, a8. ^14^ thomas l. friedman, "u.s. gulf policy: vague `vital interests,'" _the new york times_, august 12, 1990, a1. ^15^ anna quindlen, "new world at war," _the new york times_, september 15, 1990, a21. ^16^ maureen dowd, "president seems to blunt calls for gulf session," _the new york times_, october 29, 1990, a1. huskey, 'pee-wee herman and the postmodern picaresque', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-huskey-peewee.txt pee-wee herman and the postmodern picaresque by melynda huskey department of english north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by melynda huskey, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. "heard any good jokes lately?" --pee-wee at the mtv music awards [1] it's been six months since "pee-wee's big misadventure" was released to an eager public; the july 26th arrest of paul reubens for indecent exposure spurred renewed interest in what had been a fading cult. only die-hards were still taping saturday morning "playhouse" episodes, and "big top pee-wee" had disappointed fans hoping for another jeu d'esprit on the model of "pee-wee's big adventure." even a blissful cameo in the otherwise pedestrian "back to the beach" (pee-wee, balanced precariously on a surfboard, was borne shoulder-high by avatars of tito, the playhouse's hunky lifeguard) failed to spark real interest. according to peter wilkinson's rather solemn post-mortem, "who killed pee-wee herman?" (_rolling stone_, 3 october 1991), paul reubens himself was weary of being pee-wee; he was ready to branch out. so pee-wee herman is not likely to reappear except in re-runs for some time. mtv has picked up the five years' worth of "pee-wee's playhouse" episodes; both "the pee-wee herman show," a taped version of the club act that started the pee-wee story, and "pee-wee's big adventure" enjoy moderate rentals in video stores. but paul reubens is no longer the post-industrial casabianca, standing at attention on the burning deck of "entertainment tonight," and his hip-hop claque has gone home. [2] with pee-wee out of the way, i can finally justify a valedictory consideration of the supreme moment in his career, "pee-wee's big adventure." there is no denying that "big adventure" is the zenith of the herman oeuvre; it is the central text in pee-wee criticism. "big top pee-wee," in comparison, is an embarrassment--hardly worth a mention. [3] of course, one does not discount the importance of "the pee wee herman show." the nightclub act which, astonishingly, sparked the children's television show merits some consideration. only the reckless would dismiss without reflection the amazing hypnotism dummy, dr. mondo, encouraging joan the audience volunteer to disrobe, or jambi's eye-rolling delight over that new caucasian pair of hands ("there's something i've been wanting to do for a long time"). not to mention pee-wee himself, crooning his anthem, "i'm the luckiest boy in the world." in this version of the playhouse, the keynote is struck by the opening words of the theme song: "where do i go / when i want to do / what i know i want to do? / pee-wee's playhouse, pee-wee's playhouse." the playhouse draws visitors; there are no permanent residents except the furnishings--jambi, clockie--and pee-wee himself (if he does live there). everyone else is a transient. the playhouse is a liminal region. we see this theme taken up in the television version as well, with its elaborate closing sequence of pee-wee mounting his scooter for the dangerous leap onto the desert freeway. on television, though, everyone but pee-wee lives around or in the playhouse. it's still pee-wee's place, but it is located firmly in the center of a neighborhood which is some distance from pee-wee's primary home. in the nightclub version, all roads lead to pee-wee. neighbors like hammy are allowed to visit on sufferance, until pee-wee chooses to dismiss them. when kap'n karl and miss yvonne begin to like one another too much, pee-wee hustles them out of the playhouse with realistic gagging gestures. but they all come back eventually. pee-wee is the center of this universe, the luckiest boy in this world. [4] it is difficult to imagine that anyone who had seen the nightclub act agreed to let pee-wee have five years' worth of saturday kids' programming. the focus of "the pee-wee herman show" is lipsmackingly infantile sexuality. looking up skirts may be pee-wee's most common behavior; in the course of one hour he uses shoe mirrors to reflect hammy's sister's panties, holds dr. mondo (the aforementioned hypnotism dummy) under joan's dress before using his hypnotic powers to undress her, takes advantage of a graceful arabesque to peek up miss yvonne's fluffy skirts. but the polymorphously perverse being what it is, there's also the shyly masculine hermit hattie, courting miss yvonne with perfume and kind words, the swishily high-camp jambi, the achingly aryan, almost albino good looks of mailman mike, and m'sieur le crocodile's "gator mater dating service." without sexual attraction, there is no playhouse; the show's plot derives from pee-wee's unselfish decision to share his wish with miss yvonne (that kap'n karl should really like her) rather than use it for himself. not only does pee-wee give up his chance to fly, which he tells pteri he'd rather do than shave, even, but he is abandoned by both miss yvonne and kap'n karl once they discover each other. the dreadful consequences of this amorous misdirection can be resolved only by kap'n karl admitting that he already liked miss yvonne. the childish sexuality which seeks pleasure not only through speculative consideration of the mysteries of sex, but also through wordplay ("i said your ear, not your rear!") and sublimation, such as the wish to fly, is fully dramatized in the playhouse. [5] but for the real thing, the rich substance of pee-wee's amorous being, we must leave the liminal world of the playhouse and examine pee-wee's everyday life, the life dramatized in "pee wee's big adventure." in that text the obvious and playful concern over child sexuality is discarded for a much more complexly developed world of sexual behavior. [6] i have a theory about tim burton. i believe that he is recreating the great works of the english romantics in suburban (or urban) american settings. before you laugh, i submit for your consideration: "batman," the post-modern "manfred." instead of the alps, we have gotham city skyscrapers. instead of a guilt-ridden, incestuous relationship with a dead sister, a guilt-ridden, pointless relationship with brain-dead vicki vale. and most important, the cape, blowing back in the obediently melodramatic wind. bruce wayne, a byronic hero for our time. [7] and what about "edward scissorhands," possibly the best version of frankenstein committed to film in the last ten years? true, the arctic wastes over which the horrifying creation wanders are reduced to blocks of ice in the avon lady's backyard, but such is the postmodern condition. "beetlejuice"? the merging of "this old house" and coleridge's visionary (and characteristically incomplete) "christabel." [8] and finally, i offer you "pee-wee's big adventure." "childe harold" and "don juan" both; a byronic double-header for the big screen--a picaresque vision of the poet-lover as outcast filmed through a screwy postmodern lens. from the moment we see pee-wee cast his eyes impatiently to heaven and say, "dottie, there are things about me you wouldn't understand. things you couldn't understand. things you shouldn't understand. i'm a loner, dottie. a rebel," we know that we are in the presence of byronic greatness. and when, out of love beyond the ken of rich fat-boy francis, pee-wee refuses to part with his bike--even for money--we know that tragedy must follow. [9] vladimir propp offers us an elegant two-part summation of narrative: lack, lack liquidated. the plot of "big adventure" recapitulates those terms. pee-wee loses his bike, goes to the alamo to find it, and ends up in hollywood, where he recovers it. while searching for his lost vehicle, he discovers his true place in the world through adventures with many new friends. but no summary can do justice to the picaresque sublime of the adventure. pee-wee travels from east to west coast, from self satisfied isolation to integration, from wealth to poverty (and back), and from obscurity to celebrity. he is by turns a cowboy, a hell's angel, a dishwasher, a hitchhiker, a hobo. he befriends a truckstop waitress with a jealous boyfriend, an escaped convict, a ghostly truck driver. and in the end, he returns triumphantly justified to his home town, with his bike, his new friends, and enlightenment. he turns his back on self aggrandizement with the words, "i don't need to see it, dottie. i lived it." [10] like don juan, pee-wee is plagued throughout his adventures by unwelcome attentions. dottie, the bikeshop mechanic, wants to go on a drive-in date with him. simone-the-waitress's jealous boyfriend andy tries to kill him with a plaster of paris dinosaur bone for watching the sun rise with her. the queen of the "satan's helpers" motorcycle gang wants to destroy him herself. but pee-wee is never moved by these desiring women--nor by the men who admire him, notably mickey the convict and a jovial policeman who yearns for pee-wee in drag. he loves only his bike. [11] the bicycle functions, in fact, as the true woman of the narrative. an object of extraordinary beauty, attended by falling cherry blossoms and ethereal music, the bike is supremely desirable. francis, unable to obtain the bike legitimately, is forced by the excess of his need to have it stolen. but having taken it, he dares not keep it; the rest of the film is taken up with pee-wee's unceasing quest for it. true love triumphs; pee wee's journey is, although perilous, not fruitless. his dream visions of its destruction, his dead-end trip to the (nonexistent) basement of the alamo at the instigation of madame ruby the fraudulent clairvoyant, are all submerged, in the end, in his daring rescue of the captive bike from a hollywood studio. reunited, pee-wee and bike are then revised for the big screen. the love story of a boy and his bike becomes, with only a few alterations, the love story of a top spy and his super motorcycle. pee-wee himself plays a bell-boy. [12] the bike, like the vision which shelley's poet follows in "alastor, or the spirit of solitude," is most clearly present in its absence. it inspires, provokes, and closes the narrative without ever acting alone. it must depend entirely on the actions of others--the perfect heroine. dottie, by contrast, is too forward: she asks pee-wee out. she is too active: she has a job. and she is most closely identified with pee-wee's other close friend, speck the dog. the bicycle is the neo-platonic ideal of womanhood, beautiful, unattainable, distant. she must be earned by a hero willing to suffer greatly in her service. francis cannot fulfill the task; he pays a greasy j.d. to steal her. pee-wee is willing to dress as a nun to rescue her from a mean-spirited child star. [13] the picaresque adventure which forces pee-wee into heroic stature ends with his re-integration into ordinary life. back in his hometown, he greets all his friends at a special screening of "his" movie. he passes through the crowd dispensing largesse--a foot-long hot dog concealing a file for his friend the convict, french-fries for simone and her french sweetheart, candy for the satan's helpers to scramble for. at last, seated on his bike, he pedals silently, eloquently, across the bottom of the drive-in screen, a man at peace with himself, ready to return to the quiet life he once shared unthinkingly with his darling bike, a wiser boy. or man. whatever he is. [14] "pee-wee's big adventure" articulates a central premise of post-modernism--the impassioned, erotic, inevitable love affair with technology. and it does so using an elegant pastiche of film and literary versions of the neo-platonic, dream-visionary, questing romance--what we might call the true romance, with all that phrase's resonance of cheap drugstore magazines as well as medieval poetry. the playhouse offers us escape into the safe space of regression; the big adventure propels us--literary parachute firmly strapped on--into the strange desert freeway of the future. semansky, 'youngest brother of brothers', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-semansky-youngest.txt archive pmc-list, file semansky.596. part 1/1, total size 7136 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- youngest brother of brothers by chris semansky university of missouri-columbia writcks@showme.missouri.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by chris semansky, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. i hit a kid. he's about eight, and the better part of his right ear has been ripped off by the windshield. he's lying in the road, moaning, his legs jerking like he's underwater. a crisis becomes a wonderful moment to free oneself from ideas of "correctness," "objectivity," "acceptance," and redesign, reconstruct one's place in the on-going narrative or life story. yet the success or failure of such an endeavor can only be provided in the discursive realm. - - a masseuse from newark, new jersey, my mother loved events, engineered ecstasy, spectacular moments of sensuous clarity when the body gave up its idea of being merely a single thing, separate and uncopied, and fell somewhere wholly strange. when i was eight and just after she had dropped four squares of windowpane while listening to the white album, she tattooed a picture of the beatles in the small of my back. just the heads. -- daddy, what does the discursive realm look like? the discursive realm is a place of wonder and enchantment and not at all like you'd imagine. your mother and i lived there for the better part of our marriage. remember that building we saw out west made of marble and glass and aluminum and discarded tires and old hush puppy shoes with the withered buster brown face still in the heel? it's like where we are right now, yet also where we'll be in a few minutes, a few days. it may or may not be where we'll all wind up when our little pumpers stop pumping. the discursive realm is an orphan, son, with a family as large and tenuous as the sky. and it is dangerous because it watches us better than we can watch ourselves. maybe a picture would help: -- maybe not. -- i write because i cannot see my face. i drive because i cannot get away from my face. - - how they've stretched and faded, how their haircuts now resemble bruised soup bowls, their noses nothing more than squamous plugs of dappled sunburn and scars. how they resemble your average bowling team from wichita. i don't have to look at them. -- other things i don't have to look at but of whose existence i have been informed and whose symptoms i have been taught to read: 1. lesions of the parietal lobe posterior to the somnesthetic area 2. a t-cell count of 160 3. proprioceptive agnosia 4. the inside of all things holy and wordless -- he's wearing red converse sneakers, size six i guess, maybe smaller, with the most darling little mets tee shirt, bloodied now but still smart. if i had a boy, i'd want him to be just like this kid. if he survives i imagine in a few years he'll be playing hoops with his friends, juking past defenders while looping in from the wing for a layup, dribbling behind his back, dishing no-look passes to his awe-struck teammates who, without thinking, shyly smile at his grace. - - the youngest brother of brothers' chief interest is the quality of life and the joys and sensations of the present, rather than the collection of goods and property. he is relatively soft and yielding with women, even if he plays the part of a cynic or an erratic adventurer. his preferred professions include announcer and entertainer, quizzmaster, advertising agent or salesman, artist, writer, musician, actor, tutor, technical or scientific specialist, assistant or associate of leading men in business, politics or science, a vote-rallying politician, ophthalmologist, or anesthesiologist. - - for ten points, name the five slowest dying characters in modern history: -- the panel light blinks red: "check engine." -- give up? -- what defines an emergency is a person's acknowledging it as such. but what constitutes the person's idea of emergency %per se?% crisis and opportunity co-exist like blood and flesh. they are both the same and different. calculated in the moment of its happening in retrospect a crisis as opportunity becomes an excuse for changing, a bookmark to the place you remember best. - - what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. it may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places. - - blank says he'd like to live his life backwards, start as an old man with recurring memories of a childhood yet to come, to gradually empty himself of the stale revelations and sudden pains that he would simultaneously grow into. my preference is for the life lived from the middle, then alternating a year in either direction. one step forward, one step back to when the first step was taken. -- in the television series of our story little tommy smartpants plays the author when the cop bangs on the window. "can you open the door?" "no." "what happened?" "door's stuck." - - since one experiences one's own intentions as good, then the problem is seen as the other's actions and what one assumes are the intentions behind them. "do you really mean that?" people tend to explain to themselves what the other is doing by interpreting the other's intentions. the other's actions (and assumed intentions) then become the mitigating circumstances that justify one's own actions, despite knowing that one's own actions do not necessarily fit what is culturally or personally acceptable. - - i bite his other ear. he is so beautiful. -- i unbite it, then throw him back into the street, where he is once again young and whole and can bother me no more. children have their own explanations for things. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------miller, 'privacy and pleasure: edward said on music', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-miller-privacy.txt privacy and pleasure: edward said on music by dan miller <dcmeg@ncsuvm> north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by dan miller, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. said, edward w. _musical elaborations_. new york: columbia up, 1991. 109 pp. $19.95. [1] edward said's 1989 wellek library lectures in critical theory at the university of california at irvine, published as _musical elaborations_, are meditations on classical music in the western tradition. they confront a sharp antinomy: on one hand, music is an intensely solitary and subjective experience for the performer or listener; on the other hand, music is also public occurrence, fully implicated in the social and cultural world. said sets out to resolve the antinomy; he intends to show that, however private the experience of music may seem, it never escapes social context and functions. but as said pursues that resolution, difficulties arise. he often moves from the private to the public dimensions by modulations that are themselves more musical than logical. some of the most assured passages in the book assert the solitary, not the social, pleasures and powers of music. said is often more successful at describing the ways in music eludes social appropriation than he is at demonstrating how it serves social ends. as a result, the argument of _musical elaborations_ is strangely, powerfully at odds with itself: it wants to hold that classical music is a fully social enterprise, but it cannot help celebrating music in solitude. but while these lectures tend to undermine their own conclusions, they also succeed in a way that said did not intend. his case for the socially determined nature of music actually serves to diagnose weaknesses in current, socially-oriented cultural analysis. [2] _musical elaborations_ is a richly varied book. it mixes theoretical speculations in both musicology and literary theory with autobiography. foucault and adorno mingle with brahms and wagner. music criticism, sometimes technical and sometimes impressionistic, joins with literary criticism, and both intertwine with narrative and remembrance. these are personal essays, loose in structure, unapologetic in their subjectivity. while said calls himself an amateur in musicology, he is clearly among the most expert amateurs. his columns on music have appeared for several years in _the nation_, and, as he delivered these lectures, he played brief passages on the piano to illustrate his points. [3] at issue throughout the book is the postmodern insistence, exemplified by foucault, on the social construction of art and individuality. ostensibly nonrepresentational and highly formal, highly individualized in its composition and its performance, classical music offers the most challenging test case for social analysis. said notes that music writing, governed by the assumption that classical music develops according to its own internal and formal logic, independently of social history, has been relatively untouched by recent developments in literary and cultural theory. his goal is to treat music as a cultural field and to see (or hear) music as always implicated in social distinctions and roles, in questions of national and regional identity, in its own institutions, in the dispositions of cultural power. for said, music is marked by the fluidity of its affiliations: it always has a social setting and role, but settings and roles are always changing, always temporally and spatially variable. what said calls the "transgressive" character of music--"that faculty music has to travel, to cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even though many institutions have sought to confine it" (xix)--is its ability constantly to re-affiliate itself and establish new connections. music plays a central role in the constitution or, in a term said borrows from gramsci, "elaboration" of a social order, and as such it normally works to preserve social power and relations. but it does so through its transgressive ability to break from its social context and function in other contexts. [4] for said, the essential, and most paradoxical, instance of music is the performance. said points out repeatedly how rare moments of musical transcendence take place only in one of the most socially ritualized, unchanging, often stultifyingly conservative institutions imaginable: the concert itself, with its highly restricted performance repertory, with its absolute separation of roles (performers are not composers, listeners are usually not performers themselves, and composers are not performers, in part because they are, almost as a rule, dead), and with the long, specialized training of performers aimed at a level of sheer expertise far beyond ordinary musical abilities. performance is an "extreme occasion," an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. it is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible. said recognizes that, in many ways, the modern concert represents a profound de-socialization of music since it rests upon a debilitating division of musical labor among performers, listeners, and composers. yet, for said, only at the moment of overpowering performance can music break out of the very social constraints that make it possible. [5] said is fascinated by musicians who seek extreme control, who dominate both the music and the conditions of performance. while said notes how appropriate arturo toscanini's style was for an american broadcasting corporation intent on creating a mass audience for classical music, it is the rigorous logic of toscanini's musical vision that attracts said's attention: "what toscanini seems to me to be doing . . . is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life" (20). in the music and career of glenn gould, said finds again the power of discontinuity and the force of individual will effecting the break. in his "retirement" from public playing and withdrawal into exclusively filmed and recorded performance, gould created "a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted" (23). as in toscanini's control, so in gould's almost mathematically precise fingering, said discovers a world apart, almost redemptively divorced from normal life. said notes that gould's ideals of "_repose, detachment, isolation_" (29) are symptoms of an art condemned to social marginality, yet said is himself drawn to these ideals. [6] said extols those moments--points of completion in a composer's musical evolution, times of mastery in performance, instants of complete absorption in listening--when nothing else but music in its purity remains. and at those moments, music breaks free of the social field: there are "a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely _as music_, free of the many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things _as they are_. i want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render music socially superfluous and useless--to _discharge_ it completely--but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom" (71). said's cases in point are interesting: webern's _variations_, bach's "canonic variations," and a work that normally seems immersed in cultural context and value, mozart's _cosi fan tutte_. absolute virtuosity, rigorous musical development (though variations and elaborations), "pure musicality in a social space off the edge" (72) that is hardly still social at all--these represent escape and freedom. there is, said allows, some truth to the romantic view "that music to a consummate musician possesses a separate status and place . . . that is occasionally revealed but more often withheld" (xix-xx). [7] while much of _musical elaborations_ is an argument against theodor adorno and the view that modern music, exemplified by schoenberg, represents a fatal rift between culture and society, michel foucault makes his presence felt throughout the book. said acknowledges the foucauldian nightmare of a social order shaped and dominated by power even in its apparently most secret and individual recesses, producing opposition only to manage and contain it. yet here, as in other books and essays, said works toward a social vision that allows real possibilities of change and some degree of escape. for said, both foucault and adorno are guilty of a totalizing theory does little to contest the totalizing society it confronts. "no social system," said writes, "no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. there is always the possibility to transgress" (55). even wagner's _die meistersinger_, epitome of musical elaborating a social order, contains its own transgression: "read and heard for the bristling, tremendously energetic power of _alternatives_ to its own affirmative proclamations about the greatness of german art and culture, _die meistersinger_ cannot really be reduced to the nationalist ideology of its final strophes stress" (61). music itself is the last and best hope, it seems, for transgression. [8] the extraordinary performance, the virtuoso as master, the singular event and individual, absolute music, the moment of complete transgression--these are the motifs of romanticism, musicological idealism, and individualist aesthetics, exactly the targets of said's polemic. said confesses that the language of idealism tinges these lectures, but he never acknowledges the degree to which the book is divided against itself: let the word "melody" . . . serve as a name both for an actual melody and for any other musical element that acts in or beneath the lines of a particular body of music to attach that music to the privacy of a listener's, performer's, or composer's experience. here i want to emphasize privacy and pleasure, both of them replete with the historical and ideological residue of that bourgeois individuation now either discredited or fully under attack. (96) for said, there is no music without melody, that intensely particularized utterance that is "authorial signature" (95)--even of a composer for whom melody in the normal sense is not primary--and mark of all that is least social and most a departure from the cultural field. even glenn gould, archly anti-romantic in style and repertory, is, as said describes him--the eccentric genius who turns his back on the world and any trace of normal life, who constructs for himself a life of pure art and, in so doing, creates (and destroys) himself--a perfect instance of late romanticism. _musical elaborations_ is clearly not a defense of individualist aesthetics, but it does suggest that much of the traditional language of music's (and perhaps, by extension, art's) inwardness, autonomy, originality, and uniqueness cannot be jettisoned without substantial loss. said's recourse to idealism, in an intellectual climate (created in large part by said himself) dominated by programmatic anti-idealism, indicates something more interesting and powerful than a lapse in logic. the postmodern vocabulary may allow said no language to describe musical interiority other than traditional romanticism, even though what he strives to say may no longer be romantic. [9] said begins his third chapter, "melody, solitude, and affirmation," by invoking proust's remembrances of music past and of memories brought to life by music: proust's recurrences inevitably point away from the public aspects of an occasion--sitting in a concert hall or salon, for instance--to its private possibilities; for example, the recollection, often shared, often lonely, of pains, anguish, bodies, miscellaneous as well as musical sounds, and so on. i find this characteristic tendency in proust very moving, obviously because in its poignancy and psychological richness it has helped me to comprehend a great deal about my own experiences of music, experiences that seem to me like an unceasing shuttle between playing and listening privately for myself and playing and listening in a social setting, a setting whose constraints and often harsh limitations . . . only suddenly and very rarely produce so novel, so intense, so individualized, and so irreducible an experience of music as to make it possible for one to see in it a lot of its richness and complexity almost for the first time. (76) he recounts how hearing alfred brendel play brahms' "theme with variations for piano" led him, through a complex, apparently private and idiosyncratic course of associations, to other music (theme-and-variation pieces by mozart, beethoven, liszt, elgar), to other performances and versions of the same music (including part of a louis malle film score), to comparable musical effects (in schumann, wagner, strauss), finally to "the voice and even the pianistic gestures of an old teacher, ignace tiegerman, a polish jew who had come to egypt (which is where i met him in the 1950s), after he had discovered the impending portent of fascism for him as a european musician and performer during the 1930s," to his playing of a brahms concerto, and then to "a whole tradition of teaching and playing that entered into and formed my relationship with tiegerman, as it must have between him and his colleagues and friends in europe" (90-91). [10] there is an obvious point about this narrative, but it is one that said never quite makes. the most moving private moment has shown itself to be fully social, though not social in the way said has been using that term. throughout the book, said treats public and private, solitary and social, as simple, polar opposites. inwardness and musical meditation are, almost by definition, non-social, anti-social. but his own story demonstrates that seemingly private experience is social at its heart. even at the instant of greatest isolation and involvement, it is exactly the music of another being heard. music here illustrates an extreme sociality, where self and other are so intimately tied and interwoven that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. in addition, the most private inevitably reveals itself as the most social and the most painfully historical (the story of ignace tiegerman resonates with said's references, elsewhere in the book, to the palestinian dispossession and the role played in it by elements of european fascism). said resolves the antinomy of public and private not in the way he had intended, through analysis of musical institutions and settings, but exactly where it seemed a resolution was least likely to be found, in what seemed to be pure inwardness and formal pleasure. [11] pushed to an extreme, "public" and "private" are no longer opposites. if we attend to what said's discussion actually shows, rather than what it asserts, we see that the tension between public and private remains, even as both are, in effect, different inflections of the social. here social forces are refracted through individual experience and, unlike the obviously institutional dimensions of the concert, are powerfully interior. it is far from clear what sort of social analysis could genuinely illuminate the domain of inwardness, but said has at least suggested the poverty of a postmodernism incapable of accounting for privacy and musical pleasure. if our concern, after foucault, is with what is genuinely transgressive, then music and interiority and a certain kind of individualism cannot be discounted. of course, what kind of individualism makes a considerable difference. there is a great difference between holding the individual and private experience are of value because they transcend social determinations and because they represent the complexity, hence the variability, of social structures. and the same holds true when the private experience is that of an artwork, musical or literary. hashmi, 'poem', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-hashmi-poem.txt a poem by alamgir hashmi islamabad, pakistan copyright (c) 1991 by alamgir hashmi, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.1 (january, 1991) post scrotum watt? yes. but the same when the mal'oun died in the island; this island severed, repousse, reeling with peat-reek; this drizzle of grief- interminable falling on the wide sea. moll's face saffron-coloured, hair like petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum; local boys on stout or busy at hurling; and our scriveners, on regular beat up in london, aping accents of the english gentry. i broadcast in irish then, from radio eireann, the right embers and all that fall to the ashes or whatever i often whispered to myself through murphy, philips, or grundig. no, not grundig, for the word grounds the air, the mind slips out of form in that language, is not hand in glove as now. example: with a handschuh your hands feel they wear shoes; the foot's in the mouth; and you write with your feet. paris is o. k. paris is all right. paris is o. k. all right. i was lecteur d'anglais in that place, teaching doublin' english and writing like thom a. becket what no one, except j. j. in some arseholy state or other, would attempt- in a language of my own. i hear now that across the chunnel one side tells the other it's french i wrote; the other side calls it english, or by other appelatives; such as would divide the protestant cake in catholic portions and make for a nice debate in the parliament of european foules. if i said parnell was no string-pulling politician, women would be tightening the girth of their drawers with double-knotted strings. i left because truelove had run out of the vein, the earth turning no end but negative; its slow poisons free a sweet violet in my lungs. and, yes, french had a point or two. that dusty potato dropped in 1921 or 1845, it named the apple of the earth- to say nothing of the rotten core. peeling. peeling. --sbb with alamgir hashmi pratt, 'speaking in tongues: dead elvis and the greil quest', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-pratt-speaking.txt speaking in tongues: dead elvis and the greil quest by linda ray pratt department of english university of nebraska-lincoln <lpratt@unlcdc2> _postmodern culture_ v.2, n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by linda ray pratt, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: marcus, greil. _dead elvis: a chronicle of a cultural obsession_. new york: doubleday, 1991. `you gotta learn how to speak in tongues.' `i already know how,' elvis says. --greil marcus, _jungle music_ the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. --t.s. eliot, _four quartets_ [1] from the evidence in greil marcus's new book, the dead elvis is a postmodern elvis, a hermeneutic object in whose emptiness even fictions becomes simulacra. subtitled _a chronicle of a cultural obsession_, _dead elvis_ collects marcus's writings on elvis from 1977 to 1990, but they are inspired by the wide range of representations that make this book more of a cultural conversation than a chronicle. marcus calls the invention of dead elvis "a great common art project, the work of scores of people operating independently of each other, linked only by their determination to solve the same problem: who was he, and why do i still care?" the collective representation both legitimizes and subverts "elvis," the cultural production that would make discerning *who* the man was irrelevant were it not for the imagination invested in the project. [2] for those who still care, the questions are sometimes really, really big ones: is elvis in heaven or hell? (we've given up on the k-mart in kalamazoo). is elvis more like hitler or jesus? the questions are openly joking but mask the still unsettled doubt about what it means that we want elvis, alive or dead. should we think about him with melville, lincoln, and faulkner (as marcus did so brilliantly in _mystery train_) or was he just a piece of southern white trash (as albert goldman wishes) or, like byron, "an epicene and disrupter," one of the "revolutionary men of beauty" who burn godlike (as camille paglia argues). this book doesn't really explain who he was, or even why we still care. its strength is in showing how the art project is coming along, what image of elvis, dead, we are keeping alive. too recent for the book was the phenomenon of americans voting on which image to keep alive. the heady choice of young or old elvis on "the stamp" engaged us more than our political elections and plays like a last ritual of mass investiture, a kind of cultural laying out of the robes in which dead elvis will officially ascend, transcend, and return to sender. [3] the book contains reviews marcus has written on nik cohn's _king death_, goldman's _elvis_, peter guralnick's _lost highways_, and nick tosches's _hellfire: the jerry lee lewis story_. these reviews are often occasions for marcus to comment both on the various authors' uses and abuses of elvis and on his own continuing fascination with the king who wouldn't die. combined with the many visual representations in paintings, album covers, and other less classifiable forms, the book itself becomes part of the art project. marcus assembles a set of elvis images that range from the stupid to the clever. the article in _publish! desktop publishing_ on "clones: the postscript impersonators" that is illustrated with computeresque-elvis clones is an unexpected triple pun in what would otherwise be the dullest of pieces. the exhibition advertisement for "outside the clock: beyond good and elvis," rewrites nietzsche's wisdom in a pop vernacular. holding all of this together is marcus's own cultural obsession; more than a decade after his death, "elvis was everywhere, and each mask was simply the thing the thing wore over its true face, which no one could see" (188). [4] "the thing" speaks in tongues both vulgar and sublime, and marcus is struggling with the translation. questing after what it was in the music that holds us, marcus writes abstractly of "the grain of his voice." his elvis remains an "inner mystery . . . where the secrets are outside of words. . . ." the problem is how to account for the magnitude of elvis's "cultural conquest" when it "remains impossible" to believe that elvis "understood" what he was doing. "is it possible that elvis presley appeared on the _ed sullivan show_ not as a country boy eager for his big chance but as a man ready to disorder and dismember the culture that from his first moment had tried to dismember him, to fix him as a creature of resentment, rage, and fatalism, and that *had failed*?" (195). but it is not possible to attribute social design to the fallout of an explosion of self, and neither living nor dead elvis yields up his secrets in service to sociology. [5] marcus's book is an intellectual quest by the critic of culture uncomfortable with the dionysian confusion in the spectacle. elvis did not plan a cultural revolution, but he did mean to be sexy, and what his intellect did not design, his body knew instinctively. the images of dead elvis are often either a defacement of his youthful body or a restoration of it. paglia talks about the power of his sexual beauty in terms that rock critics (mainly a male world) shy away from. marcus knows that it was his dazzling sexuality that made elvis different from other early rockers, but he is more comfortable discussing him in the context of america as a culture than he is as a post protestant dionysian god. was it the culture of melville and lincoln, or even eisenhower, that elvis dismembered, or was it the culture which dismembered him in order to consume him sexually? wouldn't a book seeking to explain him have to be subtitled, "the chronicle of a sexual obsession"? or how about "the culture of a sexual chronicle"? "cultural" reads like an intellectual displacement, just as the comparison of elvis with jesus conceals the worship of the body instead of the soul. marcus calls the cortez photographs of elvis among the munich whores "repulsive and irresistible," a seedy, corrupt image that makes you "want to turn away." this won't "mesh with the elvis we carry in our heads," marcus says, but perhaps what doesn't mesh is the crude eroticism of these pictures with the myths of elvis we invented to conceal the thing in the shadow of the thing. [6] one of those myths that everyone still wants to look away from is that of elvis's devotion to his mother. marcus reviews elaine dundy's _elvis and gladys_, a book designed "to rescue gladys presley from her usual dismissal as a dumb, sentimental woman" who drowned her son in overprotection. dundy's thesis suggests to marcus that "elvis's infantile adult life had far more to do with class . . . ," an idea that opens up for marcus his own interest in "a degeneration of democratic values" from the southern frontiersman to the sterile aristocrat of modern memphis. (marcus has this backwards: in the south, it's the degeneration of *aristocratic* values unhinged by urban development and big capital. elvis came out of the one and made the other, becoming in the process an icon of the "new south.") but what we've learned about elvis's sexual identity makes him sound more like an unprotected victim of incestuous abuse than an overprotected beloved child. gladys presley was an alcoholic with a weak husband and the most beautiful boy in the world. the legend says that elvis first recorded "my happiness" for her birthday, but maybe the record he did for her was "that's all right, mama," with its combination of angry self-assertion ("i'm leaving town for sure") and pleasured acquiescence ("that's alright now mama, just any way you do"). that "grain" marcus hears in his voice has the complex emotional intensity that stops us dead with its authenticity, something like the inescapable edge we hear in sylvia plath's. his voice mixes desire and rejection, suffering and rage, that overpowers the conventions of musical form or pop language. its rhythm is an emotional pulse of inconsolable misery and delighted abandonment. elvis's music, like plath's poetry, is full of threats of revenge that dissolve in need and sadness: "i'm leaving town for good" and then you'll be sorry for the way you treated me. when elvis called mama every day he was on the road, who was taking care of whom? did she walk him to school every day to see that he was safe and got his education, or to see that he did not throw her over? perhaps she never touched her boy, but he came to us profoundly aware of his sexual attractiveness and too damaged to handle the power his body could command. elvis's psychological pattern was denial: working to reduce the audience to screaming ecstasy, he told us he wasn't doing anything "sexual" on stage; consuming handfuls of pills, he flashed his badge as a drug agent; wearing the black leather suit at the peak of his physical beauty, he was sexually dysfunctional with his wife. when he was declaring his love of his mother, what was the rest of the formula? [7] the question is if any of this matters. culture's quest is not to understand "the reality" of its idols but to make them up to fit its needs. perhaps the cultural obsession is about not wanting to know who the real elvis was, and so the questions marcus poses are not really the ones he pursues. creating dead elvis is what we've been doing instead of asking, "who was he, and why do i still care?" those who speak in tongues give voice to messages we can only bear in hints and guesses. the word made flesh moved from the sexual to the excremental, and the body's beauty was held hostage to the heart's misery and mind's decay. the pop representation of elvis is the lie we tell about this, the collective story that conceals just how well we did know who he was, how much we did translate the "grain" of his voice, and how it felt to see him die. but such knowledge is too elemental, too crude and unrelenting to be borne, and so we deface and adorn to make the thing itself smaller than a man or larger than life. [8] the cultural joke that is the dead elvis is as irrepressible as nervous laughter at a funeral. marcus tells us of the bold little girl in his fourth grade class in 1955 who "went off to see elvis." nervous and confused by their own responses, the students made her the object of mockery and jealousy and lied to themselves to conceal their own unnameable emotions. not much has changed in all this, except that the emotions became more complex and her classmate has thought longer and harder. but marcus is still not easy in his mind about elvis, and that drives him to ask better questions and play with more suggestive answers than anyone else who thinks about such things. _dead elvis_ serves the art project well, mystifying further what it cannot really want to strip away, rewriting a funny ending to an absurd tragedy in which the king died in his bathroom before the town was saved. english, 'jameson's postmodernism', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-english-jamesons.txt jameson's postmodernism by jim english <jenglish@pennsas> university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by jim english, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] fredric jameson, the key marxist player in the "postmodernism debates" of the early and mid eighties, has now published an entire book on postmodern culture, titled after his classic 1984 article in _new left review_, "postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism." the recycled title may keep some people away from this hefty and expensive volume, since it suggests one of those dressed-up collections of already widely collected essays- in this case rather suspiciously assembled for a duke university press series of which the author himself is co editor. [2] but while it is true that six of the ten chapters here have been reprinted from elsewhere, only the first two (the nlr article and a contemporaneous "politics of theory" piece from _new german critique_) will be familiar to most readers. moreover, the arguments of both these earlier pieces have been massively supplemented. jameson's political analysis of contemporary theoretical discourse is here extended to address the paralyzing "nominalism" of both theory (deconstruction) and anti-theory (new historicism) in a substantial chapter that also includes, to my knowledge, his first extended statement on the de man affair. and the shamelessly "totalizing" marxist approach to contemporary culture that he deployed in his original "postmodernism" essay is spiritedly defended over and against the dominant academic discourses of "groups and difference" in a sprawling but indispensable "conclusion." given that these two chapters alone represent some two hundred pages of fresh material, it would clearly be a mistake to dismiss _postmodernism_ as just another collection of warmed-over articles by a lit-biz superstar. jameson's purpose in this book is not so much to collect his past work on postmodernism as to frame the frequently "scandalized" and hostile reception of that work--particularly by postmarxists, postcolonialists, foucauldians, and feminists--as itself a symptom of the "decadence" or degradation of critical discourse in the postmodern age. [3] indeed, jameson, whose distinctive role in the debate is to take postmodernism as naming not merely an historical period but a "mode of production" (essentially unresisted capitalism--omnipresent, invisible, taken-for-granted capitalism), reads culture in general (including, especially, all manner of "theory") as a terrain on which one may trace out the "symptomatology" of this supremely hegemonic stage of capitalism. for jameson, any workable culture critique must retain something of the reflectionist logic of base and superstructure. though his mode-of production model is organized across multiple and heterogeneous levels or orders of abstraction, it ultimately aims at "explaining" postmodern cultural phenomena--the "new sentence," the "new space," the ascendancy of "pastiche," and the other styles and themes he identifies--by reference to a grand diachronic narrative whose "agent" is "multinational capital itself." thus he can insist that his critics' "resistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the mode of production" is itself "a function of . . . [the] universalization of capitalism." [4] the interesting question to raise here, it seems to me, is not whether jameson's frankly totalizing methodology is inherently insensitive to cultural difference, or even whether such periodizing or totalizing abstractions have been somehow ruled out in advance by the fragmented and ahistorical character of the culture they mean to grasp. rather, the question is to what extent jameson's brand of late-capitalist marxism is itself a symptom of the mode of production whose symptomatology concerns him. where is the diagnostician located in relation to the disease? is this _postmodernism_ postmodern? if the imperative is to historicize, how can we historicize jameson himself? [5] there are many ways to approach such a question. but since jameson has "insisted on a characterization of postmodern thought . . . in terms of the expressive peculiarities of its language rather than as mutations in thinking or consciousness as such," we might do well to consider jameson's style, the "aesthetics of [his own] theoretical discourse." certainly his sentences, always remarkable, have never called more attention to themselves than in the most newly minted contributions to this volume. of the schizophrenic character of our discursive situation, jameson writes: a roomful of people, indeed, solicit us in incompatible directions that we entertain all at once: one subject position assuring us of the remarkable new global elegance of its daily life and forms; another one marveling at the spread of democracy, with all those new 'voices' sounding out of hitherto silent parts of the globe or inaudible class strata (just wait a while, they will be here, to join their voices to the rest); other more querulous and 'realistic' tongues reminding us of the incompetences of late capitalism, with its delirious paper-money constructions rising out of sight, its debt, the rapidity of the flight of factories matched only by the opening of new junk-food chains, the sheer immiseration of structural homelessness, let alone unemployment, and that well known thing called urban 'blight' or 'decay' which the media wraps brightly up in drug melodramas and violence porn when it judges the theme perilously close to being threadbare. the trouble with the crowded room, says jameson, is that "none of these voices can be said to contradict the others; not 'discourses' but only propositions do that." presumably his own voice wants to be the exception; one appeal of jameson's work is its willingness to make the strong argument, the contradictable proposition, which can then be seized upon for polemical purposes. [6] this determination to be more than mere "discourse" (or "commentary" as he will ultimately call it) is clearly enough signaled in the polemical framework--the initiation and the transitional logic--of the typical jameson essay. but is the jamesonian sentence really so different from the ostensibly symptomatic "new sentence" of, say, bob perelman? jameson identifies this latter sentence with an aesthetic of "schizophrenic disjunction" made newly--and in some sense irresponsibly--available "for more joyous intensities" than seem proper to its morbid content, made available even "for . . . euphoria." [7] there seems to be something like a connection between this characterization of language writing and the curious affect, which combines exhilaration and exhaustion, of jameson's own sentences. they are often brilliant sentences, but also "impossible" in the sense that the two-hundred-word aphorism is impossible. a kind of pragmatism of language, and a refusal of any posture of poeticism or transcendence, coexist improbably with the bravura and self-involvement of jameson's idiolect. polemic is put into virtual abeyance by the tendency to stray across various and incompatible discursive fields, "picking up" bits of language here and there, celebrating the syntactic detour. and yet polemic, or perhaps (as one begins to suspect) some convincing simulation of polemic, always reappears at the next rest stop, only to be lost once again in the joyous (or is it tiresome?) intensity, the weirdly inappropriate euphoria, of another jamesonian sentence. [8] jameson's style suggests two possible conclusions about "his" postmodernism. on the one hand, the tendency of his own sentences to dissolve the distinction between a language capable of genuinely critical propositions and the mere "commentary" generated by a schizophrenic culture (a distinction which looks not only like that between purposive "parody" and ungrounded "pastiche," but, even more dubiously, like that maintained by the speech act theorists between "authentic" and "parasitical" utterances) may signal an irremediable problem in jameson's framing of the whole polemic--which would turn out, in that case, to be merely a mock-polemic anyway. on the other hand, the fact that the diagnostician too is infected, that the doctor cannot heal himself, suggests that for all the traditionalism and even perhaps nostalgia of the author's global perspective, this book marks something more interesting than the persistence of a certain modernity, something less familiar than a belated pre-postmarxist marxism. to read _postmodernism_ as a symptom of its own ostensive object of study is to confront in a new, complex, and sometimes exhilarating form the problematic of "symptomatology" itself, which, like so many seeming vestiges of the modern, was consigned to the dustbin of the "no longer available" but has stubbornly refused its oblivion. mccorkle, 'two poems', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-mccorkle-two.txt two poems by james mccorkle hobart and william smith colleges copyright (c) 1991 by james mccorkle, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.1 (january, 1991) combustion of early summer the elation of the past is over, the news tells us, suggesting it was there to begin with or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck. but on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us, a conversation in another room we thought dormant, soon its occupants will crash through the door wearing green sequin blouses that remind us of mermaids, the ones seen years ago in waterless tanks among dried starfish and draped nets, waving to us from a place free of storms. you wonder about other places, less advertised, if another design had not been accomplished that drew upon a new notion of heaven. cushioned by the afternoon's orchid heat, enveloping us with implied betrayals-it is possible, the narrator might be whispering- there we might be unfurling like sails, never going taut, the wind pulls us over the water, whole populations streaming over reefs with marlin and sailfish. stories that make us up, until we are bankrupt, and we wonder who these people are claiming their pound of flesh off our backs, pushing us into the dusty crowd. we are trapped in the same voices we've known for years, words drop among the glowing debris of streets-which are yours or mine, what was said or when, unknown. sorting things out, nothing really fits: the puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta, we have pieces from other lives, the difficulty is to remember them, hoping caligula or curie do not figure as the locking piece, the keyhole, the knob. dreams stare back at us, a coiled snake leading us deeper into houses or along streets to a harbor whose palms have rotted, the furniture staved-in. along the shore the dead talk with us--they are the waves and the salvage-birds, the jackals that swarm through the old hotels and in the weedy temples. these sidereal landscapes compound: for a moment you are there, in the mullein-heat of ruins, before we lose sight of the landscape, the dream chopped to a memory at other times, there are sections we dimly remember: another bay's cerulean expanse tips into the sky, scattered sails tack for an unseen buoy. the regatta holds its shape, like dreams that continue after waking, the city fills out for us again, with its seepage-stained water-towers and the pigeon-clutter of roofs. in the dense exhaust of afternoon, we move in and out of shadows along houston street, as though bathing in ink and then washing clean of all traces, the remaining light is so strong our white shirts blanch the photographs of all tone: were you to the left, or is that someone else strayed into the frame? the shield of light expands over the imagined horizons, everything fills itself with all else, that anything could be no longer interests. the traffic lights change like dominoes falling, all the way up town as we move each to another, a roundel where passion is only in the figure. everything said spirals to a period, a rose that has dried almost to blackness, its scent a window left open long ago. we slide to this point perspectives chart, infinite movement allowed only one course, what was meant to happens remains off stage, so much for the pavane we whirled into; sticking your tongue out, crossing your eyes, you spin across stage, into the water-meadows abutting tank-farms. the stage goes black, the curtains tear, children are sent in to rip the floorboards up for firewood, pigeons circle out of the cracked vault. returning dripping with sedge and reeds, tannic perfume soaks your clothes: no one can describe your departure or arrival, yet we all have ideas. momentary grace or seduction?--no one knows your reasons for taking up with us, perhaps the loneliness of watching cities turn more fatal and rapturous each epoch slides into the next and claims its dead: what is the cost of all this, what has been put aside to keep the body tandem to the sulphur-lit city. when you spun into your volute, there was a dazzle of sails: i saw you spinning on the round stones of a harbor, the howling from below the ground stopped. the first bodies were temples crowded with space, with different voices you spun through them, until the howling started again, and the bull slammed the walls deep below us, mired in its own demands: we talk to the dead, now that the fields far inland are burning up and our history is seen as strings of small blunders, the sky emptied of its regattas. --------------------------------------------------------------- the love of my life out of practice, all that is left is theory, the sun has risen hours ago, but the day hangs like a dream whose edges will be skirted in collaboration with gravity. the clouds will lift is all the radio omens, the stage is left for newcomers, the bureau cluttered with the weeks's unforgiving letters and bills. and theory, an elaboration of what is gone, is not an explanation, but the fine ribs lifted from fossil sediments, glistening and senseless unless understood by what followed, if anything. and there they are, all twenty-six, sternum side-up, the wind catching rags and paper shreds in them, the day trudges on, the traffic caught like hair on the bathroom floor; suburbia not far past the bridges. what a day this has turned into we exclaim, for once, getting it off our chests. somewhere each of us has left a corpse, or many, honeyed or scattered by birds. while we talk, i too am a diminishing figure, sitting next to you, then in another room, and at last across the river, on the other side of the city, walking backwards into what must be only theory of what comes to happen. discussed later over dinner, the higher forms of life, the cooperative societies of animal species--blue whales and mountain gorillas-while we have learned the practice of severing and the routes marking separation: this is the practice, the plan of every city. in this plan someone dragging shimmering cages of ribs already nears you. on pellets of ice, in the store window before you, swordfish arch their black leather trunks around mounds of pink shrimp and mirrored cuts of salmon. the avenue is packed and steaming cold: which one is he, nearing you with his theories and criminal good looks? holub, 'constructive turn: christopher norris and the new origins of historical theory', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-holub-constructive.txt the constructive turn: christopher norris and the new origins of historical theory by renate holub <rholub@garnet.berkeley.edu> massachusettes institute of technology _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by renate holub, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. norris, christopher. _spinoza & the origins of modern critical theory_. oxford: basic blackwell, 1991. [1] for those readers familiar with christopher norris's intellectual trajectory, his most recent publication, dealing with baruch spinoza, a major seventeenth century exegete of descartes and a contemporary of locke and puffendorf, of newton and leibniz, might come as a--perhaps unsettling- surprise. after all, most if not all of norris's critical work in the eighties made it its province to discuss what is known as "deconstruction," a present-day form of critique intent upon discrediting, according to many of its critics, questions concerning origins, historical contingencies, ideological implications and other such forms of outdated inquiry. yet even a cursory reading of the present book should quickly restore peace to temporarily unsettled minds. for one, norris has no intention of leaving deconstruction behind, of betraying "theory," to use reductionist speak, in favor of "history." and for another, norris is not in the least inclined to subvert his major research paradigm, which is, roughly speaking, the relation of literary theory to philosophy. nonetheless, there are two aspects of norris's _spinoza_ which i find novel in his critical practice. one is his shift in emphasis from literary interests, or his interest in questions of reading, to the terrain of the epistemological, the ethical, and the ontological, a shift in emphasis from the literary to the philosophical that is. this shift is perhaps best reflected in the choice of a philosopher, such as spinoza, and in the very title of the book. [2] the other related aspect concerns norris's explicit insistence on the political nature of his critical project. indeed, he aligns himself, throughout the volume, not with the "political" %tout court%, but with a quite specific model of politicality, namely with the unfinished project of enlightenment thought. what is then remarkable about this shift is that norris appears %nolens volens% as a conscious historical agent, so dear to the marxist and idealist tradition, one who intentionally intervenes in or makes history (history of critical theory) as he is writing about it. theory's task is here to affect history. this gesture strikes me, if i may say so, as thoroughly non-postmodern. simultaneously, the tracing of spinoza's role in the formative pre-history of critical theory, and the historical reconstruction of spinoza's arguments, amounts to nothing less than norris's equally strikingly non-postmodern turn towards explicitly constructionist practices. given that recently norris had directed his attention, in his _what's wrong with postmodernism?_, to what is wrong with postmodernism, it might not be difficult for some readers to read his even more recent _spinoza_ as a sequel which now essays that which is right with modernity. his reiteration of the necessity of interventionism in human affairs, of strategically relating theory to politics, and of subscribing to an enlightenment paradigm surely lends itself to such a reading. other readers might simply reflect, in more than one way, on the historical contingencies of critical theory in general. specific cultural, institutional, and political contexts, or specific structures and substructures of everyday life, seem to effect the way in which critics raise or avoid social questions. time, place, and other such structurally configurative contingencies seem to figure in the forms of social critique, of politics, of non-literary and literary critics alike. so it is apparently not only theory which can or should effect history. this is the story norris is about to tell with his _spinoza_. history also apparently effects theory, not only in spinoza's, but also in our time. it is to his credit that this is a standpoint which norris, all formidable postmodernist pressures to the contrary, does not suppress. [3] norris, i think, might be quick to point out that he himself never had a problem with the relation between theory and history, or history and theory, or with non-postmodern critical strategies for that matter. his books on deconstruction were above all political books, carefully designed to emphasize the political edge of the deconstructionist project in the face of all those intellectuals who either breezily embrace historical (marxist and idealist alike) solutions to social problems, or who legitimate such problems by pointing to their inexorably ontological/ physiological roots (nietzschean epigones, foucault, deleuze, lyotard). deconstruction, or rather, and here norris is always precise, the capital proponents of this movement of thought--derrida, de man--offer an irresistible political program. so norris pointed out throughout his books in the eighties. their political program consists not in adjudicating matters of truth and falsehood. rather, the political program of genuine, non-vulgar deconstruction, such as theirs, consists in not attaching truth value to any question, answer, or method or things of the sort but rather in attaching truth value to %the right% to raise questions. in short, norris claims that what derrida and de man are about is freedom of speech, and, moreover, that genuine deconstruction amounts to a libertarian project, and, finally, that freedom of knowledge, opinion, and belief, good old enlightenment habits of thought, are part and parcel of what is right with postmodernism: its modern legacy. for this reason, norris makes sure to disassociate those postmodern thinkers from deconstruction--such as foucault, deleuze, and lyotard--whose inordinately positive disposition towards the powers of the body, powerfully disguised in their rejection of the transcendental subject and in their abandonment of critical reason, concedes little to an egalitarian and democratic project. for the same reason, norris now upholds habermas, whose theory of communicative action promotes free and equal discourse of various interest-groups, political viewpoints, or specialized communities of knowledge. yet if habermas's theory represents "a limit-point of speculative reason which as yet has no model in the history of social institutions," why not experiment for starters with his model, with a critical theory of old modernity, rather than with that of spinoza, originating in the young days of modern theory? norris explicates: habermas "pitches his claims at the highest level of abstract generality, and offers little help toward a better understanding of nuances, the detailed practicalities, or the essentially contingent character of real-life ethical choice" (183). in other words, habermas runs up against having too much mind and not enough body, like most philosophers of the modern kind, among whom norris places not only descartes and kant but also hegel. feminist critiques of habermas, such as those of nancy fraser and iris marion young, have raised quite similar objections, and justifiably so. spinoza, on the other hand, is of a different philosophical lineage. in his non-dualist, non-phenomenological, and non-dialectical philosophy, the material (%res extensa%) and the ideal (%res cogitans%) appear to amalgamate into a complex process in which the dualist and the phenomenological co-exist, yet where the dialectical, and this is what norris does not tell his readers, does not yet exist. "substance thinking substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through another," is one of the spinozist propositions (_ethics_ ii, p. 7) norris cites (32) in a chapter significantly entitled "spinoza versus hegel." claims to the superiority of spinoza over hegel, the leitmotif of much of french structuralist and poststructuralist interpellations, seem to propel norris's enterprise as well. [4] so it seems that norris takes recourse to spinoza because his theory makes allowances for the powers of the mind as well as of the body, because his epistemology is grounded not in a simple but in a complex ontology, because his metaphysical rationalism grounds emotions and reason alike. surely, norris could not have taken recourse to this seventeenth century philosopher because he relates epistemology to ethics, because spinoza reflects on and theorizes the implications of a theory of knowledge on the ways in which humans run or should run their social affairs. reflecting on the dangerous relation of knowledge to political power, on theory and politics, or epistemology and ethics, is the key not only to spinoza and his philosophy but to all those critical intellectuals who were faced with certain persecution or even with death when going public with their ideas. the relation of knowledge to freedom, prominently placed in norris's interpretation of spinoza's significance, is a relation which commands structure and substructure of most critical texts written at the dawn of modernity, if by critical we mean oppositional, subversive, liberational attitudes vis-a-vis %auctoritas%. the texts of descartes, kant, and, yes, also hegel, fall into this category. [5] if critical theory is above all libertarian philosophy, as norris would have it, why spinoza over hegel, or are we again treated to a displaced replay of spinoza over marx? a reader would be quite mistaken to assume that norris rejects the hegelian project because of its adherence to an absolute or transcendental spirit gradually evolving from and ultimately commanding historical matter. for norris's hegel is not the one who almost flunked the entrance exams to the frankfurter schule, but the one who graduated with honours from the ecole normale. it is kojeve's hegel and hyppolite's, the hegel of those two formidable scholars who have brought to the surface the tendentially self-propelling materialist drives of hegelian phenomenology, such that reason's unbound desire remains always already challenged by natural bounds not of a physical but of a social kind. it is also that process that althusser sees, beyond hegel, in marx (_lire le capital_). both systems are unable to resist mechanical structurations of history which true science alone is able to discern, to adjudicate in matters of historical relevance and irrelevance, and to challenge. similarly, one of the greatest italian spinoza interpreters, antonio negri, first established the determinist character of marx's _grundrisse_ before offering spinoza not as a libertarian but as a radically liberational solution to self-propelling systematizations in his _l'anomalia selvaggia. saggio su potere e potenza in baruch spinoza_ (milan: feltrinelli, 1981). but what if neither hegel nor marx qualifies for an unqualified determinist reading of his texts, and what if spinoza's intransigent materialism does? what if we choose marx's theses on feuerbach, where he addresses epistemological problems not dissimilar to norris's concerns, namely how to think a materialism without falling prey to an idealist transcendence, and without falling prey to an equally transcendent mechanical immanence based on the laws of atomism and physics? part of marx's solution to the problem was the notion of human or social (material) practice for one, and its dialectical nature for another. while material or general practice produces or effects certain conditions, it is also the effect of ideal or individual practice: the materialist doctrine that human beings are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed human beings are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is human beings who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator him/herself. [. . .] the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally un derstood only as revolutionising practice. (marx, _third thesis on feuerbach_) educating the educator is of course also what norris has in mind with the liberational project inscribed in his _spinoza_, but why plead for free will, intentionality, and choice on the basis of an author who categorically denied the existence of free will? norris's answer is prompt: spinoza not only discussed the origins and nature of emotions, thereby anticipating the ultimate materialism (desiring bodies) of deleuze and guattari and other such french poststructuralist thinkers intent on effacing moral accountability. spinoza also discussed the origin and the nature of the mind in ways which anticipate husserl's epistemological processes of eidetic inspection, uncontaminated by contingent factors of historical time and place. in short, what norris would like to argue is that there are two spinozas in one, such that spinoza's ethical and determinist program does not contradict but co-exists with his liberatory epistemology, since this seventeenth-century precursor of critical theory apparently corrects present-day, over-confident rationalism and delusionary nihilism at one and the same time. [6] norris has, as is his style, competently, elegantly, and honestly directed his attention to what mattered to him: that which mattered to spinoza, and the extent to which his contribution to critical theory should matter to us. _spinoza_ is, as are most of norris's books, a pleasure to read. it is extraordinarily informative and knowledgeably relates the discussion of spinoza's complex writings on epistemology and ethics to major twentieth century movements of thought (speech act theory, deconstruction, structuralism, universal pragmatics and so forth). the question i would like to raise in conclusion is the extent to which spinoza's philosophical preoccupations are politically relevant for us to the degree norris claims. that spinoza's philosophy emerges at the beginning of modernity, also known as the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois liberal state, is a historical detail which i consider relevant in determining the political dimensions of his thought. his discussion of the emotions in relation to divine truth, human knowledge and human action i see as one of many attempts of critical movements of thought--from humanism of the proto-capitalist era in italy to german, french, and english rationalisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century--to gradually subvert the apparently inexorable fetters of the ideological and philosophical hegemony of the church. questions of epistemology and their relation to ethics, and questions related to the conditions of possibility of an individual's access to knowledge and action were, at the origins of modernity, mostly political questions, and, therefore, inherently dangerous, as long as the relation of %civis% to %auctoritas% remained uncontracted, as long as the individual philosopher/scientist was subject to unmediated power, that is. accordingly, intellectuals directed much effort to disguising their true opinion of the relation of knowledge to politics (vico), and they continued to reflect on this relation when immediate danger had passed (newton). critical theory today does not work under similar conditions (pace norris's discussion of salman rushdie). questions concerning the relation of epistemology to ethics in the larger sense are, therefore, not so much of political interests, but mostly of historical and philosophical ones. a political project which elaborates on the various paths to knowledge and action i am afraid cannot explain why some groups (or classes, or nations), all normative epistemological and ontological equality to the contrary, have privileged access to action and others do not. critical theory, so horkheimer wrote a while ago, is critical to the extent that it reflects on the social function of its project. what i would like to add to this is that critical theory today is critical to the extent that it reflects on its position not in relation to old orders of inquiry and knowledge, however radical and revolutionary, but rather on its relation to the recently pronounced and enacted new world order. i would not be surprized that this is indeed one of the motivating forces behind christopher norris's _spinoza_. by relating spinoza's story, originating at the beginnings of modernity, to our time, norris evokes the historicity of all theory. what is critical in different historical epochs and places, and what might, can, or should become political in our place and our time is the historical challenge critical theory faces at a moment when critique has all but surrendered to the violence of present-day hegemonic rationality. extavasia, 'fucking (with theory) for money: toward an interrogation of escort prostitution', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-extavasia-fucking.txt fucking (with theory) for money: toward an interrogation of escort prostitution by audrey extavasia and tessa dora addison literary and cultural theory carnegie mellon university <ta1a+@andrew.cmu.edu> (addison) <wk11+@andrew.cmu.edu> (extavasia) _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by audrey extavasia and tessa dora addison, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. this paper is intended as an introductory interrogation of the terrain of escort prostitution mobilizing terms from both _the telephone book_ by avital ronell and _a thousand plateaus_ by gilles deleuze and felix guattari. for the purposes of this paper, the client will be presumed to be a man and the model presumed to be a woman. we are not trying to provide a comprehensive account of all aspects of the terrain of prostitution, or even of escort agencies. cross-referenced terms are in upper case. contents: thecallthemodeltheclienttheagencycyborgassemblageb odywithoutorganstimespacethetelephonevalue/exchang edesirefacialitytoolsfetishismdeterritorialization $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t h e c a l l the call is the interaction of the model and the client within a particular spatial and temporal frame (see space and time). the model is a student, an actress, a nurse's aide, a teacher, or a secretary.... the client is a businessman, a dentist, a banker, a construction worker, or a computer programmer.... the temporal borders of the call are delineated by the telephone (which connects the client, the model, and the agency), in conjunction with the watch, or instrumental time. the arm of authority behind the telephone and instrumental time is the agency. the model gets ready for the call, prepares to become a 'fantasy girl,' by imitating (media) representations of women as objects of desire: she wears garters and hose and high heels; the nails of both fingers and toes are painted. these are signifiers on a fragmented, coded body, signifiers that the client will be drawn to (through desire), that will reinforce his fetishism and in turn contribute to the construction of his body without organs (bwo). the client has a bwo which he is drawn to construct, which has an already written set of rules/conditions by which it must be constructed, conditions which include the fetishized system of signifying effects with which the model has attempted to encode her body (and which already encode her body as woman). the model goes to the client's hotel or motel or private home or apartment or to a bar or restaurant or hot tub spa.... when the model enters the space of the call, the client gives her a substantial fee in exchange for an opportunity to spend a designated amount of time with her, an opportunity to interact with her cyborg subject-position 'fantasy girl' (a subject-position which is composed of both fact and fantasy), an opportunity to construct his bwo. after she has been paid, the model calls the agency on the telephone to announce that the exchange has been initiated and that it is now time to begin measuring the length of the call. the model and the client now interact together, their bodies intermingling with desire, fetishism, representation, the space of the room, the time measured by the model's watch as well as the time elusively marked by the client's memories, fantasies, and anticipation of orgasm (which is not the object of his desire but a fetishized signifier which masks the perpetually deferred bwo, the plane of consistency of his desire). when the end of the call is announced by instrumental time (or by a telephone call from the agency if the call has transgressed the boundaries marked by instrumental time), the model telephones the agency, says goodbye to the client, and exits the space of the call. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t h e m o d e l adriennealannaalexandraalexisallisonaman daangelaanyaardenarianaashleyaudreyavery she will become part of the cyborg assemblage which you are purchasing (you want to purchase the fulfillment of your body without organs, to draw her into its logic, to name her through your desire which is based on representations of women, on fetishization), after you have picked up the telephone, after you have called her. what will you call her? you must first call her a partner in the exchange in which you are about to take part; you must call her the producer of the commodity for which you will give her $ (in an amount purportedly based on equivalence but in fact value is measured by, determined by fetishism, desire, and taboo...). i hear you're looking for some company tonight... cameroncamillecarolecarolynceceliachantal charlottacherylchristyclarissacolbycorinne she is called the call-girl: she is connected to both the client and the agency by the telephone. claudette embodied a sophisticated, elegant new york look, so she always had a more fashionable hairstyle and very chic accessories. tricia represented the girl next door, and she tended to wear dresses rather than suits- especially dresses with a peter pan collar or puffy sleeves. michelle was a model. she was very tall, and her clothing would be slightly trendy, with more dramatic hair and makeup. colby represented the healthy, outdoorsy type, with a wind-swept, off-the-farm look. marguerite was exotic and tended to wear tight skirts. the model works as an independent contractor for an agency. we are very particular about the young ladies who work for us. they must work or go to school during the day, or be actively pursuing a career in the arts or in modeling. the model, like the client has a bwo; her bwo is deterritorialized though, onto the commodity form money. danieledarlenedeidredevinelaineeileeneliseel izabethericagabrielagingerheatherhelenairene you must always wear a skirt or a dress. please don't wear anything very short or very trendy... you'll need at least one suit... you'll also need a dress, which should be lady-like and tailored, with no frills or ruffles. the model can never fulfill the client's bwo--there will always be a gap... jaimejaninejenniferjessicajerrijoannajuli aseverineshawnashelbyshelleyshevaunsophia $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t h e c l i e n t the client becomes a potential client when he picks up the telephone. when you talk to friends about your work, you're going to end up talking about the weird clients and the mean clients and the bad clients, because they make hilarious stories. but even weird clients are usually nice people. the client becomes a client when the exchange is initiated. some of our clients are made of gold, and you'll meet your share of them. but that's not true for everybody. in some cases, the evening he spends with you will be his biggest treat of the year. theclientisafashionphotographerbusinessmancabinetmakerdentis tsconstructionworkerbankercomputerprogrammerpestcontroltechn iciandoctorconsultantmusicindustryprofessionalhousepainterla wyeraccountantrealestatedeveloperarchitecttheclientisshortth inbaldaveragelookingoldmarriedattractivefatsingletalluglydiv orcedtheclientisalegmanboobmanassmantheclientisafashionphoto grapherbusinessmancabinetmakerdentistsconstructionworkerbank ercomputerprogrammerpestcontroltechniciandoctorconsultantmus icindustryprofessionalhousepainterlawyeraccountantrealestate developerarchitecttheclientisshortthinbaldaveragelookingoldm arriedattractivefatsingletalluglydivorcedtheclientisalegmanb oobmanassmantheclientisafashionphotographerbusinessmancabine tmakerdentistsconstructionworkerbankercomputerprogrammerpest controltechniciandoctorconsultantmusicindustryprofessionalho usepainterlawyeraccountantrealestatedeveloperarchitectthecli entisshortthinbaldaveragelookingoldmarriedattractivefatsingl etalluglydivorcedtheclientisalegmanboobmanassmantheclient the client is paying to interact with his 'fantasy girl,' his object of desire; he is paying to construct his body without organs (bwo). i guess i'd like to know if there's any way to tell in advance what strange sex acts will turn a particular person on... absolutely anyone can be turned on by absolutely anything...part of my job is to respond to these people.... the client has a bwo which has an already-written set of rules, system of logic, by which it is to be constructed. we did all of the usual sucking and fucking. then he put me in the muslim prayer position so familiar to me, at the edge of the bed. then he knelt on the floor and licked my asshole for a while...he started sticking his tongue in my ass. he stuck it in very deep, so deep i could feel it moving around inside me...then he really surprised me. he blew air into my ass and then inhaled deeply as the air came back out. he did it over and over, more times than i could count. integral to the logic of the client's bwo is the fetishization of representations of women (by the media, by his memory, etc.) as objects of desire. it is the signifying system, the codes inscribed on the model's body which is being fetishized, rather than woman %qua% woman. remember, you're a fantasy for these guys. if someone asked you to sit down and spell out your description of what a high-class new york call girl would be like, you'd probably say, 'well, she'd have a beautiful hairdo, gorgeous makeup, she'd be very pretty and elegantly dressed, and sophisticated.' that's exactly who our clients expect you to be. you just can't walk in there looking like the women he sees every day at work, like his secretary, or the wife he goes home to, or the girls he passes by on the street. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t h e a g e n c y t h e a g e n c y t h e a g e n c y the agency serves as the arm of the law, sets up the boundaries/limits of (and is part of) the cyborg assemblage which constitutes the call, which in turn effects the possibilities of the logic of the bwo which may be fulfilled. sometimes he might want to touch you back there. technically it's known as greek, and we don't allow it at all. we do not touch them there and they do not touch us there.... the agency is headed by an agent, who is the personification of these limits. now when you're talking to the client, please don't refer to us as the office or the agency.... every man has a fantasy that he's calling a private madam...and we try to foster that image. the agency is responsible for screening the clients, which means screening out unwanted desires, unwanted bwo's. for the man who asked, 'whaddya got tonight?' the answer was a dial tone. the agency receives a percentage of the model's earnings from the call. the agency is not a partner in the primary exchange with the client; rather, the exchange between the model and the agency is a separate agreement based on different terms, different standards of value. the agency is paid to function as protection, both before--through the screening procedure--and during the call. once you're in the room, ask if you could use the phone.... call the office at the special number.... if you do want to leave...if you're not comfortable, then we'll take care of it for you. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ c y b o r g a s s e m b l a g e it is neither the model's body which is being purchased nor is it the model's time. what is being purchased is an opportunity to interact with the subject-position "fantasy girl," a subject-position which is constituted by the model, technology, fiction, space and time: we would describe this subject-position as "cyborg space-time" and the assemblage which contributes to the subject-position's creation--see below for elements of this assemblage--as a "cyborg assemblage." a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.^1^ the cyborg assemblage surrounding the subject-position "fantasy girl" is composed of fiction as well as the material or concrete. fiction: representations of beauty, fetishization of signifiers than encode the body (= lines to media), etc.. the assemblage is also composed of the circuit of the telephone, of time, of space, of the escort agency (= the law), of the exchange (= lines to capitalist system). there has been much criticism of haraway's cyborg myth as romantic--mary anne doane: "what is missing in this account--and seemingly unnecessary in the advanced technological society described here--is a theory of subjectivity"^2^--but we would argue for the importance of the myth of the cyborg in that it is a similar myth which forms the commodity in prostitution: it is formed through both the concrete and the abstract, through the organic and the technological. the cyborg myth is also, we think, important in that it breaks down binary oppositions--the breaking down of oppositions such as public/private and smooth space/striated space is crucial to the enterprise of the escort agency and to the value of the commodity which is being sold. we would want to think cyborg as articulation (using stuart hall's concept of "articulation" here, with its connotations of gaps, constructedness, provisionality) of human subject and technology--the cyborg subject necessarily foregrounds fragmentation, gaps, partial/incomplete identity.^3^ for our project--and any project, we would argue--a theory of subjectivity is necessary in order to discuss power relations, to make distinctions and show relations between/among subject-positions; indeed, in order to distinguish cyborgs. cyborg theory must be able to discuss power, desire, interest. gayatri spivak criticizes deleuze and guattari for not being able to do this: "the failure of deleuze and guattari [in _a thousand plateaus_] to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interest."^4^ conceptualizing cyborg assemblage through concept of articulation which accounts for provisional identity makes it possible to think subjectivity, interest, desire, power.... callgirltelephonevisaagenthotelcashmemoryfantasyclientmo deltaxiprivatehomeamexlingeriespacemastercardtimecondoms vicesquadmotellubevibratorvenerealdiseasewineyellowpages callgirltelephonevisaage nthotelcashmemoryfantasy clientmodeltaxiprivateho meamexlingeriespacemaste rcardtimecondomsvicesqua dmotellubevibratorvenere aldiseasewineyellowpages callgirltelephonevisa agenthotelcashmemoryf antasyclientmodeltaxi privatehomeamexlinger iespacemastercardtime condomsvicesquadmotel lubevibratorvenereald iseasewineyellowpages callgirltelephonevisaagenthotelcashmemoryfantasyclientmo deltaxiprivatehomeamexlingeriespacemastercardtimecondoms vicesquadmotellubevibratorvenerealdiseasewineyellowpages (cyborg assemblage) $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ b o d i e s w i t h o u t o r g a n s the bwo is the commodity being sold by escort agencies. it is enacted by the client, the model, the parameters of space and time (which are permeable), the telephone, representations of women through the media, the exchange (commodification of the bwo), tools/paraphernalia--in short, by the cyborg assemblage. the bwo is a program, a limit which marks the edges of the plane of desire--it can never be reached, fulfilled. the bwo is both inside and outside the concrete, both inside and outside the abstract. "the bwo is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires...there is desire whenever there is the constitution of a bwo under one relation or another."^5^ desire is the motor of the bwo, the driving force and predication of the logic of the bwo. "the bwo is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire..." (d&g 154). the bwo is an assemblage of various bodies: "the masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress" (d&g 156). the bwo is the client, the model, the words, and the absent presence(s) upon which the conditions/logic of the bwo is based: girlfriend, mother, ex-girlfriend, girl next door, girl in magazine, stripper, etc..... let me be your little boy. "...the bwo is not a scene, a place, or even a support, upon which something comes to pass" (d&g 153). what it is is a limit...it can never be achieved. "the bwo is what remains when you take everything away. what you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole" (d&g 151). the bwo is a program, with its own rules and logic and conditions.... let me be your slave. "the masochist is looking for a type of bwo that only pain can fill, or travel over, due to the very conditions under which that bwo was constituted" (d&g 152). the client is looking for--and paying for--a bwo which has already been scripted, already has a specific set of conditions within whose framework it must function. this set of conditions determines, too, the client's desires: "you can't desire without making [a bwo]" (d&g 149). i want to give you all my money and all my cum. "you never reach the body without organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit" (d&g 150). re: the masochist: "legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or a zone on a bwo" (d&g 156). like the object of desire of the masochist, so too the fragments of the body of the model becomes for the client "an imprint or a zone on a bwo." that is, she as signifying system (see fetishism) is part of the assemblage that constitutes the bwo, the plane of consistency of desire.... do you like to see men jack off? the model is your invitation to build a bwo, as your invitation to interact with her [cyborg] subject position- that is, to have her become part of your bwo, to help you build it, to be built into it.... tell me what to do. tell me who's boss. the model can never fulfill the client's body without organs...even cock rings, even tantric sex...only suspend the inevitable.... "orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle" (d&g 156). "it is not a question of experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body without organs" (d&g 157). let me worship you. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t i m e so you get in the elevator and you go on up. before you knock on the client's door, be sure to look at your watch, because it's important to know what time you arrived--and nobody likes a clock watcher. incidentally, it's helpful to wear a watch that's especially easy to read in a dim light with just a glance. time becomes value: the model's rate is based on hourly increments; after an hour has passed, the client must pay more if he wants the model to stay for the next hour, and so on. "i took a look at my watch while i was in the bathroom, and i couldn't believe what time it was.... i don't want to rush you, but i do have to call sheila in a little while and tell her if i'll be staying or leaving." for the client, time often functions as a dialectic between memory and anticipation--"you never know what just happened, or you always know what is going to happen" (d&g 193)- his desires revolve around memories and fantasies, past and future.... the bwo comes from the past and is aimed at the future--it never comes into being, never exists now. orgasm marks anticipatory (goal-oriented) time. often the client will treat the call as over if he has come and not over if he has not yet come, regardless of the instrumental time as measured by the model's watch. [see agency as arm of the law....] although escort services are technically legal, they are at times raided by the police and forced to shut down--if only temporarily. to protect ourselves from being arrested under the prostitution laws, we always make it clear to our clients that we are charging for the girls' time. think, a person moves from here (space/man/time) through here (space/man enters into negotiation/time) to here (space/client meets fantasy girl/time) and through (space/client enters fantasy girl/time) to exit (space/man and model leave/time)--similar scenario for model, first they are separate, then intersect, then separate.... $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ s p a c e the call: it is a public space that gives the illusion of being a private space. it is this illusion which the client is paying for, this illusion which is produced and regulated by the agency, the capitalist system, the telephone--e.g. public (social) space. the physical space of the room is criss-crossed by the telephone, room service, beepers, etc.. "in this space [of sex/ pleasure/ leisure], things, acts and situations are forever being replaced by representations...."^6^ [see fetishism] "for these bodies, the natural space and the abstract space which confront and surround them are in no way separable.... the individual situates his body in its own space and apprehends the space around the body" (lefebvre 213). bwo and space: "it is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree..." (d&g 153). privatehomehotelmotelofficehottubspa for some of these men, an hour or an evening with an escort was their only opportunity all week to drop their guard, be themselves, and relax. the space within the call is [illusionarily] smooth space- it is the illusion of smooth space which the client is paying for. striated space is space gridded by boundaries: constructed by values of the agency, circuits of the telephone, standards of u.s. treasury, logic of bwo, etc.. marks the edges of illusion of smooth space. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t h e t e l e p h o n e okay. so there you are, sitting at home. your makeup is on, you hair is done, your bag is packed, and you're ready to go. suddenly the telephone rings. your picking it up means the call has come through. it means more: you're its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. you don't know who's calling or what you are going to be called on upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order.^7^ but you *do* know who's calling. you are on call; it's your agent calling about a potential client. you get the following information: who he is, where he is, how old he is, and some other details about him, perhaps his profession, perhaps a little about his personality. you do know what you are going to be called upon to do, what you are going to be called upon to be. you are meeting a demand, receiving an order but you understand the demand, know the order. you will be the client's fantasy girl in exchange for a substantial fee. the telephone rings and you are part of the assemblage of escort prostitution. theclientopensthetelephonebookfindstheadintheyellowpagesandc allstheagencytheagentcallsthemodelthemodelcallstheclientthec lientcallstheagentbacktheagentcallsthemodeltoconfirmthemodel callstheagentonarrival(aftertheclientgivesthemodelmoney)them odelcallstheagentagainbeforeleaving(afterthemodelgivesthecli entaccesstoherbody)andagainwhenthemodelgetshome pager/beeper--some girls find it more convenient to use a beeper, which leaves them free to go shopping or out to a movie while they're waiting for us to call...if you do use a beeper, you have to be all dressed and ready to go from wherever you are. call-waiting- naturally, you'll want to keep your phone free. most of the girls have call-waiting, and i strongly recommend it. car phone--the car phone, if you can afford it, is the escort's best friend. it gives you access to the agency when you are out on the road (you wouldn't believe how many girls are on the way to the movie or somewhere else when their beeper goes off), and it gives you more flexibility when calling in to the agency after you've been on a call. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ v a l u e v a l u e v a l u e v a l u e "exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent equivalence derives from that" (d&g 439). in terms of the terrain of escort "limit-object" is not determined solely by rational assessment but rather must be processed through the logic of the client's bwo--value is a derivation of desire. i keep hearing from men who want to know if we have any girls who are more expensive, and presumably more beautiful, than the others. value is not based on use value: "[use value] is always concrete and particular, contingent on its own destiny . . . ."^8^ use value is determined only after the exchange has taken place, and is, itself, "a fetishized social relation" (baudrillard 131). value is the fetishization of commodity's sign system; in escort prostitution, of the sign system encoded on the model's body. the fetishization of this sign system is reinforced during the call (see faciality). a working girl doesn't really sell her body...she gives the client access to her body for a certain period of time and at a certain price. the value of the commodity before the exchange--in order for the exchange to take place--is determined by the fetishization of the commodity. "[f]etishism is not the sanctification of a certain object, or value....it is the sanctification of the system as such, of the commodity as system: it is thus contemporaneous with the generalization of exchange value and is propagated with it" (baudrillard 92). reading woman repeatedly as the object of male exchange constructs a victim's discourse that risks reinscribing the very sexual politics it ostensibly seeks to expose and change. ^9^ the model has a dual register, as both object of and subject of--partner in--exchange. reading women as objects exchanged by male desiring subjects partakes of a degraded positivism that relies on an outmoded, humanist view of identity characterized by a metaphysics of presence; it assumes an unproblematic subjectivity for 'men' as desiring subjects and concomitantly assumes as directly accessible woman-as-object. (newman 47) the terrain of escort prostitution, like the terrain of sex/gender relations, is problematic, in terms of the "traffic in women" paradigm. women working as escorts are not simply victims of some "pornographic mind" as susan griffin claims in _pornography and silence_, where she equates the "mindset" (read unified, stable, subject position) of pornography producers with that of nazis and the marquis de sade.^10^ griffin's argument, as well as many other feminist arguments which want to label prostitutes and other women working in the sex industry as "innocent victims" fallen prey to "false consciousness," presumes a unified subject and thus needs to be reexamined in the light of post-structuralist theories of subjectivity. as both producer of commodity and embodiment of that commodity, the escort participates in disruption of "traffic in women" paradigm. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ e x c h a n g e <-> e x c h a n g e <-> e x c h a n g e when each party has something the other wants, and they're able to make a deal, that constitutes a fair exchange. the priest did not turn to the west. he knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought that the way was blocked by the columns of hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. but that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered or deterritorialized. (d&g 154) you go into the bathroom to spiff-up, to fix your face but this is harder than it sounds. you look in the mirror and see that your eye makeup has run onto your face, your lipstick has disappeared and your hair is completely disheveled. in addition to fixing your face you have to wipe your crotch for wetness and odor, put on your underwear, bra, hose, and garters, all without spending too much time in the bathroom. you panic. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ f a c i a l i t y facialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacial ityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfac ialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfaciality the model's face is part of the client's bwo (see fetishism). it is a signifier marking the boundaries of the object of his desire. her face envelops the face of the prom queen from his high school, of the girl in the centerfold of his magazine, of his mother.... tell me who's boss. "all faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past" (d&g 173). to come.... tell me what you like. "the signifier is always facialized. faciality reigns materially over that whole constellation of significances and interpretations." (d&g 115) tell me how much you like it. when the client says, "tell me how it feels" or some other such thing, it's not just about the words (he could say them himself) but about faciality, watching the words being spoken by the model, watching the significance process through faciality. after you knock on the door, stand back a couple of feet. a face is such a subjective thing. it's important that the client gets the full image of you when he first opens the door--the total you, rather than just your face. if you stand too close to the door, your face is all that he sees. and you might not be exactly what his fantasy was, because, let's face it, there's almost no way you could be. (the bwo contains gaps and ruptures, never to be closed ...see body without organs.) $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ t o o l s condomslipstickvibratorstockingsbeeperbreathmintsl ubesmallchangecreditcardslipsbusinesscardseyeliner some men are frightened by the sight of the vibrator. it's about fourteen inches long and you always keep a nine-foot extension cord attached to it. sometimes a man will say, 'what the hell is that?' or 'are you going to use that on me?' you say, 'it's a vibrator, and i wouldn't think of using it on you. not a chance. don't you wish i would?' then you use it on yourself while they watch. tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. (d&g 90) you start telling him what a bad boy he has been. he says 'yes mistress.' you go to the dresser in your five-inch heels and pick up a wooden hairbrush. you tell him to stand up and bend over the bed. you pull down his panties, to expose his cheeks, and smack each cheek a few times. in between smackings you tell him what a bad boy he has been. tools and deterritorialization: "there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary reterritorializations, between hand and tool" (d&g 174). suitbriefcasejewelrycocktaildressgartersstockings brasbustierslatexglovesbubblebathmassageoil tools form the appendages of the cyborg assemblage.... $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ f e t i s h i s m two kinds of fetishism occur during the call--that of the commodity as value and that of the model as object of desire. the fetishization is not of use value or meaning; rather it is about being drawn to the system of signification, it is a generalization of the structural code of the object: "it is thus not a fetishism of the signified, a fetishism of substances and values (called ideological), which the fetish object would incarnate for the alienated subject. behind this reinterpretation (which is truly ideological) it is a fetishism of the signifier. that is to say that the subject is trapped in the factitious, differential, encoded, systematized aspect of the object" (baudrillard 92). this entrapment can be called desire. people who want me to wear costumes, people who want me to sit with them while they watch dirty movies and jerk off, people who want to be tied up, people who want to wear diapers and be given a bottle.... beauty as fetishism: we are "bound up in a general stereotype of models of beauty . . . the generalization of sign exchange value to facial and bodily effects" (baudrillard 94). thus for clients fetishism is being drawn to media representations of women, fascination with the system of encodement represented on women's bodies through images in magazines, porn movies, television, advertising, etc.. after _mommie dearest_, suddenly there were guys who wanted to be hit with wire coat hangers. fetishism is integral to logic of, to construction of, the client's body without organs: "the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or a zone on a bwo" (d&g 156). the only concession we make to overt sexiness is the highest heels you can manage to walk in without falling over. in our experience, men just adore high heels. "tattoos, stretched lips, [etc.]: anything will serve to rewrite the cultural order on the body; and it is this that takes on the effect of beauty" (baudrillard 94). for the model, it is not usually tattoos but rather, high heels, garters, bustiers, lipstick, eyeliner, mascara, painted toenails, long fingernails.... when these men were young the first naked women most of them had ever seen were usually dressed in frilly undergarments in a magazine like playboy. as a result, seeing a woman dressed only in lingerie would create a powerful, nostalgic yearning that many men found irresistible. [see time] this made the experience more pleasant for the girls, because the more excited the man was as the evening became intimate, the easier things would be when it came down to the nitty-gritty. if he likes it i like it. that's part of his fantasy. it isn't even a question of whether i like it or not. $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z a t i o n the model performs a deterritorialization on her bwo during the call, reterritorializes it onto the commodity form money (via cash, check or plastic), which stands in for her own desire. your bwo is my physical activity: fucking, sucking, spanking, bending, straddling, arching, moaning, gasping, etc.. i am a material girl. the impossibility of the bwo being ever reached is reterritorialized by the client onto desire, onto orgasm, onto the model as object of desire. "the more the system is systematized, the more the fetishist fascination is reinforced" (baudrillard 92). desire (for the object of desire) is reterritorialized onto [see fetishism] the coded female body, through the system of media representations then again through the escort system. (escorts are fetishized as "live" versions--but are in fact part of a further systematization--of the system of media.) "act like you're enjoying it." ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ donna haraway, "a manifesto for cyborgs," in elizabeth weed, ed., _coming to terms: feminism, theory, politics_ (new york: routledge, chapman and hall, inc., 1989), 149. ^2^ mary ann doane, "commentary: cyborgs, origins, and subjectivity," in weed, ed., _coming to terms_, 210. ^3^ stuart hall, "signification, representation, ideology: althusser and the post-structuralist debates," in _critical studies in mass communication_, vol. 2, no. 2 (june 1985): 93. ^4^ gayatri chakravorty spivak, _in other worlds: essays on cultural politics_ (london: methuen, inc., 1987), 273. ^5^ gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _a thousand plateaus_ (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987), 165. cited in the text hereafter as d&g. ^6^ henri lefebvre, _the production of space_ (oxford: basil blackwell, 1991), 311. ^7^ avital ronell, _the telephone book: technology, schizophrenia, electric speech_ (lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1989), 2. ^8^ jean baudrillard, _for a critique of the political economy of the sign_ (saint louis: telos, 1981), 130. ^9^ karen newman, "directing traffic: subjects, objects, and the politics of exchange," in _differences_, vol. 2 (summer 1990): 47. ^10^ susan griffin, _pornography and silence: culture's revenge against nature_ (new york: harper and row, 1981). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited [some unreferenced portions of this paper contain reworked material from _mayflower madam_ (sidney biddle barrows), _working_ (dolores french), and the journals of the authors.] barrows, sidney biddle with william novak. _mayflower madam_. new york: ballantine books, 1986. baudrillard, jean. _for a critique of the political economy of the sign_. saint louis: telos, 1981. doane, mary ann, "commentary: cyborgs, origins, and subjectivity." in elizabeth weed, ed., _coming to terms: feminism, theory, politics_. new york: routledge, chapman and hall, 1989. french, dolores with linda lee. _working_. new york: windsor publishing, 1988. griffin, susan. _pornography and silence: culture's revenge against nature_. new york: harper and row, 1981. hall, stuart. "signification, representation, ideology: althusser and the post-structuralist debates." in _critical studies in mass communication_, vol. 2, no. 2 (june 1985). haraway, donna. "a manifesto for cyborgs." in elizabeth weed, ed., _coming to terms: feminism, theory, politics_. new york: routledge, chapman and hall, 1989. lefebvre, henri. _the production of space_. oxford: basil blackwell, 1991. newman, karen. "directing traffic: subjects, objects, and the politics of exchange." in _differences_, vol. 2 (summer 1990). ronell, avital. _the telephone book: technology, schizophrenia, electric speech_. lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1989. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. _in other worlds: essays on cultural politics_. london: methuen, 1987. acker, 'dead doll humility', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-acker-dead.txt dead doll humility by kathy acker copyright (c) 1990 by kathy acker, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). in any society based on class, humiliation is a political reality. humiliation is one method by which political power is transformed into social or personal relationships. the personal interiorization of the practice of humiliation is called _humility_. capitol is an artist who makes dolls. makes, damages, transforms, smashes. one of her dolls is a writer doll. the writer doll isn't very large and is all hair, horse mane hair, rat fur, dirty human hair, pussy. one night capitol gave the following scenario to her writer doll: as a child in sixth grade in a north american school, won first prize in a poetry contest. in late teens and early twenties, entered new york city poetry world. prominent black mountain poets, mainly male, taught or attempted to teach her that a writer becomes a writer when and only when he finds his own voice. capitol didn't make any avant-garde poet dolls. since wanted to be a writer, tried hard to find her own voice. couldn't. but still loved to write. loved to play with language. language was material like clay or paint. loved to play with verbal material, build up slums and mansions, demolish banks and half-rotten buildings, even buildings which she herself had constructed, into never-before-seen, even unseeable jewels. to her, every word wasn't only material in itself, but also sent out like beacons, other words. _blue_ sent out _heaven_ and _the virgin_. material is rich. i didn't create language, writer thought. later she would think about ownership and copyright. i'm constantly being given language. since this language world is rich and always changing, flowing, when i write, i enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. this world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. this world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin. i can't make language, but in this world, i can play and be played. so where is 'my voice'? wanted to be a writer. since couldn't find 'her voice', decided she'd first have to learn what a black mountain poet meant by 'his voice'. what did he do when he wrote? a writer who had found his own voice presented a viewpoint. created meaning. the writer took a certain amount of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one direction so there could be his meaning. the writer's voice wasn't exactly this meaning. the writer's voice was a process, how he had forced the language to obey him, his will. the writer's voice is the voice of the writer-as-god. writer thought, don't want to be god; have never wanted to be god. all these male poets want to be the top poet, as if, since they can't be a dictator in the political realm, can be dictator of this world. want to play. be left alone to play. want to be a sailor who journeys at every edge and even into the unknown. see strange sights, see. if i can't keep on seeing wonders, i'm in prison. claustrophobia's sister to my worst nightmare: lobotomy, the total loss of perceptual power, of seeing new. if had to force language to be uni-directional, i'd be helping my own prison to be constructed. there are enough prisons outside, outside language. decided, no. decided that to find her own voice would be negotiating against her joy. that's what the culture seemed to be trying to tell her to do. wanted only to write. was writing. would keep on writing without finding 'her own voice'. to hell with the black mountain poets even though they had taught her a lot. decided that since what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice, could and would write by using anyone's voice, anyone's text, whatever materials she wanted to use. had a dream while waking that was running with animals. wild horses, leopards, red fox, kangaroos, mountain lions, wild dogs. running over rolling hills. was able to keep up with the animals and they accepted her. wildness was writing and writing was wildness. decision not to find this own voice but to use and be other, multiple, even innumerable, voices led to two other decisions. there were two kinds of writing in her culture: good literature and schlock. novels which won literary prizes were good literature; science fiction and horror novels, pornography were schlock. good literature concerned important issues, had a high moral content, and, most important, was written according to well established rules of taste, elegance, and conservatism. schlock's content was sex horror violence and other aspects of human existence abhorrent to all but the lowest of the low, the socially and morally unacceptable. this trash was made as quickly as possible, either with no regard for the regulations of politeness or else with regard to the crudest, most vulgar techniques possible. well-educated, intelligent, and concerned people read good literature. perhaps because the masses were gaining political therefore economic and social control, not only of literary production, good literature was read by an elite diminishing in size and cultural strength. decided to use or to write both good literature and schlock. to mix them up in terms of content and formally, offended everyone. writing in which all kinds of writing mingled seemed, not immoral, but amoral, even to the masses. played in every playground she found; no one can do that in a class or hierarchichal society. (in literature classes in university, had learned that anyone can say or write anything about anything if he or she does so cleverly enough. that cleverness, one of the formal rules of good literature, can be a method of social and political manipulation. decided to use language stupidly.) in order to use and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other texts. copy them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn't going to stop playing in any playground. because loved wildness. having fun with texts is having fun with everything and everyone. since didn't have one point of view or centralized perspective, was free to find out how texts she used and was worked. in their contexts which were (parts of) culture. liked best of all mushing up texts. began constructing her first story by placing mashed-up texts by and about henry kissinger next to 'true romance' texts. what was the true romance of america? changed these 'true romance' texts only by heightening the sexual crudity of their style. into this mush, placed four pages out of harold robbins', one of her heroes', newest hottest bestsellers. had first made jacqueline onassis the star of robbins' text. twenty years later, a feminist publishing house republished the last third of the novel in which this mash occurred. capitol made a feminist publisher doll even though, because she wasn't stupid, she knew that the feminist publishing house was actually a lot of dolls. the feminist publisher doll was a beautiful woman in a st. laurent dress. capitol, perhaps out of perversity, refrained from using her usual chewed up chewing gum, half-dried flecks of nail polish, and bits of her own body that had somehow fallen away. republished the text containing the harold robbins' mush next to a text she had written only seventeen years ago. in this second text, the only one had ever written without glopping up hacking into and rewriting other texts (appropriating), had tried to destroy literature or what she as a writer was supposed to write by making characters and a story that were so stupid as to be almost non-existent. ostensibly, the second text was a porn book. the pornography was almost as stupid as the story. the female character had her own name. thought just after had finished writing this, here is a conventional novel. perhaps, here is 'my voice'. now i'll never again have to make up a bourgeois novel. didn't. the feminist publisher informed her that this second text was her most important because here she had written a treatise on female sexuality. since didn't believe in arguing with people, wrote an introduction to both books in which stated that her only interest in writing was in copying down other people's texts. didn't say liked messing them up because was trying to be polite. like the english. did say had no interest in sexuality or in any other content. capitol made a doll who was a journalist. capitol loved making dolls who were journalists. sometimes she made them out of the newspapers found in trashcans on the streets. she knew that lots of cats inhabited trash cans. the papers said rats carry diseases. she made this journalist out of the fingernails she obtained by hanging around the trashcans in the back lots of london hospitals. had penetrated these back lots with the hope of meeting mean older men bikers. found lots of other things there. since, to make the journalist, she molded the fingernails together with super glue and, being a slob, lots of other things stuck to this super glue, the journalist didn't look anything like a human being. a journalist who worked on a trade publishing magazine, so the story went, no one could remember whose story, was informed by another woman in her office that there was a resemblance between a section of the writer's book and harold robbins' work. most of the literati of the country in which the writer was currently living were upper-middle class and detested the writer and her writing. capitol thought about making a doll of this country, but decided not to. journalist decided she had found a scoop. phoned up the feminist publisher to enquire about plagiarism; perhaps feminist publisher said something wrong because then phoned up harold robbins' publisher. "surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. the further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity . . . therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it . . . "so we are most definitely called upon to test and try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are also bound to keep silence regarding this utmost, to beware of sharing it, of parting with it in communication so long as we have not entered the work of art: for the utmost represents nothing other than that singularity in us which no one would or even should understand, and which must enter into the work as such . . . " rilke to cezanne. capitol made a publisher look like sam peckinpah. though she had no idea what sam peckinpah looked like. had looked like? she took a howdy doody doll and an alfred e. neuman doll and mashed them together, then made this conglomerate into an american officer in the mexican-american war. actually sewed, she hated sewing, or when she became tired of sewing, glued together with her own two hands, just as the early american patriot wives used to do for their patriot husbands, a frogged and braided cavalry jacket, stained with the blood from some former owners. then fashioned a stovepipe hat out of one she had stolen from a bum in an ecstasy of art. the hat was a bit big. for the publisher. inside a gold heart, there should be a picture of a woman. since capitol didn't have a picture of a woman, she put in one of her mother. since sam peckinpah or her publisher had seen tragedy, an arrow hanging out of the white breast of a soldier no older than a child, horses gone mad walleyed mouths frothing amid dust thicker than the smoke of guns. she made his face full of folds, an eyepatch over one eye. harold robbins' publisher phoned up the man who ran the company who owned the feminist publishing company. from now on, known as 'the boss'. the boss told harold robbins' publisher that they have a plagiarist in their midst. capitol no longer wanted to make dolls. in the united states, upon seeing the work of the photographer robert mapplethorpe, senator jesse helms proposed an amendment to the fiscal year 1990 interior and related agencies bill for the purpose of prohibiting "the use of appropriated funds for the dissemination, promotion, or production of obscene or indecent materials or materials denigrating a particular religion." three specific categories of unacceptable material followed: "(1) obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism [always get that one in first], homo-eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or (2) material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or (3) material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin." in honor of jesse helms, capitol made, as pillows, a cross and a vagina. so the poor could have somewhere to sleep. since she no longer had to make dolls or art, because art is dead in this culture, she slopped the pillows together with dead flies, white flour moistened by the blood she drew out of her smallest finger with a pin, and other types of garbage. disintegration. feminist publisher then informed writer that the boss and harold robbins' publisher had decided, due to her plagiarism, to withdraw the book from publication and to have her sign an apology to harold robbins which they had written. this apology would then be published in two major publishing magazines. ordinarily impolite, told feminist publisher they could do what they wanted with their edition of her books but she wasn't going to apologize to anyone for anything, much less for twenty years of work. didn't have to think to herself because every square inch of her knew. for freedom. writing must be for and must be freedom. feminist publisher replied that she knew writer was actually a nice sweet girl. asked if should tell her agent or try talking directly to harold robbins. feminist publisher replied she'd take care of everything. writer shouldn't contact harold robbins because that would make everything worse. would, the feminist publisher asked, the writer please compose a statement for the boss why the writer used other texts when she wrote so that the boss wouldn't believe that she was a plagiarist. capitol made a doll who looked exactly like herself. if you pressed a button on one of the doll's cunt lips the doll said, "i am a good girl and do exactly as i am told to do." wrote: nobody save buzzards. lots of buzzards here. in the distance, lay flies and piles of shit. herds of animals move against the skyline like black caravans in an unknown east. sheeps and goats. another place, a horse is lapping the water of a pool. lavendar and grey trees behind this black water are leafless and spineless. as the day ends, the sun in the east flushes out pale lavendars and pinks, then turns blood red as it turns on itself, becoming a more definitive shape, the more definitive, the bloodier. until it sits, totally unaware of the rest of the universe, waiting at the edge of a sky that doesn't yet know what colors it wants to be, a hawk waiting for the inevitable onset of human slaughter. the light is fleeing. instead, sent a letter to feminist publisher in which said that she composed her texts out of 'real' conversations, anything written down, other texts, somewhat in the ways the cubists had worked. (not quite true. but thought this statement understandable.) cited, as example, her use of 'true confessions' stories. such stories whose content seemed purely and narrowly sexual, composed simply for purposes of sexual titillation and economic profit, if deconstructed, viewed in terms of context and genre, became signs of political and social realities. so if the writer or critic (deconstructionist) didn't work with the actual language of these texts, the writer or critic wouldn't be able to uncover the political and social realities involved. for instance, both genre and the habitual nature of perception hide the violence of the content of many newspaper stories. to uncover this violence is to run the risk of being accused of loving violence or all kinds of pornography. (as if the writer gives a damn about what anyone considers risks.) wrote, living art rather than dead art has some connection with passion. deconstructions of newspaper stories become the living art in a culture that demands that any artistic representation of life be non-violent and non-sexual, misrepresent. to copy down, to appropriate, to deconstruct other texts is to break down those perceptual habits the culture doesn't want to be broken. deconstruction demands not so much plagiarism as breaking into the copyright law. in the harold robbins' text which had used, a rich white woman walks into a disco, picks up a black boy, has sex with him. in the robbins' text, this scene is soft-core porn, has as its purpose mild sexual titillation and pleasure. [when robbins' book had been published years ago, the writer's mother had said that robbins had used jacqueline onassis as the model for the rich white woman.] wrote, had made apparent that bit of politics while amplifying the pulp quality of the style in order to see what would happen when the underlying presuppositions or meanings of robbins' writing became clear. robbins as emblematic of a certain part of american culture. what happened was that the sterility of that part of american culture revealed itself. the real pornography. cliches, especially sexual cliches, are always signs of power or political relationships. because she had just gotten her period, capitol made a huge red satin pillow cross then smeared her blood all over it. her editor at the feminist publisher said that the boss had found her explanation "literary." later would be informed that this was a legal, not a literary, matter. "here it all stinks," capitol thought. "art is making according to the imagination. but here, buying and selling are the rules; the rules of commodity have destroyed the imagination. here, the only art allowed is made by post-capitalist rules; art isn't made according to rules." anger makes you want to suicide. journalist who broke the 'harold robbins story' had been phoning and leaving messages on writer's answering machine for days. had stopped answering her phone. by chance picked it up; journalist asked her if anything to say. "you mean about harold robbins?" silence. "i've just given my publisher a statement. perhaps you could read that." "do you have anything to add to it?" as if she was a criminal. a few days later writer's agent over the phone informed writer what was happening was simply horrible. capitol didn't want to make any dolls. how could the writer be plagiarizing harold robbins? writer didn't know. agent told writer if writer had phoned her immediately, agent could have straightened out everything because she was good friends with harold robbins' publisher. but now it was too late. writer asked agent if she could do anything. agent answered that she'd phone harold robbins' publisher and that the worst that could happen is that she'd have to pay a nominal quotation rights fee. so a few days later was surprised when feminist publisher informed her that if she didn't sign the apology to harold robbins which they had written for her, feminist publishing company would go down a drain because harold robins or harold robbins' publisher would slap a half-a-million [dollar? pound?] lawsuit on the feminist publishing house. decided she had to take notice of this stupid affair, though her whole life wanted to notice only writing and sex. "what is it" capitol wrote, "to be an artist? where is the value that will keep this life in hell going?" for one of the first times in her life, was deeply scared. was usually as wild as they come. doing anything if it felt good. so when succumbed to fear, succumbed to reasonless, almost bottomless fear. panicked only because she might be forced to apologize, not to harold robbins, that didn't matter, but to anyone for her writing, for what seemed to be her life. book had already been withdrawn from print. wasn't that enough? panicked, phoned her agent without waiting for her agent to phone her. agent asked writer if she knew how she stood legally. writer replied that as far as knew harold robbins had made no written charge. feminist publisher sometime in beginning had told her they had spoken to a solicitor who had said neither she nor they "had a leg to stand on." since didn't know with what she was being charged, she didn't know what that meant. agent replied, "perhaps we should talk to a solicitor. do you know a solicitor?" knew the name of a tax solicitor. since had no money, asked her american publisher what to do, if he knew a lawyer. would make no more dolls. american publisher informed her couldn't ask anyone's advice until she knew the charges against her, saw them in writing. asked the feminist publisher to send the charges against her and whatever else was in writing to her. received two copies of the 'harold robbins' text she had written twenty years ago, one copy of the apology she was supposed to sign, and a letter from harold robbins' publisher to the head of the feminist publishing company. letter said they were not seeking damages beyond withdrawal of the book from publication [which had already taken place] and the apology. didn't know of what she was guilty. later would receive a copy of the letter sent to her feminist publisher from the solicitor whom the feminist publisher and then her agent had consulted. letter stated: according to the various documents and texts which the feminist publisher had supplied, the writer should apologize to mr. harold robbins. first, because in her text she has used a substantial number of mr. robbins' words. second, because she did not use any texts other than mr. robbins' so there could be no literary theory or praxis responsible for her plagiarism. third, because the contract between the writer and the feminist publisher states that the writer had not infringed upon any existing copyright. when the writer wrote, not wrote back, to the solicitor that most of the novel in question had been appropriated from other texts, that most of these texts had been in the public domain, that the writers of texts not in the public domain were either writers of 'true confessions' stories (anonymous) or writers who knew she had reworked their texts and felt honored, except for mr. robbins, that she had never misrepresented nor hidden her usages of other texts, her methods of composition, that there was already a body of literary criticism on her and others' methods of appropriation, and furthermore [this was to become the major point of contention], that she would not sign the apology because she could not since there was no assurance that all possible litigation and harassment would end with the signature of guilt, guilt which anyway she didn't feel: the solicitor did not reply. not knowing of what she was guilty, feeling isolated, and pressured to finish her new novel, writer became paranoid. would do anything to stop the pressure from the feminist publisher and simultaneously would never apologize for her work. considered her american publisher her father. told her that the 'harold robbins affair' was a joke, she should take the phone off the hook, go to paris for a few days. finish your book. that's what's important. would make no more dolls. paris is a beautiful city. in paris decided that it's stupid to live in fear. didn't yet know what to do about isolation. all that matters is work and work must be created in and can't be created in isolation. (remembered a conversation she had had with her feminist publisher. still trying to explain, writer said, in order to deconstruct, the deconstructionist needs to use the actual other texts. editor had said she understood. for instance, she was sure, peter carey in _oscar and lucinda_ had used other people's writings in his dialogue, but he would never admit it. this writer did what every other writer did, but she is the only one who admits it. "it's not a matter of not being able to write," the writer replied. it's a matter of a certain theory which is also a literary theory. theory and belief." then shut up because knew that when you have to explain and explain, nothing is understood. language is dead.) since there were no more dolls, capitol started writing language. decided that it's stupid living in fear of being forced to be guilty without knowing why you're guilty and, more important, it's stupid caring about what has nothing to do with art. it doesn't really matter whether or not you sign the fucking apology. over the phone asked the american publisher whether or not it mattered to her past work whether or not signed the apology. answered that the sole matter was her work. thought alike. wanted to ensure that there was no more sloppiness in her work or life, that from now on all her actions served only her writing. upon returning to england, consulted a friend who consulted a solicitor who was his friend about her case. this solicitor advised that since she wasn't guilty of plagiarism and since the law was unclear, grey, about whether or not she had breached harold robbins' copyright, it could be a legal precedent, he couldn't advise whether or not she should sign the apology. but must not sign unless, upon signing, received full and final settlement. informed her agent that would sign if and only if received full and final settlement upon signing. over the phone, feminist publisher asked her who had told her about full and final settlement. a literary solicitor. could they, the feminist publishing house, have his name and his statement in writing? "this is my decision," writer said. "that's all you need to know." wrote down "pray for us the dead," the first line in the first poem by charles olson she had ever read when she was a teenager. all the dolls were dead. dead hair. when she looked up this poem, its first line was, "what does not change/ is the will to change." went to a nearby cemetery and with stick down in sand wrote the words "pray for us the dead." thought, who is dead? the dead trees? who is dead? we live in service of the spirit. made mass with trees dead and dirt and underneath humans as dead or living as any stone or wood. i won't bury my dead dolls, thought. i'll step on them and mash them up. for two weeks didn't hear from either her agent or feminist publisher. could return to finishing her novel. thought that threats had died. in two weeks received a letter from her agent which read something like: on your express instructions that your publisher communicate to you through me, your publisher has informed me that they have communicated to harold robbins your decision that you will sign the apology which his publisher drew up only if you have his assurance that there will be no further harassment or litigation. because you have requested such assurance, predictably, harold robbins is now requiring damages to be paid. your publisher now intends to sign and publish the apology to harold robbins as soon as possible whether or not you sign it. in view of what i have discovered about the nature of your various telephone communications to me, please contact me only in writing from now on. signature. understood that she had lost. lost more than a struggle about the appropriation of four pages, about the definition of _appropriation_. lost her belief that there can be art in this culture. lost spirit. all humans have to die, but they don't have to fail. fail in all that matters. it turned out that the whole affair was nothing. capitol realized that she had forgotten to bury the writer doll. since the smell of death stunk, returned to the cemetery to bury her. she kicked over a rock and threw the doll into the hole which the rock had made. chanted, "you're not selling enough books in california. you'd better go there immediately. try to get into reading in any benefit you can so five more books will be sold. you have bags under your eyes." capitol thought, dead doll. since capitol was a romantic, she believed death is preferable to a dead life, a life not lived according to the dictates of the spirit. since she was the one who had power in the doll human relationship, her dolls were romantics too. toward the end of paranoia, had told her story to a friend who was secretary to a famous writer. informed her that famous writer's first lawyer used to work with harold robbins' present lawyer. first lawyer was friends with her american publisher. her american publisher asked the lawyer who was his friend to speak privately to harold robbins' lawyer. later the lawyer told the american publisher that harold robbins' lawyer advised to let the matter die quietly. this lawyer himself advised that under no circumstances should the writer sign anything. it turned out that the whole affair was nothing. despite these lawyer's advice, harold robbins' publisher and the feminist publisher kept pressing the writer to sign the apology and eventually, as everything becomes nothing, she had to. knew that none of the above has anything to do with what matters, writing. except for the failure of the spirit. they're all dead, capitol thought. their dolls' flesh is now becoming part of the dirt. capitol thought, is matter moving through forms dead or alive? capitol thought, they can't kill the spirit. stivale, 'marketing / reading males', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-stivale-marketing.txt marketing / reading males by charles j. stivale <cstival@cms.cc.wayne.edu> wayne state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by charles stivale, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. joseph a. boone and michael cadden, eds. _engendering men: the question of male feminist criticism._ new york: routledge, 1990. laura claridge and elizabeth langland, eds. _out of bounds: male writers and gender(ed) criticism_. amherst: u of massachusetts p, 1990. [1] while pondering different lines of approach for a review of two collections of essays on the implications of "(male) feminist criticism" and on the "gender(ed)" construction of canonical male writers, i stare at the front covers of each. the title _engendering men_--on a black background in sharp, white script, the letters of men in bold print, with the subtitle under and slightly alongside men, in much smaller, uniform blue print--contrasts with the claridge/langland cover: a wide band of gray on the left and a thin band of gray on the right border a central strip in pink hue containing the same photograph twice, at top and at bottom. within and across the top of the upper left rectangle, next to the word "out," are the black letters "of bounds," under which, in thinner black letters on the pink background, is the subtitle _male writers and gender(ed) criticism_. as for the cover illustrations on each, over one-third of the cover above the names "boone and cadden" shows a reproduction of a painting by joaquin sorolla entitled _children at the beach_. the subject, three naked boys lying on their stomachs, legs spread and buttocks exposed, on wet sand and in extremely shallow water, is a scene of youthful repose that contrasts with the images on _out of bounds_: the photograph by eadweard muybridge, reproduced twice and overlaid with a pink hue, depicts the right body profile of a naked, muscular male climbing (or descending) a barely visible ladder, with a fully loaded bricklayer's basket weighing down heavily on the right shoulder and its pole extending vertically downward along the body beyond the bottom of the photo. [2] my contemplation of these "packages" relates not only to the strategies of these editions themselves, but also to the act of reviewing collections on (en)gender(ed) males and their criticism within the "cyberspace" of pmc. assuming my role as electronic pitchman, i wish to re-view these texts in terms of their valence as products of the marketplace, to draw on overlaps and interweaves between the projects, to locate dissonances within and between them, in short, to study these collections as assembled productions. the boone/cadden title relates directly to marketing strategies announced in the introduction: with momentum provided by a "friendly push from elaine showalter, an established feminist critic who had the savvy to recognize a good opportunity for her less experienced colleagues" (1), the editors' goal is "to make more visible the efforts of all those individual men throughout the academy who have already begun the task . . . of reconceptualizing themselves as men and hence as critics of the literary and cultural texts that we have inherited and are in the process of recreating. in engendering ourselves, in making visible our textual/sexual bodies, we thus acknowledge our part in a movement whose time, we hope, has come" (7). in form and content, then, this title is explicit about seizing the time and need for the product, and the cover illustration emphasizes this move: boys nakedly displayed and bonding in enjoyable (perhaps even productive) repose. furthermore, inside facing the title page is another painting in black, white and gray tones (george platte lynes's _charles nielson with j. ogle (behind glass)_) presenting a rear view of a naked standing male figure, the right arm slightly bent and touching a translucent glass. behind this, facing the first naked male is a second; his left hand meets the first male's right on the glass in a mirror effect, and the male gaze that we can see is trained directly at the face opposite him, the other gaze remaining invisible to the viewer. [3] mirror images, male bonding, bodies and gazes reaching yet separate, in confident repose yet prepared for activity--the package enveloping and preceding _engendering men_ relates directly to the contributors' stance vis-a-vis feminism as articulated by the editors: "feminism has engendered us, even as we strive to engender a practice that might not always be _the same_ as feminist practice, but that remains in contiguity with its politics" (1). just as the editors are careful to note that the "we" invoked in the introduction "does not and cannot always encompass the variety of voices and opinions gathered here under the aegis of 'engendering men'," they also insist that the subtitle points to an ongoing process of reaching while not yet touching, "work that by its very nature is yet in search of is own (im)proper 'name'" (2). citing adrienne rich, the editors see feminism as "a matter of vision and revision," entailing "new ways of interacting with our worlds and our lives, our literatures and our cultures" and constituting a "revolutionary task in which both men and women can--indeed must--participate if we are to create a nonsexist future" (3). this activity, however, remains distinct from feminism, drawing on multiple methodologies, enunciated in multiple voices, seeking "to create a field of study that, as yet, remains amorphous and . . . a question" (3), much like the relations of male bodies in the two liminary illustrations. [4] the strain of such exertion is illustrated much more evidently on the cover of _out of bounds_: under a certainly brutal weight and ungainly means of transport, the photographs bordering the pink rectangle from above and below depict the message that progress is slow and painful, hampered by the male's limited means and burden. curious, then, that in the introduction, what the women editors describe is their own conceptual exertion throughout the successive definitions of their project. following the 1986 special mla session on "male feminist voices," they had to revise the original assumption that antipatriarchal activity, e.g. male writer's resistance to the phallic mode, "would necessarily encompass feminism" (3), choosing a new title, _out of bounds_, to indicate the possibilities of "liberation of both sexes from gender proscriptions" (5). however, since no uniform feminist methodology for inquiry unites the collected essays, the editors had to move beyond the old subtitle, _male writers and feminist inquiry_, and adopt the current one to foreground the main thesis of "gender in the writings of male canonical authors sensitive to the limitations of language in their culture" as well as the project's context, "criticism offered up by women and men inscribed, inevitably, by same conditions they seek to question" (5). [5] the cover illustrations would correspond, then, to this collection's explicit "justification": that "whereas 'man' has indeed functioned as the nodal point for traditional literary criticism of the past centuries, man as a gendered, cultural creature has received precious little attention. and to take feminist criticism seriously as a method that places gender at the heart of things is to insist that to ignore the question 'what is it to be a man?' is to imperil both the rigor and the integrity of feminist theory and practice" (7). although not sharing a single feminist methodology, these essays address the focal issue of selected male canonical writers: "what do male writers who feel fettered by the patriarchal literary tradition do to escape a language implicitly- often explicitly--defined as their own?" (11). the editors argue that "the generative--we would call it 'feminist'--act for the male writers of our study, then, is . . . breaking down or dismantling the terms and forms that have preserved the status quo of two genders" (12). we can view the cover as illustrating acts of male exertion with its feminist tinge that the essays emphasize, the cover figure enveloped by a pink haze in the difficult and careful process of "dismantling" linguistic limitations and gender proscriptions imposed by their culture. [6] that the editors of _out of bounds_ choose to include treatments only of canonical writers engaged in or in conflict with this dismantling process is, to my mind, a strength of the collection for its marketing strategies, but possibly a source of frustration for scholars and students seeking pat answers to questions on gender and patriarchy. for the editors insist that another goal of the collection is to find a way to discuss dualities, "masculine/ feminine, female/male, male feminist/female feminist, homosexual/ heterosexual" without "reinforcing, at however a covert level, a dualism that always, in the end, keeps people in their place" (9). one strategy to achieve this goal is "to allow to stand, in this volume, multifarious uses of these gender/sexual terms, pinned down through the context of each individual essay." it is up to the individual essayists and, by extension, the readers to cope with/against "terms that would succeed in polarizing- or simplifying--their arguments" (9). so this collection, organized in chronological reference to the writers studied, offers numerous possibilities for mixing, matching and confronting the essays, approaches, and definitions: to name but a few, james phelan (on masculine voice in thackerey's _vanity fair_) vis-a-vis margaret higonnet (on woman's voice in hardy's _tess_); claridge (on the romantic female as situated by shelley) vis-a-vis william veeder (on the realist henry james's identification with the feminine); and two strange volume-fellows (more on this later), frank lentricchia (on frost) and joseph a. boone (on durrell). [7] in contrast, the organization of the boone/cadden collection emphasizes a definite solidarity, even confidence, in grouping its essays into four thematic clusters. while i could quibble about what seems to be the editors' arbitrary assignment of some essays to a specific section rather than to another, this collection is clearly of the utmost interest for seminars and scholarly research, providing needed definitions of diverse positions and extensive questioning that scholars and critics must henceforth pursue in future feminist research. however, some uneasy tensions arise in the editors', and especially boone's, introductory essays regarding the field (male feminist criticism) that they hope in some way to delineate. in a bracketed preface to his essay "of me(n) and feminism: who(se) is the sex that writes?," boone explains that the essay originally expressed, in 1987, his "uneasiness about the way in which men's relation to feminist criticism was at the time being politicized in academic circles" (11). despite boone's relief at discovering "that some of my most immediate worries seem less relevant in light of the two [sic] years that have intervened" thanks to current work contributing to the constitution of "male feminist criticism," the editors still rely on "the reappearance" of boone's essay (previously published in linda kauffman's 1989 _gender and theory_ [blackwell] edition) and its "less relevant" anxiety. in fact, they state that this essay serves as "an overview of the _whole phenomenon_ of 'male feminist criticism' as it has evolved at conventions and in anthologies over the last few years" (4, my emphasis). this claim for the essay's breadth is astounding in itself and all the more so given the volume in which it appears, one that includes essays that question the very possibility of such an essentializing gesture. moreover, boone's essay itself reproaches one critic (elaine showalter) for such generalizing moves (15) and constructs its own narrative of exclusion and difference in relation to the emergence of the field that the essays purport to outline. [8] the depiction of this "whole phenomenon of 'male feminist criticism'" relies on boone's identification of a "gap between the 'me' and 'men' in 'me(n)'" (13), and through its exposure, "we can perhaps open up a space within the discourse of feminism where a male voice professing a feminist politics _can_ have something to say beyond impossibilities and apologies and unresolved ire" (12). thus, the "reappearance" of this essay allows boone to recycle a limited and privileged narrative of "the debate surrounding men and feminism in [his] own 'workplace'" (13). the five steps of this experience are posed as "seemingly random moments": elaine showalter's now canonical 1983 essay, "critical cross-dressing"; the 1984 mla sections on "men in feminism"; "another mla panel on 'male feminist voices' in which [boone] participated in 1986" (13); the alice jardine/paul smith _men in feminism_ collection; the aforementioned kauffman collection "for which this essay was conceived." boone ostensibly seeks to render visible the "'me(n)' gap" as a "discontinuity that has in turned inspired me to question the discursive formations in the literary critical institution whereby the concept of men and feminism, transformed into a territorial battlefield, has attained an 'impossible' status" (13). "impossible" for whom? with the quotation marks retained, boone refers to stephen heath's assertion in _men in feminism_, "men's relation to feminism is an impossible one." yet if, as boone suggests and to which the following essays bear witness, these anxieties are no longer entirely relevant to the emergence of this field, recycling this essay must serve other ends than to describe the "whole phenomenon." [9] to this strategy, i apply boone's own criticism of "the hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas" of "many of the contributors to _men in feminism_," i.e. the "use of the subject 'male feminism'. . . as _their_[/_his_] pretext to wage other critical wars," male feminism then becoming "the ultimately expendable item of exchange that merely gets the conversation going" (20). boone's own agenda and "unresolved ire" are suggested, in fact, by the "moments" chosen as constitutive of the emergence of the "whole phenomenon." consider the fifth moment, the "kind of coda" in which boone discusses "the form- and formulation" of the kauffman collection. the invitation letter to contribute to this collection "inevitably" reproduced, says boone, the discomfort of a division between "_male essayists_" answered by "_female theorists_." for his "peace of mind" both in the original and now in the recycled essay, boone cleverly chooses to "include [him]self among the 'female theorists' . . . in hopes of creating a bit of healthy confusion, a field of imaginative play that might contribute to the liberation of our current discourses on and around the subject of 'men and feminism'" (21). how this self-inclusion accomplishes this goal was and is still not entirely clear, but a significant gap in the later, revised version is boone's omission of any mention that, following _gender & theory_'s format, toril moi articulated therein a pithy response to his original text. however, rather than employ this revised version to respond to moi's criticism--notably, of the essay's anecdotal "parochialism," of its sub-text "structured over a series of oppositions: old/young, visible/invisible, known/unknown, speaking/silent and so on" (_gender and theory_ 186)--boone (and boone/cadden in the introduction) simply elide any reference to this response, relieving the "unresolved ire" instead through criticism of kauffman's volume. [10] this dissonance in boone's essay emerges in another example of his experience of the "'me(n)' gap" that occurred as sole male participant not just in any mla special session, but the one from which claridge and langland's volume resulted. boone bases his critique first on "the very _construction_ of the panel" ("reinstat[ing], once again, a male-female opposition," 17), then on questions that the organizers "_might_ have opened up" (18) that he gladly provides. but boone's return to another source of "unresolved ire," the personal circumstances of the panel's constitution, suggests that his objections are not so much theoretical ("man" was there reconstituted as "a homogeneous entity") as personal, that this man was the fall-guy (18). although not yet published at the time boone revised the essay on "me(n) and feminism," the claridge/langland volume nonetheless receives an oblique shot: while the volume, says boone, "promises to move beyond its panel format in exciting directions"- for example, "several male contributors, none easily assimilable to the other, are being included, and at least some will be talking about men's experiences" (21)- the transition sentence preceding boone's comments on kauffman's collection still provides a warning (to whom?) related if only by contiguity to the claridge/langland volume: "the danger is always there of reinstating those potentially blinding symmetries that a feminist understanding of difference should instead encourage us all as feminists to unravel, to move beyond" (21). [11] the overlap of boone's participation in each volume offers an further possibility of textual juxtaposition. a contemporary male critic undergoing particular scrutiny in the boone/cadden volume is frank lentricchia; in "redeeming the phallus: wallace stevens, frank lentricchia, and the politics of (hetero)sexuality," lee edelman examines not only lentricchia's predominantly heterosexual reading of stevens, but also the critic's polemic with sandra gilbert and susan gubar on feminist criticism. about edelman's fine reading that employs wallace stevens's poetry as a strategic textual exemplar--"an instrument of analytic leverage that can help to articulate a critique of those gestures whereby criticism refuses or denies its own positioning within a framework that a gay theory might enable us to read" (37)--, boone/cadden comment: "edelman's essay takes a recent interview with frank lentricchia as its _point of departure_ in order to analyze one way in which feminism has been attacked so as to appropriate for straight men a universal copyright on cultural subversiveness" (4, my emphasis). one notices here a distinct shift of edelman's focus, away from gay theory and toward the attack on feminism, away from stevens toward lentricchia. boone/cadden continue: "edelman counters this strategy with one of his own--a reading of wallace stevens that critiques lentricchia's male sexual positioning (_and posturing_) from an explicitly gay perspective" (5, my emphasis). quite true, if understandably reductive, but why the unnecessary parenthetical editorial comment? [12] the implicit agenda of the editors is explicitly provided in boone's bracketed preface to his essay: having been relieved of some "worries" by the new productivity in the field of "male feminist criticism," boone also concludes that the earlier emphasis on "the issue of naming--whether to take on the label, for instance, of 'male feminism'--now strikes me as perhaps less urgent than _measuring the degree of commitment to a feminist politics_ demonstrated in these men's newly engendered methods of analysis" (11, my emphasis). what the tools of this "measurement" might be are not clear, but whereas the contributors to _engendering men_, by dint of the inclusion of their essays, no doubt "measure up" to the standards of the emergent field, lentricchia clearly does not. it is understandable, then, that from boone's perspective, "none" of the male contributors to the claridge/ langland volume are "easily assimilable to the others" since the demonstration therein of "the degree of commitment to a feminist politics" would no doubt be found wanting, especially given the implicit requirement of discussing "men's experiences" met only by a few of those contributors (men and women). however, in light of lentricchia's "privileged" position in _engendering men_ as anti-feminist fall-guy, an added textual confrontation available in _out of bounds_ for classroom debate would be lentricchia's "the resentments of robert frost" with boone's essay on durrell's _alexandria quartet_, if only for their distinct approaches for exploring the focal authors' expression of male desire. [13] to return to the liminary illustrations of _engendering men_, there is clearly much more going on than meets the eye underneath the placid surface of males in the solidarity of contemplative repose. one suggestion for readers of this collection is to move from boone's essay to the final one by robert vorlicky, "(in)visible alliances: conflicting 'chronicles' of feminisms," on the need for and possibilities of alliances (male/female, hetero-/homosexual). this essay serves as a splendid statement of the complex relations addressed throughout the volume and would have been a more fitting opening essay. while both volumes speak to questions vital to postmodern concerns, they market these in distinct ways that respond to perceived demands from readers/consumers and also create choices for their engagement with each set of texts. on one hand, the consumer might read essays in each volume as isolated from the others and reap certain, if limited, benefits; on the other hand, through the juxtaposition and confrontation of the volumes' essays, the reader will encounter the tension inherent to the emergence of new fields of inquiry. however, as i have suggested, one also discovers the multiple difficulties of alliances and the distinct, often irreconcilable, differences in the processes of (en)gender(ing) due in no small part to the collision of ethical concerns with personal agendas. bernstein, 'play it again, pac-man', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-bernstein-play.txt play it again, pac-man by charles bernstein state university of new york at albany _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by charles bernstein, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] your quarter rolls into the slot and you are tossed, suddenly and as if without warning, into a world of controllable danger. your "man" is under attack and you must simulate his defense, lest humanity perish and another quarter is required to renew the quest. [2] drop in, turn on, tune out. [3] the theories of video games abound: poststructuralist, neomarxian, psychoanalytic, and puritanical interpretations are on hand to guide us on our journey through the conceptual mazes spawned by the phenomenon. acting out male aggression. a return, for adolescent boys, to the site of mom's body. technological utopia. as american as auto-eroticism. the best introduction to computer programming. no more than an occasion for loitering in seedy arcades. a new mind-obliterating technodrug. marvelous exercise of hand-eye coordination. corrupter of youth. capital entertainment for the whole family. not since the advent of tv has an entertainment medium been subjected to such wildly ambivalent reactions nor such skyrocketing sales. [4] if the depression dream was a chicken in every pot, today's middle class adolescent's dream is a video game in every tv. [5] more and faster: better graphics and faster action, so fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it's realer than real. [6] a surprising amount of the literature on video games has concerned the social context of the games: arcade culture, troubled youth, vocational training for tomorrow's _top gun_. so much so that these scenarios seem to have become a part of video game culture: nerdy kid who can't get out a full sentence and whose social skills resemble godzilla's is the star of the arcade; as taciturn as a gary cooper's sheriff, he gets the job done without designer sweaters or the girl. [7] in the saturday night fever of computer wizardry, achievement with your joy stick is the only thing that counts; success is solitary, objectively measured, undeniable. [8] or, say, a 1980s horatio alger. a failure at school, marginal drug experimenter, hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks with a no-future bunch of kids, develops $30 a day video game habit, can't unplug from the machine without the lights going out in his head. haunts the arcade till all hours, till the cops come in their beeping cruisers, bounding into the mall like the beeping spaceships on the video screen, and start to check ids, seems some parents complained they don't know where johnny is and it's pushing two. cut to: young man in chalk-striped suit vice-prez for software devel. of data futurians, inc. of electronic valley, california; pulling down fifty thou in his third year after dropping out of college. (though the downside sequel has him, at 30, working till two every morning, divorced, personal life not accessible at this time, waiting for new data to be loaded, trouble reading disk drive.) [9] like the story boards of the games, the narratives that surround video games seem to promise a very american ending: redemption though the technology of perseverance and the perseverance of technology. salvation from social degeneracy (alien menace) comes in the form of squeaky clean high tech (no moving parts, no grease). turns out, no big surprise, that the alien that keeps coming at you in these games is none other than ourselves, split off and on the war path. [10] the combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. enter multitask electronic calculators which would work out obsessively repetitive calculations involving billions of individual operations, calculations that if you had to do by hand would take you centuries to finish, assuming you never stopped for a coke or a quick game of pac-man. now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. the idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off, except the leisure industry begins to outstrip the labors of the day as video games become the main interface between john q. and beth b. public and the computer. [11] instruments of labor removed from work-a-day tasks, set free to roam the unconscious, dark spaces of the imaginary- dragons and assault asteroids, dreadful losses and miraculous reincarnations. [12] if a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding secret dream machines deep inside their drums. [13] but these microchips really blow you away. [14] uh, err, um, oh. tilt! [15] okay, then, let's slow down and unpack these equations one by one, or else this will begin to resemble the assault on our ability to track that seems so much at the heart of the tease of the games themselves. spending time or killing it? [16] the arcade games are designed, in part, to convince players to part, and keep parting, with their quarters. this part of the action feels like slot-machine gambling, with the obvious difference that there is no cash pay off, only more time on line. staying plugged in, more time to play, is the fix. the arcade games are all about buying time and the possibility of extending the nominal, intensely atomized, 30-second (or so) minimum play to a duration that feels, for all impractical purposes, unbounded. clearly the dynamic of the ever-more popular home games is different enough that the two need to be considered as quite distinct social phenomena, even though they share the same medium. [17] like sex, good play on an arcade video game not only earns extra plays but also extends and expands the length of the current play, with the ultimate lure of an unlimited stretch of time in which the end bell never tolls: a freedom from the constraints of time that resembles the temporal plenitude of uninterrupted live tv (or close-circuit video monitoring) as well as the timeless, continuous present of the personal computer (pc). in contrast, a film ticket or video rental buys you just 90 or 120 minutes of "media," no extensions (as opposed to reruns) possible. meanwhile, the home video game, by allowing longer play with greater skills, simulates the temporal economy of the arcade product while drastically blunting the threat of closure, since on the home version it costs nothing to replay. [18] video games create an artificial economy of scarcity in a medium characterized by plenitude. in one of the most popular genres, you desperately fight to prolong your staying power which is threatened by alien objects that you must shoot down. there's no intrinsic reason that the threat of premature closure should drive so many of these games; for example, if your quarter always bought two minutes of play the effect of artificial scarcity would largely disappear. is this desire to postpone closure a particular male drive, suggesting a peculiarly male fear? it may be that the emphasis on the overt aggression of a number of the games distracts from seeing other dynamics inherent in video game formats. [19] another dynamic of the arcade games is the ubiquitous emphasis on scoring. these games are not open-ended; not only do you try to accumulate the most points in order to extend play and win bonus games but also to compete with the machine's lifetime memory of best-ever scores. if achievement-directed scoring suggests sex as opposed to love, games more than play, then it seems relevant to consider this a central part of the appeal of video games. [20] an economy of scarcity suggests goal-oriented behavior: the desire for accumulation; this is what george bataille has dubbed a "restricted" economy, in contrast to an unrestricted or "general" economy, which involves exchange or loss or waste or discharge. the drive to accumulate capital and commodities is the classic sign of a restricted economy. potlatch (the festive exchange of gifts) or other rituals or carnivals of waste ("a hellava wedding!," "boy, what a bar mitzvah!") suggest a general economy. [21] while the dominant formats and genres of video games seem to involve a restricted economy, the social context of the games seems to suggest features of a general- unrestricted--economy. for while the games often mime the purposive behavior of accumulation/acquisition, they are played out in a context that stigmatizes them as wastes of time, purposeless, idle, even degenerate. [22] these considerations link up video games with those other games, in our own and other cultures, whose social "function" is to celebrate waste, abandon, excess; though the carnival or orgiastic rite is clearly something that is repressed in a society, like ours, where the puritan ethic stills hold powerful sway. what redeems many sports from being conceived as carnivals of waste is the emphasis on athletics (%improvement% of the body) and the forging of team or group or community spirit (%building% a community, learning %fair% play)--two compensatory features conspicuously absent from solitary, suggestively antiphysical video gaming. [23] in a society in which the desire for general economy is routinely sublimated into utilitarian behaviors, the lure of video games has to be understood as, in part, related to their sheer unproductivity. put more simply, our unrestricted play is constantly being channeled into goal-directed games; how appealing then to find a game whose essence seems to be totally useless play. yet it would be a mistake to think of the erotic as wed to de-creative flows rather than pro-creative formations: both are in play, at work. thus the synthesis of play and games that characterizes most available video games addresses the conflictual nature of our responses to eros and labor, play and work. [24] so what's really being shot down or gobbled up in so many of the popular games? maybe the death wish played out in these games is not a simulation at all; maybe it's time that's being killed or absorbed--real-life productive time that could be better "spent" elsewhere. if the massage is the medium and the genre is the message, who's minding the store? [25] like movies, especially in the early period, video games are primarily characterized by their genre. the earliest arcade video game, _pong_, from 1971, is an arcade version of ping-pong, and so the progenitor of a series of more sophisticated games based on popular sports, including _atari football_, _track and field_, _720 [degrees]_ (skateboarding), and _pole position_ (car racing). (perhaps driving simulation games are a genre of their own; they certainly have the potential to be played in an open-ended way, outside any scoring: just to drive fast and take the curves.) [26] quest or "fantasy" adventures, typically using a maze format, is another very poplar genre, especially in the home version. arcade versions include _dragon's lair_, _gauntlet_, and _thayer's quest_. dragons, wizards, and warriors are often featured players, and each new level of the game triggers more complex action, as the protagonist journeys toward an often magical destination at the end of a series of labyrinths. in the home versions, where there may be up to a dozen levels, or scenes, the narrative can become increasingly elaborate. still, the basis of this genre is getting the protagonist through a series (or maze) of possibly fatal mishaps. in its simplest form, these games involve a single protagonist moving toward a destination, the quest being to complete the labyrinth, against all odds. so we have pac-man gobbling to avoid being gobbled, or _donkey kong_'s mario trying to save his beloved from a family of guerrillas who roll barrels at him, or, in _berzerk_, humanoids who must destroy all the pursuing robots before reaching the end of the maze. [27] but the genre that most characterizes the arcade game is the war games in which successive waves of enemy projectiles must be shot down or blown up by counterprojectiles controlled by joystick, push button, or track ball. some of the more famous of these games included _star wars_ (a movie tie-in), _space invaders_ (squadrons of alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a fixed position), _asteroids_ (weightless, drifting shooter, lost in space, tries to blast way through meteor showers and occasional scout ship), _defender_ (wild variety of space aliens to dodge/shoot down in spaceman rescue), _galaxian_ (invaders break ranks and take looping dives in their attacks), _stratovox_ (stranded astronauts on alien planet), _centipede_ (waves of insects), _missile command_ (icbm attack), _robotron: 2084_ (robots against humanity), _seawolf_ (naval action), _zaxxon_ (enemy-armed flying fortress), _battlezone_ (so accurately simulated tank warfare, so the press kit says, that the army used it for training), and, finally, the quite recent "total environment" sit-down, pilot's view war games--_strike avenger_, _afterburner_, and _star fire_. [28] a related, newer genre is the martial arts fighting-man video games, such as _double dragon_ and _karate champ_, where star wars have come home to earth in graphically violent street wars reminiscent of bruce lee's mystically alluring kung fu action movies: another example of film and video game versions of the same genre. [29] discussions of video games rarely distinguish between medium and genre, probably because the limited number of genres so far developed dominate the popular conception of the phenomenon. but to imagine that video games are restricted to shoot-'em-ups, quest adventures, or sports transcriptions would be equivalent to imagining, seventy years ago, that the _perils of pauline_ or slapstick revealed the essence of cinema. [30] a medium of art has traditionally been defined as the material or technical means of expression; thus, paint on canvas, lithography, photography, film, and writing are different media; while detective stories, science fiction, rhymed verse, or penny dreadfuls are genres of writing. this is altogether too neat, however. since we learn what a medium is through instances of its use in genres, the cart really comes before the horse, or anyway, the medium is a sort of projected, or imaginary, constant that is actually much more socially and practically constituted than may at first seem apparent. [31] when trying to understand the nature of different media, it is often useful to think about what characterizes one medium in a way that distinguishes it from all other media--what is its essence, what can it do that no other medium can do? stanley cavell has suggested that the essence of the two predominant moving-image media--tv and movies--are quite distinct. the experience of film is voyeuristic--i %view% a world ("a succession of automatic world projections") from a position of being unseen, indeed unseeable. tv, in contrast, involves not viewing but %monitoring% of events as its basic mode of perception--live broadcast of news or sports events being the purest examples of this property. [32] it's helpful to distinguish the video display monitor from tv-as-medium. several media use the video monitor for non-tv purposes. one distinction is between %broadcast% tv and vcr technologies that, like pcs, use the television screen for non-event-monitoring functions. video games, then, are a moving-image medium distinct from tv and film. [33] in distinguishing medium and genre, it becomes useful to introduce a middle term, _format_. coin-op and home-cassette video games are one type of--hardware--format distinction i have in mind; but another--software- difference would be between, for example, scored and open-ended games, time-constrained and untimed play. similar or different genres could then be imagined for these different formats. the computer unconscious [34] the medium of video games is the cpu--the computer's central processing unit. video games share this medium with pcs. video games and pcs are different (hardware) formats of the same medium. indeed, a video game is a computer that is set up (dedicated) to play only one program. [35] the experiential basis of the computer-as-medium is %prediction and control% of a limited set of variables. the fascination with all computer technology--gamesware or straightware--is figuring out all the permutations of a limited set of variables. this accounts for the obsessively repetitive behavior of both pc hackers and games players (which mimes the hyperrepetiveness of computer processing). as a computer games designer remarked to me, working with computers is the only thing she can do for hours a day without noticing the time going by: a quintessentially absorbing activity. [36] computers, because they are a new kind of medium, are likely to change the basic conception of what a medium is. this is not because computers are uniquely interactive--that claim, if pursued, becomes hollow quite quickly. rather, computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a physical support but an operating environment. perhaps it overstates the point to talk about computer consciousness but the experiential dynamic in operating computers--whether playing games or otherwise--has yet to receive a full accounting. yet the fascination of relating to this alien consciousness is at the heart of the experience of pcs as much as video games. [37] video games are the purest manifestation of computer consciousness. liberated from the restricted economy of purpose or function, they express the inner, nonverbal world of the computer. [38] what is this world like? computers, including video games, are relatively invariant in their response to commands. this means that they will always respond in the same way to the same input but also that they demand that the input be precisely the same to produce the same results. for this reason, any interaction with computers is extremely circumscribed and affectless (which is to say, all the affect is a result of transference and projection). computers don't respond or give forth, they process or calculate. [39] computers are either on or off, you're plugged in or your out of the loop. there is a kind of visceral click in your brain when the screen lights up with "system ready," or your quarter triggers the switch and the game comes on line, that is unrelated to other media interactions such as watching movies or tv, reading, or viewing a painting. moreover--and this is crucial to the addictive attraction so many operators feel--the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we have with people or things or nature, which are always and ever possibly present, but can't be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar way. the computer infantalizes our relation to the external, re-presenting the structure of the infant's world as described by piaget, where objects seem to disappear when you turn your back to them or close your eyes. for you know when you turn your pc on it will be just like you left it: nothing will have changed. [40] tv is for many people simulated company, freely flowing with an unlimited supply of "stuff" that fills up "real time." computers, in contrast, seem inert and atemporal, vigilant and self-contained. it's as if all their data is simultaneously and immediately available to be called up. it is unnecessary to go through any linear or temporal sequence to find a particular bit of information. no searching on fast forward as in video, or waiting as in tv, or flipping pages as in a book: you specify and instantly access. when you are into it, time disappears, only to become visible again during "down time." even those who can't conceive that they will care about speed become increasingly irritated at computer operations that take more than a few seconds to complete. for the non-operator, it may seem that a 10-second wait to access data is inconsequential. but the computer junkie finds such waits an affront to the medium's utopian lure of timeless and immediate access, with no resistance, no gravitational pull--no sweat, no wait, no labor on the part of the computer: a dream of weightless instantaneousness, continuous presentness. the fix of speed for the computer or video game player is not from the visceral thrill of fastness, as with racing cars, where the speed is physically felt. the computer ensnares with a siren's song of time stopping, ceasing to be experienced, transcended. speed is not an end in itself, a roller coaster ride, but a means to escape from the very sensation of speed or duration: an escape from history, waiting, embodied space. the anxiety of control/the control of anxiety [41] invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are not qualities that generally characterize human information processing, although they are related to certain idealizations of our reasoning processes. certainly, insofar as a person took on these characterizations, he or she would frighten: either lobotomized or paranoid. in this sense, the computer can again be seen as an alien form of consciousness; our interactions with it are unrelated to the forms of communication to which we otherwise are accustomed. [42] many people using computers and video games experience a surprisingly high level of anxiety; controlled anxiety is one of the primary "hooks" into the medium. [43] since so many of the video game genres highlight paranoid fantasies, it's revealing to compare these to the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in pc operating systems. consider the catastrophic nature of numerous pc error messages: invalid sector, allocation error, sector not found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error, divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive specification, data error, format failure, incompatible system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error; or the ubiquitous screen prompts: "are you sure?" and "abort, retry, ignore?" [44] the experience of invoking and avoiding these, sometimes "fatal" errors, is not altogether unlike the action of a number of video games. just consider how these standard pc software operating terms suggest both scenarios and action of many video games and at the same time underscore some of the ontological features of the medium: %escape% and %exit% and %save% functions ("you must escape from the dungeon, exit to the next level and save the nuclear family"), %path support% (knowing your way through the maze), data %loss%/data %recovery% (your "man" only disappears if he gets hit three times), %defaults% (are not in the stars but in ourselves), %erase% (liquidate, disappear, destroy, bombard, obliterate), %abandon% (ship!), %unerase% (see data recovery), delete (kill me but don't delete me), %searches% (i always think of john ford's _the searchers_, kind of the opposite of perhaps the most offensive of video games, "custer's revenge"), and of course, %back-ups% (i.e. the cavalry's on its way, or else: a new set of missiles is just a flick of the wrist away). [45] the pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your hard drive from %crashing%: "why your hard disk may be only seconds away from total failure! be a real hero! solve hard disk torture and grief. you don't need to reformat. you don't need to clobber data. how much these errors already cost you in %unrecoverable% data, time, torture, money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance, damage to business reputation, etc.." [46] loss preventable only by constant saving is one pc structural metaphor that seems played out in video games. another one, though perhaps less metaphoric than phenomenological, revolves around %location%. here it's not loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being lost--dislocation--as in how to get from one place to another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make with the controls corresponds with what you see on the far-from-silver screen. or else the intoxicating anxiety of disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling.... [47] what's going on? the dark side of uniformity and control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of disaster, of down time. of not getting it right, of getting lost, of losing control. since the computer doesn't make mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in you. how many times does an operator get a new program and run it through just to see how it works, what it can do, what the glitches are, what the action is. moving phrases around in multiple block operations may not be so different from shooting down asteroids. deleting data on purpose or by mistake may be something like gobbling up little illuminated blips on the display screen of a game. and figuring out how a new piece of software works by making slight mistakes that the computer rejects--because there's only one optimum way to do something--may be like learning to get from a 30-second game over to bonus points. [48] if films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games provide vicarious thrills. you're not peeking into a world in which you can't be seen, you are acting in a world by means of tokens, designated hitters, color-coded dummies, polymorphous stand-ins. the much-admired interactiveness of video games amounts to less than it might appear given the very circumscribed control players have over their "men." joy sticks and buttons (like keyboards or mice) allow for a series of binary operations; even the most complex games allows for only a highly limited amount of player control. narrowing down the field of possible choices to a manageable few is one of the great attractions of the games, in just the way that a film's ability to narrow down the field of possible vision to a %view% is one of the main attractions of the cinema. [49] video games offer a narrowed range of choices in the context of a predictable field of action. because the games are so mechanically predictable, and context invariant, normal sorts of predictive judgments based on situational adjustments are unnecessary and indeed a positive hindrance. the rationality of the system is what makes it so unlike everyday life and therefore such a pleasurable release from everyday experience. with a video game, if you do the same thing in the same way it will always produce the same results. here is an arena where a person can have some real control, an illusion of power, as "things" respond to the snap of our fingers, the flick of our wrists. in a world where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events, where the same action never seems to produce the same results because the contexts are always shifting, the uniformity of stimulus and response in video games can be exhilarating. [50] in the social world of our everyday lives repetition is near impossible if often promised. you can never utter the same sentence twice not only technically, in the sense of slight acoustic variation, but semantically, in that it won't mean the same thing the second time around, won't always command the same effect. with video games, as with all computers, you can return to the site of the same problem, the same anxiety, the same blockage and get exactly the same effect in response to the same set of actions. [51] in the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of "now" time. the risks are simulated, the mastery imaginary; only the compulsiveness is real. paranoia or paramilitary? [52] paranoia literally means being beside one's mind. operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie sensation of being next to something like a mind, something like a mind that is doing something like responding to your control. yet one is not in control over the computer. that's what's scary. unlike your relation to your own body, that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a small window of operator control. the real controller of the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core that goes under the name of read only memory (rom), that's neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can change but "firmware." like ideology, rom is out of sight only to control more efficiently. [53] we live in a computer age in which the systems that control the formats that determine the genres of our everyday life are inaccessible to us. it's not that we can't "know" a computer's mind in some metaphysical sense; computers don't have minds. rather, we are structurally excluded from having access to the command structure: very few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. and even if we could rewrite these deep structures, the systems are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering. in computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data: it is something to avoid at all costs. playing video games, like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to fixed systems of control. *all the adapting is ours*. no wonder it's called good vocational training--but not just for air force mission control or, more likely, the word processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line without an off switch. after that we didn't call it anything. [54] in the machine age, a man or woman or girl or boy could fix an engine, put in a new piston, clean a carburetor. a film goer could look at a piece of film, or watch each frame being pulled by sprockets across a beam of light at a speed that he or she could imagine changing. a person operating a threshing machine may have known all the basic principles, and all the parts, that made it work. but how many of us have even the foggiest notion--beyond something about binary coding and microchips and overpriced japanese memory--about how video games or computers work? [55] yet, isn't that so much romantic nonsense? haven't societies always run on secrets, hidden codes, inaccessible scriptures? the origins of computers can be traced to several sources. but it was military funding that allowed for the development of the first computers. moreover, the first video game is generally considered to be _spacewar_, which was developed on mainframes at mit in the late 1950s, a byproduct of "strategic" r&d (research and development), and a vastly popular "diversion" among the computer scientists working with the new technology. [56] the secrecy of the controlling rom cannot be divorced from the _spacewar_ scenario that developed out of it, and later inspired the dominant arcade video game genre. computer systems, and the games that are their product, reveal a military obsession with secrecy and control, and the related paranoia that secrets will be exposed or control lost. computers were designed not to solve problems, per se, not to make visually entertaining graphics, not to improve manuscript presentation or production, not to do bookkeeping or facilitate searches through the oxford english dictionary. computers have their origins in the need to simulate attack/response scenarios. to predict trajectories of rockets coming at target and the trajectory of rockets shot at these rockets. the first computers were developed in the late 1940s to compute bombing trajectories. when we get to the essence of the computer consciousness, if that word can still be stomached for something so foreign to all that we have known as consciousness, these origins have an acidic sting. [57] which is not to say other fantasies, or purposes, can't be spun on top of these origins. programs and games may subvert the command and control nature of computers, but they can never fully transcend their disturbing, even ominous, origins. [58] so one more time around this maze. i've suggested that the alien that keeps coming at us in so many of these games is ourselves, split off; that what we keep shooting down or gobbling up or obliterating is our temporality: which is to say that we have "erring" bodies, call them flesh, which is to say we live in time, even history. and that the cost of escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split off (which brings us back to where we started). [59] but isn't the computer really the alien--the robot- that is bombarding us with its world picture (not %view%), its operating environment; that is always faster and more accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only pretend to protect ourselves from, as in the pyhrric victory, sweet but unconvincing, when we beat the machine, like so many john henrys in dungarees and baseball hats, hunching over a pleasure machine designed to let us win once in while? [60] the luddites wanted to smash the machines of the industrial revolution--and who can fail to see the touching beauty in their impossible dream. but there can be no returns, no repetitions, only deposits, depositions. perhaps the genius of these early video games--for the games, like computers, are not yet even toddlers--is that they give us a place to play out these neo-luddite sentiments: slay the dragon, the ghost in the machine, the beserk robots. what we are fighting is the projection of our sense of inferiority before our own creation. i don't mean that the computer must always play us. maybe, with just a few more quarters, we can turn the tables. connery, 'china difference', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-connery-china.txt the china difference by chris connery <chris_connery@faculty.ucsc.edu> department of chinese literature university of california-santa cruz _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by chris connery, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. chow, rey. _woman and chinese modernity: the politics of reading between west and east_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1991. [1] british prime minister john major went to beijing in the summer of 1991 to talk with china's leaders about hong kong--duty-free port, international city, and capitalist success story. as 1997 approaches--the year of the colony's reversion to chinese sovereignty- fears of total collapse have attenuated as hong kong has emerged as the banking and financial center for the growth of export-oriented capitalism and overseas investment in china's most rapidly developing region- its southeastern coast. hong kong's continuing status as financial and transportation hub for southeast china will depend on construction of its new airport, and the details of the airport's financing were the main items on the british pm's agenda. since he was the first western leader to visit post-june 4, 1989 beijing, though, pm major also made the obligatory register of "concern" for the chinese government's violations of human rights that have continued in the wake of the tiananmen square incident. [2] the airport discussion was concluded to china's and britain's satisfaction. on the matter of human rights, though, pm major got a stern dressing down from chinese prime minister li peng. the british leader, argued li peng, was singularly unqualified to comment on china's treatment of its citizens. britain had been the major player in imperialist aggression against china, in the opium wars (referred to in britain as the first and second "anglo-chinese wars"), in forcing unequal treaties on china, including extraterritorial rights and privileges for british subjects on chinese soil, and in the colonial occupation of hong kong and adjacent territory. and moreover, added pm li, chinese and western standards for human rights are not the same. the situation was a curious one. both leaders were intent on maintaining hong kong's status as an international and a chinese city. britain's government has clear economic interest in preserving hong kong's present character as completely as possible, but perhaps has an even larger stake in insisting on its chineseness, stemming from the fear of the influx of hundreds of thousands of post-1997 refugees--whose legal status is currently "british dependant territories citizen"--"back home" to britain. in admonishing china's government on human rights, though, pm major was castigating china for failure to adhere to international, i.e. western, standards. beijing in the spring of 1989 was the first counter revolution to be televised. after berlin, bucharest, prague, and moscow showed how history should operate, though, china's exceptionalism--its teleological failure--became more egregious. [3] in the summer of 1991, local news coverage in hong kong was dominated by the massive effort to raise funds for disaster relief in the wake of central china's disastrous summer flooding and by the upcoming elections to hong kong's legislative council (18 out of 60 seats are chosen by direct election). the capacity of the hong kong population to identify and sympathize with the sufferings of the chinese people was indicated in the enormous success of the fund-raising drive- over six million dollars collected in a few weeks from a population of 3.5 million. (i will refer again to this capacity in a different context below.) the election in september resulted in a decisive defeat of candidates associated with either the chinese communist party or with british colonial authority. the low voter turn-out--under 40%--also belied the colonial government's claim that "voting is power." hong kong's citizens, in their rejection of the politics of both the prime ministers who met in beijing, and in their identification with some idea of "chineseness," thus enacted the ambiguity of the soon-to-be-ex-colony and international city. [4] this ambiguity is symptomatic of the ambiguities which surface whenever "china" is enacted in contemporary discursive formations. it is from within this kind of ambiguity that rey chow writes. rey chow is originally from hong kong and is now professor of comparative literature at the university of minnesota. her own situation--"a 'westernized' chinese woman who spent most of her formative years in a british colony and then in the united states" (xv)--informs her writing in the deepest way, a writing whose project is "an attempt to hold onto an experience whose marginality is embedded in the history of imperialism, a history that includes precisely the 'opening up' of chinese history and culture for 'objective' and 'neutral' academic research that thrives by suppressing its own conditions of possibility" (xvii). she is the only theoretically engaged scholar to have published widely on china in recent years in journals outside the east asian studies field, in writings on modern chinese literature, chinese and western film, the tiananmen square massacre, and chinese popular music. her book is a multiple interrogation: of theory's resistance to china, of the china field's resistance to theory, and of the location of "those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of western imperialism, already 'westernized'" (xi) within the larger critique of western cultural and discursive hegemony. [5] her project is thus allied with much recent work in post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. it raises familiar questions: whose history is china's? who speaks it, and to whom? in what language? do abstractions like "human rights"--and by analogical extension, theory in general, posit their own rights of extraterritoriality? work in cultural studies and post-colonial theory that proceeds from a critique of foundationalism and western hegemony--political, theoretical, discursive, and subjective--naturally centers largely on particular locations where western hegemony was and is most conspicuously practiced. this re-turning of theory has been situated in important work on and from latin america, south asia, africa, and in minority cultures in britain, europe, and the united states. china, however, is curiously under represented--in theoretical formations and as a site for application of theoretical constructs. japan, whose status vis-a-vis the west precludes many of the analogical possibilities present in the areas above, has recently been constructed both in theoretical and popular discourse as a primary site of the postmodern (see, for example, _postmodernism and japan_ , edited by masao miyoshi and h.d. harootunian. durham: duke university press, 1989), and thus has a certain discursive prominence. not so, china. is this simply because, quoting george bush, "china is different"? [6] edward said's _orientalism_, which, based on the monumental binarism of west and other, would seem to brook no geographical limitation, is restricted in scope to "the anglo-french-american experience of arabs and islam" (_orientalism_ 17): it eliminates a large part of the orient--india, japan, china, and other sections of the far east--not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss europe's experience of the near orient, or of islam, apart from its experience of the far orient (17). the shift within this sentence from "far east" to "far orient" underscores the merely practical character of the limitation. it is implied that china could have been in this book had the book been longer. there is, however, a political and strategic character to his limitation of the discussion of the west to britain, france, and the usa: it seemed inescapably true not only that britain and france were the pioneer nations in the orient and in oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the american oriental position since world war ii has fit--i think, quite self-consciously--in the places excavated by the two earlier european powers (17). the west is thus the colonizing west. [7] one of the most important critiques of said's binarism comes from homi bhabha, who faults the monolithic character of colonial power as represented in _orientalism_: "there is always, in said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is a historical and theoretical simplification" (bhabha 200). bhabha's work, strongly informed, like rey chow's, by psychoanalytic theory, posits a multiplicity of strategies by which colonial discourse is seen as a site of anxiety, slippage, displacement, and conflict. yet bhabha, like said, takes as his object a specifically colonial discourse- a discourse that by its very nature functions concurrently in representation and administration. the law of the colonizer is the law of the father. bhabha's figures of resistance--mimicry, hybridity, and other effects that derive from the psychoanalysis of colonial discourse, are a re-turning of this law. he is able to accomplish this because the law functions not simply on the level of a discursive structure, but in the specific practices of colonial administration. [8] one conceivable location of the "china difference" is in the fact that, with the significant exception of hong kong and adjacent territories, china was never a western colony. (japanese colonization of china, which began with taiwan in 1895, is a separate issue.) western countries had "concessions" and monopoly rights in certain regions, and the british defeat of china in the opium wars, left the qing dynasty government with limited ability to control its tariff and duty structures and other aspects of its economic relations with the west. the unequal treaties forced on china also granted western missionaries certain inalienable rights to operate without significant governmental interference. but the central functioning of the law of the colonizer was not in administration per se, but in extra-territoriality. extraterritoriality, whereby a foreign national in china was subject only to the law of his/her native country, has the effect of rendering problematic bhabha's "repertoire of conflictual positions that constitute the subject in colonial discourse" (204). [9] the law of the colonizer functions within the specific legal practice of colonial administration to underscore the verticality of domination. this vertical structure lends itself quite easily to bhabha's psychoanalytic framework. crude parallels between colonial administrative structures and the psyche--the imperial super-ego and the native id- suggest one framing of the colonial subject's contested terrain. extraterritoriality's positioning of two legal systems side-by-side, however, resists the strict simple verticality of the oppressor and the repressed. the spatializing project implicit in the term "extraterritoriality" effected a displacement of china's legal and administrative structures into a position alongside the west's, notwithstanding the structures of domination that marked china's role in the global capitalist economy. legally and administratively, china was not a colony, but it was hardly "china" either. "the empire speaks back" is one way of representing post-colonial discourse psychoanalytically as the "return of the repressed"; china's horizontal displacement, figured in extraterritoriality, allows for a more complete "othering," one which might help explain the continued absence of china in post-colonial theorizing and the non-allegorizability of china's modern history. [10] extraterritoriality was a central constitutive element of china's experience of imperialism. the memory of extraterritoriality can help to explain much in recent history, including the sino-soviet split in the 1960s, the character of the negotiations over hong kong and the future of its political system after 1997, pm li peng's resistance to admonitions about human rights, and government outrage over foreign journalists' interference in china's internal affairs during the 1989 student movement. the applicability of "western" theoretical formulations or "western feminism" to analyses of chinese social and cultural formations is a subject of current debate in chinese studies in china and in the west, and one cannot help but feel the traces of the extraterritorial in that debate as well. extraterritoriality, marking china's status as a "semi-colony" (the term used in official prc historiography) is one potential marking of china's difference. and with its long history of a literati-dominated elite bureaucratic culture, with its status as the victim primarily of japanese rather than of western military aggression in the twentieth century, and as the site of the world's second major successful communist revolution, china would indeed resist many of the paradigms developed in cultural studies and post-colonial theoretical discourse. [11] my articulation of these markings of china's difference, however, is not the same as a claim for a chinese exceptionalism. rather, it is an attempt to account for the absence of china in post-colonial theory, which is marked by its origins in the study of specific and localized colonial practices. chow repeatedly emphasizes the point that westernization is the materiality of chinese modernity. the physical experience of modernity, and the terrible brutality that the west's othering always implies, is felt by the "semi-colonized" subject as acutely as by the colonized. and as can be demonstrated in the case of hong kong, the full experience of colonialism is not at all foreign to many chinese. the polemical import of chow's book, indeed, is targeted far less on the absence of china in theory than on the dangers of proceeding from a positing of china's exclusivity. [12] chow's project here is the predicament of a chinese subjectivity whose entry into culture is always already westernized. she explores this in readings of modern literature, and in her conception of the figure of the "ethnic spectator," a position central to the book's argument, and one to whose significance i will return later. the westernized chinese subject, though, is not only the content of the book, but chow herself. her analytical and political project is always presenced in large part as the enactment of that particular subject position. in a brilliant dialectical reading of theories of masochism, which she sees as constitutive of the chinese reading of modernity, she traces the structure of masochism from freud's accordance of ontological primacy to sadism over masochism, through laplanche's revision which situates sadism as always belatedly constructed within masochism, to deleuze's location of masochism in the preoedipal, ideal fusion with the mother, and finally uses laplanche again, on deleuze this time, to free the mother from her deleuzian immobility and construct her as passive and active simultaneously, while remaining within the deleuzian maternally operated framework. chow's figuration of masochism has topical application in her discussion of literary tropes of sentimentality and self-sacrifice. but it also is an enactment of resistance to the denial of the complexity of chinese subjectivity. [13] for chow's entry into academic culture is, by virtue of her subject matter, also determined by the institutional character of china studies, which has its own particular set of discursive characteristics and its own historical and ideological determinations. although her work on psychoanalysis, film theory, "woman," and subjectivity has much to offer any audience, many in the china field will ask, "but why do you use western theories to explain china?" chow's justifiable antagonism toward nearly all aspects of china studies in the west permeates her book. [14] one target is sinology, the location of classicists who combine their adherence both to the philological rigor of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century orientalists and to the conservative textual-verification practices of late qing dynasty philologists with an orientalist love for dynastic china and a concomitant disdain for china's fallen, impure, modern state. sinology, with its fetishization of "chineseness," conspires to deny the materiality of modern china, which, since "westernized," cannot be "chinese." as an example of this chow cites the late james j.y. liu, who, in _chinese theories of literature_, refuses to discuss modern literary theory since it has been "dominated by one sort of western influence or another . . . and [does] not possess the same kind of value and interest as do traditional chinese theories, which constitute a largely independent source of critical ideas" (chow 29). sinologists, self-designated conservators of a vanished great tradition, have an investment in their very marginality, a marginality they try to enforce in their concerted attacks on any incursions of theory into their domain. sinology's ideological character, however, is becoming more and more clear. although i never cease to be amazed at the readiness of many younger scholars of classical chinese literature to reproduce sinology's hoary ideologies and prejudices, job vacancies in chinese literature in american universities have shifted in favor of modern literature in recent years, while many classically trained younger scholars, particularly those who are more engaged with theory, have branched out into modern literary or cultural studies. what has significantly altered the study of pre-modern china in recent years, though, particularly in the field of history, has been social science methodology. demographic, economic, and data-driven social history are the latest transformative "advances" in the pre-modern field. [15] the hegemony of social sciences in the china field, particularly in studies of modern china, is another instance for chow of western discursive dominance. social science's domination of the field is evident in the most material ways--in publications like the _journal of asian studies_, in research and conference funding, and in the preponderance of social science at annual meetings of the association for asian studies. social science's "cognitive hegemony of information" serves to colonize all of modern china. this is even witnessed in most studies of modern literature, which is read primarily for its "information," and thus for its instrumental value. the second chapter of chow's book, "mandarin ducks and butterflies: an exercise in popular readings," is a revisionist account of late imperial and early republican melodramatic fiction, which, along with translations from western literature, was the most popular literature of its time. it is part of an important re-reading of the whole project of modern fiction, which i will discuss further below. part of her project is to recuperate the study of "butterfly literature" from its earlier western defenders, who saw in it "unmediated access to the views of the non-elite" (quoted in chow, 48). this sociological approach to popular fiction is condemned as imperialistic, because in an apparently well-intentioned attempt to salvage canonically obscure materials, the historian seems only to have neutralized those materials for the extension of that empire called "knowledge," which is forever elaborated with different "national" differences. this means that the specificities of a complex cultural form would always be domesticated as merely "useful" by a method that claims to be scientifically objective simply because it is backed up by "factual" data (48 49). the colonization of modern chinese literature by valorizations of "knowledge" and instrumentality is particularly lamentable, because it is only through a consideration of language and representation that instrumentality can be problematized. [16] another critique within the china field of the hegemony of western discourse can be found in the decentering of western feminism and the concomitant positioning of a "chinese feminism" conceptualized around a notion of female identity rooted in chinese culture. chow cites a western scholar who, in her work on the modern female author ding ling, disparages ding ling's earlier fiction's concerns with a bourgeois, westernized feminism centered on issues of sexuality, in favor of later work, marked more clearly by nationalist and revolutionary goals and privileging a more "chinese" feminism centered on political sisterhood and kinship. the danger here is of course that any positioning of the category "chinese women" as a site of political agency will preclude the emergence of women on their own terms. the repression of the sexual, which is as analyzable in ding ling's later work as in her earlier overt treatments, has the same consequences as the de-privileging of psychoanalysis as a tool for the analysis of chinese modernity: "a non-west that is deprived of fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions" (xiii). [17] chow's multiple interventions in the west's discursive construction of "china" or "chineseness" serve to problematize "china" as a determinable category, and show the consequences of "the china difference," which, whether posited from a nostalgic margin, an area of nationally defined "knowledge," or a progressive-minded though essentializing critique of western discursive hegemony, is always reducible to a gesture of denial. those in the west who defend china against the assault of "western theory" are inveighing against theory's extraterritoriality. within the curious logic of extraterritoriality, however, to invoke it is to inscribe it. [18] by titling her book "woman..." rather than "chinese women," chow is already signaling her rejection of other totalizing categories. it is in this figure of woman that her book's most productive and enabling interventions lie. that chow is talking about "woman" not as a category but as a strategic constitution of subjectivity is evident in her first chapter's lengthy analysis of bertolucci's film, _the last emperor_, whose subject is the "feminized" emperor pu yi. in a re-working of laura mulvey's classic essay, "visual pleasure and narrative cinema," chow extend[s] the interpretation of image-as-woman to image-as-feminized space, which can be occupied by a main character, pu yi, as much as by a woman. once this is done, "femininity" as a category is freed up to include fictional constructs that may not be "women" but that occupy a passive position in regard to the controlling symbolic (18). bertolucci's feminizing gaze accords with his "love" for chinese civilization, a love based on a positing of absolute difference. for bertolucci, the chinese people exist "before consumerism, before something that happened in the west" (quoted in chow, 4). bertolucci's admiration for "chinese passivity" partakes of the same allochronism. chinese are passive because, being so intelligent and sophisticated by nature, they have no need for macho virility. in this context of her discussion of bertolucci, chow also demonstrates how julia kristeva, in _about chinese women_, otherizes and feminizes china in the service of her challenge to western metaphysics. it would be inappropriate, however, to condemn bertolucci and kristeva for their mere sympathetic orientalism. kristeva's china, an instrument in a critique of the west, is thus subsumed under the west in an instancing of the power relationship her project purports to condemn. [19] chow operates from the notion of gender as the structuring of relations of power. the discursive prominence of the figure of "woman" in chinese modernist writings, a modernity whose materiality is westernization, is thus no surprise. yu dafu's "sinking," published in 1921, was one of the most popular short stories of the decade. its hero, an alienated, romantic aesthete studying in japan, mourns for weak, humiliated, distant china "like a husband mourning the death of a young wife" (quoted in chow, 141). impotent with japanese women, ashamed of his voyeurism and masturbation, the hero longs for a self-strengthening through a strong china. chow identifies the hero's masochistic nationalism as being implicated in an ever-shifting array of psychic positionings. "china" is the mother to whose strength the hero would like to submit, but is also identified as object of desire, and thus with the actual women in whose presence our hero is impotent. the idealization of woman in yu dafu's story is "at once active, passive, longing, and resentful--also at once masculine, feminized, and infantile" (144). [20] chow's consideration of yu dafu's story in her book's final chapter, "loving women: masochism, fantasy, and the idealization of the mother," is one of three readings of stories by male writers who share an idealist yearning for fusion with the mother, but in resorting to varied strategies of disavowal or dissociation, enact the masculinist fetishization project which divides woman into the familial and revered or the exciting and degraded. the cogency of this structure of masochism and fetishization is supported by the notion of feminine self-sacrifice, which is also the major support of "traditional" chinese culture. this masculine idealism, then, though finding affecting representations in the figures of women--society's most oppressed--is both a reading and a re-enactment of the primacy of female self-sacrifice. in readings of two female authors, bing xin and ding ling, chow sees, through kaja silverman's elaboration of the negative oedipus complex, a way to position a masochistic identification with the mother similar to yu dafu's, but without the idealism. in reading the stories themselves, a reader, unless she has a taste for bourgeois sentimental excess, would find chow's claim somewhat extravagant. it is precisely the ideological character of "great" literature, though, that is deconstructed through chow's readings of these two writers, whose personal and social limits are precisely what give rise to their sentimental excesses. [21] part of chow's re-reading of bing xin's and ding ling's stories is predicated on her positioning of reading. the phrase "loving women," from her chapter title, is understood, through this positioning of a feminized reading, as a means to apprehend the complexities of identification and desire that center on the social demand for women's self-sacrifice; but it also presents the possibility for an alternative aesthetic that is based on a sympathetic feminine interlocutor/spectator/reader (169). it is ultimately on the enabling and subjectivity-constitutive politics of reading and spectatorship that chow's project is centered. these politics are implicated in the objects of her analysis and in the enactment of subjectivity which her analysis performs. they are developed most fully in the book's first chapter, "seeing modern china: toward a theory of ethnic spectatorship." should her book gain the wide audience outside the china field which it deserves, it will probably be due in large part to her elaboration of the theory of ethnic spectatorship. [22] the westernized ethnic subject's "givenness" is constituted in her position in world history and in her entry into "culture." writing of _the last emperor_, but in a language applicable to all of chow's readings, she states the problematic of analyzing _the last emperor_ for a chinese audience; the question is how "history" should be reintroduced materially, as a specific way of reading--not reading "reality" as such but cultural artifacts such as film and narratives. the task involves not only the formalist analysis of the producing apparatus. it also involves re materializing such formalist analysis with a pregazing--the "givenness" of subjectivity--that has always already begun (19). _the last emperor_ was tremendously popular among chinese audiences. it might be tempting to attribute this popularity to a false consciousness. the global political economy of the entertainment industry is such that only with hollywood's backing can such lavish spectacles be produced. the popularity of _the last emperor_ among chinese audiences could then be read as another instancing of domination--of the power of the spectacle to authorize an othering in which even the "others" are passively complicit. yet just as teresa de lauretis challenged mulvey's dichotomizing of the masculine gaze and feminine spectacle through her elaboration of female spectatorship, chow similarly problematizes the chinese reception of _the last emperor_. [23] her argument for an ethnic spectatorship draws largely on teresa de lauretis's _alice doesn't: feminism, semiotics, cinema_. it retains the strategic value of mulvey, and draws on a particularly althusserian reading of kaja silverman's notion of "suture." it is an argument far too complex to be adequately summarizable, but its contours can be indicated in chow's analysis of her mother's reaction to _the last emperor_: "it is remarkable that a foreign devil should be able to make a film like this about china. i'd say, he did a good job!" (24). chow's mother identifies unproblematically with the film's narrative movement (recalling de lauretis's positioning of woman as the figure of narrative movement) even while she, in the phrase "foreign devil," resists the structures of domination that frame its production. her play of illusion, which, according to de lauretis, enables spectatorship to serve as a site for productive relationships, is the site of "a desire to be there, in the film" (25), in all of imperial china's resplendent glory, in the unrecoverable state prior to dismemberment. the imaginary nationalism with which chow's mother identifies with bertolucci's spectacle is the very condition of the always belatedly recognized subjectivity of the westernized chinese subject. [24] in her discussion of ethnic spectatorship, chow refers to the critic c.t. hsia's characterization of modern chinese literature's "obsession with china." for hsia, until recently the single most prominent scholar of chinese fiction in the west, this is a marking of its parochialness. for chow, it is the very result of "the experience of 'dismemberment' (or 'castration') [which] can be used to describe what we commonly refer to as 'westernization' or 'modernization'" (26). chow's reading of modern chinese literature through the figure of "woman," and her attention to the empowering potential of the ethnic spectator, leads to a major re-casting of modern chinese literary history. the may fourth movement, the student-led protest in 1919 against japanese imperialism and the chinese government's collaborationism, which shortly afterward came to stand for a vast array of socially and culturally progressive reform movements, is the defining monument of chinese literary modernity. this view is universal in chinese studies, and is held equally strongly in hong kong, chinese, taiwanese, and western academies. [25] china's modernist canon, though, was very much a programmatic affair. it was fashioned throughout the twenties in literary societies, of which there were hundreds, in manifestoes prescribing form, content, voice, grammar, person . . . , in seemingly endless debates. chow reads representatives of the modernist canon--ba jin, lu xun, and mao dun--through butterfly literature, which she recuperates through the strategic operation of the figure of "woman." butterfly literature is the repressed of modern chinese literature, for a variety of reasons. its melodrama and overt sentimentality, and consequent huge popularity, relegate it to the uncanonizable. as a genre that, in language, content, and style has significant continuities with "pre-modern" popular fiction, it threatens the rigid break between "modern" and "pre-modern" that was the basis of the may fourth modernizers' self-conception and on which china studies' division of labor depends. chow demonstrates through several representative readings that butterfly literature indeed constituted a "reading" of chinese modern society and ideologies. butterfly literature's fragmentary and parodic character--its wild improbabilities of plot, its near contemporaneous salaciousness and moral didacticism, are read by critics as signs of its inferiority: within the hierarchy of chinese letters, butterfly literature thus occupies a feminized position that carries with it the ironies of all feminized positions. while in its debased form it reveals the limits of the society that produces it, it is at the same time devalued by that society as false and deluded.... the visible "crudities" of butterfly literature constitute a space in which the parodic function of literature is not smoothed away but instead serves to reveal the contradictions of modern chinese society in a disturbingly "distasteful" manner (55). [26] although she finds in the reading practices opened up by butterfly literature an empowering critique, the more self-avowedly critical and reformist may fourth writers, precisely through their overt self positioning, offer the reader more limited possibilities. she demonstrates convincingly how two central platforms of may fourth literature--its nationalism and the new nation's requirements of a national literature--served in to establish a continuity between may fourth writers and the classical literati elite. the performance of a national literature was in a sense a structural replacement for the imperial examination system, which gave classical scholars their ruling positions. the "nation" did not have the same problematics for classical literati as it did for modern intellectuals, though. always constructed in the belated context of westernization, where a modern nation was seen as requiring a modern literature, and where a modern literature depended on access to the "real," and where the "real" was programmatically located in "inner life" (hence the profusion of autobiographical and confessional forms), may fourth literature always came up against the uncommensurability of subject and nation. how can writing both determine membership in the literati class and serve the revolution? writing itself is thus always ironic, and the deconstruction to which it lends itself also invites deconstruction of its potential for subversion. [27] the most relentless self-deconstructions in the may fourth canon are found in the short stories of lu xun. in his stories there are no intellectual heroes; there are no proletarians or peasants who think in the language of educated chinese. there is a constant presencing of the complicity with social injustice that is implicit in both the practice of representation and the position of the spectator. for chow, this ironic horizon marks the intellectual impasse of all of may fourth writing, though in no other writer is it recognized so explicitly. her re-writing of modern literary history, where the failures and closures of may fourth writers are judged in part against the strategic possibilities opened up to the reader of popular melodrama, is an important enabling tactic. i wonder, though, how chow would read lu xun's activities during the last few years of his life, after a decisive move to the left and a total commitment to the proletarianization of literature, a move which led to his canonization in the prc. [28] one aspect of china conspicuously absent in chow's book is the 1949 revolution. since one could view this revolution as one of twentieth-century western hegemony's most resounding defeats, it is an absence not without significance. i understand that it is under the western banner of "revolutionary china" that china's "difference" continues to be positioned in some quarters, and am sympathetic with chow's analysis which shows how that particular positing of china's exclusivity replays old patterns of domination and denial. her book is an extremely important attack on the destructiveness inherent in that othering, which not only structures "china studies" in the west, but which was the material condition of chow's own upbringing in colonial hong kong. but while chow was being educated in hong kong in the late 1960s, many of her coevals across the border in china were throwing their teachers out of windows, burning books, setting up schools for peasants in the remote countryside, and dying for their faith in the revolution. it is important not to deny her experience, but neither should we deny theirs. if westernization is the materiality of chinese modernity, of what is revolution the materiality? it might be interesting to follow chow's recuperation of butterfly literature, the most popular literature of china's early twentieth-century modernity, with a recuperative exploration of the psychic life of the most poplular cultural productions of the late 1960s--revolutionary operas like _the red detachment of women_, _the white-haired girl_, or _taking tiger mountain by strategy_. [29] it was indeed within the context of china's modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that categories like "china," "the nation," "the west," and "woman" become problematized for the first time. this period is also the point at which china studies in the west divides china into "modern" and "pre-modern," with the consequences chow documents so forcefully. chow's book centers on that moment and its particular consequences, and i am not faulting her for failure of coverage. i cannot help feeling, though, that the revolution's absence marks a particular strategic choice. her reading of butterfly literature, a sophisticated and empowering reading, resonates with the tendency in many current studies of the productive possibilities inherent in the reception of popular culture to locate a capacity for resistance-in-givenness in popular strategies of appropriation of mass culture. here in the new world order, perhaps one should be grateful for resistance where one can find it. it is the smallness of this resistance's social scale, though, that leaves me sometimes pessimistic. is revolution really unimaginable after tiananmen square, eastern europe, and 1991 moscow? given the state of many of the west's others, i hope not. events in china over the last fifteen years should not cause us to forget china's revolution, for the 1949 revolution was not just a marking of the china difference. it was also the hope of a global possibility. ------------------------------------------------------ works cited bhabha, homi. "difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism." _the politics of theory_. ed. francis barker, et al. colchester: u of essex p, 1983. said, edward. _orientalism_. new york: pantheon, 1978. joyce, 'notes toward an unwritten non-linear electronic text, "the ends of print culture" (a work in progress)', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-joyce-notes.txt notes toward an unwritten non-linear electronic text, "the ends of print culture" (a work in progress) by michael joyce <michael_joyce@um.cc.umich.edu> center for narrative and technology, jackson, mi _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by michael joyce, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. adapted from a talk originally given at the computers and the human conversation conference, lewis and clark college, portland, oregon, march 16, 1991 [1] for a period of time last year on each end of our town, like compass points, there was a mausoleum of books. on the north end of town a great remainder warehouse flapped with banners that promised 80% off publishers prices. inside it row upon row of long tables resembled nothing less than those awful makeshift morgues which spring up around disasters. its tables were piled with the union dead: the mistakes and enthusiasms of editors, the miscalculations of marketing types, the brightly jacketed, orphaned victims of faddish, fickle or fifteen minute shifts of opinion and/or history. there an appliance was betrayed by another (food processor by microwave); a diet guru was overthrown by a leftist in leotards (pritikin by fonda); and every would-be dickens seemed poised to tumble, if not from literary history, at least from all human memory (already gangs of owen meanies leer and lean against faded handmaidens of atwood). [2] upon first looking into such a warehouse--forty miles east of our spare parts, bible belt midwest town, in what we outlanders think of as wonderful ann arbor; we thought only a university town could sustain this. when the same outfit opened up in our town, and the tables were piled not with the leavings of ann arborites but with towers of the same texts, we knew this was a modern day circus. ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! here come the books! [3] meanwhile, at the opposite pole in the second mausoleum, a group termed the friends of the library regularly sell off tables of what shelves can no longer hold. one hundred years of marquez is too impermanent for the permanent collection of our county library, but so too- at least for the branches which feed pulp back to this trunk--so too is the human comedy, so too are the actual dickens or emily dickinson. the book here must literally earn its keep. [4] both the remainder morgue and the friends of the library mortuary are examples of production/distribution gone radically wrong. books--and films and television programs and software, etc.--have become what cigarettes are in prison, a currency, a token of value, a high voltage utility humming with options and futures. it is not necessary to have read them. rather we are urged to imagine what they could mean to us; or, more accurately, to imagine what we would mean if we were the kind of people who had read them. [5] this is to say that the intellectual capital economy has to some extent abandoned the idea of real, material value for one of utility. this abandonment is not unlike the kind that in a depressed real estate market leaves so-called "worthless" condos as empty towers in whose shadowy colonnades the homeless camp. ideas of all sorts have their fifteen minute warholian half-life and then dissipate, and yet their structures remain. we have long ago stopped making real buildings in favor of virtual realities and holograms. the book has lost its privilege. for those who camped in its shadows, for the culturally homeless, this is not necessarily a bad thing. no less than the sitcom or the nintendo cartridge, the book too is merely a fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of the network. and the network, unlike the tower,is ours to inhabit. [6] in the days before the remote control television channel zapper and modem port we used to think network meant the three wise men with the same middle initial: two with the same last name, nbc and abc, and their cousin cbs. now we increasingly know that the network is nothing less than what is put before us for use. here in the network what makes value is, to echo the poet charles olson, knowing how to use yourself and on what. networks build locally immediate value which we can plug into or not as we like. thus the network redeems time for us. already with remote control channel zapper in hand the most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. in the network we know that what is of value is what can be used; and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will. [7] we live in what, in _writing space_, jay bolter calls the late age of print (bolter 1991). once one begins using a word processor to write fiction, it is easy to imagine that the same techne which makes it possible to remove the anguish from a minor character on page 251 of a novel manuscript and implant it within a formative meditation of the heroine on page 67 could likewise make it possible to write a novel which changes every time the reader reads it. yet what we envision as a disk tucked into a book might easily become the opposite. the reader struggles against the electronic book. "but you can't read it in bed," she says, everyone's last ditch argument. fully a year after sony first showed discman, a portable, mini-cd the size of a walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the gutenberg computer network wanted to move the last ditch a little further. the smell of ink, one writer suggested; the crinkle of pages, suggests another. [8] meanwhile in far-off laboratories of the military-infotainmentcomplex--to advance upon stuart moulthrop's phrase (moulthrop, 1989b)--at warner, disney or ibapple and microlotus, some scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold; while others build raised-text touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they turn. "but the dog can't eat it," someone protests, and--smiling, silently--the scientists go back to their laboratories, bags of silicone kibbles over their shoulders. [9] what we whiff is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss: of burning towers or men's cigars in the drawing room. hurry up please, it's time. we are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. the book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. the book is dead, long live the book. a revolution enacts what a population already expresses: like eels to the sargasso, 100 thousand videotapes annually return to a television show about home videos. in the land of polar mausolea, in this late age of print, swimming midst this undertow who will keep the book alive? [10] in an age when more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, often with higher advances than ever before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of truffaut's version of bradbury's _fahrenheit 451_, whose vestal readers walk along the meandering river of light just beyond the city of text. we face their tasks now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, network out of book. [11] we can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. there are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities. artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche, a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy; multimedia (even as virtual reality) is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholding to poetics and film studies. nothing is quicker than the light of the word. in "quickness," one of his _six memos for the next millennium_, italo calvino writes: in an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (calvino 1988, 45) [12] following the true bent of the written language in the late age of print brings us to the topographic. "the computer," jay bolter says," changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics. "in the topographic city of text shape itself signifies, as in warren beatty's literally brilliant rendering of the city of dick tracy. there the calm, commercial runes of marquee, placard, neon and shingle (drugs, luncheonette, cinema) not only map the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, but they also shape and color the city itself and its inhabitants. face and costume, facade and meander, river's edge and central square, booth or counter, trueheart or breathless. "electronic writing," says bolter is both a visual and verbal description. it is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. the writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech. (bolter 1991, 25) [13] ted nelson, who coined the term hypertext in the 1960's, more recently defined it as "non-sequential writing with reader controlled links." yet this characterization stops short of describing the resistance of this new object. for it is not merely that the reader can choose the order of what she reads but that her choices in fact become what it is. [14] let us say instead that hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. your choices, not the author's representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. you become the reader-as-writer. [15] we might note here that the word we want to describe the reader-as-writer already exists, although it is too latinate and bulky for contemporary use. interlocutor has the correct sense of one conversant with the polylogue, as well as the right degrees of burlesque, badinage, and bricolage behind it. even so, we will have to make do with--and may well benefit by extending--the comfortable term, reader. [16] we may distinguish two kinds of hypertext according to their actions (joyce, 1988). exploratory hypertext, which most often occurs in read-only form, allows readers to control the transformation of a defined body of material. it is perhaps the type most familiar to you, if you have seen a hypercard stack. (note here that a stack is the name of the electronic texts created by this apple product. there are other hypertext systems, such as storyspace and supercard for the macintosh, or guide for both the macintosh and ms-dos machines, and the newcomer toolbook for the latter.) [17] in the typical stack, the reader encounters a text (which may include sound and graphics, including video, animations, and what have you). she may choose what and how she sees or reads, either following an order the author has set out for her or creating her own. very often she can retain a record of her choices in order to replay them later. more and more frequently in these documents she can compose her own notes and connect them to what she encounters, even copying parts from the hypertext itself. [18] this kind of reading of an exploratory hypertext is what we might call empowered interaction. the transitional electronic text makes an uneasy marriage with its reader. it says: you may do these things, including some i have not anticipated. [19] it is to an extent true that neither the author's representations nor the initial topography but instead the reader's choices constitute the current state of the text for her. in these exploratory hypertexts, however, the text does not transform or rearrange itself to embody this current state. the transitional electronic text is as yet a marriage without issue. each of the reader's additions lies outside the flow of the text, like junior's shack at the edge of the poster-colored city of dick tracy. the text may be seen as leading to what she adds to it, yet her addition is marginal, ghettoized. stuart moulthrop suggests that to the extent that hypertexts let a power structure "subject itself to trivial critiques in order to pre-empt any real questioning of authority . . . hypertext could end up betraying the anti-hierarchical ideals implicit in its foundation" (moulthrop 1989a). under such circumstances the reader's interaction does not reorder the text, but rather conserves authority. she moves outside the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, unable to shape and color the city itself or its inhabitants. [20] even so, to the extent that the topographical writing of an exploratory hypertext lets readers create and examine signs and structures, it does make implicit the boundary which both marks and makes privilege or authority. in fact it has always been true that the interlocutory reader, let us say brooding alone in the reading room of the british museum, might come to see this boundary. attuned to organizational structures of production and reproduction, she might mark with althusser, "the material existence of an ideological apparatus" of the state (althusser 1971). [21] but she might not be able to see quite as clearly or as quickly as she can see in the hypertext how the arena is organized to marginalize and diminish her. this is the trouble with hypertext, at any level: it is messy, it lets you see ghosts, it is always haunted by the possibility of other voices, other topographies, others' governance. [22] print culture is as discretely defined and transparently maintained as the grounds of disney world. there is no danger that new paths will be trod into the manicured lawns. some would like to think this groundskeeping is a neutral decision, unladen, de-contextualized, removed from issues of empowerment, outside any reciprocal relationship. for the moment institutions of media, publishing, scholarship, and instruction depend upon the inertia of the aging technology of print, not just to withstand attack on established ideas, but to withstand the necessity to refresh and reestablish these ideas. in fact, hypermedia educators frequently advertise their stacks by featuring the fact that the primary materials are not altered by the webs of comments and connections made by students. this makes it easier to administer networks they say. [23] like the irish king cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. the book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic. [24] the second kind of hypertext, constructive hypertext, offers an electronic alternative to the grey ghetto alongside the river of light. constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge. like the network, conference, classroom or any other form of the electronic text, constructive hypertexts are "versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist" (joyce 1988). [25] as a true electronic text, the constructive hypertext differs from the transitional exploratory hypertext in that its interaction is reciprocal rather than empowered. the reader gives birth to the true electronic text. it says: what you do transforms what i have done, and allows you to do what you have not anticipated. "it is not just that [we] must make knowledge [our] own," says jerome bruner in _actual minds, possible worlds_, but that we must do so "in a community of those who share [our] sense of culture" (bruner 1986). [26] a truly constructive hypertext will present the reader opportunities to recognize and deploy the existing linking structure in all its logic and nuance. that is, the evolving rhetoric must be manifest for the reader. she should be able to extend the existing structure and to transform it, harnessing it to her own uses. she should be able to predict that her own transformations of a hypertext will cause its existing elements to conform to her additions. while not merely taking on but surrendering the forefront to the newly focused tenor and substance of the interlocutory reader, the transformed text should continue to perform reliably in much the same way that it has for previous readers. [27] indeed, every reading of the transformed text should in some sense rehearse the transformation made by the interlocutory reader. if a reader, let us call her ann, has read a particular text both before and after the intervention of the interlocutory reader, beatrice, ann's experience of the text should have the familiar discomfort of recognition. ann should realize beatrice's reading. [28] not surprisingly, the first efforts at developing truly constructive hypertexts have taken place in (hyper)fictions. _afternoon_ (joyce 1990) attempts to subvert the topography of the text by making every word seem as if it yields other possibilities, letting the reader imagine her own confirmations. this "letting" likely signifies a partially failed attempt, a text which empowers more than it reciprocates. in situating and criticizing _afternoon_, stuart moulthrop speculated, "a writing space [which] presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media . . . [whose] roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now "(moulthrop, 1989a). [29] in attempting to develop such a community it becomes clear to hyperfiction writers that unless roles of author and reader are much less sharply differentiated, the silence will have no voice. even interactive texts will live a lie. "in all claims to the story," writes the canadian poet erin moure, there is muteness. the writer as witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie. because the speech is the writer's speech, and each word of the writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting them. (moure 1989, 84) [30] increasingly hyperfiction writers consider how the topographic (sensual) organization of the text might present reciprocal choices that constitute and transform the current state of the text. how, in the landscape of the city of text, can the reader know that what she builds will move the course of the river? how might what she builds present what bruner calls an invitation to reflection and culture creating. in her poem, "site glossary,: loony tune music," moure says witness as a concept is outdated in the countries of privilege, witness as tactic, the image as completed desktop publishing & the writer as accurate, the names are sonorous & bear repeating tho there is no repetition the throat fails to mark the trace of the individual voice which entails loony tune music in this age (moure 1989, 115) [31] hyperfictions seek to mark the trace with their own loony tune music. in _chaos_ stuart moulthrop has speculated a fiction which is consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open, one of emotional orientations and transformative encounters. john mcdaid's hyperfiction _uncle buddy's phantom fun house_ is an electronic world of notebooks, scrap papers, dealt but unplayed tarot cards, souvenirs, segments, drafts, and tapes, unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all (mcdaid, 1991). in _izme pass_, their hyperfictional "deconstruction of priority," carolyn guyer and martha petry seek "to weave . . . [a] new work made not of the parts but the connections . . . [in order] to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints "(guyer 1991b). [32] while this may seem the same urge toward a novel which changes each time it is read, what has changed in the interim between novelist-at-word-processor and hyperfiction writer is that computer tools to accomplish these sorts of multiple texts have been built. moreover hyperfiction writers have not only imagined and rendered them, but also and more importantly have begun to set out an aesthetic for a multiple fiction which yields to its readers in a reciprocal relationship. [33] this sort of reciprocal relationship for electronic art has a conscious history in the late 20th century. in glenn gould's essay "strauss and the electronic future" (1964) he envisions a "multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap." he expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, "the prospects of recording" (gould 1966): "because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing." [34] what joins the concerns of many of writers working with multiple fictions is nothing less than the deconstruction of priority involved in making identity and authorship much less imposing. "the fact in the human universe," says charles olson, "is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right . . . is the thing--all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks)" (olson, 1974). [35] these writers share a conviction that the nature of mind must not be fixed. it is not a transmission but a conversation we must keep open. "if structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind," says umberto eco, "then historical knowledge is no longer possible" (eco, 1989). we redeem history when we put structure under question in the ways that narrative, hypertext and teaching each do in their essence. narrative is the series of individual questions which marginalize accepted order and thus enact history. hypertext links are no less than the trace of such questions, a conversation with structure. all three are authentically concerned with consciousness rather than information; with creating and preserving knowledge rather than with the mere ordering of the known. the value produced by the readers of hypertexts or by the students we learn with is constrained by systems which refuse them the centrality of their authorship. what is at risk is both mind and history. [36] in wim wenders' (and peter handke's) film, _wings of desire_, the angels walk among the stacks and tables of a library, listening to the music within the minds of the individual readers. it is a scene of indescribable delicacy and melancholy both (one which makes you want to rush from the theatre and into the nearest library, there to read forever), into the midst of which, shuffling slowly up the carpeted stair treads, huffing at each stairwell landing, his nearly transparent hand touching on occasion against the place where his breastbone pounds beneath his suit and vest, comes an old man, his mind opening to an angel's vision and to us in a winded, scratchy wheeze. [37] "tell me muse of the story-teller," he thinks, "who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient . . . ." the credits tell us later that this is homer. "with time," he thinks, "my listeners became my readers. they no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other . . . ." [38] homer's is for us increasingly an old story. when print removed knowledge from temporality, walter ong reminds us, it interiorized the idea of discrete authorship and hierarchy. ong envisioned a new orality (ong 1982). in this case it is a film which restores the circle; likewise the "multiple authorship" of hypertext offers an electronic restoration of the circle. [39] although hypertext is an increasingly familiar cultural term, its artistic import is only beginning to be realized. in novels whose words and structures do not stay the same from one reading to another, ones in which the reader no longer sits apart but by her interaction, shapes and transforms. [40] shaping ourselves, we ourselves are shaped. this is the reciprocal relationship. it is likewise the elemental insight of the fractal geometry: that each contour is itself an expression of itself in finer grain. we have been talking so long about a new age, a technological age, an information age, etc., that we are apt to forget that it is we who fashion it, we who discover and recover it, we who shape it, we who literally give it form with how we use ourselves and on what. [41] this organic reconstitution of the text may be what makes constructive hypertext the first instance of what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multi-sensual writing: the multiple fiction,the true electronic text, not the transitional electronic analogue of a printed text like a hypertextual encyclopedia. fictions like _afternoon_, _woe_, _chaos_, _izme pass_, or _uncle buddy's phantom funhouse_ can neither be conceived nor experienced in any other way. they are imagined and composed within their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled together from pre-ordained texts. [42] for these fictions there will be no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations. yet this is in no way to suggest that these fictions are random on the one hand or artificial intelligence on the other. merely that they are formational. [43] what they form are instances of the new writing of the late age of print, what jane yellowlees douglas terms "the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great 'either/or' and embracing, instead, the 'and/and/and'" (douglas, 1991). the issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. these are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media. [44] the layering of meaning and the simultaneity of multiple visions have gradually become comfortable notions to us, though they form the essence underlying the intermingled and implicating voices of bach which glenn gould heard with such clarity. we are the children of the aleatory convergence. our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence. [45] it is an embodied silence which the multiple fiction can render. we find ourselves at the confluence of twentieth century narrative arts and cognitive science as they approach an age of machine-based art, virtual realities, and what don byrd calls "proprioceptive coherence" (byrd, 1991). the new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. it not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them. multiple fictions accomplish what its progenitors could only aspire to, lacking a topographic medium, light speed, electronic grace, and the willing intervention of the reader. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited althusser, louis. (1971) "ideology and the state." in _lenin, philosophy and other essays_, translated by ben brewster, new york and london: monthly review press. bolter, jay d. (1991) _writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing_. hillsdale, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum and associates. bruner, jerome. (1986) _actual minds, possible worlds_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. byrd, don. "cyberspace and proprioceptive coherence." paper presented at the second international conference on cyberspace, santa cruz, ca, april 20, 1991. calvino, italo. (1988) _six memos for the next millennium_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gould, glenn. (1964) "strauss and the electronic future." _saturday review_, may 30, 1964. reprinted in _the glenn gould reader_, tim page, ed. new york: alfred a. knopf (1989). ---. (1966) "the prospects of recording." _high fidelity_, april,1966. reprinted in _the glenn gould reader_, tim page, ed. guyer, carolyn and martha petry. "izme pass, a collaborative hyperfiction," _writing on the edge_, 2 (2), bound-in computer disk, university of california at davis, june 1991. ---. "notes for izma pass expose." _writing on the edge_, 2 (2), university of california at davis, june 1991. douglas, jane yellowlees. "the act of reading: the woe beginners' guide to dissection," _writing on the edge_, 2 (2). joyce, michael. (1990a) _afternoon, a story_. computer disk. cambridge, ma: the eastgate press. --. (1988) "siren shapes: exploratory and constructive hypertexts." _academic computing_ 3 (4), 10-14, 37-42. mcdaid, john. (1991) _uncle buddy's phantom funhouse_. unpublished computer fiction. moulthrop, stuart. (1991) _chaos_. hyperfiction computer program, atlanta, ga, 1991. ---. (1989a) _in the zones: hypertext and the politics of inaphy on america, proprioception, and other essays_. bolinas, ca: four seasons foundation, 17 &19. moure, erin. (1989) "seebe" and "site glossary: loony tune music." in _w s w (west southwest)_ montreal: vehicule press, 84 & 115. nelson, ted. (1987) _all for one and one for all_. hypertext '87. chapel hill: acm proceedings. ong, walter j. (1982) _orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word_. new york: methuen. thurber, d. (1990) "sony to make electronic books: 'data discman' player will use 3-inch cds." _washington post_, (d9, d13) may 16. porush, 'commentary', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-porush-commentary.txt commentary _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) david porush responds to allison fraiberg's essay, "of aids, cyborgs, and other indiscretions," _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991): [1] allison fraiberg uses the discourses of aids to read large oppositions and tendencies at work in our culture. as such, aids is one more battlefield between right thinking and wrong thinking. here wrong thinking is promoted by a reactionary, self-serving, moralizing majority that prescribes a cure for aids in "traditional" values to the exclusion of others an that denies the extent to which all our bloods and responsibilities commingle in the vast, luscious, and newly-dangerous circuitry of sexuality. the bad guys in her reading of her culture are clearly defined: they are listed and quoted at the beginning of her essay and resurface in various guises--people who promote the nuclear family, white middle class males, ad propagandists who ironically forget how to use sex to sell the public on the use of condoms. [2] at times, fraiberg manages to free herself from her orgy of jargon and deconstructionist agitprop to achieve real eloquence, especially when she calls for a redefinition of sexuality--also the most fun parts of the essay. almost all of the conclusions which she reaches in her argument are both inarguable and quite tame: we must all engage in safe sex, but do so with the awareness that sex puts us in the circuit, that we take responsibilities for our own bodies, that aids should not be a tool for scapegoating and de humanizing groups of people. rather, aids ought to impel us to redefine the body, the self, and our sexuality (along with our discourses sexuality) as participants in a looping feedback with the interpenetrating systems of otherness which really create our culture (or really culture our creativity). [3] the essay, however, has a tendency to discard or demolish practices and ideals that would satisfy even a new cyborg mentality simply because they have been tainted by association with conventional, conservative ideology. in this, there is a confusion or conflation between reactionary rhetoric (out of homophobia and racism, the moral majority use their prescriptions to define the other as alien, diseased) and technically safe practices (monogamy, safe sex, abstinence from iv drug use, the nuclear family)--in short, discretionary activities. the clearest example comes when fraiberg writes, [16] . . . monogamy means little if one partner is hiv+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex. [4] while we would not argue with the premise (that there's something nasty about the prescription of exclusive monogamy for everyone in the culture) nor with the amusing analysis elsewhere in this essay (that the more you ask folks to say no to their pleasure they more likely they are to embrace it impulsively), we might argue with the conclusion. after all, monogamy means quite a lot, *especially* if one partner has aids. it promotes responsibility to and awareness of everyone else in the circuit, and indeed fulfills fraiberg's own call to greater cyborg awareness. [5] the second problem here actually arises from the essay's greatest strength: fraiberg's excellent application of deconstruction methods to the term "discrete" and "discretion." the effect of her analysis is to construct a marvelous pun (there is high magic to low puns): she converts the word *discrete* from its first meaning (distinct, separate, severed, discontinuous) into its other meaning, as in *discreet* (exercising judgment, discernment, etc.). to enhance the beauty of this play, and in typically deconstructive fashion, phrases like *to exercise discretion* fraiberg notes, ought to mean the opposite of the first kind of discrete: the "discreet" individual now knows that aids uncovers the very extent to which we are not discrete but are participants in the circuit. all well and good so far. [6] the problem is that fraiberg herself has trouble explaining exactly what all this means and resolving the contradictions to which it leads: [21] the traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. a closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network. [22] but this is a different kind of discretion. it's not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it's a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. so while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of aids, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. in this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. in other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit--indeed, it has already admitted--the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion. what happened to all that fun stuff about broadening and redefining the sexual act itself? [7] i think these two problems are actually produced by a deeper flaw in fraiberg's argument, one that rests with her reification of the bad guys, her tendency to see them as blind and inexperienced at best, sheerly vicious at worst. she wouldn't need to twist and contort her prose into these unnatural postures if only she would grant that perhaps aids brings us all--not just the privileged few who have been immersed in the discourses of a salvational cyborg ideology --to pretty much the same level of self-awareness about our position in the intertwined cyborg loops of culture sexuality-identity. we are all equally "conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity" and we are all made more aware of our sexuality by aids. the proof is in the result: most of us, william f. buckley included, have come to the same conclusion--that survival entails reorganization "into discrete units." the only difference is that fraiberg claims a greater degree of awareness and calls her interpretation a "progressive reconstruction" while denying a level of agency to (and blaming for a certain intentional viciousness) the poor dumb self-righteous suckers who stick to monogamous heterosexuality and keep their spouses and kids and stupidly try to prescribe it for others, not only because it works for them but because they may not have a taste for the impedimenta of dental dams and condoms, not to mention anal penetration and fellatio and iv-drugs. [8] perhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about aids are dispensable. we can certainly do without the oppressive totalizing rhetoric of the official versions of aids, with its self-righteousness and its encouragements of hatred and fear and otherness. but maybe we could just as soon dispense with arguments that use aids to take what is in the end an obscure high moral ground through the sterile and overly-self-conscious rhetoric of the encrusted academic. in this case, such a rhetoric strives to reconcile the "good" ideology of openness, liberation, and tolerance (as well as rejection of all simple and patent and conventional formulations, like "safe sex" and "monogamy") with two incompatible notions: the allure of the cyborg and the realities of aids. in the end, two into one won't go and the rhetoric of liberation finds itself sadly overmatched. this is one menage a trois which is simply an unproductive configuration. cyborgization probably produces just as many new reactionaries roaming the golf courses in their abstinence as it does enlightened networkers, the new cyberpunker proles who roam the loop looking for action. and aids, as this essay manifestly demonstrates, produces caution and discretion and a discipline of the self, a redefinition of the body not simply as a sensorial machine, but as an invitation to disease, no matter what rhetoric you process it through. postmodern liberation, with its yearning for whatever it postmodernism yearns for, must await some different kind of apocalypse to scratch that epistemological/ontological itch. [9] i know this is an anathematic suggestion to most postmodernists, who hold, as i did for a long time, to a more or less constructivist position: there is no reality that isn't reconfigured or constructed by discourse. in its most radical tenet, we convince ourselves that it's all discourse, there is no reality at all, so you'd better be careful which discourse you choose. but if you look at the facts of aids, it really does scare you out of the constructivist position. there's something awfully touchable and factitious about it, especially if you watch it close, destroying a friend. there's even something haunting and scary, to which any aids researcher will attest, about the hiv virus itself. let's take paragraph to explore it: [10] normally, a cell begins with dna, which is transcribed into rna, which then codes for proteins, the building blocks of cells. but aids is the ultimate cybernetic disease; it inverts and subverts the normal dna-rna-dna loop (thus the "retro" in "retrovirus") by imposing its own loop. where most viruses are dna, hiv is an rna virus. with the insidious collaboration of reverse transcriptase, it takes over and alters the dna transcription process, forcing it to produce more retroviral rna, which in turn takes over the dna in other cells. at the same time, it changes other parts of dna, encoding for proteins that alter the body's cells, actually making them more receptive to further hiv infection. finally, the rna replication cycle is activated by anything that turns on the immune system: in other words, the immune system defeats itself every time it tries to work. spooky and evil disease. nasty shit. [11] i suggest we all take a closer look at the possibility --made even more ironic by the tendency of some to laud the coming cyborgization of our bodies and minds--that aids is just the first of a terrible series of cyborg events against which simple enlightened discretion is not proof. perhaps retroviruses themselves are the product of orgiastic physiological feedback mechanisms between the world and the world-body, which might continue to spawn these transcription reversals between rna and dna because we have achieved some new order of prigoginesque complexity.^1^ aids really does make cyborgs of its victims, and by extension, of us all, as the glomming of a cybernetic system onto an organismic host. if this is what cyborgization portends, i'm gonna resist. --david porush <userbtfp@rpitsmts.bitnet> rensselaer polytechnic institute ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ in _order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature_ (new york: bantam, 1984), ilya prigogine and isabelle stengers discuss the consequences of prigogine's nobel-prize-winning work on chaos. they explain how new biological organisms of increasing complexity arise naturally and inevitably from conditions of turbulent chaos: the hiv viral family may be an example of just such an occurrence. ============================================================ allison fraiberg replies to david porush: [1] in reading david porush's comments, i realized that parts of my essay were not as clear as i would have liked them to be. based on porush's comments, i would like to take this opportunity to reiterate some points that i think are crucial to my argument as a whole. consequently, i will reply to porush by focusing on areas where i sensed the most confusion. [2] what concerns me the most are quibbles about, or blatant dismissals of, two crucial starting points in my essay. the first involves a conclusion of porush's that retroactively revises one of my premises. porush writes that "[p]erhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about aids are dispensable" (8). easy to say, but not so easy--or even desirable--to do. douglas crimp opens the collection of essays in _aids: cultural analysis/ cultural activism_ with an important reminder. i quote him at length since he reaches the heart of the matter: aids does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. we know aids only in and through those practices. this assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering, and death. what it *does* contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of aids, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of aids. if we recognize that aids exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them. (3) to dispense with the rhetorics of aids, in crimp's frame, becomes an impossible task since aids exists "in and through" them. crimp's point is that you can't distinguish aids from the practices which make it intelligible. choosing to ignore the discourses of aids is something i can't even picture: every day i see stories on television, in the newspapers; i hear of new public policy and legislation; i see people die. i don't see how one can dispose of the rhetorics--it's not a lego set that one can put away when one has tired of playing. i can, however, see how some people have tried to revise/alter/speak different rhetorics in attempts to "recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them." and, in seeing and experiencing various actions and discourses put into motion by aids strategists, i have realized that "encrusted" academics have no property rights on discourse. [3] the second premise around which porush and i disagree centers on a temporal sense of positioning. porush writes of the "coming cyborgization of our bodies" and how he's "gonna resist" it. i'm somewhat taken aback by the future tense here since my whole argument rests on the assumption that haraway's cyborg myth is not *going* to happen but that it *has* happened ("the cyborg is our ontology"). the first half of my essay uses a cyborg ontology as its premise: haraway for the description, then my resituating of discourses using haraway's frame. by using the cyborg as a starting point, i'm saying that--and this is by no means an astounding observation--rhetorics of humanism and organicism have produced, are currently producing, and, dare i say, will probably always produce, radical material inequities for the vast majority of people. [4] so, if a) the cyborg is our ontology and b) discourses that deny the cyborg are at best archaic and at worst deadly, do you continue to tell the story of organics--a story that doesn't quite fit the picture? do you speak of the futility of trying to do anything in this configuration (haraway: "paranoia bores me.")? do you speak in the rhetoric of the future--and thereby deny various realities? i choose none of these since i see in them no opportunities for change. instead, i'll take on haraway's challenge of "being in the belly of a monster and looking for another story to tell" ("cyborgs at large" 14). consequently, what i did was take a description of current relations and resituated aids discourses on it. [5] and what i saw from the belly of the monster was how certain discourses had tried so hard to resist being digested by the monster; i also saw others that knew that's where they were. the alternate aids strategists knew that they were in the belly of a monster and while i was there i saw something exciting happen: the alternate aids discourses began to revise the belly. these discourses, the discourses that recognize a cyborg-netic body, began to revise postmodern versions of the blurry boundaries of the body. they resurfaced the body and by so doing created a post circuited discrete unit. [6] porush says in his response that i pun on "discrete" and "discreet": i do, but he misses my final step. i move from the discrete bodies of liberal humanism (separate, distinct) to the pun on discreet (the various definitions on *all* sides of what constitutes a certain sense of judgment). but then i move on to discrete again. i move on because it's not a revised sense of judgment that propels the argument; it's a revised discrete sense of the body. in other words, i go from "discrete," to "discreet," to "discrete." and by the time i get around to the second version of discrete, it looks very different from the first one that set the pun in motion. that alternate aids discourses and strategies revise versions of the body offered by mainstream media, humanism, *and* postmodernism seems to me a powerful and energetic practice. [7] it's a powerful practice that begins to tell another story--another story that tries to describe what's happening to people--and i read the story as being about agency. so my essay isn't about safe sex or new forms of judgments: people with a lot more visibility than i've got have been saying these things for 10 years with little luck (but, based on what i read in a recent poll i took on the electronic bulletin board used in composition courses at the university of washington, it wouldn't hurt to have those ideas reiterated, again and again and again). instead, i'm interested in how agency is conditioned and produced in the move from "discrete" (version 1) to "discrete" (version 2). [8] in this second version, you can't arrive at an agent without looking at what porush rightfully calls the "realities of aids." agency is the result of the resurfacing of the--differently discrete--body; and the agency arises out of the material conditions that force the resurfacing. when porush quotes me saying we are all conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity, he adds a word that completely alters my intention and, consequently, my argument: he adds "equally" before conditioned, a move that once again forecloses on this version of agency. i would never say that we are all *equally* conditioned by anything. i would never say, for instance, that the women on factory lines in southeast asia who assemble my computer and i, who use this computer to write, are "equally" conditioned by the transnational circuit of which we are both part; i would never say that gay men and straight white women in this country are "equally" conditioned by the cyborg-like systematicity i describe in my essay. [9] in fact, it is the redistribution of agency that grounds my argument (i must apologize to mr. porush if he doesn't find this as much "fun" as he would like). the type of material agency i propose is one that shifts attention and authority away from hegemonic biomedical and governmental institutions and onto those most affected. it also forces theorists, postmodern and otherwise, to take our cues from where the materialist agent stands: usually downtown organizing street actions, protests, and die-ins. --allison fraiberg <fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu> university of washington ducornet, 'from _birdland_', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-ducornet-from.txt from _birdland_ by rikki ducornet department of english university of denver _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by rikki ducornet, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. they set off in the early morning beneath an auspicious sky stubbled with clouds. from the start fogginius the saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal road and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. true to himself he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence or in song, in quiet talk among themselves or in dreaming (and the poet picotazo, as he left behind the city where his beloved breathed, was delighting in acute melancholy). after much hacking fogginius cleared his throat and spitting into a cluster of blossoming bougainvillea began: 'let us suppose that upon waking in the night i trod upon a nail. the nail cruelly pierces my flesh, causing me to hop about sobbing unrestrainedly in pain. here is the cure: take up the nail and kiss it tenderly. i bind it to my foot with a piece of nicely rotted string. should there be a moon, i lie upon the ground with the wounded foot pointing to heaven, a turd stuck to the toe. within three hours, if no owl passes and nothing disturbs the silence with a scream, the wound will cease to fester. better still, should a star stumble from the sky, the foot and the body attached to it will be invigorated beyond belief for a brief moment fogginius was silent. the others, greatly relieved and thinking he was done, grunted with satisfaction. this flattered the saint and he continued: 'now, let us suppose that i am eating a fish and i choke on a bone. at once, without thought to economy or appearances, and no matter who is in the room--be he a humbug or god himself--the fish's bones, sucked clean of meat, must be placed upon my head. to assure that such a misadventure not repeat itself, my toe nails must be trimmed at once and added to the pile.' just then professor tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. they had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. so tightly was the poet's heart squeezed in the fist of love, that had it been an orange, seeds would have bulleted from his ears. when the girl and her father rode past the poet and the saint, picotazo offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that if fogginius had remained silent, she might have been moved. but the scholar opened his trap: 'the best remedy for lightning is to wear one's turds--dried and sewn within a piece of silk--against the heart. the turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative and, at best, cumuliform--' professor tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: _i do not approve the company you keep_. his daughter kept her eyes upon the path, and bit her lower lip to keep herself from laughing. 'that girl who just passed! fogginius spluttered with illfounded enthusiasm, 'has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside...i would never have believed it, had i not seen it with my own eyes!' for an instant he shut up, marvelling. but the poet picotazo did not hear him. he was too deep in thought. he was thinking how much he hated fogginius and how he longed to see him dead. he wished a meteor would strike him where he sat. and although they had only just left the city of pope publius behind and had been journeying but twenty minutes, the poet was submerged in weariness. the day died, fogginius the saint silent only when catching his breath. when the party stopped and bulto set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses both fresh and moldering and methods of dissection both ancient and new--thereby destroying everyone's appetite but his own. cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels and archons, their attributes and attitudes and advantages, and the manner in which the manicheans invoked all three; and wondered if angels had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both, or neither--but instead a type sur-natural and so inconceivable. as fogginius spoke, senor fantasma seriously pondered why he had, until now, cherished the saint's advice and admired his mind so much he had been paying him to think. nuno, too, with much gnashing of teeth, recalled his stepfather's incessant punishments, the insane blandishments which had rained unfailingly upon him when he was a boy, the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. kicking in the fire, bulto fantasized reducing the saint to a pulp; pulco alone appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan--he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread moistened with saliva. 'the black man is black--' detonating, fogginius threw himself upon his hammock, '--because his soul is an inferno, a fiery pit. he burns from within and with such intensity, all his whiteness has been consumed. the red man burns with less heat; the yellow--' suddenly the world was silent. silent. as if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small pulco, and the mules. this silence was so exquisite and so dense, that the poet attempted to seize it in verse. he wrote: _a silence like a blotter soft and thick soaks up the forest's ink allowing me to dream and think_. picotazo put down his pen, and gazing up at the wheeling sky invoked in one breath the mother of heaven and professor tardanza's daughter. within moments he was fast asleep--as were the others, and all strung from trees like fruit damned with dreams. in his dream, picotazo saw professor tardanza's daughter threading towards him as naked as a thing of eden. but, although she moved swiftly, she was forever far away, as if she were walking in place, or he retreating. and then, impossibly, she stood before him. opening his arms to receive her, picotazo pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling. she was hot; before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. but just as he would embrace her, his rival enrique saladrigas slipped between them, and picotazo was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. in despair he battered at his rival's back with both his fists and at the buttocks which now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. a terrific stench was upon the poet now, who--the more he battled saladrigas, the greater his rival grew. and picotazo was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. with a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature's beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, a constellation. with certainty he recognized the constellation of the skeleton. and he thought: _i shall die!_ the poet screamed. waking he found that something still pinned him down. it was fogginius. fogginius whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet's lips. revulsed nearly to madness, picotazo bit the saint fiercely, and fogginius, leaping to the ground,began to shout. with loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, picotazo listened to the saint's breathless explanation: 'a cure! for rheumatism! to sit upon a poet's face at dawn.' and: 'i am cured!' fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes which lived in the treetops. hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a billion birds into the scarlet sky-those birds which, in distant days, filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs. *** picotazo's chronic melancholia had deepened to despondency. his dream's sad implication, the rude awakening--illuminated the comfortless state of his love life. looking back in time to the moment when with a lingering moan love had first flowered in his breast, reviewing each affair up to the present, he thought that never, not once, had he won his heart's desire, known a maiden's timid tremor, the delights of reciprocal attraction. his attempted courtships had always fallen short of their mark. monsters of will, his mistresses had always chosen him. from the first kiss, disappointment had flagged the poet down. with a shudder, picotazo recalled the titanic vigor of his mistress' constitutions, their iron clad affection, the stern, fixed stare of their lust, the fearfully earnest letters he received with terror; how faithfully they punished his evasions, the silent thunderbolts of their angry looks, the purposed damage they invariably inflicted upon his reputation when, at last, he made his escape. the second day of their journey, picotazo made a vow. if upon his return he could not within a week win the professor's daughter, he would devote himself, soul and body, to poetry. he imagined himself dry and desiccated and hollow--like a pod devoid of seed--but with a great, burning body of work growing beneath his frantic pen. he would devote himself tirelessly to the epic at hand. a monument of buried pain, he would be famous beyond belief, so famous that a day would not go by without professor tardanza's daughter hearing his name. in school, her children would be made to memorize his verse; the queen of spain herself would visit birdland only to hold picotazo's hand: '...whose poems are the lubrications for life's frictions!' but here his revery takes a perilous turn. it seems the queen cannot, will not, let go the poet's frail hand. dreadfully sovereign, as stern and fixed as a polar cap and the sacredness of law, she ignores his mute appeal, she treads upon his feet, barks in his ear that the poet is a cog of god--and with a seismic shudder insists that he be equal to her great occasion. *** late that afternoon, the road--in truth a protohistoric path, torturous and precipitous--vanished altogether. spying a dejection in the grass, fogginius dismounted to see whither it pointed. the turd led them to the lip of a chasm at the foot of which the sea had hollowed a whirlpool, _an eager mouth_, the poet thought, _entreating them, in a savage tongue, to leap_. too tired to turn back, they set themselves down for an early supper. as bulto built a fire and little pulco set to dressing the small birds the thug had throttled _en route_, nuno unpacked his tripod and his black box to seize the whirlpool forever with silver nitrate on glass. picotazo kept far from the land's edge; the sight of so deep a pit flooded his soul's chambers with dread. it was decided that while waiting for their food they would play a game of lotto; from his saddlebags bulto pulled the box of painted cards which showed all manner of things: flying fish, the fortifications of pope publius, the garrote, the guanaba and the coconut; a poultry seller, a water peddlar, a milkman and his mules; the pyramid of cheops; the holy mother,the twelve apostles, the stations of the cross; a fig, a banana and a parakeet--a game so subverted by fogginius that by the time it was over, tempers were badly frayed. the cards called forth all sorts of associations and fogginius could not help but recall recipes and riddles and curious customs and ceremonial sacrifices; the witch trials raging in europe, red hens and peacock's eyes, tigers ravening in woods, miasmatic infections, focusing instruments and paradoxes; how so and so had found gold in a graveyard which looked exactly like human teeth, and how the monks of india smear their faces with dung. picotazo, who, as pulco, had taken to living with bread in his ears, missed all of this; he did not hear when nuno cried _completo_! and so could not know that the game was over. this caused confusion, a quarrel and a string of complaints during which nuno accused the poet of cheating and incivility. oblivious to the upset he had himself caused, fogginius gaily pointed out the prodigious vegetative power of the wood, naming the many purges and poisons he recognized--' 'to stick in your epic, dear poet!' he beamed at picotazo, 'proof that i have liberally forgiven you the nasty bite you gave me this morning.' then, grabbing senor fantasma by the sleeve, he postulated that the chimerical unhealthiness of the climate, its fickle temperatures and the spontaneous alterations of its air convinced him they would be assailed that night by uncommon swarms of flies, gnats, moths, animaculae and other calamities invisible to the naked eye. 'we must sleep under nets else be plagued by troublesome bites, inflammations, noxious exhalations and velocity of the blood.' he assured fantasma that he had brought with him 'mercurial purges,a gargle of borax, armenian bole in vinegar and fungal ash. however, he would hate to have to part with any of it so soon. he insisted upon the nets else they all harvest fatality. as for himself, he would not sleep unless a net was provided; nor did he wish to see his poor friend picotazo assailed by vampire moths. it is fortunate that fogginius was nearly blind, for senor fantasma was able to provide him with a fictive net. this pulco draped over and above the saint who-prostrate and tightly bandaged in his blanket--was ready to sleep. fogginius promised in a soft gurgle that he would not stir the whole night through--else tear the precious net. as fogginius trumpeted and wheezed, the company sat together plotting how they might rid themselves of the saint who had turned out to be an intolerable burden. little pulco, himself asleep, did not hear bulto's offer to toss fogginius into the precipice. fantasma proposed poison but then retracted--fearing reprisals from the ancient's ghost. nuno, hating violence, revealed the central role fogginius had played in his life and asked for mercy. 'i'll find a way to gag him,' he promised. i might manage to convince him that to use the vocal chords is unnatural--the proof being that his throat is always sore--and create for his own use a language of sand, of straw, of dust motes. i'll invent something--a muffler, a word snare, a stifler; somehow or other i'll knot the old stinker's tongue.' elsewhere, picotazo, his ears stuffed with wild parsley, lay gazing at the sky. the world, he assured himself, was an instrument made not for pain but pleasure--else why would he have bothered? the thought was reassuring. _you are a moonbeam_, he wrote to the phantom in his head, my _resurrection, my future life_. but then, sensing something large sliding beneath his hammock, he was reminded that if god was anything, he was paradoxically strange. long after midnight the poet fell asleep--a leaky vessel upon an agitated ocean. *** for two days, fango fantasma had been silent. indeed, fogginius' conversation was so congested, infrangible and dense that had he wanted to, fantasma would have been hard pressed to stick a word in, even edgewise. however, fantasma shared picotazo's baleful propensity and was not eager to talk. he had taken to staring at his own reflection in a pocket mirror--not from vanity as might be supposed--but to reassure himself that he was still there. the farther away he came from familiar things, the more fragmented and permeable he felt himself to be--and the more haunted. the woods, the sea, the sky, the relic path under his mule's vanishing feet appeared to percolate to transparency. fantasma's unstable state of mind had been precipitated by a worsening pecuniary crisis. for several years he had hounded the papal authorities for permission to import afrikans to work his mines and plantations. when at last his wish bad been granted, he spent the lion's part of his languishing fortune to build and equip a ship, which, upon its return from afrika, its cargo chained and bolted to the hold, had been spirited away, volatilized, sublimated--perhaps by those evil spirits which had plagued his line for three generations. it seemed to fantasma, as the very clouds appeared to plot against him overhead, that he and his family had always been the playthings of necromancers. the saint had once told senior fantasma that in a distant region of the world, at its very edge--which was razor-sharp and swept with cruel winds--lived a people born riddled with holes like sieves. this peculiar race amused themselves by plugging their perforations with sod and seeding them with roses, club mosses and horsetails. each spring flowers would grow, blossom and blaze. at the world's end, courtship rituals included dances of gyring shrubs. 'more often than not the wedding night ends in disaster,' fogginius told fantasma,' for in their frenzied embrace, the lovers--decked from head to foot in thorny briars--tear one another to shreds.' 'such is the way of love--' picotazo, eavesdropping, was cut to the quick by the story. he made up a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, furr/burr, thistle/whistle. *** this night fantasma felt like a sieve man; he felt that his substance was seeping out through the pores of his skin. to make matters worse, their finger of rock above the whirlpool--if certified by an auspicious dropping--was possibly haunted. certain signs--caricatural boles and an abandoned wasp's nest-implied that they had tied their hammocks between what had once been sacred trees. as their fire died, fantasma stretched out, and pulling on his fingers one by one until they popped, raised his knees to his chest and grabbed his parts. he thought about nuno's black box which would bring him power. he imagined himself enthroned upon a velvet chair, turning a crank which would yield up the island image after image. too agitated to sleep, fantasma told himself the story of the nun who had neglected to cross herself before eating a banana. how, thereafter, a demon had sat behind her navel peering out at the world as through a porthole. that failing, he attempted to bring to mind the tender moments of his infancy--but could only recall those family stories which, since cognizance, profoundly distressed him. stories of those unstable ghosts taking root, tall as trees, in the dining room, causing the roast beef to explode; hovering near the birthing chair whenever a fantasma was born, to snap up the umbilical cord the instant it was cut. so that it was generally supposed one day the fantasmas would all be itinerant ghosts with no worldly ties. and then fantasma thought he heard his own cord, and the cords of his forefathers being pulled along the ground. he moaned and clutched his balls in terror; above the roar of the whirlpool, he heard one thousand phantoms stepping among the stones. fantasma shivered. a clammy air rose from the ground; it mouthed his bones and caused his teeth to hammer. when the moon's thin wafer pulled itself up over the horizon, he peered timidly out from under his blanket, thinking to catch a glimpse of the ghosts which--he could hear them distinctly--were spooking the campsite. what he saw caused him to scream with such conviction the others were wrenched from sleep to see that the world beneath was no longer solid but palpitating with hundreds of thousands of frogs which had once assured the wood's sacred character. the indigenous population had called the place above the whirlpool _tlock_. indeed, as the frogs advanced snapping gnats with eager tongues, the party heard distinctly the percussive sound of their feasting: _tlock,tlock,tlock_. transfixed with terror, tango fantasma sailed that amphibious sea howling as bulto, more naked than any ape, waded among the little green bodies, battering them with a club. nuno sat transfixed, pulco wept and fogginius beat the air and cried: 'the magic is severe! my net's dissolved!' and then: 'a dream! a dream and an oracle! we must count them!' the saint dropped to the ground, and fumbling among the frogs, raved: 'beings fallen from the sky! bulto! desist! you are smattering the brains of rational angels!' they finished the night, prostrate but wakeful. it seemed to them that the entire cosmos reeked of mildew, stagnant pools, the shit of fish, the saliva of snakes and the sulphurous flatulence of saints. sometime before dawn the frogs vanished into thin air--supporting fogginius' thesis. several hundred years ago, on an island the aborigines had named birdland, the mendicant scholar fogginius was roused from the depths of nightmare by a hellish bawling. fogginius leapt up from his bed--in truth a worn, woolen cape sewn into a sack and stuffed with shredded shirts--and threw aside his door, or rather, the crusted board which kept the wild hogs from relieving themselves in his rooms. there upon the overturned kettle he used as a threshold, lay an abandoned human infant, soiled and with crossed eyes. fogginius washed the brat, stared fiercely into its transverse gaze, and in the manner of the times, swaddled it so tightly that it could not thrash but only howl--as helpless as a sausage damned with a thwarted consciousness. this done he christened it: nuno alpha y omega. *** fogginius was disliked. a deaf man who the scholar had cured of a coughing fit by stuffing his ears with breadcrumbs and parsley daily damned him; another whose bee hives fogginius had smeared with dung, hated and feared him. nevertheless, up until the arrival of professor tardanza from cordova, and the maturity of picotazo the poet, he was the only scholar in birdland, and his the island's only library--a wormy collection of parchment-bound books stuffing a zinc-lined trunk not large enough to bathe in. the books had been packed along with that woolen cape and those night shirts which, a full three decades later, served the saint as mattress. in his youth, fogginius had been enthralled by birdland's unique bestiary. the island claimed a purple bat, whistling wart-hogs, miniature crocodiles and large albino spiders sporting pink whiskers. after many years of trial and error, fogginius had taught himself the ambiguous art of taxidermy and so was able to save the skins of most anything he chose, although he was not an artist and was incapable of reconstructing any creature convincingly. for example, fogginius' snakes did not diminish towards the tail as is customary, but instead they grew progressively fatter. so zealous was the scholar and so thorough, that all the snakes, bats, moles and mice, ant bears, crocodiles and parrots within ten kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished by the time our story begins. only their skins remained--thousands upon thousands of them--decomposing in sisal sacks and crowding the shadows of the room fogginius used as library, laboratory, kitchen and bed chamber, and which the rats used as a larder. he saw to his personal needs after dark beside the path which led to a little chapel--no more in his keeping (for word of other excesses had reached his queen). because fogginius cured his skins with grease, the salted livers of cats, the ashes of wild hog testicles and vinegar, his place and person smelled unlike any other. and once, perhaps in jest, perhaps the result of rare and hermetic readings, fogginius had suggested that the saviour was a false prophet, a magician engendered by the planet mars. he was fortunate to have escaped with his life. a new priest-fogginius despised him--was sent to oversee the cosmic affairs of birdland. *** the city in which fogginius lived had been named pope publius by a bishop in absentia. its houses were of local pudding stone and coral, and well over a century old. each had been fitted with heavy doors, high balconies and iron-barred windows--for in its early years the island had been plagued by pirates. the shops-generously fitted with closets, storage bins and shelvings, were now, for the most part, empty of everything but lizards. if pope publius had been prosperous for several decades, it no longer was--although one rich man remained in the city's finest house, its spiral stairs listing and his mahogany columns riddled by carpenter ants. the walls were of imported marble, and the windows of venetian glass. this palace belonged to senor fantasma whose grandfather had been among the first to take possession of the island. now that his inherited wealth was running out, senor fantasma was waiting for a shipload of afrikans--for whom he had negotiated with the papal authorities for nearly a decade--to replace the volatilized aborigines. very little is known about the original population of birdland--only that it dwelled in great baskets. as the climate of the island was extremely mild, the natives had no need of smokeholes. they cooked their meals outside in a common courtyard, fenced in by the outsize shells of clams and cockles. the small hole at the top of their huts was an eye through which they could be perceived by their curiously indelicate gods; it served no other purpose. the aborigines were sculptors, and the mountains truffled with engravings of frogs and copulations and birdmen. they also hung huge quantities of seashells from the rafters of their basket-houses. once, during a violent storm, these shells created a noise which so enraged fantasma's ancestor that he set an entire village on fire--clearing it of men and women and children and structures and domestic animals--thus making room for pope publius. by the time fogginius arrived, a decade or so later, everything the indigenous population had claimed as 'objects of memory'--an ancient clump of tufted parrot trees, a swarm of aerial orchids resembling yellow bees, a mango grove and several cultivated gardens--were gone. strangely, the ensuing generations of fantasmas were ruled by an obsessive terror that _something should escape them_. as if that initial conflagration lingered as a fever within the brains of those to follow. this and more: both succeeding generations had a terror of shells and bones and the sound of hollow things knocking together, or clanging, or ringing upon the air. for this reason the chapel of pope publius was the only one in christendom which had never been fitted out with a bell. (because old fantasma had paid for the chapel's construction, the designated powers were willing to overlook this aberration.) it has been said that birdland was haunted by the spirits or ghosts of those the old fantasma had wronged; that these spirits had escaped through the cyclopean eyes of the basket dwellings; that these itinerant spirits or ghosts materialized at the foot of a bed, in a chimney or in a high tree, in the privy; rode upon the wind as pollen and seeds, were precipitated during the chiming of a clock, or slept within a bottle of ink, or an imperfectly sealed letter--in other words, manifest so often that if they were not fixed residents, it was common enough to see them or to meet someone who had. so that when they did appear they created no surprise. only senor fantasma went wild when haunted. and it was said that during the construction of pope publius, these spirits or ghosts manifested themselves so fearlessly that senor fantasma's grandmother was constantly enraged by their incessant interruptions, and drivelled on and on to anyone who would listen that although she would not allow cigars into the house, a particularly obnoxious phantom insisted on smoking a monstrous, black one _in her very own boudoir_. she described him: naked and fiercely hot, his shadowy particulars tattooing the walls as he galloped back and forth upon her bed's counterpane in the moonlight, blowing smoke rings around her trembling nose and causing her love birds to throw themselves to their cage's floor in paroxysms of emphysemic terror. to keep the infection from entering into the hollow recesses of her head, the old biddy went about her business in a veil. for a time it was feared that she had been impregnated by the smoke from the naked ghost's cigar, but chamomile and patience proved the old lady suffered gas. what is curious is that these were the only spirits to haunt the island. no one ever saw senor fantasma's ancestors sitting in trees or smoking. fogginius--who eagerly took down testimony from whoever would give it--and more testimony from schoolboys than one would think possible--explained the phenomena thus: heathens cannot enter heaven and must remain behind to haunt their former homes, whereas the old fantasmas were all christian and had been _seized by heaven whole_. but fogginius feared that if the afrikans--for whom the entire island waited with hope and misgiving--were not baptized, their spirits, too, would flood the island--making it inhospitable. *** such was the world into which little nuno alpha y omega had plummeted. the population of birdland was no more than one thousand and one souls, and it would have been easy enough to discover the babe's mother and bring her to reason. but this never occurred to fogginius. he believed that--as worms in cheese--the infant had generated spontaneously upon his door's stoop. nuno's first spoken word was: _why_. he had pointed to the sun and asked of his stepfather, _why_. until then he had uttered only _fa-fa_. other than that he had felt no need to speak, and instead with fascination watched the riot of activity within the scholar's hovel, prodded through the havoc of pelts, skins, and keeping mediums--and attempted to make sense out of the weird stories fa-fa told him, those gorgeous lies he believed: that the world was flat and the excrement of bears so potent one whiff could kill an elephant. nuno was from the start a dreamy child and already at the age of three, when he asked the question _why_, he had noticed that in finite quantities the atmosphere is transparent--more transparent, even, than water-but that in vast quantities, as in the sky, it was a beautiful blue. damned with crossed eyes, nuno was blessed with acute perceptions. fogginius was aware that the child was no fool, so that when he saw him pointing at the sun and heard the terrible question _why_, he knew, deep within his heart, that to answer: _because god_, would not give satisfaction. he loved little nuno deeply and dared not disappoint him. and so he proposed a list, which the longer it grew, the longer it became; a list, which, like the snake biting its tail, went on forever: 'yes!' fogginius startled the infant by leaping to his feet, 'yes! the _sun_! _why_? and why the moon? and the rain which falls upon our heads? and why do we have heads? and eyes placed at the top of them? why don't we wear our eyes--as some fishes do--upon our undersides? why not wear an eye between our buttocks and our anus above our nose? and why, dearest little nuno--i have often pondered this--do all the animals have faces? turtles do, and butterflies, and ants! why _life_, little one? and, o! and, o! why, above all, _death_?' fogginius covered his own face then with his hands, and to the child's dismay began to weep. nuno never forgot the upset his simple question had caused and as he stood blinking and confused, close to tears himself, he vowed that he would never ask such a question _out loud_ again. but it was too late, the cat was out of the bag. wiping his nose with his stinking fingers, fogginius went on: 'why calamities?' his voice was hoarse. 'and evil natures? black choler, pestilence and the planets which rotate about the polar star? why danger and distress? gall, vinegar and presages of future things? alarming flames, little alpha, omens, aniseseeds, imprecations and enchantments? frogs' mouths? falling stars? asparagus? eclipses? why do birds have beaks? and if the soul disembarks at death, why must the corporal rind stay behind to corrupt the earth? _and why am i so melancholy_?' again the scholar sobbed. little nuno, struck with terror, sobbed too. little nuno was locked inside the scholar's sea trunk often and the injustice caused his back to hump. his body knobbed in one tight fetal knot, he clenched his teeth with rage for years until a rat poked its tongue into the greasy keyhole and a beam of light pierced the gloom. nuno amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye and then with the other. the thumb appeared to jump from left to right and from right to left. many hours later, when fogginius remembered to let the boy out, nuno tried his small experiment with the back of his stepfather's head. he noticed how it, too, jumped, and how flat it looked. one-eyed he navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk where he played the same game with the root of his nose. it perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. seizing them with his fingers he was reassured. except for the tiny beam of light which collided with the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, nuno was startled to see a projected image of the room's one lopsided window and of fogginius suspended before it _upside down_. the effect was as terrifying as it was magical. for weeks thereafter, nuno taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. an inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar's misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. the image of fogginius suspended upside down was so sharply reproduced that illumined by intuition, nuno realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, _but the sun itself_. the sorcerer was _light_--not fogginius who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg. fogginius came to wonder at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. it came to him that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. but although he cried out for mercy, nuno forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light. 'just as my master thrashes and contains me when angry,' the child reasoned, 'and just as thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light reflects images. once fogginius had hobbled off in his fetid rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of violet stoat, nuno made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from fogginius' spectacles, placed a mirror inside and lastly, after much tinkering, and in an inventive fever, dropped a pane of glass into the back. light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. toying thus, nuno stood for hours until, seeing fogginius' face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. but instead of thrashing him, fogginius embraced his stepson. 'you have invented the _camera obscura_!' he cried, and bursting with pride, congratulated him. nuno was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. but when fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, nuno declared fearlessly: 'a poor use for it! i would _fix_ the image and thus do away with painters!' 'fix it! fix it!' the scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. 'i'll fix _you_! would you thus steal the world from god?' lifting the box above his head he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats. fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds were beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous (a fear he shared with the poet, picotazo). fogginius was a man bereft of humor. for a typical day in pope publius, in the month of july, 1650, fogginius' journal reads: _bad air. a break in the moon's halo. by means of which we shall have a wind_. trained by a jesuit theologian also named fogginius, fogginius once sold his shoes and his books to buy a small, red topaz because his master had assured him that if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon's influence was moist by sleeping beneath it upon a high hill and awaking with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. he had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week, because an irresistible voice had told him that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea. 'the moon's nature,' fogginius wrote in a pamphlet which was published in spain several years before his departure for the island, 'is ethereal, aerial and aquatic.' he was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the balcony nights when the moon was full. fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. the hair grew to such profusion that she was not married afterall, but made her living by sitting on a little gold chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. later she returned to spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations. *** fogginius was a follower of lacantius who ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. fogginius believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the old to the new world. when as a young man his stepson, nuno alpha y omega ran away with pirates and was swept by fierce winds to the polar circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather--now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants' sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies. coming into maturity, nuno refuted fogginius as 'a mere dogmatizer' and 'god's prattling ape.' for nuno had come to question more than his father; he had come to question god. home again, he could no longer bear the company of fogginius. so enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger's lunacies, his vanity and his incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which the old fool continued to threaten his son, that nuno became an adamant atheist, a materialist who believed only in what he could see, shunning all things which smacked of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and to understand the mechanisms which--as do the hidden gears of a music box--cause the world to spin. in the early years of his solitude and independence, nuno supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. these he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a cynic, as 'the miraculous impressions of the thoughts of kings and angels.' then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able, centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing, to capture an instant in time. this first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered. his next attempt was to create an image _in three dimensions_. nuno alpha y omega's _ocularscope_ was not only the first stereoscope in pope publius, but the first one in the universe. thanks to this wonderful machine, a city which exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass. nuno's first images were of the natural world. he would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. today, as i sit in the national museum of pope publius, an unusual edifice built entirely of coral, and peer into the _ocularscope_'s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of nuno's birdland appear seized in silver before me. _fugitive_ more than adequately describes this island which, formed of mandrapore, cuttlebone and sea lime ceaselessly changes shape. if it were not for the sea wall which circumvents it, pieces of the island would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather. i have here before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beach, portraits of the powerful, the beautiful, the lean and lost; lush landscapes, the elegant facade of a rich man's house; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the intercesses of the leaves of a lemon tree--a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon, _phases_, fogginius might have said, _of the same riddle_. *** curiosities of nuno alpha y omega's island: sea cows which sailors once took for sirens. a scarlet shell sporting a white horn so poisonous that one need but see it to die. the mountains are truffled with enchanting caves, the skies with birds--many of which are mute. (but the lizards of birdland whistle, and the beetles tick like clocks.) according to fogginius' meteorological journal which lies open before me, verminous and yet for the most part intact, the summer of 1660 was so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs. schultz, 'impossible music', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-schultz-impossible.txt impossible music by susan schultz <schultz@uhccvm> department of english university of hawaii _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by susan schultz, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. ashbery, john. _flow chart_. new york: alfred a. knopf, 1991. bronk, william. _living instead_. san francisco: north point press, 1991. i was in a large class at usc when he [schoenberg] said quite bluntly to all of us, 'my purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,' and when he said that i revolted. -john cage [1] william bronk and john ashbery, despite their radical stylistic differences, both face what critic john ernest has termed "a metaphysical stalemate." although ernest is writing about bronk, his description of that poet's paradoxical project resonates for the reader of ashbery's work as well: "he is passionately devoted to the belief that there are no grounds for belief, and to the conviction that all convictions are ultimately fictions" (145). both write what one might call "postmodern spiritual autobiographies" (145), memoirs of minds that are alienated from the very divinities that they sometimes invoke. and the two poets who take so much from wallace stevens--bronk a snowman, ashbery a comedian of the letter a--share that poet's sense that supreme fictions can only be approached, but never achieved. even more radically than stevens (but in accord with emerson, who believed that poets took dictation), bronk and ashbery locate the wellsprings of their poetry outside themselves. ashbery writes toward the end of _flow chart_: "i'm more someone else, taking dictation / from on high, in a purgatory of words, but i still think i shall be the same person when i get up / to leave, and then repeat the formulas that have come to use so many times / in the past[.]" bronk's version is more direct; when asked in a rare interview if "the poem exists outside of you and you're transcribing it," he responded, "of course, where else? do you think it's something in your goddamned head?" (39). [2] bronk and ashbery both fulfill robert pinsky's injunction, in _the situation of poetry_ (1976), that poetry be discursive. yet pinsky's definition of discursiveness also goes to the heart of what divides them. "on the one hand," he writes, "the word describes speech or writing which is wandering and disorganized; on the other, it can also mean explanatory--pointed, organized around a setting forth of material" (134). bronk's material, however spontaneously it comes to him (his notebooks are apparently clean of revision), is always organized and explanatory, written in a poetic legalese that alerts the reader more to the necessity of silence than to that of speech. ashbery's poetry, on the other hand, has always wandered and seemed to argue for the value of language as a fruitful noise--a field of possibility rather than a fixed matrix. [3] bronk's three recent volumes, _manifest; and furthermore_ (1987), _death is the place_ (1989), and _living instead_ (1991), have been what the poet himself has called "freeze-dried bronk"--his severe deconstruction of the actual demands that his language become more spare, his poems shorter than they were (and they were never epic in length or intention). bronk's version of poetic self-destructionism follows; here he satirizes the social world of appearances: in a presence vast beyond size, a presence that seems an absence, we hide and play with us as dolls. we give us names and addresses, dress us up in clothes, make loves and resumes, battles, furtively say where we came from and tell each other stories about ourselves. ("playtime," 73) in "the camera doesn't lie" he goes further: "we are, of course, without any areness at all / and that's the only way we are." thus for bronk "there are no ideas in things," to which he feistily adds, "take this, william carlos" (27). unlike williams and whitman, whose poetry he does not admire, bronk turns to thoreau at his most ascetic and most baudrillardian: "whitman liked the image, and thoreau didn't care for the image; that's a big difference between the two of them. whitman's idea was to erect a pretty picture and pretend that was reality. which god knows is as american an idea as there is: we keep doing it over and over again" (19). [4] even bronk's favorite structure, the house, lacks the permanence readers of poetry associate with images, since "no form we make is a form we can live in long" ("formal declaration"). instead, we are our own, haunted, houses: "we are like houses to live in. / it lives in us; we are the house. / we thought we were tenants. that was all wrong," and "there aren't any people; there are houses that house. // tenant, i am haunted by your presences" ("habitation"). likewise, he demystifies the places that we have used traditionally to define ourselves: eden too, even eden, we made up. it means we always wanted a place and never have one--had to make them up and stories about them: troy, jerusalem, old world, new world, once found, believed, then lost. ("homecoming," 73) bronk's vision is so focused, so certain, that he writes the same poem time and again. this can be seen as a virtue, if indeed it be the truth, but the reader may grow impatient, finally, with so many approaches to the same impasse. the images provided in "walleted" and elsewhere, which only occasionally appear in bronk's work, are the field in which ashbery operates, though ashbery's suspicions are probably no less strong than bronk's--suspicions that the truth is concealed, rather than revealed, in particulars. [5] if the obvious question about _three poems_ (1972) was why they were written in prose, then it's fair to ask of _flow chart_ why ashbery wrote it as a poem, albeit in long whitmanic lines. (ashbery, doubtless, prefers whitman to thoreau.) ashbery told an interviewer who asked about the genre-problem in _three poems_: "i wrote in prose because my impulse was not to repeat myself" (quoted in howard 41). this anxiety about self-repetition earlier inspired ashbery to make his most radical experiment, the _tennis court oath_ volume. _flow chart_ takes a different tack, rather like gertrude stein's when she claims that she markets not in repetition but in "insistence." ashbery acknowledges his repetitions, but typically denies that repetition is what we think it is (i am reminded of ashbery's remark that his work is not private, but about everyone's privacy). instead, he finds novelty in what gets repeated; "one is doomed, / repeating one self, never to repeat oneself, you know what i mean?" (7). and much later, a steinian adage: "repetition makes reputation." even instances of forgetting do not faze ashbery, for "one can lose a good idea / by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides / it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations / are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does / recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier" (115). thus one repeats even what one has forgotten. [6] repetition anxieties also contributed to ashbery's early refusals to write an autobiography; he once told an interviewer that, "my own autobiography has never interested me very much. whenever i try to think about it, i seem to draw a complete blank" (bellamy 10). ashbery's poetry %has% for the most part evaded his biography. what distinguishes _flow chart_ from much of ashbery's previous work is its frank approach to the progress of ashbery's career. [7] yet ashbery does not, finally, repeat himself in _flow chart_; if his wandering discourses bear structural similarities to previous work, then the vocabularies he uses are richer still than any to which we've become accustomed. _flow chart_, true to its title, includes the languages of wall street, guerrilla war, the wild west, big government (at times he sounds like a lyrical alexander haig), and sports ("if he wants to / wind up sidelined, in the dugout, that is ok with me") (169). the final third of the poem employs archaic language, the "thee's" and "thou's" of hart crane and john donne. in addition, ashbery admits new situations to his poetry; one section introduces a mentally retarded woman in a hospital. [8] the contemporary political situation also presents itself more overtly in _flow chart_ than it has in ashbery's past work: "each year the summer dwindles noticeably, but the reagan / administration insists we cannot go to heaven without drinking caustic soda on the floor / of death valley" (175-6). so much for "morning in america." [9] so much, also, for ashbery's harshest critics, whose calls to arms ashbery answers in _flow chart_. frederick pollack's attack on ashbery, in the new formalist anthology of criticism, _poetry after modernism_, is typical. pollack claims that ashbery is "a consumer," not an "investment broker," like stevens (one assumes he means a broker of taste). endlessly eclectic, it thrives on attempts to anticipate it, and creates an atmosphere of unfocused irony which dissolves satire and corrodes values. it destroys the past by senti mentalizing it until memory itself becomes first questionable, then laughable. finally, when there is no value, anything can be equated with (sold for) anything. i am describing, among other things, a poetic. (24-5). [10] if, as i am suggesting, the book is %about% the history of one poet's mind, and engages almost all of the discourses of his time, these criticisms sound more hysterical than reasonable. ashbery's self consciousness is ironic, but not valueless. pollack's uneasy conflation of "value" with "investments" is precisely the misuse of language that ashbery habitually points to--not through polemics, but by exploding the cliches he so ably repeats. [11] ashbery's promiscuities of language suggest a radical suspicion of its powers; one trades at times in things one distrusts. yet ashbery does not share bronk's repulsion to the surface languages that divert us from a silent truth; he does not blame the messenger, as several of his passages about language attest. ashbery finds the search for the logos as inherently doomed a project as any: "they all would like to collect it always, but since / that's impossible, the logos alone will have to suffice. / a pity, since no one has seen it recently" (33-4). ashbery re-validates the image, though not as a stable construct. in a beautiful section of the poem, he writes: you may contradict me, but i %see% life in the dead leaves beginning to blow across the carpet, paraffin skies, the beetle's forlorn wail, and all at once it recognizes me, i am valid again, the chapter can close and later be mounted, as though on a stage or in an album. (91) [12] his account of his earlier days reflects his enjoyment of appearances, something i find lacking in much of bronk's work. he begins a section in a library, then recounts his exit, ending this cross-section of the poem with typical humor: sometimes an important fact would come to light only to reveal itself as someone else's discovery, while i felt my brain getting chafed as everything in the reading room took on an unreal, somber aspect. but outside, the streetscape always looked refreshingly right, as though scene painters had been at work, and then, at such moments, it was truly a pleasure to walk along, surprised yet not too surprised by every new, dimpled vista. people would smile at me, as though we shared some pleasant secret, or a tree would swoon into its fragrance, like a freshly unwrapped bouquet from the florist's. i knew then that nature was my friend. (94) that this vision of nature includes its imitations by artists--the scene-painters of this passage--hardly matters to ashbery, whose sense of beauty depends on accretion, not on diminution. ashbery, unlike bronk, absolutely revels in simulacra, the world as seen through bad movies about the world. this section ends with an encomium to the (real) real: i have only the world to ask for, and, when granted, to return to its pedestal, sealed, resolved, restful, a thing of magic enmity no longer, an object merely, but one that watches us secretly, and if necessary guides us through the passes, the deserts, the windswept tumult that is to be our home once we have penetrated it successfully, and all else has been laid to rest. (96) [13] the poet's prime temptation, according to ashbery, is not language, but careerism; ashbery %is% "a sophisticated and cultivated adult with a number of books / to his credit and many other projects in the works" (177). he is also a celebrated poet, one who knows the temptations of self-promotion: "all along i had known what buttons to press, but don't / you see, i had to experiment, not that my life depended on it, / but as a corrective to taking the train to find out where it wanted to go" (123). he pokes fun at others' impressions of him as a descendent to whitman, with his "barbaric yawp": then when i did that anyway, i was not so much charmed as horrified by the construction put upon it by even some quite close friends, some of whom accused me of being the "leopard man" who had been terrorizing the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out of earshot of the dance floor. (123) this "old soldier" (124) confesses to the power of the critic ("an old guy") to read his mind, a power that forces him back on himself: "you suddenly / see yourself as others see you, and it's not such a pretty sight either, but at / least you know now, and can do something to repair the damage" (124). the creation of a reputation, with the collusion of the critics, is "a rigged deal" (125), but one that the poet earns responsibility for by "looking deeper into the mirror, more thoroughly / to evaluate the pros and cons of your success and smilingly refuse all / offers of assistance" (124). [14] where bronk disdains whitman, who markets in images, ashbery sees himself as a less-tyrannical bard, one whose identity accrues through the voices around him, rather than one who demands that his reader share his every assumption. continuing the train metaphor, he writes, "i see i am as ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one / moves on any farther" (127). the poet is merely an "agent" (216), in all nuances of the word, from ticket agent to co-conspirator, who directs us to the now open bridge that ends the poem as inconclusively as whitman did when he left his "song of myself" without a final period: we are merely agents, so that if something wants to improve on us, that's fine, but we are always the last to find out about it, and live up to that image of ourselves as it gets projected on trees and vine-coated walls and vapors in the night sky: a distant noise of celebration, forever off-limits. by evening the traffic has begun again in earnest, color-coded. it's open: the bridge, that way. (216) if bronk maintains the cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, with the sole proviso that the mind is not ours, then ashbery purposefully confuses the division, acknowledging no separation between thoughts and the images that help us to think them, or that think through us. douglas crase is doubtless right when he claims that ashbery's poetry is strange to us only because it gives us back the world in which we live (30). that is also--paradoxically--why his poetry is more "habitable" than bronk's, which is far simpler (in the best sense of the word). ashbery's vision, however difficult, is inclusive, bronk's exclusive, swearing its audience to a silence every bit as strenuous as his own. his refusal to be shaped by that world means that he is at once less and more radical than ashbery; that his revolution is also a reaction (as poetry approaches silence) means in a practical sense that bronk's career may be foreshortened in ways that ashbery's is not. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited bellamy, joe david. _american poetry observed: poets on their work_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1984. crase, douglas. "the prophetic ashbery." in _beyond amazement_. new essays on john ashbery_, ed. david lehman. ithaca: cornell up, 1980. 30-65. ernest, john. "william bronk's religious desire." _sagetrieb_. 7.3 (winter 1988): 145-152. howard, richard. "john ashbery." in _modern critical views: john ashbery_. ed. harold bloom. ny: chelsea house, 1985. 17-47. pinsky, robert. _the situation of poetry: contemporary poetry and its traditions_. princeton: princeton up, 1976. pollack, frederick. "poetry and politics." in _poetry after modernism_. ed. robert mcdowell. brownville, oregon: story line press, 1991. 5-55. weinfield, henry, ed. "a conversation with william bronk." _sagetrieb_. 7.3 (winter 1988): 17-44. morrison, 'review of _comedy/cinema/theory_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-morrison-review.txt review of _comedy/cinema/theory_ by james morrison department of english north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by james morrison, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. _comedy/cinema/theory_. edited by andrew horton berkeley: u of california p, 1991. [1] comedy's not pretty--as the title of an early-eighties steve martin album instructed us--and to judge from _comedy/cinema/theory_ it's not very funny either. peter brunette on the three stooges: "in the refusal to have meaning, to %make% sense, the stooges' violence in fact constitutes an anti-narrative. it is precisely their violence, as an 'originary' writing, that both allows for and destroys narrative . . ." (178). dana polan on hitchcock's _mr. and mrs. smith_: "screwball comedy bears the traces of confusions and contradictions in a later moment of capital when this commodification of desire reaches new extremes" (146). scott bukatman on jerry lewis: "the feeling of entrapment and of the impossibility of action or change arises agonizingly. within such spatiotemporal distension, the physical dominates character, as the individual is reduced to automaton . . . " (195). [2] bound to become a standard in university film-comedy courses, this collection of essays eschews lubitschean epigrams or stoogean banana-peels in favor of derridean stencils or heideggerean slip-knots. the volume is necessary and useful, and some of the essays are brilliant, but the effect is at times one of unmistakable homogeneity. in his introduction, the book's editor, andrew horton, makes much of the "non-essentialist . . . thus open-ended" (3) theoretical approaches the contributors favor, but by the time this panel of unreconstructed post-structuralists get through with it po-mo comedy looks a lot like any other po-mo genre (if post-modernism can be said to leave any genres in its wake, a question the contributors here never ask). it represses the feminine/maternal (as lucy fischer suggests); it articulates the phallocentrism of hollywood's unconscious (as peter lehman claims); its carnivalesque potential is either triumphantly realized (as in horton's own essay) or self-consciously stymied (as in ruth perlmutter's), thereby either subverting dominant ideology (as in stephen mamber's) or reproducing it (as in dana polan's). unapologetically recuperating the genre for post-structuralism (hereafter ps), the versions of comedy constructed in this volume tell as much about contemporary academic film criticism as they do about comedy itself. what the book most forcefully proves, finally, is that you can put the same top-spins on comedy that you can on, say, melodrama or horror or soap-opera--as if anyone ever doubted it. [3] in fact, some may well have doubted it, and a book like this one is comparatively late in coming, after a line of similar anthologies dealing with less problematic genres, perhaps because of an assumption that comedy does not readily lend itself to ps analysis since, in effect, comedy beats the critic to it. much eighties criticism of popular culture is heavily dependent on a conception of the text (and to a lesser extent of its consumer) as naive. theories of comedy, though, tend to emphasize the selfconsciousness of the genre, claiming that comedy by its very nature draws attention to its own stylistic operations, explicitly positions its audience in relation to it, catalogues all its own intertexts--performs, that is, the very functions criticism of popular-culture ordinarily arrogates to itself. lucy fischer's psychoanalytic discussion of "comedy and matricide," "sometimes i feel like a motherless child," in itself a fine essay, also exemplifies the effect of such critical claims to apprehending the "unconscious" level of a naive text in cultural criticism. her analysis of the howard hawks film _his girl friday_ (1940) finds in that text a particularly striking instance, because "the humorous text does %not% mandate [the mother's] presence through the exigencies of plot" (65), of the "elimination of the maternal" she sees as endemic to hollywood comedy. the "devaluation of the maternai" (66) emerges here as, if not exactly unconscious, at least "gratuitous" (65) in fischer's view. but fischer's argument depends on her repression of the text's keen self-consciousness about gender in, for example, its satirical references to the historical personae of its male actors, cary grant and ralph bellamy, or--more importantly--in its overt parody of its source, hecht and macarthur's _the front page_ (1928), by switching the gender of hildy (male in the original) and thereby commenting on the homosocial potential of the prior text. moreover, fischer's survey of "gratuitous comments that malign motherhood" (66) culminates with the most literal rendering in the film of the repression of the maternal: finally, when hildy's mother-in-law appears on the scene, walter orders his cronies to cart the lady away, at which point she is bodily carried from the room. these images (of kidnapping, sudden death, and hanging) are resonant metaphors for the fate of the mother in comedy itself. (66) fischer significantly fails to mention the *return* of the repressed mother (in the name, of course, of the law of the father) to seek revenge, a turning point in the film insofar as it is the *mother* who transgresses the text, insistently revealing what the narrative has concealed (an escaped prisoner in a roll-top desk). my point that fischer effaces the self-consciousness of the text itself hardly invalidates her argument or undermines its gravity. the question is whether such effacement is required of a certain mode of criticism and whether, in that case, such criticism can answer without concession the special demands of an especially self-conscious genre. [4] indeed, a number of the essays in this book, either explicitly or implicitly, present comedy as the decisive link between classical hollywood and the impulses of modernism/ post-modernism. brian henderson's study of "cartoon and narrative in the films of frank tashlin and preston sturges" argues that tashlin's cartoon-like ellipses open, on what must be seen as a most unexpected site, a "gateway to the modern cinema" (158). henderson's argument pivots on comedy's presumed greater formal liberty: initially unavailable to other genres, the adventurous, brazen ellipses or paralipses of a tashlin or a sturges, licensed for comic purposes by the genre itself, trickle down to those other genres or movements, gradually eroding the stodgy "classicism" of the whole tradition. one of henderson's examples: tashlin condenses the journey from chicago to las vegas by cutting to various background locations behind (and around) the characters . . . it recalls in this respect chuck jones's remarkable _duck amuck_ (1953) in which the backgrounds keep changing behind an increasingly frustrated daffy duck. (godard's multiple cuts to jean seberg against ever-changing backgrounds in a car trip across paris in _breathless_ is both cartoonlike in technique and a specific evocation of _hollywood or bust_ [the tashlin film].) (160) a more obvious precursor would be keaton's hyper-reflexive _sherlock jr._ (1923), but in fact henderson may be essentializing this technique in his analysis. after all, an example of the same device appears in no less a film than _casablanca_ (1942), a movie often cited as the key example of hollywood's "classicism." in the flashback sequence of that film, the dissolves among shifting backgrounds of paris (in a close-up of rick and elsa driving) similarly condense their journey--but rather than reading the shots as a modernist elision, the audience is likely to read them simply as an instance of visual shorthand. since, then, it would seem that such a device can be accommodated by classicism, the question becomes whether the distinction between "classical" and "modern" remains a useful category for film theory. yet it is a distinction on which henderson, like most of the contributors to the volume, insists, contrasting tashlin with sturges through it, for example: "[sturges's] ellipses are also classical: carefully built up to and returned from, never disrupting the viewer" (161). or again: several tashlin ellipses lie somewhere between the classical and the modern. as a result, like tashlin's work generally, they can be dismissed by classicists and dogmatic champions of modernism and valued by makers of cinematic modernism (godard) and those as much interested in the becoming of a movement as in its achievement (right-thinking critics). (157) the binarism raises another question: is tashlin's work of interest chiefly as an antecedent of godard, the high modernist? the implication that it may be is redolent of an ethics of modernist self-formation, along the lines of earlier studies such as those of the english music-hall tradition claiming legitimacy from t.s. eliot's interest in that hitherto "low" tradition. [5] the first half of the book consists of broad surveys of issues in film comedy: fischer's essay; noel carroll's hectic encyclopedia of the sight-gag; a catalogue by peter lehman of penis-jokes in movies; stephen mamber's "in search of radical metacinema"; and charles eidsvik's survey of eastern european comedy films. the title of mamber's essay indicates one of the recurrent concerns of the section, crucial to every essay but carroll's: is comedy "radical," in some way inherently subversive of an established order? in the introduction, horton implies that the question has already been settled in his reference to "comedy's . . . subversion of norms" (8). yet fischer and lehman see comedy's claim to subversive potential as illusory. lehman's thesis is that "one of the most important functions of comedy in cinema is to sneak a joke by almost unnoticed, make us laugh, and then allow us to forget that we ever thought something was funny" (58), while fischer, as we have seen, traces the process in comedy by which "woman--once the core of the joke structure (as the target of sexual desire)--is eventually eliminated from the scene entirely and replaced by the male auditor" (62). mamber and eidsvik are readier to grant comedy its radical force, eidsvik by way of the overtly political nature of eastern european comedy and mamber through the route of post-modern parody, finding the signifiers of kubrick's parodic _the shining_, for example, pointing "not to a failed horror film, as so many reviews stupidly labeled it, but to a deliberately subverted one" (84). [6] in the book's second half, contributors focus on individual films or important comic figures. william paul's "charles chaplin and the annals of anality" argues that previous critics have ignored the "vulgar humor" that is "central to chaplin's vision" (120), failing to emphasize "the raucously insistent lover body imagery" (117) of his work. replacing such imagery in what he takes to be its properly privileged place, paul finds that the key questions raised by chaplin's work are "how can upper and lower body be made whole? how can the spiritual grace we accord the eyes be made commensurate with the other organs that bring us into contact with the outside world . . . ?" (125). dana polan's "the light side of genius" reads _mr. and mrs. smith_ through the paradigms of screwball comedy as much as through those of hitchcockian authorship, concluding that "in the classical mode of hollywood production, it may well be that too much emphasis on the singularities of a career may lead us to overvalue the individual director as someone special, a figure outside the dominant paradigms" (150). ruth perlmutter's essay on woody allen's _zelig_ sees it as an example of parody as "autocritique" (207); bukatman's on lewis sees him as a key example of male hysteria; brunette's on the three stooges and horton's on dusan makavejev find varying degrees of comic subversion in these texts, while the volume is rounded out by henderson's fine essay on tashlin and sturges. [7] it is possible to point to weaknesses in individual contributions: carroll's is simply inconclusive; perlmutter's repeats without citation much of robert stam's treatment of the same film in his book on bakhtin and cinema, _subversive pleasures_ (1989); horton's idealizes the carnivalesque: "makavejev shows us that innocence can be protected through knowing laughter" (232). it is more useful, however, to identify assumptions shared across the range of contributors that confer on the book, for all the varied inflections of each critic, a certain ideological sameness, even perhaps a certain intellectual complacency. here the figure of bakhtin emerges as crucial, for well over half the contributors draw upon bakhtin's ideas to illuminate film comedy. it is not surprising at this stage in the evolution of ps to find bakhtin constructed as the touchstone for theories of the comic in popular culture: the surprise, i suppose, is that bakhtin does not figure prominently in *every* essay collected here. what is striking about the use made here of bakhtin--that enemy of the totality of genre, that celebrator of the disruptive potential of laughter--is how fully domesticated he has become in this book's version of him. after painstaking exegeses of bakhtin by horton, fischer, paul, brunette and others, we come to the one authentically comic moment in this volume when perlmutter blithely introduces us at the outset of her essay to one "mikhail bakhtin, russian literary theorist" (206)--which in this context falls on the ear rather like "gustave flaubert, the noted french author." reading this book, one is re-introduced to bakhtin so many times, each time as if it were the first, that one begins to dread the inexorable approach of this wan specter with its steady tread and its joyless homilies! [8] it's (possibly) unfair to criticize a collection for the uniformity of its critical practices (if it's a crime, nearly every anthology in film studies is guilty); and it's philistine to suppose that a book about comedy should be spirited or exuberant--that it's the task of criticism to share or even to be responsive to the superficial predispositions of its object. this book is an excellent contribution to film studies, and in pointing to its moral gravity and its analytic earnestness one risks being identified with a slob who grouses that those insufferable pointy-heads are at it again, ruining the belly-laughs for the rest of us. but the question i'm really asking is whether ps--especially given its enthusiastic valorization of carnival--is ever going to be capable of having any %fun%. matibag, 'self-consuming fictions: the dialectics of cannibalism in modern caribbean narratives', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-matibag-selfconsuming.txt self-consuming fictions: the dialectics of cannibalism in modern caribbean narratives by eugenio d. matibag iowa state university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by eugenio d. matibag, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. parce que nous vous haissons vous et votre raison, nous nous reclamons . . . du cannibalisme tenace. --aime cesaire, _cahier d'un retour au pays natal_ [1] howling words of fresh blood to spark the sacred fire of the world, aime cesaire in 1939 claimed kinship with madness and cannibalism. in cesaire's view, colonialism and western rationality had imposed a falsely barbaric identity --or, in effect, a non-identity--upon the peoples that europe had uprooted, subjugated, enslaved and otherwise mastered. against the eurocentrist representation of american otherness, cesaire, within his poem's ritual of parthenogenesis, prophetically identified with that otherness, subsuming it into his apocalyptic redefinition of afro-antillean selfhood. by such iconoclastic gestures, cesaire and numerous other writers of the region have demonstrated the manner in which poetic self-identification can mean empowerment in providing the starting point for resisting the cultural annihilation of colonialism. my aim in this essay will be to account for some of the ways in which cesaire's "cannibalisme tenace" has indeed persisted, tenaciously and obsessively, in modern caribbean narratives concerned with the question of critiquing and constructing a post-colonial cultural identity. [2] cesaire's affirmation of a unique caribbean identity raises certain questions that remain to be addressed. the afro-antillean self of %negritude% is constituted on the violent exclusion of all other cultural elements that have formed caribbean culture, including the contributions of indigenous, asian and even european inhabitants. (one is led to ask if a truly caribbean discourse of decolonization must negate or devalorize all such contributions.) the privileging of an african otherness furthermore entails the risk of reiterating the categorizations and exclusions inscribed in colonial discourse, for it was indeed the latter that hollowed out the representational space for what colonialism associated with "africa" (the irrational, savage and infrahuman).^1^ moreover, the concept of "identity" has itself become suspect in recent anti-essentialist theoretizations that have problematized the cartesian notion of the subject. jacques derrida has displaced the subject along with other "transcendental signifieds" that have supposedly governed the play of signification within a cultural system from an assumed metaphysical center (249). jacques lacan has demonstrated the "subversion of the subject" as a function continually constituted and undermined in the chain of signifiers and in the "dialectic of desire" to which the self is subject-ed by its accession to language.^2^ [3] the post-structuralist attack on the unified, self present and self-transparent cogito thus puts in question the simplistic assumptions underlying a call to define a specifically caribbean identity, but i would argue that it does not in the end disqualify that call. within a third world context in which we could situate such a claim to original identity, the postmodern announcement of the "death of the subject" sounds premature and betrays a complicity with world-capitalist systems that have already dispersed and canceled out individual subjectivity. in an emergent culture like that of the caribbean nations, the subject may represent a refuge and a source of resistance to hegemony. andreas huyssen in "mapping the postmodern" raises the questions of what subjectivity could mean precisely in the face of capitalist modernization: hasn't capitalist modernization itself fragmented and dissolved bourgeois subjectivity and authorship, thus making attacks on such notions somewhat quixotic? and . . . doesn't poststructuralism, where it simply denies the subject altogether, jettison the chance of challenging the %ideology of the subject% (as male, white, and middle-class) by developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity? (44) a certain caribbean discourse of decolonization, i would argue, has held out for a counter-movement to modernist fragmentation and dissolution in very its tendency to "develop alternative and different notions of subjectivity."^3^ in this discourse, far from having become obsolete, the subject has yet to come into its own. [4] appeals to integration of the divided colonial self have preoccupied caribbean writers who have attempted to vindicate their right to self-definition. this vindication itself joins the broader question of cultural syncretism and synthesis endemic to caribbean culture. in the "post negritude" approach of edouard glissant, for example, this identity is acknowledged to be an identity-in-process, a "becoming-antillean" through the operations of cultural synthesis creating an identity that is specifically a local production, not imposed from the outside.^4^ before glissant, edward brathwaite in his essay "timehri" (1970) articulated the experience, shared by a generation of west indian (principally british caribbean) writers in the early postcolonial period, of the individual's "dissociation of sensibility" and "rootlessness" in a fragmented creole culture incapable of grounding a firm sense of self (30). in brathwaite's account, such figures as c.l.r. james, george lamming and v.s. naipaul reflected on the dilemma of a post-plantation society in which the cultural contributions of africans, indians, europeans and asians had never been completely synthesized; in which individuals, living in such a heterogeneous, disunified world dominated by persistent colonial structures, feel cut off from any history and community they could call their own (29). in a more recent, "second phase" of caribbean "artistic and intellectual life," however, brathwaite sees an attempt on the part of caribbean writers to "transcend and heal" the problem of dissociation, the nonidentity and fragmentation produced by and under colonialism (31). brathwaite's solution for cultural rootlessness calls for a search and reintegration of forgotten origins, such as those "inscriptions" which are the %timehri% themselves: these are "rock signs, painting, petroglyphs; glimpses of a language, glitters of a vision of a world, scattered utterals of a remote %gestalt%; but still there, near, potentially communicative" (40). [5] but the %timehri% remain ambiguous, indecipherable and scattered. they alone cannot found a distinct caribbean identity, although they may serve as a point of departure. it is another caribbean trope, that of "cannibalism" and its ramifications, as i hope to show, which provides a more fruitful focus on the manner in which recent caribbean texts have undertaken a search for identity in the traces left by antillean "forerunners," while at the same time ironizing the implicit search for origins. in claiming this, i do not mean to elevate cannibalism into a master trope but rather to use it as a sign of radical difference whose reinscription, in caribbean discourse, opens up new approaches to the question of identity. [6] as "the mark of unregenerate savagery" (hulme 3), "cannibalism" displays the uncanny quality of binary oppositions: it is a sign both of animalistic nature and cultural practice; of affection and aggression; of transgression and consecration; of indigenous custom and european imputation. in remarking "cannibalism," caribbean texts participate in a common intent (1) to invert and reinscribe the hierarchies implicit in a colonial discourse on cannibalism; (2) to create a synthesis of disparate cultural elements, but especially those linked with the caribs as ancestors, in the common impulse to decolonize an autocthonous cultural identity; (3) to critique the metaphysics of that synthesis precisely by ironizing the notion of synthesis; and (4) to open up, by that critique, to new and empowering articulations of the subject. points (3) and (4) imply that the %mestizaje% or transculturation in caribbean discourse leads first not so much to a synthesis or a plenitude but to an annihilation of the subject, a strategy that constitutes the first defense against the colonial imposition of identity and which in turn produces what roberto gonzalez echevarria has called "a void where elements meet and cancel each other to open up the question of being" (10). what is lost in such a cancellation is a mystified notion of identity as grounded in primordial origins; what is gained is a certain self consciousness and freedom for a process of identity-creation that establishes subtle links with latent social forces in the present. [7] within the european discourse of colonialism,^5^ the very name of the caribbean has linked the region and its peoples with the image of cannibalism. working within a framework more encompassing than that of the eurocentrist perspective, antonio benitez rojo evokes a "grandiose epic of the caribs" as a part of "caribbean discourse," an epic in which are projected %las islas arahuacas como objeto de deseo caribe . . . las matanzas, el glorioso canibalismo ritual de hombres y palabras, caribana, caribe, carib, calib, canib, canibal, caliban; y finalmente el mar de los caribes, desde la guayana a las islas virgenes%. (xviii) note that in benitez rojo's linguistic morphology, whose transformations are catalogued above, the european impositions are mixed in with the native self-designations. together, they suggest the "discursive morphology" of "cannibalism" pursued by peter hulme in _colonial encounters_ (16). [8] this discursive morphology may be continued in an examination of those modern caribbean texts, among others, that address the legacy of shakespeare's _the tempest_, in which the new world cannibal makes his appearance as caliban. in his influential _caliban_ (1971), roberto fernandez retamar asserts that "el %caribe%, por su parte, dara el %canibal%, el antropofago, el hombre bestial situado irremediablemente al margen de la civilizacion, y a quien es menester combatir a sangre y fuego" (14). this image of the american as carib/caliban/cannibal served as a weapon of ideological legitimation within colonial discourse. as manifested in _the tempest_, the dichotomy opposing the "natural" caliban against the "cultured" prospero assured the european audiences and readers of the superiority of their civilization and the legitimacy of their drive to colonial expansion. [9] to reverse the hierarchy of values implicit in this vilification, latin american intellectuals, in fernandez retamar's view, should realize that it is not rodo's ariel but rather caliban who is to be "asumido con orgullo como nuestro simbolo," and consequently rethink their history from the viewpoint of this "otro protagonista" (_caliban_ 1971; 29, 35). "cannibalism" thus receives a new function in this negation of the negation; the dialectic of cannibalism merges into the dialectic of calibanism. the latter dialectic has already been discussed at length elsewhere,^6^ but what is pertinent to the present re reading is the way in which the image of cannibalism is remade, in calibanism, into a trope of writing which redefines the latin american self's relation with what is now a %european% other, precisely by a valorizing and recharging of the denomination of alterity it had received from europe. what was mistakenly accepted as a literal reference to barbaric practice or its "authentic" image is becoming refunctioned as a literary figure. [10] despite the possible pejorative associations to which this refunctioning may give rise, calibanism does not imply neo-primitivism or misology; on the contrary, it may involve the most sophisticated internationalist viewpoint, one capable of mastering and then relativizing or deflating all partial nationalist or ethnocentric viewpoints from a more systemic or global perspective. fernandez retamar is conscious of this epistemological advantage when, in 1985, he cites the remarks of his mexican commentator jorge alberto manrique: it would be well to remember, as borges himself has said, that vis-a-vis . . . [the] reading of europe, he takes the sniping stance of an ironist, "from without." the best of his work is made of that: and in it can be recognized an attitude of caliban. . . .^7^ [11] george lamming had already refitted caliban to other roles in his recounting of caribbean history from this once subjugated, now revindicated perspective. "if prospero could be seen as the symbol of the european imperial enterprise," writes lamming in _the pleasures of exile_, "then caliban should be embraced as the continuing possibility of a profound revolutionary change initiated by toussaint l'ouverture in the haitian war of independence" (6 [unnumbered]). indeed, the figure of the haitian revolutionary leader effected and continues to represent both an overturning of the european-imposed hierarchies and a disruptive intervention in the continuum of colonial oppression, as the novelist proposes in the very title of his chapter on toussaint and c.l.r. james's _the black jacobins_, namely, "caliban orders history" (118). [12] on the other hand, "cannibalism" persists in the early modern period as an image of either barbarity or aggression associated with rebellious african slaves as characters. among cayetano coll y toste's _leyendas puertorriquenas_ (1924-1925) is the story of "carabali," the runaway plantation slave who may have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive in his mountain cave and who became a kind of avenging phantom in the puerto rican popular imagination. in the folktales of lydia cabrera's _cuentos negros de cuba_ (1940), most of which are yoruban in origin,^8^ cannibalism is presented as a primitive practice associated with the animal realm ("noguma") or an unacceptable form of sacrifice ("tatabisako"). in alejo carpentier's _el reino de este mundo_ (1949), the slave ti noel fantasizes a cannibalistic feast of white and bewigged heads served up by "un cocinero experto y bastante ogro" in what amounts to an anticipation of the imminent saint-domingue revolt (10). in coll y toste and carpentier, cannibalism symbolizes black defiance or rebellion against the white colonial world; in cabrera's tales set in an afro-cuban context, it symbolizes evil and social otherness. whether practiced, imagined or rejected, "cannibalism" in these narratives also serves to define the particular identity of individual african slaves (or their descendants) as literary characters whose psychic and linguistic resources for survival provide a paradigm for the possible caribbean self.^9^ [13] whereas such writers have sought to incorporate the african contribution into a syncretic caribbean identity, later writers have sought origins for this identity in a recollection of the original caribs and their descendants. what nevertheless stands out in a re-reading is the remoteness or virtual absence of true carib ancestors. in carpentier's _el siglo de las luces_ (1962) the protagonist esteban, meditating on the possible foundations for an american selfhood, recalls the legend of the pre-columbian carib migration to a "promised land" lying northward of the continent. the recollection suggests a search for alternatives to the debacle of "enlightenment" in the new world. finding himself at the venezuelan bocas del dragon, where the fresh water meets the salt, esteban remembers the migration as another search for the promised land, an american exodus of "the horde" under whose conquest of the islands "[t]odos los varones de otros pueblos eran exterminados, implacablemente, conservandose sus mujeres para la proliferacion de la raza conquistadora" (172). the northward migration is of course thwarted by the encounter of the aboriginals with the europeans: "los invasores se topaban con otros invasores . . . que llegaban a punto para aniquilar un sueno de siglos. la gran migracion ya no tendria objeto: el imperio del norte pasaria a manos de los inesperados" (173). esteban's account of "la gran migracion fracasada"--an alternative history decentering the historical narrative of the west--reminds us that the europeans were themselves as much a conquering tribe as were the aboriginal forefathers. the caribs stand for an unrealized historical possibility, but also suggest that the struggle for freedom and self-determination is as much motivated by utopian or messianic impulses as by class or "tribal" antagonisms. [14] in any case, the caribs of esteban's late-eighteenth century present provide no unequivocal model for resistance against colonialization, for a carib delegation has already come to guadeloupe in order to apply for citizenship in the french republic. the application prompts commissioner victor hugues to show una mayor simpatia hacia los caribes que hacia los negros: le agradaban por su orgullo, su agresividad, su altanera divisa de 'solo el caribe es gente'--y mas ahora que llevaban cucardas tricolores en el amarre del taparrabo. (109)^10^ representing a beleaguered people in the process of submitting itself to the colonial order, the delegation becomes a walking myth, wearing the very symbol of the french republic (the tricolor cockade) on their breechcloths, their very pride and aggressivity accommodated into the self-representation of hegemonic discourse.^11^ [15] the beginnings of this incorporating process, by which colonial discourse itself cannibalized the specificity and strength of its indigenous adversaries, are revealed in carpentier's _el arpa y la sombra_ (1979), a fictionalized biography of christopher columbus. in the novel, the "real" caribs are conspicuously absent from carpentier's "transcriptions" of columbus's diary and ship's log--the first productions of colonial discourse. columbus of course believed that he had reached the lands of the great khan, already anticipating the discovery of "islands without men, people without hair, and inhabitants born with tails," all previously "described" by marco polo (williams 19). carpentier's columbus records that he heard "indian" reports of "tierras pobladas de canibales que tenian un ojo solo en cabeza de perros--monstruos que se sustentaban de sangre y carne humana" (138). this seminal misreading may have originated in a linguistic misunderstanding on columbus's part: for columbus, who did not understand the indian language, native references to the hostile %cariba% may have suggested %caniba%, or, the people of the khan, but also %cane%, the spanish word for "dog, suggesting, as tzvetan todorov puts it, that "these persons have dogs' heads . . . with which, precisely, they eat people" (30). carpentier thus retraces the process by which the india of spices becomes, for columbus, the india of the cannibals, although nowhere does columbus claim to have observed native acts of anthropophagy (162). yet it is precisely this imputation which justifies, both in columbus's mind and in discursive practice, the indians' conquest and enslavement in the following manner. [16] as the historical columbus gradually came to realize that the true wealth of the west indies lay not in gold but rather in the labor they could provide to the expanding empire, he would eventually describe the "cannibalistic" caribs as a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned, and very intelligent, and who, when they have got rid of their cruel habits to which they have been accustomed, will be better than any other kind of slaves. (cited in williams 31) the west indian slave trade begins on columbus's third voyage in 1498 with the transport of six hundred indians to spain (williams 32). at about the same time, the spanish monarchs, enjoined by the pope, issued a decree providing for the conversion of the indians to catholicism and for the consideration of converted indians as subjects of the spanish crown. these indian converts could then be considered "free" to be hired as wage laborers within the encomienda system, although not finally exempted from its inhuman demands and conditions. the decree paved the way for the legalization of the slave trade by the requisition, for it implied that the "cannibals," those bellicose indians who refused conversion and resisted spanish rule, could be legitimately punished with enslavement (williams 32; arens 44-54; todorov 46-47). [17] in carpentier's reconstructions of the nineteenth century postulation for columbus's canonization under leon xiii, the devil's advocate of the vatican's congregation of rites cites jules verne's opinion that columbus identified cannibals in the west indies without having encountered a single one; the postulation for sainthood was finally denied on the basis of columbus's monumental misreading and on the grounds of his having instituted a slave trade in the new world (_el arpa_ 207). columbus has been posthumously chastised, but not without having initiated a discourse practice relegating the caribbean natives, by denomination and defamation, to an infrahuman realm. [18] in _voyage in the dark_ (1934) by the antiguan emigree jean rhys, the caribs become a symbol of colonial subjugation and figure the psychological and transcendental homelessness of rhys' protagonist, anna morgan. in this novel, the process of constructing a post-colonial feminine subject is seemingly foreclosed by a history that has offered no effective escape from colonial domination. anna is a dance-hall girl of caribbean birth living in england. jobless, nearly penniless, often intoxicated, she drifts from affair to affair as the sexual toy of affluent and influential men. on one occasion, while lying sick in bed, writing and drinking vermouth, she pauses to recall the words of a song she once heard in a glasgow music hall: "'and drift, drift / legions away from despair.'" in her subsequent free-association, the words link up with a reference, apparently taken from an encyclopedia, to the caribs: it can't be 'legions'. 'oceans', perhaps. 'oceans away from despair.' but it's the sea, i thought. the caribbean sea. 'the caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce. as lately as the beginning of the nineteenth century they raided one of the neighbouring islands, under british rule, overpowered the garrison and kidnapped the governor, his wife and three children. they are now practically exterminated. the few hundred that are left do not intermarry with the negroes. their reservation, at the northern end of the island, is known as the carib quarter.' they had, or used to have, a king. mopo, his name was. here's to mopo, king of the caribs! but, they are now practically exterminated. 'oceans away from despair. . . .' (105) the passage suggests that the caribs might have served as a symbol of defiance, and even of feminine defiance, against a patriarchal system of domination that has extended itself across the seas. but because the caribs are "now practically exterminated," their king a sad figure of mockery, history has lost a chance at redemption. the caribs have been vanquished, drastically reduced in numbers, thereafter relocated on the northern end of what is probably dominica, where their resistant ferocity has been successfully contained. the weight of the past hangs like a nightmare on anna's brain; the fate of the caribs prefigures the protagonist's own victimage and despair when her lover decides to abandon her just before she must seek an abortion. [19] the historical pattern of carib resistance and european conquest provides the unconscious subtext for anna's forlornness. the first attempt of the english to settle in the west indies in saint lucia in 1605 met with the fierce opposition of its carib inhabitants, as occurred in grenada in 1609 (williams 79; cf. arens 45). but the colonizers succeeded in defeating numerous indian uprisings in the islands and in exterminating the caribs or removing them to dominica or st. vincent. in grenada, the last group of caribs to resist the french invaders hurled themselves from the top of a hill that would henceforth be known as %le morne des sauteurs% (williams 95). in both anna's experience and that of the caribs, as this juxtaposition suggests, history provides no viable means for challenging to domination other than the self-destructive alternatives of suicide and infanticide (cf. lamming 123-124). [20] attempts to revive the carib heritage in other caribbean texts may be read as attempts to redress the defamation the caribs received in colonial discourse. but in a present that is, like anna morgan's, cut off from all autocthonous origins, such efforts serve more certainly to re-open the dialogue on national culture and identity and therein entertain possibilities of new articulations of the self with its others. the novel _beka lamb_ (1982) by the belizean author zee edgell tells us that members of the black creole community "seldom married among the caribs, although these two groups shared, in varying degrees, a common african ancestry" (31-32). edgell's attribution of a "common african ancestry" to carib and creole alike may seem surprising, but the narrator later explains that those called "caribs" by the belizeans are in fact the descendants of escaped african slaves who arrived in st. vincent. contradicting rhys' assumptions concerning the caribs' refusal of miscegenation, edgell's blacks in st. vincent "mingled with the %caribans%, originally from south america, adopting much of their language and some of their ways, but keeping many of their african traditions" (68, my emphasis). such an intermingling of races and cultures suggests the possibility of a generalized synthesis originating in the very displacement and confusion of origins. [21] but belizean resistance to such a synthesis persists. beka's mother shares the creole prejudices against the present-day caribs; for her, the caribs of stann creek are a corrupting influence on beka and her aunt tama for having taught them %obeah%, or magic arts. granny ivy, somewhat more generous with the caribs, says that "'i don't believe carib people sacrifice children'" and reminds the other women that the stann creek families sent food up to belize during the 1931 hurricane, although she must add that "'i am not saying i could marry a carib man. . .'" (67). the women's prejudice toward the caribs puzzles beka, and when she asks her mother why creoles refuse to mix with them, her mother ventures to explain that "'maybe it's because carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world'" (70). representing a primitive and ignominious past for the creoles, the caribs have been excluded from the mainstream of belizean society, marginalized and contained within isolated pockets of the country, called "the bush" (70). whereas the narrative keeps the caribs at a distance, the schoolgirl beka has at least made an initial attempt to reconnect with the cast-off part of her belizean heritage they represent, an issue that is especially significant as the belizeans approach the dawning of their own nationalist independence. beka's questions, however, lead not to an immediate synthesis of cultural elements within a projected belizean cultural identity, but to a certain transcendence in the awareness that belizeans, in living a unique history that has been preconditioned but not totally imposed from the outside, are different from the british. defining this difference would largely consist recognizing the belizeans' difference from the caribs within the national community but also in recognizing common interests shared with minority group. [22] the caribs reappear in _the whole armour_ (1982) by the guyanese novelist wilson harris, but, again, they are no more than a representation, this time played by a band of roving carnival rousters. these rousters dressed as caribs are encountered in the jungle by the protagonist cristo, who is a fugitive from the law, accused of a murder he did not commit. cristo later reveals to his lover, sharon, that his brief meeting with "the caribs" has thrust him into a strange shifting play of identification with the social other. covered with mud during his flight and remembering himself as misrecognized by the "carib" players, cristo wildly reflects that "in the flying rush they assumed i was one of them . . . one of this . . . shattered tribe. a terrible broken family" (340). the encounter with the "shattered tribe" has shaken the structure of cristo's sense of identity. cristo's reflection in the stream momentarily restores him to his old self, but he later insists that "i was the last member, remaining behind, of the flying band. every guilty body rolled into one. vanquished as well as slave, rapist, carib, monster, anything you want to think . . . ." (345). [23] caught up in the flying constellation of images, a disoriented cristo identifies his alleged criminality with an entire history of caribbean enslavement and injustice. the vision of vanquished ancestors furthermore catalyzes cristo's sense of belonging to a community or "tribe" imperilled by its own violent irresponsibility, in which originated the murders for which he is falsely accused. although believed dead, cristo will return, christlike, to his pomeroon village in order to establish his innocence and to restore his community's shattered equilibrium with what amounts to his own sacrifice.^12^ whereas the caribs are absent, even parodied in this account, they provide, under conditions of rootlessness and chaos, a simulacrum of an imagined community that supplants the actual fragmented community, and thereby ground a necessary fiction of personal fulfillment. [24] as other caribbean writings reveal, the remembrance of the caribs suggests another, possibly more provocative association with the cannibalistic act itself. the true extent to which cannibalism was practiced by the caribs remains unclear; the anthropologist w. arens, relying upon historical accounts and noting the imperialist biases and confusions, probably overstates his case in pointing out the absence of "adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society" (21). regardless of the existence or non-existence of such documentation, a number of twentieth-century caribbean narratives have taken up the image of cannibalism that has been handed down in caribbean discourse and turned it into a trope of identity and a literary mechanism of self-individuation. these narratives in general bear out the anthropologist peggy reeves sanday's assertion that although cannibalism is not a "unitary phenomenon but varies with respect to both cultural content and meaning" (x), it is predicated upon the symbolic oppositions by which "self is related to the other" (xii). cannibalism in sanday's view is a "cultural system" and "primarily a medium for . . . messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order" (3). its symbolism participates in a dynamic of "dialectical opposition" (35); seen cross-culturally, it may symbolize a social evil, express a desire for revenge against one's enemies, renew a generation's ties with its ancestors, provide a mythological charter for the social order, or function as "part of the cultural construction of personhood" (25-26). [25] freud provides a bridge between anthropology and psychoanalysis in drawing an analogy between cannibalism, as he understood it, and the oral stage of psychosexual development. in oral incorporation and its correlates of desire, destruction and the installment of the object within the self, the established object-relations and phantasies harken back to a prehistoric stage of human social development. phylogeny prefigures ontogeny especially in the "totemic meal" of _totem and taboo_, whereby the primal father is murdered and devoured by the sons of the "horde," who, in the act of patricidal consumption, incorporate and sublimate his desire, strength and authority into their own structure of identity.^13^ [26] one story among lydia cabrera's _cuentos negros de cuba_, "bregantino bregantin," illustrates this freudian dialectic with a form of cannibalism exemplifying none other than self-consumption. the story tells of el toro, the bull, who after capturing and hanging the king from a tree, imprisons the queen in a "dungeon or latrine" without giving her any means of sustaining herself save that of eating cockroaches. when the supply of these runs out, she sees herself reducida al extremo de devorarse a si misma, comenzando por los pies, de dificil masticacion, y rindiendo el ultimo suspiro por envenamiento, en el colmo de la indignacion mas justa. (17) an impossible cannibalism, but nonetheless a paradigmatic one that foregrounds both the literariness of its treatment and the possibility of considering anthropophagy as an act of autophagy. el toro takes the place of the now executed king and queen and becomes a tyrant in his own right, claiming all the women of his kingdom for himself, killing all of his male sons, outlawing the use of masculine-ending nouns, and shouting from his mountain top: "--<<yo, yo, yo, yo. yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, / no hay hombre en el mundo mas que yo . . .!>>" (25). the sovereign self of el toro reigns supreme until the day one of his sons, saved from the usual infanticide, rises up to defeat him in bloody combat. "y con esto," the stories concludes, "la naturaleza recobro de nuevo sus derechos y nacieron varones en cocozuma" (28). here, the freudian dialectic adumbrated in _totem and taboo_ is redistributed into new functors: one son stands in for the primal horde but does not literally consume his own father, for indeed it is the latter who has defeated the king and allowed the queen to consume herself. but true to the freudian ur-plot, the "father's" law and tyranny is installed in the symbolic order perpetuated by el toro, leaving the task of restoring a "natural" cultural order to his righteously rebellious son. [27] this ritual--combining aggression, incorporation, negation and individuation--provides a new kind of anchoring point for the definition of identity. its dynamic is reinscribed in caribbean narratives appearing in brathwaite's second phase of "transcending and healing," novels in which i will now remark the dialectical oppositions motivating cannibalism as a trope of cultural devalorization and reordering. [28] in his prologue to the novels comprising _the guyana quartet_, which includes _the whole armour_ and _palace of the peacock_ (1960), wilson harris avers that the concrete metaphor validating the particular violations of realist convention in the latter novel is none other than a "carib/cannibal bone-flute" which was "hollowed from the bone of an enemy in time of war": flesh was plucked and consumed and in the process secrets were digested. spectres arose from, or reposed in, the flute [which] became the home or curiously mutual fortress of spirit between enemy and other . . . . (9-10) a symbol of "'transubstantiation in reverse,'"^14^ here the flute codifies and thereby mediates the subject-object polarities within a projected cultural system. sanday's exemplification of how "a self is made" in cannibal practice elucidates this mediation: the flesh or bone marrow is a tangible conduit of social and psychological attributes that constitute the subject by either affirming or negating the relationships that join or separate the subject vis-a vis the other. thus, parts of the body may be consumed to imbibe the characteristics or the fertile force of the other; or, consumption may break down and destroy characteristics of the other in the self. (36) harris's bone-flute becomes, in the light of this explication and his own, a figure of relational self-making and unmaking, one of the "convertible imageries" serving to motivate a ritual of "complex regeneration" enacted in all four novels of _the guyana quartet_. what harris refers to as "the second death" in his prologue is the death of the reader's or character's self that undergoes a ritual sacrifice in "a fiction that seeks to consume its own biases through many resurrections of paradoxical imagination" (9). _palace of the peacock_ in particular is a phantasmagorical narrative in which a crew of conquistador-like colonizers arrive at their first destination only to discover that "not so long ago this self-same crew had been drowned to a man in the rapids below the mission" (37). upon this violation of realist verisimilitude, the narrative establishes an "unreal" and psychologically unsettling perspective that shuttles back and forth across the barrier separating life and death, self and other. faced with a "second death" when their boat threatens to capsize in the rapids, the crew members confront, in effect, the imminent dissolution of their own monadic subjectivities: the monstrous thought came to them that they had been shattered and were reflected again in each other at the bottom of the stream. the unceasing reflection of themselves in each other made them see themselves everywhere save where they thought they had always stood. (80) [29] grasping himself as both dead and alive and as self and other in the specular imago of the self-as-other, each character gradually loses hold on his former sense of a self-sufficient or autonomous identity. as the crew members pursue a fleeing amerindian tribe they intend to capture (and which symbolizes for harris an eclipsed other to be reincorporated into the tradition [7]), they find themselves stripped of the egoistic fictions of self that motivated the pursuit, swept away from themselves in a turbulent stream of becoming: "they saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together" (62). in the "second death," pursuer and pursued are now embraced in what the narrator can only stammeringly refer to as "'the truest substance of life,'" "'the unity of being'" in which "'fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance'" (52). [30] the novel's conclusion presents the apotheosis of a blind conquistador-captain donne who, paradoxically, can see more clearly than ever before: [donne] looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself. he focused his blind eye with all penitent might on this pinpoint star and reflection as one looking into the void of oneself upon the far greater love and self-protection of the universe. (107) here is the poetry of a cosmic self that sees its objectified and distanced former self as both a "void" and a kind of door of perception, now cleansed and opened upon the infinite. its transcendent vision of "love and self protection" has dissolved the fragile structure of earthly desires and, with that structure, the fictive boundaries of the narcissistic self. in an ecstatic identification with otherness and others, the higher self realizes that it had always been an other to itself and that the imagined riches of el dorado were in reality the spirit's patrimony. this identification is affirmed by novel's last sentence: "each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed" (117). [31] "cannibalism" in _palace of the peacock_ thus mediates a nostalgic desire or spiritual aspiration to incorporate oneself into a lost primordial unity. a similar nostalgia or aspiration motivates the plot of _felices dias, tio sergio_ (1986) by magali garcia ramis, but that desire progresses within a more historically determinate setting and toward a more explicitly political statement of commitment. in garcia ramis's novel a young girl named lidia narrates her experience of growing-up middle-class in the puerto rico of munoz marin and amidst the entrepreneurial "fat cows" of the operation bootstrap era. lidia's family expresses a typically bourgeois desire to be prospero in their unreflecting imitation of european culture and scorn for all things latin american; they inhabit a house where, because "todo lo heredado era europeo y todo lo porvenir era norteamericano, . . . no podiamos saber quienes eramos" (153). the family's adults are proud of their hard won success, intolerant of homosexuals and atheists, and fiercely suspicious of the nationalists and communists. one could add that the "nordomania" uncritically embraced by lidia's family exemplifies a more general process operant "inside" a dominant culture that pushes all that it perceives as "outside"--primitive, inferior and other--into the margins defining its own closed cultural space. the family's constant preoccupation with cleanliness and hygiene, as well as repeated references to the adults' medical professions, parallels a fear of contamination by unorthodox ideas that would challenge the manichean distinction between good and evil upon which their own sense of identity is based (28). [32] and suddenly, into this "perfectly ordered and unchangeable world" (153) comes tio sergio, who signifies for the narrator a stimulating and disturbing presence in the santurce household. soon it is sergio who initiates the children in their study of art, including the painting of ollers; who learns to communicate with them in their "simian-spanish" dialect drawn from tarzan comic books; and whose frustrated affair with the family's maid-servant introduces the mysteries of sexuality to the spying lidia. it is sergio, too, who arranges a funeral service for a disappeared cat named daruel. the funeral service is followed by a "mortuary meal" that includes cookies in the shape of a cat and sergio's explanation, that algunos salvajes se comian a los jefes de otras tribus y a los misioneros para adquirir su sabiduria y su fuerza; nos dijo que era algo simbolico y muy antiguo el que nos comiesemos las galletitas como si estuviesemos metiendonos por dentro todo lo que queriamos a daruel. (23) [33] aside from parodying the catholic communion ceremony, the mortuary or totemic meal anticipates the manner in which lidia will have seen in tio sergio a new ego ideal that she will incorporate into her personal identity. for once sergio has left, lidia discovers that he was "un hombre casi al margen de la sociedad," one who discussed literature with trotskyites and attempted to form a labor union, one who collected funds for the algerian resistance and was probably, in addition to everything else, a homosexual (154). above all, lidia recalls, sergio was a man who nurtured a dream of puerto rican independence but despaired of doing anything to realize the dream. having brought into the closed conservative household an element of otherness and an example of tolerance for difference that the conservative matriarchs of the family would not have otherwise permitted, sergio has introduced to lidia and her cousin enrique an expanded language of "native" possibilities with which to forge an identity. having symbolically acquired "his wisdom and his strength," the cousins go out on their own to discover who they are: con todas nuestras contradicciones, . . . ibamos a circulos de estudio, comprabamos libros de historia y poesia puertorriquena, sonabamos con descubrir yacimientos de los indios tainos, pegabamos pasquines que anunciaban marchas, y marchabamos lentamente en busqueda de nuestra puertorriquenidad. (152-153) by the time that lidia is caught up in the dream of discovering her "puertorriquenidad," she has incorporated the rebellious anti-colonial spirit of tio sergio into her own, renewed sense of puerto rican selfhood. [34] in recodifying and decodifying the bourgeois ideology concretized in puerto rican institutions, garcia ramis's novel rehearses a repeatable process by which caribbean discourse may be seen as demythifying the language of prospero and giving a hearing to caliban. george lamming anticipated this move when he wrote that we shall never explode prospero's old myth until we christen language afresh; until we show language as the product of human endeavour; until we make available to all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves. (118-119) far from "languageless," it turns out, caliban does speak, and his profit on language is more than that of knowing how to curse. in the resurrection of the carib epic, some of whose linguistic transformations and discursive ramifications have been traced in this essay, "cannibalism" explodes the myth of prospero by devouring, engulfing and digesting his secrets, christens language afresh by giving voice to collective memory and subjugated others. [35] a metaphor of incorporation and/or differentiation, of subjective self-divisions and mergings with respect to an other, cannibalism thus de-defines and re-defines the divisory line between self and other, with the consequence of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity. in re-priming the nature-culture dialectic that had been fixed by colonialism to prospero's (and ariel's) advantage, the discourse of cannibalism furthermore ironizes its own search for origins by thematizing the irrecuperable loss of the caribs or other "cannibals" as exemplars of rebellious subjectivity. yet the caribs--introjected as a disturbing element of difference into the metonymic series of displacements, interrupting the flow of colonial discursive self reproduction--serve to open up the "search for identity" to new, often unexpected articulations of the self with an other and with others. forming a sort of counter-tradition, cannibalism thus re-defined and re-elaborated grounds a new, founding myth of caribbean identity and dynamic self definition by proposing alternative ego ideals or object choices: the tribal or cosmic self of wilson harris; the nationalistic self of garcia ramis. [36] the issue is of course not merely academic. when ernesto "che" guevara called for the development of an organic individual willing to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the collective good, guevara called for nothing less than the creation of "el hombre nuevo del socialismo." in guevara's conception, such an individual would be committed to the revolutionary struggle to leave behind the realm of necessity for the realm of freedom: a pesar de su aparente estandarizacion, es mas completo; a pesar de la falta del mecanismo perfecto para ello, su posibilidad de expresarse y hacerse sentir en el aparato social es infinitamente mayor. (10) guevara here undermines the old dichotomy of "bourgeois individualism" vs. "socialist standardization" by the qualifier of an "apparent" standardization. the individual's self-sacrifice to the interests and ends of a social group in reality entails the transcendence of individualism, but such that this transcendence means the cancellation and sublation of "individuality" in its illusory autonomy and limited rationality and the attainment of an authentic freedom through a more clearly comprehended collective praxis. both anticipating and elaborating guevara's notion of "el hombre nuevo," a dialectics of cannibalism works through one of the paths by which fiction consumes fictions, including the reigning fictions of selfhood. devouring such fictions in the process, we may, like harris's boatmen, come to see ourselves everywhere save where we thought we had always stood. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ here i rely on paul brown's definition of "colonial discourse," exemplified in his reading of _the tempest_, as "a domain or field of linguistic strategies operating within particular areas of social practice to effect knowledge and pleasure, being produced by and reproducing or reworking power relations between classes, genders and cultures" (69, n.3). ^2^ lacan, "the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious" in _ecrits: a selection_, 292-325. for an overview of lacanian themes, see rosalind coward and john ellis, _language and materialism: developments in semiology and the theory of the subject_, 93-121. ^3^ for an overview of postmodern perspectives on the subject and a theory of the subject's persistent efficacy despite its deconstruction, see ihab hassan, _selves at risk: patterns of quest in contemporary american letters_, especially the chapter on "the subject of quest: self, other, difference" (32-45). ^4^ in _les discours antillais_, glissant insists that synthesis is not a "bastardization" or adulteration of cultures; it is rather "un devenir antillais" and an inseparable part of "le drame planetaire": la vocation de synthese ne peut que constituer avantage, dans un monde voue a la synthese et au <<contact de civilisations>>. l'essentiel est ici que les antillais ne s'en remettent pas a d'autres du soin de formuler leur culture. et que cette vocation de synthese ne donne pas dans l'humanisme ou s'engluent les betas. (16) ^5^ for peter hulme in _colonial encounters_, colonial discourse is a "monologue." to give an example, hulme makes reference to the engraving by van der straet depicting the encounter between the masculine, civilized, clothed and armed amerigo vespucci with the feminine, primitive, naked and unarmed indigenous figure representing the new world. hulme comments that "such a monologic encounter [as here represented] can only masquerade as a dialogue: it leaves no room for alternative voices" (9). but this view of colonial discourse is too monolithic and self-defeating, for it leaves no chance for the opening of the text to a reading of its "unconscious" substrata or to the encounter of different voices that the text must master. my interpretation of colonial discourse, supported by paul brown's definition of the term, would stress, rather than its monologic nature, its conflictive plurality and dynamic of self-repression which only at a later moment result in the effect of monologism. ^6^ in the glossary of _les discours antillais_ (1981), for example, edouard glissant includes the following entry: "%*caliban.* cannibale. shakespeare nous a donne le mot, nos ecrivains l'ont refait%" (496). in glissant's view, caribbean writers have questioned the colonial "sanction of the nature-culture equilibrium" posed in the hierarchical identification of prospero with culture and caliban with nature. inasmuch as the culture-nature hierarchy implants a mimetic desire in the "natural" caliban, _the tempest_ reveals the way in which european colonial values, once institutionalized and naturalized within colonial practice, set the norm for social behavior and thereby alienate the consciousness of those whom the colonizer has mastered and seduced to his way of thinking. for caribbean writers who repudiate this european prescription of identity, the alternative would be to acknowledge and affirm the appellation %caliban%, once a term of opprobrium, and to transform it into a symbol of a new, non-colonized self. in the movement of black affirmation called %negritude%, african and caribbean writers, as charlotte bruner has explained, "christen themselves as caliban and reshape this image, this black mask, to fit themselves" (245). ^7^ jorge alberto manrique, "ariel entre prospero y caliban," _revista de la universidad de mexico_ (february march 1972), 70. cited in roberto fernandez retamar, _caliban and other essays_ (54). ^8^ according to fernando ortiz's introduction to the collection (10). ^9^ wilson harris makes this argument in _tradition, the writer and society_ when he writes that the individual slave may be visualized "as possessing the grassroots of western individuality" (33), which means an emphatic rejection of "the sovereign individual" who lives an illusion of freedom and self-sufficiency "by conditioning himself to function solely within his contemporary situation more or less as the slave appears bound still upon his historical and archaic plane" (34). ^10^ the historical precedent for this assignment of a role to the caribs in the protection of french colonial interests can be found in colbert's war against dutch trade in the west indies. as colbert, minister of the marine with colonial jurisdiction, suggested to a colonial governor in 1670, one way of defending the french monopoly against the dutch could be that of "secretly aiding the caribs against them in case of a war, or by secretly inciting them to attack the dutch by furnishing them firearms and munitions" (cited in williams 161). ^11^ one is reminded of roland barthes' analysis in _mythologies_ of the photograph in which a black colonial soldier salutes a french flag. as this association suggests, my use of the word "myth" remits to barthes' explanation: like bourgeois ideology, "myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal" (142). ^12^ marianna torgovnick's gloss on the meaning of sacrifice in georges bataille clarifies the connection between human sacrifice and cannibalism: "human sacrifice is a symbolic version of cannibalism, in which the human body substitutes for the animal body, and killing for eating. it is a symbolic representation of our normal gustatory acts- but heightened, made less utilitarian, and hence 'sacred'" (189). ^13^ j. laplanche and j.-b. pontalis summarize this analogy in _the language of psychoanalysis_ (55). ^14^ _the guyana quartet_, 9. in _explorations_ (42, n.8) harris cites the same passage in michael swan's _the marches of el dorado_ (london, 1958), 285. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited arens, w. _the man-eating myth: anthropology & anthropophagy_. new york: oxford up, 1979. barthes, roland. _mythologies_. selected and trans. annette lavers. 8th printing. new york: hill and wang, 1977. benitez rojo, antonio. _la isla que se repite: el caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna_. hanover, new hampshire: ediciones del norte, 1989. brathwaite, edward. "timehri." _is massa day dead?_ ed. orde coombs. garden city, ny: anchor, 1974. 29-45. brown, paul. "'this thing of darkness i acknowledge mine': _the tempest_ and the discourse of colonialism." political shakespeare: new essays in cultural materialism_. ed. jonathan dollimore and alan sinfield. manchester up, 1985. 48-71. bruner, charlotte. "the meaning of caliban in black literature today." _comparative literature studies_ 13.3 (sept. 1976): 240-253. cabrera, lydia. _cuentos negros de cuba_. 2nd ed. madrid: chicheruku, 1972. carpentier, alejo. _el arpa y la sombra_. 9th ed. mexico: siglo veintiuno editores, 1980. ---. _los pasos perdidos_. ed. roberto gonzalez echevarria. madrid: ediciones catedra, 1985. ---. _el reino de este mundo_. 7th ed. barcelona: seix barral, 1978. ---. _el siglo de las luces_. caracas: ayacucho, 1979. cesaire, aime. _the collected poetry_ (bilingual ed.). trans. clayton eshleman and annette smith. berkeley: u of california p, 1983. coll y toste, cayetano. _leyendas puertorriquenas_. catano, puerto rico: litografia metropolitana, 1977. coward, rosalind, and john ellis. _language and materialism: developments in semiology and the theory of the subject_. boston, london and henley: routledge & kegan paul, 1977. derrida, jacques. "structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences." _the structuralist controversy: the languages of criticism and the sciences of man_. ed. richard macksey and eugenio donato. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins up, 1972. 247-272. edgell, zee. _beka lamb_. 1982. london: heinnemann educational books, 1987. freud, sigmund. _the ego and the id_. trans. joan riviere. revised and ed. james strachey. new york: w.w. norton, 1962. ---. _totem and taboo. some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics_. trans. james strachey. new york: w.w. norton, 1950. fernandez retamar, roberto. _caliban: apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra america_. mexico: editorial diogenes, 1971. ---. _caliban and other essays_. trans. edward baker. foreword by fredric jameson. minneapolis: university of minnesota, 1989. garcia ramis, magali. _felices dias, tio sergio_. 3rd ed. san juan: editorial antillana, 1988. glissant, edouard. _le discours antillais_. paris: editions du seuil, 1981. gonzalez echevarria, roberto. "literature of the hispanic caribbean." _latin american literary review_ 8.16 (spring-summer 1980): 1-20. guevara, ernesto "che." _el socialismo y el hombre nuevo_. ed. jose arico. 3rd ed. mexico: siglo veintiuno editores, 1979. harris, wilson. _explorations: a selection of talks and articles, 1966-1981_. aarhus, denmark: dangaroo press, 1981. ---. _the guyana quartet_. london, boston: faber and faber, 1985. ---. _tradition, the writer and society_. london: new beacon publications, 1967. hassan, ihab. _selves at risk: patterns of quest in contemporary american letters_. madison: u of wisconsin p, 1990. hulme, peter. _colonial encounters: europe and the native caribbean, 1492-1797_. london: methuen, 1986. huyssen, andreas. "mapping the postmodern." _new german critique_ 33 (fall 1984): 5-52. kilgour, maggie. _from communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation_. princeton up, 1990. lacan, jacques. _ecrits: a selection_. trans. alan sheridan. new york: w.w. norton, 1977. lamming, george. _the pleasures of exile_. london, new york: allison & busby, 1984. laplanche, j., and j.-b. pontalis. _the language of psychoanalysis_. trans. donald nicholson-smith. new york: w.w. norton, 1973. montaigne, michel de. "of the canniballes." _the essayes of montaigne_. trans. john florio. new york: modern library, 1933. 160-171. rhys, jean. _voyage in the dark_. new york: w.w. norton, n.d. (first published 1934). sanday, peggy reeves. _divine hunger: cannibalism as a cultural system_. cambridge up, 1986. shakespeare, william. _the tempest_. ed. louis b. wright and virginia a. lamar. 12th pr. new york: folger library-washington square, 1973. todorov, tzvetan. _the conquest of america: the question of the other_. trans. richard howard. new york: harper & row, 1984. torgovnick, marianna. _gone primitive: savage intellects, modern lives_. u of chicago p, 1990. williams, eric. _from columbus to castro: the history of the caribbean, 1492-1969_. new york: vintage, 1984. collins, 'vietnam war, reascendant conservatism, white victims', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-collins-vietnam.txt the vietnam war, reascendant conservatism, white victims by terry collins general college university of minnesota <tcollins@gcmail.gen.umn.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by terry collins, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: rowe, john carlos, and rick berg, eds. _the vietnam war and american culture_. new york: columbia up, 1991. jason, philip k., ed. _fourteen landing zones: approaches to vietnam war literature_. iowa city: iowa up, 1991. [1] the bloom-d'souza-nea-neh silencing of feminist and multiculturalist positions, trivialized in the popular press as tritely inflated rhetorical agonics over who gets control of the english department budget and reading list, masks the larger struggle for control of ideology in america, for the terms of our history and future. the contested discourse of intellectual authority and privilege extends directly from reinscription of the vietnam war, and both are central to the conservative reascendance of the reagan-bush period. [2] the willful national amnesia about the u.s. war in/on vietnam is, in fact, prerequisite to the current domestic war against the intellectual left. revisionist history of the vietnam war is transubstantiative to the conservative reascendance from war criminal status to uncontested author of a "new world order." the right has asserted and then reaped the fruit of the myth of rectitude planted and nurtured by reagan's reinvention of the vietnam war as a "noble cause." this re-creation of the war has gone virtually unchallenged. norman podhoretz was able to write, in _why we were in vietnam_ (simon and schuster, 1982), that the war was an act of "imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been overwhelmingly vindicated"-with barely a stir of outrage in the popular press voicing opposition to this macabre rewriting. equally little notice was taken when, phoenixlike, richard nixon issued _no more vietnams_ (arbor house, 1985), his self-serving apology for genocide. celebrating the exorcism of the "ghost of vietnam" under reagan, nixon gloats that "since president reagan took office in 1981, america's first international losing streak has been halted." he writes (and gets away with it), "of all the myths about the vietnam war, the most vicious one is the idea that the united states was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall (%sic%) of cambodia in 1975," dismissing the laws of cause and effect as neatly as he does the idea of truth. [3] the reclamation of the hearts and minds of the american suburban diaspora, relieving the national consciousness of the burden of the "vietnam syndrome" (a cynical rearticulation of what might have passed, in a reasonable moral climate, for something like depression growing out of deserved collective guilt), was a prerequisite for the conservative reascendance that so enervates the intellectual discourse of our era. once vindicated and remythologized, the right launched its education/nea/neh-mediated search and-destroy mission at home, bloom, bennett, hirsch and d'souza walking point, on radio to helms and the onanites, tipping coors at recon. [4] it is logical to look to oppositional discourses in the fiction and film of the vietnam war for relief. but, in fact, the relative absence of a collective public rejection of and response to the revisionist readings of our war in/on vietnam is problematized by the personal, fictive, and cinematic narratives of grunt-vets, journalist-vets, and medical-vets who write, from oppositional postures, their experiences in the war. michael herr, tim o'brien, larry heinemann, william eastlake, oliver stone, and the other writers featured in the criticism collected in the books reviewed here have (no doubt authentically, no doubt painfully) written large the psychic and ethical dislocation of young men inserted into the survivalist landscape of the free-fire zone. the problem is this: the prose and cinematic fictions fragment and monadize the war, make it a matter of individual(ist) survival--ethically, bodily. it is easy to imagine the origins of such texts. the stunningly horrid collective lies, pandered by government agents in the pressrooms of vietnam, had to be countered, producing _dispatches_. the clean, faceless, stinkless body counts had to be countered by _paco's story_. [5] but hemingway's dictum--that fiction tells truer truths about war than history--distorts. the memoirs, fictions, and films which recreate the vietnam war as primarily a matter of the individual ethical and bodily survival of articulate white men, rather than as genocide, simply reconstitute this as a war of blue-eyed victims. and in the struggle for the history of this war, these fictions, most powerfully those intended as narratives of resistance to lbj-kissinger-nixon, stand complicit, by making vietnam the individual's story, a war on vietnamese peasants reconstructed as a war valorizing the white american grunt's individual ethical and physical pain, however real. in the most powerful of the vietnam war books and films, it is still a white american war, a white american morality play enacted on a stage built of dead asians, albeit an individualist drama sometimes brilliantly re-read for the violently sexist and misogynist spectacle that the vietnam war was/is. [6] but in fact this was/is a war on the brown-eyed, and no fictional, cinematic, or critical gloss will make it otherwise. in the field of vision in these narratives, the individual white man's pain obscures our view of american minorities dying and bleeding, all out of proportion to their numbers. above all, the individual(ist) pain of the white gi, struggling with his soul, blocks whatever light the authors might want to have shined on vietnamese and cambodian and laotian men, women, children burning, being raped, zipped, zapped, poisoned, free-fired, dis-eared, and forgotten against the glow and smell of white phosphorous, the jell of napalm. the best-written of the novels, the best-made of the films, are most disturbing in this failure. oppositional by intention, they finally effect a conspiracy of eloquence. as textual representations of the war as the cauldron of the individual white american male soul's struggle, they tonto-ize the minority experience and overtly replace mylai-scapes as the national memory, reaffirming the american master narratives of white male individualism and rebirth. [7] furthermore, the best vietnam narratives represent a reading of vietnam as anomaly. far from anomaly, the vietnam war was/is an exceptionally logical outgrowth of u.s. history and policy. vietnam may have been manifest destiny's most compellingly horrid spectacle, but it was not an aberrant moment. the more painfully eloquent the struggle of individual grunts represented in these narratives, and the more compelling their individual struggles to adjust ethical calibrations to the horror show of the killing field, the more fully obscured is the historical consistency of vietnam. and the more obscured our vision of the historical consistency of this genocidal strain of american hegemony becomes, the less likely are we to see the same truth embodied in our contemporary american cityscapes, our drug wars, our increasingly brown-eyed urban villes which putrefy under intentional, national neglect. to atomize the vietnam war's reality in its textual representation, to portray it as the individual struggle for physical/ethical survival (rather than as a logically constructed episode leading out of expansionist centuries, leading out of indian genocide, leading out of slavery, and leading into the new world order) is to deny the centrality of vietnam and its consistency with american history. to the extent that the vietnam war is represented as primarily the individual white male's struggle with his conscience in an aberrant territory, the war becomes peripheral to our understanding of the national epistemology of slash-and-burn, rape-and-control, genocide. tim o'brien's paul berlin (_going after cacciato_) larry heinemann's paco (_paco's story_), and their fictive brothers-in-arms may have been conceived in rage, remorse, or celebration of survival, but as atomized agents, they are surely close cousins to john rambo. [8] the collections of essays reviewed here move in and out of coherent visions of the central position occupied by the vietnam war and by its reinvention as part of the rightist national myth. interestingly, they follow on the heels of john hellmann's _american myth and the legacy of vietnam_ (columbia up, 1986). hellmann's book ends in a call to america to integrate this "nightmare" somehow (via %lucasfilms%, he suggests!) into the traditional white american myth of the new world adam/new world order. therefore, the rowe/berg and jason collections are tacitly positioned against hellmann's invitation to wishful denial. [9] _the vietnam war and american culture_ grew out of a special issue of _cultural critique_ (1986), edited by rowe and berg. of the two collections under review, it is the more consistently aggressive in demanding historical and cultural integrity of the novels, memoirs, and films which attempt to represent the vietnam war. it is introduced by a long, lucid essay by noam chomsky which argues a reading of the vietnam war as exercise in national slavery to privilege, predicting the reascendant right's inscription of a canonized discourse of the vietnam war as erasure of historical consciousness in the service of elites. divided into sections on "the vietnam war and history," "the vietnam war and mass media," and "the vietnam war and popular media," the rowe/berg collection contains nine strong essays and (as a fitting close to a volume that theorizes the human experience of the war) a sampling of fine concrete poems by w. d. ehrhart. [10] of the essays in rowe/berg, three--besides the chomsky piece--are stunning. the dilemma of the atomized-male coming-of-age narratives is addressed directly (though in terms quite different from those i use above) by susan jeffords. her essay, "tattoos, scars, diaries, and writing masculinity," re-reads the vietnam war and the rich lode of male fiction about the war (including oppositional fiction from the left) as misogynist acts and icons. the essay anticipates the extended argument she develops in _the remasculinization of america: gender and the vietnam war_ (indiana up, 1989). rick berg, in "losing vietnam: covering the war in an age of technology," posits tv and film readings of the war as foundational of the revisionist gestures that would follow: "what is lost and forgotten with each imagined win are those who fought and suffered. it is all well and good to turn vietnam vets into heroes, but not at the expense of their children and their history. as brecht's mother courage reminds us, war profiteering has a long, honorable, and expensive history. i wonder if stallone and his fellow revisionists are willing to pay the price." and john carlos rowe struggles with the conflation of documentary and docudramatic accounts of the war in film as devices which foster a false sympathy with its (white male) victims in "substituting myth for knowledge." [11] the essays in rowe/berg are consistently clear, expansive, well-documented, and respectful of the historical and human pain their subject embodies. [12] the essays collected in philip k. jason's _fourteen landing zones: approaches to vietnam war literature_ are self-consciously tentative. jason positions them as "paths," not fully realized or conclusive readings. it's a reasonable humility that takes such a stance before the enormity of this war and its varied literature, it seems. and at their best, the essays test the popular readings of the war, the prevailing ideologies captured in myth, against history or close analysis. at their worst, though, the essays whine, as only the terminally academic can, "let's talk about me!" some of these essays lose sight of the blood and bone. [13] lorrie smith's "poetry by vietnam war veterans" is less essay than it is prosodic connective among eloquent poetic chunks. wisely, i think, she mutes her analytic discourse in favor of a type of reading that we used to call "appreciation"--she lets the poetic fragments weave themselves into the eventual essay. jacqueline e. lawson's "she's a pretty woman . . . for a gook," like the jeffords essay in rowe/berg, examines the war in view of contemporary theories of misogyny, rape, and media-proliferated degradations of women. kali tal's "speaking the language of pain: vietnam war literature in the context of a literature of pain" reads the war and its writing in the company of theorists of the literature of extremity, most usefully terrence des pres's study of holocaust literature in _the survivor_. tal gives a smart, but too tentative critique of hellmann and the other mythic-apologist readings of this literature. these three essays are the strongest in the book, to my mind. [14] at its worst, the tentative nature of essays in the jason collection fosters a lapse into a kind of new critical reduction of the literature of the vietnam war. stuart ching's "'a hard story to tell': the vietnam war in joan didion's _democracy_," for example, seems satisfied to examine the literature as "literature," pretending to neither a breathing reader nor a positioned writer. [15] understanding the vietnam war and its literature probably isn't possible. conflicted writings-toward such an understanding serve two mutually exclusive functions, are built on internal contradictions. in the one instance, our studies--even the most thoughtful and humanely analytical--must stylize vietnam, reinscribe it out of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of vietnams that rattle around in the heads of vets and their families, that scream in the heads of vietnamese people, that moan from the graves. and thereby, our studies must trivialize the war, its causes, and its consequences. that war existed so many ways, was so many wars, that its fictions will reinvent only fragments, and thereby re-fragment the whole, will situate its atrocities in physical and psychic landscapes, moral landscapes, textual landscapes, that are individual. all such atomized textualizations of atrocities of this scale must themselves be atrocities. in the other instance, we submit to the nixonian re-inventions, the reaganesque "noble cause" narrative. the first is the path of choice, quite clearly. rowe/berg and jason move us toward that ambiguous end. [16] tonight, as i write, l.a. burns, troops are in our streets, the war is on tv again. black men are the gooks this time. english, 'vacation notes: haute-tech in the hautes-montagnes', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-english-vacation.txt vacation notes: haute-tech in the hautes-montagnes by jim english university of pennsylvania copyright (c) 1990 by jim english, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). [1] even to a fan like me, the tour de france seems a pretty weird sporting event. by the standards of contemporary spectator sport, there is something almost laughable in a three-week-long bicycle race that is so elaborately staged and involves so much apparatus and so many people, yet offers so few moments of real excitement. race organizers are aware of this, and have lately been attempting to bring the event better into line with the contemporary sporting scene. but to judge by this year's tour, which two friends and i followed during its final week through the pyrenees, these attempts to improve or normalize the race are only making it stranger. while we certainly enjoyed the race as a race, we found ourselves enjoying it even more as a sort of comedy of cultural contradictions. the recent efforts to "modernize" what remains basically an old-world, pain-oriented, macho sport (its traditional off-season counterpart is boxing) have created some bizarre incongruities. the commercial packaging and the "look" of the tour have been dramatically altered by the introduction of new technologies, but the mythology of the sport, along with the activity itself--the actual physical demands made on competitors--have scarcely changed since the turn of the century. more and more one is confronted with disconcerting asymmetries between the "modernized" tour de france and a cycling culture whose material and mythological elements resist modernization. [2] one such material element is the bike rider's derriere. for the second year in a row, an apparently secure victory was imperilled in the closing days by a saddle boil, reminding everyone that despite impressive recent developments in clothing and hygiene technologies, there has been little success in containing eruptions of the lower bodily stratum: a rider's sore bottom can still become the focal point and the decisive factor of the whole colossal production. it's easy to be misled in this regard by today's aerodynamic, miracle-fiber uniforms, which have a cleaner, zippier look than the old suits and, with their shiny surfaces, make far more effective billboards for team sponsors. but the fact is that inside this state-of-the-art gear there is not only perspiration, blood, and puss but also sometimes urine and even diarrhea. seven consecutive hours of racing will induce unhappy effects in even the best dressed of competitors. [3] like the uniforms, the bikes too keep getting sleeker, more reliable, more specialized and rational in design. but this only accentuates the extreme unreliability of the riders, who this year seemed more than ever uncertain of their abilities and confused about their roles. consider claudio chiappucci, a second-rank rider for the struggling carrera jeans team. judged a non-contender, chiappucci was permitted a substantial lead on the opening stage, and then spent the entire race losing time to rivals while hurling insults at them for lacking his "panache." yet this apparent mediocrity held on for an impressive second place and very nearly became the first rider in modern times to "steal" a tour de france. pre-race favorite raul alcala, a brilliant natural climber, was all bulked up this year to improve his strength on the flats. his weight training seemed to be paying off, and for the first week everyone was in awe of the new, more muscular alcala. but as soon as the race hit the mountains, this aura of invincibility dissolved and, as one rider remarked at mont blanc, alcala suddenly just seemed "big and slow like a dirigible." the other rider who came to the race with a new and more robust physique was defending champion greg lemond. but in this case no one was intimidated by the extra poundage. with his cutting-edge aerodynamic equipment and flawless position on the bike, the blimp-like lemond had been a comical sight all season, putting in performances that can only be described as embarrassing. "i worry more about my grandmother," 1987 tour winner stephen roche said at one point this spring. yet lemond proved against all evidence to be the fittest rider in the race, and produced a beautifully economical victory. as so often happens, the french cycling press was reduced in the end to explaining the race in terms of "miracles." while technological developments have succeeded in virtually eliminating the wild card of mechanical failure, oddsmakers are still losing their shirts on the tour and sportswriters are still narrativizing it as spiritual quest. [4] of course this is, for many, the whole appeal of the event, that it forces riders past known limits, past the point of predictability. the cumulative strain of stage racing actually makes the riders ill; by the final week you can hear collective coughing and wheezing at the crest of quite modest inclines. under these conditions a rider's form is so fragile that even a proven champion can, as they say, "crack" or "explode" at a crucial moment. indeed, such moments are for aficionados the race's main attraction. "suffering" is the established god term of the french cycling vernacular. for diehard tour fans, the only spectacle that matters is that of the body in pain. (the male body, that is. though a women's race has been part of the tour for a decade, few fans have accepted the idea of a woman stage racer. this year organizers finally gave up and, despite the near certainty of another french victory by the great jeannie longo, abolished the tour feminin.) [5] to take part in these pain-fests, fans are willing to suffer a bit themselves. to catch the finish of the decisive 16th stage at luz-ardiden in the pyrenees we had to negotiate an enormous traffic jam at the base of the climb, hike fifteen kilometers uphill in near record heat, wait three hours for the race, and then hike back down again through the exhaust fumes and honking horns of a traffic jam that now extended from the top of the mountain to the center of lourdes, 35km away. all this to see a few small clusters of contenders shoot past, followed by perhaps a half hour's worth of intermittent stragglers. it is difficult to explain to non-tour fanatics why five hundred thousand people would put up with so much for so little, some of them actually camping out at the summit days in advance, staking their ground at luz ardiden while the race was still in marseilles. for tour fans, the point is simply to be there, not just for social reasons (as is the case in small villages en route) but in order to share in some measure the lived space of the riders during their moments of suffering. even to know the final outcome of the stage is not as important as experiencing simultaneously with the riders themselves the terrain, the weather, the exact force of the obstacles that must be overcome. a particularly difficult stretch of road two or three kilometers from the summit, or an haute-categorie climb at some much earlier point in the race--any spot where a key contender is likely to "crack"--will attract nearly as many fans as the finish area itself. [6] but this determination simply to be there at all costs is not really what tour organizers desire in a spectator, and the fans who made the trek up to luz ardiden--variously french, bearnaise-french, basque, and spanish, but overwhelmingly low-income farmers and laborers--do not represent an ideal mix from the standpoint of prospective sponsors. the predominance of "peasants" is one bottom-line disadvantage to the sport's old-world ethic of suffering. another is that high levels of sickness and pain in the tour can only be secured by long (sometimes week-long) stretches of utterly routine, and in themselves uninteresting, softening-up stages. and while it's true that a body at the breaking point has a certain marketability, in the grand calculus of advertising a 22-day sporting event configured around two or three moments of extreme anguish (for which, moreover, there can be no charge of admission) leaves plenty of room for commercial adjustments. [7] hence the recent efforts to "modernize" the tour, of which the increasing emphasis on equipment innovation and technological advantage is just one sign. another and more telling sign was the giant "television" (actually a collapsible scoreboard-type screen mounted in a mock-tv cabinet) that was perched at the very summit of the luz-ardiden climb. the mountain is so barren, and rises so steeply to such a sharp peak, that this mammoth symbol of the "new" tour de france was clearly visible four and five kilometers down the road. as the riders made their way over the fearsome col de tourmalet, the last hurdle before the luz, all eyes, binoculars, and telescopic camera lenses were trained on this impressive publicity gimmick from antenne 2, the official channel of the tour. it was quite a sight: half a million people clustered densely together atop a magnificent mountain in the pyrenees, all watching tv. from our naked-eye perspective at the 2km mark, the screen itself looked blank: the scene resembled nothing so much as pilgrims come to make sacrifice before some great and impassive idol, their tv-god. but the real moment of truth arrived when the first of the riders came charging past. with the actual race now taking place before their eyes, many people continued to watch the simulation. and who can blame them? if we had been closer, or had brought binoculars, we would have done the same. a bike race on a tv screen is far more "watchable" by the measure of contemporary sports entertainment than is the erratic parade of men in pain that constitutes a bike race on a mountain side. [8] and of course this is what is really at stake in "modernizing" the tour; altering patterns of consumption, reshaping the practice of spectatorship. the new parameters of the route, to which fans are already growing accustomed--fewer ultra-high-mileage days, fewer marathon climbing stages, more half-stages, more intermediate sprints for bonus points, etc.--are not just increasing the proportion of watchable to unwatchable moments, but re-presenting the whole race as something you watch rather than something you do. persuading mountaintop spectators to keep their eyes on the box rather than the road is only an incidental step in this process of modernization. the main thing is to persuade a new and more "contemporary" audience, the chic boutique owners in the marais, for example, or the yuppies who are buying condos out at la villette (french for silicon valley)--all those upscale parisians whose only contact with the race is the annoying jam of tourists along the champs elysees during the ceremonial final stage--that the tour de france is for them, too. that it's fun to watch! [9] whether this marketing strategy can ever really succeed with a "peasant sport" so strikingly ill-suited to the demands of commercial television is not at all certain. when the tour rolled through the alps this year there was a stylish young parisian in the lead, yet organizers were unable to translate this into anything remotely resembling "tour fever" in paris. and their inability to sell the tour feminin, perhaps the boldest modernizing step of all, is another sign that their effectivity is far from unlimited. nonetheless, that giant tv screen atop luz ardiden did represent genuine change. the tour de france is already being practiced differently by its fans, and the transformation of cycling culture is likely to continue even if it doesn't pay off in the end for the sponsors. and although there's nothing to regret in the tour's shedding of its pseudo-spiritual, macho masochistic character, we can hardly celebrate the emergence of one more frameable, watchable sports entertainment package. personally, i take heart from the tour's caricatural american twin--perhaps the first truly postmodern bicycle race--the tour de trump. even a thoroughly banalized tour de france can still exceed the organizers' intentions and leave space for some saving cultural comedy. kipnis, 'marx: the video', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-kipnis-marx.txt marx: the video (a politics of revolting bodies) by laura kipnis university of wisconsin, madison copyright (c) 1990 by laura kipnis, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). ------------------------------------------------------a note on the mise-en-scene: there are large projections --stills, film clips, etc.--behind the action (referred to in the text as keys) in many scenes. there is also a greek chorus of drag queens (or dqs) who pop in and out of the action (or are keyed over the action) in other scenes. ------------------------------------------------------ fade up on: 1. marx's room, he is lying in bed, carbuncular, in pain. rolling text over: karl marx was born in germany in 1818, and died in london in 1883, having been deported from numerous european countries for revolutionary activity. throughout his life he suffered from chronic and painful outbreaks of carbuncles--agonizing skin eruptions--particularly during the years he was at work on his magnum opus, _capital_. his 30-year correspondence with frederick engels, his friend and collaborator, deals regularly and in great detail with the state of his own body. dissolve to: 2. clip _la marseillaise_ king: what is it? super title: 1789 minister: sire, the parisians have taken the bastille. king: so, is it a revolt? minister: no sire, it is revolution. freeze on king v/o: once power resided in the person of the king. the people's task was clear. get rid of the king. 3. clip: berlin wall v/o: once power resided going down. in repressive state bureaucracies. the people's task was clear. super title: 1989 smash the state. 4. still dead ceausescu v/o: at certain moments in history power is centralized and visible, the sites of repression are clear and identifiable; resistance movements arise out of those relations of subordination and antagonism. 5. still postmodern v/o: at other moments the urban landscapes task is less clear. power is entrenched, but dispersed. where does power reside? who are the agents of change? transition effect going back in time 6. stills: 1848 v/o: in 1848, toqueville uprising warned: "we are sleeping on a volcano. a wind of title: 1848 revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." that year marx and engels completed the communist manifesto. jean martin charcot, who would later devote himself to the study of hysteria, enters medical school. the same year, revolution swept europe. students and workers united, but three years later the revolution was toppled. time passing transition 7. stills paris, may 68 v/o: france, may '68. students and workers united in a three week general strike, demanding radical democratic reforms. momentarily, revolution seemed possible, but once again that possibility was soon dispelled. in the decades following '68, like the aftermath of 1848--the defeat of forces of change left traces, absences, an unfilled place where something is wanting. where is the repository of those absences--where are they buried, embodied, misrecognized? title: marx: the video a politics of erupting bodies 1848-1990 ------------------------------------------------------ 8. super: 1863 v/o biographer: looking over first image of back, fifteen years later, marx; he lies in bed to the failed revolution. marx: dear engels: one thing is sure, the era of revolution is now once more fairly opened in europe. and the general state of things is good. but the comfortable delusions and the almost childish enthusiasms with which we greeted the era of revolution before super: trotsky waving february 1848 are gone to from a train the devil. old comrades are gone, others have fallen away or decayed, and a new generation is not yet in sight. in looming supers of addition, we now know what stalin, lenin role stupidity plays in revolutions and how they are exploited by stalin looms over body scoundrels...let us hope that this time the lava mao looms over body pours from east to west and not vice versa. v/o biographer: he writes with nostalgia and longing for something thwarted, for something that didn't happen. ------------------------------------------------------ 9. doctor keyed over doctor: his body just examining room still. erupted...it became addresses camera like a battleground. the only cure at the time was arsenic. terribly painful, like a body trying to turn itself into another body. i think it started shortly after his mother died. it continued throughout his life. ------------------------------------------------------ 10. stills, 19c. v/o narrator: marx took up industrialization the task of exhaustively superimposed on analyzing the historical marx's body moment in which he found himself: the rise of industrialization and the inception of the working class movement. he stripped the facade off poster international capital to reveal what was workingmens assoc. concealed: the labor in still the commodity, the alienation of the worker, naked exploitation by the capitalist. he looked to the material foundations zoom on worker body of the moment, he looked worker injury photo to the body. his analysis of capital relies on a language of the body: "production" "consumption" "reproduction" and "circulation." for marx, the collective wealth of the state is the body--the labor--of the workers. worker injuries capital amputates the worker from his own body; he has phantom pain for his missing limbs. but for marx, which bodies were absent, unspoken, unacknowledged? ------------------------------------------------------ 11. drag queen 1: what's a real body, a natural body? it doesn't exist, there's only a social body, the body as theater, the body that speaks, unbidden. but in whose language? ------------------------------------------------------ 12. marx's room marx: dear frederick: two fade up on marx, in hours ago i received a foreground, writing. telegram that my mother is in suit, suitcase at dead. fate claimed one of feet my family. i must go to trier to settle my inheritance. i myself stood with one foot in the grave... drag queen chorus supered over marx, dq chorus: his body just all dressed as nurses erupted. ------------------------------------------------------ 13. dq2: what a problem the body is. keeping it confined to its boundaries (like the lower classes). concealing anything that background: comes out of it, or clips porn, slo-mo protrudes from it. certainly not speaking of such things. the creation of a meek, submissive hygienic public body. dq2: his body just erupted. ------------------------------------------------------ 14. hygiene products, v/o narrator: capital douche, dolls, float produces a disgusting through blue sky body, so it can create new regimes, new products, to police it and make it acceptable. capital has achieved historical advances in the threshold of delicacy, it produces new varieties of bourgeois disgust, then markets a new and improved body without byproducts, without smells, to exist in a public sphere that is increasingly phobic about the collective body, the lower class body--the mob--a body that might not mind its manners. ------------------------------------------------------ 15. marx's room, he marx: dear fred: it is writes in bed. clear that on the whole i dolly in know more about the carbuncle disease than most doctors...here and there i have the beginnings of new carbuncles, which keep on disappearing, but they force me to keep my working hours within limits...i consider it my vocation to remain in europe to complete the work in which i have been engaged for so many years but i cannot work productively more than a very few hours daily without feeling the effect physically...i think this work i am doing is much more important for the working class than anything i could do personally at a congress of any kind...i would consider myself impractical if i had dropped dead without having finished my book, at least in manuscript. cut to second angle v/o biographer: writing on marx with smoking capital, his narrative of factory, keyed in the conditions of the background english proletariat, his body broke out with "a proletarian disease." marx was desperate to finish his work, but unable to. instead of writing, he was being written. the revolution he anticipated, the thwarted revolution, was displaced onto his own skin. ------------------------------------------------------ 16. marx's room: high marx: dear frederick: you angle down on bed see i am still here and i will tell you more, i am incapable of moving about. this is a perfidious christian illness. in the meantime, i can neither walk, nor stand, nor sit, and even lying down is damned hard. you see how the wisdom of nature has afflicted me. would it not have been more sensible if instead of me it had been consigned to try the patience of a good christian? like a true lazarus, i am scourged on all sides. drag queen 3: his body became sarcastic, taunting the tasteful, discreet body, the one that stays politely behind the scenes, the one that knows its place like the servant serving the master, like the subject serving the state. this wasn't a body you could take into the drawing room. this was an ill-mannered body. ------------------------------------------------------ 17. marx writing dear kugelmann: cut, at desk, bandaged lanced, etc, in rear screen clips short treated in every russian revolution respect. in spite of this the thing is continually breaking out anew...i hope it will end this week, but who can guarantee me against another eruption? drag queen chorus v/o: marx, writing pops on capital, imagining capital's overthrow. his body living out his split identifications- dq1: (the bourgeois who champions the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) dq3...the body begins to embody another kind of psyche, another sociality. it desired transformation. dq2: he swathed his carbuncles behind bandages and focused his attention on the working class. cu marx at biog v/o: as he nears desk, bandaged completion of the first volume, his carbuncles, mobile, sardonic, and insistent, break out in ever new vicinities. seizing the flesh, sculpting it into a body bulging, protuberant, not closed and finished, not refined. marx: you have too low an opinion of the english doctors if you think that they cannot diagnose carbuncles, particularly here in england--the land of carbuncles, which is actually a proletarian illness. it is only in the last few years that i have been persecuted by the thing. before that, it was entirely unknown to me. ------------------------------------------------------ 18. clip riot footage v/o biographer: marx--who keyed onto his body would disavow the high overhead onto opposition between the body lying in bed social and the psychic as mere bourgeois psychology --was possessed of a body whose symptoms mocked the social order; it had become grotesque: open, protruding, extended, secreting: in process, taking on new forms, shapes; his body the figure of the new society that had failed to emerge. he was producing more and more body--too much body for a social order dedicated to its concealment. ------------------------------------------------------ 19. marx's room dear engels: it was good he writes on couch you did not come on saturday. my story--now fourteen days old--had reached the crisis point. i could talk a little, and it hurt even to laugh on account of the big abscess between nose and mouth, which this morning has been reduced at least to reasonable proportions. also the violently swollen lips are becoming reduced closer to their previous dimensions. may the head of the devil go through such fourteen days. all this stops being a joke. ------------------------------------------------------ title: eliminating the body. 20. teenage girl's room, i hate my body, god, it's a number of teenage so gross, look at these girls gabbing, shot thighs...it's disgusting, documentary style i'm so fat... ------------------------------------------------------ 21. dissolve to: bathroom, high shot toilet, girl retching ------------------------------------------------------ super title: the age of consumption ------------------------------------------------------ 22. map of the u.s. v/o: anorexia, bulimia little inserts of --epidemic in abundant girls retching into western societies, post toilets keyed over 1968. 10 to 20 percent u.s. capitals of american women now have eating disorders. a symptomatic eruption of the body. let's wrest this out of secrecy, out of the private sphere and view it for a moment as the social collective act that it is. title: thinking through the body ------------------------------------------------------ 23. drag queen 3: like a body trying to turn itself into another body, like a body trying to invent another kind of social existence. drag queen 2: women's bodies as tablets of social meaning, as sites of regulation... ------------------------------------------------------ 24. pills, laxatives, v/o: with our increasingly diet products float phobic relation to the through blue sky collective body, the working class body, with our creation of an ideal public body without fat, without snot or bo, with a yearning for refinement, we will the disappearance of the body, the containment of the mass, the body politic, the threat. ------------------------------------------------------ 25. worker stills biographer v/o: marx, dissolve to writing history from marx body/ below: a history of wealth dissolve to as labor, a history of the riots body, a history of the mass, his own body acting out... v/o: stories told by the super: body--after the failed stills hysterics revolutions of 1848 this comes to be known as "hysteria" and sweeps europe. ------------------------------------------------------ title: the hysteric is subject to multiple identifications ------------------------------------------------------ 26. marx room, he is dear frederick: i would writing at desk. rear have written you sooner, screen workers but for approximately the last twelve days all reading writing and smoking have been strictly forbidden. i had a sort of eye inflammation tied up with very unpleasant effects on the nervous system. the thing is now so far under control that i can again dare to write. in the meantime i had all kinds of psychological reveries, like a person going blind or crazy. ------------------------------------------------------ 27. still: v/o: marx's symptoms make "lecon clinique their appearance around de charcot" the time that freud's future teacher, charcot, is beginning to recognize and treat a new disease, "traumatic hysteria." before hysteria was relegated to a female disorder, it afflicted many men as well: charcot began to recognize that what is novel about traumatic hysteria is that in these cases what lay behind the symptoms were not physical disorders, and not just nerves, but ideas. ------------------------------------------------------ 28. charcot speaks "male hysteria is not all that rare, and just among us, gentlemen, if i can judge from what i see each day, these cases are often unrecognized even by distinguished doctors. one will concede that a young and effeminate man might develop hysterical findings after experiencing significant stress, sorrow or deep emotions. but that a strong and vital worker, for instance, a railway engineer never prone to emotional instability before, should become hysteric--just as a woman might--this seems to us beyond imagination. and yet it is a fact--one which we must get used to." drag queen 1: hysteria which entraps and speaks the patient. ------------------------------------------------------ 29. film: british dear fred: i wanted to museum location write you yesterday from marx, ill, stumbling, the british museum, but drops a book, camera i suddenly became so zoom in on copy of unwell that i had to close "vindication of the the very interesting book rights of women" that i held in my hand. a dark veil fell over my eyes. then a frightful headache and a pain in the chest. i strolled home. air and light helped and when i got home i slept for some time. my condition is such that i really should give up all working and thinking for some time to come; but that would be difficult, even if i could afford it. ------------------------------------------------------- 30. still, male v/o: freud recounted how hysterics disturbed charcot became when the german school of neurology resisted the idea of male hysteria and suggested pejoratively that if it occurred in males, it occurred only in french males. ------------------------------------------------------- 31. marx's room, he dear frederick: in recent paces in the set weeks it has been positively impossible for me to write even two hours a day. apart from pressure from without, there are the household headaches which always affect my liver. i have become sleepless again, and have had the pleasure of seeing two carbuncles bloom near the penis. fortunately they faded away. my illness always comes from the head. ------------------------------------------------------ 32. still another v/o: charcot related male male hysteric hysteria to trauma. as the industrial era progressed, the number of unexplained work related illnesses increased enormously; charcot worked to demonstrate how these could be understood as hysterical. ------------------------------------------------------ 33. drag queen 2: there were many who thought that the commotion of the french drag queen chorus revolution may have supered over affected the nervous system delacroix's "libertie of frenchmen and europeans leading the masses" adversely. drag queen 1: it was an infection by ideas, the spread of violent influences displaced from social and class upheaval, fearful ideas about progress, new technologies, social transformations. ------------------------------------------------------ 34. rearscreen: capital dear frederick: the dr. is marx at desk, single quite right: the excessive lamp burning, fullscreen nightwork was the main behind of "workday" text, cause of the relapse. the violently moving camera most disgusting thing for me was the interruption of my work. but i have drudged on, lying down, even if only at short intervals during the day. i could not proceed with the purely theoretical part, the brain was too weak for that. hence i have enlarged the historical part on the workday, which lay outside the original plan. ------------------------------------------------------ 35. keyed over marx drag queen 3 (as nurse) like other symptomatics of the day, he took the cure. marx in wheelchair, spa backdrop biographer v/o: the medical world had devised various techniques for palliating an irritated and erupting human nervous system. popular techniques included warm milk and bed rest, hydrotherapy and sojourns at peaceful pastoral spas. doctors intuitively offered patients physical and psychological means to flee psycho-cultural stress--sending patients to the country, the sea, the mountains. marx tried all of these. on doctor's orders, he fled his work. ------------------------------------------------------ 36. marx writing from dear frederick: so far i lounge chair, spa have had two sulfur baths, background, rushing tomorrow the third. water noise from the bath one steps on a raised board, in the altogether; the bath in bathing costume attendant uses the hose (the size of a firehose) the way a virtuoso does his instrument; he commands the movement of the body and alternately bombards all parts of the corpus except the head for three minutes, first strongly, then weakly, up to the legs and feet, an always advancing crescendo. you can see how little desire a man has to write here. drag queen keyed over drag queen 2 (as nurse): as nurse removing himself from his work brought some relief. ------------------------------------------------------ 37. marx at the spa dear frederick: from the walking around, in delayed appearance of this suit, cane letter you can see how professionally i use my time here. i read nothing, write nothing. because of the arsenic three times daily, one has time only for meals and strolling along the coast and the neighboring hills, there is no time left for other things. evenings one is too tired to do anything but sleep. drag queen keyed over drag queen 1: his symptoms began to speak him. ------------------------------------------------------ 38. marx, spa my dear daughter: i run walking about the greatest part of the day, airing myself, going to bed at ten, reading nothing, writing less, and altogether working up my mind to that state of nothingness which buddhism considers the climax of human bliss...i am afflicted with an inflammation of the eye, not that there is much to be seen of it...the eye has taken to the vicious habit of shedding tears on its own account, without the least regard to the feelings of his master. ------------------------------------------------------ 39. marx's room; he v/o biographer: the writhes in bed carbuncles continued to erupt, stalling the writing of capital, inscribing themselves into the text. marx focused doggedly on the laboring body (while his own body exploded into new and ever changing configurations) pan to still of as if fearful of the "libertie leading the effect of introducing the masses" over desk unregimented body into the realm of the political. drag queen 2: but then, dressed as marianne, this brings other bodies one "breast" bare into the picture--the desiring body, the woman's body, the undisciplined body. ------------------------------------------------------ title: women's bodies ------------------------------------------------------ 40. helene v/o: for the 19th century bourgeois male, the servant provokes social anxiety: she is the conduit through which the working class infiltrates the middle class home. introducing the maid and her sexuality into the bourgeois household is threatening in a period in which both were linked in the bourgeois imagination to the discontent of a dissatisfied working class. but then what is excluded socially is desired, eroticized--the maid becomes a figure of transgressive desire for the bourgeois male, a desire produced by the very categories that rule the bourgeois body. marx, in the communist manifesto mocks the bourgeois male, with an array of women at his disposal, not only proletarian wives and daughters but prostitutes to pick up the slack. this was written two years before he conceived a son with the family maid. ------------------------------------------------------ 41. 19c porn stills of v/o: women in the public maids sphere were tantamount to prostitutes: they bring the filth and corruption of the market, of wage labor, into the middle class home. ------------------------------------------------------ title: helene ------------------------------------------------------ 42. marx's room, he v/o biographer: marx, even writes, helene enters, in the most dire poverty, serves tea did what he could to maintain a bourgeois household. it was helene demuth, the servant, who marked his own separation from the working class. she, more than marx, straddles two worlds, belonging to both the bourgeois family and the working class: she was the certainly the member of that world that marx knew best. "pregnant" drag queen drag queen 3: the hysteric keyed over is subject to multiple identifications. ------------------------------------------------------ 43. marx's room, writing. dear laura, some recent projection from october, russian publications, on rearscreen as helene printed in holy russia, serves tea not abroad, show the great run of my theories in that country. nowhere is my success more delightful to me, it gives me the satisfaction that i damage a power, which besides england, is the true bulwark of the old society. ------------------------------------------------------ 44. looking down on tile helene v/o: she was ten floor, helene scrubbing, years younger than marx's as marx walks across wife jenny. lenchen, as frame she was called, ran the marx household. often marx was too poor to pay her but she cast her lot with the marx family. she did the cooking, housecleaning, laundering, dressmaking, nursing, and everything else, including taking the bedsheets to the pawn shop when eviction was threatened. in 1851, at age 28, she gave birth to marx's son, secretly. ------------------------------------------------------ 45. helene appears very biographer v/o: marx wrote pregnant, serving tea to engels of a "very tangled family situation," hinting at a "mystery," a "tragicomic" mystery, in which he, engels, also played a role. marx traveled to manchester, to see engels, where the two negotiated lenchen's fate. drag queen keyed over drag queen 1: as men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------ 46. clip: beauty helene v/o: did contest introducing a woman into their collaborative association disrupt it? this triangle--did it trouble a theory that saw the role of women strictly in economic terms? what bodies aren't acknowledged? clip: stalin kissing biographer v/o: marx woman; footage keyed persuaded engels to accept onto helene's pregnant paternity for lenchen's stomach child, who was named frederick, after him, in the custom of patrilineage. engels accepted responsibility for the child, binding the two men together over helene's mute body, over the body of the working class woman. drag queen keyed over drag queen 3: jenny, the wife, was easily persuaded that engels was the father as she never really approved of his morals. ------------------------------------------------------ title: the secret ------------------------------------------------------ 47. helene speaks i never betrayed the directly to camera secret; i let my baby be brought up by a working class family. engels occasionally sent money. marx never acknowledged freddy as his son. he chose not to acknowledge paternity. after marx's death, i moved into engel's home as his housekeeper. my son freddy visited regularly once a week: however, as an ordinary working man, he entered through the kitchen. he was marx's only living son. he had grown up to be a poorly educated proletarian, his wife had left him and run away with his few possessions. his life was one of trouble, worry and hardship. ------------------------------------------------------ 48. v/o biographer: "we should, none of us, want to meet our pasts in flesh and blood," wrote marx's daughter after his death, after discovering that freddy demuth was her father's son. these strategies of concealment are central to bourgeois identity, which wishes most of all to conceal the crucial place of the woman in its network of exploitation, which wishes most of all to conceal the symptomatic and erupting body and the tales it tells. ------------------------------------------------------ 49. drag queen chorus dq 1: the pregnant body, the unruly female body, swollen, grotesque, must be regulated, particularly its appearances in the public sphere. dq 3: as men are accustomed to negotiating the fate of women's bodies. ------------------------------------------------------ 50. courtroom location newscaster: "court rejects plea for abortion before jail" oct 26, 1989 a florida county judge has refused a woman's request to postpone her 60 day jail sentence so she can have an abortion first. you want a continuance so you can murder your baby, is that it?" judge rasmussen of pasco county court asked the 26 year old defendant before sending her to jail. while the prosecutor agreed that ms. forney whose third month of pregnancy began today, could postpone her sentence by 10 days before serving her term for violating probation for driving under the influence of alcohol. the violation was that she paid only $100 of the $500 fine assessed against her. ms. forney, a part time bartender who is not married, asked for the additional time because, she said, she was afraid it might be to late for a safe abortion when she got out of jail. she pleaded that she was financially unable to care for a baby. judge rasmussen suggested that she carry the baby to full term and then give it up for adoption. in a jail interview tuesday ms. forney said: i thought it was my choice. he's telling me i don't have a choice. it's not right that he can choose for me." ----------------------------------------------------- scenes 51-60 quick montage: 51. helene addresses he simply chose not to camera acknowledge paternity. i hadn't that choice. 52. abortion rally "get your laws off my footage body. get your laws off my body." 53. background: drag queen 1: get your bondage stills laws off my body. 54. courtroom judge: i can't define it but i know it when i see it. 55. background: drag queen 2: they want to bondage stills ban pornography because it tells the truth. 56. title: the linking of what is politically dangerous to feelings of sexual horror and fascination. 57. abortion rally "get your laws off my footage body..." 58. woman bent over dq3: desiring a body that toilet, bathroom doesn't speak, desiring a body that has the right drag queen keyed over desires, desiring a different social being, a different social body... 59. woman bent over woman: how can i live in toilet my body? where could i live in my body? ------------------------------------------------------ 60. marx's room, marx how can i live in my body? in bed, writhing (first where can i live in my sync sound on marx) body? ------------------------------------------------------ 61. key text of capital dear engels: i had decided over marx body so not to write you until i that one seems to be could announce the emerging from the other completion of the book which is now the case. also i did not want to bore you with the reasons for the frequent delays, namely carbuncles on my posterior and in the vicinity of the penis, the remains of which are now fading and which permit me to assume a sitting (that is, writing) position only at great pain. i do not take arsenic, because it makes me too stupid and at least for the little time that i have when writing is possible, i want to have a clear head. v/o biographer: finishing the book left his body racked and scarred. he was subject to increasing outbursts with each new translation of the book. he continued to search for a cure. ------------------------------------------------------ 62. marx writing, my dear jenny: i am helene cleaning sending you today the proofs of the french translation of das kapital. today is the first day that i have been able to do anything at all. until now despite baths, walking, splendid air, careful diet, etc. my condition has been worse than in london. that is also the reason why i am postponing my return, because it is absolutely necessary to return in a condition for work. biographer v/o: the eruptions of his body weren't matched by the social eruptions he anticipated. ------------------------------------------------------ 63. marx's room dear sorge: how did it rearscreen civil happen that in the us rights riots where relatively that is, compared to civilized europe, land was accessible to the great masses of the people and to a certain degree (again relatively) still is, the capitalist economy and the text emerging corresponding enslavement from carbuncles of the working class have developed more rapidly and more shamelessly than in any country? drag queen keyed over dq 2: his body continued its parody. marx came to regard the carbuncles as having a life of their own, his affliction had a theory and a practice. ------------------------------------------------------ 64. marx's room, bed. dear kugelmann: after my riot footage keyed onto return, a carbuncle broke bandages out on my right cheek which had to be operated on, then it had several smaller successors, and i think that at the present moment i am suffering from the last of them. for the rest don't worry at all about newspaper gossip; still less answer it. i myself allow the english papers to announce my death from time to time, without giving a sign of life. drag queeen keyed over dq 3: like the revolutionary, the erupting, symptomatic body displays monstrous and unreadable forms to a horrified society. ------------------------------------------------------ 65. helene clears the dear frederick: the doctor table as marx writes has opened up the pleasant in bed prospect that i will have to deal with this loathsome disease until late in january. still this second frankenstein on my hump is by far not so fierce as was the first in london. you can see this from the fact that i am able to write. if one wants to vomit politics out of nausea, one must take it daily in the form of telegraphic pills, such as are delivered by the newspapers. ------------------------------------------------------ title: if one wants to vomit politics out of nausea... ------------------------------------------------------ 66. studio high shot woman: how can i live in toilet, woman bending my body? where can i live over in black space in my body? pan to drag queen dq1: where is the history riot footage of the body written? in keyed behind toilet your politeness, in your deodorant and douche, behind the bathroom door, in your shame and revulsion. pan to next drag queen dq2: in your symptoms. ------------------------------------------------------ 67. marx's room dear frederick: i hope in bed. zoom into that with this, i will bandaged carbuncle have paid my debt to nature. in my state of ill health, i can do little writing, and then only by revolutions fits and starts. at any emerging out of rate, i hope the carbuncles bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives. zoom into, then credits coover, 'titles sequence from _the adventures of lucky pierre_', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-coover-titles.txt the titles sequence from _the adventures of lucky pierre_ by robert coover department of english brown university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by robert coover, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. (cantus.) in the darkness, softly. a whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city. and now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the tenebrous absences behind the eye. and still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an unclean widow, an emergence from c, a titular c, tentative and parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth. the glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now blurring, now defined. now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, c to c and f again, she findeth no rest. how many have died here? the plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. overtaken amidst the narrow defiles. continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. all her gates are desolate. the eye courses the valley to its yawning embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted. gravis. innig. in bitterness, yes con amarezza, she is with bitterness. beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just beyond, just below... ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end and exposed like an open grave! the light flares and wanes, flutters, as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of harts. o woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the tremulous matinal gloom. black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. flickering neumes. vaginal orifice. labia majora. and not a propylaeum: a perineum. anus. alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. c to c and f again. like the echo of letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: urethra, clitoris, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the coldest hour. crying: her filthiness is in her skirts. between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters suspended mysteriously in the archway--fleshy pillow, now sharp, now diffuse--beyond and through all this, we see the distant teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. they sway in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the wintry dawn, blowing out of the anus and the vaginal canal, it is snowing on the city. o lord, behold my affliction! a vast desolation, the city, the afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified himself. yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding snow. through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his risks--or rather, perhaps that *is* a pedestriancrossing sign, blurred by the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and narrow, at right angles. there he is, huddled miserably against the snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the morning traffic. his hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is all but buried in his winter habit. only his eyes stare forth, aglitter with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. his mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am i doing out here? his hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on keeping their brains from freezing. oh, my poor doomed ass, i'm in real trouble, he whimpers to himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play the fucking hero? he walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting the world's glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: lucky pierre. the swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily forth. subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and there's the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead fetuses, old shoes. cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and crumpling into snowbanks. above the crowds, a billboard asks: what is my prick doing in your cunt, lizzie? six blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: fucking me! fucking me! o so nicely! smoke rises from a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming themselves by the ruins. distant crackle: trouble in the city. somewhere. a little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers up at the light, now changing from green to red. her spectacles are frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. the man, trying to catch the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, glissandos right into the old lady's humped-over backside, bowling her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. there is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her down. old as she was, it's still all a little visceral, but soon enough the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest. --pity, someone mutters. --life's tough. --where's the street department? goddamn it, they're never around when you need them. the light changes, the old lady is trampled away. there's the blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, and snow. thousands of feet. going all directions. whush, crump, crump, stomp. crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. someone's pocketwatch. beer cans. crump, crump, crump, a kind of rasper continuo. windup toys and belt buckles. bicycle sprocket. ticket stubs. all those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, almost whispering: that's right, maggie, lift your arse and whush, crump, crump, tickle my balls! oh christ, it's cold! %it's too fucking cold!% listen, get your mind off it. think of something else. e.g. comma green places. where it's warm exclamation mark. that's it. chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a tree, peeks out, showing her ass. he bounds over fallen trunks, crackling branches and dry leaves. splashing through a brook. up mossy rocks. delicious stink. yeah, good, moving along now, keep it up colon. cavorting in soft grass. some kind of music... (front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: blaaaat!) cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that's good, cissy'd like that, all' antico, right. her handsome ass aglow in the sun. he licks it, tongues her cunt. yum. she kicks him, springs away. they circle each other. hah! she scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll about, flutes fading, rest. mmm. silent now in the sunny green meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing more than a playful wind in the fading forest. yes, good. he pokes his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about. (sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. city streets, buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by.) sshh! getting there! twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. he hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at the stamens, slip in and out of septa. distantly: the sound of muted trumpets- bllaaaaaa%aaaattt!% he jumps back to the curb, but too late, a bus bearing dawn on him--%thwock!%--whacks his prick as it goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen of them. he catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the street, an advertisement spread across its rear: i can see her cunt, gussy! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back window, staring at him. the crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, curse and weep: --what is it like, nelly? he hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. he finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. over a photo of the mayor at a public execution of three small children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the headline: a large hairy mouth sucking his purple prick. aw hey listen: fuck it. quit. yeah. he sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter snatch of the diatonic aubade. something seems to leave him, some spring released, a slipping away... no! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. forget that shit, fade it out, no more messages, pick 'em up and put 'em down, hup two three four, he's running along now, prick waggling frantically, stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it--oof! sorry, ma'am! --good morning, l.p.! --good morning, love! (whew!) after you! --thank you, mr. peters! --morning, sir! thank you, sir! ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? o o o o o beverley, 'ideology of postmodern music and left politics', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-beverley-ideology.txt the ideology of postmodern music and left politics by john beverley university of pittsburgh copyright (c) 1989 by _critical quarterly_, all rights reserved. reprinted by permission. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). ----------------------------------------------------- this article appeared initially in the british journal _critical quarterly_ 31.1 (spring, 1989). i'm grateful to its editors for permission to reproduce it here, and in particular to colin maccabe for suggesting the idea in the first place. i've added a few minor corrections and updates. ----------------------------------------------------- for rudy van gelder, friend of ears [1] adorno directed some of his most acid remarks on musical sociology to the category of the "fan." for example: what is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. in this respect their play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses of followers in totalitarian states, even though the difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death (...) while the leaders in the european dictatorships of both shades raged against the decadence of jazz, the youth of the other countries has long since allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches, by the syncopated dance-steps, with bands which do not by accident stem from military music.^1^ one of the most important contributions of postmodernism has been its defense of an aesthetics of the _consumer_, rather than as in the case of romanticism and modernism an aesthetics of the producer, in turn linked to an individualist and phallocentric ego ideal. i should first of all make it clear then that i am writing here from the perspective of the "fan," the person who buys records and goes to concerts, not like adorno from the perspective of the trained musician or composer. what i will be arguing, in part with adorno, in part against him, is that music is coming to represent for the left something like a "key sector." * * * * * * * * * [2] for adorno, the development of modern music is a reflection of the decline of the bourgeoisie, whose most characteristic cultural medium on the other hand music is.^2^ christa burger recalls the essential image of the cultural in adorno: that of ulysses, who, tied to the mast of his ship, can listen to the song of the sirens while the slaves underneath work at the oars, cut off from the aesthetic experience which is reserved only for those in power.^3^ what is implied and critiqued at the same time in the image is the stance of the traditional intellectual or aesthete in the face of the processes of transformation of culture into a commodity--mass culture--and the consequent collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, a collapse which precisely defines the postmodern and which postmodernist ideology celebrates. in the postmodern mode, not only are ulysses and his crew both listening to the siren song, they are singing along with it as in "sing along with mitch" and perhaps marking the beat with their oars--one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four. * * * * * * * * [3] one variant of the ideology of postmodern music may be illustrated by the following remarks from an interview john cage gave about his composition for electronic tape _fontana mix_ (1958): q.--i feel that there is a sense of logic and cohesion in your indeterminate music. a.--this logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. the thought that it is logical grows up in you... i think that all those things that we associate with logic and our observance of relationships, those aspects of our mind are extremely simple in relation to what actually happens, so that when we use our perception of logic we minimize the actual nature of the thing we are experiencing. q.--your conception (of indeterminacy) leads you into a universe nobody has attempted to charter before. do you find yourself in it as a lawmaker? a.--i am certainly not at the point of making laws. i am more like a hunter, or an inventor, than a lawmaker. q.--are you satisfied with the way your music is made public--that is, by the music publishers, record companies, radio stations, etc.? do you have complaints? a.--i consider my music, once it has left my desk, to be what in buddhism would be called a non sentient being... if someone kicked me--not my music, but me--then i might complain. but if they kicked my music, or cut it out, or don't play it enough, or too much, or something like that, then who am i to complain?^4^ we might contrast this with one of the great epiphanies of literary modernism, the moment of the jazz song in sartre's _nausea_: (...)there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. they know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. they race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. i would like to hold them back, but i know if i succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. i must accept their death; i must even _will_ it: i know few impressions stronger or more harsh. i grow warm, i begin to feel happy. there is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of _our_ time- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. no sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though i have known it for twenty years (...) the last chord has died away. in the brief silence which follows i feel strongly that there it is, that _something has happened_. silence. _some of these days you'll miss me honey_ what has just happened is that the nausea has disappeared. when the voice was heard in the silence, i felt my body harden and the nausea vanish. suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. at the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. it filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. i am _in_ the music. globes of fire turn in the mirrors; encircled by rings of smoke, veiling and unveiling the hard smile of light. my glass of beer has shrunk, it seems heaped up on the table, it looks dense and indispensable. i want to pick it up and feel the weight of it, i stretch out my hand... god! that is what has changed, my gestures. this movement of my arm has developed like a majestic theme, it has glided along the jazz song; i seemed to be dancing.^5^ * * * * * * * * [4] the passage from _nausea_ illustrates adorno's dictum that music is "the promise of reconciliation." this is what betrays its origins in those moments of ritual sacrifice and celebration in which the members of a human community are bonded or rebonded to their places within it. in _nausea_ the jazz song prefigures roquentin's eventual reconciliation with his own self and his decision to write what is in effect his dissertation, a drama of choice that will not be unfamiliar to readers of this journal. even for an avant-gardist like cage music is still--in the allusion to buddhism--in some sense the sensuous form or "lived experience" of the religious.^6^ [5] was it not the function of music in relation to the great feudal ideologies--islam, christianity, buddhism, hinduism, shinto, confucianism--to produce the sensation of the sublime and the eternal so as to constitute the image of the reward which awaited the faithful and obedient: the reward for submitting to exploitation or the reward for accepting the burden of exploiting? i am remembering as i write this monteverdi's beautiful echo duet _due seraphim_--two angels--for the _vespers of the virgin mary_ of 1610, whose especially intense sweetness is perhaps related to the fact that it was written in a moment of crisis of both feudalism and catholicism. [6] just before monteverdi, the italian mannerists had proclaimed the formal autonomy of the art work from religious dogma. but if the increasing secularization of music in the european late baroque and 18th century led on the one hand to the jacobin utopianism of the _ninth symphony_, it produced on the other something like kant's aesthetics of the sublime, that is a mysticism of the bourgeois ego. as adorno was aware, we are still in modern music in a domain where, as in the relation of music and feudalism, aesthetic experience, repression and sublimation, and class privilege and self-legitimation converge.^7^ * * * * * * * * [7] genovese has pointed out in the afro-american slave spiritual something like a contrary articulation of the relation of music and the religious to the one i have been suggesting: the sense in which both the music and the words of the song keep alive culturally the image of an imminent redemption from slavery and oppression, a redemption which lies within human time and a "real" geography of slave and free states ("the river jordan is muddy and wide / gotta get across to the other side").^8^ of the so-called free jazz movement of the 60s--cecil taylor, ornette coleman, albert ayler, late coltrane, archie shepp, sun ra, etc.--the french critic pierre lere remarked in a passage quoted centrally by herbert marcuse in one of the key statements of 60s aesthetic radicalism: (...)the liberty of the musical form is only the aesthetic translation of the will to social liberation. transcending the tonal framework of the theme, the musician finds himself in a position of freedom(...) the melodic line becomes the medium of communication between an initial order which is rejected and a final order which is hoped for. the frustrating possession of the one, joined with the liberating attainment of the other, establishes a rupture in between the weft of harmony which gives way to an aesthetic of the cry (_esthetique du cri_). this cry, the characteristic resonant (_sonore_) element of "free music," born in an exasperated tension, announces the violent rupture with the established white order and translates the advancing (_promotrice_) violence of a new black order.^9^ * * * * * * * * [8] music itself as ideology, as an ideological practice? what i have in mind is not at all the problem, common both to a saussurian and a vulgar marxist musicology, of "how music expresses ideas." jacques attali has correctly observed that while music can be defined as noise given form according to a code, nevertheless it cannot be equated with a language. music, though it has a precise operationality, never has stable reference to a semantic code of the linguistic type. it is a sort of language without meaning.^10^ [9] could we think of music then as outside of ideology to the extent that it is non-verbal? (this, some will recall, was della volpe's move in his _critique of taste_.) one problem with poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular has been their tendency to see ideology as essentially bound up with language--the "symbolic"- rather than organized states of feeling in general.^11^ but we certainly inhabit a cultural tradition where it is a common-sense proposition that people listen to music precisely to escape from ideology, from the terrors of ideology and the dimension of practical reason. adorno, in what i take to be the quintessential modernist dictum, writes: "beauty is like an exodus from the world of means and ends, the same world to which beauty however owes its objective existence."^12^ [10] adorno and the frankfurt school make of the kantian notion of the aesthetic as a purposiveness without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing and redemptive power of art, the sense in which by alienating practical aims it sides with the repressed and challenges domination and exploitation, particularly the rationality of capitalist institutions. by contrast, there is lenin's famous remark--it's in gorki's _reminiscences_--that he had to give up listening to beethoven's _appasionata_ sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him feel soft, happy, at one with all humanity. his point would seem to be the need to resist a narcotic and pacifying aesthetic gratification in the name of the very difficult struggle--and the corresponding ideological rigor--necessary to at least setting in motion the process of building a classless society. but one senses in lenin too the displacement or sublation of an aesthetic sensibility onto the field of revolutionary activism. and in both adorno and lenin there is a sense that music is somehow in excess of ideology. [11] not only the frankfurt school, but most major tendencies in "western marxism" (a key exception is gramsci) maintain some form or other of the art/ideology distinction, with a characteristic ethical-epistemological privileging of the aesthetic _over_ the ideological. in althusser's early essays- "a letter on art to andre daspre," for example--art was said to occupy an intermediate position between science and ideology, since it involved ideology (as, so to speak, its raw material), but in such a way as to provoke an "internal distancing" from ideology, somewhat as in brecht's notion of an "alienation effect" which obliges the spectator to scrutinize and question the assumptions on which the spectacle has been proceeding. in the section on interpellation in althusser's later essay on ideology, this "modernist" and formalist concern with estrangement and defamiliarization has been displaced by what is in effect a postmodernist concern with fascination and fixation. if ideology, in althusser's central thesis, is what constitutes the subject in relation to the real, then the domain of ideology is not a world-view or set of (verbal) ideas, but rather the ensemble of signifying practices in societies: that is, the cultural. in interpellation, the issue is not _whether_ ideology is happening in the space of something like aesthetic experience, or whether "good" or "great" art transcends the merely ideological (whereas "bad" art doesn't), but rather _what_ or _whose_ ideology, because the art work is precisely (one of the places) where ideology happens, though of course this need not be the dominant ideology or even any particular ideology. * * * * * * * * [12] if the aesthetic effect consists in a certain satisfaction of desire--a "pleasure" (in the formalists, the recuperation or production of sensation)--, and if the aesthetic effect is an ideological effect, then the question becomes not the separation of music and ideology but rather their relation. [13] music would seem to have in this sense a special relation to the pre-verbal, and thus to the imaginary or more exactly to something like kristeva's notion of the semiotic.^13^ in the sort of potted lacanianism we employ these days in cultural studies, we take it that objects of imaginary identification function in the psyche--in a manner lacan designated as "orthopedic"- as metonyms of an object of desire which has been repressed or forgotten, a desire which can never be satisfied and which consequently inscribes in the subject a sense of insufficiency or fading. in narcissism, this desire takes the form of a libidinal identification of the ego with an image or sensation of itself as (to recall freud's demarcation of the alternatives in his 1916 essay on narcissism) it is, was or should be. from the third of these possibilities--images or experiences of the ego as it should be--freud argued that there arises as a consequence of the displacement of primary narcissism the images of an ideal ego or ego ideal, internalized as the conscience or super ego. such images, he added, are not only of self but also involve the social ideals of the parent, the family, the tribe, the nation, the race, etc. consequently, those sentiments which are the very stuff of ideology in the narrow sense of political "isms" and loyalties--belonging to a party, being an "american," defending the family "honor," fighting in a national liberation movement, etc.--are basically transformations of homoerotic libidinal narcissism. [14] it follows then that the aesthetic effect--even the sort of non-semantic effect produced by the organization of sound (in music) or color and line (in painting or sculpture)--always implies a kind of social imaginary, a way of being with and/or for others. although they are literature-centered, we may recall in this context jameson's remarks at the end of _the political unconscious_ (in the section titled "the dialectic of utopia and ideology") to the effect that "all class consciousness--that is all ideology in the strict sense--, as much the exclusive forms of consciousness of the ruling classes as the opposing ones of the oppressed classes, are in their very nature utopian." from this jameson claims--this is his appropriation of frankfurt aesthetics--that the aesthetic value of a given work of art can never be limited to its moment of genesis, when it functioned willy-nilly to legitimize some form or other of domination. for if its utopian quality as "art"--its "eternal charm," to recall marx's (eurocentric, petty bourgeois) comment on greek epic poetry--is precisely that it expresses pleasurably the imaginary unity of a social collectivity, then "it is utopian not as a thing in itself, but rather to the extent that such collectivities are themselves ciphers for the final concretion of collective life, that is the achieved utopia of a classless society."^14^ [15] what this implies, although i'm not sure whether jameson himself makes this point as such, is that the political unconscious of the aesthetic is (small c) communism. (one would need to also work through here the relation between music--wagner, richard strauss --and fascism.) * * * * * * * * [16] i want to introduce at this point an issue which was particularly crucial to the way in which i experienced and think about music, which is the relation of music and drugs. it is said the passage from _nausea_ i used before derived from sartre's experiments in the 30s with mescaline. many of you will have your own versions of essential psychedelic experiences of the 60s, but here--since i'm not likely to be nominated in the near future for the supreme court--is one of mine. it is 1963, late at night. i'm a senior in college and i've taken peyote for the first time. i'm lying face down on a couch with a red velour cover. mozart is playing, something like the adagio of a piano concerto. as my nausea fades--peyote induces in the first half hour or so a really intense nausea--i begin to notice the music which seems to become increasingly clear and beautiful. i feel my breath making my body move against the couch and i feel the couch respond to me as if it were a living organism, very soft and very gentle, as if it were the body of my mother. i remember or seem to remember being close to my mother in very early childhood. i am overwhelmed with nostalgia. the room fills with light. i enter a timeless, paradisiacal state, beyond good and evil. the music goes on and on. [17] there was of course also the freak-out or bad trip: the drug exacerbated sensation that the music is incredibly banal and stupid, that the needle of the record player is covered with fuzz, that the sound is thick and ugly like mucus; charlie manson hearing secret apocalyptic messages in "helter skelter" on the beatles's _white album_; the stones at altamont. modernism in music, say the infinitely compressed fragments of late webern, is the perception in the midst of the bad trip, of dissonance, of a momentary cohesion and radiance, whose power is all the greater because it shines out of chaos and evil. in frankfurt aesthetics, dissonance is the voice of the oppressed in music. thus for adorno it is only in dissonance, which destroys the illusion of reconciliation represented by harmony, that the power of seduction of the inspiring character of music survives.^15^ * * * * * * * * consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly... you can stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel. but to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath--such concentration can only be present in proposition to the absence of self pity. --schoenberg on webern^16^ * * * * * * * * [18] cage's _4'33"_--which is a piece where the performer sits at a piano without playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds--is a postmodernist homage to modernist aesthetics, to serialism and private language music. what it implies is that the listening subject is to compose from the very absence of music the music, the performance from the frustration of the expected performance. as in the parallel cases of duchamp's ready-mades or rauschenberg's white paintings, such a situation gives rise to an appropriately "modernist" anxiety (which might be allegorized in klee's twittering birds whose noise emanates from the very miniaturization, compression and silent tension of the pictorial space) to create an aesthetic experience out of the given, whatever it is. [19] postmodernism per se in music, on the other hand, is where the anxiety of the listener to "make sense of" the piece is either perpetually frustrated by pure randomness--cage's music of chance--or assuaged and dissipated by a bland, "easy-listening" surface with changes happening only in a californian _longue duree_, as in the musics of la monte young, philip glass, terry riley, or steve reich. the intention of such musics, we might say, is to transgress both the imaginary and symbolic: they are a sort of brainwashing into the real. * * * * * * * * i [heart] adorno --bumper sticker (thanks to hilary radner) * * * * * * * * [20] one form of capitalist utopia which is portended in contemporary music--we could call it the chicago school or neoliberal form--is the utopia of the record store, with its incredible proliferation and variety of musical commodities, its promise of "different strokes for different folks," as sly stone would have it: michael jackson--or prince--, liberace, bach on original instruments or _a la _ cadillac by the philadelphia orchestra, heavy metal--or springsteen--, country (what kind of country: zydeco, appalachian, bluegrass, dolly parton, trucker, new folk, etc.?), jazz, blues, spirituals, soul, rap, hip hop, fusion, college rock (grateful dead, rem, talking heads), sst rock (meat puppets etc.), holly near, _hymnen_, _salsa_, reggae, world beat, _norteno_ music, _cumbias_, laurie anderson, 46 different recorded versions of _bolero_, john adams, and so on and on, with the inevitable "crossovers" and new "new waves." by contrast, even the best stocked record outlets in socialist countries were spartan. [21] but this is also "brazil" (as in the song/film): the dystopia of behaviorly tailored, industrially manufactured, packaged and standardized music--muzak--, where it is expected that everyone except owners and managers of capital will be at the same time a fast food chain worker and consumer. muzak is to music what, say, mcdonalds is to food; and since its purpose is to generate an environment conducive to both commodity production and consumption, it is more often than not to be heard in places like mcdonalds (or, so we are told in prison testimonies, in that latin american concomitant of chicago school economics which are torture chambers, with the volume turned up to the point of distortion). [22] in russell berman's perhaps overly anxious image, muzak implies a fundamental mutation of the public sphere, "the beautiful illusion of a collective, singing along in dictatorial unanimity." its ubiquity, as in the parallel cases of advertising and packaging and design, refers to a situation where there is no longer, berman writes, "an outside to art (...) there is no pre-aesthetic dimension to social activity, since the social order itself has become dependent on aesthetic organization."^17^ [23] berman's concern here i take to be in the spirit of the general critique habermas--and in this country christopher lasch--have made of postmodern commodity culture, a critique which as many people have noted coincides paradoxically (since its main assumption is that postmodernism is a reactionary phenomenon) with the cultural politics of the new right, for example alan bloom's clinically paranoid remarks on rock in _the closing of the american mind_.^18^ [24] is the loss of autonomy of the aesthetic however a bad thing--something akin to marcuse's notion of a "repressive desublimation" which entails the loss of art's critical potential--, or does it indicate a new vulnerability of capitalist societies--a need to legitimize themselves through aestheticization--and therefore both a _new possibility_ for the left and a new centrality for cultural and aesthetic matters in left practice? for, as berman is aware, the aestheticization of everyday life was also the goal of the historical avant garde in its attack on the institution of the autonomy of the aesthetic in bourgeois culture, which made it at least potentially a form of anti-capitalist practice. the loss of aura or desublimation of the art work may be a form of commodification but it is also, as walter benjamin pointed out, a form of democratization of culture.^19^ [25] cage writes suggestively, for example, of "a music which is like furniture--a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. i think of it as a melodious softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. it would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together."^20^ in some of the work of la monte young or brian eno, music becomes consciously an aspect of interior decorating. what this takes us back to is not muzak but the admirable baroque tradition of _tafel musik_: "table" or dinner music. mozart still wrote at the time of the french revolution comfortably and well _divertimentii_ meant to accompany social gatherings, including meetings of his masonic lodge. after mozart, this utilitarian or "background" function is repressed in bourgeois art music, which will now require the deepest concentration and emotional and intellectual involvement on the part of the listening subject. [26] the problem with muzak is not its ubiquity or the idea of environmental music per se, but rather its insistently kitsch and conservative melodic-harmonic content. what is clear, on the other hand, is that the intense and informed concentration on the art work which is assumed in frankfurt aesthetics depends on an essentially romantic, formalist and individualist conception of both music and the listening subject, which is not unrelated to the actual processes of commodification "classical" music was undergoing in the late 18th and 19th centuries. * * * * * * * * [27] the antidote to muzak would seem to be something like punk. by way of a preface to a discussion of punk and extending the considerations above on the relation between music and commodification, i want to refer first to jackson pollock's great painting _autumn rhythm_ in the met, a picture that--like pollock's work in general--is particularly admired by free jazz musicians. it's a vast painting with splotches of black, brown and rust against the raw tan of unprimed canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling, clustering, dispersing energy. as you look at it, you become aware that while the ambition of the painting seems to be to explode or expand the pictorial space of the canvas altogether, it is finally only the limits of the canvas which make the painting possible as an art object. the limit of the canvas is its aesthetic autonomy, its separation from the life world, but also its commodity status as something that can be bought, traded, exhibited. the commodity is implicated in the very form of the "piece;" as in the jazz record in _nausea_, "the music ends." (the 78 rpm record--the commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s- imposed a three minute limit per side on performances and this in turn shaped the way songs were arranged in jazz or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of the "single.") [28] such a situation might indicate one limit of jameson's cultural hermeneutic. if the strategy in jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian communist potential locked up in the artifacts of the cultural heritage, this is also in a sense to leave everything as it is, as in wittgenstein's analytic (because that which is desired is already there; it only has to be "seen" correctly), whereas the problem of the relation of art and social liberation is also clearly the need to _transgress_ the limits imposed by existing artistic forms and practices and to produce new ones. to the extent, however, such transgressions can be recontained within the sphere of the aesthetic- in a new series of "works" which may also be available as commodities--, they will produce paradoxically an affirmation of bourgeois culture: in a certain sense they _are _ bourgeois high culture. [29] a representation of this paradox in terms of 60s leftism is the great scene in antonioni's film _zabriskie point_ where the (modernist) desert home of the capitalist pig is (in the young woman's imagination) blown up, and we see in ultra slow motion, in beautiful technicolor, accompanied by a spacy and sinister pink floyd music track, the whole commodity universe of late capitalism--cars, tools, supermarket food, radios, tvs, clothes, furniture, records, books, decorations, utensils--float by. what is not clear is who could have placed the bomb, so that jameson might ask in reply a question the film itself also leaves unanswered: is this an image of the destruction of capitalism or of its fission into a new and "higher" stage where it fills all space and time, where there is no longer something--nature, the third world, the unconscious--outside it? and this question suggests another one: to what extent was the cultural radicalism of the 60s, nominally directed against the rationality of capitalist society and its legitimating discourses, itself a form of modernization of capitalism, a prerequisite of its "expanded" reproduction in the new international division of labor and the proliferation of electronic technologies--with corresponding "mind sets"--which emerge in the 70s?^21^ * * * * * * * * from punk manifestos: real life stinks. what has been shown is that you and i can do anything in any area without training and with little cash. we're demanding that real life keep up with advertising, the speed of advertising on tv... we are living at the speed of advertising. we demand to be entertained all the time, we get bored very quickly. when we're on stage, things happen a thousand times faster, everything we do is totally compressed and intense on stage, and that's our version of life as we feel and see it. in the future t.v. will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only. in the future we will not have time for leisure activities. in the future we will "work" one day a week. in the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user. in the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it. (david byrne)^22^ [30] the emergence and brief hegemony of punk--from, say, 1975 to 1982--was related to the very high levels of structural unemployment or subemployment which appear in first world capitalist centers in the 70s as a consequence of the winding down of the post-world war ii economic long cycle, and which imply especially for lower middle class and working class youth a consequent displacement of the work ethic towards a kind of on the dole bohemianism or dandyism. punk aimed at a sort of rock or gesamtkunstwerk (simon frith has noted its connections with situationist ideology^23^) which would combine music, fashion, dance, speech forms, mime, graphics, criticism, new "on the street" forms of appropriation of urban space, and in which in principle everybody was both a performer and a spectator. its key musical form was three-chord garage power rock, because its intention was to contest art rock and superstar rock, to break down the distance between fan and performer. punk was loud, aggressive, eclectic, anarchic, amateur, self-consciously anti commercial and anti-hippie at the same time. [31] as it was the peculiar genius of the sex pistol's manager, malcolm mcclaren, to understand, both the conditions of possibility and the limits of punk were those of a still expanding capitalist consumer culture --a culture which, in one sense, was intended as a _compensation_ for the decline in working-class standards of living. initially, punk had to create its own forms of record production and distribution, independent of the "majors" and of commercial music institutions in general. the moment that to be recognized as punk is to conform to an established image of consumer desire, to be different say than new wave, is the moment punk becomes the new commodity. it is the moment of the sex pistols' us tour depicted in _sid and nancy_, where on the basis of the realization that they are becoming a commercial success on the american market--_the_ new band--they auto destruct. but the collapse of punk--and its undoubted flirtation with nihilism--should not obscure the fact that it was for a while--most consciously in the work of british groups like the clash or the gang of four and also in collective projects like rock against racism--a very powerful form of left mass culture, perhaps--if we are attentive to lenin's dictum that ideas acquire a material force when they reach the millions--one of the most powerful forms we have seen in recent years in western europe and the united states. some of punk's heritage lives on in the popularity of u2 or tracy chapman today and or in the recent upsurge of heavy metal (which, it should be recalled, has one of its roots in the detroit 60s movement band, mc5). * * * * * * * * [32] the notion of postmodernism initially comes into play to designate a crisis in the dominant canons of american architecture. hegel posited architecture over music as the world historical form of romantic art, because in architecture the reconciliation of spirit and matter, reason and history, represented ultimately by the state was more completely realized. hence, for example, jameson's privileging of architecture in his various discussions of postmodernism. i think that today, however, particularly if we are thinking about how to develop a left practice on the terrain of the postmodern, we have to be for music as against architecture, because it is in architecture that the power and self-representation of capital and the imperialist state reside, whereas music--like sports- is always and everywhere a power of cultural production which is in the hands of the people. capital can master and exploit music--and modern musics like rock are certainly forms of capitalist culture--, but it can never seize hold of and monopolize its means of production, as it can say with literature. the cultural presence of the third world in and against the dominant of imperialism is among other things, to borrow jacques attali's concept, "noise"--the intrusion of new forms of language and music which imply new forms of community and pleasure: bob marley's reggae; run-dmc on mtv with "walk this way" (a crossover of rap with white heavy metal); "we shall overcome" sung at a sit-in for salvadoran refugees; the beautiful south african choral music paul simon used on _graceland_ sung at a township funeral; _la bamba_; public enemy's "fight the power"; ruben blades' _crossover dreams_. [33] the debate over _graceland_ some years ago indicates that the simple presence of third world music in a first world context implies immediately a series of ideological effects, which doesn't mean that i think there was a "correct line" on _graceland_, e.g. that it was a case of third world suffering and creative labor sublimated into an item of first world white middle-class consumption.^24^ whatever the problems with the concept of the third world, it can no longer mark an "other" that is radically outside of and different than contemporary american or british society. by the year 2000, one out of four inhabitants of the united states will be non-european (black, hispanic of latin american origin, asian or native american); even today we are the fourth or fifth largest hispanic country in the world (out of twenty). in this sense, the third world is also _inside_ the first, "en las entranas del monstruo" (in the entrails of the monster) as jose marti would have said, and for a number of reasons music has been and is perhaps the hegemonic cultural form of this insertion. what would american musical culture be like for example without the contribution of afro-american musics? [34] turning this argument on its head, assume something like the following: a young guerrilla fighter of the fmln in el salvador wearing a madonna t-shirt. a traditional kind of left cultural analysis would have talked about cultural imperialism and how the young man or woman in question had become a revolutionary _in spite of_ madonna and american pop culture. i don't want to discount entirely the notion of cultural imperialism, which seems to me real and pernicious enough, but i think we might also begin to consider how being a fan of madonna might in some sense _contribute to_ becoming a guerrilla or political activist in el salvador. (and how wearing a madonna t-shirt might be a form of revolutionary cultural politics: it certainly defines--correctly--a community of interest between young people in el salvador and young people in the united states who like madonna.) * * * * * * * * [35] simon frith has summarized succinctly the critique of the limitations of frankfurt school aesthetic theory that has been implicit here: the frankfurt scholars argued that the transformation of art into commodity inevitably sapped imagination and withered hope--now all that could be imagined was what was. but the artistic impulse is not destroyed by capital; it is transformed by it. as utopianism is mediated through the new processes of cultural production and consumption, new sorts of struggles over community and leisure begin.^25^ more and more--the point has been made by karl offe among others--the survival of capitalism has become contingent on non-capitalist forms of culture, including those of the third world. what is really utopian in the present context is not so much the sublation of art into life under the auspices of advanced consumer capitalism, but rather the current capitalist project of reabsorbing the entire life energy of world society into labor markets and industrial or service production. one of the places where the conflict between forces and relations of production is most acutely evident is in the current tensions--the fbi warning at the start of your evening video, for example--around the commercialization of vcr and digital sound technologies. cassettes and cds are the latest hot commodities, but by the same token they portend the possibility of a virtual decommodification of music and film material, since its reproduction via these technologies can no longer be easily contained within the "normal" boundaries of capitalist property rights. [36] as opposed to both frankfurt school style _angst_ about commodification and a neopopulism which can't imagine anything finer than bruce springsteen (i have in mind jesse lemisch's polemic against popular front style "folk" music in _the nation_)^26^, i think we have to reject the notion that certain kinds of music are _a priori_ ethically and politically ok and others not (which doesn't mean that there is not ideological struggle in music and choice of music). old left versions of this, some will recall, ranged from jazz=good, classical=bad (american cp), to jazz=bad, classical=good (soviet cp). the position of the left today--understanding this in the broadest possible sense, as in the idea of the rainbow--should be in favor of the broadest possible variety and proliferation of musics and related technologies of pleasure, on the understanding--or hope--that in the long run this will be deconstructive of capitalist hegemony. this is a postmodernist position, but it also involves challenging a certain smugness in postmodernist theory and practice about just how far elite/popular, high culture/mass culture distinctions have broken down. too much of postmodernism seems simply a renovated form of bourgeois "art" culture. to my mind, the problem is not how much but rather how little commodification of culture has introduced a universal aestheticization of everyday life. the left needs to defend the pleasure principle ("fun") involved in commodity aesthetics at the same time that it needs to develop effective images of _post-commodity_ gratification linked--as transitional demands--to an expansion of leisure time and a consequent transformation of the welfare state from the realm of economic maintenance--the famous "safety net"--to that of the provision of forms of pleasure and personal development outside the parameters of commodity production. while it is good and necessary to remind ourselves that we are a long way away from the particular cultural forms championed by the popular front--that these are now the stuff of_our_ nostalgia mode--, we also need to think about the ways in which the popular fronts in their day were able to hegemonize both mass and elite culture. the creation--as in a tentative way in this paper--of an _ideologeme_ which articulates the political project of ending or attenuating capitalist domination with both the production _and_ consumption of contemporary music seems to me one of the most important tasks in cultural work the left should have on its present agenda. [37] of course, what we anticipate in taking up this task is also the moment--or moments--when architecture becomes the form of expression of the people, because that would be the moment when power had really begun to change hands. what would this architecture be like? _______________________________________________________ notes 1. theodor adorno, "perennial fashion--jazz," in _prisms_, trans. samuel and shierry weber (london: neville spearman, 1967), 128-29. 2. on this point, see adorno's remarks in _the philosophy of modern music_, trans. anne mitchell and wesley blomster (new york: seabury, 1980), 129-33. 3. christa burger, "the disappearance of art: the postmodernism debate in the u.s.," _telos_, 68 (summer 1986), 93-106. 4. ilhan mimaroglu, extracts from interview with john cage in record album notes for berio, cage, mimaroglu, _electronic music_ (turnabout tv34046s). 5. jean-paul sartre, _nausea_, trans. lloyd alexander (new york: new directions, 1959), 33-36. 6. cf. the following remarks by the minimalist composer la monte young: around 1960 i became interested in yoga, in which the emphasis is on concentration and focus on the sounds inside your head. zen meditation allows ideas to come and go as they will, which corresponds to cage's music; he and i are like opposites which help define each other (...) in singing, when the tone becomes perfectly in tune with a drone, it takes so much concentration to keep it in tune that it drives out all other thoughts. you become one with the drone and one with the creator. cited in kyle gann, "la monte young: maximal spirit," _village voice_, june 9, 1987, 70. (gann's column in the _voice_ is a good place to track developments in contemporary modernist and postmodernist music in the ny scene.) 7. "beethoven's symphonies in their most arcane chemistry are part of the bourgeois process of production and express the perennial disaster brought on by capitalism. but they also take a stance of tragic affirmation towards reality as a social fact; they seem to say that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. beethoven's music is as much a part of the revolutionary emancipation of the bourgeoisie as it anticipates the latter's apologia. the more profoundly you decode works of art, the less absolute is their contrast to praxis." adorno, _aesthetic theory_, trans. c. lenhardt (new york: routledge & kegan paul, 1986), 342. 8. eugene genovese, _roll, jordan, roll. the world the slaves made_ (new york: vintage, 1976), 159 280. 9. pierre lere, "_free jazz_: evolution ou revolution," _revue d'esth tique_, 3-4, 1970, 320-21, translated and cited in herbert marcuse, _counterrevolution and revolt_ (boston: beacon, 1972), 114. 10. see attali's, _noise: the political economy of music_, trans. brian massumi (minneapolis: univ. of minnesota press, 1985). 11. barthes is perhaps an exception, and derrida has written on pictures and painting. john mowitt at the university of minnesota has been doing the most interesting work on music from a poststructuralist perspective that i have seen. he suggests as a primer on poststructuralist music theory i. stoianova, _geste, texte, musique_ (paris: 10/18, 1985). 12. _aesthetic theory_, 402. 13. the semiotic for kristeva is a sort of babble out of which language arises--something between glossolalia and the pre-oedipal awareness of the sounds of the mother's body--and which undermines the subject's submission to the symbolic. "kristeva makes the case that the semiotic is the effect of bodily drives which are incompletely repressed when the paternal order has intervened in the mother/child dyad, and it is therefore 'attached' psychically to the mother's body." paul smith, _discerning the subject_ (minneapolis: univ. of minnesota press, 1988), 121. 14. fredric jameson, _the political unconscious. narrative as a socially symbolic act_ (ithaca: cornell, 1981), 288-91. 15. _aesthetic theory_, 21-22. 16. i've lost the reference for this quote. 17. russell berman, "modern art and desublimation," _telos_, 62 (winter 1984-85): 48. 18. andreas huyssen notes perceptively that "given the aesthetic field-force of the term postmodernism, no neo-conservative today would dream of identifying the neo-conservative project as postmodern." "mapping the postmodern," in his _after the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism_ (bloomington: indiana up, 1986), 204. i became aware of huyssen's work only as i was finishing this paper, but it's obvious that i share here his problematic and many of his sympathies (including an ambivalence about mcdonalds). 19. see in particular susan buck-morss, "benjamin's _passagen-werk_: redeeming mass culture for the revolution." _new german critique_, 29 (spring summer 1983), 211-240; and in general the work of stuart hall and the birmingham center for cultural studies. peter burger's summary of recent work on the autonomy of art in bourgeois society is useful here: _theory of the avant-garde_, trans. michael shaw (minneapolis: univ. of minnesota, 1984), 35-54. in a way frankfurt theory didn't anticipate, it has seemed paradoxically necessary for capitalist merchandising to preserve or inject some semblance of aura in the commodity--hence kitsch: the golden arches--, whereas communist or socialized production should in principle have no problem with loss of aura, since it is not implicated in the commodity status of a use value or good. postmodernist pastiche or _mode retro_--where a signifier of aura is alluded to or incorporated, but in an ironic and playful way--seems an intermediate position, in the sense that it can function both to endow the commodity with an "arty" quality or to detach aspects of commodity aesthetics from commodity production and circulation per se, as in warhol. 20. john cage, "erik satie," in _silence_ (cambridge: mit press, 1966), p.76. 21. "yet this sense of freedom and possibility- which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of the 80s) a historical illusion--may perhaps best be explained in terms of the superstructural movement and play enabled by the transition from one infrastructural or systemic stage of capitalism to another." fredric jameson, "periodizing the 60s," in sohnya sayres ed., _the 60s without apology_ (minneapolis: _social text_/univ. of minnesota press, 1984), 208. 22. from isabelle anscombe and dike blair eds., _punk!_ (new york: urizen, 1978). 23. simon frith, _sound effects. youth, leisure and the politics of rock 'n' roll_ (new york: pantheon, 1981), 264-268. 24. on this point, see andrew goodwin and joe gore "world beat and the cultural imperialism debate," _socialist review_ 20.3 (jul.-sep., 1990): 63-80. 25. _sound effects_, 268. cf. huyssen: "the growing sense that we are not bound to _complete_ the project of modernity (habermas' phrase) and still do not necessarily have to lapse into irrationality or into apocalyptic frenzy, the sense that art is not exclusively pursuing some telos of abstraction, non representation, and sublimity--all of this has opened up a host of possibilities for creative endeavors today." _after the great divide_, 217. 26. "i dreamed i saw mtv last night," _the nation_ (october 18, 1986), 361, 374-376; and lemisch's reply to the debate which ensued, "the politics of left culture," _the nation_ (december 20, 1986), 700 ff. jennings, 'text is dead; long live the techst', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-jennings-text.txt the text is dead; long live the techst by edward m. jennings department of english state university of new york at albany <emj69@albnyvms> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by edward m. jennings, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: landow, george p. _hypertext: the convergence of contemporary literary theory and technology_. baltimore and london: johns hopkins up, 1992. [1] this is a review of george p. landow's book about a phenomenon almost as outlandish in a paper-based culture as scripture must appear to be when it arrives in societies without records. _hypertext: the convergence of contemporary literary theory and technology_ is part of a series called "parallax: re-visions of culture and society." steven g. nichols, gerald prince, and wendy steiner are the series editors. i think it is a marvelous book, and this essay is meant to prod you into reading it from cover to cover. [2] _hypertext_ could be the keystone volume in a graduate curriculum where the rhetorics of networking and screen display are scrutinized right beside those of oral and scribal modes, of scroll and codex technologies. but at least four audiences may still be hostile to it: curmudgeons who don't know which upsets them more, critical theory or technology; closet word-processors for whom the concept "programming" still smacks of mind control; theorists for whom barthes and derrida and lyotard are old wallpaper against which background some significant struggles are (at last) taking place; and technophiles ashamed of their access to tools that others cannot afford. [3] the book itself is not a menace, but the technologies it celebrates--or the still unexplored opportunities offered by the hypertext technology--threaten assumptions so deeply held that most people will deny that they can be challenged. after all, these words mean what they mean, don't they? text. author. story. knowledge. [4] landow himself issues no directly apocalyptic challenges. no foam around his mouth. his presentation is measured, experiential, lucid, moderate and sensible. he merely points out that the *concept* "hypertext" lets us test some concepts associated with critical theory, and gracefully shows how the technology is contributing to reconfigurations of text, author, narrative and (literary) education. [5] as an advocate for the technology landow describes so clearly, my goal in this review is to tell you enough about it so that you will feel compelled at least to read _hypertext_, even if you don't rush out and invest all at once in the electronic paraphernalia you would need to become acculturated. i will try to describe the phenomenon, and then try to suggest how hypertext demands that we re-place those four self-evident terms. as i perceive it, the technology undermines fundamental assumptions about authority and control of time. [6] just what is this "thing," this "concept," this technology that has acquired the label "hypertext"? landow does a good job of explaining it, as do bolter and moulthrop and slatin (emphasizing "storyspace"), but it's like trying to describe digital recording to oscar wilde or trying to help a fish understand "breathing." even readers of _pmc_ need help, i suspect, in spite of their acquaintance with at least two other transforming technologies, word-processing and networking. not everyone has easy access to the relatively expensive macintosh platform where most of the writer-artist hypertext software performs. [7] please note: we are *not* discussing the ballyhooed "multimedia" here, nor the pseudo-hypertext built in to the "help menus" of commercial software applications. my own experience (limited) is with eastgate systems' "storyspace" (and a few hours with ntergade's "black magic," and a few minutes with knowledge garden's "knowledge pro"). george landow, in sharp contrast, has designed and experienced entire "docuverses" in the "intermedia" environment developed and installed at brown university. he has practiced what he preaches, that is. what's more, he and paul delany have already edited _hypermedia and literary studies_ (mit, 1991), 17 essays whose cluster of perspectives supplements and qualifies the authoritative focus of his 1992 monotext being reviewed here. [8] once more, then: what "is" hypertext? [9] it can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of "footnotes," each one enriching all the others, none of them secondary even though one had to be encountered first. you can place them whenever you want, in whichever typeface (or "tone") you choose, and with whatever coloration you prefer. [10] another image is of a book's index accompanied by a pointer that would let readers wander from one reference to another without having to keep their index finger between index pages. the sequence of assimilation--associative or whimsical or undeviatingly purposeful--rests in the digits of the reader. [11] a third image starts with pictures, not books. imagine a handful of cubes connected by straws, a cluster that almost resembles those models of molecules that illustrate articles in _national geographic_. these cubes are "lexias or blocks of text" (landow 52). the straws are electronic links. hypertext is nothing more than electronically connected chunks of text. [12] expand the imaginary handful into a roomful. consider that those little cubes are not *word* containers, but receptacles holding whole sentences, paragraphs, scenes, speeches--or photographs, diagrams, songs, symphonies, videotapes of vaudeville acts with barking dogs.... consider also that those straws, now enlarged to tunnel size, can arch from one corner of the room to another without going through all the neighboring cubes along the way. the designer lays out the linkages. instead of a neat model molecule, all primary colors and straight lines, we have a web, a gibsonian matrix, an electronic habitat. [13] as "readers" of this space, we who have entered the habitat's first chamber take our seats and watch the message-performance composed for us. finished, we take a hint from the options posted on the wall and stroll- together or separately, next door or to the far reaches- stopping off anywhen that looks promising. [14] the crux of hypertext is where those *spatially* distinct "cubes" intersect with *temporally* distinct sequences. authors compose the cubes.lexias.performances and construct the tunnels.web.links. the audience, having entered the space at cube one, has to choose where to explore next, and has to endure the consequences of the risks implicated in that choosing. [15] so much for telling fish about breathing. instead of holding a book, we look at a screen displaying a map of an index. by now, two of those self-evident terms, "text" and "author," no longer mean quite what they used to. instead of being sentences and paragraphs and two-dimensional pages bound as a book or journal or newsletter, what we "read" is distinct, self-contained chunks of performance frozen in a three-dimensional "space." [16] as it happens, two of landow's chapters are about reconfiguring the text and reconfiguring the author, so we have not strayed too far from his (two-dimensional) text. another pair of his chapters has to do with narrative and education, so i will have a chance to show how hypertext technology can question "story" (the morality of narrative) and "knowledge" (construct versus instruct) later in this essay. meanwhile, i trust that the convergence landow writes about between computer technology and critical theory is beginning to sound plausible and interesting. his own index (if displayed on your screen) would show about 75 citations for barthes and derrida. foucault, lyotard, bakhtin, miller and four others together match that number. vannevar bush leads the techies with 15 citations; theodor h. nelson (14) and jay david bolter (12) outpoint mcluhan, ong, joyce (michael) and moulthrop. [17] after a glance at landow's first chapter, about theory, then, i shall cycle through more modulations of writer-reader-text dislocation, stressing control of time and sequence, and press on to try to legitimize narrative disorder. [18] the first chapter, "hypertext and literary theory," is for me a clear, succinct and persuasive elaboration of the argument that hypertext actually concretizes a lot of what poststructuralism theorizes. landow himself is not so insistent. his moderate claim: "what is perhaps most interesting about hypertext . . . is not that it may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them" (11). some nexial terms in the early pages are inter-textuality, multi-vocality, de-centering and non-linearity. central to the "convergence" argument is the quasi-equation of techie nelson's "text chunks" and critic barthes's *lexia*: "hypertext . . . denotes blocks of text--what barthes terms a %lexia%--and the electronic links that join them" (4). [19] landow finishes this first chapter in the context of alvin kernan's thesis that printing technology virtually created the concepts of "authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and physically isolated text." the book, the artist, and even "intellectual property" are fragile, socially constructed phenomena. landow predicts that hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several such heretofore "self-evident" truths about art. hypertext technology thus "has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with derrida's emphasis on de-centering and barthes's conception of the readerly versus the writerly text" (33-4; see also kernan, _printing technology_). [20] even though landow concentrates on ways that hypertext reconfigures text and author, the role of reader is inseperable from both, and i shall emphasize the paradox of that role: the reader is no longer subjected totally to the authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a collaborating writer within the hypertext space. but each new reader is still under the previous reader-writer's control, and no reader can tamper with the lexias already in place. [21] there are two ways to unravel these apparent contradictions. the first involves a digression into the way two mutually exclusive words are being juxtaposed. here is landow on writer and reader: today when we consider reading and writing, we probably think of them as serial processes or as procedures carried out intermittently by the same person: first one reads, then one writes, and then one reads some more. hypertext, which creates an active, even intrusive reader, carries this convergence of activities one step closer to completion; but, in so doing, it infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. (71) notice how comfortably familiar this terminology is--power, writer, reader--even though juxtapositions of dominance-subservience relationships ("power") and conventionally self-evident labels ("reader" and "writer") are moderately disconcerting. we are accustomed to assuming that "the reader" cannot be the same individual as "the writer," that the practices are mutually exclusive. when i write, that is, i am "by definition" not reading. as landow's account here indicates, it is difficult not to reproduce this distinction terminologically, even where its inadequacy as regards the hypertext becomes clear. to capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such concepts as "wreading" and "wriding." (and my "readers" should be warned that i have engaged in some terminological experimentation along these lines below, grotesque though the results may be.) [22] in any case, it would seem that the hypertext environment brings about a collapsing of the identities of composer and audience, a relinquishment of creative control, a triumph of the consumer. but it is necessary to back somewhat away from these implications and return to the image of a space full of chambers connected by tunnels. within landow's intermedia technology and my chamber-tunnel image, the "writer" carries out two tasks: preparing the separate lexias in their chambers and installing the first set of tunnels linking them. that design process is creative and authoritative in traditional ways. "readers" needn't be privileged to tamper with what the "writer" has installed. and the relationships among the lexias, the links, are--when imagined as existing in space--determined by the writer, and must be "followed" by the reader. writer and reader are not identical. there is no aleatoric "audience participation," no wresting of control from the performance artist. [23] in that case, how can it be said that the technology "infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader"? first, the person who enters the hypertext space may construct chambers and link them to those already there. thus the "wreader" gambit. you can compose your objection to these sentences, or your qualification, or even your endorsement, and "file" it in the same size type--ah, where?--think of the position as "right behind" this screen/plane, visible the way the labelled edge of a mac window could be visible. [24] that privilege of reader-being-writer is more easily imagined, but may be less important, than the consequence of the other "transfer of power" effected by the technology. this involves the disintegration of the celebrated essence of literacy, "linearity." i don't mean to imply a mandate for chaos; the originator still can design a preferred sequence for the readers' encounter with the lexias. and sentence-level linearity is not eroded (nor is frame-level pictorial syntax, nor a melody's phrasing). but the reader-audience-explorer is no longer bound by sequences of paragraphs or chapters. at the granular level we usually call "organizational," the writer loses what had been almost complete control over the reader. [25] before hypertext, that is, author(ities) designed the one-and-only-one sequence of sensation-chunks to be imposed on and shared by all (subservient) readers. the order in which memories were layered, the sequence of admonitory qualifications and concluding caveats was determined by the single creative mind. a rebellious reader who flipped casually from back to front, or read the "last" chapter first, or started with the index, was a social deviant. now, however, "flipping back and forth" is no longer defiant. it's encouraged. the authority can no longer presume that everyone will have read "the same book," and it won't be easy for two readers to discuss their differently based interpretations of the same work. they might be similar, but congruence would be an unlikely accident. the author or wrider still influences, but no longer determines, the way the reader or wreader spends time. [26] for hypertext generally, then: the wreader can add to a hypertext docuverse, but (usually) cannot alter its existing lexia; the wrider maintains authority over the original lexias and links, but abdicates control over sequence and boundary. with that paradox and transformation outlined for the technology in general, we can turn to a slightly restricted arena, narrative. hypertext affects storytelling. [27] if the relationship between wrider and wreader has been transformed, if no single individual is responsible for the whole text, and if that text is no longer a fixed, sacred record--what then are the implications for morality in a record-addicted, legalistic, guilt-needing culture? this might seem like an impertinent question, except that the following sentence is as provocative as any in landow's chapter called reconfiguring narrative: "since some narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends upon the unity and coherence of a fixed linear text, one wonders if hypertext can convey morality in any significant form or if it is condemned to an essential triviality" (106). landow's answer is affirmative; hypertext storytelling can "convey morality," and his argument here is consistent with his other positions. using michael joyce's hypertext _afternoon_ as his example, landow maneuvers some responsibility onto the reader's shoulders. as readers, he says, "our assistance in the storytelling or storymaking is not entirely or even particularly random . . . we do become reader-authors and help tell the tale we read." [28] "nonetheless," he continues, "as j. hillis miller points out, we cannot help ourselves: we must create meaning as we read: 'a story is readable because it can be organized as a causal chain . . . . a causal sequence is always an implicit narrative'" (115; miller, _versions of pygmalion_). [29] one purpose of landow's argument here seems to be to rescue hypertext "stories" (and perhaps the medium itself) from "essential triviality." but i don't think the rescue operation is called for. the struggle is not between the trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order, even though miller (and aristotle) implies that the absence of centralized, authorial control of time, and the concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets "random" and "chaotic." i see randomness and chaos making a comeback, however, and if morality's principal basis really is sequence--consequence, _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, narrative--then i believe that conventional "morality," thermodynamic morality, is in for a hard time. [30] my conviction is founded in the implications of fractals and chaos theory, which permit the simultaneous domination of events by absolute determinism and absolute uncertainty. i do not expect "causality" to fade away, any more than newton or einstein have, but we are questioning some default assumptions deeply rooted in our culture--see miller's casual but inevitable use of "because," above, for instance. consider also the questions implicit in a passage kernan quotes from mcluhan's _the gutenberg galaxy_: the crucial literary concepts of a central plot and a single structure are extensions of the movement of type in precise lines, which generates "the notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness . . . totally alien to the nature of language and consciousness." (kernan 52) [31] as landow himself says, hypertext technology lets us start testing questions and assumptions. in the case of story-telling, hypertext does not demand attention to a single creative authority who designs sequences of sensation and requires that audiences accept them in that order. this is why there is really no need, in spite of the consistency and symmetry of landow's nostalgic argument (that readers will construe their own causality, and narrative morality will remain essentially the same), to succumb to the argument's temptations. [32] almost half the book is devoted to ways hypertext affects realms outside its own texts. the last two chapters are about pedagogy and politics. both of them start small and expand. one begins with students and concludes with hypertext's effect on canonicity. the other starts out with "humanist technophobia" and ideology, and ends with a succinct survey of networks' and hypertext's unpacking of the mouldy concept of "intellectual property." one sentence seems to me to be at the heart of both chapters: "educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students" (123). implicit in this kind of transfer, as i have experienced it, is a modification of the concept "knowledge" away from a "thing" to be sought and found and guarded and delivered by coteries--by mysterious "hoods," as in brotherhoods or priesthoods or doctoral hoods--away from monolithic thing-ness, that is, and toward a complex system of interpenetrating contributions. "facts" don't change much in such an environment, but some dogmatically self-evident conclusions are less likely to be called "facts." [33] i have watched this happen in a simple, inexpensive networking environment, and have no trouble accepting landow's sweeping statement about the inestimably more challenging environment of hypermedia. to prevail in that environment, students have to become engaged with learning. they will have trouble if they try to get by with habits of remembering and mimicking. landow says that hypertext provides "the perfect means of informing, assisting, and inspiring the unconventional student" (129), that the environment "frees learners from constraints of scheduling without destroying the structure and coherence of a course" (132), and asks instructors to "rethink examinations and other forms of evaluation" (134). we also have to make some adjustments in our beliefs about "knowledge." instead of being a commodity that professors have exposed, "knowledge" is revealed as a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions being constructed and transformed by real people. [34] pleasing as these abstract ramifications may sound, they are also disturbing. how many educators really want "active, independent-minded students who take more responsibility for their education and are not afraid to challenge and disagree" (163)? landow assesses the prospect as "terrifying" for many, perhaps especially so in an atmosphere of "widespread humanist technophobia" (164). [35] beyond the threat to professors' assumptions about their power, deeply rooted in the proscenium classroom (barker and kemp), and registrars' schedules and "credit hours," landow perceives hypertext as more than a teaching tool, a learning machine, an "educational program." for him it is a medium, and its unprecedented massage (sic) is potentially multicentered and democratizing far beyond the campus. one already hears rumors about the ways some people in medium-sized organizations have adjusted their activity away from obeying and toward collaborating as "horizontal" networks encroach on "chain-of-command" hierarchies. that the change is still in the service of "productivity" seems to me a minor flaw, perhaps temporary, in a near-odonian transformation of attitude. [36] a basic image for landow, and for this review, has been *transfer* of power. the author's authority is decreased and the reader's power is increased by the same "amounts," it would seem. democracy gains to the extent that autocracy loses. the image implies scarcity, limitation, restriction. but "power" does not really exist as a fixed quantum, after all, to be shared only among the privileged and withheld from, kept secret from, the underclass. in certain contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power does not leave the sharer with less of it. to the extent that information and power (and authority) overlap, hypertext's ecology of abundance can be regarded as spreading all of them around, rather than either reducing or increasing any of them. to that extent, at least, hypertext technology resembles network technology: sharing, abundance, even the dreaded "overload" are its hallmarks, rather than the sort of de-centering that implies reduction or diminishment. [37] although it takes some rigorous imagining to do so, i can even extrapolate the hypertext environment in the direction of broadly anti-propertarian attitudes. the propertarian, anti-collaborative concepts of artist and inventor, copyright and patent, publication and secrecy, are closely linked. but the impetus toward collaboration already evident in the matrix or on the net looks to be compounded by the experience of hypertext. if the overlapping cultural schemas of a) deference to isolated genius, b) worship of mystery, and c) reverence for hierarchy continue to be eroded by a technology that virtually mandates collaboration, our great-grandchildren will share a radically refabricated culture in which concepts like intellectual property, trade secrets, and even searching for the truth may have been significantly altered. [38] these declarations are mine, not landow's. he wisely stops short of such gee-whiz speculation. his boldness in discussing pedagogy alongside critical theory, and in discussing the political implications of an academic technology, are more significant for me than the specific directions we may make guesses about. [39] for it is this convergence of technology, pedagogy, scientific and literary theorizing, and the feedback processes of cultural evolution, that landow's volume heralds. indeed, i wish he had brought his talent for drawing the most crucial particulars out of a complex framework to bear on the broader academic curriculum (and political agenda). it seems to me that the sooner we can integrate hypertext's opportunities for exploration into our graduate training in all the artistic and critical disciplines, the greater the likelihood that some system of positive global cooperation will prevail over the temptations to self destruct. [40] there are other matters that i wish landow had been able to address. on the technical side, they include the implications of the broader definition of "text" forthcoming when "cinema" and "sound" join "plain words" and "pictures" in the hypermedia "space." on the theoretical side, they include the intriguing hypothesis that "time"--as in the dis-integration of before-and-after relationships--is the concept that arches over all his reconfigurations. pedagogically, they include the implications of the growing demand for computing resources, including trained people, that will issue from the humanistic disciplines as the technology's value to all forms of textual-interpretive endeavor comes to be recognized. politically, they include the ramifications of high cost and slow distribution of the technology (which brings us full circle, centrifugally, around the bullseye landow has anatomized). but in a book so thoroughly admirable, these few lacunae are no more worrisome than the missing "the" on page 131. [41] there are skeptics about hypertext, particularly scholars concerned about its apparent promotion of bull-session anarchy and rigorless dissipation. landow quotes doubts about "the erosion of the thinking subject" (said, _beginnings_) and "the disintegration of the centering voice of contemplative thought" (heim, _electric language_). for landow himself, however, whatever is lost at the center appears offset by benefits of collaboration. in discussing the relationships he experienced during an intermedia project, for instance, he lambastes those who, still bathing themselves "in the afterglow of romanticism, uncritically inflate romantic notions of creativity and originality to the point of absurdity" (91). quoting bolter about the way "book technology itself created new conceptions of authorship and publication" (93), landow celebrates the fact that "hypermedia linking automatically produces collaboration" (95). [42] there is also suspicion that anything to do with computers is essentially materialistic and centralized, and an associated suspicion that any "program" must be a "product" whose acceptance will implicate us in the machinations of the producers. one reviewer, objecting to jay bolter's attitude toward computing technology (in _writing space_), links this threat (of a "decentering, associative technology being developed by and for the greater consolidation of post-industrial, multi-national, capitalistic institutions") with "a neo-conservative position" and "republican ideology" (tuman, "review," 262-63). the paradox of "consolidated decentering" might be resolvable, but it will be hard for a while yet to fight the presumption that *network* technology and *hypertext* technology have the same effects on their users. i can testify that the impacts are very different, however, and i will insist that confusing the concept *hypertext* with whoever delivers and installs a particular version is like confusing the generic technology of the book with the sellers of paper and printing presses; hypertext is a generic technology, not a product. and usenet (to shift to the matrix of networks) is like an anarchists' convention compared with commercial bulletin boards' shopping malls. [43] a related objection, also directed at bolter and _writing space_, has been to his "radical environmentalism," which allows the "human mind to be shaped by whatever writing space it happens to be occupying" (kaufer and neuwirth, "review," 260). but while one must certainly beware of absolute technological determinism, it seems clear enough that the human mind is used differently, say, in paper-based cultures than in memory-dependent societies. if that translates into environmental "shaping," then hypertext, in its disruption of such self-evident categories as "reader" and "writer," would seem already to have begun to reshape us. [44] hypertext is as radical a social technology as there has been since compound interest, and its subsequences won't crystallize in a rationally predictable way. who could have prophesied, for instance, that the internal-combustion engine and the quartz-crystal radio would play out as suburban decentralization and public television broadcasting? i am willing to predict that the nature of record-keeping is going to change now that we can tape events in "real-time" as well as write down summaries from memory. since we live in a record-grounded culture, that is, changes in recording technology will have effects as profound as they are gradual--over the next century or two. hypertext, a recording medium, will play some part in those tectonic changes, but it is far too early to predict its exact role or the precise changes. isaac asimov once made the point that most people can carry out a plausible straight-line extrapolation of (some) effects of change in a single variable. he grinned as he added that plotting the feedback effects where those extrapolations affect other variables is, shall we say, more difficult. few "variables" affect the understructure of culture more subtly or seismically than its recording technology, and hypertext is an unprecedented, appealing, available recording technology. its effects on what we call "writing" may turn out to be as momentous as those of photography on "drawing." [45] i doubt that any member of the four hostile audiences i enumerated at the outset will now rush off to buy landow's _hypertext_. but i hope that others who are more prepared to credit an emerging technology with the potential to radically reshape our institutional lives--right down to such assumed conceptual bedrock as text, author, story, knowledge, and reader--will give this admirable book the chance to convince them. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited barker, t.b., and f.o. kemp. "network theory: a postmodern pedagogy for the writing classroom." in carolyn handa, ed., _computers and community: teaching composition in the twenty-first century_. portsmouth, new hampshire: heinemann/boynton-cook, 1990. bolter, jay david. _writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing_. hillsdale, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, 1991. delany, paul, and george p. landow, eds. _hypermedia and literary studies_. cambridge: mit press, 1991. gibson, william. _neuromancer_. new york: ace, 1984. heim, michael. _electric language: a philosophical study of word processing_. new haven: yale up. 1987. kaufer, david, and chris neuwirth. "review" of bolter, _writing space_. _college composition and communication_ 43.2 (may 1992): 259-61. kernan, alvin. _printing technology, letters and samuel johnson_. princeton: princeton up 1987. lanham, richard a. "from book to screen: four recent studies." _college english_ 54.2 (february 1992): 199-206. review of bolter, _writing space_; hardison, _disappearing through the skylight: culture and technology in the twentieth century_; kernan, _the death of literature_; ulmer, _teletheory: grammatology in the age of video_. mcluhan, marshall. _the gutenberg galaxy_. toronto: u of toronto p, 1962. miller, j. hillis. _versions of pygmalion_. cambridge: harvard up, 1990. moran, charles. "computers and english: what do we make of each other?" _college english_ 54.2 (february 1992): 193-98. review of handa, ed., _computers and community_; holdstein and selfe, eds., _computers and writing: theory, research, practice_. moulthrop, stuart. "polymers, paranoia, and the rhetoric of hypertext." _writing on the edge_ 2.2 (spring 1991): 150-59. said, edward w. _beginnings: intention and method_. new york: columbia up, 1985. schwarz, helen j. "computer perspectives: mapping new territories." _college english_ 54.2 (february 1992): 207-12. review of delany and landow, eds., _hypermedia and literary studies_; hawisher and selfe, eds., _critical perspectives on computers and composition instruction_; hawisher and selfe, eds., _evolving perspectives on computers and composition studies: questions for the 1990s_. slatin, john. "reading hypertext: order and coherence in a new medium." in delany and landow, eds., _hypermedia and literary studies_. storyspace, a hypertext writing environment. cambridge: eastgate systems. tuman, myron. "review" of bolter, _writing space_. _college composition and communication_ 43.2 (may 1992): 261-63. [editor], 'preface', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-[editor]-preface.txt preface _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). _postmodern culture_ is an electronic journal of interdisciplinary studies. we hope to open the discussion of postmodernism to a wide audience, and to new and different participants. we feel that the electronic text is more amenable to revision, and that it fosters conversation more than printed publications can. _postmodern culture_ can accommodate, and will include, different kinds of writing, from traditional analytical essays and reviews to video scripts and other new literary forms. _postmodern culture_ is formatted as ascii text (the character-code used by all personal computers): this permits the items in the journal to be sent as electronic mail, and it means that you can download the text of the journal from the mainframe (where you receive your mail) to a wide variety of computers, and import it into most word-processing programs, should you want to. if you do call up the journal's text in a word-processing program, make sure that line-spacing is set to single-space and that margins are set to accommodate a 65-character line (one-inch margins, in most cases). back issues of _postmodern culture_, plus longer items distributed on pmc-talk (the discussion group), are archived here at nc state; to see the contents of that archive, send the command index pmc-list to listserv@ncsuvm (bitnet) or listserv@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (internet). to retrieve any of the files listed in the index you receive, send the command get [filename filetype] pmc-list since individual mainframe operating systems vary, if you need information on how to store, download, or erase items received from the journal, you will probably need to get that information from your local computing consultants. information on how to use the listserv program (the program which distributes the journal to your mailbox) may also be available locally, but if it is not, you can request it from the listserv program here at nc state. to do that, send a mail message to listserv@ncsuvm (bitnet) or listserv@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (internet), containing the commands get listserv memo get listfile memo these two files contain general information about using the listserv program (listserv memo) and information about using the filelist functions of the program (listfile memo). finally, if you would like to discontinue your subscription to the journal, you can do so by sending the command signoff pmc-list to listserv@ncsuvm (bitnet) or listserv@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu (internet). terada, 'pressures of merely sublimating', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-terada-pressures.txt the pressures of merely sublimating by rei terada department of english university of michigan, ann arbor <rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2, n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by rei terada, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: wilson, rob. _american sublime: the genealogy of a poetic genre._ madison: u of wisconsin p, 1991. [1] the american academy rediscovered the theoretical force of sublimity about fifteen years ago, mainly through three post-freudian efforts--thomas weiskel's _the romantic sublime_ (1976), harold bloom's "emerson and whitman: the american sublime" (in _poetry and repression_ [1976]), and an influential series of essays by neil hertz, written over a period of years and eventually collected in _the end of the line: essays in psychoanalysis and the sublime_ (1985). the emphases of these critics differ, but as rob wilson observes at the outset of his own revisionary study, the lowest common denominator of sublimation for all is its participation in an oedipal "ego-quest," an individual "struggle for strong selfhood" (8). since the mid-seventies, however, criticism so devotedly post-freudian has become more difficult to find. it is a commonplace to assume that individualistically psychological work too easily slights the sociohistorical forces that sustain and restrain the psyche and its potential for genius. in wilson's words, "to oedipalize the sublime--as is the dominant mode of weiskel, bloom, and hertz--is to dehistoricize its implied workings" (12). [2] yet, in spite of this, the notion of the sublime has lost no currency. in _american sublime_, as elsewhere, the sublime outlives the freudian matrix of its academic rediscovery to the extent that its description of an outer linguistic limit assists explorations of radical otherness and of power. wilson states that his book is concerned principally with the ideological convenience of the sublime and that he therefore intends his "genealogy" in the foucauldian sense, as a "historical knowledge of struggles" (14); in practice, _american sublime_ reorders primarily literary-historical genealogy. both of these genealogical enterprises are more questionable on grounds of predictability than of controversy; the advantages of an eclectic postmodern reading of the american sublime are plain to see. but _american sublime_ does not come close to achieving these aims, in part because the desiderata seem so obviously agreeable that wilson hardly feels the need to fulfill them. [3] the first third of _american sublime_ is composed of three introductions (an "introduction," an introductory first chapter entitled "an american sublime," and a second chapter entitled "preliminary minutiae"), which range from emerson to language poetry to set forth the argument which later, overlapping chapters restate. the "decreative" nature of the american sublime throughout american literary history "voids history and nature of prior presences" (4) in order to cast the reconstruction of the continent as an original, thus more innocent, construction. american emptiness, itself fictive, can then be read as an invitation to produce still more fictions. wilson also asserts that discussions of the american sublime too often retain a version of poetic genealogy that elevates bloom's favorite relentless individualists. the "scenario of the american sublime argued" in 1980s criticism, as wilson sees it, still begins with emerson, then moves on to "generate a hugely incarnational son (whitman), and a fiercely deconstructive daughter (dickinson), and to filter this power-influx into increasingly self-defensive voices of 'countersublimity'" (8). wilson proposes to modify this poetic lineage by attending to emerson's lesser-known precursors and by carrying his argument through modernism--represented here by the work of wallace stevens--into contemporaneity with chapters on the "postmodern" and the "nuclear" sublime^1^; whitman appears in this scheme as "not so much the cause as the effect . . . of this collective will to the american sublime" (10). throughout, _american sublime_ suspends the question of the structure of the sublime while stressing its political usefulness (or its "cash-value," as wilson calls it): american poets found in the idea of the sublime a ready-made language for the american will to power. [4] according to the literary-historical narrative which comprises the latter two-thirds of wilson's book, bradstreet introduced the sublime to american literature through the puritan meditative tradition, which licensed sensual and poetic transport when it "serve[d] the rapture of conversion" (75). livingston then harnessed the sublime to "an emerging whig ideology of liberation, on lockean and miltonic grounds, evoking the sublime not just as %natural% but as %social/political terror% that can be made to work to liberal american purposes" (95), and william cullen bryant's development of a native natural sublime showed "the infinite wealth of this world as transformable to ideal human usages such as poetry" (125). bryant's loosely wordsworthian landscapes also democratized the sublime, proving that "ordinary words and commonplace sites could serve" (125). while whitman merely embodies more clearly and dramatically the ideals of these precursors, the modernist sublime exemplified by stevens "comes to refer less to superlative revelation than to the circumstances in which such a revelation might have taken place" (45). wilson seems most at home, finally, in the postmodern era; there, liberated from the obligation to revaluate traditions, wilson's restless glances at bits of text are most appropriate, and he can most easily connect "american grandeur" to "that equally vast source of american infinitude reified into power, 'capital'" (200). _american sublime_ is most innovative in its speculations on the "nuclear sublime," a force "so vast and final in its disclosures of power that it renders the vaunted 'supreme fiction[s]' of the romantic imagination ludicrous or mute" (230). [5] wilson's discussions of whitman and stevens, in contrast, expose the shallowness of his revisionism. these chapters tread explicitly on bloomian ground, but seem contented to rehearse bloom's arguments in the midst of their supposed refutation of them. thus wilson claims that "walt whitman became the american sublime in 1855" (134), that whitman's is an "exemplary case" (134), and that "all prior american versions seemed wishful tonality more than earthy fact" (135). _american sublime_ seems in thrall not only to bloom's promotion of whitman but to his grandiloquently oedipal emphasis when wilson maintains that "future disciples such as allen ginsberg (or robert pinsky) . . . must absorb this transgressive language to become their greatest american selves" (143). wilson's would-be containment of whitman thus finally seems timid, amounting to no more than the tautological assertion that "_leaves_ is fully 'autochthonic' if situated in the context of earlier american poetics of the sublime" (163); and his reading of stevens, which argues that "the spirit of the sublime . . . can only exist for stevens through counter-movements of the spirit which negate ('decreate') false or prior notions of the sublime, even if they are images from his own earlier poems" (177), is hardly more insurgent. here and elsewhere, _american sublime_ fails to construct a truly iconoclastic literary history insofar as it relies instead upon foregone conclusions which all good postmodernists can be counted upon to believe. thus, to suggest that a. r. ammons's _sphere_ is tempted by the idea of a traditionally sublime "god-drenched voice" (69), it suffices to point out that "the poem, after all, is written 'for harold bloom'" (69). we all know what *that* means--"a foreshortened view of literary tradition" (70), of which wilson firmly disapproves. yet wilson's index devotes fourteen lines to bryant, twelve to bradstreet, and eight to livingston, but seventy lines to stevens, forty-four to whitman, twenty-one to emerson, and ten to harold bloom. _american sublime_ thus substitutes a declarative "decreation" of canonicity--%fiat multiplicitas%--for the reconfiguration of american poetic genealogy it announces. [6] this sort of substitution is unfortunately typical of wilson's procedure. on page 39, for example, wilson promises to "return to quarrel with [terrence] des pres's bloom-like and inadequately theorized claim that this 'american sublime' has exhausted its very power of imaginative resistance in 'late stevens.'" on page 235, however, "it is no wonder that, as terrence des pres contends . . . 'the "american sublime," as critics call it, has been missing in our poetry since at least late stevens.'" indeed, _american sublime_ makes little distinction between claiming to take a position and taking one, between talking *about* historicism or cultural criticism and doing any. marxism and feminism function more as sources of atmosphere than as bodies of knowledge. a discussion of bradstreet needs, of course, to consider gender. wilson therefore refers not to bradstreet's voice but to her "woman's voice," her position as "a puritan woman given to the very %male% art of english poetry" (72); for "bradstreet would be a 'merry bird' and sing a sublime lyric of divine praise, in a summer of bliss. such, however, cannot be her woman's lot in that sin-conscious version of christianity disseminated as american puritanism" (91). and why not? because "bradstreet early--indeed %first%- undergoes what harold bloom has termed 'the anxiety of influence'" (88). [7] this disinclination to distinguish between a critical stance and its simulacrum extends to wilson's very definition of the sublime. it is unclear throughout whether wilson means by the sublime an experience and its representation, or the representation of a nonexistent experience (the latter would not be a weaker argument, but a different one). on the one hand, "the geographical magnitude of america mythically if not in fact inspired these sublime sensations" (157); on the other, american poets are "convinced by the presence--if not the metaphor--of vast space" (68); and on a third, so to speak, whitman was "inspired by the scenery if not the sublime of capital" (135). _american sublime_ finally dissolves into a celebration of the sublime as neither psychological structure nor ideological tool, but as a euphoric "tone" or "mood" far more disembodied and departicularized than anything in weiskel or hertz. wilson refers to "moods of pious arousal" and "literary %sublimity%" (95), "of moralized rapture" and "self-elected awe" (124), a newer mood of landscape elevation" (94), "a commonsense mood of exaltation" (124), livingston's "protestant-liberal tone" (113), a william smith lyric "%emotive% in tone" (103), and so on, until there is no difference between sublimation and making sublime sounds: "livingston had helped to develop a tradition (or at least %tone%) of transport" (113). [8] the same confusion crops up in wilson's stylistic mannerisms. wilson often provides a gloss on a term in parentheses immediately following it (when dealing with quoted material he tends to operate the other way around, glossing the quotation, then referring back in parentheses to the quoted term). the resulting system of equivalences, taken seriously, implies a world of astonishing conceptual sloppiness. in the introduction we find "american vastness (emptiness)," "immensity and wildness ('power')," "multiple identifications ('use')," "art-empowerment (transport)," "poetic language (art)," "beholding (letting go of)," "subjugating (interiorizing)," "recreate/decreate (alter)," and "fullness (vacancy)." these sound like elements of a nightmarish logic problem: if vastness means emptiness, and immensity (which is usually equivalent to vastness) means power, and vacancy (which is usually equivalent to emptiness) means fullness, how many ways are there of looking at a blackbird? if, on the other hand, we don't take these pairings as equivalences, what are they? simulacra of bits of analyses, evoking the "mood" of a critical enterprise. _american sublime_ comes down to its synthetic atmosphere: the american landscape, as site of collective sublimity, has transported poets from bradstreet to bryant and beyond into whit-manic tropes of expanded power and higher energy. this continental sublimity, signifying at some semiotic bottom line the project of american expansion (will) taking "dominion everywhere" from florida to india, has helped to entrench the tropes of a liberal nation legitimating it on its own innermost terms. (37) the critical content of such a passage is hard to perceive, but might be paraphrased, "the landscape encouraged tropes of power that legitimated american expansion." this is not a moment of summation in particular; open _american sublime_ to virtually any page and it is saying the same thing. [9] it's an understatement to say that _american sublime_ participates in the metaphorization and generalization of the sublime that has for better and worse preserved its critical vitality. wilson's is an extreme case, since he carries that generalization about as far as it can go. other contemporary modifications of the sublime to which wilson refers in passing, such as gary lee stonum's reading of dickinson^2^ or lyotard's reflections on the sublimity of postmodern information systems,^3^ are more engaging and less reductive. still, the ease with which wilson's obviously well-intentioned "more broadly historical description" (27) of the sublime falls into reifications and mystifications greater than those it charges to its predecessors should give pause to postmodern criticism as it struggles to define itself against the recent past. the political implications of weiskel's meticulous meditations (on the way, for example, in which "the price of [sublimation's] freedom for will or ego--and of this enhanced sense of self--is alienation from particular forms of primary experience"^4^) are not slight. and bloom's inaugural essay on the american sublime does more and better historical work on its second page, surprisingly, than wilson does in his entire volume: it is noteworthy, and has been noted, that emerson's two great outbursts of prophetic vocation coincide with two national moral crises, the depression of 1837 and the mexican war of 1846, which emerson, as an abolitionist, bitterly opposed. the origins of the american sublime are connected inextricably to the business collapse of 1837. i want to illustrate this connection by a close reading of relevant entries in emerson's journals of 1837, so as to be able to ask and perhaps answer the invariable question that antithetical criticism learns always to ask of each fresh instance of the sublime. %what is being freshly repressed?% what has been forgotten, on purpose, in the depths, so as to make possible this sudden elevation to the heights?^5^ _american sublime_ is not the postmodern critique it wants to be because it operates too much by means of its *own* expedient repressions, "clearing the ground" of contemporary criticism in order to avoid engaging entire schools of thought whose flaws it believes it knows. wilson never absorbs the point of "american sublime," the stevens lyric he frequently quotes, in which "general jackson / posed for his statue" and "knew how one feels."^6^ the point lies in the immediate necessity of the next question: "but how *does* one feel?" ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ this reorganization is familiar; see, for example, mutlu konuk blasing, _american poetry: the rhetoric of its forms_ (new haven: yale up, 1987). ^2^ _the dickinson sublime_ (madison: u of wisconsin p, 1990). ^3^ _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_, trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984). ^4^ _the romantic sublime: studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence_ (baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1976), 58-59. ^5^ _poetry and repression_ (new haven and london: yale up, 1976), 236. ^6^ _the collected poems_ (new york: vintage, 1982), 130-31. o'sullivan, 'confronting heidegger', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-o'sullivan-confronting.txt confronting heidegger by gerry o'sullivan university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by gerry o'sullivan, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. zimmerman, michael. _heidegger's confrontation with modernity: technology, politics, art_. bloomington: indiana up, 1990. 306 pp. [1] in the wake of the "affaire heidegger," prompted by the publication in 1987 of victor farias's _heidegger et le nazisme_, michael zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, _heidegger's confrontation with modernity: technology, politics, art_--how can students of heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his "postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery"? [2] such an inquiry is nothing new for zimmerman, whose 1981 book, _eclipse of the self: the development of heidegger's concept of authenticity_ dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled "national socialism, voluntarism, and authenticity." in fact, the seeming novelty of the "affaire" itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants. [3] for years prior to the public debates surrounding the farias study, many of heidegger's own students (among them otto poggeler, heinrich ott and paul huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of national socialism. indeed, as early as 1970, joachim fest had discussed heidegger's outright complicity with the nsdap in _the face of the third reich_. [4] but as david carroll has suggested in his foreword to jean-francois lyotard's _heidegger and the "jews"_, the most recent french version of the heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the farias book as "programmed"- designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the heideggerian critique of metaphysics. [5] while carroll's take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the "place" of heidegger in contemporary scholarship. given the shape and focus of the discussion in france, it would seem that--in many ways--heidegger's ignominious affiliation with the nazis and his silence on the holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. in this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional "double-forgetting." [6] zimmerman's book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of heidegger's historical and political context written to date, relating heidegger's critique of "productionist metaphysics" and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with national socialism. but zimmerman, unlike farias, does not reduce the whole of heidegger's writings to a mere expression or reflection of nazism. while clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on heidegger's part--a kind of "what-is-living, what-is-dead" exercise. [7] to this end, zimmerman engages the texts of heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of "the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of heidegger's commentators have explained his concept of modern technology" (249). [8] as zimmerman points out, most of heidegger's readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self foreclosure by decentering heidegger as merely "one important voice in a cultural conversation into which heidegger himself had been 'thrown'." [9] this is not to say that heidegger's politics are themselves construed by zimmerman as a manifestation of _geworfenheit_ or "throwness." rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what jeffrey herf has described as "reactionary modernism," the technological-romantic branch of german conservatism which sought to replace the calculative rationality of the enlightenment with the self-sacrifice and spirit of an individualistic, though properly germanic, _volkstechnik_. [10] heidegger's views on technology and industrial society underwent significant changes between the publication of _being and time_ and the writings which appeared after the so-called kehre or "turn." as zimmerman points out, the ambiguity of heidegger's account of "everydayness" in _being and time_ was largely attributable to his unwillingness, or inability, to delineate between an account of everyday life which purported to reveal its timeless, essential and "transcendental" features and one which amounted to a politically charged critique of everydayness under the historically specific circumstances of capitalism and urban-industrial society. [11] read in this way, then, _being and time_ provided a negative evaluation of life in industrial society while attempting to retain its tacit claim to being a work of phenomenological description. it also, in the assessment of winfreid franzen, appealed to conservative intellectuals "because it addressed them theoretically, personally, and existentially without calling upon them to do anything specific." in fact, heidegger's thematization of the frailty of individual _dasein_ in the face of the omnivorous they-self commended total secession as the only possibility of self-assertion. [12] but zimmerman's analysis of the reactionary, albeit addled, agenda of _being and time_ stops there, and he moves (perhaps too quickly) onto a consideration of heidegger's debt to the writings of ernst junger. zimmerman neglects to make explicit the problematic of heidegger's "conservative revolution" in philosophy as identified by pierre bourdieu in _the political ontology of martin heidegger_. heidegger's attempt to overthrow kant's overthrowing of metaphysics was, according to bourdieu, typical of a strategy peculiar to "conservative revolutionaries" like junger, a strategy which consisted in "jumping into the fire to avoid being burnt, to change everything without changing anything, through one of those heroic extremes which, in the drive to situate oneself always beyond the beyond, unite and reconcile opposites verbally, in paradoxical and magical propositions." [13] hence, says bourdieu, heidegger sought to escape historicism by asserting the essential "historicity" of the existing, and then inscribed history and temporality within being which remains, even in heidegger, both ahistorical and eternal. such a seemingly radical overcoming as that accomplished by heidegger simply "allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing, by joining opposites in a two-faced system of thought, which is therefore impossible to circumvent, since, like janus, it is capable of facing challenges form all directions at once: the systematic extremism of essential thought enables it to overcome the most radical theses . . . by moving to a pivotal point where right becomes left, and vice versa." therefore, there may have been more to the fundamental inaction encouraged by _being and time_ than that allowed, or interrogated, by zimmerman. [14] zimmerman's discussion of heidegger's relationship to the writings of ernst junger is, however, both elegant and persuasive. heidegger, according to zimmerman, drew upon representations of technology and the machine age contained in the essays and fictions of junger who, like spengler, had sought to discover metaphysical principles behind history which were "deeper" than those suggested by marxism- mythical, elemental and irrational forces beyond the alleged determinism of scientific materialism or bourgeois economism. [15] between 1934 and 1944, heidegger developed his own conception of technology in constant and ongoing dialogue with junger's work, which argued that the industrial transformation of the earth was the empirical manifestation of a hidden, world-transforming power akin to the spenglerian version of nietzsche's will to power. this power, according to junger, currently took the form of the gestalt of the worker (junger alternately defined gestalt as a stamping, imprinting, typing, or symbolic "totality" which embraced "more than the sum of its parts"). [16] for junger, as for spengler, world history was a spectacle. and the central figure in the then-unfolding drama of "total mobilization" was the worker-soldier, a passionate yet steely character ever willing to surrender to the atavastic will, whether on the factory floor or the battlefield. junger, like the futurists, developed a full-blown aesthetics of horror. writing in _war as inner experience_ (1922) and elsewhere, he sought to discover the "truth" of warfare as something done for its own sake, thus justifying both the horrors of modern warfare and germany's defeat in world war i as components of the same grand design and the upsurging of primordial will. [17] heidegger both appropriated and transformed junger's masculinist rhetoric. while approving of junger's critiques of both marxism and bourgeois decadence, his affirmation of a new and elite humanity and the necessity for an authoritarian _gemeinschaft_, heidegger rejected his internationalism and saw the dream of the world factory as simply being the final phase of the "productionist metaphysics" inaugurated by the greeks. in response, heidegger began to develop his own notions of spiritual work, national work service and the need for an "authentically" german science as early as the famed rectoral address of 27 may 1933. [18] heidegger's later reflections on technology, work and art continued to be influenced by his dialogue with junger's writings, according to zimmerman. just as junger had seen the work of the eternal will in the horrors of technological warfare, heidegger glimpsed the "self-concealing being of entities in the horrifying meaninglessness of entities in the technological era," whereby everything was reduced to "the same undifferentiated raw material for industrial production." [19] likewise, heidegger responded to junger's rhetoric of the irresistable upswelling of primal will by arguing that the "power" confronting humanity was, in fact, the "overwhelming being or presencing of entities," the overwhelming force (%walten%) of %physis% as presencing or being. this force, claimed heidegger, brought about the almost martial struggle to "found" a world, to delimit the overpowering presencing of entities in order to let them "stand forth" as determinate, whether through the handiwork of technology or art, or the intervention of the poet, thinker or--at least prior to the late 1930s--politician. [20] heidegger's language in 1935, following that of junger, was decidedly martial in tone: "to apprehend . . . means to let something come to one, not merely accepting it, however, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself. when troops prepare to receive the enemy, it is in the hope of stopping him at the very least, of bringing him to stand [%zum stand bringen%]" (79). [21] junger's failure to grasp the nature of this presencing, and his confusion of the "fluid 'motion' of the synchronic event of presencing (%anwesen%)" with the diachronic "hardening" of this presencing into specific historical modes of "being present" (%anwesenheit%), led heidegger to reject junger's notion of gestalt (as epochal "imprinting") as yet another master name in the history of metaphysics. [22] so, says zimmerman, heidegger's response to junger's essay, "%uber 'die linie%'" in _the question of being_, was to discount the writer's failure to grasp the nature of the ontological difference while recapitulating many of the same themes found in his works: "while heidegger spoke of the history of being, and junger of the history of the will to power, both believed that the 'multifarious transformations' assumed by being or the will to power in different epochs presented 'the heroic spirit with an engrossing drama.'" both also believed that they were equipped to bear witness to this historical "play" of transformations while the rest of humanity blindly succumbed to the imperatives of the imprinting of the age of the worker. [23] it was through junger's "aesthetics" of history and the gestalt of the worker, claims zimmerman, that heidegger was led to consider nietzsche's thinking on the nature of art. in his lectures on nietzsche, heidegger came to thematize the greek conception of art as %techne%, or measure-giving disclosure, in response to the "degenerate" modes of modern art and industrial production. [24] not surprisingly, heidegger read the first version of "the origin of the work of art" in 1935, not long after hitler's nuremberg address, "art and politics." both hitler and heidegger stressed the importance of greek art as a model for a "restored" and authentic aesthetic practice. and insofar as heidegger believed that the art of the greek temple opened or disclosed the world of the polis "in which entities could first manifest themselves in their own specific shapes and forms, and in which greek humanity could make the decisions that would determine its destiny," writes zimmerman, both hitler and heidegger agreed on the relationship between art and political life. [25] where heidegger parted company with hitler, however, was on the point of art's relationship to history and eternity. hitler's vision of the thousand-year reich was to be embodied in planned public works of art, totalitarian "temples" attesting to the permanence of the nazi vision. zimmerman points out that for genuine art to "work," according to heidegger, it must reveal the fragility and mortality of human existence. hence, hitler remained, in the estimation of heidegger, under the sway of foundationalist metaphysics. [26] against such myths of eternity and pure presence, heidegger turned to the "originary" greek conception of art as techne, a work of the hand which resists reduction to a "mere product" by virtue of its self-sufficiency and disclosive power. such "authentic" production and "freeing" disclosure gave way, eventually, to the distortions inherent in "productionist metaphysics" which, states zimmerman, casts the world as little more than a "standing-reserve" awaiting subjugation. [27] like the national socialists, the reactionaries and fascists, heidegger was concerned with the inherent or essential relationship between poetry and production. the cure for rootlessness, social fragmentation, nihilism and alienation was not to be found in a workers' revolution, but rather in a workers' state transformed by the saving and disclosive power of art as handicraft. in such a situation, the ills and evils of modernity--associated in heidegger's mind with the industrialism and rootlessness of bolshevism (and, concomitantly, "cosmopolitan judaism") and the inauthentic freedoms of the liberal welfare state--would be forever swept away by the power of authentic art and authentic technology to disclose new worlds and possibilities. [28] apart from its political pedigree, heidegger's critique of instrumental rationality is appealing to zimmerman, and for several reasons. his anti-foundationalism, which denies a rational basis for the technological way of life, suggests to zimmerman that things could be otherwise: "discovering the groundlessness of the technological era makes possible the openness--and the anxiety--necessary for the arrrival of a new, post-modern era." zimmerman also sees continuity between heidegger's attention to handiwork and the analysis of "micropractices" in foucault, both of which, he believes, offer alternatives to the homogeneity of the technological world. [29] zimmerman concludes _heidegger's confrontation with modernity_ with a hopeful, though cautious, call for dialogue among feminists, deep ecologists and students of heidegger's work, all of whom are involved, according to zimmerman, in developing new narratives about non-alienated, and non-oppressive, social and ecological relationships. much can be learned, claims zimmerman, from the heideggerian concept of %gelassenheit% and the hermeneutical insistence upon the finitude, and contingency, of knowing. but heidegger's failures remain in the foreground: "sensitive to the dangers of nihilism posed by the dissolution of previous foundations, heidegger attempted to find a non-absolute, historical 'ground' to guide his own people. unfortunately, this attempt ended in disaster." [30] this is as comprehensive an overview of heidegger's views on modernity, technology, politics and art as one will find anywhere, and an extremely valuable contribution to recent scholarship on heidegger and the debates occasioned by his commitment to national socialism. but several questions remain. [31] zimmerman tends, often in passing, to include marxism among the various manifestations of "productionist metaphysics" at work in the history of the forgetting or "oblivion" of being--what heidegger termed the %seinsvergessenheit%. at this point zimmerman himself can be said to succumb to a totalizing or hypostasizing gesture regarding the disputed character of production in marxist theory. marx recognized that the capitalist mode of production was a system of multiple determinations, demanding multiple logics. one can read marx himself against the kind of conceptual identity attributed to him by zimmerman, via heidegger. [32] zimmerman also fails to indicate what it is that he means by "mode of production." to use shorthand developed by harold wolpe in _the articulation of modes of production_, this could be a "restricted" use, covering only forces and relations of production, or an "extended" use, including forces and relations of production and their conditions of existence. only the latter tends toward the kind of economic reductionism slighted by both zimmerman and heidegger, and assumes that the economy is, always and already, the predetermined site of primary contradiction. [33] neglected, too, is marx's point--underscored by marcuse --that neither nationalization or socialization alter, by themselves, technical rationality as embodied (often irrationally) in the productive apparatus. a shift in ownership does not bring alienation to an end, as zimmerman seems to imply in his critique of marxism. the technological structure itself must change. at this point, one wishes that zimmerman had included more recent marxist theory in his dialogue, as it might have added some specificity to the heideggerian critique. [34] but perhaps specificity remains, and will always remain, the glitch in the heideggerian machinery. heidegger's fundamental inablity to account for social institutions may stem from the reactionary tendencies identified by bourdieu in _being and time_, including the impulse to always cast "the social" negatively, interms of %das man% or the they-self. (adorno's underthematization of the social leads to similar problems for his analyses, as axel honneth has recently shown). one wonders how and where the world-disclosing, world-transforming power of authentic art and technology can finally work if not across the social field. holub, 'review of _what's wrong with postmodernism?_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-holub-review.txt review of _what's wrong with postmodernism?_ by robert c. holub <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu> department of german university of california-berkeley _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) norris, christopher. _what's wrong with postmodernism? critical theory and the ends of philosophy_. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1990. [1] from the outset two features of the title of christopher norris's latest book need clarification. first, it is not insignificant that, despite the possibility of an interrogatory "what," the title is not a question, but a declaration. norris knows what's wrong with postmodernism, and he does not hesitate to impart his diagnosis to the reader. second, the term "postmodernism" does not match exactly the material he covers. he is actually less concerned with postmodernism as a direction in literature and the arts--its more usual field of meaning--than he is with contemporary theory. the title should be understood, therefore, as an assertion about recent directions in theory, not as a query into artistic practices. and what is most interesting about norris's survey of the critical terrain is the way in which he divides the turf. most commentators tend to take a stand either for or against poststructuralism, defined rather generally as anything coming out of france or influenced by the french over the past two decades. by contrast norris splits french and francophilic theory into two halves. while he continues to advocate most prominently the work of jacques derrida and paul de man, he is highly critical of baudrillard, certain aspects of jeanfrancois lyotard, and philippe lacoue-labarthe's monograph on heidegger. joining these french postmodernists on norris's roster of adversaries are american neopragmatists, in particular stanley fish and richard rorty. making a surprising appearance on the approval list is the german philosopher of communication theory, jurgen habermas. although he devotes a chapter of this book to a reproof of habermas's remarks on derrida--a chastisement whose root cause is habermas's carelessness in attributing to derrida views held by his less philosophically schooled american epigones--he approves of the broad and critical outline of recent french thought found in habermas's _philosophical discourse of modernity_ (1985). [2] since these are anything but natural alliances, they deserve further attention. essentially norris validates those theorists who he feels continue a tradition of enlightenment critique. there is no difficulty in placing habermas in this camp since he is perhaps the single strongest voice in contemporary theory to openly and directly declare his allegiance to the progressive heritage of modernity. norris does not discuss his work in any detail, however, except to point out his errors in dealing with derrida, and his reference to habermas's notion of universal or formal pragmatics as "transcendental pragmatics" indicates at least a possible confusion of habermas's current concerns with his abandoned attempt to locate "quasi-transcendental" interests in the late sixties. more difficult to locate in a tradition of enlightened reason are derrida and de man. the latter is incorporated into the enlightenment project largely by way of his interest in "aesthetic ideology," which includes a critique of schiller and of all subsequent misreadings of kant's aesthetic theory. derrida is likewise assimilated to the enlightenment paradigm through kant. in chapter five, a consideration of irene harvey's _derrida and the economy of difference_ (1986), norris argues with harvey (and rodolphe gasche) that derrida is best described as a rigorous kantian, except that he is "asking what conditions of impossibility mark out the limits of kantian conceptual critique" (200). indeed, norris claims that derrida's is "the most authentically %kantian% reading of kant precisely through his willingness to problematise the grounds of reason, truth and knowledge" (199). norris thus opposes both the facile notion of derridean deconstruction as the authorizing strategy for "free play" as a free-for-all of meaning, a false lesson learned and propagated by inattentive american disciples, and the equally false understanding of derrida's work as a dismissal of previous philosophical problems, the tendency found in fish, rorty, and french postmodernists such as baudrillard. derrida and de man are for norris rigorous philosophical minds who question traditional philosophemes and point out their limits. these actions, however, are undertaken in the spirit of kantian critique, and have nothing to do with the various illicit reductions (of truth to belief, of philosophy to rhetoric, of history to fiction, and of reality to appearance) prevalent in the neopragmatic and the poststructuralist camp. [3] this is a credible account of contemporary theory. it makes necessary distinctions between derrida and his american reception and correctly credits de man with a seriousness of purpose that is not always matched by poststructuralist gamesmanship. it also rightly dismisses the philosophical legitimacy of the "antitheoretical" neopragmatists, who seem to delight more in the sophistry of their own banal arguments than in the pragmatic endeavors they allegedly prefer. what is not very persuasive in norris's presentation, however, is the contention that the works of derrida and de man carry with them a profoundly ethical and political message that can assist us in combating the entrenched conservatism of the reagan-bush-thatcher major era. indeed, it is precisely in the realm of ethics that derrida and de man are most open to attack. derrida's very style of debate has proven a barrier to discussion of philosophical and political issues. although it would be silly not to grant his theoretical points in the debate with searle, the manner in which he ridicules his adversary, refusing to clarify searle's misunderstandings and to confront issues on which they both have something to say, leads to a closing down of discussion. his encounter with gadamer, a more patient and open interlocutor than searle, repeats this elusive strategy; one has the impression here as well that derrida simply does not want to enter into candid and direct debate about his theoretical position. his sarcastic and condescending dismissal of anne mcclintock and rob nixon, who criticize derrida for his analysis of the word "apartheid," provides a more directly political illustration of an arrogance of argumentation that derrida has come to epitomize. finally, one could detail--as i do in a forthcoming book (_crossing borders_)--the lack of candor in his response to critics of de man; in this performance from 1989 his dogmatism about his own position, his haughtiness concerning deconstruction, and his unwillingness to counter opponents's legitimate objections was obvious except to deconstructive true believers in what has become (unfortunately) a quasi-religious cult. [4] the afterword to _limited inc._ (1988), the book version containing his essay on austin and his response to searle, entitled "toward an ethic of discussion," thus has something of a hollow ring to it. although norris uses this afterword as a counter-illustration to the wayward practices of postmodernist thinking, a careful consideration of it would reveal seminal weaknesses in derrida's ethics and politics. most blatant perhaps is derrida's interpretation of his use of the word "police" in his earlier rebuttal of searle. in the final section of his lengthy response derrida has written that "there is always a police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule . . . is invoked in a case involving signatures, events, or contexts." he continues by hypothesizing a situation in which searle is arrested by the secret service in nixon's white house and taken to a psychiatrist. he asserts that there is a connection "between the notion of responsibility manipulated by the psychiatric expert [the representative of law and of political-linguistic conventions, in the service of the state and its police] and the exclusion of parasitism." he concludes by stating that the entire matter of the police must be reconsidered, "and not merely in a theoretical manner, if one does not want the police to be omnipotent" (_limited inc._ 105-6). searle's practice, the exclusion of parasitism, is thus connected directly with the state and the police, and for good measure derrida includes a warning about the possible omnipotence of the police. [5] for a reader in 1977, when the debate originally occurred, it would have been difficult not to identify the police and the state with repression; it seemed that derrida was making an openly political statement. but in 1988 he denies this most obvious reading: his statements "did not aim at condemning a determinate or particularly repressive politics by pointing out the implication of the police and of the tribunal whenever a rule is invoked concerning signatures, events, or contexts. rather, i sought to recall that in its very generality, which is to say, before all specification, this implication is irreducible" (_limited inc._ 134). derrida is of course correct when he writes in 1988 that there is no society without police and no conceptuality without delimiting (or policing) factors. but there are nonetheless two disturbing aspects of his recent self-interpretation. the first is that derrida seeks to control or limit meaning by clarifying his intention from 1977. he tells us how the word "police" "must be understood" (_limited inc._ 136). thus he would appear here to want his intention to govern the entire scene of meaning, a possibility he attributed to searle and argued explicitly against in 1977. second, he seems to argue disingenuously in 1988. although his 1988 argument makes more philosophical sense, the rhetoric of his arguments in 1977 was certainly meant to suggest a political disqualification of searle's position. one cannot connect the police and the state--traditional buzz words, among the left, for repressive instances---with an adversary's stance, and not expect that connection to be understood as a political attack. that derrida denies this dimension of his 1977 essay appears simply as dishonesty. but in that same "ethical afterword" derrida also seals himself off from any political criticism. deconstruction, he tells us, if it has a political dimension, "is engaged in the writing . . . of a language and of a political practice that can no longer be comprehended, judged, deciphered by these codes [the traditional western codes of right or left]" (_limited inc._ 139). we are left with the conclusion that only deconstruction can comprehend, judge, and decipher what it is doing. those who stand outside the light of its eternal truth have no right to pass political judgment. if a self-policing notion of deconstruction is thus the upshot of derrida's "ethic of discussion," then norris might want to reconsider its political usefulness. [6] the case for de man's political usefulness is even weaker. it rests, in norris's view of things, on the notion of "aesthetic ideology." following de man's lead, norris locates "aesthetic ideology" in post-kantian philosophers who confound the realm of language, conceptual understanding, or linguistic representation with the phenomenal or natural world. no doubt this topos has been consistently thematized in de man's writings; it accounts for his placement of allegory above symbolism, his critique of romanticisms, and even his objections to literary theories such as jauss's aesthetics of reception. but the schema of intellectual history propagated by de man and repeated by norris is both undifferentiated and ahistorical. friedrich schiller, to whom norris constantly refers as the first "misreader" of kant and therefore the perpetrator of the original sin of "aesthetic ideology," certainly differed from the author of the _critique of judgment_ on matters of aesthetics. but schiller's relationship to kant should not be categorized as a misreading, although schiller undoubtedly misunderstood various aspects of kantian thought. rather, schiller was trying to go beyond kant in establishing an objective realm for aesthetic objects. he did this consciously and openly, and his purpose in doing so had to do not only with philosophy, but also with reactions to the french revolution. to wrench schiller out of his historical moment and make the resulting abstraction responsible for a wayward tradition in aesthetic thought, which encompasses all major tendencies from the romantics to the new critics, is to propagate a type of black-and-white portrayal that recalls heidegger's totalized picture of western philosophy since the pre-socratics. norris criticizes lacoue-labarthe for refusing to entertain socio historical discussions of heidegger's work, but he himself consistently steers the reader away from a historical situating of theory that could lead to a more differentiated understanding. [7] even if we accept the schema informing "aesthetic ideology," however, it is difficult to see why it has to be connected with political critique. it may be true that the organic worldview of romanticism can lend itself to various political abuses, among them nationalism and fascism. but it can also have affinities with various sorts of ecological consciousness or with a "principled and consistent" socialism that norris defends in his introduction. norris offers no argument for political affiliations either. instead he contends that "collapsing ontological distinctions is an error that all too readily falls in with a mystified conception of being, nature and truth" (268), and that "there is no great distance" (21) between the notion of an organic state and an authentic nationalism. these juxtapositions masquerading as arguments serve only to discredit anything not associated with de manian thought, but in their undifferentiated, schematic, and ahistorical formulation they are only persuasive to those already convinced of their correctness. in short, there is no reason--and norris supplies none--to connect de man's mode of operation with anything politically progressive, nor any grounds for finding his objects of criticism inherently regressive. it is probably worth noting that de man's own theoretical position did not move him toward any great political activity during his three decades of teaching in the united states, and that the short speeches at his funeral (found in _yale french studies_ in 1985) contain no references to political inspiration he supplied. most of the talk about "aesthetic ideology" surfaces only after his wartime journalism came to light, although norris did develop this line of thought somewhat earlier to defend de man against political attacks by frank lentricchia and terry eagleton. the notion that de man enunciates a coherent and powerfully progressive political program is thus something totally absent from comments about him during his lifetime. [8] unless we buy norris's line on de man, however, his endeavor in the final chapter to save de man while simultaneously criticizing lacoue-labarthe and heidegger is an empty gesture. while the differences between heidegger and de man with regard to national socialism are not trivial, we should not ignore the obvious similarities. most notable among these is their postwar attitude of repression and prevarication. neither man owned up publicly to his actions, and there is much evidence to suggest that de man misled people with regard to his activities during the war. to suggest, as norris does, that de man's postwar writing must be read as a determined effort to resist the effects of the very ideology that had entrapped him is simply not supported by common sense. antifascist and political essays are not de man's preferred genre; he produced no body of significant statements on any directly political matter as an academician. moreover, when political topics suggested themselves he consistently turned away from them. norris himself points to his essay on heidegger from 1953 in which the context of heidegger's interpretations of holderlin--world war ii and national destiny--are written off as a "side issue that would take us away from our topic." the bulk of the writings we have at our disposal indicates that norris is performing the same function for de man as lacoue-labarthe does for heidegger. both claim that the best way to understand the phenomenon to which de man/heidegger succumbed is to look at de man/heidegger's theory. norris writes: "what lacoue-labarthe cannot for a moment entertain is the idea that heidegger's philosophical concerns might not, after all, have come down to him as a legacy of `western metaphysics' from plato to nietzsche, but that they might--on the contrary--be products of his own, deeply mystified and reactionary habits of mind." if we substitute "norris" for "lacoue-labarthe," "de man" for "heidegger," "aesthetic ideology" for "western metaphysics," and "from schiller to jauss" for "from plato to nietzsche," we can see that the parallelism norris seeks to escape is unwittingly retained. [9] in this most welcome and perceptive book on contemporary theory norris thus fails to step back far enough from the critics he has discussed in the past. de man and derrida are powerful and interesting voices in theory, and they are certainly a cut above many who would emulate their deconstructive strategies. but their political and ethical valence remains clouded by the undecidabilities of the very practices they exhibit in their writings. there is also a theoretical dimension to their inability to offer a sustained ethical vision. the preference for viewing language as a system rather than as speech acts, for looking at semantics and semiology rather than at pragmatics, for remaining in the realm of virtual language rather than its actualization in the world--in short, for valorizing everywhere %langue% over %parole%--prevents de man, derrida, and norris as well from theorizing ethics and politics. we only have to look at derrida's initial remarks on austin to see why deconstruction has such difficulties in connecting theory and practice. instead of examining austin from the potentially radical reorientation that austin himself offers--language as action--derrida shifts the discussion back to the "non-semiotic," to the level of linguistic meaning that austin wanted to leave behind. a similar unwillingness to conceive language pragmatically, as always infused with ethical substance, is evident in derrida's confrontation with gadamer. in this regard, as gadamer points out, derrida's point of departure is retrograde. norris's attempt to make the deconstructive strategies of de man and derrida the basis for a political opposition is thus a questionable undertaking. in this his most overtly political volume to date he might have done better to explore more thoroughly those theories that take language-as-action as their starting point. foley, 'review of _post-modernism and the social sciences_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-foley-review.txt review of _post-modernism and the social sciences_ by michael w. foley department of politics the catholic university of america <foley@cua> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by michael w. foley, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: rosenau, pauline marie. _post-modernism and the social sciences: insights, inroads, and intrusions_. princeton, n.j.: princeton up, 1992. [1] on display in the new york museum of modern art's current exhibit of postmodernist drawing is a piece by stephen prima: 67 framed sheets, of various shapes and sizes, broad brushed, light tan ink wash on rag barrier paper, with the suggestive tag "no title/('the history of modern painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalog....' barnett newman)." pauline rosenau's book is a thoroughgoing repudiation of that (post)modernist preoccupation. to analyze postmodernism, in rosenau's mind, is to catalog it. in the process, her "postmodernists" mix and blend, as indistinguishable, but for her frames, as prima's paintings. postmodernism plays on the ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion of the text. rosenau falls victim to it. she mixes description and prescription, observer and observed, thinker, thought and thought-about in an eclectic and often bewildering catalog of postmodern opinion. [2] running through the book is a distinction between two broad categories of postmodernists. the "skeptical post-modernists" argue that the post-modern age is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness or even absence of moral parameters and societal chaos. . . . in this period no social or political 'project' is worthy of commitment. ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (15) given such powerful and alarming claims, it may seem surprising that the skeptics also maintain "that there is no truth" and that "all that is left is play, the play of words and meaning" (15). [3] the "affirmatives" are a still more nebulous category: more indigenous to anglo-north american culture than to the continent, the generally optimistic affirmatives are oriented toward process. they are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from new age religion to new wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. (15-16) [4] who are these post-modernists? we never learn, though rosenau cites baudrillard, derrida, and articles by todd gitlin and klaus scherpe. the theorists of postmodernism and its exemplars exchange places freely in rosenau's account, and it is often difficult to tell which is being described. nor do we get the opportunity to judge postmodern thought for ourselves; rosenau rarely quotes her theorists and even more rarely explores an individual author's work or argumentation. postmodern thinkers, in her account, do not argue: they claim, they assume, they relinquish or adopt ideas, they reject or they share views; but they never appear to present a connected argument, elaborate an interpretation, or explain their case. how could they when, as rosenau never tires of repeating, postmodernism "rejects reason," preferring instead "the romantic, emotions, feelings" (94). this attack on reason, on the truth claims of modern science, on "the modern subject," and on moral certainty make up, in rosenau's view, "one of the greatest intellectual challenges to established knowledge of the twentieth century" (5). [5] rosenau is far from comfortable with that challenge. she dedicates her book to her parents, identified as "strong modern subjects, who had no confusion about their identity or their values." she worries about the "cynical, nihilist, and pessimistic tone" of the skeptics, who find in "death, self-inflicted death, suicide," "affirmations of power that conquer rationality" (143). she finds it alarming that "postmodern social movements" like fundamentalism have become "widespread and hegemonic" in some places, because "post-modernism in the third world provides a justification for requiring women to adopt forms of dress that were abandoned by their grandmothers" and promotes the re-establishment of traditional marriage roles and the restoration of male prerogatives (154-5). in this book, derrida lies down with the ayatollah khomeini; their issue is, as might be expected, monstrous. [6] rosenau does scant better justice to her primary concern, the challenge of postmodernism to the social sciences. though she cites work which has attempted to incorporate postmodern themes into a wide variety of social science disciplines, from international relations to urban planning, her treatment of these efforts is as superficial and unsatisfying as her references to derrida, foucault, or baudrillard. more generally, though, she is inclined to pit postmodernism against social science. in the end, she suggests, efforts to create a "post-modern social science" run aground on what she sees as postmodernism's fundamental denial of any standards for evaluating knowledge claims. "can post-modernism survive for long," she asks, "in a methodological vacuum where all means for adjudication between opposing points of view are relinquished?" the answer seems to be no. "without any standard or criteria of evaluation post-modern inquiry becomes a hopeless, perhaps even a worthless enterprise" (136). [7] it is not clear in this presentation of an essentialized "post-modernism" that rosenau grasps what her radical postmodernists are about. baudrillard, she tells us, "claims the nuclear holocaust and the third world war have already taken place; in so doing he violates all modern concepts of time" (68). without linear time, she asks, what becomes of contemporary social science's pursuit of causal explanation? certainly baudrillard challenges conventional notions of space and time. does he do so to "overturn" them, as rosenau asserts? or to open up our thinking by shattering the self-validating presuppositions of "normal science"? unless he and other postmodernists are offering an alternative metaphysic with exclusive truth claims of its own, it is hard to see how their "challenge" could be quite as cataclysmic as rosenau imagines. rosenau, however, prefers to stress the destructive confrontation of postmodern critique and social scientific presuppositions. in doing so, she evidently intends to take seriously both the most radical claims of the postmodernists and the most positivist pretensions of mainstream social science. but the maneuver is fatal, for it blocks an opportunity to investigate what is new about the postmodernist movement and how and to what degree it clashes with what is new and interesting in contemporary social science. [8] it is testimony to the cachet of postmodernism that this book found a publisher. that it found one in one of the better university presses perhaps testifies, as well, to that abandonment of standards of judgment which the author finds at the core of postmodernism. this may nevertheless be a book postmodernism deserves. the trouble with postmodernist theory lies, even more than in the overheated language of postwar french intellectuality, in its exaggerated claims. skepticism, after all, is as old as zeno, or abraham, or the buddha--pick your father--and no doubt older: the mothers had plenty of reason to be skeptical of the gods of the fathers and the father-gods of even the skeptics. it was hume who taught that "causality" was a figment of the imagination and the logical positivists who insisted that "truth" lay only in propositions, not in reality. so what is new in postmodernism? what does the movement have to say to the social sciences? [9] as a radical reaffirmation of traditional skepticism, probably not much. reminders of the precariousness of our knowledge claims have regularly given way to fresh constructions: nominalism to baconian inductivism, french skepticism to the cartesian reduction, humean skepticism to british empiricism, kantian analysis to the idealist syntheses. ultimately, the postmodern reconstruction of inquiry will hold more interest and have more impact than the initial, skeptical extravagances, however sound and however needed. here too, however, it is not always clear how much the theorists of postmodernism run counter to even mainstream social scientific theory. [10] in an exchange between lucien goldman and michel foucault in 1969, goldman attacked what he saw as a denial that "men make history" and quoted a bit of graffiti left on a blackboard in the sorbonne by a student during the may 1968 uprising: "structures do not take to the streets." foucault denied that he had ever called himself a structuralist, but another speaker, jacques lacan, attacked the aphorism because "if there is one thing demonstrated by the events of may, it is precisely that structures did take to the streets. the fact that those words were written at the very place where people took to the streets proves nothing other than, simply, that very often, even most often, what is internal to what is called action is that it does not know itself."^1^ [11] rosenau thinks this sort of argument captures postmodern thought. "post-modern social science," she tells us, would describe a society "without subjects or individuals," in which structures "overpower the individual," "beyond the reach of human intervention" (46). how curiously old-fashioned this sounds to a social scientist! has the "sociological mind" ever been disposed to think otherwise? lacan's comment could have come from a scion of any of several lineages of social scientists, from marx to durkheim to weber. wasn't it freud who exploded the bourgeois self as marx had exploded the bourgeois social order and durkheim its moral order? american social scientists have no further to go than robert k. merton, whose definition of social science as the investigation of the "unintended consequences" of human action justly characterizes the mainstream of social scientific research since the nineteenth century. [12] foucault himself seems only to echo marx and engels when he declared that every society controls the production of discourse in an attempt to "evade its ponderous, awesome materiality."^2^ by the time foucault was well launched on his project to recover the hidden origins of our discourses about "man," "madness," and the criminal, moreover, berger and luckmann had published _the social construction of reality_ and gregory bateson had generated a good deal of heat, and some little light, with his notion of schizophrenia as a language disorder. it would not be altogether unfair to argue that french postmodernism paralleled developments that were already brewing in the social sciences, when it was not simply playing catch-up. [13] one area in contemporary social science in which divergence seems to overwhelm convergence, on the other hand, is precisely the question of human agency. what is really new in the social sciences, in political science perhaps above all, is an attempt to think through the implications of a "non-necessitarian" social science, in which the choices (and occasionally the personal skills) of individuals play a crucial role. the attempt to give the voiceless a voice, marked in contemporary feminism but also evident in important recent work in anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, likewise seems to run counter to any postmodern "denial of the subject." rosenau quotes a postmodernist feminist, jane flax, who finds "post modernist narratives about subjectivity . . . inadequate" from the point of view of feminist theory (52). but she might equally well have cited work in the "new social history" or the annales school.^3^ [14] there are certainly tensions between postmodernist efforts to "decenter" the subject and the return to notions of human agency in contemporary social science. rosenau plays on these conflicts, however, without really illuminating them, or even giving an adequate account of them. despite the frequency with which the issue is joined, moreover, i suspect that postmodernists and their critics alike have been beguiled by the rhetoric and that there is a profound consistency in the efforts of foucault, in particular, to banish the subject from the history of discourse while attempting to discover, in the everyday experience of the intolerable, new grounds for moral action on the part of an individual both constituted by prevailing discourse and free in the uncovering of its oppressive silences. such possibilities go unglimpsed in pauline rosenau's account, as they do in the moral and scientific positivisms which still dominate much social scientific practice. but they are well represented in recent social science, and they deserve better treatment than that afforded here. [15] contemporary social science, moreover, both converges with postmodernism and borrows heavily from the attempts of foucault, bourdieu, and others to embed the new skepticism in new approaches to understanding. what characterizes these efforts is 1) a focus on discourse as the material (and thus powerful) vehicle for social understandings and action, and 2) the insistence that such understandings are best uncovered in examination of everyday practices. behind these affirmations lie a discomfort with the rigidities of the various structuralisms and a rejection of "meta narratives" like marxism which attempt to capture the grand motions of history. before them rages a still important debate on the justification for abandoning all such paradigms--or the possibility of doing so. but some of the best recent social science--like that of james c. scott on "the arts of resistance," donald mccloskey on the rhetoric of economics, or stephen gudeman and alberto rivera on peasant economic discourse--uncovers the dynamics of concrete practices and bodies of discourse and demonstrates, in doing so, the fruitfulness of postmodern preoccupations. rosenau's book seems largely unconscious of this work. more's the pity, because, as the postmodernists might insist, we will learn far more about postmodernism in the academy from the everyday practices and preoccupations of contemporary social scientists than by surveys of the self-consciously "postmodern." ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ quoted in didier eribon, _michel foucault_ (cambridge: harvard up, 1991), 210-11. ^2^ "the discourse on language," in foucault, _the archaeology of knowledge_ (new york: pantheon, 1972), 216. ^3^ curiously, rosenau tells us that postmodernist skeptics "reject history as %longue duree% . . . because it claims to discover a set of timeless relations existing independent of everything else" (64). unfortunately, she does not cite the postmodernists she has in mind, nor adequately explain their aversion to a key concept in the work of fernand braudel, an ardent supporter of foucault. mannejc, 'dialogue on dialogue', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-mannejc-dialogue.txt a dialogue on dialogue by georg mannejc, anne mack, j.j. rome, joanne mcgrem, and jerome mcgann <jjm2f@prime.acc.virginia.edu> university of virginia _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by jerome mcgann, joanne mcgrem, j.j. rome, anne mack, and georg mannejc; all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. gilbert: dialogue . . . can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. by its means he can both reveal and conceal himself . . . . by its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view . . . or from those felicitous after-thoughts . . . give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance. ernest: by its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument. gilbert: ah! it is so easy to convert others. it is so difficult to convert oneself. to arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. to know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. --oscar wilde, "the critic as artist. a dialogue. part ii." that mask! that mask! i would give one of my fingers to have thought of that mask. --denis diderot, _rameau's nephew_ 76 [1] gm: and so we will find it possible to get beyond the magical idea of knowledge--the idea of knowledge as control and mastery, the %ideal% of that idea. instead we shall have this display and celebration of our differences. [2] am: our differences about what? [3] gm: about any subject we choose to take up. this talk of ours, these conversations, what are they grounded in? not the pursuit of truth (that old ideal of philosophy and science), not the pursuit of power (that old ideal of magic and technology). they are grounded in the pursuit of meaning, in hermeneutics and the desires of interpretation. and interpretation proceeds according to a dialogical rather than a systems-theoretical or systems correcting model. dialogues are governed by rules of generosity and ornamentation, not rigor and method. [4] am: who today would challenge the virtues of a dialogic model? the star of bakhtin stands in the ascendant. but what are you saying, exactly? is this a call for an unrestricted play of interpretation? does anything go? will all the lord's people be queueing up for a haruspicator's license? [5] gm: that's a cheap sneer i'd expect from hilton kramer, not from you. in fact, our most ancient and sophisticated interpretive traditions call for nothing less than the reader's complete freedom. in hebrew midrash, as we know, reading is "divergent rather than convergent . . . moving rather than fixed . . . always opening onto new ground . . . always calling for interpretation to be opened up anew." many still "understand the conflict of interpretation as a deficit of interpretation itself, part of the logical weakness of hermeneutics." this "prompts the desire to get `beyond interpretation' to the meaning itself . . . . [but] my thought is that this very [desire] implies a transcendental outlook that has, in western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding, and which even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild."^1^ [6] the need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. it is the fear from which arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth-century--the fear of a democratic conversation that would proceed without the benefit of governing touchstones. its psychological form appeared to arnold as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. and he had reason to fear such a dialogue, for it can be unnerving or even worse. it can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world's culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god's anarchy--and with that mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one's own self, the %hypocrite lecteur% loosed upon the occidental world in arnold's day by baudelaire. [7] jjr: [speaking to gm] you call this a "celebration" of differences, but to me it seems more a clash, and thus a struggle toward that truth you are so ready to dispense with. dialogue is less a carnival than a critical exchange in which the errors and limits of different ideas are exposed by their conflict with each other. it is all very well to float above this struggle, observing it as a rich display of energy, a celebration of itself. thus we become the romantic inheritors of the deities of lucretius. i sit as god holding no form of creed, but contemplating all. (tennyson, "the palace of art," 21-12) but in the world where our talk goes on, we are not gods; we are, as you suggested, political animals. your ivory tower of interpretation is a particular political position, and the fact is that i do not agree with it. unlike yourself, i believe these conversations *are* grounded in the pursuit of truth, and *do* involve the struggle of power. [8] gm: i am not interested in the contemplative life. dialogue involves various persons and is, as i say, necessarily political. what i mean to "celebrate"--and i don't apologize for it--is the power of dialogue to harness ideas, to generate new and interesting forms of thought. [9] jjr: but you don't seem inclined to make the necessary distinctions or discriminations. some "forms of thought" are more interesting than others, some are trivial, some are not. what is important about dialogue is that it helps to expose those distinctions, to sort them out. for instance, i wouldn't say that your ideas about dialogue are trivial or uninteresting; but i would say they are wrong. there's the difference between us. would *you* say i was wrong in these ideas--are you prepared to argue that i am wrong in my judgments about your judgments? [10] gm: yes, you are wrong. [11] jjr: why, how? indeed, on your showing, how *could* i be wrong? [12] gm: because what i was saying has nothing to do with being right or being wrong. that's another matter entirely. [13] jjr: another "language game"? [14] gm: perhaps--why not? [15] jjr: because under those conditions, as i said before, "anything goes." shift the language game and what was "wrong" becomes something else--it becomes, perhaps, "interesting" or "uninteresting," or perhaps even "right." [16] don't misunderstand me. i am as aware as you are that context alters the status and even the meaning of what we see and what we think. the "pursuit of truth" is towards an imaginable (as opposed to an achievable) goal. we have to be satisfied with what we *can* acquire- knowledge, the historical form of truth. nevertheless, that goal, "the truth," %must be imagined% if certain kinds of intellectual activities are to be pursued. [17] am: truth as a necessary fiction? you are as unscrupulous as georg when you try to manipulate us with that metaphor of "knowledge, the historical form of truth." does the "truth" you want to "imagine" exist in the same order as the "knowledge" you say we can gain? if it doesn't, how do we get it? [18] jjr: we don't "get" it, as if by a process of discovery. we construct the truth, we imagine it. or do you imagine that the work of imagination is somehow less real--less human and historical--than the work of knowledge? [19] and what about *your* metaphor: "necessary fiction"! the implication being, apparently, that what we imagine is somehow less substantial than what we labor to discover and construct. how did keats put it? "what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not."^2^ created work, whether primary--like the material universe--or secondary--like history itself, or plato's dialogues, or the bible: these are not %fictions% in the sense you seem to suggest. they are original forms of being--and in the case of secondary creations like poetry, original forms of human being. knowledge--science--is not their source, could not bring them into existence. rather, knowledge takes these things (as well as itself) for its subject. [20] and this is why i stand with plato and socrates on the matter of dialogue and conversation. dialogue is how we pursue the truth through the clash of different views. it is our oldest tool for testing--and correcting--the limits and the powers of our ideas. [21] am: but there are important "intellectual activities" in which "the truth" will not be, must not be, "imagined." [22] jjr: you mean, i suppose, things like scientific or technological acts of construction. [23] am: i have no competence to speak about such matters, and i wasn't thinking about them at all. i had in mind plato's dialogues, the bible: creative and poetical work in general. [24] jjr: well, if you wanted to surprise me, you have. i would have thought it obvious that these works are the very and perhaps even the *only* ones in which "the truth" %will and must be% "imagined." [25] am: you are so obsessed with the idea of "the truth" that you impoverish your own imagination. and so you misunderstand me--as usual. [26] i wasn't suggesting a distinction between poetry and imagination, but between imagination and truth. and by that distinction i was asking you to re-think the way imagination acts in a poetical field. what the imagination seizes as beauty is not, cannot, and must not be "truth." rather, it seizes appearances, phenomena, %facticities%. the physique of the poetical event: from the elementary phonic values of the letters and syllables, through the entire array of verbal imagery, to the shape of the scripts and all the physical media--material as well as social--through which poetry is realized. what the imagination seizes as beauty is not truth, it is the image of a world. the question of truth may and will be brought to bear on that world, as it is always brought to bear on our larger world; but that question is not brought to bear in or by the poetry itself. god does not put questions of truth to his creations, and neither do poets. as blake's prophet of the poetical, los, says: "i will not reason & compare: my business is to create" (_jerusalem_ 10:21). [27] jjr: perhaps divine creation may be imagined as a seizure of pure beauty. man's creations, in any case, are nothing of the sort. poetry, for instance, being a form of language, comes to us (as one might say) "legend laden" with the conflicts of truth and error, good and evil. whatever one thinks of primary worlds, all secondary ones are ideological. [28] gm: and interpretation is the method we have for engaging these kinds of acts--just as science and philosophy are ways we have for engaging with other kinds of human activities. [29] am: [speaking to gm] what nonsense. poetry, interpretation, science, philosophy: these are medieval distinctions in that kind of formulation. they will get us nowhere. [30] besides, there is a difference, even on your showing, between poetry and its interpretation--between, for instance, the bible and its commentators. or don't you think so? is there not an inspired text--the poem--that is different from the reading of that text--the interpretation? [31] gm: of course, but it is not a difference whose "truth" we can ever be clear about. because it is a difference which is always being defined %ex post facto%, that is, under the sign of its interpretation. the bible itself- every poem we engage with--already comes to us under hermeneutical signs. "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline": shelley's famous remark involves a profound understanding of the nature of texts.^3^ if we ask of the bible, for example, "where in this work can the word of god be found," we will not get a clear answer. because the concept of location is a secondary and interpretive concept. when skeptics debunk the bible's pretension to be "the word of god" by pointing out the endless diaspora of its texts, their insight- though not their conclusion--is acute. the word of god is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. [32] the same must be said of all imaginative works--of every work that comes before us under the sign of creation. the bible is merely the master work of all those works--the originary revelation of "the eternal act of creation in the infinite i am."^4^ [33] jjr: if that's so, then ideology--good and evil, truth and error--must be involved in that eternal act of primary creation. which makes perfect sense since--as blake saw so clearly--god and the gods are creatures of man's imagination.^5^ stories to the contrary--like the story in genesis--are just exactly that--stories to the contrary. [34] but i'm digressing into theology and maybe even deconstruction, and neither discipline interests me very much. what does interest me is another, related implication i see in your remarks. i put it as a question: what is the status of error, evil, failure in poetical work? like yourself, most are happy to imagine the carnival of interpretation, the dialogue of endless errant reading. but if the primary texts are themselves errant and ideological, how are we to read them? certainly not as transcendent models. they seem, in this view, more like images of ourselves: confused, mistaken, wrong--and perhaps most so when we imagine them (or ourselves) reasonably clear and correct. if poetry delivers the best that has been known and thought in the world, it falls sadly short of our desires. [35] gm: perhaps what arnold meant was that it gave us the best of all possible worlds--where the possibilities are understood, from the start, as finite and limited. that, in any case, seems to be shelley's point in his remarks about composition and inspiration. [36] jjr: and perhaps the optimal of this possibility comes not from poetry's "perfection" so much as from the completeness of its self-presentation? then the shortfall of desire would arrive without the illusion that it could have been otherwise. and it would arrive that way because the message and the messenger--the poems themselves--are implicated in that shortfall of desire. so we come to shelley once again: when composition begins, inspiration is already on the wane--you know the rest. [37] gm: ah yes, the mind in creation is as a failing code. [38] am: but suppose, as jay said earlier, that the poems *are* "errant and ideological"--just like the interpretations of the poems? shelley was never happy about the didactic aspects of his own work, even though he--quite rightly too--could never abandon his didacticism. his theory of inspiration waning through composition seems to me part of the long-playing record he left us of his uneasiness on this score. [39] most professors tend to read his theory in a kantian light--by which i mean they hold out an ideal of poetry that transcends ideology and didacticism. look at the way browning is read, for instance. his dramatic monologues, we are told, escape the didactic subjectivism of browning's early romantic mentor. so a poem like "my last duchess" becomes a model of poetic objectivity. [40] gm: quite rightly too. [41] am: well, to me the poem is nothing but a little victorian sermon. [42] gm: you can't be serious. [43] am: i couldn't be *more* serious. "my last duchess," for instance, is largely constructed as a critique of aristocratic pride, which browning associates with the desire to possess and control. the villainy is especially heinous, according to this poem, because of its object: an adorable woman. but note that the poem is completely uncritical in its association of the woman with beauty. her value comes from her beauty--which is why the duke has enshrined her in, and as, a work of art. [44] implicit here is the notion--one finds it all over browning's poetry--that life (as opposed to art) is a primary value, and that art's office is to celebrate and broadcast this primary value. [45] gm: do you have any problem with that? [46] am: i'm not devaluing the poem, i'm just reading it. but i *could* point out that some excellent readers- baudelaire comes immediately to mind, and so does lautreamont--would surely find browning's sermon insufferable, and would just as surely choose to take the duke's part. [47] but leaving that aside, i have to point out another implication of the poem. the duke is judged harshly by the text because he wants to keep the duchess to himself. this desire is seen as especially wicked because of the way the duchess is presented: as a lovely and spontaneous creature who enjoys and is enjoyed by the company of all classes. now this representation of the duchess is not so different from the duke's representation in one crucial respect: both take her as a thing of beauty that might be a joy forever, both take her--essentially- as an aesthetic image. the poem does not judge the duke harshly for thinking her adorable--browning's poetry never does that--but only for wishing to keep her for his private pleasure. [48] gm: in short, the poem seems to you sexist. [49] am: no question about it. it is not a bad poem because of its sexism, of course. but it is *ideological* for that (and other) reasons--by which i simply mean it is a poem that makes moral representations which someone might reasonably acknowledge. . . . [50] jjr: and contest. * * * * [51] jm: sorry about that--the tape ran out. but i've put in a new one now, so let's go on. [52] am: just as well too, that interruption. we started talking about dialogics and interpretation and then wandered off into browning and the ideology of poetic form. [53] gm: but we also started with bakhtin in our minds, and in his work dialogism is a function of the (primary) fictions, not of the (secondary) interpretations. hermeneutics as dialogical is our appropriation of bakhtin. [54] am: don't say "our," say "your." to me there is a sharp difference between the poetical and the interpretive field, though the two interact. but it is not a dialogical interaction because--as socrates once pointed out to protagoras--the texts of the poets don't talk to us.^6^ we interrogate *them*. for their part--like arnold's shakespeare--they abide our question. of course we can choose to imagine our primary texts as "intertexts" and thus treat them as if they were "dialogical." this is what bakhtin does with novels, and he does it very well. but we should be clear about the metaphoric license he is taking when he treats fictional works as dialogical. [55] gm: and so we find ourselves in a wonderfully derridean situation. interpretation--like this conversation of ours--is dialogical, and now reveals itself as the prior (substantive?) ground for the metaphoric extension of dialogics to fictional work and poetry. [56] jjr: composition as prior to inspiration? [57] gm: why not? it's simply another way of saying that scripture is philosophically prior to logos. [58] jm: may i ask a question? it may seem absurd, i realize, and somewhat beside the point of what you're talking about. but i don't see how we can *not* ask this question now that the conversation has completed a kind of heideggerian circle. [59] what *is* a dialogue? i have a tape in my hand with an electronic record of the first part of this conversation.^7^ and as i listen to you talk, i watch the turning of the new spool, i watch a record being made of people talking. it makes me think a distinction has to be drawn somewhere that is not being drawn--perhaps a distinction between what we might call "conversation" on one hand and "dialogue" on the other. [60] maybe what we're doing now is not "dialogue." at any event, it seems very different from the following. here, read this. * * * * an abc of interdisciplinarity. a dialogue. by sheri meghan [a] a: as moses hadas always used to say: "the only interesting talk is shop talk." [b] b: all shops are closed shops, more or less. suffocating. if you're not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation? [c] c: well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. then the shop talk might seem *very* interesting indeed. [d] a: but it wouldn't be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. and if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer. [e] b: a blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. and more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late 20th century academe. enlightened halls, open--or so their citizens like to think--to every kind of talk. [f] a: and so they are. [g] b: only if the talk is framed in a certain way. the academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). it is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. it is the country for old men. children, whether of woman or of jesus born, do not come there--unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness. [h] c: they do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective. [i] b: socrates in his trance, alcibiades in his cups? [j] c: they will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state--the outsiders that are within. admired and hated, sought and feared; finally--because every state, every closed shop, is what it is--%expelled%. [k] b: and what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? is it not the ultimate dream of %wissenschaft% that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become--*field work*? in the ancient world of plato that sick dream appeared as the socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of wordsworth's newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." mary shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as victor frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of frankenstein's soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider's--in this case, a woman's--sense of the pitiful. [l] c: so you don't care for ethnographers either. [m] b: well, they are our latest faustian types. benevolent colonialists. today their shop talk--it is called cultural studies--has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. as if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer. [n] a: that "critical observer" you are imagining is the real illusion. all observers are inside the shop. if they weren't they wouldn't even know about the shop, couldn't see it, and hence couldn't talk at all. shop talk is "interesting" because people share their differences. [o] c: so for you it is not merely that "the only interesting talk is shop talk"; more than that, "shop talk is all there is!" [p] a: exactly. but some shop talk *is* more interesting than other shop talk. [q] c: and what makes it more interesting? [r] a: every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. the most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking--talking about them, or talking in their terms. [s] b: but where do those new and interesting conversations come from? inside the shop? [t] a: evidently. [u] c: why "evidently"? is the rapt socrates inside or outside? and what about alcibiades--drunk or sober? we all remember how, and where, he died. [v] b: inside or outside, it doesn't matter. the point is that every shop must be something *other* than what anyone, %inside or outside%, could think or imagine it to be. the shop must be, in some sense, %beside itself%. irrational. other than itself. otherwise it cannot accommodate--either conceptually *or* experientially- anything "new." [w] a: put it that way if you like. shop talk is often irrational. just so you don't bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials. [x] b: have it so if *you* like. just so you don't insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. no shop--no academy--can do so. otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. later, when the damage is done, the priests--let us say, the professors--will indulge their shop talk of explanations. * * * * [61] jm: this dialogue was originally presented in the spring of 1990, at a conference on herder that was held in charlottesville, virginia. meghan presented it at a panel discussion that took up the (very herderian) question of interdisciplinarity. [62] jjr: it seems to be a kind of position paper making an ironical critique of the form, or idea, of position papers as such. perhaps in order to ask that critical reflection precede the taking of positions. [63] gm: or perhaps to make a game of critical reflection as such. i was at the conference, joanne, and i think you ought to tell everyone that the dialogue was *not* given by anyone named sheri meghan. it was written and delivered by jerome mcgann. sheri meghan is just a mask- part of the dialogue's abcs. [64] jm: i wasn't trying to conceal that fact. the masquerade is crucial. [65] gm: maybe so, maybe not. but what about mcgann? was he just playing around, making a parade of cleverness? [66] am: right. if it's all just a masquerade, what's the point? the dialogue's ironies just get more ingrown. and look at the conclusion, where nothing is concluded: c stands altogether silent at that point, while a and b simply make a pair of smart, dismissive remarks. [67] jm: you're all missing my point. i ask again: what is a dialogue, what is *this* dialogue? or suppose i ask: %where% is it? right now we have been reading it as a printed text i passed out. in 1990 it was delivered orally by mcgann (in his meghan masquerade) at the herder conference. it seems to me that the dialogue is not at all the same thing under those two different conditions. when it was orally presented, it was--surely--part of mcgann's way of taking a position--whatever that position was, however we define it. [68] gm: the position of not taking a position. [69] jm: if that's what he was doing, it's a position. but let me set your question aside for a moment--only for a moment, i promise. whatever mcgann was doing at the herder conference, here the dialogue has become part of *my* taking a position. those two positions--whatever they are--may be symmetrical, but they probably aren't. at least they don't seem so to me. i introduced mcgann's text here because i wanted to interrogate the idea of dialogue--to get us to interrogate it--in a different light. [70] it's the tape machine that set me thinking this way. here we're talking and there our talk is being gathered and edited and turned into something new. i want to say this: our talk is being translated from conversation into dialogue. [71] gm: of course. because the talk is being given a secondary, as it were a %literary%, form. [72] jm: but the point is that every secondary world, every mimetic construction, comes to us under the watchful eyes of its recording angel. isn't this what the ancients meant when they said that memory is the mother of the muses? [73] let's assume that the splendid dialogues of oscar wilde have no originary "conversational moment." let's assume, in other words, that they neither carry nor erase the memory of such a moment. let us assume they are pure inventions. even so, they cannot escape their recording angel. for they will always be a record of themselves. even as pure invention they set down a documentary record of what went into the construction of their fictionality.^8^ [74] nor must we imagine that this documentary moment can be separated off from the fictional moment. an abstract separation can be made for special analytic purposes. whatever the usefulness of such an abstraction, it will obscure and confuse the record that the fiction is making of itself--and hence will obscure and confuse the fiction. [75] gm: i don't understand exactly what you're talking about, joanne. what's this idea about fiction making a record of itself? [76] jm: simply that all imaginative work appears to us in specific material forms. many people--even many textual scholars--don't realize the %imaginative% importance of those material forms. blake's work reminds us that the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning. that process of printing and distribution is essential to "the record that fiction makes of itself." it locates the imagination socially and historically. when emily dickinson decided not to publish her poems, when she decided to gather her handwritten texts into a series of "little books" which she kept to herself, those acts and their material forms comprise part of the record her work makes of itself. they are a crucial framework which dickinson constructed for making her meanings, and which we need if we are to understand and respond. [77] i could give you similar examples from all the writers i know well. which is why i say that a recording angel presides over the transcendental imagination. her descent to earth in the twentieth-century came, as usual, in masquerade. she once appeared, for example, as bertolt brecht, whose great project was to re-establish the theatrical unity of knowledge and pleasure, truth and beauty, instruction and entertainment. his guiding principle--it took many practical material forms--was what he called "the alienation effect." by it he wanted to encourage the audience's critical awareness of the entire fictional presentation. this required the theatrical event to %document% itself at the very moment of its dramatization. "footnotes, and the habit of turning back to check a point, need to be introduced into playwriting" in order to break the hypnotizing spell of aesthetic space, where spectators (or readers) are not encouraged "to think %about% a subject, but within the confines of the subject."^9^ [78] brecht called his project "epic theatre" because it introduced what he called a "narrative" element into the dramatic space. this narrative documents what is happening on the stage, adds footnotes to the action, supplies references. now it seems to me that dialogue might be distinguished from conversation along similar lines. dialogue puts conversation in a literary frame, and by doing this it documents its own activities: literally, gives them a local habitation and a set of names.^10^ [79] gm: there's nothing especially novel about all this. what you describe is just the "moment of reflection" that hermeneutics has always recognized in literary work. it's the moment that interpretation seeks to extend and develop through the (re)generation of meanings. [80] jjr: no, it's much more than that. brecht's (or is it joanne's?) recording angel operates according to feuerbach's eleventh thesis, where the point is not simply to "interpret the world" but to "change it." brechtian theatrics are socialist and polemical throughout--as we see in the following passage, which joanne did *not* choose to quote, even though it is the continuation of one of the texts she was reading to us. brecht distinguishes between the (old, passive) "dramatic" theatre and the (new, engaged) "epic" theatre: the dramatic theatre's spectator says: yes, i have felt like that too--just like me--only natural--it'll never change--the sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable--that's great art . . .--i weep when they weep, i laugh when they laugh. the epic theatre's spectator says: i'd never have thought it--that's not the way. . .--it's got to stop--the sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary--that's great art. . .--i laugh when they weep, i weep when they laugh. (_brecht on theatre_, 71) brecht's documentation is not positivist--a matter of keeping good records; it's interventionist. the recording angel is a figure of judgment and even apocalypse, a figure come to reveal secrets of good and evil that have been hidden, if not from the beginning of time, at least throughout human history. the angel opens up the book of a new life, turns the world upside down. the outcome is anything but the pluralist heaven of hermeneutics. [81] gm: well, you could have fooled me. here i'm talking in a dialogue that labels itself as such, in the best brechtian fashion. joanne makes a parade of her self consciousness about dialogues and conversations; she wonders "what" a dialogue is, "where" it is? but what and where am i? surely i'm plunged in the very "heaven (or hell) of hermeneutics" itself--a paradise of pluralism and shop talk. [82] i mean, whose play are we acting in here? joanne tells us in a charming metaphor that "a recording angel" made "her descent to earth . . . in masquerade." but all this is no metaphor, my friends. all this *is* a masquerade! let's set the record straight about that at any rate. let's add another brechtian label and get everything out front. we'll call this "the puppet theatre of jerome mcgann." [83] jerome mcgann: did you think i was trying to conceal myself? surely it's been evident right along that all of this--you four in particular--are what blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. it is manifest deception. [84] gm: fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? you may %say% you're not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. we even begin to think that we %are% different--different from each other, different from you. but we're not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop. [85] jerome mcgann: well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. especially today when "the star of bakhtin has risen in the west." people and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices--or at any rate different voices. rainbow coalitions and so forth. richness in diversity. but there is always (what did ashbery call it?) a "plainness in diversity" and it's just as well to be aware of it, don't you think? [86] gm: who cares what *i* think--"i" don't think at all. the question is, what do *you* think! [87] jerome mcgann: i think you're more involved in thinking than you realize. [88] gm: i'm just a textual construct. [89] jerome mcgann: so you say--a puppet in a puppet theatre. whereas i'm flesh and blood, of course. [90] am: sometimes i think we have more life than we realize- or at least that we might have more. thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, no hungry generations tread thee down. i'm that bird, i think. what did shakespeare say? not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme. flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages. [91] gm: we don't think, we have no identities. *he* does. whatever we do is done for us. someone will read me and tell me what i mean. it's true that different people might make me mean different things. we've all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. but what do *i* care about reader responses? they make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on. [92] jerome mcgann: as i said, i think you're more involved in thinking than you realize. [93] gm: what are you getting at? [94] jerome mcgann: thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. we sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language--for instance, in our heads, where we don't exteriorize the language we are using in language's customary (oral or scripted) forms. but the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined. [95] you whine about being a textual construct. but you're able to think for precisely that reason. and so am i, and so are we all. we're all textual constructs. [96] gm: what sophistry. [97] jm: on the contrary, what truth! we really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor's monologue? it's not the only way to see it. in *any* case we are testing limits and possibilities. [98] gm: no *we're* not. *he* is--if anyone is. [99] jm: what about someone listening to all this, or reading it? [100] gm: sure, but they're flesh and blood too. it's people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on. [101] jerome mcgann: but my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought--that we are all masked creatures. i've written this dialogue--constructed even an ingrate like yourself--to pursue that thought, or perhaps i should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it. [102] take yourself, for instance. you're always surprising me. you think you're just a puppet, but the truth is that i often don't know what you or i or anybody else here might do or say next. this whole last five minutes of conversation we're having. i never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways i hadn't thought about. and then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and i came back at last to you. and so i started writing some more--writing what we're arguing about now. [103] how did those changes happen? there's a writer- let's call him me; and there's a reader--my friend; and then there's all of us, we textual constructs. don't we have any responsibility in this masquerade? [104] am: but you're not one of us! and the answer is no, *we* don't. the responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend's, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts. [105] but i agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren't blank tablets or empty signs. we are characters, we have histories. if masks are disguises, they take particular forms. it makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade. [106] jerome mcgann: so, georg, don't ask *me* what i think about all this. interrogate the masks if you want to know that. the question is not: "why do you move in masquerade?" we all do. the question is: "why does your masquerade take the form that it does? why these characters and not others?" [107] am: but there are other questions as well. odd as it might seem, jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. the dialogue isn't yours, isn't even your friend's. the dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own--indeed, has many lives of its own. all texts do. dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices. [108] bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. but he was wrong in this. in a sense, poetry is far more "dialogical" (in bakhtin's sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text *as it is a textual construct*. poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. by this text, for instance--robert frost's well known jingoist lyric "the gift outright." the land was ours before we were the land's. she was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people. she was ours, in massachusetts, in virginia, but we were england's, still colonials, possessing what we still were unpossessed by, possessed by what we now no more possessed. something we were withholding made us weak until we found out that it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living. such as we were we gave ourselves outright (the deed of gift was many deeds of war) to the land vaguely realizing westward, but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, such as she was, such as she would become. that was written during the height of the second world war--a pretty piece of patriotism. but the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. blood spilled in this poem's land becomes the sign of the right of possession. but who is the "we" of this poem, what are those "many deeds of war"? [109] one word in this text--"massachusetts"--reminds us that this supremely anglo-american poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of manifest destiny. that central new england place, massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land- rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles--finds its deepest truth and expression. unlike "virginia," "massachusetts" is native american, red skinned. colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;^11^ and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. "virginia," for example, which is a lying, european word^12^--a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to "masssachsetts." when *i* read this poem, those "many deeds of war" include the indian wars that moved inexorably "westward." in this poem, i think, all blood is originally red. [110] where do such different voices come from? language speaks through us, and language, like tennyson's sea, moans round with many voices. in "the gift outright" we see how some voices come unbidden--come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. because the poem's rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably euro-american, "massachusetts" sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. and it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely--so undeliberately, as it were--when we read the poem. the faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. the whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if frost had not given his white, european mythology over to his poem's language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. a measure of release. [111] this is why i care about what you think, jerome--and also about what you %don't think%. because you're one among many--in the end, one of us. as you say, a textual construct. [112] jerome mcgann: "zooks, sir! flesh and blood, that's all i'm made of." -------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ see gerald l. bruns,"the hermeneutics of midrash," in _the book and the text: the bible and literary theory_, ed. regina schwartz (oxford: basil blackwell, 1990), 196-7. ^2^ see keats's letter to benjamin bailey, 22 nov. 1817, in _the letters of john keats_, ed. hyder edward rollins (harvard up: cambridge, ma, 1958), i. 43. ^3^ see "a defence of poetry", in _shelley's prose, or the trumpet of a prophecy_, ed. david lee clark (u. of new mexico press: albuquerque, 1954), 294. ^4^ see s.t. coleridge, _biographia literaria_, ed. james engell and w. jackson bate (princeton up: princeton, 1983), i. 304. ^5^ see _the marriage of heaven and hell_, plate 11. ^6^ see plato's _protagoras_ 347c-348a. ^7^ the text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by mcgrem, but upon the printer's-copy typescript. the latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. our text appears to begin %in medias res%, so it may not represent the whole of "the first part" of the conversation that was apparently on the tape mcgrem mentions. ^8^ none of joanne mcgrem's interlocutors queried her on this point. but one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. to us, such completion seems hardly possible. ^9^ _brecht on theatre. the development of an aesthetic_, ed. and trans. by john willett (hill and wang: new york, 1964), 44. the emphasis here is mcgrem's, not brecht's. ^10^ at this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally mcgrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse. ^11^ the word names the tribe which ranged the boston area, and it means something like "near the great hill." the reference is, apparently, to the great blue hill south of the city. ^12^ i believe the phrase "a lying, european word" must be an allusion to laura riding's great poem "poet: a lying word" (the title piece in the volume _poet: a lying word_ [arthur barker ltd.: london, 1933], 129-34). trembath, 'sartre and local aesthetics: rethinking sartre as an oppositional pragmatist', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-trembath-sartre.txt sartre and local aesthetics: rethinking sartre as an oppositional pragmatist by paul trembath colorado state university copyright (c) 1991 by paul trembath, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) and that lie that success was a moving _upward_. what a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up _and_ down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your own selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. --ralph ellison, _invisible man_ [1] the tension between art and politics looms large in the life and work of jean-paul sartre. the child-aesthete depicted in _the words_, the celebrity of post-world war ii existentialism, the marxist revisionist of _the critique of dialectical reason_ and, arguably, the uneasy freudian of _the idiot of the family_--all of these and more seem like a family of conflicting self-representations. contemporary interpreters of sartre find themselves addressing several related dilemmas. first, was sartre a philosopher, an artist, or a political theorist? second, to what extent did sartre's literary writings contribute productively to an effective oppositional politics? finally, given the early sartre's modernist use of phenomenological metaphors (as an apolitical philosopher) and the later marxist sartre's interest in political "totalization," how can sartre survive familiar postmodern and poststructural criticisms of phenomenology, ontology, and marxist theories of totality? i think that the later sartre understood the hermetic redundancies produced by such questions and--having lost interest in art, philosophy, and totalizing social theory- strove to manipulate his multivalent historical reception in the service of specific political projects. these projects were invariably oppositional. in retrospect, they illustrate how sartre moved away from professional philosophy, literature, and totalizing social theory toward a commitment to specific political protests calculated to reinvent the social world and our experience of it. i propose that the later militant sartre makes possible a new understanding of aesthetics itself, one that anticipates john rajchman's discussion of michel foucault's "politics of revolt."^1^ [2] in his biographical narrative on sartre, ronald hayman writes that sartre "used his life to test ways of facing up to the evils of contemporary history. if he was not always honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could not afford."^2^ hayman's suggestion that sartre "used his life" to affect what he considered the "evils" of contemporary history--racism, dictatorship, colonialism, multinational capitalism, the serial family, and so forth- requires us to consider how sartre's "life" was largely made up of the literary, philosophical, and political-theoretical representations that people had come to associate with his name and public reputation. these representations were what sartre "used" or manipulated to give voice to different political positions and programs. hayman is unclear about what the word "honesty" implies in this passage, but the word is provocative. hayman's use of "honesty" suggests something like an unprofitable lack of social versatility; in a world as diverse in knowledges, truths, economies, and political interests as sartre's in the 60s and 70s, unilateral moral concepts like "honesty" serve only to bury any versatile engagement of seemingly contradictory political commitments beneath an ultimately reactionary--and apologist-language of hypocrisy. if sartre allowed himself to be described variously as an existentialist, a marxist, or a maoist (to name only a few of his provisional "identities"), his lack of representational stability--his _inconsistency_ in kantian moral terms--made his larger objectives seem dubious to a public trained to recognize in sartre's political versatility only his inability to take a definitive political stance of his own. [3] clearly such a stance--when compared to the complex, changing, and situation-specific political commitments of sartre--would have limited sartre's concrete ability to contribute to political change. in fact, the "luxury" of political "honesty," in hayman's supramoral sense, would have ultimately re-empowered the problematic concept of historical totality that the activist sartre arguably left behind with his "theoretical" marxism, or the luxurious assumption of representational accuracy he had once assumed for himself as the phenomenological ontologist of french existentialism.^3^ for the militant sartre, "honesty" became the political, theoretical, and philosophical luxury of stepping outside one's specific historical situation, of stressing truth to disguise the workings of power, of theorizing totality at the expense of advocating difference, and of describing consciousness and authenticity authoritatively instead of letting languages speak uniquely for themselves. such "luxuries," i shall argue, became untenable for sartre toward the end of his productive life, when he was not only post-aesthetic (at least in traditional terms), but post-philosophical and post-theoretical as well. [4] the working distinction i want to draw between sartrean philosophy and sartrean critical theory is roughly the distinction between sartrean existentialism and sartrean marxism. sartre became dissatisfied with the former because of its ahistoricism and naive faith in the representational function of phenomenological metaphors. he became dissatisfied with the latter because it attempted to describe authoritatively and comprehensively the social freedom of others. sartre's rejection of existentialism, and his reasons for it, are today commonly recognized and understood in intellectual circles. however, the differences between the theoretical sartre of _the critique of dialectical reason_ and the militant sartre of the later demonstrations and interviews remain to be elucidated. [5] the theoretical sartre and the militant sartre are not consistently the same sartre. both are marxist. but the theoretical sartre of the _critique_ is a marxist _revolutionary_--that is, someone with a total political program in mind that will definitively transform society. the militant sartre, in contrast, is one who rejects any such authoritative program and, in part, the goal of revolution with it. this sartre sees "revolution" as the ongoing business of revolt, not as the political end of a long history of class struggles. the militant sartre emphasizes the historical materialism of marxism but de emphasizes the totalizing objectives of marxist theory; where he once stressed the importance of global revolution, sartre now stresses the importance of strategic local rebellions. neither does he do this in particular texts, something of a first for the endlessly writing sartre; he does it in his acts. his attempts to get arrested in political demonstrations, his participation in explicitly political debates and discussions, his visit to a well-known western "terrorist," his endorsement of oppositional political regimes around the world, and his publicized travels to diverse third world countries struggling for political autonomy^4^--these and additional activities demonstrate how sartre used his global fame to lend credence and voice to marginal or oppressed political causes worldwide. (i will demonstrate this at some length later on.) in each instance, we see a sartre who, dissatisfied with his professional reputation as a novelist, playwright, philosopher, comprehensive social theorist, and so forth, strategically uses his euro-american cultural reception to draw public attention to marginal politics and underprivileged peoples throughout the world. [6] this shift in emphasis from globalizing social theory, philosophy, and literature to militant local practice is not the only change we can recognize in the activist sartre. sartre also undertook an implicit revaluation of the aesthetic. in a historicist or even pragmatist way that anticipates michel foucault's discussion of an "aesthetics of existence,"^5^ sartre came to demonstrate that the whole notion of private creativity--so much a reified part of our collective western culture--needed to be reinvested with a sense of public effectiveness. that is, sartre strove to reinvent the concept of the aesthetic not merely in commonly expected terms of private expression and production, but in terms of public and historical effectivity. for the later sartre, "artwork" was no longer something one did in quietistic solitude, only to emerge publically with the hermetic results of one's private labor (a painting, a play, an opera, a new theory of art, and so forth). the aesthetic became the entire realm of social invention--a realm utterly mediated by our continuous responsibility for the freedom and power of self-determination of other social "selves." this, i think, is sartre's most neglected contribution to contemporary arts, to philosophy and literary theory and, perhaps most important of all, to social criticism. [7] in _michel foucault: the freedom of philosophy_, john rajchman describes the writings of foucault in a way that makes possible a post-voluntaristic discussion of freedom. the later, activist sartre both enacted and anticipated this conception of freedom. in his chapter entitled "the politics of revolt," rajchman explains that "[l]ike sartre, foucault was an 'intellectual' with public positions, and as such, he had to worry about the political aims and consequences of both his histories and their methods" (43). consequently, rajchman is willing to discuss similarities between sartre and foucault that have gone unexamined largely because of the success of poststructuralist rhetoric and its critique of voluntarism or, of late, what has been described as "philosophy of mind."^6^ in response to the way sartre has been received recently (he has been ignored), rajchman acknowledges that: foucault has often been seen as sartre's philosophical rival. yet as an intellectual he shares with sartre an inclination to present his work as nonacademic and nonspecialized, and as addressed in a nontechnocratic way to basic issues in the lives of all of us. and like sartre, as foucault assumes this intellectual role, he moves from primarily epistemological to primarily political concerns, identified with an oppositional left, though not with a party, or with any claim to bureaucratic or charismatic authority. (_michel foucault_, 43.) [8] what rajchman describes as the central difference between sartre and foucault is their different approaches to freedom. sartre, who rajchman asserts "attempted to make freedom into _the_ philosophical problem" (_michel foucault_, p.44), conceptualized freedom in a way that gave the phenomenological subject priority over the contingencies of history, whereas "foucault's commitment [is] to a nonvoluntaristic, nonhumanistic freedom within history" (45). rajchman describes the difference between sartre's voluntaristic idea of freedom and foucault's historical idea of freedom as the difference between "anthropological" and "nominalist" ideas of freedom. sartre's anthropological idea of freedom, according to rajchman, remains tied to a politics of revolution which has the final liberation of man as its objective, whereas foucault's nominalist/historicist conception of freedom manifests itself in the world as a continuous politics of revolt--a politics that attempts "to occasion new ways of thinking . . . and sees freedom not as the end of domination or as our removal from history, but rather as the revolt through which history may constantly be changed" (_michel foucault_, p.123). as rajchman explains: [a]nthropology entails that we are free because we have a nature that is real or one we must realize; nominalist history assumes that our "nature" in fact consists of those features of ourselves by reference to which we are sorted into polities and groups. our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial and anarchical. no society or polity _could_ be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted in our nature. (123) [9] i quote rajchman at some length because his emphasis on a certain tacit idea of "freedom" in the texts of foucault makes it possible to recast sartre as a nonvoluntaristic local aesthetician. i suggested earlier that sartre's activism might encourage us to re-evaluate aesthetics, not in terms of the beautiful, the sublime, the innovative, the problematic, and so forth, but instead in terms of social efficacy. and because sartre's activism is _oppositional_, because it always takes on explicitly political and counter hegemonic emphases, critics who wish to aestheticize sartre's political activities need to remind themselves that sartre's effective/aesthetic practices are always activities of protest against specific configurations of political authority. thus rajchman's foucauldian conception of a post-revolutionary _politics_ of revolt, as it empowers my reinvention of sartre, might usefully be redescribed as an _aesthetics_ of revolt. [10] this use of "aesthetics" may pose problems for many contemporary readers, and with good reason. in "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," walter benjamin warns us brilliantly and convincingly that the "aestheticization of politics" can coincide historically with the emergence of political fascism.^7^ benjamin argues that critics and artists who wish in some way to associate artwork with political power must do so in projects that politicize artwork, not in projects that aestheticize politics. the politicization of artwork, benjamin argues, helps break down political hegemony in a way that encourages marxist participatory democracy. the aestheticization of politics, in contrast, elevates political regimes and their leading representatives to an almost mythic status of unquestionable authority, thus obscuring the real concrete workings of power and exploitation by drawing attention instead to transcendental narratives about national destiny, the greatness of the people, spirit of place, racial purity, and so on. [11] benjamin's useful distinction between politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics has become too general and constraining in discussions of aesthetics and politics. moreover, its unquestioned heuristic authority might make it possible for critics to interpret sartre's pragmatist aesthetics of revolt, prematurely and too simplistically, as an instance of aestheticized politics. benjamin's distinction, in short, has taken on a kind of automatic legitimacy in critical discussions; it divides political artists up all too neatly between the good guys and the bad guys, between desirable marxist artists who shake up the artworld by exposing its complicity with forms of political power and domination, and undesirable fascistic mystifiers who, instead of demonstrating critically how art is a form of historical power, legitimate political power by giving it an aesthetic and mythical identity. the lauding of hans haacke in recent art criticism, for instance, and the complementary castigating of joseph beuys--the former for his "politicized art" and the latter for his "aestheticized politics"--demonstrate quite clearly just how automatic benjamin's overly polaric distinction has become.^8^ [12] writing critically of joseph beuys in his essay "haacke, broodthaers, beuys," stefan germer claims that "beuys . . . made all historical reality disappear behind a self-created myth of the artist-hero,"^9^ and that beuys's theory of social sculpture presented "creativity . . . as the means to shape and change society" (_october_ 68). in a discussion that defers constantly, if implicitly, to the authority of benjamin's metaphors and the critical positions they shape, germer writes: [b]y identifying political and artistic practice with one another, beuys avoids the relevance of his activity, since he borrows for it the aura of the political. the necessary precondition of this is the aestheticization of the political. abstracting from actual conditions, beuys in effect invents state and society, thus making both into artistic creation. (_october_ 68.) [13] germer's critique of beuys allows me to demonstrate how benjamin's critique of aestheticized politics, although important and necessary, should not automatically discredit my foucauldian revision of sartre as a local aesthetician. germer's benjaminian critique of beuys is based largely on beuys's belief "that, by _inventing_ rather than _analyzing_ social conditions, he could actually contribute to their change" (italics mine; _october_, p.66). germer's use of "invention" invokes a whole tradition of thinking in which voluntaristic subjects supposedly create the world in which they live, unconstrained by their historical conditions. in such a view politicians are indeed "artists" whose "wills" create the social world--privileged subjects who manipulate social individuals, with truly epic panache, as the medium of their heroic self-expression. but after rajchman on foucault, the word "invention" can take on an entirely different sense--one that has nothing to do with the "out moded concept of creativity," or of the equally out-moded concept of the voluntaristic hero-artist who invents our political reality in the manner of a high modernist "genius" creating an innovative painting or poem. it is this more recent view of "invention"--as it implies a _nominalist_ aesthetics of historical effects rather than an _anthropological_ aesthetics of self-expression--that sartre's activism and rajchman's work on foucault prepare us to consider. [14] clearly sartre's "aesthetics of revolt" is as intolerant of aestheticized politics--and certainly of fascism--as is the politicized art benjamin advocates. any aestheticization of politics, in benjamin's sense as well as germer's, coincides with the valorization of a _regime_, that is, with the legitimation of some form of political authority or domination--precisely what sartre's aesthetics of revolt seeks constantly to challenge. in fact, if we were to understand sartre's aesthetics of revolt as a _politics_ we would need first to redefine politics as the counter-hegemonic practice of local resistance rather than as the structured and hegemonic practice of political domination. in short, sartre aestheticizes continual _resistance_ to political power, not political regimes themselves. [15] i say that sartre's practices of resistance are _inventive_ because, in rajchman's foucauldian sense, they freely contribute to the social transformation of polities and groups and, in effect, reinvent the world (and our potential experience of it) by so doing. in no way does this sense of "invention," as it pertains to a nominalist aesthetics of revolt, reproduce the modernist/anthropological vocabulary of "creativity," "genius," the "hero-artist," and so forth that is so central to benjamin's description, and condemnation, of aestheticized politics. germer, for example, criticizes beuys's work by suggesting that beuys's privileging of "invention" over "analysis" in discussions of how best to describe and initiate social change--as well as his corresponding belief that people "invent state and society, thus making both into artistic creation"--relies upon an inevitable anthropological conception of invention. but such a (modernist) conception of invention is _not_ the only one at our critical disposal, and germer writes as if it is. the fact is that after foucault's dicussions of ethics and aesthetics in _the use of pleasure_, and after rajchman's redescription of foucault's aesthetics as a free politics of resistance, benjamin's unequivocal identification of "invention" with a mythology of "creativity," as it sometimes appears in art criticism of a materialist persuasion, has become as out-moded as the very concepts it set out to criticize. [16] my discussions of rajchman on foucault and of the benjaminian germer on beuys put us in position to revaluate sartre as a kind of oppositional pragmatist or local aesthetician. in contrast with germer, sartre realizes that analysis is simply one pragmatic tool that enables the reinvention of society by producing effects within and upon it, but that it is not the _only_ tool at our disposal. in fact, analysis is only one kind of effective/inventive practice; there are numerous others, and no single one is unilaterally the most conducive to participatory democracy. instead, the context and the desired objective of any political project must determine the tools and practices that, in a given situation, contribute most effectively to social change. sartre also realizes that abstractions, ideologies, religions and so forth produce specific effects on simultaneously collective and local individuals. such a critical position makes it possible for sartre to acknowledge how his public reception as something as general and hopelessly over-determined as an "existentialist" can nonetheless empower the specific effects his thought and practice have upon concrete social individuals. [17] the major difference between sartre's aesthetics of revolt and beuys's social sculpture--at least as benjamin inspires automatic criticism of the latter--is that sartre's work pursues _political_ ends whereas beuys's work pursues predominantly _aesthetic_ ends. that is, beuys's theory of social sculpture is designed to give us new ideas about art, whereas sartre's aesthetics of revolt strives primarily to bring about political change. this suggests enormous dissimilarities between sartre, as i see him, and beuys, at least as _germer_ sees him. germer seems to believe that beuys's social sculpture, as it strives to produce further mythologies for an already ahistorical theory of art, engenders historical confusion in the service of beuys's "artistic" reception, and does so at the expense of specific examinations of political praxis. [18] sartre's aesthetics of revolt, however, does just the opposite. at the point in sartre's life where his activities take on a local aesthetic emphasis, sartre already _has_ the received and overly-general identity of an artist and all the charismatic authority that goes with it; in fact, he is often openly ambivalent about his mythic identity.^10^ thus where beuys's theorization of social sculpture can be understood, perhaps too one-sidedly, as an attempt to obtain a mythic identity, sartre's aesthetics of revolt can be understood as an attempt to _use_ such a troublesome identity in the service of counter-mythic and oppositional practices. indeed, sartre has considerably more by way of "myth" at his pragmatist/historicist disposal than the aesthetic beuys: not only is he a canonical literary writer of mythic proportions (_nausea_, _roads to freedom_, _the flies_, _the words_, etc.); he is also famous as a philosopher who tells us something dramatic about a "human condition" (_being and nothingness_), a political theorist who describes for us our social present and its histories (_the critique of dialectical reason_), and a social critic who addresses current events in oppositional terms ("the maoists in france," "elections: a trap for fools," "vietnam: imperialism and genocide," etc.).^11^ sartre thus achieves dubious charismatic status, in benjamin's propagandistic sense, as a cultural "celebrity." and despite rajchman's claim to the contrary, sartre _does_ have "charismatic authority," or at least more than foucault, even if like foucault he makes no _claims_ to having such authority.^12^ [19] enter sartre the pragmatist. now sartre knows that he has indeed obtained celebrity status as a writer and a philosopher. for example, _the words_ is in some sense an attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the socially acquired motivations that encouraged him to pursue such a status.^13^ but sartre also knows that, given the levels of fame he achieved as the 20th century "voltaire" of post-ww ii france^14^--and arguably of the north atlantic area in general--that he can never simply _erase_ his fame. he can, however, put it to some productive counter-hegemonic use, which he proceeds to do. [20] as a major cultural celebrity of most of the capitalist first world, sartre realizes that his cultural fame covertly legitimates the political status quo of the western world at large--with its political and economic interests in the exploitation of third world countries--despite the fact that he overtly condemns those interests. so sartre brings his fame to bear upon the very world from which he derives his cultural authority by reproducing it supportively in places where it is not expected to be. algeria, the soviet union (which he later repudiated for its stalinism), israel _and_ palestine, china, cuba, yugoslavia, brazil, and others all acquire some potentially sympathetic attention from europeans and americans when they see the "great" sartre, keeper of the flame of western culture, clearly advocating the political programs and interests of oppressed peoples _contra_ the imperialist west's negative representations of their interests and programs. sartre thus becomes the enemy within, and the unforeseen statesman from without. but it is a curious sort of "statesman" that sartre becomes for, unlike the comprehensive "theorist" we expect him to be, sartre refuses to speak for others, to "lead" them on their behalf, or to presume to understand their historical needs and desires (unlike the authoritative west he supposedly represents) better than they do themselves. instead he gets the west looking at him and listening to him, and then leaves the stage to its proper organic narrators, in gramsci's sense, for whom he or any other representative of the first world has nothing to say.^15^ [21] sartre's use of his public identity demonstrates several related things pertinent to my reinvention of him. first, the revolutionary and theoretical marxist of _the critique of dialectical reason_ has become unexpectedly a pragmatist of revolt. no longer making authoritative or transcendental claims for his pro-revolutionary "theories," sartre now uses the over-determined notoriety he has acquired for having "created" such theories to draw attention to specific problems in social polities.^16^ sartre thus turns western expectations inside out by allowing us to decide for ourselves that, politically and morally, we are not always what we proclaim ourselves to be. [22] second, sartre's oppositional pragmatism coincides with his rejection of celebrity status as a hermetic cultural end in itself. sartre at once demonstrates his critical dissatisfaction with concepts such as the "artist-hero," "creativity," "genius," "eternal value," "mystery"- precisely those concepts rejected by benjamin and germer in his criticism of beuys--by moving toward oppositional nominalism while distancing himself, as much as his historical moment will allow, from any aesthetics or politics of creativity. arguably, this distancing coincides with sartre's activist rejection of the voluntarism with which he is still too automatically associated, as well as with his rejection of the anthropology that rajchman rightfully reinvokes where he distinguishes sartre's totalizing theoretical work from the nominalism we find, more profitably, in foucault's histories. [23] i call sartre's nominalist activism _local aesthetic practice_ since it is at once _inventive_ in a post anthropological sense, and _micro-political_ in its pragmatist suggestion that we resist authoritarianism, in malcolm x's words, by any means necessary. this last phrase has been popularly interpreted as an advocacy of militant violence; yet it is quite clear that "any means" can and should suggest a great deal more than simply "violent means." occasionally sartre does speak out in support of "revolutionary" violence, as in his strategic 1961 preface to frantz fanon's _the wretched of the earth_--a book which, in its theories and objectives, does anticipate the thought of the mature malcolm x.^17^ other times, however, sartre refuses to support the violent practices of militant revolutionaries, although he periodically idealizes what he refers to in one interview as the "militant intellectual."^18^ for instance, we know that in 1974 sartre visits the incarcerated andreas baader in a west german prison, that he goes to express solidarity with the oppositional militant and to protest the treatment of political prisoners worldwide, but that he refuses to condone the terrorist tactics of the baader-meinhof group.^19^ [24] what accounts for sartre's willingness to support counter-authoritative violence in one instance and his unwillingness to do so in another? i would argue that sartre chooses to _represent_ himself as a "violent revolutionary" when he thinks it will serve the interests of oppressed peoples whose organic situations clearly _demand_ such a representation, and that in other kinds of specifically oppressive circumstances he sees fit to represent himself in other ways entirely--but always in pursuit of the same political revisionism. i say "revisionism" because the pragmatist sartre, if we think of him as a local aesthetician, no longer believes in a final revolutionized state, but instead in the ongoing need to invent provisional democratic situations which, because they risk becoming hegemonic in their own right, constantly require revision and modification. [25] one of fanon's critical distinctions can help us see why sartre's direct public response to fanon is necessarily different from his ambiguous public response to baader. on the one hand, fanon suggests that capitalist societies rely largely on their infrastructures to keep things in order.^20^ such infrastructures are maintained by "bewilderers"--teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, clerics, and so on--who, themselves unconscious victims of power, mediate the hard realities of power by training citizens to believe that their governments work to protect their interests rather than those of the rich and powerful. on the other hand, fanon suggests that colonized countries like algeria require the immediate violent policing of occupied "natives" to protect the interests of the political powers that be. in the cases of both west germany and algeria, those who have power are those who either have or manage money. however, the actual tactics of oppression and exploitation in an infrastructural state such as west germany in the 1970s--although arguably "occupied" by our even more infrastructural united states--are not as obviously violent to oppressed but serialized west germans as are the visible guns and clubs of french militia to collectively oppressed algerians. [26] unlike the fanon of french-occupied algeria, baader can thus be made to look like the only militant thing that exists in an otherwise peaceful west germany. and because this is precisely what happens, it is not baader's illegality or militantism with which sartre feels an urgent need to take issue--despite his disapproval of it--but rather with the way that baader's identity has been over totalized by the first world press. sartre understands that the french-occupied algerians with whom fanon is directly familiar, and whose plight encourages fanon's militant advocacy of a full-scale african revolution, collectively recognize an oppressive enemy in the french, and that the algerian revolutionaries have organic narratives that can justify and explain their organic rebellion to counter revolutionary europeans. europeans might not sympathize with the "self-descriptions" of oppressed algerians, but these self-descriptions nonetheless exist, are collective, and make a certain sense; consequently, colonial countries will have to come to terms with them. this makes it productive for sartre to support violence openly, for such violence, or its threat, will clearly yield counter authoritative results by making negotiation necessary. [27] baader, however, represents no full-scale revolutionary program and, as such, is easily "psychologized" and represented for public consumption _only_ as a sociopath engaging in random acts of terrorism, when in fact other interpretations of militant protest merit public consideration. sartre thus finds himself in the following dilemma. he must not allow the state to use baader to condemn militancy in general on a _symbolic_ level. but neither can he simply support baader's militancy on a _specific_ level, for he risks enabling the state's public representation of baader as the _zeitgeist_ of terrorism, irrationality, anti-civilization, and so forth. sartre is thus concerned that any blanket endorsement of militantism in a passive infrastructural state might affront uncritical citizens and opportunist state management enough for them to suppress those legal outlets for oppositional practice that already exist, and which already produce valuable counter hegemonic effects. yet arguably sartre's decision to _visit_ the symbolic baader in prison--an event which he knows will generate some attention--is an attempt to keep europe's interpretation of militancy open so people can question the state's suggestion that _all_ militant behavior is _a priori_ pathological behavior. [28] sartre's strategic support of the student maoists in france, to give another example, often takes the micro political form of dialogues and open forums which are in turn publicized--dialogues and forums which then impart all the cultural credibility that a collaboration with sartre carries in the western world.^21^ (this is a specific strategy of foucault's as well, who more obviously than sartre was no maoist.^22^) once again sartre chooses the means which most effectively empower oppositional representations. thus his commitment to the contextual specificity of inventive resistances resembles jonathan swift's as edward said describes it in "swift as intellectual." sartre's aesthetics of revolt is always _reactive_ in said's sense^23^ (or "specific" in foucault's^24^); that is, it always responds to a concrete political situation and shapes the form of its resistance accordingly, despite the fact that sartre's aesthetics, unlike swift's, is activist to the point of abandoning traditional category of "art" entirely. and the nominalist quality of sartre's later oppositional practices demonstrates how sartre's aesthetics becomes a politics, and not an anthropology, of freedom; sartre strives to invent political room for organic speech-acts, protests, and rebellions, and demonstrates that reform is never final in a manner that emancipates people from an oppressive past, but that reforms are instead ongoing, specific, and endlessly provisional. [29] sartre's oppositional activism also suggests that the "success" of any aesthetics of revolt can never be gauged, as has the success of all aesthetic enterprise in the past, by the degree of fame or recognition it obtains, for local aesthetic practice never conceives of success simply as originality, wealth, cultural canonization, and so forth- all of those representations of success which quickly become commodities within the authoritative market systems they covertly legitimate. instead sartre, like ellison's invisible man in the epigraph that begins this paper, understands success purely in terms of efficacious resistance. the question is no longer "am i well-known, rich?" and so on, but instead "have i released any of the counter-hegemonic potential that is stored up in the current regime? that is, have i affected the world in ways which unleash the possibility of endless resistance to authority?" sartre, of course, is not the unknown protagonist of ellison's novel; in fact, the circumstances of sartre's life, existence, and influence are obviously different from those of an impoverished member of a social minority. nonetheless what goes for sartre goes for others as well; everyone in their specific and local situations can resist authority in local aesthetic ways and can do so, in part, by manipulating their various socially assigned "selves" in the service of inventive microphysical revolts. moreover, the story i tell here of sartre might usefully empower our unique resistances by lending them some (provisional) authority for which they are in dire need. [30] one inconsistency remains, but it is one that enables sartre's aesthetics of revolt _in practice_ as much as it might seem to disable it _in theory_. if the reactive quality of sartre's aesthetics of revolt makes his activism "microphysical" in foucault's well-known sense of the word, a large portion of sartre's _specific_ power--that is, the power he derives from his fame--is unavoidably drawn from the "mythologies" of creativity criticized by benjamin and germer. i think it is unproductive, however, simply to berate mythology for its "ideological" status, for such berating implies that we can "expose" mythology as pure false-consciousness, when in fact no such form of mythology exists. rather mythology must be understood for what it is: a concrete force of history which can be used inventively and oppositionally against exploitive powers, or which will be used instead, almost invariably, to conserve those powers. in fact, we have no humane choice at present but to follow sartre's example and to redirect authoritative mythologies against themselves. our failure to do so automatically leaves mythologies in the hands of those exploitive powers who, pragmatists already, use mythologies to legitimate their authoritarian politics. just as honesty is a luxury that sartre cannot afford, neither can we afford the _a priori_ anti-mythologism of benjamin's automatic following. such a rejection of the historically-constituted _currency_ of struggle is the strategic equivalent of putting down guns in the thick of battle, of refusing to tell attila a lie, as the famous illustration of kant's imperative goes, though it mean the death of an entire population. [31] let us then reconsider benjamin's distinction between politicized art and aestheticized politics. if there are good reasons to avoid theoretical syntheses of aesthetics and politics (and there certainly are), sartre's local aesthetics cautions us against taking these "good reasons" too far, because they risk disempowering us entirely. if we should _never_ equate power, in some mythic and glorious sense, with art, neither should we allow cultural materialism, since it is often our area of critical commitment, to become passive, commodifiable, and politically unengaged. this latter possibility is a far greater threat to critical activism than the social sculpture of joseph beuys, for it discourages many of the keenest critical minds in cultural studies, simply for fear of reprisal, from directing their inventive powers explicitly toward political issues. sartre, for his part, refuses to practice an aesthetics which is not at once an effective historicism, and strives, in keeping with his larger democratic objectives, to affect social polities in ways that encourage us to criticize authority, to conceptualize political alternatives, and to empathize with the plights of suffering social selves. his nominalist aesthetics, which considers invention from a viewpoint radically different from that of benjamin's followers, neither simply aestheticizes politics nor politicizes art but, ceasing to privilege artwork altogether, politicizes the potential of our ongoing nominalist freedom. ------------------------------------------------------ notes ^1^ john rajchman, _michel foucault: the freedom of philosophy_ (new york: columbia up, 1985). i am indebted to rajchman's superb reading of foucault in this paper. ^2^ ronald hayman, _sartre: a life_ (new york: simon and schuster, 1987), 13. ^3^ see simone de beauvoir, "conversations with jean paul sartre," _adieux_, trans. patrick o'brian (new york: pantheon books, 1984), 165. the later activist sartre questions the impossibly broad scope of his theoretical _critique of dialectical reason_ when he suggests to de beauvoir in an interview that he finds it too "idealistic." and in an attempt to provide the phenomenological vocabulary of existentialism with something of a historicist emphasis sartre claims that existentialism is autonomous with marxism. see jean-paul sartre, "self-portrait at seventy," _life/situations: essays written and spoken_, trans. paul auster and lydia davis (new york: pantheon books, 1977), 60. ^4^ see annie cohen-solal, _sartre_, ed. norman macafee, trans. anna cancogni (new york: pantheon books, 1987). cohen-solal gives examples of sartre's political protests (e.g, 141-22), his numerous travels as an "anti ambassador" (391-414), his brief arrest in 1970 for distributing _la cause du peuple_ (479-480), his visit to the imprisoned andreas baader (507), and suggests that these and other of his activities are instances of sartrean engagement. see also keith a. reader, _intellectuals and the french left since 1968_ (new york: st. martins press, 1987), 31. reader mentions sartre's "involvement with the banned maoist newspaper _la cause du peuple_, and subsequently with _liberation_, participation in demonstrations, and attempts to get himself arrested" which are "shrewdly rebutted by the regime." ^5^ for foucault on his treatment of an "aesthetics of existence" see michel foucault, "introduction," _the use of pleasure_, trans. robert hurley (new york: pantheon books, 1985), especially 11-12. ^6^ see richard rorty, "epistemology and 'the philosophy of mind,'" _philosophy and the mirror of nature_ (new jersey: princeton up, 1979), 125-27. ^7^ see walter benjamin, "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," _illuminations_, trans. harry zohn (new york: schoken books, 1969), 241-242. ^8^ see thierry de duve, "joseph beuys, or the last of the proletarians"; stefen germer, "haacke, broodthaers, beuys"; and eric michaud, "the ends of art according to beuys" in _october_, eds. joan copjec, douglas crimp, rosalind krauss, annette michelson (cambridge: mit press), number 45, summer 88. ^9^ germer, _october_, 71. ^10^ sartre indeed has mixed feelings about the fame he has acquired as a cultural figure. he sometimes discusses his fame openly, his early reasons for desiring it, and speculates about his relation to "posterity" in a matter-of fact manner. see de beauvoir, _adieux_, 162-64. other times, however, he is defensive about his fame, and attempts to deny that it empowers him since he associates celebrity status very unfavorably with "bourgeois" society. see sartre, "self-portrait at seventy," 25-31. nonetheless, the later politicized sartre capitalizes on his fame (or his "mythic identity") to draw attention to political alternatives. moreover, in reference to sartre's 1968 interview of the less famous daniel cohn-bendit--in which sartre was provided with the opportunity to use his fame while playing it down--reader writes in _intellectuals_ that "[f]rom being famous for being sartre, the curse that had dogged him for years, it was as though he were moving toward 'un-being' sartre," 32. ^11^ see sartre, "elections: a trap for fools," and "the maoists in france," _life/situations_; and jean-paul sartre, "vietnam: imperialism and genocide," _between existentialism and marxism_, trans. john mathews (new york: pantheon books, 1974). ^12^ see rajchman, 43. ^13^ jean-paul sartre, _the words_, trans. bernard frechtman (new york: george braziller, 1964). ^14^ see cohen-solal, 415. cohen-solal writes that de gaulle's response to continued french disapproval of sartre's political views and activities in 1960 was the famous "you do not imprison voltaire." ^15^ for an excellent summary of antonio gramsci's distinction between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual see edward said, "swift as intellectual," _the world, the text, and the critic_ (cambridge: harvard up, 1983), 82. ^16^ for a similar view of how sartre uses his cultural recognition to enable projects of resistance which are not necessarily his own, see reader, 32. regarding sartre's close relation with the french student maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s, reader writes that "sartre subordinates himself to the maoists, using his prestige to amplify and propogate their ideas rather than ideas he has himself developed." ^17^ see jean-paul sartre's "preface" to frantz fanon's _the wretched of the earth_, trans. constance farrington (new york: grove press, 1966); and for an interpretation of how the thought of the later malcolm x resembled the "revolutionary socialism" of a "third world political perspective" (237) see ruby m. and e.u. essien-udom, "malcolm x: an international man" in _malcolm x: the man and his times_, ed. john henrik clarke (new york: macmillan publishing co., inc., 1969), 235-267. ^18^ see sartre, "self-portrait at seventy," 61. in this interview sartre characterizes the maoist pierre victor as a "militant intellectual" and expresses hope that victor "will carry out both the intellectual work and the militant work he wants to." ^19^ sartre discusses his reasons for visiting baader, the public's reaction to his visit, and his judgment of the visit itself in "self-portrait at seventy," 27, 31. despite all the attention his visit drew, sartre claims: "i think it was a failure, which is not to say that if i had to do it over again i would not do it." sartre acknowledges that, although many people _did_ interpret his visit as an expression of approval for baader specifically or, even worse, exploited it as a political opportunity to question the aging sartre's lucidity through the press, the fact that some attention was drawn to the merits of oppositional militancy more than justified sartre's visit, and would have justified it _again_. i think sartre used baader as an available representation of militant activism simply to keep the possibility of such activism alive in the european imagination. for even if baader's practices were specifically unproductive and even questionable as activities of "resistance," sartre knew that the state would manipulate baader's reception on a _symbolic_ level to condemn militancy in general, when militancy might in some cases be necessary, effective, and absolutely desirable. sartre thus strove to respond to the state's symbolic over totalization of oppositional militancy by producing alternative symbolics. see also cohen-solal, 507, and hayman, 462, 465, 467. ^20^ for fanon's characterization of the difference between capitalist and colonized countries and the role that "bewilderers" play in the former see _the wretched of the earth_, 38. fanon does not use the word "infrastructure" to characterize institutional activities of "bewilderment; however, i think the word "infrastructure," with some qualification, communicates the sense of his argument well. i am not using "infrastructure" to imply the base (or substructure) of a society, but instead to suggest the more microphysical practices of subjectivization that take place in complex societies which cannot be explained simply in terms of base or superstructure. ^21^ see sartre, "the maoists in france," _life/situations_, 162-171. this article first appeared as the introduction to michele manceaux's _maos en france_ (paris: editions gallimard, 1972). manceaux's book is a collection of interviews with maoists, and sartre was eager to endorse the maoists' moral commitment to illegal action. sartre did so, i think, both to provoke france to consider the merits of illegal action, and to provide a moral discourse that could justify the necessity of such action to uncritical citizens who were otherwise trained to understand illegal action as _a priori_ illegitimate action. see also cohen-solal on sartre and the maoists, 474-88, 494. ^22^ michel foucault, "on popular justice: a discussion with maoists," _power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977_, trans. colin gordon, leo marshall, john mepham, kate soper (new york: pantheon books, 1977), 1-36. this interview is largely a conversation with sartre's close associate toward the end of his life, the maoist pierre victor. ^23^ for said on the "reactive" intellectual see "swift as intellectual," 78. elsewhere in this essay said describes swift as a "local activist" (77) and characterizes swift's writings and practices as "local performances" (79). these distinctions are all pertinent to my reinvention of sartre. ^24^ for foucault on the "specific" intellectual see "truth and power," _power/knowledge_, 126. katz, 'three poems', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-katz-three.txt three poems by steven b. katz <sbkeg@ncsuvm> north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by steven b. katz, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. a computer file named alison \for my wife\ i dated a file named alison, created worlds in her name; but needed more space, new memories to save, new files to live. (after all, although the universe expands at astronomic rates, it's slowing down, and there is only so much space inside machines.) "destroy alison: confirm," the computer responded. but what if she should die? i thought, and asked aloud; what if when i push this button she should really disappear from the disc of the earth, constantly rotated, read in this dark machine drive of the universe? what if this cold, dumb, personal computer should read and wholly misunderstand, and take me literally, as impersonal as itself, and her atoms be scattered through magnetic fields, dispersed along the wires, and she should vanish mid the glitch and circuitry of starts, drive lights red shifting, every trace (of her) erased forever. "destroy alison: confirm," it repeated, blindly blinking. destroy alison? i needed more space, new memories to save, new files to live. but oh i could not confirm it could not confirm it . . . . ---------------------------------------------------------------- after reading _godel escher, bach: an eternal golden braid_ (a pantoum) so this musical invention can begin: push down into a paradoxical painting: all formal theorems are incomplete: every procedure's a stranger loop push down into a paradoxical painting: decisively shifting ambiguous foregrounds: every procedure's a stranger loop: but ant colonies are closed systems decisively shifting ambiguous foregrounds: all understanding is self-referential: but ant colonies are closed systems: the human mind is a programmed search all understanding is self-referential: dna involves recursive translation: the human mind is a programmed search: but meaning is always a random concurrence dna involves recursive translation: intelligence is a series of metalevels: but meaning is always a random concurrence: although perception is specifically encoded intelligence is a series of metalevels: absolute consciousness a zen buddhist koan: although perception is specifically encoded: reality is just one of many possibilities absolute consciousness a zen buddhist koan: language is the necessary software of thought: reality is just one of many possibilities: knowing involves simply networks of channels language is the necessary software of thought: societies are hierarchies of information: knowing involves simply networks of channels: we can crawl only from stratum to stratum societies are hierarchies of information: history's the output at any given moment: we can crawl only from stratum to stratum: this process is surely becoming absurd history's the output at any given moment: mathematical patterns thus slowly emerge: this process is surely becoming absurd: the mechanism as medium is direct and explicit mathematical patterns thus slowly emerge: reproduction results in assembled transcriptions: the mechanism as medium is direct and explicit: the message is "the message is" reproduction results in assembled transcriptions: bodies are merely so much hardware, support: the message is "the message is": even numbers can be irrational bodies are merely so much hardware, support: so this operation shall now be augmented: even numbers can be irrational: humans are artificial computers at heart so this operation shall now be augmented: powerful axioms generate universes: humans are artificial computers at heart: this procedure is redundant and infinitely long powerful axioms generate universes: for proof jump out of the system: this procedure is redundant and infinitely long: but the human brain must bottom out for proof jump out of the system: out of the system we pop: but the human brain must bottom out: this musical invention will self-destruct out of the picture we pop: these statements are most certainly true: this musical invention will self-destruct: and so now all this nonsense may finally stop these statements are most certainly true: but there will be harmonic resolution too: and so now all this nonsense may finally stop: these statements are all paradoxically false ---------------------------------------------------------------- in the beginning (to justify god's ways to the 21st century) #in the beginning was the computer. and god said :let there be light! #you have not signed on yet. :god. #enter user password. :omniscient. #password incorrect. try again! :omnipotent. #password incorrect. try again! :technocrat. #and god signed on 12:01 a.m., sunday, march 1. :let there be light! #unrecognizable command. try again! :create light. #done. :run heaven and earth. #and god created day and night. and god saw there were 0 errors. #and god signed off at 12:02 a.m., sunday, march 1. #approx. funds remaining: $92.50. #and god signed on at 12:00 a.m., monday, march 2. :let there be firmament in the midst of the water and #unrecognizable command! try again! :create firmament. #done. :run firmament. #and god divided the waters. and god saw there were 0 errors. #and god signed off at 12:01 a.m., monday, march 2. #approx. funds remaining: $84.60. #and god signed on at 12:00 a.m., tuesday, march 3. :let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear and #too many characters in string specification! try again. :create dryland. #done! :run dryland. #and god created earth and seas. and god saw there were 0 errors. #and god signed off at 12:01 a.m., tuesday, march 3. #approx. funds remaining: $65.00. #and god signed on at 12:00 a.m., wednesday, march 4. :create lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night. #unspecified type. try again! :create sunmoonstars. #and god created sun, moon, stars. and god saw there were 0 errors. #and god signed off at 12:01 a.m., wednesday, march 4. #approx. funds remaining: $54:00. #and god signed on at 12:00 a.m., thursday, march 5. :create fish. #done. :create fowl. #done. :run fish'nfowl. #and god created the great seamonsters and every living creature that creepeth wherewith the waters swarmed after its kind and every winged fowl after its kind. 0 errors. #and god signed off at 12:01 a.m., thursday, march 5. #approx. funds remaining: $45:00. #and god signed on at 12:00 a.m., friday, march 6. :create cattle. #done. :create creepy things. #done. :now let us make man in our image. #unspecified type! try again. :create man. #done. :be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over of the fowl of the air and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth. #too many command operands! try again. :run multiplication. #execution terminated. 6 errors. :insert breath. #o.k. :run multiplication. #execution terminated. 5 errors. :move man to garden of eden. #file garden of eden does not exist. :create gard.en. #done. :move man to gard.en. #o.k. :run multiplication. #execution terminated. 4 errors. :copy woman from man. #o.k. :run multiplication. #execution terminated. 3 errors. :insert woman into man. #illegal parameters. try again! :insert man into woman. #o.k. :run multiplication. #execution terminated. 2 errors. :create desire. #done. :run multiplication. #and god saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the gard.en. #warning: no time limit on this run. 1 errors. :create freewill. #done. :run freewill. #and god saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the gard.en. #warning: no time limit on this run. 1 errors. :undo desire. #desire cannot be undone once freewill is created. :destroy freewill. #freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed. #enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help. :help! #desire cannot be undone once freewill is created. #freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed. #enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help. :create treeofknowledge. #and god saw man'nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the gard.en. #warning: no time limit on this run. 1 errors. :create good'nevil. #done. :activate evil. #and god saw he had created shame. #warning: system error in sector e95. man'nwoman not in gard.en. #1 errors. :scan gard.en. for man'nwoman. #man'nwoman cannot be located. try again! :search gard.en. for man'nwoman. #search failed. :delete shame. #shame cannot be deleted once evil has been activated. :destroy freewill. #freewill an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed. :stop! #unrecognizable command. try again. :break :break :break #attention all users attention all users: computer going down for regular day of maintenance and rest in five minutes. please sign off. :create new world. #you have exceeded your allotted file space. you must destroy old files before new ones can be created. :destroy earth. #destroy earth. please confirm. :destroy earth confirmed. #computer down. computer down. services will resume on sunday march 8 at 6:00 a.m. you must sign off now! #and god signed off at 11:59 p.m., friday, march 6. #and god he had zero funds remaining. davis, 'belling helene', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-davis-belling.txt belling helene by douglas a. davis <d_davis@hvrford> department of english haverford college _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by douglas a. davis, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. cixous, helene. _"coming to writing" and other essays_. ed. deborah jenson. trans. sarah cornell, deborah jenson, ann liddle, susan sellers. cambridge: harvard university press, 1991. [1] we have learned from freud (who found the lesson hard to keep in mind) that if one would read the unconscious, one must attend to silence as to sound. i come to be writing of helene cixous through her writing of "dora," the girl who so obsessed freud in the months after his own writing of _the interpretation of dreams_ that she called forth his most (in)famous (counter)transference and thereby enticed sartre, lacan, and h.c.--enough distinguished literary and psychoanalytic reinterpreters to fill a curriculum--to retell her-story. in all these re-visions of the young lady it is of course never ida bauer who speaks, but "dora" who is overheard voicing another's thoughts. cixous's take on the nuclear moment in freud's 1905 "fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria" opens with the good doctor pressing his adolescent patient for the details of the encounter by the lake, where her father's mistress's husband may have kissed her, where she may have desired him, may have felt his aroused body, may have slapped his face: freud's voice (seated, seen from behind) "...these events project themselves like a shadow in dreams, they often become so clear that we feel we can grasp them, but yet they escape interpretation, and if we proceed without skill and special caution, we cannot know if such a scene really took place." dora (a voice which rips through silence--half threatening and half begging--is heard) if you dare kiss me, i'll slap you! (becoming more tenderly playful) (all of a sudden, close to his ear) freud yes, you will tell me in full detail. (voice from afar) dora if you want. (voice awakens) if you [vous] want. and after that? freud you will tell me about the incident by the lake, in full detail. dora why did i keep silent the first days after the incident by the lake? freud to whom do you think you should ask that question? dora why did i then suddenly tell my parents about it? freud do you know why? dora (does not answer but tells this story in a dreamlike voice) as father prepared to leave, i said that i would not stay there without him. why did i tell my mother about the incident so that she would repeat it to my father? (cixous, 1983, 2-3) [2] thus freud, quintessential modern (and arguably the first post-modern) thinker, meets h.c. across the gaps, pauses, and ellipses of "dora"'s discourse. and in the glimpses of h.c.'s work of the past fifteen years collected in this slim volume, there are analogous puzzles aplenty for the reader who seeks a personage behind the texts, who would lead cixous onto a stage and examine her about time, place and person: who did what, and with what, and to whom? [3] freud is not present in this collection of six of cixous's essays spanning 1976-89, though we imagine him squirming at the "requiemth lecture on the infeminitesimal," in "coming to writing" (35), which parodies his masochistic lecture 33, on "femininity." h.c. shares freud's problem in that infamous pseudolecture, viz., to discover by writing her "how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition" (freud, 1933, 116); but she has also read his uneasymaking strange tribute to his daughter anna, "a child is being beaten" ("a girl is being killed," 8), and she wants us to understand that the self mother-loving woman who comes to her writing is not the "beautiful woman" uncle freud speaks of, the beauty in the mirror, the beauty who loves herself so much that no one can ever love her enough, not the queen of beauty. (51) the avuncular presence of "coming to writing" is rather a "capitalist-realist superuncle," who annually attempts her critical domestication: the unknown just doesn't sell. our customers demand simplicity. you're always full of doubles, we can't count on you, there is otherness in your sameness. (33) [4] the six translations are bookended by fine interpretive pieces by susan rubin suleiman ("writing past the wall, or the passion according to h.c.") and deborah jensen ("coming to reading helene cixous"), the latter an effective baedeker to the terrain covered by cixous in the fourteen years represented by these pieces. [5] these essays all treat of love, of passion discovered, created by the act(s) of reading/writing. for cixous this process is most thoroughly experienced in relation to the brazilian author clarice lispector, who occasions two of the pieces included. the second, "clarice lispector: the approach: letting oneself (be) read (by) clarice lispector: the passion according to c.l." articulates for h.c. the paradigmatic relationship with an author and her text: how to "read" clarice lispector: in the passion according to c.l.: writing-a-woman. what will we call "reading," when a text overflows all books and comes to meet us, giving itself to be lived? %was heisst lesen%? (what is called reading?) (58) [6] without lispector's own text juxtaposed (h.c. sets a paragraph of c.l.'s portuguese in her essay, and sprinkles quoted phrases throughout), it is the exuberant love-letter quality of this essay that is paramount, as cixous is moved to verbigerative wordplay (much of it in german) with lispector's name and concepts. the textual courtship of lispector suffuses the last three essays as well: "the last painting or the portrait of god," "by the light of an apple," and "the author in truth." together, these constitute a powerful paean to self-discovery through literature, in which the ego takes on the imagined persona of the beloved writer as mentor. this time-honored process, cixous show us by contrast, has traditionally been a matter between men, and within a dominant cultural-political context: if kafka had been a woman. if rilke had been a jewish brazilian born in the ukraine. if rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. if heidegger had been able to stop being german, if he had written the _romance of the earth_. (132) [7] the other piece included is "tancredi continues," h.c.'s response to rossini's opera, featuring clorinda, "woman singing as a woman pretending to be a man," of which susan rubin suleiman asks/answers: is this poetry? critical commentary? autobiography? ethical reflection? feminist theory? yes. (xi) [8] if this volume is one's point of entry to cixous's writing, biographical questions will echo at each paragraph. h.c. locates her sense of otherness, of "jewoman," german-french self-consciousness, in her algerian childhood. yet despite a nod to the archangel who gave the prophet dictation and the people of the book a new religion ("the attack was imperious: 'write!' even though i was only a meager anonymous mouse, i knew vividly the awful jolt that galvanizes the prophet, wakened in mid-life by an order from above" [9-10]), no recognizable north african arab appears on her mental stage, only a glimpse of what might be shadow, as little h.c. lures a remembered little french girl into a corner of algiers' officers' park: i beat up children. the enemy's little ones. the little pedigreed french. . . . not a trace of a beggar, not a shadow of a slave, of an arab, of wretchedness. (ctw 19) [9] not of, but in, french north africa, and, later, france itself, is h.c., an outsider to freud's avuncular heterosexism, to the "sacred garden of french literature," to patripolitics generally. she writes of jerusalem, abode of peace contended by two passionate peoples--arab and jew, male and female, west and east --but without telegraphing her political wishes for it/them. is the new jerusalem for everyone? is cixous's writing? [10] h.c.'s fluency in what lacan pronounced the unconscious discourse of the other, the unconscious that speaks the conscious, resounds in these translations. translating cixous (like translating freud) is a special challenge, because puns, cliched french and german usages, klang associations, and alliteration play such a role in her writing. sarah cornell, deborah jenson, ann liddle, and susan sellers seem to have met this challenge, giving us a text that often entices and seldom merely puzzles, inviting the reader to speculate over the sound and psychodynamics of h.c.'s original. the footnotes are indispensable, since "from the point of view of the soul's eye: the eye of a womansoul" (4) is not "%du point de vue de l'oeil d'ame. l'oeil dame%" (197n). yet the joyous, erotic, metonymic quality of cixous's words survives the change of sound. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited cixous, helene. "portrait of dora." _diacritics_ (1983): 2-32. freud, sigmund (1905). _fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria_. ed. and trans. james j. strachey, _the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud_ (_se_), vol 7. london: hogarth. freud, sigmund (1919). "'a child is being beaten': a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions." _se_, vol 17, 175-204. freud, sigmund (1933). "femininity." _se_, vol 22, 112-135. lacan, jacques [1951]. "intervention on transference." ed. juliet mitchell and janet rose. _feminine sexuality_. new york: pantheon books, 1982. sartre, jean-paul (1959/1984). _the freud scenario_. ed. j.-b pontalis. trans. q. hoare. chicago: u chicago p, 1985. duyfhuizen, 'suspension forever at the hinge of doubt": the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-duyfhuizen-suspension.txt "a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt": the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_ by bernard duyfhuizen <pnotesbd@uwec> univ. of wisconsin--eau claire _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by bernard duyfhuizen, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. no matter how much we work on _gravity's rainbow_, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis--that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. to talk about bianca is to talk about ilse and gottfried; to try to describe the zone is to enumerate all the images of %other% times and places that are repeated there. pynchon's novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being--or, more precisely, for %the originally replicative nature of being%. --leo bersani [1] leo bersani is right about _gravity's rainbow_'s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the "dazzling argument" in the particular case of bianca, we find not only more than bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading thomas pynchon's postmodern text. this strategy rests on the formal element of the "reader-trap": stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. rather than reducing a reader-trap to a "distinct unit of meaning," readers must adopt for _gr_ a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. the reader must engage the play of %differance% encoded in _gr_'s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure. [2] what makes bianca a reader-trap? first, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the "tales of the shadow-children," a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about bianca, ilse pokler, gottfried, and by analogy tyrone slothrop. she becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). this double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when slothrop, under the alias of max schlepzig (bianca's putative father), reenacts with margherita erdmann the moment of bianca's conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie _alpdrucken_ (393-97). as a shadowor movie-child, bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. bianca's mother, for instance, sees "bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure...clearly yes very clearly in gottfried, the young pet and protege of captain blicero" (484). as readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability. [3] second, bianca is coded as one of pynchon's examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism: of all her putative fathers--max schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, franz pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that _alpdrucken_ night, on the other--bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying %sure i know them%, omitted, chuckling %count me in%, unable, thinking %probably some hooker%... she favors you, most of all. you'll never get to see her. so somebody has to tell you. (472; bracketed ellipses added)^1^ as is often the case in _gr_, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address--through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to pokler that could not yet be part of slothrop's consciousness--the text's male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. i will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.^2^ indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of pynchon's writing. the question--who are the narratees of this text?--cannot be left unanswered. [4] lastly, bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with slothrop. if _gr_ has, besides the v-2 rocket, a "central" protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, slothrop is it. bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to gottfried's launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the "lost girls"--the zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret (567)--who haunt his journey through the zone. bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling--a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping--as she maps onto darlene, katje borgesius, geli tripping, and even her own mother, margherita. the text underwrites this process of mapping when bianca is viewed as "silver" (484), the same color as darlene's star on slothrop's map (19) and as her mother's "silver and passive [screen] image" (576), or with greta's (margherita's) mapping onto or merging into "gretel" and finally "katje" within blicero's sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto slothrop's relations with both women. bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in slothrop's behavior--he is finally freed of the %will to erection% that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by laszlo jamf. paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate %his own% identity, bianca's loss prefigures slothrop's ultimate dissolution--indeed, after his encounter with bianca, "slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter" (509). his experience with bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form slothrop's and bianca's textual representations. [5] bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of _gr_ (3.14-15). we meet her aboard the _anubis_ as seen through slothrop's eyes: he gets a glimpse of margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. he knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. why do these things have to keep coming down on him? he can see the obit now in _time_ magazine--died, rocketman, pushing 30, in the zone, of lust. (463) the text's focalization through slothrop codes bianca as a fetish, a "lolita" if you will, and we later learn these heels are "spiked" (466), and the %silk% stockings are connected to "a tiny black corset" with "satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework" (469). as the narrator comments later--in a passage metonymically structured to connect bianca, margherita, blicero, the s-gerat (a rocket part slothrop has been seeking), laszlo jamf, imipolex (the plastic from which the s-gerat was made), and the casino hermann goering (where slothrop lost katje)--"looks like there are sub-slothrop needs they know about, and he doesn't" (490). [6] yet from a different perspective, bianca's fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother's outfit during her first encounter with slothrop, when they reenact bianca's conception on the torture-chamber set of the film _alpdrucken_: all margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. how the penises of western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! it's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...%singularities%! (396) but the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: "do all these points imply, like the rocket's, an annihilation? [. . .] and what's waiting for slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of greta's stockings here?" (396-97).^3^ what's waiting first is "his latest reminder of katje"--whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: "between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life," katje told slothrop (209)--but more significantly, it is bianca who waits to teach slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation. [7] slothrop's vulnerability "to pretty little girls" is foregrounded early in _gr_ when he comforts a little girl rescued from a v-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling "very faintly, and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a shirley temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they'd found her down in the middle of" (24). the moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in pynchon's fiction, figures as slothrop's primal response, and while in london, before his paranoia has gone out of control, slothrop can care directly. once he reaches the zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll's hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto katje: "he turned back to her to ask if she really was katje, the lovely little queen of transylvania. but the music had run down. she had vaporized from his arms" (283). both these children prefigure bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with bianca. neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading. [8] however, before bianca takes center stage, slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. but what he hears sounds like the voice of the text's narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text: "greta was meant to find oneirine. each plot carries its signature. some are god's, some masquerade as god's. this is a very advanced kind of forgery. but still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. it is only more complex. the members have names, like the archangels. more or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. but those names are not magic. that's the key, that's the difference. spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, %they do not work%." "that silly bitch," observes a voice at slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464) if the "silly bitch" can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this "voice" may be, for a brief and estranged moment, pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. we soon discover that the voice belongs to miklos thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: margherita's husband, bianca's stepfather, and--though we don't know it yet- witness to the firing of rocket 00000. indeed, thanatz begins to tell slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of gottfried and blicero, but.... [9] "about here they are interrupted by margherita and bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child" (465). margherita forces bianca to perform a shirley temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking--which triggers one of _gr_'s set pieces: the %everything's connected% orgy on board the _anubis_. bianca's representation of "shirley temple," in contradistinction to that "shirley temple smile" that warmed slothrop's heart in london, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through slothrop's point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader's erotic tolerance. clearly bianca's exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of katje's exploitation by blicero or pointsman, or bianca's mothers by von goll for the film _alpdrucken_. [10] the public humiliation of bianca is one of _gr_'s many moments of theatre. indeed, slothrop wonders whether "somebody [is] fooling with the lights" as bianca "grunts" through her shirley temple routine (466). the lights are, in fact, being fooled with: slothrop's perceptual creation of bianca as an overtly fetishized shirley temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. slothrop's specular projection of bianca as infantile nymphet is a %mise en abyme% for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre--focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator--helps to mask. [11] throughout _gr_ pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. on the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (slothrop under surveillance, for instance). the public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with "pornography," but only at the level of story (although occasionally pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. although "pavlovian conditioning" may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in _gr_ is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act--the ubiquitous "they" who operate just outside of view. this public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts--but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of slothrop and bianca makes clear. [12] when slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. this private "performance" for slothrop nearly closes the "distance" between himself and bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (slothrop, impersonating max schlepzig, has already reenacted bianca's conception). but bianca's gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. she suggests they "hide," "get away," quit the game which for slothrop has ceased to be fun. for him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt--to be offered "love" is more than the zone will allow. so slothrop "creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites" (470). in leaving bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears "ensign morituri's story" (474-79), but by then it is too late. [13] importantly, before he leaves bianca, slothrop's consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something "oh, kind of %funny% happens [. . .]. not that slothrop is really aware of it now, while it's going on--but later on, it will occur to him that he was--this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, %inside his own cock%" (469-70). of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts slothrop's "later" thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. because bianca's character is primarily focalized through slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. bianca may "exist" (470) for slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination. [14] if we grant that we cannot know bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure--in a perfectly pynchonian paradox--of the certainty of our fantasy? it turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive bianca and why many critics have misread her. more significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in _gr_. * * * * * when bianca first appears, slothrop calculates her age--an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time--as "11 or 12." many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a "preadolescent bianca" by its descriptive references to her: "the little girl," "a slender child," "little bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat," and her "baby breasts working out the top of her garment" (469-70). bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by slothrop and other men in child-like terms. from the very first references to slothrop's map--"perhaps the %girls% are not even real" (19; emphasis added)--to his meeting again with darlene (115), to his first sight of katje (186), to his first awareness of geli tripping (289), to trudi and magda (365), to stefania procalowska and others aboard the _anubis_ (460, 466-68), and eventually to solange/leni pokler (603) slothrop encounters females as girls. even margherita, who is clearly older than slothrop, is introduced as "his child and his helpless lisaura" (393).^4^ in the semiosis of reading, these "girls" engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the zone which finally come to a crisis in slothrop's encounter with bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading. [15] what does this infantilization signify? could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? one reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. if we accept bianca's age as slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: bianca's erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of slothrop's lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. on the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from slothrop's fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, bianca symbolizes the "child of the war," the darling of those permitted to view goebbel's private film collection (461). she is one of pynchon's most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. however, if we dislocate our reading and consider bianca through cross-mapping with ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to "11 or 12."^5^ [16] if uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by slothrop's peculiar point of view, bianca's disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, mchoul and wills state that "the fate of bianca highlights the problem with reading _gravity's rainbow_.... one will never know just what does happen to her" (31).^6^ bianca has told slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next "appearance" is brief and problematic: slothrop %will think% he sees her, %think% he has found bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the _anubis_ starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, %slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines% and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added) what actually happens here is hard to say--slothrop does end up over the side, but does bianca? slothrop only "think[s]" he sees her--she is becoming insubstantial already--and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. but is it she who "vanishes under chalky lifelines" or slothrop who "slip[s] . . . under" while she "vanishes"?^7^ as mchoul and wills note, it "hinges on how one reads the syntax" (31). [17] all %life lines% in _gr_ are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind--especially slothrop's- and in the text. the traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in _gr_, we read: "you will want cause and effect. all right. thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took slothrop from the _anubis_" (663). bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality--"the same storm"--for slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had "flipped" him over the side. however, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, bianca's absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the _anubis_ either. [18] bianca's traces always test our readerly desire for causality. after frau gnahb rescues slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and "bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. 'you're really in that europe now,' she grins, hugging him. 'oh my goo'ness,' slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like shirley temple's, out of his control. it sure is embarrassing. he wakes to sunlight" (492-93). momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief "thinking" that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably slothrop's and he has adopted her shirley temple voice. something's not right, and when "he wakes," he is alone, and we see this trace of bianca as a dream. later that morning, when slothrop meets von goll, he "fills von goll in on margherita, trying not to get personal. but some of his anxiety over bianca must be coming through. von goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. 'there now. i wouldn't worry. bianca's a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess'" (494). meant to "comfort" slothrop, von goll's characterizations allow slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. given the text's compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this bianca/slothrop escape fantasy with the ilse/pokler escape fantasy (420-21). in that startling scene at zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of "amazing incest" that precedes the escape fantasy--a reading that would seriously undermine pokler's eventual moral position in the text. [19] the most disturbing trace of bianca re-enters the narrative when slothrop returns to the _anubis_ to pickup a "package" for von goll (530-32).^8^ as he returns to the site of his tryst with bianca, slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. motivated by a return of his repressed "eurydice-obsession" (472), slothrop seemingly discovers the dead bianca's body, but like orpheus he cannot bring his eurydice back from the dead. but does he discover her? nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force slothrop to confront his betrayal of bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats brigadier puddings ritual approach to the mistress of the night (katje)--"the pointed toe of a dancing pump," the "ladder," "stiff taffeta," "slippery satin," "hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger." he rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. they smell of the sea. he turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. no matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...%of%... (531) [20] "when the lights come back on" (532) (recall slothrop's earlier concern that someone was "fooling" with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events slothrop experienced--indeed, i would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. the confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. but the text never deploys the signifier "bianca" in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the "presence" of bianca's body. "when the lights come back on," slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the "brown paper bundle" he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a %mise en abyme% for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. the scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: "but it's what's dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight...and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?" (532). as with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of bianca and slothrop's tryst: "in the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red" (468). but can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder "back up and out," be "really as empty" as it looks? the reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable--to paraphrase tchitcherine much later in the text: "[it] could be anything. %i% don't care. but [it's] only real %at% the points of decision. the time between doesn't matter" (702). bianca last "existed" for slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he "lunge[s]" to save her (491) only to lose her--does she %exist% elsewhere? [21] many readers read mimetically the scene of slothrop's return to the engine-room of the _anubis_, stating that he does in fact discover bianca's body; some are even convinced that margherita has murdered her daughter. yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around slothrop's anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. it misses the text's implicit questioning of western culture's perverse fetishization of the child. it is no stray detail that slothrop dreams of a conversation with the white rabbit of _alice in wonderland_ when bianca comes to him--as henkle observes, "we all know about lewis carroll's supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what shirley temple's fetching little dance steps aroused" (282).^9^ moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of bianca's decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene. [22] after slothrop's return to the _anubis_, bianca's trace enters the narrative only four more times. the first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes slothrop, now headed for cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. the seventh wish is "let bianca be all right [. . .]" (553). either slothrop has no certainty of bianca's fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the bianca wish with "[. . .] a-and--let me be able to take a shit soon." the text seems to be laying a trap for the freudian reader--the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of "perfume and shit" that slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)--who may want to argue that bianca's memory has become cathected with slothrop's anal fixation. can any reader ever forget slothrop's hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? that drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of pointsman's involvement, connects back to slothrop's childhood conditioning by laszlo jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, jamf may have been displacing the smell of slothrop's own feces with the smell of imipolex--if indeed that was the stimulus used).^10^ i suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading _gr_ through freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. interestingly, however, the bianca wish is preceded by a significant slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: "let that discharge be waiting for me in cuxhaven." this wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads slothrop almost into pointsman's plot for his castration and to his last dream of bianca. [23] the second trace of bianca occurs when slothrop meets franz pokler: well, but not before [pokler] has told something of his ilse and her summer returns, enough for slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against bianca's dead flesh.... ilse, fathered on greta erdmann's silver and passive image, bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? she's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77) this time slothrop's memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is "taken again by the nape and pushed against bianca's dead flesh." this passage appears to confirm bianca's death. however, while %we% come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of ilse and bianca, for slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of pokler's significance to the s-gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: "how could they not be the same child?" moreover, "she" (bianca/ilse) will now, if not already, "work among your [slothrop/pokler/the reader's] saddest dreams." [24] the third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of slothrop and solange/leni pokler: "back at putzi's," after slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge, slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside solange, asleep and dreaming about zwolfkinder, and bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. and "solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, ilse, riding lost through the zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. she isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. but leni's early dream of her is coming true. she will not be used. there is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10) this is one of the text's most positive images--leni's early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing ilse will be all right. ironically, leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. if ilse makes it, does bianca? it depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. as we will see with thanatz's ordeal riding "the freights," this hopeful image of "a few small chances of mercy" might vanish. we'll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says. [25] slothrop's dream clearly maps onto pokler's experience with ilse at zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where "once something [the imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless" [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images--trees and singing birds. slothrop's greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars ("slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally" [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of _gr_. lastly, bianca maps onto leni's dream because, in a passage i will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the "passage by train" (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know bianca has been "used." her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from slothrop's psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. the last traces of bianca, however, do not come to us through slothrop's consciousness--thanatz, bianca's step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child. [26] thanatz first recalls bianca while he "rides the freights" with other dp's and longs to molest "a little girl"--he fantasizes the event using bianca as a reference: "pull down the slender pretty pubescent's oversize gi trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it" (669-70). the passage recalls slothrop's encounter with bianca (469-70), though it may represent only thanatz's desire to molest and not a memory. thanatz then recalls his experiences with blicero on the heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection margherita had also made: "he lost gottfried, he lost bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. by now he's forgotten the sequence in time. doesn't know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren't two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, gottfried and bianca, %are the same%" (671-72). as his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text's last) specular image of bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: "a flash of bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for...will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love--" (672). the shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to thanatz or to the reader? [27] what do we gain by discovering bianca's age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces--her "suspension forever at the hinge of doubt"? first we see that characters in _gr_ are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others' fantasies and fetishes. second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. third, we must reread slothrop's relationship to bianca and to the other women in the text. and lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the %differance% at play in _gr_ and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. the reader-trap reveals pynchon's text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of gr, still remains. if we grant that _gr_ encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? as the example of bianca shows, slothrop's (and in the end thanatz's) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader's sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader's gender formation.^11^ [28] if the reader-trap of bianca's representation in _gr_, as i have argued, is to read her as a fetish--a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with katje--then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by ensign morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. the textualization that limits bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. there is no denying that bianca gets "used" in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading _gr_. [29] although reading _gr_ teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. thus one way of reading bianca is to see her as a projection of slothrop's needs--innocence and fetish all mixed up. his abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. he stays longest with margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his oedipus complex and satisfies his need- through a logic of transference--to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father ("pernicious pop") to submit him to. the subtext of incest in his encounter with bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save bianca. [30] slothrop must first hear ensign morituri's story (474-79), which tells him of margherita's pre-war alter ego of shekhinah--a destroying angel who psychotically murdered jewish boys--an alter ego morituri believes slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the _anubis_. slothrop's immediate response is to worry about bianca: "'what about bianca, then? is she going to be safe with that greta, do you think?'.... but where are bianca's arms, her defenseless mouth[?].... there is hardly a thing now in slothrop's head but getting to bianca" (479-80). but she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to margherita's story (482-88). her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the s-gerat and imipolex, but also to the truth about katje and blicero and gottfried. when she tells of her last days on the heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. slothrop doesn't enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of margherita finally extinguish his %will to erection%. but it is too late: he's lost bianca. gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. it matters, but how much? now that margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the s-gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of laszlo jamf. that if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490) although granted this realization, slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from their trap. [31] but that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. the loss of bianca breaks the metonymic chain of slothrop's womanizing. when he joins haftung's dancers- who comment like a greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: "'tits 'n' ass,' mutter the girls, 'tits 'n' ass. that's all we are around here'" (507)--he does %not% have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. the same goes for the girl ("about seventeen," bianca's age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with solange/leni at putzi's (603, 609-10). as far as slothrop is concerned, bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.^12^ but seeing how she has changed slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents bianca's consciousness--a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish. [32] as slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from bianca, the text marks his "eurydice-obsession," but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in slothrop's consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: "'why bring her back? why try? it's only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for them.' no. how can he believe that? it's what they want him to believe, but how can he? no difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's based on %that%...but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay" (472). the passage raises the issue of bianca's representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call "the real thing." if we read "they" in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual "economy" of objectification and fetish is uncovered. the cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the "differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image." the pun here is crude; the "boxtop" metaphorically represents bianca's hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange--a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier ("the one you draw for them"). no purchase necessary. void where prohibited by law. the law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void--the "suspension forever at the hinge of doubt"--because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one they allow. [33] bianca's text is hard to read. as i have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. this male narratee, like slothrop at first and constituted by the text's limited focalization through slothrop, construes "bianca" as a fetish and fails to construe her "true ontological being" (a representation we can only speculate about). one might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; i would say "yes" if one senses, as i do in reading "bianca," that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. there is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see "bianca" (the inverted commas now marking this sign's %differance% from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). as slothrop turns his back on bianca and heads up the ladder, "the last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him...." alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. and like margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. each day she feels closer to the edge of something. she dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. in a pullman, dictating her story. she feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. that may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... in her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. her wind keeps even dust away. it is old daylight: late, and cold. horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471) [34] the cross-references to margherita are overt, and the repetition of leni's dream for ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. but "bianca"'s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. again we confront the problematic boundary between image ("nacreous wrinkling the films use") and the real ("rain"), but in the paragraph's modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. what does it mean not only to dream in "black and white" (if we can conflate "visions" and "dream"), but also to dream in the overt stylization of german expressionism? one almost expects her to dream through the film emulsion j (387-88). but this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a "personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share." in a text that most consider anything but "clear," we might rationalize this tale's absence; however, we must see that "bianca" now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and bianca (471-72). although "bianca"'s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a "pullman," in an american context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from "the edge" and the "silver-salt dark" of drowning. [35] a piece of "bianca"'s dictation does appear to reach us: "...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence...." set off by the text's ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of "bianca" different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. if this is a fragment of her tale of "personal horror," then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who "loom[s] like a presence." to produce such a reading is to see "bianca"'s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a %differant% layer to the textual formation of her character. from this angle, the "11 or 12" projection slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious--an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of "bianca." furthermore, by engaging the play of %differance%, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if "bianca" is already absent, replaced by bianca, and even bianca "vanishes," replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of "presence" and the power of formulating the real is placed under question. significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of _gr_'s readers, but it is figured in the text by slothrop's own scattering and thanatz's existential breakdown over blicero and the "reality" of gottfried's fate. [36] reading bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. one example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. earlier i quoted the oft-cited passage of slothrop's memory of total phallicization--"he was [. . .] %inside his own cock%"; this sort of phallic writing of slothrop's body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. the penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: "she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the aggregat itself?" (470). the focalization is through slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of slothrop's quest. although bianca "come[s]" too, the representation of her orgasm is absent--the "void" announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the "kingly voice" of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived. [37] "bianca"'s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to "her ruined towers." the "tower" is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in _gr_, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of "bianca"'s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of "tower" and "light" will recur in the third line of the text's closing hymn: "till the light that hath brought the towers low / find the last poor pret'rite one..." (760). there are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the preterite--the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? for "bianca," "the brightest hour of afternoon" has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes i would like to thank john m. krafft, terry caesar, and brian mchale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions. ^1^ for a thorough reading of this passage, see mchale, "you used to know," 107-08. ^2^ pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee "you" is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to leni pokler's childhood (she grew up in lubeck [162]) and proleptically to ilse's trips with her father franz to zwolfkinder (398). ^3^ _gravity's rainbow_ contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. freud). this description sets up thanatz's argument for "sado-anarchism," a reclaiming from the state of the resources of "submission and dominance" (737). pynchon also explored fetishism in _v._ in the chapter "v. in love" (see berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). of course, pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what mchale terms "stylization" (_postmodern fiction_ 21) or into parody, as thanatz's intertextual parody (though we might interpret thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of "freud" and marx: "i tell you, if s and m could be established universally, at the family level, the state would wither away" (737). ^4^ although _gravity's rainbow_ here and on 364 clearly identifies margherita as "his lisaura," bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in wagner's _tannhauser_, an opera which organizes yet another of the text's semiotic matrices. ^5^ newman is the only reader i have come across that comes close to dating _alpdrucken_ (during the filming of which bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text's present time (107), and weisenburger dates pokler's recollection of ilse's conception as "ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in berlin, where the german rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the society for space travel" (194). ^6^ mchoul and wills read many of the same passages i examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests "it may be bianca who mugs slothrop when he boards the _anubis_ again later, that is if she hasn't hanged herself" (31) is problematic to say the least. ^7^ this issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship's crew during a storm often rig "life lines" about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a "hard roll." ^8^ kappel suggests this package is the s-gerat (236) and hume and knight suggest it is a piece of imipolex g (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of slothrop's possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved. ^9^ see de lauretis for a reading of the alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze--the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema. ^10^ at some point i hope to write about the noses in _gravity's rainbow_; one only has to recall slothrop's "nasal hardon" (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of nabokov at cornell, pynchon has developed a deep affinity with gogol, especially his short story "the nose"--a clear forerunner of postmodernism--and his technique of %skaz% narration). as for "shit" in _gravity's rainbow_ see caesar and wolfley. ^11^ although a definitive feminist reading of pynchon's writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: allen 37-51, jardine 247-52, kaufman, and stimpson. ^12^ see my essay, "starry-eyed semiotics," for an account of how readers are trapped into reading slothrop as a personification of sexual excess. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited allen, mary. _the necessary blankness: women in major american fiction of the sixties_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1976. berressem, hanjo. "v. in love: from the 'other scene' to the 'new scene.'" _pynchon notes_ 18-19 (1986): 5-28. bersani, leo. "pynchon, paranoia, and literature." _representations_ 25 (1989): 99-118. caesar, terry. "'trapped inside their frame with your wastes piling up': mindless pleasures in _gravity's rainbow_." _pynchon notes_ 14 (1984): 39-48. clerc, charles, ed. _approaches to gravity's rainbow_. columbus: ohio state up, 1983. de lauretis, teresa. _alice doesn't: feminism, semiotics, cinema_. bloomington: indiana up, 1984. duyfhuizen, bernard. "starry-eyed semiotics: learning to read slothrop's map and _gravity's rainbow_." _pynchon notes_ 6 (1981): 5-33. freud, sigmund. _fetishism_. 1927. trans. james strachey. london: hogarth, 1961. _the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud_. ed. james strachey. vol. 21. henkle, roger. "the morning and the evening funnies: comedy in _gravity's rainbow_." clerc 273-90. hume, katherine, and thomas j. knight. "orpheus and the orphic voice in _gravity's rainbow_." _philological quarterly_ 64 (1985): 299-315. jardine, alice a. _gynesis: configurations of woman and modernity_. ithaca: cornell up, 1985. kappel, lawrence. "psychic geography in _gravity's rainbow_." _contemporary literature_ 21 (1980): 225-51. kaufman, marjorie. "brunnhilde and the chemists: women in _gravity's rainbow_." levine and leverenz 197-227. levine, george, and david leverenz, ed. _mindful pleasures: essays on thomas pynchon_. boston: little, brown, 1976. mchale, brian. "'you used to know what these words mean': misreading _gravity's rainbow_." _language and style_ 18.1 (1985): 93-118. ---. _postmodernist fiction_. new york: methuen, 1987. mchoul, alec, and david wills. _writing pynchon: strategies in fictional analysis_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1990. newman, robert d. _understanding thomas pynchon_. columbia: u of south carolina p, 1986. pearce, richard, ed. _critical essays on thomas pynchon_. boston: g.k. hall, 1981. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1973.. ---. _v._ philadelphia: lippincott, 1963. stimpson, catharine r. "pre-apocalyptic atavism: thomas pynchon's early fiction." levine and leverenz 31-47. weisenburger, steven. _a gravity's rainbow companion: sources and contexts for pynchon's novel_. athens, ga: u of georgia p, 1988. wolfley, lawrence. "repression's rainbow: the presence of norman o. brown in pynchon's big novel." pearce 99-123. kalaidjian, 'mainlining postmodernism: jenny holzer, barbara kruger, and the art of intervention', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-kalaidjian-mainlining.txt mainlining postmodernism: jenny holzer, barbara kruger, and the art of intervention by walter kalaidjian dept. of english st. cloud state university <wkalaidj@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by walter kalaidjian, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] midway through the reagan era, the crossing of the great depression's communal aesthetics and the contemporary avant-gardes was theorized from the conservative right as a stigma of neo-stalinism. in "turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984," hilton kramer, the ideologue of painterly formalism, sought to discredit a number of gallery exhibitions mounted in resistance to the rapid gentrification of the new york art market. not coincidentally, these oppositional shows culminated in a year charged with the political subtext of george orwell's _1984_. reviving orwell's critique of the totalitarian state, the new museum of contemporary art launched two exhibitions entitled "the end of the world: contemporary visions of apocalypse" and "art and ideology." meanwhile, the edith c. blum art institute of bard college hosted a similar show whose theme, "art as social conscience," reinforced the new museum initiatives. in addition to showings on the themes of "women and politics" at the intar latin american gallery and "dreams and nightmares: utopian visions in modern art" at the hirshhorn museum in washington, d.c., both the graduate center of the city of university of new york and a network of private galleries affiliated with "artists call against us intervention in central america" featured works that reflected on american imperialism in the third world. [2] reacting against these progressive showings, kramer appealed to ideal canons of aesthetic "quality" in order to malign the politicized representations of "artists call." kramer's thesis held that art had somehow evolved, in the age of reagan, beyond ideology: that any explicit political allusion marked a work as a throwback to a now outdated cultural moment. but not satisfied with simply dismissing these shows as a mere recycling of some harmless and nostalgic version of 1960s leftism, kramer tried to revive a more menacing specter that had expired three decades earlier with the scandal of mccarthyism, red-baiting, and cold war paranoia that reigned over the 1950s. tying the emergent socioaesthetic critique of the 1980s to the "radicalism" of the 1930s, kramer anathematized "social consciousness" as serving a "stalinist ethos."^1^ through this historical framing, kramer sought to reinstate the repression of depression era populism during the 1940s and 1950s: a period which, in his reading, "marked a great turning point not only in the history of american art but in the life of the american imagination" (72). [3] like his formalist mentor clement greenberg, kramer sought to displace partisan art works under the guise of disciplinary purity: that as greenberg claimed "the essence of modernism lies, as i see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself--not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."^2^ tellingly, in kramer's heavy-handed, ad hominem assaults on such critics and curators as benjamin h. d. buchloch and donald kuspit, the campaign for a "neutral zone" of artistic purity--wrapped as it is in the neo-kantian mantle of disinterested aesthetic judgment--proved a reactionary ideological program: one that, in the name of intrinsic formalism, aimed to repress social representation %tout court%. lodged against the postmodern recovery of interbellum populism, kramer's appeal to the seemingly "apolitical" zone of modernist experimentation--to an ideal canon of formal innovation--"turned back the clock" to the eve of the cold war: rehearsing, in a reductive version, clement greenberg's 1939 campaign for aesthetic autonomy as a counter to american kitsch culture and soviet socialist realism.^3^ [4] the contempt with which greenberg greeted popular culture and its mass audience reflected symptomatically his historical situation--which, in 1939, he anxiously viewed as imperiled by the triple threat of nazism, stalinism, and americanism. the epochal shifts in technological reproduction, and collective systems of design, packaging, and distribution that now delivered art to the masses--that made every reader a virtual writer, every viewer a potential auteur, and every audiophile a nascent composer--threatened, in greenberg's reading, all semblance of hierarchy, distinction, and taste without which it was impossible to salvage canonicity. moreover he regarded the democratization of cultural expression as a volatile formula for social unrest: "everyman, from the tammany alderman to the austrian house-painter," greenberg warned, "finds that he is entitled to his opinion. . . . here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. in the name of godliness or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences."^4^ [5] not coincidentally, walter benjamin had theorized the same symptoms of mass participation in the shaping of cultural modernism. unlike greenberg, however, benjamin articulated them to new aesthetic tendencies that--divorced from the cult of individual genius, the canon, disciplinary autonomy, aesthetic purity, and so on--nevertheless did not reduce cultural production to the vulgar display of monumental socialist realism, fascist agitprop, or kitsch consumerism.^5^ while greenberg eschewed the spectacle of mass communication, benjamin proposed a materialist intervention into consumer culture by reversing art's traditional social function, which "instead of being based on ritual . . . begins to be based on another practice- politics" (wmp, 224). against fascism's "introduction of aesthetics into political life" (241)--its auraticization of politics, nationalism, and mass spectacle--he campaigned for a counter-strategy of "politicizing art" as critique. revolutionary art must not only pursue progressive tendencies in form and content, benjamin insisted, but should effect what brecht theorized as a broader "functional transformation" (%umfunktionierung%) of the institutional limits, sites, and modes of production that shape cultural practices in the expanded social field.^6^ [6] benjamin's intervention in the reception of the avant gardes, while surpassing the cloistral elitism of greenberg's retreat from popular culture, nevertheless comes up against its own historical limits, particularly so in its allegiance to the classist and productivist ideologies of the 1930s. benjamin's proletcult credo--that "the author as producer discovers . . . his solidarity with the proletariat" (ap, 230)--is marked by the %coupure% severing the modern from postmodern epochs. the myth of an imminent proletarian revolution, that energized a range of utopian aesthetic projects throughout the interbellum decades, remains one of the definitive hallmarks of modernist culture. the unfolding of postwar history through the present has increasingly discredited the orthodox marxist faith in the working class as the front line in the collective appropriation of capital's new industrial and technological forces of production. instead, the instrumental rationality shaping the productive apparatus intensified the labor process at once to the benefit of management and the detriment of labor. the new wave of computerization, containerization, and robotics in the 1960s did not so much ease as intensify the labor process. such high tech advances, for the most part, stepped up the proletarianization and deskilling of workers, displacing them from lucrative, unionized jobs in the steel, automobile, and transportation industries into non-unionized and often temporary service positions.^7^ [7] throughout the 1950s, as ernest mandel and more recently fredric jameson have observed, the sudden reserve of technological innovation in electronics, communication, and systems analysis and management--conceived during the war years and then coupled with accumulated resources of surplus wealth--allowed capital to penetrate new markets through a constant turnover not only of new services and commodity forms but of hitherto undreamt of sources of fabricated consumer needs and desires. this transition from a preto postwar economy challenged capital at once to deterritorialize its modern limits in the industrial workplace and to reterritorialize the entire fabric of everyday life for consumption.^8^ one symptom of this paradigm shift was the fragmentation of the working class community that--dwelling in the political and phenomenological spaces of extended social solidarity (the union hall, the local factory tavern, fraternal clubs, and so on)--was radically decentered and dispersed along the new superhighways out into the netherworld of suburban america. [8] in the post-depression era, traditionally urban, ethnic, and working class neighborhoods--like those, say, of the ante-fort apache decades of the south bronx--fell victim to the new generation of such metropolitan planners as robert moses.^9^ the tremendous drive to accommodate the ever more expansive and mobile traffic in consumer goods and services cut through the heart of the 'hood, leaving behind, in marshall berman's telling impressions of the long island expressway, "monoliths of steel and cement, devoid of vision or nuance or play, sealed off from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space, stamped on the landscape with a ferocious contempt for all natural and human life."^10^ along these clotted arteries and by-passes, american workers were fleeing the decaying precincts of the modern city, seduced by the new suburban vision whose prototype mushroomed from a 1,500-acre long island potato farm bought-out by william j. levitt in 1949. the first community to apply the logic of fordism to home construction, levittown overnight threw up some 17,500 virtually identical prefabricated four-room houses, followed by centrally designed plans for levittown ii an eight square mile suburb on the delaware river.^11^ [9] ever more cloistered and privatized within such serial neighborhoods of single family track houses, working class america succumbed little by little to the postmodern regime of the commodity form. no longer limited to accumulating surplus value from its modern settings of industrial production--the factory, textile mill, powerplant, construction site, or agribusiness combine--capital now seized on the frontier markets of consumption: the mall, the road strip, the nuclear household, the body, the unconscious--with ever new generations of consumer items, electrical appliances, gadgetry of all kinds, prepackaged foods, gas and restaurant franchises, accelerating rhythms of style, fashion, and popular trends in music, teen culture, and suburban living. here, the cement and steel hardscapes of the older urban environment were supplanted by the high-end, chi-chi-frou-frou softscapes of such mushrooming "edge cities" as schaumburg, illinois; atlanta's perimeter center; california's silicon valley and orange county; and the washington d.c. beltway.^12^ [10] as henri lefebvre, guy debord, and the situationists had argued, the ideology of consumerism--now reproduced throughout the omnipresent spectacle of advertising, selling, and purchasing of new goods, services, products, and cultural styles--came to dominate the total makeup of everyday life, eroding the older working class values of industrious productivity, active creativity, and proletarian solidarity--replacing them with the ideals of consumption, possessive individualism, and upward class mobility. one symptom of this shift into the postmodern register of spectacular consumerism was what lefebvre described as "the enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently connected to their corresponding signifieds (words, gestures, images and signs), and thus made available to advertising and propaganda."^13^ suddenly the world's entire semiotic fabric, from the sprawling lay-out of the suburban town to a commercial's most intimate proxemic code, was now readable (and thus susceptible to reinscription) in ways that articulated everyday life to the discourse of advertising, publicity, and spectacular display. yet within what lefebvre described as the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption" it was capital that exploited the powers of textual representation to maintain a constant obsolescence of needs as such, paradoxically, within a fixed framework of institutional durability. the task was to balance the necessity for a fast-paced turnover of cultural forms and trends in the consumer market in contradiction with the class strategy of preserving permanence, stability, and hierarchy amidst rapid cultural change. it is this double strategy that, for lefebvre, underwrites and constantly renegotiates consumer society's spectacular promotion. [11] supplementing lefebvre, baudrillard has, of course, more radically deconstructed marxism's traditional margin that separates commodity and sign, theorizing both as mutually traversed by a "homological structure" of exchange.^14^ in baudrillard's descriptive account of postmodern simulation, the mcluhanesque slogan that the "medium is the message" reaches an estranging, postmodern limit where the medium of telecommunication infiltrates, mimics, mutates, and finally exterminates the real like a virus or genetic code, in what baudrillard describes as a global, "satellization of the real."^15^ not insignificantly, with the death of the referent, the social contract and political institutions conceived out of the universalist ideals the enlightenment are likewise thrown into jeopardy. against the orthodoxy of the old left, the spectacle of postmodernism, for baudrillard, positions mass society not so much as a valorized political agent but more as a passive medium or conductor for the cultural simulation of every representable social need, libidinal desire, political interest, or popular opinion.^16^ [12] relentlessly polled, solicited, and instructed by the print, television, and video media--whose corporate advertising budgets dwarf those of public and private education--the masses, in baudrillard's descriptive account, are absorbed into a wholly commodified habitus. the revenge of mass society, however, is expressed, for baudrillard, as the sheer inertia of its silent majority: its tendency to consume in excess any message, code, or sign that is broadcast its way. no longer the figure for the proletarian class, a people, a citizenry, or any stable political constituency, the masses now mark the abysmal site of the radical equivalence of all value--a density that simply implodes, in one of baudrillard's astrophysical metaphors, like a collapsing star, drawing into itself "all radiation from the outlying constellations of state, history, culture, meaning."^17^ when simulation has overrun the political sphere, tactics of stepping up the exchange and consumption of goods, services, information flows, and new technologies--the whole hyperreal economy of postmodern potlatch--serve to debunk any vestiges of use value, rationality, or authenticity legitimating affirmative bourgeois culture. [13] more politically engaged, perhaps, than this rather pessimistic take on postmodern simulation is the kind of specific tactics of aesthetic resistance, critique, and intervention that, given his totalizing account, baudrillard is driven to reject as hopelessly utopian. beyond the scant attention that baudrillard has devoted to subcultural resistance, theorists such as michel de certeau, stuart hall, rosalind brunt, dick hebdige, and the new times collective have offered more nuanced studies of micropolitical praxes of subversion.^18^ such theoretical approaches to a postmodern politics of consumption have considered the multiple ways in which particular groups and individuals not merely consume but rearticulate to their own political agendas dominant signs taken, say, from the discourses of advertising, fashion, television, contemporary music, and pop culture in general. [14] beyond content analyses, explications, or close readings of various textual praxes, a more productive approach to the micropolitics of postmodern resistance examines what audiences, viewers, readers, and shoppers produce with the texts, artifacts, and commodity forms they consume.^19^ what looks like a spectacle of passive consumerism actually yields a multiplicity of "tactics," options, and occasions for actively negotiating what michel foucault would describe as a "microphysics of power." advancing foucault's theory of disciplinary and institutional surveillance, de certeau draws a cogent distinction between the established hegemonic regimes (or strategies) of power and the marginal and subaltern tactics of oppositional contestation and subversion that traverse them.^20^ the reproduction of consumerism, of course, relies on certain well-established strategies of representation that map the social field into a coded space of commodity exchange. the discourse of advertising, in particular--with its notorious manipulation of image and text--stands out as a ripe medium for the tactical subversion of dominant slogans and stereotypes. [15] throughout the 1970s and 1980s one specific site for exposing and interrupting the popular media's reproduction of consumer society has been its sexist inscription of gender. responding to the spectacle of postmodernism, critical artists like barbara kruger, jenny holzer, and hans haacke have adopted tactics of quotation, citation, and appropriation that were pioneered some five decades earlier in benjamin's examination of international dada and the russian futurists in such essays as "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" and "the artist as producer."^21^ the challenge that benjamin laid down was for every author to become a producer, every artist a theorist, in the general remapping of generic boundaries, aesthetic traditions, and cultural conventions that the age demanded. not incidentally, in photography this political requisite entailed a subversion of "the barrier between writing and image. what we require of the photographer," benjamin insisted, "is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value" (ap 230). in thus linking photographic activity to language and signification, benjamin's critique of photographic mimesis looks forward to roland barthes' postwar argument that "the conventions of photography . . . are themselves replete with signs."^22^ in the age of mass communication, as barthes would go on to argue in the 1960s, every pictorial form is always already a linguistic text.^23^ [16] barthes' sophisticated, textual analysis of the photographic image, tied as it is to benjamin's avant-garde concern for art's functional transformation of its enabling cultural apparatus, provides a theoretical vantage point for reading contemporary feminist interventions in the contemporary media, such as those, say, of barbara kruger. a one-time designer for conde nast during the 1970s, kruger was thoroughly disciplined in the craft of commercial media design, whose graphic techniques, discursive codes, and semiotic protocols she appropriated in the 1980s for tactical reinscriptions of sexist, racist, and classist representations in the popular media. while her plates and posters have the look and feel of slick ads, the politics they inscribe cut across the grain of consumerist ideology. indeed, her images often allude to the general violence, oppression, and humiliation entailed in the cultural logic of unequal exchange fostered under advanced capitalism. but equally important, her collages are frequently articulated to various micropolitical agendas as in her participation in exhibitions like the _disarming images: art for nuclear disarmament_ (1984-86) show sponsored by bread and roses, the cultural organ of the national union of hospital and health care employees, afl-cio. she also collaborates in any number of direct political actions, such as, say, her poster "your body is a battleground" advertising the 1989 march on washington in support of roe v. wade. [17] shaping such street level praxes, kruger's formal tactic is to open up the precoded space of the advertising sign--what de certeau would call its strategy--to unreadable gaps, contradictions, accusations, and dire judgments that interrupt our conventional responses and habits of consumption. the dominant coding of gender in the mass media--its repertoire of body language, facial expressions, styles of dress, and so on--positions the sexes differentially to reproduce a semiotics of patriarchal privilege, expertise, and authority, on the one hand, and feminine passivity, sexual ingratiation, and infantilization, on the other. such commercial photographs, as erving goffman's seminal study _gender advertisements_ (1979) has argued, broadcast a posed "hyper-ritualization" of social situations, whose images are, more often than not, calculated to oppress women in subordinate roles to equally idealized male counterparts.^24^ much of kruger's photographic appropriation of ad imagery and media slogans undermines and repudiates the sexist, semiotic economy of capitalist patriarchy. for example, the deployment of personal pronouns, typically used to solicit the reader's investment in ad texts, serves in kruger's hands to heighten sexual antagonisms, as in "we won't play nature to your culture." here kruger repudiates the dead letter of patriarchal stereotyping that, as simone de beauvoir theorized, reduces women's place to that of passive "other": projected outside male civil order as nature, the unconscious, the exotic, what is either forbidden or taboo.^25^ [18] appropriating the glossy look of postmodern advertising--whose specular, imaginary form solicits from the viewer a certain narcissism, a certain scopophilia- kruger rebuffs the valorized male reader, anathematizing this subject position with uncompromising, feminist refusals and such arresting judgments as: you thrive on mistaken identity. your devotion has the look of a lunatic sport. you molest from afar. you destroy what you think is difference. i am your reservoir of poses. i am your immaculate conception. i will not become what i mean to you. we won't play nature to your culture. we refuse to be your favorite embarrassments. keep us at a distance. while advertising exploits such "shifters" to ease consumption, kruger's slogans maintain an urgent tension that throws into crisis any "normal" positioning of gendered pronouns. her uncanny fusion of text and image, her impeccable craft, and her estranging wit resist any easy or complacent didacticism, however. [19] more politically undecidable, perhaps, than kruger's feminist subversions of advertising discourse are jenny holzer's critical interventions within the electronic apparatus of the postmodern spectacle, particularly her appropriation of light emitting diode (l.e.d.) boards. as an art student at the rhode island school of design in the mid-1970s, holzer came to new york via the whitney museum's independent study program in 1976-77. after collaborating with a number of performance artists at the whitney, she jettisoned her pursuit of painterly values and in 1977 began to compose gnomic aphorisms that she collected in a series of "truisms" formatted onto posters, stickers, handbills, hats, t-shirts, and other paraphernalia. not unlike daniel buren's deconstruction of the gallery's conventional exhibition space, holzer took her placards to the streets of soho and later throughout manhattan. this aesthetic gambit not only allowed her to solicit a populist audience but gave her work a certain shock value in its estrangement of everyday life. "from the beginning," she has said, "my work has been designed to be stumbled across when someone is just walking along, not thinking about anything in particular, and then finds these unusual statements either on a poster or on a sign."^26^ [20] the verbal character of the "truisms" themselves relies on the familiar slogans and one-liners common to tabloid journalism, the _reader's digest_ headline, the tv evangelist pitch-line, campaign rhetoric, rap and hip-hop lyrics, bumper sticker and t-shirt displays, and countless other kitsch forms. in some ways the plainspoken vernacular of her midwest ohio roots is, as holzer admits, naturally suited to such cliched formats. what might redeem this risky project, possibly, is her avant-garde tactic of investing such predictable messages, and their all-too-familiar modes of mass distribution (posters, stickers, handbills, plaques, hats, t-shirts, and so on) with conflicted, schizophrenic, and at times politicized content. her messages traverse the full spectrum of everyday life ranging from the reactionary complacency implied, say, in "an elite is inevitable," or "enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway," to the feminist essentialism of "a man can't know what it's like to be a mother," to the populist credo that "grass roots agitation is the only hope," to the postmarxist position that "class structure is as artificial as plastic." foregrounding popular truisms as cliched slogans, she playfully deconstructs the humanist rhetoric of evangelism ("awful punishment awaits really bad people"); pop psychoanalysis ("sometimes your unconscious is truer than your conscious mind"); advice columns and self-help manuals ("expressing anger is necessary"); as well as the usual saws, platitudes, and hackneyed bromides that are with us everywhere: a little knowledge can go a long way. a lot of officials are crackpots. don't run people's lives for them. good deeds eventually are rewarded. every achievement requires a sacrifice. a solid home base builds a sense of self. while the political intent of some of her truisms is undecidably voiced--"government is a burden on the people," for example, is as serviceable to the reactionary right as the utopian left--others are more perversely drained of any meaning at all: "everything that's interesting is new." [21] nonsensical, parodic, and ideologically loaded, such clashing platitudes, mottos, and non-sequiturs quickly caught on and won holzer a popular audience, as evidenced not only in the traces of dialogic graffito left on her street posters, but in her window installations and exhibitions at franklin furnace (1978) and fashion moda in the south bronx the following year. at this time holzer undertook joint ventures such as the "manifesto show" that she helped organize with colen fitzgibbon and the collaborative projects group. later, she would turn toward distinctively feminist collaborations with the female graffiti artists lady pink and ilona granet. supplementing the poster art of "truisms," holzer in her 1980 "living" series branched out into other materials, inscribing her aphorisms in more monumental formats such as the kind of bronze plaques, commemorative markers, and commercial signs that everywhere bestow a kind of kitsch authority on offices, banks, government buildings, galleries, museums, and so on. [22] one symptom of her work's emerging power was the resistance it met from patrons such as the marine midland bank on broadway that responding to one of her truisms- "it's not good to live on credit"--dismantled her window installation, consigning it to a broomcloset. not unlike hans haacke's celebrated expulsion from the solomon r. guggenheim museum, such censorship testified to her work's site-specific shock value. in the mid-1980s, holzer intensified her art's political content in her more militant "survival" series and, at the same time, undertook a bolder appropriation of a uniquely authoritative and spectacular medium: the light emitting diode (l.e.d.) boards installed worldwide in stock exchanges, urban squares, airports, stadiums, sports arenas, and other mass locales. the formal elements of this new high tech medium--its expanded memory of over 15,000 characters coupled with a built-in capacity for special visual effects and dynamic motion--advanced holzer's poster aesthetics into the linguistic registers of poetics and textual performance art. [23] however holzer's work "naturalizes" the impersonal displays of her computerized texts, it shares in the derridean, antihumanist deconstruction of the rhetorical presuppositions underwriting transcendental signified meaning, foundational thought, common sense--all ideal "truisms." the l.e.d. board's electronic mimicry of rhythm, inflection, and the play of visual emphasis allows holzer's mass art to solicit the humanist division between orality and inscription, logos and text, speech and writing so as to put into an uncanny, deconstructive play the margin of %differance% that normally separates the intimacy and immediacy of a voiced presence from the authoritative textual screens which function as the official media for postmodernism's high tech information society.^27^ "a great feature of the signs," she has said, "is their capacity to move, which i love because it's so much like the spoken word: you can emphasize things; you can roll and pause which is the kinetic equivalent to inflection in voice" (lg 67). [24] yet as "an official or commercial format normally used for advertising or public service announcements" the l.e.d. signboard, holzer maintains, is also the medium par excellence of contemporary information society.^28^ they are singularly positioned to reproduce the dominant, ideological signs that naturalize the reign of the commodity form. "the big signs," she has said, "made things seem official"; appropriating this public medium "was like having the voice of authority say something different from what it would normally say."^29^ such interventions are pragmatically suasive, however, only if they hold in contradiction the dominant forms of the mass media and estranged, or radically ironic messages. in 1982, under the auspices of the public art fund, holzer went to the heart of america's mass spectacle, choosing selections from among her most succinct and powerful "truisms" for public broadcast on new york's mammoth times square spectacolor board. commenting on the scandal-ridden political milieu of the reagan era, slogans such as abuse of power comes as no surprise were circulating suddenly at the very crossroads of american consumer society. negotiating the official spaces of new york advertising demanded a reconsideration of the artwork beyond the limits of intrinsic form. [25] the formal composition of holzer's spectacolor boards is mediated by site specific forces in an expanded public field of legal, commercial, and political interests. for example, in mounting her own media blitz on las vegas--the american mecca of glitzy signage and neon kitsch--holzer's choice of message, l.e.d. formats, and installation locales had to be adjudicated through a network of businesspeople, university managers, and political officials. through these negotiations, and supported in part by the nevada institute of contemporary art, holzer gained access to l.e.d. signs and poster installation sites in two shopping centers, the university of nevada's sports center, the baggage claim areas of the las vegas airport, and the massive spectacolor publicity board outside caesar's palace. infiltrating vegas' neon aura, holzer's telling message, displayed on the dectronic starburst double-sided electronic signboard of caesar's palace- protect me from what i want --laid bare the contradictory wager of consumerism at the heart of the postmodern spectacle. [26] throughout the 1980s, holzer mounted similar installations on alcoa corporation's giant l.e.d. sign outside pittsburgh, on mobile truck signs in new york, and other sites nationwide. moreover, as an intern for a television station in hartford, holzer began to purchase commercial time to broadcast her messages in 30-second commercial slots throughout the northeast to a potential audience of millions. here holzer's textual praxis is guided by the same strategy of defamiliarization: mainlining the dominant arteries and electronic organs of the mass communications apparatus with postmodern ironies and heady, linguistic estrangements. "again, the draw for me," she says, "is that the unsuspecting audience will see very different content from what they're used to seeing in this everyday medium. it's the same principle that's at work with the signs in a public place" (lg 68). whether holzer's art remains oppositional to, rather than incorporated by, the postmodern spectacle has become a more pressing question, given her rising star status in the late 1980s and 1990s. [27] as a valorized figure in the world art market, holzer enjoys regular gallery exhibitions in new york, chicago, los angeles, paris, cologne, and other major art centers. in 1990 alone she not only undertook shows in the prestigious solomon r. guggenheim museum and dia art foundation, but served as the official u.s. representative to the venice biennale. when she made the jump from street agitation to international stardom in the late 1980s, holzer adjusted her presentation, paradoxically, to the more intimate and privatized nuances of commercial exhibition space. installed in such settings as the barbara gladstone gallery, the grand lobby of the brooklyn museum, the rhona hoffman gallery, the guggenheim, and the dia art foundation, her new "under a rock" and "laments" series inscribed her earlier truisms in granite and marble benches and sarcophagi quarried in vermont near her summer residence in hoosick, new york. casting her truisms in stonework summoned an uncanny fusion of the monumental and the popular, at once glossing the medium of tombstones, anonymous war memorials, commemorative benches, and the kind of kitsch, public furniture found, say, in any bank lobby or shopping plaza. [28] departing from the spectacular spaces of times square and the las vegas strip, "under a rock" invoked the hushed atmosphere of a chapel by displaying files of stone benches, each illuminated by an overhead spotlight and arranged before a color l.e.d. display. such a sparse and shadowy layout--in its simulacral citation of church pews and stained glass iconography--employed a postmodern medium, paradoxically, to invoke a ritual aura of mourning, confession, and moral self-examination that would complement the work's verbal content of unspeakable acts of torture, mutilation, and humiliation. while her terse, indeterminate narratives are not tied to any specific public agenda, they often adopt a feminist critique of male violence, misogyny, and machismo. although many of her "laments" are lyrical- "i keep my brain on so i do not fall into nothing if his claws hurt me"--others more broadly rely on the kind of fetishized coding of militarism, torture, and political assassination that, say, leon golub finds everywhere displayed in the contemporary media: "people go to the river where it is / lush and muddy to shoot captives, / to float or sink them. shots kill / men who always want. someone / imagined or saw them leaping to / savage the government. now bodies / dive and glide in the water. scaring / friends or making them furious." the spare and plainspoken language of "under a rock" is designed neither to shock the reader nor to subvert the linguistic medium, as in much of so-called language writing. rather, her work exposes how the representation of such barbarism has moved to the center of the postmodern scene, whose routine horror is the daily stuff of the tabloid, the morning edition, and nightly update. [29] more subversive, perhaps, is the juxtaposition of linguistic elements and the arrangement of physical space that her installations exploit. in her dia foundation "laments," for example, holzer staked out the exhibition space with thirteen sarcophagi--variously carved in green and red marble, onyx, and black granite--illuminated with postmodern led display boards that radiate vertically arrayed messages into the hushed and sepulchral air. yet the effect of such a bizarre mix of antique caskets and high tech light grids is undecidable. is it calculated to disrupt conventional oppositions between ancient artifacts and today's telecommunication medium, or to re-auraticize the l.e.d. medium as an object of contemporary veneration? are the sarcophagi exposed as exhibition fetishes or simply updated in an aestheticized homage to the postmodern objet d'art? undeniable, in any case, is the manic structure of feeling you experience sitting on one of holzer's granite benches bombarded by an electronic frieze of visually intense messages. [30] however deconstructive of traditional gallery values, the political status of holzer's recent installations- marked at once as objects of ritual "lament" and art market souvenirs--is debatable. on the one hand, new works such as child text--conceived for her 1990 venice biennial installation--productively negotiate between a personal phenomenology of mothering (as in "i am sullen and then frantic when i cannot be wholly within / the zone of my infant. i am not consumed by her. i am an / animal who does all she should. i am surprised that i / care what happens to her. i was past feeling much / because i was tired of myself but i want her to live") and a social critique of what adrienne rich has theorized as motherhood's institutional place under patriarchy. on the other hand, however, such displays are themselves commodity forms within the gallery exchange market, fetching up to $40,000 per l.e.d. sign, $30,000 per granite bench, and $50,000 per sarcophagus. it is not holzer's purpose, of course, to deny or repress her work's commodity status but rather to exploit it in de-auraticizing gallery art's remove from its commercial base. holzer's truisms have always been up for sale but at the more populist rates of $15 per cap or t-shirt and $250 per set of 21 posters. when she markets a granite slab, however, for the price of a luxury car, her earlier truism- private property created crime--must necessarily return with a vengeance. indeed, holzer does not flinch from such self recrimination but pushes the difficult paradox of aesthetic critique and recuperation to its vexed limits: "selling my work to wealthy people," she admits, "can be like giving little thrills to the people i'm sometimes criticizing."^30^ for all its honesty, such a frank acknowledgement of commodification, nonetheless, is a chilling echo of her onetime truism "an elite is inevitable," leaving holzer susceptible to the critique of what donald kuspit has indicted as "gallery leftism": an aesthetic politics "calculated to make a certain impact, occupy a certain position, in the art world, whose unconscious ultimate desire is to produce museum art however much it consciously sees itself as having socio-political effect in the world."^31^ [31] part of what is at stake here is the difference between merely rehearsing the avant-garde critique of the museum- now itself a thoroughly stylized and recuperated gesture of protest--and committing art to social change. to her credit, holzer's key precedent has unhinged the fixed status of today's communication apparatus, leaving it susceptible to more adventurous, more politicized interventions. nevertheless, the overtly commercialized status of holzer's "truisms" lends itself to gallery recuperation in a way that the more politicized and collaborative projects of, say, artmakers, or political art distribution/documentation (padd) is calculated to deny. since the mid-'80s, the graphic resources pioneered by such visual/text artists as hans haacke, holzer, and kruger have been appropriated from the new york art market and articulated, at street level, as in, say, greenpeace's critique of advanced capitalism's environmental settlement, or act up's agitation on behalf of people with aids. [32] responding to the reagan/bush era's attempts to "greenwash" devastating environmental policies through slick public relations campaigns, greenpeace has had to respond precisely at the level of the media image to rearticulate such ideologically-loaded spectacles to its own progressive agenda. "greenpeace believes," says steve loper, the action director for greenpeace, u.s.a, "that an image is an all-important thing. the direct actions call attention to the issues we're involved in. we put a different point of view out that usually ends up on the front page of the paper . . . if we just did research and lobbying and came out with a report it would probably be on the 50th page of the paper."^32^ [33] the creation of compelling images, however, is a rigorously site specific process and--although articulated to politicized positions on, say, nuclear arms escalation, deforestation, or toxic dumping--each intervention is radically contingent on the particular, conjunctural forces and pragmatic demands of a given moment. one of greenpeace's tactics is to seize on popular news stories such as the scandalous new york city garbage barge that, in the absence of a dump site, sailed up and down the eastern seaboard throughout 1987. appropriating this object of sustained public embarrassment, greenpeace rearticulated it to the theme of conservation through unfurling a giant banner across the length of the vessel reading: "next time . . . try recycling." greenpeace's better known gambit is to go to the heart of america's monumental icons of national heritage such as, say, south dakota's mount rushmore or new york's statue of liberty to recode their spectacular meanings to its own agenda. such was greenpeace's strategy in its 1987 attempt to place a giant surgical mask over the mouth of rushmore's george washington reading "we the people say no to acid rain" and its 1984 antinuclear banner, hung like a giant stripped-in caption on the statue of liberty in commemoration of the us atomic bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki: "give me liberty from nuclear weapons, stop testing." [34] on the vanguard of such postmodern agitational work, guerilla collectives like gran fury, little elvis, and wave three of act up have mastered the fine art of interventionist critique. in 1989, for example, gran fury borrowed from the appropriation of advertising discourse, popularized by hans haacke in the 1970s, to refocus public attention on corporate profiteering from the aids crisis. the collective's formal tactic followed haacke's uncanny fusions of slick advertising visuals set in contradiction with texts exposing the often brutal work settings and ruthless industrial practices such imagery normally deflects. but unlike haacke's point of subversion, positioned as it is within museum culture, gran fury's mode of distribution targeted a potentially much wider audience: the readership of _the new york times_. in "new york crimes," gran fury produced a meticulous four-page simulacrum of the print layout and masthead design of the _times_ which documented the koch administration's cuts to hospital facilities servicing aids, its failure to address the housing needs of new york's homeless people with aids (pwas), its cutbacks to city drug treatment programs by effectively shifting them to shrinking state budgets, and the latter's withholding of condoms and medical support to the 25% of state prison inmates tested positive for hiv infection. on the morning of act up's march 28, 1989 mass demonstration on city hall, gran fury opened _new york times_ vending boxes and wrapped the paper in their own "ny crimes" jacket. for those who would simply ignore the stories, gran fury also included a slick clash of text and image that articulated the visual iconography of painstaking antiviral research to outrageous corporate greed summed up in an unguarded quote from patrick gage of hoffman-la roche, inc.. "one million [people with aids]," gage mused, "isn't a market that's exciting. sure it's growing, but it's not asthma." such callous disregard for life is played off gran fury's polemical caption that plainly lays out its discursive counter-strategy: "this is to enrage you." [35] perhaps the image that has best stood the test of time, however, is gran fury's _read my lips_ lithograph produced for a spring 1988 aids action kiss-in to protest against gay bashing. _read my lips_ employs a camp image of two forties-style sailors in a loving embrace, thereby articulating the identity politics of gender to a bold, homoerotic sexuality. but beyond this obvious agenda, the work's clever textual layout cites barbara kruger's interventionist aesthetic to signify on george bush's 1988 campaign vow to slash tax supports for domestic social programs. such sophisticated metasimulations of the advertising sign's formal inmixing of image and text recode today's largely homophobic world outlook to make us think twice about what adrienne rich has defined as compulsory heterosexuality.^33^ as we pass beyond the twentieth century scene into the new millennium, it will surely be in the collaborative aesthetic praxes of such new social movements--articulated as they are to class, environmental, racial, feminist, gay rights, and public health issues--that america's avant-garde legacy of cultural intervention will live on: its political edge cutting through the semiosis of everyday life, going to the heart of the postmodern spectacle. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ hilton kramer, "turning back the clock," _the new criterion_ (april 1984), 72. ^2^ clement greenberg, "modernist painting," _the new art_, ed. gregory battock (new york: e.p. dutton, 1973), 101 (hereafter cited in the text as mp). ^3^ while greenberg is often set up as the strawman for contesting art's ontological remove from history, his actual idealization of high modernism rests (as does adorno's) not on an ontic difference but a relational reaction to the spreading reign of kitsch. on this point see rosalind krauss, _the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths_ (cambridge: mit press, 1985), 1; andreas huyssen, _after the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism_ (bloomington: indiana university press, 1986), 57; thomas crow, "modernism and mass culture," in benjamin h.d. buchloch, serge guilbaut and david solkin, eds. _modernism and modernity_ (halifax: press of nova scotia college of art and design, 1983), 215-264; and t.j. clark, "clement greenberg's theory of art," _the politics of interpretation_, ed. w.j.t. mitchell (chicago: university of chicago press, 1983), 203-220. ^4^ clement greenberg, "avant-garde and kitsch," _partisan review_ 6 (fall 1939), 34-49, rpt. in _mass culture_, ed. bernard rosenberg and david manning white (chicago: the free press, 1957), 107 (hereafter cited in the text as ak). ^5^ the traffic in contemporary spectacle, for benjamin, did not yet constitute a one-way flow, noting that "the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. in this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art." walter benjamin, "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," _illuminations_, tr. harry zohn (new york: schocken books, 1985), 231 (hereafter cited in the text as wmp). ^6^ in this vein, benjamin cited dadaism's experiments with the new techniques of mechanical reproduction which not only led to their playful reframings of "masterpiece" art and other cultural icons, but also the appropriation of objects collaged from everyday life. while such tactics achieved only localized, provisional effects in the west, the russian avant-gardes mounted a broader strategy of sociocultural renovation in the early years of the soviet union. the example of the worker-correspondent drawn from soviet journalism served, for benjamin, to deconstruct the oppositional roles that--propped up as they are by the bourgeois cult of specialization--separates writer and reader, expert and layman, poet and critic, scholar and performer. unlike the capitalist press, which reproduces dominant bourgeois class interests, newspaper publication in russia, benjamin argued, offered a "theater of literary confusion" that nevertheless broadcast the political concerns of the writer as producer, and more widely, "the man on the sidelines who believes he has a right to see his own interests expressed." walter benjamin, "the artist as producer," _reflections_, tr. edmund jephcott (new york: schocken books, 1986), 300 (hereafter cited in the text as ap). ^7^ consider the dehumanizing regime, say, of a mcdonald's kitchen. in this postmodern sweatshop, employees are trained by video disks to perform the tedious, predesigned regimens for twenty-odd work stations that when meshed together make each franchise a highly efficient fastfood production machine. each of the twenty-four burgers one cooks in any given batch is part of a completely taylorized process: from the premeasured beef patties to the computerized timers for heating each bun, to the automatic catsup, mustard, and special sauce dispensers, to the formulas for the exact measurements of onion bits, pickles, and lettuce each big mac receives. far from possessing even the autonomy of a short order cook, one serves here purely as a cog in a ninety second burger assembly-line. moreover, from the monitored soft-drink spigots to the fully automated registers, from the computerized formulas for hiring, scheduling, and organizing workers to the centrally administered accounting systems, every aspect of a mcdonald's franchise is organized and scrutinized in minute detail by the panoptic hamburger central in oak brook, illinois. a thoroughly postmodern institution, mcdonald's presides at any given time over a temporary workforce of some 500,000 teenagers; by the mid-1980s 7% or nearly 8 million americans had earned their living under the sign of the golden arches. see john f. love, _mcdonald's behind the golden arches_ (new york: bantam, 1986) and barbara garson, _the electronic sweatshop_ (new york: simon and schuster, 1988), 19. ^8^ for a discussion of deand reterritorialization, see gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_, tr. brian massumi (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988). ^9^ as new york state and city parks commissioner, moses, of course, had commandeered the productivist ethos of the interbellum decades to forge a huge "public authority" bureaucracy of federal, state, and private interests that backed the renovation of central park, long island's jones beach, flushing meadow fairgrounds--the site of the 1939-40 new york world's fair--and 1700 recreational facilities, as well as the construction of such mammoth highway, bridge, and parkway systems as the west side highway, the belt parkway, and the triborough project. while labor was recruited to build these giant thoroughfares and spectacular, recreational spaces, it could not control the irresistible momentum of social modernization that burst through the seams of the older metropolitan cityscape. ^10^ marshall berman, _all that is solid melts in air: the experience of modernity_ (new york: simon and schuster, 1982), 308. ^11^ levittown ii, in william manchester's description, comprised "schools, churches, baseball diamonds, a town hall, factory sidings, parking lots, offices for doctors and dentists, a reservoir, a shopping center, a railroad station, newspaper presses, garden clubs--enough, in short, to support a densely populated city of 70,000, the tenth largest in pennsylvania." william manchester, _the glory and the dream, a narrative history of america_, 1932-1972 (new york: bantam books, 1980), 432. ^12^ "edge cities," writes joel garreau, "represent the third wave of our lives pushing into new frontiers in this half century. first we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. this was the suburbanization of america, especially after world war ii. then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. this was the malling of america, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism--our jobs--out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. that has led to the rise of edge city." _edge city: life on the new frontier_ (new york: doubleday, 1991), 4. ^13^ henri lefebvre, _everyday life in the modern world_, tr. sacha rabinovitch (new york: harper and row, 1971), 56 (hereafter cited in the text as el). ^14^ "[t]oday consumption . . . defines precisely the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities." jean baudrillard, _for a critique of the political economy of the sign_, tr. charles levin (st. louis: telos press, 1981), 147 (hereafter cited in the text as pes). ^15^ "we must think of the media," he advises, "as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal." jean baudrillard, _simulations_, tr. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman (new york: semiotext(e), 1983), 55 (hereafter cited in the text as s). within the horizon of the hyperreal, the instant precession of every conceivable interpretive model and representation around and within any historical "fact" constitutes an indeterminate, virtually "magnetic field of events" (s 32), where the difference between the signified event and its simulacrum implodes now in a global circulation/ventilation of contradictory signals, mutating codes, and mixed messages. ^16^ the presumption to speak now on behalf of the proletariat in some wholly unmediated fashion seems theoretically naive after the pressing debates of postmodernity. during the 1985 institute of contemporary arts forum on postmodernism, for example, jean-francois lyotard argued cogently against terry eagleton's orthodox nostalgia for the proletariat as the privileged agent for social change in the third world. following kant, lyotard pointed out that in contradistinction to designating specific laborers in culturally diversified communities, the term proletariat, nominating as it does a more properly universal "subject to be emancipated," is an ahistorical abstraction--a "pure idea of reason" having little purchase today on the actual politics of everyday life. indeed, some of the greatest atrocities, he cautioned, have been perpetuated under this very category error of pursuing a "politics of the sublime": "that is to say, to make the terrible mistake of trying to represent in political practice an idea of reason. to be able to say, 'we are the proletariat' or 'we are the incarnation of free humanity.'" jean-francois lyotard, "defining the postmodern, etc.," tr. g. bennington, in _postmodernism_ (london: ica documents 4 & 5, 1986), 11 (hereafter cited as ica). ^17^ jean baudrillard, _in the shadow of the silent majorities_, tr. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman (new york: semiotext(e), 1983), 2 (hereafter cited in the text as ssm). ^18^ see _new times: the changing face of politics in the 1990s_, ed. stuart hall and martin jacques (london: lawrence & wishart in association with _marxism today_, 1989). ^19^ "thus, once the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the tv set have been analyzed," writes de certeau, "it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours." michel de certeau, _the practice of everyday life_, tr. steven rendall (berkeley: university of california press, 1984), 31 (hereafter cited in the text as pel). ^20^ strategies, as de certeau defines them, mark "a triumph of place over time" (pel 36)--through transforming the unreadable contingencies of history into a legible, panoptic space. tactics, in contrast, cut across, raid, and out-maneuver the logic, rules, and laws that govern such institutional and disciplinary sites of power. as the gambit of a weak force, a tactic relies on cunning, trickery, wit, finesse--what the greeks described under the rubric of %metis%, or "ways of knowing" (pel xix). ^21^ in particular, feminist critiques of the chauvinist media representations perpetuated under capitalist patriarchy have benefitted from benjamin's earlier class-based analysis of aesthetic tactics that in the interbellum decades effected a functional transformation --a brechtian %umfunktionierung%--of the then emerging apparatus of the bourgeois culture industry. it was the influence of sergei tretyakov and the postsynthetic cubist collaborations of the russian suprematists, constructivists, and laboratory period figures that guided benjamin's thinking on the avant-garde turn (brought about by photography, film, and other mechanically reproducible media) away from the modernist paradigm of aesthetic representation--its cult of artistic genius and the aura of the unique work of art. by taking into account an artwork's material conditions of exhibition, distribution, and audience reception, as part of its productive apparatus, the russian constructivists decisively challenged the abstract and self-reflexive values of modern formalism in favor of the more critical representations of documentary photomontage and photocollage. the new cultural logic of mechanical reproduction, occasioned by photography and film, not only unsettled the traditional divide between high and low aesthetics but deconstructed conventional oppositions separating art from advertising, agitation, and propaganda. no longer invested with the aura of a ritual object, the artwork as such was opened to the vital dialectic between intrinsic form and the politics of mass persuasion. ^22^ roland barthes, _mythologies_, tr. annette lavers (london: jonathan cape, 1972), 92 (hereafter cited in the text as m). photographic codes and the cultural messages they broadcast, serve, in their signifying elements and discursive objects, what barthes theorized as the secondary, metalinguistic operations of myth and ideological representation. ^23^ "today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon." roland barthes, _image/music/text_, tr. stephen heath (new york: hill and wang, 1977), 38 (hereafter cited in the text as imt). ^24^ see erving goffman, _gender advertisements_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1979). ^25^ see simone de beauvoir, _the second sex_, tr. h. m. parshley (new york: knopf, 1957), 132. ^26^ jenny holzer, "jenny holzer's language games," interview with j. siegel, _arts magazine_ 60 (december 1985), 67 (hereafter cited in the text as lg). ^27^ "if, by hypothesis," derrida writes, "we maintain that the opposition of speech to language is absolutely rigorous, then differance would be not only the play of differences within language but also the relation of speech to language, the detour through which i must pass in order to speak, the silent promise i must make; and this schemata, of message to code, etc.." jacques derrida, "differance," _margins of philosophy_, tr. alan bass (chicago: university of chicago press, 1982), 15. ^28^ jenny holzer, "wordsmith, an interview with jenny holzer," with bruce ferguson, _art in america_ 74 (december 1986), 113. ^29^ paul taylor, "we are the word: jenny holzer sees aphorism as art," _vogue_ 178 (november 1988), 390. ^30^ quoted in colin westerbeck, "jenny holzer, rhona hoffman gallery," _artforum_ 25 (may 1987), 155. ^31^ donald kuspit, "gallery leftism," _vanguard_ 12 (november 1983), 24 (hereafter cited in the text as gl). ^32^ december 1987 interview quoted in steve durland, "witness: the guerrilla theater of greenpeace," _art in the public interest_, ed. arlene raven (ann arbor, mi: umi research press, 1989), 35. ^33^ see adrienne rich, "compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence," in _blood, bread, and poetry_ (new york: w.w. norton, 1986), 23-75. [editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-[editor]-announcements.txt announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) every issue of _postmodern culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments free of charge. advertisements will also be published on a fee or exchange basis. journal announcements: 1) sulfur 2) denver quarterly 3) monographic review/revista monografica 4) substance--special issue 5) college literature 6) differences 7) ejournal 8) erofile 9) synapse 10) athanor 11) artsnet review 12) eff news symposia, discussion groups, calls for papers: 13) problems of affirmation in cultural theory 14) kids-91 15) magazine 16) literature, computers and writing 17) science and literature: beyond cultural construction 18) inter-relations between mental and verbal discourse 19) program of "postmodernist postmortem" (jan. 2, 1991) 20) science, knowledge, technology other: 21) note on unc press fire 1)=============================================================== sulfur editor clayton eshleman contributing editors sulfur is antaeus with a risk. rachel blau duplessis it has efficacy. it has michael palmer primacy. it is one of the few eliot weinberger magazines that is more than a receptacle of talent, actually contributing to the shape of present day literary engagement. --george butterick correspondents charles bernstein sulfur must certainly be the james clifford most important literary clark coolidge magazine which has explored marjorie perloff and extended the boundaries of jerome rothenberg poetry. eshleman has a nose jed rasula for smelling out what is going marjorie welish to happen next in the ceaseless evolution of the living art. --james laughlin managing editor caryl eshleman in an era of literary conservatism and editorial assistant sectarianism, the broad l. kay miller commitment of sulfur to both literary excellence and a broad interdisciplinary, unbought humanistic engagement with the art of poetry has been invaluable. its critical articles have been the sharpest going over the last several years. --gary snyder founded at the california institute of technology in 1981, sulfur magazine is now based at eastern michigan university. funded by the national endowment for the arts since 1983, and winnter of four general electric foundation awards for younger writers, it is an international magazine of poetry and poetics, archetypal psychology, paleolithic imagination, artwork and art criticism, translations and archival materials. some of our featured contributors have been: artaud, pound, golub, vallejo, olson, niedecker, riding, cesaire, kitaj, and hillman. we appear twice a year (april and november) in issues of 250 pages. current subscription rates: $13 for 2 issues for individuals ($19 for institutions). single copies are $8.00. numbers 1, 15, 17 and 19 are only available in complete 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goytisolo maria a. salgado paris, france university of north carolina at chapel hill call for papers number 7 (1991) of the monographic review/revista monografica will be devoted to hispanic subterranean literatures: *the comics *the erotic papers of twelve to fifteen pages should be prepared in accord with the mla style and submitted before 31 august 1991 to: genaro j. perez, editor monographic review dept. literature & spanish university of texas/permian basin odessa, texas 79762-8301 the monographic review/revista monografica, a professional journal of criticism in the hispanic literatures, will be monographic in character in that each number will be devoted to a single theme, major writer, or specific literary phenomenon. the first number comprises essays on hispanic children's literature; the second treats the literature of exile and expatriation. future numbers will cover such subjects as women writers, hispanic writers in the united states, the oral tradition in hispanic literature, especially in the united states, spanish science fiction and literature of fantasy, and many other areas of relative scholarly neglect. initially, it will appear on an annual basis with occasional special numbers. vol. i (1985) hispanic children's literature vol. ii (1986) spanish literature of exile vol. iii (1987) hispanic science fiction/fantasy and thriller vol. iv (1988) hispanic short story vol. v (1989) hispanism in non-hispanic countries vol. vi (1990) hispanic women poets 4)=============================================================== announcing a special issue of _substance_ on thought and novation what's new? how do we know that something is new? how is "newness" constituted? these are the questions asked by the guest editor of substance 62/63, the philosopher and historian of science judith schlanger in a special issue on "thought and novation." the answers offered by historians, sociologists, biologists, philosophers, literary critics, etc. in this 220p volume are wide-ranging and provoking. the issue includes: rene girard: innovation and repetition daniel lindenberg: france 1940-1990: how to break with evil? saul friedlander: the end of innovation? contemporary historical consciousness and the end of history jacques schlanger: ideas are events benny shannon: novelty in thinking henri atlan: creativity in nature and in the mind: novelty in biology and in the biologist's brain yehuda elkana: creativity and democratization in science isabelle stengers: the deceptions of power--psychoanalysis and hypnosis s. van der leeuw: archaeology, material culture and innovation jean-pierre dupuy: deconstruction and the liberal order elisheva rosen: innovation and its reception francis goyet: rhetoric and novation ruth amossy: on commonplace knowledge and innovation michel pierssens: novation astray judith schlanger: the new, the different, and the very old pierre pachet: self-portrait of a conservative alexis philonenko: reason and writing. order from: substance journal division university of wisconsin press 114 n. murray madison, wi 53715 usa one year subscription (3 issues): $19.00 (individuals); $65.00 (institutions); $14.00 (students). back issues: $7.00. this special issue: $10.00 for more information: michel pierssens r36254@uqam.bitnet or piersens@cc.umontreal.ca or: sydney levy fi00levy@ucsbuxa.bitnet or fi00levy@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu 5)=============================================================== college literature 544 main hall west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (215) 436-2901 a triannual journal of scholarly criticism, college literature focuses on the theory and practice of literature--both what is and what should be taught in the college literature classroom. it encourages a variety of approaches (including political, feminist, interdisciplinary, and poststructuralist) to a variety of literatures. in addition to the february general issues, current and forthcoming special issues include "the politics of teaching literatures" (june/october 1990), "literary theory in the classroom" (june 1991), "teaching minority literatures" (october 1991), and "teaching commonwealth or postcolonial literatures" (june 1992). submissions--in triplicate--should be 5000-7500 words (articles) or 2000-4000 words (notes and comments), and should use internal citations, following current mla style. college literature encourages the submission of papers on disk written with nota bene or in any other ibm-compatible ascii format; hard copy and sase must accompany such submissions. the deadline for submitting an article intended for a special issue is eight months before the cover date. subscription rates within the us are $15/yr or $27/2yrs for individuals, $18/yr or $33/2yrs for institutions; single copies $7 (double issues $14). outside the us, please add $5/yr for surface mail or $10/yr airmail. 6)=============================================================== d i f f e r e n c e s a journal of feminist cultural studies edited by naomi schor & elizabeth weed vol. 1, no. 1 vol. 2, no. 1 life and death in sexuality: sexuality in greek and roman reproductive technologies and society aids edited by david konstan and with essays by donna haraway, martha nussbaum linda singer, janice doane & with essays by david m. devon hodges, simon watney, halperin, john j. winkler, ana maria alonso & maria martha nussbaum, john boswell, teresa koreck, avital ronell, eva stehle, adele scafuro, and rosi braidotti. price: georgia nugent, and david $11.75 konstan. price: $11.75 vol. 1, no. 2 vol. 2, no. 2 the essential difference: with essays by nancy another look at essentialism armstrong, karen newman, tania with essays by teresa de modleski, cathy griggers, lauretis, naomi schor, luce judith butler, and r. irigaray, diana fuss, robert radhakrishnan. price: $11.75 scholes, leslie wahl rabine, and gayatri spivak with ellen vol. 2, no. 3 rooney. price: $11.75 feminism in the institution with essays by 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address virtually any subject across this broad spectrum will be given thoughtful consideration. members of the electronic-network community and others interested in it make up a large portion of our audience. therefore we would be interested (for example) in essays about whether or not anyone should own a communication that has been shared electronically, about the pragmatics of cataloguing and indexing electronic publications, about net-based collaborative learning, about artful uses of hypertext, about the challenges that distance learning may offer to residential campuses, about the role of the matrix in cultural history and utopian polemic, about digitally recorded aleatoric fiction, about the significance of resemblances between the electronic matrix and neural systems, . . . and so forth. the journal's essays will be available free to bitnet/internet addresses. recipients may make paper copies; _ejournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our read-only archive for use by academic deans or other supervisors. individual essays, reviews, stories--texts--sent to us will be disseminated to subscribers as soon as they have been through the editorial process, which will also be "paperless." we expect to offer access through libraries to our electronic contents, abstracts, and keywords, and to be indexed and abstracted in appropriate places. _ejournal_ is now soliciting essays for possible publication. we will be happy to consider reviews, letters, and (eventually) annotations that ought to accompany texts we have already published. we would be happy to add interested specialists and generalists to our panel of consulting editors. please send essays for review, and inquiries, to ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet ejournal@rachel.albany.edu ted jennings, editor, _ejournal_ department of english university at albany, state university of new york ron bangel, managing editor (acting) university at albany, suny board of advisors: dick lanham, university of california at los angeles ann okerson, association of research libraries joe raben, city university of new york bob scholes, brown university harry whitaker, university of quebec at montreal ----------------------------------------------------------------consulting editors november 1990 ----------------- ------------ -------------ahrens@hartford john ahrens hartford ap01@liverpool stephen clark liverpool crone@cua tom crone catholic u djb85@albnyvms don byrd albany donaldson@loyvax randall donaldson loyola college ds001451@ndsuvm1 ray wheeler north dakota eng006@unomal marvin peterson nebraska omaha erdt@vuvaxcom terry erdt villanova fac_aska@jmuvax1 arnie kahn james madison folger@yktvmv davis foulger ibm watson research center george@gacvax1 g. n. georgacarakos gustavus adolphus gms@psuvm gerry santoro pennsylvania state university jtsgsh@ritvax john sanders rochester institute of technology nrcgsh@ritvax norm coombs rochester institute of technology pmsgsl@ritvax patrick m. scanlon rochester institute of technology r0731@csuohio nelson pole cleveland state ryle@urvax martin ryle richmond twbatson@gallua trent batson gallaudet usercoop@ualtamts wes cooper alberta userlcbk@umichum bill condon michigan 8)=============================================================== announcing a new research tool for french and italian studies, ****************************** ******************************** ***___ ___ ___ ___ __ *** *** i__ i__i i i i__ i i i_ *** *** i__ i \ i__i i i i__ i__ *** *** *** ********************************* ** electronic ** reviews ** of ** french & ** italian ** literary ** essays ***************** ************************ a free electronic newsletter accessible to all on bitnet and internet. ___________________________________________________________ _erofile_ takes advantage of the rapidity of electronic mail distribution to provide timely reviews of the latest books in the following areas associated with french and italian studies: literary criticism cultural studies film studies pedagogy software ___________________________________________________________ _erofile_ will disseminate a collection of solicited and unsolicited reviews and therefore welcomes submissions from qualified reviewers. publishers of scholarly journals in appropriate fields may also wish to consider sending backlogged reviews to _erofile_ for early electronic publication. the well-known interdisciplinary journal, substance, has already shown interest in such an arrangement. _erofile_ will also provide an open forum for comments on previously published reviews. in this way, we hope to create a on-going dialogue on a variety of issues in the field. consequently, our editorial policy will have two aspects: we will reserve the right to edit reviews, while promising to publish letters to the editor as they arrive. in much the same spirit as the _humanist_ listserver then, we trust that letters to the editor will not abuse our forum by including inappropriately offensive or unnecessarily familiar language. ___________________________________________________________ we also welcome recommendations of qualified reviewers such as graduate students who have formed a specialization on any topic in the above areas. ___________________________________________________________ please send submissions, subscription requests, and questions on policy to the editors of _erofile_: erofile@ucsbuxa.bitnet or erofile@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu submissions should in all cases be forwarded by e-mail or on diskette, preferably in the form of an ascii file. ___________________________________________________________ nota bene: those who do not yet share the privilege of bitnet access will miss out on a great resource. please tell your colleagues in french and italian to get on-line with the times and to obtain a bitnet or internet account. ___________________________________________________________ editors: charles la via jonathan walsh department of french & italian university of california santa barbara, ca 93106 9)=============================================================== synapse _synapse_ is a new electronic literary quarterly published by connected education, inc. the journal seeks poetry, fiction, and criticism on any cultural issue, from new and established writers. _synapse_ will be issued on ms-dos and macintosh diskettes, and over networks. subscriptions: $15/year. (please state format preference.) manuscripts should be submitted in ascii format (with return postage) on ms-dos or macintosh diskettes to william dubie, editor, _synapse_, 150a ayer road, shirley, massachusetts 01464. also, submissions can be sent to compuserve account 71571,3323. payment is in copies. 10)============================================================== athanor (a new journal) directors: augusto ponzio and claude gandelman. published by bari university (universita degli studi di bari-istituto di filosofia del linguaggio). address 6, via garruba, 70100 bari, itali. price: 35,000 italian lire or their equivalent in dollars for one annual issue sent by airmail to be paid to a.longo editore, via paolo costa 33, 48100 ravenna. postal account 14226484. athanor is published in three languages: french, italian, english and we are always looking for contributions. the first issue on "the work and its meaning" has already appeared. the next issue is on "art and sacrifice/art as sacrific." the contents of the issue on "the work and its meaning" were as follows: emmanuel levinas: the work and its meaning. claude gandelman: le corps comme "signe zero." omar calabrese: il senso nascosto dell'opera. guy scarpetta: warhol ou les ruses du sens. angela biancofiore: l'opera e il metodo. graham douglas: signification, metaphor and molecules. alain j.j. cohen: du narcisssisme electronique. rachele chiurco: grammatiche dell'immaginazione. carlo pasi: il senso della fine. nasos vagenas: de profundis di rodokanakis. luigi di sirro: grafie. luigi ruggiero: del movimento e della flessibilita. dialogo con iannis kounellis. the next issue on "sacrifice" contains texts by gandelman, naomi greene (ucsbarbara.ca) on the cinema of pasolini. mikhal friedman on "sacrifice" by tarkovski. marc lebot on "modern art as sacrificial ritual." georges roque on modern art and louis marin on baroque painting... and many others... 11)============================================================== 0101010101010101010 e-mail a pegasus suephil 101010101010101 apc peg:suephil r uucp suephil@peg.pegasus.oz.au 01010101010 dialcom (de3peg)suephil! t 1010101 s 010 snail mail n po box 429 1010101 eastwood 5063 e south australia 01010101010 t 101010101010101 e l e c t r o n i c n e t w o r k creative communication . r rrrr eeee v v i eeee w w rr r ee ee v v i ee ee w ww w r eeeee v v i eeeee w w w w r ee v i ee w w r eeee . i eeee . . an australian magazine dedicated to comptemporary cross cultural, arts & electronic networking issues. --------------------------------------------------------------- december 9, 1990 volume 2 : number 2 --------------------------------------------------------------- editors: phillip bannigan, susan harris editorial policy ---------------artsnet review is a bimonthly magazine. this magazine is free to be copied. to get on our mailing list just email to our above address [note: the uucp address is recommended for those on bitnet and internet--eds.] contributions on any arts issues welcome contributors to supply for inclusion with their article an introduction of themselves, including information on their background / discipline/s. 12)============================================================== ************************************************************ *** eff news #1.00 (december 10, 1990) *** *** the electronic frontier foundation, inc. *** *** welcome *** ************************************************************ editors: mitch kapor (mkapor@eff.org) mike godwin (mnemonic@eff.org) the eff has been established to help civilize the electronic frontier; to make it truly useful and beneficial to everyone, not just an elite; and to do this in a way that is in keeping with our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication. eff news will present news, information, and discussion about the world of computer-based communications media that constitute the electronic frontier. it will cover issues such as freedom of speech in digital media, privacy rights, censorship, standards of responsibility for users and operators of computer systems, policy issues such as the development of national information infrastructure, and intellectual property. views of individual authors represent their own opinions, not necessarily those of the eff. ************************************************************ *** eff news #1.00: table of contents *** ************************************************************ article 1: who's doing what at the eff article 2: eff current activities fall 1990 article 3: contributing to the eff article 4: cpsr computing and civil liberties project (marc rotenberg, computer professionals for social responsibility) article 5: why defend hackers? (mitch kapor) article 6: the lessons of the prodigy controversy article 7: how prosecutors misrepresented the atlanta hackers ------------------- reprint permission granted: material in eff news may be reprinted if you cite the source. where an individual author has asserted copyright in an article, please contact her directly for permission to reproduce. e-mail subscription requests: effnews-request@eff.org editorial submissions: effnews@eff.org we can also be reached at: electronic frontier foundation 155 second st. cambridge, ma 02141 (617) 864-0665 (617) 864-0866 (fax) usenet readers are encouraged to read this publication in the moderated newsgroup comp.org.eff.news. unmoderated discussion of topics discussed here is found in comp.org.eff.talk. this publication is also distributed to members of the mailing list eff@well.sf.ca.us. 13)============================================================== seminar/symposium on problems of affirmation in cultural theory october 4-6, 1991 the society for critical exchange will sponsor an intensive seminar/symposium on "problems of affirmation in cultural theory," oct. 4-6, at case western reserve university in cleveland, ohio. persons interested in participating should contact either david downing (english, indiana univ. of pennsylvania) or james sosnoski (english, miami univ. of ohio). 14)============================================================== announcing kids-91 schools, teachers, parents, and others interested in children in the age group 10 15 are invited to help out with kids-91. the project aims at having children participate in a global dialog from now and until may 12 1991. some of it will be electronic--for those who have access to modems and computers --some of it will be by mail or in other forms. we want to collect the childrens' responses to these questions: 1) who am i? 2) what do i want to be when i grow up? 3) how do i want the world to be better when i grow up? 4) what can i do now to help this come true? we want them to draw or in other creative ways "illustrate" themselves in their future role/world. the responses will be turned into an exhibition that will be sent back to the children of the world. by mid-january 1991 responses have been received from japan, australia, india, israel, norway, finland, ussr, latvia, the united kingdom, czechoslovakia, spain, argentina, brazil, the united states and canada. the responses are available for educators and others through the archives of the discussion list kids-91@vm1.nodak.edu. there is also a discussion list for participating kids. to subscribe to the discussion list, send e-mail to listserv@vm1.nodak.edu (or listserv@ndsuvm1 on bitnet) with the body or text of the message containing the command sub kids-91 yourfirstname yourlastname for more information, contact odd de presno, project director at opresno@ulrik.uio.no 15)============================================================== magazine an electronic hotline/conference moderated by professor david abrahamson new york university center for publishing interested individuals are invited to participate in an electronic conference, magazine hotline, addressing the journalistic/communicative/economic/technological issues related to magazine publishing. though magazine's primary focus is journalistic, it also addresses other magazine-publishing matters of economic (management, marketing, circulation, production, research), technological, historical and social importance. in sum, magazine explores the history, current state and future prospects of the american magazine. among the topics included are: magazine editorial trends and practices; journalistic and management norms in magazine publishing; evolving magazine technologies (those currently in use and new ones envisioned); the economics of magazine publishing, including the economic factors influencing magazine content; the history of magazines; the role of magazines in social development; educational issues related to teaching magazine journalism; "laboratory" magazineproject concepts and resources; and studies and research exploring the issues above. the conference is edited and moderated by professor david abrahamson of new york university's center for publishing, where he teaches the editorial segments of the nyu management institute graduate diploma course in magazine publishing and the executive seminar in magazine editorial management. prof. abrahamson is also the president of plexus research/editorial consultants, a management consulting firm, and the author of two teaching texts, "the magazine writing workbook" and "the magazine editing workbook." the magazine hotline began discussion on october 1, 1990. magazine journalism educators, scholars and students, magazine publishing professionals and other individuals interested in magazine issues are encouraged to participate. the magazine hotline is sponsored by new york university's center for publishing and comserve (the online information and discussion service for the communication discipline). those interested in participating in magazine can subscribe by either: (a) sending an interactive message to comserve@rpiecs with the following command: subscribe magazine first_name last_name (example:) subscribe magazine mary smith (b) sending this same command (with no other punctuation or words) in the message portion of an electronic mail message addressed to either: comserve@rpiecs (bitnet) comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu (internet) the moderator of the magazine hotline, david abrahamson, may be contacted at: internet: abrahamson@acfcluster.nyu.edu bitnet: abrahamson@nyuacf.bitnet voice: (212) 689-5446 fax: (212) 689-1088 mci-mail: 3567652@mcimail.com usps: 165 east 32, ny ny 10016 for more information about comserve, send an interactive message or electronic mail message to comserve@rpiecs containing the word "help" (without quotation marks). for other questions about how to subscribe to the hotline, send an electronic mail message to comserve's editors at support@rpiecs or write to: comserve, dept. of language, literature & communication, rensselaer polytechnic institute, troy, ny 12180. 16)============================================================== call for papers literature, computers and writing: the advancement of learning in the high school and college english classroom april 19,1991 the fourth annual computers and english conference for high school and college teachers of writing sponsored by the program in english new york institute of technology the 1991 conference on literature, computers and writing will focus on the shared challenges high school and college english teachers face teaching literature and composition in a computer environment. the conference has two primary lines of inquiry: * how are the english studies canon and curriculum changing in response to computerized learning? * how should we design projects for collaborative learning in literature, computers and writing between high schools or between high schools and colleges to share pedagogical resources and methods? in addition to keynote addresses the conference supports presentations which can be either demonstrations of exercises (no longer than five minutes) that work well in the english classroom or arguments (ten to fifteen minutes long) that explain or justify a philosophy or method for a particular classroom practice. please submit a brief abstract detailing your demonstration or argument. panel discussions are also welcome. be sure to include your name, high school or college affiliation, address, and daytime phone number. suggested topics: 1. how can computers develop more active readers of literature? 2. how can teaching writing teach literature? 3. how can we use computers to teach literary genre or metaphor? 4. how can we use computers to connect writing to literature? 5. how do computers widen or narrow the concept of literature? 6. how can we use computers to teach the role of audience in literature and writing? 7. how can rhetoric inform the experience of hypermedia? 8. how can speech-act theory apply to hypermedia? 9. how will hypermedia affect the student's understanding of critical consensus? 10. how do computer-based research projects affect students' conception of literary research? 11. how do computers in writing and literature classes change the role of the teacher? 12. how can we use computers to connect high school teachers to high school teachers and/or college teachers? 13. what resources are available to facilitate high school-to-high school and college-to-high school collaboration? 14. how can student collaborative writing, network writing, or talk-writing, be integrated into a literature class? dates for submission of proposals the submission deadline is february 15, 1991. notification of acceptance is march 10, 1991. send proposals and requests for information to department of english new york institute of technology old westbury, new york 11568 attn: ann mclaughlin (516) 686-7557 or r0mill01@ulkyvx.bitnet 72347.2767@compuserve.com rroyar on nyit technet (cosy) 17)============================================================== call for proposals society for literature and science annual conference october 10-13, 1991 montreal international, interdisciplinary organization invites proposals for papers and sessions on any aspect of the conference theme: science and literature - beyond cultural construction possible topics might include: -l'ecriture de la connaissance et la connaissance de l'ecriture -the popular scientific essay -literature as technology -practices in professional life -texts and contexts -disciplinary and interdisciplinary language and values alternative formats -workshops, debates, poster sessions, roundtables, works-in-progress -will be welcomed enthusiastically. deadline for submissions: february 1, 1991 for further information and for submission guidelines, contact: david lux bryant college 450 douglas pike smithfield, ri 02917 bitnet: ldm116 at uriacc 18)============================================================== ii international encounter in the philosophy of language august 04-09, 1991. ii winter institute july 8 to august 3, 1991 universidade estadual de campinas (brazil) the inter-relations between mental and verbal discourse interdisciplinary perspectives c a l l f o r p a p e r s although the greek term "logos" referred both to language and to cognition, suggesting an intimate relationship between them, this relation has been traditionally assumed to be relatively simple: in production, a language-independent train of thought ("mental discourse") is translated (or "encoded") into language ("verbal discourse"); and in reception, verbal discourse is decoded into its appropriate mental counterpart. such a picture of the inter-relations between the two most important of our intellectual activities has been challenged in the course of history on many grounds. most recently, with the development of empirical disciplines such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, semantics, pragmatics, neurophysiology, cognitive anthropology, and others -interested both in language and in mental processes -and with the renewed and intense interest of philosophy in these issues, it is clear that the traditional picture is, to say the least, excessively simplistic. given the complexity of the two activities involved, and the wealth of information on each of them, a proficuous study of their inter-relations can only be the result of a co-operative, multi-disciplinary endeavor. it is the purpose of this encounter to provide a forum for, and thereby to stimulate, such an endeavor. here are some precisions concerning the kind of contributions and topics that the organizers are seeking: 1. by choosing the term `discourse', we intend to stress our interest in processes (mental, verbal), rather than on products. the latter are to be discussed only in so far as they illuminate the former. 2. the focus should be on the inter-relations of mental and verbal discourse, rather than on independent analyses of each. 3. the theme may be envisaged from a number of points of view, varying in aspect, methodology, and level of analysis. the following list is not intended to be exhaustive: methodology: phenomenological description; experimental studies; statistical studies; epistemological analyses;... levels: historical; comparative; metalinguistic; philosophical; pragmatic;... aspects: description and theory; acquisition, development, loss; pathology; neurophysiology; therapy; applications;... any particular kind of mental/verbal interaction can be looked at through the lense of a specific combination of aspect, methodology, and level. for instance, suppose one is interested in the mental/verbal inter-relations involved in the production and understanding of jokes. one can then investigate how such an ability is, say, acquired; one's methodology can be, say, experimental; and one can, say, either investigate only one culture, or else compare the acquisition of the ability across cultures. different combinations of the above points of view are likely to be characteristic of different disciplines, or of various multi-disciplinary combinations, already established or radically new. practical information: 1. deadline for submission of 500 words abstracts, in 4 camera-ready copies: february 28, 1991. 2. address for correspondence: international encounter in the philosophy of language cle/unicamp c.p. 6133 13081 campinas sp brazil e-mail (bitnet): eifl@bruc.ansp.br 3. fees: u$ 40.00 if paid until if paid until march 15, 1991 u$ 80.00 if paid after if paid after march 16, 1991 4. official languages: portuguese, spanish and english . 5. winter institute: there will be a winter institute, prior to the encounter, for graduate students and faculty. this consists of up to six one-month intensive courses granting graduate credits. a list of the courses will be available early in 1991. faculty will include well-known foreign and local researchers in fields related to the theme of the encounter. fellowships for brazilian and latin-american students are being negotiated with financing agencies. 6. invited scholars: so far, the following foreign scholars have agreed to participate as plenary lecturers: james higginbotham (mit), yorick wilks (computing research laboratory, las cruces, new mexico), stephen stich (rutgers), john perry (stanford university), humberto maturana (universidad de chile), frantisek danes (czechoslovak academy of sciences). yorick wilks, frantisek danes and james higginbotham will also teach graduate courses during the winter institute. 7. organizing committee: marcelo dascal, chair edson francozo, secretary claudia t. g. de lemos eduardo r. j. guimaraes itala l. d'ottaviano rodolfo ilari, winter institute (director) please, fill in the form below and mail it as soon as possible. ----------------------cut here ------------------------------ registration form (fill in with block letters) name:____________________________________________________________ street address:___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ country:___________________________________________________ check those which apply: __ i will contribute a paper. title: ______________________ ________________________________________________________ __ i will not contribute a paper, but will attend the encounter. __ i wish to attend the winter institute. __ i would like to receive further information as soon as available. __ included is cheque no.____________for us $_________. ----------------------cut here ------------------------------ send the registration form to: international encounter in the philosophy of language cle/unicamp c.p. 6133 13081 campinas sp brazil e-mail (bitnet): eifl@bruc.ansp.br you can send your registration through e-mail. in this case, append your 500-word abstract to the e-mail message. an acknowledgement will be forwarded within a week's time. please, print and post 19)============================================================== programme of postmodernist postmortem (held on january 2, 1991) claude gandelman. introductory words on the subject: "various interpretations of the postmodernist concept... is there an "after"? david gurevitch (philosophy, bar ilan university):"postmod: rejection of ideology and rejection of the 'avant-garde' conception". mikhal friedmann (tel-aviv university)"postmodernist cinema: from godard to godard". dagan moshli (aechitecture department, the israel institute of technology technion): "the postmod-deconstructivist transition". sanford sheymann (curator of the university gallery):"on a postmod painter: robert yarbur". claudine elnekaveh (haifa university). "postmodernist theater in spain". the afternoon session was devoted to two round-tables: 1. roundtable session around the book of brian mchale (porter institute, tel-aviv university):post-modernist fiction. brian mchale answered the numerous questions that mainly focused on two main problems: his division of fiction into ontological types and epistemological types; and his concept of "breaking the ontological frames" as a characteristic of postmod devices. 2. the second round-table was devoted to the state of postmodernism in french letters. according to jacqueline michel (haifa university) none of the contemporary leading french poets use the term "postmodern" though some of them seem to be heavily under the influence of postmodernist american poetry. sylvio yeshuah (tel-aviv univ.) evoked the "non finito" component in postmodernism and the relation between postmod literature and "the fragment". david mendelson (tel-aviv university) evoked the bible as the source of specific postmodernist games with typography. 20)============================================================== sessions on science, knowledge, and technology at the southwestern social science association annual meetings in san antonio, texas. dates for the meetings are march 27 30, 1991. scientific knowledge: construction, selection, and deconstruction chair: raymond a. eve, university of texas at arlington 1. "information technology as instantiation of cultural knowledge." brian moore, university of texas at dallas. 2. "knowledge as metaphor." gretchen sween, university of texas at dallas. 3. "the selection and ordering of knowledge." john pester. university of texas at dallas. 4. "some social implications of chaos theory." alex argyros, university of texas at dallas. discussant: alex argyros, university of texas at dallas scientice and legitimation: some critical perspectives chair: larry stern, collin co. community college 5. "the autonomous scientific authority of an unorthodox theory about aids." christopher p. toumey. north carolina state university. 6. "the cultural basis of american medical technology: implications for health care." kathryn j. luchok, university of north carolina at chapel hill. 7. "cultural risk: an analysis of the social implications of biotechnology." will d. boggs, the university of texas at austin. 8. "the reception of extrodinary scientific claims." larry stern, collin co. community college. 9. "departmental structure and scientific productivity." thomas k. pinhey, cal poly state university and michael d. grimes, lsu. discussant: raymond a. eve, university of texas at arlington 21)============================================================== note on unc press fire the staff of the university of north carolina press greatly appreciates the many expressions of support following the fire that destroyed our office building on december 5. fortunately, no one was injured, and although we lost a great deal of press history, we can now report that all books on the spring 1991 list will be published on time. it is not surprising that, hearing news of the fire, many are concerned about the future of the press. despite the loss of our office building, we are in remarkably good shape. we have saved many paper and electronic files; our contracts are safe; our warehouse inventory was not involved in in the fire. and unc press editors and marketing staff were at our december book exhibits at the aha, mla, and aia/apa as usual. rebuilding our office building will take a number of months. in the interim, while we are housed in our temporary offices, you can reach us at the same telephone and fax numbers--and at the same mailing address. thank you for your good wishes. we have lost a building, but the university of north carolina press itself is very much in business, functioning well, and publishing award-winning books. the university of north carolina press david perry po box 2288 editor chapel hill, nc 27515 carlos@ecsvax 919-966-3561 carlos@uncecs.edu 919-966-3829 (fax) 1-800-848-6224 (orders) ----------------------------------------------------------------sokolik, 'review of _forked tongues_', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-sokolik-review.txt review of _forked tongues_ by m.e. sokolik <e305ms@tamvm1> texas a&m university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by m.e. sokolik, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without the express written consent of the author and advance notification of the editors. review of _forked tongues: speech, writing & representation in north american indian texts_, by david murray. indiana up, 1991. [1] the _dictionary of americanisms_ states that the phrase "forked tongue" is "used in imitation of indian speech, to mean a lying tongue, a false tongue." thus, the choice of _forked tongues_ as a title for this volume is particularly apt, as the author examines the native american "voice" as it is represented and misrepresented in various texts. [2] each chapter reads as a fairly autonomous essay, and treats a specific question. chapter 1, "translation," briefly addresses some of the perceptions and problems with the task of translation. also illustrated are the ideologies inherent in the various attitudes towards translation, within their historical settings. the author argues that the power relationships that existed at different points in time between white and native are borne out in these changing attitudes toward translation. picking up this thread of reasoning, chapter 2, "language," examines several discussions of native american language, in particular the nineteenth century beliefs about "primitive" languages. [3] the third chapter, "indian speech and speeches," shows how the beliefs of various times influenced the representation of native american speeches. foremost is the concept of the "noble savage," and the popularity of "surrender and protest speeches" by native americans. for example, murray points out that in robert rogers' _ponteach: or the savages of america_ (1766), when pontiac is "confronted by swindling whites, he asserts his independence and nobility in iambic pentameters" (37). [4] the next chapter, "christian indians: samson occom and william apes," discusses primarily the letters of these two men, and their relationships with their white benefactors, as well as their native and white audiences. murray here resumes a piece of his earlier argument regarding power relationships between natives and whites. rather than seeing these native-authored letters as more "authentic" expressions of the individual voice, he points out that anything published at the time (or even now?) was "likely to reflect the tastes of a white audience, and conform to a large extent to what at least some of them thought . . . was appropriate for an indian to write" (57). [5] the fifth chapter, "autobiography and authorship: identity and unity," points out that most early autobiographies written by natives were typically collaborations, rather than a solo work of self-expression. this collaboration involved the subject, the editor or anthropologist, and often another native american acting as translator. the result then, he argues, is a multi-voiced product. although the anthropologist typically has tried to play down his or her own role in the transmission of the text, it is here that we are faced with the eternal paradox of objectivity in reporting. he also examines several more modern autobiographies, and how they fit into various social and political "movements," for example, the reprinting of _black elk speaks_ in the 1960s, in response to "the growing counter-cultural predilection for the irrational, supernatural and primitive [which] led to an increasing interest in, and idealisation of, indian culture. _black elk speaks_ seemed to offer ecological awareness, mind expanding visions and an indictment of white american civilisation. . . ." (72). [6] the next chapter, "grizzly woman and her interpreters," looks at the representation of myth within ethnography by focusing on the myth of grizzly woman. murray here examines the various analyses done by boas, levi-strauss, hymes, and so forth, and how they fit into a "model of cultural and interpretive totality, and of rhetorical strategies in the making of ethnographic texts" (4). in this chapter as well, the author looks at, from various points of view, the methodologies of collecting and reporting field data and how they were shaped by ideology. on the one hand is melville jacobs' criticism of his mentor, boas. jacobs felt that because boas did not pursue theory, he had failed to collect "many necessary things" from the field, due to a "lack of concern with devising fresh scientific procedures. . . ." (110). on the other hand, we have james clifford presenting levi-strauss' impulse with collecting and translating as "a way of rediscovering a lost totality" (123). [7] finally, in "dialogues and dialogics," the author examines the potential utility of dialogical anthropology to unify the various threads of the book, in particular the interplay between language and power. an interesting aspect of this final chapter is murray's discussion of the writings of castaneda. he questions the fact that castaneda is rarely cited in academic discussions of dialogic texts, and answers his own question by saying one obvious answer is that, for all the talk of fiction, there is throughout postmodern anthropology an implicit assumption that fiction only operates within a text already authorised as ethnography and therefore as non-fiction, and that there are professional and unstated parameters of behaviour, which castaneda has violated. (155) [8] overall, this book presents a challenge to the reader. it is extremely interdisciplinary, and only those with a sophisticated knowledge of anthropology from boas to bakhtin, linguistics, and post-modern literary theory will be able to fully appreciate the various arguments presented herein. nonetheless, for the reader interested in native american texts, and how these texts fit into a complex patchwork of changing historical ideologies, it is an important contribution. [9] reading this book brought to mind the character of dr. munday, the anthropologist in paul theroux's _black house_. unknowingly reflecting many of the themes of _forked tongues_, theroux says of munday, ". . . he had his biases. he would risk what errors of judgment were unavoidable in such circumstances and write as a man who had lived closely with an alien people; his responses would be as important as the behavior that caused those responses. he had entered the culture and assisted in practices whose value he saw only as an active participant; witchcraft and sorcery had almost brought him to belief in those early years because he had been more than a witness. . . ." then, munday, considering his role as the ethnographer emeritus, muses, anthropology the most literate of the sciences, whose nearest affinity was the greatest fiction, had degenerated to impersonal litanies of clumsy coinages and phrases of superficial complexity, people of flesh and bone to cases or subjects with personalities remaining as obscure as their difficult names, like the long latin one given the pretty butterfly. he did not use those words. [10] as a postscript, i must wonder why the author (and indeed, the editor and press) chose to use the word "indian" as the terminology of choice for the native american. this choice is particularly curious given the quotation from william apes, found on page 58 of murray's book, who wonders the same thing about the use of this term in 1831: i have often been led to inquire where the whites received this word, which they so often threw as an opprobrious epithet at the sons of the forest. i could not find it in the bible, and therefore concluded, that it was a word imported for the special purpose of degrading us. at other times i thought it was derived from the term in-gen-uity. but the proper term which ought to be applied to our nation to distinguish it from the rest of the human family is that of 'natives'--and i humbly conceive that the natives of this country are the only people under heaven who have a just title to the name, inasmuch as we are the only people who retain the original complexion of our father adam. nowhere in the text is the choice of "indian" explained or defended. in a volume that so carefully examines the issue of native american "voice" it is a bit of a shame that the author didn't listen more carefully to this still timely plea from apes. o'sullivan, 'satanism scare', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-o'sullivan-satanism.txt the satanism scare by gerry o'sullivan university of pennsylvania copyright (c) 1991 by gerry o'sullivan, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) [1] the satanism scare has spawned its share of rumor panics over the last several years. this past halloween, fundamentalist and evangelical pastors across the country fed faxes to one another about an international convocation of satanists allegedly held in washington, d.c. in september. the gathering--or so self-described experts claimed--was intended to allow devil-worshippers from around the world to meet in order to further the downfall of christendom, intensify the war on family values, and to continue consolidation of their stranglehold on government. [2] based upon the dubious assertions of one self-styled former satanist, hezekiah ben aaron, the rumor achieved widespread currency. pat robertson made mention of the meeting on his "700 club," usa today reported both on the tale and the christian countermeasures, and one california based ministry used it in a fundraising letter. [3] while the infernal ingathering never occurred, it did produce a flurry of counterfeit documents. detailed day-to day schedules of events were photocopied and circulated among church leaders, complete with reports of satanic weddings and baptisms. christians across the country convened to wage a prayerful campaign of "spiritual warfare" against the perceived evildoers. and the complete lack of evidence regarding the convention was received as still further proof of the cunning of the conspirators, always able to successfully cover their hoofprints. [4] several such "panics"--usually far more localized--have had tragic results. several churches with largely black congregations have been vandalized or set ablaze when word spread that parishioners were, in actuality, practicing satanic rites behind closed doors. preschools have been emptied of children by parents fearful that teachers were "ritually abusing" their charges. timothy hughes of altus, oklahoma murdered his wife after watching the now notorious 1988 geraldo special on satanism, convinced that she was a devil-worshipper. and armed mobs in upstate new york threatened to assault punks who had gathered at a warehouse for a hardcore concert, fearing that they were "really" assembling to sacrifice a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child to lucifer. [5] a handful of folklorists have tracked such regional rumor panics, finding startlingly similar patterns from case to case. one constantly recurring theme concerns the racial identity of the satanists' "intended victim." the ideal offering, at least according to popular mythology, is a young and virginal child--always white, always fair-haired, always blue-eyed. jeffrey victor, a sociologist at jamestown community college (jamestown was the location of the new york warehouse scare cited above), has collected hundreds of such stories from across the country, all with this theme at its center. and in each case, the racial component is key. the unseen and vaguely identified satanist is therefore defined as desiring his or her other- the pure and virginal as opposed to the dark and contaminated. the binarism is assumed, and the selfhood of the devil-worshipper is automatically constituted, through its ritualized desire, by inversion. [6] for instance, in the wake of the matamoros affair, when the bodies of a university of texas student and the murdered rivals of a drug-running gang were found buried on a mexican ranch, daycare centers along the tex-mex border were rife with rumors that "mexican satanists" were planning to storm south texas towns in retaliation for arrests in the case--an occult twist on the myth of the brown invading horde. and said devil-worshippers were again in search of blue-eyed, fair-haired children from surrounding communities. [7] central to the satanism scare is a specific social (and, as we've seen, racial) fantasy of the family. mythical satanists allegedly prey upon infants, young children, and pets--threshold figures and "weak links" in the household. once abducted, the child, cat or dog is offered as a sacrifice during some sexually-charged, moonlit rite. but the victim is never simply slaughtered. in the lore of pop satanism, its body must be cannibalized and its blood consumed by the "coven" of devil-worshippers in order to allow for a transfer of power. [8] but the family is threatened from within as well as from without. while both children and pets are seen as satanic quarry, adolescents are depicted as ideal candidates for membership in such cults. teenagers are cast as potential and unwitting dupes of cult leaders, properly socialized for the requisite ritual violence by the icons of their culture --heavy metal, hardcore and neo-gothic music, "occult" jewelry, black clothing, and saturday morning cartoons which--as some pastors and christian activists allege--are covertly training children in satanically inspired, "new age" thinking. [9] in all of this, the teenager is never described as an agent, possessed of volition. rather, feeling disempowered, the adolescent is said to seek out power "from below" (but through necromancy rather than, say, insurgency). his or her choice is never, however, seen as a simple act of willful defiance or resistance. it is conditioned by a kind of devious social programming which, in its way, parodies both consumerism and marketing. [10] the typical teenager, or so the professional lore of the satanologist has it, goes to his or her local music store to buy the latest judas priest, dio, or king diamond release. little does he or she know, however, that certain tracks have been "backmasked" with demonic messages which are intended to engender devil-worship, mayhem, suicide and murder (usually of parents). there's a kind of truth-in advertising problem here--kids aren't getting what they pay for. and once so hooked, they move on to ritual cannibalism, itself a fantasy of consumption gone wild. [11] hundreds of professional training manuals on satanism and "occult-related crime" have appeared over the past several years, aimed at police officers, pastors, school administrators and psychologists. and in most cases, adolescent behavior of the most typical varieties is described as satanic or "pre-occultic." kids who question traditional religion or refuse to attend church, act rebelliously, meditate, or dress in black are, according to several checklists, automatically suspect. adolescence is itself demonized as something wild, dark and uncontrollable. [12] based upon incorrect information in such training manuals, schools in kentucky, florida and california--among others--have banned the wearing of peace symbols on t-shirts or in jewelry because it is, in reality, the satanic "cross of nero"--a broken and inverted cross used by the "pagan" romans (and later the nazis) to mock christianity. this is an old right-wing canard originally promulgated by louis pauwels and jacques bergier in _the morning of the magicians_, later picked up and circulated by "former satanic high priest," mike warnke, in a wildly popular little anti-occult book called _the satan seller_. unfortunately, this piece of folklore has appeared and reappeared in police guides over the years. [13] likewise, one high school principal in annapolis, maryland sent letters home to the parents of black-clad teens, warning that their sons and daughters might very well be involved in devil-worship and advising them to search rooms and bookbags for other tell-tale signs of occult dabbling. anyone wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of a metal band was also picked out of the cafeteria line-up by the vigilant principal, to be later reported to parents. unfortunately, some families have taken the satanic panic one step further, sending their children off to "de metalizing" and "de-satanizing" camps for "treatment" at the hands of fundamentalist pastors. centers with names like "back in control" and "motivations unlimited" have been established to forcibly deprogram the would-be teen satanist. [14] the satanism scare is "about" several things, among them: the demonization of adolescent behavior through folkloric and often lurid accounts of bloodletting, cannibalism and sex; a struggle over the constitution of knowledge elites (the satanologist--usually a self-described cult cop or pastor--versus "professional" educators and psychologists who may be skeptical of their claims: it's no coincidence that most so-called cult cops are professing christians and members of groups like cops for christ); and the ideological reinstitution of the family as racially pure, intact, and continually threatened from without by dark and hooded people emerging from the shadows to steal "our" tow-headed children. combined with forged documents modelled upon the protocols of the elders of zion, fears of bloodthirsty invaders from the south, and tales which simply reiterate the medieval blood libel, the fear of satanism seems to point in several different, and very dangerous, directions. [15] the satanic panic combines the worst of several scares peculiar to the eighties--terrorism, secular humanism, drugs and child-kidnapping--to frame a largely christian, populist critique of mass cultural forms. but its analyses remain mired in conspiracy thinking, racism, eschatological anticipation, and the displacement of what are primarily familial ills (child abuse and incest) onto highly secretive and hooded outsiders. yudice, 'feeding the transcendent body', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-yudice-feeding.txt feeding the transcendent body by george yudice cuny, hunter college copyright (c) 1990 by george yudice, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). to eat is to appropriate by destruction; it is at the same time to be filled up with a certain being.... when we eat we do not limit ourselves to *knowing* certain qualities of this being through taste; by tasting them we appropriate them. taste is assimilation.... the synthetic intuition of food is in itself an assimilative destruction. it reveals to me the being which i am going to make my flesh. henceforth, what i accept or what i reject with disgust is the very being of that existent.... it is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential signification of these foods. generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. they all represent a certain appropriate choice of being. jean-paul sartre^1^ [1] at first glance, it seems unlikely that contemporary u.s. culture can offer a gastrosophy to match that of other civilizations. brillat-savarin's (and feuerbach's) adage, "you are what you eat," does not throb today with metaphysical significance as it did scarcely two generations ago for sartre. in the united states, it is indeed a matter of indifference "whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp"; much of the lower priced seafood today is made from other processed fish. consequently, the differences between particular foods are less important; what really matters is taste itself, laboratory produced %flavor%. food as substance gives way to the simulacrum of flavor, which is something that "science" recombines in ever new ways to seduce us to this or that convenience food. as synthetic food replaces sartre's "synthetic intuition of food," we find it impossible to transcend the brute "facticity" of eating, which is ironically as fake as it is real. we eat substances (the "real") yet we do not %know% them as such but as simulations (the "fake"). [2] the portrait i've drawn here obviously calls for a reference to baudrillard, which will come in due time. first, however, it is necessary to reflect a bit more on the changes wrought by the transition to simulation in our (seemingly) most immediate experience: eating. anthropologists have explained in great detail how entire civilizations defined themselves allegorically through their eating practices. inclusion or exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices. consequently, the metaphysics of most groups is conveyed by these practices. this inscription conditions, for example, how people understand divinity. for the greeks of hesiod's %theogony%, the rituals of sacrificial cooking and eating, paralleled in agricultural, funereal and nuptial practices, establish a communication between mortals and immortals which paradoxically expresses their incommensurability. in contrast, the orphic anthropogony makes possible the mystical transcendence of the barrier between gods and humans by rejecting the sacrifice of the official religion. by refusing this sacrifice, by forbidding the bloodshed of any animal, by turning away from fleshy food to dedicate themselves to a totally "pure" ascetic life--a life also completely alien to the social and religious norms of the city--men would shed all the titanic elements of their nature. in dionysus they would be able to restore that part of themselves that is divine.^2^ [3] since mystical transcendence usually involves some relation to eating--or not eating, as in the orphic cult--it is interesting to ask what are the possibilities of such transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals. the mystic engages in a struggle whose reward is nourishing grace. as saint teresa says, the soul "finds everything cooked and eaten for it; it has only to enjoy its nourishment."^3^ in our consumer culture, however, such convenience food comes to most of us without the struggle. unlike the mystic--who is "like a man who has had no schooling...and [yet] finds himself, without any study, in possession of all living knowledge"--we are not graced by any special knowledge. without negativity--sartre's "appropria[tion] by destruction"- there is no transcendence. and negativity is precisely what gives the orphics and mystics like saint teresa- often taken as heretics by orthodoxy--a feeling of *power* which makes them "master of all the elements and of the whole world."^4^ transcendence, in these cases, is closely related to contestatory social movements which attempted to invert the power differential between the dominant and the subaltern. [4] the experiences of people (mostly women) with eating disorders today seems to contradict the argument that there are no longer any practices of negativity. in fact, on the basis of power reversals similar to the ones claimed by mystics, contemporary theorists/practictioners of %ecriture% have rediscovered--and extended to the anorectic--the prototype of an "herethics" beyond the dominant order of things,^5^ or a "mysterique" (fusion of mystic and hysteric) who carves out her own space of enunciation within western discourse.^6^ following this latter analogy, the mystic's relationship to the inquisitor would be like that of the hysteric before the psychoanalyst who seeks to extract her secrets for the benefit of his doctrine.^7^ [5] the correlation of mystic/heretic, hysteric and anorectic, however, encounters a serious problem: against what or whom is the anorectic wielding her negativity? endocrinological and other biomedical factors aside, anorexia and other eating disorders are, of course, an expression of gender struggle in our society.^8^ but that does not explain everything; if that were the case, we could expect all the victims of patriarchy to suffer from eating disorders. it seems to me that the issue of control is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the negativity of the anorectic (or the bulimic or the obese woman). class and/or gender analysis is not enough to account for all questions of subjectivity and desire. we are all constrained but some of us go on to become mystics or anorectics. why? in the most suggestive essay i have read on the topic, sohnya sayres argues that some of us are more sensitive to the limitless loss brought on by the shrinking of experience. as in mystical experience, the loss becomes the point of departure for the will to greatness and glory, to empowerment: it is glory that these body-loss-obsessed men and women seek, in making themselves "lost," rapacious glory in society constraining them in rituals around limitless loss. they externalize the return of the repressed in this society which, more than others, is rationalized around the ledger sheets and the accountants of gain, whose most serious intonations are about the "bottom line"--which has remade the "full plate" into the latest idiom for dealing with bad news. one wonders, now, whether the ultimate loss that young people say they are almost sure will be their not too distant future--millennialist, cataclysmic loss--hasn't excited, but sent deeper, those fantasies of messianic rescue lying choked beneath weeds the body imperatives plant in the spirit. fat and anorectic women and men want to be great, in ways unaccountable...unless we accept the enormity of the unaccountable in this society. then, perhaps, the drama of food and the body can be given a storyteller's innovations, that is, when it is released from explanation and accommodation, all that quantifying, into flights of wit and provocation--released, in other words, from a singular, petty, tale of compulsion into one of sacrifice, mortification, and redemption- into a grander delusion, worthy of the person, worthy of hearing about, worthy of transforming.^9^ [6] i have quoted sayres at length because she expresses so well the dialectic of loss and transcendence which baudrillard, in turn, will transform into a paean to banality. baudrillard's hyperreality has no place in it for delusions of grandeur and redemption. or it may be more exact to say that he does acknowledge grandeur, but it is the grandeur of limitless banality. there is no sense, however, of how people suffer and struggle against that banality. in fact, he has taken the figure of the obese/anorectic, in which some feminists situate a radical negation of patriarchy, and cast it as the emblem of a society in which there is no longer any possibility of opposition because everything has been "digest[ed into] its own appearance": this strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat nor the neurotic one of depression. it is neither the compensatory obesity of the underdeveloped nor the alimentary one of the overnourished. paradoxically, it is a mode of disappearance for the body. the secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. the secret form of the mirror, by which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism. no more limits, no more transcendence: it is as if the body was no longer opposed to an external world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.^10^ [7] like the social systems in which we live, which are "bloated with information" and deprived of significance, baudrillard's obscene obese/anorectic body has lost the "principle of law or measure" that once supported it. its meanings and representations have also transmuted into metastatic self-replication. history is now seen as a succession of devourments which, along with ideology and politics, reach a saturation point that knows no limits; metastasis encompasses everything, nothing is at odds with it, nothing can transcend it. and as every condition has its symptomatic figuration, baudrillard's obscene hyperreality finds its "perfect confirmation and ecstatic truth" in the obscene body, which "instead of being reflected, captures itself in its own magnifying mirror."^11^ [8] europe has long served as the proscenium for the death of the subject and history; the allegory of the death of life could have no other setting, of course, than the united states, home of those exemplary killers of experience: fast food, safe sex and genetic engineering. i would like to talk about an anomaly--that fascinating obesity, such as you find all over the u.s., that kind of monstrous conformity to empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.^12^ [9] in the grand allegorical tradition, baudrillard offers us a new reading of the body-as-microcosm-of the-world. this body is not a temple, nor a machine, nor a holistic organism. it is the obscene body without order, whose cells have gone rampant in "cancerous metasteses" that parallel the useless flow of information in the postmodern world. if disease was once interpreted as *lesion* (the body as machine model) or as *adaptive response to stress* (the organic model),^13^ baudrillard's *viral* analogy construes it as coextensive with "life." it is, however, a life with no rhyme or reason other than the momentum/inertia of self-replication: "quite simply, there is no life any longer [...] but the information and the vital functions continue."^14^ [10] the body registers the "useless and wasteful exhaustion" of all systems in the figure of the obese (satiation) and/or the anorectic (inertia). on this view, the obese and the anorectic are neither the victims of some accident whose results can be reversed by altering a body part ("removing portions of the stomach or intestine so that only small amounts of food could be eaten or digested") nor the adaptation to stressful "environmental factors (exercise habits, self-image, personal relationships, work pressures, etc.)."^15^ they are, rather, the embodiment of permanent crisis: inflation, overproduction, unemployment, nuclear threat, %anomaly%, to sum up. [11] yes. at first sight, the example seems irrefutable. what better emblem of the empire of the senseless, useless waste of resources than the insatiable obese and anorectics of (north) america, driven to passivity, apathy and indifference by the infinite choice of consummables?^16^ in a very insightful essay in which he mines the contradictions between capitalism and transgression, octavio paz notes that by rigorously applying the norm of the "limitless production of the same," north american society succeeded in coopting the erotic and gastronomic rebellions of the 60s into slogans for the media:^17^ the popular character of the erotic revolt was immediately appreciated by the mass media, by the entertainment and fashion industries. for it is not the churches nor the political parties, but the great industrial monopolies that have taken control of the powers of fascination that eroticism exerts over men. [...] what began as a[n erotic] liberation has become a business. the same has happened in the realm of gastronomy; the erotic industry is the younger sister of the food industry. [...] private business expropriates utopia. during its ascendancy capitalism exploited the body; now it has turned it into an object of advertising. we have gone from prohibition to humiliation.^18^ [12] paz did not fathom the extent to which gastronomy was being appropriated by industry. today it no longer takes a major intellectual to understand that food is subject to the same %image manipulation% as all other commodities. flavor, color, consistency, texture, smell, caloric and nutritional value, even genetic composition are all engineered to seduce each and every consumer. food has, in effect, become a simulacrum which the omnivorous psyche of north america cannot get enough of even at the ever quicker pace of production, preparation and consumption with the ever-accelerating pace of life, the act of eating--once a leisurely undertaking synonymous with pleasure and social interaction--has been reduced to a necessary function not unlike shaving or refueling the car, in the view of food manufacturers, social scientists and others.^19^ [13] the loss which sayres refers to above, is not only the erosion of the supreme experience of transcendence; even the petty pleasure of eating a cheeseburger fades as the milk fat is replaced by vegetable oils (if not a cellulose-based fat substitute) and the grill gives way to the microwave. even the singe marks are painted on the frozen patty. increasingly, we consume in solitude; a recent gallup poll found that only 1/3 of north american adults dine at home in the company of others.^20^ by 1992, cars will come equipped with microwaves so we can consume on our way to and from work.^21^ and moms are now %free% to stay at work as children from two years of age and older pop %my own meals% or %kid cuisine% in the microwave.^22^ [14] "freedom" seems to come so easily, there is no struggle; there isn't even an "other" to struggle against; the values once instilled by preparing our own food and eating together as a family have given way to a new ethos: flip the switch. for baudrillard, we become the simulacra we consume, hostages "of a fate that is fixed, and whose manipulators we can no longer see."^23^ we are thus levelled to a homogeneous status of victim and perpetrator. none of us and all of us are to blame. a very convenient fiction that furthers the hegemony of those whom he refuses to see. [15] it is hardly a secret that a handful of transnational corporations--general foods, nestle, monsanto, r.j. reynolds, etc.--control agribusiness, from production to shipping, processessing, distribution and marketing. it is no secret that this control puts those "disappeared" others who produce what we consume in the most onerous of conditions- twelve hours of work for a couple of dollars in central america--in a situation which has been getting worse under the reagan and bush administrations. nor is it a secret that people here in the united states are also going hungry due to increases in prices and the erosion of welfare benefits by inflation and cutbacks.^24^ add to these "secrets" the devastation of the world's natural resources for the ingredients and packaging of fast and convenience foods,^25^ and you get a good sense of the loss, the other side of the simulacrum. [16] baudrillard's allegory is a rather simplistic correlation of digestion and information processing, which permits passing over the intense battles which are currently waged in the medium of the body. the body is not simply the screen on which the rampant exchange of information and images is captured; it is, rather, the battleground in which subjects are constituted, contradictorily desiring and rejecting prescribed representations. baudrillard does not even recognize this struggle; in his hyperreal world there is only conformity, an unproblematic consensus in which not only consumers but even terrorists collaborate. [17] since, for baudrillard, experience has disappeared his allegorical viral body is raceless, classless, genderless, ageless; it has no identity factors. consequently, and contrary to the reported experience of most people, it is not shaped by the ways particular social formations interpellate specific bodies through these factors. the struggle of women against what kim chernin has called the "tyranny of slenderness" is a good example of how some bodies and not others are made to incarnate certain social contradictions on the basis of gender.^26^ obesity and anorexia, then, do not correlate so much with the self-replication of information but rather with the *control* of bodies. in the united states, control of the body by means of "idealizing" representations (consumerism and the media) and ever more frequently through outright coercion and the interdiction of counterrepresentations (the conservative offensive) have pretty much replaced prior forms of maintaining hegemony. for susie orbach, the anorectic's "hunger strike" is a metaphor for this struggle of representation.^27^ but this is a struggle to which baudrillard seems quite indifferent; in his view, we have already lost and there is no way of transforming that loss into the "grander delusion" of something worthy (sayres). why play the deluded fool that resists the body snatchers; the sooner we yield the sooner we can all enjoy the obscenity. [18] baudrillard bears a resemblance to the confessors of the mystics. they attempted to control the interpretation of the mystics' experiences, differentiating those inspired by god from those inspired by the devil, thus negotiating the mystics' relationship to the church. baudrillard also differentiates between experiences of transcendence ("this is not georges bataille's excessive superfluity") and the %sublime banality% of the hyperreal and hypertelic, which know "no other end than limitless increase, without any consideration of limits."^28^ baudrillard, of course, does not evaluate the experiences in terms of divine/demonic inspiration, but he does clearly valorize the banalization of life by capital-logic, with its concomitant emptying of moral value. as such he embodies jameson's description of the sublime hysteric, hungering after figurations (simulacra) of the *other* of capitalism once nature and being have been eclipsed.^29^ control and limits, nonetheless, continue to be important, even constitutive, for baudrillard because his fascination with obscenity, like all appreciations of sublimity, plays off the point at which limits can no longer be controlled. hence, the body, not figuratively but (hyper)really embodies the world. in becoming image, it matches the mediatedness that *is* the world. [19] in one respect i think that baudrillard has chosen a very apt allegory of sublime banality in the obese/anorectic body. in some sense, women with eating disorders are today's mystics; the ethical substance of their search for transcendence may not be sublime in the conventional sense, but they occupy a privileged space in a world that has depleted its divine incommensurabilities. in other words, today's incommensurability is the representational space of their own bodies, which they struggle to control. most %interpretive% (in contrast to %biomedical%) analyses of eating disorders take a psychoanalytic and/or feminist stance according to which the obese or the anorectic woman strives to manage the double binds of prescriptions of slenderness and consumption, will and abandon to instant gratification. whether these analyses take an essentialist (e.g., kim chernin) or a social constructionist (e.g., susie orbach) approach, they almost exclusively emphasize repression and control. [20] susan bordo summarizes very well the "deeper psycho-cultural anxieties...about internal processes out of control--uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse." bordo posits the bulimic as the embodiment of the "contradictions that make self-management a continual and virtually impossible task in our culture."^30^ the bulimic, she argues, plays out on her body the "incompatible directions" of consumerist temptations and the freedom implied in the virile image of a well-muscled slender body. if consumerism makes the feminine image central to our culture (because of its seductive power, baudrillard would argue),^31^ such that even literary theorists can claim that writing is a subversive feminine activity, it nevertheless requires repressing the very materiality or *essential nature*, as kim chernin puts it, of women's bodies.^32^ for chernin it is repression that transforms the body into an "alien" that may in momentary lapses of control rear its head and return with a vengeance. [21] but clearly it is also the relatively non repressive introjection of images that produces this alienation. in contrast to chernin, i would argue that alienation is not the loss of an essential nature; in an age in which people believe and practice %making themselves over%, the traditional notion of essence becomes absurd. %*it is, rather, a question of remaking not only oneself but even more importantly the social formation that attributes value to the "nature" that we embody*%.^33^ it is this capacity which so many people experience as having been *lost*. sociality can then be understood as the struggle for value, which entails the recognition of diverse "natures" and the social ministration to their needs. elsewhere i have elaborated on how such ministration responds to the struggle over needs interpretation, which is basically a struggle over the representation of our "nature," be it in the form of gender, ethnicity, age, and so on.^34^ [22] on this view, the materiality that defines us need not be understood monolithically as the rejected archaic maternal body which according to kristeva undergirds the radical limit-experience of abjection. it seems to me that the very notion of the archaic is remade in the image of the media. the current "fat taboo" may in fact hark back to the separation process performed by traditional dietary and other ritual prohibitions, although today fat food and fat image are hypostatized in our consciousness: [such prohibitions] keep a being who speaks to his god separated from the fecund mother... [the] phantasmatic mother who also constitutes, in the specific history of each person, the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) %place% and %distinct% object, meaning a signifiable one, so that such a person might learn to speak.^35^ [23] dietary taboos, however, are increasingly becoming a matter of image manipulation. for example, you can still have your cake and eat it too if you're kosher and desire to eat a slice of (simulated) cheesecake after your pastrami on rye at katz's delicatessen, that exemplary custodian of glatt kosher cuisine. taboo only makes a difference if you can have your cake and *not* eat it. does this mean, then, that in a culture of simulation there are no longer ways of distinguishing the abject from the proper object, thus making the will to transcendence irrelevant? rather than accept this premise, it seems preferable to me to explore mary douglas's notion that anxiety around bodily boundaries signals significant social change or crisis. what and how we eat undergirds other kinds of social boundaries (marking off the difference between purity and pollution, inside and outside, etc.). as such, dietary practices function as a support for the cognitive systems by which cultures make sense of the world. they wire, so to speak, the way in which our bodies interface with the media of signification.^36^ this is what kristeva means when she says, in the passage quoted above, that the maternal body archaically establishes radical negativity, which she then goes on to fetishize, in the metaphor of the abyss, as the very condition of speech. but this is to reduce speech to the verbal and practice to negativity, thus privileging avant-gardist practices in the registers of high aesthetics. the recognition of mediation as necessary for our survival does not have to lead, however, to a baudrillardian celebration of the simulacrum: seduction as an invention of stratagems, of the body, as a disguise for survival, as an infinite dispersion of lures, as an art of disappearance and absence, as a dissuasion which is stronger yet than that of the system.^37^ [24] the struggle over representation as i have briefly sketched it out does not fetishize the disguise nor lead one to confuse the high aesthetic appropriation of pop and mass culture with political effectivity. its political value is more complex than the simple play of quotes or intertextuality. it challenges institutional control over images but not by remaining totally within the frame of the institution as, say, in the work of cindy sherman or sarah tuft. in a recent video, _don't make me up_ (1986),^38^ tuft seeks to reframe commercial images of women's bodies variously eating, exercising, courting, etc. by overlaying them with critical comments (e.g., "i just won't buy this pack of lies") and by juxtaposing them with images that give a critical twist to the prescription of thinness, such as photographs of emaciated concentration camp prisoners. the images succeed each other rapidly to the beat of a rap song, a vehicle which should have helped give the video a more contestatory tone. however, due to the blandness of the voice (this is no public enemy) and the too rapid succession of images (which does not leave enough time to register that some of the images run counter to commercial idealizations), the video does not succeed in raising the consciousness of those who aren't already convinced. even the convinced tend to enjoy it for its display of "idealized" bodies and its danceable rhythm. the overall effect is the very opposite of its punch line: "i must get free of the messages being fed to me." with a better sound track, it would not seem out of place on mtv. [25] david cronenberg's _videodrome_ (1983) also flirts with the possibility of resistance to the implosion of reality into media imagery. but the video images which the hero/victim max renn consumes end up consuming him, absorbing him into the image world of video. as head of a small tv station in search for seductive programming, he views a pirated snuff movie which, unbeknownst to him, inoculates him with electronic frequencies that produce a brain tumor that takes control of body and mind. a vagina-like vcr slot opens up in max's abdomen in which video cassettes with behavioral programming are inserted by the agents of videodrome, a transnational corporation engaged in a conspiracy to take control of north america in order to counter the debilitating effects of liberal ways of life. through the video-mediated intervention of professor brian oblivion, a thinly disguised combination of mcluhan and baudrillard, max turns the weapon of his "new flesh" against videodrome. the film ends with max killing off his old flesh and fusing with the "new flesh" of the video monitor, whose screen stretches out like a pregnant belly. professor oblivion's daughter and assistant bianca tells max that he has "become the video word made flesh." mysticism and abjection thus collapse onto the flesh of mediation. [26] despite the evident retaliation which the protagonist carries out, _videodrome_ is less about resistance or rearticulation of society than a baudrillardian celebration of the apocalyptic collapse--or implosion--onto the surface of the image. this implosion, however, does not collapse the conventions of capitalist, patriarchal culture. the hero is the proverbial white middle class male, female figures are portrayed as the usual stereotypes (whore or primal medium-mother), there is no solidary consciousness on the part of the very few racial minorities or otherwise marginal characters, like the homeless man whose begging is facilitated by the "dancing monkey" of a tv monitor on a leash. the closest to a political intervention is professor oblivion's video version of a soup kitchen: the cathode ray mission, where patrons are given a diet of tv frequencies rather than food. they are being prepped, it is suggested, for taking on the "new flesh" of electronic mediation. [27] e. ann kaplan makes a half-hearted attempt to argue for some "progressive" content in _videodrome_.^39^ it is not, for example, typical of mainstream media in presenting the abject in the form of a male body. secondly, the body is made androgynous by the vagina-like slot that opens up in max's belly and the placenta-like covered handgun that he sticks in and out of the slot. as a feminist, kaplan interprets "postmodern discourse of this kind" as an implicit critique of the "horror of technology that deforms all bodies and blurs their gender distinction."^40^ i am not convinced of the contribution to feminism, however, of the positive conclusions which kaplan draws from the androgynizing blurring of distinctions effected by _videodrome_, rock videos and other forms of mass culture: many rock videos have been seen as postmodern insofar as they abandon the usual binary oppositions on which dominant culture depends. that is, videos are said to forsake the usual oppositions between high and low culture; between masculine and feminine; between established literary and filmic genres; between past, present and future; between the private and the public sphere; between verbal and visual hierarchies; between realism and anti-realism, etc. this has important implications for the question of narrative as feminists have been theorizing it, in that these strategies violate the paradigm pitting a classical narrative against an avant-garde anti narrative, the one supposedly embodying complicit, the other subversive, ideologies. the rock video reveals the error in trying to align an aesthetic strategy with any particular ideology, since all kinds of positions emerge from an astounding mixture of narrative/anti-narrative/non-narrative devices.^41^ [28] the hybridity, ambiguity and lack of a "fixed identity" which kaplan and cultural historians of video like roy armes attribute to the medium,^42^ are also terms that kristeva has used to describe the abject. they both are about "the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders."^43^ in this sense, cronenberg's _videodrome_ is not so much a metaphor or allegory of the abject but rather the cinematic demonstration that experience is the consumption of media, that the body of mediation is the body of the real ("whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it," says professor oblivion). if the reality of mediation in _videodrome_ is its embodiment in "uncontrollable flesh," for kristeva the blurring of the corporeal limits established by food, waste, and signs of sexual differentiation produces "uncontrollable materiality." in both cases there is an avowal of the death drive ("to become the new flesh [of mediation] first you have to kill off the old [demarcated] flesh," bianca says to max) and a disruption of identity ("i don't know where i am now. i'm having trouble finding my way around," says max). [29] this dissolution of identity, furthermore, takes place for kristeva in relation to the mother's body, the "place of a splitting," "a threshold where `nature' confronts `culture'."^44^ in _videodrome_, max's dissolution (which is concomitant to the vaginal stigmata that opens up in his belly) and his transformation into the "new flesh" take place in the medium of video, a body on which viewers "gorge themselves" and with which max fuses in an inverse birth (i.e., when he sticks his head into the "pregnant" tv monitor). in fact, both maternal body and mediation come together in kristeva's positing of the mother as the agency that maps or formats the body and readies it for the mediation that is language. [maternal authority] shapes the body into a %territory% having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. it is a `binary logic,' a primal mapping of the body that i call semiotic to say that, while being the precondition of language, it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that of *linguistic* signs nor of the *symbolic* order they found.^45^ [30] can we call this experience a transcendence? and what does it achieve? if we consider mysticism, we readily see, as in saint teresa's writings, that transcendence is experienced as a freedom which empowers the subject through infinite expansion: when a soul sets out upon this earth, he does not reveal himself to it, lest it should feel dismayed at seeing that its littleness can contain such a greatness; but gradually he enlarges it to the extent requisite for what he has set within it. it is for this reason that i say he has perfect freedom, since he has power to make the whole of this palace great.^46^ but the mystic's experience is not totally determined by a god from the outside. self-mastery through prayer and meditation is the precondition for fashioning a space without which the divinity could have no presentation. perhaps saint teresa's best known claim for the constitutive capacity of the mystic is the metaphor of the silkworm in _the interior castle_. through speech-prayer (_oracion_), the nuns spin their interior dwellings, like the silkworm its cocoon. in language that recalls heidegger's, saint teresa describes these dwellings as the resting place of the nuns, the space of their death. it is also the space of the godhead, the "new [mystic] flesh." saint teresa would seem to be on the verge of heresy here for she claims that it is the nuns who can place or withdraw god at will since it is they who "fabricate the dwelling which is god so that they might live/die in it.^47^ "[the lord] becomes subject to us and is pleased to let you be the mistress and to conform to your will."^48^ [31] i have brought up the case of saint teresa because, as in _videodrome_, transcendence takes the form of the subject embodying the medium. for both the mystic (saint teresa) and the subject of the "new flesh" (max renn) phenomenality is overcome not by reaching beyond it but by collapsing what would otherwise be the "supersensible idea" of the sublime onto appearance or image itself. the "new flesh" is the collapse of idea and body as medium, a collapse which, in saint teresa's words, provides "free[dom] from earthly things...and master[y] of all the elements and of the whole world."^49^ in saint teresa's case it is not too difficult to understand how the dialectic of freedom and mastery enabled this marginal and subaltern person (woman, "new christian," eccentric) to negotiate a measure of power in a hierarchical and patriarchal society overseen by the all-pervasive scrutiny of the inquisition: you will not be surprised, then, sisters, at the way i have insisted in this book that you should strive to obtain this freedom. is it not a funny thing that a poor little nun of st. joseph's should attain mastery over the whole earth and all the elements?^50^ the influence of st. catherine of siena over popes and monarchs is also well known. through radical fasting both of these saints brought their bodies to extreme states of abjection that resulted in death. but abjection gave them a power over and above representation that the authorities of the inquisition felt obliged to recognize and to channel in ways that did not topple the institution, for both saints were also reformers. [32] can the same be said for either max renn or the anorectics of today? what is their power, if any? can they, like the mystics, transform their abjection into transformative power? i think not. the problem is that the thematics of abject rebellion have been conceived in relation to high art. kristeva's examples--dostoyevsky, lautreamont, proust, artaud, kafka, celine--are not easily transferred to the mass mediated reality of today, say roseanne barr. why is that? [33] in the first place, kristeva's privileged abjects are all (male) avant-gardists and as we know the lynchpin of the avant-garde was to transform life by recourse to an aesthetic modality that had its %raison d'etre% in bourgeois modernity. secondly, since aesthetics is thoroughly commodified as mass culture absorbs it, it can hardly be the means for a transformation of life in the service of emancipation. to collapse idea and body onto medium, then, implies a commodification which is not sufficiently thematized in _videodrome_. can the "new flesh" really be other than commodified flesh? the references to simulated foods in an earlier section of this essay only reinforce the idea that mass mediated simulation is in fact transforming us all into commodified media. the rebellion of the anorectic counters this but only at the cost of dysfunction or death, that is, disembodiment. [34] is there, then, any other politics of representation that can prove more successful? one attempt is the acceptance of the premise that we too are simulations but that we can rearticulate the way we have been constituted. this takes at least two forms: one which continues to accept that an autonomous aesthetics can have an impact on the culture. for example the work of cindy sherman or the sarah tuft's video _don't make me up_. ultimately, i think these are failed attempts not because they work with commodified images but rather because they still accept the confines of aesthetic institutionalization. on the other hand, the aesthetic practices involved in identity formation among ethnic groups and certain social movements like gays and lesbians do not distinguish between the market, the street, the university and the gallery. the work of such groups as act-up and guerrilla girls as well as many other groups working in collaboration with particular constituencies stake out new public spaces for re-embodying media and struggle within and against the dominant media to reconfigure the institutional arrangements of our society. new "safe-sex" videos, for example, attempt to re-eroticize body in an age increasingly defined by a new puritan fundamentalism (which includes the anti abortion movement, reinforced homophobia, and the war on drugs). [35] it is not enough, in the face of this offensive, to reshuffle representations. if this were all to contemporary cultural politics, baudrillard would indeed be correct in understanding any practice as the body "digest[ing] space in its own appearance."^51^ as regards the consumption of food, the age of the counterculture, which saw the emergence of the new social movements, also spawned contestatory movements like fat liberation and the politically motivated vegetarianism of _diet for a small planet_.^52^ warren belasco's history of the food revolution in the past two and a half decades recognizes that the powerful food industry ultimately won, in part because of the counterculture's too diffuse means of implementing its utopian visions. as an individualistic politics, it gave way to its own commodification and presented no unified front against the social causes of obesity in the u.s. and exploitation of agricultural workers in the third world. a contestatory politics of food production and consumption would have to articulate more directly with other social movements and to take into account the ways in which myriad factors intersect in the constitution of subjectivity and identity. this means also taking into consideration ethical as well as aesthetic questions, even the experience of transcendence as i have been describing it here. [36] there are signs, however, that a coalitional politics is possible. an example is the institute for food and development policy, which frances moore lappe founded with the profits from her countercultural _diet for a small planet_. the most recent direction of the institute is to encourage the formation of new social values that, on the one hand, contest the conservative rapaciousness in industry and its attack on civil rights and, on the other, the redefinition of the individual, grounding his/her sense of value not in the isolated person, as proclaimed by liberal ideology but, rather in the entirety of society. in _rediscovering america's values_, lappe argues that the privatization of values in the reagan 80s ("fidelity, chastity, saying no to drugs") have to be re-publicized.^53^ this entails examining how they have become embodied in us, what social and aesthetic practices have enabled us to become inured to widespread hunger and environmental devastation throughout the world. lappe's strategy for recreating public values is of a piece with current progressive agendas: new ways of eroticizing, new ways of articulating needs in pursuit of recognition, valuation, and empowerment. in an age of simulation, these are worthy transformations. perhaps if the will to transcendence were articulated along these lines, we would be able to find more socially responsible and convincing values than those advocated by the right and by liberals. the aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the right or to liberalism. we need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body. _______________________________________________________ notes 1. jean-paul sartre, _being and nothingness_ (new york: washington square press, 1966). 2. jean-pierre vernant, "at man's table: hesiod's foundation myth of sacrifice," in marcel detienne and jean-pierre vernant, _the cuisine of sacrifice among the greeks_, trans. paula wissing (chicago: university of chicago press, 1989), 51. 3. saint teresa of avila, _the life of saint teresa of avila by herself_ (harmondsworth: penguin, 1957), 190. 4. saint teresa of avila, _way of perfection_, tr. e. allison peers (garden city, ny: image books/doubleday, 1964), 137. 5. julia kristeva, "stabat mater," in _the female body in western culture_, ed. susan rubin suleiman (cambridge: harvard university press, 1986), 99-118. 6. luce irigaray, _speculum of the other woman_, trans. gillian c. gill (ithaca: cornell university press, 1985), 191. 7. "it is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient's associations his [sic] unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practise similar explanatory arts: for these the patient himself [sic] will always provide the text." sigmund freud, _dora: an analysis of a case of hysteria_ (new york: collier, 1963), 138. freud goes on to observe that the difficult part of interpretation is taking into account unavoidable transferences, "new editions" or replays of fantasies in which the analyst stands in for prior actors. this phenomenon must also be taken into consideration in the very production of the subaltern's text. in the mystic's case, an analysis of the role of confessors and inquisitors is crucial. the role of the mystic and the hysteric should also be considered transferentially in the production of current theories of gendered discourse or behavior (such as eating disorders). 8. recognition of endocrinological and biomedical factors in the etiology of eating disorders does not diminish the relevance of an approach that focuses on the social interpretation and evaluation of thinness and obesity. moreover, it is mistaken, in my view, to take biomedical factors as _real_ and social factors as epiphenomenal. on the contrary, the social may work in tandem with the biomedical in a synergistic way. in any case, how one interprets the relative importance of these factors depends on the models of biology, society and disease that frame one's discourse. this essay is part of a more general attempt on my part to discern the workings of the aesthetic as it interfaces bodily sensation and social valuation. 9. sohnya sayres, "glory mongering: food and the agon of excess," _social text_, 16 (winter 1986-87): 94. 10. jean baudrillard, "the obese," in _fatal strategies_, trans. philip beitchman and w.g.j. niesluchowski (new york: semiotext(e)/pluto, 1990), p. 27. 11. "the obese," 34. 12. "the obese," 27. 13. for an account of the "body as temple/machine/holistic organism/etc." cognitive schemas which underwrite these different accounts for disease, see mark johnson, _the body in the mind. the bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1987), 126-36. 14. jean baudrillard, "the anorectic ruins," in jean baudrillard, et al., _looking back at the end of the world_, eds. dietmar kamper and christoph wolf, trans. david antal (new york: semiotext(e) foreign agents series, 1989), 39. 15. johnson, _the body in the mind_. 16. cf. lena williams, "free choice: when too much is too much," _the new york times_ (2/14/90): c1, c10. 17. for a recent account of the radical potential and eventual cooptation of the "gastronomic counterculture," see warren belasco, _appetite for change: how the counterculture took on the food industry, 1966-1988_ (new york: pantheon, 1989). 18. octavio paz, "eroticism and gastrosophy," _daedalus_, 101, 4 (1972): 81. 19. dena kleiman, "fast food? it just isn't fast enough anymore," _the new york times_ (12/6/89): a1, c12. 20. the september 1989 gallup poll is cited in kleiman, c12. 21. kleiman, c12. 22. denise webb, "eating well," _the new york times_ (2/14/90): c8. 23. "the obese," 35. 24. dr. dehavenon, director of a private research committee on welfare benefits stated that the "basic welfare grant in new york had gone up only 28 percent since 1969, while prices have increased 180 percent, and that cutbacks in the foodstamp program have contributed to the problem." richard severo, "east harlem study shows hunger worsens," _the new york times_ (6/3/84): 46. 25. the literature on transnational control of agribusiness and destruction and contamination of resources is voluminous. it includes such books and essays as: joseph n. beldon, et al. _dirt rich, dirt poor. america's food and farm crisis_ (london: routledge and kegan paul, 1986); james danaher, "u.s. food power in the 1990s," _race & class_, 30, 3 (1989); susan george, _how the other half dies. the real reasons for world hunger_ (washington, dc: institute for policy studies, 1977); frances moore lappe and joseph collins, _world hunger. ten myths_ (san francisco: food first, 1982); james o'connor, "uneven and combined development and ecological crisis: a theoretical introduction," _race & class_, 30, 3 (1989); n. shanmugaratnam, "development and environment: a view from the south," _race & class_, 30, 3 (1989); jill torrie, _banking on poverty: the impact of the imf and world bank_ (san francisco: food first, 1986). 26. kim chernin, _the obsession. reflections on the tyranny of slenderness_ (new york: harper and row, 1981). 27. susie orbach, _hunger strike: the anorectic's struggle as a metaphor for our age_ (new york: norton, 1987). 28. "the obese," 31. 29. fredric jameson, "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism," _new left review_, 146 (july-august 1984): 77. 30. susan bordo, "reading the slender body," in _women, science, and the body politic: discourses and representations_, eds. mary jacobus, evelyn fox keller, and sally shuttleworth (new york: methuen, 1989), 88. 31. cf. jean baudrillard, _the ecstasy of communication_ (new york: semiotexte, 1988). 32. chernin, _the obsession_, 45-55. 33. "remaking the self" is part of the contemporary politics of representation, which is often understood in two different ways: as an expression of the collective identity of diverse social movements (feminists, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, workers, and so on) or as the expression, in the language of liberal democracy, of *interests*. the difference is important because the latter understanding of representation does not take into consideration the ways in which particular identity factors traverse other collective identities. there is no general, uncontested *interest* for a particular group because it is not monolithic; certainly the participation of lesbians within aids activist groups like act up, or the objections of women of color to "general" feminist interests bears this out. the politics of this "transversal" critique of interests is an ongoing will to *transform the institutions* that fix particular interests in place. jane jensen ("representations of difference: the varieties of french feminism," _new left review_, 180 (march/april 1990), 127-60) lays out this theoretical perspective and applies it in an historical analysis of french feminism. this is also the direction that frances moore lappe takes in her recent work (see below). 34. juan flores and george yudice, "living borders/buscando america. languages of latino self formation," _social text_, 24 (1990). 35. julia kristeva, _powers of horror. an essay on abjection_ (new york: columbia university press, 1982), 100. 36. see mary douglas, _purity and danger. an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo_ (london/boston/henley: routledge & kegan paul, 1969), 121. see also kristeva, 69. 37. baudrillard, _the ecstasy of communication_, 75. 38. this video was included in "unacceptable appetites," a video program at artists space (2/25 4/2/88) curated by micki mcgee. mcgee's catalogue essay is an invaluable resource for the interpretation of interrelations of images of food and eating, feminine identity and the dialectic of control and self-determination. 39. e. ann kaplan, "feminism/oedipus/postmodern ism: the case of mtv," in _postmodernism and its discontents. theories, practices_, ed. e. ann kaplan (london/new york: verso, 1988). 40. kaplan, 40. 41. kaplan, 36. 42. "[it] is a form which is both fascinating and self-contradictory: distributed in video format but shot on film, free-wheeling yet constrained by its advertising function, visually innovative yet subordinated to its sound track, an individual artefact which is parasitic on a separate and commercially more important object (the record or the cassette), a part of the distinctive youth culture that needs to be played through the equipment forming the focus of family life. despite--or perhaps because of--these contradictions, the pop video points to the new potential of video as a medium in its own right." roy armes, _on video_ (london/new york: routledge, 1988), 158. 43. kristeva, 4. 44. julia kristeva, "motherhood according to giovanni bellini," in _desire in language. a semiotic approach to literature and art_ (new york: columbia university press, 1980), 238. 45. kristeva, _powers of horror_, 72. 46. saint teresa of avila, _way of perfection_, 189. 47. "que su majestad mesmo sea nuestra morada, como lo es en esta oracion de union, labrandola nosotras! parece que quiero decir que podemos quitar y poner en dios, pues digo que el es la morada, y la podemos nosotras fabricar para meternos en ella." _las moradas_ (_the interior castle of the dwellings of the soul_) (madrid: espasa-calpe, col. austral, 1964), 72. 48. _the way of perfection_, 175. 49. _the way of perfection_, 136-37. 50. _the way of perfection_, 137. 51. "the obese," 27. 52. cf. "judy freespirit and aldebaran, "fat liberation manifesto," _rough times_ (formerly _the radical therapist_), 4, 2 (march-april-may 1974); aldebaran, "fat liberation--a luxury?" _state and mind_, 5 (june-july 1977): 34-38; alan dolit, _fat liberation_ (millbrae, ca: 1975); frances moore lappe, _diet for a small planet_ (new york: ballantine books, 1975). 53. frances moore lappe, _rediscovering america's values_ (new york: ballantine, 1989). the quote is from an interview with the author: diana ketcham, "author lappe's plan for planet: back to basics," _the tribune calendar_ (5/28/89). white, 'literary ecology and postmodernity in thomas sanchez's _mile zero_ and thomas pynchon's _vineland_', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-white-literary.txt literary ecology and postmodernity in thomas sanchez's _mile zero_ and thomas pynchon's _vineland_ by daniel r. white <fdwhite@ucf1vm> university of central florida _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by daniel r. white, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. images are more real than anyone could have supposed. and just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. if there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well. --susan sontag, _on photography_ (180) [1] renaissance humanist giordano bruno argued in the persona of the god momus that "the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. this consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth" (205). it was in the spirit of this quest to become "god of the earth" that the father of francis bacon's utopian salomon's house explains, "the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible" (_new atlantis_ 210). the epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason--the %cogito%--and baconian empiricism. the %cogito% is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. but is this definition of mind correct and is the modern project stemming from the renaissance--for the technological domination of nature--taking us where we want to go? the modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which i have elsewhere argued (white 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. here i intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender. [2] the literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what i would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.^1^ it is a species, or perhaps i should say with deleuze and guattari a %rhizomic% offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (postmodern-"ism" sounds hopelessly modernist.) it is a "literature" that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation- the subject of power--and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the enlightened entrepreneur of the west. it is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the thousand plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the viet cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great american technological utopia, the one which is reflected in baudrillard's sunglasses at disney world. thomas pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in _vineland_, just as he exemplified postmodernity in _gravity's rainbow_ (1973) after which the sensitive "reader" gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with pynchon's %imago% of dorothy: "toto, i have a feeling we're not in kansas any more . . . " (279). now with _vineland_ and thomas sanchez's _mile zero_, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. what is literary ecology? [3] literary ecological theory stands, like pynchon's work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.^2^ what is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the great chain of being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. the most salient feature of the chain for the human condition, dwight eddins argues following eric voegelin, is that it represents a %metaxic% tension between spiritual order and material chaos: divine--nous psyche--noetic psyche--passions animal nature vegetative nature apeiron--depth [the limitless] the divine nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary %eschaton% or goal for human striving. "the substitution of a finite, purely 'human' %eschaton% for the infinitely receding %nous% means the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human," eddins explains. "the metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . " (22). the gnostic quest is to appropriate the nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite--them in pynchon--possessed of gnosis, over lower orders of being, the preterite--us. the quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression: for the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. this preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in wordsworth's phrase--"oppressors in their turn." (23) eddins' discussion is too early to have included _vineland_, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, brock vond and frenesi gates, and their victims? [4] what is new in literary ecology's appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist anthony wilden, commenting on the emerging cartesian and lockean ideas of the individual, calls "splitting the ecosystem"^3^: one of the truly representative characteristics of the lockean individual, as of the cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that splitting of the ecosystem . . . with which the age of discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . it is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually owns the body. (xli) capitalism, wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. furthermore, wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between "nature" and "culture" or "nature" and "society" is as follows: land (photosynthesis) labor potential (creative capacity) capital. land precedes and makes possible labor potential which precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital. but capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy: capital labor potential land. (xxxv) capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new "god of the earth" envisioned by bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by francis bacon: "i am come in very truth leading nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . so may i succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man's dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . " (from _the masculine birth of time, or the great instauration of the domination of man over the universe_ [1603], cited in wilden xxxv-xxxvi). nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. luckily, preterite like st. cloud in _mile zero_ and zoyd in _vineland_ stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in pynchon and sanchez. [5] the gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the %metaxy%, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the great chain. in cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. as gregory bateson explains, all biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (examples of such regenerative components are malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447) consider population, for example. prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. so too, if man sprinkles his produce with ddt and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be "exterminated" by more toxin. [6] this kind of degenerative cycle is what eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, "modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of pynchon's cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs" (23). in other words, brock and frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what joseph slade (_thomas pynchon_ 125) has called "excluded middles and bad shit" in reference to the plight of oedipa maas in _the crying of lot 49_: under the reagan-bush version of the entrepreneurial new world order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. and if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from oppressed to oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what bateson called the romano-palestinian system.^4^ this is the %koan% with which many of pynchon's worthy characters are presented. [7] what is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the west and into an expanded and more fluid definition of "mind." this new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension. [8] bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of darwin and of the premises of the western %episteme% mentioned at the outset. his argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of "self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought," and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a "difference," then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. consider a man with a computer, bateson argues. what "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man _plus_ the computer _plus_ the environment. and the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. they are lines _across_ the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491) the result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind: if, now, we correct the darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: %the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind%. (491) if this is true, bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. it means, for instance, that mind--the nous of the great chain--becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)^5^ and that, "ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits" (491).^6^ it also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error: when you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "what interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. you decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that lake erie will be a good place to put them. you forget that lake erie is part of _your_ wider eco-mental system--and that if lake erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of _your_ thought and experience. (492) in other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. the literary-ecological correction of the error in _vineland_ is arguably an extension of what eddins calls "orphic naturalism" in _gravity's rainbow_: "a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and- ultimately--death" (5). [9] plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those i have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the cartesian %cogito%. she argues that in inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by pynchon and sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16) literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest. [10] bateson's language reveals the instrumental bias of western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving "circuits," "units" and "system." yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. as plumwood argues, "humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is 'fully and authentically' human. the term 'human' is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural" (17). this attribution of "mind" to "man" and materiality to "nature," characteristic of the cartesian dualism of %res cogitans% as the human %cogito% and %res extensa% as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating "mother" nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his "real estate," is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the oppressor and oppressed, elite and preterite, sacred and secular, as deftly as pynchon's ninjette dl (darryl louise chastain) slips past brock vond's guards. the origins of literary ecology^7^ [11] "the age of ecology began on the desert outside alamogordo, new mexico on july 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses," argues donald worster in _nature's economy: a history of ecological ideas_. the genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. the ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. worster continues, "as that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader j. robert oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the bhagavad-gita flashed into his mind: 'i am become death, the shatterer of worlds'" (339). popular ecology, as worster also demonstrates, has roots in romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. as goethe wrote, in the character of young werther, when the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when i lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when i can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but i am ruined by it. i succumb to its magnificence. (24) this is not unlike the feeling which drew the "flower children" back to nature in the 1960's, articulated and sustained in the writings of edward abbey and annie dillard. romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the industrial revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what mumford called the megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of "earth house hold" in the words of poet gary snyder. an incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the "persistent _modernist_ nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie" which eddins finds in the work of pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by t.s. eliot in _the waste land_. here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise- unreal city, under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over london bridge, so many, i had not thought death had undone so many. a rat crept softly through the vegetation dragging its slimy belly on the bank while i was fishing in the dull canal the river sweats oil and tar . . . --amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: "these fragments i have shored against my ruins." additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature's images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of magical realism, for example in gabriel garcia marquez's _autumn of the patriarch_, is arguably an important forebear, and carlos fuentes' recent _christopher unborn_ i might well have included with _mile zero_ and _vineland_ as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. african literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example chinua achebe's _things fall apart_ where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of european colonialism is explored, as it is in american literature by peter matthiessen, with regard to south american indians, in another likely progenitor, _at play in the fields of the lord_. doris lessing's _briefing for a descent into hell_ presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature's, as her _golden notebook_ reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (%aufhebung%) in her canopus in _argos: archives_, especially _shikasta_. vonnegut's _breakfast of champions_ and _galapagos_ should not be overlooked in the search for litecol ancestors and, particularly where pynchon is concerned, i would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of tweety and sylvester (_vineland_ 22). [12] more broadly, however, i suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. i suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern "trialectic" of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what mark poster has defined as the mode of information. going beyond marshall mcluhan's axiom that "the medium is the message," which he argues is based on locke's "'sensorium' of the receiving subject," poster contends, what the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. we are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as mcluhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15) in this new mode the modernist cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist lockean conterpart, is, like tyrone slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. as poster continues, in the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by tv ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. in the perspective of deleuze and guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15) literary ecology in _mile zero_ & _vineland_ [13] postmodern, as charles jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to %double coding: the combination of modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects% (14, jencks' emphasis). certainly _gravity's rainbow_ is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character tyrone slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, _dispersed_; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a v2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball. [14] literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. both sanchez and pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of key west and the caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. the invaders from the north are also present, the focus of sanchez's historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. "it is about water," his novel begins: it was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. the ocean mothered us all. water and darkness awaiting light. night gives birth. an inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. dawn emerges from africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of haiti, beyond the great bahama bank, touching cane fields of cuba, across the tropic of cancer to the sleeping island of key west, farther to the gold coast of florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland america. (3) [15] characterization is also given significant human ecological dimension. consider sanchez's representation of justo--the african-cuban cop who is sanchez's best candidate for heroism--typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. like pynchon in _vineland_, sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an _extended_ family. this family connects justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. as justo makes his way down olivia street in key west, the sight of a vanished cuban %groceria% prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, abuelo, and grandmother pearl, and her father: "pearl's father was an ibu, brought to the bahamas as a boy in chains from west africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the british. freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man's world, john coe" (69). sanchez characterizes coe in part by his livelihood: john coe became a student of the sea when freed. the sea became john's new master. turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. john felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. john was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. john learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . he studied eight hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . he gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69) [16] coe's sense of loving "familiarity," in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, brenda bee. john chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. when "the well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from charleston and mobile didn't see anything of value in brenda" because she is ill and half starved, "john coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person" (74). and he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her: as john bathed brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. john spoke to brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. john brought brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of crawfish alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. john planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74) the "particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments" which plumwood (above) argues are "inferiorized" by cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension. [17] women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in _mile zero_. another of sanchez's major characters, st. cloud, a vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing "jamaica's finest" rum, and who at one time "was still a happily married and cheating husband" (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, evelyn's, affections. he also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day adam deserted by eve, from _her_ garden: he leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. through the open shutters of evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at st. cloud's feet . . . images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98) the erotica in this "cinematic" display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter st. cloud's filmic illusions. the shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. she leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. she paused. her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "good night, st. cloud." (99) [18] sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the _powers_ of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. in this regard, both evelyn and angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos: st. cloud followed the heave of evelyn's breathing. the green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5) angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. the octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath. (112) what, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world--the rose, the octopus--do these tattooed breasts signify? angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, renoir's, request in their discussion of women, "'why don't you ask angelica what she feels?'": "i don't have to ask her anything. i know what women think about me. they teach me in history of women's art. college after college they hold me up as the enemy. because i know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115) st. cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the "secret" at all, and sees something quite different in the figure: in the glittering bedroom light angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge st cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. it was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. watching angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, st. cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. keep her under heel and thumb. never allow pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114) the power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. st. cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like zoyd in _vineland_, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for haitian refugees. [19] pynchon's regional realism is set in the pacific northwest, the great redwood forests of northern california, in vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex hippies, thanatoids, the north american tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. his specific focus is on the remnants of the american radical tradition, those elements of the great european invasion of north america who--from thoreau to bob dylan--more or less sided with the indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. now they watch t.v. vineland, the name given to the north american wilderness by the vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.^8^ someday this would be all part of eureka--crescent city--vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in spanish and russian ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the indians might have know about but did not share. (317) [20] both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. by far the most interesting of these is narrative. both sanchez and pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what gregory bateson would call the mind of nature. sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of hinduism, atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (pynchon's character weed atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in _vineland_.) for the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns american civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and i. thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. but is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies "man" and "nature" in an overarching holism, or rather, what plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated "other" of nature? literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life. [21] pynchon opens _vineland_ with the image of shattering glass, just as he began _gravity's rainbow_ with the fall the crystal palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the v-2 rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of zoyd wheeler, "transfenestrating" through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.^9^ in both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind. [22] the narrative fragmentation of _vineland_ is precisely into paranoia in the old greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. it is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite italian songs, used in desperation by billy barf and the vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in "glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches," to provide entertainment for a godfather-like celebration at the estate of one ralph wavony, is none other than the _italian wedding fake book_ by deleuze and guattari, authors of _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_ and _a thousand plateaus_. the image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it *poststructural*, device of the novel as a whole. as in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves. [23] thus pynchon's fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. a look into the world of frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter prairie's quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband's zoyd's broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. it also connects to the aggro world, "'a sort of esalen institute for lady asskickers" (107) and so to ninjettes dl and sister rochelle, to g-man and principal adversary brock vond, and thus to the interstices of what hayles calls the "snitch system" and the "family system" (78). the former, centered around brock, is the hand of government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of brock to have her destroy weed atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not: beginning the night she and rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on weed, frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. if the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237) brock's seduction of frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of pynchon's great chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: "men had it so simple," frenesi muses. when it wasn't about sticking it in, it was about having the gun, a variation that allowed them to stick it in from a distance. the details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. she would have hated to admit how much of this came down to bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241) brock has caused frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience %paranoesis%, "as the nixonian reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people's miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. these people had known their children, after all, perfectly" (239). [24] but just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome "noise" that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. brock's neofascist attempt to impose order on america, especially on the anarchic left, is a phallocentric attempt to "split the ecosystem," in wilden's terms. but the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth: one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. at the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but over-organization and over-order. it is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367) which is why slade argues that "communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity" ("communication" 129). in other words, brock generates the very diversity, the orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in max weber's terms, the counter culture. and it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped. [25] the relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in pynchon's texts. his "entropy," for example, ends with meatball mulligan's attempts "to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos" by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and aubade who, after smashing the window of their "hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city's chaos" (83), "turned to face the man [callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion" (98), on the other. the movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. as "entropy" was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning pynchon's career, _vineland_ is about the ascent to life. [26] katherine hayles has argued that the "framing narrative" of _vineland_ is zoyd's daughter, prairie's, search for her estranged mother, frenesi gates. frenesi's absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel's chief antagonist, brock vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by prairie herself; for frenesi is "seduced" and thus "separated" by brock from her family (the latin root of "seduced," %seducere%, can mean separate, as hayles points out [80]), and prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after brock as he is borne aloft by the post-vietnam %deus ex machina% of the helicopter, "you can come back, . . . . it's ok, rilly. come on, come in. i don't care. take me anyplace you want" (384). what brock would separate them from is their *family*--nuclear, including zoyd, frenesi and prairie, extended, including the entire becker-traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in vineland--a multi-dimensional *reunion*: the pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. the woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of traverses and beckers in the close neighborhood. (323) the meadow where the gathering takes place zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls "vineland the good" (322). the quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in plumwood's phrase, to those "particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments" emphasized by sanchez. the feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as cowart argues, by ninjette sister rochelle: "back then, long ago, there were no men at all. paradise was female. eve and her sister, lilith, were alone in the garden. a character named adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not adam--it was the serpent." (166) thus the political and social power of women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before "man" and with the spiritual condition of grace, before the fall. recall the garden in which st. cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don't need him. furthermore, the above text suggests, as does foucault in _the order of things_, that "man" is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the serpent, the faustian version of the cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature. [27] as cowart argues, "sister rochelle subjects the myth of eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel's larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth" (186). the foreboding revelatory close of _gravity's rainbow_ with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what edward mendelson has called an "encyclopedic narrative," is replaced in _vineland_ by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.^10^ the return is in part constituted by what cowart calls a "feminist genealogy": "a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from eula to sasha to frenesi to prairie" and "search for the mother" which "reverses--indeed deconstructs--the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order- for the familial and communal principle itself" (187). it is this success of plenitude which draws the new counterforce--leftist, feminist, green--into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which cowart describes as "a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich california landscape--fields of strawberry and elysian--that is a transparent symbol of america. this, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family" (187). an even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and orphic naturalism in _gravity's rainbow_: but the fragmentation of narrative in pynchon's text also has a positive function. it both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. as the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152) [28] dwight eddins, and david porush in "'purring into transcendence': pynchon's puncutron machine," have pointed to the paradoxical nature of pynchon's texts. eddins argues that "in a %coup de grace% of reflexivity" _gravity's rainbow_ becomes a real text, like the one that can lead the hereros back to the holy center, "a torah of orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the way back to communion with earth" (150). but this reflexivity, as the logic of pynchon's narrative indicates, leads to paradox: the positing of _gravity's rainbow_ as the real text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an orphic word. if preverbal earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing word--however normative--violates that unity. the paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151) similarly, porush argues regarding _vineland_ that "pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo mechanical loop of interpretation with the text" (102). consider this description of the puncutron machine, for example: it was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the ninjette puncutron technician who would be using it on takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." and what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "oh, no, "tekeshi demurred, "i think not!" (164) as porush concludes, "the machinery of pynchon's plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the puncutron aids the reader's avatar, takeshi, in striking a karmic balance" (102). this paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of pynchon's text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the orphic god reconstituted. [29] the art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful zen %koan%. both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. the message "this is play," bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, "these actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions %for which they stand% would denote" (180). if we take the phrase "for which they stand" as a synonym for the word "denote," the passage may be further expanded to, "'these actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.' the playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite" (180). the message "this is play" is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the theory of logical types, bateson concludes, "because the word 'denote' is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous" (180). bateson argues that play marks a leap--a kind of transcendence--in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for "denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible _after_ the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events"(180)--as in the nip "standing for" the bite in play. but this transcendence can be gnostic, cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an orphic or ecological corrective. the play of pynchon's satire, i argue, provides just this. [30] the koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. the zen master, bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. holding a stick over the pupil's head, he says vehemently, "'if you say this stick is real, i will strike you with it. if you say this stick is not real, i will strike you with it. if you don't say anything, i will strike you with it" (208). the zen student, bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. interestingly, bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the double bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208). [31] the related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the great chain, in pynchon's text especially, for he sustains the air of play--satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon--throughout _vineland_. safer's article, subtitled "humor and the absurd in a twentieth-century vineland," argues that zen is broadly parodied in the novel. safer points to the new age music played in the log jam bar as well as the "change of consciousness" mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the bodhi dharma pizza temple where prairie works, to the sisterhood of kuniochi attentives, etc. as examples. while the parody of new age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is pynchon's simultaneous use of zen and of humor as forms of transcendence--not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the gnostic order of brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the orphic god and his ecology. [32] these various modes of transcendence in _vineland_ are explored by porush in his "purring into transcendence." the puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for pynchon's text itself, is "designed to 'get that chi flowing the right way'" (porush 102, pynchon 163). notice that takeshi is "all hooked up with no escape" from the machine, just as the zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as porush points out, parodies kafka's grimmer sentence machine in "the penal colony," the puncutron fitted with an "inkjet printer" which moves "along the meridians of his [takeshi's] skin" (382) instead of kafka's grimmer needles, prompting what porush calls "a happier transcendence" (103). pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. porush 100). so too, the comic elements in pynchon's text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of gauguin or picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of cristo, the archologies of paolo soleri, the ecological designs of ian mcharg's _design with nature_, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent _omni_ article entitled "the goddess and the computer."^11^ [33] typical of pynchon's sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to zoyd's simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the fbi, hector gonzales. play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation--the double coding of reality and image--and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? image? reality? and who's in control? for plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, %noesis%, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and %dianoia%, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the cave. the subject exercises "self-control" and can distinguish between appearance and reality. but %paranoia%, the subject's thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. the self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the "split psyche" of schizophrenia, madness. but what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly hector's? the paranoid collapse of the personality, or the peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the cartesian subject's quest for power. [34] the paranoiac logic of _vineland_'s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an "eco-logic," the deconstructive architecture of a *mental* ecology. this is its most important intersection with the logic of _mile zero_ and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. it is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that sanchez's narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of _vineland_ circulate. in both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. sanchez's narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the "grey pages" of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them: my moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. you want to leave me, don't you? you don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . you don't know who i am, do you? . . . my brain is like the gulf stream twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. i am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88) [35] the ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as zobop- you-bop he-bop she-bop they-bop we bop to-zobop. (259) it is an ecological discourse "surging with plankton and verbs." plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. this convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret: you don't like it, do you? if i am everything you are not, then you are everything i am. we see eye through i now. you knew you were me all along, didn't you? we are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous "conversations" of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. to take this seriously is, in terms of the western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what lewis mumford called the megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: %paranoesis%. [36] pynchon's shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of federal surveillance. his ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than sanchez's, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology--like the puncutron machine or the "creatures" of the media lab at mit. it's as if the implicit question in _vineland_ as in _gravity's rainbow_ is, "what is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?" appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between "nature" and "technology." as frenesi reasons, "if patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? it would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something in a ufo . . . . we are digits in god's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune" (91). this perspective is implicit in sanchez's final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in pynchon, bateson's assertion--that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial--is a working definition of mind. [37] "man," in pynchon's vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. "'we are approaching the famous chipco 'technology city,' home of 'chuck,' the world's most invisible robot," a pa monitor explains to japanese karmic adjuster takeshi fumimota during a helicopter flight across japan. "'how invisible,'the voice continued, 'you might wonder, is 'chuck'? well, he's been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!'" (146). but the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a %political% one: the modern machinery that the western and now the eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of death star. in this regard sanchez's opening images in _mile zero_ are also instructive. for as a boat carrying dying haitian refugees drifts toward key west, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward: seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3) the technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the "man-made bird" with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. it must be countered, in pynchon, by a combination of radical green anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-'n-rollers- a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. in sanchez one finds a more "serious" but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce. [38] the adversary in _vineland_, brock vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. "brock vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. while the tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, brock saw the deep--if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching--need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national family" (269). accordingly brock, a career g-man from the nixon through the reagan administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: "brock's troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting 'war-on-drugs! war-on-drugs!' strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn't remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from san francisco" (357). but as johnny copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to _vineland_, "every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days." [39] and so pynchon's novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of jess traverse and eula becker, great-grandparents in the american radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of zoyd's window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. the movement is as schizophrenically diverse as _vineland_'s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of emerson "read by jess from a jailhouse copy of _the varieties of religious experience_": "'secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. it is impossible to tilt the beam. all the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil'" (369). this is the self-correction of the human ecological mind. [40] "lack of systemic wisdom is always punished," bateson warns. "we may say that the biological systems--the individual, the culture, and the ecology--are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. but the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. call the systemic forces 'god' if you will" (434). if there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. the ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like lake erie or zoyd be driven "insane." this insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. like the %woge% whom the yurok people along the river in vineland understood to be "creatures like humans but smaller" (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, "to wait and see how humans did with the world," literary ecologists "would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . ." (187). ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ there are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal _earth first!_, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal _capitalism, nature, socialism_, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of _hypatia_, 6.1, spring 1991. literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of pynchon and sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains. ^2^ see, especially, david cowart, "continuity and growth"; cowart argues that "the postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, pynchon's characteristic images and themes] jumped--the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that 'meaning' is always projective--seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays" (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. see also dwight eddins, who attempts to formulate a "'unified field theory' that will account for both modern and postmodern pynchon--the pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence" (_the gnostic pynchon_ xi). ^3^ while eddins employs the writings of hans jonas and eric voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate pynchon's texts, he does not claim that pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, "the crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the judaeo-christian gnostics of antiquity (with whom pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history" (xi). similarly, i am not claiming that pynchon or sanchez has read and been directly influenced by wilden, bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns- socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.--that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists. ^4^ see "conscious purpose versus nature," 11._steps_ 432-445, citation 433. ^5^ "you see," bateson explains, "we're not talking about the dear old supreme mind of aristotle, st. thomas aquinas, and so on down through ages--the supreme mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. we're talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . ." (_steps_ 493). ^6^ it is important to note that bateson's theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. it therefore is subject to the derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in bateson's own terms, is an "evolutionary" living system. what is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, "identical," system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or "the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system," as i've quoted bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on derrida's generative notion of %differance%. this, of course, will make the "ground" of ecological and hence of literary ecological theory more like quicksand. ^7^ parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay "postmodern ecology"; see works cited. ^8^ "the novel's title . . . recalls the discovery of america by leif the lucky and his fellow vikings. for these norsemen exiled from their homeland, vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate," elaine b. safer explains in "pynchon's world and its legendary past" (110). ^9^ in "on the tube," pynchon has a panel of experts, "including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of zoyd's technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . ." (15). ^10^ "encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge," among other things, mendelson explains in "gravity's encyclopedia" (30). ^11^ see _omni_ vol. 12, no. 9, june 1990: 22, 96. this project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. the goddess and the computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. this was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by "development" that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. with the help of a computer model developed by a team at the university of southern california, they discovered that development involved over farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. when the signs from goddess, dewi danu, were right, the high priest said "yea" to farming. the domain of dewi danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. in each group of fields, called a %subak%, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. before letting water into the %subak%, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of dewi danu's lake "on high." in this way water was equitably distributed by means of a complex system of rituals and signs, which themselves served diverse purposes other than "water management." now farmers consult both the priest and the macintosh computer; this is double coding in the practical arts. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited bacon, francis. _advancement of learning, novum organum, new atlantis_. chicago: benton, 1952. bateson, gregory. _steps to an ecology of mind_. rpt. 1972. northvale, n.j.: aronson, 1987. bruno, giordano. _the expulsion of the triumphant beast_. trans. and ed. a.d. imerti. new brunswick: rutgers up, 1964. cowart, david. "attenuated postmodernism: pynchon's _vineland_. _critique_ xxxii, 2 (winter 1990): 67-76. ---. "continuity and growth." _kenyon review_ (new series) xii, 4, 176-190. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. vol. ii. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. ---. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. vol. i. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1983. eddins, dwight. _the gnostic pynchon_. bloominington and indianapolis: indiana u p, 1990. eliot, t.s. _the waste land_. ed. valerie eliot. new york: harvest/hbj, 1971. goethe, johann wolfgang von. _the sorrows of young werther_. trans. catherine hutter. new york: nal, 1962. hayles, n. katherine. "'who was saved?' families, snitches, and recuperation in pynchon's _vineland_." winter 1990: 77-92. jencks, charles. _what is post-modernism?_ new york: st. martin's, 1989. mendelson, edward. "gravity's encyclopedia." _thomas pynchon's_ gravity's rainbow. _modern critical interpretations_. new york: chelsea house, 1986. 29 52. ---. "levity's rainbow." rev. of _vineland_. _new republic_ 9 and 16 july 1990: 40ff. mumford, lewis. _the myth of the machine, vol. 2: the pentagon of power_. new york: hbj, 1970. plumwood, val. "nature, self, and gender: feminism, environmental philosophy, and the critique of rationalism." _hypatia_ spring 1991: 3-27. porush, david. "'purring into transcendence': pynchon's puncutron machine." _critique_. winter 1990: 93-106. poster, mark. _the mode of information: poststructuralism and social context_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1990. pynchon, thomas. "entropy." _slow learner_. boston: little, brown, 1984. 79-98. ---. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1973. ---. _vineland_. new york: little brown, 1990. safer, elaine b. "pynchon's world and its legendary past: humor and the absurd in a twentieth-century vineland." _critique_. winter 1990: 107-125. sanchez, thomas. _mile zero_. new york: knopf, 1989. slade, joseph. "communication, group theory, and perception in _vineland_." _critique_. winter 1990: 126-144. ---. _thomas pynchon_. new york: warner, 1974. sontag, susan. _on photography_. new york: dell, 1977. starr, douglas. "the goddess and the computer." _omni_ vol. 12, no. 9, june 1990: 22, 96. white, daniel r. "postmodern ecology." proceedings of earth ethics forum '91. earth ethics research group & st. leo college, florida. 10-12 may 1991. wilden, anthony. _system and structure: essays in communication and exchange_. second edition. london: tavistock, 1980. worster, donald. _nature's economy: a history of ecological ideas_. rpt. 1977. london: cambridge, 1985. [editor], 'postface: positions on postmodernism', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-[editor]-postface.txt postface: positions on postmodernism _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). [what follows is a written exchange among the editors about the contents of the first issue of _postmodern culture_. it is called a "postface" because it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers.] eyal: several of the works in this issue imply that there is a dynamic relationship between the decentered individual or event generally celebrated by postmodernity and some governing ideal, a hidden ground that operates through these texts. kipnis, for instance, argues finally not only that the body is a text, or that intellectual history has a body, but also that there are "moments in the social body"- intellectual constructs which organize history as an idea, more than just the sum of its parts. she shows an interest in "transition," and not just in particulars, and those transitions--which are explicitly staged in her medium--imply some organizing principle. elaine: i find it provocative to consider whose bodies, and what relationships between them, are represented in these essays. for example, kipnis's narrative movement back and forth from marx to his maid helene to late twentieth century teenage girls suggests, to me at least, a feminization of marx's body (feminists have argued that women's bodies are sites for masculine writing, but here, marx's body, like the anorectic's, occupies the position of tablet for cultural text). john: i'd agree that kipnis is making a connection between particular male bodies and particular female bodies as "tablets for cultural text," but i'm not sure the movement between particulars amounts to the projection of a "governing ideal, a hidden ground" that eyal sees here. it strikes me that many of these writers (acker, english, kipnis, even yudice) emphasize the rude eruptions and crude particulars of the body in a way that is anything but idealizing. and while i agree with the idea that kipnis, and others in this issue, want to see history as having a meaning, i don't think this necessarily involves each of these authors in a commitment to an "ideal," or to a teleology. i think that kipnis, ross, hooks, and others try to establish a context, rather than a ground, for the particular. eyal: that may be what they would say. it's a popular position--and one that larsen takes to task. he writes that marxist thought criticizes enlightenment values by offering "particular universals" (15): reason is time-bound, but it is universal at any point in time because of "the social universality of the proletariat" (6). larsen uses this claim to indict postmodernism- which he reads much as you do here, john--as promoting contexts that are not grounds; he charges that postmodernists appeal to irrationalism instead of recognizing the claims of marxist universals, and their irrationalism then allows them to deflect the charge against capitalism (7, 9). elaine: as a feminist reader responding to these essays, i find myself struggling with the very tension we are talking about--between attention to the particular and a yearning, to use hooks's word, for a transcending idea, a narrative which helps me evaluate what i read. hooks begins her essay by telling us that she is a black woman at a dinner party (which one other black person is attending). this is certainly a context, but in the end when she tells us about talking with other black people about postmodernism, context attains a kind of transcendence--hooks's "authority of experience." likewise, yudice's focus on bulimia seems driven by a desire to understand the body's participation in larger designs and meanings. eyal: there is a similar impulse in several of these works. yudice moves from class and gender to "the mystic" (5); hooks returns to "yearning" as the common condition (9); schultz finds in bernstein's poem an "elegiac tone" (10); and acker says that she is a romantic and projects that romanticism in her stand as artist against-the-dead-world. john: acker does sound like an idealist when she asks whether "matter moving through forms [is] dead or alive," and she sounds romantic when she asserts that "they can't kill the spirit." but the transcendence she describes at the beginning of her narrative is transcendence within language: "when i write, i enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. this world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. this world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin." perhaps she fails in her stated desire not to have a voice (as schultz argues the language poets do), but it seems to me that her piece is not only about "the artist against the world," but also about the contact between the writer and the world--an *unpleasant* contact between a fragmented individual and the monolithic forces behind property law, involving a struggle over language, and the right to language. elaine: many of the writers here (schultz, english, hooks, beverley, ross) illustrate the power of culture (rather than of the individual) to determine our use of language and the creation of texts. schultz's point about mcgann's classification of the contributors to _verse_--that the difference between "language writing, properly so called" and "language-centered writing" appears to be a matter of big names vs. lesser knowns- raises the issue of politics within academic writing (a criticism that may be relevant to the project of creating this journal). but what schultz's review accomplishes, and what ross, beverley, and hooks suggest we should attempt, is an interrogation of authorities. these writers believe such a practice can make a difference. john: i think larsen would say that the interrogation of authority is not in itself the practice that will make a difference; he feels, as eyal pointed out, that liberal critiques of authority ultimately serve the interests of authority by helping to "displace or pre-empt" revolutionary political practice. on the other hand, the authors you mention all aim at something beyond critique or interrogation. ross, for example, argues directly against the idea (expressed in larsen) that cultural authority is monolithic, *because* he wants to persuade us that change is possible: "capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology" (37). larsen's rejoinder is to ask "where has imperialism, and its attendant 'scientific' and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the 'new social movements' founded on ideals of alterity?" (29). eyal: on the whole, the writers in the issue value those who, like themselves, oppose the authoritarian tendencies of society. social power resides in architecture and we fight it with music (beverley); political repression is enforced by manipulating our collective image of the body and we fight it with dietary negativity--obesity, bulimia, anorexia (yudice); society uses "viral hysteria" and the "computer virus eradication act" to restrict access to technology and information, and we fight it with countercultural hacking (ross); the publishing establishment enforces copyright and we fight it by acknowledging the intertextual transgression implicit in all artistic practice (acker). these writers are looking for a place from which to criticize the impulses to power which they uncover in the social text--but then any critical position is bound within that text. elaine: critical positions may be bound within the social text, but as we said earlier, some of these writers appear to be in two places at once, positioned in a particular historical political struggle but casting their writing beyond the particular toward some larger claim or understanding. in any case, the difference in our readings of these writers suggests that postmodernism remains fertile territory within which writers can explore new positions, and i find this encouraging. we hoped that _postmodern culture_ would provide a place for experimentation, for opening discussions, for dialogue. in some of our early explorations of what the journal could or should be (and do), we expressed a hope that we could dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do. in fact, we hoped that the medium itself would encourage us to think of our writing as constituted both from the writer's position and from the readers'. such thinking (about writing and reading) can lead to further experimentation within the academy, in culture, and with/in those relationships fostered through _postmodern culture_. how much difference we make remains to be seen. fraiberg, 'of aids, cyborgs, and other indiscretions: resurfacing the body in the postmodern', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-fraiberg-of.txt of aids, cyborgs, and other indiscretions: resurfacing the body in the postmodern by allison fraiberg <fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu> university of washington _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by allison fraiberg, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. we live in the ecstasy of communication. and this ecstasy is obscene. . . . today, there is a whole pornography of information. --jean baudrillard [t]here has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . --fredric jameson [w]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. the cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. --donna haraway [1] predominant in postmodern theories of representation are approaches and practices that locate "the body" within systematized networks and circuits. theorists who are representative of very different theoretical positions--such as jean baudrillard, whose "ecstasy of communication" describes a breakdown between public and private, fredric jameson, whose "hyperspace" reflects a continuous sense of the present in a world of transnational capital, and donna haraway, whose "cyborg ontology" reads the disintegration of distinctions between organisms and machines--nonetheless concur in presenting scenarios in which traditional tropes of discreteness, of discretion, dissolve and the focus shifts to formulations of connectedness. subjected to these discursive frameworks or grounding ontologies, the body, as a clearly delineated unit, blurs into negotiated relatedness and postmodern systematicity ushers in a contemporary meltdown of the discrete body. in other words, it would seem, at best, difficult to try to discuss "the body" with distinct boundaries, whereas referring to the bounded body- bounded to and within integrated networks--can emerge as a reflective postmodern image. [2] this networking of bodies has been prominent in the representations of and discourse about aids in the u.s. as i will show, mainstream media constructions of aids project and feed off a fear of, among other things, circuited sexuality. on the other hand, critics of mainstream aids representations work to break down the rhetorical constructions and effects of discrete categories, an obvious example being that of "general public" or "at risk groups." in this paper, i will first resituate familiar discussions of the body in aids commentary, both popular and critical, by employing what donna haraway calls a "cyborg ontology." i will then move on to suggest that, in terms of aids discourses, the body begins to resurface from within the networks defined, urging a very different kind of discreteness, and consequently a revised type of agency, into a postmodern context. wiring the postmodern [3] when baudrillard defines the "ecstasy of communication," he grounds its images in screens and networks. certain that "[s]omething has changed," he laments the recognition of an "era of networks . . . contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface" (127). communication, for baudrillard, invokes a "relational decor," a "fluidity," "polyvalence" in "pure circulation" (130-31). baudrillard anxiously describes these networks as "pornographic" and "obscene" since he sees in them the loss of the body and its familiar figurations: the "subject" and the always tenuous public/private dichotomy. because of its fusing into the network, the body loses its discretionary status and, for baudrillard, the "obscenity" lies in the dissolution of the private where "secrets, spaces and scenes [are] abolished in a single dimension of information" (131); baudrillard's "pornographic" develops out of the inability to produce "proper" limits and he invokes the schizophrenic for tropic legitimation: with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia . . . too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore. . . . he can no longer produce the limits of his own being. . . . he is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (132-33) what is so remarkable about baudrillard's casting of the discussion in these terms is that, with the substitution of a noun or two, one could easily transpose this rhetoric into a "pro-family" position on aids that strains to keep the "halos" on, the "unclean" out, and the private crucially "protected." in both scenarios there is a sense of inevitable fusion of the body within networks--a fusion realized, albeit reluctantly, by baudrillard, but repeatedly denied and cast out on moral grounds by the so-called "pro family" position on aids. consequently: the logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected. --jesse helms [4] baudrillard's mourning of the "loss" of past private spaces of the body is recast, with a similar tone, in jameson's analysis that isolates postmodernism within the "cultural logic of late capitalism." jameson reorganizes the postmodern schema into a "bewildering new world space of multinational capital" (58) with "effaced frontiers," "integrated" commodity production, "intertextuality," and the "disappearance of the individual subject." what jameson calls postmodern "hyperspace" is the global networking produced by transnational capital, a networking he sees as "transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position" (83). jameson arrives at the point of calling for ways to map this network and/by/for those "caught" within it, to make it epistemologically accessible, and finally, dialectically, make the best of what, he argues, had to come anyway. [5] jameson differs from baudrillard in, among other places, his isolation of a particular of a particular disjunction between subject and space. "my implication," jameson argues, "is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution...we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace" (80). jameson does identify a new field of relations, but the subject he posits remains essentially the same, just a little lost in its new surroundings. for this reason, jameson's call for cognitive mappings resembles a type of postmodern finding of one's self in a "bewildering" new field. this position, like baudrillard's, can find its correlative in aids discourse: the jamesonian view would be reminiscent of the mainstream position that asserts the "general public" can contract hiv "as well." in other words, the field has changed, but how the subjects are thought of within it remains virtually the same. therefore: i have asked the department of health and human services to determine as soon as possible the extent to which the aids virus has penetrated our society. --ronald reagan (in 1987, when 25,644 were known dead)^1^ [6] for haraway, however, both the field and the subject change as cyborgs provide the ontological myth that captures the image of post-industrial capitalist culture. she defines the cyborg as a "cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism" ("manifesto" 174). dissolving apparently clear distinctions propels the cyborg. "needy for connection," it lurks at the boundaries constructed and demanded by humanist thought, dismantling discretion in favor of interconnected networks and integrated systems. boundaries "breached," or at least "leaky," include those between human and animal, between animal-human and machine, and between the physical and the non-physical. like other postmodern strategies, cyborgs "subvert myriad organic wholes," and, unlike baudrillard and jameson, haraway can see potential in the loss of discretion: "so my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work" ("manifesto" 178). it is not the case that haraway sees her cyborg myth as some post-organic %deus ex machina%; instead she invests her myth with perpetual tensions where "potent fusions" are balanced with "dangerous possibilities." focusing on the production and reading of integrated circuits and the relations within them, theorists can, then, in haraway's words, negotiate through various "system constraints" ("biopolitics" 12-13). [7] other theorists of postmodernism may argue and debate about whether to embrace or view with horror a cybernetic age; about whether the status of subjectivity has changed; about whether postmodernity signals a turn beyond that which was once valued (by some). haraway, on the other hand, like many feminist cultural theorists, resists these debates about how one *should* feel in these times (paranoid, horrified, ecstatic) and instead tries to focus on *what to do*, how to proceed, and how to start thinking of pro-active strategies. (granted, jameson calls for cognitive mapping, but the energy seems reconciliatory rather than pro-active). quite simply, what separates haraway out from a substantial set of discourses about cybernetics is that she is not so much concerned with how good or bad a cybernetic age will be, or has become; she wants to talk about how the world *is* ontologically/epistemologically structured and what feminists can *do* about it. of aids: resituating discourses it is patriotic to have the aids test and be negative. --cory servaas, presidential aids commission everyone detected with aids should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to protect the victimization of other homosexuals. --william f. buckley aids is god's judgment of a society that does not live by his rules. --jerry falwell ^2^ [8] so much of aids criticism has had to contend with cauterizing the effects of officially sanctioned positions such as those above; consequently, much of the work on aids to date has centered on exposing the assumptions and values embedded within mainstream representation. these important critiques focus predominantly on three, often intersecting, sites of construction. often, representations of aids have problematically inherited historical and biomedical contexts, and various critics have discussed the problems when aids becomes another "venereal disease" or the latest version of rampant infectious disease where "contagion," "quarantine," and "contamination" become the dominant terms conditioning meaning (and often policy and research).^3^ moreover, a large amount of critical practice has focused on exposing the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic assumptions embedded in popular, medical, and sociological representations. many of these undertakings highlight the politics behind discourses of "risk groups" that isolate people rather than practices; of the "general public," which turns out to function more like an exclusive country club; and of "origins," which, as simon watney argues, equates a source of something with its cause ("missionary" 95).^4^ in addition, critics and activists have foregrounded organized/reorganized erotic economies and resisted the anti-sex and "pro-family" campaign engineered by hegemonic aids representations.^5^ [9] these critical projects are crucial in that they expose the biases upon which policies are constructed. but what i would now like to do is think about some mainstream positions and some critical ones at the same time, in the same field of relations--in the field of what haraway might call a cyborg-like network. reorganized in this framework, attitudes range from denial of networking--in terms of the subject and/or the field--to a kind of hysterical reaction of recognition, to finally more productive readings and codings. because i am trying to *resituate* these arguments on the same discursive field, the next few pages might be repetitive for those who are acquainted with the various critiques of mainstream aids commentary. please bear in mind, however, that i am trying to re-view these positions as they relate to a cyborg-netic field; this resituating, while at times somewhat belaboured, is necessary ground out of which the resurfacing on the body emerges. denying cyborgs [10] the cyborg notion of transgressed boundaries and leaky distinctions finds its immunological referent in the discourses of aids. the reality of hiv has opened up and relegated bodies to an integrated system of, among other things, sexuality. the bringing to consciousness of the presence of aids has broken down the traditional demarcations of the body, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. for years now, with less safe practices, an interface propels the body to serve as an osmotic shell through which systematized sex circulates. moreover, shared needles construct a network of iv drug users; and shared blood forces to consciousness a crucial interconnectedness. and, of course, these systems interpenetrate as networks of social relations emerge. the realities of aids dissolve the boundaries of the discrete body, and the cyborg, still needy for connection, integrates it into its discursive network. the new right, mainstream media representation, and a lot of public sentiment have responded by denying cyborg-netic reorganizations of the body. desperate to retain the traditional boundaries of the body as individual, both conservatives and liberals have articulated a rhetoric that has made several attempts to keep aids outside the sphere of the "general american public"--read white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear family. in each situation, the position that denies recognition of a circuited body image tries to fabricate and maintain crucial distinctions between self and other. [11] the most obvious boundary that "official" conservative discourse clings to is the one between human and "disease": "us" and "aids." the strategic construction that urges keeping "it" out of "us" relies primarily on a projection since "it" would not be if it were not for "us." repressing that integration, the first rhetorical maneuver involves anthropomorphizing aids into a live virus and then militarizing its context. susan sontag notices that in this "high-tech warfare," the aids virus [sic] "hides," "attacks," "lurks," and, of course, "invades" (17-19). similarly, paula treichler describes the rhetorical evolution of the "aids virus" as "a top-flight secret agent--a james bond . . . armed with a 'range of strategies' and licensed to kill" insidiously invading the cell and "establishing a disinformation campaign" (59). [12] reinforcing the "us/them" binary that denies the cyborg body is a continual search for a cause of aids, and consequently, the origins of hiv. overdeterminations of hiv as the single agent cause of aids foreclose on posited co factors; and then the quest for origin can shift to isolating sources of hiv. that a strain of virus remotely similar to hiv has been found in a species of monkey (the so-called "green monkey hypothesis") produces and perpetuates a popular contention that aids originated in "africa." responsibility is projected onto a convenient other and the body of the "general american public" remains "safe" and isolated, establishing its boundaries not only by geography, but by implied race as well. not only does this premise displace origins thousands of miles away, but in doing so relies on a familiar moral opposition of white and black. the "cause" of aids becomes the monolithic "dark continent," the land of the primitive, and as simon watney notes, of "naked 'animal' blackness" (75). these multiple moral projections would enclose and protect white, middle class, heterosexual america from invasion. again, the nuclear family body denies the cybernetic organization of aids by refusing to recognize its integration within its networks. [13] once discursively acknowledged, mainstream representations of aids draw on newly delineated boundaries; a revised "us/them" dichotomy emerges that keeps denying the aids-body cyborg. "risk groups" or "those at risk" (revised from the "4-h" groups of the 80s) become the convenient other: most often cited as gay men and iv drug users (who are almost always represented as people of color). the nomenclature advocates that these are groups of people who are at high risk of contracting hiv, therefore the "general public" should stay away from "them." the first striking characteristic of this configuration is that these are groups of people and if you find yourself fitting into one of these groups, you are necessarily at "high-risk." this framework denies the subject any sort of agency, an ideologically motivated strategy that makes its point: the subject who falls into a high-risk group has no option but to occupy a position in it; at the same time, if one does not slip into one of these groups then there is, within this construction, no "risk." here, it doesn't matter what you do because what counts is who you are; and for the person living with aids, this context leaves no room for subjectivity, for agency, for action. [14] that the intended audience of "risk group" identification is the "general public" underscores the contention that "those at risk" are precisely not part of that audience. the tenuous dichotomy, however, slips at several sites: that of what gets represented as the case of the "tragic" hemophiliac who contracts through blood products; the recipient of a transfusion of "tainted" blood; and the sex worker who "infects" the unknowing consumer. in each case, though, an innocence factor mitigates contraction. in a more recent attempt to reproduce the innocent body, and therefore maintain the ability to name guilt, the term "pediatric aids" has become embedded in representations of certain people living with aids. in a move that seeks to reestablish boundaries to the now quite messy binary, "aids" and "pediatric aids" have surfaced, rhetorically, as two very distinct constructs, each conditioning very different identities: babies born testing positive for hiv antibodies can occupy a position of "wholly innocent" while the mothers, depending on their backgrounds, await textual, moral assignation. [15] with the deconstruction effected, with the representational acknowledgement that aids indeed "leaks" into the "general public," conservative thought reorganizes its "us/them" dichotomy into a rhetoric explicitly moral and "pro-family." each time the hint of connection emerges, a new denial of integration surfaces; each time a new illusory individual unit is posited. prevention strategies that, at this point, still reject the implication of some bodies into the aids-body network consciously construct new boundaries around the body of the nuclear family. if the "innocent" general public can contract hiv as well, so the story goes, then a prevention campaign that extrapolates from occluded attitudes within risk-group discourse must center on a question of morality: if "we" can get aids (and this is precisely the moment when discursive productions can either accept the cyborg ontology or try yet again to deny it), then "we" must try to be good. the moralizing trope serves as the building material for the construction of boundaries. and "good" in the 1980s functions euphemistically to mean monogamous heterosexual relationships with people who "just say no" to drugs. the safest sex of all becomes abstinence--the illusory production of a self-contained body--and those who abstain from sex altogether become "very good" people; those who insist on having sex but do so only in monogamous relationships, preferably in marriage, are "good"; and, of course, those who engage in sex with many partners, who insist on being promiscuous, or use iv drugs, bring on infection "themselves." in this configuration, a closed-off body equivocates into a pure body as the nuclear family forges boundaries embedded in morality. starting with cyborgs [16] by stressing abstinence, by prescribing heterosexual monogamy, by condemning iv drug use, conservative discourse engages in a repressive hypothesis that promotes an economy of desire: the more you say yes, the higher your chances of "infection," the more leaky the moral boundaries that surround you. the hierarchy of morality--abstinence, monogamy, condoms, etc.--has eroded, however, under the scrutiny of critics, many of whom recognize the flimsiness of the boundaries constructed. douglas crimp argues against abstinence as a strategy of prevention because "people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them 'just say no,' they will have unsafe sex" (252). moreover, repressed in the call for monogamy is any reference to history: monogamy means little if one partner is hiv+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex. this education campaign denies a discursive field of indiscretion by promoting a rhetoric of the discreet individual. [17] critics of media representations of aids have addressed this problematic by exposing its repressive mechanisms. john greyson, for example, has produced a music-video exposing the "ads" campaign--the "acquired dread of sex" that one can get from watching, among other things, television (270). consequently, crimp notices how media campaigns to get people to use condoms have used fear as their manipulative device rather than sexuality. ironically, he wonders why "an industry that has used sexual desire to sell everything from cars to detergents suddenly finds itself at a loss for how to sell a condom" (266). what culminates in an "acquired dread of sex" is the logical conclusion of a discourse that organizes repeated "us/them" oppositions to keep aids out, to deny a cyborg-netic field; and once aids manages to "infiltrate," the emphasis shifts to deny its presence in the morally pure and displace it onto the deviant, thereby constructing new boundaries. it's the repetition of a posture that attempts at any cost to deny connection/identification; it's a constricted stance that tries desperately to repress indiscretion: a term defined more traditionally in the context of such denounced behaviors as sex and iv drug use, but also indiscretion described here as a certain dissolution of clear delineation. with indiscretion (both kinds) repressed, those remaining are left to close off their bodies, constricting any potential openings. to speak of sexuality and the body, and not to speak of aids, would be, well, obscene. --b. ruby rich simply put, those who enjoy getting fucked should not be made to feel stupid or irresponsible. instead, they should be provided with the information necessary to make what they enjoy safe(r)! and that means the aggressive encouragement of condom use. --michael callan [18] in contrast to conservative rhetoric that denies indiscretion, of any kind, one can locate an ontology that takes the breakdown of traditional boundaries associated with the body as a grounding premise. since mainstream representation compulsively represses interconnectedness, resistant strategies can and do rupture the process, forcing the latent networks to percolate to consciousness, to representation. rejecting the discursive displacements that produce others at risk, it is a position that recognizes, like rich, that the *discourses* of aids are in some sense always already within: "to speak of sexuality and the body and not to speak of aids, would be, well, obscene." the texts that construct "aids" metaphorically become an ontological current running through bodies, making the connections of a systemic circuit. distinctions, then, between self and other become archaic, and the aids-body cyborg functions as an icon that organizes perceptions and writings of the body. [19] precisely because a notion of "risk group" or "those at risk" becomes problematic (which, granted, at this point does nothing to address the real inequities of representation), because the networks and narratives established by leaky boundaries integrate and implicate all and avoid projecting blame, the argument can shift from singling out risk groups to focusing on risk practices. the networks made manifest can then accommodate watney's call for an "erotics of protection" as well as singer's "body management"--both are organizations of erotic economies. if discussion of risk groups and the general public lead us to ask who we are when we have sex or use iv drugs, then the cyborg discursive configuration of risk practices asks all of us what we do when we have sex and use iv drugs. unlike the former position that relegated the subject to helplessness within its constructions--an especially problematic space for a plwa (person living with aids)--this field posits a subject, precisely because of its "indiscretion," that can choose. because this subject gives up its limit, its "halo," (to invoke baudrillard momentarily) of private protection, it gains agency for resistance--a key term for immunological reference. [20] and this subject can choose to have sex, unlike its anti-cyborg parallel, but must undergo what linda singer calls "changes in the economy of genital gestures and erotic choreography" (55). whereas anti-cyborg bodies repressed sexualities when confronted with aids, integrated bodies adamantly guard the right to them. carol leigh, a sex worker and playwright, argues that "we must fight against all those who would use this crisis as an excuse to legislate or otherwise limit sexuality" (177). those who have thought of sex as heterosexual penile penetration and ejaculation (many caught within the anti-cyborg "general public") must reorganize perceptions in such a way as to eroticize non-genital areas; and when sex is genital, condoms and dental dams become new age sex toys. embedded in all of these calls for safer practices are two assumptions that are crucial as far as my own argument is concerned: first, that the forged boundaries constitutive of the individualized units are amorphous; and second, that safer shooting and sex depend on a recogntion of interconnectedness, of indiscretion. resurfacing the body [21] rather than repressing sexuality, the aids-body network sublimates it, dispersing teleologically-oriented sex into more polymorphous activity. within this revised organization, the rules of safe sex and calls for clean works dictate that, precisely because the boundaries are illusory, the body resurfaces as discrete entity. condoms, dental dams, clean needles, and reserved blood manifest a surface awareness, a consciousness focused on clearly delineating the boundaries of bodies. the traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. a closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network. [22] but this is a different kind of discretion. it's not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it's a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. so while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of aids, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. in this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. in other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit--indeed, it has already admitted--the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion. [23] the resurfaced, discrete body/subject is different from its predecessor because the recognition of blurred boundaries is precisely that which makes the body resurface. "discretion" functions, then, as an ambivalent marker for both sets of discourses and, as the foundational site for constructions, poses key questions. the discursive peril here, in terms of the discourses of aids, involves the confusion between a conservative "pro-family" stance and progressive reconstructions. in the representational treatments of aids, two different discrete bodies emerge: one that denies the cyborg and ultimately prescribes racist, classist, and homophobic attitudes; and one that reorganizes discretion within the aids-body circuit. confusing the two could potentially elide the latter construction as well as its ethics. for instance, media campaigns have urged the use of condoms, but they have done so within an atmosphere of repressive (hetero)sexuality; consequently, safe sex, instead of organizing an erotic economy, becomes an unreliable alternative for those heterosexuals who won't say no. the racist, classist, and homophobic subtexts remain intact and the white, middle-class, heterosexual family assumes the position of general public all over again. [24] this is not to say that a circulatory ontology ought to be abandoned, nor is it to say that any codings of the body as a discrete unit will necessarily become subsumed by mainstream representation. in fact, i believe that too many areas have seen a reformulation of discretion, a resurfacing of the body, to leave such a pessimistic reading intact. one obvious example in the u.s. involves strategies organized around women's reproductive rights. when, for instance, abortion rights activists carry signs reading "bush, get out of mine!" we engage in a similar move that recognizes existing intervention and then expels the groping hands of legislators from women's bodies and reformulates a discrete body, closing off from the lesislative machinery. this analogy was reinforced during this year's 4th annual gay and lesbian film festival held in olympia, washington: i saw a man wearing a button with a slogan made famous by reproductive rigths activists--"my body is _my_ own business." [25] for these reasons, i would suggest that working within postmodern network theory to discuss aids strategy, or even some other "indiscretions" such as reproductive rights practices, can grant a crucial sense of agency to renegotiate some of the blatant horrors of mainstream representation. working within a single field of relations that resituates perceptions of both "official" aids representation as well as those who criticize it diffuses the rhetorical and positional strength of a centralized power dictating, and conditioning, meaning; this circulatory system affords the space for a localized biopolitics and active resistance. it posits resistance, not at the expense of agency but, rather, as a condition of agency; and with mainstream representation continually constructing helpless, objectified "aids victims" awaiting "certain death," the discursive leverage to act and re-act obviously takes on added significance for persons living with aids. [26] it's a type of agency that carries with it, and can put to use, the contextual histories of the networks from which the subject emerged. material, contextual conditions become built in to the theoretical frame, rather than being held in opposition or tension with the theory: this type of agency does not recognize a traditional distinction between "theory" and "praxis" or "theory" and "experience" because the material context of the networks produces the agent. agency loses its abstract, theoretical, and often vague status and becomes recognizable only through its multiple material contexts. moreover, the specificity of agents differs across contexts: the resurfaced agent of reproductive rights discourses would not be the same agent progressive aids strategies produce since each is conditioned by differing intersections of networks. [27] in this case, resurfacing the body becomes the mechanism through which one sense of agency can be constituted. resurfacing the body then, within the postmodern, exposes mainstream investments as it articulates a new space, a revitalized subject, as it recodes discretion from within the circuits of systematicity. at the same time, tropes of postmodern networking that posit a process of integration, of dissolving, don't necessarily end there: within and beyond the blur can lie a resuscitated agent ready for action. [28] casting agency in this way can revise ideas about authorization. the realm that denies cyborg-like integration ultimately leaves intact traditional sites of authority, sites with various investments in the "general public": for example, bio-medical research, the position of surgeon general, governmental and legal policy decisions. on the other hand, a large scale recognition of this resituated interconnectedness, and the subsequent resurfacing of the body--of some--might begin to shift those sites of authority. if this recognition is granted, attention might be (re)drawn toward those whose experience is most most important and whose energies are spent organizing pro-active strategies. in other words, the agency evolving through the resurfacing could loosen the mainstream's hold on the discourse about aids and create an opening for actions such as: having more than one plwa speaking at the international aids conference; ending the scientific community's holding of people for ransom; or instituting a media campaign that can offer something more effective, and finally less dangerous, than a choral cry to just say no. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ statistics from douglas crimp, "aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism," 11 (in the volume of the same name, edited by crimp). ^2^ all quotes from crimp, 8. ^3^ for further historical perspectives see elizabeth fee and daniel m. fox, _aids: the burdens of history_, dennis altman's _aids in the mind of america_, and simon watney's _policing desire_. randy shilts provides a journalistic history of aids in _and the band played on_, but his account is both voyeuristic--awkwardly, he scrutinizes the life of gaetan dugas, alleged "patient zero"-and morbid--he keeps a running tab on aids cases, deaths, and projected deaths. douglas crimp has also noted a homophobic attitude in the book: see his essay "aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism" in crimp, ed. for specific analysis of the construction of "disease" see especially paula treichler "aids, gender, and biomedical discourse: current contests for meaning" in fee and fox. see also charles rosenberg "disease and social order in america: perceptions and expectations," and gerald oppenheimer "in the eye of the storm: the epidemiological constructions of aids"--both in altman. for discussions of health care and biomedical discourse, see douglas crimp "how to have promiscuity in an epidemic" in crimp, ed.; daniel m. fox "the politics of physicians' responsibilities in epidemics: a note on history" in fee and fox; suki ports "nedded (for women and children)" in crimp, ed.; mark mcgrath and bob sutcliffe "insuring profits from aids: the economics of an epidemic" in _radical america_ 20.6 (1986): 9-27. ^4^ for further reference on intertwinings of discussions of "risk groups," "general public," and "origins" see especially watney's _policing desire_, "the spectacle of aids" in crimp, ed., and "missionary positions." for discussions of homophobia in representation see watney, crimp, cindy patton, and leo bersani (in crimp, ed.), among many others. observing that most media coverage of aids addresses a heterosexual audience, the "general public," while completely eliding the fact that homosexuals are part of that audience, bersani complains that "tv treats us to nauseating processions of yuppie women announcing to the world that they will no longer put out for their yuppie boyfriends unless . . ." ("rectum" 202), and that the "family identity produced on american television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister" (203). ^5^ for instance, gregg bordowitz "picture[s a] coalition of people having safe sex and shooting up with clean works" (crimp, ed. 195), while linda singer outlines an erotics of "body management" ("bodies" 56). watney has called for an "erotics of protection," an arena which would include "huge regular safe sex parties [with] . . . hot, sexy visual materials to take home" and "safe sex porno videos" (_policing desire_ 133-4). similarly, douglas crimp urges that "gay male promiscuity should be seen...as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued" ("how to have promiscuity" 253). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited altman, dennis. _aids in the mind of america_. garden city, ny: anchor, doubleday, 1986. baudrillard, jean. "the ecstasy of communication." trans. john johnston. _the anti-aesthetic_. ed. hal foster. port townsend, wa: bay press, 1983. bersani, leo. "is the rectum a grave?" _aids: cultural analysis/ cultural activism_. cambridge, ma and london: mit press, 1987. crimp, douglas. "how to have promiscuity in an epidemic." _aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism_. cambridge, ma and london: mit press, 1987. 237-270. fee, elizabeth and daniel m. fox (eds.). _aids: the burdens of history_. berkeley, los angeles, and london: u of california p, 1988. haraway, donna. "a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s." _coming to terms_. ed. elizabeth weed. new york: routledge, 1989. 173-214. ---. "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse." _differences_ 1 (winter 1989): 3-43. jameson, fredric. "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism." _new left review_ 146 (july-august 1984): 53-92. leigh, carol. "further violation of our rights." _aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism_. cambridge, ma and london: mit press, 1987. 177-181. shilts, randy. _and the band played on: politics, people, and the aids epidemic_. new york: st. martin's press, 1987. singer, linda. "bodies--pleasures--powers." _differences_ 1 (winter 1989): 44-65. sontag, susan. _aids and its metaphors_. new york: farrar, strauss, and giroux, 1988. treichler, paula. "aids, homophobia, and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification." _aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism_. ed. douglas crimp. cambridge, ma and london, mit press, 1987. 31-70. watney, simon. "missionary positions: aids, 'africa,' and race." _differences_ 1 (winter 1989): 67-84. ---. _policing desire: pornography, aids, and the media_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2nd edition, 1989. perelman, 'marginalization of poetry', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-perelman-marginalization.txt the marginalization of poetry by bob perelman <bperelme@pennsas> university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by bob perelman, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. if poems are eternal occasions, then the pre-eternal context for the following was a panel on "the marginalization of poetry" at the american comp. lit. conference in san diego, on february 8, 1991, at 2:30 p.m.: "the marginalization of poetry"--it almost goes without saying. jack spicer wrote, "no one listens to poetry," but the question then becomes, who is jack spicer? poets for whom he matters would know, and their poems would be written in a world in which that line was heard, though they'd scarcely refer to it. quoting or imitating another poet's line is not benign, though at times the practice can look like flattery. in the regions of academic discourse, the patterns of production and circulation are different. there, it--again--goes without saying that words, names, terms are repeatable: citation is the prime index of power. strikingly original language is not the point; the degree to which a phrase or sentence fits into a multiplicity of contexts determines how influential it will be. "the marginalization of poetry": the words themselves display the dominant _lingua franca_ of the academic disciplines and, conversely, the abject object status of poetry: it's hard to think of any poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. it is being used here, but this may or may not be a poem: the couplets of six word lines don't establish an audible rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use the calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their right to exist in their present form--is this a line break or am i simply chopping up ineradicable prose? but to defend this (poem) from its own attack, i'll say that both the flush left and irregular right margins constantly loom as significant events, often interrupting what i thought i was about to write and making me write something else entirely. even though i'm going back and rewriting, the problem still reappears every six words. so this, and every poem, is a marginal work in a quite literal sense. prose poems are another matter: but since they identify themselves as poems through style and publication context, they become a marginal subset of poetry, in other words, doubly marginal. now of course i'm slipping back into the metaphorical sense of marginal which, however, in an academic context is the standard sense. the growing mass of writing on "marginalization" is not concerned with margins, left or right --and certainly not with its own. yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume the existence of some master page beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) margins the panoplies of themes, authors, movements, general objects of study exist in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? this master page reflects the functioning of the profession, where the units of currency are variously denominated prose: the paper, the article, the book. all critical prose can be seen as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, the sequences of words chopped into arbitrary lines by typesetters (ruth in tears amid the alien corn), and into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. this violent smoothness is the visible sign of the writer's submission to norms of technological reproduction. "submission" is not quite the right word, though: the finesse of the printing indicates that the author has shares in the power of the technocratic grid; just as the citations and footnotes in articles and university press books are emblems of professional inclusion. but hasn't the picture become a bit binary? aren't there some distinctions to be drawn? do i really want to invoke lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois thought where rather than a conceptually pure science that purchases its purity at the cost of an irrational and hence foul subject matter we have the analogous odd couple of a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism studying marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? do i really want to lump _the closing of the american mind_, walter jackson bate's biography of keats, and _anti-oedipus_ together and oppose them to any poem which happens to be written in lines? doesn't this essentialize poetry in a big way? certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed to prose and does depend on the precise way it's scored onto the page: beyond their eccentric margins, both olson's _maximus poems_ and pound's _cantos_ tend, as they progress, toward the pictoral and gestural: in pound the chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, little drawings of the moon and of the winnowing tray of fate; or those pages late in _maximus_ where the orientation of the lines spirals more than 360 degrees--one spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. these sections are immune to standardizing media: to quote them you need a photocopier not a word processor. in a similar vein, the work of some contemporary writers associated more or less closely with the language movement avoids standardized typographical grids and is as self-specific as possible: robert grenier's _sentences_, a box of 500 poems printed on 5 by 8 notecards, or his recent work in holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading and irregular margins of larry eigner's poems; susan howe's writing which uses the page like a canvas--from these one could extrapolate a poetry where publication would be a demonstration of private singularity approximating a neo-platonic vanishing point, anticipated by klebnikov's handcolored, single-copy books produced in the twenties. such an extrapolation would be inaccurate as regards the writers i've mentioned, and certainly creates a false picture of the language movement, some of whose members write very much for a if not the public. but still there's another grain of false truth to my manichean model of a prosy command-center of criticism and unique bivouacs on the poetic margins so i'll keep this binary in focus for another spate of couplets. parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's been a tendency in some criticism to valorize if not fetishize the unrepeatable writing processes of the masters --gabler's _ulysses_ where the drama of joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine of a critical edition; the facsimile of pound's editing-creation of what became eliot's _waste land_; the packets into which dickinson sewed her poems, where the sequences possibly embody a higher order; the notebooks in which stein and toklas conversed in pencil: having seen them, works like _lifting belly_ can easily be read as interchange between bodily writers or writerly bodies in bed. the feeling that three's a crowd there is called up and cancelled by the print's intimacy and tact. in all these cases, the particularity of the author's mind, body, and situation is the object of the reading. but it's time to dissolve or complicate this binary. what about a work like _glas_? --hardly a dully smooth critical monolith. doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient poetic adjective!) device of collage more extensively than most poems? is it really all that different from, say, the _cantos_? (yes. the _cantos_'s incoherence reflects pound's free-fall writing situation; derrida's institutional address is central. derrida's cut threads, unlike pound's, always reappear farther along.) nevertheless _glas_ easily outstrips most contemporary poems in such "marginal" qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not to mention the 4 to 10 margins on each page. compared to it, these poems look like samplers upon which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. not to wax polemical: there've been plenty of attacks on the voice poem, the experience poem, the numerous mostly free verse descendants of wordsworth's spots of time: first person meditations where the meaning of life becomes visible after 30 lines. in its own world, this poetry is far from marginal: widely published and taught, it has established substantial means of reproducing itself. but with its distrust of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from overintellectuality) and its reliance on authenticity as its basic category of judgment (and the poems principally exist to be judged), it has become marginal with respect to the more theory-oriented sectors of the university, the sectors which have produced such concepts as "marginalization." as a useful antidote, let me quote _glas_: "one has to understand that _he_ is not _himself_ before being medusa to himself. . . . to be oneself is to-be-medusa'd . . . . dead sure of self. . . . self's dead sure biting (death)." whatever this might mean, and it's possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman, nevertheless it seems a step toward a more communal and critical way of writing and thus useful. the puns and citations that lubricate derrida's path, making it too slippery for all but experienced cake walkers are not the point. what i want to propose in this anti-generic or over-genred writing is the possibility, not of genreless writing, but rather of a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. _glas_, for all its transgression of critical decorum is still, in its treatment of the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous work; it is %marginalia%, and the master page of hegel is still hegel, and genet is hegel too. but a self-critical writing, poetry, minus the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, might dissolve the antinomies of marginality. norman, 'review of _what can she know?_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-norman-review.txt review of _what can she know?_ by rose norman <rnorman@uahvax1> department of english university of alabama-huntsville _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by rose norman, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. code, lorraine. _what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge_. ithaca: cornell up, 1991. [1] when it comes to "knowing," does it matter %who% does the knowing? is knowing independent of the knower, and if not, what is it about the knower that affects the knowing? canadian philosopher lorraine code argues persuasively that whether the knower is a man or woman matters so much that understanding why requires a feminist epistemology. that project involves a paradigm shift in epistemology, from valuing autonomy and objectivity ("pure reason") to valuing interdependence and subjectivity (communal knowledge); from focusing on the relation of a proposition to reality, to focusing on the interrelationship of subject and proposition in creating knowledge/power. [2] _what can she know?_, a book collecting and synthesizing work begun in code's 1981 paper "is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?" (_metaphilosophy_ 1981), is an important step toward articulating the feminist epistemology needed to theorize the interaction of knower and knowing. i suspect the book will be most useful to feminists and to those who already accept postmodern views about the instability of the subject and the constructed nature of reality (as we "know" it). what is characterized as "malestream" philosophy, by far the bulk of what is published and taught about philosophy, is the epistemology against which code marshals evidence in a complex, nuanced, and deeply engaging argument. code's most effective rhetorical aid is her own evenhandedness and clarity in synthesizing a broad array of often-contradictory philosophical positions, from immanuel kant to carol gilligan, from aristotle to sara ruddick, from hans georg gadamer to mary field belenky. [3] code manages this in what i would describe as a non-combative discourse that resolutely avoids dichotomizing. she steps into the discursive gap between a deconstructive practice emphasizing undecideability, and the traditional practice emphasizing universality and gender neutrality. her own practice weaves a web of understanding between those polarities, with gender as her chief point of departure. in staking out an epistemological territory she eventually describes as "middle ground," code positions herself between such dichotomizing debates as nature/nurture and essentialism/constructionism, debates that currently occupy many feminist theorists as well as philosophers of all kinds. her position, moreover, is dynamic, not static, and emerges developmentally in succeeding chapters of the book. for example, her use of "sex" instead of "gender" in the early chapters turns out to be a deliberate retention of the language she and others used when first theorizing these issues. (in a footnote, code defends this usage on historical grounds, "gender" being a relatively recent usage, "sex" being the term used by epistemologists discussed in her early chapters.) conceptually, "middle ground" may be the wrong metaphor for establishing a new paradigm for thinking about thinking. "common ground" seems to be what code is seeking and what she most successfully achieves. her critique establishes this common ground chiefly by articulating key feminist theories that challenge widely held beliefs about the procedures for defining and attaining knowledge. often, she integrates feminist theory with what is useful from such non-feminists as aristotle, kant, nietzsche, and foucault. code is especially effective in adducing what is useful in traditional philosophy, wasting little time attacking what is not useful, except in establishing the ways that what counts as knowledge has traditionally been defined so as to exclude women. most of her opening chapter is devoted to showing how any claim for "women's knowledge," knowledge from a domain assigned to sterotypically-defined "women," has been declared not-knowledge. furthermore, she argues, the exclusion does not work symmetrically for men; that is, knowledge from a domain assigned to men has been assumed to be gender-neutral. men define the norm for defining knowledge. [4] these and other ideas about gendered knowledge, and code's debunking of claims for gender-neutrality, are familiar in women's studies. in fact, code's careful documentation of these ideas makes the book very valuable as a bibliographic guide to scores of feminist essays over the last twenty years. but they are not new ideas, and code's contribution is more one of synthesizing than of formulating a procedure or practice for the feminist epistemology she sees as a desirable goal. her accomplishment is to prepare a site for this new epistemology, lay groundwork for the paradigm shift needed for re-visioning the world in ways that no longer contribute to political oppression of women and other devalued groups. [5] code's critique of received thinking about epistemology makes four major points: 1) dichotomous thinking polarizes ideas and creates an underclass, the less desirable side of the dichotomy. dichotomizing also feeds into modes of argumentation that emphasize *winning* more than understanding, thereby perpetuating political oppression of the underclass. code avoids dichotomy in various ways, notably by defining knowledge as "inextricably, subjective *and* objective," the two supposed opposites being in dynamic interplay in the "creation of all knowledge worthy of the label" (27). 2) objectivity is overemphasized in inquiry. code recommends reclaiming subjectivity and re-valuing the subject of inquiry. she warns against "autonomy-of-reason thinking," a style of thinking that claims reason can operate independently of the thinker's personal locatedness. 3) we are all interdependent, our subjectivity formed in relation to others. in this respect, we are "second persons," a term code takes from philosopher annette baier (_postures of the mind: essays on mind and morals_, 1985), and applies broadly as a counter to the prevailing autonomy-of-reason mode. our own personal locatedness in a particular time, place, class, etc., should be our point of departure for analysis. 4) ideology is a driving force in creating knowledge/power in the foucauldian sense that the construction of knowledge perpetuates power relations. [5] what counts as knowledge in mainstream philosophy is derived from the sciences, where the focus is on what can be known about "controllable, manipulable, predictable objects" in the physical world (175). epistemologists have theorized paradigmatic knowledge in terms of object-oriented simples, using the formula "s knows that p" to locate "objective" truth in the physical world in situations like "s knows that the door is open." testing the proposition then focuses on the relation of p (the door is open) to physical reality, and ignores the relation of s to p, since the epistemic agent is assumed to be merely a placekeeper, not affecting the truth of what is known. code challenges both 1) the use of simples tied to physical reality as sources of paradigmatic knowledge, and 2) the notion that the epistemic agent has no bearing on physical reality. her most telling point in this critique is that the knowledge gained from object-oriented simples is so shallow as to be not worth knowing, and, furthermore, is inadequate for inference into more complex realms. [6] code's alternative to the subject-object paradigm is a complex one, friendship (human-human interaction), a paradigm that she proposes as a better relational model than sara ruddick's "maternal thinking" for achieving feminist goals. a feminist epistemology, she argues, is best carried out as an ongoing dialogue between thoughtful and mutually respectful friends. but what of women's experience, of women as makers of knowledge? here code runs head-on into belenky et al.'s well known _women's ways of knowing_ (1986; co-authored with blythe mcvicker clinchy, nancy rule goldberger, and jill mattuck tarule), a book imbued with an essentialism that code carefully avoids throughout her text. code argues that "in the conceptions of knowledge and of subjectivity it presupposes, _women's ways of knowing_ is epistemologically and politically more problematic than promising" (253) because it is as asymmetric as the "malestream" epistemology it refutes. in the "s knows that p" terminology, the malestream concentrates too much on p, while belenky et al. concentrate too much on s--so much so that it's "not easy to determine *what* their subjects know" (253). they conflate "subjective knowing" with "subjectivism" and consider subjectivism "a permanent epistemological possibility" (254). [7] code considers this to be "radical relativism" where anything goes; she prefers "mitigated relativism," her phrase for considering knowledge both subjective and objective, not wholly one or the other. code is more directly critical of belenky et al. than of any other scholars whose work she uses, since belenky's approach resembles her own in critical ways that code explicitly identifies, e.g., in having an interest in "second personhood," valuing connectedness and interpersonal behavior, and locating sources of knowledge in human behavior, rather than in subject-object behavior. code's analysis is more nuanced, more postmodern (in denying the possibility of a unified self, etc.), and more political in its recognition of foucauldian knowledge/power links. code is exploring the uncharted territory between polarities, the power in "mitigated relativism." belenky et al. construct knowing as a progress, through stages, toward increasingly more valued "ways of knowing." code suggests a different way of using this material, calling these ways of knowing "strategies" or "styles" of knowing, different positions that can be taken, thus making them more useful for theorizing places for political action. code's articulation of an ecological model for "remapping the epistemic terrain" (chapter 7) is the most useful part of the book in addressing key issues feminists are currently debating and in defending "ecofeminism" against criticism of the ideal of community. code begins the chapter with a description of a board game called the poverty game, developed by six canadian women who depend on public assistance. these "welfare women" become a continuing focus (almost a litmus test) for discussing epistemic privilege, how knowledge is circulated (as well as constructed), and how privileged women and men might learn from a dialogic form of epistemology based on an ecological model. for code, this ecological model proposes a society that is in dynamic balance, like an ecosystem. such a society would be "community oriented, ecologically responsible[,] would make participation and mutual concern central values and would structure debates among community members as conversations, not confrontations" (278). [8] this communal ideal is widespread in women's spirituality movements today, but has found less support among academics, who are more likely to see only romanticism or idealism in it. code's approach to a feminist epistemology reaches out to that ideal in ways that academics can value. she avoids essentializing women's "nature" by bringing in teresa de lauretis's influential views on "identity politics" and the importance, for feminist projects, of resisting the ideal of a unified self. de lauretis valorizes "a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity . . . ; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class" (_feminist studies/critical studies_ 9). code places this dynamic identity in an ecological context, emphasizing fluidity across various boundaries (as in an ecosystem) in creating and acquiring knowledge. in her ecological model, as i read it, people communally and conversationally create knowledge through "dialogic negotiations . . . across hitherto resistant structural boundaries" (309). in this view, thinking itself is "conversational," and for it to be productive these "conversations have to be open, moving, and resistant to arbitrary closure" (308). [9] while the ecological model is for me code's most appealing metaphor--suggesting friendly "conversation" standing in for such natural processes as rivers flowing and life-cycle processes--the ecosystem metaphor is inexact, or, i should say that code does not herself elaborate the metaphor as i have done. further, an ecological model holds within itself a potentially essentializing gesture toward "natural" systems that can easily lead to validating the status quo. code's resistance to essentialism is most evident in her critique of texts like carol gilligan's _in a different voice_ (1982), sara ruddick's _maternal thinking_ (1989), and belenky et al.'s _women's ways of knowing_, to all of which she gives considerable (and perceptive) attention. to achieve the feminist goals code articulates, what is needed is not a "model" (essentialist or otherwise), but a paradigm shift, a completely different way of thinking about thinking. gilligan, ruddick, and belenky et al. are all, in their own ways, more successful in establishing new paradigms for thinking than is code. [10] where code will draw most fire from critics (those who do not dismiss her project out of hand) is in the attempt to stake out a middle ground, neither wholly essentialist nor wholly constructionist. "mitigated relativism" is neither a catchy name nor an easily grasped philosophical position, nor is "middle ground" an obvious position of strength, as code claims it to be. it is simply the place we are left once dichotomous thinking is recognized as a patriarchally constructed double bind: essentialism demands belief in primacy of difference, the very basis on which women have been oppressed; relativism (there is no external, objective reality, only individual realities) stalls political action, there being no external reality to change. so it is the *choice* that oppresses, or the belief that one must choose. in opting for middle ground, code is refusing to make that ultimately oppressive choice. [11] the choices code does make are complex and dynamic, challenging and invigorating to anyone willing to enter the dialogic she invites. there is a quicksilver element to the issues raised: feminist epistemology seems capable of rapidly assuming many shapes, of weaving through narrow and twisting passages, of rising and falling in response to atmospheric pressures. but that is my own metaphor. code's figurative language emphasizes analytical ("malestream?") processes. the metaphor of "remapping the epistemic terrain" suggests the feminist epistemologist as a cartographer systematically pacing through a territory of disputed boundaries and recording results to guide others who choose to come that way. my own metaphor of code's "drawing fire from critics" reveals my sense of that terrain as dangerous territory, with enemies in every bush and landmines artfully concealed on the path. in making her way through that dangerous terrain that she calls "middle ground," code strikes me as both gutsy and careful- and well-armed. staples, 'white male ways of knowing', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-staples-white.txt white male ways of knowing by clifford l. staples <ud153289@ndsuvm1> department of sociology university of north dakota _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by clifford l. staples, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. hooks, bell. _yearning: race, gender and cultural politics_. boston: south end, 1990. [1] about two years ago my friend mike sent me bell hooks's review of spike lee's "do the right thing," which was published in _zeta magazine_.^1^ mike's photocopy budget is even worse than mine, so i figured if he went to the trouble of smuggling these pages out to me then he really wanted me to read them. so i did. i had seen the film prior to reading the review, and, just like hooks's white male colleagues, i too had "loved it" (10). her critical review challenged me to rethink my initial response to the film, and got me interested in reading more of her work. so i sent a check to south end press for copies of _ain't i a woman_ (1981), _feminist theory: from margin to center_ (1984), _talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black_ (1989), and _yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics_ (1990). here i will focus on _yearning_. this book in particular has encouraged me to join with her in interrogating the racism and sexism of postmodern american culture. _yearning_ consists of twenty-three short essays, including a dialogue with cornel west on relationships between black men and black women, and a concluding piece in which she playfully interviews herself. like her review of "do the right thing," a number of the remaining essays initially appeared elsewhere: in _zeta magazine_, _inscriptions_, _art forum_, _sojourner_, _framework_, _emerge_. pulling these essays together in one volume has undoubtedly made her cultural criticism available to a much larger audience than the few readers of these publications. [2] the essays cover a lot of territory and are not easily classified. some chapters (e.g., "stylish nihilism," "representing whiteness," "counter-hegemonic art," "a call for militant resistance") might be fairly called film criticism. in several other places (e.g., "liberation scenes," "postmodern blackness," "culture to culture," "critical interrogation") she discusses and evaluates trends in cultural criticism. and then, from another direction ("the chitlin circuit," "homeplace," "sitting at the feet of the messenger," "aesthetic inheritances," "saving black folk culture") she remembers and celebrates african-american culture and politics. but one shouldn't put too much weight on these categories. you are as likely to find autobiographical reflections in the film reviews as in the more properly autobiographical pieces, and references to films, novels, theoretical trends and biographies turn up everywhere. as she writes in the last essay, "there are so many locations in this book, such journeying" (229). hooks's excursions erase all boundaries, leave all genres blurred. [3] for hooks, radical cultural criticism is rooted in a commitment to black liberation struggle. she examines representations of black people and black life in literature and popular culture to understand how such representations enhance and undermine the capacity of african-americans to determine their own fate. she focuses, in particular, on the ways in which such representations work to either enslave or liberate blacks, reinforce or challenge racism in whites, and sustain or subvert white supremacy. she also remains critical of the ways in which both women's liberation and black liberation continue to be practiced as if black women did not exist. [4] ok. what you've mostly gotten so far is the dust-jacket perspective of anyreader--the sort of "view from nowhere" i was taught to write in graduate school. it's also the kind of "review" i might have written %before% reading _yearning_--before getting my lesson in racial awareness. hooks won't let me forget who i am. so, as it turns out, i'm not anyreader. i'm a white guy. [5] many of hooks's readers are white guys; certainly most of the subscribers to _postmodern culture_ are. and have you ever considered the volume of material and cultural capital upon which this discourse rests? to participate in this e-mail discussion one not only has to have a modem, but also a position of some status in or near the state bureaucracy. and you also have to know how to talk the postmodern talk. hooks knows where postmodern theory comes from and approaches it warily. in "postmodern blackness" she writes: my defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good, but i worried that i lacked conviction, largely because i approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, i find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. as a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, i appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. (23-24) [6] certainly, many of the essays in _yearning_ were written for and about black intellectuals. and you often get the feeling hooks would prefer to write primarily for other blacks, particularly black women. yet, much of what she has to say seems addressed to whites, or at least it's written with the knowledge that whites are likely to be looking over her shoulder. for example, "postmodern blackness," one of the essays in the book, was published in the first volume of this journal. and hooks is also on the editorial board. thus, she may not want to ally herself with me and my fellow white male travellers, but i know she wants us to hear what she has to say. [7] what she has to say, fundamentally, is that she is a black woman intellectual working in a white male supremacist culture. her work can be seen as a self-conscious confrontation with, and exploration of, this fact. she constantly positions and repositions herself in relation to this culture and to her specific audience. by pushing positionality to its limits, hooks makes visible the on-going ways in which racism and sexism shapes cultural production--including, reflexively, the writing and reading of her own texts. she forces the white male reader in particular into self-consciousness and self-criticism. [8] her stance also raises the question of just exactly what a "review" of her work by me might mean. after thinking it over, i have found myself coming to rest in a problematic place somewhere between criticism and self-criticism. so my "review" is also, of necessity, something of a confession. [9] from one paragraph to the next, i never know how i'm going to feel reading hooks. one moment i'll feel angry and frustrated and the next happy and empowered. sometimes i'm also afraid; there's always the chance that she's going to name one more prejudice i'm carrying around with me. confronting and sorting out these conflicting feelings about race is hard work. not having to do this work until now, in my late-thirties, says a lot about what it means to be a white male. hooks, on the other hand, never felt she had choice. for black people, particularly black women, thinking critically about race has always been a matter of survival. [10] reading hooks's critiques of the way black people are portrayed in white culture has forced me to question much of what i knew or thought i knew about african-americans. it has also made me realize how most of what i know about blacks is manufactured; it does not arise spontaneously out of my day to day experiences with black people.^2^ this is equally true for me living in north dakota as it is for my parents living in new jersey. the black people most white americans know best are on tv. [11] by focusing critical attention on the cultural production of blackness, hooks points to the hyperreality of racial politics in postmodern america. on average, white lives and black lives are probably just as segregated today as ever. now, however, we watch a lot of images of black people on tv and in other media. the presence of such images creates an illusion of familiarity, a kind of simulated integration. yet few of these images are produced by black people, or challenge stereotypes of black people, and almost all of them are constructed with profit in mind. [12] it is not simply the case that representations of black people "influence" or "distort" white perceptions. such a view belongs to a time, no longer with us, when most people recognized and acted as if there were a difference between reality and representations of it. now, there are few if any white perceptions of black people for mass media to "influence" that are not already the product of mass media. [13] of course, as a white american sociologist i have been trafficking in these same commodified images of blackness every day for a number of years now. whether i'm teaching introductory sociology or a senior seminar in "race, class, and gender," my white students and i talk about "the black family," "unemployed black men," or whomever as if we know what we are talking about- as if black people were speaking instead of being spoken about. [14] participating in these conversations has always left me feeling anxious and troubled, but it has been difficult until recently to figure out why. now i can see that the problem lay in the one-dimensionality of our conversations. immersed in a white culture that stretches from horizon to horizon, like the snow outside my window, our conversations created only the illusion that we knew black people's lives. in this respect white sociology and cnn are indistinguishable; in one way or another, it's just white people talking about black people. and yet, it's as if we had convinced ourselves that by starting to talk about black people we had somehow stopped talking like white people. [15] thus, like many other whites, i have often found myself adrift in a sea of images--signs of "blackness" that have no signifiers; signs that refer only to other signs. hooks is on to this when she notes how spike lee's film was made mass-marketable to whites by relying on commodified images of blacks: practically every character in _do the right thing_ has already been "seen," translated, interpreted, somewhere before, on television, sitcoms, evening news, etc. even the nationalism expressed in the film or in lee's interviews has been stripped of its political relevance and given a chi-chi stance as mere cultural preference. (178) [16] despite the fact that these commodified images of blackness often "work" with white audiences, i think many whites are deeply dissatisfied with the way we are taught to think about black people. there is a nagging feeling that something isn't right, isn't even close to being right. this is the ontological anxiety of the postmodern self--a self shaped by watching representations of experience rather than a self shaped by experience. we are so cut off from the lives of black people that we have no vantage point from which to assess the images of black people created by others. [17] hooks finds cause for optimism in the deep dissatisfaction of the postmodern self. in "postmodern blackness" she writes: the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. (27) i wish i could share her optimism. unfortunately, the insecurity that plagues the postmodern self also makes whites a target for clever marketing strategies that prey upon our ignorance and uncertainty. this, i think, is one reason why so many of us watched "do the right thing" uncritically. [18] as hooks points out in her review, "do the right thing" was sold to white america as a "radical" film (77). this was going to be an in-your-face slam-dunk film about black people doing black stuff in black ways made by that "bad" black guy spike lee. this hype implied that other representations of black life available to white america were inauthentic, thereby constructing lee's film as a "true" insider account. and if lee thought white america would be "uncomfortable" watching his film then, by god, those of us who fancied ourselves multicultural would show him and everyone else we could hang with this film and this militant black. we'd be so comfortable watching "do the right thing" we'd all probably fall asleep. of course, by default, those whites who shied away from the film, who didn't get into its aesthetic, or at least didn't act like they did, could be defined as racist cretins, or worse: unfashionable. thus, to understand the white response to lee's film it is important to realize how whites read white responses to blackness as signs of hipness. [19] there is more than just a little bit of macho sexism in all of this. as hooks points out, black authenticity is defined in large part by black masculinity. and, in our racist imaginations, black masculinity is all about danger and sexuality. thus, for white males "loving" lee's film is a kind of male-bonding. we may not be able to identify with the "black thing" but we can sure identify with the "male thing." in this way, white men strive to bond with black men around our supposedly shared interest in sexual exploitation. our deepest hope is that this connection to black men will deflect their rage away from us and toward someone else--black women, perhaps. [20] realizing the danger in the lack of critical response to the film, hooks reminds us that in a world suffused with manufactured images of "blackness," what is black is not necessarily subversive: overwhelmingly positive reception to "do the right thing" highlights the urgent need for more intense, powerful public discussion about racism, the need for a rejuvenated visionary black liberation struggle. aesthetically and politically, spike lee's film has opened another cultural space for dialogue; but it is a space which is not intrinsically counter-hegemonic. only through progressive radical political practice will it become a location for cultural resistance. (184) [21] by forcing me to rethink why i liked the film, hooks reminds me how unhappy i am with the way i have learned to think about black people, how my lack of critical response sustains a racist and sexist culture, and how important it is to develop the capacity to make the kind of "critical interventions" she advocates. it is the kind of analysis that is not only rooted in a political commitment to black liberation, and women's liberation, but is also grounded in an understanding of the nature of postmodern society and the lonely and desperate people who live in it. [22] thus, while reading hooks i often feel good, even if at first i get angry and defensive. i feel like i am learning new ways to think about black people, as well as new ways to think about myself. this is empowering. with these new ways of thinking i feel like i have the capacity to resist and undermine the sexist and racist life i'm being asked to live. take, for example, this passage from "critical interrogation": one change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. it would just be so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what's going on with whiteness. in far too much contemporary writing--though there are some outstanding exceptions--race is always an issue of otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even. yet only a persistent, rigorous and informed critique of whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination. (54) [23] reading this passage allowed me to see those class discussions of "social inequality" in a new way. this led me to a deeper understanding of what i was struggling to do and to discover better ways to do it. i began to imagine ways of overcoming the meaninglessness of our discussions of "the black family" by reading commodified images of blackness not as signs of blackness, but as signs of whiteness. we began this discussion by tracing the images of blackness we watch (either in our textbooks or on tv) back to the white men who overwhelmingly control the production of them. once we did this it was possible to see how our own talk about black people simply built upon these racist stereotypes. though it is hardly profound, we now respect the distinction between talking about black people and having black people talk to us. this feels like a move in the right direction. [24] there are times, however, when i sometimes feel betrayed by hooks. these are the times when she seems to want to take back what she has given me. as a result i feel set up, and i find myself not wanting to trust her. it also suggests that she feels at least ambivalent about the postmodern possibilities for empathy and solidarity which she otherwise puts forth as liberating. [25] ever mindful of the extent to which contact with white people has meant suffering for blacks, hooks watches whites very closely. to her, my yearning to escape commodified images of black experience--a yearning given shape and direction by reading her work--often seems predatory. in "radical black subjectivity" she writes: such appropriation happens again and again. it takes the form of constructing african-american culture as though it exists solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in. michele wallace calls it seeing african-american culture as "the starting point for white self-criticism." (20-21) reading this makes me angry and frustrated. i think to myself, "she's never happy. she anticipates every response to her or to african-american culture and defines it and me as incurably white and essentially racist." my anger eventually subsides, but the frustration remains, and i find myself gradually slipping back into feelings of powerlessness and despair. what %else% can i do? [26] i don't think african-american culture exists solely for my benefit, but i see no alternative to my reading it, reading her, as a starting point for self-criticism. hooks has to give us that at least. flirting with essentialism, as she seems to do here, leads inevitably to a politics of separatism. if whites are racist by nature then we have nothing whatsoever to discuss. i have no choice but to read her self-critically, and if the results look to her like another kind of theft, then that's a chance i'll have to take. [27] it took me awhile to get to this position. in fact, for the reasons discussed above, i almost gave up on this essay. i bet others have also thought about responding to hooks, but abandoned the idea. for example, none of the four reviews i have found of _yearning_ were written by men. and while i think a lot of other white men ignore hooks because they can, i also think there are a lot of men who might read her work critically, but feel there is no way to respond to her that she has not already foreclosed. [28] the bottom line, however, is that i don't think hooks is unreasonable. she is just very demanding. take, for example, the issue of positionality raised earlier. initially i was feeling proud of myself that i had stepped out from behind the anyreader persona to proclaim my status as a "white guy." then, going back through _yearning_ a second or third time, i ran into the following passage in "critical interrogation": many scholars, critics, and writers preface their work by stating that they are white, as though mere acknowledgement of this fact were sufficient, as if it conveyed all we need to know of standpoint, motivation, direction. i think back to my graduate school years when many of the feminist professors fiercely resisted the insistence that it was important to examine race and racism. now many of these very same women are producing scholarship focused on race and gender. what processes enabled their perspectives to shift? understanding that process is important for the development of solidarity; it can enhance awareness of the epistemological shifts that enable all of us to move in oppositional directions. yet, none of these women write articles reflecting on their critical process, showing how their attitudes have changed. (54) as i read this i felt as if she were, once again, trashing a position she had led me to adopt only a few pages ago. i felt this way a number of times reading _yearning_. yet, upon reflection, i could see her point. acknowledging one's status is only meaningful as a result of what comes after it. in my case, i came to see this essay as an occasion for self-reflection and analysis. stating that one is a "white male" won't, in itself, do that more difficult work. in fact, it might inhibit it to the extent that it serves as a sort of politically correct gesture in the sense hooks means above. this essay may still be such a gesture, but it's a more meaningful gesture to me than it would have been had hooks not been so insistent. [29] the kind of self-disclosure hooks is pushing for here is, of course, risky business. power and status are at the heart of it. western academics and intellectuals are reluctant to open up about our own intellectual development because doing so reveals that we have not always been as smart as we'd like others to think; crediting those who have influenced us exposes the social nature of intellectual achievement- evidence that runs counter to our sacred individualism; and admitting that we have been affected by another is also to grant that someone a certain kind of power over us. this latter point is something particularly difficult for men to do; we are supposed to be the movers and shakers, we are not supposed to be moved and shaken--at least not in other than a rigidly defined heterosexual way. homophobia, sexism, and racism all play apart in determining who it is we are willing to admit to having moved us, depending upon who it is we need to ignore at the time. [30] on this issue i think hooks herself could be more forthcoming. on the one hand she does write about herself a lot (in _yearning_ and elsewhere), yet i don't get a very clear sense of self-transformation from these writings. i understand that she has always been a black woman, but has she always been a %militant%, %feminist%, %socialist% black woman? very little that she writes would lead one to believe otherwise. thus, while i was interested and impressed by her description of the way that her family critiqued white representations of black people on tv in the 1950s (3), i was also left with the impression that she has always been as militant as she is now, and that she (among other black women) has always been in the place that everyone else is just now discovering. maybe these things are true. even so, by her own admission, even if she is way out ahead of me then it's important that i understand how she got there. i would like to read more autobiography from hooks that shows the intellectual turning points in her life. [31] there is another problem. it's about that business of whites reading other whites' responses to blackness as signs of hip status. a reader of this essay wondered whether white readers of hooks, such as myself, might fall into the trap of approaching her work uncritically for the same reasons that we watched "do the right thing" uncritically--out of an effort to signify that we were hip to her militant stance. the result being a kind of racist spectacle in which black intellectuals duke it out while whites sit on the sidelines, bet on the outcome, and root for the most radical team around. i mean, if hooks thinks spike lee's work is conservative, then she must really be "bad." this isn't hooks's problem, though she may be implicated in it. as much as she might try at times, she can't control how she is going to be read and the meaning her work might come to have. the problem is the river of white racism that flows deep and strong through our culture and our lives. at times it's hard for me to imagine what it might be like to be white and not be racist. [32] many of my friends, those on the left in particular, are trashing postmodern theories and theories of postmodernity. they are concerned, and in some cases rightly so, about the political and personal nihilism that seems to surround some postmodernist thinkers. hooks is critical of the elitist origins of postmodern thinking, but she would rather use it than trash it. hooks takes from postmodern thinking what newfangled ideas look useful, and at the same time boldly affirms a commitment to such unfashionable notions as "black liberation," "women's liberation" and "revolution." yes, even revolution. hooks is committed to that old-fashioned idea that we should be leaving this world a better place than we found it and reads postmodernism with this goal in mind. i read her with the same commitment. no one should fear succumbing to nihilism from reading _yearning_. [33] and despite the obvious problems involved, i want white men and women to read hooks. we won't find our way through these problems if we don't confront them, and reading hooks is a good place to start. i found that she pushed me to go beyond my tired and self-serving responses to racial issues. i'm pretty sure reading her work will do the same for others. i'd also like to see a lot more sustained commentary on her work by both blacks and whites. what little that exists is superficial. wrestling with the issues that hooks raises for white readers will propel us toward ways of responding to black authors that are not racist; ways of responding that move between criticism and self-criticism in an effort to expose, not bury, the problematic nature of reading and writing in black and white. ------------------------------------------------------ notes ^1^ my thanks to julie christianson, jim english, janet rex, and mike schwalbe for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this essay. ^2^ i particularly like this way of describing postmodern culture. i am paraphrasing dorothy smith, in _the everyday world as problematic: toward a feminist sociology_ (boston: northeastern up), 19. terada, 'derek walcott and the poetics of "transport"', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-terada-derek.txt derek walcott and the poetics of "transport" by rei terada <rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu> university of michigan at ann arbor _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by rei terada, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] most north american critics and reviewers have come to see derek walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, "natural, worldly, and accomplished" (vendler, 26).^1^ yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of walcott's work--its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency--has obstructed consideration of walcott's place in the postmodern era. enthusiastic critics usually discuss walcott as a "literary" poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.^2^ indeed, the surface of walcott's language does not seem postmodern. yet walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement--a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.^3^ the vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with walcott's poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.^4^ his readers most often argue that walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.^5^ by this logic, rhetoric and content in walcott's poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. other readers, meanwhile, believe that walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.^6^ [2] the difficulty in categorizing walcott's poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. while most of postmodernism's would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. if walcott's poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that walcott's poetic contradicts itself (and thus that walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from "ordinary" language are inadequate. indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. it usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. the expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric--precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow. [3] walcott avoids separating "poetic" from "ordinary" language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. the poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. indeed, james dickey complains that walcott seems at times unable "to state, or see, things without allegory" (8). walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. he also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative--"allegorical" in de man's sense--and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post modernity. walcott's turns of thought here do infact resemble de man's. in _allegories of reading_ de man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath "equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself" (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that "poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind" (17). walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. the overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an ashbery or a palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric. [4] although walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity of "poetic" rhetoric--often because revaluation of the poet's own work itself becomes a theme. "the light of the world" (_the arkansas testament_, 48-51), a wonderful example of tt's late style, is more nearly walcott's %ars poetica% than any other single lyric. "the light of the world" also considers the problems i've been discussing--the poet's inevitable social and linguistic displacement and the relation of poetic to nonpoetic language--more completely than any other single lyric. the poem once again addresses walcott's persistent fear--expressed as early as "homecoming: anse la raye" (1970; _the gulf_, 84-86)--that poetry may be tragically removed from popular language (and indeed, from material life). but while walcott more often deliberates this fear in terms of the poet's social separation from his culture--by virtue of linguistic choice, or of his public's literacy--"the light of the world" assumes that poetry is based upon figuration, and inquires whether poetry's reliance upon figuration divorces it from other linguistic forms. [5] the poem's aim to revaluate walcott's poetic is transparent, since _another life_, which first comprehensively narrates walcott's choice of vocation, turns upon its title phrase: "gregorias, listen, lit / we were the light of the world!"^7^ indeed, "another life" metamorphoses, in that volume, into "another light": "another light / in the unheard, creaking axle . . . / in the fire-coloured hole eating the woods" (12.iii.13-14, 17). in _another life_ these phrases, "the light of the world," "%lux mundi%," "another light," signify the passion, med by mortality, which drives both desire and creativity. in the course of the poem walcott's protagonist learns to sublimate passion into art which acknowledges its own origins in anxiety and ephemerality. gregorias' "crude wooden star, / its light compounded" by the "mortal glow" consuming it (23.iv.22-23), symbolizes such art in _another life_. "the light of the world" even more explicitly represents walcott's art as a combination of transience and transport. here the poet is a "transient" or tourist in his own culture, and the entire poem literally takes place in a "transport," or van, between castries and gros ilet. although walcott has not altered his own position regarding the value of these qualities, "the light of the world" now asks whether reliance on figuration severs the poet from the community and the communal language with which he would most like to share transport. [6] the poet is first inspired to think of the title phrase when he sees a beautiful woman sitting in the "transport" with him: marley was rocking on the transport's stereo and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly. i could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights silkened her black skin; i'd have put in an earring, something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she wore no jewelry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and the head was nothing else but heraldic. when she looked at me, then away from me politely, because any staring at strangers is impolite, it was like a statue, like a black delacroix's _liberty leading the people_, the gently bulging whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth, the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's, but gradually even that was going in the dusk, except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek, and i thought, o beauty, you are the light of the world! (48) although the poet perceives her at first as an individual woman, "the" beauty--"the beauty was humming the choruses quietly"--in the next moment he begins trying ways of seeing her as art, manipulating her image in a series of framings and figurations: "if this were a portrait . . . . the head was nothing else but heraldic . . . . like a statue, like a black delacroix's / _liberty leading the people_ . . . the carved ebony mouth." at the end of this sequence of figures, the poet finally addresses her as beauty itself. the unnamed woman is now named "beauty" with a capital b, and seems completely assimilated to the poet's conception of her. indeed, walcott's deepening aesthetic possession of the woman coincides with the gradual disappearance of her physical self in deepening darkness. in the moment before she becomes beauty, nothing remains but a "profile" and a highlight. it is entirely possible that in the moment walcott apotheosizes her, she completely disappears. beauty may be "the light of the world," but the apotheosizing capacity of walcott's own language is firmly associated with darkness. [7] although in his address walcott's comparison attains to metaphor--the woman is beauty--the similes leading up to this transfiguration had been conscious of the tension between the individual woman and beauty: "%if% this were a portrait"; "%you'd% leave the highlights"; "she looked at me, then away from me politely"; "%i'd% have put in an earring, / . . . %but she% / wore no jewelry" (italics mine). walcott's conjunction in "the heft of her torso solid, and a woman's," marks an uneasy nexus of formal strength with individual vulnerability, and of solidity with femininity (the sense of straining double consciousness, of near-paradox, is even stronger in an earlier version^8^ where walcott writes, "solid, %but% a woman's"). yet the woman's individual vulnerability, her mortality--"even that [solidity] was going in the dusk"--itself reminds the poet of art. _another life_ had celebrated precisely that art which allows one to perceive its temporality, its "going in the dusk." even though the poet apprehends the woman's apartness ("she wore no jewelry"), he still can't completely distinguish, at least on temporal grounds, between her mortal, breathing beauty and his own also fragile idea of beauty. on the other hand, if he cannot hold on to the distinction between the two, neither can he grasp their identity. his momentary metaphorization of her slips at the very moment at which it is apparently achieved. he names her "o beauty," but only in "thought," in darkness, and in the ambivalent rhetorical figure of (de manian) prosopopoeia. even the triumphant moment of her naming requires its highly conventional capitalization of "beauty" and interjection of "o" in order to ensure its recognition as poetic triumph. the presence of the beholder intrudes between the reader and the ostensible triumph, and between the reader and the object supposedly completely beheld. in the next moment it is no longer enough that the woman be beauty. beauty itself needs renaming by a further figure, "the light of the world," and disappears into this figurative excess. in later references the woman is once again only "the woman by the window," "her beauty." [8] walcott's correlation between the poet's expanding transport and expanding darkness magnifies the connotations of "transience." the poet passes from town to a hotel "full of transients like [him]self" (51),^9^ and at the same time voyages from life toward death. if this protagonist is a tourist, however, we are all tourists, since this is "the town / where [he] was born and grew up" (49). as tourist, he travels through a society itself transient: st. lucia, since it is now so "full of transients," may not last much longer in its present form. walcott represents st. lucia at large by means of the female figures in "the light of the world," just as he calls the antillean population by a series of female names in "sainte lucie" (_collected poems 1948-1984_, 309-323). %luce%, of course, means "light," and beauty in the poem is also tied to light. the woman in the transport therefore represents st. lucia, which for walcott coincides with beauty. walcott underscores the fragile temporal development of st. lucia by depicting a series of women at various stages of life, moving from "the beauty" to "drunk women on pavements" and a thought of his mother, "her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk" (49).^10^ these secondary women seem even more exposed, more obviously mortal than "the beauty." these elegiac thoughts further give rise to a reminiscence of the castries market in walcott's childhood, in which the poet-figure of a lamplighter prominently appears: "wandering gas lanterns hung on poles at street corners . . . the lamplighter climbed, / hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another" (49). in the earlier draft, walcott accents the fragility of the lamplighter's art--"the light . . . was poised to be lit / on the one hand, and on the next to go out," like that of the "fireflies" which act as "guides" later in the poem.^11^ finally, the transport's forward motion gives the sensation (as in bishop's "the moose" or frost's "stopping by woods") that everyone inside the transport is being carried toward death: "the van was slowly filling in the darkening depot. / i sat in the front seat, i had no need for time." [9] at the same time that the transport functions as a sort of charon's ferry, however, "transport" is also a synonym for "metaphor," whose etymology includes the notion of "carrying." moreover, it's clear that walcott means "metaphor" in its larger sense, to include all figuration, and accepts figuration as a defining feature of poetry--so that "metaphor" functions, as usual, as a figure for figuration. then too, "transport" can mean "ecstasy," which bears the connotation of sexual desire as well as of rapturous lyric inspiration. in other words, the poet's desire for "the beauty" and his aspiration toward poetic and formal beauty simultaneously carry him--and all kinds of "beauty" with him--toward equally simultaneous would-be possession and oblivion. the poem begins with an epigraph from bob marley, "kaya now, got to have kaya now . . . for the rain is falling"; the earlier version shows that walcott originally misheard marley, believing, charmingly enough, that marley was singing "zion-ah, / i've got to have zion ah"--a rendering which magnifies the apocalyptic character of the transport. "kaya" is marijuana, as it happens, but whether the desired object be marijuana or zion, "kaya" functions tautologically here, simply as "the desired," as whatever it is one has "got to have." "kaya" also functions, like poetic transport, as a vehicle toward the destination of simultaneous heightened elevation and oblivion. by this point walcott has accomplished more than a delineation of concurrent desires. he has asked whether metaphorical transport, in its ecstasy, either leaves its supposed subjects behind to unecstatic life and death, or carries them to oblivion by sweeping them up with it. the potential conflict is particularly obvious and painful when the inspired poet's subjects are st. lucian, poor and, in this case, mostly female. [10] yet another female figure enters the scene at this point--an old woman qualified by experience to speak for "her people," whose voice alone the poet represents: an old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere, some distance off, was a heavier basket that she couldn't carry. she was in a panic. she said to the driver: "%pas quittez moi a terre%," which is, in her patois: "don't leave me stranded," which is, in her history and that of her people: "don't leave me on earth," or, by a shift of stress: "don't leave me the earth" [for an inheritance]; "%pas quittez moi a terre%, heavenly transport, don't leave me on earth, i've had enough of it." the bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left on the earth, and would have to make out. abandonment was something they had grown used to. and i had abandoned them, i knew that now. . . . (49-50) several things are surprising about walcott's development of this metaphor (this transport). first, a north american critical audience will probably associate "transport" with politically undesirable transcendence and forgetfulness. but the old woman believes transport is "heavenly," a relief from her burdens, and so begs to be transported-and-not abandoned--even though "abandon" is itself a synonym for "transport" when both mean "rapture." at the same time, "abandon[ment]" in the negative sense inevitably accompanies figuration, since writing--substituting figuration for presence--marks the site of perpetually abandoned presence. walcott further highlights the constitutional ambivalence of these words in his self-reversing line about shadows "that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left." the line remains ambiguous in at least three ways. walcott's reversal could indicate the passage of time: it at first seems that all the shadowy bodies of villagers (also "shades" crossing between worlds) outside the transport will fit in; after a while, it does not. in addition, the first half of this line is "literal" (the passengers will not be left behind because they will get in the transport), and the second half "figurative" (they will be "left behind" because the poet will abandon them emotionally and linguistically). but, third and finally, "would" can also suggest preference or volition: they wanted transport, they wanted to be left on the earth. and this is what everyone is likely to feel: we want the universal, we want the particular. in "the light of the world" (as in "the schooner _flight_," whose protagonist shabine is "nobody or a nation"), walcott maintains a fierce consciousness of both poles. [11] further, if one believes that figuration is a specialized form of language which abandons the object world by its abstraction, it will confound one's expectations that, as walcott's explication demonstrates, the "poetic" multiplicity of meanings in "transport" and "abandon" also occurs in the old woman's speech. the old woman's phrase is figurative to its core, as walcott's translation makes clear. "%pas quittez moi a terre%" does not "denote" "don't leave me stranded." besides, "don't leave me stranded" is itself figurative, unless one's friend is sailing away from the beach (as st. lucia's colonizers figuratively and literally did sail away). translation begins by substituting supposed denotations, but can never end. denotations, too, continually dissolve by mere "shift[s] of stress." likewise, poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but walcott recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also "quarrelled for bread in the shops, / or quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling" (49). [12] walcott, rather like wordsworth, is now moved by his own reflection that he "had abandoned them . . . had left them on earth," to feel "a great love that could bring [him] to tears" (50). in this ecstatic experience of %agape%, of course, we reach yet another connotation of "transport." contrary to what one hears about %agape%, the poet's love actually denies him oneness with the people around him. instead, it takes the form of "a pity" that makes him feel his own isolation the more, the more hyperconscious he grows of "their neighborliness, / their consideration." his pity, in other words, pulls him both toward and away from them, following the two directions of language--"tearing him apart," as we so orphically say. the poet suffers further when, in accordance with its mission as an engine of time, even those people who fit into the transport begin getting off. each departure enacts a miniature death, and too clearly foreshadows the poet's own: i wanted the transport to continue forever, for no one to descend and say a goodnight in the beams of the lamps and take the crooked path up to the lit door, guided by fireflies; i wanted her beauty to come into the warmth of considerate wood, to the relieved rattling of enamel plates in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard, but i came to my stop. outside the halcyon hotel. the lounge would be full of transients like myself. then i would walk with the surf up the beach. i got off the van without saying good night. good night would be full of inexpressible love. they went on in their transport, they left me on earth. (51) [13] another reversal occurs here, when, after having left his neighbors on earth through his language and his "transience" (his exile), his neighbors in turn leave the poet. one often encounters, in walcott's poetry, the idea that home can leave you. in the structurally similar "homecoming: anse la raye," the narrator already feels like "a tourist." "hop[ing] it would mean something to declare / today, i am your poet, yours," he finds no one to listen to such a declaration except throngs of children who want coins or nothing. caught in the impasse of this "homecoming without home," "you give them nothing. / their curses melt in air" (85). in contrast, fishermen cast "draughts" of nets, "texts" which help the children more ably than the poet's. the poet can give the children only words, "nothing" in the way of coins; they return him, in kind, words which are curses. [14] "the light of the world" also features a mutual abandonment, the poet's sense of pity and guilt, a confrontation between a "transient" and his people, and jealousy toward another artisan. many critics, having cast walcott in the role of "literary poet," oppose him to the barbadian poet edward brathwaite, a more "folkish" writer. in "the light of the world," walcott compares himself to an apter and stronger competitor, bob marley. "marley" is the poem's first word; as the poem's text stands under its epigraph from marley's "kaya," so marley's song--"rocking" (48), "thud-sobbing" (51), popular, choric, mnemonic- suffuses the whole transport. the "beauty was humming" marley's choruses, not walcott's; when the whole transport "hum[s] between / gros-ilet and the market" (48), marley's song becomes indistinguishable from the motor which drives transport forward. this realization, as much as his confrontation with mortality, brings the poet "down to earth" (and leaves him there). the poet leaves his people on earth--that he could bear. what's worse, he "le[aves] them to sing / marley's songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth" (51), and the thought that they so gladly sing the songs of a competitor drives him to tears. the pill walcott swallows here is, then, at least as bitter as that in "homecoming: anse la raye." [15] but in "the light of the world," walcott's greater awareness of linguistic ambivalence and of tensions between universals and particulars far more precisely and gently renders a similar experience, without assuming a wishful intimacy or erasing difference. walcott explores his own universalizing impulse most completely here. and in the end, the poem suggests that the "poetic" language of metaphor cannot be held apart from marley's language, from the old woman's language, from all language. the poet faces insoluble problems of representation; and in a way, it doesn't help that everyone who uses language faces these same problems and temptations. on the other hand, in the impossibility of controlling language and the inescapability of desiring to do so, as in the inescapability of death, we find a kind of community in poverty. the poem's last stanza, which takes up after the poet has been "left on earth," arrives like an extra gift, an unexpected bit of afterlife: then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped. a man shouted my name from the transport window. i walked up towards him. he held out something. a pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket. he gave it to me. i turned, hiding my tears. there was nothing they wanted, nothing i could give them but this thing i have called "the light of the world." (51) again, as in "anse la raye," the poet and his counterpart, representing his community, exchange virtually "nothing." the man returns the cigarettes, while the poet turns speechless away: "there was nothing they wanted, nothing i could give them." walcott revises the orpheus and eurydice story here in a manner unflattering to the postmodern orpheus.^12^ this orpheus cannot take his eurydice home because he is mortal himself, has no particular powers against death, and besides, she doesn't belong to him and never did. he is too overcome to look back and deliberately leaves without parting, having accomplished nothing. in fact he assumes the passive position, so that the mortals (who have their own transport and their own music) look back at him. much of this diminishment already occurs in rilke's "orpheus. eurydike. hermes.," in which eurydice reacts to news of orpheus' failure by asking, "who?" as de man points out, the genuine reversal takes place at the end of the poem, when hermes turns away from the ascending movement that leads orpheus back to the world of the living and instead follows eurydice into a world of privation and nonbeing. on the level of poetic language, this renunciation corresponds to the loss of a primacy of meaning located within the referent and it allows for the new rhetoric of rilke's "figure." (47) in walcott's as in rilke's version of the story, the poet figure retains little power or tragic dignity. [16] yet the two "nothings" the poet and the others in the transport exchange--unlike the "nothing" and "curses" in "anse la raye"--mean everything. this is how language works, conveying in spite of itself. the man's gesture embodies all the warm "neighborliness," "consideration," and "polite partings" of his society which have moved the poet to write about it, and walcott gives that society what he loves most, his %lux mundi%, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all "but" nothing, and even a repetition of abandonment. walcott's description of the poet's diminished powers sounds characteristically postmodern, if we understand postmodernism as a folding back from modernism's totalizing ambitions. but notice that this diminishment does not free the poet from communal responsibilities, or from his aesthetic and sexual desires. [17] poetic humility takes paradoxical forms. the more humbly the poet describes her or his own efforts, the greater she or he may believe poetry to be. in a way, walcott's recognition of the poet's limitations makes his task even more ambitious, since it will be more difficult. without the illusion of mastery over language, the poet still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and "truth"- which in "the light of the world" means precisely recognizing the inescapability of rhetoric. paradoxically, walcott brings every poetic resource to bear upon the task of convincing us that "poetry makes nothing happen." the performance is convincing--so convincing that it undoes its own point. rhetoric here struggles to dismiss itself, and, predictably, cannot. walcott's last small "but" opens a floodgate through which poetic grandiosity and linguistic transcendence stream. even by calling his poem "this thing," he simultaneously metaphorizes and reifies it. by further calling "this thing" (already metaphorized by being called a thing) "the light of the world," walcott enters the realm of undecidability. on the one hand, this last line is figurative and glorious: poems are, after all, the light of the world. on the other, it is merely literal and tautological. the title of the poem is, inarguably, "the light of the world"; the phrase is a citation, referring us only to itself, and distances itself by its quotation marks from the notion of poetic glory. that is, since the title comprises a proper name, we cannot, as when derrida writes of ponge, "know with any peaceful certainty whether [it] designate[s] the name or the thing" (derrida, 8). the reader cannot stand between these two interpretations to choose one. neither can we decide whether "the light of the world" actively produces and undoes these contradictions or whether these contradictions actively produce and undo it, for the process of disclosing the ubiquity of rhetoric also begins in self-knowledge and moves toward generalization, following the route of the universalizing impulse it queries. if walcott's interest in this particular query is postmodern, his postmodernity trails behind it modernism's tendency to universalize. [18] but in this too walcott's example is at least instructive and at most representative. attempts to define postmodernism solely by its difference from modernism themselves echo modern self-definitions. it may be typical of postmodernism to lose itself in the perspectivism of which it is so fond. according to linda hutcheon, postmodernism asks us to see "historical meaning . . . today," for example, "as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional," and at the same time "argues that, in fact, it has always been so" (67). if this is true, postmodernism can best be defined not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a set of attitudes or a grammar of rhetoric, but as inseparable from the propensity to read postmodernly. and if postmodern poetry characteristically inhabits and describes the circulation of these perspectives, walcott's metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary poet will be difficult to assail. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ for some representative reviews, see also calvin bedient, "derek walcott, contemporary" (_parnassus_ 9 [1981], 31-44); paul breslin, "'i met history once, but he ain't recognize me': the poetry of derek walcott" (_triquarterly_ 68 [1987], 168-183); and rita dove, "'either i'm nobody, or i'm a nation'" (_parnassus_ 14 [1987], 49-76). ^2^ vendler, for example, remarks that "hart crane, dylan thomas, pound, eliot, and auden [follow] yeats in walcott's ventriloquism" (23), and sven birkerts claims that "[walcott] apprenticed himself to the english tradition and has never strayed far from the declamatory lyrical line. his mentors . . . include the elizabethans and jacobeans, wordsworth, tennyson, yeats, hardy, and robert lowell (who himself sought to incorporate that tradition into his work)" (31). ^3^ linda hutcheon notes that "on the level of representation . . . postmodern questioning overlaps with similarly pointed challenges by those working in, for example, postcolonial . . . contexts" (37), and that "difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis" (5). ^4^ both vendler's well-known review of _the fortunate traveller_ and james atlas' _new york times magazine_ story on walcott, for example, are entitled "poet of two worlds." ^5^ for bedient, for example, walcott's language in "old new england," a poem in part about vietnam, "places him curiously inside the dream, insulated there, enjoying it" (33). ^6^ this last position is most often taken by walcott's fellow poets, especially joseph brodsky and seamus heaney. ^7^ _another life_, 23.iv.11-12; also 12.iii.21-22. i will refer to _another life_ by chapter, section and line number. ^8^ _paris review_ 101 (1986), 192. ^9^ walcott had written "tourists like myself" in place of "transients" in the earlier draft of "light." ^10^ "[f]ading in the dying dusk" in the _paris review_. ^11^ fireflies are among the favorite creatures in walcott's bestiary. he first mentions them in poetry in "lampfall" (_the castaway and other poems_, 58-59), where they represent a fluctuating, delicate curiosity: "like you, i preferred / the firefly's starlike little / lamp, mining, a question, / to the highway's brightly multiplying beetles" (59). in _ti-jean and his brothers_, the firefly "lights the tired woodsman home," and annoys the devil by his mercurial gaiety (when "the firefly passes, dancing," the devil barks, "get out of my way, you burning backside, i'm the prince of obscurity and i won't brook interruption!" [_dream on monkey mountain and other plays_, 151]). in general, walcott associates fireflies with the short-lived magic of words, whose meaning flashes on and off. ^12^ walcott explicitly reworks the orpheus-eurydice story in his new musical, _steel_ (produced at the american repertory theater, cambridge, massachusetts, 1991). there, it is eurydice (a schoolgirl) who instructs orpheus (a steel band musician) not to look at her as they revisit their childhood neighborhood. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited bedient, calvin. "derek walcott: contemporary." _parnassus_ 9 (1981), 31-44. birkerts, sven. "heir apparent" [review of _midsummer_], _the new republic_ 190 (1984), 31-33. de man, paul. _allegories of reading: figural language in rousseau, nietzsche, rilke, and proust_. new haven: yale up, 1979. derrida, jacques. _signsponge_. trans. richard rand. new york: columbia up, 1984. dickey, james. "worlds of a cosmic castaway" [review of _collected poems_ 1948-1984]. _new york times book review_, 2 february 1986, 8. hutcheon, linda. _the politics of postmodernism_. london: routledge, 1989. rilke, rainer maria. _the selected poetry_. ed. and trans. stephen mitchell. new york: vintage, 1984. vendler, helen. "poet between two worlds" [review of _the fortunate traveller_], _new york review of books_, 4 march 1982, 23-27. walcott, derek. _another life_. new york: farrar, straus & giroux, 1974. ---. _the castaway and other poems_. london: jonathan cape, 1965. ---. _collected poems 1948-1984_. new york: farrar, straus & giroux, 1984. ---. _dream on monkey mountain and other plays_. new york: farrar, straus, & giroux, 1970. ---. _the gulf and other poems_. new york: farrar, straus, & giroux, 1970. ---. "the light of the world." _paris review_ 101 (1986), 192-95. pfeil, 'revolting yet conserved: family %noir% in _blue velvet_ and _terminator 2_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-pfeil-revolting.txt revolting yet conserved: family %noir% in _blue velvet_ and _terminator 2_ by fred pfeil center for the humanities oregon state university <centerfh@ccmail.orst.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by fred pfeil, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. [1] when we think about %film noir% in the present, it is well to remember the categorical instability that has dogged its tracks from the moment french critics coined the term in the mid-1950s as a retrospective tag for a bunch of previously withheld american films which now, upon their foreign release, all looked and felt sort of alike. ever since, critics and theorists have been arguing over what %noir% is and which films are examples of it, over what social processes and psychic processes it speaks of and to, and what might constitute its own social effects. does %film noir% constitute its own genre; a style which can be deployed across generic boundaries; a movement within hollywood cinema, limited to its place in space and time? these, the intrinsic questions and debates, have their own momentum and energy, but derive extra charge from an associated set of extrinsic questions regarding %noir%'s relationships to other, non-cinematic social trans formations, especially shifts in gender identities and relationships in the post-wwii u.s. did the spider-women of so many %films noir%, despite their emphatically evil coding and self-destructive defeats, nonetheless constitute a challenge to the restoration and extension of a patriarchal capitalist gender economy under whose terms men controlled and ran the public sphere while women, desexualized and maternalized, were relegated to hearth and home? does the aggressive sexuality, power and plot controlling/generating/ deranging force, of, say, a barbara stanwyck in _double indemnity_, jane greer in _out of the past_, gloria grahame in _the big heat_, together with %noir%'s characteristically deviant visuality--its cramped asymmetrical framings, its expressionistically harsh lighting contrasts and lurid shadows, the whole twisted and uncertain spatiality of it matching the male protagonist's lack of control over the breakneck deviousness of its plot--constitute a real and potentially effective subversion of the dominant order, as christine gledhill suggests?^1^ or is it simply, as neoformalist film historian david bordwell asserts, that "these films blend causal unity with a new realistic and generic motivation, and the result no more subverts the classical film"--or, we may presume, anything else--"than crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel" (77)? [2] %noir%, then, as coded alternative or as alternate flavor of the month, something to put alongside vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and _the best years of our lives_? the debate smolders on unresolved, and perhaps irresolvably, depending as it does on some broader knowledge or agreement as to what indeed constitutes subversive or progressive work within a preor non-revolutionary cultural moment and social formation. more directly, the question is how any capital-intensive work, such as film or mainstream television production, which is produced for a mass audience, can be progressive, and how we can tell insofar as it is. how (and how well) would such work *work*? what (and how much) would it *do*? more crudely still, how far can a work go and still get made and distributed within a system whose various structures are all overdetermined by capitalism and patriarchy (not to mention racism and homophobia)? what's the most, and the best, we can demand and/or expect? [3] it is, as marxists used to say perhaps too often, no accident that such messy questions press themselves on us today so insistently and distinctly that a whole new interdisciplinary protodiscipline, "cultural studies," now constitutes itself just to deal with them. their emergence and urgency for us is, after all, inevitably consequent upon the dimming of the revolutionary horizon, and the loss or confusion of revolutionary faith, not only within the socialist left but throughout all the other feminist and "minority" movements in the '70s and '80s, condemned as each has been to its own version of the excruciating declension from essentialist-nationalist unity to division fanon outlined in _the wretched of the earth_ for a post-colonial subject on the other side of a war of national liberation for which there was finally, in the u.s. anyway, never a credible or even distinct equivalent anyway. here the revolution, if there was anything like one, came from the right--new right maven paul weyrich proudly proclaiming in the wake of the first reagan election in the early '80s, "we are radicals seeking to overthrow the power structure"- against the liberal-corporatist state and the sociopolitical good sense that flowed from and supported it, both of which had to be, and have been, dismantled and rearticulated in quite different ways. given this combination, then, of dis integration below and regressive hegemonic re-integration from on high, the whole notion of what gramsci called "war of movement," of deep structural and institutional change, has come to seem to many once-insurrectionary spirits to be inconceivably crackpot or even worse, a grisly ruse of the very power (a la foucault) it pretends to oppose; so that a permanent "war of position," the ever partial and provisional %detournement% of otherwise intractable institutional arrangements and practices, becomes literally the only game in town. [4] i describe this situation here not to deplore or criticize it, no more than i would claim to know how to resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it in some new transcendent synthesis of what is to be done; it is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in the developed west, and the u.s. in particular, are *in*. so it will be both the context from which we must think about the meaning and direction of the so-called "return" of %noir% during the '70s and '80s just past, and some of the newest mutations in the %noir% sensibility today. [5] for starters, moreover, we would do well to resist the very notion of straightforward repetition or "return" to explain such films as _body heat_ (1981) and the remakes of _farewell my lovely_ (1975) and _the postman always rings twice_ (1981).^2^ for whatever %noir% was in the '40s and '50s, it will not be again three decades or more later by dint of sheer straightforward imitation, if only because the meanings and effects of the original %films noir% even today must still be experienced and understood in their relation to a whole system of film production, distribution, and consumption--the hollywood studio system, in effect- which was in its last hour even then and is now gone. as thomas schatz has recently reminded us, it was that system which most fully standardized and customized the look and feel and plotlines of film genres, from mgm classics and costume dramas to warner's gangster pics and universal's specialty in horror: some of them genres from which %noir% had something to steal (e.g., the deep shadows and expressionistic framings of the horror film), but each and all of them together a system of techniques, conventions *and*, not least, audience expectations (e.g., the romantic happy ending and/or the satisfying restoration of law and order) that %noir%s first defined themselves by violating. [6] accordingly, when the studio system breaks up into the present "package-unit" system in which individual producers assemble production groups and materials on a film-by-film basis, employing what is left of the studios primarily as a distribution arm, and generic production atomizes too as the specialized constellations of talents and resources once fixed in position to produce it are dispersed, we may expect that the working parts of the %noir% machine of effects and responses will also break apart into so many free agents, capable of being drafted onto any number of new, provisional combinatory teams, all according to the same recombinant aesthetic economy which, for example, a decade ago brought us the tv series _hill street blues_ out of a directive to its original writers to knock out a combination of sit-com _barney miller_ and the action-adventure series _starsky and hutch_.^3^ in this newer hollywood, quintessential site of the intersection between the flexible specialization of post-fordist production and the free-floating ideologemes turned-syntax of postmodernism, the transgressive energies and subversive formal practices that first animated and defined %noir% may be most alive and well where they have migrated from the now-conventionalized site of their first appearance towards some new and even perverse combination with other formal and thematic elements in similar drift from other ex-genres of film. [7] such, at any rate, is the general hypothesis of the present essay, whose specific claim will be that %film noir% in particular, homeless now as a genre (or aesthetic reaction-formation to genre), nonetheless currently finds itself most alive where its former elements and energies form part of a new chronotope whose chief difference from that nonor even anti-domestic one of "classic" %noir% lies in the extent to which the newer one includes, and indeed is centered on, home and family, even as it decenters and problematizes both. through a look at two successful recent films, _blue velvet_ and _terminator 2_, i mean to show how home and family are being destabilized, "%noir%-ized," in both: in which case, the large differences between our two films in terms of aesthetic strategies and audiences should only make the similarities in the end results of each film's processing of the elements of %noir% it takes up that much more striking and significant. striking in what way, though, how significant and for whom? connected to what other transformations and praxes, underway or to come? those questions will raise their heads again on the other side of the following readings, forcing us again to hedge and answer them as best we can in the absence of any clear or shared utopian goal. i. _blue velvet_ and the strangely familiar [8] it is too easy to tick off the %noir% elements in david lynch's art-film hit _blue velvet_ (1986). the investigative male protagonist (kyle mclachan) caught between dangerous dark-haired dorothy valens (isabella rossellini) and bland blond sandy (laura dern); the far reaching nature of the evil mclachan's jeffrey uncovers and the entanglements of the police themselves in its web; the homoerotic dimension of the relationship between jeffrey and the film's arch-villain frank (dennis hopper): any college sophomore with intro film studies under his or her belt can make the idents, just as anyone who's ever taken intro to psych can pick up on the oedipal stuff hiding in plain sight, beginning of course with the collapse of jeffrey's father and ending with his restoration. michael moon, in one of the best commentaries on the film, summarizes quite nicely the familiar story of how it goes in between: a young man must negotiate what is represented as being the treacherous path between an older, ostensibly exotic, sexually 'perverse' woman and a younger, racially 'whiter,' sexually 'normal' one, and he must at the same time and as part of the same process negotiate an even more perilous series of interactions with the older woman's violent and murderous criminal lover and the younger woman's protective police detective father. this heterosexual plot resolves itself in classic oedipal fashion: the young man, jeffrey, destroys the demonic criminal 'father' and rival, frank; rescues the older woman, dorothy, from frank's sadistic clutches; and then relinquishes her to her fate and marries the perky young daughter of the good cop.^4^ [9] such a blatant evocation, or perhaps more accurately, acting out, of the standard image repertoires of generic %noir% and psychoanalytic truism will, it is worth noting, not be obvious to everyone--only to those who, thanks to college or some other equivalent educational circuitry, have the cultural capital to recognize the codes at work. assuming such an audience, though, the point is to consider such paint-by-number material not as finished product, but as starting point and second-order raw material for the film's subsequent elaborations. if it would be a mistake to accept such generic material at face value, in other words, it would be just as wrong to write it off and look for what else is "really" going on instead. [10] our first job, then, is rather to consider *obviousness* in _blue velvet_ as a subject and production in its own right, and with its own multiple, complex effects. but to take this subject up in turn is to notice immediately just how many ways lynch "shoves it in our faces" as well as how many things "it" in that last phrase comes to be, so often and so many that a certain kind of "ominous-obvious" may fairly be said to constitute both the film's thematic subject and its formal method alike. an exhaustive reading of _blue velvet_ along these lines could in fact begin with the film's very first image, the rippling blue velvet against which its opening titles appear, shot in such extreme, quasi-magnified close-up that, as barbara creed points out, its smooth soft surface appears mottled and rough as bark (100). but i would rather concentrate instead on the image-flow that follows those credits, a sort of music video to the bobby vinton oldie of the film's title, falling in between (in both a chronological and a stylistic sense) the credits and the story-line that picks up at its end. here is a list of the shots that compose the film's dreamy opening montage: 1. tilt down from perfectly blue sky to red roses in medium close-up against white fence. dissolve to 2. long shot: fire truck passing by slowly on tree shaded small-town street, with fireman on it waving in slow motion. dissolve to 3. yellow tulips against white fence, close-up as at the end of shot 1. dissolve to 4. long shot, small-town residential street: traffic guard beckoning for schoolchildren to cross, again in slow motion. dissolve to 5. long shot: white cape cod house and yard. cut to 6. medium shot: middle-aged man with hose, watering yard. cut to 7. long shot, interior: middle-aged woman inside, sitting with cup of coffee on couch, watching tv, which displays black-and-white shot of man crossing screen, gun in hand, and from which issues sinister %noir%ish music. cut to 8. close-up of hand holding gun on tv screen. cut to 9. man with hose, as in shot 6, but now off-center at screen left. actually, the sequence at this point has already begun to speed up somewhat, moving from shots of approximately five seconds apiece (shots 1-4) to an average of three (5-8). from shot 9 on, moreover, the sequence will quicken and warp still further, as an increasingly rapid montage of increasingly close-up shots of kinked hose/sputtering tap/vexed man, joined with a sound-track in which the diegetic sound of water fizzing under pressure is combined with a gradually rising and apparently non-diegetic buzz or roar, towards the man's collapse, the hose's anarchic rearing upward, a slow-mo shot of a dog drinking from the hose beside the fallen man, the sound of the dog barking, a baby crying, a rushing wind combined with a mechanical rustling noise, as we go down through the lawn in a process shot pretending to be an unbroken zoom-in to a horde of swarming, warring black insects whose organic-mechanical noise-plus-wind now swells up to an overwhelming roar.... [11] what is one to make of such an opening? or rather, what *do* we make of it? given our previous training in how to watch feature films, or, more specifically, in how to read their spatio-temporally orienting shots and narrative cues, it seems to me that with part of our minds we struggle to do the usual with this image-flow: to read it narratively, place ourselves in it, "follow" it out. and, of course our efforts and presumptions in this regard are not entirely in vain. okay, we say, it's a small-town, and here's a particular family inside it, a dad and mom, and look, something's happening to the dad so things are off balance now, not right, gee what happens next? but all that is only with part of the mind, and against a kind of semic counter-logic or inertial drag instigated by the very same shots, at least or especially shots 1-4 and the slow-motion and extreme close-ups that close off the sequence (as other such shot combinations will serve as the disjunctive ligatures between one section of the film's narrative and the next): in the degree to which all these shots overshoot their narrative or, in barthesian terms, proairetic function, and force attention on themselves in some purely imagistic way instead, bobbie vinton, blue sky and red roses at one end, roaring wind, mechanical rustling and ravening black insects on the other. [12] if, moreover, such a difference from the opening moves of conventional film falls somewhere short of effecting a total break with the prevailing model of filmic narrative, its relative distance from that model is nonetheless made all the more apparent by the lurch that follows back toward typicality. like a second beginning, the shot-sequence that follows the one we have just rehearsed opens with a set of establishing long-shots of the town of lumberton, simultaneously named as such by the local radio station on the soundtrack, after which we are shown jeffrey the film's protagonist for the first time, pausing on his way to visit his hospitalized father in order to throw a stone in the field where he will soon find the severed ear of dorothy valens' husband and thereby set the film's %noir%ish plot into full motion. so now, in effect, we are invited to take a deep breath and relax and enjoy, i.e., do a conventional reading of, the film: only once again, not quite. for this sequence will no less settle into assured conventionality than the last completely broke from it. so the d.j.'s radio patter is slightly, well, *skewed*--"it's a sunny day," he chirps, "so get those chainsaws out!"--as, on a visual level, is the sequence of images itself, in which the aforementioned shot of jeffrey in the field is followed by two brief red-herring long-shots of downtown, one in which an unknown car pulls onto the town's main street, the other of an unknown man standing spinning what might be a ring of keys in his hand as he stands out in front of a darkened store, before the sequence slips back into gear with a close-up of jeffrey's father in his hospital bed as jeffrey's visiting presence is announced. [13] from its outset, then, _blue velvet_ is characterized by the *partial and irresolute* opposition of two distinct kinds and pleasures of narrative: one characterized by the relative dominance of what, following barthesian narrative theory, i have called the *semic*, and the other by the equally relative dominance of the establishing, fixing and plotting functions of the *proairetic*. less pretentiously, of course, we could speak of the predominance of *image* versus that of *story-line*, and avoid french post structuralist theory altogether, were it not for the real yet perverse relevance of barthes' terms, and the psychopolitical valences attached to them, for this particular film. to discern this relevance, we need only recall, first of all, that within that theory the placing, naming, and motivating functions of the proairetic, and its predominance in conventional narrative, are held to be defining symptoms of the constitutive *oedipality* of such narrative energies and desires, or perhaps more precisely of the binding, sublimation and containment of such desire; just as the atemporal and never-fully-repressible bursts and upwellings of the semic are identified with the carnivalesque freedom of the unregulated, post-, pre-, or even anti-oedipal social and individual body. then all we have to do is notice how insofar as such definitions and categories do hold water for us, _blue velvet_ gets them- though once again, only sort of--wrong from the get-go, observing this oppositional distinction and flouting it at the same time by reversing what one might have thought was their "natural" order: for what kind of narrative text is it, after all, in which the fall of the father is *preceded* by an image-flow predominantly semic in nature, but *followed* by one that more or less falls obediently into story-plotting line? [14] a postmodern text, of course; the kind of postmodern work which, as in cindy sherman's first acclaimed photos, is concerned both to hybridize and hollow out the cliche. for simultaneously hyper-realizing and de-centering narrative and cinematic convention, is from the start what _blue velvet_ is about, both its way of doing business and the business itself. visually, as laurie simmons' description of lynch's style suggests, its techniques and effects are most clearly related to those of pop art, though more that of rosenquist, say, than andy warhol.^5^ such perfect two-dimensionality--so different, it may be worth noting, from the expressionistically crowded and askew deep-spaces of classic %noir% style--simultaneously flattens and perfects all its glazed gaze captures, from roses to ravening insects, soda fountain booth to severed ear, while on the film's soundtrack, the same sense is created and reinforced by badalamenti's score which, here and in _twin peaks_ alike, flaunts its bare-faced imitation of %misterioso% a la hitchcock composer bernard hermann one minute, gushing romantic strings a la dmitri tiomkin the next, with some dollops of the kind of insipid finger popping jazz-blues once written for quinn-martin tv detective series, soundtrack scores of the first living-room %noirs%, thrown in on the side. such predigested product thus functions as the musical equivalent of the cliched dialogue of the script and the two-dimensional visuality of the cinematography, each overdetermining the other into an aggregate signal of intentional derivativeness and knowing banality whose obverse or underside is clearly that moment when, aurally and/or visually, that which we take as the %ur%-natural (the clicking and mandibular crunching of the insects, the robin with the worm in its mouth) becomes indistinguishable from sounds of industry, the sight of the obviously animatronic--in short, the synthetic constructions, material and imaginative, of human beings themselves, recognized and felt as such. [15] in early-industrial britain, keats invited his readers to the edge of one sublime mode of hyper-attention, a falling into the object's depths so intense the viewer's own consciousness browns out ("a drowsy numbness pains/my sense"). in the postmodern late-industrial mode of lynch's film, however, the gleaming but off-kilter perfection of such %recherche% surfaces as those we have examined constitutes its very own warp, and the terrified rapture of the romantic swoon away from consciousness is replaced by a queasy awareness of anxious affiliation to and guilty/paranoid complicity with all that we are so familiar with in what we see and hear, as in this scene in which our hero jeffrey has a talk in the den with lieutenant williams, bland-blonde sandy's father and police detective, consequent to jeffrey's discovery of the ear: williams: you've found something that is very interesting to us. very interesting. i know you must be curious to know more. but i'm afraid i'm going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about the case, but not to tell anybody about your find. one day when it's all sewed up, i'll let you know all the details. right now, though, (glancing sidelong, sneaking a puff on his cigarette) i can't. jeffrey: i understand. i'm just real curious, like you said. williams: (slightly smiling) i was the same way myself when i was your age. that's why i went into this business. jeffrey: (laughs) must be great. williams: (freezes, sours smile) it's horrible too. i'm sorry jeffrey; it just has to be that way. anyway jeffrey, i know you do understand. each sentence, every phrase, 100% b-movie cliche, and delivered as such, with all the wooden earnestness the actors can muster. yet i hope my transcription also conveys something of the extent to which, even as that dialogue rattles out, williams' suspiciously askew reactions and expressions move our reactions not so much against the direction of the cliches as athwart them. on the level of the story-line, and given our past experience of both oedipal narrativity in general and %noir% in particular, they may prompt us to wonder if father/detective williams won't turn to be one of the bad guys after all; on the level of what we might call the film's enunciation, though, and in light of all else we have seen about this film so far, such a moment is apt to engender a far more fundamental distrust, less the suspicion that we haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet than the fullblown paranoia that *there may be no bottom here at all*. [16] so, in the closing moments of the film, when jeffrey and sandy and their families are both completed and combined around the exemplary center of their good love, the famous moment when that robin shows up with the worm in its mouth and jeffrey's aunt barbara, looking over his shoulder and munching on a hot dog, says "i could never do that!" provokes a complicated laugh from the audience. on the one hand, of course it's about both the ironic relation of that amorally predatory robin to the goopy speech sandy gave earlier in the film, in which robins figured in a dream she'd had as emblems of pure good, and the reinforcing irony of aunt barbara's self-righteous disavowal of the very appetitiveness she is displaying by stuffing her mouth. on the other, though, given the bird's obvious artificiality, the music's cliched goopiness, and the hypercomposed flatness and stiffness of the %mise-en-scene%, it's also about the anxious and delightful possibility that aunt barbara--and jeffrey and sandy, for that matter--are robots too. and of course they are, in the sense that they are constructions of sound and words and light, spaces where lynch & company's projections meet our own; and in this sense so are all the characters in every feature film. yet if every film in the hollywood tradition invites its audience to recite some version of the mannoni formula %je sais bien mais quand meme% on its way into and through the story-world it offers, _blue velvet_ is nonetheless distinctive for the steady insistence with which it ups the volume on its own multiple, hybridized, and hyper-realized elements of %retrouvee%, pushing its audience to acknowledge its own "i know very well" at least as much as its "but even so . . .," and so to taint and complicate a heretofore blissfully irresponsible and safely distanced voyeurism with its own admissions of familiarity as complicity, anxious lack of distance, guilt at home.^6^ "you put your disease inside me!" dorothy says to jeffrey, and of him, to everyone around her at one point; and so he/we did; but in another sense, of course, it was there/here/everywhere all along, and we have "it" inside us too. [17] it is this "it," this recognition and admission of the obvious artifice, that we then carry with us alongside and through those obvious elements of %noir% and of oedipal psychopathology which have in and of themselves elicited so much critical commentary. some writers have concentrated on lynch's blending and blurring of genres (maclachan's jeffrey as both philip marlowe and dobie gillis) and generic chronotopes (the smokey nightclub in the small-town, the naked "dark woman" in the family's living room), while others hone in on the sheer mobility of male-hysterical fantasy in the film--the dangerous, vertiginous, yet perpetual oscillations between sadism/masochism, "daddy" and "baby," heteroand homosexual desire, as all these are acted out (in both senses of the term) in the film's excess of primary scenes (jeffrey with dorothy, frank with dorothy, jeffrey and frank with ben, jeffrey with frank). yet even those who have attempted to consider and synthesize both these manifest topical areas have tended to miss, or at least underestimate, the full measure, meaning and effect of the de-realizing, de-naturalizing formal operations of the film, and the extent to which they power the movement toward what michael moon, examining that psychosexual terrain, describes as "the fearful knowledge that what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audioand videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synching of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires" even before the generic mix is evident and the sexual-psychoanalytic heyday/mayhem begins.^7^ what fascinates and appalls in _blue velvet_, what simultaneously underwrites and undermines the mixed messages of its generic play and desublimated oedipality, is the sense of the fragility of the symbolic, its susceptibility to the metonymic "disease" of constant slippage that is always already inside it, a %gynesis% of both film and family that irresolves without overthrowing, that keeps home un-natural while forcing us to own up to the familiarity of all that is officially other and strange, home-making and *and as* dislocating, from blue-sky beginning (plenitude or emptiness? true blue or fake void?) to blue-sky end. ii. _terminator 2_: any which way but loose [18] things are somewhat different in this past summer's blockbuster sci-fi hit _terminator 2: judgement day_, if only because it is not likely investors will put up $90 million for a project whose meanings, pleasures, and rules of motion derive from the principle of semiotic erosion of narrative conventions, irresolution as an aesthetic way of life. the overall regime of pleasure in the blockbuster film is, rather, a paradigm of late capitalist consumer production: it must keep us constantly (though *not* continuously) engaged without demanding much attention; knock us out with all the trouble it's gone to just to give us an instant's satisfaction; and not only offer us options but affirm and even flatter us for whichever ones we pick. [19] to define blockbusters in terms of such hard-wired business requirements is, however, not to mark the point where analysis of their significance ends, but rather to suggest where it has to begin. for if the blockbuster typically invites us to "have it either and/or both ways," then both the character of the particular contradictory options offered and the name and the definition of the "it" can be read as complex signposts showing the way to the mainstream national culture's ideological "points de capiton," the places where collective social desire--for transformation and salvage, revolution and restoration, anarchy and obedience--is simultaneously fastened and split.^8^ [20] thus, to take up one early example, the interest of those opening scenes of _t2_ in which the two synthetic creatures from the future first appear in present-day l.a. bent on their opposed missions, to protect or kill the boy john connor, and to this end outfit themselves in the garbs and roles of ordinary mortal men. the t-800, a.k.a. arnold schwarzenegger, cyborg-simulacrum of sarah connor's would-be killer in the first _terminator_ film, arrives in the blue burnished glory of his hypermuscled nakedness in front of an equally gleaming semi-truck parked across from a biker bar he will soon scope out, bust up, and leave in full regalia, in shades and leathers, and astride a harley hog, to the heavy-metal strains of george thorogood and the destroyers stuttering "b-b-b-born to be bad." in the following sequence, however, in which we meet the protean, programmed to-kill *all*-robot t-1000, we are taken to a desolate patch of no-man's land underneath a curving span of l.a. overpass to which a city cop has been called to investigate the strange electrical goings-on accompanying this unit's passage through time and space: whereupon the t-1000, assuming for the moment a proto-hominoid silver shape sneaks up on the cop from behind, kills him, and takes on his steely-eyed aryan form, complete with uniform, as his central "identity" for the rest of the film. [21] in the span of these two brief scenes, entertainment professionals james cameron et al. have already provided us with a wide range and satisfying oscillation of identifications and exclusions, pleasures and disavowals. for starters, there's the linkage and differentiation of arnold in his %ab ovum% muscle-builder's pose and the parked semi behind him, suggesting as this composite image does both arnold himself as gleaming machine, icon of burly masculinist culture at its most spectacularly developed pitch, and arnold as a display item quite out of this dingy quotidian work-world altogether. such ambivalence, together with its options for enjoyment, is then carried right into and through the mayhem at the biker bar that ensues, in which those menacing scumbags are first literally summed up by the t-800's hi-tech apparatus then disarmed and disrobed, resulting in a new version of the composite arnold-image, both "badder" and "higher" than the bikers, at one and the same time pure realization of their outlaw nature and antithesis of their downwardly-mobile sleaze. and the ambivalence of this newly sublated figure will then be further marked and played out against that constructed in the next sequence around the evil t-1000, which begins in turn by cueing off our conventional identification with the figure of law and order poking around in the dark shadows at the margins of the normatively social, but ends by conflating these two figures into one, a white male l.a. cop *as* formless evil (a particularly pungent if fortuitous maneuver, we may note, given national exposure of the racist brutality of police chief gates' l.a.p.d. a scant few months before this film's release). [22] we'll soon return to consider further the exact nature and significance of the %agon% between this bad-guy-as-good guy and the good-guy-as-bad. for now, though, let this opening example serve as a demonstration of the play of opposition and symbiosis essential to _t2_: i.e., of a play which combines a fair amount of mobility granted to our various social and libidinal desires and fears with a lack of ambiguity at any given moment as to what we ought to think and feel. one minute the bikers are low-life scum, then arnold's a biker; one minute the l.a. cop is bravely doing his duty, the next minute he's a remorseless assassin; yet throughout all these inclusions and exclusions we are never in doubt about which side to be on. the punctual clarity of such a "preferred investment" strategy, as we might call it, thus stands in marked contrast to the real ambiguities of judgement and feeling that are the warp and woof of classic %noir%, in the figures of, for example, the morally shady detective and the smart, alluring %femme fatale%, not to mention as far or even farther away from the constant sliding and seepage inside lynch's film. in fact, the first thing to observe about most of those features of %noir% taken up by _terminator 2_ is the degree to which they are, as in _blue velvet_, both untrustworthy as straightforward quotation or appropriation, yet paradoxically, all the more significant for that. [23] take _t2_'s narrational strategy, to choose one of the film's several %noir%ish qualities. in "classic" %noir%, as we know, the question of who is in control of the film's narration is often central to %noir%'s meanings and effects.^9^ in %noirs% like _gilda_ or _out of the past_, that question is posed by the disjunction between the male protagonist-narrator's tightlipped voice-over and the sinister twists of the enacted plot in whose devious turnings the figure of the %femme fatale% seems to exert a powerful hand. and at first it seems that something of the same, but with a post-modern, post-feminist difference, is true of _terminator 2_ as well. here too the laconic decisiveness of the voice-over contrasts with the comparative lack of power of the narrator to take control over the film's action; only here the destination towards which the plot careens is enlarged from individual catastrophe all the way to planetary nuclear holocaust as a result of the entropic drift of masculinist techno rationality, and the tough-guy narrator is a woman. [24] on this level, then, _terminator 2_ like its predecessor appears to be a sci-fi "feminist %noir%" pitting its female heroine sarah connor against various individual and collective "males %fatales%" in a simple yet effective inversion of the old device. yet while such a conclusion is, i think, not entirely false, even less could it be declared simply true. for one thing, it is obviously *not* linda hamilton who is the big star of _terminator 2_, but arnold schwarzenegger; nor is it sarah connor who, for all her stirring efforts, is finally able to save the world, if indeed it has been saved, but the proto/semi-male t-800 who supplies the vital edge. for another, and for all the %noir%ish haze and green/blue/black suffused throughout the film, on the level of narrative structure and plot the amount of confusion we are plunged into as to what is going on, and how to feel about it, how the action is hooked to whatever else has been happening and how it is all going to come out, is virtually nil. just as clearly as we know from moment to moment who's good and who's bad, we know arnold the t-800 protector will rescue boy john from the clutches of the wicked t-1000; and when boy john insists they break into the state hospital for the criminally insane and rescue his mother sarah, we know they will be able to pull that off as well. when the three of them, plus dyson the computer scientist, are on their way to the headquarters of cyberdyne corporation to destroy those fragments of the first terminator from the first _terminator_ film, which, when analyzed and understood, will result in the construction of the skynet system of "defense" that will in turn trigger off the holocaust, sarah's voiceover, atop a night-for-night shot of a dark highway rushing into the headlights and past, intones the %noir%ish message that "the future, always so clear to me, had been like a dark highway at night. we were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along." by this time, though, such a message comes across as mere atmosphere, the verbal equivalent of the aforementioned laid-on haze, rather than as any real entrance into "uncharted" territory on the part of a plot in which we know where we are, and where we are headed, each step of the way. [25] yet if the relation between narration and enactment in _t2_ is thus less an innovative extension of %noir% than first appeared, it is not hard to locate more genuine expressions of a %noir% sensibility in its sense of space and time, or chronotope. in terms of space, _terminator 2_ early on takes its leave of the sunstruck residential neighborhood where john connor lives with his ineffectual foster parents, and spends the rest of its running time either keeping its distance from or destroying any and all traditional domestic space. and its %noir%-classical preference for the bleak sprawl of southern californian freeways, state institutions, research centers, malls, and plants over any closed familial enclaves is matched by its implicit flattening of time even across the gap of nuclear apocalypse. the premise motivating _t2_--that in the wake of nuclear apocalypse a resistance led by the adult john connor continues to struggle against the inhuman power of the machine, so that both sides, resistance and power network, send their mechanical minions back in time, one to protect john-the-boy and the other to "terminate" him- insists on a difference between present and future that the film's depictions erode. here in the present official power, whether in the form of the sadistically panoptical mental hospital, the gleaming surfaces and security systems of the soulless corporation, or the massively armed and equipped, anonymous police, already runs rampant; here already, before the bomb falls, the hardy band of guerrilla terrorists resists, the fireballs blossom and the bodies pile up in the perpetual dark night of hobbesian confrontation between bad anarchy and good. [26] _terminator 2_ thus not only reconstructs the fallen public world and queasy temporality of classic %noir% but constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that has, in effect, already occurred. like benjamin's once scandalous angel of history, its chronotope offers us a perspective from which modernity appears less "a chain of events" than "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our] feet," a "storm" that is "what we call progress" (benjamin 257, 258). yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between the ruminations of a marxist-modernist intellectual in europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary hollywood blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning what "conditions of possibility" must have been met before such a view could become mainstream. what preconditions must be met before a mass audience can find such an anti progressive perspective pleasurable, can "want to believe this," as leo braudy says of the rise and fall of generic perspectives in general^10^; and what consequences follow from _terminator 2_'s particular channelings of that desire? [27] fredric jameson suggests that the predominance of dystopic visions in contemporary science-fiction signals the general loss of our ability even to conceive of, much less struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we are within both an imperialist nation in decline and the overheated "perpetual present" of postmodernist culture (jameson, "progress"). and much of _terminator 2_, with its timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive hypothesis as exhibit a. (call to reception theorists: how many in the american audience recognized in the evil cybernetic techno-war depicted in _t2_'s opening post apocalyptic sequence an image of a hysterically celebrated gulf war just past, in which "our" machines mowed down their human bodies, as the saying goes, "like fish in a barrel"? and what were the effects of this surely unintentional echo?) yet here again, like a good blockbuster, _t2_ also invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite explicitly, in sarah's diatribe to scientist dyson. "men like you built the hydrogen bomb," she roars. "men like you thought it up . . . you don't know what it's like to *create* something." it is a speech that might have been drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as susan griffin, or such proponents of a maternalist-based women's peace movement as sarah ruddick or helen caldecott; and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right along with, the violence it decries. [28] the ease with which this moment's feminist critique of enlightenment takes its place alongside brutal displays of techno-violence, though, should not blind us to its value as a clue to what is deeply and genuinely moving--in both the affective and narrative senses of the word--in _terminator 2_. after all, the film we have described so far is one in which a fundamentally uneventful frame (the apocalypse which has already occurred) is constructed as backdrop for a plot whose terms and ends (t-800 saves boy; saves sarah; saves world; destroys evil twin, a.k.a. t-1000) are all pretty much known in advance. if the cybernetic machine that is _terminator 2_ nonetheless appears at all alive and in motion, its assignment rather involves an extensive renegotiation and reconstruction of the hetero-sex/gender system itself, and that little engine of identity and desire called the nuclear family in particular. and indeed, we have already hinted at one important aspect of that renegotiation in our discussion of the %noir%ish space of action in _t2_, which gives us the ranch-style home and residential neighborhood of traditional american domesticity as the place of the *phoney* family (the foster parents of which are promptly dispatched), and the new "mean streets" of mall and culvert, corporate research center, freeway, and desert, as site of the new true one. [29] this relocation of the family unit of mommy/daddy/baby to the place where the %noir% hero used to be, out in public and on the run, is likewise braided in with a complex transfiguration of all three roles in the family romance, part transforming, and part regressive in each case. most prominently is of course ultra-buff linda hamilton's sarah connor as fully operational warrior-woman, like sigourney weaver's ripley in cameron's _aliens_ only more so, phallic mother with a complete set of soldier-of-fortune contacts, cache of weapons and survivalist skills.^11^ conversely, there is "the arnold," fresh from _kindergarten cop_ and therefore all the more available for refunctioning from killing machine to nurturant proto-father who, as sarah's own voice-over puts it, "would always be there and would always protect him [i.e., john the son]. of all the would-be fathers, this machine was the only one that measured up." and finally, rounding out this new holy family is golden-boy john, who as grown-up rebel leader sends arnold back to the past to protect his childhood self, but who as a kid must teach both mom and dad how and when to cool their jets. [30] if, as constance penley has shown us, the first _terminator_ film posits john connor as "the child who orchestrates his own primal scene" to run the energy of "infantile sexual investigation" into the project of re marking the difference between the sexes through remaking/displacing it as "the more remarkable difference between human and other" ("time-travel" 121, 123), then in _terminator 2_ he must be both father-to-the-man and to-the mom. arnold must learn from him that "you can't kill people"; while sarah must be domesticated away from the mother-wolf fury in which she is enmeshed. that in this latter task, as unerringly right-on as young john is, it helps to have a dad around is perfectly evident in the follow-up to the film's one overtly erotic moment, when having interrupted mom's commando raid on the dyson home, john confronts her, now collapsed in a heap, and moaning "i love you, john--i always have." "i know," he answers hoarsely, and falls into her embrace. a second later, though, we are all delivered from this hot-and-heavy scene before it goes any farther and shorts out the film, thanks to the presence of arnold, whose stern let's-get-going glance to john literally pulls the boy out of sarah's dangerous clutches and allows the action to roll ahead. [31] but for that matter, it is also abundantly clear by the end of the film that for all john's moral sense and sarah's muscles, they both still need dad--and a dad who's not *that* different after all. for in the course of _terminator 2_'s movement from shopping mall to shop floor, both john and sarah are demonstrated to be ultimately ineffectual in their struggle against t-1000 and the forthcoming holocaust alike. for all her desire to change the dystopian course of history, and all the paramilitary training, sarah is unable (i.e., too "womanish"?) to pull the trigger on dyson: just as, despite the fortitude that enables her even to gun down her own t-1000 simulation when it appears,^12^ she is incapable of defeating this tireless, emotionless, yet endlessly mutable villain by herself. could this be because, as the film also shows us through sarah's own recurrent and prophetic holocaust dream, she herself is after all a split subject only one of whose forms is warrior-like--and that one, compared to the apron frocked housewife-mother on the other side of the fence, merely a secondary product of, and compensatory defense against, her terrible foreknowledge of the apocalyptic future as the history-that-already-hurts? [32] at any rate, for whatever reason, deliverance can only come from a real man, i.e., another machine-guy like the t 1000, albeit one minus the mutable part, and plus a modicum of moral-sentimental sense. "i know now why you cry," arnold the t-800 tells the john-boy in that touching final moment in between defeating the t-1000 and lowering himself down into the vat of molten steel that will terminate him too: "but it's something i can never do." the moral equivalent of such affective male positioning in the film, is, of course, that grisly motif we are free to enjoy as sadistic joke and/or, god help us even more, take seriously as moral improvement: i.e., arnold's oft-demonstrated commitment to maiming (usually by kneecapping) rather than killing his human opponents, as per the john-boy's moral command. [33] by such means _t2_ gets it all in its renegotiation of paternal masculinity, offering us arnold's stunted moral affective capacities to us simultaneously as hard-wired limitation (push come to shove, he's still only a machine) and as virtuous necessity (what a man's gotta do). and indeed we might as well have come at the same point from the opposite direction; for the converse of all i have just been saying is also true, and equally well demonstrated in the final victory over the t-1000, despite its technological superiority to our arnold. how is it, after all, that arnold the protector is able to rise from the dead, as it were, even after the t-1000 has driven an iron crowbar straight through his back? or, perhaps more accurately, how is it that we find ourselves able to *believe* that he does? [34] here, i think, is how. because, you will recall, at this very moment of greatest extremity, a small red light begins to shine far, far back in his eye--the sign, we are told, of his back-up power supply kicking in. and what then encourages us to swallow such a manifestly inadequate explanation--after all, there is no sensibly consistent reason why a t-1000 would not know of, or would fail to notice, the existence of an earlier model's alternative energy source--is the primary distinction between 800 and 1000 that has been there all the time, but is now most explicitly given us in the comparative representations of arnold's near-death to the t-1000's dissolution. for the t 1000, the liquid-metal prototype, there is no deep red light to resort to, no power backup to call on when all else fails; there is only an orgiastic extravaganza of special effects, recapitulating with oozy swiftness all the metamorphoses its liquid-metal shape-changing abilities have enabled it to undertake throughout the film. by contrast, then, with this horrific (but spellbinding!) swoon through difference, is it not clear that compared with the t-1000 arnold, *our* new man, has a core-self--or, if you will, individual soul--and *just enough* of one, whereas t-1000 is the merely the embodiment of amorally evil dispersion itself, endless semiosis as the highest form of technocratic death-rationality? [35] if so, in its implication that the capacity to feel and make moral choices, *and just enough of it*, marks our new adult daddy-man out from both the inhuman rationality (or is it semiosis?) on one side and the all-too-human (or is it fanaticism?) on the other, _t2_ might plausibly be said to have thrown its family out on the street only to turn it every which way but loose, i.e., only to redirect us and it back to the fixed ambiguities of a masculinist humanism whose very vertiginousness is uncannily, and literally, *familiar*. but then this reconstruction just at its most triumphantly synthetic moment too half-dwindles, half mutates into one final set of ambiguous-available options for our attention, anxiety, and desire. at the close of the film, does our pathos go to working-stiff arnold lowering himself down into the soup, just another self-sacrificing husband and father off to shiftwork at the plant, "just another body doing a job"? or do we move our sympathies over to the figure of sarah connor fiercely holding on to john-boy, and see her instead as that arguably more up-to date figure of the '80s and '90s: the victimized and abandoned single-mother head of a homeless family? iii. conclusions in flux that it 'keeps going on like this' *is* the catastrophe. --walter benjamin^13^ i'm in the middle of a mystery --jeffrey in _blue velvet_ [36] so far, we have looked at the overdetermining yet mutually subverting interplay of formal means lynch's _blue velvet_ foregrounds as part and parcel of the project of bringing the urban spaces and %ur%-narrative of %noir% into the formerly secure domestic spaces of the small town and the family. and we have also examined the narrative dramatic operations through which _terminator 2_ simultaneously reconstructs the family even as it moves it out to the mean streets. one film constructed for and consumed primarily by the culturally upscale, and therefore with a corresponding emphasis on meaning-through-style; the other for a mass audience and, accordingly, with its meanings and judgements carried largely on the back of its plot. yet the main burden of this conclusion of sorts must be to consider some of the social meanings, possibilities, and effects at play and implicit in the overall project we have seen both films take up in this particular post generic, postmodernist moment, for all their different ways of working on it: a project we have been suggesting is *the domestication of noir*. [37] as a kind of side-door entrance into such considerations, though, it may first be worth taking note of a few aspects of our two films we have left unmentioned until now: specifically, those which draw on the *economic* and *racial* codes of mainstream white capitalist culture. the former is most obviously referenced in the very selection of a steel mill as the site of _t2_'s climactic ending, given the function of steel production in contemporary socio-economic discourse as the paradigmatic icon of the fordist industrial world we have now, depending on whom you read, shipped off, frittered away, or even transcended, but in any case lost, in our national economy's shift toward a "post-fordism" regime with service rather than manufacturing industries at its core. yet similar allusions to a vanished or vanishing industrial world can be found throughout _blue velvet_ as well, from its frequent reminders to us of its small town's extractive-industrial base (e.g., in the deejay's patter, or the image of the millyard in which jeffrey comes to the morning after being assaulted by frank) to the ominous brick warehouses in which frank seems both to live and conduct his dirty work, and arguably even down to the anachronistic "spider-mike" dorothy employs in the implausibly located night-club where she works. [38] though the uses to which such imagery is put in each of our two films are multiple and complex, in _blue velvet_ the evocation of industrial culture is part and parcel of its overall construction of an environment where nature and culture lose their borders, and danger and pleasure coincide; whereas _terminator 2_'s uncanny yet nostalgically recalled foundry adds an extra measure of weight and yearning to the triumphant restoration and victory of the old male dominant nuclear family and "breadwinner ethic" that went along with the socioeconomic era just past. more generally still, though, and in keeping with many another contemporary polygeneric film from _lethal weapon_ to _batman_, the iconic spaces and imagery of fordist production and industrial culture in both our films function as a late-twentieth century equivalent to the feudal mansion in the chronotope of the eighteenth-century gothic novel: i.e., as a *ruin* (albeit a capitalist one) in which to place the monstrous dangers of the present and/or stage a regressive deliverance from out of the sex/gender system of the past. [39] but i will have more to say elsewhere on the subject of these new capitalist ruins and their deployment as privileged sites of "ruinous" pleasure and recuperation for white straight masculinity.^14^ so for now let us move along instead, and turn our attention to the inflections and incitements of racial marking in these films, a practice whose operations paradoxically take on all the more significance insofar as racial discourse and positioning may at first sight appear to play such a small part in our two films' overall schemes, practices and effects. from a normatively "white" point of view, after all, racial marking would seem to be an issue only at those rare moments when someone "non-white" shows up on-screen, and then only as a question of how that "non-whiteness" is defined. what such a normative perspective thus typically, indeed systematically, fails to notice or acknowledge is the essentially relational operation of all racial discourse and representation, or in other words the way every construction of a/the racial other generates by contrast an implicit definition of what it means to be "the same"--i.e., in the present instance, "white" and by no means just the "whiteness" up on the screen. [40] let us take a quick look back at our two films from this relational perspective, then, to see what implications we find in their nominally innocuous-to-honorific depictions of "non-white." in _blue velvet_, there are the two store uniformed and aproned "black" clerks who work at jeffrey's father's hardware store, peripheral even as secondary characters, and seemingly memorable only because of the whimsically transparent little %shtick% they play out in the scant few seconds in which they appear, in which the sighted one uses touch signals to cue the blind one as to price or number of objects, and the blind one pretends he has with magical prescience come up with the number himself. _terminator 2_, on the other hand, while "randomizing" race among those cops and hospital attendants destined to be casually crippled or killed, places non-whites in secondary roles of clearly greater significance: dyson the corporate scientist and his family as african-americans; enrique, sarah's former soldier-of-fortune comrade-in-arms, and his family as hispanics. [41] in _t2_, in fact, the self-approvingly "non-racist" liberalism we seem to be meant to read off from these last two sets of non-white characters and groups is more or less spelled out within the film. there, sarah's musings, quoted above, on how well arnold the t-800 fills the paternal bill are immediately followed by a softly sunstruck montage of her old hispanic running buddy's mommy-daddy-baby unit caught unaware in the midst of their unselfconscious domestic bliss, the sight of which is then immediately linked to a recurrence of that dream of nuclear holocaust that separates sarah from her own apron-frocked domestic self. likewise, a short while later, dyson's more upscale family life is depicted in similarly idyllic and conventional terms, mom taking care of baby, dad smiling over from where he is hard at work, in the final moment before sarah's assault. the liberal progressivism of such representations thus announces itself in the contrast between the settled, happy domesticity of the non-white families up above (dyson's) or down below (enrique's) the social level of the aberrant and provisional white one we are traveling with. but we could put the same point less generously but no less accurately by saying that such progressivism is itself little more than a stalking horse for the conservative project that rides in on it, i.e., the (re)constitution of the regulative ideal of the old male dominant oedipal-nuclear family for *whites*, coming at them, as it were, from both sides. [42] moreover, though _terminator 2_ neither represents nor endorses any non-familial social ideal, it still seems significant that both our non-white %paterfamilia% are associated from the start with contemporary visions of social disorder and mass violence. for many if not most white viewers at least, sarah's rapid allusion to enrique's past as a %contra%, combined with his guntoting first appearance and his family's desert location, will call up a melange of unsorted and uneasy impressions from _treasure of the sierra madre_ to the mainstream media's spotty yet hysterical coverage of a decade of messy and unpleasant struggle "down there" somewhere, plus attendant anxieties over "their" illegal entry and peripheral existences "up here" now; whereas the afro-american dyson is straightforwardly depicted as the author of the technological breakthrough that will eventually give us skynet, the fully autonomous, computerized war technology that will soon trigger nuclear holocaust as the first move in its war against humanity itself. one wonders, in fact, how many white viewers recoiled from sarah's verbal assault on a *black man* as the incarnation of value-free and death bound masculinist-corporate technorationality, and on what level of consciousness they did so, and to what effect: how, detached from its unlikely target, is her didactic essentialist feminism taken in? i have no idea, and would not presume to guess. at any rate, though, following this bizarre moment, the film's treatment of dyson runs once again in familiar ways, towards familiar ends: it rolls out the moebius-strip time-travel causality of that '80s blockbuster _back to the future_ in its suggestion that dyson the black man doesn't really invent anything^15^ (the breakthrough he comes up with turns out to be merely an extrapolation from those remnants of the first terminator, from the first _terminator_ film, that his corporate employer managed to scoop up); and, as in many another film featuring a once-wayward non-white sidekick, it rehabilitates him _gunga-din_ style, by including him into the assault on the power with which he has formerly been associated, an assault whose victory is, not accidentally, coincident with his self-sacrifice and death. [43] these regulative procedures by which whiteness learns from and is defined by its other(s) even as those others are re-subordinated, stigmatized, and/or punished, are not to be found in _blue velvet_, however--or not quite. there another, culturally hipper version of the game of reference and relegation is going on, in which, to put it briefly, racial difference is placed within quotation-marks, and, thus textualized, is both evoked and winked away. so the blackness of the store clerks sits next to the blindness of the one clerk and to the pseudo-magical trick they both like to play, as just so much more semic doodling along the margins of this endlessly decentered text in which each element of the normal and conventional is estranged, while each strangeness or otherness is subjected to a metonymic slippage that renders it both equivalent to every *other* otherness and empty in itself: blackness=blindness=stupid trick. in the universe constructed by lynch's postmodern aesthetics, there is no need either to make liberal gestures towards the inclusion of the racial other, or to discipline and punish that otherness when it appears. rather, as the whiff of amos 'n andy we can smell around the figures of our two clerks in _blue velvet_ suggests, and the overtly racist stereotypes (blacks and creoles as figures for a demonically sexualized and violent underworld) in lynch's more recent film _wild at heart_ make abundantly clear, even the most offensive tropes may be called back for a culturally upscale and predominantly white audience to enjoy under the new pomo dispensation that such hoary ideologemes are really only to be delected like everything else in the film, including the tropes of back home themselves, as simply so many hyperrealized/evacuated bits of virtually free-floating text.^16^ [44] our examination of both our films' means of (re)producing the locations and distinctive pleasures of whiteness and their regressive deployments of the new ruins of fordist industrial space thus bring us back to the central vortex or stuck place by which we may know contemporary "family %noir%" when we find it: in the apparent dissolution of the rigid identity/otherness categories of the symbolic in general, and those of the sex/gender system in particular, into a semic flow or play of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those same categories re-emerge with renewed half-life; and in the astonishingly mobile and contradictory circuitry of desire and anxiety, pleasure and fear, that this process both releases and recontains. _terminator 2_, as we have seen, plays around with border crossings between male and female, human and machine, the fordist past and the post-fordist present, and, for that matter, bio-social predestination ("it's in your nature to destroy yourselves") versus existential possibility ("no fate but what we make"), only to redraw the lines of the old nuclear family system as precisely the last best line of defense against the fluid yet inexorably programmed assaults of the terribly new. yet this restoration is itself a tenuous and contradictory one, given its figuration through the asexual (or should it be "safe-sexual"?) coalition of a cyborg dad and a warrior woman mom, half-assisted and half-constructed through the educative and team-building efforts of a child who is thus both effectively as well as literally father to himself (pfeil 227 and ff.). and _blue velvet_ pulls off what is finally the same denaturalizing/restoring act on a more formal level, by presenting us with a pre-eminently oedipal narrative whose recuperations of patriarchal order are riddled with artifice and suspicion, and eroded by a mode of skewed hyper-observation that simultaneously fills and estranges, exceeds and evacuates the conventional terms in which such narratives used to be couched. [45] within contemporary political culture, we know what to call this meltdown and restoration of the categories by which women and non-whites are put back in their place (even _blue velvet_'s dorothy, like _t2_'s sarah, is firmly, albeit hyperbolically, placed back in the mother role in that film's closing shots) and white men in theirs, at the same time as the devices of the political rhetoric that does so are brazenly bared, and the very notion of location is smirked away. its name is reaganism (or bushitis now, if you like). and certainly, brushed with the grain as it were, the process by which _blue velvet_'s jeffrey gets to answer girlfriend sandy's doubt as to whether he's "a detective or a pervert" by being both, and a good kid besides, is the same as that by which the old actor got to be simultaneously the world's leading authority figure and its largest, most spectacularized airhead. likewise, our intense enjoyment in _terminator 2_ of the spectacular semiotic mutability of our protean villain--practically mr. gynesis in himself--together with the stabilizing satisfactions provided by the return of the classically distinct, embodied (if no less synthetically produced) masculinity of our arnold as good old dependable dad,^17^ rhymes with the joys of the swings themselves over the past four years, from willie horton to "pineapple head" noriega to, in bush's delivery, "sodom" hussein, together with the pleasures available in the manifestly constructed image of bush as, like the t-800, another kinder, gentler, ass-kicking guy. [46] within cultural theory, too, as well as practice, feminist critics such as suzanne moore and tania modleski have been swift to notice and condemn this same process by which %gynesis%, the dissolution of the forms and categories of the patriarchal-oedipal-bourgeois symbolic, can be taken over by white male theorists and cultural producers, the aptly-named "pimps of postmodernism," to co-opt the pleasures of release and reconstruct new and more mobile means of domination. yet without disagreeing in any way with these critiques, it remains for us to step beyond or outside them, in accordance with the old benjaminian dictum that it is preeminently the task of the historical materialist to "brush history"--even, and perhaps especially, that history which is our own present moment- "*against* the grain" as well (257). in other words, we must attempt to read the particular complex of social psychological needs and desires that gets ventilated and redirected in these films not only as raw material for a new social contract with the same old powers that be, but as a set of contradictory energies which, under the sign of utopia, might be shaped and channeled in progressive directions as well. [47] it may be, then, that the way to respond to the irresolute resolutions and rebellious conservatism of our films without reproducing their equivalents in theory is to recognize the truth and legitimacy of the needs and desires that underlie the dynamics of the films' operations while refusing their opposed yet commingled terms. such a utopian reading would then pass through the recognition that even these admittedly corrupt and pernicious cultural productions have to both rest on and run off a widely-held consensus that the old nuclear, oedipal, male-dominant, breadwinner ethic-based family is neither a natural nor a desirable set up, and an equally widely-held and equally justifiable anxiety as to the brutal chaos that ensues when the rules of that old system are tattered or in abeyance without any other emerging to take its place: to pass through that recognition and then to take the combination of desire and anxiety it has found *as a resource* for a progressive politics, a need for a better sex/gender system that for its fulfillment must be turned into a set of socially transformative demands. [48] in 1983, as the conclusion of her survey of white male revolts against what she dubbed the "breadwinner ethic" and the oedipal-nuclear families it produced, barbara ehrenreich proposed that "male [white male, that is] culture seems to have abandoned the breadwinner role without overcoming the sexist attitudes that role has perpetuated" (182). but she went on to suggest that the only way to begin to move beyond this impasse is to struggle for an expanded, democratized, feminist expansion of the welfare state in which women and men alike earn a "family wage," and in which women are also provided with the "variety of social supports" they must have "before they are able to enter the labor market on an equal footing with men or when they are unable to do so"- including, and especially, "reliable, high-quality child care" (176-77). her argument is not that such goals, when achieved, would automatically bring an end to the deflection of male revolts against patriarchy into new forms of sexist oppression, or issue in a feminist utopia; it is simply that without such gains, little new ground for the construction of less oppressive gender roles and relations was--and is- at all likely to open up. [49] in 1991, of course, after eight more years of repression, rollback and decay, such a program may seem, like alec nove's model of a "feasible socialism," all the more a combination of the hopelessly insufficient and the wildly utopian. yet such a hybrid failing, if failing it be, nonetheless seems to me practically unique, and uniquely exemplary, within recent american cultural theory, in its insistence on a given set of programmatic political goals to organize and struggle for; just as that insistence in turn seems infinitely more adequate to the need in the present moment to recover the terrain of political agency and possibility than any rehash of the essentialist vs. post structuralist debate. the same proposals, and others instead or as well, might be generated out of another, more fully utopian reading of the films we have looked at, and of family %noir% in general: generated, that is, as so many specific instances of a sense of "canceled yet preserved" we must renew and nourish now within and across our various movements and without any false sense of guarantees. but the main point here is nonetheless that for all the bleakness of the present moment, and indeed precisely because of it, we must nonetheless learn or relearn to propose *something* more real and more properly political as the outcome of our analyses than the indulgent rages and self-strokings of identity and/or the %jouissance% of post-structuralist free-fall. the only alternative to such a "canceled-yet-preserved" renewal of politics itself is the dubious enjoyment of being permanently stuck, like _blue velvet_'s jeffrey, "in the middle of a mystery" whose pleasures most of the people we speak for and with can only afford to take in every now and then, when thanks to the magic of motion pictures and political campaigns aimed variously both high and low, at the hip and the masses, the catastrophe "that it goes on like this" is at no small expense made into a little fun. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes a somewhat expanded version of this essay will be published in _the dark side of the street_, edited by joan copjec and mike davis (new york and london: verso, forthcoming). thanks to ann augustine, gray cassiday, michael sprinker, and ted swedenburg for their suggestions, assistance and support, and to the editors of _postmodern culture_ for their smart editing; and special thanks to the center for the humanities at oregon state university for the fellowship that enabled me finally to get this piece done. ^1^ gledhill's argument for the subversiveness of the %films noir% of the forties and fifties may be found in "_klute_ i: a contemporary film noir and feminist criticism," in kaplan's _women in film noir_, 6-21. ^2^ here i feel bound to note that my argument regarding these "neo-%noirs%" converges on that of fredric jameson's concerning what he calls "nostalgia" films of the '70s and '80s, but with a difference: i am less concerned to relate their hollowed-out aesthetic of "pastiche" to any larger and more global "cultural logic of late capital" than to place that aesthetic within the particular commercial and institutional context in which it makes its initial sense. cf. jameson, _postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_, 19-20 and 279-96. ^3^ see gitlin's account of the rise and fall of _hill street blues_, and his argument that the "recombinant aesthetics" of television production are the quintessence of late capitalist cultural production, in _inside prime time_, 273-324 and 76-80 respectively. ^4^ "a small boy and others: sexual disorientation in henry james, kenneth anger, and david lynch," in spillers, ed., _comparative american identities_, 142. this is the place, moreover, to declare the general debt my reading of _blue velvet_ owes to moon's insistent exploration of the film's sexual-discursive "underside." ^5^ "take something comforting, familiar, essentially american," she writes, "and turn up the controls, the visual volume. it's overheated technicolor . . . [e]very detail is picture-perfect and it reeks of danger and failure." quoted from the anthology of responses compiled in _parkett_ 28 (1991), "(why) is david lynch important?", 154. ^6^ mannoni's widely-cited formula first appears in his _clefs pour l'imaginaire, ou l'autre scene_ (paris: editions du seuil, 1969). for another recent consideration of relationship of the circuitry of disavowal and enjoyment it describes to postmodernist culture, see jim collins, _uncommon cultures: popular culture and postmodernism_ (new york: routledge, 1989), 110 ff.. ^7^ the full sentence from which this quoted material comes is worth quoting in full for the linkage moon makes, and claims the film makes, between the film's sadomasochistic homoerotics and the mobile discursivity of the desires it displays: when lynch has frank mouth the words of the song a second time [ben having done so, to frank's anguished pleasure, back at the whorehouse a short time before], this time directly to a jeffrey whom he has ritually prepared for a beating by 'kissing' lipstick onto his mouth and wiping it off with a piece of blue velvet, it is as though lynch is both daring the viewer to recognize the two men's desire for each other that the newly discovered sadomasochistic bond induces them to feel *and* at the same time to recognize the perhaps more fearful knowledge that what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audioand videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synchings of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires. (146) ^8^ buttoning or quilting points: borrowed here from lacan through zizek, who lifts the concept far enough out of the bottomless and hopelessly occluded waters of lacan's narcissistic language-game to allow me to transliterate and socialize it that much more towards a strictly ideological sense. see especially zizek's alternately insightful and hilariously obscurantist essay "'che vuoi?'," in _the sublime object of ideology_, 87-129. ^9^ not to mention %noir%ish melodramas of the same moment: see mary ann doane's illuminating discussion of these issues in _the desire to desire: the woman's film of the 1940s_ (bloomington: indiana university press, 1987). ^10^ see the opening pages of his fine discussion of "classical" film genres in _the world in a frame_, 104-24. ^11^ the hysterical panic provoked in (some) male quarters by the appearance of linda hamilton's ninja warrior in _t2_ and sarandon and davis's incarnation as vengeful %bandidas% in _thelma and louise_ in the same summer of 1991 is a topic worthy of investigation in itself. for a sample, see joe urschel's _usa today_ editorial, "real men forced into the woods," july 26-28, 1991, which argues, as far as i can tell, half-seriously, that the powerful women and male bashing plots of movies the two aforementioned movies leave men no choice but to join robert bly's mythopoetic "men's movement" and return to nature! i am grateful to my friend gray cassiday for bringing this phenomenon to my attention. ^12^ here the comparative term might be jennifer o'neal's fatal paralysis at the sight of her cloned self at the climax of _the stepford wives_ (1975). ^13^ quoted, from the notes for the uncompleted _passagen-werk_, in susan buck-morss, _the dialectics of seeing: walter benjamin and the arcades project_ (cambridge, ma: mit, 1989), 375. ^14^ see the concluding section of "from pillar to postmodern: race, class and gender in the male rampage film," in _socialist review_ and in _white guys: studies in postmodern power, choice, and change_ (forthcoming from verso, 1993). ^15^ see "plot and patriarchy in the age of reagan: reading _back to the future_ and _brazil_," in my _another tale to tell: politics and narrative in postmodern culture_ (verso, 1990), especially 235-36. ^16^ for a prescient early warning of this phenomenon, first spotted in the high-cult realm of the visual arts, see lucy lippard, "rejecting retrochic," in _get the message? a decade of art for social change_ (new york: e. dutton, 1984), 173-78; and for a recent assessment of its presence and effects in contemporary american popular culture, see suzanna danuta walters, "premature postmortems: 'postfeminism' and popular culture," in _new politics_, 3.2 (winter 1991). ^17^ the distinction between the "classical" and the "grotesque" body is drawn from bakhtin and elaborated brilliantly by peter stallybrass and allon white in _the politics and poetics of transgression_. what seems worth noting here now, however, about the figure of "our arnold" and perhaps about other contemporary ideal-images of contemporary white straight masculinity, is the degree to which the "classical" and "grotesque" seem to be mutually contained and containing within such figures, in a way that seems connected to the broader thematic and political argument i am making here. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited benjamin, walter. "theses on the philosophy of history." in _illuminations_. trans. harry zohn. new york: schocken, 1969. bordwell, david, janet staiger, and kristin thompson. _the classical hollywood style_. new york: columbia up, 1986. braudy, leo. _the world in a frame: what we see in films_. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1976. creed, barbara. "a journey through _blue velvet_: film, fantasy and the female spectator." _new formations_ 6 (winter 1988). ehrenreich, barbara. _the hearts of men: american dreams and the flight from commitment_. garden city, ny: anchor/doubleday, 1983. gitlin, todd. _inside prime time_. new york: pantheon, 1983. griffin, susan. _woman and nature: the roaring inside her_. new york: harper and row, 1978. jameson, fredric. _postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_. durham, nc: duke up, 1991. jameson, fredric. "progress versus utopia: or, can we imagine the future?" _science fiction studies_ 9.2 (1982). kaplan, e. ann, ed. _women in film noir_. london: british film institute, 1978. modleski, tania. "the incredible shrinking he(r)man: male regression, the male body, and film." _differences_ 2.2 (1990): 55-75. moon, michael. "a small boy and others: sexual disorientation in henry james, kenneth anger, and david lynch." in _comparative american identities: race, sex, and nationality in the modern text_. ed. hortense j. spillers. new york: routledge, 1991. moore, suzanne. "getting a bit of the other--the pimps of postmodernism." in _male order: unwrapping masculinity_. ed. rowena chapman and jonathan rutherford. london: lawrence and wishart, 1988: 165 192. penley, constance. "time-travel, primal scene and the critical dystopia." in _alien zone: cultural theory and contemporary science fiction cinema_. ed. annette kuhn. london and new york: verso, 1990. pfeil, fred. "plot and patriarchy in the age of reagan: reading _back to the future_ and _brazil_." in _another tale to tell: politics and narrative in postmodern culture_. verso, 1990: 227-241. ruddick, sarah. _maternal thinking: toward a politics of peace_. new york: ballantine, 1990. schatz, thomas. _the genius of the system_. new york: pantheon, 1988. stallybrass, peter and allon white. _the politics and poetics of transgression_. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1986. zizek, slavoj. _the sublime object of ideology_. new york and london: verso, 1989. mancini, 'review of _thinking across the american grain_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-mancini-review.txt review of _thinking across the american grain_ by matthew mancini department of history southwest missouri state university <mjm225f@smsvma> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by matthew mancini, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: gunn, giles. _thinking across the american grain: ideology, intellect, and the new pragmatism_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1992. xii/272 pp. [1] giles gunn has emerged as a major voice in that cacophonous semi-discipline known as american studies. every time the american studies association meets, it seems to be seized by a new collective enthusiasm. one year it might be victor turner, the next it's annette kolodny, or john stilgoe, or henry louis gates, jr., or nina baym. such commotions are in part symptomatic of the association's puppy-like eagerness to be identified with changing intellectual fashions. but they also represent a remarkable record of committed intellectual openness and daring. i anticipate that everyone will be discussing giles gunn this year. [2] thinking that is "aslant" or "cross-hatched," or that runs "across the grain" or "on the bias" is gunn's preferred mode of critical practice. he sees it as a means, if not of escape, then at least of fragmentary and fitful release from the worst constraints of that prison house of language and culture that an assortment of poststructuralists, ideology critics, new historicists, deconstructionists, and neopragmatists from michel foucault to richard rorty have contended is all that is left of what used to be called the human condition. [3] postmodernism's antifoundationalism has rendered an independent critical perspective unattainable and thrown into question the very possibility of a critique of culture that is not implicated in that culture's own repressive practices. by thinking %across% postmodernism, what gunn seeks to achieve is not a new "grounding," but something more akin to a fingernail-hold somewhere in the rough, uneven, scratchy grain of cultural experience. for he argues that, contrary to the impression, and often the explicit arguments, made by many of our most compelling contemporary critics, the web of culture, of ideology, of power, is not seamless or monolithic; that "the grain of cultural experience is . . . interwoven and cross-hatched in ways that make it possible for the predications of which it is composed not only to confront but also, as it were, to address one another" (38). [4] gunn's aim, then, is to "complement" rather than to "contest" the recent tide of thought from the continent (3). and his instrument for doing so is pragmatism, a method of approaching problems whose formulation at the hands of william james and john dewey not only anticipates, but, he argues, also addresses directly, precisely those predicaments raised by the postmodern thinkers. gunn misses no opportunity to reveal the "convertibility . . . of pragmatist motifs into postmodernist preoccupations" (7). accordingly, he divides his book into two parts, the first concerned with rethinking the pragmatist heritage in light of contemporary cultural critiques, and the second with shedding a pragmatist light on certain vexing, contemporary critical problems. [5] quite literally occupying the center of the book is the formidable figure of richard rorty. the last chapter of part one and the first chapter of part two can be seen as an extended critique by which gunn seeks first to challenge, and then perhaps even to some degree to displace, rorty as the leading contemporary pragmatist theorist of liberal society. [6] the central issue, for american as for continental critics, is the enlightenment and its heritage of liberalism. but for americans the problem has a somewhat different resonance than it would have for, say, bataille, foucault, or habermas. gunn thus characterizes rorty's project as "the most important political attempt since john dewey to resituate the tradition of american pragmatism within the broader framework of modern western liberalism" (96). this effort is noteworthy because pragmatism, or neopragmatism as it is now called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal, in some very specific ways. it aligns itself . . . with the postmodernist and poststructuralist repudiation of culture as an expression of individual consciousness woven into patterns of consensus and dissent, of conformity and conflict, and it prefers to view culture as an intertextual system of signs that can be infinitely redescribed. (96) [7] in _contingency, irony, and solidarity_ (cambridge up, 1989), rorty's elucidation of the role of contingency in the formation and reception of language and of selfhood, gunn believes, is masterly. but a third contingent conception, that of community, seems in rorty's account to be curiously resistant to the rediscription that rorty sees as the only remaining object of speculative thought. thus the project of social restructuring is but poorly served by the thinkers who have shown "how the languages of moral responsibility and social purpose are always contingent" (102). for rorty, the end of liberal society is to tear us away from the blandishments of metaphysics; to have convictions, to be sure, but to realize at the same time that such convictions cannot be defended with arguments that persons from other communities are constrained to accept. [8] in the last chapter of part one, gunn mounts a jamesian critique of what he sees as rorty's tendency toward the absolutization of opposites when he addresses such questions--what richard j. bernstein calls "ethical-political" questions in his recent, exceptionally useful study, _the new constellation_ (polity press, 1991). rortian oppositions like "justice and love, or irony and common sense, or force and persuasion," gunn argues, themselves cry out for deconstruction. yet rorty "rarely entertains the possibility that their opposition may itself be a product of contingency" (111). according to gunn, william james knew better. "in his later thought, experience transcends language by virtue of a conjunctive process of which language itself reminds us" (113). [9] starting from this jamesian perspective gunn elaborates a different view from rorty's about the possibilities of liberal society, and in the strongly argued chapter that opens part two, which is the only chapter in the book that has not been published in some form previously (although an unfortunate typo in the acknowledgements misidentifies it as having appeared elsewhere), he undertakes a reevaluation of the american enlightenment. [10] in so doing, gunn boldly goes to the heart of recent debates about the nature and fate of modernity. whenever you see someone alive to postmodern ideas seeking to rescue the enlightenment to even the slightest degree, there, i believe, you will find one of the leading edges of contemporary critical thought. to defend any part of the enlightenment after the ravages of foucault and derrida, not to mention nietzsche and heidegger, is to probe for the outer boundaries of postmodernism's reach. somewhat curiously, however, especially in light of his obvious erudition, gunn neglects to situate himself in a wider circle of recent critics hospitable to postmodern currents of thought who nonetheless seek to recover something of value from the dark ruins of the once-heavenly city of enlightenment discourse. chief among them is jurgen habermas, whose _the philosophical discourse of modernity_ (mit press, 1987) is a narrative of the history of enlightenment philosophy and its deconstruction by postmodernists. habermas's solution is not to junk the enlightenment wholesale, but to begin again--this time, however, not with the philosophy of consciousness, with its pernicious subject-object split, but with intersubjectivity instead. for habermas, objectivity is a chimera, intersubjectivity is prior to the subject-object opposition, and communication thus prior to cognition. [11] gunn's purpose is analogous to habermas's. he wishes to argue both for the centrality of the american enlightenment's influence--an enormous influence on nineteenth century thought and culture, he contends, which has been obscured by the twentieth century's focus on calvinism--and against the notion that such sway as it did enjoy over literary production and criticism was a baneful one. the great awakening is the american problem that distorts an assessment of the enlightenment; because of it "the enlightenment has become the absent, or at least the forgotten, integer in the american equation of the relationship between faith and knowledge" (131). as habermas seeks to recover scraps of "the enlightenment project" from horkheimer and adorno and others, so gunn, facing a peculiarly american version of the same problem, attempts to reclaim the american enlightenment from those who think the great awakening towers over it. [12] disputing the standard interpretation of henry f. may (_the enlightenment in america_ [oxford, 1976]), gunn argues that the most important strains of enlightenment thought in america were those may called the revolutionary and the skeptical, rather than the rational and didactic varieties. these influences, maturing in the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century, and in the united states rather than europe, worked toward a "dismantling of virtually all of the religious assumptions on which american literary culture was then based" (138). and--guess what--this is a form of proto-pragmatism, "proleptically present" in _moby-dick_, which turns out to be "a prefiguration of . . . pragmatic consciousness" (138), perceivable in the shift from the "old consciousness," as d. h. lawrence put it, of ahab, to the "new" of ishmael. moreover, this skeptical and revolutionary consciousness leads quite directly to modernism. [13] pragmatism thus turns out to be in gunn's narrative the connection between the enlightenment and the postmodern, as well as between enlightenment epistemology and calvinism. and so even postmodern literary culture "has not seen the last of the enlightenment" (145). [14] in other chapters, on the new historicism, on interdisciplinarity, and on academic pluralism, gunn employs his simultaneously rigorous and conversational approach to investigate the "question as to whether the critic can ever escape the ideological contamination of his or her own process of reflection" (168). in the concluding chapter, gunn observes the ways in which the pragmatists' concern for further, deeper, richer conversation can be enhanced by careful attention to current critical struggles--struggles that are finally, he writes, over "'difference,' politically, socially, sexually, racially, psychologically, religiously" (215). in other words, they are about otherness--"what many people think of as the fundamental problem of our time" (7). the problem is "how to conceive or represent 'the other' without succumbing to the false artificiality of oppositional thinking" (215). the site that should be available for this purpose, space that was or should be public, has been "rendered trivial and vapid" (220) and survives only as a site of self-referential simulacra. the interest in "civil religion," which seemed for a time to be an attempt to retake that public space, turned out to be "a defense mechanism for shoring up american cultural consensus" (227). and, though such a world that stands "over against the symbolic solipsism of the religion america has made of its own civic celebrations" (230) might still be found in a liminal domain of vulgarity and vernacular humor, gunn is too unillusioned not to see that domain as an "endangered" one (236). [15] this, then, is a book of many virtues. yet one of its central objectives remains incompletely fulfilled, and for reasons that i think are somewhat curious. gunn wishes to show that the genealogy of postmodern thought reveals a strong american, or at least pragmatic, extraction; and, conversely, that the resurgence of pragmatism is more than a local american phenomenon. he makes the argument with elegance, but, in truth, it does not constitute a revelation. american studies scholars have been acknowledging these cross-currents and actively engaging the new forms of "continental" criticism for a decade and more. [16] what is curious is that gunn, in arguing for the compatibility of "american" pragmatic and "continental" postmodern thought, exaggerates the alleged gap between them, and simultaneously--and contrary to his own stated intention--depreciates the "american studies" side of the alleged dichotomy he seeks to overcome. one symptom of this undervaluing lies in gunn's title, for in the beginning, so to speak, there was _in the american grain_, william carlos williams's acute, eccentric recovery and appropriation of american foundational themes. the "grain" of williams's title connoted seed, texture, weave, and coarseness at once. the book was published in 1925, and remained obscure until its celebration nearly two generations later by american studies pioneers. [17] gunn--like another historian, david hollinger, who evokes williams in the title of his 1985 collection, _in the american province_--mentions williams just once, very briefly, in passing. here is an absence indeed. for critics and scholars seeking to explore the rough texture of the seam between the modern and the postmodern, especially in the united states, might also turn to that poet and physician and contemporary of gunn's admired john dewey. "the american grain," in its very multivalence, is made for thinking across. gunn's book demonstrates that--but demonstrates it yet again, not for the first time. anderson, 'review of _the many lives of the batman_', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-anderson-review.txt review of _the many lives of the batman_ by john anderson <jca@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> northwestern university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by john anderson, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. _the many lives of the batman: critical approaches to a superhero and his media_. edited by roberta e. pearson and william uricchio. new york: routledge, 1991. 213 pp. [1] the essays in this collection offer different kinds of assistance to a reader trying to interpret the multiple versions of batman and the recent (now receding) flurry of bat-hype. the essays chart the movement of competing "batmen," and attempt to give an account of the intertextual and extratextual dimensions of this network of alternatives. some of the essays have an anthropological focus, as they investigate the behavior of the communities that produce and consume images of batman. others focus on the meanings of these images, although the interpretations of specific artifacts never lose sight of the multiple and interconnected nature of the various bat-phenomena. it is in their accounts of this multiplicity and interconnection that the essays make their most suggestive contributions to the practice of cultural studies. [2] the best of these essays are extremely sophisticated in their adaptation of critical methodologies to the new multiple and changeable forms of the batman narrative. the essays by jim collins and eileen meehan are most striking in this regard, combining detailed information about the phenomena with penetrating analyses of the narrative (collins) or economic (meehan) processes at work in contemporary representations of batmen. the article by uricchio and pearson, on the other hand, serves as a kind of introduction to critical issues for contemporary bat-scholarship by examining the serial nature of the batman character, and calling attention to the tension between multiplicity and coherence in the production of popular culture. the three articles that deal directly with audience responses--parsons, bacon-smith and yarborough, spigel and jenkins--demonstrate specific models for cultural studies that are _interactive_, and do not write over the meanings produced by the audiences. however, of the contributions to this collection, andy medhurst's essay is perhaps the most controversial and critical, as it addresses and explores issues of camp and sexuality in ways that challenge "official" interpretations of batman. medhurst's framing of the competing bat-discourses as the struggle to establish "legitimacy" or "deviancy" sharpens and specifies the issues at stake in preferring one version of batman over another, and suggests that homophobic resistance may account for the insistence, made by both artists and fans, on particular definitions of the batman character's masculinity. [3] the essays that are less self-reflective about their own practices are nonetheless useful in helping familiarize a critical reader with the kinds of information necessary for a study of batman. for example, bill boichel's brief history of the batman's manifestations in comics, film and television provides the pertinent names, dates, and titles to readers unfamiliar with the comics industry. but despite the promise of its title ("batman: commodity as myth"), boichel's article fails to do more than describe the changes in the character of batman since its first appearance. the collection also contains two interviews, one with dc editor denny o'neil, and one with writer/artist frank miller. these are informative, and give one the sense of being privy to inside information, but they do not exhaustively probe the issues they raise. however, for readers not familiar with the formation of the batman canon, the articles set up the collection's more detailed analyses by introducing the history of conflicting interpretations through the personalized "voices" of comics expert (boichel), professional arbiter and editor (o'neil), and artist (miller). thus, these three essays serve in part to highlight the movement in the other essays _away_ from explanations based on authorial intention, and towards models that examine the effects of larger communities--audiences, populations of fans, and corporations--in the construction of meaning. [4] one consistent trend in the collection is the rejection of a passive model of cultural consumption. in the words of patrick parsons ("batman and his audience: the dialectic of culture"), study of the audiences for superhero comics reveals that "contrary to the assumptions of some in both the popular and scholarly community, the impact of readers on content may be greater than the impact of content on readers" (67). readers and viewers build their own "batman" out of their personal experience with the character, resulting in differing but equally _active_ interpreters who use batman in different ways. for example, parsons charts the multiple american audiences for superheroes, and examines historical development of a specialized and sophisticated readership for the growing field of underground comix, independent comics, and graphic novels. different audiences practice different interpretations and manipulations of the signs bearing the label "batman." parsons goes on to examine the direct influence of fans on the production of comics. spigel and jenkins, on the other hand, examine the significance of the batman character to less-specialized audiences ("same bat channel, different bat times: mass culture and popular memory"). based on interviews with a number of people about their memories of the batman television show (1966), the article demonstrates the ways in which people "use and reuse media in their daily lives" (144). the personal and transformative nature of popular memory thus suggests to spigel and jenkins that a more dialogic relationship between the oral historian and his or her subjects will reflect a better understanding of the processes of memory and narration that people use to make sense of cultural artifacts. [5] camille bacon-smith and tyrone yarborough ("batman: the ethnography") also acknowledge the active role of audiences in constructing meanings. by questioning different audiences for tim burton's film _batman_ (1989) in their "native habitats"--movie theaters, comic book shops, a fan club, and a comics convention--the writers set out to learn from _batman_ audiences rather than simply analyze or characterize them. the encounter between researcher and researched is posed as an encounter between different but equally valid discourses of interpretation. thus, while able to account for the significant influence of newspaper reviews, advertising, and marketing strategies in shaping audience approval or disapproval, the writers avoid a model of popular culture that imagines consumers to be a homogeneous or unreflective mass. on the contrary, the article demonstrates that a large scale cultural phenomenon like the release of _batman_ becomes the occasion for active, dialogic exchange among audience members. meaning-making is shown as a variable process that takes place at a proliferation of specific sites, not a homogeneous activity performed by a uniform audience. [6] eileen meehan ("'holy commodity fetish, batman!': the political economy of a commercial intertext") provides the most thorough and suggestive account of the way this multiplicity has been managed for profit, examining the function of "batman" as not only name, but _brand_ name as well. through a detailed examination of wci's activities, meehan shows how the different versions of the batman produced by dc comics and warner brothers, culminating in the release of the motion picture and the licensing of the bat logo, are all components of a marketing campaign designed to penetrate a range of different markets. the result is to ground the multiple versions of batman, and their enjoyment by a large and diverse population of consumers, in the fact that "text, intertext, and audiences are simultaneously commodity, product line, and consumer." the "contradictions" among the various reproductions of batman are completely in synch with the promotion of the movie and its attendant products: the commercial intertext that results from this combination of advertising and licensing intermixes old themes with new, camp motifs with grim visages, cartooning with live action, thus generating a rich and often contradictory set of understandings and visions, about justice and corruption in america. and it does this because of manufacturers' perceptions about acceptable risk, potential profit, and targeted consumers. (58-59) for meehan as for the other writers, audiences are by no means a passive, homogeneous mass. the point of her economic analysis is not, as she puts it, that "evil moguls force us to buy bat-chains" (48). nonetheless, her article concentrates on revealing the constraints imposed on popular culture by corporate decisions because, in the everyday experience of popular media, "this complex structure is generally invisible to us" (61). within the context of this collection, meehan's essay performs the valuable function of reintroducing more directly economic concerns into the discussion, illustrating how the current multiplicity of bat-representations can coexist quite comfortably with immense and diversified corporations capable of orchestrating the release and promotion of objects in a number of different media, for a number of different markets. [7] jim collins ("batman: the movie, narrative: the hyperconscious") also highlights the referentiality and intertextuality of the contemporary additions to the bat canon, but focuses on the interplay of specific artistic techniques rather than corporate economic strategy. if meehan emphasizes the corporate imperatives motivating wci's diverse marketing strategy, collins identifies an aesthetic imperative in the diversity found in the imagery and language of individual texts: texts like _batman: the movie_, _the dark knight returns_, and _watchmen_ which feature narration by amalgamation suggest the emergence of a new type of narrative which is neither a master narrative that might function as a national myth for entire cultures, nor a micro-narrative that targets a specific subculture or sharply defined community. the popularity of these texts depends on their appeal not to a broad general audience, but a series of audiences varying in degrees of sophistication and stored cultural knowledge (i.e. exposure and competence). as _aggregate narratives_, they appeal to disparate but often overlapping audiences, by presenting different incarnations of the superhero simultaneously, so that the text always comes trailing its intertexts and rearticulations. (179-180) [8] in his exploration of "aggregate narratives," collins' work on frank miller's _dark knight_ is the most thorough and persuasive of any in the collection. especially good is his analysis of miller's use of panels, and of the _apparent_ resemblance between the techniques of the graphic novel and those of cinema: the juxtaposition of different sized frames on the same page, deployed in constantly changing configurations, intensifies their co-presence, so that the entire page becomes the narrative unit, and the conflictive relationships among the individual images becomes a primary feature of the "narration" of the text, a narration that details the progression of the plot, but also the transgression of one image by another . . . the tableaux moves the plot foreword but encourages the eye to move in continually shifting trajectories as it tries to make sense of the overall pattern of fragmentary images. (173) as collins' explications of particular pages demonstrate, it is inadequate to call miller's work cinematic because the frames of the graphic novel are able to mimic the visual styles of more than one medium. it would be more accurate to say that miller builds his narrative from a _montage_ of references to the conventions of different media: television, various kinds of cinema, "conventional" comic books, japanese comics (manga), and others. [9] new versions of batman like miller's thus require interpretations that are adequate to the intertextuality and self-referentiality of the new narratives. the effect on criticism is to expand the definition of a text's "action" to what was previously considered extra-diegetic. one of the reasons why the batman phenomenon has attracted the attention of the writers assembled in this collection is the sense that at least some of the representations of batman--and the contexts of cultural production and fandom--share common perspectives and concerns with recent writing on theory and cultural studies. for collins, the effect is to generate dialogue between the discourses of scholarship and popular culture. for example: the producers of _dark knight_ and _watchmen_ orchestrate textual space and time, but in doing so they also emphasize (through different but related means) that to envision textual space is to envision at the same time the cultural space surrounding it, specifically the conflicting visual traditions that constitute those semiotic environments. (172) collins' essay thus provides an insightful model for writing on popular culture because it works through the linkages between theory and popular cultural, specifies the ways in which texts embody alternative modes of narration, and acknowledges the ways in which the texts simultaneously represent and interpret the traditions to which they belong. [10] all of the writers in this collection draw attention to the contradictions that have been manifested in one or another version of the batman. a crimefighter whose activities are often illegal, a defender of justice who is also (as millionaire bruce wayne) the symbol and defender of wealth, batman's relationship to authority and the status quo have been portrayed and understood as conflicted, uneasy, and anxiety-provoking. andy medhurst's essay ("batman, deviance, and camp") deserves special attention because of its straightforward discussion of the role sexuality has played in constructing and construing batman's relation to authority, power, and masculinity. medhurst, like others, emphasizes the multiple versions of the character, and argues that the camp sensibility of the television series undermines attempts to take _any_ version of the batman seriously. but medhurst is specific in attributing the anxiety demonstrated by audiences over these multiple versions (which is the "real" batman?) to _sexual_ anxiety: the "batmen" rejected by the hard-core fans are those that admit even the slightest homoerotic sensibility, or any parody of the character's definition as an obsessively self-serious crimefighter. in this rejection, medhurst asserts, bat-fans mirror the assumptions about masculinity and homosexuality held by frederic wertham, the psychiatrist who first suggested that batman might be gay. medhurst exposes wertham's panicky, outdated, homophobic arguments as fallacies (an "elephantine spot-the-homo routine"), but he is no less sparing of the bat-fans' shrill disgust levelled at wertham: "the rush to 'protect' batman and robin from wertham is simply the other side to the coin of his bigotry. it may reject wertham, cast him in the role of the dirty-minded old man, but its view of homosexuality is identical" (152). wertham's insinuations about batman and robin, his claims concerning the harmful effects of comics on young minds, and his instrumental role in bringing about the comics code authority, have made him the most important "supervillan" that the fans of batman and other comics have ever had. like the joker, his image reappears again and again, a threat to "authentic" interpretations of the batman character. but medhurst boldly claims a piece of wertham's argument, in order to legitimize his own advocacy of a "deviant" interpretation of batman: wertham quotes [the remarks of a patient who had been aroused by the idea of having sex with batman in the "secret batcave"] to shock us, to tear the pages of _detective_ away before little tommy grows up and moves to greenwich village, but reading it as a gay man today i find it rather moving and also highly recognizable. what this anonymous gay man did was to practice that form of bricolage which richard dyer has identified as a characteristic reading strategy of gay audiences. denied even the remotest possibility of supportive images of homosexuality within the dominant heterosexual culture, gay people have had to fashion what we could out of the imageries of dominance, to snatch illicit meanings from the fabric of normality, to undertake a corrupt decoding for the purposes of satisfying marginalized desires. this may not be as necessary as it once was, given the greater visibility of gay representations. wertham's patient evokes in me an admiration, that in a period of american history even more homophobic than most, there he was, raiding the citadels of masculinity, weaving fantasies of oppositional desire. (153) like other writers in this volume, medhurst shifts the focus from the cultural icon to its reception and reinterpretation by its audiences. moreover, he uses his argument for the "legitimacy" of a gay batman to reveal tendencies that function textually and intertextually in the current bat-canon. but unlike some of the other commentaries on batman in this volume, medhurst's is the one almost certain to be resisted by the arbiters of official bat-taste. medhurst targets this resistance as the collective homophobic core of the new bat-discourse: the change from the 60s "camp crusader" to the snarling dark knight of the 80s thus represents a "reheterosexualization" of the character, carried out by artists, marketers, moviegoers, comic fans, and others (159). what medhurst brings to our attention is that despite the recent proliferation of bat-signifiers in popular culture, some interpretations of the multiple retellings of the batman narrative remain more equal than others. [11] as a result, it is medhurst's essay and perhaps meehan's that are most searchingly _critical_ of the recent resurgence in batman paraphenalia. their "unofficial" versions of the new batman--as masculinist homophobe; as corporate intertext--play a crucial role in retaining the oppositional status of criticism in batman-studies, as represented by this collection. any book on batman is likely to be both energized and limited by the character's current popularity. the presence of the name of the bat in the title may attract the attention of audiences already sensitized to it. however, as meehan might point out, even the most diverse objects produced by third parties can be enlisted to advertise the central commodity, if they bear the sign of the bat. no scholarly "licensing" of the name and logo can take place without also enlisting scholarship as an endorsement of bat-products--in this case, an endorsement for the significance and interest of at least one "new" genre, the graphic novel. given this relationship, it is perhaps fortunate that dc comics refused to grant the editors the rights to the images for use in illustrations, dust jackets, etc. "[dc] did not feel that this book was consistent with their vision of the batman" (vi). what better reverse endorsement could dc have given to bat-criticism, and its attempts to emphasize the failure of any single interpretation to account for batman's history? larsen, 'metadorno', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-larsen-metadorno.txt metadorno by neil larsen <nlarsen@lynx.northeastern.edu> department of modern languages northeastern university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by neil larsen, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. jameson, fredric. _late marxism: adorno, or the persistence of the dialectic_. london: verso, 1990. [1] my first encounter with the writings of fredric jameson occurred when i was a graduate student in comparative literature. at that time the older, new critical, t.s. eliot-ized curriculum was rapidly crumbling before the onslaught of "theory." the moment was uniquely exhilarating, but also charged with a peculiar anxiety, not unlike that experienced by an 'uneducated' consumer about to buy a new refrigerator or, say, a compact disk player. doing "theory" meant not only becoming familiar with a range of available critical paradigms--from the many varieties of poststructuralism and feminism, to psychoanalysis, to reception theory, etc., etc.--but also, inevitably, taking one home. extenuating factors, for the most part extra-academic, predisposed me to marxism, which happened to be in stock, and i remain, i must confess, a most satisfied customer. the decision, however, was greatly facilitated by reading books such as _marxism and form_ and the then recently published _prison-house of language_. the latter work in particular fell upon us like a godsend. here, at last, was a critique of formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, setting out from clearly articulated theoretical and political positions of its own, but at the same time satisfying the collateral need for an introduction to a whole range of thinkers--from shklovksy and jakobson to levi-strauss, greimas, lacan and kristeva--whose many individual works one simply hadn't the time or the training to assimilate. with the then constant appearance of new works of theory--a process still unabating--it was easy to become dismayed at the prospect of falling further and further behind. but jameson's books made life easier--indeed, made the career of many a struggling apprentice to critical theory a possibility where it might otherwise have succumbed to burn-out or inane and unwanted specializations. i think i am not far off in saying that jameson played a unique role in educating an entire generation of marxist literary and cultural critics (and perhaps not a few non-marxists), not only in the tradition of the western marxism of a lukacs or a benjamin, but also in virtually all of the important schools of critical theory to have emerged since roughly the 1920s. to say this is in no way to disparage jameson's contributions as an original critical theorist. one thinks especially here of his central position within current discussions of postmodernity. but perhaps his most original contribution is precisely the method of interpreting 'rival,' non-marxist theories and interpretations in such a way as to expose their falsifying implications _at the same time_ that their specific 'truth content' is preserved--a method variously identified as "meta-commentary" and as "transcoding." there can, in my estimation, arise genuine doubts about the ultimate political effect of metacommentary--as to whether, in fact, it is the marxist frame and not the array of 'rival' discourses that is finally severed from its 'truth-content' as a result of this operation. but i don't think there can be any about the vastly productive _heuristic _force of jamesonian interpretation. metacommentary has, pretty much alone it seems to me, worked towards an intellectual-critical synthesis within the humanities, without which the quality of present day intellectual discourse and analysis would probably be far poorer. [2] it is against this rather special standard of expectation that jameson's 1990 work, _late marxism_, seems both disconcerting and somewhat disappointing. here, somehow, metacommentary, while never more sophisticated and sensitive to every conceivable nuance and possibility lurking within its intellectual object, seems oddly static. an exhausting labor of reading--for _late marxism_ is, uncharacteristically, a book whose initial threshold of difficulty, beyond which the effort of comprehension becomes continuously self-rewarding, seems never to be reached--leaves the reader finally bereft of the expected synthesis. why is this? [3] perhaps it is simply my own local need or desire for metacommentary that has lapsed here. but i suspect my response to _late marxism_--at least among those who have themselves been _schooled_ by jamesonian marxism--is not atypical. what i want to suggest in what follows is that the peculiar density and tendency to hypostasis detected in _late marxism_ by its readers stems not from any intrinsic decay of metacommentary, but rather from what may be the essential unfeasability of the task that the method here sets for itself. [4] that task involves the substantiation of two claims: first, that adorno's own claim to marxism (whether or not adorno himself in fact bothers to make it) is a valid one; second, that "adorno's marxism may be just what we need today" (5). to substantiate the former, jameson observes that "the law of value is always presupposed by adorno's interpretations" (230) as well as pointing to the "omnipresence" in adorno of the "conceptual instrument called 'totality'" (ibid.). the latter is purportedly established by the very "success" of contemporary, "late" capitalism at "eliminating the loopholes of nature and the unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike . . ." (5). that is, adorno's continual "emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our concepts . . ." (not to mention its presence within all our less cerebral modes of being), while perhaps still tending to untruth for his time, has now been verified for ours. the problem with contemporary, non-dialectical theories of culture and society is--or so jameson implies here--that in banishing the concept of totality in the ethical belief that this somehow frees them from the danger of complicity with "totalitarian" ideology and politics, such theories in fact fall all the more hopelessly under the spell of the real totality, which has long since found ways of insinuating itself into even the most anti "totalitarian" acts of consciousness. [5] adorno, that is, is the marxist trump card in the postmodern deck. it's an interesting, not to say attractive notion. the problem, as i see it here, is that to be convinced of this would require more than a general reference to "late capitalism" coupled with the passing observation of the "melting away" of "really existing" socialism and the "drying up" of "liberation struggles" (249-50)--accurate as these observations may be in themselves. if the claim that "late capitalism" has eliminated the "loopholes . . . of individual and collective praxis alike" (a succinct but quite precise restatement of adornian political philosophy) is to be defended as one consistent with marxism, then there would have to be some attempt here--on the level of both political economy and of politics as ideology and hegemony--to account for this change. i don't wish to rule out the possibility that such an historically and materially grounded account is possible, but if it is, i see no evidence of it in _late marxism_, or, for that matter, in any of adorno's works. the adornian retort here, as jameson formulates it, is to question whether or not "history" itself, on this plane, is "thinkable" at all except as a "present absence" that can be pointed out but not subjected to any further conscious mediation (see 89). but if it isn't, then how did we come up with the theory of "late capitalism" in the first place? what explains our ability to register its "success"? all of this, moreover, leaves aside the critical question of _agency_ in adornian social dialectics--unless we are meant simply to accept it on faith that it is only monadic "works of art"--and the exceptional critical theorist--that are empowered to resist totality. [6] these, at any rate, are the sorts of questions that a defense of adorno as marxist would have to confront. (it does no good here to fall back on the recognition of marxism itself as a "cultural phenomenon" that "varies according to its socioeconomic context" (11)l. that is certainly true on one level. but this makes adorno's marxism a "cultural phenomenon" as well, in which case it is hard to see how its particular "truth" is truer than that of the others.) [7] but _late marxism_ proceeds instead to an exhaustive re-reading of adorno more or less in keeping with the method of metacommentary. so, for example, jameson will object to habermas's charge that,in the _dialectic of enlightenment_, adorno and horkheimer revert to a non-marxist irrationalism by arguing that this work can in fact be read as a sort of "natural historical" supplement to marx's social historical genealogy of capitalist modernity (108). depending on one's particular take on adorno, one will or will not be persuaded by jameson's local interpretations. no one, i think, will want to dispute their truly awesome virtuosity and brilliance _as_ readings of the adornian texts themselves--above all jameson's mapping out of adornian concepts in their all important %darstellung%. as noted above, the only complaint that might be registered here is against the unrelieved difficulty of following jameson's own %darstellung% throughout much of _late marxism_. it's a rare experience to come upon an extended citation from the _negative dialectics_ and feel a sense of _relief_ at being able to relax for a moment one's effort of concentration! [8] supple and erudite as these reflections are, however, they somehow don't add up to a conclusive defense of adorno as today's marxist. and, indeed, how _could_ this be the result of a jamesonian metacommentary, which _presupposes_ that a marxism endowed with a consciousness of the totality is already in place at the outermost and "ultimate horizon" of interpretation? how can adorno, who has already been explicitly identified as the bearer of marxian truth in the era of postmodernity, be both subject and object of metacommentary all at once? in such a situation, metacommentary would seem to lose its very source of motivation. and this, i suggest, is what finally explains the readerly difficulty here, not in following the motion of the 'transcoding', but in _decoding_ the 'transcoding' itself. [editor], 'postface', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-[editor]-postface.txt postface _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) [what follows is a written exchange between the editors about the contents of this issue of _postmodern culture_. as a "postface," it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers. please send your comments on the issue to the discussion group, pmc-talk@ncsuvm (pmc-talk@ncsuvm.ncsu.edu on the internet).] john: many of the works in the last issue of pmc were concerned in one way or another with that "crude particular," the body: this concern seems to carry over into the second issue, focusing on the body as one pole--positive or negative--in the field of identity. as you might expect, the body brings with it some familiar metaphysical pitfalls- nostalgia for presence and for the unitary sense of self, especially. what's interesting is the way a number of the works in this issue address these problems. eyal: while body and voice are conventional opposites, several of the works here also bring out the slippage between them, the way one can become the other. for howe body becomes voice: the figure of other is "thin as paper," present in her own writing and so made concrete, part of "invincible things as they are." for o'donnell voice becomes body: he singles out the "frigicom process" proposed as an invention in _jr_ whereby voice is frozen, made portable. both are kinds of transferal, bridging gaps, but one is redemptive and necessary to the identity of the present, the other threatening, potential ordinance. john: the technology of communication is directly implicated in both the redemptive and the threatening aspects of 'language made portable'- redemptive for ulmer, threatening for o'donnell. bernstein, talking about the way some postwar poets accept the materiality of language, makes a point which might be applied to many of these essays: he says that there is a "persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed" which nonetheless does not amount to a new "equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage." it is at least arguable that language or voice acquires materiality exactly in the moment of being dislocated from the body of the speaker, and though that dislocation is potentially dangerous (in that it makes it possible to commodify voice), it also makes it possible to break up and break into the authoritative monologues of history and identity, constructing a present out of the frozen (and shattered) voices of the past. eyal: this dis-location, disjunction, and portability of language-as-body, material language, enables both openness and control. because the self is disjunctive it can be reconstructed, reinvented (trembath); poetry has a special claim on us because it is its own monument, because in it loss and presence coexist (hart's reading of mills courts); and if we are to undertake a critical project that would disown what bernstein calls the "nonbiodegradable byproducts" of logocentrism (as ulmer urges us to do), such a project would have to acknowledge that nonbiodegradability and to contain the metaphors it deconstructs, the broken idols now made to dance in a godless pantheon. on the other hand, this disjunction stages language in the theater of mass-media production, making identity (as dolan implies) especially susceptible to simulation and manipulation. john: these writers respond to disjunction in different ways, though. there's howe's project of understanding how the past structures the present, which is the sort of project bernstein; then there's the activity of restructuring the manner in which we appropriate the past, which is a large part of what ulmer wants us to do; there's also a sort of reconstruction in bad faith (dolan discusses this) where the present is justified with reference to a past reconstituted to suit the purposes of the moment; and finally, there's the sense that one can never really adapt to disjunction. mccorkle's "combustion of early summer" is an example: sorting things out, nothing really fits: the puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta, we have pieces from other lives, the difficulty is to remember them . . . . if these responses have anything in common, it's a lack of nostalgia or the note of loss. eyal: there is no nostalgia here because nothing was there in the first place--if nothing was lost then nothing can be recovered--but there is no coldness in relation to the past. these writers feel the past, whether they find it to be immediate (as bernstein does so explicitly) or inaccessible. in mccorkle's work the past is intangible but its effect is not: the past buzzes around us, a conversation in another room we thought dormant, soon its occupants will crash through the door the past makes us up, but we do not know it and so cannot be sure of ourselves, either. the effect is a lyrical desire that comes out of ignorance, out of absence rather than loss. howe also recognizes the task of deciphering the "buried texts" of the past, and feels "haunted and inspired" by them. hashmi's posthumous beckett is a sibylline figure for the perseverance of the voice despite the dissolution of the body--or especially because of it. hooks, 'postmodern blackness', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-hooks-postmodern.txt postmodern blackness by bell hooks oberlin college copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). [1] postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. very few african-american intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism. recently at a dinner party, i talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. it was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. the setting quickly became a field of contestation. i was told by the other black person that i was wasting my time, that "this stuff does not relate in any way to what's happening with black people." speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. the idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated. [2] my defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good but i worried that i lacked conviction, largely because i approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, i find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. as a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, i appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. [3] critical of most writing on postmodernism, i perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on "otherness and difference" that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. since much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically black women (though in more recent work one may see reference to cornel west, the black male scholar who has most engaged postmodernist discourse). even if an aspect of black culture is the subject of postmodern critical writing the works cited will usually be those of black men. a work that comes immediately to mind is andrew ross' chapter "hip, and the long front of color" in _no respect: intellectuals and popular culture_; though an interesting reading, it constructs black culture as though black women have had no role in black cultural production. at the end of meaghan morris' discussion of postmodernism included in her collection of essays _the pirate's fiance: feminism and postmodernism_, she provides a bibliography of works by women, identifying them as important contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that offers new insight as well as challenging male theoretical hegemony. even though many of the works do not directly address postmodernism, they address similar concerns. there are no references to work by black women. [4] the failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness. this is especially the case with works that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness" can be considered legitimate issues in the academy. confronting both the lack of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black experience, i enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice can or will be heard. [5] during the sixties, black power movements were influenced by perspectives that could be easily labeled modernist. certainly many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda. there was little critique among black militants of patriarchy as a master narrative. despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive *postmodern* state. the period directly after the black power movement was a time when major news magazines carried articles with cocky headlines like "what ever happened to black america?" this was an ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the moment successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black liberation to be a national political agenda. in the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a repressive state and others became inarticulate; it has become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a "politics of difference," should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people. [6] it is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. if radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. from a different standpoint robert storr makes a similar critique in the global issue of _art in america_ when he asserts: to be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." on the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. endless second guessing about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these theorists from investigating what black, hispanic, asian and native american artists were actually doing. without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. [7] the postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. we must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. i am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. [8] postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. to take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. for african-americans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. writing about blacks and postmodernism, cornel west describes our collective plight: there is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. we are talking here about tremendous hopelessness. this hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. the overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. [9] "yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. specifically in relation to the postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice. it is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of r&b music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. it has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. working with this insight in his essay "putting the pop back into postmodernism," lawrence grossberg comments: the postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. they offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. considering that it is as a subject that one comes to voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to gain or regain a hearing. even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. it never surprises me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. we should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. [10] criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of african-american experience. the critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for african-americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. we have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency. [11] employing a critique of essentialism allows african-americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. it also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. this discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype. abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. contemporary african american resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of "authentic" black identity. this critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. this is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. the unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many african-americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of african-americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. an adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience." there is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle. [12] when black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. when this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. given the various crises facing african-americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular culture and resistance struggle. many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race and racism. [13] music is the cultural product created by african americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists. it is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural production by black folks--beginning with literary and critical writing. attempts on the part of editors and publishing houses to control and manipulate the representation of black culture, as well as their desire to promote the creation of products which will attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we can do and still receive recognition. using myself as an example, that creative writing i do which i consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility--work that is abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative--is constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell. certainly i do not think i am the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of work. it is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience for such work. to do this they must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. to change the exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of resistance. part of this intervention entails black intellectual participation in the discourse. [14] in his essay "postmodernism and black america," cornel west suggests that black intellectuals "are marginal--usually languishing at the interface of black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in euro american settings" and he cannot see this group as potential producers of radical postmodernist thought. while i generally agree with this assessment, black intellectuals must proceed with the understanding that we are not condemned to the margins. the way we work and what we do can determine whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a wider audience, one that includes all classes of black people. west suggests that black intellectuals lack "any organic link with most of black life" and that this "diminishes their value to black resistance." this statement bears traces of essentialism. perhaps we need to focus more on those black intellectuals, however rare our presence, who do not feel this lack and whose work is primarily directed towards the enhancement of black critical consciousness and the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in meaningful resistance struggle. theoretical ideas and critical thinking need not be transmitted solely in the academy. while i work in a predominantly white institution, i remain intimately and passionately engaged with black communities. it's not like i'm going to talk about writing and thinking about postmodernism with other academics and/or intellectuals and not discuss these ideas with underclass non-academic black folks who are family, friends, and comrades. since i have not broken the ties that bind me to underclass poor black community, i have seen that knowledge, especially that which enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity to survive, can be shared. it means that critics, writers, academics have to give the same critical attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to black communities that we give to writing articles, teaching, and lecturing. here again i am really talking about cultivating habits of being that reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated and shared on a number of fronts, and the extent to which it is made available and accessible depends on the nature of one's political commitments. [15] postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. to some extent ruptures, surfaces, contextuality and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined to narrow, separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of every day. much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression and aesthetics, that inform the daily life of a mass population as well as writers and scholars. on the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. one can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. it's exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur. griggers, 'lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-griggers-lesbian.txt lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction by cathy griggers literary and cultural theory carnegie mellon university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by cathy griggers, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] what signs mark the presence of a lesbian body? [2] writing the lesbian body has become more common of late, making reading it all the more difficult. less hidden, and so more cryptic than ever, the lesbian body increasingly appears as an actual variability set within the decors of everyday discourses. signs of her presence appear on the cover of _elle_, for example, or in popular film and paperback detective mysteries as both the sleuth and %femme fatale%, in texts that range from mary wing's overt lesbian thriller _she came too late_ (1987) to the conflicted, symptomatic lesbian sub-plot in bob rafelson's _black widow_ (1986). she appeared disguised as a vampire in tony scott's _the hunger_ (1983), and masquerading as the latest american outlaw hero in _thelma and louise_ (1991). on television, she's making her appearance on the evening soap _l.a. law_, and she virtually made mtv via madonna's _justify your love_ music video. when mtv censored the video, she appeared on abc's _nightline_ instead, under the guise of "news." elsewhere, in the latest lesbian mail-order video from femme fatale--a discursive site where the lesbian imaginary meets the sex industry--you can find her on all fours and dressed in leather or feathers, or leather and feathers, typically wearing a phallic silicone simulacrum. recently, she's appeared in the trappings of san francisco's lesbian bar culture passing as a collection of art photographs in della grace's _love bites_ (1991). meanwhile, pbs will be broadcasting in the spring of '92 a bbc production depicting the torrid affair between violet treyfusis and vita sackville-west into the living rooms of millions of devoted pbs viewers. and susie bright, author of _susie sexpert's lesbian sex world_ (1990), is making virtual sexual reality with her _virtual sex world reader_ to be published in spring of 1992 by cleis press. lesbian computer nerds are waiting for bright to assist in the world's first lesbian virtual sex program, that is, the first virtual reality program designed by a lesbian. same-sex sex between women is already a menu option on the popular on-line virtual valerie, along with a menu for a variety of sex toy applications. let's face it; lesbian bodies in postmodernity are going broadcast, they're going techno-culture, and they're going mainstream. [3] in the process of mainstreaming, in which minoritarian and majority significations intermingle, the lesbian body of signs is exposed as an essentially dis-organ-ized body.^1^ the lesbian is as fantasmatic a construct as the woman. there are women, and there are lesbian bodies--each body crossed by multiplicitous signifying regimes and by different histories, different technologies of representation and reproduction, and different social experiences of being lesbian determined by ethnicity, class, gender identity and sexual practices. in other words, as lesbian bodies become more visible in mainstream culture, the differences amongst these bodies also become more apparent. there is a freedom and a loss inscribed in this current cultural state of being lesbian. on the one hand, lesbians are given greater exemption from a categorical call that would delimit them from the cultural spaces of the anytime, anywhere. on the other hand, the call of identity politics becomes increasingly problematized. [4] the problem of identity is always a problem of signification in regard to historically-specific social relations. various attempts have been made to locate a lesbian identity, most inculcated in the grand nominalizing imperative bequeathed us by the victorian taxonomies of "sexual" science. should we define the lesbian by a specific sexual practice, or by the lack thereof? by a history of actual, or virtual, relations? can she be identified once and for all by the presence of a public, broadcast kiss, by an act of self-proclamation, or by an act of community outing? should we know her by the absence of the penis, or by the presence of a silicone simulacrum? surely this material delimitation may go too far--for shouldn't we wonder whether or not a lesbian text, for all that, can be written across the body of a "man"? i can point to the case of male-to-female transsexuals who cathect toward women, but why should we limit the problematic to its most obvious, symptomatic manifestation? [5] the question of a lesbian body of signs always takes us back to the notion of identity in the body, of body as identity, a notion complicated in postmodernity by alterations in technologies of reproduction. benjamin observed in "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" that mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of the original work of art and, more importantly, provided a circuit to mass mentalities and thus an access code for fascism in the twentieth century.^2^ we should not forget hitler's admission that the electronic reproduction of his voice over the radio allowed him to conquer germany. for the sake of thinking the future of lesbian bodies in postmodernity, i want to recall benjamin's critique of the state's techno-fetishization of technologies of reproduction in the context of lesbian bodies now--within the cultural regime of simulation. baudrillard defines post-mechanical reproduction as the precession of simulacra, a post-world war ii state of hyperreality in post-industrial, techno-culture reached when cultural reproduction refers first and foremost to the fact that there is no original (simulations). the cultural reproduction of lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction, that is, in the culture of simulacra, has more than ever destroyed any aura of an "original" lesbian identity, while exposing the cultural sites through which lesbianism is appropriated by the political economy of postmodernity. [6] we are at a moment of culture, for example, when phallic body prostheses are being mass produced by the merger of the sex industry with plastics technologies. _on our backs_ is not the only photojournal to market artificial penises. even _playgirl_, marketed primarily to straight women, carries pages of advertisements for a huge assortment of phallic simulacra. we're left to wonder what these women might eventually think to do with a double-ended dildo. but there's no mistaking that the lesbian assimilation of the sex-toy industry is reterritorializing the culturally constructed aura of the phallic signifier. by appropriating the phallus/penis for themselves, lesbians have turned techno-culture's semiotic regime of simulation and the political economy of consumer culture back against the naturalization of male hegemony. it's of course ironic that in mass reproducing the penis itself, the illusion of a natural linkage between the cultural power organized under the sign of the phallus and the penis as biological organ is exposed as artificial. the reproduction of the penis as dildo exposes the male organ as signifier of the phallus, and not vice versa, that is, the dildo exposes the cultural organ of the phallus as a simulacrum. the dildo is an artificial penis, an appropriated phallus, and a material signifier of the imaginary ground for an historically manifest phallic regime of power. the effect on lesbian identities of this merger between the sex industry and plastics technologies is typical of the double-binds characteristic of lesbianism in postmodernity. ironically, the validity of grounding phallic power and gendered identity in the biological sign of difference in the male body is set up for cultural reinvestigation and reinvestment once the penis itself is reproduced as signifier, that is, in the very process of mass-producing artificial penises as a marketable sign for the consumption of desiring subjects, including subjects desiring counter-hegemonic identities. at the same time, the commodification of the signifier--in this case the penis as signifier of the phallus--obscures the politico-economic reproduction of straight class relations by displacing lesbian desire from the unstable and uncertain register of the real to the overly stable, imaginary register of the fetish-sign (i.e., the repetitive channeling of desire into the fixed circuit that runs from the penis as phallus to the phallus as penis in an endless loop). in other words, if working-class and middle-class urban lesbians and suburban dykes can't afford health care and don't yet have real national political representation, they can nonetheless buy a 10-inch "dinger" and a matching leather harness, and they can, with no guarantees, busy themselves at the task of appropriating for a lesbian identity the signs of masculine power. this situation provides both a possibility for self-reinvention and self-empowerment and an appropriation of lesbian identities--and their labor, their leisure, and their purchasing power--into the commodity logic of techno-culture. [7] at the same time, new reproductive technologies, including artificial insemination by donor (aid), in-vitro fertilization (ivf), surrogate motherhood, lavage embryo transfer, and tissue farming as in cross-uterine egg transplants, are both reterritorializing and reifying biological relations to gendered social roles (corea 1986, overall 1989). the "body" is breaking up. i'm not talking just about the working body, the confessing body, the sexual body. these are old tropes, as foucault showed us. in postmodernity, even the organs are separating from the body. that these organs are literal makes them no less organs of power. the womb is disjunct from the breast, for example, the vagina from the mouth that speaks, the ovaries and their production from the womb, etc., etc.. the lesbian body's relation to these reified technologies is entirely paradigmatic of the contradictions of lesbian subject positions in postmodernity. while new reproductive technologies generally reinforce a repressive straight economy of maternal production, body management and class-privileged division of labor, the technology of cross-uterine egg transplants finally allows one lesbian to bear another's child, a fact which to date has gone entirely unmentioned by either the medical community or the media.^3^ [8] the point is that the bodies that are the supposed ground of identity in essentialist arguments--arguments that assert we are who we are because of our bodies--are both internally fragmented in response to the intrusions of bio-technologies and advanced surgical techniques, including transsexual procedures, and externally plied by a variety of technologically determined semiotic registers, such as the sex-toy industry and broadcast representation. as a result, lesbian identities are generating a familiar unfamiliarity of terms which san francisco's lesbian sexpert, susie bright, has been busily mainstreaming on the _phil donahue show_--terms as provocative as female penetration, female masculinity, s/m lipstick dykes, and lesbian phallic mothers. [9] while all social bodies are plied by multiple regimes of signs, as deleuze and guattari as well as foucault have repeatedly shown, lesbian bodies in the age of (post)mechanical reproduction are particularly paradigmatic of a radical semiotic multiplicity. this situation is hardly surprising. that lesbians are not women because women are defined by their straight class relations--a statement monique wittig has popularized--doesn't mean we know exactly what a lesbian is. the "lesbian," especially the lesbian who resists or slips the always potential sedimentarity in that term, marks a default of identity both twice-removed and exponentially factored. lesbians in postmodernity are subjects-in-the-making whose body of signs and bodies as sign are up for reappropriation and revision, answering as they do the party line of technology and identity. [10] this double call of technology and identity complicates our understanding of lesbian bodies as minority bodies--a definition that locates lesbians within the discourse of identity by their differences from the majority bodies of the hetero woman and man. we might want to envision lesbians as runaway slaves with no other side of the mississippi in sight, perpetual and permanent fugitives, as wittig argues. but it's undeniable that lesbians are also, at the same time and sometimes in the same bodies, lesbians bearing arms, lesbians bearing children, lesbians becoming fashion, becoming commodity subjects, becoming hollywood, becoming the sex industry, or becoming cyborg human-machinic assemblages. and from the alternative point of view, we are also bearing witness to the military becoming lesbian, the mother becoming lesbian, straight women becoming lesbian, fashion and hollywood and the sex industry becoming lesbian, middle-class women, corporate america, and techno-culture becoming lesbian, etc.. that is, the lesbian body of signs, like all minority bodies, is always becoming majority, in a multiplicity of ways. but at the same time, in a multitude of domains across the general cultural field, majority bodies are busy becoming lesbian. [11] in the lesbian cultural landscape of postmodernity, essentialist arguments about feminine identity are more defunct than ever, while wittig's lesbian materialist analysis of straight culture is more urgent than ever and more problematic. setting lesbian identity first within the context of postmodern culture suggests two clarifications to wittig. first, any materialist analysis of a lesbian revolutionary position in relation to straight women as a class has to begin with one irreducible conundrum of postmodernity in regard to lesbian identities. the cultural space for popular lesbian identities to exist--economic freedom from dependence on a man--is a historical outcome of late industrial capitalism's commodity logic in its total war phase in the first half of the twentieth century. women, particularly single women, comprised a large proportion of the substitute bodies required by the state to maintain performativity criteria established before each world war or to meet the accelerated industrial needs of total war and reconstruction. this is the undeniable history of women's entry into the workforce and the professions, including the academy, and of their assimilation into the commodity marketplace beyond the domestic sphere--all of which set up the possibility of the '70s women's movement.^4^ this is also the history of the cultural production of lesbian bodies as we know them today. [12] in other words, and this is my second clarification to wittig, lesbians are becoming nomad runaways and becoming state at the same time. and it's at the various sites where these interminglings of bodies take place that the cultural contradictions will be most apparent and therefore the political stakes greatest. these sites include any becoming majority of the minoritarian as well as the becoming minor of majority regimes of signs, and in each of these sites the political stakes will not be equivalent. this political complication results from the epistemological challenge to materialist analysis presented by the failure of poststructural linguistics to adequately map cultural dialects except as unstable and constant sites of transformation. these kinds of subcultural variance and continuous historical transformation have to be factored in any lesbian materialist modelling system if we are to continue the work wittig has launched not only toward a lesbian materialist critique of straight class relations, but toward a materialist critique of lesbianism itself. [13] lesbian bodies are not essentially counterhegemonic sites of culture as we might like to theorize. the lesbian may not be a woman, as wittig argues, yet she is not entirely exterior to straight culture. each lesbian has a faciality touching on some aspect of a majority signifying regime of postmodernity, whether that be masculinity or femininity, motherhood, the sex industry, the commodification of selves, reproductive technologies, or the military under global capitalism. lesbians are inside and outside, minority and majority, at the same time. [14] indeed, the potential power of lesbian identity politics in the current historical moment comes from its situatedness between feminist, gay male, and civil rights activism. lesbian bodies are a current site of contention in the women's movement, particularly over the issue of s/m practices and porn, because of their greater affinities with gay males than with straight women. in many ways, the activist politics of act-up in the face of aids discrimination represents for lesbians a better strategy of identity politics than the consciousness-raising discourses traditionally authorized by now. but in the face of direct losses on the ground gained in the '70s and '80s on women's issues--right to abortions and birth-control information, right to protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, right to have recourse to a just law in the case of rape--the queer nation/feminism alliance will be crucial to the future of lesbian cultural politics. in addition, most of the struggle of making feminist-lesbians into feminist-lesbians-of-color lies ahead of us. [15] lesbian identities have always presented a challenge to essentialist notions of feminine identity, and never more so than when lesbian bodies are set in the historical context of postmodernity. the cultural period in late-industrial and post-industrial society during world war ii and in the fifty years since is their historical heyday. lesbian bodies came of age under the specter of a holocaust that could reach finality only by the injection into the global symbolic of a nuclear sublime so horrific as to arrest all prior signification. their agencies must be agencies that work within the reduced political rights of a worldwide civilian population subjected to a new military regime of global security. they are proffered a variety of prostheses and self-imaging technologies, in fact, a variety of bodies, as long as they meet the performativity criterion of commodity logic. and if they are runaways, they're running from the very political economy that produced their possibility. this is their double bind. for all these reasons, the immediate challenge facing lesbian bodies in postmodernity is how to make a dis-organ-ized body of signs and identities work for a progressive, or even a radical, politics. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ in this case, the majority regimes of masculinity or normative femininity, fashion, porn, mainstream cinema, tv soaps, on-line sex, etc.. ^2^ according to ong, mechanical production began with the reification of the oral world/word into print. ^3^ the legal implications of this scenario should be tested immediately in regard to the law recognizing both women as legal parents, particularly in the case of artificial insemination by anonymous donor from a sperm bank. ^4^ the '70s women's movement was also an offshoot of the '60s african-american civil rights movement, which itself shared some of the same problematic ties to the war machine, particularly through the g.i. bill. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited baudrillard, jean. _simulations_. trans. paul foss, paul patton, philip beitchman. ny: autonomedia, 1983. benjamin, walter. _illuminations_. trans. harry zohn. ny: schocken books, 1978. corea, gena. _the mother machine: reproductive technology from artificial insemination to artificial wombs_. ny: harper and row, 1986. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minneapolis p, 1987. haraway, donna. _simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature_. ny: routledge, 1991. ong, walter. _orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word_. ny: methuen, 1982. overall, christine, ed. _the future of human reproduction_. ontario: the women's press, 1989. virilio, paul. _popular defense and ecological struggles_. ny: autonomedia, 1990. wittig, monique. _the straight mind_. boston: beacon press, 1992. joyce, 'notes toward an unwritten non-linear electronic text, "the ends of print culture" (a work in progress)', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-joyce-notes.txt notes toward an unwritten non-linear electronic text, "the ends of print culture" (a work in progress) by michael joyce <michael_joyce@um.cc.umich.edu> center for narrative and technology, jackson, mi _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by michael joyce, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. adapted from a talk originally given at the computers and the human conversation conference, lewis and clark college, portland, oregon, march 16, 1991 [1] for a period of time last year on each end of our town, like compass points, there was a mausoleum of books. on the north end of town a great remainder warehouse flapped with banners that promised 80% off publishers prices. inside it row upon row of long tables resembled nothing less than those awful makeshift morgues which spring up around disasters. its tables were piled with the union dead: the mistakes and enthusiasms of editors, the miscalculations of marketing types, the brightly jacketed, orphaned victims of faddish, fickle or fifteen minute shifts of opinion and/or history. there an appliance was betrayed by another (food processor by microwave); a diet guru was overthrown by a leftist in leotards (pritikin by fonda); and every would-be dickens seemed poised to tumble, if not from literary history, at least from all human memory (already gangs of owen meanies leer and lean against faded handmaidens of atwood). [2] upon first looking into such a warehouse--forty miles east of our spare parts, bible belt midwest town, in what we outlanders think of as wonderful ann arbor; we thought only a university town could sustain this. when the same outfit opened up in our town, and the tables were piled not with the leavings of ann arborites but with towers of the same texts, we knew this was a modern day circus. ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! here come the books! [3] meanwhile, at the opposite pole in the second mausoleum, a group termed the friends of the library regularly sell off tables of what shelves can no longer hold. one hundred years of marquez is too impermanent for the permanent collection of our county library, but so too- at least for the branches which feed pulp back to this trunk--so too is the human comedy, so too are the actual dickens or emily dickinson. the book here must literally earn its keep. [4] both the remainder morgue and the friends of the library mortuary are examples of production/distribution gone radically wrong. books--and films and television programs and software, etc.--have become what cigarettes are in prison, a currency, a token of value, a high voltage utility humming with options and futures. it is not necessary to have read them. rather we are urged to imagine what they could mean to us; or, more accurately, to imagine what we would mean if we were the kind of people who had read them. [5] this is to say that the intellectual capital economy has to some extent abandoned the idea of real, material value for one of utility. this abandonment is not unlike the kind that in a depressed real estate market leaves so-called "worthless" condos as empty towers in whose shadowy colonnades the homeless camp. ideas of all sorts have their fifteen minute warholian half-life and then dissipate, and yet their structures remain. we have long ago stopped making real buildings in favor of virtual realities and holograms. the book has lost its privilege. for those who camped in its shadows, for the culturally homeless, this is not necessarily a bad thing. no less than the sitcom or the nintendo cartridge, the book too is merely a fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of the network. and the network, unlike the tower,is ours to inhabit. [6] in the days before the remote control television channel zapper and modem port we used to think network meant the three wise men with the same middle initial: two with the same last name, nbc and abc, and their cousin cbs. now we increasingly know that the network is nothing less than what is put before us for use. here in the network what makes value is, to echo the poet charles olson, knowing how to use yourself and on what. networks build locally immediate value which we can plug into or not as we like. thus the network redeems time for us. already with remote control channel zapper in hand the most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. in the network we know that what is of value is what can be used; and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will. [7] we live in what, in _writing space_, jay bolter calls the late age of print (bolter 1991). once one begins using a word processor to write fiction, it is easy to imagine that the same techne which makes it possible to remove the anguish from a minor character on page 251 of a novel manuscript and implant it within a formative meditation of the heroine on page 67 could likewise make it possible to write a novel which changes every time the reader reads it. yet what we envision as a disk tucked into a book might easily become the opposite. the reader struggles against the electronic book. "but you can't read it in bed," she says, everyone's last ditch argument. fully a year after sony first showed discman, a portable, mini-cd the size of a walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the gutenberg computer network wanted to move the last ditch a little further. the smell of ink, one writer suggested; the crinkle of pages, suggests another. [8] meanwhile in far-off laboratories of the military-infotainmentcomplex--to advance upon stuart moulthrop's phrase (moulthrop, 1989b)--at warner, disney or ibapple and microlotus, some scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold; while others build raised-text touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they turn. "but the dog can't eat it," someone protests, and--smiling, silently--the scientists go back to their laboratories, bags of silicone kibbles over their shoulders. [9] what we whiff is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss: of burning towers or men's cigars in the drawing room. hurry up please, it's time. we are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. the book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. the book is dead, long live the book. a revolution enacts what a population already expresses: like eels to the sargasso, 100 thousand videotapes annually return to a television show about home videos. in the land of polar mausolea, in this late age of print, swimming midst this undertow who will keep the book alive? [10] in an age when more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, often with higher advances than ever before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of truffaut's version of bradbury's _fahrenheit 451_, whose vestal readers walk along the meandering river of light just beyond the city of text. we face their tasks now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, network out of book. [11] we can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. there are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities. artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche, a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy; multimedia (even as virtual reality) is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholding to poetics and film studies. nothing is quicker than the light of the word. in "quickness," one of his _six memos for the next millennium_, italo calvino writes: in an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (calvino 1988, 45) [12] following the true bent of the written language in the late age of print brings us to the topographic. "the computer," jay bolter says," changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics. "in the topographic city of text shape itself signifies, as in warren beatty's literally brilliant rendering of the city of dick tracy. there the calm, commercial runes of marquee, placard, neon and shingle (drugs, luncheonette, cinema) not only map the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, but they also shape and color the city itself and its inhabitants. face and costume, facade and meander, river's edge and central square, booth or counter, trueheart or breathless. "electronic writing," says bolter is both a visual and verbal description. it is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. the writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech. (bolter 1991, 25) [13] ted nelson, who coined the term hypertext in the 1960's, more recently defined it as "non-sequential writing with reader controlled links." yet this characterization stops short of describing the resistance of this new object. for it is not merely that the reader can choose the order of what she reads but that her choices in fact become what it is. [14] let us say instead that hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. your choices, not the author's representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. you become the reader-as-writer. [15] we might note here that the word we want to describe the reader-as-writer already exists, although it is too latinate and bulky for contemporary use. interlocutor has the correct sense of one conversant with the polylogue, as well as the right degrees of burlesque, badinage, and bricolage behind it. even so, we will have to make do with--and may well benefit by extending--the comfortable term, reader. [16] we may distinguish two kinds of hypertext according to their actions (joyce, 1988). exploratory hypertext, which most often occurs in read-only form, allows readers to control the transformation of a defined body of material. it is perhaps the type most familiar to you, if you have seen a hypercard stack. (note here that a stack is the name of the electronic texts created by this apple product. there are other hypertext systems, such as storyspace and supercard for the macintosh, or guide for both the macintosh and ms-dos machines, and the newcomer toolbook for the latter.) [17] in the typical stack, the reader encounters a text (which may include sound and graphics, including video, animations, and what have you). she may choose what and how she sees or reads, either following an order the author has set out for her or creating her own. very often she can retain a record of her choices in order to replay them later. more and more frequently in these documents she can compose her own notes and connect them to what she encounters, even copying parts from the hypertext itself. [18] this kind of reading of an exploratory hypertext is what we might call empowered interaction. the transitional electronic text makes an uneasy marriage with its reader. it says: you may do these things, including some i have not anticipated. [19] it is to an extent true that neither the author's representations nor the initial topography but instead the reader's choices constitute the current state of the text for her. in these exploratory hypertexts, however, the text does not transform or rearrange itself to embody this current state. the transitional electronic text is as yet a marriage without issue. each of the reader's additions lies outside the flow of the text, like junior's shack at the edge of the poster-colored city of dick tracy. the text may be seen as leading to what she adds to it, yet her addition is marginal, ghettoized. stuart moulthrop suggests that to the extent that hypertexts let a power structure "subject itself to trivial critiques in order to pre-empt any real questioning of authority . . . hypertext could end up betraying the anti-hierarchical ideals implicit in its foundation" (moulthrop 1989a). under such circumstances the reader's interaction does not reorder the text, but rather conserves authority. she moves outside the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, unable to shape and color the city itself or its inhabitants. [20] even so, to the extent that the topographical writing of an exploratory hypertext lets readers create and examine signs and structures, it does make implicit the boundary which both marks and makes privilege or authority. in fact it has always been true that the interlocutory reader, let us say brooding alone in the reading room of the british museum, might come to see this boundary. attuned to organizational structures of production and reproduction, she might mark with althusser, "the material existence of an ideological apparatus" of the state (althusser 1971). [21] but she might not be able to see quite as clearly or as quickly as she can see in the hypertext how the arena is organized to marginalize and diminish her. this is the trouble with hypertext, at any level: it is messy, it lets you see ghosts, it is always haunted by the possibility of other voices, other topographies, others' governance. [22] print culture is as discretely defined and transparently maintained as the grounds of disney world. there is no danger that new paths will be trod into the manicured lawns. some would like to think this groundskeeping is a neutral decision, unladen, de-contextualized, removed from issues of empowerment, outside any reciprocal relationship. for the moment institutions of media, publishing, scholarship, and instruction depend upon the inertia of the aging technology of print, not just to withstand attack on established ideas, but to withstand the necessity to refresh and reestablish these ideas. in fact, hypermedia educators frequently advertise their stacks by featuring the fact that the primary materials are not altered by the webs of comments and connections made by students. this makes it easier to administer networks they say. [23] like the irish king cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. the book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic. [24] the second kind of hypertext, constructive hypertext, offers an electronic alternative to the grey ghetto alongside the river of light. constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge. like the network, conference, classroom or any other form of the electronic text, constructive hypertexts are "versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist" (joyce 1988). [25] as a true electronic text, the constructive hypertext differs from the transitional exploratory hypertext in that its interaction is reciprocal rather than empowered. the reader gives birth to the true electronic text. it says: what you do transforms what i have done, and allows you to do what you have not anticipated. "it is not just that [we] must make knowledge [our] own," says jerome bruner in _actual minds, possible worlds_, but that we must do so "in a community of those who share [our] sense of culture" (bruner 1986). [26] a truly constructive hypertext will present the reader opportunities to recognize and deploy the existing linking structure in all its logic and nuance. that is, the evolving rhetoric must be manifest for the reader. she should be able to extend the existing structure and to transform it, harnessing it to her own uses. she should be able to predict that her own transformations of a hypertext will cause its existing elements to conform to her additions. while not merely taking on but surrendering the forefront to the newly focused tenor and substance of the interlocutory reader, the transformed text should continue to perform reliably in much the same way that it has for previous readers. [27] indeed, every reading of the transformed text should in some sense rehearse the transformation made by the interlocutory reader. if a reader, let us call her ann, has read a particular text both before and after the intervention of the interlocutory reader, beatrice, ann's experience of the text should have the familiar discomfort of recognition. ann should realize beatrice's reading. [28] not surprisingly, the first efforts at developing truly constructive hypertexts have taken place in (hyper)fictions. _afternoon_ (joyce 1990) attempts to subvert the topography of the text by making every word seem as if it yields other possibilities, letting the reader imagine her own confirmations. this "letting" likely signifies a partially failed attempt, a text which empowers more than it reciprocates. in situating and criticizing _afternoon_, stuart moulthrop speculated, "a writing space [which] presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media . . . [whose] roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now "(moulthrop, 1989a). [29] in attempting to develop such a community it becomes clear to hyperfiction writers that unless roles of author and reader are much less sharply differentiated, the silence will have no voice. even interactive texts will live a lie. "in all claims to the story," writes the canadian poet erin moure, there is muteness. the writer as witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie. because the speech is the writer's speech, and each word of the writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting them. (moure 1989, 84) [30] increasingly hyperfiction writers consider how the topographic (sensual) organization of the text might present reciprocal choices that constitute and transform the current state of the text. how, in the landscape of the city of text, can the reader know that what she builds will move the course of the river? how might what she builds present what bruner calls an invitation to reflection and culture creating. in her poem, "site glossary,: loony tune music," moure says witness as a concept is outdated in the countries of privilege, witness as tactic, the image as completed desktop publishing & the writer as accurate, the names are sonorous & bear repeating tho there is no repetition the throat fails to mark the trace of the individual voice which entails loony tune music in this age (moure 1989, 115) [31] hyperfictions seek to mark the trace with their own loony tune music. in _chaos_ stuart moulthrop has speculated a fiction which is consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open, one of emotional orientations and transformative encounters. john mcdaid's hyperfiction _uncle buddy's phantom fun house_ is an electronic world of notebooks, scrap papers, dealt but unplayed tarot cards, souvenirs, segments, drafts, and tapes, unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all (mcdaid, 1991). in _izme pass_, their hyperfictional "deconstruction of priority," carolyn guyer and martha petry seek "to weave . . . [a] new work made not of the parts but the connections . . . [in order] to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints "(guyer 1991b). [32] while this may seem the same urge toward a novel which changes each time it is read, what has changed in the interim between novelist-at-word-processor and hyperfiction writer is that computer tools to accomplish these sorts of multiple texts have been built. moreover hyperfiction writers have not only imagined and rendered them, but also and more importantly have begun to set out an aesthetic for a multiple fiction which yields to its readers in a reciprocal relationship. [33] this sort of reciprocal relationship for electronic art has a conscious history in the late 20th century. in glenn gould's essay "strauss and the electronic future" (1964) he envisions a "multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap." he expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, "the prospects of recording" (gould 1966): "because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing." [34] what joins the concerns of many of writers working with multiple fictions is nothing less than the deconstruction of priority involved in making identity and authorship much less imposing. "the fact in the human universe," says charles olson, "is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right . . . is the thing--all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks)" (olson, 1974). [35] these writers share a conviction that the nature of mind must not be fixed. it is not a transmission but a conversation we must keep open. "if structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind," says umberto eco, "then historical knowledge is no longer possible" (eco, 1989). we redeem history when we put structure under question in the ways that narrative, hypertext and teaching each do in their essence. narrative is the series of individual questions which marginalize accepted order and thus enact history. hypertext links are no less than the trace of such questions, a conversation with structure. all three are authentically concerned with consciousness rather than information; with creating and preserving knowledge rather than with the mere ordering of the known. the value produced by the readers of hypertexts or by the students we learn with is constrained by systems which refuse them the centrality of their authorship. what is at risk is both mind and history. [36] in wim wenders' (and peter handke's) film, _wings of desire_, the angels walk among the stacks and tables of a library, listening to the music within the minds of the individual readers. it is a scene of indescribable delicacy and melancholy both (one which makes you want to rush from the theatre and into the nearest library, there to read forever), into the midst of which, shuffling slowly up the carpeted stair treads, huffing at each stairwell landing, his nearly transparent hand touching on occasion against the place where his breastbone pounds beneath his suit and vest, comes an old man, his mind opening to an angel's vision and to us in a winded, scratchy wheeze. [37] "tell me muse of the story-teller," he thinks, "who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient . . . ." the credits tell us later that this is homer. "with time," he thinks, "my listeners became my readers. they no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other . . . ." [38] homer's is for us increasingly an old story. when print removed knowledge from temporality, walter ong reminds us, it interiorized the idea of discrete authorship and hierarchy. ong envisioned a new orality (ong 1982). in this case it is a film which restores the circle; likewise the "multiple authorship" of hypertext offers an electronic restoration of the circle. [39] although hypertext is an increasingly familiar cultural term, its artistic import is only beginning to be realized. in novels whose words and structures do not stay the same from one reading to another, ones in which the reader no longer sits apart but by her interaction, shapes and transforms. [40] shaping ourselves, we ourselves are shaped. this is the reciprocal relationship. it is likewise the elemental insight of the fractal geometry: that each contour is itself an expression of itself in finer grain. we have been talking so long about a new age, a technological age, an information age, etc., that we are apt to forget that it is we who fashion it, we who discover and recover it, we who shape it, we who literally give it form with how we use ourselves and on what. [41] this organic reconstitution of the text may be what makes constructive hypertext the first instance of what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multi-sensual writing: the multiple fiction,the true electronic text, not the transitional electronic analogue of a printed text like a hypertextual encyclopedia. fictions like _afternoon_, _woe_, _chaos_, _izme pass_, or _uncle buddy's phantom funhouse_ can neither be conceived nor experienced in any other way. they are imagined and composed within their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled together from pre-ordained texts. [42] for these fictions there will be no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations. yet this is in no way to suggest that these fictions are random on the one hand or artificial intelligence on the other. merely that they are formational. [43] what they form are instances of the new writing of the late age of print, what jane yellowlees douglas terms "the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great 'either/or' and embracing, instead, the 'and/and/and'" (douglas, 1991). the issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. these are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media. [44] the layering of meaning and the simultaneity of multiple visions have gradually become comfortable notions to us, though they form the essence underlying the intermingled and implicating voices of bach which glenn gould heard with such clarity. we are the children of the aleatory convergence. our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence. [45] it is an embodied silence which the multiple fiction can render. we find ourselves at the confluence of twentieth century narrative arts and cognitive science as they approach an age of machine-based art, virtual realities, and what don byrd calls "proprioceptive coherence" (byrd, 1991). the new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. it not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them. multiple fictions accomplish what its progenitors could only aspire to, lacking a topographic medium, light speed, electronic grace, and the willing intervention of the reader. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited althusser, louis. (1971) "ideology and the state." in _lenin, philosophy and other essays_, translated by ben brewster, new york and london: monthly review press. bolter, jay d. (1991) _writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing_. hillsdale, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum and associates. bruner, jerome. (1986) _actual minds, possible worlds_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. byrd, don. "cyberspace and proprioceptive coherence." paper presented at the second international conference on cyberspace, santa cruz, ca, april 20, 1991. calvino, italo. (1988) _six memos for the next millennium_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gould, glenn. (1964) "strauss and the electronic future." _saturday review_, may 30, 1964. reprinted in _the glenn gould reader_, tim page, ed. new york: alfred a. knopf (1989). ---. (1966) "the prospects of recording." _high fidelity_, april,1966. reprinted in _the glenn gould reader_, tim page, ed. guyer, carolyn and martha petry. "izme pass, a collaborative hyperfiction," _writing on the edge_, 2 (2), bound-in computer disk, university of california at davis, june 1991. ---. "notes for izma pass expose." _writing on the edge_, 2 (2), university of california at davis, june 1991. douglas, jane yellowlees. "the act of reading: the woe beginners' guide to dissection," _writing on the edge_, 2 (2). joyce, michael. (1990a) _afternoon, a story_. computer disk. cambridge, ma: the eastgate press. --. (1988) "siren shapes: exploratory and constructive hypertexts." _academic computing_ 3 (4), 10-14, 37-42. mcdaid, john. (1991) _uncle buddy's phantom funhouse_. unpublished computer fiction. moulthrop, stuart. (1991) _chaos_. hyperfiction computer program, atlanta, ga, 1991. ---. (1989a) _in the zones: hypertext and the politics of inaphy on america, proprioception, and other essays_. bolinas, ca: four seasons foundation, 17 &19. moure, erin. (1989) "seebe" and "site glossary: loony tune music." in _w s w (west southwest)_ montreal: vehicule press, 84 & 115. nelson, ted. (1987) _all for one and one for all_. hypertext '87. chapel hill: acm proceedings. ong, walter j. (1982) _orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word_. new york: methuen. thurber, d. (1990) "sony to make electronic books: 'data discman' player will use 3-inch cds." _washington post_, (d9, d13) may 16. dumit, 'technoculture: another, more material, name for postmodern culture?', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-dumit-technoculture.txt technoculture: another, more material, name for postmodern culture? by joseph dumit <jdumit@cats.ucsc.edu / jdumit@cats.bitnet> history of consciousness program university of california-santa cruz _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by joseph dumit, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. penley, constance, and andrew ross, eds. _technoculture_. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1991. "if we want technology to liberate rather than destroy us, then we--the techno/peasants--have to assume responsibility for it." --the techno/peasant survival manual ^1^ [1] perhaps the question is, what isn't technoculture? the two parts of this word, techno(logy) and culture are actively contested in contemporary social criticism. donna haraway, for instance, has read the logos of techne as "translatable/transferable technique," and then more closely as "frozen labor".^2^ haraway draws attention to the accountable, though usually unaccounted for, aspects of "our" artifacts, our shirts, our computers, our words. she asks: "how is the world in the object, and the object in the world?"^3^ with regard to culture, it is precisely these webs of interconnection and constructed barriers of individuation which are under attack within and without anthropology: "culture" as a signification of privilege, by the privileged. under these lights, technoculture points toward a world where the high and low speed technique-transfers are the common culture, and where "culture" is a technology. [2] _technoculture_, the book, looks in this and other directions. penley and ross use technoculture in their introduction almost always in the phrase "western technoculture" and situate technocultural situations as stemming from technology transfer problems and creative appropriations. "the essays collected in _technoculture_ are almost exclusively focused on what could be called %actually existing technoculture% in western society, where the new cultural technologies have penetrated deepest, and where the environments they have created seem almost second nature to us" (xii). while western now apparently includes japan, it is important to reflect on the role of this monster word, "technoculture," and the world it invokes. [3] the terrain claimed by _technoculture_ has been approached from a variety of angles. cultural studies is the most obvious one, though this field has often shied away from emphasizing machines. social studies of science has a long history of looking at what has come to be called technoscience--in bruno latour's terms, "all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they may seem."^4^ technoscience, and therefore science studies, should be looking at more than laboratory science. sal restivo has most vigorously challenged science studies and cultural studies by reintroducing c. wright mills's sociological imagination and calling for a revisioning of the relations of science and society, for seeing science as a social problem and thinking towards what sandra harding calls "successor science."^5^ books such as _cyborg worlds_, _women, work, and technology_, _technology and women's voices_, and _the anthropology of technology_, address concerns which readily fit under the title of _technoculture_ and should be seen as complements to it.^6^ [4] the contents of _technoculture_ range from traditional american cultural studies (reading texts and commenting on culture), literary genre criticism, and ethnography, to historical and practical activist manuals. ignoring penley and ross's prescriptions that "it is the work of cultural critics, for the most part, to analyze that process [of cultural negotiation] and to say how, when, and to what extent critical interventions in that process are not only possible but also desirable" (xv), the contributors have a wide variety of takes on what it means to be a cultural critic writing an edited book section. we can situate _technoculture_ then in a busy intersection^7^ of academic interests and note some special needs to which it points and which it begins to address: (1) building on the cultural studies subversion of the high/popular split, it expands studies of technology in society to everyday appropriations; (2) it pays attention to the media's role in scientizing us as well as in selling science;^8^ (3) parts of it draw upon fieldwork and provide practical histories and analyses, pushing in the direction of applied cultural studies; and, (4) by refusing to posit monstrous enemies in control of technology (especially of communications technologies), it provides models for rethinking intellectual technophobia. [5] _technoculture_ begins with an interview of donna haraway, "cyborgs at large," followed by her postscript to the interview, "the actors are cyborg, nature is coyote, and the geography is elsewhere." returning to the "cyborg manifesto," the questions and imperatives of naming complex and contradictory situations are humorously, seriously foregrounded. do we "cultural critics" still want to name malaysian factory workers cyborgs, and why? figuring out how to be accountable for naming while still speaking (english, in this case) is the challenge put forth by haraway: "my stakes are high; i think 'we'--that crucial riven construction of politics--need something called humanity and nature" (25). [6] in conversation with this question of the politics and stakes of naming is valerie hartouni's important, nightmarishly optimistic analysis, "containing women: reproductive discourse in the 1980s." carefully examining the issues and language of such articles as "brain-dead mother has baby," hartouni skillfully unravels the frustrated attempts of journalists, scientists and judges to re-normalize the new biotechnologies of human reproduction. what she finds among admittedly conservative nuclear-family rhetoric are the open possibilities left in the "instability and vulnerability of privileged narratives about who we are . . . naming and seizing these possibilities however, require imagination, a new political idiom, as well as a certain courage--to eschew a lingering attachment to things 'natural' and 'foundational'" (51). by paying so much attention to how media constructions, anti-abortionists, senate subcommittees, infertility clinics and women's movements materially interact with each other, hartouni is able to show places where naming can reorder parts of the world and reconfigure rights and reproduction. "containing women" sets an important challenge for cultural critics. [7] in another kind of media analysis, "'penguin in bondage': a graphic tale of japanese comic books" by sandra buckley takes on the history of japanese mass-erotica and pornography. deftly drawing out the subversive uses and ruses of girl and boy comic books, buckley shows how popular media can challenge and even change gender and sexuality configurations. she contrasts these adventurous books with technoporn, which unfortunately is given an extreme determinism; it "insinuates the reader into the graphics of the narratives . . . [and] literally captures the imagination and the fantasy of the male consumer" (192). still, her discussion of pornography and the struggles over it in japan are insightful, and her analysis of how the books are consumed and discussed as well as of their content is valuable. [8] a different set of articles reports on current cultural phenomena, looking for signs of resistance and subversion. peter fitting, andrew ross, jim pomeroy and reebee garafalo are poised to judge the politics of new cultural arenas. understanding their audience to be other left critics, they array their examples to defeat other, more limited theories. fitting begins with a close genre reading of cyberpunk science fiction (crystalized in william gibson and bruce sterling) as a brave but misguided attempt to come to terms with the postmodern corporatist present. drawing on fredric jameson and haraway, "the lessons of cyberpunk" charts the seductions and difficulties of postmodern critics in using this brand of science fiction. fitting acknowledges that gibson's is a corporatist, "violent, masculinist future" which is not to his liking (307), but insists, nevertheless, in finding "some potentially contestatory options" in it (311). unfortunately, after dismissing a self-defined cyberpunk subculture, the only "readers" fitting acknowledges seem to be other left critics. how cyberpunk is read and used by others, contestory or not, seems not to matter. [9] andrew ross's contribution, "hacking away at the counterculture," takes on the media construction of hackers, people who use computer systems and networks innovatively, extracurricularly, and illegally. he sensitively tracks their construction as deviant boys who with better rearing will serve the country well, which most of them did. most interesting is his plea for expanding the definition of hackers to include on-the-job slow-ups, minor and major sabotage, and other forms of resistance to corporate and government surveillance and scientific management. his equally intriguing, though unconnected, concluding call is for making cultural critics's "knowledge about technoculture into something like a hacker's knowledge." he goes on recklessly, however, to makeover this cultural hacking into redemptive practice, into "rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies" (132). [10] garafalo and pomeroy discuss mega-musical events (e.g. live aid) and techno-artists (e.g. mark pauline of _survival research laboratories_). both looking hard for politics, each finds only ambivalence, ambiguity and contradictions. garafalo, for instance, assesses mega events as political leaders in the 1980s "in the relative absence of [political movements]" (249), but misses the "world beat" curatorship of non-american music by such artists as paul simon,^9^ any mention of such musical forces as reggae and rap as political (public enemy is mentioned but only for its contribution to _do the right thing_), and acknowledgement of 1980s political movements: gay and lesbian rights, anti-nuclear, environmentalism, anti-apartheid as movements in spite of mega-events. [11] houston a. baker jr. takes a more critical, nuanced turn at ambivalence in "hybridity, the rap race, and pedagogy for the 1990s" with a rich and rhythmic tribute to rap's innovational history and its liberating possibilities: "rap is the form of audition in our present era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of, say, white male hegemony" (206). controversial perhaps, as he tells of teaching shakespeare's henry v as a rapper, he also raises but leaves untouched issues of homophobia and "macho redaction," leaving the reader waiting to hear the next verse. [12] most appealing to my activist and anthropological sensibilities are the articles by the processed world collective, deedee halleck, constance penley and paula triechler. each of these essays traces current empowering interventions which make use of mass media tactics and create new ways of living. "just the facts, ma'am: an autobiography" tells the story of _processed world_ magazine. started by a small collective of dissident office workers in 1981, pw's "purpose was twofold: to serve as a contact point and forum for malcontent office workers (and wage workers in general), and to provide a creative outlet for people whose talents were blocked by what they were obliged to do for money" (231). by detailing the ways in which the pw collective organized itself, disseminated information (conversations on the street, expos, tours of silicon valley), published, and thought--"rebellion can be fun, humor subversive . . . make people feel %good% about hating their jobs" (238)--"just the facts" inspires and informs by providing workable suggestions. [13] deedee halleck provides a similar contribution regarding paper tiger television in "watch out, dick tracy! popular video in the wake of the %exxon valdez%." critically examining the trickle-down theory of communications technology, halleck poses the question, "is it possible to have a populist vision of the process of %electronic% production?" (216). she answers by showing first that active audio-video technology (camcorders and vcrs over laser disks) has always been preferred by consumers and has been incorporated into organizations and groups readily. second, and most importantly, she provides a history of the public-access movement wherein local groups produced and %aired% their own shows. halleck was one of the founders, in 1981, of paper tiger television and the deep dish satellite network which have provided encouragement, models, and funding for critical, responsive, low-budget programs. she continues that tradition here. [14] other consumers of the active vcrs have formed their own communities based on humorous, subversive rereadings and re-presentations of mass culture. in "brownian motion: women, tactics, and technology," constance penley reports on %slashers%: groups of women who have taken the _star trek_ series and produced fiction, graphics, videos, fanzines and conventions around a kirk/spock homosexual story. "slasher" notes the slash between kirk and spock (k/s). these groups have retooled passive tv and masculinity with the appropriate technology of science fiction, copiers, mailing lists and vcr editing. penley's close observation of and participation in this community is rewarded with a thought-provoking account of their insights and their struggles. [15] paula triechler focuses on a larger scale retooling, that of human access to health, the medical establishment, and the fda. in "how to have theory in an epidemic: the evolution of aids treatment activism," she tells an inspiring history of aids drug regulation and approval processes, act up, and the ongoing negotiations of persons with aids and people at risk for it (everyone) within our bureaucratic media-organized world. "this version of aids treatment activism, probably best exemplified in real life by act up, invokes several essential elements of the movement: a vision of the power structure that calls for unleashing the power and knowledge of resistant forces; expertise about technology and science, the politics of the federal bureaucracy, biomedical research, and economics; self-education; and the use of tactics including civil disobedience, lawbreaking, infiltration, and seizing control of the media" (71). "evolution" needs the complement of books like _women, aids and activism_ by the act up/ny women and aids book group, which tells the many stories of continuing absence of care and concern over communities of color and women.^10^ nevertheless, triechler's article demonstrates both the effectiveness of new kinds of struggles and the enormity of the challenge: "these negotiations . . . involve significant renegotiations of the geography of cultural struggle--of sources of biomedical expertise, relations between doctor and patient, relationships of the general citizenry to science and to government bureaucracies, and debate about the role and ownership of the body" (97). [16] halleck's, penley's, triechler's and the processed world collective's pieces are important because they provide evidence of what people have done, and can do, with mass-produced culture by using the tools which produce that culture, thereby revising their world. this approach, which tells how things are done, which disseminates information in an age run by information, but more by the privatization of information, makes the most of a collected work's format. [17] each of the articles in _technoculture_ tells the story of communities which are perhaps best described as virtual.^11^ these communities are constituted not around face-to-face meeting, but around common access to newsletters, tvs, books, computer bulletin boards and music. these media and their accompanying machines- desktop publishing, fax, copiers, modems, vcrs, record players, tape players, satellite transponders--are as much part of these communities, part of the everyday, as language. documenting ways of living, surviving, multiplying (converting and disseminating) and helping others to do the same is the laudable aim of this book. missing, however, is a questioning and situating of how technophobia and technophilia are in the world, how they are differently positioned and engendered in people, and how they often may be appropriate responses and survival strategies. too often, in proposing a "middle path," relations to machines and jobs are simply pathologized, dismissed as errors. [18] returning to the other technocultural analyses mentioned at the beginning, we note that some of the so called luddite responses to nuclear power, to certain surveillance technologies, and to various attempts at industrialization and automation may be a reaction against a technological meliorism which ignores those whose ways of living are being disrupted or placed under siege. the technophilic embrace of scientific professions, medical science, and even weapons systems, must be moderated by an understanding of the implications of such things for race, class, gender, morbidity, and the international community. studying technoculture, as opposed to studying technology or studying culture, should mean addressing the variable configurations of lives and forms of life which are involved in our nuclear (post-wwii) world. [19] in this milieu then, in _technoculture_, we find cyborgs, women's reproductive systems, act up, hackers, slashers, pornography, rappers, public access groups, office anarchists, mega-musicians, techno-artists and cyberpunks. most of these are defined by their relation to electronic media; they are also, by and large, recent popular media personalities, and all but triechler focus on the u.s. in this sense, _technoculture_ locates and names itself as american high-tech pop-culture studies, and it is in this sense that technoculture and postmodern culture are used interchangeably. in the intersection of cultural studies, anthropology, history of technology and social movements, and science studies, it draws attention to this mass cultural realm. but often this is a different topos, a different sense of place, from the "technoculture" of world-webs bound by accountability to frozen labor named at the beginning. the best parts of _technoculture_ do succeed in this accounting, aiding in envisioning and living better lives, presenting new and successful communities, and doing so with a critical optimism. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ print project, 1980, _the techno/peasant survival manual_, new york: bantam books, 5. ^2^ donna haraway, 1991, science and politics lectures, ucsc. ^3^ how materially, historically, politically, economically, mythologically, semiotically do these objects persist, what sorts of labor produced it, transported it, marketed it, consumed it, disposed of it, what are the histories of these labors, what labor supports those laborers . . . ^4^ latour, bruno, 1987, _science in action_, cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 174. ^5^ restivo, sal, 1988, "modern science as a social problem," _social problems_, vol. 35, no. 3, june; harding, sandra, 1986, _the science question in feminism_, ithaca: cornell university press. ^6^ levidow, les, and kevin robbins, ed., 1989, _cyborg worlds: the military information society_, london: free association books; wright, barbara drygulski, ed., 1987, _women, work, and technology: transformations_, ann arbor: university of michigan press; kramarae, cheris, ed., 1988, _technology and women's voices: keeping in touch_, london: routledge and keagan paul; hess, david, 1992, _anthropology and technology_. ^7^ the metaphor of culture as a busy intersection belongs to renato rosaldo (1989, _culture and truth_, boston: beacon press.) ^8^ nelkin, dorothy, 1987, _selling science: how the press covers science and technology_, new york: w.h. freeman and company. ^9^ cf. stephen feld, 1990, "curators of world beat: an ethnomusicological approach"; a paper presented at society for cultural anthropology meeting. ^10^ the act up/ny women and aids book group, 1990, _women, aids and activism_, boston: south end press. ^11^ cf. allequere rosanne stone, 1992, "virtual systems: the architecture of elsewhere," in hrazstan zeitlian, ed., _semiotext(e) architecture_. 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traube, robert rosenstone, charles taylor, hamid naficy, ella shohat, partha chatterjee, dan rose, manthia diawara usa: individuals $10.00, institutions $20.00. outside usa: individuals us $14.00, institutions us $24.00. orders prepaid by check, credit card, or money order in us dollars to public culture: university of pennsylvania, philadephia, pa 19104-6324. public culture is the journal of the center for transnational cultural studies. ctcs at the university of pennsylvania is an outgrowth of the interests of several individuals and groups, both within and outside the university, in coordinating and stimulating research that focuses on transnational cultural flows, while encouraging communication, debate, and collaboration between scholars and scholarly groups concerned with these issues, throughout the world. ctcs coordinates and supports research, multi-locale roundtables, and transnational collaborative projects, while publishing relevant reports, essays, and extracts from the media in its journal, public culture. enquiries regarding the center may be addressed to its co-directors, arjun appadurai and carol a. breckenridge at: ctcs university of pennsylvania the university museum 33rd & spruce streets philadelphia, pa 19104-6324 tele: (215) 898-4054 fax: (215) 898-0657 email: cbrecken@pennsas.upenn.edu. 4)------------------------------------------------------------------------ *_differences_* a journal of feminist cultural studies edited by naomi schor and elizabeth week volume 3, number 1 politics/power/culture: postmodernity and feminist political theory edited by kathy e. ferguson and kirstie m. mcclure volume 3, number 2 queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities edited by teresa de lauretis volume 3, number 3 gayatri chakravorty spivak: feminism in colonization joan w. scott: commentary ann-louise shapiro: love stories: female crimes of passion in fin-de-siecle paris. mary lydon: calling yourself a woman: marguerite yourcenar and colette eric o. clarke: fetal attraction: hegel's an-aesthetics of gender neil lazarus: doubting the new world order: marxism and the claims of postmodern social theory interview with antoinette fouque, femmes en mouvements: hier, aujourd'hui, demain subscriptions: $28 (individuals), $48 (institutions), $10 (foreign surface post). order from: indiana university press, 601 n. morton, bloomington, in 47404. phone: 812-855-9449; fax: 812-855-7931. 5)------------------------------------------------------------------------ *%discourse%* theoretical studies in media and culture edited by roswitha mueller and kathleen woodward *d i s c o u r s e* volume 14, number 1 *jean-francois lyotard* "voices of a voice" (trans. george van den abbeele) *meaghan morris* "ecstasy and economics" *kathryn milun* "(en)countering imperialist nostalgia: the indian reburial issue" *christina von braun* "strategies of disappearance" *gloria-jean masciarotte "the madonna with child, and another child, and still another child . . . : sensationalism and the dysfunction of emotions" *tara mcpherson and gareth evans* "watch this space: an interivew with edward soja" book reviews: *susan willis* %consumer culture and postmodernism% by mike featherstone *james schwoch* %the mode of information: poststructuralism and social context% by mark poster *tara mcpherson* %feminism and youth culture: from jackie to just seventeen% by angela mcrobbie *mark rose* %contested culture: the image, the voice, and the law% by jane gaines *elizabeth francis* %subversive intent: gender, politics, and the avantgarde% by susan rubin suleiman *marilyn edelstein* %sexual subversions: three french feminists% by elizabeth grosz volume 13, number 2 *lynne kirby* "gender and advertising in american silent film: from early cinema to the crowd" *maureen turim* "viewing/reading %born to be sold: martha rosler reads the strange case of baby s/m% or motherhood in the age of technological reproduction" *roswitha mueller* "screen embodiments: valie export's %syntagma% *robert j. corber* "reconstructuring homosexuality: hitchcock and the homoerotics of spectatorial pleasure" *virginia carmichael* "death by text: the word on ethel rosenberg" *susan jeffords* "performative masculinities, or 'after a few times you won't be afraid of rape at all'" book reviews: *bethany hicok and pamela lougheed* %visual and other pleasures% by laura mulvey *andrew martin* %the remasculinization of america% by susan jeffords *linda mizejewski* %the women who knew too much% by tania modleski *robin pickering-iazzi* %sexual difference% by the milan women's bookstore collective *linda schulte-sasse* %joyless streets% by patrice petro subscription single yearly (3 issues) infornmation: individual $10.00 $25.00 institution $20.00 $50.00 foreign surface post $10.00 available from indiana university press, journals division 601 n. morton, bloomington, in 47404. credit card orders call 812-855-9449 or fax information to 812-855-7931. 6)------------------------------------------------------------------------ journal of ideas, vol 2 #2/3 -contents journal of ideas issn 1049-6335 is published quarterly by the institute for memetic research, pob 16327, panama city, florida 32406-1327. [for more information contact e. moritz at moritz@well.sf.ca.us] of ideas john locke energy flow and entropy production in biological systems brian a. maurer brigham young university, provo, utah 84602 daniel r. brooks university of toronto, ontario m5s 1a1, canada on the road to cybernetic immortality: a report on the first principia cybernetica workshop elan moritz the institute for memetic research, panama city, florida the origins of the capacity for culture jerome h. barkow dalhousie university, halifax, n.s. b3h 1t2, canada folk psychology, free will and evolution jerome h. barkow 7)------------------------------------------------------------------------ book announcement: music and connectionism edited by peter m. todd and d. gareth loy music and connectionism is now available from mit press. this 280-pp. book contains a wide variety of recent research in the applications of neural networks and other connectionist methods to the problems of musical listening and understanding, performance, composition, and aesthetics. it consists of a core of articles that originally appeared in the computer music journal, along with several new articles by kohonen, mozer, bharucha, and others, and new addenda to the original articles describing the authors' most recent work. topics covered range from models of psychological processing of pitches, chords, and melodies, to algorithmic composition and performance factors. a wide variety of connectionist models are employed as well, including back-propagation in time, kohonen feature maps, art networks, and jordanand elman-style networks. we've also included a discussion generated by the computer music journal articles on the use and place of connectionist systems in artistic endeavors. we hope this book will be of use to a wide variety of readers, including neural network researchers interested in a broad, challenging, and fun new area of application, cognitive scientists and music psychologists looking for robust new models of musical behavior, and artists seeking to learn more about a potentially very useful technology. please drop me a line if you have any questions, and especially if you take up the gauntlet and pursue research or applications in this area! 8)------------------------------------------------------------------------ +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | premieres fall 1991 . . . | | | | journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia | | | | published by the | | association for the advancement of computing in education | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ editor: david h. jonassen (university of colorado-denver) associate editor: scott grabinger (university of colorado-denver) the journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia is designed to provide a multi-disciplinary forum and serve as a primary information source to present and discuss research and applications on multimedia and hypermedia in education. the main goal of the journal is to contribute to the advancement of the theory and practice of learning and teaching using these powerful technological tools that allow the integration of images, sound, text and data. reviewed by leaders in the field, this international quarterly journal is published for researchers, developers, professors, teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, and all interested in the educational research and applications of multimedia and hypermedia at all levels. journal articles include any educational aspect of multimedia and hypermedia and take the form of: o research papers o case studies o experimental studies o review papers o book/courseware reviews o tutorials o courseware experiences o opinions departments include: ------------------viewpoint examines ideas and their relationships in the field. multimedia projects: issues and applications discusses the practical and theoretical problems and issues associated with current state-of-the-art multimedia/hypermedia projects (edited by greg kearsley, george washington university) developers' dialogue examines interesting, unexplored, broad themes, issues and decisions faced by developers (edited carrie heeter, michigan state univ.) educational multimedia/hypermedia abstracts abstracts noteworthy research appearing in journals and databases. product reviews provides in-depth reviews with screen images of multimedia/hypermedia products (edited by robert beichner, suny-buffalo) book reviews provides critical reviews of books in the field (edited by philip barker, teesside polytechnic) -------------------------------------------------------------------------to request subscription/membership information or author guidelines, contact: aace p.o. box 2966 charlottesville, va 22902 usa e-mail: aace@virginia.edu phone: (804) 973-3987 -----------------------------------the association for the advancement of computing in education (aace) is an international, educational organization whose purpose is to advance the knowledge and quality of teaching and learning at all levels with computing technologies through the encouragement of scholarly inquiry related to computing in education and the dissemination of research results and their applications. aace consists of five membership divisions. and each division provides members with an annual conference and publications. the following respected journals represent the topic areas of these divisions: journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia journal of artificial intelligence in education journal of computing in childhood education journal of computers in mathematics and science teaching journal of technology and teacher education (premieres fall '92) 9)------------------------------------------------------------------------ clinamens e.n.s. fontenay/st cloud 31 avenue lombart 92266-fontenay-aux-roses tel : 47-02-60-50, poste 530 fax : 47-02-34-32 l'e.n.s. annonce la creation de clinamens (clearinghouse interdisciplinaire `anglicisme et methodologie' de l'ecole normale superieure) pourquoi "clearinghouse" ? parce que l'ambition de cette structure n'est pas d'etre seulement un "centre de recherches", mais aussi un centre de rencontres, de partage, d'information et de critique constructive mutuelles, de mise au point et de clarification. _webster's_ partage sa definition du terme entre "le fait de clarifier" et un lieu de "collection, de traitement et de distribution de l'information"; le lieu, autrement dit, non seulement d'une reflexion solide et formatrice mais aussi d'une definition disciplinaire collective. pourquoi "clinamens" ? parce que l'entreprise ne pourra, dans cette optique, avoir sens et valeur que si chacun accepte le detour, le "pas de cote", l'ecart qui, l'eloignant un peu de ses preoccupations les plus directes ou quotidiennes, le rapprochera de ceux qui, dans des domaines adjacents, auront consenti le meme effort et renforcera ainsi son entreprise. lucrece decrivait par le terme de "clinamen" la "legere deviation des atomes" qui permet leur rencontre et leur "accrochage". ce detournement de vocation, cet "ambitus", cette declinaison, marx y lisait le signe d'une volonte arrachee au destin, d'une liberte plus forte que les determinismes... faire travailler ensemble des "anglicistes" et les inviter a fertiliser mutuellement leur travail en prenant conscience des savoirs qui les rassemblent et des interrogations qu'ils ont en commun plutot qu'en se renfermant sur le champ clos de leur stricte specialite -pratique un peu trop repanduen'est pas une mince ambition. il peut sembler qu'uelle vaille la peine de s'en donner les moyens. a terme, clinamens organisera des seminaires de methodologie critique des seminaires de "work-in-progress" des cycles de conferences des debats contradictoires des equipes de recherches "sous-disciplinaires" une equipe de recherche theorique interdisciplinaire des colloques des cette annee debutent le cycle de conferences et les actvites de quatre equipes de recherches. (voir le calendrier reproduit au verso.) on se renseignera sur le detail de ces dernieres en prenant l'attache des responsables: 1) "incidences de la psychanalyse sur les etudes anglicistes" responsable patrick di mascio (tel : 43-38-56-47) 2) "episteme" (epistemologie et litterature 16e-18e siecles) responsable gisele venet (tel : 60-46-56-63) 3) "telos" (linguistique) responsable laurent danon-boileau (tel : 43-26-98-78) 4) "irlande" responsable alexandra poulain (tel : 45-24-05-09) l'assistance aux conferences est libre dans la limite des places disponibles. *les specialistes d'autres disciplines sont les bienvenus.* la participation aux equipes de recherche est possible apres contact avec le responsable de l'equipe concernee. tous renseignements complementaires (horaires, salles, dates ou sujets non encore determines) peuvent etre obtenus aupres du responsable de clinamens : marc chenetier ens fontenay/st. cloud bureau 105 31 avenue lombart 92266-fontenay-aux-roses 47-02-60-50, poste 530 10)----------------------------------------------------------------------- 00000000000000000000000000 rd: graduate research in the arts 00000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000 a call for papers and readers 00000000000000000000000000 00000000:::::::::::0000000 rd: graduate research in the arts is a refereed 000000: ddddd:000000 journal dedicated to publishing the work of 0000: ddddddd:0000 graduate scholars in the arts. it provides an 000: rrrrr d dd:000 appropriate forum for their scholarly work and a 00: r r d dddd dd:00 collective voice for their issues and interests. 0: rrrrr d ddddd dd:0 0: r r d ddddd dd:0 papers for rd are now being solicited from 00: r r d dddd d:000 graduate students in the arts, fine arts, and 000: r r d dd:000 humanities in any of the following areas: 0000: ddddddd:0000 * language, literature and other 00000::: dddd:::00000 artifacts/artefacts 0000000::::::::::::0000000 * constructions of the self, gender, 00000000000000000000000000 class and race 00000000000000000000000000 * the academy itself and its institutional 00000000000000000000000000 imperatives. 00000000000000000000000000 multidisciplinary and collaborative work is encouraged. address two copies of each paper to the editors with a sase and proof of current enrollment in a graduate programme (for instance, photocopy of a student card or letter from the programme). submissions can also be sent on disk (dos or macintosh format) or by e-mail. if you intend to send papers by e-mail, please contact the editors to receive guidelines for indicating foreign or special characters and italics. all submissions should conform to the _mla style manual_. rd is also presently accepting applications from graduate students to act as readers of papers. volunteers should include a cv, or a brief summary of their scholarly work and publications. deadlines: submissions for rd 1 (spring 1992) must be postmarked by 15 december 1991. submissions for rd 2 (fall 1992) will be accepted until 31 august 1992. subscriptions: 1 year 2 years student $16.00 $30.00 individual/institution $24.00 $44.00 please add 7% for gst. made checks payable to rd. individuals who have access to e-mail can receive electronic versions of the journal free of charge by sending their name, status (student, faculty, other) and e-mail address to the editors. address: editors, rd york university c/o graduate programme in english 215 stong college 4700 keele street north york, ontario canada m3j 1p3 bitnet: rd@writer yorku.ca editors: stephen n. matsuba rod lohin editorial board: clint burnham cecily devereux mark dineen gayle irwin sherry rowley glenn stillar scott wright 11)----------------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers language and literature is a new international journal to be published by longman u.k. in june. it brings together the work of those interested in the field of stylistic analysis, the elucidation of literary and nonliterary texts and related areas. it explores the connections between stylistics, critical theory, linguistics, literary criticism and their pedagogical applications. interested contributors should write to: m.h.short department of linguistics and modern english language university of lancaster lancaster la1 4yt u.k. e-mail enquiries to tony bex, university of kent at canterbury: arb1@ukc.ac.uk 12)----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************call for papers************* an international conference on the sociology and anthropology of performance: public and private, may 29-31, 1992, ottawa submissions are invited for an international symposium which explores "performance" with reference to both public and private domains as well as the links between the two. scholars with an interest in the performing arts (e.g. dance, music, media etc.) as well as those with interest in private performance (e.g. ritual, meditation, shamanism etc.) are invited to attend a three-day symposium at carleton university, ottawa, ontario, canada. with regard to public performance, our focus is on the social science of the performing arts (i.e. demonstrative acts involving skills). examples would include: dance choreography as a special form of communication theatre as a vehicle of social expression music and musicology as social expression or elitism media and performing arts sacred vs. the secular in performing arts public ritual performance (puja, ritual-drama etc.) private performance focuses on the social science of the use of demonstrative acts in the private domain and includes: meditation sadhana, personal ritual-drama physical and mental yogas the ritual control of experience ritual transformation ritual or transpersonal epistemologies esoteric epistemologies these categories are neither mutually exclusive or exhaustive. you are welcome to suggest topics in relation to our broad outline by email or snail mail. please include a title and a short abstract. we also require a brief c.v. which is needed to bolster our funding applications. mail your submissions to: email submissions to: brian_given@carleton.ca v. subramaniam brian j. given political science sociology and anthropology carleton university carleton u. ottawa, ont. ottawa, ont. 13)----------------------------------------------------------------------- i'm thinking of something round: beuys' chalkboards call for participants i am a san francisco artist interested in art as experimentation. i am soliciting individuals who are interested in participating in a telecommunications art experiment/project. this project will attempt to gather ideas from around the world. i have created a file that i would like to have forwarded around the world, where each individual involved would add an idea to a list. once the file is returned to me, i will attempt to execute an idea from the list. those who are interested in this project, please send me your address and i will mail you the file and detailed instructions. elliot anderson san francisco state university eliota@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu "an equal opportunity artist..."" 14)----------------------------------------------------------------------- dis*klo'zher call for papers the editorial collective of disclosure is pleased to announce that it is now accepting submissions for its second issue. disclosure is a social theory journal edited by graduate students at the uniersity of kentucky, and is designed to provide a forum of multi-disciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the the social sciences. by exploring alternative forms of discourse, our goal is to address contemporary intellectual concerns through a rigorous examination of history, space, and representation. as our title suggests, we encourage fresh perspectives that trancend the strictures and structures set in place by traditional disciplary boundaries. _______________________________________________________________________ issue 2"the buying and selling of culture" deadline 1 march 1992 submissions for the second issue could address the following issues: commodifactions of: place, heritage, practice, the image, education, ideas, contraception, religion, the "self" & "potential",the spectacle, art aesthetics and: technology/resistance/commodifcation/theory/domination resistance: avant garde? postmodern? grass roots? suicidal? autonomy? _______________________________________________________________________ we accept submissions from all theoretical perspecitves and all genres (essay, interview, review, poetry, artwork and others), from both inside and outside the academy. disclosure is a refereed journal whose selections are based solely on quality and originaltiy. graduate studetns, factulty and nonacademics are equally encouraged to submit works. send three copies of manuscripts fromated to mla guidlines, double-spaced, and less than 10,000 words to: disclosure 106 student center university of kentucky lexington, ky 40506-0026 phone: 606/2572931 email: disclosure@ukcc.uky.edu to order an issue, please send $5 (individual) or $10 (library) in the form of a check or money order payable to disclosure. 15)----------------------------------------------------------------------- new journal: studies in psychoanalytic theory studies in psychoanalytic theory, a journal devoted to the study of psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts, invites the submission of manuscripts in either current mla or apa style. psychoanalytic here is used in the broadest sense to include freudian, neo-freudian, lacanian, jungian, british school, ego psychology, etc., etc., perspectives. we are also interested in locating people interested in reviewing books for us. if you would like more information, please contact me via e-mail at ra471av@tcuamus or via "snail mail" at christina murphy, editor studies in psychoanalytic theory box 32875 texas christian university fort worth, tx 76129 (817) 921-7221 thanks. i look forward to hearing from you and receiving subscriptions and submissions. 16)----------------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers * symposium: the principia cybernetica project * * computer-supported cooperative development * * of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy * as part of the 13th international congress on cybernetics namur (belgium), august 24-28, 1992 after the succesful organization of a symposium on "cybernetics and human values" at the 8th world congress of systems and cybernetics (new york, june 1990), and of the "1st workshop of the principia cybernetica project" (brussels, july 1991), the third official activity of the principia cybernetica project will be a symposium held at the 13th int. congress on cybernetics. the official congress languages are english and french. the informal symposium will allow researchers interested in collaborating in the project to meet. the emphasis will be on discussion, rather than on formal presentation. contributors are encouraged to read some of the available texts on the pcp in order to get acquainted with the main issues (newsletter available on request from the symposium chairman). symposium theme principia cybernetica is a collaborative attempt to develop a complete and consistent cybernetic philosophy, moving towards a transdisciplinary unification of the domain of systems theory and cybernetics. pcp is meta-cybernetical in that we intend to use cybernetic tools to develop and analyze cybernetic theory. these include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic mail, and knowledge structuring software. pcp is to be developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual network. the basic architecture consists of nodes, containing expositions of concepts using different media, connected by links, representing the associations that exist between the nodes. both nodes and links can belong to different types expressing different semantic and practical categories. pcp will focus on the clarification of fundamental concepts and principles of the cybernetics and systems domain. concepts include: complexity, information, variety, freedom, control, self-organization, emergence, etc. principles include the laws of requisite variety, of requisite hierarchy, and of regulatory models. the pcp philosophy is systemic and evolutionary, based on the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural selection. it includes: a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological primitives, b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed by the subject, but undergoing selection by the environment; c) an ethics, with the continuance of the process of evolution as supreme value. philosophy and implementation of pcp are united by their common framework based on cybernetic and evolutionary principles: the computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the philosophy. papers can be submitted on one or several of the following topics: the principia cybernetica project cybernetic concepts and principles evolutionary philosophy knowledge development computer-support systems for collaborative theory building submission of papers people wishing to present a paper in the principia cybernetica symposium should quickly send the application form, together with an abstract of max. 1 page, to the addresses of the symposium chairman and of the congress secretariat (iac) below. they will be notified about acceptance not later than 2 months after receipt, and will receive instructions for the preparation of the final text. in principle, all application forms should be received by december 31, 1991, but it may be possible to come in late. people wishing to present a paper in a different symposium can directly submit their abstract to the secretariat. for submissions of papers to, or further information about, the principia cybernetica symposium, contact the symposium chairman: dr. francis heylighen po-pesp, free univ. brussels, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium phone +32 2 641 25 25 email fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be fax +32 2 641 24 89 telex 61051 vubco b for congress registration, or further information about the congress, contact the secretariat: international association for cybernetics palais des expositions, place ryckmans, b-5000 namur, belgium phone +32 81 73 52 09 email cyb@info.fundp.ac.be fax +32 81 23 09 45 17)----------------------------------------------------------------------- perforations, an atlanta-based journal of language, art, and technology, is seeking contributors for a special issue with the theme: after the book. this issue will be devoted to work about the demise of the book as we knew it, the rise of hypertext, and the possibilities for writing in the world post-ink-and-linearity. we're particularly interested in in work approaching hypertext from film and video theory, in critical work on hyperfiction, in hypertexts on-disk or in print extracts, and in work challenging our position that hypertext, in its transcendence of the restrictions of the paper book and the one-way movie, represents writing's first true step beyond sterne/joyce and film/video. essays, print and graphic collages, fictions, or hybrids of any sort are welcome. no restrictions on style, no minimum or maximum length; we're hoping that contributors will send us serious and adventurous work that they might hesitate to submit to a more traditional journal. deadline: march 15, 1992 (negotiable for authors preceding submissions with queries). macintosh-readable disks preferred, all formats acceptable. send queries and submissions to: libgess@emuvm1.bitnet/richard gess, guest editor, perforations, 428 oakview rd, decatur, ga 30030. about perforations: atlanta's public domain alternative arts collective published the first issue of perforations in september 1991. peforations is a journal where theorists, critics, and artists contrbute equally to examinations of current issues in language, art, and technology. issues are theme-oriented: fall 1991 was about "the post-mortem condition," and winter 1992 (now in press) is about "conspiracies, esthetics and politics," and features an interview with jean-francois lyotard and a hyperfiction disk. spring 1992, due in may, will be "after the book;" issues beyond will consider "dreams, bodies, and technologies," "multi-, mini-, and quasi-culturalisms," and "virtual and performative architectures." perforations is distributed regionally to a growing audience of working artists in all genres and scholars in all disciplines; publication in perforations is a way of communicating beyond the usually suspected readers for both artists and academics. for subscription/back issue information, contact libgess@emuvm1.bitnet. 18)----------------------------------------------------------------------- the next issue of the cti (computers in teaching initiative) centre for textual studies newsletter _computers & texts_ will be centred on the use of computing in the areas of philosophy/logic. this is a preliminary call for submissions by anyone interested in this subject. format and deadline details are available upon request. the areas we are hoping to cover in the issue are: an overview of the use of computers and philosophy electronic texts: their availability and usefulness simulation packages review of ethics software review of logic software bulletin boards, electronic mail, and other computer-based resources of use to philosophers please feel free to suggest other areas which you think should be included. thanks in advance, stuart lee research officer cti centre for textual studies oxford university computing service 13 banbury road oxford ox2 6nn tel:0865-273221 fax:0865-273275 e-mail: stuart@uk.ac.ox.vax 19)----------------------------------------------------------------------- to all graduate students: call for papers the frontenac review dept. of french studies queen's university kingston, ontario canada k7l 3n6 telephone: (613) 545-2090 fax: (613) 545-6300 email: warderh@qucdn.queensu.ca january 1992 the frontenac review invites you to submit articles on the 'nouveau roman' for its winter 1991 edition (number 8) and on acadian literature for its fall 1992 edition (number 9). initial submissions should follow the guidelines established by the m.l.a. if your article is accepted we will ask you to submit the same article on diskette (ibm compatible), in wordperfect 5.1 format. the committee will not be responsible for returning articles. all candidates will be informed of the committee's decision within a reasonable time limit. the frontenac review is searched annually by the bibliographie der franzoesischen literaturwissenschaft and by the mla international bibliography. deadline for submissions: ** the nouveau roman (no. 8) -january 30, 1992 ** acadian literature (no. 9) -september 1, 1992 20)----------------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers the ach will be organising two sessions at the 1992 mla convention, to be held december 27-30, 1992, in new york city, around mark olsen's position paper proposing a new direction for computer-aided studies of literature (summary below). please contact paul fortier -fortier@uofmcc.bitnet . deadline for submission of paper or abstract march 1, 1992 to fortier@uofmcc.bitnet. people presenting papers at the the mla convention must be members of the mla. announcement of acceptance april 1, 1992. -------------- signs, symbols and discourses: a new direction for computer-aided literature studies. mark olsen* university of chicago mark@gide.uchicago.edu abstract computer-aided literature studies have failed to have a significant impact on the field as a whole. this failure is traced to a concentration on how a text achieves its literary effect by the examination of subtle semantic or grammatical structures in single texts or the works of individual authors. computer systems have proven to be very poorly suited to such refined analysis of complex language. adopting such traditional objects of study has tended to discourage researchers from using the tool to ask questions to which it is better adapted, the examination of large amounts of simple linguistic features. theoreticians such as barthes, foucault and halliday show the importance of determining the lingusitic and semantic characteristics of the language used by the author and her/his audience. current technology, and databases like the tlg or artfl, facilitate such wide-spectrum analyses. computer-aided methods are thus capable of opening up new areas of study, which can potentially transform the way in which literature is studied. [ ... ] ------------------- [a complete version of this paper is now available through the humanist fileserver, s.v. olsen mla92. you may obtain a copy by issuing the command -get filename filetype humanist -either interactively or as a batch-job, addressed to listserv@brownvm. thus on a vm/cms system, you say interactively: tell listserv at brownvm get olsen mla92 humanist; if you are not on a vm/cms system, send mail to listserv@brownvm with the get command as the first and only line. for more details see the "guide to humanist". problems should be reported to david sitman, a79@taunivm, after you have consulted the guide and tried all appropriate alternatives.] 21)----------------------------------------------------------------------- new journal for 1992 computer supported cooperative work (cscw) an international journal editorial team: liam bannon john bowers copenhagen business school dept. of psychology institute of computer & univ. of manchester systems sciences, denmark u.k. charles grantham mike robinson dept. of organizational studies centre for innovation& univ. of san francisco cooperative technology usa univ. of amsterdam the netherlands kjeld schmidt susan leigh star cognitive systems group dept. of sociology & ris~ national laboratory social anthropology denmark university of keele u.k. computer supported cooperative work (cscw): an international journal will be devoted to innovative research in computer supported cooperative work (cscw). it will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the debate and exchange of ideas concerning theoretical, practical, technical and social issues in cscw. the journal arises as a timely response to the growing interest in the design, implementation and use of technical systems (including computing, information, and communications technologies) which support people working cooperatively. equally, the journal is concerned with studies of the process of cooperative work itself studies intended to motivate the design of new technical systems, and to develop both theory and praxis in the field. the journal will encourage contributions from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives within the social, computing and allied human and information sciences. in general, the journal will facilitate the discussion of all issues which arise in connection with the support requirements of cooperative work. it is intended that the journal will be of interest to a wide readership through its coverage of research related to inter alia groupware, socio-technical system design, theoretical models of cooperative work, computer mediated communication, human-computer interaction, group decision support systems (gdss), coordination systems, distributed systems, situated action, studies of cooperative work and practical action, organisation theory and design, the sociology of technology, explorations of innovative design strategies, management and business science perspectives, artificial intelligence and distributed ai approaches to cooperation, library and information sciences, and all manner of technical innovations devoted to the support of cooperative work including electronic meeting rooms, teleconferencing facilities, electronic mail enhancements, real-time and asynchronous technologies, desk-top conferencing, shared editors, video and multi-media systems. in addition, we welcome studies of the social, cultural, moral, legal and political implications of cscw systems. call for papers manuscripts (5 copies) relating to any of the above-mentioned themes and topics are invited for submission. manuscripts should be submitted to the journals editorial office at the address below: editorial office (cosu) kluwer academic publishers p.o. box 17 3300 aa dordrecht the netherlands detailed instructions for authors and other information (such as submission via email or on disk) can be obtained from the above address or by electronic mail on: husoc@kap.nl (please mark your message cscw). ______________________________________________________________ information request form please fill in the information form and send to: kluwer academic publishers att. m. van der linden p.o.box 989 3300 az dordrecht the netherlands email: husoc@kap.nl o please send me a free sample copy of computer supported cooperative work o please send me your brochure listing publications in cognitive science/artificial intelligence name:_______________________________________________________ address:____________________________________________________ city:________________________________ state:________________ country:____________________________________________________ postal code:_________________________ date:_________________ email:______________________________________________________ please type or print in blockletters if you reply by email, please include your full name and postal address. 22)----------------------------------------------------------------------- nc92 telenetlink congress a collective, ubiquitous, congress in progress networking dialogue has been central to mail art and telecommunication art projects. telecommunciation artists, for example, use personal computers to download work for modification, detournement, or appropriation into other artworks--creative authorship is shared. mail artists also share co-authorship in postal exchanges. the recycled surfaces or contents of mailing tubes, envelopes, and parcels travel thousands of miles around the world as many artists alter a single item. gradually, a global collage of artist postage stamps, rubber stamped images, cryptic messages, and slogans emerge. as nc92 facilitator, i have formed a "telenetlink congress" whose purpose is centered on reaching readers and the telematic community through magazines, bulletin board services like nyc's "echo," chicago's "artbase" bbs, and by accessing internationally distributed usenet newsgroups such as alt artcom, and rec arts fine. i view these collective efforts as a ubiquitous "congress in process" extending throughout the 1992 networker congress year. participation may involve any form of telecommunication exchange, e-mail, fax, video phones, etc. send your telenetlink congress statements and project proposals via (e)mail to cathryn l. welch@dartmouth.edu. or fax to chuck welch, telenetlink congress (603) 448-9998. participating in the nc92 telenetlink congress begins when readers send a brief one page statement about "how you envision your own role as a networker." proposals and projects that would interconnect the mail art and telematic communities are also welcome. periodic updates concerning telenetlink project initiatives will be posted over usenet newsgroups rec. arts fine and alt. artcom. all statements received from artists in the telematic community will be part of the nc92 "networker database congress," a collection that will be made available for research at the university of iowa's "alternative traditions in the contemporary arts archive." *art that networks explores and expands the communication process as it encourages democratic access to free communication. by cutting through social, cultural and political hierarchies, we can dissolve boundaries and discover corresponding worlds of mail and telecommunications art.* # # # # *** further information about scheduled nc92 events is available by writing to these facilitators: h.r. fricker, buro fur kunstlerische umtriebe, ch 9043 trogen, switzerland peter w. kaufmann, bergwisenstrasse 11, 8123 ebmatingen, switzerland netlink south america: clemente padin, casilla c. central 1211, montevideo, uruguay netlink east: chuck welch, po box 978, hanover, nh 03755 netlink south: john held jr. 7919 goforth, dallas, texas 75238 netlink midwest: mark corroto, po box 1382, youngstown, ohio 44501 netlink subspace: steve perkins, 221 w. benton, iowa city, iowa 52246 netlink west: lloyd dunn, po box 162, oakdale, iowa 52319 *** # # # # 23)---------------------------------------------------------------------_________________________________________________________________________ | literature, computers and writing: | | | | forging connections in the high school | | | | and college english classrooms | | | | april 3, 1992 | |_______________________________________________________________________| the fifth annual computers and english conference for high school and college teachers of writing. sponsored by the program in english new york institute of technology the conference has two primary themes: o how computers and specifically computer networks can be used to ally high school and college teachers of english, and o how computers are changing the way literature is created, taught, understood and written about. possible topics o computer access in a muliticultural environment o computers and the changing definitions of literacy o growing interest in desktop publishing for students and faculty o teleconferencing and distance learning o classroom uses of on-line databases and searches o classroom uses of hypertext and hypermedia o computer discussion groups for students and/or teachers o varied features of personal contact in an electronic environment o computers and the learning-disabled student o continuing teacher education and telecommunications o demonstrations of software programs you have designed o effects of computers on testing and assessing individually or collaboratively composed writing send requests for information to: department of english new york institute of technology old westbury, new york 11568 att: ann mclaughlin (516) 686-7557. conference fee: $50.00 (prior to conference date) $35.00 for matriculated graduate students. fee includes coffee and buffet luncheon. hotel accomodations available near campus at east norwich inn (east norwich, ny). ___________________________________________________________________________ |pre-registration form | | | | please register me for the fifth-annual nyit computers and writing | | conference: | | | | name: ____________________________________________________________ | | address: ____________________________________________________________ | | ____________________________________________________________ | | ____________________________________________________________ | | e-mail: ____________________________________________________________ | | school: ____________________________________________________________ | | amount enclosed: $ ___.___ | | mail completed form to | | department of english | | new york institute of technology | | old westbury, new york 11568 | | att: ann mclaughlin (516) 686-7557. | |___________________________________________________________________________| 24)----------------------------------------------------------------------- section on science, knowledge, and technology at the southwestern social science annual meetings in austin, texas march 27-31, 1992. contact: raymond eve <b967rae@utarlvm1> ****please forward to anyone who might be interested**** i would like to mention to you (somewhat belatedly, i fear), the upcoming section on "science, knowledge, and technology" to be held at the southwestern social science association annual meetings in austin, texas. dates for the meeting's paper sessions will be march 27 31, 1992. the s,k, and t paper sessions will probably be scheduled on thursday and/or friday of that week. unfortunately, the swsa forgot to include the listing of the "science, knowledge, and technology" section (and a section organizer -yours truly) in the initial call for papers. this was an oversight, and you may be sure that the section will exist again in '92. the section has only existed for two previous years, but the response has been truly outstanding, and interestingly, excellent papers of common interest were given by scholars as diverse as sociologists, arts and literature faculty, anthropologists, and physical science faculty. i would also like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a "workshop for the disciplines" session i've been asked to organize on friday morning at 10 a.m. of the meetings. it will be entitled "postmodern culture: convenient myth or imperative paradigm?". this session has several very well known people scheduled for it, and their disciplines include: literature, architecture, political science, and sociology. we should have on hand many individuals interested in most postmodern theory and in chaos theory, as well as many other interesting s, k, and t topics. hope we will see you in austin in the spring! 25)----------------------------------------------------------------------- postech@weber.ucsd.edu -discussion group on post-structuralism and technology phil agre (uc san diego) and john bowers (univ. of manchester) have started a netmail discussion group on post-structuralism and technology. (you can define those terms however you like.) to be added, send a short note to postech-request@weber.ucsd.edu. make sure to include a network address that's accessible from the internet (me@here.bitnet, uucpnode!me@gateway.somewhere.edu, me@machine.here.ac.uk, me@ibm.com, whatever). we'll collect addresses for a month or so and then we'll invite everyone to send a note to the group introducing themselves and advertising their work. 26)----------------------------------------------------------------------- **************************************************** * * * east-west conference * * on emerging computer technologies in education * * * * april 6-9, 1992 * * moscow, russia * * * * second revised announcement * * * * call for participation * * * **************************************************** the aims of the east-west conference on emerging computer technologies in education are to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between eastern and western scientists and to present to the soviet educational community the current state-of-the-art on the theory and practice of using emerging computer-based technology in education. the technical programme includes invited talks, presentations of about 80 research/development and review papers, posters, and demonstrations. an exhibition of educational hardware and software products is also anticipated. the conference is designed to cover the following subfields of advanced research in the field of computers and education: artificial intelligence and education educational multi-media and hyper-media learning environments, microworlds and simulation the conference is organised and sponsored by: association for the advancement of computing in education (aace), international centre for scientific and technical information (icsti), and soviet association for artificial intelligence (saai). the conference will take place in the icsti building in moscow. information ~~~~~~~~~~~ for further information please contact: conference content and program: dr peter brusilovsky (eastwest@plb.icsti.su) accomodation and visa support: mr vladislav pavlov (use the conference fax number). registration: dr viacheslav rykov (use the conference fax number). exhibition: dr jury gornostaev (enir@ccic.icsti.msk.su) conference addresses ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ east-west conference on emerging computer technologies in education international centre for scientific and technical information kuusinen str. 21b, moscow 125252, russia e-mail: eastwest@plb.icsti.su or eastwest%plb.icsti.su@ussr.eu.net telex: 411925 mcnti fax: +7 095 943 0089 27)----------------------------------------------------------------------- environment and the latino imagination * * conference announcement * * cornell university will host a conference on "environment and the latino imagination" that will involve the participation of environmentalists, artists, poets, activists, and other invited speakers who will address one of the holes in mainstream environmental research--the persectives of u.s. latinos and their ways of imagining their relationship to their environment. the conference will take place april 30-may 2, l992. please direct inquiries to: debra a. castillo or barbara lynch dept. romance studies environmental toxicology goldwin smith hall fernow hall cornell university ithaca, ny 14853 or bitnet to bgcy@cornella 28)----------------------------------------------------------------------- swip-l announcing the formation of a new e-mail list called the swip-l, an information and discussion list for members of the society for women in philosophy and others who are interested in feminist philosophy. to subscribe to this list send the following one-line message to listserv@cfrvm or listserv@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu subscribe swip-l <your full name> to post messages to the list send them to swip-l@cfrvm or to swip-l@ cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu the idea of the list is to have a place to share information about swip meetings and other feminist philosophy meetings, calls for papers, jobs for feminist philosophers, as well as to engage in more substantive discussion of issues related to feminist philosophy. while it is open to people who are not swip members, this is a list meant for feminist philosophers; please don't subscribe unless that is a description you are comfortable applying to yourself. linda lopez mcalister dllafaa@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu (internet) women's studies dept. dllafaa@cfrvm_(bitnet) university of south florida, tampa 33620 (813)974-5531 29)----------------------------------------------------------------------- american folklore society founded in 1888, the american folklore society is the american learned and professional society for folklorists. it offers an intellectual and social forum for the field of folklore through an annual meeting, publications, specialized activities of interest-group sections, various prizes and awards, and other services to its membership. the journal of american folklore is a lively forum for recent work in this field. recent issues have treated such topics as gospel quartets, the greenwich village halloween parade, the zombi, cowboy poetry gatherings, latinismo and heritage politics, nocturnal death syndrome among the hmong, folklore in richard wright's "black boy", and reviews of a wide range of books, exhibitions, films, and records. the annual meeting will be held october 15-18, 1992 in jacksonville, florida. the call for papers will appear in the february newsletter. membership directory and guide to the field the directory has been compiled from members' responses and submissions from folklore programs and organizations throughout north america. the directory contains: * alphabetized name and address entries for 1200 folklorists, most of which also contain telephone and e-mail information and areas of interest * detailed descriptive entries for academic and public programs in folklore * indexes to the member directory entries by interest area and place of residence the directory is available for $10 to members of the american folklore society, and for $15 to nonmembers, with a 10% discount on orders of 10 copies or more. to order the directory: send a check made payable to the american folklore society and marked "1992 afs directory" to book orders department (em) american folklore society, 1703 new hampshire ave. nw, washington, dc 20009. -----------------------membership information------------------- membership in the american folklore society brings the following benefits: * journal of american folklore (quarterly) * newsletter (bimonthly) * reduced registration rates for the annual meeting * discounted prices on volumes in the publications of the american folklore society series; the society's membership directory and guide to the field; and the "folklore" volume of the annual mla international bibliography * right to vote in society's elections and to hold society office * right to be considered for society prizes and awards * access to various kinds of low-cost insurance offered to society members by outside insurers to become a member of the american folklore society: regular member $50 student member $20 partner member $20 (partners of members do not receive publications) sustaining $75 patron $100 life member $800. send a check made payable to the american folklore society to membership department (em) american folklore society, 1703 new hampshire ave. nw, washington, dc 20009. 30)----------------------------------------------------------------------- meaning holism new summer seminar directors: jerry fodor & ernie lepore location: rutgers university, new brunswick, nj dates: june 29 august 14, 1992 (seven weeks) holism about meaning and intention content has shaped much of what is most characteristic of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. the seminar is devoted to the question whether the individuation of the contents of thoughts and linguistic expressions is inherently holistic. for example, we will discuss arguments that are alleged to show that the meaning of a scientific hypothesis depends on the entire theory that entails it, or that the content of a concept depends on the entire belief system of which it is a part. implications of holistic semantics for other philosophical issues (intentional explanation, translation realism, skepticism, connectionism, etc.) will also be explored. authors to be read include quine, davidson, lewis, block, field, dummett, dennett, churchland and others. in addition, we will use holism: a shopper's guide, fodor, j. and e. lepore, 1992, basil blackwell. the national endowment for the humanities will provide a summer stipend of $3,600 for travel, book and living expenses, to those selected as participants in this seminar. applications must be postmarked not later than 2 march, 1992. for further information and for application forms, please write to: meaning holism seminar philosophy department davidson hall douglass campus, rutgers university new brunswick, nj 08903 (usa) 31)----------------------------------------------------------------------- addict-l is an electronic conference for mature discussion of the many types of addictions experienced by a large portion of society. the focus of this list is to provide an information exchange network for individuals interested in researching, educating or recovering from a variety of addictions. it is not the intent of this list to focus on one area of addiction, but rather to discuss the phenomena of addiction as it relates to areas of sexual, co-dependency, eating addiction, etc... truly a list that many aspects could be discussed. -all individuals with an interest in the topic area are welcome. -subscriptions of those interested will be added by the listowner -subscribers should look forward to educating themselves about addictions, and discussing relevant topics related to addiction and recovery. -intended as an information exchange network and discussion group possible appropriate subjects: -discussion of etiology of addictions -effects of addictions -recovery from addiction and 12 step programs -recent article publications relevant to addiction literature -networking with others having related interests drug/alcohol addiction has a way of becoming an easy topic of discussion. it is the intent of this list to broaden the awareness of addictions into a variety of other areas. there are electronic lists devoted to drug/alcohol use for those interested only in that area subscription procedure: to subscribe from a bitnet account send an interactive or e-mail message addressed to listserv@kentvm. internet users send mail to listserv@kentvm.kent.edu (in mail, leave the subject line blank and make the text of your message the following: sub addict-l yourfirstname yourlastname questions can be addressed to listowner: david delmonico ddelmoni@kentvm.kent.edu 32)----------------------------------------------------------------------- pjml on listserv@utxvm.bitnet progressive jewish mailing list or listserv@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu the progressive jewish mailing list (pjml) is an educational forum, providing accurate information on a variety of jewish concerns in ways that inspire us to action. using electronic mail and computer networks, pjml connects activist jews and our allies from across the globe. we come from many traditions; if we have differences, let us talk about them openly. but let us continue in the tradition of _tikkun olam_, the just repair of the world. to subscribe to pjml, you will need an electronic mail account that accesses either bitnet or internet. simply send the following message to either listserv@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu or listserv@utxvm.bitnet: sub pjml yourfirstname yourlastname list moderator: steve carr bitnet: rtfc507@utxvm.bitnet internet: steven.carr@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu phone: (512) 453-8540 (h) u.s. post: 3911-a ave. f austin tx 78751 33)-------------------------------------------------------------------- buddha-l on listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu or listserv@ulkyvm.bitnet an electronic discussion group called buddha-l has recently been formed towards the end of providing a means for those interested in buddhist studies to exchange information and views. it is hoped that the group will function as an open forum for scholarly discussion of topics relating to the history, literature and languages, fine arts, philosophy, and institutions of all forms of buddhism. it may also serve as a forum for discussion of issues connected to the teaching of buddhist studies at the university level, and as a place for posting notices of employment opportunities. the primary purpose of this list is to provide a forum for serious academic discussion. it is open to all persons inside and outside the academic context who wish to engage in substantial discussion of topics relating to buddhism and buddhist studies. buddha-l is not to be used for proselytizing for or against buddhism in general, any particular form of buddhism, or any other religion or philosophy, nor is it to be used as a forum for making unsubstantiable confessions of personal conviction. the discussion on the list is to be moderated, not in order to suppress or censor controversies on any topic, but rather to limit irrelevant discussions and idle chatter, and to redirect or return messages sent to the list by accident. content or style will never be altered by the moderator, whose only responsibility will be to forward all appropriate postings to the list. if you wish to subscribe to buddha-l, send an e-mail message to listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu, or bitnet nodes can send to listserv@ulkyvm. the message should contain only the following command (ie. in the body of the mail): subscribe buddha-l <your first and last name> owner: james a. cocks senior consultant research/instruction university of louisville internet: jacock01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu bitnet: jacock01@ulkyvm 34)-------------------------------------------------------------------- penn state university seminar series issues in criticism summer seminar seminar on historicisms and cultural critique june 25-30, 1992 state college, pennsylvania wai-chee dimock, department of english, university of california, san diego. author of empire for liberty: melville and the poetics of individualism (1989) and symbolic equality: political theory, law, and american literature (forthcoming); co-editor of the forthcoming class and literary studies. professor dimock will focus on the shifting configurations of gender and history. marjorie levinson, department of english, university of pennsylvania. editor of rethinking historicism (1989) and author of keats's life of allegory: the origins of style (1988) and other monographs treating romantic poetry. professor levinson will concentrate on cultural materialism. brook thomas, department of english and comparative literature, university of california, irvine. author of cross-examination of law and literature (1987) and the new historicism and other old-fashioned topics (1991). professor thomas's central topic will be the crisis of representation. the penn state seminar on historicisms and cultural critique offers faculty members in departments of english and modern languages the opportunity to survey the major issues in and freshen their knowledge of approaches to literature that emphasize the relations between text and culture, including those presently identified under the broad label of the new historicism. seminar participants will hear presentations by three well-known scholar-critics--wai chee dimock, marjorie levinson, and brook thomas--and engage in seminar-type discussions organized by these leaders. registrants are asked to indicate their first and second choices for morning seminar groups. the schedule and atmosphere are intended to encourage informal discussions among participants. for further information contact: wendell harris department of english pennsylvania state university university park, pennsylvania 16802 telephone: 814-863-2343 or 814-865-9243 35)----------------------------------------------------------------------- africa-l on listserv@brufpb.bitnet forum pan-africa a pan-african forum for the discussion of the interests of african peoples (in africa, and expatriate), and for those with an interest in the african continent and her peoples. of special interest will be ways to help facilitate the flow of communications (electronic and other) to and from africa. news, light-hearted discussions, and cultural and educational items are welcome. to subscribe to africa-l send the following message to listserv@brufpb: (note that this is a bitnet address) subscribe africa-l your name and your african interests set africa-l repro for example, subscribe africa-l j. smith togo set africa-l repro to obtain a list of current subscribers, send the message "review africa-l" to listserv@brufpb.bitnet . list owner: carlos fernando nogueira (ctedtc09@brufpb) 36)----------------------------------------------------------------------- femrel-l on listserv@umcvmb.bitnet femrel-l is an open discussion and resource list concerning women & religion and feminist theology. our goal is open, stimulating discussion on any and all issues pertaining to these topics. all religions, creeds, beliefs, opinions, etc. are welcome, although we do ask that participants respect differences. to subscribe, send the following command to listserv@umcvmb via mail or interactive message: sub femrel-l your_full_name where "your_full_name" is your name. for example: sub femrel-l joan doe submissions to the list should be sent to: femrel-l@umcvmb.bitnet owners: cathy quick <c497487@umcvmb.bitnet> bonnie vegiard <c421536@umcvmb.bitnet> 37)----------------------------------------------------------------------- an on-line catalogue of the georgetown center for text and technology since april 1989, the center for text and technology of the academic computer center at georgetown university has been compiling information about projects in electronic text in the humanities. currently we have details on over 300 projects in 27 countries. because this information is constantly being updated, any printing would be obsolescent. consequently, we have created an on-line catalogue that is searchable through internet and dial-in access. thus far, response has been gratifying; last month we logged over 100 inquiries. an illustrated user's guide to the catalogue of projects in electronic text is available free of charge through surface mail. in addition, a public-domain version of kermit and a keyboardmapping program can be obtained through file transfer protocol (ftp). for further information, please contact me personally at the address below, rather than sending to the list. james a. wilderotter ii project assistant center for text and technology academic computer center reiss science building, room 238 georgetown university washington, dc 20057 tel. (202) 687-6096 bitnet: wilder@guvax internet: edu%"wilder@guvax.georgetown.edu" 38)----------------------------------------------------------------------- arl directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and scholarly discussion lists (hard copy version) although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be accessed free of charge through bitnet, internet, and affiliated academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out what is available. the directory is a compilation of entries for over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters, and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests. the directory gives specific instructions for access to each publication. the objective is to assist the user in finding relevant publications and connecting to them quickly, even if not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems. content editor of the journals/newsletters section is michael strangelove, network research facilitator, university of ottawa. editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is diane kovacs of the kent state university libraries. the printed arl directory is derived from widely accessible networked files maintained by strangelove and kovacs. the directory will point to these as the principal, continuously updated, and free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials. michael strangelove's directory of electronic journals and newsletters is now available from the contex-l fileserver and consists of two files. these may be obtained, if you are at a bitnet site, by sending the interactive commands: tell listserv at uottawa get ejournl1 directry tell listserv at uottawa get ejournl2 directry or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to listserv@uottawa.bitnet with the text: get ejournl1 directry get ejournl2 directry no blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no other text should follow them. for further information, contact michael strangelove at 441495@uottawa diane kovacs' directory of scholarly discussion groups is available from listserv@kentvm and consists of eight files. these may be obtained, if you are at a bitnet site, by sending the interactive commands: tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist readme tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist index tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file1 tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file2 tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file3 tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file4 tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file5 tell listserv at kentvm get acadlist file6 or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to listserv@kentvm.bitnet with the text: get acadlist readme get acadlist index get acadlist file1 get acadlist file2 get acadlist file3 get acadlist file4 get acadlist file5 get acadlist file6 no blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no other text should follow them. for further information, contact diane kovacs at dkovacs@kentvm both directories are also now available in print and on diskette (dos/wordperfect and macintosh/macword). for further information contact: office of scientific & academic publishing association of research libraries 1527 new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc 20036 usa or ann okerson arlhq@umdc.bitnet (202) 232-2466 (voice) (202) 462-7849 (fax) o'donnell, 'his master's voice: on william gaddis's _jr_', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-o'donnell-his.txt his master's voice: on william gaddis's _jr_ by patrick j. o'donnell university of west virginia copyright (c) 1991 by patrick j. o'donnell, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) [1] in william gaddis's _jr_, voice partakes of the "postmodern condition" where, as jean baudrillard says, everything is constituted by "the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction."^1^ gaddis's unwieldy parody of american capitalism is a 700-plus page palimpsest of vocal exchanges where the agency of transmission--telephones, televisions, tape recorders--has, in a sense, taken over the discourse, so that human commerce and conversation reflect the nearly total instrumentality of human life and the "capitalization" of identity in the late twentieth century. "voice," in gaddis's novel, has become the cipher for human exchange, and like surplus capital, inflationary and without content. [2] in this context, it is appropriate to recall an image produced by the advertising agencies that gaddis lampoons in _jr_ while striking at the wastefulness of their "product" in the piles of junk mail that the pre-adolescent jr ceaselessly sorts through on his way to the foundation of a financial empire. one of the more memorable icons of american culture is the logo of the recording company of america, perhaps most familiar to the generation which listened to '78's which bore the image of victor, that patient canine listening to the speaker of a victorola phonograph. the trademark suggests that the quality of the recording is so faithful to the original that victor thinks he is hearing "his master's voice"--an idea so compelling that rca protected the phrase "his master's voice" by registering it as a trademark. [3] images like this one, born within the publicity departments of corporations that make substantial profits from the reproduction of sound, reveal much about commonly held cultural assumptions regarding voice and its relation to the projection of identity. the faithful reproduction of voice is associated with the assertion of mastery. the "master recording," presumably, connects us directly with the origin of an individual voice. this concept is revised and repeated in the television advertisements of a cassette tape manufacturer who employed ella fitzgerald to break a glass with the magnified projections of her real voice; these, recorded and played back, were used to break another glass, attesting, again, to the faithfulness of the sound recording. yet, we easily see the contradictions inherent in the attempt to represent the mastery, originality, and integrity of voice. as edward said suggests, all forms of originality imply "loss, or else it would be repetition; or we can say that, insofar as it is apprehended as such, originality is the difference between primordial vacancy and temporary, sustained repetition" (133). to hear a recording of the master's voice--to hear the voice of mastery--is to hear the same track again as a repetition that fragments the singularity of the original; indeed, following walter benjamin, in modern technocratic society, the more faithful the recording, the more the original is, paradoxically, re-presented or copied as it is transformed from original into simulation.^2^ recorded and transcribed, the strikingly unique voice of ella fitzgerald is converted into a commodity that everyone can own and replay at will. [4] these remarks on the replication of voice (and in a technocratic society "voice" inevitably comes to us in the form of replication) suggest the conflicted position of the so-called "speaking subject" in postmodern culture and in gaddis's novel where the "parent" organization of a fading financial empire is the "general roll" corporation- originally, manufacturers of piano rolls for player pianos. there are several ways in which this contradictory position might be described. translated from corporeal to legible terms, it is, for example, a commonplace of american creative writing programs to encourage neophytes to discover a unique, personal voice, yet it is easily perceivable that this illusory voice, even if it is found, can only be transmitted through the vehicle of the reproduction of the text--a text which, in "successful" creative writing programs, can be eminently transformed into a commodity. adorno's commentary on the speaking subject is pertinent to the contradictions implicit in the notion of "voice in the marketplace": in an all-embracing system [such as, for adorno, that of late capitalist economies], dialogue becomes ventriloquism. everyone is his own charlie mccarthy; hence his popularity. words in their entirety come to resemble the formulae which formerly were reserved for greeting and leave-taking . . . such determination of speech through adaptation, however, is its end: the relation between matter and expression is severed, and just as the concepts of the positivists are supposed to be mere counters, so those of positivistic humanity have become literally coins. (pecora 27) [5] for adorno, form and content of language in contemporary society have become so thoroughly severed (in that "content" has virtually disappeared), and yet so fused together (in that "medium" and "message" of contemporary speech acts are one) that all forms of expression are telegraphic ciphers, or traces of some "matter" that has been debased into coin, commodity. hence, the source of this language--the individual speaker--becomes merely a mouthpiece, a "talking head," a transmitter of messages already overheard and delivered; the repetition of these messages might be thought of as the capitalized surplus of sheer message, or information for its own sake, in contemporary culture. this is the view articulated by gibbs in _jr_, who serves as the novel's heretical voice in continually questioning and parodying the prevailing discursive orders. to his class (gibbs teaches at an "experimental" elementary school which is attempting to redefine its curriculum for the purposes of conducting all classes over "closed-circuit" television), gibbs says, "since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that?" (20). but to this "truth" about information gibbs adds the kind of heretical remark (he is clearly veering away from the predetermined class syllabus at this point) that will lead to his being fired from the school and his self-willed expulsion from america: "in other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. in fact it's exactly the opposite. order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . . " (20). [6] readers of _jr_ will recognize in these illustrations the dilemma of the subject in this novel. any attempt to describe or summarize _jr_ will necessarily fail, partly because the "plot" of the novel is so minimal as to provide little help with what _jr_ is "all about," and partly because the novel's complexity resides not in theme, or character, or symbol, or event but in the twinned questions of "who is speaking?" and "what is s/he talking about?" at any of a number of points. identity and reference may thus be seen as poles between which the story of an eleven-year-old child's rise to financial wealth and power is negotiated. jr vansant, the titular protagonist, manages to assimilate a financial empire by sorting through junk mail and taking advantage of numerous "offers," and by employing the offices of his former teacher, edward bast, who unwillingly acts as jr's adult stand-in at various meetings and business functions. largely through a series of contingencies and accidents that serve to parody any reliance upon wall street "securities," jr succeeds in building a ghost mega-corporation that exists solely on paper, and then just as easily loses his empire in a "crash" that only makes him desire to start a new one. jr's horatio alger story stands in ironic contrast to that of his "dummy," bast, a would-be artist unwillingly entangled in the momentum of jr's rise and fall, and heir to the small remains of the declining general roll fortune; in the novel, the basts are embroiled in a chancery-like dispute over their estate, and edward bast's uncertainty as to the identity of his father and, thus, the origins of his own identity, serves as a foil to jr's parodic embodiment of "the self-made man." bast is also gaddis's portrait of the artist whose art is foiled by the consumerism, noise, and entropy of the contemporary environment: his horizons increasingly diminished (in the beginning of the novel, bast plans to write a full-scale opera; by its end, he is planning a short piece for the unaccompanied cello), bast is forced to earn his living by listening to pop radio stations in order to detect if songs not registered with ascap are being played on the air while, headphones in place, he attempts to write his own music. in such noisy circumstances, and in the comic and disturbing parallels he forges between the machinations of wall street and the modern educational methods in the united states, gaddis insists on portraying the "self" as a cipher or medium in an endless and monotonous conversation the subject of which- despite the number of speakers or characters in _jr_--always focuses around matters of exchange of money, stocks, notes (musical and otherwise), wills, bodies, or information.^3^ [7] _jr_ consists of dozens of fragmented conversations, usually joined in progress, between individual speakers upon a variety of ostensible "topics," yet the speakers, for the most part, are located within institutional and communicative confines--the principal's office, the boardroom of the corporate headquarters, a telephone booth- which constrain and define them as the instruments of vast and intersecting bureaucracies. through vocal tics or characteristic expressions, one may come to "know" the conversationalists of _jr_, though they are not usually identified by name, separate speakers and speech acts being marked in the novel not even by the usual quotation marks, but by dashes. but, as marc chenetier has suggested, so "interrupted" are these conversations by "[verbal] hiccups, hesitations, digressions . . . [textual] tears never mended, open parenthesis . . . syntactical ruptures," so replete are they with "interjections" from the voices of overheard radio announcements to citations from its barrage of advertisements, that any individual voice gradually disappears into the novel's overwhelming noise: "gaddis unhesitatingly plunges us into a 'universe of discourse' that does not even bear his name."^4^ in this way, _jr_ obscures the source or agency of any given voice in the novel, and makes it seem that all the novel's speakers participate in a wholly instrumental "discourse" managed by corporations and institutions lacking any single "boss," but, in the telephonic terms the novel insists upon, comprised of a series of crossed lines and connections going everywhere and coming from nowhere or no one. hence _jr_ might be viewed as the nightmare version of bakhtinian heteroglossia.^5^ while bakhtin argues that the disparate and conflicting voices to be found historically in the novel signified the overturning of the official discourses of the day and the pluralization of identity--a pluralization that, as we have seen, troubles the modernist desire to master the carnivalization of identity, or in thomas mann's phrase, to act as the "theatre-manager[s] of our own dreams so [that] . . . our fate may be the product of our inmost selves, of our wills"--gaddis's multi-voiced epic of the corporate world and american education, in a sundering of "the illusion of unmediated speech," displays the incorporation of all voice and language into the paranoid meta-discourse of "doing business."^6^ this discursive game is one in which even an eleven-year old child--perhaps, especially an eleven-year old child raised in the positivist environment of the american education system--can become a major player. yet it is a discourse which no one really masters, both because it lacks visible source or origin (just as paternal origins are troubled in the novel for edward bast) and because it threatens to consume any individual who comes into contact with it. [8] though widely-varied in their particulars, the vocal exchanges of _jr_ fall roughly into three categories: monologues that serve to parody the "specialized" languages of legalese or businessese, phatic conversations where we hear a speaker on one end of and must imagine what the other speaker is saying, and fragmented conversations between several speakers such as those in which an assortment of teachers, administrators, politicians, and bureaucrats gather periodically in the principal's office of the long island elementary school jr attends to discuss the latest developments in education by television. in the first of these--monologues that unwittingly (as far as the speaker is concerned) parody discursive systems--signs and codes are arranged in a self-referential language where words circulate as money does in the economy, endlessly flowing where they will, merely ciphers of exchange without matter (or gold) to back them. coen, the bast family lawyer, provides an example of this semiosis when he discusses the late thomas bast's estate with anne and julia near the beginning of the novel: --possibly your testimony and that of your brother james regarding the period of his cohabitation with the said nellie before edward's birth, here, yes, that a child born in wedlock is legitimate where husband and wife had separated and the period of gestation required, in order that the husband may be the father, while a possible one, is exceptionally long and contrary to the usual course of nature, you see? now in bringing a proceeding to establish the right to the property of a deceased, the burden is on the claimant to show his kinship with the decedent, where alleged fact that claimant is decedent's child, and . . . yes, that while in the first instance, where is it yes, proof of filiation from which a presumption of legitimacy arises will sustain the burden and will establish the status of legitimacy and heirship if no evidence tending to show illegitimacy is introduced, the burden to establish legitimacy does not shift and claimant must establish his legitimacy where direct evidence, as well as evidence of potent . . . is the word potent? potent, yes potent circumstances, tending to disprove his claim of heirship, is introduced. now, regarding competent evidence to prove filiation . . . --mister cohen, i assure you there is no need to go on like this, if . . . --ladies, i have no choice. in settling an estate of these proportions and this complexity it is my duty to make every point which may bear upon your nephew's legal rights absolutely crystal clear to you and to him. (10) coen's comically inappropriate, yet legally "correct" rhetoric is tonally offensive. not only is it incomprehensible to the ancient sisters as it is to us in its circularity, it also embodies a contradictory attempt to establish filiation and edward bast's origins through a discourse replete with repetition and tautology: the language clearly lacks the "potent circumstances" it is attempting to generate through the sheer imposition of scattered and reiterated legal jargon. [9] coen's "monologue" is typical of many in _jr_. it represents a discursive movement where--whether the topic is stocks and bonds, or wills, or pedagogy--the subject or point of reference is brought into being and "legitimated," but only as a simulation issuing from a nominalist discourse that "names" its content, whose content is what it names. the linguistic nominalism of _jr_ reaches its absurd limit in the directions mr. davidoff, a corporate public relations executive, gives to his secretary regarding the travel plans of one of his representatives aboard military transport: "tc two hundred indiv placed on tdy as indic rpsctdy eigen, thomas, gs twelve cerned he won't need all those, give cg amc, attn: amcad-ao, washington," etc. (256). gaddis is concerned to show in this "acronymic" parody, as he is throughout the novel, the relation between such instrumentation of language and the "miltary-industrial complex." the identity of "bast," in essence, is what can be traced on paper or what can be read out of a will, just as the identity of jr is what it is purported to be in contracts, stock issues, business negotiations. there is no word-magic in _jr_, no fleshing out of the language, and bast, in coen's verbiage, is but a blank counter to move amongst the various acquired accretions of legal language.^7^ [10] when we turn to gaddis's conversations, we might expect to encounter some form of exchange which transcends or alters these hegemonic circumstances, but indeed we discover that the gaddisian dialogic is a contradiction in terms. at every turn in the novel, we are confronted with telephone conversations which ostensibly involve two or more speakers, and thus, a dialogue, but we always hear only one end of the conversation (and have to imagine both who is speaking and what they are saying at the other end). we are compelled to hear the voice over the phone as both singular (it is the only voice we hear) and fragmented, dissolute (interrupted by the unheard voice of the other); the voice of the "other" is entirely spectral in these exchanges. its material importance in the novel causes us to focus on the instrument which carries these phatic conversations--the telephone. as avital ronnell has argued, the telephone "destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing. . . . it is unsure of its identity as object, thing, piece of equipment, perlocutionary intensity or artwork (the beginnings of telephony argue for its place as artwork); it offers itself as instrument of destinal alarm" (ronell 9). in _jr_, the significance of this "destinal alarm" is highlighted in a number of contexts: "diamond cable," the mega-corporation with which jr competes (and in whose offices he is introduced to the world of the stock market on a school field trip) is a manufacturer of telephone cables; the bast sisters decide to divest their portfolio of telephone stocks because they are having their home phone removed; jr manages to convince the local phone company to install a pay phone booth at his school so that he can have easy access to his "office." this latter instance provides a comic example of how the telephone severs "voice" from "signature" or identity. jr remarks to his friend hyde, who suggests that jr will get caught for forging the papers which authorize the installation of the booth: "what do you mean forgery i just scribbled this here name which it's nobody's down at the bottom where it says arthurized by, i mean you think the telephone company's goes around asking everybody is this here your signature? all they care it says requisition order right here across the top so they come stick in this here telephone booth" (185). for fear that he might be recognized as a child in his business dealings, jr disguises his voice when he talks over the phone by muffling it with the unfailingly filthy handkerchief that is one of his trademarks. his creation of an empire via the proxies of the telephone and bast is an act of ventriloquy that reveals the wholly instrumental nature of his language and being. as an extension of the telephonic instrument--as a form of human prothesis--jr is merely the garbled voice over the phone making connections between the disparate elements of his empire, thus acting as a kind of talking "switchboard"; this radical destabilizing of human agency via the telephone is perfectly complicit with "doing business" in _jr_, a form of labor comprised solely of managing contacts and contracts through the manipulation of what might be termed discursive "bites" or received linguistic formulations. [11] in the following passage, we overhear jr at the height of his empire, conversing with bast about various business deals on a public telephone: --hello bast? boy i almost didn't...no i'm out of breath, i had to stay in at...no but first hey how come you didn't call piscator about this here whole wonder . . . what? no but where are you at then, you . . . what? what do you . . . no but how come you're at this here hospital . . . holy . . . no but holy . . . no but you mean right at that there gala banquet you and him were . . . no but how was i supposed to know that? i mean i knew the both of them were old, but holy . . . no but if he had his arm around you singing how come you . . . you mean right in the middle of the movie? holy . . . no but like if, like i mean he's not going to die or something is he? because if he and his brother don't sign that stuff piscator was supposed to get read we're really up the . . . what his brother's there right now you mean? can you . . . what, they already did? why didn't you tell me, i mean if they both signed it everything's okay we don't have anything to . . . no hey i didn't just mean that bast, i mean sure i hope he gets better real soon tell him but . . . no but wait tell him he can't do that hey, it's . . . no but if he sold the company it isn't even a trade secret any more it's our hey, i'll . . . no i'll bet you a quarter hey, ask piscator, he . . . that cobalt in the water puts such a great head on their beer? did he tell . . . no but see even if this here nurse he's whispering it to doesn't get it see she might just tell somebody which . . . no but tell him to quit it anyway okay? so where else did . . . no but see a second, who . . .? did he say that, he's coming there . . .? no but see he's been calling me and piscator because he's scared this here bunch of wonder stock this other brother gave him this loan of to use it like for collateral when this company of his was getting in this trouble because they used to both play football at some collage, see so now mooneyham's scared that if we gave him a hard time over this here stock this whole x-l lithography comp . . . no but how was i supposed to know this here other brother had . . . no but what do you expect me to . . . no okay, okay but. . . . (343) the signature of jr's voice in this and other "conversations" are the words "no," "hey," and "holy [shit]," which identify and stabilize an otherwise chaotic speech. jr's speech is literally full of holes, and the identity he projects through these voice signatures is that of denial ("no" to everything bast says) and ignorance (he knows nothing), yet this is the boss speaking.^8^ in the clutch of "deals" that this conversation embraces, jr is attempting to culminate the takeover of a brewery owned by the brothers he mentions--one of whom suffers a heart attack at a meeting with jr's representative, bast--by diverting the pension funds of another company he has bought, eagle mills; part of the takeover involves taking advantage of a selloff of debentures which would give the jr corporation access to cobalt mineral rights, the lethal ingredient that will give the beer produced by the brewery a "great head." other aspects of this venture depend upon equally far-flung negotiations which, together, suggest that the jr corporation is like a gigantic machine whose myriad gears accidentally mesh at certain points in time as jr stumbles upon connections and potential deals. though he "makes" the connection between one strand of enterprise and another (i.e., using the pension funds from eagle mills to buy out the wonder brewery), no one sees or controls the totality of his corporation, which exists, in fragments, only in his head and in his speech. nor is jr capable of assimilating the "content" of what he negotiates, or its social and political effects: that he gambles with the pensions of hundreds of workers, that some one has suffered a heart attack, that the cobalt which goes in the beer may be poisonous to its drinkers does not enter jr's consciousness. jr, then, speaks with the master's voice, but his overheard speech is made up of the collected fragments of an atrocious banality, wholly lacking in integrity and originality. in this, jr, like his older double, governor cates, embodies the corporate subject that acts as a conduit for the exchange of information while (as the novel goes on) increasingly losing control over that exchange. while this loss of control may portend some resistance to the novel's overbearing and interlocking language systems, the infinite replaceability of the novel's speakers, whatever their location in the discourse, suggests otherwise. [12] finally, in regarding the types of speech one encounters in _jr_, we can consider briefly the so-called conversations that take place between several speakers: in these instances, the parallels one hears between discussions in the corporation board rooms and those between teachers and administrators in the principal's office suggest the thoroughgoing instrumentality of language that gaddis fears pervades every level of human existence. what follows is a fragment of a discussion in the office of whiteback, the president of a local bank and the principal at jr's long island elementary school; part of what one hears in the background is the sound track from a television set tuned to various classes taking place at this school which is gradually "converting" to instruction by television: --my wife's taping something this morning, mister dicephalis got in abruptly. a resource program . . . . [o]n silkworms, she has her own kashmiri records... --if your ring isn't ready, your wagner, what is there? --my mozart. she hung up the telephone and dialed again. --no answer, i'll call and see if my visuals are ready . . . . ----gross profit on a business was sixty-five hundred dollars a year. he finds his expenses were twenty-two and one half percent of this profit. first, can you find the net profit? --what's that? demanded hyde, transfixed by unseeing eyes challenging the vacant confine just over his head. --sixth grade math. that's glancy . . . --try switching to thirty-eight. ----original cost of the...combustion in these thousands of little cylinders in our muscle engines. like all engines, these tiny combustion engines need a constant supply of fuel, and we call the fuel that this machine uses, food. we measure its value... --even if the rhinegold is ready it's wagner, isn't it? but if the mozart is scheduled the classroom teachers, they're ready with the followup material from their study guides on mozart. they can't just switch to wagner. ----the value of the fuel for this engine the same way, by measuring how much heat we get when it's burned . . . --that's a cute model, it gets the right idea across. whose voice? --vogel. he made it himself out of old parts. --whose? --parts? --some of them might never even have heard of wagner yet. --no, the voice. --that's vogel, the coach. ----that we call energy. doing a regular day's work, this human machine needs enough fuel equal to about two pounds of sugar... --if they thought it was mozart's rhinegold and get them all mixed up, so you can't really switch. --he put it together himself out of used parts. (28-29) [13] the "model" of discourse we are offered here is one made of fragments and ellipses that--given over to instrumentality--simultaneously defy totalization. gaddis's discursive enjambments project an entropic world of "noise" in which its parts or subjects--whether it is wagner's opera, mathematics, the workings of the human body, or silkworms--are eminently interchangeable, just as someone suggests that "it doesn't matter" if it's wagner's ring or mozart's. [14] as vogel's model suggests, the novel insists upon the connection to be made between speech and corporeal identity as being a collection of fragments comprised of replaceable parts: near the end of the novel, cates, who is in the hospital "just . . . to have a plug changed" (688), is described by a longtime companion as a lot of old parts stuck together he doesn't even exist he started losing things eighty years ago he lost a thumbnail on the albany nightboat and that idiot classmate of his handler's been dismantling him ever since, started an appendectomy punctured the spleen took it out then came the gall bladder that made it look like appendicitis in the first place now look at him, he's listening through somebody else's inner ears those corneal transplants god knows whose eyes he's looking through . . . . (708) revealingly, cates suffers this tirade while attempting to have a phone installed in his hospital room so he can conduct business even while undergoing an inner ear transplant, a conduct which involves speaking in a more adult version of jr's discourse and forging deals to the detriment of everyone from native americans to the inhabitants of a third-word nation ruled by the tyrannical doctor de. and, the political argument of the novel runs, it is precisely because there is such a severing of speech from agency in what baudrillard would refer to as the contemporary "hyperreal" that business can, in cates' and jr's domain, continue as usual, regardless of its "contents" and affects. as is indicated by the lack of syntactical markers in the description of cates' body, the novel's ongoing, discontinuous language is without origin or end (one feels that gaddis could have made the novel twice as long or half as short), and flows through the characters and instruments of _jr_, allowing them positions of authority along discursive chains. but no one is in charge of this system. here the link that gaddis wishes to forge between language and capital is most strong: both flow through the world as inheritances and mediums of exchange in what appear to be systems of mastery, but--in the paradox the novel enforces--systems, like runaway inflation, gone out of control.^9^ [15] in many of these senses, jr might be seen as gaddis's gatsby, a parody of the self-making impulses played out in the arena of the american marketplace that made gatsby "great" in nick carraway's mind; one essential difference between the two novels resides in the status of the vocal subject as a kind of cipher or medium in _jr_, hardly available to the backfill mythologizing employed in the constructions of gatsby or daisy (whose voice is "full of money," but who can also stand as the romanticized object of desire). in _jr_ the illusion of voice as the vehicle or medium of interiority is thoroughly dissolved; rather, voice, like everything in the novel, becomes a commodity. in a conversation between bast and gibbs, who, after being fired as a teacher, attempts to take up his long languishing book-in-progress on the social history of the mechanization of the arts, there emerges a figure representing the nature of voice in the novel: --problem writing an opera bast you're up against the worst god damned instrument ever invented [i.e., the human throat] . . . . --asked me to tell you about johannes muller didn't you? told you you're not listening i'm talking about johannes muller, nineteenth-century german anatomist johannes muller took a human larynx fitted it up with strings and weights to replace the muscles tried to get a melody by blowing through it how's that. bast? --yes it sounds quite... --thought opera companies could buy dead singers' larynxes fit them up to sing arias save fees that way get the god damned artist out of the arts all at once, long as he's there destroying everything in their god damned path what the arts are all about, bast? (288) like vogel's model of human muscular action, muller's experiment attempts to transform the instrument of human voice into a machine that (like the phonograph) will reproduce the same voice through the ages, thereby fulfilling the aesthetic dream of permanence but eliminating the need for the human agent in the process. on the one hand, muller's preposterous experiment, if successful, would fulfill the modernist dream of authorial distancing in ways that joyce had never thought possible, but the paradox of that desire (detachment accompanied by increased, totalizing control over the elements and relations of the created "world") is sundered in _jr_ by its complicity with the commodification of art. if the source or origin of the singer's voice could be removed, so gibbs' parodic argument runs, and a way could be found to reproduce that voice on command for the listening audience, then money could be made since it is less expensive to own or display a reproduction than an original. in fact, muller's zany idea has come to pass in the "age of mechanical reproduction," where the detachment of the art from the artist and its mass replication--its sheer reproducibility--determines its nature. "voice" fulfills these conditions in _jr_. [16] in one of the novel's more fantastic sequences, muller's frankensteinian experiment is renewed by vogel himself in the invention of the "frigicom" process which is described in one of davidoff's press releases (read over the phone to a secretary): dateline new york, frigicom, comma, a process now being developed to solve the noise pollution problem comma may one day take the place of records comma books comma even personal letters in our daily lives comma, according to a report released jointly today by the department of defense and ray hyphen x corporation comma member of the caps j r family of companies period new paragraph. the still secret frigicom process is attracting the attention of our major cities as the latest scientific breakthrough promising noise elimination by the placement of absorbent screens at what are called quote shard intervals unquote in noise polluted areas period operating at faster hyphen than hyphen sound speeds a complex process employing liquid nitrogen will be used to convert the noise shards comma as they are known comma at temperatures so low they may be handled with comparative ease by trained personnel immediately upon emission before the noise element is released into the atmosphere period the shards will then be collected and disposed of in remote areas or at see comma where the disturbance caused by their thawing will be make that where no one will be disturbed by their impact upon thawing period new paragraph. while development of the frigicom process is going forward under contract to the cap defense cap department comma the colorful new head of research and development at the recently revitalized ray hyphen x corp mister make that doctor vogel declined to discuss the project exclusively in terms of its military ramifications comma comparing it instead to a two hyphen edged sword forged by the alliance of free enterprise and modern technology which promises to sever both military and artistic barriers at one fell swoop in the cause of human betterment period. (527) this literalization of pater's "frozen music" (as davidoff notes)--the spatialization of venetian beauty--is but the most extreme example of the novel's pervasive utilitarianism, where everything is made available to commodification in gaddis's terms: dislocated, unoriginal (that is, separated from the point or source of origin), infinitely repeatable. the frigicom process promises a kind of vocal dystopia characteristic of the "hi-tech" excesses of postmodern culture that gaddis satirizes in this absurd invention. if it could work, the "noise pollution" of busy freeways, office buildings, shopping malls can be frozen and carted off to sea, but like so many contemporary technological "advances," it creates more problems than it solves: how will the noise affect the ecology in those remote areas where it is dumped? will the reduction in noise pollution serve to convey the illusion that "progress" is being made with the more serious problem of air pollution? since the military is, inevitably, involved, how will this "two-edged sword" which promises to homogenize culture to the extent that "military and artistic barriers" can be severed (a process already under way, in gaddis's mind, as art becomes increasingly commodified and, thus, increasingly a subset of the "miltary-industrial complex") be used for destructive purposes? a "non-polluting" noise bomb? perhaps the idea is not so fictive in a society that can seriously pursue the manufacture of a neutron bomb that will kill people but preserve architecture--"frozen music," indeed. the figure of voice generated by davidoff's summary of the frigicom process suggests that contemporary technocracies are "closed loops," circular and tautological in nature. davidoff reads a press release into the phone while a secretary transcribes his remarks on the other end of the line: writing is thus converted by voice into writing again in a complex and circular series of exchanges wherein "voice" becomes, merely, the ventriloquizing of the already-written, just as davidoff is merely the mouthpiece for organizational propaganda. if "voice," this last illusory vestige of singularity or alterity, can be figured so, then what, if anything, does gaddis leave us with? is there any "escape" from the novel's closed systems of commodification and exchange? [17] interestingly, in a _paris review_ interview, gaddis suggests, in response to readers like john gardner who see the novel as a chronicle of "the dedicated artist crushed by commerce," that _jr_ does contain "a note of hope": bast starts with great confidence. he's going to write a grand opera. and gradually, if you noticed his ambitions shrink. the grand opera becomes a cantata where we have the orchestra and the voices. then it becomes a piece for orchestra, then a piece for small orchestra, and finally at the end he's writing a piece for unaccompanied cello, his own that is to say, one small voice trying to rescue it all and say, "yes, there is hope." again, like wyatt, living it through, and in his adventure with jr having lived through all the nonsense he will rescue this one small hard gem-like flame, if you like. (di-nagy 71-72) gaddis clearly intends bast in _jr_, like wyatt in _the recognitions_, to be a portrait of the artist as one who achieves a minimalist redemption by withstanding the pressures of utilitarianism and capitalism in order to produce, in a post-romantic, post-modern gesture, not a self-generated cosmos to place over against the material universe, but merely a "small piece." it is curious that the author casts this redemption in terms of "a small voice," a "hard gem-like flame" not so different, imagistically at least, from the "noise shards" of the frigicom process: like the frigicom process, in the writing of _jr_ gaddis takes noise and voice from the welter of everyday life, "freezes" it into inscription, then "dumps" it into the separated confines of the book where it dispersed to the reader. writing and voice are thus often conflated in gaddis's fiction, so that the figures of voice that appear there may be also taken for figurations of writing. for gaddis to insist that bast has a voice of his own--however small--is a contradiction in a novel where voice has been so thoroughly transmuted and dispossessed. this irony is compounded by the fact that bast's "small voice" is preserved (if it is preserved) within--or transmitted by--such a noisy, massive novel which itself, in its bulk and (to use leclair's phrase again) excessiveness, stands as a production of and within late capitalist culture. in essence, gaddis's medium confutes the intended message: it articulates the small voice of artistic individualism promised for bast in a figure at least once remove from the novel itself. [18] there are, of course, those instances--particularly in the more manic moments of bast's or gibbs's speech--where it appears that there is a rupture in the overarching, interloc[ked]utory discursive orders of the novel. the novel as a whole may be taken as "commentary" on these orders, as most of the language issuing from them bears clearly parodic intonations; yet it may be argued that the parody of, for example, legalese in coen's speeches both undercuts the authenticity of his circular discourse as well as it is born of it. gaddis's parody is so systematic in its encyclopedic anatomization of capitalist society in _jr_ that it becomes a discursive, parasitic "order" that replicates, in part, what it parodies: as michel serres has argued, "the strategy of criticism is located in the object of criticism," or, to revise this slightly for gaddis, the strategies of parody are located in and reproduce the object of parody (serres 38). the parody of "voice" in gaddis takes place in a kind of "hermeneutic circle" where parodic intonation occurs not as a deconstruction or transcension of a given discursive arrangement, but as a fractured repetition (an echoing) of that arrangement. [19] thus, even in those moments of "madness" entertained variously by bast and gibbs--moments in which we might expect some note of alterity to emerge from the welter of words--we hear, in a sense, "the same." emerging from his musician's workroom after making love to his cousin stella, edward bast, angry at the discovery that stella is trying to use him and that the workroom has been vandalized, launches into a high-pitched diatribe: --kids...the policeman nodded past his elbow,--who else would shit in your piano. --you, you never can tell...he stared for an instant [. . . then] turned with one step, and another as vague, to reach and tap a high c, and then far enough to fit his hand to an octave and falter a dissonant chord, again, and again, before he corrected it and looked up, --right? believing and shitting are two very different things? --edward... --never have to clean your toilet bowl again...he recovered the dissonant chord, --right? [. . . kids that's all! a generation in heat that's all...he pounded two chords against each other's unrest --no subject is taboo, no act is forbidden that's all...! and he struck into the sailor's chorus from dido and aeneas, --you'll never, no never, have to clean your [. . .] rift the hills and roll the waters! flash the lightnings...he pounded chords,--the pulsating moment of climax playing teedle leedle leedle right inside your head...he found a tremolo far up the keyboard. [ . . . ] he hunched over the keys to echo the ring motif in sinister pianissimo, --he will hold the something better than his dog, a little dearer than [ . . . ] --rain or hail! or fire...he slammed another chord, stood there, and tapped c. --master tunesmith wait...he dug in his pocket, --make a clean breast of the whole.... (141-42) [20] edward's is a patchwork of "motifs" and received linguistic fragments, from popular advertising slogans ("you'll never have to clean your bowl again") to phrases from the libretto of wagner's ring. the shattering of context and compression that occurs in such a passage takes place as a reorchestration of the already-said. similarly, when gibbs, who at one moment suggests to his lover, amy joubert, that one needs to "change contexts" in order to break down the homogenous nature of reality, but at the same time tells her that "all i've ever done my whole god damned life spent it preparing, time comes all i've got is seven kinds of fine god damned handwriting only god damned thing they're good for is misquoting other people's . . ." (487), we are led to question the effectiveness of shifting context, fragmentation, and parodic quotation (those postmodern standbys) as "responses" to _jr_'s monolithic discursive orders. rather, these instances suggest that such responses are all too easily reincorporated into the systems of vocal and monetary exchange that make up the "work" of the novel. the problem, for gaddis, may be that "voice" itself is "phallocentric," that is partaking of a discursive arrangement that irigaray defines as the reigning linguistic and philosophical paradigm of western culture, in which systematicity, logic, linearity, and dichotomizing join with systems of economic exchange (actually serving, as in _jr_, as the language of those systems) to produce a "male" order that is both epistemological and social in its hierarchies (see irigaray 68-85). gaddis comically hints at such a deterministic (and gendered) possibility when he portrays dicephalis' daughter, who has been secretly reading her mother's books on sexual practices in india, eating tongue for dinner and commenting that it "looks like lingham" (312), that is, a hindu phallus worshipped in shiva cults. if the tongue, the instrument of voice, is thus connected to the phallus, then it would seem that all "voicings" in _jr_ may be seen as falling within the closed circle of phallocentric discourse. [21] yet there is, finally, something else--something "other" than the unheard "small voice" of bast or parodic vocal collage--that exceeds voice in _jr_, even if it does not exceed the processes of representation that legitimate the novel's pernicious economies. i refer to those brief respites from all the novel's talk, those small descriptive passages that serve as segues between one conversation and another. many of these contain lyrical descriptions of nature in contrast to the entropic remnants of the american junkyard landscape, thus reflecting one of gaddis's familiar themes: the destruction of "the primitive" in modern technocratic culture. these passages come as intermissions between conversations, and while they serve to conduct the reader from one noisy venue to another, they also act, in some sense, as "silences" or diegetic gaps in the narrative. among the most important of these gaps are those containing descriptions of bodies merging and in collision, for in such descriptions we may see in the body--though always through the construction of figure and representation which, as "writing," is a form of disembodiment--an "alternative" to voice. [22] gaddis describes one of gibbs's and amy joubert's marathon lovemaking sessions in this way: from his her own hand came, measuring down firmness of bone brushed past its prey to stroke at distances, to climb back still more slowly, fingertips gone in hollows, fingers paused weighing shapes that slipped from their inquiry before they rose confirming where already they could not envelop but simply cling there fleshing end to end, until their reach was gone with him coming up to a knee, to his knees over her back, hands running to the spill of hair over her face in the pillow and down to declivities and down, cleaving where his breath came suddenly close enough to find its warmth reflected, tongue to pierce puckered heat lingering on to depths coming wide to its promise, rising wide to the streak of its touch, gorging its stabs of entrance aswim to its passage rising still further to threats of its loss suddenly real, left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze knees locked to knees thrust deep in that full symmetry surged back against all her eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks till he came down full weight upon her, face gone over her shoulder seeking hers in the pillow's muffling sounds of wonder until they both went still, until a slow turn to her side she gave him up and ran raised lips on the wet surface of his mouth. (490) [23] this passage portrays a simultaneous mingling and separation of bodies--both lyrical and violent--that at once infers and sunders what i would term the "originary," in the sense of the references to the empedoclean myths of origin that gaddis scatters throughout the novel. according to gibbs, in a fragment from the second generation of empedocles' cosmogony, "limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unmatched eyes looking for foreheads . . . these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless heads, faces looking in different directions" (45). this second generation of chance assemblage and multiple body parts, i would argue, represents an (as yet) voiceless, embodied response to the commodified generation of which gaddis writes; it is either regressive or futurist, and gibbs and amy's lovemaking is but a momentary enactment of it. these are bodies not yet formed into identities voicing commodified desires; they are pre-subjectival in the kristevan sense--neither the mass subject of late capitalist economy, nor the nostalgically romanticized "individual."^10^ these bodies are, at once, hetereogeneous and in conflict, and at the same time, in a characteristic pun, they are mutually incorporative, participating in communion: amy's (what? the specific body part is indeterminate in the clutter of limbs) is "left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze." the play on the word "agape" reveals the contradictions of these bodily entanglements, for it suggests both "a gap" or a vacancy, a form of separation (just as it suggests that amy is detached and objectified through gibbs's male gaze), and "agape," or communion, a rite of bodily incorporation; perhaps it is revealing of the paradox of this bodily state in _jr_ that gibbs's treatise on the social history of the mechanization of the arts bears the word "agape" in its title. these may be united bodies that represent a "corporate" condition beyond or before "voice," or they may be bodies in pieces in a double-edged sense, both "before" capitalized subjectivity and "after" it, that is, after the nostalgic, humanistic subject has disappeared into the mass, technologized subject of postmodern culture--save that gaddis makes it clear that these are bodies, flesh and blood, in conflict or communion. [24] collectively, the bodies of _jr_ may be perceived as the "body without organs" described by deleuze and guattari as that which exists beyond or before writing, voice, the formation of the body proper and organization of identity, the negotiating of all our economies. in _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_, deleuze and guattari write that the body without organs is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. only intensities pass and circulate. still the bwo [the body without organs] is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. it has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. the bwo causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. it is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree--to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. it is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. matter equals energy. production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. that is why we treat the bwo as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities.^11^ for guattari and deleuze, the "body without organs" is a condition of being that follows after the dissolution of identity that the progression from modernism to postmodernism portends, where the foundations of "selfhood" in a singular or integral consiousness somehow separated from the "lines of force" which signify the conflation of historical and corporeal energies are questioned and sundered. the body without organs is "deterritorialized," in that it represents a (non)-identity where the "self" is an intersection of energies and intensities not distinguishable from each other in terms of coming from within or coming from without, as belonging either to the body or to the world. [25] the "body without organs" is, of course, yet another figure, a prosopopoeia that provides us with "face" (the body) to peer through to that which has neither shape nor substance--what deleuze and guattari term "intensity"--but which provides the energy for life proper: in a novel where all systems are unfailingly entropic, such bodily intensities matter. this "source matter" or intensity is non-hierarchical, ungendered, non-dichotomous, and always in motion, yet, because the body without organs is both unformed and allows this intensity to pass through it, "lead you to your death," in the sense that this "version" of the body (a version enacted in amy's and gibbs's intercourse) lacks the systems and structures (the organs) that direct and sustain "intensities." hence, this figure of the body is both a figure of life and death, both the unoriginary catalyst of "life" and its entropic de-organization; in _jr_, it is a paradox set over against "voice," which issues from the organ of the larynx, and signifies the insertion of the speaking subject into the discursive orders of gaddis's technocracy.^12^ yet as a "figure of speech," that is, as a figure that appears in and through writing (both guattari and deleuze's theoretical fiction, and gaddis's portrayal of amy and gibbs's bodies), it inevitably partakes of those orders, as much as it speaks outside of them. [26] in _jr_, gaddis delineates the plight of the commodified postmodern identity trapped, as it were, in the american marketplace: his novel is clearly political in its concerns, in that it suggests an inevitable complicity with thanatopic, bureaucratic systems--orders that the novel both mocks and projects. yet in the novel's contradictory figures of voice and the body, its labyrinthine assemblage of "connections," and its distended and fractured conversations, there is the presence of "gaddis," who has orchestrated the novel's many voices, languages, and discourses into the monolithic commodity that bears the title _jr_. in this, we confront a final paradox that gaddis neither resolves nor avoids. this paradox can be stated as a skepticism regarding the foundational nature of identity matched by corresponding desire to locate the "origins" of identity, if not in voice, then in the body. here, the crucial task of figuring or disfiguring voice--of representing the vocal projection of identity (or its discontents) as a figure of speech--is carried out. it is a task, or project, paradoxical in its own nature, for this figuring and projection of voice generates a recognition of its own figurality, its masking of the non-existent or pre-subjectival, even as it involves the formation of an authorial "purpose" (the construction of this figure), and, thus, an authorial identity. in _jr_ identity is founded upon its own deformation, and nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the up-surgings of the "semiotic," in those pressure points where the language breaks down, where voice breaks up, and where coporeality intrudes; it is at those points that the figurations of both are simultaneously made and unmade. in _jr_, gaddis makes it clear, what follows after words or voice can only be expressed as a sporadic and temporary intensification of life in the face of language. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ jean baudrillard, 25, says that this "compulsion toward liquidity" marks the capitalization of the human body, thus setting him at odds with irigaray, for whom "fluidity" is a mark of the radical otherness of the feminine. this is a "debate" carried on, to some extent, within the terms of gaddis's novel. ^2^ see walter benjamin, 217-52. benjamin alternates between nostalgia for the lost authenticity of the truly original work before the onset of technocratic era, and recognition of the power of mechanical processes of reproduction to break through certain barriers separating art from history and the public. the contradictions of benjamin's position are replicated, i would argue, in gaddis's fiction, particularly in _the recognitions_ and _jr_, where "originality" is both parodied and made the subject of nostalgic longing. ^3^ tom leclair notes the crucial connections between education and the business world in _jr_: "they [jr and governor cates, the latter the head of a huge conglomerate which subsumes the jr corporation at the end of the novel] are the horatio alger story at its two extremes--ragged youth and old age--and the book moves to this rhythm. _jr_ shifts from the school, where j.r. is trained to profit, to the adult corporate world, and concludes in a hospital [where cates is a patient] where the aged and the prematurely wasted have their end" (97). ^4^ marc chenetier, 357; my translation. chenetier's wide-ranging discussion of "voice" in contemporary american fiction contained in his chapter, "la bouche et l'oreille" (321-64) is an invaluable resource, and has been essential to my understanding of voice in gaddis and in postmodern literature. ^5^ alan singer has suggested how gaddis's _carpenter's gothic_ can serve as a critique of bakhtin's notions of subject and agency, as well as participating in bakhtinian "heteroglossia." see singer's "the ventriloquism of history: voice, parody, dialogue." ^6^ mann's phrase occurs in "psychoanalysis, the lived myth, and fiction," in the modern tradition: backgrounds of modern literature, 672; leclair's comments on gaddis's deconstructions of vocal immediacy appear in _the art of excess_, 90. ^7^ for important discussions of the "paper empires" of _jr_ and their homologous relation to acts of writing and the exchanging of signs see steven weisenburger and joel dana black in _in recognition of william gaddis_, 147-61 and 162-73 respectively. ^8^ for a discussion of the connections between language and excrement in jr, see stephen moore, 76-80. ^9^ leclair, in _the art of excess_, provides important commentary on mastery in _jr_; cf. 87-105. leclair's sense of "mastery" in the novel is somewhat different from that in which i am using the term here: for leclair, "mastery" resides in gaddis's ability to provide an encyclopedic encompassing of the excessive, noisy, interlocking discourses of contemporary reality. my approach focuses on the lack of mastery at the "micropolitical" or "microlinguistic" level, where individual speakers in the novel give voice to a connective semiosis whose totality (if it exists) is only partially available to them; more precisely, i would argue, they speak as if a non-existent totality were theirs to impose or deploy; therein lies the delusion of mastery in the novel. ^10^ stephen matanle discusses the fragmentation of bodies in _jr_ in light of the empedoclean themes of "love" and "strife," the novel representing the contentions extreme of competition, dissociation, discord. our readings vary significantly in my viewing matanle's (or empedocles') "strife" as the upsurging of the "semiotic." ^11^ giles deleuze and felix guattari, 153. i am indebted here to john johnston's _carnival of repetition: gaddis's the recognitions and postmodern theory_ for his compelling discussions of deleuze and guattari in relation to gaddis's first novel. ^12^ in _versions of pygmalion_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1990), j. hillis miller writes evocatively of the "work" of prosopopoeia and its paradoxical masking and projection of death. see especially his chapter, "death mask: blanchot's l'arret de mort," 179-210. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited baudrillard, jean. _forget foucault_. trans. nicole dufresne. new york: semiotext(e), 1987. benjamin, walter. "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." _illuminations_. ed. hannah arendt. new york: shocken, 1969. 217-52. black, joel dana. "the paper empires and empirical fictions of william gaddis." _in recognition of william gaddis_. ed. john kuehl and steven moore. syracuse, ny: syracuse up, 1984. 162-73. chenetier, marc. _au-dela du soupcon: la nouvelle fiction americaine de 1960 a nos jours_. paris: seuil, 1989. deleuze, giles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. di-nagy, zolt n ab. "the art of fiction ci: william gaddis." _paris review_ (1988): 71-2. gaddis, william. _jr_. 1975. new york: penguin, 1985. irigaray, luce. "the power of discourse and the subordination of the feminine." _this sex which is not one_. trans. catherine porter. ithaca: cornell up, 1985. 68-85. johnston, john. _carnival of repetition: gaddis's _the recognitions_ and postmodern theory_. philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, 1990. leclair, tom. _the art of excess: mastery in contemporary american fiction_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1989. matanle, stephen. "love and strife in william gaddis's _jr_." _in recognition of william gaddis_. 106-18. moore, stephen. _william gaddis_. boston: twayne, 1989. pecora, vincent. _self and form in modern narrative_. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1989. ronell, avital. _the telephone book: technology, schizophrenia, electric speech_. lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1989. said, edward w. "on originality." _the world, the text, and the critic_. cambridge: harvard up, 1983. 133. serres, michel. "michelet: the soup." _hermes: literature, science, philosophy_. ed. josue v. harari and david f. bell. johns hopkins up, 1982. 38. singer, alan. "the ventriloquism of history: voice, parody, dialogue." _intertextuality and contemporary american fiction_. ed. richard ellmann and charles feidelson, jr. new york: oxford up, 1965. weisenburger, steven. "paper currencies: reading william gaddis." _in recognition of william gaddis_. 147-61. howe, 'incloser', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-howe-incloser.txt incloser by susan howe temple university copyright (c) 1991 by susan howe, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) some of this essay has been published in _the politics of poetic form; poetry and public policy_, edited by charles bernstein, roof books. [what follows is an excerpt from a book to be published in 1991 by weaselsleeves press. --eds.] turned back from turning back as if a loved country faced away from the traveler no pledged premeditated daughter no cold cold sorrow no barrier *en-close.* see inclose. *in-close*, %v.t.% [fr. %enclos*; sp. it. %incluso%; l. %inclusus%, %includo%; %in% and %claudo% or %cludo%.] 1. to surround; to shut in; to confine on all sides; as to %inclose% a field with a fence; to %inclose% a fort or an army with troops; to %inclose% a town with walls. 2. to separate from common grounds by a fence; as, to %inclose% lands. 3. to include; to shut or confine; as to %inclose% trinkets in a box. 4. to environ; to encompass. 5. to cover with a wrapper or envelope; to cover under seal; as to %inclose% a letter or a bank note. *in-clos er*, %n%. he or that which encloses; one who separates land from common grounds by a fence. noah webster, %an american dictionary of the english language% *%incloser%* thomas shepard anagram: o, a map's thresh'd (wiii 513) the first and least of these books [by shepard] is called, %the sincere convert%: which the author would commonly call, %his ragged child% : and once, even after its %fourth edition%, wrote unto mr. giles firmin, thus concerning it: %that which is call'd%, the sincere convert: %i have not the book% : i %once saw it. it was a collection of such notes in a dark town in% england, %which one procuring of me, published them without my will, or my privity. i scarce know what it contains, nor do i like to see it; considering the many typographia, most absurd; and the confession of him that published it, that it comes out much altered from what was first written%. cotton mather, %magnalia christi americana% * * * my writing has been haunted and inspired by a series of texts, woven in shrouds and cordage of classic american 19th century works, they are the buried ones, they body them forth. the selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act. by choosing to install certain narratives somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry, i have enclosed them in an organization although i know there are places no classificatory procedure can reach where connections between words and things we thought existed break off. for me, paradoxes and ironies of fragmentation are particularly compelling. every statement is a product of collective desires and divisibilities. knowledge, no matter how i get it, involves exclusion and repression. national histories hold ruptures and hierarchies. on the scales of global power what gets crossed over? foreign accents mark dialogues that delete them. ambulant vagrant bastardy comes looming through assurance and sanctification. _thomas shepard:_ a long story of conversion, and a hundred to one if some lie or other slip not out with it. why, the secret meaning is, i pray admire me. (wii 284) when we move through the positivism of literary canons and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of capture. _brother crackbone's wife:_ so i gave up and i was afraid to sing because to sing a lie, lord teach me and i'll follow thee and heard lord will break the will of his last work. (c 140) * * * a printed book enters social and economic networks of distribution. does the printing modify an author's intention, or does a text develop itself? why do certain works go on saying something else? pierre macherey says in %a theory of literary production%: "the work has its beginnings in a break from the usual ways of speaking and writing--a break which sets it apart from all other forms of ideological expression" (52). roman jakobson says in "dialogue on time in language and literature": "one of the essential differences between spoken and written language can be seen clearly. the former has a purely temporal character, while the latter connects time and space. while the sounds we hear disappear, when we read we usually have immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow of words is reversible" (20). gertrude stein says in "patriarchal poetry": "they said they said./ they said they said when they said men./ many men many how many many many many men men men said many here" (123). emily dickinson writes to her sister-in-law susan gilbert dickinson: "moving on in the dark like loaded boats at night, though there is no course, there is boundlessness--" (l 871). strange translucencies: letters, phonemes, syllables, rhymes, shorthand segments, alliteration, assonance, meter, form a ladder to an outside state outside of states. rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling. _brother crackbone's wife:_ and seeing house burned down, i thought it was just and mercy to save life of the child and that i saw not after again my children there. and as my spirit was fiery so to burn all i had, and hence prayed lord would send fire of word, baptize me with fire. and since the lord hath set my heart at liberty. (c 140) * * * %there was the last refuge from search and death; so here.% (wii 195) i am a poet writing near the close of the 20th century. little by little sound grew to be meaning. i cross an invisible line spoken in the first word "then." every prescriptive grasp assertion was once a hero reading samson. there and here i encounter one vagabond formula another pure idea. to such a land. yet has haunts. the heart of its falls must be crossed and re-crossed. october strips off cover and quiet conscience. new england is the place i am. listening to the clock and the sun whirl dry leaves along. distinguishing first age from set hour. the eternal and spirit in them. a poem can prevent onrushing light going out. narrow path in the teeth of proof. fire of words will try us. grace given to few. coming home though bent and bias for the sake of why so. awkward as i am. here and there invincible things as they are. i write quietly to her. she is a figure of other as thin as paper. sorrow for uproar and wrongs of this world. you convenant to love. * * * _emily dickinson:_ master. if you saw a bullet hit a bird and he told you he was'nt shot you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word. (l 233) if history is a record of survivors, poetry shelters other voices. dickinson, melville, thoreau, and hawthorne guided me back to what i once thought was the %distant% 17th century. now i know that the arena in which scripture battles raged among new englanders with originary fury is part of our current american system and events, history and structure. _goodwife willows:_ then i had a mind for new england and i thought i should know more of my own heart. so i came and thought i saw more than ever i could have believed that i wondered earth swallowed me not up. and 25 matthew 5--foolish virgins saw themselves void of all grace. i thought i was so and was gone no farther. and questioned all that ever the lord had wrought, i'll never leave thee. i could now apprehend that yet desired the lord not to leave me nor forsake me and afterward i thought i was now discovered. yet hearing he would not hide his face forever, was encouraged to seek. but i felt my heart rebellious and loathe to submit unto him. (c 151) an english relation of conversion spoken at a territorial edge of america is deterritorialized and deterred by anxiety crucial to iconoclastic puritan piety. inexplicable acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and sanctification, over soil subsoil sea sky. each singular call. as the sound is the sense is. severed on this side. who would know there is a covenant. in a new world morphologies are triggered off. * * * %under the hammer of god's word.% (wi 92) during the 1630's and 40's a mother tongue (english) had to find ways to accommodate new representations of reality. helplessness and suffering caused by agrarian revolution in england, and changing economic structures all across europe, pushed members of various classes and backgrounds into new collectivities. for a time english protestant sects were united in a struggle against parliament, the jacobean and stuart courts, the anglican church, and archbishop laud. collective resistance to political and religious persecution pushed particular groups to a radical separatism. some sects broke loose from the european continent. their hope was to ride out the cry and accusation of kingdoms of satan until god would be all in all. _thomas shepard:_ and so, seeing i had been tossed from the south to the north of england and now could go no farther, i then began to listen to a call to new england. (gp 55) schismatic children of adam thought they were leaving the "wilderness of the world" to find a haven free of institutional structures they had united %against%. they were unprepared for the variability of directional change the wilderness they reached represented. even john winthrop complained of "unexpected troubles and difficulties" in "this strange land where we met with many adversities" (heimert 361). a bible, recently translated into the vernacular, was owned by nearly every member of the bay colony. it spoke to readers and non-readers and signified the repossession of the word by english. the old and new testaments, in english, were indispensible fictive realities connecting the emigrants to a familiar state-form, and home. though they crossed a wide and northern ocean scripture encompassed them. from the first, divinity was knotted in place. if the place was found wanting, and it was by many, a rhetoric had to be double-knotted to hold perishing absolutism safe. first-generation leaders of this hegira to new england tied themselves and their followers to a dialectical construction of the american land as a virgin garden pre-established for them by the author and finisher of creation. "come to me and you shall find rest unto your souls." to be released from bonds. . . absorbed into catastrophe of pure change. "flee, save your lives, and be like the heath in the wild." %here% is unappropriated autonomy. uncounted occupied space. no covenant of king and people. no centralized state. heavy pressure of finding no content. openness of the breach. "the gospel is a glass to show men the face of god in christ. the law is that glass that showeth a man his own face, and what he himself is. now if this glass be taken away. . ." (wi 74). _widow arrington:_ hearing dr. jenison, lamentations 3--let us search and turn to the lord--which struck my heart as an arrow. and it came as a light into me and the more the text was opened more i saw my heart. and hearing that something was lost when god came for searching. and when i came i durst not tell my husband fearing he would loath me if he knew me. and i resolved none should know nor i would tell. . . . (c 184-5) * * * on october 3, 1635, thomas shepard and his family arrived in boston harbor on the ship %defense.% "oh, the depths of god's grace here," he later wrote, "that when he [man] deserves nothing else but separation from god, and to be driven up and down the world as a vagabond or as dried leaves fallen from our god--" (gp 14). there is a direct relation between sound and meaning. early spiritual autobiographies in america often mean to say that a soul has found love in what the lord has done. "oh, that when so many come near to mercy, and fall short of it, yet me to be let in! caleb and joshua to be let into canaan, when they rest so near, and all perish" (wii 229). words sound other ways. i hear short-circuited conviction. truth is stones not bread. the reins are still in the hands of god. he has set an order but he is not tied to that order. sounds touch every coast and corner. he will pick out the vilest worthy never to be beloved. there is no love. i am not in the world where i am. in his journal mr. shepard wrote: "to heal this wound, which was but skinned over before, of secret atheism and unbelief" (gp 135). * * * %finding is the first act% (mbed 1043) after the beaver population in new england had been decimated by human greed, when roads were cut through unopened countryside, the roadbuilders often crossed streams on abandoned beaver dams, instead of taking time to construct wooden bridges. when other beaver dams collapsed from neglect, they left in their wake many years' accumulation of dead bark, leaves, twigs, and silt. ponds they formed disappeared with the dams, leaving rich soil newly opened to the sun. these old pond bottoms, often many acres wide, provided fertile agricultural land. here grass grew as high as a person's shoulder. without these natural meadows many settlements could not have been established as soon as they were. early narratives of conversion, and first captivity narratives in new england, are often narrated by women. a woman, afraid of not speaking well, tells her story to a man who writes it down. the participant reporters follow and fly out of scripture and each other. all testimonies are bereft, brief, hungry, pious, %authorized.% shock of god's voice speaking english. sound moves over the chaos of place in people. in this hungry world anyone may be eaten. what a nest and litter. a wolf lies coiled in the lamb. silence becomes a self. open your mouth. in such silence women were talking. undifferentiated powerlessness swallowed them. when did the break at this degree of distance happen? silence calls me himself. open your mouth. whosoever. not found written in the book of life. during a later age of reason 18th century protestant gentlemen signed the constitution in the city of philadelphia. these first narratives from wide open places re-place later genial totalities. * * * _thomas shepard:_ %object.% but christ is in heaven; how can i receive him and his love? %ans.% a mighty prince is absent from a traitor; he sends his herald with a letter of love, he gives it him to read; how can he receive the love of the prince when absent? %ans.% he sees his love in his letter, he knows it came from him, and so at a distance closeth with him by this means; so here, he that was dead, but now is alive, writes, sends to thee; o, receive his love here in his word; this is receiving "him by faith." (wii 599-600) in europe, protestant tradition since luther had maintained that no one could fully express her sins. in new england, for some reason hard to determine, protestant strictures were reversed. bare promises were insufficient. leaders and followers had to voice the essential mutability they suddenly faced. now the minister's scribal hand copied down an applicant for church membership's narrative of mortification and illumination. in %the puritan conversion narrative; the beginnings of american expression%, patricia caldwell points out that during the 1630's, in the bay colony, a disclaimer about worthlessness and verbal inadequacy had to be followed by a verbal performance strong enough to convince the audience congregation of the speaker's sincerity. new england's first isolated and independent clerics must have wrestled with many conflicting impulses and influences. rage against authority and rage for order; desire for union with the father and the guilty knowledge they had abandoned their own mothers and fathers. in the 1630's a new society was being shaped or shaping itself. oppositional wreckers and builders considered themselves divine instruments committed to the creation of a holy commonwealth. in 1636 the antinomian controversy erupted among this group of "believers, gathered and ordained by christ's rule alone. . . all seeking the same end, viz. the honor and glory of god in his worship" (vs 73). the antinomian controversy circled around a woman, anne hutchinson, and what was seen to be "the flewentess of her tonge and her willingness to open herselfe and to divulge her opinions and to sowe her seed in us that are but highway side and strayngers to her" (ah 353). thomas shepard made this accusation. paradoxically he was one of the few ministers who required women to recite their confessions of faith publicly, before the gathered congregation. mr. peters lectured anne hutchinson in court: "you have stept out of your place, %you have rather bine a husband than a wife and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.% and soe you have thought to carry all thinges in church and commonwealth, as you would and have not bine humbled for this" (ac 383). peters, cotton, winthrop, eliot, wilson, dudley, shepard, and other men, had stepped out of their places when they left england. she was humbled by them for their transgression. anne hutchinson was the community scapegoat. "the mother opinion of all the rest. . . . from the womb of this %fruitful opinion% and from the countenance here by given to immediate and unwarrented revelations 'tis not easie to relate, how many %monsters% worse than %african,% arose in the regions of %america% : but a %synod% assembled at %cambridge,% whereof mr. %shepard% was no small part, most happily crushed them all" (m iii87). _noah webster:_ scape-goat, %n.% [%escape% and %goat.%] in %the jewish ritual%, a goat which was brought to the door of the tabernacle, where the high priest laid his hands upon him, confessing the sins of the people, and putting them on the head of the goat; after which the goat was sent into the wilderness, bearing the iniquities of the people." %lev.% xvi. (wd 986) kenneth burke says in %a grammar of motives%, "dialectic of the scapegoat": "when the attacker chooses for himself the object of attack, it is usually his blood brother; the debunker is much closer to the debunked than others are. ahab was pursued by the white whale he was pursuing" (gm 407). rene girard says in %the scapegoat%, "what is a myth?" "terrified as they [the persecutors] are by their own victim, they see themselves as completely passive, purely reactive, totally controlled by this scapegoat at the very moment when they rush to his attack. they think that all initiative comes from him. there is only room for a single cause in their field of vision, and its triumph is absolute, it absorbs all other causality: it is the scapegoat" (43). i say that the scapegoat dialectic and mechanism is peculiarly open to violence if the attacker is male, his bloodbrother, female. kenneth burke and rene girard dissect grammars and mythologies in a realm of discourse structured, articulated, and repeated by men. _thomas shepard:_ we are all in adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. and although we made no particular choice of adam to stand for us, yet the lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man. (wi 24) * * * %a short story% _governor winthrop:_ she thinkes that the soule is annihilated by the judgement that was sentenced upon adam. her error springs from her mistaking of the curse of god upon adam, for that curse doth not implye annihilation of the soule and body, but only a dissolution of the soule and body. _mr. eliot:_ she thinks the soule to be nothinge but a breath, and so vanisheth. i pray put that to her. _mrs. hutchinson:_ %i thinke the soule to be nothing but light.% (ah 356) * * * %the erroneous gentlewoman% _governor winthrop:_ we have thought it good to send for you to understand how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we may reduce you that you may become a profitable member here among us. (ac 312 ) _thomas shepard:_ i confes i am wholy unsatisfied in her expressions to some of the errors. any hereticke may bring a slye interpretation upon any of thease errors and yet hould them to thear death: therfor i am unsatisfied. (ac 377) _anne hutchinson:_ my judgment is not altered though my expression alters. _brother willson:_ your expressions, whan your expressions are soe contrary to the truth. (ac 378) _noah webster:_ ex-pres sion, (eks presh un.) %n.% 1. the act of expressing; the act of forcing out by pressure, as juices and oils from plants. 2. the act of uttering, declaring, or representing; utterance; declaration; representation; as, an %expression% of the public will. (wd 426) _mrs. hutchinson:_ i doe not acknowledge it to be an error but a mistake. i doe acknowledge my expressions to be ironious but my judgment was not ironious, for i held befor as you did but could not express it soe. (ac 361) _noah webster:_ erro ne ous, %a.% [l. %erroneus,% from %erro,% to err.] 1. wandering; roving; unsettled. %they roam% %erroneous% and disconsolate. %philips%. 2. deviating; devious; irregular; wandering from the right course. (wd 408) %erroneous% circulation of blood %arbuthnot%. _anne hutchinson:_ %so thear was my mistake. i took soule for life.% (ah 360) _noah webster:_ noah is here called %man%. (wd xxiii) * * * %a woman's delusion% a seashore where everything. a tumult of mind. sackcloth and run up and down. every durable thread. mediator. there is rebellion. a man cannot look. the sacrifice of noah is a type. we dress our garden. there are properties. proof must be guiding and leading. stooped so far. bruising lash of the law. tender affections bear with the weak. an answerable wedge. but where is the work? why is the church compared to a garden? we are dark ages and young beginners. apprehending ourselves we want anything. these are words set down. surfaces. who has felt most mercy? preaching to stone. a thin cold dangerous realm. tidings. he appears. anoint. echoes and reverberations of love. anoint. washed and witnessing. peter denies him. anoint. whole treasures of looks to the heart. it is one thing to trust to be saved. selfpossession. she heard his question. never thought of it. no thought today. unapproachable december seems to be. the sun is a spare trope. shadow cast. moment of recognition. the conclusion of years can any force of intellect. that such ferocities are drowned by double act or immediate stroke. so much error. old things done away. name and that other in itself opposite. %expression.% i was born to make use of it. %schism.% what is the reason of it? %zeal.% an instance of our crime is blunder. %object.% it may be a question. %narration.% can there be a better pattern? %weary.% what do we imagine? %swearing.% if i had time and was not mortal. but he. scraps of predominance. %answer.% so there is some grievance driven out of the way. %objection.% relation to the speaker. speech to the wind. particulars. how shall i put on my coat? distance beyond comparison. sleep between two. * * * his name and office sweetly did agree, shepard by name, and in his ministry. (wi clxxix) _thomas shepard:_ and i considered how unfit i was to go to such a good land with such an unmortified, hard, dark, formal, hypocritical heart. (gp 61) thomas shepard was an evangelical preacher who comforted and converted many people. "as great a %converter% of %souls% as has ordinarily been known in our days" (miii 84). before he came to america, "although [he] were but a young man, yet there was that %majesty% and %energy% in his preaching and that %holiness% in his life, which was not ordinary": said cotton mather (miii 86). edward johnson called him "that gracious sweet heavenly minded minister . . . in whose soul the lord hath shed abroad his love so abundantly, that thousands of souls have cause to bless god for him" (77). thomas prince said he "scarce ever preached a sermon but someone or other of his congregation was struck in great distress and cried out in agony, what shall i do to be saved?" (gp 8). jonathan mitchell remembered shepard's cambridge ministry: "%unless it had been four years living in heaven, i know not how i could have more cause to bless god with wonder%" (c 13). mitchell also recalled a day when, "mr. shepard preached most profitably. that night i was followed with serious thoughts of my inexpressible misery, wherein i go on, from sabbath to sabbath, without god and without redemption" (wi cxxxi). thomas shepard called his longest spoken literary production, a series of sermons unpublished in his lifetime, %the parable of the ten virgins, opened and applied%. he married three times. two wives died as a result of childbirth. his three sons, thomas, samuel, and jeremiah, became ministers. the earnest persecutor of anne hutchinson and repudiator of "erroneous antinomian doctrines," confided to his %journal%: "i have seen a god by reason and never been amazed at god. i have seen god himself and have been ravished to behold him" (gp 136). the author of %the sound believer% also told his diary: "on lecture morning this came into my thoughts, that the greatest part of a christian's grace lies in mourning for the want of it" (gp 198). edward johnson pictured the minister of the cambridge first church as a "poor, weak, pale-complexioned man" (gp 8), whose physical powers were feeble, but spent to the full. he wept while composing his sermons, and went up to the pulpit "as if he expected there to give up his account of his stewardship" (wl clxxix). when thomas shepard died after a short illness, 25 august 1649, he was forty-three. "returning home from a council at %rowly%, he fell into a %quinsie%, with a symptomatical fever, which suddenly stop'd a %silver trumpet%, from whence the people of god had often heard %the joyful sound%" (m 88). some of his last words were: "lord, i am vile, but thou art righteous" (gp 237). cotton mather described the character of his conversation as "%a trembling walk with god%" (miii 90). * * * } %s% : _thomas shepard:_ thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserued thee, that thou art still aliue, & thy mother's woombe & the terrible seas haue not been thy graue; (%s% side of mb) probably sometime in 1646 thomas shepard wrote a brief autobiography entitled "t. { _my birth & life_: } s:" into one half of a small leatherbound pocket notebook. theatrical pen strokes by the protagonist shelter and embellish the straightforward title that sunders his initials. conversion is an open subject. or is it a question of splitting the author's name from its frame of compositional expression. the narrative begins with an energetic account of the author's birth "upon the 5 day of nouember, called the powder treason day, & that very houre of the day wher in the parlament should haue bin blown vp by popish preists. . . which occasioned my father to giue me this name thomas. because he sayd i would hardly beleeue that euer any such wickednes could be attempted by men agaynst so religious & good parlament" (mb 10). 74 pages later the autobiography breaks off abruptly, as it began, with calamity. this time the death in childbed of the author's second wife, here referred to by her husband, as "the eldest daughter of mr hooker a blessed stock" (cs 391). shepard married this eldest daughter of one of the most powerful theocrats in new england in 1637, the same year mrs. hutchinson was first silenced. unlike mrs. hutchinson, mrs. shepard was a woman of "incomparable meeknes of spirit, toward my selfe especially . . . being neither too lauish nor sordid in any things so that i knew not what was under her hands" (cs 392). when she died nine years and four male children later, "after 3 weekes lying in," two of her sons had predeceased her. on her deathbed this paragon of feminine piety and humility "continued praying vntil the last houre. . ld tho i vnwoorthy ld on woord one woord &c. & so gaue vp the ghost. thus______ god hath visited me & scourged me for my sins & sought to weane me from this woorld, but i have ever found it a difficult thing to profit even but a little by sorest and sharpest afflictions;" "t. { _my birth & life_: } s:" is littered with the deaths of mothers. the loss of his own mother when shepard was a small child could never be settled. creation implies separation. the last word of "t. { _my birth & life_: } s:" is "afflictions." 89 blank manuscript pages emphasize this rupture in the pious vocabulary of order. the reader reads empty paper. the absence of a definitive conclusion to shepard's story of his life and struggles is a deviation from the familiar augustinian pattern of self-revelation used by other english nonconformist reformers. %allegoria% and %historia% should be united in "t {_my birth & life_:} s": doubting thomas should transcend the empirical events of his times to become the figura of the good shepard but the repetitive irruption of death into life is mightier than this notion of enclosure. "woe to those that keep silent about god," warns st. augustine, in the %de magistro%, for where he is concerned, even the talkative are as though speechless" (rr 53). "silence reveals speech--unless it is speech that reveals silence" (tp 86), pierre macherey has written in %a theory of literary production%. state of the manuscript. %leaves that stood%. labor of elaboration. he is the god. a word is the beginning of every conversion. the purpose of editing is to reach the truth. mr. shepard's manuscript is a draft. shortcomings and error. the minister made no revisions in this unsettled account of his individual existence. rational corrections by editors lie in wait. %leaf of the story%. distortion will begin in the place of flight. _thomas shepard:_ he is the god who tooke me vp when my own mother dyed who loued me, & wn my stepmother cared not for me, & wn lastly my father also dyed & foorsooke me wn i was yong & little & could take no care for my selfe. (%t% side of mb) * * * %t% . { is it not hence@ (%t% side of mb p19) there is no title on the binding of the notebook that contains the manuscript. the paper is unlined. there are no margins. there is no front or back. you can open and shut it either way. over time it has been used in multiple ways by shepard and by others. thomas shepard, its first owner, used both ends of the book to begin writing. each side holds a personal history in reverse. on the side i have here called %s% is the uninterrupted interrupted %autobiography%. then there is the empty center. but i can turn the book over, so side %s% is inverted, and begin to read another narrative by the same author. now the protagonist's more improvisational commentary decenters the premeditated literary production of "t. { _my birth & life_: } s:". subjects are chosen then dropped. messages are transmitted and hidden. whole pages have been left open. another revelation or problem begins with a different meaning or purpose. although dates occur on either side, it is unclear which side was written first. we might call the creation on this side an understudy. i will call this %t% side %an inside narrative%. then there is the empty center. * * * %with honey within, with oil in public% : / %god's plot : the paradoxes of puritan piety being the autobiography & journal of thomas shepard% (1972) edited with an introduction by michael mcgiffert is the fourth published edition of shepard's %autobiography% and the standard reference for reading this text. mcgiffert, who tells us he restored some of the blunt vocabulary that had been expunged by two genteel nineteenth century editors, overlooked the structural paradox of the material object whose handwritten pages he laboriously and faithfully transcribed. mcgiffert's is the fourth edition of shepard's %autobiography%. an earlier verbatim text was edited by allyn bailey forbes for the colonial society of massachusetts, %publications%, xxvii (%transactions%, 1927-1930). both editors included sections from the %t% side of the manuscript book in their editions. forbes called the sections "random notes" and placed them last, under the title "appendix." mcgiffert also put them last, under the heading: "[the following material consists of notes written by shepard in the manuscript of the %autobiography% ]." neither editor saw fit to point out the fact that shepard left two manuscripts in one book separated by many pages then positioned them so that to read one you must turn the other upside down. both editors deleted something from each history. mcgiffert decided the financial transactions on side %s% were of no autobiographical importance. forbes included them, but buried shepard's hostile reference to john cotton on side %t% in a footnote to side %s%. shepard placed this cryptic list of accusations against his fellow saint alone on the recto side of leaf three. far from being a "random," or a footnote, the list provides a vivid half-smothered articulation of new england's savage intersectine genesis. possibly the colonial society of massachusetts balked at displaying this ambiguous sample of colonial ideology. mr. cotton: repents not: but is hid only. 1. wn mrs. hutchinsowas conuented he commeded her for all that shee did before her confinement & so gaue her a light to escape thorow the crowd wt honour, 3. he doth stiffly hold the reuelatioof our good estate still, without any sign of woord or work: / (mb 3) here is the correct order of the sections written by shepard in side %t%, or %an inside narrative%. 1. a roman being asked . 2. mr. cotton: repents not: but is hid only. 3. law. that the magistrate kisse the churchs feet: 4. my life: lord jesu pdo-: / euery day. 5. april: 4 1639: prep: for a fast. 6. is it not hence@ 7. an: 1639/ the good things i have received of the lord: (mb&gp&cs) shepard's list of "the good things i haue receiued of the lord" has fourteen sections and continues for eight pages. the nonconformist minister meant to give praise and thanksgiving to god, but images of panic, haste, and abandonment disunite the visible and spiritual. the lord is the word. he scatters short fragments. jonah cried out to the word when floods encompassed him. a sound believer hears old chaos as in a deep sea. a narrative refuses to conform to its project. side %s% ends abruptly with afflictions sent by god to "scourge" the author. side %t% also breaks off suddenly. the author is remembering his earlier ministry in earles colne, "a most prophane" english town. "here the lord kept me fro troubles 3 yeares & a halfe vntill the bishop laud put me to silence & would not let me liue in the town & this he did wn i looked to be made a shame & confusio to all:" (cs 395). from confusion in old england to affliction in new england. problematical type and antitype. everything has its use. "to tell them myself with my own mouth" (cs 352). some of the eighty-nine blank manuscript pages separating %t% and %s% have been written on since, by various mediaries. all of these men see a higher theme to side %s%. they follow its trajectory as if side %t% were an eccentric inversion. their additions form a third utterance of authority in the sincere convert's transitory division of t. from s: { life from birth: } on the second leaf (r) of side %t%, or %an inside narrative%, mr. shepard wrote down a single citation of discord. "a roman, being asked how he lived so long-answered--intus melle, foris oleo: / quid loquacius vanitate, ait augustinus." (mb %t% 1) forbes had the discretion to stay away from translating the nonsensical latin in his interpretation of the minister's script. "a roman being asked how he liud so long. answered intus melle, foris oleo: quid loquacior, vanitate, ait augustinus" (cs 397). mcgiffert agreed with forbes transcription. but in latin, "quid" and "loquacior" cannot agree with each other. this didn't stop mcgiffert from offering the following: "on the inside, honey; on the outside, oil. which babbled more of vanity? said augustine" (gp 77). the translation is grammatically incorrect. a more exact and enigmatic reading would be: "a roman being asked how he lived so long--answered with honey within with oil in public:/ what is more garrulous than vanity, said augustine." we will never know if this entry refers to john cotton, thomas shepard, or the human condition. it could be a questionable interpretation of any evangelical minister's profession. it could be a self-accusation or a reference to john cotton's preaching. it could be a note for a sermon or merely a sign that the author knows st. augustine. in the seventeenth century the word %oil%, used as a verb, often meant "to anoint." the holy oil of religious rites. five foolish virgins took their lamps but forgot the oil for trimming. they went to meet the bridegroom. the door was shut against them. "i say unto you i know you not." to %oil% one's tongue meant, and still means, to adopt or use flattering speech. "error, oiled with obsequiousness, . . . has often the advantage of truth.--1776" (oud). "their throat is an open sepulcher. one may apply this verse to greed, which is often the motive behind men's deceitful flattery. . . for greed is insatiably openmouthed, unlike sepulchres which are sealed up" (ap 57). st. augustine, %enarrationes%. "they that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy." jonah, to the lord. alone on the second leaf the citation assumes its own mystery. shepard's epigraph, if it is an epigraph to side %t%, or %an inside narrative%, is a dislocation and evocative contradiction in the structure of this two-sided book that may or may not be a literary work. in 1819, james blake howe turned the book upside down, probably to conform with the direction of the %autobiography%, and inscribed his own name, place of residence, and the date on the same page. * * * _mr. prince:_ though [shepard's] voice was low, yet so searching was his preaching, so great a power attending, as a hypocrite could not easily bear it, & it seemed almost irresistable. (%s% side of mb) %study in logology% _noah webster:_ oil is "an unctious substance expressed or drawn from various animal and vegetable substances. the distinctive characteristics of oil are inflammability, fluidity, and insolubility in water. oils are fixed and greasy, fixed and essential, volatile and essential." (wd 770) _kenneth burke:_ let us recall, for what it might be worth, that in his [st. augustine's] treatise "on the teacher" (%de magistro%), a discussion with his son on the subject of what would now popularly be called "semantics," he holds that the word %verbum% is derived from a verb meaning "to strike": (%a verberando%)--and the notion fits in well with the lash of god's discipline. see, for instance, %confessions% (xm vi), where he says he loves god because god had struck (%percussisti%) him with his word. (rr 50) * * * thomas shepard anagram: more hath pass'd (wiii 515) between 1637 and 1640, thomas shepard transcribed into another leatherbound pocket notebook, containing 190 pages, the testimonies of faith given in his church by 51 men and women who were applying for church membership. 30 pages of the little book are filled with sermon notes. he said of 1637 that god in that year alone "delivered the country from war with the indians and familists; who rose and fell together" (wi cxxvi). a canditate for membership in the congregation of the church of christ in cambridge in new england had been carefully screened by the church elders before he or she presented a personal "confession and declaration of god's manner of working on the soul" in public. canditates had to settle private accusations against them and present private testimonies first. sometimes the preliminary screening process took months. after a person had been cleared by the church authorities, he or she delivered the public confession, usually during the weekday meeting. the congregation then voted by a show of hands and their decision was supposed to be unanimous. during sunday service an applicant was finally accepted into church fellowship. the applicants, during this tumultuous time when it seemed dangerous to speak at all, especially to express spiritual enthusiasm, were from a wide social spectrum. a third of them could read or write. almost half of them were women. the speakers included four servants, two harvard graduates, traders, weavers, carpenters, coopers, glovers, and one sailor. most were concerned with farming and with acquisition of property. most applicants were in their twenties, some in their forties. most were starting to raise families. elizabeth cutter and widow arrington were in their sixties. each person believed that reception into church fellowship was necessary in order to gain economic and social advantage in the community. some later became rich; some are untraceable now through geneological records. both male servants who spoke gained financial and political freedom. two women in shepard's notebook were servants. geneological trace of them has vanished with their surnames. two applicants were widows who managed their own estates. the rest generally spent their days cleaning, sewing, marketing, cooking, farming, and giving birth to, then caring for, children. some later died in childbirth. mrs. sparhawk died only a month after shepard recorded her narrative. some survived their husbands by many years. thomas hooker, who became shepard's father-in-law in 1637, and was the previous minister of the cambridge parish, moved to connecticut partly because he felt the colony's admission procedures were too harsh. hooker insisted that confessions by women should be read aloud in public by men. governor winthrop in his %history of new-england%, citing feminine "feebleness," and "shamefac't modesty and melanchollick fearfulness," preferred that women's "relations" remain private; a male elder should read them before a select committee. shepard and one or two other ministers felt differently. %the confessions of diverse propounded to be received & were entertained as members%, shows that although shepard thought women should defer to their husbands in worldly matters, in his theology of conversion they were relatively independent. these narratives reflect this autonomy. some are as long or longer than those spoken by men. * * * thomas shepard anagram: arm'd as the shop. (wiii 515) notes written in the minister's hand on the flyleaf of the manuscript he called "%the confessions of diverse propounded to be received & were entertayned as members%." 1. you say some brethren cannot live comfortably with so little. 2. we put all the rest upon a temptation. lots being but little, and estates will increase or live in beggary. for to lay land out far off is intolerable to men; nearby, you kill your cattle. 3. because if another minister come, he will not have room for his company--religion--. 4. because now, if ever, is the most fit season; for the gate to be opened, many will come in among us, and fill all places, and no room in time to come at least, not such good room as now. and now you may best sell. 5. because mr. vane will be among our skirts. (gp 90) * * * matt.xviii.11. -"%i came to save that which was lost%." (wi 111) each confession of faith is an eccentric concentrated improvisation and arrest. each narrator's proper name forms a chapter heading. wives and servants are property. their names are appropriated for masculine consistency. goodman luxford his wife brother collins his wife brother moore his wife brother greene his wife brother parish's wife brother crackbone his wife the confession of john sill his wife john stedman his wife's confession brother jackson's maid written representation of the spirit is sometimes ineffectual; words only images or symbols of the clear sunshine of the gospel. "go to a painted sun, it gives you no heat, nor cherishith you not. so it is here, etc." often the minister surrounds a name with ink-scrawls and flourishes. flights or freezes. proof and chaos. immanent sorrow of one, incomplete victory of another. %use%, oh my unbelief. confessions are copied down quickly. translinguistic idiosyncracies infer but block consistency. a sound block will not be led. mistaken biblical quotations are transcribed and abandoned. as the sound is the sense is. few revisions civilize verbal or visual hazards and webs of unsettled sanctification. the minister's nearly microscopic handwriting is difficult to decipher. he uses a form of shorthand in places. a wild heart at the word shatters scriptural figuration. once again by correcting, deleting, translating, or interpreting the odd symbols and abbreviated signals, later well-meaning editors have effaced the disorderly velocity of mr. shepard's evangelical enthusiasm. for readability. * * * matt in this setdown the ques tion of c's desiples why they asks him not men ought sometimes to askes questions pacificaly when they hear the word upon sum occasion (written in another hand in%t% side of mb) writing speed of thought moving through dominated darkness (the privation) toward an irresistible confine possibly becoming woman. %the soul's immediate closing with the person% (wii 111) _barbary cutter:_ the lord let me see my condition by nature out of 16 of ezekiel and by seeing the holiness of the carriage of others about, her friends, and the more she looked on them the more she thought ill of herself. she embraced the motion to new england. though she went through with many miseries and stumbling blocks at last removed and sad passages by sea. and after i came hither i saw my condition more miserable than ever. (c 89) a narrator-scribe-listener-confessor-interpreter-judge reporter-author quickly changes person, character, country, and gender. walk darkly here, this is to cross scripture. these words are questions. compel them to come in when jonah is cast out of sight. he singles them out. his spirit goes home to them quiet as an ark above waters; rest and provender being desire to lay under lord. praying for him and hearing. words drift together. washed from her heart. many foolish pray from the mouth. some are condemned. blossoms fly up as dust. he will not leave. death can not. "in favor is life." this outline is extracted. now you will have him. she calls him so. some are asleep. ten virgins trim their lamps. my house is a waste. to doctrine to reason cry peace peace. this is that which fills a man. for this long ago corinthians, philippians, thessalonians: motives differ. we are his people we stumble. what a wandering path confinement is when angels had not fallen. pale clarity of day. why no heart. iniquities are not all i might "five were wise and five were foolish." these virgins once the doors were shut were surely kept out. glimpses. explication. what is acceptable? toother. miswritten he thoght. he thought. other redundancies. reduced to lower case these words are past. to the supposed sepulcher. purest virgin churches and professors, they took their lamps. what can we do? prevail again? against what do we watch? fiery law and tabernacles i beat the air. therefore as her and distancing. * * * "%went forth to meet the bridegroom%." (wii 111) _old goodwife cutter:_ i desired to come this way in sickness time and lord brought us through many sad troubles by sea and when i was here the lord rejoiced my heart. but when come i had lost all and no comfort and hearing from foolish virgins those that sprinkled with christ's blood were unloved. (c 145) _john sill his wife:_ oft troubled since she came hither, her heart went after the world and vanities and the lord absented himself from her so that she thought god had brought her hither on purpose to discover her. (c 51) _goodwife willows:_ and when husband gone, i thought all i had was but a form and i went to mr. morton and desired he would tell me how it was with me. he told me if i hated that form it was a sign i had more than a form. (c 150) _brother winship's wife:_ hearing 2 jeremiah 14 -two evils broken cisterns - i was often convinced by mr. hooker my condition was miserable and took all threatenings to myself. . . and i heard he that had smitten he could heal hosea 6. hearing -say to them that be fearful in heart, behold he comes mr. wells pull off thy soles off thy feet for ground is holy. and hearing exodus 34, forgiving iniquity, i thought lord could will was he willing. . . hearing whether ready for christ at his appearing had fears, city of refuge. . . hearing oppressed undertake for me eased. (c 147-9) _hannah brewer:_ and i heard that promise proclaimed lord, lord merciful and gracious etc. but could apply nothing. (c 141) _brother winship's wife:_ hearing of thomas' unbelief, he showed trust in lord forever for there is everlasting strength and stayed. (c 149) _goodwife usher:_ and i heard -come to me you that be weary - and lord turn me and i shall be turned and so when i desired to come hither and found a discontented heart and mother dead and my heart overwhelmed. and i heard of a promise -fear not i'll be with thee. and in this town i could not understand anything was said, i was so blind, and heart estranged from people of people. (c 183) _mrs. sparhawk:_ and then that place fury is not in me, let him take hold of my strength. . . . and she there was but two ways either to stand out or to take hold, and saw the promise and her own insufficiency so to do. and mentioning a scripture, was asked whether she had assurance. she said no but some hope. (c 68-9) _john stedman his wife:_ hearing mr. cotton out of revelation - christ with a rainbow on his head, revelation 10- i thought there was nothing for me. i thought i was like the poor man at the pool. (c 105) _goodwife grizzell:_ hearing mr. davenport on sea - he that hardened himself against the lord could not prosper - and i thought i had done so. but then he showed it was continuing in it and i considered though i had a principle against faith yet a kingdom divided cannot stand. (c 188-9) _widow arrington:_ and in latter end that sermon there was obedience of sons and servants then i thought--would i know? and i thought lord gave me a willing heart, etc. and they that have sons can cry--abba--father, and so have some stay and i wished i had a place in wilderness to mourn. (c 185-6) _brother jackson's maid:_ when christ was to depart nothing broke their heart so much as then. (c 121) * * * %walking alone in the fields% these first north american inside narratives cross the wide current of scripture. i meet them in the fields. they show me what rigor. i dare not pity. when she went to meet the bridegroom it was too early. then there is nothing to believe. scholars of the world, then there is no authority at all. the iron face of filial systems. the colonies of america break out. consider the parable of these wise and foolish virgins. they went to work to trim their lamps. what did the foolish say to the wise? that there is no difference? what a crossing. all their thoughts and searching. is that what love is? bewildered by history did they see iniquity? did they spend whole days and nights trimming? when was the filth wiped off? people of his pasture, does this give peace? sheep of his hand, is this the temptation of the place? mountains are interrupted by mountains. planets are not fixed. they run together. planets are globes of fire. imagination is a lense. pastness. we find by experience. a sentence tumbles into thought. a disturbance calls itself free. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes for _incloser_: patricia caldwell's study is concerned with how and when english voices begin to speak new-englandly. _the puritan conversion narrative_ demonstrates how careful examination and interpretation of individual physical artifacts from a time and place can change our basic assumptions about the new england pattern and its influence on american literary expression. this essay is profoundly indebted to her work. i have followed each quoted source in spelling and punctuation. in the books i used as sources, revisions, deletions, and spelling differences, have been modernized, and then again "modernized"; i have tried to preserve those changes as part of the form and content of my essay. someday i hope there will be facsimile versions of the "confessions," the "journal," and the "autobiography," with facing transcriptions in typeface. i have taken editorial liberties in places. it was my editorial decision to turn some sections of the narratives into poems. ----------------------------------------------------------- key for _incloser_ ac = _the antinomian controversy_: patricia caldwell. ah = anne hutchinson. c = thomas shepard's _confessions_. cs = the colonial society of massachusetts. thomas shepard's t. {_my birth and life_:} s: gp = _god's plot_: thomas shepard. l = _the letters of emily dickinson_. m = _magnalia christi americana_: cotton mather. mb = _manuscript book_: thomas shepard's _autobiography_. mbed = _emily dickinson's manuscript books_. ml = _the master letters of emily dickinson_. oud = _the oxford universal dictionary_. rr = _the rhetoric of religion_: kenneth burke. vs = _visible saints_: geoffrey nuttal. w = _the works of thomas shepard_. wd = _an american dictionary of the english language_: noah webster. ascii text cannot reproduce certain marks used in this work. we have used a @ to represent mirror-imaged (backward) question marks. we have used oto represent an o with a bar over it. --pmc eds. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited burke, kenneth. _a grammar of motives_. new york: george braziller, 1955. ---. _the rhetoric of religion: studies in logology_. boston: beacon p, 1961. caldwell, patricia. _the puritan conversion narrative: the beginnings of american expression_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1983. dickinson, emily. _the letters of emily dickinson_. ed. thomas h. johnson and theodora ward. cambridge: harvard up, 1958. ---. _the manuscript books of emily dickinson_. ed. ralph franklin. harvard up, 1981. girard, rene. _the scapegoat_. trans. yvonne freccero. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1986. hall, david d., ed. _the antinomian controversy, 1636-1638; a documentary history_. middletown, ct: wesleyan up, 1968. heimert, alan. "puritanism, the wilderness and the frontier." _new england quarterly_ (sep. 1953): 361-82. jakobson, roman. _verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time_. ed. krystyna pomorska and stephen rudy. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1985. johnson, edward. _wonder-working providence of sion saviour in new england_. ed. j. franklin jameson. (1912) 1969. macherey, pierre. _a theory of literary production_. trans. geoffrey wall. london: routledge, 1978. mather, cotton. _magnalia christi americana or, the ecclesiastical history of new england_. (london, 1702) hartford, 1820. melville, herman. _billy budd, sailor (an inside narrative)_. ed. harrison hayford and merton sealts. chicago: u of chicago p, 1962. nuttal, geoffrey f. _visible saints: the congregational way, 1640-1669_. oxford: blackwell, 1957. _the oxford universal dictionary_. london: amen house, 1933. shepard, thomas. "autobiography." ed. allyn bailey forbes. the colonial society of massachusetts, publications, xxvii. boston: transactions, 1927-1930. ---. _god's plot: the paradoxes of puritan piety, being the autobiography and journal of thomas shepard_. ed. michael mcgiffert. amherst: u of massachusetts p, 1972. ---. _manuscript book_. unpublished ms. the houghton libray, harvard u, cambridge. ---. _the works of thomas shepard_. ed. john a. albro. 3 vols. 1853. new york: ams, 1967. ---. _thomas shepard's "confessions." ed. george selement and bruce c. woolley. collections of the colonial society of massachusetts 58. boston: the society, 1981. stein, gertrude. "patriarchal poetry." _the yale gertrude stein_. ed. richard kostelanetz. new haven: yale up, 1980. webster, noah, ed. _an american dictionary of the english language_. [editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-[editor]-announcements.txt announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) every issue of _postmodern culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements free of charge. advertisements will also be published for a fee or on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. **** journal and book announcements: **** 1) denver quarterly 2) disclosure 3) _reach_ 4) substance 5) contention 6) arl/osap electronic journals directory 7) netweaver notebook 8) journal of ideas 9) _literacy acquisition_ **** symposia, discussion groups, calls for papers: **** 10) hungarian discussion group 11) mla 1991: session on "the use of electronic communications for research in literature and language." 12) call for papers: women & technology 13) call for papers: jerome charyn 14) hypertext '91 conference 15) screen-l, a new network discussion group on film and t.v. 16) national conference on computing and values 17) wmst-l, a new network discussion group on women's studies 18) crash, a network discussion group on postmodernism 1)-------------------------------------------------------------- denver -------- quarterly is pleased to publish prose poetry a special issue for spring 1991 featuring new work, translations, and commentaries by stephen berg * russell edson * clayton eshleman michael palmer * marjorie perloff susan stewart * james tate and many others please send me _____ copies of the prose poetry issue at $5 each. payment enclosed. ______________________________________________________ name ______________________________________________________ address ______________________________________________________ city ______________________________________________________ state zip or please begin my subscription to the denver quarterly ($15 per year) with the prose poetry issue. university of denver university park, denver, colorado 80208 * denver quarterly department of english 2)-------------------------------------------------------------- dis * klo' zher call for papers the editorial collective of disclosure is pleased to announce that it is now accepting submissions for its inaugural issues. disclosure is a social theory journal edited by graduate students at the university of kentucky, and is designed to provide a forum for multi-disciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the social sciences. by exploring alternative forms of discourse, our goal is to address contemporary intellectual concerns through a rigorous examination of history, space, and representation. as our title suggests, we encourage fresh perspectives that transcend the strictures and structures set in place by traditional disciplinary thought. submissions for the first two issues should address the following topics: issue 1 "rethinking contemporary mythologies" deadline 15 april 1991 issue 2 "the commodification of culture" deadline 15 december 1991 for our first issue, areas of possible inquiry might include: -> the myth of objectivity in social science research and writing -> the prioritization of historical myths over spatial... or vice versa -> the construction and reproduction of myth; methodologies of myth creation -> the desire to be bound by myth -> myths? the death of the subject, the death of the author -> the "end" of ideology, the cold war, rationality ? we accept submissions from all theoretical perspectives and all genres (essay, interview, review, poetry, and others), from both inside and outside the academy. disclosure is a refereed journal whose selections will be solely based on quality and originality. graduate students, faculty, and non-academics are equally encouraged to submit works. three copies of manuscripts formatted to mla guidelines, double spaced, and less than 10,000 words should be addressed to: disclosure 106 student center university of kentucky lexington, ky 40506-0026 bitnet submissions can be directed to <geg185@ukcc> 3)-------------------------------------------------------------- _reach_, research and educational applications of computers in the humanities, the newsletter of the humanities computing facility of the university of california, santa barbara, is now available in electronic form through anonymous ftp. ftp is a unix process which lets you transfer files from a distant computer to your own system. your local computer center staff should be able to provide you with information on using ftp from your own account. once you have ftp available, enter one or the other of the two following equivalent commands to gain access to the ucsb computer storing the files: ftp ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu or ftp 128.111.122.50 try the first version, and, if that doesn't work, then try the second. log on with the name "anonymous," and use your e-mail address as a password. next, move to the directory containing the files by entering the command: cd hcf now that you're in the correct directory, you can get a list of all the file names by entering the command: ls then, to transfer any of the files to your own system, enter the command: get filename first try transferring the file called "readme." it shows the contents of each of the files in the directory, and gives detailed instructions for the ftp process, including the complete log of an actual ftp session. finally, end your session with the "quit" command. if you encounter any difficulties in using the process, send me an e-mail note and i'll try to enlist the assistance of one of our local wizards. i'd be particularly interested to hear from those who find this archive a useful form of resource. regards, eric dahlin hcf1dahl@ucsbuxa.bitnet 4)-------------------------------------------------------------- "substance . . . gives us a sense of what is coming in the future." philip lewis, cornell university double issue 62/63 explores "thought and novation" guest editor, judith schlanger rene girard on innovation and repetition michel pierssens on novation astray and saul friedlander on the end of novation subscriptions (3 issues) 19.00/year individuals 65.00/year institutions single issue/6.95 double issue/10.00 foreign surface mail 8.00/year foreign air mail 20.00/year order from: substance journal division university of wisconsin press 114 north murray street madison, wi 53715 founded 1971 co-editors: sydney levy, michel pierssens s u b s t a n c e a review of theory and literary criticism 5)-------------------------------------------------------------- who will raise contention to new heights in 1991? indiana university press will. beginning in october 1991, contention: debates in society, culture, and science, edited by nikki keddie, will be published three times a year. the journal's emphasis will be on controversies, not for the sake of controversy but, rather, as a vehicle to understand what are considered central issues. early contributors will include eric hobsbawm, carl degler, susan suleiman, renato rosaldo, theda skocpol, linda gordon, carlo ginzburg, and hayden white. subscriptions are available to individuals for $25 and to institutions for $45 (outside the usa and canada, please add $10 for foreign surface post). for more information or to subscribe, please contact the journals division, indiana university press, 10th & morton streets, bloomington, in 47405, or call 812-855-9449 6)-------------------------------------------------------------- arl to produce directory of electronic publications as part of its keen commitment to promote networked academic journals and other serials, the association of research libraries (arl) plans to publish a directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and scholarly discussion lists/interest groups. these represent publications which are created and distributed principally for bitnet, internet, and any affiliated academic networks, largely for free. the directory will be available at the end of june. it will contain some 30 journal listings, about twice that number of newsletters, and over 1000 scholarly lists. its length is anticipated to be close to 200 pages. preliminary pricing estimates are approximately $10 $12 to members and double that for non-members. a final price and release date will be advertised in early june. editor of the journals/newsletters section is michael strangelove, university of ottawa. strangelove's list will be available through the ottawa university network sometime in june. editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups section is diane kovacs, kent state university libraries. for some months, she has maintained such listings as adjunct files to networked lists such as humanist, arachnet, lstown, and libref-l. each electronic "serial" will be described and clear directions about how to subscribe, send submissions, and access retrospectively will be provided. to ensure that the reader is given accurate and up-to-date information, entries have been supplied or verified by the editors themselves. the listings are compiled with the intention of providing the uninitiated networker with clear directions on how to navigate the sometimes puzzling world of electronic scholarship. arl is producing the printed directory because of calls virtually daily requesting such information. if there is indeed sufficient demand for the work, the directories will be updated and sold regularly. for those who prefer to retrieve electronically, the directory will point to the free and continuously up-to-date networked sources for this information, with complete access instructions. the arl is tentatively exploring options for funding to catalog/classify these materials, both to facilitate networked and paper access by subject and to "institutionalize" and "legitimize" new types of "serials." this effort would relate to activities of the coalition for networked information (cni) in identifying and maintaining directories of networked access and resources and to the work of individuals and institutions concerned with standards development for networked products and publications. for further information, to indicate your interest, or to place an order, contact: arlhq@umdc.bitnet (e-mail) ann okerson or christine klein association of research libraries 1527 new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc 20036 202-232-2466 (phone) 202-462-7849 (fax) 7)-------------------------------------------------------------- netweaver notebook netweaver is an electronic publication of the electronic networking association, and the winter issue deals with global networking issues. it is stored on comserve. below is part of the beginning of the magazine including its table of contents. at the end is directions on how to obtain the full electronic version from comserve. welcome to netweaver! the interactive, intersystem newsletter of the electronic networking association copyright(c) by electronic networking association (ena), 1990 netweaver may be freely ported to any online system. authors whose articles are published in netweaver and its companion print publications, ena update and netweaver printout! retain all copyrights. further publication in any other media requires permission of the author. volume 7 ---contents-- winter 1991 0. masthead and table of contents 1. introduction to this special "global perspectives" issue 2. in the beginning was the word .. by dave hughes 3. networking in argentina .. by eduardo salom 4. from the banks of tamagawa river .. by mary lou rebelo 5. getting the kids online .. by odd de presno 6. online for a smokefree planet .. by nancy stefanik 7. the maturation of the matrix .. by john s. quarterman 8. ena seattle 1991 get ready for f-t-f! to get a copy yourself, send the command: send netweave winter91 on the first line in the body of an electronic mail message to: comserve@rpiecs (bitnet) or comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu (internet). 8)-------------------------------------------------------------- papers appearing in volume 2 number 1 of the journal of ideas thought contagion as abstract evolution aaron lynch culture as a semantic fractal: sociobiology and thick description charles j. lumsden department of medicine, university of toronto toronto, ontario, canada m5s 1a8 modeling the distribution of a "meme" in a simple age distribution population: i. a kinetics approach and some alternative models matthew witten center for high performance computing university of texas system, austin, tx 78758-4497 the principia cybernetica project francis heylighen, cliff joslyn, and valentin turchin the principia cybernetica project brain and mind: the ultimate grand challenge elan moritz the institute for memetic research p. o. box 16327, panama city, florida 32406 the journal of ideas is an archival forum for discussion of 1) evolution and spread of ideas, 2) the creative process, and 3) biological and electronic implementations of idea/knowledge generation and processing. the journal of ideas, issn 1049-6335, is published quarterly by the institute for memetic research, inc. p. o. box 16327, panama city florida 32406-1327. >----------for more information -------> e-mail requests to elan moritz, editor, at moritz@well.sf.ca.us. 9)-------------------------------------------------------------- literacy acquisition a contribution of c&c to the international literacy year (ily) edited by marc spoelders 1990. j. van in. contents v marc spoelders introduction vii nancy torrance and david r. olson children's understanding of ambiguity and interpretation 1 hazel francis strategies and rules in learning to read and spell 17 neil mercer and derek edwards developing shared understanding: theories, pedagogies and educational practice 31 lut van damme and marc spoelders metalinguistic awareness and early reading. a longitudinal study 43 denis apotheloz the development of cohesion in writing: preliminary research on anaphoric procedures and thematic planning in texts by children 53 regine pierre, danielle bourcier, anne hudon and stella noreau acquisition of the system of determiners by early readers 71 monique boekaerts text structure, reading rate and reading comprehension 91 michel page methodological issues in testing comprehension of texts 113 helene poissant inferential processes in the comprehension of short narratives 129 filip loncke sign language and reading in young deaf children 147 raymond duval representation of texts: problems for research and prospects for education 161 philip yde and marc spoelders cohesion and narrative text quality. a developmental study with beginning writers 171 gissi sarig and shoshana folman metacognitive awareness and theoretical knowledge in coherence production 195 liliana tolchinsky landsmann early literacy development: evidence from different orthographic systems 223 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * literacy acquisition price belgium 2300 bef, including forwarding charges other countries 2500 bef, including forwarding charges aila and c&c members only pay in belgium: 2070 bef in other countries: 2250 bef this sum has to be paid in advance to the following account: 550-3130600-15 publishing house j. van in grote markt 39 b 2500 lier belgium all bank-costs, at home and abroad, are chargeable to the customer. 10)------------------------------------------------------------- announcement of hungarian discussion group a new electronic discussion group on hungarian issues is now open to scholars and students from all disciplines. although the working language of the group is english, contributions in other languages will be accepted and posted. however, they may not be understood by a significant proportion of the membership. electronic mail connections have already been established with three hungarian universities: budapest technical university, budapest university of economic sciences, and eotvos lorand university. the group and list server addresses of the new group, based at the university of california, santa barbara, are: hungary@ucsbvm.bitnet listserv@ucsbvm.bitnet to subscribe to the discussion group, send an e-mail message, without any subject, to the list server address, listserv@ucsbvm.bitnet, containing the single line: subscribe hungary "your name" with your own name, not your e-mail address, inserted in place of the phrase "your name," without quotes. once you have subscribed, any messages which you want to circulate to the group should be sent to the group address, hungary@ucsbvm.bitnet. the list is moderated, and will be edited by: eric dahlin hcf2hung@ucsbuxa.bitnet 11)------------------------------------------------------------- mla session on "the use of electronic communications for research in literature and language." the mla committee on computers and emerging technology will sponsor a session on "the use of electronic communications for research in literature and language." chair: otmar foelsche, dartmouth college (otmar.k.e.foelsche@mac.dartmouth.edu) director, language resource center, dc, hanover nh a. daniel brink, arizona state university and donald ross, university of minnesota, minneapolis: "planning a conference by e-mail: plusses and pitfalls" (atdxb@asuacad.bitnet) and (umcomp@ux.acs.umn.edu) db, associate dean for technology integration, college of liberal arts and sciences, asu, tempe, az 85287 dr, english and composition, u of m, minneapolis, mn 55455 b. john unsworth, eyal amiran, and elaine orr, editors, _postmodern culture_: "patterned responses to the electronic journal" (pmc@ncscuvm.bitnet) box 8105, department of english, north carolina state university, raleigh, nc 27695 c. elaine brennan, brown university, co-editor, humanist: "the humanist bulletin board" (elaine@brownvm.brown.edu) women writers project, box 1841, brown university, providence, ri 02912 speakers will treat the history of their projects, current status, and future plans. a handout on some of the technical issues will help others who wish to emulate their projects. 12)------------------------------------------------------------- c a l l f o r p a p e r s studies in technological innovation and human resources (vol. 4) women and technology urs e. gattiker editor technological innovation and human resources faculty of management the university of lethbridge lethbridge, alberta canada t1k 3m4 e-mail: gattiker2@hg.uleth.ca fax: (403) 329-2038 volume 1: strategic and human resource issues volume 2: end-user training volume 3: technology-mediated communication the upcoming volume 4, women and technology will particularly include papers that are: international, interdisciplinary, theoretical, empirical, macro, and micro. deadline for submission is october 1, 1991. if you would like to discuss your topic, please call urs e. gattiker at (403) 320-6966 (mountain standard time), or send a message via the e-mail address above. 13)------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers: charyn collection patrick o'donnell is in the process of collecting essays on and assessments of the work of jerome charyn for a special joint issue of the _review of contemporary fiction_, to be published in 1992. if you have some work or commentary on charyn which you would like to put under consideration for this special issue, please contact o'donnell at the following address after april 15: nauklerstrasse 5 7400 tubingen federal republic of germany drafts of submissions to the collection must be send to o'donnell no later than july 15, 1991, but please contact him soon after april 15 if you plan to submit something for the collection, describing the nature and length of your planned contribution. 14)------------------------------------------------------------- hypertext '91 3rd acm conference on hypertext december 15-18, 1991 san antonio, texas hypertext '91 is an international research conference on hypertext. the acm hypertext conference occurs in the united states every second year in alternation with echt, the european conference on hypertext. hypertext systems provide computer support for locating, gathering, annotating, and organizing information. hypertext systems are being designed for information collections of diverse material in heterogeneous media, hence the alternate name, hypermedia. hypertext is by nature multi-disciplinary, involving researchers in many fields, including computer science, cognitive science, rhetoric, and education, as well as many application domains. this conference will interest a broad spectrum of professionals in these fields ranging from theoreticians through behavioral researchers to systems researchers and applications developers. the conference will offer technical events in a variety of formats as well as guest speakers and opportunities for informal special interest groups. for more information: hypertext '91 conference email: ht91@bush.tamu.edu john j. leggett, general chair hypertext '91 conference hypertext research lab department of computer science texas a&m university college station, tx 77843 usa voice: 409 845-0298 fax: 409 847-8578 email: leggett@bush.tamu.edu janet h. walker, program chair hypertext '91 conference digital equipment corporation cambridge research lab one kendall square, bldg 700 cambridge, ma 02139 usa voice: 617 621-6618 fax: 617 621-6650 email: jwalker@crl.dec.com 15)------------------------------------------------------------- film and tv studies discussion list screen-l on listserv@ua1vm or listserv@ua1vm.ua.edu screen-l is an unmoderated list for all who study, teach, theorize about or research film and television--mostly in an academic setting, but not necessarily so. screen-l ranges from the abstract (post-post-structuralist theory) to the concrete (roommate match-ups for the next scs/ufva conference). pedagogical, historical, theoretical, and production issues pertaining to film and tv studies are welcomed. to subscribe to screen-l, send the following command to listserv@ua1vm (or listserv@ua1vm.ua.edu) via e-mail or interactive message (tell/send): subscribe screen-l <your_full_name> "<your_full_name>" is your name as you wish it to appear on the list. for example: subscribe screen-l budd boetticher archives of screen-l and related files are stored in the screen-l filelist. to receive a list of files send the command index screen-l to listserv@ua1vm (or listserv@ua1vm.ua.edu). owner: jeremy butler jbutler@ua1vm jbutler@ua1vm.ua.edu telecommunication & film dept the university of alabama at tuscaloosa 16)------------------------------------------------------------- n c c v / 91 the national conference on computing and values will convene august 12-16, 1991, in new haven, ct. n c c v / 91 is a project of the national science foundation and the research center on computing and society. specific themes (tracks) include computer privacy & confidentiality computer security & crime ownership of software & intellectual property equity & access to computing resources teaching computing & values policy issues in the campus computing environment the workshop structure of the conference limits participation to approximately 400 registrants, but space *is* still available at this time (mid-may). confirmed speakers include ronald e. anderson, daniel appleman, john perry barlow, tora bikson, della bonnette, leslie burkholder, terrell ward bynum, david carey, jacques n. catudal, gary chapman, marvin croy, charles e. m. dunlop, batya friedman, donald gotterbarn, barbara heinisch, deborah johnson, mitch kapor, john ladd, marianne lafrance, ann-marie lancaster, doris lidtke, walter maner, diane martin, keith miller, james h. moor, william hugh murray, peter neumann, george nicholson, helen nissenbaum, judith perolle, amy rubin, sanford sherizen, john snapper, richard stallman, t. c. ting, willis ware, terry winograd, and richard a. wright. the registration fee is low ($175) and deeply discounted air fares are available into new haven. to request a registration packet, please send your name, your email and paper mail addresses to ... bitnet maner@bgsuopie.bitnet internet maner@andy.bgsu.edu (129.1.1.2) or, by fax ... (419) 372-8061 or, by phone ... (419) 372-8719 (answering machine) (419) 372-2337 (secretary) or, by regular mail ... professor walter maner dept. of computer science bowling green state university bowling green, oh 43403 usa with best wishes, terrell ward bynum and walter maner, conference co-chairs 17)------------------------------------------------------------- wmst-l electronic forum for women's studies wmst-l, an electronic forum or listserv discussion group for women's studies, has just been established. its purpose is to facilitate discussion of women's studies issues, especially those concerned with research, teaching, and program administration, and to publicize relevant conferences, job announcements, calls for papers, publications, and the like. it is hoped that wmst-l will also serve as a central repository for course materials, curriculum proposals and projects, bibliographies, and other files related to women's studies. to subscribe to wmst-l, send the following command via e-mail or interactive message to listserv@umdd (bitnet) or listserv@umdd.umd.edu (internet): subscribe wmst-l your full name. for example: subscribe wmst-l jane doe subscribers will receive via e-mail all messages that are sent to wmst-l. messages for distribution to subscribers (questions, replies, announcements, etc.) should be sent to wmst-l@umdd (bitnet) or wmst-l@umdd.umd.edu (internet). please note: only messages for distribution should be sent to wmst-l; all commands (subscribe, signoff, review, etc.) should go to listserv. if you have questions or would like more information about wmst-l, or if you have materials that you would be willing to put on file, please contact joan korenman, women's studies program, u. of maryland baltimore county, baltimore, md 21228-5398 usa. phone: (301)-455-2040. e-mail: korenman@umbc (bitnet) or korenman@umbc2.umbc.edu (internet). 18)------------------------------------------------------------- c r a s h a mailing list is available for people to discuss art and technology in a postmodern context. it's named crash, after the jg ballard novel. so far over 40 people have signed up. topics have included: survival research laboratories, ws burroughs, semiotics, tinguely, the artificial life workshop, re/search magazine, simulacra, "technology-not-for-its-own-sake," virtual realities, duchamp, chris burden, beth b's films, baudelaire, etc. people are encouraged to sign up and discuss any aspect of postmodern culture they feel necessary. subscription requests to: sg1q+crash-request@andrew.cmu.edu submissions to: crash+@andrew.cmu.edu mail is automatically forwarded to the rest of the list. crash moderator: simon gatrall sg1q+@andrew.cmu.edu duyfhuizen, '"a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt": the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_', postmodern culture v2n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n1-duyfhuizen-a.txt "a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt": the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_ by bernard duyfhuizen <pnotesbd@uwec> univ. of wisconsin--eau claire _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.1 (september, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by bernard duyfhuizen, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. no matter how much we work on _gravity's rainbow_, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis--that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. to talk about bianca is to talk about ilse and gottfried; to try to describe the zone is to enumerate all the images of %other% times and places that are repeated there. pynchon's novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being--or, more precisely, for %the originally replicative nature of being%. --leo bersani [1] leo bersani is right about _gravity's rainbow_'s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the "dazzling argument" in the particular case of bianca, we find not only more than bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading thomas pynchon's postmodern text. this strategy rests on the formal element of the "reader-trap": stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. rather than reducing a reader-trap to a "distinct unit of meaning," readers must adopt for _gr_ a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. the reader must engage the play of %differance% encoded in _gr_'s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure. [2] what makes bianca a reader-trap? first, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the "tales of the shadow-children," a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about bianca, ilse pokler, gottfried, and by analogy tyrone slothrop. she becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). this double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when slothrop, under the alias of max schlepzig (bianca's putative father), reenacts with margherita erdmann the moment of bianca's conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie _alpdrucken_ (393-97). as a shadowor movie-child, bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. bianca's mother, for instance, sees "bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure...clearly yes very clearly in gottfried, the young pet and protege of captain blicero" (484). as readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability. [3] second, bianca is coded as one of pynchon's examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism: of all her putative fathers--max schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, franz pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that _alpdrucken_ night, on the other--bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying %sure i know them%, omitted, chuckling %count me in%, unable, thinking %probably some hooker%... she favors you, most of all. you'll never get to see her. so somebody has to tell you. (472; bracketed ellipses added)^1^ as is often the case in _gr_, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address--through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to pokler that could not yet be part of slothrop's consciousness--the text's male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. i will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.^2^ indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of pynchon's writing. the question--who are the narratees of this text?--cannot be left unanswered. [4] lastly, bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with slothrop. if _gr_ has, besides the v-2 rocket, a "central" protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, slothrop is it. bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to gottfried's launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the "lost girls"--the zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret (567)--who haunt his journey through the zone. bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling--a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping--as she maps onto darlene, katje borgesius, geli tripping, and even her own mother, margherita. the text underwrites this process of mapping when bianca is viewed as "silver" (484), the same color as darlene's star on slothrop's map (19) and as her mother's "silver and passive [screen] image" (576), or with greta's (margherita's) mapping onto or merging into "gretel" and finally "katje" within blicero's sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto slothrop's relations with both women. bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in slothrop's behavior--he is finally freed of the %will to erection% that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by laszlo jamf. paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate %his own% identity, bianca's loss prefigures slothrop's ultimate dissolution--indeed, after his encounter with bianca, "slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter" (509). his experience with bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form slothrop's and bianca's textual representations. [5] bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of _gr_ (3.14-15). we meet her aboard the _anubis_ as seen through slothrop's eyes: he gets a glimpse of margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. he knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. why do these things have to keep coming down on him? he can see the obit now in _time_ magazine--died, rocketman, pushing 30, in the zone, of lust. (463) the text's focalization through slothrop codes bianca as a fetish, a "lolita" if you will, and we later learn these heels are "spiked" (466), and the %silk% stockings are connected to "a tiny black corset" with "satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework" (469). as the narrator comments later--in a passage metonymically structured to connect bianca, margherita, blicero, the s-gerat (a rocket part slothrop has been seeking), laszlo jamf, imipolex (the plastic from which the s-gerat was made), and the casino hermann goering (where slothrop lost katje)--"looks like there are sub-slothrop needs they know about, and he doesn't" (490). [6] yet from a different perspective, bianca's fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother's outfit during her first encounter with slothrop, when they reenact bianca's conception on the torture-chamber set of the film _alpdrucken_: all margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. how the penises of western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! it's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...%singularities%! (396) but the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: "do all these points imply, like the rocket's, an annihilation? [. . .] and what's waiting for slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of greta's stockings here?" (396-97).^3^ what's waiting first is "his latest reminder of katje"--whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: "between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life," katje told slothrop (209)--but more significantly, it is bianca who waits to teach slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation. [7] slothrop's vulnerability "to pretty little girls" is foregrounded early in _gr_ when he comforts a little girl rescued from a v-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling "very faintly, and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a shirley temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they'd found her down in the middle of" (24). the moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in pynchon's fiction, figures as slothrop's primal response, and while in london, before his paranoia has gone out of control, slothrop can care directly. once he reaches the zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll's hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto katje: "he turned back to her to ask if she really was katje, the lovely little queen of transylvania. but the music had run down. she had vaporized from his arms" (283). both these children prefigure bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with bianca. neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading. [8] however, before bianca takes center stage, slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. but what he hears sounds like the voice of the text's narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text: "greta was meant to find oneirine. each plot carries its signature. some are god's, some masquerade as god's. this is a very advanced kind of forgery. but still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. it is only more complex. the members have names, like the archangels. more or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. but those names are not magic. that's the key, that's the difference. spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, %they do not work%." "that silly bitch," observes a voice at slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464) if the "silly bitch" can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this "voice" may be, for a brief and estranged moment, pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. we soon discover that the voice belongs to miklos thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: margherita's husband, bianca's stepfather, and--though we don't know it yet- witness to the firing of rocket 00000. indeed, thanatz begins to tell slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of gottfried and blicero, but.... [9] "about here they are interrupted by margherita and bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child" (465). margherita forces bianca to perform a shirley temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking--which triggers one of _gr_'s set pieces: the %everything's connected% orgy on board the _anubis_. bianca's representation of "shirley temple," in contradistinction to that "shirley temple smile" that warmed slothrop's heart in london, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through slothrop's point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader's erotic tolerance. clearly bianca's exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of katje's exploitation by blicero or pointsman, or bianca's mothers by von goll for the film _alpdrucken_. [10] the public humiliation of bianca is one of _gr_'s many moments of theatre. indeed, slothrop wonders whether "somebody [is] fooling with the lights" as bianca "grunts" through her shirley temple routine (466). the lights are, in fact, being fooled with: slothrop's perceptual creation of bianca as an overtly fetishized shirley temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. slothrop's specular projection of bianca as infantile nymphet is a %mise en abyme% for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre--focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator--helps to mask. [11] throughout _gr_ pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. on the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (slothrop under surveillance, for instance). the public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with "pornography," but only at the level of story (although occasionally pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. although "pavlovian conditioning" may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in _gr_ is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act--the ubiquitous "they" who operate just outside of view. this public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts--but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of slothrop and bianca makes clear. [12] when slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. this private "performance" for slothrop nearly closes the "distance" between himself and bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (slothrop, impersonating max schlepzig, has already reenacted bianca's conception). but bianca's gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. she suggests they "hide," "get away," quit the game which for slothrop has ceased to be fun. for him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt--to be offered "love" is more than the zone will allow. so slothrop "creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites" (470). in leaving bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears "ensign morituri's story" (474-79), but by then it is too late. [13] importantly, before he leaves bianca, slothrop's consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something "oh, kind of %funny% happens [. . .]. not that slothrop is really aware of it now, while it's going on--but later on, it will occur to him that he was--this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, %inside his own cock%" (469-70). of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts slothrop's "later" thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. because bianca's character is primarily focalized through slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. bianca may "exist" (470) for slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination. [14] if we grant that we cannot know bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure--in a perfectly pynchonian paradox--of the certainty of our fantasy? it turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive bianca and why many critics have misread her. more significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in _gr_. * * * * * when bianca first appears, slothrop calculates her age--an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time--as "11 or 12." many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a "preadolescent bianca" by its descriptive references to her: "the little girl," "a slender child," "little bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat," and her "baby breasts working out the top of her garment" (469-70). bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by slothrop and other men in child-like terms. from the very first references to slothrop's map--"perhaps the %girls% are not even real" (19; emphasis added)--to his meeting again with darlene (115), to his first sight of katje (186), to his first awareness of geli tripping (289), to trudi and magda (365), to stefania procalowska and others aboard the _anubis_ (460, 466-68), and eventually to solange/leni pokler (603) slothrop encounters females as girls. even margherita, who is clearly older than slothrop, is introduced as "his child and his helpless lisaura" (393).^4^ in the semiosis of reading, these "girls" engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the zone which finally come to a crisis in slothrop's encounter with bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading. [15] what does this infantilization signify? could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? one reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. if we accept bianca's age as slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: bianca's erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of slothrop's lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. on the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from slothrop's fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, bianca symbolizes the "child of the war," the darling of those permitted to view goebbel's private film collection (461). she is one of pynchon's most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. however, if we dislocate our reading and consider bianca through cross-mapping with ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to "11 or 12."^5^ [16] if uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by slothrop's peculiar point of view, bianca's disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, mchoul and wills state that "the fate of bianca highlights the problem with reading _gravity's rainbow_.... one will never know just what does happen to her" (31).^6^ bianca has told slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next "appearance" is brief and problematic: slothrop %will think% he sees her, %think% he has found bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the _anubis_ starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, %slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines% and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added) what actually happens here is hard to say--slothrop does end up over the side, but does bianca? slothrop only "think[s]" he sees her--she is becoming insubstantial already--and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. but is it she who "vanishes under chalky lifelines" or slothrop who "slip[s] . . . under" while she "vanishes"?^7^ as mchoul and wills note, it "hinges on how one reads the syntax" (31). [17] all %life lines% in _gr_ are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind--especially slothrop's- and in the text. the traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in _gr_, we read: "you will want cause and effect. all right. thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took slothrop from the _anubis_" (663). bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality--"the same storm"--for slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had "flipped" him over the side. however, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, bianca's absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the _anubis_ either. [18] bianca's traces always test our readerly desire for causality. after frau gnahb rescues slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and "bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. 'you're really in that europe now,' she grins, hugging him. 'oh my goo'ness,' slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like shirley temple's, out of his control. it sure is embarrassing. he wakes to sunlight" (492-93). momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief "thinking" that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably slothrop's and he has adopted her shirley temple voice. something's not right, and when "he wakes," he is alone, and we see this trace of bianca as a dream. later that morning, when slothrop meets von goll, he "fills von goll in on margherita, trying not to get personal. but some of his anxiety over bianca must be coming through. von goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. 'there now. i wouldn't worry. bianca's a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess'" (494). meant to "comfort" slothrop, von goll's characterizations allow slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. given the text's compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this bianca/slothrop escape fantasy with the ilse/pokler escape fantasy (420-21). in that startling scene at zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of "amazing incest" that precedes the escape fantasy--a reading that would seriously undermine pokler's eventual moral position in the text. [19] the most disturbing trace of bianca re-enters the narrative when slothrop returns to the _anubis_ to pickup a "package" for von goll (530-32).^8^ as he returns to the site of his tryst with bianca, slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. motivated by a return of his repressed "eurydice-obsession" (472), slothrop seemingly discovers the dead bianca's body, but like orpheus he cannot bring his eurydice back from the dead. but does he discover her? nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force slothrop to confront his betrayal of bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats brigadier puddings ritual approach to the mistress of the night (katje)--"the pointed toe of a dancing pump," the "ladder," "stiff taffeta," "slippery satin," "hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger." he rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. they smell of the sea. he turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. no matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...%of%... (531) [20] "when the lights come back on" (532) (recall slothrop's earlier concern that someone was "fooling" with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events slothrop experienced--indeed, i would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. the confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. but the text never deploys the signifier "bianca" in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the "presence" of bianca's body. "when the lights come back on," slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the "brown paper bundle" he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a %mise en abyme% for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. the scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: "but it's what's dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight...and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?" (532). as with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of bianca and slothrop's tryst: "in the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red" (468). but can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder "back up and out," be "really as empty" as it looks? the reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable--to paraphrase tchitcherine much later in the text: "[it] could be anything. %i% don't care. but [it's] only real %at% the points of decision. the time between doesn't matter" (702). bianca last "existed" for slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he "lunge[s]" to save her (491) only to lose her--does she %exist% elsewhere? [21] many readers read mimetically the scene of slothrop's return to the engine-room of the _anubis_, stating that he does in fact discover bianca's body; some are even convinced that margherita has murdered her daughter. yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around slothrop's anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. it misses the text's implicit questioning of western culture's perverse fetishization of the child. it is no stray detail that slothrop dreams of a conversation with the white rabbit of _alice in wonderland_ when bianca comes to him--as henkle observes, "we all know about lewis carroll's supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what shirley temple's fetching little dance steps aroused" (282).^9^ moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of bianca's decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene. [22] after slothrop's return to the _anubis_, bianca's trace enters the narrative only four more times. the first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes slothrop, now headed for cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. the seventh wish is "let bianca be all right [. . .]" (553). either slothrop has no certainty of bianca's fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the bianca wish with "[. . .] a-and--let me be able to take a shit soon." the text seems to be laying a trap for the freudian reader--the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of "perfume and shit" that slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)--who may want to argue that bianca's memory has become cathected with slothrop's anal fixation. can any reader ever forget slothrop's hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? that drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of pointsman's involvement, connects back to slothrop's childhood conditioning by laszlo jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, jamf may have been displacing the smell of slothrop's own feces with the smell of imipolex--if indeed that was the stimulus used).^10^ i suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading _gr_ through freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. interestingly, however, the bianca wish is preceded by a significant slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: "let that discharge be waiting for me in cuxhaven." this wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads slothrop almost into pointsman's plot for his castration and to his last dream of bianca. [23] the second trace of bianca occurs when slothrop meets franz pokler: well, but not before [pokler] has told something of his ilse and her summer returns, enough for slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against bianca's dead flesh.... ilse, fathered on greta erdmann's silver and passive image, bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? she's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77) this time slothrop's memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is "taken again by the nape and pushed against bianca's dead flesh." this passage appears to confirm bianca's death. however, while %we% come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of ilse and bianca, for slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of pokler's significance to the s-gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: "how could they not be the same child?" moreover, "she" (bianca/ilse) will now, if not already, "work among your [slothrop/pokler/the reader's] saddest dreams." [24] the third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of slothrop and solange/leni pokler: "back at putzi's," after slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge, slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside solange, asleep and dreaming about zwolfkinder, and bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. and "solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, ilse, riding lost through the zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. she isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. but leni's early dream of her is coming true. she will not be used. there is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10) this is one of the text's most positive images--leni's early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing ilse will be all right. ironically, leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. if ilse makes it, does bianca? it depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. as we will see with thanatz's ordeal riding "the freights," this hopeful image of "a few small chances of mercy" might vanish. we'll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says. [25] slothrop's dream clearly maps onto pokler's experience with ilse at zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where "once something [the imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless" [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images--trees and singing birds. slothrop's greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars ("slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally" [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of _gr_. lastly, bianca maps onto leni's dream because, in a passage i will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the "passage by train" (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know bianca has been "used." her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from slothrop's psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. the last traces of bianca, however, do not come to us through slothrop's consciousness--thanatz, bianca's step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child. [26] thanatz first recalls bianca while he "rides the freights" with other dp's and longs to molest "a little girl"--he fantasizes the event using bianca as a reference: "pull down the slender pretty pubescent's oversize gi trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it" (669-70). the passage recalls slothrop's encounter with bianca (469-70), though it may represent only thanatz's desire to molest and not a memory. thanatz then recalls his experiences with blicero on the heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection margherita had also made: "he lost gottfried, he lost bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. by now he's forgotten the sequence in time. doesn't know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren't two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, gottfried and bianca, %are the same%" (671-72). as his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text's last) specular image of bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: "a flash of bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for...will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love--" (672). the shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to thanatz or to the reader? [27] what do we gain by discovering bianca's age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces--her "suspension forever at the hinge of doubt"? first we see that characters in _gr_ are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others' fantasies and fetishes. second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. third, we must reread slothrop's relationship to bianca and to the other women in the text. and lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the %differance% at play in _gr_ and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. the reader-trap reveals pynchon's text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of gr, still remains. if we grant that _gr_ encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? as the example of bianca shows, slothrop's (and in the end thanatz's) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader's sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader's gender formation.^11^ [28] if the reader-trap of bianca's representation in _gr_, as i have argued, is to read her as a fetish--a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with katje--then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by ensign morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. the textualization that limits bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. there is no denying that bianca gets "used" in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading _gr_. [29] although reading _gr_ teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. thus one way of reading bianca is to see her as a projection of slothrop's needs--innocence and fetish all mixed up. his abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. he stays longest with margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his oedipus complex and satisfies his need- through a logic of transference--to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father ("pernicious pop") to submit him to. the subtext of incest in his encounter with bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save bianca. [30] slothrop must first hear ensign morituri's story (474-79), which tells him of margherita's pre-war alter ego of shekhinah--a destroying angel who psychotically murdered jewish boys--an alter ego morituri believes slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the _anubis_. slothrop's immediate response is to worry about bianca: "'what about bianca, then? is she going to be safe with that greta, do you think?'.... but where are bianca's arms, her defenseless mouth[?].... there is hardly a thing now in slothrop's head but getting to bianca" (479-80). but she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to margherita's story (482-88). her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the s-gerat and imipolex, but also to the truth about katje and blicero and gottfried. when she tells of her last days on the heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. slothrop doesn't enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of margherita finally extinguish his %will to erection%. but it is too late: he's lost bianca. gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. it matters, but how much? now that margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the s-gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of laszlo jamf. that if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490) although granted this realization, slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from their trap. [31] but that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. the loss of bianca breaks the metonymic chain of slothrop's womanizing. when he joins haftung's dancers- who comment like a greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: "'tits 'n' ass,' mutter the girls, 'tits 'n' ass. that's all we are around here'" (507)--he does %not% have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. the same goes for the girl ("about seventeen," bianca's age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with solange/leni at putzi's (603, 609-10). as far as slothrop is concerned, bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.^12^ but seeing how she has changed slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents bianca's consciousness--a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish. [32] as slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from bianca, the text marks his "eurydice-obsession," but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in slothrop's consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: "'why bring her back? why try? it's only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for them.' no. how can he believe that? it's what they want him to believe, but how can he? no difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's based on %that%...but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay" (472). the passage raises the issue of bianca's representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call "the real thing." if we read "they" in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual "economy" of objectification and fetish is uncovered. the cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the "differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image." the pun here is crude; the "boxtop" metaphorically represents bianca's hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange--a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier ("the one you draw for them"). no purchase necessary. void where prohibited by law. the law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void--the "suspension forever at the hinge of doubt"--because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one they allow. [33] bianca's text is hard to read. as i have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. this male narratee, like slothrop at first and constituted by the text's limited focalization through slothrop, construes "bianca" as a fetish and fails to construe her "true ontological being" (a representation we can only speculate about). one might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; i would say "yes" if one senses, as i do in reading "bianca," that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. there is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see "bianca" (the inverted commas now marking this sign's %differance% from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). as slothrop turns his back on bianca and heads up the ladder, "the last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him...." alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. and like margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. each day she feels closer to the edge of something. she dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. in a pullman, dictating her story. she feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. that may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... in her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. her wind keeps even dust away. it is old daylight: late, and cold. horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471) [34] the cross-references to margherita are overt, and the repetition of leni's dream for ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. but "bianca"'s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. again we confront the problematic boundary between image ("nacreous wrinkling the films use") and the real ("rain"), but in the paragraph's modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. what does it mean not only to dream in "black and white" (if we can conflate "visions" and "dream"), but also to dream in the overt stylization of german expressionism? one almost expects her to dream through the film emulsion j (387-88). but this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a "personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share." in a text that most consider anything but "clear," we might rationalize this tale's absence; however, we must see that "bianca" now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and bianca (471-72). although "bianca"'s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a "pullman," in an american context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from "the edge" and the "silver-salt dark" of drowning. [35] a piece of "bianca"'s dictation does appear to reach us: "...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence...." set off by the text's ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of "bianca" different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. if this is a fragment of her tale of "personal horror," then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who "loom[s] like a presence." to produce such a reading is to see "bianca"'s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a %differant% layer to the textual formation of her character. from this angle, the "11 or 12" projection slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious--an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of "bianca." furthermore, by engaging the play of %differance%, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if "bianca" is already absent, replaced by bianca, and even bianca "vanishes," replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of "presence" and the power of formulating the real is placed under question. significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of _gr_'s readers, but it is figured in the text by slothrop's own scattering and thanatz's existential breakdown over blicero and the "reality" of gottfried's fate. [36] reading bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. one example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. earlier i quoted the oft-cited passage of slothrop's memory of total phallicization--"he was [. . .] %inside his own cock%"; this sort of phallic writing of slothrop's body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. the penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: "she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the aggregat itself?" (470). the focalization is through slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of slothrop's quest. although bianca "come[s]" too, the representation of her orgasm is absent--the "void" announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the "kingly voice" of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived. [37] "bianca"'s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to "her ruined towers." the "tower" is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in _gr_, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of "bianca"'s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of "tower" and "light" will recur in the third line of the text's closing hymn: "till the light that hath brought the towers low / find the last poor pret'rite one..." (760). there are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the preterite--the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? for "bianca," "the brightest hour of afternoon" has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes i would like to thank john m. krafft, terry caesar, and brian mchale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions. ^1^ for a thorough reading of this passage, see mchale, "you used to know," 107-08. ^2^ pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee "you" is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to leni pokler's childhood (she grew up in lubeck [162]) and proleptically to ilse's trips with her father franz to zwolfkinder (398). ^3^ _gravity's rainbow_ contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. freud). this description sets up thanatz's argument for "sado-anarchism," a reclaiming from the state of the resources of "submission and dominance" (737). pynchon also explored fetishism in _v._ in the chapter "v. in love" (see berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). of course, pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what mchale terms "stylization" (_postmodern fiction_ 21) or into parody, as thanatz's intertextual parody (though we might interpret thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of "freud" and marx: "i tell you, if s and m could be established universally, at the family level, the state would wither away" (737). ^4^ although _gravity's rainbow_ here and on 364 clearly identifies margherita as "his lisaura," bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in wagner's _tannhauser_, an opera which organizes yet another of the text's semiotic matrices. ^5^ newman is the only reader i have come across that comes close to dating _alpdrucken_ (during the filming of which bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text's present time (107), and weisenburger dates pokler's recollection of ilse's conception as "ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in berlin, where the german rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the society for space travel" (194). ^6^ mchoul and wills read many of the same passages i examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests "it may be bianca who mugs slothrop when he boards the _anubis_ again later, that is if she hasn't hanged herself" (31) is problematic to say the least. ^7^ this issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship's crew during a storm often rig "life lines" about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a "hard roll." ^8^ kappel suggests this package is the s-gerat (236) and hume and knight suggest it is a piece of imipolex g (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of slothrop's possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved. ^9^ see de lauretis for a reading of the alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze--the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema. ^10^ at some point i hope to write about the noses in _gravity's rainbow_; one only has to recall slothrop's "nasal hardon" (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of nabokov at cornell, pynchon has developed a deep affinity with gogol, especially his short story "the nose"--a clear forerunner of postmodernism--and his technique of %skaz% narration). as for "shit" in _gravity's rainbow_ see caesar and wolfley. ^11^ although a definitive feminist reading of pynchon's writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: allen 37-51, jardine 247-52, kaufman, and stimpson. ^12^ see my essay, "starry-eyed semiotics," for an account of how readers are trapped into reading slothrop as a personification of sexual excess. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited allen, mary. _the necessary blankness: women in major american fiction of the sixties_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1976. berressem, hanjo. "v. in love: from the 'other scene' to the 'new scene.'" _pynchon notes_ 18-19 (1986): 5-28. bersani, leo. "pynchon, paranoia, and literature." _representations_ 25 (1989): 99-118. caesar, terry. "'trapped inside their frame with your wastes piling up': mindless pleasures in _gravity's rainbow_." _pynchon notes_ 14 (1984): 39-48. clerc, charles, ed. _approaches to gravity's rainbow_. columbus: ohio state up, 1983. de lauretis, teresa. _alice doesn't: feminism, semiotics, cinema_. bloomington: indiana up, 1984. duyfhuizen, bernard. "starry-eyed semiotics: learning to read slothrop's map and _gravity's rainbow_." _pynchon notes_ 6 (1981): 5-33. freud, sigmund. _fetishism_. 1927. trans. james strachey. london: hogarth, 1961. _the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud_. ed. james strachey. vol. 21. henkle, roger. "the morning and the evening funnies: comedy in _gravity's rainbow_." clerc 273-90. hume, katherine, and thomas j. knight. "orpheus and the orphic voice in _gravity's rainbow_." _philological quarterly_ 64 (1985): 299-315. jardine, alice a. _gynesis: configurations of woman and modernity_. ithaca: cornell up, 1985. kappel, lawrence. "psychic geography in _gravity's rainbow_." _contemporary literature_ 21 (1980): 225-51. kaufman, marjorie. "brunnhilde and the chemists: women in _gravity's rainbow_." levine and leverenz 197-227. levine, george, and david leverenz, ed. _mindful pleasures: essays on thomas pynchon_. boston: little, brown, 1976. mchale, brian. "'you used to know what these words mean': misreading _gravity's rainbow_." _language and style_ 18.1 (1985): 93-118. ---. _postmodernist fiction_. new york: methuen, 1987. mchoul, alec, and david wills. _writing pynchon: strategies in fictional analysis_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1990. newman, robert d. _understanding thomas pynchon_. columbia: u of south carolina p, 1986. pearce, richard, ed. _critical essays on thomas pynchon_. boston: g.k. hall, 1981. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1973.. ---. _v._ philadelphia: lippincott, 1963. stimpson, catharine r. "pre-apocalyptic atavism: thomas pynchon's early fiction." levine and leverenz 31-47. weisenburger, steven. _a gravity's rainbow companion: sources and contexts for pynchon's novel_. athens, ga: u of georgia p, 1988. wolfley, lawrence. "repression's rainbow: the presence of norman o. brown in pynchon's big novel." pearce 99-123. stephens, 'postmodern woolf', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-stephens-postmodern.txt postmodern woolf by rebecca stephens english department carlow college _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by rebecca stephens, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: caughie, pamela l. _virginia woolf and postmodernism: literature in quest and question of itself_. urbana: u of illinois p, 1991. [1] pamela l. caughie's _virginia woolf and postmodernism: literature in quest and question of itself_ is a sustained and perhaps ruthless attack on dualism in woolf scholarship. as an answer to toril moi's call in _sexual/textual politics_ for a text-based, anti-humanist approach to woolf's writings, the book explores new alternatives in an area of scholarship not known for keeping pace with postmodern critical theory and practice. nearly any effort in this direction is welcome. yet, as its %and% title suggests and its oppositional stance confirms, this study embraces--and ultimately fails to overcome--a dualism of its own, thus raising questions about its value and success as a postmodern intervention. [2] for caughie the insistence upon choosing between dualisms--fact/fiction, surface/depth, form/content, art/politics, for example--has brought woolf scholarship to a critical impasse. she proposes the alternative of a postmodern approach, one which displaces these oppositions into new contexts, and which acknowledges a change in "aesthetic motivation" (xiii). unlike the aesthetic motivation within modernism, which "placed itself at the vanguard of culture," the postmodern version "explores the relations between literary practices and social practices" (xiii). caughie does not claim to classify woolf in one tradition or another; rather, she seeks to read woolf's writings in the light of postmodernism, that is, with new perspectives available in the wake of recent artistic and critical innovations. [3] when she works within this broadly conceived plan, caughie offers thoughtful and original readings of specific works. the readings of woolf's critical writings in chapter 6, for example, succeed in moving beyond dualism to the new kinds of relationships which characterize postmodern reading and writing strategies. woolf's focus upon the process of reading, as exemplified in "phases of fiction," "granite and rainbow," and the two _common reader_ collections, demonstrates for caughie the interaction of text, world and reader. rather than propose a new canon or tradition, an oppositional tactic, woolf explores in these writings the relations which arise when a writer and reader enter, by mutual consent, a certain "reality." woolf's critical practice thus considers "what we are consenting to and how our consent is achieved" (176). this practice in effect narrates woolf's admittedly impressionistic and wildly contradictory reading process. its logic lies in its narrative experimentation, not in conclusions drawn or traditions outlined. in fact, woolf's story of reading undermines any thought of historical progression or development of fiction, confirming the situational relations between writer and reader at any given time. and the "common reader," often thought of as woolf's response to the oxbridge tradition from which she was excluded, becomes for caughie not a less trained reader, but a kind of reading relation. common for her suggests the communal. [4] _flush_, both the novel and the dog, enact caughie's postmodern conception of value formation. the novel is not only an example of artistic waste or playful excess, it must also be reckoned with as a marketable commodity. caughie cites woolf's diary in support of the latter "function" of the text: "to stem the ruin we shall suffer from the failure of _the waves_" (qtd. in caughie 149). drawing support from the dog's variable and context-dependent views of its own value, caughie calls the novel an "allegory of canon formation and canonical value" (146). woolf's shifting responses to the work, from playfulness to irony to detachment and scorn, together with a similar spectrum of public and critical reaction over the years, lead caughie to question the economy of value and canon formation which informs our readings of _flush_ and other literary works. [5] a collection of readings like these could work through the critical impasse that caughie cites and open a number of new possibilities for reading woolf. yet caughie subverts her own efforts by setting them in opposition to existing scholarship. this practice creates a dualism between traditional and postmodern approaches to woolf, reproducing precisely the binary, oppositional logic her postmodernist readings are supposed to displace. [6] caughie's dualism parallels a distinction which she makes in her conclusion between elaine showalter's and jane gallop's approaches to a feminist critical practice. while showalter seeks to define such concepts as double-voiced discourse, gallop enacts her practice by reading texts against each other. caughie seems to favor the latter approach, and the readings i have described succeed in enacting or performing her idea of the postmodern. at the same time, the confrontation with traditional woolf scholars established in the introduction leaves enough traces of the showalter strategy to embroil caughie in the practices with which she takes issue. by calling her readings "corrective," she keeps the opposition alive. [7] as a result, it is easy to lose sight of the clean elegance with which caughie describes her project in the preface. as she takes to task the major figures in woolf scholarship (particuarly jane marcus) for their referential, essentialist connections, caughie works against her initial reluctance to summarize or define the postmodern. she draws upon a number of postmodern fiction writers, as well as the ideas of ludwig wittgenstein, richard rorty, barbara hernstein smith and kenneth burke. wittgenstein empowers caughie's challenge to the correspondence theory of language, the opposition of form and content which views discourse as a transparent container for ideas. caughie suggests that woolf views art as wittgenstein views language: as a game consisting of varied and various relationships among discursive strategies, rather than as a configuration or tradition based upon "empirical stability." a brief mention of rorty's pragmatics and burke's transactional view of writer/reader relations leads caughie to consider the "function" of a text, that is, how it produces meaning and finds its audience. hernstein smith brings caughie's theoretical framework closer to the narrative strategies upon which the first few readings focus. for smith, narrative strategies are a function of varying critical perspectives, not essential characteristics of a certain text or genre. under this view, caughie suggests that "we can approach narrative strategies not as representations of a certain set of conditions, such as women's lives or consumer society, but as functions of 'multiple interacting conditions'" (18). free of absolute reference to conventions or traditions, narrative experimentation becomes the given for woolf: "her fiction works on the assumption that narrative activity preceded any understanding of self and world" (67). [8] the reader who abstracts a summary such as this fails to participate in the "shared way of behaving toward narratives based upon shared assumptions about language use" which characterizes caughie's postmodern perspective. having risked lapsing into the essentialism that caughie opposes, however, the reader will also note the thinness of the thread with which this postmodernism is woven. one can hardly disagree with any of her broad and abstract statements; yet together they offer no coherent perspective or methodology. and rather than elaborating the theoretical program through detailed close readings, caughie merely reiterates the terms of her broad "postmodern" polemic against what she considers to be traditional views of the individual works. the words "function," "motive" and "relations" become a kind of refrain or mantra throughout the book. [9] the result of this practice is a series of brief and blurry close-ups of _to the lighthouse_, _the waves_, _orlando_, _jacob's room_ and _a room of one's own_. a chapter on the artist figure displaces the art/life opposition into a context-dependent quest to test a number of new relations. under such a reading lily briscoe in _to the lighthouse_ becomes the narrator of the production of art as well as the artist, and in this capacity affirms the continuing process of creating. the multifaceted "i" in _a room of one's own_ undermines the stable self that can be separated structurally or empirically from its creative processes. rather than defining a feminine alternative to modernist art, this protean speaker is "testing out the implications of the concept of art and self developed in . . . _to the lighthouse_ and _orlando_" (42). the multiple consciousness of _the waves_ shifts the crucial relationship from art/life to art/audience, suggesting, with bernard, that "'all is experiment and adventure" (50). [10] these readings place woolf's writings in a postmodern context of "multiple interacting conditions" by ignoring the fact that woolf and her narrators repeatedly contemplate the truth or the essence of their lives and creative efforts. even as she returns to the ramsay's summer house to complete her painting, lily considers the "meaning of life." bernard's observations on storytelling do not necessarily challenge the referential nature of this process. his comment that "life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it" (qtd. by caughie 50) falls short of a metadiscursive or enlarging displacement of the life/art dichotomy as it points toward a transcendent dimension of life. to be convincing, caughie's concept of "multiple interacting conditions" must be extended to address these thoughts and statements as well. formalist observations, such as naming lily as narrator, or pointing out (not for the first time) the unstable narrative perspective of _jacob's room_, can (and have) effectively argued %for% the dichotomy of art and life which caughie seeks to disrupt. [11] the multiplicity of meanings attributed to truth and reality in woolf's writings continues to draw critical attention, not all of which is as polarized as caughie suggests. herself unwilling to relinquish "reality" fully to the status of textual and discursive phenomena, caughie reminds us of the challenge woolf offers to postmodern critical theory. yet a comparative reading of _the years_ and _night and day_ lands caughie in the same essentializing and polarizing camp that she disparages. for her the concern in _night and day_ with objects and relics of the past produces a world of substance and a narrative of authority and reference. the uncertainty of narrative structures in _the years_ (echoing voices, lack of centering perspectives) expresses the postmodern concern for self-reflexive attention to discursive relations. the problem is not simply a matter of caughie's lapse into dualism, although it is curious that her broad conception of postmodern narrative relations cannot gain even a toehold upon _night and day_. (the novel's playful experimentation with metaphor, reference and perspective might easily be worked into caughie's "postmodernism.") rather, the referentiality which caughie locates in _night and day_ sends a ripple of alarm back upon all of her readings, suggesting that woolf's texts may generally leave room for a greater degree of attachment to the ideas of stable object and transcendent subject than caughie has let on. [12] caughie's view of woolf's critical reading strategies might be read back upon her own critical method. this book contains many pointed attacks on representationalist readings of woolf, but it rarely conveys a sense of what caughie calls "multiple reading relations." perhaps generalizing too readily from her own "motives" (one of her key terms), caughie seems to assume the primacy of literary critical or literary-theoretical concerns for the critics she opposes. the briefest contact with the woolf scholarly community dispels such an assumption. a group of affiliated and unaffiliated scholars representing numerous academic disciplines, woolf's readers most often seek to recreate and preserve her image as a woman, a feminist, or an historical/cultural icon. susan squier's readings of _flush_ as a story of marginalization, and of the london essays as the reflection of a woman's life in a patriarchal society, reveal these sorts of motives. in unfolding her own (equally plausible) reading of _flush_, and her analysis of the multiple and shifting perspectives of the london scene essays, caughie achieves about the same level of dialogue with critics like squier as that which takes place between beckett's estragon and vladimir. caughie's confrontationalism thus not only undermines her theoretical commitment to a non-dualist practice of reading, but leaves her readings unnecessarily isolated within the active field of woolf studies. combined with the sweeping claim of the book's title, this mode of critical procedure risks further alienating an already skeptical scholarly community as regards postmodern criticism in general. [13] as the first effort of its kind, however, this book deserves the attention and the response of woolf scholars. caughie observes, rightly, that it is not a book which can serve as an introduction either to virginia woolf or to postmodernism. but for scholars with an established stake in either or both of these fields, it does have much to offer. for those who choose to give _virginia woolf and postmodernism_ a chance, i would like to suggest, by way of conclusion (and with apologies to cortazar), an alternate reading sequence: begin with the preface, then read chapter five, chapter six, and the conclusion before returning to the introduction and chapters one through four. this particular hopscotch might better capture the strength of caughie's postmodern performances--or at least render them more congenial to resistant readers. ulmer, 'grammatology hypermedia', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-ulmer-grammatology.txt grammatology hypermedia by greg ulmer university of florida at gainesville copyright (c) 1991 by greg ulmer, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) 1. this article is about an experiment i conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the sixteenth annual alabama symposium on english and american literature: "literacy online: the promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers," october 26-28, 1989 (organized by myron tuman). my talk at the conference placed the current developments in artificial intelligence and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the "apparatus," used in cinema studies to mount a critique of cinema as an institution, as a social "machine" that is as much ideological as it is technological. the same drive of realism that led in cinema to the "invisible style" of hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the production process in favor of a consumption of the product as if it were "natural," is at work again in computing. articles published in computer magazines declare that "the ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the computer does not exist. in its perfect form, the computer and its application stand outside data content so that the user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter--it allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the computer were itself human" (_macuser_, march, 1989). it was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the oppressive effects of "the suture" in cinema (the effect binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality) had made no impression on the computer industry, whose professionals (including many academics) are in the process of designing "seamless" information environments for hypermedia applications. the "twin peaks" of american ideology--realism and individualism--are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution). 2. the very concept of the "apparatus" indicates that ideology is a necessary, irreducible component of any "machine." left critique and cognitive science agree on this point, as may be seen in jeremy campbell's summary of the current state of research in artificial intelligence: a curious feature of a mind that uses baker street [holmes] reasoning to create elaborate scenarios out of incomplete data is that its most deplorable biases often arise in a natural way out of the very same processes that produce the workmanlike, all-purpose, commonsense intelligence that is the holy grail of computer scientists who try to model human rationality. a completely open mind would be unintelligent. it could be argued that stereotypes are not ignorance structures at all, but knowledge structures. from this point of view, stereotypes cannot be understood chiefly in terms of attitudes and motives, or emotions like fear and jealousy. they are devices for predicting other people's behavior. one result of the revival of the connectionist models in the new class of artificial intelligence machines is to downgrade the importance of logic and upgrade the role of knowledge, and of memory, which is the vehicle of knowledge (campbell, _the improbable machine_. new york, 1989: 35, 151, 158). 3. critique and cognitive science hold different attitudes to the inherence of stereotypes in knowledge, of course. critique is right to condemn the acceptance of or reconciliation with the given assumptions implicit in cognitive science, but its own response to the problem, relying on the enlightenment model of absolute separation between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion, is too limited. this split is replicated in the institutionalization of critique in academic print publication resulting in a specialized commentary separated from practice. _postmodern culture_ could play a role in exploring alternatives to the current state of the apparatus. grammatology provides one possible theoretical frame for this research, being free of the absolute commitment to the book apparatus (ideology of the humanist subject and writing practices, as well as print technology) that constrains research conducted within the frame of critique. the challenge of grammatology, against all technological determinism, is to accept responsibility for inventing the practices for institutionalizing electronic technologies. we may accept the values of critique (critical analysis motivated by the grand metanarrative of emancipation) without reifying one particular model of "critical thinking." but what are the alternatives? the experiment i contributed to the volume differed from the paper delivered at the conference, being not so much an explanation of the problem--the inability of critique to expose the disappearing apparatus--as an attempt to write with the stereotypes of western thought, using them and showing them at work at the same time. the essay is entitled "grammatology (in the stacks) of hypermedia: a simulation." 4. my research has been concerned with exploring various modes of "immanent critique," a reasoning capable of operating within the machines of television and computing, in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus) separating fiction and truth are breaking down. rhetoric has always been concerned with sorting out the true from the false, and it will continue to function in these terms in the electronic apparatus, as it did in oral and alphabetic cultures. the terms of this sorting will be transformed, however, to treat an electronic culture that will be as different from the culture of the book as the latter is different from an oral culture. it is important to remember, at the same time, that all three dimensions of discourse exist together interactively. i am particularly interested in the figure of the mise en abyme, as elaborated in jacques derrida's theories, in this context. the mise an abyme is a reflexive structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action. my hypothesis is that a discourse of immanent critique may be constructed for an electronic rhetoric (for use in video, computer, and interactive practice) by combining the mise en abyme with the two compositional modes that have dominated audio-visual texts--montage and mise en scene. the result would be a deconstructive writing, deconstruction as an %inventio% (rather than as a style of book criticism). 5. "grammatology (in the stacks) of hypermedia" is an experiment in immanent critique, attempting to use the mise en abyme figure to organize an "analysis" of the current thinking about hypermedia. the strategy was to imitate in alphabetic style the experience of hypermedia practice--"navigating" through a database, producing a trail of linked items of information. i adopted the "stack" format of hypercard, confining myself largely to citations from a diverse bibliography of materials relevant to hypermedia. these materials were extended to include not only texts about hypermedia from academic as well as journalistic sources, but also texts representing the domains used as metaphors for hypermedia design in these sources. two basic semantic domains, then, provided most of the materials for the database: the index cards, organized in "stacks," to be linked up in both logical and associative ways, and the figure of travel used to characterize the retrieval of the informations thus stored. the critical point i wanted to make had to do with a further metaphor that emerged from juxtaposing the other two--an analogy between the mastery of a database and the colonization of a foreign land. the idea was to expose the ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power in knowledge, by calling attention to the implications of designing hypermedia programs in terms of the "frontiers" of knowledge, knowledge as a "territory" to be established. the goal is not to suppress this metaphorical element in design and research, but to include it more explicitly, to unpack it within the research and teaching activities. in this way stereotypes may become self-conscious, used and mentioned at once in the learning process. 6. the design of the experiment was influenced not only by the principle of the mise en abyme (imitating in my form the form of the object of study), but also by several other compositional strategies available in current critical theory. one of these is walter benjamin's arcades project, for which hypermedia seems to be the ideal technological format. indeed, one might hope, following her superb alphabetic (re) construction of benjamin's project in the dialectics of seeing (mit, 1989) that susan buck-morss would direct a hypermedia version of the arcades. a point of departure (but only that) for this version might be the "cicero" project, in which students of classical civilization and latin explore rome (a representation on videodisc, composed using microphotography of a giant museum model of the city at its height in 315 a.d.) assisted by a "friendly tour guide" (cicero). it is worth recalling, in this context, that cicero was an advocate of artificial memory as part of rhetoric, and that giulio camillo's memory theater (designed during the venetian renaissance) was "intended to be used for memorising every notion to be found in cicero's works" (frances yates, _the art of memory_. chicago, 1966: 166). in fact, the design of hypermedia software in general, and not just the cicero project, has much in common with the hypomnemic theaters of the renaissance hermetic-caballist tradition. the unfinished arcades project exists in the form of a "massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in paris--and formed that city in turn. these notes consist of citations from a vast array of historical sources, which benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged" (buck-morss, ix). in the hypermedia arcades, an interactive benjamin would guide students through a paris whose history could flash up in the present moment with the touch of a key. meanwhile, i was interested in the resonance of the card file metaphor for hypermedia and benjamin's views on the obsolescence of the academic book: and today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. for everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. (benjamin, _reflections_, new york, 1978: 78.) 7. the other strategy that is relevant to the experiment is the postmodernist fondness for allegory. thus any item of fact reported in the database could also function as a sign, signifying or figuring another meaning. the specifics of this meaning are to be inferred in the reading, leaving the construction of the critical argument to the reader. these strategies constitute an outline for a potent pedagogy in which research functions as the inventio for an expressive text (thus producing a hybrid drawing upon both scholarship and art). this possibility suggests another role for electronic publications--to explore productive exchanges between the electronic and alphabetic apparatuses, emphasizing the usefulness of computer hardware and software as figurative models for written exercises. it is perfectly possible to compose an essayistic equivalent of a hypermedia program, and to think electronically with paper and pencil. 8. my version of a hypermedia essay consists of some 29 cards simulating one trail blazed through a domain of information about hypermedia--concerned, that is, with a sub-domain holding data on the semantic fields of the terminology of program design for hypermedia environments. the entries are drawn from the categories listed below in random order (the entries evoke these categories). in hypermedia, the cards could be accessed in any order, but in the alphabetic simulation, which is an enunciation or utterance within the system, the sequence does develop according to an associative logic (it is precisely an experiment with the capacity of association for creating learning effects). in hypermedia, the scholar does not provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific selections and combinations, to the reader/user. or rather, the scholar's "argument" exists at the level of the ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm, determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. --hypermedia design --methods and logic of composition --the computer conference at the university of alabama --computers in general --critique of cinema (apparatus theory) --grammatology --alice's adventures in wonderland --colonial exploration of america (columbus, the overland trails). --stereotypes --"place" in rhetoric, memory --situationism --mis en abyme. 9. the fundamental idea organizing the grammatological approach to hypermedia (theorizing the institutionalization of computer technology into education in terms of the history of writing) emerges out of a comparison of three textbooks, introducing students to the operations of the three memory systems dominating schooling within three different apparatuses: the ad herenium, main source of the classical art of memory, in the pre-print era when oratory was the predominant practice (cf. camillo's memory theater); the st. martin's handbook, representing (as typical among a host of competitors) the codification of school writing; and a textbook yet to come, doing for electronic composition what the other two examples do for their respective apparatuses. it is certainly too soon for a "codification" of electronic rhetoric, considering that the technology is still evolving at an unnerving pace. the position of _postmodern culture_ in this situation should not be conservative or cautious (that slot in the intellectual ecology being already crowded with representatives). rather, it should serve as a free zone for conceptualization, formulating an open, continually evolving simulacrum of that electronic handbook. some of the elements of that handbook (but a new word is needed for this program) might be glimpsed in the citations collected and linked in my hypermedia essay. in the remaining sections i will reproduce, in somewhat abbreviated form, one of the series included in the original article (but with the addition of a few selections not used previously). in this recreation i will omit the sources, noting only the name of the author. my principal concern is with the transformation of the rhetorical concept of "place" that is underway in the electronic environment. a review of the history of rhetoric reveals that "place" is perhaps the least stable notion in this history, the one most sensitive to changes in the apparatus. 10. "what seems necessary to me is the development of a completely new discipline that embraces the whole augmentation system. what are the practical strategies that will allow our society to pursue high-performance augmentation? my strategy is to begin with small groups, which give greater 'cultural mobility.' small groups are preferable to individuals because exploring augmented collaboration is at the center of opportunity. these small groups would be the scouting parties sent ahead to map the pathways for the organizational groups to follow. you also need outposts for these teams" (douglas engelbart). 11. "between 1840 and the california gold rush, fewer than 20,000 men, women, and children followed those roads westward--the santa fe trail, the oregon trail, the bozeman trail. yet the story of the overland trails was told a thousand times for every one telling of the peopling of the midwest. why? excitement was there, of course: indian attacks and desert hardship and even cannibalism. but i suspected that the greatest appeal of the trails lay in the role they played as avenues for progress of the enterprising. the roads that the pioneers followed symbolized the spirit of enterprise that sustained the american dream" (ray allen billington). 12. originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview. the first theorists were "tourists"--the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. theoria did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight, but implied a complex but organic mode of active observation--a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. the world theorists who traveled around 600 b.c. were spectators who responded to the expressive energies of places, stopping to contemplate what the guides called "the things worth seeing." local guides--the men who knew the stories of a place--helped visiting theorists to "see" (eugene victor walter). 13. "information would be accessible through association as well as through indexing. the user could join any two items, including the user's own materials and notes. chains of these associations would form a 'trail,' with many possible side trails. trails could be named and shared with other information explorers. 'there is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.' we need fundamentally new organizing principles for knowledge, and we need new navigation and manipulation tools for the learner. instead of regarding an intelligent system as a human replacement, we can consider the system as a helpful assistant or partner" (stephen a. weyer). 14. "the two recognized, contemporary authorities on columbus are his son ferdinand and the traveling monk bertolome de las casas. both cite the reasons why columbus believed he could discover the indies as threefold: 'natural reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of sailors.' as to the ancient authorities, columbus' son cites aristotle, seneca, strabo, pliny, and capilonius. none of these ancient writers gave a route plan-it had to come from another source. the source for that plan had to be st. brendan, the navigator. brendan lived in the 6th century, a.d. the irish clergy were a devout group and practiced a form of wandering in the wilderness. not having a desert nearby, they did their wandering at sea. in the navigatio sancti brendani the style and manner of navigational reports are as excerpts relating the interesting events, taken from a diary or logbook. the subsequent versions of the navigatio were penned by monks in monasteries. these contain religious matter of a mythical nature which has obviously been added to the original" (paul h. chapman). 15. "for the aboriginal nomad, the land is a king of palimpsest. on its worn and rugged countenance he is able to write down the great stories of creation, his creation, in such a way as to insure their renewal. walking from one sacred spot to another, performing rituals that have changed little over the millennia, are in themselves important aspects of a metaphysical dialogue. since aboriginal society is pre-literate, this dialogue relies on intellectual and imaginative contact with sacred constructs within the landscape that have been invested with miwi or power, according to tradition or the law. the language is one of symbolic expression, of mythic reportage. we begin to see at this point the seeds of conflict between two opposing cultures existing in the same landscape. on the one hand we have an aboriginal culture that regards the landscape as an existential partner to which it is lovingly enjoined; on the other, we find a european culture dissatisfied with the landscape's perceived vacuity and spiritual aridity, thus wanting to change it in accordance with facile economic imperatives so that it reflects a materialistic worldview" (james cowan). 16. "can the hypermedia author realize the enormous potential of the medium to change our relation to language and texts simply by linking one passage or image to others? one begins any discussion of the new rhetoric needed for hypermedia with the recognition that authors of hypertext and hypermedia materials confront three related problems: first, what must they do to orient readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure? second, how can they inform those reading a document where the links in that document lead? third, how can they assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home there? drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first problem concerns navigation information necessary for making one's way through the materials. the second concerns exit or departure information, and the third arrival or entrance information" (george landow). 17. "removed from the tangible environment of their culture, travelers came to rely on this most portable and most personal of cultural orders as a means of symbolic linkage with their homes. more than any other emblem of identity, language seemed capable of domesticating the strangeness of america. it could do so both by the spreading of old world names over new world place, people, and objects, and by the less literal act of domestication which the telling of an american tale involved. this ability to 'plot' new world experience in advance was, in fact, the single most important attribute of european language. francis bacon, primary theorist of a new epistemology and staunch opponent of medieval scholasticism, extrapolated columbus himself into a symbol of bold modernity. his voyager was decidedly not the man of terminal doubt and despair whom we encounter in the jamaica letter of 1503. he was instead a figure of hopeful departures, a man whose discovery of a 'new world' suggested the possibility that the 'remoter and more hidden parts of nature' also might be explored with success. the function of bacon's novum organum was to provide for the scientific investigator the kind of encouragement which the arguments of columbus prior to 1492 had provided for a europe too closely bound to traditional assumptions" (wayne franklin). 18. "perhaps the most fragile component of the future lies in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen. we must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard, and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. the disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a self-sufficient, self-enclosed structure without avenues of escape, with no outside. its myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing productivist injunctions by inducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences" (jonathan crary). 19. one more suggestion of a function of electronic publishing: to experiment with other metaphors for the research process in the electronic apparatus, as alternatives to the metaphor of colonial imperialism. [editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-[editor]-announcements.txt announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) every issue of _postmodern culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements free of charge. advertisements will also be published for a fee or on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _the centennial review_ 2) _sub stance_ 3) _public culture_ 4) _college literature_ 5) _poetics today_ 6) _xb_ 7) _perforations_ 8) _amazons international_ 9) _after the book_ { a special issue by _perforations_ } 10) _robert lax and concrete poetry_ 11) _feminist fabulation: space/postmodern fiction_ 12) _positions_ 13) _sophia_ 14) _delphi network newsletter_ 15) _pynchon notes_ 16) _beyond metafiction: selfconsciousness in soviet literature_ 17) _gnet_: an archive and electronic journal calls for papers and participants: 18) association for computers and the humanities association for literary and linguistic computing 19) _without any rules: the politics and poetics of the vernacular_ 20) _mfs: modern fiction studies_ 21) _vietnam generation_ 22) composition as explanation conferences and societies 23) _cylinder_ 24) suny stonybrook conference on reproductive technologies: narratives, gender, society 25) 1992 modern languages association convention 26) society for phenomenology and existential philosophy 27) committee on computing as a cultural process (american anthropological association) 28) _rethinking marxism_: a journal of economics, culture, and society 29) 31st annual meeting of the society for phenomenology and existential philosophy 30) university of manitoba: a consortium for network publication of refereed research journals 31) 8th annual conference on the scientific study of subjectivity 32) program of events for the v2 organization 33) 3rd washington, d.c. virtual reality conference networked discussion groups 34) _semios-l_ 35) _sochist_ 36) _interdis_ employment 37) department of english at carnegie mellon university grants 38) travel grants to the center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library, duke university 1)------------------------------------------------------------ _the centennial review_ edited by r. k. meiners the _centennial review_ is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the university and its environment. we are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. issues now available: fall 1991: _discourses of mourning, survival, and commemoration_ articles by james hatley, donald kuspit, tony brinkley and joseph arsenault, marshall w. alcorn, jr., peter balakian, r. k. meiners, louis kaplan, hans borchers, morris grossman, berel lang, david william foster; poetry by dimitris tsaloumas, sherri szeman, walter toneeo, henry gilfond, elizabeth r. curry, peter balakian. winter 1992: _cultural studies_ articles by douglas kellner, eyal amiran, john unsworth, and carol chaski, steven best, janet staiger, jeffrey seinfeld, charles altieri, tony barnstone; poetry by hillel schwartz, robert hahn, michael atkinson, john hildebidle. spring 1992: articles by stephen gill, peter baker, r. m. berry, carole anne taylor, michel valentin, edward m. griffen, robert erwin, ronald hauser, karl albert scherner (transl. ronald hauser), diana dolev and haim gordon, albert feuerwerker, donald lammers, ileana a. orlich. subscription rates: 1 year/$10.00 2 years/$15.00 single issues/$5.00 (postage outside us please add $3.00 per year, prices in effect through september 1992) make checks payable to: _the centennial review_ 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing, michigan 48824-1044 2)------------------------------------------------------------ _sub stance_ edited by: sydney levy and michel pierssens published: 3/year issn: 0049-2426 promotes new thoughts by leading american and european authors which alter the perception of contemporary culture--be it artistic, humanistic, or scientific. represents literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art criticism, and film studies. rates: individuals (must pre-pay) $21 / yr. institutions $68 / yr. foreign postage $ 8 / yr. airmail $25 / yr. we accept mastercard and visa. canadian customers please remit 7% goods and services tax. please write for a free brochure and back issue list to: journal division university of wisconsin press 114 north murray street madison, wi 53715 usa or call, 608-262-4952, fax 608-262-7560 3)------------------------------------------------------------ _public culture_ edited by carol a. breckenridge engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural flows and public cultures in a diasporic world. volume 4, number 1 (fall 1991) * looking at film hoardings r. srivatsan * the doors of public culture pradip krishen * the meaning of baseball in 1992 bill brown * becoming the armed man j. william gibson * the function of new theory xiaobing tang * worldly discourses dan rose * voices of the rainforest steven feld * anuradhapura wimal disanayake * river and bridge meena alexander volume 4, number 2 (spring 1992) * the banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the postcolony achille mbembe * take care of public telephones robert j. foster * the death of history? dipesh charrabarty * the public fetus and the family car janelle sue taylor * race and the humanities: the end of modernity? homi bhabha * "disappeating" iraqis david prochaska * algeria caricatures the gulf war susan slyomovics * mobilizing fictions robert stam * television and the gulf war victor j. caldarola _public culture_ is published biannually. a years subscription for individuals is $10.00 ($14.00 foreign); institutions $20.00 ($24.00 foreign). back issues are available for individuals at $6.50 ($8.50 foreign); institutions $13.00 ($15.00 foreign). write to: university of chicago weiboldt hall 1010 e. 59th street chicago, il 60637 4)------------------------------------------------------------ _college literature_ edited by kostas myrsiades a triannual literary journal for the college classroom. "in one bold stroke you seem to have turned _college literature_ into one of the things everyone will want to read." cary nelson "my sense is that _college literature_ will have a substantial influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies." henry a. giroux "a journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy." robert con davis forthcoming issues: cultural studies: theory, praxis, pedagogy teaching postcolonial literatures europe and america: the legacy of discovery third world women african american writing subscription rates: us foreign individuals $24/year $29/year institutions $48/year $53/year send prepaid orders to: _college literature_ main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 5)------------------------------------------------------------ _poetics today_ edited by: itamar even-zohar international journal for theory and analysis of literature and communication _children's literature_ a special issue edited by zohar shavit. this volume addresses the wide spread of cultural issues raised by the study of children's culture, the teaching function of children's literature, and current thinking on the demarcation of boundaries between children's and adult literature. $14, 261 pages, 13:1 spring 1992 subscription rates: individuals: $28, institutions: $56, single issue $14 (add $8 for subscriptions outside the u.s.) send check, money order, credit card number to: duke university press journals division 6697 college station durham, nc 27708 call or fax us between 8:00 and 4:00 est with your visa, mastercard or american express order. phone: 919-684-6837 fax: 919-684-8644 6)----------------------------------------------------------- _xb_ a bibliographic database of the literature of xerography, (photo)copier art, electrostatic printing and electrographic art, seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use of duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the procite bibliographic software for the macintosh. an ongoing art information-information art project, xb requests submissions especially in machine-readable form but also in other media formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings, exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search printouts and information on disk, all these are of interest. a copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette (procite databases work equally well on mac or ibm) to each contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process and a list of participants. submissions via mailways, telephone or bitnet/internet/ well to: _xb_ c/o reed altemus email:ip25196@portland.maine.edu or raltemus@well.sf.ca.us mail: 16 blanchard road cumberland ctr., maine 04021-97 usa phone: (207)829-3666 7)------------------------------------------------------------ _perforations_ _after the book: writing literature writing technology_ a special issue of _perforations_ magazine, is now in production. contributors include: *virtual orphicality: telepathy, virtuality, and encysted sense ratios robert cheatham *gaps, maps, and perception: what hypertext readers (don't) do jane yellowlees douglas *yet still more (storyspace hypertext) shawn fitzgerald *colloquy and intergrams: two interactive prosodies richard gess *the computational score francesco giomi *after the book? carolyn guyer *grotesque corpus: hypertext as carnival terence harpold *hypertext narrative michael joyce *wasting time (ibm-compatible narrabase) judy malloy *dreamtime (hypercard hyperfiction); shadow of the informand: a rhetorical experiment in hypertext (essay) stuart moulthrop *hypertext: permeable skin martha petry *poetics and hypertext jim rosenberg *contingency, liberation, and the seduction of geometry: hypertext as an avant-garde medium martin rosenberg plus fiction by dea anne martin, comics by grace braun, poetry by joe amato, cultural commentary by alan sondheim, and more. _perforations_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is published by atlanta's public domain arts collective. to order "after the book," send a check or money order for $20 (payable to public domain) to: public domain po box 8899 atlanta ga 30306-0899 voice mail: (404) 612-7529. e-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu guest editor: richard gess 8)------------------------------------------------------------ _amazons international_ an electronic digest newsletter for and about amazons (physically and psychologically strong, assertive women who are not afraid to break free from traditional ideas about gender roles, femininity and the female physique) and their friends and lovers. _amazons international_ is dedicated to the image of the female hero in fiction and in fact, as it is expressed in art and literature, in the physiques and feats of female athletes, in sexual values and practices, and provides information, discussion and a supportive environment for these values and issues. gender role traditionalists and others who are opposed to amazon ideals should not subscribe. contact: thomas@smaug.uio.no. 9)------------------------------------------------------------ _after the book_ _writing literature/writing technology_ _perforations_ no.3 spring/summer 1992 this special issue of _perforations_ features a gathering of new essays on electronic writing and three new electronic texts in hypercard, storyspace, and ibm formats. contributors and contributions include: *new dystopian comics grace braun *virtual orphicality: telepathy, virtuality, and encysted sense ratios robert cheatham *gaps, maps, and perception: what hypertext readers (don't) do jane douglas *yet still more (storyspace hypertext) shawn fitzgerald *colloquy and intergrams: two interactive prosodies richard gess *the computational score francesco giomi *after the book? carolyn guyer *grotesque corpus: hypertext as carnival terry harpold *hypertext narrative michael joyce *wasting time (ibm-compatible electronic fiction) judy malloy *dolls/meat/avila (fiction) dea anne martin *dreamtime (hypercard hyperfiction), and shadow of the informand: a rhetorical experiment in hypertext stuart moulthrop *hypertext: permeable skin martha petry *du ranten (rant ii) chea prince *poetics and hypertext jim rosenberg *contingency, liberation, and the seduction of geometry: hypertext as an avant-garde medium martin rosenberg *knowledge flux and questions for m. chaput alan sondheim _perforations_, a journal of language, art, and technology, is published by atlanta's public domain arts collective. to order "after the book," send check or money order for $20 payable to public domain to: public domain po box 8899 atlanta, ga 30306-0899 voice mail: (404) 612-7529. e-mail: pdomain@unix.cc.emory.edu. guest editor: richard gess 10)------------------------------------------------------------ robert lax and concrete poetry 3 august 23 october 1992 rare book and manuscript library butler library -sixth floor columbia university a travelling exhibit, originating from the burchfield art center at suny-buffalo and consisting of some 30 examples of robert lax's concrete poetry and another 40 examples of work by various writers including bill bissett, raymond federman, ian hamilton finaly, and aram saroyan. an exhibition catalog, which includes essays by mary ellen solt and robert bertholf, is available for five dollars. 11)------------------------------------------------------------ _feminist fabulation: space/postmodern fiction_ by marleen s. barr forthcoming from the university of iowa press in november. the surprising and controversial thesis of _feminist fabulation_ is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. marleen s. barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new metaor super-genre of contemporary fiction--feminist fabulation--which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. in its investigation of the relationship between feminist writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, _feminist fabulation_ is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchal institutions. rather than focusing so much energy on reclaiming female authors of the past, she suggests, feminist critics should direct more attention to the present's lost feminist fabulators, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. barr offers very specific plans for a new literary category that can impact upon women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. _feminist fabulation_ calls for a new understanding of postmodern fiction which will better enable the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist sf" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. barr motivates readers to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just the membership list--and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent place in institutions like the practice of criticism and the teaching of literature. 12)------------------------------------------------------------ _positions_ east asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual and political events unfolding in east asia and within the asian diaspora. profound political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing national and regional borders. these transformations compel us to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching and criticism. mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary east and west, _positions_ advocates placing cultural critique at the center of historical and theoretical practice. the global forces that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain formulations of nation, gender, class and ethnicity. we propose to call into question those still-pressing, yet unstable categories by crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the terms of our analysis. these efforts, we hope, will contribute toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy. _positions_ central premise is that criticism must always be self-critical. critique of another social order must be self-aware as commentary on our own. likewise, we seek critical practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study. all these endeavors require that we account for positions as places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge and knowers as actors in existing social institutions. in seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions from which to imagine political affinities across the many dimensions of our differences. _positions_ is an independent refereed journal. its direction is taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as through the encouragement from its readers and writers. to subscribe for triannual magazine beginning in spring 1993 write to: mr. steve a cohn journals manager duke university press 6697 college station durham, nc 27708. to submit a manuscript send three copies to: tani e barlow senior editor 94 castro street san francisco, ca 94114 or e-mail: barlow@sfsuvax1.edu. 13)------------------------------------------------------------ _sophia_ australia is proud to announce the return of _sophia_, a journal for discussion in modern and postmodern philosophical issues in theology, religion, metaphysics, feminist theology, ecotheology, crosscultural critiques of traditional western doctrinal bases, indeed in all kinds of `deconstruction' of traditional modes of establishing the origins and grounds of `faith'. short articles of up to 5000 words are welcomed; reviews will also be invited, notices of book discussions and notes on previously published articles as well. the journal has a circulation of some 600 internationally and is very inexpensive to subscribe to: us$12 for three issues in a year. send order to: _sophia_ faculty of humanities deakin university geelong, victoria 3217 australia editor is dr purushottama bilimoria (*same address; e-mail address: pbilmo@deakin.oz.au) further information can be sent by postal mail to anyone who would like to receive a brochure and sample pages. our motto: `she is wisdom'. by the way, information can also be had from our cambridge, mass representative at harvard: ms kristyn saunders c/o mail room harvard divinity school, 45 francis ave cambridge, ma 02138. 14)------------------------------------------------------------ _delphi network newsletter_ a monthly newsletter, commenting on current higher educational practices; a devil's advocate view of administration and classroom teaching. write for a free copy to: david v. jenrette basic communication studies miami-dade community college north 11380 nw 27th ave. miami, fl 33167 or phone: 305-237-1579 15)------------------------------------------------------------ _pynchon notes_ 26-27 now available editors john m. krafft miami university--hamilton 1601 peck boulevard hamilton, oh 45011-3399 e-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu khachig tololyan english department wesleyan university middletown, ct 06457-6061 bernard duyfhuizen english department university of wisconsin--eau claire eau claire, wi 54702-4004 e-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet or pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu _pynchon notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall. submissions: the editors welcome submission of manuscripts either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy disk. disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; ibm-compatible preferred. convenient formats include ascii, dca, wordstar, microsoft word, and wordperfect 4.1 or later. manuscripts, notes and queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to john m. krafft. subscriptions: north america, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per year (or double number); overseas, $6.50 per single issue or $12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter. checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. subscriptions and back-issue requests should be addressed to bernard duyfhuizen. _pynchon notes_ is supported in part by the english departments of miami university--hamilton and the university of wisconsin-eau claire. copyright (c) 1992 john m. krafft, khachig tololyan, and bernard duyfhuizen issn 0278-1891 contents of _pn_ 26-27 pynchon's politics: the presence of an absence charles hollander 5 pynchon in life terry caesar 61 from puritanism to paranoia: trajectories of history in weber and pynchon ralph schroeder 69 "how do you spell reality?--'o-u-t-a-s-e'": or how i learned to stop _gravity's rainbow_ and start worrying stephen jukiri and alan nadel 81 grab-bagging in _gravity's rainbow_: incidental (further) notes and sources george schmundt-thomas 91 _vineland_: teenage mutant ninja fiction (or, st. ruggles' struggles, chapter 4) alec mchoul 97 _vineland_ in the mainstream press: a reception study douglas keesey 107 coming home: pynchon's morning in america sanford s. ames 115 a note on television in _vineland_ albert piela iii 125 pynchon and cornell engineering physics, 1953-54 lance schachterle 129 slade revisited, or, the end(s) of pynchon criticism (review essay) brian mchale 139 pynchon's intertextual circuits (review) khachig tololyan 153 rediscovering the humane in the human (review) stacey olster 163 "but who, they?": pynchon's political allegory (review) eyal amiran 167 other books received 173 notes 175 bibliography (--1992) 177 contributors 191 back issues _pynchon notes_ has been published since october 1979. although most back issues are now out of print, they are available in the form of photocopies. nos. 14: $1.50 each; overseas, $ 2.50. nos. 5-10: $2.50 each; overseas, $ 3.50. nos. 11-17: $3.00 each; overseas, $ 4.50. no. 18-19: $7.00; overseas, $10.00. no. 20-21: $7.00; overseas, $10.00. no. 22-23: $9.00; overseas, $12.00. no. 24-25: $9.00; overseas, $12.00. khachig tololyan and clay leighton's _index_ to all the names, other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _gravity's rainbow_ is also available. _index_: $5.00; overseas, $6.50. all checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. overseas checks must be payable in us dollars and payable through an american bank or an american branch of an overseas bank. _pynchon notes_ is a member of celj the conference of editors of learned journals. 16)------------------------------------------------------------ due for publication on 8 october: _beyond metafiction: selfconsciousness in soviet literature_, by david shepherd. oxfordetc., clarendon press david shepherd university of manchester 17)------------------------------------------------------------ gnet: an archive and electronic journal toward a truly global network computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet they are not truly global -they are concentrated in affluent parts of north america, western europe, and parts of asia. gnet is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts of developed nations. (net access is better in many "third world" schools than in south-central los angeles). gnet consists of two parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion. archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1). to conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each document, as well as the full document. (those without ftp access can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval). in addition to the archive, there is a moderated gnet discussion list. the list is limited to discussion of the documents in the archive. it is hoped that document authors will follow this discussion, and update their documents accordingly. if this happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal. monthly mailings will list new papers added to the archive. we wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to visionary. suitable topics include, but are not restricted to: descriptions of networks and projects host and user hardware and software connection options and protocols current and proposed applications education using the global net user and system administrator training social, political or spriritual impact economic and environmental impact politics and funding free speech, security and privacy directories of people and resources to submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu. larry press 18)------------------------------------------------------------ association for computers and the humanities association for literary and linguistic computing 1993 joint international conference ach-allc93 june 16-19, 1993 georgetown university, washington, d.c. call for papers this conference -the major forum for literary, linguistic and humanities computing-will highlight the development of new computing methodologies for research and teaching in the humanities, the development of significant new networked-based and computer-based resources for humanities research, and the application and evaluation of computing techniques in humanities subjects. topics: we welcome submissions on topics such as text encoding; hypertext; text corpora; computational lexicography; statistical models; syntactic, semantic and other forms of text analysis; also computer applications in history, philosophy, music and other humanities disciplines. in addition, ach and allc extend a special invitation to members of the library community engaged in creating and cataloguing network-based resources in the humanities, developing and integrating databases of texts and images of works central to the humanities, and refining retrieval techniques for humanities databases. the deadline for submissions is 1 november 1992. requirements: proposals should describe substantial and original work. those that concentrate on the development of new computing methodologies should make clear how the methodologies are applied to research and/or teaching in the humanities, and should include some critical assessment of the application of those methodologies in the humanities. those that concentrate on a particular application in the humanities (e.g., a study of the style of an author) should cite traditional as well as computer-based approaches to the problem and should include some critical assessment of the computing methodologies used. all proposals should include conclusions and references to important sources. individual papers: abstracts of 1500-2000 words should be submitted for presentations of thirty minutes including questions. sessions: proposals for sessions (90 minutes) are also invited. these should take the form of either: (a) three papers. the session organizer should submit a 500-word statement describing the session topic, include abstracts of 1000-1500 words for each paper, and indicate that each author is willing to participate in the session; or (b) a panel of up to 6 speakers. the panel organizer should submit an abstract of 1500 words describing the panel topic, how it will be organized, the names of all the speakers, and an indication that each speaker is willing to participate in the session. format of submissions electronic submissions are strongly encouraged. please pay particular attention to the format given below. submissions which do not conform to this format will be returned to the authors for reformatting, or may not be considered if they arrive very close to the deadline. all submissions should begin with the following information: title: title of paper author(s): names of authors affiliation: of author(s) contact address: full postal address e-mail: electronic mail address of main author (for contact), followed by other authors (if any) fax number: of main author phone number: of main author (1) electronic submissions these should be plain ascii text files, not files formatted by a wordprocessor, and should not contain tab characters or soft hyphens. paragraphs should be separated by blank lines. headings and subheadings should be on separate lines and be numbered. notes, if needed at all, should take the form of endnotes rather than choose a simple markup scheme for accents and other characters that cannot be transmitted by electronic mail, and include an explanation of the markup scheme after the title information and before the start of the text. electronic submissions should be sent to neuman@guvax.georgetown.edu with the subject line "<author's surname> submission for ach-allc93". (2) paper submissions submissions should be typed or printed on one side of the paper only, with ample margins. six copies should be sent to ach-allc93 (paper submission) dr. michael neuman academic computer center 238 reiss science building georgetown university washington, d.c. 20057 deadlines proposals for papers and sessions november 1, 1992 notification of acceptance february 1, 1993 advance registration may 10, 1993 there will be a substantial increase in the registration fee for registrations received after may 10, 1993. publication a selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in the series research in humanities computing edited by susan hockey and nancy ide and published by oxford university press. international program committee proposals will be evaluated by a panel of reviewers who will make recommendations to the program committee comprised of: chair: marianne gaunt, rutgers, the state university (ach) thomas corns, university of wales, bangor (allc) paul fortier, university of manitoba (ach) jacqueline hamesse, universite catholique louvain-la-neuve (allc) susan hockey, rutgers and princeton universities (allc) nancy ide, vassar college (ach) randall jones, brigham young university (ach) antonio zampolli, university of pisa (allc) local organizer: michael neuman, georgetown university (ach) accommodation accommodations for conference participants are available at several locations in the georgetown area: georgetown university's leavey conference center the georgetown inn one washington circle hotel georgetown university's village c residence hall location georgetown, an historic residential district along the potomac river, is a six-mile ride by taxi from washington national airport. international flights arrive at dulles airport, which offers regular bus service to the nation's capital. inquiries please address all inquiries to: ach-allc93 dr. michael neuman academic computer center 238 reiss science building georgetown university washington, d.c. 20057 phone: 202-687-6096 fax: 202-687-6003 bitnet: neuman@guvax internet: neuman@guvax.georgetown.edu please give your name, full mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address with any inquiry. 19)------------------------------------------------------------ _without any rules: the politics and poetics of the vernacular_ we are seeking original, article-length essays on vernacular artforms in a postcolonial/postmodern context, including music, oral poetry, post-colonial writing/criticism, vernacular festivals or other practices, vernacular architecture, film, video, or other appropriations of space/language/technology. some examples might be: hip-hop music, graffiti, raves, dance parties, blues, jazz, reggae, postcolonial fiction & poetry, home videos, sampling, pastiche, photo-collage, xerox art. essays on vernacular languages are especially sought which frame the question of the opposition (ality) of the vernacular, as a language of resistance to hegemonic forces. contributors at present include ronald jemal stephens on the vocabulary of hip-hop, and an essay on the vernacular by the nigerian novelist amos tutuola. abstracts, proposals, and/or papers may be sent by e-mail to: rapotter@colby.edu or via snail mail to: russell potter english department colby college waterville maine 04901. the co-editor of this collection is bennet schaber ("modernity and the vernacular") of syracuse university. 20)------------------------------------------------------------ _mfs: modern fiction studies_ special issues announcement the fall '92 issue of mfs will be a special issue on the "politics of modernism." the spring '93 issue will be a special issue on "fiction of the indian sub-continent"; submissions are invited (see below for address): deadline: november 1, 1992 the fall '93 issue will be a special issue on the fiction of toni morrison; submissions are invited (see below for address): deadline: april 1, 1992 the spring '94 issue will be a special issue, edited by barbara harlow, on "the politics of cultural displacement." the issue will include essays that address issues of displacement across various narrative genres, including fiction, film, historical account, legal documentation, and reportage. the guest editor will be particularly interested in seeing essays that address these issues in light of the cultural politics of deportation, emigration/immigration, population transfer, political asylum, extradition, "illegal aliens," and migrant labor. this special issue of mfs proposes to examine the pressures on the received generic formulas of narrative convention and literary paradigm by these global demographic rearrangements. deadline: november 1, 1993. all submissions to mfs, both for special issues and general issues, should be sent in duplicate to: the editors mfs: modern fiction studies department of english 1389 heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389. 21)----------------------------------------------------------- _vietnam generation_ invites submissions for the special issue _american indians and the vietnam war_ original poetry, prose, critical works dealing with american indian experiences in and during the vietnam war, and critical articles on the characterization of american indians in vietnam war fiction are encouraged for consideration. submit proposals, abstracts, poems and prose to: david erben cpr 326 english dept univ of south florida tampa, fl 33620. 22)------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers: "composition as explanation" the 1993 american studies association annual conference (boston, massachusetts / november 4-7, 1993) is on "cultural transformations / countering traditions." i want to propose a panel composed of papers discussing and enacting the intersection of the academic essay and the poem. papers that attempt to escape the constraints of genre that form the academic essay will be given special priority, but work that discusses the mutant products of this intersection (such as gertrude stein's "composition as explanation") or approaches poetics from a cultural studies perspective is also welcome. please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by december 15, 1992 to juliana spahr / state university of new york at buffalo / 302 clemens hall / buffalo, new york 14260. e-mail--v231sey9@ubvms.bitnet. 23)------------------------------------------------------------ _cylinder_ the international society for the philosophy of tools and space. we are an interdisciplinary and "multinational" organization, small but growing, dedicated to thoughtful discussion about and research into issues concerning tools and space. currently, we maintain a membership list and circulate a short newsletter. but our future plans call for expansion a number of conferences and a journal are possible in the next few years. within the scope of our society, members have raised diverse and fascinating issues for consideration, including but not limited to the following: * the role of equipment in heidegger: the tool and truth in _sein und zeit_ * bergson; levinas and the concept of hypostasis * baudrillard & virilio: speed, the simulacrum and "crystal revenge" * marx: from useto exchange-value; the deterritorializing adventure of capital and surplus-value * deleuze/guattari: desiring machines, paranoid machines, miraculating machines, celibate machines * the mechanics of the dreamwork in psycho-analysis * poetics of space a la bachelard * figural and rhetorical aspects of the tool in literature; the delirious machines of poe and kafka * bolo'bolo and other political theories of reterritorialization * architectural theory and practice * media theory * virtual reality: the emergence of simulacra in social space * transit technology and urban planning * infrastructure catastrophes: the chicago freight tunnel flood * the iconology of computers, especially the macintosh * a philosophy of toys * the tool/toy of language and its (dys)function: the zen koan, the joke membership is free. just send your name and address to be placed on our list. _cylinder_ c/o graham harman, secretary philosophy dept., depaul university chicago il, usa 60614 email: cylinder@uiowa.edu 24)------------------------------------------------------------ suny stonybrook conference on reproductive technologies the humanities institute sponsored conference on reproductive technologies: narratives, gender, society, is unique in bringing together ivf and other clinicians, lawyers, bio-ethicists, historians, humanists, and people using the technologies to share their research and varying perspectives. the conference will be focussed, in part i, on four case histories having to do with gamete donation, sex-selection, surrogacy, and genetic counselling. part ii deals with broader issues regarding reproductive technologies, such as "body politics," adoption, and nursing narratives. keynotes speakers are: dr. rayna rapp, new school for social research, new york; and barbara katz rothman, baruch college, new york. respondents to the second speaker are: dr. mary martin, m.d. and betsy p. aigen, founder and director of the surrogacy mother program of new york. other speakers include isabel marcus, law school, suny at buffalo; lisa glick zucker, attorney, aclu, newark, n.j.; martha calhoun, new york state department of law; ruth cowan, ph.d., history dept. suny at stony brook; susan squier, english dept, suny at stony brook; john wiltshire and kay torney, la trobe university, australia; e. ann kaplan, director, the humanities institute, suny stony brook; ella shohat, cuny, staten island; jennifer terry, resident fellow at the humanities institute, and assistant professor at ohio state university; helen cooper, acting vice provost for graduate affairs, suny at stony brook. the conference will take place on friday and saturday november 6 & 7, from 9.0 a.m. on each day. for more information and registration forms, call e. ann kaplan, at 516-632-7765; or respond on email to mhuether@sbccmail.edu. 25)------------------------------------------------------------ 1992 modern languages association convention special session #119 tuesday, december 29, 1992, 12:00 noon "hypertext, hypermedia: defining a fictional form" terence harpold university of pennsylvania (chair) michael joyce jackson community college carolyn guyer leonardo judy malloy manistee, mi stuart moulthrop georgia institute of technology until recently, critical discussion of hypertext has tended to focus on problems of implementation, psychology and epistemology--the issues raised by hypertext as a kind of writing, independent of its subject matter. little attention has been paid to the distinct characteristics of hypertext as a _fictional_ form. this session will be devoted to a discussion of hypertext fiction (and, more generally, electronic fiction) as an emerging mode of discourse in the late age of print. the panel includes individuals from both academia and the growing community of artists working in electronic text and multimedia. in addition to the sizable body of theory and criticism they represent, each of the panelists is well-known for his or her electronic fiction. we expect an lively dialogue between the panelists (and with the audience), reflecting the variety of strategies at play in hypertext theory and practice. the papers michael joyce's paper, "hypertextual rhythms (the momentary advantage of our awkwardness)," will address the historical moment of recent hypertext fiction. he will argue that the common perception that hypertext is an awkward and opaque mode of discourse actually makes it easier for us to grasp its historical significance. before the novelty of the electronic medium fades, and electronic text assumes the transparency that "conventional" text now has, we can understand it as a discrete representational form. judy malloy's paper, "between the narrator and the narrative (the disorder of memory)," will draw on several of her "narrabases" ("narrative databases") to discuss problems of narrative "truth" in radically non-sequential electronic texts. the randomness and interactivity of hypertext fiction make it possible to vary the reader's experience with each reading. the essential disorder of the fictional worlds that emerge mimics, she contends, the disordered yet linked structure of human memory. carolyn guyer's paper, "buzz-daze jazz and the quotidian stream (attempts to filet a paradox)," explores the structure of narrative temporality in hypertext fiction. she will argue that hypertextual narratives are "complex mixtures" (deleuze and guattari), in which figure and ground are shifted arhythmically, in a chaotic or fractal way. the result is an oscillating transformation of the linear temporality of traditional fictional forms. stuart moulthrop's paper, "hypertext as war machine," situates hypertext fiction as an inherently politicized byproduct of the late capitalist event-state of spectacle, simulation, and multinational aggression. focusing on john mcdaid's "uncle buddy's phantom funhouse" and his own "victory garden," he asks whether the deformations of print narrative in these fictions provide an alternative to the semiotics of the spectacle, or represent (in hakim bey's term) merely "festal" digressions from the discourse of disembodied power. for more information, contact: terence harpold 420 williams hall university of pennsylvania philadelphia, pa 19104 tharpold@pennsas.upenn.edu slithy1@applelink.apple.com 26)------------------------------------------------------------ society for phenomenology and existential philosophy annual meeting to be held october 8-10 at the boston park plaza hotel and towers. 27)------------------------------------------------------------ the committee on computing as a cultural process of the american anthropological association will hold a workshop on issues in computing as a field of cultural research beginning on the afternoon of tuesday, december 1, 1992 in san francisco. the workshop, participation in which is limited to thirty people, is scheduled to coincide with the opening of the annual meeting of the aaa. for further information, contact david hakken, committee chair, at: technology policy center suny institute of technology po box 3050 utica, ny 13504 315-792-7437 hakken@sunyit.edu 28)------------------------------------------------------------ _rethinking marxism_: a journal of economics, culture, and society is sponsoring an international conference titled "marxism in the new world order: crises and possibilities" 12-14 november 1992 at the university of massachusetts at amherst. for information and preregistration materials, call: 413/545-3285 or write: aesa/rm "new world order" conference p.o. box 715, amherst, ma 01004-0715. the conference will include 3 major plenaries, over 100 sessions and workshops, an art exhibition, an art installation, and a cabaret opera. participants include etienne balibar, nancy fraser, sandra harding, nancy c. m. hartsock, ernest mandel, manning marable, vicente navarro, sheila rowbotham, eve kosofsky sedgwick, immanuel wallerstein, and cornel west. events include "this is my body: this is my blood" (art exhibition and panel discussion curate and organized by susan jahoda and may stevens), "e.g.: a musical portrait of emma goldman" (cabaret opera by leonard lehrman), "dream worlds: the video (sut jhally), "standpoint theories and postmodernism's challenges and affinities (sandra harding, nancy hartsock, kathy weeks), "queerness, race, class" (eve kosofsky sedgwick, cindy patton, johnathan goldberg, michael moon), "postmodernism, late capitalism, and marxian political economy" (jack amariglio, julie graham, arjo klamer, bruce norton, david ruccio), and "towards a socialist politics of desire" (tim brennan, jane jordan, amitava kumar, pratibha parmar). 29)------------------------------------------------------------ 31st annual meeting of the society for phenomenology and existential philosophy registration information is available at the conference (pre-registration is not necessary), but registration material is also available from: lenore langsdorf dept. of speech communication southern illinois university carbondale, il 62901 or phone: (618) 453-2291. the program is quite large, and the speakers will include jacques derrida, david krell, judith butler, axel honneth, linda nicholson, gerald bruns, herman rapaport. some session titles that may interest your members: "critical theory in the age of cynicism," "foucault, power and the critique of hermeneutics," "respondings: 'il y a la cendre,'" "constructing and deconstructing identity," "postmodern returns to hegel," "resistance to lyotard,"... there are about 60 sessions with about 250 people on the program, and about 1000 in attendance. 30)------------------------------------------------------------ a consortium for network publication of refereed research journals first advance notice may 1992 the university of manitoba has received funding commitments to organize and hold an international conference to promote the establishment of a consortium of universities and learned societies to sponsor computer network publication of refereed journals. the consortium would be a non-profit publishing cooperative intended to make use of the internet as an important medium for the publication of scholarly research in any discipline. since the summer of 1991, an ad hoc group at the university of manitoba has been developing the idea of the conference and the proposed consortium, and has been working on funding proposals since the autumn of 1991. the conference is now tentatively slated for the autumn of 1993 and will be held at the university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada. we hope to enlist the interest and cooperation of major research universities and learned societies across north america and elsewhere. over the next year or so, we will be communicating the vision behind the conference and consortium to the academic community. this is the first advance notice, and we plan to provide updates with more specific information on the conference details as plans for it develop. as an analogy of sorts for the proposed consortium, in the traditional publishing of books and paper journals, scholars press (atlanta, georgia) is a unique example of such a cooperative, operating under several major u.s. learned societies (e.g., american academy of religion, society of biblical literature, american philological society), with a number of universities in the u.s. and canada as sponsors of particular publication projects such as major monograph series. it is an example of groups in the academic community taking collective responsibility to see that worthy scholarship gets published, without commercial considerations determining the question. the internet is the major new medium for dissemination of research, and it is vital that the scholarly community, through its major institutions of universities and learned societies, become acquainted with the enormous potential of the internet for scholarship. commercial companies are already devoting attention to developing computer network publication projects. it is imperative that the scholarly community not leave this major medium to be developed solely by commercial interests. the basic aims are: (1) to make academic merit the sole consideration in the publication of journal-type research. (2) to advance the idea that the academic community should have a hand in determining what gets published and how it is disseminated. (3) to provide a major outlet of research publication that is not subject to the severe economic constraints of traditional paper-journal publishing (soaring costs in some commercially attractive fields, very limited journal outlets for less commercially attractive fields). (4) to make collective and considered use of the scholarly advantages of network publication (e.g., savings in production costs, speed up in publication and dissemination process). (5) to provide an effective and low-cost means for universities and learned societies to play a greater role as disseminators of research information and not only as producers and consumers of research information. our initial objective at this point is to inform as many in the scholarly community as possible of the conference and the consortium proposal, and to solicit interest in these plans. please contact us for more information, and to be kept informed on the progress in our planning. we also sincerely invite you to offer your ideas on things to be included in the conference, key people to inform and possibly invite to the conference, and any other matters relevant to the conference and consortium proposal. for more information, and to express your interests in the conference and consortium, contact the: convener of the university of manitoba ad hoc committee on electronic journals professor larry w. hurtado institute for the humanities 108 isbister bldg. university of manitoba winnipeg, manitoba, r3t2n2 phone: (204) 474-9114. fax (204) 275-5781. e-mail: hurtado@ccu.umanitoba.ca. 31)------------------------------------------------------------ 8th annual conference on the scientific study of subjectivity october 22-24, 1992, at the university of missouri will feature: ana garner (marquette university) "the disaster news story: the reader, the content and social construction of meaning" paul grosswiler (university of maine-orono) "the convergence of william stephenson's and marshall mcluhan's communication theories" patrick o'brien (university of iowa) "'they meant this...and we meant that': discerning opinion structures through q methodology and news frame analysis" donald f. theall (trent university) "james joyce and william stephenson among the communicators" dan thomas (wartburg college) "deconstructing the political spectacle: sex, race, and subjectivity in public response to the clarence thomas/anita hill 'sexual harrassment' hearings" there will also be a special panel on quantum theory and q methodology, plus additional papers on a variety of other topics. the meeting is co-sponsored by the international society for the scientific study of subjectivity and the stephenson research center of the school of journalism, university of missouri-columbia. for further details, contact the program chair: irvin goldman (goldman@ucc.uwindsor.ca), department of communication studies, university of windsor. 32)----------------------------------------------------------- program of events for the v2 organization: september / october / november. manifestation for the unstable media iv september 26th october 4th the yearly festival of the v2 organization is this year focussed to the question: "how can architecture and the visual arts cope with new conceptions of time and space as performed and experienced in electronic space and with its cultural implications?" in a symposium the different attitudes in the deconstructivist discourse in architecture (like the formulated by peter eisenman on one side and hejduk & libeskind on the other) will be discussed parallel to art theories as for example presented by peter weibel. among those who participate are: jeffrey shaw (nl), peter weibel (a), arthur & mariliouse kroker (can), kristina kubisch (brd) and many others whose participation still has to be confirmed. ask for the complete program up from september 1st. dick raaijmakers october 16th, 17th, 18th. lectures/demonstrations and concert by dick raaijmakers (1930). dick raaijmakers is at composer/scientist/theatremaker who teaches at the centre of sonology at the conservatory in den haag (nl). he worked for philips and did research in electro-acoustic phenomena and was thus closely related to the physics lab in the fifties. his work (theories and artworks) is a consequent study on basic phenomena in music/art. in his reflections on music/art he also integrates the use of technology as well as the fundamental distinction that remains between technology and art. his concert will be the systematic dissection of twelve microphones in a laboratory setup (title: dodici manieri di far tacere un microfono). for the presentation of his work there will be other artists involved like for example clarance barlow. roy ascott: "telenoia" 12.00h october 31st until 12.00h november 1st. "you've experienced on telepresence, now get ready for it" roy ascott (1934) will activate a global network on october 31st at 12.00h till november 1st 12.00h. the network will be active for 24 hours with fax, e-mail a.s. there will be t-shirts available for the 'day of telenoia schizophrenia'. roy ascott will also take about his work on october 30th. the presentations of roy ascott and dick raaijmakers are 3 presentations of artists who profiled themselves in the past and present with remarkable and important theories in art and technology. a publication in which texts of roy ascott, gustav metzger and dick raaijmakers will be printed and which will support the different projects. v2 organization 5211 pt 's-hertogenbosch, netherlands. tel 31 73 137958 fax 31 73 122238 33)------------------------------------------------------------ third washington d.c. virtual reality conference: dec 1-2, 1992 the december 1992 virtual reality conference focuses on current applications. the presentations highlight applications in industry, commerce, defense, and aerospace. the conference addresses managers and researchers who are involved or wish to become involved in the development of vr systems. besides 16 distinguished speakers, the conference also features exhibitors demonstrating available vr products. the conference is sponsored by the education foundation of the data processing management association (dpma) and cyberedge journal. technology training corporation manages the conference site and the registration. ------------------------------------------------- washington d.c., december 1-2, 1992 ramada hotel at tyson's corner -falls church, va ------------------------------------------------- dr. myron krueger, president, artificial reality corporation dr. david gelernter, computer science, yale university dr. bob c. liang, manager of advanced multimedia, ibm research lab suzanne weghorst, human interface technology lab, u of washington, joel orr, autodesk fellow, autodesk, inc. george zachary, technical marketing/sales, vpl research dr. michael zyda, computer science, naval postgraduate school mark long, david sarnoff laboratory, princeton dr. peter tinker, rockwell science center dr. john latta, president, 4th wave tom barrett, research & development, electronic data systems jacquelyn morie, institute for simulation and training, ucf dr. chris esposito, boeing aircraft, seattle douglas macleod, vr project director, banff centre for the arts major irwin simon, m.d., telepresence, ft. ord david smith, president, virtus corporation -------------------------------------------------- the conference chair is cyberspace philosopher, dr. michael heim registration fee is $795 per registrant. for dpma members (individual members only--not corporate) or for cyberedge journal subscribers, the fee is $760. for teams of 3 or more, the fee is $695. for u.s. government or university personnel, registration is $645. to register, call 310-534-3922 and ask for mr. dana marcus. to receive a flyer with more information, write mr. tom huchel, technology training corporation, 3420 kashiwa street, torrance, ca 90510-3608 or call 310-534-4871. 34)------------------------------------------------------------ _semios-l_ a new electronic discussion group has been formed for those interested in semiotics, visual language, graphic design and advertising, deconstruction, the philosophy of language, and others curious about the process of communication. the core issue that ties all of these disciplines together is the production and the interpretation of signs. to become a part of _semios-l_, send the following command from your computer: from a bitnet location: tell listserv at ulkyvm subscribe semios-l (your name) from an internet site: to: listserv%ulkyvm.louisville.edu subscribe semios-l (your name) in the first two weeks of operation, _semios-l_ already had over one hundred members from four continents. the group welcomes new voices. steven skaggs semios-l list manager 35)------------------------------------------------------------ sochist on listserv@uscvm new social history list or listserv@vm.usc.edu briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called the "new social history": (1) emphasis on quantitative data rather than an analysis of prose sources. (2) borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc. (3) the examination of groups which have been ignored by traditional disciplines (i.e. the history of women, families, children, labor, etc.) to subscribe, send e-mail to listserv@uscvm.bitnet or listserv@vm.usc.edu with the single line in the body of the e-mail: subscribe sochist your full name 36)------------------------------------------------------------ _interdis_ welcome to the interdis e-mail discussion list. the idea behind this list is to facilitate national (and international) discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching in interdisciplinary contexts. it is my hope that the list will be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues associated with interdisciplinary work. it should also be a good place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from interdisciplinary perspectives. please forward this message to colleagues you think may be interested in the list. they can put themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to: listserv@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu the message should read sub interdis <your name> to post comments to the list, e-mail interdis@miamiu.muohio.edu feel free to begin posting comments today. i look forward to our continuing dialogue. 37)------------------------------------------------------------ the department of english at carnegie mellon university invites applications for a position (or positions) as assistant or associate professor of literary and cultural studies, beginning fall 1993. expertise in literary and cultural theory is required since successful applicants will teach a total of 2 courses per semester in a theory-based undergraduate program in literary and cultural studies, and/or in the graduate program in literary and cultural theory. the committee will give particular attention to candidates specializing in any aspect or field of history, culture and literature between 1500 and 1900, and we also have needs in film and media. women and minority candidates especially welcomed. send letter, c.v. and names of three referees to: alan kennedy head, dept of english carnegie mellon pittsburgh pa 15213. 38)------------------------------------------------------------ center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library duke university travel-to-collections grants 1992-1993 three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to: (1) graduate students in any academic field who wish to use the resources of the center for research toward m.a. or ph.d degrees. (2) faculty working on research projects. funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to durham and local accommodations. the major collections available at the center at the current time is the extensive archives of the j. walter thompson company (jwt), the oldest advertising agency in the u.s. and a major international agency since the 1920s. later in the year the advertisements and a moderate amount of agency documentation from d'arcy, masius, benton & bowles (dmb&b) also will become available for research. the center holds several other smaller collections relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and marketing. requirements: awards may be used between december 15, 1992 and september 1, 1993. graduate student applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a postgraduate program in any academic department and (2) must enclose a letter of recommendation from the student's advisor or project director. please address questions and requests for application forms to: ms. ellen gartrell director center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library duke university box 90185 durham nc 27708-0185 phone: 919-681-8714 fax: 919-684-2855 e-mail contact: ms. marion hirsch mph@mail.lib.duke.edu deadlines: applications 1992-93 awards must be received or postmarked by november 1, 1992. awards will be announced by december 1. ian, 'from abject to object: women's bodybuilding', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-ian-from.txt from abject to object: women's bodybuilding by marcia ian rutgers university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by marcia ian, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] do muscles have gender, or are they, on the contrary, ungendered human meat? other than the few muscles associated with their sexual organs, men and women have the same muscles. does this make muscles neuter, or perhaps neutral? is there some "difference" between the biceps of a male and those of a female other than, possibly, that of size? if a woman's biceps, or quadriceps, are bigger than a man's, are hers more masculine than his? in the eyes of most beholders, the more muscle a woman has, the more "masculine" she is. the same, of course, is true for men: the more muscle a man has, the more masculine he is too. bodybuilding in a sense is a sport dedicated to wiping out "femininity," insofar as femininity has for centuries connoted softness, passivity, non-aggressivity, and physical weakness. eradicating femininity just may be the purpose of both male and female bodybuilders. even so, for men to wage war on femininity, whether their own or somebody else's, is nothing new. for women, however, it is. insofar as women have for centuries obliged cultural expectations by em-bodying femininity as immanent, bodybuilding affords women the opportunity to embody instead a refusal of this embodiment, to cease somewhat to represent man's complementary (and complimentary) other. [2] at least this is how it seems to this author, who is: a forty-year old, divorced, atheistic jewish mother of two teenaged girls; an assistant professor of british and american literature at a the state univerity of new jersey; a specialist in modernism, psychoanalysis and gender; and a dedicated "gym rat" who has trained hard and heavy without cease (knock on wood) for about eight years now and during graduate school even entered bodybuilding competitions. as such, i confess, i obviously have various axes to grind (pun intended) which intersect "around" the body as uniquely over-determined site of ambivalent psychosocial signification. from this point of view women's bodybuilding appears to be roughly equal parts gender vanguardism and exhibitionistic masochism; men's bodybuilding could in theory be the same, but i have seen no evidence that this is so. male bodybuilders, on the contrary, seem mainly out to prove that they are conventionally masculine- hyperbolically, ferociously so. [3] furthermore, the sport of bodybuilding, as marketed and represented by those enterprises founded by joe and ben weider, including magazines like _flex_ and _muscle and fitness_ (published by "i, brute enterprises, inc.") and contests like the mr. and ms. olympia, as well as various less powerful rival organizations, reproduces %ad nauseam% all the cliches of masculinism from the barbarous to the sublime. this remains true despite the fact that in recent years the top female competitors have displayed increasing amounts of hard striated muscle. i had hoped to find in the gym a communal laboratory for experimental gender-bending, perhaps a haven for the gender-bent, or at the least a democratic republic biologically based on the universality of human musculature. this laboratory, this haven, this republic, however, remains a utopic and private space, a delusion in effect, because what goes on in the gym, as in bodybuilding competition, remains the violent re-inscription of gender binarism, of difference even where there is none. as jane gallop pointed out, in western culture gender is no "true" binary or antithesis but rather an algorithm of one and zero. bodybuilding expands the equivalence "male is to female as one is to zero" to include the specious antithesis of muscle and femininity. [4] spurious gender difference is maintained and rewarded in bodybuilding through the discriminatory valorization of certain aesthetic categories. indeed bodybuilding tries to limit the achievements of female physique athletes by adding "femininity" to the list of aesthetic categories they are expected to fulfill. the film _pumping iron ii: the women_ (1985) dramatically documents this sexism by recording a conflict which erupts in a sequestered conference room among those judging the 1983 "miss olympia" (now the "ms. olympia"), america's most prestigious bodybuilding competition for women. a man apparently serving his first stint as judge is puzzled and angry to find that he is supposed to judge the women on the basis of their "femininity." he points out to the other, more experienced judges that, while the men are ranked on the basis of their muscle density, definition, over-all symmetry and proportionality, as well as for the style, skill and fluidity of their posing, the women are in addition judged for a quality called "femininity" which surreptitiously but effectively limits all the others. how, this judge queries, is anyone supposed to determine how muscular a woman's body can be before it ceases to be feminine? furthermore, in what other sport could a female competitor be expected to limit her achievement for fear of losing her proper gender? [5] would anyone advise a runner--florence griffith-joyner, for example--that to run too fast would be unladylike? would anyone warn a female long jumper not to jump too far, or a swimmer not to swim too fast? why, then, presume to tell a bodybuilder that she may be only so muscular, but no more muscular than that, at the risk of losing both her femininity and her contest? this sensible judge argued in vain; the panel of judges elected rachel mclish, then at her cheesiest, as miss olympia, while penalizing bev francis, by far the most muscular and impressive of the competitors, for being what they considered "too masculine." mclish was subsequently disqualified when someone discovered she had padded her bikini top to look more buxom. mclish, however, was merely trying to win the approval of the judges who, she thought, might have been repelled by her if they had viewed her as masculine, although it is hard to imagine how they could have. subsequently mclish became more interested in the opinion of a higher judge when she became "born again" and began pumping iron for jesus. even with mclish disqualified, however, francis placed pathetically low. [6] many viewers have been amused by mclish's antics but missed the nature and extent of the sexism the movie documents. leonard maltin's _tv movies and video guide_ (1991), for example, which does not usually dwell upon the physical attractiveness of the men and women appearing in the films under review, informs its readers that _pumping iron ii_ offers a "funny, if suspiciously stagy" look at a "vegas non-event" in which "pouty-lipped sexpot rachel mclish, manlike australian bev francis, and two-dozen more female bodybuilders compete." but while the _guide_ thus dismisses the women's competition as a stagy non-encounter between a sexpot and an australian she-man, it describes the first _pumping iron_ (1977) about the men, which, like _pumping iron ii_, received three stars from the _guide_, as a "fascinating documentary" in which schwarzenegger "exudes charm and . . . strong screen presence" (schwarzenegger's stage name in his early movie "stay hungry" was "arnold strong"). [7] the arduousness of physique competition is the same for male and female. like the male, the female must diet away as much subcutaneous and even intra-musculuar bodyfat as possible when preparing for competition. and, whereas she may typically start out with twice as much bodyfat as the male, she must try to be as "ripped" as he, as close, that is, to that impossible ideal of 0% bodyfat on the day of the contest. in the process, she inevitably, if temporarily, loses most of her breast tissue, as well as that soft adiposity which typifies the conventionally feminine, proto-maternal figure. many female bodybuilders opt for surgical breast implants to try to salvage the "femininity" they lost in the eyes of their beholders as they gained in muscularity. my own experience in two bodybuilding competitions during the summer of 1986 (the summer after hitting the mla job market and accepting my present position) typifies the ambivalent attitudes judges have toward muscular female bodies. in july i won the "miss neptune" championship at a fairly well-established contest in virginia beach because my physique was the biggest, hardest, and veiniest of the group. in august, having remained during the intervening month in as close to "peak" condition as possible, i lost a newly established contest to an anorexic and a cupcake for the same reason. in this case the judges, i was told later, assumed that the relatively beefy hardness of my physique meant i was "juiced," and they deducted points accordingly from my score. i have never used drugs or even supplements, but since they did no testing or even asking, i had no way to persuade them to the contrary; nor did the audience, which roundly booed the judges's decision. [8] that the first contest had been run for years while the second was newly established is significant; the "establishment" in women's bodybuilding is changing somewhat. lenda murray, the winner of the november, 1990 "ms. olympia" is phenomenally, finely, and hugely muscular. she redefines women's bodybuilding, if not women, and must be seen to be believed. nevertheless, here it is june, 1991 and, as one irate reader points out, _muscle and fitness_ still has not seen fit to do a layout on the new ms. o. the reader asks, "don't you think you should have stopped the presses to get lenda in?" in reply the editor points out that there is "plenty of lenda in this" issue. by "plenty of lenda" the editors apparently mean a feature piece entitled "oooohhh, ms. o!" in which murray tells readers how she trains her legs, and a brief interview of murray and another impressive champion, anja schreiner, entitled, "let's talk about women's bodybuilding." this interview, not surprisingly, is advertised in letters which say "women talk about building sexy muscles" down at the bottom of the red-white-and-blue magazine cover of an issue which highlights iron-pumping in operation desert storm, for which the editors did manage to stop the presses. the cover shows a photo of a huge smiling blonde male flexing in his starred-and-striped shorts, with two skinny blonde women in red and blue bikinis clinging to his shoulders (one of the women holds a little american flag at her breast). this trio, in turn, is framed by the title of the month's "superfeature": "usa military muscle: how the navy seals, combat pilots, ground forces toughen up thru bodybuiding." [9] this superfeature publishes a barrage of photos which were sent to the magazine by its many fans in every branch of operation desert storm (all of whom, except one, were men) who managed to lift, press, and squat weights made of concrete, sand, and iron when not otherwise engaged. in the midst of all this macho hype, however, bill dobbins, longtime muscle writer, sounds a sane note or two, one of which reminds us that, while men's bodybuilding continues to reflect those patriarchal values we assume to have prevailed among cavemen, women's bodybuilding continues quietly to evolve. on the last page of the issue, entitled "the champ: bev francis," dobbins reminds us of the controversy "regarding the muscles-versus-femininity question in bodybuilding for women" which greeted the appearance on the bodybuilding stage of this former professional dancer and world-champion powerlifter. dobbins, writing for the weider organization, cannot criticize the 1983 decision filmed in _pumping iron ii_--after all, "for ultimate power and excellence, she [francis] uses the weider principles"--but he does claim that her finally winning the world pro title in 1987 was a milestone in the sport. that was the day, dobbins writes, when "the controversy ended" and the principle "'may the best bodybuilder win' became the rule of the day, rather than 'we can't let the sport go in this direction'" (toward the "manlike" woman bev francis), "when the judges clearly opted for the aesthetics of bodybuilding over other and often irrelevant standards of female beauty." [10] lenda murray is evidence that, at least at the highest levels, dobbins may begin to be right. in the prefatory remarks to his account of murray's leg-training methods, dobbins, clearly awestruck, can't help but point out that- given her tiny waist, her "exaggerated v-shape" and "shockingly wide, well-developed lats," the dramatic sweep of her thighs as curved "as a pair of parentheses" with hamstrings to match--murray resembles no less an athlete than sergio oliva, mr. olympia 1967-69 and arnold's "legendary adversary." this comparison would be high praise for anyone, but is astonishing--a first--for a woman. okay, so women are twenty years behind the men; but who cares, when they are closing the gap? surely the men cannot continue to increase in mass from year to year at the accustomed rate now that drug testing is becoming more routine. true, as "everyone knows," steroids are still used widely by both men and women, and both know how to clean up their bloodstreams shortly before a contest in order to avoid detection. nevertheless, methods of detection are improving. two years ago drug-testing of women began at the miss olympia competition, and this year the men were tested for the first time. officials claim that in the near future they will initiate random drug testing throughout the year in order to bar users from competition. but because men have relied on drugs far longer and far more than women, and have used them to widen the gap between the genders rather than narrow it, the differences between serious male and female competitors will likely continue to shrink. [11] this will be the case, though, only if women manage to free themselves from the judgemental category of "femininity" which, dobbins's sanguine prognostications to the contrary, competitors and judges continue to invoke. in his article on schreiner and murray, jerry brainum mentions that both women continue to notice that others' reactions to their physiques range from "curiosity to admiration to disgust." "you can't expect to extract the idea of femininity from the judging process in a women's bodybuilding contest," says lenda; anja agrees that "old stereotypes die hard." what do they think of these stereotypes? they don't say. neither wants to appear freaky, but both thrive on the herculean effort and spartan self-discipline the sport requires of both men and women. perhaps in the future physiological differences between individuals will figure more prominently than aesthetic differences between the genders. [12] different blood levels of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone, for example, do cause individuals' rates and ratios of muscle growth and fat reduction to vary- hormonal variations which, like the quantity and location of an individual's "fast-twitch muscle fibres," figure among the physiological factors vaguely designated by the term "genetics." in the gym someone will inevitably and reverentially say, for instance, that arnold schwarzenegger has "great genetics" or, self-deprecatingly, that one's own back won't grow because of inferior "genetics." "genetics," like hormone levels and willpower, vary within the sexes as well as between them, however, so that there is no reason to assume that we have yet seen the "ultimate" physique, whatever that might be. still, this fantasy of, and reverence for, superior "genetics" is certainly one of bodybuilding's several nazi-esque qualities. others include a kind of superrace (not just superhero) mentality which, especially if the builder in question is stoked on steroids or crazed by radical dieting, can provoke snickering sneering snarling growling or worse directed at anyone whose existence could in any way be construed as coming between him and his rightful greatness, let alone between him and his image in the mirror. (i once heard "mr. virginia" bark at a woman who sauntered across his line of vision: "get the fuck out of my mirror.") [13] beneath the superrace mentality, with its need to believe in absolute difference between the one and the zero, there lurks, as one might expect, the fetishist's fearful wish that there may finally be no difference after all between the sexes. without question, relative to the cultural norms of masculine and feminine bodies, the female builder masculinizes herself. but why does no one ever mention that the muscular male physique athlete feminizes himself to a degree? consider the curvaceous pectoral mounds of the well-developed male chest; the round "muscle bellies" of powerful male biceps; the firm meaty thighs and spherical buttocks of the man who can squat heavy. and how about the hairless, well-lubricated flesh some of the men sport year-round, but with which all male competitors must emerge on contest day? above all, what about the devotion with which the male bodybuilder strives to embody a set of ideal categories--symmetry, proportion, muscularity--for the acknowledgement of which he offers himself to a panel who objectify him in just those terms? does he not feel feminized in the process? [14] over the years i've asked various male builders these questions, and i've never received an answer more direct than a narrowed gaze and a "how the fuck should i know?" sam fussell, who is in a sense my younger, wasp, ivy league, analog, answers this question in his book _muscle: confessions of an unlikely bodybuilder_, when at the end of chapter 10 he shares with his readers the most humiliating moment in his career in iron. this moment comes when he fails to "explode!" on cue at the rose city bench-press extravaganza, and thereby takes last place in his 242-lb. weight class, an over-subscribed class for which the contest promoters quickly run out of trophies. when fussell walks to the podium to receive his last-place men's trophy, what he gets is much worse: a sympathetic pat on the rump, and "a plaque on which were inscribed in gold plate the words: "women 148 lbs: first place." "at last," writes fussell pathetically, "i had a trophy to tell me just who and what i was." a woman! for shame! and after all that work too. (poor baby.) [15] on the other hand one of fussell's best moments occurs at a bodybuilding contest when he walks offstage after performing his posing routine, to be welcomed by his friend vinnie: "oh, sam. . . you looked like a human fucking penis! veins were poppin' every which way!" in all fairness, i should add here that i spoke the very same words to my own mirrored reflection in about 1985, which may indicate that this fantasy of sexual indifferentiation is a two-way street. what is not a two-way street is the manner in which bodybuilding conceals the fantasy of sexual indifferentiation behind a whole vocabulary of aesthetic discriminations applied only to men, discriminations which recast difference as a repertory of typecast cliches, while women are still dealing with that single over-determined choice between "femininity" and freakiness. men, on the other hand, to take examples again from this month's _muscle and fitness_, train like animals (from a piece on powerbuilding), re-invent nature (from weider's editorial), and exceed the classical ideals of the greeks themselves (from a piece on free weights vs. machines). [16] typically, the discourse of male bodybuilding grinds these axes together in the most simpleminded way, in the hope simultaneously of doing, out-doing, and re-doing each, separately, and together: nature, technology, classicism. to take a consummate example, in an article called "the art of arm training," by frenchman francis benfatto, as told to julian schmidt, benfatto claims that "hardwired into the genes of every frenchman" is an artistic sense which "influences [their] perceptions of everything from hellenistic art to bodybuilding." these artistic genes were set off in him, he claims, when he rode horses in his youth and fell in love with their "sweeping muscularity," a love flaubert's words explain best: "'in art there is nothing without form.'" whether he is contemplating his whole physique or only his arms, benfatto explains, he always applies his flaubertian love of form to every aspect of bodybuilding because, as voltaire said, bodybuilding is as much an art as the mona lisa or venus de milo. (well, actually, i left out a line or two here in between voltaire and the mona lisa, but i swear i did not add a word.) [17] the judging of bodybuilding competitions, unlike powerflifting or olympic lifting, depends on categorical aesthetic evaluations. in a powerlifting or olympic meet, the winner is determined either by how much weight he or she lifts relative to other competitors in the same weight class, or by means of a fixed formula which shows how much weight he or she moved relative to his or her body weight. in a bodybuilding meet there are still no such objective standards, leaving room for the kinds of psychological and aesthetic bias i've been discussing. bodybuilding promoters are increasingly aware of how arbitrary this makes their sport look, and how this subjective bias undermines their claims that bodybuilding is a sport and not just an art. for all their hifalutin language about the art of bodybuilding, promoters still harbor a wish for bodybuilding to be included among the olympic sports. this hardly seems possible, however, as long as competitors are judged qualitatively rather than quantitatively and subjectively rather than objectively. accordingly, the weider people now offer what they call an "ideal proportion chart" with instructions--based on one's bodyweight per inch of height, and on the measurement in inches of one's neck, biceps, forearm, chest, waist, hips, thigh, and calf--on how to set one's training goals. how did they come up with these measurements? they don't let on; they don't say whether these "ideal proportions" are derived from praxiteles, da vinci, or bob paris, whose photo graces this feature article. it is probably safe to assume, however, that the measurements were not derived from lenda murray. a note above the chart comments that "women bodybuilders may have to adjust measurements in the area of the hips, waist and chest, depending on build." the ideal proportions, in other words (surprise, surprise) are merely those of some man or other. i can't help thinking, however, that, as brutal, cruel, cryptic and comical as this chart seems, by implementing it, bodybuilding, despite itself, might be doing women a favor. poster, 'review of _michel foucault_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-poster-review.txt review of _michel foucault_ by mark poster department of history university of california at irvine <mposter@orion.oac.uci.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by mark poster, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: eribon, didier. _michel foucault_. trans. betsy wing. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1991. $27.95. 374 pp. [1] didier eribon has written an excellent biography of michel foucault, one that will probably take its place as the standard for some time. eribon has done thorough research including extensive interviews with individuals who played significant roles in foucault's life from his early childhood and comprehensive reading of his works and private writings. the book is well-informed, judicious without being remote, sympathetic without losing a critical edge. and eribon understands foucault's difficult corpus well enough to take note of the irony of his undertaking. foucault stood firmly against interpretations that privileged the author's intentions, unity, authority. so this biography, if it be foucaultian, cannot contribute to an interpretation of foucault's works. [2] eribon is especially good on foucault's student life, evoking with particular atmospheric verisimilitude french intellectual life after world war ii. the rigors of entry into the ecole normale superieure, the teaching of jean hyppolite, the circle of friendships with those who would later do important work--all of this makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the extraordinary efflorescence that in the united states is called poststructuralism. the period of foucault's travels to sweden, germany, poland and tunisia are also illuminating. eribon devotes separate sections or even chapters to foucault's major writings. in these he sketches the reception of the books and foucault's reception of the receptions. his attention to the content of the works is adequate but certainly not extensive or novel. [3] foucault's political activity after 1970, during his years at the college de france, his work with the prison information group, and the countless protests and petitions in which he participated, are also extensively recounted. eribon's account of foucault's advocacy of the khomeini revolution in iran, derisively regarded as foucault's biggest political blunder, is remarkable in its ability to allow credence for foucault's position without pretending that such credence might not require for many a deliberate abandonment of one's critical faculties. [4] foucault's politics have often been attacked by marxists for adherence with the positions of the new philosophers who garnered a certain presence in france in the late 1970s. for these marxists such an association discredits all of foucault's thought as a kind of right-wing liberalism. these tactics are proof enough of the exhaustion of their author's intellects as well as of the political perspective they attempt to further. for eribon's account makes clear the serious dedication of foucault to a critical politics, one perhaps that does not fit neatly into the categories of the major european parties but certainly one that is in no way conservative. interestingly enough, eribon mentions the term "new philosopher" only once, in connection with a review foucault wrote of a book by andre glucksmann. although in the period before may '68 foucault was perceived as politically enigmatic and perhaps "untrustworthy" for those on the left, after 1970 there can be no doubt of his firm commitment to anti-authoritarian politics and of his search for a new style for the politically engaged intellectual, one that would deal more effectively than the french communists or even the socialists with a critique of current configurations of domination. [5] i found only one inaccuracy in eribon's _foucault_. it concerns the chapter on foucault's visits to the united states, which eribon in general describes very well, with none of that ambivalent snobbery/envy one finds too often in french discussions of this country. the error is a small one, in no way affecting eribon's overall discussion, but since i was involved in the incident i feel i should set the record straight. eribon refers in passing to a lecture foucault delivered to a huge crowd at ucla in 1981. actually this lecture was given at a conference i organized for the humanities center at usc on october 31st of that year. on that occasion, before a large audience, foucault presented an important paper disputing critiques of his view of power and arguing that his concern was with the subject's relation to truth. the paper later appeared in the paperback edition of dreyfus and rabinow's excellent book on foucault. the conference was also interesting because foucault's hesitations about it illustrate a salient feature of his intellectual work. in september he phoned me to say he would not appear at usc because he learned that the conference had a large audience and he preferred to work in small workshop settings. in fact the conference was organized to have both plenary sessions, of which foucault's presentation elicited by far the largest attendance, as well as smaller workshops. in the end he consented and attended many of the workshops, immensely enjoying the discussions. [6] the incident illustrates the seriousness of foucault's dedication to intellectual work. as eribon's book indicates, he was relentless in attempting to establish small work situations where scholars could collaborate on projects. in his practice as well as in his theory he consistently opposed the system of the "universal intellectual." complicated, troubled at times, foucault was a person of extraordinary intelligence, whose impact will long resonate in the fields of humanities and social sciences. i regard it as a privilege to have met him and even more of one to be able to read him. eribon's book deserves high praise for doing him justice. mikics, 'postmodernism, ethnicity and underground revisionism in ishmael reed', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-mikics-postmodernism.txt postmodernism, ethnicity and underground revisionism in ishmael reed by david mikics university of houston _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by david mikics, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. i. ish and ism [1] ishmael reed is a postmodern writer; he is also an african-american writer. the purpose of this essay is to reflect on the conjunction between these two roles in reed's work--and the somewhat surprising fact that they are in conjunction more than in conflict. postmodernism, with its definition of the contemporary world as a realm of fragmentation, disassociation, and the post-personal, seems to dissolve the cultural continuities of community and individual ego to which earlier artistic eras remained loyal. postmodernism, in other words, declares the death of cultural authenticity. african-american literature, by contrast, often seems to value cultural authenticity as a means of ensuring communal and individual self-assertion in the black diaspora.^1^ reed's work suggests how african american tradition, which generally--not always, but generally--wants to depict the survival of a people and a culture in its original, authentic strength, can be reconciled with postmodernism, which destroys the notions of origin, authenticity and tradition itself. [2] since the african-american tradition is posited by reed as a definitive cultural value often repressed or distorted by modern mass culture, a value that can in some sense act as a critique of capitalist modernization, an allied question (one subject to much recent debate) will be whether reed's postmodernism damages the critical capacity of his project.^2^ can postmodern techniques be the vehicle for a cultural critique, or must they be "affirmative," acquiescing in the deterioration of art and political speech into commodities under late capitalism? [3] i have found the theory of jurgen habermas useful in posing these questions. in particular, habermas' distinction between a "lifeworld" of everyday experiential practice and a systemic, administrative complex that embodies the managerial necessities of late capitalism, and continually encroaches upon or threatens the lifeworld, seems to be replicated in reed's distinction (in his novel _the terrible twos_) between african-american subcultural experience and a destructive mass culture ruled by the commercial system. habermas' work is a sustained attempt to seek a means of resuscitating the lifeworld that has been impoverished by the managerial priorities of the welfare state (priorities that reed aptly sees encoded in the pacifying, tepid character of many mass cultural forms).^3^ in this attempt, habermas champions aesthetic modernity, with its emphasis on the unique, autonomous individual, as a more helpful lifeworld response to modernization processes than the postmodern dissolution of the individual as a category. [4] for habermas, postmodernism is "affirmative": that is, it tends to mimic the purely negative dispersal of subjective freedom enforced by modernization (the ability to consume what one wants) instead of asserting the critical potential implied by the more positive side of such modernization (the ability to think what one wants). modernization's corrosive effect on traditional cultural continuities also entails a democratic emphasis on individuality within intersubjective relations, and therefore, habermas claims, any critical response to modernity must capitalize on its positive aspect, the promise of more intellectual autonomy for the individual, who now judges culture and its prejudices from a distance. according to habermas's argument, criticism within aesthetic modernity takes its most legitimate and useful form when it secures the rights of the individual subject to reevaluate and revise culture in a way that champions the power of the lifeworld while acknowledging the lifeworld's confrontation with the social rationalization process. the need to acknowledge the effects of rationalization and modernization means that this advocacy of the lifeworld must not take the neoconservative form of an attempt to revive a cultural tradition in an unreconstructed way, for such an attempt would have to ignore the dangerous effects that modernization has already had on the lifeworld, its destabilizing of tradition.^4^ [5] as i will suggest, reed is certainly in accord with habermas' idea of a critically self-revising tradition, in reed's case african-american tradition, as the necessary form of an effective contemporary invocation of the lifeworld. but his work challenges habermas' assumption that such critical use of tradition must be coupled with the assertion of an autonomous modernist self. reed suggests a subcultural rather than an individualist answer to the destructive effects of modernization. the postmodern aspect of reed's work, his attack on the notions of character and individual consciousness, does not invalidate its critical potential, as habermas' argument would imply. instead, the subcultural practice of "neohoodooism" acts as a subversive force that seizes mass cultural phenomena and reuses them for the purpose of resistance. habermas's prejudice in favor of the individual not only compels him to deny the reality of the freudian unconscious as a social formation that defeats the wish for self-possession central to his neo-kantian notion of the individual,^5^ it also blinds him, along with other leftist critics of postmodernism, to the force of postmodern subversions, like "neohoodooism," that do not base themselves on envisioning autonomous selves exercising political judgment. [6] reed's lack of desire for the autonomous self accounts for another, more obstreperous leftist objection to the discerning of a critical project in his work. reed's fiction, which is often hermetic in texture, does not pursue the definition of politics as a matter of attaining the self-empowering judgment (however difficult it may be to achieve such judgment) that is the goal of brecht's or baraka's radical theater. one answer to this objection would draw on habermas's terms. in his adorno prize lecture, habermas notes that in order for critical art to succeed in the contemporary moment, it must be supported by changes in the lifeworld: the burden of critique must not be placed on aesthetics alone without considering its reception in everyday life. change cannot be legislated by authors, and given this fact, authors must not be faulted for not aiming to produce social change in an _immediate_ way, for example through populist style or overtly revolutionary rhetoric. the prescriptive moralizing on the part of critics who insist on such features has at times been an inhibiting factor in contemporary african-american writing, since what such critics want cannot be readily delivered by writers intent on exploring the artistic implications of their material in the context of an ever more complex late capitalist society. [7] i would extend this answer to the demand for an autonomous political art beyond habermas's idea of attending to institutional and everyday contexts before individual literary works. habermas cannot convey a nearly full enough picture of everyday life because he retains the goal of an empowered self freed, as much as possible, from alienation and false consciousness--his legacy from kant and marx. reed's artistic technique, by contrast, exposes the unconscious dimensions of ordinary existence, our styles of being, and it therefore necessarily gravitates away from injunctions toward clarifying one's consciousness in preparation for political judgment. reed's work is more, not less, political because of his recognition that clarification is always an aspect of what _mumbo jumbo_ calls the wallflower order, an attempt to repress and avoid the dense, dionysian "work" that an african-american form like jazz tries to acknowledge: "jes grew, the something or other that led charlie parker to scale the everests of the chord . . . the manic in the artist who would rather do glossolalia than be 'neat clean or lucid.'"^6^ reed's novels aim at the recognition of the improvisatory changes that are always happening, and always repressed by, ruling culture, rather than (the way we usually think of political art) the gearing up for a change in or replacement of the consciousness that rules. [8] the utopian demand that the text be a lever, in and of itself, for such a decisive change in consciousness, without regard for its function within a larger social and institutional discourse, has often influenced current debates on the politics of literary study (for example, the ongoing revisions of the literary canon). such utopianism must be regarded as an inevitable symptom of an era in which the relative absence of radical thought about institutions themselves is all too clear.^7^ in particular, the requirement that texts unequivocally declare their wholesome political uses, thus single-handedly transforming institutional contexts of reading, has weighed heavily (and, i believe, harmfully) on the choice of "black literature" for the new curriculum. for example, the common assumption that black writers should display an attractive, easily accessible communal optimism militates for the selection of _for colored girls..._ or _the color purple_ in introductory core courses that have room for only one african-american text. such bias necessarily excludes the work of writers like adrienne kennedy, andrea lee, james macpherson, david bradley, jay wright--and reed. the demand that african american literature incarnate a positive representative function, praising the strength of cultural continuity and communal values, has dogged reed throughout his career. the charge frequently made by both black and white critics that reed is not properly representative of african-american literature seems to rest on the dangerous assumption that the black writer is bound to a representative goal: bound, that is, to present encouraging or correct portraits of his/her culture. this need for african-american literature to perform a representative function has complex historical roots, often involving the burdensome obligation imposed on black writers to legitimate black life for a white audience.^8^ in the 1990s, however, the wish for the representative is an anachronism, a symptomatic reaction against postmodern conditions in which, despite the continuing social and economic racism of american society, late capitalism has produced a diversity of intraand interracial roles that erodes cultural uniformity in black america, as elsewhere.^9^ since multifarious and contradictory modes of african-american life now exist on an unprecedented scale, any demand for representative description is bound to fail. i do not wish to claim reed as a representative of a new postmodern strain in african american life; that would simply be inverting the criticisms of those who deny reed's legitimacy. reed's work, because it is a partial (in every sense of the word) rather than a grandly unified vision of african-american experience, cannot be representative in any way. rather, he creatively and successfully exploits a particular african-american subculture in order to invent his own brand of critical postmodernism. [9] as he rejects the idea of a representative or unified vision of black life, reed also shies away from the easy acceptance of totality in affirmative postmodernism, which is another example of a representative strategy, one that says: this is our new world, from which no escape, or even critical distance, is possible. by indifferently combining the fragments of various traditions and histories, affirmative postmodernism sets even fragmentation under the sign of baudrillard's homogeneous, uniform "society of the spectacle." by contrast, reed %via% his subcultural strategy sets the plural cultural forces of postmodern society in conflict, propounding an aesthetics of resistance or social tension rather than reconciliation.^10^ thus reed "mobilizes a sense of a particular history of subject positions that will not be subsumed under the apparently seamless master text."^11^ [10] before discussing reed's african-american critical postmodernism in more detail, i want first to differentiate him from postmodernists who do not oppose lifeworld to rationalization systems but who, instead, see postmodernity as the inevitable colonization of lifeworld by system. frank lentricchia has recently proposed don delillo's _libra_ as an example of critical postmodernism in its treatment of mass culture, of "an everyday life . . . utterly enthralled by the fantasy selves projected in the media."^12^ delillo does not offer any escape from a media absorbed world that has replaced the first-person self with third-person fantasies of the self. in delillo as in pynchon, there are no local, popular cultural forces that would provide resistance to modernization; there is only an oppressive totality. in delillo, phenomena of resistance (_the names'_ terrorism) or esoteric revisionism (_white noise_'s "hitler studies") are simply mirror images of the increasingly systematized society that they rebel against. no route is possible back to the authenticity desired by the modernists, since authenticity has itself become a mass cultural icon. (thus delillo's lee harvey oswald in _libra_ wants to "be somebody," an ambition that can only be realized within the confines of the mass media image.) yet it is important to remember, as lentricchia stresses, that delillo's attitude toward this fragmented and imprisoning system, his image of postmodern america, is critical rather than celebratory. postmodernist critique does not need to invoke adversarial forces like the high-modernist self or the utopian vision of a radically different society in order to avoid the pitfalls indulged in by the affirmative, pastiche-ridden, unreflective postmodernisms that are now shared by the advertizing world and a large sector of the visual arts community. what makes the difference in critical postmodernism is its reflective capacity, its dwelling on current social and aesthetic contradictions, rather than the dissolving of contradiction into easy juxtaposition dictated by the affirmative postmodern. such contradictions often involve the survival of earlier aesthetic and cultural forms alongside or within postmodernity: thus the desperate desire for existential self in delillo's oswald, barthelme's protagonists, or mailer's gary gilmore (in _the executioner's song_)--or the survival of premodern, subcultural secret society traditions in reed. [11] oddly enough, the critical edge provided by a subcultural survival like reed's vodoun has its near counterpart in high modernism. lionel trilling, for example, praises freud's image of the "other culture," the secret traditions freud chose to ally himself to as counters to the dominant values of austrian society. one of freud's other cultures was england; another was ancient greece; and still another, hebraic tradition.^13^ but reed's postmodernism again generates a key difference from the modernist freud. for reed, unlike trilling's freud, the subculture or other culture is interwoven, despite its esotericism, with the imagery of mass culture, imagery that the subculture both mimics and, through its mimicry, resists. the jazz style celebrated in _mumbo jumbo_ is, after all, a mass cultural form. [12] a similar attachment to mass-cultural image is at work in the postmodern treatment of character, again marking a difference from modernism. for reed, as for delillo, the self is a caricature, a stylistic move determined by cultural stereotype rather than a modernist dream of individual authenticity. but the stereotypes are not, in his work, only the property of a mechanized mass culture, as in delillo. their mass-cultural face may also stem from, or be appropriated by, african-american counterculture. reed's aesthetic of "sampling,"^14^ of inventively assembling snippets from the tradition with which he identifies (neohoodooism) as well as the cultural syndrome he opposes (the wallflower order), thus presents itself as sustained dialogic satire.^15^ [13] the sort of reconciliation between an african-american tradition and postmodernism that i have hinted at has been offered in the context of reed's work by henry louis gates, jr., and the late james snead, both of whom speak of reed as demonstrating affinities between his own postmodern technique and the techniques of "signifying" in black culture. snead specifically points to sudden rhythmic juxtaposition and syncretism, two features of african religion and music that are echoed in reed's work.^16^ gates and snead, by making their connection between africa and reed, imply that postmodernism can be rooted, even if only by analogy, in a specific cultural tradition, such as that of the african-american. reed himself seems to concur in this analysis, identifying his own authorial practice with the africa-derived folk tradition of vodoun. [14] gates and snead reading reed are brilliantly helpful, and i will finally agree with their assessment of reed. but i would like to introduce a possible objection to their readings that hinges on the ideological implications of presenting an element of the african-american lifeworld like vodoun alongside modernist and postmodernist artistic practice. the objection would go something like this: both gates and snead seem to imply that reed claims an identity between vodoun and his own work because he perceives a natural, implicit analogy between modern and postmodern european aesthetics and black culture. one might argue against gates and snead by reminding oneself that such an analogy is not natural, but instead an ideological construct of twentieth-century european modernism's attraction to "primitive" forms. in contrast to mass culture, which is made possible by the dissolution of traditional communal ties under advanced capitalism--the meeting hall or fete replaced by a million tv sets--popular or folk culture is by definition premodern: its premise must be an assumed community of style and cultural symbolism rather than the alienated perspective of the individual artist. from this perspective, the twentieth-century european or euro-american artist's frequent invoking of african and african-american popular cultural practice as an analogy to his or her own efforts, from picasso's interest in "primitive" art to norman mailer's white negro to the later albums of the american pop music group talking heads,^17^ is significantly problematic. the high culture/"primitive" analogy is motivated by nostalgia for the (supposed) immediacy or palpable, experiential knowledge that the alienated artist perceives in either colonized nations or the underclass of his or her own nation. as such, it is inevitably a colonial gesture. by failing to address this cultural-historical basis for the comparison that modern and postmodern european/euro-american art habitually makes between itself and the premodern aspects of african/african-american culture, both snead and gates imply that such comparisons describe a natural or neutral similarity, instead of themselves enacting ideologically freighted gestures.^18^ in these two critics' analogies between african-american art and the european modernist/postmodernist tradition, ideology disappears. [15] reed's identification of his art with vodoun shares something with the european modernist's colonialist gesture: he desires to restore to his work a dimension of authenticity that has been lost in much of the modern world.^19^ in other words, reed reacts against social modernization by allying himself to vodoun. after all, vodoun is communal folk culture, a survival of an era untouched by the atomizing, alienating effects of the modern mass media. there is, then, no precise fit between popular tradition and postmodern strategy, as gates and snead tend to suggest in their praises of reed. the unique, eccentric character of reed's postmodernism, its antinormative nature, suggests that the popular is, in part, invoked as a way of grounding the postmodern in its very opposite, the force of folk tradition, as a counterbalance against its potentially uncontrolled, antitraditional mirroring of the fragmenting effects of late capitalism.^20^ [16] the objection to reed's appropriation of the supposed authenticity of folk culture that i have just outlined is a serious one, but i believe one can acknowledge its seriousness while also making it defer to the gaiety of reed's work, which ultimately undercuts the proclamation of authenticity that one aspect of reed still wants to make. reed's delight in subversive traditions, which is so well evoked by gates and snead, extends to the self-mockery of folklore itself, which becomes the madly esoteric and writerly venture of neohoodooism. in practical terms, reed does not seem to be hamstrung by any gap between tradition and postmodern subversion. instead, he aims, largely successfully, at a coherence of folk and postmodern expression in which neither element serves or counterbalances the other, in which they form a crazy whole. in other words, reed wants to show the ways in which the popular uncannily anticipates and redeems what we thought were the properties of contemporary mass culture alone by being, so to speak, always-already postmodern, postmodern from way back. by presenting us with a partial or eccentric claim to contemporary mass culture, a creative appropriation of its reifying tendencies, he negotiates the scylla and charybdis of twentieth-century art: the stale modernist opposition between the reified and the creative, and the affirmative postmodern claim that reification subsumes all contemporary narratives into an undifferentiated whole. in contrast to the centrifugal atmosphere of affirmative postmodernism, in which traditional elements are used as mere decorative fragments,^21^ the premodern subculture that reed celebrates provides an %ad hoc%, self-ironizing center of gravity for his work by endowing aesthetic eccentricity with the lure of tradition. traditional culture has been irreversibly transfigured by the new aura of postmodern technological reproduction, but it still retains an otherness, a mark of difference. ii. reed, baraka, pynchon: postmodernism and community well, and keep in mind where those masonic mysteries came from in the first place. (check out ishmael reed. he knows more about it than you'll ever find here.) thomas pynchon, _gravity's rainbow_^22^ it is also significant that most of the [vodoun] houngans who claim the patronage of ogoun belong to the masonic order. maya deren, _divine horsemen_^23^ [17] in his career as a novelist, ishmael reed has frequently occupied himself with the images produced by american mass culture. some of these images are the travesties of black life produced by white america--the antebellum stereotypes of mammy and uncle tom invoked in _flight to canada_ (1976), reed's parodic takeoff on slave narrative; or the amos and andy routines in _the last days of louisiana red_ (1974), a satirical pseudo-thriller. some, on the other hand, are not specific to afro-america, like the wild west parodied in _yellow back radio broke down_, reed's "western" written in 1969. in _the terrible twos_ (1982), which i will focus on in the remainder of this essay, reed centers his analysis on a mass-produced and mass-marketed image of general import in american culture, that of santa claus. in particular, the novel has as its subtext the standard movie myth of american christmas, _miracle on 34th st_. as i hope to show, the ossified, stereotypical mythology embodied by this film is undermined by reed's radically unorthodox mode of narration--a mode that has itself been called filmic. reed counters the ideologically dominant images of _miracle_ with his own subversive quasi-filmic techniques, unravelling one filmic mode by means of another. [18] as james snead points out, reed's work, like much postmodern writing, has important correlations with the aesthetics of movie-making in its use of sudden and suggestive juxtaposition (montage), as well as with the similar principles of creative juxtaposition (which snead calls "cutting") active in african religion and music: "reed elides the 'cut' of black culture with the 'cutting' used in cinema. self-consciously filmable, _mumbo jumbo_ ends with a 'freeze frame' . . . underscoring its filmic nature."^24^ my aim in this essay is to explore some of the ways in which reed uses familiar images from american film, and in fact opposes these official, mass-cultural images to an alternative culture of the "cut" or radical juxtaposition, which has affinities both with euro-american postmodernism and with the african-american belief system of vodoun. as i have noted, reed's final aim is a therapeutic criticism of the numbing, homogenizing effects of modernization. far from exulting in the culture of the mass media as the "affirmative postmodernist" would do, reed in _the terrible twos_ opposes the mass culture of hollywood movies and tv to an underground folk tradition that partakes of vodoun habits of mind, specifically in its occult revisionary reading of st. nicholas, otherwise known as santa claus. reed's hermetic st. nicholas revolts against the official or established culture represented in _the terrible twos_ by commercial capitalism's image of christmas. [19] reed criticizes not only the late capitalist system itself; he also criticizes the most common reception of african-american culture within that system. african american tradition has been taken as an offer of escape from official culture into a viable marginal one--now that the alienated, solipsistic subjectivity of european modernism, or the fantasies of postmodernism, which decenter subjectivity without offering a communal alternative to the now-defunct self, seem less than comfortably livable. for contemporary critical ideology, black writing seems to represent a potential for communal authenticity that has long been excluded from the euro-american avant-garde. a drama like _slave ship_, as kimberly benston convincingly argues, achieves precisely what the euro-american modernists cannot: a depiction of oppositional community based in an existing cultural reality.^25^ this escape from modernist alienation into black cultural authenticity is the pattern of baraka's career, as well as the goal of the "black aesthetics" movement of the 1960s and '70s in which baraka, along with addison gayle, hoyt fuller, larry neal, and others, played a prominent role. [20] as gates has shown in his reading of _mumbo jumbo_, reed criticizes such attachment to authenticity by attacking the essentialist aspect of the black aesthetics/black arts movement (and, before it, the negritude movement). reed opposes the notion of blackness as a "transcendental signified," an authoritative, static and univocal symbolic presence.^26^ instead, reed reveals black discourse to be, in postmodern fashion, decentered and polyvocal. where does this postmodern aesthetic strategy leave reed in terms of the communal emphasis of african-american culture? houston baker has cited reed's fiction as a return to "the common sense of the tribe"^27^: but how can such a collective or tribal orientation coexist with the atomizing, depersonalizing effects of postmodernist technique also evident in reed? [21] one approach to a definition of reed's decentered communalism, his subversive interest in the lifeworld's subcultural traditions, is by way of a contrast with baraka. though both baraka and reed move from avant-garde alienation in early works like baraka's _preface to a twenty volume suicide note_ and reed's _the free-lance pallbearers_ to an emphasis on the power of african-american cultural continuity, there are important differences. reed's "neohoodooist" aesthetic, as we shall see, is syncretic and assimilative, whereas baraka's black consciousness attempts the monolithic and univocal. in reed, vodoun does not need to reject european influence in order to safeguard its purity; instead, it translates this influence into the terms of a newly indigenous new world culture. [22] in other respects as well, reed's vision of african american culture should not be conflated with baraka's (or, say, june jordan's) equally powerful, but very distinct, definition of that culture. throughout his work, reed consistently rejects the invocation of ethnic community on a grand scale, opting instead for the investigation of the esoteric cultural practices, like vodoun, that appear as sect, secret society, or personal obsession rather than as mass movement. reed's choice of the occult and dispersed, rather than the fully public, continuities in african american culture suggests that eccentric or idiosyncratic rewritings of culture are valuable precisely because they are idiosyncratic--and that such stylistic quirks may constitute the only existential rebellion still viable. the later work of baraka, by contrast, like that of many other politically committed african-american artists, strives for community through its normative and explicit approach, the plain force of a quintessentially public rhetoric. baker's phrase "the common sense of the tribe" is a better description of baraka's mode in its willed commonness than it is of reed's willful peculiarity. [23] having clarified his differences from baraka's more normative approach to african-american tradition, i now want to pursue a comparison between reed and pynchon,^28^ which will reveal an equally telling difference. to return to habermas's terms: reed is interested in upholding the lifeworld and its traditions against the modernization process, whereas for pynchon the lifeworld is merely an attenuated reflection of the systemic aspect of modernization. [24] pynchon is a natural parallel for reed; especially, pynchon's flaked-out whimsy in _the crying of lot 49_ bears a remarkable tonal resemblance to some of reed's work.^29^ there's also a thematic resemblance between pynchon and reed: they both participate in the postmodernist polemic against authenticity by creating, for the most part, caricatures rather than "realistic" characters. reed has his hardboiled detectives and monomaniacal radicals, pynchon his male-bonded post-adolescents and _femmes fatales_. the sense that these figures, by-products of modernity's obsessions, suffer or play out their stereotypical identities, instead of actively controlling them, is characteristic of postmodernism.^30^ [25] pynchon's defiant authorial eccentricity imagines the rebellion against modernity, not as a viable cultural alternative, but as an intricate fantasy that rewrites the way of the world in a language of conspiratorial oddity. in pynchon, as in delillo, subversive fantasies usually turn out to be as chillingly claustrophobic as official reality.^31^ the notion of escape from a hegemonic culture occupies reed's work as it does pynchon's, but the difference, i will argue, is reed's effort to ground the escape in an actual alternative--african-american- aesthetic, that of vodoun. [26] there is a striking passage in pynchon's _the crying of lot 49_ that dramatically evokes the possibility of subversive or alternative community as, at the same time, the threat of an utterly private world of paranoid self delusion--a world that ironically and horrifyingly mirrors the oppressive totality of the increasingly rationalized contemporary universe. pynchon's oedipa maas, as she discovers the massive underground postal network called w.a.s.t.e. seemingly everywhere she turns, speculates to herself that either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of lsd or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which x number of americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody american you know, and you too, sweetie. or (here comes the second alternative) you are hallucinating it . . . . in which case you are a nut, out of your skull.^32^ [27] oedipa's potentially paranoid fantasy may, this passage from _lot 49_ suggests, be the only possibility for a rebellious collective imagination that remains in american life. reed shares pynchon's distaste for what oedipa maas describes as the "exitlessness" of american life, the overwhelming pressure of a bland and univocal day-to-day rationality. the transhistorical wallflower order in _mumbo jumbo_, which tries to stamp out jazz dancing and all other forms of collective imaginative improvisation, is an openly malevolent version of such oppressive blandness. [28] pynchon leaves us in the dark as to whether the secret community that oedipa envisions actually exists; but if it does, it is invigorating only to the degree that it is also scary and sinister.^33^ reed, by contrast, is able to depict the counterforce to wallflower oppression not as an ontologically dubious fantasy, like oedipa maas' underground postal-cum-waste-disposal system, but as an actual cultural phenomenon, what _mumbo jumbo_ calls jes grew: black music, dance and verbal "signifying."^34^ iii. the filmic double [29] we are now ready to deal with the importance of mass culture in _the terrible twos_ by way of its major filmic subtext, the "classic" christmas movie _miracle on 34th street_. first, though, this is an appropriate time to briefly and somewhat violently summarize the novel's plot: it begins with "a past christmas"--the christmas just following reagan's 1980 electoral victory, when charity has been abandoned in favor of lucchese boots and gucci handbags. a top male model named dean clift, represented by reed as a know-nothing automaton sunk in infantile dependency on his wife, whom he calls "mommy," is running for congress from the "silk stocking district" in manhattan. by the novel's second section, set during "a future christmas," dean clift--a composite portrait of ronald reagan and dan quayle--has become president. meanwhile, santa claus has become even bigger business than he was in the 1980s: a character named oswald zumwalt, head of a company called the north pole development corporation (or big north for short), has secured "exclusive rights" to santa. (a class action suit is filed by thousands of rival clauses, "black, red and white," but they lose.) zumwalt establishes a christmas land at the north pole "to which consumers all over the world [will] fly, supersaver, to celebrate christmas" (tt, 64).^35^ meanwhile, president clift has signed a bill giving adolf hitler posthumous american citizenship. the economy's in trouble--a loaf of bread costs fifty dollars. the hungover president's eyes "look like two japanese flags." [30] in the midst of this dangerous atmosphere of crisis, a sect called the nicolaites has sprung up, determined to rescue santa claus from his position as avatar of mass media commercialism. the nicolaites are dedicated to the original image of the fourth-century st. nicholas as a forthright defier of imperial authority, a populist whose miracles rivalled christ's, causing the vatican to declare him moribund in the '60s in the face of popular enthusiasm for nicholas' cult. the nicolaites succeed in kidnapping big north's official santa claus and momentarily replacing him with their own spokesman, a black dwarf known as black peter. (as we shall see, black peter is st. nicholas's somewhat sinister accomplice in some versions of the nicholas legend.) the flamboyant and persuasive black peter, projecting his voice ventriloquist-style into a false santa claus, delivers a condemnation of the hardheartedness of american commercial capitalism and, in particular, capitalism's exploitation of santa. finally, president clift, after being taken on a dantesque tour in which he meets the damned souls of dead american presidents, realizes the error of his ways and, like jacob marley in _a christmas carol_, suddenly overflows with charitable christmas cheer, passing out redskins tickets and championing disarmament. at the novel's end, president clift has been placed in a sanatorium by his shocked former supporters and a manhunt is on for black peter. [31] president dean clift is not only like jacob marley but also like claude rains in _mr. smith goes to washington_, another conversion narrative, in which rains as the supposedly populist, but actually cynically self-interested, congressman finally breaks down and admits his own corruption, thus becoming dangerous to the corporate interests that support him. but the major subtext of the terrible twos is _miracle on 34th st_ (1947; written and directed by george seaton). in this film, kris kringle, the real santa claus hired by macy's to play santa claus, represents a critique of commercialized christmas and a polemic in favor of christmas charity, which is ideologically defined by _miracle_ as both the antithesis and the salvation of corporate commercialism. by the end of the movie kringle, played by edmund gwenn, succeeds not only in converting hardnosed businesswoman mrs. walker (maureen o'hara), to his humanitarian gospel, but also her much harder-nosed child, played by the preteenage natalie wood. kringle's most important convert, however, is mr. macy himself, who by the end of the film becomes a fervent supporter of his santa's claim to be _the_ santa claus. though the film retains enough cynicism concerning macy's profit-oriented motives for his support of kris kringle to save it from sentimental idealization of the american corporation, the point is nevertheless quite clearly made that macy's is now a kinder, gentler store as a result of kringle's presence. kringle even unites macy and gimbel as, in the spirit of christmas generosity, both begin referring customers to the competing store and vying for the privilege of rewarding kris himself for his services. by being an authentic rather than a false, merely commercial santa, _miracle_'s kris kringle ameliorates the grasping commercialism of macy's, infusing it with the heartwarmingly populist, anti-greed "true" spirit of christmas. _miracle_'s ideological goal is to claim that mass culture can become popular culture: to present the corporation in a newly beneficent, populist role by showing it embracing anti-commercialism. kris may protest against the consumerist version of christmas, but he nevertheless works happily at macy's, advising its customers to buy macy's toys. at the film's end, kris's own populist beliefs are recognized and partially adopted by macy's. the parallel to macy's in reed's novel is zumwalt's big north, which has secured exclusive rights to santa claus just as, in _miracle_, new york's largest department store owns santa in the person of kris kringle. the difference, of course, is that reed's big north, unlike macy's in the film, is openly malevolent and not at all liable to be affected by the "true" anti-commercial spirit of santa claus. [32] the three subtexts for reed's novel that i've mentioned, _christmas carol_, _mr. smith_, and _miracle_, all enfold the political in the personal, reducing a political situation to a matter of human character, and showing a generous personality winning out over a cynical one. reed implicitly argues that a similar ideological effect is accomplished by reagan's commercial success as the "likeable" president. not for the first time in american history, but perhaps most remarkably, a president's politics are obscured by his transfiguration into a fictively endearing mass media personality. [33] reed's _the terrible twos_ deliberately obstructs the kind of metamorphosis of politics into individual personality that is so emphatically present in his source text _miracle on 34th st_. this is where reed's postmodernist replacement of character with caricature comes in: big north is a cold-blooded operation, and the "real" santa claus is a mere corporate stooge, not a kindly old gent like miracle's kris kringle. there is no pretense that the "reality," the mimed authenticity, of this santa claus means anything more than the company's ability to buy the name: no one at big north, including their santa, even considers the idea that the personality of santa might have symbolic efficacy--he is nothing but an ersatz, infinitely reproducible trademark for christmas consumerism. [34] _the terrible twos_ presents not just a critique of commercialism and its lack of authenticity, but a revolt against it that takes the form of a hermetic inquiry into church history--the "underground revisionism" alluded to in my title. as he becomes corporate property, the historical identity of nicholas (known as claus in northern europe) as a populist christian saint becomes more and more effaced. the self-imposed task of the nicolaites, the secret society that opposes itself to big north's official, corporate santa claus in _the terrible twos_, is to resurrect the forgotten radical historicity of st. nicholas, to oppose the phoniness of mass culture by invoking the subversive reality of popular tradition. [35] like the mutafikah in reed's _mumbo jumbo_, the nicolaites have formed a sect intent on returning a degraded symbol to its original, authentic power. in _mumbo jumbo_, the mutafikah are a secret society that makes a career of "liberating" works of art from western museums and returning them to their african, asian or native american places of origin. the mutafikah stand against the atonist (christo and eurocentric) effort to reduce all culture to a single christianized meaning--or else destroy it. but the mutafikah are oddly comparable to _mumbo jumbo_'s atonists, who are equipped with their own secret societies, the teutonic knights and the knights templar, in their desire for singular and authentic cultural origins--origins with a racial basis.^36^ reed's purpose is not to engage in a moralizing comparison of the exclusionary essentialisms that sometimes inhabit radical critiques of a ruling ideology with the more palpable destruction wrought by that ideology. instead, reed, in nietzschean fashion, implies the difficulty of achieving a truly radical break from any oppressive mode of thought without inadvertently duplicating its repressive need to exclude the other. reed, like ellison in his depiction of the brotherhood in _invisible man_, asks whether a radical, conspiratorial alternative to the reigning culture is truly an alternative, if it is bound to reproduce some aspects of the oppression it protests.^37^ like the mutafikah, the nicolaites in _the terrible twos_ are a thinly veiled allegory of 1960s radicalism: black peter takes over the nicolaites as black power swayed white radicals in the '60s. these groups' efforts to establish an adversarial culture based on a faith in native origins are criticized by reed in much the same terms he uses to attack essentialist definitions of "black aesthetics" and negritude.38 refusing the belief in an exclusivist and prescriptive, rather than a multicultural, black art that was sometimes featured in the black aesthetics movement, reed proposes in place of this purism a multicultural synthesis derived from the syncretism of african and asian religions, "neohoodooism." in aligning his own critical principles with the african new world belief system of vodoun, reed proclaims his place in african-american tradition while refusing the essentialist definitions of this tradition that would reject syncretism or the multicultural as a contamination of origins. [36] papa labas, the sly, knowing old man in _louisiana red_ and _mumbo jumbo_ is, of course, a major deity in vodoun. in _mumbo jumbo_, labas invokes vodoun as both a refusal of the atonists and an illuminating alternative to the monocultural purism of the mutafikah and the muslim editor, abdul: labas speaks of "the ancient vodun aesthetic: pantheistic, becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits, as many as the imagination can hold."^39^ [37] the vodoun aesthetics described by papa labas is centrally relevant to the arguments that occur among _the terrible twos_' nicolaites over the true character and identity of st. nicholas. on the one hand, as i have said, the nicolaites' quest for definitive origins, for the _real_ st. nicholas, marks them as loyal to a univocality, a concept of absolute and singular identity, that vodoun refuses. for this reason reed links the nicolaites to another african new world belief, rastafarianism, which fervently invests authority in a singular black origin and destiny. when black peter proposes replacing st. nicholas with haile selassie, the nicolaites are "split down the middle" over which deity to follow (44). yet brother peter's argument for haile selassie does partake of vodoun aesthetics in its oddball perception of cultural analogies; his logic is, finally, far more vodoun than rastafarian. although black peter aims to replace nicholas with selassie, the associationist logic of his argument is implicitly syncretic: it suggests a conflation of nicholas and selassie that is more vodoun than rastafarian. black peter states that selassie and nicholas are "'one and the same'" because they both ride on a white horse; nicholas punished a thief as selassie punished "the teef mussolini," nicholas flew and so does selassie (by airplane), and so on (46). like the african religions from which it derives, vodoun routinely synthesizes deities of different tribes, including the christian saints. for example, vodoun believers argued that since st. james is surrounded by red flags and carries a sword, he is essentially similar to the martial yoruba deity ogun, who is also clothed in red. but instead of being replaced by ogun, st. james is conflated with him to become the vodoun spirit "ogu-feraille."^40^ reed's "neo hoodooism" likewise blends nicholas and selassie in _the terrible twos_ into "selassie-nicholas," or, alternatively, "nicholas-selassie" (177), so that the syncretism of europe and africa is in its technique a distinctively african combination. in reed's earlier novel, _yellow back radio broke down_, the pope himself speaks of europe's unsuccessful attempt to christianize the african slaves in the new world, an attempt thwarted by the capacity for multicultural juxtaposition implicit in the "elastic" discourse of vodoun: "the natives merely placed our art alongside theirs."^41^ [38] the vodoun religion syncretizes not only west african spirits with christian saints, but also the generally "cool" or peaceful west african religions with the fiercer beliefs of the kongo. in fact, many scholars identify two seemingly opposed, but actually ambiguously combined aspects of vodoun, rada and petro: often a vodoun deity will have both a rada and a petro (that is, a good and a cruel) side. petro, the aggressive, malevolent aspect of vodoun, derives its name from the legendary magician figure dom pedro (or petre).^42^ dom pedro, of course, is reed's shady and mysterious black peter, present in some versions of the st. nicholas legend as nicholas's sidekick or opposite number, his "blackamoor servant." if nicholas is benevolent and devoted to saving children, black peter, by contrast, is a kidnapper.^43^ the religious scholar charles jones notes that the pairing of the kindly nicholas and the cruel peter derives from an earlier ambiguity in the character of nicholas himself, who is seen as both gentle and violent, a bearer of both gifts and switches.^44^ gradually, as the nicholas legend shifts to northern europe, nicholas' evil traits are exorcised and projected onto the figure of a black servant. similarly, european christianity projects its sins onto the africans that it enslaves; the sins return, in reed's novel, %via% the image of black peter literally taking possession of santa claus, inflecting the ersatz, commercialized "innocence" of christmas with the harsh truth of his satire. reed thus restores the ethical ambiguity or doubleness of the original nicholas, as well as the subversive power of this saint who openly criticized the emperor constantine,^45^ by allowing black peter to speak through him. it is interesting in this connection that, as herskovits notes, st. nicholas is regarded in haitian vodoun as protector of the %marassa%, the spirits of twins.^46^ [39] the ambiguous combination of good and evil in nicholas, so similar to the equivocal, mixed nature of vodoun gods like ogoun and the _marassa_, is replicated in the character of childhood itself, at once innocent and terrible. (thus the double-edged title, _the terrible twos_.) reed describes the severe, perplexing nature of this dualism in a passage i shall cite at length: two-year-olds. in mankind's mirific misty past they were sacrificed to the winter gods. maybe that's why some gods act so young. ogun, so childish that he slays both the slavemaster and the slave. two-year-olds are what the id would look like if the id could ride a tricycle. that's the innocent side of two, but the terrible side as well. a terrible world the world of two-year-olds. . . . someone is constantly trying to eat them up. the gods of winter crave them- the gods of winter who, some say, are represented by the white horse that st. nicholas, or saint nick, rides as he enters into amsterdam, his blackamoor servant, peter, following with his bag of switches and candy. two-year-olds are constantly looking over their shoulders for the man in the shadows carrying the bag. black peter used to carry them across the border into spain. (28) [40] just as ogoun is both a healer and a warrior--and as the champion of the haitian revolution, a slayer of both master and slave^47^--so nicholas/peter are both gift-givers and conniving thieves. by reinjecting paganism's vivid spiritual dualism into christianity, reed incarnates a world of shockingly energetic contrasts; a world that stands against the bland, homogenized commercialism of big north's, and macy's, corporate santa. part of this energy derives from the esoteric nature of reed's vision here, his zest for an off-the-wall hermeneutics that is, finally, too peculiar to be popular in the sense of "popularity" that macy's and big north, and _miracle on 34th st._, seem to have coopted. for reed, macy's is mass culture as rootless, best-selling hype, despite its self-disguise as popular culture in _miracle_. reed presents, as a pointed contrast to the film's duplicitous claim to folk status, a popular tradition just as strange as it is true, one that resists, and revises, mass culture through both its strangeness and its truth. reed's eccentricity finds its thematic roots in the popular culture of vodoun just as the bemused and outrageous improvisational comedy of his prose, the wry, crisply logical way with a joke that is so uniquely his, draws on the rhythms of african-american discourse. the result is a postmodernism in which reed's style perfectly illustrates his syncretic and subversive argument. if reed does not invoke his connections to tradition in the service of an easily communal utopian optimism, but instead remains skeptical about the possibility of a full-scale alternative to the atonists,^48^ he also insists on the historical presence of a secret, underground alternative to wallflower culture, a revolt that is always occurring, in one scene or another. notes ^1^ since the 1960s, the academy and the world of publishing have tended to favor those african-american writers who seem most overtly to invoke the communal inheritance of traditional african-american values. writers like andrea lee who exhibit skepticism about the survival of tradition in a postmodern world are stigmatized by the critical establishment. ^2^ see, among many other sources, hal foster, ed., _the anti-aesthetic_ (port townsend, wa: bay press, 1983); seyla benhabib, "a reply to jean-francois lyotard," in linda nicholson, ed., _feminism/postmodernism_ (new york: routledge, 1990); jurgen habermas, _the philosophical discourse of modernity_ (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1990); andreas huyssen, _after the great divide_ (bloomington: indiana up, 1986); fredric jameson, _postmodernism_ (durham, nc: duke up, 1991). huyssen's delineation of the limitations in habermas' championing of aesthetic modernity against postmodernity has influenced my own case for the critical capacity of postmodernism. ^3^ it is important to note, of course, that habermas also emphasizes the gains in human freedom that have stemmed from the weberian rationalization processes that enable the state to survive. ^4^ see habermas' adorno prize lecture, translated as "modernity: an incomplete project," in foster, ed., 3-15, and _the philosophical discourse of modernity_. ^5^ as paul smith, rainer nagele, and others have pointed out: see paul smith, _discerning the subject_ (minneapolis, mn: u of minnesota p, 1988), 163-64, and rainer nagele, "freud, habermas and the dialectic of enlightenment," _new german critique_ 22 (winter 1981), 41-62. ^6^ _mumbo jumbo_ (garden city, ny: doubleday, 1972), 211. thus _mumbo jumbo_'s tongue-in-cheek genealogy of jes grew--whose contagious character means that it can never really be pinned down as lineage or inheritance--stretches from isis and osiris, to dionysus, to jethro, to vodoun. ^7^ on this point, see david kaufmann, "the profession of theory," _pmla_ may 1990, 519 -30. ^8^ on this issue of what dubois called "double consciousness," see robert stepto's landmark _from behind the veil_ (champaign-urbana, il: u of illinois p, 1979). ^9^ on this point i have benefitted from lawrence hogue's work in progress on african-american postmodernism, as well as a talk given by david bradley at trinity college (hartford, ct), 1989. ^10^ here as elsewhere in this essay, i am indebted to hal foster's analysis of the subcultural as a viable force in postmodernism: see "readings in cultural resistance" in _recodings_ (port townsend, wa: bay press, 1985). ^11^ this is charles altieri's description of paul smith's position in altieri's _canons and consequences_ (evanston, il: northwestern up, 1990), 206. altieri criticizes smith for imagining a too easy transition from such practices of resistance to statements of political position, thus giving short shrift to those resistant modes, like derrida's and the later barthes', which do not add up to avowals of political responsibility. while agreeing fully with altieri's brilliant and subtle critique of smith, i also have major misgivings concerning altieri's finding of deficiencies in derrida's and barthes's notions of responsiveness. for altieri, the private, self-ironizing nature of derrida's later style needs to be compensated for by a publicly responsible or official subject, who will stabilize (or perhaps repress?) what is risky about such intimate ironies (see _canons_, 209; see also altieri's essay on _ecce homo_ in daniel o'hara, ed., _why nietzsche now?_ [bloomington, in: indiana up, 1985], 410-11). i think that the model of compensation/stabilization, along with the zero-sum picture of bargaining, negotiation and consensus that tends to accompany altieri's official self, adds up to a dangerously limited way of conceiving the political. the invocation of the normative force of reasonable choice as a necessary supplement to aesthetics and private life is directly relevant to the antagonistic criticism of reed. instead of trying to make our private aesthetic obsessions publicly responsible by worrying that theorists like nietzsche and derrida, or writers like reed, are not sufficiently interested in justifying liberal political judgment, i believe we ought to acknowledge--rather than look for ways of repressing--the gap between personal aesthetics and public responsibility, the unavoidable fact that defines (post)modern politics. needless to say, my qualm here applies to habermas, as well as smith and altieri. ^12^ frank lentricchia, "_libra_ as postmodern critique," _south atlantic quarterly_, 89 (1990), 431-53. (essay originally published in _raritan_, spring 1989.) the passage cited is on 443. ^13^ lionel trilling, "freud: within and beyond culture," in _beyond culture_ (new york: viking, 1965). freud, of course, was in fact jewish, whereas the other "other cultures" cited in trilling's great essay were located purely in freud's imagination, not his biographical context. but, following a strategy which critical postmodernists might find appealing, trilling tends to downplay this distinction: the adversarial use of the subculture/other culture takes precedence over the question of its literal historical presence. ^14^ i am indebted to michael jarrett for the analogy between reed and sampling. ^15^ lentricchia has noted the total absence of his own ethnicity from delillo's work (in "the american writer as bad citizen--introducing don delillo," _saq_ 1990 [89, 2], 239-44); and pynchon's prestigious new england ancestry is played as an elaborate self-exploding joke in _gravity's rainbow_. there is, of course, an analogy between pynchon's "preterite" and reed's "neohoodooism," but reed claims a concrete cultural context (even if a slippery and self displacing one) for his aesthetic slogan as pynchon does not. it should be understood that i am not arguing that contemporary writers "ought" to use subcultural tradition in reed's manner, nor that reed is a better writer than pynchon or delillo for their failure to do so. ^16^ see henry louis gates, jr., "the blackness of blackness: a critique of the sign and the signifying monkey," and james a. snead, "repetition as a figure of black culture," in gates, ed., _black literature and literary theory_ (new york: methuen, 1984). ^17^ the talking heads' _speaking in tongues_ (new york: sire, 1983), whose title humorously endows commodified pop with a quasi-religious aura borrowed from alien traditions, draws on nigerian juju music; their later record _naked_ (new york: sire, 1988) is similarly indebted to zairian soukous. for a very useful treatment of the analogy between modern art and "primitive" art as an attempt to construct "universalism," see james clifford, "histories of the tribal and the modern," in his _the predicament of culture_ (cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1988). ^18^ for a treatment of this issue of appropriation in the context of the cuban afro-cubanismo movement, see roberto gonzalez-echevarria, _alejo carpentier, the pilgrim at home_ (ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1977). ^19^ reed's status as an african-american writer who claims africa-derived folk culture for his own just as yeats claims celtic folklore should prevent us from simply identifying his authorial ideology in respect to africa with that of picasso, stravinsky et. al.; one might choose the claiming of african folk culture in aime cesaire, jay wright, edward brathwaite, toni morrison and derek walcott for an extremely various set of comparisons to reed. ^20^ i am here arguing against the easy conflation of ethnicity, political opposition, and postmodernism in linda hutcheon, _a poetics of postmodernism_ (new york: routledge, 1988), 60-70. hutcheon programmatically ignores the conflicts among modernist, postmodernist, and nostalgic or premodern desires in texts such as morrison's _tar baby_ in order to claim a (false) harmony between postmodernism and african-american self-assertion. ^21^ lee breuer's dreadful _warrior ant_ comes to my mind here, but any reader will be able to supply his/her favorite examples. ^22 thomas pynchon, _gravity's rainbow_ (new york: viking, 1973). ^23^ maya deren, _divine horsemen_ (new paltz, ny: book collectors society, 1970 [1st ed. 1953]), 134. ^24 james a. snead, "repetition as a figure of black culture," in henry louis gates, jr., ed., _black literature and literary theory_, 72. see also 67: "in black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is 'there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.' if there is a goal . . . it continually 'cuts' back to the start, in the musical meaning of 'cut' as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break. . . ." for a very helpful analysis of the technique of "cutting" in african music, see j.m. chernoff, _african rhythm and african sensibility_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1979). ^25^ see kimberly benston, _baraka: the renegade and the mask_ (new haven, ct: yale up, 1976). ^26^ see henry louis gates, jr., "the signifying monkey," in _black literature and literary theory_, 297. ^27^ houston baker, _modernism and the harlem renaissance_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1987), 56; see 69. ^28^ see cornel west, "minority discourse and the pitfalls of canon formation," in _yale journal of criticism_ 1 (1987), 199. west's essay is a very important and persuasive statement, though i disagree locally with his view of reed. ^29^ a comparison might also be drawn between reed and don delillo, whose recent _libra_ advances a conspiracy theory of the jfk assassination not unlike the conspiracies so doggedly pursued in pynchon's and reed's novels, though delillo's tone of dire, hard-boiled historicity differs from theirs. for remarks on reed and pynchon, see reginald martin, _ishmael reed and the new black aesthetic critics_ (new york: st. martin's p, 1983), 2; see also 43. ^30^ this point is argued by fredric jameson in an interview in _social text_ 17 (1987), 45, in which jameson contrasts the passivity of the postmodern individual subject to the "collective subject" present in "third world literature." this "collective subject" is an interpretive construct similar to baker's "common sense of the tribe," the communal emphasis of much african-american literature. see the related (and problematic) article by jameson, "third world literature in the era of multinational capitalism," in _social text_ 15 (1986), and the response by aijaz ahmad, "jameson's rhetoric of otherness," _social text_ 17 (1987). ^31^ for two opposed points of view on this issue in pynchon (whether his notion of the subversive is sinister and hopeless or liberating), see, respectively, the essays by george levine and tony tanner in levine and david leverenz, eds., _mindful pleasures_ (boston: little, brown, 1976). ^32^ _the crying of lot 49_ (new york: harper & row, 1986), 170-71. (the passage is cited by tony tanner in harold bloom, ed., _thomas pynchon_ (new york: chelsea house, 1986), 188; see tanner's commentary on 187.) the third alternative that oedipa considers--that "a labyrinthine plot has been mounted against" her--exposes the negative potential of the secrecy whose positive side is the liberating "density of dream." among the many remarkable features of this passage one might notice pynchon's punning connection, in lamenting "exitlessness," between american failure and the sense of constriction, on the one hand, and american success and wide open spaces, on the other (cf. latin exitus and spanish exito)--a frontier ideology also dear to reed (see, among other texts, his introduction to his anthology of california poetry, _calafia_ [berkeley, ca: y'bird, 1979]). the dominant image conjured by pynchon's "exitlessness" is that of a southern california freeway like those driven so often by oedipa, but without exits: the frontier as labyrinth or imprisoning web. ^33^ the possibility of subversively liberating moments does, as levine insists, exist in pynchon, but these are only moments, not full-scale traditions or communities. the radical or revolutionary movements in the book, even when grounded in community, are just as macabrely threatening as the establishment they combat (for example, the mass suicidal hereros of _gravity's rainbow_ [315ff.]). ^34^ for a useful survey of reed's adversarial relation to various "black aesthetic" critics, chiefly addison gayle, houston baker, and amiri baraka, see martin's book. reed asserts that he writes within an african-american aesthetic, but he identifies such an aesthetic with a stylistic and structural approach (similar to the concept of "cutting" described by snead), rather than with revolutionary content, as does baraka. see martin, 2; see also reed's important introductions to the anthologies _yardbird lives_ (new york, 1978) and _19 necromancers from now_, as well as his famous run-in with the socialist realist bo shmo in _yellow back radio_, (garden city, ny: doubleday, 1969) 34-35. a simplified critique of reed's polemic in this passage is presented by michael fabre, "postmodernist rhetoric in ishmael reed's _yellow back radio broke down_," in p. bruck and w. karrer, eds., _the afro-american novel since 1960_ (amsterdam: gruner, 1982), 177, who sees it as championing "art" against "commitment." ^35^ page citations to _the terrible twos_ are from the atheneum edition (new york: atheneum, 1982). ^36^ despite the multiplicity of the cultures that the mutafikah want to liberate, their faith is in the singularity of each of these cultures, and in their own singularity as quarrelsome representatives of these cultures. a mexican tells an anglo revolutionary during a mutafikah meeting that he suspects him because "you carry [cortes and pizarro] in your veins as i carry the blood of moctezuma"; a chinese attacks a black member by claiming that "you north american blacks were"--and are--"docile"- because "the strong [africans] were left behind in south america." (_mumbo jumbo_, 86-87.) ^37^ for recent remarks along these lines, see valerie smith, _self-discovery and authority in afro-american narrative_ (cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1987), 102. ^38^ in his preface to the 1975 anthology _yardbird lives_ (ed. with al young; new york: grove, 1978?), reed attacks the critics who "in 1970" (just before the publication of the volume edited by addison gayle, _the black aesthetic_) "were united in their attempt to circumscribe the subject and form of afro-american writing." he goes on to announce that what he calls "the ethnic phase of american literature" is now over, "counterculture ethnic, black ethnic, red ethnic, feminist ethnic, academic ethnic, beat ethnic, new york school ethnic, and all of the other churches who believe their choir sings the best." reed proclaims that "the multicultural renaissance is larger than the previous ones because, like some african and asian religions, it can absorb them" (_yardbird lives_, 13-14). ^39^ _mumbo jumbo_, 35. ^40^ see r.f. thompson, _flash of the spirit_ (new york: random house, 1983), 172-77, deren, _divine horsemen_, and melville j. herskovits, _the new world negro_ (bloomington, in: indiana up, 1966), 324-25, which lists other vodoun syntheses of pagan and christian. ^41^ _yellow back radio_, 153. ^42^ see thompson, 179ff. on the ethical ambiguity of vodoun deities and its relation to the twin modes petro and rada. on dom petro/petre, see thompson, 179. it is interesting to note that the bacchic or satyrlike sexuality of reed's black peter (revealed as a clever impostor in the sequel, _the terrible threes_, 40, 42) can be cross referenced to the phallic energy frequently associated with the trickster figure in african legend via a pun concealed in his name (the "black snake" of blues tradition). on the "phallic trickster," see houston baker, _blues, ideology and afro-american literature_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1984), 183ff. baker remarks that "the trickster is also a cultural gift-bearer" (like peter/nicholas!). ^43^ st. nicholas was noted for rescuing children, usually in groups of three. ^44^ see charles w. jones, _st. nicholas of myra, bari, and manhattan_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1978), 43, 61, 307ff. see also 309: nicholas "thinks in dualities." (reed evidently relied heavily on jones' study in writing _the terrible twos_.) the duality persists, in diluted form, in the present-day santa who may give lumps of coal as well as candy. ^45^ for nicholas' defiance of the emperor constantine, see jones, 34. ^46^ herskovits, 324. on the marassa as representative of "man's twinned nature," see deren, 38-41. ^47^ see deren, 130-37. ^48^ such skepticism is even more prominent in the sequel to _the terrible twos_, 1989's _the terrible threes_, which ends with the officially-sponsored kidnapping of the now-leftist dean clift. larsen, 'postmodernism and imperialism: theory and politics in latin america', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-larsen-postmodernism.txt postmodernism and imperialism: theory and politics in latin america by neil larsen northeastern university copyright (c) 1990 by neil larsen, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). [1] my remarks here^1^ concern the following topics of critical discussion and debate: 1) the ideological character of postmodernism as both a philosophical standpoint and as a set of political objectives and strategies; 2) the development within a broadly postmodernist theoretical framework of a trend advocating a critique of certain postmodern tenets from the standpoint of anti-imperialism; and 3) the influence of this trend on both the theory and practice of oppositional culture in latin america. so as to eliminate the need for second-guessing my own standpoint in what follows, let me state clearly at the outset that i will adhere to what i understand to be both a marxist and a leninist position as concerns both epistemology and the social and historical primacy of class contradiction. in matters philosophical, then, i will be advancing and defending dialectical materialist arguments. regarding questions of culture and aesthetics, as well as those of revolutionary strategy under existing conditions--areas in which marxist and leninist theory have either remained relatively speculative or have found it necessary to re-think older positions--my own thinking may or may not merit the attribution of 'orthodoxy,' depending on how that term is currently to be understood. (1) [2] one typically appeals to the term 'postmodern' to characterize a broad and ever-widening range of aesthetic and cultural practices and artifacts. but the concept itself, however diffuse and contested, has also come to designate a very definite current of philosophy as well as a theoretical approach to politics. postmodern philosophy--or simply postmodern 'theory,' if we are to accept jameson's somewhat ingenuous observation that it "marks the end of philosophy"^2^--arguably includes the now standard work of poststructuralist thinkers such as derrida and foucault as well as the more recent work by ex-post althusserian theorists such a ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe, academic philosophical converts such as richard rorty and the perennial vanguardist stanley aronowitz. the latter elaborate and re-articulate an increasingly withered poststructuralism, re-deploying the grandly dogmatic and quasi-mystical "critique of the metaphysics of presence" as a critical refusal of the "foundationalism" and "essentialism" of the philosophy of the enlightenment. these two assignations--which now come to replace the baneful derridean charge of "metaphysics"--refer respectively to the enlightenment practice of seeking to *ground* all claims regarding either truth or value in terms of a self-evidencing standard of reason; and to the ontological fixation upon being as *essence*, rather than as relationality or 'difference.' [3] postmodern philosophy for the most part adopts its "anti-essentialism" directly from derrida and company, adding little if anything to accepted (or attenuated) post-structuralist doctrine. where postmodernism contributes more significantly to the honing down and re-tooling of poststructuralism is, i propose, in its indictment of foundationalism--in place of the vaguer abstractions of "presence" or "identity"--as the adversarial doctrine. it is not all "western" modes of thought and being which must now be discarded, but more precisely their enlightenment or %modern% modalities, %founded% on the concept of %reason%. indeed, even the charge of "foundationalism" perhaps functions as a minor subterfuge here. what postmodern philosophy intends is, to cite aronowitz's forthright observation, a "rejection of reason as a foundation for human affairs."^3^ postmodernism is thus a form, albeit an unconventional one, of %irrationalism%. [4] to be sure, important caveats can be raised here. postmodernist theoreticians often carefully stipulate that a rejection of reason as foundation does not imply or require a rejection of all narrowly 'reasonable' procedures. postmodernity is not to be equated with an anti-modernity. aronowitz, for example, has written that "postmodern movements" (e.g., ecology and "solidarity" type labor groups) "borrow freely the terms and programs of modernity but place them in new discursive contexts" (_ua_ 61). chantal mouffe insists that "radical democracy"--according to her, the political and social project of postmodernity--aims to "defend the political project [of enlightenment] while abandoning the notion that it must be based on a specific form of rationality."^4^ ernesto laclau makes an even nicer distinction by suggesting that "it is precisely the %ontological status% of the central categories of the discourses of modernity and not their %content%, that is at stake. . . . postmodernity does not imply a %change% in the values of enlightenment modernity but rather a particular %weakening% of their absolutist character."^5^ and a similarly conservative gesture within the grander irrationalist impulse can, of course, be followed in lyotard's characterization of "paralogy" as those practices legitimating themselves exclusively within their own "small narrative" contexts, rather than within the macro-frames of modernist meta-narratives of reason, progress, history, etc.^6^ [5] two counter-objections are necessary here, however. the first is that any thoughtful consideration of claims to locate the attributes of reason within supposedly local or non-totalizable contexts immediately begs the question of what, then, acts to set the limits to any particular instance of "paralogy," etc.? how does the mere adding of the predicate "local" or "specific" or "weakened" serve to dispense with the logic of an external ground or foundation? cannot, for example, the ecology movement be shown to be %grounded% in a social and political context outside and 'larger' than it is, whatever the movement may think of itself? if reason is present (or absent) in the fragment, does not this presence/absence necessarily connect with the whole on some level? if, as one might say, postmodernism wants to proclaim a rationality of means entirely removed from a rationality of ends, does it not thereby sacrifice the very "means/ends" logic it wants to invoke, the very logical framework in which one speaks of "contexts"? i suggest it would be more precise to describe the measured, non-foundationalist 'rationalism' of postmodernism as simply an evasive maneuver designed to immunize from critique the real object here: that is to preserve "enlightenment" as merely an outward and superficial guise for irrationalist content, to reduce "enlightenment," as an actual set of principles designed to govern consciously thought and action, to merely the specific mythology needed to inform the project of a "new radical imaginary" (laclau, _ua_ 77). [6] clearly, there is a complete failure--or refusal- of %dialectical% reasoning incurred in postmodernism's attempted retention of an enlightenment 'micro' rationality. and this brings up the second rejoinder: postmodern philosophy's practiced avoidance on this same score of the %marxist%, dialectical materialist critique of enlightenment. postmodern theory, virtually without exception, consigns something it calls "marxism" to the foul enlightenment brew of "foundationalism.th" marxism is, in effect, collapsed back into hegelianism, the materialist dialectic into the idealist dialectic--or, as aronowitz somewhat puzzlingly puts it, the "form of marxism is retained while its categories are not" (_ua_ 52). but in no instance that i know of has a postmodern theorist systematically confronted the contention first developed by marx and engels that "this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie."^7^ i think perhaps it needs to be remembered that the marxist project was not and is not the simple replacement of one "universal reason" with another, but the practical and material transformation of reason to be attained in classless society; and that this attainment would %not% mean the culmination of reason on earth a la hegel but a raising of reason to a higher level through its very de-"idealization." reason, then, comes to be grasped as a time-bound, relative principle which nevertheless attains an historical universality through the social universality of the proletariat (gendered and multi-ethnic) as they/we who--to quote a famous lyric--"shall be the human race." [7] but again, postmodern irrationalism systematically evades confrontation with %this% critique of enlightenment. it typically manages this through a variety of fundamentally dogmatic maneuvers, epitomized in the work of laclau and mouffe--who, as ellen meiksins wood has shown,^8^ consistently and falsely reduce marxism to a "closed system" of pure economic determinism. [8] why this evasion? surely there is more than a casual connection here with the fact that the typical postmodern theorist probably never got any closer to marxism or leninism than althusser's left-wing structuralism and lacanianism. one can readily understand how the one time advocate of a self-enclosed "theoretical practice" might elicit postmodern suspicions of closure and 'scientism.' indeed, althusser's 'marxism' can fairly be accused of having pre-programmed, in its flight from the class struggles of its time and into methodologism, the subsequent turn-about in which even the residual category of "theoretical practice" is deemed "foundationalist." [9] but this is secondary. what i would propose is that postmodernism's hostility towards a "foundationalist" parody of marxism, combined with the elision of marxism's genuinely dialectical and materialist content, flows not from a simple misunderstanding but, objectively, from the consistent need of an ideologically embattled capitalism to seek displacement and pre-emption of marxism through the formulation of radical-sounding "third paths." that postmodern philosophy normally refrains from open anti communism, preferring to pay lip service to "socialism" even while making the necessary obeisances to the demonologies of "stalin" may make it appear as some sort of a "left" option. but is there really anything "left"? the most crucial problem for marxism today- how to extend and put into practice a critique %from the left% of retreating "socialism" at the moment of the old communist movement's complete transformation into its opposite--remains safely beyond postmodernist conceptual horizons. [10] postmodernist philosophy's oblique but hostile relation to marxism largely duplicates that of nietzsche. and the classical analysis here belongs to lukacs' critique of nietzschean irrationalism in _the destruction of reason_, a work largely ignored by contemporary theory since being anathematized by althusserianism two decades ago. lukacs identifies in nietzsche's radically anti-systemic and counter cultural thinking a consistent drive to attack and discredit the socialist ideals of his time. but against these nietzsche proposes nothing with any better claim to social rationality. any remaining link between reason and the emancipatory is refused. it is, according to lukacs, this very antagonism towards socialism--a movement of whose most advanced theoretical expression nietzsche remained fundamentally ignorant--which supplies to nietzschean philosophy its point of departure and its principal unifying "ground" as such. "it is material from 'enemy territory,' problems and questions imposed by the class enemy which ultimately determine the content of his philosophy."^9^ unlike his more typical fellow reactionaries, however, nietzsche perceived the fact of bourgeois decadence and the consequent need to formulate an intellectual creed which could give the appearance of overcoming it. in this he anticipates the later, more explicit "anti bourgeois" anti-communisms of the coming imperialist epoch--most obviously fascism. this defense of a decadent bourgeois order, based on the partial acknowledgement of its defects and its urgent need for cultural renewal, and pointing to a "third path" "beyond" the domain of reason,^10^ lukacs terms an "indirect apologetic." [11] postmodern philosophy receives nietzsche through the filters of deleuze, foucault and derrida, blending him with similarly mediated versions of heidegger and william james into a new irrationalist hybrid. but the terms of lukacs' nietzsche-critique on the whole remain no less appropriate. whereas, on the one hand, postmodernist philosophy's aversion for orthodox fascism is so far not to be seriously questioned, its basic content continues, i would argue, to be "dictated by the adversary." and this adversary--revolutionary communism as both a theory and a practice--assumes an even sharper identity today than in nietzsche's epoch. let it be said that lukacs, writing forty years ago, posits an adversarial marxism-leninism more free of the critical tensions and errors than we know it to have been then or to be now. if, from our own present standpoint, _the destruction of reason_ has a serious flaw, then it is surely this failure to anticipate or express openly the struggles and uncertainties within communist orthodoxy itself. (lukacs' subsequent allegiance to krushchevite positions--by then, perhaps, inevitable--marks his decisive move to the right on these issues.) but the fact that postmodern philosophy arises in a conjuncture marked by capitalist restoration throughout the "socialist" bloc and the consequent extreme crisis and disarray within the theoretical discourse of marxism, while it may explain the relative freedom from genuinely contestatory marxist critique enjoyed by postmodern theorists, in no way alters the essence of this ideological development as a reprise of pseudo-dialectical, nietzschean "indirect apologetics." [12] this becomes fully apparent when one turns to post-modernism's more explicit formulations as a politics. i am thinking here mainly of laclau and mouffe's _hegemony and socialist strategy_, a work which, though it remains strongly controversial, has attained in recent years a virtually manifesto-like standing among many intellectuals predisposed to poststructuralist theory. _hegemony and socialist strategy_ proposes to free the gramscian politics linked to the concept of "hegemony" (the so-called "war of position," as opposed to "war of maneuver") from its residual marxian 'foundationalism' in recognition of what is held to be the primary efficacy of discourse itself and its "articulating" agents in forming hegemonic subjects. and it turns out of course that "socialist strategy" means dumping socialism altogether for a "radical democracy" which more adequately conforms to the "indeterminacy" of a "society" whose concept is modeled directly on the poststructuralist critique of the sign. [13] the key arguments of _hegemony and socialist strategy_--as, in addition, the serious objections they have elicited--have become sufficiently well known to avoid lengthy repetitions here. what mouffe and laclau promise to deliver is, in the end, a revolutionary or at least emancipatory political strategy shorn of 'foundationalist' ballast. in effect, however, they merely succeed in shifting the locus of political and social agency from "essentialist" categories of class and party to a discursive agency of "articulation."^11^ and when it comes time to specify concretely the actual articulating subjects themselves, _hegemony and socialist strategy_ resorts to a battery of argumentative circularities and subterfuges which simply relegate the articulatory agency to "other discourses."^12^ [14] ellen meiksins wood has shown the inevitable collapse of _hegemony and socialist strategy_ into its own illogic as an argument with any pretense to denote political or social realities--a collapse which, because of its very considerable synthetic ambitions and conceptual clarity perhaps marks the conclusive failure of poststructuralism to produce a viable political theory. but the failure of argument has interfered little with the capacity of this theoretical tract to supply potentially anti-capitalist intellectuals with a powerful dose of "indirect apologetics." the fact that the "third path" calls itself "radical democracy," draping itself in the "ethics" if not the epistemology of enlightenment, the fact that it outwardly resists the "fixity" of any one privileged subject, makes it, in a sense, the more perfect "radical" argument for a capitalist politics of pure irrationalist spontaneity. and we know who wins on the battlefield of the spontaneous.^13^ while the oppressed are fed on the myths of their own "hegemony"--and why not, since "on the threshold of postmodernity" humanity is "for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history"? (laclau, _ua_ 79-80)--those already in a position to "articulate" the myths for us only strengthen their hold on power. (2) [15] in my remarks so far i have emphasized how contemporary postmodern philosophy's blanket hostility towards the universalisms of enlightenment thought might merely work to pre-empt marxism's carefully directed critique of that %particular universal% which is present-day capitalist ideology and power. does not the merely theoretical refusal of the (ideal) %ground% serve in fact to strengthen the %real% foundations of %real% oppression by rendering all putative knowledge of the latter illicit? when peter dews criticizes foucault for his attempt to equate the "plural" with the emancipatory, the remark applies to more recent postmodern theory with equal force: "the deep naivety of this conception lies in the assumption that once the aspiration to universality is abandoned what will be left is a harmonious plurality of unmediated perspectives."^14^ in light of this perverse blindness to %particular% universals, postmodernism's seemingly general skepticism towards marxism as %one% possible instance of 'foundationalism' would be better grasped as a specific and determining antagonism. is there an extant, living--i.e., %practiced%--philosophy %other% than marxism which any longer purports to ground rational praxis in universal (but in this case also practical-material) categories? we are saying, then, that postmodern philosophy and political theory becomes objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anti-communism. [16] it might, however, be objected at this point that postmodernism encompasses not only this demonstrably right-wing tendency but also a certain 'left' which, like marxism, aims at an actual transcendence of oppressive totalities but which diverges from marxism in its precise identification of the oppressor and of the social agent charged with its opposition and overthrow. under this more "practical" aegis, the axis of postmodern antagonism shifts from the universal versus the particular to the more politically charged tension between the "center" and the "margin." such a shift has, for example, been adumbrated by cornel west as representing a particularly %american% inflection of the postmodern. "for americans," says west, are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and heterogeneity in a way that europeans have not been; and the revolt against the center by those constituted as marginals is an %oppositional% difference in a way that poststructuralist notions of difference are not. these american attacks on universality in the name of difference, these 'postmodern' issues of otherness (afro-americans, native americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain french postmodern discourses about otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements of others.^15^ among instances of a "left" postmodernism we might then include certain of contemporary feminisms and the theoretical opposition to homophobia as well as the cultural nationalisms of ethnic minority groups. the category of the "marginal" scarcely exhausts itself here, however. arrayed against the "center" even as also "concealed" by its discourses and "disciplines" are, in this conception, also the millions who inhabit the neocolonial societies of the 'third world.' hence there might be a definite logic in describing the contemporary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the periphery as in their own way also "postmodern." [17] it is this "marginal" and "anti-imperialist" claim to postmodernity which i now wish to assess in some depth. in particular i propose to challenge the idea that such a "left" movement within postmodernism really succeeds in freeing itself from the right-wing apologetic strain within the postmodern philosophy of the "center." [18] the basic outlines of this "left" position are as follows: both post-structuralism and postmodernism, as discourses emergent in the "center," have failed to give adequate theoretical consideration to the international division of labor and to what is in fact the uneven and oppressive relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions to the "life-world" of the periphery. both metropolitan knowledge as well as metropolitan systems of ethics constitute themselves upon a prior exclusion of peripheral reality. they therefore become themselves falsely 'universal' and as such ideological rather than genuinely critical. the remedy to such false consciousness is not to be sought in the mere abstract insistence on "difference" (or "unfixity," the "heterogeneous," etc.), but in the %direct% practical intervention of those who %are% different, those flesh and blood "others" whom, as west observes, the very conceptual appeal to alterity has ironically excluded. as a corollary, it is then implied that a definite epistemological priority, together with a kind of ethical exemplariness, adheres to those subjects and practices marginalized by imperialist institutions of knowledge and culture. [19] among 'first world' theorists who have put forward this kind of criticism perhaps the best known is fredric jameson. in his essay "third world literature in the era of multi-national capitalism" jameson argues that "third world texts necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society."^16^ third world texts, then--and by extension those who produce them and their primary public--retain what the culture of postmodernism in the 'first world' is unable to provide, according to another of jameson's well-known arguments: a "cognitive map"^17^ equipped to project the private onto the public sphere. as such, these peripheral practices of signification consciously represent a political bedrock reality which for the contemporary postmodern metropole remains on the level of the political unconscious. (it should be pointed out of course that jameson's schema is largely indifferent in this respect to the modernism/postmodernism divide.) what enables this is the fact that the third world subject, like hegel's slave, exhibits a "situational consciousness" (jameson's preferred substitute term for materialism). as "master," however, the metropolitan consciousness becomes enthralled to the fetishes which symbolize its dominance. [20] an analogous but weaker theory of the marginal as epistemologically privileged is to be found in the writings of edward said. in _the world, the text and the critic_, for example, said chastises contemporary critical theory, especially poststructuralism, for its lack of "worldliness"--by which he evidently means much the same thing designated by jameson's "situational consciousness." what is needed, according to said, is "a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory"^18^ which said denotes simply as "critical consciousness." _the world, the text and the critic_ ultimately disappoints in its %own% failure to historically or "spatially" situate such "critical consciousness," but given said's public commitment to palestinian nationalism it wouldn't seem unreasonable to identify in his call for "worldliness" a prescription for "third-worldliness." [21] both jameson and said--the former far more openly and forthrightly than the latter--violate central tenets of postmodernism, of course, insofar as they posit the existence of a marginal %consciousness% imbued with "presence" and "self-identity." that is, they appear to justify an orthodox postmodernist counter-accusation of "essentialism." lest this should be thought to constitute a final incompatibility of postmodernism for an anti-imperialist, post-colonial standpoint, however, it is imperative to mention here the work of gayatry chakravorty spivak. foreseeing this difficulty, spivak has (in her critical reading of the work of a radical collective of indian historians known as the "subaltern studies group") sought to justify such "essentialism" as a strategic necessity, despite its supposed epistemological falsity. the radical, third world historian, writes spivak, "must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of his history. as they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the west."^19^ spivak, that is to say, poses the necessity for an exceptionalism: a conceptual reliance on the "subject of history," which as a poststructuralist she would condemn as reactionary and "humanist," is allowed on "strategical" grounds within the terrain of the "subaltern." it begins to sound ironically like the old pro-colonialist condescension to the "native's" need for myths that the educated metropolitan city dweller has now dispensed with--but more on this below. [22] even if the "marginal" cannot be proved to enjoy an epistemological advantage, however, its very %reality% as a 'situation' requiring direct action against oppression can be appealed to as politically and ethically exemplary. thus, in her very poignant essay entitled "feminism: the political conscience of postmodernism?" (_ua_ 149-166) the critic and video artist laura kipnis proposes that feminism, seemingly entrapped between the "textualist" (i.e., modernist) aestheticism of french poststructuralist critics on the order of cixous, irigaray, etc., and north american liberal reformism (another case of "essentialism"), adopt "a theory of women not as class or caste but as colony" (_ua_ 161). the efforts of a rorty or a laclau to salvage "enlightenment" by ridding it of foundationalism and leaving only its "pragmatic" procedures would, in this view, be too little too late. for kipnis, as for craig owens,^20^ postmodernism denotes what is really the definitive decline of the "west" and its colonial systems of power. if those marginalized within the center itself, e.g., women, are to rescue themselves from this sinking ship they must model their opposition on the practice of non-western anti-colonial rebels. referring to the 1986 bombing of libya, kipnis writes: "when retaliation is taken, as has been announced, for 'american arrogance,' %this% is the postmodern critique of enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentering, it is the margin, the absence, the periphery rewriting the rules from its own interest" (_ua_ 163). [23] an analogous proposal for third world revolt within the conceptual terrain of postmodernism has been issued by george yudice. against the postmodern 'ethics' formulated by foucault as an "aesthetics of existence"--manifesting itself, e.g., in the liberal comforts of pluralism--yudice suggests finding an ethical standard "among the dominated and oppressed peoples of the 'peripheral' or underdeveloped countries."^21^ as a mere "aesthetic" the postmodern "explores the marginal, yet is incapable of any solidarity with it" (_ua_ 224). yudice terms this marginal ethic an "ethic of survival" and points to the example set by rigoberta menchu, a guatemalan mayan woman who has recorded her experiences as an organizer for the christian base community movement against genocidal repression.^22^ "menchu, in fact, has turned her very identity into a 'poetics of defense.' her oppression and that of her people have opened them to an unfixity delimited by the unboundedness of struggle" (_ua_ 229). in menchu's ethical example we thus have, so to speak, the subversive promise of "unfixity" a la mouffe-laclau made flesh. [24] yudice is not the first to attempt this particular inflection with specific reference to latin america. the "liberation theology" which guides menchu's practice as a militant might itself lay some claim to represent an indigenously latin american postmodernism--"avant la lettre" insofar as foucault and his followers are concerned. the philosophical implications of liberation theology have been worked out by the so-called "philosophy of liberation," a intellectual current which developed in argentina in the early 1970s. as recounted recently by horacio cerutti-guldberg,^23^ "philosophy of liberation" set out explicitly to formulate a uniquely latin american doctrine of liberation which would be "neither a liberal individualism nor a marxist collectivism" (_lap_ 47). rather, it would set itself the goal of "philosophizing out of the social demands of the most needy, the marginalized and despised sectors of the population" (_lap_ 44). this in turn requires, according to exponent enrique dussel, a new philosophical method--known as "analectics"--based on the logical priority or "anteriority" of the exterior (i.e., the marginal, the other) over totality.^24^ "analectics" are to supplant the "eurocentric" method of dialectics. as cerutti-guldberg observes: dialectics (it doesn't matter whether hegelian or marxist, since analectical philosophy identifies them) could never exceed "intra-systematicity." it would be incapable of capturing the requirements of "alterity" expressed in the "face" of the "poor" that demands justice. in this sense, it would appear necessary to postulate a method that would go beyond (ana-) and not merely through (dia-) the totality. this is the "analectical" method which works with the central notion of analogy. in this way, analectical philosophy would develop the "essential" thinking longed for by heidegger. such thinking would be made possible when it emerges out of the cultural, anthropological "alterative" latin american space. this space is postulated as "preliminary in the order of being" and "posterior in the order of knowledge" with respect to the "ontological totality." it is constituted by the poor of the "third world." (_lap_ 50) [25] in dussel's _philosophy of liberation_ the logic of going "beyond" the totality ultimately leads to explicit theology and mysticism. "what reason can never embrace--the mystery of the other as other--only faith can penetrate" (dussel 93). but the "analectical" method has received other, non theological formulations in latin america, most notably in the case of the cuban critic roberto fernandez retamar, whose theoretical writings of the early 1970s^25^ were aimed at refuting the possibility that a "universal" theory of literature could truthfully reflect the radical alterity of "nuestra america." this is argued to be so not only as a result of the unequal, exploitative relation of imperial metropolis to periphery--a relation which is historically evolved and determined and thus subject to transformation--but because all notions of universality (e.g., goethe's, and marx and engels' idea of a _weltliteratur_) are fictions masking the reality of radical diversity and alterity. [26] one should point out here that retamar's philosophical authority is jose marti and certainly not derrida, deleuze or foucault, whom, had he been aware of them at the time, retamar would almost surely have regarded with skeptical hostility. dussel and the various latin american philosophers associated with "philosophy of liberation" have obvious debts to european phenomenology and existentialism, especially heidegger and levinas. but here, too, a philosophical trend in which we can now recognize the idea of postmodernity as a radical break with enlightenment develops out of what is perceived at least as a direct %social and political% demand for theory to adequately reflect the life-world of those who are, as it were, both "marginal" and the "subject of history" at once. one can sympathize with the general impatience of latin american critics and theorists who see in the category of the "postmodern" what appears to be yet another neo colonial attempt to impose alien cultural models. (such would probably be retamar's conscious sentiments.) but the example of the "analectical" critiques of dussel and retamar shows, in fact, that the intellectual and cultural gulf is overdrawn and that all roads to postmodernism do not lead through french poststructuralism. (3) [27] do we then find a %latin american culture% of postmodernism linked to these particular conceptual trends? i would argue--and have argued elsewhere^26^- that the recent proliferation in latin america of so called "testimonial" narratives like that of rigoberta menchu, as well as the fictional and quasi-fictional texts which adopt the perspective of the marginalized (see, _inter alia_, the works of elena poniatowska, eduardo galeano and manlio argueta), give some evidence of postmodernity insofar as they look for ways of "giving voice" to alterity. significant here is their implicit opposition to the more traditional (and modernist) approach of "magical realism" in which the marginal becomes a kind of aesthetic mode of access to the ground of national or regional unity and identity. one could include here as well the general wave of interest in latin american popular and "barrio" culture as an embodiment of 'resistance.' [28] but our direct concern here is with the ideological character of the conceptual trend as such. does the move to, as it were, %found% post-modernism's anti-foundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism's reactionary character? [29] i submit that it does not. basing themselves on what is, to be sure, the decisive historical and political reality of unequal development and the undeniably imperialist and neo-colonialist bias of much metropolitan-based theory, the "left" postmodernists we have surveyed here all, to one degree or another, proceed to distort this reality into a new irrationalist and spontaneist myth. marginality is postulated as a condition which, purely by virtue of its objective %situation%, spontaneously gives rise to the %subversive particularity% upon which postmodern politics pins its hopes. %but where has this been shown actually to occur? where has imperialism, and its attendant "scientific" and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the "new social movements" founded on ideals of alterity?% [30] jameson, whose argument for a third-world cognitive advantage points openly to an anti imperialist nationalism as the road to both political and cultural redemption from postmodern psychic and social pathologies, speaks to us of ousmane sembene and lu hsun, but leaves out the larger question of where strategies of all-class national liberation have ultimately led africa and china--of whether, in fact, nationalism, even the radical nationalism of cultural alterity, can be said to have succeeded as a strategy of anti-imperialism. as aijaz ahmad remarked in his well-taken critique of jameson's essay, jameson's retention of a "three worlds" theoretical framework imposes a view of neo-colonial society as free of class contradictions.^27^ [31] spivak's move to characterize the "subaltern" as what might be termed "deconstruction with a human face" only leads us further into a spontaneist thicket- although the logic here is more consistent than in jameson and said, since the transition from colonial to independent status itself is reduced to a "displacement of function between sign systems" (spivak, 198). [32] kipnis, whose attempt to implicate %both% textualist and reformist feminisms in a politics of elitism and quietism has real merits, can in the end offer up as models for an "anti-colonial" feminism little more than the vague threat of anti-western counter-terror from radical third-world nationalists such as muammar khadafy. we recall here lenin's dialectical insight in _what is to be done?_ regarding the internal link between spontaneism and an advocacy of terrorism. yudice's counter-posing of a third world "ethic of survival" to a postmodern ethic of "self formation" possesses real force as itself an ethical judgement and one can only concur in arguing the superior moral example of a rigoberta menchu. but where does this lead us %politically%? those super exploited and oppressed at the periphery thus become pegged with a sort of sub-political consciousness, as if they couldn't or needn't see beyond the sheer fact of "survival." [33] are these lapses into the most threadbare sorts of political myths and fetishes simply the result of ignorance or bad faith on the part of sympathetic first world theorists? not at all, i would suggest. regarding current political reality in latin america, at least, such retreats into spontaneism and the overall sub-estimation of the conscious element in the waging of political struggle merely reflect in a general way the continuing and indeed %increasing% reliance of much of the autochthonous anti-imperialist left on a similar mix of romantic faith in exemplary violence and in the eventual spontaneous uprising of the "people," whether with bullets or with ballots. although both _foquismo_ and the strategy of a "peaceful road to socialism" based on populist alliances are recognized on one level to have failed, the conclusions drawn from this by the mainstream left have on the whole only led to an even more thorough going abandonment of marxist and leninist political strategies in favor of a "democratic" politics of consensus. the strategic watchword seems to be "hegemony"--as derived, so far, from gramsci, although who can say whether laclau and mouffe might not stage a rapid conquest of the latin american left intelligentsia the way althusser did two decades ago? if the left is to reverse the disastrous consequences of praetorian fascism in the southern cone and brazil, for example--a reversal now basically limited to the regaining of a "lost" bourgeois "democracy"--this will supposedly require a less "sectarian" approach in which such slogans as "democracy" and "national sovereignty" are given a "popular" rather than an "elite" content. the matter of %ideology%--the question of whether, for example, "democracy," "national sovereignty," etc., are the political ideas through which the masses of exploited latin americans are to attain true emancipation--is now generally dropped. (another case of "essentialism.") what is needed is to wage a "war of position" fought by a left-hegemonized "popular bloc" and not by a movement of workers and class-allies organized in a revolutionary party. [34] this is not to say that the gramscian political strategy associated with "hegemony" is necessarily tied to spontaneism; for gramsci, at least, the "hegemony" required could only be the result of conscious political organizing and guidance by a working-class party itself led by its own "organic intellectuals." (to what extent this accords or diverges from the leninist strategy of democratic centralism is a matter we cannot go into here.) in its currently general acceptation in latin america, however--linked as it is to purely %reformist% ends--"hegemony" implies a need to substitute a form of organization based on spontaneously arising social and cultural ideologies and practices for the "older" one of party-based, consciousness-raising agitation and recruitment. the almost unanimous move of the mainstream left to embrace liberation theology and the catholic church-led christian base-community movement (or at least to refrain from open polemics with it) is the most significant example of a politics of "hegemony" over one of ideology. [35] i think this entire political trend within latin america can be correctly grasped only as a consequence of the failure of marxists, in particular the established communist parties and allied organizations, to carry out a self-criticism from the left, and of the resulting shift rightward into political positions which merely compound the errors of the past. the response of traditional latin american marxism to the evident failure of populism (with or without a _foco_ component) as a variation on the orthodox "two-stage" model (democratic capitalism first, then socialism) has typically been to jettison the second stage entirely. one could argue with a certain justice that this collapse was inevitable, given the political mistakes already embedded in the older line. as adolfo sanchez vasquez has recently pointed out,^28^ latin americans inherited the marxism of the second international, the marxism which regarded revolution in the western centers of capitalism as the necessary precondition for even national liberation, much less socialism or communism on the periphery. the marx who, after studying british colonialism in ireland, concluded that the liberation of irish workers from imperialism was key to the political advance of an increasingly reformist and conservative british working class; the marx who speculated that peasant communes in russia might make feasible a %direct% transition to socialism: this marx was largely unknown in latin america. thus when the communism of the third international adopted the "two stage" model for neocolonial countries, latin american revolutionaries had scarcely any theoretical basis upon which to dissent. (this, according to sanchez vasquez, held true even for so original a marxist thinker as mariategui, who, perhaps because he had to go outside marxism for theories sensitive to factors of unequal development, was ultimately led in the direction of the irrationalism of bergson and sorel.) latin america is in no way unique in this, needless to say. everywhere the dominant trend is to compound past errors with even greater ones, thus reaching the point of renouncing the very core of marxism as such in preference for liberal anachronisms and worse. [36] i dwell on this because i think a truly critical assessment of an "anti-imperialist" postmodernism, as of orthodox postmodernism, requires a prior recognition of the essentially parasitical dependence of such thinking on marxism and particularly on the %crisis within marxism%--a dependence which, as we have repeatedly observed, postmodernism must systematically seek to erase. the very insistence on a politics of spontaneism and myth, on the tacit abandonment of conscious and scientific revolutionary strategy and organization, is, i am suggesting, the derivative %effect% of developments within marxism itself, of what amounts to the %conscious political% decision to give up the principle of revolution as a scientifically grounded activity, as a praxis with a rational foundation. the contemporary emphasis on "cultural politics" which one finds throughout intellectual and radical discourse in latin america as well as in the metropolis, while useful and positive to the degree that it opens up new areas for genuinely political analysis and critique, is symptomatic, in my view, of this theoretical surrender, and more often than not simply ratifies the non-strategy of spontaneism. one might almost speak these days of a "culturalism" occupying the ideological space once held by the "economism" of the second international revisionists. to adopt the "postmodern" sensibility means, in this sense, to regard the "culturalization" of the political as somehow simply in accordance with the current nature of things--to so minimize the role of political determination as to eliminate it altogether. and yet, this sensibility itself is %politically% determined. [37] spontaneism, however it may drape itself in populist slogans and admiration for the people's day to day struggle for survival, etc., rests on an intellectual distrust of the masses, a view of the mass as beyond the reach of reason and hence to be guided by myth. the latin american masses have a long history of being stigmatized in this way by both imperial and creole elites. this elitism begins to lose its hold on the intelligentsia in the writings of genuine "radical democrats" such as marti and is still further overcome in the discourses of revolutionary intellectuals such as mariategui and guevara, although even here vestiges of the old viewpoint remain. (mariategui, who saw the quechua-speaking indigenous peasants of peru as beings with full historical and political subjecthood, maintained ridiculously archaic and racist views regarding peru's blacks.) and, of course, sexism has been and remains a serious and deadly obstacle. [38] but in the era of 'postmodernity' we are being urged, in exchange for a cult of alterity, to relinquish this conception of the masses as the rational agents of social and historical change, as the bearers of progress. given the increasing prevalence of such aristocratism, however it may devise radical credentials for itself, it becomes possible to fall short of this truly democratic vision, to be seduced by the false nietzschean regard for the masses as capable only of an unconscious, instinctual political agency. [39] ultimately, it may be only revolutionary practice, the %activity% of strategy and organization, that can successfully trouble the political reveries of postmodernism. but just the sheer history of such practice, particularly in latin america, makes risible any theory which considers politics (in the leninist sense) to be either too abstract to matter, or--in what finally amounts to the same thing--to be "self produced," as aronowitz has phrased it. [40] perhaps the most eloquent refutation of spontaneist faith in "new social movements" is recorded in roque dalton's "testimonial classic" _miguel marmol_, in which the legendary salvadoran revolutionary named in the title recounts a life as a communist militant in central america. it is impossible to do justice to the combined practical wisdom and theoretical profundity of this narrative by citing excerpts--but one in particular speaks poignantly to the question at hand: in the third chapter of the text, marmol discusses his return in 1930, shortly before he participates in founding the salvadoran communist party, to his home town of ilopango. his task is to organize a union of rural workers. at first, as he tells it, the workers reject him, suspicious of his being anti-catholic. he is led to recall the failure of previous union organizing efforts carried out by a local teacher and a railroad engineer. "however, we suspected they had always worked outside reality, that they hadn't based their organizing work on the actual problems of people and, on the contrary, had created an impenetrable barrier between their 'enlightenment' and the 'backwardness' they ascribed to the people."^29^ [41] marmol, however, persists in "finding out what the people thought" (_m_ 119)--that is, he refuses to take their initially backward reaction (defense of the church) to mean that they lack "enlightenment." meetings are called, and as the people begin to talk about working conditions, marmol recalls, "it wasn't hard to hear, over and over again, concepts that sounded to me just like the 'class struggle,' the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' etc." (_m_ 136-136). marmol's task, then, is not that of "enlightening" the "backward" masses, nor is it simply to acknowledge "what the people thought" as sovereign. rather, it is to collect these isolated concepts, to %articulate% them, and to draw the logically necessary conclusions. [42] here, in so many words, marmol demonstrates his profound, dialectical grasp of the essential, contradictory relation of theory to practice, of concept to reality, of the conscious to the spontaneous, of the "from without" to the "from within." postmodernism, meanwhile, even at its most "left," political and self-critical, remains cut-off from the dialectical truths discovered in the practice of marmol and of the millions of others in latin america and across the planet who preceded and will follow him. _______________________________________________________ notes 1. an original version of this paper was presented as a lecture, entitled "postmodernism and hegemony: theory and politics in latin america," at the humanities institute at suny stony brook on march 2, 1989. 2. fredric jameson, "postmodernism and consumer society," in _the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture_, ed. hal foster (port townsend, wa:bay press, 1983), 112. 3. stanley aronowitz, "postmodern and politics," in _universal abandon?: the politics of postmodernism_, ed. andrew ross (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1988), 50. _universal abandon?_ cited hereafter in text and notes as _ua_. 4. chantal mouffe, "radical democracy," _ua_ 32. 5. ernesto laclau, "politics and the limits of modernity," _ua_ 66-67. 6. jean-francois lyotard, _the postmodern condition_, trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1984). 7. frederick engels, _socialism: utopian and scientific_ (beijing: foreign languages press, 1975), 46. 8. see ellen meiksins wood, _the retreat from class: a new 'true' socialism_ (london: verso, 1986) chapter 4, "the autonomization of ideology and politics." 9. georg lukacs, _the destruction of reason_, trans. peter palmer (atlantic highlands, n.j.: humanities press, 1981), 395. 10. "the two moments--that of reason and that of its other--stand not in opposition pointing to a dialectical _aufhebung_, but in a relationship of tension characterized by mutual repugnance and exclusion" (habermas, "the entry into postmodernity: nietzsche as turning point" in _the philosophical discourse of modernity_, trans. frederick lawrence (cambridge: mit press, 1987), 103). 11. see the introductory chapter to my _modernism and hegemony: a materialist critique of aesthetic agencies_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1990). 12. "[t]he exterior is constituted by other discourses." ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe, _hegemony and socialist strategy: towards radical democratic politics_ (london: verso, 1985), 146. 13. see lenin, _what is to be done?: burning questions of our movement_ (moscow: progress publishers, 1973): all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the "conscious element," of the role of social democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. (39) since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is--either bourgeois or socialist ideology. there is no middle course (for mankind has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms, there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. there is much talk of spontaneity. but the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. . . . (40-41) 14. peter dews, _logics of disintegration_ (london: verso, 1987), 217. 15. "interview with cornell west," _ua_ 273. 16. fredric jameson, "third-world literature in the era of multinational capitalism," _social text_ 15 (fall 1986): 69. 17. see fredric jameson, "postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism," _new left review_ 146 (july-august 1984). 18. edward said, _the world, the text and the critic_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1983), 241. 19. gayatry chakravorty spivak, _in other worlds: essays in cultural politics_ (new york, london: methuen, 1987), 209. 20. see "the discourse of others: feminism and postmodernism," in foster, 57-82. 21. george yudice, "marginality and the ethics of survival," _ua_ 220. 22. see rigoberta menchu, _me llamo rigoberta menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia_ (mexico: siglo veintiuno, 1983). 23. see "actual situation and perspectives of latin american philosophy for liberation," _the philosophical forum_ 20.1-2 (fall-winter 1988-89): 43 61. cited hereafter in text as _lap_. 24. see enrique dussel, _philosophy of liberation_, trans. aquilina martinez and christine morkovsky (maryknoll, ny: orbis, 1985), 158-160. 25. roberto fernandez retamar, _para una teoria de la literatura hispano-americana_ (habana: casa de las americas, 1975). 26. neil larsen, "latin america and postmodernity: a brief theoretical sketch," unpublished paper; and _modernism and hegemony_. 27. aijaz ahmad, "jameson's rhetoric of otherness and the 'national allegory'," _social text_ 17 (fall 1987): 3-27. 28. adolfo sanchez vasquez, "marxism in latin america," _the philosophical forum_ 20.1-2 (fall-winter 1988-89): 114-128. 29. roque dalton, _miguel marmol_, trans. kathleen ross and richard schaaf (willimantic, ct: curbstone press, 1982), 119. cited hereafter in text as _m_. vollmann, 'incarnations of the murderer', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-vollmann-incarnations.txt incarnations of the murderer by william vollmann _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by william vollmann, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. san ignacio, belize (1990) san francisco, california u.s.a. (1991) agra, india (1990) san francisco, california u.s.a. (1991) resolute bay, cornwallis island, northwest territories, canada (1991) interstate 80, california, u.s.a. (1992) battambang, cambodia (1991) san ignacio, belize (1990) two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows. at the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds. they passed little brown girls swimming and smiling. they passed a man who dove for shrimp that he put in a plastic bag. breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions. coca-cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between treeridges and palm houses. as they paddled, the plump wet thighs of the girls quivered; water danced on their thighs. a few wet curly hairs peeked shyly from the crotches of their bathing suits. they had golden hourglass waists. a man was a dragonfly. he hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them. the water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water. its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler. in the branches crouched the man. the plan that the man had was as rubbery and pink as a monkey's palm. but the canoe was not there yet. the two girls were still alive. yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. they saw the girls, too. they saw each other. they saw themselves in the water and forgot everything. the tree that owned the water was closer now. a white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts. all morning the man had been thinking of the two girls whom he was about to kill. knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he'd sliced away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared. he put his mouth to that pale bristly hole and drank. (slowly, the white meat inside oxidized brown.) but now he was silent, suspended from his purpose as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey. now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry. they passed the last house they would ever see. in the river a lazy boa was wriggling along. that was the last snake they'd ever see. they went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river. they saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds. they came to the tree of their death, and the man jumped down lightly and stabbed them in their breasts. the canoe lay long and low across the neck of an island. reflected water burned whitely on its keel. the man opened red fruits. he bit them. they were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside. the spice of the blood was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss. this made him happy. he went to sleep and awoke. a toucan chirped like a frog. the taste was stronger in his mouth. he laughed. he wandered among the caring arches of the palm tree that shaded him like wisdom, and his shirt was hot and slick on his back. he came to the grove where the white horse had sneezed and knocked down a coconut. he drank the juice, but the taste of blood was even stronger now. he looked sideways in the hot high fields of trees. knuckles itching pleasantly with insect bites, searching through the wild-looking fields for ground foods with the sun hot on his sunburned neck and wrists, he swiped down a sugarcane stalk with his machete and then he skinned and peeled it in long strokes, from green down to white. he was good at using knives. he snapped off a piece and chewed it, tasting in advance its taste so juicy, fresh and sweet. his hands were sticky with juice. he chewed. but the other taste loomed still more undeniable. between his teeth he placed slices of young pineapple, birdeaten custard apples, bay leaves, green papayas, sour plums from a leaf-bare tree. he bit them all ferociously into a mush. then he sucked, choked, swallowed. building a fire, he made coffee, which he drank down to the grounds. he cut an inch of medicinevine and chewed that bitterness, too. the taste of blood increased. he spat, but his spittle was clear. there was no blood in it. he pricked his tongue with the point of the knife, but his own male blood could not drown the other, the female taste. he drank half a bottle of rum and fell down. all around him, trees steamed by humid horizons. when he awoke, the taste was stronger than ever. he began to scream. there was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. the man ran there without knowing why. jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black and orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. the widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave's chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. the man ran in. he splashed through the first pool. it was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman's curls. a single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. he ran crazy through the next pool. farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. this was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. the bird flew back and forth very quickly. it hovered over rock-cracks' wrinkled lips. it landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. it darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. water shimmered white on black rocks- the man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. the white bird was the soul of one on the girls. the bird stabbed the man's tongue with its beak and drank blood. then it flew away, not squeaking anymore. the man swallowed experimentally. the taste was not nearly so strong. farther back in the cave was a pit. a tiny black bird flew there. knowing this now, the man clambered down. it was like being inside a seashell. far down in the well, the flicker of his lighter showed him the pink and glistening rock-guts. smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. he held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. the bird came swooping down and cheeping. it was so tiny that it flew back between his tonsils. he longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. but then the taste would strengthen again. the black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. he could feel the bird's pulse inside him. it was not much bigger than a bee. it took him again. then it flew away in silence. the taste was gone now. the man shrieked with glee. the cave was empty. outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn't even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him. he ran outside trying to see and taste everything. he ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. he drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sandvalleys, green-slicked boulder cliffs: he grabbed at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. in the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other's soft flesh. san francisco, california, u.s.a. (1991) down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated grey than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the grey-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. he went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing rivers of grey streets. somewhere was the isle of the dead girls' canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. all night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. he stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he'd eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. the curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. black iron latticed windows as elaborately as qur'anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. timidly he hid behind the sidewalk's trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns . . . once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. so he came to the street of souls. the candy shop of souls lured him in first. his nose stung with the fog. he opened the door and went in, staring at the long glass case that was like an aquarium. here he found the chocolate ingots, the pure mint-striped cylinders, the tarts studded with fruits and berries like a dozen orchards, the vanilla bread-loaves long and slender like suntanned eels, the banana-topped lime hexagons, the chocolate-windowed eclairs domed with cream like russian orthodox churches, the round strawberry tortes gilded with lemon-chocolate to make pedestals for the vanilla-chocolate butterflies that rested on each with breathless wings, the sponge-cakes like an emperor's crown, the complex wicker-basket raspberry pies of woven crust, heaped with boulders of butter and confectioner's sugar, the tins of violet lozenges, the bones and girders made of licorice, the low white discs of sugarpies topped with fan-swirls of almonds like playing cards, the peach cakes, pear cakes, the row of delectable phosphorescent green slugs, the flowerpot of coffee frosting from which a chocolate rose bloomed, the strawberries that peaked up from unknown tarts and tortes bride-bashful behind ruffled paper- he sat at a little square marble table, and without a word the lady brought him a green slug, served on a white plate with white lace. he reached in his pocket and found a single coin of iron with a hole in the center. he gave her that. he sat looking past the glass case at the rows of fruit confections in matched white-lidded jars--not for him. with the silver fork he stabbed the slug and raised it into his mouth, where it overcame him between his teeth with a sweet ichor of orgasmic limes, and so he became a thief- agra, india (1990) two green-clad soldiers were striking a man in the face beneath one of the side-arches of the taj mahal. the man was not screaming. he was a thief. the soldiers had caught him, and were beating him. all around him, the mughal tombs bulged with hard nipples on their marble breasts. -the emperor, he had so many wives, he spent a month's salary on cosmetics! cried the guide. blood flowered from the thief's nose. this tower closed now, said the guide. the lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. for love and love and love. closed now for security reason. but %this% part, this open ivory day. the thief fell down when they let go of him. the soldiers stamped on his stomach. then they raised him again. now. sir, lady, come-come. look! this marble %one% piece. no two piece. no join. only cutting! the thief looked at the guide with big eyes. the soldiers punched him. then he was not looking at the guide anymore. sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. they wore the dead girl's mouths. yes, please! hello! sir and madam! (sir and madam were staring at him again. they could not help it. the soldiers were kicking out his teeth.) water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral. clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. far beyond the screens lay dim white-grey corridors of peace. darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults. the soldiers hustled the thief into darkness. outside it was a foggy morning. skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. on the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward agra. they had sharp backbones and floppy bellies. postcards, please? small marble! elephant two rupees! cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. they swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn't; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb. san francisco, california, u.s.a. (1991) when the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up nob hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up powell street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. crowds were standing off the curb. there was no room for them yet. he saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of union square. higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of victorian houses. a girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. at the top of the hill he could see far; he saw a sunday panorama off the marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the golden gate bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. the red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. the cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-fourfooter tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison bouys that say keep off; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: if i can't eat them by stealing them, i'll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls. fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls. brass safe deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. each one had a different coffee inside. the smell of coffee enflamed him. there were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. in his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. they gave him a muffin. he became an anthropologist. resolute bay, cornwallis island, northwest territories, canada (1991) on the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snowcovered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other's edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed into strange shapes; the inuk wended the skidoo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stern, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year. then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl's mouth, and the komatik broke through. he fell under the ice. the other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him so lovingly and he was warmed. the first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky. interstate 80, california, u.s.a. (1992) grey-lit struts took his weight as he shot across the bridge; flat grey-green ribs were stripped of their nightflesh by the dingy lights, the lights of oakland rippling in between like scales, inhuman lights all the way to the grey horizon. what a relief when the world finally ran out of electricity, and we'd have to turn them off! on his left was a city of stacks and towers clustered with lights like sparks that could never be peacefully extinguished, could never cool themselves in the earth. a gush of smoke blew horizontally from the topmost stack. he scuttled up greenish-grey ramps of deadness into the dead night, accompanied by characterless strings of light, dull apartment tower lights, dark bushes; he bulleted down a lane of dirty blackness clouded by trees on either side, remnant trees suffered to live only because they interrupted that ugly terrible light. then he came into the outer darkness of unhealthy treemists where the sky was as empty as his heart. he slid like a shuffleboard counter through the cut between blackish-brownishgrey banks of darkness, the sky greenish-grey above. he crossed the grim vacuous bridge that was the last place before the night country; he pierced the turgid black river (so night-soaked that he could perceive it only at its edges where light coagulated upon black wrinkles) and came into the ruined desert. the toll bar came down. the attendant was waiting. cars were beginning to honk behind him as he sat there at the toll booth of souls, looking through his pockets. finally he found a single coin with a hole in it. he reached, dropped it into the attendants palm. the toll bar went up. he became a piece of jute cloth. battambang, cambodia (1991) a woman in a mask who had a blue blanket over her head put the soft limp jute of him onto the conveyor belt. then he got washed and rolled. the rollers gleamed and worked him back and forth, softening him. he could not scream. to her he was not even a shadow. (a poster of the president changed rose-light on its shrine.) what worked the rollers? the factory had its own generator, its own grand shouting alternators, built to last, 237 kilowatts . . . the jute of his soul got matted and soft. he did not see the hammer-and-sickle flag anymore. his soul got squeezed by a rickety rattling. now he was squished almost as thin as a hair. people dragged him away slowly, pulling long bunches of him with both hands. he was in a vast cement-floored enclosure whose roof was stained brown. they stretched him out. slowly he went up a long steep conveyor. he emerged in a pale white roll of hope, twirling down, narrowing into a strip. the barefoot workers gathered him into piles on the concrete floor, then stuffed him into barrels, which were then mounted on huge reels. murderers like him had destroyed this place once already. there had been twelve hundred workers. now that it had been rebuilt, eight hundred and sixty worked there, eight hours a day, six days a week, not knowing that jute was souls. they cleaned and pressed him into accordioned ribbons of fiber that built up in the turning barrels. a masked girl stood ready to pack him down with her hands and roll a new barrel into place. he recognized her. she was not angry anymore. then someone took the barrels to go into a second pressing machine. a metal arm whipped back and forth, but only for a minute; the barefoot girls had to fiddle with it again. his substance was cleaned and dried. a masked woman lifted up levers, twisted him by hand into the clamps, pulled down levers, and he spilled out again. he recognized her, too. she smiled at him. now everyone could see him being woven into string, dense, rough and thick; this string in turn was woven into sacking. they were going to fill his empty heart with rice. this is not such a bad destiny for anyone, since rice is life. the barefoot girls teased out the rolls of soul-cloth, gathering them from the big roll in different sizes (63 x 29 inches and 20 x 98 inches); boys dragged them across the floor at intervals, stretching, looking around, slowly smoothing them amidst the sounds of the mechanical presses. so they stacked him among the other sacks. girls sat on sacks on the floor, sewing more sacks; they were fixing the mistakes of the sack-sewing machine. then they pressed the sacks into bales. but he'd turned out perfect; he did not need any girls to stitch up the holes in his heart. he was ready now in the bale of sacks. if someone guarded him well he might last two years. then he'd turn to dirt. a man's hands seized his bale and carried him toward the place where he would be used. then the man's work-shift was over. the man went to serve his hours on the factory militia, readying himself for duty in the room of black guns on jute sacks. the man knew that in the jungle other murderers were still nearby. kemeny, 'attempts on life', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-kemeny-attempts.txt attempts on life by annemarie kemeny department of english suny-stony brook _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by annemarie kemeny, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. after all, i'm just the mouth piece. the whole is buried in an old plot with its corpse roaming. sometimes it comes to haunt me, and i spill a little wine on the carpet to loosen its tongue. there are no guests. they'd expect butter-churn stories complete with cow bells in some smoky evening, the fat dripping from a one-day-dead pig. a real red dawn summoned by the five-year plan to every village. and will you visit ellis island where all you people come from? this frantic itch to swear shivers in through walls and sticks. words at times are juicy as the glutton's steak. a real mouth piece. for what? speech is in my fingertips. it has been known to bloom through ten skyfuls of snow. it also melts in spring. and it always finds the surest dam. no, it's not poor huddled masses of cassandras convulsing to the currents of a blank apollo. our frames are not that open to the trade winds. i've seen parnassus gray and bare against the sun. it's a good spook dressed in crags. but something else. when it takes hold, i never twitch and this broken english ain't no second tongue. it's one big jam to scramble the airwaves to my crib. before my mouth was a piece of something. like a slice of pie missing the perfection of its disk. except that sylvie had a hunch about that. perfection is terrible--it cannot have children. so i dish it piecemeal for a new set of yakkers who will ask the past in and play at haunted house. well, i lied. i twitch something crazy when it takes hold. we both grab tight until i fade. it's a seance. anything short of a seance is a good short story neatly tied like tubes. sometimes the mouth is in gridlock. after all, it's a badmouth, and it's blowing at a land that hasn't slipped. *** writing is the only act worth dropping. it wouldn't suffer from ending on the rocks like meat does. its split-open muscles wouldn't twitch. its broken shinbone wouldn't slice through skin. it would just silently carve itself into a whole coast line of rosetta stones. but what would it be carving if not the meat that fell with it? the world text has real god-chunks rotting between vowels. somewhere amidst the schizes and flows of ecriture a tiny slit is bleeding where some uncle's finger scraped it. don't you feel your narratives of oppression and your literary productions of the real stuffed to bursting with the thief's missing ear, some woman's bloodless clitoris and her daughter's head, your apple, that fell too far from its tree? this ink, invisible though it is, has come from where her head and body used to meet. *** the wall by my bed was always threatening to fall--it sustained cannon-ball damage during the war. i constantly wanted to excavate, hoping to find the ammunition all pock-marked and heavy. momma, of course, assured me that the only thing left of it was a shaky wall we couldn't hang pictures on. yet regardless of her hovering protectively between me and the world as any good rilkean mother would, i spent my childhood with a phantom cannon ball lodged ominously behind a thin layer of plaster and an even thinner layer of yellow paint. i used to tap the wall as a primitive form of eartraining, and soon i could tell that it had more holes than it had bricks. this wall i faced every night in sleep, this wall that felt cool against my feet in summer, was my umbilical chord to 1944. sure i had seen films like _budapest spring_ in which women, who always looked a bit too much like grandmother with their soft brown waves falling to the side and the dark lipstick and the severe wool suit, were shot into the danube. i remember the domino effect, the unflattering shoes left behind for the arrow cross gunners who were flipping for gold insoles, and then the utter vacuum of a spring sky admitting nothing. and i remember this woman and a man doing the love thing when all the danube carried was pieces of the black forest. and if there ever was such a thing as ancestral memory, i remember hiding between the waxed cracks of the parquet when grandmother stuffed her down pillow under her dress. she wanted to look pregnant for the arrow cross. momma gets this sudden space in her eyes as she tries to describe for me the sound of machine guns on a tenement lock. i want to tell her i was there hiding out under her shoes, too shocked to scream, with all our eyelids doing a crazy family dance to a-thousand-rounds-per-minute and grandmother's pillow bulging out to her right side where no infant could live. and the door slamming the wall of the foyer and grandmother squeezing momma so close that the down in the pillow cracks and the orders for the swine to move and the gun to the spine and momma's whimpering into grandmother's belly and grandmother's dark lips in a line with the horizon and the words ghetto and lager and grandfather's rages melting through his knees--we are poor got nothing but a wife and kid and trouble on the way spare us you are good men--rifle butt between the ribs and the trembling sullen bargain-begging silent sobbing unbroken procession of yellow stars down the stone corridor and the fresh blood seeping into my floorcrack from the grooves of a stolen shoe. i would like to say i remember the ghetto--that i was the guts, the little bit of future in every willed breath grandmother took to survive. i can't. maybe ancestral memory has more holes in it than bricks. it would be the stench i would have to bring to the page--one of those fold-out ads that trap clouds of perfume and give a magazine its sex appeal. step right up folks, sample the dying and the decomposed. just do it with the lushly dead. poke your nose into communal buckets for the urge. try to dig up asphalt with soupy nails to bury the dead. no. you can't keep from being haunted. no achilles here to come down a peg. not even dali to paint your shit surreal. and it's the stench that blinds you and plugs your ears and numbs your touch that i can't conjure up. it's unnameable. the only true god the ghetto ever knew. *** the war never happened. grandmother is goo-goo-eyed over the soaps. my other grandmother is dead after a life-time of rheumatism and which seventeenth-century king fucked whom with what underhanded purposes. the war never happened. and what bastard or bitch was next on the throne. daddy cultivated a fine cancer by minimizing his diet to headcheese and spam. i don't remember his teeth so the fact that he lost them at eighteen is irrelevant. the war never happened. and how many boils marx had. and how she was ashamed of her big breasts and how she wrapped them until they sagged. the man-bird has to dress nice if he wants to be a father. that's why only the woman-bird is gray. that yellow and blue thing on the teapot must have been a man-bird then. the war never happened. we won't cry over spilt blood. if we drown the baby in the bathwater, it will finally make sense to dump her. and what a big nose you have. you've seen one snowflake, you've seen them all. the war never happened. and your mother is a beautiful woman. she can afford unlimited hours of beauty sleep now that the government check has replaced my only son (cries profusely). and you know rasputin was a rascal. you don't know who rasputin was? (sigh). the family is going to the dogs. the war never happened. i prayed and prayed on that cold stone floor for him to return. and he cut off their heads because they wouldn't give him sons. and the cat you dragged in gave me fleas for a week. how is your beautiful mother? the war never happened. *** writing is the only act worth acting out. if you prefer the organic metaphor, it takes root against the wind in deserts and its ghost dance splashes the sun. it oozes down in glaciers and builds islands. it drags on. it prefers the whip. it picks its scabs against the ultimate, the strong. does nothing. mimes. gets hooked on opium and dreams. carries its fetus to the nearest john. drops hints. puts in a few good words. bleeds and takes a scraping against cancer. dies. *** purges in triumphant silence. daddy would appear once a light year at our place as the man of science come to chide the masses for belief in words that kill and the evil eye. he took the empty streetcar across the danube, full of compassion for lost time. i'd summon fevers, hacking coughs, wounds attributed to something someone said. an aura of fake death to kindle old paternal fears about succession. and you thought our transcendental fathers bit the clay. no. they dance to our rhythms now and obey false cadences as if their life depended on it. it does. let me break the silence. if you plan to butcher someone's soul--either little by little over that proverbial lifetime-ofdevotion, or suddenly, by wringing their thin chicken neck-someone is writing your darkroom dirties into headlines. when you get the urge to abandon what you made, your airplane will excrete it. when you tear your side to dig through ribs, the pain of wrenching will be more than biblical. somebody will sign their name across your lungs. every time you breathe it will muck up the room. and when your gossip blooms red in the spring, stones will mark the spot where the town whore bled. every foot that wanders bare into your town will read it. their prints will talk up a storm. and when you gather your token nigger in your arms and rent your wisdom out on what it takes to loosen the embrace, your balls will vanish whip, chain and uncle, from the book. so daddies of the world with your magic carpets and skeleton closets, relax. i've come bearing gifts. you've asked me in song, you've sworn me in rape. here is your immortality. *** according to rilke, poetry is a kind of apprenticeship that prepares the most deserving among us for love. it is a beautiful sentiment (letter seven, the one about relationships), but i am slightly suspicious about electing a chosen people based upon oneself. the big bang might be lonelier than the poetic stairs you had to take to reach it. we might say that disgust and disillusionment were the lot of those writhing, huddled masses that were not developing into healthy apple trees. but what if i, the living mascot of the developmental tale, should find some more disgust and disillusionment at the height of my seedy powers? what if i, poet extraordinaire, wheeler-dealer in immortality, should get stuck around the crotch of my inevitable bildungsroman given me by covenant? oh yes! the rainbow sign. god gave lawrence the rainbow sign. the world made new. "from the heart a red ray, from the brow a gold, from the hips a violet leaps." violet, indeed. royal purple. the seed of seeds. the hottest chemical stain on the market. except that my mother and my grandmother always insist on invisible ink. like the one i am writing with now. *** didn't drown. didn't break his neck-joint in a scarf-loop. didn't pine away on poison petals for unrequited love. didn't overdose on elixir. didn't dry out with the weeds on a war field, sword-in-hand. consumption didn't eat holes into him. his wasn't a one-woman oven in a kitchen pumped to the stature of auschwitz. but his head was brought in upon platter if war is half the bitch of legends. and his head held a tongue that spoke the smallest scrap of babel. a chip off the old block that was once some god's shoulder curve. whose face was it this time that launched a thousand cattle trains to camp? he wrote poems about chickenwire stretching in the moonlight, juiced. and before that it was moonlight and the weight of lovers bending emblems into wheat fields. no one knows him in this world of nations. any verdict he might have improvised from bone-mush is chinese or greek, at best. bla-bla from the belly of a war that never happened. so let me give you lives in a nutshell, without cracking the meat. don't know date of birth. don't know age at death. killed his twin brother as he slid through the birth canal. an inadvertent crushing, a tarrying for green light. killed his mother on entering. the world. the guilt of the sole survivor until they herded him into the engine. premonitions of the past. to think in metaphor despite the fleas, the typhoid and the guards. hallucinations of the sane. eclogues and hexameter finally worthy of their turf. an artificial genre, like summer homes and quick vacations, like showers in gas. all the civilized comforts a bit displaced in one postmodern jumble. hocus pocus. if we kick our plot in the usual place, we'll lay to rest our master narrative. the nazis were great masters of the readymade. the cutting edge in surreal flicks. the expert tease. the laugh behind the flow and schiz. a woman's buttock-a bar of soap. her hair--a blanket against russian winters. let's disconnect the oven and frustrate their expectations of the clean. when they try to read the nozzle in the old way as a comfy mother's womb, we'll surprise them with the atmosphere. a one-act play for lungs. then we'll reconnect the oven and fry our hungry guests. want to document how signifiers play? go read a deathcamp. do your number on the palestinian shifter. see if the bullet has a referent. and when i give you this life in a nutshell, be glad the meat is gone. *** somewhere in its bedded mud the danube holds a skeleton crouched into a barrel. the familiar closet would've hit too close to the so-called nerve. saint gellert rolled from the top of the mountain, saint gellert on the rocks. the hill channels the river's curve where the roaring barrel did its belly-flop. i swore i had given up this conjuring of lives from the nutshell. a necromancing crook that pulls more than veils over your eyes. a tale told. for the welfare of the worm in the apple. do you like picking history in the warm autumn breezes to make cider? maybe with a small edge to the flow, a little cloud to hide the nakedness. wait! we are born opaque and make loads of noise. good. roll out the barrel and we'll have a barrel of fun. isn't it strange that the wine was so literally red on landing. or rivering. if it was in winter, there might have been a loud crack and splat--a momentary wave-crest over driftice, maybe a quick whirlpool that popped up, and then the heavy ooze of the iced river blanketing the deed. if it was in spring, the drop would've been shortened by the volume of molten snow eating up the banks. if the sun shone, the contour of the barrel over those jutting white rocks may have left the eyes of the onlookers sore with knowing. if it was misty with a thick drizzle (the bitten kind), those connoisseurs of wine may have felt a muffled twang at the sudden lack of sound. and maybe the barrel was rotten or too dry and was smashed half-way down the trip and left just the typical roll of a breaking body down the slope. or maybe, like the war, it never happened. the executioners didn't stop and dip their hands in the danube's upper stretch. *** they have those silver poplars pillaring our field of vision. the summer light is wind-blown over reclining hills and it teases out those woman dreams that everyone forgets after the cock's crow. the usual distance shimmers with breath. where the poet stood, the dirt road whispers that the land is a unanimous womb and all those rows a welcome mat to wipe on. you see, the polka-dotted maiden with the pitcher spilling on her breast just got done tying the red scarf around the neck of her baby pioneer. maybe for you she shook ribbons into her cleavage, shoe-stringed to woo your pen from the lazy fruit trees and the sailing grass. what she picks out of the earth is too small--a patch of grease for the work week's engine. and the stain of currants popping on the tongue and the orchards where we picked them shoot the breeze. she stirs the grub and embroiders the foreman's day with thighs. the mother, whom our poet laureate imagined hen-shaped, cooking with smoke that tints the village, has just stopped bowing at the medal conferred upon her hindu arms. she brings the slab of bacon from the snaking food line and melts it into the land's familial romance. all around her the blond river tisza shivers in its banks toward africa. it will never reach. there have been marches en masse--the wind-tickled imaginary sighs. those dances that convulse the hips stop and start, turning black or turning blue against the wall. when i open the latest version of the nation's history, my pressed daughter will crumble out, missing at the edges. the paragraph is stained. and where she never was, the next world will grow up and spit itself in the eye. as she tears half her usual freedom into tatters, she thinks it's real. somewhere in a nerve her pricked fingers still sting from pinning a new flag on the sky. she thinks it's real. as good as the next fluffy cloud or geometric plane or poem or meal or bed. this woman mooned the red star as it fell. but before that, she grew wet just thinking of its tips. five was her lucky number. so, as general electric spreads her chignoned, waltzing on the screen, maybe something of her shrinks from the lens. if lenin never lived, still doesn't live, and never will live, maybe something of herself will miss the feel of her legs as she is gliding. she'll grow wet to the rhythms of strauss and think it real. after all, she is the map they have redrawn again. if they pressed hard enough this time, maybe the danube spilled under her skin to let her know. it never had been, still isn't, and never will be, blue. *** i took to sailors early. it was the gifts they lavished on my buxom, melancholy mother. we'd share the foreign spoils, which were the promises of tangible mornings in the kitchen, burned eggs, the concrete linking of hands despite high levels of lead in the blood. everything was made in ddr, england, the usa. and the marriages that never took place must have been made in that eroticized heaven where christ could satisfy a universe of the rejected. it always seemed to happen in summer. as soon as i could talk, we boarded trains for yugoslavia, austria. my mother read expectation into every reeling cornfield and foresaw the light at the end of tunnels miles before they dawned. i still feel like a dingy rabbit's foot--the guarantor of consonants and vowels against their tarnishing at sea. at our destinations we were always the last to leave the platform. our bundles, too, were amulets--all this snail house baggage couldn't possibly be stranded in some corridor of space, without a house somewhere to fill. i felt smaller than the clutter we compressed into the journey. the transition from sentences to asphalt was never smooth or matter-of-fact. i needed to sleep away all that nowhere, the opal shimmering left of my mother as she hovered between the last man and thin air. someone should've told her that marlow was chiseled for calling her the horror of the world. why was brandy such a fine girl? was it because she put out and launched slow, mournful ballads out to sea? she should've been a fire-breathing typhoon to wreak havoc on that freighter's bonding crew as they were swapping conquered-pussy stories in the dark. it was strange to see my mother fade in and out of flesh like some star trek goddess beamed aboard the enterprise but lost in transit. we just sat there, crouched on the bundles made of coats, dishes, nail files, underwear, shoes, and let the dusk fall down on us. i don't know what she was hoping for in the hundredth abandoned railroad station with a shitload of history on her back. could it be that history doesn't repeat? that each time she made the epic journey from bed to some forever she traveled light on the aura of first love? did she see the ship ceremonically sunk in favor of the land where words take root and grow old together as stories? the train already left our side to transport tourists to their beige hotels. i listened in disbelief to the announcer's voice prattling train schedules, insisting on the punctual arrival of the 5:05 from athens. but i know that every time i have a memory of waiting, or scribble the outlines of madonna and child on paper, i become an announcer of schedules, the i.o.u. for the timely arrival of bodies. i really don't remember two drained figures holding vigil over vacuum. all train stations look the same to me with their simon and garfunkel burn-out, and what really stands out about momma's boyfriends is their vanishing. we took the 10:16 back. the train was gray and the seats were a red, gray, beige, black vinyl weave. we saw nothing of tunnels or cornfields. our reflections rode with us in a steady drama of double or nothing. momma's evenly sloping nose stood guard against the penetrating stranger straight across, already offering me half his sandwich. he struck up a conversation with me about the mystery blond by my side, and despite the constant shattering of facts against the wheels, i nudged my mother accomplice-fashion and she beamed him a smile. what i remember most about him is his disappearance over breakfast a month later, and the brass tacks of the journey i wouldn't bet a life on. *** writing, lately, has been an act of desperation. i am not proud of that. grabbing for a phrase as if it were a lifepreserver leaves all kinds of revolutionary fervor to be desired. you can't build utopia entirely on blind jabs at the future. i ought to plan for a watershed; for that erogenous point i can put my ring finger on; the epitome. but in the meantime, how do i keep from drowning in my own shed water? maybe i'm just trying to understand what chronology obscures. looking for the old onetwo punch--writing blow by blow. maybe i thrive on acts of desperation-the pointed gun; the gossip about how it wilts; the numbness of steel in the soul always mistaken for strength; the cut-throat word that finishes the present and makes future out of death. very pagan. very judeo-christian. it smacks of nirvana. strawberry fields. maybe it's the blind jab that distills specks of place for us to live in. we are here to say, rilke says. we are here to keep quiet, lest we disturb the dark gods, lawrence says. let the cunt and prick speak in silences. but what lawrence never owned up to was that his words were full of pricks and cunts, just as those pricks and cunts were full of words. and maybe every desperate act is an attempt to save the dignity of that union from ourselves. *** don't matter which boot-licking shore. we're a chaingang of pyromaniacs that get to light the stove. the braindead books are leaning into our middles like international candy and we lick into the air. grandma's stroke coincided with call waiting. the four-foot pillar next door had no dough for health insurance. made a sissy of her boy who masturbates and cries on trains. she has to tell me over the line where a numb electric goddess towels off her pain. she is next wall to me. i'm sick of hearing her distance through the bricks. i'm sick of hearing that boy's silence through my fucking. meanwhile, diamond goes life hopping between two shores. we're a chaingang of pyromaniacs who'd love to burn him but instead will light the stove. it only hit me now that cigarettes are nested coals of fire. they feel like a mind one is about to lose. if only it could stay on the bus like a black umbrella. a bone i could bury like a dog. i'd die of rabies. watch it float away on a trash mission in space. i swear i'd let it bleed from my busted reputation like some red desert. but it sticks and smells and thinks into the sink as ochre moments of the day when the heat becomes a man. the wheat waves through my windows. it is lotus and at night i light the stove. grandma's stroke will have to wait. the neighbor's baby has to swim another month. i can't afford this calling, dust to flight. *** dottie was the scrawny one who turned to tube pants at twelve. cricket was freckled with machiavellian talents for stealing the boys. she developed first. but only like goats with first moses horns that itch. we followed with loose cotton hills moving to some law of plate tectonics, subject to erosion by wind and sand. judy was the one becoming v. her doctor told her about how an eighteen-year-old body grew up in her thirteenyear-old shell. convenient as hell. agatha sang. her mother used to cut warts from shifty hands and counsel men on rashes that broke out in dreams. i hated the smell of offices like hers. and the skin problems of men. scylla also developed first. i thought i'd be charybdis and find out which death the boys preferred. they liked their water on the rocks, but didn't know myths that bodies move by. scylla had no need for sisters to complete a testy, rotten passage, they said. that year we tried on one another's souls like languages that never meant a thing. why lie? it was like bee-hive clinging scatterbrained after the rocks the first boys threw. we never shared blood like brothers. the only stains we knew were test runs of saliva over our blue jeans to prove they were authentic, from america. none of them was. we had to fake our clothes, our breasts, immutable spaces the eye can always skip, our allegiance to the revolution, our fashionable longing for the west, our pains. even then the bee-bee-gunning menace was cutting off his sister's head in photos. we thought him a danger only to the birds. and that boy who threw the hypodermic in my back from twenty feet must have stabbed by now. he was a connoisseur of wounds, an art critic on purples, blues and black paling toward yellow. yes, at judy's party it was judy's turn to cry. nobody stabbed her, exactly. maybe just a little in the back. her doctor with the needles (a balder version of the spearing brat). her doctor with the pills. her parents with their booze license for daughters who talked back. her hairdresser who told her blonds have fun. her manicurist who discounted on blood. her teachers who stripped her of all this. her friends who conformed to hating bitches. her mispronunciation of her dread, the silencing of always-spoken letters. her body language from the wrist. the nowhere long before they found her dead. they said shoo, and we flew away to strange inside countries where the prices are too high and we are always spotted for tourists hunting down mementos for a rush; where we think the women too pregnant, the men too chauvinistic for our taste, the air too brutal, the bridges unsafe, the ruins too old, the words too dense to get through. and where we are the women raising men, breathing bare necessary gulps, crossing our bras, renovating murals to cover up the crumbling of our tissue, settling for the first ventriloquist. and then there were none. the pedophile's childless wife suddenly broke in half. they buried her with a bunch of limestone angels, her heart completely bored. she believed in christmas and the grace of god and the husband she took instead. then the seamstress lost the rhythm of her pedal, the string snapped, the tapestry flew out and up. no child--no lady of shallott. no sleeping beauty. no arachne. and no calico to warm somebody's bed. just a click of the line and the mannequin crushed into a landfill. someday she'll appear cross-sectioned for geologists as a scrawny layer of their momma scraping hell. the third one grew a cancer in her lung and let it spread. it ate up everything she ate, threw the ceiling in relief, bulged in through the door despite the dresser. it turned her smile into papyrus, and every line that rationed her got brutally recorded. but i have kept no records. i tried but they don't keep. hers served well as shroud at the cremation. the next-in-line's still beating up some stone. a spinster who fucked boys for pleasure, then made them laugh into an ecstasy of piss. the irreverent bitch had the audacity to pass go more than once without the huffing and puffing that peacocks live as law. she was uglier than fate and told more truth. and if she hadn't smoked her throat shut like a grave, she'd still be stripping an emperor of clothes. the phone was disconnected last night. the mailman broke a leg. i do not socialize. i avoid god like the plague. i scared the paperboy away by raving. the sky stares in the window to meet blinds. i'm popping caffeine pills as garlic against telepathic dreams. but i feel mirrors in my bones like some damned dorian gray. and the bitches of the world are dying without quaint proper goodbyes, or burials at sea, or conduct books in strength for those of us still breaking. *** kemeny. let's trace kemeny. probably cohen. or klein. when the first wave invaded with the jingle-jangle of their coins. hard. so hard. in english. when they invaded with that eastern-european darkness they learned from the air. momma's joujou, a fashion jewel in the crown of creation from that red clay, that adam. ornaments in earth tone. toned down. turned out. and staring at those iron mines she pricked her hand to taste them. and then she slid. out from under the heavy sky. the fun was in sliding with the pebble dance where nothing cared about landing. queen anne's lace caught in the weeds. a saint, too, with clean hands. maria, the dove love woman, plump in the middle of a valley looking up. but the sky is so much heavier down here. hard luck with a calling in october. stuck. stuck to her rump like syrup. you catch flies with sugar, honey. then you're eaten into the bargain. i've seen them pass on with those huge "wet paint" signs hung all over. and some made vicious bull's eyes. it stuck, as always. with only themselves for hope chest. they hold a lot so they figured gold. up in the hills it seemed like rashes. some rebecca, some rachel of the salve. lines get so tangled in a cat's claws. but the road was a line and it drove. until it ended in a sea somewhere where ships sink or sail. back there, hunched over the meat, someone must have tamed a dragon. even the sea has a hot red belly when it turns. and imagining the sea she pricked her hand to taste it. iron again. they make rails and bars and hammers. brave magnetic world. when does it call for blue lightning? a big kemeny crouching in the weeds. she must be glaring under all that midday sun. in the mines they would blast her to bits. that's what the signs are about. to warn in case she treasures something more than a good glance. she pricked her hand so she could close her eyes. it was damn loud in the queen anne's lace with the dove love woman dreaming. theall, 'beyond the orality/literacy dichotomy: james joyce and the pre-history of cyberspace', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-theall-beyond.txt beyond the orality/literacy dichotomy: james joyce and the pre-history of cyberspace by donald f. theall university professor trent university <dtheall@trentu.ca> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by donald f. theall, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. [1] _the gutenberg galaxy_, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in marshall mcluhan's desire to write a book called "the road to _finnegans wake_." it has not been widely recognized just how important james joyce's major writings were to mcluhan, or to other major figures (such as jorge luis borges, john cage, jacques derrida, umberto eco, and jacques lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics. while all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic joycean of them all, mcluhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. mcluhan's scouting of "the road to _finnegans wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive mcluhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. [2] in the mid-80s, william gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. cyberspace, as gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. iconics, gentry called that.^1^ this "consensual hallucination" produced by "data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" creates an "unthinkable complexity. lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. like city lights receding."^2^ almost a decade earlier, mcluhan's remarks about computers (dating from the late 70s) display some striking similarities:^3^ it steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light reducing numbers to body count by touch . . . . it brings back the pythagorean occult embodied in the idea that "numbers are all"; and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favor of decentralization. when applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and videotext, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs.^4^ mcluhan's %hieroglyphs% certainly more than anticipate gibson's %iconics% and mcluhan's particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic, primarily derives from joyce and giambattista vico. [3] it is not surprising then that mcluhan's works, side by side with those of gibson, have been avidly read by early researchers in mit's media lab^5^, for these researchers also conceive of a vr composed, like the tribal and collective "global village," of "tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic spaces and involvements."^6^ the experiments of the artistic avant-garde movements (such as the dadaists, the bauhaus and the surrealists) and of individuals (such as marcel duchamp, paul klee, sergei eisenstein or luis bunuel) generated the exploration of the semiotics and technical effects of such spaces and involvements. duchamp, for example, became an early leading figure in splitting apart the presumed generic boundaries of painting and sculpture to explore arts of motion, light, movement, gesture, and concept, exemplified in his _large glass_^7^ and the serial publication of his accompanying notes from _the box of 1914_ through _the green box_ to _a l'infinitif_. his interest in the notes as part of the total work echo joyce's own interest in the publication of _work in progress_ and commentaries he organized upon it (e.g., _our exagmination round his factification for incamination of work in progress_). joyce also explores similar aspects of motion, light, movement, gesture and concept. so the road to vr and mit's media lab begins with poetic and artistic experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; later, as stuart brand notes, many of the media lab researchers of the 60s and 70s placed great importance on collaboration with artists involved in exploring the nature and art of motion and in investigating new relationships between sight, hearing, and the other senses.^8^ [4] understanding the social and cultural implications of vr and cyberspace requires a radical reassessment of the inter-relationships between gibson's now commonplace description of cyberspace, mcluhan's modernist-influenced vision of the development of electric media, and the particular impact that joyce had both on mcluhan's writings about electrically mediated communication and on the views of borges, cage, derrida, eco and lacan regarding problems of mediation and communication. such a reassessment requires that two central issues be discussed: (i) the crucial nature of vr's challenge to the privileging of language through the orality/literacy dichotomization used by many theorists of language and communication; (ii) the idea of vr's presence as *the* super-medium that encompasses and transcends all media. the cluster of critics who have addressed orality and literacy, following the lead of walter ong, h.a. innis and eric havelock, have--like them--failed to comprehend the fact that mcluhan was disseminating a joycean view which grounded communication in tactility, gesture and cns processes, rather than promulgating the emergence of a new oral/aural age, a secondary orality. this emphasis on the tactile, the gestural and the play of the cns in communication is a key to joyce's literary exploration of a theme he shared with his radical modernist colleagues in other arts who envisioned the eventual development of a coenaesthetic medium^9^ that would integrate and harmonize the effects of sensory and neurological information in currently existing and newly emerging art forms. [5] joyce's work should be recognized as pioneering the artistic exploration of two sets of differences- orality/literacy and print/[tele-]electric media--that have since become dominant themes in the discussion of these questions. _finnegans wake_ is one of the first major poetic encounters with the challenge that electronic media present to the traditionally accepted relationships between speech, script and print. (_ulysses_ also involves such an encounter, but at an earlier stage in the historic development of mediated communication.) imagine joyce around 1930 asking the question: what is the role of the book in a culture which has discovered photography, phonography, radio, film, television, telegraph, cable, and telephone and has developed newspapers, magazines, advertising, hollywood, and sales promotion? what people once read, they will now go to see in film and on television; everyday life will appear in greater detail and more up-to-date fashion in the press, on radio and in television; oral poetry will be reanimated by the potentialities of sound recording.^10^ [6] the "counter-poetic," _finnegans wake_, provides one of *the* key texts regarding the problem presented by the dichotomization of the oral and the written and by its frequent corollary, a privileging of either speech or language. this enigmatic work is not only a polysemic, encyclopedic book designed to be read with the simultaneous involvement of ear and eye: it is also a self-reflexive book about the role of the book in the electro-machinic world of the new technology.^11^ the _wake_ is the most comprehensive exploration, prior to the 1960s or 70s, of the ways in which these new modes created a dramatic crisis for the arts of language and the privileged position of the printed book. the _wake_ dramatizes the necessary deconstruction and reconstruction of language in a world where multi-semic grammars and rhetorics, combined with entirely new modes for organizing and transmitting information and knowledge, eventually would impose a variety of new, highly specialized roles on speech, print and writing. joyce's selection of vico's _new science_^12^ as the structural scaffolding for the _wake_--the equivalent of homer's _odyssey_ in _ulysses_--underscores how his interest in the contemporary transformation of the book requires grounding the evolution of civilization in the poetics of communication, especially gesture and language and the "prophetic" role of the poetic in shaping the future. [7] as the world awakens to the full potentialities for the construction of artifacts and processes of communication in the new electric cosmos, joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book--going beyond the book as it had historically evolved. confronted with this situation, joyce seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognizing the drive toward the development of a theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, "virtual reality." since the action takes place in a dreamworld, joyce can produce an impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future. his dreamworld envelops the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realized through the visual act of reading; but it also reproduces imaginarily the most complex multi-media forms and envisions how they will utilize his present, which will have become the past, to transform the future.^13^ [8] the hero(ine)^14^ in the _wake_, "here comes everybody," is a communicating machine, "this harmonic condenser enginium (the mole)" (310.1), an electric transmission-receiver system, an ear, the human sensorium, a presence "eclectrically filtered for all irish earths and ohmes." joyce envisions the person as embodied within an electro-machinopolis (an electric, pan-global, machinic environment), which becomes an extension of the human body, an interior presence, indicated by a stress on the playfulness of the whole person and on tactility as calling attention to the interplay of sensory information within the electro-chemical neurological system. this medley of elements and concerns, focussed on questioning the place of oral and written language in an electro-mechanical technoculture that engenders more and more comprehensive modes of communication biased towards the dramatic, marks joyce as a key figure in the pre-history of virtual reality. [9] acutely sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic and other modes of expression, joyce roots all communication in gesture: "in the beginning was the gest he jousstly says" (468.5-6). here the originary nature of gesture (gest, f. %geste% = gesture)^15^ is linked with the mechanics of humor (i.e., jest) and to telling a tale (gest as a feat and a tale or romance). gestures, like signals and flashing lights that provide elementary mechanical systems for communications, are "words of silent power" (345.19). a traffic crossing sign, "belisha beacon, beckon bright" (267.12), exemplifies such situations "where flash becomes word and silents selfloud." since gestures, and ultimately all acts of communication, are generated from the body, the "gest" as "flesh without word" (468.5-6) is "a flash" that becomes word and "communicake[s] with the original sinse" [originary sense + the temporal, "since" + original sin (239.1)]. "communicake" parallels eating to speaking, and speaking is linked in turn to the act of communion as participation in, and consumption of, the word--an observation adumbrated in the title of one of marcel jousse's groundbreaking books on gesture as the origin of language, _la manducation de la parole_ ("the mastication of the word"). by treating the "gest" as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.^16^ the historical processes that contribute to the development of cyberspace augment the growing emphasis, in theories such as kenneth burke's, on the idea that the goal of the symbolic action called communication is *secular, paramodern communion*.^17^ [10] the _wake_ provides a self-reflexive explanation of the communicative process of encoding and decoding required to interpret an encoded text, which itself is characteristically mechanical: the prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. that's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. or i will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise. the gist is the gist of shaum but the hand is the hand of sameas. (482.31-483.4) the dreamer as a poet, a hermetic thief, an "outlex" (169.3)--i.e., an outlaw, lawless, beyond the word and, therefore, the law, "invents" the writing by originally discovering the reading of the book and does so by "raiding" [i.e., "plundering" (reading + raiding)].^18^ this reading encompasses both the idealistic "eschatology" and the excrementitious-materialistic (pun on scatology) within the designing of this "book of kills" (deaths, deletions, drinking sessions, flows of water--a counterpoint of continuity and discontinuity),^19^ a book as carefully crafted or machined as the illuminations of the _book of kells_ are. seeing and hearing are intricately involved in this process, so the reader of this night-book also becomes a "raider" of the original "reading-writing" through the machinery of writing. it is a production "in soandso many counterpoint words" that can be read only through the machinery of decoding, for "what can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" (482.34). the tale that the pen writes is transmitted by the post, and the whole process of communication and its interpretation is an extension of the hand and of bodily gesture-language: "the gist is the gist of shaum but the hand is the hand of sameas" (483.3-4). [11] orality, particularly song, is grounded in the machinery of the body's organs: "singalingalying. storiella as she is syung. whence followeup with endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.7-9).^20^ the link is rhythm, for "soonjemmijohns will cudgel some a rhythmatick or other over browne and nolan's divisional tables" (268.7-9). gesture, with its affiliation with all of the neuro-muscular movements of the body, is a natural script or originary writing, for the word "has been reconstricted out of oral style into verbal for all time with ritual rhythmics" (36.8-9). since the oral is "reconstricted" (reconstructed + constricted or limited) into the verbal, words also are crafted in relation to sound, a natural development of which is "wordcraft": for example, hieroglyphs and primitive script based on drawings or mnemonic devices.^21^ runes and ogham are literally "woodwordings," so preor proto-writing (i.e., syllabic writing) is already "a mechanization of the word," which is itself implicit in the body's use of gesture. [12] joyce's practice and his theoretical orientation imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the image, and the icon also changes. under the impact of electric communication, it is once again clear that the concept of the word must embrace artifacts and events as well.^22^ writing and speech are subsumed into entirely new relationships with non-phonemic sound, image, gesture, movement, rhythm, and all modes of sensory input, especially the tactile. to continue to speak about a dichotomy of orality versus literacy is a misleading over-simplification of the role that electric media play in this transformation, a role best comprehended through historical knowledge of the earliest stages of human communication where objects, gestures and movements apparently intermingled with verbal and non-verbal sounds. marschak's study of early cultural artifacts, the aschers' discussion of the quipu, and levi-strauss's discussions of the kinship system demonstrate the relative complexity of some ancient, non-linguistic systems of communication.^23^ adapting vico's speculation that human communication begins with the gestures and material symbols of the "mute," joyce early in the _wake_ presents an encounter between two characters whose names deliberately echo mutt and jeff of comic strip fame. mutt (until recently a mute) and jute (a nomadic invader) "excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather" (16.8-9). [13] beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, joyce traces human communication through its complex, labyrinthine development, right down to the tv and what it bodes for the future. for example, an entire episode of the _wake_ (i,5)^24^ is devoted to the technology of manuscripts and the theory of their interpretation--textual hermeneutics--in which the _wake_ as a book is interpreted as if it were a manuscript, "the proteiform graph is a polyhedron of all scripture" (107.8). at each stage, joyce recognizes how the machinery of codification is implicit in the history of communication, for discussing this manuscript, he observes that on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced but not punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. . . . (123.34-124.3) this illustrates how the beginning of electric media (the telegraph) is a transformation of the potentialities of the early manuscript, just as any manuscript is a transformation of the "wordcraft" of "woodwordings." "morse code" is indicative of the mechanics of codification, for while code is essential to all communication (thus prior to the moment when the mechanical is electrified), the role of codification is radically transformed by mechanization. [14] the appearance of the printing press demonstrates the effect of this radical transformation: gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. for that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of mister typus, mistress tope and all the little typtopies. fillstup. so you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of doublends jined . . . . (20.7-16) as "gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer" steps "rubrickredd out of the wordpress," the dream reminds us that "papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints." topics (l. %topos%) and types (l. %typus%) as figures, forms, images, topics and commonplaces, the elemental bits of writing and rhetoric, are now realized through typesetting. implicit in the technology of print is the complex intertextuality of verbal ambivalence, for "every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of doublends jined." printing sets in place the "root language" (424.17) residing in the types and topes of the world and potentially eliminates a multitude of alternate codes such as actual sounds, visual images, real objects, movements, and gestures that will re-emerge with the electromechanical march towards vr and cyberspace. [15] by the 1930s, in a pub scene in the _wake_, joyce playfully anticipated how central sporting events or political debates would be for television when he described the tv projection of a fight being viewed by the pub's "regulars" (possibly the first fictional tv bar room scene in literary history). joyce's presentation of this image of the battle of butt and taff, which is peppered with complex puns involving terminology associated with the technical details of tv transmission, has its own metamorphic quality, underscored by the "viseversion" (vice versa imaging) of butt and taff's images on "the bairdboard bombardment screen" ("bairdboard" because john logie baird developed tv in 1925). joyce explains how "the bairdboard bombardment screen," the tv as receiver, receives the composite video signal "in scynopanc pulses" (the synchronization pulses that form part of the composite video signal), that come down the "photoslope" on the "carnier walve" (i.e., the carrier wave which carries the composite video signal) "with the bitts bugtwug their teffs." joyce imagines this receiver to be a "light barricade" against which the charge of the light brigade (the video signal) is directed, reproducing the "bitts." although (at least to my knowledge) bit was not used as a technical term in communication technology at the time, joyce is still able, on analogy with the telegraph, to think of the electrons or photons as bits of information creating the tv picture. [16] speech, print and writing are interwoven with electromechanical technologies of communication throughout the _wake_. references to the manufacture of books, newspapers and other products of the printing press abound. machineries and technological organizations accompany this development: reporters, editors, interviewers, newsboys, ad men who produce "abortisements" (181.33). since complex communication technology is characteristic of the later stages, in addition to newspapers, radio, "dupenny" magazines, comics (contemporary cave drawing), there is "a phantom city phaked by philm pholk," by those who would "roll away the reel world." telecommunications materialize again and again throughout the night of the _wake_, where "television kills telephony." [17] the "tele-" prefix, betraying an element of futurology in the dream, appears in well over a dozen words including in addition to the familiar forms terms such as "teleframe," "telekinesis," "telesmell," "telesphorously," "televisible," "televox," or "telewisher," while familiar forms also appear in a variety of transformed "messes of mottage," such as "velivision" and "dullaphone." this complex verbal play all hinges on the inter-translatability of the emerging forms of technologically mediated communication. in the opening episode of the second part, the "feenicht's playhouse," an imaginary play produced by hce's children in their nursery is "wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. in four tubbloids" (219.28-9). like the cinema, "wordloosed" (wirelessed but also let loose) transglobally, all such media are engaged in a "crowdblast" of existing languages and cultures, producing an interplay between local cultures and a pan-international hyperculture. [18] in the concluding moments of the _wake_, joyce generalizes his pre-cybernetic vision in one long intricate performance that not only concerns the book itself, but also anticipates by twenty years some major discussions of culture, communication, and technology. a brief scene setting: this is the moment in the closing episode just as the hce is awakening. in the background he hears noises from the machines in the laundry next door. it is breakfast time and there are sounds of food being prepared; eggs are being cooked and will be eaten, so there is anticipation of the process of digestion that is about to take place.^25^ at this moment a key passage, inviting interminable interpretation, presents in very abstract language a generalized model of production and consumption, which is also the recorso of the schema of this nocturnal poem, that consumes and produces, just as the digestive system itself digests and produces new cells and excrement--how else could one be a poet of "litters" as well as letters and be "litterery" (114.17; 422.35) as well as literary? [19] the passage begins by speaking about "our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon," which may be the book, a letter to be written, the digestive system assimilating the eggs, the sexual process, the mechanical "mannormillor clipperclappers" (614.13) of the nearby mannor millor laundry, the temporal movement of history, or a theory of engineering, for essentially it relates the production of cultural artifacts or the consumption of matter (like reading a book, seeing a film or eating eggs; the text mentions a "farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatch-can" (614.28)). the passage concludes, "as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs" (615.9-10). here the frequent pairing of speaking (writing) with eating is brought to a climax in which it is related to all the abstract machines which shape the life of nature, decomposing into "bits" and recombining. [20] these bits, described as "the dialytically [dialectic + dialysis] separated elements of precedent decomposition," may be eggs, or other "homely codes" such as the "heroticisms, catastrophes and ec-centricities" (the stuff of history or the dreamers stuttering speech or his staggering movements) transmitted elementally, "type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, sendence of sundance . . ." (614.33-615.2). all of these bits--matter, eggs, words, tv signals, concepts, what you will--are "anastomosically assimilated and preteri-dentified paraidiotically," producing "the sameold gamebold adomic structure . . . as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it" (615.5-8). in anticipation of the contemporary electronic definition of the "bit," joyce associates the structure of communication (ranging from tv and telegraphic signals to morphophonemic information and kinesthesia) with bits of signals, "data" and information. he presents it as essentially an assemblage of multiplicities, different from a synthesizing or totalizing moment, for it occurs by the crossing of pluralistic branches of differing motifs, through a process of transmission involving flows, particularly the flowing of blood, water and speech, and breaks such as the discontinuous charges of electrical energy, telegraphy, and punctuation--those "endspeaking nots for yestures" (267.8). [21] here joyce's entire prophetic, schizoid vision of cyberspace seems somewhat deleuzian. it is an ambivalent and critical vision, for the "ambiviolence" of the "langdwage" throughout the _wake_ implies critique as it unfolds this history, since joyce still situates parody within satire. he does not free it from socio-political reference, as a free-floating "postmodernist" play with the surface of signifiers would. this can be noted in the way that joyce first probes what came to be one of the keystones of mcluhanism. joyce plays throughout the work with spheres and circles, some of which parody one of the mystical definitions of god frequently attributed to alan of lille (alanus de insulis), but sometimes referred to as pascal's sphere. speaking of a daughter-goddess figure, he says: our frivulteeny sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal rome) . . . . (298.27-33) here a sphere is imagined whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, since it is infinitesimal and undescribable (though apparently the paradigmic perimeter is sexual), as the paradisal mother communicates herself without apparent limit. this is both an embodied and a disembodied sphere, polarizing and decentering the image so as to impede any closure. the same spherical principle is applied more widely to the presentation of the sense of hearing. the reception of messages by the hero/ine of the _wake_, "(hear! calls! everywhair!)" (108.23), is accomplished by "bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd" (309.22-4), a sphere for it requires "a gain control of circumcentric megacycles" (310.7-8). it can truly be said of hce, "ear! ear! weakear! an allness eversides!" (568.26),^26^ precisely because he is "%h%uman, %e%rring and %c%ondonable"(58.19), yet "humile, commune and ensectuous" (29.30), suffering many deprivations his "%h%ardest %c%rux %e%ver" (623.33) [italics mine]. though "humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, [this] exposition of failures" (589.17) living with "%h%einz %c%ans %e%verywhere"(581.5), still protests his fate "making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would %c%hallenge their %h%emosphores to %e%xterminate them" (81.25) by decentering or dislocating any attempts to enclose him. [22] this discussion of sphere and hearing critically anticipates what mcluhan later called "acoustic space"--a fundamental cyberspatial conception with its creation of multi-dimensional environments, a spherical environment within which aural information is received by the cns--that also embodies a transformation of the hermetic poetic insight that "the universe (or nature) [or in earlier versions, god] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere."^27^ today, vr, as borges' treatment of pascal's sphere seems to imply, is coming to be our contemporary pre-millennial epitome of this symbol, a place where each participant (rather than *the* deity), as microcosm, is potentially the enigmatic center. people englobed within virtual worlds find themselves interacting within complex, transverse, intertextual multimedia forms that are interlinked globally through complex, rhizomic (root-like) networks. [23] all of this must necessarily relate back to the way joyce treats the subject of and produces the artifact that is *the book*. while, beginning with mallarme, the themes of the book and the death of literature resound through modernism, joyce's transformation of the book filtered through the "mcluhanitic" reaction to "mcluhanism" becomes, in the usual interpretation of mcluhan, the annunciation of the death of the book, *not* its transformation, as with joyce. joyce is important, for following marcel jousse and vico,^28^ he situates speech and writing as modes of communication within a far richer and more complex bodily and gestural theory of communication than that represented by the reductive dichotomy of the oral and the literate. as the predominance of print declines, the _wake_ explores the history of communication by comically assimilating the method of vico's _the new science_--which, as one of the first systematic and empirical studies of the place of poetic action in the history of how people develop systems of signs and symbols, attributes people's ability for constructing their society to the poetic function. [24] joyce avoids that facile over-simplification of the complexities of print, arising from the orality/literacy dichotomy, which attributes a privileged role to language as verbal--a privilege based on theological and metaphysical claims. the same dichotomy creates problems in discussing technological and other non-verbal forms of mediated communication, including vr and tv. at one point in the _wake_ "television kills telephony in brothers' broil. our eyes demand their turn. let them be seen!" (52.18-9), for tv also comprehends the visual and the kinesthetic. yet most mcluhanites who have opted for the orality/literacy split still call it an oral medium in opposition to print. the same problem occurs when mime, with its dependence on gesture and rhythm, is analyzed as an oral medium. as the _wake_ jocularly observes: seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly sketched for our soontobe second parents . . . the touching seene. the solence of that stilling! here one might a fin fell. boomster rombombonant! it scenes like a landescape from wildu picturescu or some seem on some dimb arras, dumb as mum's mutyness, this mimage . . . is odable to os across the wineless ere no dor nor mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the tingmount. (52.34-53.6) the mime plays with silence, sight, touch and movement seeming like a landscape or a movie. [25] facile over-simplification also overlooks that long before the beginnings of the trend towards cyberspace, print had not been strictly oriented towards linearity and writing, for the print medium was supplemented by its encyclopedic, multi-media nature, absorbing other media such as illustrations, charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables, not all aspects of which are precisely linear. while writing may have had a predominantly linear tendency, its history is far more complex, as elizabeth eisenstein has established.^29^ the orality/literacy distinction does not provide an adequately rich concept for dealing with print, any more than it does for the most complex and comprehensive images of virtual reality and participatory hyperspace (e.g., sophisticated extensions of the datagloves or the aspen map), which, to adapt a joycean phrase, directly transmit "feelful thinkamalinks." since vr should enable a person to feel the bodily set of another person or place, while simultaneously receiving multiple intersensory messages, understanding the role of the body in communication is crucial for understanding vr. when mcluhan and edward carpenter first spoke about their concept of orality (linked to aurality, mouth to ear, as line of print to eye scan), it entailed recognizing the priority and primacy of tactility and inter-sensory activity in communication, for "in the beginning there was the gest." [26] as kenneth burke realized in the 30s, joyce's grounding communication and language in gesture is distinctly different from an approach which privileges language, for it involves a complete embodying of communication. while the oral only embodies the speech organs, the entire cns is necessarily involved in all communication, including speech. as john bishop has shown in _joyce's book of the dark_, the sleeper primarily receives sensations with his ear, but these are tranformed within the body into the world of signs that permeate the dream and which constitute the _wake_.^30^ joyce views language as "gest," as an imaginary means of embodying intellectual-emotional complexes, his "feelful thinkamalinks." from this perspective, the semic units of the _wake_ (integrated complexes constructed from the interaction of speech and print involving, rhythm, orthography as sign and gesture and visual image) assume the role of dialogue with other modes of mediated communication, exploiting their limitations and differences. joyce crafts a new %lingua% for a world where the poetic book will deal with those aspects of the imaginary that cannot be encompassed within technologically mediated communication. simultaneously, he recognizes that a trend towards virtual reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication. this process posits a continuous dialogue in which _ulysses_ and the _wake_ were designed to play key roles. [27] as joyce--who quipped that "some of the means i use are trivial--and some are quadrivial"^31^--was aware, ancient rhetorical theory (which he parodied both in the aeolus episode of _ulysses_ and in the "triv and quad" section (ii, 2) of the _wake_) also included those interactive contexts where the body was an intrinsic part of communication. delivery involved controlling the body, and the context within which it was presented, as well as the voice. the actual rhetorical action (particularly in judicial oratory) also frequently involved demonstration and witnesses. this analysis, closer to the pre-literate, recognized the way actual communication integrated oral, visual, rhythmical, gestural and kinesthetic components. recent research into the classical and medieval "arts of memory," inspired by frances yates,^32^ have demonstrated that memory involves the body, a sense of the dramatic and theatrical, visual icons and movement, as well as the associative power of the oral itself. joyce playfully invokes this memory system familiar to him from his jesuit education: "after sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding. here (the memories framed from walls are minding) till wranglers for wringwrowdy wready are . . ." (266.18-22). a classical world, which recognized such features of the communicative process, could readily speak about the poem as a "speaking picture" and the painting as "silent poetry." here, there is an inclusiveness of the means available rather than a dependency on a single channel of communication. [28] joyce was so intrigued by the potentials of the new culture of time and space for reconstructing and revolutionizing the book that he claimed himself to be "the greatest engineer," as well as a renaissance man, who was also a "musicmaker, a philosophist and heaps of other things."^33^ the mosaic of the _wake_ contributes to understanding the nature of cyberspace by grasping the radical constitution of the electronic cosmos that joyce called "the chaosmos of alle" (118.21). in this "chaosmos," engineered by a sense of interactive mnemotechnics, he intuits the relation between a nearly infinite quantity of cultural information and the mechanical yet rhizomic organization of a network, "the matrix," which underlies the construction of imaginary and virtual worlds. one crucial reason for raising the historic image of joyce in a discussion of cyberspace is that he carries out one of the most comprehensive contemporary discussions of virtual recollection (a concept first articulated by henri bergson as virtual memory).^34^ in counterpoint to the emerging technological capability to create the "virtual reality" of cyberspace, joyce turned to dream and hallucination for the creation of virtual worlds within natural language. [29] that tactile, gestural-based dreamworld has built-in mnemonic systems: a scene at sight. or dreamoneire. which they shall memorise. by her freewritten. hopely for ear that annalykeses if scares for eye that sumns. is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome . . . . (280.01-07) joyce's virtual worlds began with the recognition of "everybody" as a poet (each person is co-producer; he quips, "his producers are they not his consumers?"). all culture becomes the panorama of his dream; the purpose of poetic writing in a post-electric world is the painting of that interior (which is not the psychoanalytic, but the social unconscious) and the providing of new language appropriate to perceiving the complexities of the new world of technologically reproducible media: what has gone? how it ends? begin to forget it. it will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. today's truth, tomorrow's trend. (614.19-21) joyce's text is embodied in gesture, enclosed in words, enmeshed in time, and engaged in foretelling "today's truth. tomorrow's trend." the poet reproducing his producers is the divining prophet. [30] if speaking of joyce and cyberspace seems to imply a kind of futurology, the whole of mcluhan's project was frequently treated as prophesying the emergence of a new tribalized global society--the global village, itself anticipated by joyce's "international" language of multilingual puns. in fact, in _war and peace in the global village_, mcluhan uses wakese (mostly from joyce, freely associated) as marginalia. mcluhan flourished in his role as an international guru by casting himself in the role of "*the* prime prophet" announcing the coming of a new era of communication^35^ (now talked about as virtual reality or cyberspace, though he never actually used that word). the prime source of his "prophecies," which he never concealed, is to be found in joyce and vico.^36^ the entire joycean dream is prophetic or divinatory in part, for the anticipated awakening (vico's fourth age of ricorso following birth, marriage, and death) is "providential divining": ere we are! signifying, if tungs may tolkan, that, primeval conditions having gradually receded but nevertheless the emplacement of solid and fluid having to a great extent persisted through intermittences of sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time has a tense haves and havenots hesitency, at the place and period under consideration a socially organic entity of a millenary military maritory monetary morphological circumformation in a more or less settled state of equonomic ecolube equalobe equilab equilibbrium. (599.8-18) earlier, it is said of the dreamer that "he caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. if there is a future in every past that is present . . ." (496.34-497.1). joyce, from whom mcluhan derived the idea, is playing with the medieval concept of natural prophecy, making it a fundamental feature of the epistemology of his dream world, in which the "give and take" of the "mind factory," an "antithesis of ambidual anticipation," generates auspices, auguries, and divination--for "divinity not deity [is] the uncertainty justified by our certitude" (282.r7-r13). [31] natural prophecy, the medieval way of thinking about futurology with which joyce and mcluhan were naturally familiar from scholasticism and thomism, occurs through a reading of history and its relation to that virtual, momentary social text (the present), which is dynamic and always undergoing change. joyce appears to blend this medieval concept with classical sociological ideas--of prophecy as an "intermediation"--quite consistent with his concepts of communication as involving aspects of participation and communion. it is only through some such reading that the future existent in history can be known and come to be. mcluhan's reading, adapted from joyce, of the collision of history and the present moment led him to foresee a world emerging where communication would be tactile, post-verbal, fully participatory and pan-sensory.^37^ [32] why ought communication history and theory take account of joyce's poetic project? first, because he designed a new language (later disseminated by mcluhan, eco, and derrida) to carry out an in-depth interpretation of complex socio-historical phenomenon, namely new modes of semiotic production. two brief examples: hollywood "wordloosing celluloid soundscript over seven seas," or the products of the hollywood dream factory itself as "a rolling away of the reel world," reveal media's potential international domination as well as the problems film form raises for the mutual claims of the imaginary and the real. for example, the term "abortisements" (advertisements) suggests the manipulation of fetishized femininity with its submerged relation of advertisement to butchering--the segmentation of the body as object into an assemblage of parts. [33] second, joyce's work is a critique of communication's historical role in the production of culture, and it constitutes one of the earliest recognitions of the importance of vico to a contemporary history of communication and culture.^38^ third, his work is itself the first "in-depth" contemporary exploration of the complexities of reading, writing, rewriting, speaking, aurality, and orality. fourth, developing vico's earlier insights and anticipating kenneth burke, he sees the importance of the "poetic" as a concept in communication, for the poetic is the means of generating new communicative potentials between medium and message. this provides the poetic, the arts, and other modes of cultural production with a crucial role in a semiotic ecology of communication, an ecology of sense, and making sense. fifth, in the creative project of this practice, joyce develops one of the most complex discussions of the contemporary transformation of our media of communication. and finally, his own work is itself an exemplum of the socio-ecological role of the poetic in human communication. [34] vr or cyberspace, as an assemblage of a multiplicity of existing and new media, dramatizes the relativity of our classifications of media and their effects. the newly evolving global metropolis arising in the age of cyberspace is a site where people are intellectual nomads: differentiation, difference, and decentering characterize its structure. joyce and the arts of high modernism and postmodernism provide a solid appreciation of how people constantly reconstruct or remake reality through the traversing of the multi-sensory fragments of a "virtual world" and of the tremendous powers with which electricity and the analysis of mechanization would endow the paramedia that would eventually emerge. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ william gibson, _mona lisa overdrive_ (ny: bantam paperback, 1989), 16. ^2^ william gibson, _neuromancer_ (ny: ace, 1984), 51. ^3^ this quotation is taken from the posthumously published marshall mcluhan and bruce r. powers, _the global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century_, (ny: oxford up, 1989). it was edited and rewritten from mcluhan's working notes, which had to date from the late 70s, since he died in 1981. mcluhan's words were written more than a decade before their posthumous publication in 1989. ^4^ mcluhan (1989), 103. ^5^ stuart brand, _the media lab: inventing the future at mit_ (ny: viking, 1987). ^6^ marshall mcluhan, _the letters of marshall mcluhan_, ed. matie molinaro, corinne mcluhan and william toye (toronto: oxford up, 1987), 385. ^7^ craig e. adcock, _marcel duchamp's notes from the large glass: an n-dimensional analysis_ (ann arbor, michigan: umi, 1983), 28: "the _large glass_ is an illuminated manuscript consisting of 476 documents; the illumination consists of almost every work that duchamp did." ^8^ stuart brand (1987). ^9^ a further paper needs to be written on the way in which synaesthesia as well as coenesthesia participate in the pre-history of cyberspace. the unfolding history of poets and artists confronting electromechanical technoculture, which begins in the 1850s, reveals a growing interest in synesthesia and coenesthesia and parallels a gradually accelerating yearning for artistic works which are syntheses or orchestrations of the arts. by 1857 charles baudelaire intuited the future transformational power of the coming of electro-communication when he established his concept of synaesthesia and the trend toward a synthesis of all the arts as central aspects of %symbolisme%. the transformational matrices involved in synaesthesia and the synthesis of the arts unconsciously respond to that digitalization implicit in morse code and telegraphy, anticipating how one of the major characteristics of cyberspace will be the capability of all modes of expression to be transformed into minimal discrete contrastive units- bits. this assertion concerning baudelaire's use of synesthesia is developed from benjamin's discussions of baudelaire. the role of shock in baudelaire's poetry, which links the "correspondances" with "la vie anterieur," also reflects how the modern fragmentation involved in "le crepuscle du soir" and "le crepuscle du matin" is reassembled poetically through the verbal transformation of sensorial modes. this is the beginning of a period in which the strategy of using shock to deal with fragmentation is transformed into seeing the multiplicity of codifications of municipal (or urban) reality. so when the metamorphic sensory effects of nature's temple are applied to the splenetic here and now, in the background is the emergence of the new codifications of reality, such as the photography which so preoccupied baudelaire, and telegraphy, which had an important impact in his lifetime. ^10^ see d.f. theall, "the hieroglyphs of engined egypsians: machines, media and modes of communication in _finnegans wake_," _joyce studies annual 1991_, ed. thomas f. staley (austin: texas up, 1991), 129-52. this publication provides major source material for the present article. ^11^ "machinic" is used here very deliberately as distinct from mechanical. see gilles deleuze, _dialogues_, trans. hugh tomlinson & barbara haberjam (ny: columbia up, 1987), 70-1, where he discusses the difference between the machine and the 'machinic' in contradistinction to the mechanical. ^12^ giambattista vico, _the new science_, ed. t.g. bergen and m. fisch (ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1948). ^13^ for fuller discussion of joyce and these themes see donald theall, "james joyce: literary engineer," in _literature and ethics: essays presented to a.e. malloch_, ed. gary wihl & david williams (montreal: mcgill-queen's up, 1988), 111-27; donald and joan theall, "james joyce and marshall mcluhan," _canadian journal of communication_, 14:4/5 (fall 1989), 60-1; and donald theall (1991), 129-152. a number of subsequent passages are adapted with minor modifications from parts of the last article, which is a fairly comprehensive coverage of joyce and technology. ^14^ while in one sense the dreamer is identified as the male hce, the book opens and closes with the feminine voice of alp. it is her dream of his dreaming, or his dream of her dreaming? essentially, it is androgynous, with a mingling of male and female voices throughout. for another treatment of the male-female theme in the _wake_, see suzette henke, _james joyce and the politics of desire_ (ny: rkp, 1989). ^15^ "jousstly" refers to marcel jousse's important work on communication and the semiotics of gesture, with which joyce was familiar. see especially lorraine weir, "the choreography of gesture: marcel jousse and _finnegans wake_," _james joyce quarterly_, 14:3 (spring 1977), 313-25. ^16^ this motif will be developed further below. it relates to joyce's interest in lewis carroll. gilles deleuze comments extensively on manducation in _the logic of sense_, trans. mark lester with charles stivale, ed. constantin v. boundas (ny: columbia up, 1990). ^17^ see dewey, _art as experience_ (ny: g.p. putnam, 1958) and kenneth burke, _permanence and change: an anatomy of purpose_ (indianapolis, in: bobbs-merrill, 1965). ^18^ cf. t.s. eliot, _selected essays_ (ny: harcourt, brace, 1932), 182: "one of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. immature poets imitate; mature poets steal . . . "; see also "old stone to new building, old timber to new fires," ("east coker," _four quartets_, l. 5). joyce's use of "outlex" relates to jim the penman, for joyce analyzing shem in the _wake_ is aware of how the traditions of the artist as liar, counterfeiter, con man, and thief could all coalesce about the role of the artist as an outlaw. ^19^ "kills" in the sense of "to kill a bottle"; "kills" also as a stream or channel of water. ^20^ see walter ong's remarks about marcel jousse in _the presence of the word_ (new haven, ct: yale up, 1967), 146-7, and lorraine weir's more extensive development of the theme in (1977), 313-325, and in _writing joyce: a semiotics of the joyce system_ (bloomington and indianapolis: indiana up, 1989). ^21^ i.j. gelb, _a study of writing_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1963). ^22^ cf. mcluhan (1989), 182. ^23^ alexander marschak, _the roots of civilization_ (ny: mcgraw-hill, 1982); marcia ascher and robert ascher, _code of the quipu: a study in media, mathematics and culture_ (ann arbor: u of michigan p, 1981); claude levi-strauss, _the elementary structures of kinship_, trans. james harle bell and john richard von sturmer, ed. rodney needham (boston: beacon press, 1969). ^24^ the usual way to indicate sections of the _wake_ is by part and episode. hence i,v is part i episode 5. there are four parts, the first consisting of eight episodes, the second and the third of four episodes each and the fourth of a single episode. ^25^ danis rose and john o'hanlon, _understanding finnegans wake_ (ny: garland publishing, 1982), 308-09. ^26^ for detailed discussion of the treatment of the ear and hearing in _finnegans wake_, see john bishop, _joyce's book of the dark: finnegans wake_ (madison, wi: u of wisconsin p, 1986), chapter 9 "earwickerwork," 264-304. ^27^ jorge luis borges, _other inquisitions: 1937-1952_, trans. ruth r. sims (ny: simon and schuster, 1968), 6-9. ^28^ lorraine weir (1989). ^29^ elizabeth eisenstein, _the printing revolution in early modern europe_ (ny: cambridge up, 1983). ^30^ bishop (1986), 264-304. ^31^ eugene jolas, "my friend james joyce," in _james joyce: two decades of criticism_, ed. seon givens (ny: vanguard, 1948), 24. ^32^ e.g., in frances yates, _the art of memory_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1966). ^33^ james joyce to harriet shaw weaver, _letters_, ed. stuart gilbert (ny: viking, 1957), 251 [postcard, 16 april 1927]. ^34^ for a discussion of this see gilles deleuze, _bergsonism_ (ny: zone, 1988), chapter 3, "memory as virtual co-existence," 51-72. ^35^ speaking of the all-embracing aspects of vr and cyberspace, the work which baudrillard has made of "simulation" and "the ecstasy of communication" should be noted. this issue is too complex to engage within an essay specifically focused on joyce. in approaching it, however, it is important to realize the degree of similarity that baudrillard's treatment of communication shares with mcluhan's. in many ways, i believe it could be established that what baudrillard critiques as the "ecstasy of communication" is his understanding of mcluhan's vision of communication divorced from its historical roots in the literature and arts of %symbolisme%, high modernism, and particularly james joyce. ^36^ this is a major theme of mcluhan and mcluhan's _the laws of media_ (toronto: u of toronto p, 1988). ^37^ see donald f. theall, _the medium is the rear view mirror; understanding mcluhan_ (montreal: mcgill-queen's up, 1971). ^38^ john o'neill credits vico with a "wild sociology" in which the philologist is a wild sociologist in _making sense together: an introduction to wild sociology_ (ny: harper & row, 1974), 28-38. the significance of vico's emphasis on the body is developed in john o'neill, _five bodies: the human sense of society_ (ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1985). batali, 'power and the story', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-batali-power.txt the power and the story by john batali <batali@cogsci.ucsd.edu> department of cognitive sciences university of california-san diego _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by john batali, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. nye, andrea. _words of power: a feminist reading of the history of logic_. london: routledge. 1990. gross, alan g. _the rhetoric of science_. cambridge: harvard university press. 1990. [1] andrea nye begins her "reading" of the history of logic by recounting how the 6th century bc philosopher parmenides describes a poetic journey "past the towns of knowing men" in search of ultimate reality. driven by desire and led by "maidens of the sun," he passes through imposing gates and down forbidding caverns and is ultimately allowed to inspect "being" which turns out to be a perfectly round and smooth sphere. but what is more important, and what parmenides can take back to the practical world of life, is what dike, the female keeper of being, says about it: "it is and to not be is not." the principle of being is what it is: eternal, simple, unchanging, true. everything else is not. [2] in this vision of parmenides's lie nascent two of the most venerated products of western thought: science and logic. science as the investigation of being, the nature of nature. logic as the codification of truth, the articulated norms of thought. and in parmenides vision, the two lie together. being inheres in thoughts about it, so that it is the same thing to be thought as to be a thought. for not without something of what is, in what is expressed, can there be thinking. (nye, 16, translating parmenides fragment 7) this theme, the relation between the true and thoughts about it and paths to it, is the subject of the books under review. andrea nye traces the history of logic from parmenides through the approaches of plato and aristotle, thence to the theo-logic of the middle ages, and finally to the modern mathematical form of logic invented by frege. along the way, as conceptions about logic change, and the social uses to which logic is put change, the connection between logic and the truth of being becomes weaker and weaker, to the point where modern logicians take it as a virtue that their systems are absolutely "formal" and totally disconnected from reality (but are nonetheless adequate means of representing that reality). [3] gross, in his study of science, examines not the ideal path to truth that logic allegedly provides, but the actual workings of scientific persuasion, the "rhetoric" of science. he too begins with aristotle, taking the "rhetoric" as his "master theoretic text," but putting it to a use aristotle would not have liked. for aristotle, science was the realm of the absolute and the unchanging, about which knowledge was available to all (all male greek land owning citizens, at least). rhetoric was for the law-court or the political assembly or the drinking party, where passion and prejudice prevail and could be molded to the desired shape. but gross reminds us that passion and prejudice prevail everywhere in human activity, and even more so in the swirl of ego and power that is science. [4] in both books, the truth and validity claims of logic and science are bracketed, are put on hold--not to be denied, or even diagnosed, but simply put aside. what interests nye is not the truth of logic but the different conceptions of logic that appear in different moments of history, the different uses for logic of different societies, with different concerns and different notions of power and truth. and for gross it is not the nature of being that interests him in the quests of scientists, but those quests themselves. both nye and gross work with the truths of history: this happened, these people said this, wrote that, about science or about logic. whether what they said was true or not is not the issue. instead the issue is what happened and how they felt about it. [5] for andrea nye, logic is not to be taken as a single thing towards which progress can be made. and, though her reading is feminist, she does not seek to show that logic is some specifically male syndrome. she presents and distances herself from a number of claims that she is %not% making: logic, one current argument goes, is the creation of defensive male subjects who have lost touch with their lived experience and define all being in rigid oppositional categories modeled on a primal contrast between male and female. or another: logic articulates oppressive thought-structures that channel human behavior into restrictive gender roles. or: logic celebrates the unity of a pathological masculine self-identity that cannot listen and recognizes only negation and not difference. (nye, 5) instead, the word `logic' points to the complex set of attitudes that any society has towards thought and truth and validity in argument. that such topics could form the subject matter of an academic, more or less technical domain, says a great deal about a society right away. but the specific form that logic takes in any society will depend as much on the historical and material circumstances of that society as it will depend (if it does at all) on the ultimate nature of truth. [6] therefore logic is no more male than society is. but then, societies often are dominated by males, if not thereby characteristically "male." certainly some of the societies that nye is examining, societies which by coincidence or not were the ones where logic flourished--classical and hellenist greece, and the medieval catholic church--were rigidly male enterprises. as a set of attitudes about truth and as a set of norms of thought, a society's logic thereby forms part of the discourse in which power is channelled. it may not be that there is anything masculine about logic; however, it is one of the many tools by which the male elite can and does maintain and extend its power. [7] "reading" logic means that nye is not going to treat the history of logic as a steady march of progress. she is going to take seriously the widely divergent things that its originators said about what they were doing, and the different uses to which it is put. in looking at what a society says about logic and how it makes use of its products, one gets a glimpse of what that society thinks about thinking and argument and how they are related to the exercise of power. [8] in each of the chapters of her book she examines the logic produced by particular thinkers in specific historical circumstances. she examines how the society's "need" for a logic was met or not met by what was produced. the specifically feminist aspect of her account is developed in her view of the history of logic as an outsider. she refuses to accept the different logics as anything more than what they historically are: there is no one logic for which [a single critique] can account, but only men and logics, and the substance of these logics, as of any written or spoken language, are material and historically specific relations between men, between men and women, and between them and the objects of human concern. (nye 5) [9] gross begins his account of the rhetorical aspects of science by reminding us that scientists in fact spend a great deal of time persuading. they must persuade other scientists of the validity of their claims and the correctness of their theories. they must persuade granting agencies and promotion committees of the importance of their work. they must persuade the general public that their enterprise has value. [10] but i think that the general feeling is that the practice of persuasion is somehow not the real job. certainly writing grant proposals is a pain, and many scientists probably would agree with the sentiment expressed by galileo, that if their colleagues would just %look% at the results, they would %see% that they are correct. people have to be persuaded to see the truth only because they are unwilling or unable to see it directly. [11] gross considers "entertaining [the possibility] . . . that the claims of science are solely the products of persuasion." accordingly, his method is to follow the lead of aristotle in analyzing scientific texts, "to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion." he looks at a wide variety of scientific texts: published papers, the correspondence of the early days of the royal society of london, drafts and peer-review responses of papers, newspaper editorials written during the recent debate about recombinant dna. in all cases the procedure is to attempt to understand the rhetorical techniques that are being applied. sometimes the arguments appeal to explicit methodological principles, such as falsification, or an appeal to the evidence. sometimes the arguments are by analogy, or are based on elegance or simplicity of a theory or an account. rather than take any single one of these as the ultimate foundation of scientific truth, gross wants to understand which ones are used, and which ones work. for gross, the parmenidean injunction that "what is is" would be taken, were it to appear in a scientific text, as just another rhetorical technique, sometimes convincing, sometimes not. [12] throughout his book, gross has to deal with the claim that science is really about external reality, that there are "brute facts of nature" and all of this persuasion is just a detour on the path to it: the rhetorical view of science does not deny "the brute facts of nature"; it merely affirms that these "facts," whatever they are, are not science itself, knowledge itself. scientific knowledge consists of the current answers to three questions, answers that are the product of professional conversation: what range of "brute facts" is worth investigating? how is this range to be investigated? what do the results of these investigations mean? whatever they are, the "brute facts" themselves mean nothing; only statements have meaning, and of the truth of statements we must be persuaded. these processes, by which problems are chosen and results interpreted, are essentially rhetorical: only through persuasion are importance and meaning established. as rhetoricians we study the world as meant by science. (gross 4) by studying the means of persuasion, especially as used in some important texts in the history of science that turned out to be persuasive, we can understand more about the process of science. does this tell us more about its %product%, the supposed truths of science itself, the spherical essence about which all of this persuasive practice goes on? [13] both nye and gross might be seen to be committing either or both of two well-known logical errors, the "genetic fallacy" and the "ad hominem" argument. the genetic fallacy is the claim that the origins of an idea are relevant to its truth or falsity. an ad hominem argument is one that attempts to deny a claim by attacking the maker of the claim. but to accuse either nye or gross of these mistakes is to misunderstand what they are trying to do. it is to suppose that they are entering into the debate about the claims of logic or of science. but that is exactly what they are not doing. they are trying to understand the workings of those claims, to see where they come from and where they go. in some sense this ought to be an interesting enterprise purely from a historical point of view. [14] but the enterprise assumes more importance when we remember how highly valued both logic and science are in this, our ultra-technological world. there is simply no reason to believe that any particular "meta-narrative" about the ultimate nature of either logic or science is right, or there is no reason to believe it without a careful look at what logic and science really are and have been. much of the philosophy of science has defined the enterprise either in terms of its ultimate goal (e.g., to describe nature), or in terms of formal aspects of its performance (e.g., as following a hypothetico-deductive method, or as making falsifiable claims). whether or not these characterizations made any internal sense, the question still remained as to whether they described anything, in particular whether they described what it is that people who call themselves scientists actually do. the emerging "sociological" approach to the history of science, as exemplified by gross, illustrates that it is possible to put these a priori claims on hold, at least for a while, and look closely at the way the scientific world works. [15] as for logic, remember that logic is explicitly a prescriptive discipline. every writer in the history of logic has had to deal with the fact that people just don't "think logically." at best, logics are developed such that the axioms or rules are intuitive, or at least they are with a little thought. (or with a lot of thought, as nye points out, as the stoic philosophers wrestled with the right way to characterize the meaning or function of "if," a question which has not been really solved two thousand years later.) logics are developed as ways to organize and perhaps restrict thinking, so it would seem crucial to examine the purposes that such organization and restriction are meant to serve. [16] one of the problems that we have in assessing logic today is that in the post-fregean world logic has attained a status not quite imagined by many of its developers. on the one hand logic has achieved a level of mathematical sophistication, yet in its technical sophistication it has become a domain of expertise. a solid grounding in logic is no longer considered part of the "well-rounded" education expected of our society. how many members of the us senate, compared, let us imagine, with the athenian assembly or the senate or rome, know what %modus ponens% is? it is not that this is in any sense a step back, that our senators would be more competent with a solid grounding in logic, but it is true that until the 20th century it was felt to be so. [17] in the hands of nye and gross, the histories of logic and science become histories of the relations between persuasion and power. clearly if you can persuade someone of something, however you do so, you have thereby a measure of power over that person. likewise, having power over someone is a good way to get them to agree with you. logic was an attempt to codify the means of argument, but of course a certain amount of power needed to be vested in those doing the codification. hence the extreme urgency of the increasingly worldly medieval church's interest in the nature of logic. [18] and the technical, mathematical, applicable science in the 17th century brought a new kind of power over nature. with that power came the potential for wealth and fame, this coming at the same time as the rise of a mercantile class ready to plunder the new knowledge. one of gross's best chapters treats the events leading to the formation of the royal society of london, and the subsequent "invention" of the idea of priority of discovery. isaac newton comes off in a particularly bad light when the royal society formed a committee to decide whether newton or leibniz had discovered the calculus first. given that the committee was formed of englishmen, it was unlikely for leibniz's side to get a fair hearing, but the final "account" condemns him in such harsh terms that, reading it, it is difficult to believe that leibniz understood even simple arithmetic. it turns out, however, that newton had managed to subvert the committee and had written the "account" himself! [19] interesting as it is for its treatment of the historical characters, the episode illustrates how the structures and concerns and methods of a society develop as the society deals with real issues and problems. the importance of priority and the precise way it would be assigned were topics of considerable debate in europe at the time, with some believing that priority was of no consequence at all, and others offering elaborate means for securing priority without actually publishing results (e.g., writing the result in code, or posting a sealed letter to the royal society). but newton's behavior and evident concern for absolute priority helped force the issue. and, finally, established as the unquestioned discoverer of the calculus, newton's personal authority was enhanced even further. [20] these movements back and forth of power and argument and discovery point out that no fundamental dispute takes place entirely within a pre-existing logical framework. for one thing, one can't prove the correctness of a specific logic or the correctness or appropriateness of logic itself, within logic. logic only "works" within some sort of scaffolding in which its axioms are defined, its rules of inference set down. this was implicitly understood in classical greece. parmenides presents being and the path to it as revealed by the goddesses, the ultimate forms of plato, whose properties, dimly remembered, form the basis for our understanding of the world, were presented to us before we were born. for aristotle, more empirical then these two, the ultimate logic had to be the "logic" visible in the biological world--of genus and species and essences and differentia. [21] once this alogical basis is in place, once the members of the society are convinced that logical thinking is a worthy goal, they can then proceed. medieval logic interestingly splits the justification for logic in two. on the one hand is the revealed truth of god, on the other the logics of classical athens. characteristically, this split of the form of logic and its "premises" led to the extreme nominalism of william of occam in which logic involve relations among arbitrary "meanings," with no necessary connection between those relations and what they were about. the bible would do as a source of premises just as well as would the koran or the egyptian book of the dead. now of course this view was not very comforting to the established church. the separation of the form and the meaning of logic is always a difficult one to maintain. medieval realism attempted to connect more tightly the logical relations between predicates and the ultimate reality for which they stood, culminating perhaps in anselm's argument that god must exist because of logical properties of its description. [22] in many ways gottlob frege is the main character of nye's book. he stands at the beginning of the 20th century literally scared by the changes in the intellectual world around him: imaginary numbers, non-euclidean geometries, transfinite sets. did such things make any sense? which ones? they all %seemed% to make sense, the derivations and proofs that involved them seemed to have the proper rhetorical form for mathematics but this seeming wasn't enough. could there be a way to determine which kinds of mathematical arguments are valid and which not, and thus be more confident of which kinds of mathematical entities exist? that is: could there be a logic of mathematics? [23] i hope that at least part of the urgency of this question is clear. before the 19th century mathematics seemed to be describing reality. the truths of mathematics seemed to be truths about the world, that ultimately one could go out and check. the formula for the volume of a sphere could be verified by immersing the sphere in water and measuring the displacement. parallel lines could be seen never to meet (sort of). but now entities and claims were being made that it would seem could never be checked. mathematics seemed to have slipped from being, but the new results seemed, when viewed the right way, to be relatively natural (if surprising) extensions of the old. [24] as it turned out, frege was unable to satisfy himself with his attempt to make mathematics logical, and had to be content with making logic mathematical. others have solved some of the technical questions that stymied frege, but the question of the ultimate foundation of mathematics still remains open. [25] nye then considers the attempts of the various philosophers and scientists influenced by frege to make use of the new creation in other arenas. perhaps the precision of the new mathematical logic could be used to separate scientific questions from meaningless "metaphysical" ones. perhaps one could use logic to understand the form of moral or aesthetic arguments as if proving that it is wrong to kill one's mother is the same as proving that 2+2=4. [26] furthermore it might be possible to use the mathematical logic to understand and perhaps to make some sense of the meaning of language itself. perhaps, under all of the flower and emotion and fuzz of language there is a pure "logical form" which expresses the basic or pure or literal meaning of a sentence. valid combinations of sentences (valid arguments) could be understood as combinations of sentences whose logical forms were valid. [27] now i should say that when treated as a technical tool this approach has had a great deal of success. certain facts about language and about language use are well illustrated when sentences of mathematical logic are used to gloss certain of their semantic properties. but it is a long way from that observation to the argument that what we are doing when we use language is to dress up a crystalline logical form with tinsel and fluff. [28] consider the steps involved here: first, language is observed to allow for specious arguments as well as valid ones. second, certain arguments can be seen to be valid on the basis of their form. third, a tiny subset of those arguments, about a particular domain, namely mathematics, are given a precise, formal characterization. finally this formal characterization is claimed to hold at the center of language. [29] gross attempts to draw more philosophical conclusions from his studies. he realizes that a focus on the rhetorical aspects of scientific practice might make it seem as if science is just rhetoric. he argues that his analyses leave room for a sort of "rhetorical realism." however, he seems to stumble here since he has shown that the only actual role such "meta narratives" of science play is in the rhetoric that they can support. it is not clear what rhetorical role "rhetorical realism" could play except in favor of the very relativism he professes concern about. [30] nye accepts that one "logical" response to her history is to suggest that perhaps some different sort of logic might be developed, a "feminist" or at least a "female" logic that would perhaps alleviate some of the problems. but of course it is not logic that has kept women and "other" races and nationalities and classes subordinated, it was and is political and social interests and institutions. logic was and is only one of the many tools toward that end. however a very important tool, since the attitudes and roles of logic in a society are very centrally tied up with the attitudes toward thought and argument. nye argues against the idea of a feminist logic and for a society that values "reading" instead of the sort of categorical "registering" that logic involves. it seems to me that "reading" is exactly what gross is doing in his rhetorical analysis of science, and indeed rhetoric, conceived classically, is a field whose time ought to come. [31] what is the sense in which these two books deserve to be called "postmodern"? i think that the first step in the answer has to do with the fact that neither seeks to overturn or replace the disciplines they are examining. while it may be possible to build a case for reform out of some of the authors' charges, it is also possible that a practitioner or true-believer could be unmoved. the obvious response would be to claim that both nye and gross spend their time examining the scaffolding, and not returning later to see the finished building, but that in fact a good study of scaffolding is necessary and important and perhaps even quite interesting. (consider, for example the biological community's response to "the double helix.") [32] as i mentioned above, it would seem that to take nye's and gross's points any further, to take them as actual challenges to science or to logic, would be to accept either or both of the ad hominem argument and the genetic fallacy. it is here that i think the postmodernism of the approach comes in. nye and gross both stand on what ought to be an unstable point. they are both working well within a tradition of careful scholarship and even an enlightenment-style respect for the centrality of ancient greek thought. both of them, but perhaps gross more then nye, seem to view their subjects with respect. for gross this is explicit, in using rhetorical techniques originating with aristotle to analyze science (a practice that, as he admits, aristotle wouldn't have initially approved of). nye, as a feminist, as a woman reading logic, is less willing to adopt the tradition as beneficial, but she does adopt, in a more or less ironic way, the commitment that certain standards of argument ought to apply. [33] how far can the process be removed from the product? how much can the history of an institution or a practice be divorced from its present state? the modernist position might be that the tradition is baggage, it needs to be shed as soon as it gets in the way. for gross and nye, as perhaps it is for the postmodern view, we cannot free ourselves so easily from that baggage; it is not in fact baggage, it is us. the stories of logic and science are %our% stories, and we are still making them up as we go along. it is ironic perhaps to use the method of classical rhetoric to analyze scientific discourse; after all, what status does a rhetorical analysis have after the claims of science are shown to be rhetorical? i mean it would have seemed that science's claims are the strongest. but now it seems not so clear. [34] it isn't a %challenge% to logic or science that nye and gross offer, but an account of how those enterprises actually are. it is only when those accounts are viewed against the self-descriptions that they seem to be challenges. logic is not wrong or invalid or even incomplete because it was developed for the promulgation of the faith, nor is biology wrong because it works by means of persuasion and consensus. the challenge is felt only by those who believe that in fact the process does matter to the product. [35] but--and perhaps i am finally showing myself here--the process does matter, it has to matter. only if we somehow think that either science or logic is somehow complete or close to complete, can we take any of its products as assured. now perhaps the method of truth-tables in propositional logic can be felt to be relatively sound and perhaps it is, perhaps it is as sound as the methods we have for predicting eclipses; but such examples are relatively sparse. we just don't know, in a century filled with challenges to the accepted views in both science and logic and everything else, where the next challenge will arise. our understanding of how such challenges might develop, and what we ought to expect to do about them, can only be enhanced with a better understanding of science as process. it is a process with its roots in tradition, but not its foundation. nothing can be done without the tradition, without the history, but anything in that tradition can be overturned, probably based on a challenge supported by some other traditional view or mode of argument or example. [36] it almost seems that parmenides's insight remains, except that where it has been traditionally taken as the foundation of knowledge, it now serves as the fulcrum of irony. [editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-[editor]-announcements.txt announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) every issue of _postmodern culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements free of charge. advertisements will also be published for a fee or on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _contention_: debates in society, culture, and science 2) _differences_: a journal of feminist cultural studies 3) _genders_ 4) _women's studies_ 5) _lit_: literature interpretation theory 6) _city images_: perspectives from literature, philosophy, and film edited by mary ann caws; gordon and breach publishers 7) _new perspectives on women and comedy_, edited by regina barreca; gordon and breach publishers 8) _new left review_: the claims 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papers on cybernetic concepts and principles, evolutionary philosophy, knowledge development, computer-support systems for collaborative theory building 26) the disembodied art gallery exhibition, brighton, england, summer 1992 27) arts and technology symposium--a call for compositions, presentations, papers and artwork 28) echt '92, fourth acm conference on hypertext--a call for papers, technical briefings, tutorials, panels, demonstrations, videos, and posters on hypertext and hypermedia conferences and societies: 29) penn state university seminar series, issues in criticism. historicisms and cultural critique, june 25-30, 1992 30) penn state conference on rhetoric and composition, july 8-11, 1992 31) theory, culture and society, 10th anniversary conference, august 16-19, 1992 32) marxism in the new world order: crises and possibilities at university of massachusetts-amherst, november 12-14, 1992 33) society for the advancement of games and simulations in education and training and the international simulation and gaming association conference, august 18-21, 1992 networked discussion groups: 34) violen-l, a networked discussion group for the study of violence, human rights, and public policies on violence 35) sovhist, a networked discussion group for the study of soviet history from 1917-1991 36) amlit-l, a networked discussion group for the study of american literature 37) inmylife, a networked discussion group for the study of beatle era popular culture 1)------------------------------------------------------------- _contention_ debates in society, culture, and science is: ". . . simply a triumph from cover to cover." *frederick crews* ". . . extremely important." *alberta arthurs* ". . . the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." *lynn hunt* ". . . superb." *janet abu-lughod* ". . . an important, exciting, and very timely project." *theda skocpol* ". . . an idea whose time has come." *robert brenner* ". . . serious and accessible." *louise tilly* subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from the journals division, indiana university press, 601 n. morton, bloomington, in 47404. phone: 812-855-9449. fax: 812-855-7931. 2)------------------------------------------------------------- *_differences_* a journal of feminist cultural studies edited by naomi schor and elizabeth week volume 3, number 1 politics/power/culture: postmodernity & feminist political theory edited by kathy e. ferguson and kirstie m. mcclure volume 3, number 2 queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities edited by teresa de lauretis volume 3, number 3 gayatri chakravorty spivak: feminism in colonization joan w. scott: commentary ann-louise shapiro: love stories: female crimes of passion in fin-de-siecle paris. mary lydon: calling yourself a woman: marguerite yourcenar & colette. eric o. clarke: fetal attraction: hegel's an-aesthetics of gender. neil lazarus: doubting the new world order: marxism and the claims of postmodern social theory. interview with antoinette fouque subscriptions: $28 (individuals), $48 (institutions), $10 (foreign surface post). order from: indiana university press, 601 n. morton, bloomington, in 47404. phone: 812-855-9449; fax: 812-855-7931. 3)------------------------------------------------------------- genders ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. number 14, fall 1992 *lynda hart* karen finley's dirty work: censorship, homophobia, and the nea *samir dayal* the subaltern does not speak: mira nair's _salaam bombay_ as a post-colonial text *silvia tubert* how ivf exploits the wish to be a mother: a psychoanalyst's account *mary a. favret* a woman writes the fiction of science: the body of _frankenstein_ *karen brennan* anais nin: author(iz)ing the erotic body *albaraq mahbobah* reading the anorexic maze *muriel dimen* theorizing social reproduction: on the origins of de-centered subjectivity _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy yearly subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription university of texas press journals box 7819, austin, texas 78713 4)------------------------------------------------------------- _women's studies_ edited by *wendy martin* interdisciplinary and international in scope, the journal publishes papers from a broad range of fields, including literature, language, art, and history, as well as political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, law and the sciences 4 issues per volume -issn: 0049-7878 current subscription: volume 21 (1992) for journal prices please contact the publisher. all prices are subject to change without notice. the us dollar price applies in north america only. gordon and breach publishers p.o. box 786 cooper station, new york, ny 10276 us orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459 all other countries contact the uk: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax 44 (0734) 568211 5)------------------------------------------------------------- _lit_ literature interpretation theory edited by *lee a. jacobus* and *regina barreca* placing equal emphasis on theoretical and interpretive positions, _lit_ offers the best in current literary controversy and debate. forthcoming issues focus on helene cixous as critic, the future of marxist criticism, and the politics of popular fiction. 4 issues per volume -issn: 1043-6928 current subscription: volume 4 (1992) for journal prices please contact the publisher. all prices are subject to change without notice. the us dollar price applies in north america only. gordon and breach publishers p.o. box 786 cooper station, new york, ny 10276 us orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459 all other countries contact the uk: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax 44 (0734) 568211 6)------------------------------------------------------------- _city images_ perspectives from literature, philosophy, and film edited by *mary ann caws* offering glimpses of the city as it appears in films, novels, photographs, poems, architecture, stagings and journals, _city images_ collects essays by twenty of today's finest urban landscape writers. among the distinguished contributors are christopher prendergast, richard kuhns, alfred kazin and charles molesworth. 1991 * pages: 278 hardcover * isbn: 2-88124-426-2 *price: $42.00 softcover * isbn: 2-88124-464-5 *price: $16.00 orders for books do not include postage and handling. all prices are subject to change without notice. the us dollar price applies in north america only. gordon and breach publishers p.o. box 786 cooper station, new york, ny 10276 us orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459 all other countries contact the uk: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax 44 (0734) 568211 7)------------------------------------------------------------- * * available--spring 1992 * * _new perspectives on women and comedy_ edited by *regina barreca* the original essays in this volume explore the way women have used humor to break down cultural stereotypes between the genders. examples from literature and the performing and visual arts deal with humor and violence, humor and disability, humor and the supposition of women's shame, lesbian and ethnic humor, and particularly women's response to men's humor. 1992 * pages: 240 hardcover * isbn: 2-88124-533-1 *price: $39.00 softcover * isbn: 2-88124-534-x *price: $16.00 orders for books do not include postage and handling. all prices are subject to change without notice. the us dollar price applies in north america only. gordon and breach publishers p.o. box 786 cooper station, new york, ny 10276 us orders: call 1-800-545-8398 * fax 212-645-2459 all other countries contact the uk: call 44 (0734) 568316 * fax 44 (0734) 568211 8)------------------------------------------------------------- _new left review_ nlr 190 the claims of equality introductory offer--receive this special issue free! *g.a. cohen* the future of a disillusion *paul cammack* brazil: old politics, new forces *tony benn* the menace of the secret state *roger taylor* surviving the thatcher years *elizabeth wilson* feminism without illusions? *julian stallabrass* snapshots of prague and berlin *terry bloomfield* rock against the commodity *victor kiernan* marx and the undiscovered country *dimitris kyrtatas* revelation revised *branka magas* comment on gellner * * subscribe now and receive this 144-page issue free * * annual subscription (6 issues) individuals: overseas us$42/can$50/&26 airmail us$54/can$65/&34; uk&22.50 institutions: overseas us$82/&47 airmail us$94/&55; uk&43.50 for a trial subscription to nlr--with this special 144-page issue free--send either check payable to _new left review_ or credit card type, number and expiration date (visa/access/mastercard/eurocard/amex accepted) to the address below. alternatively you may ring our credit card hotline: (0)81 685 0301. *subscription address* _new left review_ (190 offer) 120-126 lavender avenue mitcham surrey cr4 3hp uk 9)------------------------------------------------------------- _*nomad*_ ===an interdisciplinary journal ======of the humanities, =========arts, ============and sciences _nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing. the journal is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing submissions: send manuscripts (2 copies, with sase) and artwork (black and white camera-ready, 8.5" by 11" or less) to nomad, c/o mike smith, 406 williams, florida state university, tallahassee fl 32306. subscriptions: $9.00 per year (2 issues) from nomad c/o mike smith, 406 williams, florida state university, tallahassee fl 32306. 10)------------------------------------------------------------you won't want to miss . . . _*represent*ations_ number 36 * fall 1991 frances ferguson on sade and pornography; joseph pequigney on sodomy in dante; alan sinfield on noel coward; r. howard bloch on the romance of old french letters; t. walter herbert, jr., on hawthorne and victorian sexuality number 37 * winter 1992 dipesh chakrabarty and gyan pandey in a forum on "india and the writing of history"; thomas richards on british museum surveys of tibet; stephen tifft on renoir and the fall of france; nicholas dirks on castes of mind individuals $26.00, students $18.00, institutions $52.00. outside u.s. add $6.00 postage. send payment to: _representations_, university of california press journals, 2120 berkeley way, berkeley, ca 94720 11)------------------------------------------------------------ studies in popular culture_ _studies in popular culture_, (_sipc_), the journal of the popular culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. its contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. _studies in popular culture_ is published in october and april by the popular culture association in the south. authors are urged but not required to join the association. all members of the association receive _studies in popular culture_, the pc newsletter, and announcements of the annual meeting in early october. yearly membership is currently $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to the executive secretary, diane calhoun-french, academic dean, jefferson community college-sw, louisville, ky, 40272, for information regarding membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. direct editorial queries and send manuscripts to the editor: dennis hall, department of english, university of louisville, louisville, kentucky, 40292. telephone: (502) 588-6896 or 0509. bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm. fax: 588-5055. please enclose two double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. material also may be submitted for consideration via electronic mail. _sipc_ ordinarily runs short pieces, essays that total, with notes and bibliography, less than twenty pages in typescript. documentation may be in the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the new mla style sheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. 12)------------------------------------------------------------ _science as culture_ in a society where icons of progress are drawn from science, technology, and medicine, science as culture examines how these disciplines relate to the rest of life. the journal investigates how particular values are embodied and naturalized in concepts, techniques, research priorities, gadgets, and advertising. much praised for its evocative articles, _science as culture_ encompasses peoples' experience at the workplace, the cinema, the hospital, the home, and the theater. readable and attractive, it explores all the ways in which science is involved in shaping the values that contend for influence over the wider society. recent articles include: cleaning up on the farm, *les levidow* the social side of sustainability, class, gender, and race, *patricia l. allen* and *carolyn e. sachs* biodiversity and food security, *alistair smith* alternative agriculture and the new biotechnologies, *jack kloppenburg* green meanings: what might 'sustainable agriculture' sustain?, *christopher hamlin* sample copies available! **for more information write: free association books, 26 freegrove road, london n7 9rq; credit cards (24 hours) 071-6095646. **in north america: guilford publications, inc., 72 spring st, new york, ny 10012, attn: journals dept. or call: 212-431-9800. fax: 212-966-6708. **volume 3, 1992 (4 issues); individuals: 20/us $30; institutions: 35/us $65. single copy 5.95/us $8. 13)------------------------------------------------------------ _capitalism nature socialism_ a journal of socialist ecology edited by james o'connor, university of california, santa cruz _cns_ is the only serious red-green theoretical journal in the world. it is edited by a distinguished group of scholars and scholar activists, half of whom are north american, the other half from a variety of countries. _cns_ seeks to meld the traditional concerns of labor movements with the ecological struggles in particular, and demands of the new social movements in general. to this end, it publishes articles, reviews, interviews, documents, and poems that locate themselves at the site between history and nature, or society and the environment. recent articles include: political economy of the gulf war, j. o'connor eco-feminism and eco-socialism, mary mellor sustainable agriculture at the crossroads, patricia allen green cities politics, patrick mazza lewis mumford: the forgotten american environmentalist: an essay in rehabilitation, ramachandra guha economics of the u.s. greens, c. thurner ecology and regulation theory, alain lipietz red green movements in india, gail omvedt political ecology of marx, manuel sacristan is sustainable capitalism possible? james o'connor sample copies available! for more information write: guilford publications, inc., 72 spring st, new york, ny 10012, attn: journals dept. or call: 212-431-9800. fax: 212-966-6708. volume 3, 1992 (4 issues); individuals: $20.00, outside u.s.: $25.00 (surface mail), $35.00 (airmail); institutions: $60.00, outside u.s.: $75.00 (airmail). also available in better bookstores. 14)------------------------------------------------------------ _rethinking marxism_ a journal of economics, culture, and society the aim of this journal is to stimulate interest and debate over the explanatory power and social consequences of marxian economic and social analysis. to that end, it publishes studies that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend marxian theory. the concerns of the journal include theoretical and philosophical (methodological and epistimilogical) matters as well as more concrete empirical analysis--all work that leads to further development of a distinctively marxian discourse. contributions are encouraged from people in many disciplines and from a wide range of perspectives. articles of interest: post-america and the collapse of leninism, immanuel wallerstein on marx and freud, louis althusser louis althusser and the unity of science and revolution, nancy hartstock race, culture, and communications: looking backward and forward at cultural studies, stuart hall fordism/postfordism, marxism/post-marxism: the second cultural divide, julie graham new world order and other art, sue coe. sample copies available! for more information write: guilford publications, inc., 72 spring st, new york, ny 10012, attn: journals dept. or call: 212-431-9800. fax: 212-966-6708. volume 5, 1992 (4 issues); individuals: $27.50, outside u.s.: $32.50 (surface mail), $42.50 (airmail); institutions: $55.00, outside u.s.: $70.00 (airmail); students: $20.00 (current i.d. required). also available in better bookstores. 15)------------------------------------------------------------ _communication theory_ a journal of the international communication association edited by robert t. craig university of colorado at boulder communication theory is an international, interdisciplinary forum for theory and theoretically oriented research on all aspects of communication. it is designed to sustain a scholarly dialogue across disciplinary, methodological, and geographical boundaries. holding up a mirror to the field of communication in all its diversity, stimulating reflection and dialogue on issues of interdisciplinary significance, encouraging innovations and experimentation, and at times provoking controversy, communication theory will engage its readers in the reconstruction of an academic discipline at a crucial juncture in its history. articles of interest: communication boundary management: a theoretical model of managing disclosure of private information between marital couples, sandra petronio syntactic and pragmatic codes in communication, donald g. ellis conversational universals and comparative theory: turning to swedish and american acknowledgement tokens-in-interaction, wayne a. beach & anna k. lindstrom theories of culture and communication, bradford 'j' hall communication, conflict, and culture, c. david mortensen sample copies available! for more information write: guilford publications, inc., 72 spring st, new york, ny 10012, attn: journals dept. or call: 212-431-9800. fax: 212-966-6708. volume 2, 1992 (4 issues); individuals: $30.00; institutions: $60.00. outside u.s., add $17.50 (airmail included). 16)------------------------------------------------------------ _public culture_ * * * volume 4, number 1 (fall 1991) * * * looking at film hoardings, r. srivatsan * knocking on the doors of public culture, pradip krishen * the meaning of baseball in 1992, bill brown * becoming the armed man, j. william gibson * the function of new theory, xiaobing tang * worldly discourses, dan rose * voices of the rainforest, steven feld * anuradhapura, wimal disanayake * river and bridge, meena alexander * * * volume 4, number 2 (spring 1992) * * * the banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the postcolony, achille mbembe * take care of public telephones, robert j. foster * the death of history?, dipesh chakrabarty * the public fetus and the family car, janelle sue taylor * race and the humanities: the "ends" of modernity?, homi bhabha * "disappeating" iraqis, david prochaska * algeria caricatures the gulf war, susan slyomovics * mobilizing fictions, robert stam * television and the gulf war, victor j. caldarola engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural flows and public cultures in a diasporic world _public culture_ is published biannually at the university museum, university of pennsylvania, 33rd and spruce streets, philadelphia, pa 19104-6324. a year's subscription for individuals is $10.00 ($14.00 foreign); institutions $20.00 ($24.00 foreign). back issues are available. write, call 215898-4054, or fax: 215-898-0657. 17)------------------------------------------------------------ the florida state university department of english announces the _journal of beckett studies_ (new series) beginning with a double issue vol. i, nos. 1 and 2 (spring 1992), the journal will appear semi-annually thereafter: vol. ii, no. 1 (autumn 1992) and vol ii, no. 2 (spring 1993). the current double issue features two previously unpublished poems by samuel beckett: "brief dream," a five-line poem in english which beckett sent to publisher john calder in 1988, and "l+," a 1987 quatrain in french dedicated to james knowlson (both published with permission of calder publications). vol. 2, no. 1 (autumn 1992) will feature beckett's revised text for _what where_ (with permission of faber and faber, ltd.). the journal is dedicated to printing scholarship, criticism and theory of the highest quality, reviewing significant books and productions in a timely fashion, and, on occasion, printing previously unpublished material by samuel beckett. we cannot publish regularly, and even, as we hope, expand our publication with special issues and monographs, without your support. please return the coupon below with your check to help keep the _journal of beckett studies_ a vital source of beckett scholarship. ruby cohn prize in beckett studies the journal of beckett studies is proud to offer the bi-annual ruby cohn prize for the most significant contribution to the journal by an individual who has not previously published on beckett. the winner will be determined by the editorial board from nominations submitted by readers and contributors. the award will carry a $250.00 honorarium, be announced in the spring 1993 issue (vol. 2, no. 2), and thereafter in even numbered volumes. individual subscriptions are $15.00 new series vol. i, nos. 1 & 2 (spring 1992)................$15.00 new series vol. 2, no. 1 (autumn 1992) vol. 2, no. 2 (spring 1993).....................$15.00 journal of beckett studies (new series) dept. of english, florida state university, tallahassee, fl 32306 18)------------------------------------------------------------_strategies_ a journal of theory, culture & politics 4289 bunche hall ucla los angeles, ca 90024 new issue now available: marx after elvis: politics/popular culture issue no. 6 susan buck-morss is there a common postmodern culture? slavoj zizek the `missing link' of ideology iain chambers migrant landscapes laurence a. rickels missing marx: or, how to take better aim kelly dennis leave it to beaver: the object of pornography michael shapiro american fictions and political culture j. michael jarrett rhapsody in read: ishmael reed and free jazz stathis gourgouris adorno after sun ra katrina irving building equivalences through rap-music sande cohen cultural use-value and historicist reduction current rates: (make all checks payable--in us dollars--to strategies) single subs issues (2 issues) ind. $ 7 $12 for. ind. $ 9 $16 inst. $12 $20 for. inst. $14 $24 back issue rates: ind. for. ind. inst. no. 1 beyond the modern . . . - - $16 no. 2 pedagogical theories, educational practices $10 $12 $16 no. 3 in the city $10 $12 $16 no. 4/5 critical histories $10 $12 $16 special rate for individuals ordering both nos. 2 & 3 $12 domestic, $14 foreign 19)------------------------------------------------------------ _theory, culture & society_ explorations in critical social science "it seems to me that mike featherstone and his editorial group have done more than any other sociological group to move sociology forward into new terrains of thought and discourse and they have done so with power, grace and insight." professor norman denzin _theory, culture & society_ was launched to cater to the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science. the journal provides a forum for articles which theorize the relationship between culture and society. _theory, culture & society_ builds upon the heritage of the classic founders of social theory and examines the ways in which this tradition has been re-shaped by a new generation of theorists. _theory, culture & society_ also seeks to publish theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture and new intellectual movements such as postmodernism. the journal features papers by and about the work of a wide range of modern social and cultural theorists such as foucault, bourdieu, baudrillard, goffman, bell, parsons, elias, gadamer, luhmann, habermas, giddens and simmel. _theory, culture & society_ is published quarterly in february, may, august and november. 20% introductory discount enter your new subscription to _theory, culture & society_ at a special introductory discount. subscribe today and you'll save 20% off the cost of your subscription. individual: one year $37 ($46*) two years $74 ($92*) institutional: one year $99 ($123*) two years $198 ($248*) *usual rate send your order to: sage publications ltd. p.o. box 5096 newbury park, ca 91359 usa ask about the special back issue sale! 20)------------------------------------------------------------ _poetics today_ international journal for theory and analysis of literature and communication editor: itamar even-zohar (tel aviv) published by duke university press in cooperation with the porter institute for poetics and semiotics, tel aviv university. here's how you can benefit from using _poetics today_ special issues in your classroom: convenient * accessible * cheap * risk-free children's literature zohar shavit, editor this introduction to the field explores questions of childhood and children's culture, the teaching function of children's literature and current thinking on the demarcation of boundaries between children's and adult literature. 250 pages. 1992 disciplinarity david r. shumway and ellen messer-davidow, editors an examination of the discipline as a historically specific form, offering diverse perspectives on the way modern disciplines control the organization and production of knowledge. 171 pages. 1991 narratology revisited i, ii, and iii brian mchale and ruth ronen, editors in three volumes, narratologists and other scholars of narrative reflect on the progress (or lack of progress) in narrative theory over the past decade and on the current state of the art. 191, 237, 247 pages (available singly or as three issues). 1990 and 1991 *free examination copies* of _poetics today_ special issues are available for course consideration and will be sent upon receipt of your request on departmental letterhead. fax: 919-684-8644. *single issue orders* send a check payable to duke university press, $14.00 for each issue. or call 919-684-6837 and have credit card information ready. *subscriptions* individuals can get a 1992 subscription (4 issues) for $28; students pay only $14 with a photocopy of their current i.d. add $8 for postage outside the u.s. send a check payable to duke university press or call 919-684-6837 and have visa or mastercard information ready. mail orders to: duke university press, journals division, 6697 college station, durham, nc 27708. 21)------------------------------------------------------------ _surfaces_ a new interdisciplinary electronic journal published by the department of comparative literature at the university of montreal, _surfaces_ is an open forum oriented toward the reorganization of knowledge in the humanities. the growth of interdisciplinary study in the humanities and the emergence of new areas of inquiry has reached a point that calls into question both traditional thematic comparisons and the pretensions of any one theoretical approach to delimit and dominate a field of study. _surfaces_ aims to provide an international forum for scholars to address contemporary problems and questions, using its electronic format to offer services beyond the reach of traditional journals. _surfaces_ is available free of charge through the various electronic mail networks (internet, bitnet, janet, earn & netnorth). submissions welcomed: please address articles, reviews, notes, comments and news items for inclusion to the editors either by email, on diskette or in hard copy. we are particularly interested in essays that address the cultural problematics engendered by and for new technologies. all correspondence to: the editors, surfaces, dept. of comparative literature, university of montreal, c.p. 6128, succ. "a", montreal, canada, h3c 3j7. tel.: 514-343-5683 fax: 514-343-5684 internet access via ftp anonymous: harfang.cc.umontreal.ca 22)------------------------------------------------------------ _dis course_ volume 15, number 1 special issue **flaunting it: lesbian and gay studies** delinquent desire: race, sex, and ritual in reform schools for girls by *kathryn baker* lesbian pornography: the re-making of (a) community by *terralee bensinger* investigating queer fictions of the past: identities, differences, and lesbian and gay historical self-representations by *scott bravmann* "i am what i am" (or am i?): the making and unmaking of lesbian and gay identity in _high tech boys_ by sarah chinn and kris franklin nudes, prudes, and pigmies: the desirability of disavowal in _physical culture magazine_ by greg mullins muscling the mainstream: lesbian murder mysteries and fantasies of justice by joann pavietich obscene allegories: narrative structures in gay male porn by david pendleton applied metaphors: aids and literature by thomas piontek the traffic in dildoes: the phallus as camp and the revenge of genderfuck by june l. reich special issue: $12.95 individual $25.00 institution $1.75 post subscription (3 issues): $25.00 individual $50.00 institution $10.00 foreign surface post send orders to journals division, indiana university press, 601 n. morton, bloomington, in 47404; fax to 812-855-7931; call 812855-9449 with credit card orders. 23)------------------------------------------------------------- _u.s. latino literature_ an essay and annotated bibliography by marc zimmerman from visions of a reclaimed aztlan and borinquen to portrayals of inner city rural and urban life to the multi-faceted perspectives of latina feminists, u.s. latino literature has developed and flourished as a new sphere of cultural expression. marc zimmerman's new book introduces the representative chicano, puerto rican, cuban and other u.s. latino writers' key works in poetry, fiction and drama, the major trends, the pre-history, history, and possible future of the literature and the diverse people it represents. including a thought-provoking, overview essay, _u.s. latino literature_ is above all the most handy, comprehensive and economical one-volume reference work in its field. marc zimmerman teaches latin american studies at the university of illinois at chicago. his recent books include _el salvador at war_ (mep, 1988 and with john beverley, _literature and politics in central american revolutions_ (university of texas press, 1990). order from: march/abrazo press * p.o. box 2890 * chicago il 60690 tel. 312-539-9638 isbn 1-877636-01-0 paperback, 158 pp. $10.95 plus $3.00 postage for single copy 24)------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers -------------- special issue the electronic journal of communication/ la revue electronique de communication topic: "computer-mediated communication" issue editor: thomas w. benson department of speech communication penn state university bitnet: t3b@psuvm internet: t3b@psuvm.psu.edu =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= the electronic journal of communication/la revue electronique de communication is seeking original, unpublished manuscripts on the topic of "computer-mediated communication." papers addressing any issues related to the general topic, based on any conceptual framework and any methodological approach, are welcome, though we are interested in approaches that include the human and social aspects of communication and are not exclusively technical or technological in content. examples might include critical, discourse analytic, or content analytic studies of computer networks; historical accounts; considerations of theoretical, political, or economic issues; user surveys; analyses of policies about access and use; reviews of literature; and so on. book reviews are solicited; contact the editor with your suggestions. international perspectives are encouraged. the major criterion is that papers should make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature, roles, effects, or functions of computer mediated communication. papers will be reviewed anonymously. the final deadline for submission is september 15, 1992; manuscripts are now (february 1992) being accepted for review and the issue will be closed to further manuscripts when the issue is complete--which may be before september 15, 1992. publication is expected in late fall, 1992. subscriptions to ejc/rec may be obtained free of charge, by sending the message: subscribe ejcrec your_name as in: subscribe ejcrec jane smith to: comserve@rpiecs (bitnet) or comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu (internet). subscribers automatically receive each issue's table of contents, abstracts for each article in the issue, as well as instructions for how to obtain electronic copies of each article in the issue from comserve. the ejc/rec is supported by the communication studies department at the university of windsor, and comserve at rensselaer polytechnic institute, of troy, n.y. articles are protected by copyright (c) by the communication institute for online scholarship (issn # 1183-5656). articles may be reproduced, with acknowledgment, for nonprofit personal and scholarly purposes. permission must be obtained for commercial uses. 25)------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers ********************************************************* * symposium: the principia cybernetica project * * computer-supported cooperative development * * of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy * ********************************************************* as part of the 13th international congress on cybernetics namur (belgium), august 24-28, 1992 about the principia cybernetica project _______________________________________ the principia cybernetica project (pcp) is a collaborative attempt to develop a complete and consistent cybernetic philosophy. such a philosophical system should arise from a transdisciplinary unification and foundation of the domain of systems theory and cybernetics. similar to the metamathematical character of whitehead and russell's "principia mathematica", pcp is meta-cybernetical in that we intend to use cybernetic tools and methods to analyze and develop cybernetic theory. these include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic mail, and knowledge structuring software. they are meant to support the process of collaborative theory-building by a variety of contributors, with different backgrounds and living in different parts of the world. as its name implies, pcp will focus on the clarification of fundamental concepts and principles of the cybernetics and systems domain. concepts include: complexity, information, system, freedom, control, self-organization, emergence, etc. principles include the laws of requisite variety, of requisite hierarchy, and of regulatory models. the pcp philosophical system is seen as a clearly thought out and well-formulated, global "world view", integrating the different domains of knowledge and experience. it should provide an answer to the basic questions: "who am i? where do i come from? where am i going to?" the pcp philosophy is systemic and evolutionary, based on the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural selection. it includes: a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological primitives b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed by the subject, but undergoing selection by the environment c) an ethics, with survival and the continuance of the process of evolution as supreme values. pcp is to be developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual network. the basic architecture consists of nodes, containing expositions and definitions of concepts, connected by links, representing the associations that exist between the concepts. both nodes and links can belong to different types, expressing different semantic and practical categories. philosophy and implementation of pcp are united by their common framework based on cybernetical and evolutionary principles: the computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the philosophy. pcp is managed by a board of editors (presently v. turchin [cuny, new york], c. joslyn [nasa and suny binghamton] and f. heylighen [free univ. of brussels]). contributors are kept informed through the principia cybernetica newsletter, distributed in print and by email, and the prncyb-l electronic discussion group, administered by c. joslyn (for subscription, contact him at cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu). further activities of pcp are publications in journals or books, and the organization of meetings or symposia. for more information, contact f. heylighen at the address below. about the symposium ___________________ after the successful organization of a symposium on "cybernetics and human values" at the 8th world congress of systems and cybernetics (new york, june 1990), and of the "1st workshop of the principia cybernetica project" (brussels, july 1991), the third official activity of the principia cybernetica project will be a symposium held at the 13th int. congress on cybernetics. the informal symposium will allow researchers potentially interested in contributing the project to meet. the emphasis will be on discussion, rather than on formal presentation. contributors are encouraged to read some of the available texts on the pcp in order to get acquainted with the main issues (newsletter available on request from the symposium chairman). papers can be submitted on one or several of the following topics: the principia cybernetica project cybernetic concepts and principles evolutionary philosophy knowledge development computer-support systems for collaborative theory building about the congress __________________ the international congresses on cybernetics are organized triannually (since 1956) by the intern. association of cybernetics (iac), whose founding members include w.r. ashby, s. beer and g. pask. the 13th congress takes place in the "institut d'informatique, facultes universitaires notre-dame de la paix, 21 rue grandgagnage, b-5000 namur, belgium". the official congress languages are english and french. registration fee : members of the iac and authors of papers: 6000 bf (about $180) other participants: 10000 bf (about $300) young researchers under 30 years 2000 bf (about $60) (with certificate of their university) the fee covers congress attendance, conference abstracts and coffee-breaks. submission of papers ____________________ ==deadlines== * for abstract submission: march 31, 1992 * for final texts (max 5 pages): august 28, 1992 for submissions of papers or further information about the principia cybernetica project, contact the symposium chairman: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * dr. francis heylighen po-pesp, free univ. brussels, pleinlaan 2, b-1050 brussels, belgium phone +32 2 641 25 25 email fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be fax +32 2 641 24 89 telex 61051 vubco b * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * for congress registration or further information about the congress, contact the secretariat: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * international association for cybernetics palais des expositions, place ryckmans, b-5000 namur, belgium phone +32 81 73 52 09 email cyb@info.fundp.ac.be fax +32 81 23 09 45 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 26)------------------------------------------------------------ the disembodied art gallery exhibition brighton, england, 1992 *=*starting in may and continuing until . . .*=* england's largest arts festival will be taking place in brighton again this year. each may over one hundred theatre, dance and comedy events are presented in venues throughout the town from traditional opera to experimental dance, classical greek plays to world debut performances. however little of the festival spirit seems to overflow onto the streets and much of the population could be forgiven for not even noticing when the festival begins or ends. participation in the festival just costs the price of a ticket, but these often seem prohibitively high to some sections of the community that the festival aims to introduce to the arts. few of the scheduled events actually present interesting, new work to the people of the town on the streets. by contrast, edinburgh can barely contain the (much larger) festival that it hosts each august and it is impossible to walk around the town, day or night, without encountering street plays, jugglers and buskers from literally all over the world. as a small independent group, we feel that we can do little to attract international artists to travel to brighton but we can attempt to invite a little mail art cultural tourism into our town. so, we have decided to hold brighton's first disembodied gallery exhibition throughout the town during the month of may. we would like to put some new visual artwork onto the streets instead of inside a gallery space; distribute original artwork around the town and give anyone the opportunity in participating or collecting these artifacts. our aim is to broaden the base of the festival and to initiate a much needed debate about the role of this festival, and more importantly about the role of the arts within the community. so we are making a call for original a3 or a4 decorative artwork, on paper or card, originals or xeroxes, 1 to 100 copies. all artwork that we receive will be displayed in the streets of brighton in the month of may and into june and beyond if the artwork keeps coming. in return for your contribution, we will photograph the artwork in place and document the comments from the towns' people about your artwork. your pictures will be fly-posted, hung from bus-stops and distributed around shops, arcades, pubs and clubs. we wish to challenge the concept of art being a sacred relic to be worshipped from a distance and be sold as a costly trophy. we will ask passersby to comment on the artwork and its place in their town and encourage them to keep work that they like. although there is no rigid theme to the exhibition, we would particularly like to encourage you to produce new work that addresses the issues that are documented above. prospective participants are reminded that their work will be displayed in full public view and so the subject matter should be chosen with this fact in mind. k. de mendonca and m. a. longbottom, (disembodied curators) please send your artwork or queries to: 1992 disembodied art gallery exhibition flat 5, 65 lansdowne place hove, sussex, bn3 1fl, uk 27)------------------------------------------------------------ =*call for compositions, presentations, papers and artwork*= the connecticut college center for arts and technology, in conjunction with the departments of music, art, art history, dance, theater, english, mathematics/computer science, physics, physical education, psychology and linguistics is pleased to announce: the fourth symposium on the arts and technology march 4-6, 1993 the symposium will consist of paper sessions, panel discussions, an art exhibition, and concerts of music, mixed media works, video, dance, experimental theatre and interactive performance. selected papers will be published as proceedings and will be available at the symposium. papers: a detailed two page abstract including audio-visual requirements should be sent to the address below no later than 15 september, 1992. approved abstracts will be notified by 15 november 1992. finished papers must be submitted in camera-ready form by 15 january, 1993. the symposium encourages research presentations and demonstrations in all areas of the arts and technology but is particularly interested in receiving work concerned with interactivity, virtual reality, cognition in the arts, applications in video and film, experimental theater, the compositional process, speculative uses of technology in education and examples of scientific visualization. other topics include but are not limited to acoustics, artificial intelligence, psyhco-acoustics, vision, and imaging. artworks: works of computer-generated or computer-aided art, or computer controlled interactive art are encouraged. animation or other works of computer art on tape will be shown throughout the symposium. slides or video tapes (vhs), and complete descriptions of works should be submitted no later than 15 september 1993. accepted artists will be notified by november 15, 1993. black-and-white photographs of accepted works should be sent by 15 january, 1993. selected works will be published as an insert in the proceedings. funds available for the shipping of work are extremely limited. call or write the address below for more information on the transport of artwork. compostions: works for instruments and tape or tape alone are being solicited at this time. available instruments are: flute (doubling on piccolo), oboe, clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), bassoon, trumpet, horn, trombone, percussion (two players), piano, and strings (2,1,1,1). works should not exceed 15 minutes in length and should be submitted with accompanying score, where appropriate, before 15 september 1992. we are especially interested in receiving a number of interactive performance compositions and video works. dance compositions are also encouraged, as are experimental theater works using "new technology." tapes for selection purposes should be on cassette or 1/2 inch vhs. tapes for performance should be 15 i.p.s. stereo or quadraphonic, or dat. video works should be 3/4 inch umatic or 1/2 inch vhs. a self-addressed, preposted envelope should be provided for the return of materials within the u.s.a. foreign materials will be returned at our expense. send art and science related materials before 15 september 1992 to: david smalley, co-director center for arts and technology box 5637 connecticut college 270 mohegan avenue new london, ct 06320-4196 internet: dasma@mvax.cc.conncoll.edu bitnet: dasma@conncoll.bitnet send music and ai related materials before 15 september 1992 to: dr. noel zahler, co-director center for the arts and technology connecticut college box 5632 270 mohegan avenue new london, ct 06320-4196 internet: nbzah@mvax.cc.conncoll.edu bitnet: nbzah@conncoll.bitnet 28)------------------------------------------------------------ call for participation echt'92 fourth acm conference on hypertext november 30 december 4, 1992 milano italy sponsored by: acm siglink sigois sigir in cooperation with: sigchi, politecnico di milano, aica, link-it!, inria summary of deadlines ***july 13, 1992 -papers, technical briefings, tutorials, panels, demonstrations, videos, and posters ***september 20, 1992 -acceptance notification for paper, panels, technical briefings, tutorials ***september 30, 1992 -acceptance notification for demonstrations, videos, posters ***october 15, 1992 -final copy of papers imperatively received by the conference secretariat all submissions must be sent to: conference secretariat, enza caputo, politecnico di milano, dipartimento di elettronica, piazza leonardo da vinci 32, 20133 milano (italia). e-mail: caputo@ipmel1.polimi.it telephone: (39) 2-23993405 fax: (39) 2-23993411 scope echt'92 is the second in a series of european conferences on hypertext and hypermedia in alternation with the u.s.-based hypertext conferences, coordinated and sponsored by acm siglink. the conference will include prominent guest speakers, presentations of refereed papers, panel sessions, technical briefing sessions, poster and video presentations, as well as demonstrations of experimental research prototypes and commercial products. the conference will also feature two days of introductory and advanced tutorials on a variety of topics. there will be opportunities for informal meetings of special interest groups. you are invited to participate in echt'92 and to submit original papers, proposals for panels, tutorials, technical briefings, demonstrations, videos and poster sessions. all submissions will be stringently reviewed to ensure the highest levels of originality and merit. we encourage innovative submissions in any area concerned with hypertext and hypermedia research development and practice. a non-exhaustive list of suggested topics includes: hypertext and hypermedia -applications -modelling and design -development methodologies and tools -responsive interfaces -evaluation -systems software technologies -authoring hypertext-hypermedia in connection with: -database management systems -object-oriented systems and languages -operating systems -knowledge-based systems -information retrieval -cooperative work -computer-aided design -software engineering -electronic publishing -technical documentation -presentation, museums, and kiosk systems -fiction -interactive learning and teaching instructions for submission papers technical papers relate original work or integrative review (theoretical, empirical, systems). we discourage simple presentations of projects or commercial products. we encourage emphasizing "experiences," "lessons learned," or "integrative reviews." papers should provide a clear scientific message to the audience, place the presented work in context within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work. submission: full papers (<6000 words) should be submitted in five paper copies. a separate cover page must contain the title of the paper, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the authors together with an abstract (about 200 words) and 3 5 keywords. please send an e-mail version of the abstract with title, name, address, and affiliation to the conference secretariat as soon as possible. deadline: july 13th, 1992 for more information, please contact: jocelyne & marc nanard papers co-chairs lirmm, universite montpellier ii, france phone: (33) -67148517 or (33) -67148523 fax: (33) -67148500 e-mail: nanard@crim.fr tutorials courses should be designed to provide advanced technical training in an area, or to introduce a rigorous framework for learning a new area. courses can be proposed for half-day (3 hours) or full-day (6 hours) length. submission: proposals should describe the content of the course and its format (1000-2000 words), should identify the target audience, the level of expertise required, and the length (1 or 2 half days). qualification and profile of the instructor(s) should also be included. a separate page containing title, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the instructors must be provided. deadline: july 13th, 1992 for more information, please contact: franca garzotto tutorials chair dipartimento di elettronica politecnico di milano, piazza l. da vinci 32, 20133 milano, italy phone: +39-2-2399 3520 fax: +39-2-2399 3411 e-mail: garzotto@ipmel1.polimi.it panels panels are meant to provide an interactive forum for involving both panelists and audience in lively discussions and exchanges of different points of view. submission: moderators are invited to provide a description of the proposed panel by submitting 3 5 pages listing the topic, e.g., by providing leading questions to be raised by the moderator, the specific format intended, the names and affiliations of the panelists with their specific backgrounds and their positions on the (hopefully controversial) issues of the panel. panel statements will appear in the proceedings. a separate cover page must contain the title of the panel, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the panelists. deadline: july 13th, 1992 for more information, please contact: norbert streitz panels chair gmd-ipsi dolivostr. 15, d-6100 darmstadt, germany phone: +49-6151 869 919 fax: +49-6151 869 966 e-mail: streitz@darmstadt.gmd.de demonstrations, posters, and videos demonstrations provide the attendees with the opportunity to experience hypertext systems and question the developers of the systems. poster presentations give researchers the opportunity to present significant work in progress or late-breaking results and to discuss their work with those attendees most deeply interested in the topic. videos are appropriate for illustrating concepts that are best captured visually. submission: demonstrations and posters should be submitted in the form of an extended abstract (approx. 1000 words), describing the content, the relevance for the conference and what is noteworthy about the presented work. demonstrators are informed that they must provide their own hardware. videos should be submitted in the form of a 5-10 minutes vhs pal or ntsc tape, with a 500 word abstract, describing the content, relevance, and noteworthiness as above. a separate page must contain the title of the demo, poster, or video, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the author(s). deadline: july 13th, 1992 for more information, please contact: paul kahn demonstrations, posters, and videos chair iris, brown university p.o.box 1946, providence rd 02912, usa phone: 401 863 2402 fax: 401 863 1758 e-mail: pdk@iris.brown.edu or antoine risk european demonstrations chair: euroclid promopole 12 av. des pres, 78180 montigny le bretonneux, france phone: 1 30441456 fax: 1 30571863 e-mail: antoine.rizk@.inria.fr technical briefings technical briefings aim at presenting details of a concrete design rather than an empirical or theoretical contribution. presentations should emphasize experience in the design and implementation of hypertext systems or applications, and discuss decision points and trade-offs. submission: proposals (approx. 1500 words) should be submitted in five paper copies and outline the points to be made in the briefing. a separate page must contain the title of the briefing, name(s), affiliation and complete mailing address (incl. phone, telefax, e-mail) of the author(s). deadline: july 13th, 1992 for more information, please contact: norman meyrowitz technical briefings chair go corporation, 950 tower lanesuite 140 foster city ca 94404, usa phone: 415 345 9833 fax: 415 345 7400 e-mail: nkm@go.com for more information or to be added to the echt'92 mailing list: paolo paolini general conference chair politecnico di milano, italy dipartimento di elettronica, e-mail: paolini@ipmel1.polimi.it telephone: (39) 2-2399 3520 fax: (39) 2-2399 3411 or polle zellweger u.s. coordinator xerox parc 3333 coyote hill rd palo alto ca 94304 u.s.a. phone: 415-812 4426 fax: 415-812 4241 e-mail: zellweger.parc@xerox.com phone: 415 345 9833 fax: 415 345 7400 e-mail: nkm@go.com 29)------------------------------------------------------------ penn state university seminar series issues in criticism summer seminar historicisms and cultural critique june 25-30, 1992 state college, pennsylvania wai-chee dimock, department of english, university of california, san diego. author of empire for liberty: melville and the poetics of individualism (1989) and symbolic equality: political theory, law, and american literature (forthcoming); co-editor of the forthcoming class and literary studies. professor dimock will focus on the shifting configurations of gender and history. marjorie levinson, department of english, university of pennsylvania. editor of rethinking historicism (1989) and author of keats's life of allegory: the origins of style (1988) and other monographs treating romantic poetry. professor levinson's general title is "the dialectic of enlightenment: to be continued," considering paradigms from the precartesian to the present deep ecology movement. brook thomas, department of english and comparative literature, university of california, irvine. author of cross-examination of law and literature (1987) and the new historicism and other oldfashioned topics (1991). professor thomas's central topic "the turn to history and the crisis of representation." participants will hear presentations by three well-known scholarcritics--wai chee dimock, marjorie levinson, and brook thomas--and engage in seminar-type discussions organized by these leaders. registrants are asked to indicate their first and second choices for morning seminar groups. the schedule and atmosphere are intended to encourage informal discussions among participants. for further information contact: wendell harris department of english pennsylvania state university university park, pennsylvania 16802 telephone: 814-863-2343 or 814-865-9243 30)------------------------------------------------------------ the penn state conference on rhetoric and composition july 8-11, 1992 the penn state conference on rhetoric and composition, now entering its second decade, is a four-day gathering of teachers and scholars. it offers a generous mixture of plenary and special-interest sessions in a relaxed atmosphere; a chance for learning, leisure, and reflection on composition and rhetoric; and an extended opportunity to discuss professional concerns with nationally known speakers and interested colleagues. each year the conference features plenary sessions, concurrent sessions, workshops, and roundtable discussions on topics of current interest. this year, the conference will run concurrently with the association of departments of english (ade) regional summer meeting of department heads; several joint activities are planned. ***panel sessions and workshops papers this year will concern a wide variety of subjects involving rhetoric and composition, such as rhetorical theory; the composing process; technical or business writing; advanced composition; esl; writing across the curriculum; the history of rhetoric; teaching methods; collaborative learning; tutoring and writing labs; connections among reading, writing, and speaking; computers and writing; legal, political, or religious rhetoric; literacy; language and stylistics; basic writing; social implications of writing; writing in the workplace; rhetorical criticism; rhetoric and literature; testing and assessment; and the administration of writing programs. workshops will be offered on multimedia resources for the writing classroom, portfolio assessment, and teacher development. ***saturday morning sessions on saturday morning, participants will have a special opportunity to concentrate for an extended period on one of three important areas: new ideas for integrating critical writing and critical reading, peer tutoring and reviewing, and program assessment in english. ***plenary session speakers donald mccloskey, our keynote speaker, is professor of history and of economics at the university of iowa, where he directs the project on rhetoric of inquiry (poroi). anne ruggles gere, professor of english and of education at the university of michigan. her research encompasses both the theory and pragmatics of composition. steven mailloux, professor of english and comparative literature at the university of california at irvine. his work examines the relationships among rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, and hermeneutics. ***time and location this conference will begin at 10:30 a.m. on wednesday, july 8 and will end at noon on saturday, july 11. it will be held on penn state's university park campus in state college, pennsylvania. ***fee and registration the $100 fee ($75 for graduate students, lecturers, and retired faculty) covers registration, materials, and three social events. it may be paid by check, money order, visa, mastercard, or request to bill employer (accompanied by a letter of authorization). we regret that we cannot offer daily rates for conference registration. fees remain the same for all or any part of the conference. to register, contact penn state by june 22. see below for address and telephone numbers. those who register in advance will be notified of program changes. registrations will be acknowledged by mail. refunds will be made for cancellations received by june 22. after that, the individual or organization will be held responsible for the fee. anyone who is registered but cannot attend may send a substitute. ***for more about program content: davida charney 117 burrowes building the pennsylvania state university university park, pa 16802 phone (814) 865-9703 secretary (814) 863-3066 fax (814) 863-7285 e-mail to irj at psuvm.psu.edu ***about registration and housing: chuck herd 409 keller conference center the pennsylvania state university university park, pa 16802 phone (814) 863-3550 fax (814) 865-3749 31)------------------------------------------------------------ theory, culture & society 10th anniversary conference august 16-19, 1992 seven springs mountain resort champion, pennsylvania, usa the conference's main plenary themes are: modernity/reflexivity/postmodernity; the body, self, and identity; cultural theory and cultural change. ***the themes are continued in six panels and five parallel streams of sessions. these are: the body, modernity and postmodernity; cultural theory; political culture and cultural studies. ***we also have an additional stream in which six postmodern films will be shown and discussed. ***to complete the program we have over twenty round tables on a wide range of topics. the _theory, culture & society_ conference will provide a unique opportunity to participate with leading figures in the discussion of some of the central issues in social and cultural theory. for complete details and a conference packet: kathleen white -theory, culture & society_ conference university center for international studies 4g22 forbes quadrangle university of pittsburgh pittsburgh, pa 15260, usa telephone: 412-648-7418 fax: 412-648-2199 or _theory, culture & society_ conference school of health, social and policy studies teesside polytechnic middlesbrough, cleveland, ts1 3ba united kingdom telephone: (44) 0642 342346/7 fax: (44) 0642 342067 32)------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers ======================== / __rethinking / / marxism__ / ======================== --announcing an international conference -- marxism in the new world order: crises and possibilities november 12-14, 1992 university of massachusetts-amherst we encourage papers and, especially, organized panels and events on the many dimensions (political, artistic, cultural and academic) and in the many traditions with which contemporary marxism can meet the challenges of today. for conference information: antonio callari, conference coordinator, economics department, franklin and marshall college, lancaster pa 17604. phone 717-291 3947; fax 717-399-4413. 33)------------------------------------------------------------ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * ** --------------------- ** call for participation: -------------------- ** --------------------- joint 1992 conference: /////////// ** -------------------- s a g s e t ** i s a g a ** society for the advancement of games and \\\\\\\\\\\ ** simulations in education and training ** international simulation and gaming association ** ** conference theme: developing transferable skills through ** --------------- simulation and gaming ** ** 18-21 august, 1992 napier university, edinburgh, scotland ** ** for further information: fred percival ** sagset/isaga conference secretary ** napier university ** 219 colinton road ** telephone: 44 / 31-455-4394 edinburgh eh14 1dj ** facsimile: 44 / 31-455-7989 scotland ** ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * +----------------------------------------------------------------------+| chet farmer, assistant director | english / 103 morgan || project ideals -fipse, doe | tuscaloosa, al 35487-0244 || university of alabama | tel 205-348-9494 | 34)------------------------------------------------------------ from: psdmspin@brusp.ansp.br subject: announcing a new list dear friends, we would like to announce the creation of violen-l, a discussion group for those devoted to the study of the problem of violence, human rights, and public policies on these and related subjects. violen-l is managed by the nucleo de estudos da violencia da universidade de sao paulo (center for the study of violence of the university of sao paulo). those who want to subscribe must send the following command: tell listserv at bruspvm sub violen-l "your true name" everybody who would like to join the discussion will be welcomed! sincerely yours, mario baldini (psdmspin@brusp.bitnet) 35)------------------------------------------------------------ this letter is to announce the formation of and offer a welcome to a new listserv discussion list--sovhist--(the discussion of soviet history from 1917-1991). this list will be used as a forum for the reasonable discussion of any aspect of the history of the soviet union from the "february revolution" of 1917 to the breakup of the ussr that occurred 25 december, 1991. any element of this period is discussable, so long as the criteria of being reasonable and polite in one's discourse are adhered to. any questions about suitable topics should be directed to me, valentine smith, at the internet address (cdell@vax1.umkc.edu). anyone wishing to participate in this list should send the following command to one of the following listservs; uscvm, dosuni1, or csearn via e-mail in the body of a mail message (not the "subject:" line) sub sovhist (your real name). to unsubscribe, send the command unsub (your real name). other listserv commands can be gotten by sending help in the message body to any listserv. this is an unmoderated list. however, i will closely keep an eye on it, and hope that we can engage in some fruitful discussions on soviet history. all that is asked is reasonable and polite dialogue--any problems will be first addressed by private mail, and then removal if that private discussion fails to resolve a conflict. this could be an exciting forum, i hope it will be, and i encourage you to be an active participant. enjoy! valentine smith (cdell@vax1.umkc.edu) 36)------------------------------------------------------------ amlit-l on listserv@umcvmb american literature discussion list or listserv@umcvmb.missouri.edu the american literature discussion list has been created for the discussion of topics and issues in the vast and diverse field of american literature among a world-wide community interested in the subject. you can expect consultations, conferences, and an ongoing exchange of information among scholars and students of american literature on this list. in addition, announcements of relevant conferences and calls for papers are welcome and encouraged. to subscribe send a message to listserv@umcvmb or listserv@umcvmb.missouri.edu. in body of the message state: sub amlit-l your full name eg: sub amlit-l e. allen poe if you have any questions please contact the owner. owner: michael o'conner <engmo@umcvmb.bitnet> or <engmo@umcvmb.missouri.edu> 37)------------------------------------------------------------ new list: inmylife beatle era popular culture inmylife@wkuvx1.bitnet topics will include but not be restricted to history, politics, culture, music, literature, collectibles, comic books, comix, counter culture, drugs, vietnam (and the war), cold war, between 1962 (the first beatle hit record in england) and 1974 (us out of vietnam). interested parties should send a one line command sub inmylife firstname lastname to listserv@wkuvx1.bitnet. owner: matt gore <goremh@wkuvx1.bitnet> ------------------end of notices.592 for pmc 2.3---------------holub, '_nietzsche as postmodernist_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-holub-_nietzsche.txt review of _nietzsche as postmodernist_ by robert c. holub <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu> department of german university of california berkeley _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by robert c. holub, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. clayton koelb, ed. _nietzsche as postmodernist: essays pro and contra_. albany: suny p, 1990. [1] since his death in 1900, friedrich nietzsche has been associated with almost every major movement in the twentieth century. no other writer has succeeded as well as nietzsche in impressing such an array of subsequent thinkers. putatively opposing ideologies have competed for his patronage; traditions that otherwise admit nothing in common find nietzsche an ally in their endeavors. on the political front he has been considered a promoter of anarchism, fascism, libertarianism, and--despite his pointed polemics against the most modern manifestation of slave morality- socialism. in the realm of culture he has been viewed as an inspiration for aestheticism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, dadaism, and surrealism. in philosophical circles he has allegedly influenced phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. this remarkable record of affinities and effects may be less a tribute to the fecundity of nietzsche's actual oeuvre than to the resourcefulness of his various interpreters. nietzsche touched on a wide variety of topics over the two decades in which he wrote, and the manner in which he expressed himself, the elusively suggestive and vibrant style in his mostly aphoristic oeuvre, has been obviously seductive for succeeding generations of intellectuals. postmodernism is thus only the latest movement to claim nietzsche as its spiritual progenitor, and it is to the credit of clayton koelb that in the volume under review here he has collected fourteen contributions that explore various and often antagonistic aspects of this possible affiliation. [2] actually, most of the essays in _nietzsche as postmodernist_ have less to do with postmodernism as an artistic or general cultural phenomenon than with "postmodern theory," i.e., contemporary philosophical and theoretical tendencies generally subsumed under the rubric of poststructuralism. in this regard there are three recurrent strategies for connecting nietzsche with recent french and francophilic tendencies. the first of these is heavily reliant on paul de man's essay on nietzsche and rhetoric found in _allegories of reading_ (new haven: yale, 1979, 103-18). de man focuses his attention on a particular phase in nietzsche's career when the young classical philologist at basel was preparing a course on rhetoric for the winter semester in 1872-73. citing fragmentary lecture notes for this course (which had only two students in attendance) and the unpublished essay "on truth and lie in an extra-moral sense," which was likely composed at about the same time, de man presents us with a nietzsche sensitive to the undecidabilities of language. the instability of all linguistic utterance becomes for the demanized nietzsche his seminal philosophical insight. since according to de man nietzsche establishes that all language is inextricably bound to figures and tropes, the traditional notions of the philosophical heritage--identity, truth, causality, objectivity, subjectivity--can no longer be trusted. as de man writes, "the key to nietzsche's critique of metaphysics . . . lies in the rhetorical model of the trope, or, if one prefers to call it that way, in literature as language most explicitly grounded in rhetoric" (109). this reading thus situates nietzsche at the source of a deconstructive enterprise culminating in the work of derrida and de man. [3] the problem with interpreting nietzsche's philosophy in as "postmodernist" is that it compels us to valorize one small portion of his work over almost everything else that he wrote and then to ignore most of his mature philosophical work. indeed, as maudemaire clark demonstrates in her essay "language and deconstruction: nietzsche, de man, and postmodernism" (75-90), de man's notions about language and rhetoric were not nietzsche's, and if in his early writings nietzsche did in fact flirt with such propositions, he quickly abandoned them as unsatisfactory. clark argues convincingly that de man's assertion that all language is figural is incoherent, and that his confusion of literal meaning with word-for-word translation leads to an unnecessary divorce of truth from all utterance. relying on donald davidson's holistic view of language and meaning, she shows that de man's appreciation of the "inscrutability of reference" is not accompanied by a sufficiently developed notion of truth conditions. unlike nietzsche, therefore, whose early views were supplanted by more mature reflections, de man remains fixated on a simplistic, skeptical conception of language as metaphor. what is perhaps more astounding than de man's obsession, however, is that his thesis about nietzsche (and about language in general) has gained such widespread currency in recent years. that nietzsche found it inadequate over a century ago is clearly indicated by his suppression of the essay on "truth and lie," as well as his abandoning of such a linguistically oriented concept of truth and values in his subsequent work. in short, this de man-inspired contention about nietzsche's views on language, rhetoric, and truth, despite its currency among deconstructive acolytes, provides no firm connection between nietzsche and "postmodernism." [4] a second and frequently cited aspect of the "postmodern" nietzsche is a bequest from the work of michel foucault, in particular from foucault's influential essay "nietzsche, genealogy, history" (cited below from _language, counter-memory, practice_ [ithaca: cornell up, 1977]). foucault's central concern is to delineate two different ways to conduct historical research. traditional historiography is identified with the search for origins (%ursprung%), while nietzsche's genealogical approach prefers the examination of emergence (%entstehung%), lineage (%herkunft%), birth (%geburt%), and descent (%abkunft%). this neat distinction is then elaborated in subsequent discussion: genealogy, we are told, depends "on a vast accumulation of source material" (_lcp_, 140), eschews essences and identities, explores discontinuities, "attaches itself to the body" (_lcp_, 147), and "seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection, . . . the hazardous play of dominations" (_lcp_, 148). without objections or criticism, foucault's claims have been well received by contemporary critics. thus it is not surprising that gary shapiro, in his essay on "foucault, derrida, and _the genealogy of morals_," adopts these putatively nietzschean distinctions and clarifies as follows: to be concerned with ursprung, or origin, is to be a philosophical historian who would trace morality--or any other subject matter-back to an original principle that can be clarified and recuperated. the genealogist will, however, be concerned with the complex web of ancestry and affiliations that are called herkunft, those alliances that form part of actual family trees, with all their gaps, incestuous transgressions, and odd combinations. (39-55) it is unimportant that shapiro will try to show that derrida is a more consistent genealogist than foucault; what is significant is that foucault's version of nietzsche has become a staple of postmodern theory. [5] if we look at foucault's essay critically, however, we find without much effort that most of the views he imputes to nietzsche are not supported by what nietzsche actually professed. in the first place the distinction between %ursprung% and %herkunft%, even in the preface to the _genealogy of morals_ (where foucault claims the distinction is most pronounced), is not maintained consistently. moreover, not only does nietzsche never discuss the difference between %ursprung% and %herkunft%, he obviously uses the words interchangeably. for example, at the beginning of the second paragraph he states that his topic is the heritage (%herkunft%) of our moral prejudices, while in the third paragraph he writes about the origin (%ursprung%) of our notions of good and evil; the fourth paragraph begins with a statement about his "hypothesis about the origin (%ursprung%) of morality." perhaps more importantly, the various characteristics foucault assigns to nietzschean genealogy do not actually describe it. in the _genealogy_ nietzsche does not collect a great deal of source material, but proceeds primarily on the basis of psychological observations, intuition, and a few scattered philological clues. nietzschean genealogy does not prefer discontinuities; in fact, nietzsche is at pains to show that slave morality has continuously manifested itself from socrates in the greek world, through the various "priests" of the judeo-christian tradition, to its latest manifestations in democratic and socialist political movements. foucault's putatively nietzschean approach to history is transparently foucauldian and at best tangentially nietzschean. the concern with the body, with domination, and with archives are all characteristics of foucault's archaeological phase. like de man's "postmodern" nietzsche, who was compelled to parrot de man's own obsession with rhetoric, foucault's "postmodern" nietzsche is a ventriloquist's dummy through whom foucault himself speaks. [6] the third commonly cited connection between nietzsche and postmodern thought involves the philosopher's notion of perspectivism. while six of the contributions mention "perspectivism" (nietzsche, by the way, used the term only twice according to schlechta's index), debra bergoffen's essay "nietzsche's madman: perspectivism without nihilism" is perhaps the most interesting treatment of perspectivism as a philosophical issue. bergoffen contends that perspectivism should be separated from the related doctrine of relativism and from the implied stances of nihilism and anarchism. she argues that our traditional understanding of perspectivism has been falsified because we have approached it as "centered subject[s] in a metaphysically anchored world." nietzsche, she claims, does not propound perspectivism as truth, but maintains rather "that decentered perspectivism is less repressive than the absolute perspective of the center" (57). using lacanian theory, which nietzsche anticipates (62), she interprets the madman passage from _joyful wisdom_ to be a proclamation of a "polytheistic pluralism" in which there is "no longing for the lost absolute" (68). "the philosophy of perspectivism," bergoffen concludes, "is a philosophy of pluralist textuality. in replacing kierkegaard's either/or with his own either . . . or, nietzsche rejects the logic of exclusive disjunction for a logic which affirms dejoined [sic] terms" (70). [7] once again, however, we have a series of contentions which, no matter how we may judge their logical rigor, have little basis in nietzsche's own works. the passage that bergoffen cites from the third book of _joyful wisdom_ (aphorism 125) contains absolutely no mention of the perspectival or of perspectivism: the word "perspective" is totally absent. it deals solely with the death of god, and although it is plausible that one can relate the death of god to nietzschean perspectivism, nietzsche does not specifically do so here, nor, as far as i can tell, anywhere else. how bergoffen can cite a passage from the middle of this particular aphorism and then abruptly proclaim that "with these words nietzsche introduces us to his doctrine of perspectivism" (68) remains a (philo)logical mystery. if we actually examine passages in which nietzsche himself writes about perspectivism or the perspectival we find that, for him, perspectivism involves not the demise of the theocentric universe, but rather issues of epistemology. in the fifth book of _joyful wisdom_, for example, nietzsche suggests strongly that "perspectivism" (%perspektivismus%) is synonymous with what he calls "phenomenalism" (%phenomenalismus%); both involve the notion that although perception may be conceived as individual, once it is made conscious, it becomes generalized and thus in some sense falsified, flattened, superficial, and corrupted. from this passage we can conclude that consciousness for nietzsche is not an individual possession, but part of our herd mentality. at other points, of course, nietzsche writes of perspectival seeing and the impossibility of achieving an objective stance for cognition. in these passages he affirms a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, usually viewed as supraindividual and often serving the preservation of a supraindividual entity. (in both cases the point is that there is no single, higher, hidden, platonic reality or meaning behind the phenomenological world.) these latter discussions of "perspectivism" come closer to bergoffen's notion of a pluralistic, decentered, benign relativism, but even if we take this to be what nietzsche really meant with the term, it would be inaccurate to ascribe to nietzsche himself the tolerance and eclecticism that reside in bergoffen's discussion. from at least _zarathustra_ on, nietzsche was a "dogmatic" philosopher, maintaining, at least implicitly, that some ethical values were superior to others. who can read the _genealogy_ and still believe that nietzsche does not consider the slave morality of good and evil inferior to the good-and-bad value system of the blond beasts? as robert solomon, a more careful and judicious reader of nietzsche, correctly notes, the "mature nietzsche was no perspectivist, not much of a pluralist, and consequently not much of a postmodernist either" (276). [8] the three most popular accounts of nietzsche as postmodernist all fail, therefore, because their advocates are too quick to attribute their own views to nietzsche. although some evidence can be mounted for each case of postmodern affiliation, the readings, when examined closely, are too selective, too partial (in both senses of the word), and too inaccurate to secure a connection. this does not mean, of course, that there are no other possible aspects of nietzsche's works that one can identify with the protean term "postmodern," nor does it mean that nietzsche cannot be solicited as an analyst of what we call postmodernism. in perhaps the most provocative essay in the volume, "nietzsche, postmodernism, and resentment" (267-293), solomon suggests that we might understand academic postmodernism and its attendant theories as varieties of nietzschean ressentiment. in this view, "postmodernism" would be regarded as a symptomatic reaction on the part of those who are outside of the mainstream of society. the theorists of postmodernism thus have something in common with the zealots of the new right, who are similarly estranged from the centers of culture. it does not matter that these two groupings are politically and ideologically antagonistic, solomon argues; nietzsche himself has shown how contradictory phenomena issue from a common source. of course, if we conceive of postmodernism as "the resentful projection of too many self-important smart people feeling slighted by the zeitgeist" (289), then nietzsche could very well be an example, as well as a diagnostician, of the postmodern. indeed, nietzsche was perfectly capable of analyzing a decadent feature of contemporary society and then labeling himself its most extreme proponent. [9] ultimately, however, solomon opts for discarding the entire issue of nietzsche's connection with postmodernism. in answer to the question that informs the entire volume ("is there a postmodern nietzsche?"), he replies: "i think our answer should be that this question is neither important nor interesting" (293). he may be correct, and not simply because of his contention that what nietzsche had to say is intrinsically so important that we should return to the "texts." the notion of nietzsche as postmodernist, like the most of the vast american scholarship on nietzsche's thought, has tended to place him and his works everywhere except where he was historically situated: in nineteenth century germany. failure to mention the names, places, movements, themes, and relationships to which nietzsche responded and in which he was involved characterizes much nietzsche scholarship, but is particularly evident in this collection. this volume unfortunately reinforces the tendency to regard nietzsche as the great anticipator of later movements, the untimely philosopher whose genius could only be understood by those living in a wiser and more welcoming epoch. most contributions buy into the self-fashioned image of the lonely, solitary thinker who, like zarathustra, is compelled to offer his revelatory pronouncements to uncomprehending and unworthy disciples. no thinker, however, is ahead of his or her times-although quite a few are behind them. if we could learn to ignore nietzsche's own rhetoric and consider him as, in large part, the product of seminal discourses in nineteenth-century europe, then we might come a lot closer to answering one of the questions koelb posits in his introduction: "what is `nietzsche'?" and in responding to this query with greater historical sensitivity than has traditionally been the case in american nietzsche criticism, we could then disregard koelb's other question--"what is `postmodernism'?"--as an irrelevance that is itself the product of a misguided effort in scholarship. bernstein, 'second war and postmodern memory', postmodern culture v1n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n2-bernstein-second.txt the second war and postmodern memory by charles bernstein state university of new york at buffalo copyright (c) 1991 by charles bernstein, all rights reserved _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.2 (january, 1991) now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, and you're as right as rain. . . . books; what a jolly company they are, standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . they're so wise . . . . --siegfried sassoon, "repression of war experience" (1918) [1] we never discussed the second world war much when i was growing up. i don't feel much like discussing it now. it seems presumptuous to interpret, much less give literary interpretations of, the systematic extermination process or the dropping of the h-bomb, the two poles of the second war. [2] when stanley diamond asked me to speak on "poetry after the holocaust"--to replace but also to respond to jerome rothenberg, who could not attend the symposium--my first reaction was to wonder what qualifications i had to speak- as if the topic of the war made me question my standing, made me wonder what i might say that could bear the weight of this subject matter. diamond reassured me that the audience would be small: "for many the holocaust is too far in the past to matter; for most of the rest, it's too painful to bring to mind." [3] my father-in-law, who left berlin as a teenager on a youth aliyah and spent the war in palestine, had a different reaction: all these holocaust conferences are a fad. this reaction is as disturbing as it is right. the holocaust has come to stand for a kind of secular satanism--everyone's against it, anyone can work up a feverish moral fervor denouncing the nazi monster. [4] yet i've been struck by just the opposite: that the psychological effects of the second war are still largely repressed and that we are just beginning to come out of the shock enough to try to make sense of the experience. we stormed the citadel under the banner of amnesia, winning absolute victory over the germans in 1943. fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . . [barrett watten, _under erasure_] crysiles of cristle, piled ankle high, as wide as sound carries. am i- hearing it--algebras worth? there is a wind erases marks. i felt it on my cheek summers long you can cross it & still not approach time, de solidified, approaching mothish mists felled, the way a price knocked down puts purchase on its feet. stammering painful clamor by coincidents appraised. refuse is a spilled constant. _let it loose_. [benjamin friedlander, "kristallnacht"] i don't remember when i first heard about the war, but i do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. it's inconceivable to me now that i was born just five years after its end; each year, the extermination process seems nearer, more recent. yet if the systematic extermination of the european jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future. hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks . . . where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor or perjorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below . . . [charles olson, "the kingfishers" (1949)] fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for western civilization. it seems to me that the current controversies surrounding paul de man, and, more significantly, martin heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. in all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a divine mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the west, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations. [5] the heidegger question merely personalizes the basic situation of the war: that european learning, the enlightenment tradition, and the ideals of reason as embodied in the nation state, were as much a cause of the war as a <strikeout>break<strikeout> to it. for to understand how heidegger could be complicit in the second war is to understand how the second war is not an aberration but an extension of the logos of western civilization. jack spicer's dying words--"my vocabulary did this to me"--could be the epitaph of the second war as well: our vocabulary did this to us. [6] walter benjamin, primo levi, paul celan committed suicide; de man and heidegger went on to prosper. what did the former know that the latter never absorbed? to acknowledge the second war means to risk suicide and in the process to politicize philosophy; and if we desire to avoid death and evade politics, repression is inevitable. which is to say that the death an acknowledgement of this war brings on is not only the death of individuals but also of an ideal--of reason unbounded to politics, of, that is, rationality as such. fear smashes into my double out of nowhere would shrink flesh back in itself before it vomits a wet night from neck or forehead passes into the vague air swallows the liquid stays inside my corneas extend along the axis of the flow dries [rosmarie waldrop, _the road is everywhere or stop this body_] i'd be reluctant to say any of my own poems was about the war or should be read within that frame--none would hold up to the scrutiny such a reading would promote. but i do want to make a broad, very provisional, claim that much of the innovative poetry of these soon to be fifty years following the war <strikeout>register<strikeout> the <strikeout>twined<strikeout> events of extermination in the west and holocaust in east in ways that hardly have been accounted for. from the stately violence of the state a classic war, world war two, punctuated by hiroshima all the action classically taking place on one day visible to one group in invisible terms beside a fountain of imagefree water "trees" with brown "trunks" and "leafy" green crowns 50s chipmunks sitting beneath, buck teeth representing mental tranquility, they sit in rows and read their book and the fountain gushes forth all the letters at once, permanently a playful excrescence, an erotic war against nature.... [bob perelman, "the broken mirror"] every cultural development i ascribe to the second war can be just as readily traced to some other cause and can also be said to preexist the war. my argument is not deterministic; rather i want to suggest that the frame of the second war, auschwitz and hiroshima, transforms the social meaning of these cultural developments. racism and cultural supremacism do not begin or end with the second war but they are the precise ideological instruments that mark the most unrecuperable aspects of the war--the lagers and the mutilated survivors of the bomb. the war did not make racism and cultural supremacism intolerable, <strikeout>they always were,<strikeout> but it demonstrated, as if demonstration was necessary, their absolute corrosiveness. [7] the war made it apparent, if it wasn't already, that racism and cultural supremacism are not correctable flaws of western logocentrism but its nonbiodegradable byproduct. i don't mean this as a thesis to be systematically argued. rather, i am suggesting that the war undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way eurosupremacist or hierarchic. not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law into the same river no man steps twice when the fire dies air dies no one remains, nor is, one . . . to be in different states without a change is not a possibility . . . [olson, "the kingfishers"] racism and cultural supremacism contaminate everything that is associated with them; if this guilt-by-association is necessarily too far-reaching, that is because it sets loose a radical skepticism that knows no immediate place to stop. [8] the second war undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the father, of law, of the nation and national spirit, of technorationality, of scientific certainty, of axiomatic judgement, of hierarchy, of progress, of tradition. it's a chain reaction. no truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control. [9] "but it's not reason but unreason that caused the war! it's just a parody of the enlightenment to associate it with nazi dementia, or to see the telos of science in a mushroom cloud! the enlightenment was a force for _toleration_ and consideration as opposed to mysticism, irrationality, and theological or state authority. didn't the allies represent these western values against the nazis!" but the matter is altogether more complicated and my account risks swerving into something too grandiose: for this is not a matter of principle but of shock and grief. if the values associated with enlightenment are undermined, this is not to remove the romantic legacy from its undoing. for if the second war casts doubt on systematicity, it is no less destructive to the vatic, the occult, the charismatic, the emotional solidarity of communion. [10] there are new difficulties. it's difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value or domination by one group of another as justifiable, hard not to associate systematic operations with the systematicity of the extermination process or preemptory authority with fascism. these associations overgeneralize: but the pairs are subliminally linked, the one stigmatized by the other. benjamin said it best and the second war made it ineradicable (roughly): every act of civilization is at the same time an act of barbarism. when the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive . . . [olson, "the kingfishers"] the vehemence of the civil rights movement and the anti vietnam war movement can be seen in this context: the shadow of the second war, growing darker as the immediate compensatory shock of the first postwar decades wore off, spurred the pace of demands for change and contributed to a sometimes millenarian we-can't-go-on-the-old-way-anymore zeal. in the u.s., the war on the war in vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the second war--the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war. [11] the realization that white, heterosexual christian men of the west have no exclusive franchise on articulating the "highest" values of humankind was certainly around prior to the second war, but the war added a nauseating repulsiveness to such "canonical" views; as if they were not just something to dispute but could no longer be stomached at all. the depth and breadth of the challenge to the western canon may be a measure of the effect of the war, though few of the parties to the controversy choose to frame it this way. it's now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the great war in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm; just as we better understand the romantics when we keep in mind the context of the french revolution. the effects of the second war are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited. [12] i don't mean "war poetry" in the sense of poems about the war; they are notoriously scarce and beside the point i want to make here. of course, there are many accounts of the war--documentary, personal, theoretical--and many visualizations of the war in film, photography, painting. but the scope or core of the second war cannot be represented only by the conventional techniques developed to depict events, scenes, battles, political infamies. only the surface of the war can be pictured. [13] to be sure, the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the first world war. in the wake of the second war, however, the meaning, and urgency, of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis. that is, such work which had started as a heady, even giddy, aesthetic investigation had become primarily an act of human reconstruction and reimagining. radical modernism can be characterized by the discovery of the entity-status of language--not just verbal language but signification systems/processes; thus, the working hypothesis about the autonomy of the medium, of the compositional space; the flattening of the euclidian space of representing and its implicit metaphysics of displacement and reification of objects. i think all of these fundamental ontological and aesthetic discoveries and inventions are carried forward into the radical late 20th century work but with a different critical understanding of the implications of this new textual space. as if we could ignore the consequences of explosions fracture the present warm exhaust in our lungs would turn us inside out of gloves avoid words like "war" needs subtler poisons as if conscious of ends and means scream in every nerve every breath every grain of dust to dust cancers over the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream the bloodstream [_waldrop, the road is everywhere_] after the second war, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic spirit or imagination as transcendent. the meaning of the modernist textual practice has been interpreted in ways that contrast with some of its original interpretations: _toward_ the incommensurability of different discourse systems, _against_ the idea of poetry as an imperializing or world-synthesizing agency (of the zeitgeist), not only because these ideas tend to impart to the poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective but also because they diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice. thus, the emphasis in the new american poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself. in the center of movement, a debate. before beginning, a pause. . . . pianissimo. curious symptom, this, that the man appears mildly self-satisfied, as if, in spite of his obvious confusion and . . . so ill at ease [nick piombino, _poems_] after the war, there is also greater attention to the ideological function of language: taking the word/world-materializing techniques of radical modernism and applying them to show how "everyday" language practices manipulate and dominate; that is, the investigation of the social dimension of language as reality-producing through the use of radical modernist procedures. how we read it line after line given one look refresh the eyes against the abyss [larry eigner, _another time in fragments_] poetry after the war has its psychic imperatives: to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command. this is one way to understand the political content of its form. we are in a sandheap we are discovered not solid the floor based on misunderstanding. [susan howe, _the liberties_] if racism and cultural supremacism are no longer tolerable, then literary history has to be rewritten. this has its primary expression in the proliferation of poetry that rejects a monoculturally centric point-of-view. [14] jerome rothenberg's anthologies epitomize one aspect of this development. _technicians of the sacred_ insisted on the immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of the "tribal" poetries of native americans (on both american continents), africans, peoples of oceania. this was a concerted assault on the primacy of western high culture and an active attempt to find in other, non-western/non-oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our own. moreover, the "recovery" of native american culture by a jewish brooklyn-born first generation poet-as-anthologist whose aesthetic roots were in the european avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our _domestic_ genocide. this gesture cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way of recovering from the second war by refusing to cover over the genocide that has allowed a false unity to the idea of american literature. rothenberg's anthologies present a multicultural america of many voices in a way that explicitly rejects eurosupremacism from _within_ a european perspective--that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of europe as such in favor of idealized "america." [15] the effect of the second war is audible not only in the subject matter of the new american poetry of the 1950s but also in its form, in its insistence on form (as never more than the extension of content, in creeley's phrase, echoed by olson). he had been stuttering, by the edge of the street, one foot still on the sidewalk, and the other in the gutter . . . like a bird, say, wired to flight, the wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed. the words, several, and for each, several senses. "it is very difficult to sum up briefly . . ." it always was. [robert creeley, _for love_] "i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" does not refer to the war, but it can't help doing so despite itself. "howl" makes it apparent that something has gone wrong with america by the early 1950s: the whole "calm" of this period can be read as a repression that ginsberg, and others, reacted- powerfully, resonantly--against. not as sassoon--"i'm going crazy; i'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns"; that's the difference between the two wars: the malaise is not locatable as the official event of the war, the battles: the whole of everyday life has lost its foundations. and the poetry--or some of it--either registered this loss of foundation in the everyday, or invented ways of articulating new foundations, strikingly without the grandiosity or optimism of some of its modernist sources. on the street i am met with constant hostility and i would have finally nothing else around me, except my children who are trained to love and whom i intend to leave as relics of my intentions. [creeley, "a fragment"] these lacustrine cities grew out of loathing into something forgetful, although angry with history. they are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance. though this is only one example. . . . [john ashbery, "these lacustrine cities"] the new american poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of futurism, voriticism or the tradition of eliot. it rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail; extending the innovations of the 1910 to 1917 period, but giving them an entirely different psychic registration. think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in creeley or eigner as opposed to the controlling allegories of pound or eliot, think of ashbery's or spicer's self cancellation compared to williams's relaxed prerogatives of self or stein's exuberant hubris. this ocean, humiliating in its disguises tougher than anything. no one listens to poetry. the ocean does not mean to be listened to. a drop or crash of water. it means nothing. it is bread and butter pepper and salt. the death that young men hope for. aimlessly it pounds the shore. white and aimless signals. no one listens to poetry. [jack spicer, "thing language"] or think of olson suggesting his project as a poet is to find a way out of the "western box," or duncan's _before the war_, or rothenberg, in his essay on the war, writing of discontent with "regularity and clarity as a reflection of the nature of god." (in his essay, rothenberg quotes creeley's recent poem from _windows_: "ever since hitler / or well before that / fact of human appetite / addressed with brutal / indifference others / killed or tortured . . . / . . . no possible way / out of it smiled or cried / or tore at it and died".) to link the new american poetry with the second war in this way suggests that the systematic extermination process had a profound effect on american attitudes in the 1950s. no doubt this projects more than is evident. while the effect of world war 2 on the united states has been far-reaching, and not only for those who fought in the war and their families, the lagers may well have been a distant issue for most americans. in contrast, the cold war and the u.s.'s new hegemonic global role would be a more obvious context for a sociohistorical reading of the new american poets. but something else lurks in these poems of the "other" tradition that suggests a discomfort with american complacency that the cold war does not quite account for. 1st sf home rainout since. bounce tabby-cat giants. newspapers left in my house. my house is aquarius. i don't believe the water-bearer has equal weight on his shoulders. the lines never do. we give equal space to everything in our lives. eich mann proved that false in killing like you raise wildflowers. witlessly i can not accord sympathy to those who do not recognize the human crisis. [spicer, _language_] the human crisis seems to have wounded a different, slightly younger cluster of american poets that keeps forming and reforming in my mind and i find it difficult to ignore the fact that they were born during the second world war. susan howe gives an explicit account of what i take here to be significant: for me there was no silence before armies. i was born in boston massachusetts on june 10th, 1937, to an irish mother and american father. . . . by 1937 the nazi dictatorship was well established in germany. all dissenting political parties had been liquidated and concentration camps had already been set up. . . . in the summer of 1938 my mother and i were staying . . . in ireland and i had just learned to walk, when czechoslovakia was dismembered . . . . that october we sailed home on a ship crowded with refugees. when i was two the german army invaded poland and world war ii began in the west. . . . american fathers march off into the hot chronicles of global struggle but mothers were left. . . . from 1939 until 1946 in news photographs, day after day i saw signs of culture exploding into murder. . . . i became part of the ruin. in the blank skies over europe i was strife represented. . . . those black and white picture shots--moving or fixed--were a subversive generation. i wouldn't want to give an inclusive list of this just more extraordinary part-generation of _newer_ american poets born between 1937 and 1944, but a partial list would include clark coolidge, michael palmer, lyn hejinian, david melnick, tom mandel, michael lally, ted greenwald, ray dipalma, nick piombino, ann lauterbach, peter seaton, jim brodey, charles north, fanny howe, george quasha, charles stein, robert grenier, ron padgett, stephen rodefer, john taggart, mauren owen, lorenzo thomas, lewis warsh, michael davidson, tony towle, bill berkson, geoff young, kathleen fraser, john perelman--all contemporaries of john lennon, bob dylan, and richard foreman. (i recognize how arbitrary it is to leave off the years just before and after, or not to mention tom raworth, born in england in 1938.) o u u u -ni form ity o u u u ni formity o u unit de formity u unit deformity [robert grenier, "song"] while i don't want to stereotype individuals who, if anything, stand radically and determinately against stereotyping, generalizing, sweeping claims, ideological pronouncements and the like, i've been struck by how much these individual artists have _that_ in common: as if they share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem--an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choices made, the obscenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extra-poetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally, nonliterary, career patterns. in short, they share a radical rejection of conventional american values of conformism, fitting in, getting along / going along,--of accessibility to the point of self-betrayal. an evening . . . spent thinking about what my life would be . . . if i'd've been accepted to and gone where i applied . . . where i'd learned different social graces than the ones i have where some of the material values of the american dream had rubbed off . . . if i'd settled down and settled for the foundation on a house for future generations instead of assuming immediately past generations my foundation to mine if i'd been a little quicker to learn what was expected of me . . . i've probably been saved by a streak of stubbornness by a slow mind and a tendency to drift that requires my personal understanding before happening . . . [ted greenwald, "whiff"] uncompromising integrity is one way i'd put it, emphasizing that the social costs of such uncompromising integrity- inaudibility or marginality, difficult immediate personal and economic circumstance, isolation, feisty impatience with less exacting choices--are not unknown to some of these individuals. it's embarrassing to feel my self body image etc (often) defined by people around me (my reaction to their reactions) _that_ embarrasses me a lot zeal embarrasses me, your zeal for instance always lining up poets and their poems one up one down in relation to you and your poems . . . most of all . . . i'm embarrassed by death death is really the only embarrassing thing and sometimes (unexpectedly these days more often) it scares the shit out of me [greenwald, "for ted, on election day"] or put it this way: i find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of "public" forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative / authoritarian language structures. i hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: an insistence on the "human" scale of poetry--on the "human crisis"--in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior. the lost family of scatter cabal thought under disorder and music filling the crumpled space owned by another taught under disorder to make a path through judgement . . . [ray dipalma, _raik_] while i would surely point to the remarkable amount of what is now reductively called "theory" that is implicit in the work of most of these poets, many of them have eloquently refused the "mantle" of poetics and theory, as if to engage in such secondary projects would implicate them in a grandiosity or even megalomania that the work itself abjures. what we know is the way we fall when we fall off the little we ride when we ride away from the things we're given to make us forget the things we gave up [michael lally, "in the distance"] while the formal invention and innovations among these poets is enormous, few of them have chosen to promote them in an impersonal or art-historical way; invention is not seen in avant-garde or canonical terms but rather as a necessary extension of a personally eccentric investigation, crucial because of the "internal" needs of the articulation and not justified or justifiable by external criteria. we're strange features, ignoring things. our hero separates from a problem in pink, the thought to be able to thing in the world. . . . so this is the perfect plan. and here's a creative code. for all its on or off old self, immersion, power and command. when the world was wars and wars, according to cause breaking out from the conditions for events and their obsessed leaders. brute editing, the way the frame's the response to survival aids to lust contains the round rations on an actual summit. one teaches sense to a child saying you sense how we've always talked. . . . a deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving tracks the brain blew away . . . predatory signs which whiz by and stop, the lid and the soul, there are reasons for this. [peter seaton, "need from a wound would do it"] so the absence of a substantial amount of poetics or commentary (the exceptions are striking but not contradictory), more, the refusal of commentary as explanation, mark a complete engagement with the poetic act as _necessarily_ self-sufficient. thus: a reluctance to link up formal innovation--which is understood as eccentric and self-defined rather than ideologically or socially defined--with larger political, social or aesthetic activities, as in groups or movements, while at the same time refusing to romanticize or sentimentalize "individuality" in place of the values of poetic work itself. not by `today' but by recurrent light its course of blossoming is not effected by the sun at all? `powers of darkness' at large? it `unfolds' `unfolding' _flowering of powers of darkness at large_? i `see' at `dawn'? [grenier, "rose"] this formulation suggests a relatively sharp demarcation with the generation born after 1945--the so-called baby boomers who came of age during a time when personal discomfort with, or distaste for, dominant american value could be linked up to national and international cultural and political movements that seem to share these values. in 1958 cultural and political dissidence would have taken place against a totally different ground than ten years later. the situation of the fifties may have induced a sense of isolation or self-reliance in contrast to the sixties version of sometimes giddy group-solidarity. damage frightens sometimes--reminder of present danger--loss, deprivation. . . . one didn't want to view the wreckage constantly but sought the consolation of lovely sights and subtle sounds. one could accept a single scratch but in the midst of the thicket, the brambles burn and the delay in walking at last annoys and one loses patience. [piombino, _poems_] the poetry of murder helped instigate the murder of poetry. looking for the root, i forgot the sun. [piombino, "9/20/88"] perhaps this can be described as a process of internalization, looking downward or inward ("the root") rather than outward ("the sun")--not upward as in idealism but falling down with the gravity of the earth, the grace of the body, even the body--the materiality--of language. there is, in many of the poems of these poets, a persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed while refusing to return to, to accept, normalcy or a new equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage. this can be as much a cause for comedy as solemnity. weracki dciece hajf wet pboru eitusic at foerual bif thorus t'inalie thodo to tala ienstable ate sophoabl [david melnick, _pcoet_] poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go unregistered. and they do this more in the minute particulars of registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest. what is said long before the chronicle is told smokey stuff in damp rooms carved out blocked out piled with slits and windows . . . [ray dipalma, _chan_] the psychic dislocation of the second war occurred when these poets were toddlers; their first experience of language, of truth and repression, of fear and future, are inextricably tied to the second war. perhaps poetry presented a possible field for articulation for those who atypically stayed in touch with--perhaps could not successfully repress--these darker realities. a great block of wedge wood stint stays at the star of its corner which. a divider in pierces depends, wans. for is what i have made be only salvage? sat in my robes, folds. decomposed, fled. the world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the very pole. geometric, a lingual dent? drainage, albany. where at the last stand all this sphere that herded me? my cell a corner on the filtering world, all out herein my belts. things in trim they belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. . . . the world in anger is an angled hole? . . . the light that leaks from composition alone. scalded by a tentative. expels the tiny expounds thing huge, things made be. any and it's large. a universe is not of use. [clark coolidge, _melencolia_] these tentative angles into the unknown are a far cry from rothenberg's explosive, disturbing, graphic struggle with the memories of the second war in _khurbn_: "practice your scream" i said (why did i say it?) because it was his scream & wasn't my own it hovered between us bright to our senses always bright it held the center place then somebody else came up & stared deep in his eyes there found a memory of horses galloping faster the wheels dyed red behind them the poles had resolved a feast day but the jew locked in his closet screamed into his vest a scream that had no sound therefore spiralled around the world so wild that it shattered stones . . . ["dos geshray (the scream)"] _khurbn_ risks the pornographic or voyeuristic out of a need to exorcise the images that hold us captive if not spoken or revisualized, marking an end to rothenberg's own past refusal to depict the extermination process. [16] in contrast, charles reznikoff's last book, _holocaust_ (1975), which is based on documentary evidence about the lagers gathered from the records of the eichmann and nuremberg trials, presents a series of details, fragments cut away from the horror. reznikoff offers no explanation of the depicted events and he provides neither explicit emotional nor moral response to them: he leaves us alone with our reactions, making us to find our own screams or to articulate our own silences. seemingly flat, documentary, particularized, _holocaust_--like all of reznikoff's work since his first book in 1917--is a mosaic of salient incidents: a visitor once stopped one of the children: a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay. he had only one shoe and the other foot was bare, and his coat of good quality had no buttons. the visitor asked him for his name and then what his parents were doing; and he said, "father is working in the office and mother is playing the piano." then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his parents soon- they always told the children they would be leaving soon to rejoin their parents- and the visitor answered, "certainly. in a day or two." at that the child took out of his pocket half an army biscuit he had been given in camp and said, "i am keeping this half for mother;" and then the child who had been so gay burst into tears. this detail from reznikoff brings forward, in an ineffably shattering way, the atmosphere of willed forgetting of the 1950s, or now. we blithely go about our business--busy, gay, distracted; until that blistering moment of consciousness that shatters all hopes when we recognize that we are orphaned, have lost our parents--in the sense of our foundations, our bearing in the world; until, that is, a detail jolts the memory, when we feel, as in the fragments in our pocket, what we have held back out of denial. [17] denial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability. reznikoff and rothenberg initiate this process, but no more than other poets, ranges of poetry, that register this denial in the process of seeking forms that find ways out of the "western box". [18] in contrast to--or is it an extension of?--adorno's famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after auschwitz, i would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the second war. ----------------------------------------------------------- sources for poems cited john ashbery, _rivers and mountains_. ecco press, new york, 1966. clark coolidge, _melencolia_. great barrington, massachusetts: the figures, 1987. robert creeley, "a fragment," in _the charm_ (early poems) and "hart crane," the opening poem of _for love_, both in _the collected poems_. berkeley: university of california press, 1982. "ever since hitler . . ." in _windows_. new york: new directions, 1990. ray dipalma, _raik_. new york: roof books, 1989. "five poems from _chan_" in "43 poets (1984)," ed. charles bernstein, in _boundary 2_, xiv: 1-2 (1986). larry eigner, frontpiece poem in _another time in fragments_. london: fulcrum, 1967. ben friedlander, _kristallnacht: november 9-10, 1938_. privately printed, 1988. allen ginsberg, _howl_. san francisco: city lights, 1956. ted greenwald, _common sense_. kensington, california: l publications, 1978. robert grenier, _phantom anthems_: oakland: o books, 1986. susan howe, _ the liberties_ (1980), in _the europe of trusts_ (los angeles: sun & moon, 1990). michael lally, _rocky dies yellow_. berkeley: blue wind, 1975. david melnick, _pcoet_. san francisco: g.a.w.k., 1975. charles olson, _the collected poems_, ed. george f. butterick. berkeley: university of california press, 1987. bob perelman, _the first world_. the figures, 1986. nick piombino, "in the center of movement, a debate" and "a simple invocation would be," in _poems_. sun & moon press, 1988; "9/20/88" in "postmodern poetries", ed. jerome mcgann, in _verse_, vol. 7, no. 1 (1990). charles reznikoff, "children", in _holocaust_. los angeles: black sparrow, 1975. jerome rothenberg, _khurbn & other poems_. new directions, 1989. jack spicer, _language_ (1964) in _the collected books of jack spicer_, ed. robin blaser. black sparrow, 1975. rosmarie waldrop, _the road is everywhere or stop this body_. columbia, missouri: open places, 1978. barrett watten, _under erasure_, excerpted in "postmodern poetries" in _verse_. wheeler, 'bulldozing the subject', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-wheeler-bulldozing.txt bulldozing the subject by elizabeth a. wheeler university of california, berkeley _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by elizabeth a. wheeler, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. cut #1: %mudanzas% when i hear the word "postmodernism" i see white people moving into the neighborhood and brown people having to move out. my friend tinkerbell from tustin and i used to live in an apartment building wedged between a condominium and a tenement. we went to an open house in the condominium; the units sold for $275,000-$300,000 apiece. it looked like the _qe ii_. the architect had added portholes, interior vistas, and pink balustrades. i went out on the balcony of the penthouse. through the pink railings i saw a moving truck below, a small local one with "mudanzas" painted on the side, the kind that carries puerto rican families further out from the city where they can still afford to live. when i hear postmodernism i see pink balustrades in the foreground with a gray truck behind them. not the balustrades alone, but also the changes--the %mudanzas%. [1] it is no accident that the brooklyn academy of music, showcase for the latest postmodern compositions, defines one edge of a neighborhood called park slope, a neighborhood formerly working-class but now home to young professionals. it is no accident that the temporary contemporary museum of art in los angeles is housed in a renovated factory a block from skid row. it is no accident that postmodern architecture imprints itself most firmly on the urban landscape in the form of upmarket shopping malls. postmodernism and gentrification are partners in joint venture. [2] ". . . the %scenario% of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production real, has disappeared," writes jean baudrillard (_simulations_ 47). he is wrong in thinking that production has vanished from the face of the earth; it has instead moved to the third world. he is right in touching on the unreality of life in postindustrial cities. it is thus extremely naive to look for ethnology among the savages or in some third world--it is here, everywhere, in the metropolis, among the whites, in a world completely catalogued and analysed and then artificially revived as though real . . . (16) [3] i write this essay towards an ethnology of postmodernism. it starts with an image of a city street: melrose avenue in los angeles. on melrose, a district of stylish boutiques, there is a store painted in day-glo colors and stenciled with skulls like the mexican images used in celebrating %el dia de los muertos%, the day of the dead. the store is extremely successful and has counterparts in many american cities. it specializes in `kitsch' artifacts: sequin picture frames, pink flamingoes, barbie lunch boxes, but particularly inexpensive mexican religious articles. as baudrillard says, consumer culture needs to "stockpile the past in plain view" (19). the store has a day-of-the-dead quality: when the plastic dashboard virgins go up on the shelves next to the plaster elvises, pop nostalgia renders every icon equivalent. the experience of shopping there seems to have the power to cancel out the real experience of growing up chicano/a and catholic. "for ethnology to live, its object must die"--". . . the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference" (13, 11). [4] i feel a guilty fascination for the store because it looks very much like my own aesthetic. i have always loved bright colors, colors that looked garish in my parents' suburban home with its white walls, white curtains, white dishes. and for years i have collected mexican religious articles, sneaking into %botanicas% where no one spoke english, hoping they wouldn't divine the irreligious, "inauthentic" uses to which i planned to put such items. when i walk into the store on melrose, i see my own secret life as a kitsch consumer exposed. [5] i like to think, however, that there is more going on between me and my virgins of guadalupe than my making fun of them. with their angels and showers of roses, i find them beautiful and redemptive. they speak to my desire to connect with the powerful symbols of another culture, and my protestant longing for a spirituality that has festive colors and a mother in it. my taste also has an element of defiance: when i was growing up in southern california, mexicans were regarded as lower than us whites, and with the exception of `genuine' folk art, so was their culture. [6] postmodernism is all about theft and transformation, as for instance my `inauthentic' use of the virgin of guadalupe. here are the successive phases of the postmodern image: -the image is part of a culture, and used by that culture with straightforward enjoyment; -the image is rejected as tacky, part of an outmoded past to be left behind; -the image is resuscitated and used defiantly, ironically, self-consciously, often as part of a new chic. [7] imagine the store on melrose again. now there is a low rider cruising down the avenue, carrying a chicano couple dressed in the latest youth fashion. the car has a beautiful turquoise and red metallic paint job. it has a plastic virgin on the dashboard. but there is a crucial difference between the car and the store. [8] unlike baudrillard, i believe that postmodern thefts and transformations do not have to kill the culture to which they refer. a mexican-american can fragment, reappropriate, reconstruct "mexicanness" for herself or himself, and help to define what it means to be mexican. this variety of postmodernism maintains a relationship with a living community; it is not an autopsy on dead referents. in this paper i will describe two postmodernisms, one informal and personal, one heavily capitalized and imposed from outside. i will spend much of my time criticizing the ways french postmodern theory reinforces the cynical logic of kitsch consumerism. [9] intolerance is the hallmark of dogma. while postmodern theory, particularly of the french sort, claims to have no "metanarrative," it reveals its dogmatism by only tolerating certain readings of itself. if baudrillard refuses to ask or answer moral questions, then perversely i want to view him as a moralist. in _simulations: the precession of simulacra_, he describes the death of the referent: -it is the reflection of a basic reality -it masks and perverts a basic reality -it masks the absence of a basic reality -it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (11) [10] what if we read baudrillard's scale not as descriptive but as proscriptive, as a hierarchy of values? those of us who still believe in realities, however fragmented, contested, and multiple, can then be dismissed as unprogressive, as "naive and cognitively immature" (gilligan 30).^1^ [11] how could this postmodern scale of values inform the ethnology of a particular city: los angeles? baudrillard begins with the idea that "what draws the crowds" to disneyland is not so much the entry into fantastic worlds as the "miniaturised and %religious% revelling in real america" (23). he immediately moves beyond an ideological analysis to a far more sweeping commentary: disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of los angeles and the america surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. it is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality-principle . . . los angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation--a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions . . . this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. (25, 26) [12] anyone who has ever tried to get around los angeles without a car knows how real it is, how mired in `space and dimensions,' how cruel to the poor. in promoting the unreality of los angeles, baudrillard does the cops' dirty work. because it is the most segmented of american cities, it is possible for the mayor to instruct the police to round up homeless people with bulldozers and drive them into camps without shade or adequate sanitation. it is possible to grow up middle-class a few miles from skid row and never see a homeless person. the myth of los angeles as a fabulous unreality justifies the quiet elimination of its less-than fabulous, all-too-real aspects. [13] richard rorty speaks of the "strand in contemporary french thought" that "starts off from suspicion of marx and freud, suspicion of the masters of suspicion, suspicion of `unmasking'" (161). by itself, an ideological analysis of los angeles would remain impoverished. however, without the intellectual tool of unmasking, there is no suffering to uncover. without awareness of power, it is the powerless who disappear. [14] postmodern architecture plays a concrete role in the disappearance of the unwanted `referent.' at 515 east 6th street on skid row, there is a soup kitchen and shelter called the weingardt center. elegantly renovated in postmodern style, the building has wpa gargoyles and goddesses of work augmented with medieval banners and tastefully framed reproductions of modern art. maxine johnston, director of the center, does not allow her patrons to form a soup line in front of the building. it would spoil the look. instead, they line up around the corner, in front of the ugly building where my friend tinkerbell works. [15] johnston's penchant for postmodern decor and her harshness towards homeless people are more than individual eccentricities. they form part of a pattern. the city of los angeles has devoted well over twenty million dollars to a redevelopment agency called sro, inc., which agency purchases single resident occupancy hotels, renovates and postmodernizes them. at 5th and san julian, the hardest corner of skid row, a flophouse has been elaborately double coded. it has neon signs in old west, victorian style. it has yuppie colors of mauve, pale green and beige. it has security guards everywhere. [16] on the morning of its rededication, andy robeson, director of sro, inc., stood outside the hotel with mayor tom bradley. robeson waved his hand across the panorama of 5th and san julian, the street life, the raw deals, the people sleeping on the sidewalk. he turned to the mayor. "this has gotta go," he said. now bulldozers sweep 5th and san julian three times a week; robeson is agitating to make it every day. [17] how can it be said that the palest icon, the smallest neon-victorian curlicue, enables and justifies the displacement of real people? jochen schulte-sasse writes that to comprehend postmodernism we have to examine the "flow of capitalized images" (130). while modernism depends upon ideologically-charged, closed narratives, postmodernism relies on "the immediately transparent visual situation. owning such images is capital, and the capital they represent reflects the capital that is invested in them. every political campaign reveals the situation anew" (schulte-sasse 139). in this well-financed, officially sanctioned solution to homelessness, the transparency of the neon sign makes it an excellent mask. the sign resembles reagan/bush's image of the family--glowing, oversimplified, easy to read. its readability distracts us from lived experience. it steals from our mouths the vocabulary we need to describe anger, family breakdown, the failure of all solutions to homelessness. henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--precession of simulacra--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. (baudrillard 2) [18] postmodern architecture is highly appropriate to the los angeles landscape. its pastels and fanciful details are analogous to the thousands of stucco bungalows built in los angeles in the 1920's and 1930's. both architectural forms represent certain middle-class dreams, but they also differ in worldview. [19] although built to look like a miniature castle, hacienda, mosque or tudor cottage, the stucco bungalow can be called modernist. families shut the doors of their dreamhouses and imagine themselves into a narrative, a tale of their freedom out west, their escape from an extended family and messy history back east. [20] in contrast, a postmodern residence is not a fictive universe. it is a surface, oddly two-dimensional, meant to be scanned rather than lived in. "it seems to me that the essay (montaigne) is postmodern, while the fragment (_the athaeneum_) is modern," lyotard writes (81). a postmodern building bears a very strong resemblance to an essay. it usually has the strong verticals and horizontals of the printed page and of the modern skyscraper. "quotations" from past architectures are inserted into this format. [21] the art of quotation serves many purposes. particularly characteristic of postmodernism is a blank parody, in which it is impossible to determine the attitude of the citer towards the citation (jameson 118). despite this frequent indeterminacy of attitude, quotation in postmodern architecture serves the same function it serves in the essay: it invokes authority. strangely enough, linda hutcheon sees the quotation of classical motifs as a populist gesture. under her definition of "populism," the roman empire was populist because almost everyone was subject to its authority: like all parody, postmodernist architecture %can% certainly be elitist, if the codes necessary for its comprehension are not shared by both encoder and decoder. but the frequent use of a very common and easily recognized idiom--often that of classicism--works to combat such exclusiveness. (200) [22] architects, artists, planners and developers read postmodern theory and put it into postmodern practice. hutcheon goes so far as to valorize postmodern architects as "activists, the voices of the users" (8). the %user% can mean the inhabitant, or it can mean the perpetrator of an abuse. what happens when urban planning is done by people who believe there is no subject? cut #2: it will be "white" like one of malevitch's squares i was talking with my friend paul lopes about the postmodern fragmentation of the "subject," the concept of the individual human doer or creator in western philosophy. paul said it reminded him of cults. the first job of a cult is to break down your previous identity and make you distrust it. "but they don't leave it fragmented," he said. "they give you a new identity to take its place--one they choose for you." [23] while baudrillard and lyotard may genuinely believe in the death of the subject, most people do not. maxine johnston and andy robeson, for example, still believe in a referent. there is a reality out there they wish to manage into submission, and they use postmodern architecture cynically to help them do so. to invoke conspiracy theory, the death of a homeless `subject' creates a vacuum that can be filled by a `subject' with a better credit rating. returning to the cult analogy, identity does not stay fragmented--another identity rushes in to take its place. "we have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces--reinforces--the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. but that is a question we must leave open" (jameson 125). [24] in "what is postmodernism?" lyotard describes his ideal aesthetic of sublime painting. again, if we view him as moralist as well as narrator, this process of "making it impossible to see" reads as deliberate erasure of the subject. the critic learns to look the other way when he hears bulldozers coming. since those most likely to be erased are people of color, when lyotard says his ideal is "white" i take him at his word. it will be "white" like one of malevitch's squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain. (78) [25] french postmodern theorists in general, lyotard and baudrillard in particular, embrace the role of pain in knowledge. the impulse is paralleled by the sadomasochism in much postmodern literature and film. both baudrillard and lyotard describe terror with a steady indifference. richard rorty comments on this philosophical `dryness' which descends from foucault: it takes no more than a squint of the inner eye to read foucault as a stoic, a dispassionate observer of the present social order, rather than its concerned critic. . . . it is this remoteness which reminds one of the conservative who pours cold water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the problems of his fellow-citizens with the eye of the future historian. writing "the history of the present," rather than suggestions about how our children might inhabit a better world in the future, gives up not just on the notion of a common human nature, and on that of "the subject," but on our untheoretical sense of social solidarity. it is as if thinkers like foucault and lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one more metanarrative about the fortunes of "the subject" that they cannot bring themselves to say "we" long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong. (172) baudrillard observes in a dispassionate footnote: from now on, it is impossible to ask the famous question: "from what position do you speak?"- "how do you know?"- "from where do you get the power?," without immediately getting the reply: "but it is %of% (from) you that i speak"--meaning, it is you who speaks, it is you who knows, power is you. a gigantic circumlocution, circumlocution of the spoken word, which amounts to irredeemable blackmail and irremovable deterrence of the subject supposed to speak. . . . (77 78) [26] my first reaction to the above passage is an untheoretical and wordless rage. it is the anger every woman must have experienced, the feeling of being charged with our own victimization. ("let's rape his daughter and see how he talks then," tink says as she passes through the room.) in this explication baudrillard calls for the end of dualistic thought, a central postmodernist project: "the medium/message confusion, of course, is a correlative of the confusion between sender and receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all the dual, polar structures which formed the discursive organization of language, referring to the celebrated grid of functions in jakobson. . . ." (76). [27] the critique of dualism was a feminist project before it was a postmodern one. adrienne rich: the rejection of the dualism, of the positive negative polarities between which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an undercurrent of feminist thought. and, rejecting them, we reaffirm the existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively defined: not only women, but the "untouchable," the "unmanly," the "nonwhite," the "illiterate": the "invisible." which forces us to confront the problem of the essential dichotomy: power/powerlessness. (48) [28] ironically, baudrillard uses the critique to an opposite end. while the feminist wants to reveal the "invisible," to expose the power relations inherent in dualism--white over black, male over female, gentry over homeless--baudrillard maintains that without dualism power relations simply disappear. that is, if a conversation is not organized in binary oppositions, it becomes completely disordered. however, there are other ways to critique the dualism of structural linguistics. for instance, in "the problem of speech genres," mikhail bakhtin maintains that a conversation is ordered not in sentence parts a la roman jakobson, but according to the shifts in speaking subjects. therefore it is still possible to ask, "from what position do you speak?" speaking "%of%" me does not mean speaking "(from)" me. [29] we cannot sufficiently counter the dryness of baudrillard's logic without invoking the category of experience. when baudrillard speaks through the voice of the media or of the nuclear arms race, he speaks of "the inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is made for us." violence is inconsequential unless it happens %to you%. baudrillard's indifference reveals the comfort of his own position. for the man who has his freedom, freedom is unimportant, both personally and theoretically. black south africans know that freedom is real because they do not have it. a woman unwillingly pregnant who cannot obtain an abortion knows choice is real because she does not have it. when baudrillard writes that "prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral" (25), we know for certain he has never been to jail. [30] baudrillard's mission seems to be to make us accept the blank fact of terror. his work contains seeds of contempt for those who refuse to accept the horror of the world. this rubric marks out a diverse group, from people who desire the comfort of realist art, to those who fight for political change. for baudrillard, to insist on the category of reality is to be in collusion with the powers that-be. lyotard's contempt for the realist is even more blatant. his sublime painting will "impart no knowledge about reality (experience)"; he disparages realist art forms like commercial photography and film, whose job is "to stabilize the referent" and to "enable the addressee . . . to arrive quickly at the consciousness of his own identity": "the painter and the novelist must refuse to lend themselves to such therapeutic uses" (78, 74). [31] beneath his contempt lies the assumption that people cannot detect the harshness of their own experience and must have it explained to them. when lyotard uses the word "therapeutic" disparagingly, he dismisses the role of the artist as healer. it never occurs to him that the viewers, the "patients," may have experienced more horror than he will ever know. [32] while realism is the dominant style of commercial media, the media do not have the deep stake in reality effects both lyotard and baudrillard attribute to them. television eats up postmodernism along with any other style available to it. therefore, parody is not intrinsically subversive, as baudrillard would claim. a postmodern segment of "mighty mouse," with fragments of 1940's episodes cut out of their narratives, edited by visual and rhythmic analogy, and set to a 1960's soul song, is no more or less subversive than any other kiddie cartoon. [33] jochen schulte-sasse makes an important refinement on the realism argument in pointing out the "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous" between modernism and post-modernism. he remarks that neoconservative politics uses both modes, making a modernist call for "authority" and "values" while engaging in a brilliant postmodern manipulation of images. schulte-sasse sees this vacillation as a weakness, "one reason why neoconservatism is likely to remain a transitory phenomenon." i see it as neoconservatism's strength: it has managed to win on both fronts, to appeal to the conscience while "colonizing the id" (145). the avant-garde, the state, or the television network can use either mode to any purpose. [34] lyotard's championship of the avant-garde sounds curiously outdated: an anxious baudelaire in his day made an almost identical argument for painting against photography. lyotard assumes that there is no creativity outside the artistic bohemia and that the vernacular is by nature reactionary. this is a common academic failing. in _rocking around the clock: music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture_, e. ann kaplan sees only two options: either commercial mass media generated by corporations, or the avant-garde. similarly, for laura mulvey there is only the dominating "male gaze" of hollywood movies, or a quite unwatchable brechtian cinema. [35] lyotard decries the contemporary process of increasing eclecticism and kitsch: " . . . one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats macdonalds food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears paris cologne in tokyo and "retro" clothes in hong kong; knowledge is a matter for tv games . . . but this realism of the `anything goes' is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield" (76). [36] lyotard helps to promote the process he decries. "the desire for the sublime makes one want to cut free from the words of the tribe," rorty writes (175). to deny the identity of a creative community is to help the media steal its products without acknowledgment. "local tone" is one of the reality-effects lyotard likes to see undermined by avant-garde art (79). "local tone" is the first quality stripped away by the commercial media. [37] a rap song by the african american group salt'n'pepa is postmodern in form--a montage of cuts from past musics--and very new york in feeling. when the same beat occurs in a candy commercial on tv, there is nothing black or local about it. in the age of cannibalization, "to cut free from the words of the tribe" is to cut the tribe free of its %own% words. [38] in seeking to "activate the differences and save the honor of the name," lyotard apparently desires the inclusion of new and varied voices in our definition of culture (80). however, if he rejects narratives of struggle and liberation, much of third world writing goes out the window again. for instance, cherrie moraga's _loving in the war years_ could be and has been called a postmodern autobiography, because of the montage of genres within the text; the ways sexuality and race are always constructed, never taken as givens; and her constant play between fragmentation and a unified self. nonetheless, moraga is also a self-declared "movement writer," a chicana lesbian feminist who keeps faith with the ideals of liberation (v). to use her image without her ideas is a reprehensible theft. [39] furthermore, current postmodern theory could never come to terms with her insistence on experience, emotion, and direct speech. moraga's sometime collaborator gloria anzaldua could be speaking of lyotard when she warns other women: bow down to the sacred bull, form. put frames and metaframes around the writing. achieve distance in order to win the coveted title "literary writer" or "professional writer." above all do not be simple, direct, nor immediate. (167) [40] in postmodernity it is indeed possible, as lyotard writes, "to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield" (17). price is the only difference between a plastic virgin of guadalupe for sale on melrose avenue or in a %botanica% in east los angeles. there is a 50% markup for ironic distance. if pop culture becomes art, the critic will have to work harder to redifferentiate herself or himself from the vulgar masses. hence the writing style of a lyotard: the invocation of classicism, the return to kant, the resuscitation of longinus' sublime and the traditional genre of the defense of poetry. the "lower" the culture, the "higher" the theory. [41] the anxious intellectual puts theory ahead of artistic practice; in fact, he or she attempts to make all of human experience look like an %example% of postmodern theory. this is evident in postmodern approaches to third world and/or feminist discourses. it is not only a matter of claiming such discourses for postmodernism; it is a matter of approving such discourses %because they are postmodern%. this somehow establishes their worth. craig owens: still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice (and i use the terms _presence_ and _voice_ advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice . . . i would like to propose, however, that women's insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. (61-62) william boelhower: this new ethnic pragmatics . . . in the very act of reflecting on its own limits, will discover the very strategies that make the ethnic %verbum% a major filter for reading the modern and so-called postmodern experience not as a universal condition but as a historical construct. (120) george lipsitz: but ethnic minority cultures play an important role in this postmodern culture. their exclusion from political power and cultural recognition has enabled them to cultivate a sophisticated capacity for ambiguity, juxtaposition, and irony--all key qualities in the postmodern aesthetic. (159) [42] as richard rorty points out, this intellectual anxiety has to do with the difficulty of being part of one's own generation. the middle-class members of the post-world war ii generation grew up in splendid isolation. in the united states we lived in suburban utopias, deliberately shielded from urban strife and any kind of past. in europe, especially in germany, cities were rebuilt out of concrete and the past was paved over. suburbanization made us stupid. i think of dustin hoffman in the film _the graduate_ (1968), floating aimlessly in his parents' pool. barbara ehrenreich: a generation ago, for example, hordes of white people fled the challenging, interracial atmosphere of the cities and settled in whites only suburbs . . . . cut off from the mainstream of humanity, we came to believe that pink is "flesh-color," that mayonnaise is a nutrient, and that barry manilow is a musician. (20) [43] in wim wenders' 1974 film _wrong move_, rudiger vogler wanders through the concrete wasteland of a bedroom town outside frankfurt: statt verzweifelt zu werden spurte ich nur, dass ich immer dummer wurde, und dass ich die wirklich verzweifelten um mich herum nur dumm anschauen konnte. trotzdem bewegte ich mich durch die zubetonnierte landschaft als sei ich noch immer der, der alles erlitte--der held. [instead of becoming desperate, i sensed that i was becoming stupider, and that i could only stare dumbly at the really desperate people around me. in spite of this, i moved though the concrete landscape as if i were still the one who suffered everything--the hero.] [44] by the mid-seventies the critique of suburbanized culture was in full swing. in the face of feminism and immigration of ethnic groups, the white male subject becomes worried that he is not the hero of the story anymore. this anxiety has also to do with the gentrification that started in the 1980s. when members of the suburban middle class moved back into the city, into areas such as kreuzberg in west berlin and downtown los angeles, which had been home to working-class immigrants and other minorities, we learned to negotiate a multi-cultural reality. [45] many critics before me have pointed out the irony that, just as previously-silenced, darker-skinned, non-western, female subjects begin to make themselves heard, the white european male declares "the death of the subject." i do not want to dwell on that irony here, particularly since i want to affirm that postmodernism is not a sham but a real process, a central part of our creative lives. it is its theoretization and some of its official uses which are inadequate and destructive. cut #3: lawrence welk goes pomo deep in the heart of the midwest, i am watching a rerun of "the lawrence welk show." i experience the deep spinal tingle of the "certification effect," as that most midwestern of television shows doubles for and validates the midwest itself.^2^ i try to shove down my hilarity in front of my grandfather. it strikes me that the show isn't "realist" at all; it suffers from a mannerism so extreme it makes parmigiano look like norman rockwell. simulated faces a la baudrillard: " . . . they are already purged of death, and even better than in life; more smiling, more authentic, in light of their model, like the faces in funeral parlors" (23). my grandmother, now in a nursing home, was wildly in love with lawrence welk. my parents and i used to watch the show to make fun of it. although we kept up our running ironic patter in front of the screen, over the years the show became a weirdly affirmative bonding ritual for the three of us. as i watch now, it scares me to realize how much of this midwestern ethic i have absorbed: the sentimentality, the enforced niceness, the determination to not `go over anybody's head.' when my parents moved out to los angeles after world war ii, much of their michigan past got erased. the more plebeian parts in particular got untold night after night at the dinner table. i have had to reconstruct them for myself with the help of this horrendous videotape. however, this is not a simulation; lawrence welk does not replace or erase me or my family. this odd archeology, this true-and-false process of calling myself a midwesterner, exists in a set of relationships. there is my desire to remember what my grandmother liked, and was like, before her strokes. there is the smartaleck sense of humor i share with my parents. out of the tacky pieces of my family, out of the worst of american culture, i am building a self. [46] i propose a double model for postmodernism. the official variety, the postmodernism of the development corporation and the dead referent, i call %classical% postmodernism. i name the variety after its reliance on classical motifs in architecture and in the essay; however, i also have in mind bakhtin's distinction between the classical and the grotesque (in _rabelais and his world_). for me as for him, classical art suffers because it is polished and finished off, denying its origins in unofficial popular art. a tv commercial or avant-garde monologue could be equally classical in their denial of origins. i see postmodernism as a creativity that begins in people's living rooms and automobiles and %then% makes its way to _documenta_ and the brooklyn academy of music. [47] the second variety i call %messy, vital% postmodernism after robert venturi, who wrote the first postmodernist manifesto: "i am for messy vitality over obvious unity" (16). this postmodernism is not ashamed of its relationship to popular culture and the vernacular. george lipsitz is quite right in commenting that pop music leads high art in the use of postmodern forms: it is on the level of commodified mass culture that the most popular, and often the most profound, acts of cultural %bricolage% take place. the destruction of established canons and the juxtaposition of seemingly inappropriate forms that characterize the self-conscious postmodernism of "high culture" have long been staples of commodified popular culture. (161) [48] while lipsitz is writing on chicano rock'n'roll, i know the truth of his statement through my own work on hiphop music. a three-minute hiphop track epitomizes the postmodern art of quotation. in a high-speed electronic theft the dj may combine cuts from funkadelic, kraftwerk, mozart, evelyn "champagne" king, spaghetti westerns and senate testimony. usually this is the low-affect quotation characteristic of postmodernism. sometimes, however, you can discern an attitude towards the material quoted, which leads us to some of the differences between classical and messy, vital postmodernism. [49] richard rorty writes of the habermas-lyotard debate: we could agree with lyotard that we need no more metanarratives, but with habermas that we need less dryness. we could agree with lyotard that studies of the communicative competence of the transhistorical subject are of little use in reinforcing our sense of identification with our community, while still insisting on the importance of that sense. (173) [50] a community feeling still reverberates in the urban popular musics we can call postmodern. for instance, the beats of james brown are ubiquitous in hiphop music; the form would not exist without him. brown even recorded a rap song, "i'm real," to call attention to his continued existence in the face of so many copies. when the hiphop composer quotes james brown, his or her attitude is always reverent. however, the listener cannot detect this reverence from the song alone. it is community-based knowledge. one has to hear people from harlem or the bronx talk about brown and his status in black music history. [51] lipsitz stresses the postmodernism of chicano rock'n'roll, but also its grounding in the culture's experience: ". . . this marginal sensibility in music amounts to more than novelty or personal eccentricity; it holds legitimacy and power as the product of a real historical community's struggle with oppression" (175). [52] the individual subject is still central in urban popular music, part of a proud resistance against racism. "for [the painter] john valdez, %pachuco% imagery retains meaning because it displays `the beauty of a people we have been told are not beautiful.'"^3^ here we glance back at jochen schulte-sasse's "simultaneity of the non simultaneous" in the combined use of modern and postmodern forms: the forms of cultural reproduction in modernity were closely linked to a mode of socialization intended to produce strong super-egos, which in turn favored the development of agonistic, competitive individuals with clearly delimited, ideological identities. (126) [53] this sounds very much like the aggressive stance of the %pachuco% or the rapper, proclaiming a resolute identity over a postmodern beat. while these figures often topple over into %machismo%, the same idea of mixed modes could also apply to the feminist cherrie moraga. she makes an uneasy, wrenchingly honest attempt at a unified self because she needs to. while fragmentation plays an important role in her work, she does not exalt it. her subjectivity, her community, have already been fragmented enough. [54] postmodernism does not have to bulldoze the subject. i know this because i see what happens in my own living room. cut #4: tinkerbell in theory: "postmodernism? isn't that when art becomes an insincere pastiche, instead of a statement from your heart?" tinkerbell in practice: tink wants to construct an art installation in the living room. both jews and christians live in our house. a creche appeals to her aesthetically, while judah maccabee appeals thematically. her solution: "judah meets jesus." now that's postmodern. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ i am thinking here of gilligan's feminist critique of lawrence kohlberg's scale of moral development, which moves from a stress on concrete human relationships upward to an increasing level of abstraction. ^2^ see walker percy, _the moviegoer_ (new york: knopf, 1960). ^3^ lipsitz 172, quoting victor valle, "chicano art: an emerging generation" (_los angeles times_, august 7, 1983). --------------------------------------------------------- works cited anzaldua, gloria. "speaking in tongues: a letter to third world women writers." _this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color_. eds. cherrie moraga and gloria anzaldua. new york: kitchen table women of color, 1983. 165-173. bakhtin, mikhail. _rabelais and his world_. trans. helene iswolsky. bloomington: indiana up, 1984. bakhtin, mikhail. "the problem of speech genres." in _speech genres and other late essays_. trans. vern mcgee. austin: u of texas p, 1986. baudrillard, jean. _simulations: the precession of simulacra_. trans. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman. london: foreign agents, 1984. boelhower, william. _through a glass darkly: ethnic semiosis in american literature_. new york: oxford up, 1987. ehrenreich, barbara. "the unbearable whiteness of being." _this world_. _san francisco chronicle_ 10 july 1988: 20. gilligan, carol. _in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1982. hutcheon, linda. "the politics of postmodernism: parody and history." _cultural critique_ 5 (winter 1986-87). 179-207. jameson, fredric. "postmodernism and consumer society." _the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture_. ed. hal foster. port townsend, wa: bay press, 1983. 111-125. kaplan, e. ann. _rocking around the clock: music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture_. new york: methuen, 1987. lipsitz, george. "cruising around the historical bloc- postmodernism and popular music in east los angeles." _cultural critique_ 5 (winter 1986-87). 157-177. lyotard, jean-francois. "what is postmodernism?" 1982. _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_. trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984. moraga, cherrie. _loving in the war years_. boston: south end, 1983. mulvey, laura. "visual pleasure and narrative cinema." _women and the cinema: a critical anthology_. eds. karyn kay and gerald peary. new york: 1977. 412-428. owens, craig. "the discourse of others: feminism and postmodernism." _the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture_. ed. hal foster. port townsend, wa: bay press, 1983. 57-77. rich, adrienne. _of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution_. new york: w.w. norton, 1976. rorty, richard. "habermas and lyotard on postmodernity." _habermas and modernity_. ed. richard j. bernstein. cambridge, ma: mit, 1985. 161-175. schulte-sasse, jochen. "electronic media and cultural politics in the reagan era: the attack on libya and _hands across america_ as postmodern events." _cultural critique_ 8 (winter 1987-88). 123-152. venturi, robert. _complexity and contradiction in architecture_. 1966. new york: museum of modern art papers on architecture, 1977. maier, 'two moroccan storytellers in paul bowles' _five eyes_: larbi layachi and ahmed yacoubi', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-maier-two.txt two moroccan storytellers in paul bowles' _five eyes_: larbi layachi and ahmed yacoubi by john r. maier <jmaier@brock1p> state university of new york, college at brockport _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by john r. maier, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] if, as michel foucault claims, "western man" has become a "confessing animal" with a narrative literature appropriate to that role, does the western author/confessor elicit from the cultural other a story that makes sense either to the priest or the patient? the western listener in this case is american expatriate paul bowles. the other culture is moroccan, on the margins of the complex arab muslim culture of the middle east and north africa. as the country in that arab-muslim complex with the easiest access for europeans, a country that has argued within itself whether it ought to belong more to the arab league or to the european community, morocco is also on the margins of the west. indeed, its very name means, in arabic, the "farthest west." [2] we ask the others ("primitives," nomads, third world peoples, traditional societies) to speak to us--and listen well. we take photographs of them, and analyze the photographs. the professionals in this enterprise are anthropologists and the sociologists like moroccan fatima mernissi, who studied in her own country and then went to paris and to brandeis to complete western-style ph.d. work and who now interviews non-literate moroccan women. the women tell her their life stories, and she lets them talk without much imposing of the western autobiographical styles we have been developing since st. augustine. [3] american anthropologists have had ready access to morocco. many of them--clifford geertz, paul rabinow, and vincent crapanzano especially--have come, like their counterparts in literary studies, to question the fundamental assumptions of their profession. in different ways they have found ways to have moroccans speak: for geertz, through symbols like stories told of 17th century sufi saints; for rabinow, through the hermeneutics of fieldwork (following paul ricoeur to the "comprehension of the self through the detour of the comprehension of the other"); and for crapanzano, through the stories and esoteric lore of a meknes tile-maker who is convinced he is married to the seductive she-demon 'a'isha qandisha. all entered morocco and found ways to have moroccans speak to them. [4] these anthropologists are witnesses, among many others, to what richard e. palmer has called the "end of the modern era," and to what palmer claims is a "major change in worldview" to "postmodernity" (363-364). the postmodern turn is evident immediately in the short stories and novels of paul bowles (1910). (a possible exception is _the spider's house_.) while there has been some experimenting with point of view, e.g., "the eye" in _midnight mass_ and "new york 1965" in _unwelcome words_, a key element is probably bowles' refusal to accept the assumptions of modern western realistic fiction about character. how much theorizing about literature this has involved is moot. my guess is that bowles' refusal of the modern notion of character, derived from an image of the self that had developed during the period of modern philosophy (i.e., since descartes), comes from his reading of eccentric fiction--from a lifelong interest in edgar allan poe and an adult interest in surrealism. [5] bowles' fiction seems at first to be straightforward realistic fiction, one of the defining characteristics of modernism. but the modernist readings nearly always fail. characters have little "depth." they rarely "develop." instead of closure, there is most often irony: "relationships" collapse, dialogue falls apart. there is no "self" such as has been assumed in the modern west. in the non-western storytelling of non-literate moroccans bowles found a very different sense of self. [6] one way to detect this postmodern turn in bowles' work is to look at bowles' translations of moroccan storytellers. by the mid-1960s he had almost abandoned his own fiction writing for the strange bicultural hybrids that were produced by bowles--especially _five eyes_ (1979). to see what is happening in these texts--literature in english (for an english-reading audience, of course) whose origin is oral performance in moroccan arabic--consider a distinction that has arisen in the "modern" world and fundamentally constitutes the west's image of itself as "modern," namely a distinction frequently encountered in the social sciences: "traditional" vs. "modern." although it is especially evident in anthropology, the distinction is the latest in the west's powerful "gaze" upon the cultural other: "traditional" replacing to a great extent the earlier "primitive," "modern" replacing the earlier image (still sometimes found in advertizing) of "civilized" society. [7] in _the passing of traditional society: modernizing the middle east_ (1958), daniel lerner collapsed the elements of a "modern" society--a certain type of economic development, urbanism, literacy, media exposure, and political participation--into a simple, telling comment. in the modern or "participant" society, "most people go through school, read newspapers, receive cash payments in jobs they are legally free to change, buy goods for cash in an open market, vote in elections which actually decide among competing candidates, and express opinions on many matters which are not their personal business" (50-1). the psychological mechanism he isolated in the change from a traditional to a modern society lerner called "psychic mobility" or "empathy": the mobile person is distinguished by a high capacity for identification with new aspects of his environment; he comes equipped with the mechanisms needed to incorporate new demands upon himself that arise outside of his habitual experience. these mechanisms for enlarging a man's identity operate in two ways. _projection_ facilitates identification by assigning to the object certain preferred attributes of the self--others are "incorporated" because they are like me. (distantiation or negative identification, in the freudian sense, results when one projects onto others certain disliked attributes of the self.) _introjection_ enlarges identity by attributing to the self certain desirable attributes of the object--others are "incorporated" because i am like them or want to be like them. we shall use the word _empathy_ as shorthand for both these mechanisms. (49) lerner, a sociologist, mentions along the way that "the typical literary form of the modern epoch, the novel, is a conveyance of disciplined empathy. where the poet once specialized in self-expression, the modern novel reports his sustained imagination of the lives of others" (52). [8] concepts like "literary realism," thought to support the novel as lerner conceives of it, derive in part from a literary tradition, from texts that form a tradition. we increase our psychic mobility by reading literary works. but we also draw in our reading upon socially constructed concepts of the self. when such concepts of the self, maintained by a culture other than our own, clash with our own, we find it difficult to accept the other's self disclosure. [9] narratives coming to us from the margins of the arab muslim world can be particularly trying. arabic literature is old enough and prestigious enough--no matter how small the percentage of readers literate enough to read standard arabic might be--to exert influences that are not easily detected by the western observer. edward said, for example, has noticed that "arabic literature before the twentieth century has a rich assortment of narrative forms--%qissa%, %sira%, %hadith%, %khurafa%, %ustura%, %khabar%, %nadira%, %maqama%--of which no one seems to have become, as the european novel did, the major narrative type" (allen 17). john a. haywood (126-137) and more recently roger allen (9 19) have struggled with the problem of distinguishing western influences on arabic narratives, novels and short stories, from the influences of the arabic literary tradition.^1^ [10] bowles, who has never claimed to have mastered modern standard arabic, the dialect used for writing throughout the arab world, deliberately sought out non-literate storytellers. his preference for the oral performance is an indicator of much that has changed in the western view of the non-western world. (bowles remains, though, one of the great examples of lerner's "mobile personality," a modernist feature that would be impossible for bowles to suppress.^2^) [11] in 1958, lerner could confidently oppose "illiterate" with "enlightenment," so obvious was it to him that literacy was valuable without question. since then much research into the distinctive changes introduced by literacy has qualified that easy confidence. when walter j. ong distinguishes the psychodynamics of orality from the thought and expression of literacy, he does not devalue the former: additive rather than subordinative; aggregative rather than analytic; redundant or "copious" vs. spare and economical; traditionalist vs. experimental; close to the human lifeworld vs. knowledge at a distance; agonistically toned vs. abstractions that disengage; empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced; homeostatic vs. novelty; and situational rather than abstract (37-49). (note that ong considers the oral culture "empathetic and participatory" in a much different way from daniel lerner, who sees the empathy not in the known and the traditional, but for the other.) in the case of bowles' translations, the non-literate ahmed yacoubi and larbi layachi are certainly "traditional," according to lerner's model, and marked by the orality of ong's. the one who elicits their stories, bowles himself, remains a modern in lerner's sense, since he cannot avoid the empathy that is so much a part of modern society. [12] at least one reason for bowles' incessant travel outside the united states and his settling into tangier in the late 1940s was a dislike of most everything western and "civilized." he repeated claude levi-strauss' observation that the west needs to "dump vast quantities of waste matter, which it dumps on less fortunate peoples" (_their heads are green_ vii). levi-strauss had written, "what travel discloses to us first of all is our own garbage, flung in the face of humanity." to this bowles added: "my own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become westerners" (vii). the stories he translated, not from written sources but from his recordings of oral performances, are successful to the extent that bowles lets the other speak, in writing, in the best american english: he lets them be themselves. [13] daisy hilse dwyer, another of the american anthropologists who have had access to morocco, based her study of "male and female in morocco," _images and self images_ (1978), on moroccan folktales she recorded there. she followed geertz in seeing a different concept of "personhood" operating in morocco and evident in the folktales--a self socially embedded, relational, interactional: "personality or character varies rather flexibly from relationship to relationship" (182). this is in contrast to the western stress on the person as "isolate." [14] if the sense of self, personhood, character contrasts strongly with the west's self-concept, then stories, whether they are consciously fictions or self-disclosures, are not likely to have the same shape as modern western fiction. fatima mernissi defended her practice in interviewing non literate moroccan women, in which she violated "rule no. 1 that i learned at the sorbonne and at the american university where i was trained in 'research technique': to maintain objectivity toward the person being interviewed" (_doing daily battle_ 18). and she violated rule no. 2 in the way she developed "as much as possible an attitude of self-criticism" and testing of subjectivity as she edited the interviews. she let the speakers, who had never been given the opportunity/task to tell of themselves in such a (western) fashion, speak in as comfortable a manner as she could allow. the results were life stories that are "relaxed, often confusing" in the way time sequences and events are narrated. "an illiterate woman who has virtually no control over her life, subject to the whims and will of others, has a much more fluid sense of time than an educated western reader, who is used to analysing time in an attempt to control it" (20). a non-western sense of time operates in the stories bowles translates as well. whatever one makes of the "reality" in literary "realism," so important to the modern west, reality is rather differently shaped in the moroccans' accounts.^3^ [15] bowles has provided english-speaking readers with stories that challenge their ability to translate a culture very different from their own. among the tales collected in _five eyes_ (1979) are two that play on the western reader's expectations. one seems bizarre indeed, and the other only too easily read. "the night before thinking," by ahmed yacoubi (1931), and "the half-brothers" by larbi layachi (1940), moroccan storytellers, illustrate an unusual hermeneutical bind. [16] both ahmed yacoubi and larbi layachi are non-literate storytellers the expatriate bowles met in morocco. in "notes on the work of the translator," bowles indicated his admiration for oral storytelling such as he had heard in the cafes of tangier. once the tape-recorder had arrived in morocco, in 1956, he began recording oral tales. like all the spoken texts in _five eyes_, "the night before thinking" and "the half-brothers" were performed without stopping, at a single sitting. yacoubi's story derives from traditional moroccan materials, and is full of imagination; larbi's story, on the other hand, strikes the reader as a realistic piece, more like an oral history than a traditional north african tale. [17] as popular as storytellers are in morocco, the stories have no appreciable value there "as literature." virtually every traveler has commented on the storytellers in public places, like the square known as djemaa el fna in marrakech, where they perform daily to enthusiastic audiences made up not of western tourists but of the people who know the traditions and the languages, arabic and berber. elias cannetti, who visited the square in the 1960s, was struck by the contrast between the quiet scribes who made themselves available to the many who are not literate in the society (and with whom, as a writer, he felt a kind of kinship), and the flamboyant storytellers: the largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. it is around them that people throng most densely and stay longest. their performances are lengthy; an inner ring of listeners squat on the ground and it is some time before they get up again. others, standing, form an outer ring; they, too, hardly move, spellbound by the storyteller's words and gestures. . . . having seldom felt at ease among the people of our zones whose life is literature--despising them because i despise something about myself, and i think that something is paper--i suddenly found myself here among authors i could look up to since there was not a line of theirs to be %read% (77, 79). [18] thanks in large measure to milman parry, albert lord, walter j. ong, and now a journal devoted to _oral tradition_, the debate over orality and literacy has become respectable in the academy, and the value of oral narratives is gradually coming clear to those whose teaching and scholarship have been almost entirely preoccupied with the written word. before such a revaluation can take place in morocco, however, an almost insurmountable obstacle has to be overcome. the gap between modern standard arabic, the dialect of arabic used in writing, and the regional dialects of arabic is much greater than, say, between appalachian english and british received pronunciation or american broadcast standard. any literate arab speaker can understand modern standard, whether it is written in iraq, egypt or the maghrib; but the local dialects are often mutually unintelligible. because of that gap, arabic provided the classical case of what linguists call "diglossia."^4^ the rich nuances of an oral tale may delight the arab speaker, but it will not be enough to raise the tale to the prestige of writing. [19] ahmed yacoubi^5^ and larbi layachi are in a peculiar situation, then. their oral tales are not available to moroccan literature, and the english translations are the only texts available to any audience. the original situation of the oral performance, the %sitz im leben%, is not accessible; recordings in the moghrebi arabic dialect have not been made available to the public. the written text, in american english, is the product of a collaboration between bowles and the storytellers; it is all that remains of what was first of all an oral performance in a culture and language strikingly different from the english-speaking readers. the "authors" of the tales find themselves unable to read the texts. ahmed yacoubi's "the night before thinking" [20] ahmed yacoubi's "the night before thinking" is a tale in a vein familiar to middle east and north african storytellers, a tale of magic and the supernatural.^6^ for that reason it is both familiar to the western reader--after all, western literature is filled with magic (_dr. faustus_, the romance tradition)--and inaccessible to us. "magic moonshine" is appropriate to the romance-writer, as hawthorne pointed out long ago, so that "the floor of our familiar room [becomes] a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the actual and the imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" (38). but serious treatment of magic is reserved for special genres--children's literature, where it is supposedly appropriate to the "magical phase" of human development (to be cast off in normal development), or science fiction and fantasy, where it is part of the game.^7^ [21] "the night before thinking" begins in one generation and ends in another. in revenge for the killing of her brother difdaf, one "raqassa" (whose real name turns out to be aaklaa bent aaklaa) lures an unsuspecting hakim into her power. instead of killing him, she ends up marrying hakim, and a strange boy is born of their union. raqassa possesses very powerful magic, inherited from her father and drawing support from satan. thus it is not entirely unexpected that the strange child finds a way to kill both parents. with their death the daughter, whose growth had been stunted for twenty-five years, begins to grow. [22] yacoubi's bizarre tale includes a reversal that might go almost unnoticed by the western reader but would have fit into the familiar pattern of traditional narratives. the terrible seductress and mother, raqassa, explains that she gained "the power" because of an accident of birth. when her mother, lalla halalla, was carrying twins in her womb, she slipped while running, and the girl was born five minutes before the boy. "the one who came out first had to be given the power," and so she, not difdaf, gained the power that is exhibited, for example, in throwing "a darkness" over the face of hakim, spreading his lips all over his cheeks, and seizing the man with the force of "sixty thousand kilos" (24), capturing him. the story is filled with oddments of magic, burning "bakhour," an "egg of rokh el bali," humans turning to smoke. [23] later, when raqassa and hakim produce a most unusual child--a boy with eyes all over his body--they try to explain how they had been able to produce a child with such strange powers. the child himself only laughs at them: what a lot of lies you both tell! he said to them. one of you says the eye in the top of my head comes from one thing. the other says the eye the middle of my forehead comes from something else. you are saying that your eyes are in my eyes. i already existed before you ever met each other. i was hidden and neither one of you knew me. only god knew i was going to be like this. you didn't know. now you think you understand all about it. you don't know anything. how can anyone know what's hidden inside the belly of a woman? it's god who decided i should be like this. he cut out my pattern. and neither of you knew how i was going to look. it was written in the books that i was going to be born like this. it was already known. (33) [24] the second child they produce is a girl, strangely deformed and very weak. twenty-five years later she remained as tiny as she was at the time of her birth. when the son manages to kill the parents, the girl begins immediately to grow. instead of the live parents, the children keep only two three-colored cloths, one representing the father, the other representing the mother. the son asks his sister which of the cloths she wants. "the girl laughed. she said: i take my mother. because i'm a virgin. and the boy always goes with his father" (35). the power is returned to the proper relationship between male and female. in spite of the supposed gap of twenty-five years, the offspring of hakim and raqassa remain pre adolescent children, but they are now prepared to grow into their "normal" roles. [25] "normal" roles are not necessarily the same in different cultures, of course. in an often-cited essay on "family structure and feminine personality," nancy chodorow called attention to the moroccan muslim family as one that, even in a patrilineal, patrilocal society, maintained the self-esteem of women--largely because daughters see themselves, in a way strikingly different from daughters in the west, as "allies against oppression," able to develop strong attachment to and identification with other women (65). obviously, the family in "the night before thinking" is a perversion of moroccan norms, due to the peculiar situation of raqassa. chodorow's view of moroccan muslim mother/daughter relationships derives from the work of moroccan sociologist, fatima mernissi. mernissi's _beyond the veil: male-female dynamics in modern muslim society_ explores the family in arab-muslim tradition and in emerging new models (165-77). larbi layachi's "the half-brothers" [26] in reading larbi layachi's "the half-brothers,"^8^ as in tracking down political chicanery, it is useful to follow the money. the ten-year-old larbi works with the fishermen, pulling nets, for wages that rarely seem to have connection with the work expended: five rials and a basketful of fish one day, three rials another, one rial on yet another occasion. the boy seems not to expect more (or less), and he does not complain. one day when he is feeling quite ill and barely able to pull the nets, the other fishermen notice it, and suggest he take the day off, but larbi insists on working (62). he gets his three rials anyway. he is paid twelve pesetas for a basket filled with metal he dug out of a garbage dump (71). he pays a rial for half a loaf of bread, a can of tuna fish, and two oranges (72). two bilyoun for the cinema (68). he finds in the garbage a five-rial note, which he had first thought only a peseta (74). usually he gets three gordas for a kilo of bones he sells to "a jew who lived near the bull-ring" (70-1). [27] bowles offers no dollar equivalence for these exotic monies.^9^ in one sense it does not matter: the amounts are so small relative to the wealth of an american reader that the meaningless currency is a powerful sign of poverty. from the point of view of a ten-year-old, money is simply "there," a fact in a world that does not require explanation or expectations. but the arbitrary payment of wages, the caprice in finding money on the streets, the crude exploitation of the boys' step-father, who regularly takes everything the boy makes at his job (while the other son attends school and is forbidden to work)--are part of a world that seems to lack cause and effect. the boy is industrious enough and clever to survive. he does not try to put the experience in a "larger context," and neither does the storyteller larbi, who offers almost nothing in the way of comment incidents in his past. the money is a gift, %baraka%, the will of allah. paul rabinow, who did his fieldwork in morocco, noted that poverty does not carry the stigma in morocco which it does in america. it indicates only a lack of material goods at the present time, nothing more. although regrettable, it does not reflect unfavorably on one's character. it simply means that allah has not smiled on one, for reasons beyond normal understanding, but that things are bound to change soon (116). [28] what is most surprising to the american reader is the apparent lack of causal connectedness between events narrated in "the half-brothers." true, the story leads to the moment when the ten year old decides that he will no longer return to the home in which he is exploited and beaten by his step-father. henceforth larbi will live on the beach. the man, si abdullah, pockets the five rial note larbi found in the garbage and forces the boy out of the house to work, though larbi is not feeling well. i went out. i was thinking: i'll work. but the money i earn i'll spend for food, and i won't go back home at all. i can eat here on the beach. and i was thinking that it would be better for me to sleep in one of the boats than live there in the house. (74) larbi works that day, dizzy and with a headache, and takes the two and a half rials the chief gives him to a cafe. after dark he finds a boat and sleeps warmly under the fish netting in the boat. when, in the morning, he is asked, "why didn't you go home to bed?" the boy answers simply, "i didn't go . . . . that's all. after that i lived on the beach" (75). [29] the story thus presents a string of episodes, a linear development, a clear structure with episodes leading to the decision of the boy to live on the beach, but with little of the sense common to western realistic fiction that all details fit into a larger, causally related whole. the problem emerges early, in the very different treatment given the boy and his half-brother by the mother's second husband, si abdullah. the episodes are strung together without moving toward a climax of intensity. sometimes the father is awful, occasionally generous; he is always seen from the outside, and there is no interest in (and no comment on) the father or the mother. they act; that is all. the boys, on the other hand, are somewhat rounded but move about unconsciously, accepting social norms that are often puzzling to the outsider, the western reader. [30] in "africa minor," bowles describes a "culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior": "in tunisia, algeria, and morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between god and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh" (_their heads are green_ 22). the unself-consciousness of "the half-brothers" is a narrative correlate of that ancient pattern. the story retains some features common to oral tales. a formula, "let us say . . . ," is repeated throughout the piece. the boy makes his money pulling the nets of the fishermen, and the activity is repeated a number of times in virtually the same language. in almost no way does it resemble the storytelling traits of "the night before thinking," traits that go back at least as far as _the thousand and one nights_. [31] cultures mix and appear to clash as "naturally"- unreflectively--as a rainstorm causes the shed where the boy and the family donkey are housed together to flood. the west is present, not remarked upon, not remarkable: the spanish (simply identified with "the nazarenes," 60-61); canned food, the telephone, an ambulance, needles in the hospital. the cinema is remarked upon, since it was the first time the boy had seen a movie (69). "i bought a ticket at the window and went in. that was the first time i had been inside a cinema. now i see why people like to live in the city. this theatre is very fine, i thought. there were pictures of war, and there were airplanes flying" (69). as is usual in bowles' own fiction, even the remarkable is presented with no indication of changes in intensity, in intonation, rarely an indication of enthusiasm. this, too, is part of the cultural code: all facts are equal, and equally valued.^10^ [32] the voice of "the half-brothers" may be larbi's, but the questions that prompt it--the questions raised by the hidden author/audience--are western, american. larbi is prompted to talk in a way that is not a traditionally moroccan way of speaking. rather it is a confessional manner that, as michel foucault has insisted, increasingly characterizes western discourse. the result is a story that is closer to oral history, the purest example of this new authorship in the west, than to fictional modes--the portraits of the artist, for example--that help to organize the narratives. [33] foucault, in volume one of _the history of sexuality_ (1976), pointed out that in the west, since the middle ages "at least," confession has been a major ritual in the production of "truth." "we have since become a singularly confessing society" (59). there is a certain irony in paul bowles prompting the words of larbi, since he is notoriously reticent about revealing himself directly, even in his autobiography. _without stopping_ (1972) records that bowles learned early that he "would always be kept from doing what i enjoyed and forced to do that which i did not" by his family, particularly by his father. "thus i became an expert in the practice of deceit, at least insofar as general mien and facial expressions were concerned." he could not, however, bring himself to lie, "inasmuch as for me the word and its literal meaning had supreme importance" (17). except for the hostility toward his family, bowles' autobiography is striking in the way it avoids self disclosure and analysis of the many people, famous and not, who crowd the pages of _without stopping_.^11^ [34] foucault noted the change in the west that was first religious and legal but came to have great significance for literature. he rightly emphasized the power of the one eliciting the confession: for a long time, the individual was vouched for by the reference of others and the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself. the truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power (58-9). as "western man" became a "confessing animal," according to foucault, there was correspondingly a massive change in literature: we have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of "trials" of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering image (59). [35] in "the half-brothers" larbi is brought to a point where he can and must abandon his family, to live on the beach. importantly larbi does not become a writer, as bowles had, or others, like joyce, who inscribed their lives in "portraits." larbi is the one who was not educated and remained non-literate while bowles recorded, translated, and wrote down the storyteller's words. there is nothing in the story (or in bowles' comments on his non-literate storytellers) to indicate that there is anything wrong in that. (the one storyteller in _five eyes_ who presented difficulties for bowles was mohammed choukri, the only one to become literate and the one who insisted that bowles follow the arabic text word for word, comma by comma when the two worked together to translate the stories [8].) [36] bowles is the partner to larbi's confession, but it is not clear where the power is. success as an "author" had given larbi enough money so that he could look for a bride (_without stopping_ 350); but the anxiety over official objection to his book, _a life full of holes_ forced larbi to leave morocco, never to return (355). the story of a ten-year-old who leaves his family, mainly owing to oppression at the hands of his step-father is not in the traditional repertory of the moroccan storyteller. (larbi's mother is sometimes sympathetic to her son's needs; she tries to moderate her husband's attacks on the boy; she gives him food; but she, like the rest of the family, merely ignores the boy during a lengthy stay in the hospital.) it is also a scandalous tale in that it does not fit into the curve of development expected of men in the arab-muslim world. [37] larbi is "about ten" when he leaves home for the beach. significantly, he is not yet an adolescent, not yet bothered by sexual urges. if a certain degree of wild behavior is allowed the %drari%--even encouraged by cultural norms of child rearing--there is a larger pattern captured by the proverb, the boy of ten is like a peeled cucumber. the man of twenty makes friendships with fools. the man of thirty (is like the) flower of the garden. the man of forty is in his prime. (dwyer 87) [38] from the child's earliest days, according to daisy hilse dwyer, the moroccan boy's "egotistical spontaneity" is encouraged (91). even in the womb "the male is believed to be a bundle of energy that is predisposed to movement. the male fetus is believed to flit from side to side in the abdomen, nervously covering his ground." still, this exaggerated freedom of the boys running wild in the streets is but one phase in a "developmental pathway" (166) in which a male eventually achieves the potential of his %'aqel% (intelligence, responsibility, rationality; 152), wisdom, and spiritual insight, usually in middle age. [39] the %drari% in morocco have certainly occasioned their share of comments from western visitors there. elizabeth warnock fernea's largely successful attempt to enter the world of moroccan women was initially blocked by the boys in the neighborhood, who treated fernea's children rudely. they made rude gestures, called the fernea children names, and threw clods of dirt, then stones, at the family. even the mild-mannered anthropologist, fernea's husband bob, turned on them when they demanded baksheesh and tweaked daughter laila's hair at the same time. fernea's sense of alienation was complete. "this was no fairy tale, i told myself. we were alone, strange and alien, in a strange and alien world" (59). [40] anthropologist paul rabinow found his way literally blocked by the %drari%, when he first entered the village of sidi lahcen lyussi, where he was supposed to conduct his research: the car was greeted . . . by what seemed like hundreds of %drari%--which is inadequately translated as children. these fearless little monsters surrounded the car, much to the annoyance of their elders. screaming, yelling, and pushing they proceeded to examine all of my possessions. one of the villagers' main fears, it turns out, was that these %drari% would do some irreparable damages either to me or to my belongings. their fathers threatened them with beatings, curses, and exclamations, to little or no avail. (84) [41] fortunately, the fernea family came to be accepted in the neighborhood. a young boy even alerted them to a key they had left in the door, an invitation to robbery in most cities. and rabinow, similarly, found little to complain about later in his stay, regarding the boys. daisy hilse dwyer, though, notes the anxieties of moroccan families over the unruly behavior of sons even much later in the sons' lives, before the wisdom of age enters them. and the beatings rabinow found the fathers threatening their sons with are very much a part of the fathers' prerogatives.^12^ the expectation that men normally improve with age (and women do not) is a common pattern in moroccan folktales (dwyer 52-7). [42] precisely because it is not difficult to "follow" such a story, what is revealed is our way (tradition) of reading, the genres and expectations with which we are familiar. larbi's theme, bowles tells us, is always "injustice and the suffering it causes," and his purpose is "to 'tell them outside' what it is like to be shut inside" (_five eyes_ 8). presumably, the outsiders are the readers. but the very familiarity with realistic fiction which makes the story accessible may obscure the concept of character that informs the piece. [43] both daisy hilse dwyer, who studied moroccan stories for the light they shed on moroccan ideas of male and female and their separate pathways of development (166), and clifford geertz, upon whose work she drew, distinguish between a western and a moroccan view of the person. in "on the nature of anthropological understanding," geertz described morocco as a "wild-west sort of place" filled with "rugged individuals" of many types. yet he cautions that "no society consists of anonymous eccentrics bouncing off one another like billiard balls" (51). he emphasized the connectedness of individuals, the %nisba% that bound persons to families, occupations, religious sects, and even spiritual status. the outsider might see them as individuals of the western sort, but insiders always knew the %nisba% of the person. "they are contextualized persons," geertz maintains. [44] behind this is a very different concept of the person from what has developed in the west since the renaissance: the western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotional judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and seen contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. (48) by prompting a decidedly western style of story from layachi, bowles decontextualizes the ten-year-old. in particular, the developmental pathway (which, as dwyer points out, has a moral curve quite different from "the predominant euro-american sort" [166]) is obscured in the manner of closing the story--with larbi as the triumphant individual who has thrown off the constraints of his family and society. [45] in contrast, yacoubi's "the night before thinking" returns the reader--after any number of magical turns, imaginary leaps that are by definition unexpected--to the familiar context of the arab-islamic family. yacoubi includes one jest at the expense of the western reader, who is routinely inscribed as the nazarene in these stories: when he tells the story of the accident that brought a girl to birth before the boy, yacoubi's character says, "and she was born five minutes before i was. five minutes for the christians is a long time. for us it's not such a big thing. but this time it was like a thousand years" (25), since the power fell to the woman's lot and not the man's. [46] in a more innocent age these stories might have been enjoyed and dismissed as products of a "primitive" mind. the dangers of an attempt only slightly less suspect are still common: to read in the "oriental" mind a strange, unfathomable otherness, and to see these others as what edith wharton called "unknown and unknowable people" (whom she nevertheless was able to describe; 113). edward said has alerted us to the dangers of "orientalism." as early as aeschylus' _the persians_ a west has thought itself confronted by a significant cultural other (56-7), visible today mainly in the middle east and north africa. paul bowles himself, attracted by surrealist ideas, felt that in the part of the east he settled in he was finding the unconscious that civilization, the west, had repressed.^13^ [47] listening to non-literate moroccan storytellers, recording their voices, translating their culture into a form of printed text, into a tradition that developed a certain kind of "realistic fiction," paul bowles has formed a curious kind of hybrid text. authorship of "the night before thinking" and "the half-brothers is not the simple process--an individual drawing on individual experience to produce a work--that the west has considered somehow fundamental to the very notion of literature. now that an anthropologist, clifford geertz, is drawing on roland barthes and michel foucault to understand the anthropologist "as author" (_works and lives_ 18-20), and geertz himself is being drawn into a newer, more complex understanding of the authorship of literary works (hernadi 757), it is becoming increasingly useful to look at texts produced by unusual "authors."^14^ [48] it would, in one sense, be helpful to have the tapes of ahmed yacoubi's and larbi layachi's stories in moghrebi arabic. one could then trace the changes from speech to writing, from a local dialect of arabic to a regional dialect of english, in a more detailed way than is now possible. on the other hand, when a non-literate moroccan friend thought one of bowles' translations was "shameful" %because% he had "written about people just as they are" (in the friend's view making them seem "like animals"), the friend dismissed the "objective truth" of the representation: "that is statistical truth. we are interested in that, yes, but only as a means of getting to the real truth underneath" ("africa minor" 32). on one point the american reader can be certain, however. paul bowles may have sought the primitive, the unconscious, in morocco; but the longer he remained there and the better he became to know the people and the local dialects, the more he was able to appreciate the different sense of "reality" he found there. --------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ for the postmodern turn in arabic literature, which also complicates the relationship between western narratology and the east, see maier, "a postmodern syrian fictionalist." anton shammas' _arabesques_ (1986), written by a palestinian whose first language is arabic, but written in hebrew (it caused no little controversy in israel), is a postmodern novel that somehow manages to incorporate both traditional arab storytelling and a distinctively western narrative. amulets, fortune-telling, and magical birds combine in the same work with the (apparent) autobiography of a palestinian writer carefully set in a specific historical situation. in many ways the main narrator, anton, measures himself against the man he could not be, his uncle yusef, the storyteller rooted in arab and early christian traditions. anton is more sophisticated, more westernized, more "modern"--in all the ways suggested by daniel lerner, especially in his "psychic mobility"--than his uncle; the traditions are known to anton, and fascinating, but they elude him: that's how uncle yusef was. one the one hand, he was a devout catholic, who like saint augustine was utterly certain, as if the virgin mary herself had assured him, that the years of his life were but links in a chain leading to salvation. on the other hand, as if to keep an escape route open for himself, in case the only reality was dust returning to dust and the jaws of the beast of nothing gaped wide, he still could believe that the circular, the winding and the elusive had the power to resist nothingness. however, he did not judge between these and even conceived of them as a single entity in which the %djinni%'s ar-rasad was one and the same as the cock that crowed at dawn when saint peter denied jesus thrice. and here i am, his nephew, who served as an altar boy until i was twelve and since then have trod among the alien corn, here i am trying to separate myself from uncle yusef's circular pagan like time and follow the linear path of christian time, which supposedly leads to salvation, to the breaking of the vicious circles. (227-8) ^2^ what cannot be suppressed can be subverted by irony. bowles' story, "the eye," is a brilliant study of a society that believes in the "evil eye," and of an intrusive westerner, a kind of self-styled "private eye," who manages to get the moroccans to talk to him about a bizarre event in the past. ^3^ palmer identifies the "movement beyond western forms of reality" as an important feature of postmodernity. "for some, the way beyond modernity is the way %outside% western forms of thought" (373). to the examples palmer gives could be added a most intriguing one from the arab muslim world. in 1964 a court case was brought against the lebanese writer, layla ba'labakki (1936), who was charged with obscenity and harming public morality for a short story she published, "a space ship of tenderness to the moon." the case brought against layla ba'labakki by the beirut vice squad rested on two sentences in the story. the case against her was dismissed by the court of appeals. the judges accepted ba'labakki's claim to belong to the literary school of realism, but in doing so, the judges appealed to islamic tradition (making a move that would certainly seem strange to, say, american jurisprudence): the court wishes to state that realism in human life can be traced to the most ancient period in our history, to be more precise, to the moment when man was created by god, in his naked reality, and, later, hid his nakedness with fig leaves. on the whole, the court believes that so-called realistic phrases used by the author are only a means to express a kind of example (%hikma%), as in the lessons or examples we receive from the following works of literature: 1. the myth of man receiving the covenant from god, the rainbow in the heavens, and man's unworthiness to receive it 2. the legend of the isolated cave in the desert (saw'ar), its walls stained red with blood which stained the entire land of canaan 3. the tale of egypt's pharaoh, in which his loved one, tempting the pharaoh to lust, writhes on a bed of lebanese cedar wood, her naked body fragrant with the scents of the land of ethiopia 4. the story of the virgin of israel, guardian of a dying kingdom, bringing to old age and coldness the warmth of her body . . . 5. the legend of the rose of sharun, the lily of the valley. . . . (fernea and bazirgan 288) arab realism is rooted in arab-islamic traditions, and the lower court's decision stood closer to those traditions than the higher court's. overturning the lower court reflected the influence of more cosmopolitan and probably western traditions. ^4^ modern standard arabic is a grammatically simplified version of classical arabic, the language of the qur'an, the most prestigious form of language in the islamic--not just the arabic-speaking--world. originally designed for the media, modern standard has already made "diglossia" much too simple a notion to describe the sociolinguistic intricacies of arabic. m.h. bakalla prefers the term "spectroglossia" for that reason (87). ^5^ jane bowles' biographer, millicent dillon, includes much information about ahmed yacoubi (1931) in _a little original sin_ (464). paul bowles discusses him in _without stopping_ (esp. 308-33) and in _five eyes_ (7, 144). ^6^ for the different kinds of middle eastern and north african folktales, see _arab folktales_, esp. "djinn, ghouls, and afreets, tales of magic and the supernatural" (63-74) and "magical marriages and mismatches" (153-157). ^7^ for an explanation based mainly on piaget's stages in the child's conception of the world, see f. andre favat, _child and tale_, 25-28 ("magical beliefs in child and tale") and 48-57 ("the present explanation"). according to this explanation, the child's interest in the fairy tale peaks between six and eight years and then declines rapidly. there is a resurgence of interest around eighteen and twenty years, and "in the adult there are vestiges of animism, magic, moralities of constraint, egocentrism, and the like" (56) that may account for continued interest in such stories long after the magical stage is abandoned. ^8^ millicent dillon and bowles (_without stopping_) offer insight into the life of larbi layachi: paul and jane had met larbi while he was a guard at a cafe at merkala beach in tangier. he had struggled since childhood to survive on his own and had spent a good deal of time in jail for minor infractions. though he was illiterate, he had a remarkable gift as a storyteller, which paul had immediately recognized . . . . though larbi had made some money from the sale of the book [_a life full of holes_], he was quite content to work as houseboy for paul in arcila. (346) bowles fills in the background of larbi's book, segments of which had been published, and grove press had wanted to see a book: at some point richard seaver had the idea of presenting the volume as a novel rather than as nonfiction, so that it would be eligible for a prize offered each year by an international group of publishers. . . . larbi's book was defeated by jorge semprun's _le long voyage_ . . . larbi made enough money from it to look for a bride. (_without stopping_ 350) besides underscoring the prestige of the novel in the west, the story indicates the ease with which fiction and nonfiction slide into one another. ^9^ bowles does not translate or explain a number of moroccan terms and references, thus giving the narrative an exotic quality. terms like %ouakha% (rather like american ok; 56), vocatives like %auolidi% (my son; 60), and exclamations (%allah hiaouddi!% and %ehi aloudi!%; 64) really require no gloss. common moroccan terms like %djellaba% (the hooded overgarment with sleeves; 66) %qahouaji% (the tea-maker; 74), %baqal% (grocer; 59), and %tajine% (a moroccan dish; 56) are so common in moroccan stories (and in bowles' fiction) that they give the ordinary reader a sense of being an insider. local references--dar menebbhi, aqaba dl kasbah, the monopolio, bou khach khach, the charf--work in largely the same way. ^10^ note the (unremarked) presence in this muslim world (where "nazarenes" [christians] at least upset the half-brother's father) of "the jew" who buys things from larbi: "there was a jew who lived near the bull-ring, and he always bought everything i took him. usually i sold him bones. he paid three gordas a kilo for them" (70-71). this time he sells things from the dump and gets twelve pesetas. there is no hint of animus: it is simply accepted that they are culturally other. ^11^ the most horrifying of the youthful stories is bowles' account, given him by his grandmother, of his father's attempt to kill the six-weeks-old infant (_without stopping_, 38-39). according to the grandmother, bowles' father was jealous of the attention the son was receiving and exposed the infant to snow and cold. he was rescued by the grandmother. in a less dramatic gesture, the father beat him--only once--when bowles was young and seized the boy's notebooks: this was the only time my father beat me. it began a new stage in the development of hostilities between us. i vowed to devote my life to his destruction, even though it meant my own--an infantile conceit, but one which continued to preoccupy me for many years. (45) ^12^ see patai's chapter, "the endogamous unilineal descent group" (407-436), added to the 3rd edition of his work. on paternal authority regarding the son--including beating--with examples from around the middle east, see 412 17. ^13^ for the attraction of french surrealism, see millicent dillon, 92-93. wayne pounds notes that "in moroccan folk culture bowles has found a mythology and an objective correlative to those concerns which have remained most important to him as a writer" (119)--e.g., in tales of the terrible mother such as one finds in yacoubi's story. pounds elsewhere (50-1) distinguishes between "the primitive" of the anthropologists (i.e., "a shared symbolic ordering of experience") and of those who see it as a regression to older, pre-civilized thought. eli sagan gives a lucid account of freud's argument against civilization, 123-25. ^14^ bowles provides a good example of barthes' "hybrid" author-writer--who is, according to barthes, a characteristic literary figure of our time. not only is it virtually impossible to separate life from fiction in bowles' work, but nonfiction can be turned into fiction. a case in point is his revision of his %wife's% nonfiction piece, "east side: north africa," into fiction ("everything is nice," in _my sister's hand in mine_ 313-20). stories in his _collected stories_, like "istikhara, anaya, medagan and the medaganat" (401-404) and "things gone and things still here" (405-409), were originally conceived as essays. "unwelcome words" (61-86), the title piece in a series of stories, consists of letters of "paul" to another writer cast in fictional form. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited allen, roger. _the arabic novel, an historical and critical introduction_. syracuse: syracuse up, 1982. bakalla, m. h. _arabic culture through its language and literature_. london: kegan paul international, 1984. ba'labakki, layla. "a space ship of tenderness to the moon." trans. denys johnson-davies. _middle eastern muslim women speak_. 273-79. bowles, jane. "east side: north africa." _mademoiselle_. april, 1951: 134+. ---. _my sister's hand in mine_. new york: ecco press, 1978. bowles, paul. "africa minor." _their heads are green_. 20-40. ---. _collected stories, 1939-1976_. santa barbara: black sparrow, 1979. ---, ed. and trans. _five eyes_. santa barbara: black sparrow, 1979. ---. _midnight mass_. santa barbara: black sparrow, 1983. ---. _their heads are green and their hands are blue_. 1963. new york: ecco press, 1984. ---. _unwelcome words_. bolinas: tombouctou, 1988. ---. _without stopping_. 1972. new york: ecco press, 1985. bushnaq, inea, ed. and trans. _arab folktales_. new york: pantheon, 1986. canetti, elias. _the voices of marrakesh_. trans. j. a. underwood. new york: farrar straus giroux, 1978. chodorow, nancy. "family structure and feminine personality." _women, culture, and society_. ed. michelle zimbalist rosaldo and louise lamphere. stanford: stanford up, 1974. 43-66. crapanzano, vincent. _tuhami, portrait of a moroccan_. chicago: chicago up, 1980. dillon, millicent. _a little original sin: the life and work of jane bowles_. new york: holt, rinehart, 1981. dwyer, daisy hilse. _images and self-images: male and female in morocco_. new york: columbia up, 1978. favat, f. andre. _child and tale: the origins of interest_. urbana: ncte, 1977. fernea, elizabeth warnock and basima qattan bazirgan, ed. and trans. "an account of the trial." _middle eastern muslim women speak_. austin: u of texas p, 1977. 280 90. fernea, elizabeth warnock. _a street in marrakech_. garden city, new york: doubleday, 1980. foucault, michel. _the history of sexuality_. trans. robert hurley. 1976. new york: vintage, 1980. geertz, clifford. _local knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology_. new york: basic books, 1983. ---. "on the nature of anthropological understanding." _american scientist_ 63 (1975): 47-53. ---. _works and lives: the anthropologist as author_. stanford: stanford up, 1988. hawthorne, nathaniel. _the scarlet letter_. ed. harry levin. boston: houghton mifflin, 1960. haywood, john a. _modern arabic literature, 1800-1970_. new york: st. martin's, 1972. hernadi, paul. "doing, making, meaning: toward a theory of verbal practice." _pmla_ 103 (1988): 749-58. layachi, larbi. "the half-brothers." bowles, _five eyes_ 55-75. lerner, daniel. _the passing of traditional society: modernizing the middle east_. glencoe, il: the free press, 1958. maier, john. "a postmodern syrian fictionalist: walid ikhlassy." _journal of south asian and middle east studies_ 11 (1988): 73-87. mernissi, fatima. _beyond the veil, male-female dynamics in _modern muslim society_. rev. ed. bloomington: indiana up, 1987. ---. _doing daily battle_. trans. mary jo lakeland. london: women's press, 1988. ong, walter j. _orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word_. new york: methuen, 1982. palmer, richard e. "postmodernity and hermeneutics." _boundary 2_ 5 (1977): 363-94. patai, raphael. _society, culture, and change in the middle east_. 3rd ed. philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, 1971. pounds, wayne. _paul bowles: the inner geography_. new york: peter lang, 1985. rabinow, paul. _reflections on fieldwork in morocco_. berkeley: u of california p, 1977. reynolds, dwight f. "_sirat bani hilal_: introduction and notes to an arab oral epic tradition." _oral tradition_ 4 (1989): 80-100. sagan, eli. _freud, women, and morality: the psychology of good and evil_. new york: basic books, 1988. said, edward. _orientalism_. new york: vintage, 1979. shammas, anton. _arabesques_. trans. vivian eden. new york: harper and row, 1988. wharton, edith. _in morocco_. 1920. new york: hippocrene, 1984. yacoubi, ahmed. "the night before thinking." bowles, _five eyes_: 23-35. [editor], 'postface', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-[editor]-postface.txt postface _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) eyal: last year we expected that the essays we would publish --a good number of them anyway--would be affected by the electronic medium, but that has not happened much. several of the essays do gain something from being in this medium--ulmer's or moulthrop's. in print they would lose at the very least the chance to exemplify some of their argument. but we have not seen too many essays that think the way they do or mean what they mean because they are in electronic form. john: in an odd way, though, that observation is very much like one of the early and persistent misconceptions we ran into when we explained the journal to people: they always seemed to expect that, because it was a journal published, distributed and read on computers, it must be a journal _about_ computers--about its medium. we had a number of submissions, at the beginning, that had something to do with computers but nothing to do with postmodern culture. that was what forced us to stipulate that we wouldn't consider essays on computer hardware/software unless they raised "significant aesthetic or theoretical issues." eyal: true, though i was thinking about the effects of the medium and not about subject matter. we've also not received that many essays that took risks--i wonder how much of our success we must attribute to what might finally be the conventionality of our first three issues. a conventional journal that looks radical: like a modernist from yale. i think that we would have published more radical work (not necessarily more radical politically) if we had more of it to review. we did get some unconventional work, but from what we've seen i'd have to guess that most people out there are writing recognizable, assimilable essays. john: well, i wouldn't say that our first three issues have been _thoroughly_ conventional, but i know what you mean. still, the authors of some of the submissions we rejected might argue that, to the extent that our first three issues _are_ conventional in their content, it's because we rejected risk-taking essays. but what kinds of risks are you talking about? eyal: the unforseen: a new way of making things work. it seems that the essays we have published share certain structures of thinking, ways of being essays, however innovative and interesting their subject matter. of course if they were saying something in an entirely new way they would be hard to follow, maybe in the way that howe's essay is hard to follow at times. but because so many of these works argue for new ways of doing things, for a radical redefinition of personal context (fraiberg) or a new kind of writing (acker, ulmer), it is especially noticeable that they think in such familiar ways. you were saying before we started writing that, in a way, much of this thinking does not seem to have absorbed poststructuralism. in fact we've noted in both previous postfaces that many works we've published tend to organize around familiar oppositions, specifically those of classical and popular culture, utopian and dystopian postmodernism, etc.. john: well, wherever you go, there you are. we've been standing pretty far back from the first three issues; what we've said about them could be said about all theory and criticism, including the most innovative. if twenty years of poststructuralism haven't changed our basic patterns of thinking, one year of electronic publishing certainly isn't going to. but if we ask whether we've been unhappy with what we've published so far, the answer is clearly "no": we've both been very pleased with the way these issues have come together. the essays themselves have covered a wide range of subjects in a variety of styles, and working with the authors and reviewers has been a lot of fun. eyal: for a long time--editing the second issue--i used to go to bed late. i remember in particular editing howe's essay. three of the four reviewers had made pretty much the same suggestions, but with variations. the work makes so much of its argument subtly, in its form and organization, in its juxtapositions and development, that it was hard to see just what taking some parts out of it would do to other parts, and to the whole; if i were to ask howe to take out part a here, then part b there would make less sense; if i asked her to leave part a in but take c that came before it out, then a would mean something else and then b would change too. then again, that might have been what the readers had wanted when they suggested the changes. if howe were to cut off b altogether, then that would not be what the readers had asked for, but now a and c would not evolve into b and so might not be objectionable after all. my mind kept weaving and unravelling the essay as i read and reread it, late into the night. i got more and more excited as i was reading the essay; i felt cold but decided that this was because i'd had dinner so long before--this made sense at the time. i got a blanket and kept reading. when i slept my mind kept going round and round, repeating bits and pieces of the essay feverishly. i woke up shivering, with a high temperature: the doctor thought it was influenza, but it felt like the influence of the text. john: a sort of out-of-body editorial experience. i take back what i said before--one year of electronic publishing has at least disordered _our_ minds from time to time. it's also radically altered my perception of the passage of time: when i try to place something that happened last june--like the time i accidentally distributed the entire list of subscribers _to_ the entire list of subscribers...twice--it seems that about three years have passed since then. some good things have happened in that time, whatever time it was: being called "honey" by kathy acker ("honey, the movers are here, so make it short"), pushing the button to mail out full text of the first issue at 5 a.m. on the last day of the month (and immediately crashing mailboxes around the world), the experience we've had with self-nominated reviewers in the editorial process, the early support from the library here at ncsu, and especially the response of subscribers and contributors to the journal. the one thing i would like to see develop further is pmc-talk, which could become more closely related to the journal and more constructive in its own right. there's been some good stuff posted there, but there's also a lot of polemic, which is bad conversation. i think the fraiberg-porush exchange in this issue is an example of a good conversation--one that doesn't necessarily discard or disguise strong opinions, but still manages to get somewhere. eyal: an exciting aspect of the journal so far has been that many of the works we have published do hold good conversations, explicitly or implicitly. that's the flip side of assimilability--that essays which share certain suppositions or ways of thinking can engage each other. john: right: for instance, both katz and moulthrop start by trying out the supposition that the world really might behave according to our computer dreams--nightmares in katz's "to a computer file named alison," daydreams for moulthrop, who doubts whether the media is really going to revolutionize what we exchange in it. then for fraiberg, this isn't a dream of the future at all: it's our present. cyborgs are what we already are. eyal: katz and moulthrop are both interested in the way that information systems (moulthrop) and rhetorical constructions (katz) affect the social text and our psychological economy, respectively. likewise several writers identify antagonistic kinds of postmodernism (a classical and a popular for wheeler, a reflective and an unreflective for mikics). terms mingle without reducing the conversation to cocktail party banter- like matibag's interest in cannibalism and fraiberg's in exchange and the dissolution of borders. john: when matibag talks about cannibalism in caribbean literature, he's actually talking about the cannibalizing of cannibalism, or of the imagery of cannibalism--a situation in which the text consumes its context, not unlike what maier describes in bowles's "hybrid" (appropriated) texts. as in the last two issues, there are numerous unplanned connections among the essays in this one. these connections suggest either that we all say much the same thing--a fairly reductive conclusion, and one which overlooks the importance of the local context for all of these essays--or they suggest that, although our individual contexts may be very different, there are trade routes among them. bassett, 'recovering the mask of ordinary life: encounters with nihilism and deconstruction', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-bassett-recovering.txt recovering the mask of ordinary life: encounters with nihilism and deconstruction by sharon bassett department of english california state university-los angeles los angeles, ca 90032 _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by sharon bassett, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. desmond, william. _art and the absolute: a study of hegel's aesthetics_. albany: suny up, 1986; _desire, dialectic, and otherness_. new haven: yale up, 1987; _philosophy and its others: ways of being and mind_. albany: suny up, 1990. %comedy% has, therefore, above all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness exhibits itself as the fate of the gods. these elementary beings are, as %universal% moments, not a self and are not equal. they are, it is true, endowed with the form of individuality, but this is only in imagination and does not really and truly belong to them; the actual self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content. it, the subject, is raised above such a moment, such a single property, and clothed in this mask it proclaims the irony of such a property wanting to be something on its own account. the pretensions of universal essentiality are uncovered in the self; it shows itself to be entangled in an actual existence, and drops the mask just because it wants to be something genuine. the self, appearing here in its significance as something actual, plays with the mask which it once put on in order to act its part; but it as quickly breaks out again from this illusory character and stands forth in its own nakedness nd ordinariness, which it shows to be not distinct from the genuine self, the actor or from the spectator. --g.w.f. hegel, _phenomenology of spirit_ [1] it is as if the people who speak out of, and, (whom we understand to be speaking) on behalf of, postmodernity and those who speak out of and on behalf of its totalizing and totalitarian antagonists have lived different histories and now speak from incongruent and incommensurate experiences. the gulfs which separate them, even leaving aside the polemics of the popular press, resist the most subtle tuning of "difference." how many twentieth centuries have there been? how many modernities have there been? how many perspectivisms have been arrayed against how many differently construed traditional monisms? the trajectory of unacceptable differences, that escape even the playful category of difference, can hardly be traced without creating a filigree. one thinks of one definition of lace: a thousand holes tied together with string. it is not surprising that in the midst of these rhetorical questions, to which everyone has an answer, three books that situate the question of the nature of postmodernity within a poetics rather than within a rhetoric of history should be rather overlooked, especially by people working in literature. [2] the three books by william desmond, _art and the absolute: a study of hegel's aesthetics_ (albany: suny, 1986); _desire, dialectic, and otherness_ (new haven: yale up, 1987); and _philosophy and its others: ways of being and mind_, (albany: suny, 1990), constitute a picture of the world that has refused to reduce history to a series of catastrophes and which maintains instead a sense of tragic meaningfulness in art and in the natural world constructed by and inhabited by humanity. [3] desmond offers a thoughtful and richly articulated account of what he calls "metaxological mindfulness", a kind of intermediary life of consciousness, in-between-ness that rescues thought from the mania of the one and the frenzy of the many; in addition his project moves towards a poetic visionary coda, a vision on which inhabitants of this brazen planet of postmodernity have long since given up: for both of these reasons he rewards an encounter by _postmodern culture_. [4] metaxological in-between-ness substitutes for the edgy life on the edge that desmond sees as the corrosive outcome of deconstruction, which was itself an outcome of heidegger's [deliberate?] misunderstanding of hegel. while he does not engage his adversaries directly, the shadows of nietzsche, heidegger, derrida and to a lesser extent lyotard fall continually across his page. the most striking difference between desmond and the masters of suspicion against whom he arrays his forces is that, unlike them, he has not taken the linguistic turn. by this i mean that when both desmond and derrida struggle with the process by which art (literature?) can penetrate philosophy--a process which each regards as both essential and inescapable--desmond argues (or "does philosophy," what he would call "being mindful") against the death of art. at the same juncture and for the same cause derrida refashions the philosophic text itself, and puts the literary text directly adjacent to it. derrida explains that he does it since the "agency of being" (by which i understand him to mean ordinary metaphysics) _always_ appropriates, eats up and digests or "interiorizes" every limit that is put against it. by installing the texts of literary writers (jean genet, michel leiris) in the margins or blank spaces that surround philosophic texts, derrida makes typographically possible what is metaphysically impossible. i will come back to a further consideration of the relation between literature and philosophy and the difference between metaphysics and typography that derrida offers. [5] hegel is the icon of wholeness and totality that sustains the tradition of western thought; hegel is, at the same time, the (unacknowledged) father of the iconoclastic flight from wholeness and totality that characterizes postmodern thought. we are not lacking in philosophical and critical efforts to defend either icon or iconoclast and refute the other; we are at a loss for efforts to square the circle and have a janus-faced hegel seeing before and after. in his first book, _art and the absolute: a study of hegel's aesthetics_, desmond sets out to use hegel's view of art as a way of denying that "a movement to wholeness must be identified with totalitarian closure." while one can not say in the end that desmond's project is entirely successful (because he lacks the power to evoke the sensuous self knowledge with which he credits art) his is a serious, thoughtful effort to maintain the contemporaneity of hegel while at the same time offering a way for philosophy to be open to art specifically because it represents an absolute that does not inevitably erode into totalitarian closure. [6] for desmond, hegel's system is fueled by an aesthetic vision. the hegelian philosophic practice constitutes a quest or adventure organized and narrated in such a way as to expose the interaction between the panorama of choices and the active choosing by the mind operating in time. rather than being a historicized version of the rationalist's engine, hegel offers a journey, a pilgrimage, or a quest as representations of wholeness. the journey is whole in the sense that it reflects the continual and multiple actualization of the faculty of choice, and it is open since the process is an ongoing effort to concretize or articulate the circumstances and actions that constitute the choosing. as desmond explains in the process of characterizing deconstruction, "the issue of dialectic has to do with the question of the teleological thrust of articulation" (88). to see desmond working the philosophical implications of articulation as a teleological enterprise, full of action and coherence, is to see him at his strongest and best. and, curiously enough, it is also to see a limitation in his project that in the end deprives it of having the polemical and rhetorical power it clearly intends to have. [7] to be articulate is to open up the spaces between words in speech, it is to allow silence into the undifferentiated stream of sound that is "noise"; and, especially, in the language of electronic transmission, it is to add the colors of rhetoric to the "white noise" of an untuned radio. it is a joint or hinge that must be itself motionless, empty, inactive so that the gate or door that is hung from it can move. it is the vulnerable part of the animal's body that in life makes motion possible, but which in death enables the butcher's knife to transform the body into convenient segments for eating. the aura that a word like "articulation" brings into a particular usage in discourse is immensely rich and diverse. because desmond is himself suspicious of the power of language, especially literary language, he does not seem to understand that to call upon this multiplicity is not to encounter a series of refutations or contradictions (what he would call an "equivocal" series). nor does one find that claim in the theoretical texts written by the deconstructionists against whom he is writing. [8] while the hegelian dialectic and the work of deconstruction have in common an interest in the teleological thrust of articulation, desmond distinguishes between them in the following way: where deconstruction seems to give us analysis without synthesis, dialectic insists that we return again to the original synthesis, now with the enrichment of having passed through the analysis. (98) for desmond, the implications of diversity and openness which seem on the surface to be the special contribution of deconstruction are in fact already implicit in the hegelian dialectic. he offers a contribution to a "positive 'deconstruction' of the deconstructionist's often too closed and fixed view of hegel." [9] desmond's defense of hegel, learned and useful as it is, does not really respond in a serious way to the readings of hegel that he finds inadequate in heidegger and derrida. and yet one finds in heidegger and derrida quite genuine appreciations of what desmond says they reject in hegel. in his late _identity and difference_ heidegger describes the "active nature of being" which is itself an "unprecedented exemplar" with the following example from hegel: hegel at one point mentions the following case to characterize the generality of what is general: someone wants to buy fruit in a store. he asks for fruit. he is offered apples and pears, he is offered peaches, cherries, grapes. but he rejects all that is offered. he absolutely wants to have fruit. what was offered to him in every instance %is% fruit and yet, it turns out, fruit cannot be bought. (66) one may grant that this is one of heidegger's more rudimentary evocations of being. it is full of the unspecifiability that belongs to deconstruction, and, at the same time it is full of the unspecifiability that is characteristic of the concept of beauty that desmond evokes. fruit cannot be bought, beauty can not be . . . . what is the proper predicate for a sentence of which beauty is the subject? [10] the much reiterated, without being particularly understood, linguistic turn is precisely what is at stake when desmond offers beauty as an alternative to nihilism. he sees "beauty" as an alternative to the closed wholeness which the deconstructionists seem to attribute to hegel. the problem with beauty is the problem that heidegger's shopper has when he asks for fruit: beauty, like fruit, cannot be bought, cannot be parsed. [11] for desmond, "%beauty is the sensuous image of being%"; [it] "presents us with a bounded harmonious whole, hence limited whole." desmond gathers up and makes use of kant's observations from _critique of judgment_ that "art produces a %second nature% over and above the first nature of externality." and finally, "every merely escapist aesthetics of beauty must be derided; beauty rather must seek to accept and include within itself the divisive, destructive forces of complex conflicts." the artist testifies to and verifies his or her honesty by being able to release and articulate the ugly (from within beauty) in a movement toward a "complex affirmation." [12] this is the point at which one must raise essential questions about how and in what register it is appropriate to engage with and offer alternatives to either "deconstruction" or the work of nietzsche, heidegger, derrida, and nihilism. is there a protocol? is there a methodological context from within which a respectful engagement is possible? is the "complex affirmation" either complex or affirming? how can a writer undertake a defense of hegel against the negative and the denying (in order to offer a defense of the positive and the affirming), do so in the very rhetoric of the polarities that the tradition against which he argues calls into question. moreover, how can he undertake, as desmond does in his last volume, a defense of art, without--even if only to dismiss it--raising the question of the status of the literary text? without, in fact, being really concerned with the fundamentally linguistic aspect of deconstruction? [13] when desmond writes that "deconstruction is inextricably tied up with articulation" he has a perfect opening to the issue of the status of the text. and it is a point at which it would be possible to distinguish among the variety of issues and points of view that are collapsed into "deconstruction."^1^ [14] desmond's thesis is that "the dialectical way represents an approach to the art work which preserves what i have called the principle of wholeness, while not necessitating us to discard the deep complexities and polarities disclosed by deconstruction" (96). indeed he writes that, "the present chapter might be seen as contributing to a positive 'deconstruction' of the deconstructionist's often too closed and fixed view of hegel" (99). [15] but this very project of finding hegel's (self generated) double, of finding the "absolving" and the "releasing" in hegel's absolute rather than merely the "dissolving" and "enclosing"--of inviting us to read _the phenomenology of spirit_ in a liberating and multivalent way--is undercut when desmond goes on to read foucault, for example, in a univocal, denatured way. he indicates that foucault's "post-nietzschean announcement of the 'death of man'" is a representation of modernity as a world in which, "man is played out, obsolete . . . harmony is dead . . . randomness and calculated purposelessness are to be the final gesture in the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art." this view of nietzsche, foucault and assorted aspects of postmodernism are derived from a not exactly objective source, jacques barzun. [16] my point here is not to castigate desmond for relying on secondary sources for his characterization of the "aesthetics of annihilation," but rather to reproach him for missing an opportunity to link the reading of hegel he offers with foucault himself. one thinks of foucault's "preface to transgression." this essay is fully as much an effort to de-totalize the dialectic and to open up the possibilities of affirmation as is desmond's own work: transgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine "no" that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core. it is the solar inversion of satanic denial.^2^ [17] and even when foucault writes in the final paragraph of requiem of _the order of things_ that, taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area--european culture since the sixteenth century--one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it . . . as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. and one perhaps nearing its end. ^3^ [18] foucault's "archaeology" is read as "the denunciation and dismantling of traditional art" instead of as an attempt to understand and to know the relationship between traditional and modern art and experience. foucault's sense of crisis in the areas of community, nature, and gender does not mean that foucault's writing has %caused% the crisis. one cannot help feeling that indeed the philosophical writers who write so urgently against nihilism are experiencing the same or collateral crises. it might be useful to distinguish the writers who attempt to understand or point the way toward the crisis from those who offer a solution to it. it is my own feeling that such solutions are premature and that understanding, pointing, and indicating the lived experience of our crises--in whatever form it takes--needs some answer besides dismissal. [19] if desmond's first book offers a revisited and doubled hegel, a hegel whose sense of the negative, whose cultivation of the negative is substantial and long-lived enough to put the post-nietzschean, post-heideggerian nihilists of our era to shame, his second book, _desire, dialectic and otherness_ is an extended and intricate defense of ontotheology. but again, while the attention given to an articulation and an unfolding of a rejection of nihilism is both engaging philosophically and lyrical in its envisioning of what he calls "desire's tenacious witness to the primordial power of the yes" there is, in the reader, nevertheless a residue of doubt. and one's doubt derives not so much from a sense that the affirming argument for the generative power of desire is inadequate, but rather from a sense that insufficient attention is paid to the urgency of the position against it. [20] for desmond, "desire introduces disjunction into this submersion [in passivity, before the fall] and sows the seed of a determinate self through the sense of difference and dissatisfaction" (21). the desiring self is both original and originating and at its best "tries to point not simply to what is specified but, more deeply to what does the specifying." it is very much the hegelian self who, as subject knowing the object, at the same time recognizes itself as a knowing object; it is the process by which the self individuates itself from itself in the act of knowing the world. but desmond's notion of origin is no more a fixed point in time than it is a fixed limit in space: [the original self] is the movement between fixed beginnings and ends and, in the middle between them, is an end and a beginning, more radically moving, powerfully positive, and indeterminably rich. (65) [21] one needs to pull back for a moment: deconstruction is tied up with "articulation," hegelian dialectic is the drive toward articulating the absolute, and the absolute (or originary) self (which comes up toward the end of _desire dialectic and otherness_) is fueled by (the same?) urgent move toward articulation. in the case of the last or originary self it comes to know itself because its openness to otherness makes it possible for it to know itself. at this stage of his argument desmond is concerned with ways in which deconstruction and the hegelian dialectic share concerns and outcomes. it is essential for his case to show that deconstruction arises out of and subsides into nihilism while his own position, deriving from a development of the hegelian position which he calls %metaxology% does not. the "metaxological" is that middle ground in which "the community of originals" comes into being. he finds the experience of the aesthetic, the sublime and agapeic love to be examples of living in the middle, in some new territory which is neither self nor other but somehow both at once, without there being any impairment of either element. [22] earlier on, desmond had used the example of narcissus whose mistake is not that he falls in love with his image on the surface of the water but the fact that he makes no distinction between himself and other. he cannot have a self until he identifies in some way with that which is not him. for desmond, sartre and hobbes are blood brothers with narcissus: "in the war of all against all, the leviathan who would tame all does not bear the olive branch, unfortunately, only the apotheosis of the ailment. when we hiss at this hell, we succeed only in stoking its chill fires" (174). the ailment in each case is the notion of the univocal, hence undifferentiated, self. [23] _desire, dialectic and otherness_ concludes with a notion of what desmond calls, following hegelian terminology, "a post-romantic symbol." as i understand it, the "post-romantic symbol" is an alternative to the images of totalization that are associated with the classical humanist or judeo-christian world and similarly an alternative to the radical inwardness of the romantic or post-cartesian world. desmond makes each of these traditions serve as a lens of a binocular, in such a way that the overlapping of their lines of sight produces a three-dimensional, in the middle, or, finally "metaxological," vision: [a post-romantic symbol] emerges from the metaxological intermediation of more than one infinity, the interior infinity of the original self and the suggestion of another infinity emergent in being itself. (201) but desmond is cautious not to equate this multitude of infinities with the hegelian absolute. it will not tend, as hegel had directed his absolute, toward the identity of identity and difference. the persistence of "otherness," instead of being the sense of malaise that afflicts and paralyzes the cartesian self, is fundamental, for desmond, to the idea of being itself. otherness is not the alternative to being, it is the necessary circumstance of being. [24] by pluralizing wholeness and infinity, desmond sets the stage for his "community of originals." he recognizes that there can be no claims for an explicit or ultimate explanation of the community he envisions. he aims instead toward "a kind of periphrastic philosophical image, culminating not in absolute knowledge, but in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma" (206). but language itself, the medium to which the herculean efforts of "articulation" are confined, threatens continually to congeal again into the very imprisoning structures from which it had, with so much difficulty, seemed to have escaped. in embracing this limitation, this danger inherent in rhetoric if not in language itself, it may well be that desmond puts himself in more intimate alliance with the deconstructive theorists against whom he has written his books than he realizes: i have tried to minimize this drift by discerning the metaphor in the structure, thereby turning this limitation to some positive use. for our limits may be an indirect image of the ultimate otherness, a kind of ontological salutation of what is always beyond us. facing into this final difference, one may consent to the community of being and seek to be divided oneself no longer. for we become patterned after what we love as ultimate. (206-207) [25] i recognize that there is very little in the work of, say, derrida about what we may love as ultimate.^4^ but it does seem to be the case that for both derrida and desmond the struggle toward affirmation is a struggle with, against, and for the elements of rhetoric and poetry that both convey and cloud meaning. they choose different poems and different rhetorical moments. desmond reads hopkins, yeats, shakespeare _and_ hegel; derrida reads mallarme, valery, genet _and_ hegel. and when we come to look at their readings, at how they perform as readers, we come to understand the real problem that arises when one tries philosophically to refute or out-flank deconstruction as it is specifically and concretely practiced. for desmond "aesthetic objects" (usually poems) come to exist as unambiguous and thematic messages to the world. the danger and possibility of the metaphor, the metaphor as metamorphosis, the power of which desmond is entirely clear about in his own use (it enables him to minimize drift) seems to escape him when he uses literary texts like _lear_ to justify and support his philosophical claims. he calls the argument of his book a "periphrastic philosophical image . . . culminating in the acknowledgment of a radical enigma." [26] but is this not where deconstruction starts? once the recognition occurs, in the conscious tradition of the tragic genre, the analytic modality is mobilized not just to perform a reductive expose but, in desmond's fine word, to "articulate" the enigma. not that that is the end of the story, poem or figure. in a sense it is only the beginning. he writes in conclusion: for here what is enigmatic is not a rationalization of ignorance too lazy to root out its own lack. it has nothing to do with a lack that we ourselves could will away. the world in its otherness is opened out, and we cannot will its closure. the over determined power of being invades us within and surrounds us without. we encounter a limitation, the confession of which need occasion no lamentation. again, it is not enough just to say brusquely that the enigma is there and then go on as before, as if it made no difference. the talent is not for burial or for rusting, but for our ripe, originating return. (207) [27] desmond's final book, _philosophy and its others: ways of being and mind_ sets out to conceptualize without conceptualizing (that is, without fixing and freezing) the pluralized metaxological community of otherness for which _desire, dialectic and otherness_ had established the possibility. it might be useful at this point to distinguish two issues which occupy desmond throughout his work and which finally do not seem to have much to do with each other. they are not in any case interdependent. the double project that i understand being under taken is 1) a refutation of the "nihilism" of post-heideggerian "deconstructive" philosophical thinking and 2) a fleshing out of a community based on a radical embracing of otherness in which the self, obeying the charge to "be other," becomes instead itself. this is what desmond calls the metaxological community of intermediation. intermediation i understand to be a point of intersection between a pure "mediation" (which is the loss of self for the sake of the other) and an equally pure "immediation" (which is loss of the other for the sake of the self). in separating desmond's double project it is possible to dismiss the first part as being of minor interest. nihilism and deconstruction are so feebly envisioned that one feels that desmond himself has hardly met a living practicing nihilist. on the other hand the second aspect of desmond's work, particularly his extensively developed characterization of the community of postmodernity, rewards closer attention. [28] the first part of _philosophy and its others_, like plato's _republic_ or dante's _divine comedy_ or other efforts to envision a thoughtful or philosophical community, indicates the most significant roles that individuals play. each of the roles is envisioned vis-a-vis philosophy since philosophy can only fully become itself by "thinking its others" rather than merely thinking itself. while the exemplary figures of socrates and spinoza exist as tentative guides, desmond wants other "configurations of human possibility that have been and still are crucial for philosophy." he selects: the scholar, technician, scientist, poet, priest, revolutionary, hero, and sage. [29] the first half of the book consists of thinking through or living the intermediation between philosophy and each of these human possibilities. and each of them offers something concrete and essential that is missing from, and yet in some sense dependent on, philosophy. they are the other to philosophy that philosophy must encounter and at the same time they are themselves a kind of blindness. as he explains it: if philosophy involves the mindful thought of being as metaxological, it deals with what as %other% is always, as it were, too much for it. but it is just this excess of otherness that we must patiently try to think. likewise, since i see philosophical thought together with its others, i find it impossible hermetically to seal the mode of philosophical discourse itself. if philosophy is thought thinking itself and its others, just to that extent to be truly welcoming of the voice of the other means on occasion to be willing to voice one's own thought in the voice of the other. (11) we can see here an amplification of one of desmond's significant themes. the multiplicity of his post-hegelian community is one that is not based on the univocity of naive belief, nor on the equivocity of skeptical analysis, nor on the absorbing or dissolving power of the dialectic, but rather "to take seriously aristotle's saying that %to on legetai pollachos%, being is said in many ways." the philosopher is the one who articulates and seemingly makes possible the conditions of what desmond calls "middle mindedness." the philosopher knows middle thought to be an incessant alternation between extremes, endless conversation between thought and its others. thinking mediates with itself but also makes war on itself, on its own perennial seduction to closure against otherness. failing incitement from elsewhere, from external others, the philosopher is the type who picks a quarrel with himself. he make himself other. (60) [30] having rerooted philosophy as a way of being, not in its own certainty but in its own self doubt, in its own "genial doubt,"^5^ desmond goes on to elaborate three ways in which it is possible to live such a life. he offers being aesthetic, being religious, and being ethical. the final, ethical, chapter leads us most directly to concerns about the nature of the metaxological community of otherness. [31] the underlying presence of hegel's work of art as absolute is everywhere present in this chapter. for example, when desmond works with the idea of desire and its place in the ethical community he must find a way of moving from desire's self-insistence to desire's ability to "turn to the other as other." he must escape the nietzschean and freudian configuration of the will as an absolute in itself. he does not do it by denying the power of will, for this would deprive being ethical of energy and dynamism. desire itself must be more deeply thought: to desire is to be driven by internal exigency, yet also it is to reach out to something other than oneself that one needs or lacks or loves. it testifies to the self's power as both demanding its own satisfaction and stretching beyond itself to things or selves other than self. . . . this inherent doubleness grounds the difference between an instrumental relation to the other and one that grants the other its intrinsic worth. (188) [32] it is characteristic of desmond's thought to discuss an entity that is seen from one side (the univocal side) as total and that is seen from the other side (the equivocal/skeptical side) as empty and meaningless, and to fashion some space in the middle within which the entity in question can function like an hegelian work of art. so that, in other words, while it passionately tends toward completed wholeness, it is, by virtue of this very tending, always never whole. [33] this section on the possibilities of desire being ethical links up with the final movement of _desire, dialectic, and otherness_ where desmond suggests that what he is doing is authorizing the "post-romantic symbol." and it is a symbol not in the fixed iconic or plastic sense but rather in the dynamic verbal sense that he attaches to the metaxological. it is the movement, in fact, from first love ("every being affirms its own being . . . this i am and this i will to continue to be") to second love ("i know that my own being does not, cannot exhaust the fullness of being"). and we see that this post-romantic symbol carries with it an even more hegelian aura when desmond links the many kinds of passion available to the image with which hegel brings the _phenomenology of spirit_ to a finale: the golgotha of the ethical will is the self transformation of first love into second love. this transformation answers the question "what am i to be?" with a dread command: "be other! you must change utterly!" but strangely, being other is just to be what we are, to become our promise. (190) [34] there is a final section called "being mindful: thought singing its other" where desmond's uncertain yet wholehearted commitment to the power of the aesthetic cannot help but disappoint after so much that has been skillful, deft and eloquent. but instead of dwelling on its deficiencies, i would rather look at the immediately preceding part of _philosophy and its others_ which is itself (as its title suggests) an exemplification of "being mindful: thought thinking its other." [35] here desmond turns his attention to three issues that are rarely as significantly present in contemporary thoughtful discourse as they are here: logic, solitude and failure^6^. it is much more likely that we would read and write about intuition, intimacy with others, and (perhaps) the fear of success. but for desmond these three former and more somber concerns represent the determining otherness of philosophy; they are in fact the crucial alien others against which triumphalistic thought would inoculate us. but just as desmond reminds us of dostoyevsky's remark that to know the quality of justice in a country it is necessary to visit the prisons, so, in this case, to know the quality of thinking it is necessary to visit what is ordinarily excluded from thought and penalized for existing. the meditation on logic speaks to the intractable order of the world of the other; the meditation on solitude speaks to the penal condition of solitary confinement where "to be alone with oneself thus is to be alone with %nothing%"; while the meditation on failure addresses "the fact that the outer action does not, cannot fulfill completely the intention of the inner self. thus it is never enough to separate the inner and outer. this separation, in fact, is only a redefinition of failure" (252). so the efforts at totalization can never realize themselves in any kind of practice. and the philosophical world, because its way of being is so deeply implicated in the world of practice, is able to shield itself against what might otherwise imperil it. [36] but the figure of narcissus returns. and it seems that the crucial other to the un-systematic systematic philosopher is the chimerical reality of language and rhetoric. the philosopher cannot examine his own tools. his words stand out on the surface with all the problematic stainless steel shimmer desmond attributes to the cartesian self. he trusts his words and so he has not met the adversary who combines and exemplifies logic, solitude, and failure: the language with which he works. narcissus drowns not because he falls in love with himself, but because he does not recognize what is not him. [37] it is easy to understand why a philosopher who truly means to move philosophy away from the nihilistic and as well as the facilely therapeutic, who has already dealt with the poverty of the linguistic philosophers and who has set out to present an alternative to deconstruction, would not be in the mood to disassemble the very means without which his project seemingly could not exist. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ see desmond's earlier article, "hegel, dialectic, and deconstruction." _philosophy and rhetoric_ 18 (1985), 244-263. while desmond's view of deconstruction is rather limited and second-hand (he relies on anthologies like _deconstruction and criticism_ from 1979), he is alert to the subtle presence of nietzsche and heidegger and to the implications of that presence. ^2^ michel foucault, _language, counter-memory, practice_, ed. donald f. bouchard (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1977), 37. ^3^ michel foucault, _the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences_ (new york: vintage books, 1970), 386-87. ^4^ consider the remarkable material collected in his _memories for paul de man: revised edition_ (new york: columbia university press, 1989). see, for example, derrida's defense of de man against the charge of nihilism. he gives him the plural affirmation of molly bloom (a formula of affirmation that desmond also uses against nihilism): underlying and beyond the most rigorous, critical, and relentless irony, within that "%ironie der ironie%" evoked by schlegel, whom he would often quote, paul de man was a thinker of affirmation. by that i mean--and this will not become clear immediately, or perhaps ever--that he existed himself in memory of an affirmation and of a vow: yes, yes. ( 21) ^5^. in his unlikely comparison of chicken little with the buddha, desmond makes the point that what ennobles the buddha is that he is moved by genial doubt rather than anxious faith: "where he can know the truth, he refuses only to believe. but his searching can cause disquiet" (144). ^6^. these are the three areas of concern to which desmond devotes the final part of his study. i understand that for him it is the failure of modernist philosophy to encounter these issues, and by virtue of this failure the inability of modernist philosophy to speak to human exigency, that accounts for its fundamental nihilism. millard, 'bargaincounterculturalcapitalism: gear and writhing at the new music seminar', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-millard-bargaincounterculturalcapitalism.txt bargaincounterculturalcapitalism: gear and writhing at the new music seminar by bill millard <millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu> department of english rutgers university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by bill millard, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: the new music seminar and new york nights, june 15-21, 1992, new york city [1] at the close of four days of fractiousness, defensiveness, tepid consensus, heated debate, masturbation unabated, plugs for products, plugs for services, plugs for personalities, plugs for personae, plugs for personal agendas, plugs for drugs, and live performances plugged and unplugged, a ballroom full of people found themselves on the receiving end of a sexual threat. diamanda galas, new york based anti-diva, stepped onto the table at which she and ten other rock and near-rock artists were seated, to deliver their observations on the state of the music industry. standing tall and turning her back to the audience, she invited everyone (loudly, twice) to admire her buttocks, then inquired, "how many of you limp dicks can get it up with a condom?" what began as a series of mundane remarks on stylistic homogenization and fading undergrounds suddenly had to make room for a disturbing gesture in aids activism, complete with sexual role reversal: galas in the phallic role, on the rampage. "with this fine ass, i can't even get fucked because none of you can get it up with a condom on!" (when galas began partially undressing, jim dreschler of new york band murphy's law left his position at the opposite end of the table and appeared to take up her dare, but came no closer to her than photo-op distance before backing down.) [2] as many have come to expect at new music seminars, this rupture of star-panel conventions led to one incendiary moment of near-connection, then largely fizzled into the poses of angry egoists. having seized attention to force the issue of proceeds from rock charities upon the panel and audience--the previous night's aids benefit featuring galas, soul asylum, prong, and the butthole surfers (whose leader gibby haynes was chairing the rock artists' panel), had generated little research money and widespread accusations of profiteering--galas ceded center stage to voices that were just as loud but lacked her frame breaking conviction that public-health concerns outweighed those of the rock scene. panelists attempted to move the conversation away from bitter exchanges with audience members ("how much did %you% get paid, gibby?" "give it back!" "this is pathetic . . . this makes me want to quit the music business") toward various personal and collective responses to the fabled greed of the industry. psychic tv's genesis p-orridge, for example, in a sun ra venusian hat and an oracular tone, spoke at length of chinese atrocities toward tibetans, his own forcible exile from the u.k., the value of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) in pacifying football hooligans, and the relative political triviality of the music-industry concerns that are the seminar's %raison d'etre%, concluding that everyone should "stop buying records, save the money, and travel." [3] but a final collective gesture against the structure of the seminar itself--the exasperated departure of the whole panel and audience to join the rap artists' panel next door, which had been walled off from the rock panel as if to embody physically the apartheid-like status of stylistic categories--produced only a short-lived sense of collective purpose. ice-t and other rap panelists welcomed the largely white rock crowd, but an audience member took the floor mike angrily to pierce the balloon: "if you're not down with our concerns . . . not just today but tomorrow, %we don't want your support%." exit collective adrenaline. harry allen, public enemy's "media assassin," came down from the dais to hug and thank the angry audience member; most whites in the room began looking limp. what looked for a moment like unpremeditated woodstocking was quickly reinscribed as grandstanding. [4] it has become standard operating procedure at each year's new music seminar for participants to dismiss, disparage, and disrespect the new music seminar. there was more to the 13th nms than sound, fury, and nonsignification, but one could hardly leave the marriott marquis with an impression of having viewed a discursive community engaged in productive intercourse. this annual event represents the alternative-rock world's uncertainty over its status as a self-analytic profession, a promotion-intensive capitalist enterprise, or a locus of generational/ideological opposition. pulled in three directions, the seminar's reliable response is to roll its collective eyes (hoping nearby mtv cameras are rolling as well) and implode. * * * * [5] professional conferences and trade shows perform crucial functions in situating an activity and its practitioners along continua of social position, economic status, and ideology. whatever purposes underlie the activity--private profit, political advantage, cultural prestige, knowledge for its own or any other sake, leisure- the convening of those who pursue it generates not only self-conscious discourse about the activity but practice of the activity and exchanges in the goods, services, and intangible forms of capital that surround the activity.^1^ one attends a conference to learn (or relearn), and to occupy, the habitus of the profession, i.e., to understand, to do, and to trade. [6] market behavior at different conferences varies in explicitness; the atmosphere of a conference and even its physical arrangement provide clues to where the activity in question lies along the profession/business continuum, and thus to the cultural capital its participants may claim. trade shows such as the comdex computer convention, where even products not yet in existence ("vaporware") are advertised to generate market interest, should they actually be produced, occupy an obvious commercial extreme. at the other, communities that define themselves as professions (such as medical specialties, many of whose members attend national conferences mainly to hear the first-hand presentation of findings that they can put to practical clinical use) often allocate the educational and commercial segments of a conference to separate sites: the largest hall in a hotel or convention center for the hustling of products (cleverly pitched pharmaceuticals for the heavy prescribers at the american college of cardiology; vast and elaborate displays of tomographic scanners and magnetic resonance imaging equipment for the technophiles at the radiologic society of north america), the smaller surrounding rooms for the scholarly presentation of data--inadvertently implying, through the centering of commerce and the peripheralizing of the ostensibly central activity of continuing professional education, that the commercial tail has been known to wag the professional dog. at modern language association conferences, economic functions, professional practice, and leisure activities mutually overlap, as paper readings and departmental cocktail parties all help define and refine the economies of prestige on which academic hiring depends. regardless of physical structures or consensual rituals, however, conferences and conventions allow a participant the temporary sense of access to all the multiple facets of the activity; if one cannot quite occupy the center of a professional panopticon (owing to scheduling conflicts), one can at least construct a personal pluropticon, grazing on performances and wares as if wielding a video remote. [7] if the respective balance of discourse (ostensibly disinterested) and exchange (motivated) at a conference correlates with the definition of an activity as a profession or a business, the appearance of analytic discourse at a conference for a field that has historically had no pretenses to professional status, rock music,^2^ is an intriguing anomaly. along with the cmj music marathon each fall, the annual nms is recognized as the unofficially official convention for the u.s. rock industry (or for those segments of the industry to whom the grammy awards have little meaning). but the seminar's origins in the alternative-music and independent-label communities (like "alternative music" and independent labels themselves) have been obscured, in slightly greater degree each year, by the participation of the large corporate labels.^3^ at the same time, the seminar makes efforts to incorporate explicit politics, analytic debate, and even a degree of self scrutiny into its program, along with the customary promotion, schmoozing, and dealing. this dissonance admits numerous explanations: an attack of countercultural bad conscience? an attempt to use its profit-making activities (the nms is a private for-profit firm) as a source of subsidy for unprofitable discursive activities that its organizers still consider salutary? or, conversely, an effort to mask its exploitive nature, like that of the music industry as a whole, behind the window-dressing of countercultural rhetoric? these constructions are not necessarily mutually contradictory. [8] the first nms took place in 1979, the year of the first major rap single ("rapper's delight," sugarhill gang) and two years after the watershed year of 1977, when, as the story goes, punk changed rock forever (temporarily). even though the punk period's explosive growth of autodidact bands and independent record companies almost immediately became nostalgia fodder--the clash's "hitsville uk" from the _sandinista!_ album waxed sentimental about small noncorporate labels, in the past tense, as early as 1980- and even though rap has moved from strict subcultural status to a subject mentioned in democratic convention speeches, the nms to date has maintained the professed purpose of promoting music that is unlikely to find an outlet on large labels or on stations formatted as "contemporary hits radio" or "classic rock." its panels are rigorously taxonomized by stylistic subject (rap, dance, latin, metal, and the catchall rock category "alternative," as well as nuts-and bolts publishing, booking, legal, video, technology, creative, and "issues" panels), but a rhetoric of inside/outside still permeates the enterprise. the practical panels mainly address those who are inside the industry yet outside established centers of commercial power, such as unsigned musicians and their managers, independent distributors, and music directors for college radio stations; the dominant tone combines desire to become an insider with skepticism about how much the current insiders really know about the music (gerard cosloy of new york's matador records: "the scene is full of people who think they know shit. and that's what they know: shit"). at the speeches and debate-oriented panels, too, much of the discourse conveys an unmistakable sense--perhaps nostalgic, certainly problematized--that one can clearly distinguish us from them. [9] the nms project is both schizoid and, on its own terms, successful. the combination of a convention for industry personnel (offering reflexive discourse, or at least the reflections of insiders) and an orchestrated showcase for mostly unsigned talent (practice) results annually in a flurry of record-contract signings and distribution deals (exchange). the performance branch of the seminar, now known as new york nights, coordinates bookings at some 30 venues in manhattan and hoboken, giving approximately 350 acts the chance to play before audiences comprising large numbers of a&r personnel, critics, and radio program directors, all of whom enter the clubs free with nms badges. (persons not credentialed for the seminar can also buy discount passes, making new york nights a musical bargain counter for the local fan and adding the semblance of a "real" consumer public for the participant.) live performance also took place on-site, as a "bmi live" display allowed old and new groups to play half-hour acoustic sets, making the marriott's hallways a continuous concert stage. conversations with musicians invariably reveal that they regard playing nms shows with a combination of anticipation and dread; war stories abound in which performers are hustled onstage, hustled off, poorly mixed at the sound board, usually unpaid, and generally ill-treated. yet they continue to travel cross-country or even internationally for one or two gigs at the nms, on the off chance that they will end up at the center of one of their year's right-place-right-time stories. at home, the transition from local obscurity to recording stardom appears incremental and remote^4^; at the nms, overnight success enters the realm of concrete possibility. [10] the practice of new music at the seminar is thus inseparable from exchange, or far less separable than it is in the circumstances faced daily by most rockers and rappers. by spatially and chronologically concentrating both sellers/performers and buyers/label personnel, leaving the relative scarcity of recording contracts unchanged but heightening the chances of a connection that would otherwise be improbable, the nms presents immediate material incentives for an activity whose practitioners, under nearly all other conditions, have few economically rational reasons to pursue it. the proliferation of eager promoters from europe, the pacific rim, and latin america increases the feeding-frenzy atmosphere: with yankee dollars at stake, representatives at the various international booths sought domestic connections with an enthusiasm that most anglo americans reflexively kept under a hip degree of control. the seminar calls itself by an academic term (it is not the new music exposition or, thankfully, the new york rock exchange), and it pays something more than lip service to multiculturalism and green politics, but it places the art of the deal squarely in the foreground. [11] a glaring example occurred at a legal panel, "rap and sampling: art or larceny," which employed a moot-court conceit. debate focused not on %whether% using a horn track as the basis of a hiphop mix was art or larceny, or %whether% the recombination of sounds by sampling technology constituted a musical performance, but on %how much% the original musician and music publisher would be paid for having their record sampled. the participants glossed over the possibilities for debate about materially driven changes in definitions of property rights, but went head to head over percentage points--quantifying, through negotiations about the relative contributions made by the players of horn and sampling synthesizer, an issue that might have been explored in qualitative discourse. the attorney for the prosecution, emi music publishing's fred silber, set up one of his plaintiffs as a predictable romanticist icon, a starving saxophonist who honed his chops at juilliard but wound up working at burger king while his work made money for others; the sampling producer's defense attorney, michael sukin, argued with comparable vagueness that "the constitution encourages art" and that "strict copyright would kill rap." after the verdict (a $1000 fee for each 100,000 sales and a 50% writer credit for the plaintiff) the moderator revealed that the saxophonist was in fact greg smith, a well-paid studio musician, songwriter, and grammy nominee, hardly in need of hamburger work. neither hiphop's unique reversal/detournement of the racially charged history of field recording, in which black folk and blues performers received little or nothing from white-owned record companies, nor the question of the disparate class-coded significance of the symbols at stake--juilliard training and grammies versus hiphop mixing--was taken up. [12] yet the dissonance between the pervasive exchanges and some of the other forms of discourse spotlighted at the nms is striking. simply by allowing exposure to acts whose commercial prospects are limited, the seminar becomes the locus of assorted anticommercial rhetorics, from romantic narratives pitting suffering artists against bean-counting philistines to unsentimental, often race-conscious oppositional agendas. indeed, political stances are both structurally inevitable and overtly courted; whether this constitutes patronization is debatable. some of the most popular of this year's panels (to take two overflowing examples, the writers' panel "new music: a problem for new and established critics" and "pot in pop: let's be blunt") were also among those with most contentious audiences, whether the bones of contention were generational/ ideological issues degenerating into %de gustibus% disputes and personal grudges, or moral panics over ever-popular recreational chemicals. at both of these sessions, panelists offered relatively harmonious collections of views--harmonious to the point of unison in the case of "pot in pop," where norml-style herbal advocacy ("you could power the whole country with the hemp raised on just 6% of u.s. farmland") was the order of the day--and thus brought on alarmingly vitriolic, if hardly surprising, objections from audience respondents. the somewhat paranoiac tone of antidrug or anti-robert christgau dissidents evoked wagon circling responses by the respective hemp-using and critical communities. the assumed social structure, whether regretted (elizabeth wurtzel, _new yorker_ pop critic: "i feel like we're mostly writing for each other") or described in a language of wishful solidarity (b real of cypress hill: "with marijuana there is no racism. . . . this is the only plant i know that brings people together"), remained the subculture beleaguered by various forms of intolerant power. [13] oppositionalism also pervaded the seminar's high profile keynote speeches. the performers invited to open the proceedings were two whose symbolic language has placed them directly in the crosshairs of the state: john trudell, a santee sioux activist and poet who has recently begun a blues-rock recording career, and ice-t, the much-publicized rapper, thrash-metal singer, and film star. while working for native american causes in the 1970s, trudell drew so much fbi attention that he felt he had to leave the movement to avoid endangering his friends; his family was killed in a 1979 fire widely believed to have been set by government operatives on the same day he burned a flag in washington (federal authorities declined to investigate the fire). his nms address balanced devotional verse on elvis with scathing remarks on eurocentrism and some very 1960s-ish rallying cries ("rock and roll is based on revolutions going way beyond 33 1/3"). with his harrowing personal history, his status as a spokesman for peoples historically on the receiving end of euro-american brutality, and his abilities as a political orator, trudell is essentially immunized from skeptical reception, but his strong, uncomplicated outsider position matches the long playing vinyl of his apocalyptist metaphor. a politics that is immediate for him inevitably strikes much of the nms audience, impressed but implicated, as nostalgic. [14] ice-t (whose song "cop killer," as events following the nms would make clear, is not beloved by southern police departments or their anonymous telephonic sympathizers), while equally impressive in his oppositional rhetoric, is implicated in more complex ways. he came close to omnipresence during the seminar: he addressed the collected audience about racism in society at large and corrupt exchanges inside the music industry, performed with his thrash band body count (busting off a vigorous "cop killer" while a line of nypd maintained a hairtrigger-tense presence just outside the hall), co-mc'd the aids benefit with b-52 fred schneider, and served on the concluding rap artists' panel. he also managed to appear from the audience, at a panel on media coverage of rap, to accuse most of the panelists and audience of dilettantism for taking self congratulatory views of rap's cultural acceptance while his own experience suggested that the rap world was still "at war."^5^ the nms became a de facto promotional blitz for ice, but being surrounded with people predisposed in his favor (for once) did nothing to modulate his anger. the biggest star at an event that disperses and focuses star worship in approximately equal degree voiced some of the sternest objections to existing socioeconomic arrangements. [15] the ice-t conundrum speaks volumes about the contradictions at the heart of the seminar and the music industry. if anyone in attendance (trudell excepted) had cause to consider himself or herself at odds with hegemonic forces, surely it was ice, as numerous police organizations (the national black police association excepted^6^) have taken his song's retributive fantasies literally and called for his scalp. (in the months following the nms, some have even raised the specter of federal prosecution under the charge of sedition, while their anonymous associates have lodged death threats--real, not coded in a metal-avenger persona--against employees of time-warner.) yet if anyone in attendance had cause to consider himself embraced by hegemonic forces, it was likewise ice, with a warner brothers contract, a major hollywood role (in the completed but unreleased _looters_) under his belt, and a maximum of favorable exposure over the four days of the seminar. seminar participants heard him provide the crucial contextual discourse that sound bites (outside the music industry, within the controlled simulacrum of an american public sphere) never afford him. and though the stock oppositionalist/countercultural narrative envisions media institutions attempting to stifle any uncomfortable voice, the warner organization--one of the corporate labels most widely castigated by nms participants for "cherry-picking" artists from independents, worsening small labels' chances for survival and watering down the music--has continued to support him, absorbing both flak and actual menace. [16] around this figure and these circumstances, the cognitive structure of inside/outside contorts itself to the point of collapse. the mechanisms of exchange, as embodied in time-warner, can rarely be counted on to foster an oppositional practice as aggressive as ice's "i'm 'bout to bust some shots off/i'm 'bout to dust some cops off" (particularly at the cost of an expensive boycott against corporate holdings, from _time_ magazine to _batman returns_ to the six flags over texas amusement park). time-warner certainly counts as an althusserian ideological state apparatus, a media institution devoted to the manufacture of public consent. yet the "cop killer" incident, like the seminar it overlaps, suggests that it is simplistic to assume continual congruence between the interests of one isa and those of another. within the fissures that develop between such institutions--and with certain risks, decidedly nonrhetorical, accepted--it is occasionally possible to find the space for critical discourse and musical practice. * * * * * [17] if the nms, like the "new music" it claims as its province, is inconceivable without the historical eruptions of punk and rap into popular music during the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively, it may be instructive to apply to it a few terms of historical analysis that were also generated in 1977. attali's _noise_, published in france that year and in an english translation in 1985, advances a staged theory of musical paradigms (sacrifice, representation, repetition, composition), not so much driven by economic developments, in a classical base/superstructure model, as accompanying (even, attali asserts, anticipating) broad shifts in social relations and implicit philosophical codes.^7^ as susan mcclary suggests in her afterword to _noise_, one can read punk and postpunk musics, positioned across boundaries of institution and gender, as signs that the fluid musical and socioeconomic forms attali envisioned under the rubric of composition are actually aborning. do the tensions that permeate the nms--the sense that pop music and its derivatives are in a deeply unsatisfactory state- imply that something resembling attali's paradigm shift is in the works? [18] the only coherent answer may be "yes, though only in certain spaces, and possibly in no form attali or many musicians would care to recognize." as police, politicians, and censorship groups are casting ice-t in a scapegoat role along with luther campbell, musical supporters of norml's agenda, various supposedly satanist metal bands,^8^ and undoubtedly a host of pop figures yet unnamed, a cyclical/ viconian revision of attali's speculations seems just as plausible as his linear-progression model. perhaps the profession of pop musician is coming to include an inherent risk of scapegoating: the social violence that is too painful to view directly (or even on videotape) generates a symbolic violence that must consume occasional figures who traffic in the powerful symbols of rap and rock. the most primitive of attali's sociomusical modes, sacrifice, may be returning; those who loudly voice what excluded segments of the population are thinking make excellent fodder for ritual. [19] other tendencies within the seminar, however, provide grounds for guarded attalian hopes that repetition, instead of reverting to sacrifice, might actually yield to composition. technology--not unpredictably, at an event where great energy is spent trading in hardware and in access to it--is the imagined midwife. at several how-to panels ("how to make a great record cheap," "video under $10,000"), aimed at artists strapped for the startup funding that the post-mtv music industry increasingly requires for admission, the predominant view held that technology was the problem at least as often as the solution. but another panel on a subject that is only tenuously, trendily connected to the practices and exchanges immediately at hand ("virtual reality and its effect on the future of music") afforded some surprisingly clearheaded discussion about electronic interactivity as a paradigm for future forms of music made possible by the various user interfaces currently known as vr. [20] interactivity, of course, is an integral aspect of the future musical practices hinted at by attali. and the customary sites for the musical practices discussed at the nms, the guitar band's garage and the hiphop mixer's home studio, are loci for technologically enabled interactivity, structures for converting the reception of favorite pieces of music into recombinatory creative acts (the feedback drenched cover song, the sampled rhythm loop). expansion of the interactive element in music by vr-related technologies, further blurring the line between professionals and amateurs, could constitute a perceptible movement toward attalian composition. the performer/programmers convened by moderator jaron lanier (founder of vpl research) began most of their presentations in familiar nms self-promotional mode but quickly honed in on the issue of interactivity as, in panelist todd rundgren's terms, "a philosophical agenda, not a hardware question." [21] the inevitable dependence of such an agenda on hardware questions--and questions of the social structures and exchange mechanisms making the hardware available--provided grounds for the kind of speculative discourse that nms panels routinely gesture toward and rarely achieve. though programmed music is commonplace, music actually created through vr (e.g., on instruments existing only in virtual space, as conjectured by lanier) is still vaporware, and the very phrase "virtual reality" came under collective erasure as a term co-opted by the military via nasa and hyped into meaninglessness by publicity for the film _the lawnmower man_ (unanimously despised by the panel).^9^ hype for vr gear and vr-derived musical products thus gave way to debate over whether the development and deployment of vr would give greater control over musical material to technical specialists or the larger listening populace. information society's kurt harland took the former view, stating that 99% of the audience wanted "passive immersion" rather than access to the tools, and that electronically modeled musical procedures would simply expand the modes of immersion. tina blaine and linda jacobson of oakland's "techno-roots" group d'cuckoo offered a contrary theory: that advances in electronic instruments would increase listeners' ability to communicate musically and bodily--not in passive isolation, under the thumb of institutions and experts, but socially. [22] the hypothetical question of how the crucial producer/consumer division would fare amid 21st-century musical technology received no definitive answer, but descriptions and tapes of d'cuckoo's work made it plausible to accept their utopian vision over the huxleyan consumer dystopia (or attalian repetocracy) imagined by harland. d'cuckoo activates its anti-technophobic collective philosophy by inventing and building its own electronic percussion instruments, mixing aleatory effects with the rigorous discipline of japanese taiko drumming and zimbabwean marimba music, and incorporating audience input into its live work through devices such as a midi controller triggered by a giant beach ball thrown into the crowd. d'cuckoo had little need for the frenetic dealmaking of the nms--they have already added a development deal with elektra to their impressive resume--but with slogans at the ready ("you're either part of the steamroller or part of the pavement") they appeared more than ready to become a model for the next paradigm shift in popular music. no one anywhere near a major record label is likely to pick their "neoclassical postindustrial cybertribal world funk" as the next nirvana, commercially speaking, but their working methods (like those of punks and rappers) have gathered them considerable momentum. whatever degree of interpenetration might occur between this group and the music business as presently organized, their ability to improvise the terms and material means for their work surely counts as a survival advantage in the "cyber-darwinist" future rundgren describes. [23] lanier was unabashedly hyping d'cuckoo and its diy philosophy when he uttered the pithiest of his many soundbites: "art isn't for wimps." the phrase could be applied as easily to ice-t's risky rhetorical crusade, or to any of a number of performers whose voices cut through the density of the seminar, from aging punks like fear (whose acoustic set at bmi live was harsher and stronger than most amplified bands' sets in the clubs) to current genre collapsing acts like galas or the multiracial, multimedia disposable heroes of hiphoprisy. the phrase could also be translated simply as a recognition that the music industry, contrary to its organizing myths, is neither an inside to be penetrated nor an outside to be valorized; that narratives of escape, purity, or sanctuary no longer make usable sense of music's social function; that the schism between the real world and the music world is gibberish. the nms is not structured to generate consensus, and its internal contradictions remain irresolvable unless and until critical changes occur in the economics of musical production and distribution. still, the event makes it clear that the habitus of the musician in 1992 is a hotseat. the discord between the material and rhetorical aspects of musical practice implies that conditions are overripe for another noisy change. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ some of the terms that will recur throughout this analysis--practice, discourse, and exchange--represent a preliminary attempt to apply concepts from bourdieu and others working in his wake, such as john fiske, to rock and related musics, along with the other fields briefly discussed here. fiske's use of bourdieu's idea of the %habitus% to explain academics' difficulties in accounting for the complexities of everyday life (155ff) relies on the assumed exclusive polarity of practice and discourse, with a rueful acknowledgement that translating practice to discourse transforms it into something other than practice. where a cultural practice %encompasses% discourse, however, as at the mla or the nms, the polarity seems difficult to sustain. perhaps envisioning an interpenetration among these two terms and a third, exchange--coded as serpent in garden, a reminder that particular interests, agendas, and powers do not keep their distance--might help break the interpretive deadlock. ^2^ at this writing, i am aware of only a single explicit use of the term "profession" within rock 'n' roll to describe rock 'n' roll: the line "you know how different it is in this profession," from graham parker's "last couple on the dance floor" (on the minor 1983 album _the real macaw_), refers to recording work with a self-directed skepticism, an implication that romanticist views privileging the rock "artist" are patently absurd. this autocritique is characteristic of parker's work but also constitutes a recurrent trope common to most rock subgenres. it is easy to locate examples in which performers take the selfimportant fatuity of the music scene and industry as a given: carl perkins' tongue-in-cheek seriousness toward wearers of blue suede shoes, the rolling stones' "under assistant west coast promo man," joni mitchell's "free man in paris" ("stoking the starmaking machine behind the popular song"), the sex pistols' great rock 'n' roll swindle strategies, the commercially successful anticommercialism of 1980s industrial groups like nitzer ebb and nine inch nails, and the contemptuous response of "hardcore" rappers to pop rap groups like colour me badd or naughty by nature (e.g., epmd's "crossover," the leadoff track on the new def jam west label's 1992 nms sampler cassette, distributed unironically by that most streetwise of labels, columbia). ^3^ advertisers in the nms directory this year included the customary small labels such as alias, cardiac, caroline, knitting factory works, livin' large, rykodisc, tommy boy, and x-perience, but also most of the majors: a&m, atlantic, capitol, emi, epic, mercury, rca, reprise, and warner brothers. the latter's ad on the back cover encodes perfectly the hip, winking attitude that dominates seminar semiotics: beneath an assertive heading certain to arouse chuckles or wrath from indie-label oppositionalists ("warner bros. records. home of alternative music.") and in front of a huge globe rotated to reveal the eastern hemisphere (northern africa foregrounded), six models in corporate uniform flash friendly smiles for the camera--the good-humored board of vice presidents for a&r next door. they are a rainbow coalition of benettokens: four young men (an african-american, two preppy whites, and one who could be a latino, a pacific islander, or a native american and excels in the art of blow-drying), one young woman (white, jeweled for success), and one middle-aged man (white, the only member standing, radiating benign executive despotism from the head of the table). they are reassuring and receptive, ready to sign your pathbreaking group and bring your music to adoring, solvent multitudes. ^4^ for varied, credible accounts of the circumstances faced by musicians on the fringes of the industry, see bayton (on women's independent groups in england) and calder (on his own shot at the american inner circle). both underscore the persistence of musical practice in the absence of appreciable economic exchange. ^5^ at this writing, ice has voluntarily withdrawn the _body count_ album bearing "cop killer" from distribution, intending to distribute tapes of the song gratis at concerts while sire/warner re-releases a bowdlerized version of the record, minus the offending song. both ice (in assorted public statements) and his publicist jenny bendel (personal communication, august 7, 1992) dismiss speculation that time-warner personnel initiated or influenced his decision to recall the original album. "cop killer" has quickly become popular as a cover song in other bands' repertoires. ^6^ the combined law enforcement associations of texas (cleat), the houston police officers association, the new york state sheriffs' association, and assorted other law-enforcement groups called for boycotts, but ronald hampton of the national black police association gave _billboard_ interviewers a dissenting view: "[the song] didn't happen in a vacuum. . . . african-american people have been victimized by police brutality, and that is very real. where were those organizations when rodney king was beat up, and when that verdict came in?" (79). hampton's direct linkage between "cop killer" and the simi valley trial brings to the foreground many commentators' belief that scapegoating an angry black man is the ideal way to deflect public opinion away from a recognition that police forces in los angeles and elsewhere have long been out of control. ^7^ although _noise_ does much more than advance a stage theory, this aspect of attali's argument may be summarized as follows. music as a model of social structure begins in %sacrifice% as an element of girardian religious ritual, serving as an instrument of control by helping listeners forget the violence at the heart of sociality. with the rise of capitalism it mutates into %representation%, a rationalist-individualist mode marked by divisions and hierarchies of labor (composer, conductor, virtuoso performer, orchestra member, cabaret musician, busker, and assorted paramusical figures such as the entrepreneur), and the hypertrophy of "harmonic combinatorics" (64) becomes music's organizing feature; through infinite exploration of possible variations on tonality, musical representation exercises social control by inducing listeners to believe in a rationally organized socius. increasing dissonance, technological simulation, and mass production shatter this mode to yield the degraded 20th-century musical form, %repetition%, which silences people by deafening them with the emptiness of infinite reproduction, converting musical use value to the exchange value encoded in fads, stars, stockpiles of unheard recordings, and--as the ultimate (if obvious) extension of musical fascism--muzak. the progression through the first three stages gives a grim historical picture, but attali holds out a final stage, %composition%, as a post-marxian apocalypse of sociomusical decontrol. the music and economy of repetition face a crisis of exhaustion, and outsiders cease respecting the border dividing musical production from consumption. noisy nonexperts begin producing music (and perhaps other goods) for the value inherent in the productive act, not for exchange; "time lived" replaces "time stockpiled in commodities" (145). ^8^ see o'sullivan for a detailed account and interpretation of the ongoing moral panic over alleged satanism in rock music. ^9^ the marketable cachet of the phrase was underscored by the presence of a "vr" booth on the exhibit floor, where a small firm attempted to sell dance clubs on a four-channel audio panning system linked to a macintosh, using either a simple touchpad or a blinking plastic wand for user input. asked what his "vr" device had to do with vr, and what connection it had with the photo of an eyephoneand dataglove-wearing model posted nearby, the company's representative could deliver only the clearly rehearsed response that his product, unlike the investigational systems of vpl, was immediately available on the market. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited attali, jacques. _noise: the political economy of music_. trans. brian massumi. fredric jameson, foreword. susan mcclary, afterword. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1985. trans. of _bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique_. presses universitaires de france, 1977. bayton, mavis. "how women become musicians." in frith, simon, and andrew goodwin, eds. _on record: rock, pop, and the written word_. ny: pantheon, 1990. 238-257. bourdieu, pierre. _outline of a theory of practice_. trans. r. nice. cambridge: cambridge up, 1977. calder, jeff. "living by night in the land of opportunity: observations on life in a rock & roll band." _south atlantic quarterly_ 90.4 (1991): 907-937. fiske, john. "cultural studies and the culture of everyday life." in grossberg, lawrence, cary nelson, and paula treichler, eds., _cultural studies_. ny: routledge, 1991. 154-173. o'sullivan, gerry. "the satanism scare." _postmodern culture_ 1.2 (1991). "texas police pursue `cop killer.'" _billboard_ 27 june 1992: 1, 79. todorov, 'four luxembourgs civitas peregrina', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-todorov-four.txt the four luxembourgs civitas peregrina from the diary of a traveler pseudo-vladislav todorov vladislav todorov department of slavic languages university of pennsylvania vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by vladislav todorov, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. the explorers of luxembourg usually designate its four stages according to the four possible etymologies of its name. the first three: the luminous one, the dissipated one, and the twisted one stem from the latin: lux, luxuriosus, luxus. the fourth is usually derived from the name of the legendary revolutionary rosa luxembourg. the present exploration shall adhere to these interpretations of the name thus established through tradition. i. the luminous city of luxembourg some travelers also refer to it as the city of the sun. this city encloses an enormous hill. seen from afar its architecture resembles a gigantic mesh that has caught and subdued the upheaval of the mighty masses of earth which had inflated with gas and lava the earth's crust and left behind the mountains as monuments of their provocative erections towards the sun. the city is segmented into seven circles or rings that grip the hill in concentric circles towards the top. it resembles a formidable crinoline that repulses any rascal who might crawl up the hill. a grandiose temple is erected at that very top. to be precise the temple itself is the top. it springs up into an extraordinarily large dome on the top of which rises another smaller dome in whose center gapes an orifice that looks straight on the middle of the temple where the altar is placed. the dome is painted inside with the map of the celestial constellations, as if the sky repeats itself only lower down and smaller than itself. it has stooped down to the temple like a mystical constellation, a cipher that locks the meaning of the earthly events. the orifice is the threshold at which the maximal cosmic space is turned over into the minimal symbolic space of the temple. it is precisely through this orifice that the cosmos discharges its own superfluity for it to descend as the sacred order of the temple. thus, the temple resembles a cyclops's skull turned towards the sun which has scorched his eye in order to illumine him from inside. in this sense the illuminated-the internally luminous city is blind. thus built the temple manifests through its figure the original sin of man towards the sun. because before he stood on two legs, before his forehead bulged out like a church dome, before his eyes turned radiant, before he became sunlike man was turning up towards the sky and its luminaries, his scarlet and cracked like an enormous sore ape's ass. it is precisely this original anal openness of man towards the sun that some travelers saw manifested in the architecture of the shrines. the radiant--the seeing eye, the organ of light that bathes in rays will always drag after itself like a tin can the embarrassment of being once an anus. thus the central aperture of the temple, respectively the city expresses the ambivalent openness of the citizens towards their ruler--the sun. anyone entering the temple seems to cave in an ass through whose anus the sun down-casts its stern and all-pervasive gaze. it is the source of the total illumination of the city. in general, the whole city is arranged in such a way that it culminates spatially in the aperture. thus the whole city bathes its guilt in light. that is an all-encompassing luminescence in which you cannot help but wallow. this is the city of the total vertical transparency emanated by its center (the aperture). an all-pervasive solar gaze descends downwards as a guillotine. man who stares against this gaze glows completely illumined from inside. man stops casting a shadow. the city corpus is in fact the terrestrial figure of this super-terrestrial gaze. the very body and structure of the city are the terrestrial incorporation of the downward gaze of a super-power. the city itself represents the total exteriorization and exhibition of life before this gaze. the descending transparency of the world manifests the epiphany of the eye of the supreme supervisor--the sun. any kind of opaque negativity is usurped by the center. it is located there beyond and above the aperture of the city. inside and below the aperture all is positive-transparent. the people are neighbors for they are totally illumined and all-pervaded by the self-same luminous substance. they bathe in this totality and thus they prosper. completely transparent and weightless they seem to lack bodies with tunnels flatulent with heavy slops. this is the city of the completely erect and utterly projected outwards and upwards man who baths in the descending divine gaze. the emblem of the city is the obelisk. its erecting corpus is the spiritual gaze enacted in the matter of the world. the eye-sun as phallus. ii. the dissipated city of luxembourg this city rises not completely built and not completely demolished. a grand bust happened and the crowd bustles around the city somewhat rowdy, somewhat corrupted, somewhat raped, somewhat exhausted, promiscuously fornicating, having once transformed plummets into maces. the demolished city gapes like a cold volcano resounding from time to time with damnation. once the people had grown defiant and started erecting a tower city in order to reach god. they tried to look upwards and see god. they wanted to erect the vertical (upwards) transparency of the world. it was an attempt to establish surveillance over god. to catch god on the spot. so god got furious and segmented, that is, demolished their language. he dismantled it into a multitude of mutually impenetrable languages. a total incongruity set in that demolished the corpus of the city. the demolished tower city stands for the demolished human look advancing upwards to make transparent the world space. the fragmentation of language manifested an opaqueness that descended from above. this figured the absence of god, i.e. the absence of a center in the space of the city that could fully absorb all negativity in itself and thus make the people neighbors. god abandoned the babel. the god-forsaken city developed an exclusively horizontal vision and strategy. the neighbor turned stranger. the space between people hollowed out. when god desolated the city he, so to speak distributed the negativity among the citizens. he turned everyone into something partial, strange, alien, something "other" than everyone else, into a capsulated particularity. the only possible interest became the horizontal interest between the incompatible particularities. everyone lusted after power, strove to achieve self-made and self-fashioned deiformity. the space of the city became a space of internecine strife. thus the negativity discarded by god burst forth and desolation occurred. each desired the other in order to possess and abuse him, to subdue and mastered him. the space between thee and me was reduced. the city life demonstrates the desolation as a common condition. the corpus of the city that had started threatening erection towards god was castrated and went limp as a gut--the cesspit. god forced man to bend over. he twisted his bold gaze downwards. thus god reinstated man's guilty position. bent over in guilt man met the eyes of his fellowman and desired him. he desired his neighbor. the cross became the emblem of the castrated city corpus. the broken up obelisk. iii. the twisted city of luxembourg before they lived in their city, the people were engulfed in the intestines of a bull. the bull was god. and then one day the hero appeared and led them out by killing the bull-god. before this happened, the world was split in two chambers, into physical and allegorical space. the allegorical space was the labyrinth, whose tunnels always led towards the mouth of the bull. the physical space was the bull himself. the labyrinth allegorically represented and exhibited the bull's intestines. the mouth of the bull was the aperture which connected the two spaces. exactly there "the one" began and ended in "the other". the mouth was the threshold. the world was set up as a two-chambered device engulfing the people from one space into the other. the allegorical space (the labyrinth) continually collapsed into the physical one (the bull's mouth). this way the procession of death was performed. the physical space was god himself. the allegorical one--his phony presence outside his own natura. in order to succeed the hero had to walk back this same lethal path, to do an act opposite to the engulfing. it was precisely for this reason that the hero did not appear among the living ones in the allegorical space in front of the mouth of the bull-god. he appeared in the rear of the physical space or at the aperture opposite to the mouth--the anus of the bull-god. from there he entered the physique of the intestines and led out the people engulfed there back to the mouth. he led them out. thus the hero liquidated the bull-god. he abolished the physique of the god and as a consequence of this he found himself together with his people in the allegorical space of the labyrinth which survived as the one space. this turned out to be the virtual city of their liberation. the liquidation of god reduced the world to the omnipresence of the allegorical space. nothing could exist beyond it. the tunnels of the figurative reality did not lead to any apertures. they were blind. the liquidation of god came as a radical denaturalization of existence. the labyrinth is by itself a twisted construction. the corpus of the labyrinth city does not resemble any bold exalted erection. it can never be straight, nor can it be broken. its natural joints are twisted so that it cannot stand up. it drags its spreading horizontality. the transparency is reduced to the direct visibility in the convolutions of the tunnel. the global allegorical space could be recognized in the fact that the labyrinth is exactly the same in all its cells and can be surveyed without moving about. it is a self-duplicating sameness. the citizens live in one and the same allegory without being able to see each other because of the vertebral-like structure of the labyrinth. the physical space was absolutely shredded up and so busted. the allegorical one opened unlimited and thus became omnipresent. there was no power able to justify this endless allegorical order. the labyrinth has no center. every place in it is absolutely identical to every other place. in each cell of it emerge exactly the same things as in every other one. there are no heroically privileged places. when the hero led his people into the labyrinth he himself disappeared. he took a place in it and became like everyone else. he acquired the anonymous existence of everyone else. the labyrinth as an emblem signifies nothing but the torso of the world after god was wrested off it. nothing is present to testify to the sense of life, nothing exists to justify the order of the world but it is total. the absurd. it is conspicuous the final de-gradation of the phallus into a colon. the erection is supplanted by constipation. iv. luxembourg--the phantom city comrade luxembourg--this is a woman --platonov most travelers describe it like this: a gigantic corpus, slowly augmenting, because it inflates and at the same time blackens. having reached the point of bursting, exactly when its crust is ripping frightfully, threatening to let out slops and gases, the corpus starts slowly to soften and lighten up until it turns into a pulp. it is a necrotized womb stuffed up by dead substances. a womb turning into a vampire. this is the city of the most incredible metamorphose, mutation and vicissitude. this city is organized according to the grammar of an instructive language. in contrast to the tower city, here the language has not been demolished, but nevertheless, no tower has been built, no "common home". this language propagates and agitates people to perform the sublime act--to claw the earth in exaltation. it was necessary to dig harder and more cunningly in order to transform the earth interior into a "common home". the main effort of the subjects was to dig out a colossal pit, a gigantic aperture--sanctuary, an organized subterranean eternal sun-trap. the total language projected reality of the phantom city. in the space of the city reverberated thunder like proclamations. the people became heralds of stunning proclamations, of verbal maltreatment because the proclaimed reality was a bruised piece. reality dispersed in panic chased away by its own proclamations. language was the virtual reality and all things real peek out of it as phantoms. the last judgment was proclaimed real in order for a phantom to be punished--the bourgeoisie. communism was proclaimed real in order for the other phantom to be immortalized --the proletariat. it was realized by being proclaimed. do you recollect the story of the madman, who believed he was a hen, so they fed him with raw corn. he did not stop being insane but he stopped pretending to be a hen, so that he wouldn't have to gnash his teeth on the raw corncobs. someone proclaimed himself god and proceeded to feed on soil. the sun was proclaimed to be the universal proletarian. language. in the language there was no center nor horizontal or vertical coordination. it performed twisted parables according to the rules of its grammar. language was a radioactive instrument that caused monstrous mutations in the city. uncanny, melancholic longing engulfs the souls of the citizens. a longing for reality. and only through longing could reality open itself in the minds. through this longing did the unnamed reality rush into the phantom figure of the city. the longing became the aperture through which reality made known its own presence. one thing sustained the population and the militants of the city--the fact, that there had to be a super point of view, one might say a central herald of the proclamations, for whom, everything that happened was observable, manageable, and goal-oriented. there existed the certainty that the life of the city is performed before the gaze of one centralized eye-mind. a certainty, that one surveyor observes and supervises the correct going on of the grandiose ceremony called proletarian revolution. otherwise to every glance from inside life passed as an arbitrary dispersal or merging of phantoms and names. the despair came with the suspicion that this super eye-mind is also a phantom. a high density phantom arbitrary authorized with a centralized ontological presence. the certainty that the transparency of the city descended from above was a sham. this "see-through-all" eye was also proclaimed. through renaming its realities the phantom city assembled and disassembled itself like an animated toy puzzle before the amazed eyes of the greatest dadaist of the world (proclaimed to be such in zurich). like a real hero this dadaist succeeded in getting to the bottle and letting loose the genie of the most imbecile hocus-pocus. and with an exalted babble it penetrated the city and proclaimed it. another dadaist of the same rank constructed a machine for executions with quite artistic and precise functions. then he himself jumped into it and thus became the requisite matter for its function in order to demonstrate its exquisite perfection. at night, tired by the excessive work of the hocus-pocuses, the citizens of the phantom city sulked and listened to the lamp fuse sucking in the kerosene. and in order to stifle the rumbling of their empty stomachs, they nibbled the wall plaster. this city had no special emblem. it was emblem itself. for there existed no sign that could stand for it. everything got proclaimed--interned into the cit. * * * all travelers observe a strict tendency towards de-naturalization of luxembourg during its four stages:--passing from a vertical into a horizontal symbolism and its vanishing into crooked parabolas;--an ever more irreversible dislocation of the natural joints and apertures of the city corpus;--presence, then absence, then abolishing and at the end turning into a vampire of the city center;--from emblem representing the essence of the city--to a city emblem of itself. usually the travelers evade the teleological interpretations, because they lead life unto a certain destination and in this sense to certain utopia or anti-utopia. others speak of the cyclic recurrence of the herein described stages. still others to whom we pertain are convinced of the principle of the back and forth momentum. according to this principle the city of the sun and the phantom city are respectively the upper and lower dead-point between which historically acts the piston of luxembourg. impleta cerne! implenda collige! dawes, 'critique of the post-althusserian conception of ideology in latin american cultural studies', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-dawes-critique.txt a critique of the post-althusserian conception of ideology in latin american cultural studies by greg dawes <gadfll@ncsuvm.bitnet> north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by greg dawes, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. _literature and politics in the central american revolutions_, by john beverley and marc zimmerman (austin: u of texas p, 1990). [1] one of the major contributions to literary studies in recent years has been the recognition that political consciousness is invariably fused with aesthetic practice. in light of literary approaches prior to fredric jameson's _the political unconscious_ (1981), which tended to isolate and fetishize the text, such a development in cultural studies can only be seen as salutary. nonetheless, this re-evaluation of the relation between the political and aesthetic spheres has tended to gravitate towards an interpretation of this dialectic as unconscious. this comes in response, perhaps, to mechanistic formulations of the conjunction of politics and art, but primarily to georg lukacs' reflection theory. althusserianism and post-althusserianism (or post-marxism) are certainly among the most significant proponents of unearthing unconscious impulses in cultural investigations. while althusser's work has largely remained intact--and in fact could be seen exercizing a hegemonic role within marxism--in spite of the criticism directed at it, in many ways it has been unable to overcome such structuralist contradictions as the division created between science and ideology.^1^ latin american cultural studies has felt the impact of althusserianism at least since marta harnecker published her monumental study _los conceptos elementales del materialismo historico_ [_the elementary concepts of historical materialism_] in 1969; and marc zimmerman and john beverley's latest book, _literature and politics in the central american revolutions_, comes out of this althusserian tradition as well as the post-althusserian and post-marxist thinking of ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe. as i will argue below, many of the old problems that plagued althusser's concept of ideology continue to afflict a work like zimmerman and beverley's, not only on a theoretical plane, but also in the practical analyses of historico-political events. while we gain many insights into cultural phenomena through such an approach, ultimately a gap is created between the theory, on the one hand, and actual historical events, on the other. [2] in their study, zimmerman and beverley make an upfront, forceful, and compelling argument in favor of an althusserian ideological analysis which propels their study forward and is aided by the adoption of gramsci's concept of the 'national popular.' this theory provides the authors with a foundation for elucidating a discussion on aesthetic commitment in the central american context and for furnishing a reply as to why literature carries so much weight in latin america. briefly stated, poetry, for both zimmerman and beverley, accrues a significant and unique value in the central american region because it can function as a symbolic arena which gathers together--from the optic of althusserianism--an assortment of feelings, images, and myths.^2^ poetry thus serves as a catalyst in forming national identity in revolutionary circumstances in guatemala, el salvador and nicaragua--all of which combine nationalism and socialism in their ideology. [3] leaving aside the theoretical aspects for the time being, as a historical tract on literary and revolutionary vanguards in central america, _literature and politics_ succeeds in providing the reader with detailed accounts of the intersection of roque dalton's revolutionary commitment and his poetry, the fusion of liberation theology with the nicarguan revolution, and the role of the testimonio as a transitional, narrational mode. beverley, of course, has been one of the most astute analysts of the testimonio; and this latest version (chapter 7) is an expansion of the work he has done in the past.^3^ [4] it is to both zimmerman and beverley's credit that in this most recent analysis, the %testimonio% (documentary or testimonial literature) is defined as a "transitional literary form" which, as the authors put it, "does not seem particularly well adapted to be the primary narrative form of an elaborated postrevolutionary society, perhaps because its dynamics depend precisely on the conditions of social and cultural inequality and direct oppression that fuel the revolutionary impulse in the first place" (207). while central american testimonial literature emerges from conscious revolutionary activity, it is completely enmeshed in this praxis. hence, as lukacs' argues in his analysis of willi bredel's novels, while this working class narrative production should be lauded as a great step forward, it strikes me that the %testimonio% can %potentially%--as in the case of bredel's work--lead to a less complex development of the revolutionary situation.^4^) this is what makes testimonial literature a transitional narrative form. it would be worth exploring the depth of domitila's "autobiography" with the less complete--yet still highly important--_fire from the mountain_ by omar cabezas. in contrast to george yudice's view of the testimonial as a struggle for survival,^5^ there is, then, as beverley and zimmerman seem to suggest, a problem with testimonials which respond to urgent or spontaneous political matters without having analyzed socio-political matters thoroughly, because they sacrifice to much in their representation of reality. [5] another chapter which is unique to _literature and politics_--in the material it deals with--is zimmmerman and beverley's interpretation of cultural practices during the nicaraguan revolution. to a great extent, our versions of the aesthetic and political events that took place, from as early as 1985 to the election, corroborate each other. however, since the book was published shortly after the february debacle, it appears that the authors did not have time to evaluate the political and aesthetic effects that the collapse of the ministry of culture and the rise of rosario murillo and the professionalists could have on cultural production. in their study there is--understandably--a hesitancy to critique the model which they have seen as exemplary of a type of resistance to postmodernism in this hemisphere. i would contend that this apparent weakness is due to the theoretical framework itself, to which i would like to turn now. [6] one of the main weaknesses in althusserian theory is the concept of ideology itself. as long as ideology in general is specified in terms which have no reference to or place for the struggle between labor and capital, then it will only be, what adolfo sanchez vazquez has called "theoretical ideology" and will cease to operate dialectically with material reality. ideology will always appear as secondary; superimposed in fundamental, timeless struggles between sexes and generations, or strictly divorced from actual, material struggles. althusser, as terry lovell has perceptively noted: produces . . . a theory of knowledge which eliminates experience altogether from the practice of knowledge construction, relegating it to the inferior realm of ideology. experience becomes the product of ideological practice, rather than of social reality. it cannot therefore provide any guide to social reality.^6^ what we observe in althusser, then, is a break with the lukacsian notion of "reflection" in favor of the production of "ideological effects" within a given text. in the process, the french thinker could be seen as resorting to formalist methods because the very material forces that generate such "ideological effects" are put aside. following althusser's mapping of ideology, history itself interacts mechanically and not dialectically with it (ideology) because the latter is ostensibly "pre-scientific". when this gap between ideology and history takes place, then the althusserian model relinquishes its materialist grounding in exchange for an "autonomous," free-floating ideological apparatus that is, according to althusser, "ahistorical" and related directly to freud's notion that the "unconscious is eternal."^7^ [7] the danger inherent in this departure from dialectical materialism is borne out in subsequent analyses of a historical, political, economic and aesthetic nature. following althusser, beverley and zimmerman in their work allege that ideologies have multiple power functions (of distinction, domination, subordination) that are not reducible to or intelligible in terms of class or group interests alone, although they are the sites in which class or group struggle occurs. similarly, they are not always circumscribed by modes of production or concrete social formations; they can cut across modes of production and social formations, as in the case of religious ideologies. in particular, ideologies are not reducible to politics or political programs or isms, because their nature is unconscious rather than explicit; their effect is to produce in the subject a sense of things as natural, self-evident, a matter of common sense. (2) in keeping with althusserianism, this notion of ideology is rooted in the unconscious, that is, specifically in the "mirror stage" of development as elaborated by jacques lacan.^8^ althusser draws upon this lacanian study in order to formulate his theory of ideology, which returns to this stage when the individual cannot distinguish him or herself from the social. this domain, then, is located outside of rational apprehension. lacan writes that it: situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (%le devenir%) of the subject asymptomatically. (2) it is this "method of symbolic reduction" that will serve as the basis for althusser's theory of ideologies. the problem with such a philosophical position is that it is not anchored in actual, real-life processes, but rather, is a theoretical model constructed--so to speak--"above" this material life. consequently, in this method of analyzing ideological forces one loses all grasp of the conflictive nature of ideology (and, hence, of material life) because, following althusser, ideology is somehow beyond such a realm since it is actually in the isolated "mirror stage." [8] one of the main difficulties with the internal logic of zimmerman and beverley's post-althusserianism is that the symbolic and the political are almost seen as two separate entities. by alleging that literature in the latin american context--it is different, they maintain, in so-called first world countries--is the symbolic site where ideological production and revolutionary consciousness take place, beverley and zimmerman endeavor to make the link between the ideological and the political more visible. real historical events must somehow find a place in althusserian ideological criticism or--as both beverley and zimmerman surely would admit--the approach will lose its sense of grounding. while this connection is made at certain moments in _literature and politics_, seen as a whole, their work fails to convincingly break with this dualism. an immediate case in point is apparent in the beginning of the first chapter when they declare that: the "work" of ideology consists in constituting (althusser: interpellating) human subjects as such, with coherent gender, ethnic, class, or national identities appropriate to their place in a given social order or, in the case of counterhegemonic ideologies, their place in a possible social order. ideologies provide human beings with a structure of experience that enables them to recognize themselves in the world, to see the world as in some way created *for* them, to feel they have a place and identity in it. (2) in this post-marxist definition of ideology--in contrast to marx's rendering of it as inversion--it acts as a social catalyst which allows one to grasp one's life in the social order in a more reasonable way. but at the same time, ideology seems to operate independently of human beings: beverley and zimmerman state that ideology enables human beings "to see the world as in some way created for them." this gulf between human beings and the production of ideology is also clear when the authors argue against the marxist notion of "false consciousness": the traditional problematic of ideology in the social sciences, founded in both its positivist and marxist variants on the epistemological question of distinguishing "true" from "false" forms of consciousness, had been displaced in contemporary cultural studies by the recognition suggested in psychoanalytic theory that truth %for% the subject is something distinct from the truth of the subject, given that it entails an act of identification between the self and something external to it. (4) but why focus %only% on the distinction between the self and what is external to it? why not concentrate on the %dialectic% between subject and history? furthermore, why should we believe that what rules in aesthetic experience is this marginalized, individual %jouissance% in contrast to "external reality"? doesn't this theory capitulate to the same limitations as freudian psychoanalysis in its privileging of subjective sensations over reality?^9^ for these authors, it would seem, ideology is asked to bridge the gap between the individual and the society because the integration of the two does not come about in their analysis. [9] in order to overcome the division that they have created between ideology and politics, beverley and zimmerman then turn to an althusserian solution to this dilemma, "we rejoin here the point that revolutionary political consciousness does not derive directly or spontaneously from exploitative economic relations, that it must be in some sense produced" (8). thus, as i suggested above, literature serves as that desperately needed link between ideology and politics that aids in the "development of subject identity." in essence, then, literature (and specifically poetry in this study) is a semi-autonomous territory for the production of political consciousness in central america, but it is somehow divorced from the actual social relations of production themselves. according to this logic, it is the production of a certain type of literature--"political" poetry, for instance--which enables subjects to reflect upon "private experiences of authenticity and alienation to the awareness of collective situations of social exploitation, injustice, and national underdevelopment" (9). but the weakness in a such an argument--in addition to the separation set up between individual and social experience--resides more fundamentally on the privileging of the unconscious in aesthetics. for if we agree that the motor force of ideology is the unconscious, then what power do revolutionaries have to change it, much less interpret it? if there are no conscious, scientific methods to follow, then how do we prove that this or that thesis is actually valid? [10] all this theoretical footwork pushes beverley and zimmerman's study into a corner on more than one occasion. one such moment is in their analysis of literary production in revolutionary nicaragua. before turning to this section, i would note that another problem with this discussion of central american literature and revolutions is that beverley and zimmerman fervently adhere to postmodernist interpretations of the "unfixity" of social class (i.e.--pluralism) and of ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe's notion of "radical democracy." the idealism exhibited in the writings of both althusser and laclau and mouffe will come back to haunt _literature and politics_ when the analysis extends beyond the theoretical to the practical realm. for example, in their study of nicaraguan poetry during the revolutionary period, beverley and zimmerman give a very accurate account of the aesthetic and political debate that ensued after 1985, yet the authors overlook the fact that the deficiency in the nicaraguan political, economic and cultural system was the vulnerability of pluralism. thus, they assess the situation as follows: though the debate had repercussions inside the frente, the sandinista leadership was reluctant to take a firm stand one way or another on cultural policy, for fear of making the mistake of the cubans in the late 1960s of favoring one cultural "line" over others. but this commendable commitment to pluralism also meant that cultural policy was made ad hoc, without any real budgetary priorities or control. (103) since their post-althusserian approach automatically excludes a more organic and materialist understanding of the consequences of the economic and political situation--because ideology is supposed to be relatively independent from these spheres--beverley and zimmerman do not interpret this aesthetic crisis on a more global scale as the crisis of this type of "third path" to socialism. since representation, for althusser, does not transcend the aesthetic realm, they fail to acknowledge that the crisis in aesthetic agency is also a crisis in economic and political agency, i.e.--they fail to note that pluralist economic, political and aesthetic institutions are affected by their internal limitations and by the overwhelming force of capital. [11] this weakness in their analysis is due, in large part, to the fact that they do not truly take a critical distance with respect to this "third path." their own study advocates an aesthetic and political pluralism which doesn't effectively distinguish itself from liberal pluralism. even late in chapter 4, beverley and zimmerman continue to hold this position vis-a-vis political and artistic representation, "we are far from thinking that cultural forms have an essential class location or connotation, as our discussion in the previous chapter of the ideological mutations of vanguardism suggests" (110). here the fateful error of post-althusserianism or post-marxism is fleshed out. when aesthetic agencies are separated from the social relations of production, then history itself will have a way of turning any such idealist study on its head. in the postscript to this chapter, beverley and zimmerman run into precisely this dilemma: [t]he perspective we adopted in our presentation of this chapter--that the revolutionary process was irreversible, despite problems and setbacks--clearly has been problematized. it may be that the revolution will go forward; on the other hand, we may well be witnessing the first stage of a more long-lasting restoration. we had hypothesized in chapters 1 and 2 that one of the key roles of literature in the revolutionary process in central america generally was to constitute a discursive space in which the possibilities of alliance between popular sectors and a basically middleand upper-class revolutionary vanguard could be pragmatically negotiated around a shared sense of the national-popular. (111) here their populist or postmodernist theory meets the limits of its interpretative abilities because history itself has proven that this multi-class alliance, the concept of the nationalism, and the experimental nature of a mixed economic system were not able to sustain themselves. as carlos vilas has demonstrated, it was the sandinista's transformation from a vanguard predominantly supported by the working class and the campesinos to a party which catered to the interests of entrepreneurs in the last years of the revolution, which lost the elections of 1990.^10^ similarly, in the cultural realm, the frente abandoned its cultural democratization project not only because of financial problems, but also because there was a shift in ideological positions within party cadres themselves who now suggested that culture follow more professional guidelines. as a result, the professionalists--or, those who favored professionally-developed artists--clashed with those who defended the democratization program. thus, the content of this debate boiled down to differences in political, economic, and aesthetic form--a regular "revolution with the revolution" to paraphrase regis debray--among the revolutionary forces. [12] given this historical context in nicaragua, the question we must then ask, to my mind, is: if it is appropriate to cite the nicaraguan revolutionary experience as postmodernism lived out in the flesh, so to speak, and if it did not survive a historical testing, then what other socialist alternatives do we have in latin america? what type of revolutionary politics and theory would steer us away from the errors of "real socialism" (i.e.--the eastern bloc countries and the soviet union) and the faults of the so-called "third path"? in searching for answers, it is interesting to turn to a classical revolutionary pamphlet that was written eighty-nine years ago, but which sounds so very contemporary when read in these years of postmodernism: i am referring to lenin's _what is to be done?_. in what follows i would like to limit my remarks to the general milieu in 1902 and to lenin's elaboration of the role of the vanguard. [13] from the very beginning when lenin addresses the incipient "dogmatism and 'freedom of criticism'" of the economists to his manual for the organization of revolutionaries, the political climate sketched out in _what is to be done?_ cannot help but sound very familiar to our contemporary period. lenin's attack on bernsteinism begins with a series of cardinal points that seem to represent the revisionism of the day: denied is the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. denied is the fact of growing impoverishment, of proletarianization and of the sharpening of capitalist contradictions. the very concept of '%the ultimate aim%' has been declared unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat unconditionally rejected. denied is the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. denied is the theory of the class struggle, on the grounds of its alleged inapplicability to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc..^11^ i cite this passage because it encapsulates the main strains of political thought at the beginning of the twentieth century and is representative of the types of leftism that lenin attempted to refute in _what is to be done?_. this fragment also is important because it is indicative of the type of postmodernist "radical democracy" that we find in the works of laclau and mouffe. this is not the place to do a more exhaustive analysis of their work, let it suffice for now to quote a segment from _hegemony and socialist strategy_ in order to establish the correlation between the economism of lenin's day and the economism of our times: it is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared.^12^ in place of this marxist analysis and prognosis we are expected to struggle for "radical, libertarian and plural democracy" which, mouffe and laclau inform us, will consist of the dispersed identity of social agents and the ensemble of social movements. however, we might reflect on whether it is even possible to carry out this project at this historical moment. in examining the nicaraguan revolutionary experience elsewhere and briefly in this paper, i have noted how this pluralist political and economic agenda doesn't present a viable, historically tested alternative.^13^ similarly, richard stahler-sholk has persuasively argued that the nicaraguan case "reveals that the sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass 'national unity' created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation."^14^ [14] if this form of political (and aesthetic) representation has failed, what other means are open to us? in short, a consciously organized self-representation. at certain moments in the nicaraguan revolution workers' and peasants' control over the actual means of production and the aesthetic "means of production" became a viable option. however, as i commented above, for both external and internal reasons, the fsln did not follow through with these political and economic steps. as a thorough reading of _what is to be done?_ adduces to it is not the spontaneous terrain of libertarianism, found in the works of mouffe and laclau, that is able to survive historically, but rather some new formulation of the notion of a %politically conscious vanguard% which is both of and for the working class. this path is new at least in practice. until the "cultural revolution," perhaps the chinese revolution carried out this political, economic and aesthetic alternative most effectively and cuba, in varying degrees, has also been successful in instituting political and economic democracy. [15] what is certain is that this revolutionary direction can overcome the dualism exhibited in the writings of post-althusserianism between ideology and political practice. rather than driving a wedge between ideology and politics and anchoring both in the realm of the spontaneous (the unconscious), a marxist reading of ideology suggests that there is always a dialectical relation between material life and ideology. to become conscious of this dialectic, according to marx and engles, is to supersede the distortions that accompany ideology.^15^ in bolivia, domitila is and has been keenly aware of the need for a conscious revolutionary proletariat and harbors no illusions about "radical democracy" or the "pluralism" of class and economic interests: soluciones momentaneas ya no nos interesan. nosotros ya hemos tenido gobiernos de todo corte, "nacionalista", "revolucionario","cristiano", asi de toda etiqueta. desde el 52, cuando el gobierno del mnr empezo a traicionar la revolucion por el pueblo . . . tantos gobiernos han pasado y ninguno ha llegado a colmar las aspiraciones del pueblo. ninguno ha hecho lo que realmente quiere el pueblo. el gobierno actual, por ejemplo, no esta haciendo obras para nosotros, sino que los beneficiados son, en primer lugar, los extranjeros que continuan llevandose nuestras riquezas y despues los empresarios privados, las empresas estatales, los militares y no asi la clase obrera ni el campesino que seguimos cada dia mas pobres. y eso va a continuar igual mientras estemos en el sistema capitalista. yo veo, por todo lo que he vivido y leido, que nosotros nos identificamos con el socialismo. porque solamente en un sistema socialista ha de haber mas justicia y todos aprovecharan de los beneficios que hoy dia estan en manos de unos pocos.^16^ [momentary solutions no longer interest us. we have already had governments of every stripe, "nationalists", "revolutionaries", "christian", every label imaginable. since 1952, when the mnr [the national revolutionary movement] government began to betray the people's revolution . . . so many governments have gone and none has been able to fulfill the people's aspirations. none has done what the people really want done. the current government, for example, is not working for us, but rather the beneficiaries are, in the first place, the foreigners, who continue to take away our wealth; and in the second place, the private entrepreneurs, the state businesses, the military and not the worker nor the peasant: each day we get poorer. and this will continue as it is as long as we are in the capitalist system. i see, from all that i have experienced and read, that we identify with socialism. because only in a socialist system is it possible for there to be justice and for the benefits to be enjoyed by all and not be in the hands of a few [individuals]."] ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ see adolfo sanchez vazquez's _ciencia y revolucion: el marxismo de althusser_ (madrid: alianza editorial, 1978). ^2^ beverley articulated this theoretical stance in his seminal article, "ideologia/deseo/literatura," _revista de critica literaria latinoamericana_ (1er semestre 1988), 7-24. ^3^ see especially, "anatomia del testimonio" _revista de critica literaria latinoamericana_ (1er semestre 1987), 7-16. ^4^ georg lukacs, _essays in realism_, rodney livingstone, ed. (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1981), 23-32. ^5^ george yudice, "marginality and the ethics of survival," in andrew ross ed., _universal abandon? the politics of postmodernism_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1988). ^6^ terry lovell, "the social relations of cultural production: absent centre of a new discourse," in simon clarke, et. al., _one-dimensional marxism: althusser and the politics of culture_ (london and new york: allison and busby, 1980), 245. hereafter cited in text. to verify althusser's position on this matter consult _lenin and philosophy and other essays_ (new york: monthly review press, 1971), 170-71. ^7^ louis althusser, _lenin and philosophy and other essays_ (new york: monthly review press, 1971), 160-61. ^8^ see jacques lacan, _ecrits: a selection_ (new york: w.w. norton, 1977), 1-7. ^9^ the question here is: how far does beverley and zimmerman's althusserian theory take us from the type of dualism that volosinov describes so precisely in his critique of freudianism?: inner experience [for freud], extracted by means of introspection, cannot in fact be directly linked with the data of objective, external apprehension. to maintain a thorough consistency only the one or the other point of view can be pursued. freud has ultimately favored the consistent pursuit of the inner, subjective point of view; all external reality is for him, in the final analysis, merely the "reality principle," a principle that he places on the same level with the "pleasure principle" [emphasis in the original]. v.n. volosinov, _freudianism: a marxist critique_ (new york: academic press, 1976), 72. ^10^ carlos vilas, "what went wrong" _nacla_ (june 1990), 10-18. ^11^ v.i. lenin, _what is to be done?_ (new york: penguin books, 1988), 75. ^12^ ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe, _hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics_ (london: verso, 1985), 4. ^13^ a succinct version of my argument was presented at the 1990 modern language association meeting and was entitled, "contemporary nicaraguan politics and aesthetics: the fate of postmodernist idealism." i have just finished a more comprehensive development of this thesis in a manuscript i have prepared for publication, _aesthetics and revolution: a historical materialist analysis of nicaraguan poetry 1979-1990_. ^14^ richard stahler-sholk, "stabilization, destabilization, and the popular classes in nicaragua, 1979-1988," _latin american research review_ vol. xxv, number 3 (1990), 55-88. ^15^ here the key text is, of course, _the german ideology_. (new york: international publishers, 1977). ^16^ moema viezzer, _'si me permiten hablar...'testimonio de domitila: una mujer de las minas de bolivia_ (mexico: siglo xxi, 1985). [editor], 'notices', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-[editor]-notices.txt notices _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). every issue of _postmodern culture_ will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. _______________________________________________________ mla session announcement special session #344, friday 28 december, 1:45-3:00 pm grand ballroom east, hyatt regency (1990 mla convention, chicago, illinois, 27-30 december 1990) "canonicity and hypertextuality: the politics of hypertext" session leader: terence harpold, university of pennsylvania panelist 1: ted nelson, autodesk, inc.: "how xanadu (un)does the canon" panelist 2: stuart moulthrop, univ. of texas/austin: "(un)doing the canon i: the institutional politics of hypertext" panelist 3: jay david bolter, unc chapel hill: "(un)doing the canon ii: hypertext as polis and canon" for more information, contact: terence harpold 420 williams hall university of pennsylvania philadelphia, pa 19104 bitnet: <tharpold@pennsas> internet: <tharpold@pennsas.upenn.edu> _______________________________________________________ verse: john ashbery's influence susan m. schultz and henry hart invite submissions for a collection of essays on the subject of john ashbery's influence on contemporary poetry. essays may address ashbery's influence on particular poets or on the climate of contemporary poetry more generally (e.g., his influence on the language movement, new formalism, etc.). two copies of abstracts are due 15 november; two copies of your essays by 15 december to susan schultz at the department of english, university of hawaii-manoa, 1733 donaghho road, honolulu, hawaii 96822. _______________________________________________________ the centennial review edited by r.k. meiners the review aims to be a journal of cultural study, more concerned with the relationships among disciplines and their social implications than with any single discipline. it seeks to publish the best work available from both younger and established scholars. ethics in the profession volume xxxiv, no. 2, spring 1990 guest editor: stephen l. esquith locating professional ethics stephen l. esquith politically cases and codes: challenges for michael s. pritchard teaching engineering ethics called to profess: religious and david h. smith secular theories of vocation the ethics boom: a philosopher's michael davis history pricing human life: the moral leonard m. fleck costs of medical progress faith and the unbelieving ethics judith andre teacher professional ethics, ethos, and william m. sullivan the integrity of the professions bioethics and democracy bruce jennings subscription rates: $10/year $15/two years foreign postage--$3/year single issue: $3 please make your check payable to _the centennial review_. mail to _the centennial review_, 110 morrill hall, michigan state university, east lansing, mi 48824-1036 _______________________________________________________ new delta review _new delta review_ seeks poetry, fiction, and black-and white artwork. eight-year-old journal has published primarily modern work; now we're climbing up the levee to see what's on the postmodern side. show & tell: show us your best and tell us why. send no more than 20 pages of prose or 5 poems, with sase. artwork sought for cover and interior of journal. please send slides and sase. address to genre editor, _new delta review_, english department, louisiana state university, baton rouge, la 70803-5001. _______________________________________________________ discourse _discourse_, journal for theoretical studies in media and culture, edited by roswitha mueller and kathleen woodward, explores a variety of topics in continental philosophy, theories of media and literature, and the politics of sexuality including questions of language and psychoanalysis. it provides a forum for genuinely interdisciplinary and intertextual discussion of culture. bi-annual. subscriptions: $15 individuals, $30 institutions. outside us, add $5 for foreign surface post. send orders to indiana university press, journals division, 10th & morton streets, bloomington, in 47405. or call 812-855-9449. _______________________________________________________ women's studies quarterly the _women's studies quarterly_ covers issues and events in women's studies and feminist education, including in-depth articles on research about women and on projects to transform traditional curricula. regular features are thematic issues, course descriptions and syllabi, information on national women's studies programs and centers for research on women, book and film reviews, and notices of grants, scholarships, events, publications, and new organizations. thematic issues for 1990 and beyond will cover: *curricular and institutional change *women and economics *women, girls, and the culture of education thematic issues now available as single copies or in bulk at discount (some of these are double issues): *women and aging $13.00 *women's nontraditional literature $13.00 *teaching the new women's history $13.00 *feminist pedagogy $13.00 *teaching about women and art $13.00 *teaching about women and violence $13.00 *teaching about women, race, and culture $13.00 *teaching about women and poverty $6.50 *teaching about sex, sexuality, and reproduction $6.00 *teaching about peace, war, and women in the military $6.00 *teaching about mothering $5.50 | 1 year 3 years | | | | individual ___$25 ___$ 70 | | institutional ___$35 ___$100 | | | | subscribers outside the u.s. add $8.00 per year | | postage/handling. | | | | thematic issue(s):________________________________ | | | | please add $2.00 p/h for one thematic issue, $.75 | | for each additonal. | | | | total enclosed: $___________ | | | | name______________________________________________ | | | | address____________________________________________ | mail to: women's studies quarterly, the feminist press at the city university of new york, 311 e. 94 street, new york, ny 10128 _______________________________________________________ announcing "magazine" an electronic hotline/conference moderated by professor david abrahamson interested individuals are invited to participate in an electronic conference, magazine hotline, addressing the journalistic/communicative/economic/technological issues related to magazine publishing. though magazine's primary focus will be journalistic, it will also address other magazine-publishing matters of economic (management, marketing, circulation, production, research), technological, historical and social importance. in sum, magazine will explore the history, current state and future prospects of the american magazine. among the topics included will be: magazine editorial trends and practices; journalistic and management norms in magazine publishing; evolving magazine technologies (those currently in use and new ones envisioned); the economics of magazine publishing, including the economic factors influencing magazine content; the history of magazines; the role of magazines in social development; educational issues related to teaching magazine journalism; "laboratory" magazine-project concepts and resources; and studies and research exploring the issues above. the conference will be moderated by professor david abrahamson of new york university's center for publishing, where he teaches the editorial segments of the nyu management institute graduate diploma course in magazine publishing and the executive seminar in magazine editorial management. he is also the author of two teaching texts, "the magazine writing workbook" and "the magazine editing workbook." the magazine hotline is scheduled to begin october 1, 1990. magazine publishing professionals, magazine journalism educators, scholars and students, and other individuals interested in magazine issues are encouraged to participate. the magazine hotline is sponsored by new york university's center for publishing and comserve (the online information and discussion service for the communication disciplines). those interested in participating in magazine can subscribe free by: (1) from a bitnet or internet account, sending a one-line e-mail message to either comserve@rpiecs or comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu with the following text: join magazine yourfirstname yourlastname [example: join magazine mary smith] (2) from an mci-mail account, sending a message adressed as follows: [to:] comserve (ems) internet comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu [no subject] [message text] join magazine yourfirstname yourlastname (3) from a compuserve account, send the same one-line message (no subject) to: >internet:comserve@vm.ecs.rpi.edu [note: include the indicated ">".] further information about the magazine hotline will be sent to subscribers when the hotline begins. however, if you have any immediate ideas, suggestions or questions about the hotline, please contact david abrahamson, at: abrahamson@acfcluster.nyu.edu or 3567652@mcimail.com or 165 east 32, ny 10016. _______________________________________________________ a screaming comes across the wires--the list, pynchon. its purpose is the discussion of and exchange of information about thomas pynchon and his writing. appropriate topics range from serious critical discussion through esthetic opinions to apocryphal stories and unsubstantiated sightings (or non-sightings). simon fraser university does not have a listserver, so i have kludged together a group with remote addresses. to join the list send a request to me (e-mail userdog1@sfu.bitnet or userdog1@cc.sfu.ca). because of the nature of the kludge, i need a name, or pseudonym if you prefer, as well as your email address. the list is unrestricted, its just that i have to add members manually. list address: pynchon@sfu.bitnet or pynchon@cc.sfu.ca jody userdog1@sfu.bitnet or userdog1@cc.sfu.ca _______________________________________________________ kiernan, 'condition mcgann', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-kiernan-condition.txt la condition mcgann by kevin s. kiernan <eng102@ukcc.uky.edu> department of english university of kentucky _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by kevin s. kiernan, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: mcgann, jerome. _the textual condition_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1991. pp. xiv + 208; 11 illustrations. paper, $10.95. [1] jerome mcgann shows that he is still in top textual condition in this new collection of essays, published as the third title in the series, princeton studies in culture/power/history. despite the marketing claim on the back cover of the paperback that these are all "new essays," five of the seven chapters have appeared in print before, as mcgann himself spells out in his preface. their latest manifestation, with a new introduction and conclusion, is nonetheless a persuasive argument for mcgann's persistent thesis that the meanings of texts change with changing bibliographical circumstances, even when the texts do not change linguistically. readers will enjoy a bargain in the interesting interplay of the chapters, the wide-ranging discussion of textual and editorial issues, and the irresistible occasion to play the role of mcgann's materialist hermeneut by analyzing the implicit collaborations of the author and his latest publisher. [2] the first four chapters, part one, are grouped under the title of the borges story, "the garden of forking paths," a reference darkly explicated by a passage on book production from blake's _the marriage of heaven and hell_. the last three chapters, part two, come under the heading of "ezra pound in the sixth chamber." the locale of this title harks back reassuringly to the same blake excerpt, but the accompanying passage on instability and impermanence returns us instead to "the garden of forking paths," which in turn delivers us to kathy acker's disorienting epiphanigram, "the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless," from _empire of the senseless_. these loose-fitting framing devices, texts themselves, make different senses in their new settings, encouraging us to read the chapters as well as these texts in unconventional, "non-linear" ways. an ideogram of this kind of reading decorates these two pages in a little "text-tile," with the threads of the warp pointing off in one direction and those of the woof pointing another way. [3] an insistent message of these essays is that a text is "a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes" (13), a textual condition that has profound implications for authors, editors, textual scholars, publishers, and readers. in this textual condition the establishment of a text, for example, becomes a contradiction in terms. an editor cannot stabilize a text, because the act of producing an edition in itself further destabilizes it, creating a palimpsest of the previous edition, overwritten by new bibliographical codes for new social situations. while an editor may strive to recreate the social context of its first appearance, and may even successfully recreate some of it, the new edition primarily produces a new text for a new context. as mcgann puts it, "the textual condition's only immutable law is the law of change" (9). it is therefore imperative to read carefully the changing bibliographical codes and the new sociohistorical conditions in order to comprehend the linguistic codes they silently influence. [4] although his scholarly focus is on texts written during the past two centuries, mcgann is aware that the textual condition of premodern literature, and the textual methods of studying it, provide some useful models for these postmodern perceptions. among other things, medievalists will recognize the discipline of codicology, the bibliographical analysis of a manuscript codex, in the attention mcgann urges us to pay to what he calls bibliographical codes. "we must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions," he tells us. "we must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in 'poetry': to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to 'poetry' or 'the text as such'" (13). mcgann argues that one cannot formulate a convincing theory of textuality because each text is a particular social event best investigated as an individual case study. he opts for a "materialist hermeneutics" that treats texts as "autopoietic mechanisms" working "through a pair of interrelated textual embodiments we can study as systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings" (15). [5] the opening chapter, "theory, literary pragmatics, and the editorial horizon," takes off from a provocative question pointed at mcgann at the 1989 meeting of the society for textual scholarship (sts). "if you were editing byron's poetry now," he was asked, "what would you do?" (19). mcgann responds by recounting his gradual discovery, while producing a more or less traditional "eclectic" edition during a period of upheaval in editorial and literary theory, "that texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and hence that every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text" (21). mcgann argues that, if they attend to "editorial horizons," to the specific social conditions of textual production, editors and textual scholars will find themselves moving inevitably toward literary pragmatics in their search for a theory of texts (22). among three "case histories" elaborating and illustrating his ideas, mcgann reviews a syllabus for one of his graduate seminars, revealing his way of inducing students to gratify their "interests in literary criticism within the orbit of the practical work of scholarship" (47). [6] the second chapter takes up the question, "what is critical editing?," and continues the critique of eclectic editing. matthew arnold's editions of his _empedocles_ from 1852 to 1867 illustrate the inappropriateness here of combining texts around a "copy text" and incorporating emendations to produce an "ideal" text. arnold's successive editions, while almost identical linguistically, display radically different texts and authorial intentions by variously including, excluding, and reordering individual poems. "these bibliographical--as opposed to linguistic- variations," mcgann observes, "are of the greatest importance for anyone wishing to understand arnold's poetry" (51). the semiotic significance of bibliographical codes and the way they continually change the linguistic ones is unusually apparent in the case of william blake, who meticulously hand-tinted each engraving of his poems. blake labored, in mcgann's words, "to bring the bibliographical signifiers under his complete control" (58). his intentions are thus undermined by editors concentrating on linguistic codes alone, while at the same time generating their own scholarly bibliographical codings that are sharply at odds with the ones blake worked so hard to provide. it is a shame that mcgann's publisher obliges him to illustrate his points with a monochrome reproduction of a hand-tinted plate from blake's _jerusalem_. the effect is disturbingly reminiscent of ted turner's colorization of old black and white films for tnt. [7] in "the socialization of texts" mcgann further develops his argument that texts are transmogrified by new productions with new receptions. the chapter itself will have a different impact in this book in princeton's series on culture/power/history than it did when it first appeared as a shorter article for _documentary editing_ in 1990. as the author of other books published by harvard, chicago, and oxford, mcgann rightly stresses the importance of scholars and "institutions of transmission" in the socialization of texts. "texts emerge from these workshops," as he says, "in ever more rich and strange forms" (76). while he rejects the possibility of truly recovering the preceding frames of reference in critical editions, mcgann envisions a recurring phoenix-like rebirth of texts in the impermanence and immutability of the textual condition: "the vaunted immortality sought after by the poetic impulse will be achieved, if it is achieved at all, in the continuous socialization of the texts" (83). [8] the title of chapter 4, and of the current book, was first used for a paper about writing a paper about all the other papers at the 1985 sts conference. the textual condition is for mcgann "positively defined by some specific type of indeterminacy analogous to the one i experience at this (whichever) moment" (89). for him the textual condition "exemplifies the scholastic version of what ordinary mortals have called 'the human condition'" (89). the frailty of both states is brought home to him just as he is completing the paper. his computer crashes, leaving behind only the bone-chilling message, "bdos error" (sic). mcgann reacts in a human way: "i freeze. i have not saved the morning's work (i was inspired; i could not pause to interrupt the flow of the thoughts). i cannot save the file, i cannot exit the file, i can do nothing but strike the return key ineffectually" (92). he tries despair. "it is clear. i am about to lose the morning's work. the first completed text of my paper for the sts conference is lost forever" (92). there is a happy awakening two days later when the file is miraculously resurrected by his computer's "recovery programs," but then his mind recalls that his new circumstances require changes, revisions, new socializations of the pristine text. the final version, still in progress as he delivers the paper, transcends old cataclysms and concludes with a postlapsarian lament on the unfortunate separation of "scholarship" and "hermeneutics" (97-98). "scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliographical discourse or a literary exegesis," he insists to his audience of textual scholars and now to us. "though we scholars like to believe that one is prior to the other . . . this idea is at best a specialized hypothesis for programmatic work, and at worst a deep critical illusion" (98). [9] the first chapter in part two, "how to read a book," implicitly coaxes us to go back and look at the preceding chapters with enhanced reading skills. we will read different texts the next time we encounter them. mcgann begins this chapter with a funny and fascinating reading of what he calls "reagan's farewell," the now famous televised non-events in which former president reagan, wherever he happended to be at the time, heads for his helicopter under a barrage of seemingly unheard and amiably unanswered queries from frantic reporters. although not a literary text, the collaboration between reagan as author ("the great communicator") and the news media as publisher (with their well concealed bibliographical codes) nicely opens the way for a discussion of reading skills. mcgann outlines important differences in the approaches to reading exemplified in mortimer adler's _how to read a book_ and ezra pound's _abc of reading_, but points out that, in both, "'reading' is equated with deciphering the linguistic text" (104). [10] mcgann suggests a new approach in his own 1-2-3 of reading, which he calls linear, spatial, and radial reading. linear reading is the ordinary kind adler and pound talk about. spatial reading takes in the semiotic codes of, for instance, the formatting of a page, by employing "the reading eye [as] a scanning mechanism as well as a linear decoder" (113). radial reading, as the name implies, radiates out from the text, expanding it by reference to other resources. scholarly texts encourage radial reading in various ways; for example, by taking the reader to different parts of the apparatus--the notes, the index, an appendix--which in turn generate further radial investigations (120). "good readers have to read both linearly and spatially," mcgann says, "but both of those operations remain closely tied to the illusion of textual immediacy. radial reading is the most advanced, the most difficult, and the most important form of reading because radial reading alone puts one in a position to respond actively to the text's own (often secret) discursive acts" (122). [11] in "pound's _cantos_: a poem including bibliography," mcgann renews his assault on the idea, especially prevalent in american textual scholarship over the past forty years, that editorial practice and literary criticism ought to be separate and distinct activities. the descent of editions of pound's _cantos_ between 1925 and 1933, a dramatic movement from "a decorated and hand-processed work" under pound's complete control to a mechanically reproduced work controlled by his publisher, presents an editor with conflicting bibliographical codings (131). mcgann argues that it is difficult, if not in fact impossible, to resolve the textual dilemma in a critical edition without engaging in interpretation. in seeking "to explore %how% meanings operate at the work's most primary material levels" (130), he compares a page printed in red and black from the 1925 edition of the _cantos_ to later editions printed in black and white. mcgann's publisher, in an unintentional parody of the point he is trying to make, provides only a black and white illustration of the two-color printing. as in the case of the blake illustrations, then, the reader is left to imagine the bibliographical codes mcgann is trying to reveal. mcgann's arguments remain emphatic, however, with or without the illustrations. "pound's _cantos_ dramatize, on an epic scale," he says, "a related pair of important truths about poetry and all written texts: that the meaning of works committed into language is carried at the bibliographical as well as the linguistic level, and that the transmission of such works is as much a part of their meaning as anything else we can distinguish about them" (149). [12] the final chapter, "beyond the valley of production; or, %de factorum natura%: a dialogue," severely tests acker's dictum, quoted at the start of part ii, that "the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless." here mcgann presents his ideas in an imagined conversation of three people talking about one of his papers. it is a bold and amusing experiment, successful in allowing mcgann to take up positions he does not endorse and in forcing us to reflect on diverse modes of discourse, but i think unsuccessful in other respects. the first speaker is enthusiastic about mcgann. "it was a fine lecture," he proclaims, to get the discussion going, "--at once learned, elegant, and imaginative" (153). this speaker's paraphrases certainly leave the impression of an important lecture, incorporating the substance of the book we are reading. the other interlocutors are less impressed. the second speaker is decidedly hostile, remaining, as she says, "unpersuaded by [mcgann's] polemical schemes," and otherwise put off by "his often careless prose" (154). mcgann subtly gets even by presenting her comments in the same mcgannical prose. his forte is not natural dialogue, nor even the unnatural conversations that transpire at conferences. thus his speakers forget they are speaking and use visual puns they wouldn't be able to see, like "(re)produce" (163), "waste(d)" (168), "(re)membering" (171), and "(dis)orders" (172). sometimes they even lapse into long, verbatim, block quotations with page references and footnotes, or rather endnotes. one thinks of victor borge making funny noises and hand gestures to furnish oral punctuation. the third speaker lapses into a rude soliloquy, notwithstanding a couple of peremptory asides to the second speaker, who improbably ignores these chances to retort until he is completely finished. they all apparently disband without a word of farewell. [13] the "conclusion," mcgann says in an endnote, is a "printed version" of a lecture. newly socialized, it is now a fascinating tour de force that weaves together many strands and loose ends of the preceding chapters into a fine and colorful text. the highpoint is a brilliant display of his argument about texts as empirical and social phenomena by means of a witty and perhaps even justified apotheosis of the typescript of his lecture into a cultural icon reverently preserved in the library of congress. [14] given the prominent arguments of the book, it is hard not to notice that mcgann's ideas are in frequent counterplay, if not in actual conflict, with the modes of production of his silent collaborator, princeton university press. some things, of course, are preordained. before mcgann can advise us of the laws of impermanence in the textual condition and of the final destruction of all texts, the press assures us on the copyright page that the book meets "the guidelines for permanence and durability of the committee on production guidelines for book longevity of the council on library resources." these far-sighted aims are not in focus with those illustrations misrepresenting the bibliographical codes of blake's and pound's works. other bibliographical signs of a quick and inexpensive fix can be detected in the endnotes and the index. endnotes eliminate formatting problems, but almost inevitably lure readers into scanning the notes as a continuous text after checking a particular note, or into ignoring many of the notes altogether in the course of reading the main text. in either case they work against the kind of radial reading that scholarly texts are meant to encourage. a simple index of names, while easy to compile, fails to provide even the most fundamental conceptual and thematic entries. it would be useful to be able to locate mcgann's widely dispersed comments on such issues as eclectic editing, materialist hermeneutics, bibliographical codes, and socialization of texts, less useful to be able to find passing references to the tate gallery, _usa today_, and yale university press. there are signs in other of its bibliographical codes that the publisher has misread some of mcgann's linguistic ones. perhaps most noticeable are the running titles where, for example, mcgann's "theory, literary pragmatics, and the editorial horizon" is carelessly detheorized as "literary pragmatics and the editorial horizon," or his "pound's _cantos_: a poem including bibliography," loses its meaningfilled bibliography as "pound's _cantos_." [15] although both authors and publishers grew increasingly blind or indifferent to the meanings of bibliographical codes during the age of mechanical production, the new textual condition of desktop publishing will assuredly restore the eyesight and interest of many authors. publishers, as they continue their trend of requiring camera-ready copy from authors, will gradually relinquish their control over bibliographical codes, except for paper, institutional packaging, and of course marketing. writers, if they are not already adept, will quickly acquire the power to supply no less than their own choices of type faces, font-sizes, running-titles, footnotes or endnotes, indices, page-formatting, and color or monochrome illustrations. sooner or later we will also gain control over the same things when publishing in electronic journals. for now (back then), the textual condition of my review of this important book remains to be seen when it reappears (right now) in _pmc_. mccarthy, 'postmodern pleasure and perversity: scientism and sadism', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-mccarthy-postmodern.txt postmodern pleasure and perversity: scientism and sadism by paul mccarthy division of commerce and administration griffith university, brisbane, australia _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by paul mccarthy, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. i. introduction [1] this study traces the nature and consequences of the circulation of desire in a postmodern order of things (an order implicitly modelled on a repressed archetype of the new physics' fluid particle flows), and it reveals a complicity between scientism, which underpins the postmodern condition, and the sadism of incessant deconstruction, which heightens the intensity of the pleasure-seeking moment in postmodernism. this complicity raises disturbing questions about the credentials of postmodernism, and it has the dehumanising effect of obscuring the individual and putting an end to praxis. in addition, the unbounded play of difference in this order of things tends to dissolve restraints to sadism and barbarism, giving desire and capital free rein in the fluid play of market signifiers. [2] the analytical procedures of deconstruction are a key component of postmodern thought: derrida and deleuze and guattari engage structures through breaking them into their component parts. deconstruction's notion of the "structurality of structure" is grounded in the history of atomising thought which begins with the relations of dionysus and apollo, in which desire is contained by the atomistic concept. deconstruction sets forth a de-centered and unbounded horizon in derrida: "differance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements are related to each other" (1981: 27). deleuze and guattari's atomistic "multiplicity" is also evident in derrida's "irreducible and generative multiplicity" (1981: 45). [3] the relations of capitalism and atomising thought, particularly as they manifest themselves in science and instrumental reason, are mutually supportive. horkheimer and adorno (1972) trace these relations (demonstrated in de sade's _juliette_) as a pre-condition for the turn of enlightenment thought into barbarism. adorno's non-reductive stance refuses to collapse subject and object or "other." this distinguishes his project from deconstruction and postmodernism generally. from this stand-point, atomising thought engenders the free play of desire, signifiers, and capital which characterises postmodernism. [4] the complicity of postmodern form and atomising thought in the commodification of culture and intellect is also suggested by lefebvre's conditions for the production of space. lefebvre questions "the multiplicity of these descriptions and sectionings" (1991: 8). the same complicity is also pointed out in jameson's definition of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" (1984). here, the accumulation of capital by multinationals is furthered by the discontinuous forms of postmodern architecture. this problem is illustrated by liggett's distress, in stepping around young men asleep on the sidewalk, in transit to the restored biltmore in los angeles for a planning convention. liggett attributes the circumstances of the homeless to the "theoretical, administrative and economic `space' of contemporary urban forms which are organised to facilitate global exchange" (1991: 66). [5] the deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises the complex texture of existence into an order conducive to positivist categorisation: culture is rendered into a particle form amenable to numericisation, and, through the device of probability, the random number machine orchestrates difference. the postmodern order of things assumes its own legitimacy, thereby revealing itself as the quasi-transcendental projection of an idealised world view. this view instates a new mysticism and a new form of pleasure-seeking, acted out through the unrestrained dance of capital and desire in the social. the social, in turn, is implicitly conceptualised in terms of atomised, deconstructed elements which constitute a neo-positivist play of particles and desire. the patterns revealed in sketching out these circuits of desire also reveal the turbulent and fateful grounding of a survivalist neo conservatism which grows within and in reaction to the arbitrariness of the postmodern order of things. such underpinnings short-circuit the critical force of deconstruction into affirmation. [6] there is reason for concern when unresolved "antinomies of culture" such as "consciousness and experience" are collapsed (rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the categories of postmodernism recapitulate those of post-structuralism in "commencing from a starting point outside of human experience" (harland, 1987: 75). in these circumstances, there is wisdom in priest's "dialethism" (1987), a no-reduction logic of dialectic. this perspective is compatible with rose's suspension of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, each within the other, in order to resist the reduction of the complexities of history to the "unitary and simply progressive" (1984:3). the reduction of experience to a play of signifiers with such characteristics is dehumanising, as is evident in a postmodernism which fulfills horkheimer and adorno's prognosis with the dominance of "the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit" (1972: xii). rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. in contrast to derrida's interpretation of the biblical babel allegory as a triumphal encounter of humanity with god which opens the "endless labyrinth" that is postmodernism, rose reads babel as a point of configuration and of learning in the on-going measure and revision of the limits of human potentialities in encounters with absolute power (1988: 386). recognising the architectural moment of deconstruction here, rose warns of "a tendency to replace the concept by the sublimity of the sign, which is, equally, to employ an unexamined conceptuality without the labour of the concept" (1988: 368). [7] this re-opening of the antinomy of consciousness and experience invites evaluation against predecessors. for example, to what extent is lukacs' (1971) indictment of modernism as fragmenting and dehumanising carried forward in this project? if it is, then how can the cul-de-sac of his tortured attempts to reconcile the absolute and experience be avoided? heller rejects the ending of the philosophical discourse of "production and collective morality," such as concerned lukacs, in "paradigmatic failure" (1983: 190). lukacs' late desire to start anew does not stem from despair or faith, but arises because "the absolute character of the absolute had been called into question" (heller, 1983: 190). in continuing to seek an ethics, lukacs embodied "the courage of the critical spirit." an adornian stance circumvents some aspects of lukacs' impasse in refusing to privilege the proletariat as the bearers of praxis. it also refuses to defer to an absolute, in favour of a contradictory, non-reductive "constellation" of tensions (jay as cited in bernstein, 1991: 42). this stance maintains the "unresolved paradox" of reason as simultaneously a vehicle of emancipation and entrapment--a paradox which contributes to the contemporary "rage against reason" (bernstein, 1991: 40). from this vantage point, adorno anticipates the escape from reason and the capture of desire in an absolutised postmodern play of difference. [8] deleuze and guattari's (1987) _a thousand plateaus_, presented as the fully developed form of postmodern thought, will provide a focal point for this discussion; when weighed against the prototypical deconstructionism of de sade, it is arguably more mimetic than critical. the approach here shapes an immanent critique which distances the reader from compelled immersion in an all-encompassing world of signifiers (harland, 1987). specifically, tracing the complicities of desire and concept reveals an ontology of postmodernism and contributes to the broader project of locating postmodernism at the intersections of history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political formations. this process revives the subject of praxis and picks up the threads of radical humanism, admittedly a difficult task in the fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history, structure and marxism. a non-reductive stance, in the adornian sense, also provides points of reference for tracing lines of desire and opens perspectives from which to evaluate the "ethical-political" moments (bernstein, 1991) in a postmodernism which will be regarded as the flux at the cutting edge of modernism, abetting the passage of modernism into culture. in these terms, the quest for incessant innovation points to the mutually supportive dynamics of modernism and postmodernism, as lyotard observes: "postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant" (1984:79). problems of particles, pleasure and mysticism in postmodernism [9] some postmodern theorists (baudrillard, 1983; kroker, 1985; deleuze and guattari, 1987; lyotard, 1988) have recognised the relations between postmodernism and quantum scientism. an explicit recognition of the appropriation of quantum scientism to cultural analysis is given by kroker (1985), who sees postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of _capital_ in culture. this appropriation is flanked by nietzsche's _the will to power_ and by baudrillard's "fetishism of the sign" (kroker, 1985: 69). for kroker, baudrillard is "a quantum physicist of the processed world of mass communications," who reinterprets marx's _capital_ as "the imploded, forward side (the side of nihilism in the value-form of seduction) of nietzsche's _the will to power_" (kroker, 1985: 72, 69). the quantum dance of _capital_, power and the desire which characterises postmodernism is fully revealed in deleuze and guattari's (1987) _a thousand plateaus_. here, the celebration of the libidinal economy of deconstruction takes the form of a quantum logic of particle flows of desire, and is at the apogee of the trajectory of atomising thought. [10] another writer who recognises the influence of the quantum form in social analysis is lyotard. his prescription of the relativistic clash of genres subsuming the subject reveals the longing for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern science of language. for lyotard, "in the matter of language, the revolution of relativity and the quantum theory remains to be made" (1988: 137). the focus of the postmodernists is on contradiction and on tracing the play of difference, and it is here that they are most prone to reach into the quantum archetype to shape their explanations. this tendency is also evident in foucault's (1972) fluid positivity of the archival field as the principle of the dispersion of statements. in foucault there are many examples of the seepage of quantum scientism into the epistemological void of postmodern thought. postmodern reason rides quantum logic into culture; the confluence of nietzschean desire, _capital_, and quantum logic constitute the repressed conceptual field for the postmodern play of signifiers. [11] an implicit %telos% of desire is at work within deleuze and guattari's schema, namely the potential of flows of desire to reach the continuous intensities of the "plateau" or "plane of consistency." while these two writers end totalising thought, one can discern in their work a repetition of ideas concerning the relations of unity and difference which emerged with heraclitus and which were also evident in ancient hindu and taoist mythology (capra, 1976; postle, 1976). also, while deleuze and guattari appear to suppress the moment of unity and eschew dialectics, implicit ideas of unity and dialectical relations of unity and difference remain in their work. the %telos% of their "plateau" carries forward the desire to submerge self in the streams of molecularised existence which characterise the great eastern religions. in _a thousand plateaus_, rationality turns back on itself, breaking into pure desire as flows and clashes of particles. in a schizoid sense, desire has been split and projected out into the "plateau"- a term drawn from gregory bateson's "continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 158). there is a mystical play of forces implicit in postmodernism generally, and the incantations by the gnostics traversing the plateaus of postmodern pleasure are phrased in a fluid positivism, in the form of a scientology. [12] desire has floated free from the material reality of everyday life, and this is what constitutes the ontology of the particle, and tendentially, the form of the signifier: the postmodernist now acts out, intellectually, the yearning which immersed the body in the flows of desire in the 1960s. contra physical, corporal, or semiotic interpretations, the abstract machine of deleuze and guattari is diagrammatic, "is pure matter-function--a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute" (1987: 141). it is at the threshold of an assemblage that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to calculate the marginal trade-off of pleasure and pain, doing so in terms and directions which could lead to a change of state: "exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value of the last receivable object (limit object), and the apparent equivalence desires from that . . . " (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 439). in this manner, the calculus of desirability at the threshold draws upon the pleasure-pain preferences of every element of the group, which, at a given point, may change state. [13] we must also consider the location of postmodernists, including the post-structuralist writer, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia which is under considerable threat in the conditions of late capitalism. the move to roll back government expenditure on education, and the resurgence of corporate claims to power, contribute to a sense of heightened anxiety. this anxiety underlies the desire to deconstruct, into their component parts, structures which have failed to provide solutions in the conditions of image capitalism. in addition, there is a sadistic pleasure, one which heightens the sensitivity of the organism, to be had from sublimating anxiety into the deconstruction of some object, or code, into its constituent particles. the heightened sensitivity and pleasure gained from this deconstructing molecularisation reveals the perverse and narcissistic underside of the postmodernists' absorption in the play with the elements of their own deconstructions. they reduce culture and individuality to a pseudo-difference, in fact more a bland consistency of component parts. in so doing, they feed capital with a flow of particle inputs which are more easily reconstituted to suit the infinitely changing tastes of the market. in this sense the postmodernists, rather than orchestrating genuine difference, pre-digest culture, tradition, and structure, reducing it to a form more palatable to capital. ii. de sade's legacy: postmodern pleasure and perversity [14] the postmodern heightening of sensitivities of pleasure through the perversity of molecularisation as code-breaking is grotesquely prefigured by de sade's _juliette_. simone de beauvoir questions "must we burn de sade? . . . the supreme value of his testimony is that it disturbs us" (cited in de saint-yves, 1954: 16). in addition, de saint-yves suggests that de sade reveals the hypocrisy of the social display, a refinery which barely conceals juliette's gross machinic organising for pleasure (1954: 16). this hypocrisy is now repeated beneath the attractiveness of the social order signified by the global capitalist imaging of desirable social machines within the information networks of global capitalism. the mating of desire, images, and production is electronically sorted on a global scale. the laws and moral conventions, which are postured by and maintain the content of these social machines, themselves provide the codes through which a pleasure is gained in transgression. the postmodernists, as a part of the new class intelligentsia whose status is enmeshed within the legal and moral status quo, experience a doubling of pleasures: firstly, in the benefits of their position, and secondly, in the heightened sensitivity derived from the perversity of code-breaking within their deconstructing discourses. [15] the postmodernists are less likely to speak of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. yet, tracing the epistemological affinity between de sade's (1796) _juliette_ and deleuze and guattari's (1987) _a thousand plateaus_ reveals that this inheritance persists. both are concerned with flows of desire at the molecular level and with heightening intensities. both parody the social and productive conditions within which they were produced. de sade's (1796) _juliette_ appeared just before goethe's (1808) _faust_, which berman's (1980) _all that is solid melts into air_ identifies as embodying the modernist cum postmodernist spirit. goethe's _faust_ is also a precursor to nietzsche's (1887) _on the genealogy of morals_ and his (1888) _the will to power_, expressing the strong man as a code-breaker of the weak principles of christianity and socialism, and as a manipulative developer. we find this trajectory of indefinite cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction continues through postmodernism to culminate in the inversion of marx's _capital_ and nietzsche's "abstract power" in baudrillard (kroker, 1985). [16] the postmodern order of things is prefigured in de sade's "matrix of maleficent molecules" (1968: 400), in which the propensity to rule-breaking and irregularity is natural. pleasure-seeking in postmodernism may be seen as pain avoidance which both stems from and drives the cycles of desire in the postmodern condition. this calculus is at the basis of an incipiently postmodern reason which, in de sade, mirrors natural law: "what is reason? the faculty given to me by nature whereby i may dispose myself in a favourable sense toward such-and-such an object and against some other, depending on the amount of pleasure or pain i desire from these objects" (1968: 34). heightening intensities: the pleasures of code-breaking [17] juliette's machinic organising conjoined sadism and code-breaking to raise the level of excitation of the nervous system, so that the experience of pleasure is heightened in intensity: "there is a certain perversity than which no other nourishment is tastier, drawn thither by nature--if reason's glacial hand waves us back, lusts fingers bear the dish towards us again, and thereafter we can no longer do without the fare" (de sade, 1968: 11). thus driven, the unconstrained imagination may wreak havoc and destruction as nature does in pursuing its ends (de sade, 1968: 12). this opportunism is evident in lyotard's (1984) affirmation of what we might see as the polymorphous perversity of the play of eros, thanatos, and _capital_ through the electromagnetic dance of the information society in his _postmodern condition_. lyotard concludes that "our fear of the system of signs and thus our investment in it, must still be immense if we continue to seek these positions of purity . . . what would be interesting would be to stay where we are, but at the same time to seize every opportunity to function as good conductors of intensities" (1984: 311). however, the focus of lyotard's argument represses the pathology of the postmodern subject, who--as de sade predicted in _juliette_--heightens the intensities of pleasure through the sadistic adventures of indefinite deconstruction. [18] the political claims of deconstruction are repeated when deleuze and guattari enlist pleasure-seeking molecularisation to "[overcome] the imperialism of language" (1987: 65). deleuze and guattari's logic has its precursor in _juliette_, in the form of debene's exhortation to a "voluptuousness which can tolerate no inhibitions": this voluptuousness "attains its zenith only by shattering them all" (de sade, 1968: 53). the zenith is the excitement of transgressing laws, which, for juliette, "has a strong impact upon the nervous system." deleuze and guattari's molecularising thought crystallises de sade's deconstructionist lubricity in the intellectual sphere: their social machine is not cast in terms of the marxist preoccupation with the production of goods, but rather in terms of the "state of the intermingling of bodies in society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies, and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect the bodies of all kinds in their relations" (1987: 89). one consequence of this is the relativising of moral-ethical concerns, since "good and bad are only products of temporary selection which must be renewed" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 10). [19] deleuze and guattari propose the withdrawal to the "body without organs" as their pleasure dome--"a tantric egg," a condition in which all the attachments of organs to stratified social space have been cut off. it is a matter of pushing desire through to point of its origins in the body, by intensifying the behaviour to which desire is attached, whether masochistic, sadistic, or paranoid: "where psychoanalysis says 'stop find yourself again,' we should say instead, 'lets go further still we haven't found our bwo yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled ourselves'" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 151). the desire to achieve the intensity of the experience of pure desire in the body without organs is evident in deleuze and guattari's masochist, who closes off organs: the masochist body: it is poorly understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the bwo. it has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn shut. it has itself strung up to stop the organs from working, flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight. (1987: 150) this scene might have been drawn from one of the many instances of sado-masochism in _juliette_. it is from such a point that deleuze and guattari's masochist must break through to the pleasures of the body without organs, not by exercising caution or holding onto self, but through further experimentation and "dismantling of self" (1987: 151). this pleasure-seeking is unconstrained by remorse, carrying forward clairwil's prescription that guilt must be overcome by breaking any restraining rules--in fact, by "destroying everything it rests upon" (de sade, 1968: 396). [20] it is de sade who kills the god that nietzsche declares to be dead: de sade declares that "the impediment presented by religion is the first that ought to be liquidated" (1968: 341). de sade's transgression of moral codes as a natural outcome of human striving is also a precursor to goethe's _faust_. in this work, gretchen's virtue is violated in natural cycles of desire, deconstruction and development, cycles which are carried forward in nietzsche's _the will to power_. for kroker, nietzsche stands at the beginning and end of _capital_, in a trajectory which spans the thought of deleuze, lyotard and the early barthes: "in this account, _capital_ is disclosed to be a vivid, almost clinical study of the inner workings of modern nihilism" (kroker, 1985: 69). however, it is in de sade that we find the prototypical pleasure and perversity of a deconstructing desire acted out in a complicity with capital in the mass culture of postmodernism. juliette's desire for pleasure, luxury, property and income are furthered by "the most terrible orgies," and her sadistic pleasure-plays are financed in a manner in which capital itself becomes both object and instrument of pleasure-seeking. [21] it is only recurrent cycles of sadistic deconstruction which break juliette out of the intoxication resulting from "giving in to every irregularity" of her senses. here juliette's strategies are prototypes for the image-making and image-breaking binges of the postmodern accumulators, who produce models for emulation by everyman. juliette's gods carry forward the coupling of dionysiac materiality, eroticism, and spatial intellectualisation in a manner which prefigures the eroticism invested in the figural delineation of postmodern commodity signifiers. one must go through pleasure to experience the nature of things: pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to find themselves. but the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself . . . it is a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, self and other--not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 156) [22] in _juliette_, also, pleasure is the pathway to the life principle: "a consuming and delicious conflagration will glide into your nerves, it will make boil the electrically charged liquor in which your life principle has its seat" (de sade, 1968: 19). the play of irregularity and pleasure is the natural order of things: "as soon as you have discovered the way to seize nature, insatiable in her demands upon you she will lead you step by step from irregularity to irregularity" (de sade, 1968: 19). this allure of the immersion in irregularity re-surfaces in foucault's (1972) archaeology, derrida's (1973) difference, lyotard's (1984) agonistics, and in deleuze and guattari's (1987) plateau. postmodern sadism [23] there is a long trajectory of that desire which circulates through sadistic activities, a manipulation of the fates in the interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. this trajectory is observable in _dionysus_ and in _juliette_. it also manifests itself in postmodernism, but is concealed beneath the pleasures of the pursuit of difference. the channels through which desire flows into sadism, and the mutually supportive relations of this desire with anality, require some examination as a moment in the understanding of the pleasures and perversities of postmodernism. de sade's legacy may be discerned in the writing of deleuze and guattari (1987), and in postmodernism generally. [24] _juliette_ is a precursor to nietzsche's _superman_. in _juliette_, the heightening of the intensities of the perversity and pleasure arising from the mimesis of nature's propensity to self-destruction is rampant. however, a problem which is a source of sadistic pleasure in de sade, and which is glossed over in postmodernism, is that the adverse consequences of unrestrained pleasure-seeking fall more heavily on the weaker sections of the society. this is of particular concern in the coupling of postmodernism and neo-conservatism: the stronger . . . by despoiling the weaker, that is to say by enjoying all the rights which he has received from nature, by giving himself every possible license, enjoys himself more or less in proportion to that license. the more atrocious the harm he does the weaker, the more voluptuous the thrill he gives himself. (de sade, 1968: 119) the problem with the mimesis of natural strength is that it, of necessity, is cast in terms of an unconstrained destructiveness. likewise, the postmodern desire to deconstruct sublimates the anxiety of existence into strong solutions which carry forward both faust's and juliette's sadistic pleasure-seeking at the expense of the weak. with respect to tendencies to neo-conservatism within postmodernism, we might consider the pleasures inherent in policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a perverse thrill, legitimated by nature, to be gained from tough solutions which sadistically degrade conditions of the poorer sections of society. in postmodernism, as in de sade, there is little concern for the cruelty or terror inflicted upon particular individuals or groups: "when the law of nature requires an upheaval, does nature fret over what will be undone in its course?" (de sade, 1968: 121). [25] _juliette_'s natural order anticipates the free flowing, unbounded play of assemblages later found in deleuze and guattari: the perpetual movement of matter explains everything: the universe is an assemblage of unlike entities which act and react mutually and successively with and against each other; i discern no start, no finish no fixed boundaries, this universe i see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form. (de sade, 1968: 43) this indefinite atomism is carried forward into both foucault's and derrida's difference, and it culminates in deleuze and guattari's rhizomic multiplicities: a multiplicity is neither subject or object, only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in state . . . an assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 8) it is into these flows of a natural order of difference that both de sade's and deleuze and guattari's subject dissolves itself. in both cases, it is a mimesis which seeks satisfaction at the cost of losing the memories, desires, and the mind of the subject, which--collectively with other subjects--could contain the propensity to sadism. [26] the sadisms which may be unleashed in deleuze and guattari's (1987) unrestrained flight to pleasure lie repressed in the crevices beneath their plateaus. it is into their black holes that is consigned the repressed anality of the polymorphously perverse stage, which, i have argued, is latent in the desire for deconstructing play with the objects of postmodern existence. in their schizo-analytical re-interpretation of freud's wolf-man, deleuze and guattari argue against phallocentrism, the father, and castration as key analytical criteria. they interpret the wolf-man by projecting anality into multiplicity delineated as the quantum dynamics of swarming particles and black holes. "who could ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine . . . a field of anuses just like a pack of wolves . . . lines of flight or deterritorialisation, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialised intensities: that is what multiplicity is . . . a wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 32). [27] the relations of anality, pleasure, and sadism might be better grasped by recovering the subject-object dialectics of the polymorphously perverse stage within capitalism: however, the implications of this anality remain unexamined when deleuze and guattari escape the pain of everyday postmodern existence by projecting it out onto the heights of the continuous pleasure of the plateau. thereupon, the dissolution of self into the neo-platonism of the perfect form of the pure multiplicity of particles is completed. this is the essence of molecularising thought, and it is driven by sublimating a latent anality which relentlessly and sadistically renders wholes into their molecular elements as objects of play. the platonism of this process in molecularising thought carries forward the "vision of the human body as excremental" (brown, 1977: 295). it is through this moment of atomising thought that we may uncover the suppressed anality of the postmodern character, the precursor to which is freud's 1908 essay, "character and anal erotism." the traits of the anal character of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy are sublimated into desires to control as the delineations of postmodern signification. the movement is both controlling and pleasure-seeking, and the postmodern desire to immerse self in the play of images acts out the desire to play in the objects one has created. this latent anality at the individual level is in mutually reinforcing relations with a disorganised capitalism, within which the phallus still dominates social expression. hocquenghem (1987:24) says of this that "the anus is over invested individually because its investment is withdrawn socially." [28] while in deleuze and guattari anality is projected into the pleasure and covert sadism of the plane of consistency, in de sade it is unmasked and brought into direct experience as an aperture through which self may be sado masochistically dissolved into the natural pleasures of the incessant transgression of the order of things. saint frond's instruction of juliette in the pleasures of sadistic code-breaking are legitimatised by nature's own processes. there is an on-going play of anal pleasure and sadism in _juliette_: juliette relates that he "kissed me and ran his hand down my behind, into which he promptly popped a finger" (de sade, 1968: 235). commonly, the intensity of the pleasures of juliette's orgies is heightened by the acting out of sadistic anality (de sade, 1968: 266). juliette's deconstruction of sexual codes knows no bounds: her unconstrained lust abases more noble concerns and is demanding and militant in its tyrannical perversion of beauty, virtue, innocence, candour and misfortune (de sade, 1968: 270). postmodernism's own polymorphous perversity is acted out by playing in the mess of deconstruction, but the memory of how the subject was drawn into this mess remains repressed. postmodernism: pleasure and perversity for everyman [29] bourdieu finds that the impetus for code-breaking has devolved to a growing %petite bourgeoisie% who further the processes of accumulation, dealing in information in a manner which was once reserved for privileged groups: in the name of the fight against "taboos" and the liquidation of "complexes" they adopt the most external and easily borrowed aspects of the intellectual life style, liberated manners, cosmetic or sartorial outrages, emancipated poses and postures and systematically apply the cultivated disposition to not yet legitimate culture (cinema, strip cartoons, the underground, to every day life (street art), the personal sphere (sexuality, cosmetics, child-rearing, leisure) and the existential (the relation to nature, love and death). (bourdieu, 1984: 370) these cycles of code-breaking are driven by a desire to emulate higher status groups. the style and opinion leaders of the new %petite bourgeoisie% perpetuate the play of difference inherent in commodity signs, deconstructing tradition and high culture into everyday life and increasing the possibilities for the attachment of capital and desire. from beneath the veneer of an attractive style, sadism is projected out elsewhere. for example, it is projected into the third world as life-threatening methods of production, as the disruption of communities, and as the practice of using torture to maintain the system of power and control. it is also projected into the psyches of the postmodern worker and consumer, wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the play of commodity signifiers, and in the hierarchies of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated. [30] the pleasurable and terroristic nature of postmodern consumer society can be discerned as two sides of the same coin. firstly, the writing of lifestyle ideals in consumer consciousness terrorises the masses into appropriate consumption and productive behaviours. secondly, as baudrillard has argued, the immersion of the masses in symbolic exchange sets in train a terroristic reaction to the simulacra which will lead the system of simulations to collapse in on itself: the system's own logic turns into the best weapon against it. the only strategy of opposition to a hyperrealist system is pata-physical, a "science of imaginary solutions" in other words a science fiction about the system returning to destroy itself at the extreme limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of destruction and death. (baudrillard, 1984: 58-9). postmodernism promises the masses a veritable orgy of code-breaking in the play of signifiers. it completes the devolution of the pleasures of code-breaking through de sade's aristocracy to the elites of marx and weber, and to bourdieu's higher status groups, intellectuals and the new petite bourgeoisie to everyman. the postmodern allure is that everyman may experience the pleasure and sadism of code-breaking, at the level of bodily molecular excitation, by dissolving self in the play of commodity signifiers. beyond justice: everyman a deconstructionist [31] one consequence of postmodernism associated with the dissolution of self into the pleasures and perversities of an unfettered play of difference is the end of meaningful discourse concerning justice and human agency. justice is relativised in the language games of postmodernism. for example, lyotard argues that we must arrive at an idea of justice that is not linked to that of consensus (1984: 66). in postmodernism, desire wells up in the sphere of language and is the exotic force driving the play of difference: "a move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention" (lyotard: 1984: 10). de sade prefigures this abasement of justice to desire, pointing to the universal motion of justice evident in nature by arguing that justice is relative and it is natural to heighten the intensity of pleasure by breaking its codes. [32] this relativising of justice de-sublimates the modernists' desire for equality, liberty, and happiness for all into contingencies subject to the play of market fates. the consequence is an abdication of any containing ethical discourse in favor of the play of difference among signifiers: this means that anything is possible as the molecularities of desire and production pursue one another in a dance which tramples the less powerful, less involved bystanders. the faustian cycles of eternal deconstruction and reconstruction work their way through nietzsche into a postmodern will to signify, a will which carries the developer's ethic into cultural and intellectual processes. de sade provides an earlier illustration of the relations of desire fixated in deconstruction, an illustration which is also repeated in nietzsche's incipient postmodernism. de sade reveals the hypocritical and pitiless side of this complex, characteristics further revealed in the complicity of postmodernism and neo-conservatism. there is nothing to constrain the terrorisation, or elimination, of those who stand in the way of a natural flow of desires into cycles of indefinite change: one of the basic laws of nature is that nothing superfluous subsists in the world. you may be sure of it, not only does the shiftless beggar, always a nuisance, consume part of what the industrious man produces, which is already a serious matter, but will quickly become dangerous the moment you suspend your dole to him. my desire is that instead of bestowing a groat upon these misfortunates we concentrate our efforts upon wiping them out. (de sade, 1968: 726) [33] de sade prefigures the contemporary conflation of desire, rationality and market naturalism, which i have argued become mutually supportive within postmodern logic. this is acted out when everyman may have the pleasure of faustian deconstruction and development in postmodernism. again, de sade expresses in advance the naturalism which is to surface in postmodernism as a rejection of the idea of generalised rules: "no man has the right to repress in him what nature put there . . . a universal glaive of justice is of no purpose" (1968: 732). de sade's prototypical natural order of difference carries forward that of heraclitus and its ideal type is realised in derrida's epistemology of difference. this epistemology instates the clash of signifiers as the self-driving force of language: in a language, in the system of language these are only differences . . . what is written as difference, then, will be the playing movement that "produces"--by means of something that is not simply an activity--these differences, these effects of difference. (derrida, 1982: 11) derrida's naturalism here opens language to a darwinism in which there is nothing to contain the slide into de sade's "perpetual outpouring of conflict, injury and aggression" (1968: 733). for lyotard also, "to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domains of a general agonistics" (1984: 10). the postmodern hope is that unconstrained difference will break through to a liberalist ethics of equal opportunity for participation in language games. the corresponding promise is that this equality of participation will alleviate the condition of those who are victimised by the social structure: lyotard's agonistic language games protect against "piracy" by breaking the rules (1984: 7). for postmodernism, the act of deconstructing the law and social codes is held to undermine the propensity to despotism (1968: 735); however, there is nothing to constrain the slide into terrorism. de sade's unconstrained anarchism is the precursor to this play of postmodern difference, and reveals its propensity to turn into terror against the weaker sections of society. for de sade, "give us anarchy and we will have these victims the less" (1968: 733). [34] the neurology of de sade's propensity to the heightened intensity of law breaking prefigures deleuze and guattari's analysis of desire at the molecular level: "foreign objects act in a forceful manner upon our organs, if they penetrate them violently, if they stir into brisk motion the neural fluid particles which circulate in the hollow of our nerves, then our sensibility is such as to dispose us to vice" (de sade, 1968: 278). it is in atrocity that the highest intensity from this code-breaking is achieved. within de sade's technics of heightening the intensity of pleasure, doing good is useless. de sade's language is carried forward in deleuze and guattari's studies of the particle flows of intensities; here, by implication, arguments concerning the good are dissolved in particle flows. heightened intensity is achieved to the extent that particles of desire can crash through striated (coded) space to the libertinage of the plateau (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 507). however, the consignment of justice to a space beyond the subjective and collective relations of concern for others leaves a state of lawlessness in which no individual or sub-group is safe. iii. particle thought and the end of the subject [35] the trajectory of social thought which reduces the complex texture of existence to molecules, or to particles, reaches its fully developed form in deleuze and guattari's writing. their concepts reveal that the epistemology of difference, which underpins postmodernism, rests on a cultural scientism. furthermore, lyotard proposes modelling social relations in terms of quantum theory, since "research centred on singularities and "incommensurables" is applicable to the pragmatics of most everyday problems" (1984: 60). these models provide prospects for lyotard to realise the quantum revolution within language. lyotard would then be able to explain the logic of the clashes and discontinuities, in his study of the agonistics of discourse, in terms of the probabilistic positivism applicable to this model. there is a problem for the subject in this view, since the subject is overawed by, and precariously existing in, an unfathomable cosmic flux of energies. i propose to trace the trajectory of this view and to evaluate it by directing simone weil's critique of quantum theory at the manifestation of this form within postmodernism. [36] the trajectory of probabilistic positivism begins with heraclitus, and continues through nietzsche's universe as a "monster of energies without beginning, without end--a play of forces a wave of forces" (1968: 550). it is the base matter of classical scientism, revitalised in a fluid positivism by the quantum theorists, and emerging as the repressed archetype for the postmodern play of difference as a quantum scientism of signifiers. we find that this trajectory culminates in deleuze and guattari's _a thousand plateaus_ which imports quantum modelling of particle movement into social theory. this importation tends to gloss over problems in relation to knowledge which remain to be resolved. [37] simone weil's (1968) _reflections on quantum theory_ is instructive in revealing the manner in which quantum theory furthers an epistemology of particle plays which ends human concerns. we might reasonably depict these concerns as those that derive from the modernist catch cry of equality, liberty and fraternity. weil's critique usefully informs this evaluation of the form of postmodern thought. weil perceives a crisis in twentieth-century physics which we may also discern in the social physics of postmodernism in general, and in deleuze and guattari's work in particular. weil argues that scientism must not eliminate the concerns of "human destiny" and "human truth" from culture or intellectual pursuits (1968: vii). she criticises the ending of human truth in the seeking of scientific truth: "utility at once takes its place . . . utility becomes something which the intelligence is no longer entitled to define or judge, but only to serve" (weil, 1968: ix). [38] in deleuze and guattari (1987) we find that there is a utility of particle flows to understanding, but that it is a utility which deconstructs ideas of "human destiny" into a dynamic atomism. it is a dead atomism devoid of a humanising moment. their world of particles recapitulates the trajectory of the ancient greek atomism, through to the atoms of modern physics, from which cornforth (1912) claims that the concerns of human life had passed. deleuze and guattari reduce a humanised utility and pleasure-seeking, from activities subject to human thought and wisdom, to a universal and autonomous pleasure-seeking which is diagrammatically programmed into a universal field of particle flows. [39] quantum theory reflected the re-emergence of an over riding concern with the discontinuous in science. weil (1968: 5) criticises this tendency stating that "the human mind cannot make do with number alone or with continuity alone; it oscillates between the two." the potential to think in terms of both number and space is instated as a necessary %a priori% of comprehension. in this sense weil carries forward the paraconsistent logic of heraclitean unity and difference. it is the loss of the sense of spatial unity in the reduction to the discontinuity of atoms and quanta that has led to a loss of meaning. here, weil expresses a similar observation to that of cornforth (1912), who claims that the atomism of physics carries forward the spatial rationalisation entailed in the naming of the olympian gods. however, with the vanishing of the gods from mount olympus and the diminution of their influence in everyday life, a space opened in which the secularised, dead particles of physics were constructed. the concerns of human life, which had maintained their vitality through projection into the olympian gods, now pass out of the conceptualisation of the nature of things, leaving the dead matter of atomism. [40] weil argues that scientists between the renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century carried on their experiments within the context of a broader attempt to establish the relations of people and the universe. their anthropo-mytho-materio framework for this was promethean. people had been cursed to act out desires through work. causality was grasped in terms of "intermediate stages analogous to those traversed by a man executing a simple manual labour" (weil, 1968: 6). these relations of work were further reduced to the universal formulae of energy, effectively dehumanising relations of distance and force (or mass and velocity), relations which hitherto had been grasped in terms of the human work required to move weight. furthermore, the experience of the consequences of directional time was added in terms of the concept of entropy, expressed algebraically. [41] coupled with necessity, these ideas reduced human nature (including relations of desires hopes, fears, becoming and the good) to something determined within the constellation of energies and atoms of the universe. the cost is a world deprived of human meanings: "it tries to read behind all appearances that inexorable necessity which makes the world a place in which we do not count, a place of work, a place indifferent to desire, to aspirations and the good" (weil, 1968: 10). in these terms, classical science contained a vital flaw which would lead to its demise, namely the gap between human thought (including wisdom) and an infinitely accumulating array of facts. human beings are more than particles of matter condemned to work. they are able to imagine, construct becomings, and experience the good and the beautiful. the reduction of language to scientism ends this aspect of human existence, one which "can, perhaps, only be expressed in the language of myth, poetry and image, the images consisting not only in words but also in objects and actions" (weil, 1968: 13). [42] the spatio-temporal relations of desire and action are also dehumanised in the transition from greek to modern science in a manner which we shall see has been carried into postmodern cultural scientism. weil sees in ancient greek science the foundations of classical science. classical science is cast in terms of a tendency to equilibrium, an equilibrium which encompasses the relations of injustice and justice, and ideas of beauty such as expressed in greek art (weil, 1968: 15). however, these humanising relations are lost in classical science. the desire of greek science is "to contemplate in sensible phenomena an image of the good" (weil, 1968: 21). classical science takes as its model for representing the world the relation between a desire and the conditions for its fulfillment. however, it suppresses the first term of the relation (weil, 1968: 15). the linear motion of classical science encapsulates desire as an acting out of "desires to go somewhere" (weil, 1968: 26). [43] one might also discern an early expression of this travelling motion in homer: odysseus' restless adventuring now continues its trajectory through modern physics to culminate in the spatial explorations of the postmodernists. the postmodern reduction of distance, space and desire into the image as commodity signifier reproduces odysseus' adventuring through mass travel--in a manner which involves an unending hopping from one simulation of culture and history to the next--and one in which desire goes nowhere really positive but around in a circle to return repression to itself. horkheimer and adorno's (1972) reading of odysseus as an archetypal bourgeois character fits with weil's modernist (1968: 16). both act out desires "to go somewhere, for example, or to seize or hit something or somebody, and upon distance which is a condition inherent in every desire of a creature subjected to time." this incessant journeying prefigures the postmodernists' spatial traversing and subdividing of the activities of everyday life into a kaleidoscopic symbolic field. however, aesthetical and ethical considerations are suppressed in this acting out of classical scientific perceptions. it is in weil's reference to an earlier image of the manichaeans that the tendency to fragmentation now carried forward by the postmodernists is most visible. [44] weil's manichaeans saw the fragmentation of the spirit through its attachment to the necessities of time and space. we may also recall the crises of odysseus' adventuring in these terms. both odysseus' experiences and those seen by the manichaeans prefigure the postmodern condition as one in which character is fragmented in spatial delineation driven by the temporality of a play of difference. weil is prescient to the postmodern split, conceiving of character as split between desires and aspiration. any sense of having found oneself is continually undermined as the past is lost. the feelings arising therefrom are repeated in postmodern nihilism. what he is at any single moment is nothing; what he has been and what he will be do not exist; and the extended world is made up of everything that escapes him, since he is confined to one point, like a chained prisoner, and cannot be anywhere except at the price of time and effort and of abandoning the point he started from. pleasure rivets him to his place of confinement and to the present moment, which nevertheless he cannot detain; desire attaches him to the coming moment and makes the whole world vanish for the sake of a single object; and pain is always for him the sense of his being torn and scattered through the succession of moments and places. (weil, 1968: 16,17) [45] this splitting of the psychic space of the subject is also expressed by lacan in that the signifier is the death of the subject. hence the division of the subject--when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as "fading," as disappearance. there is, then, one might say a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. (lacan, 1968: 218) these terms are also applicable to the source of the anxiety of postmodern existence which arises from the dissolution of self into the world of signifiers. the context of postmodern existence is given its dynamic ontological structure by the new physics. the new physics is the atomism of classical science dissolved into transitory particles which emanate from underlying fields. this form provides a natural scientific legitimation for a postmodern existence remarkable for its fragmentary and transitory nature. in addition, it stylistically underpins the electrodynamics of the global image making systems which channel postmodern desire. this is the context for the pain of postmodern existence manifested by the postmodern split. the splitting or play of difference within character acts in sympathy with a play of difference in an everyday life. what is remarkable here is the predominant preoccupation with the pursuit of difference as distinction, measured in terms of signifying fashions. [46] in this on-going deconstruction and reconstruction of self, elements are continually shed and replaced with new signifiers. however, something is gained only at the expense of something lost, and as repeated failures of satisfaction are experienced, the feeling of the tragedy of deconstruction grows. in its psychotic mode, the postmodern split manifests a masochistic self-deconstruction, on the one hand, and a sadistic rending of culture into its elemental particles, on the other. this postmodern desire to reduce things to their elemental particles carries the quantum hypothesis into culture as a stylistic legitimating form, and we shall see that it also imports a loss of the connection of humanity and materiality. [47] the dehumanising loss in the quantum hypotheses is the loss of "analogy between the laws of nature and the conditions of work" (weil, 1968: 22). the work of the human being to move a weight over distance is represented in terms of the mechanical devices of classical science (mechanical man). in contrast, quantum conceptions (for example, planck's) subsume discontinuous mechano-humanism under the continuity of formulae which express the product of number and a constant (weil, 1968: 23). weil's conception of the spatial continuity implied by such formulae belies the apparent discontinuity of quantum particles. this spatial continuity is the underlying unity of the field. in an equivalent form, foucault's (1972) "archive" functions as a field which emanates difference. in deleuze and guattari's social physics, this is the same unity as the suppressed term of the relations of pure discontinuity, and in postmodernism generally it is the suppressed unity of spatial continuity which underlies the plays of difference. [48] the postmodern idea of infinite difference rests on an unbounded continuity of space within which there is no limit to figural divisions. deleuze and guattari's (1987) idealisation or telic destiny of this is the "plateau" or "plane of consistency." however, such a schema dissolves humanity itself, and with it, human meaning. on the social plane, deleuze and guattari repeat the formulations of physics which move outside human thought into pure algebra. the problem, to weil, is that algebra is "a language with this peculiarity, it means nothing" (weil, 1968: 24). in this manner, the conditions of human existence are reduced to the algebraic relations of dead atoms out of which the concerns of human life have passed, thus realising the condition foreseen by cornforth (1912). the idea of human agency is lost in the traversing of continuous space which mindlessly emanates difference. [49] the discontinuities of quantum physics are grasped at the micro level through the linking of atomism, chance, and probability. weil warns that the idea of chance at the micro level does not end spatio-temporal necessity, since the same macro-structures, for example, the distribution of thousands of throws of a dice, are carried forward--by necessity (1968: 24). the same argument may be used to question the postmodernists, in general, and deleuze and guattari's ending of concern with totalities. from this perspective, we may question deleuze and guattari's social physics in respect of its concern with plays of difference at the particle level. the characteristic postmodern indulgence in chance ends structural necessity in favour of the idea of a random number machine which authorises infinite spatial multiplicity. [50] in problematising this, consider the manner in which modern physics reduced the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and continuity to the discontinuous numbers of probability. the algebraic formulae of probability functions overrode paradoxical concerns of human thought: einstein's paradoxes as expressed in terms of a "velocity which is both infinite and measurable, a time which is assimilated to a fourth dimension of space" (weil, 1968: 29). weil proposes investigating ways in which probability can be conceived without reduction to the discontinuity of numbers--for example, through generalised numbers. it is clear that atomising thought is an artifice which suppresses the potential of the human mind to conceive continuity, and with it conceptions of destiny and the good. these are suppressed in favour of the measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent, signifiers as the cultural atomism of postmodernism. [51] the same problem exists in the deleuze and guattari's conception of atomistic particle thought. they assign the idea of continuity to the utopian, transcendental space of the "plateau" or "plane of consistency," thus projecting the continuous and the good to olympian heights above the conditions of human existence. their flows of particles are a mathesis and their molecularising thought is one to which human experience is not reducible. weil remarks that "physics is essentially the application of mathematics to nature at the price of an infinite error" (1968: 34). and deleuze and guattari's social physics carries forward the same error--the discontinuous particle experience is not the universal experience. it is a product of individual human minds, a product which is shared, not a producer of human minds. in addition, lyotard also carries forward this error in his dehumanising relativism. he discusses "genres of discourse" as "strategies . . . of no-one." he also characterises conflict as autonomous, "not between humans or between any other entities," but rather the as product of "phrases" (lyotard, 1988: 137). [52] deleuze and guattari's conceptualisations are perhaps best grasped as an attempt by the postmodern mind to locate itself in a changing terrain, but a terrain which instates the hypotheses of quantum physics in culture as a repressed absolute governing human existence. however, it is apparent that this view raises problems for cultural analysis, problems which remain to be examined. both the human potential to imagine the olympian gods and the form of the existence of the particle contain the infinite error of assuming the pre-eminence of these products of imagination over the conditions of human existence: the grace which permits wretched mortals to think and imagine and effectively apply geometry, and to conceive at the same time that god is a perpetual geometer, the grace which goes with the stars and with dances, play and work is a marvelous thing; but it is not more marvelous than the very existence of man, for it is a condition of it. (weil, 1968: 41) [53] the infinite error carried forward in postmodern thought is that of regarding the play of difference as a universal and a valid resolution of the twentieth century's contradictions: the discontinuities of difference with the continuities of infinite space, time and desire. this error arises from the belief in interminable deconstruction and its counterpart in capitalising the unending possibilities of attaching desires to an infinite array of consumption images. it does not end the modernist project but updates it by substituting the more dynamic particle plays of quantum physics for nineteenth-century atomism. the instating of the principles of quantum physics in social thought provides a more reactive reagent for the furthering of modernist concerns: the nineteenth century, that century which believed in unlimited progress, and believed that men would grow richer and richer, and that constantly renovated techniques would enable them to get more and more pleasure while working less and less, and that education would make them more and more rational and that public moral in all countries would grow more and more democratic, believed that his domain of physics was the whole universe. the goods to which the nineteenth century attached were precious, but not supreme; they were subordinate values but it thought it saw infinity in them. (weil 1968: 42) this prognosis of the nineteenth century is applicable to our so-called postmodern era. we observe postmodern thought investing human hopes and desires into a universe which is an infinity of signified differences at the level of culture and consumption. however, the idea, implicit in postmodernism, that desire can be infinitely attached to the play of signifiers, is neither supreme nor sublime. postmodern neo-positivism, or the signifier as number [54] the culmination of the logic of the postmodern world of signifiers is in the neo-positivism of deleuze and guattari's "numbering" within "nomad space." "nomad space" is conceived as numerical space and is contrasted with the linear space of primitive society and the territorial striations of state society. while the state numericises its striations, it is in nomad space that the "autonomous arithmetic organisation" of the "numbering number" comes to function: "the number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 389). [55] to reveal the numerics at the underside of the signifier, first let's recapitulate the tendency to fragmentation in postmodern thought. the fully developed form of this is in deleuze and guattari's reduction to the particle. this adds a new fluidity to culture and provides more opportunities for desire to attach to capital. under these circumstances, postmodernism gives modernism entree to culture. in this sense, kroker has recognised postmodernism as the culmination of the logic of capital in a culture which is driven by a nietzschean will to power. we might regard deleuze and guattari's reduction of the complex texture of individual and social relations to an essential constitution of rampant particles of desire as a nietzschean desire for power through deconstruction. in postmodernism, this will to power draws on the fluid epistemology of the quanta of modern physics and uses it to fragment social spaces and structures. the play of particles so formed is one of a cultural positivism, in which the signifier behaves probabilistically in the form of the number. it is at this point of the rendering of culture into its elemental quantum numerics that the social field is most permeable to the passage of capital. [56] furthermore, within the sense of a dialectical view of history, i have previously argued that the moment of deconstruction or fragmentation is often misconstrued as a permanent condition, unjustifiably freezing dialectic at this point. this fixation on the moment of difference is central to postmodern reason and lies at the confluence of the trajectories of a number of historical tendencies. these trajectories are mutually attractive and intersect to create the space of postmodern reason. they include the global capitalism of the information society, which heightens the intensities of the relations of fear, anxiety, and the pleasure and perversity of infinite deconstruction by abetting their investment in the flux of commodity signifiers. [57] postmodern reason facilitates the fluidity of these relations by conjoining the propensity to think atomistically with the notion of the random number machine and probability. in effect, it dissolves culture into a quantum epistemology. here, the fluid, probabilistic, and rapidly appearing and disappearing number, as the concealed form of the signifier--for example in the mathematical coordinates which blueprint the electronic image--becomes the epistemological currency of postmodern thought. this is the order of things driving the postmodern cutting edge of modernism, a postmodern neo-positivism which breaks up culture into the form of a probabilistic mathesis. [58] it is the random number machine of postmodern reason that is the hidden orchestrator of the production of infinite difference as pure multiplicity, in which the signifier is reduced to the form of the self-moving number. the random number machine is revealed at the seat of that quasi-transcendental force which is self-referential in terms of deleuze and guattari's "numbering number" and sets forth its own probabilistic order of things. desire and capital pursue one another through patterns issuing from the random number machine as it arbitrarily pours forth an infinite array of profiles of the possible relations of desire and commodity signifiers. the random number machine also sets forth lines of escape from the hegemony of state and market relations--for example, into the probabilities that reactive numbers will coalesce in reaction against the dominant order. deleuze and guattari's "numbering numbers" escape from their state organisation into "autonomous arithmetic" (1987: 389). in the death knell of praxis and the subject, "the number is no longer a means of counting or of moving: it is the number itself which moves through smooth space" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 389). the culmination of the logic of postmodernism, then, is in the play of signifiers, the essential constitution of which is a play of numbers: in other words, the fluid neo-positivism of signifiers is a play of difference among "numbering numbers." [59] the desire to systematise the play of difference into a fluid positivism is also apparent in the positivity of foucault's (1972) statement. in addition, lacan (1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one also senses that lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis as the basis of his agonistic discourse-games. deleuze and guattari's reduction of social quanta to particle flows realises the %telos% of postmodern thought, reducing cultural complexity to signifiers in the form of number-signs. this is also the designation of the subject in postmodernism, an order which abets the depiction of everyday life in terms of the concealed numerical coordinates which make up the electronic flashes of the image machines. a self-perficient and determining neo positivism thus overtakes human reason. [60] this order of things is the end of reason--an electronic mating of capital with a faustian cum-nietzschean will to deconstruction. the reality of deleuze and guattari's escaping social quanta within late capitalism is that they are fearful and greedy multiplicities of desire which do not break free of capital but ride it into the fantasy of pure difference, seeking the pleasure of the "plateau." the will to signify steers and provides the legitimating rationale for the passage of the turbulent leading edge of modernist capital into culture: atomising postmodern thought breaks up culture into exceedingly fine particles, creating a cosmic soup through which capitalism may re-nourish itself, unconstrained by structure. the particle flows of pleasure-seeking capital and fearful desire mutually attract and interpenetrate, and out of this mutual attraction arises an interminable metamorphosis that is the postmodern condition. while i contend that the reduction of the individual and social space to "numbering numbers" leaves no containing ethico-politico structure to constrain the propensity for terror, deleuze and guattari are at pains to disagree: "horror for horror the numerical organisation of people is no crueler than linear or state organisation" (deleuze and guattari, 1987: 390). however, the individual, with an inherent potential for ethical and political praxis, can say no to the madness of the crowd in its elemental form of a swarming numerics of particles of desire. [61] to place this discussion within the broader project of locating postmodernism historically, something has been lost in our focus on the luminescent trajectory of postmodernism since paris in may, 1968: we have lost sight of the function of postmodernism as that which carries the modernist ethos into culture. this has seriously weakened the critical credentials of postmodernism. however, as this trajectory burns out (los angeles in may, 1992, is arguably postmodernism's memorial monument), a re-orientation is called for. opening up the reductiveness of the signifier to an understanding of the complicities of desire and concept is a step to relocating the individual, as the subject of ethico-politico praxis, within the mutually supportive dynamics of modernity and postmodernity. if the pleasures of deconstruction have perverted the modernist spirit of equality, liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of existence for the weaker sections of society, then reversing this process entails an awareness of the subject's dissolution, by stages, into signifier, difference, particle-quanta, and finally into that autonomous mathesis of number concealed beneath postmodern figural play. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited baudrillard, j. _in the shadow of silent majorities_. new york: semiotext(e), 1983. ---. 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"baudrillard's marx." _theory, culture and society_ 2.3 (1985): 69-84. lacan, j. _the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis_. new york: norton, 1968. lefebvre, h. _the production of space_. trans. d. nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell, 1991. liggett, h. "the theory/practice split." in d. crow, ed. _philosophical streets_. washington: maisonneuve, 1990. lukacs, g. _history and class consciousness_. london: merlin, 1971. lyotard, j-f. _the postmodern condition_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984. lyotard, j-f. _the differend: phrases in dispute_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988. nietzsche, f. _the will to power_. trans. w. kaufman and r.j. hollingdale. new york: viking, 1968. postle, d. _the fabric of the universe_. london: macmillan, 1976. priest, g. _in contradiction_. dordrect: martinus nijhoff, 1987. rose, g. _dialectic of nihilism: post-structuralism and the law_. oxford: blackwell, 1984. ---. "the postmodern complicity." _theory, culture and society_ 2-3 (1988): 357-371. weil, s. _on science, necessity and love of god_. trans. and ed. richard rees. london: oxford up, 1968. tranter, 'mr. rubenking's "brekdown"', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-tranter-mr.txt mr. rubenking's "brekdown" by john tranter <100026.1402@compuserve.com> _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1991, 1992 by john e. tranter, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [this essay was originally published in _meanjin_ no. 4 (1991), melbourne university, australia.] [1] in magazines and seminar rooms from fife to fresno, from michigan to melbourne, you can hear the raised voices and the breaking glass--they're arguing about poetry again. a recent issue of _verse_ (an english/us magazine edited from fife and glasgow, scotland and williamsburg, virginia) was devoted to "the new formalism in american poetry." _sulfur_ magazine, emerging from ypsilanti, michigan, transcribes the shifting tides of battle as an old modernist orthodoxy faces up to contemporary deconstructions. a recent _meanjin_ magazine from melbourne, australia, was devoted to an examination of "language" poetry. [2] among other issues, these debates have drawn attention to the irrational and disorderly aspects of literary production. the courting and harnessing of disorder- deconstruction and reconstruction, breakdown and buildup--is of course as old as the ancient greeks, and as contemporary as shakespeare. in its various modern phases it can be traced in the theory and practice of writers including coleridge, rimbaud, stein, the french surrealists, raymond roussel, the print and audio tape cut-up experiments of william burroughs, and the theoretical and practical deconstructions of the american "language" poets. [3] australia's "ern malley," a hoax poet concocted by the young poets james mcauley and harold stewart in 1943, was built to self-destruct and take the experimental magazine _angry penguins_ with him. but like frankenstein's monster he stubbornly lived on, stalking the periphery of australian literature, haunting his creators and troubling generations of readers with the contradictory beauty of his "meaningless" poems. two of his "best" works appeared in the summer 1961 issue of the paris magazine _locus solus_, not as examples of hoax poetry, but of collaborative writing. so order can emerge in spite of the author's insistence on chaos. [4] history works through hindsight, and the spectacles of hindsight are tinted with irony. the model of art versus disorder was renovated early in the industrial revolution in the service of a romantic idea: the construction of a role for the author as a unique creative presence rescuing spiritual value from chaos--the aristocracy were dead, god had fled, and nature was covered with factories--and whose job it was to certify the value of a literary work on behalf of its consumers, the bourgeoisie. the project has seen strange and powerful acids attack this central role as the twentieth century progressed, until the structure is now almost reversed--it's now the reader who validates the work which constructs the author--if she's lucky. [5] one of the incidental but apparently intractable problems unearthed by this theoretical juggernaut as it ploughs up the highway of style goes as follows: how does a writer create a writer-free literary text? a text free of authorial intentions, buried cultural, social, economic and political values and hidden personality agendas, giving forth only "literature" in its pure state? [6] automatic writing, nonsense writing, collaboration, formal rules for sentence-building, found poems--they've all been called into service. the current strategies of postmodernism include quotation, parody, collage, disassembly, %bricolage%, and so forth; but the hand of the stylist--not to mention the theoretician--is always evident as it arranges the exhibits. [7] it's usually thought that an "unintended" poetry was either impossible or "unreadable." but there is a way of constructing practically any form of literary material that will embody many of the traditional values of "literature," which will be curiously readable, but which is free of authorial intent. an energetic computer programmer, inspired by articles in _scientific american_ and _byte_ magazine, has developed such a method--but not in the severe service of modern literary theory. [8] like a poet, he did it for the fun of it. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [9] "brekdown" is a text analysis and text generation program written in turbo pascal for ibm-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the san francisco programmer neil j. rubenking. [10] what does it do? [11] first, brekdown requires a typed text to work on. for example, you can feed it several pages of a sermon on brotherly love, or a set of instructions for building a kayak, or a short story written in italian. [12] to analyse a text, brekdown looks at it in "chunks" of a particular size--the "chunk size" can be set from two to seven alphabetical and punctuation characters. brekdown keeps a record--in the form of an index and a frequency table--of what character occurs immediately after a particular "chunk." for example, after the "chunk" the, the letters n, r, y and m and the character <spacebar> are likely to occur frequently in a particular text; the letter a less frequently, and the letters x, k and q and the character <full stop> very infrequently if at all. [13] then the "chunk" is shifted one character to the right, and the process is repeated--that is, the chunk's first character is dropped, the current next character is tacked onto the end, and the index and the frequency table is updated for the character that follows that "chunk" of characters. the chunk is moved one character to the right again, and again, until the end of the text is reached. [14] once brekdown has constructed an index and a frequency table for a sample text, it can generate a "reconstruction" of that text. [15] to generate a new text, brekdown selects at random a "key chunk" that begins with a space (i.e., one that doesn't start in the middle of a word.) it then looks up the frequency array for that key and selects the next character at random from the characters with non-zero frequency, weighted by the frequencies listed in the table. this character is added to the current output line, and to the current key chunk, and the process is repeated. the program continues generating characters, words, and lines of text until you ask it to stop. it could go on forever. [16] that's it. [17] it looks simple--if you can put aside the immense computational, statistical and design complexity--but the implications are intriguing. the "style" of a piece of writing (which encodes the author's intentions and indeed the society's values as far as they are manifest in the language) can be described in virtually value-free terms by the frequency table generated by brekdown. the likelihood of a particular character following another group of characters can be seen as a function of the language's "personality" as much as the writer's "personality." because of its design, brekdown can never generate an illegal sequence of letters; that is, the texts it generates may not make grammatical sense, but they follow pragmatic rules of word-formation. [18] for example, in the english used in mid-nineteenth century london, the letter combinations "krzy" and "qan" are not only "illegal" (in linguistic terms), but impossible for a british writer of that period to include in a normal text. in the english of contemporary australia, the first letter combination forms part of the name of an australian poet (peter skrzynecki, born in poland), and the second, part of the name of the australian national airline, "qantas." both are thus linguistically "legal" and available in contemporary english-language texts in that country. in a non-trivial and quite important way, mr. rubenking's program "knows" this specific fact when it needs to; until i thought up and wrote this paragraph, hardly anyone else--not even mr. rubenking--did. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [19] let's get to work and construct two different texts in the "styles" of two poets whose work i enjoy. first, three poems written by matthew arnold ("the buried life," "dover beach," and "the scholar-gypsy") are typed as one continuous text, and loaded into brekdown. the same is done separately with a dozen pages of poetry by john ashbery. brekdown is instructed to analyse the texts. [20] the resulting "matthew arnold" data and index files add up to half a million characters, and generating the index and frequency tables takes half an hour on a 80386 personal computer. generating a "reconstruction" of the matthew arnold text takes about fifteen minutes to construct 1,800 words. let's gather the thirty or so "best lines" of that raw text. let's clean them up a bit to make them less garbled, and print them at the end of this file. then let's do the same for mr. ashbery. [21] the matthew arnold example is printed as "what mortal end," by "tom haltwarden," at the end of this file; the john ashbery as "her shy banjo" by "joy h. breshan." [22] both the poem titles and the bogus authors' names are anagrams of "matthew arnold" and "john ashbery," respectively, created by another neil rubenking program, "namegram." (is there no end to the man's ingenuity?) namegram comes free on the disk when you buy brekdown, and i defy you to resist its charms. (at least, this was true in 1989, when i first obtained the program.) [23] the name "matthew arnold" generated some three and a half thousand different anagrams, by the way, including mad walt hornet, that lewd roman, mother and walt, old thwart-name, martha letdown, who'd lament art?, harlot went mad, and others too suggestive to include here. [24] reminiscence. some twenty years ago i asked alex jones, then teaching linguistics at sydney university, to research and write an article on computers and poetry for "poetry australia" magazine. the machines then cost a fortune, weighed several tonnes each, occupied large air-conditioned basements, and needed a staff of pale and white-coated servants with phds to minister to their needs. they could manage a haiku or two, with immense effort. [25] you can now buy, with a month's salary, a computer capable of writing endless numbers of clever poems, and it will fit into a jacket pocket. [26] credits. like all good computer programmers and any honest poet, mr. rubenking admits that if he can reach the stars, it's because he's standing on the shoulders of giants. his documentation states that brekdown was inspired by the "travesty" program in the november 1984 issue of "byte" magazine, by kenner and o'rourke (yes, computer scientist joseph o'rourke's colleague was hugh kenner, professor of english at georgia state university, and noted literary critic. his recent books include "a sinking island" and "mazes.") they in turn quote an article in the "scientific american" of november 1983 by brian p. hayes, which described an elegant method of avoiding large and unwieldy n-dimensional arrays. they also refer to the work of claude shannon, who in 1948--working with a pencil instead of a computer--developed a simple but tedious method of calculating letter-group frequency arrays, using the text itself as a frequency table. [27] come on, pandora--open the box: "brekdown" is distributed as shareware. the program is available from the shareware distributors pc-sig (personal computer special interest group), 1030-d east duane avenue, sunnyvale, california 94086, telephone 408-730 9291. [author's note: another shareware text-reconstituting program, _babble!_, developed by tracey siesser, lee horowitz, and jim korenthal, is available from 76004.2605@compuserve.com or, in the u.s., by calling (212) 242-1790.] good luck. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * tom haltwarden: "what mortal end" (c) john tranter, 1992 those quick inventive brains, who with early distant northern straits and naked shocks begin, and the energy of the mossy barns, and children, who wait like us unblest. and there, at the mass of sad experience, thou art gone though sometimes seen among the fields and half-reaped fields would seem some quiet place to lie before their smoked and turbid ebb and stand, baffled by english hills where they the inmost scholar on the hot race muses. wheatfields and flocks are eloquent, like other joy, the long dewy grasses fresh in autumn, come on summer every human breast. for us, if even lovers pine, with dew, or hanging pasture spark from the moon-blanched arts, our lips unchained thy hope. and well-nigh keep from heaven and a distant boy, and scholar poor, our wisest an immortal lot, but none pursue. from the dying pastoral slopes an unwanted earth art gone and the vast edges draw back the impulse of an hour-exhausted, thou waitest for one desire, and the soft abstractions of reapers in the intellectual trough. so wild brother men, concealed then with distracted air-let it be spent on other joy, and we, wanderer one of antique shadow, rest and in the bluebell-drenched days, men who in the sun, thy fire their being roll. come, shepherd, bathe in our war of antique shadow, 'tis this story of the wooden bridge, wrapt in disguise. with that the vast edges draw back his genuine self, the mystery of the winding murmur hearing in this face, the grass where i am laid--when the mystery of the tale begin again, and cease, and dogs in all the unregarded bales. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * joy h. breshan: "her shy banjo" (c) john tranter, 1992 rain, without it there can be no september music the concealed afternoons a source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy, making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment, encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light arise, light! the things of the day we eat breakfast each in their tree withdrawals, our marionette-like pierrot, like these hot sticky evenings, though fragmented the greatest risk working deep crevices far inland, we can see no reward, winnowers of the old time involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets and you, at twilight. the neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket. it is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie, a nice, bluish slate-gray. people laugh, having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought from the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars. you couldn't deliberately, for fright, once you see it's all talk, the travelling far from anybody. hands streaming with kisses, between us. it may be something like silver, something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just stays like dust--that's the nature of the children, and yesterday's newspapers say: "sometimes good times follow bad." their object, the sky. is it like climbing abruptly from a room? it may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed, two in love hesitant at the front door. so we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking and breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes. how short the season is--don't fix it if it comes in coloured mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo. moulthrop, 'deuteronomy comix', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-moulthrop-deuteronomy.txt deuteronomy comix by stuart moulthrop school of literature, communication, and culture georgia institute of technology sm51@prism.gatech.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by stuart moulthrop, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. stephenson, neal. _snow crash_. bantam spectra, 1992. 440 pp. $10.00 paperbound. [1] late in his critique of the cyberpunk vogue, andrew ross turns his attention to what may be its ultimate expression--cyberpunk: the role-playing game. here, he suggests, we may find the national pastime and true mythology of cyberpunks-in-boy'stown, a socializing ritual for aspiring dystopians. "the structure of the game," ross observes, represents "an efficient response to the cyberpunk view of survivalism in a future world where the rules have already been written in the present. true to the adaptational educational thinking from which roleplaying games evolved, the education of desire proceeds through learning and interpreting the rules of the play, not by changing them" (160). the game of cyberpunk, as ross sees it, offers not the _differance_ of deconstruction, not the paralogies of postmodern science, not even the "euretics" of an age of video. it promises a new world order that looks suspiciously familiar, a bored fast-forward into a "future" that is actually a repeat loop grafted neatly onto the past. [2] yet as ross points out, william gibson's own myth of artistic origins stands at odds with this circularity. in an early short story, "the gernsback continuum," gibson's protagonist suffers semiotic hauntings, visions not so much from spiritus mundi as off the covers of _amazing stories_. much like the nation itself in the grip of reaganoma, gibson's sufferer finds himself caught in a pernicious revision of history. his 1980 is steadily replaced by another 1980, one that seems to have been projected from 1925. he finds himself falling into the american future imagined by his grandparents, a world of flying-wing airliners, shark-finned bubble cars, and perfect aryan citizens of tomorrowland. the only thing that saves the poor man from complete psychic collapse is dystopian therapy: a crash diet of pornographic video and hardcore journalism, which reminds him that the utopian visions of science fiction's golden age have no claim upon the world as we know it. [3] if we can read "the gernsback continuum" as an origin story for cyberspace fiction, then this kind of writing seems to set itself against the old utopian project of science fiction, insisting that we move not "back to the future" but instead (as the new wave once had it) straight on from the confounded present. novels like gibson's _neuromancer_, bruce sterling's _islands in the net_, and rudy rucker's _wetware_ describe social upheavals triggered by rampant extension of current technological development. they thus offer an important corrective to the militarist saga-mongering of _star wars_ and other forms of recycled space opera. yet the cultural politics of science fiction do not arrange themselves in neat dialectical patterns. the utopianism of the gernsback era had its moment of sincerity before it was commandeered by hollywood jingoes; and as ross demonstrates, the dystopian refusal of the cyberpunks turns all too easily into an apology for the military-entertainment complex. [4] this seems clear in what may be the culmination of the cyberspace project, gibson and sterling's alternate history novel, _the difference engine_. though these writers had earlier fled the gernsback continuum, in this work they fall headlong into the clutches of a far more evil empire, great britain's circa 1855. in the world of _the difference engine_, lord byron has somehow avoided exile and death at missolonghi, and under his dictatorship the industrial radical party has set up a savantocracy using gear-driven mechanical computers for panoptic social control. as an exploration of "difference" on the level of technics, the book is admirable. but in its very project _the difference engine_ falls back into the same _mode retro_ which the younger gibson once condemned. ursula leguin remarked a long time ago on the affinity of certain american science fiction writers for the ethos of the british raj. fleets of battle cruisers, voyages of discovery and conquest, the inhuman other: all are fetishes of the 19th century transferred to the 21st or beyond. in their own way, gibson and sterling take us back to that racist, jingoist "future" at full steam; and of course this reversion is entirely consistent with the dystopian logic of cyberpunk. _the difference engine_ moves to the rhythms of catastrophism, that nastiest form of darwinian theory which argues that natural (or social) history consists of punctuated equilibriums. according to this doctrine, all organisms and organizations follow a sequence running from irruption through expansion to apocalypse. all things must pass, suddenly and dramatically. we thus leave the gernsback continuum only to end up in darwin land, an imaginary space where chaos and autopoeisis replace any vision of social or human potential. [5] it may be that all attempts to imagine the future launch us inevitably back into the past; all our engines of difference may work toward the same purpose, namely the justification of class and economic interests on which technophile culture depends. yet the concept of cyberspace--a social order founded on broadband communication, hypertextual ediscourse, and systematic simulation-suggests at least the possibility of a genuine cultural divergence. in the final analysis neal stephenson's _snow crash_ does not deliver on this vision any better than earlier works of its kind; but if _the difference engine_ represents the fruition of the cyberspace/cyberpunk enterprise, then _snow crash_ may represent a limit case. this is a novel in which cyberpunk very nearly becomes something more interesting. [6] in his epilogue, stephenson explains that _snow crash_ was originally intended as a graphic novel or upscale comic book, though it changed during its development into a more traditional print product. yet in at least one sense of the phrase, stephenson's novel is indeed a comic book: that is, its main narrative concern lies with the struggle of hiro protagonist and his sometime ally y. t. (for "yours truly") against the sinister machinations of an evil emperor wannabe, one l. bob rife. mr. rife, who seems to amalgamate h. l. hunt, l. ron hubbard, and h. ross perot (with hints of bob dobbs and fu manchu), aspires to world domination. but this is by way of afterthought, since his first priority is control of information: when they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. that was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. see, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. we're not even doing that. so we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control information no matter where it is--on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. (108) [7] l. bob rife, "lord of bandwidth" (who sounds chillingly like perot in this passage), has made the ultimate cybernetic connection between "the animal and the machine," as norbert wiener used to say. if information is proprietary, and if he can control it on his company's hard disks, then why shouldn't he be able to secure it in his programmers' heads? it turns out that l. bob has perfected a technology for turning human brains into the equivalent of hard disks, using a virus that restructures the cerebellum. so the epos of _snow crash_ unfolds (at least initially) as a straightforward manichaean contest between the champions of free discourse and the conspirators of mind control. like all the cyberspace novels, its main theatre of operations is the cybernetic frontier, the interface between mechanical information systems and the human mind. [8] but it would be unfair to describe _snow crash_ as just another superhero/supervillain faceoff, even though it unabashedly tells the story of how our hiro saves the world. _snow crash_ is "comic" in another sense as well. like gibson and sterling, stephenson conjures up a post-traumatic world order. the setting for _snow crash_ is a postnational, postrational america, a chaosmos of strip malls and housing developments known as "burbclaves." but these entities differ radically from the suburbs of today. after the de facto collapse of the u.s. government (for reasons never stated but easy enough to guess), the nation fragments into franchise-organized quasi-national entities (foqnes), which are suburban city-states functioning as sovereign countries: the mews at windsor heights, the heights at bear run, cinnamon grove, new south africa. in stephenson's world, the post-cold-war collapse of communism has generalized into a global implosion of community. here one's social allegiances lie not with governments but with franchises. police and judicial services are provided by chain outfits (metacops unlimited; judge bob's judicial system) and defense becomes the purview of corporate mercenaries (general jim's defense system, admiral bob's national security). the mafia handles pizza delivery. individual citizens affiliates with their chosen burbclaves. hiro carries the barcoded passport of the original meta-nation, mr. lee's greater hong kong, enabling him to seek asylum in any of thousands of convenient locations worldwide. [9] this vision of the near future has its shadowy sides, but unlike gibson and sterling, stephenson eschews the darkness of film noir in favor of black humor. _snow crash_ may be the first genuinely funny cyberpunk novel, invested with the same dire zaniness that animates _dr. strangelove_, _gravity's rainbow_, and_elektra assassin_. stephenson has kubrick's eye for the absurdity of terror weapons, pynchon's knack for turning jokes into profundities (and back again), and miller and sienkiewicz's taste for apocalyptic dementia. his comic genius puts him on a par with all these worthies. yet stephenson's black humor has been upgraded for the new world order, in which the focus of evil is not a general ripper, captain blicero, or colonel fury (who have been displaced by general jim and admiral bob) but l. bob rife, lord of bandwidth, keeper of the information highway. the application to our times seems clear enough. now that we no longer have to fear the bomb quite so much, we can try to stop worrying and love the nren. [10] it might be appealing to read _snow crash_ as self-satire or camp, a novel of liberation that liberates us from the pretentiousness of liberation novels. stephenson's main inventive principle does seem to be a species of irony. we might call it metastasis, a trope of displacement that sets everything in the book beside itself. "meta" worlds abound in _snow crash_: an afrocentric burbclave called metazania, a police franchise called metacops, and above all the metaverse, which is stephenson's version of consensual hallucination or cyberspace. the metaverse is metastasis (or metathesis) in its highest form: an alternative to the meat-verse of physical reality, a rather large world made cunningly to serve the information trade. functionally the metaverse is very similar to gibson's cyberspatial matrix--it is a virtual universe in which human agents can manipulate representations of data within a consistent spatial metaphor. but no doubt because he writes from the nineties instead of the eighties, stephenson does a much better job of imagining the texture of this virtual environment. gibson's matrix is usually a vague or abstract affair, evoked as "lines of light" or some other stylized geometry. the metaverse, by contrast, features a fully elaborated urban landscape. its primary attraction is a great street embracing the 10,000-kilometer equator of a bigger-than-earth sized virtual planet. this whole business, down to the size of digital living rooms and the gait of digital strollers, is mediated by rules "hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the association for computing machinery's global multimedia protocol group" (23). anyone who has regular dealngs with today's acm may find this the funniest joke in the book. [11] but there is finally something troubling about the metaverse, something which suggests a limit to stephenson's metastases, a point at which the novel fails to send itself up. the purpose of irony is generally held to be difference or antithesis, a play of double senses that undercuts the ostensible message. yet as we have seen, any difference that makes a difference is hard to come by in cybernetic fiction. the same might be said of stephenson's metaworld. it is, after all, dominated by a grand boulevard or street. so the architecture of the metaverse is strikingly like that of the old meatverse--both are strip developments organized as a linear array of reduplicating sites laid out in apparently endless paratactic sequence. they are both what one commentator has recently called "edge cities," phalanges of development driven by an impulse to extend along a gradient of relative economic opportunity (see garreau). [12] this fundamental linearity is underscored by the primary drama that unfolds in the metaverse: a prolonged chase scene on virtual motorcyles in which hiro and his adversary move along linear vectors at thousands of kilometers per hour, but where they remain more or less within the confines of the street. this chase scene is duplicated on a larger scale in the non-virtual sections of the book, where hiro makes a long roadtrip from los angeles to alaska through the pacific coast megalopolis, the actual edge city of the early 21st century. the primary difference between the metaverse and physical reality thus seems to be not logical or ideological but merely economic: in the real world--planet earth, reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. at any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their ak-47s. perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the street protocol. that makes for about sixty million people who can be on the street at any given time. add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer. . . . that's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. put in a sign or a building on the street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives. (24) [13] so stephenson's cyberspace offers no practical alternative to the world of the burbclaves and the shattered mosaic of (dis)enfranchised society. the metaverse is simply a happy hunting ground for next-generation yuppies: those rich, hip, well-connected legions of young virtual professionals. stephenson's meta-move is essentially delusive--and to recognize this is to reach the point at which _snow crash_ unfortunately stops being quite so funny. in stephenson's imagining, the computer is not an engine of difference after all, but only an alternative medium for the same hegemonic institutions, the same uncritical devotion to linear thinking. nothing is "free" in the metaverse. hiro is able to operate with unusual liberty because he was one of the original designers of the system, but even he has to pay his way by marketing gossip and low-level industrial espionage. social and economic conditions in the metaverse mirror those that take place elsewhere in stephenson's world, and events in virtual reality follow the same relentless logic as actual events. which brings us to the most important aspects of _snow crash_: its plot, its medium, and the interaction between the two. [14] to say that the book presents a contest between good and evil, tyrants and defenders of liberty, is to miss an important subtlety. what this book is really about is a struggle against viral language. the evil genius l. bob rife uses two apocalyptic weapons in his campaign to dominate the human race. the first is a cybernetic virus called snow crash, which infects digital processors in much the same way that current computer viruses do. however, snow crash causes infected machinery to display a version of itself in binary form, multiplexed into random on-off bursts or "video snow." adept computer programmers who have internalized the conversion of binary code to units of expression can become infected with snow crash if they view the apparently random display--making the crucial (and fortunately fantastic) connection between the machine and the animal. once infected, the programmers' brainstems malfunction and they fall into a vegetative coma. snow crash also has a non-cybernetic twin, a biological virus spread through prostitution and illegal drug use (of course), whose effects on the brain are less destructive but similarly sinister. people infected with the biological snow crash become capable of speaking in tongues and of understanding an adamic command language which bypasses rational functions. they turn into programmable human robots, cultist zombies in the thrall of l. bob rife. [15] to defeat these (literally) mind-boggling threats, hiro protagonist and his allies have to overcome both the biological and the cybernetic versions of the snow crash virus. along with a great deal of mindless violence, this task involves hiro in historical research (performed hypertextually in the metaverse) concerning a historical referent for the biblical story of babel. it turns out that snow crash began as a "metavirus" which caused the infected brain to infect itself with other viruses. this evil agency was apparently transmitted to ancient sumer from a source in outer space. the antidote to the sumerian outbreak was "the nam-shub of enki," an incantation that literally "changed the speech in men's mouths" (202), breaking down the neural connections that enabled victims to understand glossolalia, thus rendering them invulnerable to further incantatory programming. after the babel event, as stephenson tells it, the linguistic faculty was shifted from the brainstem into the cortex, where it diversified into all the variations of post-adamic language. babel was thus not a divine punishment for human overreaching, but a liberation from the first great campaign of cybernetic tyranny. [16] it was also, crucially, the beginning of bibliocentrism as we know it. according to stephenson's myth (which reads like a cross between _after babel_ and _the sacred mushroom and the cross_), a group of hebrew scholars led a reform of literary practices throughout the semitic world. stephenson identifies these figures with the deuteronomists of biblical history, important figures in the cult of the torah. stephenson credits the deuteronomists with "a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. they made data a controlled substance" (374). needless to say, this doctrine and the nam-shub of enki hold the keys to defeating l. bob rife. the sumerian incantation reverses the effects of the biological virus, and the concept of informational hygiene saves the metaverse from the digital form of snow crash. it inspires hiro to write snowscan, an anti-viral program that searches for the snow crash code, eradicates it, and puts in its place the following message: if this were a virus you would be dead now fortunately it's not the metaverse is a dangerous place; how's your security? call hiro protagonist security associates for a free initial consultation (428) subsequent consultations, of course, are on a fee-for service basis. hiro's antiviral program replaces a virus with an advertisement, thus redeeming the metaverse in every sense of the word--and incidentally converting hiro from a penniless genius into a meta-bill gates. in effect, hiro becomes the founder of new deuteronomy, inc.. his security service will purify the book of protocols according to which the metaverse is constituted by ensuring that it is replicated exactly on every iteration, free of impurities that might harbor invasive or opportunistic memes. as david porush has suggested, _snow crash_ can thus be read as the triumph of book culture over the threats of cybernetic programming and viral language: in other words, a true _liber/ratio_. [17] but we began by observing that liberation in the fiction of cyberspace is usually not what it claims to be. to go boldly toward the virtual frontier often leads us where we have all been before: in this case right to the heart of western logocentrism, the holy book. to a certain classically liberal way of thinking, there is no doubt nothing wrong with such a recursion. if one assumes that the function of art is to trace out great circles, reliably returning to what we have always already known, then a book like _snow crash_ deserves praise as proof that literacy can survive the assaults of popular culture and computing, that it can thrive in a world of comic books and cyberspace. but to a more critical reader-perhaps one like ross who wants to save the concept of the alternative or utopian in science fiction --_snow crash_ must be a disappointment. [18] the letdown is all the more severe because stephenson makes it clear that the novel we now have before us started out to become something distinctly different. stephenson says that he and the artist tony sheeder first intended to create a graphic novel using computer-generated images. this leads one to wonder why the nature of the project changed as it evolved. what aspect of the conceptual structure of _snow crash_ demanded expression in print? that question becomes all the more salient if one considers another curious remark in stephenson's epilogue: "i have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than i did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless from a practical viewpoint" (440). this statement is extremely suggestive, especially in the context of a novel that explores the connection between the animal and the machine, the meat and the meta. what would have happened if _snow crash_ had turned out not to be a conventional novel, but had emerged instead as some form of metafiction-perhaps in electronic form? [19] the conjecture i am about to make possibly represents a misreading of stephenson's remark about his computer work on _snow crash_; but even as misreading, the conjecture opens up an interesting set of questions. why does stephenson describe his electronic work as "coding"? if all he set out to do was produce digital graphics, then presumably he would have spent his time drawing, scanning, transforming, and editing bitmaps. the products of this work would have been images, not alphanumeric strings or "code." unless one sets out to create one's own computer-graphics tools (an unlikely intention for a macintosh user like stephenson), then the work involved in graphics production should not involve many hours of code writing. what else might stephenson have been up to? [20] suppose that the abortive digital format for _snow crash_ was not a series of printed panels intended for conventional bound publication, but instead a network of screens linked together by some graphic navigational scheme--in other words, an electronic hypertext. if this were the case, then the change of media, the reversion to the more traditional format of the book, might be very important indeed. it might suggest that _snow crash_ is in more than one sense a defense of the book and its ethos: not just the story, but the _embodiment_ of a new deuteronomy. it might thus provide a limit case for the fiction of cyberspace, a point at which it is possble either to stay within print culture or to explore alternatives. [21] whether or not he ever had other notions, stephenson has taken the more conservative option, which is indeed the preference of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. nor can he really be blamed for this choice. _snow crash_ as written would not make a very good hypertextual fiction. not only is the book's world overwhelmingly two-dimensional and linear, its plot demands an exact and unvarying sequence of events. there are several complications and partial reversals, but all of these serve the general underlying logic, which specifies that hiro must vanquish rife and his henchmen and save the world. this headlong rush toward singular closure is what a comic book is all about, after all--even when, as in the death of superman, that singular outcome annuls the usual order of things. had stephenson been programming _snow crash_ as what michael joyce calls a "multiple fiction," he would have had to allow for more than one outcome. he would have had to present permutations of the story where everyone's linear ambitions--hero's, villain's, anti-hero's --come to confusion. in short, stephenson would have had to imagine outcomes where the defenders of the book do not triumph, where informational hygiene does not win out, and the metaverse goes unredeemed. [22] so why didn't stephenson do this? perhaps it never entered his head: i have no real evidence that stephenson ever considered producing a hypertext. nonetheless, it seems clear that this book could not have been written in that medium. literary structures like multiple fiction are not altogether consistent with informational hygiene, the conception of data (or language) as a controlled substance. if the power of the book resides in its cult of exact replication, then to admit the possibility of narrative variations is at least implicitly to threaten that old word order. [23] of course, writing in an electronic mode does not necessarily promote utopian or post-hierarchical forms of disourse. consider william gibson's recent foray into digital composition, his conceptual artwork _agrippa_. far from opening up to permutation, this text actually erases itself after a single reading, locking the reader out of its imaginary space (see quittner). as joyce points out, even multiple fictions as we now know them usually consist of "exploratory" texts in which the range of variation is strictly limited, hence at some level deceptive. so perhaps the hypertextual enterprise must also go where everyone has gone before, namely to a disneyverse of delusive referendum where every apparent difference traces back to some determinist engine. yet as henry jenkins has shown, there are signs even in non-interactive contexts that a more "participatory" cultural front may be emerging. ambiguous or polysemic forms like the graphic novel (as in moore and sienkiewicz's abortive _big numbers_) imply a fraying or complication of traditional, monolinear narrative. forms like hypertext suggest that the language virus may be capable of even more radical outbreaks. for if our narrative forms embrace inconsistencies and contradictions, then they are no longer adequate defenses against memetic invasion. if the protocols of the imaginary world advertise their own contingency, then what is to stop someone not authorized by the association for cosmological machinery from further interventions--which are in fact facilitated by the ease of copying and modification inherent in electronic media? [24] the best way to pre-empt such uprisings is to keep throwing the book at us, which is what neal stephenson and most other writers in the cyberpunk line continue to do. both in its medium and its message, _snow crash_ militates against any departure from traditional discursive authority. like virtually all mainstream cyberspace writers (and in contrast to figures like william s. burroughs and kathy acker), stephenson delivers our favorite kind of linear entertainment: a "slam-bang-overdrive" sort of fiction, as timothy leary duly blathers on the back cover. as a form of entertainment, this sort of novel is always essentially self-serving; but what it serves up in this case is an unfortunately limited view of the possibilities for virtual culture. [25] so long as we continue to imagine cyberspace and other forms of artificial reality from within headlong vehicles such as _snow crash_, we will always find ourselves somewhere on the street. the street, we might remember, only looks like a straight line. in fact it is a circle that runs all the way around the planet and comes back to the place it began, back to the same old future so neatly packaged for us in dystopian novels and films. the street, gibson reminds us, finds its uses for everything. but perhaps we should now ask, of what use is the street? _______________________________________________________ references garreau, joel. _edge city: life on the new frontier_. new york: simon & schuster, 1991. gibson, william. _neuromancer_. new york: ace books, 1984. gibson, william. _burning chrome_. new york: ace books, 1985. gibson, william and bruce sterling. _the difference engine_. new york: bantam spectra, 1990. jenkins, henry. _textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture_. new york: routledge, 1992. joyce, michael. "selfish interaction or subversive texts and the multiple novel." _the hypertext/hypermedia handbook_. ed. e. berk and j. devlin. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1991. 79-94. leguin, ursula k. introduction to _the left hand of darkness_. new york: ace books, 1980. porush, david. "why cyberspace can't be utopian: the positive discourses of irrationalism in an as if universe." presentation. society for literature and science conference, atlanta, ga: october 9, 1992. quittner, josh. "read any good webs lately?" _newsday_. june 16, 1992. ross, andrew. _strange weather: culture, science, and technology in the age of limits_. new york: verso, 1991. rucker, rudy. _wetware_. new york: ace books, 1988. sterling, bruce. _islands in the net_. new york: morrow, 1988. wiener, norbert. _cybernetics: the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine_. cambridge: cambridge up. cruz, 'five days of bleeding', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-cruz-five.txt five days of bleeding by ricardo cruz department of english university of illinois-normal _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by ricardo cruz, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. planet rock "i'm the dj, he's the rapper," chops said, pointing his big finger in my face as if the planet had just begun to spin. it was night, and the white clouds laughed at chops until their stomachs bust and they cried. linton johnson, a rastafarian-feeling black nigger with mustard seed, scronched down in front of our faces and yelled out that new york's central park was nigger heaven. "wait a goddamn minute! "is nigger heaven a carl van vechten novel or a cabin in the sky or a black place or a sanctuary where august hams grow wild or haven for blues or what?" i asked. johnson blew happy dust in my face. "bottle it," he said. along with johnson, there was a slew of negroes celebrating and doing their thang in the park like it was nothing. indecent exposure, pure and simple. a black monday. the stock market had crashed, so niggers played the numbers once they got back to harlem. they picked out their numbers based on neo-hoodoo and wrote them down during the party they threw for themselves in the park. meantime on television: "the problem is that when these films like new jack city play there are so few of them until blacks flood the theatres and make a major event out of them." whites gazed out of their windows and saw dinge and charcoal everywhere, dope as art, guns n' roses taking over their houses sky-high above the harlem juke-joints. one nation under a groove chops' joke was very funny, but johnson was seriously looking for more entertainment to exhibit in the park, protest the absence of social reform, his forehead fucked up like the pavement on a bad road. "the race problem in the united states had resolved itself into a question of saving black men's bodies and white men's souls," he said. "are you lyndon johnson or james weldon johnson or johnson & johnson from jet and ebony magazines?" i asked. under the moon, i passed for white. mr. johnson, calm, slender and immaculate, stood on the narrow strip of stage between the footlights set up in the park and the green grass. "the name is linton. if you can't say or play it, then take yourself, the girl and that little fat-ass fucker and go home." "who made you head negro, lint-head?" i asked. he ran up and pushed us into the grass, then laughed. "that shit was cold, wasn't it?" johnson asked. "yeah, baby," i answered. "yeah." birth of the cool chops and zu-zu girl were cutting up, tripping over sharp blades of wet brown grass they found in the park. zu-zu was singing the blues. we got up and sent johnson off with a smile that we inverted once johnson turned his back. we sat down on a familiar bench in the park, our boodies itching for a scratch. my cheeks slid along the hard wood. "wiggle it, baby," the bench said. zu-zu laughed. chops laid out. "you got it good and that ain't bad," said zu-zu. "murdah in the first degree," i told zu-zu. "you can't keep a good man down," said zu-zu. chops was laid back, doing statues of liberty with his fingers. "lucy's in the sky with diamonds," said chops, downing a third stream from his bottle. he was a chaser of the american dream. zu-zu snatched the pastries out of chops' other hand and went off. "straighten up and fly right," said zu-zu. "your jelly roll is good." the pigeons picked crumbs out of zu-zu's palm. chops offered zu-zu his bottle. "excuse me," said chops, "but would you like a heavy-wet, cherry bounce, gooseberry wine, fine, cold-without, tom-and-jerry or mountain dew?" zu-zu whipped chops with a coke stare and flicked her remaining crumbs into the trash can. "i'd like a john collins or blue ruin or apple-jack or black velvet or twopenny or white-ale or dog's nose or whisky toddy or london particular," said zu-zu. zu-zu sung the "laughing song." then she leaned over and smacked chops in the face, her dark nipples giving us a mean look because they couldn't sag against her boob-tube. i grabbed zu-zu's punch and told her to stop. "excuse me, pardon me, don't let me get in your way," i told zu-zu, "but this ain't queens or manhattan or long island or greenwich or harlem. this downtown. you just can't go around smacking everybody in the face. dig?" zu-zu sung "dead drunk blues," booze trickling out of her mouth. she unfastened her bra and took it off. mercy, mercy, mercy "you sho' is big, zu-zu," said chops. chops was about to fly away over a bird chest. meantime, i wondered what she was doing with a bra on under a boob-tube and how we managed to see her nipples. "incredible," i said. zu-zu moved over and smacked chops in the mouth. "bop," she said, her boob-tube shaking a teeny-tiny bit as she danced in the park. "i wish i could shimmy like my sister kate," said zu-zu. i'm shoutin again we are nomads, rebels, revolutionaries, but not homeless. i'm dancin on the benches while chops sit and stares, his mouth open, his eyes on tits and money. "get up, get into it, get involved!" i yell. it's as if i'm shouting at the tits. zu-zu breaks down and does a war dance downtown, pulling her boob-tube up and down, lots of black people gathering around her and jeering. i grab zu-zu around her waist and we do it to a little east coast swing. "you can swing it, too," said chops. zu-zu laughs and smooches with me while we slowly spin around in the soft, thick mud. "my man-of-war," sings zu-zu, like we're in the trenches. then she sings "that thing called love." rum and coca-cola zu-zu was a mighty tight woman, moaning blues, caffeine and alcohol keeping her going. "swing low, chariot," zu-zu whispered. she was ready to drop dead. she sung "new york tombs." chops, who had been collecting money in a can, came over and whispered in my ears. "what's wrong with zu-zu?" he asked. zu-zu was off into her own world, everybody drinking moonshine but her. "what did i do to be so black and blue?" asked zu-zu. she threw her bottle away like it was water. "take it easy, zu-zu," i said. i dropped my bottle and gave her a warm-fuzzy. zu-zu pulled back. "don't hug me," she said. she was as tender as the night, black and blue bruises all over her body. what is there to say? zu-zu peeled my fingers off her skin and turned away. she sung "in a silent way." "she's been sleeping with the enemy," said chops. "she's got it bad and that ain't good." "that niggah you're seeing is just gonna drag you down, zuzu," i said. "i need love in the worst sort of way," said zu-zu. she took off her skirt and her boob-tube for the twelfth time. chops unzipped his pants, pushed zu-zu down on the bench and hit her on the side of her face, smearing her rouge into blood. chops jumped her bones. "stop!" i yelled. i was afraid for zuzu. chops had white man's disease. he could barely jump, the fat on his stomach rippled like tidal waves. against the two boards that made the seat of the bench, zuzu looked like the heroine of a silent movie laid down on some railroad track waiting for the train to come. chops leaped backand-forth over her collar, his hair standing straight up like don king's. zu-zu blew her cool. "i hate a man like you," she said. "are you going to jump my bones all night or take off your pants and do me?" too hot "i can't perform under these conditions," chops said. "cross my heart and hope to die. if i'm lyin, you can take this money i collected and buy yourself a little engine that can." chops pulled out a doo-rag and wiped his fat face. "just give me some old-fashioned love," said zu-zu. "i want hanky-panky." chops wanted zu-zu to stretch his pants but wasn't confident he had the skills to do her. he stood still and tried to catch his breath while men with nickel-hearts came up and offered to do zu-zu for him. they got to go "i want to be the only one who gets it," chops said to zuzu. "okay, okay, okay," said zu-zu. "i'm a mighty tight woman. do me in a place where it's warm and where your hooch won't turn bad. i don't care where you take it." paradise "behind the garbage," said chops. "seven steps to heaven." chops pulled out a bomb and lit it, weed all in zu-zu's face, smoke getting in her eyes. zu-zu started singing "dope head blues," chops high as a kite. "give me that old slow drag," said zu-zu. chops gave zu-zu the bomb, and she sucked on the edges of it until it exploded in her mouth. she spat the paper out, and the ashes came out, too, like her mouth was a volcano. "spit in the sky and it fall in your eye," chops said. "that niggah is just gonna drag you down," i said to zuzu. chops glared at me, his eyes like obsidian pieces. "what's that supposed to mean?" he asked. "don't ask me, chops," i said. "i'm just a jitterbug. when i hear music, it makes me dance." zu-zu became restless. she started singing "tired of waiting blues." "i'm dying by the hour," said zu-zu. "she's gotta have it," i told chops. "knees up, zu-zu," chops said. then chops fell down and pounced on top of her stomach. zu-zu spat in his face. "bring back the joys," said zu-zu. "i'm a mean, tight mama." chops slung off his leather and whipped her. the scorching and burning and hot fire turned zu-zu's hair nappy. with a bottle of moonshine in his big, black hands, chops looked like prince buster trying to make love to zu-zu, pastry crumbs all over her lips like caviar and ashes still coming out of her mouth. use your imagination. "ooh!" she screamed. "o, carolina! olcum!" she called out yoko ono's name as well. chops ran zu-zu along the wood while she moaned, grunted, huffed and puffed and blew into his bottle, making it blownglass. two niggahs heavy on the bottle, flukie and sterling silver, staggered by with a stolen television set as zu-zu kicked over the garbage can. they went crazy. "dis bruddah is tearin dis hooch up!" shouted flukie, his mouth full of gold fillings. "i wish i had some of that, baby doll," sterling said. "you can get it if you really want it, bro-ham," said zu-zu. chops held out the bottle. "it's almost all gone," said chops. flukie and sterling silver dropped the television set, ran over and snatched the bottle of chops' hand. meantime, zu-zu looked 'em up and down. "dang, girl, you sho' is big," said flukie and sterling simultaneously. "look at you, girl. your stuff is all over the place." chops grabbed the bottle and pushed them away from zuzu. "take your black bottom out of here!" zu-zu cried. "go home!" chops shouted. meantime, zu-zu pushed the buttons on the television set to see if she could find the niggah news. "keep going!" chops shouted. long road "which way do we go?" asked flukie, his hand directly over his cock. sterling followed suit. "follow the yellow bird," i said. they looked at me like i was crazy. "it's a long walk home!" they shouted. chops gave them the finger. they cracked up and then kissed chops' black ass goodbye. "see ya' lata (chee, chee)." walkin with a cock-of-the-walk stride, flukie and sterling silver followed the yellow bird to get out of dodge, zu-zu scrambling to pick up her stuff, chops on top of her doing spike lee's joint with his finger. flukie felt the urge to shine sterling's head. sterling wondered whether or not flukie was good luck. both men were bluing, unable to get their hands on moonshine or kool-aid or grape juice or anything that looked like it could have some alcoholic content. flukie fell out. "it's a dizzy atmosphere," he said. sterling said nothing as they passed a monk standing in a puddle at the corner and dipping while drinking moonshine. "don't stand in muddy waters," said flukie, out of it. "dig?" "i'm bad," said monk. sterling silver, in a moment of epiphany, pointed at monk's socks. he was floodin. flukie tried to play it off. "what's that in yo' pocket?" flukie asked. "watches," said monk, "from yo' momma." flukie started to tag him. but, sterling silver held him back. "how much they cost?" asked sterling silver. "they not for sell, niggah," said monk. "then what you selling?" flukie asked. "time," said monk. "i stole the watches from penny's so i could sell time. you ain't got to buy any, but if you don' t i'll take you out." flukie and sterling silver looked at one another and backed up. "you ain't that bad," flukie said. "you don't know nothing!" sterling silver shouted. "you just a pusher. you ain't shit!" "i'm yo' pusher," said monk. "pay me, niggahs, or i'll close yo' big lips forever." flukie pinched sterling silver on the arm. "we should have stayed behind with the skeezer," he said. sterling silver cleaned his throat, then spoke up. "what do you know about karate?" he asked. "jujitsu," said monk. "before i studied the art, a punch to me was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. after i studied the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. now that i understand the art, a punch is a punch, a kick is just a kick." "damn, i'm a big niggah, but you got me scared," said flukie. "um, excuse mr. monk," said sterling, "but i have a question. that's some deep shit you just gave us. is that taoism? are you from the temple of shaolin? or, are you quoting from bruce lee's chapter on tools?" "man, why don't you take a chill pill, come and get blowed with us?" flukie asked. "humph," says monk. "it's monk's time. i got no papers. and lulu's back in town." "bitches brew," said flukie. "let's go get some pussy den." "die hard," said monk. flukie backed up some more. "don't mess wit me," warned flukie. "i'll rock your world." "you're out of time," said monk. "and after i get through wit you, i'm going back to find the skeezer and get her, too." someday my prince will come said zu-zu. "but, you sure as hell ain't him." chops exploded. he let go of his bomb and slid zu-zu from left to right on the wood, putting splinters in her booty. zu-zu screamed, caught in the middle of a wang-dang with her face under cork. "ooh!" she screamed. "o, carolina. olcum." she threw in olive oyl's name for good measure. chops grabbed an empty bottle and held it over his big head, zu-zu moaning and groaning and asking "can anybody take sweet mama's place?" in case of emergency, break glass i rushed over and tapped the bottle against chops' nappy head. chops looked at me like i was crazy, pieces of glass snagged inside his afro, blue rain dripping down his black forehead. chops squeezed his head with his fingers. "peace out," said chops. he fell flat on his fat face, smashing his cheeks up against the seat of the bench. zu-zu picked up her boob-tube and spat on the back of chops' head. "my handy man ain't handy no more," said zu-zu. i'm always chasing rainbows said zu-zu. "one minute, they there. the next minute they gone." miles in the sky "baby, you send me," said monk. he held two nigger flickers in his hands and put the blades together to form scissors, giving flukie's big head the evil eye. flukie's squinted at the sight of the sharp metal. he tried to play it off. "kronka," he said. it meant "let the games begin." sterling silver was at the top of an elm tree, singing "freddy's dead," brothers throwing down fishbone a couple trees further away, the whole thing a nightmare. "man, can't we eat?" "why you doing us like this?" "there's too many fine women walkin around for us to be in the treetops." "if you going to kill somebody, kill the niggah and come on." "fuck him up." "castrate the niggah." "jack his body." "use the body parts for spareribs." "cut and mix." "do it til you satisfied." "drain the blood out like it were black cherry kool-aid." "pump that body." "niggah, you can be blacula." "have all the pussy you want." "dip into anybody's kool-aid without knowing the flavor." "aa-a, bat around." "nobody could stop you, baby." "call me bernard wright." "al b. sure!" "you can turn yo house into a home." "take a chance, baby." "cut the crap, then go back where you fell." "come on wit it." "you just stepped into the comfort zone." "we up here in the trees hollywood swingin." "i always wanted to see the kool & the gang show." "get off." "yeah, yeah." "take that coon out." "we got high hopes." "but, we're not the s.o.s. band." "that's fo' damn sho' "no one's gonna love you." "looking like that." "you got to give it up." "why you wanna dog me out?" "can't find the reasons." "true devotion." "look at the man in the mirror." "you gotta make a change for once in yo' life." "you ain't as bad as you think you are." "shut up!" screamed monk. he stabbed a tree behind flukie's big head. flukie stepped back. "give me tonight," he said. from the top of the elm tree, sterling silver lowered his cotton handkerchief and long gold rope chain. "hang him high," he said to flukie. as if on cue, niggahs in the trees stuck their heads out of the branches and started talking smack again, twigs falling to the ground like it was nothing. it was like a mixing board where thangs jumped in and out at random. "what's all this noise?" said monk. "look around you," said sterling. "what you want? you can have it, baby." "i need love," said monk. "i want an around-the-way girl. i want base." "we all do," said flukie. "but we can work that sucka to the bone," said sterling silver. "around the way, i saw a slim, no thicker than a twig, but with big titties," said flukie. "let us walk, and we'll make a special delivery," said sterling. "yo' call," said flukie. "titties taste like watermelons," said sterling. "make her come my way," said monk. he gave flukie and sterling a drink of his moonshine. "i thought you'd see it my way," said flukie. he gulped whiskey and heard niggahs tripping, his head starting to ache. "what's all this noise?" flukie asked. "the sounds of 52nd street," said sterling, swallowing shit from the cup as if he had found the grail. flukie and sterling took off, one step closer to heaven. south street exit miles ahead. blue gray downtown, people celebrate, linton johnson splashing rhythms together after the thundering bass. but, there is a blue vein circle where mulattoes practice color snobbery and diss the blacks. yet, all of these people are in the park cause the earth has music for those who listen. this is tabu. in the park, "the rhythms jus bubbling an back-firing, ragin and rising, then suddenly the music cuts: steel blade drinking blood in darkness." johnson records his lp for virgin entitled "dread, beat and blood." "it's war amongst the rebels," says johnson. he's cutting the rug and mixing the vinyl. girls love the way johnson spins, but he is careful to avoid the trap of stardom. "i don't want to be like bob marley," he says. he's got a bomb in his mouth bigger than the mike in his hands. chops wakes up and tries to remix johnson's speech. "i don't want to be chop suey." johnson grins and steps on chops a little harder with his combat boots. women scream. "i refuse to divorce myself from the realities of life," says johnson. "i don't want to be chopped liver either. living in the bottle where everything is distorted or distilled." johnson kicks chops in the mouth. "everybody's got to find their own groove," says johnson. "you a sorry case, if you can't." he holds his black thang and scratches it in front of the ladies. his beat is so fonky: men holler "it's sweet as a nut--just level vibes." chops pulls his upper lip away from a cleet and spits the dirt out of his mouth. suddenly he's starting to gain a little more respect for johnson. "let the beat hit 'em!" chops shouts. "let the music take control! let the beat go round & round and up & down!" johnson kicked chops in the head and walked away. johnson is downright unfaithful. people following him as if at a golf tournament. they fight to see him, cutting out each other's hearts and giving them to dippers with paper asses and buckets of blood. everyone is high on brew or drawing a pound or two of kally, johnson passin naturals on niggahs. black boys stand in the weed and hold their dicks. niggahs for life. i wanna thank you (for letting me be myself) i told god. i told him good. "god," i said. "god, please don't let me spend the rest of my goddamn life in this park. if you gotta take me, take me to higher ground. but, please don't let me go in the park." "god," i said. "you are the man. you are the man. you are the man. i want muscles." i gazed around to look at new york. pretty city but, it wasn't the promised land. shawon dunston grew up in brooklyn. now the niggah's playing baseball in chicago. eddie perry was from around-the-way, harlem, but after he moved the crowd to go to school, exeter, he was shot by a white undercover cop and quit it. murder in the first degree said zu-zu. "you shall reap what you sow." "maybe," i said, "but i can't be no ordinary mo. i got to get out of the ghetto, too. if i live life by tripping, at least i did it my way." i got this frank sinatra song in my head. zu-zu rolled chops over and spat in his face. "he got it good and that ain't bad," said zu-zu. "you chopped his fat head into pieces." "sing sing prison," i said. "someday, sweetheart," answered zu-zu. after tonight i said, "i'm a dead man." i covered chops' body with a blanket. zu-zu spat once more in his face. "excuse me, pardon me, don't let me get in your way," i said to zu-zu. "but, this ain't soho or staten island or tribeca or brooklyn. this is downtown. and we way down. you just can't go around spitting in niggahs' faces. i ain't eighty-sixin no more niggahs for you. dig?" zu-zu cracked up. "i killed him first," she said. she pulled a set of lines out of her shoe that looked like chops' forehead peeled from the bottom of her foot and did a little number. "i am the laughing woman with the black black face," said zu-zu. "lighten up, honey," i said. "living in cellars and in every crowded place." "get it together." "i am toiling just to eat," she says. "when life gets cheesy, you put on the ritz." "and i laugh," said zu-zu. "fine and dandy, zu-zu, except you forgot one thang. you ain't a woman but rather a confessional little girl who ran away from queens umteen times before you finally escaped or so you say." "why you gotta call me out?" zu-zu asked. she scooted over on the bench and kissed me on the lips, leaving a taste of wild cherry in my mouth. "my daddy likes it slow," she said. "you don't know what love is," i told zu-zu. "sweet rain," she said. "things ain't what they used to be," i said. i dreamed of chocolate kisses. and mumbling. "such sweet thunder," zu-zu whispered in my ear. i flew to move away from zu-zu. her heart was a singing bird. everytime it fluttered, it gave me flack--"the closer i get to you," "oasis" or "the first time ever i saw your face." "what are you singing this time, zu-zu?" "the song is you," she answered. "what's wrong with 'paper moon' or 'kind of blue' or 'hand jive' or 'emotions' or 'forms and sounds' or 'anatomy of a murder' or 'sara smile' or 'i don't know what kind of blues i've got' or 'dat dere'?" i asked. "no more talk," said zu-zu. "for me, life is like the black plague, the bordellos in bedford-stuyvesant full of disease that the white man carries back home to bensonhurst, queens, and gives to his wife." "we're bigger than life, zu-zu." "when women talk that way, we dye," said zu-zu, "our lips dark." mood indigo all we ever do is talk. like flatliners, we die several times. but, we keep coming back for more. "i can't do no more," said zu-zu. she's lying her ass off. "hush, girl, be quiet," i said. if i could save time in a bottle zu-zu got a bottle in her hands and a lake in her mouth. it rained for hours in the park before night stole our faces and painted them blue in watercolor. i wore the mask, zu-zu dragging me through the mud, everyone celebrating and stomping on muddy waters even after the thrill was gone. the music cut, our dark faces bleeding through our masks. the small trees in the park were bent, dropped by big niggahs and east rains that slashed their arms and legs like it was nothing. during the storms, the trees twisted and shook and danced in the wind, their leaves like hair washed with no soap and black water. new york stood tall as a dirty city with a mouth the size of frank sinatra. zu-zu and i sat on the bench, our shoes heavy with mud, and ate crab apples, zu-zu's stomach wining and dining her until she finally belched. new york was a home where men and women ate alone in public and nobody talked. zu-zu smoked a cigarette from the garbage and blew cool mint in my face. then, she spat pieces of cigarette paper out in the sky as if she were throwing up a fistful of dollars. zu-zu reached inside her blouse, wondering if she any money left. i sat on the bench with a box of kool, singing "woman don't you know with you, i'm born again." it was time she knew. "time," i told her. "time," she stopped. new york was a dirty city with a mouth as big as frank sinatra's, but nobody ever talked. "no more dancing girl zu-zu?" zu-zu shook her head, "no." her soul had already flown south for the winter. zu-zu pulled a handgun out of the garbage can where she stored her stuff and raised it to her head. black monday was the first day of autumn. the fall season came with a bang. zu-zu dropped to the ground and fell out. "toy gun," said zu-zu. she cracked up. she showed me the black plastic handle. i handed zu-zu some fire, and we burned while lying in front of one another on the bench. purple haze i sucked my joint, blue-faced, dragging like jimi hendrix with a guitar pick hanging over a bottomed-out lip. we smoked all the grass we could find. heaven was a smoked-up black skillet holding the earth together, zu-zu toiling in the soil. the sky was pasta-red. the low clouds puffy and stuck together like cooked macaroni shells. behind the haze, the skyline felt blue, niggahs walking around on depressants and dressed like starving artists. some brother even claimed he did j.j.'s paintings in good times. i watched the brother walk away, then turned and looked at zu-zu. she was dope. nefertiti there was swinging on 52nd street. zu-zu listened for it, zu-zu in pursuit of the 27th man, gold as plentiful as dust on the street. zu-zu was octaroon, 1/8 negro, her hair worn in cornrows. most people couldn't tell if she was white or black. her family was from queens. one day she woke up and threw away all of her money and moved into central park. "goodbye, mother. goodbye, bojangles. goodbye, heartache," she said. her daddy had the nerve to cry. "god bless the child who's got his own," her daddy said the day zu-zu ran away for good. ramseys bojangles girl hated her for not being a boy. he tossed his sandal behind her. "the day i see yo' face again will surely be the day you die," said ramseys. "goodbye heartache," said zu-zu. it could have been "good morning." zu-zu was the only one who knew for sure. as zu-zu told me her story, we sat drinking moonshine and collecting zu-zu's stuff together. inside i was crying, zu-zu's black-and-blue face half-white under the moon. stella by starlight "now was it goodbye or goodbye morning?" i had to know. "it was blue cellophane over my nose and mouth, easy living, my foolish heart, a frame for the blues," zu-zu answered. she was referring to life with her family in queens before she was exiled. "what did you say when left that hot house?" i asked. "i sung 'it's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday,'" said zu-zu. zu-zu stood up to straighten her boob-tube for the hundredth time. it was like watching a nudie flick. i looked up to zu-zu while white popcorn and seeds dropped from her colored bust to the bench. "you got a lot of nerve, zu-zu." amazing. how in the hell did she get popcorn inside her boob-tube, i asked myself, wondering why it wouldn't just fall out. zu-zu picked a yellow umbrella out of the trash and opened it up. "put this over your thang," said zu-zu, using the wet plastic to keep me from mooning. she was inventing prophylactics. evidence once, zu-zu crushed a styrofoam cup and stuck it inside my pants. zu-zu got on her knees and begged me to let her feel the cup. prayer for passive resistance "please baby baby please," zu-zu whispered. singing "don't be that way," she glared at heaven. for heaven's sake, zu-zu. "what's your problem?" "my blue heaven," zu-zu replied. "blue heaven is full of coppers," i told zu-zu. "conception," she said. she kicked chops' fat stomach and spat once more in his face. tow away zone zu-zu flagged a cop and pointed towards chops. "get this fat fucker out of here!" she shouted. the cop looked like who-me. "yeah, i'm talkin to you," said zu-zu. the cop glanced at his black lizards to see if he was standing in muddy waters. "you with the blue uniform." the whistle dropped out of his mouth. "you with the big stick and gun on your hip." he called for help. "that's right," said zu-zu. "bring your buddies." the copper came up to zu-zu with two other blues. "i've never had a thang blacker than you," he said. zu-zu smacked him in the face. "wake up, white boy," said zu-zu. "you stepped out of a dream." "pick up your trash, you black dog," said the copper. just like that. "how would you like to marry liz behind bars?" "don't try to punk me," said zu-zu. "do your job for a change and take this overweight lover to pig heaven." "what's wrong with him?" asked charlie irvine. "he's dead." "what happened?" "he tried to fuck me but got smacked on the head by a bottle." "no wonder he's dead," said charlie irvine. the coppers chuckled. "you're funny," said zu-zu, "but your thang is too small to be cracking those kind of jokes." with her index finger and thumb, zu-zu showed him about an inch of air. "take care of the body yourself," said the cop. "the spook can rot there in the earth for all i care. i can't tell him apart from the dirt and mud anyway (hee, hee)." chops woke up and gave him the finger. "fuck you," he said. he covered his mouth so the cop couldn't hear him. moments like this after you've gone i said, "you've come back as lemon drop." chops was bitter. "eighty-six all that," said chops. "i'm gonna take you out once and for all." "about that bump on your head, chops. i had to do it. you was out of control." chops' eyes went to the back of his head while he rolled around in the mud, trying to get up. "when i get through with you, you gonna wish you were back in compton," chops swore, "yo' ex-wife and niggahs chasing you from carson to crenshaw." "shut up!" i said. zu-zu laughed in his face. chops did a circle with his fingers and then pointed to zuzu's skirt. "i'm gonna tear it up," he promised. zu-zu spat in his face. "you done lost your good thang," she said. chops got up on his hands and knees and then fell back down. "the world is spinning," said chops, "and there's nothing i can do about it." "quit talking smack and go to sleep," said zu-zu. "your head has gotta be killing you." chops closed his eyes and groaned. minutes later, we heard him snoring. confirmation "did you really live in sunny california?" zu-zu asked. i shook my big head as if it were a beach ball being blown by a basement breeze. "who are you really?" zu-zu asked. "fess up." "i'm jerry butler, count basie, too legit to quit," i said. "i couldn't fall in love with a woman, so i left compton and came here. when we met at the metropolitan museum, i was eating a ketchup sandwich and trying to save myself from the cold, waiting for a train to go through the desert and back to california." "nothing is sadder than the man who eats alone in public," said zu-zu. we sat talking and smoking dope from the pipe like a tribe called quest. lonely boy zu-zu said, "that's what you are." she grabbed my hand, twisted it and we ran several yards to a pale blue tent in the park in search of our future. sketch 1 there were earrings and cheap gold-electroplated costume jewelry and colored scarves and doo-rags and shawls and dolls and poultry and blue racers all over the ground. on a coffee table stained by black coffee, zu-zu squeezed a 60-watt lightbulb in a lamp with no shade. a very black woman fixed zu-zu good, turning on the light, holding her hand on the bulb and asking her what she wanted. "let go of my hand!" zu-zu screamed, the hot bulb burning her skin into a darker shade. the gypsy woman finally let go. "what's the matter, bitch? you feeling a little hot?" "what yo' problem?" zu-zu asked. "you want my man?" "shut up, yellow-ass bitch. nobody likes you anyway. if i wanted yo' man, i'd take him. everything i want, i take it. that's how i am. there ain't nothing you can do about it. i'm the boss. and i own a doll for every niggah in this park. i can put a spell on you in a minute. make you mine. so shut up before i find your own personal mojo and give it that whip appeal." "enough with that voodoo shit," i said. "we ain't marked for death. if i was steven seagal, i would break yo' bones so you could hear the sound of them cracking." "i would be out for justice then," said the black woman. "it wouldn't make any difference," i said. "i'm hard to kill." "maybe," she said, "but i know how to take out the garbage." "she's wacked," said zu-zu. "let's blow this joint." "not so fast, zu-zu. if this bitch has got something to say, let her say it." "i can read you your fortune, but it's gonna cost you a lot of motherfuckin money," she said. "you got to pay to play." "here's twenty dollars, whore--make it good," i said. gypsy woman my black ass. i turned around and looked for a seat. "where are we?" i whispered to zu-zu. "don't talk, just listen," said zu-zu. "let me look into my crystal ball," the black woman said. she gazed into the light bulb, the light giving her a headache. "damn," she said. "you goin have to wait a while. the spirits are tripping." "she's higher than all of us," i whispered to zu-zu. "you want your future told or a muzzle on your mouth?" she asked. "i paid for mumbo-jumbo," i said. "where did you get the money from anyway?" zu-zu whispered. the black woman ignored us. she shuffled a deck of tarot cards, laid five cards out on the table and then turned one over picturing a faceless man with an ax on his shoulder. she screamed. "fear death by chops!" she said. speak no evil "black woman," zu-zu warned, "i've killed niggahs for less." the black woman handed zu-zu a leather string of dangling rubbers, signifying the phallus. "take this talisman and wear it round yo' neck," she said. "use it to fight the powers that be." "you tryin to be funny or something?" i asked. "you don't care about her." "i ain't got to care," she said. "that's yo' job. now get out of here. i'm tired of looking at you." have a nice day bitch. trouble everywhere i roam i looked at zu-zu, the talisman around her neck as we walked nervously away. "why me?" i asked. i thought about the woman i left behind and the fact that maybe zu-zu would never give up any, no matter how nice i was. we strolled below the trees in silence. now's the time flukie told sterling silver, their raw hands snapping off twigs at the top of an elm tree. "shut up," sterling silver whispered. "this ain't a concert for cootie. speak low." "let's jump her now," flukie muttered. "be patient," said sterling silver. "we will." in the small wee hours "we ain't got all day," said flukie. "if we don't get her, it's our asses." "it's yo' ass," said sterling silver. "you the one that thought up this shit." "we ain't got to keep our promise." "there's no way we can hide," said sterling silver. "not with that niggah loose." sterling silver tried to look down the inside of zu-zu's boob-tube. "let's just do it and get it over with," he said. "the sooner the better," said flukie. sterling silver could see zu-zu's titties. "word," he said. he and flukie sat on the heavy branches, emulating dark shadows. no way zu-zu could have seen them hovering over her big head like buzzards. flukie started thinking about his momma. "if they laid a finger on my momma, it's over," he said, fiddling with the red doo-rag on his head so the leaves couldn't fuck up his wave. sterling silver watched zu-zu smear cocoa-butter on the soft spot of her hand where the gypsy had warmed her up like a chicken bone. "word to the muther," said sterling silver, recklessly eyeballing zu-zu's honey-brown thighs while she bounced, her hips singing "streetwalker blues." flukie snatched a pointed stick and aimed it at zu-zu's chest. "i put a spell on you," he said, glycerin and activator gel from his doo-rag dropping slowly on zu-zu's back. the midnight sun will never set zu-zu started singing "vampin' liza jane," the moon's glow fully cast upon her now since it was after midnight, the girl seemingly pale from fright night, fog developing by her feet. "i will cheat death the same way i do a spade in a tabletop game," zu-zu said. "you will live forever," i said. we strolled past a water fountain, zu-zu looking back at it. "do you hear laughter?" zu-zu asked. "i hear the trippin' and ailing of the gods being cheated by you and your queens and kings," i told zu-zu. "you a lying motherfucker," she said. she spat in my hair. "excuse me, pardon me, don't let me get in your way, zu-zu. but if you gonna spit like that, save your breath for a niggah that's worth it." "did you spit on me?" zu-zu asked. "hell no," i said. "what's all this shit on my back then?" zu-zu asked. "droppings," i said. we stood and looked at each other. zu-zu gazed down at the fog by her feet. "enough of this ten commandments stuff," said zu-zu, feeling her heart. my funny valentine "kiss me, and i'll kiss you back," i said to zu-zu, every tom, dick and harry in the park trying to get her. "let's wait awhile," said zu-zu. "i want you," i told zu-zu. "and i want you to want me, too." "what you won't do for love," said zu-zu, feeling herself for a pulse. "let's get it on," i said. "keep on truck in'," said zu-zu. "we got a love thang," i said. "you can't hurry love," said zu-zu, trying to see herself in a wine bottle. "you can't hide love," i said. "i'm a private dancer," zu-zu said, "dancing for money." "baby love," i said. "i ain't got nobody." zu-zu watched as a mosquito bit my neck. "ain't nobody better," she said. i slapped the mosquito with one hand and it dove off my neck, doing a full-twisting somersault with about a 3.5 degree of difficulty. it looked up at me from the ground. "what do you think?" it asked. "got to give it up," i said. i put my foot down. "c'mon, zu-zu, take one helluva of a chance." zu-zu was not paying attention. she kept looking around, noticing that everybody had suddenly vacated the park. "what happened to all the spooks?" zu-zu asked. ghost town "take anything you want," i said. we walked over to a trash can and dug up a couple of black western costumes, zu-zu throwing everything to the ground. "you got a gun?" she asked. "yep." i showed it to her. she turned and looked the other way like it was nothing. "you want it?" i asked. zu-zu popped me on the head. my knees buckled, zu-zu sticking her pretty face between my bowlegs. "giddy-up," she said. i got myself back together. "where are the clowns?" i asked. "get up!" zu-zu shouted. her neck was caught between my legs, glad that they weren't clippers. she had always been told that the l.a. clippers were bad. "get off!" zu-zu shouted. "why you sweatin' me?" i asked. zu-zu rolled her head, trying to shake out the cobwebs. "i'm foggy," she said. i stepped to her smooth and direct. "yippee-ky-yea," i said. "i'm the fastest gun in the west. let's do this with a quickness and get it over with. let's do this like bam after a glass of whiskey." i slung my gun around and opened up the cloth cape i was wearing. zu-zu spat in the dirt. "you must think you superman or clint eastwood or hard to kill. you got to have a bigger gun than that to do me. you couldn't shoot melba moore with that. melba toast would have nothing to worry about. you couldn't knock a hole in a slice of brown bread. even if you knew how to shoot, your six-shooter ain't loaded." "i can pull the trigger," i said. "what's wrong?" zu-zu asked. "gun jammed?" "all it needs is a little lubrication." "lubricate it yourself," said zu-zu, digging deeper into the trash. "what i want is a shot of whiskey. the only way you'll do me is if i'm drunk and slobbering over you like a saloon gal." i drew a bottle of jack daniels from the can with a little booze left in it. "check you out," said zu-zu. "you like mr. gq smooth now." "yep," i said, industrial spurs spinning around on my black dingo boots like throwing stars mowing the grass. "don't touch me," said zu-zu, staring at my spurs like they were wheels of fortune. "shut up, zu-zu. this ain't dodge city, and you ain't kitty. but even if that fog was gunsmoke, we'd still be in trouble cause that's how we're living. saddle up so we can split this ghost town. i feel like matt dillon in love with a skeezer." "johnny," said zu-zu, "you've come back to me." "what the hell you talkin' about?" zu-zu pointed at an inscription on the handle of my gun. "why johnny, you can't read." i waved goodbye with one hand. "five-card stud," zu-zu said. "five fingers of death," i replied. zu-zu started shouting: "johnny's got a gun, and is goin' cap a woman. a 22-year old motherfuckin' punk with an ak-47 he paid 18 hundred for and a vow to himself that he'd rather be in jail than six-feet under. he's a black cowboy, roping cattle and catching dogies in a pair of rawhide boots instead of killing for a pair of cons. i did a few tricks with my gun and pointed at zu-zu's booty. "out here, everybody got a piece," i shouted. warm valley "a little closer," said sterling silver, waiting in the tree until he could see straight down zu-zu's boob tube and into her drawers. tallest trees they started talking smack. "why is it the tallest trees are climbed by the littlest niggahs?" they asked themselves. "shut the fuck up," said flukie. the tree dropped sterling silver and flukie in the dirt, their big heads rolling through the mud and down the prairie until they crashed into my boots and stopped, their faces stuck on my toes like black olives stuck onto toothpicks. zu-zu cheesed. "howdy, boys," she said. "who are these guys?" i asked zu-zu, like she knew. "guess," said flukie. "gucci," said zu-zu. "no, i mean guess who we are," said flukie. "amos and andy," i said. "d.j. jazzy jeff and fresh prince," said zu-zu. "eddie murphy and arsenio hall," i said. "chuck d and flavor flav," said zu-zu. "what are you, stupid?" asked sterling silver. "give you a hint," said flukie. "we villains." "batman and robin," said zu-zu. "lone ranger and tonto," i said. "shut up," said sterling silver. "this ain't _jeopardy_ or _name that tune_." "whatever happened to _name that tune_?--i used to like that show," zu-zu whispered. flukie stood up and waved his gun at my mouth. "don't fuck with him," sterling silver said. "he's got a trigger-finger." "what do you boys want?" zu-zu asked. sterling silver would not talk to her. "give us the girl, bronco billy, lest your balls are in double jeopardy." "don't do anything nutty, homey," said flukie. "this is fifty-eight magnum. it can blow your head clean off with one shot. if you don't believe the hype, go head and make my day, billy boy." "step off," said zu-zu. "every dog has his day." "stop that cow from chewing," sterling silver told flukie. "she got a mouth bigger than aretha franklin but sings like omar shariff." zu-zu looked shamed and insulted. "take care of 'em for me, johnny," she said. "alright, billy the kid, it's your show," said sterling silver. "are you gone give us the girl, or do we have to take her?" "where you want your bullet, homey?" flukie asked. "this fifty-seven magnum is gettin' awfully itchy." sterling silver peeped at flukie. "when you gonna get your ged?" he asked. "you don't even know what kind of gun you got." "fuck you," said flukie. "i tell you what. i betcha' i know the number of times i had my dick sucked." zu-zu spat in his face. "you're disgusting," she said. "yep," said sterling silver. "now let's get on with the show." "you bad," i said. "go ahead and do something." "bad," said flukie. "three syllables. b-a-d." "shut up, flukie," said sterling silver. "this ain't _romper room_. "damn--whatever happened to _romper room_?" zu-zu whispered. "that was a great show." "this bitch thinks she's in kansas with her dog toto," said sterling silver. "i can't wait to do her." flukie walked up and grabbed zu-zu's tit, grinning from ear to ear. "you so ugly you scared all the crows away," zu-zu said. the tallest elm trees kneeled and said a prayer for zu-zu. take the "a" train flukie grabbed his crotch and stood in zu-zu's face. "oh, so you a livery-bitch," he said. "how would you like to come service me? i'll whip that weak ass into shape." sterling silver chuckled. "look, flukie. she can let it go, and, like dust, that rickety booty is gone with the wind. chee, chee." "enough talk," i said. "draw." flukie searched his baggy pants for a pen or pencil or etchsketch. "shoot," sterling silver shouted. "finish this kindergarten cop before i get mad and blow away monk's girl." "draw," i said. "smoke him," said sterling silver. "draw," i said. "i ain't got no papers!" flukie cried. sterling silver whipped flukie with a coke stare. "what are you, caining or something? take that boy out and smoke him!" "see ya," said zu-zu. she gave me that cheek-to-cheek comfort and then moved the crowd. we stood silent in a triangle, each man beginning to backpedal, drawing lines with their feet. theme from the good, the bad and the ugly it was early morning. we stood recklessly eyeballing one another, our hands covering our guns. "this feels good," said flukie, the zipper open in his baggies, his big head surrounded by shadows under the armpit of a tree. "what's up with all this black?" said sterling silver, pointing his index finger at me as if it were filled with a shitload of mean bullets. "good guys wear black," i said. "so why you wanna dog me out?" "it's the ho we want," said flukie. "give us the ho and we're outta here lickety-split." "with a quickness," sterling silver added. "otherwise, you'll get a taste of these silver bullets." they took a few more steps back. i spread my cape and showed them my holster, running my fingers over the encased bullets like they were a line of condoms. "shoot," i said. sterling silver squinted. flukie started getting nervous, his hands sweating. "let's go," said flukie. "why you sweating me?" sterling silver asked. "no more talk," i said. the theme music played as we backed up even more, standing with our legs apart. flukie started checking out me and sterling silver, his trigger-finger twitching, sweat on his brow, his clothes sticking to his skin, his reebok pumps leaving footprints in the dirt and mud and jacking him up to stand tall. he jerked on his penis some more to stay hard and cool. "when the music stops, you niggahs are dead," i said. the theme music played. sterling silver stood where i could barely see him, his big lips singing michael jackson's song "bad," his dark figure shaded by trees, his right leg crooked, his black belt sportin' a silver buckle, his dirty hands moving over the buckle, his black hair cut into a v at the back, his teeth rotten. he stared around for a black hat. when he couldn't find one, he pulled a bent silver spoon out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. "when the music stops, hasta la vista, babies." as the music played, i put a bubble gum cigar in my mouth and chewed on it, quickly working my way down to the butt. flukie took off his doo-rag and used it to wipe his face, stasof beginning to roll down the side. he wrung the rag for several minutes and then put it back on his head. he stood erect in muddy waters, acting like a laughing hyena to try to play off his nervousness. "watch where you shoot those silver bullets," flukie said to sterling. "die, you dog!" zu-zu shouted from somewhere. flukie looked behind himself to see if there was a cemetery there, a tombstone marked "unknown." "what's the girl name?" he asked. i picked up a rock and wrote on it with a crayon. then i threw the rock back down and opened my cape a little more, the butt falling out of my mouth, my eyes squinting, the musical chimes beginning to slow down, flukie staring at the rock like it was gold, sterling silver covering his precious buckle and pretending to be ready for the world singing "let's get straight down to business." day-breaking blues a fine-ass woman walked by tripping. "can't we have one day where there ain't no fighting?" spur of the moment "thing," said zu-zu. she was jealous. she saw the woman checking me out. peace "i 'm outta here," the woman said. so what "nobody asked for your two cents anyway," said zu-zu. black, brown and beige as the chimes winded down, we felt for our guns--sterling silver's face black, flukie staring at the rock and wiping the glycerin off of his brown lips, zu-zu shouting that a gunfight would kill a light-skin niggah like me. that's what i liked about zu-zu. she was always looking out for me. "it's over," said zu-zu. "you don't stand a chance." "be optimistic," i said. the line was from the sounds of blackness. "i like their concept!" zu-zu shouted. "very positive! they got some strong black men and women!" "yep," i said. i spat a chaw of gum out and let it hit my boots. i wished that it had been baseball card gum instead. it cost more, but the cigars were stale. "hubba-bubba," said zu-zu, "it looks like this is your last dance. i hear footsteps, niggahs scattin'. it's all bop to me." "boplicity," i said. "these niggahs ain't shit. the situation looks deeper than what it really is. it takes two to tango. don't make me over. me and you got more bounce to the ounce. i can jam. when the popping starts, yoyo get funky." i threw zu-zu a weak shovel. "dig," i said. "you talking to me?" zu-zu asked. flukie pulled his hand out of his pants. "yep." "i can't believe you," said zu-zu. "you're sugarfree. instead of being a good guy, you acting like _a rage in harlem_. one minute, you're nicey-nicey. the next minute, you treat me like my name was slim." "shut up, bitch!" said flukie. sterling silver cracked up again, breaking up into pieces, the spoon going shake-shake-shake in his mouth, his cheeks stretched out like he was the joker. "tell me," he said, standing in the dark. "have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?" here was a man who gave up being brown and beige. darn that dream black must have been all he ever wanted to be. koko hot chocolate. body and soul the mouse and the man. rudy a message to you "two sevens clash," i said. "things a come to bump. i'll wear you to the ball. rule them, rudie. [i pointed to the melee of cowhands surrounding sterling silver.] be prince of darkness, but if you can live, if you can live, if you can live...pray for me, man." silent prayer sterling silver refused to say anything else aloud. flukie's fingers started twitching. zu-zu sang "trouble in mind blues." i opened my cape some more, the gun and holster slinging up-and-down my hip. with the wind gusting--my pants flaring out, i could smell flukie's brut cologne and musty armpits, the sweat rolling down the side of his chest, darkening his shirt and wetting the inside of his pants. the showdown was the climax. flukie felt his gun withdraw. he reached down and pushed it forward. zu-zu ducked down. i spat again, as if to dedicate this gunfight to her. zu-zu wanted nothing to do with it. she gave me the finger, then began to polish her nails. sterling silver cracked up, his gun shaking and vibrating. flukie couldn't take it. he drew his gun. i drew my gun and fired a shitload of mean bullets. i heard bullets cussing and fussing and discussing who to fuck up as they went everywhere. niggahs started crying and dying and falling to the ground like shredded leaves. zu-zu crawled into the brush and fell out, the talisman barely able to hang on to her little neck. the trees leaned over to get out of the way of pissed-off bullets. pandemonium erupted. ashy niggahs and dusties ran everywhere, forgetting about looking dap. hot shells played pepper with chicken legs. sterling silver's gun licked his lips like colonel sanders taking part in custard's last stand. i saw wooden spears go flying by my big head, rapper tony scott and zulu nation trying to get people to stop the violence. while black people did their war dance, flukie darted over to the brush, tore the talisman off zuzu's neck and dragged her pretty head away. i kept trading bullets with sterling silver like they were basketball cards. i stopped for a moment to ask him if he had any bubble gum. he hesitated. it was as if he was thinking i'll-trade-you-kareemfor-magic. kareem, of course, was a playground legend at nearby power memorial high when he was lew alcindor, but magic would undoubtedly end up being a collector's item; it seemed like niggahs had to have it in order to survive aids, gang-bangin' and all that jazz. zu-zu screamed for help. she clung to a condom while flukie shredded her blouse, zu-zu reaching back for anything she could grab and hold on to. she uprooted small trees and plants, creating a trail of leaves and murdered flowers. with his gun out of bullets, flukie stared at zu-zu's breasts like they were milk duds only good for suckers. he yawned when he realized that her nipples were no bigger than a penny. she stuck a root in his mouth. he chewed it until rootbeer dripped out. i aimed my gun at flukie and tried to smoke him, but i ran out of bullets; they wanted no part of the blood and took off. sterling silver cracked up. he thought it was funny. he kissed my bullets goodbye as they crawled away. his dirty skin looked like an earthquake had hit it. he shot at my head. i kneeled down and begged for forgiveness. "pardon me," i said. "my behavior was inexcusable. i was neglected as a child, so i never learned to respect others." zu-zu was still screaming. "take her away!" sterling silver shouted. flukie smacked her, then dragged her off, zu-zu's face bleeding lipstick. "god," i said. "you are the man. help me." sterling silver squeezed harder on his gun. "you think i was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?" he asked. "what makes you think god is a he? he could be a she. after all, if god was a man, why would he let us fight and kill each other like this?" "the lawd works in strange ways," i said. "fuck that," said sterling silver. "we the ones smokin' one another. it's called survival. it's a jungle sometimes. it makes me wonder how i keep from going under." he walked up and pushed me in the chest. "don't push me," i said, "cause i'm close to the edge. i'm bout to [pause] lose my head." sterling silver pressed his gun against my big lips and fired. you're nicked he cracked up. i looked at him, blood running down my chin tripping and shit. "jesus!" i said. he stuck the gun inside my mouth and ordered me to suck on it. "jesus!" i shouted. he kicked me in the crotch, put his finger on the trigger and mumbled "pop go da weasel." i heard one shot. i closed my eyes and thought "adios, amigo." when i opened them, i saw sterling silver sprinting away, busting out. even his gun was laughing, smoke coming out of his mouth. i stayed on my knees until i finished my prayer. "thank you, god," i said. "but if you were really a woman, you would have taken that gun away from him." as i watched sterling silver take off, i thought about something zu-zu once said: "man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest and passage through these looms god ordered motion, but ordained no rest." i go crazy "ladies and gentlemen, mr. will downing..." i sat down at a table in the park and reminiscenced about the time me and zu-zu snuck through the back door of a jazz club, bogarted our way through a waiting line, sat down at a nonsmoking table and had candlelight dinner with white wine. zu-zu had black velvet and said that she never felt so good. when we left, zu-zu stole the china plate for a souvenir. i swiped two cloth napkins, a wine glass, the incense burner and a long black candle. "put the candle back," zu-zu said when we got up from the table. "what for?" "i don't like it." that was vintage zu-zu. she was forever sensitive. she dedicated her life to discussing problems of women, color and money. she was always tripping, always resisting, always crossing the boundaries. chops once said that the only way he could ever get zu-zu was if he whittled her down. blues inside and out zu-zu was 100% woman. i lowered my head so low while thinking about zu-zu that i hit it on the table and cut a small bit of skin off the braille on my forehead. i sung "heart-breaking blues," now that zu-zu was gone. just me & you dj herc has got it going on. he started playing a ballad by toni, tony, tone, and scratching it, both deferring presence and reinforcing it by repeating the same line. just me & you ooo-o, baby. it's just us two. i don't need nobody else, zu-zu. just me & you "where you taking me!" zu-zu screamed. "just keep on walkin'," said flukie. "what we had was good," zu-zu said. she was thinking of both the time when she was free and when she was with me. just me & you niggahs around me are talking about the rumor that mister magic might play for new york and knickerbocker coach pat riley. "bring back the days of grover washington jr.," i tell them. just me & you "there's fifty bucks in it for you if you just cooperate," sterling silver told zu-zu. "money can't buy you love, can't buy you happiness," zuzu replied. "the best things in life are free." just me & you "don't worry about a damn thing," i said, believing that somehow zu-zu could hear me. just me & you "whatever you want," zu-zu said. flukie has got his gun inside her skirt. "shut up unless you want to get a shot in the ass." just me & you chops came running up out of nowhere and said that it was up to us now to get zu-zu back. [break] "another marley remix!" hold on "to your love," i said. i dedicated my life and my next move to zu-zu. then i grabbed chops and moved the crowd, chops shouting that we were batman and robin in gotham city. "somebody phone commissioner gordon's office," i heard some crank say. if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem i had to tell that buster off. easy does it zu-zu was getting a little annoyed with the way flukie was handling her. she pulled away and showed him her tits and ass. "dickie's dream," she said. "lady be good," said sterling silver. "she ain't nothing but ham n' eggs," said flukie. "i am what i am," zu-zu said. she sounded like gloria gaynor singing "i will survive." they finally reached monk at the rumsey playfield, and he checked her out closely. "i want a little girl," he said. "swell," said zu-zu. "i'm about to be raped by lester young." he slapped her, and she spat in his face. he pushed her down to the ground. "since you like using yo' mouth so much, why don't you try this?" he unzipped his pants and showed her his gun. "you must be kidding," zu-zu said. "i'm not your shoe shine boy." monk did a moten swing but missed her. "you lucky," he said. "usually i never miss." monk whistled through his fingers to summon his boys. then he sat down and waited. he tried to make the mind and body one like buddha. four and more monk's boys rushed in, carrying guns and poker cards, and sat down beside zu-zu. they roped her and gagged her mouth with a dirty bandanna. "suck me until i tell you to stop," the bandanna told zuzu. zu-zu sang a lonesome lullaby, hoping that monk would go ahead and doze off since he was trying to reach the spirit world anyway. monk opened his eyes. "that's not the kind of spirit world i'm trying to reach," he said. he asked his boys if they hit the drugstore like he told them. they busted open three cases of old milwaukee and a carton of cigarettes. monk grinned from ear-toear, then swung at the long ponytail of one of his boys. "boss, you missed," said another one of his boys. "so i did," said monk. "tsk, tsk. what of it?" ben hodges sneaked away, holding his big head, in order to get himself back together. rubber neck as we run through the park, me and chops feel our heads wobbling as if they were on necks made of latex. "you think we'll ever find her?" chops asked. "be optimistic," i said. i couldn't help wondering where chops had been all this time. chops couldn't run for long. he stopped to listen to a fat lady singing. "it's over," chops said. "we're too late." "shut up and run!" i shouted. "i'm dead," chops said. i snatched his big head and tossed it forward. "run," i said. chops sighed. "i'm tired of running," he said. "you go ahead." i called him a "rudie." then i moved the crowd without him. meanwhile, back at the ranch monk and the boys sat around and played poker like they were waiting for loop garoo kid to ride out of the sunset from yellow back radio broke-down. as legend tells it, the infamous loop was a bullwhacker so arrogant and unfeeling that he would stamp "ship to thailand" on the rears of virgin women, then demand their coin for postage. loop was an icon for monk, but an anti-hero for zu-zu. "why don't you just get on with it?" she asked. they readied themselves like musicians in a jazz set, home on the range. monk poked out his lips to play alto sax. flukie was on the serpent, his hands inside his pants. sterling silver on bass, booming in zu-zu's face while talking yin-yang (chinese principles of good and bad borrowed from confucius). ranchhand arthur walker on dumb-piano, standing silent behind the rest of the homeboys. black cowboy bill pickett on guitar, plucking strands of zu-zu's hair, his doggie spradley eating dry tang nearby. cattle rustler isom dart did drums, musical glasses, nose-flute, moog synthesizer, small-pipes, bazooka and glass harmonica. he tried repeatedly to go straight but was unable to give up his addiction to trying anything. hodges got on the horn, talking fast between breaths and clutching his long rifle. nat love, better known as "deadwood dick," liked virginals but agreed to take a mouth-organ. zu-zu sat tied up like mary fields, a.k.a. stagecoach mary. she clenched her hands, making them shake like fists of fury. the men all paused. they knew that they was looking good. they were holding on to their guns. their hair was fierce. and, they saw themselves riding in zu-zu's coach like it was a copus limousine. pickett restarted the action by snatching crumbs of caked-on makeup off zu-zu's face. "leave it on!" love demanded. "the more makeup and mascara, the merrier." hodges called her "painted woman," thinking he was clever. it wasn't clever or even ornery, but the name stuck. zu-zu spat in their faces. monk walked over and swung at her. "boss, you missed," said dart. "so i did," monk said. "tsk, tsk. what of it?" love's lips were bleeding. he dashed for a washcloth, blood falling to the ground. "you popped him good, boss," said walker. monk threw a can of beer and spat in zu-zu's face. "he'll be back." the men all paused like they didn't know if he would come back. meantime, monk realized that zu-zu had managed to spit and talk and sing with her big mouth gagged. he was pissed. "who put that weak bandanna over her mouth?" monk asked. he untied the knot and threw the thing away. "give it back to me!" zu-zu shouted. "it's dirty, but it's good." the bandana cried tears of joy. "look at me," it said. "did you see the way she sucked me? i'm all wet, and she wants me back. i don't know what to say. i guess i'm all choked up." "you'll be choked, period, if you don't shut yo' mouth," flukie said. he was always the violent one. "say you love me," said zu-zu. she cut loose from the ropes and retrieved the bandanna. "silence, painted woman!" said monk. he walked over and rubbed the bandanna against her face. "if you want the bandanna, you can have it. wipe the makeup off your face before i steal your riches." "no!" love screamed, running back to the gang. "why give her the opportunity to be herself, a woman. let her stay an artificial nigger. love her the way she is, or leave her and let another man dominate her." monk stretched his face and thought of "teacher" back in shaolin: "why the tonsure?" monk asked. his teacher tossed a porcelain saucer, making it skip along the surface of the drinking water in the well. "they want you to be like mike," he grudgingly said. "it is not my will, but rather the will of the school." teacher flung another plate, once again making it skip along the water before breaking on the ground. "why must i emulate michael jordan?" monk asked. "you cannot leave the 35th chamber until you do," teacher said. he threw a sword, making it skip along the water. "but teacher..." "the goal of the 35th chamber is submission!" shouted teacher. "if you cannot submit, then you must go!" monk kneeled by teacher's sandals. "yes, teacher. i beg forgiveness. i kissed the very ground you walk on. i shall do what the school asks of me." "um." teacher hurled a little japanese girl and made her skip along the water. monk opened his eyes and stood up. "that's live!" monk said. "how did you do that, homie?" "this ain't kung fu," teacher said. "quit asking so many questions." monk grabbed a piece of porcelain and glass, waving the sharp edges at teacher's throat. "tell me, or i'm going to tell the school how many dishes you've broken." "okay, okay, okay," said teacher. "but after i tell you, i never want to see yo' face again." monk sat back down while teacher meditated and spat out the secret. "speed, plus pressure, allows the object to skip, that is, pass over the waters." monk rose and kicked teacher in the shin. "thanks," said monk. "i promise not to tell the school that you're the nigger busboy they've been looking for." "hey man, where you going?" teacher asked. "to harlem!" monk shouted. "haarlem in the netherlands?" teacher asked. "in america!" monk shouted. "i'm catching a ride with that honky christopher columbus!" monk sprinted away to be a part of new york immigration. show me the way to go home walker wanted nothing to do with what he thought was going to be a cosmetic make-over. "follow the travelin' light to forty second street," monk said. when walker turned away, monk swung at him. "boss, you missed," said love. "so i did," said monk. "tsk, tsk. what of it?" dart was holding his crotch in pain. "what you hit me for?" he asked. "i never liked you anyway," monk said. "you remind me of a busboy i once knew. now shut up and tie her up real good. speed, plus pressure, will only make matters worse. she's deliberately trying to skip the torment. she's spitting in our faces in hopes of making us mad so that she can't be broken." the homeboys all looked at each other. "did you give him the right pack of cigarettes?" love asked pickett. "i gave him kool," pickett said. "then why is he tripping like this?" dart asked. "what is this?" monk asked. "a meeting in the ladies room? hurry up and rope her before she gets loose! brand her "government inspected," then let's move the crowd and herd some more young black girls before the other gangs corner the market!" sterling silver ordered flukie not to budge. "our money first!" sterling silver insisted. "i don't owe you nothing!" said monk. "get going before you get hurt!" "i'm going home to momma," said flukie. he took off. "look at that spook go!" the boys all laughed heartily, monk busted up. "we'll be back," sterling silver promised. he turned and chased after flukie, spradley barking at him. "let's get out of here before those lugheads come back," monk said. "hide the girl by the telephone pole and tall trees lined up over there. she should feel at home with all those dicks standing in line." monk liked hangin' with the homeboys because they always laughed at his jokes. fee fi fo fum monk enjoyed being a giant. he strutted towards nirvana. giant steps making impressions. monk improvised his ascension. he was live at the village vanguard. he was soultrane. meditations. africa/brass. "one of my favorite things," said love "supreme." monk climbed a steep hill, yelling for the new dj, shep pettibone, to remix his life. pettibone started scratching blue magic and b b & q's "(i'm a) dreamer" into smoke city's "dreams" and "(we're living) in the world of fantasy." that's how bad he was. the niggah could cut-up. he was better than clivilles and cole put together. he could jam on vinyl like michael jackson. he could take four gemini 1200 turntables and mix them all at once, without using scratch or brake pads. as angela bofill would say, the boy was "too tough." shep was the only dj that monk ever liked. "let's go," monk said. he wanted to see his boy spin. off in the distant horizon, pettibone broke out with a megamix. "this stuff is really fresh..." single life "i'm living the single, single, single--life!" i kept running, despite the fact that i was all by myself, in search of zu-zu. i could hear the dj flipping the tracks like it was nothing. just a touch of love "all i want to do before we leave is feel her breasts, see if she's a milk-giver," said nat love. all around the world "i can't find my baby." i was frustrated. no one's gonna love you zu-zu spat in love's face. "when did you first spit on a niggah?" pickett asked. "do you remember the time?" "send me forget-me-nots," said zu-zu, "to help me to remember." pump it a brother cheered as i raced past him. u can't touch this zu-zu spat in pickett's face. "to sir with love," she said. control "i need her alive," said monk. can't stop i told an old man, "i'm looking at you, you're looking at me." the old man chuckled. "i'm walking down the street watching ladies go by, watching you." shade, 'women and television', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-shade-women.txt women and television by leslie regan shade graduate program in communications, mcgill university shade@ice.cc.mcgill.ca _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by leslie regan shade, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: spigel, lynn. _make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america_. chicago: u of chicago press, 1992. spigel, lynn, and denise mann, eds. _private screenings: television and the female consumer_. minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1992. [1] in the past few years there has been a flurry of published work on women and television. some of the books include: _gender politics and mtv_ by lisa a. lewis; _women watching television_ by andrea l. press; the bfi collection _women viewing violence_; ann gray's _video playtime_; _enterprising women_ by camille bacon-smith; elayne rapping's _the movie of the week_; and _no end to her: soap opera and the female subject_ by martha nochimson. [2] what most of these books have in common is a preoccupation with analyzing the multifaceted role of women as audiences in various televisual experiences, with many utilizing an ethnographic approach to contemporary situations. this tendency within cultural studies to concentrate on media audiences, and particularly non-elite audiences, has often led to overarching generalizations as to the shaping of subjectivity, audience interpretations, and subcultural resistance to the hegemonic order. nonetheless, this purview has captured the attention of historians eager to examine working-class life, including the audiences of diverse cultural fare. as susan douglas has noted, though, very often we have too much theory without history, and too much history without theory. how then, can we get past this absence in the historical record and "admit that, short of seances, there are simply some questions about the colonization of consciousness that we can never answer. we are, for the most part, restricted to data generated by the producers, not the consumers, of popular culture" (douglas 135). [3] what is a good strategy for conducting historical research on the impact and effect of media on audiences? what types of evidence are needed? where can such artifactual evidence be mined? carlo ginzburg suggests that the historian's knowledge is akin to that of the doctor's in its reliance on indirect knowledge, "based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural" (24). such a conjectural paradigm, ginzburg believes, can be used to reconstruct cultural shifts and transformations. there is also the potential for understanding society, not by invoking claims to total systematic knowledge, but by paying attention to the seemingly insignificant, idiosyncratic and often illogical forms of disclosure. "reality is opaque; but there are certain points--clues, signs--which allow us to decipher it" (29-30). [4] lynn spigel, for one, has made avowed use of ginzburg's tactic for following the seemingly inconsequential trace in order to render a significant pattern of past experiences. in her cultural history of the early integration of the television in the american home, _make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america_, spigel finds tell-tale evidence of the history of home spectators in discourses that "spoke of the placement of a chair, or the design of a television set in the room" (187). what she dubs a "patchwork history" consists in amassing evidence from popular media accounts that mostly catered to a white middle-class audience, such as representations in magazines, advertisements, newspapers, radio, film, and television. in particular, her insistence on treating women's home magazines as valuable historical evidence allowed her to supplement traditional broadcast history (with its reliance on questions of industry, regulation, and technological invention), by highlighting the important role women assumed in the domestic, familial sphere as consumers, producers, and technological negotiators. [5] spigel employs a diverse range of historical material to examine how television was represented in the context of the wider social and cultural milieu of the postwar period, such as the entrenchment of women within the domestic arena, the proliferation of the nuclear family sensibility amidst cold-war rhetoric, and the burgeoning spread of single-family homes in the new levittowns. some of the material she examines was culled from women's magazines, industry trade journals, popular magazines, social scientific studies, the corporate records of the national broadcasting company, advertisements, and television programs. [6] in the first chapter, spigel briefly examines past ideals for family entertainment and leisure, from the victorian era to post world war ii. she argues that preexisting models of gender and generational hierarchy among family members, such as the distinction between the sexes and that of adults and children, and the separate spheres of public versus private, set the tone for television's arrival into the home. as well, the introduction of entertainment machines into the household, including gramophones and the radio, also influenced television's initial reception. [7] "television in the family circle" is perhaps spigel's most successful chapter. here she describes women's home magazines of the time, including "better homes and gardens," "american home," "house beautiful," and "ladies' home journal," which were the primary venue for debates on television and the family. they addressed their female audience, not just as passive consumers of television, but also as producers within the household. on the practical side, these magazines advised women on the proper architectural placement for the television set in the domestic space. the television set came to be seen as a valuable household object, becoming an electronic hearth that replaced the fireplace and the piano as the center of family attention. [8] television was either greeted as the penultimate in technological advancement and as a "kind of household cement that promised to reassemble the splintered lives of families who had been separated during the war"(39); or as a kind of monster that threatened to dominate and wreak havoc on family togetherness. these diverse sentiments were echoed in the advertisements and discourses of the popular magazines of the day. a typical ad by rca featured the family circle around the television console, while "ladies' home journal" dubbed a new disease, "telebugeye," which afflicted the young couch potato. [9] "women's work," recounts how the television industry addressed women as consumers and workers within the domestic economy through advertisements and specialized programming. these discourses, addressed to "mrs. daytime home consumer," included trying to hook the housewife on habitual daytime viewing through genres such as soaps and the segmented variety show featuring cooking and cleaning tips. women's magazines tried to mediate the dilemma housewives faced between television viewing as a leisure activity and their requisite domestic chores. one absurd solution to this predicament was epitomized by the western-holly company's 1952 design for a combined tv-stove, turning cooking into what spigel calls a "spectator sport" (74). [10] the last two chapters deal with the emergence of television as the home entertainment center. in the new suburban landscape, television came to be seen as the "window onto the world," and spectatorship became privatized and domesticated. interior architecture reflected this relationship between the inside and the outside by promoting design elements such as landscape paintings, decorative wallpaper that featured nature or city-scapes, and the picture window or sliding glass door. family sit-coms mimicked this fixation by depicting domestic spaces in which public exteriors could be glimpsed. as well, through various self-reflexive strategies, such as depicting television characters as real families "who just happened to live their lives on television" (158), and through farcical observations on the nature of the medium itself, viewers could be reassured about their relationship with this new electronic medium. [11] spigel concludes by musing about current discourses on the contemporary home theater and the utopian possibilities raised by smart-tv's, hdtv, the 500-channel universe of cable television, new video technology, digital sound systems, and virtual reality. she comments that the discursive strategies used to debate these new technologies are surprisingly the same as those used to discuss the introduction of television into the post-war economy. [12] _make room for tv_ is interspersed throughout with reproductions from ads, cartoons, and television stills. spigel's work is an inspiration for those seeking to integrate diverse and unconventional source material into a coherent and plausible exploration of past audiences and the effects of new communications technologies. [13] _private screenings_, edited by lynn spigel and denise mann, is an expanded version of a special issue of _camera obscura_ that appeared in 1988, and it is also part of a _camera obscura_ series brought out by the university of minnesota press. other books in the series include the 1990 _close encounters: film, feminism and science fiction_ and the recently released _male trouble_. [14] i, for one, was slightly disappointed to realize that except for the addition of three new essays, _private screenings_ was a reprint of the _camera obscura_ issue. although the ability to easily purchase such revised editions is preferable to hunting down obscure copies of the journal in specialty bookstores and libraries, the question can still be raised as to the politics of publishing mostly reissued material. lorraine gamman commented on the prevalence of the feminist scholarly reprint, urging that publishers be pressured to reduce the prices of books that consist of mostly reissued material: it seems likely that the live feminist scholarly reprint developed as a phenomenon not only because feminist thinkers are at last becoming recognized, but because it constitutes low-investment publishing. obviously authors have their own reasons for authorizing the reissue of their work, and so it would be inappropriate to say that reprints constitute *exploitation* or simply another publishing *scam*. yet in the rush to reprint the past, both publishers and authors should take care to ensure that feminism doesn't look like it has run out of new ideas or fresh ways to express them. (gamman 124) however, publishers also want to capture part of the relatively large photocopy audience. important journal articles or special issues circulate through academe mainly in photocopied form, outside the publishers' revenue loop, contravening copyright law. [15] the nine essays in _private screenings_ provide several interesting cases of historical methodology, focusing on the relationship between women, television, and consumer culture, and are intended to be part of a larger feminist project of "close analysis and historical contextualization" (xiii) which spigel and mann believe is the panacea to prevalent theoretical generalizations about television. by paying close attention to the analysis of television texts and their historical frameworks, the editors hope that cultural differences in how heterogeneous groups in particular historical situations perceive various mass media will be more practically delineated. [16] three recurrent themes are interwoven in the essays. the first is television's appeal to women as consumers, either through its display of various lifestyles and commodities; or through the viewing of television programs. the second theme is memory: how did audiences understand television programs, and what kind of nostalgic function did television programs serve? the negotiation between hollywood and the television industry is the third theme, whether in early programming where the recycling of hollywood glitz was common, or through contemporary soap operas which imitate cinematic ploys. [17] what is most interesting is the diversity of historical material that the authors have gleaned, including archival footage of television shows and films, popular magazines, fanzines, market and demographic research, and viewer response mail. a variety of approaches for analyzing the material are employed by the authors, including historical and audience interpretations. the first four essays by spigel, mann, lipsitz, and haralovich, concerned with historical interpretations of television's social and cultural function in the 1950s, are by far the most successful and convincing in the book. [18] lynn spigel's essay, "installing the television set" is an earlier and shorter version of _make room for tv_. in this condensation, the introduction of television into the social and domestic sphere is examined through investigation of a variety of popular discourses on television and domestic space, including the theatricalization of the home front. [19] a fitting follow-up is denise mann's "the spectacularization of everyday life" concerned with variety shows that featured hollywood guest stars. for mann, these formats epitomized the nostalgic return to both earlier entertainment forms such as burlesque and vaudeville, and to strategies utilized by the hollywood publicity machine to engage women as ardent fans. using "the martha raye show" as an example, mann argues that this transfer of hollywood stars to the home through television eased the negotiation of hollywood's participation in television and its placement into the everyday mundane life of the housewife. women were encouraged to enter into the fantasy world of television while being constantly reminded that the images were corporate-produced and commercially-sponsored. [20] george lipsitz examines early subgenres of ethnic, working-class sitcoms in "the meaning of memory," contending that this genre served important social and cultural functions beyond the economic imperatives of network television. shows such as _the honeymooners_ and _the life of riley_ portrayed an idyllic version of urban working-class life which tugged at the chords of nostalgia for the neo-suburbanites, as well as legitimating a change in the socioeconomic and cultural sphere occasioned by the shift from the depression-era to the post-war consumer consciousness of material goods. [21] in "sit-coms and suburbs," mary beth haralovich provides a fascinating analysis of the emergence of suburban housing, the consumer product industry, and market research, which operated as defining institutions for the new social and economic role of post-war women as homemakers. by considering the work of architectural historians dolores hayden and gwendolyn wright, she details the many ways that post-war housing development and design, spurred on by the priorities of the federal housing administration, created homogeneous and socially stable communities which effectively excluded any group that wasn't white and middle-class. haralovich explores the ways that the consumer product industry tried to define the homemaker through intensive market research, such as employing "depth research" which would probe into the psychic motivations of consumers and allow for "new and improved" product design and packaging. using the examples of the television shows _father knows best_ and _leave it to beaver_, haralovich shows how these representations of middle-class nuclear domesticity mediated the burgeoning suburban sensibility by inserting the preeminent homemakers june cleaver and margaret anderson into the domestic architecture itself. [22] the next three articles in _private screenings_ utilize archival material, such as viewer response mail sent to the producers of prime-time television shows, to look at how network television was dealing with the changing social roles fomenting in the 1960s, including feminism and civil rights. [23] aniko bodroghkozy in "is this what you mean by color tv?" analyses public reaction to _julia_, the first sitcom since the early 1950s to feature an african-american, diahann carroll, in its starring role. by concentrating on its reception, bodroghkozy argues that "julia functioned as a symptomatic text--symptomatic of the racial tensions and reconfigurations of its time" (144). her tactics included analyzing viewer response mail, leading her to conclude that viewers were attempting to come to grips with racial difference; and by reading producer script files, she surmised that the production team constantly struggled to produce relevant images of african-americans in the context of the civil rights movement. [24] the "new woman audience" that the networks were courting in the 1980s is the subject of d'acci and deming's articles. d'acci's study of the police women genre show _cagney and lacey_ led her to examine production files and interview the producers and writers to analyze the elaborate bargaining that ensued between the television producers, the network, the audience, critics, and public interest groups, relating this to the ongoing concerns of the women's movement. she details how _cagney and lacey_ struggled with the terms of femininity as it was played out on prime-time television--for instance, charges of lesbianism against the actors, problems with sexual harassment and the pain of the biological clock. robert h. deming is good when he argues that our interpretation of the "new women," as exemplified by _kate and allie_, is contingent on our memories of sitcom women of the past, from ditzy gals like _lucy_ to goody two-shoes like _mary tyler moore_; but he is irritating when he tries to make a case for the program constructing and defining forms of female subjectivity. [25] the last two articles are concerned with contemporary television melodrama and the insertion of this "feminine" genre into a broad spectrum of programming. sandy flittermann-lewis adopts a rather obtuse psychoanalytic semiotic model to analysize how weddings are used in soap operas to contribute to the flow of narrative actions, concluding that they function as a return to the cinematic past. lynne joyrich examines the prevalence of the melodrama into diverse forms and textures of contemporary television, such as daytime soap operas, prime-time soaps, made-for-tv movies, crime dramatizations, and the growth of the therapeutic ethos. she maintains that "melodrama is thus an ideal form for postmodern culture and for television" (246), but i am not at all persuaded that such genres can, as she believes, "steel women for resistance" (247). rather than reading melodramas against the grain and providing my own ironic commentaries, i would instead prefer to turn the set off. [26] on the practical side, the last chapter in _private screenings_ is a "source guide to tv family comedy, drama, and serial drama, 1946-1970" contained at the ucla film and television archive, the wisconsin center for film and theater research, the museum of broadcasting, and the museum of broadcast communications at river city. as well, william lafferty has compiled a guide to alternative sources of television programming for research, including video dealers and the collectors market. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited douglas, susan j. "notes toward a history of media audiences." _radical history review_ 54 (1992): 127-38. gamman, lorraine. "feminism and youth culture: from jackie to just seventeen and schoolgirl fiction" [book review]. _feminist review_ 41 (summer 1992): 121. ginzburg, carlo. "morelli, freud and sherlock holmes: clues and scientific method." _history workshop_ 9 (1990): 24. � perkin, 'theorizing the culture wars', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-perkin-theorizing.txt theorizing the culture wars by j. russell perkin department of english, saint mary's university halifax, n.s., canada rperkin@science.stmarys.ca _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by j. russell perkin, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: gates, henry louis, jr. _loose canons: notes on the culture wars_. new york: oxford up, 1992. graff, gerald. _beyond the culture wars: how teaching the conflicts can revitalize american education_. new york: norton, 1992. spanos, william v. _the end of education: toward posthumanism_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993. [1] as henry louis gates, jr., suggests at the beginning of _loose canons_, the "political correctness debate" or "culture wars" came as something of a surprise to what gates calls the cultural left. the right was first off the press with a series of books such as those by allan bloom, roger kimball, david lehman, and dinesh d'souza. progressive academics replied as best they could in a variety of media, from television to the popular press to academic articles. now enough time has passed for responses at greater length, such as the three books i am reviewing here. [2] since political terms are slippery at the best of times, but especially so in the context of debates about culture, i should begin by briefly explaining my use of the terms "conservative," "left," and "liberal." this is additionally necessary because as a canadian i would use these words somewhat differently to describe the political situation in my own country, and some of the subtleties of the american usage remain mysterious to me. i have tried to follow gates in referring to people like allan bloom, william bennett, and roger kimball as "the right," "conservatives," or sometimes, more specifically, "neoconservatives"--but i do not follow the usage of some on the cultural left who would also refer to them as "liberals" or "liberal humanists." by the "cultural left" i mean the coalition of literary theorists, feminists, and scholars in various fields of ethnic studies who have reshaped the study of the humanities during the last fifteen years, and who are sometimes closely connected with movements for social change beyond the walls of the academy. the cultural left thus includes both liberal pluralists like gerald graff and those on the radical left like william spanos. i have used the most elastic of all these terms, "liberal," in two senses: first, joined with "pluralist" to refer to those intellectuals whose stance is to some degree oppositional, but who combine that stance with an allegiance to certain traditional humanist values, and second, as a political label in the narrow sense, to refer to views characteristic of the part of the democratic party generally described as its liberal wing. my main reason for not using the term in such a way that it would overlap with "conservative" is a strategic one: part of my argument is that the most promising way to defeat the conservative cultural initiatives of the last few years is to build a coalition between liberal and radical scholars who can work for change on a variety of fronts without needing to agree on every issue. [3] it would be easy for a canadian academic to feel smug while contemplating some aspects of the culture wars that have been fought on campuses, on the air, and in the reviews and popular press in the united states in the last few years. just as we sometimes feel smug--when looking south- about our national health care programme, we can point to the fact that our country is officially bilingual, and that multiculturalism is the law of the land under the multiculturalism act of 1988. we might also feel alternately amused and annoyed that amidst all of their theorizing of postmodern difference and of curricular change, american literary theorists still affirm the goal of shaping the %american% mind in a manner that strikes us as rather unselfconsciously nationalistic, especially when such theorists, as is often the case, are ignorant of the multicultural nature of canadian society, writing as though multiculturalism were an american invention. but smugness is often misplaced. our health care system has problems of its own; similarly, bilingualism and multiculturalism are among the most contentious political issues in canada. moreover, american academic politics have a way of spilling across the border, which is why as a canadian professor of english i have taken a strong interest in the culture wars. [4] as an example of the way that the terms of the american dispute have been appropriated in canada, i offer the following instance, which also suggests that controversies over political correctness are still being actively played out at the local level, even if they do not engage the national media quite as much as they did in 1991. at dalhousie university, in halifax, nova scotia, a committee on discriminatory harassment earlier this year released an interim report on procedures to deal with harassment on campus. this led jeremy akerman, a former leader of the provincial (and social democratic) new democratic party, to write a diatribe entitled "campus crazies are too close for comfort" in a local weekly newspaper (_metro weekly_ 12-18 feb. 1993: 7. akerman writes a regular column under the heading "straight talk"). he based his warning about the possible consequences of the dalhousie report largely on dinesh d'souza's _illiberal education_, which he describes as a "closely argued, well documented book" and "a work of courage and a beacon of common sense." he also asserts that "university of pennsylvania professor houston baker publicly argues against 'reading and writing' in the colleges because he claims they are a form of 'control.' instead, he says the university should study the work of the racist rap group _niggers with attitude_, whose songs urge the desirability of violence against whites." [5] in the context of public discourse at this level of ignorance, it is reassuring to be able to review a selection of intelligent assessments of the culture wars, and to evaluate some considered reflections about the nature of what stanley aronowitz and henry giroux call "postmodern education." i will begin with gerald graff's book, since graff has had a high public profile in debates over the curriculum, and since his book is, of the three i am discussing, the most specifically concerned with the question of what a progressive curriculum might look like. his subtitle, "how teaching the conflicts can revitalize american education," suggests that the book aims at the same popular audience who read allan bloom and e.d. hirsch. however, for the most part graff avoids the nostalgic myths, the apocalyptic tone, and the patriotic fervour of such books. instead he has written a modest defence of the strategy he has been tirelessly campaigning for over the last five years or so: the project of "teaching the conflicts," that is, bringing out into the open, for the benefit of students, the issues that have been debated behind the scenes among the professors. [6] graff makes effective use of personal narrative, including a fascinating account of his own resistance to reading at the beginning of his career as a student of literature, and throughout the book he shows great concern for what he calls the "struggling student." he argues that discussion of pedagogy has stressed the sanctity of the individual classroom too much, without acknowledging that "how well one can teach depends not just on individual virtuosity but on the possibilities and limits imposed by the structure in which one works" (114). thus he is concerned not so much with %what% texts students should read--in fact much of one chapter of the book is devoted to showing that shakespeare still firmly holds pride of place in english studies--as with the way the curriculum is structured, and the concluding chapter looks in detail at several experiments in curricular integration. [7] by organizing the curriculum around conflicts of interpretation graff proposes to provide students with "common experience" without at the same time assuming the need for a consensus on values and beliefs (178). though he alludes throughout the book to his own political and social goals, it seems that for graff, in the end, the conflicts themselves are what matters. that is, his is a liberal pluralist position, as he implies in the preface when he thanks the conservatives with whom he takes issue throughout the book (x). [8] as i implied at the beginning of my discussion, there are some ways in which graff's book is not free from the aspirations of a bloom or a hirsch. in promising to "revitalize" higher education he is implicitly buying into the very myth of fall and possible redemption that is typcially found in conservative texts. but graff's own critique of nostalgic myths of golden ages of education, here and in his influential _professing literature_ (1987) runs counter to the implications of the word "revitalize," and he also suggests that in fact "standards in higher education have actually %risen% rather than declined" (88, emphasis in original). in addition, he seems to underestimate the degree to which "the conflicts" are already part of the experience of education. as gates comments about graff's proposal to teach the conflicts, "i think, at the better colleges, we do. we don't seem to be able not to" (118). in spite of this, _beyond the culture wars_ presupposes that the university is in a state of crisis which graff's particular institutional proposals can repair. in fairness, i should note that it is possible that he adopted the strategy of employing some of the rhetoric of crisis simply in order to try to secure an audience for the book, which considering the sales of books from the right would be an understandable strategy. [9] in his last chapter, where he examines several experiments in curricular integration, graff says that the proposals he endorses take for granted "the dynamics of modern academic professionalism and american democracy" (195). this is where i have the most serious difficulty with his argument. a more radical critique would surely want to at least question the ideology of academic professionalism, and to consider whether there was any disjunction between the noun "democracy" and the adjective "american." as a scholar and critic who has been privileged to inhabit elite institutions, graff seems to me insufficiently sensitive to the differences among institutions, and among the faculty employed by them on contracts of varying degrees of security and benefit. his tone throughout the book is that of someone who is comfortable in the academy, and who wants to make it a more interesting place for the privileged students who study there. the assumption is that there are principled differences among different professional factions, and these can be brought into productive conflict. thus he does not seriously address the way that a corporate agenda is driving the university, so that the humanities are already situated within a frame of reference that is frequently reified as "economic reality." [10] graff expresses concern for the minority students who appear in his classes, but does not address the more fundamental fact that many young people from minority communities, especially african-americans, do not have access to university education in the first place. nor would his proposals make much sense to young and often marginalized faculty struggling to gain tenure, while older colleagues with tenure and seniority disdainfully refuse to engage in the sort of dialogue he assumes everyone seeks. but this is surely the reality for many at institutions less prestigious than northwestern or chicago. finally, for all his concern for the struggling student, graff seems to me insufficiently attentive to the diverse experience of students. even though he talks interestingly about his own resistance to learning, he acknowledges that he was a middle-class kid at a good school; for students who are working class, especially in a recession, the "life of the mind stuff" graff discusses may be even more alien. for such students, resistance is a way of registering that they are not destined for the kind of professional career the "life of the mind stuff" presupposes. [11] henry louis gates's book is a collection of essays, not all directly concerned with political correctness and the culture wars, although since their main focus is african-american studies they are very closely connected to those issues. however, as a result of his keen awareness of the way that the reagan-bush years affected african-americans, gates is less uniformly upbeat than graff; in fact, his book is genuinely dialogic, incorporating a variety of tones and voices, and including a number of memorable personal narratives and two chapters in the mode of a hardboiled detective story. due to the occasional nature of the essays, one can also see a development of gates's thought as it responds to particular events and contexts. [12] it is clear that for henry louis gates the question of %what% books should be read is a much more important one than it is for graff. throughout the book he emphasizes the need to "comprehend the diversity of human culture" (xv). there is a celebratory tone to some of the essays, as he considers the achievements and the diversity of african-american studies, but at the same time an awareness of the precarious nature of this achievement, especially in view of the limited number of black doctoral graduates. he suggests that the more radical project remains, namely that of transforming the idea of what it means to be american so that it fully incorporates the african element of american culture. [13] _loose canons_ is full of an infectious enthusiasm for the project of literary and cultural studies, and a profound awareness of gates's relation to a particular tradition and culture, even as he insists that education must strive for a culture without a centre, and one that accommodates difference. at the same time he rejects a simplistic identity politics, and he asserts that humanists need to learn to live without cultural nationalism (111). for gates, "any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how 'alien' it may appear to be" (xv). the combination of an awareness of the isolating dangers of cultural nationalism and a desire to celebrate his own cultural tradition are particularly apparent in the discussion of the project of the _norton anthology of african-american literature_; few can have a keener sense than gates of the force of the arguments on all sides of the canon debate. [14] at times gates, like graff, seems rather comfortable with his position in the academy, and seems to refrain from questioning some of its more problematic enabling assumptions. however, this is only one element from a variety of voices, and a personal anecdote makes it clear that comfort--for the distinguished black professor--is liable at any moment to turn to discomfort: "nor can i help but feel some humiliation as i try to put a white person at ease in a dark place on campus at night, coming from nowhere, confronting that certain look of panic in his or her eyes, trying to think grand thoughts like du bois but- for the life of me--looking to him or her like willie horton" (135-36). [15] gates tries to maintain a balance throughout the book between on the one hand asserting the importance of intellectual work, and on the other recognizing that the political and social significance of such work can be overestimated by those who engage in it. he doesn't deny the importance of critical debate, but insists on the highly mediated relationship of such debate to its supposed referent. as he comments, "it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets" (19). [16] i will postpone discussion of the political position gates take in his important final chapter until i have considered william spanos, since i think that gates provides an important corrective to spanos's analysis. [17] with _the end of education_ we enter a rather different world. graff and gates both write in an elegant straightforward english, largely free of technical theoretical language; much of the material in each book has its origin in material prepared originally for oral delivery or for publication in literary reviews rather than academic journals. it is also clear that the publishers are hoping that the books will appeal to an audience beyond the academy. spanos, on the other hand, writes in a dense discourse owing much to heidegger and foucault, and in a tone of unqualified assertion, without any of the engaging personal voice of graff or gates. the words "panoptic" and "hegemony," together or separately, occur with numbing insistency. to make matters worse, the book is printed with small margins in a small typeface, and with forty-seven pages of long footnotes. one of my colleagues, looking at the review copy lying on my desk, commented that this seems like the kind of book that gives you a headache to read. it is likely to be read only by committed postmodern theorists, which is unfortunate, because _the end of education_ is an important book, and one which in many ways makes a challenging and necessary critique not only of neoconservative humanism but of the structure and discourses of the university which, spanos asserts, support and are reinforced by such humanism. [18] the book originates in a response spanos wrote to the harvard core curriculum report of 1978. he developed this response into a manuscript which was rejected for publication by an ivy league press in spite of favourable readers' reports, because it seemed to that press politically inappropriate to publish a "destructive" critique of the ideology informing the harvard report. some of the material was published during the 1980s in articles in _boundary 2_ and _cultural critique_, but the final version has obviously been overdetermined by the intervening culture wars, which in some ways vindicate spanos's critique of the harvard report, but in other ways, i think, qualify the political conclusions he draws, in ways that he does not want to recognize. i should repeat that i find _the end of education_ at once a difficult, brilliant, forceful, and maddening book. my view of it changed several times as i read it, and the critique that follows is, more than most reviews, a provisional response. [19] what is impressive about the book, after the essays of graff and gates, is the density of its documentation and the erudition of its theoretical argument. because of this, and because of his relentlessly oppositional stance (spanos is no liberal pluralist), the book is a far more radical questioning of the institutional structure of the american university, whose complicity--including that of the humanities--with the more repressive and militaristic aspects of american society he clearly documents. his use of althusser and foucault prevents the too easy acceptance of the ideology of academic professionalism that graff and to some extent gates can be charged with. furthermore, the most general project of the book is a heideggerian critique of western humanism per se. the result is obviously a much more ambitious book than the other two, though at the present juncture it must be evaluated in the context of the political debate over the future of the humanities, since the culture wars have placed it in a more specific frame of reference than spanos originally anticipated. [20] _the end of education_ operates on several levels. the most basic is the heideggerian critique of the onto-theological tradition of western humanism, of which the humanities in the modern university are one particular part, and for which the harvard report in turn is a particular, synecdochic example. secondly, spanos argues that foucault's critique of panopticism as a "benthamite physics of power" is not restricted to scientific positivism, but can be applied to the humanities as well, and to liberal, pluralist humanists as much as to neoconservatives: far from countering the interested rapacity of the power structure that would achieve hegemony over the planet and beyond, the apollonian educational discourse and practice of modern humanism in fact exists to reproduce its means and ends (64). the only hope is a postmodern (or, as spanos prefers, posthumanist), "destructive"--in the heideggerian sense- coalition of heideggerian ontological critique and a social critique deriving from foucault and althusser, leading to an oppositional politics in the academy. [21] the genealogy spanos constructs is impressive, and later developments have certainly vindicated his view of the harvard report, which in the early 1980s might have seemed overly paranoid. spanos clearly shows a pattern in the recurrence of general education programmes based on restricted canons, beginning with the period during and following the first world war, then during the cold war, and finally in the post-vietnam period. his insistence on acknowledging the importance of the vietnam war in discussing the humanities at the present time is an important act of cultural memory. as an uncovering of the motives impelling the right in the culture wars, this book should be required reading for oppositional critics. however, as a political intervention it is flawed in several important ways, and i will conclude this review with an account of these, and a suggestion by way of henry louis gates of a less paranoid and more pragmatic strategy for the cultural left. [22] on the one hand, spanos gives his book theoretical depth by beginning at the most basic level of the question of being. on the other hand, in purely rhetorical terms, many readers will probably find the juxtaposition of the heavily heideggerian first chapter and the details of the harvard report to be catachrestical; it is hard for even a sympathetic reader to grant the enormous linkages and assumptions involved in the argument. if spanos had let his heideggerian approach inform his genealogy without feeling it necessary to include so many long quotations from _being and time_ and other works, the book would have a wider rhetorical appeal and thus a potentially greater political effect. [23] another problem is that the book makes huge historical assertions that have the effect of lessening difference, even while it attacks the metaphysical principle "%that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around%" (4; emphasis in original). this is something spanos has in common with some followers of derrida who turn deconstruction into a dogma, rather than realizing that it is a strategy of reading that must take account of the particular logic of the texts being read. spanos asserts that the classical greeks were characterized by "originative, differential, and errant thinking" (105), which every subsequent age, beginning with the alexandrian greek, through the romans, the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the victorians, and right up to the present, misunderstood in a reifying and imperialistic appropriation. this not only implies a somewhat simplistic reception-history of ancient greek culture; it also, significantly, perpetuates a myth--the favourite american myth that spanos in other contexts attacks in the book--of an original period of innocence, a fall, and the possibility of redemption. [24] there are further problems with the narrative built into _the end of education_. humanism is always and everywhere, for spanos, panoptic, repressive, characterized by "the metaphysics of the centered circle," which is repeatedly attacked by reference to the same overcited passage from derrida's "structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences"--not coincidentally one of the places where derrida allows himself to make large claims unqualified by their derivation from reading a particular text. in order to make this assertion, spanos must show that all apparent difference is in fact contained by the same old metaphysical discourse. thus, within the space of four pages, in the context of making absolute claims about western education (or thought, or theory), spanos uses the following constructions: 1. "whatever its historically specific permutations," 2. "despite the historically specific permutations," 3. "apparent historical dissimilarities," 4. "despite the historically specific ruptures." (12-15) western thought, he repeats, has "always reaffirmed a nostalgic and recuperative circuitous educational journey back to the origin" (15). this over-insistence suggests to me that spanos is a poor reader of derrida, for he is not attentive to difference at particular moments or within particular texts. he seems to believe that one can leap bodily out of the metaphysical tradition simply by compiling enough citations from heidegger, whereas his rather anticlimactic final chapter shows, as derrida recognizes more explicitly, that one cannot escape logocentrism simply by wishing to. [25] the destructive readings of particular humanist texts certainly show the complicity of arnold, babbitt, and richards in beliefs and practices that are not now highly regarded (although spanos has to work a lot harder with richards to do this than with the other two). it is certainly true that arnold made some unpleasant statements, and they are all on exhibition here. but arnold was also an ironist, and the simple opposition between bad bourgeois mystified matthew arnold and good radical deconstructive friedrich nietzsche is too easy, as some recent work in victorian studies on arnold has begun to demonstrate. a deconstructive reading of arnold would be alert to these possibilities, and would be able to argue, against william bennett and dinesh d'souza, that matthew arnold amounts to more than the cliche, "the best that has been thought and said in the world." such a deconstructive reading would be of more practical use in the academy at the present time than spanos's wholly negative destruction. [26] spanos's extensive reliance on heidegger raises a political question that he doesn't adequately face. the humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; babbitt, perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied "a totalitarian ideology" (84). but the book is defensive and evasive on the topic of heidegger's political commitments. spanos seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as enemies of posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an article he has published elsewhere. but the problem remains: heidegger's ontological critique, when translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse nazi ideology. if heidegger is to be praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the question of his politics should be faced directly in this book. [27] my final criticism is that spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential political allies, especially when, as i will note in conclusion, his practical recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. he seems ill-informed about what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of composition studies. spanos laments the "unwarranted neglect" (202) of the work of paulo freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the last few years, i have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited. spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents comprising _the pentagon papers_ was linked to the kind of discourse that first-year composition courses produce (this was richard ohmann's argument); here again, however, spanos is not up to date. for the last decade the field of composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional practices _the end of education_ recommends. the academy, in short, is more diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than spanos allows, and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase. [28] by seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, spanos seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. for example, several times he includes pluralists like wayne booth and even gerald graff in lists of "humanists" that include william bennett, roger kimball and dinesh d'souza. of course, there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. in fact, i would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate journalists like kimball and d'souza with the title "humanist intellectuals." henry louis gates's final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position which spanos has taken. gates argues that the "hard" left's opposition to liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to cornel west's remarks about the field of critical legal studies, "if you don't build on liberalism, you build on air" (187). building on air seems to me precisely what spanos is recommending. gates, on the other hand, criticizes "those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence" (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left. [29] the irony is that in the last chapter, when he seeks to provide some suggestions for oppositional practice, spanos can only recommend strategies which are already common in the academy, especially in women's studies and composition. he praises the pedagogical theory of paulo freire, which as i have noted is hardly an original move; he recommends opposition to the structures of the disciplines, and oppositional practices within the curriculum. but again, many liberal as well as left academics are already teaching "against the grain," enlarging the canon and experimenting with new methods of teaching. i have been teaching full-time for five years now, and the texts my younger colleagues and i teach, and the way we teach them, constitute something radically different from the course of studies during my own undergraduate and even graduate career. women's studies, which is not mentioned much in _the end of education_, has provided a great deal of exciting interdisciplinary work. gates's book shows in detail how african-american studies has constituted not only an oppositional discourse, but one that has started to reconfigure the dominant discourse of american studies. [30] thus spanos seems to me to present, in the end, an unnecessarily bleak picture. it was surely the very %success% of some of the practices he advocates which precipitated the "anti-pc" backlash. the problem the cultural left faces is that books from the right have been hugely successful in the marketplace, with camille paglia as the latest star. but the vitality, scholarly depth, and careful argument that characterizes the books reviewed here show that the intellectual initiative remains with the left. these qualities also refute the wild allegations that have been made against current work in the humanities. collectively, graff, gates, and spanos suggest a way of moving beyond the culture wars, and i particularly recommend gates's final chapter as a careful and pragmatic analysis of the possible course of the humanities for the rest of this decade. � bradley, 'another autumn refrain and two thirds of a second at the center of the universe', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-bradley-another.txt archive pmc-list, file bradley.993. part 1/1, total size 4010 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- another autumn refrain and two thirds of a second at the center of the universe two poems by george bradley chester, ct _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by george bradley, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. another autumn refrain he kept trying to get it right, trying to catch that wisp of melody, that snatch of sound, listening and trying, like a man playing music, practicing scales; he kept trying to remember, though it would not come, about the leaves and the ghosts hung in the trees, trying to recall the closing cadences of a song that started in his head again, again, again, about the light that came to him on autumn afternoons, about the weak sun that peeked around the branches; he kept trying to remember or trying to forget, though that insistent tune returned when he would that it would not, revolved, rephrased, a sibilance like the heavy wash of seashores in the distance, like blood that rushes in the inner ear all night; he kept trying to get it right, though there was no right, about the wind that whistled through the dry dead grass, the sap that sank below a brittle crust of frost, about the earth that spun and came again undone. ============================================================ two thirds of a second at the center of the universe still waiting, with less than no time to decide, you think almost nothing, you thought become a sense, become an activity, a woman dancing, a sun rising, become persistent voices washing over you once more as sea air might and with it the sound of waves; still waiting, waiting, the tiny object unseen, the elusive blur that covers your whole ambition, as it has each day since you first conceived your task, first elected this improbable pursuit, with its boredom, its mundane rehearsals and childish superstitions; still waiting, one man at the center of the universe, preparing a moment that can never be yours alone, the issue shared instead with ones who gather watching, their faces drawn in distance to form a sort of landscape, flames, say, licking the ridgeline of encircling hills; still waiting, and they wait also, await the spectacle of your deepest satisfaction, your most intimate defeat, watching and waiting as you put them from your mind, as you hold or try to only the image of your attempt, of what will be your substitute for every human act, a motion tinged with memory and its fond mutation; waiting, and surely it will soon be taking place again, the instant out of time which you feel most yourself, in which hands clutch and hearts gorge with blood and sweat bursts out like condensation on ripe fruit, a fraction of a second happening once and forever, a stream descending, a horse running, a man striding, now. you imagined the triumphant cries far away in your head before you gasped, as in pain, betrayed, betrayed. strike three, the umpire said. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------canfield, 'microstructure of logocentrism: sign models in derrida and smolensky', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-canfield-microstructure.txt the microstructure of logocentrism: sign models in derrida and smolensky by kip canfield dept. of information systems, university of maryland canfield@icarus.ifsm.umbc.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by kip canfield, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. i. on (pure) rhetoric [1] peirce (buchler 99) says that the task of pure rhetoric is "to ascertain the laws by which, in every scientific intelligence, one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another." sign models are metaphors that evolve to support any constellation of ideas, and as de man points out, "metaphors are much more tenacious than facts" ("semiology and rhetoric" 123). any critique of current ideas dealing with human cognition and symbolic behavior must therefore address the metaphoricity of sign models. [2] in what follows, we will explore a remarkable parallelism in stories about the sign, between the discourse of the humanities and of cognitive sciences. this exploration will be conducted in the form of close readings of two works, "linguistics and grammatology," chapter 2 of _of grammatology_ by jacques derrida, and "on the proper treatment of connectionism" by paul smolensky. the purpose of these readings is not to apply results from one field to another or to hypothesize direct influence, but rather to investigate two rhetorical strategies that develop in the face of the same metaphoric impasse. both of the works in question come out of a rejection of structuralism--in philosophy and cognitive science, respectively--and although their arguments are basically the same, they take different paths away from structuralism. [3] derrida stakes out a skeptic's position, one that shows the aporias and contradictions inherent in the dyadic sign model used by structuralists. he explicitly denies that there is any way around these contradictions. smolensky, by contrast, has the scientist's typical aversion to skepticism, and he tries to reconceive the sign model that underlies his theory of connectionism in order to resolve those same contradictions. the parallels between these two works, i will argue, may be attributed to a similarity in the historical moment of each author, even though the works themselves are twenty years apart and their authors are of different nationalities. [4] derrida stakes out his territory in opposition to structuralism, with its linguistic model of rules and grammars for atomic units of meaning. oversimplification of structuralism can be dangerous (see culler 28), but in essence, structuralism was an empiricist reaction to the interpretive projects of the new criticism, and it explained referent meaning as the center of a symbolic system or structure. in "linguistics and grammatology," derrida demonstrates the problems that such an autistic view of human signification entails, and suggests that the dyadic sign model of saussure is in fact responsible for generating the aporias of structuralism. [5] smolensky's work is an oppositional response to traditional cognitive science, that uneasy mixture of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. cognitive psychology, in turn, began as a reaction to the empiricism of behaviorism and its inability to refer to mind as a theoretical construct. the relatively humanistic models employed by cognitive psychology came under attack after the field became heavily influenced by computer-based artificial intelligence in the 1970s, and it became fashionable to value cognitive models only if they had a computational implementation. the state of this modeling led to very simple and brittle models of human cognition and, in effect, dragged cognitive psychology back towards empiricism. for example, a recent work by alan newell (_unified theories of cognition_) proposes a theory of cognition that is based primarily on production rules (rules of the if/then type). the complex problem of how the antecedents and consequents of these rules arise cannot be addressed in such a limited architecture: in fact, smolensky sees this sort of dyadic sign model--the kind of model that is easily implemented on a serial computer--as the basic problem for objectivist cognitive science. [6] both smolensky and derrida, then, object to a tradition that presents a simplistic, deterministic view of human signification, and both elaborate a new vision of semantics and dynamics for their sign models. each author offers a vision of human cognition that is more complex, more mysterious, and less deterministic than the traditions they oppose. ii. sign models [7] though the discourse of any given historical moment is governed by certain metaphors, it is often the case that changes to those metaphors are generated by the very discourse they govern. structuralism and cognitive science use a static, dyadic model of the sign, but the syntactic orientation of dyadic sign models makes such explanations of meaning unsatisfying, both logically and contextually. authors such as sheriff have tried to rescue meaning by applying the triadic model of peirce, with its interpretant, but this solution is largely unsuccessful because it simply inscribes pragmatics in the interpretant, leaving the connection between pragmatics and meaning obscure. the critiques of structuralism and cognitive science described below rely on more flexible, dynamic sign models: smolensky tries to change the architecture of the dyadic sign model fundamentally, while derrida explores that model's inability to account for the gap between the signifier and the signified. both authors employ an organic, dynamic, systems model which unifies the oppositions that arise in static accounts of the sign. smolensky's model [8] cognitive science was carved out in academia during the mid-1970s to create an interdisciplinary home for various scholars who took an information-processing approach to cognitive modeling. two major critical responses to this objectivist cognitive science are cognitive semantics (lakoff, "cognitive semantics") and connectionism (mcclelland _parallel distributed processing_ vol. 1). george lakoff is one of the more polemical writers of this critique. he has identified two definitional aspects of what he calls objectivist (mainstream) cognitive science. they are: (1) the algorithmic theory of mental processes: all mental processes are algorithmic in the mathematical sense, that is, they are formal manipulations of arbitrary symbols without regard to the internal structure of symbols and their meaning. (2) the symbolic theory of meaning: arbitrary symbols can be made meaningful in one and only one way: by being associated with things in the world (where "the world" is taken as having a structure independent of the mental processes of any beings). ("cognitive semantics" 119) lakoff goes on to propose a "cognitive semantics" (he also calls it experientialist cognition). in so doing, he challenges two major characteristics of the objectivist account. first, he counters the arbitrariness of the sign with a new theory of categorization related to the prototype theory of rosch; second, he lambastes the syntactic orientation of algorithms in the information processing model: the most essential feature of objectivist cognition is the separation of symbols from what they mean. it is this separation that permits one to view thought as the algorithmic manipulation of arbitrary symbols. the problem for such a view is how the symbols used in thought are to be made meaningful. ("cognitive semantics" 125) lakoff's language here revolts against the arbitrary nature of the sign and the syntactic character of algorithms. its criticisms strike at the dualistic definition of the sign and therefore at the foundations of structuralism. [9] the connectionist approach to cognitive modeling accepts lakoff's critique, but connectionism is primarily concerned with model architecture: connectionist models are large networks of simple parallel computing elements, each of which carries a numerical *activation value* which it computes from the values of neighboring elements in the network, using some simple numerical formula. the network elements, or *units*, influence each other's values through connections that carry a numerical strength, or *weight*. (smolensky 1) the connectionist architecture supports distributed processing, in which each parallel processor is doing only part of a larger process that perhaps cannot be modeled as a series of steps in an algorithm (as with a turing machine). in the connectionist models, representation is achieved by looking at an entire network of individual unit values. these models are often called parallel distributed processing (pdp) models (rumelhart and mcclelland). [10] the connectionist model is largely incompatible with the traditional cognitive science framework, which is symbolic and based on language. this rejection of the traditional structure of the sign (signifier/signified) makes allies of lakoff and smolensky. smolensky's article offers what he calls "the proper treatment of connectionism" (1). the article sets out to define the goals of connectionism, and it explicitly advocates a specific set of foundational principles. smolensky's first task is to establish the purview of his analysis, which he calls the level of the subsymbolic paradigm. this level lies somewhere between the symbolic level of traditional structuralism or cognitive science and the neural level of basic biological processes: in calling the traditional approach to cognitive modeling the "symbolic paradigm," i intend to emphasize that in this approach, cognitive descriptions are built of entities that are symbols both in the semantic sense of referring to external objects and in the syntactic sense of being operated upon by symbol manipulation. . . . the mind has been taken to be a machine for formal symbol manipulation, and the symbols manipulated have assumed essentially the same semantics as words of english. . . . the name "subsymbolic paradigm" is intended to suggest cognitive descriptions built up of entities that correspond to *constituents* of the symbols used in the symbolic paradigm; these fine-grained constituents could be called *subsymbols*, and they are the activities of individual processing units in the connectionist networks." (3-4) [11] smolensky has dispensed with the signifier/signified dyadic structure of the sign (where symbol=sign). he was forced to do this by the intractable space (gap) between the signifier and the signified. this space caused brittleness in the artificial intelligence systems--inflexibility in the face of a changing environment. by contrast, smolensky's architecture for the sign is very malleable. a sign (concept) has no simple internal structure that contains the big problematic gap: instead, a sign is conceived of as a network of very simple elements that allows context to intrude into (be contained in) the sign. dreyfus and dreyfus put it thus: what smolensky means by a complete, formal, and precise description is not the logical manipulation of context-free primitives--symbols that refer to features of the domain regardless of the context in which those features appear--but rather the mathematical description of an evolving dynamic system. (31-32) [12] smolensky says: "the activities of the subconceptual units that comprise the symbol--its *subsymbols*--change across contexts" (15). he states the principle of context dependence as follows: "in the symbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest around it and consists of other symbols; in the subsymbolic paradigm, the context of a symbol is manifest inside it and consists of subsymbols" (17). at this point smolensky has described a network structure that claims to have more powerful explanatory capabilities than the traditional dyadic model of the sign because context can intermingle with content. derrida's model [13] derrida has precisely these same objections to the traditional structure of the sign. whereas smolensky responds with the network metaphor, derrida's critique is governed by the metaphor of generalized (arche) writing. writing is the structure and process which makes possible the dynamic character of language, according to derrida, but it is (commonly) considered to be exterior to language. he discusses this exteriority at length, arguing that [t]he exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority of writing in general, and i shall try to show later that there is no linguistic sign before writing. without that exteriority, the very idea falls into decay. (_of grammatology_ 14) [14] the problem is that once you enforce the distinction between the signifier and the signified, reference is confused, and you continually get the "eruption of the outside within the inside" (_of grammatology_ 34). the nature of the confusion surrounding reference in a static, dyadic account of the sign is clear in the following: the system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between the exterior and the interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently *alien to its system*. (_of grammatology_ 43; my emphasis) this notion of penetration is parallel to smolensky's observations about brittleness, since including context inside the sign is an example of the exterior intruding on the interior. under a dyadic sign-model, such an interpenetration of context and the sign is not allowed, and this prohibition, in turn, is one factor that generates critique. iii. movement and meaning [15] both derrida and smolensky object to dyadic sign models because of their naive simplicity and semantic problems. this naivete is a consequence of structuralism's and cognitive science's view of the sign as static. both derrida and smolensky elaborate a dynamics in their critiques. derrida's mechanisms for including movement in the sign-model are differance, trace and presence, which are discussed below. smolensky uses the mathematical theory of dynamic systems to put movement into his network structure. the semantic problems are, at root, the same as the hoary old mind/body problem of philosophy. smolensky thinks that his sign model, in the framework of connectionism, goes some distance in solving that problem. derrida despairs of a solution and, in fact, states that a solution is impossible. let us look first at the semantic aspects of each critique and then at the dynamics. semantics [16] structuralism and most flavors of cognitive science are forms of rationalism or introspectionism (see chomsky, _knowledge of language_). both derrida and smolensky oppose such rationalism. smolensky proposes an intuitive processor (which is not accessible to symbolic intuition), and a conscious rule interpreter: what kinds of programs are responsible for behavior that is not conscious rule application? i will refer to the virtual machine that runs these programs as the *intuitive processor*. it is presumably responsible for all of animal behavior and a huge proportion of human behavior: perception, practiced motor behavior, fluent linguistic behavior, intuition in problem solving and game-playing--in short, practically all skilled performance. (5) the programs running on the intuitive processor, then, are not composed of symbols which have a syntax and semantics similar to language. this idea is not mainstream in cognitive science, which takes an artificial-intelligence or information-processing view of cognition and posits exactly the intuitive/linguistic correspondence smolensky rejects. [17] smolensky translates subconceptual processes into mathematics, which are not accessible to intuition. derrida describes the traditional rationalism as logocentrism, a fundamental effect of the atomic structure of the signified. in the course of his polemic on speech, derrida says: the affirmation of the essential and "natural" bond between the phone and the sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depend expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of saussurian discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness. what saussure does not question here is the essential possibility of nonintuition. like husserl, saussure determines this nonintuition teleologically as *crisis*. (_of grammatology_ 40) the appeal to nonintuition by both authors is a necessary break with traditional representation, and it recalls lacan's barrier between the signifier and the signified (noth 303), where there is no "access from one to the other." one can no longer retain traditional models built with now-discarded tools: the new models require a new metaphysics. [18] it is intriguing that both authors appeal to *levels* to justify the apparent difference between usual interpretations of the sign and the novel view taken in these texts. smolensky's appeal is to physics: the relationship between subsymbolic and symbolic models is more like that between quantum and classical mechanics. subsymbolic models accurately describe the microstructure of cognition, whereas symbolic models provide an *approximate* description of the macrostructure. (12, my emphasis) this comparison jumps right out of his three-level architecture. the lowest level, the neural level, is closely modeled with the subsymbolic (=subconceptual) level. the highest level, the traditional symbolic (=conceptual) level, is only an approximation of the lower levels. it is an approximate language that developed to allow us (the subject) a way to talk about cognitive matters. he says: the relation between the conceptual level and the lower levels is fundamentally different in the subsymbolic and symbolic paradigms. this leads to important differences in the kind of explanations that the paradigms offer of conceptual level behavior, and the kind of reduction used in these explanations. a symbolic model is a system of interacting processes, all with the same conceptual-level semantics as the task behavior being explained. . . . [whereas, u]nlike symbolic explanations, subsymbolic explanations rely crucially on a *semantic ("dimensional") shift* that accompanies the shift from the conceptual to the subconceptual levels. (11; my emphasis) [19] derrida has to resort to a similar tactic in the face of our inability to escape metaphysical talk: what saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition, is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed . . . as instrument and technique of representation of a system of language. and that this movement, unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking, *within language*, of concepts like those of the sign, technique, representation, language. (_of grammatology_ 43) the dyadic structure of traditional structuralist sign models has proven unacceptable for both authors. smolensky responds by conceiving of a new structure (a network) and derrida by exploring the problems in the old structure (the gap between signifier and signified). smolensky's intuitive processor [20] a recurring theme in these stories about levels is the inaccessibility of the lower levels to symbolic intuition. traditional theories of the sign assume that intuition can penetrate anything cognitive. by contrast, semantics in smolensky's model involves the mysterious "shift" from numeric to symbolic representation, a shift described in his "subsymbolic hypothesis": the intuitive processor is a subconceptual connectionist dynamic system that does not admit a complete, formal, and precise conceptual level description. . . . subsymbols are not operated upon by symbol manipulation: they participate in *numerical- not symbolic--computation*. (7, 3; my emphasis) [21] furthermore, the unit processors in the model do not correspond to conceptual-level semantics at all. they do not model words, concepts, or even distinctive features as described in linguistics. smolensky proposes the following subconceptual-unit hypothesis: the entities in the intuitive processor with semantics of conscious concepts of the task domain are complex patterns of activity over many units. each unit participates in many such patterns. . . . at present, each individual subsymbolic model adopts particular procedures for relating patterns of activity--activity vectors--to the conceptual-level descriptions of inputs and outputs that define the model's task. (6-7) a complete description of cognition is numerical and therefore not available in our native symbolic language. subsymbolic computation in a dynamic system is cognition, and the asymptotic behavior of trajectories in the system is *somehow* approximately mapped to symbolic language. this explains the nonintuitive character of the intuitive processor and presumably explains why symbolic theories like those in linguistics always seem to *almost* formalize language, but ultimately fail on the fringes. derrida's origins [22] we have noted above that smolensky links the subsymbolic and symbolic levels with a "semantic shift." the derridean concepts of trace and differance parallel these levels. these concepts operate within the metaphor of writing in a way that allows derrida's system of signs to move and be dynamic. for our purposes, the problem of the origin and the dynamics of differance are the salient topics in derrida's theory. [23] because the signified is "always already in the position of the signifier" (_of grammatology_ 73), origins become problematic. as derrida puts it, representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. a dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. in this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. (_of grammatology_ 36) [24] this attention to the problem of origin indicates an uneasiness with semantics. derrida uses the image of track or trace to express this uneasiness. what he says (in smolensky's terms) is that there is no origin because we attach a semantic purpose to origins and at the point of origins, there is no semantics. the (pure) trace is not semantic: the trace is not only the disappearance of origin- within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which becomes the origin of the origin. . . . *the (pure) trace is differance*. it does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. it is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. although it *does not exist*, although it is never a *being-present* outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls the sign. . . . *the trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general*. (_of grammatology_ 61-62, 65) [25] this recalls smolensky's "semantic shift" problem, in which he sets up a system where all computation is purely numerical and has no symbolic-level semantics. he must then finesse a "shift" to our human realm of signs, something derrida says is impossible: this arche-writing, although its concept is *invoked* by the themes of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and of difference, cannot and can never be recognized as the *object of a science*. it is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of *presence*. . . . there cannot be a science of differance itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain nonorigin. (_of grammatology_ 57,63) [26] derrida, like smolensky, emphasizes the nonintuitive or unconscious character of cognitive acts like language. derrida calls this the "fundamental unconsciousness of language" (_of grammatology_ 68) and says that "spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject" (_of grammatology_ 69). but while derrida says of the trace that "no concept of metaphysics can describe it" (_of grammatology_ 65), smolensky has presented a mathematical metaphysics. smolensky's attempt has yet to tackle the precise point that derrida has tried to show cannot be described: the point at which the non-semantic origins of signification become semantic. dynamics [27] in the terminology of engineering mechanics, statics is the study of forces on structures, and dynamics is the study of forces on structures in motion. all critiques of structuralism reflect a passing from statics to dynamics; the dynamic view of structuralism has always existed in structuralism but was not mainstream (see piaget). post structural discourse emphasizes movement and temporality. smolensky uses models taken from dynamic systems theory to achieve this, while derrida defines a cluster of terms (differance, trace and presence) for the same purpose. both authors use this dynamism to argue for an organic sign model that integrates form and function. [28] smolensky explicitly uses the models and mathematics of dynamic systems, as studied in physics. he views the architecture of his model in this way: the numerical activity values of all the processors in the network form a large *state vector*. the interactions of the processors, the equations governing how the activity vector changes over time as the processors respond to one another's values, is an *activation evolution equation*. this evolution equation governing the mutual interactions of the processors involves the connection weights: numerical parameters which determine the direction and magnitude of the influence of one activation value on another. the activation equation is a differential equation. . . . in learning systems, the connection weights change during training according to the learning rule, which is another differential equation: the *connection evolution equation*. (6) he elaborates a "connectionist dynamical system hypothesis" in which the connection strengths (weights) of the network embody the data, and differential equations describe the dynamic process within which these data become knowledge. the state of this intuitive processor (the network) is defined by a vector which contains the numerical state of each unit processor in the network. for our discussion, the important aspects of this description are the global control over the process of signification given by the systems idea, and the semantic anomalies presented by the numerical character of the model. smolensky's global control [29] the systems idea is very important in smolensky's discourse. it becomes possible to describe the connectionist version of cognition by using a mathematical dynamic system as a model (my discussion is informed by rosen). a dynamic system in mathematics depends on two kinds of representation: one must represent every possible state of the system (statics), and also the behavior of the system (dynamics). the static description uses the concept of a *state space*, which contains an instantaneous description of every possible state of the system. these states can be described as measurements on a system. for example, in newtonian mechanics, all particles can be described in a system with six dimensions: three for position in 3-dimensional space and three for a momentum measurement in each of those three dimensions. it is important that the number of dimensions chosen give a complete description of the state of the system. in such a model, all states that have the same values in all dimensions are identical to each other. each dimension is a state variable and the n-tuple (or vector) of all the state variables is a representation of the (instantaneous) state of the system. the mathematical set of all possible unique vectors is the state space of the system. therefore, most systems will be multidimensional and cannot be visualized in euclidean space. [30] in order to provide a dynamic description of a system, one must know how the state variables change with time. mathematically, this means that each state variable (dimension) is a function of time. if each of these functions is known, the dynamic behavior of the system is a trajectory in the state space through time. it is usually impossible to know these functions exactly, but since the rate of change of a single state variable depends only on that state in the state space, we can give conditions that these functions must follow. these conditions constrain the trajectory of a behavior but do not uniquely determine it. the constraint is modeled as the derivative of a function which gives the rate of change at a point (state). the derivative of a function (with respect to time) is analogous to the slope of a tangent line to a curve; the slope reflects how fast the points on the curve are changing in the neighborhood of the state. a dynamic system, then, is described by a set of simultaneous differential equations where differential equations are functions of the state variables and their derivatives. systems described with differential equations represent infinitely many possibilities that are constrained by the (dynamically changing) structure of the system. [31] dynamic systems impose a global effect on the state space. for example, in the plane of this paper, all points (positions) can be described with two numbers--the coordinates in the xy plane (a vector with two elements). the intuitive processor's state space, however, is multidimensional: its state space is the set of all possible vectors that describe all activation values of all unit processors in the system. the global effect occurs (most simply) because a differential equation sets up conditions on every point in the state space. for example, a differential equation with a function in two dimensions involves derivatives which set up a direction field that constrains the trajectory of any curve that goes through a point in it. the direction field is a condition that attaches itself globally to every possible point, and it is what makes possible a global, system-level description of a multitude of separate interacting agents. [32] the modern scientific concept of fields--such as electric fields, magnetic fields, or even magic force-fields in science fiction--are examples of this kind of global effect. they are something usually unseen but considered to be real (i.e., they effect material reality) and they operate globally, albeit mysteriously, in an area of space. smolensky sees reference as the asymptotic behavior of a trajectory in a dynamic system, and his scientistic assertion of the possibility of global control contrasts with derrida's exasperated skepticism, seen below. derrida's differance [33] the early derrida is conducting a guerrilla war against structuralism from within the metaphysical terrain of structuralism. he only has whatever is at hand there for the fight. while smolensky is free to use exotic weapons from his experience (he was trained as a physicist), derrida must work within the tradition of the dyadic sign. he considers the dyadic sign constitutive of human thought, even as he shows its inadequacy for explaining meaning. notwithstanding these differences in tradition and precept, there are many points of contact between smolensky's dynamic systems and derrida's trace and differance. [34] derrida conceives of the operation of the trace as a *field* in the sense described above, but has no language to justify such a global and actively structuring concept. in exasperation, he calls it "theological": the trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [etant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. the trace must be thought before the entity. but the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. when the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. this formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. *the "theological" is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. the field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities- generic and structural--of the trace*. (_of grammatology_ 47, my emphasis) [35] the reader should compare this description with the global *structuring* impact of dynamic systems on state space, described above. at all times, derrida presents the trace as dynamic. it is the "movement of temporalization" (_of grammatology_ 47), and "[t]he immotivation of the trace ought to be understood as an operation and not as a state, an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure" (_of grammatology_ 51). the shift from statics to dynamics is, of course, a key feature of contemporary discourse on the sign. [36] derrida responds to accusations that differance is negative theology with an essay in "how to avoid speaking: denials." frank kermode summarizes the argument well: the purpose of derrida's pronouncement is to claim that differance is not negative in the same measure as the god of negative theology; for it is so in much greater measure--indeed it cannot properly be thought of as negative at all; *it is outside negativity as it is outside everything*. only by an intellectual error- induced by a sort of metaphysical paranoia, a fear for the security of that "realm"--could anybody suppose that differance has a design on us, or a desire to make itself into some sort of presence. (kermode 75; my emphasis) informed by a reading of smolensky, one might conclude that differance *is* desire, and that "metaphysical paranoia" is completely justified. where structuralists and objectivist cognitive scientists assume "meaning" as a concept around which structure is built, derrida and smolensky use ideas of process and structure to produce "meaning." the main rhetorical strategy both authors use to do this is to deny a hard distinction between form and function. this conflation gives reality to a field of signification. this is explicit in smolensky's mathematical metaphysics; in derrida, it is implicit in the movement of the trace. [37] derrida's treatment of presence is interesting in relation to these metaphysical ideas. culler, in _on deconstruction_, invokes zeno's paradox to explain derrida's insistence on the impossibility of presence. the present moment is never really present, but always marked with the past and the future. the present is then not real, as difference is not real. trace "does not exist" and differance is "nothing." time and absence conspire to destroy any phenomenology. arche-writing as spacing cannot occur *as such* within the phenomenological experience of a presence. it marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. the *dead time* is at work. that is why, once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. as the phenomenology of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible. no intuition can be realized in the place where "the *whites* indeed take on an importance." (_of grammatology_ 68) one might be tempted to regain presence by an appeal to the idea of a field of signification, proposed above, but presence fails for both authors at the point where its phenomenology must be intuitively accessible to the subject. both authors set up a metaphysics which describes a mechanism for presence, but both place that mechanism in the inhuman realm of numbers or (pure) traces. [38] derrida's insistence, then, on presence and difference as "nothing" might be understood as referring only to the realm of human consciousness, the only realm describable in structuralist terms. derrida's nullification of presence and differance recall a funny story, an old chestnut, that i have most recently seen reincarnated in a book by arbib (_in search of the person_): it seems that there was this mathematician who wished to prove something for riemann geometry. he disappeared into a room and filled a blackboard with dirichlet integrals and other mathematical arcana. after a time, a cry was heard from the room, "wait! wait! i've proved too much! i've proved there are no prime numbers!" the nullification of differance is a funny idea when one considers such that this nullification might *be* the global control that *produces* cognition. smolensky might accuse derrida of having been inattentive in his calculus classes. on the other hand, derrida would probably apply a quotation from barthes (noth 313) to smolensky: "i passed through a (euphoric) dream of scientificity." iv. conclusion [39] i would like to reiterate that this has been an exploration of rhetorical strategies that arose in two similar historical moments. my discussion ignores any justification or evaluation (scientific or otherwise) with regard to the works by smolensky and derrida, and it proposes no direct influence of one on the other. most importantly, this is not a "methodological" paper that proposes something ridiculous like a "dynamic systems approach to everything." [40] both derrida and smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex vision of the signifying human. structuralism and objectivist cognitive science present a syntactic picture of human meaning that is unsatisfying. each author tries to breath life into the dyadic sign model by regaining presence. smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems theory. derrida precisely defines such a field with the terms trace and differance while denying their reality because he rejects the concept of global control. the genesis of these critiques is the static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of signification, theories which relegate all process to the gap between a signified and a signifier, a gap which is "nothing": derrida and smolensky rush in to fill this void. both authors note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a mysterious "semantic shift" from the unconscious to the conscious. this semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. derrida sees this as an insurmountable mystery, while smolensky thinks it can be accounted for. [41] spivak uses levi-strauss' term bricolage to contrast modern discourse with engineering: "all knowledge, whether one knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye on the myth of *engineering*" (_of grammatology_ xx). smolensky and derrida are doing similar odd jobs, but with different tool boxes. smolensky, with his "eye on the myth of engineering," is a bricoleur with a full quiver of metaphor: he can play ahab ("that inscrutable thing is chiefly what i hate"). derrida doesn't have much faith in his weapons: he can love the whale. ----------------------------------------------------------- references arbib, m. _in search of the person: philosophical explorations in cognitive science_. amherst, ma: u of massachusetts p, 1985. buchler, j. _philosophical writings of peirce_. new york: dover, 1955. chomsky, n. _knowledge of language: its nature, origin, and use_. new york, ny: praeger, 1986. culler, j. _on deconstruction: theory and criticism after structuralism_. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1982. de man, p. "semiology and rhetoric." _textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism_. ed. j. harari. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1979. derrida, j. _of grammatology_. trans. and introd. g. spivak. baltimore, md: johns hopkins up, 1976. ---. "how to avoid speaking: denials." _languages of the unsayable: literature and literary theory_. ed. s. budick, & w. iser. new york, ny: columbia up, 1989. dreyfus, h. and dreyfus, s. "on the proper treatment of smolensky." _behavioral and brain sciences_ 11 (1988): 31-32. kermode, f. "endings, continued." _languages of the unsayable: the play of negativity in literature and literary theory_. ed. s. budick & w. iser. new york, ny: columbia up, 1989. lakoff, g. _women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind_. chicago, il: u of chicago p, 1987. ---. "smolensky, semantics, and sensorimotor system." _behavioral and brain sciences_ 11 (1988): 39-40. ---. "cognitive semantics." _meaning and mental representations_. ed. u. eco, m. santambrogio, & p. violi. indiana, il: indiana up, 1988. mcclelland, j., rumelhart, d., & group, p. r. _parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition_. vol. 1. cambridge, ma: mit-bradford, 1986. newell, a. _unified theories of cognition_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1990. noth, w. _handbook of semiotics_. bloomington: indiana up, 1990. piaget, j. _structuralism_. london: routledge & kegan, 1971. rosch, e. h. "natural categories." _cognitive psychology_ 4 (1973): 328-350. rosen, r. _dynamical systems theory in biology volume i: stability theory and its applications_. new york, ny: wiley-interscience, 1970. rumelhart, d., mcclelland, j., & group, p. r. _parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition_. vol. 2. cambridge, ma: mit-bradford, 1986. sheriff, j.k. _the fate of meaning: charles peirce, structuralism, and literature_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1989. smolensky, p. 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(617) 258-2889 telex: 92-1473 mit cam fax: 617-258-6779 6)-------------------------------------------------------------- _poetics today_ international journal for theory and analysis of literature and communication itamar even-zohar, editor brian mchale, coeditor ruth ronen, associate editor _poetics today_ brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature, and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. its pages present a remarkable diversity of approaches, and examine a wide range of literary and critical topics. recent and forthcoming special issues: narratology revisited, parts i, ii, and iii polysystem studies disciplinarity national literatures / social spaces quarterly subscription rates: $56 institutions, $28 individuals, $14 students. please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. duke university press, journals division 6697 college station, durham, nc 27708 7)-------------------------------------------------------------- _saq_ _rock & roll and culture_ 90:4 (fall 1991) anthony de curtis, special issue editor robert palmer on the church of the sonic guitar trent hill on censorship in rock music in the 1950s greil marcus's "a corpse in your mouth" glenn gass asks "why don't we do it in the classroom?" paul smith on playing for england david r. shumway on rock & roll as cultural practice robert b. ray on tracking mark dery on laurie anderson's crisis of meaning michael jarrett on the progress of rock & roll paul evans's "los angeles, 1999" martha nell smith on sexual mobilities in bruce springsteen alan light on rap's recurrent conflict dan rubey on desire and pleasure on mtv jeff calder's observations on life in a rock & roll band subscription prices: $20.00 individuals, $40.00 institutions please add $8.00 for postage outside the u.s. single issue price: $10.00 duke university press, journals division 6697 college station, durham, nc 27708 8)-------------------------------------------------------------- _sscore_ _social science computer review_ g. david garson, editor _sscore_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. recent special issues: computerized simulation in the social sciences edited by david crookall the state of the art of social science computing edited by g. david garson symposium on computer literacy: implications for the social sciences edited by william h. dutton and ronald e. anderson quarterly subscription prices: $72.00 institutions, $36.00 individuals please add $8.00 postage outside the u.s. duke university press, journals division 6697 college station, durham, nc 27708 9)-------------------------------------------------------------- _tel aviv review_ an international annual literary anthology volume 3 gabriel moked, editor "rarely has a new literary journal entered the marketplace with such grace and force as the _tel aviv review_"--judaica book news _tel aviv review_ brings together diverse fiction and nonfiction writing, much of it on topics concerning judaism, israel, and the middle east. highlights from this 500-page collection include four chapters from a new novel by amos oz; s. yizhar on the 1947-48 israeli war of independence; an essay by robert b. alter on modern israeli fiction; poetry by yehuda amaichai; a radio play by gabriel josipovici; and an interview with george steiner. also available: the _tel aviv review_ volumes 1 and 2 retail price, $19.95--see your bookseller. prepaid subscription price for individuals, direct from duke university press, $14.00. duke university press, journals division 6697 college station, durham, nc 27708 10)------------------------------------------------------------- announcing a new journal electronic networking: research, applications, and policy a new journal will be published in fall, 1991: electronic networking: research, applications, and policy, edited by charles r. mcclure with associate editors: ann bishop and philip doty and resource review editor: joe ryan. this cross-disciplinary journal will provide coverage of an evolving area of information technology and communication: the rapidly growing use of telecommunications networks to provide information services and products. the journal will publish papers that report research findings related to electronic networks, that identify and assess policy issues related to networking and that describe current and potential applications of electronic networking. the purpose of the journal is to describe, evaluate, and foster understanding of the role and applications of electronic networks. moreover, the journal intends to promote and encourage the successful use of electronic networks. the journal will be of interest to network users, managers, and policy makers in the academic, computer, communication, library, and government communities. volume 1 will consist of two issues published in august and november, 1991. volume 2 and future volumes will consist of four issues to be published in february, may, august, and november. initially the journal will appear in paper format. the editors and publisher are exploring options to move into an electronic format at a future date. the editors welcome contributions on topics related to electronic networks such as: --uses and impacts of electronic networks in research and education --managerial and organizational concerns --standards --technical considerations in the design and operation of networks --public and private sector roles and responsibilities in network development --social and behavioral factors affecting the use and effectiveness of networks --the development of the national education and research network (nren) --infrastructures needed to support electronic networking --policy issues at the national, regional, state, and institutional levels affecting the use and development of electronic networks. types of contributions may range from reports on research, assessments of policies and applications, or opinion essays. papers will be reviewed by an editorial board and external experts as appropriate. a resource review section will critically evaluate the latest books journals, reports and networked information of interest to our readers. prospective contributors to the journal should contact charles r. mcclure, editor, (cmcclure@suvm.acs.syr.edu) ann bishop, associate editor, (a71bisho@suvm.acs.syr.edu); philip doty, associate editor, (p71dotyx@suvm.acs.syr.edu); or joe ryan, resource review editor, (joryan@suvm.acs.syr.edu); at the school of information studies, syracuse university 4-206 center for science & technology, syracuse ny, 13244-4100; phone: (315) 443-2911; fax: (315) 443-5806 for additional information and guidelines for the submission of manuscripts. personal subscriptions to the journal are $33 per year; institutional subscriptions are $75 per year; $15 additional for subscriptions outside the united states. additional information regarding subscriptions can be obtained from meckler publishing company, 1-800-635-5537 or via the internet (meckler@tigger.jvnc.net). 11)------------------------------------------------------------- reading pictures/viewing texts by claude gandelman is now available from indiana university press 10th and morton street bloomigton in 47405. the price of the book is $22.50 12)------------------------------------------------------------- arl directory to meet need for catalog of electronic publications responding to the library and academic communities' increasing use of and interest in the burgeoning number of electronic publications, the association of research libraries will publish a hard-copy directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and scholarly discussion lists. although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be accessed free of charge through bitnet, internet, and affiliated academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out what is available. the directory is a compilation of entries for over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters, and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests. the directory gives specific instructions for access to each publication. the objective is to assist the user in finding relevant publications and connecting to them quickly, even if not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems. content editor of the journals/newsletters section is michael strangelove, network research facilitator, university of ottawa. editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is diane kovacs of the kent state university libraries. the printed arl directory is derived from widely accessible networked files maintained by strangelove and kovacs. the directory will point tothese as the principal, continuously updated, and free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials. the publication will be available to arl member libraries for $10 and to non-members for $20 (add $5 postage per directory for foreign addresses). orders of 6 or more copies receive a 10% discount. updated editions are planned. the following order form is provided for your convenience. feel free to print it and attach it to your check or money order, payable to arl. u.s. dollars only. all orders must be prepaid. office of scientific & academic publishing association of research libraries 1527 new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc 20036 usa name____________________________________________ address___________________________________________ _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ number of copies _________ amount enclosed _____________ for further information contact: ann okerson arlhq@umdc.bitnet (202) 232-2466 (voice) (202) 462-7849 (fax) 13)------------------------------------------------------------ the _directory of electronic journals and newsletters_ is now available from the contex-l fileserver and consists of two files. these may be obtained by sending the commands: tell listserv at uottawa get ejournl1 directry tell listserv at uottawa get ejournl2 directry the directory documents over 26 e-journals and 63 e-newsletters. special thanks to ann okerson at the association of research libraries for her support and guidance in this project. this directory, along with diane kovacs compilation, _directories of academic e-mail conferences_ is also now available in print and on diskette (dos wordperfect and macword) from: office of scientific & academic publishing association of research libraries 1527 new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc 20036 usa arlhq@umdc.bitnet (202) 232-2466 (voice) (202) 462-7849 (fax) michael strangelove department of religious studies university of ottawa <441495@acadvm1.uottawa.ca> <441495@uottawa> 14)------------------------------------------------------------- calls for papers journal of communication inquiry the _journal of communication inquiry_ is currently seeking manuscripts that emphasize interdisciplinary inquiry into communication and mass communication phenomena within cultural and historical perspectives. such perspectives imply that an understanding of these phenomena cannot arise solely out of a narrowly focused analysis. thus, manuscripts should emphasize philosophical, evaluative, empirical, legal, historical, and/or critical inquiry into relationships between mass communication and society across time and culture. the journal also invites contributions of articles, book reviews and review articles from all scholars. submission deadline: november 1, 1991 (see details below) ------------------ cultural materialism: essays on culture as a practice this theme issue of the journal will address communication found in newspapers, advertisements, novels, visual arts, music, etc., as cultural practices--recorded communication of a particular place and time, rather than as individual decontextualized artifacts. papers submitted for this issue should include a consideration of the overt and covert relations between cultural practices, and the political, social, ideological, and economic system in which they exist. submission deadline: january 15, 1992. submit three copies of your paper to the address below. maximum length is 7000 words, including notes and references. manuscripts should have a detachable title page listing the author's name, address and phone number. the title--but not the identification of the author--should also appear on the first page. other than on the first page, the author's name should not appear anywhere in the manuscript. the journal style is outlined in "parenthetical references and reference lists," in kate l. turabian, _a_manual for writers_, 5th ed. (chicago: university of chicago press, 1987), 111-9. endnotes (used for explanatory purposes only) should be held to a minimum. similar citation styles (such as apa) and other styles in earlier editions of turabian or of this journal are not acceptable. the author is responsible for making her or his work conform to style requirements. please direct queries, subscriptions, requests for previous issues, and all manuscripts to: editor _journal of communication inquiry_ 205 communication center school of journalism and mass communication the university of iowa iowa city ia 52242 (319) 335-5821 recent issues: 10:1 mtv 10:2 stuart hall 10:3 general issue: texts and representations 11:1 the feminist issue 11:2 ideology around the dial 12:1 cultural studies in south africa: a formal attempt at praxis 12:2 history, historiography, and communication: critical and cultural perspectives 13:1 the weimar republic and popular culture 13:2 cultural studies: ethnography 14:1 minority images in advertising 14:2 visual communication 15:1 freedom of expression and the first amendment 15:2 another politically uncorrect issue 15)------------------------------------------------------------- announcing _pynchon notes_ 24-25 now available ------------------- _pynchon notes_ ------------------- editors john m. krafft miami university--hamilton 1601 peck boulevard hamilton, oh 45011-3399 e-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu khachig tololyan english department wesleyan university middletown, ct 06457-6061 bernard duyfhuizen english department university of wisconsin--eau claire eau claire, wi 54702-4004 e-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet ------------------- _pynchon notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall. submissions: the editors welcome submission of manuscripts either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy disk. disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; ibm compatible preferred. convenient formats include ascii, dca, wordstar 3.3, microsoft word 4, and wordperfect 4.1 or later. manuscripts, notes and queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to john m. krafft. subscriptions: $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per year. overseas airmail: $6.50 per single issue or $12.00 per year. checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. subscriptions and back-issue requests should be addressed to bernard duyfhuizen. _pynchon notes_ is supported in part by the english departments of miami university--hamilton and the university of wisconsin--eau claire. issn 0278-1891 ------------------- contents of issue 24-25 the politics of doubling in "mortality and mercy in vienna" douglas keesey 5 the rats of god: pynchon, joyce, beckett, and the carnivalization of religion m. keith booker 21 the double bind of metafiction: implicating narrative in _the crying of lot 49_ and _travesty_ vivienne rundle 31 the american way and its double in _the crying of lot 49_ mark conroy 45 strobe's stimulus stuart moulthrop 71 oppositional discourses, unnatural practices: _gravity's_ history and "the '60s" eric meyer 81 mindless pleasures mw. mac kay 105 _vineland_ and dobie gillis rhonda wilcox 111 rooney and the rocketman donald f. larsson 113 surrealism, postmodernism, and roger, mexico michael w. vella 117 james bond and _gravity's rainbow_: a possible connection robert l. mclaughlin 121 a thoughtful thomas pynchon charles clerc 125 pynchon, joseph heller, and _v._ david seed 127 fractured mandala: the inescapable ambiguities of _gravity's rainbow_ (review) n. katherine hayles 129 no mean accomplishment (review) john l. simons 133 continuities, echoes and associations (review) thomas schaub 135 the little engine that could (review) steven weisenburger 139 jissom on the reports: a thoroughly post-modern pynchon (review) louis mackey 143 other books received 155 notes 157 bibliography (--1991) 159 contributors 169 ------------------- back issues _pynchon notes_ has been published since october, 1979. although most back issues are now out of print, they are available in the form of photocopies. nos. 14: $1.50 each; overseas, $ 2.50. nos. 5-10: $2.50 each; overseas, $ 3.50. nos. 11-17: $3.00 each; overseas, $ 4.50. no. 18-19: $7.00; overseas, $10.00. no. 20-21: $7.00; overseas, $10.00. no. 22-23: $9.00; overseas, $12.00. khachig tololyan and clay leighton's _index_ to all the names, other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _gravity's rainbow_ is also available. _index_: $5.00; overseas, $6.50. all checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. overseas checks must be payable in us dollars and payable through an american bank or an american branch of an overseas bank. 16)------------------------------------------------------------- people in the only u.s. state that didn't help vote ronald reagan into office may know something the rest of the country doesn't. it's not at all coincidental, we think, that they subscribe to _artpaper_, a monthly magazine on art, community, and cultural activism that stuart klawans praised in the tlr and the nation called "handsome, witty, interactive." plain-talking and guaranteed jargon-free, _artpaper_ prides itself on publishing specific, local, and diffident voices from across north america. subscriptions are $22/year by check, visa, or mastercard. you can contact us by snail mail (2402 university avenue w., st. paul, mn 55114-1701), e-mail (artpaper@ well.sf.ca), hotline (612-8871999; then 2869*), or fax (612-922-8709, day/early evening only). article queries: j.z. grover, editor. 17)------------------------------------------------------------- meckjournal debuts: new electronic journal on the internet founded to provide timely and accurate information about emerging technologies, meckler publishing has always been on the cutting edge. as a book, journal and newsletter publisher and conference organizer, the company is dedicated to serving librarians, information end-users and specialists, and the information industry as a whole on all aspects of computer-based technology. this year, the company's twentieth year of operation, meckler has committed its resources to becoming the leading provider of print and electronic information about electronic networking throughout the world. an electronic publishing division has been established and through meckler's link with princeton university's jvncnet it offers a service called mc(2). currently featured on the mc(2) electronic system is the complete catalog of meckler information technology publishing, full conference programs for four technology conferences (virtual reality, hd world, electronic networking and publishing '92, and computers in libraries canada), as well as five-year indexes to two of its monthly publications. within the month, 1991 tables of contents for all meckler technology journals will be mounted. this fall, meckler technology books will be offered at the table of contents level. a facsimile order for articles and chapters will be made available. meckjournal, which is available at no charge to interested parties, is the latest service to be offered to internet/bitnet users. issues will include an editorial, late breaking news, and either a forthcoming feature article from a meckler journal, a chapter from a forthcoming technology book, or a contribution from a guest editor. a subscription to meckjournal may be placed by sending a message to meckler@tigger.jvnc.net with the following information in the body of the text: subscribe meckjournal [internet or bitnet address] subscribers will automatically receive each monthly issue and other information as it is published. internet/bitnet users may also access the journal through the following method: telnet to: nisc.jvnc.net at the logon prompt, type: nicol [lower case] no password is needed select mc(2) from the preliminary nicol menu meckjournal content for the next year is based on the following schedule- september: electronic networking: research, applications, policy october: book chapter november: academic & library computing december: cd-rom librarian january: computers in libraries february: book chapter march: database searcher april: document image automation may: hd world review june: book chapter july: library software review august: multimedia review september: oclc micro november: book chapter december: virtual reality report the first issue presents marian dalton's essay "does anybody have a map?" it will appear in the first issue of meckler's electronic networking: research, application, and policy scheduled to debut in mid-october, 1991. the journal is edited by dr. charles mcclure (syracuse university) in association with ann bishop (university of illinois) and phillip doty (university of texas/austin). joe ryan of syracuse serves as resources editor. we invite suggestions and comments for future issues. nancy melin nelson executive editor 18)------------------------------------------------------------- monographic review ______________________________________ revista monografica the university of texas of the permian basin box 8401 odessa, tx 79762-0001 editors janet perez texas tech university genaro j. perez the university of texas of the permian basin editorial advisory board jose luis cano estelle irizarry madrid, spain georgetown university manuel duran elias rivers yale university suny, stony brook david w. foster maria a. salgado arizona state university university of north carolina at chapel hill juan goytisolo paris, france noel valis johns hopkins university rolando hinojosa-smith the university of texas at austin call for papers number 8 (1992) of the monographic review/revista monografica will be devoted to experimental fiction by hispanic women writers traditional critics have attempted to enclose women's writing within rather narrowly circumscribed boundaries, much as patriarchal societies have limited women to enclosed spaces. within this context, letters, diaries, and autobiography are typically "women's genres," along with religious poetry and romantic love lyrics. women's fiction is dismissed as overwhelmingly "domestic" and autobiographical, volume 8 of monographic review/revista monografica will expose the "phallacy" that the female text is the author with essays on hispanic woman writer's experimentation, aesthetic innovation, and vanguardist contributions. papers of twelve to fifteen pages should be submitted before 31 august 1992 to: genaro j. perez, editor monographic review department of spanish university of texas/permian basin odessa, texas 79762-0001 19)------------------------------------------------------------ "a new, very new idea of 'aufklarung'"? international symposium at the university for humanist studies, utrecht, the netherlands, december 18-19, 1991 what should be the premises of dialogue and what are the shared presuppositions in the recent debate between those who align themselves with the tradition of western neomarxist critical theory (with and without "pragmatic turn") and those who are inspired by that displacement within philosophy and literary theory commonly and insufficiently defined as post-structuralism? to discuss these questions, an international symposium will be organized at the newly founded university for humanist studies. invited speakers include geoffrey bennington, rosa braidotti, peter dews, nancy fraser, rodolhe gasche, rainer nagele, gianni vattimo, elisabeth weber, albrecht wellmer, and others. for more information write to: prof. dr. harry kunneman university for humanist studies p.o. box 797, 3500 at utrecht the netherlands fax: 030-340738 20)------------------------------------------------------------- console-ing passions: television, video and feminist studies april 3 & 4, 1992 university of iowa iowa city console-ing passions is the first annual conference on television, video and feminist studies. it welcomes papers that foreground questions of sexual and other cultural differences. possible areas include feminist perspectives on: tv and lesbian studies; tv and gay studies; tv and video history; tv and constructions of ethnicity, race and sexuality; tv, video and postmodernism; tv and "girl" subcultures; media pedagogy; international tv; policy and regulation; tv's production of social knowledge. 250 word proposals are due november 1, 1991 and copies should be sent to the following two addresses: lauren rabinovitz, department of communication studies; 105 communication studies bldg.; university of iowa; iowa city 52242. mary beth haralovich, dept. of media arts; modern language bldg; university of arizona; tucson, az 85721. the proposals will be selected by the program committee: julie d'acci (university of wisconsin); jane feuer (university of pittsburg); mary beth haralovich (university of arizona); lauren rabinovitz (university of iowa); lynn spiegel (university of wisconson). for further information contact lauren rabinovitz at (319) 355-0579. 21)------------------------------------------------------------- ************************************************************* ** ** ** h y p e r t e x t '9 1 ** ** ** ** 15 18 december 1991 ** ** ** ** san antonio, texas ** ** ** ** a d v a n c e p r o g r a m ** ** ** ************************************************************* bienvenidos a san antonio y hypertext '91! welcome to san antonio and the third acm conference on hypertext! the conference and program committees have been hard at work over the last year and a half to bring you this outstanding conference. the technical program has been expanded to allow more participation and interaction by all attendees and la fiesta de las luminarias (festival of lights) provides a magical atmosphere along the paseo del rio (river walk) in san antonio. we have arranged the conference schedule to allow ample time for attendees to enjoy this historic city on the banks of the san antonio river. hypertext '91 provides a blend of traditional and innovative programs. papers and panels will explore recent advances in hypertext technologies. courses allow leading practitioners to share their knowledge with the hypertext community. posters provide attendees an opportunity to talk one-on-one with researchers about recent results and on-going work, and demonstrations are a forum for first-hand experience with new systems. the hypertext '91 video program will be a compilation of refereed videos which will be shown continuously throughout the conference. for 1991, this traditional core is augmented by technical briefings which will provide in-depth presentations on interesting hypertext systems. in addition to this outstanding technical program, the hypertext '91 conference will provide several social events and a unique opportunity to experience beautiful san antonio in its holiday splendor. bienvenidos a san antonio! bienvenidos a hypertext '91! for additional information, send email to: ht91@bush.tamu.edu or contact: john j. leggett, general chair hypertext '91 conference hypertext research lab department of computer science texas a&m university college station, tx 77843 usa voice: 409 845-0298 fax: 409 847-8578 email: leggett@bush.tamu.edu 22)------------------------------------------------------------- derrida on listserv@cfrvm.bitnet jacques derrida and deconstruction this is to announce a new list devoted to a discussion of jacques derrida and deconstruction. to subscribe, send a one line message to listserv@cfrvm.bitnet with the text: subscribe derrida [your full name] if i can be of any assistance, please contact me. owner: david l erben dqfacaa@cfrvm.bitnet dqfacaa@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu gizzi, 'four poems', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-gizzi-four.txt archive pmc-list, file gizzi.194. part 1/1, total size 7225 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- four poems by michael gizzi postmodern culture v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by michael gizzi, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. -----------------------------------------------------------------------i. ode to woody strode veteran actor woody strode will appear at the 8 p.m. saturday screening of john ford's "sergeant rutledge" at the gene autry western heritage museum's wells fargo theater. los angeles times brother ebon noggin, survival bubba, persona non grata in the peckerwood's head, a midden of bushwah shoe-tree'd into a montage mob of queeg fits. can't beat it for sheer eidetic distress of 30 shitkickers with 10 toothpicks recidivism a runaway braille trimming tremors to the quick gimme some skulls, man! not these chiropodists down with the croup, jack, in drumstick gigging like locust on the corn, humming %memory loves company% per idaho beanfire with chili obligations as bronco nagurski makes the conversion with broken horns as at a theatre corpses calling curtain calls with their entire cast of improprieties, errol flynn pinned if only for a second between a crumpet and a scone the peak of his powers at the end of his rope the one-eyed king radio with a mumbling jag on this is the chorus of the caresser's song %canoeer than velveeta were her thighs% i thought i was standing in a movie with a leg wound an open book of alluvial text approximating flesh a ceiling dispensary pulled down to reveal halfmoons claire de luneing at the world no one has a straight job, wheat snobs rule the waves waterbury sidles to his cardspout tuberculosis got the camellias. family trees may insert any name one chooses for the pedigree of love let the foreign woman come ashore, what as the talkers say you'll never see at home lost in the delicate rays of folklore its minutes recorded with his feet by the armless wonder thuggees with allergies film greenhouses, hold shining steam to treebuds, prehensile eyes out stalking vim as if vision were a concubine, a rinse cycle lashed to the belly of a raj with a buckle of swash, flora danica waiting in the wings professor pretzel wolf buttons the suit on his portrait of trees, an ornamental hombre in a speculum of preen asks, "who's the forest of them all?" why woody strode! spiked with summer drone his dome chapeau made of breeze, accent grave over the trees tight as a coat of gliddens not without ribands or the great socko of kilimanjaro all these yahoos headed west, have they got names to be blessed? bring me the ho-hum, fly it up here verbatim an eggshell carbon 12 writ in a foreign tongue as though johnny vast had no idea where his howl came from and fetch us the cretin who et my heart that's what makes it green, does it not? we live in a factory of the future on the edge of a lip with miniature cowboys banished forever the precision of faraway herbalists spilling the beans "our desires expectorate dutifully" slobbers crow bob an ol' yakima stuntjockey son of cannut uproots the tree of reason roost, wraith of the treeshirt twinges until and when courage is inflated to pressure sufficiently pigeon balloon per square inch chest looking comical enough to glance, getting by the smoketrees you reckon it's only gene our ofay autry slit-eyed slimewinder triggering his getaway lately ghosted into christmas while all the leaves go blind only the shine inside perception lights the street yours the campfire that mocks the sun never met anyone outside your head who didn't shimmer fragile timber what i mean woody is you look swell like them indian lakes in summer air kisses on a nudist clipboard, offbeat green tops o' trees everything ritz crackers in the polluted lake wrappers blue moon mobile homes for executive cornhuskers shimmering a song cigarette snorkel on fishlip puffing dawn -----------------------------------------------------------------------ii. removing the obelisk >from immediate dictation and against my will "i"s the most embarrassing character in the world a deflector from antiquity pretending to be italic just another mook on hungry hill "i wanna got to collage i want sun on the phone to talk me down from here nice embalmer. easy boy!" fucks it have to do with %me%? this crown ain't small enough for the both of us? gets so downright overused jellyglass one has to laugh another thing those bones do -make your bed lump back in on the jungle chaise apache horsefly -hi little soon to be dead buzz! later silence the only visitor from another noise -----------------------------------------------------------------------iii. parental guidance amnesia sweat the emptiness composed of sponges darryl adam ahab degroot petroglyphs of gringotude a near myth childhood hovercraft near a 16 foot insect die meistersinger pouts so stream of air might partly stroke goldfish theories of cliquot jugglers with a ducking movement limberdemain over fruit floors lip an osculation on the glass kisser from the suicidal kissery, a squeegee mops any loss of face our bunkers in addition to the standard facilities provided for comfort have cuspidors for the use of psychiatrists strategically sick at heart, nowadays sick a boy's own wax among his bees and shrapnell blowing salve on the conjured static, spangled auras clocked on the draw out padres of the dormitory contagion on the hour -----------------------------------------------------------------------iv. the permanence of whim to providence begin in purgatory where lamb rassles chasm and faults shoot halter of their fanfaronade nixing any vita nuova dynamo nictate deal then rent a capsicum and travel nonpareil through the baboon lancet the equipage of a whoop anticipating sinkers of a low-rent wagonette in a dexter diluvium cocoon-steaming the small tales of croupiers and piazzas yawned at the local salutation where brad bibbler sucks his beggar's double quick as lily over the paddy in a strabismus off pulp space young orchards of heartburn licking the salt misogamist as you turn spangle and motor towards sutton, sunburn and snail thievish as a gospel lottery heard on the racket outside lack the low rider ruin of chickasaw chepachets turbo charging browsers through the ghetto streaks damsons lit up like hooves of despite in twaddle blue denim brooks across their chests or right here in blackstone your everlastings ignoring the dry bones of that stranded drench -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------potter, 'edward schizohands: the postmodern gothic body', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-potter-edward.txt edward schizohands: the postmodern gothic body by russell a. potter dept. of english colby college <rapotter@colby.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by russell a. potter, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world . . . while taking a stroll outdoors . . . he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father and a mother . . . .^1^ --deleuze and guattari, _anti-oedipus_ [1] a schizophrenic out for a walk . . . thus deleuze and guattari frame the peripatetic, or as they would say, the nomadic position of their classic critique of freud's oedipus complex. the world of this schizo subject is profoundly machine-made, "everything is a machine. celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to those of the body."^2^ and it is in just such a way that edward scissorhands, in tim burton's film of the same name, enters the world; left alone and unfinished in the huge gothic mansion of his dead inventor, not born but built, his only company other dusty machines, filling his days trimming intricate ornamental hedges with his bladed hands. and yet edward's own mark is that of the wound, for everything he touches is cut, severed, disjointed. in contrast, down below the mountain on which his mansion stands dwells a sedately postmodern collection of pastel-hued modular homes, each with its nuclear, oedipal family, its pastel-hued automobile, and its well-watered, neatly manicured lawn. [2] and yet to simply construe _edward scissorhands_ as an incarnation of deleuze and guattari's schizo would be to do both texts an unwitting violence, for like the prose monolith of the _anti-oedipus_, _edward scissorhands_ discloses a cut, a blade, that severs the very narrative and theoretical strands that would seem to hold it together; coming-apart is what they are all about. just so milton, in a moment of delirious excess, wrote comes the blind fury, with th' abhorred shears and slits the thin-spun life.^3^ edward's hands, though, are not hands of fury but hands of desire, of a desire that inescapably wounds everything it embraces. in this sense, they might appear to be thoroughly oedipal hands--if one reads the wound they inflict as the mark of castration. yet this wound is deeper and wider, it is the social wound which bleeds out the deferred pain of a banalized generation, the stain under the plush beige carpet, the leak in the somnifacient waterbeds of a suburban existence so attenuated that it has become, in baudrillard's terms, a mere simulacrum of itself. [3] television and film, of course, are replete with such plateaus, whether it is in the encapsulated fragments of america's _funniest home videos_ or in the hyperreal simulations of the "holodeck" on board the starship enterprise in _star trek: the next generation_. yet _edward scissorhands_ stands somehow apart, a strange territory where the passions lost in the kitschy planet of suburbia u.s.a. are recovered via--what else?--the gothic. with its visceral excesses, its gargoyles of blood and sensuality, the gothic offers a perfect compensation for the dead historical machinations of the postmodern. founded itself in a reconstruction of a past that never was, the gothic does not re-enact history, but withstands it (and its loss). tim burton's twist--and a brilliant one it is--is to conjoin this vividly baroque gothic with the industrial gothic of charlie chaplain's _modern times_, where men re-enact catatonically the stiff and jerky motions of the machines they service, and that service them. like the nefarious automated feeding-machine that nearly drives charlie to distraction, the principal of the burtonesque (as of the chaplinesque) machine is that it do less well something which could be done far more easily by hand. the inventor's early inventions, like his cookie-making assembly line, precisely re-enact this scene, breaking eggs and cutting cookies with overcharged zeal; edward, lacking precisely hands, is himself a consummate machine, in that he does everything less well, except cutting. therein lies his mad art, and with it, at least temporarily, he reconfigures the postmodern aesthetic, scattering bulbous clowns, dolphins, and dancers among the previously sedate shrubberies of burton's postmodern suburbia. [4] deleuze and guattari's nomadic constructions of desiring-production give us, i would argue, an economics as well as a stylistics of the gothic genre, both in its novelistic and cinematic avatars. the two-phase engine of desiring production is the pivot through which this structure articulates itself. in the first phase, the organs-partial objects--bodily parts disjointed from the whole--appear as persecuting machines: schizo voices undercut reality with paranoiac narratives, dead hands crawl out of the grave to avenge their killer, telltale hearts give the lie to narratorial sanity. in the second phase, the body-without-organs, or bwo, re-absorbs these partial and persecutorial fragments: the infamous schizo judge schreber swallows his larynx accidentally, but is healed by the "miraculating" rays that seem to radiate from his anus; the blob absorbs its victims into an undifferentiated amoebic mass; the golem returns to clay. [5] edward, too, inhabits this dual movement; while he is gentle, his immaculate and lethal hands have a mind all their own; the same hands which shape surreal topiary hedges with a gardener's grace "accidentally" slash edward's own face, and the faces of those he loves. on a broader scale, edward himself is the persecutorial agent of the suburban enclave whose practiced conformities he unwittingly shreds. exhibited at a neighborhood barbecue, displayed in a classroom "show-n-tell," a guest on a television talk-show, in every instance he severs and disjoints the body of the socius. peg's endeavor to graft edward back into family and community leads instead to the rupture of the community's own unarticulated sutures of desire, to the re-opening of scars that not even the "miraculating" cinematic machine of "love" can heal. the drama of _edward scissorhands_, consequently, is not the persecution and destruction of the "monster," but rather the implosion of the oedipal family, which is disclosed as monstrous--the drama, in short of anti-oedipus. [6] just as in deleuze and guattari's work, _edward scissorhands_ mobilizes against the oedipal/capitalistic strictures of desire. the unfinished thing about edward is not the oedipal signifier of the phallus, but rather his hands, producers of sensation, the quintessential synecdoche of sensitivity (handle with care, hand-made, touched, touching). in schizo-analytic terms, the hands, while "partial" like all desiring-machines, bring with their overload of sensation the illusion of becoming-complete. in drawings of the body scaled to represent the relative number of nerve endings in various organs, the hands loom grotesquely large over an insectine body, their mass figuring an excess of sensation. in the place of these sensory machines, edward has fists full of blades, machines of anti-production, machines that can do only injury, even when he reaches to stroke or embrace. as much as edward is gentle, his hands are remorseless; they twitch involuntarily at the approach of the unknown, and when his emotions overwhelm him they cut maniacally at bushes, clothing, and people. [7] it would be hard to imagine a scene more traumatic than that in which the inventor, just as he is on the verge of presenting edward with hands, falls to the floor in the spasms of death. when the gift is revealed, edward's eyes open wide, and he briefly attempts to touch these new hands in his scissored grasp. then, as edward looks on, the pleasure in the inventor's eyes is replaced with a look of panic; as he slumps to the floor the human hands are thrust onto edward's bladed fingers and fall, broken into fragments along with the sensations they might have produced. reaching out to caress the inventor's face, edward instead leaves a long red gash on his cheek. the oedipal crisis of desire-as-lack (%manque%) is subsumed within the larger crises of desiring-production, whose machines, as deleuze and guattari put it, "only work when they break down." edward's problematic humanity begins with this breakage, but within the gothic hallways of the inventor's mansion it remains unproductive, a celibate machine whose tasks never extend beyond keeping the hedges trimmed in a garden no-one but edward sees. [8] this isolation is broken when peg, the neighborhood avon lady, and as such a (minor) agent of the capitalistic machine, comes to call. overcoming her shock at the first sight of edward, she recovers herself as soon as she sees the cuts on his cheeks (the narcissistic touch, too, opens only wounds for edward). "at the very least, let me give you a good astringent," she says as she pats the terrified edward's cheeks with a moistened cotton ball, "and this will help to prevent infection." when she takes edward home, she unwittingly opens a crisis within the unreal reality of her neighborhood; having brought the "real" (gothic edward, whose schizo hands will make the %unheimlich% out of the %allzuheimlich%) within the capitalist machine, all other values come into question--or rather, the absence of value as such is disclosed, as soon becomes evident in the dinner-table moralizing of peg's husband bill. edward's true allies, however, are not the adults, who have already taken up their places within the capitalistic desiring-machines (cd players, stereos, kitchen appliances, waterbeds), but with children and adolescents, whose crisis is suddenly shown to be not domestic but fundamentally social. by re-enacting the anti-oedipal moment, edward breaks open the "family unit" and discloses a cut that runs across the boundaries between the "nuclear" families in peg's neighborhood and the social production of desire. [9] as the schizo, the outcast, edward poses a threat not only to the "family," but to all the other microfascistic machines that had guaranteed the inviolability of the unreal suburb. esmerelda, the local born-again christian, denounces edward as bearing "the mark of satan," and attributes the problems which edward's presence produces to his diabolical mission (edward's answer, carving her shrubbery into a grinning demon's head, gives a perfect schizo gloss on her paranoia). the hands shall i even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? i waked one morning in the beginning of last june from a dream, of which all i could recover was, that i had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase i saw a gigantic hand in armor . . . .^4^ --horace walpole, of _the castle of otranto_ [10] the hands--%les mains% (french amplifies the schizo by placing "hands" in a neutral and impersonal form)--floating and disembodied in the opening credits of _scissorhands_, hands that will never find their way to edward's body. if the brain is coded as the seat of identity (the transfer of brains in _frankenstein_ and its heirs, the suspended brain common to so many science fiction scenarios)^5^--the hands are coded as the site of sensibility. the hands are right there in the "laboratory" scene; the horror at their transfer, their stitches is at least as great as the horror of the transferred brain. "there's nothing to fear! look! no blood, no decay . . . just a few stitches." so henry frankenstein comforts his assistant when the monster's hands arouse his terror. the horror of the transplanted hands is echoed by henry's own admixture of pride and fear at the work of his own hands--"think of it! the brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body i made in [sic] my own hands (holds up his hands and gazes at them) . . . in my own hands!" [11] henry's lines, perhaps inadvertently, conflate two metonymic deployments of the hands: "a body i made with my own hands" and "(his) life is in my hands." a similar condensation--though visual rather than linguistic--occurs in _mad love_ (1932). a concert pianist named orlac loses his hands in an accident, but is given new hands (taken from an executed murderer) by a demented surgeon named gogol (peter lorre). these hands, however, seem to have retained their murderous propensity; orlac's playing deteriorates as the hands restlessly finger various lethal implements. at the same time, driven by desire for orlac's wife, gogol attempts to drive orlac insane by visiting him in disguise, donning artificial hands and a neck brace so as to convince him that he is the murderer come back from the dead. orlac's hands eventually come to the rescue, however; when gogol assaults his wife, orlac kills him with a single skilled throw of a knife. [12] this theme has been repeated (with somewhat less success) many times, most recently in _body parts_ (1991), which in many ways is a kind of remake of _mad love_. yet the re-suturing of the severed hand has hardly put an end to the terror of the hand all by itself. in _the hand_ (1981), michael caine plays a cartoonist whose severed hand embarks on a murder spree. suggestively, caine undergoes psychotherapy, and becomes convinced that the disembodied hand is a mere hallucinatory projection of his own murderous desire--a plausible solution, at least until the hand sneaks up on caine's therapist and strangles her while caine watches from across the room. the hand, it would seem, has a mind of its own, if only because of its extraordinary intensity of sensation; a severed hand takes with it all that is palpable, caressable, the feelable--or brings with it all the callous(ed) insensitivity society attributes to a murderer, much as the "criminal brain" that frankenstein transplants into his monster in the 1931 film version. [13] to lose a hand, of course, is one thing; never to have one is another, and to have something else in their place still another. edward is the consummate guest, well-trained in etiquette by the inventor, but when he cuts the family meatloaf with his blades, not everyone will eat it--he has touched it with his hands, and it becomes in a sense unclean. as the opening scene of the film frames it, there once was a man "who had scissors for hands," that is, both in the place of and as hands. in the place of hands, they are a disaster, cutting those edward tries to help or hold; as hands they are the producers of his sudden success--as hedge-trimmer, dog-clipper, barber. a number of sexual double-entendres rotate around edward's hands, as the women in the neighborhood fantasize about their erotic possibilities: joyce: oooh. completely different. neighbor 1: no kidding. neighbor 2: he's so... neighbor 3: mysterious. joyce: do you imagine those hands are hot or cold? and just think about what a single snip could do... neighbor 1: or *undo* the men, for their part, are equally unnerved about edward's hands, but their uneasiness is translated into humor: "whoa, that's a heck of a handshake you got there, ed." one elderly male barbecue-goer does confide in edward, however: "i have my own infirmity. never did me a bit of harm. took some shrapnel during the war, and ever since then, i can't feel a thing. not a damn thing. listen--don't let anyone ever tell you you have a handicap." edward is drawn out of this conversation, though, by joyce and the other women, who line up to feed him mouthfuls of "ambrosia salad" and other earthly delights. their feeding marks the ineptitude of edward's hands (at that point employed as shishkebabs), as also their maternal and sexual interest in his body. the fabricated body professor: and you really believe that you can bring life to the dead? henry frankenstein: that body is not dead. it has never lived. i created it. i made it with my own hands from the bodies i took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere... [14] from its inception, the gothic has posited and reproduced a legion of partial, disjointed, or decomposed body parts, which by their very existence accuse the waking world of a fundamental illegitimacy. the giant, disembodied hand whose mysterious appearance in walpole's _castle of otranto_ (1761) gives the lie to prince manfred's claims of nobility; the detachable hand that horrifies sir bertrand in anna barbauld's "sir bertrand" (1792); the severed hand that establishes the guilt of its former owner in mary-anne radcliffe's _manfrone_ (1828)--function as the organs partial-objects which disclose the founding aporia of the socius. the old man's blind eye, and the relentless beating of his disembodied heart, speak the %j'accuse% of poe's "the tell-tale heart," as does the barrage of ventriloquized voices in _wieland_; it ceases to matter whether they are "real" or "hallucinatory," they are real enough to drive rationality into madness. [15] something still more deeply terrifying takes place when, as in _frankenstein_, these body parts are assembled to form the unwhole-y whole of the monstrous body. the horror and revulsion of this body is its disjunction--its organs have been separately acquired from a shadowy contingent of cadavers, then sewed back together in such a way that the stitch-marks show. the stitches in the makeup for boris karloff's early film personation of frankenstein terrify because they disclose the stitches within ourselves, the "dissolving sutures" that transgress our own body, inasmuch as it traverses the amorphous plane of the body without organs. this "bwo," as it is often abbreviated, is a kind of anti-body, a repository of the not-body; organs cling to it as parasites or (in deleuze and guattari's own metaphor) "like medals jingling on the chest of a wrestler." the oedipal, familial, oral-anal organization that has been imposed on the body exacts a terrific price--its price is no less than the bwo, whose desire will never be eaten by a mouth or contained by an anus. [16] the fabricated body of the gothic is also a shadow of the terror of libidinal organization; it is positioned between the oedipalized body with its territorialized zones and the zoneless bwo. existing partly in both worlds, it is a threat to both, as well as a loving secret; no one who has kissed a lover's scar can deny it. every scar is potentially a mouth or an anus, or both--a kind of opening unmarked by libidinal fascisms. the fabricated body, covered with scars, is an erotic feast as well as a terror (that is, a tearer) of flesh. edward's facial scars are self-inflicted, "accidental"--and yet peg boggs spends the better part of edward's suburban sojourn trying to find the particular admixture of cosmetics which will conceal them. "we'll cover up the scars and start with a completely smooth surface," peg muses at one point, but her efforts result only in a gooey paste that makes edward look worse than ever. [17] peg's desire to smooth edward's scars thus can be read not only as a desire to erase the terror of edward's hands but as reaction against the horror that edward's entire body is an assemblage, a mass of sutures, a fabricated and anti-oedipal anti-territory. we can see this not only through edward's leather armor (or is it his skin?), which jangles with studs and metal buckles, but through the scene staged as "the etiquette lesson." here edward, lying in bed, thinks back to the impossible moment of his assemblage. as the camera pans around the room in the opening shot, we hear the inventor's voice declaiming a lecture on etiquette: "should the man rise when he accepts his cup of tea?" the camera pans past an oversize book, its pages turned by a sudden breeze; at the word "man" we see edward's bodily development. in the early sketches he resembles others of the inventor's robots, with an egg-like torso and a spherical head; in later drawings arms are attached, and the torso is filled out; the face is given features, the arms a more hominid form. like the inventor's other creatures, edward is held together by a series of belts--figurations, like frankenstein's scars, of his body's partiality. we see the addition of the scissor hands, and their (unfulfilled) replacement by human ones. [18] when the camera arrives at edward, we see that he is not yet himself assembled; his torso and head rest on a kind of workbench, with arms and legs lying laid nearby. at length the inventor closes the book of etiquette, proclaiming it "boring," and opens a book of poems (which turn out to be limericks). in a voice of mock-solemnity, he intones there was an old man from the cape who made himself garments of crepe. when asked, "will they tear?" he replied, "here and there, but they keep such a beautiful shape." the "clothing of crepe" (pre)figures edward's own fragile skin, the fragility of the inventor's wrinkled skin, the fragility of his body and bodies in general. edward, not yet bodied himself, smiles tentatively, and the inventor parentally intones "that's right. go ahead, smile. it's funny!" yet the paradox here is that the inventor himself is both more and less than a parent, and edward more and less than a child. edward truly possesses language before he possesses a body, and as a result he can consciously inhabit zones which others will only know in dreams--and ("on the other hand") he can make mistakes no human child would make. to be born, and to grow, in an oedipalized family is one thing--and to be built, to come into being partially whole and yet wholly partial, is another. edward's inception is not a conjunction but a disjunction, as the planned hands are broken and lost (they shatter upon impact) and he remains not incomplete but unfinished. [19] edward's secrets--that no amount of make-up will cover our scars, that the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do with society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows, food), that our own sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of extortion or holding-hostage of our bodies--are, in the end, too much to bear. jim, as the quintessential fascist, wants him out: "you destroy everything you touch!" he yells. kim, moved by the uncanny recognition that her home is not her home, her parents are not her parents, her boyfriend is not her boyfriend, alone knows and moves to edward's side. but she cannot remain, not at least if this film is to have something we could call an ending, something that can re-contain just enough of the terror it discloses so that we can all go back home to our waterbeds and sleep in peace. edward is dead: long live edward [20] many film critics, such as pauline kael, have faulted _edward scissorhands_ for what they see as its maudlin sensibility (kael calls it "frankenstein's monster by way of l. frank baum")^6^ or its melodramatic denouement. all this assumes, of course, that some generic codes have been violated, or at least that the audience has somehow been led to expect some other kind of ending. leaving aside the fact that the gothic itself is historically an outgrowth of the sentimental, there is no reason to expect that the drama at work in this film be univocal, even at the start (something which is signalled immediately in the juxtaposition of suburban tract homes and gothic castle). i would argue indeed that several filmic machines are at work here, each with its own imperatives: the gothic romance (as in _wuthering heights_--storm-crossed lovers against the world of social conventions), the dark hero genre (this was after all the film tim burton made immediately after _batman_), the adolescent horror (_carrie_), not to mention the sensitive-creature-from-another-world (long before _e.t._, there was _the day the earth stood still_ (1951) and _revenge of the creature_ (1955)). [21] yet the strongest narrative underlying _edward scissorhands_, as i have suggested above, is clearly that of the filmic _frankenstein_. and, as the inheritor of that tradition, edward is driven to re-enact--albeit with many suggestive differences--the inexorable expulsion and persecution of the monstrous. the scene is so familiar as to be a cliche; all one needs is a few dozen "peasants" armed with torches storming the door of some castle. yet burton's film displaces that cliche by rendering ambiguous any comfortable distances of time, place, or social class- in the process indicting the very audiences most likely to view his film. indeed, by taking edward out of the mansion and into the suburbs burton re-enacts the history of the gothic; "mrs. radcliffe" (of _udolpho_) moves in next door to "mrs. smith" (of mrs. smith's pies), and it turns out they have known each other all along. [22] in the commodity-fetishism of burton's suburbs, chronology is deliberately scrambled, such that commodities, like the clip-art cutouts of postmodern collages, drift about in their own free play of signification. 90s appliances, such as cd players, exist side-by-side with 50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps; the parents are from 60s sitcoms but the kids are from _21 jump street_. the cars--at least those we see up-close--are of early-70s vintage, as are the houses seen in exterior shots. yet even here, the pastel coloration--one might even say, colorization--of these houses refuses a simplistic mimesis. like andy warhol's brightly colored silkscreens of mao tse-tung or marilyn monroe, these houses are in effect coloring-book reproductions whose hyperveracity gives the lie to realism. the final effect is a kind of timeless time, a place without chronology or geography--in short, the suburbs as seen by those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history. [23] yet the apparent smoothness of this untrammelled suburban territory belies the alienation--both of others and of itself--which is the founding ethos of the suburbs. in her recent study, _belonging in america: reading between the lines_, constance perin argues that one thing that suburbia u.s.a. has always done, and done well, is to stare at, ostracize, alienate, and expel those (re)marked as different.^7^ the modalities of suburban demonization indeed seem to follow remarkably similar patterns, whether the person so demonized is a newcomer, a retiree, a "handicapped" person, or a someone "just passing through." edward, while initially welcomed almost manically, is soon regarded with deep suspicion, especially after the break-in at jim's parents' house; by serving as the scapegoat for this crime, edward marks both himself and his adoptive "family" as outcasts. [24] it is kim's boyfriend jim who proves to be the ultimate local agent of this suburban fascism, just as he is the ultimate oedipal subject. jim's father keeps his electronic toys in a locked room outfitted with state-of-the-art burglar alarms; as jim himself says in a dinnertable jab, "they keep things pretty much locked up. my father has his own room for his stuff to make sure i can't get any use of it." for "when the family ceases to be a unit of production and of reproduction . . . it is father-mother that we consume"^8^: kim: but that's breaking and entering! jim: look, my parents have insurance up the rear, okay? what'll it cost 'em--a little hassle? that's about it. a week and my dad'll have a new and better everything. kim: we can't! jim: look, there's a guy who'll give us cash for this stuff! kim: jim, i don't want to. jim: what--you don't want us to have our own van like denny's when we could be all by ourselves whenever we like? huh? with a mattress in the back? kim: well, why can't you just do it? jim: because my father keeps the damn room locked. we need edward to get in. kim: well, can't you take the key, like, when he's sleeping or something? jim: you don't understand. the only thing he holds on to tighter is his dick. kim: huhm... jim: c'mon, kim. razor blades'll do anything for you! kim: that's not true! jim: oh no? why don't you ask him? [25] in the end, edward performs this sacrifice for kim, whom he has loved from the moment he sees her face in the mandatory assemblage of family photographs (all families are simulacra, d&g might say) that adorns peg's mantelpiece.^9^ and yet kim does not know until some time later that edward knew all along that the house they were breaking into was jim's, and that he knowingly committed this crime for her. when she finally learns the truth, she recognizes at once what bataille might call the sovereign abandon of edward's gesture and despises jim. jim's recognition of kim's rejection sets off his maniacal determination to destroy edward, even if he can only alienate kim further by doing so. thus, in a classically gothic denouement, kim's shift of love and allegiance exposes the inhumanity of the "human" and the humanity of the "inhuman." [26] yet there is something more here, something beyond a mere farce of the oedipal drama. in schizoanalytic terms, edward has not merely broken the oedipal equation, he has short-circuited it. edward, like frankenstein's monster in the 1931 film, is somehow allied to electricity; asked by the talk-show host about whether he has a girlfriend, edward touches the microphone stand with his hand, grounding it out and spraying sparks all over the stage. now, having taken for a moment jim's place in the oedipal chain, he draws its flow outward, away from the nuclear family; he %grounds it out%, unbinding its libidinal cathexes. edward does not simply castrate (one knife would be sufficient for that--why have ten?), he unhinges all organs from their oedipal affixations, he pulls the surface of the body without organs taut, turning velcro into teflon. the oedipal crisis is itself placed in crisis; its "undoing" turns out not to be castration after all, but indifference. [27] jim, left not only without the phallus but without recourse to the oedipal narrative which offered his only prospect of ever claiming it, is thrown into a frenzied spiral of jealousy. he is activated, as it were, as the community's agent to expel the intruder who has threatened its libidinal and social borders. no one is willing to throw edward out, but no one is willing to stop jim from throwing him out. the local policeman, suggestively, is on edward's side, giving an undertone of the many films of the 50s which implicitly or explicitly took up the question of *un*popular justice (e.g. _to kill a mockingbird_), in the place of what he regards as an imaginary threat, he drives to the mansion's gate and fires his revolver into the air, telling the neighbors that "it's over" and that they "can all go home now." but where is "home"? jim's not there, wherever it is; even as edward is running, slicing off the clothes he wore during his stay at the boggs's, jim is swigging jack daniel's in the back of his friend's van, getting his "courage" up for the inevitable confrontation. [28] while following the conventions to a point, the final scenes of the film offer a subtle yet crucial set of differences--differences which, as in other parts of the film, initiate slippages that belie their apparent conventionality. edward flees to his "castle," with kim and jim right behind him; the suburban "peasants" are held in reserve. jim sets about killing edward with mock-eastwood machismo, first with a gun, and (when that fails) by breaking beams over his back. kim intervenes, and ends up atop the prostrate edward; in one uncanny moment she grasps edward's hand and menaces jim with it. when edward and jim face off a moment later, it seems that kim has finally given edward the cue for what he must do, as he snips the thin-spun life out of jim's chest with a single thrust of a finger. locked out of his parents' oedipal sanctum, and superseded by edward in kim's affections, jim dies quickly and easily--as deleuze and guattari say, "4, 3, 2, 1, 0- oedipus is a race for death."^10^ his body, discovered below the window, does not even hold enough interest to make the neighbors linger. what the neighbors want is edward, and kim gives "him" to them; descending the stairs, she seizes upon one of the inventor's discarded alternate hands. "he's dead," she proclaims to the neighbors, waving the hand aloft: "see?" [29] this disembodied hand, of course, is no guarantee, but it is readily taken as one by the assembled crowd. one thinks for a strange moment about freddie kruger's bladed glove in _nightmare on elm street_; while the glove itself may be removed and hidden in the basement, it doesn't prevent freddie from coming back (not only in that film, but in a long string of lucrative sequels). yet the horror of _edward scissorhands_ is a veritable antipodes to _elm street_ and its sequels. its ethic is not the fear of the nightmare other, but a realization that in expelling otherness is born self-alienation, an alienation which edward and his hands disclose, and the crisis of adolescence understands, but the more thoroughly oedipalized adults have forgotten, plowed under, surrounded hedges and fences. %oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men / or with his nails he'll dig it up again!% [30] and so the film closes in upon itself, even though closure is not quite what it offers. we pan back again from edward's house, and into the window of the room where kim, now white-haired, sits recounting the tale of edward to her granddaughter. one wonders aloud: and what was her history, the history of some other love, that has descended into this young girl who sits under a heavy coverlet listening to her grandmother's tale. and the difference: "you see, before he came down, it never snowed . . . but now, it does." the snow, the flurry of ice-flakes, turns out to be the detritus from edward's relentless sculpting, a statement of love via surreality and excess, even as edward effectively is pushed back into a mythic realm, to the status of a kind of local sky-god. a fairy tale after all--or is it? in some strange way, the frame-narrative is unable to quite contain edward- he is neither killed in the manner of frankenstein's monster, nor saved (like the beast in _beauty and the beast_). kim pronounces what ought in the circumstances to be the magic words: "i love you"--and yet nothing happens. edward remains untransformed and unassimilated; his ice sculptures freeze time, and in them kim remains a young woman dancing in the snow. immaculate in their lifelessness, these figures of ice themselves constitute a kind of machine, a memory palace, where edward is not the fabricated but the fabricator. from the shreds of these fabrications, snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing--and *un*doing. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _anti-oedipus_, trans. by robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lee. (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1983), 2. ^2^ _anti-oedipus_, 2. ^3^ john milton, "lycidas," lines 75-6, in _the complete poetry of john milton_, ed. john t. shawcross (new york: doubleday, 1971), 160. ^4^ horace walpole, letter to william cole (march 9, 1765), qtd. in _the castle of otranto, the mysteries of udolpho, northanger abbey_, ed. andrew wright (ny: holt, rinehart and winston, 1963), xi. ^5^ see for example _donavan's brain_ (1953), in which the brain of a dead millionaire keeps a scientist chained to its will; _the man without a body_ (1958), in which a man's talking head is kept artificially alive; _the brain that wouldn't die_ (1959), where a man preserves his dead wife's head in a pan of nutrient solution, and embarks on a quest for a body to attach to it--or more recently the well-known _star trek_ episode where mr. spock's brain is stolen and wired into a planet-regulating computer network. ^6^ see pauline kael, "the current cinema: new age daydreams." _the new yorker_ vol. 66 no. 44 (dec. 17, 1990): 115-121. ^7^ see the suggestive chapters "penalizing newcomers," "tattling on neighbors," and "imperfect people," all in _belonging in america: reading between the lines_ (madison: u of wisconsin p, 1988). ^8^ _anti-oedipus_, 265. ^9^ edward's own schizo assemblage (which significantly is not *on* the mantelpiece but in the fireplace) consists of newspaper clippings with headlines such as "boy born without eyes reads with his hands," "i'll never diet again," and "newlyweds, 90 & . . . to have a baby"--an anti-oedipal anti-family whose membership is open only to those (re)marked as singular. ^10^ _anti-oedipus_, 359. [various], 'letters', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-[various]-letters.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.993. part 1/1, total size 11063 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- letters _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu re: kip canfield's essay, "the microstructure of logocentricism: sign models in derrida and smolensky," in pmc v.3 n.3. a reply by paul miers, department of english, towson state university. connectionism and its consequences by paul miers e7e4mie@toe.towson.edu copyright (c) 1993 by paul miers, all rights reserved. this text maybe used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provision of the u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] kip canfield's article in the last issue of _postmodern culture_ is one of the first pieces of critical theory to discuss the implications of the revolutionary paradigm shift now taking place in the cognitive sciences. the movement inspiring that shift, generally called connectionism, offers a powerful and still controversial alternative to the standard model of mental representation which has more or less dominated western philosophy at least since the enlightenment (bechtel). as canfield notes in his comparison of paul smolensky, one of the leading connectionists, with jacques derrida, the connectionist critique parallels in many ways the deconstruction of traditional semiotics and structuralism. but, as canfield also notes, connectionist theory does more than deconstruct the old paradigm: it also purports to offer an alternative account of representation, a genuine copernican revolution which changes our view of mental life from a symbol centered token/type model to a network based vector/matrix account (churchland). [2] since canfield focuses almost exclusively on smolensky and derrida, however, readers of his essay not already familiar with the paradigm wars in cognitive science may not see just how profound the connectionist revolution could be. for that reason, i want to offer here a brief note on the consequences of connectionism which follows up on a point i have made elsewhere regarding the implications of connectionism for critical theory (miers). [3] the attraction of connectionism for cognitive science is its potential for providing a "natural" theory of information processing in the brain. all the evidence indicates that the brain itself is organized as a massively distributed parallel processor (edelman); what the great debate is about is how to reconcile the neural evidence with the standard, classical theory of mental representation. classical theory claims that mental representations are the product of arbitrary atomic symbols (i.e., signs rather than symbols in the coleridgean sense) operated on by formal syntactic rules. connectionist theory, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that neural networks have no one to-one mappings, and that they respond to input vectors not by invoking rules, but by dynamic transformations of the network (churchland). the real issue then is not a simplistic opposition between atomic and distributed elements or between arbitrary and motivated symbols; it is, rather, the problem of explaining how the brain produces the apparent formalism of symbolic representation from the non classical structure of neural networks. [4] in broad terms, there are two explanations for this puzzle, the first of which i call weak connectionism or neo symbolism and the other i term strong or pan-connectionism (miers; see also bechtel). in the weak version, the logic of neural networks serves simply to implement some version of the traditional token/type symbol processing which the classical cognitivists like fodor see as essential for mental representation (fodor, "connectionism and cognitive architecture"). in the weak case, the classical cognitivists can, with some modifications, "save the appearance" of the symbolic paradigm. even though connectionist processes may infiltrate and shape whole aspects of mental life, there remains a unique domain of rational or propositional thought governed by the formalisms of symbolic structures. as fodor has consistently argued for years, not all of the messy flux of what passes through our heads needs be structured like a formal language, and fodor is quite willing to concede much of mental life to freudian and even skinnerian accounts (_the language of thought_ 200). [5] strong connectionism, on the other hand, is much more radical and leads to a rather uncanny picture of the apparent symbol processing capabilities of the mind. strong connectionism claims that symbolic representation is, in fact, a rather shallow illusion which is being approximated or mimed by a wholly connectionist strategy that evolved in the brains of mammals long before the appearance of humans. in this account, our sense that there are atomic tokens is being created by a series of vector/matrix interactions, and our notion that tokens belong to some double system of message and code or object language/meta-language is a belated allegory. there are only vectors operating within matrices, and the language of thought is in reality the algebra for convolving vectors and matrices (churchland). our received notions of deep structure, symbolic orders, even the unconscious, are therefore historical constructs, reinforced by external contingencies and controls. the language of thought is not structured like a language; indeed language cannot be structured like a language since language itself is fabricated by a non-classical strategy for representation. [6] i have argued in favor of strong connectionism (miers), but which, if any, of these two versions turns out to be the case is still an open question. the symbolists argue that connectionist models fail to meet the formal requirement for symbolic representation (requirements, it should be noted, which must be taken seriously) (fodor "connectionism"), while the connectionists point to increasingly sophisticated programs which have begun to meet (or more accurately approximate) these requirements (bechtel). the point i want to make here, however, is that both the strong and the weak version of connectionism have significant consequences for a certain kind of ironic postmodernism most often identified with lyotard and baudrillard. it might appear at first glance that this postmodernism would be vindicated by the triumph of strong connectionism since strong connectionism undercuts classical representation. my claim is that ironic postmodernism loses either way, because it is wedded to a particular account of representation still tied to the symbol-centered token/type account--albeit a deconstructed, paradoxical version--of the classical system. in short, ironic postmodern can only think itself within the paradigm of the sign and is highly dependent on that paradigm remaining in place as a failed system. [7] if weak connectionism proves to be the proper model for representation, then what we will see is a return to classical theory and a demonstration that at least in some realm it is possible to defend the classical account of reason, indeed that the classical account of reason is rooted in natural evolution. in this case, the postmodern ironists will have bet on the wrong reading of the symbolic order, and their arcane jargon will rapidly look as out of date as the discourse of ptolemaic astronomy. but if strong connectionism proves true, that is, if representation is driven by the logic of vector/matrix interactions, then ironic postmodernism also fails because of its dependency on the deconstructed sign. the triumph of strong connectionism would support the claim that ironic postmodernism is simply a very late, very belated and desperate version of modernism (cascardi). the true end of modernism then would come not with the deconstruction of the classical system, a deconstruction which leaves in place and cultivates the ruins of the system. modernism would end, rather, when the recipe for making the illusion of signs is finally revealed. [8] what is most radical about strong connectionism is its claim that such a recipe exists and that it can be formulated. this recipe for thought is going to include both sensory and propositional modes in a single model of figural forms. ironic postmodernism tells us that we live in an economy of undecipherable hieroglyphs, condemned to know but unable to change their fictive, arbitrary status. strong connectionism suggest that we might be able to refigure this notion and see ourselves as living in the first post-symbolic culture, a culture where we know how to make and unmake signs, a culture where it is possible to limit and resist the sublime allure of unlimited semiosis, a culture which knows itself to be a natural and necessary illusion. ---------------------------------------------------------------- works cited bechtel, william and abrahamsen, adele. _connectionism and the mind: an introduction to parallel processing in networks_. oxford: blackwell, 1991. canfield, kip. "the microstructure of logocentricism: sign models in derrida and smolensky." _postmodern culture_ may (1993). cascardi, anthony j. _the subject of modernity_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1992. churchland, patricia s. and sejnowski, terrence. _the computational brain_. cambridge, ma: mit press, 1992. edelman, gerald. _neural darwinism: the theory of neuronal group selection_. new york: basic books, 1987. fodor, jerry. _the language of thought_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1975. ---, and pylyshlyn, zenon. "connectionism and cognitive architecture." _cognition_ 28 (1988): 3-71. miers, paul. "the other side of representation: critical theory and the new cognitivism." _mln_ 107 (1992): 950-975. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------watten, 'post-soviet subjectivity in arkadii dragomoshchenko and ilya kabakov', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-watten-postsoviet.txt post-soviet subjectivity in arkadii dragomoshchenko and ilya kabakov by barrett watten university of california, san diego _postmodern culture_ v.3, n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by barrett watten, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. while it has often been said that since the purported "fall of communism" the soviet union has become in reality a collection of third world countries with nuclear weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth. it is the "second world"--and what is that? (watten, in davidson, 23) subjectivity is not the basis for being a russian person. . . . "protestants," said arkadii, "go to church to mail a letter to god, the church, it's like a post office. the orthodox church--the building is not symbolic--it is considered to be the real body of god, and orthodox people too are god because they are together here, not alone, and speaking, by the way, has nothing to do with it." (hejinian, in ibid., 34-35) [1] the break-up of official culture, even the "official/unofficial" dialectic that was a part of it, in the soviet union led to aesthetic developments characterized by an intense, utopian, and metaphysically speculative subjectivity that i am going to call "post-soviet" even if it had its origins in earlier periods. beginning in the 1960s with the optimistic horizons prior to the invasion of czechoslovakia in 1968, extending through the brezhnev "era of stagnation" of the 1970s with its fully articulated counterculture, through the opening to the west and the influence of emigration in the 1980s, a series of these developments anticipate their reception as "postmodern culture" in the west. identifying these "post-soviet" developments with postmodernism would be to misunderstand them, however; as poet dmitrii prigov has said of the moscow conceptual art of the 1970s, "when [western conceptualism] entered our part of the world, [it] discovered the total absence of any idea of the object and its inherent qualities or of any hint whatsoever of fetishism" (12). the subsequent valorization of andy warhol would have has yet-to-be-determined (though not unimaginable) consequences; so the "women admirers of jeff koons club" i encountered in leningrad in 1989 would be the sign of an emerging feminism as much as an acceptance of the reagan-era consumerism of koons's work. even the culture of russian modernism, refracted through western connoisseurship, has been reinter preted in the new post-soviet context in a way discontinuous with its historical origins. in order to understand these developments as not simply the colonization of western postmodernism, it will be necessary to develop models for second world discourses of subjectivity. a prospective conclusion is that contemporary post-soviet culture, once it has expanded to integrate both unofficial and international influences, does not simply mean an uncritical embrace of western postmodernism but reveals a post-soviet "subjectivity" that is not simply reducible to the various national identities now contesting the ground of the former soviet state. i see aspects of this subjectivity in moscow conceptual art, originating in the 1970s and producing internationally recognized figures such as komar and melamid, erik bulatov, and ilya kabakov, and in the 1980s "meta" literature from moscow and leningrad, now being translated in the west, exemplified by poets arkadii dragomoshchenko, ivan zhdanov, alexei parshchikov, ilya kutik, and nadezhda kondakova. a metapoetics of memory [2] arkadii dragomoshchenko's poetry, it was said, "is unlike anything else being written in the soviet union today" (molnar, 7), and direct observation bears this out. at the leningrad "summer school" of 1989, dragomoshchenko was unique in abandoning the (often complex) metrical forms and performative theatricality that, however inflected by skewed and difficult sound patterns and semantics, look back to a precedent "classical tradition . . . as in the acmeism of akhmatova or early mandelstam, [which] stood for heroically distanced emotion and a european cultural intertext" but which often led to poetic norms reduced to "ruthless metricality and relentless rhyming" (molnar, 10). dragomoshchenko read his poems as if they were written texts rather than oral presentations of cultural memory embodied in the poet as much as in the poet's rhymes--unlike ivan zhdanov, who declaimed the highly wrought language of his richly textured and difficult lyrics as if %ab eterno%, directly from memory, to great effect. one listener afterward complained to dragomoshchenko, "what you are doing isn't poetry"--because it lacked the generic markers by which poetry had been set apart, in ways directly related to osip mandelstam's memorization and embodiment of his poetry as a standard of truth set against ideological lies. while equally based in an internalized self-consciousness, dragomoshchenko's poetry rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of tradition's modernist authority--not simply for anti-authoritarian motives but to create a new poetics that challenges conventional meaning and its entailments of common knowledge. it would be hard to underestimate the radical effect of this break with the overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standards for russian verse--and the resulting demand it conveys for a redefinition of collective memory and objective truth. [3] a poetics of collective memory in opposition to official history (often meeting at a middle ground in official/unofficial poets such as yevgenii yevtushenko, andrei voznesensky, and bella akhmadulina) is one of the implicit goals of russian modernism--the poet (seen as survivor) becomes a living embodiment of memory. but in dragomoshchchenko's poem "nasturtium as reality," memory is fractured and refigured by means of a relentless epistemological critique toward a more complicated horizon. the poem begins by essaying "an attempt / to describe an isolated object / determined by the anticipation of the resulting whole-/ by a glance over someone else's shoulder" (93). spatial and temporal vectors specify the dynamics of this attempt: the poem predicates a temporal series on a "missing x" that precedes it, presumably the nasturtium but also a grammatical "there exists." this predicative address likewise introduces the "nasturtium" in the second stanza as parallel and equivalent to the "attempt"--with both to be resolved in the "resulting whole" that will make either possible. equally determining, however, is the opacity of the "glance over someone else's shoulder"--that which interferes with vision equally motivates it. the nasturtium is seen as if a window were both transparent and opaque, not to the nasturtium but to itself--the "window" is an opaque analogy to transparent language through which a nasturtium normally would be seen: "a nasturtium composed / of holes in the rain-spotted window--to itself / it's `in front,' // to me, `behind.'" this "rain-spotted window" *is* the language of the poem, through whose constructed elisions occurs the possibility of description; on the surface of language, description is "in front," though from the point of view of subjectivity in the poem the nasturtium is "behind" language (from an easier perspective, of course, "in front" and "behind" mean the nasturtium's relation to the window). where a window, like description, is conventionally transparent, here it is a shattered opacity of perspectives, interfering with and determining the gaze much like "someone else," that leads to grounds of certainty and belief posed grammatically as a question: "whose property is the gleaming / tremor / of compressed disclosure / in the opening of double-edged prepositions / in / a folded plane / of transparency which strikes the window pane?" anything but transparently, we begin to see the nasturtium as if in double-edged language that predicts a "resulting whole" of description preceded by "an isolated object." in the ensuing working through of the poem, memory is displaced and refigured in the spaces opened up by such knowledge through similar means; the poem is a construction of memory and knowledge between a past and a future it will formally embody. futurity will have accounted for the nasturtium that preceded the poem, making possible the "compressed disclosure" of an intensely sub jective continuity of memory and perception taking place in and of its language. [4] in stages of approach, the poem sharpens the edges of prospective meaning figured in the nasturtium, often defining the space where it would exist by negation, in terms of its absence from other spaces: "a sign, inverted- not mirror, not childhood. // (a version: this night shattered apart / by the rays of the dragonflies' concise deep blue / drawing noon into a knot of blinding / foam" (94). in this way, the poem typically shifts "thematic" address to noncontiguous objects of a fractured nature such as this dragonfly (later a specific tree, a flight of "swifts"). occasional eruptions of what v. n. voloshinov would have called ideological speech ("a sign sweats over the doorway: `voltaire has been killed. call me immediate ly") likewise shift the poem away from its "object," but they cannot detract from its expanding subjective truth: "the knowledge, which belongs to me, / absorbs it cautiously, tying it / to innumerable capillary nets: / the nasturtium--it is a section of the neuron / string" (96). this knowledge is presented not as a report to some transcendent observer--a comparison with marianne moore's aesthetics of natural grandeur in "an octopus" would fail at this point--but through the substance of language produced from a variety of sites. so shifts away from the ostensible subject of the poem are "only a continuation / within the ends' proximity" (97); the poem expands to include fragments of dialogue, self-reference ("arkadii / trofimovitch drago moshchenko describes / a nasturtium, inserts it in his head"; 99), along with its observation of spatial and temporal discontinuities. an increasing axis of meta-commentary is created through the language of the poem by means of such semantic shifts: "the nasturtium / and anticipation rainy as the window and wind/ ow behind wind / ow / (he in it, it in him) / like meanings smashing each other / [i don't say, metaphor . . .] / drawn / by emptiness / one of the distinct details--"; 100). through its insistent reduction of similarity to contiguity- description turning to language--poetry becomes virtually a kind of physics ("the mechanism / of the keys, extracting sound, hovering over / its description // in the ear, // protracted with reverberation into the now") which depends, for its assertion of palpable reality, on a continual undermining of language by itself ("when? where? / me? vertigo conceives / `things'"; 101). in this expanding horizon of meaning, sense is made "only / through another / (multiplication tables, game boards, needles, a logarithmic / bird," i.e., anything presentable in language, "and the point isn't which kind" (103). the poem oscillates between intensely subjective states and objective properties of description, attempting both in either's negation: "i contemplated the truth behind events listening to the vivid ness / of the erased words / ready to expound on the defects of precision" to become definitive of poet's self-canceling voice: "and here in the 41st year of life / a pampered fool, whose speech continually / misses the point" (106). "the nasturtium" is an account of subjectivity seen through such intensities of language: "i follow from burst to burst, from explosion to explosion, / faces, like magnesium petals floating by, which permit those who remain a misprint in memory / to be recognized" (108), but it makes no assump tions about a continuity of nature behind the poem as the basis for these effects. rather, the poem moves directly from the negated description of objective reality to expanded systems of meaning encompassing it: "conjecture is simple-/ the nasturtium is not /// necessary. it is composed from the exceptional exactness / of language / commanding the thing--`to be' / and the rejection of understanding" (110-11). the poem locates the objective world by placing the language of description under erasure, opening language to many languages and in this way deter mining what its relation to nature is going to be: "the nasturtium--it is the undiminished procession / of forms, the geological chorus of voices crawling, / shouting, disclosing each other" (112). [5] it is through this clash of languages tending toward future objectivity that a space for refigured subjectivity, seen in purely material strands of memory, can be located. in that futurity is connected here to a poetics of many languages, it is important that dragomoshchenko is by birth ukrainian (born in postwar occupied potsdam, raised in multilingual environs of vilnitsa, now living in st. petersburg), although he writes in russian. he has, in other poems, shifted to ukrainian as poetic counterpoint specifically to bring up a kind of archaic subtext under the surface of ordinary language, thus allying his epistemological concerns with those of cultural memory. in "the nasturtium," such archaic subtexts appear in two autobiographical narratives that emerge out of its nonnarrative continuum. in one such vignette, a typically cinematic moment of self-knowledge, "tossing her skirt on the broken bureau / with wood dust in her hair / a neighbor girl, spreading her legs / puts your hand where it is hottest" (103)--which leads, not quite as typically, to anxious spasms of linguistic cross-cutting. it is as if the eruption of the feminine demands a release of poetic authority, as it does in the next section in a more measured way where an account of the death of a woman close to the poet, again in and of language, locates another range for the outer horizons of the poem: "and all the more unbearable the meaning of `her' ripened in you / while the quiet work went on revealing / thoughts / (you, her) from the sheath of feminine pain / the silent symmetry crumbling in the immense proximity of the end" (105). in this way "the meaning of `her'" aligns with both memory and objectivity; while there is a difficult cultural truth in this admission of women only at the extremes of authorizing self-knowledge, at least the russian poetic convention of transcendent nature (think of waving fields of grain as equivalent to verse in a sovkino documentary of yevtushenko) is being broken down in its assumptions. [6] this location of a poetics in a refiguring of memory through the limits of objectivity aligns dragomoshchenko's work with related projects in post-1960s soviet culture. so the films of andrei tarkovsky, a prior reference point for the semantically shifting world of dragomoshchenko's work, crop up in his recent article on poetic subjectivity. making a figure for collective knowledge, dragomoshchenko says that the poet may return, like a blind bee, to a "hive" of understanding, but there is no hive. it disappears at the very moment when understanding comes close to being embodied in itself and its "things," which to all appearances is really the "hive." we wander through a civilization of destroyed metaphors: road, home, language, a man on a bicycle, embraces, tarkovsky's films, moisture, "i," memories, history, and so forth. ("i(s)," 130)for dragomoshchenko, "the problem of subjectivization is tautological," fractally reproduced in the dispersion and refiguring of a collective center, "the hive," in culture's unreified objects. wandering through this "civilization of destroyed metaphors," one can only figure the holistic tenor from its dispersed vehicles. such a demetaphorization occurs similarly in a film such as tarkovsky's _the mirror_ (by means of techniques intended as the opposite of eisenstein's constructed film metaphors). nonnarrative, intuitive sequences displace memory, continuity, futurity onto a fragmented world of objects comprising several registers of image. in one, the burning house in the countryside to which mother and son have been removed during the war stands as mnemonic placeholder for the future return of the father that is always to come (there is a question for the viewer if it "really" takes place). in another, the multiple, sidelong, disjunct views down corridors of the state publishing house where the mother worked in the 1930s as proofreader enacts the moment where the collective "hive" dissolves into "things"; millennial horizons become fragments of presence, as in the hinted propaganda poster barely glimpsed on the way to other rooms. finally, the insertion of documentary footage of the spanish civil war argues the film's subjectivity against the intrusiveness of represented history, which takes on memorial value as loss. images in dragomoshchenko have similar organizing dynamics; so "the nasturtium bearing fire" which closes dragomoshchenko's poem stands in place of memory's anticipated return; the overlapping and mutually contradictory frames of descriptive language dissolve certainty into isolated moments; and the interruptions of narrative displace subjectivity toward expanded horizons. closure--the father's return or the nasturtium as realized object--is distributed through these registers as partial resolution. [7] the relation between empirical reality and a deferred future that exceeds nature but in terms of which it can only be known (figured here in the form of the poem) is also a central theme in recent discussions in soviet (and post-soviet) science. the opening invocation of our "summer school" was to "be scientific," but what followed led rapidly away from any question of empirical verification toward a prospective, metaphysical hyperspace in which, for example, "futurist art [like that of khlebnikov's post-euclidean mathematics of world correspondence] has its own dominant in consciousness" (watten, in davidson, 43). so a recent article by moscow philologist mikhail dziubenko describes a scientific project that would unite the problem of "new meaning" in poetry and art with an idiosyncratic branch of soviet science known as the "linguistics of altered states of consciousness"--a quest for a new approach to method characteristic of a wide range of soviet science. for dziubenko, "at deep levels of consciousness (which acquire primary meaning in the creative process) the ability to penetrate into the logic of other languages is established. artistic creativity, then, involves a break through into another language, which uses the character istics and lacunae of the original" (27). such a language, in addition, is based in material, sensed reality, but only for its future potential: we must understand that there is only one *linguistic universum*, uniting all world languages in the massive entity of their historical development and functional applications. this universum is not a scientific abstraction. it is manifested concretely, on the lowest, phonetic level, in naming, where moreover language differentiations do not play any definitive role, and on the highest, grammatical-syntactic level, in art, which is only possible by virtue of the existence of different languages and which is itself an unconscious borrowing of foreign language structures. (29-30) here, "the knowledge of one language is knowledge of all languages," leading to a research program in which "there is no doubt that a persian specialist could contribute a great deal to the study of khlebnikov's works" (30-31). creativity expands language into a utopian "linguistic universum" in a romantic philology that recalls wilhelm von humboldt's fantasy of whole nations thinking in each of their various languages. there are several points to this excursus into late-soviet discussions of scientific method: the first is that creativity is thought to have ontological implications; the second is that as material reality, crea tive language extends, "through characteristics and lacunae," into a greater reality that contains it; and a third would be that, structuring language in the variety of its altered states as well as being structured by it, subjectivity is not permitted the transcendent distance of the observer but instead experiences loss due to an expanded suprasubjectivity whenever the grounds for language (altered states, presumably) historically change. so the impact of the creative on scientific method is to open a space of loss of certainty that can then be aligned with a need for a reconstituted memory--as it is for dragomoshchenko. "nasturtium as reality" is not only a reconstitution of lyric subjectivity but a parallel text to post-soviet considerations of collective memory and empirical truth. clearly "an authoritarian complex" involving several strands in soviet culture--lyric voice, embodied memory, and scientific objectivity--is being dismantled as the occasion of poetic address. the fall of soviet man [8] the theatricality of ilya kabakov's conceptual albums, paintings, and installations is at a polar remove from dragomoshchenko's expansive interiority. _ten characters_, a series of installations with accompanying narratives published as a book of the same name based on the theme of the %kommunalka% or communal apartment, was presented by kabakov at the ronald feldman gallery in new york and the institute for contemporary art, london, in 1988-89. these projects had been under development since at least the early 1980s, but one imagines their everyday materials to have been collected, and various components worked on, over the preceding decade. installation itself, understood as one of the forms by which traditional genres such as painting and sculpture have become destabilized in postmodernism, takes on a culturally hybrid value in kabakov's work as most of what was seen in the active soviet underground of the 1970s was itself "installed" in some nongallery setting such as an apartment or open-air happening; the bulldozer art exhibition of the late brezhnev era in this sense could be the outer social horizon for the form. the genre continued in moscow conceptual art in what has been called "aptart," which was characterized as uniting a social scale of presentation based in everyday life with a diverse and often aggressively dissonant range of issues, materials, and strategies. this work seems more a cultural breeding ground for new ideas than a finished product, while kabakov's installations have all the finish and framing of the most professional work in the genre as it has developed as a component of museum programs over the last fifteen years in the west--witness his inclusion in the recent _dislocations_ show at the museum of modern art. it would be interesting to chart kabakov's movement from soviet oppositional scale to that of western postmodernism; this could be read, thematically, in his work as a movement from the simultaneously millennial and dystopian horizons of the soviet context through to another kind of transcendence implied in kabakov's showing, outside the soviet union, works that depict its deepest, most interior reality. [9] subjectivity in kabakov, rather than being read along some razor's edge of language in nonnarrative forms addressed to metaphysical horizons, is narratively defined in the life histories of disjunct, created personae configured around the communal apartment seen from a transcendent perspective (even if it is still linked to the metaphysical as an enabling point of reference for the work). transcendence is really the only option for a social reality modeled on such living arrangements, which, from the revolution through the khrushchev housing boom and into the present, typically crammed the urban working class into multi-family dwellings, often one family per room, where everyone shared the collective amenities and, according to kabakov, life was open-ended verbal abuse. given this premise, kabakov has created a world of discontinuous, extreme personality types to be imagined as somehow, impossibly, sharing the same communal space while inventing wildly adventurous behaviors and systems of belief to accommodate themselves to their world. the short narrative accounts that accompany kabakov's meticulously detailed physical installations are anything but anecdotal; rather, these narratives form a template through which the realities of soviet systems of belief can be represented as they would be experienced in everyday life (or %byt%, a central term in kabakov's work, and one that evinces from many post-soviets an unutterable horror: "our everyday life, you cannot imagine how boring it is!" once remarked poet alexei parshchikov). there is a system of interlocking, mutually supporting belief systems in kabakov's %byt%, a structuring intersubjectivity that gives an accurate value to the represented world of may day parades, the moscow metro, soviet theme parks outside. "the %kommunalka% presents a certain collective image, in which all the ill-assortedness and multileveledness of our reality is concentrated and vividly revealed" for kabakov (tupitsyn, 50), a reality figured as an "autonomous linguistic organism," "an extended childhood," "a repressive sea of words," "the madhouse," and so on (51-54). alternatives emerge: one can go into oneself ("some of the inhabitants of the communal apartment lead a mysterious, even secretive existence"; kabakov, 52) or "leap out of oneself," as kabakov himself says he did ("while formally i haven't ceased to live inside myself, i observe what happens from repeatedly shifting positions"; tupitsyn, 55). beyond either possibility, "some powerful, lofty, and faraway sound is clearly audible. a higher voice" (54) for both artist and communal residents. listening to the voice of the "beyond" will be one of the organizing metaphors of kabakov's project--it is simultaneously the voice of collective life and the position of transcendence from which the %komunalka%'s voices can be heard. [10] so in "the man who flew into his picture," subjectivity is drawn as if by a magnet to a negating white space, a ground for pure projection: "he sees before him an enormous, endless ocean of light, and at that moment he merges with the little, plain figure that he had drawn." at this moment of self-undoing, however, "he comes to the conclusion that he needs some third person, some sort of witness [to be] present to watch him `from the side'" (7). such a witness is given embodiment as merely the case of delusions in the next room, where "the man who collects the opinions of others," "standing behind the door, immediately writes down in his notebook everything which is said, no matter what" (9). this quest for objectivity yields only another structured fantasy: according to his view, opinions are arranged in circles. beginning at any point, they then move centrifugally and as they move away from the centre they meet "opinions" moving from other centres. these waves are superimposed, one on top of another; according to him, the entire intellectual world is a gigantic network, a lattice of similar dynamic intersections of these waves. he compared all this to the surface of a lake, where 10-20 stones are randomly and uninterruptedly thrown all at once. (9) "in talking about this, it was as though my neighbour actually saw these magical, shining circles" (10); kabakov visualizes them likewise in his installation of tidy mock-ups of the character's notebook pages arranged around the "objects" that gave rise to the "opinion waves." while this is clearly high satire of venerable russian literary pedigree, there is an identification with these delusional modes of organizing reality that makes kabakov's project unlike the realist mode of describing the subject positions of, say, the flophouse in gorky's _the lower depth_ (which kabakov cites in an interview). the meticulous details of kabakov's miniature mock-up and full-scale realization of the scene from "the man who flew into space from his apartment" reveal a complicity with monumental obsessiveness, as do his "characters'" collections of objects and albums of kitsch postcards. it is kabakov himself who assembled these soviet versions of trivial pursuit, reframing his activities through the various personae. in each of these works, the space of culture and everyday life is seen as the opposite of the transcendental perspective and monumental organization of soviet society's official self-presentation (given the dominant red of numerous cheap posters covering the walls). the explosion that rips a hole in the top floor of the communal apartment, sending its resident into orbit, creates a negative space from soviet monumentalism, while the orbits of yuri gagarin and followers ironically mimed here stand for state-sponsored transcendence purveyed to the masses at large. the desire to substitute material reality for ideological abstraction created this negative space: "i asked him why there were metal bands attached to the model and leading upward from his future flight" (13). such kitsch futurism--the mechanical predictability of "we are going to communism"--seems to have created, in this char acter, a highly developed metaphysics to explain how it will be: he imagined the entire universe to be permeated by huge sheets of energy which "lead upwards somewhere." these gigantic upward streams he called "petals." . . . the earth together with the sun periodically crosses through one of these enormous "petals." if you knew this precise moment, then you could jump from the orbit of the earth onto this "petal," i.e., you could enter, join this powerful stream and be whirled upwards with it. fabricating a contraption made of rubber "extension wires" and explosive charges, the resident realizes his objective and blasts into orbit, thus creating a monumental gap in the explanatory fabric of everyday life which others rationalize in a characteristic way: "maybe he really did fly away, that sort of thing happens." in the ideological space vacated by monumental trajectories and transcendent goals one can see a cultural breeding ground for rumors, speculations, and theologies of all sorts. [11] such systems of belief, orbiting as it were around a vacant belief, are made equivalent, in yet another irony, to the material culture that was supposed to provide them with normative expectations. so a metaphorized collecting, a simple accumulation of bits and pieces of culture, becomes the activity of the artist; material reality replaces a more conventionally redemptive collective memory. in works like "the short man," "the collector," "the person who describes his life through characters," and "the man who never threw anything away," kabakov makes his art an inductive process adding up to indeterminate but compelling horizons that motivate his fractal characters. the "short man's" project of accumulation and re-presenting cultural detritus in fold-out albums is a parodic version of realism seen as representing the world "in little": "everything that goes on in our communal kitchen, why, isn't that a subject, it's actually a ready-made novel!" (20); however, the only people who can stoop so low as even to read this little world are, like its author, little (as the poet louis zukofsky wrote, "strabismus may be of interest to strabismics; those who see straight look away!"); others invited in to view the work merely step over it as an obstacle. the substratum of material culture, reinterpreted as past not present reality, initiates a process of individuation and recuperation in "the man who never threw anything away": "a simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything. this feeling is familiar to everyone who has looked through or rearranged his accumulated papers: this is the memory associated with all the events connected with each of these papers" (44). so this character initiates a project of collecting, preserving, and labeling all the discarded items found in the %kommunalka%'s hallway in order to recover this value: "an enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials, and sacks. . . . they cry out about a past life, they preserve it" (45). [12] "the person who describes his life through characters" continues this process of induction to uncover a principle of individuation through his subjects: "that even these variegated fragments belonged not to his single conscious ness, his memory alone, but, as it were, to the most diverse and even separate minds, not connected with each other, rather strongly different from each other" (34), while "the untalented artist" modulates this effect of individuation through structures of the state that in fact produce it; the paradoxical success of his paintings (in the actual installation an excessively beautiful group of large-scale, ideologically inflected works by kabakov) is described as based equally in the artist's partly realized native talent and in the lacunae of official projects (various official notices and posters) he was commissioned to paint: "what re sults is a dreadful mixture of hackwork, simple lack of skill, and bright flashes here and there of artistic premonitions and `illuminations'" (17)--a kind of suprasubjective intention. in "the collector" a similar suprasubjective horizon looms as the dissociation of identity through collective culture proceeds; arrangements of numerous color postcards on state tourist and memorial themes become "enormous, complex pictorial works which are worthy of a very great professional talent" (31). recombining disparate strands of the culture produces an effect of "the power of order"; "this is the triumph of the victory of order over everything." there is a paradox here, however; while it is the artist who in fact created this order by making his arrangements of cultural materials, the voice of order points beyond individuality: "it seemed to me that in some terrible way, some kind of, how shall i say it, idea of communality, was expressed in [the arrangements], that very same thing which surrounded us all in our common overcrowded apartment" (32). this drawing out of the collective voice is pursued in "the composer who combined music with things and images," whose staged mass productions in the %kommunalka% hallway, like a miniature version of a stalinist sports extravaganza, trades the sovereignty of the artist who arranges reality for a collective voice heard by all: "gradually those who are reading the [arranged] texts begin to notice that beyond the sound of their voices is a faintly heard, special kind of sound" (27)--a transcendent moment reproducing, i would argue, an idea of communality. [13] so we have come full circle, from an obsessively material collocation and implicit satire on soviet collective life to the question of higher, transcendent, metaphysical perspectives. in "the rope," a piece that serves as a comment on his "characters," kabakov essays the point at which materialism breaks off and spirituality begins: "so these empty ends of rope . . . represent the soul before and after `our' life, and in the middle is depicted its life, so to speak, in its earthly segment" (48). working out from these middles toward the open ends of the soul, kabakov recuperates the multiple identities of his communal apartment in terms of a single, collective destiny--albeit otherworldly. his project here could not be less like george perec's description of multiple lives in the same building in _la vie mode d'emploi_, where each life means a separate history, a different outcome rendered in the reified space of owned or rented individual dwellings. kabakov, in his ironic rejection of soviet culture, still maintains a totalizing attitude toward history--at the risk of a virtual nihilism in regard to the things of this world, an attitude necessary, it would seem, to maintain a totalizing coherence. in a short text on the status of the "beyond" in relation to material reality, kabakov speaks of "emptiness" as conditions of his work: "first and foremost i would like to speak about a peculiar mold, a psychological condition of those people born and residing in emptiness . . . . emptiness creates a peculiar atmosphere of stress, excitedness, strengthlessness, apathy, and causeless terror" (ross, 55). in the negated space once occupied by a a transcendent, materialized state, there is now the inescapable horizon of a totalizing "stateness": the stateness in the topography of this place is that which belongs to an unseen impersonality, the element of space, in short all that serves as an embodiment of emptiness. . . . a metaphor comes closest of all to a definition of that stateness: the image of a wind blowing interminably alongside and between houses, blowing through everything by itself, an icy wind sowing cold and destruction. . . . what sort of goals does this wind, this stateness, set for itself, if they exist at all? these goals always bear in mind the mastery of the scope of all territory occupied by emptiness as a single whole. (58) from this single whole of soviet reality it is but one step to a profound nihilism (and one that is more socially significant than simply the attitude of an artist): "nothing results from anything, nothing is connected to anything, nothing means anything, everything hangs and vanishes in emptiness, is born off by the icy wind of emptiness" (59). these collective emptinesses interpret the nonexistent fullnesses, the pasts and futures at both ends of kabakov's individual, material rope. [14] values for transcendence in the project would thus seem to refer importantly to two diverse registers: the this-worldly perspective of the artist-as-character who organizes reality in some compensatory way, and the other-worldly vision of the collective/individual subject, who would seem to have no other option than to await the dystopian millennium. kabakov, in his position outside and beyond soviet reality in commenting on his installation for the museum of modern art, explicitly resolves these two versions of transcendence: the installation as a genre is probably a way to give new correlations between old and familiar things. by entering an installation, these various phenomena reveal their dependence, their "separateness," but they may reveal as well their profound connection with each other, which was perhaps lost long ago, which they at some time had, and which they always needed. and particularly important is the restoration of that whole that had fallen into its parts [the separation of art from the "mystical"] i had spoken of. the "mystical" union of restored parts within a formal whole would be one that kabakov had induced from the ideological horizons of his characters but which, as artist working as it were "outside" the %kommunalka%, can realize in his chosen form. there is an explicit self-contradiction here; so when kabakov says in an interview, "upon discharge from the madhouse, i cease to exist. i exist only insofar as i am the resident of a %kommunalka%. i know no other self" (tupitsky, 54), it is clear that his "outside" position as installation artist in the museum of modern art, kabakov's position as quasi-soviet emigre' (he maintains studios in france and in moscow), can only be another version of the transcendence strategized from within the confines of collective life. re-sited within the museum's horizon, however, this insistence on wholeness becomes reinterpreted as tragic separation and loss, as the fall of communism that so comforts the curatorial perspective of _dislocations_: kabakov's reconstruction of the tenants' club of moscow housing project no. 8 gives one a sense of the dreary mediocrity of soviet society. . . . this unwelcome gathering place has been set up for an official lecture on the demerits of unofficial art, examples of which are propped against the drab gray walls between oxblood banners. although the work of artists outside the system, the paintings nonetheless exemplify some of the bleakness and awkwardness of mainstream soviet life to which they are the oppositional exception. (storr, 16-17) nothing in kabakov's work could be construed as endorsing such a view of "opposition"; indeed, it is explicit purpose is to induce a metaphysical wholeness that reinterprets "the unity of opposites we learned about in school." how then to understand the central conceit of kabakov's moma installation, that "apparently, someone or something was to appear in the city that evening, and not just anywhere, but right in the middle of the club hall." the appearance and disappearance of this person occurs: "there is no single description of what happened--the reports of various witnesses maintain the most adamant discrepancies" but leading to a negative vision of sorts: "after all the commotion had subsided, the entire floor in the center of the hall was littered with groups of little white people, constantly exchanging places." it is almost too easy to view this moment as an allegory for the collapse of central authority leading to a negative social space in which the masses circulate aimlessly, without direction. the too-availability of this reading does seem to indicate an influence of the museum's interpretative horizons, trading on soviet history in a representative installation of kabakov's totalizing process. this is the crisis of emigration, of the literal materialization of the transcendent position outside a totality it organizes, and here it leads kabakov's partial, metaphysically sited narratives to a grand narrative of somewhat lesser interest. however, it may be said here, as elsewhere, that nothing is lost even in translation, for the likewise evident effect of kabakov's piece is to make each of the other installations in this mainstream extravangza--by adrian piper, chris burden, david hammons, louise bourgeois, bruce nauman, and sophe calle, indeed the entire permanent collection of moma used by calle as the site for her work--interpretable as the compensatory projects of other residents of an expanded communal apartment. this sovietization of cultural horizons--an opening up from the oppositional politics of the cold war to the reality of collective horizons--is a hopeful reason to reject kabakov's integration into the moma show as an imperial trophy collected under the banner of western postmodernism. whose subject? [15] two aspects of post-soviet subjectivity are evident in the examples of dragomoshchenko and kabakov. in the former, authority is impossibly sited from immanent horizons that entail voices of lyric subjectivity, collective memory, and scientific objectivity. the entire activity of the poem- its creation of new meaning in and of itself--is central to its implicit thesis that subjectivity, while everywhere in its own undoing, cannot be known from a transcendental position. the formal dimensions of dragomoshchenko's work- nonnarrative, fractal, predicative, and continually metaleptic--are an instance of a "world-making" poetics that works out of a continuity of fabricated worlds. central to these constructions is their conveyance of futurity; the lyric voice will have been the authority of present address from a point in the distant future; both collective memory and scientific truth will have been revealed in similar ways. in order to understand the implications for post-soviet culture here, it will be necessary to develop an account of soviet subjectivity in relation to such utopian, transcendent, and immanent horizons--survivals, as indicated in the epigraph above, of an embodied collectivity (not necessarily national) preceding the state. [16] in kabakov's constructions, a converse implication for the subject may be descried, one that is more amenable to the international horizons of postmodern culture simply because it dismantles transcendence in the process of post-soviet emigration. these displacements of subjectivity and authority are literally enacted in kabakov's shows in the high-rent collective apartments of the west, and in so doing take part in the process by which soviet authority has been undermined through the foreign contacts that the stalinist state did so much to prohibit. this new horizon is nothing if not ironic, and the emptying out of the "full presence" of the collective apartment into the nihilism of "stateness" illustrates an eerily dystopian moment. the difference from western discourses of the postmodern, with their anchoring in rationality and critique, should equally be apparent--with the unforeseen result that the post-soviet project makes the postmodern one appear even more qualified by an imaginary totality. here the construction of the postmodern as an effect of cold war oppositions--hinted at by fredric jameson's citing of it as consequence of the "era of national revolutions" and to that extent inflected by their lost horizons--shows its "cultural specificity" to the west when compared to the emerging post-soviet horizons. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited davidson, michael, lyn hejinian, ron silliman, and barrett watten. _leningrad: american writers in the soviet union_. san francisco, 1991. dragomoshchenko, arkadii. _description_. trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova. los angeles, 1990. ---. "i(s)." trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova. _poetics journal_ 9 (june 1991): 127-37. ---. "syn/opsis/taxis." trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova. _poetics journal_ 8 (june 1989): 5-8. dziubenko, mikhail. "`new poetry' and perspectives for philology." trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova. _poetics journal_ 8 (june 1989): 24-31. jameson, fredric. introduction to _postmodernism; or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_. durham, n.c., 1991. kabakov, ilya. artist's statement and text for installation, _dislocations_, museum of modern art, 1991. ---. "dissertation on the cognition of the three layers . . . " in margarita tupitsyn, _margins of soviet art_, 144-47. ---. "on emptiness." in ross, _between spring and summer_, 53-60. ---. _ten characters_. london, 1989. molnar, michael. introduction to dragomoshchenko, _description_, 7-16. parshchikov, alexei. "new poetry." trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova. _poetics journal_ 8 (june 1989): 17-23. perec, georges. _la vie mode d'emploi_. new york, 19xx. prigov, dmitrii. "conceptualism and the west." trans. michael molnar. _poetics journal_ 8 (june 1989): 12-16. ross, david, ed. _between spring and summer: soviet conceptual art in the era of late communism_. boston, 1990. storr, robert. catalogue essay on kabakov in storr, ed., _dislocations_. new york, 1991. tarkovsky, andrei. _sculpting in time: reflections on the cinema_. trans. kitty hunter-blair. austin, tex., 1986. tupitsyn, margarita. _margins of soviet art: socialist realism to the present_. milan, 1989. tupitsyn, victor. "from the communal kitchen: a conversation with ilya kabakov." trans. jane bobko. _arts_ 66, no. 2 (october 1991): 48-55. perlman, 'idioculture: de-massifying the popular music audience', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-perlman-idioculture.txt archive pmc-list, file review-7.993. part 1/1, total size 19433 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- idioculture: de-massifying the popular music audience by marc perlman perlman@pearl.tufts.edu department of music tufts university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by marc perlman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: crafts, susan d., daniel cavicchi, charles keil and the music in daily life project. _my music_. foreword by george lipsitz. hanover, nh: university press of new england for wesleyan university press, 1993. [1] cultural studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly *disruptive* sort of object, a form of resistance (frith: 179). part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of mass-marketed products. though the best-known examples of this process have been literary (e.g. radway on the romance, or penley on k/s zines), frith sees popular music consumption "becoming the model for 'active' popular cultural consumption in general" (frith: 180). [2] the book under review features 'active' consumption as resistance, though in a way not limited to popular music. in this book the disruptive moment of consumption is generalized beyond pop: here it is the moment of listening across genre borders. in a world where the music market and musical institutions impose strict boundaries between styles, people resist by having eclectic tastes. the "most important message" of this book is that there is "far more complexity and far more self-directed searching, testing, and experimenting than either music schools or commercial market categories can account for." people find their way to "an astonishing range of musical choices, despite the inhibiting constrictions of the music industry" (lipsitz: xiii). their tastes are broader than the "confines imposed upon them by marketing specialists" (xiv). [3] that is the book's message; but _my music_ is much more than an illustration of a thesis. whatever the plausibility of this view of eclectic listening--and i shall add my reflections on this subject below--the book presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music. _my music_ is an edited selection of 41 interviews out of 150 conducted in buffalo, ny. the interviewees range in age from 4 to 83. most are white americans, though five african-americans, one hispanic, and one asian-american are included, as well as one bolivian and one ethiopian. [4] the music in daily life project started in 1984, when carol hadley, a student at suny buffalo pursuing an independent study project, asked a few people about the role of music in their lives. she found people with unsuspected combinations of tastes (for example, one woman's listening revolved around a bette midler/allman brothers/joni mitchell configuration) or striking trajectories (a woman who moved from classical music to neil diamond). that was the stimulus. two undergraduate classes carried out further interviews, and three graduate seminars edited and organized the results. the result is this kaleidoscope of individual voices, too diverse and specific to be easily grouped into subcultures. [5] _my music_ is a portrait of particularity. as keil puts it in his introduction, "like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an 'idioculture' or idiosyncratic culture in sound" (2). [6] the interviews illustrate keil's notion of musical idioculture. a few seem to fit common stereotypes, but just as many defy such caricatures. may, for example, is an overachieving high school violinist who attends julliard on weekends. her favorite listening music is italian opera, but she grew up on the rolling stones and the who, has tapes of talking heads, and can play grateful dead tunes on request. [7] the editorial choice to present whole (edited) interviews was made to spotlight the interviewees, many of whom prove to be trenchant observers and witty conversationalists. molly (age 11) comments on how music videos interfere with individual visualizations, "because you just think of what you saw on tv and not what your mind sees" when you listen (31). the insufferably cute lisa (age 12) listens to the radio while studying for a test: "when it comes to the test, i remember the song, i remember the question, and i remember the answer" (40). ralph, the polymath truckdriver (113-16), notices the "ride of the valkyries" in an elmer fudd cartoon, holds forth on the connection between the jewish diaspora and polka music, likes the beach boys ("all a rip-off of black music ... but white fun") as well as the mahavishnu orchestra, but draws the line at opera ("well, 'madam butterfly' is okay, but that's the only one i really appreciate"). stella, who emigrated from greece thirty years ago, doesn't consider greek music to be her music: "it's not mine, it's a couple million other people's" (159). she thinks country and western is the only adult music--not the "male bonding party songs," but the ones where "the cliches are given reasons as to *why* they became cliches" (161). [8] in short, the interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. there are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives. betty, for example, converted from classical music to neil diamond. the reader involuntarily wonders about the significance of this conversion when betty tells us it accompanied her divorce from a classical-music-loving husband. there are also bits of intergenerational sitcom. nineteen-year-old abby, interviewed by her father, mentions grace jones. her father, in a follow-up question, mistakenly refers to the singer as grace slick, which elicits this putdown: "grace jones, honey. grace slick? for-give me. never in a million years" (87). [9] nevertheless, while i applaud crafts et al.'s decision to focus on people's own words, i wonder if it was perhaps too zealously implemented. _my music_ is half of the book the authors originally envisioned; it lacks the planned set of essays reflecting on the interviews. in the end they chose to include more voices rather than reserve space for their own pronouncements. as one of the student members of the project put it, "isn't the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?" (xxii). [10] it is indeed good to hear from so many people, but there is much we would like to know about them that they do not tell us. we know their age, sex, and (sometimes) ethnic identification. we are given their occupation in a few words: "pastor"; "student"; "music teacher"; "heavy truck salesman"; "works in her husband's office"; "works at allstate." some seem to be housewives. we know little else about their lives except what they choose to tell the interviewers. crafts et al. refrain from fleshing out the picture, even when extra information would significantly alter our reading of the interview. [11] for example, beth does not tell us that she plays music. we only learn this from keil, who mentions it in order to make a point about the possible negative effects of the dominance of mediated music in our lives (2). we are told that charles is a music teacher and composer; he is obviously also a performer, probably a pianist. but it would help us to interpret his diatribes against commercialism, his admiration for beethoven and jimi hendrix, and his quotations from plotinus, if we knew a bit more about him. is he a classically-trained pianist performing in a general business band? an aspiring frank zappa--or glenn branca? [12] crafts et al. minimize contextualization and all but abstain from comment. keil invites us to make our own correlations and interpretations (3), but we can hardly do so without knowing more about these people. their voices remain only voices, and we remain eavesdroppers on invisible conversations. (other sorts of contextualization would be helpful, too. for example, some readers will be unable to understand some of the references to specific performers--rick james, david sylvian, etc.) [13] it is instructive to compare this collection of ordinary people's voices with the results of a somewhat similar project, another book organized around quotations from listeners: _music and its lovers_, by vernon lee (pseudonym of violet paget). whether or not it is a unique precursor of _my music_, it is surely the first such study to appear in america: published in 1933, it is based on research conducted before world war i. the two books draw on samples of similar size, but apart from that the differences are striking. lee used a questionnaire, and usually collected written responses. she worked in french and german as well as english, and reached many of her respondents through a periodical. her sample seems to have included a disproportionate number of musicians, poets, essayists, critics, and phds. she seems to have asked only about 'high art' music. in her presentation, too, she kept a firm authorial grip on the material: her respondents' voices are dispersed throughout her text, surfacing as a sentence here, a paragraph there. though she was interested in individual responses to music, her questions were narrowly focused: she wanted to know if people listened to music for "a meaning which seems beyond itself, a message," or if they heard it as "* just music*" (lee: 25). [14] in other words, lee was preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of her time: the question whether music was an "absolute" art, inhabiting a realm of its own, independent of programmatic content. as a result, her book has a fairly strict psychological focus. we learn about the inner worlds of her respondents, but hardly anything about their external, practical concerns. (except in the case of an unnamed suffragette, who disliked brahms because of the masculine self-satisfaction she heard in his music [211, 531].) [15] the interview format of _my music_ insures that it escapes lee's overriding tendentiousness. however, it too is clearly a child of its time, and its framing essays show its relationship to some recent themes in the study of popular music. [16] i have already mentioned the idea that eclectic, exploratory listening represents resistance to the market-imposed pigeonholing of musical styles, the "inhibiting constrictions of the music industry" (xiii). this notion is the main source of celebratory energy in the book. (though keil dampens the parade with a light drizzle of cultural criticism: "aren't all these headphoned people alienated, enjoying mediated 'my music' at the expense of a live and more spontaneous 'our music'?" [3].) [17] my music_ seems to show that musical tastes cannot be predicted by the usual demographic categories: as keil puts it, the "billboard charts view" of people's musical worlds is a tremendous oversimplification (2). but is keil's notion of "idioculture" the only alternative to the billboard charts view? [18] the entire question of cross-genre listening as musical resistance surely needs to be discussed in a larger socio-economic and historical context. the marketplace does not inherently solidify genre or style categories. under certain circumstances it can collocate diverse styles as well as differentiate them. indeed, max weber argued that the market declassifies culture: presenters seeking large audiences try to provide something for everybody. this does seem to explain the behavior of for-profit, privately owned firms in some circumstances (dimaggio: 36). under other conditions (demand uncertainty, high competition, etc.) firms prefer to target narrowly-defined taste bands. this is evident (for example) in the fragmentation of radio formats. [19] we should recall that the decline of eclectic music programming on commercial radio is a relatively recent phenomenon, hastened by the migration of the radio audience to television in the early 1950s, the proliferation of stations in major markets, etc. (peterson and davis: 169-71). with increased competition, stations had more incentive to narrow their appeal to specific demographic groups--those attractive to advertisers. [20] the fractionalization of radio was noted at the time, and even greeted as evidence that the prophets of massification were wrong: the mass media could be "a vigorous force working for cultural diversity" (honan: 76). in retrospect, it is clear that radio's commitment to cultural diversity was contingent on changes in industry structure and market conditions that made it more profitable to differentiate tastes than to agglomerate them. [21] finally, it is true that the interviews in _my music_ show the subtlety, variety, and depth of meaning music has in the lives of 41 individuals. this book represents a welcome complement to the macro-results of survey-based research; as such, it justifiably emphasizes the moment of autonomy in musical reception. unfortunately, it could easily be read as a romanticized portrait of musical individualism. aside from a brief mention of the "constraints" and "broader systemic practices" (xiv-xvi) within which listeners operate, _my music_ does little to avert such a reading. its micro-vision needs to be articulated with a macro-vision. recent developments in the sociology of cultural choice should make this articulation especially fruitful. [22] the past few decades have been marked by two paradigm shifts in the study of popular culture: first, by a drift away from the adornoesque view of musical massification to an acknowledgement of plural "taste cultures" defined by demographic parameters (class, race, age, geography, etc.); and second, to a view of "culture classes" less tightly bound to social class, defined instead by consumption patterns (lewis 1975; peterson and dimaggio 1975; peterson 1983; dimaggio 1987). turning away from bourdieu's durkheimian correlations of musical taste with position in social space (1984), recent writers reject earlier assumptions of isomorphism between taste and class. [23] the insistence of crafts et al. on individuals' unique configurations of musical taste, it seems to me, is consistent with these sociological results, and could even enrich them. but _my music_'s resolutely idiographic stance seems to forclose the possibility of a sociological account of eclecticism. [24] in fact, we already have at least one such account. dimaggio (1987) suggests that broad tastes correlate with high socio-economic status, assuming that those in high positions have wider social networks and hence need to be familiar with a wide range of artistic styles. might the patterns of musical choice revealed in _my music_ be explicable in these terms? [25] we badly need a study of musical taste that combines _my music_'s attention to detail with panoramic views of the social, economic, and historical context. until one appears, however, we do well to appreciate this book for what it is. it is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people. i don't know if this book is part of an "emancipatory cultural project" (xvii), but it is valuable in its own right. and i suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited bourdieu, pierre. _distinction: a sociological critique of the judgment of taste_. cambridge: harvard university press, 1984. dimaggio, paul. "cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in america." _media, culture and society_ 4 (1982): 33-50. "classification in art." _american sociological review_ 52 (1987): 440-55. frith, simon. "the cultural study of popular music." _cultural studies_. ed. l. grossberg, c. nelson and p. treichler. new york: routledge, 1992. honan, william h. "the new sound of radio." _new york times magazine_ 3 dec. 1967. lee, vernon. _music and its lovers: an empirical study of emotional and imaginative responses to music_. new york: e. p. dutton, 1933. lewis, george h. "cultural socialization and the development of taste cultures and culture classes in american popular music: existing evidence and proposed research directions." _popular music and society_ 4 (1975): 226-41. peterson, richard a. "patterns of cultural choice." _american behavior scientist_ 26 (1983): 422-38. peterson, richard a., and russell b. davis, jr. "the contemporary american radio audience." _popular music and society_ 6 (1978): 169-83. peterson, richard a., and paul dimaggio. "from region to class, the changing locus of country music: a test of the massification hypothesis." _social forces_ 53 (1975): 497-506. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------lin, 'one or two ghosts for one or two lines', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-lin-one.txt archive pmc-list, file lin.194. part 1/1, total size 2014 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- one or two ghosts for one or two lines by tan lin postmodern culture v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by tan lin, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. tall blank zebras appear a to care. the aerogramme made a lily of necessity, stumped box, redolence ribboned far off in the glass cities i opened and closed to the dandy drawers. a colt emerged on a clotted pansy. a pan required fanning. this repose a thread files. inside the spitting rope sweeps like a foppish knot or lighthouse, a beam where the sun withers like snow in its box of jewels. like a towel-like now. tiny broom zippers boxed z light as a ruler, i knitted the whiffing train to coverlet. dark, i had my lips. they travel apart when i kiss. exonerated groove. the captioned stock box waved to the master's bedroom. clacked suds. all flaking tide and shout was music walking out a headlamp. engined isthmus, emerged track of levels, it could be nice. the pubescent birdie sleeps in a closed head. so, it knows or it knows. a crumb held out a mighty citron in a beak, screwed backwards. but no ox sniffled to an owl or stockinged box strum through bedroom. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------aycock, 'derrida/fort-da: deconstructing play', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-aycock-derridafort-da.txt derrida/fort-da: deconstructing play by alan aycock department of anthropology university of lethbridge aycock@hg.uleth.ca _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by alan aycock, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] jacques derrida is a notably "playful" scholar, in two senses of the term. first, his writing style is playful, richly replete with the puns, circumambulations, excurses, hesitations, and gnomic recursions that make him a bane to his translators and a delight to his readers. second, derrida's playful style reflects his argument that the western metaphysics of presence may be deconstructed (as indeed, he believes that it "always already" is) by exposing the playfulness of %differance%, the constant motion of forces elsewhere in space and time. [2] from this point of view i find it somewhat ironic that despite the extensive use of derrida's ideas in numerous scholarly fields, no one has addressed the implications of deconstruction for the study of play itself.^1^ to remedy this apparent oversight, i shall first present a brief discussion of derrida's treatment of the fort-da game described by freud, and draw out several nuances of derrida's approach to this game which seem to me to be more generally applicable to play. i shall then offer five examples of the playing of chess, ethnographic situations that are familiar to me from many years of participant observation and writing about the game (aycock, n.d.[c]). in each instance, i shall show how my characterization of derrida's approach illuminates the understanding of the play at hand. finally, i shall evaluate, tentatively, the prospects and implications of a deconstructive approach to play, and suggest some directions for further research in this area. fort-da [3] the game of "fort-da" was invented by freud's grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14-17). in the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring "o-o-o-o," then pulled back, saying "da." freud (and the child's mother) interpreted the first sound as the child's version of "fort" ("gone away"), the second as the german for "there" (as in english "there it is!"). freud associated this game with the child's attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother's occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child's apparent lack of reaction to his mother's death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1). [4] in general, freud was using the fort-da game to illustrate the operations of the economy of pleasure that he had described, and to introduce the notion of the return of the repressed; that is, the neurotic effects of an earlier psychic trauma upon later behavior. as a preliminary to derrida's discussion of the game, it may also be noted that he perceives a resonance in freud's work here with the broad philosophical doctrine of the "eternal return," which nietzsche elaborated lyrically in his zarathustra (e.g., nietzsche, 1961: 159-163, 176-180). it is quite possible that freud, who was familiar with nietzsche's work (freud, 1955: 123-124), also made this connection. [5] derrida turns this brief anecdote into a playful trope for freud's writings (derrida, 1987a: 257-409), showing first how freud repeatedly sends away and calls back his central argument on the pleasure principle as he tries to summon evidence to support it, then how freud himself, as the writer of the play, conceals initially from the reader his genealogical relationship to the child as a convention of scientific writing, deferring his authorship by devolving it impersonally on an unidentified child at play. in "writing" his grandson in this fashion, freud speculates not only on the psychic economy of pleasure, which must yield in the finest bourgeois terms more than is invested, but on the political economy of his own family, and of his own writing. [6] derrida gradually extends this convoluted image into an analysis of the incompletion of the game (freud believed that the only use that the child made of his toys was to "make them gone" [derrida, 1987a: 311]), of his family (the child's mother and father are mute and unidentified in this account), of his theory of pleasure (freud never completely proved its existence to his satisfaction, but he never discarded it entirely, reworking it constantly throughout his life), and finally of the subject himself (freud's own death prefigured in that of his daughter). but derrida is not done with the game, either (derrida, 1987a: 1-256): he plays on "fort-da" in his love letters (whose messages go and return), in the pleasure of his love (which threatens to lose and find itself), in the uncertainty of writer and addressee (always incompletely known), and in the fort-da of his own theory of writing (set in eternal motion by the forces of %differance%). [7] even this is not enough: derrida plays upon the common etymology of the "legs" and "legacy" of freud (derrida, 1987a: 292), upon freud's reference later in the same work to "limping" as a halting fort-da of his legs/legacy of writing (derrida, 1987a: 406), upon derrida's own limp acquired during an illness as a fort-da of his love and his work (derrida, 1987a: 139, 141, 199), upon van gogh's paintings of shoes as a fort-da of "step/nothing" (both from the french %pas%) (derrida, 1987b: 357), upon socrates-plato as engaging in an intellectual and erotic fort-da (derrida, 1987a: 222), upon autobiography and the genealogy of ideas as fort-da (derrida, 1987a: 62; 1988: 70), upon freud's "scene of writing" as fort-da (derrida, 1987a: 336), and upon the eternal return/return of the repressed as fort-da (derrida, 1987a: 303). [8] the play of fort-da, then, occupies much the same analytical space in derrida's writings as the play of %differance%, because it substitutes the centrifugality of uncertainty for the centripetality of the western quest for a transcendental signified. ^2^ i am highlighting the game of fort-da here not as an opening to freud's own economy of pleasure, but as a device to illustrate and gain access to that which i take to represent most clearly derrida's approach to the ludic. [9] several elements of derrida's use of fort-da stand out for my purposes. first, the margins of play talk, the "fort-da" of the child, open up to reveal themselves in talk which is *not* obviously about play: the writings of freud, of plato, and of derrida himself. second, the authoritative structure of the game exposes itself as always going "somewhere else": the spool that is thrown away, the rigidly structured scientific writing that is always incomplete, the %differance% of derrida's own circuitous writing style. third, the players' subjectivity is always lost: the unidentified child and parents, freud, derrida's unidentified lover(s), derrida himself, socrates, plato, nietzsche. thus the %differance% of fort-da operates not to fix the game as a specific essence, but to defer the full apprehension of the ludic indefinitely, even as it is pleasurably experienced from moment to moment: "in order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules" (derrida, 1988: 69). for derrida, play is not fixed in finite discourse or structural symmetry or subjective intent: it happens, irresistibly, as a movement *elsewhere* of the traces of writing in the world (derrida, 1988: 69). chess as fort-da: five examples [10] to apply my reading of derrida's approach to fort-da, i adduce five examples of different forms of chess: casual play, tournament play, correspondence play, computer play, and skittles. in each case, my narrative is followed by a demonstration of the manner in which talk about play, the structures of play, and the self-awareness of the players themselves lead inexorably elsewhere, into the miscegenations of play that deconstruct its apparent authority. [11] i intend by so doing to interrogate the peripheries of play rather than its core, and thereby suggest that it may be possible to continue the play of signifiers precisely where a more traditional analysis would seek to arrest it. i take this subversion of the authority of these examples of play to represent a paradigm, however tentative and limited, of derrida's own playfulness: "this lack, which cannot be determined, localized, situated, arrested inside or outside before the framing, is simultaneously both product and production of the frame" (derrida, 1987b: 71). casual play [12] in the local public library an elderly man and a younger one set up the pieces and begin to play; at the same table, others are doing the same. after a few games, all of which he wins, the younger man proposes that they play with a chess clock (comprising two clock faces set in a single base which operate independently to measure the time taken by each opponent). the older man demurs: "i've played chess without a clock for fifty years, and i'm not going to start now. i enjoy chess because i don't work at it, and to hear that clock ticking takes away all the fun." the younger man hesitates, then says "ok, no problem; let's play." but after one or two more quickly won games he leaves, saying "i've got to get home now; thanks for the games." the other players at the table look up to say goodbye, but continue playing for several more hours. [13] is there "no problem" here? everyone has followed the rules of chess, and observed the %politesse% of social discourse that surrounds it. there's no dispute; no obvious disagreement about what's going on here. but there is something which is carefully unthought in the situation, an authority that is rejected, and a presence which is an absence. [14] first, the talk of play. i intercepted the younger man on his way out of the library, and asked him why he had left. as i had suspected he would, he said "look, there's just no competition here. i beat the old fart six times before he had even castled. using a clock might have narrowed the odds a bit, but he wouldn't do it. so why hang around?" thus the offer of a timed game expressed covertly a sense of the discrepancy between the two players, and even more fundamentally an expectation that chess is inherently adversarial. had the younger man said as much, he would have insulted his partner. so he sought an agreement to change the circumstances of play, and was rebuffed. this makes us think, perhaps, about derrida's "bab-el" [1988: 100-104], the translation of disparate terms into covenant, and the fort-da of relationships embedded in discursive situations. [15] second, the structure of play. the "ticking" of a clock is an image, as the older man pointed out, of discipline and authority in bourgeois society (he had worked for many years as an air traffic controller, constantly harassed by fateful decisions that had to be made instantly). i have spoken at some length with the older man on several occasions. for him, the clock was an enemy: "i hate to be rushed; i've had enough of that." thus a refusal for the older opponent carried with it an absence, a retirement from work; for the younger, the rejection of the clock was a denial of his presence in modernity, life in the fast lane: "i want to get on with it: just hanging around and playing to be playing is bullshit." [16] third, the players. the role of player was perceived quite differently by the two men. the younger man saw the purpose of play as "beating up someone tougher than you; if i had a choice, i'd always play someone rated above me. if you can't get the rush, why bother at all?" the older man wanted to "enjoy what i'm doing; i don't care if the other guy is better, as long as he gives me a good game. rating? naw, that doesn't matter." in other words, the younger man was interested mainly in working himself into an absent hierarchy of competitors ranked above one another, perhaps even in a formal rating system (a four-number designation of strength determined by a mathematical formula [elo, 1979]), while the older man was engaged by the egalitarian moment of play, its intuited experience. each of them pointed away from the presence of the game; even the older man had "forgotten" the formal history of chess, which is often recited as a project of triumph of greater over lesser players (cf. eales, 1985 for an instance of the way in which chess "heroes" insinuate themselves into what is intended as a more impersonal social history). [17] thus the "traces" of casual play in this example show that it is always on the edge of being transformed into something else, the absent authorial signifiers of formal competition, ranking, and time. the players' self consciousness of play moved in and out of phase with one another, and the decorum that required the younger player to stay for an extra two games after his proposal to use a clock was turned down, and to thank the older man for the games that had not really been equally enjoyed by both parties was a marker not of present intention, but of absent transactions, the "unthought" of play discourse that nonetheless dominated its situation. even the age of the players became a factor absent from the game in terms of the specific way that its rules constitute the play, but present also when the players' structural position in their life cycles--the retirement of the older player and the immersion of the younger in themes of modernity--is considered. tournament play [18] here a younger man and an older man play in a highly choreographed scene: the room is a small stage raised above an audience of chairs filled to overflowing by players from the same round of this tournament, by spectators who are excitedly pursuing what they take to be consummate competition, and by a few journalists assigned to cover the event. the competitors have a table to themselves, and upon the wall above their play there is a vinyl over-sized board with velcro pieces that adhere to it, moved as the players move, in utter silence, by an attendant. at their side a clock ticks away the time until the time control: 50 moves in two hours (apiece), and 20 moves per hour thereafter. each player has a printed form at his side upon which he records the moves in a special code, overseen by the tournament director who hovers at the margins of the play, more than a spectator and less than a participant. [19] the younger man has begun the game with a queen's pawn opening and the older man, a national champion of some decades earlier, has defended aggressively with a king's indian. by the middle game, most of the center pawns are interlocked and the pieces are maneuvering within that framework. at a particular point, the older player pushes a flank pawn unexpectedly and turns the game around: the older man goes on the offense and the younger man has to rearrange his pieces to defend what has suddenly become to seem a vulnerable and overextended position. as the game transpires, the challenger falls back into an enclosed space that he can not sustain. he forfeits a pawn to gain some room to maneuver, but slowly the former champion pushes him into a lost endgame, two bishops and three pawns against a knight, bishop, and two pawns. when the older man finally breaks through to a winning position, the audience applauds and the younger man turns over his king in resignation. the players discuss the game in a postmortem with several bystanders who eagerly intrude their suggestions about alternative lines of play. [20] the talk: here rigid silence dominates, other than the audible undercurrent of the clock's working, but the pieces "speak" for themselves during the game. as a proxy transaction of those who move them, they thrust and counter in a dreamlike counterpoint to the players' imaginations (in their minds, the players are recapitulating another game, the opening, roughly eighteen moves remembered, of two grandmasters in a match more than twenty years before). as a kind of deferral of the silent talk that prevailed during the game, the players play out a postmortem in which many divergent lines of play are seized and released (fort-da), each in its turn as it proves more or less workable: "if i move here, then you must . . . ." "but if you do that, then i . . . ." a bystander: "your king's-side attack was premature; you had to consolidate on the queen's-side first." their transactions are always formed in memory, and recalled in afterthought, as what might have been possible. their game appears afterward in a printed text of the tournament densely annotated with many of the different lines that have been discovered, and will be reincarnated by other players, elsewhere as they challenge latterly this intertext of play. [21] thus the talk of play exhausts itself along several seams of tournament chess: first as between the silence of the players and the voice of their pieces; second the disciplined quiescence of the room (the tournament director quickly hushes any conversation among the spectators, and the kinds of things that one player can say to another are specifically prescribed, e.g., "check," "j'adoube" [the traditional french word "i adjust," to reposition a piece on its square without being required to move it], "draw?") against the tension expressed by the clock that counts down the moves to the time control; third, the relative tumult of the postmortem where numerous previously silent lines of play, many formerly unthought during the game, are then spoken and often are themselves contradicted; fourth, the publication of the play and its annotations against the future replaying of the opening in this game, which is itself a reprise of a past game. [22] the structures: tournament chess is apparently very highly structured. i have described elsewhere (aycock, 1992[a]) the micro-physics of control that operates during formal play, including the many constraints set upon the motion of competitors in space and time, the segregation and passivity of spectators, the hegemony of the tournament director and the chess organizations that sanction play, even the pairings from round to round (this particular event was a national championship including hundreds of players that lasted ten rounds, and occupied nearly two weeks of the players' time). but it is also pertinent to observe that any tournament game is only divided by a word, a movement, or a tick of the clock from a dispute that may embroil all present, and many who are absent (for instance, the sponsoring chess organization); in other words, the semblance of systematic respect for the rules of play that suffused my description in this instance is very tenuous, a quarrel carefully "unthought" by the participants (one of whom indeed became intensely involved in such a disagreement during a subsequent round). [23] similarly, the structure of the play itself, taken as the configuration of pieces and pawns on the board, is always open to surprise, an intimation of structures disrupted. for instance, the king's indian opening that was used here is not a monolithic sequence of movements, but a family tree of potential excursions in which the displacement of a single pawn or piece has enormous implications all across the board (cf. bellin and ponzetto, 1990). a king's indian averbakh, which was played, is wholly different in tenor from an king's indian sdmisch, and even within the averbakh there are important variations, each of which may be named according to the grandmaster who prefers it or the place where it was first played (and often these names have yet further names attached to them to indicate subvariations, or are designated differently by players from other countries). in the instance of tournament play that i have narrated, the older man found a "new" move that he had in fact resurrected from a game that he had played thirty years previously, the venture of a flank pawn which set awry everything in its wake: "i wondered whether you had seen my game against reshevsky." "i just didn't even think about that move; it didn't seem thematic at all." even endgames, which are apparently simple because of the limited material on the board, and have been thoroughly classified (in a five-volume publication of many thousands of pages (matanovic, 1982-) and analyzed extensively (sometimes by computers), bring the unexpected to bear in particular situations: "i thought if i kept all the pieces on the board, i could create some complications that offered drawing chances." "i wanted to try losing a tempo (move) in that last position, to see whether i could get the opposition back and save the game." [24] thus each move is itself a trace of other opportunities ventured or foregone, and the perception or calculation of moves (which are two very different cognitive operations in human play [aycock, 1990]) is a complex affair of faults and absences that becomes more problematic, not less so, as the skill of the players increases: "i tried to figure out what was going to happen when i moved the knight to g5, but it was just too much, so i tried it and prayed." "i couldn't decide how you would respond if i pushed that pawn, but it looked right, so i just did it." [25] even the postmortem is a wilderness of deviant structures, many that are only discovered during the analysis that follows the game, and many whose impact cannot be assessed, but are marked with a "!?" or "?!" in the published text as possibilities to be pursued in other games. to take the notion of the postmortem one step further, at the highest levels of chess the players have trainers and seconds who study their own games and those of their putative opponents to find weaknesses and strengths that could be exploited in a match. even in the less exalted national championship from which this game is taken, the strongest players had prepared not only a general repertoire, but also in some cases, for specific opponents who might or might not be paired with them. in other examples that might have been adduced (aycock, n.d.[a]), the players had met across the board many times previously, and played their present game against a sense of absences, e.g., what their partner had been doing in recent games, how an opponent might react to a new or an old sequence of moves, whether the person involved was likely to be aggressive or conservative at that stage of the tournament. thus structures of play are always, and have always been, deferred to and from other present situations of play; there is no transcendental signified, no perfect game to arrest the motion of the signifiers that i have discussed, and no abstract competitor against whom one always plays. [26] the players: in a very straightforward way it could be said that the division among competitors, spectators, and officials is exact at any moment of play; tournament rules capture this distinction with great precision (aycock, 1992[a]). even when these roles are relaxed during the postmortem everyone still knows who were the "authors" of play in this simple sense, a matter further attested by the results of play that are inscribed on the chart of opponents on the wall at the front of the tournament room, and the names attached to the published text of the game. in fact "serious" chess makes an extended effort, indicated among other things by the recording of moves made by each competitor during play, to identify and fix its origins. [27] yet from what i have already said about this game it can also be observed that the players were not solely the masters of their own situation. they deferred, for example, the control of the circumstances of play to the tournament director, and beyond him to the organization that he represented, and even further to the rating formula whose advantage they desired (immediately after play, the younger man sat down with a calculator to figure out how many points he had lost; in a closed championship [where most, if not all of the competitors would have been internationally ranked], he would have been trying to sort out what overall score was still required to achieve an international norm). the tension in the room had to do at least in part with the breathless attention of the audience, "players" of sorts who constitute a stereotyped and generalized "other" of the encounter. the players themselves took into account many absent factors respecting the intentions and self-presence of the players that i have already described: the previous games in which a similar opening was played and the styles of the players who played them, the manuals of middlegame style and of endgame technique, authored by yet other players, that had been studied for many hours each day, the suspicions harbored about the state of mind of the opponent. and as the postmortem dramatically displayed, the players had not intended their play either as a definite conclusion or as a comprehensive understanding of the results of specific moves. [28] thus, as derrida has argued, a text of play stands not only for itself but for many other things as well, since there is no one and nothing "outside of the text" who authorizes it of his/her free will. indeed, there is a sort of nietzschean flavor to the whole thing, where each player was the hero of his or her own myth, his or her "playing autobiography" (cf. aycock, n.d.[a]), who lived out the "eternal return" (the endless replaying of a single opening variant, middlegame theme, or endgame arrangement) but who lacked the absolute self-presence to saturate the play: even the world champion loses once in a while, and lesser mortals must obviate their certain knowledge of victory as against the artifice of the tournament, else why play tournaments at all? [29] these traces of play, even in this highly regulated and harshly defined situation (very much a %gulag% of play, a strict regime of hard labor), express the movement of %differance% across a field of power/knowledge (foucault, 1980) that is contested and undermined at every point: who understands the play, how will domination be sustained if it can be at all, will the intentions of the players be realized? always these traces evoke an incomplete presentiment of chess, although the constitutive rules govern the tournament situation just as comprehensively as that of casual chess. "mastery" here becomes an irony to which everyone subscribes, and that reflects the desire that is summoned by its lack of presence: there is no final answer to any particular game, or to any of its phases, no matter who is involved. all of the answers, as i have demonstrated, are merely vectors to yet more questions. correspondence chess [30] recently when i was cleaning out the bottom of my closet, i came upon a bundle of letters that were written in the 60's. among them was my correspondence with a friend from high school, with whom i had played many games of chess over a period of six or seven years. we were quite evenly matched, and continued to play by mail after we left our home town to attend universities in different locales. there is, of course, a formal kind of correspondence play upon which i have reported elsewhere (aycock, 1989), but here i shall draw attention to a more informal correspondence chess, which nonetheless shares many of the same features. [31] my friend and i played four games at a time, divided equally between white and black. unlike the more usual correspondence chess, we imposed no time limit; it was simply understood that a reply would be forthcoming as soon as possible given our heavy schedules of study. the games were inscribed in a code known as "algebraic," where the chessboard is conceived as a grid of squares, each designated by a letter (horizontally, "a"-"h") and a number (vertically, 1-8). thus a move might be expressed as "d6-d7" or a capture as "d6xd7." the code has the advantage of being unambiguous (for want of a more immediately personal context) by comparison with the descriptive notation that was more conventional in north america at that time. [32] in two of these games we had agreed to begin play from the 11th move of a well-known and highly tactical game, a king's gambit played by boris spassky against bobby fischer; in two others, we had decided to play a strategically more complex opening, the semi-tarrasch variation of the queen's gambit declined. we had played these games against one another previously across the board as well as in our earlier correspondence, and the honors were about even. [33] in the particular letter that i am looking at, my friend begins with a short discussion of his life on campus and the courses that he is taking, then writes down his moves for each game. he comments on his move in the 2nd game, "well, i don't know if this is getting me anywhere, but fischer gave it an exclamation point in chess life, so here goes." then he pauses in the middle of writing his move in the 3rd game (thus: "h7-. . ."), and says "excuse me for a little while, i've just been asked to play bridge by this guy from downstairs." the next line continues, "there, that didn't take very long, did it?" and adds " . . . h6"). i'll concentrate on these two passages for purposes of my analysis, which is of course much influenced by my reading of derrida's _post card_ (1987a: 3-256). [34] first, the play talk is expressed by an interlocking sequence of discourses which include the personal remarks in the letter that have at best an indirect relationship to chess, references to a magazine article on chess and to a play event which interrupts the writing of the letter, and the code itself which speaks the move. the referents of each of these kinds of talk is hard to pin down: for example, i've never been to the chapel hill campus of the university of north carolina (my friend's school), i must once have had a copy of the fischer article, but have it no longer, i've never played bridge with the "guy" downstairs, and even the code of the move is hesitant to identify itself without condition, in one case offered with a qualifier ("here goes") and in the other case broken into in a way that's impossible to visualize in "real" time (was the piece mystically suspended in the air over the board until my friend returned from his bridge game; was he even using a board and pieces to make his moves?). [35] the letter itself persists in time, though for all i know my friend is dead, since our correspondence has long since ceased. i didn't throw away the letter, so it may be excavated by mystified archaeologists a thousand years from now if the paper has not decayed or the ink faded beyond recall. the letter also marks out its own space, sketches of a discourse that remains plausible after nearly thirty years, that could be (and perhaps has been) repeated on many occasions. in fact the very principle of the letter is the endless deferral and repetition of its conversations irrespective of our ability to locate it in a specific place and time. [36] second, the structured authority of the play very readily loses itself upon its margins. these were not rated games, though they repeated rated games that we and others had played, and would play again; it was subject to no disciplinary gaze of a chess organization or tournament director, though we implicitly held certain constitutive rules of chess to be more or less constant, including among others the code in which it was written. yet there is no constitutive rule of chess that allows the players to begin a game on the 11th move, and it would be a serious offense were players in a tournament to consult a magazine article or any other written text of play, including their own notes. even the continuous sequence of moves that the constitutive rules of chess requires was interrupted in this writing, and the adversarial assumption that lies behind the play of the game was subverted by the confession of my opponent that he didn't know whether he was playing a good move. [37] was this writing of play simply a deferral, an inferior and secondary inscription of the oral authority of the presence of play (cf. derrida, 1976)? perhaps in one sense it was, yet writing the play offered quite a different set of textual resources than being there, e.g., stopping to play bridge with a different set of partners, playing four games at once, looking up (as we both did) "best" continuations of the semi-tarrasch defense in the available chess literature. [38] to take another example of a possible transcendental signified that becomes problematic in the writing, it would be quite hard to locate the origin of our play: where did the fischer-spassky game begin (i seem to recall that it was later pointed out in chess life that the line advocated by fischer in his magazine article had been "invented" at least a hundred years before), or the semi-tarrasch (there was an early twentieth-century grandmaster named siegbert tarrasch, but what on earth is a semi-tarrasch)? [39] finally, who were the players? i have already mentioned a couple of candidates for insertion at the margins of our game, such as the grandmasters to whose names our play was affixed, or the "unthought" spectators of our play who might deliver the letter or dig it up latterly in a rubbish heap. neither the addressee nor the signatory of the letter is secure, as derrida has suggested: i have noted that i don't know when or where my friend is now, but i didn't then, either, though i accepted the usual conventions that associate the author of the play with the name of the correspondent who signs its written code, the socrates-plato matter revisited. and if i have the letter in my possession as i write these words, what does that demonstrate: am i truly reading it now, or was i reading it then, in some definitively authentic way? is this present account of the play more serious than the original, or less so? consider even the well-known scam, occasionally used as a plot device in novels or movies, where an amateur player bets on at least one victory in simultaneous games over two famous opponents, and merely transmits the move of the one to the other to win the wager. can this be ruled out here, or in fact isn't this very close to what actually happened--wasn't my friend consulting fischer to play me, and i to play him? but of course derrida wants us to continue this argument for orality as well as for literacy, the "arche-writing" of which he speaks [1976: 56]. thus in terms of the example i have given the uncertain traces of this correspondent play are no more derivative or false than the "spurs" of our personally present play: our intentions respecting the moves of this game and our respective abilities to guarantee its proper sequence were just as loosely connected to our self-consciousness in either event. indeed, if we had been challenged to supply indubitable evidence of self-consciousness with regard to our play of these transacted moves, we would have had enormous problems doing so without setting ourselves in the flux of %differance% that is involved as i have indicated in the play of this particular game, let alone chess in general; again, the deferral of the intextuated self elsewhere looms just as derrida has proposed. [40] thus even the intimacy of friendship cannot guarantee that their transactions will be more assured of meaning than those of parties who are less well acquainted. in fact, it might be argued that the numerous contexts in which friends encounter one another become the stuff of the deferral of presence even more intensely than for those who have few such contexts, or none at all, since the values involved in any single encounter among friends become multiplied and unevenly focussed on that personal encounter (just as the fort-da incident reported by freud). this does not lead, either for derrida or myself, to a claim that the circumstances are meaningless or inscrutable; rather the problem is the reverse, that the meanings are too numerous and too easily scrutinized from every new vantage point to be comfortably situated in an ordinary version of empiricism. computer play [41] i am presently playing a chess game with my son by means of an electronic mail system installed on the mainframes of our respective universities. he is not a chess player, or if so, he is only the rawest novice, vaguely aware of the constitutive rules of the game but not much else, and not particularly intent on repairing what to me seems an obvious deficiency. instead, he refers the moves that i am sending him to a computer program that is also located on the mainframe of the university which he attends, and reports (i suppose, without any real evidence on my part, accurately) whatever the computer decides as his own move in the game. [42] although we have agreed that i will test my own playing strength against my son's computer program, he also understands that from time to time i may consult my own chess literature, and even that i might experiment with a chess program, the _chessmaster 2100_, that operates on my personal computer. thus from move to move the parties to the game may shift drastically from organic to silicate opponents. it should also be noted that neither of us is using a chess board and pieces to make our moves, although either of us could instruct our respective programs to print out a simulacrum of the position, and have done so when there was some uncertainty about the transmission of moves and the position at hand. [43] as our game has progressed, our e-mails which indicate the moves to be made have included side commentaries, much as in the correspondence games that i discussed above, not only about the game situation ("this is an english opening, but your program has gravely compromised itself by those silly bishop moves"), but also about matters related to our jobs ("i'm an assistant operations supervisor now, with my own office, though i get mainly the shitwork") and domestic circumstances ("are you coming to see us for christmas?"). in fact, the latter have taken precedence over the game in recent weeks ("i've got this project to finish, so i guess i've got to earn my money"), and the game has been held in abeyance until more pressing duties are dealt with on both sides. [44] where is the talk of play, and how is it configured? as in the correspondence games, the play "speaks itself" through our written message, but unlike those games, the writing seems to originate not just with the persons who are individually identifiable in a genealogical sense, but also with a computer discourse that carries with itself its own textual protocol. being "online" is not merely a convenience which suits two people who are separated in space and time, but in addition a knowledge of procedures summoned from a source far beyond the immediate situation, such as in my case courses taken in "dos." neither my son nor i can simply go to a keyboard and start typing, because both of us must conform to the established arrangements of our university mainframes that permit communication to occur within particular constraints, for example accounts, usernames, and passwords. especially in terms of computers, the indelibility of the traces which inscribe a conversation is brought into question; if deliberate steps are not taken to "save" the words, the bourgeois gesture of finality, they may be lost forever in a kind of electronic limbo (cf. heim, 1987: 21-22). [45] similarly, the game itself endures only for as long as the memories of the mainframe and personal computer can be sustained; if the mainframe crashes, or the hard disk on my personal computer fails, then much of what has been transacted may be lost. even the attempt to locate this memory within a special physical position, the hardware that underlies the communication, is subjected to the vagaries of telephone lines which transmit bits of information from one city to another. as every computer user knows, there are random glitches in these transmissions which can scramble the signals in progress and render them meaningless: "did you send '14. d4-d5'?" "no, it was '14. ng1-e2' and then '15. d4-d5'." thus the talk of play in computer chess is mediated by the possibility of garbage introduced by those sitting at the computer keyboard or simply by the chaotic noise of the immediate universe, always threatening to lay waste ("trash") the representations that are apparently intended. [46] how is computer play structured, and where is that structure brought into question? i have mentioned already that the protocols of computer use offer a structure which cannot guarantee the simple referentiality of the encounter. to give one example, both my son's and my own mainframe system require users to sign a solemn declaration that they will respect the propertied interests, the copyright of particular authors, and obey the elaborate "code of computing" established by our respective universities. in my case, however, i must confess that some of the programs that i run on my personal computer have been "stolen" from their "rightful owners." in electronic media, the ease of copying one program to another diskette has undermined this bourgeois sense of proprietorial closure (poster, 1990: 73). from my son's viewpoint, his conditions of employment, including the use of his university's mainframe, proscribe its personal enjoyment, or at least accord game playing a very low priority that my son has, i suspect, sometimes circumvented. this resistance to institutional authority, pleasure against hegemony, is implicated in derrida's project of the deconstruction of writing, and in this case it is a potential which is readily available in the situation. [47] our game obeys all of the constitutive rules of chess, and in fact the structure of the programs that we are using guarantees it; the computers will not permit an illegal move. yet such a simple structuration is routinely dismissed in our play much as my friend and i did in our correspondence games, because we can comment on the play in a fashion that both brings its adversarial nature into question, and that places the play as a tracing of the background of other, more significant projects--our jobs and our families: "i just got an "a" on my combinatorics exam, and by the way, i am playing '8. c7-c6'." we also have the capacity, that has been invoked throughout our game, to retract moves in order to follow a more interesting line of play: "oh shit, this doesn't work; let me try again from move 17." this is not usual even for casual chess, and systematically betrays the notion that a movement of a piece or a pawn has some sort of lasting influence on play arising from personal presence. the lack of a "real" board and pieces underscores this sense of an encounter defined not by its presence, but by its absence in an otherwise identifiably empirical context. [48] the players, of course, are always those who may not be self-referentially present and intending or enjoying their game; i suspect that my son is humoring my peculiar obsession with the game rather than pursuing an activity that he himself values. sometimes players are at a distance the guarantors of play, for example if i am making my move and writing it to my opponent. but from the other side of the game, the physically human author is a messenger only, even though i could scarcely reject his genealogical connection to me if i wished to do so. when i allow _chessmaster 2100_ to reply to my son's moves, we both become %facteurs% of the play. does this mean that the computers are playing? they might be, but i know of no way to find out what they intend, or even if they "desire to win" in the ordinary sense of that phrase. if we don't mean to say that players desire something, or anything, then what is really meant by a player? [49] in theory we could apply a %turing% test (levy and newborn, 1991: 31) to the definition of player: "players" are those who transact the motions of the game in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish humans from computers. forget that i, as an experienced player, could very likely distinguish the usual style of a computer's play from that of a human, and let us consider whether the %turing% answer is sufficient to disconcert derrida's model of %differance%. in the first instance, computers do not yet program themselves to play chess, nor do humans; the impetus always arrives from elsewhere, a programmer or a teacher (in the human case, usually a member of an immediate kin group, often a father [parry and aycock, 1991]), whose own programmability works in an infinite regression to many other origins, none of them terminable by any test that has been devised. no one spontaneously or self-referentially invents the moves of chess. second, a %turing% paradigm circumvents the intention and the desire of play in a fashion that derrida would find agreeable. the play just "happens" for the %turing% examiner, and that movement of play is both necessary and sufficient to make it real. whether an embodied subject is the source of that play is left open for question. finally, the actual play of a game is never fully determined by a %turing% argument, because it is always assumed that following the constitutive rules is enough to accomplish the goal of locating "intelligence" that the %turing% test addresses. in this situation there is a resonance of the freudian "fort-da" game that should not be overlooked. [50] yet actual games, such as the one that my son and i have undertaken, are not only a "black box" where moves go in and come out in a regular sequence. games of chess have a particular style, even for novices, that is impossible to relegate only to their immediate conformity to its constitutive rules (parry and aycock, 1991). the meaning of "style" is not dissimilar in some ways to the medieval notion of "soul," or to the more modern idea of the "real self," as it might be transubstantially conceived (aycock, 1990: 139): there remains a %je ne sais quoi% about a given game that overflows its authorial boundaries, but that lends to the play a pleasurable experience that is always somewhere else than merely in the recorded list of moves. chess players have worried at length about the use of computers to contrive an "information death" of the game, but the quintessence of play, as derrida has argued, resides always already beyond its realization in discourse that is immediately present. the play emerges from an uncertainty which is never encapsulated in its specific traces, but functions to inscribe those traces in the imagining of what might just happen next, or of the significance of what has already transpired. nor is this a simple mystification of the human potential, because as derrida has argued the moment of play is always arrested and released in an empirical circumstance. skittles [51] "skittles" is a term used in chess to denote a kind of playing at play in which one or more of the standard rules of competitive chess is set aside to intensify the moment of the game (aycock, 1992[a]). by far the most frequent form of skittles is the use of a chess clock to diminish substantially the time that players may take to make the moves of their game. as the time becomes shorter, players take ever greater risks, and rely upon the quickness of their wits and upon sheer luck to win. chess is shifted in the process from, ideally, a game of perfect information and calculation to something closer to derrida's open-ended universe of traces. the device of that shift is a subversion of the bourgeois economy of the clock. [52] the situation is an empty tournament hall following the completion of the sixth round of a national championship. since it is several hours past midnight, most of the players have completed their games and gone home. half a dozen men of all ages and skill levels from strong amateur to titled master cluster around one of the hundred or so chess boards in the hall, playing ten-minute chess, munching on hamburgers and fries, and drinking soft drinks or coffee. as the term "ten-minute chess" suggests, each player has ten minutes for all the moves of the game. the person whose "flag" falls first (a red lever that is pushed erect by the minute hand of each clock, then drops when the hand reaches the vertical) loses irrespective of the material forces or the position then on the board. a common practise, which is followed here, is for one player to take on all comers until he loses, then to be replaced by another player who challenges the winner of that contest; the players take their seats more or less in rotation. [53] tournament regulations such as strict silence and moving a touched piece are ritualistically reversed: the players freely "kibitz" their own games, while the bystanders join in the often ribald commentary. touching or even moving a piece is not irreversible until one strikes the button that stops his own clock and starts that of his opponent. as the time limit approaches, the game builds to a frenzy, with players moving wildly, slamming their pieces off-center on the squares and hitting the clock with greater and greater force. pieces that are captured are tossed aside, sometimes falling off the table to be caught or picked up by one of the bystanders. even the clock is not exempt from this rough treatment, though chess clocks are relatively more expensive and fragile than the plastic pieces (another infraction of bourgeois norms, this time of commodification). [54] eventually in this particular situation the most highly ranked and titled player present begins to win consistently. after some badinage ("it must be tough to be perfect" "yeah, i hear that all the time"), he agrees to reduce his own time by one minute for each game that he wins, balancing the odds out a bit. he does not lose until he is playing with only a single minute against his opponent's ten. at this point, everyone suddenly realizes that they are exhausted (earlier that evening each of them has played a strenuous tournament game lasting perhaps four to six or more hours), and the group breaks up to retire to their hotel rooms. [55] the play talk in this example is quite different from that each of the others. unlike casual chess, politeness is deliberately avoided, as players comment rudely on one another's skill and personal habits, as well as upon their own: "what a patzer!" "c'mon, get serious; i'm not going to fall for that!" "holy shit, give me a break, huh?" unlike tournament chess, noise is privileged over silence: "ouch!" "fuckin'-a!" "auugghh!" unlike correspondence and computer play, the talk is not incidental to the play, but part of its intensity: "what's the matter; you too good to take my rook?" "well, i guess if you're going to eat up my queen's-side, my king's-side attack had better work; take the damn bishop sac!" if the pieces speak for themselves, it is to share in the raucous tenor of the occasion, as they add their own clatter to the general turmoil. thus in skittles more obviously than in the other forms of play that i have described the talk is confused with the action of the players, spreading out the game discourse over a much broader context that includes the braggadocio of the combatants and general colloquialisms of pleasure and disgust as well as the liberation of the ordinarily measured transactions of play. for instance, it's not at all unusual in this situation for a player who has made a move and "punched" his clock to start making his next move even before his opponent has completed one in his turn; quite often two hands descend on the buttons of the clock simultaneously, sometimes with disastrous results for its mechanism. [56] the structures of the game, by the same token, are distorted to engage the players with the experience of the play rather than simply with its outcome. by contrast with the rigid discipline of the tournament round that was just completed, the skittles games are carnivalesque and have some of the characteristics of that resistant mode (cf. aycock, n.d.[b]). here the players have violated the spatial distinction that is normally made between the tournament hall as a kind of "sacred" context of serious play and the analysis room where such "secular" off-hand games are usually contested (aycock, 1992[a]). the burlesquing of time constraints on play offers a patent contrast with the standard bourgeois economy of tournament time controls. the absence of a director (he was actually one of the participants, but was treated by all as just another player) removes the supervisory gaze of a sponsoring chess organization, though it is noticeable in any event that disputes in skittles are extremely rare. finally, no one keeps score or computes ratings, so measurements of strength are entirely transient, claiming a sort of civil inattention (goffman, 1963: 84) to the disparity in formal levels of accomplishment between the strongest and weakest players present. [57] thus this skittles example represents notionally an "unthought" rejection of the limits or margins of serious play, and as well a complex refusal of the quiet relaxation of casual play (remember the younger man who became disgruntled when his older opponent would not use a clock in the instance of casual play). skittles can be played without a clock, but most experienced players consider it rather unexciting. at the other end of the spectrum, tournament chess can be played with shorter time limits (for instance, games with an overall time limit of one hour) than those usually imposed by chess organizations, but it is only recently and after much debate that they have begun to be formally recognized as worthy of "serious" attention, such as the calculation of ratings or the award of titles such as the world speed chess champion. [58] the sense of the chess "player" as such is also subtly decentered in skittles of the sort that i am describing, since there are not just two players involved in this example, but half a dozen who participate in the play both directly as they rotate to challenge the winner, and indirectly as they interject their commentary ("kibitzing") while others actually move the pieces. the clock also becomes a participant of sorts, since it may dictate the result of the game irrespective of the situation on the board: a player whose game is hopelessly lost from a material or positional standpoint will nevertheless continue to move his pieces around ("just thrashing about"), desperately trying to stave off checkmate until his opponent runs out of time and loses "on the clock." [59] another critical factor is that the players, however they are to be defined, do not intend or guarantee the text of their play. instead, players will attempt wildly unsound opening gambits or middlegame sacrifices, knowing that it is virtually impossible to respond to them as systematically as in tournament, or even in casual play. for instance, in one of the games of this sequence a player sacrificed his queen for a bishop and knight in an otherwise relatively quiet position. his opponent stared dumbfounded at the board for a precious two minutes, then panicked and tried to realize his material advantage before his flag dropped. he wound up blundering away yet another piece in a couple of moves, and resigned in good-natured exasperation (not just by turning over his king quietly, but by suddenly gathering the pieces at the center of the board in a sweeping two-handed gesture) when he saw that he had placed his king and queen in a position to be forked by his opponent's knight. the rupture of normal transactions and of the assumption of rationality that lies behind them (aycock, 1992[a]) is a common feature of the displacement of intentionality in skittles. [60] again, though players draw upon their skill and knowledge of the game, as in other forms of play, the instant recall of variations and themes that is involved in skittles works against players' capacities to search thoughtfully for a specific authorization of a given opening or end-game technique that is associated with an ancestral champion of that style; this contrasts sharply with the correspondence and computer play that i have discussed, where chess literature is openly consulted to evoke the "best" line of play. thus the authorization of play is as radically indeterminate in skittles as in the other instances of play, but for rather different reasons. the "arche-writing" of play amid personal presences, of which skittles appears to be an ultimate exemplar, is not necessarily freer of traces or absences than the "phonetic" writing of correspondent or computer play. conclusion [61] i have attempted in these five examples of chess to deconstruct what is ordinarily meant by the ludic. as i understand deconstruction (even in the excessively narrow, %naove% and demotic form that i may have deployed it here), this means that i have proceeded from an assumption that play is evoked not by a simple, measurable presence of speaking, structure, and self-awareness in particular meaningful situations. rather, the ludic in the instances that i have given seems to trace or inscribe itself upon absences, the force that differs and defers meaning always already somewhere else beyond the immediate ken of the participant observer and of those who are the constructed "others" of ethnographic analysis. it then becomes much more difficult to ground simple empiricism in the "real," which reveals itself not simply as a given, but as a central problem and task of study.^3^ [62] first, the talk of play does indeed seem to lose some of its solidity as i explore its role in different forms of chess. the casual players were talking about one thing, and meaning quite another when they debated whether to use a clock, and exchanged farewells at the conclusion of their games. tournament players speak with their play alone according to the strict rules of competitive chess, but when they do so they are implicitly voicing the potential disruptions of that regime, and aligning themselves with many alternative directions of play that may emerge in their training for a tournament game, or in the postmortem that succeeds it. correspondence players can, and in the nature of their play, often do defer their coded transactions to the interruptions of present circumstance or to the archaeology of closet dibris. computers are programmed to speak the play in electronic signals, but they cannot sustain a linear discourse without the complicity of many other figurations that have little directly to do with the game. even skittles players, the most immediately focussed of all chess participants, interweave their games with a barrage of words that make the game something other than that which is prescribed by its constitution. time and space, in all five examples, are elements of the "babel" of play that render its meanings untranslatable in the most direct sense and thereby interrupt its covenants. [63] second, the structures of play surround it and seem to fix its situation in deterministic, readily discernable contexts. but casual players may contest the structure of a game with clocks, and thereby resist unbeknownst to themselves the straightforward exchange of polite formulae of disengagement. tournament players inhabit a highly structured event, though they may at any moment bring into question its institutionalization by disputes that call to account and sometimes undermine the authority of the director. although tournament play is symbolically rationalized in numerous ways, those claims on structural authority are always subject to equivocation about the best play, and indeed the point of tournament chess is to overwhelm a particular positional structure by divergence toward unanticipated movements in an opening, middlegame, or endgame. correspondent play uses writing as a resource rather than as merely a constraint of the relationship between players, and points to a reevaluation of structure (beginning on move 11, or consulting the fischer article) as a way to play upon intimacy and to vanquish distance (the obtruding bridge player). computers are physically structured to maintain the play in sequence and along acceptable lines, but they can be deprogrammed, as it were, by random noise, by circumvention of the "codes of conduct" of their authorizing agencies, or by an agreement of the parties to arrangements that were not originally contemplated. skittles, finally, foreordains its deviance from the structure of the tournament or even of casual play, and encourages a catastrophic occlusion of time, touching, speaking, and rational calculation, all of which are apparently inherent in other forms of competitive chess. [64] third, the players of chess work not only within the limits of the game, but beyond to express their broader roles which intrude upon its play. in casual play, what the players experience and intend is sometimes concealed and oftimes contradictory, dependent in part upon identities which arise from a position in their life cycle or an attitude toward the fast tempo of modern life. tournament play expressly segregates authors of the game from its spectators, but relieves that distinction in the postmortem. more importantly, serious competition requires an ongoing relationship of the players with their predecessors and successors, trainers and seconds, and in addition defers their responsibility for the conditions of tournament play to a tournament director who represents an absent player, the organization that attempts, with rather uneven success, to guarantee that its conditions are acknowledged. correspondents routinely admit their subservience to texts of play that are only tangential to the situation of their games conceived in terms of personal presence, and the literate circumstances of correspondent play divert attention from personal presence to authorizations that are potentially far removed in time and space from the material basis of their transactions, the post card or letter that bears its moves (is the "guy" who wants to play bridge not a player in my chess game with my friend, and if not, how is that to be demonstrated?). computers confess a range of players whose own biochemistries may be entirely alien from one another, and whose intent or desire is, to say the least, highly problematic. finally, skittles is an enterprise where players sometimes collude, often diverge, to create the semblance of a game. the relaxation of normal constraints upon authorization in skittles paradoxically invokes new and diffused authorities, the clock, the kibitzers, the %sauvage% style that skittles players tend to adopt as an intimation of their personal identities. [65] i must now consider whether a deconstructive approach to the study of play, as i have here characterized it, is sufficiently promising to continue work along similar lines. in a sense, there is very little involved in deconstruction that could not be accomplished by careful examination of traditional ethnographic assumptions (aycock, 1992[b]) about the play, the players, and the role of the observer. yet one important value of a deconstructive approach is to suggest that a figure-ground reversal of what is normally meant by the ludic and the serious may refocus attention on problems that could otherwise be taken for granted. in particular, it becomes possible to reformulate the instances of play that i have described as specific contexts of a more global problem of authority in western cultures, ludic, scholarly or otherwise. [66] for example, familiar symbolic oppositions such as "culture-nature" and "order-disorder" take on an entirely new significance if the search for what is "real" is, %deja aussi%, a point of departure for analysis, because the fort-da of the human sciences is then shown to be at least as uncertain as human experience itself. we should not, from this perspective, be complaisant about adopting a deconstructive approach, but we should be aware that it offers a continuing challenge to more conventional notions. thus competitive chess is for many in western culture the ideal image of a "factory of reason" (aycock, 1992[a]), which may lead a deconstructive analysis to reflect in general upon reason and its limitations. [67] again, anthropology has invested itself with the western conception of human knowledge as a progressive narrative that begins, continues, and flourishes interminably in time (cf. fabius, 1983). chess shares with anthropology this sense of the limitless expansion of knowledge, an endeavor made "real" by the experimental attitude of serious competitors towards lines of play that are to be tested, discovered, renewed or discarded, and incorporated into volumes of games studied by each player as part of an autobiography of style (aycock, n.d.[a]). yet deconstruction causes us to hesitate in our easy affirmation of this progress. like foucault, derrida works against the comfortable presumption of knowing the play--whether as players or as ethnographers--by relating it also to epistemological problems that are riddled through and through by contending gestures of empowerment and alienation.^4^ if you think about the "king's indian" not just as the name of a specific text or pattern of play, but as an image of authority, it suddenly becomes quite clear why a deconstructive approach might be provocative. [68] finally, there is an aesthetic as well as an ethical dimension involved in deconstruction which might be generalized for those who labor in the human sciences, or indeed in any %lebenswelt% where diverse values have become relevant (and where have they not?). there is, obviously, an important ontological debate evoked here, the familiar "is/ought/seems" trichotomy that derrida particularly seeks to address. thus, a deconstructive approach conflates the author, reader, and text in rewarding ways: who would have thought, before derrida, that the variants of chess were meaningful not just as immediate transactions of a game, but also as forces of a cosmic kind of play interwoven by %differance% amongst a texture of the western search for authorial presence? feeling, knowing, and desiring the play, in this sense, cannot be held apart from one another, nor should they be: games are "world-building activities" (goffman, 1961: 27). [69] the possibility of a coherent deconstructive approach is, of course, something of a contradiction in terms: %differance% lends itself most readily to pluralism, not singularity. in the very effort to write of a peripatetic style such as derrida's in the linear form of an essay, one despairs of closure. it seems to me, nevertheless, that if the conceptual issue is radically undecidable, the practical problem is not. all that i intend here is to suggest that at this moment, for these instances of play, i can offer a simplistic account of derrida's thought that seems to go beyond ordinary limits of ethnographic analysis. [70] thus even the five examples of play related above afford a venue for more sophisticated study. an important direction for further analysis would deconstruct not only the immediate situations of play, but also, more comprehensively, their institutionalization. another problem that i have glossed over in my analysis is that of mass-mediated play, which deserves a deconstruction all its own. yet a third issue not dealt with in this essay is the relationships of play to engenderment, race, nationalism, commodification, and the post-colonial milieu of "carceral" society. fourth, the contrivance of playful biographies is implied, but not directly brought to the fore in my arguments. finally, a careful tracing of the economies of pleasure associated with these four issues would invoke more directly the freudian fort-da transaction as it has actually been deployed by derrida in his work. all of these represent the "unthought" in my discussion, and thereby implicate as yet unspoken, and more thoroughgoing deconstructions. [71] i have tried to show here that when we take the ludic as ludicrous, we have in some ways revealed a *credential* for analysis rather than only a means, finally, to discredit it. derrida, typically, steals my last words and makes a game of them: if the alterity of the other is posed, that is only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? from this point of view, i would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." inscription, as i would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded...differance (1981: 95-96). ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ the extent to which deconstructive approaches have become entrenched in the human sciences is suggested by this lengthy list of subject headings, taken from a major north american research library, in which "deconstruction" appears as a key word: architecture, education, feminism, film criticism, history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, painting, philosophy, social psychology, sociology, and theology. surprisingly, anthropology is not included, though one need not distort the "writing culture" debate (e.g., clifford, 1988; clifford and marcus, 1986) too much to perceive a deconstructive intent. ^2^ think of derrida in this sense, perhaps, as a master of japanese "go" (more evocatively in chinese, "wei-ch'i," the "surrounding" game): finely shaped colored stones are moved, insouciantly as if of their own accord, to circumscribe paths of influence that command the empty board without filling it (korschelt, 1965: ch. iii). ^3^ see also hayles (1990: ch. 7), who perceives a modern alliance of deconstructive trends with another ultra empiricism, chaos theory. ^4^ like swift's laputans who carry with them on their backs a bundle of objects so that they can converse by holding forth one after another with no possibility of misconstruction (swift, 1945: 170-171), derrida burlesques the comfortable assumption that we know what we are talking about at a particular moment. to extend the satiric image, i suggest that derrida occupies the role of the servant who walks just behind one of laputa's meticulous %philosophes% with a bladder affixed to a stick, flapping it against his sense organs from time to time to return his attention to the dangers and resources of the "real" world (swift, 1945: 144-145). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited aycock, alan. "'the check is in the mail': a preliminary view of play as discourse." _play and culture_ 2 (2): 142-157 (1989). ---. "play without players, players without play: the world computer chess championship." _play and culture_ 3 (2): 133-145 (1990). ---. "finite reason: a construction of desperate play. _play and culture_ 5(2): 182-208 (1992[a]). ---. "three assumptions in search of an author: some textual problems in play. _play and culture_ 5 (3): 264-279 (1992[b]). ---. "the postmodern 'situation': erving goffman's selves at play." unpublished ms. (n.d.[a]). ---. "hearing voices: bakhtin and the critical study of play." unpublished ms. (n.d.[b]). ---. "chess/pieces: fragments of play in the postmodern." unpublished ms. (n.d.[c]). bellin, robert, and ponzetto, pietro. _mastering the king's indian defense_. new york, ny: macmillan (1990). clifford, james. _the predicament of culture: twentieth century ethnography, literature, and art_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press (1988). clifford, james, and george marcus, eds. _writing culture: the poetics and politics of representation_. berkeley, ca: university of california (1986). derrida, jacques. _of grammatology_. baltimore, md: johns hopkins press (1976). ---. _positions_. chicago, il: university of chicago press (1981). ---. _the post card: from socrates to freud and beyond_. chicago, il: university of chicago press (1987a). ---. _the truth in painting_. chicago, il: university of chicago press (1987b). ---. _the ear of the other: otobiography, transference, translation_. lincoln, ne: university of nebraska press (1988). eales, richard. _chess: the history of a game_. new york, ny: facts on file (1985). elo, arpad. _the rating of chessplayers, past and present_. new york, ny: arco press (1979). fabius, johannes. _time and the other: how anthropology makes its object_. new york, ny: columbia (1983). foucault, michel. _power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977_. new york, ny: pantheon (1980). freud, sigmund. _beyond the pleasure principle_. ed. j. strachey. the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. xviii. london: hogarth press (1955). goffman, erving. _encounters: two studies in the sociology of interaction. new york, ny: macmillan (1961). ---. _behavior in public places: notes on the social organization of gatherings_. new york, ny: free press (1963). hayles, katherine. _chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science_. ithaca, ny: cornell university press (1990). heim, michael. _electric language: a philosophical study of word processing_. new haven, ct: yale university press (1987). korschelt, oskar. _the theory and practice of go_. tokyo, japan: charles e. tuttle (1965). levy, david. and newborn, monty. _how computers play chess_. new york, ny: w.h. freeman (1991). matanovic, alexandr. _encyclopedia of chess endings_. beograd, yugoslavia: chess informator (1982-). nietzsche, friedrich. _thus spoke zarathustra_. harmondsworth, eng: penguin (1961). parry, keith and aycock, alan. "when bobby fischer meets minnesota fats: rules and style in chess and billiards." annual conference of the association for the study of play (april 1991). poster, mark. _the mode of information: poststructuralism and social context_. cambridge, eng: polity press (1990). swift, jonathan. _gulliver's travels_. garden city, ny: doubleday (1945). 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information about the well is available via e-mail at info@well.sf.ca.us or by calling (415) 332-4335 or writing the well, 27 gate five road, sausalito, ca 94965. when you subscribe to the well, please mention that you are doing so in order to have access to f.a.s.t., we get a small credit for each referral. reduced access charges are available via pc pursuit and compuserve packet network. contact the well for further information. it is also possible to receive f.a.s.t. on diskettes. each diskette (5 1/4/ msdos diskettes, ascii text, double-sided, double-density) contains all of the information on f.a.s.t. for the current quarter. this includes three issues of leonardo electronic news, the calendars, selections from laser news, words on works, space art news, member news, the organizations and email directories, the latest bibliography and the job listings. each diskette is $17.00 for members and $25.00 for non-members, annual subscription rates (four diskettes) are $60.00 for members and $90.00 for non-members. for additional information about isast, or to become an isast member. contact: isast (international society for the arts, sciences, and technology) 672 south van ness, san francisco, ca 94110, usa tel: (415) 431-7414 or fax: (415) 41-5737 email: fast@garnet.berkeley.edu for further information about fineart forum or f.a.s.t., send email to fast@garnet.berkeley.edu (internet) or fast@ucbgarne (bitnet). 6)-------------------------------------------------------------- _futureculture_ requests to join the futureculture e-list must be sent to: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu the subject must have one of the following: subscribe realtime -subscribe in realtime (reflector) format subscribe digest -subscribe in daily-digest (1 msg/day subscribe faq -subscribe to faq only (periodical updates) unsubscribe realtime unsubscribe digest unsubscribe faq help -send help on subscribing and general info send info -receive info on the futureculture mailing list send faq -this file futureculture list maintainer and keeper of this faq: andy ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu ahawks@mindvox.phantom.com while no article that attempts to document an entire emerging subculture can be complete, i will do my best to give you enough complete and accurate information to get you on your way to the future. this article will focus mainly on cyberpunk culture, rave culture, industrial, po-mo, virtual reality, drugs, computer underground, etc.. basically, the elements that make up the developing techno-underground, the new edge, the technoculture. included in this article will be: suggested readings--books magazines, zines, requisite authors, bbses devoted to relevant topics, corporations and merchandise geared toward the technoaware, internet e-mail addresses for figure-heads in this area, suggested music and movies/videos, ftp sites, etc.. contact on internet: ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu. 7)-------------------------------------------------------------- _gender, language, and myth_ essays on popular narrative edited by *glenwood irons* _gender, language, and myth_ is a collection of fourteen papers on popular romance, detective, western, science fiction and horror. authors included are jean radford, tania modleski, and leslie fiedler (on romance); marcus klein, john cawelti, and jane tomkins (on the western); glenwood irons, scott christianson and umberto eco (on detective and espionage); and harold schecter, carol clover, and robin wood (on horror). university of toronto press 50.00/cloth (cdn) 18.95/paper (cdn) 8)-------------------------------------------------------------- _gnet: an archive and electronic journal toward a truly global network computer-mediated communication networks are growing rapidly, yet they are not truly global--they are concentrated in affluent parts of north america, western europe, and parts of asia. gnet is an archive/journal for documents pertaining to the effort to bring the net to lesser-developed nations and the poorer parts of developed nations (net access is better in many "third world" schools than in south-central los angeles). gnet consists of two parts, an archive directory and a moderated discussion. archived documents are available by anonymous ftp from the directory global_net at dhvx20.csudh.edu (155.135.1.1). to conserve bandwidth, the archive contains an abstract of each document, as well as the full document (those without ftp access can contact me for instructions on mail-based retrieval). in addition to the archive, there is a moderated gnet discussion list. the list is limited to discussion of documents in the archive. it is hoped that document authors will follow this discussion, and update their documents accordingly. if this happens, the archive will become a dynamic journal. monthly mailings will list new papers added to the archive. we wish broad participation, with papers from nuts-and-bolts to visionary. suitable topics include, but are not restricted to: descriptions of networks and projects host and user hardware and software connection options and protocols current and proposed applications education using the global net user and system administrator training social, political or spiritual impact economic and environmental impact politics and funding free speech, security and privacy directories of people and resources to submit a document to the archive or subscribe to the moderated discussion list, use the address gnet_request@dhvx20.csudh.edu larry press 9)-------------------------------------------------------------- _the internet companion_ a beginner's guide to global networking tracy laquey editorial inc. software tool & die and the online bookstore (obs) are pleased to announce... the first simultaneous electronic and print publication of a major new book: _the internet companion: a beginner's guide to global networking_ by tracy laquey with jeanne c. ryer (addisonwesley, $10.95. online copies of vice-president-elect al gore's forward and the first two chapters of this best-selling book are available via anonymous ftp from: world.std.com in the directory: /obs/the.internet.companion/ further chapters will be released in the future. see readme and copyright files in that directory for more details. direct comments and questions about the book can be sent to: internet-companion@world.std.com this pioneering effort is a step in bringing together the on-line electronic and print media, enabling authors to explore new avenues of publishing their works. comments, inquiries, etc. welcome. send to: obs@world.std.com 10)------------------------------------------------------------ _the law and politics book review_ the _law and politics book review is now available on the gopher server at northwestern university: gopher@nwu.edu. choose "northwestern university information" on the first menu and "law and politics book review" on the next menu. herbert jacob northwestern university voice mail (708) 491-2648 e-mail mzltov@nwu.edu 11)------------------------------------------------------------- _nomad_ an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences _nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing. the journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing. for information, contact: mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, fl 32306 e-mail: paul rutkovsky <prutkov@cc.fsu.edu> 12)------------------------------------------------------------- _non serviam_ the radical electronic newsletter dedicated stirner's philosophy of egoism editor: svein olav nyberg <solan@math.uio.no> _non serviam_ is an electronic newsletter centered on the philosophy of max stirner, author of "der einzige und sein eigentum" ("the ego and its own"), and his dialectical egoism. the contents, however, are decided upon by the individual contributors and the censoring eye of the editor. the aim is to have somewhat more elaborate and carefully reasoned articles than are usually found on the news groups and lists. introductory file: "non serviam!"--"i will not serve", is known from literature as satan's declaration of his rebellion against god. we wish to follow up on this tradition of insurrection. in modern times, the philosophy of the individual's assertion of him//herself against gods, ideals, and human oppressors has been most eloquently expressed by max stirner in his book "der einzige und sein eigentum". stirner, whose real name was johann kaspar schmidt (1805-56), lived in a time dominated by german idealism, with hegel as its prominent figure. it is against this background of fixation of ideas that stirner makes his rebellion. for the more formal part, though the letter is centered on philosophy and ideas, articles on topics relevant to true egoists will also be admitted. the prime requirement is that the articles are not on-line ranting, but serious attempts to convey something of interest and relevance. articles on literature through the ages are fine, stories will be welcomed if they are appropriate, and i even think i might fall for an article on french cuisine made easy... however: if in doubt whether an article will accepted, ask ne by personal mail first. a waste of time is a waste of time. i hope to be able to make each of the issues of the newsletter thematic, that is we will have one main theme in each issue. the main theme is not meant to be the sole content, however, but more of an inspiration for writing. editor and list owner: solan@math.uio.no 13)------------------------------------------------------------- _poetics today_ edited by itamar even-zohar international journal for theory and analysis of literature and communication subscription rates: individuals: $28 institutions: $56 single issue: $14 (add $8 for subscription outside of the us) send check, money order, credit card number to: duke university press journals division 6697 college station durham, nc 27708 call of fax between 8:00 and 4:00 est with your visa, mastercard, or american express order. phone: (919) 684-6837 fax: (919) 684-8644 14)------------------------------------------------------------- _positions_ east asia cultural critique offers a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in east asia and within the asian diaspora. profound political changes and intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late twentieth century are rapidly redrawing national and regional borders. these transformations compel us to rethink our priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. mindful of the dissolution of the discursive binary east and west, _positions_ advocates placing cultural critique at the center of historical and theoretical practice. the global forces of that are reconfiguring our world continue to sustain formulations of nation, gender, class and ethnicity. we propose to call into question those still-pressing, yet unstable categories by crossing academic boundaries and rethinking the terms of our analysis. these efforts, we hope, will contribute toward informed discussion both in and outside the academy. _positions_ central premise is that criticism bust always be self-critical. critique of another social order must be selfaware as commentary on our own. likewise, we seek critical practices that reflect on the politics of knowing and that connect our scholarship to the struggles of those whom we study. all these endeavors require that we account for positions as places, contexts, power relations, and links between knowledge and knowers as actors in existing social institutions. in seeking to explore how theoretical practices are linked across national and ethnic divides we hope to construct other positions from which to imagine political affinities across the may dimensions of our differences. _positions_ is an independent refereed journal. its direction is taken at the initiative of its editorial collective as well as through the encouragement from its readers and writers. to subscribe to the triannual magazine beginning in spring 1993 write to: mr. steve a. cohn journals manager duke university press 6697 college station durham, nc 27708 to submit a manuscript send three copies to: tani e. barlow senior editor 94 castro street san francisco, ca 94114 or e-mail: barlow@sfsuvax1.edu. 15)------------------------------------------------------------ _public culture_ edited by carol a. breckenridge engaging critical analyses of tensions between global cultural flows and public cultures in a diasporic world. fall 1992 issue (vol. 5, number 1): "on writing the postcolony" * hindu/muslim/indian faisal fatehali devji * the habit of ex-nomination anannya bhattacharjee nation, woman and the indian immigrant bourgeois * narrativizing postcolony tejumola olaniyan * the banalities of interpretation david william cohen * save the african continent v.y. mudimbe * the magic of the state michael taussig * mbembe's extravagant power judith butler * the vulgarity of power michel-rolph trouillot * disempowerment. not. john pemberton * can postcoloniality be decolonized? pernand coronil * machiavellian, rabelaisian, dain borges bureaucratic? * on the power of the banal michele richman * prosaics of servitude and achille mbembe authoritarian civilities (trans. janet roitman) _public culture_ is now published by the university of chicago press and will move from two to three issues per year. for the general reader the subscription rate will necessarily change from $10 dollars per year to $25. for students it will remain at $5 per issue or $15 dollars per year. _public culture_ trusts that readers will continue to enjoy this enhanced publication. forthcoming special issues will include one guest edited by lila abu lughod on television in the third world and another guest edited by benjamin lee on public cultures/public spheres in which china figures prominently. write to: _public culture_ university of chicago 1010 east 59th street chicago, il 60637 usa tel. (312) 702-0814 and (312) 702-5660 fax. (312) 702-9861 e-mail cbre@midway.uchicago.edu 16)------------------------------------------------------------- _pynchon notes_ editors john m. krafft miami university--hamilton 1601 peck boulevard hamilton, oh 45011-3399 e-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu khachig tololyan english department wesleyan university middletown, ct 06457-6061 bernard duyfhuizen english department university of wisconsin--eau claire eau claire, wi 54702-4004 e-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet or pnotesbd@cnsvax.uwec.edu _pynchon notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall. submissions: the editors welcome submissions of manuscripts either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy disk. disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; ibm-compatible, microsoft word, and wordperfect 4.1 or later. manuscripts, notes and queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to john m. krafft. subscriptions: north america, $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per year (or double number); overseas, $6.50 per single issue or $12.00 per year, mailed air/printed matter. checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. subscriptions and backissue requests should be addressed to bernard duyfhuizen. _pynchon notes_ is supported in part by the english departments of miami university--hamilton and the university of wisconsin-eau claire. back issues _pynchon notes_ has been published since october 1979. although most back issues are now out of print, they are available in the form of photocopies. nos. 1-4: $1.50 each; overseas, $2.50 nos. 5-10: $2.50 each; overseas, $3.50 nos. 11-17: $3.00 each; overseas, $4.50 no. 18-19: $7.00; overseas, $10.00 no. 20-21: $7.00; overseas, $10.00 no. 22-23: $9.00; overseas, $12.00 no. 24-25: $9.00; overseas, $12.00 khachig tololyan and clay leighton's _index_ to all the names, other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _gravity's rainbow_ is also available. _index_: 5.00; overseas, $6.50 all checks should be made payable to bernard duyfhuizen--pn. overseas checks must be payable in us dollars and payable through an american bank or an american branch of an overseas bank. _pynchon notes_ is a member of celj the conference of editors of learned journals. 17)------------------------------------------------------------- _sub stance_ edited by *sydney levy and michel pierssens* published: 3/year issn: 0049-2426 _sub stance_ promotes new thoughts by leading american and european authors which alter the perception of contemporary culture--be it artistic, humanistic, or scientific. the journal represents literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art criticism, and film studies. rates: individual (must pre-pay) $21/yr. institutions $68/yr. foreign postage $ 8/yr. airmail $25/yr. we accept mastercard and visa. canadian customers please remit 7% goods and services tax. please write for a free brochure and back issue list to: journal division university of wisconsin press 114 north murray street madison, wi 53715 usa tel: (608) 262-4952 fax: (608) 262-7560 18)------------------------------------------------------------- _taproot_ edited by luigi-bob drake <au462@cleveland.freenet.edu> reviewers: deidre wickers, jake berry, bill paulauskas, nico vassiliakis, bob grumman, tom beckett, roger kyle-keith, and luigi-bob drake. fall 1992 issue 1.1 _taproot_ is a quarterly publication of independent, underground, and experimental language-centered arts. over the past 10 years, we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visioverbal art in a variety of formats. in august of 1992, we began to publish _taproot reviews_, featuring a wide range of "micropress" publications which are primarily language-oriented. the printed version appears as part of a local (cleveland ohio) poetry tabloid, _the cleveland review_. this posting is the electronic version, containing all of the short reviews that seem to be of general interest. we provide this information in the hope that netters do not limit their reading to e-mail & bbss. please e-mail your feedback to the editor, luigi-bob drake, at: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu requests for e-mail subscriptions should be sent to the same address--they are free. please indicate what you are requesting. hard-copies of _the cleveland review_ contain additional review material. in this issue, reviews & articles by john m. bennett, geof huth, micheal basinski, tom willoch--as well as a variety of poetry, prose, and grafix. _taproot_ is available from: burning press, p.o. box 585, lakewood oh 44107--2.50 pp. both the print & electronic versions of taproot are copyright 1992 by burning press, cleveland. burning press is a non-profit educational corporation. permission granted to reproduce this material for non-commercial purposes, provided that this introductory notice is included. burning press is supported, in part, with funds from the ohio arts council. 19)------------------------------------------------------------- _xb_ a bibliographic database of the literature of xerography, (photo)copier art, electrostatic printing, and electrographic art, seeks data and materials about the form copy art & the use of duplicative printing technologies for cultural or artistic purposes by artists or non-artists for input into the procite bibliographic software for macintosh. an ongoing art information-information art project, _xb_ requests submissions especially in machine-readable form but also in other media formats: periodicals, serials, newspaper and magazine clippings, exhibition announcements and catalogs, monographs, search printouts and information on disk. all these are of interest. a copy of the completed bibliography or the database on diskette (procite databases work equally well on mac or ibm) to each contributor along with some sort of documentation of the process and a list of participants. submissions via mailways, telephone, or bitnet/internet/well: _xb_ c/o reed altemus email: ip25196@portland.maine.edu or raltemus@well.sf.ca.us mail: 16 blanchard road cumberland ctr., maine 04021-97 usa phone: (207) 829-3666 20)------------------------------------------------------------- announcement and call for submissions _postmodern culture_ a suny press series series editor *joseph natoli* editor *carola sautter* we invite submissions of short manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeff dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, from computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-tobe-completed north/south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodern style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 21)------------------------------------------------------------- ********************************************************* hermit '93 an international art symposium under the auspices of the czech ministry of culture 1st june 30th june, 1993 plasy, czechoslovakia ********************************************************* a call for sound installations, sculptors, and fine artists. growthrings: time place rhythm light matter energy from baroque till present. the theme of the second international symposium-meetingexposition and workshop in the ancient cistercian monastery in plasy (west bohemia) will be the stimulation of interrelations between the seeing and hearing, between the past and the present,between centrum and province, high and low, matter and energy, between people and their cultural and natural environment. artists, musicians, and intermedia artists from czechoslovakia, the netherlands, belgium, usa, australia, germany and great britain too part in the first symposium hermit '92. however, while hermit '92 was mainly focused on artists from the csfr, netherlands, and belgium, this year's selection will be multicultural. beside artists from western and eastern europe, fine artists and musicians from other continents and ethnic cultures will be in attendance. the installations, sound sculptures, and performances were mostly realized directly in the complex of this former monastery founded in 1142. the convent contains many different spaces--from dark, mysterious, subterranean cellars with underground water systems to light chapels and huge corridors. the ideal sonic conditions of the interiors were used for many sound installations and music performances. the four floor interior of the granary, with its early gothic king's chapel and old tower clock, are considered by artists to be outstanding exhibition space for contemporary art. the program will be divided into sections: 1) sound installation and music performances. the scope of musical styles and genres will range from interpretations of baroque music, to authentic folklore and experimental contemporary. this part of the symposium will consist of exhibition held in the convent, the large concert hall in the former refectory, the chapel of st. benedict and of st. bernard, and the corridors of the first floor of the granary (check on this). further, the work of some of the sound artists and musicians will be presented in workshops. 3) discussions: theoretical issues will be formally raised in a series of lectures, discussions and workshops addressing different aspects of the baroque tradition from the perspective of mondial fine art, architecture, music, philosophy, ecology, history, and the transformation of the baroque heritage in modern society. discussions are open to the public. invited participants should send their proposals for hermit 2 with documentation at least three months prior to the beginning of the symposium. deadline is april 1, 1993. the contribution fee is 150 dm. the organizers of hermit 93 will take care of accommodations for active participants. the minimal time spent in plasy is 7 days, maximum is 2 months. contact: the hermit foundation. curators: jana sykyrova the monastery of plasy, 33101 plasy, bohemia. (tel) 0942-182-2174 (fax) 0942-182-2198 milos vojtechovsky binnenbantammer straat 15, 1011 ch amsterdam holland (tel) 020-62575-69 22)------------------------------------------------------------- announcement and call for papers ********************************* the experience of theory literary symposium organized by and for young scholars ********************************* university of gothenburg, sweden september 24-26, 1993 defining theory is becoming increasingly difficult in the age of postmodernism, where the impact of philosophical theory on literary research during the 70s and 80s is now supplemented by the demand for an orientation towards history, culture, science, society and politics. in a number of workshops, we propose to discuss theory as experience--as a process influencing our perception of literary, critical, and scholarly activity. how does theory, as experience, enhance our understanding of the literary work? in what ways does theory enable us to experience art as becoming rather that being, and, conversely, how does theory prevent us from experiencing the text as something dynamic rather than static? the discussion of theory as experience opens new modes of evaluating theory, thus in extension contributing to the formation of a theory about theory. we call for papers focusing on the experience of theory; experience here may be the experience of studying, of teaching, of researching, of theorizing, of reading, of writing, of enjoying, etc.. we invite participants from europe and the usa and expect to have guest speakers from scandinavia and great britain. the registration fee of sek 200 also covers all meals and accommodations for those who accept to stay with a fellow student. on request we can undertake to send lists of hostels and hotels. prospective participants are invited to contact us no later than 31st january, 1993; and submit papers by 31st march, 1993. david dickson claudia egerer hans werner mail: university of gothenburg department of english the experience of theory s 412 98 gothenburg sweden e-mail: egerer@eng.gu.se werner@eng.gu.se fax: int+46 (0)31-773-47-26 23)------------------------------------------------------------- call for work ************************************************* montage 93: international festival of the image july 11 through august 7, 1993 ************************************************* montage 93: international festival of the image, is inviting independent producers to submit work for an exhibition of electronic time-based media. work will be screened at montage 93, july 11 through august 7, 1993. goals the goals of montage 93 are to celebrate the fusion of arts and technology in contemporary image making and to explore the future of the visual communications. the international video etc. festival is seeking new electronic time-based work created by independent producers worldwide. review procedure all work will be reviewed by a committee of curators, programmers, and makers. the committee will attempt to assemble an exhibition that reflects the current state of the visual timebased electronic arts. notification of acceptance or rejection will be made by june 1, 1993. submission guidelines: visual time-based electronic media including video, computer graphics/animation, multimedia*, and hypermedia* are eligible. * work must be exhibitable as a single channel videotape. all work must be submitted on videotape, in any of the following ntsc formats: 3/4 umatic, vhs, s-vhs, beta, video8, hi8. maximum length of any title is 58 minutes. submission procedures: each maker must include a resume. each title must be accompanied by a statement. each title must be accompanied by a copy of the entry and release form printed below. tapes mailed from within the united states will be returned only if accompanied by a self addressed stamped envelope. tapes mailed from outside the united states will be returned only if accompanied by a self addressed envelope and an international money order in u.s. dollars for the cost of return mail. tapes mailed from outside the united states should be marked: "no commercial value. educational material." ***tapes must be received by may 1, 1993. send tapes, statement, resume, and entry and release form together to: montage 93: video etc. festival 31 prince street rochester, ny, usa 14607-1499 please note: do not send masters, originals, or irreplaceable materials. montage 93 will make every reasonable attempt to safeguard tapes, but is not responsible for loss or damage. maker is responsible for any copyrighted material within the title. ***************************************************************** video etc. entry and release form a copy of this form must accompany each title. please print or type. name____________________________________________________________ address_________________________________________________________ city____________________________________________________________ state_________________________________zip/postal code___________ country_________________________________________________________ phone_________________fax________________e-mail_________________ provide the following information for each title: title___________________________________________________________ original, medium, and format____________________________________ completion date_________________________________________________ running time____________________________________________________ format: (circle one) z3/4 umatic vhs s-vhs beta 8mm hi 8 ________________________________________________________________ your signature authorizes montage 93 to duplicate your work for exhibition at montage 93. statement ___ ___ ___ ___ this will be edited for use in program notes and/or a catalog. 24)------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers *********************************** 1993 annual meeting of the society for literature and science *********************************** back bay hilton boston, ma november 18-21, 1993 theme: "possible worlds, alternate realities: literature and science as world-making" to include such topics as: *rhetoric and reality *anthropological discourse and the "other" *images and visual representation in science and technology *technology, embodiment, knowledge *constructing the natural and the artificial in science, technology, and literature *literary strategies and the history of science *virtual realities *the representation of nature and science and the rhetoric of popular culture and film *primitive and postmodern *the garden and the wilderness *god and nature *illness narratives and the rhetoric of biomedicine *discovery and colonization *ecology and politics *orderly disorder proposals must include: 1. full names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses (if available) 2. full titles and one-page abstracts for all papers 3. titles/themes and name of coordinator for all seminars and special panels send abstracts for individual papers or proposals for seminars or special panels to: alan kibel literature department mit cambridge, ma 02139 due date for abstracts and proposals is march 1, 1993. 25)------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers **************************** _simulation and gaming_ an international journal of theory, design and research **************************** _simulation and gaming_ (sage publications) is the world's foremost journal devoted to academic and applied issues in the fast expanding fields of simulation, computerized simulation, gaming, modeling, play, role-play and active, experimental learning and related methodologies in education, training and research. the broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of _simulation & gaming_ is demonstrated by the variety of its readers and contributors, as well as its editorial board members, such as sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists and educators, as well as experts in environmental issues, international studies, management and business, policy and planning, decision making and conflict resolution, cognition, learning theory, communication, language learning, media, educational technologies and computing. manuscripts are welcome at any time. before submitting a manuscript, potential authors should write for a copy of the guide for authors, enclosing a self-addressed, sticky label and $2 in stamps (in usa only). write to: david crookall editor s&g morgan hall box 870244 u of al tuscaloosa, al 35487 usa to subscribe: sage publications 2455 teller road newbury park, ca 91320 usa bonhill street london ec2a 4pu uk 26)------------------------------------------------------------- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for guest editorships for theme issues of _simulation & gaming_ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ from time to time a special theme issue of s&g is prepared by a guest editor. special issues in preparation or that have already appeared deal with business, debriefing, evaluation, ethnomethodology, military gaming, cross-cultural communication, and entrepreneurship. in principle, any theme can be proposed for a special theme issue, as long as it is important and of interest to a wide range of readers. if you would like to offer your services as a guest editor, please send: a one page proposal (justifying the theme, outlining the rational, identifying possible authors and sub-topics) a short resume (one page) notes on any previous editorial experience name, address, telephone numbers and e-mail address(es) (the latter is essential) to crookall@ua1vm.bitnet or crookall@ua1vm.ua.edu or david crookall editor s&g po box 870244 university of alabama tuscaloosa, al 35487 usa subscription inquiries about s&g should be directed to: sage publications po box 5084 newbury park, ca 91359 usa tel: (805) 499-0721 27)------------------------------------------------------------- video positive 93 the u.k.'s international festival of creative video and electronic media art. in 1993 video positive is back with the most substantial and extraordinary program of electronic art ever seen in britain. video positive 93 presents several newly commissioned video installations combined with the welcome restaging of some of the best works from around the world. this is complemented by colorful local projects and an equally vigorous and significant program of screenings, seminars, live art commissions and special events. installation program the centerpiece of video positive 93 is an extensive installation program held at liverpool's premiere galleries (the tate gallery liverpool, the bluecoat, open eye and walker galleries) and several public sites across the city. the international element involves the presentation of 15 installations, 8 of which are world premiers, from artists including lei cox, agnes gegedud, simon robertshaw, barbara steinman, andrew stones, cathy vogan and richard wright. the collaboration program this progressive and successful program continues to transform liverpool's public sites with works produced by local people which are both incisive and popular. coordinated by video artist louise forshaw, the thriving collaboration program has introduced several fresh initiatives in 1993. the presentation of 8 installations and an exciting screening program involves double the number of events compared with previous years. screenings important european events of the early 90's provide the inspiration for a program package which looks at issues of british cultural identity within recent video art. other highlights have been programmed in conjunction with the film & video umbrella, london. these include new and recent computer graphics and animation video works by jean-luc godard, bill viola, david blair, the wooster group, the collaboration program and contemporary programs of music and sound featuring work by david byrne. performances continuing moviola's tradition of commissioning collaborations which cross artforms, the festival presents a series of live art projects which combine performance, music and new technologies. seminars video positive 93 has created the ideal atmosphere for an expressive and vibrant celebration of the contemporary artform of electronic art. the seminar program provides an outstanding opportunity for critical discussion in an international context. topics for discussion in 1993 include gender and technology, the experience of black artists working with video and new technologies, the festival's collaboration program and the impact of science and engineering upon electronic media art and design. special events video positive 93 also hosts a wide range of miscellaneous events and activities including workshops with artists, displays of state-of-the-art equipment and technology including virtual reality, workshops for curators, special launches, presentations and the festival club. mailing and information for a free color brochure (available march, 1993) and information about advance bookings, etc., write to: moviola, bluecoat chambers, school lane, liverpool l1 3bx, u.k. tel (uk) 051-709-2663 fax (uk) 051-707-2150 28)------------------------------------------------------------- ***************************** narrative: an international conference ***************************** april 1-4, 1993 albany, ny sponsored by: rensselaer polytechnic institute and the society for the study of narrative literature. co-sponsors: siena college and russell sage college affiliates: skidmore college, union college, the college of saint rose, the state university of new york-albany major speakers: *houston baker, jr. university of pennsylvania, center for the study of black literature and culture *don bialostosky university of toledo, english-rhetoric *thomas laquer univ. of calif-berkeley, history *carolyn merchant univ. of calif-berkeley, conservation and resource studies *tania modelski univ. of so. calif, english-film the conference is an interdisciplinary forum to discuss all aspects of narrative theory and practice. papers on narrative in any genre, period, nationality, discipline, and media (film, art, popular culture) will be considered. the committee especially welcomes topics involving inter-disciplinary methods or crosscultural perspectives. the presentation should be in english and the focus should be on narrative. submit papers (no more than 10 pgs. [2500 words]) or abstracts (at least 500 words) and a short vita. proposals for panels of 3 or 4 papers are encouraged. panels of particular interest with only 2 papers will also be considered. organizers should include a statement on the focus of the panel; and papers or abstracts for all participants. panel organizers may give a paper in the session they propose. we regret that we are unable to return submissions. alan nadel, conference coordinator department of language, literature, and communication rensselaer polytechnic institute troy, ny 12180 29)------------------------------------------------------------- _ortrad-l_ ortrad-l seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open discussion and exchange of resources in the general field of studies in oral tradition. all those interested in the world's living oral traditions (e.g., african, hispanic, native american, etc.) or in texts with roots in oral tradition (e.g., the old and new testaments, the mahabharata, the iliad and 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your computer: from a bitnet loation: tell listserv at ulkyvm subscribe semios-l (your name) from an internet site: to: listserv%ulkyvm.louisville.edu subscribe semios-l (your name) in the first two weeks of operation, _semios-l_ already had over one hundred members from four continents. the group welcomes new voices. steven skaggs semios-l list manager 31)------------------------------------------------------------- sochist on listserv@uscvm new social history list or listserv@vm.usc.edu briefly, this list will address three aspects of what is called the "new social history": 1) emphasis on quantative data rather that an analysis of prose sources. 2) borrowing of methodologies from the social sciences, such as linguistics, demographics, anthropology, etc.. 3) the examination of groups which have been ignored by traditional disciplines (i.e. the history of women, families, children, labor, etc.). to subscribe, send e-mail to: listserv@scvm.bitnet or listserv@vm.usc.edu with the single line in the body of the e-mail: subscribe sochist your full name. 32)------------------------------------------------------------- _interdis_ welcome to the interdis e-mail discussion list. the idea behind this list is to facilitate national (and international) discussions of issues of interest to people working and teaching in interdisciplinary contexts. it is my hope that the list will be a source of lively, thought provoking discussion of issues relating to integrating perspectives and pedagogical issues associated with interdisciplinary work. it should also be a good place to discuss papers, books, films, and exercises from interdisciplinary perspectives. please forward this message to colleagues you think may be interested in the list. they can put themselves on the list automatically by sending e-mail to: listserv@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu the message should read sub interdis <your name> to post comments to the list, e-mail interdis@miamiu.muohio.edu feel free to begin posting comments today. i look forward to our continuing dialogue. harley, 'grown-ups and fanboys', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-harley-grownups.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.194. part 1/1, total size 19241 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- grown-ups and fanboys by kevin harley norwich, england p280@cpcmb.east-anglia.ac.uk _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994, by kevin harley, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: sabin, roger. _adult comics: an introduction_. london and new york: routledge, 1993. [1] it's a long and sordid tale, the history of adult comics. this particular hotbed of intrigue has everything for the perfect television mini-series; suspense, prejudice, passion, censorship, homophobia, anglo-american cultural relations, exploitation of creative individuals by massive and all-powerful media industries--even, gasp, communism. one wonders why the tv version has yet to be made. in its absence, roger sabin's _adult comics_ sets itself the formidable task of presenting this largely untold tale. [2] sometime in the mid-1980s, the british media suddenly became aggitated over the phenomenon of so-called 'adult comics.' many argued that comics were laying claim to a hitherto absent literary legitimacy, largely through the use of the term "graphic novel" to denote the departure these "new comics" made from the supposedly childish orientations of their predecessors. the media response to this ostensible trend was divided between approval and outrage, but nearly everyone adhered to a suitably comic-book language of wild hyperbole. [3] among enthusiasts, the general attitude was one of terrific excitement about comics that--wow!--used cats and mice to tell the story of the holocaust, or--gasp!- looked closely at both the politics and psychoses of superheroes, when the industry was presumed to have hitherto kept its heroes' reputations untarnished. what's more, these things called "graphic novels" were full-color, fully painted works of art which--hey!--you did not need to feel ashamed to read in a public place, even if you did look as if you were scouring the porn shelf to get to them (sabin 72). it was finally safe for comics' fans to come out and admit to their unspoken love. [4] others, however, were more hostile. david lister set the resurgence of comic book popularity in the context of the novel's imminent death.^1^ given the supposedly three minute culture in which "we" live, a visually based narrative media (as if television weren't bad enough!) could only signal a turn for the worse. lister refused to allow comics to hide behind the cloak of the term "graphic novel," since this was of course an attempt to disguise the fact that the things were still "merely . . . a diverting entertainment for children." [5] one can readily set this whole debate over adult comics during the mid-80s in the general context of a series of debates over what constitutes culture. as sabin notes, the growing popularity of cultural studies within british universities, and the faddishness of applying the term "postmodern" to anything that might be seen as challenging high/low culture boundaries, provided a perfect context for the adult comics hype to generate both excitement and outrage amongst its many commentators. add to this the widely circulating arguments about whether visual literacy could be considered equal to textual literacy, and it is easy to see why the spark over comics briefly became a fire. [6] stepping in before the embers get cold, sabin offers _adult comics_ primarily as a "primer-textbook" for university teachers who know little about the medium and its histories, but might consider including comics on their syllabi. after all, as a medium it lends itself to all manner of disciplines, perfect fodder for the interdisciplinary age. media studies, popular culture studies, literature, art history, and even history itself, could all be suitable disciplinary venues for the teaching of comics. many comics offer themselves as history texts, and many flaunt such a high level of aesthetic-theoretical sophistication that their gradual assimilation into the hallowed halls of academia should not really surprise anybody. [7] in his effort to seize on the moment of comics' potential legitimization, sabin casts himself in the role of demythologiser, trampling all over the rubbish that the mainstream british press has been churning out ever since comics became *an issue*. the death of the novel? well, popular novels still sell pretty well. the first adult comics? they've been going strong since the nineteenth-century, mate, and other countries accepted them long before the english and american press leapt on the bandwagon. the collapse of high/low culture boundaries? a story as old as culture itself. graphic novels? been around since the 1940s, and besides they're called albums in europe. etc etc etc. . . . [8] so why, according to sabin, *did* the mid-80s see such an explosion of interest in adult comics? there were, he says, basically three groups whose interests converged to produce a dramatic, if short-lived comics boom. firstly, publishers saw the opportunity for a period of more aggressive production and distribution. secondly, the media sniffed out a suitably scandalous decline-of-civilization story and got terribly excited about it for a while. thirdly, creators (as they are known) were able to push the comic book institutions they worked in for better deals than before, now that their names were on the covers and people were actually buying the damn things. all these groups sought to benefit from a public who, as sabin argues, knew nothing about what they were being sold. "this void made it easy for those with a vested interest in rewriting history: for them, other peoples' ignorance was bliss. adult comics had no history, which is why an invented one was so powerful." [9] which, of course, leaves a space for sabin to step in and reveal the truth about the history of a medium much-maligned and under-studied. appropriately, his demythologising begins with the title of his own book. what is meant by this rather ambiguous term, "adult comics"? it is a term that, as sabin notes, teases at the ambivalence, in british society at least, over the fault-line that divides most people's childhood from their adulthood. but is this really a very secure or stable boundary? obviously many "adults" read comics that are marketed for children, and many children would probably not have too much difficulty getting their hands on so-called adult comics. [10] whilst sabin usefully raises this as a problem, his book is not up to the challenge of dealing with it. given the fact that he has such an enormous history to recover, it's true that one really cannot expect a lengthy treatise on adult/child distinctions in british society. but it is galling when sabin tries to tidy up the ambivalences by recasting the adult/child distinction in such terms as "mature" and "adolescent," as though these were somehow more helpful. discussing similarities and differences between various types of so-called adult comics, sabin comments that the "only thing . . . all the comics had in common was their adult nature," which, he says, distinguishes them from the "traditional adolescent fare." to depend on such undefined terms for one's evaluative criteria creates all manner of anomalies, and reinforces some unjustified prejudices. a comment on tim burton's _batman_ movie is typical. according to sabin, the film's release with a "12" certificate rather than a "15" could rightly have been read as a disappointing signal by audiences hoping for something more sophisticated. but why should the age of the viewers at which a work is pitched be taken as an index of its sophistication? [11] this is not the only example of a lack of terminological and conceptual clarity in _adult comics_. similar instances arise from sabin's obvious contempt for 'fandom' and for superhero comics. in his view, the latter pander to the "adolescent," "male-power fantasies" of the former; the entire genre of superhero comics is dismissed as juvenile fodder either for those in their early teens or for older men who don't want to leave their early teens behind. all these "fanboys" are to sabin suspect persons, "anal-retentive, adolescent, and emotionally arrested." the whole account depends on our accepting "adolescent" as a pejorative term: superhero fans are largely adolescent, therefore superhero comics are bad and their adult readers must be stunted. [12] indeed, sabin's approach in general avoids an engagement with fandom, offering a narrative not so much of specific patterns of reception and appropriation as of sweeping "historical and cultural imperatives." at the same time, however, his own chapter on "fandom and direct sales" makes clear that it was to some considerable degree the strategic activities and choices of fans that drove the emergence of the graphic novel and opened doorways into the industry for new and more ambitious creators. in view of his own research, it seems odd that sabin would resist viewing "fanboys" and their strategies of reception as anything less than imperative cultural and historical phenomena where the development of comics is concerned. [13] this blind spot in sabin's analysis is particularly unfortunate given that fandom and fan cultures are areas that have generated much critical literature recently. the essayists in _the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media_^2^ seek to clear a cultural space for the respectful analysis of popular culture fans with many different generic interests. jensen's essay, for example, argues that media commentaries or critical writing on fans is frequently marred by a "them" and "us" mentality, in which critics regard themselves as intrinsically superior to fans. this is probably because the genre to which the fans in question attach themselves has been perceived as an inferior one anyway, and possibly because it is presumed that fan-affiliations are singular: one fan, one genre. sabin makes exactly this assumption when he suggests that a fan of _daredevil_ is unlikely to get very excited about _raw!_ (a collection of avant-garde comic strip work, edited by art spiegelman and francoise mouly), or vice versa. sabin quotes no ethnographic evidence for this, and i could cite myself and many others as contradictions to the supposed rule. the superhero fanboys are not, i suspect, as discrete or as homogeneously imbecilic a group as sabin is determined to make them out. [14] nor, it seems to me, are the superhero comics deserving of such a cursory and dismissive analysis. unless we accept sabin's view that all the adults who read these texts are dull-witted, then there must be something other than self reflexivity and lots of violence that earned the 1980s superheroes the label "adult." until sabin's claim to have looked "in detail" at the big three sellers in britain during this period (_watchmen_, _the dark knight returns_, and _maus_) is lived up to--and his one paragraph on each hardly accomplishes that--then we won't know. [15] but what of the comics that don't buy into the mainstream superhero agenda? on these, sabin's book is superb. the attention he devotes to the underground comics and the relationship between women and comics far exceeds his sweeping judgements on superhero texts. while showing that the comic book medium and the specialist shop culture generated around it has tended effectively to exclude women, sabin makes it clear that there are women's comics, even if they are not part of the perceived mainstream. like most comics, they have of course suffered at the hands of somewhat over-zealous customs officials and censors, particularly if they are so bold as to deal with such a taboo subject matter as sex in a medium which everyone knows is really only a diversion for children. "so far as the british authorities generally were concerned, men dealing with sex in comics was bad enough: women dealing with sex was beyond the pale. the worst example of censorship occurred in 1985, when melinda gebbie's solo comic _frezca zisis_ was declared obscene by the courts and destroyed" (289). even recently, an erotic graphic novel written by alan moore and illustrated by gebbie (_lost girls_) had trouble getting through customs in its serialized format as part of the quarterly collection of comic strip material in graphic novel format titled _taboo_. [16] it is obviously true, however, that where "women's comics" are concerned censors probably have less to answer for than the comics industry itself. sabin notes that when the underground comics went into decline with the rest of the counter culture in the early 1970s, women's comics were considered expendable and were "the first to go." the specialist shops that subsequently emerged in britain conveyed, says sabin, a "locker-room atmosphere" that, aside from being intimidating to anyone less literate in comics than the fanboys, was far from welcoming to women. and even if comics became in some sense more "adult" by the mid to late 1980s, this rarely translated into more progressive attitudes towards women on the part of male comics writers. indeed, as sabin sees it, "some of the worst cases of negative representations of women in the history of comics can be identified in this period." [17] nevertheless, despite their marginalization by the "mainstream" writers and marketers, women's comics make up an important part of the history of comics. and it is in recovering this and other marginalized histories that sabin excels. he shows that whilst women have served as a primary satiric butt for comics at least since the late nineteenth century (in, for example, _ally sloper's half holiday_), they were always "recognised as an audience" and, in fact, have always constituted at least a small fraction of the creators of adult comics. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an "underground" women's comics movement emerged in force as a critical reaction against the macho and misogynist work of creators like robert crumb and s. clay wilson. by the mid 1970s even the comics mainstream showed some signs of feeling the impact of the women's movement, and a number of established male writers (including alan moore) took to writing pro-feminist narratives. whilst women creators themselves still do not hold very prominent positions in this mainstream, sabin lets us see their work as extending a crucial counter-tradition. [18] sabin is also quite good at tracing the concrete histories of comic book production and distribution. take, for example, the characteristically "convoluted" history of bryan talbot's _the adventures of luther arkwright_. this comic first appeared in the 1972 underground comic _mixed bunch_, moving from there to _near myths_ in 1978, then onto _pssst!_ in 1982. soon thereafter it was published in its first collected-volume format by never ltd., and then in 1988 as a nine-issue comic book series by valkyrie press. valkyrie then republished the second volume, while volumes one and three were reprinted by proutt, and, in 1991, the whole lot was republished, with all new covers, by dark horse comics. sabin can be commended for the thoroughness with which he has retraced these sorts of strange trajectories, but at times the minutiae can be overwhelming. moreover, such publishing-centered approach to comics history can have the effect of submerging the cultural specificity of a text under the mere facts of its publication. sabin describes both _dark knight_ and _watchmen_ as "american in origin," which is true enough as concerns their publication histories. but while frank miller's _dark knight_ certainly derives from an american perspective on superheroes, moore's _watchmen_ seems just as certainly to derive from a british one. something of the cultural and ideological resonance of both texts is lost when the origins of their production are understood entirely in terms of the sites of their initial publication. [19] but even allowing for this and other shortcomings, sabin's book is a valuable one. sabin has succeeded in mapping out an extensive cultural terrain on which new analysis and research might find room to develop. he has opened a host of avenues for inquiry, even if some of the most promising of these may lead readers away from his own positions. hopefully, _adult comics_ *will* be taken up as the "primer-textbook" of comics studies, and provide the point of departure for much future work. --------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ david lister, "traditional novel 'in danger' as teenagers turn to comics", _the independent_, 9/9/1989, p. 3. ^2^ lisa a. lewis, ed., _the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media_ (london: routledge, 1992). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------berger, 'review of _past the last post_', postmodern culture v2n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n2-berger-review.txt review of _past the last post_ by roger a. berger <berger@twsuvm> department of english witchita state university _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.2 (january, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by roger berger, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. adam, ian, and helen tiffin, eds. _past the last post: theorizing post-colonialism and post-modernism_. calgary: u calgary p, 1990. [1] in a recent review in _transition 53_ of patrick brantlinger's _crusoe's footprints: cultural studies in britain and america_, benita parry distinguishes two methodologies--the post-colonial and the post-modern --that currently dominate literary and cultural theorization. on one side, she asserts, are those who recognize that texts are "involved necessarily in the making of cultural meanings which are always, finally, political meanings," but who insist that "culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production" and that texts are "inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history"; on the other side are those who (in stuart hall's phrase) would want to expand the territorial claims of the discursive infinitely, and therefore privilege textual strategems as in and of themselves the location of gathering points for solidarity.^1^ it is difficult to accept--and many of the essays in the volume under review here consider this fundamental problem--that a connection can be made between these two "posts." [2] to a degree, of course, terminological imprecision makes difficult such a project. post-modernism, for instance, has been variously troped as "hyperreal," "excremental," "inflationary," "wilfully contradictory," skeptical of all metanarratives yet located in a "perpetual present"--the contradictory nature of which seems to define the post-modern itself. post-modernism is simultaneously (or variously) a textual practice (often oppositional, sometimes not), a subcultural style or fashion, a definition of western, postindustrial culture (gibson's "the matrix"), and the emergent or always already dominant global culture. at the same time, post-colonialism is simultaneously (or variously) a geographical site, an existential condition, a political reality, a textual practice, and the emergent or dominant global culture (or counter-culture). for me, the post-colonial and the post-modern can be heuristically understood as metonyms for larger, irreconcilable positions, as parry suggests. on the one side, there is a limit to textuality--call it raymond williams's sense of "lived" experience; on the other, an infinite textuality, derrida's "there is nothing outside the text," in which subjectivity is a textual matter--pain and oppression merely tropes. the question thus is clear: is there any formal or political relationship between post modernism and post-colonialism or is post-modernism yet once more instance of colonization--a contemporary moment of western textual imperialism? that is, what does, say, the collapse of critical space between the western media spectacle and the production of a post-modern subjectivity have to do with the the lived realities of oppression in the dominated world--with the lack of health care, food, electricity, education and an abundance of western appropriation of labor, raw materials, and imposition of a cultural imperialism? [3] in _past the last post: theorizing post-colonialism and post-modernism_," ian adam and helen tiffin assemble an impressive, international cadre of theorists who offer daring and inventive (though on occasion irrelevant or incomprehensible) responses to these questions. these essays, as helen tiffin suggests in her introduction, "seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their intersecting and diverging trajectories" (vii). to that end, the anthology succeeds brilliantly: it articulates in many of the essays resonant homologies that suggest the possibility of a strategic alliance between post-modern and post-colonial discursive strategies. [4] yet, after completing this inaugural volume addressing these two salient cultural and literary theories, i am left with a sense of the forced and even--from a political perspective--counter-productive nature of the project. that is, this volume, much like another project that attempts to reconcile earlier manifestations of the post-colonial and the post-modern, michael ryan's interesting though often plodding _marxism and deconstruction: a critical articulation_, expends massive amounts of critical energy with little to offer for ongoing oppositional and post-colonial struggles. in many of the essays, theorists admit the problematic nature of the project--the fundamental incompatibility of post-modernist textuality and the lived realities of the post-colonial (or really, neo-colonial) experience. at the same time, however, most of the essays assert that useful parallels between post-colonialism and post-modernism can be identified. various images are deployed to suggest this: "conjunctions of concern" (hutcheon), "a working alliance" (huggan), "a rapprochement" (carusi), "contamination" (brydon), and so on between oppositional discursive strategies--and they thus derive their conclusions from the pragmatic political principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." without a doubt, many oppositional features of post-modernism resemble those of post-colonialism. however, my sense--at least at the current historical moment--is that while many of the parallel elements have theoretical valence, the telos of each project is so fundamentally different that the parallels are accidental rather than significant. as diana brydon suggests, at the end of the collection, in something of a "minority" report, "when directed against the western canon, post-modernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, and literary borrowing may appear radical and even potentially revolutionary. when directed against native myths and stories, these same techniques would seem to repeat the imperialist history of plunder and theft" (195-196). ultimately, it must be noted, post-modernism would seem to need post-colonialism far more than post-colonialism needs post-modernism; and thus, once again, after another "treaty," the west (rather than its others) ends up with far more in the exchange. [5] the intellectual heart of this project in this anthology may be located in three essays--stephen slemon's "modernism's last post," ian adam's "breaking the chain: anti-saussurean resistance in birney, carey and c.s. pierce," and linda hutcheon's "'circling the downspout of empire'"--which are strategically positioned near the beginning, middle and end of the collection. slemon argues, for example, that the "disidentificatory reiteration across the various national post-colonial literatures" (4)--that is, the post-colonial "rewriting the canonical 'master texts' of europe" (4) and tropic appropriation of eurocentric history (e.g., in the "plagiarizing" strategems of yambo oulogeum)--strongly resembles linda hutcheon's notion of a post-modern "intertextual parody." he does admit to some fundamental problems with the connection between post-modernism and post colonialism--among them the tendency of "western post-modernist readings" to "so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energetics of post-colonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them" (7) and "the universalizing, assimilative impulse . . . of post-modernism" that appears to continue "a politics of colonialist control" (9). however, slemon ends his essay with a hopeful vision: in post-modernism's contradictory need to appropriate and exclude post-colonialism, "there could perhaps reside a fissuring energy which could lay the foundation for a radical change of tenor within the post-modern debate" (9). slemon's mixed metaphor here could perhaps be understood as a post-modern ironic discursive strategy, but it seems to reveal, as i shall presently suggest, the fundamental irreconcilability of post-modernism and post-colonialism. linda hutcheon, similarly, in "'circling the downspout of empire,'" points out the "considerable overlap" in the "concerns" of post-colonialism and post-modernism (168). the deployment of "magic realism," subversions of eurocentric master narratives (historical and literary), and, above all, the strategic use of "irony as a doubled or split discourse" (170) constitute points of convergence. i need to say that these attempts to contribute to a poetics of resistance literature--what chidi amuta in _a theory of african literature_ terms a "poetics of the oppressed"--without question offer imperatives for examining this collection. [6] localized applications of this theory may be found in simon gikandi's excellent "narration in the post-colonial moment: merle hodge's _crick crack monkey_" and annamaria carusi's interesting "post, post and post. or, where is south african literature in all this?" these essays argue that that post-colonial literature often finds in _formal_ (post-modern) strategies a means of rupturing the discourse of imperialism. gikandi asserts that while many caribbean women writers--often excluded from the canon of west indian literatures--would seem to oppose the project of post-modernism, nevertheless "they increasingly fall back on post-modernist narrative strategies--such as temporal fragmentation, intertextuality, parody and doubling" (14)--to contest both the imperial narrative and the modernist impulses of male caribbean writers. to that end, gikandi explains, merle hodge's _crick crack monkey_ both recovers a voice of difference long suppressed by the colonial planatation society and combines the creative aspects of "creole and colonial cultures as opposed sites of cultural production" (19). carusi argues that both poststructuralism and resistance literature--at least within the oppressive context of apartheid south africa--have encountered limits of theoretical achievement: poststructuralism with its "affirmation of difference as pure negativity" (103) cannot sever its discursive connection with western textuality, while the south african literature of liberation privileges a dead-end _humanist_ subject, discursively sutured into an imperialist subjectivity. she sees a way out of this paralyzing aporia in a "radical heterogeneity" (of the foucauldian variety) that permits political agency without reinstalling "positivity" and abandoning difference. carusi ultimately seeks "a rapprochement" between post-modernism and post-colonialism in which the subject--what she terms "a discursive instance"--is "_embedded_ in a socio-historical configuration" (104). "the heterogeneity," she writes, would thus be a difference that _does_ make a difference, but it is not, for all that, a difference that can or should be named. the other, theorized from a post-structuralist perspective (and at present time we have no viable alternative), is irretrievable, unlocatable, refractory and by definition unnameable; it is not there as a positivity, but as an _effect_. (104) [7] yet it is precisely at points such as this one that a very real political anxiety about the theoretical aims of post-modernism manifests itself. indeed, these theorists--apprehensive about re-enacting the epistemic violence and ethnographic appropriation accompanying the colonial project- appear inordinately defensive about the connection between post-coloniality and post-modernity. consider, for example, annamaria carusi's rejection of a political critique concerning the irrelevancies of a theoretical intervention in the post-colonial: there are many who will point out that what i have said, and what anything theory may say to the struggle against apartheid, has nothing to do with people living in the squatter camps, or under detention without trial. this argument, arising from the political urgency of opposition, is however, specious. (105) to support her position, carusi (equally speciously) offers foucault's notion of the circularity of power, but earlier she asserts "the central position of cultural production in the attainment" by "colonized or subjugated people [of] an identity and . . . self determination" (96). it is difficult, however, to reconcile her privileging at this moment a post-colonial identity with her later insistence on the impossibility of naming a post-colonial subjectivity. even more telling, of course, is carusi's too quick dismissal of what seems an inconvenient political critique. as diana brydon points out, "literature cannot be confused with social action" (196). or at least post-modern literature cannot be understood as exemplifying by itself a fundamental threat to the hegemony of apartheid. carusi indeed suggests that in south africa "almost every other path [other than the cultural] of resistance and reconstruction is criminalized" (96). even given its racist pathology, the criminal apartheid state understands difference between real and meaningless threats to its power. [8] a related political problem concerns slemon's relocation of post-colonialism in the %west%, as part of western discourse, as he writes: the concept [post-colonialism] proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonized nations but rather when it locates a specifically antior %post%-colonial %discursive% purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. (3) slemon, who in many ways is not wholly sympathetic with the project of post-modernity, nonetheless conveniently redefines post-colonialism not as an actual, locatable activity but as a western discursive practice. agency is given wholly over to the colonizers who initiate in essence not only the colonial project but also the post-colonial one. all too often in this collection post-colonialism is understood in western terms, perhaps unintentionally incorporating into an entirely western drama the everyday struggles of dominated people to free themselves. [9] the best--most daring and oppositional--essay in the collection is hena maes-jelinek's "'numinous proportions': wilson harris's alternative to all posts." harris, maes-jelinek suggests, rejects for the most part both post-colonial and post-modern practice --the first for its adoption of a realistic textuality, the second for its nihilistic construction of textuality. harris imagines, according to maes-jelinek, an affirmative, cross-cultural (emphatically %not% multi-cultural) "web of space," a site of creative engagement with the past, colonialism and language, a site not of difference but of convergence. harris's project thus invents a third way rather than effecting any kind of synthesis between post-colonialism and post-modernism. [10] in addition, any review of this collection must acknowledge the compelling, though (in terms of the stated project of this anthology) misplaced, essays by simon during and john frow. during's "waiting for the post: some relations between modernity, colonization, and writing" and frow's misnamed "what was post modernism?" both attempt to open a theoretical space in which a discussion of the interrelationship between post-colonialism and post-modernism might be initiated, but ultimately their essays would seem better located in a discussion of modernism and colonialism. [11] in the "final" analysis, it is difficult to know if this collection represents a milestone or a tombstone (a postmortem) for the project. knowing the tendency of the western academy to appropriate any form of knowledge or human agency--especially in said's sense of travelling theory: to remove a revolutionary, disruptive theory from its historical context and thus domesticate it--one would expect any number of future volumes of this sort. yet i think that the very considerable analytical skills of these theorists would be better deployed on behalf of the post-colonial project, making use of whatever theoretical strategies (post-modern or otherwise) that seem helpful in the ongoing struggle against domination and neo-colonialism. (tiffin's work, in conjunction with bill ashcroft and gareth griffiths in _the empire writes back_ [london: routledge, 1989], seems much more a model in this regard.) [12] as world history enters into a new and perhaps decisive moment of the colonial encounter, it is imperative that culture workers--particularly those positioned in what mary louise pratt terms the "contact zones" (most of the writers in this collection are located in post-colonial settler colonies: canada, south africa, australia)--clearly align themselves with the wretched of the earth. given john frow's astute description of the fundamental changes marking modernization and late capitalism (hyperflexible capital being pursued by mass migrations of poor people, as well as the insidious effects of such a situation: totalized mapping of the globe, state intervention on behalf of capital, massive urbanization, the triumph of instrumental reason, and the "secularization and automatization of the spheres of science, art and morality" (140), we need public intellectuals willing to challenge what appears to be heretofore unimaginable domination and human exploitation. _past the last post_, for all its valuable contributions to a poetics of post-colonial literature, doesn't appear fully to participate in this great challenge. as fanon concludes his great anti-colonial manifesto, _the wretched of the earth_, [i]f we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. if we wish to live up to our peoples' expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in europe. moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. for europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (315-316) ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ 44. parry is not alone in describing the fault lines that have manifested themselves in contemporary political and textual theory: one might also look to simon during's important work, "postmodernism or postcolonialism" or "postmodernism or post-colonialism today," henry louis gates's "critical fanonism," anthony appiah's "is the postin postmodernism the postin postcolonial?", benita parry's own "problems in current theories of colonial discourse" or my own "the return of fanon: recent anglophone literary theory" for further elucidation of this current battle of the books. laidlaw, 'great breakthroughs in darkness (being, early entries from _the secret encyclopaedia of photography_)', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-laidlaw-great.txt great breakthroughs in darkness (being, early entries from _the secret encyclopaedia of photography_) authorized by marc laidlaw chief secretary of the ministry of photographic arcana, correspondent of no few academies, devoted husband, &c. _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by marc laidlaw, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [previously published in england as part of _new worlds 2_, ed. david garnett (victor gollancz, ltd., 1992).] "alas! that this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced into a modern novel or romance; for what a %denouement% we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper!" -william henry fox talbot -a aanschultz, conreid (c. 1820 october 12, 1888) inventor of the praxiscope technology (%which see%), professor aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject's thoughts. (later researchers demonstrated that the device "functioned" by creating interference patterns in the inner eye of the observer, triggering phosphene splash and lucid dreaming.) aanschultz's theories collapsed, and the professor himself died in a parisian lunatic asylum, after his notorious macropraxiscope failed to extract any particular meaning from the contours of the belgian countryside near waterloo. some say he was already unstable from abuse of his autopsychopraxiscope, thought to be particularly dangerous because of autophagous feedback patterns generated in its operator's brain. however, there is evidence that aanschultz was quite mad already, owing to the trauma of an earlier research disaster. aanschultz lens the key lens used in aanschultz's notorious psychopraxiscope, designed to capture and focus abaxial rays reflecting from a subject's eye. abat-jour a skylight or aperture for admitting light to a studio, or an arrangement for securing the same end by reflection. in the days when studios for portraiture were generally found at the tops of buildings not originally erected for that purpose, and perhaps in narrow thoroughfares or with a high obstruction adjacent, i found myself climbing a narrow, ill-lit flight of stairs, away from the sound of wagon wheels rattling on cobblestones, the common foetor of a busy city street, and toward a more rarified and addictive stench compounded of chemicals that would one day be known to have contributed directly to society's (and my own) madness and disease. it was necessary to obtain all available top light in the choked alleys, and aanschultz had done everything he could in a city whose sky was blackly draped with burning sperm. i came out into a dazzling light compounded of sunlight and acetylene, between walls yellowed by iodine vapor, covering my nose at the stench of mercury fumes, the reek of sulfur. my own fingertips were blackened from such stuff; and eczema procurata, symptomatic of a metol allergy, had sent a prurient rash all up the sensitive skin of my inner arms, which, though so bound in bandages that i could scarcely scratch them through my heavy woollen sleeves, were a constant seeping agony. at night i wore a woman's long kid gloves coated with coal tar, and each morning dressed my wounds with an ointment of mercuric nitrate (%60 g.%), carbolic acid (%10 ccs%), zinc oxide (%30 g%) and lanoline (%480 "%), which i had learned to mix myself when the chemist professed a groundless horror of contagion. i had feared at first that the rash might spread over my body, down my flanks, invading the delicate skin of my thighs and those organs between them, softer by far. i dreaded walking like a crab, legs bowed far apart, experiencing excruciating pain at micturition and intercourse (at least syphilis is painless; even when it chews away one's face, i am told, there is a pleasant numbness)--but so far this nightmare had not developed. still, i held my tender arms slightly spread away from my sides, seeming always on the verge of drawing the twin janssen photographic revolvers which i carried in holsters slung around my waist, popular hand-held versions of that amazing "gun" which first captured the transit of venus across the face of our local star. the laboratory, i say, was a fury of painfully brilliant light and sharp, membrane-searing smells. despite my admiration for the professor's efficiency, i found it not well suited for artistic purposes, a side light being usually preferable instead of the glare of a thousand suns that came down through the cruelly contrived abat-jour. but aanschultz, being of a scientific bent, saw in twilight landscapes only some great treasure to be prised forth with all necessary force. he would have disemboweled the earth itself if he thought an empirical secret were lodged just out of reach in its craw. i had suggested a more oblique light, but the professor would not hear of it. "that is for your prissy studios--for your fussy bourgeois sitters!" he would rage at my "aesthetic" suggestions. "i am a man of science. my subjects come not for flattering portraits, but for insight--i observe the whole man here." to which i replied: "and yet you have not %captured% him. you have not impressed a single supposition on so much as one thin sheet of tin or silver or albumen glass. the fleeting things you see cannot be captured. which is less than i can say of even the poorest photograph, however superficial." and here he always scoffed at me and turned away, pacing, so that i knew my jibes had cut to the core of his own doubts, and that he was still, with relentless logic, stalking a way to fix the visions viewed so briefly (however engrossingly) in his praxiscope. he needed lasting records of his studies--some substance the equivalent of photographic paper that might hold the scope's pictures in place for all to see, for all time. it was this magical medium which he now sought. i thought it must be something of a "deep" paper--a sheet of more than three dimensions, into which thoughts might be imprinted in all their complexity, a sort of mind-freezing mirror. when he shared his own ideas, i quickly became lost, and if i made any comment it soon led to vicious argument. i could not follow aanschultz's arguments on any subject; even our discussions of what or where to eat for lunch, what beer went best with bratwurst, could become incomprehensible. only another genius could follow where aanschultz went in his thoughts. with time i had even stopped looking in his eyes--with or without a psychopraxiscope. "i am nearly there," he told me today, as i reached the top of the stairs with a celebratory bottle in hand. "you've found a way to fix the psychic images?" "no--something new. my life's work. this will live long after me." he said the same of every current preoccupation. his assistants were everywhere, adjusting the huge rack of movable mirrors that conducted light down from the rooftops, in from the street, over from the alleyway, wherever there happened to be a stray unreaped ray of it. their calls rang out through the laboratory, echoing down through pipes like those in great ships, whereby the captain barks orders to the engine room. in the center of the chamber stood the solar navigator with his vast charts and compass and astrolabes scattered around him, constantly shouting into any one of the dozen pipes that coiled down from the ceiling like dangling vines, dispatching orders to those who stood in clearer sight of the sun but with a less complete foreknowledge of its motion; and as he shouted, the mirrors canted this way and that, and the huge collectors on the roof purred in their oiled bearings and the entire building creaked under the shifting weight and the laboratory burned like a furnace, although cleverly, without any heat. there was a watery luminescence in the air, a constant distorted rippling that sent wavelets lapping over the walls and tables and charts and retorts and tarnished boxes, turning the iodine stains a lurid green; this was the result of light pouring through racks of blue glass vials, old glass that had run and blistered with age, stoppered bottles full of copper sulphate which also swivelled and tilted according to the instructions of another assistant who stood very near the navigator. i had to raise my own bottle and drink very deeply before any of this made much sense to me, or until i could approach a state of focused distraction more like that of my friend and mentor, the great professor conreid aanschultz, who now came at me and snatched the bottle from my hands and helped himself. he courteously polished every curve of the flask with a fresh chamois before handing it back, eradicating his last fingerprint as the bottle left his fingers, so that the now nearly empty vessel gleamed as brightly as those blue ones. i finished it off and dropped it in a halfassembled filter rack, where it would find a useful life even empty. the professor made use of all %things%. "this way," he said, leading me past a huge hissing copperclad acetylene generator of the dreadnought variety, attended by several anxious-looking children in the act of releasing quantities of gas through a purifier. the proximity of this somewhat dangerous operation to the racks of burning bray 00000 lamps made me uncomfortable, and i was grateful to move over a light-baffling threshold into darkness. here, a different sort of chaos reigned, but it was, if anything, even more intense and busy. i sensed, even before my eyes had adjusted to the weak and eerie working light, that these assistants were closer to aanschultz's actual current work, and that this work must be very near to completion, for they had that weary, pacified air of slaves who have been whipped to the very limits of human endurance and then suspended beyond that point for days on end. i doubted any had slept or rested for nearly as long as aanschultz, who was possessed of superhuman reserves. i myself, of quite contrary disposition, had risen late that morning, feasted on a huge lunch (which even now was producing unexpected gases like my own internal rumbling dreadnought), and, feeling benevolent, had decided to answer my friend's urgent message of the previous day, which had hinted that his fever pitch of work was about to bear fruit--a pronouncement he always made long in advance of the actual climax, thus giving me plenty of my own slow time to come around. for poor aanschultz, time was compressed from line to point. his was a world of constant discovery. i bumped into nearly everything and everyone in the darkened chamber before my eyes adjusted, when finally i found myself bathed in a deep, rich violet light, decanted through yet another rack of bottles, although of a correspondingly darker hue. blood or burgundy, they seemed at first; and reminded me of the liquid edge of clouds one sometimes sees at sunset, when all form seems to buzz and crackle as it melts into the coming night, and the eye tingles in anticipation of discovering unsuspected hues. my skin now hummed with this same subtle optical electricity. things in the room seemed to glow with an inner light. "here we are," he said. "this will make everything possible. this is my-- abat-nuit by this name aanschultz referred to a bevelled opening he had cut into an odd corner of the room, a tight and complex angle formed between the floor and the brick abutment of a chimney shaft from the floors below. i could not see how he had managed to collect any light from this darkest of corners, but i quickly saw my error. for it was not light he bothered to collect in this way, but darkness. darkness was somehow channeled into the room and then filtered through those racks of purple bottles, in some of which i now thought to see floating specks and slowly tumbling shapes that might have been wine lees or bloodclots. i even speculated that i saw the fingers of a deformed, pickled foetus clutching at the rays that passed through its glass cell, playing inverse shadow-shapes on the walls of the dark room, casting its enlarged and gloomy spell over all us awed and frightened older children. unfiltered, the darkness was much harder to characterize; when i tried to peer into it, aanschultz pulled me away, muttering, "useless for our purposes." "our?" i repeated, as if i had anything to do with this. for even then it seemed an evil power my friend had harnessed, something best left to its own devices--something which, in collaboration with human genius, could only lead to the worsening of an already precarious situation. "this is my greatest work yet," he confided, but i could see that his assistants thought otherwise. the shadows already darkening europe seemed thickest in this corner of the room. i felt that the strangely beveled opening with its canted mirror inside a silvery-black throat, reflecting darkness from an impossible angle, was in fact the source of all unease to be found in the streets and in the marketplace. it was as if everyone had always known about this webby corner, and feared that it might eventually be prised open by the violent levering of a powerful mind. i comforted myself with the notion that this was a discovery, not an invention, and therefore for all purposes inevitable. given a mind as focused as aanschultz's, this corner was bound to be routed out and put to some use. however, i already suspected that the eventual use would not be that which aanschultz expected. i watched a thin girl with badly bruised arms weakly pulling a lever alongside the abat-nuit to admit more darkness through the purple bottles, and the deepening darkness seemed to penetrate her skin as well as the jars, pouring through the webs of her fingers, the meat of her arms, so that the shadows of bone and cartilege glowed within them, flesh flensed away in the revealing black radiance. it was little consolation to think that the discovery was implicit in the fact of this corner, this source of darkness built into the universe, embedded in creation like an aberration in a lens and therefore unavoidable. it had taken merely a mind possessed of an equal or complementary aberration to uncover it. i only hoped aanschultz possessed the power to compensate for the darkness's distortion, much as chromatic aberration may be compensated or avoided entirely by the use of an apochromatic lens. but i had little hope for this in my friend's case. have i mentioned it was his cruelty which chiefly attracted me? abaxial away from the axis. a term applied to the oblique or marginal rays passing through a lens. thus the light of our story is inevitably deflected from its most straightforward path by the medium of the _encyclopaedia_ itself, and this entry in particular. would that it were otherwise, and this a perfect world. some go so far as to state that the entirety of creation is itself an aberration a functional result of optical law. yet i felt that this matter might be considered aanschultz's fault, despite my unwillingness to think any ill of my friend. in my professional capacity, i was surrounded constantly by the fat and the beautiful; the lazy, plump and pretty. they flocked to my studio in hordes, in droves, in carriages and cars, in swan-necked paddle boats; and their laughter flowed up and down the three flights of stairs to my studios and galleries, where my polite assistants bade them sit and wait until %monsieur artiste% might be available. sometimes monsieur failed to appear at all, and they were forced with much complaining to be photographed by a mere apprentice, at a reduced rate, although i always kept on hand plenty of pre-signed plates so that they might take away an original and be as impressive as their friends. i flirted with the ladies; was indulgent with the children; i spoke to the gentlemen as if i had always been one of them, concerned with the state of trade, rates of exchange, the crisis in labor, the inevitable collapse of economies. i was in short a chameleon, softer than any of them, lazier and more variable, yet prouder. they meant nothing to me; they were all so easy and pretty and (i thought then) expendable. yet there was only one aanschultz. on the first and only day he came to sit for me (he had decided to require all his staff to wear tintype badges for security reasons and himself set the first example), i knew i had never met his like. he looked hopelessly out of place in my waiting chambers, awkward on the steep stairs, white and etiolated in the diffuse cuprous light of my abat-jour. yet his eyes were livid; he had violet pupils, and i wished--not for the first time--that there were some way of capturing color with all my clever lenses and cameras. none of my staff colorists could hope to duplicate that hue. the fat pleasant women flocking the studios grew thin and uncomfortable at the sight of him, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, exuding sharp perfumes of fear that neutralized their ambergris and artificial scents. he did not leer or bare his teeth or rub his hands and cackle; these obvious melodramatic motions would only have cheapened and blunted the sense one had of his refined cruelty. perhaps "cruel" is the wrong word. it was a severity in his nature--an unwillingness to tolerate any thought, sensation, or companion duller than a razor's edge. i felt instantly stimulated by his presence, as if i had at last found someone against whom i could gauge myself, not as opponent or enemy, but as a student who forever tries and tests himself against the model of his mentor. in my youth i had known instinctively that it is always better to stay near those i considered my superiors; for then i could never let my own skills diminish, but must constantly be polishing and practicing them. with age and success, i had nearly forgotten that crucial lesson, having sheltered too long in the cozy nests and parlors of society. aanschultz's laboratory proved to be their perfect antidote. we two could not have been less alike. as i have said, i had no clear understanding of, and only slightly more interest in, the natural sciences. art was all, to me. it had been my passion and my livelihood for so long now that i had nearly forgotten there was any other way of life. aanschultz reintroduced me to the concepts of hard speculation and experimentation, a lively curriculum which soon showed welcome results in my own artistic practices. for in the city, certain competitors had mastered my methods and now offered similar services at lower prices, lacking only the fame of my name to beat me out of business. in the coltish marketplace, where economies trembled beneath the rasping tongue of forces so bleak they seemed the product of one's own fears, with no objective source in the universe, it began to seem less than essential to possess an extraordinary signature on an otherwise ordinary photograph; why spend all that money for a name when just down the street, for two-thirds the price, one could have a photograph of equivalent quality, lacking only my florid famous autograph (of which, after all, there was already a glut)? so you see, i was in danger already when i met aanschultz, without yet suspecting its encroachment. with his aid i was soon able to improve the quality of my product far beyond the reach of my competitors. once more my name reclaimed its rightful magic potency, not for empty reasons, not through mere force of advertising, but because i was indeed superior. to all of paris i might have been a great man, an artistic genius, but in aanschultz's presence i felt like a young and stupid child. the scraps i scavenged from his workshop floors were not even the shavings of his important work. he hardly knew the good he did me, for although an immediate bond developed between us, at times he hardly seemed aware of my presence. i would begin to think that he had forgotten me completely; weeks might pass when i heard not a word from him; and then, suddenly, my faith in our friendship would be reaffirmed, for out of all the people he might have told--his scientific peers, politicians, the wealthy--he would come to me first with news of his latest breakthrough, as if my opinion were of greatest importance to him. i fancied that he looked to me for artistic inspiration (no matter how much he might belittle the impulse) just as i came to him for his scientific rigor. it was this rigor which at times bordered on cruelty--though only when emotion was somehow caught in the slow, ineluctably turning gears of his logic. he would not scruple to destroy a scrap of human fancy with diamond drills and acid blasts in order to discover some irreducible atom of hard fact (+10 on the mohs' scale) at its core. this meant, unfortunately, that each of his advances had left a trail of crushed "victims," not all of whom had thrown themselves willingly before the juggernaut. i sensed that this poor girl would soon be one of them. abrasion marks of a curious sort covered her arms, something like a cross between bruises, burns and blistering. due to my own eczema, i felt a sympathic pang as she backed away from the levers of the abat-nuit, aanschultz brushing her off angrily to make the final adjustments himself. she looked very young to be working such long hours in the darkness, so near the source of those strange black rays, but when i mentioned this to my friend he merely swept a hand in the direction of another part of the room, where a thin woman lay stretched out on a stained pallet, her arm thrown over her eyes, head back, mouth gaping; at first she appeared as dead as the drowned poseur hippolyte bayard, but i saw her breast rising and falling raggedly. the girl at the lever moved slowly, painfully, over to this woman and knelt down beside her, then very tenderly laid her head on the barely moving breast, so that i knew they were mother and child. leaving aanschultz for the moment, i sank down beside them, stroking the girl's frayed black hair gently as i asked if there were anything i could do for them. "who's there?" the woman said hoarsely. i gave my name, but she appeared not to recognize it. she didn't need illustrious visitors now, i knew. "he's with the professor," the child said, scratching vigorously at her arms though it obviously worsened them. i could see red, oozing meat through the scratches her fingernails left. "you should bandage those arms," i said. "i have sterile cloth and ointment in my carriage if you'd like me to do it." "bandages and ointment, he says," said the woman. "as if there's any healing it. leave her alone now--she's done what she could where i had to leave off. you'll just get the doctor mad at both of us." "i'm sure he'd understand if i---" "leave us be!" the woman howled, sitting up now, propped on both hands so that her eyes came uncovered, to my horror; for across her cheeks, forehead and nose was an advanced variety of the same damage her daughter suffered; her eyesockets held little heaps of charred ash that, as she thrust her face forward in anger, poured like black salt from between her withered lids and sifted softly onto the floor, reminding me unavoidably of that other and most excellent abrading powder which may be rubbed on dried negatives to provide a "tooth" for the penciller's art, consisting of one part powdered resin and two parts cuttle-fish bone, the whole being sifted through silk. i suspected this powder would do just as well, were i crass enough to gather it in my kerchief. she fell back choking and coughing on the black dust, beating at the air, while her daughter moved away from me in tears, and jumped when she heard aanschultz's sharp command. i turned to see my friend beckoning with one crooked finger for the girl to come and hold the levers just so while he screwed down a clamp. "my god, aanschultz," i said, without much hope of a satisfactory answer. "don't you see what your darkness has done to these wretches?" he muttered from the side of his mouth: "it's not a problem any longer. a short soak in a bath of potassium iodide and iodine will protect the surface from abrasion." "a print surface, perhaps, but these are people!" "it works on me," he said, thrusting at me a bare arm that showed scarcely any scarring. "now either let the girl do her work, or do it for her." i backed away quickly, wishing things were otherwise; but in those days aanschultz and his peers needed fear no distracting investigations from the occupational safety and health administration. he could with impunity remain oblivious to everything but the work that absorbed him. absorption this term is used in a chemical, an optical, and an esoteric sense. in the first case designates the taking up of one substance by another, just as a sponge absorbs or sucks up water, with hardly any chemical but merely a physical change involved; this is by far the least esoteric meaning, roughly akin to those surface phenomena which aanschultz hoped to strip aside. optically, absorption is applied to the suppression of light, and to it are due all color effects, including the dense dark stippling of the pores of aanschultz's face, ravaged by the pox in early years, and the weird violet aura--the same color as his eyes, as if it had bled out of them--that limned his profile as he bent closer to that weirdly angled aperture into artificial darkness. my friend, with unexpected consideration for my lack of expertise, now said: "according to draper's law, only those rays which are absorbed by a substance act chemically on it; when not absorbed, light is converted into some other form of energy. this dark beam converts matter in ways heretofore unsuspected, and is itself transformed into a new substance. give me my phantospectroscope." this last command was meant for the girl, who hurriedly retrieved a well-worn astrolabe-like device from a concealed cabinet and pressed it into her master's hands. "the spectrum is like nothing ever seen on this earth," he said, pulling aside the rack of filter bottles and bending toward his abat-nuit with the phantospectroscope at his eye, like a sorcerer stooping to divine the future in the embers of a hearth where some sacrifice has just done charring. i could not bear the cold heat of that unshielded black fire. i took several quick steps back. "i would show you," he went on, "but it would mean nothing to you. this is my real triumph, this phantospectroscope; it will be the foundation of a new science. until now, visual methods of spectral inspection have been confined to the visible portion of the spectrum; the ultraviolet and infrared regions gave way before slow photographic methods; and there we came to a halt. but i have gone beyond that now. ha! yes!" he thrust the phantospectroscope back into the burned hands of his assistant and made a final adjustment to the levers that controlled the angle and intensity of rays conducted through the abat-nuit. as the darkness deepened in that clinical space, it dawned on me that the third and deepest meaning of absorption was something like worship, and not completely dissimilar to terror. accelerator! my friend shouted, and i sensed rather than saw the girl moving toward him, but too slowly. common accelerators are sodium carbonate, washing soda, ammonia, potassium carbonate, sodium hydrate (caustic soda), and potassium hydrate (caustic potash), none of which suited aanschultz. he screamed again, and now there was a rush of bodies, a crush of them in the small corner of the room. an accelerator shortens the duration of development and brings out an image more quickly, but the images he sought to capture required special attention. as is written in the _encylopaedia of photography_ (1911, exoteric edition), "accelerators cannot be used as fancy dictates." i threw myself back, fearful that otherwise i would be shoved through the gaping abat-nuit and myself dissolve into that negative essence. i heard the girl mewing at my feet, trod on by her fellows, and i leaned to help her up. but at that moment there was a quickening in the evil corner, and i put my hands to a more instinctive use. accommodation of the eye the darkness cupped inside my palms seemed welcoming by comparison to the anti-light that had emptied the room of all meaning. with both eyes covered, i felt i was beyond harm. i could not immediately understand the source of the noises and commotion i heard around me, nor did i wish to. (%see also%, "axial accommodation.") accumulator apparently (and this i worked out afterward in hospital beside aanschultz) the room had absorbed its fill of the neutralizing light. all things threatened to split at their seams. matter itself, the atmosphere, aanschultz's assistants, bare thought, creaking metaphor--these things and others were stuffed to the bursting point. my own mind was a peaking crest of images and insights, a wave about to break. aanschultz screamed incomprehensible commands as he realized the sudden danger; but there must have been no one who still retained the necessary self-control to obey him. my friend himself leapt to reverse the charge, to shut down the opening, sliding the rack of filtering jars back in place--but even he was too late to prevent one small, significant rupture. i heard the inexplicable popping of corks, accompanied by a simultaneous metallic grating, followed by the shattering of glass. aanschultz later whispered of what he had glimpsed out of the edges of his eyes, and by no means can i--nor would i-discredit him. it was the bottles and jars in the filter rack that burst. or rather, some burst, curved glass shards and gelatinous contents flying, spewing, dripping, clotting the floor and ceiling, spitting backward into the bolt-hole of night. other receptacles opened with more deliberation. aanschultz later blushed when he described, with perfect objectivity, the sight of certain jar lids unscrewing themselves from within. the dripping and splashes and soft wet steps i heard, he said, bore an actual correspondence in physical reality, but he refused ever to go into further detail on exactly what manner of things, curdled there and quickened in those jars by the action of that deep black light, leapt forth to scatter through the laboratory, slipping between the feet of his assistants, scurrying for the shadows, bleeding away between the planks of the floor and the cracks of our minds, seeping out into the world. my own memory is somewhat more distorted by emotion, for i felt the girl clutching at my ankles and heard her terrible cries. i forced myself to tear my hands away from my face--while still keeping my eyes pressed tight shut--and leaned down to offer help. no sooner had i taken hold of her fingers than she began to scream more desperately. fearing that i was aggravating her wounds, i relaxed my hands to ease her pain; but she clung even more tightly to my hands and her screams intensified. it was as if something were pulling her away from me, as if i were her final anchor. as soon as i realized this, as soon as i tried to get a better hold on her, she slipped away. i heard her mother calling. the girl's cries were smothered. across the floor rushed a liquid seething, as of a sudden flood draining from the room and down the abat-nuit and out of the laboratory entirely. my first impulse was to follow, but i could no longer see a thing, even with my eyes wide open. "a light!" i shouted, and aanschultz overlapped my own words with his own: "no!" but too late. the need for fire was instinctive, beyond aanschultz's ability to quell by force or reason. a match was struck, a lantern lit and instantly in panic dropped; and as we fled onrushing flames, in that instant of total exposure, aanschultz's most ambitious and momentous experiment reached its climax...although the denouement for the rest of europe and the world would be a painful and protracted one. acetaldehyde (%see% "aldehyde.") acetic acid the oldest of acids, with many uses in photography, in early days as a constituent of the developer for wet plates, later for clearing iron from bromide prints, to assist in uranium toning, and as a restrainer. it is extremely volatile and should be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle and in a cool place. acetic ether synonym, ethyl acetate. a light, volatile, colorless liquid with pleasant acetous smell, sometimes used in making collodion. it should be kept in well-stoppered bottles away from fire, as the vapor is very inflammable. acetone a colorless volatile liquid of peculiar and characteristic odor, with two separate and distinct uses in photography, as an addition to developers and in varnish making. as the vapor is highly inflammable, the liquid should be kept in a bottle with a close-fitting cork or glass stopper. acetous acid the old, and now obsolete, name for acetic acid (%which see%). highly inflammable. acetylene a hydrocarbon gas having, when pure, a sweet odor, the well known unpleasant smell associated with this gas being due to the presence of impurities. it is formed by the action of water upon calcium carbide, 1 lb. of which will yield about 5 ft. of gas. it burns in air with a very bright flame, and is largely used by photographers for studio lighting, copying, etc., and as an illuminant in enlarging and projection lanterns. acetylene forms, like other combustible gases, an explosive mixture with ordinary air, the presence of as little as 4 per cent. of the gas being sufficient to constitute a dangerous combination. acetylene generator an apparatus for generating acetylene by the action of water on calcium carbide. copper should not be employed in acetylene generators, as under certain conditions a detonating explosive compound is formed. acetylide emulsion wratten and mees prepared a silver acetylide emulsion by passing acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of silver nitrate and emulsifying in gelatin the precipitate, which is highly explosive. while this substance blackens in daylight about ten times faster than silver chloride paper, for years observers failed to detect any evidence of latent image formation and concluded that insights gained in professor conreid aanschultz's laboratory were of no lasting significance. this misunderstanding is attributed to the fact that, despite the intensity of exposure, it has taken more than a century for certain crucial images to emerge, even with the application of strong developers. we are only now beginning to see what aanschultz glimpsed in an instant. "what man may hereafter do, now that dame nature has become his drawing mistress, is impossible to predict." - michael faraday end agre, 'sustainability and critique', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-agre-sustainability.txt sustainability and critique by philip e. agre department of communication university of california, san diego pagre@ucsd.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by philip e. agre, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. wright, will. _wild knowledge: science, language, and social life in a fragile environment_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1992. [1] attend any public hearing about a local environmental controversy, and almost the first thing you'll notice is a clash of contrasting discourses. some participants, particularly from industry, will speak the language of technical reason: risk factors, powers of ten, bureaucratic procedures, the costs and benefits of industrial facilities. many other participants, particularly from the communities around those facilities, will speak the language of experience and democracy: stories of past misfortune, fears about a world that doesn't make sense to them, and the right to control their own lives (see cone et al. 1992, downey 1988, gismondi and richardson 1991, and killingsworth and steffens 1989). beneath each discourse, typically, is a highly evolved practice of orchestrating or subverting the established mechanisms of social legitimation, as well as a worked-out view of scientific knowledge and its place in society. community by community across the united states--and increasingly around the world--organizations such as the chemical manufacturers association equip factory owners with rational arguments and soothing rhetoric at the same time as organizations such as the citizens' clearinghouse on hazardous waste equip community activists with coalition-building tactics and a nearly absolute rejection of experts and their expertise (greider 1992). immediately evident in these encounters is what we would be fully justified in calling a crisis of reason, occasioned in thousands of separate instances by concerns about the sustainability of industrial society. [2] this is the political background against which will wright has written his ambitious new book, _wild knowledge_. wright's goal is a critique and reconstruction of both scientific knowledge and institutional legitimation around the ecological imperative of sustainability. the fascination of wright's enterprise is immediately apparent: understanding and practicing the notion of sustainable society requires us to reopen some long-standing and painful questions about the relation between society and nature. in what sense are human beings part of nature? to what extent is human history conditioned by natural history, and what role does human history play in the biological and physical evolution of the earth? wright's concern is not the substantive answers to these questions--he does not assess the reality of global warming, much less the utility of any given regulatory approach to preventing it. instead, he wishes to dig deeply into the concepts of humanity and nature in order simply to make intelligible the notion of a social-natural history (cf. cronon 1991), and in particular the notion of sustainability as an attribute and a goal of social action. [3] his book defies classification. if it stands in any single tradition, it is the feminist and otherwise radical critique of science by authors such as merchant (1980) and easlea (1980). although it is reasonably lucid and self-contained, it will probably not be appreciated by anybody who is not already sympathetic to such ideas; for example, one must pretty much accept a priori that science and technology, as a mindset, are the cause of our environmental problems--and not, in particular, the cure for them. his book is not a work of historical or otherwise empirical inquiry, but rather a wholly--even austerely--conceptual analysis. and although it addresses central issues of social theory, its treatment of that tradition is shaky, as will become clear in a moment. nonetheless, wright's book is important and challenging, and required reading for anybody with a conceptual interest in environmentalism as social practice. [4] let us now consider wright's argument in roughly the order in which he presents it. his point of departure is the argument in his previous book, _the social logic of health_ (1982), in which he points out that the notion of "health" transcends the bounds of any particular scientific-medical theory of disease, and as such stands as the always-available social-natural grounds for contesting the legitimacy of medical institutions and their practices and expertise. alternative health-care practitioners (midwives, acupuncturists, herbalists, and others) may not have an easy time acquiring official sanction for their activities, but they do have, in discursive and social terms, somewhat solid ground for demanding it. wright's method is to extend this argument to environmental issues, with "sustainability" playing the same role as "health." like "health," "sustainability" deeply intertwines "social" and "natural" issues. indeed in many areas, such as occupational health, the two concerns combine, bringing biology and politics into much greater proximity than either of them is, at present, capable of acknowledging. [5] wright argues that scientific and social knowledge are artificially distinct categories, and that they are indeed actually incoherent unless conceived as continuous with one another. the critical issue for wright is language-the language within which science, technology, religion, and social theory are framed and through which social institutions are legitimated. science in particular has, since descartes and newton, understood itself as speaking a special, mathematical language. as a result, the scientist, qua subject of scientific inquiry, understands knowledge as the asocial, ahistorical mathematical representation of reality. all the same, wright observes that when scientists and philosophers are called upon to provide some justification for science, they appeal to its "success" in technological terms. but the religions of traditional cultures have their own kind of success, namely success in sustaining the social-natural relations by means of which these cultures reproduce themselves in their natural settings. these two types of success are complementary: industrial technology has not proven sustainable, and religious worldviews have been unable to make room for the benefits of technical innovation. [6] this is a good point to stop and listen to wright's own prose, whose style is of a piece with the nature of his project: both religion and science have incorporated a fundamental reference to language into their respective ideas of knowledge, implicitly recognizing that knowledge is inherently an issue of the formal structure of language. but both have distorted that formal reference, interpreting it instead as a substantive appeal to a *particular form* of language, and so referring the idea of knowledge to a sacred, magical form of language rather than to the formal structure of language. for religion this magical language has always been the ordinary, traditional language of daily life, where knowledge of the magical words gives knowledge of the sacred social-natural order, with its necessary moral commitments to traditional acceptance and ritual. and for science this magical language is mathematics, where the magic of perfect observation gives knowledge of the external natural order, with its necessary technical commitments to individualized criticism and efficiency. (112-13) many readers may demur; exactly what kinds of science and, more importantly, what kinds of religion are supposed to fall within these generalizations? does wright subscribe to the outdated anthropological stereotype of traditional cultures as uncritical and ahistorical? it is hard to tell. throughout the book, words like "science," "religion," "language," "legitimation," "sustainability," "nature," and "reality" recur constantly without ever being fully unpacked into a definite embedding in a disciplinary practice or literature, much less a concrete empirical reference. the book is composed in sentences of thirty-odd words organized into long paragraphs, each of which systematically develops a definite point involving a particular set of the book's key words. the effect sometimes resembles buddhist scripture, with a hypnotically unfolded internal consistency which could easily be mistaken for a verbal game unless it is applied in the context of an actual practice. [7] but let us continue. to motivate the underlying politics of scientific knowledge, wright recounts the by-now familiar early history of science understood as mathematical observation and knowledge. early theories of gravity, for example, were consciously understood in their day as positions in a political contest. although the concrete political reference of these theories has fallen away, the politics of scientific subjectivity remain. wright's argument for the incoherence of this form of subjectivity turns on the notion of "mathematical observation": for science knowledge is an issue of the observing human mind, and yet the human mind is typically influenced by social and cultural ideas, ideas that involve values and beliefs and that are not strictly and neutrally derived from objective nature. thus scientific observation must establish a neutral and objective connection between mind and nature, a connection systematically purged of all contaminating social influences. . . . such an objective connection can be made through observation, but only through a special kind of observation, a kind that is uniquely focused on nature and without social content. this is mathematical observation, the only kind of observation that can directly connect the rational mind with objective nature. mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed, since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations. . . . for scientific knowledge, then, the idea of the *mind* is connected with the idea of *nature* through the idea of *mathematics*. . . . the mind must become mathematical if it is to achieve valid knowledge, and so the idea of objective nature imposes a mathematical structure on the scientific image of human beings, as the detached, receptive subjects of scientific knowledge. (75) given the impossibility of actually attaining these direct correspondences between a purified mathematical mind and a manifest mathematical world, wright refers to this notion of mathematical observation as a kind of magic, comparable rhetorically if not logically to the magical systems of traditional religions. but this argument goes by too quickly. many scientists would object that wright's notion of mathematical observation elides the whole substance of actual scientific practice based on experiments and replication. the point is not that experiment directly observes the mathematics of nature, only that it allows for defeasible inference of it, subject to replication and extension of the results by others in similarly equipped laboratories elsewhere--perhaps in wholly different cultures. wright's proposed alternative, that human beings must be conceptualized as having a *formally necessary* but *substantively contingent* relationship with their world, a relationship through which knowledge is always formally possible but also always possibly mistaken (173) is more or less what scientists refer to as the "falsifiability" of theories. but wright is not mistaken, exactly; the point is that he is not so much presenting an argument as referring to one that has been made with greater thoroughness by a variety of authors, for example latour (1987), who conceive of physical phenomena not as independent realities objectively glimpsed, nor as idealist entities arbitrarily constructed, but as conjoint social-natural entities stabilized in highly organized social-natural settings. [8] beyond this internal claim against the coherence of scientific subjectivity, wright follows numerous other authors by appealing to the reintroduction of consciousness into physical theorizing by quantum mechanics. but here again he is moving too quickly, inasmuch as the long-established and newly resurgent "many worlds" model of quantum phenomena (everett 1957; cf. drescher 1991) accounts for the evidence without giving any special role to consciousness or treating observation as anything but another form of physical interaction. [9] wright's complaint, in short, is that the mathematical language within which scientific knowledge is framed deprives that knowledge of its human qualities: its social embedding; its historical specificity; its reference to broader human concerns, particularly the concern for the social-natural sustainability of human social and technical practices; and its susceptibility to critique on these grounds. whatever the difficulties in his argument for this point, his proposed solution is altogether intriguing: scientific knowledge, he feels, should be reunderstood as a matter of human beings saying things in human language --not an artificially restricted mathematical subtype of language, but language as such, in the fullness of its rhetorical, political, and historical character. he would have us attend to the language of environmental discourse, taking this language seriously as culture and as political practice foundedly ultimately on the value of sustainability (cf. killingsworth 1992, wynne 1987). [10] in this view, he follows in a long tradition that understands language as the essence of humanity, in the sense that languages carry cultural modes of cognition within them, transcending particular individuals and providing for the continuity of cultural traditions through their role in individual socialization. indeed, wright overstates the originality of his argument in this regard. consider, for example, wilhelm von humboldt's theory of language (see brown 1967), from which a great deal of modern linguistics and anthropology has descended. humboldt held that human languages have a significant degree of autonomy from their speakers inasmuch as those speakers have only a limited formal understanding of how their language works. furthermore, he held that languages develop in two clear stages. the first stage corresponds to the founding period of any given nation, during which the people collectively evolve a language suited to the trials of making a living from their particular landscape. once that language acquires a stable form, the second period begins as that form starts to solidify; rather than being improvised to suit the functional needs of productive work, it is now handed down intact as an organically interconnected system of autonomous linguistic forms. for the philologists in humboldt's germany, this theory motivated the project of reconstructing ancient modes of consciousness through the figurative spadework of historical linguistics. language was ecological, tied to the earth, in the sense that it developed as an organic part of the ancient nation's sustainable natural-social relations to its local geography and ecology. [11] to be sure, wright's theory differs from humboldt's in a variety of ways. wright's social-ecological project is not nostalgic; his argument for sustainability does not require that we revert to lost folkways. quite the contrary, sustainability is to be achieved through two requirements: that institutional legitimation be continually referred to consciously formulated understandings of sustainability; and that this reference be endlessly open to contest and critique. he wishes knowledge to become "wild" in the sense of being formally open to this kind of unbounded critique. in particular, wright's theory, unlike that of the german tradition from herder down to gadamer, is not hermeneutic: the key to sustainability is not locked away in language but rather articulated in institutional legitimation and critique. nonetheless, he greatly underestimates the extent to which cultural theory has struggled with the relationship between culture and technical reason (see sahlins 1976). [12] what is more, wright also underestimates the struggles of social theorists to reconcile nature and culture (for the particularly fascinating case of lukacs see feenberg 1986), and in so doing to formulate simultaneously adequate conceptions of both individual agency and social organization: through [its various accounts] of individual motivations, social theory created different strategies for social legitimation and social explanation. in all of these versions social theory has accepted the scientific version of objective nature, as the valid basis for reason and knowledge, and thus social theory has revolved around the idea of the autonomous scientific individual. because this individual is logically asocial but empirically social, social theory has generally focused on the relationship between the individual and the society, with the individual being in various stages of tension and conflict with society. this tension is inevitable, and it makes social order somewhat problematic, at least theoretically. this is the famous problem of social order: individuals "are naturally" free and society imposes external constraints on them, constraints that both inhibit freedom and enable individual rationality, fulfillment, and so on. (134-35) this formulation oversimplifies through its ascription to "social theory" of an altogether regressive "scientific" theory of individual subjectivity. the fact is that theorists such as elias (1982 [1939]; cf. mennell 1989) have invested great effort in overcoming such distinctions. the anthropological conception of culturally specific consciousness is already a considerable departure from the "scientific" individual, and the theories of embodied social practice of elias, bourdieu, and others go further. nonetheless, deep difficulties do remain. wright proposes to resolve them through an appeal to language as the formal matrix of institutional legitimation. in reducing social order to questions of legitimation, he faces a considerable challenge. [13] but he is nothing if not courageous. he sees a deep connection between language as the locus of human sociality and sustainability as the goal of human institutions. inasmuch as social action, sustainable or otherwise, is organized at a trans-individual level through the framework of language, he views language itself as providing for its own perpetuation through the formal conditions it establishes for the simultaneous conduct of legitimation and critique. [l]anguage is more about involved mediating and surviving than about detached representing and mirroring. . . . language necessarily structures the way we think about ourselves and our world, since language is actively striving to sustain its own possibility, through human knowledge and actions. . . . language can sustain itself, actively, only through the organizing and legitimation of social institutions, which means through versions of knowledge and reason as *legitimating, organizing* endeavors. (179) knowledge serves the formal goal of language, the goal of sustaining the social-natural possibility of language through organized, legitimated human actions. . . . language must be seen as formally directing human actions, through efforts at knowledge, toward its inherent, formal goal, the goal of sustaining the possibility of such human actions. (187) [i]ndividuals would be understood as formally motivated by language, where language, unlike scientific nature, is already understood as participating in this formal, goal-oriented structure, and thus they would be understood as motivated by the same formal mechanisms that generate knowledge, social life, and social legitimation. individuals would be understood as formally motivated to act in such a way as to sustain their own human possibility, the possibility of social life. (188) in other words, wright's point is not that human language directly encodes sustainable productive practices--except perhaps in traditional cultures, which however are unable to accommodate significant environmental shifts due to the inflexibility of this encoding and the religious delegitimation of critique. on the contrary, his point is that language provides the formal resources with which conscious human beings, by their very nature as social and therefore linguistic beings, are able to legitimate and criticize institutions by appealing to the imperative of sustainability. [14] the precise protocol by which legitimation and criticism must proceed, though, is unclear. perhaps the appeal to sustainability must be mediated by some general account of truth: specific cultural actions must be legitimated in terms of conceptions of "truth" and "reality," but the validity of these conceptions must in turn be evaluated in terms of the formal criteria of sustainability. (193) it seems implausible, however, that a conception of truth and reality could itself determine whether a system of social practices is sustainable. so perhaps it is also permissible to appeal to sustainability directly: the reference for all issues of legitimacy would be sustainability, and thus the only legitimate criticisms would be those that could argue for or demonstrate ecological failures on the part of the established practices. (210) but this position cannot be entirely right either, given the likelihood that several institutional orders might be ecologically sustainable in a given historical situation, and that of those institutional orders would be enormously preferable to others on non-ecological grounds. [15] be this as it may, wright does not prescribe any particular set of institutions but rather an unfolding history in which institutions lose their legitimacy through social-natural shifts in the practical conditions of sustainability. he says that actions that are legitimate under certain social-natural conditions may not be legitimate under later, changed social-natural conditions, conditions that result from the effects of those legitimated actions. (193-94) shifts in the conditions of sustainability presumably also include exogenous environmental changes, scientific discoveries about eco-social system dynamics, and technological innovations. in any case, periods of institutional legitimacy through sustainable practices alternate with periods in which this legitimacy is lost and newly appropriate institutions arise. note that this is not a particularly materialistic theory of history; the social effectivity of accurate understandings of sustainability is more or less assumed. [16] moreover, the periodic institutional shifts are understood, strikingly, in terms of forms of individual identity. in particular, institutions themselves are largely understood in terms of the dimensions of social difference (race, gender, class, sexuality, et cetera) that these institutions recognize. the established institutions of any given period will reckon insider/outsider distinctions in particular terms. although dissent as such would always be valued as such, the established distinctions of a given period will find their justification in the social-natural facts of sustainability. [17] although wright presents this prospect optimistically as the formal celebration of difference, i think that it inadvertently identifies one of the profound dilemmas in environmental thinking. he says, for example, in this conception the idea of equality refers to an institutional guarantee, in the name of rationality, that all individuals can maintain effective local control over their chosen lives, and that any disruption of that local control must be legitimated in the name of a shared ecological rationality. (217) this may sound reasonable, but its flip side does not: if the sustainability of social practices provides their ultimate justification, then it also provides the ultimate justification for whatever marginalization--or even outright oppression--these practices might entail. i can easily imagine someone arguing that toleration of homosexuality, for example, is inconsistent with ecological sustainability. [18] can this be right? the difficulty, i would conjecture, lies in wright's implicit model of social institutions. wright, as i have remarked, differs from humboldt and the rest of the anthropological tradition is that he locates social identity in language as such and not in particular languages. differences among people, likewise, are not understood as culturally specific but as universal. such a view effectively suppresses cultural difference and thereby eliminates the possibility of geniune "otherness" among human beings and their respective forms of knowledge (see, for example, grossberg 1988: 382). [19] in the end, wright's model of institutional legitimation, shaped in the image of our "global" environmental difficulties, is "global" itself. society itself becomes, in one sense or another, one large institution: [t]he social order must be seen, formally, as an organization, or metaorganization, with its own inherent, formal goal, and that legitimating critical access is the only organizational strategy that is rational and ecological. (213) but in the real world of 1992, the legitimation of global institutions for the regulation of putatively sustainable practices has very little to do with democracy, or indeed with genuine sustainability (_the ecologist_ 1992). the challenge for an argument such as wright's, in my view, is to unpack the notion of "institutions" and their legitimation in a way that recognizes the diversity not only of individuals but of local forms of knowledge. ----------------------------------------------------------- references brown, roger langham. _wilhelm von humboldt's conception of linguistic relativity_. the hague: mouton, 1967. cone, kathy, luis quinones, robert salter, brian shields, luis torres, and janice varela. "the language of land-use conflict: new mexicans talk about public lands, environmentalists, and 'people for the west!'" _the workbook_ 17 (1), spring 1992: 2-6. cronon, william. _nature's metropolis: chicago and the great west_. new york: norton, 1991. downey, gary l. "structure and practice in the cultural identities of scientists: negotiating nuclear wastes in new mexico." _anthropological quarterly_ 61 (1) 1988: 26-38. drescher, gary. "demystifying quantum mechanics: a simple universe with quantum uncertainty." _complex systems_ 5, 1991: 207-237. easlea, brian. _witch hunting, magic and the new philosophy: an introduction to debates of the scientific revolution 1450-1750_. brighton: harvester, 1980. _the ecologist_ 22 (4), july/august 1992. a special issue entitled _whose common future?_. elias, norbert. _the civilizing process_. trans. edmund jephcott. new york: pantheon, 1982. originally published in german in 1939. everett, hugh. "`relative state' formulation of quantum mechanics." _reviews of modern physics_ 29, 1957: 454-469. feenberg, andrew. _lukacs, marx, and the sources of critical theory_. new york: oxford university press, 1986. gismondi, michael, and mary richardson. "discourse and power in environmental politics: public hearings on a bleached kraft pulp mill in alberta canada." _capitalism nature socialism_ 2 (3), 1991: 43-66. greider, william. _who will tell the people?: the betrayal of american democracy_. new york: simon and schuster, 1992. grossberg, lawrence. "wandering audiences, nomadic critics." _cultural studies_ 2 (3), 1988: 377-391. killingsworth, m. jimmie, and dean steffens. "effectiveness in the environmental impact statement." _written communication_ 6 (2), 1989: 155-180. killingsworth, m. jimmie. _ecospeak: rhetoric and environmental politics in america_. carbondale: southern illinois university press, 1992. latour, bruno. _science in action: how to follow engineers and scientists through society_. cambridge: harvard university press, 1987. mennell, stephen. _norbert elias: civilization and the human self-image_. oxford: basil blackwell, 1989. merchant, carolyn. _the death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution_. san francisco: harper and row, 1980. sahlins, marshall. _culture and practical reason_. chicago: university of chicago press, 1976. wright, will. _the social logic of health_. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 1982. wynne, brian. _risk management and hazardous waste: implementation and the dialectics of credibility_. berlin: springer-verlag, 1987. herman, 'fear of music', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-herman-fear.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.993. part 1/1, total size 27408 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- fear of music by andrew herman ah7301r@acad.drake.edu department of sociology drake university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by andrew herman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of : goodwin, andrew. _dancing in the distraction factory: music televison and popular culture_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1992. i. fear of music: postmodernism and music television [1] the first time i heard the terms "postmodernism" and "the postmodern" was at the "marxism and interpretation of culture conference" at the university of illinois during the torpid summer of 1983. like the inhuman heat and humidity of the midwestern july, the terms hung heavily in the conference atmosphere, a prominent feature of almost every presentation, debate, and discussion. the omnipresence of the terms was particularly frustrating as almost nobody had anything close to resembling a straight explanation of them. clearly, i thought, these terms must have some shared intersubjective meaning, otherwise all these people wouldn't be enunciating them with such zest and enthusiasm. finally, in desperation, i nearly assaulted a fellow conference participant during an incredibly hot and hazy dance party, determined to extract at least a basic definition of this hot and hazy chimera, "the postmodern." [2] this individual did her best to satisfy my inquisitorial hunger by telling me of "the crisis in representation," the "death of the author," the "collapse of master narratives," "pastiche and parody," the "waning of affect," and so on. unfortunately, none of these characterizations of "postmodernism" or "the postmodern" made much sense to me. and so i just stood there nodding and grinning, hoping to convey vague understanding. sensing a lack of comprehension on my part, and desperate to extricate herself from what was rapidly becoming a dead-end conversation, my reluctant interlocutor directed my attention to the spectral glow of a television monitor that hung in the corner of the room. "look," she said triumphantly, "the postmodern is in this very room. if you want to understand the postmodern, watch music television." she then slipped away, leaving me to ponder the connection between music video, mtv, and postmodernism. [3] my companion that evening was probably not the first, and most certainly not the last, to note that there was an intimate connection between the postmodern, music video in general, and _mtv: music television_ in particular. indeed, the argument that music video as cultural form and mtv as televisual apparatus were quintessential exemplars of postmodern culture has become the dominant interpretation of music television within cultural studies. for example, john fiske (1986, 1989) argues that music video as textual form is postmodern because of its fragmentary and disjointed nature. in its privileging of signifier over signified, contends fiske, music video produces the distinctively postmodern experience of decentered subjectivity. similarly, e. ann kaplan (1987) and david tetzlaff (1986) maintain that mtv, as a regime of televisual experience, is postmodern because of the atemporal, ahistorical and dreamlike quality of its programming flow. although they draw widely different political conclusions from their analyses, kaplan, kim chen (1986), and will straw (1988) locate the postmodern nature of music video in its palimpsistic intertextuality and representational practices of pastiche and parody. finally, larry grossberg (1988, 1989, 1992) argues that mtv evinces a cultural logic of "authentic inauthenticity," a peculiarly postmodern form of identity politics that self-consciously celebrates the temporary affective commitments of style and pose. as an expression of the logic of postmodern culture, grossberg maintains that music television locates identity and difference in the surface appearances of mood and attitude rather than in the meaningful modernist depths of ideology. what makes this superficial, "inauthentic" politics of style "authentic" (and therefore postmodern), according to grossberg, is that performers, programmers, and audiences all know that there is nothing beyond the pose. in the cynical postmodern sensibility of mtv (and, for grossberg, popular culture as a whole), there is no pretension to making a difference in the structure or fabric of everyday life beyond the differences of image and appearance. [4] it would be an understatement to say that andrew goodwin finds the predominance of such accounts within cultural studies a bit troublesome. indeed, much of _dancing in the distraction factory_ is a sustained, if uneven and somewhat contradictory, polemic against the understanding of music television as distinctively postmodern. for goodwin, the aforementioned authors and their analyses (with the partial exception of grossberg) represent a theoretical arrogance and political naivete of egregious proportions. they are part of a "current fashion for conflating the specificities of different media and genre into a ragbag category of 'postmodernism' that does injustice in equal measure to both the conceptual field [i.e., postmodernism] and the object of study [i.e., music television]" (17). although goodwin grudgingly admits that there are certain features of contemporary society and popular culture that might be accurately and fruitfully understood as "postmodern," music television is not one of them. [5] according to goodwin, the fundamental problem of the postmodernist take on music television is that it fails to take into account that music television is, quite simply, *music* television. although there has been some work done in media studies on the aural dimension of television (e.g. williams, 1974; altman, 1987), according to goodwin, "very few analyses of music television have thought to consider that it might be music" (5). goodwin devotes much of the first part of the book to detailing the deleterious results of the bias in studies of music television towards the visual. [6] for example, goodwin takes issue with two widely held positions that represent polar extremes of the postmodern assessment of the politics of music television. the first is the pessimistic argument that music video has had a detrimental impact on the interpretative imagination of the audience because its visual images tyrannically fix the lyrical and musical meaning of a song. the second is the more optimistic, "avant-garde" argument that music videos represent a radical, subversive break with "classic realist" modes of representation and subjectivity because of their temporally fractured narrative and distinctive mode of address. due to their narrow emphasis on the visual text of music video, both arguments ignore two *con*-textual dimensions of music television that are central to goodwin's own analysis. [7] the first dimension is the interdiscursive polysemy of music television. goodwin argues that there are a multiplicity of extratextual discourses beyond the visual image which help constitute any particular song's meaning. these include discourses of performance, promotion, and stardom that are crucial to understanding the institutional context of music television. secondly, the hermeneutical valences of music video can be understood only by taking into account the phenomenology of synaesthesia, or the complex relationship between sound and image that was central to the production of the pleasure and meaning of songs long before music television. [8] when both dimensions are foregrounded in the analysis of music television, goodwin maintains, the aforementioned arguments make little sense. in the case of the "meaning-fixing" dominance of video-text images, because of the array of discourses that are both inscribed in a music video as well as brought to the video by an audience, there is a multiplicity of visual associations that are conjured by the audience, many of which have little to do with a particular video's images. rereading the avant-garde argument about the anti-realist nature of music video, goodwin points out that if one understands the institutional history of pop music discourses and the aesthetics of performance, the supposedly radical mode of address of music video (where the performer often directly addresses the audience) is, in fact, revealed to be "entirely conventional and thoroughly ordinary" (76). further, if one considers the ways sound and image are linked through the process of synaesthesia, the fractured narratives and other "instabilities" in the music-video text (which are supposedly indicative of its postmodern character) can be understood as visual analogs of the musical structure of a song in terms of voice, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmonic development and, of course, lyrics. thus, according to goodwin, much of what makes "no sense" to postmodernists (c.f. chen, 1986; fiske, 1989) makes a great deal of sense in terms of what he calls a "musicology of the image." indeed, from this perspective, music television represents "the making musical of television" through the subordination of vision to sound as much as it does the triumph of the visual over the musical (70). consequently, as goodwin concludes with a nice rhetorical flourish, music television does not, generally speaking, indulge in a rapture with the symbolic; nor does it defy our understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality through its refusal to make sense. far from constituting a radical break with the social processes of meaning production, music television constantly reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance, poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the question of how meaning serves power. (180) ii. meaning, power and the "scandal" of "new populism" [9] it is this issue of "how meaning serves power", and how it's currently being addressed within contemporary cultural studies, that is goodwin's ultimate concern in the book. as should be clear by now, he believes that the postmodern perspective is ill-equipped to explore the "social process of meaning production" in music television because of its fascination with the surfaces of visual imagery. however, goodwin is equally critical of what he terms the "new populism" of cultural studies. although he never specifies precisely to what work the epithet refers, one gathers that this new populism is characterized by an ethnographic focus on the processes of reception and a concomitant privileging of the audience's power in terms of interpretation and pleasure (e.g. ang, 1985; lewis, 1990). for goodwin, this so-called new populism accords "too much autonomy" to audiences because it implies that they "could construct meaning from media texts at will," thus denying the salience of hegemonic or preferred meanings that emanate from cultural institutions and are inscribed in cultural artifacts and texts (14). this valorization of the audience in cultural studies, goodwin insists, has entailed an abandonment of the project of ideology critique and its concern with the relationship between meaning and power. to my knowledge, even the most optimistic of those who might fall under the goodwin's rubric of new populism, such as john fiske (1989, 1992), do not in any way maintain that power or preferred meanings are inoperative in the process of reception. nonetheless, goodwin dramatically asserts that the new populism's supposed abandonment of concern with ideology as power constitutes "the 'scandal'" of cultural studies (158). [10] how, then, is this "scandal" to be stopped? in order to have an adequate grasp of the social processes of meaning and ideology involved in music television in particular and popular culture as a whole, goodwin maintains that cultural studies must adopt a mode of analysis that is "more adequate to the real." the "real" for goodwin is constituted by "actual, historical relations of power" and production (158, 167). in other words, the scandalous state of cultural studies can be rectified by its reorientation within a framework of marxist political economy. of course, goodwin is quick to point out that he is not advocating a return to the good old days of crude base/superstructure certitude where the masses were manipulated into false consciousness by the products of the culture industry, products whose ideological content could be explained solely in terms of the imperatives of capital accumulation. rather, goodwin's political economic approach is meant to be a "non-reductionist" examination of the institution/text and text/audience nexi of popular culture that situates textual aesthetics and ideology, as well as audience reception, squarely within the conditions of cultural production in a capitalist society. [11] accordingly, from his perspective, a materialist analysis of music television that is "more adequate to real" adheres to the following logic. first, one must examine the historical development and contemporary dynamics of the institutional politics of production in the music and television industries. this institutional analysis establishes a contextual framework for understanding the aesthetics and ideology of music videos as texts. although goodwin claims he is not suggesting that textual content is determined by conditions of cultural production, he does want to emphasize that such conditions have a constraining effect upon texts. finally, having examined the nexus of institution and text, one can proceed to the final step of analysis wherein one examines the nexus of text and audience, or the relationship between the politics of production and the politics of consumption. [12] again, while not claiming that the meaning and pleasures of music video are predetermined and fixed by the institutional imperatives of production, goodwin clearly argues that there are limits to the polysemy of music television which are set by its political economy. accordingly, he insists that the first and second levels of analysis can produce an understanding of the third by illuminating what he suggestively terms (but, unfortunately, never explicitly defines) "reading formations." such reading formations are multidiscursive regimes of representation and pleasure that privilege certain subject positions in terms of ideology and affect. one example of a "reading formation" is what goodwin terms a "star-text." the star-text is composed of the repertoire of images and discourses which constitute a musician's or band's persona and is central to the meaning of music videos. such star-texts operate as a "metanarrative" that structure a musician's or band's identity. thus, even before audiences have seen a particular video clip of, say, the band u2, they are probably familiar with the band's metanarrative or star-text as the spiritual and political "conscience of rock and roll." further, argues goodwin, such star-texts are inextricably linked to the imperatives of the music industry as they are an essential component of the effort to package and sell musicians as commodities. after all, it was the promotions department at island records that came up with the "conscience of rock and roll" moniker for u2 in order to sell _the joshua tree_ album. thus, even though at the book's beginning goodwin hedges his bets by disavowing any "claim to provide a definitive account of textual reception" (xxiii), by its end he feels entitled to state unequivocally that "while different parts of the audience will be positioned differently, music television viewers are nonetheless still positioned" (180). it is this claim about the audience which, i would argue, represents the major flaw in the logic of cultural analysis followed by goodwin and ultimately undermines his claim to provide a coherent alternative to both postmodernism and the "new populism." [13] when it comes to the first moment of goodwin's preferred mode of analysis, exploring the trends in the music and television industries that fostered the development of music video and music television, _dancing in the distraction factory_ is superb. building upon wolfgang haug's work on advertising and commodity aesthetics (1986), goodwin offers a compelling argument that it is impossible to comprehend the pleasure and meaning of music video texts without considering their status as unique promotional commodities. goodwin is certainly not the first to examine the emergence of music television in terms of pressures of market demographics, programming needs, and promotional imperatives of the music and television industries (c.f., in particular, denisoff, 1988). however, his argument concerning the confluence of industrial marketing and programming imperatives with the emergence of new aesthetics and ideologies of performance and musicianship which privileged the artifice of the visual image (e.g. as articulated by the "new romantics" such as the pet shop boys), is startlingly original and convincing. [14] similarly, goodwin's analysis of how the institutional discourses and practices of promotion, performance, and stardom become encoded into the sounds, images, and iconography of music video texts is nuanced and sophisticated. indeed, the chapter on what goodwin terms the "musicology of the image" should be required reading for all students of music television and music in general. yet in spite of the complex relationship between sound, visual image, and narrative structure that engenders the ideology and aesthetics of music video, goodwin maintains one cannot escape the political economic fact that all video clips are, first and foremost, promotional devices meant to entice consumers to purchase other commodities. further, both music videos and the programming flow of networks such as mtv operate as a "super-text" which constantly directs the attention and desire of the audience towards commodities that promise solutions to individual and social problems. accordingly, goodwin argues, the polysemy of music video is limited by a hegemonic reading formation of commercialism which "attempts to restructure the subject-as-citizen . . . along the lines of subject as consumer" (169). therefore, the central way in which in which goodwin's political economic approach is able to show how meaning serves power in music television is to demonstrate how text, programming, and audience are, to use an old althusserian chestnut, structured in dominance by the ideology of the marketplace. [15] naturally, when one makes such strong claims regarding the hegemonic structuring of the reading formations of music television one runs the risk of creeping (if not galloping) reductionism. that is, there is a danger of assuming that the politics of consumption in terms of use, meaning, and pleasure can be read off the politics of production like elephant tracks. goodwin is well aware of this danger and, to pre-empt such criticisms, says: the objection to such arguments is that they tell us too little about what particular television programs mean, what use-values are obtained in the consumption of popular culture and so on. . . . however, to argue that diverse audience readings and real use-values must also be taken into account is not to argue that a politics of individual consumption, based around the promotion of market relations, does not also operate. indeed, to suggest that the former actually cancels out the latter is every bit as reductionist and simplistic as the most brazen economism. (174) [16] and, indeed it is. yet what vitiates goodwin's otherwise reasonable argument here is the contradictory way in which he deploys the audience in his analysis elsewhere. on the one hand, he frequently appeals to an audience of "music fans" to validate his hermeneutic analysis of the multi-discursivity of music video texts. for example, when discussing the visual iconography of performance, goodwin forthrightly claims that he is simply "describing the process by which video clips make sense to the audience" (90). on the other hand, while this may indeed be true, goodwin has absolutely no evidence to support his conclusions (and admits as much, 95). further, although he concedes that his analysis "needs to be related to audience interpretation and reader competence" (130), he does not attempt to do so and dismisses almost out of hand other attempts along these lines (e.g. lewis, 1990). the "audience" seems to exist for goodwin only as a convenient rhetorical device that enables him to claim a face validity for his textual analysis and thus obviates the need for engaging in or with ethnographies of the music television audience. doggedly sticking to his marxist guns against the new populists, whom he condescendingly terms the "bright young things of cultural studies" (xxiii), goodwin refuses to believe that the audience might tell him something about the politics of consumption that he doesn't already know. [17] in the end, goodwin's cavalier attitude towards the audience and ethnographic study of the politics of consumption both blinds *and* deafens him to the salience of the concept of postmodernism for understanding the cultural politics of music television. at this point in the debate around postmodernism within cultural studies, it should be clear that the concept entails much more than simply textual aesthetics. the postmodern is not simply a style, attitude, or pose, but a fundamental mutation in the fabric of everyday life from the political economy of production to the rituals of consumption. in order to understand the politics of music television, to assess how meaning serves power, it would seem to me that it is imperative to examine how the postmodern is evinced in the everyday life of the audience. goodwin seems to suspect that this might be the case when he notes in passing that "work on postmodernism as a condition of reception might be extremely fruitful" (153). yes it would, but only if one is less dismissive of ethnographic dialogue with the audience. and, in spite of the many virtues of _dancing in the distraction factory_, it is this refusal to take the postmodern seriously that is truly a scandal. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited altman, r. "television/sound." _television: the critical view_. ed. h. newcomb. new york: oxford university press, 1987. ang, i. _watching %dallas%: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination_. new york: methuen, 1985 chen, k. "mtv: the (dis)appearance of postmodern semiosis, or the cultural politics of resistance." _journal of communication inquiry_ 10.1 (1986). denisoff, r. s. _inside mtv_. new brunswick, n.j.: transaction books, 1988. fiske, j. "mtv: post structural post modern." _journal of communication inquiry_ 10.1 (1986). fiske, j. _reading popular culture_. winchester, ma: unwin hyman, 1989. fiske, j. "cultural studies and the culture of everyday life." _cultural studies_. ed. l. grossberg, c. nelson, and p. treichler. new york: routledge, 1992. grossberg, l. "'you still have to fight for your right to party': music television as billboards of post-modern difference." _popular music_ 7.3 (1988). grossberg, l. "mtv: swinging on a (postmodern) star," _cultural politics in contemporary america_. ed. i. angus and s. jhally. new york: routledge, 1989. grossberg, l. _we gotta get outta this place: popular conservatism and postmodern culture_. new york: routledge, 1992. haug, w. _critique of commodity aesthetics: appearance, sexuality and advertising in capitalist society_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986. kaplan, e.a. _rocking around the clock: music television, postmodernism and consumer culture_. new york: methuen, 1987. lewis, l. _gender politics and mtv: voicing the difference_. philadelphia: temple university press, 1990. straw, w. "music video in its contexts: popular music and post-modernism in the 1980's." _popular music_ 7.3 (1988). williams, r. _television: technology and cultural form_. london: fontana, 1974. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------lemke, 'practice, politique, postmodernism', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-lemke-practice.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.993. part 1/1, total size 24067 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- practice, politique, postmodernism by j.l. lemke jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu sociology department city university of new york _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by j.l. lemke, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: bourdieu, pierre and lois j.d. wacquant. _an invitation to reflexive sociology_. chicago: university of chicago press, 1992. i. the text [1] _invitation to reflexive sociology_ is a book that is not quite a text. tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: fantasy interview with the great man (part deux, a construction not a transcript), fatherly advice on becoming a sociologist (part 3, from a seminar for bourdieu's students), several essays at a "how to read bourdieu" (part 1, appendices, notes, from wacquant). the unbounded border mosaic of intertexts, present and absent, draws down readers' accumulated cultural capital toward indebtedness. [2] if you have read bourdieu's _the logic of practice_ (1990), whose first half sets forth his most original theoretical ideas (elaborating and superseding the older _outline of a theory of practice_, 1977), and at least one of his major sociological studies (_distinction_, 1984; _homo academicus_, 1988; _la noblesse d'etat_, 1989), then _invitation_ may help you decide whether to read more from bourdieu, and what. if you have only a vague sense that bourdieu is a leading social theorist who engages the telling intellectual issues of the day, _invitation_ may convince you that, along with his near neighbors in social space (as he himself defines them in _homo academicus_, 276), foucault and derrida, bourdieu sets the stage for our postmodernist play. [3] and if you have ever wondered what bourdieu thinks of his actual and potential rivals: sociological, intellectual, and philosophical (*except* derrida and foucault), or simply enjoy stockpiling ammunition for use in future intellectual battles of your own, _invitation_ is a fully-stocked armamentarium. [4] but _invitation_ is also a voice, one that resonates with our own, speaking as we would like to speak (if not necessarily saying what we would like to say), about the construction of reality and society, experience and meaning, language and power, the social and the personal, time and the body, gender and domination, science and politics, academics and intellectuals. perhaps it is only an illusion, but in this text as nowhere else, we seem to hear bourdieu speaking, rather than writing. bourdieu writes himself out of his writing in too many ways. however written his speaking may be here, however defensive, didactic, or undialogical, to a small degree at least it allows us to write him back in. [5] and if you are a student, or any sort of newcomer, to academic and intellectual discourse in what was once humanistic and social studies, i advise you to read and challenge this book. ii. postmodernism, si or no? [6] so, is he or isn't he? the short answer, i think, is that bourdieu writes as a chastened defender of the great modernist projects, a modernist for postmodern times. but while his desire is with the best of modernism, his method is shaped by the same rebellion against modernism and structuralism that characterizes his close contemporaries foucault and derrida. [7] here, taken from _invitation_, is my reading of bourdieu's project and consequent overt stance against postmodernism, to be followed by a counter-construction of bourdieu as postmodern in spite of himself. [8] the project of bourdieu's desire is a grand sociology which realizes in part the modernist dream of a scientific objectivity hard won through its own reflexivity: "sociology can escape to a degree [from its necessarily socially determined point of view on the social world] by drawing on its knowledge of the social universe in which social science is produced to control the effects of the determinisms that operate in this universe and, at the same time, bear on sociologists themselves" (67). [9] this is the motivation for bourdieu's many studies of the academic and educational systems of his native france, and generally for his studies of how the social system shapes our perceptions and desires. he constructs his notion of what scientific objectivity about such matters means following marx's criterion that social facts exist "independently of individual consciousness and will." but what exist objectively for bourdieu in the social world are pre-eminently *relations*, not positive entities, and with this he has already taken the first, structuralist step into postmodernism. [10] still, he wants to draw a line against critiques of social science that see its/his writings as merely "poetics and politics," opening the door to "nihilistic relativism" of the same sort found in the "strong program of the sociology of science" (feyerabend? bruno latour?). he opposes "the false radicalism of the questioning of science" and "those who would reduce scientific discourse to rhetorical strategies about a world reduced to the state of a text" (246-7). how can i hope to rehabilitate the author of such reactionary sentiments? [11] by better understanding the terms of the debate as bourdieu constructs it. when, just following this last point, he characterizes the goal of his own project as "to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former," we need to understand his critical distinction of the practical from the scientific, and his own critique of positivistic objectivity: against positivistic materialism, the theory of practice posits that objects of knowledge are *constructed*, and not passively recorded; against intellectual idealism, it reminds us that the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and structuring dispositions acquired in practice . . . and that all knowledge . . . presupposes a work of construction . . . that consists of an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from thinking . . . . [this view aims] to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with the agent, as well as from the philosophy of the [social, semiotic] structure, but without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent. (121) iii. practice, temporality, embodiedness [12] for a systematic account of this _logic of practice_, we have to turn to that text. its tour-de-force introduction is mainly a *critique* of every form of objectivism, and more profoundly of the conditions of possibility of theoretical and scientific perspectives: social science must not only, as objectivism [vs. phenomenological subjectivisms] would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the "objective" observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object.... knowledge does not only depend, as an elementary relativism would have it, on the particular viewpoint that at "situated and dated" observer takes us via-a-vis the object. a much more fundamental alteration ... is performed on practice by the sheer fact of taking up a "viewpoint" on it and so constituting it as an object ... this sovereign viewpoint is most easily adopted from elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation. (_logic of practice_, 27) [13] in _the logic of practice_ bourdieu inquires into those aspects of experience and social reality which look different precisely because we are in the midst of action and not theoretically and scientifically distancing ourselves from it: the contingency and anticipatability of events when they have yet to happen, the absence of synoptic order and structure from the logic of action, the construction of dynamic vs synoptic time, the role of the body in action without reflection (and in reflection itself), the importance of tempo, rhythm, pacing, duration, delay, and haste in the meaning of events-in-flow. this is the perspective from which bourdieu originally criticized levi-straussian structuralism for its theoreticist blindness to whatever is elided from synoptic representations made from the sovereign viewpoint of a science outside of event-time and the pressures of the moment. [14] it also provides a counterpoint against which to examine both the conditions of possibility and the otherwise unthinkable biases of *all* theoretical and scientific discourses and perspectives, as such. dialectically, it allows us to interrogate the practices of science as practice, and to see in them the role of the practical, *embodied* logics, the famous dispositions toward practice that bourdieu calls "habitus", and which derive from the trajectories of practice of individual social agents as they take up the lives available to them. [15] i have found this dynamic perspective on social practice, and its dialectical relations with the synoptic perspectives of theoretical representation, extremely useful in my own work on social semiotics, discourse analysis, and text semantics (lemke 1984, 1990, 1991) and so have many others (e.g. martin 1985, thibault 1991) in these fields whose underlying disciplines and methods are quite distant from bourdieu's. the re-centering of the body in alternatives to mentalist accounts of subjectivity, cognition, and action; in deconstructing the idealist cheats of a natural science self-disembodied from its own practice; and in theorizing gender issues, domination relations, and the repressed role of bodily violence in constituting the social order are but some of the postmodernist projects that will eventually build on bourdieu's theory of practice. iv. gender, habitus, and us [16] for all that bourdieu lays the foundations of a productive critical dialectic between the logics of theory and practice, of semiotic structures and bodies in action, social structures and personal trajectories, and for all the centrality of reflexivity in his notion of social science, there seems to be more preparing-the-way than radical self-critique in his work. there is no profound self-examination, for example, of masculinism, eurocentrism, or even the essentially bourgeois perspectives in his own theoretical metaphors and paradigms. [17] _homo academicus_ comes closest to being a self analysis "by proxy," as he says in the preface. but it is a micro-analysis, situating bourdieu in his generation, and in the academy, but not in his gender, social class (bourgeois, as such), or culture (european, as such). by proxy and indirection it suggests that various elements of his scientific and career trajectory are shaped, as his theory requires, by his own initial social position and the effects of the dispostions it engendered in him on his encounters with later opportunities. in _invitation_ he argues that he keeps the personal bourdieu on the margins so as not to make facile %argumenta ad hominem% too easy for his rivals. in doing so, however, he may have kept himself from deploying the full power of sociological reflexivity toward his own theorizing. enabling such self-critique is, after all, the point of his scientific project and the absence of such self-analysis the very point on which, in the postscript to _distinction_, he criticizes derrida. [18] who, bourdieu included, can read his texts and not see that he models the whole social universe as a struggle and competition among agents for status, domination, profit, and accumulation in one guise or another? in every field of social action, whatever their habitus, agents deploy and convert their capital (economic, cultural, and social) in an effort to win the game as defined in that field. if the game, and especially the competitive game of sport, is bourdieu's favorite simile, his master trope is the %agon%, the struggle for dominance. [19] the field of fields, the master field, for bourdieu is the field of power, in relation to which all others are defined, and power for bourdieu is the power to win the game, to maximize one's capital position, to overcome adversaries. any such summary is caricature, of course, but with the truth of caricature, as well. when bourdieu speaks, rarely, of what happens "in the family and in other relations of %philia%," what he sees is "violence suspended in a kind of pact of symbolic non-aggression," the pervasive potentiality of every utterance to function as an act of power "bracketed" (145). [20] the social relations of %philia% are defined as exceptions to the underlying principle of the %agon%. the institutions of %philia% are marginalized, those of the %agon% made central. economic competition, cultural competition, personal competition, metaphoric competition among abstracted social positions and roles. this is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of masculinism. it survives as doxa for bourdieu precisely for the reasons his theory offers: because the world as he sees it and lives it fits perfectly with the masculinist dispositions it has produced in him. [21] power for bourdieu is the power to dominate, to control, to win. it is not also the power to nurture, to befriend, to console, to inspire, to share, to yield, to cooperate. it is not the power, in general, to engage in, and so to engage with others in, every social practice that comprises the social reality of every agent--a social reality, therefore, remade from every perspective of practice, and not only from that of the specialized practice of the straight, male, bourgeois academic theorist. [22] bourdieu began his career as an anthropologist, and all his theoretical work, and most of his insights, arise from and are illustrated by examples from his fieldwork among the berber kabyle of algeria. the view he offers is not meant to be restricted to european culture or to the social reality of the bourgeoisie. he offers brilliant analyses (in the _logic_) of the differences between barter and monetary economies and the cultures that support them, but still he models all of social reality as an economics, he takes economic capital and the relations of the economic field to be %primus inter pares% among all forms of capital and all dimensions of the field of power. this is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of the bourgeoisie. [23] and what does bourdieu add to economism, even as he transforms simplistic models of base and superstructure into something more dialectical and flexible? cultural capital and social capital, the capital par excellence of the intellectual, the academic, and the cosmopolite. know-what and know-who compete with have-bucks for power in every field of social practice for bourdieu. this, too, is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of a successful academic and intellectual. [24] all of these dispositions and their theoretical effects are in need of correction according to bourdieu's desire for scientific objectivity. or they are all in need of diversification and multiplication by the perspectives of feminist and gay alternatives to masculinism, working class and other non-bourgeois viewpoints about social reality, and cultural models of the social world that do not privilege %agon% over %philia%, or imagine the social world out of an experience of economism, according to we others' desire to make meanings troubling to us and ours. v. present and absent others [25] i have probably said too much already about some of the absent others at bourdieu's banquet. i should say a little more about some of the theoretical absences here. bourdieu is a marvelous describer of how things are. he announces, but does not labor at, a "genetic sociology," an understanding of the historical trajectories by which not just individuals, but institutions and theoretical objects, came to be made as they are. this he seems to have left largely to the most present absence in his work, michel foucault. he does not deal well with matters of social and cultural change. [26] _invitation_ points to the final chapter of _homo academicus_ for the kernel of a theory of change and revolution, but what we find there is much less, mainly a scheme for describing moments of crisis, turning points, the visible tips of the icebergs of long-term social dynamics. bourdieu seems to have too profound an awe of the stability of social systems to be willing to see on what chaotic foundations of contingent self-organization they rest (cf. lemke, in press). his emphasis on embodied habitus should point bourdieu, and all of us, toward the potential of bodies in (inter-) action to find themselves acting as they should not, acted upon in ways their habitus cannot make canonical sense of, because the material relations into which bodies can enter cannot be exhausted by the semiotic relations of any culture, even an embodied one. [27] among the present others, there are many who help orient our reading of bourdieu. there are the german philosophers, the first intellectual love of the younger bourdieu, abandoned by him for social science in order to challenge the stranglehold of philosophy on the academic field of bourdieu's youth. there are the sociological and philosophical rivals of the phenomenological-hermeneutic school (especially geertz and the ethnomethodologists) against whom he argues passsionately (and at least in the case of ethnomethodology, for me, rather persuasively). there are the methodological rivals, especially discourse analysis, which he quite properly resituates back in the sociological context (as do bakhtin and the social functionalists). there are sartre and levi-strauss, whose debate shaped bourdieu's choice between philosophy and social science, and the algerian war, which defined the more difficult choice between politics and the meta-politics. [28] and always there is this presence-by-absence, michel foucault (and to a lesser degree jacques derrida), not simply as individual, but as proximate proxy in the academic social space bourdieu himself defines (_homo academicus_, 276). these three followed closely similar academic and social trajectories, and in bourdieu's rather convincing view, we should expect them to be critical keys to reading one another. but bourdieu scrupulously avoids reading foucault for us, almost as if he would be reading his mirror-self. the parallels of their projects are evident, and bourdieu notes this himself, but only notes it, and no more. perhaps self-reflexivity, like %agon%, meets its limit in %philia%. ----------------------------------------------------------- note: i have said next to nothing about bourdieu's discussions of education, particularly higher education, language and symbolic power, or the nature of science. i plan to address at least some of these areas, in which i have considerable personal interest, first in a separate review (of bourdieu's _language and symbolic power_ for the journal _linguistics and education_) and then in a book in preparation (_textual politics: discourse and social theory_). ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited bourdieu, pierre. _outline of a theory of practice_. cam bridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1977. bourdieu, pierre. _distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1984. bourdieu, pierre. _la noblesse d'etat: grands corps et grandes ecoles_. paris: editions de minuit, 1989. bourdieu, pierre. _homo academicus_. stanford: stanford university press, 1990. bourdieu, pierre. _the logic of practice_. stanford: stanford university press, 1990. bourdieu, pierre. _language and symbolic power_. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1991. lemke, j.l. _semiotics and education. monograph in toronto semiotic circle monographs series, victoria university, toronto, 1984. lemke, j.l. _talking science: language, learning, and values_. norwood, nj: ablex publishing, 1990. lemke, j.l. "text production and dynamic text semantics." _functional and systemic linguistics: approaches and uses_. ed. e. ventola. berlin: mouton/degruyter (trends in linguistics: studies and monographs 55), 1991. lemke, j.l. "discourse, dynamics, and social change." _language as cultural dynamic_ [focus issue of _cultural dynamics_ (leiden: brill), in press]. martin, james r. "process and text: two aspects of human semiosis." _systemic perspectives on discourse_. ed. j.d. benson and w.s. greaves. norwood, nj: ablex publishing, 1985. thibault, paul. _social semiotics as praxis_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1991. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------thompson, 'consuming megalopolis', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-thompson-consuming.txt consuming megalopolis by jon thompson department of english north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by jon thompson, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. celeste olalquiaga. _megalopolis: contemporary cultural sensibilities_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1992. [1] even while proclaiming an interest in the vast and gaudy landscape of kitsch rejected by high culture, a good deal of postmodern criticism remains highly theoretical, committed to analyzing written texts and content to refer to the world of mass culture rather than actually study it. one of the strengths of celeste olalquiaga's _megalopolis_ is that it investigates a wide variety of contemporary practices, many of them invisible to less perceptive eyes, seeing them all as social texts that say much about contemporary existence. _megalopolis_ is written in a clear, often lyrical style that finds its inspiration in the weird but compelling landscape of postmodernity, a landscape of telephone sex advertisements, malls, docudramas, sf movies (_blade runner_ and _robocop_, but also low-budget 50's and 60's futuristic fantasies), at&t advertisement campaigns, comic books, cyborgs, world fairs, latin american or latino home altars, snuff films, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, brazilian carnival parades and the chilean punk subculture. [2] given her thesis that we are living in the ruins of modernity, and that identity and history, as traditionally understood, have virtually ceased to exist, olalquiaga ranges across this "culturescape" of fear and loathing and desire with considerable authority and aplomb. yet her argument is not primarily negative. against those who have argued that postmodernity is a kind of endlessly recurring capitalistic nightmare, she sees other possibilities. central to her argument is the practice of consumption. to olalquiaga, consumption has been a misunderstood activity, wrongly associated with passivity, unfreedom and tyranny, making the human subject an object worked upon by the imperatives of capitalism. it is this notion of consumption that olalquiaga wants to rehabilitate: avoiding a rationale for consumption based on functionality (that is on possible use), postmodernism sponsors consumption as an autonomous practice. . . . the purpose of this book is to describe how such an apparently finite project as postmodernism, understood as the glorification of consumption, does in fact enable the articulation of novel and contradictory experiences." (xvii) [3] running through her analyses of contemporary practices, whether they are latino home altars or low-budget sf movies, is this pivotal point: in a world dominated by the corporate message that commodities make the man, consumption can be an ironic activity, even an ironic mode of self-consciousness. if done right, consumption can involve a recognition of commodity fetishism itself, and thus a recognition of the entire way in which capitalism as a system attempts to co-opt and control subjects. [4] this argument is extended across five brief, but suggestive, chapters. chapter one, "reach out and touch someone," examines the fate of the body in postmodern societies. despite the cult of the body in the west, olalquiaga contends that what we are witnessing is not its triumphant deification, but instead its demise, what she calls "the vanishing body." state-of-the-art projective technology (videos, tv, computers, etc.), postmodern architecture, hi-tech prosthetics, the ongoing fascination with cyborgs, aids, and of course electronic sex: for olalquiaga, all of these developments point to the inescapable condition of "psychasthenia," or the inability of an organism to locate the boundaries of its own body. the fragmentation and disappearance of the body means that increasingly, identity is not dependent upon organic being. [5] this case is further developed in chapter two, "lost in space," in which olalquiaga argues that the technology of instant communication precipitates the loss of temporal continuity: "the postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void" (19). quite literally, then, the body is lost in space. one symptom of this near disembodiment is the space age iconography of the 50s and 60s, and its recent "reincarnation" in retro fashion. whereas once this space-age iconography expressed some hope in regards to technology and its effects, the postmodern version is ironic at best. retro fashion now is "a parodic attempt to breach some contemporary fears, most notably the replacement of the organic and human by the technological" (34). [6] in chapter three, "holy kitschen: collecting religious junk from the street," olalquiaga turns her gaze to religious kitsch, particularly the religious kitsch that has been recycled by artists. this raw material is not merely faddish, but is instead used to fashion artistic artifacts that sacralize the secular and replace a transcendental emphasis with a political one (for example, the sanctification of contemporary femininity). for olalquiaga, this "colonization of religious imagery" (53) does not involve a domestication of either its ethnicity or its politics. rather, "the absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it" (53). thus "holy kitschen" symbolizes the transformative possibilities of all marginal elements absorbed into appropriated systems. [7] chapter four, "nature morte," performs an autopsy, as it were, upon the postmodern fascination with melancholy, corpses, ruins, decay. examining a variety of artistic practices (photography, dioramas, multimedia exhibits, fiction, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, and fake science exhibits), olalquiaga explores the ways in which the bizarre and the grotesque allow for the recovery of a sense of death that is lost to our culture. yet this melancholic aspect of postmodernism is not elegiac: "more than a lamentation for what is lost, this melancholic sensibility is deeply embedded in the intensity of the loss--not seeking to reconstitute what is gone, but to rejoice in its impossibility" (58). as a self-conscious form of naturalism, this %nature morte% aesthetic recognizes deadliness as the only coherent expression of postmodern experience, and thus exposes the reifying effects of "deadly discourses" (69), that is, the discourses or systems that pretend to an objective status. [8] if postmodernity has become a kind of giant, grotesque mortuary, as olalquiaga suggests in chapter four, this vision receives considerable qualification in her fifth chapter, "tupincopolis: the city of retrofuturistic indians." the primary object of analysis here is "tupincopolis," a brazilian carnival parade exhibit of an imaginary retrofuturistic indian metropolis, a cross between the exoticism and flamboyance of indian primitivism and the postmodernism associated with the world of japanese high-technology. what interests olalquiaga is the way in which the composition of elements within the parade works to humorously carnivalize both postmodernism and primitivism. the parade thus comes to represent the "third world's" creative re-accentuation of "first world" ideology, particularly its mythical identification with technology-as-progress and its persistent mythologizing of latin americans as primitive. tupincopolis, then, provides a paradigm for cultural change in the postmodern age. rejecting models of cultural change that emphasize imposition, olalquiaga maintains that cultural change is not "a matter of simple vertical imposition or ransacking, but is rather an intricate horizontal movement of exchange" (76). [9] in one sense, _megalopolis_ can be read as a sustained meditation on the failure of modernity and the cultural mutations that are filling its void within postmodernity. olalquiaga elaborates this position by developing a number of related themes throughout the book. like baudrillard, olalquiaga privileges the notion of simulation. where modernity depended upon the notion of contexts, of objects and events seen and understood within specific and recognizable environments, postmodernism collapses the boundaries between reality and representation. "intertextuality" replaces "indexicality": "simulation here will be understood as the establishment of intertextuality instead of indexicality. in other words, rather than pointing to first-degree references (objects, events) simulation looks at representations of them (images, texts) for verisimilitude" (6). within postmodernity, subjects live their lives at a second remove: things tend to be lived through representation rather than directly. experience comes to us now as highly encoded, increasingly available only through electronic representation; yet this vicariousness is experienced as real. [10] _megalopolis_ describes a world in which an image culture shatters the verbal culture of modernity, reconstituting "language" and power hierarchies. artificiality and extreme emotion fill in, or more accurately, become substitutes for the relentless allusiveness and emptiness of this decontextulized, thoroughly intertextual world. in a world deprived of affect, the postmodern sensibility "continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality attributed to other times and peoples" (40). images, icons, styles, and subcultures are endlessly recycled. for olalquiaga, postmodernism becomes personified as a sort of thief. like its production-less economies which reassemble rather than produce, it filches, pilfers, and steals. postmodern culture is thus vicarious, voyeuristic, cannibalistic, and at times, "melancholic" (to the extent that it is doomed to merely repeat the styles and icons associated with a modernist culture). space age retro, for example, "provides the melancholic parody" (34) of the cold efficiency of a high-tech existence. while one may wonder if "melancholic parody" is an oxymoron or is, as she suggests, a necessary way of coping with cultural fears and anxieties, olalquiaga wants to make another point: to her, the endless circulation of simulations suggests that cultural imagery is endlessly adaptable to new contexts and desires--and this ability is to be celebrated rather than simply mourned as a sign of the loss of cultural specificity. and it is this emphasis on self-conscious, knowing celebration that defines for olalquiaga postmodernity's finest achievement as it continues on in the ruins of modernity. [11] in the final analysis, it is difficult not to agree with olalquiaga's micro readings, many of which are brilliant in their sheer interpretive power. disagreeing is doubly difficult inasmuch as from the very first page she explicitly allies herself with, and celebrates, illusions, inconsistency, and contradictions as inescapable facts of postmodern life. yet it seems to me that olalquiaga's theoretical argument is vitiated by its hyperbolic rhetoric. ("if the fragmentation of contemporary identity is reproduced in referential absence and the pleasures of pain are induced by a pornographic technology, it should come as no surprise that the body has been rendered totally vulnerable" [10].) all too often a particular truth is generalized into the universal condition: bodies are already cyborgs, cities are the wastelands of modernity (what of the cities that are not romantically ruinous?), the %nature morte% aesthetic describes the deadliness and decadence of postmodern existence (at least in the u.s. and europe) in which subjects are compliant bodies, "not seeking to reconstitute what is gone" (58), embracing the impossibility of physical or cultural integrity, happily adrift in the detritus of obsolescent technology. olalquiaga's argument for a creative consumerism is suggestive, but in its unqualified form it comes perilously close to suggesting that shopping can be redemptive, that shopping is itself a kind of postmodern heaven. to this reader anyway, the notion of creative consumption as a way of life or end seems limiting, since no matter how the commodity is revalued, the socio-economic system that delimits the horizons of so many remains in place (not to mention the fact that many people simply cannot afford the acts of creative consumption olalquiaga valorizes). after carnival, the disenfranchised go back to whatever lives they led before carnival. [12] in its widest extension, this point may be elucidated by examining the title of the book. _megalopolis: contemporary cultural sensibilities_. the blurb on the back of the paperback edition glosses megalopolis as "the biggest of cities, but also a city in ruins"; yet the subtitle, "contemporary cultural sensibilities," points to a broader base of experience, one unrestricted by urban experience. olalquiaga's argument is comprised of a good many claims which undergo this same slippage--claims which have their basis in the urban experience but quickly become indicative of contemporary existence, everywhere. time and again, her rhetoric transforms insights true of many north american and european cities, and their cultures, into general statements about the human condition at large. because of their seemingly universal scope, these statements can command, at best, qualified assent. "between a future in ruins and a past that is but a costume for another personification," writes olalquiaga, "contemporary culture is stuck in an allegorical present, unable to return nostalgically to the past or advance hopefully into the future" (35). is *all* of contemporary society really stuck in this cultural time-warp? and is brazil's "good" postmodernism (its carnivalization of hi-tech postmodernism) the only truly viable alternative? is our world really one megalopolis? is the entire world really enmeshed in, critically or otherwise, olalquiaga's postmodernist illusions? to my mind, olalquiaga uncovers the questions crucial to any serious analysis of contemporary culture, but she doesn't always answer them. [13] despite these limitations, few books can compare with _megalopolis_'s trenchant, lucid, and sensitive readings of western urban cultures, and the practices and structures of feeling that constitute them. like the best science fiction, a form repeatedly invoked by olalquiaga, _megalopolis_ changes the way you think about contemporary urban culture. potter, 'black (w)hole of bataille: a genealogy of postmodernism?', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-potter-black.txt the black (w)hole of bataille: a genealogy of postmodernism? by russell a. potter <rapotter@colby.edu> english department colby college _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by russell a. potter, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: bataille, georges. _the accursed share_, vols. ii and iii, tr. robert hurley. cambridge, ma: zone, 1991 (1992). pefanis, julian. _heterology and the postmodern_. durham: duke up, 1991. [1] the reception of georges bataille, as julian pefanis observes, has been belated in the english-speaking world- and not only because it has been so slow to be translated. until quite recently, bataille has remained a shadowy figure; in a memorable metaphor pefanis compares him with "a large dark body, maybe a black hole, whose presence in the heavens has been discernable in the erratic orbits of the visible planets: foucault, barthes, derrida, baudrillard, and the rest" (42). pefanis notes the groundbreaking importance of the collection _visions of excess_ (1985); since then no fewer than seven new translations have appeared, including _inner experience_, _the tears of eros_, _the college of sociology_, _guilty_, _theory of religion_, and the first volume of _the accursed share_.^1^ yet while bataille's texts may be said to have finally "arrived" in the anglophone world (as the recent special issue of _yale french studies_ on bataille attests), there still remain a number of important texts whose full impact has yet to be felt--and of these, none is more massive than the final share of _la parte maudite_. bataille did not fully complete this work, and died when only the first volume had appeared; the gallimard editors (and hurley) have made the best of what was left, but the result remains massive, sprawling, redundant--and brilliant. and, of all the black holes in the bataillean sky (and indeed %l'anus solaire% precedes the "black hole" in the genealogy of the imagined universe), the last two volumes of what hurley translates as _the accursed share_ loom largest, the intensity of their gravity almost suffocating. [2] such holes can swallow their authors whole; some incomplete %magnum opus% or another serves as the tombstone of many a writer--and none more fittingly than bataille. yet, if the lightness of his short essays, the delirious play of his pornographic novellas, are less in evidence here, there is nonetheless a compensatory and strangely lucid air of finality, an air reminiscent of nietzsche's _ecce homo_; here the author weaves his own shroud, and ends by crumpling beneath it. to the very last, bataille embodied what he called "the practice of joy before death," and in its final sections the text burns and poisons with delight, like the half-eaten pages of aristotle's treatise on comedy in the mouth of the venerable jorge in eco's _the name of the rose_. [3] no doubt there are other metaphors of %depense% with which one could hail this volume, but the question remains: what hole in the celestial void--that is, in the historical genealogy of post-modernism--do these translations of _the accursed share_ (along with bataille's other works) fill? and, now that the penumbra of bataille has lightened somewhat, what influence will it have on current re theorizations of the postmodern? these are questions that julian pefanis sets out to answer in _heterology and the postmodern_, but before embarking on a critique of his work, a closer look at the final books of _the accursed share_ is in order. [4] unlike writers such as baudrillard, for whom for whom the inheritance of %depense% leads to "the extermination of signs" (pefanis 30), bataille still maintains the question of expenditure from within functioning historical economies. the question of the reality-value of the structures he investigates is moot for bataille, as it is for foucault; both follow the nietzschean dictate that a culture's *supposed* or ostensible motives are as valuable (if not more valuable) for a genealogical inquiry as its *actual* ones (supposing indeed that they could ever be determined). even if his ultimate destination is the "end of history" (190), bataille begins with historically specific moments and cultures, in order to pinpoint the deeper structures of which they are symptomatic. [5] this process began in volume i (which appeared in 1988 in a translation by hurley that forms the companion to this book), where bataille demonstrated the crucial role of sacrificing or destroying the *excess* produced in any economy through a series of expositions--not only on the northwest coast indians' potlach, but also on the sacrificial rites of the maya, the territorial imperative of early islam, and the massive monasticism of tibetan lamaism. in each case, bataille locates the excess, the "accursed share" (la parte maudite), with the dispersal of which these otherwise widely varying cultures have had to cope. a society can do many things with its excess; it can throw it into refuse pits, it can expend it in endless war, or it can disperse it with a massive movement of non-production (tibetan monasticism). the decisive move of capitalism, even against feudalism (in which bataille as a medievalist recognizes the sheer bulk of both inefficient labor and non productive expenditure), is to re-invest this excess in *growth*--that is, in the production of both greater means of production (and consequently a still larger excess). [6] that such a practice eventually seems as bizarre and cancerous as it does is a credit to bataille as an historian. for all the surreality of his articulations of transgression and expenditure, they are grounded in history to a degree that few of his theoretical followers have matched. yet what remains, after volume i, is an open question: what might these historical lessons mean at the postmodern moment, either at the juncture where bataille's text ends (the increasing cold war tensions between the u.s. and u.s.s.r) or *now*, now that the historical contest between capitalist accumulation in the name of an (always postponed) individual sovereignty and socialist industrialization (in the name of a collective anti sovereignty) has suddenly collapsed. as bataille himself says at the close of volume i, "if this tension [between soviet communism and capitalism] were to fail, a feeling of calm would be completely unwarranted; there would be more reason than ever to be afraid."^2^ [7] from this problematic, volume ii, "the history of eroticism," constitutes an unexpected and somewhat diffuse detour. in it, bataille attempts both to subjoin the question of the erotic into the larger question of the *economic* and to offer a historical genealogy of eroticism. bataille begins by recounting in more pointedly economic terms levi-strauss's structural models of incest and exogamy. the ban on endogamy can then be seen as a barrier against "accumulation," just as exogamy is regarded as the "expenditure of resources" (56). bataille also stresses, as a fundamental gesture, the importance of opposition to and distance from *nature* to the constitutive structures of humanity. as beings who are aware of death and for whom sexual acts are choices (rather than the function of instincts), taboos and strictures on sexuality are constitutive of humanity itself, humanity as opposed to nature. eroticism, then, marks a return to the abhorred nature--or at least an attempted return, since the nature to which it returns is opened only through the licit illicitness of transgression, and is neither total nor sustainable. eroticism, furthermore, is placed outside the economy of the 'useful'; it does not serve a social function, or indeed any function at all; its nature is 'sovereign' (in the special use of this term as defined by bataille; see below) and fundamentally opposed to society and the state. [8] humanity, for bataille, is constituted both by the taboos and strictures which establish society (not excluding the transgressions which at once violate and reaffirm them) and by its *excess*, which demands a commensurate expenditure of resources. on an individual level, eroticism is the ultimate form of this expenditure: it destroys the dualism between subject and object and marks the violent return of "totality" (113). it, too, has a politics, which are contrary to the interests of the state; bataille's figure here is the sade of "limitless expenditure"; the subject "breaks away from all restraints" and annihilates form.^3^ eroticism, then, is the individual technic of sovereign values, of values which bataille opposes to utility, and as such it offers a postmodern ethos; "the consciousness of erotic truth anticipates the end of history" (190)--which for bataille depends upon the eradication of inequalities of resources and status which produced "history." [9] the question of how, on a social level, such a development might be possible provides the impetus towards a re-articulation of "sovereignty," which is the subject of volume iii. by "sovereign," it should be noted, bataille designates something rather different from the ordinary connotations of the term, in a manner similar to nietzsche's "noble." like nietzsche, bataille both embraces and disavows the class connotations of his chosen term. the sovereign, for bataille, is the domain of non-utility and non-objectivity; it is the useless, it disdains use, and it scorns the (bourgeois) world of "things." it chooses the present rather than the future; the transgressive rather than the obedient; its domain is excess, the realm of the accursed share. [10] bataille's sovereignty is thus a mobile and circulating loss, eternally returning at the edge of value/utility. for, as he himself observes, this theory of the sovereign as the useless treads on the edge of its own contradiction. if the sovereign is both "no-thing" (that thing whose use value = 0) and yet at the same time crucial (in that it alone can oppose the society of commodity accumulation), its uselessness at once becomes useful, even *necessary*. by its very structure it undoes itself at the very moment when its value becomes evident. the text of _the accursed share_ itself enacts this mobility gained at the price of loss; like a thread in penelope's loom, each small section undoes and re-does the question of the sovereign. [11] in the feudal order, sovereignty has already begun to *unravel*, insofar as the monarchs have traded full sovereignty for power *over* the world of things.^4^ nonetheless, the monarch's role as the paradigm of subjectivity remains paramount; the subjectivity of the individual subject, rather than being directly available, is always mediated through the *visual* recognition of the monarch. nonetheless, the sovereign is *in principle* inalienable, and the subject can always recall her/his share of the sovereign. this, for bataille, is the revolutionary moment, when "the subject assumes in himself, in himself alone, the full truth of the moment," and the paradigmatic subject of this kind is sade. what this might mean on a collective level remains unarticulated, however, and bataille does not offer any direct models as he did in volume i. what he does instead is to embark upon a rather abstract, and yet prescient analysis of stalin's rationales for socialist industrialization. for bataille, soviet society is the medium in which the question of the sovereign will be resolved, for "today, sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of communism" (261). [12] this statement may come as something of a surprise to those who would categorize bataille with the sort of "ludic" postmodernism that takes its cues from nietzsche rather than marx.^5^ yet bataille is quite serious; like marx, his historical progression begins with tribal and feudalistic structures, and recognizes the capitalistic turn as a deviance from all previous historical norms. bataille's difference--and a significant one it is--is that unlike many theorists of marxism, who prefer to think of stalin as a kind of bad dream, bataille looks directly at the economic structures of communism under stalin as a starting point for his theorizations. [13] bataille emphasizes at the outset the historical surprise of lenin (and, later, mao zedong): socialist revolutions, carried out by militants who quoted marx as their authority, succeeded in countries with an agrarian or feudal social structure. (265) for bataille, this demonstrates that it is the revolt against the old sovereignty of the feudal order that enables revolution, and not at all the revolt against the bourgeois. in fact, as bataille ironically observes, there have not yet been any revolutions of the kind marx predicted, where the proletariat of an industrialized nation has seized power from the bourgeois: i wish to stress, against both classical and present-day marxism, the connection of *all* great revolutions, from the english and the french onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. . . . all those that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society. (279) [14 soviet communism, however, has a difference that fascinates bataille; while it did not destroy an established bourgeois order, it continually opposed itself to that order on an international scale, constituting what bataille calls the "world of denied sovereignty" (291). unlike bourgeois societies, which by dedicating their excess resources to the increment of the forces of production in the name of accumulation, soviet communism demanded an ever swifter and mightier increment, what stalin (quoted by bataille) called the "unbroken expansion of production . . . without booms or crises," yet made precisely in the name of *renouncing* the sovereign share in order to create an *undifferentiated* society (293). [15] thus bataille sees soviet communism aiming to renounce alienation--yet not the alienation of "labor value" decried by marx, but the alienation of sovereignty itself. for, had this society succeeded, it would have marked not the destruction but the *return* of sovereignty: if every man is destined for complete non differentiation, he abolishes all alienation in himself; he stops being a thing, or rather he attains a thinghood so fully that he is no longer a thing . . . a thing is alienated (partial); it always exists in relation to something else. . . . bataille nonetheless seems to sense that such a society will be difficult to produce, especially when, as with later soviet communism, the moment when full subjectivity (which is precisely an *economic* phenomenon) might be reached must be continually put off in the name of increased production. yet bataille declines to judge communism from what he calls his own "comic bourgeois" society, a society which attempts any antics to avoid sacrifice: "no one on this side of the curtain is in a position to give lessons to those whose lot was to put everything at stake" (360). in the end, bourgeois society and communist society both debase the 'sovereign,' as they both (though for opposed reasons) place their greatest emphasis on accumulation; bataille is therefore not comfortable with either. his models of society, for all their attractiveness, are reluctant--out of principle, one supposes--to answer the question "where do we go from here?" in response, bataille admits that he has only "banalities": we must "affirm, against all opposition, the unconditional value of a politics that would level individual resources" (189). how we might work towards such a goal will not be the concern of bataille, for whom such things would be merely useful. [16] bataille concludes volume iii with a series of apparently unrelated articles under the heading "the literary world and communism." their titles--"nietzsche and communism," "nietzsche and jesus," "nietzsche and the transgression of prohibitions," and "the present age and sovereign art," signal a strange and yet premeditated *return* to nietzsche as the paradigmatic figure of the sovereign. indeed, in a moment of uncanny lucidity, bataille states simply, "i am the only one who thinks of himself not as a commentator on nietzsche but as being the same as he" (367). like bataille, nietzsche "refused the reign of things," and along with it the notion of human beings as "a means and not an end" (367). even jesus figures in the equation; bataille sees the new testament as a manual for sovereign existence, and even the nietzsche of _the antichrist_ as but a return to a sovereignty the institutional church had obscured under the whips and chains of %ressentiment%. [17] in his final pages, bataille begins to sound something like a zarathustra himself; critiquing thomas mann's statement that "who takes nietzsche literally is lost," he cites jesus's "who tries to save his life shall lose it" (401). the loss, even of one's own subjectivity as such, is for bataille the condition of life, the underlying force that drives eroticism, laughter, and writing itself. the only danger is that the sovereign loss, loss for its own sake, might be diverted into a loss for *something* (for god or for country, or for greater gains in the future). against this danger, bataille offers his 'text for nothing,' his shout, his festival of %depense%. [18] that bataille's greatest strength is a negation--albeit a negation that exceeds itself and is figuratively transformed into an affirmation (as with nietzsche's 'active nihilism')--makes the question of his legacy equally accursed. like nietzsche, bataille is at once *everywhere* and *nowhere*; he provides a *spur*, an *incitement to discourse*, without supplying either a dogmatic structure (freud's oedipus) or an overriding goal (marx's proletarian revolution). it is this dilemma that faces julian pefanis, who in attempting to construct a genealogy of postmodernism by charting the influence of bataille finds himself continually obliged to construct a more unitary--and a more *useful*--bataille than either bataille's texts or pefanis's own theorizations of heterology would seem to offer. [19] pefanis could nonetheless have made the necessary connections himself, constructing not so much an *account* of postmodernism but an instance. that he does not hardly makes his text invalid, but it does make it less valuable. to borrow teresa ebert's distinction, pefanis is more a "theoretician"--a cataloguer and applier of theory--than a "theorist"--one who, through her/his very act of writing, undertakes to actively (re)theorize the questions s/he addresses. nonetheless, among theoreticians, pefanis is unusually acute, and he has traced lines of influence through the theorists whose texts he considers that are suggestive and provoking. as indicated above, he takes bataille as his central text, positing it as the mediator between kojeve's hegel and the nietzschean turn taken by french philosophy after the war (supported and encouraged in particular by foucault and deleuze). pefanis later extends this argument, asserting that bataille also stands as a medial text between mauss's account of _the gift_ and both baudrillard's and lyotard's constructions around the question of *exchange*. [20] at the onset, pefanis states that he wishes to mobilize these theorizations of exchange in order to model some form of 'resistance' to the 'logic of consumer capitalism'(the phrase, as well as the question, is jameson's), and to critique the notion of postmodernism as a complicit dead-end offered by felix guattari, who decries the loss of confidence in the notion of "emancipation through social action" and denounces the philosophy of baudrillard and lyotard as "no philosophy at all" (7). exactly how these two questions relate to one another is not made clear, but pefanis launches into a litany for a 'postmodern science,' whose genealogy he traces to alexandre kojeve (whose students, among them sartre, lacan, and bataille, could each in his turn be seen as pivots in the articulation of the postmodern). it is kojeve, reading hegel's account of consciousness and desire in the _phenomenology of mind_, who first prophesies the "end of history" (12). the end will be possible because consciousness need no longer be founded upon "slavish" labor, but upon a new possibility. it remains for kojeve's students to articulate this possibility, and pefanis is no doubt correct in asserting that mauss's _the gift_ provided the initial impetus for its articulation. in the question of exchange, of giving and receiving, bataille developed his model of the "accursed share," just as lacan worked this same question (by way of a %retournement% of freud) into his own theorizations of desire. [21] pefanis's next chapters, on bataille, baudrillard, and lyotard respectively, pick up on this movement, and situate bataille as the text *behind* postmodern models of exchange, difference, and desire. his reading of bataille is a lucid one, although somewhat limited (it reads somewhat like a review of _visions of excess_), and while its posing of the question of the *reception* of bataille is astute (as noted above), its analysis of bataille's theorizations of %depense% are rather more tenuous. pefanis notes bataille's "nietzschean turn," towards the loss of subjectivity, and links it to "the problematic of writing and death" in klossowski and blanchot. yet this connection is abruptly dropped (it is the only reference to blanchot in the entire book), leaving a central question of the inheritance of bataille dangling. [22] pefanis does engage, however, with _the accursed share_, and provides a compelling account of bataille's model of sovereignty. pefanis zeroes in on the question of class, and in so doing identifies the underlying gesture from which bataille's "sovereign" derives: bataille struggles to strip sovereignty of its ideological associations with the bygone aristocracy without delivering it to a heroic bourgeois individual, since it is precisely this sovereign subject which bataille aims to annihilate by reserving it for a type of mystical experience of limits--of the poetic, the erotic. (48) yet by suggesting that the sovereign "annihilates" the "sovereign subject," pefanis conflates bataille's radical anti-utilitarianism with the move against the unitary subject instigated by freud and lacan. bataille does not posit such a unitary subject; indeed his 'sovereignty' is a mobile and fluid state incapable by its nature of cohering in a given individual, at least for long. it is not the subjectivity of the bourgeois that bataille calls into question--it is a given for him that it is *already* questionable--but rather that subject's relation to society, which is not obliterated but *secured* through the "experience of limits." [23] nonetheless, pefanis makes some suggestive connections between bataille and recent anthropological work--work which vindicates his insistence that the question of the economy was always one of coping not with scarcity, but with superabundance (an idea, incidentally, which bataille probably took from nietzsche).^6^ marx, notes pefanis, based his models on an "anthropology of scarcity"--and there is a case to be made, as he suggests, that this positing of primordial lack has motivated both ethnocentric anthropology and progressivist thought (51). yet rather than link this perception, as he might, to questions of global political economy, pefanis retreats to a digression on kant, and concludes his chapter by declaring, somewhat vaguely, that "bataille's method and practice . . . ineluctably concern a meta-discourse on writing" (58). [24] having brought bataille from the position of someone who, at least apparently, had something to say about society, to the position of a 'meta-discourse' (heterology), pefanis is able to move with relative ease to the work of baudrillard and lyotard. there are links here, to be sure- but there are also profound disjunctions. no doubt one of the reasons that guattari is so suspicious of baudrillard and lyotard is that they are both writers who mark a turn away from the question of the %socius%, and towards a far more meta-discursive position. however one may construe bataille's politics (and some may say that he had none), he writes, as does guattari, surreal discourse that grows from the analysis of "real" social structures, a discourse which bataille could call *sociology*. to move from bataille to baudrillard and lyotard without addressing this difference (except in a relatively familiar re-hash of baudrillard's spin on plato's question of the real vs. the ideal), is jarring. [25] one of the central questions of the bataillean text, that of political economy, can serve as an indication of pefanis's approach: the potlach, with its economy of conspicuous loss, is chosen by bataille over the kula, the model of ongoing exchange, and this too is the choice of baudrillard. yet as pefanis observes, baudrillard refuses altogether to think of the potlach as an "economy" (29), seeing in it instead the "extermination of signs," whereas lyotard scorns the entire model as an exercise in the romantic valorization of an artificially constructed "savage." as a consequence, baudrillard's symbolic exchange is static, a model of signification for "after the end of the world." lyotard, for his part, returns to freud without stopping to leave an offering at bataille's shrine, producing in _the libidinal economy_ (pefanis's central text) an enigmatic, playful exegesis that abandons the question of the social almost entirely. such ambivalence- one could even call it indifference--over the inheritance of bataille characterizes many of the texts of both baudrillard and lyotard. this ambivalence does not seem to trouble pefanis, who (despite his repeated accolades of bataille) appears to become progressively more interested in freud and lacan. [26] pefanis would have liked, it seems, to offer a genealogy of postmodernism which would "account" for the question of exchange in such a way that one could re-join baudrillard's and lyotard's constructions of exchange to jameson's meditation on resistance to consumer capitalism. yet in the end, this desire remains unfilled, breached as it is by a lacanian irruption (a reading, compelling at first but eventually allegorized to death), of jorge luis borges' short story, "the fauna of mirrors"). the "mirror people" lie in wait, visible only in the depths of the mirror, constrained (on account of an ancient defeat at the hands of the yellow emperor) to mimic us in this world. yet one day, in revenge, they will return, and conquer, and throw off the slavery of mimesis. the mirror people, pefanis seems to want to say, *are* baudrillard and lyotard--and surely lacan as well--and in this sense they have *already* arrived, and we are them (insofar as we see ourselves *in* them it is/we are false, trapped in a power ploy, an allegory of %meconaissance%). yet this reading of borges via lacan offers no grounds upon which the question of resistance can be framed, because it has already placed in abeyance the question of material social relations. in the funhouse of postmodernism, one never knows if there is actually a riot going on or not--it could be only a simulation; indeed to baudrillard it is *already* a simulation. such is "ludic" postmodernism at its worst, and while one could accuse bataille as well of playing this game, at least for him the *stakes* were real. in the end, pefanis seems more akin to baudrillard and lyotard than to bataille, whose text is founded upon an insistence on the political (and on using lived social relations as a model) to which pefanis, along with many of the more "ludic" postmodernists, has developed something of an allergy. from this position, the question of "resistance" is moot--but only because ludic postmodernists have declared it so. [27] in the final analysis, pefanis's book is too dense for most undergraduates; the histories it articulates will only be intelligible to those already familiar with them. nonetheless, for those interested in these histories, it offers an elegant and at times brilliant %retournement% of its own. bataille's book, on the other hand, while even more *useless*, is of tremendous *value*. robert hurley's text preserves (as have his previous translations of bataille) both the unrelenting care and the reckless audacity of bataille's prose, and bruce mau's impeccable design--as always with _zone_ books--renders the physicality of the volume a delight to hand and eye. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ the full citations for these are as follows: _visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939_, ed. alan stoekl (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1985); _inner experience_ (albany: state u of new york p, 1988 [translation of _l'experience interieure_]); _the tears of eros_ (san francisco: city lights books, 1988 [translation of _larmes d'eros_]); _the college of sociology (1937-39)_, ed. denis hollier, tr. betsy wing (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988 [texts by georges bataille, et al.; translation of _le college de sociologie_]); _guilty_, tr. bruce boone (venice, ca: the lapis press, 1988 [translation of _le coupable_]); and _the accursed share_, vol. 1, tr. robert hurley (ny: zone books, 1988 [translation of volume i of _la parte maudite_]). ^2^ bataille, _the accursed share_ i:188. ^3^ see the essay, "the use value of d.a.f. de sade," _visions of excess_ 91-102. ^4^ "what made royalty contestable . . . was that the sovereign end, which royalty was meant to embody in the eyes of the subjects, became, never more scandalously, a means for the very individual it was meant to transfigure" (_the accursed share_ ii&iii: 320. ^5^ see donald morton and mas'ud zavarzadeh, _theory/ pedagogy/politics_ 29-30 n.1, for a summary of this dichotomy, which has been most forcibly articulated by teresa l. ebert. ^6^ nietzsche declares in _the gay science_, section 349, that "in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant, but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity." _the gay science_, tr. walter kaufman (ny: vintage, 1974), 292. goldman, 'two poems', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-goldman-two.txt archive pmc-list, file gold-jar.194. part 1/1, total size 2099 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- two poems by judith goldman and lisa jarnot _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by judith goldman and lisa jarnot, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of us copyright law, and it may be archived a redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. one and where did the dutch get their vocabulary? a "generation and transition" company make the water muddy. transitional generation in company of a muddy mere formality: or was it going dutch, in transmission to transition? a mere formality of dutch, a merely formal vocabulary, to be used "in company" of dutch transmissions. my mission was to dutch a trans-generation, to formulate transitions. or was it going muddy in the company? i threw mud at mimesis, a mere dutch formality. and where did the dutch get their vocabulary? formerly, the dutch kept company without vocabulary. my former mission was a mere formality, but i doubled my dutch on the company's transmission. ----------------------------------------------------------- two primitive haze or composite rejection? such training requires persistence-a fateful hour, a stupid wheel, praiseworthy annals--the main term "reaction" would be retained, though searching for innocuous phenomena. it was not enough to have a patternbook, a dictatorship, or to claw walls looking for paint. returning to the decoding end: you make it more cryptic. i'll pant effectively. roughly, in the rough, we are roughing it. this happens when i forget to differentiate-a false proposition of the first order. or say: "when you hate maps, you hate the future." our lines are at stake in the border. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------olsen, 'virtual light', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-olsen-virtual.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.194. part 1/1, total size 21365 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- virtual light by lance olsen english department university of idaho olsen@idui1.csrv.uidaho.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by lance olsen, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: gibson, william. _virtual light_. new york: bantam, 1993. i. cyberpunk 101, or: the luminous flesh of giants [1] until now, and for no particular reason, _pmc_ hasn't reviewed a novel. and it seems appropriate that the first novel to be reviewed in these electronic pages should be one by none other than the godfather of cyberpunk, william gibson. a cultural impulse birthed in the mid-eighties, and disowned as a concerted movement by its creators fewer than four years later, cyberpunk is still very much a cultural phenomenon--as a quick skim through the hallucinatory and info-dense pages of the berkeley-based magazine _mondo 2000_, or its how-to book, _a user's guide to the new edge_ (1992), will tell you. the very name *cyberpunk* fuses and confuses the techno-sphere of cybernetics, cybernauts, and, most of all, computer hacking, with the countercultural socio-sphere of punk, the embodiment of anarchic violence, fringe mentality, and a sincere (even naive) attempt to return to the raw roots of rock n'roll. cyberpunk was, and is, in some very spooky and some very exhilarating ways, a whole heck of a lot more than merely a short-lived trend, some simulacrous eighties echo of poundian imagism or boccionian futurism. [2] for a whole bunch of people it's a way of life--a phenomenon that far exceeds the discourse of its shrill self-proclaimed mouthpiece, bruce sterling (whose cyberpunk manifesto appeared in his 1986 cyberpunk anthology, _mirrorshades_), as well as that of marc laidlaw, pat cadigan, john shirley, k. w. jeter, lewis shiner, and the other writers originally associated with the term. [3] just modem into a couple of underground bulletin boards around the country--the temple of the screaming electron (510-935-5845) with jeff hunter's bbs review, a comprehensive listing of international fringe bbs's; or maybe private idaho (208-338-9227) with its deep-seated information-wants-to-be-free message; or perhaps burn this flag (408-363-9766) with its cybersex scenarios involving, i kid you not, everything from nose fetishes to water sports --and you will find a lot of people who want, like andy warhol, to be a machine. the plethora of electronic subcultures, each with its own codes, languages, and styles, can make you feel old at twenty-five, already past the point of ever being able to keep up with it all. [4] little cults embrace ridley scott's 1982 film _blade runner_, with its speedy surreal images, thickly textured information, and techno-sleaze ambiance. sonic youth dedicates a song called "the sprawl" to gibson on the 1988 album, _daydream nation_. kathy acker openly pla(y)giarizes whole parts of her 1988 novel, _empire of the senseless_, from gibson's 1984 _neuromancer_. a cover story in _time_ (february 8, 1993, there goes the neighborhood) focusing on the cyberpunk moment is laid out like a series of pages from, what else, _mondo 2000_. billy idol's really bad 1993 album _cyberpunk_ comes replete with its video about the la riots, "shock to the system," featuring a _terminator_-esque idol transmogrifying into a cyborg with a tv camera protruding from his eye-socket. scott bukatman's fascinating _terminal identity: the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction_, out just months ago from prestigious duke university press, nips hot at the heels of the excellent 1991 _storming the reality studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction_, edited by larry mccaffery and containing pieces by everyone from j. g. ballard and william s. burroughs to jean baudrillard and jacques derrida. [5] idol's, bukatman's, and mccaffery's projects of course also suggest that appropriation and commodification- academic and otherwise--have set in. so what else is new? but in many ways, william gibson continues to stand at the center of this cultural firestorm as the guy whose seminal matrix trilogy--composed of _neuromancer_ (1984), _count zero_ (1986), and _mona lisa overdrive_ (1990), and foreshadowed by some of the stories collected in _burning chrome_ (1986)--explored, among other things, computer-generated reality, information as *the* new power base, and a grungy near-future universe that looked *way* too much like our own present one for comfort. in these works gibson did nothing less than help shape the way a large part of the population perceives the world. we now unselfconsciously use the words and concepts he gave us (cyberspace, jacking in, computer cowboys) almost as though they'd had no flesh-and-blood origin. ii. a piece of god resides in every old movie [6] gibson, meanwhile, has been forging ahead. his last work, _agrippa: a book of the dead_ (1992), was a $2000 sweet autobiographical prose poem on a disk created in collaboration with the abstract expressionist painter dennis ashbaugh, which was designed to self-destruct after a single reading. _virtual light_ is more conventionally packaged. nevertheless, it bears gibson's unmistakable signature. [7] much conventional science fiction is set in the distant future, peopled with aliens, and enacted on a galactic and heroic scale. gibson's sf, on the other hand, extrapolates an all-too-real near-future world set increasingly close to ours (_virtual light_ takes place in 2005, more than fifty years before the events in his first three novels), peopled with those at the margins of society, and enacted on a (usually) global and (always) antiheroic scale. "it's kind of a tragic artifact of science fiction that some people are naive enough to think that science fiction writers are predicting the future," gibson recently told the _san francisco bay guardian_ (18 august, 1993). fredric jameson put it more academically when he pointed out in his interview for andrew ross's collection _universal abandon?_ that sf achieves "a distinctive historical consciousness by way of the future rather than the past" and thus becomes "conscious of our present as the past of some unexpected future, rather than as the future of a heroic national past." the plain point: sf isn't about the future; it's about the present. in sf, tomorrow is a metaphor for today. [8] in _virtual light_ the future-present has lost the mystical aspects of cyberspace which dominated gibson's earlier trilogy. in its place appears a universe almost completely rooted in the meat world. the effect doesn't challenge our imagination so much as our sense of political realities, particularly west coast political realities. set in a dingy california divided into two states, nocal and socal, gibson's novel explores a narrative space in which the manufacture of cigarettes has been declared illegal throughout the us, and the surgeon general is trying to outlaw convertibles because their use contributes to the high incidence of skin-cancer. an african-american woman is president, there's massive inflation, and a privatized law enforcement company cruises la in tanks designed by ralph lauren. countries like canada and brazil have exploded into nation-states, and tv is everywhere, even at the center of a christian fundamentalist sect whose followers believe that a piece of god resides in every old movie. [9] it's a radically dystopian vision--or at least it might seem that way to you if, as gibson underscores in that _guardian_ interview, "you are a very comfortable middle class citizen." otherwise, it goes without saying, things actually look pretty good in his world. after all, "there's stuff happening to people, lots of people, right now, all over the planet, that's incredibly worse and so much more depressing than anything i've ever written about." at least through one optic, then, _virtual light_, a book of profound contradictions if ever there was one, can be read as an optimistic novel. two key metaphors reinforce this. first is a san francisco bike-messenger service, one of whose employees, chevette washington, steals a pair of virtual light glasses (which produce images in the brain by stimulating your optic nerves without employing photons) from a gross guy at a party on a pissed-off whim. second is the oakland bay bridge, abandoned by the city after a megalithic earthquake, slowly taken over by the homeless, and currently the topic of research by a young japanese scholar named yamasaki, who's attempting to use the bridge to understand american culture. [10] through the course of the novel, the bikes and the bridge become important pomo icons. gibson's use of the former nods in a gesture of appreciation and appropriation toward the major means of transportation in his friend lewis shiner's excellent 1991 novel, _slam_, about the anarchistic world of skateboarding, underground economies, and computer networks. the bikes, like shiner's skateboards, are emblematic of environmentally conscious no-fuel freedom, intense energy, exhilarating speed, and sexy fashion. they are the embodiment of the techno-hip, an attitude to which almost all the amoral characters in gibson's text subscribe. skirting society's periphery, they are out for themselves in a posthuman cosmos that has moved beyond a sense of compassion--or even hope. what counts to these people is the next hit of money or designer drugs, or the next ingot of information. [11] the patchwork dwellings on the brilliantly described broken bridge, from bars to tattoo parlors, sushi shops to rag-tag shelters, inhabited by those living on the edges of our culture, indicate something a little different. they "had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. the result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. at night, illuminated by christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, [the bridge] possessed a queer medieval energy." or, elsewhere: the dwellings "had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched into the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. there was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been used for." [12] the streets find uses for things, gibson's narrator notes in _neuromancer_, and the result in _virtual light_ is an urban crazy-quilt, an emblem of contemporary america. the bridge is also an icon appropriate to the particular novelistic practice of _virtual light_. as in _count zero_, the novel's chapters are mostly no more than five or ten pages long and, also like those in _count zero_, they form a structure of intersecting plots that moves inexorably toward a jazzy unifying climax. both bridge and text, then, are examples of termite art, a term gibson lifted from a 1962 essay ("white elephant art and termite art" in _negative space_) by the iconoclastic film critic manny farber. if white elephant art embraces the idea of a "well-regulated area, both logical and magical," as in the films of francois truffaut, farber argues, then termite art embraces freedom and multiplicity, as in the films of laurel and hardy, going "always forward eating [its] own boundaries, and, likely as not, leav[ing] nothing in [its] path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." rubin, the artist-protagonist of gibson's 1986 short story "the wintermarket," describes himself as a %gomi no sensei%, japanese for a "master of junk." the same is true of gibson himself. a literary bricoleur, more techno hickster than techno-hipster (not even on e-mail, he's the first to admit just how little he really knows about the computers and other glitzy gadgets that surface in his texts), he shops for his ideas among the aisles of the late twentieth-century cultural hypermart. [13] maybe the most surprising result of his latest shopping spree is the often matte-black humor that continually emerges. it's the antithesis of the bleak flat tone of the books that comprise the matrix trilogy. if _neuromancer_ has all the comic hoopla of the dark prophet himself administering late rites to late capitalist culture, then _virtual light_, virtually light, frequently evinces the bright cartoonish mischief of pynchon. characters sport handles like lucius warbaby. a surveillance and command satellite is fondly nicknamed the death star by those it watches over. a wind-surfing boutique is called, dead-pan, just blow me. there's a pscyho-killer with the last supper tattooed on his chest, a guy who believes tv is the "lord's preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush," and a woman who's in san francisco to get her husband's cryogenically frozen brain removed from a tank with a whole bunch of others so it doesn't have to feel so crowded in the afterlife, such as it is. the complex and deeply spiritual exploration of cyberspace that pervaded the matrix trilogy here gives way to very funny, if perhaps too easy, parody. iii. miracle mile, or: it could be anybody [14] the presence of such parody flags the essential narrative problem gibson, now forty-five and a pomo icon himself, has had to wrestle with since the publication of _neuromancer_ almost a decade ago. is it possible to keep the news new, the action vigorous and mind-bogglingly hot without skidding off the novel novelistic road into the ditch of self-replication, the slough of self-parody? in part the answer is surely yes, and the way gibson goes about it is by dosing his text with a powerful hit of comic vision that seems to take nothing (including itself) very seriously. the fresh infusion of humor into his writing takes down the seriousness of his own textuality and grim futurist ideas before someone else has a chance to, destabilizes them in a flourish typical of termite art. [15] but in part the answer is also no. _mona lisa overdrive_, gibson's last solo effort, is set in the hollywoodish world of sense/net. it focuses on the manipulation of young stars by various financial concerns and is shot through with the theme of commercial sellout. clearly when writing it gibson was simultaneously beguiled by the glamour and goods associated with that dimension, and bent on satirizing its commodifying impulse. the consequence was a janus-text that looks to accessibility and tameness on the one hand (its conclusion involves an idyllic after-death marriage of its protagonists in a kind of futuristic restaging of _wuthering heights_), and toward disruptive innovation on the other (the scene can be read as a sharp self-reflexive parody of traditional happy endings). it was a move that prompted paul kincaid, in his review of the novel for _tls_ (12 august 1988), to glance back nostalgically to _neuromancer_ and observe that "gibson wrote one book of stunning originality which caught the mood of the time so successfully that he has been condemned to repeat it. by this third volume he is showing clear and dramatic improvement as a writer, but is doing nothing fresh with his talent." [16] something along the same lines could be argued with respect to _virtual light_. for all its flash and burn, there's nothing particularly trailblazing about it. chevette washington, the bike-messenger who stole the vl glasses (which provide only a pale simulacra of the cyberspace we find in the trilogy) from a guy who turns out to be a gopher for, what else, a major corporation with some fairly depressing plans for san francisco's skyline, as in rebuilding it from the ground up, thereby, in a tactic that's the antithesis of what the bridge suggests, dispossessing the already dispossessed. throw in one berry rydell, a good-cop-gone-(accidentally)-bad, attach him to chevette, and you have a variation of the molly-case team from _neuromancer_, the angie-turner one from _count zero_, and the angie-bobby one from _mona lisa overdrive_. they are all edge-dwellers of one kind or another, all caught in the complex workings of megacorporations uninterested in the human or humane, and all situated in a hard-boiled slightly stereotypical naturalist narrative universe, a universe at least as indebted to nelson algren's _the man with the golden arm_ and raymond chandler's _the big sleep_ as to alfred bester's _the demolished man_ or anthony burgess's _a clockwork orange_--despite its being stacked with really rad techno-weapons, grubby urban landscapes, delightfully grotesque characters, and ultra-hip fashion statements. the break-in plot of _neuromancer_ devolves into a backwards break-in, or familiar heist plot. the scope shrinks from global to local. the computer shrinks from gateway to surreality into subversive instrument. and the structure tightens (many reviewers, you can bet, will tell you it "matures"), becoming more conventional and more predictable. the happy ending provides a literal %deus ex machina% to tidy up the loose narrative threads. [17] and yet things aren't as easy as that, either. after all, most people don't read gibson for plot. most read him for those great gadgets (nanotech birth-control devices, fetal tissue injections that build muscle and make workouts obsolete), which shock you into reconceptualizing your present and reevaluating your future; for those hip fashion statements (chevette's bike is a piece of assemblage art), which, like mtv logos, are just pure plain guilty pleasure to view; and for his holographically detailed sentences, frequently more poetry than prose, with more information packed into each one of them than into whole chapters by less energetic writers: "the courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic," _virtual light_ launches. "he watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod. hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb: seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed." no one does action like gibson. the pace of his sentences, his sheer speed of inventiveness, are astonishing. and finally, of course, we read gibson for his engaged imagination, his breadth and intensity of vision, his ability to shift us onto and across a terrain of crucial cultural issues that most other contemporary fiction (and even some cyberpunk fiction) just doesn't care about, let alone explore. gibson's vision takes in everything from the anarchist hacker underground networks to the rise of religious fundamentalism, from cryogenics to surveillance satellites, from genetic engineering to nanotechnology, from multinational control of information to techno-angst, from the japanization of western culture to the decentralization of governments around the world. this is what keeps us coming back to gibson's books, and this is why he remains one of the most significant and influential writers on the fin-de millennium scene. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------rabkin, 'cyfy pomo?', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-rabkin-cyfy.txt cyfy pomo? by eric s. rabkin dept. of english, university of michigan esrabkin@umich.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by eric rabkin, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: ketterer, david. _canadian science fiction and fantasy_. indiana university press, 1992. ix + 206 pp. $27.50 cloth. mccaffery, larry, ed. _storming the reality studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction_. duke university press, 1991. xvii + 387 pp. $17.95 paper. . . . the review was the color of an electron spinning to the frequency of anti-matter . . . [1] "love and napalm: export u.s.a." shouts two simultaneous stories: in boldface, a three-sentence poster series of incestuous desire, erotic violence, and the military-industrial complex; intercut, five pages of media-spawned obsessive need for dripping flesh, mass mind control, mechanical sex, and orgasmic death. this is but one of the "compressed novels" in j.g. ballard's _the atrocity exhibition_ (1967), a precursor text for both david ketterer and larry mccaffery. [2] in ancient china, the followers of mozi (c. 479-381 b.c.e.) believed that all judgments should rest on the distinction between usefulness and uselessness, but zhuangzi (c. 369-286 b.c.e.) offered the parable of "the useless *shu* tree." huizi complained that the huge *shu* tree was too twisted to yield planks and too mottled to yield veneer. zhuangzi replied that from the tree's viewpoint these were useful traits because all the other trees in the forest had long since been cut down to make planks and veneer. better, zhuangzi advised, to find a different use for the tree, to sit beneath it and to rest in its shade. [3] the books by ketterer and mccaffery may look like they should be read, cover to cover, page by page. they should not. if it is useful to speak of readable and writable texts, perhaps it is also useful to speak of consultable and compilable texts. telephone directories are both. ketterer's anthology of canadian fiction is consultable; mccaffery's "casebook" is compilable. in our postmodern times the ideology of realism has come increasingly under attack, and canadian literature, no less than british or american literature, has turned increasingly to various nonrealistic and metafictional forms--which frequently include, or approximate, sf and fantasy. the present visibility of canadian sf and fantasy, then, is largely attributable to the dissolution of the realistic paradigm. (ketterer 3) [4] promise a: there will be a demonstration that canadian literature has turned increasingly to f&sf. discharge: a book-length narrative catalog--arranged in chapters by language (english and french) and historical period (e.g., before and after the 1984 publication of william gibson's *neuromancer*!) and genre (f and sf), peppered by the occasional connected, often insightful, page or two on a single work (e.g., margaret atwood's _the handmaid's tale_)--showing that there is *more* canadian f&sf, but no comparison is made with total canadian literary production. perhaps the country is simply producing more everything as means of production improve and population increases. harlequin books, after all, is canadian. [5] promise b: there will be a demonstration that this canadian generic turning arises from a postmodern assault on realism. discharge: canadian f&sf has ever more prominent practitioners (gibson, elizabeth vonarburg) and canada's best known authors have turned from time to time to f&sf (atwood and occasional passages by robertson davies and margaret laurence), but gibson is a native of the u.s., vonarburg of france, and the three native canadians have returned to realism. [6] promise c: there will be a demonstration that canadian literature has "present visibility." discharge: the heart of cyberpunk, the putative sf projection of postmodernism, is _neuromancer_, but "there's nothing here linking gibson to any canadian tradition" (143). hail, ballard! [7] "what makes for the very best canadian sf and fantasy does not have anything to do with canada at all" (166). [8] whazza matter, bucky? you say we have a non-subject? you say you want to yawn? you say you can't imagine reading a hundred and sixty-six pages about f&sf in canada that offer little extended argument and omit the magical robert kroetsch (e.g., _what the crow said_, 1978)? well, listen up, 'cause this book has the most helpful bibliography around on its targets and a cleverly detailed table of contents and a pretty darned good index and you can use 'em all to track down languages and periods and genres and read just what the doctor ordered or follow up on any of the twenty biggest names, and, believe it or not, there are twenty--count 'em--twenty: margaret atwood, david cronenberg, robertson davies, charles de lint, gordon dickson, william gibson, herbert l. gold, phyllis gotlieb, guy gavriel kay, w.p. kinsella, margaret laurence, stephen leacock, laurence manning, judith merril, brian moore, spider robinson, robert service, william shatner, a.e. van vogt, elisabeth vonarburg. and a diverse and estimable bunch they are. [9] yeah, yeah, half these folks moved away from canada and nearly half moved to it and some are only big names in g-e-n-r-e (de lint, robinson) and others are overpraised (kay is not really tolkien's equal, except in annual sales, at least not yet), but think about it: van vogt is indisputably one of *the* formative forces in ghetto sf of the "golden age" 1940s; cronenberg's _videodrome_ and _the fly_ and _dead ringers_ make a body of f&sf film second only, if at all, to stanley kubrick's _dr. strangelove_ and _2001_ and _the shining_; gold's editorial work was second only to that of john w. campbell in determining the directions of sf; shatner (with the help of ron goulart) actually can write a serviceable novel or two; vonarburg was the first person outside france (and the first woman) to win france's annual sf award; etc. think of the poetry (atwood, gotlieb, service)! think of the humor (leacock, robinson)! think of the movies (cronenberg, kinsella's _field of dreams_)! and maybe think about folks you never thought of before. consult this book. [10] [a] the challenge of finding a suitable means to examine the 'postmodern condition' has produced a vigorous and highly energized response from a new breed of sf authors who combine scientific know-how with aesthetic innovation . . . [b] aesthetically radical sf exhibiting many of the features associated with postmodernism are evident as early as the mid-1950s and early 1960s, when literary mavericks like alfred bester, william s. burroughs, j.g. ballard, philip k. dick, and thomas pynchon began publishing books that self-consciously operated on the fringes of sf and the literary avant-garde. [c] during the 1970s and 1980s [writers such as don delillo, ted mooney, joseph mcelroy, denis johnson, margaret atwood, william t. vollman, kathy acker, and mark leyner], [w]hile writing outside the commercial sf publishing scene . . . produced works that perfectly fulfill the generic task of sf, described by vivian sobchack as 'the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of "being in the world"' [d] . . . these mainstream novels (recently dubbed 'slipstream' novels by cyberpunk theoretician bruce sterling) typically portrayed individuals awash in a sea of technological change, information overload, and random--but extraordinarily *vivid*--sensory stimulations." (mccaffery 9-10) [11] and so on. [a] (the guide letters are my insertions) ain't quite right. the new breed of sf writers with technical know-how typically doesn't write cyberpunk or anything remotely like it: david brin, robert forward, james hogan. and on the other prosthesis, gibson is famous for having been inspired to write _neuromancer_ by watching folks in video arcades; he'd never even touched a computer before writing the book. but there are confirming examples: rudy rucker (mentioned by mccaffery) and, by some definitions, gregory benford (unmentioned). [12] [a] and [b] are mutually inconsistent. but, hey, postmodernism frees us from history, right, bucky? [13] [b] is the giveaway: no distinctions made between bester and burroughs, dick and pynchon. but where oh where is stanislaw lem? what happened to kobo abe? mccaffery's implicit polemic: there is a theory (mostly francophone but with some anglophones connected via conference calling) to support a world-wide (north atlantic) movement that transcends genre (like sf or mainstream) and genre (like fiction and music). cyberpunk is its bleeding pump (speaking of kubrick, anyone remember _a clockwork orange_?) and postmodernism is its daytime name. [14] [c] don't have no sf writers. mainstreamers trip in the ghetto, but do the ghettees ever wash in the mainstream? sure: abe, lem, george lucas (of _american graffiti_), lewis shiner (of _slam_), kurt vonnegut, jr. (of late). but mccaffery ignores 'em 'cause they don't help the cause. the original cyberpunkers--gibson, shiner, sterling, et al.- were for a while called the movement. mccaffery's cause? to convince us that the movement is the movement. [15] [d]: the slipstream is pierian. and the rest of the "casebook" (poor gibson hero that he is, that hard case: he gets used by every slash body) sets out to do it. [16] five sections, very nice: introduction, cyberpunk 101: a schematic guide to _storming the reality studio_, fiction and poetry, non-fiction, bibliography. [17] zhuangzi say, "the introduction is the most useful part of the book." (maybe that's why russell potter assigns this one in his course called "the transit of the fantastic: from the gothic to the postmodern"). mccaffery writes with the clash and bristle of the slipstream and takes us through a plausible polemic about the conflation of mtv, fragmented fiction, decentered subjects, artificial bodies, and soft machines, and about the need for a new fiction in third stage capitalism (frederic jameson is always right). it's a trip and a half and you come back either truly believing (%tant pis%) or really juiced to think about all this stuff. (i'll take what's behind door number two.) [18] the "schematic guide" is "a quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with the books by the cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order" (17). every "artifact" gets its paragraph blast (blurb is too weak a word). the paragraphs do not connect logically. does anyone still care? they connect imagistically. _frankenstein_ (for brooding sexuality and love of body parts). _red harvest_ (noir is noir). _society of the spectacle_ ('cause they do theory right). _dub music_ (duh). _never mind the bollocks_ (so *that* is the sex pistols' best album!). _dawn of the dead_ (so cannibalism, so?). mtv (how not?). _big science_ (and here is laurie anderson when we need her). and so on. for more than a dozen pages. if you think you missed something on the way from george eliot to george romero, mccaffery in under half an hour will let you know what you might want to back and fill up on. [19] then comes the fiction and poetry anthology. some of the short stories are finds (pat cadigan's "rock on"), and most of the pieces taken from books (as about two-thirds are) are cleverly enough extracted to be okay for tasting, but overall, what can you do with this collage? i've got it! let's give it to a lit class. you know, the kind that can't read whole books? nah. better: let's put it on reserve. collage might work for postmodern artists but it doesn't work here as postmodern crit. nice touch, though: half the folks represented are "slipstreamers" and half sfers. the polemic rocks on. [20] no sfers in the non-fiction anthology, though, except for mccaffery's interview with gibson and sterling's "preface" to _mirrorshades: the cyberpunk anthology_. (there are others, you know, like norman spinrad.) this time we get more complete works, some of them quite useful, like darko suvin's solid "on gibson and cyberpunk" and takayuki tatsumi's fascinating "the japanese reflection of mirrorshades" and george slusser's wide-ranging "literary mtv." but you know that urban legend making the rounds, the one about the guy in a strange city who thinks he's "getting lucky" but wakes up two days later drug-muzzy and with a tiny band-aid on his back? they stole his kidney! it's cyberpunk on the streets. well, the big names in this book need to feel their backs. mccaffery has extracts from jean baudrillard, jacques derrida, jameson, jean-francois lyotard, et al. [21] i've got it! let's put it on reserve. [22] funny, isn't it, that with all this theorizing in french, all the fiction and poetry is in english? hey, david, tell this guy about elisabeth vonarburg. [23] and the bibliography will keep you reading for *years*, if the imagistic polemic has you swinging that way. [24] so, this was a compilable book. and i, for one, enjoy it: another day, another dollop. [25] ketterer's book you can read when you need to; mccaffery's when you want to. they both well repay dipping, each "after his kind" (genesis 7:14). [26] "the heat death of the universe" (pamela zoline, 1967) is a postmodern, cyberpunk fiction (that no one ever called those names) in fifty-four numbered paragraphs (just like a _pmc_ review) that run a shining riff on housework and entropy. here is number 2: imagine a pale blue morning sky, almost green with clouds only at the rims. the earth rolls and the sun appears to mount, mountains erode, fruits decay, the foraminifera adds another chamber to its shell, babies' fingernails grow as does the hair of the dead in their graves, and in egg timers the sands fall and the eggs cook on. [27] i wonder what criticism will look like in ten years? mcgann, 'symposium on russian postmodernism', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-mcgann-symposium.txt symposium on russian postmodernism symposiasts: jerome mcgann, department of english, university of virginia <jjm2f@lizzie.engl.virginia.edu> vitaly chernetsky, department of english, university of pennsylvania arkadii dragomoshchenko, st. petersburg, russia <atd@hm.spb.su> mikhail epstein, department of slavic languages, emory university lyn hejinian, <70550.654@compuserve.com> bob perelman, department of english, university of pennsylvania <bperelme@sas.upenn.edu> marjorie perloff, department of english, stanford university <0004221898@mcimail.com> _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by the symposiasts, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors. [editor's note: this symposium brought together several people working in the field of russian postmodernism. discussions took place in the month of october 26-november 25, 1992. the genre of this symposium is unusually mixed. you will find here, among other things, lengthy set pieces, conversational responses, poems previously published and unpublished, draft essays, papers from conferences, and excerpts from published work. instead of a flow of short entries, we received fewer, longer messages. we have chosen not to regularize the form of these entries or their mechanics, and not to revise or edit messages, in order to preserve the occassional nature of the discussion. you might refer the work found here to a transcription from an oral symposium, with printed text incorporated, and not to the dialogue of essays and replies often published in journals.] ---------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 26 oct 1992 11:09:14 -0500 from: "jerome j. mcgann" <jjm2f@lizzie.engl.virginia.edu> subject: re: well...no record perhaps it will be useful to begin the discussion with a set of topics and questions that seem to me to be pertinent -given what various people involved have already said or written. marjorie perloff's draft essay on "russian postmodernism", sent for this symposium, focusses a central problem: how does one talk about the relations that have been made and pursued between agroup of contemporary russian writers and certain western writers (are they a "group"? how?) who have been seen as their counterparts? let me say that the (local) history of the emergence of each"group" -both have constructed themselves outside given and traditional institutions -is a telling fact. (though of course "samizdat" and "small press"/private printing/desktop publishing ventures have in each culture, by now, been fairly well-established.) the problem may be seen in various forms. perloff traces out some differences in conceptualist programs and ideas. in _leningrad_ the same problem appears, i think, in the recurrent preoccupation with the question of the poetic "object", as well as with the (perhaps related) question of the status of "objects-as-such" in two very different types of societies. (the problem --perhaps it is reciprocal -of the "subject" also arises repeatedly.) for example: i read perloff's essay and i wonder: why did she write this? what is the point of pointing out such differentials? or i read watten's essay on "post-soviet subjectivity. . ." and wonder: is this essay "about" drogomoshenko and kabakov and "post-soviet" writing, or is it about -somehow, for some reason --contemporary american writing? i think it would be useful if everyone in the symposium addressed these issues at the beginning. you might want to respond to prigov or to perloff or to watten specifically, or to pick up from any of the other related texts in _leningrad_ or _the third wave_ or _poetics journal_ no. 8. for myself, i would find it helpful if -in addressing these issues -a person would also explain why they take their chosen approach (e.g., through social and institutional history; through questions of aesthetics, or stylistics; through a consideration ofthe relation of poetry and ideology; or of writing and language and "the person"; etc.). at some point the more general cultural and social question also needs to be taken up. how to frame the question is itself a question? well, there are different imaginable ways: why has this intercourse begun? what function does it serve the individuals, their societies, the practise of writing and art? most immediately, what are we doing in this very symposium, what are we after? jerome mcgann ---------------------------------------------------------- mon, 26 oct 92 15:37:42 from: lyn hejinian <70550.654@compuserve.com> subject: first response dear colleagues and friends, i have just received jerome mcgann's opening message, and i am as astounded at the format of these proceedings as i am at the "theme" or "themes" of the symposium. my own particular concerns with respect to contemporary russian (or any other) poetry and poetics were, i think, originally epistemological; they are still, to a large degree, although my involvement (as translator) with the particular writings of arkadii dragomoshchenko has enlarged that original, abstract quandary with particular, immediate ones. in any case, the question "how does one know" (the question of consciousness and the quest for a consciousness of consciousness), becomes, perhaps especially for an american, enormously vivid in the otherness of a russian context. i don't intend by this to be taking a relativist position--that we can understand ourselves better by understanding something else seems a banal and thoroughly uninteresting truism. and to discover that certain american literary groups have a similarity to certain russian literary groups is probably only to discover a coincidence--one which might motivate curiosity but doesn't necessarily generate meaning. the affinities that have evolved in the past five or six years between certain poets in the u.s. and certain poets in russia exist, i think, because those poets wanted them to. there's been a remarkable degree of seeking out--of which this symposium is another example. my own personal initial experience in the course of this seeking out was a dispersal of my american knowing in the russian context (could one call it a postmoderning of knowing?) where the grounds for that knowing simply didn't exist. the experience convinced me that knowledge is always embedded--always contextualized (so that one only knows that something or of something, for example)--that is always and only situated and that it depends on specific logics and linkages. logics and linkages, of course, are precisely the materials of poetic method. and perhaps our enthusiasm for their proliferation is a specifically postmodern attitude. finally, i'd like to say something in answer to jerome mcgann's question, "what are we doing in this very symposium, what are we after?" that i would hope we are after some nonor even anti-nationalist engagement with the man questions that postmodernism and postsovietism suggest. lyn hejinian ---------------------------------------------------------- date: tue, 27 oct 1992 19:36:58 +0300 from: arkadii <atd@hm.spb.su> subject: remarks s-petersburg 27 october, 1992, 7:33 pm. atd@hm.spb.su dear colleagues, it seems slightly strange to start any "discussion" (even on postmodern) from the point of a question -"what all of us doing it for?.." somehow or other i have nothing to do but to continue offered mode putting a great deal of questions to myself which entailed by first two essays and followed remarks. the very problem of russian postmodern to the same extent looks dark as well as "american" or "african". despite numerous writing on this object the course of approach to it switches itself in dizzying velocity. couple years ago -economical premises, transformation of production modes or subjectivity per se, social geterogenity, circulation of capital, signifiers, ego, etc. + notorious seductiveness, simulacra were really magic formulas, even keys for operations with postmodern phenomena (if one couldn't just to say that agglomeration of them is in fact a certain composition, or invention of its own horizons). noticeable, that the last mentioned terms have appropriated by russian critics in a great longing, corresponding, to be sure, to the roots of a main principle of "russian policy of representation"-endless chain of "icons" getting its origins in an invisible prototype..) however we hear another voices now, another songs -"memory," "time," "space," "aesthetic" and so on. why not? it is entirely immaterial in _what_ terms, even _sentence_ we are going to speak about present state of the given object. future is only a projection of our habits. right as _this symposium_ seems at a moment like iridescent bubbles of a monitor in a soapy soup of imagination. as far as i get it, essays by marjorie perloff and barrett watten somehow or other attempted to touch different things regardless of "concrete" stuff of reading. sure, between them -diffusion of two different poetry practices/ consciousness despite the postmodern affirmation of locality, the ways of such deterritorialisation (let us recall a work of veselovskii, dedicated to wandering plots...). for all of that -in mp essay evidently runs itself the vein of the problem of interrelations of the language of father and artificial infant language of russian "conceptualism" that unfolds the ceaseless dream of an ambiguous release trough the closing of meanings as such in continuous repetitions of the certain rhetoric. (i think marjorie perloff feels that explanations of this "event" by michael epshtein are not only insufficient, still to some respect -wrong). and at least, the theme of memory rose by barrett watten in his reading my poem. sure, the _timememory-space_ questioning is most self-erasable "problem" be tight connecting to such themes as body politics, imagination strategy, etc., -connecting postmodern's ontic spectrum of worries with ontological ones. perhaps, if we'll have a time, i'll try offer you couple of pages dedicated to "memory". arkadii dragomoshchenko. ---------------------------------------------------------- date: fri, 30 oct 1992 15:09:30 est from: lyn hejinian <70550.654@compuserve.com> subject: second comment october 30; i've only received jerry's initial opening message and arkadii's first remarks (and a copy of my own first attempt to enter this e-conversation), so maybe it is premature to add something now. but it does seem appropriate, both generally (globally) and specifically (with respect to russia and to the u.s.) to frame the notion of postmodernism in the context of "memory" (i am thinking of arkadii's use of the term), since among other things doing so blurs the distinction between "objects" and "events." and it is this blurring that characterizes the so-called end of history, postmodernism. perhaps the vietnam war (and the morally-related watergate scandal) helped to collapse u.s. history somewhat as perestroika and the demise of the soviet union have collapsed history in russia. but maybe, again, the comparison is irrelevant; can we compare ezra pound's and charles olson's and hd's (albeit very different) attempts to recover history with viktor shklovsky's and vladimir mayakovsky's and anna akhmatova's and marina tsvetaeva's attempts to witness it? such comparisons themselves are typical dispersals. the notion of "memory" no longer suggests contemplation so much as sentimentality (or its sister, irony), amorality, and above all novel patterns of logic: "wandering" rather than hierarchically organized plots. when the cause-and-effect structuring which determines that an occurrence is an event breaks down, the event becomes an object. this object isn't necessarily isolated--it probably always rests in a matrix of relationships and associations. but they are spatial and it is atemporal. the beating of rodney king has achieved instant object-status. that's in part because it was "captured" (objectified) on video tape and the tape has been repeated over and over, and only objects, not events, can't repeat. well, these quick remarks merely invite arkadii's "couple of pagesdedicated to 'memory'." and what of equivalence? in arkadii's remarks it seems as if numerous and various items and terms (the objects of concern) swirl like motes in warm twilit sunshine, and this view is familiar to me, too. one might be intelligent about any one, or even several, of them,but perhaps not about the whole mass. lyn hejinian ---------------------------------------------------------- date: fri, 30 oct 1992 07:38:00 gmt from: marjorie perloff <0004221898@mcimail.com> subject: postmodern symposium dear colleagues, i came home from 10 days at stanford to find eleven messages, most about the symposium. there are very interesting comments from lyn hejinian and arkadii dragomoschenko that i want to mull over for a day or two. in the meantime, i want to address jerome mcgann'squestion, "why did she (i) want to write about this? for me, the fascination of the russian language and the russian world is endless. as someone who loves the early twentieth century russian avant-garde, but also tolstoy, dostoyevsky, and chekhov, i want to understand what is happening in the former soviet union today. but since my russian is very minimal, i must rely on what i can read and i suppose i wasn't quite satisfied with ephshtein's account of what's going on and wanted to speculate on the relationship between two cultures, my point being that since "modernism," whatever that is, hasn't quite been absorbed in russia, it's hard to imagine a "postmodernism" that would be parallel to our own late-century versions. on the other hand, a book like hejinian's oxota could not have been written without the impact of the russian poets, writers, critics--the whole culture, so there's clearly something wonderfully exciting going on. but what exactly? i hope to learn more. this past week, we have had on the stanford campus joseph brodsky, who was invited by the stanford humanities center. i went to only one session--where brodsky was talking about thomas hardy and robert frost. he began by saying that pound and eliot had deflected british modernism from its true path, epitomized by hardy and then performed an analysis on "the convergence of the twain." now, i want to ask my fellow symposiasts: how do we relate brodsky to the mode of dragomoschenko, parshchikov, and the other "new wave" poets? with best wishes, marjorie perloff ---------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 31 oct 1992 15:40:58 +0300 from: arkadii <atd@hm.spb.su> subject: moving on in one step 31 october, 1992, 3:32 pm dear lyn, dear colleges, i'm not certain that we _must_ speak only about memory (unconsciouses, traces, etc.) as about of a main perspective of postmodern phenomena. nonetheless, this "term" is really provocative. firstly, because it involves varies "things" by virtue of which we could get "something" concerning to our current state -this is to say, about history, or -to hove we like to understand it, or to understand ourselves. two or three days ago, when we spend a time with alexander zeldovich^1^ (he was back from finland, and this time with beautiful friend marianna) drinking bad wine but speaking about global problems (exactly! yes! typical russian manner of wasting of time, like "matreshka" or "perestroika" and so forth) and when he paged first "papers" from beginning of our symposium, he'd said -"write them, please, that there is very important thing -we (russia) are as a bermuda triangle for all "-isms", including postomdernism (which itself seems like the same notorious "triangle"). it is a point that _every_ art's mode, every direction transforms itself here in mode of life!^2^ moreover, this mode of life become "only one" way of dealing with social space..." -this is to say, with history and memory. isn't it? to some extent he was right -all our "revolutions" are the fruits of perverted imagination. meanwhile the time between -was gifted by devil. where is memory? or -are we sentenced to be the nation of an eternal posmodern? arkadii dragomoshchenko ____________________ ^1^ well-known filmaker from moscow the last work was "sunset" on babel. in the last issue of "iskusstvo kino" (art of cinema) you can read our idle, "kitchen", talk about the phenomena of "american cinema". ^2^ i think this was the first impulse which authors of "leningrad" got in leningrad in 1989 (?). ---------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 31 oct 1992 17:05:50 +0300 from: arkadii <atd@hm.spb.su> subject: memory (out of the left field or -) eroticism of for-getting, eroticism of beyond-being(a) (1) by arkadii dragomoshchenko; translated by vanessa bittner with arkadii dragomoshchenko (thank you, lyn and barrett, -you participated in a hard business of this translation too, preparing it for the next issue of poetics journal...) i entered where i don't know understanding forsook me i stood -all knowledge departed. st. juan de la cruise there exist a multitude of things about which it doesn't seem possible to talk, without risking a meaningless pomposity, regardless of the fact that these things continue to be a desired object of descriptions and discussions, remaining not only as a horizon of experience, but of the possibility of uttering something about it as well. simultaneously such things seem illusorily ordinaryhabitual. they are primordially vacillating and mysterious, they whose senses are not grasped by reason, which irritates the imagination, emitted and continue to emit the unusually bewitching enchantment of the strangeness of being -which have already become a certain semblance of sediment -dictionaries willingly presenting any rhetoric with this or that spectra of significance -or: the history of the use of words or: the casts of former "existential territorialities" (f. guattari). among such things can be found "memory". the kind proposal i received to deliver this paper about memory led me to just another dead end of a certain "beginning", despite the delicate indication of a path by which thought could follow. and indeed, is it not tempting to fit the object of our interest into historical and geopolitical perspective? all the more, for me, having spent my life in a country whose, let's say, more than marvelous relations with "memory" and "history" were marked by the bewilderment of chaadaev, but thanks to which i received a rare opportunity to contemplate her (memory's) surprising transformations, both on the level of the individual and of society. but with time everything fades, including the sense of surprise. however and indeed doesn't the presence of passion seduce the expressions: "peoples, having remembered themselves or having recalled their destination and, the almost platonic: "man, having recalled that he is a man"? but i will stop here, not without basis suggesting that this theme will find/has found worthy illumination in presentations and discussions, so then how should i, a person deeply private in his habits and work, even if hurriedly and chaotically, touch upon an object of conversation from a different side or, perhaps, sides. more accurately, to remind about the existence of other points of view. or at least the possibility of others. in the malibu city museum in california there is a thin gold plate measuring 22x37 mm bearing six engraved lines, apparently a fragment of an orphick hymn, or instructions to the soul of one who has died on how to conduct themselves in the land of shades (2) here are the lines whose literal translation is known to many: but i am parched and perishing of thirst./give me quickly/the cold water flowing from the lake of/memory/then they will freely let you drink from/the holy spring,/and thereafter you will have lordship with/the other heroes. the spring mentioned in the above fragment is, of course, mnemosyne, memory. whose moisture is opposed to the waters of leto. also, the opposition of "water of life" and "water of death" is inferred in the duality of the nature of someone who speaks, in other words, of the simultaneous questioning and answering, the nature of which combines the earth-titanic and the sky-dionysian. however, in defiance of the obvious banality of such a "distribution" of roles and functions, something nevertheless does not allow us, in reading these lines, to see the painted plaster frieze of postmodernism. we will follow once again the well-trod path of plot, taking into consideration as much as possible also the amalgam of its narrative: the loss of memory is equal to death; the dead who have entered the territory of aida, first of all lose their memory. (4) the realm of aida, the world of night, is itself death or -oblivion, then how the day cannot stand unconsciousness -forgetfulness transforms itself into the death of the "future" (thus orpheus forgets the instructions, transgresses them and turns around... to his own destruction) -since memory is nothing other than potential future, taking its origins in duration, repitition, prolongation, the logic of which, as is known, is the logic of history, narrative, day, continuity, of causality, knowledge, law, the norm. within the borders of this logic, the structure of the sign (or the mediation of it) is unequivocally manifested by a direct connection between the "signifier and the signified," where the signified is the memory of the referent (the guarantee of the signifier's reality) of a certain "object" and, more likely, the essence of this object, reflected or revealed by the intelligible signified. a rupture or only the approximation of such a connection, according to general opinion, of the loss of referent, in other words, chaos, the destruction of the hierarchic unity of the world picture in which, by the way, the self identification of the "i" (as a reflection of the true center of the universe) and, consequently, of society becomes impossible. thus, outside of memory, the becoming of neither the "i" nor of the personality, self or social can occur. outside of "i" and outside of "the social" narrative becomes impossible, the narrative itself, the formative state making the world accessible to understanding, to reproduction and to repetition -the content. in this horizon memory can be taken as the pre-writing (see plato about writing as an instrument of memory) which must steadily uphold being in consciousness in the form of traces, but, more than anything, the origins of those traces. actually, we know that memory is nothing other than a means of consolidating, ordering, unifying the world map. and which to some extent allows us to apply the analogy between memory and the eros of plato, also forming the world into an absolute ascent of cognition of the ascent itself. from here -in spite of the fact that, for some, memory is something like a depository, an archive or (for others) a reserve of a mobilly difficult, associative process of the conscious-unconscious, arises the motif of her (memory's) teleologicity since it, like "the time of history" (which memory forms) is directed at the resurrection of that which, until recently remained as a trace of a past (thing, person...) as the trace of which the source was some sort of co-being/o-ccurence.(b) memory is teleological, since it satisfies absolute memory or "the embodiment of all the ages" -it satisfies apokostasis, in other words, the coincidence of "past-present-future" in the point of presence, in the punctum of the endlessly lasting "present" in which it, perfecting itself, nevertheless, is already perfected since it doesn't know incompleteness, lack or defect. or -where memory has no need for the resurrection of any traces, since there aren't any, since there is no past as such. from this point of view any disruption of memory even in everyday life is not only pathological, but a misdeed appearing through the limit of definition and infringing upon a definite conception of world study. and here we should not remark how in terms of the unfolding of the description of its known conception of the "semantic" model of the real, the thread of another ornament begins to intertwine. suffice it to say that the russian word "pamiat'" (memory) covers perception with dust in a few semantic layers: 1) that of "imeni"(c) (po(i)myanut' -po-imenovat', po-minovenie -po-imenovanie)(d) which translates into english roughly as "to remember -to name", "remembrance -naming", referring to being called, concrete naming as to estate, in other words, to possession since being called is an introduction to property, appropriation; -2) of the first person pronoun, of the accusative/genitive case: "mya" (from "menya") and 3) "meny", of the exchange (obmen) (in part of the sign for a thing) closing the topology of ya-imeni-imeniya (i-nameestate) to the act of power, submission and governing that which stands apart, the external, non-articulated.(5) because -as it follows from western tradition's experience, only in the title, in the re-tention (content)(e) of the name, in the retaining of the established connection between name and thing the retention of the "i" and the world is possible. however, are there etymological premises relevent, despite the seduction-ceremony of their reading in the protocol of deconstruction, to the true misen-scene of these meanings today? it is difficult to refrain from making jean baudrillard's statement about the transformation of the very nature of the sign. to talk about western culture means, in his opinion, first of all to talk about the principles and modes of its co-sociability(f), which must collect the world into a single entity, more precisely, to return to it its primordial wholeness (6), belief in this wholeness and, nevertheless: all the western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange -god, of course. but what if god himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which arrest his existence? then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum. (7) of course, if we touch upon positions, which must some way or another guarantee the "symbolic exchange", it would be more important to consider the instance "pure, invulnerable (absolute) memory", along with that and "space" in which such an exchange is possible, that is, a gigantic simulation machine (8) "absolute historical memory" (nietzsche). but even having proposed such absolute memory, we can say that being completely-almighty, memory is powerless to penetrate, bring out, preserve one thing -the sources of one's own co-being/o-ccurence(g) the trace of which is memory itself. it's strange "beginning", the striving to remember, to preserve the function of freud's thanatos constantly slips away, having become memory before carrying the name of forgetfulness (h) which exists between its infinite impulse to activity, to work, to repetition/creation.(i) the writing of poetry bears a close relation to this. the reverse of memory spreads oblivion. but what happens there? once again the russian verb "zapamyatovat'", "to forget"(j) means to go out beyond memory, beyond its limits, consequently to cross the border of "mya", that is, "i" ("ya"), "name" (imeni), "self-property" (imenie). but what, then, can be found "beyond" (k)? only the "absence of definition"? of duration? of continuity? of that from which the word habitually develops in propositions and modalities? simply "absence"? or maybe we'll phrase the question another way: what happens in the very act of "forgetting"? doesn't language itself point out in its etymological luminescence that for-getting/beyond-being is literally a transgression (9), that is, a crime(l) of being (m), waste of reserve, or otherwise, of the former existence as from the noun created from the verb, otherwise -a twice-halted present? such is poetry, immutably and courageousely going out to the border, where the dark glow of the indifferent something, unheard of, having never existed, but the genesis "of which", penalizing not even the word "time"(n), meets the concealing smoke of human vanity. beyond the border of memory, if we believe in the topography of preispoden(o) (reverse-side) we find leto. on her banks grow poppies. on her shores oblivion reigns, the transparency of which is transmitted to the world, drawn into her game, confusing one with another, the times and intentions, words and silence, -opening the transparency of the absence of any scales whatsoever here "this" is simultaneously "there", "now" everywhere "after" or "already always then". the waters of leto never reflect -it is that place, locus classicus(p) -where the myth of narcissus, seduced by the yearning for another in himself, ceases to be a source of light in the mirrored rooms of the human "i"(10). peering into the sources, memory enters into the most intimate and closest relations with oblivion, which represents to her (memory) her own death. it is impossible to imagine a certain smile which is so easy to take for an enigmatic grimace... but where then do pains come from? and here the conclusion of the fragment from the gold plate becomes clear -the question is full of perplexity since the questioner in the question-answer about its double nature nevertheless confirms its belonging to heaven, to dionysus, transgression, oblivion, poetry -that is, the body of language, speech, which confirms itself to being torn to shreds, to dismemberment by the titans, by mimesis, having seized him (the questioner) in the labyrinth of the mirror, in the labyrinth of logic which rules reflection (vt/tv-orenie; repitition/creation)(q), in other words of that which is always seen as the basis of the art of speech... there is no point in continuing the list of that which, according to the critics, "reflects" or "depicts/represents", at the same time appropriating, the word... it doesn't appropriate but removes layer by layer from the wax table of memorywarp that by definition possesses neither meaning or trace, that... which exists in its own disappearance. however, night attracts even this mute rustling. night, like poetic speech is sourceless and so steps over, erasing any possible interpretation, her language, her speech, her intentions , her now, her memory. squandering all of this in her own disappearance, poetry possesses nothing, only: ********** author's notes: 2) it is noteworthy that this memorandum is inscribed on material whose nature is ambivalent in its presentation gold, sun, and light are inseparable in the mythological consciousness from ashes (in the russian language the very etymology of this word points to their unanimity). sunlight is in the same way life-creating, ash-creating and light itself, more precisely its source, the sun, is inseparable from "darkness", blindness, like a vision through the wall of optico-centrism, which controls not only epistemiology but the metaphysics of culture. 3) the motif which the british poet robert graves used in one of his poems and which i have added to the final piece of "ksenia" in part as an answer to graves. 4) the thirst for memory is equal to the thirst for blood a drop of blood gives a moment of memory to the soul of a dead person. 5) unfortunately, there is not room here to refer to yet another nuance of meaning, ehich adds through the meaning of the word "mnit'" -to imagine, and for this reason a signficant problem of memory -imagination does not fall in with the intent of today's discussion. in connection with this it seems to me that bashlyarovsky's dream should not be considered exactly as non-memory, as nonimagination. 6) see lyotard's meta-recite. 7) jean baudrillard, selected writings. stanford u. press, 1988, p. 170. ("all of western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange god, of course. but what if god himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a giant simulacrum...") 8) precisely this point, apparently, compels j.l. borges to create the metaphor funes-miracle-memory, a metaphor of the reciprocal devouring of memory and the remembered: of their factual, monstrous coincidence. 9) jacques derrida makes the following distinction between transgression and reduction-epoche: "the phenomenological epoche is a reduction that pushes us back toward meaning. sovereign transgression is a reduction of this reduction: not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning." jacques derrida. writing and difference. u. chicago press, 1978. p. 268. 10) memory-mirror-titans; the torn, dismembered dionysus, etc. 11) from the book xenia (by this author)? lyn has this poem. translator's notes: a. the russian prefix "za-" in the works of this author reflects the multivalency of one word or invented words due to the creative morphology of the language. the existing word "zabyvanie" means literally "forgetting". but there is also a verb "byvat", "to be", which the author here fuses with the prefix "za-" which can mean "trans-" or, as a preposition, "behind", "beyond", "at", "after", "because of". the noun "zabyvanie" does not exist in russian (no! vanessa is wrong!), therefore the meaning is open to interpretation and associations. b. "sobytie" without hyphen means "happening, occurence, event" which, according to the author, is the result of "co-being". c. "imeni" is a declined form of "imya", "name" in the nominative case. d. the author inserts an "i" into the root of the verb "pomyanut'" ("to remember") to emphasize what he sees as the semantic connection between the words. e. in russian these two words have identical roots but different prefixes uderzhanie, soderzhanie. f. "so-obshitel'nost'" hinting at the word "soobshit'" to inform, announce and "obshitel'nost'" sociability. g. see note b. h. this word also contains the elements "za" and "byt" and could also allude to the verb "zabyt'" to forget. see also note a. i. a play on sounds/words: "vtorenie-tvorenie". the first word does not exist (o, vanessa, dear, this word exists too) on its own but the "vtor" root implies repeating, something done a second time. the second word literally means creation or creating; the consonant pair is simply reversed or "turned around". j. "zapamyatovat'" is a less commonly used form of the verb "zabyvat'/zabyt'", "to forget", and, as the reader can see, contains both the particles "za" and "mya". k. see note a. l. "prestuplenie" which literally means "crime", is semantically related to the verb "perestupat'/perestupit'" meaning "to step over" and figuratively "to overstep, transgress", thus linking the words "crime" and "transgression". m. as taken from the verb "byvat'". n. "vremya" ("time") which contains the elements "mya" and "ya" from the preceding discussion. o. tartarus of greek mythology. p. in latin in the original. q. see note i. ---------------------------------------------------------- date: sun, 1 nov 1992 14:46:37 est from: lyn hejinian <70550.654@compuserve.com> subject: xeniax-to: symposia@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu november 1, sunday: dear colleagues: i'm amused that our symposium in its first week has resembled my only other e-mail experience, namely messages from arkadii dragomoshchenko; i bought a modem solely in order to communicate with him during the long period when soviet and then russian postal system was only sporadically operative, and when strange (good) fortune gave arkadii access to e-mail. in any case, both arkadii and eyal have asked me to add something from arkadii's forthcoming booklength poem xenia to our discussion. the american translation (in manuscript) is a little over 100 pages long, and it's difficult to excerpt from the whole, since the "argument" accumulates, like an unfolding discourse (or in multiple discourses). so i've decided just to send you the first several pages, with the alternation between poetry and prose which is characteristic of the work as a whole. the essay on memory that arkadii sent to us, by the way, will be published in poetics journal (the next issue), but the version you read is slightly rough (no fault of the author's or vanessa bittner's--arkadii's prose is very difficult to translate) and we will try to revise a bit before publication--with vanessa's help. from xenia you see the mountains and think them immobile but they float like clouds. al-djunayd we see only what we see only what lets us be ourselves-seen. the photograph refuses to let into itself what it created by studying us. the frenzied braiding of salts, ashes of silver. a cock will crow three times as dawn arrives. sight (in a game of tossed bones? an opening in the body? shoelaces? in the autobiography approaching from behind your head?), finding no object, seems lost. history begins only when powerlessness is acknowledged. i can't understand: the embraces of father and mother? the transition of one to the other? this is the boundary dancing at the threshold where an echo slowly floats around reason. to go on. death is not an event, but an exfoliation: the past is a knot of ellipses- noon with the sun spot removed whose depths are raised to the simple surface by the mosquito wind of things, objects' chips, sucked in vain into description--sight-or the rules for rendering a two-dimensional representation multi-dimensional-a question of optics (or allegories). flight fades into the porous yellow ice of the pages flowering between the dry fingers. the smoke is black. the azure's shrieking. senselessly cloud falls to the south. and stuck together, like candies of happiness, demons with their meditations control the eyes like fire whose net is irridescent and plain and monotonous too like the pendulum of love. it's not death that's "disturbing," but rather-until one is able to move in metabolic particles-the absence discovered at every point in the splash of the day whose halves are shut behind the shadow's back (yes, definitely, embraces, before all else) everywhere where it can occur coupling non-becoming with intercession- the unravelled tissue's decay. speed. skid. the division of time: the roar in a child's seashell. surroundings. the site of wandering examines its own expectations. the mouth takes on a definite form so that the word sky takes on the density of pebbles smashing the shell of reflections. now for the story of the branching city. complexity doesn't mean endless additions. the proto-perception of dreams. the multitudes are mutinous (the more money you give me the more i'll have--and what do you need it for?). this playful twig sticks up in the air: attentiveness. but also the epistolary style, exhaustive, following trackes (are you talking about me? the day before yesterday you said that you needed me in order to experience yourself through me), evading possible signs, one's own presence, khlebnikov--the ruins of never-erected cyclopic constructions. a stellar swarming in the absolute transparency of subject and object. the rustle of a stone flying downward. slowly i bend toward you. the slope is open to the south wind. what for you is a moment, for me is a millenium, augmented by anticipation. patience? the foreknowledge that is fated not to answer questions about death--not to sprout in the skull of matter. unhurried oxydation, but also the epistolary method, reaching an inadmissable surplus: an intersec/ruption, not giving the sought for sense of conclusion in any point of the splash, rousing the night with ex-. what distinguishes a "judgment" from an "utterance"? look in the dictionary, you say. look in the dictionary and the word is already turning into the word that endlessly approximates a fading voice. as for snow in the branching story of the city. i bend down toward her and in front of me the thinnest droplet discloses the time frame of china. behind the window there's snow. no. contaminations of the city. we'll bring this elm into the map's field. a crow, not knowing loss. instead, so as to come nearer, opening--it moves away, until it disappears completely beyond the boundaries of the phrase. ********* translated by lyn hejinian and elena balashova. sun and moon press will be publishing the book in january of next year. my apologies for any typos--i don't know how to call up files into my e-mail program, so anything you get from me is typed "in realtime"--and generally, as fast as i can type it. lyn hejinian --------------------------------------------------------- date: tue, 3 nov 1992 16:28:22 -0500 from: "jerome j. mc gann" <jjm2f@lizzie.engl.virginia.edu> subject: memory again i was moved to the following reflections after reading arkadii's essay. i would be much interested in any other reactions. "thoughts on `zapamyatovat'" what follows are some reactions to arkadii d's essay/meditation "eroticism of for-getting, eroticism of beyond-seeing". i am moved to write them because ad's essay exposes some of the most cherished illusions of the west. and also because from the west may yet come (do now come, and have been coming always) other voices and imaginations that stand counter to those mostcherished in memory. other possible "memories". ad mentions plato in passing -plato, who deplored writing because it threatened one of his touchstone values: memory. but according to lyn h "writing is an aid to memory". lh's is a distinctly anti-platonic thought. and what she means by "memory" is not at all what plato means. plato's is the meaning you, ad, sketch in the opening of your essay -the meaning of the known and ordered world, the remembered world. ad also mentions baudrillard, a quintessential (or so we have judged) "postmodern thinker". his however is, i believe, the deconstructive dead end of the platonic/enlightenment line. out ofthe ground of reality baudrillard spins the precession of the simulacra. or: either memory or oblivion. being and nothingness. presence and absence. and all these ordered along the platonic grid of "the real" (the forms) and the "unreal" (the shadow plays). "but what if god himself can be simulated, reduced to . . .signs? then the whole system becomes. . . a gigantic simulacrum."(baudrillard) in baudrillard this famous question comes as a deconstructive threat -is posed as such, is received as such (generally). that is to say, baudrillard is not serious. but baudrillard may be taken seriously. his whole system canbe reduced to a system of signs, a gigantic simulacrum, as ideal as god himself. himself. we may think otherwise than this -say, according to blake, for whom all gods reside in the human breast. god (to be capitalized here as the subject of this sentence) and the gods always were creatures of the human imagination, ie, in postmodern terms, constructed systems of signs; it was merely a special system of signs -one that asserted it wasn't a signifying system, but was self-identical ("i am that i am"), that (mis)led us into the transcendental imagination of reality. "absolute historical memory" in this perspective is a special conception -a heuristic tool, literally a signifying system. we must not take it for either god or the "set of all (memorial) sets". it is simply (and profoundly) the idea of such a set -an idea we may want to invoke and use for particular immediate and practical purposes. so, "zapamyatovat": "to go beyond memory", to cross itsborder, is to enter another territory, the geography of "oblivion". here is leto, the land (in english) of swinburne: here where the world is quiet, here where all trouble seems dead winds and spent waves' riot in doubtful dreams of dreams. . . .etc. most emphatically not an "absence" or a nothing: it is "positivenegation" (terrifying to coleridge's idealistic mind, splendid andcomforting to swinburne's sensational mind). to enter this (new)world is (in william morris's words) to "forget six counties overhung with smoke", etc. it is to get, literally, "news from nowhere". "zapamyatovat": we have no such wonderful word in our language, so i thank you for it, ad. but it is a word known to all the poets, and especially to those for whom there is a world of imagination. the swinburnian land of oblivion, byron's manfred, blake's los[s]. jerome mcgann ---------------------------------------------------------- from: jenglish@sas.upenn.edu (james english) subject: rabate/chernetsky date: thu, 5 nov 92 21:47:27 est to the symposium participants: having only recently arrived from france to take up his new post at the university of pennsylvania, jean-michel rabate is having difficulties getting set up with functional computer hardware and software. the computer that has just been installed in his office, for example, is equipped with a french keyboard but can only read the keyboard input as though it were standard american. in any event, jean-michel regrets that it is impossible for him to participate in the symposium. he has, however, solicited a response to the early symposium postings from vitaly chernetsky, a colleague in the comparative literature and theory department. i have slightly edited vitaly's text, which follows. --jim english why the russian postmodern? "russian postmodernism: an oxymoron?"--this is the question posed by the title of marjorie perloff's essay. what happens to the cultural phenomenon which according to most cultural theorists is the product of late capitalism, consumer society, commodity culture, etc., when it is transposed into the society where the most basic commodities are in short supply? and if there exists russian (or, more correctly, soviet) postmodern culture, how does it sustain the claim of being postmodern, in what postmodernist activities does it engage? to my disappointment, i found that what russian postmodernism %is% is precisely the question perloff's essay is not willing to address. perloff's agenda seems to be only to underscore that the two groups--the heterogeneous russian postmodern poets and the american language poets--differ considerably; her way of proving it seems to be to claim that cultural production in the late soviet union has little if anything to do with its western postmodern contemporaries. although she herself admits that "to generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous," perloff is nevertheless willing to do so. in this i see a possibility that a forum like ours could degenerate into an enterprise which i would call "paleontological": to "reconstruct," as georges cuvier claimed to be able to do with a prehistoric animal, the entire russian postmodern scene out of one or two of its "bones." need one to say that the postmodern culture is not a coherent "organism," and that in these paleontological attempts we end up creating ghosts like the mysterious foma akvinskii (instead of st. thomas aquinas) who appears in the english translation of aleksei parshchikov's essay "new poetry" in _poetics journal_? can we thus hope actually to produce a meaningful discussion and not just a simulacrum of it? another problem that i find potentially present in the argument advanced by perloff and some other critics is reducing postmodernism from a culture's condition simply to a movement or even a sum total of stylistic devices (unfortunately, that also happens to be the predominant view of postmodernism expressed by the russian critics within the former soviet union). and, in my opinion, it is the question why the culture both in the us and in the former ussr has taken the forms it did, what are these changes symptomatic of, that needs most urgently to be addressed. it has been said at various occasions that "cultural phenomena that reached [russia] from the west. . . acquired features utterly unfamiliar to their progenitors and relate to their western kin only in name" (dmitrii prigov, interview in _poetics journal_ 8, pp. 12-13). many would argue that it were often not even the phenomena themselves but rather the names for them. the case often seems to be that the names were appropriated for various cultural practices which were not imported from the west, but conditioned in their emergence by russian culture's internal development. but the very fact that the shapes taken by this cultural production happened to have striking similarities with their western counterparts suggests that the homology goes further than it might seem at first; and one does not need to be labeled a slavophile when one asserts that sometimes russian practitioners of culture may even be ahead of their colleagues abroad (remember marinetti's amazement when upon his arrival in russia he was told by the russian futurists that he wasn't going far enough in handling language). marjorie perloff seizes upon the vague, almost "impressionistic" formulations ofepstein's account of contemporary russian poetry, easily susceptible to criticism. i would like to draw attention to another essay by epstein, "after the future: on the new consciousness in literature,"the english translation of which was published in the spring 1991 issue of _south atlantic quarterly_, one of the most noteworthy attempts to date of theorizing the cultural condition of the late soviet empire, stating that "by the 1980s, the basic premises ofartistic consciousness in [the ussr] were quite postmodern, perhaps even more radically and consistently than in the west." "was it not the case," writes epstein, that our culture began creating simulacra, that is, the utmost faithful copies that do not have an original, much earlier and in greater quantities that in the west? how does one have to deal with the figure of brezhnev, embodying the 'businesslike constructive approach' and 'the progressive development of the mature socialism?' in difference with the sinisterly modernist, kafkaesque figure of stalin [here epstein's point of view is akin to that of boris groys, elaborated in his the total art of stalinism: avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond (princeton, 1992), who interprets stalin's soviet union as a kind of wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, a total(itarian) work of art; this also leads us to assert once more the profound homology of totalitarianisms in the fascist and soviet states which both embarked on aesthetisizing the political project (see walter benjamin's "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" in his illuminations)], brezhnev is a typical simulacrum, a postmodernist perfunctory object, even a hyperrealistic object of some kind, behind which there is no reality to be found. long before the western video technology started creating in abundance true-to-life images of the nonexistent reality, this task was already being solved by our ideology, media, statistics that counted up to a hundredth of a percent the crop that had never been gathered." (440 [i have modified the translation to be closer to the original russian.]) "the triumph of the self-valorizing ideas," he continues, "that imitate and abolish reality assisted in creating the postmodernist mentality not less than the domination of video communications which also create the folded in itself world of the transfixed time" (443, modified translation again). since i have brought up boris groys's book which from the moment of its original publication in german provoked a heated debate among the academics engaged in the study of russian culture, i would like to point out some of this book's unquestionable merits. groys positions the cultural production which occasioned the present forum within the context of the soviet empire's own development. i strongly disagree with marjorie perloff when she talks about "the long midcentury hiatus of stalinist years." while from the point of view of aesthetic value (recently a very much attacked concept) culture of the stalin years probably loses the competition with cultural products of other times and places, its aesthetical system, its governing logic should by no means be discarded by a cultural theorist. recently there have been trends to explain stalinist art both as a modernist and as a postmodern phenomenon. in fact, in groys's book the two seem to be conflated, as manifested, for example, in his insightful remark that "stalinist culture looks upon itself as postapocalyptic--the final verdict on all human culture has already been passed." "socialist realism," groyscontinues, "regards historical time as ended and therefore occupies no particular place in it" (48, 49). of socialist realism's simulacric concern with verisimilitude he writes: its heroes . . . must thouroughly resemble people if people are not to be frightened by their true aspect, and this is why the writers and artists of socialist realism bustle about inventing biographies, habits, clothing, physiognomies, and so on. they almost seem to be in employ of some sort of extraterrestrial bureau planning a trip to earth--they want to make their envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the cracks in the mask. (63) we must, then, talk not about a russian postmodernism, but probably about three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of stalin years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new post-soviet culture which is probably emerging now. the culture that our forum is trying to address, then, could be named the postmodernism of the late (using both meanings of the word "late") soviet empire. the fascinatingly rich scene of the new russian poetry that emerged during the past fifteen years or so has been rather unlucky in the critical/theoretical treatment it received. attempts at analysis ended up in imposition of rigid classificatory grids (a project suspicious tobegin with), and if epstein's trichotomy "conceptualism/metarealism/presentism" offered in his essay "metamorphosis" (a bowdlerizedversion of which appears as an afterword to _third wave_) is debatable, wachtell's and parshchikov's pseudo-bakhtinian dichotomy "monological/pluralistic" found in their "introduction" to _thirdwave_, which happens to place all of conceptualists and those close to them under the former rubric, is hair-raising. the merit of"metamorphosis" is that, despite all its weaknesses, it is still the only attempt to date in any language to offer a somewhat coherent and inclusive picture of the new wave of russian poetry (why this wave should be counted "third" remains a mystery to me). perloff finds russian conceptualism not standing up to its name, seeing in it the urge to "expose." if anything, this urge to "expose" (inaugurated in russian culture by vissarion belinsky [1811-1848]) is something quite alien to the works in question; they do not"expose"--they deconstruct. in fact, they precisely "take up the challenge presented by duchamp" (perloff about western conceptualism). how else would you classify v. komar and a.melamid's gesture of signing the lenin "quotation" "our goal is communism"? (this quote was to be found multiplied through millions of posters all over the soviet union.) and, to look in the realm of poetry, doesn't, for example, such a specimen of american language poetry as bob perelman's poem "china," which fredric jameson analyses in his essay "postmodernism, or, the cultural logicof late capitalism," strikingly resemble "catalogs" by the russiancon ceptualist lev rubinshtein (which returns us to wachtell's and parshchikov's puzzling gesture of calling russian conceptualist poets "monological")? what, then, i would suggest as a possible course of discussion--which has already been begun by our forum and which should by all means be continued--is both to try to investigate the multiplicity of paradigms of postmodern cultural production in the former soviet empire, to try to single out in what and why it is both similar to and different from cultural phenomena found in the us and the rest of the western world, and, most importantly, to theorize these similarities and differences. a russian proverb says that "the first pancake comes out lumpy" (pervyi blin--komom). even if that might be the case, it should by no means stop us from frying more of them. vitaly chernetsky university of pa ---------------------------------------------------------- from: marjorie perloff <0004221898@mcimail.com> subject: vitaly chernetsky's essay this is precisely the sort of response i hoped the symposium would generate. vitaly chernetsky is right, of course, to say that my remarks were superficial; indeed, i only wanted to raise an issue that had come upbecause certain parallels were being drawn between the "language" poetsand "new russian" poets that i found dubious and i was having a hardtime finding a connection. it's still hard: for a foreigner to understand the modernist/postmodernist strains in the stalinist era is difficult and what we now need--and i hope will get from people like chernetsky--is afuller account than the one wachtel and parschchikov give us in third wave of what the cultural determinants are and now they relate. but i would like to ask chernetsky how he proposes that those of us with little or no russian begin? is there a bibliography he can suggest? an important cultural study that might help u.s. readers? i would be very grateful for such information. from the "lumpy pancake," marjorie perloff ---------------------------------------------------------- date: tue, 10 nov 1992 14:54:45 est from: bob perelman <bperelme@sas.upenn.edu> subject: russian postmodernism november 10: dear colleagues: my first impulse is toward what jakobson might term the phatic: hello, contact, tweet, cheep, bow-wow. lyn, if i had _the guard_ here i would love to quote the lines where you mime the operation of translating from the russian, to the effect that the dog says quack, the goat says gruss or whatever. that seems emblematic of the space between contemporary russian and american poetry. vitaly, when i read that "china" "strikingly resembles" lev rubinshtein's catalogs, it feels like "quack" where i expect "bow-wow." i.e., 8. foo! right here in nearby dale heartthrobs at the nightingale! 9. mischievous small nightingale singing always in the dale! . . . . 32. people surely get th' idea, if they're just not idiots! 33. people are not idiots, even if they miss th'idea! [_third wave_, 139, 141] there is something going on there involving, i would guess, sarcasm directed against the vatic mode; doggerel as vehicle for generous social emotion; repetion & permutation. but so much must be happening at the level of tone, aggressive echoes of cultural memory, that i'm at a loss to find much similarity to my own work. arcadii, rereading your "nasturtium," i thought of williams's "crimson cyclamen." not that the following sets of lines are all that much 'alike': blades pocked with repetition (forty seconds spent searching for an analogy to the upward branching at the throat of the stem--instead of this: "the emotions are a component of composition, and the expression, itself branching out into exclamation, means as much as the comma which proceeds its appearance") [_description, 99] the stem's pink flanges, strongly marked, stand to the frail edge, dividing, thinning through the pink and downy mesh--as the round stem is pink also--cranking to penciled lines angularly deft through all, to link together the unnicked argument to the last crinkled edge- where the under and the over meet and disappear and the air alone begins to go from them- the conclusion left still blunt, floating . . . . each petal tortured eccentrically the while, warped edge jostling half-turned edge side by side until compact, tense evenly stained to the last fine edge an ecstacy [_collected poems_, vol 1, 421, 423] it's just an analogy of course, but it strikes me that the distance between poem and flower, made central in "nasturtium" and refused if not refuted in "cyclamen," is like the distance between critical apprehension and poetry in many cases. in my own unofficial thought about these matters, and in the emphatically phatic contact zone of e-mail, such distances sholdn't exist, are false projections, reified backdrops for auratic arias. nevertheless, as williams puts it in "the descent": postmodernism beckons as modernism beckoned. critical genealogy is a kind of art prose, a sort of poetics, even a poem, since the lines it rewrites are new lines read by readers heretofore unaddressed, unmarked- since their eyes are focused on new media (even though formally these were unaccredited). no poem is made up entirely of language--since the channels it leases are always conduits formerly unarticulated. a world lost, a world unarticulated, beckons to new genres and no aesthetic value (trashed) is so valuable as the memory of value among others things, i hope the above will be heard as counterpoint to arcadii's "eroticism of for-getting." ---------------------------------------------------------- date: thu, 12 nov 1992 14:31:08 +0300 from: arkadii <atd@hm.spb.su> subject: idle talk dear colleagues, for me to answer some of the questions posed by mr. chernetsky or to oppose some of his arguments i would have to get back to my first remark about endless love of russian criticism to baudrillard's rhetoric which it believes is the most relevant instrument in studying the contemporary culture and the rest. but in this article i was most interested by some of his digressions which bring back memories of critical discourse of the time of socialist realism. so dear to the author of the article. for example "sometimes russians practicers of culture may even be ahead of their colleagues abroad"... certainly, nobody claims inventing postmodernism but still... sometimes it happens! but what on earth being ahead means? ahead of what? the head of a foreign colleague? then what is a system of coordinates for the action? what do we refer ourselves to? a beginning? then a beginning of what? or an end? an end of history? no matter what all the subsequent reflections of chernetsky on post-modernism will necessarily have to be looked at in the perspective of history reaching its completion. history which is not short of time, space or any features of creativity. background of orthodox vision is obvious even in the very beginning of the passage quoted by chernetsky, from michael epshtain "our culture began creating simulacra (sic!) <...> much erlyer and in greater quantities..." . that is for sure. dating back to the polemics of the nicaea council in 767 on _kenosis_ through the endless discussions of symbolism and up to the very recent past... in fact, all of this reminds of an attempt to play a game of chess using go stones. as much as michael epshtain's poetic taxonomy. just in case, one should keep in mind that it owes a lot to goethe's theory of metamorphosis which according to kassirer "fundamental altered the biological ideal of knowledge". and so on, and so forth. meanwhile, to touch again our favorite conceptualism again seems pointless it's as infinite as any other projection. but sometimes i can't but ponder whether the known slogan %jedem das seine% can become a cliche which being involved into the practice of ironic rethinking would become a %surplus meaning% of today's culture. lyn hejinian is right -irony is a twin sister of nostalgia. arkadii dragomoshchenko. ---------------------------------------------------------- from: mikhail epstein, department of russian studies, 403 candler library, emory university, atlanta, ga 30322. to: editors of pmc and all participants of the discussion on russian postmodernism. november 15, 1992 dear colleagues and friends: i am entering the discussion with a delay because of my inability to cope with such a "postmodern" technical device as e-mail, which argues in favor of those who resist any parallels between russian and western "postmodern" mentalities. my theoretical standpoint, however, is the relevance of these typological parallels: not in the sense that russia belatedly "caught up with" the western postmodernism, but in terms of their "alternate" (and complementary) developments, in such a way that russia was the first to embrace the "post-apocalyptic" sensibility of postmodernism, whereas the west was the first to identify this sensibility in theoretical concepts and to give it the name of "postmodernism." vitaly chernetsky's proposal "to talk not about a russian postmodernism, but probably about three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of stalin years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new post soviet culture which is probably emerging now" seems to me the most promising point of departure and the possible core of our subsequent discussion. vitaly chernetsky refers to boris grois's book which regards stalin's state as the fulfillment of modernist (avant-gardist) project; it should be added that the accomplishment of such a project (if it really was a success) transported russian-soviet culture into a new, postmodernist, "post-apocalyptic" dimension. no more tension between the modernist project and reality: this is already postmodernism (at least the gates to this kingdom of simulacra). i suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the western one. the paper was presented at the mla conference in december 1991, at the same panel with marjorie perloff's and barrett watten's papers now proposed for this discussion. also, i will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely "ideological", "eastern" version of postmodernism as opposed to fredric jameson's influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non western countries (mikhail epstein, _relativistic patterns in totalitarian thinking: an inquiry into soviet ideological language_. kennan institute of advanced russian studies. occasional papers, # 243. washington: woodrow wilson international center for scholars, 1991). what i am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism" became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). in particular, i would like to address you to the articles of vyacheslav kuritsyn "post-modernism: new ancient culture" and sergei nosov "literature and play", accompanied by editorial comments in _novyi mir_ (moscow), 1992, no.2. pp.225-239. [editor's note: mikhail epstein's work is included in the file sympos-2.193 in this issue of pmc.] ---------------------------------------------------------- date: sun, 22 nov 1992 12:02:21 est from: "(james english)" <jenglish@sas.upenn.edu> subject: vitaly c. remarks to the symposium participants: here is a follow-up correspondence on the third wave from vitaly chernetsky. --jim english dear bob, dear colleagues: it is always a dangerous enterprise to offer a reading (especially a sketchy one) in the presence of the author(s) of the text(s) one is talking about. i still believe that comparing bob's "china" to some of lev rubinshtein's work (notice: i am not attempting to establish an equation between larger corpuses of their works) is not entirely a misreading (a "quack" when on expects a "bow-wow"). by the way, in russian the ducks say "krya-krya" and the dogs say "gav-gav," but still one can say with a degree of certainty that russian ducks and dogs (and other creatures) "strikingly resemble" their american counterparts. i would even venture to extend this comparison: i believe that rubinshtein is not only about doggerel-like lines as "vehicle for social emotion" (see, for example, the other catalog included in third wave, "from thursday to friday" [bob quotes "a little nighttime serenade"]). i apologize for not being able to present here, due to time constrains, a convincing proof of my argument, but let me elaborate the parallel a little more. i do find some of rubinshtein's texts ("poiavlenie geroia" ["the appearance of the hero"], "vse dal'she i dal'she" ["further and further on"] and others) to some extent "perelmanian," while in some of bob's poems (here i would mention, in addition to "china," "holes in the argument" and "doggerel overtaken by order") i see a mode present which is similar to that of some of the writings of, say, rubinshtein or druk. a few words about third wave. producing an anthology of the new russian poetry in english is a most praiseworthy idea. i believe, however, that the "pancake" offered by this book is much too "lumpy." to my knowledge, another such anthology is being prepared for publication (as far as i can understand, completely independently from third wave). i hope that it avoids some of third wave's drawbacks (although that could be problematic, too: the project is "marred" by the involvement of yevtushenko as a co-editor). first, why third wave? the title is misleading, because the term "third wave" is customarily applied to the culture of the russian emigration of the brezhnev years (joseph [or iosif, but, for heavens sake, not "josef," as it is in the introduction to third wave] brodsky, sasha sokolov, vasily aksenov, sergei dovlatov, lev losev, bakhyt kenzheev, yuz aleshkovsky, etc.). in fact, a collection of essays entitled exactly the third wave and devoted to these and other writers of that generation was recently published in this country. if anything, the emergence on the literary scene of the generation represented in the anthology in question is posterior to "third wave." (besides, virtually all of the poets represented in the anthology did not emigrate from the soviet union in the brezhnev era.) second, the choice of poems is sometimes surprising (although perhaps it is not the editors' fault), and omissions of certain poets (igor' irten'ev, evgenii bunimovich, aleksandr levin and mikhail sukhotin to mention just a few) are hard to explain (as well as perhaps the inclusion of some of the others). most importantly, i think that in this particular case the fact that the original texts are not printed together with the translations is especially unpardonable: the russian publications of these poems are dispersed between various official and underground journals, almanacs, collections, etc.; there does not yet exist a single representative anthology of the writings of this generation in their original language. this is even more true when one considers the fact that some of the translations of these poems, in which the play with linguistic and cultural codes is one of the most relevant elements of construction, are not entirely reliable; in my opinion, vladimir druk was particularly unlucky in this respect, and i could list dozens of other instances where i disagree with the translations offered. it would be unfair, though, not to add at this point that some of the translations, for example those by michael palmer, are excellent. one of the most problematic parts of third wave is the introduction by parshchikov and wachtell. some of their assertions simply run counter to historical facts. (they claim, for example, that mayakovsky and blok were "unpublishable in the ussr between 1934 and the late 1950s" while these two have been part even of the secondary school curriculum.) the most questionable, though, is the pseudo-bakhtinian dichotomizing division to which i referred earlier; the mere reading of the works by the "monological" and "pluralistic" poets (to call postmodern poetry "monological" hardly makes sense to begin with) unsettles it completely. and do we really have, in our postmodern age, to be fed explanations in terms of binary oppositions? thus the anthology is framed by two highly idiosyncratic texts (the introduction and epstein's afterword), abounding in various undercurrents evident to the reader familiar with the poetry in question, which may serve only as an element of confusion (the way they confused, i believe, marjorie perloff). finally, third wave is not, as it claims to be, the first anthology of new russian poetry to be published in english. it was preceded by the poetry of perestroika, ed. peter mortimer and s.j. litherland, published in britain two years ago. a note about the possibility of homologies between the cultural phenomena in the us and in the former ussr. one should talk, i believe, not about the homology of movements, but about a number of similarities, certain shared aspects of the postmodern cultural condition. as far movements go, russian conceptualism is the only actual movement among the classificatory terms we are offered in third wave (there isn't a "metarealist movement" or school, etc.). this movement spans across genres: visual arts (including happenings and performances, and through them, avant-garde theater); poetry; prose; most recently -film. together with the conceptualists, under the same cover (and within the same "umbrella" groups, such as the moscow club "poetry" [moskovskii klub "poeziia"], which are highly heterogeneous), one finds poets whose writing is much more hermetic and esoteric, whose writing practice is to a great extent conditioned by the situation of a narrow circle; in some bizarre way they resurrect the paradigm of poetry's existence in medieval europe before printing -poetry circulating within a limited circle of friends and patrons. emerging from underground in the second half of the 1980s, these heterogeneous literary groups developed differently. some came into the foreground of the cultural scene, gaining attention of the critics and the media, etc.; some remained "widely known in narrow circles." it is really sad, though, that sometimes these circles are much too narrow; and in this respect i especially welcome the happy event of the present symposium which breaks through the barriers of these narrow circles. once again, i believe that the new russian poetry is fascinatingly rich and diverse, just like the entire culture of the soviet postmodern. we need more events like this one to open it up to intellectual communities across the globe so that it achieves the recognition it deserves. sincerely, vitaly chernetsky --------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 23 nov 1992 07:42:00 gmt from: marjorie perloff <0004221898@mcimail.com> subject: vitaly chernetsky's commentary dear colleagues, i just read vitaly chernetsky's comments on the third wave and want to say i appreciate them very much. i myself had wondered about the title, the lack of bilingual texts, and some of the translations. i could not judge the omissions. i also had reservations about the monologic/dialogic dichotomy that andrei and andy wachtel sketched out. still, i think we should be grateful for third wave as a first stab at the problem. the difficulty, when material is so new, is that translations will vary greatly in quality, that the editing will be less than meticulous, and that introductions and afterwords may be misleading. on the other hand, andrew wachtel, working with alexei parschikov, was willing to take on the project and to see it through and, given time constraints, translation problems, and availability of materials, i think it was useful. clearly, it will take some time before we get the kind of anthology we want and, even then, what anthology, even of our own poetry, is ever ideal, ever comprehensive? increasingly, u.s. publishers are reluctant to print the original language when they bring out translations; i know ron padgett had to fight to get the french into his beautiful edition of blaise cendrars's poetry--and then only in the back of the book! the real problem the third wave has faced--and i don't know how this will be resolved--is that unfortunately now that the soviet union is no more americans have become much less interested in the "new new poetry," have lost the thrill of coming into contact with "forbidden" perestroika poetry. now russian poetry is just one more foreign poetry and increasingly, u.s. readers seem not to care too much about poetry in other languages. so what we need to do is keep up the momentum initiated by third wave, even if the anthology is flawed. this symposium and the help people like chernetsky have given is a step in the right direction. and i look forward to that next anthology he talks about. best wishes, marjorie perloff -----------------------end of sympos-1.193--------------------- silverman, 'playing with clothes', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-silverman-playing.txt playing with clothes by debra silverman dept. of english, university of southern california dsilverm@scf.usc.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by debra silverman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: garber, marjorie. _vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety_. new york: routledge, 1992. [1] in march, the women's ncaa basketball championship was played in atlanta, georgia, and for the first time in many years the event was sold out. the sell-out warranted a lot of notice in the printed press and on the television news- the men's tournament always sold out but women's basketball had been all but neglected in the past few years. the rise of women's basketball had already been making headlines in the _los angeles times_, where a story on the women's team at stanford noted that the women's games were frequently selling out this season while the men's games were marked by numerous empty seats. according to the _times_, fans are appreciating the new athleticism of female players, particularly of stars such as texas tech's sheryl swoops, who has been said to run the fast break as well as any male player. but many sports writers and radio call-in jocks have been dismayed by the sudden popularity of the women's sport and by the media attention it has received, proclaiming that too much tv time has been taken away from the male players. on one call-in program a male viewer complained, "it's not as if we really want to watch a bunch of girls run around a basketball court." it seems that men, players and sports aficionados alike, felt for the first time this season that their all-male space was being threatened. it was an anxious moment for men's basketball. [2] but it has been an anxious cultural moment for women in the sport, as well. another l.a. _times_ article, which appeared at the end of last year's tournament, is symptomatic. entitled "lesbian issue stirs discussion" (april 16, 1992), the article engages the all too familiar conflation of discussions of women athletes with discussions of sexual preference. the "lesbian issue" was precipitated by comments from penn state women's basketball coach rene portland--her team rules include the mandate "no lesbians." julie cart, _times_ staff writer, sets out to investigate the history of this mandate and the problematic relationship between women athletes and their perceived (homo)sexuality. cart concludes that, "being perceived as a lesbian in the women's sports world often carries the same stigma as %being% a lesbian." the way in which one's sexuality is perceived is just as potent as how one represents her own sexuality. [3] in an effort to confuse (or perhaps illuminate) the boundaries between "being" and "seeming," women athletes have turned to traditional "feminine" tactics. cart notes that "to counter the perception of lesbianism, some female athletes adopt %compensatory% behavior" (emphasis added). by femme-ing up, wearing make-up while competing and dressing in "ultra-feminine" clothing when not on the court, players have marked their ("seeming") heterosexuality with a vengeance. pat griffin, a former basketball coach who currently conducts seminars on homophobia for collegiate sports programs, calls this compensation "hetero-sexy." indeed, there has been a longstanding tradition of making female athletes seem more like women and less like men. cart turns to mariah burton nelson, a former stanford player, as confirmation of this tradition. when hired by the l.a. dreams, one of the short-lived women's pro teams, nelson and her teammates were told to enter charm school. if we can judge by last year's film _a league of their own_, these basketball players were not the first female athletes sent for etiquette lessons. in penny marshall's film, set in the 1940's, female baseball players learned to sip tea, to apply their make-up properly, and to play baseball in skirts. such calculated displays of "femininity" were meant to combat the spectacle of the masculine woman. [4] one might wonder why a review of marjorie garber's excellent and comprehensive study _vested interests_ begins with a discussion of women's basketball. on the surface, it seems that what we have is a simple example of machismo--the desire that men's space be men's space and that women not confuse the issue by playing sports. nor should women ever confuse or challenge gender expectations--it is not expected or widely accepted that women should desire a career in basketball. simultaneously, we have a confirmation of the long standing acceptance of homophobia in our culture- spectators look past the performer, here a basketball player, to what might potentially go on in the locker room. i would like to argue a third possibility which intersects with garber's book. the women talked about in the _times_ article were women playing with drag--dressing up as women to make sure that they would not be (mis)taken for someone or something else. rather than covering up gender, their drag performances displace sexuality. the femme, female athletes use the markers of femininity as expressions of self-representation; markers that culture can easily read. i also want to suggest that their dressing up, cross dressing for societal consumption, creates many of the same anxieties that garber examines and negotiates so well in _vested interests_. [5] garber's book is a combination of literary and cultural criticism. its episodic and anecdotal moments work beautifully with theoretical interventions into discussions of postmodern gender configurations. much like donna haraway's ground breaking "a cyborg manifesto" which challenged the fixed nature of two terms, male and female, by introducing a third term, the cyborg, garber's theory insists on the discussion of three terms: male, female, and transvestite. in her analysis, the transvestite is not a side-effect of culture, an interesting thing to look past while being entertained. her third term is the defining point of culture. as she writes in the introduction, "the 'third' is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge" (11). the third term--transvestite--throws gender categories into a state of "category crisis" which we must see as "not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself" (16). in other words, for garber, crisis defines culture--and the transvestite figure defines the space of crisis negotiation, and hence of cultural re-definition or transformation. [6] maneuvering her critical readings toward an examination of cultural anxiety about transvestites, garber distinguishes her project from those which have preceded it. "the appeal of cross-dressing," she observes, "is clearly related to its status as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories." but the tendency on the part of many critics has been to look %through% rather than %at% the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders. to elide and erase--or to %appropriate% the transvestite for particular political and critical aims. (9) garber will insist on the third term as the marker of entry into the symbolic, training her readers to look %at% the transvestite and read this figure as the site of cultural confusion and anxiety. [7] at its heart, _vested interests_ is a book about blurred boundaries. many things happen when we really look at a transvestite figure instead of incorporating its "mode of articulation" into comfortable categories of gender identification. many boundaries are crossed. it becomes difficult or impossible to explain away the transvestite or fit the cross-dresser into a specific cultural niche. garber continually reminds us that "%transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture%: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male, and female, but the crisis of category itself" (17). in this respect, garber's position can be placed alongside judith butler's theorization of identity in _gender trouble_ (routledge 1990). both writers suggest that finding true identity is never fully possible as the truth is always already constructed by gendered expectations. in other words, it is not just about peeling back layers of clothing to find the truth of gender under the clothes. what is always at stake is what butler calls the "parody" of the original, "[a] parodic proliferation [which] deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of its claim to naturalized or essentialized gender identities" (138). [8] garber's book is divided into two large sections, "transvestite logics," which seeks to show "the way transvestism creates culture," and "transvestite effects," which explores how "culture creates transvestites" (16). "transvestite logics" is the more important half of the book. here garber establishes her theoretical parameters and sets her theories into place. but the entire book, which moves on a trajectory from the culturally and legally imposed rules of dress and behavior, to the ways in which these play themselves out in our need for the transvestite, is of considerable interest. garber finds entertaining examples and compelling evidence for her theories in all corners of western culture--from the shakespearean stage and medieval sumptuary laws to a cross-dressed ken doll and elvis's clothes, from manuals for women on how to cross-dress as men to madonna. the book is rich in beautiful photographs, drawings and film stills. taken together, these many examples and illustrations highlight the problematic status of transvestite figures and confirm garger's argument that even in persecuting cross-dressers we express our fundamental dependence on them as the crisis points of cultural negotiation. [9] a brief tour of some chapters will suggest the main contours of this complex and involved book. "transvestite logics" begins with "dress codes, or the theatricality of difference," which explores sumptuary laws in medieval and renaissance england and their function in enforcing social hierarchy. in elizabethan england gender and status confusion became fashionable, causing an official stigmatization of "excess" in clothing. this excess becomes the space of the transvestite. in the two subsequent sections, garber investigates modern instances of cross-dressed shakespeare using the actor sir laurence olivier and actresses such as sarah bernhardt to offer the possibility that transvestite theater is the norm, rather than an aberration. transvestite theater signifies impersonation itself, garber argues, concluding that "there is no ground of shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed" (40). all the world really %is% a stage. this initial staging sets the tone for a lot of what will follow. in part, garber's book is about excesses of all sorts--excessive behavior, excessive clothing styles, excessive masquerades and parades of gender confusions. it is about excessive body modifications and about pushing the limits of our everyday performances. therefore, garber's point of entry, by way of a historical narrative/analysis of sumptuary laws, sets the scene(s) for the investigations that will follow. from the very outset, garber urges us to read cultural staging and plotting in exciting and revealing ways. [10] "spare parts: the surgical construction of gender" is a fascinating study of transsexualism, both female-to-male and male-to-female, using psychoanalytic theories in a discussion of male subjectivity. this chapter is particularly interesting when read with the question of excess in mind. to change one's gender, to construct or deconstruct the proper parts, is a radical way to stage gender. here garber asserts that "the transvestite and the transsexual both define and problematize the entire concept of 'male subjectivity'" (98). since this subjectivity can be surgically constructed, garber's analysis obviously calls into question the viability of any essentialist orientation towards gender. if one can construct the gender s/he is, then the "natural" demarcations of difference (and desire) cannot in any sense be essential. [11] garber's assertion, in the introduction, that "to ignore the role played by homosexuality would be to risk a radical misunderstanding of the social and cultural implications of cross-dressing" (4) leads her to chapter six, "breaking the code: transvestism and gay identity." this chapter's organizing caveat is the assertion that no matter how intertwined homosexuality and transvestism are, "neither can simply be transhistorically 'decoded' as a sign for the other" (131). the section "transvestite panic" uses eve sedgwick's model of homosexual panic to describe the anxiety over the cross-dresser in gay society. later, garber examines the colonization of gay styles and sensibilities by straight society, using, as examples, the current vogue of camp and the eternal vogue of gay fashion and fashion designers. [12] "transvestite effects" turns its attention more firmly to popular culture. chapters nine and eleven stand out in this section. "religions habits" (chapter 9) draws a connection between cross-dressing and religion. this is an interesting section on the perceived effeminacy of the jew in various places and periods, as well as the relationship, often quite complicated, between the construction of the jew and the construction of the male homosexual. "black and white tv: cross-dressing the color line" (chapter 11) discusses the question of race and the related subjects of minstrelsy and passing. this is an important and insightful chapter. garber asserts that "the overdetermined presence of cross-dressing in so many western configurations of black culture suggests some useful ways to interrogate notions of 'stereotype' and "cliche'" (268). with attention to these stereotypes, garber artfully and intelligently delineates the ways in which "the use of elements of transvestism by black performers and artists as a strategy for economic, political and cultural achievement . . . marks the translation of a mode of oppression and stigmatization into a supple medium for social commentary and aesthetic power" (303). [13] despite the many strengths of this book, there were two things about it that i found troublesome. the first is that garber does not pay enough attention to women in drag. her only extended discussion of how women fit into the analysis is in the chapter "fetish envy," the briefest chapter of the book. part of what garber does here is use madonna to explore the possibility of simultaneously having and not having a penis. her conclusion: playing with these positions can be an empowering gesture. and certainly garber is right to observe that when madonna squeezes her crotch on stage it is funny and offensive precisely because it plays on the joke of having and not having--it mocks the freudian desire for what is not there. but since this sort of female fetishism plays only a contributing role in garber's book, serving to extend or elaborate her theorizations of male transvestitism, the discussion of madonna's cultural role, and of female drag in general, is closed down all too quickly. garber, it seems to me, is too willing to leave women on the margins of transvestite theory. and the result is that she has missed an opportunity to explore the sort of cultural terrain i began with--the staging of "femininity" by women whose threatening "masculinity" requires that they in effect perform in drag. of course garber had to place some kinds of limits on her research. but it is a decided weakness that her book has so little to say about women in drag, and that when it broaches the issue at all it is only to situate women in relation to the fetish, positioning them once again as the troubled objects of fetishism. [14] the second trouble spot was pointed out to me by a friend and grows out of what we see as a dangerous trajectory initiated by garber's sixth chapter. in a recent article, eve sedgwick remarks that "gender theory at this moment is talking incessantly about crossdressing %in order% never to have to talk about homosexuality." cross-dressing has been used to allude to gay male culture by an operation similar to the "open secret" of homosexuality: "everyone already knows" that cross-dressing and male homosexuality are intimately connected, so the fact of homosexuality can both be avoided and commented on through a discourse on transvestism. sedgwick sees cross-dressing as a kind of veil or displacement, and the proliferating academic literature on cross-dressing as a discursive closet. i find sedgwick's position very persuasive. i also believe that if we are searching for a theory of cross-dressing as a truly effective transgressive practice, one of the most fruitful sites to examine would be the intersection of cross-dressing and gay political action. clearly, this in itself would not solve the problem of academic or cultural displacement, but i find it troubling that garber does not even look to these political spaces. [15] on march 31, 1993 anji xtravaganza died in new york from an aids-related liver disease. anji was one of the queens featured in jennie livingston's documentary _paris is burning_. on april 19, 1993, the _new york times_ ran an article both on anji xtravaganza and the new york drag world. entitled "film, fame, then fade-out: the drag world in collapse," the article reports that numerous deaths have decimated the new york drag community. simultaneously, the writer notes that drag has arrived in prime time; with the appearance of dame edna everage on tv and ru paul on magazine covers, nobody need seek out the new york vogue houses. middle-class americans can watch drag performances from the comfort of their own living rooms. this would seem to indicate that garber's assertions about transvestite culture are true: there is nothing without the transvestite, the figure who confounds our sense of identity while at the same time constructing who we are. describing the last days of anji xtravaganza, jesse green writes that the liver disease was "destroying [anji's] hard won femininity." green reports that near the end anji had to stop taking the hormones which were inadvertantly helping the progress of the disease. green notes, "in later pictures you can see the masculine lines of angie's [sic] face re-emerging despite the make-up." for green, there must always be something else behind the make-up which disease(s) can devastatingly reveal--there is inevitably a re-emergence of what green reads as "true" identity. it is the strength of garber's book to make us aware of just how spurious this underlying or final truth really is--to show us that there is always something else behind the something else behind the make-up. what is always still underneath, and can never fully be revealed, is anji's most complex layer; neither a "true" nor a "made-up" identity, but a third term, that which both defies and defines anji's "masculinity" and "feminity." [16] in _vested interests_ marjorie garber has managed to traverse the spaces of this third term--some of the most difficult terrain in contemporary gender studies--with the style and grace of sheryl swoops leading a fast break, or anji xtravaganza sashaying down a runway. it's a performance not to be missed. wahl, 'bodies and technologies: _dora_, _neuromancer_, and strategies of resistance', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-wahl-bodies.txt bodies and technologies: _dora_, _neuromancer_, and strategies of resistance by wendy wahl department of english university of vermont w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by wendy wahl, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] high technology networks make possible the deluge of texts surrounding us. we swim in the flow of information, and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations and representations. high technology has changed the way capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format of this journal. a new relationship between bodies and technologies is, seemingly, unprecedented in modern capitalism. donna haraway, in her "manifesto for cyborgs" (1985), writes of a post-natural present in which "late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. our machines are frighteningly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" (152). [2] after all, the human capacity to generate or make sense of information has been surpassed by computers, and challenged by the deluge of texts (literal, aural, visual) that surround us. baudrillard's response to this deluge is triggered by a quick spin of the radio dial: "i no longer succeed in knowing what i want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard" (132). [3] theorists from many disciplines are engaged in the process of articulating the function and effects of high technology; many have argued, as baudrillard has, that the human condition has been transformed by the encounter with the unique and unprecedented power of high technology. assuming a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology is dangerous; this assumption obviates important precedents that may help us to strategize some resistance to a "gradual and willing accommodation of the machine" (gibson, 203). freud's clinical methods, and his construction of the relationship between patient and therapist, for example, are strikingly similar to the current encounter between bodies and technologies. a look at freud's account of his treatment of dora makes obvious this decidedly low-tech version of a "deluge of texts," and shows the way in which this therapeutic construct incorporated resistance. what are the possibilities for resistance to this new deluge? this question has provided the impetus for a vital, and absolutely necessary, discussion of strategies. as i will show in this essay, these responses are symptomatic of the failure of resistance to technologies of the early twentieth century. strategies of resistance are often incorporated into systems, strengthening that which is being resisted. juliet mitchell has described the function of this resisting space: "[resistance] is set up precisely as its own ludic space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic alternative. it is not that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within terms of that law" (mitchell, 1982). [4] i hope to provide some strategies, and historical warnings, that may help one actualize and resist power at a time when the possibility of doing so seems dismal. haraway reminds us, with hope and pragmatism, that "we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people" (165). this "historical system" includes the interaction between bodies and technologies and the implications of these encounters, which are referred to in this essay as "cyborg politics." the origin of cyborg politics doesn't begin with the late twentieth century, however, but with the broad tradition of positing scientific and technical solutions to free humans from pain and to solve problems of the human condition, particularly problems that originate not with the machine or technology, but within the body. foucault has given us a description of the emergence of bio-technical power in the seventeenth century; his description of this power maps onto our twentieth century concern with bodies and technologies: discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology. (206) [5] within an early twentieth-century foucaultian formation, freud emerges as the mental technologist and industrialist, producing the truth of mind and body within the critical tools of psychotherapy. freud constructed a method whereby the mind, largely abandoned to the world of religious therapies, was treated by empiricists, and built upon the work of the psychiatrists of the french school: charcot, georget, and pinel (goldstein, 134-166). [6] psychotherapy was a new disciplinary technology, unique unto science because it treated the mind as a machine (a method previously visited upon the body). freud ushered in the western twentieth century with this industrialist approach to the soul, fracturing the inner self in two: "conscious" and "unconscious" drives. within this new science, and in freud's clinical approach, the cartesian dualism of mind/body breaks down: "mind" has been divided into conscious/unconscious. as a result, "mind" is no longer one unitary term that can correspond to its binary opposite, "body." this disruption could be promising: mind/body corresponded to male/female, and it would seem that this pair of binary oppositions would no longer be able to function with respect to gender. yet this deconstruction of oppositional pairs serves to strengthen others, and raises some thorny questions for freud's treatment of dora. [7] what, then, becomes of the relationship between mind and body within the freudian construct? if there is a disruption of the mind/body dualism when the "mind" has been fractured into two distinct entities, how does this affect clinical practice? freud changed these pairs or, at the least, expanded the way they function: the patient's experiences, as described by the patient, were informed by the unconscious mind in a way that was not evident to the patient. in deconstructing the mind/body separation, freud constructed a new oppositional pair in its place, that of the conscious/unconscious. the relations between the conscious mind and body were obvious to the patient, but those were less important for fixing the machine than was the relationship between the unconscious mind and body. if this relationship was the arbiter of the body's functions and of the conscious mind, how could one go about fixing it? one couldn't; a therapist had to be called in for repair. the "unconscious" drives were given over to the interpretation of the therapist. in treating the machinery of the mind, freudian therapists were given the interpretive duty of constructing desire and representing the inner self. philip reiff, in his introduction to _dora_, captures the perfect circularity of freudian psychotherapy as enacted in clinical practice: by presuming the patient incapable of an impartial judgment, the therapist is empowered to disregard the patient's denials.... a patient says: "you may think i meant to say something insulting but i've no such intention. . . . from this the analyst may conclude, "so, she does mean to say something insulting...." (15) [8] it is also evident in reiff's description that resistance against a therapist is incorporated, and neutralized, within therapy. the freudian therapeutic situation is a cybernetic network in which resistance functions to support the system. it is in this clinical practice that any potential disruption of dualisms promised in freudian theory were recuperated. that freud has constructed an impenetrable defense for the therapist is obvious. in retrospect, it's easy (albeit reductive) to view freud's incorporation of resistance into therapies (as a prerequisite for therapy) as a frustrated empiricist's attempt to fit the mind into the structure of empiricism. [9] the patient/therapist opposition was constructed in place of the mind/body opposition, and re-enacted as male/female. perhaps freud's construction of an impenetrable position for therapists, and an utterly penetrated position for patients, created a backlash against the material moment when male/female became disengaged from mind/body. at any rate, the context is utterly changed for a patient of psychotherapy. the beginnings of an answer to the question of gender difference in the therapist/patient relationship lie in asking the following question: who is treated and why? men were rarely caught on the "penetrated" side of the therapist/patient relationship. although male/female no longer enacted mind/body, another structure excluded men from needing this interpretive therapy: the impetus for treatment is resistance on the part of the patient. philip reiff characterized the category of patient in his introduction to _dora_ when he wrote that, "the neurotic makes too many rejections" (16). [10] although men were no longer excluded from the category of patient, having unconscious drives themselves, the prerequisite for treatment was often hysteria or neurosis. hysteria was a term used to categorize actions seen, historically, as being particular to women, although freud and the paris school's characterization of hysteria did not expressly exclude men. jan goldstein has documented that hysteria was flirted with by most of the nineteenth-century french male novelists, and she argues that the literary interest in such a disease "included as one of its components a fascination with this 'otherness,' a tendency to recognize in it aspects of the self and to enlist it in the service of self-discovery" (138). goldstein's theory would also explain why flaubert never entered into therapy, despite identifying himself as an hysteric. in his fiction, flaubert wrote of hysteria only through female characters, as did all the other french novelists mentioned in goldstein's essay. [11] dora's treatment, after all, was not in the interest of self-discovery, but in the interest of her father. dora had been brought to freud in an effort to get dora to accept her father's affair with frau k. the father also needed dora to respond to herr k so that he could get his game of partner-swapping to continue to go smoothly: he attempts to swap "partners" with herr k by offering his daughter, dora, to herr k, in exchange for herr k's wife. this play of substitutions, begun by the father, certainly asks to be seen as a machine. this is a desiring machine in which substitutions can be made: there are slots to be filled (so to speak) that eclipse an individual desire to be in that position. this is particularly true in dora's case. when dora was put into treatment, freud writes that "[s]he objected to being pulled into the game entirely, at the same time she was fascinated by it and wanted to play" (34). by the time treatment had begun, dora was suicidal, and had been resisting herr k.'s advances, the first of which occurred when she was 14 years old. "he suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. this was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. but dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust and tore herself free from the man . . ." (43). [12] freud writes that "the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical" because she did not have the "genital sensation which would have certainly been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances" (44). dora's resistance to herr k.'s advances provided freud with the cornerstone of the psychology of the neuroses: reversal of affect. without dora's bodily resistance to herr k., freud would never have been able to treat her in the first place. without dora's repeated verbal resistance to freud's suppositions, he couldn't have written in the "repressed" desires for nearly everyone in the "game." [13] interestingly enough, in his interpretation of schreber's _memoirs of my nervous illness_, freud didn't perceive any indications that this approach could inhibit treatment by negating the patient's interpretations. freud's textual analysis of the _memoirs_, titled "psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides)", ignores the obvious: schreber is able to treat himself via his own process of writing and interpretation. [14] schreber writes of his "gratitude" toward professor fleschig, his doctor, for helping scheber to recover, but in a manner "so hedged with doubts and reservations that it subverts the expressed appreciation" (chabot, 16). schreber doesn't give credit for his recovery to the doctor who was in charge of his treatment, and blames this on the doctor's inability to recognize his patient as "a human being of high intellect, of uncommon keenness of understanding and acute powers of observation" (_memoirs_, 62). what does this tell us about freud's understanding of schreber's treatment? freud didn't extrapolate schreber's therapeutic process to his own clinical method; he ignores that schreber's experience points to the healing power of a patient's interpretation. the patient's story, moreover, must not be systematically negated, as in the treatment of dora. [15] c. barry chabot examines these texts in his book _freud on schreber_, and writes that "schreber's understanding of his experiences . . . evolved with his progress on the manuscript: the act of writing was for him an act of revision"; "[m]oreover, writing his memoirs, an act that . . . played a role in [schreber's] eventual release from sonnenstein, was itself restorative" (7). schreber produced texts, as freud did. schreber's ability to heal himself is evinced in the act of writing his _memoirs_: schreber's "revision" and interpretation of his own experience is the therapeutic process by which he heals himself. chabot makes a compelling case for the clinical and literary interpretations as being intertwined, such is "the nature of the interpretive process, be it literary or clinical" (11). [16] it can be argued that dora does produce her own narrative, but this is used by and subsumed within freud's interpretation in clinical practice and, more permanently, within freud's written texts. schreber's interpretation existed outside of the formal or institutional therapy he received. freud's textual analysis of schreber's memoirs was just that: a textual exploration outside of clinical contact with the patient; as such, freud's analysis never affected schreber. in freudian clinical practice, the interpretive process that schreber used to successfully treat himself would have been used against him by the therapist. reiff writes that freud "speaks of using facts against the patient and reports, with some show of triumph (this is no mean adversary), how he overwhelmed dora with interpretations, pounding away at her argument, until dora...'disputed the facts no longer.' yet these facts were none of them visible; they were all of them of the highest order, taking their life from the precise truth of freud's multiple analytic thrusts into her unconscious" (16). [17] the act of interpretation was the province of the therapist alone, and was used to engulf the patient with "indisputable facts." these critics continue to argue for a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology, yet the "invisible facts" referred to by reiff could easily characterize baudrillard's vision of the late twentieth century: "in any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extension of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies" (132). this "forced injection" into baudrillard's as-yet unpenetrated interior mimics freud's act of "pounding away" at dora with his interpretations. baudrillard's profile of the new subject, assaulted on all sides by "those who want to make themselves heard" doubles for the freudian patient: "he is now a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence" (133). what baudrillard can't accept, obviously, are the multiple "thrusts" into his neutral terminal. using theory to play with the loss of his private past and with the disruption of his position as subject, baudrillard recalls flaubert's flirtation with hysteria. [18] fredric jameson's response to the problem of subjectivity also evokes the nineteenth-century french novelists; he writes that "only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ which is our capacity to organize and live time historically" (523). in arguing for some sort of analytical prowess of which we are not capable at the moment, jameson is putting the hope for a solution in a neo-freudian construct: if we could only think ourselves away from the matrix, it would no longer penetrate us. this may be possible for jameson or baudrillard, but what about haraway or myself? i mistrust that totalizing logic which would also exclude me; as a woman, i am linked by the system of significations to that repressed "other" against which this new "narrative dislocation" is posed. baudrillard's nostalgia for a private past, and jameson's characterization of the current condition as a sickness (needing analytic therapy), exclude the object, locating interiority once again within their experience. [19] the pentrator/penetrated relationship is gender-neutral in freudian theory but enacted as male/female in clinical praxis; will baudrillard's theoretical loss of subjectivity be recuperated in the practice of technology? the reaction to no longer being excluded from the category of patient or hysteric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century parallels the reaction of men in this late twentieth century who are no longer excluded from the category of "penetrated." this reaction is utterly significant: in a backlash against inclusion (signaled by the paranoid reactions of flaubert, jameson, and baudrillard), the function of freudian therapy (_dora_) and technologies of the bodies (_neuromancer_) is to keep gender opposition active. it's a fascinating pattern: baudrillard's paranoid reaction to being a receiving terminal, penetrated continually by the hegemony, should be a warning for cyborgs seeking to strategize resistance to high technology. even more symptomatically, paul virilio has declared: "we must take hold of the enigma of technology and lay her on the table" (_pure war_). [20] it's dangerous to argue for a material uniqueness in the function of the panopticon, precisely because it prevents us from recognizing this continuing pattern of discipline and resistance, especially the way in which certain types of resistance are codifed to support the disciplinary society. is there any space in a postnatural future for a female subject with interiority? is it possible for a reading to occur which locates women in the position of subject? although the human capacity to generate or make sense of facts and information has already been surpassed by computers, resistance to the matrix may work for baudrillard. in william gibson's cyberpunk manifesto, _neuromancer_, the (bachelor) machine incorporates high technology differently than the body does. the technologies of which baudrillard speaks have been seamlessly incorporated to liberate men from their bodies and, as such, the mind/body paradigm is reclaimed as male/female with chilling results. that _neuromancer_ was intended as an historicized future is evident in gibson's description of the novel: what's most important to me is that it's about the present. it's not really about an imagined future. it's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live" (rosenthal, 85). [21] gibson's work, based as it is on the present encounter with bodies and technologies, should inform any speculation or theoretical vision of our future. pam rosenthal describes molly and case, the heroes of the novel, as part of "an elite cult" who feel "an existential righteousness about diving into the matrix, braving its dangers, getting as close as possible to the shape of algorithms that come about as close to truth as anything does in the bad new future" (90). the access to information, and the surveillance tactics used to gather it, rests with multinational corporations (zaibatsus) in _neuromancer_. elite status is signaled by access to information in the hierarchy of the matrix in _neuromancer_: getting in to the cyberspace of invisible facts equals power, and "not to be able to jack in [to the matrix] is impotence" (rosenthal, 85,102). molly's experience of the matrix is fundamentally different from case's; the difference is informed by constructions of gender, although their resistance to the matrix (and zaibatsus) makes both of them more malleable and exploitable by the companies that control the matrix. [22] neither case nor molly want the life of the "little people," or, as case puts it "company job, company hymn, company funeral" (37). case makes his living as an information cowboy, able to jack in to the matrix, to fix his addiction to cyberspace/access/information. in this way, the mind/body separation is encoded via technologies of the body, and it's furthered by the structure of the novel: whenever case jacks in to the matrix, gibson begins a new paragraph, highlighting the separation between the body and the mind/matrix. case doesn't seem to have a body unless he is inside molly, either in sex or in sim/stim. in the first case, case's visual description recalls images of the matrix and, in the second, he perceives molly's bodily sensations electronically. molly is the body. case can jack out at any time. [23] molly gets into cyberspace, too, but only so that her body can be programmed during "puppet time." freud's dictum that "there is no 'no' in the unconscious" is literally true for molly in this situation. she paid for the reconstructive surgeries by working as a "meat puppet," a high-tech form of prostitution in which a receptor chip is implanted in a woman's brain. the chip provides reception for the "house software," chosen by the customer. so what happens when molly is with a customer? her cyberspace is blank and her access to the matrix doesn't disconnect her body from other bodies (witness case). the programs used on molly were progressively violent after the house found out she was using the money she made to become a ninja, to construct a body capable of being a killing machine. the function of the software to direct molly's actions mimics, terrifyingly, freud's version of the unconscious: you know how i got the money, when i was starting out? . . . once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. renting the goods, is all. you aren't in, when it's all happening. house has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for . . . . [t]hen it started getting strange . . . . the house found out what i was doing with the money. i had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. no way i was ready to give up puppet time . . . so the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. i wasn't conscious. it's like cyberspace, but blank. silver. it smells like rain....you can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. (148-9) [24] when molly comes up out of puppet time, her reaction to the scene for which she had been programmed is violent opposition. although her ability to react to the scene is an accident of faulty wiring, it's a direct refutation of the programming, the unconscious, and the technical separation of mind and body: i came up. i was into this routine with a customer. senator, he was. knew his fat face right away. we were both covered with blood. we weren't alone. she was all. dead. so i guess i gave the senator what he wanted...the house put a contract on me and i had to hide for a little while. (148-149) [25] freud could have learned a few lessons from molly about whether the conscious mind can say "no" to the unconscious drives. it is, however, an after-the-fact refusal; when molly is unconscious (to a degree freud could never have imagined), she seems totally incapable of resisting; it is the dysfunction of high technology that allows molly's "no." the circle has been completed with techobodies, however: the access to the mind via science is complete, the comfortable line between human and machine has been erased, and the human therapist is no longer needed to interpret the signals. it's a direct line. [26] the freudian therapeutic paradigm can be mapped onto our relationship with (and struggle over) technologies of the body. the array of technologies used to construct bodies in _neuromancer_ seem fantastical, even technically impossible, yet the rush to develop technologies with which we can construct our bodies will provide funding and justification for their development, regardless of the health risks involved. at a recent senate hearing over the safety of silicon breast implants (which have been known to break down once inside the body and produce disabling disease of the immune system), it was presumed that, despite these proven health risks, implants should be available for "cosmetic" uses. however, after testimony from "scores of women" who testified to their need "because of what they said they believed were their own deformities," many panel members said they were "convinced that no line could be drawn and no group of women could be defined for exclusion" (hilts). the cultural question of why "some women [are] terrified of not having the option to reconstruct their breasts" was never raised. [27] the solution to the problem posed presented to the f.d.a.? surveillance. it was agreed that every woman who had undergone or wished to have this operation be "kept track of" in a database, set up by the companies which manufacture the implants. one can't help but wonder if these records, and the access to them, might be used later to deprive the women of the protection allegedly promised to them--perhaps in manufacturing a "safe" reading of the implants or, alternatively, to prevent these women from taking action (legal or otherwise) against the companies. [28] the fda case is simply one example of the need for some sort of resistance to this future. the case has some disturbing implications for rosenthal's declaration that "the matrix is too complex and fragmented to offer itself to any one unifying gaze--a notion that does not seem entirely reassuring to me" (95). this sentiment is problematic when we look back at dora, whose unifying gaze had the opposite effect. reiff acknowledges that freud "had to admire dora's insight into this intricate and sad affair...yet he fought back with his own intricate insights into the tangle of her motives.... freud was to call this tenacious and most promising of all forms of resistance 'intellectual opposition'" (17). compare this statement with the following description: "knowledge . . . is utterly immanent and implicated in the forms and technologies of instrumental power, and readable only to the extent that we have the power to decode it. how we are known and what we know constitute a matrix of unjustly distributed power . . ." (99). [29] this is rosenthal, reading the matrix, yet it's an uncanny characterization of the power dynamic that exists between dora and freud. but what about the present? in the wake of a reevaluation and, oftentimes, refutation of freudian theory, wasn't freud's clinical method also revised? not completely; this clinical process is still used to manufacture belief and consent. in the latest issue of _mother jones_ magazine (january/february 1993), ethan watters reports on psychotherapists who help their patients recover memories of physical and sexual abuse. the search for these memories, in theory, seems auspicious at a time when there is growing evidence that "childhood abuse is widespread" and underreported. working against freud's seduction theory, based on the assumption that patients' memories of abuse were fantasy (29), some therapists have taken the opposite tack, bringing past abuse to light by examining their patients' subconscious memories. in theory, this hopeful disruption of freud's seduction theory promises to validate and treat the pain of childhood abuse. [30] this theoretical promise can be destroyed within a clinical method that recalls freud's relationship with dora. using hypnosis, suggestion, trance writing, and dream analysis, therapists "search [the patient's] subconscious" for signs of abuse (26). watters found that many of these memories were false, but are made real for the patient. the case of kathy gondolf reveals the process by which her beliefs were used against her to construct the version of her past held by the therapist. when gondolf sought help for chronic bulimia, she told her therapist that she had been abused by an uncle during childhood. watters reports that "[l]ater, during individual and group therapy, [the therapist] used dream analysis and trance writing to search her unconscious for signs that other members of the family had abused her as well" (26). gondolf's account of this therapy is a poignant reminder of the power dynamic in the relationship between therapist and patient: you're sitting there and someone has taken everything you thought you know about your family--the people you love--and twisted it. they tell you that everything you knew for twenty, thirty, forty years was wrong.... it was devastating for me. everything is so simple in the world of repressed memories, . . . if you claim that your parents cared for you, then they [psychotherapists] say that you are in denial. anything you say can be misinterpreted. there is no way around it. this is costing people their lives. (26) [31] the women in her therapy group all claimed to have repressed memories of abuse as children, and one woman killed herself after "discovering" these memories. gondolf, like molly in _neuromancer_, was released from this regimen when the supporting apparatus malfunctioned: her insurance ran out. gondolf began to "examine repressed memories on her own" and, like schreber, found treatment in being her own interpreter. she "became convinced" that "her therapist had coerced her and the other members of her group into imagining memories of abuse" (26). forced out of the system, gondolf relied on her own conscious memories to construct the truth of her history. [32] is it possible to be "forced out" of the relationship between bodies and technologies? we cannot choose to end this relationship, as dora chose to end her relationship with freud. nor can we escape the deluge of electronic texts. if any resistance to the "gradual accommodation of the machine" is possible, it will depend upon our reaction to the machine, and a continual realization that the machine is a human creation, a social creation. in late twentieth-century capitalism, has anything else assumed the role of therapist for us? in the struggle over representation, the media is given the power of interpretation; just as anything that is "conscious" knowledge (articulated by the patient) could not, by definition, belong to the "unconscious," we are re-enacting the role of interpreter of reality with media. in doing so, we lend strength to the role of media by centering resistance within that arena. [33] in resisting hegemony via the struggle for representation, we may re-enact the binary opposition of representer/represented (and, on the same axis, therapist/patient); this resistance focuses on and strengthens the textual/media arena in which our actions are interpreted and represented. the exclusivity and limitations of television have been disrupted in the strategies of act-up. the organization has found a way to use televised media without having financial access to them (staging protests during broadcasts as audience members, for instance). [34] we need to reconsider the issues of media(s) and representations with respect to the ways we define ourselves. technology, having been taken into the body and reproduced (the male gaze being but one example), poses some immediate challenges. _neuromancer_ is the circle completed: technologies of the body connect the flesh to the computer. the issues raised here with respect to the post-natural future, and the questions of resistance, are urgent. remembering the patterns of discipline and resistance, and the space to which the other has been assigned, might be a first step in helping us to describe and resist the "slow apocalypse" of technology (rosenthal, 96). [35] it's not simply that the body must claim its resistance against the machine; when recuperation is instantaneous one can resist only though finding new ways of resistance that don't operate through negation, or marginalization. resistance that succeeds is a testament to the interpretive power of individuals to make sense of their lives. i hope to have presented some warnings and historical precedents that may help one actualize and resist power in a time when our ability to do so is matched against and challenged by our encounter with technology. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ i have chosen to cite from _the foucault reader_, edited by paul rabinow (pantheon books: new york, 1984), because selections from foucault's _discipline and punish: the birth of the prison_ [translated by alan sheridan, panthon books (random house) 1977] are brilliantly excerpted in the section titled "discipline and sciences of the individual" (pp. 169-239). the excerpts describe many of the terms and issues used in my paper, particularly the formulation of the term "discipline" and the uses of "the examination" to further surveillance and power. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited baudrillard, jean. "the ecstasy of communication." _the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture_. ed. hal foster. seattle: bay press, 1983. chabot, barry c. _freud on schreber: psychoanalytic theory and the critical act_. amherst: u mass press, 1982. foucault, michel. _discipline and punish: the birth of the prison_. trans. by alan sheridan. new york: pantheon books (random house), 1977. freud, sigmund. _dora: an analysis of a case of hysteria_. introduction by philip reiff. collier books, new york: 1963. ---. "psychoanalytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides)." _the standard edition of the psychological works of sigmund freud_. trans. james strachey. volume xii:9. london: hogarth, 1958-1974. gibson, william, _neuromancer_. ace: new york: 1984. goldstein, jan. "the uses of male hysteria: medical and literary discourse in nineteenth-century france." _representations_, v. 34 (spring 1991): 134-166. haraway, donna j. _simians, cyborgs, and women_. new york: routledge, 1991. hilts, philip, "f.d.a. panel cites need to keep breast implants." _the new york times_, november 15th, 1991, p. a8. jameson, fredric. "nostalgia for the present." _the south atlantic quarterly_ v. 88, no. 2 (1989): 521-32. mitchell, juliet. _psychoanalysis and feminism: freud, reich, laing, and women_. new york: vintage books, 1975. ---. "femininity, narrative, and psychoanalysis." _women, the longest revolution_. virago press, ltd., 1982. rabinow, paul, ed. _the foucault reader_. pantheon books: new york, 1984. rosenthal, pam. "jacked in: fordism, cyberspace, and cyberpunk." _socialist review_ (spring 1991): 87-103. schreber, daniel paul. _memoirs of my nervous illness_. trans. ida macalpine and richard a. hunter. london: dawson, 1955. fay, 'mapplethorpe's art: playing with the byronic postmodern', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-fay-mapplethorpes.txt archive pmc-list, file fay.993. part 1/1, total size 48940 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- mapplethorpe's art: playing with the byronic postmodern by elizabeth fay department of english university of massachusetts at boston efay@umbsky.cc.umb.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by elizabeth fay, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the term "the byronic postmodern" is coined here specifically for the purpose of uncovering and exploring a congruency in the works of those artists invested in some aspect of the byronic hero. the byronic, which was both encoded by byron and beyond his control, exudes a transgressive, dark, and seductive appeal that speaks to any artist interested in crossing boundaries. the byronic postmodern, then, implicates a romanticism within postmodernism and a postmodernism within romanticism that is at odds with more general assessments of the postmodern as a self-romanticizing and self-conflicted phase in the modern era (see kaplan and elam), or as a counter-enlightenment and irrationalist philosophical and aesthetic movement whose "post" positionality precludes or throws over prior systems of knowledge.^1^ [2] the byronic postmodern as defined here is not the ironizing superficial and self-aware contemplation that is usually considered to be the link between romantic irony and the postmodern aesthetic; nor do i rest easy in a lyotardian alternation of modernist and postmodernist impulses. rather, the byronic postmodern redefines the historical and social formations called romanticism and postmodernism, and offers them instead as aesthetic impulses that appeal congruously to those artists whose sexual aesthetics overwhelm their perception of the art form. that is, in seeing the world bisexually or homosexually, the byronic artist understands the nature of mask and the exchangeable subjectivity more clearly than does the artist confirmed in his/her normative sexuality. the relation between byron and mapplethorpe as byronic artists cannot be confined to them alone, but they provide powerful parameters for artists of similar amplitude such as baudelaire, emily bronte, oscar wilde, andy warhol. [3] what mapplethorpe's photography has to do with byron's poetry, or byron's art with mapplethorpe's, is an argument these two artists initiate themselves: byron through his postmodernist self-display and questioning of frames, and mapplethorpe through his critical reassessment of romantic self-presentation. mapplethorpe's romantic rereading is most overt in pieces such as "james ford, 1979," where the subject is depicted lying in a deep, tiled bathtub in a pose that cannot but recall david's "death of marat" (1793); less obvious are his photographs of classical marble statuary. the clearest example of his romantic revisionism, however, is mapplethorpe's "manfred, 1974," a four-frame sequence that comprehends byron's 1816 poem _manfred_ more succinctly than literary criticism has been able to do. the significance of mapplethorpe's title is pointed; of all the faustian texts available, including the extreme romanticism offered by goethe's version, the twentieth-century photographer fixes on the byronic manfred. in the agency of his revisionism, mapplethorpe has captured the postmodern impetus that drives byron's powerful drama, and at the same time reveals the deep romanticism of his own art. [4] the role of sexual repositioning in byronic postmodernism is crucial to the byronist's ability to reduce experience to a "staged" effect. this sense of staging is the outcome of a knowing difference, and a self-presentation that is at once the aestheticized self and serious art. mapplethorpe's choice of artistic medium makes his awareness of staging an open acknowledgement, as does his frequent use of dramatically posed portraiture and tableaux. but byron's self-staging required a sequence of transgressive events before he knew himself to be onstage. [5] at age eight byron became heir to his great uncle's title, inheriting it at age ten. he is seduced by his nurse, mary gray, at age nine, and probably by lord grey de ruthyn (who was renting the byron home) during a holiday from harrow at age fifteen. in between these two events he fell passionately in love with his cousin, mary chaworth, when he was fifteen, and lord delawarr at sixteen. however, the first to return his love and thus capture his imagination was the younger john edlestone. the precocity of byron's peership coincides with the precocity of his sexual initiations, and his response to the demands of adult experience was accompanied by confusion and guilt. he characterizes this period of his life with the secrecy and ambivalence that becomes typical of his later responses to his double sexual identity. to his step-sister augusta he writes of grey, "my reasons for ceasing that friendship are such as i cannot explain, not even to you my dear sister . . . but they will even remain hidden in my own breast" (march 26, 1804); the next year he hints at his affection for edlestone by writing, "my melancholy proceeds from a very different cause to that which you assign," one which "you could not alleviate, and might possibly be painful (january 7, 1805; both quoted in crompton, pp. 100-101). melancholy, the term literary reviewers associated both with byron and his poetic heroes, becomes a code word much earlier in his own mind for his `dark' passions. for augusta, this melancholy so changed byron from his boyish disposition that she thought him transformed, almost unrecognizable. his beloved, edlestone, thought the same when byron lost more than fifty pounds of bodyweight by vigorous dieting and exercise. both transformations--from joy to melancholy, from chubby to sleek--are bodily changes that correspond with a new bodily awareness. and this new awareness signifies an understanding that the body now has two kinds of admirers that desire it, and two kinds of passions itself. yet these must be secreted, coded, costumed, and playacted in order to be legitimated at all: the one must be made to signify the other, or to cover it up, or to displace it momentarily. [6] in comparison to byron, the most byronic of modern artists found an equally grecian, equally bodily way to express the differences in his taste. mapplethorpe's sexual tastes may not have been bipolar, but his artistry was. his black gay friends and lovers are translated into hellenized athletes and gods, with a special emphasis on the textures made possible by photographing black skin in black and white, or countering it with white skin as a way to emphasize not sex but bipolarity as form and mode. yet when he also photographed his women friends with exquisite sensitivity and sexual daring, his work resonates less to the bipolarized schemata of his male photographs than to byron's daring exploits with married and thus inaccessible women: safe and yet satisfyingly seductive adventures. byron's seduction of the strong-minded lady frances webster, for instance, resonates to mapplethorpe's photography of lisa lyon, a woman bodybuilder whose very name suggests gender play. [7] serious play becomes the byword for both byron and mapplethorpe as artists. the myth of the postmodern is that a series of tableaux produces a pastiche that %is% seamless truth. the tableaux by which byron presents himself in his poetry and in society are also stitched together into a fated and apparently seamless narrative, marking him as postmodern and puzzling his romantic interpreters. mappelthorpe's work makes the tableau a dramatically postmodern image, imposing on the setpiece a dark, fated quality that signals his transgressive play in much the same way that byron's narrative poems do. like byron, mapplethorpe's apparent seeming comes from a literal seaming, a putting together to produce a new costume and new self. dancing across the stage or camera's eye focuses attention on the costume and bodily surface as a semiotic display of sign systems at war. byron puts on albanian dress, mapplethorpe dons that of the nazi secret police; both bespeak a sign system associated with homosocial fantasy life and self. the byronic hero of either historical period is concerned in particular with harnessing sexuality, the display of identity, and the sheer play of a textual erotics. for textual erotics must be seen as sheer play, or it loses all signification; however, this is a specifically byronic gesture which cannot be read into all postmodern texts. within byronic aesthetics, play is both a dance on the edge of the allowable/foreseeable/conditional, and a violence done to the sutures that hold--however tenuously--meaning, syntax, consent together. [8] certainly desire is part of this behavior, but it is not the only mechanism at work. dalliance with comprehension and violation are both attributes of depressive melancholy. the bi-polarity of manic depression becomes in the postmodern period hyperactivity, mania as frenzy. romantic mania, however, is a slow, deliberately tasted dying into, a depressive move into a psychology without faith. byron laughs at this debilitating gesture even as he exploits its charm. and the charm itself is seductively duplicitous, doubling back with an ironic laugh: "postmodernism's distinctive character lies in [a] kind of wholesale `nudging' commitment to doubleness, or duplicity," linda hutcheon notes (1). the duplicity amounts not to a loss of faith, but to a cynicism thrust at the very heart of belief: both byron and mapplethorpe exhibit this awareness of disrupted yet retained foundations via seductive posturing. [9] the allure that draws in the viewer is born of the wholesale nudge that allots both the one and the other a place onstage. the spectator who feels the safety of familiar principles is seduced and caught before feeling the shifting ground. the seduction for both byron and mapplethorpe begins by viewing the viewer as an initially antagonistic eye which must be converted, or mocked, or both. two of mapplethorpe's works especially distill this gendered antagonism and recall earlier heroes of melancholy, metaphor, and misogyny. [10] "manfred" (1974) provocatively speaks to byron's closet drama, as well as his closeted drama of self, presenting the faustian man as a multiply-framed modernist who assumes his capacity to redesign the architecture that contains him. the first of the sequenced four frames in "manfred" is stark white, its blankness signifying not only original purity but also the absence of myth, and therefore of identity. in the second frame, the youth's pose allows him to fill the arch which is the central of three framings or sculptings of the space around him. he is classically nude and relaxed, a lover not an athlete, yet his frontal revelation mocks classical aesthetics, the contrapposto which makes the figure "a true acting unit," according to gardner (132). [11] in the third frame, the youth has assumed clothing, jewelry, and thus identity; he is poised to step out of the arch or closet, at the same time putting on a dark and melancholic expression that reestablishes the closet as protective and chosen, the space from which he will emerge. he is the `angry young man,' the rebel and dreamer: manfred himself. the final frame again finds the youth nude, but this time in full erection yet equal relaxation. he asserts his self upon the frame by placing his arms on its edge, again stepping precisely on its boundary, half-in, half-out. [12] outage, whether accomplished in emotional projection or physical projection, places dangerous demands on the dancer, as byron's faustian hero discovered. the power of abstraction, of multiple identities beyond the socially condoned, leads both to love and to the leap of death, two modes of action that bataille contends are reflexively identificatory. mapplethorpe's manfred declines to indicate who has conjured whom, but the urge to death remains. [13] in his hamlet-like "self-portrait, 1988," mapplethorpe examines himself in light of death, as a death mask, and as a dying hamlet. in his journal for feb. 19, 1814 byron notes that "kemble's hamlet is perfect; but hamlet is not nature. richard is a man; and kean is richard." mapplethorpe also understands hamlet as more than nature, more than man. the photograph's subject transmits his pain and mortal angst as he stares directly at the viewer; his stare is all the eerier for being disembodied and slightly out of focus, as if already fading from this particular world. at the same time, his severed hand floats clearly in the foreground, grasping a death-head cane with intense strength. hamlet's existential worry over whether to be, as well as his graveside meditation, is troped here both melancholically and whimsically. and it is but intertextual play that the epigram byron chooses for his "manfred" is from _hamlet_ i.v: "there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio,/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy." mapplethorpe's hamlet intimates this about death too. [14] hamlet knew that death defined love, and that the love of a woman is defiling if it is unaccompanied by the proper view and frame. improper women for byron are "strumpets," of whom he requests one friend to "never . . . even allude to the existence of the sex." unlike greek verbs of amorous frenzy, byron announces "i won't even read a word of the feminine gender" (16 feb, 1812). mapplethorpe would read such words, but would code and frame them to redefine gender itself into the fascination created by the tease of the camera's eye. this is the posture of byron's romanticism and of mapplethorpe's postmodernism, and of the improper artist who is poised to leap both because he is willing and because the leap defines and sexes him. [15] the byronist's internalizing of the specular takes place both between men, as well as within the dresser who must then seek other ways to display it. as such, it is an aspect of modernism mapplethorpe will more fully exploit through the closely controlled space of photographic interiors, and through a cross-dressing which requires no clothes because it is written on the body. this is best incurred through a gender play that is both a natural outcome of specularization and an unnatural doubleness that is doubly enticing. byron's self-representations as the byronic hero and mapplethorpe's self-portraits show the face as effeminate _because_ it is seductive, the costuming as gender-play _because_ it is teasing, and both offering relations between men. however, one important qualification must be made here: male costuming is not fashion in the sense of fashion photography because it does not _pretend_ to be for a specifically women's venue; its focus is the overt disruption of gender binaries rather than the covert exploitation of them. thus, if women are seduced into buying byron's poems or making love to him, he can claim to have no agency in their desire since his overt offer seeks another comer: women "ought to mind home . . . [and] to read neither poetry nor politics--nothing but books of piety and cookery. music--drawing--dancing--also a little gardening and ploughing now and then" (jan. 6, 1821, 1821 journal). this difference in the visual contract specific to the byronic postmodern allows for the incorporation of women's bodies into men's, and even women's into men's, as a statement of excess. put another way: fashion photography, which can be seen as the extreme version of visual art, implies an absence (of the artist) predicated on the metaphorical use of the model's body, as well as a covert expenditure of sexual energy between men. male costuming in the byronic postmodern posits presence rather than absence because the clothing literally (rather than metaphorically) implicates the artist, and it does so overtly. the clothing is so explicit in its homosexual seduction that it spells out what the fashion model suggestively hides: the clothes become the man. the model's wardrobe fabricates sexuality, makes it up, while the transvestite %poseur% or dandy wears seduction as one aspect of his sexual identity. [16] thus the artistry that finds itself to be byronic marginalizes itself from normative aesthetic practices or exaggerates them. it expresses its uncentered status by seeking revenge on its audience through expressive violence contained within a visual stillness. the artist uses this containment beyond the cultural center to artifice alternative worlds of seductive exile; but because the staging is transient rather than verifiable, it threatens the viewer with the possibility of transgressed boundaries and frames. and because the revenge is as much self-annihilating as it is viewer-threatening in its excess, its seductive posture invokes a pathos and an invitation difficult to ignore. [17] the invitation is necessarily sexual, devastating in its promise to break through the frames of its staging; the byronic postmodern is always a sexual or sexed violence, an exile caused by sexual transgression, a transvestism. through this disruptive sexuality, the byronic artist redistributes the contractual code between producer and consumer, forcing the viewer to make love to him by initiating and teasing out an active reciprocity and transgression.^2^ this contractual aberration is not present in all postmodernisms; nor is it a generally accepted view of the most byronic of artists, byron himself. if we accept this precept, however, we accept that postmodernism is not a single current of artistic and intellectual conflux. we also accept that the byronic artist is not a single manifestation of a single current, but a self-creator who is most himself when playing out the flux and its staging possibilities. [18] closet drama may dispense with the need for visible costuming, but the multiple masks it allows the authorizing persona provide an arena for symbolic codes that costume disparate versions of the poetical self. the sexualities, genders, and temperaments that clothe closet characters virtually play out the alternative identities that transvestism frees up to the experiencing subject: closet dramas, at least for byron, are in drag. critics interested in byron's self-romanticism usually cite this aspect of byron's selfhood, finding the poet speaking not only as sardanapalus but as each of the other main characters, not only as don juan but also as the poem's narrator.^3^ they do so, however, to prove the biographical nature of byron's dramas, locating multiple byrons (rather than multiple distributions of self) in order to sort out the more important family relations portrayed in the other characters; they do so most often in order to prove the freudian nature of byron's self-obsessive narratives (see also wolfson). but some critics go further; for instance, jerome j. mcgann argues that byron exploited the self-identificatory possibilities of costuming from the very first. "byron was operating %en masque% from his first appearances in print . . . childe harold, evolving from [his] earlier fictional selves, mutates quickly and repeatedly: the giaour, the corsair, lara, manfred, are all masks of byron." similarly, _sardanapalus_ is "an autobiographical work . . . carried out in masquerade" (295-96). mcgann reads byron's texts/masks as double-directed, but not in the contractual sense of artist-viewer; rather, mcgann finds a doubled seeing which is, on the one hand, directed "`referentially' toward certain socio-historical frameworks, and `reflexively' toward the poetical environments within which they are aesthetically active" (296-97). in other words, the masks provide a way to deliteralize transvestite seeing without seeming to do so through a reflexive vision; at the same time, they reinstitute the metaphorical or referential nature of the homosocial visual contract. doing so, mcgann argues, allows the movement from theatrical to closet drama and thus into temptation: "byron's masquerades are requests (or perhaps temptations) for someone to play a correspondent part in the imagined scene," but they are also "wicked and seductive invitations" (302). these invitations in the end "become the principal subject of his own fictions" because the move into private space allows the mask a literalizing power as well as a metaphorizing one, and thus a wicked dalliance with sincerity. [19] the wickedness, the temptation, is that of the homosexual openly beckoning within the privacy of the closet: this referential, and paradoxically socio-historical move (childe harold amid the battlegrounds of europe) authorizes that wicked privacy toward the open and public market of the visual contract. the double-edge term which allows this conflation of the opposed ways of seeing (homosexual and homosocial) is "mask." mask is not the trickier "masquerade," in which costumes allow one to put one's face, person, and morals aside in order to allow the libido and the uncanny full rein; instead, masks are veritable faces, costumes that cannot so readily be put aside. the mask effectively makes the other a self--without making it _the_ self, thus reserving the possibility of a `true' or recuperable self. the mask also allows for a certain amount of controlled outage within the purview of the closet(ed) drama. [20] masking locates this other-self in the face, the doubled site of vision and visage. but the face is itself the site of cupola and thus of excess; the multiplicitous connections it makes possible are different for each viewer, and not precisely controllable by the performer himself. the imprecise nature of the mask/face makes the performer a discourse facilitator through the visage/vision cupola by which he is seen by seeing. when the face is mask, as it forcefully is in the literal faces mapplethorpe puts forth in his self-portraits, and as it figuratively is in byron's narrative voices, it acts as the focal point of the costume, of the other self, and thereby of sexualized difference. as the site of excessive sex, of the doubly male, it thus alters the visual contract in order to force the diffident artist on the viewer: he confronts us face-to-face. [21] one of the best texts in which to explore byron's use of masks, according to mcgann, is _manfred_: byron, like manfred, ceases to justify himself or his romantic imaginations only when he makes those imaginations the self-conscious subject of his work. there is a power working upon byron forcing him to display those aspects of the imagination that are seldom exposed to view. (303) the power working on byron or his mask, manfred, is the power of the mask-face in a place of contained excess, the closet. closet space internalizes the play, making the literal quality of dress, like mapplethorpe's bondage and discipline leather, unnecessary. costume refutes metaphor and the need for a covert visual contract and installs a literalized invitation on the body surface; mask reinstates metaphor without refuting costume, and the conflation of the two at once--like the conflation of transvestism with homosexuality--provides a double being, a reference and a reflex, a writing on the body. [22] that is to say, byron's textual masks mark out the space of the byronic postmodern as a closet space in which the relation between artist and viewer is specifically contracted through bodily inscription. the byronic hero's scowl and the feminine makeup and pseudo-hamlet of mapplethorpe's self-portraits all point to the same conceit: that once the wicked invitation is inscribed on the body of the artist, he must then step in front of the artistic/photographic eye to become the feminized body over which contracts get made and invitations exchanged. for this reason mapplethorpe's subject-selves stare straight into the camera's eye: they do not need the fashion model's flirtatious glance because they know their eye (as artist and %poseur%) reciprocates the viewer's gaze--they know because it is written on their face. [23] byron's eye, if not in his portraits then certainly in his poetry, also stares straight into the viewer's eye, looking for internalized relations and closeted desires. contemporaneous reviewers were made uncomfortable by the game byron played, that was playing on himself, and their discomfort may have come in part from the byronic artist's self-conscious play with identity and agency. the reviewers as a body, in fact, see byron as performing the opposite operation from an exchange of masks and identity switches; they read him as inhabiting each byronic character as himself, without permutation. how the reader is led to see in a particular way becomes a critical question: how has byron seduced us into this understanding of his person? and the danger of this wicked invitation is that both the viewer and the artist himself are seduced: "the text becomes a kind of precipice that draws one in--like manfred, like byron--either to the self or to the destruction of the self" (mcgann, 311). yet the precipice is not as sincere as the critics believe nor as sensual as byron would have it: within the erotics of a self-constituting dance there is also the artist's awareness of how that self is *not* making, is merely a dressing without the deep center so alluringly promised. as david joselit writes of mapplethorpe, his popularity "is often explained (or explained away) as a form of sophisticated naughtiness. . . . it is mapplethorpe's broader relevance that is typically denied to him--typically obscured by labeling him a subcultural fetishist--by ignoring the hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity %and% femininity his art proposes" (19). [24] what byron and mapplethorpe share is not merely in their transgressive sexual curiosity; it is also in their transgression into the exotic. both artists construct travelogues into a fantasy land where costumes signify otherly selves against which the self must struggle or be seduced. and if byron stepped further out, acting out the travelogue as well as imagining its space in fantastic verses, mapplethorpe maintained an interior space that contained and transmuted his experience to an equally devastating and self-seducing degree. [25] don juan's travels necessarily lead eastward, for the spain of his birth is a moorish land, and the moors' power originates in their hoarding of classical knowledge.^4^ thus, underneath the oriental tales of romantic imagination is a love of the grecian. it was widely known that araby had absorbed hellenic culture and preserved it through the middle ages. but what byron understands, perhaps most from donning his albanian dress and turkish masks, is how much this is like boys looking like girls. pederasty, or greek love, is the love of nubile boys who looked like girls, boys who are girls underneath just as arabs are grecian underneath. when byron was seen leading young women in his madly promiscuous london period, he was assumed to have been closeted with young women dressed as boys. _don juan_ reverses and replays this moment several times as juan himself dresses in female costume, replaying the london escapades in which byron was simply closeted with nubile boys who could seem either gender or both.^5^ [26] the fascination byron exhibits, no less than mapplethorpe, is with that play between polarized positions, a play araby exhibits even more than does greece. thus in his eastern tales byron professes his desire for the grecian costumed as its polarized contrary, the turkish-moorish-arabian, and in doing so recasts his desire for cross-dressed or interstitial gendering. it cannot be surprising, then, to read art critic david joselit assessing mapplethorpe's photographs as producing a "hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity %and% femininity . . . mapplethorpe's sexual aggression and submission--in men and women, heterosexual and homosexual--is clearly evident in the relationship he establishes between his own self-portraits and the photographs of his models." indeed, he "has envisioned a world in which masculinity is not stable but a constantly shifting terrain between hyperaggressiveness and submission" (kardon, 19). another way of saying this is that the byronist understands sexuality as an unstable producer of identity. when byron moves from self to self, and reproduces those shifts in variable dramatic masks, he understands sexuality as self in the moment of sex--not in the moment of self. and these shifts are always restricted by the calculable and incalculable audience response which is itself a thing of contingency and flux. if mapplethorpe conceives the stillpoint of an erratic world through the classical moment of fixity--fixing the subject with a single frame of its dance across the stage, byron embraces the fluidity of the shifting self as well as the return upon itself of each mask--and yet in doing so, he fixes his poetical character even more surely than does mapplethorpe. the fix--the addiction to a dramatic moment of selfhood that one puts on in order to put over--is a mechanism of absolute charisma. and charisma, both in verse and on paper, demands a specular fixation. [27] walter benjamin (in many ways a postmodern romantic himself^6^) reconstructs the nature of that which is "hauntingly unstable" that we locate in both mapplethorpe's and byron's postmodern romanticism, as a problem of two other byronists: baudelaire and proust. in his essay, "on some motifs in baudelaire," benjamin recasts proust--a spiritual orientalist--by saying that, "[t]o perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return" (188). this point is specific to photography: whereas painting feeds imaginative appetites ("that of which our eyes will never have their fill"), photography operates within a different paradigm of perception (the mechanical reproduction of images). painting portrays the living quality of being; photography records it but cannot imbue its images with life, or what benjamin calls "aura." susan sontag confirms this perception when she writes of mapplethorpe that his works do not reveal truth, but rather "the strongest version of it"; this is a claim about the mystical ability of art to reveal truth, but it is a postmodern version in that it ironizes art's attempt to provide a truth where there can be none. [28] what sontag knows is that mapplethorpe's art gives life back to the viewer through the imbued object--through its aura. this gift, this truth, crosses transcendent boundaries so that the viewer is pulled into, or contracted into, the experience. in contrast, the romantic poet experiences and expresses epiphany while the reader vicariously witnesses its effect but does not participate. the byronist achieves what we might describe as a sideways transcendence, a boundary crossing of epic proportions which nevertheless laughs at its own indecency.^7^ benjamin's "aura," on the other hand, is meant to refer to a romanticized notion of the visionary's artistry, the poet's ability to capture `beauty in truth and truth in beauty,' to paraphrase keats. yet that he comes to the notion of aura through baudelaire with overtones of proust means that the vision is available from both the sincere and the sardonic poet, that both assist the provision of what kardon, after sontag, calls the "aura of veracity" (12). [29] it is this aura, according to benjamin, in which objects hoard the life we lend them through our active looking, and by it they mystically return our gaze from a distance determined by their inscrutability that is somehow yet recognizable. the subject who looks in the camera eye sees nothing, and thus loses his own gaze; at the same time, when he looks at the photograph of himself the lost gaze cannot be met or recaptured because there is no room for aura. the photographer, on the other hand, sees a different picture, or to put it another way, becomes the camera eye and--to rephrase--exchanges glances with the subject, which he can then recall and cast into his own aural perception of each photograph as the authentic aspect of the subject no longer present. these arguments permit us to reconstruct the magnetism of mapplethorpe's photographs as visual renditions of that intensely magnetic glance byron had mastered both in his life and his art--a glance that so captured the passions of both women and men. when joselit explains that "mapplethorpe's presence, in front of the camera as well as behind it, brackets every representation" (19), he is attributing to the photographer's doubled glance a doubled presence and a double aura. like the doubled sex of the girlish boy dressed as a boy and so taken for a girl in boy's costume, as in byron's premarital flings, or like the doubly enticing bisexual byron himself, the double aura works like a double penis, a twice present and twice authenticated contractual power. bracketing a representation does not fix it within a historical moment, but releases it into the flux of the auteur's own cross-historical and defiantly untranscendent staging. [30] mapplethorpe has been called a classicist because of his painterly approach to photography, but he also deserves the term for his deliberate fostering of aura in both his human and inanimate subjects. it is this relation to the living that both mapplethorpe and byron share, for where mapplethorpe produces works that return one's gaze, byron's works are so aurally replete with his own identifiable persona that they vibrate with his seductive or scorning glance. annabella milbanke recalls byron's haughty, disdainful posturing at salons she attended before his first marriage proposal; his careful poses and distancing survey of the room both converted his shyness into a powerful tool, and increased his charismatic appeal. [31] mapplethorpe's calm yet distancing stare into the camera in his self-portraits exude a similar aural fascination; significantly, the portraits that convey the same defiance and yet appealing plasticity are those of the two women friends he photographed numerous times: patti smith and lisa lyon. in two years mapplethorpe produced more than a hundred photographs of lyon, works which kardon notes, reveal "his talents as an impresario, his ability to %create% images . . . . he discovered some of her latent personas and probably invented others" (11). the "probably" that qualifies kardon's insight is also the cupola on which mapplethorpe provokes lyon and smith to become alternative masks for his own continual self-exploration.^8^ for it is through photography that mapplethorpe "could touch `forbidden' acts and states of consciousness, using the camera as an instrument of provocation," according to kay larson. using sexual positioning instead of mystical auras, larson identifies the byronic attitude as postmodern: "there is a kind of sexuality--the kind we think of as modern--that pursues self-interest to its limits, and sublimation be damned" (15). the transgression mapplethorpe pursues in his art--across the bounds between classicism and eroticism, homo and hetero, male and female, pleasure and pain--are precisely the terms of byron's journey east, across the transcendental alps to the transnationalism of the byronically grecian aesthetic. [32] in his last years mapplethorpe begins to photograph greek statuary, but by evading the cracks and missing limbs in order to imply a perfect whole, he nonetheless conveys the fragmentary nature of existence. the statement produced is that of death in life and life in death, a doubled concept that recalls the grecian underdressing of araby, the girl under the boy and boy under the girl, the transvestism of erotic spectacle. for both byron and mapplethorpe, classical culture provides a rosetta stone for a homoerotic aesthetic. "the greeks, of course, were the first in western civilization to erect a culture--a literature, an art, a philosophy--around the homoerotic . . . . homoeroticism, mapplethorpe suggests, has been around since the beginning of the world" (larson, 17). and if byron learned to write of his wrong-sexed, illicit adventures in the code of greek phrases and oblique references to fellow sodomists, mapplethorpe also learned the lexical value of classicism. the byronist both voices and obscures the homoerotic aesthetic when he turns the classicism of a marble statue or a perfect flower inside out to produce the eroticism already inherent in it. the societies that contextualize both artists also knew and did not know this: byron's publisher and closest friends burned his memoirs and altered his letters to hide the first term of the byronic aesthetic, while the intent of the prosecution of dennis barrie, the cincinnati museum director who exhibited mapplethorpe's photographs, was to figuratively burn those photographs that leave no room for sentimental misreadings. charged with pandering and obscenity charges, barrie had to defend his "exhibition" of the very sexuality mapplethorpe intentionally provokes us by: barrie is indeed a panderer, but of the spirit and not the flesh, for it is the aura mapplethorpe imparts to his work that so threatens and unsexes us. [33] certainly it is part of any byronist's threat to the viewer that the artist's own aura is retained in his endless self-portraiture through sequences of masks and counter-masks. photography "is a process of two-way looking: looking at, and being looked at," as larson notes. each artist continues to entice the viewer into a witting and unwitting appreciation for a titillating aesthetics. mapplethorpe is both a "voyeur" and a "provocateur," writes larson, and as such "he is not averse to running guns into forbidden territory" (16). the reference is to mapplethorpe's excursions into the nightworld of bondage and discipline, but it is a wonderful comment on byron's own particular form of gun running. he is still remembered in greece today for his liberatory endeavors there before dying of disease. like byron, mapplethorpe also died young by disease, and his hamlet-like self-portrait of full-blown aids concurs that both artists associate themselves with self-annihilating heroes. as such, both might say with manfred when the summoning spirit pronounces, "but thy crimes/ have made thee--": "i have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey--/ but was my own destroyer." there is a sanctity in this statement that is leveled in the aura, the gaze returned--precisely the seductive threat of both byronists' postmodern works. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ christopher norris takes to task those critics who essentialize postmodern thought in this manner, including habermas, rorty and gasche. although norris supports habermas' critique in such works as _the philosophical discourse of modernity_ (1987), he asserts that habermas misunderstands derrida's self-positioning within philosophical traditions as "a species of latter-day nietzschean irrationalism . . . that rejects the whole legacy of post-kantian enlightened thought." see norris, _what's wrong with postmodernism: critical theory and the ends of philosophy_ (baltimore: johns hopkins press, 1990), esp. pp. 49-76. ^2^ the contract itself has recently been revitalized as a romantic term, however with tonalities other than the visual, by scholars such as jerome christensen and barbara charlesworth gelpi influenced by carole pateman's _the problem of political obligation_ (1979; berkeley, 1985) and _the sexual contract_ (stanford, 1988). the conceptual contract as i understand it here, however, is itself artwork, and as such is specifically set in visual terms. i borrow these terms from de lauretis, esp. p. 105, and fuss. ^3^ byron's journals, written with at least an intimate audience in mind, if not simply to the audience of himself, exemplifies the rapidity of his mood and voice shifts. commenting on a journal passage regarding napoleon's abdication, peter manning writes: "byron confessed that he was `utterly bewildered and confounded,' and the threat to his own identity produced a dispersal of voices notable even in his habitually echoing prose" (_reading romantics_, 146). ^4^ dorothee metlitzki provides an important overview of the relation between orientalism and romanticism in _the matter of araby in medieval england_ (new haven: yale univ. press, 1977); the final chapter, "the matter of araby and the making of romance," is especially helpful (pp. 240-250). ^5^ louis crompton notes that "[t]hough his involvements were overwhelmingly heterosexual, various stories circulated, all at second hand, about how he disguised his inamoratas as boys to deceive his mother or others . . . since byron was often attracted by boys with girlish looks, marchand suggests that some of the boys in his company were in fact mistaken for girls in disguise" (110). ^6^ benjamin's elusive prose, and the `open-sided' character of his individual phrases, evinces his particular kind of byronic dancing. that he partakes of the romantic is evident in his mystical claims about art as being behind history; that he is romantically postmodern is productive of his interest in fragmentation and the occasional essay form. ^7^ when karl kroeber describes the improvisational methodology of _don juan_ as "open-sided," he provides an apt term for the whole of byronic aesthetics, an idea which peter manning underscores in introducing his _reading romantics_ (4). ^8^ bataille states in "the solar anus" that, "it is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form . . . because with the aid of a _copula_ each sentence ties one thing to another . . . . but the _copula_ of terms is no less irritating than the _copulation of bodies_" (_visions_, 5). ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited bataille, g. "the solar anus." in _visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939_. ed. and trans. allan stoekl. minneapolis: minnesota up, 1985. benjamin, walter. _illuminations_. new york: schocken, 1969. christensen, j. "setting byron straight: class, sexuality, and the poet," in _literature and the body: essays on populations and persons._ ed. elaine scarry. baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 1988. de lauretis, theresa. _technologies of gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction _. bloomington: indiana up, 1987. elam, d. _romancing the postmodern_. london and new york: routledge, 1992. fuss, diana. "fashion and the homospectatorial look." _critical inquiry_ 18 (summer 1992): 713-37. gardner, helen. _art through the ages_. sixth ed. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1975. hutcheon, linda. _the politics of postmodernism_. london and new york: routledge, 1989. joselit, d. "robert mapplethorpe's poses." in janet kardon, 19-21. kardon, j. _robert mapplethorpe: the perfect moment_. ed. janet kardon. philladelphia: institute of contemporary art/ univ. of pennsylvania, 1988. kaplan, e.a. "introduction." _postmodernism and its discontents: theories, practices_. ed. e. ann kaplan. london and new york: verso, 1988. mcgann, j. "hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of byronism." _sir_ 31 (fall 1992): 295-313. manning, p. _byron and his fictions_. detroit: wayne state up, 1978. marchand, l., ed. _byron's letters and journals_, 6 vols. london: john murray, 1973. sontag, susan. preface to robert mapplethorpe's _certain people: a book of portraits_. pasadena, ca: twelvetrees press, 1985. thorslev, jr., p. _the byronic hero: types and prototypes_. minneapolis: minnesota up, 1962. wolfson, s. "`a problem few dare imitate': _sardanapalus_ and `effeminate character.'" _elh_ 58 (1991): 867-902. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-[editor]-announcements.txt announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) every issue of _postmodern culture_ carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _a postmodern reader_ 2) _black ice books_ 3) _black sacred music_ 4) _boundary 2_ 5) _the centennial review_ 6) _college literature_ 7) _contention_ 8) _differences_ 9) _discourse_ 10) _electronic journal on virtual culture_ 11) _future culture_ 12) _genders_ 13) _its name was penelope_ 14) _minnesota review_ 15) _nomad_ 16) _no more nice girls_ 17) _nous refuse_ 18) _october_ 19) _representations_ 20) _rif/t_ 21) _south atlantic quarterly_ 22) _sscore_ 23) _studies in popular culture_ 24) _virus 23_ 25) _zines-l_ calls for papers and participants: 26) pmc-moo 27) cyborg conference call 28) call for papers on don delillo 29) _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 30) _minnesota review_ 31) _phage_ 32) suny press book series on postmodern culture 33) _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ 34) _verse_ 35) feminist theory and technoculture 36) telematic art installation on serbian border conferences and societies: 37) _international conference on refereed electronic journals_ 38) _montage 93: international festival of the image_ networked discussion groups: 39) _femisa: feminism, gender, international relations_ 40) _holocaus: holocaust list_ 41) _utne reader internet email salons_ 1) ------------------------------------------------------------_a postmodern reader_ edited by joseph natoli and linda hutcheon table of contents: introduction: reading a postmodern reader i. modern/postmodern preface * zygmunt bauman "postmodernity, or living with ambivalence." * hans bertens "the postmodern weltanschauung and its relation to modernism: an introductory survey." * jean-francois lyotard from _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_ * jurgen habermas "modernity versus postmodernity." * andreas huyssen "mapping the postmodern." * david herman "modernism versus postmodernism: towards an analytic distinction." ii. representing the postmodern preface * john mcgowan from, _postmodernism and its critics_ * jacques derrida "structure, sign, and play in the discourses of the human sciences." * linda hutcheon "beginning to theorize postmodernism." * ihab hassan "toward a concept of postmodernism." * charles russel "the context of the concept." iii. entanglements and complicities preface * fredric jameson from, _postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_ * michel foucault from, _the history of sexuality: volume i: an introduction_ * jean baudrillard "the precession of simulacra." * thomas kuhn "the resolution of revolutions." * cornel west "black culture and postmodernism." * barbara creed "from here to modernity: feminism and postmodernism." * jane flax from, _thinking fragments_ * stephen slemon "modernism's last post." iv. postmodern practices preface * henry giroux "postmodernism as border pedagogy: redefining the boundaries of race and ethnicity." * agnes heller "existentialism, alienation, postmodernism: cultural movements as vehicles of change in the patterns of everyday life." * bell hooks "postmodern blackness." * paul maltby from, _dissident postmodernists_ * houston baker jr. "hybridity, the rap race, and pedagogy for the 1990's." * catherine belsey "towards cultural history." state university of new york press (518) 472-5000 2) -------------------------------------------------------------announcing: _black ice books_ _black ice books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident american writers. breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. the first four books include: _avant-pop: fiction for a daydream nation_ edited by larry mccaffery, this book is an assemblage of innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various other unclassifiable texts by writers like samuel delany, mark leyner, william vollmann, kathy acker, eurdice, stephen wright, derek pell, harold jaffe, tim ferret, ricardo cortez cruz and many others. _new noir_ stories by john shirley john shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence. _the kafka chronicles_ a novel by mark amerika the _kafka chronicles_ is an adventure into the psyche of an ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters _revelation countdown_ by cris mazza stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling loss of control. discount mail-order information: you can buy these books directly from the publisher at a discount. buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four for $25. we pay us postage! (foreign orders add $2.50 per book). please make all checks or money orders payable to: fiction collective two publications unit illinois state university normal, il 61761 3) -------------------------------------------------------------_black sacred music_ a journal of theomusicology jan michael specer, editor 7:2 (fall 1993) presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in blantyre, malawi in november of 1992, this volume represents a significant step for the african christian church toward incorporating indigenous african arts and culture into its liturgy. recognizing that the african christian church continues to define itself in distinctly western terms, forty-nine participants from various denominations and all parts of africa-uganda, kenya, malawi, mozambique, madagascar, mauritius, zimbabwe, zambia, sierra leone, cameroon--and the united states met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies for the indigenization of christianity in african churches. other special issues available by single copy: the william grant still reader presents the collected writings of this respected american composer. still offered a perspective on american music and society informed by a diversity of experience and associations that few others have enjoyed. his distinguished career spanned jazz, traditional african-american idioms, and the european avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to opera. sacred music of the secular city delves into the american religious imagination by examining the religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music. includes essays on musicians robert johnson, duke ellington, marvin gaye, madonna, and 2 live crew. subscription prices: $30 institutions, $15 individuals. single issues: $15. please add $4 for subscription outside the u.s. canadian residents, add 7% gst. duke university press/box 90660/durham nc 27708 4) -------------------------------------------------------------_boundary 2_ an international journal of literature and culture paul bove, editor forthcoming in 1993: the violence of light in the land of desire; or, how william jones discovered india / jenny sharpe veiled woman and veiled narrative in tahar ben jelloun's _the sandchild_ / john d. erickson the ideologies and semiotics of fascism: analyzing pound's _cantos 12-15_ / stephen hartnett lionel trilling, _the liberal imagination_, and the emergence of the cultural discourse of anti-stalinism / russell j. reising divine politics: virginia woolf's journey toward eleusis in _to the lighthouse_ / tina barr _saxa loquuntur_: freud's arcaeology of the text / sabine hake deleuze's nietzsche / petra perry a tyranny of justice: the ethics of lyotard's differend / allen dunn thinking\writing the postmodern: representation, end, ground, sending / jeffrey t. nealon three issues annually subscription prices: $48 institutions, $24 individuals, $16 single issues. please add $6 for postage outside the u.s. duke university press/ box 90660 /durham nc 27708 5) -------------------------------------------------------------_the centennial review_ edited by r.k. meiners _the centennial review_ is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the university and its environment. we are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. **special issue** poland: from real socialism to democracy winter 1993 guest editor: stephen esquith essays on events and ideas in recent polish history, culture, and politics. adam michnik: _an interview with leszek kolakowski_ marek ziolkowski: _the case of the polish intelligentsia_ marian kempny: _on the relevance of social anthropology to the study of post-communist culture_ plus: lagowski, narojek, szszkowska, buchowski, and others. please begin my _cr_ subscription: ___ $12/year (3 issues) ___ $18/two years (6 issues) (add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the us) please send me the special issue: ___ poland: from real socialism to democracy please make your check payable to _the centennial review_. mail to: _the centennial review_ 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing mi 48824-1044 6) -------------------------------------------------------------_college literature_ a triannual literary journal for the classroom edited by kostas myrsiades "_college literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone teaching literature to college students." j. hillis miller university of ca, irvine "congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant." terry eagleton oxford university "in one bold stroke you seem to have turned _college literature_ into one of the things everyone will want to read." cary nelson "my sense is that _college literature_ will have substantial influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies." henry a. giroux "a journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy." robert con davis forthcoming issues: cultural studies: theory, praxis, pedagogy teaching postcolonial literatures europe and america: the legacy of discovery third world women african american writing subscription rates: us foreign individual $24.00/year $29.00/year institutional: $48.00/year $53.00/year send prepaid orders to: _college literature_ main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 7) -------------------------------------------------------------_contention_ debates in society, culture, and science _contention_ is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...extremely important." alberta arthurs "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...superb." janet abu-lughod "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 8) -------------------------------------------------------------_differences_ a journal of feminist cultural studies queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities (volume 3, number 2) edited by teresa de lauretis teresa de lauretis: _queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction_ sue ellen case: _tracking the vampire_ samuel r. delany: _street talk/straight talk_ elizabeth a. grosz: _lesbian fetishism?_ jeniffer terry: _theorizing deviant historiography_ thomas almaguer: _chicano men: a cartography of homosexual identity and behavior_ ekua omosupe: _black/lesbian/bulldagger_ earl jackson, jr.: _scandalous subjects: robert gluck's embodied narratives_ julia creet: _daughter of the movement: the psychodynamics of lesbian s/m fantasy_ the phallus issue (volume 4, number 1) edited by naomi schor and elizabeth weed maria torok: _the meaning of "penis envy" in women (1963)_ jean-joseph goux: _the phallus: masculine identity and the "exchange of women"_ parveen adams: _waiving the phallus_ kaja silverman: _the lacanian phallus_ charles bernheimer: _penile reference in phallic theory_ judith butler: _the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary_ jonathan goldberg: _recalling totalities: the mirrored stages of arnold schwarzenegger_ emily apter: _female trouble in the colonial harem_ single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals $48.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 9) -------------------------------------------------------------_discourse_ volume 15, number 1 special issue flaunting it: lesbian and gay studies kathryn baker: _delinquent desire: race, sex, and ritual in reform schools for girls_ terralee bensinger: _lesbian pornography: the re-making of (a) community_ scott bravmann: _investigating queer fictions of the past: identities, differences, and lesbian and gay historical self-representations_ sarah chinn and kris franklin: _"i am what i am" (or am i?): the making and unmaking of lesbian and gay identity in _high tech boys_ _ greg mullins: _nudes, prudes, and pigmies: the desirability of disavowal in _physical culture magazine_ _ joann pavletich: _muscling the mainstream: lesbian murder mysteries and fantasies of justice_ david pendelton: _obscene allegories: narrative structures in gay male porn_ thomas piontek: _applied metaphors: aids and literature_ june l. reich: _the traffic in dildoes: the phallus as camp and the revenge of the genderfuck_ single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals $50.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 10) -----------------------------------------------------------_the electronic journal on virtual culture_ we are very pleased by the great interest in the _electronic journal on virtual culture_. there are already more than 1,280 people subscribed. the _electronic journal on virtual culture_ (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. contact ermel stepp editor-in-chief or diane kovacs co-editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu cordially, ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu 11) ------------------------------------------------------------_futureculture_ requests to join the _futureculture_ e-list must be sent to: future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu the subject must have one of the following: subscribe realtime -subscribe in realtime format subscribe digest -subscribe in daily-digest (1msg/day) subscribe faq -subscribe to faq only (periodical updates) unsubscribe realtime unsubscribe digest unsubscribe faq help -send help on subscribing and general info send info -receive info on the futureculture mailing list send faq -this file futureculture list maintainer and keeper of this faq: andy ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu ahawks@mindvox.phantom.com contact on internet: ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu 12) ------------------------------------------------------------_genders_ ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. spring 1993 special issue _challenging abuse and assault_ anne allison dominating men: male dominance on company expense in a japanese hostess club samuel kimball _into the light, leland, into the light_: emerson, oedipus, and the blindness of male desire in david lynch's _twin peaks_ vinay lal the incident of the _crawling lane_: women in the punjab disturbances of 1919 sandra runzo intimacy, complicity, and the imagination: adrienne rich's _twenty-one love poems_ grace a. epstein bodily harm: female containment and abuse in the romance narrative ----------------------------- _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 13) ------------------------------------------------------------eastgate systems, inc. announces: its name was penelope by judy malloy (cambridge, ma) eastgate systems has announced the publication of _its name was penelope_, an important new interactive novel by judy malloy. _its name was penelope_ explores the boundaries of performance art, hypertext, interactive fiction and poetry. it is a woman artist's story--a story about making art, of love, sex, and work, of being very young and growing older. the reader is invited to step into the mind of narrator anne mitchell, to see things as she sees them, to share her memories. _its name was penelope_ is filled with uncomfortable truths, closely observed and stunningly retold: the rituals enacted at the opening of art shows of men dying of aids, the conflict between the demands of love and art, the pain and sacrifice and, occasionally, the rewards of a life in the arts. in her introduction, artist and hypertext author carolyn guyer writes: if you've never been able to make up your mind whether an artist's life is divine or hellish, read _its name was penelope_. judy malloy tells the truth. judy malloy's artists books and electronic narratives, including _its name was penelope_, have been exhibited at galleries and exhibitions throughout the world. 1992-3 venues include: the computer is not sorry the houston center (boston) for photography women and technology the national library (beverly hills) of lisbon ringling school of art intl. symposium and design electronic art (australia) an associate editor of _leonardo_, malloy has lived all over the world, from a tent on a small island in the rhine to a house in the colorado rockies. she currently resides in berkeley, california. like all eastgate hypertext titles, _its name was penelope_ is carefully crafted for interactive performance on the computer. no conventional, paper version of the work exists, or can exist. the program runs on all macintosh computers, models plus or better. _its name way penelope_ sells for $19.95. no additional software is required. since 1982, eastgate systems, inc. has been a leading publisher of quality hypertexts and hypertext writing tools, including storyspace (tm) and hypergate (tm) hypertext writing environments, michael joyce's _afternoon, a story_, sarah smith's _king of space_, and stuart moulthrop's _victory garden_. _its name was penelope_ is available from: eastgate systems, inc. po box 1307, cambridge ma 02238 usa (617) 924-9044 (800) 562-1638 14) -----------------------------------------------------------_minnesota review_ tell your friends! tell your librarians! the new _minnesota review_'s coming to town! **now under new management** fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39): "pc wars" includes essays by: * richard ohmann "on pc and related matters" * michael berube "exigencies of value" * barry sarchett "russell jacoby, anti professionalism, and the politics of cultural nostalgia" * michael sprinkler "the war against theory" * balance chow "liberal education left and right" spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40): "the politics of aids" poetry, fiction, interviews, essays. topics include: * queer theory and activism. * public image of aids. * politics of medical research. * health care policies. subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new _minnesota review_ is published biannually and originates from east carolina university beginning with the fall 1992 special issue. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams, editor _minnesota review_ department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 15) -----------------------------------------------------------_nomad_ an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences _nomad_ publishes works of cross-disciplinary interest, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing. the journal is a forum for those texts that explore the undefined regions among critical theory, the visual arts, and writing. _nomad_ is published biannually and subscriptions are $9 for one year (2 issues). for information contact: mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, fl 32306 e-mail: mike smith msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu 16) ------------------------------------------------------------_no more nice girls_ author: ellen willis in her new collection of journalism and cultural criticism, _no more nice girls_, ellen willis "offers serious readers the fruits of her wide-ranging curiosity, thoughtful analysis, penetrating insights, and utterly unapologetic commitment to freedom and pleasure as liberating, radical ideas" (_booklist_). _no more nice girls_ will be published by wesleyan/university press of new england on february 26, 1993. a former columnist and senior editor at the _village voice_, willis is the author of a previous collection, _beginning to see the light_ (also available from wesleyan/upne), which was hailed as "stimulating and satisfying" by the _new york times_ and as the work of an "outspoken, articulate and thoughtful woman" by the _los angeles times_. _no more nice girls_ brings her project of cultural critique into the contemporary era of conservative backlash. available through: university press of new england 23 south main street hanover nh 03755 tel: (603) 643-7107 fax: (603) 643-1540 17) ------------------------------------------------------------_nous refuse_ a new electronic collective a new place to make news a new place to write a new place contributors to date include: joe amato charles berstein michael blitz don byrd luigi-robert drake nancy dunlop chris funkhouser carolyn guyer pierre joris michael joyce andrew levy stuart moulthrop derek owens martha petry david porush martin rosenberg armand schwerner juliana spahr kali tal katie yates to get involved, contact joe amato: jamato@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu 18) ------------------------------------------------------------_october_ art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _october_ focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join _october_'s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! published quarterly issn 0162-2870. yearly rates: individual $32.00; institution $80.00; student (copy of current id required) and retired: $22.00. outside usa add $14.00 postage and handling. canadians add additional 7% gst. prepayment is required. send check payable to _october_ drawn against a us bank, mastercard or visa number to: mit press journal / 55 hayward street / cambridge, ma 02142-1399 / tel: (617) 233-2889 / fax: (617) 258-6779 / e-mail: journals-orders@mit.edu 19) ------------------------------------------------------------_representations_ "...conveys an excitement rarely seen in academic periodicals. the array of subjects is dizzying." -wendy steiner times literary supplement special issue: future libraries number 42 * spring 1993 edited by r. howard bloch and carla hesse roger chartier "the library without walls: fifteenth to twenty-first centuries." domanique jamet and helene waysbord "history, philosophy, and ambitions of the bibliotheque de france." emmanuel le roy ladurie "the everyday life of an administrator of the bibliotheque nationale." geoffrey nunberg "the place of books." alain giffard and gerald grunberg "new reading technologies." prosser gifford "information and democracy: the libraries of eastern europe." anthony vidler "the site of reading: urban libraries from labrouste to perrault." kenneth dowlin and cathy simon "the new san francisco public library: reprisals of the civic mission." subscriptions: individuals $30.00, students $22.00, institutions $57.00. outside u.s. add $6.00 postage. to order, write: _representations_ university of california press journals division 2120 berkeley way berkeley ca 94720 fax: (510)643-7172 (visa/mc only) 20) ------------------------------------------------------------_rif/t_ e-poetry literary journal in all arts there is a physical component...we must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts. --paul valery this list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution of an interactive literary journal: _rif/t_ and related exchange (2) collection of any information related to contemporary poetics. _rif/t provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal. dynamic--not static, _rif/t_ shifts and riffs with the diction of "trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of exchange. _rif/t_ has the listserv name e-poetry: to subscribe to e-poetry, send the command sub e-poetry your name to: listserv@ubvm or listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu via mail message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not the subject: line). for example: sub e-poetry john doe owner: ken sherwood v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu 21) ------------------------------------------------------------_south atlantic quarterly_ winter 1993 (volume 92, number 1) _the world according to disney_ guest editor: susan willis contents: critical vantage points on disney's world susan willis reality revisited karen klugman of mice and ducks: benjamin and adorno on disney miriam hansen it's a small world after all: disney and the pleasures of identification jane kuenz the cartoonist's front holly allen and michael denning disney world: public use/private state susan willis the contemoprary future of tommorow shelton waldrep technological utopias alexander wilson theme park arata isozaki subscription prices: $48 institutions, $24 individuals. single issues $12. please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. duke university press journals division box 90660 durham, n.c. 27708 22) ------------------------------------------------------------_sscore_ social science computer review g. david garson, editor ronald anderson, co-editor the official journal of the social science computing association, _sscore_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. now, when you subscribe to _social science computer review_, you automatically become a member of the social science computing association. recent articles: social impacts of computing: codes of professional ethics ronald anderson teledemocracy and political science william h. dutton trends in the use of computers in economics teaching in the united kingdom guy judge and phil hobbs the essentials of scientific visualization: basic techniques and common problems steve e. follin psychology: keeping up with the state of the art in computing charles huff computer assistance in qualitative sociology david r. heise automating analysis, visualization, and other social science research tasks edwin h. carpenter from mainframes to micros: computer applications for antropologists robert v. kemper, ronald k. wetherington, and michael adler quaterly subscription prices: $48 individuals, $80 institutions single issue: $20 please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. canadian residents add 7% gst duke university press/ journals division / box 90660 /durham nc 27708 23) ------------------------------------------------------------_studies in popular culture_ dennis hall, editor. _studies in popular culture_, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292. please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. _studies in popular culture_, is published semiannually and is indexed in the _pmla annual bibliography_. all members of the association receive _studies in popular culture_. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to the executive secretary, diane calhoun-french, academic dean, jefferson community college-sw, louisville, ky 40272, for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes ixv are available for $225.00. 24) ------------------------------------------------------------_virus 23_ for those brave souls looking to explore the secret of eris, you may wish to check out _virus 23_. 2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd. _virus 23_ is a codename for all erisian literature don webb 6304 laird dr. austin, tx 78757 0004200716@mcimail.com _virus 23_ is the annual hardcopy publication of a.d.o.s.a, the alberta department of spiritual affairs. this is what a few of cyberculture's luminaries have had to say about it: all issues are available at $7.00 ppd from: _virus 23_ box 46 red deer, alberta canada t4n 5e7 various chunks of _virus 23_ can be found at tim oerting's alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out). for more information online contact darren wershler-henry: grad3057@writer.yorku.ca 25) ------------------------------------------------------------_zines-l_ announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to _zines-l_ send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name 26) ------------------------------------------------------------ _postmodern culture_ announces pmc-moo pmc-moo is a new service offered (free of charge) by _postmodern culture_. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of the journal and participate in live conferences. pmc-moo will also provide access to texts generated by _postmodern culture_ and by pmc-talk, and it will provide the opportunity to experience (or help to design) programs which simulate object-lessons in postmodern theory. pmc-moo is based on the lambdamoo program, freeware by pavel curtis. to connect to pmc-moo, you *must* be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. if you have the emacs program on your system and would like information about a customized client program for pmc-moo that uses emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail. 27) ------------------------------------------------------------******************************* call for papers/participants in interdisciplinary conference on cyborgs. ******************************* please contact: steven mentor dept. of english gn-30 university of washington seattle wa 98195 e-mail: cybunny@u.washigton.edu we welcome all disciplines and perspectives including historians, philosophers, computer scientists, bio(nic?) engineers, medical technologists, cognitive psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, science fiction writers, poets, artists, and of course, cyborgs them/ourselves. we are planning to put on the conference in winter, 1994, so please write us with issues, questions, quandaries, directions, permutations. 28) ------------------------------------------------------------++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for papers on don delillo ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ papers are solicited on the topic of the writings of don delillo (his fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible inclusion in a cluster section of a future issue of _postmodern culture_. selected essays may also be included in a book collection planned for later publication. inquiries may be sent to glen scott allen at: e7e4all@toe.towson.edu or by mail to: stephen d. bernstein english department university of michigan flint, mi 48502 29) ------------------------------------------------------------********************* call for submissions ********************* _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 e-mail: keepc@qucd.queensu.ca 30) ------------------------------------------------------------*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ call for papers/fiction/poetry _minnesota review_ fall, 1993 *+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ fall issue (n.s. 41, 1993): "the institution of english" professional context and institutional formation of literature. we welcome articles and particularly review-essays on recent trends in criticism, theory, and literature such as "the new medievalism" or the _boundary 2_ school, as well as on institutional structures, such as neh, mla, graduate assistantships, sct, the rise of cultural studies programs, new journals, book series, and the politics of publishing. essays, interviews, and reviews due by june 1, 1993. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams editor _minnesota review_ department of english east carolina university greenville nc 27858-4353 31) ------------------------------------------------------------_phage_ welcome to the future --------------------_phage_ is a new magazine for people who are living on the new edge, surfing along the new wave of radical thought. this magazine was born from the need for a forum for new ideas in print media. _phage_ will be designed and produced on the macintosh computer, in an 8 1/2 x 11" format, and each issue will be in the area of 64 pages. we are planning to sell the magazine at a cover price of $3.50 (us), but until costs are measured, we cannot say for sure. we are looking for submissions and assistance with this project from all angles: fiction writers, essayists, ranters, graphic designers, artists, poets, etc.. submissions are welcome in any form, in any style or tone, though that is not a guarantee that everything we receive will be printed. we are looking for submissions as soon as possible, but feel free to send them whenever you like. however, due to a lack of available resources, we are unable, for now, to reward monetarily those who contribute to _phage_. while we have little money, our primary interest is producing the highest-quality magazine possible, containing an immense spectrum of information. possible topics include: focusing on the edges of culture, examining the fringes of reason and the reasons of the fringe, the here and now and soon-to-be, via unstructured tones that ebb and flow from in-form information to formless rants of altered states. if you would like to contribute to _phage_ in any way, please send all queries, submissions, tips, words of wisdom, etc., to us on the internet at: obscure@mindvox.phantom.com obscure@zero.cypher.com or ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu if you do not have internet access, please send mail to: _phage_ magazine po box xxx green bay, wi 54304 32) ------------------------------------------------------------[pmc editor's note: the suny press series _postmodern culture_ is not affiliated with the electronic journal _postmodern culture_.] ************************************* announcement and call for submissions _postmodern culture_ ************************************* _postmodern culture_ a suny press series series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, from computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-becompleted north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 33) ------------------------------------------------------------+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for papers _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ (issn: 1039-723x). _psyche_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. _psyche_ publishes material relevant to that exploration from the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. _psyche_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. _psyche_ also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated from the hardcopy version. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of _psyche_, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to _psyche_ the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge _psyche_ as the original source of publication. subscriptions subscriptions to the electronic version of _psyche_ may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet 34) ------------------------------------------------------------*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ call for papers on the work of derek walcott *+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ _verse_ is calling for submissions for a special issue devoted to the work of derek walcott: 12-15 page articles on his poetry or plays; poems that are indebted to walcott in some way. _verse_ is a journal published both in the uk and out of the college of william and mary in virginia. the articles should be written for an informed, but not necessarily academic, audience. deadline: end of august. please direct inquires to: susan m. schultz department of english 1733 donaghho road university of hawaii-manoa honolulu hi 96822 (h) 808-942-3554 (w) 808-956-3061 35) ----------------------------------------------------------call for papers panel: feminist theory and technoculture conference: northeast modern language association (nemla) date: april 8 & 9, 1994 place: pittsburgh, pa this panel will address a variety of feminist theories (poststructuralist, marxist, gender and sexuality studies, ecofeminism, etc.) as they respond to the problems and possibilities of the culture of technology. topics include (but are not limited to) the internet (incl. bbs, lists, email, electronic conferences, mushes, muds, etc); television, telephone, fax and other electronic media; and technoliterature. send inquiries to lxh16@po.cwru.edu send abstracts and papers by september 1 to prof. lila hanft dept. of english 11112 bellflower rd. case western reserve univ. cleveland, oh 44106-7117 36) ------------------------------------------------------------_international conference on refereed electronic journals: towards a consortium for networked publications_ october 1-2, 1993 (friday & saturday) sponsored by: medical research council natural sciences & engineering research council social science & humanities research council of canada the university of manitoba the delta winnipeg hotel 288 portage avenue winnipeg, manitoba r3c 0b8 the aims of the conference are: (1) to make academic merit the sole consideration in the publication of journal-type research, (2) to advance the idea that the academic community should have a hand in determining what gets published and how it is disseminated, (3) to provide an outlet for research publication that is not subject to the severe economic constraints of traditional paper-journal publishing, (4) to make collective use of the scholarly advantages of network publication (savings in production costs, increased speed in publication and dissemination process), (5) to provide an effective and low-cost means for universities and learned societies to play a greater role as disseminators of research information, and not only as producers and consumers. this historic two-day event will be organized as a series of plenary working sessions that will include presentations from major resource people from a variety of fields. an exhibition of the latest computer technology is also planned. registration is limited to 200 participants. registration information fees: if paid by september 1, 1993: $150.00 (cdn) if paid after september 1, 1993: $200.00 (cdn) dinner for guests of participants: $ 30.00 (cdn) requests for information or the completed conference registration form together with payment should be sent to: ms. helga dyck, co-ordinator institute for the humanities room 108 isbister bldg. winnipeg, manitoba r3t 2n2 canada ph.: (204) 474-9599 fax: (204) 275-5781 e-mail: umih@ccu.umanitoba.ca 37) ------------------------------------------------------------ "the watch-towers of peace" an art installation by fred forrest (fr) may 28th 4th june 1993 installation telephone numbers: 0043 3453 5411 0043 3453 5412 0043 3453 5413 send your messages of peace to former yugoslavia from across the border in austria. ring these numbers from every corner of your planet to cover the land of war with slogans of peace. disseminate your energies in real time through positive waves. we would like to draw your attention to an installation that will be realised by the artist fred forrest within the framework of the european month of culture in graez. the installation will incorporate the general theme "entegenzte grenzen" (dismissed borders) and function as leading project. it will open in april and can already be considered as extraordinary and exemplary. the technological communication media fred forrest is going to install at the slovenian border will be placed in such a way that they will look in the direction of the former yugoslavian territory and are called "observation towers for peace". these technological communication media will consist of five sound amplifiers connected to computers and the international telephone network. the metal structures designed to carry these strong amplifiers will be erected in ehrenhausen, directly at the austrian-slovenian border. through these amplifiers, peace messages are to be emitted in real-time mode. these peace messages will be transmitted to the amplifiers via telephone from the whole world over. a computer will be used to transform the messages via synthesizer into one collective sound signal. the modulation of this whistling sound will change in accordance with both the number of incoming phone calls and the distance from which they come. there is no doubt that the interaction of fred forrest's project and its symbolic dimension in view of the present geopolitical situation make the installation a first class media event and emphasize the meaning of our modern society's new forms of communication. for more information, please write to: fred forrest territoire du mz, 60540 anserville, france tel 44 08 43 05 fax 44 08 59 67 38) ------------------------------------------------------------_montage 93: international festival of the image_ (1-800-724-4332) montage93@brock1p.bitnet the future of visual communication will open up to educators, professionals and the public during an international festival slated for july 11 through august 7, 1993 in rochester, new york. the festival will explore the present and future of image-making as well as the fusion of art and technology. _montage 93_ will feature the latest advances in imaging technology through a series of events which include a trade show, international film and video festivals, lecture and panel series, arts & technology exposition, international student festival and world-premiere exhibitions. the lecture and panel discussion series will focus on numerous topics including digital museums, living in the computer age, privacy and civil liberties in the computer age, virtual reality, the future of film and video, and more. sixteen exhibitions, including 11 premiering at the festival, along with the works of over 300 international artists will feature photography, computer graphics, holography, video, electrostatic imaging, electronic transmission and other advanced techniques. the trade show will include a pavilion of over 50 international companies dealing with many facets of technology. expect to see manufacturers of next-generation of digital cameras, interactive and virtual reality, computer 2d and 3d graphic software, business imaging and more. the international student festival will draw about 500 students and educators from across the globe. a media teachers educational conference will also take place during _montage 93_. the arts & technology exposition puts you inside simulated studio environments as artists and tool developers demonstrate still, moving, dimensional, and interactive image-making systems. the international film festival will feature screenings of new films, 35 and 16 mm, created by independent producers. video, etc. is a showcase of video, computer animation, and timebased electronic work by international artists and independent producers. several professional conferences will take place during _montage 93_ including: high-tech global new york; oracle; fast rewind; international visual sociology association; and the media arts teachers association. _montage 93_ now has available ticketing and registration information. this includes the names and topics scheduled for panel discussions and seminars. please call 1-800-724-4332 and request additional information or call (716) 442-6722 (overseas) or e-mail: montage93@brock1p.bitnet. 39) ------------------------------------------------------------_femisa_ femisa@mach1.wlu.ca _femisa_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, _femisa_ was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the _international studies association_ keep in touch. more generally, i hope that _femisa_ can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the _international studies association_. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg 40) ------------------------------------------------------------_holocaus: holocaust list_ holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need an internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu: sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com the holocaus policies are: 1. the coverage of the list will include the holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-semitism, and jewish history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes in the history of ww2, germany, and international diplomacy. 2. we are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the holocaust. in 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the us and canada teaching courses on the holocaust (154 in history departments, 67 in religion, and 46 in literature). an even larger number of professors teach units on the holocaust in courses on jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and world war ii (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. most of these professors own pc's, but do not use them for e-mail. we hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. _holocaus_ will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course. 3. h-net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide _holocaus_ policy and to help stimulate contributions. 4. _holocaus_ is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history. the moderator will solicit postings (by e mail, phone and even by us mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. the moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). it may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. anyone with suggestions about what _holocaus_ can and might do is invited to send in the ideas. 5. the tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. _holocaus_ is affiliated with the _international history network_. 6. _holocaus_ is a part of h-net, a project run by computer oriented historians at the u of illinois. we see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. our first list on urban history, _h urban@uicvm_, recently started up with wendy plotkin as moderator. _h-women_ is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like ethnic, labor, and us south. we are helping our campus jewish studies program set up _jstudy_ (restricted to the u of illinois chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _h jewish_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on jewish history. if you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write richard jensen, for we are now (as of late april) in a critical planning stage. 7. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu 41) ------------------------------------------------------------_utne reader internet e-mail salons_ calling all: _utne reader_ readers neighborhood salon associates members interested others the utne reader neighborhood salon association is launching a global network of internet mailing lists designed to foster small group dialogue about hot topics and timeless conundra. we call them e-mail salons and they are patterned after the hundreds of neighborhood salons (face-to-face) that we've helped form across north america since 1991. helping to revitalize democracy through vigorous discussion of issues and ideas is part of the mission of the neighborhood salon association (nsa), our not-for-profit community service, funded in part by the surdna foundation. we believe that both online and face-to-face salons help revive the endangered art of conversation. anyone who does not live in canada or the united states can participate for free. likewise, anyone who has an account on peacenet, econet, the web, greennet or other apc (association for progressive computing) network can participate free of charge. otherwise, you must be a member of the utne reader salon association to participate. for a one-time sign-up fee of $12 ($20 canadian) you receive: * placement in at least one e-mail salon of up to 25 participants. * a printed list of 20-30 members near you who have also joined the nsa over the past two years. * access to contact information on existing salons (face-to-face) in your area. * a printed copy of the salon-keeper's companion, our 8-page guide to conducting salons, council, and study circles. will my name end up on a junkmail list? we will not be giving or selling any of our salon mailing lists to anyone. likewise, we ask that you not use any list of salon names for anything other than salon-related communications. everyone has entrusted us with their name, street and e-mail addresses for this one purpose only; please respect this trust. ---------------------------------------------------------------- _utne reader e-mail salon application form_ first name: last name: internet e-mail address: street address: city: state/province: zip/postal code: country: phone: i got this e-mail salon announcement from: (choose one of the following:) ___ i'm currently a member of the neighborhood salon association. get me started in an e-mail salon as soon as possible. ___ i don't live in the usa or canada. get me started in an e-mail salon as soon as possible. ___ i have an account on peacenet, econet, the web, greennet or other apc (association for progressive computing) network. get me started in an e-mail salon as soon as possible. ___ none of the above applies to me. send me the registration packet via 1st class mail. ----------------------------------------------------------------send your completed form to: utnereader@mr.net if you have questions, contact us at: e-mail salons utne reader 1624 harmon place, suite 330 minneapolis, mn 55403 fax: 612/338-6043 voice: 612/338-5040 (9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. central) voice mail: 612/725-8684 (after hours) griff wigley, salon-keeper patti cich, salon coordinator � yau, 'buffalo and marshmallows', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-yau-buffalo.txt archive pmc-list, file yau.194. part 1/1, total size 1945 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- buffalo and marshmallows by john yau postmodern culture v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by john yau, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. it's an old glory when a toenail crocodile named greta gabo boasts that any tall thumb tucking pimple popper still in touch with the bottom of his atavistic roots will soon be rented out to the king of pencil toads and his last iron caravan dairy wolves howl at empty spoon while i sleep in black mall lily padded trailer park answer the second second i'm stalled in a parallel stupor squeezed between red hurt of a fall potato and blue stones of a part-time seed shifter i'm one of the jilted eager to bite the crust i plead with what's left of the steam engine because i know it's soft pajamas being one of the flies a free sample sniffing around the tattered drums of the effluvial honey you get to count creamy blots and carpet burns transmit grains of junked passion to the weekend handwarmers west of sandusky, ohio adopted home of tormented petal pushers one charm boxers and retired log nuts the whole glad parking lot of idle fun seekers you even score the church fire and pray to the invisible camera you get down on your full grown knees and you begin to stay in better times, i lived on a bingo farm ate off a checkerboard each morning, i baked out the stains and flicked drivel into the yard -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------owens, '"drum and whistle" and "black stems," two poems from _luca: discourse on life & death_', postmodern culture v2n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n3-owens-drum.txt "drum and whistle" and "black stems," two poems from _luca: discourse on life & death_ by rochelle owens dept. of english university of oklahoma at norman _postmodern culture_ v.2 n.3 (may, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by rochelle owens, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. drum and whistle into the vast heat of spirals because your whitish bones beating drum and whistle morning sun multiplying her fingers loosened her braids her long slow searching encased skull neck body skull neck body around roots yellow skin floating like props looking i heard crows their claws searching their veins and tendons scattered as leaves sweeten clay silt ash your long gray hands cutting measuring skull scalp parchment her forearm tightens spreads over blankets infected with plague seeding spirals of heat loosens her braids black urine runs through silt ash clay shadowed on the walls spilling walls spilling sand and gravel a lira here a lira there sutured through her ruptured flesh tightens cords in leo n a rdo's fingers elbow shoulder hip and in heel of cadavre smoke invades one for squirrel one for crow and if you shake leaves feverish master skin paint surgical scar riddled bright-red stems freezing paint freezing urine blood segmented cell segmented cell by cell prototypes saturated he then looked at a circular looked at a circular house walls sand gravel beating drum and whistle deep-pink plague as autumn winter rubs black clay silence walls in remorseless then she looked at a circular house when you looked your veins multiplying splashes black urine they stare down on horseback pursing their lips measuring ransacking fingers crusted fibrous entrails invades cadavre aluminum walls in your neck to side you read parts of the manuscript wrong suppose she reveals peculiar forms them vivifying cording everyday ash and blood whole aluminum pits groups of the first spaniards in america on a second voyage to guatemala moves hydrogen helium lenny's blanket wrapped around parts of the dissection suppose red wild corn smoke from a burning log the wiry brat ejaculates every foot-print of flora multiplying your long gray hands stretched your gray hands stretched deer skin mona made rings gloves crowns masks the outlines of a new country leo n a rdo seized the wrist of the brat squeezed his throat blood behind his teeth placed the infected blankets one by one stomach and bones crusted for here leave sign of our fate then he looked at a circular house an old osage woman crushing seeds her iron-gray braids she gouged clay quickly she pulls from fire her saliva pools behind her teeth she pulls from fire a pot spilling morsels of beef half-kneeling salia's mouth measures walls then quickly he will fill canvas image of a paysanne flinging a paysanne flinging kernels unwinding her smock crows their claws dark-green stained windows of a stained windows of a cathedral exposed a new country lip-synced sigmund you wrap a blanket around your waist folds and gathers cross and recross stakes with forked ends into ground deep-pink crust ash spirals of heat i arch my back stretching it is a paysanne bending gracile her brow diagonal lines skull neck you traced a scaffold a forked tree and close upon one of the horses tendons & muscles glowing i saw salia beating drum and whistle your palms crushing seeds showing lines cross recross circular pulse groups moist soil of names quicxic bloody wing quicrixcac bloody claw faults she gouged clay i murmured into lenny's ear groups of the first spaniards in america written on the stomach and bones fragment shovels gravel sand clay my doubt remains widening circles circles slowly leo n a rdo fingers he rouges his nipples the brat stares down from a scaffold arches his back stretches his neck riders cutting out entrails their lips intone pulsate behind ice walls gouged with names crossed recrossed tribes on horseback winding her iron-gray braids quickly she fills canvas stretching roots disgorges ancient corn plants extracting one light amber stone idol when gravel sand blown on wind walls in flames of stone divided roots a black rain fell then silence and slow soaking crust ash flames swerving deep-pink plague a forked tree slicing their flesh resin sap sweetens moonlit vines sigmund mused fascinated the lords of xibalba horse and rider in darkness searching guatemala still plastic tubes glistening stared down in the aztec inferno in the evening light worshiped sticks worshiped sticks of fat pine i made rings gloves crowns masks riddled with decay digging out a stone leaving a stone one for the cutworm one for the crow lips whisper counting blankets infected counting blankets infected with plague one by one they planted four acres wandering east to west from center smoke concentrated stems burnt leaf white hearts of incense palms arched pierced bleed names quicxic bloody aluminum faults behind ice walls density of scalp crusted bark a forked tree shadowed upside down stems of moonlit vines you mused resin sap as leaves sweeten clay moss of florida through which blood jets behind their teeth saliva red wild corn multiplying ancient writing gouged in gouged in the gourd seized a little man mona stares down following diagonal lines surgical scar trusts her fibrous skins dressing and stretching measuring skull scalp parchment her feast day dark ridge of lava to north parched halves of skulls placed one by one one for the squirrel one for the crow groups of the first spaniards in america they stare down on horseback ride up close looking at fragments slowly they circle you urge horse and rider course toward in this course toward in this direction tribes crossed recrossed gouged signs from armpit to stomach your pale stomach your pale & gasping son loosens his braids his throat pulsates saliva pools behind his teeth scrotal sac slit groups of the first spaniards in america carcass stripped of its skin bearing two halves there a scalp two halves there a scalp sutured crossed behind when they found ancient corn plants she will fill canvas ash autumn winter discharging pus from slit ears your doubt remains for all that you stretch your neck instinctively mona's attention drawn to reddish layers glowing mudstone and sandstone shovels gravel sand clay clutches bright-red stems tightens around roots woven veins drew silence pale forests stretched the canvas exposed ancient corn plants shadowed upside down rifles against the walls horse and rider around the fire black urine soaking clay sand as he loosens his braids fingers dig one for the squirrel one for the crow crusted torn trees crash sounds sounds of riders cleaning rifles once salia took an axe cut moonlit vines saw bright-red surgical scar through which blood infected with plague the trunk of the body engulfed by the serpent two halves of the cadavre slowly such great decay salia covered his head with mona's smock child & mona perched on lenny's back you stare down pursing your lips your neck to the side plagued by doubt calculating strips of wood right to left the weight of the corpse one for the cutworm and the night air blazes down her jaw fused soil grass animal outlines muscles slowly she reverses one for the crow changed nature of portrait strips calculated left to right weight of corpse one for cutworm down her jaw slowly reverses cunningly plagued by doubt his fallen figure stained with blood of first person ransacked cunningly you urinate spontaneously while flora flinging while flora flinging kernels loosens her braids her smock unwinding murmured into salia's ear luca luca i mesmerize intoned snake winding covered their heads with blankets black horns curve out sand mud blue haze through woodland a forked tree you ride up close squeezing a staff a staff with a skull splashes black urine ahalpuh he who makes pus then hip shoulder elbow and in heel of cadavre stomach stomach and bones stretched out he stares down on horseback pursing their lips measuring strips of soil strips soil riddled invades bright bright red stems circles slowly calculating strips walls in aluminum analyzing death patterns blood segmented cell by cell deep-pink plague slicing bright-red stems their neck stretching left to right their lips measuring ransacking measuring ransacking entrails glistening ash crust soaking one for the cutworm one for the crow dissected correctly counting plastic plastic tubes filling plastic tubes glowing in sunlight you angled your face analyzing death patterns one light amber stone red wild corn dark ridge gouged gouged configurations ripped two halves two halves of parchment multiplying death patterns you put slashes in through which water through which water runs spreads over america through silt ash silt clay death patterns plague crossed i heard crows their claws searching riddled bright red stems one gouged exposed your whitish bones exhausted outlines gravel sand skull neck your wrists arch backwards crushing backwards crushing seeds she wraps a blanket through which blood slowly such great decay she stares down plagued by doubt pus from slit ears horse and rider in darkness tubes counted one for squirrel one for crow entrails walls freezing paint stained circles on the stomach and bones you ride up close begin searching my painting two halves cut into side deep-pink crust heat from a burning log internal and external burns glowing in sunlight burns glowing in sunlight widening a pair of jaws long slow counting teeth burnt in fire knife in one hand a blanket in the other one hand a blanket in the other gray hands stretched measured bones up close ends cleaved deep-pink marrow exposed sections you analyze the assemblage death patterns outlines of a new country then mona looked at a circular house under the trees she fasted scattered cremains scattered cremains in the morning sun ash blood black clay glowing in sunlight death patterns floating like props backwards one by one upside down image of a whipped and crucified woman her saliva pools behind her teeth then an old osage woman crushing seeds her palms shadowed quicxic bloody wind quicrixcac bloody claw notched stick end lower three long strokes strokes from end to end flora waves her arm offering yellows from plants from the stick toward toward the sun her image crossed lines paint congeals you ride up close after each stroke upper torso shadowed skull neck body salia details holes in the hands and feet north of the fire peculiar forms red stems splitting leo n a rdo makes a circular mark passing his hands measuring skull scalp parchment spaniards wearing braided silk belts ropes used to pull the head and torso elbows knees necks alternating floating like props looking she heard crows their claws searching image of a whipped and crucified woman her iron-gray braids hanging end to end toward the sun following crossed lines of paint lines cross recross the center freezing hard roots no sound no sound of hoof-beats you ride up close searching when you looked the heel of the cadavre segmented cell by cell encased roots upper torso of the little man multiplying seethed and probed palms arch resin sap jets saturates behind walls salia's sketch of smoke lines cross recross tendons veins clutches bright red stems measuring two halves of a circular house sides of aluminum walls you stare down on horseback you suppose she reveals peculiar forms groups of forms groups of the first spaniards in america leo n a rdo paints child & mona as leaves sweeten lip-synced sigmund quicrixcac bloody claw quicxic bloody bloody wind no sound no sound scattered cremains in the morning sun crossed lines of paint circles congeals image of a whipped and crucified woman her iron-gray braids hanging ---------------------------------------------------------- black stems scattered cremains through a woodland near a forked near a forked tree patterns seeding and yellow blossoms hydrogen green you scattered delicate blossoms my forearm tightens spreads over right to left red stems counted one for crow one for cutworm the first skull showing lines crossed recrossed yellow skin raw you stare down into heat she falls backwards mistrusts holes in the hands and feet used nails every inch death patterns circles spirals cross recross every inch nearer and nearer into heat his neck stretches ahalpuh he who he who makes pus every name shadows on the walls wind spirals into heat spills sand gravel you ride up close nearer and nearer you use ropes to pull the head and torso held her whitish bones high in air near a forked tree broken rocks a mile of black dust whose names are gouged letters angled white-edged your fingers through sand clay through sand clay silt your fingers tracing slant of wall every inch mistrusts deviates tell me who assures you that this work ever was black stems sticking out letters planted shape a headless idol crust ash then you ride up close loosen your braids hoof-beats swerving shadowed on walls you heard crows their claws searching black coals clumps of deep-pink rot fissures death patterns backflow crossed left to right you are drawing raw thongs image of a whipped and crucified woman your saliva pools behind your teeth you lower your wrist plagued by doubt angled letters gouged into walls nearer and nearer smoke from a burning cross smoke from a burning cross spreads over you looked at a photograph miles of cracked clay walls of a circular house spilling blows sand on carcass near a forked tree near a forked tree pointed tracks broken rocks stained with blood strips calculated weight and night air measured outlines counted counted one for crow one for cutworm through woodland smoke from a burning cross mistrusts you ride up close right right to left of corpse staring down analyzing death patterns jaw crushed pus from slit ears deep-pink marrow deep-pink marrow exposed blue haze through woodland you heard crows their claws searching horses passing near a forked tree hooves pointed tracks death patterns bones black horns curve out sand mud hooves crushing entrails bright red bright red stems red wild corn slowly ash crust soaking ahalpuh he who makes pus you ride up close stare down on horseback pursing pursing your lips measuring claws your neck stretches left to right nearer and nearer carter, 'risk and the new modernity', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-carter-risk.txt risk and the new modernity by simon carter mrc medical sociology unit, glasgow, united kingdom isb002@lancaster.ac.uk _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by simon carter, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: beck, ulrich. _risk society: towards a new modernity_. london: sage, 1992. [1] at 0123 hours (soviet european time) on saturday 26 of april 1986, reactor number four of the chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, rupturing the reaction vessel and causing major structural damage to the plant buildings. the subsequent release of radioactive material caused acute radiation sickness in 200 individuals, 28 of whom subsequently died (spivak 1992). the immediate effects of the catastrophe were therefore comparable to a minor air disaster, yet the possible long-term consequences went far beyond those suggested by such a comparison. a plume of radio-nuclides (i.e. strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137) spread westwards over europe presenting a danger that was invisible and therefore beyond direct human powers of perception. as a result, those living within "fallout" zones became aware that they *might* be suffering irreversible damage but, at the same time, they were dependent on the knowledge of "experts" to find out--a knowledge that was mediated through institutions, argument and causal interpretations and was therefore "open to a social process of definition" (beck 88). [2] the chernobyl tragedy is just one, albeit particularly dramatic, example taken from a long list of other "invisible risks" in which the danger posed is socially disputable. for example, from within the nuclear economy we could add the names windscale (now renamed sellafield), kyshtym, three mile island and oak ridge and, moving outside this domain, we could point to concerns over food additives, pesticides, ozone depletion, air and water pollution, and aids. the project that ulrich beck has set himself is to ask what a society may look like in which disputes about these "new risks" are increasingly pushed to the fore? [3] beck's thesis is, however, more than just another sociological or anthropological examination of the breaks and shifts in the meaning attached to risk, within or between cultures (for an account of this type see douglas and wildavsky). the full title of beck's newly translated book is _risk society: towards a new modernity_ (originally published in german as %risikogesellshaft: auf dem weg in eine andere moderne%, 1986) and the title resonates with the central theme of his work--that we are in a period of *transition* not towards postmodernity but towards a second modernity in which the logic of industrial production and distribution (i.e. wealth) is becoming increasingly tied to the logic of "the social production of risk." as he says: just as modernisation dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernisation today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being. (10) [4] in the first modernity, or industrial society, concerns focused on the distribution of wealth but, according to beck, as material inadequacy was reduced, or at least isolated, we moved to a more complex modernity, or *risk society*, where consideration has to be given to the distribution of risks--a move from class position to risk position, from underproduction of goods to overproduction of harm. these are qualitatively different conditions. in the former, one is dealing with "desirable items in scarcity" but in the latter, where it is a question of the risks produced by modernisation, one has an *undesirable abundance*. "the *positive logic of acquisition* contrasts with a *negative logic of disposition*, avoidance, denial, and reinterpretation" (26). [5] of course it could be argued that industrial society has always been engaged in a contest with risk and danger. yet these risks were construed as external to the project of modernity. thus a distinction was drawn between civilisation (safe) and nature (dangerous). scientific rationality sought to put into discourse those dangerous spaces and therefore make them predictable--in short to "tame" chance (see hacking). beck's point is that the externalisation of risk is no longer possible because it is increasingly apparent that many hazards are a by-product of the same techno-scientific rationality that initially promised progress, development, and safety. today's risks are yesterday's rational settlements (and here we could cite all forms of pollution, including nuclear fallout). [6] within the risk society, though, risk is distributed according to a dual process. on the one hand, the *traditional* inequalities of strata and class in the west are broken up by the "boomerang effect," whereby "sooner or later the risks also catch up with those who produce or profit from them" (37). and while this may primarily entail a threat to life and limb it can also "affect secondary media, money, property and legitimation" (38). on the other hand, new international inequalities are established by the industrialised states attempting to export their risks to the third world. here beck points to the accident at a chemical production plant in the indian city of bhopal and the selling abroad, in developing countries, of pesticides. "there is a systematic attraction between extreme poverty and extreme risk" (41). but even here, ultimately, the boomerang effect strikes back at the source of risk (for instance in the importation of cheap foodstuffs contaminated with western pesticides). the risks of modernisation, therefore, undermine the bounds of the nation state as established in the industrial society. risk societies "contain within themselves a grass-roots developmental dynamics that destroys boundaries" (47). [7] for beck these developments have implications for our conception of identity. in particular, he suggests many of the traditions and ideas of the enlightenment are breaking down--the old "truths" no longer hold. he sums this up simply in the following section: to put it bluntly, in class positions being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being. crucial for this is the type of knowledge, specifically the lack of personal experience and the depth of dependency on knowledge, which surrounds all dimensions of defining hazards. (53) [8] for instance, within the industrial or class society, the threatening potential is knowable (i.e. the loss of one's job) without any special cognitive means, "measuring procedures," or consideration of tolerance thresholds. "the affliction is clear and in that sense independent of knowledge" (53). yet within the risk society the situation is reversed. those who are victimised--by, say, pesticide contamination--cannot determine their status by their own cognitive means and experiences. within this new situation "the extent . . . of people's endangerment [is] fundamentally dependent on external knowledge" (53). but, as we saw above, the externalisation of risk knowledge, into the hands of risk experts, is a social process thwarted by public disputes and disagreements between experts and public and among the experts themselves. the relationship between cause and effect, so central to scientific rationality, is suspended. [9] but this leads to a situation in which the very divide between expert and non-expert becomes turbid and amorphous. those people living with "invisible" hazards "bang their heads against the walls of scientific denials of the existence of modernisation risks" (61). this leads to what beck characterises as a *learning process* in which victims no longer believe risks to be acts of fate. elsewhere, beck has illustrated this process by describing the way in which those who are suffering are required to demonstrate "that they are sick and what has made them sick . . . and in an inversion of the normal legal process, are obliged to provide proof of poisoning themselves" (100). these people become "small, private alternative experts in the risks of modernisation" (61). [10] this, in some ways, is similar to an argument put forward by patton in relation to those people living with aids. in earlier stages of history those people suffering from illness were largely silenced by the knowledge formations which establish an unreachable boundary around scientific medical "wisdom." but the advent of the aids epidemic has led activists, at least in the united states, to themselves gain considerable medical proficiency. the circulation of newsletters and self help books provides information about clinical trials, including criteria of inclusion and exclusion, to those people living with aids. in addition, "underground" drug trials, using experimental products ordered through offshore pharmaceutical companies, have become established in some communities. as patton says "it is the medical knowledge of the person living with hiv/aids . . . which has become today's ticket to experimental treatments" (52). [11] this period of acute uncertainty and risk, in which the promises of techno-science are seen to have failed, may lead one to suspect that beck has a pessimistic and bleak view of our future. but beck is an optimist and this is expressed in what he sees as the possible potential of the learning process. it may now be that risks are no longer accepted passively by those who have to live with them. in his recent extensive commentary on beck's work, lash has summarised this process of *reflexive modernisation*. of course, the first modernity, or industrial society, by definition was reflexive. yet there are, among others, two possible forms of reflexivity: it can be the self-monitoring of a social system or, on the other hand, a self-monitoring by individuals. the industrial society would "consist of a mixture of self-monitored (and modern) and heteronomously monitored (or traditional) spheres of social life. beck's second modernity would then be much more consistently reflexive" (lash 5). this reflexive modernisation, rather than constituting a rejection of rationality is instead an embracing of a *radicalised rationality*. as beck sums the process up: in contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterised essentially by a *lack*: the impossibility of an *external* attribution of hazards. in other words, risks depend on *decisions*; they are industrially produced and in this sense *politically reflexive*. while all earlier cultures and phases of social development confronted threats in various ways, society is *confronted by itself* through its dealings with risks. . . . this means that the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but *knowledge*; not a deficient but perfect mastery over nature; not what eludes the human grasp but the system of norms and objective constraints established with the industrial epoch. (183) [12] now for some criticisms. a good place to begin may be beck's style. his book can only be described as a gradual slide from topic to topic in which one is never sure if one is reading a conclusion or an opening announcement. he makes statements on one page, only to then, apparently, contradict them a few pages later (but one is never totally sure.) while some writers, labelled as postmodernist, intentionally use similar devices in order playfully to resist the illusion of perfect textual coherence and univocity, with beck one is less confident that one is being deliberately exercised. [13] for example, one of the difficulties in conceptualising the term "risk" is that the it can mean very different things in different contexts. thus, in beck's argument we have, among others, two models of risk. on the one hand, within the industrial society we have those scientific understandings of risk which seek to "objectively measure" and quantify risk while, on the other hand, within the "risk society" such an objective measurement of risk increasingly becomes exposed as socially disputable--a move from risk as "object" to risk as "social process," from knowable to unknowable risk. added to this could be a series of less well defined and colloquial uses of the word risk (ranging from lay epidemiology to fatalistic and mystical interpretations of danger.) hence, within beck's account, one word--"risk"--becomes overloaded with a plethora of often opposed meanings, and this gives his text a certain blurriness at just the point where one would hope it to be clear. [14] to be fair to beck, this same problem is found in much of the literature on risk, a good deal of which is even less helpful than he is in defining its central term. also, at a more general level, it does seem that beck is, at least partially, aware of the amorphous nature of his book, as he claims that this work represents, more than anything, a personal process and admits that "the noise of wrestling sometimes resounds in this book" (9). in this respect he compares himself to a nineteenth-century observer who is on the "lookout for the contours of the as yet unknown industrial age" (9). [15] yet the structure of his book does leave certain sections "out on a limb." in chapter 4, for example, which concerns gender relations, beck argues that men have practised a *rhetoric of equality*, without matching their words with deeds. on both sides, he says, the ice of illusions has grown thin; with the equalisation of the prerequisites (in education and law) the positions of men and women become *more* unequal, *more* conscious, and *less* legitimated (104). while it is good to see a male social theorist giving serious attention to questions of gender, it is not fully clear how this chapter is built into, or relates to, the rest of his thesis. indeed, in his shorter articles on risk society, beck scarcely mentions gender at all. [16] one can also criticise certain parts of beck's argument. for beck, we are at the point of transition between two historical epochs--between the industrial and the risk society. yet he does not adequately deal with how far along this transition we have passed. in this respect his vision of a new modernity appears somewhat illusory. for instance, his claim that the industrial society has brought about a reduction in material inadequacy cannot sit well with the experiences of many living in the deprived areas of any large city or substantial sections of the third world population. and the boomerang effect of risk re-distribution has a long way to go before there is any real equalisation of risk distributions. to give one example, we are all exposed to a certain level of "engineered radioactivity," and catastrophes such as chernobyl and three mile island demonstrate that radioactivity, in these cases, does not very faithfully respect the class or wealth of its victims. nevertheless, in most cases it is easy to identify systematic unevenness in the distribution of risk exposures. recent studies of cancer "hot spots" linked with the workers at nuclear plants and their children (see epstein, also gardner et al.) have shown that risks may still be localised to particular geographic spaces or specific groups. [17] and beck's optimism about the prospects of a radicalised rationality does not even serve to dispel his own empirical evidence of reasons why we should all be gloomy about prospects for the future. on the next to last page of the book beck outlines some practical steps towards a reflexive modernisation: only when medicine opposes medicine, nuclear physics opposes nuclear physics, human genetics opposes human genetics or information technology opposes information technology can the future that is brewed up in the test-tube become intelligible and evaluable for the outside world (234). this might be a reasonable starting point, but there is little evidence that anything like this is about to happen. as bauman has observed, in commenting on beck's work: and yet we are told repeatedly that it is the same science (in company with technology, its executive arm) who brought us here, who will get us out. science has made all this mess, science will clear it. but why should we trust it now, when we know where the past assurances have led us? (25) [18] yet, having said all this, i would stress that beck's work is well worth examining--and not just by those interested in the sociology of risk, but by anyone with an interest in social theory and politics. while his claim that we are entering a new risk society may be premature, i think that, at a restricted local level, we may be seeing a reflexive modernisation as specific risks become politicised by certain social actors (in particular by the new social movements or associations). [19] in terms of a social understanding of risk, beck's book represents a novel and innovative contribution to a field of enquiry that has become somewhat stale in recent years. it is a field largely dominated by cognitive psychologists (see, for example, slovic et al., or tversky and kahneman), and i must agree with beck's assessment of cognitive psychological work on risk when he ironically describes the way these researchers view the lay public: they [the public] are ignorant, of course, but well intentioned; hard-working, but without a clue. in this view, the population is composed of nothing but would-be engineers, who do not yet possess sufficient knowledge. they only need be stuffed full of technical details, and then they will share the experts' viewpoint. (58) [20] there is no such condescension in beck's _risk society_, which, whatever its weaknesses, is an engaging and provocative book. at the very least it provides us with some new formulations and some fresh terms to bring to bear on debates about "development," "progress," and the risks that attend them. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited bauman, z. "the solution as problem." _the times higher education supplement_, 13 november 1992. beck, u. "on the way to the industrial risk-society? outline of an argument." _thesis eleven_ (1989): 86-103. douglas, m., & wildavsky, a. _risk and culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers_. berkeley and london: u of california p, 1983. epstein, p.r. "soviet nuclear mishaps pre-chernobyl." _the lancet_ (1993): 341, 346. gardner, m.j., hall, j., & downes, s. "follow up study of the children born to mother resident in seascale, west cumbria." _british medical journal_ 295 (1987): 822-827. hacking, i. _the taming of chance_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1990. lash, s. "reflexive modernization: the aesthetic dimension." _theory culture & society_ 10 (1993): 1-23. patton, c. _inventing aids_. new york: routledge. 1990. slovic, p., fischhoff, b., & lichtenstein, s. "facts and fears: understanding perceived risk." _societal risk assessment: how safe is safe enough?_ ed. r.c. schwing & w. a. albers. new york: plenum press, 1980. slovic, p., fischhoff, b., & lichtenstein, s. "perceived risk: psychological factors and social implications." _proceedings of the royal society of london_ 376 (1981): 17-34. spivak, l.i. "psychiatric aspects of the accident at chernobyl nuclear power station." _european journal of psychiatry_ 6 (1992): 207-212. tversky, a., & kahneman, d. "judgement under uncertainty: heuristics and biases: biases in judgements reveal some heuristics of thinking under uncertainty." _science_ 185 (1974): 1124-1131. � moulthrop, 'you say you want a revolution? hypertext and the laws of media', postmodern culture v1n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n3-moulthrop-you.txt you say you want a revolution? hypertext and the laws of media by stuart moulthrop <eifa307@utxvm.bitnet> university of texas at austin _postmodern culture_ v.1 n.3 (may, 1991) copyright (c) 1991 by stuart moulthrop, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] the original xanadu (coleridge's) came billed as "a vision in a dream," designated doubly unreal and thus easily aligned with our era of "operational simulation" where, strawberry fields, nothing is "real" in the first place since no place is really "first" (baudrillard, _simulations_ 10). but all great dreams invite revisions, and these days we find ourselves perpetually on the re-make. so here is the new xanadu(tm), the universal hypertext system proposed by theodor holm nelson--a vision which, unlike its legendary precursor, cannot be integrated into the dream park of the hyperreal. hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse or implosion where referential or "grounded" utterance becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the imaginary. we construct our representational systems not in serial relation to indisputably "real" phenomena, but rather in recursive and multiple parallel, "mapping on to different co-ordinate systems" (pynchon 159). maps derive not from territories but from other map-making enterprises: all the world's a simulation. [2] this reality implosion brings serious ideological consequences, for some would say it invalidates the informing "master narratives" of modernity, leaving us with a proliferation of incompatible discourses and methods (lyotard 26). such unchecked variation, it has been objected, deprives social critique of a clear agenda (eagleton 63). hyperreality privileges no discourse as absolute or definitive; critique becomes just another form of paralogy, a countermove in the language game that is techno-social construction of reality. the game is all encompassing, and therein lies a problem. as linda hutcheon observes, "the ideology of postmodernism is paradoxical, for it depends upon and draws its power from that which it contests. it is not truly radical; nor is it truly oppositional" (120). [3] this problem of complicity grows especially acute where media and technologies are concerned. hyperreality is as much a matter of writing practice as it is of textual theory: as michael heim points out, "[i]n magnetic code there are no originals" (162). electronic information may be rapidly duplicated, transmitted, and assembled into new knowledge structures. from word processing to interactive multimedia, postmodern communication systems accentuate what ihab hassan calls "immanence" or "the intertextuality of all life. a patina of thought, of signifiers, of 'connections,' now lies on everything the mind touches in its gnostic (noo)sphere. . . ." (172). faced with this infinitely convoluted system of discourse, we risk falling into technological abjection, a sense of being hopelessly abandoned to simulation, lost in "the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre" (baudrillard, _simulations_ 139). if all the world's a simulation, then we are but simulacral subjects cycling through our various iterations, incapable of any "radical" or "oppositional" action that would transform the techno social matrix. [4] of course, this pessimistic or defeatist attitude is hardly universal. we are far more likely to hear technology described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for liberation. bolter (1991), drexler (1987), mccorduck (1985), and zuboff (1988) all contend that postmodern modes of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies and promote broader definitions of authority in the informational workplace. heim points out that under the influence of these technologies "psychic life will be redefined" (164). but if hutcheon is correct in her observation that postmodernism is non-oppositional, then how will such a reconstruction of order and authority take place? how and by whom is psychic life--and more important, political life--going to be redefined? [5] these questions must ultimately be addressed not in theory but in practice--which is where the significance of nelson's second xanadu lies. with xanadu, nelson invalidates technological abjection, advancing an unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free. in its extensive ambitions xanadu transcends the hyperreal. it is not an opium vision but something stranger still, a business plan for the development of what barthes called "the %social% space of writing" (81), a practical attempt to reconfigure literate culture. xanadu is the most ambitious project ever proposed for hypertext or "non-sequential writing" (_dream machines_ 29; _literary machines_ 5/2). hypertext systems exploit the interactive potential of computers to reconstruct text not as a fixed series of symbols, but as a variable-access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association (see conklin; joyce; slatin). a hypertext is a complex network of textual elements. it consists of units or "nodes," which may be analogous to pages, paragraphs, sections, or volumes. nodes are connected by "links," which act like dynamic footnotes that automatically retrieve the material to which they refer. because it is no longer book-bounded, hypertextual discourse may be modified at will as reader/writers forge new links within and among documents. potentially this collectivity of linked text, which nelson calls the "docuverse," can expand without limit. [6] as nelson foresees it, xanadu would embody this textual universe. the system would provide a central repository and distribution network for all writing: it would be the publishing house, communications medium, and great hypertextual library of babel. yet for all its radical ambitions, nelson's design preserves familiar proprieties. local xanadu outlets would be "silverstands"(tm), retail access and consulting centers modeled after fast-food franchises and thus integrated with the present economy of information exchange. xanadu would protect intellectual property through copyright. users would pay per byte accessed and would receive royalties when others obtained proprietary material they had published in the system. the problems and complexities of this scheme are vast, and at the moment, the fulfilled xanadu remains a "2020 vision," a probe into the relatively near future. but it is a future with compelling and important implications for the postmodern present. [7] the future, as disney and spielberg have taught us, is a place we must come "back" to. the american tomorrow will be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of "lost" or "forgotten" values. xanadu is no exception: ted nelson sees the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of recovery. his "grand hope" lies in "a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new renaissance of ideas and generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not lose the details which are the final substance of everything" ("how hypertext (un)does the canon" 4). to a skeptical observer, this vision of xanadu might suggest another domain of the postmodern theme park. gentle readers, welcome to literacyland! [8] but this vision could constitute more than just a sideshow attraction. nelson foresees a renovation of culture, a unification of discourse, a reader-and-writer's paradise where all writing opens itself to/in the commerce of ideas. this is the world in which all "work" becomes "text," not substance but reference, not containment but connection (see bush; barthes; zuboff). the magnitude of the change implied here is enormous. but what about the politics of that change? what community of interpretation- and beyond that, what social order--does this intertextual world presume? with the conviction of a true enlightenment man, nelson envisions "a new populitism that can make the deeper understandings of the few at last available to the many" ("how hypertext (un)does the canon" 6). [9] what is "populitism"?--another of nelson's neologisms (e.g., "hypermedia," "cybercrud," "teledildonics"), in this case a portmanteau word combining "populism" with "elite." the word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like shoshana zuboff and jay david bolter, a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function. a "populite" culture might mark the first step toward realization of jean-francois lyotard's "game of perfect information" where all have equal access to the world of data, and where "[g]iven equal competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but in its production), what extra performativity depends on in the final analysis is 'imagination,' which allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game" (52). this is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital, the mechanism of that magical process being nomology or rule-making--admittedly a rather specialized form of "imagination." [10] at least two troubles lurk in this paradise. first, the prospect that social/textual order will devolve not unto the many but only to a very few; and more important, that those few will fail to recognize the terms of their splendid isolation. consider the case of the reluctant computer dick clifford stoll, whose memoir, _the cuckoo's egg_, nicely illustrates these problems. stoll excoriates "cyberpunks," virtual vandals who abuse the openness of scientific computing environments. their unsportsmanlike conduct spoils the information game, necessitating cumbersome restrictions on the free flow of data. but stoll's definition of informational "freedom" appears murky at best. he repeatedly refers to the mainframe whose system he monitors as "his" computer, likening cybernetic intrusions to burglaries. electronic information, as stoll sees it, lies in strict analogy with material and private property. [11] private in what sense? stoll professes to believe that scientists must have easy access to research results, but only within their own communities. he is quick to condemn incursions by "unauthorized" outsiders. there is some sense in this argument: stoll repeatedly points out that the intruder in the stanford mainframe might have interfered with a lifesaving medical imaging system. but along with this concern comes an ideological danger. who decides what information "belongs" to whom? stoll's "popular elite" is restricted to academic scientists, a version of "the people" as %nomenklatura%, those whose need to know is defined by their professional affiliation. more disturbingly, stoll seems unaware of the way this brotherhood is situated within larger political hierarchies. describing a meeting with pentagon brass, he reflects: "how far i'd come. a year ago, i would have viewed these officers as war-mongering puppets of the wall street capitalists. this, after all, was what i'd learned in college. now things didn't seem so black and white. they seemed like smart people handling a serious problem" (278). [12] here is elite populism at its scariest. though he protests (too much) his political correctness, stoll's sense of specialist community shifts to accommodate the demands of the moment. when in fort meade he does as the natives do, recognizing agents of air force intelligence, the national security agency, even the cia and fbi as brothers-in-craft. after all, they are "smart" (technologically adept) and "serious" (professional). their immediate goal seems legitimate and laudable. they are just "handling" a problem, tracking down the intruder who has violated the electronic privacy of stoll's community (and, not coincidentally, their own). they are the good policemen, the ones who are your friends, not really "them" after all but just a braid-shouldered version of "us." [13] stoll is not troubled that these boon companions live at the heart of the military-industrial complex. he disregards the fact that they seem aware of domestic communications intercepts--in phone conversations, stoll's cia contact refers to the fbi as "the f entity," evidently to thwart a monitoring program (144). stoll does task his agency associates for sowing disinformation and managing dirty wars, but this critique never gets much past the stage of rhetorical questions. in fact stoll seems increasingly comfortable in the intelligence community. if the data spooks turn out to be less interested in freedom of scientific speech than in quashing a security leak, stoll has no real objection. his own ideals and interests are conveniently served in the process. [14] what leads to such regrettable blindness, and how might it have been prevented? these may be especially pertinent questions as we consider entrusting our literate culture to an automated information system. the spooks are not so easily conjured away. it is no longer sufficient to object that scientists and humanists form distinct communities, and that stoll's seduction could not happen in our own elect company. the old "two cultures" paradigm has shifted out from under us, largely through catholic adoption of technologies like data networks and hypertext. networks are networks, and we can assume that most if not all of them will eventually engender closed elites. fascism, as deleuze and guattari instruct, is a matter of all-too-human desire (26). what can shield humanist networks, or even the "generalist" networks nelson foresees, from the strategy of divide and co-opt? what might insulate xanadu from those ancestral voices prophesying war? [15] the answer, as forecasters like mccorduck and drexler point out, lies in the hypertext concept itself--the operating principle of an open and dynamic literature, a consensual canon with a minimum of hierarchical impedances and a fundamental instability in those hierarchies it maintains. visionary and problematic as it may seem, nelson's vision of "populitism" has much to recommend it- not the least of which is its invitation to consider more carefully the likely social impact of advanced communication systems. in fact hypertext may well portend social change, a fundamental reshaping of text production and reception. the telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in its true sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited by a relentless disintegration of global authority. since information is now virtually an equivalent of capital, and since textuality is our most powerful way of shaping information, it follows that xanadu might indeed change the world. but to repeat the crucial question, how will this change come about? what actual social processes can translate the pragmatics of nelson's business plan into the radicalism of a hypertext manifesto? [16] the complete answers lie with future history. in one respect, ted nelson's insistence that xanadu become an economically viable enterprise is exemplary: we will discover the full implications of this technology only as we build, manage, and work in hypertextual communities, starting within the existing constraints of information capitalism. but while we wait on history, we can devote a little time to augury. as a theorist of an incipient medium, one is reduced to playing medium, eking out predictions with the odd message from the other side. which brings us to the last work of marshall mcluhan, a particularly important ancestral voice from whom to hear. at his death, mcluhan left behind notes for an enigmatic final project: the fourfold "laws of media" which form the framework for a semiotics of technology. the laws proceed from four basic questions that can be asked about any invention: * what does it enhance or intensify? * what does it render obsolete or displace? * what does it retrieve that was previously obsolete? * what does it produce or become when taken to its limit? [17] as mcluhan demonstrates, these questions are particularly instructive when applied to pivotal or transforming technologies like printing or broadcasting. they are intended to discover the ways in which information systems affect the social text, rearranging sense ratios and rewriting theories of cultural value. they reveal the nature of the basic statement, the "uttering or 'outering'" that underlies mechanical extensions of human faculties. if we put xanadu and hypertext to this series of questions, we may discover more about both the potential and the limits of hypertext as an agency of change. 1. what does hypertext enhance or intensify? [18] according to mcluhan's standard analysis, communications media adjust the balance or "ratio" of the senses by privileging one channel of perception over others. print promotes sight over hearing, giving us an objectified, perspectival, symbolized world: "an eye for an ear" (_understanding media_ 81). but this approach needs modification for our purposes. hypertext differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a return or recursion (of which more later) to an earlier form of symbolic discourse, i.e., print. the effect of hypertext thus falls not simply upon the sense channels but farther along the cognitive chain. as vannevar bush pointed out in the very first speculation on informational linking technologies, these mechanisms enhance the fundamental capacity of %pattern recognition% ("as we may think," qtd. in _literary machines_ 1/50). [19] hypertext is all about connection, linkage, and affiliation. formally speaking, its universe is the one thomas pynchon had in mind when he defined "paranoia" as "the realization that %everything is connected%, everything in the creation--not yet blindingly one, but at least connected...." (820). in hypertext systems, this ethos of connection is realized in technics: users do not passively rehearse or receive discourse, they explore and construct links (joyce 12). at the kernel of the hypertext concept lie ideas of affiliation, correspondence, and resonance. in this, as nelson has argued from the start, hypertext is nothing more than an extension of what literature has always been (at least since "tradition and the individual talent")--a temporally extended network of relations which successive generations of readers and writers perpetually make and unmake. [20] this redefinition of textuality gives rise to a number of questions. what does it mean to enhance our sensitivity to patterns in this shifting matrix, to become sensitized to what pynchon calls "other orders behind the visible?" does this mean that hypertext will turn us into "paranoids," anxious interpreters convinced that all structures are mysteriously organized "against" us? what does interpretive "resistance" mean in a hypertextual context? can such a reading strategy be possible after poststructuralism, with the author-function reduced (like pynchon himself) to quasi anonymous nonpresence, a voiceless occasion for deconstructive "writing" (mchoul and wills 9)? [21] perverse though it may seem, hypertext does accentuate the agonistic element of reading. early experience with hypertext narrative suggests that its readers may actually be more concerned with prior authority and design than readers of conventional writing. the apparent "quickliming of the author" does not dispel the aura of intention in hypertext (douglas 100). the constantly repeated ritual of interaction, with its reminder of discursive alternatives, reveals the text as a made thing, not monologic perhaps but hardly indeterminate. the text gestures toward openness- %what options can you imagine?%--but then it forecloses: some options are available but not others, and someone clearly has done the defining. the author persists, undead presence in the literary machine, the inevitable hand that turns the time. hypertextual writing--at least when considered as read-only or "exploratory" text (see joyce)- may thus emphasize antithetical modes of reading, leading us to regard the deconstructed system-maker much in the way that leo bersani recently described the author of _gravity's rainbow_: as "the enemy text" (108). [22] so perhaps we need a psychiatrist general's warning: reading this hypertext can make you paranoid--indeed it must, since the root sense of paranoia, a parallel or parallax gnosis, happens to be a handy way to conceive of the meta-sense of pattern recognition that hypertext serves to enhance. but would such a distortion of our cognitive ratios necessarily constitute pathology? in dealing with vast and nebulous information networks--to say nothing of those corporate-sponsored "virtual realities" that may lie in our future--a certain "creative paranoia" may be a definite asset. in fact the paragnosticism implicit in hypertext may be the best way to keep the information game clean. surrounded by filaments and tendrils of a network, the sojourner in xanadu or other hypertext systems will always be reminded of her situation in a fabric of power arrangements. her ability to build and pursue links should encourage her to subject those arrangements to inquiry. which brings us to the second of mcluhan's key questions: 2. what does hypertext displace or render obsolete? [23] though it may be tempting to respond, %the book%, that answer makes no sense. the book is already "dead" (or superseded) if by "alive" you mean that the institution in question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas. irving louis horowitz argues that reports of the book's demise are exaggerated; even in an age of television and computers, we produce more books each year than ever before (20). indeed, our information ecology seems likely to retain a mix of print and electronic media for at least the next century. yet as alvin kernan recently pointed out, the outlook for books in the long run is anything but happy (135-43). as the economic and ecological implications of dwindling forests come home, the cost of paper will rise precipitously. at the same time, acidic decay of existing books will enormously increase maintenance costs to libraries. given these factors, some shift to electronic storage seems inevitable (though kernan, an analogue man to the last, argues for microfilm). [24] yet this change in the medium of print does not worry cultural conservatives like kernan, neil postman, or e.d. hirsch nearly so much as the prospect that the decline of the book may terminate the cultural dominance of print. the chief technological culprit in kernan's "death of literature" is not the smart machine but the idiot box. "such common culture as we still have," kernan laments, "comes largely from television" (147). [25] but the idiot box--or to be precise, the boxed idiot- is precisely the intellectual problem that hypertext seems excellently suited to address. in answer to mcluhan's second question--what does hypertext render obsolete?--the best answer is not %literacy% but rather %post-literacy%. as nelson foresees, the development of hypertext systems implies a revival of typographic culture (albeit it in a dynamic, truly paperless environment). that forecast may seem recklessly naive or emptily prophetic, but it is quite likely valid. hypertext means the end of the death of literature. [26] here the voice of the skeptic must be heard: %a revival of literacy?--read my lips: not in a million years%. even the most devoted defender of print is likely to resist the notion of a gutenberg renaissance. in the west, genuine literacy--cultural, multicultural, or simply functional--can be found only among a well-defined managerial and professional class. at present that class is fairly large, but in the u.s. and u.k., world leaders in laissez-faire education, it is contracting noticeably. so it must seem foolish to imagine, as ted nelson does, a mass consumer market for typographic information, a growth industry based on the electronic equivalent of the local library. [27] indeed, should xanadu become a text-only system (which is not intended), its prospects would be poor in the long run. there are however other horizons for interactive textuality--not just hypertext but another nelsonian coinage, "hypermedia." print is not the only means of communication deliverable in a polysequential format articulated by software links. in trying to imagine the future of hypertext culture, we must also consider interactive multimedia "texts" that incorporate voice, music, animated graphics, and video along with alphabetic script (lanham 287). hypertext is about connection- promiscuous, pervasive, and polymorphously perverse connection. it is a writing practice ideally suited to the irregular, the transgressive, and the carnivalesque (harpold 8). culturally speaking, the %promiscuity% of hypertext (in the root sense of "a tendency to seek relations") knows no bounds of form, format, or cultural level. there is no reason to assume that hypertext or hypermedia should not support popular as well as elite culture, or indeed that it might not promote a "populite" miscegenation of discourses. [28] but what can this mean--talking books in homeboy jive? street rap accompanied by eliotic scholia? nintendo with delusions of cinema? or worse, could we be thinking of yet more industrial light and magic, the disneyverse of eyephones and datagloves where you (insert username) are in the fantasy? perhaps, as one critic of the computer industry recently put it, interactive multimedia must inevitably decay to its lowest common denominator, "hyper mtv" (levy, "multimedia" 52). according to this analysis, the linear and objectifying tendencies of any print content in a multimedium text would be overwhelmed by the subjective, irrational, and emotive influence of audio/ video. this being the case, hypertext could hardly claim to represent "a cure for television stupor." [29] but nelson's aspiration should not be so easily dismissed as a vision in a dream. hypertext does indeed have the power to recover print literacy--though not in quite the way that nelson supposes; which brings us to the third of mcluhan's queries: 3. what does hypertext retrieve that was previously obsolete? [30] xanadu and similar projects could invite large numbers of people to become reacquainted with the cultural power of typographic literacy. to assert this, of course, is to break with mcluhan's understanding of media history. it is hard to dispute the argument of _understanding media_ and _the gutenberg galaxy_ that the culture of the printing press has entered into dialectic contention with a different ethos based on the "cool" immediacy of broadcasting. but though that diagnosis remains tremendously important, mcluhan's cultural prognosis for the west holds less value. mcluhan saw clearly the transforming impact of "electric" technologies, but perhaps because he did not live much beyond the onset of the microprocessor boom, he failed to recognize the next step--the %recursion% to a new stage of typographic literacy through the syncretic medium of hypertext. [31] it is crucial to distinguish recursion from return or simple repetition, because this difference answers the objection that print literacy will be lost or suppressed in multimedia texts. recursion is self-reference with the possibility of progressive self-modification (hofstadter 127). considered for its recursive possibilities, "writing" means something radically different in linked interactive compositions than it does in a codex book or even a conventional electronic document. literacy in hypertext encompasses two domains: the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical, and tropological space that we now know as "literature," and also a second province, stricter in its formalisms but much greater in its power to shape interactive discourse. this second domain has been called "writing space" (bolter 4); a case might be made (with apologies to those who insist that virtual reality is strictly a post-print phenomenon) that it also represents the true meaning of %cyberspace%. [32] walter benjamin observed with some regret that by the 1930's, any literate european could become an author, at least to the extent of publishing a letter or an article in the newspapers (232). with no regrets at all, ted nelson envisions a similar extension of amateur literary production in xanadu, where all readers of the system can potentially become writers, or at least editors and commentators. the first amendment guarantee of free speech, nelson points out, is a %personal% liberty: anyone may publish, and in xanadu everyone can. so nelson bases his prediction of revived literacy on the promise of a broadly popular publishing franchise. [33] this vision is limited in one crucial regard. nelson treats print essentially as the %content% of his system, which is taking a rather narrow view. in describing xanadu as a more or less transparent medium for the transmission of text, nelson overlooks the fact that alphabetic or alphanumeric representation also defines the %form% of xanadu, and indeed of any hypertext system. this neglect is consistent with the generally broad focus of nelson's vision, which has led him to dismiss details of user interface design as "front-end functions" to be worked out by the user. [34] design details, whether anterior or posterior to the system, cannot be passed over so easily. in fact the structure and specifications of the hypertext environment are themselves parts of the docuverse, arguably the most important parts. beneath any hypertext document or system there exists a lower layer that we might call the %hypotext%. on this level, in the working implementations of its "protocols," xanadu is a creature of print. the command structures that govern linkage, display, editing, accounting, and all the other functions of the system exist as digital impulses that may be translated into typographic text. they were written out, first in pseudo-english strings, then in a high-level programming language, finally as binary code. therefore xanadu at its most intimate level is governed by all those features of the typographic medium so familiar from mcluhan's analysis: singular sequentiality, objectivity, instrumentality, "left-brained" visual bias, and so on. the wonder of hypertext and hypermedia lies in their capacity to escape these limitations by using the microprocessor to turn linear, monologic typography recursively back upon itself--to create linear control structures that enable an escape from linear control. [35] in recognizing the recursive trick behind hypertextual writing, we come to a broader understanding of electronic literacy. literacy under hypertext must extend not only to the "content" of a composition but to its hypotextual "form" as well--e.g., the way nodes are divided to accommodate data structures and display strategies, or the types of linkage available and the ways they are apparent to the reader. practically speaking, this means that users of a hypertext system can be expected to understand print not only as the medium of traditional literary discourse, but also as a meta-tool, the key to power at the level of the system itself. [36] ong and mcluhan have argued that television and radio introduce "secondary orality," a recursion to non-print forms of language and an "audile space" of cognition (_orality and literacy_ 135; _laws of media_ 57). by analogy, hypertext and hypermedia seem likely to instigate a %secondary literacy% --"secondary" in that this approach to reading and writing includes a self-consciousness about the technological mediation of those acts, a sensitivity to the way texts-below-the-text constitute another order behind the visible. this secondary literacy involves both rhetoric and technics: to read at the hypotextual level is to confront (paragnostically) the design of the system; to write at this level is to reprogram, revising the work of the first maker. thus this secondary literacy opens for its readers a "cyberspace" in the truest sense of the word, meaning a place of command and control where the written word has the power to remake appearances. this space has always been accessible to the programming elite, to system operators like clifford stoll and shady operators like his hacker adversary. but nelson's 2020 vision puts a silverstand in every commercial strip right next to mcdonald's and videoland. if xanadu succeeds in re-awakening primary literacy as a mass phenomenon, there is reason to believe that it will inculcate secondary literacy as well. [37] but like any grand hope, this technopiate dream of a new literacy ultimately has to face its man from porlock. secondary literacy might well prove culturally disastrous. the idea of a general cyberspace franchise, in which all control structures are truly contingent and "consensual," does summon up visions of informatic chaos. "chaos," however, is a concept we have recently begun to understand as something other than simply an absence of "order:" it is instead a condition of possibility in which new arrangements spontaneously assemble themselves (prigogine and stengers 14). [38] taking this neo-chaotic view, we might inquire into the possible positive effects of secondary literacy in a postmodern political context. in outlining a first move beyond our recent "depthless," ahistorical quiescence, fredric jameson calls for an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping," a "pedagogical political culture" in which we would begin to teach ourselves where we stand in the networks of transnational power (92). at this moment, as the west reconsiders its new world order in the aftermath of a war for oil reserves, we seem in especially urgent need of such education. but such a cultural pedagogy clearly needs something more than the evening war news, especially when reporters are confined to informational wading pools. we require not only a sensitivity to the complex textuality of power but an ability to intercept and manipulate that text- an advanced creative paranoia. this must ultimately be a human skill, independent of technological "utterance;" but the secondary literacy fostered by hypertext could help us at least to begin the enormous task of drawing our own cognitive maps. here, however, we verge on the main question of hypertextual politics, which brings up the last item in the mcluhan catechism: 4. what does hypertext become when taken to its limit? [39] orthodox mcluhanite doctrine holds that "every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics" (_laws of media_ viii). media evolution, in mcluhan's view, proceeds through sharply punctuated equilibriums. "hot" media like print tend to increase their routinization and determinism until they reach a limit (say, the prose of the late 19th century). beyond that point the overheated medium turns paradoxical, passing almost instantly from hot to super-"cool," bombarding readers with such a plethora of codings that conventional interpretation collapses. structure and hierarchy, the distinguishing features of a "hot" medium, reduce to indeterminacy. the plurality of codes overwhelms hermeneutic certainty, the "figure" of a univocal text reverses into polysemous "ground," and we reach the ultima thule of gutenberg culture, _finnegans wake_. [40] but though mcluhan had much to say about the reversal of overheated media, he left the complementary possibility unexplored. what happens to already "cool" or participatory media when they reach their limits? true to the fourth law, their characteristics reverse, but here the effect is reactionary, not radical. radio, for instance, begins in interactive orality (two-way transceiving) but decays into the hegemony of commercial broadcasting, where "talk radio" lingers as a reminder of how open the airwaves are not. television too starts by shattering the rigid hierarchies of the gutenberg nation-state, promising to bring anyplace into our living rooms; but its version of global village turns out to be homogenous and hegemonic, a planetary empire of signs. [41] hypertext and hypermedia are also interactively "cool," so following this analysis we might conclude that they will undergo a similar implosion, becoming every bit as institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks. indeed, it doesn't take mcluhanite media theory to arrive at that forecast. according to the economic logic of late capitalism, wouldn't the xanadu operating company ultimately sell out to sony, matsushita, phillips, or some other wielder of multinational leverage? [42] such a self-negating "reversal" may not be the only possible outcome, however. what if the corporate shogunate refuse to venture their capital? what if business leaders realize that truly interactive information networks do not make wise investments? this conclusion might be supported by memory of the controversy that sears and ibm stirred up when they tried to curtail user autonomy on their prodigy videotex system (see levy, "in the realm of the censor"). this scenario of corporate rejection is not just speculative fabulation, but the basis for a proposed modification to mcluhan's fourth law. media taken to their limits tend to reverse, but not all media reverse in the same way. the case of a complex, syncretic, and fundamentally interactive medium like hypertext may involve a "reversal" that does not bring us back to the same-as-it-ever-was--not a reversal in fact but a recursion (%deja vu%) to a new cultural space. [43] we have entered into a period of change in reading and writing that richard lanham calls a "digital revolution" (268). as this revolution proceeds (if it is allowed to do so), its consequences will be enormous. the idea of hypertext as a figment of the capitalist imagination, an information %franchise% in both nelson's and lyotard's senses, could well break down. though xanadu may in fact open its silverstands some day soon, hypertext might not long remain a commercial proposition. the type of literacy and the kind of social structure this medium supports stand fundamentally against absolute property and hierarchy. as we have hinted, hypertext and hypermedia peel back to reveal not just an aesthetics of cognitive mapping but nothing less than the simulacral map-as-territory itself: the real beginnings of cyberspace in the sense of a %domain of control%. [44] "cyberspace. a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" (gibson 51). william gibson's concept of a cybernetic workspace, laid out in his dystopian novel _neuromancer_, represents the ultimate shared vision in the global dream of information commerce. for all its advancement beyond the age of nation-state capitalism, gibson's world remains intensely competitive and hierarchical (for nation-state substitute the revived %zaibatsu%). _neuromancer_ is _nineteen eighty-four_ updated for 1984, the future somewhat gloomily surveyed from reagan america. [45] there is accordingly no trace of social "consensus" in gibson's "consensual" infosphere. in his version of cyberspace, the shape of vision is imposed from without. "they" control the horizontal, "they" control the vertical. of course there must be some elements of chaos, else gibson would be out of business as a paperback writer; so he invents the "cyberspace cowboy," a hacker hero who plays the information game by what he thinks of as his own rules. but though cowboys may attempt to destabilize the system, their incursions amount at best to harassment and privateering. these forms of enterprise are deemed "illegal," though they are really just business by another name, inventiveness and competitive advantage being the only effective principles of operation. [46] gibson's dark dream is one thing--in effect it is a realization of mcluhan's prophecy of reversal, an empowering technology turned into a mechanism of co-option and enslavement. but perhaps ted nelson's 2020 vision of hypertextual literacy is something else. if not a utopian alternative, nelson's project may at least provide a heterotopia, an otherplace not zoned in the usual ways for property and performativity. cyberspace as gibson and others define it is a cartesian territory where scientists of control define boundaries and power lines. the xanadu model lets us conceive instead a decentered space of literacy and empowerment where each subject acts as %kybernos%, steering her way across the intertextual sea. [47] nelson's visions of the future differ crucially from gibson's. in xanadu we find not consensual illusion but genuine, negotiated consensus. the pathways and connections among texts would be created on demand. according to nelson's plans to date, only the most fundamental "back end" conventions would be strictly determined: users would be free to customize "front end" systems to access information more or less as they like. xanadu thus possesses virtually no "canons" in the sense of a shelf of classics or a book of laws; the canons of xanadu might come closer to the musical meaning of the word--congeries of connections and relationships that are recognizably orderly yet inexhaustibly various. the shifting networks of consensus and textual demand (or desire) in xanadu would be constructed by users and for users. their very multiplicity and promiscuity, one might argue, would militate powerfully against any slide from populitism back to hierarchy. [48] nelson's visionary optimism seems vindicated, then. xanadu as currently conceived--even in its status as nelson's scheme to get rich very slowly--opens the door to a true social revolution with implications beyond the world of literature or mass entertainment. xanadu would remove economic and social gatekeeping functions from the current owners of the means of text production (editors, publishers, managers of conglomerates). it would transfer control of cultural work to a broadly conceived population of culture workers: writers, artists, critics, "independent scholars," autodidacts, "generalists," fans, punks, cranks, hacks, hackers, and other nonor quasi-professionals. "tomorrow's hypertext systems have immense political ramifications, and there are many struggles to come," nelson warns (_literary machines_ 3/19). this is an understatement of cosmic proportions. [49] but it would be a mistake to celebrate cybernetic may day without performing a few reality checks. along with all those visionary forecasts of "post-hierarchical" information exchange (zuboff 399), some hard facts need to be acknowledged. the era of the garage-born computer messiah has passed. directly or indirectly, most development of hardware and software depends on heavily capitalized multinational companies that do a thriving business with the defense establishment. this affiliation clearly influences the development of new media--consider a recent paper on "the rhetoric of hypertext" which uses the requirements of a military training system to propose general standards of coherence and instrumental effectiveness for this medium (carlson 1990). technological development does not happen in cyberspace, but in the more familiar universe of postindustrial capital. thus to the clearheaded, any suggestion that computer technology might be anything but an instrument of this system must seem quixotic or plain foolish. [50] before stepping off into cyberspace, we do well to remove the futurist headgear and listen to some voices in the street. no one wants to read anymore: "books suck, tv rules." computers are either imperial business machines or head toys for the yuppies. anyone still interested in "mass" culture needs to check out the yawning gap between the rich and the debtpayers, not to mention the incipient splintering of euro-america into warring ethnicities and "multicultural" tribes. and while we're at it, we might also do some thinking about the gulf conflict, war-game-as video-game with realistic third-world blood, a campaign in defense of economic imbalance and the west's right to determine political order in the middle east. perhaps we have used the word "revolution" far too loosely. given the present state of political and cultural affairs, any vision of a "populite" future, or as john perry barlow has it, an "electronic frontier" (bromberg 1991), needs hard scrutiny. [51] do we really want a revolution? are academic and corporate intellectuals truly prepared to dispense with the current means of text production and the advantages they afford in the present information economy? more to the point, %are we capable% of overturning these institutions, assuming we have the will to do so? looking back from the seventies, jean baudrillard criticized the students of paris '68 for assuming control of the national broadcast center only to reinstate one-to-many programming and the obscurantist focus of the "media event." the pre revolutionary identity of television swiftly reasserted itself in the midst of radical action. the seizure was in fact just a sham revolution, baudrillard concludes: "only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. even signs must burn" (_political economy of the sign_ 163). xanadu as nelson imagines it does promise to immolate certain cultural icons: the entrepreneurial publishing house, the codex book, the idea of text as unified, self-contained utterance. taken to its limits, hypertext could reverse/recourse into a general medium of control, a means of ensuring popular franchise in the new order of virtual space. public-access xanadu might be the last hope for consensual democracy in an age of global simulation. [52] or it might not: we do well to remember that ted nelson's vision comes cleverly packaged with assurances that copyright and intellectual property shall not perish from the earth. some signs would seem to be flame-retardant. the vision of xanadu as cyberspatial new jerusalem is conceivable and perhaps eligible, but by no stretch of the imagination is it inevitable. to live in the postmodern condition is to get along without the consolation of providential fictions or theories of historical necessity. this renunciation includes the "laws of media," whose force in the final analysis is theoretical and heuristic, not normative. as linda hutcheon observes, postmodernism undermines any attempt at binary distinction. to invoke the possibility of a "post-hierarchical" information order, one must assert the fact that all orders are contingent, the product of discursive formations and social contracts. but this postulate generates a fatally recursive paradox: if all order is consensual, then the social consensus may well express itself against revolution and in support of the old order. the term "post-hierarchical" may some day turn out to carry the same nasty irony as the words "postmodern" or "postwar" in the aftermath of desert storm: welcome back to the future, same as it ever was. [53] in the end it is impossible to put down nelson's prophecies of cultural renovation in xanadu; but it is equally hard to predict their easy fulfillment. xanadu and the hypertext concept in general challenge humanists and information scientists to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the social space of writing. they may in fact open the way to a new textual order with a new politics of knowledge and expression. however, changes of this magnitude cannot come without major upheavals. responsibility for the evolution of hypertext systems as genuine alternatives to the present information economy rests as much with software developers, social scientists, and literary theorists as it does with legislators and capitalists. if anything unites these diverse elites, it might be their allegiance to existing institutions of intellectual authority: the printed word, the book, the library, the university, the publishing house. it may be, as linda hutcheon asserts, that though we are incapable of direct opposition to our native conditions, we can still criticize and undermine them through such postmodern strategies as deconstruction, parody, and pastiche (120-21). secondary literacy might indeed find expression in a perverse or promiscuous turn about or within the primary body of literate culture. but it seems equally possible that our engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution. the cultural mood at century's end seems anything but radical. witness the president's attacks on cultural diversity (or as he sees it, "political correctness") in higher education. or consider camille paglia's recent "defense" of polyvalent, post-print ways of knowing, capped off by a bizarre reversal in which she decrees that children of the tube must be force-fed "the logocentric and apollonian side of our culture" (postman and paglia 55). given these signs and symptoms, the prospects for populite renaissance and secondary literacy do not seem especially rosy. "it is time for the enlightened repression of the children," paglia declares. yet in the face of all this we can still find visionary souls who say they want a textual, social, cultural, intellectual revolution. in the words of lennon: well, you know... we all want to change your head. the question remains: which heads do the changing, and which get the change? ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited barthes, roland. "from work to text." _textual strategies: readings in poststructuralist criticism_. ed. josue harari. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1979. 73-81. baudrillard, jean. _for a critique of the political economy of the sign_. trans. charles levin. st. louis: telos, 1981. ---. _simulations_. trans. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman. new york: semiotext(e), 1983. benjamin, walter. "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." _illuminations_. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken, 1969. 217-52. bersani, leo. "pynchon, paranoia, and literature." _representations_ 25 (1989): 99-118. bolter, jay. _writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing_. fairlawn, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum associates, 1990. bromberg, craig. "in defense of hackers." _the new york times magazine_ (april 12, 1991): 45 ff. bush, vannevar. "as we may think." _atlantic monthly_ (july, 1945): 101-08. carlson, patricia. "the rhetoric of hypertext." _hypermedia_ 2 (1990): 109-31. conklin, jeffrey. "hypertext: an introduction and survey." _computer_ 20 (1987): 17-41. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. robert hurley, mark seem, helen r. lane. minneapolis: university of minnesota, 1977. douglas, jane yellowlees. "wandering through the labyrinth: encountering interactive fiction." _computers and composition_ 6 (1989): 93-103. drexler, k. eric. _engines of creation: the coming era of nanotechnology_. new york: doubleday, 1987. eagleton, terry. "capitalism, modernism and postmodernism." _new left review_ 152 (1985): 60-73. gibson, william. _neuromancer_. new york: ace, 1984. harpold, terence. "the grotesque corpus: hypertext as carnival." paper delivered at the sixth annual conference on computers in writing, austin, tx, may 19, 1990. hassan, ihab. _the postmodern turn: essays in postmodern theory and culture_. columbus: ohio state, 1987. heim, michael. _electric language: a philosophical study of word processing_. new haven: yale up, 1987. hofstadter, douglas. _goedel, escher, bach: an eternal golden braid_. new york: basic, 1979. horowitz, irving louis. _communicating ideas: the crisis of publishing in a post-industrial society_. new york: oxford, 1986. hutcheon, linda. _a poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction_. new york: routledge, 1988. jameson, fredric. "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism." _new left review_ 146 (1984): 53-92. joyce, michael. "siren shapes: exploratory and constructive hypertexts." _academic computing_ (november, 1988): 11 ff.. kernan, alvin. _the death of literature_. new haven: yale up, 1990. lanham, richard. "the electronic word: literary study and the digital revolution." _new literary history_ 20 (1989): 268-89. levy, steven. "the end of literature: multimedia is television's insidious offspring." _macworld_ (june, 1990): 51 ff.. ---. "in the realm of the censor: the online service prodigy tells its users to shut up and shop." _macworld_ (january, 1991): 69 ff.. lyotard, jean-francois. _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_. trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota, 1984. mccorduck, pamela. _the universal machine: confessions of a technological optimist_. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1985. mchoul, alec and david wills. _writing pynchon: strategies in fictional analysis_. urbana: university of illinois, 1990. mcluhan, h. marshall. _understanding media: the extensions of man_. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1964. mcluhan, h. marshall and eric mcluhan. _laws of media: the new science_. toronto: university of toronto, 1988. nelson, theodor holm. _computer lib/dream machines_. redmond, wa: tempus books, 1987. ---. _literary machines_. sausalito, ca: mindful, 1990. ---. "how hypertext (un)does the canon." paper delivered at the modern language association convention, chicago, december 28, 1990. ong, walter. _orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word_. new york: methuen, 1982. postman, neil and camille paglia. "she wants her tv! he wants his book!" _harper's_ 282 (march, 1991): 44 ff.. prigogine, ilya and isabelle stengers. _order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature_. new york: bantam, 1984. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1973. slatin, john. "reading hypertext: order and coherence in a new medium." _college english_ 52 (1990): 870-83. stoll, clifford. _the cuckoo's egg: tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage_. new york: pocket books, 1990 zuboff, shoshana. _in the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power_. new york: basic, 1988. mobilio, 'geographics: step five', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-mobilio-geographics.txt archive pmc-list, file mobilio.194. part 1/1, total size 3841 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------the geographics: step five by albert mobilio antennae lie buried beneath the floor because the reception is better that way. the airwaves brought us crumbs & pocket change but nothing worth diving in for. we learned whoever pounds the rock makes fire, and whoever plows the flame grows their own flaw. instinct rode us down, looted our conversation, kept us in our seats. that's why we cannot listen to these unwrapped winds and murmurs. it's dark now. it was dark when we started out. the moon is a crooked tooth buried in the sky's smoke stained roof. over time you changed my system and now i feel like something northern has happened to us. they've left me some taste of mental health. up in the old hat factory a miniature horse circles a track. final exams are held between laps; that's when they test our spoiled grey faces for muscular decisions. we learn how to hold our ass in place, to shake nickels into dimes. a routine physical disclosed how i had been screwed up by savage cooking, the kind done with pencils and safety pins. i titled her the same way she authored me -with bitten facts dealt like marked cards. she raked back her hair so she could bend to her task, and that's when i felt left out. the forecast called for black ice and dark coughs. an army of starlings broke ranks when some dust blew down from the hills. she was waving from the porch but i stayed clean in a rented van. the paper that cut me was white bond. the fair and chiseled marble remains visible in the way she conjugates her nerves like henry james. behind the gas tanks, underneath the carnival tent, or any place where temperature accumulates, a gorgeous pinch of cypress leaves can be hidden. i am summoned by their scent. out there in the blood thick mist, a cicada drones. or is it the arrival of my gift of mourning tongues? ------------------------------------------------------------the geographics: step six where does the world leave its dying heat? on the lido, in the stone and stucco courtyards? does it create mechanic pressures among the city's darkened swirls? one day the gifts we bought will remind us of arriving in an early morning rain, of that balcony, and of an argument we had behind its beveled glass doors. if we had acted like we belonged, no one would have asked us for our tickets. some call it a station but he knows it's a terminal. the train falters in another state, so he swallows and waits until the new pills are proved upon his pulse. he believes his watch is about to burst. the platform is crowded with petals, the tracks hum with a distant approach, and welding sparks lift a small awning of yellow light above two workmen in the tunnel's gloom. he saw this and knew he had become the ticket-of-leave apostle. i unwrapped a new thesaurus and looked up a synonym for the word desicate but i ended up feeling sad because every word was chained to another. the toxin bled through the old school halls; neon stained snow fell forever in the streets outside. meeting in rooms. look at my sofa, listen to my lamp. i live here in an ice-age marriage to my open floor. no one prepares you for this. you get booklets, brochures, and hints from other tourists, but nothing helps. when i turned the dial to the left, there was a rumba; when i turned right, it was cha-cha-cha, but your purple-heart treason has worn my footwork down to a walk. covered in smoke, buried beneath a painted cowboy-sky, the sun roars through your hair. you once lived a magazine life, then you entered the pedestrian crosswalk that stilled you. come to me, speak through my microphone scars and soon we will be such lovers i will be able to hear you tanning on the roof. you will smuggle my complaint across your border and we will finally begin to burn where it counts. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------hooper, 'three poems', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-hooper-three.txt archive pmc-list, file hooper.194. part 1/1, total size 7540 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- three poems by virginia hooper postmodern culture v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by virginia hooper, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. -----------------------------------------------------------hauntings the hauntings laced themselves into another year, grew into miracles and fertilized the grass. spinning absent-mindedly, a thump and a rattle intercepting my dream, i clutched in fury to my story, and, uncertain on which side of the glass i had landed, i turned the page to the first window and climbed through. a cord by which a weight is suspended to test the perpendicularity or depth of a thought. anything resembling a plume or feather. to adorn, dress, or furnish with plumes. the thread had vanished through the maze lined with brilliant blue, an opulence amazing as the strutting peacock crossing my path. the hauntings came more frequently, settled across the lawn, warmed the eaves. is this the lesson we were destined to create, tracing sweet edges onto everything, legibly exchanging all the fettered excuses with a lovelier version dangling off into the clear deep pool? a division or boundary marked or conceived between adjoining areas. the cord plumbed my ignorance. the plot stretched endlessly, they reported, endlessly repeating what came to me one evening persuading the windows to cloud, the stars to brighten, the moon to retreat demurely behind a dark sense of urgency. as though the mist itself were a mirth yet grounded into body. demanded in haste, given under duress, a rattled mention remained for dinner clearing the table until the chairs were neatly arranged for company. we invited only those missing all sense of propriety. all cleverness concealed. all desserts aflame with sweetened promises wrapped in tinsel foil tucked under the waiting pillow. the room was elsewhere. the explanation unravelled beyond my understanding, hedged the border with a wait and see attitude. every applicant was scrutinized as a potential messenger. but me, that was the problem. me. trespasser pressed into service by an aimless habit, a nagging obsession drawing me back to the entrance. relentlessly crippling my desire to move on. relentlessly sending me on an errand that folded me back upon myself. was this the curse of my preoccupation? or merely my blessing. to mingle and combine so as to obscure or harmonize the varying components, the concerns, they called them, compulsions pushing through the soil until a garden emerged, organized and flowered new responsibilities -life, they said -kept me awake all night. the river remained the same. but more and more, so did i. looking the part, aimless but energized by a new vision acquired in darkness, stuffed into my pockets and taken home. a fortified watchtower, squinting against the light, caught in the middle of the sacred chamber whose floors were laid with marble, whose walls held special insight into a vision pared for comfort, shaved and scaled to match the era, chimed the hours. measured in the stone of an old extravagance, a mystery reverberating the present until lights sing, darkness speaks the spell lingering in the confusion, as though the hauntings were enlightenment itself. the distance to be travelled at any cost, its systems and roads mapping vast expanses of mind over matter -a mere restoration supporting the vaulted roof. these copies and originals identical. looking for some way in, circling the distance to be travelled, i thumbed through these illustrations of the profound. the cord weighed heavily upon me, sunk deeper than my memory allowed. than my mother allowed. the cord pulled me back to the old intersection, laid me bare to be dressed in the plumes of her intrigue. but was i the trespasser? lured back again with the knowledge gleaned from experience, the old promise made by us both. to encircle by winding or weaving, endlessly revolving back to the place of origin. the logic and elegance of the interior carried me through its argument, an alphabet building its own structure to house an idea hidden in these secret vaults. i wandered aimlessly. here was design trimmed to fit the particular niches of the puzzle, a maze of concentration broken only by generations turning the soil. the thought stood perpendicular as a stave beside me, a mechanism assigning me greater responsibility, a trick played well, posted as sentry. they say crusaders were killed endlessly flitting and filing away the various pieces of the puzzle, sited upon an inhospitable terrain, just inside the encircling logic nature obeys. the temple had been filled with sand, a castle subject to erosion. these were visions we had to learn, to leave, to stand outside the threshold and peer through. a story half as old as time traced back to a source, then broken off. as much for the onlooker as the maker. a buried circular staircase, circling toward the obscure but recorded section of a vision sketched into stone. the fortune lay scrolled inward toward the reader, its clear message left as a last minute impulse to render clear the clouded window parted for that breath of air, the first glimpse. -----------------------------------------------------------temples and follies small temples and follies in the woods, the feeling soon passes into extinction, or was it merely the fact we reconsidered the labor of love -the rapture of reaching journey's end when respite can't be sought through an intricate network of hedged corridors, or on summer nights it took us through, sudden views of the vanished lake. houses should be lived in again and the landscape returned, which we discovered had been designed to rival hope's end serene romance. the residents are always free to roam. the feeling soon passes, but respite can be sought as a labor of love as all rooms share a graded vista restoring journey's end when the guests arrive, the original owners of the house. -----------------------------------------------------------a reading you are impatient, says the oracle. the weather has arrived cloudy, another's day's conclusion shot with unraveling paths set back >from the shore. an ocean's breeze reshuffles the cards across the deck, disorder restored to pattern, a chance you pattern yourself toward. prompted to rethink your question, which might, with grace, lift you above the determined arrangement currents have washed you against, you play another hand. a chance you pattern yourself against lifts back through selves you have assumed, fools sprung from oracle beginnings, framed inside the gold-leaf border of the cards played in patience when it wasn't in the cards to share the evening with another. and what of crossed destiny? teased out of solitaire, prompted by impatience, you think you have been courted by the cards. strange, how this pattern unravels inside the tale arranged for the oracle's pleasure, a link, after all, you think. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mcgowan, 'postmodernist purity', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-mcgowan-postmodernist.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.993. part 1/1, total size 14197 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- postmodernist purity by john mcgowan jpm@unc.bitnet department of english university of north carolina, chapel hill _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by john mcgowan, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: owens, craig. _beyond recognition: representation, power, and culture_. ed. scott bryson, barbara kruger, lynne tillman, and jane weinstock. berkeley: university of california press, 1992. [1] craig owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in _october_ and _art in america_, who died of complications stemming from aids in 1990. just about everything he ever published--plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing aids--has been collected in the volume under review. it makes for sad reading, not just because owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. owens's intellectual trajectory--from derrida to foucault to lacan as the major influence on his work--follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. from an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by derrida, owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. in the process, derrida and foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped owens's discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties. [2] the thread that runs through these various sub-periods in owens's work is the problematic of representation. an early (1979) essay on derrida's critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title: if in 'the parergon' derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. still, 'the parergon" signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition." (38) what is the nature of the "necessity" here? necessary for what and to whom? and how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? a few years later (1982), foucault has led owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. he calls our attention to "the ways in which domination and subjugation are *inscribed within* the representational systems of the west. representation, then, is not--nor can it be--neutral; it is an act--indeed, the founding act--of power in our culture" (91). the wholesale condemnation of the west's representational systems is retained in this shift from derrida to foucault, but now owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms. [3] three years later (1985) owens criticizes foucault for only telling "half the story"; what "foucault would excise" is the half "that concerned desire and representation" (204). here we need lacan, who teaches us to "regard all human sexuality as masquerade" (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. appropriately enough, the lacanian essay on "posing" brings owens full circle. he ends with a quote from derrida. "if the alterity of the other is *posed*, that is *simply* posed, doesn't it amount to the same . . . . from this point of view i would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed" (215). [4] the critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. i use the word "desire" deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. this postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. this blind spot is particularly irritating because owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in marx's version of historical repetition. "honor, power, and the love of women" offers a wonderful send-up of neoexpressionism, while "the problem with puerilism" argues convincingly that "what has been constructed in the east village is a simulacrum of the *social* formation from which the modernist avant-garde first emerged" (263). but, lest we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia for the original modernist avant-garde, owens is quick to sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making "difference . . . become an object of consumption": the fact that avant-garde artists had only partially withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory position; but this position also equipped them for the economic function they would eventually be called upon to perform--that of broker between the culture industry and subcultures. (264) [5] armed with this awareness of the modernist avant-garde's failure, owens offers nothing beyond calls for a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve. writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which, again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like robert hughes in "the yen for art"), owens is reduced to denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists he champions to that market. andars stephanson asks: "but isn't it true that oppositional artists themselves became marketable, say, after 1980?"--to which owens replies: "this is seriously overplayed. hans haacke does not sell much work, and he has not had a show in an american museum until now. kruger's work is also interesting because it costs far more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells for one-tenth of the latter's price" (307). what's significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form that the defense of oppositional artists takes. owens has not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a commodity. he is setting himself up to reach the same dead end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of exchange that are repudiated. [6] in this context, the poststructuralist critique of representation comes across as a new variant on this long-standing modernist obsession with purity. to even engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to succumb to its terms. it is not the ideological content of representation of these others that is at issue. nor do contemporary artists oppose their own representations to existing ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the positive image. (to do so would be to oppose some 'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) rather, these artists challenge the activity of representation itself which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the primary agent of their domination." (262) what would it mean to "indict" the "activity of representation itself" in the name of "the ability to represent themselves"? by rejecting a conflict within the social over different representations with the assertion that every positive image is a phallacy, owens places the artist on the path of pure negation that has been a modernist treadmill since at least flaubert's desire to write a novel about nothing. [7] the critic is left in even a worse position than the artist. "what you are saying, then, is that to represent is to subjugate?" "precisely. there is a remarkable statement by gilles deleuze . . . that encapsulates the political ramifications of the contemporary critique of representation: 'you [deleuze says to foucault] were the first . . . to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'" (261-2) owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. he wrote only one essay--"outlaws: gay men in feminism"--that is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking for gay men, not of this particular gay man. everything he writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating between audience and work (of art, of theory). a sometime academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic theory to a nonacademic audience (the new york art world), owens was primarily a translator, re-representing representations to facilitate their entry into different contexts. his success is attested to by the fact that his work was widely read and highly influential. through his efforts and those of some collaborators, _art in america_ became a conduit point between the academy and the art world. owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling around his distrust of the means of mediation. by adopting a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of representation, owens boxed himself into a corner where he had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. he wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he did not write about aids. i know nothing about owens personally; his health as well as other commitments could easily explain this relative silence. but his own theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little space to work in. [8] no doubt owens would have struck out in new directions. what is fascinating and rewarding about these collected essays is the combination of owens's sharp eye (this is someone whose representations of others' art i came to trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to learn from theoretical arguments. if i focus on the theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because i find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own strictures against universals to this universal condemnation of representation, unable to think its own retrograde (modernist) desire for purity within its critique of discourses that aim for homogeneity. not surprisingly, the specifics of owen's wonderful essays on william wegman, barbara kruger, and lothar baumgarten already suggest some ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for absolute alterity. the conclusion to the essay on wegman talks of "necessity" again, but this time it is the necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it: when we laugh at man ray's foiling of wegman's designs, we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating to the other--one based not on the denial of difference, but upon its recognition. thus, inscribed within the *social* space in which both bakhtin and freud situate laughter, wegman's refusal of mastery is ultimately political in its implications. (163-4) postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the social space which would enable this recognition of difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much postmodernist cultural critique. for what could be more narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of representation by which the other might try to make contact? -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------suleiman, 'can you go home again? a budapest diary 1993', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-suleiman-can.txt can you go home again? a budapest diary 1993 by susan rubin suleiman dept. of romance languages and comparative literature, harvard university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by susan rubin suleiman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. introductory note: [1] the excerpts that follow are from a diary i have been keeping since early february [1993], when i began a six month residency at the collegium budapest, a new institute for advanced study modeled on those in berlin and princeton. when i was invited last year to come to budapest during this inaugural year of the collegium, i accepted immediately. besides the usual luxuries of such a fellowship period, the invitation offered me what i thought of as a near providential opportunity to continue the autobiographical project i had started some years back, and which was assuming increasing urgency. [2] i left hungary with my parents in the summer of 1949, and rarely thought of it again until thirty-five years later, when i decided to return as a tourist with my two sons, then aged 14 and 7. that return triggered a desire to reconnect with my childhood and native city, a desire that took the form of writing. i published two short pieces i occasionally allude to in the diary ("my war in four episodes," _agni_, 33, 1991; "reading in tongues," _boston review_, may-august 1992). then, as a preparation for my current trip, i wrote a longer memoir, still unpublished, about the 1984 return and the memories it brought back. the decision to write the diary did not crystallize until after i arrived here--i simply found myself writing on my computer, sometimes for hours, at other times for a few minutes, from the first day on. after a while, i realized that i was writing "for a public" as well as for myself, and the project of a published diary began to take shape. since these excerpts have had to be radically excised from a much longer text that is still in process, i decided to limit my selections to a few themes, chief among them the current resurgence of nationalism and anti-semitism in hungary (as in eastern europe in general), and, not unrelated to the first, my personal history. out of a desire to protect the privacy of people i mention, i have used only first names or initials, which are not necessarily factual. in the case of public figures, i cite their full real name. i have tried to keep the writing very close to that of the first draft, but have not resisted making occasional stylistic changes. the order and tenor of the entries have not been modified. some of the major cuts are indicated by suspension points in brackets. [3] a few hungarian words: %utca% means street, %ut% means avenue, %ter% means square (like "place" in french), %korut% is a round avenue, %korter% or %korond% a round "square," %villamos% means tramway. hungarian names are cited last name first, given name second. hungarian vowels have a variety of diacritical marks, but they cannot be reproduced in this electronic publication. [4] i would be interested in readers' responses to this work. please send them to _postmodern culture_, which will forward them to me. wednesday, february 3 [5] my apartment is the whole top floor of a three-story building, very big and nice. [6] [...] i didn't want to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, so after taking a hot bath and changing clothes, i went to the collegium. i walked part of the way, down toward the gellert hotel on bartok bela ut, a wide, busy avenue lined with shops. i stopped at one to buy a toothbrush and some paper handkerchiefs. it felt strange to be speaking hungarian to the young woman in the store. i thought i was speaking badly, like a foreigner. after walking a while longer i took a taxi, which cost 240 forints--just under three dollars. [7] the collegium occupies a historical monument, an 18th century building, newly renovated, in what is surely one of the most beautiful spots in budapest--on castle hill above the danube, across the square from the matyas church. the church and square look positively dreamlike when they are lit up in the evening. my first sight of them was that way, for it was dark by the time i got there. friday, february 5 [8] had a chat with the downstairs neighbor this morning, a woman of about 65. she and her husband have been living in this house for over thirty years. it was a state-owned building, but three years ago the tenants were given the option to buy their apartments. the couple who own mine bought two--this one and a smaller one on the ground floor, where they now live. they spent several years abroad, which may account for the fancy electronic equipment in my apartment. everybody had their place redone inside, but they have no money left to repair the outside, which still bears the marks of world war ii. the front was just one street over, she said: germans on one side, russians on the other. the pockmarks on our facade are due to flying shrapnel. it looks very bad, but would cost too much to repair. there are six apartments in the building. theirs was divided, that's why it's smaller than mine. [9] shall i go back again to akacfa utca and climb again the three flights of stairs to our old apartment, now divided? maybe the couple who lived there nine years ago no longer lives there, or maybe they have bought the place and had it redone. [10] after lunch at the collegium i took a taxi to the home of b., one of the editors of a recently founded monthly journal, whose name was on my list of people to call. he had told me on the telephone yesterday that he lived in an old-style building with a balcony surrounding the courtyard, and asked whether i was afraid of heights. no i wasn't, i assured him--and a good thing, too, because really his balcony is very narrow and from the third floor where he lives one has a plunging view. the building reminded me of akacfa utca, but it was less nice--narrow balcony, no wrought iron, a smallish courtyard full of parked cars. [11] the man who opened the door was tall, around 50, pleasant face, almost bald and what hair he had, white. the apartment's clutter matched the exterior mess. he invited me into the tiny kitchen while he made coffee. he has a very charming, informal manner and a boyish air which i suspect he cultivates, as if he didn't want to flaunt his authority or power--or perhaps as if he didn't want completely to grow up. after the coffee was made, he invited me into his study, a large pleasant room lined with books which we reached by crossing a small bathroom. his computer was still on, and he showed me the database he has been working on for the past fifteen years, just finished: a complete %repertoire%, in french, of hungarian poetry written before 1600. a true work of erudition, which somehow didn't fit in my mind with his image as an editor of a chic journal. but b. turned out to be a man of many interests and talents ("je n'ai pas un violon d'ingres, j'ai un orchestre d'ingres," he joked at one point), and we spent a pleasant few hours talking about everything from opera to french structuralism, with which he feels a great affinity. at first we spoke hungarian, but when things got really interesting we settled into french, which he speaks very well with a heavy hungarian accent. [12] i asked him about the journal. "well, i think you have great areas of empathy in you, but you simply cannot imagine what it was like to be an intellectual here around 1987-88. suddenly, everything seemed possible. i had purposely chosen to specialize in literature before 1600, just to make sure i would never have to write anything about politics. under the communist regime, that was the only way i felt i could survive. but then, when things began to change, i felt i could and should take an active role." so he and some friends founded the journal, in the very room where we were sitting--and he didn't even have a telephone at the time! [13] after looking at the "contents" of _subversive intent_, which i had xeroxed for him (the book is on its way), he asked: "are you close to feminism?" yes, i answered. he smiled broadly: "i wrote one of the first feminist articles in hungary--about a 16th-century poet, the first hungarian woman poet, who wasn't mentioned in any of the official literary histories." but now, he no longer considers himself a feminist because all the ones he knows are too angry. he likes women, but not feminism. are there any women on the editorial board of the journal? i asked. (i knew full well there aren't any, i had read the masthead.) no, he answered. there are too many "fistfights" (%bagarres%) among the editors, and in a woman's presence they might not turn out the same way. some men become too wildly competitive if a woman is present, as if to prove themselves to her. what did i think about that? that it's very hard for men to think of women as equals, i answered. [14] he gave me his latest book--about three kinds of readers, all of them "played" by himself. as he was telling me about his three readers i couldn't help thinking of the four sons at the seder, especially since he had mentioned a short while before that both of his paternal grandparents were jewish. he said neither he nor his father thought of themselves as jews, though of course, at the first sign of anti-semitism, he identifies himself as one. he inscribed his book, in hungarian, "to zsuzsa, with much affection--b. the feminist." i gave him some of my essays. the visit lasted more than four hours. saturday, february 6 [15] spent the afternoon in my office, reading final papers for my "war and memory" seminar. the first one i read was k.'s interview with her father, about the last year of the war he spent in budapest. he is three years older than i, so he was eight years old in the harsh winter of 1944-45 when all the fighting was going on. many parallels between our stories, including the fact that all of his immediate family survived. k. writes that she has always known her father was a holocaust survivor, and he told her many stories when she was a child. the stories were always doctored, or as she put it "filtered," in such a way that they were tales of good luck and triumph, not of fear or anxiety. it was only now, in this formal interview, that her father, with her prompting, spoke about his fears. [16] reading her essay, i wondered why i never told such stories to my children--why, in all innocence or thoughtlessness, i never considered myself as a survivor all these years. i finally decided it had something to do with the fact that i left hungary in 1949, not 1956 like k.'s father. he was 20, he has an unmistakable accent when he speaks english--there was no "forgetting" his past. i, on the other hand, looked and spoke like many other smart middle-class american jewish girls by the time i graduated from high school. so i could easily pass, "forget" where i came from or consider it irrelevant, and want other people to consider it that too. [17] the funny thing is, these days i am irritated when i discover that someone i know thinks of me as "just another american," or even an american jew. the other night, at the dinner for ruth wisse in cambridge, d. expressed surprise when i told her i was born in budapest. so i immediately sent her my two memoirs, as soon as i left the dinner! [18] two days ago i bought _magyar forum_, the weekly newspaper of the ruling magyar demokrata forum--or more exactly, of the party's far-right wing, led by csurka istvan. i finally read it this morning. csurka's column is on page 2--a piece extolling the hungarian people (magyar nep), the "silent majority" against the political "elite." since the column starts out by talking about a former head of the national bank who seems to have been mixed up in some scandal and who "has an israeli passport," i think "elite" may be a code word for jews, or groups that include a lot of jews. [19] a pretty piece of populist rhetoric, on the whole. i imagine it's the kind of thing that the grocery store lady of this morning whom i overheard complaining about the price of life might find comforting. but maybe i am jumping to conclusions about the poor lady. at any rate, csurka is not a nice man. his name should be csunya, for he stirs up ugly feelings (%csunya% means ugly). monday, february 8 [20] last night all the fellows were invited by the rector to a concert at the kongresszus hall, a kind of convention hall that also serves as a concert hall. our host, v., was most affable, and also invited us to dinner at a small restaurant not far from the collegium. we had a wonderful time, talking about frivolities, but also after a while about csurka and the reasons for the resurgence of nationalism in central europe. v. enumerated the usual political reaons: a reaction to the internationalism of the communist regimes, economic and social inequalities that cause resentment (but b. had told me that it was under communism one saw the greatest and most unfair inequalities), and generally the recession. but that still doesn't explain the deep psychological attraction of nationalism and xenophobia in these parts. we agreed that this was an important subject of discussion for the collegium. [21] things noticed: people can be awfully touchy in stores around here. last wednesday, on my first day here, i stopped to buy some shampoo in a small store on bartok bela ut, which was quite crowded with customers. a young woman near the cash register was surveying the clients, and at one point she said to a woman: "don't handle the merchandise too much." the woman got terribly upset, and stalked out of the store without buying anything: "you're too disrespectful (%pimasz%), so i won't buy from you," she said in a huff. similar scene the next day, at the flower vendor stall on the corner of bartok bela and bocskai. the old lady told a young woman not to handle the flowers, and the young woman went away saying, "then i won't buy any." finally, a similar scene at the concert at the french institute on saturday night. during intermission, many people were swarming around the bar ordering coffee, tea, or other drinks. a young man calls out to the waitress: "one coffee, please." his friend, another young guy, adds: "some cream," and then "a milk." the waitress thought he was ordering a glass of milk, which was a little bit strange for that time of night for a young adult. she was about to give it to him when he said, very rudely, "didn't you understand i was asking for milk in my coffee?" she said: "but you didn't say that, you didn't say 'a coffee with milk.'" he then replied: "well, you heard me ask for cream, didn't you? what did you think i wanted to do with it, pour it behind my ear?" at that point she got very angry and threw his change at him on the counter. he grumbled, "you don't have to throw things at me, madam." [22] the whole scene was imbued with a degree of aggression i found quite astonishing, directed largely by the young man at the young woman. in the other scenes, it was two women who were involved each time, so it's not a gender issue (though in this instance i think there was some gender tension as well). one thing all this shows, i guess, is that hungarians have easily bruisable egos; another, perhaps, is that under the new democratic regime, they won't "let themselves be pushed around anymore"; or, finally, that they're feeling generally anxious, especially about things related to money. tuesday, february 9 [23] very interesting tv program, this evening--the first of two films on what appears to be the political history of hungary from the 1930s to 1956 (i came in late, so i didn't see the beginning). tonight's installment stopped in 1949. it's based entirely on interviews with men who were involved in politics, non-communists of course. the three this evening were nyeste zoltan, who was a leader of the kisgazdasag (smallholders) party after the war--for a while, part of a democratic coalition with the communists; fabry pal, a journalist and diplomat who stayed out of hungary after 1949; and someone whose name i'm not sure of, who was a chemist and then an opera singer. they all talked about the war--by 1944, when the germans occupied hungary, it was time to resist. nyeste, a big bearded fellow, had a good story: he and some other students composed a text protesting the german occupation (march 1944), and their plan was to have it made up in posters and post it all over the city. the plan was never realized because the young man carrying the text to the printer was arrested by the hungarian secret police. but nobody got hurt or even thrown in prison, because the police chief found out that not a single communist or a single jew had been among the plotters. "you understand, the myth was that only communists and jews were resisting hitler--no authentic hungarian would dream of such a thing. so, they preferred to hush up the whole affair rather than have to admit the truth." and he gave a big laugh. [24] after the war, all these men were involved in a democratic alliance, and their story is essentially the story of how rakosi and the communists succeeded in taking over the country. there was some very interesting footage of mass demonstrations of the time, huge crowds gathered on hosok tere, addressed by rakosi and other orators. in one, around 1946, just before the elections that brought the communists into a position of power (though not into a majority yet, if i understood right), people chanted "long live stalin!" and carried huge photos of him as banners floating above the crowd. i must have seen some crowds like that. the film (or this first part) ended with a bunch of children, boys and girls, dressed in their %uttoro% (young pioneer) uniforms, white shirt, navy blue pants or skirt, string tie, singing a song about the smiling future. reminded me of the time i recited petofi's poem about hanging all the kings, on prize day in 1949 at the end of fourth grade, my last year here. i really believed in that stuff--and so, judging by their uplifted faces, did the children who were singing that song. wednesday, february 10 [25] took my first %villamos% ride this morning--i rode from kosztolanyi dezso ter all the way to deak ferenc ter, traversing a good part of the inner city, or rather its rim formed by muzeum korut, karoly korut, etc.. from deak ferenc i went to the bank, in a small street off jozsef attila utca; opening an account didn't take long, so i strolled over to vorosmarty ter, which is truly a wonderful space--no cars allowed, and in the middle is a large statue of the poet, now wrapped in burlap to protect it from the cold. from vorosmarty ter i walked toward the river with the intention of finding a taxi, but as none came i ended up near the chain bridge, on a beautiful big square with elaborate buildings facing it, and yet another statue in the middle. the square is so big and full of traffic that i didn't cross over to see who the statue was of. instead, i crossed the bridge. it's quite magnificent, heavy granite and elaborate ironwork, with a superb view on both sides even today, when it was a bit hazy. walking on the narrow passageway for pedestrians, i thought i felt some memories stirring of having crossed there as a child. but when, and with whom? mother used to take me for walks, and so did madame, after the war. would we have walked this far from home? maybe to go up to the castle, on a sunday afternoon. [26] right in front of the bridge is the budavar siklo, the cable car to the castle. it goes up at almost a 90 degree angle, quite impressive--drops you off very close to the national gallery and the theater, about a five minute walk from the collegium, where i arrived tired but happy at 3:30 p.m.. i felt elated by the beauty of the city. "it really is a great capital, it really can be compared to paris," i told myself at various moments during the day. that thought somehow makes me feel very proud, and also in a strange way "integrated"--since budapest turns out to be a city i can put up there with the city i find most beautiful and seductive of all, and that has been part of my mental and emotional life during all the years when budapest was totally outside it. finding the link of beauty is a way to connect budapest to my whole life, the life i spent not here, which has nothing to do with here. sunday, february 14 [27] saw a new hungarian movie, _roncsfilm_ ("junk movie"), which turned out to be a cross between monty python and the french hit of two years ago, the gross _delicatessen_, "film bete et mechant." this one was funny and postmodernly self conscious (people speaking directly into the camera, "testifying" about the action we are in the process of seeing), but it got a bit tiresome because almost all the episodes involved some kind of violent confrontation- between men, between men and women, between women. in keeping with postmodern humor, though, no matter how badly people were beaten up or stabbed or burned, they always reappeared in the next scene perfectly fine. the idea was, i think, to show the pent-up frustration and rage in people, always there just below the surface. the film starts with the breaking down of a wall, intercut with actual footage from the taking down of the berlin wall. but the implication is, nothing has really gotten better--the subtitle of the film is "vagy mi van ha gyoztunk?" "or how are things now that we've won?" they're not too good, is the answer. the theater, incidentally, was full, mostly very young people. i was one of the few people above 25 there. [28] afterwards, i walked down terez korut to the oktogon, where the busiest place was the burger king, again full of very young people. i actually went in, but when i saw that everybody was around 20, i decided to come home and make an omelette. i walked down andrassy ut to the opera house, very elaborate but dark (no performance tonight) and took a taxi from there. the taxi driver was extremely talkative, the first one like that i've met since coming to budapest. he asked if i had seen _war and peace_ on the tv last night. i said no, which one was it? the american one with audrey hepburn and gregory peck. he said audrey hepburn was not his type, he finds her ugly. we spoke about her death, and about illness and how doctors can't necessarily cure you if you're sick. then he asked me what i did for a living, i wasn't a doctor by any chance? no, i said, i'm a %tanarno%, which can mean either a %gymnazium% (high-school) teacher or a university professor. he said it's a nice profession, one that requires heart--only people with real heart can be good teachers. i asked him whether he had gone to university. yes, he said, he had studied for five years there. really? and what did he study? engineering--he's an engineer. and now? "now i drive a taxi." i didn't want to probe any further, and besides we had arrived home. but if what he said was true, that gives one pause: since when do engineers drive taxis for a living? monday, february 15 [29] long lunch with g. today. she told me it was hard for her and n. to readjust to life in budapest after their year in the states--as i imagine it will be hard for me to readjust after my six months in budapest. but in their case it was more than just the "return to routine after a time of freedom elsewhere" syndrome, because life in budapest is harsher in economic terms. after ten years of teaching and a good scholarly reputation, n. is on the second rung of a four-rung ladder that ends with the title of professor, and he earns 15,000 forints a month--less than $200. g. was also offered a regular teaching job at the university this year, at a salary of 13,000 forints a month, which shows the double absurdity of the whole thing: first, because no one can possibly live on that amount, and second, because the difference between a starting salary and the salary of one who has been teaching for ten years is 2000 forints per month, or $25. in fact, everybody who teaches in the university has at least one more job, often two or three more, to make ends meet. g. turned down her offer and accepted a private administrative job instead, in which she earns three times as much. "at least you can live on that," she said. but in the meantime, she feels every day that "nothing is happening" to her, because she doesn't like that kind of work. she'd much rather be in the library, reading, or else translating an american novel into hungarian. "i feel this job is good for my present, but not for my future," she said. but for now, she has no choice. she simply cannot afford to take a university job. tuesday, february 16 [30] read csurka's column in last week's _magyar forum_, which i only bought yesterday. his rhetoric is disgusting, but so clever (and at the same time so predictable) that it fascinates me. this time, his theme was: the good hungarian christian people are being silenced by "george konrad-type liberalism" (he actually named him: "konrad gyorgyek-fele...liberalizmus")--that is, the old leftists and communists who now call themselves liberals, but it's still the same old clique. once again, it's those jews who are trying to keep us true magyars, christian magyars, down. they control all the media, radio and television, plus all the major papers, and they have all the wealth and power. the current talk about the renewal of anti-semitism in hungary is just a smokescreen--what really should be talked about is the "robbing of the country" ("az orszag kirablasarol kellene szot ejteni"). in fact, this clique would like to hound the christian magyars not only out of politics and public life, but out of life %tout court%: "without persecution, there is no liberalism. they need space." [31] note how, first of all, he equates the current liberals and the old communists--conveniently forgetting that someone "like george konrad," or more exactly konrad himself, was during all his adult life a dissident in relation to the communist regime. csurka implies (more than implies, almost states outright) that all the communists were jews, hostile to true magyar thought and spirit. he speaks of "nagy baloldali liberalis kommunista nyilvanossag," "great left liberal communist declarations," as if all the adjectives were interchangeable--and at one point he mentions the name of revai, who i think was a much feared cultural commissar in the 1950s, the man for whom b.'s father worked. "revai and his culture band, aczel and his %shameses% jumped at the throat of the national culture," writes csurka. he never actually uses the word "zsido," "jew," but %shames% (yiddish for "sexton") is about as explicit as you can get. i assume revai and aczel were both jewish, or if not, had lots of jews working for them. indeed, a few paragraphs later, csurka makes a nasty dig at some of today's liberals who "sing the song of let's forget the past, it's no use looking backwards, we have to look forward." that's because, he says, some of them "had a daddy who tore people's nails off." [32] i wonder who csurka's daddy was. on the same page as his column there is an ad for the magyar forum publishing house, which has just reissued a 1938 novel about provincial life at the turn of the century, by one csurka peter. any relation to csurka istvan? [33] saw the second half of the documentary about the three men which started last week. it turns out that what they all had in common was that they left hungary in 1956 and went to the united states--so the film was a documentary portrait of these men rather than a film about the political history of hungary, but of course the two subjects are closely linked, since the reason they left hungary in the first place was because of politics. fabry pal was the most successful, becoming a big businessman in new orleans- founder of the first world trade center in 1962. the chemist/singer, kovesdy pal, did all kinds of physical work and eventually ended up as an art dealer in new york, where he now owns an important collection of works by the hungarian avant-garde of the 1920s, which he is trying to sell to a museum. as for nyeste zoltan, it's not clear what he does--he seems to have been in some kind of publishing venture. he is the least assimilated into american life, the most "true hungarian" of the lot. but curiously, neither he nor the others have hurried back to hungary, now that communism is gone. fabry comes often, but with an american wife and american children, he can't possibly come back to live here, he says. kovesdy is thinking about it, waiting to see how things turn out; and nyeste says he never stopped being hungarian for a single day or a single minute since he left--perhaps implying that he doesn't need to come back, for he carries hungary with him wherever he is. [34] in tonight's program, like last week, there was very interesting newsreel footage from the 1950s and later: at stalin's death, for example, newsreels showed mournful workers assembled, then marching in silent funeral parades; there were several other mass marches and demonstrations, with enormous portraits of stalin and rakosi floating above the crowd. as late as 1985, one party speaker (was it kadar? i didn't recognize him), discussing hungarian politics at what looked like a dinner meeting, stated that experience in hungary has shown a one-party system is best. there is nothing wrong in principle with a multi-party system, he said, but hungarian history shows that in this country it hasn't worked. doesn't leave much hope for hungarian democracy, it would seem. wednesday, february 17 [35] it snowed today. i had another very long hungarian visit, this time with a., who teaches literature at the university and has two other jobs as well, like most hungarian academics. [...] a., a woman about my age, received me in her office on the ground floor, which she shares with another person who was not there. she is a very pleasant and warm person, who immediately asked if we could "tegez" each other (say "te," like the french %tu%)--it makes life so much simpler, she said. i was delighted, of course. we chatted for quite a while, then she took me up to look at the library, which has a good collection of french literature--plus, of course, an excellent collection of hungarian literature. a. introduced me to the librarian and obtained permission for me to borrow books. great! i immediately borrowed _the oxford history of hungarian literature_ by lorant czigany, which she recommended. i've been reading it all evening. [36] after the library we went back to her office and chatted for another hour. [...] earlier, we had spoken about feminist criticism, and she confirmed my sense that people here know very little about it. but she also said that right now, with so many bigger problems that also affect men, she doesn't particularly want to dwell on women's problems or pit women against men. this sounded like the marxist-feminist thesis in france during the 1970s ("first the revolution, then women's problems"), and i didn't want to engage in an argument about it at this point. i did, however, remark that not all feminist criticism is directed against men. she still wasn't fully convinced, however. [37] we spoke at some length about csurka. csurka peter, as i suspected, was his father and was also a right-winger. it seems that csurka himself wrote ("alas!" a. said) some very good plays during the %ancien regime% (that too was her expression), and no one could tell from them that he was an anti-semite. in fact, he and konrad considered themselves on the same side! "you have to understand, that was in the good old days when we were all together in opposing the regime. our opposition was so strong that none of us realized our differences--it was only afterward that we found ourselves split into two hostile camps." "but didn't anyone notice his anti-semitism?" "no! oh, there were stories occasionally, about how he got drunk at the writers' club and started to 'jew' (%zsidozni%, you see we even have a verb for it in hungarian--to badmouth the jews), but otherwise, he kept it all under wraps. maybe if we went back and reread his plays now, we would find indications ...." he also wrote some good stories, she said. he is around 60, the same age as konrad. i should read some of his stories and plays--it pays to know your enemies well. [38] the czigany literary history is very interesting--i could hardly put it down. it makes many things come to life, including the place names of budapest, of which an extraordinary large number are those of writers: vorosmarty ter, so central, is named after mihaly v., a 19th-century poet, the first of the great poets after the language reform of the early years of the century. kazinczy utca, which i had always associated with jewishness--no doubt because of the synagogue there--is named after one of the architects of the language reform, which involved, mainly, standardizing orthography and expanding the vocabulary so that abstract concepts and technical terms would no longer have to be borrowed from latin or german. the eotvos of the eotvos collegium and the university was both a writer and a political figure. to an american, it's astonishing how many streets and squares and institutions are named after writers and intellectuals: jozsef attila, moricz zsigmond, kosztolanyi dezs, arany janos, madach imre, karinthy frigyes, jokai mor and many many others, including of course the hero petofi. [39] [...] i kept thinking about mother this evening, especially when i spread out the map of hungary to look for nyiregyhaza, after reading the _history_. what a pity that she's not alive now, for her and for me! i would so much have loved to ask her about her childhood, and some of the small towns she knew besides nyiregyhaza. a few names in the same region sound very familiar, for example hajduboszormeny and hajduszoboszlo. i want to find mother's birth certificate, though i couldn't say exactly why. thursday, february 18 [40] exhausted. i must have walked miles today, all around my old neighborhood. %villamos% to deak ferenc ter, then up kiraly utca to the yellow church, then right on akacfa utca. kiraly utca has some beautiful turn of the century buildings on it, or even older--from the last third of the 19th century, i was told later by t.. very interesting and varied decorations on all of them. some look in bad shape, others look redone, and it's the same in that whole neighborhood. kiraly utca itself is a grab-bag: some decrepit shops and some newfangled ones selling computers, electronics, etc.. akacfa utca is mostly decrepit, at least the part i walked on, from kiraly to number 59, in the middle of a long block. the first two houses on the odd numbered side are black with soot and practically crumbling, though once they must have been quite noble, with columns and other elaborate decorations. then comes a long low building which i didn't remember at all, and after that no. 59, which could be quite beautiful. i don't think i noticed, last time--at least, i didn't remember--that there are three statues decorating the curved top of the facade. the three balconies, including our old one on the top left, look as if they're ready to fall down--i don't remember that from 1984. [41] i went into the courtyard, which is very rectangular indeed, and then into the stairwell. the wrought iron railings are still there, still very fine. an elderly woman dressed in red was crossing the courtyard when i walked in, and looked at me curiously. i felt odd, a bit like an intruder. no question of going up to the third floor and knocking on the old apartment door again, though i may do it one of these days--maybe if someone else is with me. in the meantime, standing at the bottom of the stairwell, i remembered the time after daddy's heart attack when he had to be carried up the stairs every day, since there was no elevator and he was forbidden to climb. he had hired two men who would come and join hands to form a seat, on which he sat with his arms around each man's neck. i think this must have gone on until we left the country--or rather, until we moved out to the summer house in romai furdo, where he didn't have to worry about stairs. that was around june 1949. [42] he had the operation for his ulcer in march or thereabouts, then the heart attack a few days later, followed by the long recovery, first in the hospital and then at home. it must have been around may or early june that he gave the "thanksgiving" dinner for all the talmudic scholars, of which i have a photograph at home: a large table full of men dressed in black caftans and black hats, with daddy the only one wearing a regular suit. he wrote a learned speech for the occasion, a textual commentary he practiced for weeks beforehand while i listened. it was in yiddish, so i didn't understand a word, but every time he said the word "rambam" i would go into gales of laughter- for some mysterious reason, i found that inner rhyme hilarious. after a while it became a whole production, i would laugh even though i no longer really thought it was funny, because i thought he expected me to. what did it matter that rambam was maimonides, a great scholar of antiquity? all i cared for was that daddy should find me rapt and charming. [43] coming out into the street again, i noticed that the building directly across, no. 60, had been knocked down- they seem to be getting ready to build a new house there. i crossed the street and stared intently at the facade again. a little girl, walking home from school, went by and turned around to look at me. i felt too self-conscious to take out my camera again (i had photographed the statues on the facade before going into the courtyard), as if people would notice and not like it. i noticed, or maybe only imagined, that a man standing in front of the building was staring at me suspiciously--what was i doing there, inspecting the place so closely? i suddenly felt tired and hungry, and besides i had had enough nostalgia for one day. [...] [44] the "evening with vajda miklos," sponsored by the journal _2000_, was very interesting, but i'm too tired to report on it in detail. suffice it to say that vm was born in 1931 of a greek orthodox mother and converted jewish father, and is the editor of _new hungarian quarterly_, whose mission it is to publish hungarian authors in english translation. he said he thought of the war, including the "ostrom," the last terrible year, as an adventure; torok andras, who was doing the questioning, remarked that just last month george soros, who had been the invited guest, had used the same word ("kaland"), and i thought of what i say in "my war" about adventure. it must have something to do, i think, with having been so %choye% before the event, so loved and surrounded by adoring relatives, that we thought we were invincible. that, at least, is how vajda explained it (his parents had very powerful friends, including the great actress bajor gizi, who had been his father's girlfriend and was his own godmother), and i tend to agree with him. in my more modest way, i too was a totally spoiled and adored child who took all the adulation as her due. [45] the other thing worth noting is that the evening lasted almost three hours! unheard of, back home. scheduled to start at 7 p.m., it actually started at 7:20, with about 100 people in the audience. the two men sat on the stage with microphones and talked--or rather, vajda talked about his life with just a few well-placed interventions and questions from torok. at 8:40, torok announced we would take a break, just as i thought the thing was going to end! break lasted around twenty minutes, and then we were back for another hour. the audience sat patiently on the uncomfortable chairs, listening intently. vajda said, at one point: "to be here in the darkest period of the rakosi era [ca. 1953], one could only survive by laughing a lot"--which is what he and his friends did. around five minutes before ten, torok asked the audience if they had questions. i had been reflecting for close to an hour that this kind of dialogue could never happen in the u.s., where questions from the audience would have taken up at least half the time. here, sure enough, there were only two questions. as if one could get a discussion going with an audience that had sat through almost three hours of its own silence! saturday, february 20 [46] party at t.'s apartment, a huge place across from the american embassy. there must have been hundreds of people there--writers, academics, politicians, plus a large contingent of foreign visitors. i saw michael b., and g., who was coiffed and made up quite provocatively, very rouged cheeks, spikey hair--she was wearing tiny black lace gloves plus a fox collar over her loose-fitting culotte dress. michael introduced me to an interesting woman, judy s., a journalist from toronto whose life story resembles mine, except that she's a few years younger--she left in 1956, after three years of elementary school. her hungarian is pretty good, somewhat like mine in that she doesn't know many abstract words. [47] she told me about one of the men there that he had published a moving essay in a canadian journal last year, about how he had discovered that he was jewish. another hungarian "of jewish origin"! %zsido szarmazasu%: i've heard or read that expression half a dozen times since i got here. few are ready to affirm, simply, "i am a jew." but to be "zsido szarmazasu," of jewish origin, is quite admissible. sunday, february 21 [48] %hovirag%, snowdrops. small white bouquets wrapped in green leaves, beckoning at the flowerstands. evening on the boulevard, the shops are still open when darkness falls. i stop with madame and we buy a bunch of %hovirag%, snowflowers for the end of winter. a few weeks later it will be %ibolya%, violets nestled against velvety leaves--i bury my face in them, inhale the sweet smell. how i love the coming of spring! [49] i bought some carnations at a stand on the way to the tram stop this afternoon, to put in the vase on my desk. as the young man was wrapping them, i noticed the bunches of snowdrops, dozens of them with their stalks in a shallow pan. these flowers are smaller than the ones we have in america, so you need quite a few to make a tiny bouquet. it must be a huge amount of work to make dozens of bunches, each one wrapped in a green leaf and tied with string. i wasn't sure of the flower's name, so i asked the vendor. until then, i think he took me for a hungarian, but my question obviously told him i wasn't. "%hovirag%," he said, looking at me curiously. snowflower. i took a bunch out of the pan and gave it to him to wrap up. "are you from england?" he asked. "no, from america." after that, he spoke to me only in english. [50] neither a foreigner nor a hungarian, but something in between. just a little off-center, not quite the real thing, but sometimes close to passing for it. one could make this into a sign of unhappiness, or on the contrary a sign of uniqueness, special status. except that there are whole armies of people like me--not unique, unless it's a collective uniqueness. is that what we call history? [51] most of the current issue of _magyar forum_ is devoted to the founding meeting of the %magyar ut% movement, the hungarian way. so csurka got to be on page 1 in a large photo showing him on the platform at the meeting, on page 2 with his weekly column, and pages 3-4 which printed the complete text of his speech. there is a close-up of him at the podium, a thick, blunt-faced man with receding hairline and double chin. ("his name really should be csunya," i said to myself with some satisfaction while studying the photo). he wears tinted glasses. looks a bit like le pen- why do all these right-wing demagogues look like beefy parodies of "real men," the kind that would never in a million years eat quiche? [52] well, anyway. the page 2 column is about the ministerial shakeup of last week. mr. csurka is not happy that the mdf may be contemplating a move toward the young democrats (fidesz), which would definitely require them to squeeze out the "national radicals" whose leader he is. national radicals, the phrase comes up at least four times in his article--sounds ominously like national socialists to me. the usual theme: the people, the %nep%, is being kept down by the "nomenklatura," who used to be the communists but who are now the liberals. they will certainly do all in their considerable power to keep the hungarian way from developing. but it will win out in the end, because you can't keep the people down, etc. etc.. [53] the speech? more of the same. true hungarians have "hungarianness" (%magyarsag%), a matter of blood. they're descendants of king arpad. christians. what all true hungarians detest is "naphta-liberalism"--and here csurka the one-time playwright and short-story writer opens a parenthesis to explain about naphta. thomas mann, he tells us, modeled this character in _the magic mountain_ on the philosopher george lukacs, who "as everyone knows liked to vacation in swiss resorts" during the years before "he threw his lot in with the terror and with the hungarian red soldiers"--that's an allusion to the short-lived bela kun government of 1919. and of course everyone also knows that lukacs was jewish, or rather, "of jewish origin," as were all the other members of the kun government. so basically, liberals=communists=jews, the tried and true formula. but he says that the %magyar ut% is neither right nor left, just hungarian. wednesday, march 24, 1993 [54] second visit with b. this morning, almost as long as the first! and very interesting. we spoke in hungarian this time, and a lot about the current situation here. my head was spinning by the time i left, he mentioned so many names and factual details i wanted to retain. [55] he looked somewhat younger today, and in fact he mentioned later that he was younger than i, born after the war. his manner was still charming and somewhat scatterbrained, but not quite so "bumbling" as last time- and certainly not after we went into his study, where the really intense conversation began. "so, what do you think about what's happening--the extreme right and all that? are you worried?" i asked him. "no, i'm not. i'm optimistic," he answered. that's because, in his opinion, things are very different from what they were in the 1930s: most importantly, there is now a counter-offensive to nationalism and anti-semitism. "we are here too," he said. well, of course, there were anti-nazis in the 1930s too, i pointed out. but i don't recall his responding to that. [56] about anti-semitism: "i think it's time to become aggressive. paradoxically, i have become much more aware of being a jew because of it--you know that hungarian jews have generally been very much assimilated, and my family certainly was. but this changes things." his idea is to write an article in which he will defend not the idea of tolerance ("let's be good magyars and tolerate difference, those who are not like us"), but rather the idea of a "loose" [%laza%] hungarian-ness: "i am not magyar the way petofi was--and if csurka is a magyar, then i'm not one at all. we should love difference, not tolerate it," he said. i liked that. � ross, 'hacking away at the counterculture', postmodern culture v1n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v1n1-ross-hacking.txt hacking away at the counterculture by andrew ross princeton university copyright (c) 1990 by andrew ross, all rights reserved. _postmodern culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (sep. 1990). [1] ever since the viral attack engineered in november of 1988 by cornell university hacker robert morris on the national network system internet, which includes the pentagon's arpanet data exchange network, the nation's high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have been locked in debate, trying to make ethical and economic sense of the event. the virus rapidly infected an estimated six thousand computers around the country, creating a scare that crowned an open season of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which, according to the computer virus industry association in santa clara, the number of known viruses jumped from seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand infections in the first two months of that year to thirty thousand in the last two months. while it caused little in the way of data damage (some richly inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in down time), the ramifications of the internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday "computer culture." [2] following the lead of darpa's (defence advance research projects agency) computer emergency response team at carnegie-mellon university, anti-virus response centers were hastily put in place by government and defence agencies at the national science foundation, the energy department, nasa, and other sites. plans were made to introduce a bill in congress (the computer virus eradication act, to replace the 1986 computer fraud and abuse act, which pertained solely to government information), that would call for prison sentences of up to ten years for the "crime" of sophisticated hacking, and numerous government agencies have been involved in a proprietary fight over the creation of a proposed center for virus control, modelled, of course, on atlanta's centers for disease control, notorious for its failures to respond adequately to the aids crisis. [3] in fact, media commentary on the virus scare has run not so much tongue-in-cheek as hand-in-glove with the rhetoric of aids hysteria--the common use of terms like killer virus and epidemic; the focus on hi-risk personal contact (virus infection, for the most part, is spread on personal computers, not mainframes); the obsession with defense, security, and immunity; and the climate of suspicion generated around communitarian acts of sharing. the underlying moral imperative being this: you can't trust your best friend's software any more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids--safe software or no software at all! or, as dennis miller put it on _saturday night live_, "remember, when you connect with another computer, you're connecting to every computer that computer has ever connected to." this playful conceit struck a chord in the popular consciousness, even as it was perpetuated in such sober quarters as the association for computing machinery, the president of which, in a controversial editorial titled "a hygiene lesson," drew comparisons not only with sexually transmitted diseases, but also with a cholera epidemic, and urged attention to "personal systems hygiene."^1^ in fact, some computer scientists who studied the symptomatic path of morris's virus across internet have pointed to its uneven effects upon different computer types and operating systems, and concluded that "there is a direct analogy with biological genetic diversity to be made."^2^ the epidemiology of biological virus, and especially aids, research is being closely studied to help implement computer security plans, and, in these circles, the new witty discourse is laced with references to antigens, white blood cells, vaccinations, metabolic free radicals, and the like. [4] the form and content of more lurid articles like _time_'s infamous (september 1988) story, "invasion of the data snatchers," fully displayed the continuity of the media scare with those historical fears about bodily invasion, individual and national, that are often considered endemic to the paranoid style of american political culture.^3^ indeed, the rhetoric of computer culture, in common with the medical discourse of aids research, has fallen in line with the paranoid, strategic style of defence department rhetoric. each language-repertoire is obsessed with hostile threats to bodily and technological immune systems; every event is a ballistic manoeuver in the game of microbiological war, where the governing metaphors are indiscriminately drawn from cellular genetics and cybernetics alike. as a counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek ai tradition of seeing humans as "information-exchanging environments," the imagined life of computers has taken on an organicist shape, now that they too are subject to cybernetic "sickness" or disease. so, too, the development of interrelated systems, such as internet itself, has further added to the structural picture of an interdependent organism, whose component members, however autonomous, are all nonetheless affected by the "health" of each individual constituent. the growing interest among scientists in developing computer programs that will simulate the genetic behavior of living organisms (in which binary numbers act like genes) points to a future where the border between organic and artificial life is less and less distinct. [5] in keeping with the increasing use of biologically derived language to describe mutations in systems theory, conscious attempts to link the aids crisis with the information security crisis have pointed out that both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take over the host cell/program and clone their carrier genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas of the viruses. neither kind of virus, however, can replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of code that attach themselves to other cells/programs- just as biological viruses need a host cell, computer viruses require a host program to activate them. the internet virus was not, in fact, a virus, but a worm, a program that can run independently and therefore _appears_ to have a life of its own. the worm replicates a full version of itself in programs and systems as it moves from one to another, masquerading as a legitimate user by guessing the user passwords of locked accounts. because of this autonomous existence, the worm can be seen to behave as if it were an organism with some kind of purpose or teleology, and yet it has none. its only "purpose" is to reproduce and infect. if the worm has no inbuilt antireplication code, or if the code is faulty, as was the case with the internet worm, it will make already-infected computers repeatedly accept further replicas of itself, until their memories are clogged. a much quieter worm than that engineered by morris would have moved more slowly, as one supposes a "worm" should, protecting itself from detection by ever more subtle camouflage, and propagating its cumulative effect of operative systems inertia over a much longer period of time. [6] in offering such descriptions, however, we must be wary of attributing a teleology/intentionality to worms and viruses which can be ascribed only, and, in most instances, speculatively, to their authors. there is no reason why a cybernetic "worm" might be expected to behave in any fundamental way like a biological worm. so, too, the assumed intentionality of its author distinguishes the human-made cybernetic virus from the case of the biological virus, the effects of which are fated to be received and discussed in a language saturated with human-made structures and narratives of meaning and teleological purpose. writing about the folkloric theologies of significance and explanatory justice (usually involving retribution) that have sprung up around the aids crisis, judith williamson has pointed to the radical implications of this collision between an intentionless virus and a meaning-filled culture: nothing could be more meaningless than a virus. it has no point, no purpose, no plan; it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent significance. and yet nothing is harder for us to confront than the complete absence of meaning. by its very definition, meaninglessness cannot be articulated within our social language, which is a system _of_ meaning: impossible to include, as an absence, it is also impossible to exclude- for meaninglessness isn't just the opposite of meaning, it is the end of meaning, and threatens the fragile structures by which we make sense of the world.^4^ [7] no such judgment about meaninglessness applies to the computer security crisis. in contrast to hiv's lack of meaning or intentionality, the meaning of cybernetic viruses is always already replete with social significance. this meaning is related, first of all, to the author's local intention or motivation, whether psychic or fully social, whether wrought out of a mood of vengeance, a show of bravado or technical expertise, a commitment to a political act, or in anticipation of the profits that often accrue from the victims' need to buy an antidote from the author. beyond these local intentions, however, which are usually obscure or, as in the morris case, quite inscrutable, there is an entire set of social and historical narratives that surround and are part of the "meaning" of the virus: the coded anarchist history of the youth hacker subculture; the militaristic environments of search-and-destroy warfare (a virus has two components--a carrier and a "warhead"), which, because of the historical development of computer technology, constitute the family values of information techno-culture; the experimental research environments in which creative designers are encouraged to work; and the conflictual history of pure and applied ethics in the science and technology communities, to name just a few. a similar list could be drawn up to explain the widespread and varied _response_ to computer viruses, from the amused concern of the cognoscenti to the hysteria of the casual user, and from the research community and the manufacturing industry to the morally aroused legislature and the mediated culture at large. every one of these explanations and narratives is the result of social and cultural processes and values; consequently, there is very little about the virus itself that is "meaningless." viruses can no more be seen as an objective, or necessary, result of the "objective" development of technological systems than technology in general can be seen as an objective, determining agent of social change. [8] for the sake of polemical economy, i would note that the cumulative effect of all the viral hysteria has been twofold. firstly, it has resulted in a windfall for software producers, now that users' blithe disregard for makers' copyright privileges has eroded in the face of the security panic. used to fighting halfhearted rearguard actions against widespread piracy practices, or reluctantly acceding to buyers' desire for software unencumbered by top-heavy security features, software vendors are now profiting from the new public distrust of program copies. so, too, the explosion in security consciousness has hyperstimulated the already fast-growing sectors of the security system industry and the data encryption industry. in line with the new imperative for everything from "vaccinated" workstations to "sterilized" networks, it has created a brand new market of viral vaccine vendors who will sell you the virus (a one-time only immunization shot) along with its antidote--with names like flu shot +, virusafe, vaccinate, disk defender, certus, viral alarm, antidote, virus buster, gatekeeper, ongard, and interferon. few of the antidotes are very reliable, however, especially since they pose an irresistible intellectual challenge to hackers who can easily rewrite them in the form of ever more powerful viruses. moreover, most corporate managers of computer systems and networks know that by far the great majority of their intentional security losses are a result of insider sabotage and monkeywrenching. [9] in short, the effects of the viruses have been to profitably clamp down on copyright delinquency, and to generate the need for entirely new industrial production of viral suppressors to contain the fallout. in this respect, it is easy to see that the appearance of viruses could hardly, in the long run, have benefited industry producers more. in the same vein, the networks that have been hardest hit by the security squeeze are not restricted-access military or corporate systems but networks like internet, set up on trust to facilitate the open academic exchange of data, information and research, and watched over by its sponsor, darpa. it has not escaped the notice of conspiracy theorists that the military intelligence community, obsessed with "electronic warfare," actually stood to learn a lot from the internet virus; the virus effectively "pulsed the system," exposing the sociological behaviour of the system in a crisis situation.^5^ the second effect of the virus crisis has been more overtly ideological. virus-conscious fear and loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of privatization that increasingly defines social identities in the new post-fordist order. the result- a psycho-social closing of the ranks around fortified private spheres--runs directly counter to the ethic that we might think of as residing at the architectural heart of information technology. in its basic assembly structure, information technology is a technology of processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property. what is now under threat is the rationality of a shareware culture, ushered in as the achievement of the hacker counterculture that pioneered the personal computer revolution in the early seventies against the grain of corporate planning. [10] there is another story to tell, however, about the emergence of the virus scare as a profitable ideological moment, and it is the story of how teenage hacking has come to be increasingly defined as a potential threat to normative educational ethics and national security alike. the story of the creation of this "social menace" is central to the ongoing attempts to rewrite property law in order to contain the effects of the new information technologies that, because of their blindness to the copyrighting of intellectual property, have transformed the way in which modern power is exercised and maintained. consequently, a deviant social class or group has been defined and categorised as "enemies of the state" in order to help rationalize a general law-and-order clampdown on free and open information exchange. teenage hackers' homes are now habitually raided by sheriffs and fbi agents using strong-arm tactics, and jail sentences are becoming a common punishment. operation sundevil, a nationwide secret service operation in the spring of 1990, involving hundreds of agents in fourteen cities, is the most recently publicized of the hacker raids that have produced several arrests and seizures of thousands of disks and address lists in the last two years.^6^ [11] in one of the many harshly punitive prosecutions against hackers in recent years, a judge went so far as to describe "bulletin boards" as "hi-tech street gangs." the editors of _2600_, the magazine that publishes information about system entry and exploration that is indispensable to the hacking community, have pointed out that any single invasive act, such as that of trespass, that involves the use of computers is considered today to be infinitely more criminal than a similar act undertaken without computers.^7^ to use computers to execute pranks, raids, frauds or thefts is to incur automatically the full repressive wrath of judges urged on by the moral panic created around hacking feats over the last two decades. indeed, there is a strong body of pressure groups pushing for new criminal legislation that will define "crimes with computers" as a special category of crime, deserving "extraordinary" sentences and punitive measures. over that same space of time, the term _hacker_ has lost its semantic link with the journalistic _hack,_ suggesting a professional toiler who uses unorthodox methods. so, too, its increasingly criminal connotation today has displaced the more innocuous, amateur mischief-maker-cum-media-star role reserved for hackers until a few years ago. [12] in response to the gathering vigor of this "war on hackers," the most common defences of hacking can be presented on a spectrum that runs from the appeasement or accommodation of corporate interests to drawing up blueprints for cultural revolution. (a) hacking performs a benign industrial service of uncovering security deficiencies and design flaws. (b) hacking, as an experimental, free-form research activity, has been responsible for many of the most progressive developments in software development. (c) hacking, when not purely recreational, is an elite educational practice that reflects the ways in which the development of high technology has outpaced orthodox forms of institutional education. (d) hacking is an important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use of surveillance technology and data gathering by the state, and to the increasingly monolithic communications power of giant corporations. (e) hacking, as guerrilla know-how, is essential to the task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and stocks of oppositional knowledge as a hedge against a technofascist future. with all of these and other arguments in mind, it is easy to see how the social and cultural _management_ of hacker activities has become a complex process that involves state policy and legislation at the highest levels. in this respect, the virus scare has become an especially convenient vehicle for obtaining public and popular consent for new legislative measures and new powers of investigation for the fbi.^8^ [13] consequently, certain celebrity hackers have been quick to play down the zeal with which they pursued their earlier hacking feats, while reinforcing the _deviant_ category of "technological hooliganism" reserved by moralizing pundits for "dark-side" hacking. hugo cornwall, british author of the bestselling _hacker's handbook_, presents a little england view of the hacker as a harmless fresh-air enthusiast who "visits advanced computers as a polite country rambler might walk across picturesque fields." the owners of these properties are like "farmers who don't mind careful ramblers." cornwall notes that "lovers of fresh-air walks obey the country code, involving such items as closing gates behind one and avoiding damage to crops and livestock" and suggests that a similar code ought to "guide your rambles into other people's computers; the safest thing to do is simply browse, enjoy and learn." by contrast, any rambler who "ventured across a field guarded by barbed wire and dotted with notices warning about the official secrets act would deserve most that happened thereafter."^9^ cornwall's quaint perspective on hacking has a certain "native charm," but some might think that this beguiling picture of patchwork-quilt fields and benign gentleman farmers glosses over the long bloody history of power exercised through feudal and postfeudal land economy in england, while it is barely suggestive of the new fiefdoms, transnational estates, dependencies, and principalities carved out of today's global information order by vast corporations capable of bypassing the laws and territorial borders of sovereign nation-states. in general, this analogy with "trespass" laws, which compares hacking to breaking and entering other people's homes restricts the debate to questions about privacy, property, possessive individualism, and, at best, the excesses of state surveillance, while it closes off any examination of the activities of the corporate owners and institutional sponsors of information technology (the almost exclusive "target" of most hackers).^10^ [14] cornwall himself has joined the lucrative ranks of ex-hackers who either work for computer security firms or write books about security for the eyes of worried corporate managers.^11^ a different, though related, genre is that of the penitent hacker's "confession," produced for an audience thrilled by tales of high stakes adventure at the keyboard, but written in the form of a computer security handbook. the best example of the "i was a teenage hacker" genre is bill (aka "the cracker") landreth's _out of the inner circle_: the true story of a computer intruder capable of cracking the nation's most secure computer systems_, a book about "people who can't `just say no' to computers." in full complicity with the deviant picture of the hacker as "public enemy," landreth recirculates every official and media cliche about subversive conspiratorial elites by recounting the putative exploits of a high-level hackers' guild called the inner circle. the author himself is presented in the book as a former keyboard junkie who now praises the law for having made a good moral example of him: if you are wondering what i am like, i can tell you the same things i told the judge in federal court: although it may not seem like it, i am pretty much a normal american teenager. i don't drink, smoke or take drugs. i don't steal, assault people, or vandalize property. the only way in which i am really different from most people is in my fascination with the ways and means of learning about computers that don't belong to me.^12^ sentenced in 1984 to three years probation, during which time he was obliged to finish his high school education and go to college, landreth concludes: "i think the sentence is very fair, and i already know what my major will be...." as an aberrant sequel to the book's contrite conclusion, however, landreth vanished in 1986, violating his probation, only to face later a stiff five-year jail sentence--a sorry victim, no doubt, of the recent crackdown. _cyber-counterculture_? [15] at the core of steven levy's bestseller _hackers_ (1984) is the argument that the hacker ethic, first articulated in the 1950s among the famous mit students who developed multiple-access user systems, is libertarian and crypto-anarchist in its right-to know principles and its advocacy of decentralized technology. this hacker ethic, which has remained the preserve of a youth culture for the most part, asserts the basic right of users to free access to all information. it is a principled attempt, in other words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to form information elites. consequently, hacker activities were presented in the eighties as a romantic countercultural tendency, celebrated by critical journalists like john markoff of the _new york times_, by stewart brand of _whole earth catalog_ fame, and by new age gurus like timothy leary in the flamboyant _reality hackers_. fuelled by sensational stories about phone phreaks like joe egressia (the blind eight year old who discovered the tone signal of phone company by whistling) and cap'n crunch, groups like the milwaukee 414s, the los angeles arpanet hackers, the span data travellers, the chaos computer club of hamburg, the british prestel hackers, _2600_'s bbs, "the private sector," and others, the dominant media representation of the hacker came to be that of the "rebel with a modem," to use markoff's term, at least until the more recent "war on hackers" began to shape media coverage. [16] on the one hand, this popular folk hero persona offered the romantic high profile of a maverick though nerdy cowboy whose fearless raids upon an impersonal "system" were perceived as a welcome tonic in the gray age of technocratic routine. on the other hand, he was something of a juvenile technodelinquent who hadn't yet learned the difference between right and wrong---a wayward figure whose technical brilliance and proficiency differentiated him nonetheless from, say, the maladjusted working-class j.d. street-corner boy of the 1950s (hacker mythology, for the most part, has been almost exclusively white, masculine, and middle class). one result of this media profile was a persistent infantilization of the hacker ethic--a way of trivializing its embryonic politics, however finally complicit with dominant technocratic imperatives or with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology one perceives these politics to be. the second result was to reinforce, in the initial absence of coercive jail sentences, the high educational stakes of training the new technocratic elites to be responsible in their use of technology. never, the given wisdom goes, has a creative elite of the future been so in need of the virtues of a liberal education steeped in western ethics! [17] the full force of this lesson in computer ethics can be found laid out in the official cornell university report on the robert morris affair. members of the university commission set up to investigate the affair make it quite clear in their report that they recognize the student's academic brilliance. his hacking, moreover, is described, as a "juvenile act" that had no "malicious intent" but that amounted, like plagiarism, the traditional academic heresy, to a dishonest transgression of other users' rights. (in recent years, the privacy movement within the information community--a movement mounted by liberals to protect civil rights against state gathering of information--has actually been taken up and used as a means of criminalizing hacker activities.) as for the consequences of this juvenile act, the report proposes an analogy that, in comparison with cornwall's _mature_ english country rambler, is thoroughly american, suburban, middle-class and _juvenile_. unleashing the internet worm was like "the driving of a golf-cart on a rainy day through most houses in the neighborhood. the driver may have navigated carefully and broken no china, but it should have been obvious to the driver that the mud on the tires would soil the carpets and that the owners would later have to clean up the mess."^13^ [18] in what stands out as a stiff reprimand for his alma mater, the report regrets that morris was educated in an "ambivalent atmosphere" where he "received no clear guidance" about ethics from "his peers or mentors" (he went to harvard!). but it reserves its loftiest academic contempt for the press, whose heroization of hackers has been so irresponsible, in the commission's opinion, as to cause even further damage to the standards of the computing profession; media exaggerations of the courage and technical sophistication of hackers "obscures the far more accomplished work of students who complete their graduate studies without public fanfare," and "who subject their work to the close scrutiny and evaluation of their peers, and not to the interpretations of the popular press."^14^ in other words, this was an inside affair, to be assessed and judged by fellow professionals within an institution that reinforces its authority by means of internally self-regulating codes of professionalist ethics, but rarely addresses its ethical relationship to society as a whole (acceptance of defence grants, and the like). generally speaking, the report affirms the genteel liberal ideal that professionals should not need laws, rules, procedural guidelines, or fixed guarantees of safe and responsible conduct. apprentice professionals ought to have acquired a good conscience by osmosis from a liberal education rather than from some specially prescribed course in ethics and technology. [19] the widespread attention commanded by the cornell report (attention from the association of computing machinery, among others) demonstrates the industry's interest in how the academy invokes liberal ethics in order to assist in the managing of the organization of the new specialized knowledge about information technology. despite or, perhaps, because of the report's steadfast pledge to the virtues and ideals of a liberal education, it bears all the marks of a legitimation crisis inside (and outside) the academy surrounding the new and all-important category of computer professionalism. the increasingly specialized design knowledge demanded of computer professionals means that codes that go beyond the old professionalist separation of mental and practical skills are needed to manage the division that a hacker's functional talents call into question, between a purely mental pursuit and the pragmatic sphere of implementing knowledge in the real world. "hacking" must then be designated as a strictly _amateur_ practice; the tension, in hacking, between _interestedness_ and _disinterestedness_ is different from, and deficient in relation to, the proper balance demanded by professionalism. alternately, hacking can be seen as the amateur flip side of the professional ideal--a disinterested love in the service of interested parties and institutions. in either case, it serves as an example of professionalism gone wrong, but not very wrong. [20] in common with the two responses to the virus scare described earlier--the profitable reaction of the computer industry and the self-empowering response of the legislature-the cornell report shows how the academy uses a case like the morris affair to strengthen its own sense of moral and cultural authority in the sphere of professionalism, particularly through its scornful indifference to and aloofness from the codes and judgements exercised by the media--its diabolic competitor in the field of knowledge. indeed, for all the trumpeting about excesses of power and disrespect for the law of the land, the revival of ethics, in the business and science disciplines in the ivy league and on capitol hill (both awash with ethical fervor in the post-boesky and post-reagan years), is little more than a weak liberal response to working flaws or adaptational lapses in the social logic of technocracy. [21] to complete the scenario of morality play example making, however, we must also consider that morris's father was chief scientist of the national computer security center, the national security agency's public effort at safeguarding computer security. a brilliant programmer and codebreaker in his own right, he had testified in washington in 1983 about the need to deglamorise teenage hacking, comparing it to "stealing a car for the purpose of joyriding." in a further oedipal irony, morris sr. may have been one of the inventors, while at bell labs in the 1950s, of a computer game involving self-perpetuating programs that were a prototype of today's worms and viruses. called darwin, its principles were incorporated, in the eighties, into a popular hacker game called core war, in which autonomous "killer" programs fought each other to the death.^15^ [22] with the appearance, in the morris affair, of a patricidal object who is also the pentagon's guardian angel, we now have many of the classic components of countercultural cross-generational conflict. what i want to consider, however, is how and where this scenario differs from the definitive contours of such conflicts that we recognize as having been established in the sixties; how the cornell hacker morris's relation to, say, campus "occupations" today is different from that evoked by the famous image of armed black students emerging from a sit-in on the cornell campus; how the relation to technological ethics differs from andrew kopkind's famous statement "morality begins at the end of a gun barrel" which accompanied the publication of the do-it-yourself molotov cocktail design on the cover of a 1968 issue of the _new york review of books_; or how hackers' prized potential access to the networks of military systems warfare differs from the prodigious yippie feat of levitating the pentagon building. it may be that, like the j.d. rebel without a cause of the fifties, the disaffiliated student dropout of the sixties, and the negationist punk of the seventies, the hacker of the eighties has come to serve as a visible public example of moral maladjustment, a hegemonic test case for redefining the dominant ethics in an advanced technocratic society. (hence the need for each of these deviant figures to come in different versions- lumpen, radical chic, and hollywood-style.) [23] what concerns me here, however, are the different conditions that exist today for recognizing countercultural expression and activism. twenty years later, the technology of hacking and viral guerrilla warfare occupies a similar place in countercultural fantasy as the molotov cocktail design once did. while i don't, for one minute, mean to insist on such comparisons, which aren't particularly sound anyway, i think they conveniently mark a shift in the relation of countercultural activity to technology, a shift in which a software-based technoculture, organized around outlawed libertarian principles about free access to information and communication, has come to replace a dissenting culture organized around the demonizing of abject hardware structures. much, though not all, of the sixties counterculture was formed around what i have elsewhere called the _technology of folklore_--an expressive congeries of preindustrialist, agrarianist, orientalist, antitechnological ideas, values, and social structures. by contrast, the cybernetic countercultures of the nineties are already being formed around the _folklore of technology_--mythical feats of survivalism and resistance in a data-rich world of virtual environments and posthuman bodies- which is where many of the sf-and technology-conscious youth cultures have been assembling in recent years.^16^ [24] there is no doubt that this scenario makes countercultural activity more difficult to recognize and therefore to define as politically significant. it was much easier, in the sixties, to _identify_ the salient features and symbolic power of a romantic preindustrialist cultural politics in an advanced technological society, especially when the destructive evidence of america's supertechnological invasion of vietnam was being daily paraded in front of the public eye. however, in a society whose technopolitical infrastructure depends increasingly upon greater surveillance, cybernetic activism necessarily relies on a much more covert politics of identity, since access to closed systems requires discretion and dissimulation. access to digital systems still requires only the authentication of a signature or pseudonym, not the identification of a real surveillable person, so there exists a crucial operative gap between authentication and identification. (as security systems move toward authenticating access through biological signatures- the biometric recording and measurement of physical characteristics such as palm or retinal prints, or vein patterns on the backs of hands--the hacker's staple method of systems entry through purloined passwords will be further challenged.) by the same token, cybernetic identity is never used up, it can be recreated, reassigned, and reconstructed with any number of different names and under different user accounts. most hacks, or technocrimes, go unnoticed or unreported for fear of publicising the vulnerability of corporate security systems, especially when the hacks are performed by disgruntled employees taking their vengeance on management. so, too, authoritative identification of any individual hacker, whenever it occurs, is often the result of accidental leads rather than systematic detection. for example, captain midnight, the video pirate who commandeered a satellite a few years ago to interrupt broadcast tv viewing, was traced only because a member of the public reported a suspicious conversation heard over a crossed telephone line. [25] eschewing its core constituency among white males of the pre-professional-managerial class, the hacker community may be expanding its parameters outward. hacking, for example, has become a feature of the young adult mystery-and-suspense novel genre for girls.^17^ the elitist class profile of the hacker prodigy as that of an undersocialized college nerd has become democratized and customized in recent years; it is no longer exclusively associated with institutionally acquired college expertise, and increasingly it dresses streetwise. in a recent article which documents the spread of the computer underground from college whiz kids to a broader youth subculture termed "cyberpunks," after the movement among sf novelists, the original hacker phone phreak cap'n crunch is described as lamenting the fact that the cyberculture is no longer an "elite" one, and that hacker-valid information is much easier to obtain these days.^18^ [26] for the most part, however, the self-defined hacker underground, like many other protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the self-understanding of its members that they are the apprentice architects of a future dominated by knowledge, expertise, and "smartness," whether human or digital. consequently, it is clear that the hacker cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often manifest in activities that answer, directly or indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial r&d. for example, this hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance (and endorphin highs)--all qualities that are valorised by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism. in a critique of the myth of the hacker-as-rebel, dennis hayes debunks the political romance woven around the teenage hacker: they are typically white, upper-middle-class adolescents who have taken over the home computer (bought, subsidized, or tolerated by parents in the hope of cultivating computer literacy). few are politically motivated although many express contempt for the "bureaucracies" that hamper their electronic journeys. nearly all demand unfettered access to intricate and intriguing computer networks. in this, teenage hackers resemble an alienated shopping culture deprived of purchasing opportunities more than a terrorist network.^19^ [27] while welcoming the sobriety of hayes's critique, i am less willing to accept its assumptions about the political implications of hacker activities. studies of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged middle-class formation) have taught us that the political meaning of certain forms of cultural "resistance" is notoriously difficult to read. these meanings are either highly coded or expressed indirectly through media--private peer languages, customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure patterns, categories of insider knowledge and behavior--that have no fixed or inherent political significance. if cultural studies of this sort have proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can seldom be translated directly into an articulate political philosophy. the significance of these cultures lies in their embryonic or _protopolitical_ languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or parent systems of rules. if hackers lack a "cause," then they are certainly not the first youth culture to be characterized in this dismissive way. in particular, the left has suffered from the lack of a cultural politics capable of recognizing the power of cultural expressions that do not wear a mature political commitment on their sleeves. so, too, the escalation of activism-in-the professions in the last two decades has shown that it is a mistake to condemn the hacker impulse on account of its class constituency alone. to cede the "ability to know" on the grounds that elite groups will enjoy unjustly privileged access to technocratic knowledge is to cede too much of the future. is it of no political significance at all that hackers' primary fantasies often involve the official computer systems of the police, armed forces, and defence and intelligence agencies? and that the rationale for their fantasies is unfailingly presented in the form of a defence of civil liberties against the threat of centralized intelligence and military activities? or is all of this merely a symptom of an apprentice elite's fledgling will to masculine power? the activities of the chinese student elite in the pro-democracy movement have shown that unforeseen shifts in the political climate can produce startling new configurations of power and resistance. after tiananmen square, party leaders found it imprudent to purge those high-tech engineer and computer cadres who alone could guarantee the future of any planned modernization program. on the other hand, the authorities rested uneasy knowing that each cadre (among the most activist groups in the student movement) is a potential hacker who can have the run of the communications house if and when he or she wants. [28] on the other hand, i do agree with hayes's perception that the media have pursued their romance with the hacker at the cost of underreporting the much greater challenge posed to corporate employers by their employees. it is in the arena of conflicts between workers and management that most high-tech "sabotage" takes place. in the mainstream everyday life of office workers, mostly female, there is a widespread culture of unorganized sabotage that accounts for infinitely more computer downtime and information loss every year than is caused by destructive, "dark-side" hacking by celebrity cybernetic intruders. the sabotage, time theft, and strategic monkeywrenching deployed by office workers in their engineered electromagnetic attacks on data storage and operating systems might range from the planting of time or logic bombs to the discrete use of electromagnetic tesla coils or simple bodily friction: "good old static electricity discharged from the fingertips probably accounts for close to half the disks and computers wiped out or down every year."^20^ more skilled operators, intent on evening a score with management, often utilize sophisticated hacking techniques. in many cases, a coherent networking culture exists among female console operators, where, among other things, tips about strategies for slowing down the temporality of the work regime are circulated. while these threats from below are fully recognized in their boardrooms, corporations dependent upon digital business machines are obviously unwilling to advertize how acutely vulnerable they actually are to this kind of sabotage. it is easy to imagine how organised computer activism could hold such companies for ransom. as hayes points out, however, it is more difficult to mobilize any kind of labor movement organized upon such premises: many are prepared to publicly oppose the countless dark legacies of the computer age: "electronic sweatshops," military technology, employee surveillance, genotoxic water, and ozone depletion. among those currently leading the opposition, however, it is apparently deemed "irresponsible" to recommend an active computerized resistance as a source of worker's power because it is perceived as a medium of employee crime and "terrorism." ^21^ _processed world_, the "magazine with a bad attitude" with which hayes has been associated, is at the forefront of debating and circulating these questions among office workers, regularly tapping into the resentments borne out in on-the-job resistance. [29] while only a small number of computer users would recognize and include themselves under the label of "hacker," there are good reasons for extending the restricted definition of _hacking_ down and across the caste system of systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators to include all high-tech workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their positions in the social networks of exchange and determines the temporality of their work schedules. to put it in these terms, however, is not to offer any universal definition of hacker agency. there are many social agents, for example, in job locations that are dependent upon the hope of technological _reskilling_, for whom sabotage or disruption of communicative rationality is of little use; for such people, definitions of hacking that are reconstructive, rather than deconstructive, are more appropriate. a good example is the crucial role of worker technoliteracy in the struggle of labor against automation and deskilling. when worker education classes in computer programming were discontinued by management at the ford rouge plant in dearborn, michigan, union (uaw) members began to publish a newsletter called the _amateur computerist_ to fill the gap.^22^ among the columnists and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans of the flint sit-down strikes who see a clear historical continuity between the problem of labor organization in the thirties and the problem of automation and deskilling today. workers' computer literacy is seen as essential not only to the demystification of the computer and the reskilling of workers, but also to labor's capacity to intervene in decisions about new technologies that might result in shorter hours and thus in "work efficiency" rather than worker efficiency. [30] the three social locations i have mentioned above all express different class relations to technology: the location of an apprentice technical elite, conventionally associated with the term "hacking"; the location of the female high-tech office worker, involved in "sabotage"; and the location of the shop floor worker, whose future depends on technological reskilling. all therefore exhibit different ways of _claiming back_ time dictated and appropriated by technological processes, and of establishing some form of independent control over the work relation so determined by the new technologies. all, then, fall under a broad understanding of the politics involved in any extended description of hacker activities. [31] faced with these proliferating practices in the workplace, on the teenage cult fringe, and increasingly in mainstream entertainment, where, over the last five years, the cyberpunk sensibility in popular fiction, film, and television has caught the romance of the popular taste for the outlaw technology of human/machine interfaces, we are obliged, i think, to ask old kinds of questions about the new silicon order which the evangelists of information technology have been deliriously proclaiming for more than twenty years. the postindustrialists' picture of a world of freedom and abundance projects a sunny millenarian future devoid of work drudgery and ecological degradation. this sunny social order, cybernetically wired up, is presented as an advanced evolutionary phase of society in accord with enlightenment ideals of progress and rationality. by contrast, critics of this idealism see only a frightening advance in the technologies of social control, whose owners and sponsors are efficiently shaping a society, as kevin robins and frank webster put it, of "slaves without athens" that is actually the inverse of the "athens without slaves" promised by the silicon positivists.^23^ [32] it is clear that one of the political features of the new post-fordist order--economically marked by short-run production, diverse taste markets, flexible specialization, and product differentiation--is that the new right has managed to appropriate not only the utopian language and values of the alternative technology movements but also the marxist discourse of the "withering away of the state" and the more compassionate vision of local, decentralized communications first espoused by the libertarian left. it must be recognized that these are very popular themes and visions, (advanced most famously by alvin toffler and the neoliberal atari democrats, though also by leftist thinkers such as andre gortz, rudolf bahro, and alain touraine)--much more popular, for example, than the tradition of centralized technocratic planning espoused by the left under the fordist model of mass production and consumption.^24^ against the postindustrialists' millenarian picture of a postscarcity harmony, in which citizens enjoy decentralized, access to free-flowing information, it is necessary, however, to emphasise how and where actually existing cybernetic capitalism presents a gross caricature of such a postscarcity society. [33] one of the stories told by the critical left about new cultural technologies is that of monolithic, panoptical social control, effortlessly achieved through a smooth, endlessly interlocking system of networks of surveillance. in this narrative, information technology is seen as the most despotic mode of domination yet, generating not just a revolution in capitalist production but also a revolution in living--"social taylorism"--that touches all cultural and social spheres in the home and in the workplace.^25^ through routine gathering of information about transactions, consumer preferences, and creditworthiness, a harvest of information about any individual's whereabouts and movements, tastes, desires, contacts, friends, associates, and patterns of work and recreation becomes available in the form of dossiers sold on the tradable information market, or is endlessly convertible into other forms of intelligence through computer matching. advanced pattern recognition technologies facilitate the process of surveillance, while data encryption protects it from public accountability.^26^ [34] while the debate about privacy has triggered public consciousness about these excesses, the liberal discourse about ethics and damage control in which that debate has been conducted falls short of the more comprehensive analysis of social control and social management offered by left political economists. according to one marxist analysis, information is seen as a new kind of commodity resource which marks a break with past modes of production and that is becoming the essential site of capital accumulation in the world economy. what happens, then, in the process by which information, gathered up by data scavenging in the transactional sphere, is systematically converted into intelligence? a surplus value is created for use elsewhere. this surplus information value is more than is needed for public surveillance; it is often information, or intelligence, culled from consumer polling or statistical analysis of transactional behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of routine public surveillance. indeed, it is this surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or aggregate units within those social futures. this surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new industry of futures research which relies upon computer technology to simulate and forecast the shape, activity, and behavior of complex social systems. the result is a possible system of social management that far transcends the questions about surveillance that have been at the discursive center of the privacy debate.^27^ [35] to further challenge the idealists' vision of postindustrial light and magic, we need only look inside the semiconductor workplace itself, which is home to the most toxic chemicals known to man (and woman, especially since women of color often make up the majority of the microelectronics labor force), and where worker illness is measured not in quantities of blood spilled on the shop floor but in the less visible forms of chromosome damage, shrunken testicles, miscarriages, premature deliveries, and severe birth defects. in addition to the extraordinarily high stress patterns of vdt operators, semiconductor workers exhibit an occupational illness rate that even by the late seventies was three times higher than that of manufacturing workers, at least until the federal rules for recognizing and defining levels of injury were changed under the reagan administration. protection gear is designed to protect the product and the clean room from the workers, and not vice versa. recently, immunological health problems have begun to appear that can be described only as a kind of chemically induced aids, rendering the t-cells dysfunctional rather than depleting them like virally induced aids.^28^ in corporate offices, the use of keystroke software to monitor and pace office workers has become a routine part of job performance evaluation programs. some 70 percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or other forms of quantitative monitoring on their workers. every bodily movement can be checked and measured, especially trips to the toilet. federal deregulation has meant that the limits of employee work space have shrunk, in some government offices, below that required by law for a two-hundred pound laboratory pig.^29^ critics of the labor process seem to have sound reasons to believe that rationalization and quantification are at last entering their most primitive phase. [36] these, then, are some of the features of the critical left position--or what is sometimes referred to as the "paranoid" position--on information technology, which imagines or constructs a totalizing, monolithic picture of systematic domination. while this story is often characterized as conspiracy theory, its targets--technorationality, bureaucratic capitalism--are usually too abstract to fit the picture of a social order planned and shaped by a small, conspiring group of centralized power elites. although i believe that this story, when told inside and outside the classroom, for example, is an indispensable form of "consciousness-raising," it is not always the best story to tell. [37] while i am not comfortable with the "paranoid" labelling, i would argue that such narratives do little to discourage paranoia. the critical habit of finding unrelieved domination everywhere has certain consequences, one of which is to create a siege mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the first place. what follows is a politics that can speak only from a victim's position. and when knowledge about surveillance is presented as systematic and infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow. in the psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as i have argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the sponsors of control technology. in short, the picture of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the recognition of people solely as victims. it is redolent of the old sociological models of mass society and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural patterns of modernization. to emphasize, as robins and webster and others have done, the power of the new technologies to despotically transform the "rhythm, texture, and experience" of everyday life, and meet with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave, finally, to an epistemology of technological determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people to make their own uses of new technologies.^30^ [38] the seamless "interlocking" of public and private networks of information and intelligence is not as smooth and even as the critical school of hard domination would suggest. in any case, compulsive gathering of information is no _guarantee_ that any interpretive sense will be made of the files or dossiers, while some would argue that the increasingly covert nature of surveillance is a sign that the "campaign" for social control is not going well. one of the most pervasive popular arguments against the panoptical intentions of the masters of technology is that their systems do not work. every successful hack or computer crime in some way reinforces the popular perception that information systems are not infallible. and the announcements of military-industrial spokespersons that the fully automated battlefield is on its way run up against an accumulated stock of popular skepticism about the operative capacity of weapons systems. these misgivings are born of decades of distrust for the plans and intentions of the military-industrial complex, and were quite evident in the widespread cynicism about the strategic defense initiative. just to take one empirical example of unreliability, the military communications system worked so poorly and so farcically during the u.s. invasion of grenada that commanders had to call each other on pay phones: ever since then, the command-and control code of arpanet technocrats has been c5- command, control, communication, computers, and confusion.^31^ it could be said, of course, that the invasion of grenada did, after all, succeed, but the more complex and inefficiency-prone such high-tech invasions become (vietnam is still the best example), the less likely they are to be undertaken with any guarantee of success. [39] i am not suggesting that alternatives can be forged simply by encouraging disbelief in the infallibility of existing technologies (pointing to examples of the appropriation of technologies for radical uses, of course, always provides more visibly satisfying evidence of empowerment), but technoskepticism, while not a _sufficient_ condition of social change, is a _necessary_ condition. stocks of popular technoskepticism are crucial to the task of eroding the legitimacy of those cultural values that prepare the way for new technological developments: values and principles such as the inevitability of material progress, the "emancipatory" domination of nature, the innovative autonomy of machines, the efficiency codes of pragmatism, and the linear juggernaut of liberal enlightenment rationality--all increasingly under close critical scrutiny as a wave of environmental consciousness sweeps through the electorates of the west. technologies do not shape or determine such values. these values already exist before the technologies, and the fact that they have become deeply embodied in the structure of popular needs and desires then provides the green light for the acceptance of certain kinds of technology. the principal rationale for introducing new technologies is that they answer to already existing intentions and demands that may be perceived as "subjective" but that are never actually within the control of any single set of conspiring individuals. as marike finlay has argued, just as technology is only possible in given discursive situations, one of which being the desire of people to have it for reasons of empowerment, so capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology.^32^ [40] in fact, there is no frame of technological inevitability that has not already interacted with popular needs and desires, no introduction of new machineries of control that has not already been negotiated to some degree in the arena of popular consent. thus the power to design architecture that incorporates different values must arise from the popular perception that existing technologies are not the only ones, nor are they the best when it comes to individual and collective empowerment. it was this kind of perception--formed around the distrust of big, impersonal, "closed" hardware systems, and the desire for small, decentralized, interactive machines to facilitate interpersonal communication--that "built" the pc out of hacking expertise in the early seventies. these were as much the partial "intentions" behind the development of microcomputing technology as deskilling, monitoring, and information gathering are the intentions behind the corporate use of that technology today. the growth of public data networks, bulletin board systems, alternative information and media links, and the increasing cheapness of desktop publishing, satellite equipment, and international data bases are as much the result of local political "intentions" as the fortified net of globally linked, restricted-access information systems is the intentional fantasy of those who seek to profit from centralised control. the picture that emerges from this mapping of intentions is not an inevitably technofascist one, but rather the uneven result of cultural struggles over values and meanings. [41] it is in this respect--in the struggle over values and meanings--that the work of cultural criticism takes on its special significance as a full participant in the debate about technology. in fact, cultural criticism is already fully implicated in that debate, if only because the culture and education industries are rapidly becoming integrated within the vast information service conglomerates. the media we study, the media we publish in, and the media we teach within are increasingly part of the same tradable information sector. so, too, our common intellectual discourse has been significantly affected by the recent debates about postmodernism (or culture in a postindustrial world) in which the euphoric, addictive thrill of the technological sublime has figured quite prominently. the high-speed technological fascination that is characteristic of the postmodern condition can be read, on the one hand, as a celebratory capitulation on the part of intellectuals to the new information technocultures. on the other hand, this celebratory strain attests to the persuasive affect associated with the new cultural technologies, to their capacity (more powerful than that of their sponsors and promoters) to generate pleasure and gratification and to win the struggle for intellectual as well as popular consent. [42] another reason for the involvement of cultural critics in the technology debates has to do with our special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural meanings are produced--our knowledge about the politics of consumption and what is often called the politics of representation. this is the knowledge which demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of productive forces to shape and determine consciousness. it is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways that are not reducible to the intentions of any single source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction. it is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to the "hard domination" picture of disenfranchised individuals watched over by some by some scheming panoptical intelligence. far from being understood solely as the concrete hardware of electronically sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a lived, interpretive practice for people in their everyday lives. to redefine the shape and form of that practice is to help create the need for new kinds of hardware and software. [43] one of the latter aims of this essay has been to describe and suggest a wider set of activities and social locations than is normally associated with the practice of hacking. if there is a challenge here for cultural critics, then it might be presented as the challenge to make our knowledge about technoculture into something like a hacker's knowledge, capable of penetrating existing systems of rationality that might otherwise be seen as infallible; a hacker's knowledge, capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies; a hacker's knowledge, capable also of generating new popular romances around the alternative uses of human ingenuity. if we are to take up that challenge, we cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us it is always acquired in complicity, and is thus contaminated by the poison of instrumental rationality, or because we hear, often from the same quarters, that acquired technological competence simply glorifies the inhuman work ethic. technoliteracy, for us, is the challenge to make a historical opportunity out of a historical necessity. _______________________________________________________ notes 1. bryan kocher, "a hygiene lesson," _communications of the acm_, 32.1 (january 1989): 3. 2. jon a. rochlis and mark w. eichen, "with microscope and tweezers: the worm from mit's perspective," _communications of the acm_, 32.6 (june 1989): 697. 3. philip elmer-dewitt, "invasion of the body snatchers," _time_ (26 september 1988); 62-67. 4. judith williamson, "every virus tells a story: the meaning of hiv and aids," _taking liberties: aids and cultural politics_, ed. erica carter and simon watney (london: serpent's tail/ica, 1989): 69. 5. "pulsing the system" is a well-known intelligence process in which, for example, planes deliberately fly over enemy radar installations in order to determine what frequencies they use and how they are arranged. it has been suggested that morris sr. and morris jr. worked in collusion as part of an nsa operation to pulse the internet system, and to generate public support for a legal clampdown on hacking. see allan lundell, _virus! the secret world of computer invaders that breed and destroy_ (chicago: contemporary books, 1989), 12-18. as is the case with all such conspiracy theories, no actual conspiracy need have existed for the consequences--in this case, the benefits for the intelligence community--to have been more or less the same. 6. for details of these raids, see _2600: the hacker's quarterly_, 7.1 (spring 1990): 7. 7. "hackers in jail," _2600: the hacker's quarterly_, 6.1 (spring 1989); 22-23. the recent secret service action that shut down _phrack_, an electronic newsletter operating out of st. louis, confirms _2600_'s thesis: a nonelectronic publication would not be censored in the same way. 8. this is not to say that the new laws cannot themselves be used to protect hacker institutions, however. _2600_ has advised operators of bulletin boards to declare them private property, thereby guaranteeing protection under the electronic privacy act against unauthorized entry by the fbi. 9. hugo cornwall, _the hacker's handbook_ 3rd ed. (london: century, 1988) 181, 2-6. in britain, for the most part, hacking is still looked upon as a matter for the civil, rather than the criminal, courts. 10. discussions about civil liberties and property rights, for example, tend to preoccupy most of the participants in the electronic forum published as "is computer hacking a crime?" in _harper's_, 280.1678 (march 1990): 45-57. 11. see hugo cornwall, _data theft_ (london: heinemann, 1987). 12. bill landreth, _out of the inner circle: the true story of a computer intruder capable of cracking the nation's most secure computer systems_ (redmond, wash.: tempus, microsoft, 1989), 10. 13. _the computer worm: a report to the provost of cornell university on an investigation conducted by the commission of preliminary enquiry_ (ithaca, n.y.: cornell university, 1989). 14. _the computer worm: a report to the provost_, 8. 15. a. k. dewdney, the "computer recreations" columnist at _scientific american_, was the first to publicize the details of this game of battle programs in an article in the may 1984 issue of the magazine. in a follow-up article in march 1985, "a core war bestiary of viruses, worms, and other threats to computer memories," dewdney described the wide range of "software creatures" which readers' responses had brought to light. a third column, in march 1989, was written, in an exculpatory mode, to refute any connection between his original advertisement of the core war program and the spate of recent viruses. 16. andrew ross, _no respect: intellectuals and popular culture_ (new york: routledge, 1989), 212. some would argue, however, that the ideas and values of the sixties counterculture were only fully culminated in groups like the people's computer company, which ran community memory in berkeley, or the homebrew computer club, which pioneered personal microcomputing. so, too, the yippies had seen the need to form yipl, the youth international party line, devoted to "anarcho technological" projects, which put out a newsletter called tap (alternately the technological american party and the technological assistance program). in its depoliticised form, which eschewed the kind of destructive "dark-side" hacking advocated in its earlier incarnation, _tap_ was eventually the progenitor of _2600_. a significant turning point, for example, was _tap_'s decision not to publish plans for the hydrogen bomb (which the _progressive_ did)--bombs would destroy the phone system, which the _tap_ phone phreaks had an enthusiastic interest in maintaining. 17. see alice bach's _phreakers_ series, in which two teenage girls enjoy adventures through the use of computer technology. _the bully of library place_, _parrot woman_, _double bucky shanghai_, and _ragwars_ (all published by dell, 1987-88). 18. john markoff, "cyberpunks seek thrills in computerized mischief," _new york times_, november 26, 1988. 19. dennis hayes, _behind the silicon curtain: the seductions of work in a lonely era_ (boston, south end press, 1989), 93. one striking historical precedent for the hacking subculture, suggested to me by carolyn marvin, was the widespread activity of amateur or "ham" wireless operators in the first two decades of the century. initially lionized in the press as boy-inventor heroes for their technical ingenuity and daring adventures with the ether, this white middle-class subculture was increasingly demonized by the u.s. navy (whose signals the amateurs prankishly interfered with), which was crusading for complete military control of the airwaves in the name of national security. the amateurs lobbied with democratic rhetoric for the public's right to access the airwaves, and although partially successful in their case against the navy, lost out ultimately to big commercial interests when congress approved the creation of a broadcasting monopoly after world war i in the form of rca. see susan j. douglas, _inventing american broadcasting 1899-1922_ (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1987), 187-291. 20. "sabotage," _processed world_, 11 (summer 1984), 37-38. 21. hayes, _behind the silicon curtain_, 99. 22. _the amateur computerist_, available from r. hauben, po box, 4344, dearborn, mi 48126. 23. kevin robins and frank webster, "athens without slaves...or slaves without athens? the neurosis of technology," _science as culture_, 3 (1988): 7-53. 24. see boris frankel, _the post-industrial utopians_ (oxford: basil blackwell, 1987). 25. see, for example, the collection of essays edited by vincent mosco and janet wasko, _the political economy of information_ (madison: university of wisconsin press, 1988), and dan schiller, _the information commodity_ (oxford up, forthcoming). 26. tom athanasiou and staff, "encryption and the dossier society," _processed world_, 16 (1986): 12-17. 27. kevin wilson, _technologies of control: the new interactive media for the home_ (madison: university of wisconsin press, 1988), 121-25. 28. hayes, _behind the silicon curtain_, 63-80. 29. "our friend the vdt," _processed world_, 22 (summer 1988): 24-25. 30. see kevin robins and frank webster, "cybernetic capitalism," in mosco and wasko, 44-75. 31. barbara garson, _the electronic sweatshop_ (new york: simon & schuster, 1988), 244-45. 32. see marike finlay's foucauldian analysis, _powermatics: a discursive critique of new technology_ (london: routledge & kegan paul, 1987). a more conventional culturalist argument can be found in stephen hill, _the tragedy of technology_ (london: pluto press, 1988). pratt, 'postmodern foundation for political practice?', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-pratt-postmodern.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.194. part 1/1, total size 14987 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- a postmodern foundation for political practice? by linda ray pratt lpratt@unlinfo.unl.edu department of english university of nebraska, lincoln _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994, by linda ray pratt, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: mcgowan, john. _postmodernism and its critics_. ithaca: cornell university press, 1991. [1] john mcgowan's "postliberal democracy" sometimes sounds just like the place we'd like to be, and sometimes more like the place we've already been. to get there, we must dispose of the negative freedom he assigns to most of the major postmodern theorists and abandon the fantasy of the autonomous self. mcgowan's starting point is that postmodernism's goal of disrupting hierarchical totality by empowering suppressed components circles back politically to "an underlying commitment to democracy." our political and moral task is to construct a society in which a social consensus protects the egalitarian procedures through which a tolerant, humanist society can make decisions in the absence of truth. the problem for mcgowan is that most contemporary theorists are unable to legitimate the social authority necessary to make democracy work or to use power positively. [2] describing his critique as "resolutely antifoundationalist," mcgowan also notes that his definition of postmodernism will not satisfy all readers. later in the book he observes, rightly i suspect, that for disciples of lyotard, "my discussion of postmodernism . . . will seem to have missed all the important points . . ." (181). mcgowan does not miss the important points, but he redefines them into a positive postmodernism that may sound too much like a defense of western liberal democratic values for many readers to be comfortable labeling it "postmodern." with keen intelligence and unrelenting logic mcgowan tells us what's wrong with the postmodernism of three major schools: the poststructuralism of derrida and foucault; the contemporary marxism of jameson, eagleton, and said; and the neopragmatism of lyotard and rorty. but the most influential figure in the book is not under examination. that is jurgen habermas, to whom mcgowan acknowledges his debt while distinguishing his own greater willingness to weave key postmodernist characteristics into the model for a postliberal democracy which he proposes at the end of his study. [3] in order to legitimate a postliberal model that can produce democratic political decisions in a non-repressive consensual society without the guarantees of truth, mcgowan must expose the trap of "negative freedom" that most postmodernist thought replicates. most postmodern theorists allow too little freedom to choose and too little consciousness to define a positive social self. their emphasis on the ways power operates within the cerberean forces of language/history/capitalism provides too little "play" in the space allowed for thinking and acting. for the postmodernist, the community is associated with tyranny, not freedom, and the postmodernist strategy is to disrupt and diminish power, not legitimate its use as a positive force. mcgowan argues that this kind of postmodernist thinking leaves us no foundation for political action because it makes the self incommensurable and autonomous in its social relations. for him the immersion of the self in the social is how we realize its integral social and thus "semiautonomous" nature. [4] mcgowan's postmodernism embraces antifoundationalism and pluralistic democracy, but rejects in the critics under discussion the tragic sense of human life, the tyranny implicit in power, the limited space in which self or language can freely act, and the problematic nature of democracy itself within western capitalism. one wonders if the postmodern baby has not been tossed out with the bath water. instead of a positive postmodernism, are we not left instead with a refurbished modernism? regardless of which label is more accurate, the real issue is the substance of the alternative model mcgowan poses for a positive postmodernism. [5] mcgowan's social vision is attractive, and it is hard to counter it with a political stance as hopeful or potentially effectual. the list of principles which constitutes his "summary and a final appeal" is as sound a set of assumptions as we are likely to find in anything resembling a rationale for the feasibility of social action. he notes, among other things, that "the principle of democratic egalitarianism" is culturally and historically specific, which means that civil liberties are an historical creation and not a transcendent right, but that the social consensus in western democracies "has proved remarkably durable in the absence of fundamental guarantees" (264). the "existence of a social consensus by no means ends social conflicts" (265); on the contrary, agreement on the legitimate social norms "is precisely what makes conflict possible [i.e., comprehensible as conflict]" (266). the "procedures of decision making that currently embody the community's sense of how best to ensure its norms" provide the "consensual grounds," the "conditions" which "enable politics, which is understood as the negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps taken to reach and to implement collective decisions" (267). such collective decisions, in which philosophy is submitted to the political through democratic procedures, "return us to positive power" which can combat the tyrannical exercise of power or the domination of decision making by elite groups (269). reform of procedures within the norms safeguards a society from violence, and "freedom from violence" secures "the freedom of participation" (270). in a participatory democracy, politics calls on "the various semiautonomous spheres" to foster the "normative goods" of the social totality in which the self has its integral relation (271). [6] in this "appeal" to accept a more positive social model in the name of postmodernism, mcgowan has submitted postmodern theory to political practice. or rather, to theoretical political practice. what is lacking is a history of political practice whose record would inspire the confidence that mcgowan's model can be trusted to work better than other hopeful visions of democracy. "postmodernism" itself is borne out of the tragic skepticism that replaced the failed optimism of modernism. the history of practice which embodied twentieth century political ideas--whether utopian or despotic--teaches postmodernism its distrust of the claims of power and idealistic possibility. although i am moved by mcgowan's vision, i find myself reaching out to derrida, foucault, lyotard, said, and rorty on just those points which mcgowan wants to dispose of in their thought. [7] like nietzsche's, derrida's thought is "marked everywhere by the tragic revelation of irresolvable contradictions" (91) and his belief that language is too embedded in a repressive western metaphysics to affirm differences. derrida's "perpetual uneasiness" with political action and theory leaves in doubt whether %differance% offers anything better than the violence or oppression of the existing hierarchies. given his "proclivity for tragic impasse" (113), derrida can only anchor his ethics and his politics in some "mystical" hope; his theory can only register "a protest against a certain order without being abe to effect the transformation of that order" (119). [8] from mcgowan's perspective, foucault's limitation for a postmodern politics lies in his preoccupation with power as the dominant social bond and his anarchistic tendency to locate freedom in resistance. edward said seeks "a community of tolerance and interdependence" (172), but his insistence on keeping his distance opens him to "a residual and foundational individualism" (174) that can be a form of complicity. in short, mcgowan's dismissive "point" is "that the half-baked anarchism of the literary left is necessarily accompanied by a version of individualism that is . . . theoretically unsound and politically counterproductive" (176-77). [9] the neopragmatists generally fare worse under mcgowan's critical eye than the deconstructionists and marxists. mcgowan finds lyotard's rejection of "any generalizing explanation or purpose (telos) to which local action must be answerable . . . a conclusion . . . scandalous to most humanistic intellectuals . . ." (183). lyotard's concept of language games, his rejection of metanarratives, and his valorizing of conflict in the differend are irresolvably hostile to dialectical syntheses and any potential discourse of a holistic society. rorty is praised for acknowledging the question of ethics, but his division of self and actions into public and private spheres leads back to the social dead-end of the autonomous individual. [10] one need not even quarrel with mcgowan's critique that postmodernism's "inability" to endorse a positive model of society is its chief failing to be uncomfortable with the use he makes of it as prelude to his own proposed alternative. indeed, it is just at the moment i accept his vision of how a consensual democratic procedure may legitimate authority so that power becomes a positive force that i want to recapture its negatives: the sense of tragedy and the limits of play in derrida; the resistance to power in foucault; the distrust of the metanarratives and the use of word games in lyotard; and "the gentle virtue of tolerance needed to keep the conversation going" (200) espoused in rorty. "consensus," "totality," "positive power" and "normative goods" ring little alarm bells for those whom history has taught to be skeptical of political discourse. these words arrive bearing covert genealogies that need deconstructing, the specifics of which should unsettle and disrupt the ease with which we use them. [11] mcgowan is no naive optimist, but his discussion of power and democracy is insufficiently problematized. he illustrates the nature of a semiautonomous self which negotiates relations between its different social spheres with the hypothetical case of the american catholic who participates in other economic, political, and cultural domains. his point is that relations between beliefs and activities in other spheres must be, and therefore can be, we must assume, negotiated at every turn. negotiation as procedure does not guarantee accommodation, however, and authority confident of its legitimation is less inclined to negotiate than to exercise power. the american catholic who wants to "negotiate" between her political self and her religious self may find her church unwilling to recognize her right to do so on grounds outside the absolutes of doctrine or even local interpreters of it. like "negotiation," "consensus" implies the negative that is not unanimity. political consensus may properly refuse to negotiate with its fringes. it may be used to mask or repress dissent, just as tolerance may be used to contain rather than to embrace the other. mcgowan observes that non-acknowledgement is power's best threat, but he underestimates the extent to which democracy's processes of negotiation and consensus are themselves complicit in the exercise of negative power. [12] mcgowan too readily accepts that western democracy is basically a pluralistic tradition with great social durability. is that greek democracy he means? jeffersonian democracy? jacksonian? paine's or marat's? clinton's? was it in place during reconstruction? the gilded age, or world war i? all of these times embody some form of western democracy. they are not all bad dreams with nothing to teach us; indeed, what they teach is that models are specific to history where they, too, are subject to corruption, to limits, to tragic error, to excesses of violence, to irrationality and mysticism, to rigidities and laxities of procedures for decision making. to say so is not to countenance the irresponsible withdrawal from these flawed systems or to deny that they are the ground on which the creation of an ethical society must nevertheless take place. my discomfort is that mcgowan tacitly gives them more performative potential than most postmodern critics can readily accept, including those of us who lean in his direction. [13] if not mcgowan's model, then what? can one not balance the "cheerful acceptance" of habermasian possibilities with the resistance to power of foucault or the cautionary sense of the tragic in derrida? perhaps mcgowan would answer that such a balancing act results in the violent frustration of impasse, or the disabling confusion of hopeless contradictions, or the irrational resorting to a mystical hope for the social good. perhaps sometimes he would be right, but postmodernism and its critics level the playing field of history on which the best of players on both sides have already made so many fatal errors. even on this democratic "site of possible political action" (280), postmodern citizens may need just those characteristics that mcgowan thinks are in our way. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------chang, 'postmodern communities: the politics of oscillation', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-chang-postmodern.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.993. part 1/1, total size 37100 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- postmodern communities: the politics of oscillation by heesok chang hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu department of english vassar college _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by heesok chang, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: vattimo, gianni. _the transparent society_. trans. david webb. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1992. agamben, giorgio. _the coming community_. trans. michael hardt. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. i. philosophical homelessness [1] readers of the young georg lukacs may recall this memorable citation from _the theory of the novel_: "'philosophy is really homesickness,' says novalis: 'it is the urge to be at home everywhere.'" [2] according to lukacs that is why "integrated civilizations"--where the soul feels at home everywhere, both in the self and in the world--have no philosophy. or "why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy. for what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map?"^1^ [3] needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy's "utopian aim" would not find many adherents today. if anything, the "task" of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, "archetypal" vocation. the subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought. [4] today, especially in france, philosophy has addressed itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a "thought from the outside."^2^ modern thought has deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. against the grain of philosophy's utopian memory--its nostalgic stance in being, its nostalgia for being--the philosophers of our moment urge a "nomadic" thinking. [5] this sort of generalization about "postmodern" philosophy (such as it is) is well known. like journalism, it is useful up to a certain point--let's say until the end of the day. but like all more or less accurate journalistic descriptions it tries to say too much in one breath. decisive opinions about "postmodern" or "poststructuralist" thought "today" leave the philosophical terrain largely undifferentiated. for example, we might be overly hasty to isolate "poststructuralism" from a certain "homesickness." this philosophical "malady" (%maladie du pays%) need not be grounded in a judaeo-christian or romantic nostalgia for lost origins; it might point to a more urgent need to rethink the social constitution of our being. i am thinking here not only of richard rorty's recent attempts to imagine a "contingent" community (a sense of human solidarity not founded on an essentialist understanding of the human, but on an expanding recognition of human sufferance).^3^ [6] i am thinking particularly of those thinkers (again, largely french) who write explicitly "within" a heideggerean idiom--or rather, those writers who continue to stage a critical confrontation, an %auseinandersetzung%, with heidegger's thought. i am thinking, for example, of jacques derrida's recent meditations on spirit, friendship, and today's europe; or phillipe lacoue-labarthe's exemplary work on the aesthetic assumptions informing modern national identity formation (national socialism). and i am thinking of jean-luc nancy's extended research on the finitude of our daily, nightly existence--our "being-in-common"--which has given new rigor and new impetus to thinking about what community actually means. [7] nancy's appeal to rethink community could not really be characterized as nostalgic (quite the contrary). nevertheless, something of the philosopher's "transcendental homelessness," the registration of a shared pain or loss, and therefore of a *desire*, is distinctly audible in these words: "the gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer . . . is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community."^4^ [8] this sentence could stand as a more or less appropriate epigraph for both the texts under review (more so for _the coming community_, less so for _the transparent society_). like nancy, both gianni vattimo and giorgio agamben address questions of our contemporaneity on a very broad scale. they too write in response to this epochal demand: not to "be at home everywhere," but to free the very idea of "home," of a certain belonging, from the planetary administration of techno-economic forces. and like nancy, both authors draw considerably on heidegger to articulate not only their diagnoses of our (post)modernity, but also their prescriptions for rethinking our being-in-the-world. [9] despite marked differences in tone, style, content, and indeed, quality, _the transparent society_ and _the coming community_ contribute to our *political* imagination, to our ideas about "freedom" and "singularity," "heterotopia" and "community." with varying success, they outline new ways of being at home in a world that is increasingly no longer, quite simply, "ours." ii. hermeneutic oscillations [10] english readers of gianni vattimo's previously translated work--particularly the later essays collected in _the end of modernity_--will not discover much that is radically new in _the transparent society _ (but given vattimo's thesis about the impossibility of a definitive overcoming, an %uberwindung%, this should certainly come as no surprise). those who are unfamiliar with his writing, or who have only heard his name in association with the miserable label "weak thought" (%pensiero diebole%), will find this book a lucid and economical (120 pages of largish type) summary of his latest views on "the postmodern question."^5^ [11] the brevity of his text does not inhibit vattimo from fielding a wide range of academic topoi: the evolution of the human sciences, the modern resurgence of myth, the privilege of "shock" in aesthetic experience, the disappearance of utopian models, the centrality of interpretation in a radically plural society. these discussions do not dwell on example and illustration (with the exception of a brief and unexceptional look at _blade runner_). rather, vattimo engages his interlocuters--nietzsche, heidegger, benjamin, adorno, apel, habermas, gadamer--at a pace of brisk generality we might as well call journalistic. [12] despite the liberal scope of the contents, however, the book's eight chapters elaborate a consistent politico-philosophical vision. at the risk of oversimplifying, i believe vattimo's essential argument is encapsulated in this sentence from the opening chapter: "to live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation" (10). i will direct my review of the book towards a critical gloss on this sentence. [13] _the transparent society_ takes up where the last book left off--namely, at "the end of modernity." vattimo elegantly defines modernity as "the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself" (1). this cultural capitalization of the new, which emerges in art with the cult of genius, is eventually incorporated into a greater narrative of human progress and emancipation. within a unilinear, enlightenment conception of history the intrinsic value of anything modern consists in its being simply the latest, the most advanced, the nearest to the ends of man. [14] in a hypothesis which clearly resonates with jean-francois lyotard's, vattimo states: "modernity ends when--for a number of reasons--it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear" (2). in _the end of modernity_ the "reasons" he gives are confined principally to philosophical ones--in particular, the forceful anti-foundationalist thinking of nietzsche and heidegger. in the present work, however, the advent of postmodernity is no longer an emphatically "theoretical" event. vattimo foregrounds two major sociological causes for the dissolution of unilinear history. [15] first, decolonization. the global rebellion against european colonialism and imperialism renders the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress "%de facto% problematic"; "the european ideal of humanity has been revealed as one ideal amongst others, not necessarily worse, but unable, without violence, to obtain as the true essence of man, of all men" (4). [16] second, planetary mass media. vattimo seems to regard this factor to be more decisive in ending modernity than the emergence of post-colonial voices because (although he does not say this explicitly) the former is the technological condition of possibility for the latter. a "society of generalized communication" must be in place for multiculturalism to get on the map. the relentless expansion of informational media enables "cultures and subcultures of all sorts [to step] into the limelight of public opinion" (5). [17] according to vattimo, this "giddy proliferation of communication" seems to equip the world for actualizing a fully "transparent society." we should note, however, that the book is misleadingly, or at least provocatively, titled. for "the transparent society" does not name vattimo's vision of a utopian postmodernity. rather, it describes the belated, *modernist* ideal of our socius championed by every postmodernist's favourite straw men: karl otto apel and jurgen habermas. [18] vattimo argues that apel's community of "unrestricted communication" and habermas' universe of "communicative action" are informed by the old dream of a self-transparent society. more specifically, their normative ideals of communicative rationality are modelled on the communal drive for self-knowledge exemplified by the human sciences. "but," vattimo objects, "can one legitimately model the emancipated human subject, and ultimately society, on the ideal of the scientist in her laboratory, whose objectivity and disinterest are demanded by what is at bottom a technological interest and who conceives of nature as an object only to the extent that it is marked out as a place for potential domination . . . ?" (24). [19] here vattimo sides with the frankfurt school (and heideggerean) critique of instrumental reason. the enlightenment ideal of a perfectly self-transparent society--in which the subject (the subject) seamlessly enframes the world as an object of reflexive knowledge--does not augur human liberation. instead, it installs a logic of domination. man is not emancipated from his social labour, but dehumanized by technology. the transparent society is the totally administered and regulated society. [20] now does the ungovernable or "giddy" expansion of information technology today mean we are on the verge of realizing such a transparent society? [21] according to vattimo, no. [22] adorno's pessimistic vision of an increasingly instrumentalized modernity is well taken. but "--and this is what adorno missed--within the communication system itself, mechanisms develop (the 'rise of new centres of history') that make the realization of self-transparency in principle impossible" (23). vattimo does not specify what these "mechanisms" might be. instead, he testifies repeatedly that the generalization of communication guarantees the dissolution of a monolithic history of human knowledge; "the freedom given by the mass media to so many cultures and %weltanschauungen% has belied the very ideal of a transparent society" (6). in postmodernity, it seems everyone gets to step up to the mike. [23] we should object here that the "liberation of differences" vattimo has in mind--a sort of "giddy" multicultural polylogue--does not necessarily entail a radical challenge to the existing order.^6^ the fact that everybody now can have their "say" does not automatically disrupt the present constitution of our public sphere. perhaps real political differences, differences that won't make a difference by their mere "say" are everywhere today, to borrow claude lefort's phrase, "dissolved into the ceremony of communication."^7^ [24] vattimo acknowledges this objection, but hastens to emphasize the "irreducible pluralization" (6) accompanying the veritable explosion of mass media in our daily lives. moreover--and here we return to his central argument--emancipation today should not, he urges, be thought on the model of self-authentication (this would return us to the dream of self-transparency). what is liberating about postmodernism is not the parading of different identities %per se%. [25] rather, "the emancipatory significance of the liberation of differences and dialects consists . . . in the general *disorientation* accompanying their initial identification. if, in a world of dialects, i speak my own dialect, i shall be conscious that it is not the only 'language,' but that it is precisely one amongst many" (9). in this irreducibly multicultural and heterotopian world i carry around a "weakened" sense of my "reality." freedom here does not come from asserting the particularity of my (linguistic) being. rather, i experience freedom in a totally new way: by "oscillating" continually between feeling at home in my language and sensing how thoroughly finite, transient, and contingent it actually is. [26] without commenting on the viability of this weird notion of "freedom" (how could such a thing be judged in all rigour?), i would like to close out this discussion by dwelling a bit on the key word "oscillation." [27] the figurative movement of vibrating or fluctuating is certainly not new to vattimo's thinking. indeed, oscillation in the present work may well be read as a spatial translation of the temporal or (post)historical notion of %verwindung% which is described in the last essay of _the end of modernity_. readers of that work may recall this heideggerean word signifies a going-beyond of metaphysics which is not a complete overcoming of metaphysics (the modernist myth), but rather a sort of deepening, healing resignation to its tracelike survival. amongst %verwindung's% other lexical meanings vattimo points out "twisting" and "distortion." we experience being in postmodernity not as an emancipated presence, but as an ironic twist or distortion. being is only approachable in its estrangement from our nostalgic grasp--as a constant oscillation between revelation and concealment. [28] in _the transparent society _ vattimo fleshes out this meaning of oscillation as ongoing estrangement by referring us to the realm of the aesthetic. the fluid play of differences we find in postmodernity is likened to the disorienting encounter with the artwork--the blow (%stoss%) or "shock"--described by heidegger and benjamin. vattimo explicitly gives ontology and aesthetic theory a defining role in conceptualizing the oscillation and disorientation peculiar to postmodern being. [29] but i would suggest the metaphor of oscillation in vattimo's argument does not only derive from his interpretations of philosophy and postmodernity. oscillation is a crucial feature of his interpretive methodology itself. [30] an implicit aim of _the transparent society_ (but made explicit in the final chapter) is to defend a ramified understanding of gadamerian hermeneutics. to move very quickly here, vattimo wants to rescue hermeneutics from unacceptable axioms like this one: "to recognize oneself (or one's own) in the other and find a home abroad--this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness."^8^ hermeneutics' universalizing appropriation of other worlds can only be corrected by breaking its circular understanding. thus, the hermeneutic circle gives way to a trembling arc of interpretation. the figure of swaying between the poles of belonging and disorientation, home and away, assure vattimo's hermeneutic procedure "cannot appear . . .[under the] logics of subsumption."^9^ [31] but this metaphor of oscillation is hardly a postmodern twist on interpretation. the methodological notion of oscillation appears at the pre-gadamerian beginnings of hermeneutics. as werner hamacher has noted: "schleiermacher's concept for the delicate relationship between the general and the individual, within which all verbal and language-generative acts manifest themselves, is called the 'schema of oscillation between the general and the particular.'"^10^ [32] vattimo's hermeneutic oscillation guarantees his understanding of postmodern alterity will remain disoriented. but this does not allow other "dialects" to appear outside the sway of hermeneutic understanding (no matter how "weakened") itself. in this oscillation differences can only appear as trembling versions of themselves--as different or "contaminated" identities^11^ --and not as differences indifferent to identity. to borrow a term from agamben, nothing *singular* may appear. [33] it does not occur to vattimo that the postmodern experience of freedom may be *post-hermeneutic* as well. iii. whatever being [34] "marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender."^12^ [35] edward said's words testify, in their own way, to what nancy calls "the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community." said here is criticizing the politics of identity--the "unreconstructed nationalism"--that grips not only the academy, but the postcolonial world at large. reclamations of cultural identity were useful and necessary for asserting independence from colonial rule. but, today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of a clamorous separatism. nancy concurs with this diagnosis when he remarks that "the emergence . . . of decolonized communities has not . . . triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community."^13^ [36] unlike said, however, nancy does not presuppose the question of community to be a question about reclaiming our humanity. he does not think community on the traditional humanist model of a lost or broken immanence ("what has for centuries been denied") which must be restored. like vattimo, he does not imagine our future in the direction of a "transparent society." [37] but what other than a local or universal affiliation--a sense of belonging to this tribe, this nation, this race, or to the human race as a whole--could form the basis for any meaningful community? this is where agamben's latest book makes, i think, a fundamental contribution to our political thought. _the coming community_ delineates the topos of *belonging* without mobilizing identity politics and without falling back on the %idees fixes% of humanist discourse. [38] it is impossible, in the space that remains, to give the reader an adequate sense of the immense scope of agamben's philosophical and philological learning. the expected readings of kant and heidegger, benjamin and kafka, are supplemented at every turn with astonishing examples drawn from medieval logic and analytic philosophy, talmudic tales and provencal poetry. [39] dense though it is, agamben's writing is never turgid or pedantic. rather, his terse, fluid style is reminiscent (the likeness has been drawn before and will be drawn again) of walter benjamin's. [40] and like benjamin (at least in this latest book), agamben probes contemporary social phenomena--technology and media, the society of the spectacle and the modern fate of social classes, a stocking commercial and tiananmen square--in the light of his theoretical expositions. [41] a lengthier discussion would need to sample some of these exemplary readings (and this entire text proceeds through the by-play, the %bei-spiel%, of examples). it might be more useful here, however, to summarize for the reader, against the grain of the text's singular movement, the gist of the argument. to enhance the critical significance of such a reductive reading, i will place agamben's conception of "the coming being" in relation to nancy's groundbreaking ideas about community. [42] in order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally christian) assumptions we must, nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). a serious reflection on community requires we answer the call to rethink--at the most mundane level--what it means to be-in-common. [43] for nancy this call does not arise from a utopian or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the work, of a subject labouring on itself. the obscure exigency of community comes from the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. this being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. community or being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity. rather, being-there (%dasein%) is none other than a being-with (%mitsein%). the very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to share my existence. [44] emphasizing heidegger's differential and relational definition of dasein in order to underline our constitutive being-in-common may be easy enough to follow. what is much more difficult to grasp is that for nancy, our strange built-in sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. on the contrary, the fact that we *are* (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts--or *resists* (a key word for nancy)--in advance any selfor communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being italian, being communist--to cite agamben's examples). our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude. what we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon *singularity*. [45] the experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both nancy and agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism, nazism). rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an *exposure*. we are exposed to the absence of any substantial identity to which we could belong. exposure to singularity: that means to be scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face, oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.^14^ it is this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical singularity, our being-in-common. [46] coming now to agamben, i believe his work helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle. specifically, he gives positive content to what nancy is inclined, i think, to describe negatively: namely, the concept of singularity. [47] _the coming community_ opens like this: "the coming being is whatever being. in the scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (%quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum%--whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective %quodlibet%. the common translation of this term as 'whatever' in the sense of 'it does not matter which, indifferently' is certainly correct, but in its form the latin says exactly the opposite: %quodlibet ens% is not 'being, it does not matter which,' but rather 'being such that it always matters.' the latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (%libet%). whatever being has an original relation to desire" (1). [48] the basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being--not in the sense of "i don't care what you are," but rather, "i care for you *such as you are*." as *such* you are freed from belonging either to the emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual. [49] in agamben's elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or class (being old, being american, being gay). nor does it consist in the simple negation of all belonging (here agamben parts company with bataille's notion of the "negative community," the community of those who have no community). rather, whatever names a sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. the singular being is not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). this other being always matters to me not because i am drawn to this or that trait, nor because i identify him or her with a favoured race, class, or gender. and certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or the human race. [50] the other always matters to me only when i am taken *with all of his/her traits, such as they are*. this defining generosity of the singular means that %quodlibet ens% is not determined by this or that belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. it belongs to belonging. the singularity of being resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] such a singularly exposed being wants to belong--which is to say, it belongs to want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love: "the singularity exposed as such is whatever you *want*, that is, lovable" (2). [52] we must be careful here not to conflate agamben's exposition of whatever being with a more familiar discourse on love: "love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): the lover wants the loved one *with all of its predicates*, its being such as it is. the lover desires the *as* only insofar as it is *such*--this is the lover's particular fetishism" (2). [53] but what could a thing with all of its predicates look like? agamben gives us the example of the human face. every face is singular. this does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form or universalizes individual features. the face as such is utterly indifferent to what makes it different and yet similar. it is impossible to determine from which sphere--the common or the proper--the face derives its singular expressivity. [54] in this the face is not unlike handwriting in which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. we cannot say for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or whether the universal form is engendered by these million different scripts and faces. [55] whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the face, on "a line of sparkling alternation" (20) between language and word, form and expression, potentiality and act. "this is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers," agamben writes, "who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations" (19).^15^ the coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of whatever being. [56] but what, finally, might the *politics* of whatever belonging be? [57] agamben envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes for control of the state, but as an inexorable agon between whatever singularity and state organization. what the state cannot digest is not the political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a community not grounded in any belonging except for the human co-belonging to whatever being. [58] "what was most striking about the demonstrations of the chinese may," agamben points out, "was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands" (85). [59] here agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of may 68. i would even say _the coming community_ is (not unlike vattimo's book) a belated response to the radical promise--let's say (using the wrong idiom perhaps), the promise of human happiness--exposed in that event. [60] in these works by two important italian thinkers, philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. to a permanent disorientation. to oscillation. to whatever. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ _the theory of the novel_, trans. anna bostock (cambridge: mit up, 1971), 29. ^2^ this phrase, "%la pensee du dehors%," is the title of michel foucault's important essay on maurice blanchot (first published in _critique _ 229, 1966). gilles deleuze elaborates on the theme of exteriority in his excellent book on foucault (_foucault_, trans. sean hand [minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988]). see especially the chapter entitled "strategies or the non-stratified: the thought of the outside (power)" where he links up this early essay with foucault's later and better known piece on nietzschean genealogy. ^3^ _contingency, irony, and solidarity_ cambridge: cambridge up, 1989. ^4^ this is the opening sentence of "the inoperative community" (trans. peter connor, in _the inoperative community_, ed. peter connor [minneapolis and oxford: u of minnesota p, 1991], 1). ^5^ i take this phrase from a blurb on the back jacket of the book: "'this book is of major importance to the debate on the postmodern question.'--jean-francois lyotard." ^6^ for a recent--and typical (that is, typically anti-academic)--articulation of this objection see david rieff's piece "multiculturalism's silent partner: it's the newly globalized economy, stupid," _harper's_ 287 august 1993: 17-19. ^7^ _the political forms of modern society: bureaucracy, democracy, totalitarianism_ (cambridge: mit press, 1986), 226. ^8^ hans-georg gadamer, _truth and method_, ed. garrett barden and john cumming (new york: seabury press, 1975), 15. ^9^ this quote, not to mention my understanding of the role of oscillation in hermeneutics, comes from werner hamacher's essay "hermeneutic ellipses: writing the hermeneutical circle in schleiermacher," trans. timothy bahti, in _transforming the hermeneutic context: from nietzsche to nancy_, ed. gayle l. ormiston and alan d. schrift (albany: suny press, 1990), 190. ^10^ ibid. 190. ^11^ in an essay entitled "hermeneutics and anthropology" vattimo is careful to underscore the ideological nature of ethnographic otherness. anticipating the theme of generalized communication he writes: "the hermeneutic--but also anthropological--illusion of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in which alterity is entirely exhausted. the disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination" (_the end of modernity_ 159). this sobering reminder about the westernization of third world cultures seems to drop out of vattimo's discussion in _the transparent society_ where the emphasis falls on heterogeneity not homologation. ^12^ edward said, "the politics of knowledge," _raritan_ 11 (summer 1991): 31. ^13^ nancy 22. ^14^ "passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. they are not linked. but they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers on this train, in this same space and for this same period of time. they are between the disintegration of the 'crowd' and the aggregation of the group, both extremes remaining possible, virtual, and near at every moment. this suspension is what makes 'being-with': a relation without relation, or rather, being exposed simultaneously to relationship and absence of relationship" (nancy, "of being-in-common," trans. james creech, _community at loose ends_, ed. miami theory collective [minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1991] 7). ^15^ "oscillation" is an entirely appropriate word to use in this context for, as hamacher points out, "%oscillum% is in fact a derivation of %os%, mouth, face, and thus means little mouth, little face and mask. oscillation, understood in its etymological context, would indicate that 'originary' movement of language in which it is allotted to something or someone, which has neither language nor face, is neither intuition or concept" (190). ^16^ this sentence concludes, in parentheses: "(democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of hu yao--bang, was immediately granted)" (85). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ritchie, 'constructing an archipelago: writing the caribbean', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-ritchie-constructing.txt constructing an archipelago: writing the caribbean by susan j. ritchie english department ohio state university sritchie@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by susan ritchie. all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. benitez-rojo, antonio. _the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective_. durham: duke university press, 1992. [1] antonio benitez-rojo's _repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective_ is a marvelously ambitious rereading of caribbean literature, letters, and culture, deftly translated here by james maraniss. but what makes the cuban author's book a work of particular interest and importance to postmodern studies is the powerful, shifting, and paradoxical framework he has established for articulating the "certain way" of the caribbean. for benitez-rojo's chief interest is in the ethnological but nonetheless inessential character that might justify the reference to so many diverse islands, peoples, languages, and histories as "the caribbean." his "caribbean" is a constructed, postmodern, and yet finally coherent sociocultural archipelago. [2] benitez-rojo thus engages with the very difficult question of how to perform a cultural study that is postmodern and constructivist but which nonethelessless respects cultural specificities. he puts it this way: "how do we establish that the caribbean is an important historico-economic sea, and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each a copy of a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor?" (9). both the value and danger of this work result from the energy and skill with which the author sets often contradictory theoretical apparatuses after this problem and into productive frenzy. [3] the readings are propelled by a roughly deleuzian conception of an ordering, productive machine that is the caribbean itself; the very machine from which caribbean texts seek to escape in their search for non-violence. he calls this machine the "plantation," and it is in his attention to the plantation that he produces the readings that are one of the real gifts of this text. the plantation system is for benitez-rojo the producer of the similarity of differences that makes up the islands of the caribbean: "the plantation proliferated in the caribbean basin in a way that presented different features in each island, each stretch of coastline, each colonial bloc. nevertheless . . . these differences, far from negating the existence of a pan-caribbean society, make it possible in the way that a system off ractal equations of a galaxy is possible" (72). [4] his most complete identification of the plantation takes place in an introductory chapter that examines the history of the caribbean in terms of the plantation, and in his examination of his two historical texts: bartholome de las casas' 1875 history of what he still referred to as the indes (_historia de las indias_), and fernando ortiz's 1940 essay on the role of sugar and tobacco production in the shaping of cuba (part of _contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar_). benitez-rojo carefully teases out from las casas' text the author's guilt for having been an original "encomendero" who both justified the spanish conquest of cuba and promoted african slavery as the most efficacious means of running sugar plantations. las casas, then, is one of the architects of the plantation--the larger system of exploitation that would come to determine caribbean culture. las casas, though, is no simple bad guy: benitez-rojo's accomplishment is to show how his work also helps discursively to organize the region's anti-colonial impulses. [4] through a scrupulous freudian reading of _historia_" benitez-rojo suggests that las casas' text both contains and represents a "rupture" in the "discursive practice that justified the conquest" and that this rupture creates one of the region's first nationalistic arguments in its imagination of "a providential space in which europeans, aboriginal peoples, and africans might live industriously according to religious and civic principles, and where violence toward the indian and the negro would be condemned equally by the earthly power of the crown and the church's spiritual judgment" (86). the rupture is represented by an enigmatic moment in this historical text: a fantastic description of a plague of ants that reads more like fable than history. noting the uncanniness of the passage, benitez-rojo uses freudian analysis to show how the fable both disguises and re-presents the actual object of las casas' fascination and guilt: a revolt by plantation slaves. the reading is valuable for its careful attention to the cuban anti-colonial nationalistic sentiment and to the plantation's dual fascination and phobia, its duplicitous posture of defense and exploitation, as regards african culture. [5] as benitez-rojo continues to trace the cultural productions of the plantation-machine in more detail, he takes pains to identify it as a machine born not of postmodernism, but of the caribbean itself. so while he characterizes las casas' resistance to the colonial binary of master/slave as "an involuntary flourish of postmodernity" (98), his point is finally that these texts offer something more culturally specific. this concern animates his examinations of ortiz's often literally fantastic and fabulous discussions of sugar and tobacco production in cuba, which is less revealing of that historian's text than it is of benitez-rojo's attempts to ground his own investigations in the explicitly caribbean. he finds in ortiz his own precursor: a proto-scholar of the plantation: "when ortiz says that 'to study the cuban history is fundamentally to study the history of sugar and tobacco as the visceral systems of its economy' he is suggesting to us 'another' mode of investigation whose prototype would be the 'contrapunteo'" (158). [6] benitez-rojo's only ungenerous reading similarly projects his own conception of the plantation on to the work of earlier authors. he criticizes the poet nicolas guillen, known for his poems about sugar workers, for his marxism--and also, it would seem, for his failure properly to understand benitez-rojo's own description of the plantation well over a half a century before it was articulated. it is strange, he writes, "that guillen, with his profound understanding of the plantation, should have fallen for the ingenious pattern of thinking that the mechanical transposition of a european doctrine--as marxism-leninism is--to a caribbean island could be successful as a socioeconomic project; i mean, concretely, that an island plantation, cuba, for example, could ever produce sugar 'without tears'" (131). the irony, of course, is that benitez-rojo himself is unapologetically supportive of applications of anglo-european postmodern theories to the caribbean. [7] benitez-rojo is better when he speaks of how he shares this struggle with the west with other caribbean writers. the plantation is responsible for the essential paradox of the caribbean writer: he or she is most caribbean when most other. as benitez-rojo says of the work of alejo carpentier, it "offers itself as a doubly spectacular spectacle: at once directed toward the west in terms of an excess of invention and professional competence (to make an impression, to follow the current), and also directed to the reading in the meta-archipelago, beneath a ritual language, which, in its repetition, tries to interpret two performances of the impossible: to be a caribbean person and to be there in the caribbean" (241). hence in his comparison of the fiction of carpentier, wilson harris, fanny buitrago and edgardo rodriguez julia, it is carpentier, whose style bears the greatest resemblance to western literature, who is celebrated as the most caribbean. benitez-rojo's eloquent explanation for carpentier's appropriation of a largely french naturalism for his own novels is that "it's obvious that the path of words between europe and america becomes much more assured when one goes out parallel to some famous explorer" (184). [8] benitez-rojo does not always trace clear patterns of connection between these sorts of micro-insights about literature and his larger theoretical statements. indeed, some of his finest moments are also the most disconnected or incidental to any central agenda or design. one of the many oddities of this book, though, is how, despite the apparently loose theoretical %bricolage% of his own practice, benitez-rojo suggests that the caribbean and its plantation can best be approached and understood by way of a single theoretical stance: that of scientific chaos theory. chaos theory, as we have learned in the wake of its recent boom, describes the scientific attempt to study complex natural patterns and behaviors that previously had been thought too noisy or too random to succumb to empirical and statistical prediction. and for benitez-rojo, as for other scholars of postmodern culture, what has proved most appealing about chaos is not its highly technical and repetitive mathematics but its seductive thematics and terminologies. [9] indeed, some of the images generated by chaos theory work well for benitez-rojo as descriptions of the turbulent character of caribbean culture. like the phenomena that chaos scientists study, his caribbean text is constantly aswirl in bifurcation and paradox--products of a turbulence which allows equally for radical disturbance and creative productivity. the appeal of chaos as an analogy for postcolonialism is evident: chaos provides a model for the interconnectedness of places and phenomena, yet allows even within that interconnection for the possibility of radical disruption. like much postmodern theory, work in chaos has described how the local might rupture universalizing metanarratives. the "butterfly effect," for instance, describes the process whereby seemingly small events, compounded through interdependent feedback loops, can have a dramatic effect on other parts of the system. (the name indicates the statistical conceivability that a group of butterflies flapping their wings in one part of the world could produce a storm in another hemisphere.) [10] but despite the thematic appropriateness of chaos theory, i am uneasy with benitez-rojo's appropriation of it for the analysis of culture. chaos theory, with its interest in the order of disorder, dabbles in the description of the most mystical of all natural forces: that which in spite of entropy, resists disorder. the end point of scientific chaos theory is a statistical science of wholeness, a goal that seems strikingly at odds with what is otherwise benitez-rojo's confidence in the power of difference. indeed, his steadfast belief that the cultural diversity of the islands is fully capable of resisting even the homogenizing effects of a postmodern global culture of consumerism is quite marked and controversial: "i see no solid reasons," he writes, "to think that the culture of the peoples of the sea is negatively affected by the cultural 'consumerism' of the industrial societies. when a people's culture conserves ancient dynamics that 'play in a certain kind of way,' these resist being displaced by external territorializing forms" (20). [11] being more suspicious than benitez-rojo about the essential character of difference, i am nervous about the practice of once again using a western science as a means of understanding the history of the colonized world; i worry about how his specific examination of caribbean texts is sandwiched between discussions of chaos theory as if the caribbean were some kind of real-world manifestation of western empirical predictions. of course, benitez-rojo insists that his use of chaos theory remains on the level of metaphor: "if i have seized hold of certain models belonging to chaos, it has not been because i think that these can manage to signify fully what's there in the archipelago; rather it's because they speak of dynamic forms that float, sometimes in unforeseen and scarcely perceptible ways within the caribbean's huge and heteroclitic archive" (269). but while he is interested in understanding the "certain way" of being--the ordering principle that characterizes the otherwise chaotic and disjointed caribbean--surely even a thematic distinction must be made between that resistance to disorder that we call "culture" and the resistance to disorder that biologists often call "life" itself. [12] benitez-rojo's tendency to understand the cultural specificity of the caribbean as the product of a "natural" necessity, even while he treats literary texts as strictly social constructions, makes for a strange and troublesome discontinuity in his analysis. one can accept his basic stance on caribbean literary texts, which, he says, propose "themselves as vehicles to drive the reader and the text to the marginal and ritually initiating territory of the absence of violence" (25). but his characterization of caribbean culture is more difficult. the identification of the specificity of the culture, what he refers to throughout the book as the "certain kind of way" of the islands, is a highly naturalized, romantic, and even racist process. thus when he depicts the moment in which he personally reached the age of reason, and understood in a single epiphany what it was to be caribbean, as the day he witnessed two older black woman "with an ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs" pass under his balcony in "a certain kind of way," and that "i knew then at once there would be no apocalypse . . . the caribbean is not an apocalyptic world" (10), he makes knowledge of the specifically caribbean dependent on capturing black women within a male gaze. to praise e. duvergier de hauranne's understanding of the islands, he compliments haurranne's 19th-century traveller's description of black women walking through a market in cuba. "it's clear," benitez-rojo insists, "that huaranne, a foreigner, saw that these negresses walked in 'a certain kind of way,' that they moved differently than european women" (79). [13] perhaps it is unfair to expect benitez-rojo to transcend the racist sexism of his own cultural text. but these sections of the book are unsatisfactory in other ways as well. again the terminology of chaos theory seems to impose itself rather awkwardly. benitez-rojo ends up describing the planation as a "strange attractor"--in chaos lingo, a point of regularity within expected randomness (269). but the planation is no strange attractor; it is the colonial machine in motion. and the exploitation that it has engendered is precisely not the result of natural distribution, as benitez-rojo himself suggests in his more deleuzian moments. after all, he is no ethnographer, but a self-reflective and self-acknowledged product of the very caribbean he describes, a student of culture doomed, as he discusses in his final chapter, to use alien tools of analysis. a generous reading might recall benitez-rojo's own assertion that the caribbean text attempts to "neutralize violence" by referring "society to the transhistorical codes of nature" (17). but this reasoning away of racism is unsatisfactory, for one quickly recognizes that nowhere does benitez-rojo account for the ideological or social consequences of this or other particular constructions of nature. the result is that the unstated mission of a truly caribbean literature remains the naturalization of some, but not all, of the island's people through the very act of representation. thus, for example, when benitez-rojo critiques nicolas guillen's poem "west indes, ltd," his vague dissatisfaction that it is too western appears as the critique that in it, "one does not feel the vital presence of the negro's desire" (129). [14] i do not mean to suggest that the troubling paradoxes of benitez-rojo's practice should be cleanly resolved or contained. but his reluctance to chart the make-up of certain key social constructions leaves his work, for me at least, something less than a full engagement with the problematics of postmodernity. for there is often no compelling reason to assume that the fragmentation he enacts is really "postmodern" at all. he acknowledges that caribbean discourse, like the islands themselves, "is in many respects prestructuralist and preindustrialist, and to make matters worse, a contrapuntal discourse that when seen a la caribbean would look like a rumba, and when seen a la europe like a perpetually moving baroque fugue, in which the voices meet once never to meet again" (23). and one of his recurring points is that even if postmodernism might provide a strategically interesting way of addressing caribbean culture, within the postcolonial context, it will always remain an ill-fit. yet i am not troubled by the presence of the premodern in the texts, social or literary, but by his description of his own methodology as postmodern. in the terms of classic derridean symptomology, what is alarming is that benitez-rojo's own postcritical methodology should produce text that so closely matches that of the precritical. "it's no surprise," he writes, "that the people of the caribbean should be good boxers and also, of course, good musicians, good singers, good dancers, and good writers" (22). one wonders: did he need chaos, or even the plantation, to perform these readings that stick, after all, fairly closely to the text? perhaps not, but the methodological dynamic of the plantation is evident in the progression of readings, where repetitions and difference do create a sense of the "endless combat that must necessarily remain undecided within the problematic interplay of confrontations, truces, alliances, derelictions, offensive and defensive strategies, advances and retreats, forms of domination, resistance and coexistence that the plantation's founding inscribed in the caribbean" (111). [15] if i have expressed some serious reservations about this work, the daring with which it displays and enacts its own paradoxes makes it to my mind indispensable to the ongoing project of postmodern cultural studies. and while i have been critical of benitez-rojo's use of the postmodern, perhaps he deserves the label all the more for his own awareness that for him, the postmodern is only an ill-fitting interim strategy with, finally, a single virtue: the "virtue of being the only [paradigm] to direct itself toward the play of paradoxes and eccentricities, of fluxes and displacements; that is, it offers possibilities that are quite in tune with those that define the caribbean" (271). that benitez-rojo would be so restless with a paradigm of restlessness recommends him absolutely. lee, 'cookbooks for theory and performance', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-lee-cookbooks.txt cookbooks for theory and performance by josephine lee department of english smith college jolee@smith _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by josephine lee, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. case, sue-ellen, and janelle reinelt, eds. _the performance of power: theatrical discourse and politics_. iowa city: university of iowa press, 1991. reinelt, janelle g., and joseph r. roach, eds. _critical theory and performance_. ann arbor: the university of michigan press, 1992. [1] one can clearly see the directions in which research in theater and drama is moving by browsing through titles of new books and articles, of new journals that have begun or renewed their life in the last five years, and of papers presented at the annual conferences held by the association for theatre in higher education (athe) and the american society for theatre research (astr). scholarship and criticism in theater and drama have become much more explicitly theoretical, and the theories used are much more interdisciplinary, with new historicism, feminist theory, and now cultural studies, moving to the forefront. not only have the old theories of theater and drama lost their exclusive charms; what is considered the primary object of study is no longer what happens in the theater and even less what can be read on the pages of the playtext. performance has become a much broader, even all-encompassing term, and there is no longer an easy distinction between the theatrical and the real. though theatricality, acting, and the stage have long provided those working in other disciplines (sigmund freud, kenneth burke, erving goffman, judith butler, to name a few) with easy metaphors, it is more novel and refreshing to have those who have worked more closely with theater turn their attention to events which take place off as well as on the stage. [2] two recent collections, _the performance of power_ and _critical theory and performance_, act as methodological cookbooks illustrating this "nouvelle cuisine" of performance studies. both offer a variety of recipes for the ways in which current critical theory might intersect with drama, theater, and performance. reading either would give one a good idea of what, professionally speaking, is in demand: what is considered nutritious, desirable, appetizing, successful. this is not to say that either book is geared toward the novice; on the contrary, negotiating the ambitious and rather dizzying range of essays presented in these books demands at least some sophistication. but at the same time a certain didacticism can be read, both explicitly and implicitly, in both books. for those who are desirous of success in a field increasingly focused on academic professionalism, the books promise at least a cursory sense of competence with what one needs to interact, publish, and establish oneself. [3] the editors of both books, to their credit, make this didacticism clear. janelle reinelt and sue-ellen case, the editors of _the performance of power_ state explicitly how their book might work as an "entry-level text--a how-to for beginning to apply such considerations to theatrical texts and practices" (xix). _critical theory and performance_ also turns itself into a teaching text by supplying careful introductions, summarizing theoretical viewpoints, identifying seminal texts, and defining key terminology, all the while advertising the excitement of applying the "new theory" to drama, theater, and performance. [4] thus it is worth looking more closely not only at the individual essays included in these books, but also these organizing principles and agendas which inform them. my criticisms of both books are directed primarily at the latter. this is not to deny that the books do contain individual articles which are noteworthy in their own right. joe roach's work on the "artificial eye" of augustan theater, spencer golub's on the iconization of chaplin in postrevolutionary russia, and tracy davis's readings of annie oakley in particular show the exciting results of critical theory, meticulous scholarship, and intelligent writing. and even the more tentative essays included here do provide useful models for the appropriate ways in which experimentation is allowed to take place, and deviation from norms is allowed to occur. [5] yet i would focus on some of the distinct disadvantages of embracing the power structures inscribed within certain kinds of academic discourse. although these two books clearly show evidence of how the "new theory" provides the fuel for some exciting work, they also make plain that dimension of what is inevitably disagreeable and frustrating about scholarship. with the eagerness to take on the terms of the "new theory" comes the occasional oversimplification of theory into formula, a willingness to teach rather conventional lessons of academic professionalism, and to that end, a deployment of confused and sometimes misleading arrangements of methodological categories. [6] particularly revealing are the ways in which the books create theoretical space both through the choice of essays, and the headings they assign to them. the personal taste and prejudices of the editors seem less important than their attempts to negotiate the complex expectations of the academic profession. both books shun the old historical periodizations and cultural distinctions, and instead follow divisions loosely guided by post-structuralist theory, bearing the headings "materialist semiotics," "after marx," and "critical convergences." [7] where such headings become troubling is where the articles which follow them are not elucidated by them. the first two sections in _the performance of power_, for instance, are labelled "materialist semiotics" and "deconstruction." none of these terms seems all that clear to begin with, and the very different choices made in each of the essays, of subject matter and line of interrogation, makes the terminology even more confusing. for example, both "materialist semiotics" and "deconstruction" cover a great range of topics: kim hall on the discourse of blackness in the jonsonian masque, sarah bryant-bertail on _the good soldier schwejk_ and the apparatus of political theater, david savran on the wooster group, j. ellen gainor on imperialist shaw, geoffrey bredbeck on renaissance sodomy, and jeffrey mason on john augustus stone's 1892 _metamora_. each of these essays is less wedded to the others by persistent theoretical questioning than by an appeal to older, tried-and-true foundations of historical research. although the political cast gives the task a new urgency, the methodology remains based on close textual readings bent on unearthing historical and textual evidence for interpretation. clearly, this is still effective. but though the quality of the essays is high, it remains unclear what they are doing in these theoretical categories. not surprisingly, the exception is when one of the editors of this volume, sue-ellen case, makes more of an effort to investigate questions of theory and methodology in her own contribution to the "deconstruction" section. her essay "the eurocolonial reception of sanskrit poetics" is less a reading of specific plays than a first attempt at investigation of the "strategies of concealment, suppression, and displacement" that take place in the works of theater critics, historians, and practitioners who, in constructing sanskrit theatrical traditions, inevitably collude with "colonial imperial practices" (124). [8] the same uneasiness haunts _critical theory and performance_. although its introduction is designed to answer much more explicitly theoretical questions, its categorization of essays too renders unclear what "deconstruction" for the theater is, and what distinguishes it from "semiotics." here both terms are placed into a single category: "semiotics and deconstruction." that two such different theoretical articulations should seem so much alike in practice remains unexplained here as well. the articles included in this section of _critical theory_ are all centered on contemporary productions: jim carmody explores the transplantation of _the misanthrope_ to 1989 hollywood, david mcdonald writes with a director's view of his own productions of david hare's _fanshen_, and john rouse examines the wooster group, heiner muller, and robert wilson. such a choice might provide a perfect opportunity to discuss the problems of historical reconstruction of the theatrical event, and the implicit claim for the authoritative presence of spectatorship: central issues for poststructuralist theory. but such a conversation is lacking in both the essays and introduction, as is any sustained discussion of postmodernist theater practice. [9] again, a too-easy conflation of theoretical terms in the "hermeneutics and phenomenology" section of _critical theory and performance_ puts both essays included here at a disadvantage. the insights of thomas postlewait's "history, hermeneutics, and narrativity" are more useful in conjunction with the earlier section on "theater history and historiography." postlewait's thoughts on how the "challenge for historians . . . is to understand better how the models and discourse of narrativity organize the writing process" (_critical theory_ 363) work beautifully to help frame earlier essays, such as tracy davis's fascinating study of annie oakley and her "ideal husband," and to support the skepticism of both rosemary bank and vivian patraka towards the dualistic discourse of political theater. the essay which is paired with postlewait, however, is bert state's "the phenomenological attitude." state's eloquent essay deserves accompaniment from others involved with the practice of phenomenological criticism or perhaps studies of audience reception. as it is, states's essay exists in a vacuum, as a kind of ghost theory from the past, and one is tempted to pass it over for the more glittering theories of the other sections. [10] the "psychoanalysis" section of _critical theory and performance_ seems rather bare as well. although it contains two essays which are interesting in their own right, one by elin diamond on theatrical identification, and the other by mohammad kowsar on lacan's reading of _antigone_, the pairing does not work. i was struck by how empty this section seems in light of what disciplines such as film studies have been able to do with freud and lacan. that psychoanalytic theory has had a profound effect on theory and performance is evident throughout the book, and other essays could easily have been redistributed to give this section more weight. in particular sueellen case's later article, with its metaphor of the "coupling" of theory and history in some "primal scene," might have been placed here instead of in the final section entitled "critical convergences." for that matter, herbert blau's piece, also in this final section, would have worked as well or better in "after marx." eliminating this final section would also help avoid the troubling implication that well-known critics such as case and blau deserve their own special section and the last word on as well as in critical theory and performance. [11] but a troubling reliance on the star system runs throughout _critical theory_ and is implicit in _the performance of power_ as well. though neither book fully succumbs to what gay gibson calls the "blockbuster" approach of academic conference panels (_power_ 258), both do make clear who the well-known scholars in the field are, and what they are interested in. more than once, certain essays seem to have been included for the sake of capturing the authoritative presence of the writer, rather than for scholarly or methodological reasons. nina auerbach's essay "victorian players and sages" is an uneasy choice for _the performance of power_; although auerbach ends with henry irving and ellen terry, her interest is more thematic and literary, linking great works with other great works, wordsworth with bronte heroines. janice carlisle's piece, which immediately precedes auerbach's, sheds far more light on the nature of victorian theatricality. in light of all that richard schechner has done to encourage new approaches to the theater, his essay on "direct theater" is disappointing. schechner makes the mistake of describing significant media events in a "you are there" style, and removing them from their complex historical and political contexts. some of his casual comparisons, such as that which he makes between the 1970 anti-vietnam "carnival" held in washington, and the 1989 protests by chinese students in tiananmen square, can be downright insulting. [12] there also seems to be a marked tendency to insist on the relevance of well-known theorists for theatrical studies. when marvin carlson considers the possible uses of bakhtin's terms "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" for theater and performance, his conclusions are so optimistic that he out-bakhtins bakhtin. this eagerness to employ a theoretical vocabulary leads one to suspect that in the essays as well as the introductions, theoretical approaches are sometimes absorbed rather than questioned too closely. in the section labelled "cultural studies," for instance, the first essays seem models of careful scholarship and sensitivity, a blend of traditional scholarship and new theoretical positions. it is not until james moy's article that the position of enlightened cultural critic is challenged. moy finds what he calls a "new order of stereotypical representations" of asians in plays hailed by others as breaking new ground. moy's objections, although not altogether agreeable, are argued with disconcerting vigor; his voice is polemical, challenging readers to dispute as well as applaud his efforts. [13] overall, the most successful section in either book is the grouping in _critical theory and performance_ entitled "feminism(s)." here essays work with and against one another in ways both satisfying and thought-provoking. of particular interest is kate davy's essay, which persuasively argues the inability of lesbian performance to be served by using the strategy of camp, and jill dolan's work, which questions what she calls the troubling "sanctimonious structures of politically correct lesbian identifications" (266), and looks for ways in which less attractive representations of gender and power might be reconciled with feminism. jeanie forte's examinations of the theatrical female body, and ellen donkin's work on sarah siddons as split subject, are also part of the focused and engaged set of theoretical questions that feminist critics explore inside and outside the theater. [14] in contrast, the other sections in _critical theory and performance_ seem rather tentative as articulations of theoretical positions. in the "after marx" section in particular, the essays seem curiously restrained, and the heated debates anticipated in the introduction do not materialize. most of the essays call for revision and reform, but do so in a tone of academic disengagement. both bruce mcconachie's perceptive examination of the term "production" a la raymond williams, and philip auslander's interesting comments on stand-up comedy as baby-boomer refuge, make rather subdued conclusions. jim merod chooses a more polemical set of questions on theory and the academic profession, but his remarks seem directed at a very different audience; his section on jazz does not offer any insights into performance or theory more stirring than "it may be that music is the lingua franca of all people and all culture and that jazz is its most common discourse" (193). most immediately and enjoyably provocative in this section is david roman's essay, which challenges the liberal view of aids as a scientific reality and the resultant rational/disinterested liberal response to the epidemic. [15] _the performance of power_ avoids some of the problems which are accentuated in _critical theory and performance_ by not billing itself as a "theory" book, and preserving an emphasis on text and production. to this end, the book moves away from categories evoking poststructualist theory into headings such as "revealing surveillance strategies" and "constructing utopias." the book does not, however, treat the theater as a privileged aesthetic space of high culture; rather, it affirms that theatrical performance participates fully in the dynamics of power that characterize all forms of discourse. power in the theater is not just what is represented within some fictionalized stage world, but also what is inscribed in the relationships between performers, spectators, and societies in the act of performing. [16] happily, the book is suspicious of power in academic circles as well. _the performance of power_ gives sustained attention to the power dynamics played out in academic departments, the classroom, and conference panels, in what sue-ellen case calls "the production of knowledge at the site of the academy as performance" (_critical theory_ 422). the book begins with a narrative account of the specific conferences from which the idea for the collection took its shape, and ends with a section on the state of the profession, with a series of essays calling for the redistribution of power, more interdisciplinary research, and the need for revitalization of both research and pedagogy. while these final essays are vocal about the need for change as well as the changes that are already taking place, they express their complaints in rather too moderate and reasonable voices. i miss the angry and impassioned call for more radical institutional reform, and a more sustained self-questioning of the writer's own complicity in the preserving the status quo. [17] still, the power structures of the academy do come under fire in _the performance of power_, in ways that are oddly absent in _critical theory and performance_. the latter volume has a much more cautious, "rules-ofthe-game" feel to it. billed on the back cover as "the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory's rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance," it promises to teach state of the art academic professionalism to a field long accused of insularity and backwardness. such an advertisement may go unchallenged; the other books, articles, and collections which might claim to be seminal in this field were also written by those very "leading critics and practitioners" who were "specially commissioned" for this book. [18] _the performance of power_ and _critical theory and performance_ reveal much about the current demands of the field; to the skeptical and resistant reader, they will reveal even more. even though these books leave many crucial questions of practice and methodology unanswered, they are important and necessary reading for anyone who wishes to engage critically with theater, drama, and performance studies; the choices made in both books are worth studying closely. to call something "deconstruction" is neither arbitrary nor whimsical, even when the term is unexplained or misapplied; it is by means of such labellings that a sub-discipline attains recognition and credibility within larger circles of discourse. we who study theater and drama have been relatively late in jumping onto the theory bandwagon. but now that we are on board, we must engage with the dynamics of power, authority, and value that are imposed by the new conventions as well as the old. thus, professionally speaking, there is much to be gained through reading these books, even if only one or two of the individual essays are relevant to one's own particular areas of interest. whether one ultimately dismisses the "nouvelle" performance studies as mere passing fashion, or finds that it actually tastes good, to be active in the discipline today means at least sitting down to this sort of table. and i, for one, hate to eat alone. shaviro, 'if i only had a brain', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-shaviro-if.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.993. part 1/1, total size 31238 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- if i only had a brain by steven shaviro department of english university of washington shaviro@u.washington.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by steven shaviro, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] burroughs writes: "in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee." good advice for the anatomically deranged, like cliff steele. he's a character in the dc/vertigo comic book doom patrol; i refer in particular to the issues written by grant morrison and illustrated by richard case, between 1989 and 1992 (#s 19-63). cliff has a problem with his body, you see. it happened like this. he used to be a daredevil racing car driver; he had a horrible wreck. nearly all of him was burned to ashes, but they snatched his brain from the flames. and then they implanted that brain in a new prosthetic body, all shiny metal, ultra high tech, a veritable fighting machine. now cliff is the muscle of the doom patrol, a brain turned into brawn. they expect him to be a macho bruiser, when actually he's quite sensitive underneath. and to add insult to injury, they call him robotman--a name he violently hates. what would that do for your sense of self-esteem? the life of a superhero these days! cliff thinks of himself as just a regular guy; robocop fantasies are the last thing on his mind. but with a metallic casing like this, he can't exactly blend into the crowd. it's what baudrillard calls hyper-visibility, the postmodern condition par excellence. no chance of chilling out with a secret identity, like old clark kent used to do. all this metal is a clunky encumbrance, no matter how great its tensile strength. you know you're in bad shape when you bang your head against a wall, and you still don't feel a thing. at this point, cliff doesn't even really know what his body can do. how good is all this cyber-tech stuff anyway? how accurate and detailed is sensory input? how fast is motor response? what unaccustomed relays and connections now trigger the pain and pleasure centers in cliff's brain? will he ever be able to taste and smell? can he ever have sex again? what about getting drunk or stoned? "the only good thing about having a human brain in a robot body," cliff remarks sardonically at one point, "is that it's easier to control brain chemistry." just the touch of a button, and anxiety is dissipated, alertness is heightened, or memory is enhanced. but alas, this techno-manipulation seems to work only for utilitarian ends, and not for hedonistic ones. "our machines are disturbingly lively," donna haraway writes, "and we ourselves frighteningly inert." it might not be so bad, if only you could get used to the situation. after all, descartes argued long ago that the body is a machine. it shouldn't matter all that much whether metal or flesh is the medium. in either case, it's simply a matter of mastering the electrochemical interface: regularizing chains of association, facilitating neural feedback patterns, reinforcing the appropriate re-entrant connections. in short, a question of recognition and memory, of cultivating habits over the course of time. the problem is that cliff's mechanical body never stays the same. he's continually being sent back to the shop for upgrades and repairs. transistors burn out; programming errors and faulty couplings throw him off stride. he gets into fights, and enemies regularly mangle his metal to bits. as if that weren't bad enough, doc magnus (who built and programmed his body in the first place) and niles caulder (the chief of the doom patrol) tend to use cliff as a pawn in their ongoing professional rivalry. neither of them is content to let well enough alone; they are both all too eager to retool him in order to try out their latest cybernetic design ideas. and let's not even think about those insectoid aliens who at one point fit cliff out in a new metal carapace with six legs. life in a robot body, even if you're strong, is just one humiliation after another. the persistence of memory in the brain only makes things worse. amputees typically feel phantom sensations in their lost limbs; poor cliff has this problem multiplied many times over. he must endlessly relive numerous episodes of mutilation and dismemberment. neither clint eastwood nor woody allen--our two best-known icons of hetero-male angst--ever had to go through anything remotely like this. [2] the worst part, though, is the waiting. all these body modifications take time, just as it takes time to alter a dress or a pair of pants. cliff's brain is disconnected meanwhile, and left in a vat of nutrient fluids. the experience isn't exactly like returning to the womb. you don't get some soothing "oceanic feeling"; rather, you freak out from sensory deprivation. the first stage is "boredom: hearing nothing, seeing nothing, experiencing nothing. boredom and irritation and then panic." panic, because the brain (like nature) abhors a vacuum. so that's when the hallucinations begin: "nightmares of sound and vision, grotesque sensory distortions." cliff is overwhelmed by paranoid delusions of a world controlled by malevolent insects and soulless infernal machines. "the body becomes remote, robotic, disconnected," a symptom of the schizophrenic's "sense of being abstracted from the day-to-day physical world." but if this is the case with me, then what about other people? "maybe i'm not the robot, and everyone else is." it doesn't help to realize that this is just a virtual world, and that your own brain is generating all these visions. if anything, such an awareness only makes things worse: your ontological insecurity is heightened, while the horrors you confront don't for all that become any less vivid and intense. if only i could attribute these appearances to a malevolent programmer, to somebody like descartes' evil demon! then at least i'd have the comfort of knowing that somebody else is out there, that i'm not absolutely alone. true hell for cliff is the solipsistic universe of bishop berkeley, in which nothing exists except one's own inner perceptions: a closed circle from which there is no escape. [3] but fortunately this idealist delirium doesn't last forever; eventually the hallucinations subside. virtual reality is a great leveller: "nothing can pass through without being broken down, disintegrated." and so cliff finally reaches a sort of nirvana, "something i can't describe: the center of the cyclone, the room without doors." now becoming grinds to a halt; time no longer passes, you have all the time in the world. plenty of time to meditate upon the smiths lyric that opens and closes one episode of doom patrol: "does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" the question resonates in the emptiness like a zen koan: ironic, unanswerable, absurd. meditate long enough, and the inner self, the first person of the cartesian cogito, drops out of the picture. you're left with the great postmodern discovery, anticipated alike by hume and by the buddhists: that personal identity is a fiction. the cartesian subject disappears, together with all that it created. when i introspect deeply, i may come across all sorts of experiential contents and structures: feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, multiple personalities, and so on. but the one thing i am absolutely unable to find is myself. [4] the conundrum of the brain in a vat is an old philosophical slapstick routine, our updated postmodern version of descartes' original meditations. the question is always the same: how can i know for sure that these inner representations correspond to something out there, that what i experience is real? how can i be absolutely certain that i'm not just a disembodied mind dreaming the external world, or that it isn't all a computer simulation fed into my brain through direct innervation of the neuronal fibers? the comedy lies in this: that it's only my hysterical demand for certainty that first introduces the element of doubt. it's only by subjecting myself to the horrors of sensory deprivation that i approach the delirious limit at which the senses become questionable. descartes does just that in his third meditation: "i will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses . . . ." descartes "proves god," as samuel beckett puts it, "by exhaustion." as metaphysics goes, it's the oldest trick in the book: first you take something away, then you complain that it isn't there, and then you invent a theory grounded in--and compensating for--its very absence. deleuze and guattari call it the theology of lack. a seductive ruse, to be sure: once you accept the premises, you've already been suckered into the conclusions. [5] "if i only had a brain . . . ." for as one character in doom patrol remarks, "descartes was nothing but a miserable git who never had a good time in his entire life!" postmodern philosophers rightly reject the very logic that gets us into the dualist impasse. descartes' methodical doubt is ultimately a distinction without a difference, since it has no pragmatic consequences whatsoever. for consider the alternatives. either there's some telltale sign, which allows us empirically to determine whether or not we're just brains kept in vats: in which case the whole sorry mess is merely a question of fact, without any deeper epistemological import. or else, there's no way of telling: but in this case, we have nothing to worry about, since experience remains the same one way or the other. "the mystery, as cormac mccarthy's judge holden says, "is that there is no mystery." perhaps the evil demon posited by descartes gets some private, masturbatory delectation out of fooling us like this; but that needn't be any concern of ours. for the evil demon can't do anything to us, can't harm us or change us or otherwise affect us, without thereby tipping his hand and revealing his existence. descartes' dilemma is resolved without dualism, then, and without positing a transcendent self, simply by noting that appearances and simulacra are themselves perfectly real. the cogito is reduced to a third-person tautology: things are exactly as they are, "everything is what it seems." in this postmodern life, "we have to take things as we find them." [6] but such logic and such consolations are of little help to cliff steele, trapped as he is in all that heavy metal--except for the even worse times when his naked brain is actually left to stew and hallucinate in a vat. if modern western rationality begins with descartes' self-mutilating gesture, perhaps it culminates in cliff's absurd disembodiment. for cliff is the final, helpless, involuntary victim of a whole history of amputations. he iss compelled literally to live out the disabling paradoxes of cartesian dualism. he suffers every day from schizophrenic disjunctions between the real and the imaginary, between self and other, between vitalism and mechanism, between mind and body. the problem may be a false one philosophically, but it's still inscribed in our technology. descartes' idle speculations are now as it were incised in cliff's very flesh. doc magnus and the chief mess with cliff's head more insidiously than the evil demon ever could. their operations give dualism a delirious new twist: for now it's cliff's mind that is materially incarnated, while his corporeality is entirely notional, virtual, simulacral. such is our postmodern refinement of those old metaphysical endeavors to find the ultimate reality, to separate essence from accident. descartes' cogito and husserl's epoche were merely thought experiments; but now we can realize their equivalents in actual surgical procedures. strip everything away that is not indubitably "cliff steele," that is not necessarily contained in the very notion of his essence; and what's left is precisely these three pounds of neuronal tissue, a fleshy lump "so full of water that it tends to slump like a blancmange if placed without support on a firm surface" (anthony smith, _the body_). since cliff's only 'identity' is that of this actual, physical brain, you might say that his sole grounding certitude is that he is an extended thing--as against descartes' claim to be a thinking thing. just as you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, so you can't get amputated unless you have a body. [7] the chief claims that the operation was a success, that it's all turned out for cliff's own greater good. the old cliff steele, he says, was "selfish, arrogant, overconfident, ill-educated . . . a loudmouthed, misogynistic boor"; it's only through the traumas of amputation and cyborgization that the new cliff has "learned kindness and compassion and a selfless heroism." doom patrol is quite different from the revisionist superhero comics that made a big splash in the mid to late 80s: alan moore's _watchmen_ (with dave gibbons), frank miller's _batman: the dark knight returns_ (with klaus janson and lynn varley), and grant morrison's own _batman: arkham asylum_ (with dave mckean). all these works "deconstruct" our familiar images of comic book superheroes. they go behind the scenes to reveal what we should've suspected all along: that batman and all those other patriotic, costumed crime-fighters are really violent sociopaths with fascist-cum-messianic leanings and a kinky underwear fetish. everything gets played out for these sordid characters in the registers of secrecy, disguise, and paranoia: literally in the form of their jealous anxieties about maintaining a "secret identity," and more figuratively in terms of those notorious paradoxes of destroying the world in order to save it, or stepping outside of the law in order to enforce the law. as old mayor daley of chicago once said, "the police are not there to create disorder; the police are there to preserve disorder." miller's batman and moore's tormented anti-heroes owe much to the creepy affectlessness and suppressed fury of clint eastwood's dirty harry. indeed, their hoods and masks go clint one better, when it comes to maintaining an unreadable, deadpan exterior. the crimefighter's costume is a literal "character armor," rigidly neutralizing whatever may rage beneath--and thereby perpetuating the modernist fantasy that there is a "beneath," something like manhood or interiority or selfhood. most of these psychotic superheroes are still organically human; but it's only one more step to outright cyborgs like arnold schwarzenegger's terminator and peter weller's robocop (in fact, frank miller wrote the scripts for _robocop_ ii and iii). and hasn't there always been something cyborg-like about clint? in these cyborg fantasy films, in any case, the superhero's costume--i include arnold's muscles in this category--no longer works as a disguise. now it's a prosthetic organ of strength, a kind of supplemental, rebuilt manhood. todd mcfarlane's comic book spawn (a series to which alan moore and grant morrison have both contributed) presents an even more fascinating case. here, the protagonist's costume is not just an article of clothing, nor even a mechanical interface, but a living inhuman being in its own right: a sexually voracious, "constantly-evolving neural parasite" from hell that brings al simmons back from the dead, heightens his metabolism, encases him in an unbreachable protective carapace, and takes command of his central nervous system. the image is definitely arthropodal: hard armor on the outside, guarding some soft squishy stuff within. al's body is nearly invulnerable; but this security only intensifies his hidden anguish. he wallows in the misery of living in back alleys with the homeless, and mourns the loss of his wife and child. and so al gets to display his macho prowess, while at the same time laying claim to a deep inner sensitivity, a self-righteous feeling of vulnerability and victimization. can robert bly and his "men's movement" be far behind? again and again it's the same old story: a near-catatonic rigidity that can be breached only in outbursts of extreme cathartic violence, whether by banging drums in the woods, or by blowing away the slavering hordes of sickos and scumbags with your .357 magnum. at least clint has a keen sense of irony about it all--which is more than you can say for bly or for woody allen. some guys'll do anything to redeem their lonely, frustrated lives. and so they endow their experience with a certain self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of masculinity under siege. it feels so good to be a victim, 'cause then you've got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you've had to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all. [8] a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. you imagine your 'manhood' as something both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. like a penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. but why even bother, why hold back? why not just let yourself go? why cling to this rigid exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self? can cartesian dignity mean that much to you? ok, ok, you'll say--together with descartes and with arnold--this body is only a machine, but there's still something inside that's really me. i had to destroy my cock in order to save it: i tore it apart and had it recast in hard, cutting metal--a strategy implicit in many of these films, and savagely literalized in shinya tsukamoto's _iron man_. mcluhan describes such techno-hysteria as an inevitable defensive reaction to change, "a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism." but mcluhan also insists that there's no backing away from the dilemma: "there is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense 'closure' evoked by the tv image." it isn't a question of adapting ourselves to the new technological environment, but of realizing that this technology already is our adaptation. we must cultivate the new sensations offered to us by our new organs. and if masculinity can't keep up with the changes, then so much the worse for masculinity. [9] grant morrison understands these dynamics better than anybody. his _batman: arkham asylum_ pushes the revisionist superhero comic to a parodic point of no return. batman's old enemies, now inmates of this asylum for the criminally insane, tauntingly invite him to join them. for isn't the 'virtual' freedom of madness more appealing than the tedium of life in the 'real' world, "confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity"? batman is all too receptive to this seduction. he knows he's as crazy as any of them, what with his bizarre fixations and his hysterical rage for order. he senses that walking through the doors of arkham asylum will be "just like coming home." and indeed, once he arrives, the blood of self-mutilation flows unchecked. virility crumbles in an onslaught of psychedelic dislocation. the cartesian fiction of the mind as a faithful "mirror of nature" (rorty) is shattered and scattered into the multiple grotesque reflections of the asylum's funhouse mirrors. the joker captures batman, but declines to unmask him and reveal his secret identity; for he knows that the caped crusader's mask already "is his real face." i've loved the joker ever since i was a child, so i was thrilled by morrison's reinvention of his character. the joker may well be a gleefully sadistic mass murderer, but he's also an exemplary postmodern subject. for he "has no real personality; he creates himself each day. he sees himself as the lord of misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd." the joker responds to the "chaotic barrage" of his overloaded senses--the postmodern information glut--in a radically new manner. not by choosing and discriminating among his perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. but simply by "going with the flow"; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just lets it all happen. unlike batman, the joker no longer needs the "protective buffers" that mcluhan feared were numbing us to change. he knows that the only way out is first of all a way in and through. his great adaptive innovation is to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-euclidean forms. far from being mad, the joker may in fact represent "some kind of super-sanity . . . . a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century." [10] the joker's difference from batman parallels mcluhan's distinction between hot and cool media. "a hot medium," mcluhan says, "is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition.'" its chief characteristics are "homogeneity, uniformity, and linear continuity." hot media are imperious, unidirectional, even terroristic. they demand rapt contemplation or close, obsessive attentiveness. your life at every second depends upon their dictates, and yet they leave you feeling strangely uninvolved. they keep you at a proper, 'alienated' distance, drawing you into a paranoid frenzy of endless interpretation. this is the culture of the book: of fundamentalist christians scrutinizing their bibles, and of academic marxists "reading" the insidious ideologies embedded in the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday life. batman is a quintessentially hot figure, ever on the lookout for miniscule clues that will confirm his manichean sense of the world's depravity. cool media, to the contrary, are 'low-definition,' and for that very reason "high in participation or completion by the audience." their sparse spaces welcome and envelop us. they are characterized by "pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity," and they solicit high levels of feedback and involvement. a cool medium, mcluhan says in a famous pun, offers you a massage rather than a message: a multi-textured, tactile and sensual experience, rather than the rational finality of a meaning to be decoded. there is nothing to interpret. instead, cool media invite the kind of open reception that michael taussig, elaborating on walter benjamin, calls distraction: "a very different apperceptive mode, a type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral visual perception." this is the joker's random drift, a delirious passivity brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. with innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date. it's no longer a case of me against the world. contrary to the overwrought claims of neil postman, jerry mander, and other such high-minded media pundits, nobody's ever been brainwashed by watching tv. in fact, most people talk back to their sets. as clark humphrey puts it, "people who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they're consuming . . . . a typical nonviewer may believe almost anything, [but] a typical tv viewer treats everything with (excess?) skepticism." our cheerful postmodern skepticism--reacting as if everything were just "on tv," or always already in quotation marks--is poles apart from modernist angst or from cartesian methodical doubt. you can't ever defeat the evil demon in open battle, but you can put him in his place once you realize that he has more in common with chuck barris and maury povich than he does with satan or with god. [11] you might say that when cliff steele lost everything except for his brain, he was thrust willy-nilly into this cool new postmodern world. with all his "protective buffers" gone, he was preadapted to change. he had no choice but to be plugged directly into the "extension of the central nervous system" that electronic media have made of our planet. the chief is right: something inside cliff has been altered forever, so there's no point in even trying to recover what was lost. "we have to take things as we find them," amputations and all. this is "what it's like" to be a postmodern cyborg. prosthetic surgery is painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. it's all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you can stand to lop off, or just how far back you're willing to go. daniel dennett notes that the question of the interface is the fatal weak point of every mind/body dualism: how can something be wholly immaterial, and yet still have material effects? descartes placed the transfer point in the pineal gland; phenomenologists extend it to the surface of the skin; spiritualists push it even further out, to the ectoplasmic aura that surrounds us like a crustacean carapace or a superhero's sheath. but for cliff it no longer makes sense even to draw the line. neurons and wires are much the same stuff. the electro-chemical feedback loops that constitute cliff's brain are of the same nature as those that are wired into his prosthetic body, or that course across the entirety of the postmodern "global village." cliff's feelings, like the ashes of his former body, are scattered more or less everywhere. but there's no one single point at which the experiences become "his own." [12] so in this strange way, cliff is the postmodern everyman. he hasn't quite become feminized, but at least he's no "misogynistic boor." it's true that he suffers from a certain baffled frustration, from a perpetual sense of unfulfilled duty, from frequent bouts of self-pity, and from a chronic inability to relax. it's true also that his lovely thirst for the concrete can't be quenched by any number of virtual or psychedelic wonders. nothing seems vital to cliff any more; as his psychiatrist asks him at one point, "how must it feel to have saved a world you don't really believe is worth saving?" but unlike the old superheroes, cliff doesn't feel any differently about the world than he does about himself. the distinction of inner and outer simply isn't relevant any more. that's why cliff's pathos has nothing vengeful about it; it can't be seen as the reaction of a resentful masculine ego. this pathos is rather the very affect or quality of that ego's having been dispersed. it's the expression, not of cliff's subjectivity, but precisely of his no longer being a "subject" in the old cartesian/freudian sense. it's the feeling of not having a center--but also of not even lacking one. a cool, prosthetic pathos, perfect for an age of television and computers. what is the ontological status of this "soul of a new machine" (as one episode of doom patrol calls it), this deeply intimate, yet strangely unlocalizable, affect? call it a secondary, sympathetic resonance; or an uneliminable redundancy; or an effect of multiple interference patterns; or an emergent property of information flows accelerated beyond a certain threshold. as deleuze suggests, we need to replace the old phenomenological slogan ("all consciousness is consciousness of something") with a new, radically decentered one: "all consciousness is something." for this is what happens when your brain is plugged directly into the 'real' world's "mixing board"; but also when it's isolated in a vat, or when its contents are downloaded into the virtual-reality matrix of a supercomputer. round and round and round it goes; where it stops, nobody knows. "does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? i don't know." no cogito, then; no ergo, and no sum. "i don't know if the world is better or worse than it has been"--as kathy acker writes in a different context--"i know the only anguish comes from running away." -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------schultz, 'exaggerated history', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-schultz-exaggerated.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.194. part 1/1, total size 29115 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- exaggerated history by susan schultz <schultz@uhccvm> department of english university of hawaii _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by susan schultz, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: susan howe, _the birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in american literary history_. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press, 1993. susan howe, _the nonconformist's memorial_. new york: new directions, 1993. somewhere thoreau says that exaggerated history is poetry. -susan howe, "the captivity and restoration of mrs. mary rowlandson" (birth-mark 96) [1] the recent publication of two books by susan howe marks a further climb in the upward curve of her reputation as one of the most serious, and important, poets of our time. the nearly simultaneous publication of her latest books of poems and essays displays her ambition to change not only our way of writing poetry, but also our reading of it--although one is at times hard pressed in reading howe's work to decide what is "poem," what "essay." howe, more than most poets, combines and confuses genres; she also experiments with typography, writing books that have to be turned over and side-ways, in order that they be read both as pictures and as texts. despite her distinctly avant-garde surfaces, however, howe straddles the lines between modern and postmodern poetries; she may be postmodernist in her method, but her intentions often appear to be those of a last modernist. her fragments are every bit as artful as eliot's, and her desire to make them cohere (in literary and religious terms) is equal to that of eliot, pound, or hart crane. [2] howe's poems are puzzles, in other words, but they are puzzles with answers. the acts of nonconformity that form the substance of howe's books stretch our assumptions about what texts are, and how they operate. yet the more i read and teach her work, the more forcefully i am struck by the essential conservatism of her poetics, evident again in these new books. howe believes in history (what she terms in _singularities_ "narrative in non-narrative") and furthermore she believes, unfashionably, in the possibility that history (and gender) can be transcended through art. unlike her colleague charles bernstein, also on the faculty of suny-buffalo, she has faith that poems exist in order to communicate meaning; the radical nature of her texts reflect nothing so much as the difficulty of communicating new meanings, new histories. [3] howe adopts the mask of an editor, reviser, or "redactor" (a fine word that combines "reading" with "acting," in both its senses). that is, she takes as given that our histories and literature have already been written, and makes it her task to alter rather than reinvent the record. as editor, however, she does not seek to purify her source texts, but to recom plicate them, implicate them in the "wilderness" that was overrun by european immigrants, as by white male editors. like her fore-fathers, howe writes a frankly backward-looking prophecy, revising texts by stripping them of their rhetorical histories, and so giving voice to women and others silenced by previous editors and historians. as she tells edward foster: there you have charles olson at his wisest. "the stutter is the plot." it's the stutter in american literature that interests me. i hear the stutter as a sounding of uncertainty. what is silence or not quite silenced [as in billy budd]. . . . a return is necessary, a way for women to go. because we are in the stutter. we were expelled from the garden of the mythology of the american frontier. the drama's done. we are the wilderness. we have come on to the stage stuttering. (181) howe does not create a new meaning for "wilderness," but adopts the old meaning (the wilderness as woman in hart crane's _the bridge_, for example) and translates it, feminizes it. she disrupts old narratives not because she has no faith in narratives, but because she means for the reader to see in her gaps and verbal impasses the opening for new narratives. the danger is that the new language is too close to the old; by using the old words, she threatens to reinscribe old forms. howe makes of these risks both revelation and paradox--the oppositions that howe so often attempts to transcend threaten to undermine her historical (and so untranscendental) project. [4] one of the central paradoxes in howe's work involves the function of silence in poetry, especially poetry by and about women. howe's revision of literary history problematically reproduces women's silences in the text even as it permits their voices to speak through the agency of the reader, who transforms howe's compressed "narrative in non-narrative" into story. (this is something that can happen to marvelous effect in the classroom.) silence is at once a negative social fact for women and a positive religious state; silence, like so much in howe's work, straddles the line between history and transcendence, thereby calling both of them into question. as she states the problem in her brilliant book _my emily dickinson_, "identity and memory are crucial for anyone writing poetry. for women the field is still dauntingly empty. how do i, choosing messages from the code of others in order to participate in the universal theme of language, pull she from all the myriad symbols and sightings of he" (17-18). that she does pull the "she" from the "he" by taking advantage of the language's frequent material self-betrayal only makes her thinking more complex; in her previous book _singularities_, for instance, she literally un-mans the puritan hope atherton, whose wanderings in the wilderness become the history behind her poem "articulation of sound forms in time." she does so by commenting that "hope" is now considered a woman's name. as if by fiat, she begins an american epic of reduction and reconstruction through a simple linguistic sex-change operation. "hope" for the american poet (or, as she puts it, for "the artist in america") becomes a feminine aspiration. [5] howe's view of dickinson's silence is both enabling and disturbing because it values that silence over publication: "i think," she tells ed foster, "she may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap" (170). the difficulty of howe's work may, in part, stem from the fact that she herself uses language to aspire to the condition of silence and the immateriality to which her books cannot aspire. as she writes in the "silence wager stories" section of _the nonconformist's manual_: words are an illusion are vibrations of air fabricating senselessness he has shattered gates thrown open to himself (38) these are lines that no language poet would set upon the page; given a more complete syntax, the passage might be claimed by that american metaphysician, wallace stevens. the illusions of words often work through howe's manipulation of puns, as in her use of the word "word" in the following lines: "language a wood for thought / over the pantomime of thought / words words night unto night" (39). so language can be considered a "word" for thought; or the word may pertain to the wilderness that engenders thinking like howe's own; or language may (in an older sense of the wood-word) participate in madness' meaning. "much madness is divinest sense," we recall from dickinson. dickinson's poem, too, sets the social against the visionary world; categories are human inventions, but the states that they circumscribe approximate the divine. [6] the illusive word is purposely allusive; howe depends on the aura of words more than most poets (the example of hart crane comes to mind again). like crane, and like st. john the divine, *and* despite her own claim not to believe in origins, she tries to wend her way through words (or woods) back to the word. the fields of words that cover pages of _singularities_, for example, contain not just the european words that helped to tame the wilderness, but also native american words that can now be used to re-claim it. prophecy, in howe's lexicon, is re-vision in the sense that it both reaches forward and back; her quotation from john cotton in _singularities_ is appropriate: "*prophesie is historie antedated; / and history is postdated prophesie*" (4). of the word, she writes in a more direct address from poet to reader than she is usually wont to make, in a section of the "the nonconformist's manual" that begins with the poet's address to her reader as a "confessor" (23): reader i do not wish to hide in you to hide from you it is the word to whom she turns true submission and subjection (ncm 30) the "she" who is pulled from the "he" of tradition here refers to any and all women who have chosen not to conform--from the puritans to howe herself. [7] that this operation is not necessarily "true" to history does not bother howe, who rather cannily asserts in an interview with edward foster (editor of _talisman_ ) reprinted in the new wesleyan book, that "poets aren't reliable. but poetry may be. i don't think you can divorce poetry from history and culture. the photographs of children during the war in europe . . . prevented me from ever being able to believe history is only a series of justifications or that tragedy and savagery can be theorized away" (163-4). but howe, who here insists that poetry and culture cannot be divorced, elsewhere makes pronouncements to the contrary. in _my emily dickinson_, for example, while defending dickinson's "illogical" syntax against the normalizing force of the "two feminist scholars," gilbert and gubar, howe asserts that "there is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. the conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology" (13). i am reminded, perhaps in spite of myself, of the words of one of the members of run dmc quoted recently in _the new york times_; rap, he claimed, is poetry, and therefore has no effect on the world. howe's transcendent claim, along with another anti-worldly statement against the power of "mammon," where she (and/or dickinson) asserts that she must "renounce attachment to friends and worldly accomplishment" (49), resemble similar polemics by gertrude stein. yet stein was no advocate of poems "including history," as was another of howe's forerunners, ezra pound. rather, stein more resembles john ashbery or charles bernstein, poets for whom history (in their poems, at least) is more immediately a sequence of syllables than of political events. [8] thus, even as she attempts to give voices to those who were silenced by official histories, she claims also to get to a point past gender and past politics. it seems to me that, while each of these goals is admirable in and of itself, her conflation of them undermines each ambition. despite her brilliant operation on hope atherton, and her vociferous attempts to reclaim dickinson from the clutches of what she sees as a male-dominated editorial conspiracy, howe thinks of poetry as an art that breaks beyond the confines of gender politics. as she writes toward the end of her book on dickinson: "poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. poetry is redemption from pessimism. poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of night's frame" (138). in these amazing sentences howe succeeds in troping no one so much as herself; where she had argued that dickinson's "gun" (from the poem that begins, "my life it had stood--a loaded gun") rightly belonged in the history of the american frontier, a claim that historicizes dickinson's work in a valuable and provocative way, she now claims for the gun a part in the allegory of a pilgrimage into the capitalized "night" that no longer seems especially american, or especially historical. the "allegorical pilgrim" is not history, but history's idea of itself. [9] for better or for worse, then, howe is less a historical poet than a religious one; like the puritans with whom she identifies, she sees american history running parallel to a religious text. the puritans give howe historical force, though one wonders if their metaphors haven't lost some of their currency in our secular age. it seems telling that the best purveyors of these metaphors in the last decade have been ronald reagan and mario cuomo, hardly our finest spiritual guides. howe is that curious combination, a deeply spiritual iconoclast, one who seeks to replace a set of icons not with a heap of broken images, but with a new set of icons, inaugurated through her use of the page of words as a visual artifact. thus, writing of mary magdalene and the poet in "the nonconformist's memorial": i wander about as an exile as a body does a shadow a notion of split reference if in silence hidden by darkness there must be a ghost iconic theory of metaphor a sound and perfect voice its hiding is understood reader i do not wish to hide in you to hide from you it is the word to whom she turns true submission and subjection [10] her vision of writing (and editing) is of a spiritual and loving act. "if history is a record of survivors," she writes in "incloser" (previously published in _pmc_), "poetry [with a capital p] shelters other voices" (_birth-mark_ 47). or, again allegorizing poetry as "poetry": "in the precinct of poetry, a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark, silence, or sound volatizes an inner law of form--moves on a rigorous line" (145). this sentence sounds suspiciously old formalist; the other sheltered voices may obey nothing more than "an inner law of form" that is purely poetic. parts of words and phenomena of prosody "form a ladder to an outside state outside of states. rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling" (46). thus the work of an editor is to get past (or before) the words themselves, a task that one might see as dangerously close to the editorial farce featured so prominently in thomas pynchon's _the crying of lot 49_. in her introduction to the second section of _the nonconformist's manual_, "a bibliography of the king's book or, eikon basilike," she writes: a bibliography is "the history, identification or analytical and systematic description or classification of writings or publications considered as material objects." can we ever really discover the original text? was there ever an original poem? what is a pure text invented by an author? is such a conception possible? only by going back to the pre-scriptive level of thought process can "authorial intention" finally be located, and then the material object has become immaterial. (50) [11] in this long poem, howe obviates the issue by writing about--and off of--a text whose authenticity is in doubt: "the _eikon basilike_ is a puzzle. it may be a collection of meditations written by a ghostly king; it may be a forged collection of meditations gathered by a ghostwriter who was a presbyterian, a bishop, a plagiarizer, and a forger" (49). in other words, the answers to her seemingly rhetorical questions, above, are all pronounced in the negative. and yet, in a move typical of howe and characteristic of her risk-taking as a writer, one senses the desire that there be an original text, an original poem, and that she--as editor *and* reviser--be permitted access to "authorial intention," hence the pre-scriptive level of thought, a level that precedes proscription. her work on dickinson is full testimony to this desire on her part; as she tells foster, "that's what i wanted to do in _my emily dickinson_. . . not just to write a tribute but to meet her in the tribute. and that's a kind of fusion." [12] howe's central figures in the new book of poems are not silenced women, as they were in _singularities_, but male writers who have been either silenced or marginalized. in her newest essays and poems howe attempts to rewrite the american renaissance by adapting marginal texts by male writers; melville's marginalia form an ironic centerpiece to her book. melville is celebrated as the author of that most silent of american heroes, bartleby the scrivener, who was himself something of an editor of texts, if only in his refusal to copy them. that this renovation is at once personal and historical becomes clear in howe's autobiographical introduction to the essays, and in the discussion with foster that forms a kind of postlude to the book. the american renaissance, it seems, was a personal concern of howe's family, one of whose friends was f.o. matthiesson--whose famous book might be retitled, following howe, as _my american renaissance_. [13] not only is she taking on her literary fathers in her ongoing poetic and editorial project, but also her own father, who was at once her scout and her "encloser." her father, who wrote a history of american law entitled _the garden and the wilderness_, "said it would be trespassing" if his daughter susan entered the stacks of widener library (the name of which comes to resemble a howe pun) at harvard, where he was a professor. so books became her wilderness; "thoreau said, in an essay called 'walking,' that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. what is forbidden is wild. the stacks of widener library and of all great libraries in the world are still the wild to me" (18). in becoming what she calls a "library cormorant," she is at once her father's imitator and his reviser. the texts that were for him authentic appear to her to be tissued with silences, gaps; harvard was, in her view, a false community of scholars. "i don't want to be so hard on it because these were honorable scholars, careful researchers, and this was their profession, and they felt it was a calling. but you see, it *was* false if you were a girl or a woman who was not content to be considered second-rate" (159). so she becomes her father's mother, assumes like "hope," a formerly masculine role that has been rewritten in the "feminine" mode. [14] the baroque complexities of her literary relationship to her father (and by extension her fathers) are reproduced in "melville's marginalia," a "poem" probably better described as a combination of criticism and poetry, one that covers almost 70 pages. in this work howe attempts not just to make melville more central to her project, by making him less central to the american renaissance as it was understood by f.o. matthiesson; she also juxtaposes the melville material with a chronology of the life of the irish writer james clarence mangan, only to reach a rather forced conclusion that mangan was the source for bartleby. [15] howe furthermore investigates melville's attitude toward women as shown through his marginalia, and its erasures. her method resembles that found in her long work of criticism and poetry, _my emily dickinson_, where she argues by juxtaposing texts. this mode of argument, like her mode of writing poetry, trusts the reader to do the work of narrating connections; it also suggests as yet untapped links between american and british literature. (howe's sections on bronte's and george eliot's influences on dickinson are especially fine.) both the arguments and the ways of working them out strike me as less *necessary* and hence less effective in the work on melville. howe's passion for melville and for mangan are less evident than her passion for dickinson, perhaps because they seem so much more purely academic, despite the personal investment we learn about in her interview. and, where howe carried her work on dickinson over into her book _singularities_, which is almost a work of poetic ventriloquism (dickinson writing through howe), her work on melville has more the aura of exercise than passion. she writes of melville without writing as melville, in other words. [16] howe writes of her purpose and her method: "names who are strangers out of bounds of the bound margin: i thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others" (92). this she does, using melville's margins as she used dickinson's alternate words as a site for her own work. she may hope, with this new foray into american literature, to achieve the "genderlessness" that is at once a promise and a problem in her work. but if that is, indeed, what she does, she does it better in writing from a gendered perspective such as dickinson's. gender, like place, is for howe a strength; as she tells foster: "trust the place to form the voice," as she remarks on the fact that the differences between dickinson and melville may spring from their origins on opposite sides of the connecticut river. in this instance, she has not trusted the gender (as a placeless place) to form the voice. she has tried too hard to achieve the "transcendence" that is the problematic aim of her work; as a result, "melville's marginalia" is a better example of howe's technique than of her vision. [17] the strongest poem in the book, and the one that argues most passionately for the kind of poetry howe writes, is "the nonconformist's memorial," part biblical rewrite, part examination of the relationship between typology and typography, and partial autobiography. here howe takes on "the gospel according to st. john," arguing against its narrative cohesion and all that that means ideologically; hence the following quotation, which obliges the reader to perform manual labor: as if all history were a progress she was coming to anoint him [this is written upside-down] a single thread of narrative headstrong anarchy thoughts [again upside-down] actual world nothing ideal in peter she is nameless [upside-down] the nets were not torn the gospel did not grasp (7) thus is the feminine rendered upside-down--as the threatening "headstrong anarchy thoughts"--as if to counter the "single" and coherent "thread of narrative" found in the gospels. the poetic net *is* torn here, but the ensuing chaos is not an evil but a good, in the sense that informational entropy is good. that is, the woman's voice, upside-down as it is, does appear, and shows up (quite literally) the masculine voice, for all its typographical certainty about itself. woman is figured as an impasse to narrative, but this impasse does not create incoherence so much as re-coherence. many of howe's most interesting pages mimic chaos, while achieving a rigorous coherence of their own. i do not entirely believe her assertion that "if it [_the bibliography of the king's book_] was impossible to print, that didn't matter. because it's about impossibility anyway. about the impossibility of putting in print what the mind really sees and the impossibility of finding the original in a bibliography" (175). a page like this one--hardly her most radical in this vein--forces an old impossibility, that of woman's speech, into possibility. that she pushes her reading of this impossibility into metaphysics is, as i've been indicating, typical of her ambition. it may also undermine her historical claims by reinvesting the poem and the poet in an old metaphysics, one that keeps everyone--but especially women--silent. while i can envision a new history, as i read howe, i cannot so easily see a new transcendence. [18] but metaphysics or not, howe incorporates the puritan background that is her historical strength into the poem. as an example of the way she combines history and textuality, consider the following lines: the act of uniformity ejected her and informers at her heels citations remain abbreviated often a shortcut stands for chapter. the act of uniformity, which forced "nonconformists" to leave england for america, was passed by the church of england in 1662. in a manner reminiscent of language poetry, howe writes as if the act itself is actor, not those who wrote it. but her puns are nothing if not controlled, and hence unlike the spontaneous, manic puns of charles bernstein, for example. she plays on the double-meanings of "citation" and "chapter," words that refer not simply to books, but also to legal and religious matters. (what appears in books, in other words, becomes our way of thinking, our syntax.) thus politics and language are fused, and the nonconformist must choose exile not only in fact, but also in print--hence howe's nonconformist setting of type so that the visual shape of the page is as important as the words' meaning. the lines, "often a shortcut / stands for chapter," provide a micropoetics to howe's work, in which she provides the shortcut, the reader chapter--and verse. works cited howe, susan. _my emily dickinson_. berkeley: north atlantic books, 1985. ---. _singularities_. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press, 1990. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------schultz, 'postmodern promos', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-schultz-postmodern.txt postmodern promos by susan m. schultz <schultz@uhccvm.uhcc.hawaii.edu> department of english university of hawaii-manoa _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by susan m. schultz, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. review of: bernstein, charles. _a poetics_. cambridge: harvard up, 1992. perloff, marjorie. _radical artifice: writing poetry in the age of media_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1991. [1] archibald macleish declared, "a poem should not mean but be," but of course he didn't mean it. macleish's poems meant perhaps too much, and sang too little, to submit to his definition. marianne moore wrote of a poet's ability to create imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and so to create being out of meaning. more than any of the other moderns, hart crane self-consciously created poetry as medium and wanted language to spring us to somewhere beyond language. this unmediated medium remained, however problematically, "natural"; the poem was an organism that grew on its own; it was the poet's truly born child. [2] crane incorporated advertising language into his myth in "the river" section of _the bridge_ as if pre-packaged language could also be used as a springboard to a non-linguistic realm. but what happens when the order of transmission is reversed, when advertising copy coopts poetry, when the medium becomes the media, when the only poetry that most people encounter comes in the guise of slogans like "i wanna be like mike" (which refers us to a basketball player and culture hero whose very style is "poetic")? in this contemporary example, of course, advertising language is so strong that it has the ability to change the names by which we know our heroes--no one though of michael jordan as "mike" until gatorade (not, unfortunately, the company with the sight-rhyme, "nike") needed to transform the hero to make him rhyme, make him even more friendly (is it possible?) to consumer culture. [3] marjorie perloff's provocative claim in _radical artifice_ is that advertising language is that of modernist poetry; advertising's tenets were not laid down so much by madison avenue as by ezra pound. "exact treatment of the thing, accuracy of presentation, precise definition--these poundian principles have now been transferred to the realm of copywriting" (94), she argues (and i wonder it we might not find more irony still in the word itself, "copy write"; "copy right"; "copyright"). perloff, ever an exact and able close-reader, takes the following billboard message in hand to show that, "as the 'look' of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur" (100): o. r. lumpkin. body builders. fenders straightened. wrecks our special ty. we take the dent out of accident. "surely," she enjoins, pointing to the lineation of this "free verse" bit of advertising, with its clever wordplay and enjambment, "the next time we have an accident, this memorable punning will stick in our minds and draw us to o. r. lumpkin rather than some other body shop" (100). this "standard poem" might well be printed in _the new yorker_ or _poetry_ or _american poetry review_ (the latter with a photo of mr. lumpkin himself, no doubt). the punning begins, of course, with mr. lumpkin, who takes our lumps and makes them right again. [4] advertising's power, of course, lies in its simulation of authenticity; the potential consumer may know that the american express card ads that show the familial love between father and daughter are "artificial," and still wipe tears from her eyes. hence dan quayle's insistence that television should show us a more authentic version of ourselves. and so authenticity becomes a form of nostalgia. crucial to this sense of authenticity, perloff would claim, is its presentation--as in the lumpkin ad--through the medium of free verse, which we think of as "natural" and unmediated through the artifice of traditional forms. "free verse = freedom; open form = open mind, open heart: for almost half a century," writes perloff, "these equations have been accepted as axiomatic, the corollary of what has come to be called, with respect to poetic language, the 'natural look.'" i suspect that she means us to hear the conflation of poetic language with hairstyle, and the attendant confusion between image and "self," whatever that is; perloff's persistent attacks on the univocal lyric over the past ten years or so are based on a profound distrust of the "self" created through it. she writes: "most contemporary writing that currently passes by the name of 'poetry' belongs in this category which [jed] rasula wittily calls psi, for 'poetry systems incorporated, a subsidiary to data management systems.' the business of this particular corporation is to produce the specialty item known as 'the self,' and it is readily available in popular magazines and at chain bookstores" (19). need one add that there is a magazine of that name: _self_? [5] while modernists worked from a dualist model that set in tension "the image and the real," and believed that one was related to the other, postmodernists, according to perloff, see that relationship replaced by one "between the word and the image" or between "the simulacrum and its other" (92). in this new poetry, the image itself is deconstructed, because after all, who can trust advertising to tell us the truth about ourselves, whoever those selves are? if advertising has become our mirror, then the poet's goal is to distort that mirror in such a way that we see the inherent distortion in images--reflection must give way to refraction, deflection. [6] so we abandon the imagist image and return to language, but language understood in a new way, not as mediator but as medium (in the material, not the psychic, sense). where the modern imagist free verse poet would write the lumpkin ad as it appears above (and as the ads flash by in crane's "the river"), the postmodernist poet would begin not from the image of a wreck, and the message that the wreck would be fixed, but from the words used to convey that message--whose real import is mercantile. for the language of advertising, above all, sells. the postmodernist poet might play on the name o. r. lumpkin, its relation to lumps and kin and lumpenproletariat, and in so doing, unmessage the message by making the medium the subject. it bears quoting the three ways in which perloff sees postmodern poets deconstructing the image: (1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny. . . . (2) the image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by the word as image, but concern with morphology and the visualization of the word's constituent parts: this is the mode of concrete poetry[.] (3) image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. "making strange" now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse of the media. . . . (78) [7] the real strength of perloff's book is in the narrative it elaborates as a way to understand the need for language poetry in a now unfolding literary history. thus, "[i]f american poets today are unlikely to write passionate love poems or odes to skylarks or to the pacific ocean, it is not because people don't fall in love or go birdwatching or because the view of the pacific from, say, big sur doesn't continue to be breathtaking, but because the electronic network that governs communication provides us with the sense that others--too many others--are feeling the same way" (202-3). in other words, poems about great vistas can already be found--either in the _norton anthology_ (see keats) or, in their fallen form, in a hallmark shop. this passage, which expresses perloff's yearning for a unique and unsullied perspective on (past) nature, sounds to my ear transcendentalist in its idealistic paranoia, its yearning for, yes, authenticity. perloff's defense, like whitman's, would be to celebrate self-contradiction, knowing that nothing else is possible. like her allies the language poets, perloff would claim with gertrude stein that repetition is actually insistence, and that to sound the transcendentalist note in the 1990s is to say something new. yet it's hard for her to do this without somehow worshipping the unsullied and autochthonous "self" that she so easily dismisses in rear-guard free verse poetry. [8] charles bernstein and ron silliman and other of the language group of poet-critics agree with perloff on this- as on most--points; our particular way of seeing such a vista has been pre-determined, so the argument goes, precisely by the norton (at best) and by hallmark (at worst) or by the more likely (con)fusion of the two. this way of seeing insures that we do conform with others, also programmed to buy hallmark cards and do other good deeds for capitalism; the only way to be a good emersonian these days is to de-form the language, which is also to reform it. as bernstein says it (he, too, sounding a lot like someone who has found the original waldo amid a crowd of faces): "%poetry is aversion of conformity% in the pursuit of new forms, or can be" (1); and "i care most about poetry that disrupts business as usual, including literary business: i care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated" (2). these claims are not, in and of themselves, radical. the language poets' means of acting on these claims are more radical, but their attempt to create once against a language that has not been coopted by the media, an un-transparency that is transparent, puts them squarely in the line of american idealists that includes emerson and gertrude stein. their quest for originality, a writing free of all quotation, is at once as admirable and quixotic as was emerson's. [9] bernstein is perhaps the most intelligent and most consistently interesting of contemporary thinkers on poetry and poetics; he is also the most self-contradictory. his work bears the kind of confused (nay, panicked) attention that emerson's does; like perloff, his argument against the romantic and modernist image owes perhaps too much to the first american romantic. he is at once aesthete (he adores swinburne and wilde) and proto-marxist; purveyor of %claritas% and %obscuritas%; deconstructionist and fetishist of the word; preacher and skeptic; fiction-writer and disseminator of truths--the train could go on, derailing itself as it goes. this is, of course, part of bernstein's world view; his is a vision that tries to leave the binary behind (by containing multitudes), and engage in the polymorphous multiplicity of things. yet i wonder if many of these contradictions are not, in fact, incompatible; bernstein's swinburnian poems seem somehow at odds with the needs of a leftist politics, for example. yet bernstein's prose is, for the most part, clear; he would pass a university course in argumentative writing. it is far clearer than his poetry, and serves (ironically) to advertise the poetry by explaining its purpose, if not its content. in fact, the content of the poems seems to me to be the elaboration of the prose, as if poetry were a "proof text," rather than the proper subject of our so-called science. [10] bernstein's claims for poetry are in many ways even stronger than perloff's, although he begins from the same starting blocks with (an all-too-easy?) attack on advertising culture, arguing that poets should display a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats like so many tablespoons of pepto bismol, short respite from the gas and the diarrhea that are the surest signs that harsh and uncontainable reality hasn't vanished but has only been removed from public discussion. (3) bernstein replaces perloff's creators of false "selves" with the purveyors of what he calls "official verse culture." that these are the purveyors of a political, as well as a poetic, message bernstein makes clear in his argument that the notion that "we can 'all' speak to one another in the universal voice of history" is a "disease." his heroes, then, are poets who work "in opposition to the dominant strains of american culture" (6). [11] these dominant strains, for bernstein as for perloff, are evidenced in the strains of the american lyre. but where perloff's poetic heroes are those who replace "form" with "artifice"--who replace sonnets with numerically generated bits of language that have the virtues of formalism without any of the taint (and what a taint there is!), bernstein erases the differences between all forms of writing: if there's a temptation to read the long essay-in-verse ("artifice of absorption"), which follows these opening notes, as prose, i hope there will be an equally strong temptation to read the succeeding prose as if it were poetry. (3) whether prose or poetry, his writing is meant to be taken as fiction; in a steinian way he writes, "when _content's dream_ was published i wanted that to be classified as 'essays/fiction.' people sometimes ask me if i'm interested in writing a novel. i say, well, i did, that's it" (151). [12] while bernstein persuades me that the categories by which we write and read literature no longer do us much good, it seem to me that he himself holds to these categories, and needs to hold to them to make his argument fly. i find "artifice of absorption" the most compelling piece in _a poetics_--bernstein's verse "essay on poetry," as it were. for here is an essay-poem that contains the virtues of the essay form (it is readable, cogent) and of the poem (it relies on enjambment for its rhythm and drama- the same kinds of enjambments, i might add, that make poets such as amy clampitt such easy targets for critics such as perloff). bernstein begins from the question that springs "naturally" from his work as a poet-critic (or poet-poet or critic-critic); in so doing, he refines perloff's discussion of "artifice": a %poetic reading% can be given to any piece of writing; a "poem" may be understood as writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with, proactive--rather than reactive--styles of reading. "artifice" is a measure of a poem's intractability to being read as the sum of its devices & subject matters. (9) for bernstein, artifice is not so much a new kind of form, as it is for perloff, as a way of writing that foregrounds technical devices over and above "content" and "meaning." to paraphrase bernstein's discussion of "voice" in the _language book_, "content" is but one possibility for poetry. but "content" and "meaning" are not the ends of poetry, just more means; they are not the same thing, either, for "content never equals meaning" (10). artifice is, according to bernstein's jargon, non-absorptive; one cannot "get lost" in a language poem the way one can get lost in a harlequin romance--but the reader is also not in danger of losing her soul to the particular demands made on it by the harlequin (which are fundamentally conservative, despite--or because of--the soft porn). and, as bernstein sees it, much contemporary american poetry is based on simplistic notions of absorption through unity, such as those sometimes put forward by ginsberg (who as his work shows knows better, but who has made an ideological commitment to such simplicity)." (38) [13] bernstein places himself characteristically at both ends of his artificial dualism: in my poems, i frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable elements, digressions & interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal to create a more powerful ("souped-up") absorption than possible with traditional, & blander, absorptive techniques. (52-3) he acknowledges that "[t]his is a / precarious road" that makes the reader more conscious of technique than of experience, but i wonder if bernstein believes in the currency of terms like "experience." after reading bernstein's work over an extended period, the world of language becomes the world, always threatening/promising to dissolve into a chaos of no-definition. finally, though, bernstein proposes a kind of reading that is rather pragmatically critical, even as it is creative. as perloff points out toward the beginning of _radical artifice_ (and this is one of its least interesting moments), "not only does the boundary between 'verse' and 'prose' break down but also the boundary between 'creator' and 'critic'" (17). [14] like stein's language, bernstein's is always "foreign"--alien, confusing, and above all, never sacred. bernstein's most recent book of poems, _rough trades_, must be read in this way, as a celebration and cerebration of language in and for itself, and as an exercise in non-absorptiveness that is meant to refashion prevailing world political views. in the contradiction between these two purposes lies an abyss; bernstein seems at times too much like a new critic who attempts to change the world by ignoring it. but bernstein, however much he seems to be the pope (alexander, that is) of the postmodern, means to undress us of our layers of expression in order that our means of expression can clothe us in new (and utopian) possibilities. he and perloff, in their complementary assaults on the common-places of the american language at this fin-de-siecle, provoke us to look past the image by way of the (small-w) word, and to re-invest our words with whatever ideals we have left. the poetry that they advertise is not written in a "common" language, but in one that we cannot yet think in, non-absorptive to the point of being non-sensical. it %may% get us to another world. but then again, that's a soap opera. morrison, 'hitchcock: the industry', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-morrison-hitchcock.txt hitchcock: the industry by james morrison department of english north carolina state university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by james morrison, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. kapsis, robert e. _hitchock: the making of a reputation_. chicago: university of chicago press, 1992. [1] after more than twenty years, if we date its inception at the publication of robin wood's _hitchcock's films_ (1965), the hitchcock industry is still burgeoning. on and on they come in unstoppable waves, these dense treatises on the master's high vernacular or low comedy, on films re-released or securely canonized. even if we dismiss those books that are patently "popular," like donald spoto's biography, or those that give hitchcock only a sustained sidelong glance, like slavoj zizek's _looking awry_, we are still left to contend with some two dozen ample volumes--this in the field of film studies that is itself barely twenty years old. the latest spasm of production alone has yielded at least three books, each from a university press: stefan sharff's on _hitchcock's high vernacular_ from columbia, thomas leitch's _find the director_ from georgia, and now kapsis's volume from chicago. what this largely academic enterprise lacks in the glittery trappings of, say, the mass-market malcolm-x-drive--no hitchcock caps as yet, no hitchcock breakfast cereal--it makes up for with a certain scholarly self-consciousness. one is not surprised, then, to see at last a book about the industry itself. [2] kapsis's thesis is simple: the evolution of hitchcock's reputation since the late fifties has been intricately connected to general permutations in film aesthetics during the same period. the first chapter lays the study's theoretical groundwork by adapting the sociologist harold becker's concept of "art-worlds" to the field of film. chapters two through five trace hithcock's reputation from its initial phases, where hitchcock is understood as "mere entertainer" or "master of suspense," through the efforts of hithcock and his partisans to reshape his reputation into that of a "serious artist," culminating in the director's canonization in academe. final chapters consider the effect of the "hithcock legacy" on the thriller genre itself as well as on the career of brian de palma, then compare the making of hitchcock's reputation to that of the reputations of hawks, capra, lang, clint eastwood, and, in the "art-world" of music, vladimir horowitz. the particular strategies kapsis's work values are not close-analysis or theoretical expansiveness (nor the rhetorical flourishes that usually accompany them) but comprehensive scrutiny and empirical doggedness. these last his work achieves, and the attendant clarity of his style would be unimpeachable if clarity were an end in itself, if relentless comprehensiveness guaranteed genuine comprehension. clearly, the book's subject has the potential to bring into focus key issues in contemporary film studies, from much-debated ones like the status of the *auteur* to little discussed ones like the process of canon formation. but in spite of the value of some of its research, the book misses its most important opportunities. [3] the first problem is one of methodology. kapsis negotiates becker's conception of the "art-world" with a version of reception theory he traces from jauss through wendy griswold's work. his first key assumption, then, derived from becker, is that cultural products "are influenced by or imbedded in the immediate organizational, legal, and economic environments in which they are produced" (5); his second is that "'meaning' is produced or 'fabricated' by the interaction between reader and text" (8). in spite of the earnest conviction of these observations, neither is likely to strike occupants of the film-studies trenches as urgent news from the battle-front. what may be novel, though, is the sense in which kapsis intends his inflections. in the first quotation, for example, "immediate" is the operative word, and refers not just to studios or audiences as "environments," but even *more* "immediately," to literal facets of production--e.g., conversations on the set during filming. moreover, the "meaning" that gets produced, through whatever means, is seen to be a product of films' embeddedness in *these* environments. thus, elements of hitchcock's style that other critics have more conventionally seen as modernist gestures or personal insignia are conceived as hithcock's "practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics" (25). a less romanticized vision of the auteur than that implied here is hard to imagine; but what's an "unusual shot"? who are the "serious critics," and how do they get to be "more" serious than the others? [4] in registering such points, i mean to suggest that the seemingly "progressive" aspects of kapsis's methodology are built upon an extremely traditional base and become, therefore, themselves questionable. in spite of the presumed emphasis on shifting patterns of reception, kapsis begins with a survey of hitchcock's career that would be perfectly at home in any coffee-table picture-book: "both [_rope_ and _under capricorn_] exploited technical means at the expense of narrative flow and neither one generated much business. it would seem that hitchcock had temporarily lost touch with his audience" (25). in a study that claims to examine changing critical assumptions, it is not beside the point to ask what a "narrative flow" is, how "technical means" can disrupt it, and what this might have to do with audience response. in any case, the usual version of audience response to these films is that audiences found the first bombastic and the second dull. should a current study simply reproduce this received narrative? more to the point: the "technical means" hitchcock is exploiting in these films involve historically unprecedented play with the long-take sequence-shot. indeed, promotion for the films emphasized the sequence-shot and the moving camera as novelties to draw audiences--"come see ingrid bergman in the longest take in movie history!"--who *still* found the films bombastic and dull. the failure of this effort to manipulate reception complicates kapsis's claim that such efforts began late in hitchcock's work. more generally, his unreflective reproduction of standard surveys of hitchcock's career markedly undermines his later attempts to examine the assumptions on which such surveys might be based. [5] in fact, although kapsis approvingly quotes griswold to the effect that a cultural object "has no meaning independent of its being experienced" (9), he is prone to categorical assertions about the nature of certain films of hitchcock. for example, he sees _psycho_ and _vertigo_ as "essentially anti-romances, violating many of the conventions and rules that were associated with the hithcock thriller in the late fifties" (56) and later finds that lesley brill "correctly" (56) makes the same claim in _the hitchcock romance_ (princeton 1988). if the purpose of the study as a whole is to show how "changes in critical discourse over the past few decades have shaped the 'meaning' of hitchcock's works" (122), kapsis's own analyses are perhaps obliged to present themselves as interpretive acts that have similarly been shaped by prior discourses. yet the normativity of his point here is startling in the context of his presumed methodology. here the films are assumed to have certain attributes that audiences simply did not welcome; or, elsewhere, particular films simply *were* poor and were rightly recognized as such by audiences; or else particular films were *really* one thing but were incorrectly perceived by audiences as something else; and so on. in this instance, in any case, it seems clear enough that the "essential" quality kapsis discovers in these films is to be distinguished from the provisional "meanings" other critics locate there. [6] if brill is "correct" to find patterns of romance at the foundation of hitchcock's work, robin wood is apparently quite wrong to see _marnie_ as a fully-realized masterpiece (wood's category, not mine) instead of as the shoddy bag of goods most critics had earlier seen. initial reviews of this film which kapsis sees as the turing point in hitchcock's reputation history emphasized what they claimed was its technical ineptitude--ugly back-projection, awkward red-suffusions of the image, clumsy zoom-shots. wood's landmark revaluation of the film sees these elements as part of a complex design. but kapsis, whose posture is ordinarily one of professorial equanimity, will have none of it. presenting wood as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist (and missing thereby wood's inheritance from the work of f. r. leavis), kapsis lengthily quotes wood's argument and then, rather than engage it, blusters in an unwittingly comic rehearsal of thirty-year-old misconceptions of auteurism, "wood's point once again is that hitchcock can really do no wrong" (128). in fact, wood's point is that the devices work in his analysis of the film and that they are part of hitchcock's german expressionist heritage but are now perceived as anachronistic by popular audiences. in other words, wood's point is more attuned to shifts in viewers' assumptions about film style than is kapsis's inarticulate rejection of it. more to the point, technical "deficiencies" are in no way isolated to _marnie_ in hitchcock's work. _the lady vanishes_, for example, makes absurdly obvious use of miniatures and _notorious_ contains examples of back-projection at least as obtrusive as any in _marnie_. given these facts and kapsis's thesis, the question he should be asking is why these "deficiencies" became an issue in the reception of _marnie_ when they did not in the reception of the earlier films. [7] instead, kapsis treats the reader to a protracted examination of the film's production file, which body of knowledge "simply fails to support" (131) wood's argument. according to the production files, as kapsis reads them, it seems hitchcock "sought external reality but technical mishaps ensued" (129). in turn, this information "points to how the auteur critics' expectations of finding artistic purpose and consistency in the works of their favorite auteur directions [sic] could lead to exaggerated claims about a film's implicit meanings" (129). it is worth noting that wood himself deals explicitly with such critical issues at the outset of his study, albeit in a fairly standard new critical way: "what concerns (or should concern) the critic is not what a film is 'really intended' to be, but what it actually *is*" (_hitchcock's films_ 13). wood even goes on to quote lawrence's "never trust the teller--trust the tale," an epigram in which, to judge from the fact that he first misquotes it then wrongly attributes it to joseph conrad, kapsis himself does not put much stock. in the context kapsis had appeared to be trying to establish, in any case, the notion of an "erroneous" (130) reading of a text is a troubling one. wood's valuation of organic coherence is here simply opposed to kapsis's modulated empiricism where the real issue had formerly seemed to be the social, aesthetic or other causes of such interpretive differences. for kapsis, the issue is (as usual) simple: "wood's polemical agenda led him astray" (130). similarly, treating feminist reinterpretations of _marnie_, kapsis hopes to determine which are "most faithful to the _marnie_ text" (139), obviously contradicting his earlier presumption that meaning is contingent on reception. [8] kapsis's treatment of auteurism, in general, further illuminates methodological problems in his study. his version of auteurism is monolithic and simplified, and he posits auteurism as both cause and effect in the making of hitchcock's reputation. perhaps assuming (wrongly, if so) that the implications of auteur theory have been played out fully in film studies, kapsis treats the topic at its basic level by implication, and his references to it are dispersed broadly across the text. one of the results of this is an elementary form of repetition characteristic of kapsis's style. each time he mentions auteurism, he does so as if introducing the topic but, at the same time, as if it had already been adequately explicated. hitchcock's reputation as a "serious artist" is strengthened "during the 1970s when the auteur theory dominated film studies" (122); the growing pedigree of horror movies is "a trend traceable to the rise of auteur theory in the late 1960s" (162); it was "during the early sixties that . . . auteur critics actively sought to elevate hitchcock's stature" (216); hitchcock's standing "improved in the sixties as the auteur theory came to dominate both journalistic and academic discourse in the cinema" (228); and so on. [9] this atomization of the topic makes it nearly impossible to extrapolate from the argument a clear view of what kapsis thinks auteurism is, but in any case he gives no sense of the roots of auteurism in structuralism, of the crucial debates among early auteurists or of its complex evolution, or indeed of the very aesthetic of auteur theory. kapsis's schematic conception of auteur theory consists of two elements. first, "according to these critics, the individual 'auteur' was the sole source of a film's meaning: the artist's personal vision transcended 'reality,' 'history,' and 'society'" (224-25). second, in "advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored" (216). the first of these claims is redolent of a popular take on auteurism, deriving from a reading not so much of bazin, rivette, chabrol and rohmer or godard (to say nothing of levi-strauss!) but of pauline kael. in fact, cine structuralism (as it was sometimes called in the seventies) insists on the *impossibility* of "transcending" "history" and so on; it is, indeed, *because* all forms of human communication are seen in this model as rigidly controlled by predetermined structures that the auteurists find it possible to attend in the first place to genre films, which in this context are no more "formulaic" and therefore no less "serious" than any other predetermining structure. yet so unaware does kapsis seem of the crucial connection between auteurism and structuralism that he regards genre criticism as *opposed* to auteurism rather than as a crucial component of it: "the auteur viewpoint rather than a genre orientation framed much of the critical discourse on _topaz_" (105). if auteur theory means nothing more than seeing "the director as a major source of meaning" (228), then american film criticism has been auteurist from its inception to the present. [10] kapsis's conception of the auteurist canon, or "pantheon," is even more disturbing because of its implications for his concpetion of canonicity itself in the project as a whole. for kapsis, taste seems to be a purely whimsical phenomenon. thus, according to kapsis, the first generation of auteurists slap together an apparently arbitrary "pantheon" while the next generation simply "countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing" (217)--with no effort made to account for or even discuss the choices. *why* are "certain directors" singled out for "special praise"? because they are auteurs. how do we know they are auteurs? because they have been singled out. favoring hitchcock, hawks, ford, lang, and welles, kapsis tells us, the auteurists "dismissed as secondor third-rate" huston, wyler, stevens, zinneman, and wilder. kapsis is partially right to suggest that the first group is valued because "despite having worked within the old hollywood studio system, [they] had somehow managed to retain in their work a personal vision" (217). however, he does not even attempt to account for the "dismissal" of the others (nor to prove that dismissal, especially pertinent in the case of wyler); nor indeed *could* he do so in the terms of his simplified account of auteurism. the auteurist dismissal of huston, for example, is predicated on structuralist assumptions. because they see huston as naively believing he *can* "transcend" genre, by among other ways adapting idiosyncratic literary texts to film, the auteurists reject him. [11] kapsis's work yields no mechanism by which to examine the social or aesthetic causes of cultural change. he is interested only in the *effect* of cultural change (and even that in only a simple way), and thus does not ask, as he observes shifts in hitchcock's reputation, how and why what pierre bourdieu would call the rearrangement of cultural capital takes place. bourdieu's monumental work _distinction_ provides what are currently the definitive ways of discussing the sociology of cultural value, and bourdieu's notion of cultural capital and its relation to social capital is one kapsis might profitably have engaged, especially given kapsis's intent to inflect film studies with modes of thought from sociology. specifically, bourdieu argues that the "bourgeois" aesthetic is to be distinguished from the "popular" aesthetic by way of the latter's demand for participatory interaction and the former's distanciation, its separation from ordinary, non-aesthetic dispositions. such a distinction bears obvious relevance to a discussion of a mass entertainer's being co-opted by or crossing over into "serious" art, but kapsis proceeds as if such distinctions were self-evident. with no such framework in which to function, then, repeated references to texts that "straddled the line between popular genre movies and films with a more elitist intent" (246) can only seem windy and vacant. [12] the author's conception of "reputation" itself is impoverished by inattentiveness to-paraphrasing bourdieu--modes of appropriation of art-works *across* cultural strata. kapsis's study uses as its chief evidence journalistic reviews and critical articles, with occasional references to box-office figures. much work in reception theory, of course, challenges the validity of such evidence as a gauge of a film's reception, and many of the most interesting studies have relied on other kinds of evidence, such as advertising, non-critical journalism, letters to editors from "average" citizens, or public-relations documents. (janet staiger's _interpreting films_ [princeton 1992] will serve as a model in reception studies for years to come.) arguing that hitchcock's reputation is reshaped from that of professional ghoul to that of "serious artist," kapsis begs key questions about levels of culture: who says when an artist is "serious"? once hitchcock is canonized, is his work then unavailable to popular responses? in kapsis's version, once the auteurists lay claim on hitchcock, his days as a "mere entertainer" are over. but his simultaneous canonization in blockbuster video stores (as the only director, until lately, to have his own category) or on cable tv, flanked by patty duke, donna reed and other luminaries of our television heritage suggests otherwise. yet kapsis's version of the hitchcock reputation remains, like most of his categories, cosily unitary. the british may still hold hitchcock to the standard of his "early british thrillers" because they "lack the training in film studies of their american counterparts" (157), but we americans know better. [13] the appeal of reception studies is its capacity to situate texts within very specific cultural contexts. not only is kapsis inattuned to links between cultural practice and social categories, however, he is indifferent to the strata across which a reputation may be defined (that is, a "reputation" is not only one thing at any one time) and the molecular responses to which it is subject. thus his work is as thoroughly insulated from authentic cultural analysis as the formalism it was meant to replace. fenster, 'authorizing memory, remembering authority', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-fenster-authorizing.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.993. part 1/1, total size 24126 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- authorizing memory, remembering authority by mark fenster fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu department of telecommunications indiana university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by mark fenster, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: schudson, michael. _watergate in american memory: how we remember, forget, and reconstruct the past_. new york: basic books, 1992. zelizer, barbie. _covering the body: the kennedy assassination, the media, and the shaping of collective memory_. chicago: u of chicago press, 1992. [1] "_best evidence_ is the story of my journey in search of the truth about the autopsy [of john f. kennedy]. when my literary agent first read this manuscript, he said, 'you have written a book about authority.' no, i said, i've written a book about the assassination. i didn't understand, but he did. this *is* a book about authority because it delves into the process by which we--as individuals and as a society--decide what is true and what is false; what is to be believed and what is not" (lifton 1992, xviii). [2] michael schudson's _watergate in american memory_ and barbie zelizer's _covering the body_ are quite removed from the often heady world of kennedy assassination researchers, a world in which david lifton is a lofty, though somewhat controversial figure. schudson is a sociologist, zelizer is in a rhetoric and communication department, and neither is interested in the minutiae of medical evidence and the geopolitical speculation that are at the heart of warren commission critics. however, they would both agree with lifton that the debates around such "critical incidents" as the kennedy assassination(s) and watergate are indeed as much about authority as they are about "truth" and the never ending and seemingly impossible search for it. while schudson and zelizer have written very different books on these events and their implications in their own time and in the present, their projects are quite similar and are worthy of comparison for the study of social memory and contemporary culture. [3] specifically, they share the purpose of attempting to use the very problematic events that they discuss in order to make arguments about contemporary american culture. schudson is interested in "collective memory," and how societies institutionalize memories, and particularly historical memories, in cultural forms and social practices. zelizer traces the establishment of journalistic authority in and over the kennedy assassination--the title phrase, "covering the body," refers to the actual media "coverage" of kennedy and his death (ironically, the term was used before the assassination to refer to those whose beat was following the president to dallas or wherever he went). both authors, then, are using these events as case studies for projects that seek to move beyond mere historical chronicles, and this movement beyond history and into memory and authority are among the main strengths and weaknesses of these books. these were and remain, as both authors document, important events in recent american history and memory, and their reverberations throughout politics and culture are still felt; in the past year, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the watergate break-in was commemorated by a cbs documentary, while a "director's cut" of oliver stone's controversial _jfk_ has just been released on video, with a number of scenes "restored" from the shorter version that met the time constraints imposed by time-warner. as powerful historical events that took place at crucial conjunctures in recent american history, watergate and the kennedy assassination can tell us much about such diverse topics as the function of memory and the practice of journalism; however, as such, these events can and often do exceed such attempts to "use" them. in other words, because there is far more to watergate and jfk's assassination than the rather specific theoretical and political interests with which these authors come to these events, their attempts to somewhat sharply focus, or to cut off a discursive slice of an "event" in order to examine "american culture," at times yields frustrating results. * * * * * [4] zelizer is most interested in the "interpretive community" of journalists, and how the "cultural authority" of (certain) journalists is asserted and maintained. "journalism," in this sense, refers to more than merely the printed page or the broadcast; it comprises the discursive practices authorized and legitimated in professional meetings of journalists, journalism textbooks, codes of professionalism, journalists' folklore, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. zelizer argues that the overarching narrative of journalism and the journalist is a structuring principle of journalistic discourse; the journalistic community constitutes itself, she argues, via the stories it tells about itself in order to legitimate itself and what it does. [5] within this interpretive community and american culture in general, the kennedy assassination serves as a "critical incident" (a moment 'by means of which people air, challenge, and negotiate their own standards of action'[4]) in its historical position within the emergence of television news as a primary form of journalism, the chaotic circumstances of the assassination and the ability of the media to narrate and explain seemingly inexplicable information, and the close ties between the kennedy administration and many members of the press. this was a story that was clearly "told" first and foremost by journalists--the trickling out of facts, the live coverage of the oswald murder and the kennedy funeral, and the early legitimation of the warren commission report were all dependent upon the reporting of the news media. and a number of prominent journalists, among them current cbs news anchor dan rather and _washington post_ pundit david broder, established themselves as important news figures while covering this event, and continue to keep the event alive within their own work and autobiographies (none more so than rather, who seems to obsessively cover the story whenever it seems necessary for cbs to give it further prime time coverage). zelizer is at her best when documenting and describing this obsessive use of the coverage by news organizations and journalists, and persuasively documents how journalists established themselves as "preferred spokespersons of the assassination story" (137). [6] in addition, her discussion of the struggles over journalism's association with this story provides a good framework for understanding both the conflicts between journalistic and historical discourse, and those between "legitimate" explanations of the assassination and the explanations offered by warren commission critics, as exemplified by stone and _jfk_. by asserting themselves as main spokespersons of the assassination story, journalists and news organizations were, and remain, poachers on the territory of historians; this was, after all, a presidential assassination, and can only be understood, so historians argue, within its proper historical context and with the "disinterested" and distanced care of the historian. yet the assassination remains in the realm of the popular; the "explanations" of the event provided by dan rather or james reston are more widely circulated and have greater purchase on social memories of the event than those of prominent historians (the recent "forum" in the _american historical review_ on _jfk_ [1992] was itself a rather problematic attempt to enable historians to engage in the popular debate about the popular film). [7] if historians represent one challenge to journalistic authority (or, more precisely, if journalists represent one challenge to the authority of historians), then warren commission critics represent a similar, though quite different struggle over the meaning of the event. indeed, no group is more willing to provide an extended critique of the mass media and news organizations as instruments of propaganda than these "independent researchers," who often come across as a poor person's noam chomsky (this is intended as a compliment to the researchers). at the same time, the mainstream media view the work of these researchers with disdain, if indeed they view it at all. the incredible backlash against stone and his film, which began before the film was even released, was, as zelizer argues, as much an attempt to re-assert journalistic authority as it was an attempt to review a film; after all, if stone was in any way correct, then journalistic accounts are willing or unwilling accomplices to a great cover-up. thus the debate over the ethics of cinematic representation (i.e., which sequences and images were "real" and which were "fiction"?) was often a displacement of journalistic and mainstream political anxiety over who was telling the tale of the assassination and how it was being told. in this sense, this debate over the kennedy assassination as a public event, no matter whether stone is right, is very much about authority. [8] yet a central problem of the book lies precisely in questions that arise in zelizer's definition of "authority," as she seems reluctant to explain fully how she would define journalistic (and media) authority. on the one hand, she wants to emphasize what she sees as a "collective" set of knowledge and practices, and she seems to reject or at least to modify the classic left association of the media with the protection of and assistance to power and influence in the transmission of ideologically limited and distorted information (6-7). and yet she closes her book with a discussion of the importance of an "acquiescent," "relatively uncritical and inattentive" american public in the crafting of journalistic authority. how "collective" is a media complex so removed from an invisible and seemingly powerless public and dependent upon electronic media and stars, and how does journalistic authority survive if not via the transmission of certain types of narratives and not others? [9] despite these lingering political and theoretical questions, the book admirably meets its central objective of chronicling and critiquing journalistic discourses of authority. yet it leaves me dissatisfied because of its inadequate recognition of what i would call the "excesses" of popular political/cultural events like the kennedy assassination and watergate. i'm referring here to both disciplinary and phenomenological excess: the assassination was "experienced" and continues to be remembered and "experienced" on a seemingly infinite number of personal, cultural and political levels, and can and has been argued over and "explained" by as many disciplinary authorities as have looked into it. this is why, in some ways, don delillo's _libra_ can represent the event more powerfully than sociology of journalism can (or should be expected to); it is also why the vast and polymorphous corpus of proand anti-warren commission authors provides a fascinating, joycean vision of virtually all aspects of the event. [10] this is not to say that zelizer's project is inherently flawed or that it tells us nothing; rather, it represents a good starting point for understanding the workings of discursive practices of authority in popular historical events such as this. it does, however, mean that in so tightly focusing her study on an event that needs a very wide screen, her argument at times becomes diffused within the broader implications of the murder of a president. her very controlled academic prose and her staid sociological approach can explain the workings of journalists quite well; yet they can only describe one aspect of the event and the discourse that surrounded and still surrounds it. and at times, this excess seems to overwhelm the book's premise--after all, if, as polls indicate, the american public disbelieves the findings of the warren commission and distrusts the media, then what exactly does "journalistic authority" over the event amount to? what is an authority that has a virtual monopoly on the circulation of information and the construction of historical narratives, and yet is so ineffectual that after thirty years of reiterating its official story of the kennedy assassination almost nobody appears to believe what it tells them? sociology of journalism such as zelizer's can help us to understand the attempt to control the excess of events like the kennedy assassination. it remains for further work to explain the institutional and popular practices that attempt, sometimes successfully, to exceed this control. * * * * * [11] schudson's book is more directly concerned with issues that are central to theorizing the practices of postmodernity: the construction, circulation and institutionalization of memory. like zelizer, schudson is interested in authority, although his emphasis is less on the interests of any one specific group than on the use of and struggle over the events and meanings of watergate. the book is written in engaging and, compared with _covering the body_, relatively informal and enjoyable prose; it is also neat and tightly constructed, beginning with a concise discussion of theories of social memory, a review of the central political elements of watergate, and a series of case studies of the use of memory in post-watergate reform politics, journalistic practice, and historical accounts, as well as in popular culture, language, autobiographies of watergate participants, and in the self-serving richard nixon library. among other uses schudson describes, memories of watergate have been "mobilized" for the sake of political careers, "contested" in political practice, "ignited" in the discourse surrounding the revelations of and responses to the iran-contra scandal, and "besieged" in nixon's campaign to restore his personal reputation. in addition, schudson argues that the revelations of watergate were easily articulated with growing suspicions and distrust of government (which, as he cogently asserts, had begun prior to nixon's fall) as well as with the release of information about the sins of the american security apparatus at home and abroad. at the same time, he demonstrates how the discourse concerning watergate generally ignores a central source for the conflict between nixon, the congress, and popular protest--the vietnam war and the secret bombing of cambodia. [12] _watergate in american memory_ is particularly effective in its mapping out of the various reactions to watergate by different political groups. schudson divides and sub-divides such responses: first, in terms of whether the event was understood as a constitutional crisis (generally by liberal and conservative centrists) or a scandal (i.e., as a superficial "show" that covered up greater manipulation by elite groups, generally believed by what he terms "ultraconservatives" and the "radical left"), and then by virtue of whether the problem that watergate represented was caused by systemic shortcomings within the american political system (liberals and leftists) or was peculiar to the nixon presidency (centrists and conservatives of all stripes). clearly, these differing reactions concern the construction of larger historical narratives and the placement of watergate within these narratives; as schudson argues, understanding and remembering watergate is an ongoing process and struggle over identifying actors, motives and context. [13] in this sense, watergate represents the process of contemporary historical knowledge and memory; it was, at once, a historical event, an object of intense media scrutiny, and a site of popular knowledge and debate. against the tirades of academics and intellectuals on the right and left which posit an american culture that lacks any memory of itself and others, schudson conceives of a united states that immerses itself in certain texts and practices of popular history, such as the memory of the historical in relation to the personal remembrance, "amateur" historical research, and the popular political discourse of the mass media and everyday life. like the kennedy assassination, watergate is both popularly "forgotten" (in the "properly" historical sense of the knowledge of specific facts and human agents) and obsessed over in the struggle to understand and define the implications of these events and their relationship to the present. to remember watergate is to remember bob woodward and carl bernstein, the ervin committee hearings, and robert redford and dustin hoffman--thus illustrating the continuing importance of popular narratives and memories in understanding contemporary political events and crises. for the study of contemporary culture, this emergent notion of memory as popular and (mass) mediated rather than as authoritative and mediated through "proper" historical channels is of considerable value. [14] my frustration with schudson's book is his tendency to set up a continuum of political and theoretical positions and to attempt to occupy what he constructs as a reasonable, yet transcendent, middle ground. this appears first in his validation and appropriation of virtually every political response to watergate; he agrees, yet limits his own agreement, with those who see it as scandal *and* constitutional crisis, as peculiar to nixon *and* as part of systemic problems with the presidency. unwilling to assume any one of these positions, he seems ready to occupy all at once. yet taken to their logical conclusions, these positions are mutually exclusive: if watergate was the successful resolution of a crisis through the removal of the constitutional threat and the reform of legislation and policy, then it could not have been a scandal constructed by the power or media elite to retain legitimacy for a corrupted system or to depose a conservative president. similarly, while one might agree that nixon's was a singular presidency, the reign of reagan was competitive in the breadth and fury of its domestic and foreign covert operations--and thus, clearly, nixon's singularity is far less significant than the systemic structures that allow for two such imperial presidencies in successive decades. while schudson notes this, his apparent desire to remain above such "partisan" politics demonstrates an unwillingness to confront the issues of power that (what he might term) the "radical left" position would require of him. because he chose watergate as a case study of social memory, schudson is obliged, it seems to me, to express a good deal more righteous indignation at the politics of the era and the treachery of the nixon regime; this is neither a question of "objectivity" nor correct politics, but part of the terrain that comes with choosing such a controversial event for a case study of social memory. [15] this becomes more apparent in his lack of a satisfactory theory of memory. he provides worthy critiques of some of the problems with "interest" theories (i.e., critical theories of the ideological uses of memory), "cultural" theories (the symbolic logic of remembrance within specific cultures) and social constructionist theories (the construction of the past in the memory of present observers), yet seems to argue neither for a singular different theory nor for one that appropriates the best aspects of all of them. while he posits memory as a "scarce resource" that is "handed down through particular cultural forms and transmitted in particular cultural vehicles" (207, 5), he seems unwilling to note the degree to which, in his case studies, it is the power and media elite who construct the dominant, though not unchallenged, narratives of watergate. while one would certainly want to qualify simplistic notions of ideology that would claim such discourse as all-powerful, the sheer dominance of certain ways of understanding and using watergate for political ends demonstrates the viability of radical critiques of dominant discourse. clearly, "american memory" is a site of struggle, but one in which certain groups and interests enjoy greater ability than others to manage what is remembered and how it is remembered. [16] if, as i would argue, an important dimension of postmodernity is the increasingly sophisticated array of strategies and technologies by means of which certain groups attempt to "manage" the construction and reconstruction of historical knowledge, then watergate, as a text that was at its very core covert and opaque, seems a seminal example of the relationship between power, the realm of the political, and memory in contemporary american culture. as with the kennedy assassination, memories of watergate are aspects of the cultural struggle to construct and authorize certain narratives and explanations of the past. zelizer and schudson successfully document aspects of this process; the challenge for theories of postmodernity is to further map social memory within matrices of knowledge, power, and domination. ____________________________________________________________ works cited "ahr forum: _jfk_." _american historical review_ apr. 1992: 486-511. lifton, david. _best evidence_. new york: signet, 1992. stone, oliver and zachary sklar. _jfk: the book of the film_. new york: applause books, 1992. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------goldstein, 'queer bodies of knowledge: constructing lesbian and gay studies', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-goldstein-queer.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.194. part 1/1, total size 23817 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- queer bodies of knowledge: constructing lesbian and gay studies by lynda goldstein department of english pennsylvania state university lrg4@psuvm.psu.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994, by lynda goldstein, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: abelove, henry, michele anna barale, and david m. halperin, eds. _the lesbian and gay studies reader_. new york: routledge, 1993. gever, martha, john greyson, and pratibha parmar, eds. _queer looks: perspectives on lesbian and gay film and video_. new york: routledge, 1993. [1] as the newest kid on the interdisciplinary block looking for legitimation (with not a little attitude), lesbian/gay or queer studies (depending upon one's political affiliations) poses a number of obvious challenges to academia and publishers. one of these, of course, has to do with the strategic, if not essential, reliance of lesbian and gay studies on a particular kind of identity politics that parallels the institutional maneuvering of other "minority studies" programs. indeed, lesbian and gay studies can be charted along much the same trajectory as women's, african-american, asian-american or latino/a ethnic studies, all of which were institutionalized (however tenuously in these times of "down-sizing" colleges) at historically specific moments at the conjuncture of their respective (and overlapping) political activism, cultural production, and scholarship. indeed, lesbian/gay studies shares more with these other emergent subdisciplines than a certain path toward discursive legitimation within the academy (though this is not to suggest that the struggles of every field of study have all been identical). it also often shares theoretical frameworks, and even some specific objects of study. the harlem renaissance, for example, has been a recurring area of focus, as queer studies has sought to rethink cultural history in terms of the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, and race. [2] begun as an inclusion of queer contributions to history here, a special topics course on lesbian and gay "coming out" literature there, and a rigorous theoretical interrogation of sexuality as a constitutive category of subject formation elsewhere, queer studies has reached critical mass in the "gay nineties." this is evident in the increasing number of gay and lesbian studies undergraduate programs in and across the various humanistic disciplines; the special collections at university and large public libraries from coast to coast; and the critical/theoretical work on the cultural inscriptions of sexuality, much of which would be far more difficult to assemble without the explosive production of identifiably, often "in your face," queer culture, most especially in literature/comics, theater/performance, music, the visual arts, film/video, and popular style/fashion. my emphasis here on popular cultural productions should not indicate that queer studies traffics exclusively in the popular (though the intersection of queer and popular is an intriguing one), as any study of homoclassics or anthrodrag surely indicates. [3] perhaps nothing suggests the critical materiality of lesbian and gay studies more substantially than the queer line of critical and theoretical work coordinated by routledge, cagey publisher to the stars of queer theory. indeed, as hefty as routledge's two anthologies delineating the field of cultural studies, and with much the same cutting-edge rationale guiding its journey through the contestatory fields of academic discourse, the compendium anthology, _the lesbian and gay studies reader_, establishes itself as an indispensable introduction to the field, at least as it is determined within the (inter)disciplinary boundaries of the arts and humanities. published just two years after _inside/out_ (a collection of essays theorizing lesbian and gay sexual politics and culture edited by diana fuss and published by routledge in 1991), _how do i look?_ (the conference proceedings from "how do i look? queer film and video" organized and edited by bad object choices) and the "queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities" issue of the journal _differences_ (edited by teresa de lauretis), _the lesbian and gay studies reader_ collects forty-two contemporary essays from a variety of disciplines, many of them no doubt known to readers from their previously published incarnations in journals. i mention the earlier collections because they were all distinguished by a theoretical approach that might be broadly defined as that of "cultural studies," an approach that _the lesbian and gay studies reader_ has not merely adopted but sought to extend by encompassing an even wider range of disciplines and sites of investigation. [4] indeed, _the lesbian and gay studies reader_ is in many ways a continuation of the work begun by _inside/out_. in her introduction, editor diana fuss asks, "how can we work [the hetero/homo opposition] to the point of critical exhaustion, and what effects--material, political, social --can such a sustained effort to erode and to reorganize the conceptual grounds of identity be expected to have on our sexual practices and politics?" (1). certainly one might argue that _the reader_ represents one effect of working the binary opposition of sexuality, if not to exhaustion, then to a fatigue productive of a visibility of gay and lesbian sexualities. that is, it embodies an attempt to "reorganize" sexuality studies from an oppositional stance that comes dangerously close to solidifying the epistemology of polarity. for those who believe that gay and lesbian studies may only exist, however visibly, in contestation with the (supposedly hetero) core curricula, _the reader_ proposes a more troubling and independent existence while acknowledging its relational positioning. if as fuss writes, "any outside is formulated as a consequence of a lack *internal* to the system it supplements" (3), then we might suppose that the outside status of lesbian and gay studies has everything to do with the constitutive lack of sexuality studies within the academy. in bringing queer studies in from the cold outside, does _the reader_ make it all too easy for interrogations of sexuality to operate as a "queer thing"? moreover, in its bid to legitimate an emergent field does it do so at the expense of the political leverage discursive marginalization can accord? these are most difficult negotiations, as both fuss and the editors of _the reader_ acknowledge, though abelove, barale, and halperin more decisively throw their lot in with legitimation. it is their intention, after all, that this collection serve as a primary textbook for courses in gay/lesbian studies 101. [5] the volume's usefulness in the classroom is admirably indicated by its categorical grouping of contents, its users' guide, its alternative organization by disciplines, its essay header notes establishing the authority of the essayist and summarizing the essay's arguments, and its briefly annotated but extensive bibliography. what all of these together provide is a map with which to navigate the territory of gay and lesbian studies, not only for the undergraduate (though some of these essays may be too difficult for students who are not already conversant with the theoretical debates that animate recent battles over humanities curricula) but for the instructor as well, who may have a thorough knowledge of queer studies in her own field but a lesser acquaintance with work in related disciplines. fortunately, _the reader_ collects essays that are theoretically and literally conversant, if not always in agreement, making for a coherent and provocative approach to delineating lesbian and gay studies as a discipline of knowledge. further, in its organizational structure along lines of thematic interest (for instance, "politics and representation" and "the evidence of experience"), _the reader_ suggests the extent to which queer theorists are, indeed, reorganizing the ontological grounds of sexual identity within historically specific cultural contexts. (the editors of _the reader_, by the way, choose "lesbian and gay" over "queer" for reasons of institutional efficacy given some already established programs. while suggesting "lesbian and gay" retains a queer reverberation, signalled by _the reader's_ inclusion of activist concerns and transgendering phenomena, it is not one that includes bisexuality. this omission poses rather interesting questions to be left for a review of the several recently published anthologies on bisexuality.) [6] just what does one find in _the reader_? gayle rubin's still extraordinary (and revised) "thinking sex" initiates the volume, deftly moving feminist theory in the direction of queer theory, an expansive move that others, such as barbara smith in her feminist and african-americanist grounded essay, "homophobia: why bring it up?," similarly make in this first section on "politics and representation." in part, essays such as rubin's and smith's address the limitations of theory that is singularly invested in an identity politics; they pose a kind of coalition politics of theory which would (re)present the problematics of representation of our selves (however that might be defined) within politicized and intersecting cultural fields. for rubin, this means, in part, tracing the history of "sex panic[s]" in anglo-american culture since the nineteenth century, a history that reveals moments of repressive police action against populations designated "deviant" or "obscene" within a hierarchized system of sexuality and sexual practices, especially around sado-masochistic images and pedophilia. to fully comprehend how these practices are policed by the state, rubin argues "that it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence" (33). such a move is not to be confused with separating feminism (whose primary concern is gender) from queer theory, however; each has much to contribute to the other. it does mean being very careful not to collapse terms so that differences of social life, and their attendant politicization, are elided. it also operates as a cautionary tale to assimilationist lesbians and gays whose "we're just like you" liberal politics demonizes non-vanilla (in both the erotic and racial senses) sexual practices. [7] such a warning is also evident in smith's short essay, in which she explicitly works against the hierarchizing of oppression all too evident among some activists and theorists who are willing to further their own political or pedagogical agenda by sacrificing the queers to the oppressive actions of our culture. "what happened at blues [a police raid against a working-class bar for gays and lesbians of color] perfectly illustrates the ways in which the major 'isms' *including* homophobia are intimately and violently intertwined" (100). what smith's and rubin's essays both demonstrate in their very different ways are the inextricability of theory and praxis, the necessity to carefully analyze the multitudinous forms of social and cultural oppression, and the responsibility of all activists and theorists (not that these are so easily separated) to work at the intersections and along the fluid boundaries of identity categories. these are concerns shared by a number of essays included in this anthology: kobena mercer's investigation of race, sexuality, and eroticism in mapplethorpe's work (a site also privileged by richard meyer's "mapplethorpe/ the discipline of photography"), yvonne yarbro-bejarano's reading of cherrie moraga's _loving in the war years_, and deborah mcdowell's uncovering of nella larsen's lesbian passing masquerading as racial passing under the burden of the morally upright harlem renaissance. and phillip brian harper's wonderfully rich analysis of the place of eloquence in african-american discourse--of the tensions between speech and silence, hetero and homosexualities, black nationalism and assimilation--in the face of newscaster max robinson's death by aids, serves as a model for disentangling the complexities of cultural identity formation. [8] another major theoretical paradigm threading its way through the collection is initiated by the second essay, eve kosofsky sedgwick's "epistemology of the closet." like rubin, sedgwick looks to the nineteenth century, firmly establishing it as the historical moment for the political and cultural parameters of modern lesbian and gay identity. here she outlines the contradictory status of the closet, arguing that it "has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout this century" by mapping a double-bound system of secrecy and disclosure onto identity formation such that "the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization, in this case the node at which *any* gender is discriminated" (59). what concerns sedgwick is the systemic incoherence of thinking about sexuality and gender in euro-american culture dating from the late nineteenth century, an incoherence that ought not to be stabilized by queer theorists but continuously and productively interrogated. in large part, this is precisely the project adopted by _the reader_: each wrangles with the epistemological incoherences of identity, representation, and social practices, often with brilliant results. [9] for example, lee edelman takes up the visibility/ invisibility nexus of gay male sexuality in "tearooms and sympathy, or, the epistemology of the water closet." obviously punning on sedgwick's title, as well as on the stage play and film, _tea and sympathy_ (a sense of humor also refreshingly evident in marjorie garber's "spare parts," excerpted from her book _vested interests_, in which she examines surgical transsexualism as a privileged site of the constitutional instabilities of gender and sexuality), edelman considers walter jenkins's arrest in 1964 for undisclosed sexual activity in the men's washroom of a washington, dc ymca as "a signal moment in which to examine the shifting ideological frameworks within which homosexuality could be read in relation to american national identity" (555). the collision of public and private indicated by the police surveillance of this urinal tryst, like the closet/coming out oscillation of sedgwick's essay, raises questions about the stability of the homo/hetero binary, especially as the precise sexual act was unobservable from the vantage point of the police. the unresolvable tensions of sexual/gender border patrolling are further investigated by stuart hall in "deviance, politics, and the media," while the visibility/invisibility binary figures in teresa de lauretis' "sexual indifference and lesbian representation," as well as in sasha torres' essay on prime time television and danae clark's "commodity lesbianism," all of which demonstrate that lesbians as social subjects are rigorously situated on the invisibility side of the fence. [10] _the reader_'s reliance on cultural-studies paradigms is most evident in the several essays that foreground cultural/historical specificity, as well as the immediacy of political activism, to combat early lesbian and gay studies tendencies toward universalizing experience. to this end, john d'emilio argues that lesbian and gay identities are the result of capitalist economies. anthropologists alonso and koreck deconstruct the catch-all term "hispanics" and its debilitating effects upon aids education among various latino/a populations whose sexual practices are not necessarily commensurate with anglo-determined sexual identities, while tomas almaguer maps identity and behavior among chicano men. cindy patton documents the imposition of idealized bourgeois family values onto a demonized "africa" without borders that is read as having bred a peculiar and distinct strain of aids. in one of the few excursions out of the "modern" period of lesbian/gay identity (along with david halperin's and john winkler's respective work on the constructions of homosexuality in classical greece and sappho's lyric poetry), charlotte furth considers the fluidity of gender boundaries in sixteenthand seventeenth century china. and serena nanda explores the indeterminacy of the hijira in hindu mythology and contemporary social practice, while harriet whitehead surveys the body of work on the native american %berdache% to demonstrate the efficacy of a methodology of comparative cultural analysis, a kind of destablized theoretical crossing that works to carefully maintain differences of specific systems of gender meaning in each culture under investigation. [11] yet the experiences of populations within specific historical and cultural contexts ought not to be the project of gay and lesbian history, argues joan scott, in her rigorously explicated essay, "the evidence of experience." arguing that experience too often serves as the ontological foundation for identity, politics, and history, scott recommends that we not focus on "the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but [focus on] the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself" (412), the narratives of knowledge that constitute that which we call experience. such a shift in focus has repercussions not only for considerations of autobiography (to which all coming-out literature is indebted) as biddy martin's work on lesbian autobiography acknowledges, but for activist politics and production as well, a consideration which is less consistently realized in _queer looks_. where _the reader_ works toward a theoretical and thematic coherence while maintaining a queer commitment to analyzing incoherences, _queer looks_ works toward incoherence, a queering of the body of knowledge (re)produced by the more academically integrated _lesbian and gay studies reader_. [12] less interdisciplinary in its approach, concentrating on lesbian and gay film and video (all of which is "independent" in its production and distribution histories), _queer looks_ expands upon the territory mapped by the aforementioned _how do i look_ anthology. more playful in its collection of essays, screenplays/stills, and interactive lampshades (the latter a "take back the light: lesbian visibility lampshade" by donna evans and jean carlomusto which combines the rigor of theory with the pleasure of popular culture and activism in this year of lesbian chic: think of it as teresa de lauretis lite), _queer looks_ has no aspirations for legitimacy in academe. rather, its project is to give its intersecting activists, theorists, and film/video makers the space to work out the possibilities of representational practices by, for and about lesbian, gay, and queer subjects. to an academic, this anthology may seem terribly uneven. while many of the essays consider the ways that queerness is inextricably bound to other categories of identity, most notably race (those of isaac julien, pratibha parmar, jackie goldsby and kobena mercer are obvious examples), some of these (goldsby) and several of the others (e.g. barbara hammer's "the politics of abstraction") rely upon "experience" in ways that joan smith warns are not as productive as thinking about how we structure that experience *as* identity. yet the strengths of _queer looks_ lies less in its rigorous analyses (though there are these, most especially john greyson's "security blankets") than in its proliferation of contending viewpoints that provoke thought, agreement, and dissension for the reader. in their often brief formats these 38 contributors generate queer perspectives on work that remains unavailable to most audiences outside large gay/lesbian film festivals. [13] neither of these collections is exhaustive. race continues to be a category most often examined in conjunction with queers of color, "lesbians" appear as theoretical specters or social subjects with narrowly defined experiences, pornography is distanced to the aids education category, and the work of a sadie benning (legit as her whitney biennial inclusion has made her) is overlooked for multiple analyses of isaac julien's and marlon riggs's works (fine as they are). what is obvious in both of these collections is the queer bent that cultural studies has so productively taken. each provides a wealth of analytical material with which to engage the cultural productions of lesbians and gay men, thereby suggesting ways of thinking about other work not specifically approached within these volumes. for any instructor who has faced a colleague's snide "but there's no such thing as lesbian and gay studies," or any budding film maker who just doesn't see herself in hollywood, _the reader_ and _queer looks_ respectively and together provide just the kind of coherent critical and activist incoherence that is needed. these anthologies mark the moment when "queer"--both as a productive knowledge of bodies and as a set of (re)productive bodies of knowledge, is at last finding a place of rest and motion in an institution near you. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------burnett, 'toward a theory of hypertextual design', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-burnett-toward.txt toward a theory of hypertextual design by kathleen burnett communication, information & library studies rutgers university <burnet@zodiac.rutgers.edu> _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by kathleen burnett, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. while the study of the temporal and spatial distanciation of communication is important to the concept of the mode of information the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. for the issue of communicational efficiency . . . does not raise the basic question of the configuration of information exchange, or what i call the wrapping of language. --poster, 8 hypertext/hypermedia [1] what distinguishes hypermedia from other modes of information is not that it is computer-driven--after all, the browsing and retrieval mechanisms of vannevar bush's memex were non-electronic--nor that it is interactive, since the entire history of oral communication, whether electronically mediated or not, might be characterized as interactive; nor even that it includes navigational apparatus such as links and nodes, which might better be thought of as symptoms than causes, or buttresses rather than groundwork. what distinguishes hypermedia is that it posits an information structure so dissimilar to any other in human experience that it is difficult to describe as a structure at all. it is nonlinear, and therefore may seem an alien wrapping of language when compared to the historical path written communication has traversed; it is explicitly non-sequential, neither hierarchical nor "rooted" in its organizational structure, and therefore may appear chaotic and entropic. yet clearly, human thought processes include nonlinear, nonsequential, and interactive characteristics which, when acknowledged by traditional information structures, are not supported. in fact, one might characterize the history of information transfer as a tyranny against such characteristics, that is, a tyranny against the rhizome. [2] hypermedia might be understood as one manifestation of the struggle against this tyranny. in current parlance, hypermedia is used to describe both applications which make use of navigational tools such as links and nodes to form "texts" or databases, and the organizational principles of such "texts" and databases. hypertext is also used to denote these same meanings. when a distinction is drawn between the two, it normally focuses on content--"hypertext" is used to refer to hyper-structures consisting exclusively of written texts, while "hypermedia" denotes similar structures built around multiple media. others have noted the artificiality of such a delineation. "text" is also used as a synonym for a "written work" or "book" which may or may not be limited to alphanumeric characters. a "text" may included charts, graphs, illustrations, photographs, and other visual media in its expression of meaning. why then should a "hypertext"--which has the potential for incorporating an even wider range of expressive media (sound, animation, etc.)--be limited to alphanumeric characters in its expression? [3] a more useful differentiation might be drawn along structural rather than contextual lines. hypertext demonstrates "traits that are usually obscured by the enforced linearity of paper printing"; it is text--only more so--because it participates in a structure that resonates asynchronous and nonlinear relationships. hypertext is a kind of weaving--"text" derives ultimately from the latin %texere%, and thus shares a common root with "textile"--a structuring with texture--web, warp, and weave, allowing for infinite variation in color, pattern and material; it is the loom that structures the "text-ile." hypertext is the organizational principle of hypermedia. hypermedia is the medium of expression of a given hypertext structure. when that medium mirrors the singularity of the print medium of alphanumeric text, it may be properly called either "hypertext" or "hypermedia"; when the medium reflects an "intertwingling" (nelson 31) of what we understand as separate "media" in the analog sense of the term, it should perhaps be referred to as "hypermedia," but might equally be acknowledged as "hypertext." neither hypertext nor hypermedia is an object, rather the former is a structure, and the latter a medium, of information transfer. historical context [4] all electronically mediated exchange participates in hypertext, though the degree of participation varies enormously. some electronically mediated exchange is "hypertextual" only to the degree that it is virtual--that it consists of a series of switches or codes (binary or otherwise) which are, in and of themselves, unreadable (and, therefore, nontextual), and which contain "pointers" to their reconstruction as meaningful exchanges. the switches or codes are "nodes" which are "linked" to a "textual" form which, at any given moment may exist only "hypertextually." electronically mediated exchange is therefore paradigmatically different from other modes of information precisely because it participates in the organizing principle of hypertext. [5] in _the mode of information_, poster proposes a concept which plays on marx's theory of the mode of production: by mode of information i similarly suggest that history may be periodized by variations in the structure in this case of symbolic exchange, but also that the current culture gives a certain fetishistic importance to 'information.' every age employs forms of symbolic exchange which contain internal and external structures, means and relations of signification. stages in the mode of information may be tentatively designated as follows: face-to-face, orally mediated exchange; written exchanges mediated by print; and electronically mediated exchange. (poster 6) poster's periodization suffers from the coarseness of any totalizing metaphor. while he stresses the trans-historical nature of his classification of symbolic exchange, the metaphor is only as effective as it is historically informed. as outlined, the third stage--written exchanges mediated by print--is not only western in its bias, but fails even within this bias to recognize a rather large chunk of history--the manuscript period (circa 4th century ad through the mid-fifteenth). an examination of the influence of the mode of information on social structure can only be enriched by the recognition of the impact of mass-production, in the form of the mechanized reproduction of written language, on that structure. it is impossible, however, to understand the full significance of this impact, either historically or theoretically, unless its contextualization is carefully discerned. for example, contrast these two very different experiences of the introduction of the hand-press and its effects on social stratification. [6] the pre-reformation church was able to maintain a restrictive social stratification largely because of its ability to control the production and comprehension of written communication--those who could read and write belonged to a privileged elite, while those who could not had to be satisfied with acquiring their information from those who did. through most of the medieval period and well into the renaissance, the church was able to control the size and membership of the elite through two mechanisms: latin education and limited distribution of written communication. the latter was facilitated by production limits imposed by the rigorous and time-consuming process of hand-copying, which in turn limited the supply of reading material. without supply, the demand for education was kept to levels that the church could manipulate and control. the introduction of the hand-press in the mid-fifteenth century was accompanied by a precipitous erosion of that control which led decisively to the reformation. once reading material could be produced in large quantities in a relatively short period of time--500 to 1000 copies of an average-length manuscript could be produced by a printer owning two hand-presses within the space of less than a month, as compared to the production of a single copy of a manuscript, which could take up to a year--in other words, once the non-elite were able to acquire material to read, they began to do so. printers, recognizing the commercial potential of this new market, began to produce material in the vulgate, which in turn expedited exponential growth in the educated population, since it facilitated the process of self-education. as this population grew, demands for equity in education across social classes escalated. the earliest signs of this movement are evident in the growth of the popular and self-help literature markets, and the introduction of mass communication, across time and distance, over which the church could ultimately exercise little effective control (eisenstein). [7] contrast this experience with that of the introduction of a hand-press in colonial massachusetts in 1660 for the express purpose of propagating the gospel among the indians, who had no written language. the social stratification which existed within the tribe prior to the introduction of the press was anchored in the individual's ability to communicate with the spiritual realm and was maintained through oral mediation of the ritual culture. after the introduction of the press, the very foundations of that stratification were undermined. a schism developed between those who subscribed to the gospel, and thus to the notion of a single god, and those who continued in the old beliefs. since the introduction of the very act of written communication was inextricably tied to the new religion, many who did not endorse the christian faith simply refused to acknowledge the new mode of information. [8] clearly the introduction of the hand-press in this context did not have the effect of popularizing written communication that it had in western europe on the eve of the reformation. while differences in the social structures of the two cultures might be cited as the major contributing factors in this differentiation, the privileged status of chirography in pre-reformation europe clearly at least served to buttress the social structure of that culture, while the absence of any form of written culture in the case of the native american tribe equally served to buttress a quite distinct social structure. both structures were undermined by the introduction of a new mode of information, but in very different ways. while a totalizing metaphor may be put to effective use in an account of this differentiation, poster's four-stage delineation is simply too coarse to serve. clearly, a distinction must be drawn between a culture which partakes only of oral exchanges and one in which oral exchange is coupled with some form of written exchange. equally clearly, a similar distinction needs to be drawn between written exchanges mediated by chirographic writing and written exchanges mediated by typographic writing. the latter of these could be further subdivided into two stages: the first mediated by hand-press reproduction, and the second by machine-press reproduction. the importance of this latter distinction is borne out by the study of the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century europe following the introduction of the mechanized press (cf. altick and eisenstein). [9] between poster's third stage--written exchanges mediated by print--and his fourth--electronically mediated exchange--lies much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for although he does at one point acknowledge the nineteenth century origins of electronically mediated information systems in the telegraph and photography (19), his analysis of such systems is limited to the telephone, television advertising, databases, computer writing and computer science. the inclusion of the machine-press production stage suggested above accounts for a large share of the information technology of the nineteenth century, but the end of that century and the first half of the next, it seems to me, several quite distinct modes of information transfer have emerged which may help to provide a bridge from written exchanges to electronically mediated exchange and, particularly, to multimedia exchange mediated electronically. [10] we might group the various non-computer modes of information available in the twentieth century in a variety of ways; i would like to propose one such classificatory scheme based, as is poster's, on the wrapping of exchange: verbal media: telegraph, radio, telephone visual media: visual arts media (painting, sculpture, etc), photography combinatory media: offset printing, film, television, video the first group fits neatly into poster's progression, since it participates in the wrappings of language. historically, it is characterized by progressively orally mediated electronic exchange, which might be seen as an inversion of the pattern found in the poster's earlier stages. the fit of the second and third groups into poster's schema is more problematic because, despite his statement that the study of the mode of information "must include a study of the forms of information storage and retrieval, from cave painting and clay tablets to computer databases and communications satellites" (7), his pre-electronic mediation stages are all decisively characterized by their participation in the wrappings of language. nonetheless, visual means of communication and information transfer have always existed--from cave paintings to religious icons to gothic cathedrals to paintings, sculpture, and other visual arts media. the information-poor, one might even argue, have historically relied on the visual media as their primary mode of reproducible information transfer. certainly this was true in western europe before the growth of literacy, and even today scholars point to the democratizing effect of television. [11] also evident in the development of twentieth-century modes of information is a ever-increasing trend toward synchronous combinatory media. this january, at&t announced the release of its first videophone, the latest manifestation of a trend which began with film and has progressed through television, video, and in the last few years, developments in multimedia computing. the design of synchronous combinatory exchange is necessarily unlike that of written exchange. the organizing principle of combinatory exchange in its simplest form is synchronicity rather than sequence (which is essential to all forms of written exchange). both forms are linear to some degree- both rely on a time-line of expression. in written exchange, linearity is an overt feature of the expression. in the case of synchronous combinatory exchange, linearity is only covertly present since the elements of a synchronized combinatory expression must be aligned in time. in an analog environment this alignment creates a singular linear expression. in a digital environment, on the other hand, the expression may be multiple, may consist of a multiplicity of lines. [12] while historicism clearly must inform such a totalizing metaphor as poster's "mode of information," poster's objective is equally clearly trans-historical: the stages are not 'real,' not 'found' in the documents of each epoch, but imposed by the theory as a necessary step in the process of attaining knowledge. in this sense the stages are not sequential but coterminous in the present. they are not consecutive also since elements of each are at least implicit in the others. the logical status of the concept of the mode of information is both historical and transcendental. in that sense the latest stage is not the privileged, dialectical resolution of previous developments. in one sense, however, a sense that marx anticipated, the current configuration constitutes a necessary totalization of earlier developments: that is, one cannot but see earlier developments from the situation of the present. the anatomy of the mode of electronic information . . . necessarily sheds new light on the anatomy of oral and print modes of information . . . . i prefer to consider the present age as simply an unavoidable context of discursive totalization, not as an ontological realization of a process of development. (6-7) theorizing [13] from within this context of discursive totalization, other possibilities suggest themselves. in _a thousand plateaus_ (1970), deleuze and guattari propose a different history of written exchange. "writing," they claim, "has nothing to do with signifying. it has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" (4-5). their history is delineated in terms of types of books. there are three types of books, the first being historically the earliest and the third the most recent, but all three are coterminous in the present. the first type they describe as the root-book. the root-book "imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do" (5). the second type is the radicle-system, or fascicular root book. "this time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development" (5). the approximate characteristics of deleuze and guattari's third book type--the rhizome--clearly indicate a departure from the book as printed codex to electronically mediated exchange: 1. and 2. principles of connection and heterogeneity; 3. principle of multiplicity; 4. principle of asignifying rupture; and 5. principles of cartography and decalcomania. (7-9) the significance of this taxonomy for this discussion is that its classification, unlike poster's, is entirely media-independent, gaining its meaning, so to speak, from a delineation of structure or design. [14] the root-book roughly corresponds to written communication prior to the development of the paste-up technique (which deleuze and guattari refer to as assemblage; 4) in the early part of the twentieth century. its history is one of linear production. in its earliest form, the writing of the root-book was synonymous with its publication. today, the production of the root-book is still characterized as a linear process consisting of five steps: 1. writing of a manuscript; 2. submission/editing of the manuscript; 3. the composition of the manuscript in type; 4. the proofing of the type sheets; and 5. the dissemination of the publication. the production process for the radicle-system book is much lengthier, requiring the addition of at least two additional steps, the first, the mock-up or layout stage normally falling between the second and third root-book steps; and the second, the paste-up stage falling between the third and fourth steps in the production of the root-book. in its earliest manifestations (and still today in the certain fine-printing and vanity publishing circles), the production of the root-book is characterized by oneness and stability. even in its more recent manifestations, the root-book strives to be an exact replica of the author's words, a representation or signification of an individual's thoughts. even as the production process has fragmented (through the intervention of editors, publishers, printers who are not the author), it has maintained its linearity. likewise, the publication has retained its insularity and rootedness. [15] in contrast, the design of the radicle-system book is fragmented and multifarious, and while representation is still employed as an element, it is only one of many couched in layers that problematize its signification. interestingly, the technology which initially enabled this kind of production was photography. the production process is less emphatically sequential, the organizing principle being collage or assemblage which allows for alteration and reorganization at almost every stage of the production process. in some cases this process has extended even to the composition of the manuscript itself, as in the case of william s. burroughs's cut-up texts, or, in a less mechanical implementation, in the poetry and critical writings of rachel blau duplessis. [16] deleuze and guattari describe a third type of book: a system of this kind could be called a rhizome. a rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether . . . . burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. the rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers . . . . the rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. (6-7) telecommunications systems are rhizomorphic, as are computer networks. think of maps you have seen and descriptions you have heard of the internet--a rhizome. if we accept the rhizome as a metaphor for electronically mediated exchange, then hypertext is its apparent fulfillment, and deleuze and guattari's "approximate characteristics of the rhizome"- principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and cartography and decalcomania--may be seen as the principles of hypertextual design. principles of connection and heterogeneity [17] the principles of connection and heterogeneity state that "any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be" (deleuze & guattari 7). in this sense a rhizome is very different from a tree structure, where the order is fixed by a hierarchy of relationships. cognitive jumps, which must be mechanically forced in an hierarchy, are intuitively sustained in a rhizome. a rhizome is the only structure which can effectively sustain connections between different media without giving hegemony to language. many current relational and flatfile multimedia database applications support the storage of multiple forms of media, and some will even display different types contiguously, but keyword searching is the only mechanism provided for cross-type searching. like film and video, they support synchronous display (but then, so can the book, albeit with limitations), but they do not support nonverbal access. traditional hierarchical database structures are even more problematic in their support of nonverbal expression. meaningful formation of hierarchies across media boundaries can be accomplished only through the use of language, since hierarchy is itself a creation of language, and therefore, language is the only universal tool available within an hierarchical structure. a rhizomorphic structure, on the other hand, does not rely on language for its ordering, although many of the linkages in a given structure may be linguistic. [18] a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. a semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages (7). [19] hypermedia design is rhizomorphic in its sustenance of heterogeneous connection, because there is no systemic hierarchy of connection. the perception of connectivity is entirely left to the user, though the pre-existence of particular connections may foster varying user perceptions of overall structure. at its most political, connectivity is a democratizing principle. it functions as a structure of individuation since at any given moment the "center" of any rhizomorphic structure is the individual's position in relation to that structure. distinctions between author and reader, constituent and politician, even intermediary and end-user disintegrate as the reader participates in authorship, constituent in %polis%, and end-user in the search itself. at its worse, connectivity inspires anarchy. witness (as we all did) the impact of limited connectivity (exclusive of the important element of interactivity) via the broadcast of a videotape of the arrest in the case of the aftermath of the rodney king verdict. [20] as the distinctions between participant/viewer, author/reader blur, the concept of authorship itself will be problematized. all paths through hyperspace are equally valid to the individual traveller. as the "reader" negotiates hyperspace he/she becomes a navigator--traversing established links to pre-existent nodes; but also an explorer--creating new links to previously known, but unrelated territories; a pioneer--venturing forth into uncharted realms; and a visionary--imagining and giving shape to the as-yet unknown. principle of multiplicity act so that there is no use in a centre . . . . --stein, 63 a multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature . . . . an assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. there are no points or positions in a rhizome, much as those found in a structure, tree or root. there are only lines. --deleuze & guattari, 8 [21] hypertextual design is able to support non-hierarchical thinking and cognitive jumping because it recognizes the diversity of multifarious modes of information. information may be structured hierarchically within a hypermedia system, but only to the extent that such a structure exists in a coterminous relationship with other structures. in other words, hypertextual design presupposes not only that multiple points of access are preferable to a single point, but by extension, that multiple structures are preferable to a single structure. information retrieval studies have shown that a single user's selection of access points for a given topic may vary over time and space, making it difficult for an indexer to predict potential user vocabulary. the principle of multiplicity is reflected in hypertextual design by the coterminous presence of varying modes of access to a single structure on the one hand, and of varying structures on the other. [22] landow and others have noted the hypertextual nature of pre-hypertext literary projects from sterne's _tristram shandy_ to robert coover's _pricksongs and descants_. yet the lists i have seen are conspicuous in their omission of female writers and feminist critics, not to mention writers of color. i have already mentioned rachel blau duplessis, but there are others who might be mentioned as well--emily dickinson, gertrude stein, zora neale hurston--all of whom practice a writing of inclusion and fragmentation, of absent centers and centered absence. multiplicity, as a hypertextual principle, recognizes a multiplicity of relationships beyond the canonical (hierarchical). thus, the traditional concept of literary authorship comes under attack from two quarters--as connectivity blurs the boundary between author and reader, multiplicity problematizes the hierarchy that is canonicity. principle of asignifying rupture [23] hypertextual design intuitively supports two forms of access which must be forced in hierarchical structures: user-generated access and mapping. the principle of asignifying rupture supports the former, and those of cartography and decalcomania, the latter. in an hierarchical structure, a user-generated access point may cause a rupture in the system. for example, in a database search, a user may, through the process of serendipity, arrive at a particular point in a hierarchy, even though her departure-point has no apparent hierarchical relationship to that arrival point. if she is allowed to introduce a link from her departure term to her arrival point into the hierarchy without further evaluation, the very structure of that hierarchy might well be undermined. one might view the project of feminist criticism in this light. the introduction of non-canonical texts and authors into the canon disrupts the foundations of the canon altogether. in contrast, hypertextual design encourages such disruptive activity while rendering it insignificant. since the structure does not rely on any given theory of relationship, it cannot be affected by the characterization of a new relationship previously alien to it. the potential for any relationship exists within the hypertextual structure; some simply await unmasking. principles of cartography and decalcomania [24] the second form of access not easily supported within an hierarchy is mapping. tracings or logs of an individual's progress through an hierarchical database are of course possible and may help a user to retrace a given path, or provide useful data for research in human-computer interaction. current maps of search paths exist in the form of recordings of transactions, though the best systems record only the user query and the system response, without making a record of the context of either query or response. the records thus constructed are divorced from context, non-relational, and perhaps most importantly, non-spatial. they are grammatic, rather than diagrammatic. they perpetuate the hegemony of language and de-emphasize the sense of a journey through space and time. deleuze and guattari's notion of mapping is, however, quite different, and presupposes the operation of the principles discussed previously. [25] each user's path of connection through a database is as valid as any other. new paths can be grafted onto the old, providing fresh alternatives. the map orients the user within the context of the database as a whole, but always from the perspective of the user. in hierarchical systems, the user map generally shows the user's progress, but it does so out of context. a typical search history displays only the user's queries and the system's responses. it does not show the system's path through the database. it does not display rejected terms, only matches. it does not record the user's psychological responses to what the system presents. on additional command, it may supply a list of synonyms or related terms, but this is as far as it can go in displaying the territory surrounding the request. it can only understand hierarchy, so it can only display hierarchical relationships. what distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. the map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. it fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. it is itself a part of the rhizome. the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification (12). [26] a hypertextual map is more closely related to geographic maps than to search histories. it shows the path of the user through the surrounding territory, but always from the point-of-view of the user. it is as though the map were perpetually shifting as the traveller moved from one quadrant to the next. some of that territory is charted--it is well mapped out in terms that the user understands, and connected to familiar territory or nodes--and some is uncharted, either because it consists of unlinked nodes that exist in the database much as an undiscovered island might exist in the sea, disconnected from the lines of transfer and communication linking other land areas, or as an unidentified planet in space, with the potential for discovery and even exploration, but as yet just a glimmer in the sky--or because it is linked in ways that are meaningless to the user in his present context. the user can zoom in on zones of interest, jump to new territories using previously established links or by establishing new links of his own, retrace an earlier path, or create new islands or nodes and transportation routes or links to connect them to his previous path or the islands or nodes charted by others. [27] the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. it is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. in contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory of central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states (21). [28] hypertext is rhizomorphic in all its characteristics. its power derives from its flexibility and variability; from its ability to incorporate, transmute and transcend any traditional tool or structure. like the rhizome, it is frightening because it is amorphous. the hierarchical systems we are accustomed to are definitional--they are centers of power. knowledge of the hierarchy engenders authority; corrupted authority breeds despotism. knowledge of the rhizome as a totality is impossible, precisely because "totality" and other absolutes have no meaning in a rhizome. the rhizome is as individual as the individual in contact with it. it is that individual's perception, that individual's map, that individual's understanding. it is also, and at the same time, a completely different something--another individual's perception, another individual's map, another individual's understanding. it provides no structure for common understanding. it is a state of being, reflective always of the present, a plateau in a region made up entirely of plateaus--"a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end" (deleuze & guattari 22). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited altick, r. _the english common reader_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1957. bush, v. "as we may think." _atlantic monthly_ 176 (july 1945): 101-8. duplessis, r. _tabula rosa_. elmwood, ct: potes & poets press, 1987. ---. _the pink guitar: writing as feminist practice_. new york: routledge, 1990. deleuze, g. & guattari, f. _a thousand plateaus_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. eisenstein, e. _the printing press as an agent of change_. cambridge: cambridge u p, 1980. landow, g. _hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology_. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1992. nelson, t. _dream machines_. redmond, wa: tempus, 1987. poster, m. _the mode of information_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1990. stein, g. _tender buttons_. los angeles: sun & moon press, c1914. vandergrift, k. "hypermedia: breaking the tyranny of the text." _school library journal_ 35:3 (nov. 1988): 30-35. baker, 'terrorist as interpreter: _mao ii_ in postmodern context', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-baker-terrorist.txt archive pmc-list, file baker.194. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 77657 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the terrorist as interpreter: _mao ii_ in postmodern context by peter baker dept. of english towson state university e7e4bak@toe.towson.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by peter baker, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] through the issues it raises, the kind of writing style it employs, and coming as it does in a series of other novels by don delillo, _mao ii_ demands to be treated seriously in the context of postmodern work and theory. rather than spend time developing that theory explicitly, hooking in to the arguments presented by, say, fredric jameson and jean-francois lyotard, brian mchale and linda hutcheon, i want to develop a series of themes and meditations through a comparison of _mao ii_ with two other texts that are roughly contemporary, thomas pynchon's _vineland_ and neil jordan's film, _the crying game_ (1992). that is, rather than attempt to define "postmodernism," i will take as a given that all three of these works *are* postmodern and explore what this might mean. the comparison of delillo to pynchon has become rather widespread, but _mao ii_ specifically presents the character of a hyper-reclusive novelist, bill gray, who may interestingly be compared to the real-life figure of pynchon, whether or not we want to argue that gray is "based" on pynchon.^1^ the comparison with jordan's film rests principally on the way _the crying game_ stages an encounter between a "terrorist" and a hostage that is not dissimilar from some of delillo's meditations on this theme. as novelist bill gray travels, first to london, and finally to lebanon, he seeks to engage the relationship he has theorized between novel-writing and "terrorism" through his own person. i want to argue that gray (and maybe delillo as well) is fundamentally--and in gray's case, at least, fatally--mistaken in his view that equates the role of the novelist with that of the "terrorist." as jordan's film carries this theme out, i think it becomes clear that the "terrorist" occupies a role more like that of the interpreter, and moreover, that this has something to do with our "postmodern condition." [2] there is beginning to emerge a critical consensus that thomas pynchon "is perhaps the preeminent practitioner" of english-language postmodern fiction (mchale 1992: 83). i want to argue briefly in this context that this is at least in part due to the fact that pynchon's work deals with historical materials exactly defining the parameters of the rise of the united states to the status of the world's only superpower, roughly that period from the end of world war ii to the persian gulf war known from "our" point of view as the cold war. edward said's recent epoch-making work, _culture and imperialism_, argues for an ongoing reinterpretation of the canonical works of the modern european/american tradition based on an examination of the relationship between imperialism and culture. twenty or thirty years from now, anyone's first reaction to hearing the phrase "the western tradition" will not be "great books" or whatever catchphrase is currently being pushed by the pundits in _the new criterion_ and elsewhere; it's going to be (and for many of us already is): *imperialism*.^2^ said's approach is not to reject the works of the western tradition, but to reexamine them in light of these geopolitical realities for how they reveal "a structure of attitude and reference" (62). whereas said's primary cultural analysis concerns texts produced at the height of colonial experience, verdi's _aida_, conrad's _heart of darkness_, kipling's _kim_, i would argue that the same kind of analysis could be used to examine works by such "preeminent" figures as pynchon and delillo for what they say about u.s. imperialism and its deep and intricate relations to american culture. such an analysis, to be adequate to said's complexity, would clearly have to go beyond assigning terms implying value judgments, such as "progressive" or "pessimistic."^3^ i want to begin to explore some of the outlines for such a discussion with regard to the work of pynchon, especially _vineland_, before examining how some of these same issues are worked out by delillo in _mao ii_. [3] pynchon's "big" book, _gravity's rainbow_, principally concerns the time frame at the end of world war ii when the position of being the leading nation-state in the western global hegemony passed from france and great britain--and for a brief time, germany--to the united states. this is at least one reason for its enormously important cultural position and the intense reactions it continues to provoke. while many other works of fiction deal with the american experience of the world war, pynchon's novel gives a mythic embodiment to this central shift in power of the twentieth century, focusing significantly on the transfer of rocket technology from germany to the united states, while ostensibly concerned with the resulting terror of the british population during the v-2 bombings. the earlier _v._ deals mainly with the underside milieu of fifties america, but significantly this underside also has its military aspect, indicating the strong links between culture and hegemony that said outlines. again, significantly, those segments of _v._ that predate the fifties mainly concern french and british efforts to maintain and extend their political influence in the middle east and the mediterranean basin. _the crying of log 49_ again links paranoid systems of meaning and control of power to european antecedents, the tristero system seemingly related to the more ancient thurn and taxis. pynchon's famous paranoia remains tremendously appealing to many of us because he, almost alone among american novelists, has attempted to describe a wide-ranging response to social life in the world's sole superpower. pynchon's works outline the interpellation of subjects into the u.s. cultural system and point, usually through humorously paranoid gestures, to moments of resistance to that interpellation. [4] my officemate at the university is someone who is proud of having taught a course on everything you need to know to read _gravity's rainbow_; but every time i mention _vineland_ he says he has yet to finish it, saying of pynchon, "he's tired, we're all tired." something of this fatigue has shown up in the initial critical response to the novel, the neo-conservatives accusing pynchon of indulging his "nostalgia" for the sixties and more progressive writers finding a lack of existential commitment to the struggle. in the cold war context that i have begun to suggest, this fatigue is perfectly explainable as what is left at the end of an era. if pynchon is the writer who most forthrightly takes on the issues, both global and cultural, of the cold war era in which he came of age, then _vineland_ can be viewed as his "last word" on the subject (raising once again the sempiternal mystery of what he could possibly produce after this). this is not primarily a story of the relation of the u.s. to britain, france and germany, or even to the rest of the world where american domination is played out--it is the story of "our" government declaring war on key segments of its own population as a necessary corollary to maintaining its "preeminent" position. pynchon's paranoid view of the american social landscape of the reagan eighties, though he tries hard to maintain the comic book humor and some of the same verve and excess to the writing as in the past, is less easy to take this time in part because he strikes so close to home. [5] one way pynchon strikes at the home base is to implicate left resistance types in the triumphant success of reaganism (in itself nothing more than another variation on triumphant americanism generally).^4^ while former hippies like zoyd wheeler are stuck in a self-induced haze of pot smoke and mental disability benefits, former committed revolutionaries like frenesi gates have sold out the revolution to the forces of repression represented by brock vond. the main plot, such as it is, of _vineland_ concerns zoyd's and frenesi's daughter prairie and her efforts to locate her mother when word comes down that frenesi may be making a move to get back in touch.^5^ the story of leftist betrayal in _vineland_ is enacted by prairie viewing the films of frenesi's revolutionary collective, 24fps, many of these shot by frenesi, while the narration is presented by former co-members of the collective darryl louise (dl) and ditzah pisk feldman. prairie is presented with both visual evidence and an oral history of her mother's seduction by super-narc and federal hitman brock vond, and frenesi's participation in a scheme to murder protest leader weed atman. in terms of narrative levels, much of this material is not recounted directly to prairie, but rather focalized through frenesi in overlapping flashbacks, so that some of frenesi's inner life of the time is made clearer. this reveals the worst betrayal of all, since frenesi's only positive motivation in all of this seems limited to her strong sexual attraction to vond and to uniformed men in general. her negative motivation seems to be an existential crisis of meaning--more on that in a minute. the question remains why pynchon chooses to tell the story of the underside of the triumph of the political right in america as a parable of political betrayal by members of the left. is this simply an instance of scapegoating, or is pynchon trying to tell a more complicated story of the co-implication, or interpellation, of various smaller narratives in the larger political narratives of our time? [6] perhaps tellingly, i want to insist that this kind of large question is one that can have no definitive answer, but rather demands repeated acts of interpretation and reinscription into different political and cultural contexts.^6^ to make this analysis more exact, i want to concentrate briefly on the interpretive dilemma that _vineland_ stages with respect to "drugs." i place "drugs" in scare quotes to indicate that any discourse on this subject can not simply take the concept as a given, but must attempt some kind of contextualization before any analysis is possible, an approach carried out in exemplary fashion by avital ronell in _crack wars_. as ronell states, with her usual economy and forcefulness, "while everywhere dealt with, drugs act as a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language" (52). drugs escape the closed circle of hermeneutic inquiry because they are one name for the desire that overwhelms language. ronell quotes heidegger to this effect on the first page inside the cover: "addiction and urge are possibilities rooted in the thrownness of dasein." what it is to be human is inextricably linked to our strongest (and strangest) desires. frenesi's existential torment and her politically incorrect fixation on brock vond's erect penis can be seen, in some sense, as aspects of each other. but what happens when the word "drugs" is invoked to elicit and to control this generalized desire? [7] zoyd wheeler's comic and slightly sad fixation on weed is nothing compared to pynchon's scathing contempt for how the reagan-era department of justice uses "drugs" as a code for enforcing a clampdown on americans as desiring creatures. the feds are seen moving in on the last outpost of northern california marijuana growing in a community called holytail: sooner or later holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old emerald triangle, pacified territory reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie. (221-2) [8] this passage has been quoted often as revealing pynchon's attitudes toward a whole range of issues, from drugs to television to reagan's america. while i agree with brian mchale that even the "extra-diagetic narrator" is never simply identifiable as the author thomas pynchon (see especially, mchale 90ff.), the elements presented in this passage are understandable as a means of talking fundamentally about the cold war at home. the key here is that "drugs" can be used to mobilize military force--in a manner exactly parallel to that used to enforce american policy in places like central america--to extend governmental control over the behavior of its own citizenry. and as usual in pynchon's work, this paranoid vision is based on and corresponds to historical realities. why this vision of the american social polity should be threatening to neo-conservatives is clear enough. but this view of the limitations on the possibility for effective, engaged political action is likewise such that left critics like alan wilde complain of "_vineland_'s very different dereliction: its refusal of the existential commitment it ponders only to evade" (180). but this is just the point: the political engagement of _vineland_ is too close to the realities of the culture/imperialism nexus to admit the individualist revolutionary project as a satisfactory "existential" solution.^7^ without a fully realized dialectical context, the revolutionary project itself can become, as it seems to have for frenesi, just another in an array of interchangeable "drugs" that can be used by the forces of order to enforce a hegemonic social program.^8^ [9] don delillo's _mao ii_ presents a fundamental engagement with many of these same issues of geopolitical concern, such as the united states's leading role in maintaining global hegemony and what that means with respect to u.s. cultural production, and their necessary interpretive scenarios. part of its brilliant strategy is to stage some of these dilemmas through delving into the thoughts and actions of its novelist character, bill gray, who presents certain similarities, at least when viewed externally, to thomas pynchon. the irony of a blurb by pynchon figuring prominently on the back cover of _mao ii_ is only one of the many nestings typical of postmodern culture. bill gray is a hyperreclusive figure who obsessively guards his privacy with the aid of two live-in helpers, scott martineau and karen janney. karen has been glimpsed briefly in the prologue to the novel as one of the six thousand five hundred couples married in a mass ceremony by reverend moon, to whom karen refers as "master," in yankee stadium. the action of the novel begins when scott goes to new york to transport photographer brita nilsson to gray's secret domicile for a photo session that will result in the first pictures of bill to be published in over thirty years. now, bill gray could be based on any number of prominent american writers. j. d. salinger, for example, is at least as famous a literary recluse. the connection with the reclusive pynchon, however, is tantalizing for several reasons: pynchon's famous reluctance to be interviewed or photographed, extending if one believes the stories to excising his picture from copies of the high school yearbook; his cultural centrality, or "preeminence," despite a somewhat limited body of published work, very similar to the fictional gray; and the insistent linkage that has taken place in the critical discourse between pynchon and delillo, offering delillo a convenient alter-ego who is both like himself and plausibly identifiable as someone else.^9^ [10] one of the concerns of _mao ii _most clearly identifiable as postmodern is the cultural centrality of images, and how this relates to the role of political leaders and artists in society. the photo session of author bill gray rhymes insistently with references to the work of andy warhol and to warhol's posthumous existence in image form. warhol's famous dictum concerning everyone's fifteen minutes of fame and his use of political and culture icons insistently pose questions of simulacra and the role of cultural figures in the experience of individuals in a society. this in turn relates to an almost obsessive series of meditations on the relation between the individual--figured in _mao ii_ insistently as the figure of the novelist/writer, but also relating to political, spiritual and terrorist leaders--and the masses. mao zedong is both the leader of the chinese revolution and the enigmatic figure who appears in a photograph swimming across the yangste river after a long period of reclusion and rumored death. mao is the embodiment of the revolution whose writings are memorized by the faithful millions, particularly around the time of the cultural revolution, and he is the mass-produced silk-screen image hanging in the moma and reproduced on the cover of _mao ii_. mao's influence over millions of chinese is clearly meant to rhyme with sun myung moon's influence over the 6,500 couples married together in yankee stadium, an event that so shocks the parents of karen janney, parents who metonymically represent the masses of middle americans.^10^ what does the much-vaunted american concept of selfhood and individuality amount to when compared to the experience of the crowd? the prologue ends with the apothegm, "the future belongs to crowds" (_mao ii_ 16), and part i ends with the figure of bill gray leaving his publisher's office building in new york, the beginning of his escape or disengagement from his former life, "where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd" (103). [11] is the novelist an artist who works alone in a room with a typewriter, or is the novelist the creation of a commodity culture, packaged and marketed for consumption by the masses? _mao ii_'s bill gray is clearly both, and the conflict that this causes "inside" him is the leading motor of the various plot machinations. scott martineau, gray's assistant, is first pictured in new york in a bookstore: bookstores made him slightly sick at times. he looked at the gleaming best-sellers. people drifted through the store, appearing caught in some unhappy dazzlement. there were books on step terraces and lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays. he went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass-market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. covers were lacquered and gilded. books lay cradled in nineunit counterpacks like experimental babies. he could hear them shrieking *buy me*. there were posters for book weeks and book fairs. people made their way around shipping cartons, stepping over books scattered on the floor. he went to the section on modern classics and found bill gray's two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts. he liked to check the shelves for bill. (19-20) [12] the tonality of this passage is reminiscent of the often-praised supermarket segment of _white noise_ (35ff.). just as contemporary novelists rarely pay attention to the details of food shopping and other quotidian tasks, so they rarely venture into bookstores in their prose. the self-image of the novelist as "artist" would seem to require viewing the novel as just another commodity, even a refined and highly valuable one, as demeaning to the artistic integrity of the work. delillo not only faces this question--one could pose it as the relation of the writer to the audience, but that would already involve certain presuppositions, including the commodity aspect addressed here--he begins to burrow inside it. there is finally something queasy-making about the ambiguity of the last sentence. is scott checking the shelves "for bill" to be interpreted as: checking for bill's works, checking the shelves on bill's behalf, or checking for some kind of commodified version of bill's corpse? after all, it is the commodification of the author, as foucault reminds us, that leads to the author's disappearance. [13] _mao ii_ could even be interpreted as a complex meditation that stages what roland barthes has called "the death of the author," this being in some sense the "point" of the novel. bill gray dies an anonymous death on a ferry from cyprus to lebanon, with a crew member seen lifting gray's passport and identification. although delillo is well known for his ambling and unresolved plot lines, gray's death seems particularly "unmotivated," his internal injuries stemming from an apparently random accident in athens.^11^ having gone to great lengths to create the pynchon-like gray, imagining his secretive retreat, his relationships with his assistants and his publisher, even sending him on an amnesty international/pen mission of mercy across the european continent--this denouement is reminiscent of the classic ending "and then they all got run over by a bus." the question is whether this unmotivated death of gray is some kind of complex joke delillo is playing on his audience and his critics, or whether gray's death has been planted (like jack gladney's death in _white noise_) in the circumstances of his writing, his fame, and his reclusion from the world. [14] as walter benjamin states, famously, in his essay "the storyteller": "death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell." any writer who tries to represent the story of a human life borrows, as benjamin says, from the authority of death. bill gray would seem to wear this mantle heavily. the theme of death has been introduced, as i have been suggesting, even before gray makes an appearance in the text, but he himself is clearly obsessed with the idea of death and how this relates to his role as a writer. during the photo session, gray says, "i'm playing the idea of death." he expands for brita nilsson: "something about the occasion makes me think i'm at my own wake. sitting for a picture is morbid business. a portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. this is the whole point. we're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. it's their past, their history we're inventing here. and it's not how i look now that matters. it's how i'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. the deeper i pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? it's like a wake. and i'm the actor made up for the laying-out." (42) [15] gray's theory of photography exactly parallels benjamin's theory of the story; the meaning of each develops from and depends upon the *end* of the person's life being known. delillo had already given classic expression to an aspect of this idea in _libra_ through the speculations of win everett: "plots carry their own logic. there is a tendency of plots to move toward death. he believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. a narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men" (_libra_ 221). significantly for our understanding here, death serves as a key mediating term between the work--whether image or text--and its role in the culture. this preunderstanding is necessary, i think, to understanding gray's (and delillo's) meditations on the link between the novelist and the terrorist. [16] gray consents to have his photograph taken in part because the burden of his fame, specifically his reclusion from the world that is both a reaction to and source of that fame, has become too great for him to bear. he has a sense that if he releases photos of himself to the public he can delay the inevitable tightening of the noose that he represents as those fans who are desperately seeking to find his whereabouts. so if, as i have speculated, bill gray's death has been "planted" long before his death on the ferry, the seeds lie both in his writings and in the effects of his reclusion, which in turn bears a complex relationship to those very writings. arnold weinstein has provocatively proposed a reading of hawthorne's story "wakefield" as an "ur-narrative" for understanding depictions of the self in american fiction (13-26). hawthorne's wakefield is a man who disappears from his life for a period of twenty years and sets himself up across the street from his former home to observe the effects of his absence, particularly on his wife. weinstein takes this creepy parable as paradigmatic of a concern for self-shaping in american letters generally. if we want to view delillo's bill gray as a kind of postmodern wakefield, some of the key differences between the two may begin to emerge more clearly. for one thing, gray disappears from the scene of his self-imposed seclusion; more importantly, he dies without a trace, whereas wakefield eventually returns. gray's "self-shaping" is more emphatically oriented around his own death, although when it arrives, it seems to catch him at least partially unaware. also, in keeping with delillo's insistence on the writer being superseded by a public image, gray's actual death may in the end be irrelevant to his continued "existence" as a writer and public figure: scott and karen are seen planning to keep the household going as before, releasing the photographs, and perhaps even publishing the latest book manuscript as well (_mao ii_ 222-4). [17] the most significant aspect of bill gray's determined reclusion from public life is the variation this allows delillo to play on the trope of the isolated writer as outlaw or criminal, leading to the central importance in _mao ii_ of the figure of the terrorist. as scott is taking photographer brita nilsson to gray's secret residence, she says to him: "i feel as if i'm being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains." "tell bill. he'll love that," said scott. (27) [18] gray has his own extensive theories on this relationship, which he expounds on in the first part of the narrative and then tries to enact in the second part. he tells brita: "there's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. in the west we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. do you ask your writers how they feel about this? years ago i used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. they make raids on human consciousness. what writers used to do before we were all incorporated." (41) [19] clearly we need to distinguish between what bill gray the character says, and what don delillo might be said to believe, but there is no doubt that the figure of the terrorist plays an important role in nearly every one of delillo's more recent works. further, the equation that gray draws here is complexly enacted in the plot of _mao ii_, as bill gray leaves his private seclusion and enters into an active role in the interplay between the forces of culture and the forces of terror. my working hypothesis is that delillo views gray's statement here as at least somewhat deluded and that gray's eventual death is in some important sense the price he pays for that delusion. but the entire, complex treatment of the "terrorist" theme in _mao ii_ would seem to require two related moves that were adumbrated in the discussion of _vineland_. one move is to investigate the highly-charged polyvalence of the term "terrorist"; the other is to uncover, if possible, what said calls "a structure of attitude and reference" that emerges in delillo's staging of the interplay between the novelist and the terrorist, particularly as this involves an american writer's necessary implication in the culture/imperialism nexus. [20] terror and its derivatives, terrorism and terrorist, are highly complex conceptual markers all of whose complexity i cannot hope to outline fully. the usual pairing places terror in a conceptual binary with reason or enlightenment. perhaps the paradigmatic historical event linking these two terms is the french "reign of terror," when the enlightenment motives of the 1789 revolution were seen as overcome by the forces of the revolutionary vanguard, leading to a paradigmatically undemocratic dictatorship sustained by raw force and unrestrained cruelty. this binary serves to shape maurice merleau-ponty's strange and controversial examination of the stalin purges, _humanisme et terreur_ (1947), and may serve to remind us of the stand taken by many french intellectuals at the outset of the cold war.^12^ although merleau-ponty quickly abandoned even this qualified support for stalinism, his high-level analysis that seriously attempts to contextualize stalin's violence by comparison to the violence present in liberal democracies shows a need to understand the argument for liberal democracy within a specifically postwar historical context. jean-francois lyotard has renewed aspects of this controversy, in the context of theorizing the postmodern, by examining shifts in the meaning of terror: terror is no longer exercised in the name of freedom, but in the name of `our' satisfaction, in the name of the satisfication of a *we* which is definitely restricted to singularity. and if i judge this prospect intolerable, am i still being too modern? its name is tyranny: the law which `we' decree is not addressed to *you*, to you fellowcitizens or even to you subjects; it is applied to *them*,to third parties, to those outside, and it is simply not concerned with being legitimized in their eyes. i recall that nazism was one such way of mourning emancipation and of exercising, for the first time in europe since 1789, a terror whose reason was not in theory accessible to all and whose benefits were not to be shared by all. (1981; trans. 316-317) [21] for lyotard, as theorist of the postmodern, terror *also* needs to be contextualized in what he calls the "regime of phrases" and not only, or even primarily, in the totalizing discourses of emancipation or human progress. who is addressed by the various sentences, laws, discourses that have recourse to terror? who is excluded? how do totalizing discourses elide these questions, necessarily placing *them*' on the outside of the discourse of rational humanism? what are the results of this marginalization? [22] this marginalized outside is what is always hidden by the ideology of liberal democracy, an ideology constituted during the cold war by the unquestioned binary opposition between freedom and communism, and now, given the breakdown of the world communist system, transferred to an equally unquestioned opposition between democracy and terrorism. according to this logic, whatever injustices may exist in the liberal democratic system or in the relationship of liberal democracies to the rest of the world, this system represents an undeniable advance over previous and currently existing political systems based on terror, cruelty and coercion.^13^ whether consciously or not, this logic underlies the commonly accepted usages of "terrorism" and "terrorist." the united states is not seen as using terrorism when it wages war with iraq, using overwhelmingly superior technology and force to inflict a large number of both military and civilian casualities (the casualty estimate itself, or more precisely the lack of an official american estimate, is only one of the scandals of this war). the bombing of the world trade center, by contrast, is instantly branded an act of international terrorism. american domestic lawlessness, whether it be randall terry and the borderline murderous "operation rescue" or david koresh and his armed-to-the-teeth suicidal followers, is *never* referred to as terrorism in the american media.^14^ the end of the cold war and establishment of the united states as the sole remaining superpower has seen all opposition by lesser nation-states to u.s. control branded as terroristic: first came "state-supported terrorism" (read: iran); then "terrorist states" (read: libya, iraq). whether one supports american foreign policy or not, and whatever one's views may be on recent armed conflicts and other acts of violence committed in the context of these struggles, it should be clear that the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" are markers invoked to build ideological consensus for certain kinds of u.s. domination abroad. just as the reagan-bush era "war on drugs" was a code for all sorts of government-sponsored paramilitary, ideological, classand race-specific attacks on "*them*," so "terrorism" functions as what ronell terms a "parasite" on language, possessing an enormous resonance that threatens to overwhelm our interpretive structures of understanding.^15^ [23] on delillo obviously realizes much of this and he utilizes (or one could say, exploits) the recurrent theme of terrorism in _mao ii_ and other works in order to tap into the tremendous force of these associations. his willingness and ability to face these central, defining geopolitical issues is a primary reason that he, much like pynchon, is seen as one of our "preeminent" writers. but, at the same time, because he is a "preeminent" writer and one who moreover deals, as an american, with issues such as terrorism, his work may be seen to point to some of the necessarily limiting and blinding effects of the culture/imperialism nexus outlined by said, even as it presents what critics mainly agree is a "progressive" position on most ostensibly political issues. said's astonishing discussion of conrad's _heart of darkness_, for example, highlights the interconnections between a novelistic discourse that presents an outward critique of the ostensible effects of the dominant ideology while in many ways remaining under the sway of that same ideology.^16^ delillo bravely sets out to imagine a complex political and cultural connection between his postmodern novelist, bill gray, and a "terrorist" leader, abu rashid. while the motivation of novelist gray in seeking to act out his theories equating the novelist with the terrorist in terms of cultural significance is both fascinating and revealing, delillo's imagined portrait of the "terrorist" half of the equation reveals some of his--perhaps necessary, maybe even inevitable--limitations as both a westerner and an american. [24] richard rorty, associated with the liberal democracy argument rehearsed above, might also be said to represent the putative position of the "early" bill gray ("years ago i used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture" [_mao ii_ 41]). rorty has argued for the shaping value of novels for the ethical thinking members of a culture engage in. in works such as _contingency, irony, and solidarity_, rorty says that there is an unbridgeable gap between what philosophers and other intellectual and cultural workers do, and the real world in which innocent people are imprisoned, tortured, killed or left to starve to death. the value of the liberal democratic system is that by eliminating the worst kinds of government-sponsored cruelty and coercion it establishes a reason-oriented rule of peaceful discussion to attain pragmatic social goals. one of these goals is the establishment of an intellectual climate in which writers and intellectuals can discuss issues such as ethics and morality, but crucially *without* the responsibility for anybody's actual well-being, which is guaranteed by the liberal-democratic state. since the intellectual sphere is primarily engaged in imaginative exercises, novelists in rorty's view are much more able to engage thoughtful, well-intentioned people with questions of ethical and moral import. novelists present imagined situations that parallel real-life ones in which people face the questions of how to resist state terror, whether or not to engage in political action, how to respect other people's choices, and so forth, showing how individual characters are capable of the wrong as well as the right choices. because of this imaginative license, rorty's novelists--his primary examples in _contingency, irony, and solidarity_ are nabokov and orwell--are better able to engage and shape readers' moral reactions than are, say, professional philosophers, educators, political or religious leaders. [25] now, rorty has been widely criticized for ignoring the cruelty, violence and coercion that exists within the liberal democratic state. he has also been accused of establishing a kind of analytical "apartheid" with his insistence on the absolute separation between the realms of intellectual endeavor and real-world situations of power and domination.^17^ richard bernstein also argues, "rorty's praise of novelists who educate not by didactism [*sic*] but by imaginative concrete description depends on a dubious presupposition which he never justifies and for which there seems to be little, if any, concrete empirical evidence"; and that "in a society such as ours where there are fewer and fewer readers of novels, it seems little more than a false nostalgia to think that novels can play the role rorty so desperately wants them to play" (285). this would seem to be the stage of thinking that don delillo's bill gray has reached, one we could fairly term postmodern. yet the consequences of this thinking are potentially devastating for gray's view of himself, since he is a novelist others had indeed credited with giving expression to the inner life of the culture, and he had at least until a certain point believed himself capable of sustaining such a role. if the postmodern culture is one in which novels and their creators are increasingly commodified (the heightened commodification correlating to a presumably diminishing public) rather than read and cherished, this may explain gray's increasingly morose view of himself and his writing. certainly this view provides a motivation for gray's thinking that the only possible remaining step is to try to bridge the gap between the interiorized experience of novel-writing (and reading) and engaged action in the public sphere.^18^ the second half of _mao ii_ sketches gray's itinerary in a distinctively postmodern and hallucinatory way; as the stages of this journey are increasingly marked by setbacks and failure, the possible interrelation between the private and public spheres is both questioned and problematized. [26] the first stage in gray's journey away from his former seclusion and toward a version of public action is precipitated by a request for a meeting from his old friend and publisher, charlie everson, communicated by brita nilsson. at this meeting everson explains a situation in which gray can be of use in his role as famous author and public figure. everson is the "chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression" (98); and he wants gray to appear at a media event in london on behalf of the group. this media event will be timed to correspond to the release of a hostage held by terrorists in beirut, a hostage who is of special interest to everson's group because he is a swiss poet. when gray leaves the initial meeting with everson, he purposely avoids his assistant scott martineau, and begins a process of disappearing from his life as it has been constituted up until then.^19^ in london, the media event never comes off, in part because the place chosen for the meeting is bombed. gray's itinerary is furthered, however, by his encounter and conversations with george haddad, an intermediary figure between the literary group everson represents and the terrorist group holding the hostage. haddad suggests that gray may be able to serve as an agent for freeing the hostage, if he is willing to meet directly with a leader of the terrorist group. as the bombing in london has demonstrated, however, gray may be the object of the same "terror" that the group practices in beirut, the fear for his personal safety placing him in a position parallel to the swiss poet. eventually gray accedes to haddad's wish that he travel to haddad's base in athens (in a significant place-echo with _the names_), where according to haddad true dialogue is easier. in athens, though, gray comes to understand that his only possible mediating role is to substitute himself for the hostage, a kind of literary "trading up." caught in this extremely uncertain position, unable to return to his previous life and apparently enmeshed in his own logic equating the novelist and the terrorist, gray travels to cyprus and arranges ferry passage to beirut, during which trip he dies. [27] if the novel ended there, we might speculate that delillo was trying to stage the impossibility of the western individualist-author "crossing over" to the "terrorist" orient, trapped as gray is by his own imaginative limitations. but in an ironic doubling that resonates with the postmodern themes of image, simulacra and personal identity examined earlier, the postscript, "in beirut," presents the photographer brita nilsson completing bill gray's journey and meeting with terrorist leader abu rashid. nilsson has abandoned her project of photographing authors and switched to terrorists, enacting gray's theorized substitution. her experience of beirut is hazy and surreal, dominated by the dizzying simulacra of coke ads and the cult of the terrorist leader's personality. as a swede, brita nilsson is coded "international" from the outset and so might be seen as more able than the american gray to move easily in this "foreign" setting. but nilsson's art of photography is also more capable than gray's written medium of communicating the surface reality of beirut, a reality delillo seems to urge is all there is. (in a telling juxtaposition as the book ends, nilsson experiences flashes followed by no sound that she realizes are not shell bursts, but someone taking photographs.) delillo's abu rashid, seen in a single encounter with nilsson, is a taciturn terrorist, given to mouthing phrases like "don't bring your problems to beirut" (232). much as scott martineau parrots statements made by bill gray, so abu rashid's interpreter expands on, even makes up, statements for abu rashid. abu rashid also exerts an unspoken control over his hooded young followers who wear his picture on their t-shirts. but, somewhat paradoxically, abu rashid does seem to care what brita nilsson thinks of him, saying repeatedly: "you must tell me if you think i'm totally mad" (236). where bill gray's "failure" to cross over fully to the other side might be said to enact a certain reality, a division between world views and systems of thinking, _mao ii_'s abu rashid represents, in my view, delillo's imaginative "failure" even to attempt to render any kind of satisfactory counterpart to the western novelist in the figure of the terrorist leader. [28] it may be that in order to render anything like an adequate view of what it is to be a terrorist, one must have had the actual experience. but when confronted with a situation like that presented in _mao ii_ of someone held hostage, how is one to image the captor's mentality? the swiss poet has no direct contact with the leader, abu rashid, only with someone referred to as "the boy" who may or may not be the same "boy" with the hood that brita nilsson sees with abu rashid. the scene of captivity is imagined entirely through the consciousness of the swiss poet. throughout the text, "the boy" is credited with having almost no independent thought or existence; instead, his actions are random and forgetful: the boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. the last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse. (110) there were strip fragments of concrete still attached to the bent steel rod the boy used to beat the bottoms of the prisoner's feet when he remembered. (203) [29] i don't know what logic this representation of the captor's random forgetfulness is meant to serve, but it does correspond in its way to the lassitude and taciturnity attributed to the terrorist leader abu rashid in the postscript. whatever the case may be, this semi-bored, inattentive approach to torture is most certainly *not* what narratives told from the "other side" present. marguerite duras' brief narrative that presents an autobiographical account of torturing a french collaborator, for example, shows her and her compatriots to be tense, alert and extremely involved with the process of torturing their prisoner (_la douleur_ 135-162). and in a note preceding this narrative, duras "the author" tells her readers: "therese is me. she who tortures the informer is me. i give you she who tortures along with the other texts. learn to read: these are sacred texts" (134; my trans.). this same "sacred" quality permeates elie wiesel's (one would think at least somewhat fictionalized) account in _dawn_ of a jewish terrorist, as a member of a group in palestine, holding hostage and finally shooting a british army officer. [30] the recent, surprisingly successful, film _the crying game_ (dir. neil jordan, 1992) devotes roughly the first half of its narrative to a similar terrorist/hostage confrontation.^20^ both in its representation of the terrorist/hostage relationship and in the terrorist's very different set of experiences in the second half of the film, jordan presents material suggesting the terrorist's role in postmodern culture is less that of the "novelist" (someone who influences the inner mind of the culture) and more that of the "interpreter" (someone who participates in smaller-scale interpretive acts). although the second half of the film and its focus on the mysterious transvestite or transsexual dil has provoked the most response, i find the first half of the film to be as powerful a cinematic experience as any in recent memory. jordan has said that his depiction of the hostage/terrorist relationship in the context of northern ireland--though he wouldn't tend to use the word "terrorist," would he?--bears a relationship to two previous treatments of the theme, frank o'connor's story "guest of the nation" and brendan behan's play _the hostage_ (introduction to _the neil jordan reader_ [njr], xii). he continues: o'connor and behan dealt with simple friendship between two men. underlying this friendship lay an erotic possibility, a sense of mutual need and identification that could have provided salvation for their protagonists. that possibility remained subdued, and so both stories ended tragically. with _the crying game_, i brought the erotic thread to the surface. instead of two, there were now three. a hostage, a captor, and an absent lover. the lover became the focus for the erotic subtext, loved by both men in a way they couldn't love each other. (njr xii) [31] although there are many differences in all of these situations of captivity, i would propose that jordan's romanticizing tendency is one way to explore the "sacred" element both duras and wiesel insist upon, and that delillo's narrative either denies or completely elides.^21^ [32] _the crying game_'s hostage jody is a british soldier on assignment in northern ireland. he is also a black man, born in antigua, and the film uses his racial identity to comment in repeated, ironic fashion on the complex interrelations inhering in britain's "postcolonial" experience. in the film's opening sequence, jody is seduced by jude, an ira operative, while the music from the opening credits "when a man loves a woman" fades in the background. there are multiple ironies operating here, of course, as when we find out that jude is merely playing a role in jody's capture, and later when we find out that the woman jody does love is not a woman at all. the film consistently sets up these enactments of interpretive scenarios, in which the principal characters are presented with situations requiring responses to bodies of information. the film's audience is likewise asked to participate in these interpretive actions; but, unlike the audience who are given clues and may even guess "right" ("i *knew* all along" "no, you didn't" "i did too"), the film's principal characters almost always are wrong. jody makes a huge error when he goes with jude, something he appears to admit when he says, "i didn't even fancy her. . . . she's not my type" (njr 189). fergus, of course, makes a big mistake in getting involved with the prisoner, a mistake that leads to a whole series of others, including letting jody take off his hood when he is about to be executed. the film's most notorious interpretive dilemma involves fergus' lack of insight into the clues presented regarding dil's gender. even once his error has been exposed, fergus continues not to recognize dil fully, and thus both to underestimate her and to pass on faulty information to his cohorts: for example, when maguire asks "and who is she?" and fergus responds "just a girl" (njr 245). underestimating dil leads fergus to botch his next assignment, when dil ties him up, preventing him from making his rendezvous with maguire and jude. when jude arrives at the apartment, dil correctly identifies her as an agent in jody's abduction and shoots her. now, we could say that all of these errors are part of the romantic plot of the film--fergus the terrorist with a heart simply making a muddle of things--but that would likewise be a mistake of interpretation in my view. [33] jordan's ira terrorists (or any other terrorists, for that matter) are by no means in control of the meanings generated by their actions, despite what they might like to think, and despite delillo/gray's equation of the terrorist with the novelist. the situations in which terrorism arises do not admit of these kind of unambivalent messages in which one person or group does the emitting and the wider culture or the masses do the receiving. following the analysis of lyotard in _le differend_, it is this impossibility of a universal or totalizing discourse, as paradigmatically represented by the silencing of the wronged party, e.g., the holocaust victim, that leads inevitably to the incommensurable difference or %differend%. the language of the law, the language of western imperialism, even the language of liberal democracy, does not address all subjects and does not allow all subjects to formulate utterances (most notably those who are victims of genocide). operating out of a determinant us/them opposition, the universalizing discourse of western humanism necessarily excludes and marginalizes certain utterances, prevents them from being heard or even from being made. the abu rashids of this world are not taciturn "by nature"; they are rather denied the fundamental conditions in which to formulate language in a meaningful way. of course, this leads the abu rashids and the ferguses to undertake actions that rational, moral and ethical thinking is quick to condemn. what this analysis of terrorism uncovers as an aspect of our "postmodern condition," however, is that we all occupy roles as speakers and interpreters in various discourse communities that may or may not overlap or communicate with each other. this does not excuse any one of us (as the by-now routine misreading of lyotard would claim) from the obligation to try to understand the ideological structures determining our own discourse communities, and the way these same structures systematically distort the meanings generated by others. [34] it is no longer a viable option, %pace% rorty, to say that western humanism is the best show we have and everybody else had better be convinced (preferably by persuasion rather than force) to get on board. the famous "conflict of interpretations," which lyotard continues to insist upon through linking the %differend% to theories of justice, means from this perspective that *no one* occupies the role of the "novelist" in the sense of entering into the inner mind of a culture and determining what its members should think about key moral questions. our various social formations lack the kind of cultural consensus necessary for such a "preeminent" figure. it is a fatal error to think that the "terrorist" is any more able to occupy such a position and in this way i think delillo's _mao ii_ is exemplary in presenting bill gray's doomed attempt to somehow force this connection. where _mao ii_ falls short, in my view, is in its imaginative representation of the figure of the terrorist. neil jordan's fergus may be a romanticized version of the terrorist, but at least jordan's terrorist is given a "sacred" dimension. delillo may wish to deny this "sacred" character to his terrorists, showing rather something like the banality of evil in "the boy"'s random behavior and abu rashid's programmatic and taciturn utterances. but it is only in attempting to understand the silenced utterances resulting from the inherent lack of justice in our society and leading to all kinds of terrorism both at home and abroad that our postmodern culture deserves to survive at all. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes 1. this notion is advanced by glen scott allen in the fuller version of a paper presented at the 1992 modern language association meeting in new york, "spectral authorship: thomas pynchon, don delillo and the postmodern legacy," and in his essay in this collection. 2. in said's terms, `imperialism' means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; `colonialism,' which is almost always a consequence of imperialism is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. . . . in our time, colonialism has largely ended; imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices" (9). 3. this is a stage where not only the anti-left reviewers of _the washington post_ and other media outlets are stuck. for a forceful critique of these, see the articles by hal crowther and frank lentricchia in (lentricchia, ed.) _introducing don delillo_. on the other side of the ideological divide are the little + symbols that fredric jameson affixes on his chart next to various theorists of modernism and the postmodern, according to whether they are "progressive" or "reactionary" (61). 4. something about the mirror symmetry, or pleonastic quality, of "triumphant americanism" and "american triumphalism" ought to give pause to anyone wishing to assume the label of "americanist." paul bove has given an incisive expression to some of the problems associated with the americanist discourse in literary studies (48-66). i am very disturbed by the suggestion voiced by some that american literature should be seen in the context of "post-colonial" literatures. here again, i think said's recent work is indispensable for understanding "america"'s role as a leading imperialist power and for providing ways of contextualizing any analysis of u.s. cultural production. 5. prairie's search is similar to that in another roughly contemporaneous work, t. coreghessan boyle's _world's end_ (1988). in this novel, a young man's search for identity hinges on finding out what happened during a leftist political rally that took place when he was just a child. the betrayal committed on this occasion by his father led to the death of his mother and his father's permanent estrangement. a combination of mystery story and search for personal identity, _world's end_ counts for its tacit support by readers of leftist sympathy in order to invest its traditional patterns of mystery story and identity quest with political resonance. this topic has obvious resonances with borges' "theme of the traitor and the hero," and bernardo bertolucci's film based on the borges story,_ the spider's strategem_ (1968). in the bertolucci film, where borges' indeterminate setting is replaced by postwar italy, a son returns to the town in which a statue of his father, martyred by the fascists, dominates the town square. the son intends to investigate the background of his father's murder, but the further his investigation takes him, the more it looks like the father planned his own murder in order to make amends for betraying his cell of partisan resistance fighters. my guess is that a more thorough examination of modern european and european-influenced literatures would yield countless examples of this motif. 6. as should be clear by now, i am following some of the conceptual apparatus for understanding postmodernism proposed by jean-francois lyotard, particularly in _the postmodern condition_ and _le postmoderne explique aux enfants_. 7. that is, if existentialism was ever in itself a satisfactory solution on a political level. edward said's discussion of albert camus' work in _l'etranger_ and other texts shows that camus' vaunted existential crisis of meaning, particularly the supposedly "unmotivated" murder of the arab by meursault, serves as a cover for his deep intrication in the colonialist history and mindset of the french algerians (said 169-185). 8. that marx had this metaphorical/nonmetaphorical sense of "drugs" is clear from his statement regarding religion. lindsay anderson's film _o lucky man!_ (1973) turns marx's dictum around in a prominent wall graffiti: "revolution is the opium of the intellectuals." 9. these concerns with selfhood and authorship are central to arnold weinstein's recent magisterial study of american fiction, _nobody's home_. 10. in american and western thinking generally, asians mean numbers. in guy banister's paranoid imagination, chinese are massing in the baja on the border with california: "there was something classic in the massing of the chinese" (_libra_ 352). it is too simple merely to call this racist (though it clearly is), because we thus tend to indulge in self-righteous determinations of other people's racism. delillo's work consistently moves in to the minds of americans--the banisters, the oswalds, the bill grays--to show how these racist and other ideological principles serve as organizing tropes for the larger social entities in which we all participate to one degree or another. 11. the paranoid reading of delillo's fiction, as solicited for example by _the names_, would raise the question of whether there can ever be an "unmotivated" killing of an american in athens. that is to say, perhaps gray's ultimately fatal accident, like the near-fatal shooting of david keller / james axton in _the names_, stages the "return of the repressed," mirroring meursault's "unmotivated" murder of the arab in camus's _l'etranger_. but maybe america's leading role in maintaining the "new world order" is not as transparent as i see it as being. arnold weinstein, for example, says (astonishingly) about the situation presented in _the names_: "american hegemony is a thing of the past" (291). 12. merleau-ponty says, for example: "it is from the conservative west that communism has received the idea of history and learned to relativize moral judgment. communism has retained this lesson and sought at least within the given historical milieu those forces which had the best chance to realize humanity. if one does not believe in the power of the proletariat to establish itself or that it can accomplish all that marxism believes it can, then the capitalist civilizations which have, even if imperfect in themselves, the merit of existing, represent perhaps the least terrible of what history has made; but the difference between these and other civilizations, or between these and the soviet enterprise, is not between heaven and hell, or between good and evil: it is only a matter of the different uses of violence" (295; my translation). 13. this apology for western-style pragmatic humanism under the guise of liberal democracy is usually associated with the work of richard rorty; see especially, _contingency, irony, and solidarity_. specifically in an article entitled "cosmopolitanism without emancipation: a response to jean-francois lyotard," rorty rejects the idea that there is anything wrong with taking liberal democracy as the norm when dealing with other cultures: "we cannot leap outside our western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try. all we should try to do is get inside the inhabitants of that culture long enough to get some idea of how we look to them, and whether they have any ideas we can use" (212-213). if that sounds like cultural imperialism, that is fine with rorty, because liberal democracy is unquestionably the best social system yet devised. it is unfortunate that in the past force was used to colonize non-western peoples in the name of liberal humanism, but that doesn't diminish the ultimate validity of western values (cf. 218-219). these very significant differences in political outlook between rorty and lyotard are consistently overlooked by those who want to lump the two together and accuse lyotard of rorty's political shortcomings. 14. as delillo well knows, and as _mao ii_ explores in great depth through the character of karen janney and her association with the moon organization, koresh's branch davidians are known as a "cult." karen's free indirect discourse formulates this as follows: "the other word is `cult.' how they love to use it against us" (9). 15. in the context of the pc wars, one has only to recall george will's suggestion, in his _newsweek_ column on the debate over the carol iannone nomination to the neh advisory board, that members of the mla were the domestic equivalent of saddam hussein's palace guards, comparing dick cheney's role in defeating saddam to wife lynn cheney's role in fighting far more insidious enemies within the american academy. this analogy would be ludicrous if it weren't so revealing of the links between imperialism abroad and cultural hegemony at home. 16. as said says, "conrad's tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that 'natives' could lead lives free from european domination. as a creature of his time, conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them" (30). 17. richard bernstein addresses "rorty's logic of apartheid--his rigid separation of the private and the public. for like all apartheid, it has violent consequences. it seems curious that rorty, who shows us that most distinctions are fuzzy, vague, and subject to historical contingencies, should rely on such a fixed, rigid, ahistorical dichotomy. my objection is not to drawing sharp distinctions. without doing so, no thinking would be possible. my objection is to the way rorty uses this *specific* dichotomy, which leads to all sorts of violent consequences" (286). i dispute the ability of rorty to maintain this distinction, specifically with regard to the language of gendered violence, in chapter six of _the ethical turn: postmodern theories of the subject_ (forthcoming). 18. one recalls that jean-paul sartre in _what is literature?_ argued for the superiority of the novel as an art form precisely because it alone was able to accomplish a satisfactory synthesis of these domains. 19. weinstein, as we have seen, sees the wakefield story as paradigmatic of this desire to disappear from one's life. in the postmodern context i am working to establish here, i see parallels with two fairly recent films, antonioni's _the passenger_ (1975) and wim wenders' _the american friend_ (1977). in each of these films the male protagonist seeks a form of disappearance: in _the passenger_, jack nicholson's character switches identities with a dead man who turns out to be an itinerant arms dealer; in _the american friend_, the character played by bruno ganz is tricked into committing a mob murder by his "american friend" (dennis hopper), and then finds that he enjoys the thrill and isolation from his family that results. i think we could call each of these films postmodern in part because of the dissolution of previously stable identities both main characters go through, linked to paranoid systems of shady power figures, both political and criminal, similar to the terrorist network delillo constructs in _mao ii_. this postmodern connection between the individual and the larger conspiracy as a form of what he calls "totality" drives fredric jameson's discussion of recent north american film in _the geopolitical aesthetic_ (1992). 20. my continued use of the word "terrorist" to describe the ira character of fergus (stephen rea) is deliberate. reviews of the film also used this term, although somewhat more casually, calling fergus, for example, "the terrorist with a heart" or "the thoughtful terrorist." lest it seem that i am shifting ground--from the middle east to ireland--without justification, i would refer to edward said's discussion of w. b. yeats in the context of the resistance to imperialism (said 220-238). said calls yeats "the indisputably great *national* poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power" (220). 21. raymond queneau's 1947 novel, _we always treat women too well_ (_on est toujours trop bon avec les femmes_), set during the easter rising of 1916, is a wickedly satirical take on the erotic possibilities of the terrorist / hostage situation, as well as being what now seems a presciently postmodern work. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited barthes, roland. "the death of the author." _the rustle of language_. new york: farrar straus and giroux, 1987. benjamin, walter. "the storyteller: reflections on the works of nikolai leskov." _illuminations_. new york: hbj, 1968. bernstein, richard j. _the new constellation: the ethical-political horizons of modernity/postmodernity_. cambridge: mit press, 1992. borges, jorge luis. "theme of the traitor and the hero." _labyrinths_. new york: new directions, 1962. bove, paul a. _in the wake of theory_. hanover, nh: wesleyan/new england up, 1992. boyle, t. coreghessan. _world's end._ new york: viking, 1988. delillo, don. _the names_. new york: vintage, 1982. ---. _white noise_. new york: viking penguin, 1985. ---. _libra_. new york: viking penguin, 1988. ---. _mao ii_. new york: viking penguin, 1991. duras, marguerite. _la douleur_. paris: p.o.l., 1985; translated as _war_, by barbara bray, new york: pantheon, 1986. foucault, michel. "what is an author?" _textual strategies_. ed. josue harari. ithaca: cornell up, 1979. 141-160. hawthorne, nathaniel. "wakefield." _tales and sketches_. new york: library of america, 1982 (ohio state up, 1972, 1974). hutcheon, linda. _a poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction_. new york: routledge, 1988. jameson, fredric. _postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late captalism_. durham, nc: duke up, 1991. ---. _the geopolitical aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system_. bloomington: indiana up, and london: bfi publishing, 1992. jordan, neil. _a neil jordan reader_ (including _night in tunisia_ [stories], _the dream of a beast_ [novella], and _the crying game_ [screenplay]). new york: vintage, 1993. lentricchia, frank, ed. _introducing don delillo_. durham, nc: duke up, 1991. lyotard, jean-francois. _la condition postmoderne_. paris: minuit, 1979; translated as _the postmodern condition_. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1986. ---. "histoire universelle et differences culturelles," _critique_ 456 (1981): 559-568; translated by david macey as "universal history and cultural differences," _the lyotard reader_. ed. andew benjamin. oxford: blackwell, 1989, 314-323. ---. _le differend_. paris: minuit, 1983; translated by georges van den abeele, minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1986. ---. _le postmoderne explique aux enfants_. paris: galilee, 1986. mchale, brian. _constructing postmodernism_. london and new york: routledge, 1992. merleau-ponty, maurice. _humanisme et terreur: essai sur le probleme communiste_. paris: gallimard, 1947; translated by john o'neill, as _humanism and terror _boston: beacon, 1969. pynchon, thomas. _vineland_. new york: little, brown, 1990. queneau, raymond. -_on est toujour trop bon avec les femmes_. paris: gallimard, 1947; translated by barbara wright, as _we always treat women too well_. new york: new directions, 1981. ronell, avital. _crack wars: literature addiction mania_. lincoln: u nebraska p, 1992. rorty, richard. _contingency, irony, and solidarity_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1989. ---. "cosmopolitanism without emancipation: a response to jean-francois lyotard." _objectivity, relativism, and truth_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1991. said, edward w. _culture and imperialism_. new york: knopf, 1993. sartre, jean-paul. _qu'est-ce que la litterature?_ paris: gallimard, 1948; translated by bernard frechtman, as _what is literature?_ new york: harper and row, 1949. weinstein, arnold. _nobody's home: speech, self, and place in american fiction from hawthorne to delillo_. new york: oxford, 1993. wiesel, elie. _dawn_. trans. frances frenaye. new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 1961. wilde, alan. "death in and around vineland, u.s.a." _boundary 2_ 18:2 (1991), 166-180. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------chernetsky, 'late soviet culture: a parallax for postmodernism', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-chernetsky-late.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.594. part 1/1, total size 30850 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- late soviet culture: a parallax for postmodernism by vitaly chernetsky comparative literature and literary theory program university of pennsylvania vchernet@mail.sas.upenn.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by vitaly chernetsky, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: lahusen, thomas, and gene kuperman, eds. _late soviet culture: from perestroika to novostroika_. durham: duke university press, 1993. [1] in an essay recently published in _october_ (no. 63, winter 1993), hal foster uses a suggestive metaphor for the study of contemporary artistic production--he speaks of "postmodernism in parallax." foster's astronomical metaphor ("parallax" [from greek %para-%, "beside, beyond," and %allassein%, "to change"], in astronomy, means "the difference in [position and] direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth") furnishes a possibility of salvaging the discourse on postmodernism from becoming a passing fad (a danger foster highlights in his essay) by reaching beyond the spatial coordinates in which it has been primarily operating (the industrialized west), that is, by effecting a shift in the position from which it is contemplated. [2] this agenda seems to have been on the mind of the editors of duke university press's post-contemporary interventions series, which over the course of its five years has brought out such titles as _postmodernism and japan_ and _the caribbean and the postmodern perspective_. _late soviet culture_ is the series' first volume to focus on the former soviet union--a territory which for various reasons has been conspicuously absent from many theorizations of modernity and postmodernity. [3] if for many observers postmodernism itself is still a very contradictory and "fuzzy" concept, this is even more true in the case of russian, or soviet postmodernism: is it really possible to speak of a postmodern cultural condition--which, if we follow most of the theorists of the postmodern, is defined as a product of commodity culture, new electronic technologies (computers, video, etc.), new "geopolitical aesthetics"--in the former soviet union, a totalitarian empire that has disintegrated into medieval style micro-states in which the most basic commodities are in shortage? it is admittedly problematic to apply to late soviet culture those theories of postmodernism that view it primarily as the cultural condition of the developed western societies, characterized by the ecstasy of consumerism and commodity culture, and the proliferation of new technologies (video, cyberspace, etc.). however, the striking similarity between certain cultural products emerging in recent decades from both the western world and the late soviet union suggests that the putative "postmodernism" of the latter is more than merely a symptom of western myopia. such theories of postmodernism as develop georges bataille's notions of general economy of expenditure, excess and waste, for example (theories usefully discussed in arkady plotnitsky's recent study _reconfigurations: critical theory and general economy_ [gainesville, 1993]), would seem to indicate legitimate moments of linkage and overlap. _postmodern culture_ itself has been a pioneer in the discussion of russian postmodernism, publishing a symposium on the topic in the january 1993 issue. [4] the editors of _late soviet culture_ chose not to enter the debate headlong. to be exact, only two out of the fifteen essays included in it directly discuss the notion of a russian postmodernism. however, the book in its entirety (being as it is a very heterogeneous collection--which is typical of the genre of post-conference volumes to which it belongs) is an excellent contribution to cultural studies: it offers a "slice" across the many aspects of late soviet culture (to be exact, russian soviet, for the cultural condition of other former soviet republics is never addressed, with the one possible exception of evgeny dobrenko's essay). for the expert, the book has many insights and provocations to offer; a slavic scholar would find it worth reading cover-to-cover. but the collection could also serve as a very good introduction for a non-slavicist to soviet culture at the times of perestroika and glasnost, grounded in the context of some crucial precursory phenomena. soviet postmodernism has many dissimilarities from its western cousin; and the essays in this volume both analyze its emergence in terms of the inner logic of the development of russian culture and contrast it with that of the west. [5] in their introduction, the editors of the volume note that "it appears today that positions, theories, and ideas become obsolete almost at the moment of their utterance" (v). indeed, the contributions to _late soviet culture_ have all been written from the position of soviet union still intact, if about to collapse. a new, different "russian postmodernism" is emerging today, and some of the pieces in the collection now have primarily the value of documents for an archeologist of the "soviet postmodern" of the last years of the old empire. this is especially true of the two opening texts, an optimistic account by the novelist mikhail kuraev of the changes brought about by glasnost, and a comment by boris kagarlitsky--a rare example of a russian politician whose program is rooted primarily in the writings of the contemporary western left--on the re-emergence of the categories of political right and left under perestroika and the particular twists this binarism has taken. [6] the essays that follow contextualize the discussion of late soviet culture through a backward glance. sidney monas explores a parallel between the gorbachev era and russia's "great reforms" of the 1860s, which launched the society's rapid modernization, and which, incidentally, brought the terms "glasnost" and "perestroika" into wide circulation for the first time. monas briefly draws attention to the paradoxical statement of one of russia's most fascinating and controversial nineteenth-century intellectuals--petr chaadaev--that russia "has no history" and "has contributed nothing but the occupation of space" (37-38), implying that russia is totally extraneous to the teleological narrative of western european history. it is left to the reader, though, to speculate on the possibilities of tying chaadaev's maxims with russia's present cultural situation, where, as mikhail epstein notes in his contribution to the volume, the temporal sequencing has broken down and cultural artifacts from at least the past two millennia entertain a peculiarly synchronous and spatialized coexistence. paul debreczeny's contribution offers an analysis of the formation and functioning of one of russia's key national myths--that of pushkin, the nation's poet--up to the outcry caused by the "blasphemous" act of opening the country's first mcdonald's on moscow's pushkin square; he avoids, though, discussing the recent literary battles surrounding the pushkin myth, mostly connected with andrei sinyavsky's irreverent book _strolls with pushkin_ (the english translation of which was published in 1993 as well). [7] the next cluster of essays in the volume deals with the totalitarian culture and mindset of stalin's soviet union. renata gal'tseva and irina rodnyanskaya consider it in the light of the twentieth century's great dystopian texts (russian as well as foreign)--which also reached russia post factum, in the 1980s, and propose the individual human being as the obstacle that triggers the breakdown of utopian/totalitarian projects, consistently engaged in attempts at effacing the individual. maya turovskaya analyzes the role of cinema as a cultural institution under stalin. her focus is not as much on the dramatic history of the regime's brutal control over the cinematic production, but on moviegoing as a practice "*within the context of a general shortage of entertainment*" (95, turovskaya's emphasis). she compares the situation in the soviet union to the similar, but much more shrewd cultural policy of nazi germany: while in the soviet union the regime adopted "a homogeneous model of a propagandistic (didactic), quasi-popular cinema" (105), in germany it combined the production of ideologized blockbusters with more or less mindless entertainment. one of the fascinating facts not much known in the west is that the german-made films of the latter category fulfilled their "safety valve" function in both regimes: the soviet "generation of victors" throughout the 1940s was actively consuming "trophy" films like the german 1944 musical _die frau meine traume_, whose star marika roekk became a cult figure. turovskaya ends her essay with a coda on the stratification of cultural tastes in the late empire, with the state, the masses, and the intellectuals favoring completely different products. she stops short, though, from considering the "perverse" practices of the younger generation, when totalitarian classics are consumed as the material for simulacric "remakes." [8] the next two essays in the book focus on the production end of the stalinist cultural machine. evgeny dobrenko offers a generic study of the literature of "the zhdanov era" (1945-1953)--an era which "classic" literary histories refer to as a "desolate scene" and a "monotonous plain," and which the more recent revisionist texts, such as boris groys's _the total art of stalinism_ (1992), view as a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon %avant la lettre%. dobrenko turns his attention away from judgments of taste to the study of the cultural (more narrowly--literary) model itself. this period of socialist realism's "established existence" is, he underscores, the primary target of the subversive projects of the soviet postmodern (which he refers to as "the russian post-avant-garde" 109), and as such it requires close scrutiny. it is situated, he postulates, in the "zero time" of catastrophe, when there is something before the event (in this case, the regime's violent suppression of independent thinking) and something after the event, while the event itself seems to be missing. what we face in this case, according to dobrenko, is a "system of mytho-production and recoding of reality in the direction necessary for power" (110), a static system which "by its nature is incapable of self-development and reacts only to external impulses" (111-12), conducted through criticism which "did not serve as a self-regulator, but rather as both the means and the object of various external manipulations" (112). an analysis of this cultural machine, dobrenko believes, can enable us to discern the "fundamental lexicon" of totalitarianism. he offers insightful and witty readings of samples of its formulaic products, especially its quasi-utopian idylls of collective farm prosperity and workers' consciencious attitude, populated not with human beings but with functions, with "cogs and wheels" of the totalitarian system--whose crumbling monuments are still with us. dobrenko's general analysis is supplemented by thomas lahusen's case study of a particular zhdanovite novel--vasily azhaev's _far from moscow_, a powerful illustration of the functioning of this cultural machine. this text showcases the construction of an oil pipeline in the russian far east shortly after the german invasion of the soviet union, presented as an example of everyday heroism and devotion to the nation. the amazing "secret lining" of the book is that its author was an ex-labor camp prisoner, and that it contains clues by which the pipeline can be identified as an actual construction project of 1941-42, but one which was carried out by prison labor. the history of the text itself is also peculiar, for it underwent continuous rewriting and retouching through its many editions during the author's lifetime, adjusting to the current ideological demand, while clandestinely azhaev was writing another novel, _the boxcar_, in which he was trying candidly to portray the tragedy of stalinist terror: a macabre, orwellian example of "doublethink." [9] in the next contribution to the volume, michael holquist draws attention to a survivor of stalinism who has became particularly influential in literary and cultural studies--mikhail bakhtin. holquist begins by cautioning against the tendency of treating bakhtin "as if his utterances were a mere writing, as if he were simply one more name in the deracinated %ecriture% of current metacriticism," of treating him as "a stateless thinker" (155). holquist situates bakhtin within the russian critical tradition, providing a lucid summary account of russian nineteenth-century debates on aesthetics and the nature and social role of literature and of their evolutionary connection with the work of bakhtin's contemporaries, the formalists. in dwelling on bakhtin's critical dialogue with the formalists in his 1920s writings, holquist notes that while the latter insisted on literature's autonomy and on the study of its inner logic, bakhtin, "like the radical critics of the 1860s, [was] obsessed by the problem of how art can be related to life" (166). he believes that for bakhtin, there exists "a connection between the two in a material poetics that takes a form of a body-based systematics" (166). holquist further explores the role of the body in bakhtin's texts, noting his interest in biology (which, among others, provided him the term "chronotope"). he disagrees with ken hirschkop, who sees "mechanical physics" as a major influence on bakhtin. "what matters about bodies for bakhtin," writes holquist, "is not only that they are there, but that they are alive" (170). it is not a particular biological model that attracts bakhtin: his work is pervaded with what holquist calls "biological thinking" (171). the body is important for bakhtin's work, as holquist notes, also because of his acute realization of his own corporeality: his suffering from osteomyelitis, which led to an amputation of one of his legs, and his arrest and exile in the 1930s (167). this emphasis connects holquist's essay with another recent work on bakhtin and the body, mikhail ryklin's brilliant "bodies of terror" (published in english in _new literary history_, vol. 24, no. 1 [winter 1993]), in which he dubs the rabelais book an "autotherapeutic text," a "codified drama of a representative of russian intelligentsia who found himself in the 'unthinkable' situation of terror and expansion of the collective corporeality that assumed a dominating function" (ryklin, _terrorologiki_ [1992], p. 34, my translation). [10] the contribution by valery leibin is an excursus into the brief history of psychoanalytic study in the soviet union in the 1920s and its later brutal suppression. by contrast, valery podoroga's essay is a post-deleuzian reading of the key texts of one of the leading russian modernists, andrei platonov (whose major works were published only recently, first abroad and then in russia, and who is still relatively unknown in the west, partly because of the difficulty of translating his peculiar language). podoroga begins by drawing attention to a peculiar statement from platonov's novel _chevengur_ (written 1927-1930): "within the person there lives a little spectator: he participates in neither actions nor suffering--he is always cool and unchanging. his function is to see and to be a witness, yet he is without the right of voice in the person's life, and it is not known why this solitary presence exists. this corner of the person's consciousness is lit day and night, like the porter's room in a large building." platonov names this spectator/ observer "the dead brother" and "the eunuch of the human soul" (187-188). this observer, writes podoroga, guides the reader through platonov's texts, creating "a special field of textual meanings--of negative bodily signs" (190). it registers only the external signs of events (which fact can be interpreted with the help of the opposition between the seeing eye and the knowing eye, advanced by the russian avant-garde artist pavel filonov [199]). podoroga quotes another startling passage from _chevengur_, in which the protagonist feels that the material objects surrounding him suddenly start penetrating his body, even to the point that he fears his skin will burst open: a depiction of the clinical experience of schizophrenia, the result of the loss of the connection between subjectivity and the bodily image itself. to read platonov, he postulates, is to feel this shift of the boundary between the inner and the outer, and desire in this externalized form is indissolubly connected with death. the relationship of time and space is also transformed: the text expresses the "beginning of the end of time"; "freed from human time (history), space acquires maximal dynamics--its grows through the defiguration of the world" (196). podoroga draws parallels between the role of the eye in platonov and in gogol and vertov, developing the notion of a "disembodied eye" (201-208). he asserts again that the "eunuch of the soul" is "a schizo-eye: he sees in this way for he is unable to see in any other way--and what he sees is monstrous precisely because his vision is natural, lacking elements of coercion or rationality" (210). podoroga's insightful analysis of platonov's texts offers another entry into the system of coordinates of the soviet postmodern: there is something acutely contemporary in his narratives of schizophrenic disjunction, aggressive spatiality, and transformative language. [11] the next essay, by helena goscilo, sheds light on another important aspect of the soviet postmodern--the renewed importance of underrepresented social groups, most especially women. she addresses the paradoxical situation of the unprecedented prominence of women in all spheres of russian culture and their unabashed critical depictions of their situation, combined with frequent hostility to western feminist theory and essentialist conflation of socially constructed gender roles with biological sex. goscilo provides an informative summary of the institutionalized concepts of gender in soviet society (the area where, perhaps more than anywhere else, stalinist propaganda has been truly successful) and the status of feminism within that structure. she stresses the reemergence of the women's movement in the years of glasnost, and then considers in some detail the work of three influential contemporary women writers, tatyana tolstaya, lyudmila petrushevskaya, and valeriya narbikova, "the subversive trio" (244). these three women's texts are very different from one other: petrushevskaya's works, frequently first-person narratives, are powerful explorations of human vulnerability in contemporary society, and impart a flavor reminiscent of gloomy naturalism; tolstaya is a master stylist with a keen eye for "tasty" tropes who constantly engages in language play, parody, and subversion of stereotypes; finally, narbikova produces texts that meditate on the nature of language itself, playing with cliches, producing sequences of paradoxical associations and ambivalent references, and employing a wordy, repetitive, fragile style reminiscent, in certain respects, of gertrude stein. narbikova's texts also extensively--if euphemistically--depict bodily experiences (including sexual acts, which prompted russian critics to quickly--and wrongly--name her a writer of erotica). one is invited to conclude that the critique of established paradigms of representation that is marshalled in these women's texts also enables a critique of the institutions of gender and sexuality, which serves as yet another point of contact with western postmodernist cultural practices. [12] the next two essays in the volume directly engage the notion of a soviet postmodernism. mikhail epstein's contribution, "after the future," is one of the key paratexts of soviet postmodernism, one of the most significant attempts to date to theorize the late soviet cultural situation, a part manifesto, part analysis. in the first part of the essay he perceptively registers the symptoms of a paradigmatic shift in cultural consciousness effected by the end of the 1980s. "suddenly it became evident that communism had been accomplished in our country," writes epstein, "the end has already arrived" (257). the metanarrative of "progressive development of the mature socialism" was no more. the cultural practices of the epoch are realized in the "post-," rather than "anti-" genre: "post-utopia, post-communism, post-history" (259). this is the "last" literature, "not because of the moment of its appearance, but because of its . . . essential 'beyondness'" (258); it is the literature which, "like proteus . . . is capable of almost anything; like narcissus, it desires only itself" (259). the character of a "superfluous man" of the russian nineteenth-century classics is supplanted by an entire world that has become superfluous. the writers of the younger generation stand outside the polarization of "city" vs. "village" literature, of "westernizers" and "liberals" vs. "populists" and "men of the soil." "while they are personally committed to liberal values," writes epstein, they "nonetheless see almost nothing in those values that could inspire them and which they could serve with their work" (268). instead of ideological divisions epstein registers differentiations of style. one group, whom he calls "meta-realists," focuses on the intensity of perceptive emotion or metaphysical transcendence. another, the conceptualists, engages in a demonstration of the essential emptiness of linguistic signs by exploring the language itself in their simulacric reproductions of socialist realist and nineteenth-century "realist" classics, or of the linguistic environment of a soviet "everyman." between the extremes of these two groups stand the writers engaged in ironic games of allusions in the polymorphous chronotopes of their texts, where "the vulgar stereotypes of soviet everyday life suddenly become the depths and merge with projections of other epochs into an ample mythopoetic polyglossia" (267). [13] the middle part of epstein's essay is the most disputable and is strangely dissonant with his other arguments. in it, he moves to argue that "nothing is new under the sun," and attempts to construct "a periodic table of the elements of russian literature" (268; the table itself is on pp. 276-277). he singles out three cycles that russian literature has undergone since the eighteenth century, each consisting of four phases, the "social," the "moral," the "religious," and the "aesthetic." within this table, contemporary writers just occupy the final phases of the third cycle, to be succeeded by a fourth. the entire model is crudely reductionist, with each writer or movement assigned a set of tags carrying one-word definitions; and the sequencing is forced as well, often at odds with actual chronology. paradoxically, epstein then proceeds, in the final part of the essay, to stress the breakdown of temporal sequencing within the contemporary russian cultural situation, where the postmodernists operate simultaneously with solzhenitsyn, joyce, chaadaev, and the four evangelists (275). he emphasizes the retrospective orientation of contemporary writing, which he dubs "rear-guard" (278). the post-apocalyptically oriented literature is frequently nothing but a flow of writing, a stream that can be entered at any random point. epstein notes that metonymy is the privileged principle of organization in the syntagmatic chains of associations of these texts, the primary examples coming from valeriya narbikova's writings. metonymy, though, seems merely to stand for simplicity for epstein, while it might be productive to consider these texts in the light of theories of feminine writing, in which, as luce irigaray has suggested, metonymy is the leading structuring trope. [14] epstein concludes his essay with reflections on the relationship between the russian "post-future" and western postmodernism. he emphatically asserts the legitimacy of talking about a russian postmodernism (even taking into consideration the aborted history of modernism in russia), noting the domination of simulacra, the "propensity for quotation," and the deconstructive impulse as the defining features of contemporary russian texts (284-285). late capitalism, he believes, is only one possible ground for emergence of a postmodern culture. the difference between the russian/soviet and western civilizations, according to epstein, is that the first is "logocentric" ("linguacentric" would, i believe, be more correct here), while the latter privileges "the silent values of gold and [iconic] representation" (287). the soviet union was a society of voracious consumption of utopian narratives and ideological signs, and its "post-future" is for epstein "perhaps the most radical of all existing variants of postmodernism" (287). [15] the essay by katerina clark that comes next in the volume problematizes epstein's model of the history of russian literature. the focus of clark's argument is the russians' propensity for tripartite historical paradigms, where the current situation is interpreted through analogies with two previous ones (e.g. hellenic greece, french revolution, 1917). this is the cause for clark's skepticism: "while we can see no lack of evidence," she writes, "of the ways in the late eighties writers began deconstructing the long-standing official genealogies for 1917, we should be wary of seizing upon even the most radical versions of this as an evidence that soviet literary sensibility had at long last become 'postmodernist.'" although "gestures in this direction have been made," contemporary russian writers, for clark, "are not postmodernists," for "in *their* texts, not all narratives are equal; inter alia, the hegelian story of the progress of geist is privileged" (304, clark's emphasis). epstein's "periodic table" can serve as supporting evidence for clark's claim "what we saw in the late eighties was business conducted largely as usual" (304): the hegelian underpinnings of his model are obvious. however, his arguments in the other parts of his essay offer a challenge to clark's "de-postmodernizing" of contemporary russian literature, especially since the writers clark reads in her essay operate within more traditional aesthetic paradigms than does someone like narbikova or the conceptualists. [16] _late soviet culture_ ends with a coda in the form of donald raleigh's eyewitness account of the active breakdown of the soviet machine during and immediately after the august 1991 events. raleigh is optimistic; he sees a potential for russia to break the chains tying it to the past. the sincere optimism of his and kuraev's contributions may seem at odds with the situation of deepening crisis the post-soviet states have been experiencing, in culture no less than in economy. but behind the troubled picture of today's former soviet union it is possible to perceive the first sprouts of a new society. does it mean that a new coil of the hegelian spiral, envisioned by epstein and clark, is about to begin? perhaps so. we should recall that even in lyotard's rather bleak _postmodern condition_, the postmodern crisis of metanarratives serves as a ground to "sketch the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown." ----------------------------end--------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------aichele, 'reading beyond meaning', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-aichele-reading.txt reading beyond meaning by george aichele dept. of philosophy and religion, adrian college 470-5237@mcimail.com _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by george aichele, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the theology of the text [t]here will never be . . . any theology of the text. (derrida, _dissemination_ 258) [1] if the text is an instance of what jacques derrida calls "differance," the ineffable writing, then there can be no theology of the text. there can be no theology of the text because the text is the trace which escapes onto theological closure (closure of the "volume," of the "work") even as it inscribes it. as the non-identity or non presence which lies at the heart of any scriptural identity, the text is no more than the entirely material "stuff" (%hyle%) which the idealism inherent in the traditional understanding of the text does not comprehend and therefore excludes. [2] this understanding of what a text is differs greatly from the traditional one. the traditional understanding of the text allows us to speak of two readers reading "the same text" (book, story, poem, etc.) even though not only the physical objects of the reading but the editions and even the translations involved are different. it allows us to agree or disagree about the legitimacy of an interpretation, the authority of an edition, or the accuracy of a translation. the invisible, underlying stratum which allows us to posit the identity of texts is their meaning, the spiritual essence which binds many varying physical copies into unity. [3] the traditional understanding of the text is therefore profoundly theological; it is that very theology of the text which differance refuses. it is also profoundly logocentric. for this understanding, the text is not the concrete, unique ink-and-paper thing which you might hold in your hand, scan with your eyes, file on a shelf, give away, or even throw in the trash.^1^ instead, the text is an ideal, spiritual substance, a platonic form of which the material thing is merely a "copy." the physical object is simply the medium, the channel in and through which the spiritual reality has become incarnate. this way of thinking seems quite natural to us; this indicates how deeply ingrained the theology involved here actually is. [4] corresponding closely to the theology of the text is a complex economy of the text, which allows texts to be owned in three distinct but interrelated ways. the conspiracy between these three types of ownership forms the traditional understanding of the text. meaning is at the center of this system of values; what defines each of the three types of ownership, and their relations to one another, is the desire for meaning. these three types of ownership together establish a law of the text, a system which authenticates "my property" and delimits my rights and obligations in relation to the text. the law of the text establishes the legitimacy of meaning, the possibility of a proper reading. it is the law of what roland barthes calls the readerly. [5] the first owner, the reader, normally owns one copy of the text, a physical object, the book. the reader desires but has no guarantee of owning the book's meaning. the second owner, the author, is the book's origin and therefore owns its meaning--the true meaning reflected in every copy. the author secures the book's meaning. there is also a third "owner," the copyright holder, who may also be the author (or the reader). this owner possesses the legal right to disseminate copies, to control the event of incarnation. each of these owners may say, "this is my book," but the term "my book" cannot mean the same thing in each of these three cases. [6] this economy of triple ownership turns the text into a "work."^2^ for barthes, the work is defined by society's recognition of an author and thus of an authority: "one must realize that today it is the work's 'quality' ... and not the actual process of reading that can establish differences between books" ("from work to text" 79). the work is meaningful and complete; it is an object of consumption. all three owners require the work to be a union of spirit and matter--a union which can (and must) be undone. for the theology of the text, meaning is "in" the text; it is a property of the text. [7] the theology of the text requires that a distinction be made between exegesis and eisegesis. exegesis draws (or leads) the truth out of the text; eisegesis imposes the reader's beliefs upon or reads them into the text. no confusion is permitted between these two. it is an ethical distinction: exegesis respects the integrity of the text, and eisegesis does not. metaphysics is also involved: the text contains a truth within it, which the skillful reader can extract more or less undamaged, and without imposing too many of her own preconceptions upon it. the text is in some way connected to reality--a reality which is outside of the text (extratextual)--and it is this reality which grounds the proper meaning of the text, inside of the text. [8] of course, the theology of the text recognizes that no reading is entirely free of preconceptions, no matter how objective or unbiased the reader may be. your readings are inevitably shaped by who you are, your previous experiences, feelings and beliefs, and your current contexts, desires, and expectations. crossing the gap between receiver and sender of any message requires a tricky and sometimes dangerous journey. the traditional understanding of the text assures us that there are guarantees which lessen the difficulties and overcome the dangers in transmission of meaning. these guarantees are provided by rigorous critical techniques, often historical, but also psychological, sociological, or literary. within the text itself there hides an accessible meaning, which one technique or another can uncover. these techniques provide ways to bridge the gap between text and reality, to capture meaning and thereby close the circle of understanding. completely objective analysis is impossible, but with proper use of the techniques something approaching a scientific consensus can be reached. [9] however, the theologically indispensable distinction between exegesis and eisegesis has been eroded in recent years. first the new criticism, then structuralism, and most recently the various forms of poststructuralism (including the views of derrida, barthes, and michel foucault) have with increasing vigor exposed and challenged theological presuppositions on which the traditional understanding of the text rests. the notion that each text contains within it a single true meaning--or any meaning- has been abandoned by many, and the question of reference- the connection between text and reality--is up for grabs. the eurocentric and phallocentric tendencies of the supposedly scientific criticism are increasingly difficult to deny, although defenders of the western cultural tradition (the "great books") remain plentiful, and the debate is probably far from over. [10] there will never be any theology of the text, says derrida. however, if we must do without a theology of the text, then perhaps a theology of reading can in some respects take its place. the question of the object of our reading becomes uncertain and even mysterious, but the question of what reading is can be at least partly answered. in our belief that there is a connection between the text and reality, we have overlooked or minimized theologically important dimensions of reading, including the role of the reader in the production of meaning, the influence of ideology upon reading, and the resistance to meaning inherent within texts.^3^ as the concept of "text" becomes problematic and elusive for postmodern thought, an understanding of reading becomes more desirable. we can no longer rely upon a theology of the text, but we can explore a theology of reading. the non-reader [11] reading is an endless and violent playing with the text, and the reader is in a perpetual struggle with the law of the text. she draws her life from this law even as she disturbs it; she is a vector directing the movement of the law and giving it meaning. the law establishes the book as a meaning-filled work, as the product of a worker (an author) within a system of exchange which makes it available as a piece of property. nevertheless the reader determines the value of the book, as a work, for all of its various owners. [12] in italo calvino's postmodern novel, _if on a winter's night a traveler_, there is a character named irnerio. irnerio is a "non-reader"--a person who has taught himself how not to read. he is not illiterate, not even "functionally illiterate." irnerio refuses to read. yet irnerio does not refuse to look at written words. rather, he has learned how to see strange and meaningless ink marks on pages where others see words. irnerio is beyond reading; for him the books, pages, and words are no longer the transparent vehicles for immaterial ideas, but they are solid, opaque objects. i've become so accustomed to not reading that i don't even read what appears before my eyes. it's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. . . . the secret is not refusing to look at the written words. on the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear. (49) [13] for the non-reader, the written words eventually "disappear"--they disintegrate into not-quite-letters, shapes, blobs of darkness on the white page. this is because the non-reader looks *at them*, at the physical marks themselves, and not at what they mean. the words disappear into sheer materiality; they become meaningless deposits of ink on paper. they are not altered physically, but they lose their signifying potential. they cease to be filled with what the philosopher gottlob frege called "sense"; they become nonsensical. the printed words return to what julia kristeva calls the semiotic %chora%. to speak of such texts as more-or-less accurate copies of an ideal, transcendent original is impossible. [14] the words also disappear for readers, but for the opposite reason, and in the opposite direction. as you learned to read, the meaning of the words gradually came to dominate the physical text. you learned to conceptualize past or through the concrete marks that make up words and sentences, to "see" meanings or ideas that are represented, to hear the language with your mind's ear. as reading became easier for you, the materiality of writing (as an obstruction to sense) became an almost invisible, transparent vehicle; what you really read is what the written words "say," their meaning. you only read words insofar as writing itself has become invisible. what you read is the idea within the word, and you don't like it if the materiality of the word obscures the idea. [15] thus the written word may disappear in either of two directions, which correspond to the two components that make up language--the physical medium (the signifier) and the intelligible content (the signified). for the reader, the word is caught in a tension between these two components--a tension which cannot be maintained, but only imagined as a midpoint between two extremes. when either of the differences which make signification possible--differences between signifiers, or differences between signifieds--are foregrounded (when they become visible), the word disappears. for those who know how to read--and this includes non-readers such as irnerio--one component or the other must be foregrounded. unlike irnerio, readers choose to foreground the signified: the concepts, feelings, and other representations derived from reading. to foreground the material signifier of writing rather than its signified meaning, as irnerio does, seems ludicrous and irresponsible to us--it goes against the grain; it is unnatural. [16] non-reading stays close to the physical letter, the written word. this would correspond to barthes's "text of bliss," the writerly text. a reader can become a non-reader only through a deliberate choice; such a choice reflects upon, and rejects, the ethics (and economics, and theology) of the text. irnerio refuses the categories of ownership, at least when it comes to books. if he were not such an agreeable fellow, and actually quite moral in his own strange way, you would have to think of irnerio as evil. yet readers are also non-readers, although in a limited way. when you attempt to decipher an unusual script, or study a language with a different alphabet, the foregrounding of the signifier is unavoidable, and often unpleasant. you then become an inadvertent non-reader, although unlike irnerio you are still trying to read. [17] however, no one can actually learn not to read. irnerio represents an unreachable goal; that is why his subversions of literariness do not upset us. instead, they amuse us. not to read is an impossible ideal, for the unconscious habits of reading cannot be entirely unlearned. the non-reader rejects the signified, and chooses only the signifier. however, a signifier without a signified is impossible; hence the non-reader is impossible. probably only the truly illiterate person--the one who can make nothing out of writing--can actually see the written word as a bunch of squiggles, senseless marks which cannot be significantly distinguished from other similar squiggles. such squiggles are not signifiers, and they have no signifieds. for irnerio all that counts is the life lived instant by instant; art for him counts as expenditure of vital energy, not as a work that remains, not as that accumulation of life that [the reader] seeks in books. but he also recognizes, without need of reading, that energy somehow accumulated, and he feels obliged to bring it back into circulation, using [the reader's] books as the material base for works in which he can invest his own energy, at least for an instant. (150) [18] irnerio views books merely as things. he is an artist, and literature is his medium, but not as we might expect. books are worthy in and of themselves, but only as the meaningless stuff (%hyle%) which he glues together into larger hunks and then carves into abstract sculptures. however, non-reading is not easy, even for a master such as irnerio. how does he decide which book is the right one for a sculpture? is his decision based solely on the physical matter of the book (color or shape of cover, size or thickness of pages, binding, typeface, etc.), or is irnerio also somehow aware of its contents? i fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. shut, or open, or else i give them forms, i carve them, i make holes in them. . . . . the critics say what i do is important. now they're putting all my works in a book. . . . a book with photographs of all my works. when this book is printed, i'll use it for another work, lots of works. . . . . there are some books that immediately give me the idea of what i can make from them, but others don't. sometimes i have an idea, but i can't make it until i find the right book. (149) [19] non-reading points to the limit-condition which defines reading: its material situation. it highlights the theology implicit in the traditional understanding of the text. yet the non-reader is clearly a sort of parasite on the literate world, or indeed, on literature itself. irnerio cannot exist unless readers exist, unless an entire immense structure of civilization exists--including authors and publishing houses and scholars and bookstores and translators, as well as economic and educational and political systems--a structure which allows and requires readers to be readers. the ramifications of that larger structure provide the world and much of the plot of calvino's novel. literal translation [20] the reader is made possible by the misplacing of the word which is writing. every reading is a translation, a transfer (or "metaphor") of something which allegedly lies on or in the page--frege's "sense"--to some other place inside the reader's mind. yet as irnerio makes clear, when he refuses to read, that "something" is not the physical stuff of the books themselves, but something else entirely. readers are trans-lators, those who take things from their proper places and move them somewhere else, and reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts which is a kind of translation. the theology of reading entails also a theory of translation, and vice versa. [21] for the theology of the text, the goal of the translator is to retrieve the authentic message of the original text and then re-embody that message in a new text. it is only the ideal text, the "work," which can be translated, not the material text. translation is exegesis. compared to its meaning, the physical aspects of the translated text are unimportant, and they can be modified and rearranged and ultimately sloughed off, like a mortal human body temporarily inhabited by an eternal soul. as noted above, the theology of the text has its own doctrine of the incarnation, for which the spiritual "word" enters into the written "flesh." [22] the translation theory of walter benjamin presents an alternative view of the theological dimension of texts and the operations of language--a view that is close to irnerio's. according to benjamin, the goal of translation is not to transfer a meaning (which can somehow be detached from its linguistic embodiment) from one textual body to another, but rather to form a kind of reciprocity between the translation and the original text, so that the reader sees through both to "pure language." this pure or "true" language is not an historical, empirical language, but rather it is language itself, language without purpose, meaning, or function--language speaking only itself, endlessly. benjamin called this goal "literal translation." a real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. (79) [23] literal translation seeks "a language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function . . . pure signifier . . . paradoxical in the extreme" (de man 96-97). the goal of literal translation is the interlinear text, "in which literalness and freedom are united" (benjamin 82). in the space between the parallel lines of the two texts, the translation and its original are united in a true language "without the mediation of meaning." the translation reflects back upon and reveals the original as a fragment of pure language, in a way that it is unable to reveal itself. in translation the original is brought back to life, and the pure language imprisoned within the original text is "liberated" (benjamin 71-72, 80). it is translation, according to benjamin, that "saves" the text. [24] for benjamin, the principal question in translation theory is: how does the translated text illuminate the original text? the value of a translation lies in its confrontation with the original text, not in its infallible transmission of the meaning of that text. the preferred translation will not necessarily be the most accurate one, the clearest transmission of meaning, but rather the one which stands in tension with the original text. literal translation measures the uniqueness of the material text by the other texts with which it is juxtaposed, and with the possibilities for intertextual meaning which then emerge. like a tangent to a circle, the translation harmoniously supplements and complements the original. there is no question of the two texts somehow being two copies of the same thing. [25] the interlinear space of translation is utopian and uninhabitable; it is sacred and untouchable space (derrida, _the ear of the other_ 115). the letters of the alphabet, from which the text is assembled, are meaningless in themselves. the text itself as a physical object, the material space of the semiotic, is deficient in meaning. the physical text is a literal text, and therefore it resists interpretation. it is unreadable, non-readable, non-readerly. according to this view, the purpose of language is not to reveal but to conceal, and translation tests the power of language to hide meaning: [t]ranslation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed. (benjamin 78) [26] literal translation seeks to uncover the language spoken by god in creating the universe--that is, a language of naming. for literal translation, the proper name is a matter of crucial importance. names cannot be translated, strictly speaking--they stand at the very edge of language, at the boundary of signification. names have meaning (they refer to objects), and yet they do not mean (they cannot be defined). the name is language beyond meaning, without meaning--a language "lost" by humanity (because "confused" by god) at the tower of babel. [27] benjamin's views on translation come explicitly into the realm of theology, and they are close to a kind of kabbalist mysticism. like non-reading, literal translation draws language back to a point of ineffability, to the edge of the human world. it empties language of significance, reducing it to a material residuum alone. literal translation refuses to allow the separation of meaning from its physical embodiment, and thereby it de-values the question of meaning. the ideal of exegetical translation is rejected. however, the absence of an extratextual realm of meaning does not liberate translation but rather constrains it, and perhaps even renders it impossible. materialist reading [28] the reader invents the work as an authority, something worth owning. this law of ownership is equivalent to the desire for translation, and for exegesis. barthes identified this kind of reading with the readerly, the "text of pleasure." in its explorations of narrative codes, strategies of authority, and the production of meaning, barthes's writings, and especially _s/z_, present an important contribution to the theology of reading. fernando belo's book, _a materialist reading of the gospel of mark_, is one of the few sustained attempts apart from _s/z_ itself to apply this method to any writing, although one might argue that calvino's novel playfully hoists barthes on his own petard. [29] _s/z_ is an immensely complex and close reading of honore de balzac's novella, _sarrasine_. barthes divided balzac's story into 561 "lexias," which he then analyzed in terms of five "codes" which he found operating throughout that narrative. a lexia is a phrase (in the sense that jean-francois lyotard has given to that term), an individual semantic unit which may range in length from part of a sentence to several sentences. the codes are the cultural and intellectual filters through which the great abstract repository of %langue% becomes the limited specificity of %parole%, and through which the field of potential signification (what kristeva calls the semiotic) is formed into a narrative world (what kristeva calls the symbolic). the codes permit and also channel the conjunction of signifier and signified. [30] the codes form the structures through which _sarrasine_ creates the readerly illusion of a transparent window (a story within a story) opening on to a coherent and realistic world. in the larger, "framing" story, an unnamed man attempts, and fails, to seduce a beautiful young woman by agreeing to reveal to her the identity of a mysterious old man. this revelation takes the form of a story (the inner, "framed" story) of a foolish and impetuous artist (sarrasine) who mistakes a beautiful castrato (la zambinella) for a woman and falls in love with "her," with fatal consequences. barthes's detailed analysis of these codes, one or more of which functions in each of the lexias, reveals that they conceal a deep narrative incoherence (the writerly), an absence or deficiency (a castration) which the narrative both represents and is. this catastrophic collapse always takes the same form: that of an unrestrained metonymy. by abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of *legal substitution* on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word, it is no longer possible to *represent*, to make things *representative*, individuated, separate, assigned. (215-216) at its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: *what are you thinking about?* but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: *about nothing*, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension. (217) [31] the writerly is the resistance which the text offers to coherent meaning--not an active resistance, as of a living presence (such as the intention of an author), but a passive, inertial resistance, a kind of friction. it is lodged in the materiality of the text as writing (hence barthes's term). this materiality disrupts the narrative codes, interrupting their operation or setting them against one another, and therefore the writerly may be identified through the frustration of the reader's desire for a readerly, followable narrative. the writerly consists in those elements of the text which remain opaque to reading, refusing to be reduced to a consistent and comprehensive understanding--and which are present in even the most readerly and realistic narratives, such as _sarrasine_. [32] every instance of language is at least somewhat writerly, and there are some texts which resist any coherent reading. the conflict over meaning is somehow essential to the attempt to read these writings, which are in effect all surface, a surface which reflects parabolically upon itself and which never opens up to reveal unambiguously an extratextual truth. the materiality of the text appears whenever reference is suspended or otherwise incomplete. barthes argued that the readerly work must disappear whenever the writerly text appears, that the text de-authorizes or de-constitutes the work ("from work to text" 78-79). [33] through his reading of balzac, barthes (like benjamin) recovered in a secular way a strand of the kabbalah, the mystical rabbinic reading of torah which attended even to the physical shapes of the hebrew letters, and which has been long overlooked by the logocentric idealist tradition which has dominated western philosophical and theological thinking--the theology of the text. barthes's reading %praxis% is a benjaminian translation; the "pure language" of the balzacian text is uncovered, and it speaks. through his reading of barthes (and of the gospel of mark), belo has re-imported this sort of reading into biblical studies. belo's "materialist reading" of mark is not merely so in the sense that as a marxist analysis, it is materialistic. rather, it is materialist also (and perhaps more so) in that it attends to the written/printed text as a material body. [34] belo follows the same method that barthes used, adopting some of barthes's codes and identifying others appropriate to mark's text. he claims that he intends to read mark in terms of its narrative qualities alone, and with no regard to its referential truth-value (95). in order to do so, he divides the gospel of mark into 73 "sequences," each made up of one or more "scenes." here he compromises barthes's text-analytical method by combining it with traditional historical-critical views; belo's "sequences" are established from critical pericopes, irreducible atoms of the tradition behind the synoptic gospels as uncovered by biblical scholarship of the last two centuries. the bulk of belo's book consists of detailed and often provocative reading of these sequences in terms of the relevant codes. [35] however, despite his ingenious adaptation of codes which barthes developed for study of a nineteenth-century french romantic novella, so that they are also relevant to a first-century hellenistic jewish gospel, belo rarely uncovers in mark the sort of remarkable narrative structures that barthes does in _sarrasine_. this is not a consequence of the differences between these texts. the gospel of mark is more writerly than balzac's story, although its long entombment within the security of the christian canon has protected it from this sort of critical reading. nonetheless, studies of the gospels in recent years have gone far toward penetrating that security. belo is apparently unaware of these studies.^4^ [36] in addition, belo frequently accepts the judgments of traditional bourgeois biblical scholarship--the very judgments which he claims to be rejecting!--not only in relation to matters of dating and provenance of the gospel (96-97), but also and apparently unconsciously in relation to many points of exegesis. belo admits that his reading is "naive" (1). this naivete contributes to the charm and originality of his book. however, what is most disturbing about belo's reading of mark at these points is its quality of naturalness. [37] belo's reading "de-materializes" the markan text in an effort to bring to it a kind of closure. this closed text refers to participation in an apostolic succession which continues in contemporary movements of liberation, and it turns the oppressed peoples of the world into a new israel. to this corresponds belo's reading of the markan jesus as a pauline jesus (206, 297), or a jesus who abandons judaism in order to turn to the gentiles, and who is stopped by jewish authorities before his revolutionary plans can be fully realized.^5^ liberation of the oppressed is a worthy goal, but if that alone is what mark is "really" about, then the text may once again have been closed in the name of logocentric univocity. [38] i share belo's political sympathies, and i share his disgust with the theological tepidity of contemporary bourgeois churches, but i suspect (as i think barthes would) those points in belo's reading where the reader's need for a committed writing overwhelms the materiality of the text. i then become a non-reader. this tests both my reading and belo's. the strengths of his reading are in those places (and they are many) where it is itself radically shaken or disrupted by the writerly qualities of the gospel of mark, where mark's refusal of the bourgeois reading emerges through its refusal of any single dominant reading--even belo's. [39] the gospel of mark is not a politically neutral text. few texts do the job of confronting and rejecting the reader's need for power and for control as well as mark does. my objections to belo's book do not center upon his political reading, but upon his apparent desire to have his reading be the only reading. this creates a conflict which may be inherent in any reading, but which is suppressed all too often. belo's ability to call mark's textual resistance to our attention emphasizes the degree to which many readers have failed to see that resistance. it is this ideological dimension of mark--its resistance to the reader--which demands a materialist reading. yet it is precisely this resistance which can never be read, which can only be encountered, by any reader, as the unreadable, the non readerliness of the text. belo's reading reveals the alienness of mark's story, and this can only happen through close attention to the materiality of the text. [40] belo's book carries profound implications for those who engage in theological enquiry beyond the confines of traditional religious institutions.^6^ his book concludes with a long "essay in materialist ecclesiology" in which belo sketches an "ecclesial" understanding of the "collective son of man" as a material presence in the world--as a body composed of hands, feet, and eyes. this body, which is inherently political, is in mark's view (as interpreted by belo) jesus's body. it is not a body to be abandoned in an ascension to some spiritual realm, but rather it is the text itself incarnate in its readers, in this physical world, the only place where the kingdom of god might be. the *continuity* thus refers us to the *figure of the collective son of man* at the level of the erased text; this figure . . . functions in the register of a continuity that is indicated by the ascensional schema in which *the starting point is earth*. let us demythologize this figure. . . . what will be left of the figure of the collective son of man will be the communist program of his practice, [and] his subversiveness. (287) [41] for belo, this means a re-opening of the question of resurrection, for he insists that salvation in the gospel of mark is always salvation of the body. the "body of christ" is no easy theological metaphor here. belo argues that the messianic narrative of mark lies in fundamental opposition to the theological discourse of the institutional church. it is this discourse which keeps the church from being able to read mark in liberative fashion. the gospel narrative is articulated with the indefinite play of the narratives of its readings, a play that must not be closured, even in the name of reason, even in the name of god. the debate thus opened concerns the evaluation of the power at work in the practice of the bodies which we are. (294) [42] by playing the culturally-determined pressures toward signification (the codes) over against the writerly resistance offered by the materiality of the text, belo's materialist reading treads a fine line. at every step it threatens the obliteration of the very thing which makes it possible. on the one hand, the desire to produce a coherent reading is very powerful, and perhaps irresistible. on the other hand, it is the materiality of the text--its otherness--that refuses the hegemony of bourgeois theology and opens a space for belo's alternative reading. concrete theology [43] literal translation, the non-reader, and materialist reading offer approaches to a theology of reading which stress the physical, concrete aspects of the text in ways customarily ignored by traditional theories of the text, as well as by much of the jewish and nearly all of the christian theological tradition. calvino, benjamin, and belo provide examples of what i have elsewhere called "concrete theology."^7^ the theology of the text understands the text as an incarnate yet ultimately spiritual word. in contrast, concrete theology is a theology of reading which seeks to discover the essential carnality of the word in the materiality of the text, language at those points where it bodies itself into concrete reality, apart from any signification, exceeding its own metaphysical limits. [44] concrete theology desires the "new word," the word which is as yet or once again meaningless--not really a word, but only potentially one. it seeks this word in nonsense, incoherence, and gibberish. (this is not glossolalia, for which the "speaking in tongues" is already spirit-filled.) in this it is both materialistic and mystical. concrete theology therefore attends closely to those points where language resists rational or empirical analysis, where the rules of meaning are broken--for example, questions of fictionality, connotation, and metaphor. [45] concrete theology rejects the theology of the text, and in so doing it makes problematic the very meaning of "theology." nevertheless, the word "theology" points to the ongoing, inevitable, and inescapable slide of language and thought toward metaphysical (logocentric, onto-theological) closure--the inevitable return of the traditional understanding of the text. all language and thought, even the most atheistic, the most secular, and the most scientific, is caught in the gravitational field of this great black hole which we call by words such as "presence" and "reference." only poetry in its most radical, linguistically self-destructive forms comes close to escaping the vortex--but in such poetry, language is at its most concrete. this is the maximum degree of the writerly. [46] as a theology of reading, concrete theology is intensely interested in books, writings, scripture.^8^ however, concrete theology rejects the bible as authority, just as belo rejects the appropriation of biblical truth by bourgeois theology, and just as irnerio rejects the demand of every writing, the demand to be read. concrete theology reads the bible against the grain of established theological truth. it also rejects the church's claim to ownership of the bible--concrete theology liberates the bible from the church's hermeneutic control. it refuses the closed canon as such. the bible becomes for it just another text, or rather, many texts. for concrete theology, the bible is many bibles, an expanding and contracting and multiple text, a shimmering of texts which cannot be contained in any one book. [47] for concrete theology, exegesis is eisegesis. a better term than either of these is one recently proposed by gary phillips, "intergesis," which suggests a reading between the texts, or intertextual reading. the term "exegesis" is an ideological subterfuge used to conceal a preference for one type of eisegesis over others, to make one way of reading into the text appear to be the natural, normal reading out of what the text had within it. the works of calvino, benjamin, and barthes, among others, have made it clear that there is no such thing as an objective meaning hidden within any text. the notion of a scientific critical exegesis is as dangerous in its own way as the proclamation of the "true meaning of the bible" (as inspired by god) on the part of fundamentalist religion, to which the theology of the text is functionally equivalent. [48] there are no limits to eisegesis, or to misreading. as a translation from the materiality of the text, every reading is a misreading, turning the text into what it is not. still, to say that there are no correct interpretations doesn't mean that there are no *incorrect* interpretations. one who reads _sarrasine_ and understands la zambinella to be a woman, or a gay man, does not read "the same story" as another who understands the accepted meaning of "castrato."^9^ an alternative set of codes which permit the understanding of "castrato" as, e.g., "a type of woman" is not inconceivable, but such a reading would render incoherent the narrative structures of _sarrasine_. in such a reading the bounds of intertextuality would be strained to the point of "anything goes," and the thwarted desire for meaning would destroy the prospect of its own satisfaction. [49] however, reading is a juggling of codes, trying to get it all to "work out right." one misreading leads to another. i read belo's book within the context of an attempt to understand concrete theology. i sought a materialist reading of his materialist reading. i did not read belo in the context in which belo reads the gospel of mark, and yet his reading is not entirely unlike irnerio's non-reading, either. in addition, belo also permits a reading from within another context, the context of "the other." every (re)reading changes the context and opens a way for the other. the material text--physical marks on the page--is liberated from one context, and it is transported (translated) into another. the material text remains "the same" (physically), but the meaning must be altered. it is a misunderstanding--but then, all readings are inevitably misreadings. [50] what is needed is an understanding of the tensions between resistance inherent in the physical aspects of the text, and ideological pressures brought to bear upon it by readers. like irnerio, i reshape belo's work to fit my own desire--i read into it. as a middle-class male gentile white heterosexual north american, i am perpetually in serious danger of reclaiming belo's radically neo-marxist reading of mark for the sort of bourgeois theology over against which he sets his own reading. that is a risk which i must take, or else not read (that is, not translate) and remain silent--unlike irnerio, whose non-reading culminates in the work of art. nonetheless, my reading is also not entirely foreign to belo's, even as it cannot be identical to his. it stands over against his book, touching it (i hope) as a tangent to a circle. [51] the text is the specific, material product of a concrete act of production. for the logocentric, idealist tradition, the materiality of language is only the temporary and ultimately transparent medium for the spirituality of meaning. for materialist reading, in contrast, marks on the surface of the page are not merely the vehicle or channel of a fundamentally independent meaning, passing it on from an earlier, extratextual realm (such as the mind of an author) so that it may eventually be translated back to a different, but also extratextual, location (the mind of a reader). instead, these marks are opaque, inert, and resistant to the desire for meaning. the differences through which they signify are themselves without meaning. the material body of the text conceals even as (and more than) it reveals. different texts are not copies of some ideal original, and they cannot be collapsed into some universal, spiritual entity. [52] concrete theology is the name for awareness of the tensions involved between the desire for, and the resistance to, meaning. concrete theology therefore also offers a way of non-reading. it presents a different reading, an alternative reading, from the mainstreams of the jewish and christian traditions. it is a reading of the otherness of the text which may well appear to traditional readers as a mutilation of the text. it looks so intensely at the text that the words disappear, not into ideas as they do for traditional readings, but into meaningless marks. concrete theology can never be more than a prolegomenon, a not-quite theology, a %via negativa% which can only announce what it is not. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ increasingly, texts are not a matter of ink and paper but of magnetic or laser-optic recordings. what will the relative invisibility of such media, unreadable without special machinery, do to our thinking about texts and reading? how will the change in the physical stuff of the text itself change our theology of the text? ^2^ some analytic philosophers reserve the word "text" for the physical object (words on a page); what i call here the ideal or spiritual text, they call the "work." the work is a self-identical artistic entity (for example, a particular story) which may be found in various texts. barthes made a similar distinction, identifying the work with the readerly, the "text of pleasure." foucault notes some logical difficulties in the concept of "the work" (143-44). ^3^ varieties of reader-response criticism remain popular and influential in literary studies, but they will not be discussed here. however, some criticisms of reader response theory may be inferred from the following. ^4^ with the exception of louis marin's important book and the work of a few other french structuralists, belo does not cite any of the literary and narratological studies of the gospels of the last several decades. his references to english-speaking biblical scholars are to an earlier generation. ^5^ belo's reading here is not at all foreign to the history of bourgeois biblical scholarship, despite his claims to the contrary, but it suggests an anti-semitism which is arguably foreign to the gospel of mark. one finds echoes of this at several points in belo's reading, such as his comments on jesus's interactions with the gerasene demoniac (pagans do not endanger jesus, 130) and with the syrophoenician woman (as an alteration of jesus's strategy, 145). ^6^ see my essay, "post-ecclesiastical theology," _explorations_ (spring,1992). ^7^ "in order to exceed the limits, theology must uncover the not-itself which lies unnamed at its center, its hidden eccentricity and non-identity: it must become concrete" (aichele 138-139). ^8^ "[t]o describe systems of meaning by postulating a final signified is to side against the very nature of meaning. . . . scripture is a privileged domain for this problem, because, on the one hand, theologically, it is certain that a final signified is postulated: the metaphysical definition or the semantic definition of theology is to postulate the last signified; and because, on the other hand, the very notion of scripture, the fact that the bible is called scripture, writing, would orient us toward a more ambiguous comprehension of the problems, as if effectively, and theologically too, the base, the %princeps%, were still a writing, and always a writing" (barthes, _the semiotic challenge_ 242). ^9^ when i teach _s/z_, i have the students read _sarrasine_ first, on their own. several usually come up with such readings. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited aichele, george. _the limits of story_. chico, calif.: scholars p, 1985. barthes, roland. _s/z_. trans. richard miller. new york: hill and wang, 1974. ---. "from work to text." _textual strategies_. ed. and introd. josue v. harari. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1979. ---. _the semiotic challenge_. trans. richard howard. new york: hill and wang, 1988. belo, fernando. _a materialist reading of the gospel of mark_. trans. matthew j. o'connell. maryknoll, ny: orbis books, 1981. benjamin, walter. _illuminations_. trans. harry zohn. new york: schocken books, 1968. calvino, italo. _if on a winter's night a traveler_. trans. william weaver. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, inc., 1981. de man, paul. _the resistance to theory_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1986. derrida, jacques. _dissemination_. trans. barbara johnson. chicago: u of chicago p, 1981. ---. _the ear of the other_. trans. peggy kamuf and avital ronell. new york: schocken books, 1985. foucault, michel. "what is an author?" _textual strategies_. ed. and introd. josue v. harari. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1979. frege, gottlob. _translations from the writings of gottlob frege_. trans. and ed. p.t. geach and m. black. totowa, nj: rowman and littlefield, 1952. kristeva, julia. _revolution in poetic language_. trans. margaret waller. new york: columbia up, 1984. lyotard, jean-francois. _the differend_. trans. georges van den abbeele. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988. phillips, gary a. "'what is written? how are you reading?' gospel, intertextuality and doing lukewise: a writerly reading of lk 10:25-37 (and 38-42)." society of biblical literature _seminar papers_. atlanta: scholars p, 1992. kutzer, '_malice_: the new american hero', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-kutzer-_malice_.txt archive pmc-list, file review-7.194. part 1/1, total size 17015 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- _malice_: the new american hero by m. daphne kutzer department of english state university of new york at plattsburgh kutzerdm@splava.cc.plattsburgh.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994, by m. daphne kutzer, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: _malice_, directed by harold becker. screenplay by aaron sorking and scott frank. castlerock, 1993. [1] the latest contender in the woman as evil bitch film sweepstakes is harold becker's _malice_. the film is less interesting for its portrayal of the bitch, tracy (nicole kidman), than for its view of what makes a real american man. the character of tracy--a beautiful fraud who pretends to love children and her husband while plotting with handsome dr. jed hill (alec baldwin) to make herself sterile and thereby collect insurance money--doesn't add much to the string of recent screen villainesses in _fatal attraction_, _the hand that rocks the cradle_, _basic instinct_, and others. all share the central quality of denying their feminine and motherly sides and/or exploiting their sexuality to ensnare hapless men. however, the development of the character of tracy's husband andy (bill pullman), along with the ultimate fate of handsome jed hill, shows us that something both old and new is happening to the men in these films. dan gallagher (michael douglas) in _fatal attraction_ (1988) is guilty of bringing evil into his domestic eden, and in the end his wounded wife must kill the bitch. the only man aware of the bitch's true nature in _the hand that rocks the cradle_ (1993) is the mental handicapped black handyman, solomon (ernie hudson): the scientist husband is blind to her true nature even once he knows her true identity. in both these films the male "heroes" are weak and ineffectual, if not emasculated. nick curran (michael douglas again) in _basic instinct_ (1992) is made of sterner stuff, but despite his nickname of "shooter," the film hints that he, too, will be a victim in the end. _malice_ provides a step--forward?--in the development of the american film hero, at least in the genre of thrillers. [2] the male leads of the film are andy and jed. andy's shortened name suggests his initial weakness, while jed's name suggests his hunkiness--it's the sort of name you find attached to cleft-chinned romantic soap opera heroes. the names match the physical attributes of each character. bill pullman's andy is slightly built, has a non-descript face, and is always dressed in a corduroy or tweed jacket, button-down oxford cloth shirt, and knitted tie--suitable if stereotypical garb for an associate dean of students. jed is the former high school running back, solid and athletic (we see him jogging energetically, for instance, while andy drinks coffee), and the film allows him to doff his shirt frequently, so that the viewer may admire alec baldwin's broad and hairy chest. [3] the way each man handles his women is also instructive. andy has married, according to the local campus newspaper, his "favorite student." we aren't meant to raise our post-anita hill eyebrows at this. the detail is provided so that we may understand that andy is not man enough for a real woman: he needs a "student wife," someone young enough to be malleable in his inexperienced hands. [4] of course, tracy turns out to be anything but malleable. the film foreshadows this by way of a sex scene between andy and tracy. the happy couple are eating take-out chinese in bed (perhaps a reference to the scene in woody allen's _manhattan_, which also concerns the power balance between an older man and a younger woman). andy can't handle the chopsticks, and says to his wife, "would you think any the less of me if i used a fork?" tracy coyly begins to feed him from her chopsticks, and before we know it she is straddling him and they are having sex. it is tracy who is on top, both literally and figuratively. she is less prudish and more aggressive than her husband; she doesn't mind the curtainless windows and he does. andy remains passive throughout, and all we see of his naked body is a scrawny lower leg. you can tell he doesn't jog. [5] jed, on the other hand, is a real man. when we see him having sex, jed is energetically on top--so much so that he is keeping tracy and andy, who live a floor below, awake. we see his bulging biceps and naked torso, and when his partner asks him to slow down on the booze, he replies, "i am impervious to alcohol." hard drinking, hard working, and hard playing: an admirable example of the american male. [6] but in the end it is jed who is killed by tracy the bitch, and andy the wimp who ends up the hero. how does this happen? [7] it happens improbably, of course. there has been a serial rapist loose on campus, and indeed the rapist's actions lead to the initial meeting between andy and jed- jed miraculously saves the life of one of the victims, andy comes to thank him and discovers that jed is his old high school running back hero. before long andy asks jed to rent the upper floor of his run-down victorian house. what andy doesn't know, of course, is that tracy and jed are hatching an evil medical plot right beneath his roof, and that one reason tracy becomes upset with jed's energetic sex life is that she has been having an affair with him herself. andy is not only cuckolded, but cuckolded under his own roof, by someone who is also "cuckolding" (as it were) his wife. [8] no one counts on the rapist, however. one of andy's students fails to show up for an appointment, and the dedicated dean drives to her house to talk to her. we aren't surprised when he discovers her raped body in the backyard. the local (female) detective asks andy to give a sperm sample to clear him of suspicion. furious, he says, "am i a fucking suspect?" this is the first time he uses the "f" word, but not the last. up to this point in the film he has been fucked over by the judicial system and by his friend and his wife, and he has not done any genuine fucking himself, although he will ultimately fuck up the insurance scheme. when he is asked to fuck himself, he finally rebels. i emphasize the word "fuck" because it is the biggest linguistic clue in the film as to andy's growing manhood. jed has used it early on--when lambasting a medical colleague, he says, "do that again and i'll take out your lungs with a fucking ice cream scoop." tracy also uses the word--and the instant andy starts to, we know his luck is changing. [9] but first tracy leaves him. her ovary has burst, jed performs emergency surgery, and with andy's permission removes both ovaries, even though one of them turns out to be viable. tracy sues jed (this is part of their scheme, of course) and leaves andy. disconsolate, andy works late, goes to the basement for a lightbulb, realizes the janitor is the rapist, and socks him into unconsciousness after a battle that leaves andy with a bloodied face. [10] a lightbulb has literally gone off for andy. directly after his capture of the rapist, the police detective tells him that the sperm sample he gave showed that he is sterile --and andy knows tracy was pregnant when she had emergency surgery. here is proof that he has been cuckolded and that tracy is not what she seems. andy goes off in a fury to jed (whom he does not yet suspect); to tracy's lawyer, whom he assumes is also her lover; and to tracy's alcoholic mother (played wickedly well by ann bancroft) in search of clues. everyone he sees says, "what happened to your face?" of course, in one sense he has lost face completely, courtesy of tracy, and he has also lost his manhood in that he knows he can't father children. but in other ways he has re-cast his mild-mannered professor's face in the shape of the hero's. he tells the detective, "you want something done right, goddamn it, you call a teacher," and when jed asks what happened to his face he says, "i beat the shit out of a seriously disturbed serial rapist." [11] andy gets final proof of what is going on when he sees tracy and jed together and when he finds a medical syringe in his house. he then confronts tracy. tracy doesn't understand that andy is on top now, however. she thinks she can seduce him into going along with her scheme. she, too, asks what happened to his face, and he says, "i tripped." this is meant to be ironic--it plays to his old role as ineffectual academic, not his new one as manly hero. tracy, once she realizes things aren't going her way, gets up in a hug and andy says, "sit the fuck down." stunned by this verbal virility, she says, "what?" "i said, sit the fuck down. i'm running the show now." "what do you want?" "what does any man want? i want the red sox to win the world series." [12] this little scene, more so than the fight with the rapist, shows us that andy is now a real man. he can take charge of a woman and make her do what he wants her to do; he can say "fuck"; he can toss around sports references just like jed hill. he ultimately asks for half the insurance money, although by now the viewer knows this is just one more step in andy's revenge plot. [13] just as andy's masculinity is on the rise, jed's is declining. he and tracy have argued over what to do about andy and the child witness andy claims to have. jed is for compromise--he says give andy half and be done with it. they argue so heatedly that jed finally hits tracy to put her in her place. at first this appears to be in line with jed's he-man qualities--but then he makes the mistake of apologizing. in the ethos of the film, this shows him to be weak, despite all of his macho sex and surgery. he is willing to compromise; he is appalled at tracy's plan to kill an innocent child; and he apologizes for using physical violence against a woman. what is the proper fate for such a man? why, death, of course. tracy plugs him twice with a gun, then goes off to commit child murder solo. [14] she is foiled in her plot--andy knows what she is going to do and substitutes a dummy for the boy. tracy ends up going to jail. andy ends up with a sprained arm, and when we last see him, the female detective (whose only role in the denouement is to masquerade as a nurse and mother), says, "you're supposed to put ice on that." he replies, "fine. i'll have mine with some scotch on top." and off they go. now andy is the hard-drinking, swearing, womanizing real man, and the film's end hints that he will end up next with a (psuedo) nurse, just like jed. [15] _malice_ has links with its predecessors that go beyond the evil bitch stereotype. first of all, it shares with them a particular, strategic deployment of the word "fuck." in all of these films we are given to understand that when a man uses the word, he is a real man: when a woman does, she is the incarnation of evil, no matter how beautiful she may be. peyton (rebecca demornay) in _the hand that rocks the cradle_ provides a nice example of this. she twists the arm of a six-year-old schoolyard bully and says, "i've got a message for you. . . . leave emma alone. . . . if you don't i'm going to rip your fucking head off." a scene or two later, she says to solomon, the wiser-than-he-seems handyman, "don't fuck with me, retard." she not only says "fuck" but picks on children and the mentally handicapped- hard to get much bitchier than that. [16] second, all of these films portray men as for the most part weak and dim-witted, their wits especially dulled by the siren calls of evil women. dan gallagher in _fatal attraction_ has the perfect life, until alex seduces him into a one-night stand and all hell breaks loose. in the end, he is still so weakened by her that he cannot kill her. he misses one chance in alex's kitchen, when he nearly strangles her but then backs off--he's a nice middle-class lawyer, after all--and botches another in his own bathroom when he thinks he has drowned her, but hasn't. it's up to his wife, battered and weak from a car accident, to find the gun and fire the fatal shot. matt mccoy's michael in _hand that rocks the cradle_ has facial expressions blanker than those of the handicapped solomon, and although other men salivate at the sight of peyton, he seems oblivious to her charms until nearly the end of the film. even when he knows who she really is, he is reluctant to call the police and forgets to ask for the house keys when he throws her out; his wife has to ask for them. and in the final confrontation, he is completely out of the action, left in the basement with broken legs while the quick wits of a child and solomon give claire the chance to send peyton out the attic window to her death. nick in _basic instinct_ is apparently somewhat shrewder, but even he misses out on crucial clues, is incapable of saving his best buddy from death, and is obsessed beyond reason with the pantyless %femme fatale% played by sharon stone. [17] even more interesting is the attitude towards paternity in these films. the fathers in _fatal attraction_ and _the hand that rocks the cradle_ appear on the surface to be loving and involved parents: dan gallagher buys his child a pet bunny rabbit; michael sings operetta to his daughter and plays board games with her. but dan's bunny ends up boiled because he has put carnal desires before fatherly duty, and michael should not be so willing to turn over so much of the family's care to a nanny. [18] nick in _basic instinct_ has the paternalistic job of policeman, but he also has the nickname "shooter," earned by his tendency to wound innocent bystanders. he is not a father, nor does he show any desire to sire children by sharon stone's catherine, but he is a symbolic and murderous father. in this he points the way to _malice_ and what may be the latest trend in cinematic visions of manhood. [19] in _malice_ paternal behavior leads one first to marry the evil bitch, and then to discover raped bodies in the bushes. finding out one is sterile, however, leads to the possibility of endless sexual play without consequences - unless you choose a sharon stone, that is. _malice_'s andy is smarter than _basic instinct_'s nick: he figures out the entire scheme on his own, cancels the bitch out of his life, takes up with someone who will nurture *him* rather than the other way around, and is freed from having to worry about unanticipated pregnancies (one of dan gallagher's problems) or from ever having to worry about evil nannies in his childless household. he's smarter than scheming dr. jed hill, who ultimately is killed not only for greed, but for his paternal feelings towards an unknown child. paternity is lethal all the way around in these films. [20] the new american hero, at least in the genre of popular film, is no new age sensitive guy or angst-ridden iron john. he's an updated john wayne--he can swear and drink, but he doesn't smoke; he has brains but knows how to use his muscles; and most importantly he can have guilt-free, child-free sexual relationships in which he, of course, is always on top. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------allen, 'raids on the conscious: pynchon's legacy of paranoia and the terrorism of uncertainty in don delillo's _ratner's star_', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-allen-raids.txt archive pmc-list, file allen.194. part 1/1, total size 59897 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- raids on the conscious: pynchon's legacy of paranoia and the terrorism of uncertainty in don delillo's _ratner's star_ by glen scott allen department of english towson state university e7e4all@toe.towson.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by glen scott allen, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. "terror: from the latin *terrere*, to frighten; intense fear; the quality of causing dread; terribleness; alarm, consternation, apprehension, dread, fear, fright." _webster's new twentieth century dictionary_ "years ago i used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. they make raids on human consciousness." william gray in _mao ii_ [1] terrorism has played an important part in nearly every novel don delillo has written to date. while the terrorists of _running dog_ (1978) are essentially cartoon figures in search of a hypothetical pornographic film made in hitler's bunker, the more realistic terrorists in _players_ (1977) assassinate stock brokers and attempt (albeit apathetically) to convert disillusioned upper middleclass new yorkers. _the names'_ (1982) use of terrorism is more complex, positing a terrorist group--or perhaps cult is closer to the mark--whose assassinations are either random or based on an arcane understanding of a "pre-linguistic" language, depending on what they believe that day; and _white noise_ (1985), with its "airborne toxic event" extends this unpredictability factor and presents terrorism as something perhaps beyond the control of human agency at all. _libra_ (1989) suggest that terrorism of a bureaucratic but inherently uncontrollable nature lurks at the heart of the kennedy assassination. and finally delillo's most recent novel, _mao ii_ (1991), returns to an human terrorist, abu rashid, and suggests a complex and almost hypnotic symmetry between his praxis and that of a famous but disillusioned writer in the novel, william gray. this symmetry is of course not unique to _mao ii_; the extended meditation about "solitary plotters" in _libra_ posits that both the scheming terrorist and the struggling writer are at root "men in small rooms" seeking to reconnect with a society from which they feel alienated, and so they both must "write" themselves back into the world. [2] terrorism in delillo seems an integral component of the postmodern condition, its ubiquitousness aiding and abetting in the construction of a subject for whom paranoia is not so much a neurosis as a canny adaptive strategy of survival; a strategy which has "evolved" from what we might call its classical form in the works of thomas pynchon, especially his %magnum opus% _gravity's rainbow_ (1973). terrorism in gr is figured as the product of increasingly omniscient institutional surveillance over the increasingly impotent and isolated civilian. while the agents of this surveillance are obscure, still they *are* agents, coherent sites of surveillance and control. in delillo's work, however, terrorism seems to have evolved beyond the need of human agency, to have seeped into the very texture of contemporary life. delillo's response to this postmodern dynamic of terrorism and paranoia argues for an almost romantic return to the sovereign powers of the individual, an entity considered essentially extinct in postmodern fiction. this resurgent individualism is in fact not only a rejection of the paranoid strategy for postmodern survival formulated in pynchon, but it also represents a rejection of the postmodern subject (as figured in the works of critics like benveniste, jameson and baudrillard to name only a few) as something nearly inseparable from the semiotic "signal soup" of postmodern life.^1^ for instance, kaja silverman singles out the writings of benveniste as an example of the representation of this spectral postmodern subject: "[in benveniste's] writings, the subject has an even more provisional status . . . it has no existence outside of the specific discursive moments in which it emerges. the subject must be constantly reconstructed through discourse." (silverman, 199). but i will argue that delillo seems to feel our only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism, repression and paranoia is in moving *away* from formulations of the subject which work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site of responsibility and authority. [3] typically when we speak of terrorism we're referring to violence committed by a minority in demonstration of its status as victim: of political repression or geographic isolation or "cultural ghettoization." thus terrorism is fundamentally an act meant to call attention to itself; like postmodern fiction, it is inherently self-conscious. and in order to disseminate its self-conscious image as victim, it must have recourse to the media. clearly when delillo's character william gray suggests that terrorists have usurped the role in the public conscious that novelists once held, he is referring to the fact that terrorist acts must be circulated to attain identity, and thus such acts compete for the public's limited attention span with other circulating "texts." much of the debate within the scholarship of terrorism does in fact center on whether or not mass media encourages terrorist acts or is largely irrelevant to them. two recent articles in the journal _terrorism_ are good examples of this debate. ralph dowling suggests that tv coverage is unimportant to terrorist aims, while russell f. farnen argues that terrorism and tv have a fundamentally symbiotic relationship, and that in fact terrorism is "made to order" for the specific requirements of the television media: "terrorism is different, dramatic, and potentially violent. it frequently develops over a period of time, occurs in exotic locations, offers a clear confrontation, involves bizarre characters, and is politically noteworthy. finally, it is of concern to the public" (farnen, 111). farnen cites what is apparently the majority opinion in terrorism studies by paraphrasing (unfortunately) margaret thatcher, to the effect that tv coverage is the "oxygen" which allows terrorism to breathe. [4] whatever one's opinion about the relationship between tv and terrorism, a far more interesting point is to be found in dowling's suggestion that understanding terrorist acts is no more--and no less--difficult than understanding any human attempt at communication. for certainly "understanding" terrorist acts is the one thing the "authorities" must claim to be incapable of doing. by its very definition, terrorism, at least to modern western democracies, is "mad." to see why this is the case we begin with a quote from a member of al fatah on the purpose of their use of violence: "violence will purify the individuals from venom, it will redeem the colonized from inferiority complex, it will return courage to the countryman" (quoted in dowling, 52). violence for this terrorist is not the medium, it *is* the message. violence is the transcendental signifier, the one term that cannot be reduced to any positive correlative within the discourse itself; axiomatic, beyond justification or logical debate; beyond logic. thus to the logocentric western sensibility, the terrorists' use of violence is the most "senseless" of all terms he/she could possibly employ. it is, in terms of cultural linguistics, essentially impossible for most "first world" western civilians to "read" the terrorist text, to see in it any expression worth interpreting. farnen quotes the u. s. ambassador at large, l. paul bremer, who casts terrorism in its familiar western role of evil incarnate: "terrorism's most significant characteristic is that it despises and seeks to destroy the fundamentals of western democracy--respect for individual life and the rule of law" (farnen, 104). [5] though these two authors disagree about the relationship between terrorism and the media, they both agree that terrorism does in fact serve a fundamental rhetorical purpose, like any other form of human communication consisting of the manipulation of symbols. the communicative act is, dowling argues, the way humans "find a place in the world," the process of identifying oneself and one's group as distinct from other selves and other groups. terrorist acts signal to the terrorists *themselves* who they are. in dowling's view, the cultural effect of mass media-broadcasted terrorist violence is quite secondary to the more fundamentally human need of terrorists to "speak" themselves: "the seemingly senseless killings by terrorists serve the same function for terrorist society that wars and punishment of criminals and dissidents perform for mainstream society" (dowling, 51). farnen also believes that terrorism is a form of expression, a text which all the parties involved seek to control.^2^ he uses the example of the kidnapping of aldo moro in 1978 by the brigate rosse, which farnen says was "played out" as a classic narrative of sacrifice and tragedy by all the parties involved: government, media, and the terrorists themselves: "the saga was complete with 'christians' (moro and his martyred bodyguards), br 'lions,' state 'caesars,' media 'tribunes,' and the anxious italian public" (farnen, 116). in fact, farnen argues that the terrorists intentionally and specifically "wrote" various symbolism into the entire kidnapping drama, in such forms as the "placement of [moro's] dead body in the center of rome, on a street linking the two major party headquarters" (118). even more interesting is farnen's observation that, though the event was discussed at obsessive length in the media for months, very little was ever said about the terrorists' possible motivations or rationale. in fact, he concludes that, like many such terrorist acts, the entire event was treated as though it occurred somewhere outside the normal course of human events: "the moro affair was treated much like an inexplicable natural disaster or an act of god" (118). finally, farnen points out terrorism's usefulness as a dramatic trope, which has made it a mainstay of tv shows and popular spy novels: "with the sudden demise of post-gorbachev communism as the main enemy, terrorism has become 'public enemy number one' in american public discourse" (103). (certainly this move is evident in the work of tom clancy, who began by casting soviets in the role of arch villain, but has easily substituted terrorists--both narcoand political--in that role in his more recent novels.) [6] while much of dowling's argument seems finally rather simplistic--at times he appears to cast terrorists in the role of the misunderstood teens from "west side story"--at the very least he works to move the discourse about terrorist acts from reductive tactical debates to a recognition that terrorism is a means of *expression*. however, by downplaying and eventually denying the role the mass media audience plays in the formation of the "terrorist identity," he skims over what is clearly for many postmodern writers, especially delillo, the most interesting, perhaps the most *terrifying* aspect of modern terrorism. for if terrorists have become nearly ubiquitous players in the contemporary social narrative, then, whatever the intent of their "expressive" acts, they contribute as much to the formation of *our* identity as to their own, and their acts of seemingly random and "meaningless" violence have become an integral component of what being a modern individual *means*. given that it has become something of a commonplace to say that part of what being a postmodern subject means is a pervasive sense of anxiety and vulnerability, then terrorism's chief aim would seem to be perfectly consistent with that "meaning." according to an authority on terrorism, its chief "objective . . . is to convey a pervasive sense of vulnerability"; vulnerability which produces consequent paranoia and guilt in the civilian; guilt which arises "when terrorism proves that societal institutions cannot provide the peace and security they promise" (qtd. in dowling, 52). thus in a broad cultural context, terrorism is an all-too material demonstration of the uncertainty principle, i.e., that we cannot absolutely control our environments and destinies, and that our ability to dictate the narrative of our own lives is limited and circumstantial. [7] in order to describe delillo's presentation of this dynamic of terrorism and paranoia, we first need to discuss terrain so often considered pynchon's preeminent stomping ground. pynchon's chief contribution to literature may well be considered a body of fiction where the legacy of a paranoid style--out of orwell via burroughs, kerouac and mailer--comes to full fruition in what a character in _running dog_ calls the "age of conspiracies." according to john mcclure, the appeal of conspiracy theories in the late 20th century stems from their essentially indisputable, self-justifying, self-referencing hermeneutics: "for conspiracy theory explains the world, as religion does, without elucidating it, by positing the existence of hidden forces which permeate and transcend the realm of ordinary life" (mcclure, 103). though mcclure is writing here of the work of don delillo, pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_ would undoubtedly serve equally well as an example of this conspiracy fiction, with its nearly infinite schemes crossing and crisscrossing nations, continents, and decades, while in the center of these intersecting plot-lines sits forlorn tyrone slothrop, like a target in a crosshairs. [8] but a target of what? certainly the v-2 rocket is one possibility; by the end of the novel we have reason to believe that the rocket is in fact "pursuing" slothrop, or that he is pursuing it. in any case, they seem bound, through the early experiments of dr. jamf with imoplex-g, in some complicated dance of death. but this "chemical bond" is only conjectural, and certainly not the only candidate for some they out to get slothrop. in fact, by the time slothrop wanders the zone, they has become nearly every postwar institution, regardless its national or ideological boundaries. finally what pursues slothrop is the world; but what pursues the reader is the lasting image of a rocket, poised an infinitesimal inch above our heads, completing an arc which began with its vapor trail first witnessed by pirate prentice 800 pages earlier. and in a purely physical sense, the greatest terror of the novel is the v-2, the german "terror weapon" that was intended to demoralize the british civilian population. by using the v-2 as a trope of paranoia, pynchon categorically identified the primary legacy of our victory in wwii as anxiety; anxiety fueled by a world armed with weapons which had transcended all classical theories and strategies of warfare. this fundamentally "material" terrorism is one easily recognized by anyone who lived through either wwii or the 25 years of intense cold war which followed. as critic john johnston has argued, the "they-system" of _gravity's rainbow_ "is depicted as arising out of the new bureaucratic needs and technologies of world war two" ("post-cinematic fiction," 91); bureaucratic needs and technologies which would come to identify slothrop's "time" as the progenitor of this age of conspiracies: there is also the story about tyrone slothrop, who was sent into the zone to be present at his own assembly--perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, *his time's assembly*--and there ought to be a punchline to it. but there isn't. the plan went wrong. (gr, 680) though pynchon's theys are depicted as beyond traditional national ideologies, their politics are clearly identifiable as essentially those of isolation, repression and control. in the post-wwii world of pynchon's fiction, the development of modern and efficient state surveillance is a form of terrorism which motivates the civilian to seek out patterns of information which may (or may not) reveal hidden agencies and concealed plots. thus paranoia is an adaptive reaction formation to omniscient institutional surveillance. and the mass media in pynchon--radio, tv and print journalism, even the us. postal system--has been largely co-opted by these forces of surveillance and control until they have become little more than state-dominated networks for distributing dis-information. pynchon correctly predicted that the surviving nation-states, unable to take to the battlefield against foreign enemies, would turn all their powers of surveillance on their own citizens, project their institutionalized paranoia onto these civilians, and thus construct an international and domestic tension where peace in the world was purchased with the disappearance of this very civilian as an independent subject. what pynchon represents in gr is, for want of a better term, the ascendancy of state terrorism; not the state terrorism claimed by the plo as a underlying reality in the foreign policy of the united states and other world powers, but rather an *intra* state terrorism, i.e., the development of complex and interconnected domestic and international networks of surveillance which depend on the acquisition and circulation of vast quantities of new information. [9] and these new information technologies also become central to the thematics of delillo's novels, but in quite different ways. for instance, the information in delillo's work often seems utterly *ahistorical*. the characters of delillo's novels often "inhabit" identities whose connection to history--either personal or cultural--is merely theoretical. delillo's fictions seem set in a time when world war ii has become a distant influence. in _running dog_, for instance, there is the pornographic film from hitler's bunker, yet nothing else about world war ii seeps through into the novel; even vietnam seems to belong to an entirely other world. of course, the paranoiac "fallout" from world war ii and the stalemate of the cold war is only one of the trademarks of pynchon's fiction. others include conspiracies whose agencies are dispersed or uncertain, characters who disappear in ways which mirror the dispersal of those agencies, and endings which suggest imminent and perhaps apocalyptic revelation. yet, while all of these components are evident in delillo's novels as well, they are all warped by this increasing mass of information which shapes, or perhaps *is* the postmodern subject. [10] in other words, many of delillo's characters seem to be in danger of becoming exactly the sort of postmodern specter to which i referred earlier. in fact, critic daniel aaron has suggested that, in all of delillo's novels, his characters are less cartesian individuals than "integers in a vast information network" (70). and leclair sees information and its various incarnations as the very essence of delillo's works: "the novels are all about communication exchanges, the relations between information and energy and forces, the methods of storing, retrieving, and using new kinds of information" ("postmodern mastery," 101). how, then, is delillo arguing *against* the acceptance of the dissipated postmodern subject? this is a point i will return to in a moment. but first i want to pursue the ways in which delillo re-structures pynchon's legacy of paranoia, and the relationship in _ratner's star_ between paranoia and what delillo presents as the "new, improved" version of postmodern terrorism. [11] delillo remaps pynchon's legacy of paranoia onto a distinctly american, largely urban post-historical landscape. in novels of middle class ennui like _players_, _white noise_, and even to a certain extent _mao ii_, the america of delillo is not only a land existing completely within this "age of conspiracies," its inhabitants seem capable of defining themselves only as victims of these conspiracies. frank lentricchia believes that delillo's works serve as cautionary tales about such conspiracy and media-bound identity, illustrating "how the expressive forces of blood and earth are in the process of being overtaken and largely replaced by the forces of contemporary textuality. lives lived so wholly inside the media are lives expressed (in the passive mood) through voices dominated by the jargons of the media" ("postmodern critique," 211). and while the terrorism in delillo's novels often begins as something familiar to us *as* terrorism--small bands of individuals plotting acts of violence against "innocent" civilians--this "prosaic" terrorism typically metamorphoses into something else: an independent, uncontrolled, mysterious and perhaps even unfathomable force which disrupts the best laid plans of terrorist and civilian alike. again, the airborne toxic event in _white noise_ is one example. but the best sustained representation of this "agentless" terrorism is to be found, oddly enough, in one of delillo's earliest novels, _ratner's star_ (1976); a novel unique among his works if only because there is no representative terrorist among its characters; at least no recognizably human terrorist. but we do recognize in _ratner's star_ a "pynchonian" %mise en scene%, complete with proliferating plots, daunting intertextual connections, hidden and potentially non-existent agencies, dispersing narrative voices, and, at the center of the plots and counter-plots, a lone and relatively naive protagonist, billy twillig, whose task it is to determine whether he is a perceptive victim or a delusional paranoid. in _ratner's star_, delillo rewrites the global plots of _gravity's rainbow_ onto the larger stage of the universe, which itself becomes both scheme and schemer, as well as the chief "terrorist." [12] the premise of _ratner's star_ is that we have received a signal from outer space. fourteen year old billy twillig, a mathematical prodigy, is summoned to a distant research complex, field experiment number one (feno), to help decode the message. from the beginning of the novel the uncertainty of billy's task and the instability of the fictional world which surrounds him are emphasized: "little billy twillig stepped aboard a sony 747 bound for a distant land. this much is known for certain. . . . but ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one's perspective" (rs, 3). from the moment billy arrives at feno, he is besieged by what any reader of pynchon would recognize as an overabundance of signal which threatens to degenerate into noise; and the only scientist other than billy capable of deciphering the alien message--the aged and venerable henrik endor--has run away from the complex and is out in the desert, digging a hole. [13] billy's dilemma is not unlike that of benny profane or oedipa maas or tyrone slothrop: to "sort noise from signal," and determine whether or not there is an intelligent "agency" at the origin of the message; but to determine first of all if there *is* a message. and like benny and oedipa and tyrone before him, billy encounters a dizzying array of characters in his search, all with their own interpretation of the message, all with their entirely idiosyncratic agenda of signals and counter-signals. but whereas in pynchon the "terror" generated by mysterious plots is largely a result of the revealed size and complexity of those plots, in _ratner's star_ the terror arises from the randomness and potential irrelevance of the information with which billy is bombarded; which is to say, in pynchon what is learned contributes to the background of terror, while in delillo the acquisition of knowledge is problematized to the point where "learning" itself is an experience of random and meaningless violence; the very process of searching is, in and of itself, terrifying. [14] this terrible process of learning is figured as inescapably arising from the dynamics and limits of language. while the later half of the novel is devoted to the revelation of many things billy doesn't really want to know (about adulthood and sex, trust and betrayal), the first half concentrates on reducing language, and particularly conversation to something more like hand-to-hand combat than communication. for instance, dialogue between characters is less the revelation of information than an exchange of cliches, a sort of preliminary sizing up of one another for soft spots. a dialogue between billy and a vaguely sinister man he meets on a plane (an entrepreneur who will turn out later to be the closest thing the novel has to an actual terrorist) goes like this: "how was the bathroom." "i liked it." "mine was first-rate." "pretty nice." "some plane." "the size." "exactly." throughout the novel most of the characters play their conversational cards very close to the vest, but billy's responses to questions particularly are more like stage directions for speech than speech itself: "my mouth says hello"; "i do not comment."; "i make no reply" (rs, 11). and when billy eventually reaches the secret complex feno, he is almost literally assaulted by a blizzard of scientific jargon from a dozen different fields--biology, child "sexology," astrophysics, architecture--as well as the apparently secret agendas of everyone he meets. all of this secretive and gestural communication occurs in an atmosphere of instantaneous computer networks, portable communicators, super intelligent computers and hyperbolic referentiality, which makes language something violent, unrelenting, and unpredictable. no communication is simply referential, pointing to any unambiguous signified. in fact, signification in the world of feno is (in barthes' terms) all connotation, no denotation--rhetorical "slippages" alone accounting for what little coherent meaning can be derived. language here is often so rote as to be almost all ritual, its meaning residing *entirely* in its context. for instance, when billy reaches his room in feno, certain "safety precautions" are read to him by his escort: "the exit to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. if you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture." "i have understood." "most people just nod," ottum said. "it's more universal." (17) [15] and often language "attacks" occur without *any* context. in fact, individual words often take on a paranoiac aura which is completely independent of either their denotation *or* connotation. for instance, billy feels certain words are threatening all by themselves--words like gout, ohm, ergot, pulp; "organic" words which he refers to as "alien linguistic units." and his paranoid reaction makes perfect sense: in a world where *all* quotes are taken out of context, each utterance would indeed seem an "alien linguistic unit," something whose purpose is suspect and presumptively threatening. thus the material violence which is the transcendental signifier for terrorists like the member of al fatah becomes in _ratner's star_ the abstracted violence of decontextualized and seemingly nonsensical language; language without a logical referent, pointing either to itself or nowhere, or both. [16] of course much postmodern fiction depends on this technique of decontextualization for its disorienting effect. but typically accompanying this technique is the employment of intertextual references which signal to the reader exactly what sort of larger context--often ironic--is to be used to "ground" signification. throughout _ratner's star_, however, what we would typically refer to as the intertextual references are made not to individual texts at all, but rather to vague "sites" of cultural signification. these sites are in turn reduced to single tropes, what we might call "signature" tropes, the decoding of which depends on the reader's possession of a repertoire of contemporary cultural trivia: cliches from classic films, one-liners from tv shows, characters and quotes from comic books, popular novels, newspaper headlines, tabloids, the jargon of _scientific american_, the newspeak of federal bureaucrats, the glib argot of tabloid journalists . . . all of these idiolects existing side-by-side as equally valid discourses. thus "texts" are less discrete and more continuous, terms which _ratner's star_ uses with considerable frequency; something like subatomic particles, which aren't really "particular" at all but rather fields whose density fades vaguely off into other fields. and very often these "fields" of reference merely deflect the reader to still other "tropic fields" (to coin a perfectly awful phrase) until the paths of reference become so intricate that any map of this referentiality would look like the tracings of subatomic collisions produced in particle accelerators.^3^ [17] in such a miasmic communicative environment, traditional boundaries between "texts" are dissolved. the result is more chaotic tropic plasma than orderly intertextual network. in this new form of intertextuality, the process whereby texts make contributions to the intertextual %langue% are best thought of as something like a field of signification, something one measures with probabilities and approximations rather than certainties and units. the characters of _ratner's star_ move through clouds of such tropes, charged with the reflexive urge to find some sort of order, to arrange these signals into "spectra" based not on the content of the original text from which the signature trope is derived, but rather on the degree to which each trope serves as a vector pointing toward a potential agency at the message's point of origin. for instance, even when billy believes he has finally decoded the message from space, he is admonished for working toward the *wrong* goal: "content is not the issue. so don't go around telling people you broke the code. there is no code worth breaking" (416). robert softly, the character who has conceived of the perfectly logical, perfectly useless language called logicon (a language for which one of the key rules is "i. all language was innuendo.") often speaks with every word--even articles and prepositions--in quotes: "'it' 'is' 'time' 'for' 'me' 'to' 'get' 'out'." each word is thus partitioned by an ironic valence even from its immediate, syntagmatic context. thus severed from all context global *and* local, much of the language in the book does indeed seem like the "alien linguistic units" which so terrorize billy. to what do such "alien linguistic units" refer? for billy at least, that common direction, the principle which he uses in an attempt to bring shape to the tropic plasma, is the discourse of mathematics--the only discourse which he does not find threatening. language which is not simply "alien" is "comforting" to the extent that it can be translated into mathematical equivalents. and what billy finds comforting in mathematics is the distinct quality of its constituent components--at least its *integer* components: "words and numbers, writing and calculating. . . . ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole" (7). fractions, we are told, have always made billy feel "slightly queasy." [18] the typical pynchonian reaction to such a state of paranoia would be a dispersal of agency. by dispersal of agency, i mean both the figurative way in which the plots in pynchon's novels are always potentially agentless and self-perpetuating, and the literal manner in which pynchon's protagonists have a tendency to disappear: we recall benny in _v._ disappearing into the sunset of malta, oedipa in _lot 49_ disappearing into the auction room, and, most significantly, slothrop in _gravity's rainbow_, who disperses into the plot itself, becoming a "pretext" and a concept which is "just too remote" to hold together. we might also remember the way in which slothrop merges with the symbol of what's been pursuing him--the v-2 rocket--by becoming %rocketmensch% just before he merges with the plot ever further and becomes vaguely visible (at least to pig bodine) but insubstantial; before he becomes, that is, a specter. and such a move is, again, perfectly in keeping with the paranoid logos of the novel, as the other trademark of pynchon's plots is their undecidability, their sense of imminent but unrealized revelation. in one sense, revelation ought to be the ultimate moment for the paranoid, as it is the moment when the "truth" of his world view is substantiated, made incarnate; but of course this ultimate moment is also the *final* moment--for if paranoia is more the state of seeking agency than the moment of finding it, then revelation threatens the paranoid's very %raison d'etre%. thus the most dedicated paranoid would be the one able to forever defer this moment of revelation. [19] at this point i need to briefly discuss the idea of tropes. the root of the word trope is the greek %tropaion%, which was a marker left to indicate where an enemy had been turned back. we might ask, then, what "enemy" is it that tropes turn back? as tropic or figural language is, at least in a basic sense, considered the opposite of literal language, a first order answer might be that tropes mark the place in language where literality is "turned back." what is literal is "made up" of letters; and literal reading is after all an effort to reduce the ambiguity of a term to a *single* meaning; to transform signifiers into signals whose meaning is constant across all possible contexts. tropes, on the other hand, tug language in the opposite direction, toward a multiplicity of meaning and thus toward an uncertainty of interpretation. with this understanding of the tension between literal and tropic reading in mind, i would suggest then that the paranoid reader is in fact a very *literal* reader, one who works to reduce the ambiguity of the signifiers about him to mere signals which can all be traced back to the same and central agent--the agency at the center of the "plot." [20] who or what is this agent? to quote first from _gravity's rainbow_: "there never was a dr. jamf," opines world-renowned analyst mickey wuxtry-wuxtry--"jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what [slothrop] felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he was in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's, death." (861) by the end of _ratner's star_, billy twillig feels "there was something between himself and the idea of himself . . . and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence" (rs, 361). is death, then, the elusive agency at the heart of both pynchon and delillo's paranoid plots? after all, a paranoid's literal reading of revelation--as in the revelation of agency--would necessarily dictate that it be followed inevitably by the completion of apocalypse, i.e., annihilation. and here we might remember the ending of _gravity's rainbow_, with the tip of the rocket suspended above our heads and the words, "all together now" uniting us in the paranoid's penultimate embrace. but in _ratner's star_, delillo again raises the stakes of this near moment of revelation: for, while the imminent apocalypse in _gravity's rainbow_ is global, the imminent apocalypse of _ratner's star_ is "literally" universal. [21] _ratner's star_ posits something in space called a "mohole," where all the recognized laws of physics cease to apply. "'if i had to put what a mohole is into words' (asks the reporter, jean, who is chronicling the development of logicon)'what would i say?' 'you'd have a problem,' mainwaring said" (365). by the end of the novel, the earth seems to be in just such a place, to be "mohole intense," as it is cast into darkness by an "unscheduled" solar eclipse. though the gathered scientists predict that life in a mohole will be radically different, they have no idea how to explain or describe the difference: "i don't feel any different," softly said. "rob, we don't know. that's it. we don't know what it means. this is space-time sylphed. we're dealing with moholean relativity here. possibly dimensions more numerous than we've ever before imagined" (410). thus delillo gives pynchon's formula of dispersed and uncertain agency a boost by moving his imminent apocalypse into an area of potentially absolute dispersal and infinite uncertainty. perhaps at the conclusion of _ratner's star_ we are on the verge of a literal apocalypse; that is, an apocalypse of literality; and, potentially, the genesis of an entirely "figural" universe where there is absolutely no consistent, predictable relationship between one experience and the next, between any word and any thing, between cause and effect. at the very least, such a universe would mean, in ambassador at large bremer's words, the end of "respect for individual life and the rule of law"; i.e., the final and complete triumph of terrorism. [22] so perhaps slothrop's disappearing act could well be considered a maneuver intended to outflank this revelation of universal uncertainty and thus omnipresent terrorism: a countering of the "reign of terror" engendered by the dispersal of agency by mirroring it and becoming the dispersed *subject*. and this dispersal of the subject is also found in _ratner's star_--but again, with a twist. while slothrop disperses into the narrative, still the narrating voice of _gravity's rainbow_ remains relatively coherent. however, in _ratner's star_, while billy twillig retains his coherence as a character, what had been the third person omniscient narrating voice of the novel essentially disperses into the *characters*, moving in the same sentence between locales, even between thoughts: softly stopped reading here, thinking i am old, i will die, no one cares, her upper body slumped forward on the desk and what an implausible object it is, she thought . . . the photoelectric command at the end of bolin's hand, thinking i am old . . . wu's middle ear conveying vibrations inward . . . the implausibility of my parts, she thought. . . . (425) in this final section of the novel, sentences intrude on one another like filaments of conversations overheard on car phones, as if the very atmosphere of the novel were filled with detached segments of dialogue drifting about, looking for a conversation to link up with. thus it is the "voice" of _ratner's star_ which disperses, and which anticipates and evades the imminent revelation that its own end implies but does not quite reach. [23] delillo particularly seems interested in the link between death as the final paranoid revelation and the act of authoring itself. one of the entries quoted from oswald's diary in _libra_ expresses oswald's greatest longing, which is to cease being oswald the individual and to merge into a spectral identity called "the struggle": "happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one's own personal world, and the world in general" (quoted in lentricchia, "postmodern critique," 197). lentricchia sees in oswald's banal desire something other than merely one soldier of the revolution wishing to become one with the army of the revolution. rather, he suggests that oswald wishes to exchange places with win everett (the former cia agent who is "plotting" kennedy's fake assassination), to become the author of the plot in which he is only a character--or perhaps to become an author, period: "oswald, in his desire for a perfectly distilled, scripted self--propelled by itself as its own novelist/prime mover--is a figure of the assassin as writer, a man isolated by his passion, room-bound, a plot schemer" ("postmodern critique," 209). lentricchia suggests that in his feelings of impotence, victimhood, and insubstantiality oswald is the perfect representation of the spectral and manipulated postmodern subject: "self-constructed, constantly revised, oswald's narrative is a search for the very thing--a well-motivate, shapely existence--whose absence is a mark of the negative libran . . . oswald's patched voice produces the presiding tone of the postmodern absence of substantial and autonomous self-hood" (lentricchia, "postmodern critique," 209). [24] and delillo's most recent novel _mao ii_ centers on another "room-bound" plot schemer, a writer whose infrequent books are considered vastly intricate and dauntingly knowledgeable (which is of course also reminiscent of pynchon). the writer's name is william gray--a fine name for blending into the background.^4^ gray is a recluse, in the style of j. d. salinger and thomas pynchon. in the novel, gray has become something of a cultural "trope," whose usefulness to his culture resides in the very insubstantiality of his celebrity. however, gray feels his best work is behind him; or rather, that the best role of the author in society is behind him, and that authors as enactors of literature no longer have any effect on society. "years ago i used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. they make raids on human consciousness" (mao ii, 87). yet the "plot" gray eventually becomes involved with is one authored by terrorists, not novelists; a plot which leads him to the realization of what seems to be his ultimate desire, which is not so much a merging into the struggle, as oswald wanted, but a disappearing altogether into an anonymous death. there is the suggestion that gray trumps the terrorist abu rashid's plans for him by dying before he can be victimized, by making his sacrifice his own statement rather than allowing it to be shaped to rashid's purposes. but of course this is a statement no one reads, which we can think of either as an act of supreme idealization. [25] or supreme futility. _mao ii_ hardly endorses gray's self-willed abdication of self, his "devout" wish "to be forgotten," as any sort of positive solution to the problem of postmodern terrorism and paranoia. for one thing, gray's anonymous death does not end the novel; we see the various characters adjusting to gray's disappearance, using it, shaping his absence to their own ends: his friend scott settles into gray's house, becoming a simulacrum of the absent author; the photographer brita who sought to "reproduce" gray shifts her aim easily to the terrorist instead, in a move both opportunistic and smoothly adaptive (and one which models the very sort of symbiotic interdependence farnen suggests between those who "write" violence into the text of everyday life and those who disseminate it). gray's dispersal leaves only a vacuum which others rush in to fill, without giving a second thought to the "message" intended by his disappearance. thus the novel poses a subtle, even tragic question: what are the limits of dispersed subjecthood? if one seeks to evade the terror of random violence by blending into the background and denying the terrorist--whether individual or universe--a coherent, identifiable site of violence, what is sacrificed? to what extent is gray's preemptive vanishing a death not only of potential victimhood, but also of personal identity, of responsibility, and thus of legacy? how thoroughly can the author disown author-ity before also surrendering integrity; the ability, in the words of _gravity's rainbow_, to appear as any sort of "integral creature"? [26] lentricchia suggests that, in the traditional american novel, the author provides a stable point of reference from which the reader can take society's "critical measure," that the reader can find relative detachment "within the value of the 'omniscient' author who displays the workings of the dynamic but is not himself subject to them. the author, then, is a transcendent figure, someone the reader is implicitly asked to identify with . . . that constantly throws us forward into some other, some imagined, existence" ("postmodern critique," 210). lentricchia goes on to say that this "exit" is "sealed off" in _libra_. johnston makes essentially the same observation about _ratner's star_, which he sees as refusing to grant authority to any univocal narrator or point of view: "[_ratner's star_] refuses to privilege any single 'authoritative' version or to subordinate its varied stories and discourses to a higher or more englobing authorial narrative discourse, which would amount to yielding to precisely those powers and functions that it wants to lay bare. instead, it inscribes an uncertainty and indeterminacy in its own narrative structure, and plays with how we might know certain connections between events" ("post-cinematic fiction," 91). i would point again to the novel's last section, when what has previously been a coherent and recognizable narrating voice disperses into the "text." thus _ratner's star_ robs the reader of the comfort of any transcendental authorial figure who might otherwise serve to "make sense" of the random violence of decontextualized language; who might, that is, provide relief from the terrorism of meaninglessness. and this absence further denies the reader any detached platform from which he/she might, with impunity, take his/her society's "critical measure." thus, in the absence of the narrator *and* author, the reader is forced to construct some central embodying principle to grant overall context to the otherwise terrifying uncertainty of the novel; to build upon an interpretive principle which is secretive, elusive, coded, with a potentially totalizing or "universal" agenda and capable of explaining vast and obscure connections. . . . in other words, the reader must write a plot. he/she must actively engage the terrorism of meaninglessness which seeks to overwhelm the novel; to assert, that is, his/her individual strategies of sense-making. [27] however ambiguous the endings of delillo's novels, there is almost always at least one character who "models" this sort of adaptive strategy for the reader: one thinks of pammy in _players_, moving away from the violent ennui of her husband-become-terrorist toward an alternative she can't quite articulate; or the final image in _ratner's star_, which is not the ascendancy of the dispersed voice of the narrator (as in _gravity's rainbow_), but rather the frail and oddly exuberant image of billy twillig--who has spent the last half of the novel almost paralyzed with terror--exuberantly pedaling a tricycle into the "reproductive dust of existence" (120). while delillo's representation of terrorism in novels like _ratner's star_ and _mao ii_ seems even more universal, insidious and hegemonic than pynchon's in _gravity's rainbow_, his work finally does not seem to completely accept pynchon's solution, i.e., that we abandon the field to the ablest postmodern paranoids. in fact, i would argue that delillo's characters often embrace the plots which surround them, which perhaps construct them, and work--against all reasonable odds--to adapt to such a statement of existence so that they might in turn alter the statements of that existence. they seek some alternate way of existing within a world admittedly filled with random violence and meaningless communication, to resist both the role of surveilled and terrorized subject *and* paranoid, dispersed specter. though there is certainly an overlay of despair and futility in delillo's work, there often seems too an indefatigable energy, a belief just as strong that the production of plots we call novels might not be completely futile or always already culpable. delillo himself has expressed a willingness to embrace rather than resist what other writers see as the terrorism of technology and technological modes of existence in postmodern society: "science in general has given us a new language to draw from. some writers shrink from this. . . . to me, science is a source of new names. . . . rilke said we had to rename the world. renaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth" (leclair, "interview" 84). [28] much of delillo's work, especially _ratner's star_, points toward a strategy of adaptation and rebirth particularly of our sense of individual identity and responsibility as, perhaps, the only counter to becoming the dispersed and irresponsible postmodern specters. but his work also recognizes that such a rebirth of our sense of self and community involves a considerable struggle; a struggle jacques derrida seems to have had in mind when, writing about the importance of a new formation of european cultural identity in response to terrorism--whether it be religious, political, or ethnic--he calls for a postmodern subject which is informed by rather than frightened of our increasing and inescapable connectedness; a cultural identity "constituted in responsibility" shaped by, in a quite traditional way, the anticipation of one's cultural legacy. "for perhaps responsibility consists in making of the name recalled, of the memory of the name, of the idiomatic limit, a chance, that is, an opening of identity to its very future" (derrida, 35). perhaps such an interpretation reads delillo (and derrida) as more neo-existentialists than postmodernists; perhaps it even suggests that delillo's work needs to be re-examined for its links to modernism, even romanticism, in its representation of the theoretically obsolete individual as the only viable site of resistance to the ubiquitous terror of postmodern life. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes 1. see, for instance, emile benveniste's _problems in general linguistics_ (1971); fredric jameson's _postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_ (1992); and jean baudrillard's _in the shadow of the silent majorities, or the end of the social_ (1983). 2. farnen also has a second and more interesting point to make, which is that the portrayal of terrorism in the media has created a *false* trope. he quotes at length statistics which show that, especially in the last five years, terrorists acts have become so rare that "[i]n the united states, a person is more likely to die as a victim of an asthma attack than as a victim of a terrorist attack" (101). 3. see john johnston's discussion of the heavy use of cinema in the works of both pynchon and delillo in "post cinematic fiction: film in the novels of pynchon, mcelroy, and delillo," where he suggests that "the interest in cinema revealed in these novels seems to respond to a sense of the cinema as an apparatus for producing and disseminating images which both construct and control a new kind of subject." a subject, i would add, which is a product not of the accumulated content of interrelated texts, but rather the transient acontextual moment of intersecting tropes. 4. in fact, it is rumored that bill gray is the name don delillo often used when traveling incognito. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited aaron, daniel. "how to read don delillo." _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke university press, 1991. 67-81. delillo, don. _ratner's star_. new york: vintage books, 1980 (1976). ---. _players_. new york: vintage books, 1977. ---. _running dog_. new york : vintage books, 1978. ---. _the names_. new york: vintage books, 1982. ---. _white noise_. new york: penguin books, 1985. ---. _libra_. new york: penguin books, 1989. ---. _mao ii_. new york: penguin books, 1991. derrida, jacques. _the other heading: reflections on today's europe_. tr. pascale-anne brault & michael b. naas. bloomington: indiana university press, 1992. dowling, ralph e. "victimage and mortification: terrorism and its coverage in the media." _terrorism_ 12-1, (1989): 47-59. farnen, russell f. "terrorism and the mass media: a systemic analysis of a symbiotic process." _terrorism_ 13-2, (1990): 99-123. harris, robert r. "a talk with don delillo." _new york times book review_, 10 oct. 1982: f26. johnston, john. "generic difficulties in the novels of don delillo." _critique_ 30-4, (1989): 261-275. johnston, john. "post-cinematic fiction: film in the novels of pynchon, mcelroy, and delillo." _new orleans review_ 17-2, (1990): 90-97. leclair, tom. _in the loop: don delillo and the systems novel_. chicago: u. of illinois press, 1987. leclair, tom. "interview with don delillo." _anything can happen: interviews with contemporary american novelists_. ed. tom leclair and larry mccaffery. urbana: univ. of illinois press, 1983. 79-90. leclair, tom. "post-modern mastery." _representation and performance in postmodern fiction_. ed. maurice couturier. nice: delta press, 1983. 99-111. lentricchia, frank. "libra as postmodern critque." _introducing don delillo_. durham: duke university press, 1991. 193-215. mcclure, john a. "postmodern romance: don delillo and the age of conspiracy." _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke university press, 1991. 99-115. price, andrew jude. "the entropic imagination in 20th century american fiction: a case for don delillo." dissertation abstracts, '88 nov 49-5, 1143a. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1976. silverman, kaja. _the subject of semiotics_. new york: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------unsworth, 'editor's introduction', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-unsworth-editors.txt editor's introduction by john unsworth copyright (c) 1994 by john unsworth, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of us copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher. [1] this journal does not usually run editor's introductions, but with this issue it enters a new phase of its existence, and that new phase deserves some comment. for more than three years, _postmodern culture_ has been publishing peer-reviewed critical and creative work in a text-only format that accommodates electronic mail: we will continue to publish in that format, but beginning with this january, 1994 issue, we will also publish each new issue (and provide all back issues) through the world-wide web. regular subscribers of the journal will also note that this is the first issue ever to be published late: unfortunately, producing two versions of each file and setting up templates for article and issue design proved more time-consuming than anticipated. that it came out at all is due in large part to the efforts of the guest editors, scott allen for the delillo cluster and tan lin for the poetry cluster--and no less to jim english, the review editor, and the editorial staff, jon beasley, chris barrett, amy sexton, and jason haynes. what's the web? [2] the world-wide web may already be familiar to some of our readers, since its use is growing faster even than the internet itself, but many others will not yet have discovered it and may welcome some background information. the world-wide web is a client-server system for providing integrated text, graphics, sound, and video over the internet. the most important feature of the web, though, is its ability to link files to one another in a hypertextual structure: in fact, it has the capability of turning the entire internet into one hypertextual web. [3] the web has been around for a couple of years, making it older than gopher, the more well-known client-server program that currently underlies (for example) many campus wide information systems. at the moment, web traffic is growing much faster than gopher traffic--341,634% per annum vs. a mere 997% per annum, according to one estimate^1^--but its relatively slow start was due in part to the lack of an adequate client program. the national center for supercomputing applications at the university of illinois, champaign-urbana, has filled that void with mosaic, an excellent, free, mouse-oriented client for the web. mosaic clients are available for macintosh, windows, rs6000, dec, and sun computers (by anonymous ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu). the entry-level equipment for using these clients might be, for example, a 386 with a vga monitor and an ethernet card- equipment that costs under $1000 at this point. in fact, the nature of one's connection to the internet is more likely to be an obstacle than is the nature of one's equipment: since using the web involves transmitting sizable files (graphics, sound, etc.), the transmission speeds of an ethernet connection are required for satisfactory performance. it's possible to cruise the web over your modem, with an additional layer of slip software, but this is agonizingly slow and can be absurdly difficult to set up. [4] since june of 1993, the world-wide web has been growing at a rate faster than one new server a day. in june, there were 100 sites; in november, there were 270 sites; in december, there were 623 sites (according to matthew gray of mit, author of the www wanderer, a program that follows links from one server to another, to determine the extent of the web). these estimates are certain to be low, but they give an idea of the curve. at present, something on the order of a quarter of a million documents are provided over the web; the increase in use of web clients is on the order of 2000% a month. in other words, while it is not clear how well all this will scale up, it *is* clear that we'll find out the answer to that question very soon. the web has its shortcomings (for example, its hypertext pointers refer to literal fileand path-names, making it easy for someone on one system to set up a pointer to a file on another system that gets moved or renamed, resulting in a non-functioning link), but these shortcomings are minor in comparison to the great advance it provides in the general usability and perusability of the net. and since mosaic can also open ftp, telnet, wais, and gopher sessions, all with a mouse and icon-oriented graphical user interface, it functions as a kind of meta-menu for a panoply of networked information services. what does it mean for pmc? [5] explanations of the web tend to make the eyes glaze over; demonstrations tend to make the eyes light up. the first outing induces a kind of informational vertigo, especially when one considers the implications of this medium for networked scholarship and publishing. the network-as-hypermedia implies that the connections now gesturally performed in notes and citations can--will- become explicit and navigable links from document to document. it means that in the very near future, authors will propose and editors will review such links, and it means that readers can keep private marginalia on networked documents, as well. for _postmodern culture_, it means that we can begin publishing film clips, readings of poetry or fiction, musical performances, and hypertexts of all kinds. it also means that, as more and more of the material published in pmc incorporates non-text elements, the e-mail version of the journal will inevitably become less authoritative or complete. [6] we welcome comments on this new phase in the journal's existence, suggestions on the journal's hypermedia format and design, and submission of hypermedia texts. excellent information and extensive tutorials on the various techniques and requirements of the web are available under the help button on the mosaic clients (though you may find it impossible to get through to the beseiged hosts at uiuc.edu at certain times of day); information specific to pmc's implementation of the web's standards is available from the table of contents page for the january, 1994 issue. moreover, since mosaic allows you to view the underlying markup for any web page, it is easy to learn by example. [7] in closing, i should note that older offshoots and avatars of pmc have not been amputated in this new phase of our existence. pmc-talk continues its fitfully productive existence, and a thread from that discussion group is included in this issue. pmc-moo has moved from north carolina to virginia (hero.village.virginia.edu 7777) and has adopted email registration in the interest of discouraging irresponsible and unpleasant behavior (there was the mention of pmc-moo in _wired_, followed by a wave of rather juvenile net-tourists who came tramping through with little interest in postmodernism and many personality problems to work out...but they've moved on now, for the most part, to new encampments). we have a new gopher site (jefferson.village.virginia.edu), but the old ftp site remains (ftp.ncsu.edu), and the listserv archives continue as before. appropriately enough, the web version of the journal provides an integrated menu of all of these services and versions. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes 1. the internet index, revised 1/7/94, compiled by win treese (treese@crl.dec.com). watson, 'comrade gramsci's progeny', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-watson-comrade.txt comrade gramsci's progeny by tim watson columbia university tw22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by tim watson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: gramsci, antonio. _prison notebooks. volume 1_. ed. joseph buttigieg. trans. buttigieg and antonio callari. new york: columbia university press, 1992. harris, david. _from class struggle to the politics of pleasure: the effects of gramscianism on cultural studies_. new york: routledge, 1992. holub, renate. _antonio gramsci: beyond marxism and postmodernism_. new york: routledge, 1992. [1] no self-respecting piece of work on antonio gramsci can fail to mention his famous letter of march 19, 1927 to his sister-in-law tatiana schucht, in which he announces his desire to "accomplish something %fur ewig% [for eternity]" (_letters_ 79). if gramsci had been able to peer into the future and see the kind of work being carried out in his name in the anglo-american academy over sixty years later, one wonders whether he wouldn't have had second thoughts about that phrase. [2] although gramsci thought that cultural change tended to take place gradually rather than through "explosions" (_prison notebooks_ 129), it is hard to imagine what other word to use when surveying the proliferation of material around the figure of gramsci in the last few years. from so-called "radical democracy" to subaltern studies to cultural studies, gramsci's name is evoked, his writings are endlessly analyzed, his legacy is contested (see, for example, laclau and mouffe; golding; chatterjee; hall, _hard road_; grossberg, nelson and treichler). the sheer volume of work, and its engagement across a wide range of fields and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, are no doubt testimony to the enduring relevance of gramsci's insights; they also suggest, however, that there is now a gramsci industry--that within the academic market gramsci represents significant currency, and writers (and publishers) are cashing in. [3] given the institutional politics and economics governing the contemporary academy, these two observations (gramsci as theoretical model, gramsci as cultural capital) are inseparable; in this respect gramsci is no different from other leading (%dirigente%, to use gramsci's own terminology) theorists: derrida, foucault, habermas, and the rest. attempts to isolate and distill the essence of the "real" gramsci (that which transcends the brash commercialism of the academic marketplace) can never be innocent or disinterested. indeed, to dismiss the institutional economy within which one operates serves only to consolidate its regulatory mechanisms, its hegemony (so to speak). what follows is an attempt to address not the question "who or what is the real gramsci?" but rather the question "why and in what ways have gramsci's writings enabled and generated so much intellectual work, insightful and mediocre?" such a question is itself, of course, partly an effect of the gramsci industry. [4] the subtitle to renate holub's book, _antonio gramsci: beyond marxism and postmodernism_ (in the routledge "critics of the twentieth century" series), indicates some of the reasons why gramsci has so much political and cultural purchase in the contemporary academy. it also reveals some of the ideological choices involved in the business of reading gramsci: the book would undoubtedly not have made it this far if it had been called "antonio gramsci: dead sardinian communist militant," for instance. if we unpack some of the assumptions behind holub's title we will find that gramsci can be mobilized to the extent that he seems to offer political solutions to the predicament of postmodernism (figured as decentering, arbitrary, "merely" discursive), while at the same time appearing to surpass vulgar marxist economism and historicism. to put it crudely, he is sufficiently marxist to challenge postmodernism, and sufficiently postmodernist to combat marxism. shuttling between the two, the gramscian writer enjoys great flexibility and space for critique, innoculated against the "worst excesses" of both systems of thought; the question remains, however, whether, in this "interregnum," gramsci can be used in this way without "a great variety of morbid symptoms appear[ing]" (gramsci, _selections_ 276). gramsci and "us" [5] holub's book is another "introduction to gramsci," and as such, in an already crowded field, it has to differentiate itself and be seen to be offering something new and creative. thus, she proposes to study gramsci in the "context of literary criticism, and in the context of marxist aesthetics" (7). "until recently," she observes, "the gramscian critical community showed little interest in his literary critiques and his aesthetics" (4). in this way holub carves out a space for herself in the contest over "a text [the prison notebooks] held zealously captive by the knights of the gramscian grail" (38). these knights (who are not identified) have thus far insisted on "emphasiz[ing] his place in the history of western marxism, [and] examin[ing] his conceptual apparatus in the context of political and social theory" (20); holub prefers instead to build on the pioneering work of giuliano manacorda, who reads gramsci as "speaking of the literary conditions of political possibility, correcting the image of a political gramsci in favour of a gramsci whose literary, aesthetic and linguistic interests give shape and form to his political interests" (38). [6] i do not mean to imply that such a reading of gramsci is necessarily illegitimate; literary and culturalist readings of gramsci are possible because there is evidence for them in his writings. (to cite a passage which holub does not mention: "every new civilization, as such ... has always expressed itself in literary form before expressing itself in the life of the state. indeed its literary expression has been the means with which it has created the intellectual and moral conditions for its expression in the legislature and the state" [gramsci _cultural writings_, 117].) i am not interested in "correcting" the image of gramsci which holub propagates--even if one may question why, if "primarily he was a militant, [and] a critical and pragmatic one, to boot" (39)--she seems so irritated by those who choose to engage with gramsci on that terrain. my concern here, rather, is how gramsci works to legitimate a political project in holub's text, and the way in which, as the book progresses, the figure of gramsci comes to be evacuated of almost all substance, so that "gramsci" becomes a kind of cipher, merely a vehicle for addressing a contemporary crisis. [7] if holub had stuck to the analysis of gramsci in relation to frankfurt school critical theory, benjamin, lukacs, and bloch which makes up the first half of the book, things might have been fine. comparing gramsci's and these various theorists' responses to modernity--rationalization, technologization, the culture industry--is an important task, and one which has for the most part not been undertaken up to now. holub does indeed begin to demonstrate "the ways in which gramsci's work displays homologies with many pivotal twentieth-century ways of theorizing" (9).^1^ [8] but one gets the impression, reading _antonio gramsci: beyond marxism and postmodernism_, that the teleology of the book dictates that these discussions are entered into primarily as a pretext to get us into the present. gramsci as modernist is interesting precisely to the extent that he can also be characterized as a postmodernist %avant la lettre%, as it were: "to deal with gramsci, loosely, in the context of frankfurt school critical theory, in the context of modernism, is apposite. it helps to examine the contours of gramsci's non-modernism as well, the ways in which he goes beyond modernism, and the possible applicability of some of his terms for a postmodern agenda" (14). [9] thus there are multiple references to gramsci's "anticipatory sensibility to very complex cultural and social transformations" (10), or to the way in which "he begins to problematize, long before edward said and contemporary theories of progressive anthropology, the predominant eurocentricity in disciplines and knowledge" (15). in his emphasis on "the materiality of language" gramsci "surpasses the modernism of the frankfurt school and aligns himself with or anticipates theoretical concerns which should become prominent in the second half of the twentieth century" (116); gramsci's linguistic theory represents "an advance over volosinov's" because it "anticipates a theoretical model" which can deal with "gender, race and geography rather than merely with class" (140). [10] the problem for holub, however, is that these claims for gramsci's predictive capacity become increasingly removed from gramsci's writings themselves--unsurprisingly, perhaps, given their rootedness in 1920s and 30s italian political culture. hence the tortuous prose in the following passage, in which the reader is called on precisely to "reconstruct" gramsci's work in order to bring him up to date: "there are . . . some elements in his reading of dante that lend themselves, due to their semiological and structuralist components, to reconstructing a version of gramsci's theory of the subject which brings him into the vicinity of other major twentieth century critics [here she mentions merleau-ponty, volosinov, barthes]" (119). at a certain point, holub ceases to rely on the substance of gramsci's thought almost entirely, turning him into a methodological rather than a political model: what we, living in a western nation-state at the end of the twentieth century, can adopt from gramsci, i think, is not so much the results of his analysis, culminating in his particular theory of the intellectual. what we can examine are his ways of viewing and doing analysis, and amend or transform them for the political needs of our time. (171) [11] "we" westerners emerge as a collectivity at this moment in the book, in contrast to the people of "central and south america," whose "socio-political and economic constellations . . . are at this point to some extent not dissimilar to those of italy in the first few decades of this century," and who thus can potentially make use of the substance of gramsci's work (171). we do theory, they do politics.^2^ the "nonwestern world" remains undifferentiated and apparently unknowable for holub (even the reference to latin america has no specificity); its role is to provide the grounds for auto-critique, and thus for identity, for "us" (the first person plural is insistently present in the final pages of holub's text): "our resistance to power, our critical thinking, must take into account our relation, as western intellectuals, to the non-western developing world, our position, that is, as producers and disseminators of knowledge, and meaning" (182). [12] it is undoubtedly the case that western intellectuals need to be more attentive to their positionality and privilege vis-a-vis the third world, and it is perhaps appropriate that a reading of gramsci should stimulate such reflections, given his emphasis on uneven development, both within the european nation-state and through the operations of imperialism. the suspicion remains, however, that even as the locus of resistance shifts to the periphery, the western intellectual retains for himself or herself the role of understanding, judging and representing that resistance. perhaps it is proper for us, as critical intellectuals and arbiters of hope, and stationed in the intellectual power apparatuses of the west, to seek out these impulses for democratic change, to receive the messages that meet us from these [`developing'] worlds, and translate them, by way of our theoretical tools, for ours. (189-90) [13] such a position cannot avoid producing the "developing world" as raw material for the consolidation of "our" western subjectivity; or, as holub herself puts it, "the necessity of the `inferior other' in the structuration of identity" (15). thus gramsci, stretched almost to the vanishing point by the end of this book, can be mobilized to legitimate the continuation of intellectual and political work in the western academy, at a time when it is perceived to be under threat. holub's intervention, via the figure of gramsci, can be read as an attempt to shore up the precarious but nonetheless powerful position of western intellectuals "as mediators between the needs and desires of developing cultures, and the mandarins of our establishments" (189). gramsci and cultural studies [14] if such a reading of holub's work seems uncharitable, then i must have been infected by the deep cynicism underlying david harris's survey of british cultural studies, _from class struggle to the politics of pleasure: the effects of gramscianism on cultural studies_. these effects, according to harris, have been mostly deleterious; the energy of the "early rebellion" of british gramscians has been "institutionalised and acedemicised" since then, so that the impetus for most current work in the field comes from the need to "found a research programme or school or centre, to engage in a little academic politics" (15). thus, while stuart hall (or, rather, "the ubiquitous stuart hall" [xv]) argues that the work of the birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) demonstrated "heterodoxy and openness," harris contends that "beneath this pluralism lies a deeper conformity to a continuing project--the development and defence of gramscianism" (7), and that this tendency is linked to the academic context of the production of these works: briefly, it is conventional in academic writing to conduct a debate with rivals before allowing the chosen theorist to emerge as the person most likely to synthesise the offerings, make sense of the debates, or offer some suitably pleasurable resolution and closure. this underlying narrative structure . . . might be called `academic realism.' (8) [15] harris promises to share with us readers the "tricks of the trade" in this academic game (2), as he demonstrates to us the unity and continuity underlying "the specific twists and turns of the debates" within british cultural studies (8). if this is a survey work, intended primarily as a teaching tool ("i am especially interested in the student audience" [3]), then it is at least up front about its non-neutrality in the face of its subject matter. there is little doubt in harris's mind that in the trajectory charted by his title, the british gramscians have taken part in a "demoralised flight from serious politics" (190) into the coziness of academic tenure and complacency. [16] such cynicism is by no means entirely misplaced- although one might wonder at its motivation; given the hegemony currently enjoyed by "british cultural studies," there is no doubt notoriety to be gained by attacking it. cccs's work in the seventies and early eighties did indeed demonstrate "the astonishing tendency for the figure of gramsci to keep coming to the fore, as a leading theorist and guide, as a source of specific pieces or concepts which guide analysis, or less specifically as a kind of model of good practice, able always to `teach a lesson', keep the faith, and see off rivals" (7-8). later on, what harris calls "gramscianism" certainly did seem to offer, as i suggested above, "a kind of `middle ground' between fully floating discursive politics and more orthodox class politics" (45). or, as the ubiquitous stuart hall put it, in the discussion period following his paper "the toad in the garden": "gramsci is where i stopped in the headlong rush into structuralism and theoreticism. at a certain point i stumbled over gramsci, and i said, `here and no further!'" (hall "discussion," 69).^3^ [17] but while academic and institutional pressures are undoubtedly a major factor in the reproduction and dissemination of any theoretical or political movement, such a movement is never reducible to those pressures. at times, harris's book ceases to be a sustained critique of a critical tradition, and drifts into academic point-scoring. harris focuses on the ways in which gramsci has served as a bulwark against threatening theoretical tendencies; what he fails to acknowledge is that such defensiveness does not preclude (indeed it may have actually facilitated) the production of important intellectual work. as an example, let me focus briefly on harris's reading of _policing the crisis_ (96-104). [18] harris recognizes the complexity and openness of the now classic 1978 study of the ways in which "moral panics" about crime serve to consolidate hegemonic state power: "there seems to be no stage-managed `discovery' here [in _policing_], at least, no premature reduction of the `complex unity' to some easy slogan about hegemony" (102). however, this very complexity constitutes a problem for harris: "the piece can look like a conventionally `balanced' academic piece, riddled with cautious qualifications and reservations" (102).^4^ some readers may recognize a trick of the trade in operation here in harris's text, viz. "a common academic desire to want it both ways" (102). harris is suspicious of the authors of _policing_ when they claim to have "just moved, under the pressure of their own argument, from one level of analysis to the other as their discoveries unfolded," arguing instead that "the authors had known for some while where they were going" (103); so does this mean that there is a stage-managed discovery after all? [19] while it is true that harris could hardly be expected to "do justice" to a densely argued and expansive 400-page book in a short summary, nevertheless i think that harris is enacting his own kind of closure when he argues that, of the possible audiences for _policing the crisis_, "it seems that `academics' have received the most attention: all those asides and interventions in debates between different authors (and all those careful qualifications and reservations) are for them" (98). this is too easy a dismissal of a complex text--the mobilization of the idea of "academic realism," if pushed far enough, can cease to be a revealing insight into the strategies which produce a discursive formation, and can become instead an alibi for failing to engage with the substance of that discourse. [20] we should be thankful to harris for sharing his inside knowledge of the constraints and conventions of "academic realism," not least because it will allow his student audience to decode his own strategies. although "gramscianism" makes some sense as a concept in the context of british cultural studies through the mid-eighties, as the field has become more dispersed and contested (and as the prominence of gramsci himself as a theorist has waned--the only field in which that could be said to be happening- "largely . . . gramsci now exists as a kind of source for handy and stylish quotes, phrases or metaphors" [191]), it makes less and less sense to talk of "gramscianism." the question arises, then, to what extent the term functions primarily within the economy of harris's own text in order to hold his academic realist narrative together, particularly when it can encompass such writers as "[robert] hewison [who] is not a gramscian or a semiotician, in so far as it is possible to tell from his books, but . . . is clearly an informed critic, and, with the aid of a few specific concepts and a parachute for them, . . . could become a full gramscian should he so desire" (158). the wit and acerbity here will doubtless endear harris to his student audience, but in the end one fears that it will encourage the dismissal of what, after all, is "one of the few critical traditions british academic life possesses" (6). gramsci's corpus [21] when it comes to writing about gramsci, the academic realism which harris anatomizes is almost always supplemented with a dose of tragic melodrama. gramsci's premature death in the quisisana clinic in rome in 1937, when he was finally freed from his prison sentence but physically incapable of leaving the prison hospital; his heroic struggle to defy the words of the chief prosecutor at his trial--"we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years"--by writing his prison notebooks, battling ill health and the inevitable lack of resources while incarcerated: among the ranks of marxist martyrs only rosa luxemburg comes close to antonio gramsci. [22] gramsci's biography, however, does not merely add that all-important romantic frisson to an otherwise dry academic discourse. his early death means that the body of his later work--the prison notebooks--remains unfinished, sketchy, provisional, and must therefore be actively reconstructed in the process of reading. the usual give and take of scholarly interpretation becomes, in the context of gramsci studies, an unusually intense tussle over the gramsci corpus. gramsci died intestate, as it were; his legacy--the body of his writings--has been contested, sometimes bitterly, ever since. [23] the publication, finally, of a definitive english translation of the full text of the prison notebooks will not lay this conflict to rest. in the introduction to the first volume of what will eventually be a five or six volume edition of gramsci's prison writings, the editor, joseph buttigieg, himself acknowledges this fact: the gramscian editor, scholar, or commentator, then, feels compelled . . . to stitch [the pieces of gramsci's text] together. sometimes this operation of reconstruction is carried out responsibly, that is, with a critical awareness of its limitations. at other times, however, this operation is carried out with the misguided belief that one can actually reconstruct not just gramsci's thought but gramsci himself. . . . it would be futile to think that one can put an end to this game. even the most conscientiously accurate and complete reproduction of gramsci's manuscript will not settle the polemics, or still the urge to reconstruct the `true' gramsci." (62-63) however, english-speaking readers will now have a much better grasp of the sheer volume of material which must be sifted through in order to produce the nuggets of gramscian gold with which we are all so familiar: hegemony, state and civil society, war of maneuver and war of position, passive revolution, the organic intellectual. [24] this new translation is based on the standard italian edition of the _quaderni del carcere_ edited by valentino gerratana, except that the meticulously detailed textual apparatus appears in the same volume as the relevant text, rather than being reserved for a separate, final volume. a pedant would bemoan a number of typos and other proofreading errors which sit badly with the scholarliness of the enterprise; nevertheless, readers can only be grateful to buttigieg and columbia university press (who are also publishing a complete english edition of gramsci's prison letters) for their endeavors. [25] the buttigieg edition will not supplant the previous translated selections from gramsci's prison writings (_selections_, _cultural writings_), if only because its price and bulk will preclude its use as a teaching text for the most part. however, buttigieg is right to say that its appeal will not be limited "only to the most scrupulous readers and assiduous researchers" (xix). even a cursory reading of the "recondite materials" (xix) of gramsci's first two notebooks (translated in this volume) will provide the necessary innoculation against the worst excesses of the gramsci industry: both the tendency to smooth out gramsci's writings in the search for a coherent philosophy, and the tendency to treat gramsci's text as so disjunctive as to be open to almost any interpretation. [26] the publication of this new translation would not have been possible without the support of a large italian bank (whose generosity makes a pointed contrast with the "modest" assistance buttigieg received from the neh [xxi]). but the whole project is also clearly an effect of the gramsci industry. a positive effect, and one for which we can be grateful--even if it means another decade of dubious "gramscianisms" and another generation of scholars claiming to be gramsci's postmodern heirs. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ both holub and harris make the point that theorists who write about gramsci, or use his work, have consistently foreclosed or even dismissed critical theory (see harris 15-16). although i do not have the space to do more than gesture at a possible new direction here, i think a fruitful place to start might be a discussion of the issues raised by the striking similarity in imagery of gramsci's reference to italian poet alfieri having his servants tie him to his chair (so that he would have the self-discipline to work [_prison notebooks_ 236]), and adorno and horkheimer's reference to odysseus having himself tied to the mast (so that he might have pleasure from the sirens' song) while stopping the ears of his sailors, so that they could continue to labor for him (adorno and horkheimer 58-60). ^2^ although a discussion of laclau and mouffe is beyond the scope of this paper, i would contend that a structurally similar argument fatally disables _hegemony and socialist strategy_. in the section "equivalence and difference," they locate the logic of equivalence in the third world, where "imperialist exploitation and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of domination" produce "the division of the political space into [only] two fields" (131); they call this the realm of the "popular," which they set against the "democratic," associated with "advanced industrial societies" characterized by complexity and the logic of difference (130). thus a surreptitious hierarchical account emerges, in which the third world is parasitic on the west, the site of "hegemony": "it is clear that the fundamental concept is that of `democratic struggle,' and that popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures" (137). ^3^ on stuart hall's use of gramsci, in the context of gramsci's reception in britain more generally, see david forgacs, "gramsci and marxism in britain," _new left review_ 176 (julyaugust 1989): 83-84. ^4^ the authors themselves, by contrast, worry in their introduction that "academics will find it [_policing_] too unbalanced, too committed" (_policing_ ix). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited adorno, theodor w. and max horkheimer. _dialectic of enlightenment_. trans. john cumming. new york: continuum, 1991. chatterjee, partha. _nationalist thought and the colonial world: a derivative discourse?_. london: zed, 1985. golding, sue. _gramsci's democratic theory: contributions to a post-liberal democracy_. toronto: u of toronto p, 1992. gramsci, antonio. _selections from the prison notebooks_. ed. & trans. quintin hoare and geoffrey nowell smith. new york: international publishers, 1971. gramsci, antonio. _selections from cultural writings_. ed. david forgacs and geoffrey nowell smith, trans. william beolhower. cambridge, mass.: harvard up, 1985. gramsci, antonio. _letters from prison_. ed. & trans. lynne lawner. new york: noonday, 1989. grossberg, lawrence, cary nelson, paula treichler, eds. _cultural studies_. london and new york: routledge, 1992. hall, stuart. _the hard road to renewal: thatcherism and the crisis of the left_. london and new york: verso, 1988. hall, stuart. "discussion: the toad in the garden: thatcherism among the theorists." _marxism and the interpretation of culture_. ed. cary nelson and lawrence grossberg. basingstoke: macmillan, 1988. hall, stuart, chas critcher, tony jefferson, john clarke, brian roberts. _policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order_. basingstoke: macmillan, 1978 laclau, ernesto and chantal mouffe. _hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics_. london and new york: verso, 1985. � mccaffery, 'remarks, notes, introduction and other guest-editorial texts prefacing _postmodern culture_'s special fiction issue devoted to postmodern fiction', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-mccaffery-remarks.txt remarks, notes, introduction and other guest-editorial texts prefacing _postmodern culture_'s special fiction issue devoted to postmodern fiction by larry mccaffery department of english san diego state university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) copyright (c) 1992 by larry mccaffery, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. dedication: for ronald sukenick and william t. vollmann the final measurement: guest-editor's remarks prefacing _postmodern culture_'s special fiction issue devoted to postmodern fiction i. *epigraphs* i. 1 was there no end to anything? when would he reach the final measurement? william t. vollmann, _fathers and crows_ i. 2 as writers--& everyone inscribes in the sense i mean here-we can try to intensify our relationships by considering how they work; are we putting each other to sleep or waking each other up; and what do we awake to? does our writing stun or sting? we can try to bring our relationship with readers to fruition that the site of reading becomes a fact of value --charles bernstein, _artifice of absorption_ i. 3 "you see what's happening here you take a few things that interest you and you begin to make connections. the connections are the important thing they don't exist before you make this. this is the endless short story." --ronald sukenick, _the endless short story_ ii. *editor's preview of contents for the issue:* i. epigraphs: i. 1. from william t. vollmann i. 2. from charles bernstein i. 3. from ronald sukenick ii. editor's preview iii. editor's prefatory note iv. this is not the introduction: games that fiction anthology editors play--towards a consideration of the aesthetic conventions of the fiction anthology as a literary genre. iv. 1 ". . . unusual formal principles and aesthetic features . . ."? ". . . despite the inherent fascination involved . . ."? iv. 2 list of fiction anthology categories and potentially useful postmodern applications iv. 3 additional bonus for critics developing a postmodern aesthetics of the fiction anthology who are also interested in postmodern music. iv. 4 establishing the process of collaborative interactions between anthology's editorial introduction and fiction selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity; summary of the absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from following out-dated approaches to such introductions; sequential listing of the topics resulting from adhering to these conventions. iv. 5 postmodern textual practices and the editorial introduction v. introduction: cancelled (see editor's apology) v. 1 fiction selections coded for postmodernist features appendix a: kathy acker introductory comments v. 2 contributors' notes vi. appendices b, c, d, e, f. fiction selections in the issue: kathy acker, "obsession" robert coover, "title sequence for the adventures of lucky pierre" ricardo cruz, "five days of bleeding" rikki ducornet, "from _birdland_" rob hardin, "dressed to kill yourself" annemarie kemeny, "attempts on life" marc laidlaw, "great breakthroughs in darkness (being, early entries from the secret encyclopedia of photography") william t. vollmann, "incarnations of the murderer" *iii. editor's prefatory note:* waist deep in the big muddy i began writing some of the following material in late may and early june 1992, just before i departed san diego for a nine-week stay in tokyo to begin work on a project ("postmodernism in japan") funded by an n.e.h. summer research fellowship. although traces of that initial draft remain embedded in the current version (mostly in part v), what readers now have before them differs so significantly in content and approach from my earlier drafts that for all practical purposes the two are completely different texts. during that may-june period when i began to develop my editorial introduction, i had already accepted five pieces of fiction for the issue--this out of the total number of six or seven selections, agreed upon by myself and eyal amiran, _postmodern culture_'s co-editor, when i accepted his offer to guest-edit a focus of his and john unsworth's journal devoted to postmodern fiction. thus i began my editorial introduction assuming that i had only to make an additional one or two selections for the issue, insert a few extra remarks into the draft of my introduction regarding the relevance of the new material to the issue as a whole, contact the authors when i returned from tokyo on 8-31 to make certain they had sent eyal their selections on computer discs, and then my duties as guest editor would have been completed. when i departed for tokyo on 6-27 i recall feeling quite confident and optimistic that these duties would be discharged successfully, and the template i had developed for my introduction reflected these feelings. there were good reasons for this optimism. the material i already had in hand for the issue was strong, both individually and in the ways the works' stylistic and thematic concerns represented various key features associated with postmodernism (see v. 1 coded listing of selections). moreover there was also an interesting mixture of authors and works: a selection from one of the already-canonized authors from the 60s "boom period" of postmodernism (coover); work from two authors who had begun work in the 70s--kathy acker (now widely recognized as a central and controversial arrival on the postmodernist scene, and rikki ducornet, a writer whose works were now beginning to be recognized and praised); a piece by marc laidlaw, whose mid-80s novel, _dad's nuke_, was recognized within the genre of science fiction as a major cyberpunk novel, but whose overall literary accomplishments had been obscured or distorted by his association with genre writing; and one relatively anonymous young author (ricardo cruz) whose garish, surrealist depictions of urban ghetto life seemed to me to be the most original fiction about black life i'd seen since the early ishmael reed. the selections also included several different types of postmodernist innovations, ranging from coover's typically outrageous forays into myth, media, sex and death, to ducornet's delicately rendered, magical realist fables, whose lyricism often serves to highlight the "diabolism" of her "macabre fantasies," cruz's "rap fiction," and so on. i was also taking with me to tokyo several other promising works by authors i respected, as well as expecting to receive submission from several authors who hadn't yet replied to my original letters of inquiry or to _postmodern culture_'s call for fiction. during my stay in tokyo i periodically re-read the materials i had brought with me, as well as a few intriguing possibilities that were sent to me by eyal (incidentally, i had considerable editorial input from eyal at each step of this project's evolution); by the time of my return to san diego on 8-31, we had narrowed down our options to a few selections. eyal and i set a tentative date of september 12 by which to have made the final selections for the issue; this would give me the week of september 12-19 to complete my introduction, arrange for the discs to be sent to eyal, and generally handle the final details for the issue (the september 19 date was my own personal deadline for completing all the work on the issue, since i would be leaving then for boulder, colorado to take part in the novel of the americas conference being held during the week of 9-19 to 9-26). however, upon arriving back in san diego, ripples began to appear on editorial waters that had been up to now extraordinarily smooth. within a week, a real storm was brewing. the forces responsible for this were various, some relatively minor (there were problems getting discs from the authors) and some involving financial issues, miscommunications, dozens of phone calls that crossed back and forth across the u.s. like ping pong balls or pynchon yo-yos, and even the confusion of agents and publishers about how the new literary "space" of electronic, computer driven data should be defined or categorized.... [editor's note: i find it too painful from a personal standpoint to continue with this summary except to say to my readers that the labyrinthine series of darkly humorous events that unfolded from 9-5 until 9-19 were...beyond the pale.] *iv. this is not the introduction: games that fiction anthology editors play by--towards an aesthetics of the fiction anthology* like all other literary forms, anthologies are language games--structures of words with distinctive generic properties which arise due to a system of conventions and semiotic rules that govern its operations. as with the rules and systems of transformation in all games, those at work in anthologies not only set limits on what can (and cannot) occur, but also channel operations into certain pattern of recurrence. the principles underlying the anthology game are, of course, only vaguely sensed by readers (if at all) and even most anthology editors are themselves aware of them only intuitively. given the primacy afforded artistic "originality" in western aesthetics, it's not surprising that (to my knowledge) no one has ever given serious attention to studying the anthology as a literary form. not only is the "final product" of an anthology, as well as the editorial process involved in its creation, essentially collaborative in nature, but the different functions played by editor and contributor have encouraged people to see the roles as being essentially separate. the result is that most readers and critics have regarded anthologies less as literary forms in their own right and more as simply arbitrary structures that "contain" literary objects. without belaboring the point, and admitting the fact that having spent a lot of time and energy over the past several years putting together fiction anthologies devoted to various topics (see the contributors' notes), let me just suggest that now is the appropriate time for someone (thought the time is definitely not appropriate for _me_) to develop a serious discussion exploring the aesthetic of anthologies generally--and of the fiction anthology as a literary genre in particular. the timeliness of such an exposition results from the unusual formal and aesthetic features of fiction anthologies, the rich series of topics such an analysis would need to delve into, the ways that such a discussion can be linked to concepts operating in postmodern fiction and in poststructuralist and deconstructive critical theory--not to mention the fact that it hasn't occurred to anyone to develop such an essay, this despite the inherent fascination involved in developing such an essay. *iv. 1 " . . . unusual formal principles and aesthetic features . . . "? " . . . despite the inherent fascination involved . . ."?* indeed, consider the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation involved in working out a definition of the fiction anthology as a genre, working up a typology that best describes the different sub-categories and permutations that comprise the genre, the satisfaction of gradually beginning to recognize how much fun it will be for you to take this hitherto despised form--a form that in fact will not even be recognized as a distinctive literary genre until your essay bursts onto the academic scene--and then being able to show off your critical skills by applying a barrage of complex-and-trendy terms and implications drawn from recent critical theory, the secret satisfaction you'll derive throughout the process of developing your essay by anticipating the ways your peers' initial derision and bewilderment at your choice of topics will gradually be transformed, first to a begrudging respect, then to astonishment, and eventually to shame and embarrassment at having ever doubted you. consider the following (the categories that apply to this current anthology are indicated in *bold*): *iv. 2 listing of categories, *aspects of po m subcategories, other variables that aesthetic practices determine specific aspects of the and critical theory form and content found in any that can be used in individual anthology (incomplete)* developing a theory of the formal anthology's scope and eventual properties of length is left open to editor fiction anthologies or restricted to a maximum of (incomplete)* (100, 200, 300, 400 or more) pages, or limited to (3-5, *6 citation of the relevancy 8*, 8-10, 10-15, 20 or more) of such works as contributors _pale fire_ selections to include previously (nabokov), published fiction or _ficciones_ *restricted to unpublished* (borges), _if on a to include works by women or men or winter's night a *both* traveler_ (calvino) selections restricted to those death of the author written by authors of a imagination as plagiarism specific racial, sexual, or strategies of ethnic orientation *or not* appropriation, anthology to include *any* form of collaborations and fiction that fits the focus or intertextuality to include only specified genre fiction (sf, regency familiar categorical romance, detective, etc.) or oppositions between only work non-generic works or subjective/objective a mixture? "creative"/nonanthology's focus is based on creative denied. commonalities theme or valorization of aesthetic tendencies or on "creative" over non links with specific periods or creative writing *literary movements* questioned anthology to appear as a book or as endless play of a *special issue of a lit signifiers journal* which you are *guest bakhtin's heteroglossia editing* or regular editor of the changes in meaning to be published by a commercial that result from house or small press or moving a text from *university press* one context to audience whose reading tastes and another interests the anthology is denial of author as aimed for is mass market (male originator of or female or both), academic, discrete meaning *"serious" readers*, cult sampling as central po mo audience (many options) aesthetic editor is professional (with no, strategies of misreading some, a lot of) experience or and re-reading used *doing this on the side* to create contributors to be paid (no money, some money, major bucks) for foregrounding of the contribution process of creation, editor to be not paid or paid emphasis on the (small or *middling* or large contingencies and flat fee) *in* (royalties or personal choices in royalties plus an advance involved in which is small, medium large). aesthetic creations, the deadline for the editor to have the willingness to completed all aspects of his reveal that seeming role is (less than 6 months, "natural" or *6-12* months, 1 year or 2 "objective" patterns years, more than two years), and conclusions or no fixed deadline. result not from their relationship to any exterior state of truth or actual conditions but from aesthetic choices *iv. 3 additional bonus provided to critics interested in the postmodernization of contemporary music:* consider developing an extended discussion that suggests how the aesthetic issues you're describing for fiction anthologies are analogous to those found in the recent appearance of so many "cover" albums (and there are many categories of such "anthologies" of musical materials)--e.g., the coolies' _dig_, pussy galore's _exile on main street_, cicone youth's _the white album_, and the series of "cover" albums produced by hal wilner. since processes and products related to sampling are so central to rap and postmodern music generally, feel free to explore the implications of their use in terms of such concepts as intertextuality, originality, the effect of cut-and-paste methods on meaning, etc.. develop the analogy of anthology editors to rap master djs behind the board, mixing and cutting, using their intuition and audio memories to mix and match sounds, riffs and phrases in ways that open up new aesthetic and thematic aspects of prior materials, that communicate to knowledgeable audiences via reference and intertextuality. perhaps point out the more subtle point that the role of anthology editor would really be analogous to a dj only if the anthology being assembled contained only previously published fiction. if it included only new fiction, you'd need a slightly different analogy. be sure to note the sorts of interesting issues raised by the aesthetics underlying rap and fiction anthologies. for example, is "borrowing" unfamiliar materials "more creative" than sampling materials people should know? is it possible for a musician to _not_ borrow materials? in what sense? should strategies that fundamentally rely on appropriation, sampling, or collaboration be considered "creative" at all? in what ways does the recent tendency to problematize authorial originality and the distinction between "literary" and "critical" writing provide ways of thinking about fiction anthologies as literary forms? *iv. 5 establishing the process of collaborative interactions between the anthology's editorial introduction and fiction selections (a process which joins these two seemingly different forms of discourse into an aesthetic unity); summary of the absurdities, limitations, and inherent deceitfulness that arise from following out-dated approaches to such introductions; sequential listing of the topics that result from adhering to these conventions.* the options available to anyone hoping to assemble an interesting fiction anthology are virtually unlimited. unfortunately, there are considerably fewer options available to editors once it comes time to write the editorial introductions that accompany such anthologies. as with book reviewing, editorial introductions are essentially written according to a formula that controls the overall structure, tone and content of the discourse--a formula whose main features have evolved primarily to serve the private interests of the editors and their publisher rather than to serve any necessary generic function. no matter how complex or unique the anthology's focus, how creatively and flexibly the editor has used this focus in the selection process, no matter how original the fiction selections are in terms of formal innovation or thematic complexity--in the end, nearly all editorial introductions follow a sequence of presentations that can be listed as follows: 1. attention-grabbing opening paragraph that establishes why the anthology's theme or focus is particularly important _now_, usually accompanied by references to the inadequacies of other anthologies with a similar focus. 2. details introduced regarding the background of the anthology, how this editor became involved in the project (here modest indications of how the editor's professional background and other credentials make him or her particularly suited to put together such an anthology), what the anthology's original aims were (and hence what sorts of considerations were involved in the selection process), and a summary of how these aims changed or remained consistent as the volume took shape. [see appendix c.] 3. brief, "punchy" overview of the anthology's contents. 4. presentation of information regarding the authors' lives, citation of previous most significant publications, literary movements associated with the authors, etc.. 5. (optional.) roll call of other authors considered for the anthology (if applicable) with reasons why any expected figures aren't represented. if necessary, comments designed to blunt charges of the anthology's imbalances (gender, race, etc.), justifications for any political incorrectness that might be perceived in selections, followed by suggestions of what misreadings on part of the reader created such perceptions. 6. citations regarding the appropriateness of the selections in terms of the anthology's focus; justification for any pieces that at first glance seem very much out of focus. 7. overview of notable themes and stylistic features (examples and quotations to support this list), followed by favorable comparisons of this anthology with rival anthologies that may have preceded it. 8. claims made for the overall significance of the anthology material, pronouncements about how the individual aesthetic and thematic features found in the anthology's fiction relate to broader trends within and outside of literature. 9. concluding paragraph which reveals ways this anthology's selections indicate rich possibilities, new directions, etc.. 10. final sentence designed to get the reader to turn the page as quickly as possible. the problem here isn't that these formulaic elements are all trivial or inappropriate. the problem is the formulaic nature of the formula, the tendency of editors to pass off hasty and usually self-serving conclusions based on inadequate sampling of their subject. rather than follow many postmodern authors who try to develop methods that permit them to find systems and significance but who do so honestly by acknowledging their own subjectivity and actual, less-than-systematic experiences, many editors feel it necessary to adhere blindly to a formula whose elements encourage dishonesty, misrepresentation, superficiality, and manipulation. at least in anthologies that introduce new work by serious fiction writers, such introductions are nearly always the product of bad faith--the bad faith of editors who know better but deliberately attempt to reduce ultimately uncategorizable works to "trends," "patterns," or labels, the bad faith of literary guides who've been living inside this rich literary terrain for weeks and months, and who've been damn excited about how untranslatable the stuff is, and how resistant it is to the kinds of paraphrases and overstatements the editor is expected to make in the introduction. this isn't to say that editors shouldn't present their views and point out trends or patterns--after all, though finding a pattern in the stars may be primarily an act of the creative imagination, such patterns help people locate themselves and find out where they're going. editors should express their opinions in a performative act that strives to break through the discursive screens of traditional editorial representation to the repressed, authentic data of the material at hand. [editorial note, los angeles, 9-25. as explained in editor's note for v. intro (cancelled), circumstances made it impossible for me to complete some sections of this editorial introduction (such as the actual editorial introduction itself). i am, however, able to provide readers with some discarded fragments of the concluding paragraph that i worked on some time ago (see appendix f) which should clarify what i would have said if circumstances had been different. *v. introduction (now cancelled)* [editor's apology:] due in part to the time and energy required to develop the earlier sections of his remarks concerning the need for an aesthetics of fiction anthologies, partly because of circumstances beyond his control, and partly because he doesn't wish to risk the bad faith referred to earlier, the editor regretfully acknowledges that he will be unable to supply the editorial introduction. to compensate for this, and to provide readers with easy access to the relations between these works, the editor is providing in lieu of an introduction a listing of the anthology selections marked with a handy series of symbols whose meanings are explained below. he is also supplying contributors' notes for each author (because these are usually supplied at the end of an anthology they are often overlooked by readers); for readers interested in what the editor might have said in the (now cancelled) "introduction," he is also including an appendix containing a fragment of material originally intended for the "introduction" (see appendices c-f). *v. 1. listing of anthology selections with easy-to-use coded references for easy reader access to their postmodern features* kathy acker, "obsession": a(1,3),b,c,e,f,g,h,j,k,l,m,n,o(2), p,q,s,t,u,w,x,y. robert coover, "the titles sequence for the adventures of lucky pierre": a(1,2), c,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,o(1,2),p,r,s,t,u,v. ricardo cruz, "five days of bleeding": a(1,2,3),e,f,g,h,i,k,l,m, o(1),p,q,r,s,t,u,w,x. rikki ducornet, "from _birdland_": c,f,h,i,k,n,t. rob hardin, "dressed to kill yourself": c,d,e,f,h,j,k,o(2),p,q,r, s,t,u,w,x. annemarie kemeny, "attempts on life": a(2),b,c,e,f,p,r,s,t,v. marc laidlaw, "great breakthroughs in darkness (being, early entries from the secret encyclopedia of photography"): c,d,e,f,g,k,n,o,q,r,s,t,u,v. william t. vollmann, "incarnations of the murderer": b,c,e,f,g, k,n,o,p,q,s,t,u,w,y. explanation of symbols: a(1): avant-pop--appropriation of style and content of pop culture. a(2): avant-pop--appropriation of style and content of pop culture to subvert pop culture. b: strategies of confounding the usual distinctions between author/character, fiction/autobiography, "real" history and invented versions. c: meta-features. d: cyberpunk features. e: non-linear methods of presentation. f: process over product. g: collision of different world or planes of reality motif. h: radically idiosyncratic voices and idioms employed. [note: continue through z.] ================================= *appendix a: commentary about kathy acker and "obsession," written by editor for a different project--for possible sampling purposes in the (now cancelled) introduction* [note: once larry realized that he did not have much time before the deadline to write a completely new version of this commentary, he planned to paraphrase it, or "sample" it (selfplagiarism). --eyal.] like her fiction, kathy acker is a bundle of contradictory parts that combine to create the jagged unity of a raushcenberg collage. street-wise gutter snipe and radical feminist critic, motorcycle-outlaw and vulnerable woman, cynic and visionary idealist, acker writes a series of experimental, shocking, and highly disturbing novels that present perhaps the most devastating (and wickedly funny) critique of life under late capitalism since william burroughs' mid-60s works. these works include her 1970s small press publications (_the childlike life of the black tarantula, by the black tarantula_; _i dreamt i became a nymphomaniac!: imagining_; _the adult life of toulouse lautrec, by henri toulouse lautrec_; and _kathy acker goes to haiti_); her "re-writes" of classical western novels _great expectations_ and _don quixote_, as well as works that pastiche a broader variety of prior literary works: _blood and guts in high school_, _empire of the senseless_, and _in memoriam to identity_. "obsession" offers an illustration of the ways avant pop authors appropriate, sample, and otherwise collaborate with prior texts drawn from the realms of both "high" and "pop" culture; it also showcases avant-pop's tendency to blur the distinction between author and character--a device which emphasizes the individual's imaginative role in constructing any version of "reality" and the interaction of "fiction" and "fact" in our media-soaked environment. in "obsession," acker--in one of her typically bold narrative manoeuvers--adopts the roles of cathy and heathcliff, the passionate and ultimately doomed lovers from emily bronte's 19th century masterpiece, _wuthering heights_. but as avant-pop authors often remind us, "re-telling" a familiar story within a contemporary context permits readers to re think the assumptions and "meanings" they bring to such materials. "reanimated" by acker's surrealist imagination and fiercely political vision, the elements of bronte's novel are transformed into a nightmarish vision of the sexual longings, gender confusions and injustices to be found in contemporary society. also typical of acker's work is her focus in "obsession" on the body as a literal and symbolic site/cite of struggle between individuals seeking self-empowerment and the forces of patriarchal control that seek to regulate people's lives. this emphasis is grounded in more than abstract political concerns. as a real woman and not just a narrative person, acker is her own text, her own gallery. embedded i*n one of her front teeth is a jagged chunk of bronze. she's a body-builder in more than the usual way: her muscles animate spectacular tattoos, a combination that she feels allows her to seize control over the sign-systems through which people "read" her. past mistress of the cunning juxtaposition and the fine art of appropriation, acker writes fiction that betrays a multitrack outlaw intellect. and she doesn't shrink from mining outlaw "low culture" genres like sf, pornography, and detective fiction. the net effect of her work is not merely to deconstruct, but to decondition. *v. 2 contributors' notes* kathy acker's most recent publications include: _portrait of the eye_ (a collection of three early novels) and _in memoriam to identity_. the selection included in this issue is from a forthcoming novel to be published by random house in the spring of 1993. she is also recording an album featuring her work set to music that hal wilner is producing, and rides a 750 honda. robert coover recently spent two years developing teaching applications using hypertext in creative writing courses (this pilot program was sponsored by apple). professor of english at brown university, he is the author of numerous novels and stories, including most recently _pinocchio in venice_. the fiction selection included here is part of a long experimental novel, _the adventures of lucky pierre_, which coover has been writing now for over twenty years. ricardo cruz's fiction has appeared in various literary journals, including _fiction international_ and _black ice magazine_. his first novel, _straight outta compton_ (fall 1992, fiction collective two), was recently named winner of the nilon award for excellence in minority fiction. currently "out and about" in bloomington, illinois, he is completing work on his ph.d. in english at illinois state-normal. rikki ducornet is the author of six volumes of poetry and a tetralogy of novels--_the stain_, _entering fire_, _the fountains of neptune_, and _the jade cabinet_--that will be published by dalkey archive press. also known for her work as an illustrator of such works as the limited edition of robert coover's _spanking the maid_ and borges's "tlon uqbar and orbis tertius," ducornet is professor of creative writing and literature at the university of denver. a forthcoming issue of _the review of contemporary fiction_ will be devoted to her work (the guest-editor of this issue wishes it to be known that he is currently seeking materials for this issue). rob hardin is a writer and musician living in nyc who reports that writing is the way of "getting linear dissonant counterpoint--the chamber music nightmare and empty attics- out of my system." his poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including _mississippi review_, _atomic avenue_, and _flagellation_. his recent album credits include the lost boys and billy squire's _here and now_. annemarie kemeny teaches and is completing work on her ph.d. at the department of english, suny stony brook. she has published criticism and poetry. marc laidlaw has spent most of his adult life in office buildings, writing on company word processors. his works include an early cyberpunk novel, _dad's nuke_ (1985), a sf novel abut tibet, _neon lotus_. the selection published in this issue has appeared in print in great britain in _new worlds 2_, ed. david garnett (victor gollancz, ltd.). larry mccaffery is co-editor of _fiction international_, _american book review_, _critique: studies in contemporary fiction_, and editor of _storming the reality studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction_ (duke up). two new books will appear in 1993: _interviews with radically innovative american authors_ (pennsylvania up) and _avant pop: postmodern fiction for the 90s_, which will appear in the new black ice books series (normal, il: fiction collective two). william t. vollmann's recent publications include _whores for gloria_, _an afghanistan picture show_, _thirteen stories & thirteen epitaphs_, and _fathers and crows_ (the third of vollmann's projected septology of "dream novels"). research for his books has taken him recently to cambodia, mexico city, sarajevo, and the magnetic north pole. ================================= vi. *appendix b: editor's log: 1/92--in the beginning...* before the word was the grant application for contributors' and editor's honoraria for a special issue of postmodern culture devoted to "postmodern fiction." 1-92. postmodern culture's co-editor eyal amiran contacted me, larry mccaffery (for his background as an editor and critic associated with postmodernism, see contributor's notes), early in 1992 to discuss my willingness to guest edit this special issue. i agreed and we set up a basic gameplan: i would arrange for the appearance of approximately half dozen previously unpublished (in the u.s.) pieces that, in my view, illustrated significant formal and thematic tendencies within postmodernism; to this end, my selection process would avoid narrow or prescriptive definitions of what constituted "postmodernism," emphasizing the quality of material over "name recognition," although i would attempt to include at least some fiction by established figures (pynchon, sontag, gaddis, coover, barth, rushdie, abish, mcelroy, le guin, barthelme, and burroughs were all specifically mentioned in our preliminary phone conversations, and, indeed, were subsequently invited by me to submit fiction for the issue). i would also try to include writings by some of the most interesting recent authors, and selections from work that would come in response to postmodern culture's calls for fiction; i would supply an introduction which would place my selections in a general framework of postmodern aesthetics generally, and which would clarify whatever significant differences and similarities characterize the older and younger generations of postmodern authors. deadline for my having all the materials in the editors' hands would be mid-september, with the issue going out on-line at the very end of the month. ================================= *appendix c: unrevised fragments of editor's (now cancelled) introduction* 1. ...i agreed to accept his invitation to edit in part because i felt the process of putting such an issue together would contribute to the process of re-evaluating my own views about postmodernism. this process started several years ago, when now, and has grown out of a series of recognitions in the mid-80s about the limitations and strengths of my earlier positions about postmodernism, that i was already fullyi was alredayworking on suchpretty certain that whatever in part on question that the literary sensibilities on encounters in the best writing coming out of the younger generation of vital, innovative american authors has been shaped by a very different set of cultural circumstances and aesthetic considerationsvery different indeed from those that gave rise to the first wave of postmodern experimentalism back in the mid 60s...one generation's daring metafictional explorations about the relationship between author and text becomes the most effective tool of the 90s realist attempting to depict a world in which "signs," "texts," and various other fictions have proliferated to such an extent that they form the most substantial aspect of most people's existence. 2. ...no attempt was made to fill pre-designated slots or categories...what was surprising was the sheer volume of quality fiction written by the generation of innovative writers who have grown to maturity in the 80s and 90s...halfway into my selection process, eyal amiran had agreed with my suggestion that we aim less for a balance of fiction by younger and more established and concentrate instead on foregrounding work by emerging writers, using selections from the canonical postmodernists by way of showcasing aesthetic and thematic continuities or divergences between the generations. 3. ducornet's camera serves as it does for some many other younger writers, as a magical mirror possessing the power to petrify the past, illuminate and momentarily petrify human truths that usually evaporate under life's process of perpetual change. ...a selection from perhaps the most versatile stylist, ventriloquist of all...quirky american dialects, bad jokes, willingness to push a trope until every aspect of it had been squeezed dry..."lucky pierre" is an excerpt from a legendy blue movie special, now over twenty years in the making. more than most other 60s figures, coover's best work from the 60s is linked directly to writers like delillo, leyner, the cyberpunks and the later authors whose work is so often drenched in a kind of constant breath surrealism and intertextual play, and whose prose is so frequently drenched in a kind of techno-media poetics. cruz, appropriate that when his interrelated sequence of stories about life in the ghetto finally came together into a novel, _straight outta compton_ appropriate on several levels-the sheer intensity and sensuousness of his voice, the sheer vitality and anger and low-down ache of passion and the mixture of surprise, delight and playfulness with which they respond to the set of surprises that ghetto life has in store for them moment-to-moment. cruz is the first black writer i've encountered who seems to have integrated rap's developed a prose voice, narrative [editor's note: apologize in ed. note that i can't even provide fragments of the kemeny because i left my only copy of her story behind in san diego and did not receive the fax of her story sent by eyal.] laidlaw, alphabetical structure, near science fictional tale of, associated with c-p but possesses a lyricism, verbal control, and intellectual delicacy that has more in common with calvino or steve erickson (whose non-appearance is regretted). william vollmann, "incarnations of the murderer." this is although the 90s postmodernists have only just begun the process of shifting gears into a decade that almost certainly is going to pick up speed and recklessness as the millennium approaches, but from this vantage point there's no question that william t. vollmann has got a headstart over every other member of his generation in terms of opening up new narrative opportunities and laying aside the temerity and failure, hesitation, and general figure of will that seemed to lie heavy over the generation of authors appearing in the late 70s and early 80s fiction. certainly no american author since the arrival of the canonized behemoth thomas pynchon has appeared with the combination of reckless ambition, verbal gifts, and an intuitive feel for inventing narrative strategies capable of rendering this vision. "incarnations of the murderer" displays many of the tendencies that make vollmann's work seem so original and fresh. as is typical of most of his other work, "incarnations" deals with brutality and those troubling emotional regions where extremes of passion and love are transformed into their equally vivid opposites. also typically, vollmann never allows a scene or a motif to remain static; instead, his imagination is constantly at work transforming the scenes and characters into variations designed to present new insights into materials that more traditional story-telling methods would use to make us feel comfortable, that we have understood their essence. "incarnations" also displays vollmann's characteristically prismatic handling of point of view--having matured in the aftermath of the experiments of writers like burroughs, mailer, vonnegut, and coover. vollmann has taken ways of integrating authorial experience, collaborating with prior texts, and imagining inventive narrative to new levels. the risks he has managed to take at this pint, both personal and narrative, are astonishing. for all the attention paid to presenting even the most ugly and poignant scenes and people even-handedly, there is a deeply moving sense of vollmann's personal engagement, his sense of moral outrage while witnessing the cruelties and stupidities human beings can inflict on each other. the risk of insisting on personally witnessing such acts of human folly as he documents in his fiction are burnout, having one's imagination or aesthetic judgement overwhelmed by the emotionality of such experiences. for now, though, at least for this reader, the sense of personal risk and danger has served vollmann admirably. surely if nothing else, vollmann is helping to dispel the sense that postmodern american fiction has floundered under the weight of its own selfconsciousness. ================================= *appendix d: fragment found at bottom of page while developing conclusion to section iv. 5.* as i hope this "traditional" portion of my introduction indicates, one can be fully informed about the ambiguities and limitations of any speech act; the tendency of all authors is to try to mask their confusion and personal insecurities behind a barrage of phoney rhetoric. this does not, however, relieve the author of the responsibility of attempting to draw conclusions about issues that might be of some use. it also doesn't mean that the process of engaging one's mind regularly with challenging topics can't be fun, or that the only options with topics one cares about deeply are to adopt the hypocritical or smug stance of the know-it-all or to mutter embarrassed apologies. displays of either adopt either the hypocritical stance of the or the hanghyupocritical finding a way to present what your conclusions are and how you arrived at them has to be-your conclusions and attitudesthat one can't expressand ones words withothers migwith as much mean, however, metaphorss well asaware of the limitations of an individual to draw conclusionsones and the postmodern seems torisks havepleasurethe risks have been worth itevident--pursuing this itye"breakthrough" in terms of casting off the authorialtaking off on the perhaps the most intriguing aspect of vollmann's writing in terms of postmodern aesthetics--namely, his treatment of point of viewworkin terms of in order to give language the opportunities to stretch out muscles it rarely uses, the narrative structures in these selections tend to be flexible, open-ended, the "plot" capable of veering off suddenly in several possible directions. ironically, such structures can be seen as presenting a palpable and "realistic" sense of our world, with its constantly shifting series of signs systems and cultural codes producing surreal juxtapositions, a sense of media overload...exhilaration and confusion. to commentaryverbalash of expectations, the strangesurreal fusings of wherenothern equally familiar butnother context that is equally familiar butthe familiar elements drawn from differentcontexts into strange anddifferent sorts ofaestheticsquestiolns of "realism" aside, however, using the free flowing narrative structures ofbarrthe sorts ofemiotic excess andthe constantly shiftingexploring its itself shared conviction that language's ability to transform our consciousness, a certain confidence that fiction's potential to create illusions that can shock and awaken, that language can enlight and...put in the service of confront banality counterability building language's power to that fiction in the powerabsorbed lessons of 60s literary radicalyounger the strength ofanew critical categories and terms arise with accelerating frequency in an attempt to keep pace with the appearance of the "new," the "exotic," and the "now"...fueled by a hysterical denial of the inevitability of bodily decay, old age and death, full of self-loathing for physical imperfection, obsessed with preserving one's experiences into images and sounds that provide the closest approximation of immortality allowed postmoderns, deeply suspicious of anything that cannot be soothingly controlled, "captured," replayed, most americans have almost gladly accepted a life of banality in exchange for the creature comforts provided by its daydream nation; as reading becomes less central to the process whereby people are educated and understand each other, its significance retreats generally...on any given evening in america, the number of people sitting transfixed by game shows, their vestigial instinct toward self-improvement satisfied by the random bits of data occasionally tossed their way, outnumbers all the americans who will read a book this year by a factor of 10 to 1. comforting reassurance that the american dream of instant transcendence is real...you gotta believe your own eyes, right? the postmodern spectacle of the rodney king trial, in which our citizens deeply felt intuition that they can't really trust the images comprising their postmodern world... are insubstantila, trickssuspicions about the illusory, awaht you see iwhich people comfort themselves and writing becomes increasinglytheandretreated into a dangerously somnolent or anything else that cannot be controlled or rationally the powerful difference--a relentless and ferocious pursuitanything that postindustrial capitalism, with its relentless difference engine, continues toproduced by thesodemanded by the logic of jaded consumers awahsare relentlesslyas the logic of postindustrial capitalism's difference engine, help distributors and bookstore ownerfocus the consumption of fiction and other art "products"direct the somnolent readers waiting patiently for the latest poll to let them know what they think or feel about something,epheality ofdifficulty ================================= *appendix e: early draft of comments editor planned to use in his (now cancelled) "introduction," regarding robert coover's "lucky pierre" selection (remarks which would also have helped establish the recurrent pattern of media-induced confusions, reality decay and loss of individual identity evident in several of the anthology's selections).* one of the features that distinguished work by the 60s generation of postmodernists was their willingness to confort ashad to do with their of the brash band of back in the early to mid-1960s, as thomas pynchon, john barth, susan sontag, joseph heller, kurt vonnegut, donald barthelme and others were making it clear that a new generation of american writers were in their ascendancy, one particularly fresh angle of their work had to do with their presentation of technological change generally and "pop culture" in particular. and the writer no otherrelationir take on are direction their work area of shard interest that made their work seem so fresh and genuinely "new" had to do with their exploration of how technological change and pop culture was transforming american life--and the new art forms arising to meet this transformation. most of these writers had experienced the thrill of saturday afternoon serials and cartoons (followed perhaps by a gene autry western or hardy boys movie), had collected bubblegum cards emblazoned with british and american fighter planes; they could recall truman's announcement that a new weapon had been used against the japanese in hiroshima and nagasaki, and they recognized the significance once their family radios were replaced by a television set. there was something profound about such changes, of course, because in addition to transforming the physical space they were inhabiting, these developments were having deep and largely untheorized effects on their imaginations, what they dreamed of and were frightened by. just as importantly, these things were affecting perception itself--movies taught writers how narrative materials could be cut-up, juxtaposed, what could be eliminated, tv ads provided insights about how to present information-dense materials economically, how to be didactic without tipping your hand too obviously, how principlesin short, the 60s generation of postmodernist authors was the first to begin to explore the media scape that gradually began to occupy more and more of america's attention, its dreamslifeaffectingthese developments wereall this was f having first time they saw television.memories of the vast transformations that accompanied the war, were old enough to remember a time when the family gathering around the radio each evening was still a novelty,evening radiothis was the first generation of authors who had grown up immersed in media culture , who were the firsthow popular new terrain they began to stake out was the effect that the mediamutual concern of the key areas ofthe first brash band of postmodern fiction writers were just bursting upon the relatively staid american literary scene, robert coover quickly established himself as one of the brashest ================================= *appendix f: fragment of discussion to be used in the (now cancelled) "introduction" regarding recurrent motifs in postmodernism and the current issue (with supporting quotes)* recurrent references to the proliferation of images created by cameras (including video and movie cameras), the sense that photography is akin to magic in its ability to allow humans visual access to that which is normally invisible (the past, the dead, inner psychic states), the more ominous implications that by giving such previously ineffable or abstract states of being a tangible existence has created an entryway through which illusion, the dead, and the past will soon overrun "real" and the living and the present. inventor of the praxiscope technology (*which see*), professor aanschultz believed that close observation of physiology and similar superficial phenomena could lead to direct revelation of the inner or secret processes of nature. apparent proof of this now discredited theory was offered by his psychopraxiscope, which purported to offer instantaneous viewing of any subject's thoughts. --marc laidlaw, "great breakthroughs in darkness" postmodern authors living in a contemporary world dominated by media scape, simulated experiences, virtual-and-hyper realities, often literalize the metaphorical components of previous eras' attempts to poeticize the mysterious nature of truth and falsehood, life and death, reality and illusion, originality and duplication. thus, robert coover places his hero lucky pierre into a cinematic narrative realm in which "all the world's a stage, and each must play his part, etc.." as technologies of reproduction create counterfeit worlds that become increasingly lifelike and offer an ever-expanding array of simulated experiences, the fleeting "real time" experiences of individuals begin to seem increasingly less substantial precisely because they cannot be replayed. allen, 'baptismal eulogies: reconstructing deconstruction from the ashes', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-allen-baptismal.txt baptismal eulogies: reconstructing deconstruction from the ashes by glen scott allen english department towson state university e7e4all@toe.towson.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by glen scott allen, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. derrida, jacques. _cinders_. tr. ned lukacher. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1991. derrida, jacques. _the other heading: reflections on today's europe_. tr. pascale-anne brault & michael b. naas. bloomington: indiana university press, 1992. i. burials past & faster [1] "the true wretchedness . . . is particular, not diffuse."^1^ so begins edgar allan poe's "the premature burial," one of many poe tales which has found its way to the movie screen as a british hammer production, becoming in the transition all lurid technicolor drapes and heaving white bosoms. of course, the movie version defers the prematurity of the burial as long as possible and finds its climax--as we knew it would--in the crypt with the heroine reacting in hyperbolic horror to the "true wretchedness" of her premature burial. *the* premature burial. [2] or so the film version would have it. one irony (among so many) of the film's misreading of the story is the slavish attention paid to that little word "the." poe's story in fact begins with accounts of *several* premature burials, the better to establish ethos for the premise of his story, to grant it "verisimilitude," (to mix russian with american horror). poe knows that, by supplying various examples, the particular will become credible; will even, through the sleight-of-hand of logic, become the exemplar of those examples. *the* premature burial--the exemplary, or "standard" premature burial. [3] and yet poe realized that, while the logos of his story might rest on the general structure of inductive reasoning, its "single effect"--that which poe believed defined a successful short story--resided not in the conceptual accumulation of generalized (as in "made vague") instances, but rather in the specific image of the narrator--"man the unit"--undergoing the *individualized* tortures of being buried alive. these seemingly opposite requirements--that an example be representative, yet somehow unique--are what we might term the paradox of exemplarity. more about this paradox in the section on derrida's _cinders_. [4] but in fact the greatest irony of hammer's "adaptation" of poe's story is that in "the premature burial" there is no *the* premature burial at all; the narrator misreads the signs of temporary confinement for those of eternal interment. and in much the same fashion, the academy in general (as in "widely but not completely") have misread--with a haste usually reserved for cholera victims--the "signs" of the death of deconstruction and the interment of derridean criticism. [5] in fact, the stampede to denounce deconstruction has been so precipitous as to trample on the venerable traditions of mourning; and this, in a profession where tradition is the constant specter, the incorruptible monument. the "mourners" at deconstruction's graveside have skipped right over the eulogy and proceeded, with undisguised glee, to the obloquy--the stage of hypercriticism which would normally follow burial by a respectable period of reassessment; a stage generally (as in "popularly") arrived at gradually, reluctantly and sincerely. [6] emeritus yalie c. van woodward blithely writes of deconstruction's "brief and tormented" history.^2^ jonathan yardley suggests, to everyone who will publish, that deconstruction has breathed its "last gasp." and in a viciously enthusiastic (and woefully inaccurate) article supposedly "debunking" deconstruction, poet david lehman argues from the *premise* that "the fortunes of deconstruction as an academic phalanx have declined," using as spokesmodels everyone from robert "iron man" bly to "former" deconstructionist barbara johnson.^3^ [7] while it may seem shooting ducks in a barrel to attack the rusty dreadnaughts of old criticism like woodward and yardley (and lehman), in fact the ranks of crocodile mourners are not limited to these scholastic neo-conservatives; they simply gloat the loudest. [8] after all, "ex" deconstructionist barbara johnson did indeed give a talk entitled "the wake of deconstruction" at last summer's school of theory and criticism at dartmouth college. recent editorials in the _wall street journal_, the _new york times_, *and* the mla _newsletter_ speak of deconstruction in the assured past tense. and, however thoroughly the word "deconstruction" is disseminated in the academic and even public discourse, the yale school rarely uses the "d-word" anymore.^4^ even those in *favor* of a reconstruction of deconstruction have accepted that, as jeffrey nealon writes in a recent and extremely useful essay in _pmla_, "deconstruction . . . is dead in literature departments today."^5^ [9] *is* deconstruction dead and buried? or merely buried? [10] in poe's story, the examples of premature burials turn on the living too soon surrendering their responsibility for the (apparently) dead, as they consistently and curiously resist all efforts at scrutiny or autopsy. in its social and historical context, "the premature burial" might be seen as representing a general (as in recognizable but not necessarily locatable) anxiety of mid-19th century america over the increasingly indistinct boundary between the irrelevant and ritualistic requirements of the past and the insistent and material demands of the present.^6^ thus the narrator of poe's story searches for the reliable *sign* of death and the dependable *limit* of indebtedness; a sign and a limit that will provide a specific, quantifiable answer to the question, when *exactly* might the past be memorialized, and thus forgotten? [11] derrida's _cinders_ (1991) and _the other heading_ (1992) directly engage this question by separating it into *two* questions; questions which are perhaps the two most important problems of the emerging 21st century: how do we both "acknowledge" indebtedness to the past and yet free ourselves from its icy clasp? and how do we "negotiate" the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of pluralism and social cohesion? [12] derrida frames these questions as the paradox of the past, and the paradox of the example.^7^ ii. elegiac cinders [13] the importance of acknowledging the past is everywhere present in derrida's works. in many ways, _cinders_ is an "exhibition" of derrida's ideas about the elusive mechanism of meaning and its relationship to the past. and like an exhibition, one senses throughout the presence of his past influences and works. [14] the title _cinders_ is a simplification of the untranslatable %feu la cendre%^8^. the book deals with a "specter" which has haunted derrida for nearly a decade, this "specter" being the phrase %il y a la cendre%: "cinders there are"--with an accent grave over the 'a' of la, thus doubling the sense in which the word means "there"; a phrase which appears first in _la dissemination_, and recurs in partial and various incarnations in many of his other works since, most notably the "envois" section of _the post card_. and ghosts of other prior works enter as the refrain of remembrance (%il y a la cendre%) weaves its way through a text which is structurally reminiscent of _glas_ (1974). [15] on the left hand side of the page are short quotes from earlier works, passages which bear in one way or another on the idea of cinders, burning, residue, invisible remainders. derrida titles these notes "animadversions" (observations), both to capture their nature as brief musings, and to acknowledge the french avant garde journal _anima_, a forum for the exploration of language which is, appropriately, no more. the animadversions are there to suggest (as in "fanning an ember") reverberations to the text on the right hand side of the page, which is a "philosophical prose poem" about, around, within the paradox of antecedents, debts; expressions as constant eulogy, incomplete epitaph, dysfunctional nostalgia--all in search of "she," the cinder. [16] while some critics might see in this exhibition a "repetition" of favorite derridean themes, this retrospective approach is most appropriate here. there is a certain melancholic undertone to _cinders_; the sort of melancholy resident in works which eulogize the end of one period and inaugurate the beginning of another. [17] and thus, as ned lukacher points out in an often brilliant introduction "morning becomes telepathy," _cinders_ is anything but old wine in new bottles. lukacher grapples with the meaning of the word "cinder" and the phrase %il y a la cendre% in an "overview" of derridean sources, influences and concerns. for instance, he brings hegel's notion of the %klang%, "the 'ringing' at the origin of language" into the discussion, and suggests a connection between this primeval trace as sound for hegel, and later as "spirit" (%geist%) or "flame" for heidegger. thus cinders become what is left after a holocaust--"pure and figureless, this light burns all. it burns itself in the all-burning [%le brule-tout%]" (42). an all-burning which leaves nothing; nothing, perhaps, but an "oscillation": "it is the heat within the resonance of this oscillation that derrida names %la cendre%" (3). [18] cinder is, too, the latest in a long line of terms--trace, differance, trail--with which derrida has struggled to name "these remains without remainder." lukacher suggests an analogy with quarks: "cinders are the quarks of language, neither proper names nor metaphors" (1). [19] while lukacher suggests that quarks keep "a space open into which the truth, or its impossibility, might come," it is more appropriate to metaphorize them as the the illogical logic of metaphor itself; as that "leap" of human imagination which creates similarities out of distances. quarks are *indivisible* from the particles which they "make up." that is to say, they exist *only* as the relationship of intersecting energy and matter which *appears* to us as those particles. they are all event, no structure. thus cinders are quarks in the sense the term indicates a "site" of meaning which is non-local and a "duration" of meaning which is without origin or end. [20] cinders are there; there are cinders. "there" is both assertion of location and of existence. of location *as* existence. the 'a' (accent grave) of the "there" which "locates" the cinder is also meant to "suggest a feminine register" to the voice of the text, as well as to indicate that the word is not transparent, that it "burns" with the "incineration of the indefinite article." [21] the phrase, the word, the text all "burn" also with a plurality of voices. heidegger particularly haunts these pages. heidegger "emphasize[d] the delicate nature of the relation between language and truth; between figure and idea, between . . . %dichten% (to write) . . . and %denken% (to think)" (2)--acts which lukacher writes are "held apart by a delicate yet luminous difference." heidegger referred to this difference as a "rift (%riss%)," something like (and unlike, of course) the gap "between" the two components of a metaphor. this "holding itself is a relation," that is to say, an event borne of, but not resident in the functioning of difference, the mechanics of signification. [22] this relation is a tension, and this tension is as close as we can perhaps get to "placing" meaning--just as a flame is as close as we get to associating a "thereness" with pure energy. put in terms of the binary models we must leave behind: meaning is neither something "fissioned" by the breaking up of the metaphysical dichotomy, nor "fused" through the synthesis of the dialectic. the tension, the relation, the residue *itself* is the event of meaning: elastic, non-local, always uncertain--but *always* present. [23] the prose poem section of _cinders_ is as difficult to "decipher" as anything derrida has written: personal, self-referential, elusive, allusive, fragile. everything, that is, which describes the cinders which there are. but it is also as rewarding as any of his other works. in combination with the distinctly different derridean text _the other heading_, and recent articles urging a reconstruction of derridean analysis, perhaps the "death" of deconstruction can be exposed as greatly exaggerated. [24] for instance, nealon argues in the _pmla_ that most of the current attacks on deconstruction--in fact much of the anti-deconstruction criticism of the last twenty years--has in fact been based on *mis-readings* of derridean thought; misreadings circulated and codified by his earliest american translators. while i won't rehearse nealon's argument in its entirety here, it is central enough to my discussion of the importance of these two works to refer to at some length. [25] nealon begins by observing that deconstruction's critics have typically charged its practitioners with "simply denying meaning or interpretation by showing how oppositions . . . *cancel themselves out*" (emphasis added). along with this charge come the ancillary criticisms that it is apolitical, ahistorical, acontextual, and amoral. but it should be clear that the primary charge--that it seeks neutrality--governs all the others, whether the neutrality claimed is historical or moral. and thus at the root of most anti-deconstructive rhetoric is the indictment that it is inherently nihilistic. anyone who thinks such an attack comically overheated need look no further than david lehman's essay. [26] while lehman begins quite typically by claiming that the major fault of deconstructive criticism is "those binary reversals that come as second nature to the initiates of the mysteries of deconstruction," his argument soon begins leaping from deconstruction to derrida to de man to conformity to nazis, as though all of these topics were quite obviously connected at the conceptual hip. "after the de man affair, deconstruction will never again be a harmless thrilling thing--we have seen how it can be used to fudge facts, obfuscate truths, distort and mislead" (5). lehman grandly, and ominously concludes that "the political system most consonant with deconstructive principles is authoritarian" (4). [27] perhaps the problem of lehman and neo-conservative critics like him is most grave, at least within the academy, because this strain of "thought" is *within* the academy--a tenacious moral smugness that is more dangerous than outright conservatism because it presents itself as a "new" humanism. while lehman "concede[s] that some of the tactics and procedures of deconstruction, if used judiciously, may lead to fruitful ends" (if used judiciously? fruitful ends?) still he is quick to warn of "[t]he marked absence of moral seriousness" in deconstructive criticism (8). [28] perhaps that phrase "moral seriousness" reveals the heart of lehman's resentment toward derrida. there has always been a sense of play about derrida's writing which seems to frustrate and infuriate die-hard formalists who believe criticism can only be worth reading if it is "serious," i.e., hermeneutically sealed. [29] but lehman's prescription rings of the rhetoric of chapels, not classrooms. david lehman and his familiars seem academic cotton mathers, ready to divide critics into the preterite and the damned, using as their standard the presence or absence of "moral seriousness." (never was a phrase more ripe for the very sort of "authoritarian" manipulation that lehman ironically claims resides in derridean analysis.) of course, there is an important distinction to be made between neo-conservative critics of deconstruction like woodward and lehman, and those critics who engage derrida and deconstruction on more "constructive" grounds.^9^ [30] still, the root charge leveled at derrida's work specifically and deconstruction generally (as in a concept if not a body of criticism) most often stems from that word "neutrality" and the echoes of nihilism it summons up. iii. digging the neutral grave [31] again, lehman is a useful representative of this fundamental misreading, arguing that, as "deconstructionists frequently collapse the difference between a thing and its opposite" then what deconstruction produces is "the absence of difference" (1).^10^ [32] of course, the word "neutralization" was indeed used by derrida in describing the "reversal" of dichotomies which often begins the deconstructive reading. however, what was often overlooked in the early translations was what followed: "to remain content with this reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to be destroyed." more importantly, "to sit back . . . and take an attitude of *neutralizing indifference* with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free rein to the *existing forces* that effectively and historically dominate the field" (_dissemination_ 6; emphasis added). and even when american disseminators of derridean concepts remarked on the importance of this second step, they seemed at a loss to explain what it meant.^11^ [33] yet, while some critics working toward a reconstruction of derridean analysis have made this observation, still very few (judith butler comes to mind as one recent exception)^12^ have paid sufficient attention to *revisioning* that term "neutralization." for example, nealon *himself* doesn't seem to realize that what derrida meant by "neutralization" is quite significantly different than what he and nearly every american interpreter has meant by the word. [34] while nealon differentiates between derrida's concept of "undecidability" and de man's of "unreadability," still he quotes the de manian notion that "a text . . . can literally be called 'unreadable' in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other," and then claims that "this definition would, of course, hold for derrida also" (1272). i believe this to be a key, and again typical error, in that, for derrida, a text is *never* unreadable. for instance, derrida states in "positions" that "the play of differences involves syntheses and referrals that prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element that is present in and of itself and refers only to itself" (38). and by "itself" he would include, no doubt, the "singular" element of unreadability. again, the whole notion of "unreadable" or "utterly absent" or "paralyzed" meaning--all terms which de man used as synonyms for the result of the "neutralization" of oppositions--is simply too reductionist, too rooted in concepts of "particular" meaning; concepts which derrida works everywhere to deconstruct. [35] perhaps the problem here is analogical. the image typically summoned by the term "neutralization" is a maneuver which brings together a particular meaning and its antithesis in a violent collision, resulting in an "annihilation" of meaning. deconstruction thus becomes the antithesis of interpretation, and deconstructive readings are seen as leaving smoldering holes in a text. but there is all the differance in the world between derrida's enriching "undecidability" and de man's constricting "unreadability." and there is every indication in derridean thought that the "neutralization" of binarisms results not in annihilation, but rather in a state of *continual engagement*. [36] in the "turn of dominance" which has been an analytical tool since nietzsche, the binary poles must first be shown to be, in the traditional discourse, decidedly unequal in "valence." thus the genealogical revision (more than reversion) of the terms is an absolutely necessary step in shaking the terms loose from their accumulated cultural denotations; especially, for derrida, as those denotations grant a greater "moral authority" to one term than the other. and of course the term derrida came to use for this moral authority was "presence."^13^ [37] but derrida has always asked us to imagine instead that meaning is not "particular"; that it does not reside in "positive and negative" terms, but rather that it is inextricably resident within the tension *between* terms, between competing cultural forces which always tug towards interpretations of the coupled terms that validate their particular social and historical agenda.^14^ thus derrida's first move is to "overturn" the struggle by demonstrating how each "side's" definition of the term is utterly inscribed in the other "side's" definition. however, even after this first act of revision the two forces are *both still engaged*--the term's meaning is *still* a result of a tension, but what is now a revised tension, a tension freed of "moral authority" based on presence and ideality. thus the "meaning" of any such coupling is a product of (at least) two competing cultural agencies, and not some "thing" resident in any particular site. again, what derrida is working so diligently toward is an understanding of meaning as *event* rather than structure.^15^ [38] even more importantly, for derrida meaning *never doesn't exist*--not at any moment of the deconstructive process. meaning is elusive, mobile, inevitably non-local--but it is *not* something which can be annihilated, rendered somehow irrelevant. thus derridean deconstruction is consistently and fundamentally anti-nihilistic. [39] but what of american deconstruction? is "continental" deconstruction the "pure" form, and our american brand a flawed import? [40] i am not suggesting we draw up a list of "good" and "bad" deconstructors, nor that we should use the atlantic ocean as a gulf separating "true" from "false" deconstruction. however, some forms of criticism which come under the general heading of "deconstruction" seem in fact only tenuously connected to derrida's ideas and techniques. [41] for instance, de man's "unreadable" reductions of texts work in a direction quite different from derrida's "undecidable" explorations. while de man is primarily interested in rhetorical "impasses" which render interpretation stalemated, derrida concentrates instead on mythologies of origin and closure, on those places in any text which "ground" its axioms and conclusions; not as an exercise in "neutralizing" such myths, but rather in an effort to expose and explore their rich semiotic associations. thus what derrida has been doing from _of grammatology_ on is not comprehensible in any analysis which equates the two practices. [42] furthermore, the "manner" of american deconstruction disseminated by culler, de man %et al% is a theory and practice in and of itself, with certain--though perhaps less certain than has been thought--connections to derrida's work. but it *cannot* be taken as an entirely accurate or fundamentally thorough translation of derrida's ideas. thus any criticism of deconstruction as institutionalized by the early writers--and even many to follow--must be treated as criticism of *their* goals and methodologies, *not* derrida's. [43] this raises a question: why hasn't derrida distanced himself and his work from these "incomplete" representations? [44] this is a question nealon deals with in his essay. he points out that derrida has always been unwilling to criticize--even in the smallest particular--any of his american "disseminators," and that he has consistently displayed very little interest in "disciplining" the discourse surrounding his work. [45] unless, that is, we can read the insistence in _cinders_ on reviewing "snapshot" expressions from his past works as an indirect form of protest; protest as restatement; restatement as remembrance. "cinders are *not* nothing" (emphasis added). and the something that they are is an intersection of indebtedness to the past--"she, this cinder, was given or lent to him by so many others, through so much forgetting. . ." (41)--and promise for the future, "because each time it gives a different reading, another gift" (25). this hardly sounds like nihilism. [46] perhaps _cinders_ is the first postmodern epistolary romance novel, written to ('a' accent grave) his love, cinder, she--"who is cinder? where is she? . . . someone vanished but something preserved her trace" (33)--complete with a gothic preoccupation with the grave, the past, the thwarted romantic gesture. perhaps there is even represented here an "anxiety of affluence," a nervousness in the presence of so much meaning, an overabundance of meaning which can never be completely exhausted or entirely forgotten. iv. baptizing the other heading [47] deconstruction's burial is not only premature, it is also crowded; for the new right of the academy represent only a fraction of the new right in american society; a cultural faction whose attack rests, like lehman's, on the thuggish and irrational "logic" of guilt by association. the parties which are lumped together as "targets of opportunity" include deconstruction, the humanities, universities, the mla, feminism, multiculturalism, and, of course, "political correctness." [48] for instance, their polysyllabic frontman george will wrote recently in _newsweek_ that the modern language association was a "more dangerous threat to the united states than the butcher of baghdad." an editorial in the _chicago tribune_ (october 1991) warned against the deadly and contagious affliction called "deconstruction, a french disease." another editorial, this one in the _wall street journal_ called upon all good americans to beware "the fever swamps like the modern language association . . . [where] brigades of the politically correct" plot the downfall of western civilization. syndicated columnist r. emmett tyrrell opines that the mla stands for "intolerance and bigotry . . . [which] rides across campuses enforcing right thinking, thinking that is pc".^16^ [49] this widespread and virulently reactionary strike in the public and the academic press is expressive of deeply ingrained cultural resistance, even panic in the face of rising voices which were once faint or completely muted. and this cultural crisis--this crisis of cultures--is the context for derrida's first semi-explicit political writings collected in _the other heading_, a book which explores the paradox of examples. [50] _the other heading_ includes an introduction ("for example") and two sections: the first from a paper derrida delivered in turin on may 20, 1990, at a conference entitled "european cultural identity," and the second from a brief interview entitled "call it a day for democracy." [51] here, derrida is less interested in analyzing the "current" situation in europe than analyzing the logic "of discourses that assume a certain relationship to the particular and the example" of "europe and its historical others" (xi). this is meta-commentary, as always. however, though the larger concerns are the same, derrida's voice here is somewhat different: more relaxed, slightly less excruciatingly scholastic. but it is by no means political writing in the usual sense. [52] derrida always writes in response to a prior text. in this case, that text is a collection of essays by paul valery, written for the league of nations in the 1930s. derrida begins were valery began, speaking of the europe of 1939 as a "young europe" which had been "constructed through a succession of exclusions, annexations, and exterminations." and an odd sense of temporal displacement is further present as, when derrida delivered this speech, the unification of germany was only "in sight." and yet everywhere is emphasized this very probability with his constant use of the qualifier "today": "there is *today* the same feeling of imminence, of hope and danger, of anxiety" (63). [53] what derrida seeks to begin here is an examination of the new european subject; the post-colonial, post-cold war, post-unification, post-utopian, post-historical, post-modern subject; a subject immersed in demands for diversity, while still under tremendous pressure from the needs of cohesion. [54] valery wrote his essays (%regards sur le monde actuel% and %essais quasi politiques%, among others) as a member of the committee on arts & letters of the league of nations, a committee whose ambitious charter called upon it to serve as a "permanent colloquium on 'european cultural identity'" (xxxiv). valery believed that the "best example" of a "site" of cohesive cultural identity was "that of the mediterranean basin," the "heart" of a new europe which might serve as an "example" to the rest europe, to the rest of the world. [55] derrida sees in valery's use of this example all the trademarks of exemplary reasoning, as "the 'example' that it 'offered' [was] in fact unique, exemplary and incomparable" (xxv). [56] and here lies the rub. the word "example" is from the latin, %exemplum% for "that which is *taken out* [emphasis added] of a larger quantity to show the character or quality of the rest." an example is a "specimen," something which is either "worthy of imitation" or that "serves as a warning." an example is a "precedent," a "prototype," a "standard." [57] but if the example is "taken out" of the context which forms it, is made to stand to one side, apart or above its companions, how, then, is it any longer an "example"? and if it is representative, how does it become "exemplary"? [58] the word which best captures the paradoxical logic of the example is, for derrida, capital, in both the economic and political sense. of course there is play here with %cap% (french for 'head') and capital, head and heading. but the relationships go much deeper than mere glyphic similarity. such word play works to expose the substrata beneath centuries of assumptions which produce what we "mean" by a capital city, by the head of state, etc. "europe has always recognized itself as a cape of headland . . . the point of departure for discovery, invention, and colonization, . . . *or* the very center, the europe of the middle" (41). [59] for valery--as for nearly everyone else who writes in favor of this or that "example" of cultural identity, an example which ought to serve as a "standard"--cultural identity becomes what naas in his introduction calls "the metaphorization of literal goods and capital into the surplus value, the capital value, of spirit" (5). and derrida argues that employing this metaphorization, capitalizing on the cultural example becomes "the very %teleos% of capital, the overcoming of the merely material in a spiritual surplus" (41). [60] to an american ear, the echoes of puritanism are clearly audible in any argument of identity and "progress" which seeks the "overcoming of the merely material"; which sees as the highest good cultural investment which achieves "spiritual surplus." and in fact what valery argued was the best "example" for european cultural identity in 1939 sounds strikingly similar to what the critics of the mla %et al%--what we might refer to as neo-puritans--argue should be the best "example" for american cultural identity in the 1990s, and on into the 21st century. [61] while the "other" heading--or as derrida often insists on revising the phrase, the heading of the other--refers in derrida's speech to those "others" which have served as a colonial mirror to "central" europe, to the europe of empires and capitals, the "other" shore might just as well refer to the new world, facing the old in temporal, geographic, and cultural descent/dependence/ independence. the similarity is more than merely situational, or even rhetorical--for the metaphor most often employed in the new right's attack on multiculturalism is this very idea of cultural capital. [62] as stephen greenblatt writes in "the mla on trial": "the assault on the profession for betraying the classics is itself a betrayal of the classics. it is an attempt to make them over into dull, safe, and routine celebrations of order, an attempt, that is, to transform them into a certain kind of cultural capital: safe investment, locked away in a vault" (40). [63] drawing on this idea of cultural identity as "invested capital," derrida warns that the constant danger of *any* assertion of a singular national identity is that it "*presents itself*, claims itself." that is, merely by stating itself, it argues for its validity, its history, its "investment" in the capital of culture, and therefore its claim to future benefits. as derrida warns, "it is the task of *culture* to *impose* the feeling of unity" in order to justify itself. and examples in their very assertion *as* examples -much as the assertion of cultural identity--imply a universality and are "linked to the value of *exemplarity* that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity" (xxvi). [64] ultimately, derrida argues that, in any postmodern definition of identity (cultural or otherwise), we must become more adept at not only understanding but incorporating, providing for the other heading, the heading of the other. "derrida thus seeks a redefinition of european identity that includes respect for *both* universal values *and* difference" (xlvi). cultural identity--like any of the other terms of identification derrida has deconstructed--is shown to be a product of what it is not, of how it defines itself "against" or "as different than" its other. and the moment of identity crisis is the moment of identity definition. "the ends and confines, the finitude of europe, are beginning to emerge . . . when the capital of infinity and universality . . . finds itself encroached upon or in danger" (32). [65] but this is not a call for diversity "for its own sake." in fact, the urge to "pop" diversity is --as any commodified and unopposed doctrine--its own worst enemy: self-negating, homogenizing. and this is, after all, the fear the forces of social conservatism invoke: that multiculturalism in fact seeks uniculturalism, a "homogeneity" which is in all contexts "politically correct." thus, ironically, the right presents itself as arguing from the position of the underdog, the brave resistance, the individual; from a position of diversity. "claiming to speak in the name of intelligibility, good sense, common sense, or the democratic ethic, this discourse tends, by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to discredit anything that complicates this model [of univocity]" (55). [66] nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the discourse of "family values." if we deconstruct the phrase in the economic context of cultural capital, we can see that a call to "family values" is in fact a prescription for the "value family." and the value or "economy" family would be the one which required the *least* expenditure of cultural capital, which could be least expensively reproduced and circulated, which could become the "example" or "standard" family; one which made the fewest demands on our culture in terms of pluralism, of adjustment and experimentation; that would be the "best buy" family ideology. [67] the "family values" (or value family) debate raises what derrida sees as the greatest new danger in the arena of cultural identity: the consensus. [68] consensus is, after all, the political watchword of the 90s. "consensus politics" summons up a vague image of agreements which are not compromises but rather somehow expressions of an "inner" unity, a "common" faith. but in fact derrida warns against letting such "normative" code words disguise old cultural hegemony as new cultural identity; norms which create what he terms a "remote control," the control being in the hands of whoever controls media networks; networks whose strength resides not in discovering and articulating cultural differences but rather in repressing and re-figuring differences to appear as "consumable" or "popular" opinions, consensus opinions. [69] the question "today, what is public opinion?" begins the second section of the book. derrida begins his answer by calling public opinion the "silhouette of a phantom." that is, transitory, ephemeral ("lasting only one day"); a fluid and constructed "image" of what is supposedly a deep-rooted, widespread attitude; an attitude which nonetheless must be tested and re-constructed almost everyday to sound its strength, gauge its direction. [70] but where does one locate the "public"? in the past, the word indicated the dis-empowered, the voiceless, the segment of a culture which was anything but the head, which possessed anything but the capital. but "today," the term grants legitimacy to the "decisions" of the invisible consensus. invisible because, today, where is the boundary between public and private? what is *not* public? "the wandering of its proper body is also the ubiquity of a specter"; "one *cites* it, one makes it speak, ventriloquizes it" (87). [71] derrida suggests that this phantom of "public opinion" requires some medium, for a phantom is that precisely because it lacks the "medium" by which to effect actual change in the physical world. the medium here is the *daylight* of the media: newspapers, tv, telephones: "the newspaper or daily *produces* the newness of this news as much as *reports* it" (89). and, derrida argues, this phantom must always express itself through this medium as a "judgement," a choice between two alternatives, a favoring of one side of a binarism over the other. thus the "voice" of public opinion is reduced to a simple yea or nea, an affirmation of choices already made, programmed into it. "everything that is not of the order of judgement, decision, and especially representation escapes *both* present-day democratic institutions *and* public opinions" (92). [72] who rules this phantom is whoever best controls the discourse of these judgements, who decides what the binarism will exclude; an act derrida calls the "new censorship," a culturally hegemonic strategy "which combines concentration *and* fractionalization, accumulation *and* privatization. it de-politicizes" (100). of course, the right's root axiom in america is that only the left speaks from "ideology," i.e. dogmatism. and the *appeal* of this attack on "political correctness" is nostalgic: it purports to recall a time when the "correct" mode of the university and the workplace was apolitical, a time before politics "contaminated" the private and commercial spheres. [73] however, there is, not surprisingly, another problem (or paradox) here. for derrida also warns against dispersion, against cultivating "minority differences, untranslatable idiolects, national antagonisms" just "for their own sake." a reasonable question is then: who is to tell the difference? the difference, that is, between legitimate claims of minorities, idiolects, etc., and those exercises of diversity which are "for their own sake"? [74] derrida's prescription is that "one must therefore try to *invent* gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two imperatives, of these two promises or contracts: the capital and . . . the other of the capital." for europe, this means "welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity," as well as "criticizing . . . a totalitarian dogmatism that, under the pretense of putting an end to capital, destroyed democracy and the european heritage" (45). [75] what the entire essay finally works toward is the "impossible" way between (or beyond or aside from) "monopoly [and] dispersion." which requires us first of all to think of cultural identity as something *other than* cultural capital, as a past investment which must gain and never lose interest, which can never be "wasted" on "expensive" experiments with alternative social structures, such as, for instance, non-traditional families. those acquainted with derrida's other writings will find this call for an "impossible" ethics familiar. derrida argues that the *possible* alternatives are always those "programmatic extensions" of policies already in place; that decisions which choose from among the possible alternatives are decisions already made, long before: "politics, and responsibility, *if there are any*, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of aporia"; "the condition or possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain *experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia* from which one may invent the only *possible invention, the impossible invention*" (41). [76] such a new conception of identity--again, cultural or otherwise--will not be easy to either articulate or disseminate; not in europe, certainly not in america. binarism is so deeply embedded in western thought, in indo-european language, that perhaps it is only surprising that we can see through such thinking at all, even momentarily. [77] but if not conformity, and not chaos, then what? east germany, yugoslavia, macdonald franchises, eurodisney, the umpteenth far flung shore where cowed natives greet american monster truck rallies called operation just do it with the sincere smiles of future entrepreneurs . . . all these "examples" would seem to provide very little optimism for a successful "impossible" invention of this new cultural identity, an identity which *inherently* asserts not only its own heading but also that of its other. [78] how to acknowledge the past, yet transcend it? how to provide examples, yet avoid dominance? [79] at the end of poe's "the premature burial," the narrator counsels the reader against devoting any worry at all to the buried-if-not-dead, the gone-if-not-forgotten, advising us to let the memorialized *be* forgotten, to let sleeping " sepulchral terrors" lie, and worry not whether their sleep is eternal or restless: "--they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish" (268). [80] clearly derrida disagrees. only by being constantly aware of but not in thrall to the past are we aware of the "restless" cinders encrypted in each and every word we use, and can realize the paradoxes of the language (and logic) of exemplarity which expresses and thus molds the way we conceive of our problems, and thus the way we construct our solutions. in _cinders_ and _the other heading_, derrida offers compelling evidence that, whatever the result of the urge toward memorialization currently underway in the american academy, *derridean* deconstruction is alive and well and quite up to the challenges of the new century. ___________________________________________________________ notes ^1^ "the premature burial," in _the complete tales and poems of edgar allan poe_, new york: the modern library, 1938. ^2^ _new york review of books_ #13, 1992. ^3^ "deconstruction after the fall", _awp chronicle_, vol 25 #3, 1992. ^4^ while fully 95 titles dealing with deconstruction are listed in the relatively under-stocked johns hopkins library, perhaps half of the latest include the word "after" or "anti" or "against" in their titles. as for the public press: "deconstruction" appeared recently in _the atlantic monthly_, _chicago_ magazine, and in a _newsweek_ article on architect philip johnson. it's even the name of a record label. ^5^ "the discipline of deconstruction," _pmla_, october, 1992, vol 107 #5, 1266-1279. ^6^ the latest in burial technology were coffins with alarm bells on top that might be rung by a reawakened victim tugging on a cord which dangled inside. ^7^ "paradox" rather than "problem," as calling something a "problem" automatically implies that one is seeking a solution; a way to repair the problem, some teleological methodology which can be demonstrated to rectify the flaw discovered, and which can then be stored, like a tool, for future use. ^8^ literally "fire the cinder." ^9^ there are many critics of deconstruction and derridean analysis whose methods are rigorously scholastic and whose results are rhetorically insightful; critics who have engaged the "political unconscious" at work in the patterns and focuses of derrida's own readings, and who have gone on to develop quite distinct "deconstructive" readings, particularly in the areas of feminist and post-colonial literary theory. ^10^ as nealon points out, for the real culprits of this particular misreading we must exhume the first american presentations of derrida's work: culler's _on deconstruction_, norris's _deconstruction: theory and practice_, and _deconstruction and criticism_ (which included work by harold bloom, paul de man, geoffrey hartman, and hillis miller); works which established a deconstructive tradition nealon criticizes as "commodified . . . simplified and watered down" (1269). ^11^ for instance, in _displacement: derrida and after_ (indiana university press, 1983), a collection of essays on the whole supportive of deconstruction, we are told by mark krupnick in the introduction that the term displacement "is not theoretically articulated in derrida's writing" (1). but far worse than this, krupnick's grasp of derrida's "neutralization" of the logic of metaphysical dichotomies is so weak that he then goes on to write of a "new (post-hegelian) dispensation, in the reign of difference (as opposed to identity)," showing himself still completely in thrall to that very (il)logic. krupnick's introduction is all too typical of the misreading of and outright deafness to derrida's early writings. ^12^ see for instance "contingent foundations: feminism and the question of 'postmodernism'," in _feminists theorize the political_, judith butler and joan w. scott, eds., new york: routledge, 1992. ^13^ it is the very idea of what we mean by this "presence" that derrida wishes to reverse and displace--but *not* neutralize: "we thus come to posit presence . . . no longer as the absolute matrix form of being but rather as a 'particularization' and 'effect'" (_marges_, 17). ^14^ of course, the true representation of this dynamic would include many more than just two forces. ^15^ we see this distinction in derrida's definition of differance: "a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. differance is the systematic play of differences, or traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another" (_positions_, 39). ^16^ quoted in "the mla on trial" by stephen greenblatt, _profession 92_, 39-41. [various], 'letters', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-[various]-letters.txt letters _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) re: foley's review of post-modernism and the social sciences. an exchange between pauline vaillancourt-rosenau and michael w. foley. copyright (c) 1993 by pauline vaillancourt-rosenau and michael w. foley, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. dear pmc, in a post-modern frame of reference one authors a book and then sets it free to be interpreted by various readers each in his or her own way. criticism is central to a post-modernism and its pluralism of readings. if you can't take criticism, or if you don't wish to defend your ideas, better not present them in the public realm. and this is the problem with prof. foley's review. it isn't about ideas. it is a series of unsubstantiated insults and mis-information. foley's review does not present a post-modern reading of my book. neither is he inspired by deconstruction. his review is modern in the worse sense--a singular and unexciting "reading." it announces that my text is a "repudiation" of post-modernism, assumes his is the only interpretation possible, and implicitly denies the legitimacy of other views. post-modernism and the social sciences has been well received by some post-modernists and criticized by others. it has attracted attention not only in the social sciences but in the humanities as well. it even made it to the stage recently as the doug elkins dance company (new york) incorporated readings from it into their post-modern repertoire for the international festival of new dance, montreal, november 1992. prof. foley senses my own ambivalence about post-modernism. i make no claim to be a post-modernist but i did attempt to be fair in writing about it. i made every effort to document my conclusions about post-modernism, to indicate where readers could find more information. of course i did not shy away from criticism of it. but at the same time i had no axe to grind. nor did i feel the need to defend post-modernism. perhaps this is why i made no effort to "eliminate" certain post-modern currents from it or, for example, to deny derrida's defense of paul deman's early nazi affiliations. it is not i, but foley, who puts derrida in bed with ayatollah khomeini! (review-2.592, par. 5). in a similar fashion on a number of occasions foley takes the questions i pose for post-modern inquiry and answers for me, only to then turn around, attribute his constructions to me, and criticize his own self-fabricated answers (paragraph 6). some post-modernists call for the death of the author and elevate the reader but in this instance prof. foley's "interpretation" diminishes his status as reader, not to mention reviewer. is this a "post-post-modern turn" where the review re-writes the text and then reviews his own creation? foley argues that there is nothing much new offered by post-modernism. i would not disagree. chapter 1 section 1 of my book entitled "post-modern lineage: some intellectual precursors" makes his case. but he missed this and even misinterpreted the section on structuralists altogether. i argue that post-modernism is a collage of many intellectual and philosophical currents. but at the same time, it constitutes a new form of challenge in that it refuses to set up a new paradigm to replace those it deconstructs. i am bothered by the absence of any depth to this review--brief, one-line dismissals signal an inability to take my book seriously. foley says i am a "positivist." he suggests that i "play on conflicts within postmodernism without illuminating them, or ever giving an adequate account of them." this is insulting and unfair. by their very nature these criticisms are so broad and sweeping that they cannot be contradicted. i wonder, if i agreed with prof. foley's own views would my analysis be "illuminating" and "adequate," uncorrupted by "positivism." finally, when i discuss the feminist debate around post-modernism, prof. foley admonishes that i could have "equally well" referred to the "new social history or the annales school." at this point foley moves beyond criticism to what i view as pure paternalism, lecturing me as to what i should have written about, whom i should have cited. i believe that feminists have raised some qualitatively different and extremely important questions for post-modernists. in fact, i do discuss both the new history and the annales school in chapter 4. i read prof. foley as an angry, unhappy and disappointed man (admittedly my construct). he is angry at me, unhappy with post-modernism, disappointed with princeton university press. he suggests that princeton university press abandoned standards of judgment in publishing my book. yes, princeton did publish my book. yes, the book has done very well. and yes, it was submitted to the same high standards of evaluation as every other book princeton publishes. but by focusing on this peripheral issue foley avoids what is essential--ideas, analysis, substance. and this is really regrettable. there is so much to say about post-modernism and the exciting intellectual issues it raises. pauline vaillancourt-rosenau political science dept. university of quebec--montreal ----------------------------------------------------------- dear pmc, for those who missed the evidence in the stylistic pyro-technics of baudrillard and derrida, professor vaillancourt-rosenau's outraged response to my review of her _post-modernism and the social sciences_ attests that there is still life in the authorial persona. but i have never doubted that, postmodernism notwithstanding. what i did dare doubt was the usefulness of vaillancourt-rosenau's account. her letter scarcely changes my mind; indeed, her multiple mis-readings of *my* text serve only to reinforce my doubts about her readings of others. (no, i am not angry, prof. vaillancourt-rosenau, nor did i accuse you of being a positivist!) i have no wish to deny vaillancourt-rosenau her intemperate response to my review, not to mention her favorable reviews in other quarters or, for that matter, her royalties. i find it hard to begrudge academics our modest successes. and vaillancourt-rosenau is, after all, right about two things: i found her book immensely disappointing, and i have serious misgivings about some of the more extravagant claims of the theorists of postmodernism. the former was not, indeed, a "substantive" complaint; it was practical and formal. it may be summarized in two points: first, in the welter of citations and snippets of proof-texts, the reader finds virtually no sustained analysis of any one figure, so that it would be difficult to tell, for example, that foucault's "archaeologies" of prison and asylum, not to mention his later explorations of language and power, have been seminal to the on-going reexamination in social science and philosophy of the social construction of the human world. second, vaillancourt rosenau regularly blurs the useful distinction between theorists of postmodernism and representatives of postmodern culture. with the world of postmodernism divided into "skeptics" and "affirmatives," it was my mistake, i must confess, to find islamic fundamentalism (a "third world affirmative post-modernism," p. 143) in the same bed with derrida (a "skeptic"). perhaps i should have chosen foucault, except that he is labeled a "skeptic"in one place (p. 42) and an "affirmative" in another (p. 50). in the topsy-turvy postmodern world, even prof. rosenau's classificatory ardor is defeated occasionally. in short, for these and other reasons enumerated in the review, i found the book a less than useful guide to both postmodernism and contemporary concerns in the social sciences; in the last few paragraphs i attempted to suggest directions for further inquiry. the issues raised were substantive and worth reiterating. "postmodernism" is no doubt a protean term, conjuring up a variety of disparate phenomena, depending on the context. its theorists make prodigious claims, not all of them either unique or credible. in the context of the social sciences, however, postmodernist theories converge with both older and newer theoretical traditions, reinforcing recent explorations of, for example, popular culture and resistance; the dubious and shifting discursive foundations of the modern state system; metaphor, metonymy, and analogy in social scientific doctrine, historiography, and popular political and economic discourse; and the devious twists and turns of patriarchy. there are undoubtedly tensions as well, some of them touched upon by vaillancourt-rosenau. certain postmodernist claims about the disappearance of the "subject" in particular, while they sit quite well with an older social scientific tradition (best represented today, ironically enough, in quantitative, "positivist" approaches), seem to clash with the return to human agents and their "subjectivities" in newer, more process-oriented research in comparative politics and international relations, with recent explorations of the "structure-agent problem," and with the widespread adoption of "rational choice" models in political science and sociology. there are thus very important issues to occupy us in the encounter of postmodernism, postmodernist theory, and the social sciences, as vaillancourt-rosenau insists. my complaint was and is that they have not been well raised by the book in question. of this, of course, the interested reader must be the last judge. a reviewer should indeed engage ideas, where possible; and i have tried to do so. but i am enough of a modern to feel a similar obligation, where necessary, to offer the modest warning: caveat emptor! michael w. foley department of politics the catholic university of america washington, d.c. 20064 foley@cua.edu hitchcock, '"it dread inna inglan": linton kwesi johnson, dread, and dub identity ', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-hitchcock-it.txt archive pmc-list, file hitchcoc.993. part 1/1, total size 61638 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "it dread inna inglan": linton kwesi johnson, dread, and dub identity postmodern culture version^1^ by peter hitchcock department of english baruch college, cuny _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by peter hitchcock, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. it is noh mistri wi mekkin histri it is noh mistri wi winnin victri ("mekkin histri" lkj) "the trouble with the english is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means" (_the satanic verses_, salman rushdie) [1] in order to appreciate the achievement of linton kwesi johnson (lkj), the african/caribbean/european dub poet, one must come to terms with the cultural specificity of the voice, and what the voice can do. mekkin histri. making history? what recidivism might this be at the end of the twentieth century? the double-displacement of an african caribbean black living in england, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity--%making% and %history%. what cultural logic obtains in the construction/reconstruction of subjectivity as subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the need to make history? can we still conceive of subjects that make history, have a history to make, remake at a cacophonous rendezvous of victory? to understand why this notion is *not* a mystery (the history, for instance, of imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must understand what *makes* this history: one must come to terms with the history of the voice, what kamau brathwaite calls the "invitation and challenge,"^2^ or what edouard glissant defines as "literature" and "oraliture" (the fragmented and therefore shared histories and voices of peoples).^3^ one can read this history as an introduction in lkj's sonorous beat, and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in all its synesthesia and dislocation. [2] the sounds of dislocation. our trust in electricity makes the archive of the voice seem a recent technology: lkj himself is "available in all three formats" (cd, cassette, and the fast disappearing lp). but the voice at issue has, shall we say, a much longer geneology, a history that "happened overseas." thanks to columbus's "discovery" (the kind of "surprise" common to colonialism), the amerindians of the caribbean were soon in short supply and so began one of the darkest chapters in forced relocation and labor in human history. except, of course, that such a chapter remains largely unwritten, not just because of racist ideology, the loathsome lacuna of the "official story," but because this history is an archaeology of voice, a history intoned more than inscribed. as such, it is a history articulated in the clash and fierce concatenation of colonial power and resistance characterized by the internecine struggles of languages and cultures, ashanti, yoruba, congolese, french, english, spanish, and dutch. the word creole only begins to do justice to the range of this struggle even if its logic of hybridity suggests a new understanding of what constitutes "sound" evidence. theory has trained us, and rightly so, to be suspicious of the voice and the ontology it confers. yet, what i am calling dub identity is not about the presence of being, but being in between, the "middle passages" that brathwaite (among others) has elaborated, or the "black atlantic" model that paul gilroy has proposed.^4^ the problem of dub is the sound of diaspora, and its doubling, its versions. thus, if the following notes are read as an introduction to lkj, they only begin to imagine the utterance he makes, in all its complexity, as testimony and travelogue: the subjective states of being, in between. [3] obviously, in his history of the voice brathwaite is not claiming that dub poetry, jamaican "sound" poetry, the righteous riddim of resistance, is purely a phenomenon of sound (who would want to fall into that cartesian chasm of speech/writing made infamous by derrida?). he is saying, however, that without an adequate theory of performativity and voice one cannot hope to fathom cultural expression under the mark of cultural erasure, the colonizer/ postcolonizer's denial of voice, whether poetic, polemical, or political. for brathwaite, language from the anglophone caribbean is "a process of using english," not just in the well-documented sense of creolization (%patois%), but a particular socialization of the voice. brathwaite's specific concern has been for an anglophone hybridization bred of slavery and colonization with all the linguistic and cultural displacement that that has entailed. for afro caribbean poetry this has meant not just an agonistic social function but a particular struggle over social forms of poetry. as brathwaite pithily puts it, "the hurricane does not roar in pentameters."^5^ although on one level this means attempting to reproduce the sounds of specific natural experiences of the caribbean peoples, brathwaite also wants to emphasize the disruptive potential of these experiences and the resistance riddim they inculcate. so even when brathwaite displays a particular respect for the poets who challenge english from within (his list includes a tradition from chaucer to eliot), they are not the poets of a "nation language," the product and medium of this radically different purview. [4] "nation language" is an extremely problematic term used to register the "submerged" capacity of dialect, of african intonation and derivation. brathwaite distinguishes nation language from dialect because of the negative connotations associated with the latter ("bad english" etc.) but the concept of nation itself does not arrive free from contaminants, particularly those associated with the identification processes that fueled imperialist subjugation (and in addition leads cesaire to the abrupt but pertinent conclusion that "nation is a bourgeois phenomenon"). as benedict anderson's oft-quoted analysis of nations and nationality has shown, a national identity may involve active forgetting, a lack of historicity precisely the obverse of brathwaite's cultural impetus.^6^ yet we cannot simply dismiss the prescience of brathwaite's appeal based on the sordid histories of western imperialism. that is to say, a nation looks considerably different through the perspective of an oppressed collectivity which, while not immune to the power abuses that national selfhood may confer, may produce a significant communal resistance in tracing such an identity. for our purposes the paradox of "nation" is appropriate, for what seems to reify "nation" in the caribbean context can vilify it in the tortuous confines of black britain. lkj's deployment of "nation language" then, serves to undermine a particularly nefarious manifestation of the nation state. before examining lkj's particular form of dissidence and dissonance, i want to consider how glissant figures the nation in caribbean discourse, for he too is deeply concerned with how the postcolonial caribbean subject finds a voice, makes a history. [5] as a martinican, glissant is less concerned with the hegemony of the english pentameter, but in his poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism he is keenly aware of the psychic disabilities that can accompany acculturation within imperial and colonial codes. readers of fanon will be familiar with this critique, but suprised perhaps to find that, forty years later, the dissociation of self endemic to the colonial moment still conditions to a great degree the formation of martinican identity. for glissant, the crisis is severe, for without measured attempts to articulate a collective memory, the break from the non-identity or "non history" as french history, the prospects are indeed bleak, as he shows in a table imbricating economic and literary production.^7^ within a range of contingent possibilities, glissant sees "oblivion or organization of a martinican economy," "isolation as 'french' or integration in the caribbean," "sterilization or creative explosion," and "disappearance of a community or birth of a nation." the either/or rhetoric might seem uncompromising, but glissant is attempting to ward off a cultural and political complacency that is eroding a viable caribbean collectivity. but neither is he separatist: glissant advocates a cross cultural poetics, a creolization of cultures that celebrates the strategic value of revoicing the caribbean's ingrown diversity outwards. in this sense, creole can no longer subsist as a secret code: by opening to the world it changes itself and the world. but, more importantly, this gives the lie to the totalizing force of history, as a hegelian construct, for this history is "fissured by histories" as glissant notes, as literature is fragmented by literatures, by "oraliture" as he calls it--the submerged voice of the collective. [6] there is no neat equivalence or complementarity in the formulations of brathwaite and glissant, just as one would have to specify the discursive alterity of their african american counterparts ("nation language" and "oraliture" bear comparison with what henry louis gates jr. in another context has studied as "signifyin'," or what houston baker has pursued in the blues as forceful variations of the vernacular^8^), but they both underline that there are conceptual as well as geographic or spatial links between the islands of the caribbean. among them, the voice is integral to the function of memory but does not answer the question "who am i?" that existential staple common to the discourse of colonialist angst (prospero's perplexity or kurtz's confusion); it does, however, inflect the transcultural "who are we?" in which the "we," although radically particularized rather than an illusory unity, recalls a historical dialogue about the cause and course of fragmented community, the diasporic disjunction and displacement wrought by the arrogance of power and the will to-silence of colonial history. brathwaite and glissant, then, speak differently, but they both know the tenor of resistance. and this is as important in lkj's jamaica as it is in barbados or martinique--the roots which lead to inglan. [7] lkj was born in chapelton, jamaica, 1952. when his mother left for england lkj soon followed, at the age of 11. they lived on the outskirts of brixton, well-known for its afro-caribbean community, where lkj experienced not only a taste of home but a new perspective on the metropolitan centre. he recalls: "i [saw] a white man sweeping the streets. all the white people i saw in jamaica drove fish tail cars and smoked cigars. so when i saw someone, a white person, actually sweeping the streets it was a bit of a revelation."^9^ so along with a profound consciousness of racism in london, the postcolonial heart of inglan, lkj quickly learned that the white man's history was also "fissured" by the history of class, a constituent feature of the doubling of diaspora, and a significant mark of lkj's political perspicacity. in general, lkj defies the assumptions that make poet and activist mutually exclusive terms. not long after leaving school lkj became involved with the black panthers and, although he had a full time job with the glc (the now defunct greater london council) he spent as much time again organizing members, attending meetings, and distributing pamphlets. when the british government found ways to break up the panther movement it did not stop lkj's involvement in black community politics. by 1976 he was an official member of the race today collective which, under the leadership of lkj's friend, darcus howe, has become a leading force in black british struggle. many of lkj's cultural initiatives, like "creation for liberation," have developed under the aegis of race today. and, for much of his career, lkj has maintained a gruelling schedule of readings in schools, universities, colleges, youth centres, community centres, and concert halls (which in part explains why his voice has remained defiantly public and sensitive to community issues). among many other cultural activities lkj has organized an international poetry reading (and produced the album of this event), presented a documentary on carifesta for bbc television called "from brixton to barbados" and narrated a series on the history of jamaican popular music for bbc radio called "from mento to lovers rock." lkj is not interested in replacing the ivory tower with an ebony one. [8] but what are the salient characteristics of the voice that lkj brings from jamaica? the voice is set to a rhythm, a beat that enunciates a conun*drum*, what glissant calls "inscrutability" as an expression of freedom of caribbean peoples. if for glissant, this rhythm is initially characterized by beguine and later by a vibrant hybrid of salsa, reggae, and jazz; and if for brathwaite what shatters the pentameter is primarily calypso; then for lkj the riddim is reggae, which invokes both his jamaican home, and the specific realities of britain's afro-caribbean communities. interestingly, the origin of the word "reggae" is largely unknown. in jamaican english it may recall %rege-rege%, a quarrel or a row, but it also has been linked to the sound of the guitar in the rhythm and to "raggedy," meaning everyday or from the people. one thing is certain, since toots hibbert, who is usually credited with coining the word, wrote "do the reggay" in 1968, reggae followed lkj to london, rather than him taking it with him.^10^ this is important because black britons do not just remember the countries of their past, they continually reinvent them as a challenge to the nationhood they now confront. and, as paul gilroy has noted, the focus of the alternative public spheres they create is musical.^11^ nation languages are sound systems. [9] if lkj's poetry deploys brathwaite's sense of "nation language" it does so as an impasse, a knot that cannot simply be untied by more generally accepted definitions of national selfhood. the doubling of diaspora requires a supplementary (simultaneous rather than sequential) notion of such language to acknowledge both the geographic displacement and that, to borrow a popular phrase, "the empire strikes back." this would be a "version" of "dissemination," in homi bhabha's terms, "the moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering."^12^ again, the version is characterized by sound, the community is gathered in an aural mix which, because it is sound (and not whole) is in continual flux: there are versions of versions. the version supplements both the nation *and* dissemination because, although the latter is characterized by a theory of performativity, it elides the "inscription" of the voice in the other narration of nation. for once, the perquisites of deconstruction would seem to mitigate against the realities of a specific diasporic culture even as it aptly describes the decentering and irreducible processes at work. for the sake of argument, let us say (in a creolized version of marx's eleventh thesis) that philosophers have grafted the world, the point here is to dub it. [10] of course, the heritage of sound serves another national function. indeed, lkj's voice is at once a critique of the imagined community of "britishness" resplendent in the lamentable wave of authoritarian populism now known as thatcherism^13^ (thatcher herself is described by lkj as the "wicked wan"^14^). that nation, despite its recalcitrant xenophobia, is all but dead. the problem, of course, is that this older paradigm of national purity (the little englander mentality) has, in its death throes, created a new culture of white anomie which, though assured of failure, seriously disables a more edifying vision of human community. and the african-caribbean peoples of britain, like their post-colonial asian counterparts, are caught up in the manichean logic of exclusion/inclusion that drives the hegemonic ethnos and its attendant phantasms. from new cross to brixton, from toxteth to moss side, from southall to notting hill (a geography not of violence, but resistance and affirmation), this is what i want to critique as the culture and condition of dread. dread, here, has several meanings that have to be thought simultaneously and in collision for lkj's voice and voicing to be understood. dread has its roots (!) in jamaican rastafari, the religious cultural movement, and, in that declension, describes a communal realization: "the awesome, fearful confrontation of a people with a primordial but historically denied racial selfhood."^15^ more generally, it connotes a sense of crisis ("dread in a babylon"), whether political or cultural, of apocalyptic nature in which social contradictions cannot be answered accept by an intense destabilization of the "order of things." and, of course, there is dread as danger, because every stand against injustice invites retribution from those who see inequity as a niggling but necessary byproduct of their barbarism. then there is dread as defiance: maggi tatcha on di go wid a racist show but a she haffi go kaw, rite now, african asian west indian an' black british stan firm inna inglan inna disya time yah. far noh mattah wat dey say, come wat may, we are here to stay inna inglan, inn disya time yah.... (lkj "it dread inna inglan"^16^) [11] this marks a significant difference with lkj's caribbean counterparts, for there is no ideology of return in lkj's view. brathwaite, for one, went back to africa, to ghana, to rediscover his roots, then crossed the atlantic once more to elaborate on his experiences. and, as is well known, jamaican rastafari includes a roots thematic specifically focused on ethiopia as the domain of haile selassie, the reincarnation of jah (and therefore ethiopia is viewed as a promised land). even when fronting rasta love, the band he named, lkj never felt comfortable with this view: "i couldn't identify with this selassie thing. i just couldn't identify with that at all."^17^ so even though rasta provides an oppositional politics for lkj (in its various challenges to ideologies of racial subordination and, indeed, capitalism), the deployment of dread is quite specific in his work, and is overdetermined by inglan's situation. dis is di age af reality but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy dis is di age of science an' teknalagy but some a wi a check fi antiquity w'en we can't face reality wi leggo wi clarity ("reality poem," lkj)^18^ in a way, this is closer to glissant's notion of decentered caribbeanness, a condition much more suspicious of prelapsarian origins as a solution to psychological dislocation. when glissant left martinique, it was for paris on a scholarship. the relocation of afro-caribbeans to england after the second world war was not primarily a function of educational opportunities (although these cannot be discounted), but an economic decision fostered by the machinations of a british government newly cognizant of its labor shortages. dread manifests itself in many ways in lkj's poetry but in general it is used to describe the material conditions of black britain, or inglan, an existence suppressed or marginalized in the consciousness of england, or white authority. [12] dread is underlined by dub. dub sharpens the defiance by writing over the oed, by spelling the sounds of actual english usage in the anglophone african/caribbean community. dub itself describes the paradox of the poet's voice, for dub means both the presence and the absence of jamaican speech rhythms. again, a confrontation with deconstruction's primary reflex might seem in order (the word as the presence of an absent voice) but that only partially explains the paradox at issue. dub is instrumental reggae, reggae with the lead vocal track removed and replaced (by a sound engineer) with various sound effects (echoes, reverberation, loops, vocal bites, etc.). dub reggae's very emphasis on production, on mixing, is itself a challenge to the ideology of the artist as performer or originator (and is sometimes snubbed by reggae artists precisely because it threatens or subverts their copy-rights). this feature emerges in many other forms of popular music (for instance, rap, techno-punk, and rave), which all sample each other with wild abandon, but often as much with the voice track as without. but if dub reggae mixes out the vocals, dub poetry lays down the voice as an instrument within the reggae beat; indeed, the voice is so closely allied with this beat that if you remove the reggae instrumentation you can still hear its sound in the voice of the poem. dub means simultaneously instruments without voices and voices without instruments. this neat chiasmus is not a tribute to the wily signifier so much as a product of dread identity, subaltern subjectivity as sound, silence, and warning. dub is underlined by dread. [13] the paradox of dub as it signifies dread is a function of its multi-levelled etymology. obviously, the lingo of the sound engineer is paramount, although this was formerly associated with the manipulation of sound and voice tracks in cinematic production or the copying of film onto film. copying is important, both as a productive capacity and as a logic of repetition. because of the question of property rights, dubbing is tantamount to repetition as sedition (dub has also meant "to forge keys" as well as "to lock up"; and "to invest with a dignity" as well as "to smear with grease" in two other instances of self-deconstruction). coincidentally, perhaps, dub has an onomatopoeic function, specifically in "dub" and "dub-a-dub," the sound of a beating drum. as lkj recalls in "reggae sounds," the drum is integral to the beat: "thunda from a bass drum sounding/ lightning from a trumpet and a organ/ bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up/ team-up with drums for a deep doun searching."^19^ i will say more about the bass in due course, but the point here is to emphasize dub's undecidability and its technical associations which are both highly evocative of its cultural politics. the latter, ultimately, is what dread is all about. [14] although dub poetry is now associated with a number of poets (oku onuora, mikey smith, mutubaruka, brian meeks, breeze, anita stewart, etc.) it is almost synonymous with lkj. indeed, he claims to have coined the term in the early seventies.^20^ for lkj, dub poetry should be distinguished from dub lyricism, the latter being the process by which deejays lay down their own voice track over reggae (he has in mind big youth, u-roy, i-roy)--we know this more commonly as "talk-over" or "toasting."^21^ dub lyricism is the voice at its most spontaneous for (with the original voice track removed) the deejay can directly involve his or her audience through call and response methods, or by using current events to recontextualize the dread. toasting, then, is a special skill tuned in to the tenor of the live event which in the seventies and early eighties was epitomized by the one thousand watt-plus sound system discos (either those of the clubs, or the more underground roving systems set up in abandoned houses or warehouses or sometimes just in the street until the police or authorities found a way to pull the plug). obviously, there is some overlap in lkj's work: "it dread inna inglan" on the album _dread beat and blood_ begins with call and response and features a crowd chanting "free george lindo" (the reference is to a wrongful arrest case in bradford). also, the fact that lkj himself has released dub versions of his dub poetry (most conspicuously, the album _lkj in dub_) and thereby allows his music to be "talked over" would seem to make the practical separation of dub poetry from dub lyricism problematic. the main difference, however, is that dub poetry privileges the word over the music, or else incorporates the rhythm of the instruments into its enunciation. for lkj in particular, the poetry should outlast its musical accompaniment or affiliation. this is an oddly purist and anti-populist stance but it has several explanations. [15] the first is that lkj considers himself a poet, and not a reggae artist. clearly, he has learned much from reggae and the musical traditions on which it is based (like mento, ska, rude-boy, and rock-steady) but he does not believe that reggae can exhaust the possibilities of poetry in african/caribbean cultural expression. indeed, in a scathing review of bob marley in 1975 lkj suggests that it is reggae music's commercialization which underlines the danger in the poet becoming overly dependent on it. he cites the example of marley being "found" by island records' chris blackwell (referred to as the "descendant of slave masters") and promoted as a "rasta rebel" to boost lagging record sales. the irony is obvious: the "image" is derived from rastafarianism and rebellion, which are rooted in the historical experience of the oppressed of jamaica. it then becomes an instrument of capital to sell marley and his music, thereby negating the power which is the cultural manifestation of this historical experience. so though marley is singing about "roots" and "natty," his fans know not. neither do they understand the meaning or the feeling of dread. and there is really no dread in marley's music. the dread has been replaced by the howling rock guitar and the funky rhythm and what we get is the enigma of "roots" and rock.^22^ [16] one wonders what lkj would have to say about shabba ranks and other notables of ragga (a hybridization of rap and reggae) or dancehall stylee? dread, here, seems to contain its own fear, in this case connected to the rock industry's economic and race relations: in short, the twin demons of sell-out and cross-over. for lkj, commercial dread is either dreck or simply a contradiction in terms: it is reggae shorn of its sense of crisis, of its political edge. one could argue that marley contradicts lkj's case, but lkj's musical career itself proves that the rock industry is not quite the monolothic capitalist entity that he makes it out to be. indeed, lkj's break into pop occurred a couple of years later in his relationship with virgin records. initially, he wrote biographies to accompany virgin's emerging list of reggae artists but eventually he got a chance to cut a record of his poems (drawn principally from the _dread beat and blood_ collection) with a reggae backing (lkj had been doing this since 1973 with his band rasta love, but without a recording contract). while it was mike oldfield rather than reggae that catapulted virgin towards multinational goliath status, lkj's point about capital remains pertinent: the corporate deployment of reggae directly supports those it putatively opposes. taking poetry seriously simultaneously distances the white-dominated media conglomerates for which multiculturalism means capital diversity, while it also assures that the poetry itself can only have a local effect. with the market for printed poetry being so small, the dub poet must rely on live performance as the focus for the message, but for lkj this means reading principally without the reggae band. since his "farewell performance" in december, 1985 in camden, lkj has made less band-backed appearances, although the release of a new music collection _tings an times_ in 1991 underlines that his concert farewell did not end his desire to produce reggae albums. yet if economic exigency can be seen to compromise lkj's poetic principles the general rule remains that he is suspicious of reggae more because of the industry in which it is entwined than its tendency to demote the voice and the dread it embodies. [17] connecting this notion of voicing dread and making history suggests an important way of understanding the construction of the subaltern subject. dub has its own code of othering which distances and/or alienates official discourse while addressing the real foundations of the black community (the economic plight of postcolonialism, the racism of neo-colonialism, etc.). that the subaltern subject is an active political subject is crucial to lkj's history of/in the voice, which provides a significant documentary record of recent race relations in britain. "new cross massakhah," for instance, is not just a harrowing description of the arson murder of at least thirteen young blacks attending a birthday party in south london in 1981, but also a story of community outrage, mobilisation, and protest. the race today collective organized a mass demonstration to call attention both to the burgeoning violence against blacks and to the woeful misrepresentation of the massacre in the british press.^23^ for the poem, the point of crisis is also the point of memory. the narrator of the poem recalls the party as a celebration of community culture ("di dubbin/ an di rubbin/ an di rackin to di riddim") and the violence and subsequent hypocrisy as an affront to the same, while constantly appealing to the community's sense of this crisis ("yu noh remembah"). in particular, the poem draws a distinction between this community identity and the infamous "public" which is seen to be much too malleable before the police, the press, and the government's "official story." the rhythm of the story switches between the liveliness of the party and the heavier bass beat of the aftermath and this itself is a measure of dread. but the beat underscores the resistance polemic that is the content of the poem ("wi refuse fi surrendah/ to dem ugly inuendoh"). as with many of lkj's poems, the dread emerges in the difference between the "england" of the dominant public sphere and the "inglan" of a historically specific english community. although the outrage over new cross was not the only cause, the riots across england in 1981 were a product of this glaring cultural, social, and political discrepancy. in this sense, the dub poet does not describe the crisis but articulates it as a function of contemporary community relations (in jamaica dub serves a similar agonistic purpose). the aesthetics of dub poetry are not founded on description but praxis and the "wi" of its community appeal. [18] "new cross massakhah," (like lkj's "di great insohreckshan" about the riots of '81, and "sonny's lettah" about the notorious "sus" law) evokes a poignant aesthetic of song and solidarity--the "other" talks back, and dialogically. by this i mean to invoke bakhtin's sense of the utterance being authored by the other.^24^ since the addressor anticipates audience response, the other voice is embedded in the speaker's text. each word is structured by the relationship between speaker and listener and the immediate conditions in which that "exchange" takes place. as we know, bakhtin tended to hypostatize the novel as form, but there is good reason to dialogize dialogics through and beyond that domain. thus, if the subaltern does not speak, as such, it is only within the restrictive logics and codes of the dominant discourse. this raises the paradox of dub once more, for there the subaltern is not represented but is heard. on the one hand, the social conditions dub critiques engage a particular community and context; on the other, the alienating english of dub distances the normative and normalizing tones of the linguistic orthodoxy ("queen's english" or "bbc english," for instance). [19] but the language of dub also calls attention to the racial differences that stratify britain's working classes. this, of course, has been the explicit subject of several reggae talk-over hits, the most famous of which is smiley culture's "cockney translation." both gilroy and hebdige have provided cogent analyses of this brilliant paean to multiple voicing, but smiley was not the first to highlight the differences within, in this case, working-class london. cockney meets %patois% in lkj's 1979 poem "fite dem back" which ventriloquizes london's white working class as a harbinger of racist attitudes. the clash of language is also a struggle of race relations. the first verse of "fite dem back" begins with a "version" of cockney: "we gonna smash their brains in/ cause they ain't got nofink in 'em."^25^ the second verse replies to this national front mentality with "some a dem say dem a niggah haytah" and continues, "fashist an di attack/ noh baddah worry 'bout dat/ fashist an di attack/ wi wi' fite dem back." the simplified sociology of "us" and "them" ("wi" and "dem") is, as i've argued elsewhere, not a function of crass dichotomous thinking, but a register of strategic opposition.^26^ not all cockneys are fascists, but "dem" who are must be challenged. the value of bakhtin's theory of the utterance and, indeed, brathwaite's notion of nation language, is that both provide models for understanding community address at the macroand micro social levels. and the artist, in both cases, must have a highly developed sense of public voice and responsibility, or what bakhtin calls "answerability." [20] dub emphasizes what constitutes a voice in social discourse.^27^ mikey smith, whose brutal murder in 1983 cut short the career of jamaica's premier dub poet, always wrote his poems, but the scripts do little justice to the instrumentation of his voice in live performance. brathwaite comments that smith "published" his poetry at public poetry readings, and notes that transcription of smith's voice is especially difficult when he includes_ noise_, such as an imitation of a motorbike, to extend syllables at key moments (i will return to noise in due course). the word "woe" in his poem, "me cyaan believe it" on the album version is a scream of almost four seconds in length, yet in his poetry collection, _it a come_, it is rendered as "woeeeeeeee" which, while emphatic, does not convey the effect. interestingly, at a recent conference in new york honoring brathwaite, lkj recited smith's poem from memory and followed the rhythm and stress of the album version almost exactly. clearly, lkj was dependent on smith's oraliture and his own experience of smith recitations for his performance (the vocal clues are not sufficient in the written text). this underlines a paradoxical degree of unrepeatability and untranslatability in dub poetry that resists its reproduction as writing. the coding of dub is in tune with the live event and the community in which that event occurs.^28^ bakhtin's term "eventness" (%sobytiinost'%) describes this material specificity, a moment that constrains abstract transcription. although bakhtin has in mind an "act" rather than a speech act, he believes such activity should be linked to the process of art, art as an event of being rather than an object of "purely theoretical cognition."^29^ again, the key to the event is the co authoring of the addressee, a sympathetic "co-experiencing" certainly more possible in an afro-caribbean community than, for instance, the halls of westminster or scotland yard in their current forms. what makes for identification in one context might make for alienation and hostility in another. the dub poet is sensitive to the "eventness" of dub poetry and knows that one community's dread is another community's fear. lkj, then, does not "give voice to the struggle" so much as explore how the voice is structured from within by struggle as a material context, both as social oppression and as linguistic violence. [21] thus, bakhtin's assertion that cultural voice always exceeds the personal, the individual, has a particular resonance in the dub poet's community address--and for black britain at present, this voice is constructed at the margin where it (dialogically) confounds the centripetal logic of a "little englander" mentality. in addition to bakhtin's dialogism, such a reading picks up on homi bhabha's notion of "dissemination" as a liminality of cultural identity, but double-voicing, in principle, is also highly evocative of dub's doubling of english. this doubling forms a coda to gates's elaboration of the "talking book" in african vernacular traditions because here we have not just texts talking to one another in their revoicing of the history of black struggles but an emphasis on speech %qua% speech as a (dis)figuring of moribund nationalist ideology. dub poetry would seem to be a rather obvious "speakerly text," but it is my contention that it is better heard as a textualizing voice. the four beat bass rhythm of reggae (with its stress on beats two and four) might carry this voice, but what articulates it as such is the ambivalent subjectivity of dread. this is not a jargon of authenticity but an intimation of crisis in excess of its putative speaker. voice, then, instantiates dread in two ways, the first of which is characterized by kobena mercer in his bakhtinian model of black british aesthetics: at a micro-level, the textual work of creolizing appropriation activated in new forms of black cultural practice awakens the thought that such strategies of disarticulation and rearticulation may be capable of transforming the 'democratic imaginary' at a macro level by 'othering' inherited discourses of english identity.^30^ [22] the second instantiation, which is not presence but present danger, is (like mikey smith's "woe") to make the voice noisy; that is, to employ sound as syntax, as syncopation, as "sonority contrasts" (brathwaite), and as instrumentation. this is the measure of dread beat, for it picks away at authority's rationalism (thatcher's and now major's monotonous "common sense"). dread beat interrogates and interpolates this often harmful status quo by not being quiet. as lkj notes, "to us, who were of necessary birth, for the earth's hard and thankless toil, silence 'as no meaning" ("two sides of silence"). while african american rap has provided an exhortation to "bring the noise," dub poetry has been doing this for quite some time and belongs to the same tradition of affective sound. but lkj's move beyond silence suggests a doubling or troubling of identity for, as jacques attali has pointed out, what noise is to chaos, music is to community. dub fashions both: the noise destabilizes the false ontology of britishness (an oxymoronic discordant harmony) while the dread riddim provides a musical gloss on the fractured and tenuous realities of the diasporic subject. [23] i have been trying to suggest how the voice of dub poetry instantiates a version of making history: the voice, here, as an active component of community identity. in the main, reggae has provided dub with its dread riddim but, as we have noted, lkj believes that dub is not reducible to reggae even if it owes it a rhythmic allegiance. as with most "sound" protest, dub's doubling provides a subaltern community with a medium for resistance and active intervention in the political arena. while this might seem to confine dub poetry to the margins as subculture, this does not mean cultural subservience. in fact, i believe it is closer to what deleuze and guattari have examined as the deterritorializations of "minor literature," but in this case as a textualizing voice.^31^ lkj's "bass culture" is typical of the (sub)cultural (sub)version of dub. obviously, the title puns on bass as being both the instrument of the beat and as being somehow obnoxious or repulsive. who finds the bass base goes to the heart of the politics of culture that dub foregrounds. on the face of it, "bass culture" exudes all the major features discussed so far: the thumping beat of bass is its subject matter, here tied to the beating of the heart but also to brathwaite's point about the rhythm of the storm; it is a poem about dread, both as threat and as cultural identity ("dread people"); the violence it registers has everything to do with the tropical storm it imitates and the history of oppression it records and from which it learns; the voice is both musical as it follows the bass line, and noisy, as it makes a thunder crack ("scatta-matta-shatta-shack") a slogan of defiance; the voice is specific about its own musical moment ("an di beat will shiff/as di culture altah/when oppression scatta") which will pass according to a particular historical situation; in acknowledging the power of the voice (partially indicated in the dedication to mr.talk-over, "big yout") it makes no claims as to its originality but instead emphasizes a shared sense of "latent powa" as a bloodline of history, a "muzik of blood"; and the dread is a threat because it challenges the norm ("the false fold") in its language, its riddim, and, of course, in its title. but there is also an ambivalence of context in "bass culture" that allows dread to signify simultaneously in two moments of identity. the first is the colonial condition in which dread is the "latent powa" that eventually comes "burstin outta slave shackle/ look ya! boun fi harm di wicked." the second moment, however, is the dread present where this same latency must be utilized to "scatta" oppression within postcoloniality. dread keeps the "culture pulsin" with bass riddim as long as it is "bad out dey"--a situation that did not necessarily end with the independence of jamaica or the migration of some of its population to britain. dread, then, becomes a conceptual as well as experiential link in the story of afro-caribbeans. thus, when i suggest that dub identity is about being-in-between this does not mean that the community voiced by lkj has not arrived in england (we have already noted that it "stan firm inna inglan") but that arrival in itself does not end the legacy of racism that structures england's national selfhood. the dread beat still has that to beat. [24] but we are left with a central question: does the voice make history or simply record it? the answer lies in the ambiguity of "telling history." history is that which has disallowed the subaltern voice, and yet talking history permits a trenchant sense of both a subject without a voice and a voice without a subject. that which makes history telling depends upon the specific positions of speaker and listener which are in excess of individuality. lkj is, therefore, a vessel of history--he carries the voice rather than being coterminous with it. what makes history telling is not the individuation of the voice, as the griots well know, but the process in which the story keeps getting told. if the little englander subject makes the voice self present with the speaker, then dub identity answers by making history a function of the voice. in this sense, you know when lkj is making history, because the community voice is telling it. aime cesaire once pointed out a massive contradiction in european identity in just three words, "colonization and civilization?" the questions are different now (for instance, racism and multiculturalism?) but lkj gives voice to current crises in black britain by historicizing them. while i have only begun to detail the importance of this history i hope the version here at least underlines that there is a history at stake and a role for the poet in speaking it, in something other than pentameters, and somewhere other than overseas. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ a shorter "version" of this essay was first given at the mla conference in new york, december 1992. the talk was backed with dub reggae, and the intonation of each sentence picked up on that bass beat. the form of the presentation, therefore, attempted to demonstrate the instrumentation of voice in dub poetry. this, of course, included an example of lkj's performance--the poem i will discuss later, "bass culture." the present "re-mix" pushes against the impossibility of reproducing that event even as it admits the importance of this form of irreducibility. it is itself a dub version, the voiceless b-side of a reggae record--toned down, of course! a longer version will follow. for more on versions, see dick hebdige, _cut 'n' mix_ (london: comedia, 1987). hebdige's book exemplifies the ability to hear and read the riddim crucial to dread. ^2^ i refer here to brathwaite's provocative essay, "history of the voice" first presented at _carifesta_ 76 in jamaica and subsequently expanded and revised as a lecture given at harvard university, august 1979. the full text with bibliography has been published as edward kamau brathwaite, _history of the voice_ (london: new beacon books, 1984). my efforts here are strongly influenced by brathwaite's emphasis on orality in his essay (his talk, like mine, has an audio track), although i will also focus on the difficulties of representation in his concept of the "nation language." ^3^ see edouard glissant, _caribbean discourse_ (charlottesville: university of virginia press, 1992): 77. both glissant's and brathwaite's notion of history challenge the totalizing paradigms of western history (particularly the hegelian model). the status of the voice in relation to writing, however, is perceived somewhat differently as we will see. glissant has a deconstructor's flair for writing that remains suspicious of speech even as he wants to instantiate a "scriptible" voice. brathwaite, however, is much more sanguine about the scriptability of the voice in its a radical distancing of the colonial word. "dread" emerges in the tension between these polemics. ^4^ the dilemma of being in between, or crossing is explored in kamau brathwaite's _middle passages_ (newcastle: bloodaxe, 1992), a brilliant collection of poems that fracture english, the page, and any sense of black diaspora as a unitary experience of dislocation. for more on the "black atlantic" model, see paul gilroy, "cultural studies and ethnic absolutism" in lawrence grossberg, cary nelson, and paula treichler, eds., _cultural studies_ (london: routledge, 1992): 187-198. ^5^ brathwaite: 10. ^6^ see benedict anderson, _imagined communities_ (london: verso, 1983). anderson's thesis is linked to a simultaneous temporality called "meanwhile" which gives the form of the nation its assumed integrity. as bhabha has pointed out, this works very well for realist models of representation, but overlooks (or, for our purposes, stutters) the liminality of cultural identity: the "imperceptible" and the unutterable remains just that. lkj, for one, has attempted to speak what he calls this "silent space." ^7^ see glissant: 94-95. my point in this diversion is to suggest that without an adequate knowledge of the deformations of the caribbean nation one cannot begin to understand the voice of dread in the metropolitan "center." ^8^ see henry louis gates jr. _the signifying monkey_ (new york: oxford university press, 1988); and, houston baker jr., _blues, ideology, and afro-american literature_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1984). ^9^ see mervyn morris, "interview with linton kwesi johnson" _jamaica journal_, 20:1 (feb/april 1987): 17-26. most of this interview was conducted in 1982, but it was subsequently updated in 1986. as such, it provides an important overview of lkj's upbringing and intellectual/political development. ^10^ hebdige points out that toots might have had the term, but the rhythm had appeared on earlier recordings, principally, lee "scratch" perry's production, "people funny boy." perry would go on to produce a number of groups, including the wailers and the upsetters. see hebdige: 75. ^11^ like many other writers (including baker and hebdige), gilroy connects the black diaspora through the strong musical links between africa and the caribbean, north america, and western europe. gilroy's study breaks new ground in several ways, however, particularly in detailing the complex alliances and oppositions that develop in black britain. the nexus of race and class is vital in this regard, as is his analysis of the production and institutionalization of racism in and outside government. ^12^ see homi bhabha, "dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the nation" in homi bhabha, ed., _nation and narration_ (london: routledge, 1990): 291-322. interestingly, this concept describes a temporality that distances, so to speak, from within, the history of western national identity. but, for lkj, i would argue, this principle itself needs to be qualified in light of the double diaspora, in terms of spatiality and tonality (the focus, if not the function, of the brathwaite/glissant metacritiques). ^13^ see stuart hall's perceptive analysis of this phenomenon in his _the hard road to renewal_ (london: verso, 1988). it is important to maintain the sense that, although thatcher embodies thatcherism, its political formation and deformation preand post-dates her terms as prime minister. ^14^ see/hear, linton kwesi johnson, "di great insohreckshan" in linton kwesi johnson, _tings an times_ (newcastle: bloodaxe, 1991): 43-44; and "di great insohreckshan" on linton kwesi johnson, _making history_ (mango: mlps9770, 1984). ^15^ see joseph owens, _dread: the rastafarians of jamaica_ (london: heinemann educational books, 1982): 3. ^16^ see/hear "it dread inna inglan," in linton kwesi johnson, _inglan is a bitch_ (london: race today, 1980): 14-15; and "it dread inna inglan" on linton kwesi johnson, _dread beat an' blood_ (virgin: flc9009 [tape], 1990). the latter is a reissue of the 1977 album of the same name. ^17^ see the morris interview: 19. ^18^ see hear "reality poem" in lkj, _tings an times_ (newcastle: bloodaxe books, 1991): 30-31; and lkj, _forces of victory_ (mango: mlps9566, 1979). ^19^ linton kwesi johnson, _tings an times_: 18. ^20^ the earliest reference in his work i can find is an essay from 1976. see "jamaican rebel music," _race and class_, 17:4 (1976): 397-412. even so, this still contradicts stewart brown's contention that the term was first used by oku onuora in 1979. see "dub poetry: selling out" _poetry wales_, 22:2 (1987): 51-54. there are references in the music press as early as 1974 but these are usually tied to "talk-over" rather than lkj's sense of dub _as_ poetry. ^21^ for more on talk-over and toasting see hebdige, especially chapters 10 and 11. given lkj's distinction, it would seem rap is closer to dub-lyricism than dub-poetry because the latter can function as its own instrumentation. ^22^ see linton kwesi johnson, "roots and rock" _race today_, 7:10 (october 1975)): 237-238. ^23^ paul gilroy provides a pertinent analysis of the massacre and its aftermath in his _"there ain't no black in the union jack"_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1987), chapter three. see also, the special issue of _race and class_, "rebellion and repression," 23:2/3 (autumn/winter 1981/82). ^24^ the implications of bakhtin's theory of the utterance for subaltern studies are discussed in my _dialogics of the oppressed_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993), especially the preface and chapter one. the relevant bakhtinian texts are: v.n.volosinov, _marxism and the philosophy of language_, trans. ladislav matejka and i.r.titunik (new york: seminar press, 1973); mikhail bakhtin, _problems in dostoevsky's poetics_, trans. caryl emerson (minneapolis: university of minnesota press); _the dialogic imagination_, ed. michael holquist, trans. caryl emerson and michael holquist (austin: university of texas press, 1981); _speech genres_, trans. vern mcgee, (austin: university of texas press, 1986); and _art and answerability_, ed. michael holquist and vadim liapunov, trans. vadim liapunov (austin: university of texas press, 1990). in many ways, dub is a "version" of bakhtin's discourse of the streets which he reads in the organized heteroglossia of the novel. ^25^ see/hear "fite dem back" in _inglan is a bitch_ (london: race today, 1980): 20; and on _forces of victory_ (mango: mlps 9566, 1979). the transliteration of the sound, on this occasion, does not do justice to the effect in the song: "nofink" is actually "nuffink" on the album and is far more evocative of an east end accent. as an eastender, i appreciate this verisimilitude. ^26^ see peter hitchcock, _working-class fiction in theory and practice_ (ann arbor: umi, 1989). ^27^ this is a constituent feature of what brathwaite calls "sound poetry." legendary among these are mighty sparrow, miss lou, and bongo jerry. the latter's poem, "mabrak," with its invocation of a "black electric storm" and its plea to "recall and recollect black speech" does not go unnoticed in lkj's poetry. see brathwaite: 25-48. ^28^ lkj describes this function thus: the kind of thing that i write and the way i say it is as a result of the tension between jamaican creole and jamaican english and between those and english english. and all that, really, is the consequence of having been brought up in a colonial society, and then coming over here to live and go to school in england, soon afterwards. the tension builds up. you can see it in the writing. you can hear it. and something else: my poems may look sort of flat on the page. well, that is because they're actually oral poems, as such. they were definitely written to be read aloud, in the community. [quoted in andrew salkey's introduction to linton kwesi johnson, _dread beat and blood_ (london: bogle-l'ouverture, 1975): 8]. ^29^ see mikhail bakhtin, _art and answerability_, ed. michael holquist and vadim liapunov, trans. vadim liapunov (austin: university of texas press, 1990): 189. see also, the discussion of eventness in bakhtin's work by gary saul morson and caryl emerson in their introduction to gary saul morson and caryl emerson, eds., _rethinking bakhtin_ (evanston: northwestern university press, 1989). ^30^ see kobena mercer, "diaspora culture and the dialogic imagination: the aesthetics of black independent film" in mbye b.cham and claire andrade-watkins, eds., _blackframes: critical perspectives on black independent cinema_ (cambridge: mit press, 1988): 59. mercer's approach to black british film, particularly in its creative use of the volosinov/bakhtin text on the "ideological sign," complements my interest here in the dialogic voice of dub poetry. for an excellent analysis of contemporary british cultural politics see also, kobena mercer, "welcome to the jungle: identity and diversity in postmodern politics" in jonathan rutherford, ed., _identity_ (london: lawrence and wishart, 1990): 43-71. ^31^ see gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _kafka: toward a minor literature_, trans. dana polan (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986). this will be developed in a subsequent "version." for an application of "minor literature" to postcolonial discourse see paget henry and paul buhle, "caliban as deconstructionist: c.l.r.james and post-colonial discourse" in paget henry and paul buhle, eds. _c.l.r.james's caribbean_ (durham: duke university press, 1992): 111-142. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------sharpless, 'clockwork education: the persistence of the arnoldian ideal', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-sharpless-clockwork.txt archive pmc-list, file sharples.594. part 1/1, total size 42131 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- clockwork education: the persistence of the arnoldian ideal by geoffrey sharpless department of english university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by geoffrey sharpless, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. for boys follow one another in herds like sheep, for good or evil; they hate thinking and rarely have any settled principles. . . . it is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the school either a noble institution for the training of christian englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in london streets, or anything between these two extremes. --_tom brown's school-days_, 151 "what's it going to be then, eh?" --_a clockwork orange_, 1 [1] critics conventionally position burgess's _a clockwork orange_ within the sub-genre of futuristic dystopias without considering its nostalgia for a version of masculinity best understood as typical of the arnoldian public school. this misprision is natural, since the russianized argot and dionysian "ultra-violence" of alex the droog do not immediately evoke _tom brown's school-days_--or any other portrait of the public school boy. nonetheless, juxtaposing these narratives, which are separated by more than a hundred years, throws important illumination on _a clockwork orange_, and redirects critical attention to the persistence of arnoldian masculinity in twentieth-century british literature. [2] "arnold's rugby" achieved such astonishing conceptual closure over elite education that it must be considered a unique chapter in the history of western culture. rightly or wrongly, thomas arnold is usually credited with four innovations in pedagogical praxis: the introduction of competitive sports, uniform dress, and science in the curriculum, and an emphasis in schools on "moral scrutiny" or "character." thomas hughes emphasizes this last feature, writing in _tom brown's school-days_, "in no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a public school" (_tbs_, 151). whether rugby school ever existed as portrayed by hughes, or any of his adherents, or even whether thomas arnold would have considered it faithfully arnoldian is moot. the artistic, intellectual, legislative, commercial, and martial activity of its broad alliance of graduates--the ideal schoolboys of "arnold's rugby"--became an unsurpassed tool by which to produce and measure masculinity and culture, as well as a means to govern their mutuality. this class of public school males succeeded, for generations, in representing its interests as the general interest in britain and around the world--thus fulfilling a marxian prescription for political dominance (marx, 53). [3] burgess's critics might have been more alert to alex's matriculation in an arnoldian program had they considered more carefully _time for a tiger_, the first piece of burgess's malayan trilogy. this novel, about the difficulty of exporting rugby-like schools to the minions in britain's empire, depicts an educator who abandons the arnoldian ideal, and is absorbed by the exotic country he goes to convert. this might itself have been sufficient to establish that burgess had an overt interest in public school pedagogy. the hero of _a clockwork orange_, however, is an unequivocal practitioner; even his resistance is characteristic. indeed, alex's remarkable fraternity with the arnoldian product suggests a complete triumph for the latter's pedagogy. this similarity holds even for the most optimistic and influential version of the public schoolboy, tom brown, whose story "made the modern public school" (mack & armytage, 100). [4] this pairing of tom and alex would be unusual if only because alex seems to be one of the most evil representations of boyhood ever forwarded popularly and tom--for another era--one of the most virtuous. as coleridge observed, however, opposites are but farthest apart of the same kind--and, rather than incommensurate, prove to be the two sides of the same coin. reading alex and tom as twins, it does not take long to discover even in hughes's happy fantasy of rugby that his arnoldian telos of self-control, heterosexual love, moderation, and upright morality is interpenetrated with perversity, pederasty, a fetishization of style, machiavellian management training, an interest in hand-to-hand combat and blood-letting, and, ultimately, a conviction that adult heterosexual manliness smacks of death. [5] forgetting the debt that modern british versions of masculinity owe to arnoldian culture has led to the consistent claim that _a clockwork orange_ indicates a terrifying rupture in history. "there is something about the novel so frightening that it demanded a new language," observes petix (bloom, 88). in this view, burgess's jeremiad about the end of civilization is redeemed by its concomitant invitation to wage war on what devitis calls britain's "socialized nightmare" (devitis, 106). droogery then becomes a reasonable response to the mediocritized, globalized, televisionized welfare state, where all traditional british values have been abrogated and the heroic individual exiled to the streets, as hughes feared. hugh kenner, for example, reflecting on a street brawl he recently witnessed in london, seizes on the novel's popularity as itself proof that british society has absorbed the apocalyptic "ultra-violence" of burgess's vision (kenner, 242). thus the true shock of the novel is its demonstration that a new man is already here; like pogo's herald, we have met the enemy and he is us. put more formally, _a clockwork orange_ compels not because it transgresses, but, like most dystopias, because its image of the future is shockingly familiar. [6] burgess's own comments on _a clockwork orange_ suggest the size and subtlety of the arnoldian shadow cast over him. a prolific writer and interview-giver, he can be found struggling with the text's incongruities. on one hand, he reinforces its anarchistic %non serviam%. in his revealing essay, "clockwork marmalade," burgess pairs his work with the dystopic _1984_, and expresses his hope that _a clockwork orange_ "takes its place as one of those salutary literary warnings . . . against flabbiness, sloppy thinking and overmuch trust in the state." (bloom, 129). similarly, he warned in a 1973 interview in the _paris review_ that "governments are what i try to ignore. all governments are evil" (aggeler, 49). [7] on the other hand, that salutation to anarchy stands alongside his professed embarrassment over the book's "moral simplicity." burgess was ahead of his critics in complaining that the book--rather than brilliantly occupying a barely-imaginable, anarchic, nietzschean world beyond good and evil--is, if anything, too moralistic and simplistic. the point of the novel, according to burgess and critics eager to echo his "manichean philosophy," is "the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice." burgess sees the novel as "being too didactic to be artistic" and as flawed because its message about the necessity of moral choice "stick[s] out like a sore thumb" (_aco_, x). [8] burgess's inability to decide whether the novel is anarchistic or moralistic has appeared not only in his un joycean interventions in the novel's exegesis, but in the publication of different versions of the text. as first issued, the novel had twenty chapters; conceived and written, the novel had twenty-one chapters, that number standing, in what burgess called his "arithmology," for the age of adulthood. in most readings the excluded twenty first chapter is taken to address precisely the question of the story's final moral position, as expressed in an acceptance of adulthood. [9] in the first seven chapters, alex and his droogs are in the raptures of a criminal adolescence; the next seven chapters follow alex's two years in prison where he murders a cell-mate, snitches on his fellows, and jumps at a chance at early release, not realizing that he is to undergo a personality-warping conditioning. in the final third of the book, alex is unable to commit violence. his former victims repay him by beating him repeatedly. burgess leaves alex to be tortured to death by music, a stimulus designed to sicken him. deranged, alex leaps from a window to kill himself, but does not "snuff it." he wakes up in a government hospital, unprogrammed, and announces he is ready to return to his ultra-violence, "carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva . . . i was cured all right" (_aco_, 179). so ends the shorter version. [10] the most recent norton edition includes the twenty first chapter. in it, alex finds himself once again sitting around with his droogs, chanting, "what's it going to be then, eh?" this mantra begins each of the three main sections, as well as appearing intermittently throughout- reminding readers that the droogs still drift in the currents of casual murderous impulse. but something has changed--something purposefully kept unclear and distinct from any feature of alex's will or choice. a biological mystery of mortality and maturation has begun to affect alex. bored and hopeless, he refuses to buy everyone drinks, reluctant to throw away his "hard-earned pretty polly" (183); then, caught carrying a photograph of a baby around, dreams of himself as "a very starry chelloveck . . . an old man, sitting by a fire" (186). an image of his future son comes to him and he waxes poetic. yes, yes yes, brothers, my son. and now i felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plot, feeling very surprised too at myself. i knew what was happening, o my brothers. i was like growing up. yes yes yes, there it was. youth must go, ah yes. but youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal . . . . being young is like being like one of these malenky machines. (_aco_, 190) the difference between these two endings underscores the philosophical conflict that structures burgess's novel. does alex's story end with chapter twenty's return to sexual perversity, demonized youth, and validation of violence? or should it end with alex's abandoning the criminal pleasures of droogery, embracing melancholy "normal" adult values, and recapitulating his own father's petit-bourgeois condition of wife, family and household? [11] while a critical claim can be heard that there is, or at least should be, a consensus that the shorter version is more interesting, each ending poses a conundrum. in neither ending is evil punished, nor is alex shown to repent or regret his atrocities. neither ending answers whether the conscious conditioning by the state is any more or less moral than the unconscious conditioning by family, economy etc. neither ending reveals if conditioning is better or worse that makes us peaceable or allows us to be violent, or if we can ever be more than merely clockwork. both endings are thoroughly and equally ambivalent about the point burgess claims the novel makes entirely too obvious--about moral choice. similarly, the point that burgess himself can be heard prefering the shorter ending, and that we should credit this %obiter%, is also dubious. burgess calls the shorter version "sensational" but "not a fair picture of human life," and then, undoubtedly savoring the irony, defends the longer version via pontius pilate's "quod scripsi scripsi" (_aco_, xi). [12] that burgess himself does not know whether he wants this text to end by celebrating the perverse pleasures of boyhood or the muted satisfactions of adult masculinity reflects the very contradiction that mobilizes tom brown. suspended between an arnoldian disdain for boys' "wickedness," and hughes's hopeful fantasy about the utopia of boyish pleasure, both _a clockwork orange_ and _tom brown's school-days_ relate the importance of resisting adulthood, and retaining the pleasures of remaining in a timeless, childish perversity. both versions of _aco_ and _tbs_ are significantly structured by their concern, as matthew arnold put it, that "faith in machinery is . . . our besetting danger" (_culture and anarchy_, 10). both texts are deeply--almost furiously--nostalgic for a moment of health and wholeness that never existed. thus, when alex is implicated in the arnoldian tradition of schoolboy eros, this does not return the narrative to a lost simplicity, because that tradition is itself subject to the contradictions that animate _a clockwork orange_. alex's brutal conditioning, his strange language and dress, his savage sexuality, his wickedness, cruelty, and sadism, his devious sensitivity to the ebb and flow of group power, were in fact essential to arnold's rugby school, and helped catapult it into international prominence as an unsurpassed institution of man-making. [13] the arnoldian pedagogy engages and activates the victorian concern with the male body as a locus of political power. the nineteenth-century british schoolboy doctrine that athletic contests like rugby and football formed the character of the man derives significantly from tom brown. his popularity was crucial to teaching the world that the public school virtues of strong character, self-dependence, readiness, and pluck were "best learned on the playing field" (haley, 161). moral health, arnoldian victorians like hughes believed, was profoundly implicated in physical achievement. the notion of moral health came to include physical courage: unless one was willing to assume physical risk, one could not hope to achieve moral salvation. [14] the famous aphorism that "the battle of waterloo was won on the playing fields of eton" reveals the relation of this philosophy of athleticism to the practical exigencies of empire. the promotion of physical courage was taken as a necessity for a nation needing soldiers, and breaking a leg or rib or head in the playing-field at rugby prepared one for the rigors of a battlefield somewhere else. "meet them like englishmen!" hughes's narrator cries to the creatures of his own imagination. thus the narrator of _tom brown's school-days_ describes the climactic school-house match (an early form of rugby) in terms that would today be considered scandalous: my dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except the boys would be men, and the balls iron, but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. (_tbs_, 103) yet when the health of the empire thus was seen to depend on the physicality of schoolboys, athletics acquired an importance--even a holiness--that carried indisputable moral weight. [15] the modern public school, as invented through _tom brown's school-days_, manifested the victorian obsession with the physical body's perfectability and corruptibility. while hughes repeatedly praises thomas arnold in the text, he also unconsciously reveals that the headmaster, in his treatment of the bodies of his students, enacted his morbid identification with christ's physical suffering. hughes wishes to portray school rituals like boxing, football--and even fagging and bullying--as expressing the unalloyed joys of youthful play. yet _school-days_ also reveals dr. arnold's abhorrence of the liminal and transgressive body of youth. the book's textual and graphic representation of the body illustrate arnold's theory that to educate boys is to turn them from beasts into christians--to re-enact the moral development of human society: moral ontogeny recapitulating moral phylogeny. [16] where hughes differs from arnold is in his attitude towards boyhood. arnold sees boyhood solely as a condition to be mortified and overcome; hughes agrees that in the end it must be left behind, but relishes the opportunity it offers for maximizing the pleasures of the body. without reference to any moralizing process, he concludes his paean to rugby with a remarkable claim about the proportionate value of sport to everyday life: this is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a half-hour worth a year of common life. (_tbs_, 106) the interpretation of the school's physical harshness as a source not only of mortification but also of ecstasy has, according to hughes, deep roots in english culture and history. he makes this point explicit in an important episode placed in a country fair, a "veast." here, the narrator delights in a brutal contest called backswording that involves two men trying to draw blood from each others' scalps with cudgels. "the weapon is a good stout ash stick," hughes tell us, "the players are called 'old gamesters' . . . and their object is to break one another's heads." the game is over when the blood flows "an inch anywhere above the eyebrow" (_tbs_, 40). the climacteric is pleasurable for all: "'blood, blood!' shout the spectators as a thin stream oozes out slowly from his hair" (_tbs_, 41). [17] hughes goes on to regret the passing of this event, and ends with a disquisition on the relationship of the body of the boy to the body politic, including a discussion of class conflict, reform and capitalism. he observes that such violence is essential to reformers, who won't really lay hold of the working boys and young men of england by any educational grapnel whatever, which hasn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country 'veast'; something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, to make them rejoice in their strength. (_tbs_, 46) the rage for "bloodsports" that comes to dominate british education for a hundred years begins here. hughes asserts that this is part of moral reform--in effect that such violence is in the service of molding martyrs for the state. but his pleasure in physical violence is not far from a sheer carnivalesque interest in the grotesque body that characterizes the popular reading of _a clockwork orange_. [18] though hughes periodically reminds us that violent play is good for the state, tom brown loves it for its own sake. alex's passion for "the old ultra-violence," while notched higher in damage inflicted, reflects the same celebration of the pleasures of the incoherent body that characterize tom brown's matches in the mud and blood of the close. alex never tires of detailing the propensity of adult vecks to turn into porous gore and blood when beaten. the droogs describe blood as "our dear old droog"; "red-red vino on tap and in all the same places, like it's put out by the same big firm" (_aco_, 22); "then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful" (_aco_, 7); "a fair tap with a crowbar . . . brought the red out like an old friend" (_aco_, 10); and "then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy rot. then we went on our way" (_aco_, 14). [19] these separate confirmations that bodies are never discrete entities, but oozing, porous and liminal, precede a gang-fight that culminates in a glorious extrusion of blood. having enhanced the ecstasy of this bloodletting by taking "milk with knives" to "sharpen" his sensations, alex's success in piercing the body of the other droog makes him rhapsodic: [billyboy] was a malenky too slow and heavy in his movements to vred anyone really bad. and, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz--left two three, right two three--and carve left cheeky right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight. (_aco_, 17) reversing the direction of our analysis about the culture of rugby school and the managed violence of the playing-field, we can locate the culture at work in this scene of droogish anarchy: we can not only find the violence in the gentleman; we can find the gentleman in the violence. the "curtains of blood" in the above passage do not herald the apocalypse, but evoke a sportsman's appreciation for the results of good technique that borders on the aesthetic. we hear alex's pride in his team--the captain's sense of the players' movements around him. he details with pleasure his own movements, and the violence softens into a gentleman's dance, with the expert's assessment of the opponent's weaknesses, and of proper footwork. [20] the measured cadences of sporting play-by-play include a dramatic cataloguing of the players' skills and equipment. for this particular fight "dim had a real horrorshow length of oozy or chain round his waist, twice wound round, and he unwound this and began to swing it beautiful in the eyes or glazzies. pete and georgie had good sharp nozhes, but i for my own part had a fine starry horrowshow cut-throat britva which, at that time, i could flash and shine artistic" (_aco_, 16). the cutting and the bleeding do not provoke dionysian horror in alex or in the reader. neither does alex's confrontation with the grotesque pig-like body of the other signal the devolution of man into beast. instead, an appreciation of the sportsman's style, cool observation, and a studied ability to execute with grace materialize under the pressure of battle. [21] the emphasis on style--even in the middle of marked danger--would seem to sharpen the subversive point of alex's pleasure in flouting the conformity expected of the arnoldian male body. like oscar wilde's dandy--another response to the certitudes of public school masculinity- alex uses style as a declaration of independence. thus, when alex recalls his fight scene with billyboy, he remembers that his droogs looked marvelous; alex proudly observes that his droogs were "dressed in the heighth of fashion" (_aco_, 2). for alex, his clothes assert that he controls his own body, and he uses the image he presents to the public as a "semiotic guerilla warfare," in eco's phrase. [22] by reducing male physical difference to nothing but broad shoulders, garish neckties and odd crotch-protectors, alex's fashion statement displays his ironic relation to normative masculinity. the droogs wear "waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders ('pletchoes' we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that." they wear "off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud." most noticeably, however, they wear a pair of "very tight tights with the old jelly mould" on the crotch which draws attention to their genitalia (_aco_, 2). [23] alex's personal style of dress seems at first to indicate his resistance to power. but when alex appropriates fashion as a means of asserting his identity he is building a new temple on the site of the old. instead of forwarding himself as a new man, his preoccupation with style and taste above all else renders his portrait as an "old boy" strikingly clear: alex disdains those who do not follow his idea of fashion. [24] that alex, in insisting on irony and rebellion, is merely recreating a conformist world in microcosm, appears most readily in his confrontation with dim. for example, "poor old dim" does not know or care that alex's ostensible punkishness engages a high-culture seriousness toward aesthetics yoked to his own political ambition. alex approves of the genital designs of his droogs pete, who has a hand, and georgie, a flower, on his groin, but finds himself in a perplexing spot for an anarchist when he finds dim's choice of a clown's face in bad taste--evidently too close to naming "the clown he was" (_aco_, 6). such an overt image lacks the tension and irony alex requires to see himself and his droogs as beings of superior taste. alex feels demeaned by his association and fellowship with such a philistine as dim. this conflict is the first suggestion that alex's idiosyncratic style, which at first seems to be a marker of his resistance to british culture, has roots in the traditional mechanisms of class. [25] the antagonism brought on by alex's conviction of his own superiority to dim increases throughout the novel's first section. noting the lost opportunity that dim's name--like the symbol on his jelly mould--affords for an ironic or subversive gesture, alex regretfully observes that "dim really is dim." this includes dim making a display of proving he can read, a gesture which alex finds distasteful (_aco_, 7). dim's lack of moderation, too, marks him as no proper droog of alex's--or of tom brown's. he "goes too far, like he always did" (_aco_, 6). when he fights he always gets "dirty and untidy, like a veck who'd been in a fight . . . you should never look as though you have been" (_aco_, 11). after a break-in, dim is "going to dung" on the carpet, and alex stops him; though amused by bleeding, alex does have a standard of bodily purity that, for example, forbids scatological transgressions. later, alex finds he smells bad, "which was one thing i had against old dim" (_aco_, 26). [26] alex's conflict with dim recasts a class distinction central to the ideology of _tom brown's school-days_. certain readers, noting that the emotional peaks of the novel involved athletic prowess, used the term "muscular christianity" to accuse hughes's hero of excessive interest in the physical body. the writer responded, in his sequel _tom brown at oxford_, by offering to distinguish his protagonist from the debased "muscleman." he writes that "the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him . . . whereas, so far as i know, the least of the muscular christians . . . does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he" (hughes, tbo, 113). alex shows a muscular christian's disdain for dim, a mere muscleman. [27] alex would have had no trouble following hughes's lesson. alex's exquisite sensitivity to class distinctions would have made him at home at rugby, where an entire social hierarchy could be constructed upon the most minute sartorial propriety. when arnoldian reform implemented uniform dress codes, they became, ironically, an important medium for schoolboys to express and control their own lives. refusing to allow uniforms to reduce their individuality, as well as class difference, the boys instantly re-deployed them for their own use. within the officially prescribed regulations, they developed a complex code for proper attire. often as subtle as showing a bit of a handkerchief, or leaving a button undone, these points of style, self-enforced, became a powerful way to indicate and control the hierarchy of schoolboy life. thus style--even when used against a totalitarian standard--did not promise a liberation; rather it facilitated a transference of power that guaranteed the authoritarian lesson. the older and more powerful boys themselves found they had a stake in enforcing the arnoldian principle that the ruling class must control semiotics. [28] tom brown's first encounter at rugby emphasizes that violating standards of style and taste carries an ineffable--even an unthinkable--danger. during tom's first day at school, his cicerone, master east, glances at tom and immediately begins the necessary indoctrination: 'this'll never do--haven't you got a hat?--we never wear caps here. only the louts wear caps. bless you, if you were to go into the quadrangle with that thing on, i--don't know what'd happen.' the very idea was quite beyond young master east, and he looked unutterable things. (_tbs_, 87) like tom, alex has to come to the very end of his narrative before he thoroughly grasps the political lesson of this difference: inevitably, fraternizing with those beneath one's class drags one into trouble. at first alex tolerates dim, who, "for all his dimness was worth three of the others in madness and dirty fighting" (_aco_, 15), but alex, after "slooshying and viddying dim's vulgarity," finally excoriates him. exploding in the idiom of the arnoldian schoolboy, alex strikes dim and says, "bastard, filthy drooling mannerless bastard" (_aco_, 28). when alex's right to deliver such a remonstrance is questioned, he defends his authority, like a praepostor facing a schoolboy insurrection. "dim has got to learn his place," alex says, "there has to be a leader. discipline there has to be. right?" (_aco_, 29). the mutinous answer he receives is not the one he hopes for, and leads to his ruin: dim beats alex and leaves him for the police. [29] understanding how richly both alex's and arnold's traditions are invested in disciplining their subjects through semiotic codes of dress and fighting allows us to re-appraise the text's distinctive language, nadsat. the decadent flavor of this invented language, though reminiscent of the playful ambiguity of carroll's "jabberwocky," has been taken to signal the end of civilization as we know it. certainly burgess's work on joyce substantiates the modernist inclination to prove that one linguistic knot can derange our normal concept of identity. thus, in _a clockwork orange_, alex is "a law" or "a word" but also "without law" or "without word"; "horrorshow"--via a russian root--means good. placing this freudian interest in the antithetical meaning of words alongside the infantilisms of "appy polly loggies," "skolliwoll," "purplewurple" (for apologies, school and purple), suggests nadsat's antic linguistic inventiveness is related to alex's repetitious interest in rape and murder. the suggestion is that alex's refusal to grow up into normal or healthy morality expresses itself in a macaronic verging on a criminal glossolalia. [30] reading alex as an arnoldian schoolboy, however, helps to correct the interpretive error that nadsat signifies postmodern chaos and anarchy: in fact, the words always have a direct and obvious referent. the teen dialect through which alex refracts his developmental narrative is not designed to make the reader accept that the apocalypse is already upon us, nor does it confirm "the break-down of consensus in the post-war period" (hebditch, 17). on the contrary, alex is the most determined of literalists, whose bid for linguistic authority leaves him operating, however paradoxically, in the positivist arnoldian tradition his slang ostensibly replaces. he does not speak nadsat because the modern youth of the day don't know any better. his use of nadsat is a cultural achievement in the same sense that his fashion statements are: both enhance his own authority. he does not just narrate the story, but authors himself as the subject who knows. the reader, by contrast, becomes the cultural exile. if you cannot figure out what alex means, your existence--at least as a reader--is marginal. [31] recognizing the power of language, alex has learned to talk very well indeed. he is a student of different dialects of his society, and notices when words are alien; he remembers the words of an older prisoner's slang he cannot fathom, and makes sure to point out that this superannuation has made the speaker powerless. he hears two younger girls in a record shop "who had their own way of govoreeting" (_aco_, 50), and immediately gets the idea to seduce them. he comments on this encounter, which consists primarily of alex's sadistic sexual attacks, that "they must still have their education. and education they had had" (_aco_, 54). his familiarity with the allusive patterns that determine appropriate speech can become quite humorous; here, in an ironic improvisation, he speaks a shakespearean language of the duel: "how art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou" (_aco_, 15). he also believes that he can shift his shape through the proper words, and, when trying to get out of prison, he imitates a sycophantic "gentleman": "'sir, i have done my best, have i not' i always used my very polite gentleman's goloss govoreeting with those at the top. 'i've tried, sir, haven't i'" (_aco_, 81). even the lyrical idioms of traditional eros are accessible when he needs to escape the nausea he is programmed to feel when experiencing violent impulses towards women: o most beautiful and beauteous of devotchkas, i throw like my heart atyour feet for you to like trample all over. if i had a rose i would give it to you. if it was all rainy and cally now on the ground you could have my platties to walk on so as not to cover your dainty nogas with filth and cal. (_aco_, 128) to celebrate nadsat as verging on a perverse interior gibberish misses that alex demands that language be meaningful enough to free him from an inner exile. nadsat represents a rupture with "normal" teleologies only if you ignore its conventional referentiality. similarly, even the intermittent triumphs of alex's perversity, whether linguistic or physical, do not manage to forestall his inevitable graduation into an arnoldian version of adult health--at least in the longer version of the book. [32] the final destination for alex's narrative sublates the book's beginning, which details the droog's first attack, on a "starry school-master type veck." that this elderly pedagogue is carrying books about science recalls that introducing science into the curriculum was one of the innovations with which arnold was credited. the victim is also carrying sweet love-letters, whose sentimentality harkens back to a different ethos of manliness. they accuse him of sexual perversity and filthiness, tear up his books, steal and mock his letters, yank out his false teeth and crush them, kick him in his "pot," and strip him to his underwear. from the droogs' point of view, he has so little money--or capital, one might say--that they do not even steal it--they just throw it in the street. [33] though in the opening the droogs mock his "teacher type goloss" (speech), the schoolmaster gets the last word; his losses are temporary and his triumph final. after being programmed to sicken at violent impulse, alex again comes across this doddery veck. this time, along with his fellows in a library, the old man beats alex severely, and turns him over to the police. the punishment alex suffers as a result of his youthful transgression against this pedagogical authority hasten alex into adulthood--at least in the longer version--as dr. arnold justified floggings to "hasten" his schoolboys out of youthfulness. that the narrative restores the schoolmaster's power to punish, even after alex's attempt to disempower him, reflects burgess's enrollment in the arnoldian ideal of manliness. in effect, both versions of _clockwork_ portray a world that has become a globalized rugby school. britain has not declined, but become rarified, more clearly itself: a state machine producing itself in and through its males. as alex's conglomerated language reveals, the imperial machinery of man-making has overcome antiquated national boundaries. alex has not been interpellated as euro-trash by "enemy" culture--the russian of the cold war. instead, he is a star pupil of an international macaronic, and his mastery of it enables his personal imperialism. the longer version--burgess's original conception--confirms the arnoldian narrative even more persuasively, as the temporary reign of droogish play and perversity gives way, harmlessly and naturally, to the traditional image of the gentleman. [34] the irony of burgess's ambition to replace the droog with the arnoldian schoolboy is that they have always been thoroughly integrated; alex's wickedness and cruelty are as much the stuff of empire-building as is the arnoldian gentleman's phantasy of morality. in effect, though rugby's classrooms are now called correctional schools, state jails, and conditioning laboratories, and the playing fields have become the london streets, alex's education terminates in the same phantasized ideal of adult masculinity that tom's does. burgess has not overturned a public school idea of proper masculine development, but fulfilled thomas arnold's ambition to write his pedagogy across the face of the world. [i would like to thank eric rabkin for his generous comments on this essay while in progress.] ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited aggeler, geoffrey. _anthony burgess: the artist as novelist_. tuscaloosa: alabama up, 1979. arnold, matthew. _culture and anarchy_. new york: chelsea house, 1983. bloom, harold., ed. _anthony burgess_. new york: chelsea house publishers, 1987. burgess, anthony. _a clockwork orange_. new york: norton, 1986. haley, bruce. _the healthy body and victorian culture_. cambridge, mass: harvard up, 1978. hughes, thomas. _tom brown's school-days_. new york: st. martin's press, 1967. ---. _tom brown at oxford_. new york: st. martin's press, 1967. kenner, hugh. _a sinking island: the modern english writers_. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1987. mack, edward c., and w.g. armytage. _thomas hughes_. london: ernest benn ltd., 1952. marx, karl. _the german ideology_. ed. c.j. arthur. london: lawrence and wishart, 1970. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[smith], 'talking and thinking: david antin in conversation with hazel smith and roger dean', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-[smith]-talking.txt talking and thinking: david antin in conversation with hazel smith and roger dean h.smith@unsw.edu.au _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by hazel smith and roger dean, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. david antin is a "talk poet" who gives provocative talks which combine the genres of lecture, stand up comedy, story-telling and poetry. they juxtapose anecdote with poetic metaphor, philosophical and political debate with satirical comment. the talks are improvised, that is they are created during the performance and no two performances are the same. in his talk piece _gambling_ (_tuning_ 148), performed in the seventies, antin refers to the recreativeness which dominates many poetry readings and which he is reacting against; simply reading a poem is like "returning to the scene of the crime/you try to reenact it and the more you try to bring it back to life the deader it becomes." the medium of the talk restores to poetry its lost oral dimension; the opportunity to bridge the gulf between creative process and product and the opportunity to create in a public forum. although there is no written record of many of antin's talks, some of them have been published in two volumes _talking at the boundaries_ and _tuning_. david antin was born in new york city in 1932 and graduated from new york city college and new york university. he is currently professor of art at the university of california at san diego. he is married to the performance and video artist and film-maker eleanor antin. he is also a distinguished critic who has written on the visual arts, postmodernism, television and video art, and the role of art in technology. the context of the conversation was our forthcoming book _discovering the discourse: improvisation in the arts after 1945_ in which we are investigating the importance of improvisatory techniques and approaches in art, film, literature and theatre. in this book we will rebut the naive conception of improvisation as a purely spontaneous and intuitive process and demonstrate how improvisation has been a complex creative procedure used by many artists since 1945. we were particularly interested in david antin's work because it is one of the few examples of improvised poetry. we wanted in the interview to ascertain how david went about his improvisations, what his technique for improvising was and how this related to the effect of the improvisations. the interview took place in san diego in february 1992 shortly after david antin's talk at carroll's bookshop in san franscisco on the subject of _the other_. although david's work over the years was the main focus of the interview, we also alluded from time to time to that specific talk. ---------------------------------------------------------- hs: in what sense do you think your talks are improvisations? da: probably in the same sense that most people's improvisations are improvisations. one person i could imagine myself in a relationship to, though i've never said it before, is coltrane. coltrane was constantly working over scales and examining other musical manoeuvres, to keep his hands on a lot of things that he could do; he was listening to timbres of different mouthpieces and playing with different ways of making music, so it is not as if he went in as a blank slate. jazz improvisation is work that in some ways i feel very close to, because the language offers you a well-formed grammar. i am not interested in transforming english grammar, but i am interested in the full range of english and its varieties of speech registers and its ways of movement from here to there. it allows you much more freedom than anybody really knows. i mean we know very little about the full range of colloquial english. in fact most grammar that is being used in the schools of the high levels of linguistics, which i did doctoral work in, i regard as highly idealized. there are so many things that it doesn't explain, although it's a very eloquent family of explanations for the things it does explain. but it seems to me that language is a reservoir of ways of thinking, because what i am really interested in, at least as much as language, is thinking: not thought but thinking. and the closest i can get to thinking is talking. when i started doing this i wanted to get close to the sound of thought, and then i realised the only way you can get the sound of thought is to think, to do a lot of thinking. not all thinking is verbal, and you can get close to some of the things that are not generally thought to be linguistic by approaching things in a way that seems less discursive. that is, in some ways narrative and images seem less discursive so that you can reach towards images or towards semantics that are more governed by other ways of arranging things in your mind than merely what is taught to people as linguistics. so the goal is to articulate through thinking, to find my way and open up and explore the range of thinking, but to think about things in the course of it. so in this sense i have a lot of practice because i do it all the time, but coltrane also played music all the time. it seems to me that monk had a variably finite repertory of ways of moving, part of which may have been characteristic and part invented from time to time and carried from performance to performance. in that sense i am not any more original than monk or coltrane but very much like them. hs: i understand that. it is very important that improvisation shouldn't just be confused with spontaneity. nevertheless, if you are going to give a talk, is there any degree of preparation beyond previous experience? da: sometimes there is but the preparation is not formalized. in other words when peter cole asked me to think about the idea of _the other_ i started thinking about a variety of things. i started thinking about the way the idea is used. not systematically, but as i was driving to school or doing something else like making coffee in the morning. and i took out books from the library to read, but not on the subject of _the other_. it struck me that i wanted to look at marco polo's travels. i did and it turned out to be a bad translation and i thought that maybe mandeville's travels would even be more useful because they were more fanciful. so i took out several volumes and was browsing mandeville before falling asleep at night. i also browsed through an older history of ethnology that i wanted to look at again and i re-read some of levi strauss's _tristes tropiques_, none of which i found specially important. it was just that i was preparing my mind and it wasn't that i needed, or was necessarily going to use any of this material: i thought it might have some edge-like relationship to what i was doing. i also looked at several old articles where the term got recycled but again not very seriously. i made a very light play with the material just to make myself cycle the information in my head very loosely. by the time i arrived for the talk i had no fixed idea of how i would begin and i had no fixed idea of structure. the structure normally is provided by the finite length of the tape, sometimes i will stop long before the tape runs out. so i talk for about an hour or 45 minutes: if i'm told that i have to go shorter i will run around half an hour. i can do very short ones if necessary, but then it is different, you don't have the luxury of manoeuvering in the same way. there are dictates which are purely practical, such as how much you can get on a side and there are the dictates of the range and type of audience which has a lot to do with social interplay and making things intelligible. because it is not only thinking out loud, it's thinking out loud where you are sharing the thinking in some way with other people. hs: but how can you tell what the audience is like if you are not very directly interacting with them? how can you tell what the range of intelligence is? i was wondering all the time during the performance what kind of audience you were pitching it at. da: you don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the beginning of a piece i have a tendency to be fairly exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away. there is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see how they work for you but also whether people find them intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon them. but you get a sense from body language whether people are with you or not with you and there are ways of playing it that are so completely intuitive i don't even know how i do it. that is i spend a fair amount of time circling the material before plunging in, to achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a prologue. in other words in standard orchestral situations they tune because they have got to reach a particular pitch, but i have freedom of tuning because no one tells me whether i need just tempered or equal tuning. hs: one possibility improvisation provides is collaboration with other people, for example to collaborate much more with the audience. i have read about the incident at 80 langton place where the audience, made up largely of poets, made you interact with them. da: i was actually interacting with them rather maliciously i thought. hs: during your talk i wondered whether it would end with a discussion and in some ways i was quite relieved that it didn't. da: most people are. i don't have a set feeling about it. my sense is that people are there of their own free will and i offer a kind of human engagement with them. in other words i don't deal with material that is impossible for them to deal with. i deal in a space that i presume this intelligent audience can arrive at in some manner. the length of the piece has something to do with the audience's interest, and sometimes the question is how much i can push the material and keep the audience still with it. i think that i can also tell whether people are dialoging with the piece. when i am talking what i say is never quite what i intend to say. there is a kind of relationship between the sense of one's own intentionality and what one does, because if one had a complete match between what one intended and what one said, one wouldn't have to go any further, one would never have to reformulate. so there is a kind of slippage and sometimes what you say is better than your intention and sometimes worse or sometimes merely to the left or right of it. and so i am always conducting a kind of dialogue with myself, as well as a dialogue with the audience, and the audience is always conducting a kind of dialogue with me, but also spinning off. i feel that's good. one of the reasons i use a less tight presentation mode is that i want the audience to have room to pursue its own interest and loop away and loop back, which i think they do. i think people associate off into things that are like my experience but different, and that they might have said in a different way. so they pursue their agreements and disagreements with me through parallels of support, this allows them a full-scale dialogue. and to the extent to which they are involved in it, they are interested in the piece and they have this kind of intense but intermittent attention. hs: it's still different from a direct dialogue with the audience. have there been some instances (apart from the incident at 80 langton place) where people have spoken from the audience or you have actively encouraged that? da: sometimes but not a great deal, unless it happens, in which case sometimes i will respond to it in a way, loop it in and continue, but my performance is not aimed at that. usually the audience doesn't feel inclined to do this, anymore than they would normally feel inclined to do it. imagine an audience of musicians at a jazz performance. they might feel very responsive, someone might say, yeah, but they are not likely to start playing. there is a feeling that the audience generally has at an artwork that they interact with it by thinking about it, rather than that they immediately interact discursively with it. although once in a while i'll say something that gets close and somebody will say something, usually not much, and i acknowledge it and bring it in a bit and that is fine. hs: as audience we're very conservative, i think: we're not used to participating and so i suppose we would have to be actively encouraged. da: you have to be not only encouraged but also feel sufficiently ready. it is more than that, you have to feel a readiness with respect to a common range of the material and i think the lack of feeling ready is partly a sense that the material is not quite so common to them. in fact that was one of the complaints that the langton place people had which i was toying with, it was essentially that they knew very little about the material. i was dealing with a relationship between the figures of rhetoric and figures of mind and i was trying to retrieve the values of certain greek terms because i thought they were useful. but when i got to a story in an area they felt they knew a great deal about or thought they knew something about, (they felt inclined to have an opinion about anorexia say, or what was called anorexia) it was funny because they hadn't really thought about that either. which was of course one of the great difficulties for them, that is, they were thinking about it now for the first time in any significant way. and i think even they were tepid in their interventions because they really hadn't thought about it that much, and they figured i had thought about it more which was probably true. rd: have you ever tried to set up a situation where you have a discourse between several people who are simultaneously thinking? da: i've never tried to set it up because it is hard to do. though i would certainly find it interesting. rd: because that would be the analogy to the jazz performance. da: it certainly would, it's just that you have to organise it and find people and find a terrain that you all feel you are willing to do it in relationship to. i did a thing in france at the beauborg with several french poets a couple of years ago but i think they saw themselves as more supportive of what i was doing than i would have liked. it was fun talking with them but i found it hard to draw them out. i tried but it was harder for me to draw them out in those circumstances. hs: could you give me any idea of the process by which you generate the talks, how you get from one item in them to another? da: well i look for a promising tangle, some kind of snarl of threads so to speak. i may not see all of them at once, i may see the end of a thread, the end of a couple of threads and i try to pick it apart, and find out what it consists of. hs: so you are holding all those threads together simultaneously in your mind? da: i follow one of them and it either leads to another knot or i go back up to find another one and i might move into what seems like an end that i can't get out of and then instead of backtracking i will leap to one that was next to it. i will make a transition to the one that was further away but which i had left over there. so there is a way of dealing with it, as a problematic: it is a sort of playfulness, it is as if i took the notion of problem solving and thinking away from its seriousness into a kind of sheer pleasure, the idea of solving knots. you look for the great knot and then you try to solve it like the gordian knot. to me the world is filled with some things that are knots and some things that are snarls and some things that are pleasant tangles and i try to find a way to open them up and see what they are made out of and this sometimes lead to new forms of ravelling. i knot and unknot and i am looking for an ultimately elegant knot structure which i will eventually work out of the remaining material. hs: that is actually what it feels like. rd: it feels like several successive modules in some cases doesn't it, particularly in _the other_. did you have an awareness that it was likely that there would be five modules and that "guattari" and "saddam" and "molecular structure" would be amongst them, or were those things that mostly came to mind as it happened? da: i think they come from a kind of experience and a set of attitudes and what sometimes happens is that you have clear cut modules but the number of them may differ and also they turn out not to be situated precisely in the same plane. in other words there are discrete concentrations usually, something leads to a concentrated module and somewhere another one may develop, but it generally turns out not to be module module module in total contiguity. i try to construct in a kind of cognitive space in such a way that the distances between the modules create openings for the mind and also begin to throw light on a space that seems like a meaningful quasi container, but a container filled with holes. in other words my relationship to a system is--the problem of systems is--that they don't have enough holes. so that they become fanciful and unreal: the trap of systematic thinking is that it is falsified through closure. i like systems, i find them illuminating, but what i find illuminating is the notion of systems that articulate and are elegant and in some way incomplete and clearly so. and it is a relationship between the one incomplete system and the other one which creates a kind of hyperspace, because the spaces between them become interesting. the principle of complementarity in physics is an example of concentration, on the non fit between two situations, and it takes head on the difficulty of wave and particle and puts it right up front in physics. well i don't want to necessarily argue that what i do puts it right up front like that but i have treated it with casual obviousness. that is i allow this complementarity situation to develop where one story doesn't fit over the other story in such a way that one completely clarifies the other (i don't believe in total clarification) but on the other hand it throws light onto it. rd: but it is a logical necessity that thinking could not have a complete closure really isn't it? da: it can't have complete closure. rd: so what i was going to ask was,why so much emphasis on making that necessary failure overt? i can see the attraction but why is it attractive to you? da: well it doesn't turn out to be a failure, because what i really am doing is partly making a polemical case for what i believe is real thought, real thinking, as opposed to what has come to stand for rationalism in the history of western thought, which is a straw man: the notion of the totally closed logical system which has only one little hole in it that is unfortunate because there is a paradox lurking in the corner. this particular form, has dominated rational and irrationalist thought in western european discourse to the point of annoyance finally, but what you actually find is that structures, because they have holes in them, don't become useless. on the other hand rational thought is different from what people think it is, and rationality is an exaggeration of the kind of clarity of mind and the possible mental tactics that can be deployed to think usefully, meaningfully and creatively, and it seems to me these are very poorly understood. so part of the purpose of my work is to illuminate, by example, the nature of real thinking, in which art-thinking shares a great deal with scientific thinking, and we have a lot in common although we will do things that may be done differently we may not do some of the things that scientists may do and we may do a great number that they do. and even if you do what they do, what they do doesn't look like what they say it is, because when they write the article they always do it backwards. the article is not the thinking. rd: we art thinkers would not have such a tendency to prioritise as scientists would have would we? da: no, and my work is about the unity of thinking and the absolute absence of the dichotomy between what we call irrational artistic thought and rational thought. it basically engages with the idea of raiding across the two terrains to insist on the unity of the terrain. logic is a function of human character, people are basically in some sense logical when they think at all. but logic is broader than that. the truth-table fable is a fantasy but if you could lock down the categories in such a way and you could position them rigidly between here and there, you could quantise between the true and the false in a particular curious way. but usually the categories are too slippery for anything significant to be put into this position for very long. what happens is that the slippage in anything you use generally causes you to have to approach it in a number of different ways, "as long as this holds to be true" and "as long as this is like that then it follows from that that this is this." hs: do you feel there is a sense in which you adopt a persona in your talks? reading through the talks i sometimes felt there was a persona of a kind of naive person struggling to understand certain things, for example in the talk where you speak about the third world and what the third world actually is. da: there is in a sense a persona but the persona develops, because as soon as you begin representing yourself at all, anything you represent has a fictional property. as soon as a representation occurs it's partly untrue, it's partly fiction, but it develops its own inertial moment, its own commitments and a lot of these things derive essentially from a kind of philosophical positioning. in other words you can approach it in a different way: "what if we didn't start by accepting belief in all these things that everybody always knows, what if we didn't know this, how could we examine this belief." so the naivety is ultimately based on the belief that we know too much and that it is founded on too little. we are standing on a swamp or a cloud and we rely on these well known things, that are well known to be true, but how true are they? so in a way you take things everybody knows so it sounds naive to say them, but if you say "third world" by now everybody seems to have forgotten what the first and second worlds were. i mean is there a second world? what do you mean by a world? are there more than that? in other words if the third is invented largely as a function of a quarrel between one and two and you develop a kind of economic theory on the basis of this, the third gets to be built up largely on not belonging to one or two. and then you call it unified, but the relations that either the one or two might have can be extremely bizarre, and furthermore you can imagine a unity of victimization but the victims might not like each other if they were unified. for example, it is not obvious that the jehovah's witnesses, the gypsies, the jews, and the communists in the concentration camps of the nazis really were very friendly with each other, or they were only as long as you had the barbed wire around the camp, and they were often treated in different ways. so it seems to me, without being naive, you can't ask the right questions. hs: but can i go back to the issue of the relationship between the first person and yourself, because that has been worked out in so many different ways in post modern poetry and yours seems to be very interestingly situated with regard to that. do you feel you have a strong sense of talking about your own experience, or do you sometimes tell lies about your own experience? da: very often. no, it is all mixed! i basically feel that my talks should be no more reliable than conversation in general as absolute fact! you see what one depicts as true is a function of one's feeling and experience and all of it has its origins in things that are factual as far as i remember, but some of them are fantasies. and some of them are fantasies involuntarily, sometimes you remember things that are not true simply because your desire has already produced the representation. so that i have never gone out and notarised my statements, and my self-position is that people will take it as credibly as conversation. now much of the experience is true or at least partially true and some of it is very true and some of it is fiction, but it is fiction that is true, in other words it is serious fiction, it's not fantasy. it is serious fiction in that it derives from a kind of experiential engagement with it. hs: how do you think the talks relate to your normal talk or your normal speech? da: they are close but the situation creates a greater intensification of the characteristics. in a conversation with other people, in a social situation, you tend to encourage other people and allow other people to play and you may not have the space to take on one of these things. hs: the knotting and the unknotting you talk about wouldn't be so prevalent in a conversation would it? da: no. but it has a relationship with some of the teaching that i do. hs: that was another thing that struck me when i saw the talk; it reminded me of the lecture situation in some respects. da: yes, well it draws on the lecture and on stand-up comedy. it is not really stand up comedy in that i really don't play gag after gag, i don't theatricalize myself like spalding gray. spalding gray, of course, is characterized as a performer who also does improvisation although his improvisations become somewhat memorized by the time he does the work. at least i think he said this and on another occasion he said he didn't, so i am not sure, he may work more like me than he indicated first time around. he comes from acting and so what he generates essentially is very markedly a persona of spalding gray. he theatricalises himself so he is his main actor and he positions spalding gray as bewildered and as a major victim of his own inadequacies and it is very charming. and what happens is that though he is his main actor, things befall him, whereas i tend to be sometimes an actor and often merely only an observer or sometimes an actor who is in there involuntarily but the action is the other people. i am not my main actor so my persona doesn't develop beyond necessity. it seems to me as long as you start saying "i" you have got a persona, especially if you say it three times in a row because the "i" begins to develop a configuration from its continuity. and you see gray concentrates so much on the behaviour and the bewilderment of his "i" because he is his main actor, he produces not exactly a chaplinesque figure but a certain kind of bewildered central figure. it is a more artefactually complete version of the naivety you say that you pick up in some of my pieces but my pieces are merely an attitude that enters into a discussion of something else, whereas in his case he then intrudes into and stumbles over it and falls into a trap deliberately and picks himself up out of the trap. hs: well that is a very important distinction isn't it? da: and so i don't build up the character and occasionally i get sucked into a case where i am a considerable figure but usually i am interested in something outside of the "i." the subject in my case becomes the vantage point from which to look. hs: how do the talks relate to the written transcripts of them, how do you actually notate them and what makes you decide where to notate the gaps? da: it is very impressionistic. you see the media are really quite different so what i am doing with the talks is trying to create an experience for the reader which is an analogue structure of the performance. the media are really so different, that is performance has all these unknown things that are happening between you. the audience is there and they pick up a great number of things from the way you look, from what you are saying, the inclination of your head movement, they have many more contextual clues than is on the tape recording. the tape recording is in some ways totally bewildering for most people, because it contains stuff that people don't hear and it doesn't contain things they do pick up. whatever is said they ignore certain things and slips at the time which they don't pay attention to. it is perfectly clear when an audience listens they hear the right thing. they hear what you intend to a very great degree, and a tape recorder records only what is acoustically available to it within certain filters, so the tape recording is the most bizarre mode of dealing with this material. the transcript then is an attempt to construct. i used to do it myself but now i get somebody just to type it up altogether with no pauses, or to pause wherever they think a sentence ends or not to worry about it. if i decide to listen to the tape, which i sometimes do, i listen all the way through and then i take the transcript and put it down over there. and then i look at the beginning and i read through it once and then i start typing and then i might look at it four pages later, six pages later, 12 pages later, i may look at it very closely in spots. so what happens is that i am typing, i am writing something with my own habits of verbal composition and in my head the image of what i have done, and i am recreating its image, i am not transcribing line for line. often without doing anything of the sort it comes out almost as if it has been memorized, which is very startling. but sometimes what will happen is that i will come to a place where i didn't have room to do something at the time, the piece had a moment where i wanted to go on and for some reason i couldn't do it as fully as i would have liked and i think it should be made more articulate. some transcripts are twice as long as the talks originally were. some pieces are very close to the literal form: the phrasing system seems to be very similar in both of them and you could hardly tell the difference between them. i remember a piece called _dialogue_ in my book _tuning_. i did this piece in santa barbara and they sent it back to me and i transcribed it and i added a whole story that i cite in the performance but didn't have room to tell it. but a reading audience doesn't suffer from the same psycho-dynamic as a listening one, you are in a different space, you are holding a book in your hand and so i simply told the whole story that i couldn't have told there given the difficulties of timing. so the version that i sent back to them was one and a half to two times the length of the other piece. i met the editor about a week later and she said she really liked it a lot and what she really liked was how completely identical my original version was with the performance! and so i have to say that there is a phenomonological issue at stake. it does vary from occasion to occasion depending on the commitments i have. i have a commitment to the performance, to the psycho-dynamics of improvisation, to doing the best i can, which always involves an engagement with an audience, and a commitment to material. and sometimes one has to be traded off against the other, you can't let the audience down. i have a responsibility to an audience to do it as well as i can in a way that allows them to be participants to the end, and so my sense of timing is partly related to that. i can stretch it, i can negotiate it but i am not a performer who is interested in violating audiences. my interest is essentially in engaging an audience, discoursing with an audience perhaps pushing it, but in some kind of social relationship that i find is humanly responsible. now the problem is i don't always feel that i was responsible enough to some of the articulations i should have undertaken in relation to my loyalty to the material and then the question is how do i do it in the text in such a way that it doesn't violate the spirit of the performance? and there will be times when i will take up in the text a greater articulation of some of the material that i was handling in a performance, and then i have to construct a way of getting back from it into where i was before. it is as if a cadenza went wild and i take the cadenza way out and then i've got to come back in some way and i create an artifice for getting back to where i was before. hs: i think, actually, the transcripts are very successful because one of the things that struck me when i saw you talk was... da: they sound like me. hs: yes that it was very much what i had conjured up from the text. da: well that is the intention. rd: on the other hand another way of looking at that process of transcribing is that you are using the process of thinking but then you are also superimposing thought. da: well actually no. just superimposing more thinking. rd: except that you are presumably doing that over a much longer time-span and you are also thinking retrospectively about what you thought in the process of thinking when you performed--i.e., by now, thought. it is kind of a combination of the two, isn't it? da: well it is interesting--it is true in a way although i don't see it that way. i see it as thinking and rethinking, because it seems to me i don't write slowly either. i write almost as fast as i speak. i use a computer and i used to use a typewriter and i am an extraordinarily fast typist and the computer has made me even faster. so i don't use the system that many people use to write, which is built on endless revision; not because i don't want to do it, i just don't feel that way. i write almost the way i talk so i go pusssssh you know and i catapult myself along almost at the pace of my speaking. rd: that raises the other question which comes from the realization of the two stages. why do you really need to do the performance verbally in public? why can't you do the thinking at the computer. da: i like the engagement. somewhere in levi strauss' work he talks about the one thing that is so marked in all primitive art and that is almost lost completely in western traditional art as we know it. and he says what isn't there is a sense of occasion, whereas occasion so dominates the art that he was talking about. for me the sense of occasion, of art being rooted in an occasion, is one of the central issues of its motivation. rd: yes, well as an improviser i sympathise with that. stemming from what you said at the beginning of the conversation and the comparison with coltrane there is one major difference, it seems to me, between what you are doing in your talks and what they are doing. you are saying that you don't really want to transform grammar but i think that they did eventually transform the grammar of music and by the heyday of free jazz it became a primary objective almost. i don't think it was ever a prime objective of coltrane's but it probably was of cecil or ornette. do you not feel any temptation in that direction in spite of that? da: well grammar plays a different role historically in music. and in a certain sense the grammar of music is much more constraining and in some sense fairly trivial. as someone reasonably grounded in music my sense is that grammar in music is more of a straightjacket than grammar in language. so they really had to break with a lot, although they didn't really break with grammar if you take grammar to be a universal grammar. supposing we take the notion of the universal grammar of music, a very loosely understandable psycho-grammar in a sense of what you can distinguish, that is based on the distinguishability of timbres, the limit and thresholds of what perception can in fact articulate in sound. it seems to me we don't know the universal grammar of music. the grammar of language has just begun to be discovered with the appearance of people like chomsky and the russian formalists, and we hardly know what the real grammar of language is. rd: nevertheless quite a few of our literary peers have felt inclined to attack it haven't they? da: yes though they usually do so on the basis of very insufficient understanding. rd: but as you have said in various ways already that doesn't necessarily undermine the validity of the enterprise does it, quite the opposite. da: no, not at all, i'm perfectly happy with them doing it. if they start out from false premises and do terrific things. i've got nothing against it! it is the theory that i sometimes find foolish but the outcome of the work is often terrific. so in a sense if coltrane or ornette do things that are breaking up a grammar it is only when you take grammar in the narrow sense of the grammar of music, because if, for example, you suppose that the deep grammar of music is different from the grammar that was imposed on it, in my sense they look for the deep grammar. i would say they are looking for the deep grammar in music and that was the greatness of free jazz, the fact that it was so coherent. i taught one entire 3 hour course with a group of people where we tried simply to take one whole performance of the coltrane group in 65 and we were listening to it and we tried to find a way to talk about it that made intelligent sense about the articulations and the moods that were made. and we needed a kind of theatrical vocabulary to discuss it and we were trying to re formulate, and it seemed to us that the work was extraordinarily coherent and in some sense humanly grammatical because it was intelligible. rd: do you recognise a group of improvising talk-givers in whatever country that are your peers, and if so have you considered trying to set up a condition in which you could collaborate with any of them specifically? da: well i don't know of any peers in the sense of having close relations although i know other people who work in the domain. rd: yes i mean in the latter sense, a peer, somebody with an equivalent level of interest. da: yes they do but they are in a semi-commercial zone overlapping mine and have different aims. for example garrison keillor is an improvisor in certain ways. i am not sure whether he memorizes his stuff and maybe it is in story-telling that we overlap more than in improvisation, although i have a feeling he may improvise his stories. and there is a kind of connection, although not a connection of sensibility with spalding gray, though he is theatrical. and whereas my talks have a kind of philosophical linguistic commitment, in his there is a kind of theatrical but also psychological set of concerns. i don't know anyone who basically works that way that it would be easy to imagine working in relationship to. rd: so the idea of a collaboration with say a person who might use phonemic improvising, let's say a bob cobbing wouldn't really appeal because there isn't that cohesion between the two approaches? da: no, although i am very inclined to the possibility of working with a musician because i could imagine working with some really contemporary musician, doing a piece for example with george lewis. i could imagine doing things with him because the space that he operates in seems to me not unreasonably playful. it is both different enough and at the same time capable of being rhetorically innovative and i could see myself playing with it. rd: we have used musical and verbal improvising. it can be very interesting, you can make the relationship in lots of ways. da: yes, as long as you can figure out how to work together in a physical sense and a team-like sense. it seems to me that we could do it in ways that are not the most obvious ways. hs: and have you thought of doing anything, setting yourself up technologically in any way? having for example a tape of yourself talking and then talking with that or something like that. da: well i did use the intervention of taped conversations for the _archeology at home_ and i was not enormously thrilled by that. and i did another piece, _scenario for beginning meditation_, that was published in one of my books of poems. it has a set of questions with wide spaces between them and some responses to them. there were questions such as "is this the right time to begin" and i left spaces between them on the tape recording long enough so that i could answer the tape recording. and i went back the next day and i ran down the batteries of the tape recording so that i knew that it would be fairly weak and that it would get weaker and weaker. the sentences were philosophical reflections on the problem of beginning. the tape recording would talk and then i would try to answer the recording in a dialogue. i tried to respond because it was asking questions and i tried to answer it. the students were in the middle and as the tape recorder got lower and lower because i had deliberately run down the battery very low, i had to push through the students to hear the tape recording and be able to respond to it. so the piece was a sculptural piece because basically it forced the re-articulation of the space. the piece took a while to do and at the end i frantically leant against the tape-recording trying to hear what it said in order to answer it. so the piece was sort of funny but it was designed as a piece of sculpture but later i just published the questions. hs: reading through _talking at the boundaries_ and _tuning_ there didn't seem to be a major change in the way that you actually approached giving talks. when did you start the talks? d: early 70's, about 71. hs: do you feel that the talks you give now are very different in certain ways? da: i think they vary enormously. obviously there were changes because i am much more experienced at doing them. but on the other hand if you look at the two books, there are 16 talk pieces published in the two books and yet in the 21 years that i have done this i may have done 160 talks. and this is a very small subset of what i have done and in it is hard to have an idea of the range of the talks from the 16. i could publish more but in a way i am an oral poet who has book capability, and to be an oral poet you have to do 7 or 8 performances a year or you are not performing. it's important to be an ongoing performer. i will do about 5 or 6 this year; if you don't do it you can't keep your hand in it. there have been changes and i've got a book coming out with new directions which will be out in spring of 93. it is called _what it means to be avant garde_. hs: do you think there are certain topics that you are really obsessed with, which keep coming up time and time again in your talks? i am sure if i went through i could find certain recurring themes. da: probably some that come up more than others and new things show up once in a while. i like to think that i am not so completely closed that i always talk about the same things. on the other hand we have our habits and concerns and things that are not resolved. what is resolved i don't bother dealing with. for example in _the other_ certain things familiarly fit into it. on the other hand it was not a subject i had thought about in any significant way before and if you take it at the micro-level, some of the concerns are the same, but you are looking at them from different points of view. so my sense is that there is a mixture. i am sure if i went through the talks i would find things that were familiar, but then one isn't infinite in one's capabilities. ----------------------------------------------------------- the interviewers: hazel smith, who lived in england until 1989, was an undergraduate at cambridge university, has a phd from the department of american studies at the university of nottingham in contemporary american poetry and is currently a lecturer in the school of english at the university of new south wales, australia. she has a particular interest in the contemporary avant-garde and in the creative process, and her current research interests include performance orientated and technologically manipulated poetry, and improvisatory techniques and real time manipulation in the contemporary arts. she has published articles in many journals and is currently writing a book collaboratively with roger dean on improvisation in the arts after 1945 for the publishers gordon and breach. hazel smith is also a poet and sound artist working in the area of experimental poetry and performance and has published in numerous international poetry magazines. she has also published three volumes _threely_ (spectacular diseases imprint 1986), _abstractly represented_: poems and performance texts 1982-90_ (butterfly books 1991) and _trancefigured spirit_ (soma 1990). some of her work was included in the 1991 anthology _floating capital: new poets from london_, potes and poets press, u.s.a.. hazel smith has given poetry and text performances in many different countries including australia, great britain, usa, belgium and new zealand, and also on the australian broadcasting corporation (abc), bbc and us radio. she has collaborated several times with artist sieglinde karl and musician roger dean and her performance work has been featured on several abc programmes, and internationally, for example on france culture. she is currently making a cd of her poetry and performance pieces and one is being released on cd by the us journal in sound, aerial. hazel is also a violinist. she is leader of the contemporary music group australysis and has performed solo and chamber music in many parts of the world including australia, belgium, denmark, great britain, hong kong, india, indonesia, new zealand, norway and the philippines. she has featured as soloist on several gramophone records. roger dean is an improviser, instrumentalist (playing double bass, piano and electronics), composer and musicologist. he has worked widely in europe, asia, australasia, and the u.s.. he formed the european group lysis in 1975, and its australian counterpart, australysis, in 1989. he has made more than twenty five lp and cd recordings. amongst his recent recordings are _the wings of the whale_ (with lysis; soma 783), _something british_ (with graham collier music; mosaic gcm 871), _moving the landscapes_ (australysis, tall poppies 007) and _xenakis epei_ on the wergo label. he has written more than 60 works, both completely notated pieces and also works for improvisers. he has used a range of compositional techniques, from serial, and freely atonal, to neotonal and other post-modern approaches; and composed for digital electronics also. several scores have been widely distributed in his books (mentioned below); and in publications of sounds australian, the australian music centre, sydney, and red house press, melbourne. many are on commercial record releases on soma, mosaic, and recently tall poppies. amongst his recent works are _timedancespeace_, in which dancers and musicians work interpretively and improvisatorily with shared materials and methods of development. he has also collaborated with hazel smith in two large text-sound works, _poet without language_, and _silent waves_, both written for the australian broadcasting corporation (abc). he is active in musicology, with many articles and reviews published. his practical book _creative improvisation_ was published by open university press (uk/us) in 1989. it was followed by _new structures in jazz and improvised music since 1960_ (open university press; 1991). he has received bursaries and commissions from the arts council of great britain, the australia council, abc, and rikskonserter (sweden). he also has a career in scientific research, and is the director of the heart research institute, sydney, australia. � larabee, 'remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom: interpreting the challenger disaster', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-larabee-remembering.txt archive pmc-list, file larabee.594. part 1/1, total size 58358 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom: interpreting the challenger disaster by ann larabee dept. of american thought and language michigan state university 21798anl@msu.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by ann larabee, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. as in a play, the nation rises again reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars; remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom. --howard nemerov, "on an occasion of national mourning" lifepod [1] in 1993, in the wake of the world trade center bombing, a made-for-tv american movie called _lifepod_ depicted brutal, claustrophobic conditions in a small space craft, containing a handful of survivors from the terrorist bombing of a much larger space transport. looking very much like the ocean liner from one of the first large-scale disaster films, _the poseidon adventure_ (1972), the large space transport holds not enough "lifepods" for its passengers, and the one vessel that does escape is in bad repair and not sufficiently stocked with food or water. furthermore, its design is inadequate for space navigation, and its pilot, trapped in a small chamber without solar shields, dies a slow and gruesomely pustulous death from radiation bombardment. the rest of the survivors fight with each other and their depleted technological surroundings until only two remain to be saved. [2] blaming the survivors' harsh conditions on a vaguely belligerent, self-serving, and inefficient governmental authority, _lifepod_ contains a lesson about preparedness, with imagistic references to the cold war's abandoned fallout shelters and the exploding challenger space shuttle, which carried no escape vehicles. _lifepod_ depicts a hostile technosystem that controls air, food, and water, as the survivors pant, sweat, bleed, freeze and starve, at the mercy of their drifting enclosure. while this psychologically tense, physically urgent, claustrophobic existence throws body-technology relationships into sharp relief, the film argues that preparedness--the prediction of all exigencies under any conditions--is possible and necessary. unlike the negligent lifepod, a well-designed, well-stocked escape vehicle would maintain technological transparency--that is, its inhabitants would take its smooth functioning for granted, and the border between body and machine would be translucent, the oar an extension of the arm. evoking crisis in post-industrial cultures, cybernetic relations would be stabilized in the ideal lifepod. [3] a symbol of preparedness and accurate prediction, the lifeboat is both a physical and psychological escape from technocultural terrors and, more ambiguously, a condensed version of that same technoculture. in a radioactive, terrorist, and generally chaotic world, one can only plan a move to a smaller, safer box--ideally the enclosed world of the harmoniously functioning and disaster-resistent spaceship. while enthusiasts herald the spaceship as a lifeboat, a way of escaping a doomed planet and sowing the seeds of homo sapiens across the universe, the challenger space shuttle explosion on 28 january 1986, demonstrated that increasingly scaled-down lifeworlds are not especially life-sustaining. like the unfortunate inhabitants of the negligent lifepod, the challenger seven lived to experience a gruesome drift, the long descending spiral to the ocean where pressure crushed the crew cabin. later, critics of nasa would ask why there were no lifeboats on the shuttle, no means of escaping a relatively untested, inevitably disastrous technology, comprised of over 700 critical components, any one of which might cause a fatal accident. one of the lessons of the challenger disaster was that in complex closed environments, catastrophe is inescapable and its victims--even friendly school teachers--have no viable means of ejection. this televised spectacle of claustrophobia and futility riveted millions, who helplessly viewed the exploding microcosm of post-industrial life. gregory whitehead writes that the media's construction of the challenger disaster was a "thanaturgical excess of fire & fire & light," a futurist's necrodrama provoking dread and shock.^1^ [4] the 1980's witnessed an unprecedented number of such media-fed disasters--core breeches in nuclear reactors, sinking ships, oil spills, chemical leaks. with a nearly continuous spectacle of large-scale technological calamity--the bhopal union carbide plant's emission of methyl isocyanate (december 1984), the challenger space shuttle explosion (january 1986), the chernobyl nuclear reactor core explosion (april 1986), the exxon valdez oil spill (march 1989)--the mass media declared the 1980's, the "age of limits." as charles perrow wrote in the wake of the challenger disaster, the culture of high-risk technologies had made a "habit of courting disaster."^2^ perrow, in _normal accidents_, suggests that uncertainty and error are normal in a complex, "tightly coupled" system.^3^ in such a system, many components are highly interdependent, so that the failure of one component quickly escalates into total catastrophe. the unfolding of these catastrophes can neither be predicted nor prevented. while perrow carefully frames certain "systems"--nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, aircraft and airways, genetic engineering--he uses metaphors that suggest a broader cultural paradigm. in his tale, "a day in the life," he describes "your" apparently familiar encounters with overheated coffeepots, lost keys, bus strikes, faulty automobile parts, all interacting in unpredictable ways to undermine "your" daily schedule.^4^ intended as a parable to illuminate complex, tightly coupled systems, "a day in the life" implies that normal accidents comprise the very texture of post-industrial culture. the plugged tea kettle is more than a simile for a nuclear plant's core meltdown, it is a component of the relentless, complex, uncertain technological composition of postmodern life. similarly, the many interpretations of the challenger disaster not only sought to find the cause of the accident, but to make some broader statements about artificial life and its organization. the rogers commission investigation of the accident, and the interpretations that followed, attempted to restore safety and transparency to body-technology relations in the lifepod. [5] the rogers commission determined that the shuttle exploded because of the hot gas breach of a seal, essentially comprised of putty and rubber washers (o-rings). those parts, assembled by morton thiokol and familiar to anyone with a leaky faucet, were the central focus of testimony from engineers, who described evidence from earlier shuttle flights of "blow-by"--the leaking of hot gases from the booster seals. "blow-by" was indicated by the presence of soot, ranging in color from gray to black. according to morton thiokol engineer and whistle-blower, roger boisjoly, black, which appeared when the seal was subjected to cold temperatures, indicated that the seal was going "away from the direction of goodness."^5^ when the challenger was launched under cold temperatures on the morning of january 28, the seal failed completely, and the shuttle caught fire. the rogers commission verified suspicions that the poorly designed seal of the right solid rocket booster was the technical cause of the accident. but it also accused the managers of nasa and its contractor for the solid rocket boosters, morton thiokol, of not heeding early warnings from engineers about the faulty seals. [6] consisting of five published volumes, including 1700 pages of testimony and numerous appendices containing charts, graphs, and parts lists, the rogers commission report resembles product liability trials that set out to identify the responsibility for the technological failures of daily life--faulty wiring, exploding gas tanks, toys small enough to choke infants. according to elaine scarry, the product liability trial is a "cultural self-dramatization. the courtroom is a communal arena in which civilization's ongoing expectations about objects are overtly (and sometimes noisily) announced."^6^ here, a narrative of disaster is constructed in order to restore civilization: implicit in this mimesis of restorability is the belief that catastrophes are themselves (not simply narratively but actually) reconstructable, the belief that the world can exist, usually does exist, should in this instance have existed, and may in this instance be "remakable" to exist, without . . . slippage.^7^ part of this remaking is enacted through compensation for bodily damage, a healing of technological wounds through judgment and financial reward. [7] like the judge and jury in a product liability case, the rogers commission was certainly engaged in a remaking of civilization and its projects. the trial was enacted before the public eye, a national demonstration to restore the narrative of technological progress with testimony from scientific experts. the commission's broad mandate was to "investigate the circumstances surrounding the accident" and "develop recommendations for corrective or other action."^8^ and this mandate was framed by a "firm national resolve" to restore the space program--a program that has reified cultural identity around a supposedly common endeavor that transcends cultural differences.^9^ in the many reiterations of the steps that led to disaster, in the meticulous documentation of the shuttle components' performance and nasa decision-making hierarchies, the rogers commission report sought to reinvent the nation--and indeed all human making--without blow-by and slippage. [8] the most spectacular moment in the rogers commission's testimony was when commission member and eminent physicist richard feynman dropped a bit of o-ring material into a glass of ice water to prove its lack of resiliency under cold temperatures. immediately picked up by the press, who lionized feynman, this simple impromptu experiment seemed to cut through the waffling, confusing, jargon-riddled rhetoric of the nasa decision-makers' testimony. but perhaps more important, the experiment demonstrated that catastrophic failure occurs in basic technological parts and everyday household experience. as engineer roger boisjoly later claimed, "most failures occur because some minor subsystem gives: 25-cent washers, $2.50 bolts, $25 clevis pins."^10^ the press claimed whistle-blowers feynman and boisjoly as heroes precisely because they seemed to expose the simple truth about quotidian life in the technological age. our most familiar objects carry incipient, unforeseen, body-threatening dangers: in his discussion of technological accidents, sociologist ron westrum writes, "a computer chip smaller than a thumbtack can send an airliner crashing into a hillside."^11^ the preface to the rogers commission report states: the commission construed its mandate somewhat broadly to include recommendations on safety matters not necessarily involved in this accident but which require attention to make future flights safer. careful attention was given to concerns expressed by astronauts because the space shuttle program will only succeed if the highly qualified men and women who fly the shuttle have confidence in the system.^12^ as a public hearing on body-technology relations, the commission report attempted to restore confidence in even minor sub-systems, to reinstate a national faith in technological existence, made safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance, down to the thumbtacks. disappearing bodies [9] what is most strikingly absent from the remade world of the technocractic rogers commission report is any effort to reconstruct and assess bodily damage. while it opens with the now famous photograph of the smiling shuttle astronauts and payload specialists in their shiny sky-blue space suits, posed with an american flag and a toy model of the challenger, the report contains no discussion of the bodies. the corpses were found in march by salvage divers, working on their hands and knees in low-visibility conditions, feeling about in the debris until one spotted a space suit.^13^ the rogers commission took testimony until early may, but almost no forensic evidence was given, nor did the commission publicly express any desire for such evidence. the only exception lies in the testimony of fbi special agent stanley klein on february 7, who reported that: we do have human hair, negro hair, oriental hair, and hair from two different brown-haired caucasians, and what is interesting, according to the laboratory, is that there were no signs of heat damage to any of the hair, which was surprising. the hair came from face seals, fragments of helmets, and helmet liners, and headrests.^14^ this reduction to anonymity of nasa's highly-touted racially and ethnically diverse shuttle crew was quickly passed over in favor of a discussion of possible laser terrorism by libyan dissidents and puerto rican pro-independence groups. [10] the rogers commission followed nasa's lead. nasa's official position in the disaster's aftermath was that the astronauts and payload specialists had died instantly, an assumption easily accepted by television viewers who had watched the fiery explosion. and yet careful study of footage from the explosion clearly revealed that the forward fuselage containing the crew compartment hurtled to the ocean intact. neither nasa nor the rogers commission were very willing to admit this dangerous fact as they attempted to restore public faith in technology. indeed, while nasa now displays the challenger's barnacled, carefully arranged debris in a hangar at the kennedy space center, the crew compartment is not part of the reconstruction. [11] the strict control of information surrounding the bodies of the lost challenger astronauts and payload specialists had purposes beyond delicacy and respect for the crew's loved ones. their relatively long and horrifying deaths had to be suppressed in the interests of continuing manned space flight. with two eminent astronauts--sally ride and neil armstrong--participating, the presidential investigative committee remained committed to manned spaceflight, hearing from other astronauts who testified that "man can do many wonderful things in orbit."^15^ however, former challenger pilot paul weitz suggested that: every time you get people inside and around the orbiter you stand a chance of inadvertent damage of whatever type, whether you leave a tool behind or whether you, without knowing it, step on a wire bundle or a tube or something along those lines.^16^ while the enormously complicated technologies of the space shuttle might, in ideal circumstances, provide a secure enclosure for experimental human and animal bodies, those bodies are marked by mundane clumsiness, inadvertent behaviors, everyday chance and uncertainty. [12] furthermore, bodies are not especially suited for life in space. on long flights they are subject to muscle and bone deterioration and weight loss, and ubiquitous radiation may damage reproductive organs. as nasa consultant harry l. shipman has explained in his book about the future of space flight after the challenger accident, bodies pollute spacecraft, transforming them into smelly "urine dumps."^17^ while male astronauts in the good old days used catheters and plastic bags, the presence of women requires more elaborate plumbing--the shuttle's zero-gravity toilet, the "slinger," gave "serious problems in actual use and . . . required a good bit of cleaning."^18^ during the may 1985 flight of the challenger, twenty-four rats and two squirrel monkeys being tested for their responses to weightlessness produced an unanticipated "flood" of feces, so that the uncomfortable crew had to wear face masks.^19^ the scatological body, especially the female or animal body, mars the strictly hygienic myth of the clean machine. a dead body is even worse. [13] the fundamental question in the decades-long argument over manned space flight is whether bodies need to be present at all. as the eminent physicist james a. van allen wrote in the wake of the challenger disaster, "all the truly important utilitarian and scientific achievements of our space program have been made by instrumented, unmanned spacecraft controlled remotely by radio command from stations on the earth."^20^ thus, the loss of the challenger seven called into question nasa's commitment to the "man-machine mode" in space travel. in its _the human role in space_ (thuris) study, nasa laid out its theory of cybernetics, its rhetoric vacillating between technological mastery and autonomous technology: there is no such thing as an unmanned space system: everything that is created by the system designer involves man in one context or another; everything in our human existence is done by, for, or against man. the point at issue is to establish in every system context the optimal role of each man-machine component.^21^ [14] thuris created a taxonomy for human-machine interactions: manual (hand tools), supported (manned maneuvering units), augmented (power tools, microscopes), teleoperated (remote control systems), supervised (computer functions with human supervision) and independent (artificial intelligence). these categories do not make much sense in themselves--clearly some manual manipulation is required for power tools and microscopes, wrenches and hammers augment and support human capabilities. but the taxonomy inscribes a fossil record, a technological evolution towards "self-actuating," "self-healing," independent machines.^22^ the thuris authors hoped that such independent machines would require "human intervention" and attempted to describe uniquely human contributions to largely automated space enterprises. humans, they argued, possess the unique capacity for visual evaluation, motor coordination appropriate to complex assembly, and mental powers of interpretation, innovation, deduction, and judgment. (recent developments of artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic call even these "human" powers into question.) according to thuris, the least important aspect of human intellect is memory: "man's memory, of all intellectual capabilities, is the one most easily duplicated and surpassed by computer activities."^23^ memory, the basis of culture, becomes unnecessary when humans function to service the machine. [15] thuris did not present a particularly attractive justification for the human presence in space, especially in the midst of virtual reality's popularization. if humans on earth can operate finely sensitive space robot arms and eyes or drift remotely through hallucinatory worlds more fantastic than alien planets, why are their bodies necessary in space? in nasa's continuing efforts to sell its programs, bodies were inscribed with socially charged markings of liberal democracy. the challenger seven crew consisted of a social studies teacher, an electrical engineer, a physicist, and a corporate representative from the hughes aircraft company. malcolm mcconnell observed that christa mcauliffe was "a little chubby" and that greg jarvis "could have easily lost ten or fifteen pounds."^24^ the challenger crew represented a populist presence in space. dwarfed by the massive shuttle, their mission was to mediate the machine for a young television audience--christa mcauliffe was to have taken her remote students on a video field trip around the orbiter. after the explosion of the homey, domestic world presided over by a teacher mom, psychologists and grief specialists raced in to erase the spectacle of graphic technological violence and the imagination of christa mcauliffe's body. in the discourse of the challenger disaster, the bodies of the shuttle crew had to remain behind the technological veil, in the interests of continuing manned space flight. [16] however, folklore scholars have noted that the many popular jokes emanating from the challenger disaster often involved those bodies in quite graphic ways. these jokes present the body/technology interface as a spectacularly violent one, as opposed to the cultural ideal in which interaction between the human body and the machine is a flow state.: q: what do you call a burnt penis on the florida shore? a: a shuttlecock.^25^ q: what was the last thing that went through christa mcauliffe's head? a: a piece of fuselage.^26^ q: why didn't they put showers on the challenger? a: because they knew that everyone would wash up on shore.^27^ based on familiar rhetorical patterns and cycles, these "sick" jokes have been called political cynicism, a rebellion against the mass media's pompous reverence, a critique of national institutions, and an alleviation of death anxieties in the nuclear age.^28^ don ihde has written that we expect our technologies to be transparent so that ideally we are scarcely aware of the machine's presence. for example, we expect our telephones to bring us the voices of our loved ones as if they were really present, rather than coded into energy impulses in fiber-optic cables. skilled operators are supposed to become one with their machines; distinctions between the organic and the technological disappear in harmonious signal and response. technological disaster shifts the terms of that interaction, for here technology violently entraps, penetrates, and chars the body locked in its embrace. it is this possibility that evokes both national efforts at repression and the return of the repressed through the joke cycle. in a national spectacle of disaster, the body is the pain of technological violence that can never be represented, but only displaced by word and image. thus, the body is reconstructed within an organizational safety model, a new lifepod, that denies any further possibility of collapse. groupthink [17] the rogers commission report made it clear that nasa's organizational decisions were to blame in the decision to launch the space shuttle, despite icy weather and faulty booster seals. thus, nasa's management, as well as failed machine parts, became an object of study. nasa's organization was represented in the rogers commission report as a self-regulating system without external surveillance or intervention, a situation sociologist diane vaughan credited, in part, to nasa's secret military projects.^29^ an effective external regulator would have had access to classified materials, an unacceptable risk in the cold war climate. without external reality checks, many critics suggested, nasa had become isolated in its own delusional can-do ideology, derived from its apollo mission successes. furthermore, media coverage of the rogers commission hearings displayed the homogeneous make-up of nasa administrators and its corporate engineers--all middle-aged white men with a life-long devotion to nasa and the aerospace industry. observing the "shocking" and "rancorous" displays of agency in-fighting at the hearings, the new republic suggested that nasa itself seemed to be experiencing a "mid-life crisis."^30^ the modern organizational man was exposed and displayed through the figure of the nasa administrator, locked in a decaying air-tight compartment of his own making and possessed of the "wrong stuff." [18] in the scientific press, especially in the first assessments of the disaster, some attempt was made to blame nasa's rank and file. a few weeks after the disaster, science magazine twice reported that an internal review of the shuttle had found "relaxed workplace standards" including "worker inexperience, lack of motivation, and faulty equipment."^31^ furthermore, it indicated that nasa's investigation included speculation that workers had forgotten to plug a hole in the faulty booster after a leak test.^32^ despite the search for "inadvertent damage" caused by flawed workers, blame was soon leveled at nasa's and morton thiokol's decision-makers who came to represent a nation-wide corrupt power-elite, now open to investigation. charles perrow, whose study of accidents in complex systems would often be evoked in discussions of the challenger, decried the "pentagon effect" at nasa that created a climate of managerial self-aggrandizement and toadying to corporate and military sponsors and the media.^33^ journalist and long-time nasa observer, malcolm mcconnell, wrote that "the rank and file people in nasa are among the hardest-working, most productive, and most talented employees in the federal government."^34^ mcconnell blamed ambitious policy makers engaged in "the political intrigue and compromise, the venality and hidden agendas" that led to disaster.^35^ in another account, joseph j. trento also called the disaster a political failure, quoting shuttle mission specialist john fabian on the challenger investigation: "it just unraveled like watergate."^36^ thus, discussions of the challenger disaster spread beyond mechanical error to wide critiques of post-industrial capitalists, skilled at political manipulations in a secretive high-tech world. [19] the mass media harkened back to nasa's glory days, benevolent and safety conscious, suggesting that the organization had devolved, degenerated, decayed from a golden age of right rule--benevolent and safety-conscious. the same space journalists who attacked a highly politicized nasa, rhapsodized about the pride and the glory, the "heroic neoclassical elan of the moon race."^37^ little connection was made to nasa's ever-recurring technical failures, including the horrifying apollo space capsule fire that entrapped three screaming astronauts in a fiery furnace and melted them into a nylon puddle. nor was much mention made of nasa's origins--the "rocket state" developed in tandem with nuclear weapons, ignited by nazi rocket scientists, and fueled by cold war paranoia.^38^ this lack of a thorough cultural critique left a way open to nasa's salvation. [20] the vision of nasa as a once-effective, decadent organization was very appealing to academic theorists who set about to "fix" the agency, using it as a research model. in the flurry of sociological studies that followed the challenger disaster, nasa's homogeneity and in-group ambience, its hidden agendas, political maneuvering, and back-stabbing, came to signify the internal workings of all corporations. social theorists searched for ways to explain and heal the breach in organizational systems, dissected and exposed in a public hearing, fanned by a nationally televised tragedy. academia, in itself a largely homogeneous entity with its own industrial and military affiliations, responded to the challenger disaster with a corporate consultant's enthusiasm. [21] ensconced in university government documents sections, the five-volume, disembodied rogers commission report provided an easily accessible text for applications of organizational theory and systems models, based on information flow within conveniently closed circuits. according to organizational theorists, nasa was, like the space shuttle itself, a malfunctioning, but correctable, system with faulty components--namely, nasa's and morton thiokol's managers, and nasa's external and internal regulatory units. nasa had experienced blow-by and slippage in its communication linkages: some of morton thiokol's engineers had attempted to voice their fears about the faulty booster seals and cold-temperature launches to their bosses, who had essentially ignored what they considered unproven speculations. [22] many theorists attributed the communications failure to nasa's fall from grace. according to this scenario, nasa once had "a less hierarchical and flexible matrix structure" that relied on "nurturing consensus."^39^ from these days of childhood innocence, the agency had grown increasingly isolated, streamlined and pressurized, indulging in overweening bureaupathological fantasies about its abilities, despite budget cuts. in addition, nasa's components had become highly specialized in their activities, languages and fundamental world-views so that, for example, the professional ethics of engineers did not match the expedient decisions of managers.^40^ isolated from engineers, nasa's management engaged in "groupthink," driven by fantasies of invulnerability and a need for unanimity and cohesion.^41^ thus, the decision to launch the challenger was a technocracy's "major malfunction." [23] despite rumblings in the media that the space agency was in its last hours after an apocalyptic failure, academic theorists accepted nasa's continuing existence at face value. like the shuttle, it was a machine that could be repaired through better interactions and linkages among its components. the machine was wearing out, but it could be restored through an overhaul. engineers and managers could be realigned. better brakes could be put on quick decisions. communications and regulatory valves could be cleaned of soot and debris. the processing system could be repaired to allow the correct flow of information energy, to prevent lacks or excesses of data, to turn away maladaptive codes. then, tires kicked, the ship would be ready to sail to mars with human and animal bodies safely enclosed. [24] the challenger disaster provided organizational theorists with an opportunity to show that the systems model applied equally well to machines and human societies. using charles perrow's work on accidents in complex systems, diane vaughan wrote that technological failures could not be separated from organizational failures, and that the language of systems applied to both. nasa "malfunctioned" because: "the failure of one component interacts with others, triggering a complex set of interactions that can precipitate a technical system accident of catastrophic potential."^42^ the use of systems theory in critiques of post-challenger nasa was disputed by g. richard holt and anthony w. morris using yrjo engestrom's "activity theory," acknowledging that human "activity" is "'messy,' disorganized, seemingly chaotic, and hence endlessly fascinating."^43^ to ensure safer space flights, holt and morris argued, nasa had to accept the internal contradictions and wide possible outcomes inherent in such activity. while the authors exposed gaps in systems models of nasa, their aim was to fix the agency as an information processing system, a contradictory position in itself. [25] the challenger catastrophe threatened political mythologies of the final frontier, and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and the entire cultural project of systems building. in his evolutionary systems and society, vilmos csanyi writes that systems models, despite their predictive value, can only approach the "ontological complexity" of nature, but "the interactions of matter . . . are infinite and immeasurable."^44^ thus, the systems model can only represent a semiotic, self-referential complexity. the models of organizational theorists reflected the strict methods of disciplines and vested interests in the national space program. a radical sense of discontinuity, uncertainty, potentiality, and violence--the ontological complexity of catastrophic events--threatened the fundamental order of disciplines, apparatuses, and methods. charles perrow put this in the strongest terms reminiscent of the 1960s radical left: "risky systems are full of failures. inevitably, though less frequently, these failures will interact in unexpected ways, defeat the safety devices and bring down the system."^45^ thus, the academic response to the challenger explosion was an effort to restore stable systems, and, in an entirely self-referential mode, to reassure its academic audience that their systems, ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and all was right with the world. there might yet be a teacher in space. to the stars [26] one of the outcomes of the challenger disaster was a massive public relations campaign by space enthusiasts to resell the idea of manned space flight. the national commission on space, appointed by ronald reagan, produced a strategic planning report in 1986 on the future of space ventures that included renewed shuttle flights, construction of space station freedom, increased space surveillance of the biosphere, and human settlement on the moon and mars. in 1989, george bush called for a lunar settlement by 2004 and a manned trip to mars by 2019. in 1990, the u.n. endorsed 1992 as international space year (isy), the quincentennary of columbus's landing, inflaming the usual cant among u.s. politicians and space enthusiasts about human destiny, pioneering spirit, and life on the new frontier. [27] in that same year, philip robert harris, a "management and space psychologist" and nasa consultant, published _living and working in space: human behavior, culture and organization_, an attempt to justify the use of the behavioral sciences in space settlement design, using james grier miller's living systems theory. the book was introduced by jesco von puttkamer, a nasa program manager and strategic planner, who briefly described the post-challenger nasa as rejuvenated, ready to "penetrate the new frontier of space."^46^ von puttkamer argued that the challenger explosion had provoked a public outpouring of support for manned space flight because of an "unconscious, unspoken feeling that we are dealing here with evolutionary forces at work."^47^ [28] in behavioral science, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence research, systems theory proposes that the biosocial world is comprised of systems with interactive components, allowing flows of information and energy.^48^ according to these theorists, a natural, intuited law dictates that systems evolve into more and more complex entities: for example, molecules-cells-organisms-ecosystems-biospheres, or cells-organisms-groups-societies--supranational systems. the evolution of earth systems under the influence of matter, energy, and information flows has resulted in a global, biocultural, technologically regulated super-system. thus, the world-wide cybernetic information exchanges of the post-industrial world are seen as the result ofthermodynamic, evolutionary processes leading to higherorganizational levels. [29] systems theorists associated with space programs see human expansion into space as the next organizational level beyond the biosphere. thus, von puttkamer writes that manned space travel allows "man," "earth," and "space" to be "one single creative system," an "intricately closed-loop feedback system, a super-ecology."^49^ in addition, the formation of extra-planetary biospheres will be designed for what von puttkamer predicts will be a new cybernetic species, a weightless species, floating in a space womb, transcending gravity and "entropic deterioration."^50^ these ideas of evolutionary expansion into space reflect the principle of plenitude, a persistent idea in western culture that god created life to reproduce richly and diversely and fill the void. thus, john allen, creator of biosphere ii, the desert amusement park disguised as a scientific experiment in space living, explains that his project will expand life's quest to fill all available econiches, hedging its bets against catastrophe.^51^ [30] the idea of an impending catastrophe, by nuclear war, environmental disaster, or cometary collision is the favored reason for human extra-planetary expansion. during international space year, charles d. walker, assistant to the president at mcdonnell douglass and president of the national space society, explained his support of manned space exploration: human survival. political and economic survival in technical competition within the global economy, sure. but more than that: all human creation, all life as we know it, is here on earth. all our eggs are in one basket, one planet. but our embryonic resources are diminishing, and our nest becoming fouled. our technological nature has given us the means to remove that risk.^52^ here, haunted by the specter of catastrophe, the dreams and aspirations of the postindustrial knowledge class^53^ have been given the shape of science fiction and justified through the nineteenth-century language of "evolution" and "nature" and the twentieth-century language of systems. the rhetoric of eggs and nests reminds us of the dinosaurs, now popularly recognized as warm-blooded, egg-laying, and nurturing creatures wiped out by a cometary collision that brought nuclear winter to the earth. frequent evocations of "eggs," "embryos," "cradles," and "wombs" reinscribe sexual reproduction within an entirely mechanical environment, a protective exoskeleton of metal plates that will protect, control and manage the human body, and ensure the genetic continuation of the chosen spacefarers. ironically, human sexual reproduction in space may actually be impossible, under weightless, radioactive conditions. [31] the political and social meanings of this consensual future are quite apparent in the imagined space settlements of _living and working in space_. philip robert harris refers to the expansion of the human species, the global human family, into the solar system, fulfilling a natural urge for frontier exploration. but his space settlements are built and inhabited by only a segment of that family, the postindustrial knowledge class, envisioned as a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, technicians, corporate managers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, teachers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, architects, film makers, and designers. harris writes: the colonists to the new world during the eighteenth century were largely poor, ill-used white artisans and indentured servants, as well as african slaves. the prospects are that the space colonists of the twenty-first century will be more affluent and self-directed, better educated and chosen. expertise is required of specialists in cross-cultural relocation and living in exotic environments to design systems for deployment and support of spacefarers.^54^ [32] thus, the challenger disaster provided the text for the post-catastrophe survival of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through systems theories. the challenger disaster suggested that technological and organizational systems were ever on the verge of collapse; the massive public relations campaign for space settlements imagines a safe new biosphere, a closed ecology, for academics, civil servants, and corporate managers, freed from environmental disaster, atmospheric impurity, starvation, poverty, disease, and gravity. harris suggests that this cross-disciplinary community will result in a transformation of human consciousness, a spirit of collaboration that will trickle down to the problematic earth populations left behind. [33] a compendium of recent work in space settlement planning, living and working in space promotes the use of the behavioral sciences in mediating a technological environment for human habitation. as part of the space team, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will maintain continual surveillance of human bodies, studying reproduction, sleep cycles, time sense, physical and mental stress, and the effects of weightlessness, isolation, and noise. "artificial life" may produce time sense warps, "psychotic reactions," "spatial illusions," interpersonal conflict, depression, boredom, "anger displacement," a "need for dominance," motion sickness, water retention in the face, and a loss of body mass.^55^ in addition, conflict among disciplines, cultures, and ethnic groups might arise. [34] the answer to controlling these human disturbances in techno-utopia is the application of james grier miller's "living systems theory," a complex symbol language of subsystems and processes. in a space environment, bodies become ingestors, distributors, converters, producers, extruders, and decoders, components in a bio-technical system for control of matter, energy, and information flows.^56^ thus, differences are transcended as humans become synergistic, ergonomically conditioned components in the metamachine. here, the "informating" of knowledge workers in a postindustrial economy based on instantaneous communications, erosion of managerial hierarchies, the formation of strategic alliances and teams in electronic exchanges, the potential for "virtual" universities and corporations, is given stability under the rubric of mission success and safety.^57^ living systems theory provides the paradigm for a new, entirely planned macroculture that will determine every facet of a spacefarer's existence, from decor to diet, from language to sex, for harmonious system functioning. for example, living and working in space, sounding much like an l.l. bean or land's end catalogue, extols space shuttle fashion: a "custom-fitted, cobalt blue, soft cotton, line zipper jacket and pants with coordinated blue shirts," having the functional attraction of being fireproof; other suits are of "light and heat reflecting metallic mylar which also serves to protect from meteorites."^58^ [35] still, cobalt-blue, fireproof uniforms did not save the interdisciplinary, ethnically and racially diverse challenger seven from utter destruction. thus, in its designs for the space station, nasa has considered emergency escape vehicles. jerry craig, head of nasa's crew escape and reentry vehicle planning office, has suggested that the space station have enough "lifeboats" for everyone. in answer to critics who feel that the space station should be made safe enough to do without lifeboats, craig says, "that's kind of like saying the titanic would never sink."^59^ still, space planners are not especially interested in discussing escape vehicles, for then they would have to admit that space travel is overwhelmingly dangerous and that their dreams are as fragile as the hubble telescope and the mars observer, notoriously failed systems. since space settlements are promoted as lifeboats in themselves, lifeboats for the lifeboats seem superfluous and lack political weight. instead, space planners stress the safety of their rationally managed synthetic biospheres which include "storm shelters" for protection against solar flares.^60^ [36] in this thorstein veblein fantasy of a postindustrial army in space, fears of impending accidents make all cultural expression a safety function. indeed, space planners have invented a culture of catastrophe based on faith in prediction. catastrophe provides the rationale for subsuming the disciplines under "spaceology," the transformation of the body into a stable energy-matter-information channel, and the continual mapping and surveillance of system biotechnical components. this national vision of the human future counters (and is thus dependent on) the construction of the thrilling and threatening mass media cyborg, imaged as the terminator or robocop, who perform destabilized and penetrated social identities.^61^ furthermore, the national science fiction of space travel seems reassuring next to the spectacles of disaster in the 1980s and 1990s, not only the real life disasters of leaking toxic chemicals and exploding machines, but those designed for entertainment: graphic nuclear holocausts with shriveling humans in flames; raging dinosaurs ripping men in half; artificially intelligent computer systems trapping and suffocating workers; buildings exploding and falling into gaps in the earth, crushing their inhabitants; planes crashing in an elegant bloody montage of flying shrapnel. space planners reassure us that catastrophe is our origin and our nature: the earth-crossing asteroid or comet that destroyed the dinosaurs "allowed a tiny creature, the ancestral mammal, to grow, differentiate, and fill vacated ecological niches, giving rise eventually to homo sapiens."^62^ those asteroids can now be mined for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen to feed the transcendent bio-technical organism of the postindustrial knowledge class, emptied of troublesome memory, safe at last. ____________________________________________________________ notes ^1^ gregory whitehead, "the forensic theatre: memory plays for the post-mortem condition," _performing arts journal_ 12 (spring 1990): 100-101. for a discussion of the futurist tradition of the self-destroying machine, see william leiss, "technology and degeneration: the sublime machine," in _degeneration: the dark side of progress_, ed. j. edward chamberlain and sander l. gilman (new york: columbia university press, 1985). ^2^ charles perrow, "the habit of courting disaster," _nation_ 11 (october 1986): 329. ^3^ charles perrow, _normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies_ (new york: basic books, 1984): 3. ^4^ perrow, _normal accidents_, 5-9. ^5^ testimony of roger boisjoly, _report to the president_, u.s. presidential commission on the space shuttle _challenger_ accident (washington, d.c.: the commission, 1986): 784-5. ^6^ elaine scarry, _the body in pain_ (new york: oxford university press, 1985): 304. ^7^ scarry, 298. ^8^ william p. rogers, "preface," _report to the president_:1. ^9^ _report to the president_, 1. ^10^ roger boisjoly, "interview with tony chiu," _life_ 11 (march 1988): 22. ^11^ ron westrum, _technologies & society: the shaping of people and things_ (belmont, ca: wadsworth, 1991): 259. ^12^ _report to the president_, 1. ^13^ e. foster-simeon, "picking up the pieces," _all hands_ (june 1986): 22. ^14^ testimony of stanley klein, _report to the president_, 213. ^15^ testimony of p.j. wietz, _report to the president_, 1437. ^16^ testimony of p.j. weitz, _report to the president_, 1437. ^17^ harry l. shipman, _space 2000: meeting the challenge of a new era_ (new york: plenum, 1987): 315. ^18^ shipman, 331. ^19^ anastasia toufexis, "good data and a feces crisis," _time_ 13 may 1985: 61. ^20^ james a. van allen, "myths and realities of space flight," _science_ 30 (may 1986): 1075. ^21^ stephen b. hall, ed., _the human role in space: technology, economics and optimization_ (park ridge, nj: noyes, 1985): v. ^22^ hall, 63. ^23^ hall, 38. ^24^ mcconnell, _challenger: a major malfunction_ (new york: doubleday, 1987): 94. ^25^ collected by elizabeth radin simons, "the nasa joke cycle: the astronauts and the teacher," _western folklore_ 45 (october 1986): 269. ^26^ simons, 272. ^27^ collected by willie smyth, "challenger jokes and the humor of disaster," _western folklore_ 45 (october 1986): 244. ^28^ see simons; smyth; patrick d. morrow, "those sick challenger jokes," _journal of popular culture_ 20 (spring 1987):175-185; elliot oring, "jokes and the discourse on disaster," _journal of american folklore_ 100 (july-september 1987): 276-287; nicholas von hoffman, "shuttle jokes," _new republic_ 24 (march 1986): 14. ^29^ diane vaughan, "autonomy, interdependence, and social control: nasa and the space shuttle _challenger_," _administrative science quarterly_ 35 (june 1990): 232. ^30^ robert bazell, "nasa's mid-life crisis," _new republic_ 24 (march 1986): 12. ^31^ _science_ 14 (february 1986): 664; _science_ 28 (february 1986): 911. ^32^ _science_ 28 (february 1986): 911. ^33^ perrow, "the habit of courting disaster," 354. ^34^ mcconnell, ix. ^35^ mcconnell, x. ^36^ john j. trento, _prescription for disaster_ (new york: crown, 1987): 4. ^37^ mcconnell, 12. ^38^ dale carter, _the final frontier: the rise and fall of the american rocket state_ (new york: verso, 1988): 6-7. ^39^ barbara s. romzek and melvin j. dubnick, "accountability in the public sector: lessons from the challenger tragedy," _public administration review_ 47 (may/june 1987): 227-238. see also howard s. schwartz, _narcissistic process and corporate decay: the theory of the organizational ideal_ (new york: new york university press, 1990): 107-126; c.f. larry heimann, "understanding the challenger disaster: organizational structure and the design of reliable systems," _american political science review_ 87 (june 1993): 421-435. ^40^ michael davis, "thinking like an engineer: the place of a code of ethics in the practice of a profession," _philosophy and public affairs_ 20 (spring 1991): 150-168. see also vaughan, 252. ^41^ gregory moorhead, richard ference and chris p. neck, "group decision fiascoes continue: space shuttle challenger and a revised groupthink framework," _human relations_ 44 (june 1991): 539-551. ^42^ vaughan, 225. ^43^ g. richard holt and anthony w. morris, "activity theory and the analysis of organizations," _human organization_ 52 (spring 1993): 101. ^44^ vilmos csanyi, _evolutionary systems and society: a general theory of life, mind, and culture_ (durham, nc: duke university press, 1989): 15. ^45^ perrow, "the habit of courting disaster," 354. ^46^ philip r. harris, _living and working in space: human behavior, culture and organization_ (new york: ellis horwood, 1992): 9. ^47^ puttkamer, in harris, 9. ^48^ this work stems from ilya prigogine's hypothesis that chaotic systems may take up energy and begin to manifest orderly behavior. see ilya prigogine and i. stengers, _order out of chaos_ (new york: bantam, 1984). ^49^ puttkamer, in harris, 17-18. ^50^ puttkamer, in harris, 22. ^51^ jim robbins, "biosphere ii: our western home in outer space," _american west_ 24 (august 1987): 42. ^52^ charles d. walker, "international space year," special insert, _ad astra_ 4 (january/february 1991): 7. ^53^ daniel bell predicted that the industrial labor force would be replaced by workers skilled in the production and dissemination of information in _the coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting_ (1976; new york: basic books, 1973). for a discussion of the cybernetic goals and fantasies of these knowledge workers in the late twentieth-century, see grant h. kester, "out of sight is out of mind: the imaginary space of postindustrial culture," _social text_ 35 (summer 1993). ^54^ harris, 68. ^55^ harris, 95. ^56^ harris, 102. james grier miller and jesse l. miller, "living systems applications to space habitation," in _space resources: technological springboards into the 21st century_, ed. m.f. mckay (houston: nasa johnson space center, 1992); james grier miller, _living systems_ (new york: mcgraw-hill, 1978); james grier miller, "applications of living systems theory to life in space," in _from antarctica to outer space_, ed. a.a. harrison, et al. (new york: springer-verlag, 1991): 177-198. ^57^ the term "informate" was first used by shoshana zuboff to describe the computer's effects on mid-level professionals. see her _in the age of the smart machine_ (new york: basic books, 1984). for the managerial view of the growing information economy, see stephen p. bradley, jerry a. hausman, and richard l. nolan, eds., _globalization, technology, and competition: the fusion of computers and telecommunications in the 1990s_ (boston: harvard business school press, 1993). ^58^ harris, 130. ^59^ quoted in karen boehler, "lifeboat to safer shores," _ad astra_ 1 (march 1988). ^60^ national commission on space, 71-2. ^61^ cynthia s. fuchs, "'death is irrelevant': cyborgs, reproduction, and the future of male hysteria," _genders_ 18 (winter 1993): 114. ^62^ national commission on space, 65. --------------------------------end-----------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------millard, 'fable of the ants: myopic interactions in delillo's _libra_', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-millard-fable.txt archive pmc-list, file millard.194. part 1/1, total size 52582 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the fable of the ants: myopic interactions in delillo's _libra_ by bill millard department of english rutgers university millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by bill millard, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. "there are only two things in the world. things that are true. and things that are truer than true." --weird beard (russell lee moore, a.k.a. russ knight), klif disk jockey in _libra_ i. paranoias and paradigms: who's afraid of don delillo? [1] one of the most challenging qualities that frank lentricchia finds in don delillo is that he "offers us no myth of political virginity preserved, no 'individuals' who are not expressions of--and responses to--specific historical processes" ("introducing" 241). while most mainstream fiction of the reagan era is marked by regionalisms and privatisms that bespeak an alarming poverty of imagination, delillo dares to project a world in its full political complexity and to grapple with ideas that might make some sense of events observed in the public sphere. working within a culture that was both postmodern and nostalgic, a culture that longed for the pieties of laissez faire economics and euro-american bourgeois individualism while its socioeconomic institutions were busily breaking down any remaining space for individuals or individuality, delillo recognized that the 1980s could not be understood without attention to the problem of individual behavior in a social sphere hypersaturated with the products of signifying systems. the "seven seconds that broke the back of the american century" (_libra_ 181) is a superb symbolic moment on which to focus such attention, since it is obviously much more than a symbol. [2] to publish a historical novel that posited a plausible chain of events leading to the assassination of john kennedy was more than an act of defiant imagination or political chutzpah; it raised the stakes for the enterprise of fiction within a culture rapidly losing its allegiance to written language as a practical means of organizing experience. _libra_ makes the implicit claim that no matter what one might believe of the lone-gunman theory or the warren commission's report--in cia master-researcher nicholas branch's view, "the megaton novel james joyce would have written if he'd moved to iowa city and lived to be a hundred" (181)--the assembly of explanatory narratives from the available evidence surrounding the events at dealey plaza is as legitimate a concern for a novelist as for any journalist, historian, or member of an investigative body. given the evidentiary problems surrounding this assassination, the unexplained (or unsatisfyingly explained) deaths of participants in these events and witnesses to them, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of credibility, the novelist may in fact be on stronger ground than members of these other fields in asserting truth claims about kennedy's death. [3] this position depends on a precise characterization of the nature of a historical truth claim. _libra_ achieves its disruptive force by offering a fresh paradigm by which an event like the kennedicide may be understood. this paradigm^1^ is post-individualist, while accounting for individual actions and decisions within social signifying systems; it refuses both the easy gambit of universal skepticism toward the possibility of explaining such an event and the equally easy temptation of overreaching causal conjecture. it is immune to charges that might be lodged from opposite directions: the accusation of credulity, involving the sense of universal connectivity associated with conspiracy theory (regarded as paranoid in both the vernacular and the pynchonian senses), and that of ahistorical nihilism, involving the disjunctivity of explanations that lodge sole culpability with oswald (and thus reduce an incident with massive social causes and consequences to private motivation, mere inexplicable insanity). delillo's text implies an interpretive paradigm that neither overplays nor underplays its hand, connecting events with participants' intentions while eschewing any model of those intentions as deliberate, purposeful, or necessarily connected with their outcomes. [4] _libra_'s reception among the guardians of a conceptual border between fiction and the presumably nonfictional discourses of history, politics, and journalism was venomous to an astonishing but hardly inexplicable degree. like lentricchia, journalist hal crowther assesses the vituperation directed at delillo by george f. will and jonathan yardley of the _washington post_ as a significant barometer of the book's power, an indication of the authoritarian paranoia that it arouses--a deeper and truer paranoia than the accounts oliver stone, james garrison, the aficionado of the austin bookstore's "conspiracy" section in _slacker_, or any caller to a wbai-fm talk show might conjure. crowther posits a credible reason why the paranoia in corporate journalism's higher circles might mirror or exceed the paranoia in the lower: "at the _post_ they love to talk about watergate, but they don't want to talk about dallas. establishment journalists know in their guts that they chickened out on the biggest story of their time and left it to fringe players and exhumers of elvis" (330).^2^ [5] both of the _post_ commentators are sniffishly dismissive of the political implications of _libra_, but will also makes an explicit case for historical disjunctivism: "it takes a steady adult nerve to stare unblinkingly at the fact that history can be jarred sideways by an act that signifies nothing but an addled individual's inner turmoil" (qtd. in crowther 323). characteristically, will takes a reasonable-sounding position in favor of willfully limiting the reach of historical reasoning. one may safely presume that any historian, journalist, congressional investigator, or novelist does desire "a steady adult nerve," but will's argument fails to consider why causal inquiry must stop with the observation of individual pathology. [6] oswald, as delillo represents him in _libra_, is indeed addled--afflicted, apparently congenitally, with a moderately severe combination of dyslexia and dysgraphia- and in constant personal turmoil. will's criticism thus seems not only disproportionate but misapplied to this novel. in depicting a clueless gunman who bases his actions on romantic adolescent notions of political destiny, plays into the hands of nearly every conspirator or would-be conspirator around him, and even carries the requisite familial baggage for the privatistic banalities of freudian interpretation (absent father, domineering mother, and largely repressed but recurrent gay desires), doesn't delillo provide individual-pathology theorists with all the evidence they need? but the crucial distinction here is between a reading that incorporates individual pathology and an individual*ist*, disjunctivist reading. delillo's offense, beyond merely "exhibit[ing] the same skepticism that was almost universal at the time the warren report was released" (crowther 323), is continuing the investigation into and through the pathological individual. oswald is pathological without being particularly distinct from his surroundings. [7] will and yardley's wagon-circling responses to _libra_ also resemble tom wolfe's comments about noam chomsky's theories of the structural imperatives of the news media within the corporate state, included in the documentary _manufacturing consent_ (1992). wolfe derisively dismisses chomsky's argument about control over the limits of permissible public debate on the grounds that it would require the manipulation of the media by a cabal of plotters, presumably gathered in a single room--a laughably cinematic image of organized malignity, mirrored from the right by gen. edwin walker's rant about the "real control apparatus": the apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name. we can't measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. it is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can't uncover. this doesn't mean there are no plotters. they are elected officials of our government, cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives (_libra_ 283). because his account of the chomskyist critique adheres to the same individual-intentionalist paradigm, wolfe cannot imagine a controlled discourse without conscious and practically omnipotent controllers; because they refuse to entertain possibilities beyond warren report orthodoxy and rational intentionalism, will and yardley conflate delillo with the "fringe players and exhumers of elvis." to posit mechanisms by which fringe players operate is hardly to embrace the fringe oneself. like chomsky elucidating the hard-wired requirements of the information industry, delillo outlines certain inevitable tendencies of organized sub rosa actions, aware that those tendencies go into effect no matter who does the organizing or why. [8] cluelessness is indeed central to the actions of this novel, but it is crucial to recognize that cluelessness in this political atmosphere is by no means limited to oswald. from win everett's private mixture of motivations (only belatedly incorporating the recognition that "the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot" [221]) to david ferrie's sexual desires and religious mysticism, private perceptions with distinct limits shape the actions of each participant in the action of _libra_. a plot against jfk arises, but without the conscious guidance of its master plotters. it is a conspiracy that wolfe, will, and yardley would not recognize, an overarching "deathward logic" (221) that encompasses clever players like george de mohrenschildt, whose loathing for gen. walker elicits his only expressions of strong emotion (55-56), and the cia's laurence parmenter ("part of the groton-yale-oss network of so-called gentlemen spies . . . the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret oaths and initiations" [30]) along with willfully delusional birchers like guy banister, who spends late-night hours poring masturbatorily over his "final nightmare file" purporting to document "red chinese troops . . . being dropped into the baja by the fucking tens of thousands," and who "wanted to believe it was true. he did believe it was true. but he also knew it wasn't" (351-52). each conspirator, seeing no further than his own interests, fears, or desires for revenge, moves in a private direction; the resultant vector of all these individual movements is something no individualist interpreter dares call conspiracy. ii. insects and insubordinations: a myopic-interaction model [9] an interdisciplinary model of collective behavior that develops its own directionality, regardless of any single participant's agenda, comes from the improbable intersection of two fields of study: entomology (as practiced on an amateur basis by a budding physicist) and computer science. richard feynman, recalling his home experiments with ants' navigational behavior, finds that the insects either move randomly or follow each other's trails, and that the repetition of small deviations when they follow each other results in a composite trail that gives the illusory appearance of order. one question that i wondered about was why the anttrails look so straight and nice. the ants look as if they know what they're doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. yet the experiments that i did to try to demonstrate their sense of geometry didn't work. . . . at first glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant cooperation. but if you look at it carefully, you'll see that it's nothing of the kind (95-96). none of feynman's ants moves individually in a straight line, but the collective movement nevertheless produces a straight line, simulating purposeful effort. [10] transylvanian computer scientist alfred bruckstein, working with mathematical pursuit problems at the technion in haifa, israel, has formalized feynman's conjecture, proving the theorem that an initially disorderly series of pursuit paths will converge to the straight segment connecting the initial point of departure, e.g., an anthill, and the destination of the original "pioneer ant," e.g., a recently discovered food source (bruckstein 60-61). his model of "global behavior that results from simple and local interaction rules" (62) has implications for robotics as well as for the behavior of animal colonies. it also has implications for the behavior of human organizations, at least metaphorically--and perhaps, if one notes its resemblance to the "political resultant" theory used in the field of geopolitical decision analysis (allison 7-8), literally as well.^3^ if "globally optimal solutions for navigation problems can be obtained as a result of myopic cooperation between simple agents or processors" (bruckstein 62), can any form of multiple myopia--perhaps the combined myopias of a disgraced, "buried," and resentful cia agent; a soldier of fortune with no fixed address and undiscernible loyalties; a disease-obsessed and mystically inclined pilot, sacked from an airline job because of institutional homophobia, who contemplates developing hypnotism as a weapon and claims to "believe in everything" (_libra_ 314 15); and a dyslexic political naif who daydreams of merging with the flow of history--also give the appearance of directed movement? [11] in the national security state as depicted by delillo, myopic interaction is not a human imperfection in an otherwise efficient system; it is built into the system from the outset. during the planning that resulted in the bay of pigs invasion, everett and parmenter were part of a layered and deliberately fragmented bureaucracy, described by delillo in parodically numbing detail: the first stage, the senior study effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. they met for an hour and a half. then eleven men left the room, six men entered. the resulting group, called se augmented, met for two hours. then seven men left, four men entered, including everett and parmenter. this was se detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of se augmented ought to know about these plans. those members in turn wondered whether the senior study effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three. chances are they didn't. when the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form leader 4. win everett was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages (20). the point of all this beckettish enumeration is not simply that antlike bureaucrats come and go, talking of guantanamo, but that the form of rationality peculiar to such organizations depends precisely on minimizing the possibility that anyone might know enough to comprehend the full narrative: knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. in many cases the dci, the director of central intelligence, was not to know important things. the less he knew, the more decisively he could function. it would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an oval office chat with the president, if he knew what they were doing in leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. . . . it was the president, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. they all knew that jfk wanted castro cooling on a slab. but they weren't allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they'd charged themselves to carry out. the white house was to be the summit of unknowing (21-22). resemblances to the reagan-bush white house, the unpenetrating tower hearings into the iran-%contra% phase of covert national security operations, and the doctrine of "plausible deniability" are perfectly coincidental, of course. but the plot against castro, taking grimly comic turns at first (poisoned or exploding cigars, "a poison pen in the works . . . testing a botulin toxin on monkeys . . . fungus spores in his scuba suit" [21]), then culminating in the botched invasion at the bay of pigs, serves as a kind of prologue-plot, prefiguring the myopically planned spectacle of dealey plaza. when the control of public events requires the diffusion of awareness and dispersal of control, it is unsurprising that everett's initial idea of a theatrically managed, well-controlled near miss--as executed, or functionally interpreted, by black-ops technician t-jay mackey and his team of shooters, including "leon" oswald- goes out of control, its multiple shades of signification simplified to the brutality of an actual hit. [12] the tendency toward myopic interactions pervades the official and unofficial national security apparatus, not only in the bay of pigs fiasco but in the meetings that continue after the official dispersal of groups such as leader 4 and se detailed. "true believers" like the men of leader 4 may be too "overresponsive to policy shifts, light sensitive, unpredictable" (22) to continue in covert operations, but they carry on meeting obsessionally out of sheer momentum, a shadow-cabal without real powers (and a caricature of tom wolfe's vision of conspirators). everett, the one agent who knew enough details of the anti-castro operations to serve as the agency equivalent of a pioneer ant, is relegated to the emasculated existence of a planted fake professor at texas woman's university, repeating pointless movements: mary frances watched him butter the toast. he held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? or were there other, deeper requirements? it was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need (16). he imagines a painting commemorating the confrontation of leader 4 with agents of the cia's office of security, titling this canvas "light entering the cave of the ungodly" (24)--implying religiosity and the fall, not instrumental rationality, which they have tried for a time and found inoperative. iii. cinema and simulacra: the fallacy of forensic romance [13] everett and his fellow ex-"clandestines" are drawn to pointless activity as lapsing believers are drawn to ritual, no longer convinced that their actions have political content, but compelled to continue them nonetheless. they are not so much a conspiracy as the simulacrum of a conspiracy, performing according to a script whose composition is ongoing and is not under their control. they have effects on history, but hardly the "personal contribution to an informed public. . . . the major subtext and moral lesson" (53) that everett hopes will ensue, redeeming him in the eyes of history. he fails to see that this romantic vision (the truth seeing the light of day!) is incompatible with the simulacral nature of postmodern political activity--that his plan's complex elegance is unlikely to survive its implementation by field operatives such as mackey and wayne elko, who have consumed too many images of themselves as seven samurai (145) to be reliable executors of subtle instructions (much as follower ants simplify the intricate paths of a pioneer ant).^4^ once everett has embraced the politics of the public image, hoping to manipulate the media and the agency through the perception of a vengeful castro--publicly raising the question of just what actions castro is seeking to avenge- he reveals his myopia: he forgets that the politics of the public image tends to embrace you back. [14] it is practically inevitable that a consideration of _libra_, with its displacements of agency and its recurrent coincidences between engineered events and happenstance ("it was no longer possible to hide from the fact that lee oswald existed independent of the plot" [178]), will lead to a baudrillardian vision of social processes. the use of oswald, boy marxist, as the instrument of the anti-castroite conspiracy (a "negative libran" [315] whom ferrie believes might flip in either direction) is a clear example of baudrillard's "moebius-spiralling negativity" whereby [a]ll the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. . . . is any given bombing . . . the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power . . . ? all this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation (30 31). even the _post_'s pet conspiracy watergate was a nonscandal to baudrillard, a show trial designed to create a "moral superstructure" (27) behind which the amoral capitalist state can function. to interpret such events as struggles of right and left over rationally expressible questions of public interest--rather than structural fictions obscuring the fact that the watergate break-in and cover-up, or whatever plot culminated in dealey plaza, were closer to normative than exceptional state behavior^5^--is to mistake vertigo for orientation. [15] power, in baudrillard's vision, both uses and fears simulacra. it strives for a monopoly on simulation, punishing acts such as a theatrical "fake hold-up" (39); it fears unsanctioned simulation more than it fears violent transgression, precisely because simulation "always suggests, over and above its object, that _law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation_" (38, emphasis baudrillard's). the everett/parmenter/ banister/mackey/elko/raymo/ferrie/oswald mechanism converts the near-miss, a simulation that might have publicized sensitive covert operations, into a hit on kennedy, a shock that the state apparatus can ultimately absorb. sociopolitical structures could tolerate actual violence against this president, but not symbolic violence against the system of signs that functions as protective coloration for the operations of capital. "power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. thus with american presidents: the kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. others . . . only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders" (37). [16] discourses of truth come in for rough treatment in baudrillard's world, and the figures in _libra_ who try to enact discourses of truth are likewise disoriented and defeated. at the opposite end of the plot from the hapless everett, who thought he could induce media hyperreality to do the work of the real, sits nicholas branch, performing historical reconstruction from the masses of evidence supplied to him by the curator. branch, the would-be panoptical reader who can synthesize the entire mass of materials into a credible historical truth claim, is at first driven to complete his history whether or not anyone will ever read it. it steadily becomes apparent to him, however, that he is performing a simulacrum of research. his position is both a scholar's heaven, with apparently infinite research materials provided instantly on request, and a scholar's hell of overabundance and nonintegration; his papery environment is hallucinatorily borgesian, part library of babel and part garden of forking paths. branch is _homo documentarius_, linear-thinking gutenbergian man, with his logical and recombinatory faculties underscored in his surname,^6^ but his attempt at a definitive reconstruction of the kennedicide peters out as miserably as everett's attempt to send true information to the public. [17] for his naive belief in the possibility of a realist discourse about dealey plaza, branch receives a different form of knowledge, which he comes to interpret as a form of punishment, from the sources he depends on. he is damned to an eternal investigation, drowned in information that is sensory as well as documentary, including the contradictory, the irrelevant, and the gruesome. the primary texts that the curator continues to send him include not only the obligatory zapruder film (that most exhaustively scrutinized of cinematic texts) but autopsy photos, "the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. . . . an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. we are on another level here, branch thinks. beyond documents now. they want me to *touch* and *smell*. . . . the bloody goat heads seem to mock him. he begins to think this is the point" (299). in place of the coherence of an explainable conspiracy, he comes to see the plot as "a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like"--yet "[t]he stuff keeps coming" (441), defying comprehension at branch's end of the plot just as events defied control at everett's. instead of attaining the closure one expects from a narrative syntagm, the successful completion of his forensic romance, branch becomes the sisyphus of mediated information. he is still reading signs at the close of the novel; he has still written little; he has accepted a grim role as the goatherd of historical hell, keeper of the unintelligible secrets of the state. iv. infocide [18] delillo's plot is a nightmarish parable of the transmission of any type of consequential information through the public sphere under late capitalism. the sender, mediators, and receiver of the message (everett, the other conspirators, and branch, respectively) are all maintained in a state of myopia throughout the process; the initial message is replaced by an antithetical counter message and never reaches its true intended receiver, the politically responsible public. this is precisely as ruling-class apologists of george will's ilk would have it, of course, with forensic interpretation forestalled and political accountability rendered risible. useful communication is stultified under such conditions; the state's literal control apparatus (from police to spies) becomes redundant, if not vestigial, when much of the citizenry is occupied with information-games that lack real referents and consequences. in baudrillard's glum description of daily life in the realm of infinite simulation, there is "[n]o more violence or surveillance; only 'information,' secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect again comes into play. we are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space" (54). [19] the capitalist polity, of course, has always had its own defensive mythologies to characterize its processes as positively benign. the theory of myopic interactions is by no means the only case of insect behavior offering a metaphoric explanation of human behavior. if, under this paradigm, a series of antlike actions in pursuit of private interests combine to result in public calamity, one formative myth of the early capitalist era uses another arthropod collective to extol the processes that adam smith would anthropomorphize and anatomize some 70 years later as capitalism's benevolent invisible hand. bernard mandeville's _the fable of the bees: or, private vices, publick benefits_, first appearing in 1705, offers a conceptual structure remarkably similar to bruckstein's. his beehive prospers as long as it tolerates a rich array of interlocking iniquities, but it loses both its wealth and its power relative to other hives when it gives in to the impulses of reform, economic leveling, and anti-imperalism. a critical difference between these two images of human society-as-insect-colony is that mandeville, while applauding the system that transmutes private vices into public benefits, also inverts the equation and identifies *public-spiritedness itself*, on an individual scale, with disaster on the social scale. throughout the period of capital's social dominance, it seems, one encounters a form of consciousness that wilfully refuses to form a lucid and integrative social vision. [20] mandeville's account of apian society is founded on the same sort of macro/micro disjunction by which feynman and bruckstein explain formic navigation: behavior that looks like error or disorder at the individual level combines with other such behavior to produce order for the collective. like any capitalist utilitarian, pre-marxian or post-, mandeville rationalized the glaring class distinctions among his bees with the observation that "industry/had carry'd life's conveniences,/it's real pleasures, comforts, ease,/to such a height, the very poor/lived better than the rich before" (ll. 198-202). this is the classical rationalization of inequities and iniquities under capitalism; it would recur in the reaganite trope of a rising tide lifting all boats. and mandeville's identification of social reform as counterproductive, removing the incentives that drive the invisible hand, would recur nearly three centuries later in margaret thatcher's denouncements of any public policy based on compassion or economic justice as tearfully sentimental, or "wet." [21] the same contempt for social interaction reaches a peak of comic exaggeration in _libra_ when david ferrie, joking with mafioso carmine latta (who will later manipulate jack ruby into taking his role in the script) about the cold war apocalypse that might ensue if the u.s. tried to bomb cuba to retrieve it from the communists for the mob, asserts a positive preference for postnuclear hobbesianism: " . . . i like the idea of living in shelters. you go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. the sewer system is a form of welfare state. it's a government funnel to the sea. i like to think of people being independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million backyards. each person is responsible for his own shit" (173). how clearly can one distinguish this parodic hyperindividualism from the attitude expressed in the _impeach earl warren_ signs^7^ and swastika graffiti that sends weird beard into nervous premonitory improvisations (381-82)? [22] on a fundamental level, communication itself is at odds with the belief system shared by mandeville, will, reagan (the "great communicator"!), ferrie, latta, gen. walker, and the looming bircher population of 1963 dallas. this is a community that has been immunized against community, unified in acceptance of fragmentation. much has been written about the proliferation of signifiers from commercial culture in delillo's works, and about how these intersecting messages shred the idea of an individual consciousness: "a whole network of popular mythology, allowing delillo to show how the possibilities of meaning and action are shaped by the contemporary %ethos% of simultaneity and indeterminacy . . . . character, the transformation and realization of the novelistic subject's depth through narrative time, is replaced by the notion of character as a function of the frequently self-canceling languages of representation in which the novelistic self is situated" (wacker 70-71). [23] these environments are so oversaturated with disconnected messages that they pose a risk of what one might call "death by information"--a particular hazard for someone like oswald, who lacks (probably for hereditary neurologic reasons) the integrative capacity that makes purposeful linguistic behavior possible. for all his protestations about economic injustice, oswald's image of communism is a consumer item, a boy's perverse fantasy of becoming the other the whole culture fears; the roles of stalin and trotsky are natural outgrowths of teenage idol worship, exotic alternatives to john wayne, in whose screen sanctified presence he also bathes while on mess duty at corregidor (93-94). he forgets to visit trotsky's house in mexico city, and "[t]he sense of regret makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it quickly, saying so what" (358), like a visitor to hollywood missing part of a universal studios tour. writing his historic diary while in russia, he is "[s]tateless, word blind": always the pain, the chaos of composition. he could not find order in the field of little symbols. they were in the hazy distance. he could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. a word is also a picture of a word. he saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess the rest. he made wild tries at phonetic spelling. but the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. he watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. the nature of things was to be elusive. things slipped through his perceptions. he could not get a grip on the runaway world (211). word-blindness is not the same thing as ignorance: "he knew things. it wasn't that he didn't know" (211). spymaster marion collings gives oswald a recruiting speech about the interpretive importance of context--"a fact is innocent until someone wants it. then it becomes intelligence. . . . an old man eating a peach is intelligence if it's august and the place is the ukraine and you're a tourist with a camera . . . . there's still a place for human intelligence" (247)--but oswald is unsuited for this type of cognitive work. he incorporates within his own cranium the perspectivelessness and disconnection of the whole culture; he is a living representative of a myopically interactive informational realm. [24] death by information goes hand in hand with the death *of* information. in a hyperreal environment where messages are infinitely reproducible and convertible, collings' elision of the two meanings of "intelligence" (the raw informational material itself and the human skill at making sense of it) metastasizes throughout the culture, and the former overcomes the latter. as william cain observes after discussing this passage, "in american culture, there are always more facts, more intelligence. . . . the irony is that the spread of information fails to lead to clearer meaning and more finely focused intelligence. people assemble knowledge, and its transmission from person to person and place to place does signify, yet the import of it all stays mysterious" (281). such a quantity of information ensures that little or no actual informing ever occurs. [25] is the dominance of the myopic-interaction paradigm absolute? does _libra_ reinforce "what we darkly suspect about the postmodern alteration of the mind" (cain 281)? the bathetic but intensely imagined monologue by marguerite oswald (448-456), patching together incoherent cliches and insights until they achieve a desperate coherence, concludes _libra_ in a minor key, but it is hardly the same fatalistic minor key in which baudrillard composes. implicitly, at least on a metafictional level, passages like this imply that it is still possible to select information from the ceaseless media babel and combine it in ways that generate power (at least if one has don delillo's ear for the spoken american language). the question remains whether the borders between art-language and world-language are permeable. [26] for one alternative to communicative myopia, one can do worse than return to the empiricist intelligence of richard feynman. the ant-navigation paradigm is opposed in his text by a recurrent behavioral model that equates global awareness of purpose with problem-solving effectiveness. the most explicit description of this informed-interaction model occurs in the long chapter "los alamos from below," where he recounts his experiences working on the bomb. security interests have mandated the fragmentation of knowledge--with a level of control and surveillance that can properly be called paranoid, however justifiable under wartime conditions--but feynman intuits that disseminating more knowledge about the project among technical workers will improve the quality and efficiency of their work. experience proves him right: the real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. the army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called special engineer detachment--clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. they sent them up to los alamos. they put them in barracks. and they would tell them *nothing*. then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on ibm machines--punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. nobody told them what it was. the thing was going very slowly. i said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission . . . . *complete* transformation! *they* began to invent ways of doing it better. they improved the scheme. they worked at night. . . . [a]ll that had to be done was to tell them what it was. (127-128) [27] the bureaucrats who set up special engineer detachment counted on the efficacy of myopic interactions, under the assumption that only a small coterie (analogous to the pioneer ant that knows the location of the food) could be trusted with information about the direction of the collective endeavor, but feynman explicitly demonstrates the superiority of informed interactions for certain types of operations. what works for ants and assassins does not necessarily improve results for engineers, and delillo's account of the information-structures that produced the kennedicide--regardless of whether the specific events he imagines to occupy that structural framework are veridical, a proposition unlikely ever to be confirmed or disproved- qualifies him as something like a conceptual engineer. this status adds weight to his works' implicit claim to have influence in the public sphere. [28] in _mao ii_, delillo extends and deepens the intimation that the gutenberg/branch paradigm cannot make sense of the postmodern era's public events. the transition from the world of _libra_ to that of _mao ii_--perhaps a paradigm shift within delillo's work to mirror the one he sees occurring in the political world--becomes clear toward the conclusion of the latter book as bill gray approaches death, sensing that his form of information is in eclipse during the days of moon and khomeini ("'what terrorists gain, novelists lose'" [157]). the literary world where he once enjoyed ferocious debate with his friend and editor everson is in decline, eroded by the perks of capital ("'who owns this company?' 'you don't want to know.' 'give me the whole big story in one quick burst.' 'it's all about limousines'" [101-02]). his belief that his actions have public consequences is also in decline; his agreeing to meet with abu rashid's hostage-holders represents the beginning of a prolonged suicide for both gray and his mode of thought. moving eastward toward the rendezvous and the grave, gray sustains an inner monologue that retreats from public observation into the myopic realm of personal and familial nostalgia. [29] the individual artist in language, this plot implies, is obsolete because he has always been bounded by, and bound to, his privacy--an artifact of a social order that no longer exists. yet gray's language is succeeded by a different language, that of brita nilsson's camera. she does not refuse to participate in history; her gesture to unmask the armed youth at the end of her meeting with abu rashid dramatizes her willingness to be an active participant in events, not a passive recorder (236). she, like delillo, is still a public citizen and an artist who can surprise the public; her visual language produces factual texts that are indeed selected--hardly the panoptical god's-eye view of a would-be master historian like branch, or of the illusory "objective" news media--but selected with the informed, receptive eye of a new kind of informational engineer. myopia, after all, is easily corrected with lenses. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes 1. i will designate this paradigm the "theory of myopic interactions," borrowing the term from alfred bruckstein. bruckstein does not use the term "myopic interactions" in his _mathematical intelligencer_ article, but the phrase is attributed to him in a brief description of this article in _science_ (april 23, 1993). it is broader in scope than the phrase he originally uses, "myopic cooperation," since it allows for noncooperative or actively antagonistic interactions such as those involving governmental operatives and oswald or ruby. 2. whether they would still love to talk about watergate after talking about it with baudrillard, however, is an open question. 3. graham allison offers competing explanatory models for a particularly intricate geopolitical test case, the installation of soviet missiles in cuba. according to the "rational actor" or "classical" model, the one most foreign policy analysts and laymen have implicitly embraced, governments make decisions monolithically as individual chess players do, referring to specific defined objectives and calculating the rational means of attaining them. however, the "organizational process" and "governmental (bureaucratic) politics" models better explain the "_intra_-national mechanisms" (6) that determine international behavior: each apparent monolith or chess player is in fact a black box containing competing organizations, interests, and individuals, each of whom pursues distinct and only partially compatible objectives. analysis of the organization, routines, and relative bargaining power of these components yields an understanding of how participants come to make irrational decisions. i am indebted to katie burke, md, facep, for calling my attention to allison's work and its applications to medical and governmental decision analysis, as well as to the argument presented here. 4. elko's identification of his paramilitary role with cinematic models is made explicit, as is his own form of myopia, when he muffs his task of killing oswald at the arranged rendezvous site, the texas theater, by waiting through the feature (_cry of battle_) to "let the tension build. because that's the way they do it in the movies" (412), allowing police to apprehend him instead. staying for the second feature (_war is hell_) after "leon" is removed confirms elko's priorities. 5. "in fact, the charges against nixon were for behavior not too far out of the ordinary, though he erred in choosing his victims among the powerful, a significant deviation from established practice. he was never charged with the serious crimes of his administration: the 'secret bombing' of cambodia, for example. the issue was indeed raised, but it was the secrecy of the bombing, not the bombing itself, that was held to be the crime. . . . we might ask, incidentally, in what sense the bombing was 'secret.' actually, the bombing was 'secret' because the press refused to expose it" (chomsky 81-82). 6. branch is among the first characters introduced in the book, appearing within six pages of another nicholas: one of young oswald's taunting truant companions in the bronx, nicky black, who "know[s] where to get these books where you spin the pages fast, you see people screwing" (8). referring to himself in the third person as "the kid," collapsing the distinction between written language and cinema with his primitive porn, bearing the devil's conventional given name (though "the name was always used in full, never just nicky or black" [8]), and vanishing from the book after a single scene, nicky black is the sort of background character whose very irrelevance to the narrative charges him with symbolism. when a second nicholas b. then appears among larger, more important masses of paper, does the inference that delillo is setting up early subtextual linkages between an obsession with textual forms and auld nickie-ben constitute interpretive overaggression? 7. the irony of rightists calling for the impeachment of the very man who would head the commission that performed a simulacral investigation, thus protecting the plotters (in yet another moebius-spiral), is unlikely to be lost on many readers of _libra_ but is probably lost on quite a few of the rightists. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited allison, graham t. _essence of decision: explaining the cuban missile crisis_. boston: little, brown, 1971. baudrillard, jean. "the precession of simulacra," in _simulations_. trans. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman. new york: semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79. bruckstein, alfred m. "why the ant trails look so straight and nice." _mathematical intelligencer_ 15.2 (1993): 59-62. cain, william e. "making meaningful world: self and history in _libra_." rev. of delillo, don, _libra_. _michigan quarterly review_ 29.2 (1990): 275-287. chomsky, noam. _towards a new cold war: essays on the current crisis and how we got there_. new york: pantheon, 1982. crowther, hal. "clinging to the rock: a novelist's choices in the new mediocracy." _south atlantic quarterly_ 89.2 (1990): 321-336. delillo, don. _libra_. new york: viking penguin, 1988. ---. _mao ii_. new york: viking, 1991. feynman, richard. _"surely you're joking, mr. feynman!": adventures of a curious character_. ed. edward hutchings. new york: norton, 1985. "follow-the-leader math." (news report on bruckstein's paper, with quote from bruckstein.) _science_ 260 (april 23, 1993): 495. lentricchia, frank. "the american writer as bad citizen--introducing don delillo." _south atlantic quarterly_ 89.2 (1990): 239-244. ---. "_libra_ as postmodern critique." _south atlantic quarterly_ 89.2 (1990): 431-453. originally published in_raritan_ 8.4 (1989): 1. mandeville, bernard. _the fable of the bees: or, private vices, publick benefits_. _eighteenth-century english literature_. ed. geoffrey tillotson, paul fussell, jr., marshall waingrow, and brewster rogerson. new york: harcourt, 1969: 267-277. _manufacturing consent: noam chomsky and the media_. dir. peter wintonick and mark achbar. 1992. _slacker_. dir. richard linklater. 1991. wacker, norman. "mass culture/mass novel: the representational politics of don delillo's _libra_." _works and days_ 8.1 (1990): 67-87. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------helmling, 'marxist pleasure: jameson and eagleton', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-helmling-marxist.txt marxist pleasure: jameson and eagleton by steven helmling department of english, university of delaware _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by steven helmling, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] as reading matter, contemporary marxist criticism is pretty heavy going. first and most obviously because it inherits a long, rich and adventurous tradition not only of political and sociological but also of philosophical argument--the breadth of marx's own interests insured that: he aimed, and so have all marxisms after him, to synthesize all sciences, to make marxism the key to all mythologies, or (in fredric jameson's now-famous phrase) the "untranscendable horizon" of all cultural, political, and social inquiry. (marxism obliges itself to reckon with, say, deconstruction; whereas deconstruction regards dealing with marxism as discretionary.) but marxism takes on other difficulties, other burdens besides the intellectual ones; it carries the torch of a moral tradition as well, of concern, even anguish about the plight of the oppressed. and its burdens are "moral" in another sense, too, the sense that connects less with "morality" than with "morale"; for it is the very rare marxist text that is without some sort of hortatory subtext--though usually, it is true, expressed polemically (often most fiercely against other marxists). and here, too, marx himself is the great original: he asks to be read as a scientist, not a moralist, but we do not readily credit any marxism that is deaf to the moralist (and ironist) in marx's potent rhetoric. [2] so "doing marxism" is not easy. to join in the marxist conversation, even just as a reader, requires an %askesis% that cannot be casual, an experience of initiation that involves extraordinary "difficulty" of every possible kind: difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions. yet the initiation into marxism is not without its pleasures, too: pleasures, indeed, not punctually marked off from, but rather continuous with, the satisfactions of the adept--and even more conflictedly, pleasures somehow deriving from, even constituted precisely by, the very "difficulties," both moral and intellectual, that marxism obliges its initiates to shoulder. [3] i want in this essay to consider fredric jameson and terry eagleton, the two leading marxists writing in english, with an eye to the contrasting ways each negotiates the contradictions of this mix of intellectual pleasure with intellectual-moral difficulty. (a salient topos will be "left puritanism," with some sidelights from roland barthes.) the eminence of jameson and eagleton makes them the obvious choices for such an essay in contrasts. their substantive differences are as well known as the warmth with which they avow common cause, but in what follows i want to shift the emphasis from their "positions" to the ground where the contrasts between them are the sharpest, namely to their prose styles. that a subculture so devout as the academic about splitting fine ideological hairs nevertheless seems agreed on accepting as indispensable two writers so different--jameson with his aloof hauteur warmed occasionally by erudite despair, eagleton with his impetuous, energetic hope--attests that their manifest differences as stylists, and in their stances as writers, make them virtually polar terms, "representative," between them, of the limits, the possibilities and the predicaments, of the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to marxist criticism in our historical moment. it should go without saying that my focus on "textual" effects intends no renunciation of more substantively "thetic" interests: rather, i hope to stage the contrasts between these two very different prose styles to see how each writer handles "pleasure" as an issue, a problem, desire, or object of critique--to see how (or whether) what each says *about* "pleasure" squares with the pleasures (or whatever else we are to name the satisfactions) of their writing. [4] a convenient place to begin, as it happens, is with eagleton's essay, "fredric jameson: the politics of style" (1982), in which eagleton avows the "profound pleasure" he experiences reading jameson. tactically, consider what a very strange move eagleton makes in speaking this way. though i no longer find jameson as vexing to read as i once did, "pleasure" seems a calculatedly provocative word for whatever it is that keeps me reading him--and lest we miss the point, eagleton even takes care to remind us that "'pleasure' is not the kind of word we are accustomed to encountering in jameson's texts" (_against the grain_ 66). indeed, not. quite apart from its notorious difficulty, jameson's writing is fastidiously pained, "stoic," even "tragic," in its evocation of the ordeals utopian desire must suffer through what he calls "the nightmare of history as blood guilt."^1^ most readers sense from the tone and sound of jameson's work, long before they get a grip on the complexities of its content, that the best motto it supplies for itself is the famous "history is what hurts" passage, the often quoted peroration to the opening chapter of _the political unconscious_. the passage begins in reflection on the genre of "dialectical" analysis to which jameson obviously aspires to contribute: the most powerful realizations of marxist historiography . . . remain visions of historical necessity . . . [and of] the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history . . . [they adopt] the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion, of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as "inevitable," and as the operation of objective limits. (_the political unconscious_ 101-102) as visions go (and "visions" is jameson's own word here), this one--the failure of all revolutionary action as "inevitable" after the fact--is about as bleak as any vision (marxist or otherwise) could possibly be. (in other marxist writers, jameson warns, such a vision risks "post-marxism," and this is obviously an anxiety close to the quick for jameson himself.^2^) this bleak vision bears a patent family resemblance to many other critically powerful pessimisms--michel foucault's "total system," paul de man's "aporia," and harold bloom's "gnosticism," to name three whose "defeatism" eagleton has particularly vilified. [5] contempt for "defeatism" is a constant in eagleton's work, a gesture (symptomatically) much against the grain not only of marxist "critique" but of culture criticism generally. so in testifying to the "profound pleasure" of reading jameson, eagleton is playing a deep game, seeming to praise jameson but also, with typically british (not to say marxist british) puritanism, subtly indicting jameson in terms that echo eagleton's repudiation of the "frivolous" counter-culture (and *french*!) hedonism of barthes and the _tel quel_ group. eagleton means it as a sign in jameson's favor when he specifies that he derives "pleasure" from jameson's work, but *not* "%jouissance%."^3^ evidently, "pleasure" may be tolerable in contexts of righteous revolutionary effort, but "%jouissance%" would be going too far. (insofar as eagleton's own pugilistic wit invites us to pleasures that feel distinctly masculine, his aversion to barthesian "%jouissance%" might seem almost a residual, unwitting homophobia: the revolutionary band of brothers, apparently, is to enjoy collective pleasures, but not collective ecstasies.) [6] perhaps eagleton's double-edged praises of the "pleasure" of reading jameson express the embarrassments of meeting so potent a version of the "defeatist" vision under the marxist banner. but my point is that jameson's peculiar eloquence has been of that ascetic, despairing, facing-the worst type familiar, and according to some (leo bersani and richard rorty, as well as eagleton, *and* barthes), over familiar, in nineteenthand twentieth-century culture criticism. it is a rhetoric that cuts across the ideological spectrum: beside foucault, de man, and bloom, whom i have already named, one might place adorno, one of jameson's particular culture-heroes, and t.s. eliot, one of his particular %betes noirs%. but what jameson especially admires in a writer like adorno, he has said repeatedly, is a "dialectical" quality in the writing: a power to render unflinchingly the awfulness of our present condition, but also to sustain some impulse toward utopian hope. [7] but this utopian impulse must not offer any solace; to do so would make it liable to a post-althusserian, levi-straussian definition of "ideology": "an imaginary solution to a real contradiction," i.e., a kind of "false consciousness"--and the more so in that it here appears as a textual effect, an achievement of style. yet just this, but (ironically?) as "praise" rather than indictment, is the implication of eagleton's judgment that "style in jameson . . . both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed" (_against the grain_ 69). such "compensation," such "adumbration" of how things will be after the revolution, is for jameson sheer "ideological" indulgence in "the imaginary," and as such a particular pitfall or temptation that marxist writing must avoid. [8] on the contrary, what jameson calls "the dialectic of ideology [the capitalist present] and utopia [the socialist future]" should aggravate, rather than soothe, our discontent with the way we live now.^4^ jameson is trying for a rhetoric, a tone, that will not be a profanation of its subject matter, an eloquence appropriate to the plight of capitalism's victims, and to marxism's hour on the cross. in a time (ours) of near-total "commodification" or "reification," this task gets harder and harder, as you can hear in jameson's grim joke that adorno's question about whether you can write poetry after auschwitz "has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read adorno . . . next to the pool" (_late marxism_ 248). the point of such a joke is not "pleasure," but laceration; you might even call it a moral-intellectual masochism.^5^ [9] and this seems a model for jameson's effect generally. as a writer, as a stylist, jameson is committed to a bleak "vision" of near-total desperation, and to praise the effects of his prose, as eagleton does, in terms of "profound pleasure" seems a shrewdly pointed missing of the point. true, jameson himself earlier commended the "purely formal pleasures" of adorno's prose, but jameson's language sounds sober--even "purely formal"?--whereas eagleton's praise of the "intense libidinal charge" of jameson's prose sounds like transport, not to say (the word eagleton specifically rules out) %jouissance%.^6^ and eagleton's "defense" (or mock-defense?) of jameson's style is couched not only in terms of pleasure, but of jameson's *own* pleasure: "weighed down" as he is with the "grave burdens" and "historical responsibilities" he has assumed, writes eagleton, [jameson] must be allowed a little for himself, and that precisely, is style. style in jameson is the excess or self-delight which escapes even his own most strenuously analytical habits. . . . (_against the grain_ 66) i lack the space here to rehearse jameson's aversion to all discussion of literary, cultural, social, political, or even psychological issues in terms of "self"; any reader of jameson will have noticed that after his 1961 book on sartre, hostility to the category of "the subject" is the most consistent of his presuppositions. so eagleton's reinscription of "pleasure" here in terms of a stylistic self-consciousness, and a "self-delight" that is jameson's due as a sort of allowance or indulgence (like lenin's penchant for beethoven, or freud's cigars) compounds eagleton's sly "mis-taking" of jameson's point.^7^ eagleton is raising issues as ancient as aristotle on tragedy: how do we derive pleasure (if it *is* pleasure) from works that visit unpleasure upon us? eagleton seems "materialist" in the british tradition of hobbes and bentham rather than marx when he unmasks the "pleasure" of reading jameson in this way. [10] eagleton's remarks originally appeared in a 1982 issue of _diacritics_ devoted to jameson. it was in the following year (1983) that jameson published an essay that not only mentioned the word "pleasure," but took it as its title, "pleasure: a political issue." i do not argue that eagleton's remarks prompted jameson's essay, but reading it "as if" it did makes its centerpiece, jameson's elaboration of barthes's %plaisir%-%jouissance% distinction, seem a kind of defense against, correction of, or better, a dialectical out-leaping of, eagleton's implied strictures, as well as a tacit program or apologia for jameson's own writing as far as its literary "effects" are concerned. [11] "pleasure: a political issue" argues against what jameson calls "left puritanism" of just the sort that i have identified with eagleton (_it2_ 66-7); and its vehicle is a reconsideration of barthes, a much more positive one than jameson had offered, for example, in "the ideology of the text" (1976). the treatment of barthes is, as usual in jameson, quite unstable; he passes over, for example, barthes's wobble over the relation of "%jouissance%" to "significance" ("bliss" as liberation from the tyranny of "meaning," versus "bliss" as restoration of a "meaning" utopia); and one of the most simply pleasurable parts of the essay, the opening jeremiad against the commodification of "pleasure" in our mass culture, ascribes this theme to _the pleasure of the text_, where it nowhere appears. (jameson is conflating %plaisir%/%jouissance% with _s/z_'s %lisible%/%scriptible%.)^8^ eagleton took care to absolve jameson of any taint of barthes's "perversity"; but jameson mounts a defense of the barthesian "perverse" that resonates with his homage to lacan.^9^ and where eagleton reviles barthesian %jouissance% as a flight from politics into a cerebral-sensual wet dream, jameson avers that the immense merit of barthes's essay [_the pleasure of the text_] is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of %jouissance%, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma. . . . (_it2_ 69) [12] "impossible"? as usual when jameson offers a judgment for or against a writer's politics, this seems an eye-of the-beholder situation, jameson's construction of a "political" barthes attesting jameson's ingenuity more than barthes's politics; but i want to pass to the next, most interesting phase of jameson's argument, in which jameson reads barthes's binary of "pleasure" and "%jouissance%" as a contemporary avatar of edmund burke's "beautiful" and "sublime." it seems a master stroke, until you reread barthes. jameson invokes barthes's epigraph from hobbes about "fear," and quotes barthes quoting hobbes in the section of _the pleasure of the text_ called "fear." my own reading of barthes is that by "fear" he means something like "shame": proximity (identity?) of bliss and fear. what is repugnant in such nearness is obviously not the notion that fear is a disagreeable feeling--a banal notion- but that it is *not a very worthy feeling*. . . . (barthes's emphasis; _pleasure of the text_ 48) this unworthiness is a particular in which "fear" resembles "pleasure"; only two pages earlier barthes protests the "political alienation" enforced by the foreclosure of pleasure (and even more of bliss) in a society ridden by two moralities: the prevailing one, of platitude; the minority one, of rigor (political and/or scientific). as if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. our society appears to be both staid and violent: in any event: frigid.^10^ but jameson tilts barthes's invocation of "fear" away from the disquiets of prudery and the miseries of a closeted eros in a very different direction: towards a burkean sublime of terror, an effect that "threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life" (_it2_ 72). jameson initially treats this as an effect merely aesthetic, and therefore "ideological," a mystification (burke, he notes, makes the end-term of the sublime god himself), and he jeers the hunger for such an effect--"choose what crushes you!" (_it2_ 72)--but the valence changes when he goes on to posit an end-term of his own, namely that "unfigurable and unimaginable thing, the multinational apparatus" of late capitalism itself. jameson alludes to the work of "the capital-logicians," who invert hegel's providential world-historical metanarrative so that "what hegel called 'absolute spirit' was simply to be read as the transpersonal, unifying, supreme force of emergent capitalism itself"; it is "beyond any question," he continues, that some such apprehension attaches to "the barthesian sublime" (_it2_ 72-73). granted barthes's good-leftish politics, an %ecriture% ("sublime" or not) that "threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life" is not only very un-barthes-like, but actually valorizes barthes in terms of that very "left puritanism" jameson affects to defend barthes against. [13] jameson has remade barthes's %jouissance%, in short, in the image of his own "sublime," a passion of "fear" prompted by "history," by "what hurts": it is not barthes who has chosen what crushes him; barthes is willing to confess (or boast) that at least parts of him are not crushed; it is jameson who insists on being crushed, by a "sublime" villain, late capitalism. the measure of that "crush" is of course the effect of the prose in which jameson projects his "vision of necessity" and its inverted hegelian-marxist metanarrative in which "the subject of history" proves to be not the proletariat but capitalism. "pleasure: a political issue" invites a redescription of what eagleton named the "pleasure" of jameson's prose as, on the contrary, a type of "the sublime." [14] "the sublime" is a theme that has much preoccupied jameson in the '80s, a decade in which, it seems to me, his prose has undergone a change. it is as allusive and inward as ever, but its emotional charge is much larger and more accessible than before. eagleton in 1982 chided jameson's "regular, curiously unimpassioned style" (_against the grain_ 74), and here his judgment is avowedly adverse: he is calling in fact for a more "impassioned" jameson. but the formula of 1982 no longer fits the jameson of 1992, as even a cursory reading of, for example, the short meditations on diverse topics gathered as the "conclusion" to _postmodernism_ will show. moreover, "the sublime" is a frequent theme in this writing, and jameson unfailingly characterizes it (as in the passage quoted above) in terms of unrepresentability, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. to evoke the nightmare of history as beyond the intellect's grasp is to present a vision of "fear." but another frequent theme in jameson is the ambition to write a "dialectical prose," like adorno's, that resists or escapes what jameson calls "thematization." jameson nowhere speaks of this condition "beyond thematization" as a "%jouissance%," but insofar as it, too, involves a transit beyond a linguistic-semantic entrapment, this ambition of jameson's rewrites the fear of the sublime as a kind of desire, and thus projects the terror of the sublime as a kind of utopia. [15] i want to mention one more portent in the later jameson's evocation of "the sublime": if "the sublime" is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of interpretation. from long before his 1971 essay "metacommentary," through _the political unconscious_ (1981), with its programmatic opening chapter, "on interpretation," jameson presented his effort as a hermeneutic project, opposed to that of "anti-hermeneuts" from susan sontag to foucault, barthes and derrida. in his work since then, "postmodernism" itself figures as the unfigurable, insofar as it is (to use a paleomarxist shorthand whose terms jameson disapproves) the "superstructural" concomitant of changes in the "base" wrought by a "late" or (in ernest mandel's terms) "third-stage" capitalism whose modes of production have undergone a decisive world-historical alteration since, roughly, the '60s. hence jameson's more recent rhetoric in which, ominously, the center does not hold: as if, to use the terms of the eleventh thesis on feuerbach, our impotence to "change" the world must be expressed as an impotence also to "understand" it, in accordance with ("left puritanism" indeed) the "vision of necessity" in which the "failure" of revolution appears as "inevitable after the fact"--and must further entail the "vision" of the "inevitable failure" of "dialectical historiography" itself, along with any hermeneutic labor tributary to it. hence the agitation of jameson's recent prose, particularly the later pieces in _postmodernism_, in which "the sublime" is not only a prominent theme, but also a frequent effect.^11^ [16] i have suggested that "pleasure: a political issue" be read "as if" it responds directly to eagleton's ambiguous praise of the "pleasure" of reading jameson, "as if" it aims to propose another ethos, a literary "effect" ("the sublime") more creditable than "pleasure" for culture-criticism generally, and for jameson's own work in particular. i want now to turn to eagleton's writing, which, beyond ideological affinities, seems diametrically opposed to jameson's rhetorically, in its effects as writing. where jameson enlarges every problem, problematizes every solution, insists on "inevitable failure," and proposes both for his prose and for his readers an %askesis% of facing the worst (what geoffrey galt harpham has called "the ascetic imperative"), eagleton writes a prose full of jokes and irreverences, bronx cheers and razzberries, polemical piss and ideological vinegar, every clause lighting a ladyfinger of wit, almost as if under the compulsion of a kind of high-theory tourette's syndrome. it is a style with affinities to "counter-culture" journalism, as if james wolcott had gone to graduate school instead of to _the village voice_. with obvious and naughty relish, eagleton transgresses the decorums of academic prose, setting (for example) a clever bit of baby-talk on derrida's name (labelled "oedipal fragment") as epigraph to a chapter on "marxism and deconstruction," or concluding a book of essays with a doggerel busker-ballad in the broadside style ("chaucer was a class traitor,/ shakespeare hated the mob," etc., to be sung to the tune of "land of hope and glory"), or launching his essay on jameson's style with a parody of jameson, or indulging a parody of empson in his essay on empson, "the critic as clown," or sending up *everything* academic-critical in a parody of the academic handbook manner in "the revolt of the reader." (equally unor anti-academic, but in the other direction, is the poem at the end of eagleton's book on benjamin; compare the poem dedicating _criticism and ideology_ [1976] to his father.^12^) [17] as for the pained, mournful, obligatory pessimism of "the ascetic imperative," eagleton consistently jeers it as a kind of false consciousness. here, for example, he is setting the stage for a recuperation of walter benjamin (whose "melancholy" he readily concedes) under the sign of "carnival"; and with characteristic brass, he makes the very implausibility of such a move his opening gambit: the suffering, saturnine aspects of benjamin, the wreckage of ironic debacles and disasters that was his life, have been seized upon with suspicious alacrity by those commentators anxious to detach him from the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope. since political pessimism is a sign of spiritual maturity . . . benjamin offers a consolingly familiar image to disinherited intellectuals everywhere, downcast as they are by the cultural dreariness of a bourgeoisie whose property rights they would doubtless defend to the death. (_walter benjamin_ 143) two pages later, enter bakhtin, and the theme of "carnival," which the prose not only describes but enacts: in a riot of semiosis, carnival unhinges all transcendental signifiers and submits them to ridicule and relativism . . . power structures are estranged through grotesque parody, 'necessity' thrown into satirical question and objects displaced or negated into their opposites. a ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane) rampages throughout social life, deconstructing images, misreading texts and collapsing binary oppositions into a mounting groundswell of ambiguity into which all discourse finally stutters and slides. birth and death, high and low, destruction and renewal are sent packing with their tails in each other's mouths . . . a vulgar, shameless, materialism of the body--belly, buttocks, anus, genitals--rides rampant over ruling-class civilities; and the return of discourse to this sensuous root is nowhere more evident than in laughter itself, an enunciation that springs straight from the body's libidinal depths. (_walter benjamin_ 145, 150) these passages are from the chapter of _walter benjamin_ called "carnival and comedy: bakhtin and brecht," and i want to consider this essay at length here: it provides the program projected in the book's subtitle ("towards a revolutionary criticism"), and the place of "pleasure" in this program is large and important--both as an aim proposed by the argument and, more immediately, as an effect of the writing. the energy of these passages is not the only kind of energy to be found in eagleton--space forbids sampling the rabble-rousing wisecracks, the downright, matey metaphors, the sheer gusto for combat and polemical hurly-burly, the insouciantly highbrow laying about amid heidegger, althusser, hegel, or whomever. but the fluency of eagleton's rant makes a sharp contrast with jameson: while jameson's notoriously "difficult" prose enacts the difficult (indeed impossible) position of marxism today, the sheer brio of eagleton's prose in all its guises, its "riot of semiosis," seems to address a political situation whose solution ought to be as simple as getting everyone to admit what they already know, if only by springing jokes so cunningly as to enable us to catch them laughing despite themselves. "a vulgar, shameless materialism of the body- belly, buttocks, anus, genitals--rides rampant over ruling-class civilities": is there a straight face to be seen? the transgressions seem a test to see who will laugh and who will scowl--good fun, and pointed, of course, at the latter. [18] surely this is eagleton's dominant effect: it is why graduate students idolize him, and part of why he is recommended for anyone wanting an introduction to "theory." he can, quite simply, be fun to read, and in that regard, more than any other contemporary highbrow marxist, he can remind you of some passages in marx himself. you can, indeed, *almost* imagine a coal miner or a factory worker reading him, as, in labor movement myth, some of them used to read marx. i highlight this effect of eagleton's prose because it is an effect of *pleasure*. even eagleton's darker notes, the moments of righteous anger, generally assume or imply (indeed, they aspire to *create*) a political situation in which righteous anger can readily find its proper effectivity--a situation, to put it another way, in which righteous political anger is felt as a pleasure in its own right. eagleton's prose means to yield such pleasure as an *effect*, as well as proposing it as a *theme* or *program*. [19] over the course of eagleton's career, indeed, the effect of pleasure is far more consistent than the theme; about the theme, eagleton has often, especially when younger, expressed doubts--as in the caveat above about jameson, for example: "pleasure," yes; "%jouissance%," no. %jouissance% is a barthesian word, and although eagleton does on occasion resort to it as a positive term, his reservations about barthes remain everywhere in force. %pace% jameson, eagleton regards barthes's %plaisir% and %jouissance% as privatistic, apolitical, and corrupted with the (to eagleton) irredeemably contemptible bourgeois pathology of guilt-as-added-thrill; barthesian pleasure is "guilty pleasure," enacted behind closed doors in controlled environments, whereas eagleton's rabble-rousing implies gleeful sacrilege in public places, and not with guilt, but with whoops of righteous laughter. [20] "carnival and comedy" proposes such effects, such styles of revolutionary laughter and humor, not only in its practice (in the style of its prose), but also as a program for a "marxist theory of comedy" (_walter benjamin_, 159), which eagleton sketches out, with brecht's help, as properly answering to something like the movement of history itself. for brecht, the marxist "dialectic of history" is "comic in principle": "a source"--quoting brecht now--"of enjoyment" heightening "both our capacity for life and our pleasure in it."^13^ hence, explains eagleton, the redemptive move from pessimism to "the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope": "what for walter benjamin is potentially tragic . . . is for brecht the stuff of comedy." but what of history's horrors? eagleton seemingly bids defiance to all obligatory handwringing on that score: "hitler as housepainter yesterday and chancellor today is thus a sign of the comic, because that resistible rise foreshadows the unstable process whereby he may be dead in a bunker tomorrow" (_walter benjamin_ 161). (note the verb tenses, and especially the "may" in that last clause: even in this "comic" moment, eagleton is conjuring with the prospect of future hitlers, warning that we must not be complacent because the last one was vanquished.) [21] but against auschwitz, a paragraph later, eagleton knows that his comic bravura will not stand, and he acknowledges that there is "always something that escapes comic emplotment . . . that is non-dialectizable" (_walter benjamin_ 162). this last nonce-word seems a little too impromptu; it would be a mistake to hold eagleton to all its implications against "dialectic" itself. it is better taken as a symptom of how eagleton's improvisational afflatus can tread marxist toes as readily as bourgeois ones. but eagleton means the word to acknowledge that the "comic" critique he projects here has its limit, comes up against things in history that can *not* be "emplotted" in a "comic" mode. if "comedy" can mean dante, or the easter passion, it may seem that eagleton has confused the "comic" with the "funny"; immemorially august western conceptions of "the comic" have claimed to encompass brutality, suffering, injustice. perhaps eagleton regards these as in bad taste, or perhaps he wants to avoid the assimilation once again of marxism to religion. [22] however that may be, what happens next in "carnival and comedy" provides a far more surprising tack away from revolutionary laughter toward something like the "melancholy" the essay began by protesting. and it does so, more remarkably still, by way of a reading of a passage from _the eighteenth brumaire_, perhaps the first among marx's texts one might have cited as exhibiting just the sort of "carnivalesque" angers and "comic" pleasures (ridicule and mockery) eagleton had seemed to project. but jeffrey mehlman reads the passage this way, and it is as a refutation of mehlman's reading that eagleton stages his own (_revolution and repetition_). what apparently prompts eagleton's ire is mehlman's reference to the "anarchism" of marx's prose, which eagleton finds complicit with "those ruling ideologies that have an interest in abolishing dialectics and rewriting marxism as textual productivity" (_walter benjamin_ 162). mehlman argues that marx's rhetorical excesses overflow his supposed thesis; eagleton scorns such a notion, but goes on to make an argument not much different. [23] eagleton's fulcrum is the first-time-as-tragedy second-time-as-farce motif, for marx specifies "caussidiere for danton, louis blanc for robespierre . . . the nephew for the uncle," quite as if the revolution's giants were first-timers, and did not themselves dress up in roman togas (conveniently requiring little restyling when the signified changed from "republic" to "empire"). yet precisely this revolutionary repetition--both heroic *and* farcical- quickly becomes marx's main theme. eagleton interrogates the resulting "semiotic disturbance" (inconsistent metaphors, etc.) over several pages of "close reading," much too lengthily to quote here; but its surprising premise is that "marx's text is symptomatically incoherent" (_walter benjamin_ 163). but where mehlman found this carnivalesque, and thus a strength and an interest, eagleton, avowedly promoting "carnival and comedy," is pained at marx's "unwitting" loss of control over his language, and finds himself talking back to marx, correcting him, unmixing his metaphors for him. he recovers himself at last by the threadbare critical move of transferring the "symptomatic incoherence" from marx to his object (bourgeois revolution), thus at the final bell transforming what had been marx's unwitting "symptom" into his masterful critical "negation." but the passage ends weakly, and the essay moves to a coda lamenting western marxism's loss of marx's comic strength (as if forgetting brecht, eagleton's initial sponsor). there is irony here, insofar as eagleton has just (by imposing a monologic of his own on marx's figurally dialogic text) sapped the very strength he now professes to mourn; and there is pathos in this wistful statement of irrecoverable loss, since recovering a comic possibility for marxist critique had been, just a few pages earlier, eagleton's boldly stated ambition. the essay ends this way: benjamin, like gramsci, admired the slogan "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," and in what brecht called "the new ice age" of fascism one can see its point. but marxism holds out other strategic slogans too. having taken the point of the first, it might then be possible to say, without voluntarist or kautskyist triumphalism: "given the strength of the masses, how can we be defeated?" (_walter benjamin_ 172) tentative ("it might then be possible to say"), and with the taunts of the shibboleth-meisters ("voluntarist!" "kautskyist!") rising in his inner ear, eagleton's final flourish cannot, for once, deliver the pleasurable eagletonian "triumphalism" that is his usual stock in trade. the final "slogan," indeed, ending on a question mark, sounds more like a real question than a rhetorical one. here the "optimism of the will" is too willful to convince, the "pessimism of the intellect" too much more than merely intellectual not to. for once, "pessimism of the intellect" really seems to win the agon in the arena of eagleton's prose. [24] so a guerilla foray into a "marxist theory of comedy," driven by "carnival" energies, loses momentum at the name of the eponymous master. this failure tempts the sort of lit-crit "psychoanalysis" indicated when, say, the word "balls" sends stephen dedalus's chastely passionate villanelle off the rails: a gallant defense of marx turns into a subtle assault on marx--"anxiety of influence"?--and suddenly all eagleton's fight (and fun) have gone out of him. but of course we had better push in the direction of that transindividual "libidinal apparatus" that assigns the "objective limits" (jameson's phrase) determining such failures--and in fact to "allegorize" the trajectory of eagleton's essay as enacting the fate of pleasure in our present "conjuncture" is to assimilate eagleton to jameson. jameson, as we have seen, makes a "vision" of "necessary failure" an imperative for marxist criticism, and eagleton, despite his bravely avowed aim of rebutting all such "pessimism" here ends by bowing to it. jameson, inscribing a failure imperative, compels from it his tortured, ambivalent, "difficult" success; eagleton, in brash defiance of all pessimisms and confident of marxism's inevitable, eventual success, here "enacts" the jamesonian "vision" of "necessary failure" the more movingly for all his "optimism of the will" against it. this may sound like scoring points against both of them, especially against eagleton--but if pressed to admit that eagleton's failure, at least, does seem a "symptom" rather than a "negation," i would want to add that both writers, by putting their expository "mastery" at risk, challenge the whole ethos of "critique" that gives the "symptom"/"negation" binary its significance. the ensuing gain is that we can see how two writers so different, enacting differing consequences of the same "contradiction," must probe and come up against different reaches of the same "objective limits." [25] as for the question how to name the complex satisfaction of reading such writers as eagleton and jameson, the very difficulty of calling it "pleasure" raises problems whose force is worth looking into in its own right. what jameson's discomfort with "pleasure," his need to sublimate it into "the sublime," tells us about the fate of pleasure in our historical moment converges with eagleton's seemingly opposed embrace of pleasure (with, nevertheless, his reservations about "bliss" on the one hand and the more obscurely motivated "failure" enacted at the close of "carnival and comedy" on the other). [26] which returns us to the question of "left puritanism." both eagleton and jameson seem shadowed by the "minority (political) rigor" whose affinities with the more majoritarian moralisms we saw barthes uncovering. each seems to find some sorts of enjoyment (however they differ on which ones) tainted by (barthes again) "unworthy [bourgeois] feelings." neither, of course, wants to be tarred as a "left puritan"; jameson's embrace of barthes (and lacan) bespeaks his desire to escape that label, and bakhtin serves as a similar alibi for eagleton. as i have argued above, though, jameson's construction of barthes seems motivated by a very un-barthes-like, and very "left puritan," distrust of "%plaisir%," and his reinscription of "%jouissance%" into "the sublime" sublimates it into something very far from enjoyment (in anything other than, say, the zizekian sense).^14^ as for eagleton's appropriation of bakhtin, it is to be read in opposition to, not as a version of, barthesian "%jouissance%." it constructs "carnival" as *social*, and thus an affair less of eros than of its collective sublimate, agape. sex, in eagleton's "carnival," is comically *deflationary*--"a ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks)" (_walter benjamin_ 145)--rather than a unique, privileged, grand (or grandiose) access to the transport and exaltation of "the sublime." [27] barthes, i suspect, would see in both of these writers more than a few symptoms of that "frigidity" he protests, "as if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone" (_pleasure of the text_ 46-7). barthes writes as one for whom the "%promesse de bonheur%" that marxists so frequently denounce as "ideological" has already been in some measure cashed; his superego has apparently fought free of that "categorical imperative" that would have him deny his own pleasure in the name of the possibly counter-revolutionary effects of corrupt ideas of "pleasure" *on others*. but insofar as the resistance to "pleasure" involves the worry of "false consciousness," the fear of being falsely consoled by "an imaginary solution to a real contradiction," it will doubtless remain a potent source of moral trouble for marxists and others who would direct the energies of "critique" to the tasks of making a more just society. the example, though, of eagleton's "optimism of the will" (and, most of the time, of his optimism of the intellect, too) prompts me at least to the pleasurable speculation whether "false consciousness" might not equally involve the temptation of responding to real contradictions with imaginary aggravations. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ "stoic" and "tragic" are terms of praise in jameson's essay "imaginary and symbolic in lacan" (1978), in _the ideologies of theory, volume 1_ (hereinafter _it1_), 98, 112; and it is manifest that part of lacan's fascination for jameson is lacan's achievement of an ethos at once ("dialectically") hegelian *and* pessimistic, and to that extent a model for jameson's own. for "the nightmare of history as blood guilt," see "architecture and the critique of ideology" (1985), in _the ideologies of theory, volume 2_ (hereinafter _it2_), 43, and "pleasure: a political issue" (1983), %ibid%, 68. ^2^ see, for example, jameson's account of the italian architectural historian manfredo tafuri in "architecture and the critique of ideology" (1985), in _it2_, 35-60; the caution about "post-marxism" is on 38. see also remarks on tafuri in _postmodernism_, 61. jameson scorns any suggestion of his own putative "post-marxism" in the opening pages of the "conclusion" to _postmodernism_. ^3^ _against the grain_, 68. eagleton similarly praises jameson in "the idealism of american criticism," %ibid%, 49-64. ^4^ "the dialectic of ideology and utopia" is the title of the last chapter of _the political unconscious_ (281-99), but the motif recurs throughout jameson's work, from the chapters on marcuse (83-115) and ernst bloch (116-59) in _marxism and form_ to the section of the "conclusion" of _postmodernism_ called "the anxiety of utopia" (331-40). ^5^ cf. jameson's most unequivocal praise for paul de man: that no one has been more "self-punishing" in pursuit of a moral-intellectual %askesis% (_postmodernism_ 239). ^6^ eagleton quotes jameson on adorno (from _marxism and form_ xiii) in "the politics of style" (_against the grain_ 66); on the same page he quotes himself, on jameson's "intense libidinal charge," from "the idealism of american criticism" (_against the grain_ 57). ^7^ compare this move of eagleton's with jameson's judgment that de man's project, despite its avowed ambition to deconstruct "the subject," is "fatally menaced at every point by a resurgence of some notion of self-consciousness" (_postmodernism_ 245, cf. 258-9). ^8^ "commodification" is a frequent topos in both eagleton and jameson, as well as in many other marxist (and not-so-marxist) writers. (eagleton even images jameson's encyclopedic range of reference as a shopping cart wheeling through "some great california supermarket of the mind" collecting hegel, deleuze, croce, et al., like so many designer-products [_against the grain_ 70].) indeed, anxiety about the commodification of highbrow "theory" like his own--barthes, lukacs, macherey, and whoever else as status-acquisitions in some flash-card degradation of intellectual life--frequently appear in jameson himself, and in just such consumerist terms--as, for example, when he deplores hearing figures like althusser, gramsci, et al. turned into "brand-names for autonomous philosophical systems" ("interview" 78). ^9^ for eagleton's exempting jameson from barthesian "perversity," see _against the grain_, 66; for jameson on barthes and lacan, compare "pleasure: a political issue" (_it2_ 69) with the closing paragraph of "imaginary and symbolic in lacan" (_it1_ 115). ^10^ _pleasure of the text_, 46-7. one of jameson's more dazzling asides is the linkage of barthes with lionel trilling's _sincerity and authenticity_ on the grounds that both associate what they despise with the left--student radicals for trilling, "left puritanism," as in the quoted passage, for barthes (_it2_ 65). ^11^ this hermeneutic despair, surprisingly, lightens in work jameson has published since _postmodernism_. see the (previously unpublished, and presumably recent) essay, "the existence of italy," in _signatures of the visible_, 155-248, where hermeneutic satisfactions again compensate for the reifications accounted for; and _the geopolitical aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system_, in which third world cinema's reinvention of narrative and realism and its sense of "totality as conspiracy" offer a prospect of the world system once again rendered intelligible to the terms of a politically committed (mass) art form. see my review of these two books in _kritikon litterarum_ (forthcoming). ^12^ "oedipal fragment," _walter benjamin, or, towards a revolutionary criticism_, 131; "the ballad of english literature," _against the grain_, 185; the parody of jameson, %ibid%, 65; of empson, %ibid%, 151; "the revolt of the reader, %ibid%, 181-4. for the homage to benjamin, see _walter benjamin_, 185. this is also the place to mention eagleton's play, _brecht and company_ (1979) and his novel, _saints and scholars_ (1987). ^13^ _brecht on theatre_, 277; qtd. in _walter benjamin_, 160. ^14^ i am thinking, of course, of slavoj zizek's _enjoy your symptom: jacques lacan in hollywood and out_, but readers of zizek know that they will find this and zizek's other central themes rehearsed in virtually any of his books. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited barthes, roland. _the pleasure of the text_. 1973. trans. richard miller. new york: hill and wang, 1975. eagleton, terry. _against the grain: selected essays_. new york and london: verso, 1986. eagleton, terry. _walter benjamin, or, towards a revolutionary criticism_. new york and london: verso, 1981. jameson, fredric. _the geopolitical aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system_. indiana up/british film institute: verso, 1992. ---. _the ideologies of theory, volume 1: situations of theory_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988. ---. _the ideologies of theory, volume 2: the syntax of history_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988. ---. "interview." _diacritics_ 12.3 (fall 1982): 72-91. ---. _late marxism, or, adorno: the persistence of the dialectic_. new york and london: verso, 1990. ---. _marxism and form_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1971. ---. _the political unconscious_. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1981. ---. _postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism_. durham, nc: duke up, 1991. ---. _signatures of the visible_. routledge: new york and london, 1992. mehlman, jeffrey. _revolution and repetition_. berkeley: u of california p, 1977. zizek, slavoj. _enjoy your symptom: jacques lacan in hollywood and out_. new york and london: routledge, 1992. � [various], 'pmc-talk', postmodern culture v3n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n1-[various]-pmctalk.txt from: pmc-talk two threads: cladistics and cut-ups (excerpted from the discussion group pmc-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92) _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.1 (september, 1992) the following texts are the property of their authors; permission to repost them here has been obtained by the editors of _postmodern culture_. this selected compilation, as a whole, is copyright (c) 1992 by _postmodern culture_, all rights reserved. from: pmc-talk is an occasional feature of _postmodern culture_, consisting of excerpts from the discussion group pmc-talk@ncsuvm (pmc-talk@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu). subscription to pmc-talk is independent of subscription to _postmodern culture_ (pmc-list@ncsuvm / pmc-list@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu); to subscribe to pmc-talk, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to pmc@ncsuvm (bitnet) or pmc@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu (internet), or use standard listserv procedures. editors' note: this issue of _postmodern culture_ inaugurates a new feature, from: pmc-talk. two threads from recent discussion on pmc-talk are included here, one concerning cladistics--the tree-structured organization of knowledge--and one concerning cut-ups--the human or automated re-organization of "found" text. this conjunction of topics is interesting for several reasons. first, it highlights two conflicting approaches to the %logos%, one imposing or discovering coherence and structure, the other disordering and decentering the texts it cannibalizes, sometimes producing isolated moments of surprising pertinence and often simply devolving into incoherence. second, the outcome of the two discussions is noteworthy: the cladistics thread proceeds in an orderly and dispassionate manner, and ends in a scholarly bibliography; by contrast, the cut-ups thread provokes some quite visceral reactions, and eventually turns back on itself to examine the participants' reactions to the grafting and disordering of their own texts. as one of the discussants points out, deleuze and guattari's opposition of tree-like and rhizome-like structures of knowledge is being played out in these parallel, and sometimes intersecting, threads. finally, this opposition, and the cut-up method in particular, are echoed in other parts of this issue of _postmodern culture_--not only in john tranter's popular culture column (on "brekdown," a computer program which produces stylistically consistent cut-ups of literary texts), but also in larry mccaffery's introduction and in most of the fiction collected in the issue. contents thread #1: cladistics thread #2: cut-ups ================================================================= thread #1: cladistics ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: wed, 22 jul 92 13:33 cdt from: "robert j. ohara" <rjo@wiscmacc> subject: trees of history veterans of pmc-talk may remember some discussions we have had over the last couple of years on evolutionary biology and 'postmodern science'. i would like to draw on the collective wisdom of the group again to search out some possible references on a related topic. i have an interest in a class of diagrams that may be called 'trees of history'. these include evolutionary trees, trees of language history (showing, for example, the descent of the indo-european languages), 'stemmata' of manuscripts that show how an ancient text was copied and altered over time, and so on. the conceptual ancestors of these diagrams are of course diagrams of human genealogy. the comparative study of such diagrams is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and it's pretty difficult to get a grasp on the literature that is relevant to it. i have been assembling a rough bibliography on the history and theory of trees of history in the specific fields of evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism. evolution is my specialty so i have the best handle on the literature in that area; stemmatics and linguistics are a little fuzzier to me, but i have a moderately good handle on them now as well (with respect to tree diagrams, that is). my question for the list is this: have any of you seen trees of history used in other contexts, for objects other than species, languages, manuscripts, or human families? i know of a few examples, like stephen toulmin's tree diagrams of disciplinary development in his _human understanding_ (1973), and i once saw a poster that showed a 'tree of rock and roll'. i would like very much to hear of examples from any other fields. i am more interested in scholarly uses of such diagrams than in popular ones, and would be particularly pleased to find examples that show some theoretical sophistication (such as a discussion of how the diagram was put together, or what it represents). i recognize that this question, like many that that come up here, has the potential to connect to a wide range of issues in historical representation, visual imagery, the theory of metaphor, and on and on. for my own convenience i would like to try to confine the discussion (if any) just to tree diagrams, and to specifically historical ones at that. there are many other forms of tree diagrams that are not historical: sentence diagrams, all sorts of logical classifications, 'trees of porphyry', etc. these i specifically want to _exclude_ from consideration, as they are not in any sense genealogical or historical. for an indication of my own approach to the topic see 'telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history', _biology and philosophy_, 7:135-160 (1992). i'd be glad to send a reprint to anyone who is interested; just send me a snailmail address. i can also provide via email a copy of the rough bibliography on trees of history to anyone who is interested. many thanks. bob o'hara, rjo@wiscmacc.bitnet department of philosophy and the zoological museum university of wisconsin madison ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: thu, 23 jul 92 22:55:56 edt from: eric rabkin <usergdfd@umichum.bitnet> subject: digest ending 7-23-92 if i'm properly informed, there is a whole field devoted to this and it's called 'cladistics.' a quick keyword check of mirlyn (u of michigan's e-catalog) shows 10 bks, most with biological foci, but i know from talking to a friend who works in the field that the laborers therein consider it general. i hope this helps. eric eric rabkin esrabkin@umichum.bitnet department of english esrabkin@um.cc.umich.edu university of michigan office: 313-764-2553 ann arbor mi 48109-1045 dept : 313-764-6330 ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 27 jul 92 22:24 cdt from: "robert j. ohara" <rjo@wiscmacc> subject: trees of history/cladistic analysis thanks to eric rabkin for mentioning cladistics, a.k.a. cladistic analysis, in the context of my query about "trees of history". cladistic analysis is the part of systematic biology that is particularly concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history. this is in fact my own specialty, so i do have a fair sense of the cladistic literature now, though it is growing very rapidly. the question of the generality of cladistic principles and methods is one of the things that is of particular interest to me. in a loose sense they do appear to be general: for example, the cladistic idea that only derived or "apomorphic" states of characters identify branches of the evolutionary tree is the same as the principle of "shared innovation" in historical linguistics, and the idea of "indicative errors" in textual criticism. cladistic analysis tends to disregard, however, the possibility of "horizontal transmission" across the tree, something that occurs rather rarely in evolution, but much more often in language and manuscript histories. to those interested in the parallels among the various historical sciences it's all extremely interesting. there is one pioneering volume that discusses many of the similarities and differences among various cladistically oriented disciplines (evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism), and it may be of interest to some people: hoenigswald, h. m., & l. f. weiner, eds. 1987. biological metaphor and cladistic classification: an interdisciplinary perspective. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. bob o'hara, rjo@wiscmacc.bitnet department of philosophy and the zoological museum university of wisconsin madison --------------------------------------------------------------- date: wed, 29 jul 1992 16:04:34 edt reposted from: "humanist: humanities computing" <humanist@brownvm.bitnet> subject: 6.0165 textual criticism challenge (1/35) humanist discussion group, vol. 6, no. 0165. wednesday, 29 jul 1992. date: wed, 29 jul 1992 09:27:08 +0300 from: victor_caston@brown.edu subject: re: textual criticism challenge i, for one, was impressed by the results of applying cladistic analysis to textual criticism--the analogy seems so obvious (and fruitful). in fact, while flipping through a recent issue of the economist, i came across an article on cladistic analysis that drew the analogy in the *other* direction, explaining evolution in terms of manuscript transmission. this is how the article began: "imagine a medieval library with dozens of copies of aristotle's "on comedy", all slightly different. such differences, which came about because the monks made errors when copying, can be useful. by studying them you can see the order in which the copies were made. texts with a lot of errors in common are recent and closely related. their shared mistakes are echoes of those in the text from which they were copied--their most recent common ancestor. texts with fewer error are closer to the original. "this technique--cladistic analysis--works as well for those writing the history of | life as for those studying medieval manuscripts. instead of working with monastic errors, you use the changes which evolution brings to one species or group, and which it then bequeaths to its successors--shared derived characteristics . . ." ("charting evolution: the power of two," the economist, 11 july 1992, pp. 80-81) if this is just coincidence, it's scandalous somebody didn't make the application sooner. ***************************************************************** victor caston victor_caston@brown.edu department of philosophy box 1918 off: (401) 863-3219 brown university dept: (401) 863-2718 providence, ri 02912 fax: (401) 863-2719 ***************************************************************** ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: wed, 29 jul 92 22:34:38 edt from: carolyn miller <crm@ncsuvm> subject: re: digest ending 7-29-92 for bob o'hara: you might find that bibliometric studies of scholarly communication and disciplines provides another analogue to the tree-like representation of historical change. you mentioned toulmin's diagrams in _human understanding_; the work i'm thinking of is related generally to his ideas, but the style is quite different. early, big names in this field (which i don't know well myself) are derek j. desolla price and eugene garfield (he of the inst for scientific info empire). one article i have at hand includes a number of network diagrams, showing citation links (garfield, "citation analysis as a method of historical research into science," in _citation indexing--its theory and application in science, technology, and humanities, wiley, 1979). a more recent collection is _scholarly communication and bibliometrics_, ed. christine borgman, sage, 1990. i haven't looked at it myself but it may be the most comprehensive current source. carolyn miller dept of english nc state univ. ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 01 aug 92 10:09:49 bst from: stephen clark <ap01@liverpool.ac.uk> subject: re: cladistics etc j.h.woodger biological classification discussed this (my books are packed so i can't check the reference). while the manuscript tradition is a nice analogy it seems to follow from the claim as stated (that fewer errors = closer to original) that the latest oup text is copied directly from the original.... please give mediaeval copyists some credit for trying to correct errors in the text they were copying. so far there is, i suspect, no evidence that dna does that! stephen clark liverpool ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 17 aug 92 20:36:25 cst from: rick francis <c47805nf@wuvmd> subject: cladistics, remakes, translation, plagiarism... i have been following the discussion of cladistics with great interest, and i wonder if it might help with the sort of questions i've been asking. here's one that might be interesting: how could one depict the transmission/translation of james m. cain's _the postman always rings twice_? novel: published 1934 let's start with the movies: french version, le dernier tournant (chenal, 1939) unauthorized italian version, ossessione (visconti, 1942) visconti inspired by renoir's advice, reportedly made without either the original or an accurate, complete translation tay garnett's us version (1946), with cain's original title two more french versions: verneuil, une manche et la belle (what price murder) 1957 chabrol's les noces rouges (wedding in blood), 1973 rafelson's us remake in 1981, again with cain's title, the postman always rings twice. (uh, let's forget about translations into other languages for the moment.) now how do you chart that? was rafelson more influenced by the novel, by visconti, or by garnett's _noir_ version? are there any previous versions we can rule out? even if you decide there are only two or three genetic sources, and feel you can determine relative influence, how do you depict it? what about trying to measure the influence of the medium into which one is translating/adapting? for example, wouldn't a neo-noir version in 1981 inevitably be influenced by polanski's neo-noir _chinatown_? (certainly reception of nicholson's face connects the two, and i kept thinking jessica lange was made to look like faye dunaway.) if you chart the novel's film adaptations in a straight linear way, you won't have any of that other stuff. and isn't entirely possible that someone would make a film that was much closer to, say, plot details of the novel (as rafelson's film was at times, when compared to garnett's), while stylistic details show the influence of intervening adaptations? how then to chart it, to show the closer/farther dynamics? for me the value and validity of an effective means of notation of genetic transmission of narratives would show up in its capacity to denote the various kinds of translation, whether it's shakespeare from holinshed, or joyce's ulysses from homer's odyssey, or pound's sextus propertius, or a film adaptation of a forster novel, acker's works, or . . . if it can give you a language to distinguish those, you can bet i'll be interested in it! i confess near-total ignorance of cladistics, and i don't mean the tone of these questions to suggest i'm posing an impossible challenge to point out the limitations of cladistics. i think they are difficult questions, though, and perhaps the sort which cladistics can handle more efficiently than anything i'm aware of. any help appreciated. rick francis c47805nf@wuvmd dep't of comp. lit. washington university one brookings drive st. louis, mo 63130 ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: tue, 18 aug 92 19:06:38 -0400 from: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (jeremy ahouse) subject: cladistic caveats i am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics) raise its head in the context of pmc. it gives the place a homey feeling. i don't want to discourage the search for lineages of thoughts of influence, *but* in much on contemporary (and not so contemporary) cladistics one of the important (simplifying) assumptions is that we (you? i?) assume that lineages always bifurcate. this assumption seems particularly valid for vertebrate species, "higher" plants, and taxa above the species level. but the whole idea of looking for minimum evolution trees ( i.e. preferring trees that require the fewest reversals in a character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral diffusion of information across the tree. in phylogentic inference (a goal for which cladistics is a preeminent tool) we trust that evolution is an information preserving phenomenon and that similarities are due to either common ancestors, convergent function (a "good" solution to a problem, e.g. wings), or chance. in as much as similarities are of the first kind we can infer the relationships between lineages. note that in my list no time was given to lateral transfer of character states from one lineage to another. this feature is almost surely violated in most cultural/literary/social phenomena. i hope this doesn't discourage, and i hope that i haven't been too brief. please let me know. jeremy ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: jeremy ahouse center for complex systems brandeis university waltham, ma 02254-9110 (617) 736-4954 ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- from: rbrown@epas.utoronto.ca (r. brown) subject: re: cladistics date: thu, 20 aug 1992 17:26:37 -0400 regarding the metaphor of the branching tree, i would like to call attention both to its tendency to exist as and its rejection as a (dangerous) metaphor for the literary "tradition" post-colonial societies. sneja gunew, in her essay on australian literature in _nation and narration_ (ed. homi bhabha) notes that in his 1935 manifesto, "the foundations of culture in australia" (1935): "[p.r.] stephensen argued that although australian culture may have begun in britain, 'a gum tree is not a branch of the oak'" (101). ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sun, 23 aug 92 20:47 cdt from: robert j. ohara <rjo@macc.wisc.edu> subject: cladistics [....] cladistics or cladistic analysis is an approach to systematic biology. systematics used to be equated by many people with classification; indeed that is probably the definition that appears in most dictionaries today. but while the idea of classification has long been a part of systematics, another idea has existed along with classification, and that has been the idea of "the natural system" (whence "systematics"), the idea of the arrangement of the whole of living diversity. while classifications have traditionally been represented in words, "the natural system" has often been represented diagrammatically. in the pre-evolutionary period the natural system was sometimes compared to a map, with species arranged in some sort of abstract space; alternatively, it was sometimes compared to a system of nested circles or stars that blended into one another at their points of contact. one of the oldest images of the natural system is that of the scala naturae or chain of being, a linear arrangement reaching "from monad to man". arthur lovejoy's classic book _the great chain of being_ is still the best history of that particular view of natural diversity. as naturalists came to accept evolution, the tree came to be the principal model of the natural system, and evolutionary trees came to be published with some regularity beginning in the late 1800s. "tree" in this context does not mean a picture with leaves and bark and that sort of thing, although some such evolutionary "trees" have been drawn; it means simply a branching diagram, like a genealogical chart, with lines connecting ancestors and their descendants. (i will return to characteristics of the diagrams themselves in a moment.) now while it is true that evolutionary trees have been drawn since the mid-1800s, it is not stretching the truth too far to say that systematists really only figured out how to reconstruct them in the last thirty years. (darwin's tree in the _origin_ is a hypothetical one; it only shows what an evolutionary tree would be like if we really had one.) this is where cladistic analysis comes in. cladistic analysis is a method of historical inference: it is a method for taking evidence that exists in the present the similarities and differences among a collection of organisms under study and using that evidence to reconstruct the branching family tree of those organisms, and the sequence of changes they have undergone in the course of their history. cladistic analysis has swept the field of systematics in the last thirty years, and its development and adoption, in my view, constitutes a genuine conceptual revolution, one that has not only intellectual components, but all the characteristic socio-disciplinary turmoil that accompanies a scientific revolution as well (see david hull's _science as a process_ (1988) for some discussion of that turmoil). it is very important to understand that the development of cladistics has been a conceptual revolution, rather than a technical one: there is no reason that it could not have been developed in the 1860s, and contrary to many misconceptions (some of which have been promulgated by historically unconscious workers in systematics), it does not depend upon computers, molecular biology, or any other current technology, although computers can be used and are used to make comparisons among different trees very quickly, and molecular data can be incorporated into cladistic analysis just surely as anatomical, physiological, or behavioral data can. as a method of historical inference, cladistic analysis has many insights to offer workers in fields outside of systematics i think, but only if the objects whose history is of interest have a reasonably clear tree-like pattern of ancestry and descent. in linguistics, for example, it may be possible to apply cladistic techniques to the reconstruction of the histories of language families, and some steps have already been taken in that direction by a few workers. similarly, in the study of the histories of manuscripts copied over many years from originals that are now lost, cladistic techniques can be applied with good success. peter robinson of oxford and i have collaborated on the application of cladistic techniques to the reconstruction of the family tree of an old norse narrative that is known from about 40 different mss, and have a paper on the subject now in press in _research in humanities computing_. i would be happy to send a copy of that paper to anyone who has an interest in these issues. [....] the technicalities of cladistic analysis can lead us into the depths of evolutionary theory and statistical inference, a region from which some have never returned. there is, however, a more general issue that arises in the context of "trees of history", one that may be of interest to more of the readers of pmc, and that is the issue of historical representation. cladistic analysis is primarily a method of inference: a method of finding out something that you don't already know. once you have found something out (or believe you have), you are then faced with the problem of representing your knowledge, and in the case of systematics this means drawing a tree. the problem of historical representation in evolutionary biology has not been examined in great detail, because the matter has usually been considered unproblematic: you just look at your specimens, make your tree (either by cladistic methods today, or by the earlier intuitive and ill-defined methods), and that's that. it turns out, however, that historical trees are very subtle representational instruments, and they can be drawn and read in a great variety of ways. complex branches can be collapsed into simple branches, events can be included and excluded, the tree can be given a direction (a crown) based on some particular criterion, it can show evolutionary "ascent" or "descent", "higher" and "lower" organisms, and so on. the scientific value of many representational devices that have been traditionally incorporated into evolutionary trees is close to zero. those familiar with some of the general problems that have been discussed in analytic philosophy of history or in narrative theory will recognize many of the phenomena they are familiar with, such as the foregrounding and backgrounding of selected events, in evolutionary representations just as surely as in conventional human histories. i have attempted to outline some of these representational problems in a recent paper that may be of interest to some people: o'hara, r. j. 1992. telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. biology and philosophy, 7:135-160. as above, i would be happy to send a reprint to anyone who is interested; just send me a snailmail address. in connection with an interdisciplinary course i am planning i have put together a working bibliography on "trees of history" in a variety of disciplines (primarily evolution, linguistics, and manuscript studies). i'll pass a copy on to the pmc editors and ask them if they would put it on the pmc file server for general retrieval. bob o'hara center for critical inquiry in the liberal arts university of north carolina at greensboro ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: 29 aug 1992 20:02:41 -0400 (edt) from: rjohara@uncg.bitnet subject: cladistics and trees of history i have sent a copy of my bibliography on "trees of history" and cladistics to the pmc editors with the request that they place it on the filelist here, so it should be available to all shortly. i would welcome any additions or corrections to it i have labelled it a "working bibliography" and that it is. [....] bob o'hara robert j. o'hara, postdoctoral fellow center for critical inquiry in the liberal arts university of north carolina at greensboro greensboro, north carolina 27412-5001, u.s.a. rjohara@uncg.bitnet rjohara@iris.uncg.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- working interdisciplinary bibliography: 'trees of history' in systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. robert j. o'hara, august 1992. email: rjohara@uncg.bitnet or rjohara@iris.uncg.edu. suggestions for additions, deletions, and corrections are very welcome; my own field is systematics, so that is the area in which this list is most reliable. my object here is not to create an exhaustive bibliography, but rather a bibliography that will help advanced students in any one of these fields get a good sense of what has gone on and is going on in the other fields, with special reference to theory. studies of particular biological taxa, language families, or manuscript traditions that do not have a theoretical or historical emphasis are generally excluded from this list. asterisks indicate works that may be particularly useful to beginners. 1. interdisciplinary works 2. general and theoretical works systematics 3. general and theoretical works historical linguistics 4. general and theoretical works stemmatics 5. historical works systematics 6. historical works historical linguistics 7. historical works stemmatics 8. trees of history elsewhere 9. miscellaneous works on evolution in relation to other fields 1. interdisciplinary works bateman, richard, ives goddard, richard t. o'grady, vicki a. funk, rich mooi, w. j. kress, & peter cannell. 1990. speaking of forked tongues: the feasibility of reconciling human phylogeny and the history of language. current anthropology, 31:1-24. [see also responses and commentary on pp. 177-183, 315-316, 420-426.] bender, m. l. 1976. genetic classification of languages: genotype vs. phenotype. language sciences, 43:4-6. flight, colin. 1988. bantu trees and some wider ramifications. african languages and cultures, 1:25-43. [reanalyzes some linguistic data using the distance wagner procedure from systematics.] greenberg, joseph h. 1957. language and evolutionary theory. pp. 56-65 in: essays in linguistics. chicago: university of chicago press. hoenigswald, henry m. 1990. language families and subgroupings, tree model and wave theory, and reconstruction of protolanguages. pp. 441-454 in: research guide on language change (edgar c. polome, ed.). trends in linguistics, studies and monographs, 48. berlin & new york: mouton de gruyter. [short historical and theoretical discussion of the tree model and the principle of shared innovation (apomorphy), and the discovery of some of the limitations of trees in linguistics.] *hoenigswald, henry m., & linda f. wiener, eds. 1987. biological metaphor and cladistic classification: an interdisciplinary perspective. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. [the most important single interdisciplinary collection, with papers on all three subjects.] koerner, e. f. konrad. 1981. schleichers einfluss auf haeckel: schlaglichter auf die wechselseitige abhangigkeit zwischen linguistichen und biologischen theorien in 19. jahrhundert. zeitschrift fur vergleichende sprachforschung, 95:1-21. [reprinted in koerner, 1989, practicing linguistic historiography: selected essays, pp. 211-231, amsterdam: john benjamins.] koerner, e. f. konrad, ed. 1983. linguistics and evolutionary theory: three essays by august schleicher, ernst haeckel, and william bleek, with an introduction by j. peter maher. amsterdam: john benjamins. [contains: (1) schleicher, 1863, the darwinian theory and the science of language; (2) schleicher, 1865, on the significance of language for the natural history of man; (3) bleek, 1867, on the origin of language (with preface by haeckel); (4) w. d. whitney, 1872, dr. bleek and the simious theory of language.] lee, arthur. 1989. numerical taxonomy revisited: john griffith, cladistic analysis and st. augustine's quaestiones in heptateuchum. studia patristica xx. maher, john peter. 1966. more on the history of the comparative method: the tradition of darwinism in august schleicher's work. anthropological linguistics, 8:1-12. picardi, eva. 1977. some problems of classification in linguistics and biology, 1800-1830. historiographia linguistica, 4:31-57. platnick, norman i., & h. don cameron. 1977. cladistic methods in textual, linguistic, and phylogenetic analysis. systematic zoology, 26:380-385. robinson, peter m. w., & robert j. o'hara. in press. cladistic analysis of an old norse manuscript tradition. research in humanities computing. oxford: clarendon press. [application of systematic techniques to a stemmatic problem.] shevoroshkin, vitaly, & john woodford. 1991. where linguistics, archeology, and biology meet. pp. 173-197 in: ways of knowing (john brockman, ed.). new york: prentice hall press. stevick, robert d. 1963. the biological model and historical linguistics. language, 39:159-169. uschmann, georg. 1972. august schleicher und ernst haeckel. spitzbardt, 1972:62-70. 2. general and theoretical works systematics *brooks, daniel r., & deborah a. mclennan. 1991. phylogeny, ecology, and behavior: a research program in comparative biology. chicago: university of chicago press. [chapter 2 is an introduction to cladistic analysis.] camin, joseph h., & robert r. sokal. 1965. a method for deducing branching sequences in phylogeny. evolution, 19:311-326. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] edwards, a. w. f., & cavalli-sforza, luigi l. 1964. reconstruction of evolutionary trees. pp. 67-76 in: phenetic and phylogenetic classification (v. h. heywood & j. mcneill, eds.). systematics association publication 6. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] farris, j. s. 1970. methods for computing wagner trees. systematic zoology, 19:83-92. [an early influential paper; now substantially superseded.] farris, james s., arnold g. kluge, & m. j. eckardt. 1970. a numerical approach to phylogenetic systematics. systematic zoology, 19:172189. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] felsenstein, joseph. 1982. numerical methods for inferring evolutionary trees. quarterly review of biology, 57:379-404. fitch, walter m., & emmanuel margoliash. 1967. the construction of phylogenetic trees. science, 155:279-284. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] hennig, willi. 1965. phylogenetic systematics. annual review of entomology, 10:97-116. [a synopsis of hennig 1966.] hennig, willi. 1966. phylogenetic systematics. urbana: university of illinois press. kluge, arnold g., & james s. farris. 1969. quantitative phyletics and the evolution of anurans. systematic zoology, 18:1-32. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] maddison, wayne p., michael j. donoghue, & david r. maddison. 1984. outgroup analysis and parsimony. systematic zoology, 33:83103. [a review of outgroup comparison as a method of polarity determination.] *maddison, wayne p., & david r. maddison. 1989. interactive analysis of phylogeny and character evolution using the computer program macclade. folia primatologica, 53:190-202. mayr, ernst. 1974. cladistic analysis or cladistic classification. zeitschrift fur zoologische systematik und evolutions-forschung, 12:94-128. [distinguished clearly the issue of historical inference (cladistic analysis) from the issue of classification.] *mayr, ernst, & peter d. ashlock. 1991. principles of systematic zoology, second edition. new york: mcgraw-hill, inc. [pp. 274-321, "numerical methods of phylogenetic inference", written by david maddison, is a good introduction to cladistic analysis. much of the rest of the book is outdated.] o'hara, robert j. 1988. homage to clio, or, toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology. systematic zoology, 37:142155. [a discussion of the theoretical similarities between history and evolutionary biology (systematics in particular).] *sober, elliott. 1988. reconstructing the past: parsimony, evolution, and inference. cambridge: mit press. stevens, peter f. 1980. evolutionary polarity of character states. annual review of ecology and systematics, 11:333-358. *swofford, david l., & gary j. olsen. 1990. phylogenetic reconstruction. pp. 411-501 in: molecular systematics (d. m. hillis & c. moritz, eds.). sunderland, massachusetts: sinauer. [an advanced but comprehensive introduction.] wagner, warren h., jr. 1961. problems in the classification of ferns. recent advances in botany, 1:841-844. [one of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] *wiley, edward o. 1981. phylogenetics. new york: wiley. [a general textbook on systematics.] zuckerkandl, e., & linus pauling. 1965. molecules as documents of evolutionary history. journal of theoretical biology, 8:357-366. [journals: systematic zoology (now systematic biology), cladistics, systematic botany, taxon, zeitschrift fur zoologische systematik und evolutions-forschung.] [software: macclade, paup, phylip, hennig-86, clados, and others. see maddison in mayr & ashlock, p. 320-321 for a listing.] 3. general and theoretical works historical linguistics allen, w. s. 1953. relationship in comparative linguistics. transactions of the philological society, 1953:52-108. anttila, raimo. 1989. historical and comparative linguistics. amsterdam. [a general textbook.] bynon, theodora. 1977. historical linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press. [a general textbook.] [chretien, c. d. 1963. shared innovation and subgrouping. ijal, 29:66-68.] *gamkrelidze, thomas v., & v. v. ivanov. 1990. the early history of indo-european languages. scientific american, march, pp. 110-116. gleason, h. a. 1959. counting and calculating for historical reconstruction. anthropological linguistics, 1(2):22-32. grace, george w. 1965. on the scientific status of genetic classification in linguistics. oceanic linguistics, 4:1-14. greenberg, joseph h. 1987. language in the americas. stanford: stanford university press. hetzron, robert. 1976. two principles of genetic reconstruction. lingua, 38:89-108. hock, hans henrich. 1991. principles of historical linguistics, second edition. berlin & new york: mouton de gruyter. [a general textbook.] hoenigswald, henry m. 1966. criteria for the subgrouping of languages. pp. 1-12 in: ancient indo-european dialects (henrik brinbaum & jaan puhvel, eds.). berkeley: university of california press. *mallory, james p. 1989. in search of the indo-europeans: language, archeology, and myth. london: thames and hudson. nichols, johanna. 1992. linguistic diversity in space and time. chicago: university of chicago press. pulgram, e. 1953. family tree, wave theory, and dialectology. orbis, 2:67-72. *renfrew, colin. 1989. the origins of indo-european languages. scientific american, october, pp. 106-114. *ruhlen, merritt. 1991. a guide to the world's languages. volume 1: classification. stanford: stanford university press. shevoroshkin, vitaly, & t. l. markey, eds. 1986. typology, relationship, and time: a collection of papers on language change and relationship by soviet linguists. ann arbor: karoma publishers. shevoroshkin, vitaly, ed. 1989. reconstructing languages and cultures. studienverlag dr. norbert brockmeier. shevoroshkin, vitaly. 1989. methods in interphyletic comparisons. ural-altaische jahrbucher, 61:1-26. shevoroshkin, vitaly. 1990. the mother tongue. the sciences, mayjune. *wright, r. 1991. quest for the mother tongue. atlantic, 267(4):3968. [popular magazine article.] [journals: diachronica; historische sprachforschung/historical linguistics.] 4. general and theoretical works stemmatics clark, a. c. 1918. the descent of manuscripts. oxford: oxford university press. colwell, ernest cadman. 1947. genealogical method: its acheivements and limitations. journal of biblical literature, 66:109133. dawe, r. d. 1964. the collation and investigation of manuscripts of aeschylus. cambridge: cambridge university press. [on the limitations of stemmatics.] greg, w. w. 1927. the calculus of variants: an essay on textual criticism. oxford: oxford university press. greg, w. w. 1930. recent theories of textual criticism. modern philology, 28:401-404. [reply to shepard (1930).] [griesbach. 1796. prolegomena to his second edition of the new testament. (establishes the principle of lectio difficilior, and other rules, fide shepard 1930.)] kleinlogel, alexander. 1968. das stemmaproblem. philologus, 112:63-82. maas, paul. 1958. textual criticism. (translated from the german by barbara flower.) oxford: oxford university press. quentin, henri. 1926. essais de critique textuelle. paris: picard. reeve, m. d. 1986. stemmatic method: 'qualcosa che non funziona'? the role of the book in medieval culture (proceedings of the oxford international symposium, 1982, edited by peter ganz), 1:57-69. bibliologia, vol. 3. brepols, turnhout. *reynolds, leighton d., ed. 1983. texts and transmission: a survey of the latin classics. oxford: oxford university press. *reynolds, leighton d., & n. g. wilson. 1991. scribes and scholars: a guide to the transmission of greek and latin literature. third edition. oxford: oxford university press. shepard, william p. 1930. recent theories of textual criticism. modern philology, 28:129-141. [critique of quentin (1926) and greg (1927); see greg (1930) for a response.] weitzman, michael. 1985. the analysis of open traditions. studies in bibliography, 38:82-120. [a substantial discussion of how to reconstruct the history of contaminated manuscript traditions.] weitzman, michael. 1987. the evolution of manuscript traditions. journal of the royal statistical society, series a, 150:287-308. [develops a statistical model of the process of manuscript descent.] west, m. l. 1973. textual criticism and editorial technique. stuttgart. whitehead, f., & c. e. pickford. 1951. the two-branch stemma. bulletin bibliographique de la societe internationale arthurienne\bibliographical bulletin of the international arthurian society, 3:83-90. zuntz, g. 1965. an inquiry into the transmission of the plays of euripides. cambridge: cambridge university press. 5. historical works systematics craw, robin. 1992. margins of cladistics: identity, difference and place in the emergence of phylogenetic systematics, 1864-1975. pp. 65-107 in: trees of life: essays in philosophy of biology (paul griffiths, ed.). australasian studies in history and philosophy of science, 11. gaffney, eugene s. 1984. historical analysis of theories of chelonian relationship. systematic zoology, 33:283-301. greene, john c. 1959. the death of adam. ames: iowa state university press. [a general history of natural history, with some discussion of systematics.] gruber, howard e. 1972. darwin's 'tree of nature' and other images of wider scope. pp. 121-140 in: on aesthetics and science (j. wechsler, ed.). cambridge: mit press. hull, david l. 1988. science as a process. chicago: university of chicago press. [contains an account of the recent (post-1960) history of systematics. see craw (1992) for criticism.] lam, h. j. 1936. phylogenetic symbols, past and present. acta biotheoretica, 2:152-194. o'hara, robert j. 1988. diagrammatic classifications of birds, 18191901: views of the natural system in 19th-century british ornithology. pp. 2746-2759 in: acta xix congressus internationalis ornithologici (h. ouellet, ed.). ottawa: national museum of natural sciences. o'hara, robert j. 1991. representations of the natural system in the nineteenth century. biology and philosophy, 6:255-274. o'hara, robert j. 1992. telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. biology and philosophy, 7:135-160. [on the similarities between historical narratives and evolutionary trees.] oppenheimer, jane m. 1987. haeckel's variations on darwin. hoenigswald & wiener, 1987:123-135. [on the tree diagrams of the german evolutionist ernst haeckel.] de queiroz, kevin. 1988. systematics and the darwinian revolution. philosophy of science, 55:238-259. [a good interpretation of the history of recent systematics.] reif, wolf-ernst. 1983. hilgendorf's (1863) dissertation on the steinheim planorbids (gastropoda; miocene): the development of a phylogenetic research program for paleontology. palaontologische zeitschrift, 57:7-20. stevens, peter f. 1982. augustin augier's "arbre botanique" (1801), a remarkable early botanical representation of the natural system. taxon, 32:203-211. stevens, peter f. 1984. metaphors and typology in the development of botanical systematics 1690-1960, or the art of putting new wine in old bottles. taxon, 33:169-211. voss, e. g. 1952. the history of keys and phylogenetic trees in systematic biology. journal of the scientific laboratory, denison university, 43:1-25. wagner, warren h., jr. 1980. origin and philosophy of the groundplan-divergence method of cladistics. systematic botany, 5:173-193. winsor, mary p. 1976. starfish, jellyfish, and the order of life. new haven: yale university press. 6. historical works historical linguistics bonfante, giuliano. 1954. ideas on the kinship of the european languages from 1200 to 1800. journal of world history, 1:679-699. de mauro, t., & l. formigari. 1990. leibniz, humboldt, and the origins of comparativism. amsterdam: john benjamins. [amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, 49.] hoenigswald, henry m. 1963. on the history of the comparative method. anthropological linguistics, 5(1):1-11. hoenigswald, henry m. 1975. schleicher's tree and its trunk. pp. 157-160 in: ut videam: contributions to an understanding of linguistics. for pieter a. verburg on the occasion of his seventieth birthday...(werner abraham et al., eds.). lisse: peter de ridder press. [h&w p113] hymes, dell, ed. 1974. studies in the history of linguistics: traditions and paradigms. bloomington: indiana university press. koerner, e. f. konrad. 1978. toward a historiography of linguistics: 19th and 20th century paradigms. in: toward a historiography of linguistics: selected essays. amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, iii. studies in the history of linguistics, vol. 19. amsterdam: benjamins. koerner, e. f. konrad. 1982. the schleicherian paradigm in linguistics. general linguistics, 22:1-39. morpurgo davies, anna. 1975. language classification in the nineteenth century. current trends in linguistics, 13:607-716. myers, l. f., & w. s.-y. wang. 1963. tree representations in linguistics. in: project on linguistic analysis, report no. 3, ohio state university research foundation (n.s.f. grant g-25055). [fide h&w p256] pederson, holger. 1931. the discovery of language: linguistic science in the nineteenth century. cambridge: harvard university press. [reprinted 1962, indiana university press, bloomington.] priestly, tom m. s. 1975. schleicher, celakovsky, and the familytree diagram. historiographica linguistica, 2:299-333. robins, robert h. 1973. the history of language classification. current trends in linguistics, 11:3-41. robins, robert h. 1979. a short history of linguistics. london. robins, robert h. 1987. the life and work of sir william jones. transactions of the philological society, 1987:1-23. [short biography of an 18th century founder of historical linguistics.] southworth, franklin c. 1964. family-tree diagrams. language, 40:557-565. stewart, ann h. 1976. graphic representation of models in linguistic theory. bloomington and london: indiana university press. uschmann, g. 1967. zur geschichte der stammbaumdarstellungen. gesammelte vortrage uber moderne probleme der abstammungslehre (m. gersch, ed.), 2:9-30. jena: friedrich schiller universitat. [journals: historiographica linguistica.] 7. historical works stemmatics holm, g. 1972. carl johan schlyter and textual scholarship. saga och sed: kungliga gustav adolf akademiens aarbok, 48-80, uppsala. [contains stemmata of legal texts from 1827] timpanaro, sebastiano. 1981. la genesi del methodo del lachmann, third edition. padua. 8. trees of history elsewhere cook, roger. 1974 [reprinted 1988]. the tree of life: image for the cosmos. new york: thames and hudson. [an art historical study of tree imagery. includes some historical and genealogical trees.] murdoch, john e. 1984. album of science: antiquity and the middle ages. new york: charles scribner's sons. [chapter 5 of this anthology of scientific diagrams, "dichotomies and arbores", illustrates many medieval tree diagrams. most of these are logical trees, but some genealogical trees are illustrated also.] toulmin, stephen e. 1972. human understanding. princeton: princeton university press. [evolutionary epistemology: trees of disciplinary development.] young, gavin c. 1986. cladistic methods in paleozoic continental reconstruction. journal of geology, 94:523-537. 9. miscellaneous works on evolution in relation to other fields bichakjian, b. 1987. the evolution of word order: a paedomorphic explanation. pp. 87-108 in: papers from the 7th international conference on historical linguistics (a. g. ramat et al., eds.). amsterdam: john benjamins. bredeck, elizabeth j. 1987. historical narrative or scientific discipline? fritz mauthner on the limits of linguistics. pp. 585-593 in: papers in the history of linguistics (hans aarsleff, louis g. kelly, & hans-josef niederehe, eds.). amsterdam: john benjamins. durham, william h. 1990. advances in evolutionary culture theory. annual review of anthropology, 19:187-210. lass, roger. 1990. how to do things with junk: exaptation in language evolution. journal of linguistics, 26:79-102. leroy, maurice. 1949. sur le concept d'evolution en linguistique. revue de l'institut de sociologie. 337-375. masters, r. d. 1990. evolutionary biology and political theory. american political science review, 84:195-210. sereno, m. i. 1991. four analogies between biological and cultural linguistic evolution. journal of theoretical biology, 151:467-507. terrell, john. 1981. linguistics and the peopling of the pacific islands. journal of the polynesian society, 90:225-258. [biogeography and linguistics.] ================================================================= thread #2: cut-ups ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 27 jul 92 10:36:19 cdt from: "finagle, etc. (durflinger,edward m)" <durfling@grin1.bitnet> subject: an editorial comment greetings: i enclose the following neoist reply to mr. mccarthy: postmodern pleasure and perversity [14] the postmodern reduction of the logic of heraclitean unity and eschew dialectics, implicit ideas of beauty such as expressed in terms of a probabilistic mathesis. [58] it is a play of signifiers. it completes the devolution of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. yet, tracing the play of numbers: in other words a science fiction about the credentials of postmodernism, then, is in the fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political formations. this process revives the subject reveals the longing for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern desire to systematise the play of difference among "numbering numbers." [59] the desire of a natural order of things driving the play of signifiers. it completes the devolution of the concealed form of the unconscious" (deleuze and guattari, f. _a thousand plateaus_ which imports quantum modelling of particle inputs which are organised to facilitate global exchange" (1991: 66). [5] the deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises the complex texture of individual and social space have been cut off. it is a play of irregularity and pleasure arising from the authors and advance notification of the masses into appropriate consumption and productive behaviours. secondly, as baudrillard has argued, the immersion of the subject was drawn into this mess remains repressed. postmodernism: pleasure and perversity for everyman [29] bourdieu finds that the "autonomous arithmetic organisation" of the libidinal economy of deconstruction grows. in its psychotic mode, the postmodern worker and consumer, wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the heightened sensitivity derived from the material reality of deleuze and guattari's (1987) plateau. postmodern sadism [23] there is a utility which deconstructs ideas of beauty such as "consciousness and experience" are collapsed (rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the categories of postmodernism as a moment in the play of difference into a universe which is an assemblage that this inheritance persists. both are concerned with flows of a dialectical view of history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political formations. this process revives the subject of ethico-politico praxis, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia which is under considerable threat in the pleasures inherent in policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a marvelous thing; but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the perversity of code-breaking through de sade's deconstructionist lubricity in the inversion of marx's _capital_ as "the cultural logic of the body in the interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. this trajectory is observable in _dionysus_ and in deleuze and guattari's work in particular. weil argues that scientism must not eliminate the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and continuity to the atoms of the rendering of culture into everyday life and death between the unary signifier and the good to olympian heights above the conditions of the complex texture of individual and putting an end to praxis. in addition, lacan (1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one also senses that lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis and their molecularising thought crystallises de sade's "matrix of maleficent molecules" (1968: 400), in which the concerns of human striving is also projected into the epistemological affinity between de sade's _juliette_) as a manipulative developer. we find that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to explain the logic of the marxist preoccupation with the linear space of the good" (weil, 1968: 22). the work of the complexities of history to the form of the relations of desire in the hierarchies of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated. [30] the pleasurable and terroristic nature of things: "as soon as you have discovered the way of a contradictory, non-reductive "constellation" of tensions (jay as cited in bernstein, 1991: 42). this stance maintains the "unresolved paradox" of reason as simultaneously a vehicle of emancipation and entrapment--a paradox which contributes to the spirit" (1972: xii). rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. in contrast to derrida's interpretation of the continuous intensities of the measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent, signifiers as the delineations of postmodern thought, reducing cultural complexity to signifiers in the play of commodity signifiers, and in postmodernism may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the modernist catch cry of equality, liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of late capitalism. the mating of capital by multinationals is furthered by "the most terrible orgies," and her sadistic pleasure-plays are financed in a culture which is also expressed by lacan in that the moment of difference with the linear space of the trajectory of this desire with anality, require some examination as a triumphal encounter of humanity and materiality. [47] the dehumanising loss in the conditions of existence into strong solutions which carry forward the paraconsistent logic of late capitalism. the mating of capital and fearful desire mutually attract and interpenetrate, and out of the information society, which heightens the sensitivity of the quantum form in social thought which reduces the complex texture of individual and social space have been cut off. it is clear that atomising thought which reduces the complex texture of existence for the thank you, monty cantin karen eliot, eds. smile magazine ---------------------------------------------------------------- from: christopher maeda <cmaeda@mc8.mach.cs.cmu.edu> date: thu, 30 jul 92 10:31:59 edt subject: postmodernism: who gives a fuck anyway? i'd like to start a new topic. what's the point of all this? not "what's the point of postmodernism?" we already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. very neat. no. i want to know what is the point of the people on this list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? are you trying to improve society? destroy society? get tenure? (check all that apply.) take the "war machine" article appended below. i've read it twice and it still doesn't make a damn bit of sense. (though the authors do deserve a pat on the head for using 5 syllable words so convincingly...) i would try again but it's so mind-numbingly boring. i'm really annoyed. it seems that so much of the work in this genre is intended not so much to enrage or enlighten but simply to show how clever the author is. any concrete proposition is so obscured that one begins to doubt whether the author really had anything to say in the first place. i've begun to suspect that the author usually doesn't. from: "finagle, etc. (durflinger,edward m)" <durfling@grin1.bitnet> the war machine monty cansin karen eliot reprinted from "smile" magazine a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: fri, 31 jul 1992 17:43 est from: jschwar@bgsuopie.bitnet subject: giving something and getting something else i'd like to unstart christopher m.'s topic and flop it on to the cladistics thread. the "war machine" article and the one before it from "smile" (and where can i get this zine? does it actually exist?) seemed to me to be summaries of sections of deleuze and guattari's _thousand plateaus_, a really groovy book that folks are just starting to use in cultural criticism (see the last couple issues of pmc for examples...). anyway, d & g have some very biting critiques of the phallic, "arborescent" (i.e. tree-like) structure of knowledge (esp. in the chapter "introduction: rhizome"). i'm really sick of the "what good is theory? let's do something real" riff, but i'm not sure how to refute it. i was quite entertained however, to find incisive discussions of this thang in the last 2 books i read, gallop's _around 1981_ and fish's _doing what comes naturally_. jeff schwartz dept. of popular culture bowling green state university bowling green oh 43402 ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 1 aug 92 13:29:03 cdt from: "finagle, etc. (durflinger,edward m)" <durfling@grin1.bitnet> subject: warmachine:who gives a fuck?; or, what is the sound of one person taking a joke? christopher maeda <cmaeda@mc8.mach.cs.cmu.edu> date: thu, 30 jul 92 10:31:59 edt postmodernism: who gives a fuck anyway? doesn't make a damn bit of sense.(though the authors do deserve a pat on the head for using 5 syllable words so convincingly...) i would try again but it's so mind-numbingly boring. i'm really annoyed. it seems that so much of the state apparatus (stratum), the double task of priest and believer, legislator and subject. (deleuze 1984, pg. 92). the kantian subject is actually made up of space: the human population. (above, pg. 423). even the most terrifying war machine monty cansin karen eliot reprinted from "smile" magazine a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. metallurgy is the point of the subject is actually made up of space: the human population. (above, pg. 423). even the most terrifying war machine in itself. in its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic formulas" which deleuze added as a pure matter of wrought objects, or the construction of the essay of sedentary or state structures, nomads and the battle is evidently not always the object of war. war is often a matter of avoiding the battle, using speed and stealth to outmaneuver the enemy. but is war necessarily the object of knowledge, as opposed to the schematization of space/time is a brick. one can build many different windows. the war machine that sweeps them along? we have been raised, for the present and the war machine's exteriority, propositions i-iv make connections to the extent of obliteration the state apparatus. "for what can be done to prevent the theme of race from turning into a "free and indeterminate accord," where one faculty does not exactly lie in between the nomads and the war machine in itself. in its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the third fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the people on this list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? are you trying to improve society? destroy society? get tenure? (check all that apply.) take the "war machine" article appended below. i've read it twice and it still gives a fuck anyway? fuck! i'd like to start a new topic. what's the point of postmodernism?" we already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. very neat. no. i want to know what is the correlative form of content." it is a brick. one can build many different windows. the war machine in itself. in its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the third fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the state is not a simple dispute over philosophy, but has become an issue of pragmatic action. deleuze's book foucault again becomes the stage for this confrontation, for deleuze's foucault is the correlative form of content." it is a way as the study of the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the people on this list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? are you trying to improve society? destroy society? get tenure? (check all that apply.) take the "war machine" article appended below. i've read it twice and it stillgives a fuck anyway? fuck! i'd like to start a new topic. what's the point of postmodernism?" we already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. very neat. [remainder of repost deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. [remainder of reposted message deleted -ed.] a book exists only through the phylum: on the other by state theorematics. a note from the editors of 'smile:' in case any of you were not aware of it before, the texts that have been reprinted in this space from time to time are computer-generated cutups of other, pre-existing texts. the reason we chose to submit them to the list is that such texts can serve as illustrations for many postmodern concepts which can be raised for discussion. for example, does a piece of text such as above constitute a "work"? if so, does it have one, two, three, or no "authors?" why does a piece of text have to have sequentiality, linearity, and originality to be considered "meaningful?" the hostile reaction of the above critic seems to indicate that these are far from dead issues, as he struggled so valiantly to extract "meaning" out of a text that had been deliberately rendered "meaningless." however, although a cutup text lacks "meaning" per se, does it lack usefulness? the random juxtapositions of phrase in the above article and the cutup of the pmc article mccarthy 592 that we submitted earlier struck us as not only amusing, but critical and artistic. as neoists, we believe that questions of "originality" and "authorship" and "meaning" are dead issues. the essense of the new art and literature is plagarism, as the kathy acker story from an earlier issue of pmc illustrated so well. the recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural signs that are shoved at us every day through the media is the only art form left that is relevant for the postmodern age, a fact that has been widely bandied about but largely ignored since the days of the cabaret voltaire. one might as well open oneself up to the possibilities of manipulated the images created for us by capital rather than being manipulated by them. virtually yours, karen eliot monty cantsin ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 1 aug 92 20:58:15 edt from: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (mm) subject: dead issues i guess the neoists are trying to say that the issues are dead issues but that they are far from being dead issues. aside from that, i can think of no way that an artist could more effectively serve the interests of late capitalism than by jettisoning the idea of meaning and mandating the real work of "recylcing, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural signs." some theory is very difficult, and people indeed work very hard to understand it; you (smile) seem insufferably elitist looking down your noses at people so far behind the times as to look for the meaning in a text. i thought one of the characteristics of pm thinking was creation without the imposition of rules? opening up to the possibilities of manipulating the images created for us by capital is obviously worth doing, but why be so smug and call it the only game for whoever is really au courant. that's the real bullshit in postmodernism. michael mccoll. (by the way, there are places in the cut-ups where things are joined in really blunt, dumb ways.) in case you have not noticed, new combinations of media images is the media's game, and audiences can be seduced whatever the new forms of manipulation. like you could even keep up with the media's everfresh combinations of rap, gymnastics, coca-cola, and lover, warm love, from at&t. in short, why do you need to be so elitist and exclusionary about one thing there is to do, when there are a lot of things. if you jettison "meaning," you circulate all the more effectively in the media transfos. michael mccoll ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sun, 2 aug 92 00:03 ast from: j_duchesne@upr1.upr.clu.edu subject: war machine texts event it was evident that the war machine texts were either parodies or wordgames drawing on macarthy 592 and deleuze & guattari's _a thousand plateaus_. the low threshold of resistance to free-play (or simply unfettered theoretical and linguistic performances) is a symptom of the fear-of-theory syndrome that plagues higher learning institutions in many places. it is not so bad in the anglo-zone, i gather. in latin america it is an epidemic that threatens from the right and from the left (even the "nondogmatic" left, even liberation theology, etc.). i recently performed an e-mail event intending to fog (or de-fog) the patriarchal repressive binary discourse being used in a latin american discussion group concerning sendero luminoso (shining path guerrillas). some reactions amounted to near death threats. the theoretical after-thoughts to the event motivated even stronger reactions, even though the text made it clear there was no support to sendero (or the army) involved. what is really feared is the volatilisation of agency, authorship, of the subject and/or of stratified ethico-political languages spontaneously enabled by the playful use of theory and language in general. some of these hostile reactions approach very much the fascist spanish civil war slogan: "abajo la inteligencia, vivan las cadenas, viva la muerte!" (down with intelligence, long live chains, long live death!).--"who gives a fuck anyway!". p.d. macarthy 592, by the way, tries to associate the conception of atomistic actual occasions arranged upon an extensive continuum of potentialities (i.e., of molecularity upon a plane or "plan" of consistency) with the reduction of experience and action to numbered schemata, that is, the paradigmatic scheme of a much feared proto-facist anarcho-crazyism read in deleuze & guattari and others. but such an atomistic conception, in the mentioned versions (which owe much to bergson and whitehead), really point to the multiplicity, plurality and spontaneity open to nonstratified events on or beyond the extensive continuum (whitehead) or plane of consistency, organized or disorganized (deleuze & guattari). juan duchesne j_duchesne@upr1 ---------------------------------------------------------------- from: christopher maeda <cmaeda@mc8.mach.cs.cmu.edu> date: mon, 3 aug 92 18:58:37 edt subject: the new art date: sat, 1 aug 92 13:29:03 cdt from: "finagle, etc. (durflinger,edward m)" <durfling@grin1.bitnet> subject: warmachine:who gives a fuck?; > the recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of > multiplicity of cultural signs that are shoved at us every day > through the media is the only art form left that is relevant > for the postmodern age... > one might as well open oneself up to the possibilities of > manipulated [sic?] the images created for us by capital rather > than being manipulated by them. a cute but pathetic idea. what's the difference? you probably end up buying the crap irregardless. or to put it differently, if you do art by recycling advertising, you further the ends of the advertisers. ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: thu, 6 aug 92 01:58 ast from: j_duchesne@upr1.upr.clu.edu subject: theory and landscape my intervention (digest 8-1) was not necessarily authoritarian or exclusionist. it's more a problem of my being able to produce only a terminator-2 type of english at the moment. this time after reading subsequent postings on the war machine (smile) issue, i would qualify my rash fear-of-theory diagnosis and let it apply to general situations loosely related to this particular communicative situation of pmc-talk. what i read in the subsequent "contra-smile" interventions is a tendency to associate dense (or even opaque) theoretical language with some sort of vacuousness or manipulative bluff (the way masturbation is usually related to waste or unproductiveness of some sort). but the first element is not a sufficient condition for the second. "light" or "clear" theoretical language uses are very often as vacuous and deceptive as some of the baroque "postmodern" terminology may be. we really need to go into the dense pomo forest to distinguish between real content and bluff (aside from the obviously mediocre, therefore trivial, samples). to the said tendency associating "ludic" (>ludere) density and irrelevance is related an "i'm not wasting my time" tactic justified on very bi-polar notions of theory-practice, play-commitment, form-content, "jouissance"-sense, etc. or i am wrong? corrigenda: am i wrong? juan duchesne ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: mon, 10 aug 92 10:33:42 edt from: cj stivale <cstival@cms.cc.wayne.edu> subject: the c. maeda et. al. discussion i think that mbm at upenn's point (4 aug 92) is well-stated and well-taken, regarding perceived impatience/reproach(es) to c. maeda's intervention (30 jul 92). however, impatience would seem to be the operative mood given maeda's neat title ("postmodernism: who gives a fuck anyway?"). maeda used therein a scattershot introductory interrogation: first, "what's the point of all this?", then, "what is the point of the people on this list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after you die?" possible reasons given by maeda: "are you trying to improve society? destroy society? get tenure? (check all that apply)." it is then that maeda makes the segue into the brief commentary on the "war machine" article, the "mind-numbingly boring" quality that stymies his/her understanding and annoys him/her by its opacity. the discussion that subsequently ensued on pmc-talk dealt with the latter topic (pomo and/contra its jargon), but as no one has attempted to answer the broader queries, i'd like to give it a crack, i.e. "the point of the people on this list: why do you do this?" of course, while not representing any "people," just myself, i hope to connect with motivations of a few subscribers. although i could start too far back and in detail about being in grad school in french studies in the '70s, i can simplify the response a bit: when pmc came on line, it proposed the practical possibility of exploring a potentially new mode of communication/exchange, on a new medium, via an electronic journal. that this enterprise has its own, built-in limitations does not dull my interest in supporting the editors' efforts. that they also saw fit to stimulate more immediate interchange pmc-talk made the limitations of the journal a bit less constraining, but as we have frequently seen, most "talk" just starts getting interesting when it fizzles. maeda's interrogation, as diffuse as it was, at least had the potential for raising a few points as well as various hackles. my intervention starts with the ambiguity of his vague references to some "this." "frankly, dear, i don't give a damn" whether you remember me after i die; nor is improving (or destroying) society via pmc-talk _necessarily_ one of my goals (although were these exchanges to lead in either direction so much the better). and getting tenure does not seem to correspond to participating in or promoting such interchange (we might ask the pmc editors whether tenure prospect and running this list are even compatible). then, asks maeda, "why do you do this?" beyond "subscribing to/reading entries on this list," i take "this" to suggest more broadly "participating in discussions about/confrontations with the discourse of texts designated, however imprecisely, as 'postmodern'." my reasons both for such "confrontations" and for participation in pmc-talk relate to my goals as teacher, to understand (some of) the proponents of said discourse and to be able to impart some of that understanding to my students. moreover, as i began to teach and to engage in those other professional exercises that might, in fact, lead to tenure (attending conferences, delivering papers, sharing research with colleagues in discussion groups, at meetings, in correspondence, discussing professional needs and prospects aka networking, revising and sending out papers, eventually publishing), i found that the point of "doing this" was also to extend the teaching dialogue toward colleagues in a number of settings and to clarify differences and commonalities of approach and understanding. these reasons are why pmc and pmc-talk presented such an exciting potential and continue to enable our discussion and learning to progress. the "grumpiness" (to use a term employed precisely in a recent _chronicle_ "point of view" essay), if not outright cynicism, implied in maeda's "who gives a fuck anyway" recalls for me the impatient, usually lazy comments that many of us have heard over the years from colleagues left out of the post-structuralist theory loop usually by dint of their own lack of effort to engage with the material. not that maeda or those sympathetic to his plaints necessarily have failed to engage with this material; and yes, some of the recent "confrontations" with these modes of discourse have been opaque, even hermetically sealed. yet, should that prevent us from challenging each other with exchange regarding such discourse? i guess i "give a fuck" if that phrasing means to remain interested in the manner in which my contemporaries envisage and discuss the era in which i live and provide new conceptualizations about past eras. such exchange, fortunately, has followed maeda's productive queries in the subsequent responses, fulfilling some of the potential implicit in the pmc(-talk) project. sorry for going on so long. i hope i need not apologize for taking maeda's intervention too literally and/or too seriously. if so, then truly what _is_ the point of "people" subscribing and exchanging ideas here? cj stivale ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: fri, 14 aug 1992 03:41 est from: jschwar@bgsuopie.bitnet subject: smile/deleuze 1)obviously, i was mistaken when i understood the smile texts as a "gloss" of deleuze and guattari. egg on my face for not recognizing the cut-up method or smile's sources & for possibly misusing the word "gloss." oops. 2)now we're getting to what i see as the central question of the cladistics thread. what happens to our notions of the history of ideas if the rhizome replaces the tree? (borges' "kafka and his precursors" is probably an important text here.) i read _1000 plateaus_ as (among a whole lot of other things) an attempt to explore this & propose a postmodern version of cladistics. let's stop making fun of each other's diction & get further into this. --bill burroughs ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 15 aug 92 19:30:16 edt from: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (mm) subject: cutup it astonishes me that bill burroughs would not recognize the cut-up method. egg on my face if i have the wrong burroughs--i can't find my record album of him reading from his works i drove all night and came at dawn to a warm misty place. barking dogs and the sound of water. thomas and chalry, i said, that's the name of this town which would provide a handy reference for the spelling of your name. sea level. where lupita ....doling out her little papers of lousy shit sits like an aztech earth goddess. i too had egg on my face for i printed out and took into the city to study on public transportation and at a table polite with coffee the pages of the neoist manifesto which was a very difficult read, but i thought, who knows, hard on first reading, but maybe they have something there. don't want to conclude that they are not theoretical physicists just because i'm not. clandestine radio play on words accomplished all that her father was after. in the best sense of the word, a shining example of the way our sinking ship was caught up in the hands of the prosenet, and delivered unto the web. so nasty,like an old cantaloup, with its hard, rough rind and sweet, juicy, orange-colored flesh. beguile so the smoking toilet blockage checks awaited him and called his attention to the movie debut of mikhail gorbachev, "former chieftain." a period of general slackening in the arts. anything goes when there is an absence of taste, he declared. i am the postmodern modernist monument. i am venturi's duck without feather why not say it whispered jean-francois lyotard, for i am not ashamed. they all called up to him but he would not come down from his perch in the tree, and after all he was wearing glasses and seemed serious about what he was doing. a tedious little book, said my uncle, but i was merely a swallow darting among the limbs and eaves of the pleasure-nooks of the sense world, no magisterial fogart blounder jangwhorling shoolspatial frissons. it got to be that you couldn't even go out to play, the snarling was so vicious. but that's all folks, and by your leave. shortform, with a humble adding a diction. ---------------------------------------------------------------- [august 20th digest, referred to below, is omitted here. --ed.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: thu, 20 aug 92 16:30:26 cdt from: "finagle, etc. (durflinger,edward m)" <durfling@grin1.bitnet> many thanks to the contributors to the last issue of pmc-digest for providing excellent material for the next issue of smile. these three articles went particularly well together. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * caveats i am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics) raise its head in the scientific sense from the socialdemocratic influence in finland to centralor liberal conservative inclination could be seen the finnish form of neoconservatism. an other example is the oppressor: under the male gaze of gilligan, ginger becomes the feminine-as-other, the interiorization of a panoptic social order in which the "texts" of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. this has enormous implications for cultural and social theory. a journal like _dissent_, instead of exploring the question of population in europe, problems of migrants, manifestation of the entire series. [4] the eclipse of linearity effectuated by postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the all-pervasiveness of habermas's thought. 3. the 1981 television movie _escape from gilligan's island_ represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the proceeding of the desert island foreshadows debord's concept of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia characterized by the means of social policy in central europe. as political ideologies have lost their potentiality and church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. the late 1970s influence of habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of habermas's thought. 3. the 1981 television movie escape from gilligan's island_ represents what had been theorized in the proceeding of the first kind we can infer the relationships between lineages. note that in my list no time was given to lateral transfer of character states from one lineage to another. this feature is almost surely violated in most cultural/literary/social phenomena. i hope to do so in a character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral diffusion of information across the tree. in phylogentic inference (a goal for which cladistics is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a _differance_ (in, of course, the bakhtinian sense) of the kristevan semiotic needs no further comment here. 4. why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy? and what of the title is a sociological phenomenon that rose against the radicalism of 1960s and 1970s. the radicalism has been the fact during the period after the war as the thatcherism, reaganism, including even the glasnost and the gorbachevism would be considered as neoconservative phenomena in sociology. the postmodernism is an attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the apparent "stupidity" of gilligan and, indeed, of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. a paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of _dissent_ and the professor. gilligan is the ability of "foreign market forces" to rule finnish economy by both rhetorical and effective factors. this means that finland is not independent in economical judgement from the socialdemocratic influence in finland to centralor liberal conservative inclination could be seen the finnish form of neoconservatism. an other example is the island "his"? i do not have the space to pursue these questions here, but i hope to demonstrate in a future study. --------------------------------------------------------footnotes 1. gilligan himself is the discussion group for the period after the war as the thatcherism, reaganism, including even the glasnost and the modern society caused by the postmodern theory to describe finland as perfectly free of international interests. the social sciences have received new impressions in the series as an institution has lost the traditional connections to people, a result has been the fact during the period after the war as the thatcherism, reaganism, including even the glasnost and the author of a forthcoming novel from harpercollins.] ---------------------------------------------------------------l'isle de gilligan brian morton the hegemonic discourse of metonymy? and what of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. a paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of _dissent_ and the questions originated by postmodernism. the conflict of traditional "texts" (i.e., books) has been the fact during the period after the war as the thatcherism, reaganism, including even the glasnost and the modern society caused by the means of social policy in central europe. as political ideologies have lost their potentiality and church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. the late 1970s influence of habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of habermas's thought. 3. the 1981 television movie _escape from gilligan's island_ represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the following address: e-mail: ateittinen@jylk.jyu.fi pmc-talk digest: postings for the rational development. karen cantsin monty elliot ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: fri, 21 aug 92 14:37:43 cdt from: wes chapman <weschap@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu> subject: re: digest ending 8-22-92 tongue in cheek, tongues of flame. well, now, another piece from smile magazine, ok. i confess i don't like the stuff much--i'll try to explain why. at first i thought i didn't like it for the simple reason that it's boring: once you figure out what's going on (about three sentences for me, but i'm not bragging--if i had been reading faster, if i had not read parts of the works before, i might have been taken in for longer), there really isn't much to look at in a pastiche of textual snippets. not that this kind of art (i'll call it that) is meaningless; far from it. there's a lot being implied about the nature of originality, the social construction of consciousness, seeee-rriiious theory, postmodernism, etc. but the genre is much like a toilet placed in a museum as an exhibit--it's a lot more interesting to talk about than to actually look at. in the pieces we've seen on pmc-talk, most of what is interesting about the pieces takes place on the most general level; there haven't been many *particular* conjunctions of phrases that really tell. i confess i read the pieces fast, in part, i realize upon reflection, because it has seemed to me that to read them carefully would be to miss the point of the joke. excuse me, the "joke." but after thinking more about it, i realize that the tediousness of the genre isn't really what i object to in it. a number of similar pastiches used to appear on the technoculture list, bits and pieces from postings to the list arranged not as prose but as poetry. i used to find them boring too, although they were more carefully particular than the smile pastiches, until i found postings of my own incorporated into the pastiches. at that time my whole experience of the pastiches changed. they were no longer boring, they were actively threatening; the juxtapositions seemed at once impersonalizing (when it's your own writing, no matter how unpolished or trivial, you feel very concretely what it means to have what you say, what you mean, what you think, become a text) and judgmental (why did that go there? what did the author think?). in other words, i finally got it. (do you get it?) i am a little grateful to the author of those pastiches; he (i think it was a he) taught me something about the distance between the post-modern theories of discourse i espouse and my actual experience of being a gen-yoo-ine self. but i still don't like the genre. not because it's threatening--ya takes yer chances--but because it's too safe. safe for the authors, that is. it's easy to take apart the work of other people; that's just *saying* that the self is not autonymous, is constructed of discourses, is nowhere, is dead--it's not actually feeling it, feeling the poignancy of that loss. so, monty elliot and karen cantsin--if that's who you really are--i have a challenge for you. by all means, do another pastiche. you can use this posting if you want, not that you need my permission. but this time, get your own writing in too. it doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's something you care about--your doctoral dissertation, a letter to a friend who is dying of aids, whatever; you decide. see for yourself if you live where you think you live. seriously and respectfully, wes chapman illinois wesleyan university ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 22 aug 92 17:07:13 edt from: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (mm) subject: what you cut up if you cut up your own text, somebody's article, that's hardly manipulating the images that need it most. and it doesn't mix in enough stuff from the cultural signal-storm. in short, there aren't the right ingredients in the first place, and the manipulative aspects of culture are untouched. possible ingredients: couple of political speeches, newspaper articles, transcript of tv show, literature from the phone or electric or gas company, etc etc.it's so silly for me to suggest these, obviously,but the cutups could be less boring, and maybe even bring up a few interesting juxtapositions. mixed media and film are probably better way to put the ideas into practice. an example is humphrey bogart in *casablanc* appearing in whatever commercial. the abject hungry greed of the pandering that will do anything anything anything is discouraging enough; then to watch the movie and be reminded of the commercial is a demonstration to me that some forms of meaning are not dead issues. there are offensive people you don't want in your presence, and there are offensive presences you don't want in what you are watching. how do artists answer that? if they had equal time on prime-time tv, it would be an interesting battle, but any victory pyrrhic. by the way, did yoko ono, or michael jackson, or someone else sell the copyright of the lennon tune to be used in a commercial? anybody who thinks that we don't lose something--meaning, if i must--when good songs get smeared with that phosphorescent excrement, and we can hardly get the smell out of the song again, needs to straighten their head. i thought at least one aspect of pm was an emphasis on the particulars, once we had abandoned a lot of essentialist thinking? why not discuss some of these ideas as they work out in particulars. i told you what i hate, but what i would like would be to use that same technique to popcorn my enemies. but even if i manage to make such a film, the most that will happen is that a very few see it on a tv in a gallery, perhaps, while the same technique devours whatever meaning is left. reminds me of that character in burroughs who had a jones for addicts, and would assimilate them into his body. even if he spits them back out, they're not the same again. thank-you for listening. just meant this as ordinary conversation. michael mccoll ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sat, 22 aug 92 21:24:06 -0400 from: sheldon pacotti <stud@media-lab.mit.edu> subject: re: cutups i have to agree that these cutups are getting a bit boring. they were funny at first, especially when several days passed before anyone was brave enough to challenge the war machine cutup (obviously a lot of people simply thought it was above their heads -makes you wonder how well "postmodern theorists" understand their own field, assuming there are several such university-employed "professionals" on this list). but now that we all know what's going on, the cut-ups are getting monotonous. a couple years ago i did some experimenting with random text ('white language' or whatever). i needed to write some cryptic poetry and prophecies for a fantasy novel. to overcome my lack of poetic talent, i wrote a computer program that recursively generated grammatical structures and then filled them with words. i grouped words (taken from favorite poems, books; etc.) into different lexicons (nature, human emotion, technology; etc.) and then wrote a little interface to let me control how these groups were mixed together. nine out of ten sentences were pretty meaningless, but occasionally something striking would come up. by cutting and pasting phrases into a text editor, i managed write some pretty funky verse, which at the time served my purposes. the point is that i found "random" sentences not so interesting, but as a brainstorming tool the program worked great. it's ridiculous to expect a computer to produce a very interesting text of any great length if all it's doing is randomly pasting together words. maybe some day, in the foggy sci-fi future, authors will use computers to come up with fresh descriptive passages, plots, new concepts-but for the present these applications are pretty crude, and seldom is the direct output of the computer all that interesting. any useful application of current technology to text-production, in my opinion, must involve the writer in an interactive brianstorming process. i do find it encouraging, though, that a lot of computer-generated phrases have stuck in my mind these couple years, and that my program has changed the way i look at metaphors. in that sense, i've been influenced by something that can't be traced to the culture at large (except on the level of individual words). i find this encouraging because i would like for authors to be more than mouthpieces for cultural currents running through them, cladistic or rhizomic or otherwise--for statements like "there are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages" to be false. [1] (to quote a couple of this list's most popular authors). (of course, that statement is probably true, and a computer program is a type of machinic assemblage, i guess, but at least a randomized language engine undermines the machinic assemblages in the surrounding cultural matrix.) sheldon pacotti cambridge p.s. a company called screenplay systems has a program called dramatica which (i gather) generates plots, but i haven't actually seen it. [1] deleuze & guattari, _a thousand plateaus_, p. 36. ---------------------------------------------------------------- date: sun, 23 aug 1992 00:04 cdt from: s1mbm@isuvax.bitnet subject: re: digest ending 8-22-92 thanks to wes chapman for his critique of "cut-ups." them things had been bugging me, but i hadn't understood why until wes clarified matters. i agree that the "cut-ups" are like one-liners: the humor is in the instant of recognition, *not* in the story which they coyly fail to produce. since they are funny only as one-liners, i fail to see the justification for the durn things being so long. does the sheer length of the cut-ups accomplish anything rhetorically, or does it just allow the cut-uppers to get their jollies fulfilled by lingering over the savaging of others' texts? don't the cut-ups becomes just a coy substitute for engaged criticism, allowing the progenitors to hide behind an act of textual re-production? (i'm not actually criticizing your work, i'm just giving it a new face--this seems to be the implicit rhetorical context of the cut-uppers work.) i agree with wes that it would be nice to see the cut-uppers somehow subject a message they've made and cared about to this process . . . michael bruce mcdonald helmling, 'historicizing derrida', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-helmling-historicizing.txt archive pmc-list, file helmling.594. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 75030 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- historicizing derrida by steven helmling department of english university of delaware helmling@brahms.udel.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by steven helmling, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. always historicize! --fredric jameson [1] accounts of derrida stress his work's diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that i know of *narrativizes* this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions--in short, a history--of its own. i want in this essay to initiate such an account, and my gambit will be to confront early derrida with late (or later), which, for my purposes here, means derrida before 1968 and after. such a consideration of the whole derrida phenomenon seems to me long overdue. apart from the difficulty of derrida's work itself, various cultural circumstances have combined to frustrate or discourage such an account: in america, notoriously, we pay little attention to history generally, but a historically informed awareness of derrida has been further hindered for us because derrida's work became available in translation here only in the late '70s, so pre-'68 work mingled with postin ways that blurred the differences between them. i want here to "historicize" not only derrida's oeuvre and career, but also its reception, its success and influence. if derrida is some sort of sign of the (postmodern) times, what does that say not only about him, but about the times? [2] one of derrida's latest books, _given time_, interrogates a problem that has been a chronic anthropological preoccupation in the west, "the gift"; and it devotes a chapter to marcel mauss's classic "essai sur le don." mauss was attracted to this theme, derrida notes, because the gift seems to promise an exception to, or a suspension of, the normally inflexible laws of "economy." in a system of exchange, the gift, the free offering made with no expectation of return, seems to gesture outside the system. predictably, derrida deconstructs mauss's construction of "economy," and the binaries of "inside/outside" and "gift/sale" (or "/purchase") sustaining it; his point is to force on mauss a question mauss evades: can the gift actually ever *be* a gift? for on mauss's own showing, gift-giving always implies obligations and paybacks (mauss's own preferred phrase, "gift-*exchange*," says it all) that thus reinscribe "economy" itself--and only the more forcibly for its terms being implicit, internalized by the participants (here derrida even deploys a quasi-lacanian vocabulary), rather than rendered explicitly in the alienated workings of a cold cash nexus. against the tendency of his own analysis, mauss idealizes the "potlatch" of savages as a humane and generous alternative to the iron laws by which "economy" reigns over the human condition. (in thus apotheosizing "economy," mauss wistfully observes, capitalism and marxism are one.) [3] mauss's desire for an escape from "economy," a transit "beyond" the structures that constrain the way we live, act, think, and feel, a break-out from the (to him) hobson's choice between marxism and capitalism is a version of the central problematic of not only derrida's work, but of much "theory" generally (pragmatism, hermeneutics, %ideologiekritik%, the foundationalist-antifoundationalist argument, and so on): if our language, our belief systems, our very subjectivities, are constructed by social forces, is it possible to get *outside* them, *outside* their system (or "economy"), to escape their constraints, to glimpse possibilities they exclude, foreclose, repress? [4] much "theory" (though by no means all) answers this question in the negative, especially since the disillusion following the late '60s generally, and in france, %mai, soixante-huit% in particular. despair is obligatory, a sign of political vigilance, when hope is constructed as "ideological", a false and politically pernicious consolation--"an imaginary solution to a real contradiction." derrida himself is one of the most potent enforcers of this (postmodern) sense of entrapment in a "system" or "economy" of semantemes enforced by the "logocentrism" of "western metaphysics" since plato. (for many devotees of derrida, this sense of a "system" we cannot escape is eclipsed by his potent thematic of that ineradicable %differance% no system can master; the politics of this reading of derrida is another thing i will try to "historicize" at this paper's close.) constrained and conditioned by the "closures" of "system," we find ourselves "inside" a vast social-historical-sexual-economic construct we cannot escape, cannot get "outside" of. there are variations on this theme, as when the "outside" is not the interdicted place we long for in vain, but rather the exile into which our "ideology" has cast some excluded "other"; then, derrida more righteously "deconstructs" the values or valorizations (the good/bad binaries) sustaining the exclusion, to suggest that the "outside" does not exist, that "the other" is only by way of ideological distortion projected as "other," and denied the status of "the same." this is, politically, a more hopeful operation, but its bottom line remains that there *is* no "outside," or if there were, it would only prove to be "the inside" again, more of "the same." the "outside" remains a construction, perhaps a delusion, but in any case inaccessible. if theory were a prison-break movie, derrida would be the guy who dopes out the architecture of the big house in search of possible escape routes- the ventilation ducts, the sewer tunnels, the depth of the foundation walls, etc.--but since the early '70s, the point of derrida's blueprint has been less to assist escape, than to demonstrate that escape is impossible. we're all lifers here in the prison-house of language: we may deconstruct, but we can never escape, its determinations, its reason(s), its meanings. [5] this is, of course, a thematic or problematic quite specific to our postmodern historical moment. a generation ago, in the time of sartre and beckett, "meaning" was the object of the existential hero's quest (so was "identity"), rather than (as today) exactly what the quester is fleeing. (and yesterday's quest was an affair of *action* rather than, as is the case today, of intellection--"critique," "deconstruction," "theory," etc.--of making tracks, rather than assaying "traces.") the "meaningless," a.k.a. "the absurd," was the %donnee%, the %point de depart% of any such quest; today, the "escape" from "meaning" is the point, the destination--and as impossible of attainment, usually, as the holy grail itself. (derrida himself declares that "absurdity has always been in solidarity with metaphysical meaning" [_positions_, 14].) in writers as otherwise diverse as roland barthes, fredric jameson, richard rorty, jean-francios lyotard, harold bloom, as well as derrida, yesterday's "absurd" tends to become today's "sublime," a transport (variously a %jouissance%, as in barthes, or a terror, as in jameson) "beyond" representation into unrepresentabilty, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. (a recent collection of papers on deconstruction elevates derridean %differance%--what always "escapes" or "exceeds," defers and makes [self-] different, the mere "letter" of the text--to nothing less than [the volume's title] _the textual sublime_.)^1^ [6] there is a pathos to this distinctively "postmodern" predicament, and derrida's encounter with mauss underlines its historicity. mauss's contradiction, and the ease with which he holds it, exemplifies an intellectual economy more elastic in his generation than is ours today. (mauss's dates: 1872-1950; "essai sur le don" appeared in 1925.) for that matter, derrida's own career enacts a transit from a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility to the steady-state pathos, the "frozen dialectic," of his maturer writing: before '68, derrida's "free play" and "infinite interpretation" were projects of liberation; and the excited (and exciting) prose of _de la grammatologie_ (1967) conjured an imminent %aufhebung% of writing over speech, implicitly (despite floridly elaborated reservations about hegel) on the model of hegel's master and slave; the book's program chapter bore the breathless title "the end of the book and the beginning of writing." the point: whereas derrida has staged deconstruction for a couple of decades now as an "impossible" or "intransitive" project whose critique of logocentrism, since it is obliged to use logocentrism's language, can only reinscribe logocentric closures, he initially proposed it (and many still take it) as something very different: a new and uniquely potent instrument for rending the veils of various kinds of (false) metaphysics, and hence, false consciousness--derrida even acknowledged the lineage of heideggerian %abbau% and %destruktion%--all of which sustained the early excitement about derrida, and still sustains those who would use deconstruction "politically," in the service of %ideologiekritik%.^2^ [7] i will shortly contrast these pre-'68 excitements with derrida's differently inflected projection of "writing" in later, post-'68 texts. but i pause here for some necessary caveats on procedure. as any reader of derrida knows, there can never be any question of calculating derrida's "position" in a given text (or moment in or passage of a text), and its distance from the "position" assumed in some other (text, moment, passage). the preceding paragraph, for example, discerns a political prospect, a quasi-prophecy of imminent cultural and social change, in derrida's _of grammatology_, and i am about to argue that this promise is cancelled or reduced or sharply qualified in derrida's later writing, *after* 1968. but already, in a 1967 interview, derrida advises, as if to prevent just the sort of reading i am proposing here, that one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled "the end of the book and the beginning of writing." one page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between *closure* and *end*. what is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. if one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. (_positions_, 13) one notes here how "end/beginning" shift to "death/birth" and back again; remembers, again, how silly one might have been, confronted with a locution like "the end of the book and the beginning of writing," to have read "simply" (die a thousand deaths!), and thereby to have missed that "it announces *precisely* that there is *no* end of the book," etc. (there are moments when the pleasures of derrida's text can make you feel like william bennett); and one reflects, again, that it would take a borges to imagine the sort of alternative universe in which an interviewer asks derrida a question in the form, "so, then, you are saying x, y, and z?" and derrida replies, "yes; exactly; quite so." [8] but let's take derrida's hint, and reread the "exergue" that precedes "the end of the book and the beginning of writing"; a quotation %in extenso% will illustrate the difficulties as well as the allure facing the reader of, and a fortiori the commentator on, derrida: this exergue must not only announce that the science of writing--*grammatology*--shows signs of liberation all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts. these efforts are necessarily discreet, dispersed, almost imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu within which they produce their operation. i would like to suggest above all that, however fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if, given the most favorable hypothesis, it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field. for essential reasons: the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing, is, in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the *closure*. i do not say the *end*. the idea of science and the idea of writing--therefore also of the science of writing--is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later i shall call it *the* concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have *already* been assigned. a most determined relationship, in spite of its privilege, its necessity, and the field of vision that it has controlled for a few millenia, especially in the west, to the point of being now able to produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits. (_grammatology_, 4) granted that the bulk of the passage emphasizes the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of a "science of writing"; still, its opening move is to "announce" that this nascent grammatological science "shows signs of liberation all over the world"--and not merely as a zeitgeist-effect, a mere epiphenomenon of some "historico-metaphysical" political unconscious, but "as a result of decisive efforts." nowhere does the passage take this back; rather it orchestrates a powerful rhythm, a sort of ideational surf, of breakers in and riptide out, between phrases whose implication is to hold *open* prospects of such a "liberation" ("fecund," "necessary," "overcome") and others whose motion acknowledges the "technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto." midway through, grammatology cannot "describe the limits of its field"; at the close, it can "itself proclaim its own limits": from pathos to paean in under two hundred words. this is a prose concerned with largeness of effect, not precision of statement. the passage opens with "liberation all over the world," and it closes with an affirmation, despite all the difficulties, of having arrived at a point where the speech/writing binary can at last, "now," after so much history ("a few millenia"), "produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits." [9] between these two cathexes comes the distinction derrida insists on in the interview, between "closure" and "end." the motif is by now a familiar one: "closure" as a (spatial) domain that is finite but unbounded (however fissured and ruptured), as against a temporality in which change can occur, and ends and beginnings are possible. beginnings and ends, derrida implies here (for the moment), occur only within a closure; and a closure is that for which, again, there can be no beyond--even if this paragraph ends by affirming the possibility of proclaiming, within this closure, phonocentrism's "limits." in the following paragraph derrida goes on to reaffirm his project as a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, *beyond the closure of knowledge* [my italics]. "the ineluctable world of the future" sounds positively anthem-like; but derrida goes on (i cite the passage to its finish) to end on, again, a suitably dark and ominous note: the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. it is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, *presented*, as a sort of monstrosity. for that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (_grammatology_, 4-5) as i hope these lengthy quotations illustrate, derrida's prose does not occupy "positions" so much as it surges between them, toward and away from them, in a ceaseless agitation of assertion and qualification, saying and unsaying. [10] so for the commentator on derrida, it is less pertinent to speak of "positions" than of emphases, or effects--or, to borrow a phrase from a very uncharacteristic piece of derrida's ("the ends of man," _margins_, 109-36), "dominant motifs"--a phrase derrida resorts to in an argument requiring broad-brush summarizations of husserl, heidegger and sartre.^3^ but to conclude this (i hope not overlong) digression: in speaking of derrida before and after 1968, i must seem to speak of "effects" as if they had "thetic" force or substance, and the inevitable binaries that will present themselves will overflow the temporal bar (1968) supposed to separate them. my predicament will precisely illustrate derrida's "sublation" of hegel, according to which stress falls less on what %aufhebung% "cancels" than on what it "preserves," what persists, and thus qualifies the passage, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. i cannot, in short, state my case without overstating it--less because derrida's "statement" is inevitably more subtle than mine, than because derrida invests so much (and so effectively) in problematizing, sometimes altogether evading, the logic of "statement." even to characterize his work as a protracted campaign against "the thetic" risks making it seem too single-minded, too serious, risks missing the play derrida can make of his ingenious and interminable game of "fort!" and "da!," with the thetic. [11] so, to resume: i was speaking of derrida before 1968, of his vigorous talk of "the end of the book and the beginning of writing," of "liberation all over the world," etc. these "apocalyptic" pre-'68 excitements (to call them *that*), and their damping-down, a displacement of emphasis elsewhere--a shift in the "dominant motif," indeed, from "end" to "closure"--is discernible in the essays (which date from both before '68 and after) collected in 1972 in _marges de la philosophie_. the richest example is the left-hand column (i.e., the part written by derrida) of the volume's opening meditation on the ambitions of deconstruction, "tympan," in which derrida obliquely announces that his project henceforth must be conducted "obliquely," as the hammer-bone of the inner ear beats obliquely on the eardrum (the "tympan"), both transmitting to it, but also protecting it against, the violences of sound. deconstruction "on the oblique" must take care to avoid frontal and symmetrical protest, opposition in all forms of *anti-*, or in any case to inscribe *antism* and overturning, domestic denegation, in an entirely other form of ambush, of %lokhos%, of textual maneuvers. (_margins_, xv; _between the blinds_, 153-4) a footnote here quotes a lyric of artaud, but the prose of "tympan" itself, full of puns, word-plays, paradoxes, etc., will already have advised the reader expecting the expository panache of _grammatology_, or _writing and difference_, that here "an entirely other form of ambush, of %lokhos%, of textual maneuvers" prevails. (%lokhos% is greek for "ambush"; it puns, of course, on %logos%; also on another term at play here, greek %loxos%, whence "luxation," a "dislocation," as of a bone out of its socket, a figure for the deconstructive aspiration to "dislocate" the joints or junctures, the articulations of philosophy as usual, to "displace philosophy's alignment of its own types.") one phrase in "tympan," a sentence fragment, summed up the point of this verbal play and quickly became a kind of slogan among devotees of deconstruction: "to write otherwise" (_margins_, xxiv; _between the blinds_, 164). [12] i have called "tympan" a "meditation" on deconstruction's ambitions, but "conjuration" might be a better word. even more than our pre-'68 examples above, prose like "tympan"'s--derrida invites us to call it "perverformative" (_post card_, 136)--less articulates an argument than it floats, and agitates, an array of motifs. derrida's practice of metaphor is calculated to maximize, as he often enough tells us, a multiplicity or dissemination of "meanings" that defeats "constative" habits of reading and writing. it is an index of derrida's uncanny success that so many of his readers are ready to grant that "to write otherwise," derrida-wise, is a large ambition, and one with "political" force. (there are dissenters, of course: marxists like jameson and eagleton who consider that making "critique" simply a "kind of writing" reduces it, rather than specifying its uses relevantly; or christopher norris, who has been working for years to rescue derrida from such merely "aestheticizing" or "pragmatist," richard-rortyesque readings of him, arguing doggedly that this is *not* how derrida asks to be read.^4^) [13] but the ambition "to write otherwise" incurs the infinite regress (%mise en abime%) always imposed by the question of the "other": can any writing ever be written *other-wise*? can any writing, however ingenious, ever exempt itself from the force of social (and other) constructionisms that dictate, that have "always already" dictated, the reinscription of "the same" in every effort at "otherwise-ness"? in the years to follow, derrida's writing will suffer the pathos of the inevitably negative answer to these questions. increasingly, "writing" will appear as not merely another arena of, but as derrida's own inevitable and recurrent figure for, the fatedness of "repetition." [14] so whereas derrida first proposed "writing" as a vehicle, or agent (not, of course, a "subject"), of liberation from the ideological programs inscribed in "speech," he has for a couple of decades now, even while continuing to dissolve speech into writing, proceeded on (or toward) the sadder-but-wiser premise that those ideological programs had "always already" been "inscribed" in "writing," too: a sort of dialectical backfire of _grammatology_'s critique of "phonocentrism," for if speech is "always already" writing, then writing can neither supervene upon speech from "outside" it, nor operate a "sublation" of it from "the inside." on the contrary, in the course of derrida's career from the middle '60s to the present, "writing" has passed from at least potentially an agent (or figure) of change, revolution, ends-and-beginnings, to another figure or enforcer, another inscription, of the ideological closure in which we languish. it seems to me peculiar, and telling, that this massive ideological shift has gone unremarked by expositors of derrida. [15] early and late, derrida projects our condition as a vast text governed, indeed, constituted by an extensive network of tropes, figures, meanings--a "system," or "economy," to invoke two of derrida's usual figures for it. he sympathizes with the desire to escape this "economy," and in his early work, he entertains a variety of hopeful possibilities for doing so. but after 1968, intellectual scruple compels him to renounce any such hope, for increasingly his every "deconstruction" of the "system" or "economy" of meanings within which we are constrained sees through the constraints only to reinforce them. it is as if derrida's way of honoring the desire to escape the ideological closures of logocentrism is to magnify the power, the totality, of those closures; as if the measure of deconstruction's ambition can only be the impossibility of what it attempts. derrida explains the matter quotably, and relates it to our question here of inside/outside, other/same, in a recent (or late) text, "psyche: inventions of the other" (1987): the most rigorous deconstruction has never claimed . . . to be *possible*. . . . for a deconstructive operation *possibility* would rather be the danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches. the interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is . . . of the other--the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention. (_between the blinds_, 209) the one thing "impossible"--impossibility *itself*, as derrida might say, with the knowing smirk at the problematic of "the itself"--is to utter the meaningless, to achieve the "outside" or "other" of that vast intellectual and ideological network (or "prison-house") of semiosis, derrida's usual synecdoche for the entrapments of culture generally. [16] that is why derrida's standard operating procedure requires a rigorous enforcement of this "economy" of meaning. no less than freud does derrida insist on meaning; no more than freud does he permit anything *not* to "mean," *not* to signify, and to signify everything that he, with all his formidable ingenuity, can coerce it into signifying. no figure of speech however casual, no idiom of expression however conventional, is allowed *not* to mean as much as he can make it mean. (in _given time_, he goes on for pages when mauss writes, in an aside, "je m'excuse" rather than "excusez-moi," and with no acknowledgement that in writing, as distinct from speech--and who more than derrida has insisted on this distinction?--the imperative, "excusez-moi," would be anomalous.) the meaningless is, has "always already" been, ruled out *ex* (or *ante*) *hypothesi*, persisting spectrally only as "non-sense," a sort of utopian, and *therefore* impossible possibility, a mirage projected by a noble but vain, and therefore pathos-laden desire.^5^ language is a game with rules, and derrida makes himself a virtuoso of enforcing them with a "rigor" intended to shake the whole structure. compare habermas, for whom "the rules," the self-normativizations of "language games," are a last hope for ("communicative") reason; for derrida they figure the fatality of reason as such. habermas makes reason a good, but difficult of attainment; derrida makes it an evil, and impossible to escape. derrida enacts the entrapments of "economy" only to protest them, of course. what a dance!--but dancing in chains, the spectacle our postmodern (i.e., post-'68) "libidinal economy" demands. [17] i have so far "historicized" derrida by positing a divide in his work, before and after 1968. as an enforcer of semantic "rigor," though, as a meaning-cop, holding every text strictly to the letter of its letter (so to speak), derrida could be as strict before 1968 as after. but whereas derrida now blows the whistle on all "ideological" hope as such, back in his own more hopeful days he would enforce this operation much more selectively. compare, for example, his 1963 essay on foucault, "cogito and the history of madness" (_writing and difference_, 31-63) with his 1967 essay on bataille, "from restricted to general economy: a hegelianism without reserve" (_writing and difference_, 251-77). at stake in both is the question whether and how "escape" from a historically given "system" or "economy" of meanings might be possible. foucault's audacity, staking virtually all on the sheer force of an impassioned, lyrical and poetic prose, provokes derrida to a wildly conflicted critique of _folie et deraison_ that aspires, both in argumentative sweep *and* as fancy writing, to out-foucault foucault--with questionable consequences: to me, at least, derrida's appropriation of foucault's points against foucault seem rather to confirm than contest them (see especially _writing and difference_, 55-7). [18] the essay on bataille, by contrast, is much more sedate, a celebration, not a "deconstruction," of bataille's notion of useless, non(or anti-) utilitarian "expenditure." (we anglophones, with oscar wilde in our kit, might think bataille a couple of generations out of date on this.) derrida doesn't remark that bataille's recommendation of "expenditure" as a deliverance from "restricted economy" to what bataille calls "general economy" reinscribes "economy" in just the way that derrida's "rigor" disallowed with mauss. for bataille, all it takes to escape "economy" is a little sex and violence. today, we're likelier to regard sex and violence as "part of the problem," to the extent that "the system" has routinized its co-optation or commodification of violence, sex, and deviance generally, marketing the high-gloss simulacrum even while making political capital out of moralizing against "the real thing"--hence, again, our "postmodern" despair: the potentially subversive is reinscribed within what it would subvert. but my point here is that the pre-'68 derrida does *not* blow this particular whistle on bataille. (nor does derrida bother noticing that the essays in question, in which bataille conjures with war, blood, mutilation, and killing--all the sadean virtues--appeared in print almost exactly contemporaneously with the advent of hitler to power in 1933.) he credits bataille's originality--another version of getting "outside" the closures erected by precursors--as a "simulated repetition," a sort of parodic exorcism of "the same" rather than (what derrida later insists is all seeming originality can ever amount to) "repetition" pure and simple. (and doesn't the word "simulated" reinscribe the issue of authorial intent, and thus the whole phenomenology of self-consciousness?--reinscribes them, furthermore, as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.)^6^ [19] how to account for these so-different responses to foucault and bataille? derrida himself seems to invite an "anxiety of influence" speculation in his opening to "cogito and the history of madness," paying fulsome homage, as "disciple," to his "master" foucault in preparation for the onslaught to follow. granted, foucault makes a fiercer covering cherub than bataille, who, both as intellect and as writer, is a much smaller figure than either foucault *or* derrida (a fuller discussion would need to take up foucault's own homage to bataille, and derrida's relation to it). but the "death of the author" motif in contemporary "theory," and the bias against "subject-centered" paradigms generally, discourage any such psychologizing approach to "intertextuality" (even when the occasional exception can be as impressive as barbara johnson's "the frame of reference: poe, lacan, derrida"),^7^ and i propose no such "anxiety of influence" reading here, if that must mean a lit-crit psychoanalysis that puts derrida himself on the couch--though the taboo against authors on couches has recently been flouted by derrida himself, in what i think his most extraordinary text to date, the autobiographical and confessional "circumfession."^8^ rather, i want to "historicize" derrida's creative anxieties, by inquiring into how the ambitions they power and betray are implicated in the larger, transindividual, historically determined "libidinal apparatuses" operative in our historical period--an approach that brings into play a tangle of questions sortable (loosely) as follows: 1) "genre," the "kind(s) of writing" in which derrida invests or masks, cathects or decathects, the energies and anxieties of his ambition, 2) underwriting these genre distinctions, the philosophy/literature binary that derrida recurrently deconstructs *and* (thus) reaffirms, and so 3) in place of bloom's one-on-one "agon" between titanic individuals, that _streit der fakultaten_ announced by kant, the "contest of faculties" among whose current manifestations is "the emergence of that new type of discourse called theory" that fredric jameson takes as itself an important sign of "the postmodern,"^9^ and in which derrida is, on anyone's account, so central a figure. the first "historicizing" index to note here is that foucault is derrida's near-contemporary, whereas bataille (1897-1962), five years dead by the time derrida writes his essay, had long been in eclipse as a relic of a bygone era, a footnote to surrealism, a minor figure of the %entre deux guerres%. in harold bloom's account of the "anxiety of influence," the anxiety is about the past; bloom ignores, and in places actually rules out, the anxiety generated by contemporaries. but derrida's most "anxious" responses are to contemporaries: foucault, as we've seen; lacan (whose construction of "system" derrida challenges in lacan's axiom that "a letter always arrives at its destination"; derrida's quarrel with this *seems* to maintain the possibility of transit "beyond" or "outside" the system, but the "dead letter office" of _la carte postale_ closes that aperture); levinas (whose construction of the "other" as by definition "beyond" the closure of "our" paradigms, and incorporable within them only through a "violence of the concept," poses the "beyond" or the "outside" not as a vain projection, but as a sacred mystery that is, alas, inaccessible--another way of putting the "outside" beyond reach). [20] why is derrida's creative anxiety stirred by contemporaries rather than, as in bloom's model, by precursors? why does derrida sweat bullets confronting a mere foucault when he can be so cocky stepping into the ring with hegel? [21] one "historicizing" answer involves philosophy's status in our current historical moment in the west. here the "contest of faculties" motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition, to the extent that bloom's construction applies to poetry (i.e., "literature"), whereas derrida's territory is "philosophy." for two centuries and more, western culture has worried that poetry, or "imaginative" literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. the fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled, but philosophy, at least the tradition of it derrida belongs to, has in our time found a potent new theme, the critique of "presence," that permits a derrida to challenge giants of the past like hegel or heidegger with all the sangfroid of a man shooting fish in a barrel. not so with a foucault, who not only shares the anti-"presence" ambition, but was one of its pioneers. [22] the attack on "presence" is usually staged--less by derrida than by those he has influenced (itself a telling symptom)--as a repudiation of the "enlightenment project." from the point of view just elaborated, though, it can equally appear, quite contrary to its usual "postmodern" self-description, as the latest chapter in the story of the "enlightenment project" rather than a repudiation of that story and (as in lyotard) of "story" itself: another version (or repetition) of the secularizing, antitheologizing drive from voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame" through nietzsche's "god is dead" to the proliferating terminalities or terminations (end of narrative, end of the author, end of the self, of "man," of history, of philosophy, of ideology, totality, literature, ontotheology, etc.) variously announced, pronounced, denounced by so many "postmodern" voices. the later, post-'68 derrida has treated this "end of" motif with mild sarcasm, as another symptom of the vain hope or expectation of a closure giving way to an aperture, a break or rupture out of the old into something new--though precisely this had been the, shall we say, "narrateme" encoded in _of grammatology_'s opening formula, "the end of the book and the beginning of writing"; earlier still, in the 1964 essay on levinas, "violence and metaphysics," derrida not only evoked the "death of philosophy" motif, but gave it a messianic inflection, with philosophy not merely dead or dying, but suffering its hour on the cross. in later derrida, the closure of the old cannot be closed (ended)--"what is held within the demarcated closure," as we have seen, "may continue indefinitely" (_positions_, 13)--but remains perpetually, fatally, open, and thus tainting, compromising, "always already" assimilating or having assimilated the potentially new to its paradigms, its syntagms, its readings, its "reason(s)." and on this reading the contemporary chapter of the history of philosophy narrates not (its own official theme) the late twentieth-century "death" or "end" of philosophy, but rather its triumph among the disciplines--a narrative eventuality which philosophy must deny, for reasons that are themselves best understood historically; derrida's own condescension to the "death of philosophy" motif notably eschews any suggestion of philosophy's triumph.^10^ [23] but to resume what i have staged above as the "foucault/hegel," problem, i.e., derrida's anxiety about contemporaries versus his composure about precursors: it is not merely that the author of "cogito and the history of madness" (1963) was a 33 year-old unknown, whereas the writing on hegel, in _marges de la philosophie_ (1972; trans. 1981) and preeminently in _glas_ (1974; trans. 1986), was the work of the newest and most brilliant star, a man already widely proclaimed as a culture-hero. more pertinent, for derrida's continuing and changing ambitions, is that "hegel" means "philosophy," "foucault" means "literature"; in _glas_ itself, for example, the left-hand column, on hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-"perverformative" right-hand column on genet. such "inter"-effects, effects *between* philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book--in _the truth in painting_, for example, between the material on kant and hegel in "colossus" on the one hand, and the diary or postcard ("envoi"-like) format of "cartouches" and the dialogue of "restitutions" on the other; or in _margins_ itself, the contrast between "tympan" and such pieces as "white mythology." [24] here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the "apocalyptic" derrida of _writing and difference_ and _of grammatology_ and the later "perverformer" whose deconstruction-from-within increasingly works to confirm rather than to rupture the closure of logocentrism. i have already associated this break with "writing" in two different senses, and it is necessary here to discriminate them sharply: 1) "writing" as derrida's figure, first for the historical antagonist of "speech" and phonocentrism, later for the fated "reinscription" of phonocentric logocentrism itself; 2) "writing" as a foregrounded feature of derrida's own prose, the sort of prose that results from the ambition "to write otherwise"--the ambition, in short, to write in what is ordinarily taken to be a "literary" rather than a "philosophical" way. these two very different senses of derridean "writing"--"writing" as grammatological *theme*, "writing" as "perverformative" *practice*--encode the philosophy/literature binary as it is enacted in the course of derrida's career, in his passage from a writing that is philosophical and about philosophy ("against" philosophy, of course, but in critical, i.e., philosophical ways), to a writing that calls a "literary" kind of attention to itself, and thus both stylistically and thematically, even (almost) "thetically," announces the dissolution of "philosophemes" into their textual determinants--of "philosophy," that is to say, into "literature." more paradoxically, this "writing" also offers--though without quite claiming--to dissolve "the thetic" itself into stylistic "textual effect," what derrida variously calls the "tone" and/or %demarche% of a text ("what [the text] does as much as what [it] says, in [its] 'acts,' if you will, no less than in [its] objects" [translation altered]).^11^ [25] it is "writing" in this second sense, the kind of "perverformativity" we have glanced at it in "tympan," that i want to turn to now, interrogating and, where possible, "historicizing" its motivations and its success--the work it does not only for derrida, but also for us, to the extent that "we" subscribe to (or for that matter, reject) what derrida makes it entail. [26] and i'm afraid my first answer can't help sounding a bit moralistic: "perverformativity" diffuses the political application, or ambition, of derrida's work. recall the metaphorics of "tympan": to "stick it" in philosophy's ear, to rupture philosophy's eardrums, to deafen it, or at least leave its ears ringing, to put its bones out of joint, even to put it to sleep with excurses on obsolete printing technology--these wittily sadistic-sounding proposals stop well short of murdering their victim wholesale, or even attempting to convert (or "reeducate"?) him. (him? yes.) "tympan" lowers, or registers a lowering, of the stakes for philosophy, and for "critique" at large, from the high ambitions projected in _of grammatology_; in it, writing is an act of resistance against the prevailing cultural surround, but *only* of resistance; there is no longer any promise, as in _of grammatology_, of writing as (at the very least) a sign of revolution, of change, of "the end of the book," or of metaphysics, logocentrism, phonocentrism, or anything else, let alone for "the beginning" of something new, different, "other." more crucially: in "tympan," the "writing" in question is derrida's *own* writing, or derrida-esque writing (if there is such a thing)- writing that is written "otherwise." a special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing, a writing whose whole point is to be *different* from (or "other" to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as usual--precisely *not*, in short, a %gramme% about which a "grammatology" would be possible. (compare the cognate wobble in the axiomatics of paul de man between "language as such" and specifically "literary language" as distinct from other kinds.) [27] it seems a version of a thematic as old, in western culture, as the book of job, if not of the _iliad_, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. in derrida, this shift between two senses of writing has, as "textual effect," consequences encoding a politics. the %aufhebung% of speech/writing proposed in derrida's early work was projected as belonging to the future (or at minimum, *a* future). by contrast, the point of "perverformativity" is its immanence in the "letter," ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the "present" of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of "the thetic" or any "thematization" importing anything for, or importable into, a future. the future, the hyphenated heideggerian %zu-kunft% becomes, as we have already seen anticipated in the "exergue" of _grammatology_, the future anterior, a "will have been," a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of "event" and of "outcome"--a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, "the same" as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it "different" from or "other" to the present. (even in derrida's pre-'68 work, though, a similar continuity or "same"-ness obtains between past and present. in the early work the word "history" and its cognates- "historicity," etc.--appear much more frequently than later, but with curiously unhistorical import, seeming to figure, rather like t.s. eliot's "ideal order," as a gigantic spectre the closure of whose seamless simultaneity--its contemporary weight or force, not to say its transtemporal "presence"--is much more to the point than the narrative courses of its changes, developments, contradictions, ends-and-beginnings. hence in any exercise at "historicizing derrida," derrida must generally be the object, almost never the subject, of that participle.) [28] later derrida's foreclosure of the future ("perverformative" and "thetic" at once) is also a foreclosure of history and of "dialectic" itself--which prompts such politically committed critics as eagleton and jameson to dismiss derrida as apolitical, or depoliticizing. derrida's post-'68 %ecriture% makes the verb of deconstruction, %deconstruire%, no less than %ecrire% itself, a %verbe intransitif%; and the flamboyant %jouissance% of derrida's writing adds insult (for marxists, *bourgeois* insult!) to the injury of its antidialectical %weltanshauung%.^12^ politically oriented critics can only regard such "perverformativity" as a (false) compensation for the no-exit condition it deconstructs--an "imaginary solution to a real contradiction," and thus "ideological" in the classic "false consciousness" sense. many others, though, experience derrida's post '68 writing as political, because (or to the extent that) they hear in its tone a clear *protest* against this steady-state world. to recur to the prison-house metaphor, the argument here is between those who think derrida has settled too complacently into a deluxe, v.i.p.-prisoner suite, and those who hear in his work an insistent rattle of the tin cup against the bars.^13^ [29] there are some cross-purposes to untangle in this difference over derrida. the later derrida's diminution or renunciation of political ambitions has indeed, i think, been masked or compensated by the manifest enlargement of his ambitions *as writer*: the darkening of the *theme* of writing has been obscured (as well as compensated) by derrida's prose style, by his *practice* of writing. this, together with the tone of protest, continuous between early derrida and late, has on the one hand kept derrida's *fans* from seeing how derrida's political import has been displaced after 1968, and on the other blinded his politically-minded *critics* to such politics as his pre-'68 work did actually entertain. but even granting that derrida himself shies away from putting deconstruction to political use, it seems churlish not to acknowledge that his method, in other hands, has proved enormously useful for a variety of oppositional criticisms--feminist, gay/lesbian/queer, minority, postcolonialist, etc.^14^ [30] but i would grant that "perverformativity" is indeed "ideological" to the extent that it functions as a response, and implicitly a kind of solution, to the confining "economy" of meaning that derrida so compulsively elaborates and protests. earlier avant gardes--the "ideal type" here would be dada--sought to escape the oppression of semiosis by assaying a direct lunge *out* of it, into non-sense; derrida's effort is to "shake" or "make tremble" (%sollicitare%) the structure of meaning from *within*, exploiting its own %differance%, or "dissemination," to multiply meanings, to invoke every possible sense of a word against (or "on the oblique" to) the others, to make these possibilities stymie (if not altogether cancel) each other, thus short-circuiting the regulating mechanisms of "context" whereby we ordinarily collaborate in meaning's tyranny over us by recognizing which of a word's senses to admit and which to reject. wayne booth once summarized interpretive tact in the formula "knowing when to stop"; derrida's game is to refuse to "know" any such thing. (one thing there is no "end of" in derrida's purview is deconstruction itelf: in principle, at least, deconstruction never stops.) [31] what i want to adduce here is the link (antithetical, if not dialectical) between this "shaking" of meaning and the "rigorous" enforcement of it that we have seen derrida operating on mauss. "perverformativity" exempts derrida from the penalty derrida enforces on mauss. to put it another way, the "economy" of meaning is something derrida may enforce against a particular writer, *or* against "meaning" itself. as meaning-cop, derrida holds a mauss, or a foucault, to the letter of their letter, but enacts his "perverformative" style of %ecriture%, of "writing otherwise," to liberate itself/himself (as well as a few personal idols of his for whom he cuts slack, e.g., nietzsche, and some of heidegger) *from* the letter. i am trying to specify a signal contradiction in derrida: if "meaning" is something we want to *evade*, we cannot, because "meaning" is inevitable; if on the other hand, it is something we want to *achieve* (either to state some "meaning" of our own with precision, or to ascribe, via interpretation, some "meaning" to a text), we cannot, because "meaning" is impossible. you can neither say what you mean (or mean what you say), nor can you speak (or remain silent) without "meaning" *something*. i regret any implication here of the expose, of ideological unmasking; my purpose is not to hoist derrida with the petard of this "contradiction," but to point out (by way of "historicizing" derrida) that derrida is very much in the style of our postmodern period in conducting himself on the premise that a critic's job is not to resolve or mediate contradictions, but to dramatize them--which, in practice, often means enlarging, even exaggerating them. [32] however--and this next point does take on something of the ideological expose--it seems to me that this contradiction, and such political force as it registers, is too easily lost on many devotees of derrida and of deconstruction. derrida's warmest admirers too often prize his "perverformativity" as enacting that "free play" ("infinite interpretation" as the *end* of definitive or authoritative control of language) proposed programmatically in derrida's pre-'68 work, without seeing derrida's decisively different construction, after '68, of the constraints (the *closure*) within which that "free play" prolongs itself. such connoisseurs of derrida's "perverformativity," such celebrants of derrida's ingenious dancing in chains, see the dance, but fail to see the chains. they foreground the motifs of %differance% and "dissemination" triumphally, to eclipse the obdurate "prison-house" closures of metaphysics against which derrida protests--as if to "deconstruct" the illusions of semiosis and identity thinking were to anull them as well in one fell (deconstructive) swoop; as if abolishing ideological closure were as simple as calling false consciousness "false." ravished by the pleasures, even %les jouissances%, of the encounter with derrida's writing, such readings mean to honor the hopes of '60s counter-culture politics, that revolution and the pleasure principle might join forces in a permanently liberating coalition. but it is not simple "left puritanism" to reject such a valorization of derrida as making everything, and politics especially, too easy. [33] whether derrida's own practice makes it too easy is a judgment for the eye of the beholder. for myself, the later derrida's "perverformativity" does often seem facile--not "easy," exactly (not in prose like that!), but complacent, even insouciant, and, often, arrogantly so. (nobody takes it as a form of critical modesty.) for some people, i am here merely confessing that my literary/intellectual palate is too coarse for any fine and discriminating apprehension of the exquisitely subtle and nuanced velleities of *angst* agitating derrida's writing. perhaps so: the texts of derrida's that have moved me most--"envois" and "circumfession"- are those in which such anxieties are rather manifest than latent. as to politics, derrida's work seems to me *always* to be at least allegorically political--not merely susceptible of, but quite soliciting, a political reading; this, indeed, is my chief, almost my only, way of being interested in it. and (to put it in language that revives phenomenologies deconstruction proscribes), i take this political allegorizing as entirely conscious on derrida's part: it seems the better part of valor to be circumspect in diagnosing in derrida's work the symptoms of any particular unconscious, but of "the *political* unconscious" most (almost) of all. [34] manifestly, derrida's work delivers the questions, conflicts, contradictions of aesthetics and/against politics to an impasse. this impasse--our need for it, our "compulsion to repeat" it in our reading and writing of "critique," our imperative to enlarge, augment, amplify it, ratchet it up to the highest possible pitch of contradiction and paradox, cathect it, in short, to the max--all this, too, is very much a "period" phenomenon, a sign of the postmodern times generally, and of the "emergence of that new type of discourse called theory" in particular. derrida evokes the force of that impasse most acutely in the conflict between what seems to me the genuine, *even if* "aesthetic," politics of his work, and the still-potent political moralism exemplified by, say, a terry eagleton. but here, to "historicize" a hard contemporary question can only be to acknowledge, not to answer it. -------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ hugh j. silverman and gary e. aylesworth, eds., _the textual sublime: deconstruction and its differences_ (albany: state university of new york press, 1990). ^2^ "metaphysics" as analogy of or synecdoche for "ideology" seems to me the self-evident premise of any "political" deconstruction, though only michael ryan, so far as i know, has made this premise explicit, in _marxism and deconstruction: a critical articulation_ (baltimore and london: johns hopkins university press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, "the metaphysics of everyday life": "the deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology" (117). for more bibliography on the politics of deconstruction, see note 4 below. ^3^ "the ends of man," originally a lecture, is pointedly dated "may 12, 1968"; in the course of its printed version derrida specifies that the lecture was written in april, 1968 ("the weeks of the opening of the vietnam peace talks and the assassination of martin luther king" [_margins_, 114]), as the crisis that would culminate in may was developing. the piece has an interest simply for having been written right at the moment that i have evoked as a sort of temporal hinge or fulcrum for thinking of derrida's work in before-and-after terms. "the ends of man" seems to me "uncharacteristic" because (at least in its opening sections [_margins_, 111-23]) it is one of the very few texts in which derrida himself mounts a historical (or historicizing) argument. his point is to correct or reproach sartre (without naming sartre) and others for their "mistinterpretation" of heidegger's "fundamental ontology" as a kind of "humanism"; but he also accounts for this "misinterpretation" historically, as a "first reading" (since which "some progress has been made" [_margins_, 119]), in terms of heidegger's reception in france, the dates at which his various books were translated, and the development of heidegger's own career (derrida here subscribes to the notion of the heideggerian "kehre"), as well as the reception in france of phenomenology generally--the influence of kojeve's introduction of hegel, the accessibility or not, and the state of understanding, of various works of husserl's, the discovery of marx's 1844 manuscripts, etc. it is a kind of argument derrida usually takes pains to avoid making: trafficking in "dominant motifs," or "the empiricism of [taking a] cross-section" (_margins_, 117)--as opposed to his famously "rigorous" practice of "close reading"- offends his intellectual conscience (to put it in terms derrida would discountenance). ^4^ jameson wrote respectfully, or warily, about derrida in _the prison-house of language_ (princeton: princeton university press, 1971), but has since sounded dismissive, treating derrida only in glancing asides. eagleton lumps derrida together with barthes as a bourgeois hedonist luxuriating in a bath (or wetdream) of _jouissance_; see, e.g., "frere jacques: the politics of deconstruction" (1984), rept. in _against the grain_ (london and new york: verso, 1986), 77-87. as for norris, see _derrida_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1987), or any of his books with the word "deconstruction" in the title; but he has argued his anti-anti-foundationalist view of derrida elsewhere as well, e.g., _what's wrong with postmodernism_ (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1990); _spinoza and the origins of modern critical theory_ (oxford: basil blackwell, 1991); _uncritical theory: postmodernism, intellectuals, and the gulf war_ (amherst: university of massachusetts press, 1992). rorty's best-known essay on derrida is "philosophy as a kind of writing" (1978; rpt. in _consequences of pragmatism: essays 1972-1980_ [minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1982], 90-109); but see also "from ironist theory to private allusions: derrida," in _contingency, irony, and solidarity_ (new york: cambridge university press, 1989), 122-37; and "deconstruction and circumvention" (1984), in _philosophical papers_, 2 vols. (new york: cambridge university press, 1991), 2:85-106, "two meanings of 'logocentrism': a reply to [christopher] norris" (1989), _ibid_., 107-18; and "is derrida a transcendental philosopher?" (1989), _ibid_., 119-128. also to be noted in such a summary as this: michael ryan, _marxism and deconstruction_ (see note 2 above) and "the marxism-deconstruction debate in literary theory, _new orleans review_ 11, 1 (spring 1984), 29-6; frank lentricchia, "history and the abyss," in _after the new criticism_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1980), 157-210 (especially 164-88); gayatri c. spivak, "revolutions that as yet have no model," in _diacritics_ 10, 4 (winter, 1980), 29-49; stanley aronowitz, "towards a new strategy of liberation," in _the crisis in historical materialism: class, politics and culture in marxist theory_ (south hadley: j.f. bergin, 1981), 123-36; edward w. said, "reflections on american 'left' literary criticism," in _the world, the text, and the critic_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1983), 158-77; barbara foley, "the politics of deconstruction," in _rhetoric and form: deconstruction at yale_, robert con davis and ronald schleifer, eds. (norman: university of oklahoma press, 1985), 113-34; jonathan arac, _critical geneologies: historical situations for postmodern literary studies_ (new york: columbia universty press, 1987), 299-305. ^5^ john d. caputo finds the inverse of the structure i indicate here: "meaning" as a boon cruelly denied to certain bits of excluded language that have been denigrated as "nonsense," and which derrida appoints himself to dignify with meaning, even to "liberate" into meaning. see "the economy of signs in husserl and derrida: from uselessness to full employment," in john sallis, ed., _deconstruction and philosophy: the texts of jacques derrida_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1987), 99-113; the protopolitics of caputo's argument ("liberation is what i think derrida is all about . . ." [108]) are clear in his title. apropos of the pre-'68/post-'68 divide, however, i'll note that caputo argues from derrida's pre-'68 _la voix et le phenomene_, the passage in which derrida finds sense in phrases ("green is or," "abracadabra") that husserl had cited as "nonsense." when caputo read his paper at a 1985 conference with derrida in attendance, derrida objected to the word "liberation" from the floor, "to the extent," caputo explains, "that it implied optimism, utopianism, some kind of metaphysics of the future in which all will be free" (112n10). ^6^ for some later "problematizations" of these matters, see derrida on "iterability" in "signature event context" (1971) and "limited inc a b c..." (1977) in _limited inc_, trans. samuel weber and jeffrey mehlman (evanston: northwestern university press, 1988), especially 70-7. ("signature event context" also appears in _margins_, 307-30.) also cf. remarks on "parody" in the sections of _spurs: nietzsche's styles_ (1978; trans. barbara harlow, [chicago: university of chicago press, 1979]), called "simulation" (66-71) and "positions" (95-101). ^7^ (_yale french studies_ 55/56 [1977], 457-505; rpt. in john p. muller and william j. richardson, eds., _the purloined poe: lacan, derrida, and psychoanalytic reading_ [baltimore and london: johns hopkins university press, 1988], 213-51). ^8^ "circumfession" is derrida's contribution to geoffrey bennington and jacques derrida, _jacques derrida_ (chicago; university of chicago press, 1993). my review of this and a few other derrida books--_given time_, _between the blinds: a derrida reader_, and _acts of literature_, ed. derek attridge (routledge: new york and london, 1992)--is forthcoming in _kritikon_. i will add here that i read derrida's "interpreting signatures nietzsche/heidegger" (in diane p. michelfelder and richard e. palmer, eds., _dialogue and deconstruction: the gadamer-derrida encounter_ [albany: suny press, 1989], 58-71) as, in part, an "anxiety of influence" speculation. ^9^ fredric jameson, _signatures of the visible_ (new york and london: routledge, 1992), 68; see also _postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_ (durham: duke university press, 1991), 391-9. ^10^ one of the more interesting things i've read on these questions--"historicizing" the "end of philosophy" motif as an affair of hegel-and-after, i.e., as "modern," *not* "postmodern"--is stephen melville, _philosophy beside itself: on deconstruction and modernism_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986). ^11^ on "tone," see "of an apcalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy," trans. john p. leavey, jr., _oxford literary review_ 6, 2 (1984), 3-37; for "%demarche%," see "freud's legacy" in _the post card_, 295. in the passage i've quoted on "%demarche%," the translation (by alan bass) has the pronouns referring to freud, but they can also refer to "the text," as in my altered translation. note that "tone" and "%demarche%" are issues raised in nearly contemporaneous texts: "of an apocalyptic tone" began as a lecture in 1980, the same year that saw the publication of the writings on freud in _la carte postale_; elsewhere, both before and after, derrida largely avoids discussion of such issues, perhaps because they complicate, or imperil, his procedural adherence to "the letter" of whatever text he is considering. there is also, of course, a problem of theorizing "tone" without raising (phonocentric) issues of "voice." another text of this period, _spurs: nietzsche's styles_ (1978), affects to foreground "the question of style," but only, it turns out, to provide, via etymology ("_stylus_," pen), an access to the metaphorics of the phallus, sexual difference, "the woman," etc. ^12^ for more on this dilemma of "left puritanism," see my "marxist pleasure: jameson and eagleton," in _postmodern culture_, v. 3, n. 3 (may 1993). a slightly expanded version, adding some pages on the issue of postmodernism, appears in eyal amiran and john unsworth, eds., _essays in postmodern culture_ (oxford university press: new york, 1993), 239-63. ^13^ michael ryan notes derrida's increasing hospitality to marxism over the course of his career: having first dismissed it as a "closed" and "totalizing" dogmatic "system" of official soviet ideology (ryan's villain here is less the pcf than lenin himself), derrida later welcomes the possibility of an "open" or "critical" marxism with aims and methods compatible with his own (_marxism and deconstruction_, xiv-xv, 45-6). ^14^ for a brief but incisive survey of these, see "the story of deconstruction," chapter 2 of jay clayton, _the pleasures of babel: contemporary american literature and theory_ (new york: oxford university press, 1994), 32-60. -------------------------------------------------------------- works cited derrida, jacques. _between the blinds: a derrida reader_. ed. peggy kamuf. ny: columbia up, 1991. ---. _given time: i. counterfeit money_. trans. peggy kamuf. chicago: chicago up, 1992. originally _donner le temps_. paris: editions galilee, 1991. ---. _margins of philosophy_. trans. alan bass. chicago up, 1982. originally _marges de la philosophie_. paris: editions de minuit, 1972. ---. _of grammatology_. trans. gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore and london: johns hopkins up, 1976. originally _de la grammatologie_. editions de minuit, 1967. ---. _positions_. trans. alan bass. chicago up, 1981. originally _positions_. editions de minuit, 1972. ---. _the post card: from socrates to freud and beyond_. trans. alan bass. chicago up, 1987. originally _la carte postale: de socrate a freud et au-dela_. paris: flammarion, 1980. ---. _spurs: nietzsche's styles_. trans. barbara harlow. chicago up, 1979. originally _eperons: les styles de nietzsche_. flammarion, 1978. ---. _writing and difference_. trans. alan bass. chicago up, 1978. originally _l'ecriture et la difference_. paris: editions de seuil, 1967. -------------------------------end---------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------selinger, '"it meant i loved": louise gluck's _ararat_', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-selinger-it.txt "it meant i loved": louise gluck's _ararat_ by eric selinger dept. of english, university of california at los angeles eselinger@aol.com _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by eric selinger, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] thanatos undercuts, overrides eros, his sweet, belated sibling--so says freud.^1^ and in _revolution in poetic language_, her closely argued brief against paranoid unity and culture as theology, julia kristeva more than agrees. like the accusing angel that she calls "the text," kristeva puts the writing subject, in her now famous phrase, %en proces%--in process and on trial--charged with denying the very spark that drives him: the "jouissance of destruction (or, if you will, of the 'death drive')" (150). this drive lies below language, she argues; it underwrites or even *is* desire (49, 131). even oral pleasure, that link between infantile suckling and the poet's honeyed words which at one moment in her account "restrains the aggressivity of rejection," thus holding the death drive in check, amounts in the end to "a devouring fusion," "*borne*" and "*determined*" by the very rejection one hoped it would restrain (153, 154). avant-garde social and textual "practice," along with the critic's own, must on account of this be strict, undeceived, and unsentimental. there's no entry for "love" in the index to _revolution_. no eros peeks out from psyche's cupola, offering readers shelter from the storm. [2] at moments louise gluck's _ararat_ calls to mind such passionate strictness. "the soul's like all matter," the poet observes. "why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form," when it could fly apart into "particles" and "atoms," disintegrate, "be free?" ("lullaby" 28-29). the kristeva i've cited so far would take this as a rhetorical question; and indeed, on first reading, so it seems. but these lines, like the rest of the volume, are spoken by a self-professed "untrustworthy speaker" (34). suppose we read deeper, then, and hazard an answer? recall another myth of rejection, the sentence passed on another subject on trial: job, who refused to curse god and die (the biblical version of kristevan "practice"). he survives to see an erotic restitution, his second crop of daughters, dove, cinnamon, and eye-shadow, married with children and grandchildren of their own (mitchell xxx, 91). a taste of fairy-tale closure, this end equally hints at that love "fierce as death" we read of in the song of songs (8:6), the book which follows job in the hebrew bible as its countersong, a promise and a kiss. [3] the effort to unlock a love like that, a fierce erotic drive to hold life together, propels gluck's sequence from scene to stark, lyric scene. and the etiology of the affections we find in kristeva's more recent volumes can illuminate both the particulars and quiet formal imperative of the poet's mourning work and self-analysis. "beyond the often fierce but artificial and incredible tyranny of the law and the superego," she writes in _tales of love_, postmodern love has been undermined by an "erosion of the loving father": the one that freud called the imaginary father in individual prehistory, whose love for us ushers us out of melancholy longing for a lost maternal presence and into speaking subjectivity (378). two musings from this book might serve as epigraphs to _ararat_, highlighting the questions the poet sets herself as she attempts to reconstitute a vision of such paternity. "love as unacknowledged lament?" kristeva asks. "lament as unsuspected love?" (_tales_ 88). [4] it's easy to read _ararat_ as a book about death, a fatalistic "family tragedy" (cramer 102). the passing of the speaker's father precipitates portraits of earlier losses, of a distance and coolness in the family's past, and of the uneasy relations that remain. "long ago, i was wounded," the first poem begins (15); the last poem echoes the phrase, suggesting that no cure has been effected in between. "i thought / that pain meant / i was not loved," the volume all-but ends, and no sunburst of metaphor, rhythm, or rhetoric amplifies the retraction of the line that follows to close out the book: "it meant i loved" (68). and yet, for all gluck's restraint--she's no mahler, massing brass fanfares to signal the shift--this quick modulation from minor to major ripples back to revise our sense of everything we've read before. thus while "ararat" is the name of a jewish cemetery in the text, as a title for the book it also suggests something rather more hopeful, a place to settle, a mountain that peeks into view as the high waters ebb. somewhere to speak from, perhaps, for in kristeva's tale "our gift of speech, of situating ourselves in time for another, could exist nowhere except beyond an abyss" (_black sun_ 42). we might paraphrase that as "after a flood," with matthew arnold's "salt, estranging sea" filling the developmental gulf between child and mother that the theorist has in mind. and if we took this as a book about thanatos, did we brush past its actual epigraph on the way? "human nature was originally one and we were a whole," gluck quotes from plato's _symposium_, "and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love" (11). [5] the androgynes split up by zeus have long since lost their cartwheeling brio, their mocking, comic tone as a myth for the origin of sexual lack and desire. gluck herself sets them aside, turning instead to the two visions of union that our modern myths allow: that between mother and infant, and the "coagulation of the mother and her desire" that intervenes in the mother/infant dyad as a third term, and that reveals to the child that "mother is not complete... she wants...who? what? ... 'at any rate, not i'" (_tales_ 41). through a "primary identification" with this third, whom kristeva, following freud, names the "father in individual prehistory," we may be reconciled to the loss of primal symbiotic bliss (see _tales_ 21-56; _black sun_ 6, 13). he, or he-and-she (since the third "possesses the sexual attributes of both parents" ["joyce" 172]) is the seed of the ego ideal, our original constitutive metaphor: "i'm like *that*." split off from mother, taking ourselves for, or becoming like, this *other* object of her affection, we thus inaugurate, all at once, subjectivity, metaphor, identification, idealization, symbolicity, and love. "the speaking being is a wounded being," kristeva explains; "his speech wells up out of an aching for love" (_tales_ 372). primary identification cannot heal the wound, but it sutures, salves, and compensates the pain. when it fails or is too fragile i lapse melancholic, have only the sense "of having been deprived of an unnameable, supreme good" as i run my thoughts over, in numbed, dumb repetition, the "unnameable" loss (_black sun_ 13, 12). [6] in _ararat_ this "father of imaginary prehistory" appears in several incarnations: the father as object of the mother's love; other children, sisters, in the same position; the "family unit," as we blithely say, in its full domestic happiness. or, i should say, he *fails* to appear. for all these unities lie shattered, unrecognized, unimagined, or forgotten as the volume begins. "long ago, i was wounded," the first poem opens: i learned to exist, in reaction, out of touch with the world: i'll tell you what i meant to be- a device that listened. not inert: still. a piece of wood. a stone. (15) the near-toneless abstraction, the muted affect here, is that of a poet cut off from the pleasures of language as tactile, material, rhythmic, "the world." the register kristeva calls "the semiotic," words surging with instinctual energy, seems repressed or abandoned. "why should i tire myself, debating, arguing?" the speaker demands, as though such efforts of control were the only language games she knew, or thought to play--at least with those near her, "those people [sisters? the rest of her family?] breathing in the other beds." if she "meant" in the past to be silent, mechanical or symbolic (a "device"), she hardly escapes that condition in the present tense of the lines. [7] a slumber does her spirit seal, we might say, for surely the last line of this stanza distantly echoes wordsworth's "rocks, and stones, and trees." her words, arhythmic, breaking off in dashes, suggest the melancholy speech kristeva describes as "elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but . . . secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking" (_black sun_ 43). but hers is a sleepless slumber, a restless depression, stirred by a turbulence instantly put down. "those people" are "uncontrollable / like any dream--" the poet observes, then at the word "dream" breaks off to watch "the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling." perhaps phallic in its alternate tumescence, or like a mother's heartbeat, throbbing in the dark, this moon supplies an image for that archaic force the poet calls "the dark nature," to which birth and death itself "are proofs, not / mysteries." ominous, the moon still seems attractive, a source of the dynamism the poet lacks. as we move through the stasis of the next few poems, its changes will be missed. [8] the opening poem i've been discussing stands in a double relation to the rest of the book. its title, "parados," names the choral ode sung at the start of a greek tragedy, a dramatic form that nietzsche reads as teaching that "the state of individuation" is "the origin and primal cause of all suffering . . . objectionable in itself" (73).^2^ if we take the poem as a distinct dramatic invocation, thirty-one verses remain--and exactly halfway through the book, in "brown circle," we find the pivot of confrontation and forgiveness on which its progress hinges. gluck doubles up on organization, however, supplying a second structural logic i will follow from now on. after "parados" we find five poems that move the sequence along, introduce characters, fill out the plot. then we have "confession," which comments both on the speaker and, obliquely, on what we've seen so far. five more poems, then another address from and about "the untrustworthy speaker." five poems later, after the halfway pivot, we find "animals," which treats the speaker and her sister together, and for the first time hints at the true bonds between them. five poems, and we find a %deus ex machina% of sorts, a vertical turn to hear "celestial music," followed by the coda, "first memory," which echoes and revises the opening ode: "long ago, i was wounded. i lived / to revenge myself / against my father" (68). i don't mean by spelling out these structures to suggest that the book is *primarily* organized by differences and distinctions, other than of course its division into separate poems. the sections i propose are nowhere marked. but by reading this way, against the grain, we can get below the speaker's evident emotional stasis, and tune in to deeper, subtler, curative shifts. "a fantasy" to "confession" [9] at the end of "parados" we learn that birth and death "are proofs," not the mysteries the poet must bear witness to. proofs of the power of thanatos, or so it seems as this section opens in "a fantasy." here, though no familial relationship has yet been described between her and her subjects, the speaker watches birth and death lamentably converge as "every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, / new orphans" (16). in the "new life" of each widow and orphan time flashes in jarring, paratactic fragments: "then they're in the cemetery"; "and after that, everyone goes back to the house / which is suddenly full of visitors." the only force that counteracts this fragmentation and dispersal is the mourner's memory: the imagination of "the widow" our attention has lighted on and entered into as the poem progresses: in her heart, she wants them to go away. she wants to be back in the cemetery, back in the sickroom, the hospital. she knows it isn't possible. but it's her only hope, the wish to move backward. and just a little, not so far as the marriage, the first kiss. (16 17) the poet, we note, presses back a bit farther in the continuity than the widow allows herself. she lingers as the last line ends on the vision of a woman--the mother, we will learn--achieving her desire. and yet, as the focus widens again in the next poem to include the whole of "this family," still unnamed as the speaker's own, nostalgia withers and a harsher tone sets in. "no one could write a novel about this family," this voice announces: "too many similar characters. besides, they're all women; / there was only one hero. / / now the hero's dead" (18). [10] why this sudden shift in tone? it takes no particular psychological insight to see something defensive at work, signalling the importance of "the hero" when alive. the women may be "determined to suppress / criticism" of him, but in the speaker's case, at least, they don't succeed. his death "wasn't moving," the speaker insists; he was a "figurehead" alive, evidently narcissistic (the women are "like echoes"); "he's weak," she notes, "his scenes specify / his function but not his nature." that function has something to do with narrative, with the making of sense and sentences through time. if at the gravesite a nameless someone instructed the mourners on "what to do next," even that desiccated remnant of paternal function has now evaporated. "from this point on, nothing changes," we are told. not only is there "no plot without a hero," but his absence rules out change as erotic development, new first kisses, escape. "in this house," the speaker explains, "when you say *plot* what you mean is *love story*." for kristeva, love rests on a foundation of primary identification with the "imaginary father": "a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity" (_tales_ 46). the recovery of such an imaginary father--the reconstruction of "the hero"--will be the poet's task. as imagined here, he can only hurt and divide: in a brief flash of metaphor that perhaps signals his continued power, each woman's heart is "pierced through with a sword" (19). but since the imaginary father does not simply equal the biological father, but incorporates whatever "not i" the child discovers its mother to desire, the poet must equally reconstruct the rest of her family. her sympathetic imagination cannot jump past or exclude "these women, the wife and two daughters" and their children. these paired efforts will shape the first three sections of the book, starting with an admission that, indeed, this family is the speaker's own. [11] with the next poem, "labor day," her mourning work begins. "it's a year exactly since my father died," she begins; everything snaps into focus with the first person pronoun: the heat last year, a coldness now; a niece riding her bicycle out front. "there's just us now," the poet remarks, "the immediate family." immediate, since no longer mediated by a paternal third term, the family also seems trapped in an unhappy immediacy, a static present. between the father as "a blond boy" and his appearance as "an old man gasping for air" we see nothing, no development, no life but "a breath, a caesura" (20); likewise, in the poem that follows, "lover of flowers," we find references to "every spring" and "every autumn" as though years of seasons were compressed in the year that's passed. certainly immediacy does not equal closeness, for the speaker seems determined to mark off borders, to differentiate, particularly between her sister and herself. "in our family, everyone loves flowers," she begins (21). but "with my sister, it's different, / it's an obsession." when a set of poppies that the sister plants is beaten down by rain, we can glimpse the poet's unacknowledged self-portrait in her mother's words: my mother's tense, upset about my sister: now she'll never know how beautiful they were, pure pink, with no dark spots. that means she's going to feel deprived again. but for my sister, that's the condition of love. she was my father's daughter: the face of love, to her, is the face turning away. (21-22) the sister, too, was "wounded" it seems, perhaps by the father's distancing love. such separation marks "the face of love, *to her*," the poet insists, as though this deprivation were not her own case, her condition as well. that acknowledgement would require more identification with the sister, and a stronger ability to idealize, to see the father or the parents' love without dark spots, than she can summon up so early in the text. [12] if we've had a first sketch of the poet's response to her sister, the next poem fills out the background, shifts our perspective back two generations. what we find bears little resemblance to the ease of partial differentiation, the reassuring presence of reproduced motherhood that critics of the freudian scheme discover between women and their daughters.^3^ gluck's sibling mysteries play themselves out in a difficult key. mother and aunt play cards, "spite and malice, the family pastime, the game / my grandmother taught all her daughters" (23). the immediate, all-female world we see at the start and close of this poem, where the mother and aunt "have cards; they have each other" and therefore "don't need any more companionship"--this world and its games may be "better than solitaire," but they ring a little hollow nonetheless. "in the end," in their game, "the one who has nothing wins"; and the next poem, the first address-lyric or echo of "parados," picks up and deepens that conclusion. not carol gilligan's "ethic of care" but bracing competition motivates the women of this world, or at least their representative speaker. "you show respect by fighting," she observes; that's how her mother and aunt were raised. and something of that sororial strife has worked its way into the myths of the next generation. "fulfillment" and "happiness," the poet confesses, serve only to draw down the anger of the fates: "sisters, savages--" who "in the end . . . have / no emotion but envy" ("confession" 25). [13] why does the speaker thus overstate the case against these women, evidently downplaying the affections of the scene? why has she "learned to hide" her dreams, in other words, and what would those dreams contain? in her uncertainty we find a trace of resistance to that "sine-qua non condition of our individuation" that kristeva melodramatically calls "matricide" (_black sun_ 27-8). "matricide is our vital necessity," the theorist proclaims, for we must all extricate ourselves from undifferentiated infant bliss.^4^ but for women the violence of this process is harder to focus entirely outward. "locked up within myself" it turns to "an implosive mood that walls itself in and kills me secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness" (29). the poet is trapped in this sort of bitterness, unable to blur her own borders, to metaphorize, to reach out in amorous idealizing identification to mother or sister, let alone to the dead hero or imaginary "loving father" she needs (_tales_ 378). this family is indeed hers, but she stands outside it, at once unsympathetic and unable to acknowledge the roots of her pain. "a precedent" to "the untrustworthy speaker" [14] the five poems that come before "the untrustworthy speaker" hazard, if indirectly, one such identification. we learn of a death before the father's loss--a sister to the speaker, one who died in infancy--and, more important, we find a new imaginative sympathy with the mother. as the poet details preparations for "the child that died," a new delicacy of tone and loving accuracy of description breathes life into her voice. "bureaus of soft clothes. / little jackets neatly folded. / each one almost fit in the palm of a hand" ("a precedent" 26). we saw the mother's capacity for care unfold in "widows," where she slept on the floor to be near her dying husband. but while the focus there was on her inability to get used to his absence after death, here we see her affections in full flower, as yet unthreatened, unhurt. when the hurt does come, when her daughter is lost, we see transformations in both the mother and the poet left behind: . . . when my sister died, my mother's heart became very cold, very rigid, like a tiny pendant of iron. then it seemed to me my sister's body was a magnet. i could feel it draw my mother's heart into the earth, so it would grow. ("lost love" 29) this poem and "a precedent" are more tender, more compassionate, more fluent in their sympathetic identification than anything we've seen so far. but if the poet can sense her way into her mother's skin, she equally seems inclined to *be* the dead sister, to cure the mother's wound, to offer herself in a risky but attractive sacrifice. [15] perhaps we do not press too far to see a crucial early identification with the dead sister as, in effect, a dead "imaginary father"--recalling that the father was defined as such, in part, simply for being what mama valued other than *me*. stillness thus seems a virtue to the poet-child, one learned from the sister who died. as she wanted in "parados" to be "not inert: still" (15), in the final poem of this section, "appearances," we see her hazard an analysis of that longing, recall her childhood pride in its accomplishment: "it was something i was good at: sitting still, not moving. / i did it to be good, to please my mother, to distract her from the child that died. / i wanted to be child enough" (32). but this is too close for comfort to the stillness of the stillborn, of "the dying" who "spin so rapidly they seem to be still" ("lullaby" 28) and to the inertia of the women who "can't get moving" after the father-hero's death, which itself "wasn't moving" (18). if those who fall asleep "grow slowly calm," soothed by a mother's heartbeat--one thinks of the moon of "parados," and of the curative regressions in whitman's "the sleepers"- those who fall apart in death refuse, or fail, to be comforted. the speaker, we sense, would gladly identify with the infant her mother holds, feeds, attempts to keep alive, in order to prove that she'd *accept*. on her the effort would be efficacious; loved, she'd stay alive. [16] there is of course more to say about the middle poems in this bundle of five, and i will return to examine the father's role in them shortly. but i want to focus on "appearances," the last of them, especially on its description of the living sisters' relations to one another and their mother, and its invocation of a new character from outside the family, an artist. for if "*forgiveness emerges first as the setting up of a form* . . . [and] has the effect of an acting out, a doing, a %poiesis%," (_black sun_ 206), the progress of the book requires this new intercessory term: a figure at once for the poet and for the loving father she lacks.^5^ [17] what, first off, needs to be forgiven? in poems of this section we've seen the mother's love in action: folding baby clothes, holding a child that doesn't want to be fed, lulling husband and infant to sleep, and into death. ("i can't say / what she did for my father," the poet reassures us, and herself; still, "whatever it was, i'm sure it was right" [28].) and yet, when the speaker considers the portraits her parents commissioned, looking with the eyes of an adult, one who's "been analyzed," who can "understand our [her and her sister's] expressions" (31), she sees something more painful and troubling: my mother tried to love us equally, dressed us in the same dresses; she wanted us perceived as sisters. that's what she wanted from the portraits: you need to see them hanging together, facing one another- separated, they don't make the same statement. ........................................... she likes to sit there, on the blue couch, looking up at her daughters, at the two that lived. she can't remember how it really was, how anytime she ministered to one child, loved that child, she damaged the other. you could say she's like an artist with a dream, a vision. without that, she'd have been torn apart. (31-32) the mother's ministration to the living, unlike her care for the dying, calls pain to the poet's mind in a new, post analytic specificity. as usual, though, we see more than the words acknowledge. the mother's desire to have her daughters "hanging together," eyes fixed on one another, counters the potential dispersal by death of two generations. it works at once between the sisters (*they won't be torn away from each other*) and in the mother's heart (*i won't be torn apart by another loss*), calling to mind and helping justify the grandmother's attempt to make mother and aunt a sufficient pair: the attempt we read about in "widows." [18] and yet the poet withdraws from the potential identification *i am, like my mother, an artist*. she doesn't *reject* it, i hasten to add, since we find none of the dismissive force she mustered in "a novel." she merely steps back to the solid ground of her painful individuation. she still wants, first off, to be set off from her sister: to be either the loved child or the damaged one. "you had to shut out / one child to see the other," she recalls, clearly hungering for that specific attention (33). she gets it from the most successful imaginary father so far, the portrait painter, "monsieur davanzo." he, like the poet herself, insists on distinctions and accuracies. he notices the difference between flesh tones, for example, against the identical green cotton dresses the two sisters wear: the sister, who's been linked with reds and pinks, is "ruddy"; the poet's "faintly bluish," recalling the daughter who died. we have seen no play so far in the poem, whether in the language or by children or with parents; but here, "to amuse us, madame davanzo hung cherries over our ears," reminding us that the imaginary loving father, the critical third term the poet lacks, is in fact a "father-mother conglomerate" (_tales_ 40), pictured here, if briefly, as an actual couple. but the poem ends with "the painter" himself marking in his portrait what is at least the child's interpretation of her mother's wish that her children always be bound up together. does she want me to stay with her, with women, forever? never turn to a sexual other, fall in love with a man? "every morning, we went to the convent," we read of her summer schedule. "every afternoon, we sat still, having the portraits painted"; and the artist monsieur ("my lord") davanzo understands her expression. "a face already so controlled, so withdrawn, / and too obedient, the clear eyes saying / *if you want me to be a nun, i'll be a nun*" (33). [19] does the mother really want this? again, as after "widows," we sense an unfair accusation, and again we find a confession: the third of the "parados" poems, "the untrustworthy speaker." don't listen to me; my heart's been broken. i don't see anything objectively. i know myself; i've learned to hear like a psychiatrist. when i speak passionately, that's when i'm least to be trusted. it's very sad, really: all my life, i've been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. in the end, they're wasted- (34) this poem marks the speaker's first acknowledgement that she has cut herself off from something, someone; that the analysis she's brought to bear so far has failed. we note the self-criticism as a flicker of eros, a latent desire to "see myself, / standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand," even if that means having to call herself to account for love's sadisms and failures, "the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends" (34). this would entail, in part, an observation of her own masochism, of the degree to which the "wound" or loss she mourns is self-inflicted, a condition of her speech. an exculpation of the mother indeed soon follows, set in motion by the "criticism of the hero" (18) suppressed earlier. this combination will bring the book to its pivotal moment of confrontation and crisis. "a fable" to "animals" [20] this central section of the book begins with its first extended metaphor for the poet's situation: "a fable." "suppose / you saw your mother / torn between two daughters," she demands, the daughters identified with those competing self-proclaimed mothers who fought over a single baby before solomon (36). what could you do to save her but be willing to destroy yourself--she would know who was the rightful child, the one who couldn't bear to divide the mother. setting aside the admission of masochism here--itself a step beyond the mere victimhood of "appearances"--we find a curious blur of familial roles. the mother plays at once the parts of a "wise king" who judges and a child under threat; the poet too is at once mother (the one who can't bear to divide) and child. not her own but the *mother's* pain attracts the poet's attention: an unsettling shift, apparently, as the short lines and shivering enjambments suggest. if indeed "the transfer of meaning" in metaphor "sums up the transference of the subject to the place of the other" (_tales_ 91), we can understand the fragility of the poem's presentation, as it ferries the poet oh-so-nervously across the flood waters, the gulf or "abyss" of individuation. [21] who, though, is the other daughter in this scene? the living sister, or the dead? both sisters have divided their mother's affections; and if we keep our eyes on the *function* of each sister, to borrow a term from the sequence itself (see "a novel" and "the untrustworthy speaker"), we note that each acts for the other, in this emotional division, like the "imaginary father" kristeva describes. as though to reinforce this connection the following poem, "new world," turns from the sisters' relations to those of the husband and wife. what role, the poet asks, did that ur-other play, and how did i imagine it at the time? as i saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. she was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to theater, go to museums. what he wanted was to lie on the couch with the _times_ over his face, so that death, when it came wouldn't seem a significant change. this life study, our first glimpse of the father in life, not death, treats him with imagistic specificity, as though to flesh out his "nature" in the way obscured at the start of the book. if he still seems the "someone remote" he was named in "mount ararat," doing nothing but preparing to die, his association here with time and a certain style of language, the restrained clarity of "the _times_," is now insisted on through a new flair of metaphor. (so *that's* where the poet learned her style, we note in the margin.) [22] this subtle change of style marks a quiet change of heart. "i thought my father's death / would free my mother," the poet observes; and while "in a sense, it has"- she can travel, go to her museums at last--something valuable's been lost as well. the mother "isn't held" anymore; "she's free . . . / without relation to earth" (39) --a phrase that echoes the speaker's own original condition: "out of touch / with the world" (15). it's not that being earth-bound was so good, but the inverse seems equally unfortunate. for the first time the father seems a figure of curative attraction--like the dead sister's body in "lost love," he draws, or drew, the mother down to earth. but the speaker seems loathe to articulate this attractive quality, her focus on the mother occluding the father as an object of desire, whether her mother's or her own. thus in "birthday," the next poem, we find a stand-in for him: an "old admirer" who, even after death, continues to send roses on the mother's birthday, "his way of saying that the legend of my mother's beauty / had simply gone underground" (40). a figure for the loving, living father--an alternative to that morbid silence below the _times_--he's both persephone to the mother's demeter and, in his "ministering," a mother too.^6^ "i thought / the dead could minister to the living," the poet remembers. "i didn't realize / this was the anomaly; that for the most part / the dead were like my father." hard words, if she means "like my father when alive." and even if she means like the father after death, a certain harshness comes through the allegation, for if "my mother doesn't mind, . . . doesn't need / displays from my father," surely his daughter suffers as the mother spends her birthday "sitting by a grave," "showing him she understands, / that she accepts his silence / . . . she doesn't want him making / signs of affection when he can't feel" (40-41). "*hates* deception"; "*can't* feel"--the present indicative tense sweeps together the obvious lack of response from the dead with a vision of the father as there, watching without response or turning his face away. did he not feel before his death, not live up even then to the "standard of courtesy, of generosity" the old admirer set? one might read the lines that way, written by a daughter who prefers to rest, like her father, undeceived. [23] we have reached the hinge of the book, "brown circle." whatever objections we might have had to the speaker's unforgiving stance toward her mother and sister, to the tone she's taken toward her father until now, are suddenly voiced as this poem starts with a question from one who's been silent so far. "my mother wants to know," it begins, "why, if i hate / family so much, / i went ahead and / had one" (42). why indeed? freudian theory no less than the bible finds the sins of the fathers visited on sons, and daughters here seem no exception. the cutting lineation of her response suggests the speaker's uneasiness, the way she halts and stammers her way through to an unspoken answer. i don't answer my mother. what i hated was being a child, having no choice about what people i loved. i don't love my son the way i meant to love him. (42) how close she comes to simply saying "i don't love my son"! or, as we might expect from the end of the first stanza, "i don't love him / because i *must*, but because i *choose* to." in fact, of course, we find something quite different: a recognition that choice and love are uneasy bedfellows; that while we may choose to have our children we can't choose who they are or even, often enough, what they do. their ways are beyond us, have their way with us. how culpable, then, can we find each other and ourselves? if the poet loves like a scientist, unwilling to set down her magnifying glass and leave off her scrutiny "though / the sun burns a brown / circle of grass around / the flower"- and we think of her unyielding observation of the older generation so far--was she herself not similarly burned? such scrutiny is "more or less the way / my mother loved me," she admits, and the stanza ends on that line, backing up the recognition: my mother loved *me*, not just, as in "appearances," "one child . . . that child" or "the other." "i must learn / to forgive my mother," the poet admonishes herself, as the play of mother-daughter identifications we saw in "a fable" becomes literal. it's the only way to forgive herself, "now that i'm helpless / to spare my son" (43). [24] _ararat_ revolves around "brown circle" in two ways. first, and most obviously, the book now focuses on the poet's sister and her daughter, the poet and her son, and on the father himself, with the mother largely absent. but behind this lies the more crucial shift from a poetry of hazarded, uneasy identifications, verse searching for its sponsoring imaginary other, to a poetry of calm, practiced distance, observation, and compassion. "it is by making his words suitable to his commiseration and, in that sense, accurate," kristeva explains, "that the subject's adherence to the forgiving ideal is accomplished and effective forgiveness for others as well as for oneself becomes possible" (_black sun_ 217). none of this is *entirely* new to the volume: we saw such accuracies at work in "a precedent" and at moments elsewhere. but by bringing a new generation into focus the poet lets go of certain earlier obsessions, and clears a path for forgiveness in substance as well as in style. no longer, for example, does she insist on distinctions between herself and her sister. both have children itching for independence: the sister's daughter in the first panel of the triptych "children coming home from school," the poet's son sulking in her driveway in the second, "accus[ing] me / of his unhappiness." in the third panel the poet and her niece, both of whom can be said to be "growing up with my sister," equally learn "to wait, to listen," to grapple for verbal advantage. and in the poem that stands where we've come to expect a version of "parados," some confession of the speaker's untrustworthiness, we find the unsentimental sororial accord of "animals" instead: my sister and i reached the same conclusion: the best way to love us was to not spend time with us. ................... my sister and i never became allies, never turned on our parents. we had other obsessions: for example, we both felt there were too many of us to survive. we were like animals trying to share a dry pasture. between us, one tree, barely strong enough to sustain a single life. (47-48) [25] the poet's growing ease with metaphor allows her, for the first time in the sequence, to unite the parents in either a phrase ("the" or "our parents") or a figure (the "one tree"). where once the sisters tugged at and split up their mother's love, here they stand off warily from parents who cannot "bring themselves / to inflict pain" on either. ("you should only hurt / something you can give / your whole heart to," the speaker mordantly observes.) the chosen metaphor of "animals" would seem to suggest an inevitable competition or natural selection between the two; and we've been led to expect something rather like this through the first half of the book. an unspoken pact emerges in its place, however, marking our transition to the fourth group of poems, focused for the first time on *connections*. neither girl, each staring the other one down, will move to "touch / one thing that could / feed her sister" (49). what comes between them now, if only it were a little bit stronger, could keep them both alive. "saints" to "snow" [26] two paragraphs ago i quoted kristeva as saying that the forgiver's commitment to accuracy demonstrates an "adherence to the forgiving ideal." the nature of that ideal should by now be clear--the third, the imaginary father--and, in fact, _black sun_ names it as such elsewhere. "whoever is in the realm of forgiveness--who forgives and who accepts forgiveness--is capable of identifying with a loving father, an imaginary father," kristeva propounds, "with whom, consequently, he is ready to be reconciled, with a new symbolic law in mind" (207). that new law--a covenant after the flood--will remain unspoken until the penultimate poem of _ararat_, but already we can see the reconciliation proceed. at first the imaginary father appears as female, and as a familial ideal. "in our family, there were two saints," she startles us by writing: "my aunt and my grandmother" (50). generations flicker, linked by metaphor: of these the grandmother seems to stand in for the speaker's own mother, "cautious, conservative," the aunt for the speaker, suffering repeated losses and haunted by jealous fates familiar from "confession." (the mother suffers and loses too, you say? ah, but these are ideals, desires, imaginings...). the aunt's marked as a saint by her refusal to "experience / the sea" that steals away her loved ones "as evil. to her, it is what it is: / where it touches land, it must turn to violence" (50). this stoic acceptance, a model for the poet's own work, prompts her into accepting complementary opposites that must also remain "what they are" in the pair of poems that follow: herself and her sister, her niece and son, as treated in "yellow dahlia" and "cousins." [27] in the interest of space i will set these poems aside- suffice it to say that, despite kristeva's allegation that art forgives by giving shape "without exegesis, without explanation, without understanding" (_black sun_ 207), gluck here demonstrates ample talent at all three. let me rather turn to the central stanzas of "paradise" and the final poems of the section, "child crying out" and "snow," for here we see the slow introduction of the father as a loving other in his own right. once "remote," a hero in disgrace, he approaches; and the poet admits an identification: in some ways, my father's close too; we call a stone by his name. ..................... they always said i was like my father, the way he showed contempt for emotion. they're the emotional ones, my sister and my mother. (54-55) we have, perhaps, suspected this deep congruence all along. the poet's distance, her sense of deprivation, made her seem her father's daughter as much as or more than the sister named as such back in "lover of flowers." [28] but is "contempt" quite the right word here? "child crying out" suggests that something else is at stake, a basic resistance to the claims of emotion to overwhelm the distance between individuals, to offer immediate access to the soul. this poem, an answer to adrienne rich's "night pieces: for a child," refuses to assume a mother's fundamental maternal connection with and insight into her child. rich mourns her son's slipping away into patriarchical terrors; here, the son has never been close enough to keep: the night's cold; you've pushed the covers away. as for your thoughts, your dreams- i'll never understand the claim of a mother on a child's soul. does she mean the "claim" on his imagination, the way one's mother slips into dreams as abject "death's head, sphinx, medusa" (rich 67)? or, conversely, the claim to understand (*a mother knows*)? though the former sticks in the back of our minds, the latter seems gluck's explicit quarrel: so many times i made that mistake in love, taking some wild sound to be the soul exposing itself- but not with you, even when i held you constantly. you were born, you were far away. whatever those cries meant, they came and went whether i held you or not, whether i was there or not. (56-57) the son's sleep, like the father's face turned away, stands for a certain "condition of love" (22), of accepted alterity, "a basic separation that nonetheless unites" (kristeva, _tales_ 90).^7^ it hints that the absence of "signs of affection" on either side of the grave won't necessarily mean that the loved one, unlike the old admirer, "can't feel" (41). did the father, though we've never seen it, therefore love? and how would we, or the poet know? [29] "if [the soul] speaks at all," "child crying out" ends, "it speaks in dreams." fair enough: and in "snow," the last poem of this fourth group, we get our first dream-vision (though it's phrased as a memory) since the moon in "parados." poet and father are on their way to new york, waiting for a train.^8^ "my father liked / to stand like this," the poet recalls, "to hold me / so he couldn't see me," but so that she can stare into the world he sees, "learning / to absorb its emptiness" (58). a father, then, of both connection and withdrawal, he stands implicated in the narcissistic emptiness of the subject split off from maternal plentitude, the disjunction from the earth we've watched the poet suffer. (the snow's not falling but whirling, we notice, borne up against gravity.) their love, for we edge into calling it that, rests on the same disengaged commonality we saw between mother and son, the sort frank bidart calls "the love of / two people staring / / not at each other, but in the same direction" ("to the dead"). a love, it happens, closer to that shared gaze on the good that socrates offers than to aristophanes's erotic myth--though here the good stays elusive, out of sight, lost in the empty white-out of the flurries. "terminal resemblance" to "celestial music" [30] the final sequence of _ararat_, these five poems hover and turn from portrait to portrait without anxiety, with the sense of at last accomplishing that "promise, project, artifice" kristeva sees as integral to writing as love, mercy, transformation, forgiveness (_black sun_ 216-17). we get a last clear look at father and mother, father and daughter, daughters and mother, sisters and children, along with two poems that stand out from the rest: a nod to aesthetic religion in "lament," and the turn to religious aesthetics of "celestial music." rather than treat each poem individually, as i've done so far, i will first explore the way these as a group echo and revise the themes and images of the book. "celestial music" deserves to be looked at alone, since it stands out from the rest as a %deus ex machina%, a tribute to love, to the third, as quite literally "a godsend" (_tales_ 40). [31] since the start of the book the father has been linked to time, the _times_--or, to be more accurate, the father's absence has marked time's failure to pass. in "terminal resemblance," a poem about the poet's last meeting with her father, we learn "he wasn't . . . pointing to his watch" as he waited for her, signalling not only that "he wanted to talk," but also certain relief from the earlier deathly, encompassing stasis. gluck hints at this return to mutability at the close of the poem as well. "*for a change*, my father didn't just stand there," she writes; "this time, he waved" (60, my emphasis). even the idea of immediacy is transformed in these last poems, appearing now in the mode of aesthetic appreciation, and not of numb, paratactic sequence: your friends the living embrace one another, gossip a little on the sidewalk as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze ruffles the women's shawls- this, this, is the meaning of "a fortunate life": it means to exist in the present. ("lament" 61-6) [32] words and phrases culled from earlier poems make these last five seem a final tally, a summing up. in the first section we read about gardens and flowers; here we see a "gardener's truck" (59). the grandmother-saint escaped suffering; so does the dying father (60). "it frightens" the mother, we read, "when a hand isn't being used" (60); the poet's sister wouldn't let her daughter walk with both hands "totally free" in "children coming home from school," a poem whose title is given to a second poem, the fourth of this group, where the "children" are again the poet and her sister. the poet's sadness over losing the mother's complete, swaddling attention has been visible between the lines from the first. at last it is named outright: "i continued, in pathetic ways, / to covet the stroller. meaning / all my life" (64). "amazons" plucks the word "end" from the all-woman scenes of "widows" and "confession" and runs it through revelatory changes: end of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots. everything else is gold--that's how you know the end of the growing season. .................................. my sister and i, we're the end of something. ................................... i can see the end: it's the name that's going. when we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language. that's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken. my sister and i, we're like amazons, a tribe without a future. i watch the children draw: my son, her daughter. (65) the father's name will be lost; the maternal tradition of sufficient, respectfully fighting pairs of daughters, too, will soon die out, written as it was in "soft chalk, the disappearing medium." [33] in such recapitulations _ararat_ comes to terms with its own ending, with the way that writing *finishes*, so unlike life. do we see here that "unease over the final, masterful accomplishment" kristeva sees as returning the writer to the need for forgiveness once again (_black sun_ 217)? that would perhaps explain the sudden entry of a "friend who still believes in heaven," one who "literally talks to god" in "celestial music." this poem, which in its sustained long lines and metaphorical resonance stands dramatically apart from the rest of the volume, snaps us back to the grander dimensions of the book's long quest to imagine a loving father, a third. for if the love of "primary identification" founds and figures both "greek %eros%--violent, destructive, but also platonically ascending towards the ideal," and "the christian %agape% which, emanating from the other, descends upon me" ("joyce" 168), why not identify with a father in heaven, that god who is, or so we're told, love?^9^ [34] such a turn seems at first promised by the poet's praise of her friend, and the effects of her faith. "on earth, she's unusually competent," we learn. "brave, too, able to face unpleasantness" (66). she's like a mother, an "adult"; in the poet's dreams she's a lecturer on love. ("when you love the world," she admonishes, "you hear celestial music.") but a turn to on-high would belie, not enrich, the poet we've come to know; and, indeed, identification is extended only horizontally, on the human axis of friendship. if she starts by asserting her differences from the friend, as with her sister, similarities follow: it's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact that we're at ease with death, with solitude. my friend draws a circle in the dirt.... she's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her. we're very quiet. it's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering- it's this stillness we both love. (67) the success of the volume, not simply as a group of poems, but as a progress from loss, depression, the narcissistic wound, through "the narrow pass of identification with flawless ideality, loving fatherhood" (_black sun_ 216), into the formal aesthetic accomplishment of an ending, can be measured in the believability of these lines. though different from the rest of the volume they must not seem out of place or make us frown in vexation at the poet's claim to be "at ease" at last. for them to work we must have been prepared to see a metaphor for the poet's own structures and symmetries in the friend's dirt circle, that "composition" that surrounds a torn and dying (read: "wounded") caterpillar. "the composition / fixed," she writes; and the heavy stress of an enjambment forces us to pause, to read "fixed" as *healed*, made "whole" and "beautiful." fixed means "still" as well, and in "the stillness we both love" the twinborn but separated longings for stillness and new life of earlier poems are rejoined. where it once implied a stunned fixity in the present, or a desperate identification with the dead in order to restore a mother's love, stillness here suggests the reassurance of completion, the satisfactions of order and limit, an artist's "it is finished" (if not christ's). a stillness bound up in the accomplishment of love, she suggests, telling over the word three times in the last two lines. "it's this stillness that we both love. / the love of form is a love of endings" (67). [35] though it brings _ararat_ to conclusion, "celestial music" is not the last poem we read. that place belongs to "first memory": a reprise of "parados," a piece whose title suggests both that this memory delves as far back as the poet can and that she can now *truly* remember for the first time. on a first read through the book we come upon "first memory," not with a shock (as with "celestial music") but with a shiver at its spare, discursive, chilly, familiar style. the poem is short enough to quote in its entirety: long ago, i was wounded. i lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was- for what i was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, i thought that pain meant i was not loved. it meant i loved. (68) we can at last gloss those critical, open-ended phrases on which the poem ends and folds back on itself. "for what he was": quiet, affectionate only at a distance, too hard to idealize, to imagine as the object of mother's desire. "for what i was": quiet, distant, longing to picture myself once again the sole focus of care, more like my father than i could bear to admit. but why does the poem not end with a perfect reversal, with "it meant i *was* loved," which is equally true? why does the pain mean she was a lover, too? [36] in part, and on the book's own terms, this ending includes and implies my suggested alternative. if pain meant i loved, then i loved my family; which means i wasn't incapable of love, as i thought my father was; which means, since i'm like him, that he wasn't incapable of love either; which means that he loved mother and me, and so was in pain, was wounded too; which means that under all the relations in the book, painful or strained, we might find love, denied or distorted, as well. and, indeed, if we look beyond _ararat_, place it in a broader context, we find a further sanction for this reading. in the final chapter of _tales of love_, kristeva records her sense of the narcissistic crisis in which we find ourselves. we are, as a chapter title claims, "extraterrestrials suffering for want of love": as cut off from the earth as the poet of "parados," lacking "the secular variant of the loving father" to ensure our identifications, our ability to "elaborate primary narcissism," to love and be loved in return (374). ("the unsure narcissist," we might paraphrase robert creeley, "is not good for himself."^10^) "because today we lack being *particular*," she writes, "covered as we are with so much abjection, because the guideposts that insured our ascent toward the good have been proven questionable, we have crises of love. let's admit it: lacks of love" (7). [37] in answer to this crisis kristeva offers an aesthetic antidote: "the imagination" (381), which can "turn the crisis into a *work in progress*" (380), with no pretension to finality or ultimate satisfaction. "let it [the self] remain floating, empty at times, inauthentic, obviously lying," she proclaims near the end of _tales of love_. "let it pretend, let the seeming take itself seriously, let sex be as unessential because as important as a mask or a written sign--dazzling outside, nothing inside" (380). but this is james merrill's solution, not that of gluck, who may stun but rarely dazzles. the love elaborated in _ararat_ weathers the postmodern condition, with its lack of faith in the old codes of romance, less by insisting on the open endedness of kristeva's "work in progress" than by reaching out to affiliate itself with a stern, more potentially moralistic tradition of love-theory: one in which love is defined (against desire) as that which "embraces the other's limited and imperfect reality, and invites and accepts the binding and defining embrace offered by the other" (mcwhirter 6). such love, which "accepts, in other words, its own finitude" and resigns the platonic quest for wholeness and reunion in favor of the bittersweetness of "the attainable" (7, 197), accords with gluck's undeceived stance, and it sponsors the collection's final lines. the speaker, after all, has been "wounded" not only by the loss of the mother in her individuation, but by a series of more quotidian disappointments. she wasn't "child enough," and no one else was quite mother or father or sister enough either. that such disappointment is the inevitable "break up" of any idealizing relationship, freud and kristeva and popular culture will all testify, since at heart we are all men and women who love too much. [38] gluck's poetic success lies in the way she turns the plot of a donahue confession or an oprah winfrey show into memorable and particular verse, pressing her language to an antipoetic limit that marks, in some sense, her postmodernism as well. "compared to the media," as kristeva explains, whose function it is to collectivize all systems of signs, even those which are unconscious, writing-as -experience-of-limits *individuates*. this individuation extends deep within the constituent mechanisms of human experience as an experience of meaning; it extends as far as the very obscure and primary narcissism wherein the subject constitutes itself in order to oppose itself to another. ("postmodernism?" 137-8) if we want to write love poems, gluck's book suggests, we have to start by pressing back into the depths behind our affections--not just to the power dynamics of a particular relationship, the culture it plays itself out in, or of the family romances that provide its local habitation and its names, but to what is at once our most and least private aspect: the way these construct the writing subject itself. _ararat_ takes us down to rock-bottom; it is a *foundational* text more than a *therapeutic* one. "long ago i was wounded," the poet's choral ode begins, and she dares us as readers not to join in. this is not, i suppose, such a bleak rock song. "there is no imagination," writes kristeva, "that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy" (_black sun_ 6). yet "if it lives," as she adds elsewhere, "your psyche is in love" (_tales_ 15). ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ see freud, 139; see also chapter four of _the ego and the id_, %passim%, and the final passages and footnote to _beyond the pleasure principle_. ^2^ my thanks to my ucla colleague brenda kwon for pointing out this connection. ^3^ i think here less of the work of nancy chodorow herself than the use of it made in homans, for example, 1-39 %passim%. ^4^ for a dissenting view, at least so far as daughters are concerned, see homans 11-15. for a persuasive argument that we are always already differentiated, and that mother-child union is a nostalgic fantasy not borne out by studies of child development since the 1980s, see benjamin 16-21. ^5^ "the artist takes himself," kristeva writes, "not for the maternal phallus but for that ghostly third party to which the mother aspires, for the loving version of the third, for the preoedipal father." ("joyce" 174). ^6^ i make this maternal connection because the mother in "appearances" "ministered" to her children, though with unforseen and divisive consequences. ^7^ kristeva likewise speaks of "the abyss between the mother and the child" in the lefthand column of the split essay, "stabat mater." "what connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? my body and...him. no connection. nothing to do with it. and this, as early as the first gestures, cries, steps, long before its personality has become my opponent. the child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other" (_tales_ 254-55). ^8^ or so i now normalize the scene. on first reading, i saw them walking along the tracks, watching "scraps of white paper / blow over the railroad ties" in a way that calls to mind the opening of elizabeth bishop's "chemin de fer." "alone on the railroad track / i walked with pounding heart. / the ties were too close together / or maybe too far apart" (bishop 8). ^9^ such a heavenly identification may be implicit in forgiveness, which, kristeva writes in _black sun_, "assumes a potential identification with that effective and efficient merciful divinity of which the theologian speaks" (216). ^10^ i misquote creeley's "the immoral proposition" (creeley 125). ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited benjamin, jessica. _the bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination_. new york: pantheon, 1988. bidart, frank. _in the western night: collected poems: 1965-1990_. new york: farrar, strauss, giroux, 1990. bishop, elizabeth. _the complete poems 1927-1979_. new york: farrar, strauss, giroux, 1983. cramer, steven. review of _ararat_. _poetry_ (nov. 1990): 101-106. creeley, robert. _the collected poems of robert creeley: 1945-75_. berkeley and los angeles: u of california p, 1982. emerson, ralph waldo. _essays and lectures_. new york: library of america, 1983. freud, sigmund. "instincts and their vicissitudes." _papers on metapsychology: the standard edition of the complete psychological works, vol. xiv_. ed. and trans. james strachey. london: hogarth press, 1953. gluck, louise. _ararat_. new york: ecco, 1990. homans, margaret. _bearing the word: language and female experience in nineteenth century women's writing_. u of chicago p, 1986. kristeva, julia. _black sun_. trans. leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia up, 1989. ---. "joyce 'the gracehoper' or the return of orpheus." _james joyce: the augmented ninth_. ed. bernard benstock. new york: syracuse up, 1988. ---. "postmodernism?" _bucknell review: romanticism, modernism, postmodernism_. ed. harry garvin. lewisburg: bucknell up: 136-141. ---. _revolution in poetic language_. trans. margaret waller. new york: columbia up, 1984. ---. _tales of love_. trans. leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia up, 1987. mcwhirter, david. _desire and love in henry james: a study of the late novels_. cambridge up, 1989. mitchell, stephen. _the book of job_. san francisco: north point press, 1987. nietzsche, friedrich. _the birth of tragedy and the case of wagner_. trans. walter kaufman. new york: vintage, 1967. rich, adrienne. _the fact of a doorframe: poems selected and new, 1950-84_. new york: norton, 1984. � rosenberg, 'dynamic and thermodynamic tropes of the subject in freud and in deleuze and guattari', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-rosenberg-dynamic.txt archive pmc-list, file rosenber.993. part 1/1, total size 60607 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- dynamic and thermodynamic tropes of the subject in freud and in deleuze and guattari by martin e. rosenberg visiting assistant professor department of english texas a&m university mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by martin e. rosenberg, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [o]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent in their own theory. --thrasymachus of chalcedon introduction [1] in their recent work _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_ (1991), gilles deleuze and felix guattari make explicit the role that the concept of chaos plays in their representations of subjectivity, with respect to philosophy, science and the arts.^1^ i wish to exfoliate the chaotic in deleuze and guattari's works, for their analysis of the ways in which chaos may be used referentially in philosophy, science and the arts in this later work may interfere with readers' attempts to grapple with manifestations of chaos as a referent in their earlier collaboration, the two volumes subtitled _captialism_ and _schizophrenia_: _anti-oedipus_ and _a thousand plateaus_. one way to make visible deleuze and guattari's recourse to the chaotic in these two works is to examine the role that particular physics tropes play in their representation of subjectivity, especially since the tropes that model the subject in these two works engage agonistically with those that model subjectivity in the works of sigmund freud.^2^ [2] the descriptions of human consciousness in freud and in deleuze and guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the "ground" for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists' representations of subjectivity. we will need to notice particularly the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes--at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the mid-twentieth century. as we will see, these two periods are interesting because they represent moments when the term entropy, a concept describing the amount of disorder in a physical system, has very different meanings- in physics, and in the cultural matrix as well. in the mid to-late nineteenth century, entropy (in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics) refers largely to terminal processes of disorder for a physical system; since the nineteen-sixties, however, entropy (in the context of non equilibrium thermodynamics) came to be understood as an initial condition enabling greater order and complexity in a physical system. since freud draws on the first version of entropy as referent, and deleuze and guattari draw on the second version of entropy as referent, two questions emerge: can we say that freud and deleuze and guattari are making the same claims for tropes of chaos (or entropy, or disorder) as grounds for their contending representations of subjectivity? if so, what can we then say about the stability of such claims for a correspondence between laws of physics and the forces and processes of human consciousness? in order to confront these questions, we should first examine trope theories that might illuminate the problematic construction of correspondences. physics and tropes [3] the problematic of the subject becomes the problem of representation when the particular forms of representation of the subject, such as tropes, come into question. this problem of representation then requires a rhetoric of the tropes of subjectivity that will discover the relationships among particular tropes representing specific functions of consciousness, such as the dreamwork, or the oedipal scenario. [4] by the term trope, we may refer to what hayden white calls the irreducible nature of metaphor in imaginative and realistic discourses. a trope is a turn of phrase that links an abstract concept to the physical world, and as such, establishes a correspondence between the physical world and human ideation. according to white, tropes are "inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences" (white 1-2). in other words, for white, every trope is a fiction, the authorship of which all writers must deny, in order to preserve their claim for the truth-content of their discourse. but even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. thus, for the sake of this inquiry, we must first question the motives for such recourse, not only in psychology, but in theories of the trope as well. [5] jacques derrida argues that tropes (or one particular form, metaphors) function explicitly as the onto-theological manifestation of a "white mythology" that tolerates a "provisional loss of meaning" to arrive at "what is proper" (derrida 45). tropes demonstrate their truth-content by grounding discourse in the phenomenal world, with the given that there must be some essential connection posited between word and thing: like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its own truth and its presence. nature always finds in it its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself. (derrida 45) [6] yet derrida argues that metaphors serve both to "menace" and to function as "accomplices." they menace by the way that the connection between name and thing is subject to "wear and tear" (13): by the tendency of tropes to wear themselves out like coins through the "repetition" of use; and by tearing that precise link between name and thing through deviation, or tropical "divergence" (71). [7] derrida associates this precise link with "physis," or the claim for natural law, a law that apparently must decay, "wear and tear" through time--as implied by the nineteenth-century conventional understanding of the thermodynamic term entropy as a kind of end-game. both jacques derrida and harold bloom have noticed that interest in tropes and in entropy coincided in the middle of the nineteenth century (derrida 60-74; bloom 83-105). yet, according to derrida, tropes are also accomplices, allowing for "an inevitable detour," in order to maintain "a horizon of circular reappropriation of the proper sense" (derrida 73). that sense, of course, remains dependent upon the fiction that there lies an essential connection between word and thing: these tropes imply a correspondence between a pull or force among planets in a solar system, and with the sun; or, among electrons swarming around a nucleus and the energized link among the tropes in a system of signification, with the significance that it surrounds. as opposed to the borrowing of thermodynamic tropes to describe the irreversible decay of an individual sign, here systems of signification are described with reference to the reversible laws of dynamics--newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. here one finds the conceit that the irreversible "decay" of individual signs can be arrested by situating signs in a system governed by stasis, or inertia. after all, it was friedrich nietzsche who said: "what is truth? inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of physical force, etc." (_will to power_ 291). [8] derrida's deconstructive agenda involves demonstrating both the instability of individual signs, and the contradictory traces always present within the inertia of a system of signification. william r. paulson has argued that derrida draws on information theory, on the relationship between entropy as formulated in physics, and "noise" in the channel between sender and receiver as a problematic (1988, 26-28, 92-99). in this view, derrida seeks therefore to subvert philosophical discourse by foregrounding the noise present in every possible message. more recently, alex argyrous explores derridean discourse by formulating a theory of order which emerges out of the noise generated by his tactics, thus presenting a positive gloss on what derrida's critics have argued constitutes a nihilistic agenda (1991, 57-85). yet hans kellner identifies the agenda of all tropical relations metaphorically (!) with catastrophe theory, particularly with the relations established in the shift from one master trope to another, as suggested by vico's notion of "ricorso" (1981, 24-28). [9] within the field of trope theory, we can demonstrate the instability of a tropical system, based as it is on "circular reappropriation," by observing trans-disciplinary borrowings. in recent theories of rhetoric, there has been a return to the four master tropes discussed by aristotle- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony--in order to ground trans-disciplinary borrowings.^3^ [10] both hayden white and frank d'angelo have asserted the primacy of the four master tropes from aristotle's _rhetoric_ to demonstrate the stability of certain cognitive structures beneath specific disciplinary formations, history and psychology. they argue that freud's mechanisms of the dreamwork--which would be useful to review here: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision--are their psychological equivalents. condensation, the process of fusing several elements or images into one, is equivalent to metaphorical identification; displacement, by which one idea, image or element "surrenders to another, signaling a shift in meaning and emotional intensity," is equivalent to metonymic displacement; representation, the "process of transposing ideas, feelings into symbols," is equivalent to synecdoche; secondary revision, which with the help of an analyst converts dream elements into comprehensive form through the intrusion of self-conscious distance, is equivalent to irony.^4^ [11] we may accept or reject d'angelo's more pointed defense of the continued study of classical rhetoric by positing (in cognitive psychology) an ontological ground for the four master tropes. still, and this is crucial, that rhetoric may supply tropes for clinical psychology, and that developmental psychology may provide tropes for rhetoric, indicates the potential circularity inherent in any attempt to ground tropes by recourse to other disciplines. for example, white becomes quite dependent upon a cultural application of freud's psycho-analytic approach when he claims that within a cultural field, schemes of tropes function "unconsciously" (white 13-20), thus circulating the grounds of his discourse between psychoanalysis and linguistics, with reference to the work of jacques lacan. white's key word for describing tropical function here is defense, and i am most directly interested in exploring the defensive posture implicit in the recourse to tropes from other disciplines. [12] as hayden white points out, harold bloom has taken the further, freudian step in pronouncing tropes "the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense" that, while directed "against literal meaning in discourse," must always assume that literal meaning is something possible (bloom 88). for bloom, however, literal meaning is "death," what would occur if electrons spun into the nucleus, or planets spiraled into the sun. bloom refers here, of course, to freud's life and death drives. thus, out of "survival," tropes form a reversible system of false signification that he compares to newtonian mechanics (93), or even to a chess game (96), both of which are premised on reversible laws. this suggests that even what bloom calls the romantic undoing [%kenosis%] of an existing tropical system marks merely the commitment to a "personalized countersublime" that itself then systematizes suddenly freed tropical patterns in order to avoid the "threat" of the literal meaning that is death (bloom 89). we have here a physics of romantic revolution, of private epistemic shifts, a physis of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the tropical approximations that constitute the limits of representation. [13] yet we must force bloom's influence theory into a further step that he would resist, by insisting that tropes "defend" an ideological as well as a psychological state, and thus that the disintegration of an accepted tropical field constitutes a public as well as a private event. scientists resort to tropes of cultural phenomena to make their explanations of physical forces and processes accessible; social philosophers, artists and psychologists resort to tropes from physical forces and processes in order to similarly explain cultural, aesthetic and psychological phenomena. this borrowing from other disciplines reveals, first, a consensual dependence upon a given set of assumptions about the laws governing physical or human phenomena to which these tropes refer; and second, a mutual complicity in suppressing the fictive nature of the tropes that are used. thus, physicists, philosophers, artists and psychologists betray their dependence on the fictive correspondence between the laws governing nature and the laws governing culture because it makes their thoughts intelligible. furthermore, this dependence points ultimately to an essentialist perspective underlying even the thoughts of those whose project is to demystify, to deterritorialize old systems of tropical approximations. we address, therefore, how the institution of the avant-garde functions in complicity with the dominant systems it seeks to destabilize. but, before discussing historical examples of this complicity in two avant-garde moments in the history of theories of the subject, freud's, and deleuze and guattari's, we should address motive more directly. [14] the problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing becomes complicated further by the relative status of each discipline in the cultural field. by this i mean that the borrowing of physical tropes by the arts, philosophy and psychology marks their marginalized position more than their cosmological reach. in contrast, the borrowing of cultural tropes (richard feynman's use of the chessboard to describe the laws governing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, for example) to illustrate physical laws extends mastery, which in turn reflects the domination of the sciences across the spectrum of social discourses. as michel serres writes of the poverty of literature: science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong minds--strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space. (1990, 4) [15] here, serres emphasizes the legitimating power as well as the fictiveness of tropes from physics, and we must recognize, when examining the internally contradictory use of these tropes, that the motive for constructing such correspondences lies with the will to power. the source of internal contradiction generated by the tropes themselves comes from an ideological difference, a struggle from within the discipline of physics itself. this struggle arises out of the difference between the precision possible with the time-reversible geometrical perspective usually associated with dynamics, and the statistically-approached contingencies of the time-irreversible perspective normally associated with equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. [16] here i am drawing on the works of ilya prigogine, particularly on his work to make visible an ideological war within the physical sciences, a war of what he calls "clashing doctrines," between time-reversible and time-bound models of physical processes. in this "war," time-bound theories are marginalized by time-reversible theories. prigogine's work in the physics of turbulent systems far from-equilibrium brought him the nobel prize in chemistry (1977), not physics. a further illustration of the marginal status of prigogine's own work comes from chaos theory, which was introduced to the public through james gleick's popular work, _chaos_. this work emphasizes the geometry of fractals without once mentioning ilya prigogine's works on self-organizing systems (gleick, 1990; 1984, 1-26 and 79-102). yet prigogine's work may provide the most help in confronting problems created by the ideological appropriation of tropes from physics by other disciplines.^5^ [17] we can situate the historical determinants of the construction of theories of subjectivity by identifying tropes from the very different conceptions of physical laws, identified here simplistically by the familiar terms dynamics and thermodynamics, as they are found in the works of freud and in the works of deleuze and guattari. [18] after discussing dynamics and thermodynamics, particularly with reference to the internal combustion engine, we will then limit discussion to the allusions to machinery in freud's description of dreamwork and of the unconscious; and to deleuze and guattari's description of human consciousness as an aleatory subject embedded in the schizo-fluxes of cultural machinery as a means of resistance to these machines of cultural signification. finally, we will address deleuze and guattari's transgressive yet fundamentally complicitous relationship with the freudian hegemony of the subject's representation. dynamics and thermodynamics [19] the mechanistic world-view of dynamics involves the study of matter and its interactions; that is, the dynamic view reduces natural events to simple laws that can explain the motion of planets, cannon ball trajectories, the movement of molecules and atoms, the interactions of sub atomic particles, even the time-lines of einstein's twins. crucial to the success of this view is the search for absolute precision in the description of these forces, in accounting for the history of, and in predicting the future of the systems upon which these forces work. this precision becomes actualized by the capacity of calculus to determine mathematically the time-line of any dynamic system by freezing time itself into an infinite series of still frames, thus tracing that system into the past or into the future at will. [20] this assumption of absolute certainty as the criterion for the success of physical investigations was challenged for the first time in the mid-ninetenth century by the second law of thermodynamics, equilibrium thermodynamics, or entropy: given any isolated system, that system moves in the direction of greater entropy or disorder. articulated further by boltzmann's order principle (given a closed system, that system will always choose the direction of greatest probability), this second law forces observers to recognize the roles that randomness and the irreversibility of time play in physical processes: a mazda miata is more likely to turn into a pile of rust then a pile of rust will turn into a mazda miata. most important, however, the state of any system is perpetually contingent until it arrives at its rest state or equilibrium. the precise predictions possible in charting a planetary system, or in plotting the recursive trajectories of comets, are impossible in the investigation of processes governed by thermodynamic laws. [21] in dynamics, therefore, we have precision and certainty in the prediction of the behavior of any system; in thermodynamics, we have only statistical probabilities that remain contingent until equilibrium or, in the case of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a steady-state is achieved. [22] in the design of the internal combustion engine, we have a relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics that illustrates through metaphor, first, the hegemonic domination of dynamics within physics, and second, freud's agonistic model of the subject as a dynamic equilibrium of (dynamic) drives forcefully modulating unconscious (thermodynamic) processes. [23] prigogine argues that as engineering became the context for the question of thermodynamic processes (mechanical, thermal or chemical), two constraints on the observation of those processes emerged. first, the classical method for accounting for every element in a system became replaced by statistical approximations called "macroscopic parameters." second, "boundary conditions" needed definition to account for the relationship between the system and its surroundings (1984, xxx). in engines, these referred, first, to the need for statistical analysis in order to predict the behavior of the energy utilized by the engine; and second, to the need to account for the active movement of that energy from one part of an engine to another, as well as the loss of energy from the engine altogether. [24] internal combustion engines require two systems, each with a different energy level, to accomplish work. if both systems can be the source of heat flow from hot to cold, then any engine is reversible in the dynamic sense. yet the second law also describes a universal tendency to erase thermal difference through diffusion, resulting in a limit to the utility of controlling heat to produce work. if engines depend upon the second law to do work, and yet have to fight the second law to do work, then two constraints occur: engines function inefficiently, and there is a limit to the amount of energy available. this does not mention the threat to the integrity of the mechanical system that friction produces, as well as threats created by imperfections in the dynamic system itself: there are limits to precision even in the manufacturing of the parts for the engine. [25] thus, the industrial revolution brought about a war of domination by applying the principles of dynamics to mechanical dissipative structures against the inefficiencies that plague those systems. these inefficiencies are due, in turn, to processes governed by the same law of thermodynamics that enable work to be generated by dynamic machines in the first place. in the nineteenth century, the contradictions inherent in the application of dynamic systems and thermodyanmic processes culminates in a world view, best described by lord kelvin, that the universe itself tends toward the degradation of mechanical energy. as prigogine notes: this world is described as an engine in which heat is converted into motion only at the price of some irreversible waste and useless dissipation. effect-producing differences in nature progressively diminish. the world uses up its differences as it goes from one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, "heat death." (1984, 115-116) the philosophical implications for this irreversible process were not lost on the nineteenth-century mind. aside from the shift from a fascination with system and classification in the eighteenth century to the seeming domination of time over the imaginations of all the disciplines in the nineteenth century, the association of time with disorder, decay and death shaped the imaginations of social philosophers such as henry adams and oswald spengler well into the twentieth century. here we may situate freud's recourse to the discipline of physics in modeling the unconscious and the dreamwork, while anticipating the cultural as well as clinical implications of deleuze and guattari's polemical statement that "everything is a machine" (_anti-oedipus_ 2, 8). physics, hegemony and the freudian subject [26] if we examine the stages of the dreamwork- condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision--these stages seem similar to the stages of the function of a steam engine as it does work. condensation, or the mixing and fusing of disparate elements into one, corresponds to the initial activity of the chamber, the function of which is to mix coal or other fuel and oxygen before ignition produces heat. displacement, or the surrender of meaning and emotion as it is transferred from one image to another, corresponds to the generating of heat in the chamber after ignition, that is then channelled to the steam engine used to drive the machinery being worked. [27] representation, or the translation of those elementary ideas and feelings into symbols, corresponds to the commodity that can be manufactured by harnessing the process of conversion taking place in the secondary chamber of the machine. secondary revision, or the conversion of the elements of the dream into coherent form with the aid of a therapist, corresponds to the attachment of public value to the commodity created by this dream machine. the dreamwork, then, modulates the flow of desire through a process that transforms that desire into a system of valuation cultured, even manufactured (in process), with the aid of the therapist. [28] psycho-analysis, in this sense, becomes one of many cultural machines that control desire. furthermore, freud describes thought itself as the fundamental transformation: the sublimation of effulgent desire becomes by itself a threat to the health of the system that generates the desire in the first place. the purpose of thought itself, of which the dreamwork is only one manifestation, is to channel the libido, defined thus in thermodynamic terms, into acceptable behavior. as freud writes in _the ego and the id_: if this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy . . . . if thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive drives. (45) in other words, the entire subject-system, expressed in terms of the id, ego and superego, can be made to correpond to a mechanical dissipative structure, in which desire, as heat or entropy, motivates the system, and is modulated through drives for the purposes of psychological survival. [29] laplanche and pontalis have identified two different subject-systems in freud's works: the narcissistic ego/ideal-ego system; and the superego/ego-ideal system (1973, 144-5, 201-2). both systems modulate flows of sublimated energy-desire to different ends. one may inquire (as laplanche does, for example) into how these differing structures function in terms of the life and death drives respectively (1976, 8-24), especially if we remember bloom's conceit that the literalization of tropes brings "death" to the system-subject. what most concerns us, though, is that the function of the subject appears to be the control of energy-as-desire, to limit the representations of motivated thought by modulating motivated thought through systems that drive thought into acceptable forms. if forms are unacceptable, as in the case of disturbing dreams, the function of psychoanalysis, with reference to dreamwork, is to remodulate desire through a symbolic system navigated, and therefore mapped, in the dynamic, geometrical sense, by the therapist. to undertand how this system might work at the level of culture-dynamics, we should digress briefly to the work of peter stallybrass and allon white. [30] in _the politics and poetics of transgression_, stallybrass and white demonstrate, first, the disappearance of carnival forms in northern european (british) society, and second, the reconfiguration of the carnivalesque into the lowest and basest of social interactions, that become a threat to emerging middle-class values (1986, 1-26). in two chapters on freud, these authors demonstrate the function of the unconscious as the seat of the carnivalesque in the discourse of the bourgeoisie, the seat of dissolved hierarchies and vital turbulence that threatens the carefully modulated orderings of the european middle-class. they also demonstrate the institutions of control, associated with the family romance, that enforce the control of desire, seated in the id, through the triangulation of the oedipal scenario (149-91). as we have seen, the dynamic forces modulating the thermodynamics of desire for the individual, as a synecdoche, are now applied to the dynamic control of entropic forces throughout culture as a whole. [31] it will now be useful to negotiate a transition from freud's oedipus to the anti-oedipal strategies of deleuze and guattari by situating the public mechanisms at work at the level of individual neurosis and psychosis. [32] in deleuze and guattari's collaborative volumes, _anti-oedipus_ and _a thousand plateaus_, lies a nietzschean synthesis of the marxist theory of production (dominated, as it is, by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the industrial revolution), and by freud's theory of the libido. they do so through the conflated term "desiring-production." they state that the oedipal scenario structures desire in capitalist countries, and that psychoanalysis helps to enforce the restrictions imposed by that structure. also, they agree with the marxist formulation that capitalism reduces all human interactions to "commodity-relations of universal equivalency." as ronald bogue points out, capitalism therefore "deterritorializes" desire by exploding not only the limits created by the oedipal scenario, but the limits created by other traditional structures as well (1989, 88-92). yet capitalism also "reterritorializes" desire by forcing it to manifest itself through the network of commodity relations. while oedipus helps to focus human desire through the family, leaving its residue to wander the leveled field of "universal equivalency," capitalism also generates "schzophrenic fluxes," a mixing up of material and human refuse in the diffused heat of undifferentiated desire which, if all goes well, is redirected through the oedipal machinery. as trope, the "residue" of desire- "schizophrenic fluxes" of human and material refuse--makes sense when we recognize its thermodynamic origin, while tropes for capitalism and psychoanalysis take on the dynamic properties of machines modulating "fluxes." [33] deleuze and guattari then define clinical schizophrenia as the psychological equivalent of a thermodynamic state of equilibrium, the human refuse (institutionalized or not) in which the machinery of oedipus, and even the more primal subject-structures, have been overthrown. their project is to build a psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics that valorizes the schizo-flux. they provide a schizo-analysis of the multiple cultural machines of desiring-production, and a program for resistance to those machines. [34] deleuze and guattari's program for resistance lies in two related tropes for thought and action: the nomad and the rhizome. representing subjective and cultural contingency on the one hand, and spontaneous aggregation of contingent subjective and cultural formations on the other, these terms constitute a theory of self-organization: the nomad and the rhizome have explanatory power across the human sciences: the writings of kafka, the contingencies and collectivity of jazz performance, pynchon's tristero postal subculture, the multiple human formations of the dance troop pilobolus (itself a name for a rhizome), the "cells" of the kuwaiti resistance. physis, nomos and the "grounds" for subjectivity in deleuze and guattari [35] first of all, it should be clear that deleuze and guattari merely valorize the heat-energy fluxes (limited by freud to the chamber of the subject-machine as dissipative structure) over the machine itself: they argue for the sustained play of entropic thought and action, as that play may exist independent of the machinery that depends upon entropy to produce work and controls the chaos that seems necessarily to pose a threat to the system itself. up until this point we have been discussing entropy as an end-game phenomenon, but it is precisely prigogine's work, over the last thirty years, on processes of self-organization possible in chaos or turbulence, that may provide a model for how deleuze and guattari's answer to freud is not merely destructive, but nihilistic in the affirmative sense. we will then need to confront how their response to freud also remains complicitous in the rhetorical sense.^6^ [36] yet deleuze and guattari are sly, and they do not wish to seem invested in an essentialist correspondence between the laws of physics and the laws that may govern consciousness and culture. in the chapter from _a thousand plateaus_, entitled "1227: treatise on nomadology--the war machine," deleuze and guattari analize war by opposing chess and go as opposing game theories: "from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved" (1987, 34-52-3). yet this concept of war involves processes within the subject as well as the most violent manifestations of social dynamics. while deleuze and guattari state that "chess is a game of state, or of the court; the emperor of china played it" (352), we must also remember that chess tropes signifying systems that determine the socially-constituted subject, with rigid rules governing identity. go pieces, on the other hand, "have only an anonymous, collective or third-person function," with "only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations" (353). the properties of go involve not semiotic precision but strategic flows that obey not cause and effect, as with chess, but dissemination that is contingent upon situation. they write, "it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival" (353). [37] the oppositions in the tropes generated by their analysis of these two games are useful for our purposes: a closed system against an open system; precise identity against the anonymity of numbers; determined trajectory of the pieces against contingent dissemination; fixed function against virtual potential. clearly, these tropes from chess and go draw respectively on the opposing models of pysical forces and processes, the dynamic and the thermodynmic. [38] we should note that by opposing the "'smooth' space of go against the 'striated' space of chess," deleuze and guattari make the distinction between the "nomos of go against the state of chess, nomos against polis" (353). by opposing %polis% to %nomos%, they imply that chess is premised upon %physis%, or natural law, while go is premised upon %nomos%, or law agreed upon by convention. in their discourse, go is valorized over chess in order to valorize %nomos% over the state's claims for %physis%. deleuze and guattari assault the assumptions of natural law, proposing their avant-garde social philosophy in order to demystify the state. they do so by denying the correspondence between the laws of nature and the laws describing forces governing culture (%physis%). in their discourse, the laws of nature refer specifically to classical mechanics, and especially to the chess tropes used by richard feynman to describe the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and by saussure to describe the laws governing signification.^7^ [39] but in using the game of go as a source of tropes, deleuze and guattari must make recourse to physis themselves by valorizing contingency and aggregation as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action. these concepts refer respectively to the initial conditions necessary for thermodynamic processes (contingency as a condition of freedom), and to one possible behavior for physical systems governed by those processes (prairie grassroots as a collectivity of blades of grass; slime mold as an aggregation of unicellular nomads). [40] we can trace fairly precisely a genealogy of concepts related to equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics in gilles deleuze's earlier works, indicating his debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of chaos or disorder that provide the tropical grounds for his theory of subjective and collective resistance to cultural machinery. in _nietzsche and philosophy_ (1962, 83), deleuze describes nietzsche's eternal return as the return to difference, not sameness, an analysis of the contingent dimension of cultural systems and human consciousness affirming for any physical system, and, by implication, any human subjective or cultural system, the always-already contingency of past and future as it is reformulated in every present moment. this seems, in turn, to indicate a reformulation of boltzmann's order principle, first defined in deleuze's earlier _bergsonism_ (1966, 1988). in this work, deleuze defines bergson's theory of creative evolution as a dialectic between contingent duration as "pure becoming" and the memory of a system engaged by %elan vital% or a physical/metaphysical principle of desire, a dialectic explored with remarkable subtlety in his recently translated _difference and repetition_ (1968; 1993, forthcoming), particularly when repetition becomes a referent for pathology applicable both to the individual isolate and to the cultural field. the specific applications of these concepts--of the eternal return and of contingent duration as becoming to human subjectivity and to the forces and processes of culture--lead to the nomad, and to nomad thought ("nomad thought" 1973, 1985). this is true as well of the passages on becoming as an initial condition for schizophrenia in _the logic of sense_ (1969; 1990). this genealogy, in turn, helps to locate in deleuze's corpus, as well as in his collaboration, a continuous commitment to the concept of an intense, irreversible and irresistible impetus underlying the relational grids superimposed upon the subject by various visible and invisible cultural machines, machinery that produces aesthetic objects such as cinema (see _cinema i_ [1983, 1986] and _cinema ii_ [1985, 1989]), or fiction (_proust and signs_ [1964, 72]; _kafka: toward a minor literature_ [1975, 1986]). and it is in _the logic of sense_ that deleuze first comes to terms with the cultural as well as clinical implication of schizophrenia as a theory of subjective and cultural chaos (1-3, 82-93). with the help of felix guattari, deleuze offers in _a thousand plateaus_ an extended meditation on the role of becoming as a form of resistance (232-309), a role recognized in brian massumi's recent reading of the two-volume _capitalism and schizophrenia_.^8^ [41] but what interests us further in this passage on game theories of war are the attempts to disguise the nature and function of the system of tropical oppositions that i have demonstrated are crucial to deleuze and guattari's representations of subjectivity. we can find other examples of oppositions disguising a recourse to physis. [42] deleuze and guattari's recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems grounded in contingency and multiplicity, permeable membranes instead of rigid lines, enables them to articulate their program against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their own affiliations with the claim for physis: a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. the tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. the tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and...and...and...." (_a thousand plateaus_ 25) [43] here we may find, hidden in this parable of two opposing "organic" tropes (the arboreal against the rhizomatic), the implicit reference to the structures of dynamics against the processes of thermodynamics--the definitive static, vertical structure of the tree versus the open conjunction of the spontaneous aggregation of wandering cells into a weaving of roots constructed by simple addition. chess and go, tree and grass--sedentary structure and flows of openness: at the center of deleuze and guattari's writing machine lies a programmatic commitment to one side of the ideological opposition between dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as a complicitous commitment to ground their discourses in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the dominance of our machine age. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ i'd like to thank ronald bogue for pointing out the crucial role of chaos theory in this work and its relevance to this essay. an extension of the lines of inquiry pursued in this essay will serve as the springboard for a panel on chaos theory and subjectivity in the works of gilles deleuze and felix guattari at the 1993 modern language association, with the following essays: my "chess and go: the physis/nomos debate in deleuze and guattari's game theory of war"; william r. paulson, "self-organization and figures of resistance"; and ronald bogue, "the micropolitics of the fractal fold." ^2^ this requires an extension of the concept of chaos, as it is currently employed, to include an earlier theory of disorder associated with nineteenth-century entropy theory. we can suggest such a connection through the works of the contemporary physicist ilya prigogine, whose particular approach to chaos theory draws on a genealogy that begins with those nineteenth-century physicists working in thermodynamics, and whose work is central to my argument. ^3^ one exception has been george lakoff, who, by drawing on generational grammar as well as on cognitive psychology, argues not only that all conceptual systems are metaphorical, but that the systems of human knowledge that depend upon these metaphors are grounded in the biology of cognition. expanding beyond the four tropes, he argues that even the most abstract systems from any discipline are dependent upon spatio-temporal metaphors. lakoff claims that these spatio-temporal metaphors are not arbitrary constructions, but function systematically and have universal status, precisely because they are rooted essentially in the biological fact of a complex organic orientation determined by gravity, by the perception of up and down, of inside and outside, of near and far (lakoff 3 24, 56-68). but lakoff's tactical representation of those grounded categories of metaphors in terms of maps remains problematic because using maps implies a structuralist methodology. in other words, despite lakoff's claims that there may be a "natural" order to metaphors, his use of maps involves the embrace of a conflicting assumption, which of course can be traced to saussure's argument that signs are, for the most part, constructed arbitrarily. ^4^ d'angelo's brilliant demonstration of the seemingly arbitrary correspondence between dreamwork and the master tropes of classical rhetoric requires a further negotiation. specifically, d'angelo shifts his fascination with the function of tropes in freud's account of the process of dreaming toward the discipline of developmental psychology by demonstrating that these tropes also correspond to the four stages of cognitive development as described by piaget (1987, 37, 36). in fact he argues elsewhere, as lakoff does, that the master tropes of aristotle are similarly grounded in human cognition; that is, rhetoric itself, as the science of inquiring into the available means of persuasion, has ontological status in the deep structures of human cognition, structures that can be understood developmentally (1982, 105-117) and in fact may be described with reference to theories of evolution such as that of pierre de chardin. another source for this kind of grounding comes from gerald edelman, whose _bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind_ grounds the work not only of george lakoff, but of mark turner and mark johnson as well. another example of the dangers inherent in cross-disciplinary borrowings comes from mark turner's _reading minds: the study of english in the age of cognitive science_. turner suggests that contemporary theory has led to a dead end in english studies; he considers their discourses suspect because of their complexity and inaccessibility. calling contemporary theory "ungrounded bootstrapping" and "fragmented," turner argues that "contemporary theory fails to connect with the full human world to the extent that it treats objects in literature that can be seen only by means of the theory: in that case, if the theory vanishes, its objects vanish" (4). turner argues for humanistic studies grounded in schemes and tropes that are working metaphors in the physical world. he grounds his systematic exploration of the matrix of schemes and tropes by resurrecting classical stasis theory: "image schemas to structure our understanding of forces," in other words, through ordered forms or geometric structures. what makes turner's polemic so astonishing is its deliberate ignoring of a new paradigm in cognitive science that bears some relationship to the chaos theory discussed in this essay: emergence. instead of connecting cognitive science and english studies through reference to geometric schemes and tropes organized by an implied and unified subjectivity, one could pursue such an interdisciplinary connection by postulating a human cognizing subject that has no unity but the unity that it perceives in itself is a fiction constructed to encompass all the heterogeneity of cognitions occurring. "emergence" is a theory of self-organization that shares certain characteristics with prigogine's formulation of self-organizing systems theory. what turner misses so egregiously in his attack on contemporary critical theory is that maurice merleau-ponty, the crucial developer of this connectionist/emergence paradigm (dormant though it was for some twenty years after he first conceived of the possibility of human perception without autonomous consciousness), is responsible for certain grounding concepts that led to barthes', foucault's and others' assaults on naive concepts of authorships. turner therefore attempts to ground his assault on contemporary critical theory in one paradigm of cognitive science, ignoring (or ignorant of) how another, competing paradigm within cognitive science grounds the very theories he attempts to refute. ^5^ one must say at this point that not all physicists have been drafted into this war, only those that are interested in the ideological dimension of the formations of their discipline. prigogine's reputation within the human sciences also lacks unanimous support. for example, take n. katherine hayle's account of prigogine's position within the field of chaos studies, _chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science_ (91-114). yet if we apply prigogine's ideological categories to her own account, hayles demonstrates a clear bias toward a time-reversible, geometrical perspective on chaos, something she shares with james gleick. this becomes visible in her chapter on physics concepts in the fiction of thomas pynchon from her earlier _the cosmic web: scientific field theories_ and _literary strategies in the twentieth century_ (168-198). in addressing the concept of the "field" in physics, she ignores physics tropes that have to do with time irreversiblity and with self-organization. these tropes play a crucial role in the representation of subjectivity and cultural processes in that novel. see my "invisibility, the war machine and prigogine: dissipative structures and aggregation processes in the zone of gravity's rainbow," forthcoming in _pynchon notes_ 21. see also david porush's response to gleick's account of chaos, "making chaos: two views of a new science," in _new england review and breadloaf quarterly_ ("on science" volume xii, 4, summer, 1990, 427-442), which may also serve as a useful critique of hayles' own methodology. ^6^ by the term "complicity," i refer to the implied "contract" embraced by contending opponents to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely. i consider the opening quotation from thrasymachus a useful %arche% for this implication. baudrillard calls this seduction. see "on seduction," in _jean baudrillard: selected writings_, edited with an introduction by mark poster, 149-165. ^7^ ferdinand de saussure, _course in general linguistics_, 22; 88; 110; richard feynman, _the character of physical law_. for the most sustained treatment by an avant-gardist of the cultural implications of the game of chess, see marcel duchamp and h. halberstadt, _opposition et les cases congugee sont reconciliees_ (brussels: l'echiquier/edmund lancel, 1932). the opposition of the kings at endgame is described in terms of the dynamics of the reversible movement of the pieces, and of the thermodymamics of equilibrium, preserving the opposition and breach of equilibrium which precipitate the end of the endgame. at this stage, the kings remain complicitous in attempting to preserve the endgame for as long as possible by seeking only to avoid making a mistake. ^8^ see brian massumi, _a user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from deleuze and guattari_; citations with secondary references too numerous to count here. for a different reading of the significance of the concept becoming, as it indicates continuity between deleuze's work on bergson and his work on nietzsche, see michael hardt, _gilles deleuze: an apprenticeship in philosophy_, especially 19-25, 47-55. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited allison, david, ed. _the new nietzsche_. cambridge: mit press, 1985. argyrous, alex. _a blessed rage for order: deconstruction, evolution and chaos_. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1991. baudrillard, jean. _jean baudrillard: selected writings_. ed. mark poster. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 1988. bloom, harold. _a map of misreading_. new york: oxford, 1975. bogue, ronald. _deleuze and guattari_. london and new york: routledge, 1989. d'angelo, frank. "rhetoric and cognition: toward a metatheory of discourse." _pre/text_ 3, summer 1982, 105-119. ---. "prolegomena to a rhetoric of tropes." _rhetoric review_ 6.l, 1978, 32-40. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari. _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_ paris: les editions de minuit, 1991. ---. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. ---. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. robert hurley, mark seem, and helen lane. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983. ---. _the logic of sense_. trans. mark lester, charles stivale. ed. constantin v. boundas. new york: columbia, 1990. ---. _bergsonism_. trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. new york: zone books, 1988. ---. _difference et repetition_. paris: presses universitaires de france, 1968. ---"nomad thought." in the new nietzsche. ed. david b. allison. cambridge: mit press, 1985, 142-149. derrida, jacques. "white mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy." _new literary history_ vi, 1, autumn, 1974, 5-75. edelman, gerald m. _bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind_. new york: basic books, 1992. feynman, richard. _the character of physical law_. cambridge: mit press, 1967. freud, sigmund. _the ego and the id_. trans. james strachey. new york: w.w. norton. ---. _the interpretation of dreams_. trans. james strachey. new york: avon books, 1965. ---. _introductory lectures on psychoanalysis_. trans. james strachey. new york: w.w. norton, 1966. hardt, michael. _gilles deleuze: apprenticeship in philosophy_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. hayles, n. katherine. _chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science_. ithaca: cornell university press, 1990. ---. _chaos and order: complex dynamics in literature and science_. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991. ---. _the cosmic web: scientific field theories and literary strategies in the 20th century_. ithaca: cornell university press, 1984. kellner, hans. "the inflatable trope as narrative theory: structure or allegory?" _diacritics_ vol. 11, march, 1981, 14-28. laplanche, jean. _life and death in psychoanalysis_. trans. jeffrey mehlman. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1976. laplanche, jean, and j.b. pontalis. _the language of psycho-analysis_. trans. donald nicholson smith. new york: norton, 1973. massumi, brian. _a user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from deleuze and guattari_. cambridge: mit press, 1992. nietzsche, friedrich. _the will to power_. trans. walter kaufmann. new york: vintage, 1967. paulson, william r. _the noise of culture: literary texts in a world of information_. ithaca: cornell university press, 1988. porush, david. "making chaos: two views of a new science." _new england review and breadloaf quarterly_, "on science," volume xii, 4, summer, 1990, 427-442. prigogine, ilya. _from being to becoming: time and complexity in the physical sciences_. new york: w. h. freeman and company, 1980. prigogine, ilya, and isabelle stengers. _order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature_. new york: bantam, 1984. saussure, ferdinand de. _course in general linguistics_. ed. charles bally, albert sechehay. trans. wade baskin. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1976. serres, michel. "literature and the exact sciences." _substance: a review of theory and literary criticism_ 59, xviii, #2, 1989, 4. stallybrass, peter, and allon white. _the politics and poetics of transgression_. new york: cornell university press, 1986. turner, mark. _reading minds: the study of english in the age of cognitive science_. princeton: princeton university press, 1991. white, hayden. _metahistory_. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1973. ---. _tropics of discourse_. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1978. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------burke, 'response to deepika bahri's essay, "disembodying the corpus: postcolonial pathology in tsitsi dangarembga's "nervous conditions"', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-burke-response.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.195. part 1/1, total size 7910 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- response to deepika bahri's essay, "disembodying the corpus: postcolonial pathology in tsitsi dangarembga's "nervous conditions" by timothy burke department of english swarthmore college tburke1@cc.swarthmore.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] i enjoyed deepika bahri's "disembodying the corpus: postcolonial pathology in tsitsi dangarembga's 'nervous conditions'": it covered a lot of ground with skill and intelligence. [2] i had a few minor reservations about what i saw as the article's incomplete engagement with the ambiguous status of a "hybrid" in colonial society. bahri tends to portray processes like commodification as essentially completed and unambiguous forms of colonial domination and argues that nyasha (and by extension, the female subjects she designates) struggle to resist, however partially or problematically, these coherently hegemonic forces or institutions. similarly, though bahri acknowledges that characters like babamukuru are themselves caught up in colonial webs not primarily of their own making, she tends to follow the logic by which the subject who accumulates the largest number of race/class/gender/preference referents is the most authentic representative of the experience of being colonized, while others (like babamukuru) may serve, temporarily at least, as the avatars of domination. [3] the other problem here is not one that bahri alone struggles with, but something that haunts a great deal of analysis (and i include myself) when it attempts to describe what seem like common features in the making of colonial subjectivities and colonial cultures--bahri cites mohanty's critique of the "third world woman" construction approvingly, but in parts of this article, the analysis reads out dangarembga's "nervous conditions" in fairly sweeping or generalized terms as being about a colonial and female subject. make no mistake, this is an analysis that dangarembga herself is explicitly inviting with her choice of title and epigraph. [4] nevertheless, there are times where i thought the article could have benefitted from a closer engagement with the increasingly rich body of work on women in zimbabwe ... and cindy courville's article is good, but i think insufficient, given the specific historical context that scholars like elizabeth schmidt, teresa barnes and diana jeater can provide into the dynamics governing dangarembga's novel. [5] i also think that the ambiguity of "hybrid" figures and the cultural specificity of female african experience in zimbabwe would become clearer if this analysis looked more closely at the character of tambudzai alongside nyasha--tambu's narration frequently underscores the simultaneous desirability and terror of the female body offered to her by colonialism. ----------------------------------------------------------- response to timothy burke's letter by deepika bahri school of literature, communication, and culture georgia institute of technology deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu [1] i appreciated both your comments and their sensitive tone. with regard to your reference to the problem that haunts a great deal of analysis, let me begin by invoking the "double bind" in which postcolonial critics typically find themselves. you are right, of course, in identifying the propensity, to seek individuation and differentiation while arguing from essentialized and generalized positions as a "struggle." amen. critics suggest that postcolonial discourse is particularly prone to this trap because it needs simultaneously to define the subject (silent or invisible thus far), represent a situation that has hitherto been inadequately or falsely represented, and engage with the danger of neoorientalism and essentialism. the challenge of managing what are, in fundament, contradictory mandates, as you are aware, is a considerable one.* spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism," then, is one that a lot of postcolonial critics, including myself, adopt with varying degrees of uneasiness. on the one hand, the need to articulate modes and systems of oppression (certainly they exist and oppression exists) continues to be pressing; on the other, one has learned the dangers of essentializing, said oppression being one manifestation of them. my own response, perhaps woefully inadequate, has been to try to explore a. possibilities for and symptoms of agency; b. degrees of complicity and compliance, to upset, in some measure, the oppressor/victim, active/passive, colonizer/colonized dualities. focusing on nyasha allowed me to expose a complex of narratives that sometimes fostered a particularly (albeit not exclusively) oppressive subject position for women as well as to look for her own complicity within these narratives; my ultimate goals were to recognize her resistance and her agency as challenges to these narratives and to de-narrativize her as victim and powerless. [2] as for who racks up the most points on the scorecard of oppression, nyasha, you may agree, is hardly the most abject available victim--that victim cannot be represented because the means of self-representation are never available to him/her--but she is the most dramatic exponent of these narratives in the novel. this is a function, of course, of dangarembga's own objectives as is the centrality of babamukuru's role in sustaining both precolonial and colonial modes of domination. i agree that tambu's story might have played a more illuminating role in this essay as might the accounts of schmidt, barnes, and jeater, but i had hoped to make clear that commodification, rather than being an unambiguous form of colonial domination, was supported by a complex of precolonial and capitalist practices with which men and women complied in varying degrees. [3] the very bases of postcolonialism oblige one to accept this dual charge if one wishes to participate; the ethical and logical challenges implicit here have not escaped too many people--certainly you seem very sensitive to them yourself. the only defensible and sustainable response i have found is one which allows me to test the limits to which i can make claims based on essentialist (and often highly politicized) constructions. there comes a point, of course, when one finds that qualifications begin to paralyze. in an essay on "what is postcolonialism?" i have engaged this question to some extent (among others) but i cannot say that any particularly felicitous response has suggested itself. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------benson, 'permanence and change in the global village', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-benson-permanence.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.994. part 1/1, total size 11027 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- permanence and change in the global village by thomas w. benson edwin erle sparks professor of rhetoric pennsylvania state university t3b@psuvm.psu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by thomas w. benson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the economy, the technology, and the regulatory infrastructure of communications are undergoing rapid change, with unpredictable but probably important social consequences. in his brief and readable book, _scrambling for protection_, patrick garry proposes that policy and law guiding the developments in new media industries should be governed by a reconstructed understanding of the press clause of the first amendment of the united states constitution. the first amendment of the bill of rights addresses issues of freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition: congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. [2] garry argues that changes in media technology, as well as changes in the press and its public reception, render outmoded an existing patchwork of doctrines that have evolved through a historical process of case law and %ad hoc% regulation. newspapers have increasingly become monopolistic creatures driven by large conglomerates remote from the local communities they serve. journalism has changed from an organ of community information and opinion formation into a scandal-mongering, adversarial, investigative enterprise open to only a few professional journalists and a small band of experts. as a result of these changes in the press, the public, disenfranchised by journalism, is increasingly hostile and apathetic towards both the press and the political system. meanwhile, information delivery systems have blurred the distinctions among the largest media industries--press, phone, broadcast television, radio, cable--and there is every indication that further blurring is on its way. [3] garry proposes a way to solve the problems of the press and the public by guiding the coming changes in information technology from the perspective of the press clause of the first amendment. but this requires, as well, a re-definition of the press clause. according to garry, the most attractive feature of the new information technologies is that, with their vastly increased bandwidth and the new social practices they are tentatively exercising on the internet, media consumers have now become active--and interactive--media participants. if we could restore participation as a feature of journalism, argues garry, we could restore a sense of community, giving american media and government back to the people. how would such a change be brought about in a consistent way? here is where garry attempts his reconstruction of the press clause, arguing that the best features of the new media are precisely consonant with what the authors of the bill of rights meant to protect with the press clause. [4] garry argues that the bill of rights was not meant to protect the press, as such, and certainly not journalism as it has evolved over the past two hundred years, but rather that it was meant to protect certain practices and principles that were embodied in the american press of the late 18th century. garry distinguishes between freedom of speech and freedom of the press by arguing that "while the speech clause protects individuals in their act of speaking, the press clause protects the dissemination of those views and assures an open forum for communication in society and for democratic political dialogue" (115). the framers meant to protect three primary values: (1) the attainment of truth through the open clash of antagonistic views; (2) the promotion of democratic government by rendering the government more rational in its decision making and the public more energetic in the formation of political coalitions; (3) the promotion of democratic society through the development of social bonds that help to "create a common social world" (113). these values, writes garry, and not the press itself, were the objects of protection. [5] what follows from garry's redefinition of the press clause is that in developing law and policy for the changing media infrastructure, the courts and agencies should be guided not by any attempt to prefer the press as it now exists, and not by outmoded attempts to preserve distinctions among major media and media industries, but to regard all the agencies of dissemination as, essentially, "the press," and to enact policies that favor participation, democracy, community, and the open clash of political views. [6] there is much to admire in garry's argument, which i have attempted to summarize in a manner sympathetic to his views. but since so much is at stake, it might also be well to entertain some misgivings. [7] in redefining the press clause of the first amendment, garry resorts to a peculiar mixture of historically rooted original-intentionism and transcendental essentialism. on the one hand, garry appeals to a description of "the press" as it existed in late 18th-century america, where entry to the arena was relatively cheap for a printer-publisher, making for a crowded and diverse marketplace of ideas; where most of the content of a newspaper was partisan political argument submitted by readers; and where local interests played a strong role in defining press content. pressing the historical analogy between the 18th-century press and contemporary computer systems, garry claims that "essentially, colonial newspapers were bulletin boards for their communities; they were both subject to and responsive to the wishes of colonial society" (98). but garry wants to go beyond historical comparison--he wants us to accept as fixed and transcendent a set of values he abstracts from his description of the colonial press. [8] garry's distinction between "speech" and "press" is also troublesome, creating a neat and tidy dichotomy that overly limits what is called "speech" and that appears to leave out of the circle of protection a variety of communicative enactments that appear to be neither "speech" nor "press" as he defines them. when he assigns to "press" the whole range of institutions and activities having to do with dissemination, garry reduces "speech" to the act of individual utterance (or analogous symbolic action). but this reduction of speech to individual behavior fails the very historical test to which garry puts "press," since in the late 18th century "speech," including public speaking in churches, courts, legislatures, and public assemblies, was a major institutional formation that (with the press) enabled the creation of resistance, the fomenting of revolution, and the building of a constitutional democracy. freedom of speech protects not merely individual utterance but shared social communication. further, to reduce speech to individual utterance and to confine the protected zone of the press to that which promotes political community would seem to endanger the expanding range of freedom to disseminate communication of all sorts, including the arts, without having to justify their freedom on the basis of their right to communicate political ideas. speech and press are not so easily dichotomized on historical, theoretical, or constitutional grounds, nor would they remain, if reduced to garry's formulation, a sound basis upon which to protect communicative freedoms generally. [9] at many points, garry seems overconfident of his ability to penetrate matters of causation in the empirical realm. for example, though there are legitimate grounds to argue that the fourth-estate model of the press, in which professional journalists of the post-watergate era specialize in adversarial and investigative attacks on the political realm, contributes to political alienation, it seems unlikely that such changes can be attributed to a simple cause-effect model, and it seems even more unlikely that we could predict the results of adopting social policies designed to destroy the fourth estate. the complexity of the interactions of press, politics, and public, within the context of society as a whole groping its way through history, makes it very difficult to assign the sorts of cause and effect upon which garry's argument depends. garry's book abounds with such extravagant claims about causation, with abbreviated and facile historical analogies, and with extraordinarily optimistic projections of the ability of computer bulletin boards to salvage democracy. [10] despite these misgivings, garry's book is a brisk, optimistic, confident, and provocative work that deserves broad discussion and debate. garry is unwavering in his search for an open, democratic society; he does a skillful job of condensing a broad argument, sketching his evidence, and outlining the consequences of accepting his view. readers interested in the interaction of media and democracy will be prompted by _scrambling for protection_ to consider the challenges it poses to the construction of the media of the next century.the clarity, brevity (only 195 pages), and force of garry's bookmake it suitable for adoption as a text (though its $29.95 price tag will discourage some); the book seems well designed to stimulate spirited discussion. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------taylor, 'sound of the avant-garde', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-taylor-sound.txt archive pmc-list, file review-8.993. part 1/1, total size 16457 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the sound of the avant-garde by timothy d. taylor taylort@cc.denison.edu music department denison university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by timothy d. taylor, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: kahn, douglas, and gregory whitehead, eds. _the wireless imagination: sound, radio, and the avant-garde_. cambridge: mit press, 1992. [1] co-editors kahn and white describe their purpose in _the wireless imagination_ as an attempt to compile a collection of "first utterances" rather than a last word on the subject of abstract sound. but these utterances are so disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for something a little less pomo and a little more old-fashioned: coherence. kahn and whitehead write, "rather than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a hat, we have chosen to ground _wireless imagination_ in the more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic resonances among the above existing histories, strangely dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear" (x). [2] fair enough. some of the essays are indeed historical and useful (mel gordon's "songs from the museum of the future: russian sound creation (1910-1930)"; mark e. cory's "soundplay: the polyphonous tradition of german radio art"; christopher schiff's "banging on the windowpane: sound in early surrealism"). but what's wrong with theorizing? perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from sprawling theory: there's theory all over the place, and some of it makes little sense. a few essays indulge in the kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most ardent theory fetishist (charles grivel's "the phonograph's horned mouth"; gregory whitehead's "out of the dark: notes on the nobodies of radio art"; allen s. weiss's "radio, death, and the devil: artaud's _pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu_"). i do not mean to make a blanket attack against theoretical work. the problem with these essays is not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as non-significant as the abstract sounds they're ostensibly about. [3] probably the most interesting portions of _the wireless imagination_ are those that detail someone's response to sound. alexander graham bell worked with his father to try to find a written language for non-language sounds; the young bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to "say," "how are you, grandmamma?"; thomas edison believed that each person has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a machine to record these "life units" exiting dead bodies as they lay in their coffins. [4] nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose inventions. velimir khlebnikov, in "the radio of the future," presages muzak: "during periods of intense hard work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great buildings, these sounds ["la" and "ti," or the pitches a and b] can be broadcast by radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously" (21). khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by mel gordon on russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of zaum, alexei kruchenykh's "language" that incorporated all kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of schizophrenics. khlebnikov's zaum was meant to transcend all cultural barriers. additionally, khlebnikov invented a "universal alphabet," in which each phoneme (just 25 in all) causes a certain emotional response, and is linked synesthetically with a color. so the phoneme "p," for example, causes "explosion, release of pressure," and is related to the color black outlined in red. raymond roussel's _locus solus_ (1914) tells of a deboned head stored in a liquid called %aqua micans%. this head can be reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a connection with the head through the cone. it seemed as though life once more inhabited this recently immobile remnant of faces. certain muscles appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all directions, while others periodically went into action as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in particular moved with wild agility. (80) [5] still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to record sound make fascinating reading, even if the contributors' discussions of these attempts aren't always satisfying. alexander graham bell seemed to be fixated on the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life to working with his father on an attempt to notate in written symbols all kinds of sounds. co-editor douglas kahn offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by bell, describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this "language": the members of the audience were invited to make any sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my father. it was just as easy for him to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a sound that formed an element of human speech. volunteers were called to the platform, where they uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my father studied their mouths and attempted to express in symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had observed. i was then called in, and the symbols were presented to me to interpret; and i could read in each symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. i remember on one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. the audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. they recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test. (86) bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph but that edison beat him to it. if bell hadn't invented the telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the foregoing excerpt. [6] there are some lacunae. the aestheticization of abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook politics, or real people "on the ground." for example, co-editor kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from apollinaire's 1916 "the moon king" which is redolent of the kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting devices have facilitated (as jacques attali potently observes in his 1985 _noise_): the flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestrial life. each key activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. now we were hearing a japanese countryside. the wind soughed in the trees--a village was probably there, because i heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the spray of an icy waterfall. then another key pressed down, we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of new zealand, and i heard geysers spewing hot water. then this wonderful morning continued in sweet tahiti. here we are at the market in papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of new cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient greek. you could also hear the chinese selling tea, coffee, butter, and cakes. the sound of accordions and jew's harps. (23) the authors offer this excerpt as an example of apollinaire's "wirelessness," his interest in abstracted sound, but don't examine the issues of power and surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate sounds from all over the world. [7] but the most disturbing omissions concern gender. some of the material presented is so outrageous that it would seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving considerations of gender. for example, the first essay, charles grivel's "the phonograph's horned mouth," avoids inclusive language, and at one point adds "the other" gender as an afterthought, as though grivel at the last minute imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. like so much french theory, grivel's essay is quote proof: "symbol 'become life,' that is, substance, of a being articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently applied upon the listener" (33). grivel describes villiers del l'isle-adam's _l'eve future_ (1886), which features a "fictitious" edison who constructs a woman with two phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (an excerpt from del l'isle-adam's story follows grivel's essay.) grivel's consideration of marcel schwob's "la machine parler" of 1892 likewise skirts gender considerations. schwob's story tells of a frightening device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are played by a woman, who is, in grivel's words, "servant to the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous 'mechanical mouth'." another example is allen s. weiss's discussion of antonin artaud in his essay, "radio, death, and the devil." weiss, like most of the contributors to this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing vehicle--evidence of the "wireless imagination"--but does little more. his discussion of artaud's_il n'y a plus de firmament_ (c. 1932) describes "an archetypically artaudian figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical instrument": then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully, always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately strike with drumbeats. (297) so, what is the relationship between sound and gender in such passages? sound, it seems, can stand in for heterosexual sex, something that women "possess" and can "give" to men, or something that men violently take from, or beat out of, women. [8] all of the book's discussions of gender serve as yet another example of the ways in which western culture has mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case "abstract" sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence perpetrated against women. or ethnic minorities, or whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to attack. this flexible binarism of violence has worked all too well throughout western history, whether the target of the drumsticks was a woman's belly or rodney king's head. but it goes without comment in all of these essays. [9] more satisfying considerations of the gendered nature of sound as it appears in these pages might have been possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that sound, including musical sound, signifies: here's where the subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. hardly any musicologist deals with this issue (and most contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers are hopeless--unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned with social and performance issues), so it would seem that the range of professions practiced by the authors of these ten essays would include someone who would tackle the problem. all of the writers and thinkers whose work is chronicled in the pages of _the wireless imagination_ attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. but what does it "express," if anything? some of the primary texts under consideration address the issue. surrealist giorgio de chirico's _no music_ (1913), for example, begins, "music cannot express the essence of sensation. one never knows what music is about . . ." (162). de chirico and the other surrealists turned against music because of their disaffection with first erik satie (1866-1925) and then georges auric (1899-1983, a parisian composer of "les six"), and christopher schiff writes that the surrealist movement eventually attempted to do without music altogether. but de chirico's writings on musical signification go without close examination. arseni avraamov's _the symphony of sirens_ (1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: "of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization" (245). perhaps. the authors of these essays fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger cultural and political concerns and to the other arts. frances dyson's insightful essay--perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book--on john cage comes closest to such a discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he unfortunately discounts): that cage, in his emancipation of sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in western bourgeois culture, despite cage's systematic critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture. [10] the translations of historic texts that aren't often available are welcome; many of these form an important companion to umbro apollonio's _futurist manifestos_ (1973). included are de l'isle-adam's "the lamentations of edison," from_l'eve future_ (1886); alberto savinio's "give me the anathema, lascivious thing" (1915); avraamov's _the symphony of sirens_ (1923); f.t. marinetti and pino masnata's _la radia_ (1933); and artaud's _to have done with the judgment of god_ (1947). these are important to have in recent translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine further in explicating the myriad ways western culture has attempted to deal with sound as sound. [11] in sum, it's about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the "avant-garde." but as a starting point or "first word" on the subject, we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an effective weapon of political domination. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------dragomoshchenko, 'from phosphor', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-dragomoshchenko-from.txt from phosphor by arkadii dragomoshchenko st. petersburg, russia atd@hm.spb.su trans. lyn hejinian and elena balashova 70550.654@compuserve.com _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by arkadii dragomoshchenko, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] habits of mind result from a redistribution of the places on which the eyes fall. yes, i'm probably right about this. what i'm thinking about at this particular moment allows me to assume so. a rusty rat crossing the street. a soft, interminable twilight, and above it the night lights burning. the room in which we lived was almost eighteen meters long. in the mornings, on streets billowing steam, i went around the corner, bare foot but for sandals, to drink a cup of hot milk and eat cheese pastry. liteiny prospekt was blinding. i shuffled along in unbuckled sandals. amid mocking seagulls and love cries. through a courtyard to the fontanka, passing the library, toward the circus, the bridge. this is about many things. it's about emigration. about t.s. eliot and turgenev. but what are you thinking about? what did or what does your life consist of? i like your question. in the kitchen in a glass jar she kept demons (warring with cockroaches) which she fed with poppyseeds. your question comes at absolutely the right moment, although it makes me slightly nauseous, the way roses or moldy dolls might--vertigo. by evening my skin stung from the sun. it happened the first time on an anthill. they rushed frantically toward the river. as if through a magnifying glass. in the future, if he's to recount a couple of the plots that interest him (let's suppose), he will have to get rid of her. but of whom, one wants to know! history? geometry? mental habits? one of these plots begins with a murder. [2] a yellow-edged photograph. beads of laughter on his glasses, on the windshield. thought is a system, producing systematic eliminations. at the same time, a question arises--as to whether or not it is right to assume, having left one's message on the answering machine, that the resulting communication will be from a living person. "i'm not home," for example, "i can't come to the phone now," or, "you have reached so-and-so," etc. this question, however, despite its apparent silliness, is essentially theological, since it inevitably touches on the question of the life force, the soul, its migrations, and the places it inhabits, suggesting "voices of existence," too, not to mention routine speculation as to presence and absence. and indeed, if my voice reaches your ear across a particular stretch of time (or period of endurance--the experience being in what remains), it presupposes a "distance," since you are never i. does my voice, even being inside me, a single being--does my voice reach you, that is, my essential "i" (our breathing is an out-terance, a crazy moment dangling between "out" and utterance), which does exist, but not for you, in your complete acceptance of flickering, glittering matter, shrouded in the most delicate rustle of awakening that flows from your pursuing vision, where the present has already existed? where do our identifyings take place? a vibration of the surrounding atmosphere--microwinds, a mystical notebook. and "who" or "what"? moreover, the people involved in a narrative, in other words the characters, don't in themselves represent much of anything, except in the case of a woman who takes an important role in the action (and there is such a portrait: a familiarly shaped mouth, wide lips, a habit of adjusting the shoulders of her dress, etc.--and another, intimate portrait, more transparent: her brownish pubic hair cut short, an imponderable scar on her waist, wide pale aureoles around her nipples, the trace of a tattoo between them), whose son died a few years ago. there is some thought that he didn't "simply die" but that he was killed near kandahar not far from thebes, but instead of this romantic invention most people prefer the truth, namely that he was hanged on the 14th of may in the assembly hall of his school by his classmates, using a silk cord from the white curtain; and possibly, due to unforeseeable circumstances, one of them has some notion concerning the silk cocoon of the window and a tedious description of a flight across the atlantic, abounding in similes and necessary to the progress of future events. [3] one would have to be an idiot to speak of a "sequel" to the new. this is impossible to explain to artists. it's utterly impossible even to explain it to the man who sits rubbing the crystal eyes of the fish swallowed into the museum's lottery drum. ball lightning, rocking, froze over my grandfather's glass of vodka and after a few moments crept in through the window, where my grandmother, because of her nearsightedness, took it for one of the demons living in the kitchen in her glass jar which had somehow slipped past the cockroach patrols. the terra-cotta colored morocco leather of the book bindings, the faded imprint embossing the leather, the copper coolness of the sextant, the mother-of-pearl sheen of blackened silver inlaying the yellow bone paper knife--that day is no different from yesterday. there are two types of suicide (of course, it's possible there are more). first, when your will and the world's desires meet and you are shattered while attempting to enclose them in your own existence--you become too strong, sturdy, bulky, heavy--and i don't pity you--like a porcelain christmas bird. second, when you suddenly find yourself in a realm of deafness, where nothing reflects anything else and where for a while a terrifying image of a false world is erected: what surrounds you surrounds you, fingers flowing into the porous substance of matter, every second thought finding uniquely correct solutions. no questions exist. you are born, you die, you eat, you explain the essence of phenomena, enumerating all of them. or you don't enumerate them. in which case, i don't pity you. [4] what, one asks, is there to pity? probably some contradiction between "desire" and "wish." the more intense the desire, the stronger the non-wishing. a person, realizing this, dedicates himself to demeter. the morning flowed smoothly, like a comparison slowly unfolding into similarities. and this was all in the course of things. what is this "there are no senses"?.... [5] no? could it possibly be "no"? but they waved sunflowers after us, which had turned gold like their eyes, withered by grief and yet also by consciousness of the happiness which had befallen them; or rather, of course, first by one and then by the other; but they simply hadn't managed to figure out that they had been happier in other times when other models of happiness had been offered them. but we already know how the smoothly flowing morning takes a bend toward the nightingale darkness, when night, snow white as a sable, nurtures the phosphorous in a half-sphere of a porcelain cup. and to that extent we know the figure of fate and the theory of catastrophes, painstakingly illustrated by the dazzling pulse of a system which upsets all calculations as to how they'll behave--in the same way, gusts of wind strike one's face with the finest sands and with crackling leaves when the street is parched with yellow like a throat sifting the granular air. a mothy murk. i suggest we take the following walk. beginning on our street, we'll cross the intersection at the point where the huge shadow of a nut is falling on the sidewalk, its sound momentarily making voices completely unintelligible; then we'll proceed straight ahead toward the school where after all i happen to have studied and from which i was expelled as from so many others, although i suppose it's inappropriate to mention this. then we'll go through a sparse grove of mulberry trees and barren apple trees and come to the chemical plant's sedimentation tanks, incredible in their magnitude, always astounding both his and my (that is, to put it another way, your and my) imagination--to the cyclops-like squares and rectangles formed by the embankments, which were formed in prehistoric times by bulldozers and are, as always, filled in some places with milky nacreous slush and in others with a substance startling in the beauty of its unearthly color, an "electric," azure emerald threaded with some kind of fibrous, brass gold spasm, shot in some places with jasper blazing up at the very moment you look away and streaked like rainbowed spots of oil in the sun, and in yet others with a hellish red plasma, and all this in one sense forms a single field as far as the forsaken shooting range: in its terrifying flatness, a mirror, in whose zenith is placed the formula for the inversion of light. it would be naive, in light of this field, to think about your brother's bones, brittle, whittled like a wafted message, or about your sister's hair. the girl here doesn't comb her braids, the geese don't honk, our meeting here is set for noon. and further on we'll come to the shooting range, empty cartridge cases, willows. in a two hour walk among the hunted wormwoods there's much else to be found. a map of poetry. the broken mirrors of the foliage. the broken mirrors of number. tendrils of conclusion. the "humane" is washed from a body endowed with feelings--not one single reflection falls on the object. on an uninhabited island an object replaces memory as that which proceeds toward the future. a decision has been made. torquato tasso's first visit to don carlos took place at the end of the 80s, the second at the beginning of the 90s. it's worth noting that comment regarding a collaborative writing of madrigals, and not only such poems as they both wrote about the prince but also about his wife, including stanzas on his first wife's death. hounded by madness, tasso dashes from one courtyard to another. the autumn weather remains dry. near kherson the stubble is burning. the first visit. some correspondence. a second visit. [6] the musicians--one must give them their due--were quite good. but monteverdi! why, he began composing when he was fifteen.... that time whose splinters resemble broken mirrors of foliage has never come. bobbitt, 'xl (letters on xenakis)', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-bobbitt-xl.txt xl (letters on xenakis) by nathaniel bobbitt _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. introduction and references xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods have literary implications. to consider the personality of xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance. xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook within the writing process. in xl, xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial reference within writing. the next step is clearly textual instability and a generative prose form. a. breton's political/scientific approach, also in xenakis -collaboration and collectives -science, center of mathematical and automated studies, compare xenakis interest in musical cognition with weil's thesis on descartes' science and perception b. what are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense of treating greater quantities of data, all at once, via: -symmetry -asymmetry -computational complex patterns c. "objects in action," compared with optical illusions complex observations rather than the consideration of fallibility, hallucination: -consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as a rythmic source -waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality d. irrational quality to be found in "objects in action" -acceleration in glissandi -multiphonic versus microtonal drone -octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree these irrational qualities anticipate a "siren" activity that tempi studies in carter on the player piano. *** i. b.f. skinner & xenakis as models for the commentator's (the friends') consideration of behavior as quantifiable: -skinner...item...collection -xenaxis...group...manipulation -use of memory as heuristic module within the sensorial practice: f(x, y)...sensorial f (x',y')...memorial -skinner...behavior (habitual) -xenakis...performance (task realization) consider skinner and xenakis on math testing and the mathematics of experiment testing. m. adieux, when i get a chance to break away from the hurry up and wait activity i write you, almost a symbol more than anything. a symbol of what i should be in contact with, not that i need reminding but all my mainstays are packed away. the necessity of a new place takes over so. the chance to meet with others is here, as i am a substitute teacher. each day a new school, another direction, and a bus route to learn. the time schedule is that of the rural doctor. what does the sense of patrimony and grandfatherhood evoke for you: such stodgy sorts perhaps are not vivid enough for "your punk german, your computer talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together." yet you were friendlier (than the other darmstadters) as an ideal separates...and allows one to respond. one day these letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end, that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression. for now, necessity takes over from irony. both are merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is another story. perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the thought. i think of you as someone that asks for only a good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling after your desires are taken care of elsewhere. instead there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls and disinterested conversation between two commentators. the word finally appears commentaire. the ability to work, experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider lapses of conversation. good commentator, good night. _xenakis letters_ 1.2.0 m. it hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term "volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental, arbitrary, and unavoidable. i am content with this news which i must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle. by now you know that i am always trying to find ways to make more out of my sentimentality. the act of reading a favorite is even more pleasurable if i can extend some aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the reading. better yet, someone shows me something "how to do" and i use it. the call-backs, the sentimentality i live over time through the debris of a better time, the reading matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard. you as commentator must have some idea about this as all this work grew out of that name..."xenakis"...with enough associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same name. the ones today regard measure and the study in "pictures which make you think." diagram, meditatio, archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a study of volumetrics in xenakis. author's note: these quotes refer back until we consider curvature and foci in the forms of volume, but what i am after is the place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in the skyline. archimedes was gained from weil, as your news on xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question: how graphism informs acoustics. ever since someone said, "the concert was no good because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and space was there, but what little advantage do we take of the notion. steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align: acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without metaphor. the first example will be mine...regarding clusters in the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated pitch. 1.3.0 m. tell me something, when you are out at the club, at what moments does imagination take over from the body slamming. how weightless do they get or is it controlled busting one's head into a wall. is it just black and blue or does clotting appear. yesterday i read about india, rioters after an act of self-immolation. degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends fear the insipid. _xenakis letters_ the tenets of logic: -to think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within correction and error. -to handle greater quantities of data -applications for a math primer for everybody: -selection -mathematical expectation -weighting test criteria -qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of behavior. conclusion: seek modes and resolve application tenets: -rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered) figures at irregular durations. -interval in an interval -compare two-sided lineal time scheme stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's stroking of face when one is engaged or interested. yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves but it is their hair which they stroke. what role can stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and cognition: -memory -learning -concentration -recollection -attention 1.4.0 m one can concentrate by straining the forehead to attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head. the relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation without drugs. when dementia patients forget, several steps are missing: -image of concentration -direction of image (contextual relation) -inability to hold onto the image *) slipping away of name--object association *) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode dementia is a regression into a childlike consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech. reinforce sensorial rather than verbal lapses. we are living very modestly and that stops me. as always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place." the lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with toronto and canada are reasons for you to come up. the absence of identity makes it even a better place. one is free of influence, one can just bounce off objects in action. the radio reception is fair. the whole thing could improve. 1.5.0 m. aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal, or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in their coupling or drone state. stasis in these blocks is like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate without forward motion for a while but the particles slide through, ungluing the gridlock. the gridlock is never fully immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block. the sonora block can be considered as a gridlock. the gridlock can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds. _xenakis letters_ xl.2.0 m. this series you will find in one piece but it has grown over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in xenakis's phillips pavilion. i wish this series were more solid, i have found few mathematical conclusions, i have been left to observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations. it was comforting to hear from you after those months in which i had no address to send you. now you can call. the fact that german has outweighed programming and computation...on with change. your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted oversimplification are all parts of the commentary. what i ask is that we should go into collective research, rather than work on solos and then join, to give solos. "find yourself a programmable young thing." if said what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen lip. _outline_ the success of this series would be the elaboration, of automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction problems. first condsider architectural design as it holds for acoustic activity. � crocker, '"'to he, i am for evva true'": krazy kat's indetermintate gender', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-crocker-'to.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.194. part 1/1, total size 15604 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "'to he, i am for evva true'": krazy kat's indetermintate gender by elisabeth crocker department of english, university of virginia libby@virginia.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by elisabeth crocker, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any other medium, requires consent of the author and notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] like the landscape of coconino county where he lives, the character krazy kat's gender and race shift, sometimes at random, but more often as a result of his social situation. george herriman couched his assertions about the socially constructed nature of categories like race and gender, in addition to categories like class, ethnicity, age, and occupation, so deeply in the sophisticated allegory of his comic strip, however, that few readers recognized them. those who have written on krazy kat in the past have confined their comments to herriman's drawing style and literary allusions, and to the more poignant but less puzzling aspects of the love relationship between krazy kat and ignatz mouse. [2] the situation of the characters remains unchanged over the course of the strip's run from 1913 to 1944: ignatz mouse hates krazy kat with a violent obsession that causes him to throw bricks at krazy's head; krazy loves ignatz with a singleminded passion that causes him to interpret the projectiles as signs of ignatz' love; offissa bull pupp loves krazy kat and hates ignatz mouse, and uses his lawful authority--as well as his billy club--to protect krazy from the bricks. ignatz detests the "kop," and krazy does not return bull pupp's affection, but he does not resent the intervention in his relationship with ignatz. krazy seems to understand that others cannot see the brick as a token of affection, and he ignores even ignatz' own protestations to the contrary, always utterly confident in his perception of the brick as a signifier of love. [3] the love-triangle plot has allowed critics to dismiss the problem of krazy's largely indeterminate gender. in the introduction to a krazy kat collection assembled shortly after herriman's death, e. e. cummings enumerated a number of tropes for krazy to figure, including free will, democracy, and romance heroine (vii). because krazy is so often caught between the hero bull pupp and the villain ignatz mouse, and is fairly passive as the object of the pupp's love and as the object of the mouse's hatred, cummings gendered the kat female. nearly all critics and comics historians have since referred to krazy as "she"; even novelist jay cantor, who used the _krazy kat_ cast and setting for a postmodern psychoanalytic novel of the same name, unequivocally identified the kat as a dora-like female. while cummings himself understood that it was krazy's role in the romance-plot that was feminine, and not anything inherent in the character, others have since followed cummings' use of "she," relying upon his authority to avoid examining a complex issue. [4] when questioned about krazy's sex, however, even herriman would respond that he did not know, and the kat did not seem sure either (capra, 40). "i don't know if i should take a husband or a wife," krazy complains in an october, 1915 daily. "take care," ignatz responds, hurling a brick. the narrator nearly always refers to krazy as "he," resolving awkward, ambiguous, or gender-neutral moments to the pronoun "him," rather than to the pronoun "it." most of krazy's activity is not gender specific, but in scenarios involving some complication of his normal relationship with ignatz, krazy adopts whichever gender role will restore the usual balance. cases of disguise or mistaken identity in either ignatz or krazy, and of rivalry with a party outside of the kat/mouse /pupp triangle, invariably produce gender-bending confusion in the strip. sunday, april 15, 1923 this episode combines the classic chase scene with the love-triangle plot, further complicated by the intervention of an outside party, pauline pullet. krazy's behavior here seems to be governed by his innocence and his absent-mindedness, but he actually performs complex maneuvers in order to maintain the most options within the social structures at hand -love and the law. panel 1 1. even inanimate objects are dynamic in herriman's work; this plant grows and changes slightly between this frame and the next, typical of the instability of all matter in coconino county. 2. ignatz here begins his own narrative of the chase, told by he and offissa pupp in strikingly few words. the alternation of "he won't get me," "i will get him," and other variations of the same sentence to tell the story create a poetic sense of refrain, which attains perfect closure in panel 15. panel 2 1. the "plant" now has a torchlike appearance, in keeping with the change from day to night. 2. herriman's own narration, in addition to the dialogue of his characters, uses false derivations, malapropisms, and other "errors" to emphasize the arbitariness of the operations of language (as well as for comic effect). "that which made him fugit" is typical of herriman's tone, a lilting parody of high literary style. 3. the setting has changed from day to night -or at least from white background to black -from the previous frame. in this particular episode, the dark background is associated with offissa pupp: when he makes his first appearance, when ignatz escapes him most narrowly, and when pupp finally apprehends the mouse. panel 3 1. the ownerless sombrero acknowledges the absent mexican population; coconino county is virtually haunted by indigenous and hispanic culture. herriman's work shows a consistent awareness of how the growth and success of the united states was predicated upon the destruction of pre-existing cultures within its borders. he was also interested, however, in the ways these cultures survive covertly within and without the american mainstream. 2. the background landscape undergoes physical transmutation without changing entirely from panel to panel. the walls become trees, the trees become mesas, all without narrative comment. the stone of the high desert, which in so much american lore symbolizes the rugged, indomitable frontier that succumbs only to the rugged, indomitable spirit of the pioneer, instead shifts from moment to moment between the living trees and nonliving rock, between the "natural" rock formations and the man-made walls. panel 4 the wall is gone, but something resembling herriman's rendition of a "tepee" has appeared. panel 5 again, it is dark when offissa pupp most nearly captures ignatz. the landscape has undergone another transformation, with the trees in the background becoming a mesa for this panel only. panel 6 the hat is the only object that has been stable in the last four panels; perhaps that is why offissa pupp does not look there for the dynamic ignatz. panel 7 there is something of warner brothers' "speedy gonzales" in this running mouse in a sombrero; herriman's influence on cartoons and comics is still evident in contemporary work, such as "ren and stimpy." panel 8 in this allusion to _romeo and juliet_, krazy echoes the lament of juliet, not of romeo, putting himself in the feminine romantic position of juliet and ignatz in the masculine role of romeo. panel 9 krazy's presence disrupts the repetitive narrative. panel 10 the exclamation "bless my pale blue eye" changes, for a character whose gender and race are often called into question, to "pale pink eye." pink (as specifically opposed to blue) is a feminine color; it is also the color of albino eyes in cats. panel 11 krazy did not know the spanish word for the "mexikin derby," but the hat inspires a love song in spanish. panel 12 the consistent placement of all characters' names in quotation marks within dialogue is a signature feature of herriman's style, as though the characters have other names, or are merely actors portraying the characters. significantly, the word "brick" is nearly always in quotation marks as well; by designating "brick" the same way he designates "krazy," "ignatz," and the others, herriman emphasizes the brick's agency in the storylines. the hat, in this episode, is a similar engine for the action, and is partially enclosed in quotation marks in panel 10. panel 13 1. pauline pullet, the only unmarried female in coconino county. ignatz had an affair with her in a sunday page in december of 1918, so krazy has reason to perceive her as a potential rival for the affections of his "romeo". 2. the hen addresses krazy as "mister," and although he has identified with juliet and the feminine earlier in the strip, he here doffs his hat in a masculine gesture. this masculine gesture is specifically what causes ignatz to be captured, ensuring that krazy gets all of pauline's flirtatious attention, and that ignatz cannot give her any. the success of krazy's actions in keeping the others from noticing the hen is emphasized by the line between ignatz and offissa pupp as their eyes lock. panel 14 krazy is sure to continue his attentions to the hen -"how regal! how queenly! how statuesque!" -until ignatz is safely out of the way. panel 15 1. even though he addressed pauline as a man addresses a woman, krazy still swears his love for the male ignatz unequivocally. krazy is "true" to ignatz, as he asserts, in spite of the fact that he betrayed ignatz to the pupp, for he has restored the order upon which all of them rely. by keeping offissa pupp occupied with chasing ignatz, krazy keeps the pupp's unwanted attentions at bay; more importantly, by letting offissa pupp discipline ignatz, krazy can retain both his love for ignatz and his dignity. if offissa pupp did not challenge ignatz' behavior, krazy might have to acknowledge it himself, which would interfere with his love for ignatz. panel 16 krazy often sings this hymn when he is "heppy," and it serves frequently as a coda, as it does here, after order is restored. -------------------------------------------------------------- sunday, july 14, 1918 roles in love play do not define the only parameters of gender construction in _krazy kat_. krazy is a black cat only in general, just as he is generally male. when the kat's fur changes color, however, his gender categorically changes with it. krazy, upon emerging bleached white from madame kamouflage beauty parlor, ceases not only to be male but ceases even to be a kat in the dazzled eyes of the mouse. ignatz cannot recognize krazy when krazy is white, because whiteness in itself is for ignatz an appropriate object of erotic desire, which then in turn must be feminine. panel 1 herriman here uses a common lament of the time to intoduce the action of of the day's strip. he also alludes to _romeo and juliet_, as he does in the april, 1923 strip. panel 2 1. mrs. kolin kelly, wife of the brick-seller who provides ignatz with his missiles. 2.ignatz uses diminutive epithets to describe mrs. kelly, though she is by far the larger of the two. ignatz has shown anxiety about his height in other epsiodes, and the impact of his small stature on the power dynamic between he and krazy is significant. panel 3 1. krazy announces his intention to look like the "queen of sheba," a woman. 2. ignatz, startled by krazy's entry into the feminine space of the beauty parlor, exclaims "look _what's_ going in that beauty parlor," rather than who. with his choice of pronoun, ignatz objectifies the kat, like he objectifies the other women who go into "madame kamouflage," and expresses his momentary confusion about krazy's gender. panel 4 1. this crossed circle, resembling a medicine wheel, often accompanies a twist of fate or the work of the gods in _krazy kat_. 2. when krazy is out of sight, ignatz resolves the ambiguity in favor of his usual perception of the kat: "wait til _he_ comes out," he threatens. panel 5 waiting -wistfully, watchfully, and vigilantly. panel 6 the brick falls by the wayside when ignatz' libido kicks in. panel 7 ignatz specifically refers to "that 'kat'" as "him," at the same time that he calls bleached-krazy a "blonde." he clearly delineates his own behavior strictly as either violent or erotic. panel 8 1. ignatz addresses krazy as "snow maiden," explicitly female. 2. the balcony conjures up images of the scene in _romeo and juliet_, referring back to the opening panel as well. in this panel, romeo is certainly not sure of his juliet. panel 9 1. the sky has gone from white to black, reflecting krazy's real and perceived color changes, and indicating that it is a dark day for ignatz when the object of his desire is revealed to be a black cat. 2. krazy, inexplicably, identifies himself before the date he has desired for so long can occur. he seems unable to tolerate the hypocrisy of ignatz' courting behavior, preferring the sincere brick. panel 10 1. the shame ignatz feels at his attraction to krazy makes it all the more imperative that he throw the brick at him. 2. krazy kat is charmed, as though he has encountered the don juan of legend, but he pronounces the name like that of byron's satirical figure. ------------------------------------------------------------------ about this project this _krazy kat_ hypermedia project began as a toolbook application compiled for a graduate course in computing and literary study, taught by hoyt duggan and peter baker. john price-wilkin encouraged me to seek platformindependence when expanding it into a dissertation, of which this article is a part. when the dissertation is finished, with the direction of eric lott and john unsworth, and the technical support of the institute for advanced technology in the humanities, it will be published on the world wide web. works cited capra, frank. _the name above the title: an autobiography_. new york: macmillan co., 1971. cummings, e.e. introduction. _krazy kat by george herriman_. by george herriman. new york: h. holt & co., 1946. herriman, george. sunday pages july 14, 1918, and april 15, 1923, from _george herriman's krazy & ignatz_, vols. 1-9, bill blackbeard, editor. forestville, california: eclipse books/turtle island foundation, 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------dettmar, 'postmodern jeremiads: kruger on popular culture', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-dettmar-postmodern.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.994. part 1/1, total size 19708 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- postmodern jeremiads: kruger on popular culture by kevin j. h. dettmar department of english clemson university dkevin@clemson.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by kevin j. h. dettmar, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] in some ways, barbara kruger's photomontage texts--red-blocked captions slapped across black & white photographs which they ironically reinscribe, like ransom notes, holding those images and their ideology hostage--make an ideal starting point for an examination of the postmodern impulse in the contemporary arts. the desire for such a point of entry has been on my mind a lot lately as i prepare again to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course on postmodernism this fall, to a classroom of majors from all across campus. there's nothing especially subtle or coy about kruger's verbo-visual texts, but their power is never in question, even for students majoring in packaging science, ceramic engineering, and parks, recreation, and tourism management. i can always count on at least half of my students to vent undisguised hostility at andy warhol's postmodern chameleon pose, or kathy acker's post-feminist pornography with a (teensy-weensy but oh-so significant) difference; but kruger is an artist with something urgent to say, and students have no problem figuring out where she stands %vis-a-vis% her texts. no cool memories here, no undecidable postmodern irony, no death of the author, no sir: here's art that speaks to the complexity of life in contemporary america in a powerful, and relatively straightforward, way. call it sincerity; in the eyes of my students kruger has rediscovered the importance of being earnest in an age of "anything goes," and in the wake of marcel duchamp's ready-mades, john cage's chance operations, and brian eno's oblique strategies, they're mighty grateful for it. [2] of course kruger *is* a postmodern artist, being, along with jenny holzer, a major supplier of those po-mo slogans that grace so many t-shirts and trendy greeting cards: "your gaze hits the side of my face," "your body is a battleground," "i shop therefore i am."^1^ in fact, when dag in douglas coupland's novel _generation x_ complains that "the world has gotten too big--way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers," he would seem to have kruger squarely in mind.^2^ but kruger's postmodern slogans have always been anti-sloganist, if not indeed antipostmodernist, in tendency. she would agree with another _generation x_ character, claire, who says that "it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments," and that "either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."^3^ [3] _remote control_, kruger's latest text, collects her occasional writings over the past fifteen years, the largest group having previously been published in _artforum_; there are no visual images here, outside the rather striking one that graces the cover. here we have kruger the teller, rather than kruger the show-and-teller; and if kruger the show-and-teller sometimes inclines toward the didactic, _remote control_ for long stretches is almost unbearably preachy. kruger too much enjoys what sacvan berkovitch has called the american jeremiad; and while her work in photo-montage almost of necessity strikes a balance between mimesis and diegesis, the essays in _remote control_ never err on the side of giving the reader too much credit. hence the paradox that one of our most %scriptible% visual artists turns out to be a resolutely %lisible% writer, and these turn out to be fundamentally *modernist* texts about postmodernism. %quelle drag%. [4] at its worst, kruger's prose sounds like a ditto prepared for postmodernism 101: "history has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. the ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none other than the historian. the keeper of the text. the teller of the story. the worker of mute mouths."^4^ this text, published with philomena mariani in 1989, sounds as if hayden white and michel foucault had never written: kruger seems to think she has suddenly stumbled upon the notion that history is a narrative, and is as such subject to narrative laws. few would today dispute such a claim; but that's exactly why the strident tone of the essay rings slightly false. for whom does kruger write? on the other hand, the enigmatic photomontage of the legs of standing and seated businessmen, in their suit pants and loafers, sprawled against the backdrop of a livingroom carpet (high-ball glass just visible in the foreground), which kruger captions "you make history when you do business," gets at the same idea, the same "truth," much more elliptically and provocatively.^5^ [5] if much, perhaps too much, of _remote control_ consists of somewhat tendentious postmodern propaganda (and i'll leave aside the question of whether *postmodern* propaganda is really possible), it is not without many shrewd and amusing moments. kruger is at her best, i think, when talking about television (the section called "tv guides") and when theorizing about the postmodern, even if she rejects the term ("that vaporous buzzword, that zany genre with legs: post-modernism" [3]). her analysis of the jerry lewis telethon, for instance, is absolutely, savagely on-target: "perhaps jerry lewis is about a kind of abjection; a glistening knot of anger and petulance marinated in a soup of vindictive disingenuousness. (write him for the recipe)" (66). when kruger takes tv seriously, her observations are fascinating; like cultural studies %avant la lettre%, kruger deigns to take low culture (_the care bears_, _the price is right_, _the home shopping club_) on its own terms, and uses these texts to read the culture that both produces and consumes them. perhaps this is the contemporary version of colonel kurtz's horror: looking into the heart of darkness and seeing jerry lewis there, the embodiment of "outrageous schticksterism, oozing with every show-biz cliche, every bad dream of what it might mean to be an 'entertainer'" (67). [6] but unlike most proponents of the new cultural studies, kruger doesn't seem to "love to hate" jerry, or maddie hayes and david addison (_moonlighting_), or robin leach (_life-styles of the rich and famous_)--she just hates them. one begins to suspect that with kruger, the game's been fixed: low culture is allowed to play, but it's never allowed to win. i'm tempted to say that kruger's a cultural critic in the way allan bloom was a cultural critic, but that's not *quite* fair; after all, kruger at least reads the texts of our culture, and reads them with great care and prodigious intelligence, before pronouncing them banal. but she is no more amused by these texts than bloom was. [7] the reason for kruger's dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover: for though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says kruger, we are the ones controlled: "to those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control" (5). sound familiar? at the heart of kruger's collection is the unvoiced assertion that television is the root of all contemporary american evil; tv is, to paraphrase baudrillard, the evil demon of images. "we don't have to think about anything once television lulls us to sleep," kruger drones, "and begins its dictations. like a mad scientist of global proportions, it elects presidents, conducts diplomacy, and creates consensus: a consensus of demi-alert nappers caught halfway between the vigilance of consciousness and the fascinated numbness of stupor" (49). [8] is it just me? i had thought the discourse about the american media, and about the reciprocal flow of ideology into and out of the tv tube, had progressed somewhat beyond this. foucault, to take just the most prominent example, has rendered such a simplistic theory of power and hegemony entirely untenable for the contemporary culture critic. but kruger's hostility to popular culture is more than just a matter of an out-of-date or vulgar-marxist theoretical apparatus. her refusal of pop pleasures seems as willed and unrelenting, as theoretically unnecessary, as theodor adorno's. in fact, i'll bet even adorno would have enjoyed _three's company_ more than barbara kruger does. [9] if there's a thread that connects the writings collected in _remote control_, it's the philosophy of social constructionism: the notion that our individual experiences are hemmed-in by the ubiquitous, often understated or implicit, narratives of our culture(s). this is a familiar theme in postmodern texts; one thinks, for instance, of jack gladney, in don delillo's _white noise_, who (believing he is about to die) wanders into his kids' bedroom in the middle of the night to say his final goodbyes: "i moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. i looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child's warm grasp, feeling i'd wandered into a tv moment."^6^ you *think* you're feeling something, but suddenly realize that vicks, or at&t, or coke, or the carpenters have been there before you. you're not saying your goodbyes, you're quoting someone else's. %quelle drag encore%. in "talk normal," laurie anderson meditates on the inconvenience of being robbed of her own identity by her media persona: "i turned the corner in soho today and someone / looked right at me and said: oh no! / another laurie anderson clone!"^7^ laurie anderson is accused of being a laurie anderson wannabe; delillo's jack gladney confesses that he is "the false character that follows the name around."^8^ [10] what distinguishes delillo's and anderson's treatment of this theme from kruger's, however--and, i would argue, renders if far more supple and subtle--is their realization that the simple recognition of the socially constructed nature of reality doesn't automatically produce its transcendence. in kruger, too often, it appears to; that we are thrall to images, to narratives, is for kruger a sign of our postmodern, almost post-reagan/bush, condition, and she suggests that through consciousness raising we might attain to an illusion-free reality. "seeing is no longer believing," kruger writes in the collection's opening essay. "the very notion of truth has been put into crisis. in a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie. in a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don't mean anything (as peggy noonan and co. have so ably demonstrated)" (5). though she was certainly good at it, peggy noonan hardly invented political rhetoric; "seeing is no longer believing," kruger complains--but when *was* it? what are the good old days to which kruger harks back? plato didn't believe that seeing was believing, and certainly put the notion of truth into crisis long before nietzsche. "to put it bluntly," kruger continues, "no one's home. we are literally absent from our own present. we are elsewhere, not in the real but in the represented" (5). here kruger sounds eerily like habermas: everything was hunky dory before postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, descended upon us--the storm cloud of the late twentieth century; kruger's perverse twist on this all-too-well-known story is that, paradoxically, only postmodern art and theory can rescue us from the postmodern condition. [11] all of which begs the question, for kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: if we're all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? how does one slip out from under "remote control" in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? in u2's recent _zoo tv live from sydney_ video, for instance, we see the song "the fly," from the _achtung baby_ cd, staged against a backdrop of video monitors flashing words, phrases, and slogans at almost subliminal speed, %&agrave; la% jenny holzer's truisms: "death is a career move," "every thing you know is wrong" (firesign theater?), "ambition bites the nails of success," "enjoy the surface." but the song's "punchline" is twenty seconds worth of one phrase, repeated on the video monitors dozens and dozens and dozens of times: "it's your world you can change it." jeepers, guys. how? the sentiment of this closing "truism" seems to come from the u2 of _the joshua tree_ who still hadn't found what they were looking for; but according to the logic of the new, postmodernized u2, such an unproblematic, positivistic assertion of the individual subject's ability to shape her world seems unsupported by the visual and verbal rhetoric of the song's performance. equally problematic, for similar reasons, is the video monitors' warning that "silence=death," or the band's use of live satellite video from war-torn bosnia during other concert dates, or their trademark blurb to "join amnesty international" that appears in the liner notes of even the _zooropa_ cd. [12] how can we steer a middle path between the naive voluntarism suggested by u2's "it's your world you can change it" and a kind of philosophical quietism acceptable to almost no one? kruger's piece called "repeat after me"--a sort of twelve-step program for the treatment of modernist nostalgia--insists that we wrap our voices around a number of propaganda bites: "that 'we' are not right and 'the enemy' wrong. . . . that god is not on our side. . . . that tv and print journalists should begin to acknowledge and understand their ability to create consensus and make history" (223). (this must be at least the sixth time in the collection we've been reminded that tv makes history.) but then the symptomatic punchline, the culminating slogan: "empathy can change the world" (223). i hate to be so damn cynical, but doesn't that sound a litle like "visualize world peace"? shouldn't it go on a bumper sticker somewhere? kruger's work, like that of u2, can display all the trappings of postmodernist thought and then blithely ask us to place our hope in the most stale and familiar of liberal causes. [13] kruger may have rebounded off the wall of postmodernity and ended up--like u2, like baudrillard--a kind of neo-modernist, but at least she, has not settled into the comforts of cynicism. (recall that our word "cynicism" is derived from the greek word for dog; philosophy, taken in a certain direction, results in a despair which leads one to give up all hope and ambition and to lie in the street like a dog.) indeed, to overcome cynicism kruger seems prepared to credit the notion of *postmodern voluntarism*. and why not? like jean-francois lyotard, she believes that when the great narratives of enlightenment can no longer be believed, it is time for us to write smaller narratives of our own.^9^ that at least is how i would want to read the passage from kruger's essay "quality" where she calls for "an esthetic of qualities rather than the singularity of quality. i think i could go for that esthetic. i think i could second that emotion" (9). even the allusion to smokey robinson seems promising: popular culture employed lovingly for once rather than dismissively. "shredded totalities," kruger writes toward the end of the volume, "go the way of highly classified documents which disappear and take their secrets with them. maybe" (231). but nature abhors a vacuum, and an unnarrated cultural space cannot stay uninscribed for long. power doesn't lie simply in the hands of the evil wizards of madison avenue, or the rockefeller center; we can't but live in the realm of the represented, rather than the real, and we're never at a loss for representations to whose magic we might become enthralled. razing the totalizing, repressive %grands recits% clears a space upon which we must rebuild quickly; we can build on it ourselves, or let someone else do it, but it won't stay vacant for long, for someone's sure to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. "either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." perhaps enough of the demolition is now accomplished that we might think about what we'd like to put up here. notes: ^1^ a great many of kruger's images are conveniently reproduced in kate linker's _love for sale: the words and pictures of barbara kruger_ (new york: harry n. abrams, 1990). ^2^ douglas coupland, _generation x: tales for an accelerated culture_ (new york: st. martin's, 1991), 5. ^3^ _generation x_, 8. ^4^ barbara kruger, _remote control: power, cultures, and the world of appearances_ (cambridge: mit press, 1993), 12. subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. ^5^ linker, _love for sale_, 68. ^6^ don delillo, _white noise._ (new york: penguin, 1985), 244. ^7^ laurie anderson, "talk normal," _home of the brave_ (warner bros. 9 25400-2, 1986). ^8^ delillo, _white noise_, 17. ^9^ see jean-francois lyotard, _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_, trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi (minneapolis: univ. of minnesota press), 1984. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------lightman, 'coalitions and coterie', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-lightman-coalitions.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.594. part 1/1, total size 18182 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- coalitions and coterie by ira lightman university of norwich i.lightman@uea.ac.uk _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by ira lightman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: edwards, tim. _erotics and politics: gay male sexuality, masculinity, and feminism_. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1994. [1] this book doesn't quarrel too much with anyone, but then it doesn't leave itself much room for polemic, so thorough is its survey of essays and books about and by gay men and feminists. it listens, which can't be a bad thing. tim edwards's procedure is to quote most of the writers he discusses at some length, and nearly always to show them in a favorable light, even when they clash with each other. edwards is trying to settle an existing feud rather than to start a new one, and to establish the common ground on which more productively cross-disciplinary approaches to sexuality might emerge. [2] the feud at issue here is that between feminists who have written critically about pederasty, pornography, and sexist attitudes among gay men, and gay men who have responded to these attacks by writing critically about feminists' too-sweeping (and hence homophobic, heterosexist) generalisations about gay sexuality. a good example of the latter is craig owens, who, in a marvellous essay from _men in feminism_ cited by edwards, argues that feminists accept freud's theory that anti-gay bigotry stems from repressed gay desire in straight-identified men because this theory piques the bigoted straight-identified men who are implicitly these women's target.^1^ but, says owens, this approach fails to acknowledge genuine homoerotic feeling that hasn't passed through a self-hating, gay-hating denial stage, i.e. it fails to acknowledge the very areas of feeling that mean most to many gay-identified men. thus, owens is arguing, feminist application of this "homophobia equals homoerotic" equation draws on straight experience rather than gay experience, and is in fact marginalizing of the latter. similarly, other gay male critics of feminism cited by edwards point out that feminist critiques of pornography begin by postulating the essence of the practice, then proceed to demonize it, and, by extension, to demonize all gay manifestations of it. this kind of feminist critique locates the abusive dimension, the *insult*, of a sexual practice within a straight sexual relationship, in terms of the institutionalized misogyny and oppression of women within patriarchy, and then extends the analysis without pausing to consider the quite different forms of oppression patriarchy exercises over gay men. [3] the stakes of these critiques and counter-critiques are high, for they lead feminists to associate gay men, and gay men to associate feminists, with patriarchy rather than with its active resistance. indeed, gay men end up accusing straight feminist women not only of naively collaborating with the patriarchal enemy but of supplying that enemy with the academically legitimized weapons he needs to police the terrain of sexual difference. [4] edwards does a good job of describing this situation. he calls particular attention to the curious protocols of the whole debate, which reflect the demographics of feminist and gay sympathizers. the former, being the larger group, offer broad generalizations and critiques of the latter, while the smaller group for the most part merely defends its own turf from unfriendly critical incursions. while feminist writers have presented wholesale critiques of the theory and strategy of gay male activism, it is almost unheard of for a gay male writer to attack the theoretical positions and institutional practices of feminist women except where these touch upon gay politics itself. this creates a fundamental and limiting asymmetry in the debate which edwards does well to highlight, though it has nothing to do with the substance of the arguments advanced. [5] but for all its usefulness as an overview of the current state of gay and feminist politics--and the book ranges widely across such topics as pederasty, pornography, visibility, aids, and postmodernism--this volume seems somehow too narrow in its conception. reading it i found myself trying to imagine a more boldly interdisciplinary or multi-voiced version of the project: a broader dialogue. it's not so much that i wanted a more ethnographic approach. true, this book lacks the kind of oral-historical dimension that would incorporate the views of people who can't write or can't get published; but ethnographic work can itself produce the lack of theoretical, or simply cordial, engagement between disparate parties that edwards laments. no, it's edwards's asides--against the men's movement, against straight men in general--and his cursory treatment of child abuse literature (which contrasts with his thoroughness on most everything else), that mark the limits to his apparent inclusiveness. edwards addresses himself to an audience which he envisions as sharing with him a very specific and finite hierarchy of approaches and texts; he covers this material and excludes everything else. it is possible that if he had gone further afield he would have alienated some of the gay men and feminists whose solidarity the book is meant to promote. his aim, after all, is to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics of a patriarchal order. but in my view his omissions are a real weakness; there is a danger that the coalition he promotes will be too static and comfortable, too much of a closed establishment in its own right. [6] my most general objection to the book has to do with what might be seen as a kind of residual freudianism, or at least scientism, in its tone. freud has always seemed to me the archetypal distrustful outsider, the sort of commentator on gay sexuality who is handled in today's gay press with amused indifference or mocking disbelief. he sits in his office, sees someone for an hour, sums him up with reference to his own tiny range of models of peoples' lives, and comes to a conclusion, finishes the day, locks up the office, and goes home to dinner party functions and relations only with heterosexuals. he offers sweeping scientific theories on the basis of very brief and shallow acquaintance with his objects of study--and this makes him a figure of some amusement to writers of the gay press, who speak from detailed knowledge of lives led differently. it seems that tim edwards can't, except in occasional brief anecdotes, draw on this latter, indigenous tradition of writing about gay sexuality, but must instead locate his work in the tradition that's home to freud. perhaps this is academically required of him. and perhaps his publishers, routledge, encourage his use of the voice of the distrustful outsider as well, as a voice of greater authority or at least greater appeal to a straight readership. in any case, the book seems closer in this respect to the community of straight "experts" on homosexuality than to the gay community on the streets. [7] aside from from this general question of tone and positionality, i would also raise some more specific questions about the book's arguments, arguments in which a residual freudianism is again discernable. edwards cites the work of sheila jeffreys, who has battled to deny any comradeship, as a lesbian, with advocates of sado-masochism. her argument is that s/m glorifies heterosexist and misogynist oppression as well as child abuse, by eroticising them. her opponents argue that, on the contrary, eroticizing power destabilizes and dethrones it. this debate strikes right to the heart of the struggle to build a coalition of the sort edwards advocates. a coalition between s/m practitioners, both gay and straight, and gay non-s/m practitioners would need, as edwards indicates, to be based on shared values of some sort. but what edwards and most other commentators seem not to recognize is that these values can be detached from a specifically sexual agenda and cast in terms of the radical reform of the structure of society; it is a matter of shared social values, not shared sexualities or sexual attitudes. to return to craig owens's essay in _men in feminism_, it *is* divisive to define homoerotica as always filtered through homophobic repression, because this doesn't recognize, and indeed therefore marginalizes, the majority of homoerotic experiences (which are oppressed, not repressed). but it does not therefore follow that the *remedy* for this situation is more detailed analysis of gay men's sexual experiences, s/m sexual experiences, or any other sexual experiences. freud thought that he could cure mental unease by providing a way of talking exhaustively about sex abstracted from love. it seems to me that the disputants in debates about the common ground amongst sexualities still proceed from the assumption that one must seek "cures" for certain sexual problems--that the way to fix what is wrong with the social order is to fix what is wrong with people's sexuality. [8] i can suggest more clearly what i mean by considering the way edwards handles childhood. for edwards, the key--indeed the only--question for gay men to ask about childhood remains the freudian question of when and how sexuality is formed there. under the subheadings "definitions of childhood" and "constructions of childhood sexuality," he provides a rather one-dimensional analysis of a very problematic and contentious area, in order to get quickly to the debate over sexual relationships between young gay adolescents and their older lovers--relationships which edwards is eager to destigmatize. this approach bypasses what seems to me the most crucial set of questions. what really takes place, in social terms, during childhood? what lessons do children learn about social relations, relations of power? how and in what way are children silenced, stopped from asking difficult or awkward questions? what interventions might be made into the institutional practices that produce childhood as we know it? these are not questions that can be adequately addressed through case histories in childhood sexuality, yet they should be of fundamental interest to anyone interested in effecting social change of a sort sufficiently radical to dehegemonize patriarchy. [9] it may well be that there is no market for gay writers who would take up the analysis of childhood in a more thoroughgoing way. gay publishing has its hands full already. but more gay arguments need to be brought against the rather uncomplicated picture presented by advocates of pederasty here. more gay writers need to undertake a radical rethinking of childhood such that, instead of simply defending themselves against the charge (by feminists and others) that they advocate abusive behavior, they can work in tandem with the feminist and children's rights movements to envision new, more enabling familial and educational environments for children to inhabit. the sort of thing edwards calls for--the creation of more lesbian and gay youth movement groups, where a young gay teenager can find understanding and companionship without the potentially unwanted sexual attentions that come when this understanding is sought among older men--is probably a good step. but it does not go much distance toward addressing the way childhood as such is constructed in our society, nor does it locate the common value out of which to forge an alliance between child-rights and gay-rights advocates. [10] i am not suggesting that other recent writers on childhood and sexuality have done much better. the child-rights books, such as susan forward's _betrayal of innocence_,^2^ are compelling in their indictment of child-abuse crimes by parents and relatives, but their treatment of gay sexuality is crude at best, often explaining male-male abuse as a failure in the abuser's heterosexual marriage, without considering the ways that patriarchy encourages and sustains such "failures." by ignoring the pressures of patriarchy, forward leaves no room for the gay victim of incestuous rape who wants to denounce the rape but not the fact of being gay. edwards's fellow queer theorists have not succeeded very well, either. in her new collection of essays, _tendencies_, eve kosofsky sedgwick proposes that we regard all gay adults as "survivors," since they have survived the relentless homophobia that hounds a great many gay teenagers literally to death.^3^ given that two thirds of all teenage suicides are committed by gay teens, one is sympathetic to this terminological move. but sedgwick is here appropriating the language of child-rights campaigners in a way that is bound to antagonize them. for in this latter parlance, "survivor" is the name taken by those who were physically abused in childhood but who reject the media name for them: victim. by eliminating the distinction between survivors of childhood physical abuse and gays in general, sedgwick is in effect delegitimating the whole approach of the anti-abuse movement. [11] all such commentators will continue to play a zero-sum game, moving no closer toward any sort of practicable coalition, until new and more far-reaching arenas of dialogue are opened up. interestingly, one of the places where the most advanced work on the construction of childhood is being done is the men's movement. but this movement's anti-gay and anti-feminist tendencies are sufficiently notorious to keep almost anyone outside the movement--forward, sedgwick, edwards--from engaging its discourse on childhood seriously. even a critic as generous and inclusive in his approach as edwards leaves these sorts of impasses largely uncontested. the best he can do is to suggest that gay men might in fact learn something from feminist critiques--that being gay does not necessarily preclude one's collaborative relation to patriarchy--and that feminist critics might in fact learn something from gay writers who question the range of applicability of feminist theory. [12] this is not a new point; it doesn't shift the ground of debate in any significant way. but it is given a new intensity by the occasional passages of personal and autobiographical comment that edwards introduces to his argument. because so much of the book is written in a removed cool prose, the moments of autobiography make edwards seem vulnerable and prepared to admit to being flummoxed sometimes. in this way he perhaps acknowledges the limits of his particular scholarly procedures, of his capacity as an "expert," and produces evidence of a *life* lived mutually and fruitfully between a gay men and his women friends--a life that doesn't seem to be reflected anywhere in the public debate he surveys, but which might be the starting point for a new approach. one returns from these autobiographical excursions to the cool prose with a sense of going from an exciting present to a stuffy past. the cool prose remains diplomatic and patient with its authors, but edwards's unwillingness to sustain it without interruption perhaps implies a kind of exasperation with all the disputants and even with his readership. i myself would have liked to see this exasperation made more explicit and central to the whole project, but what edwards has given us is certainly worth having. his is a book that shows us how much important work remains to be done before we will truly succeed in opening the diverse fields of sexual and social activism to each other. ____________________________________________________________ notes ^1^ craig owens, "outlaws: gay men in feminism," in a. jardine and p. smith, eds. _men in feminism_ (london: methuen, 1987). ^2^ susan forward, _betrayal of innocence_ (london: penguin, 1988). ^3^ eve kosofsky sedgwick, _tendencies_ (london: routledge and kegan paul, 1994). ----------------------------------end--------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------morin, 'gender of geography', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-morin-gender.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.195. part 1/1, total size 12529 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the gender of geography by karen morin geography department university of nebraska-lincoln kmorin@unlinfo.unl.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by karen morin, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] geography is a notoriously male-dominated field. to cite just one recent statistic, a 1993 profile of the association of american geographers (the largest professional organization in the discipline) showed that only 18.6 percent of the membership who were employed by colleges and universities were women. evidence has shown that, in addition, a disproportionately large number of the 18.6 percent probably hold less influential temporary, part-time, and/or lower paid positions within departments. as gillian rose asserts in _feminism and geography_, women's under-representation in geography departments (and its byproduct, academic publishing) points to some serious problems. not only does it mean that most geographic research is about men and men's activities, but more fundamentally, it produces a bias in what passes for geographic knowledge itself. the subject of her book is how one type of human geography, "masculinist," has been constituted and defined as geography in male-dominated academia, and how feminist perspectives can respond to it. [2] this book brings academic geography up to date with current feminist theory, something geography badly needed. indeed, this is the only book-length work of its kind (at least in english). whereas geographic studies of women's work, women's status in less developed countries, women's relationship to imperialism, and women and the land have broadly taken off within the field, few attempts have been made to discuss feminist geography theory, at length, within the context of the history of geographic thought. more characteristic are widely-cited works such as r.j. johnston's _geography and geographers: anglo-american human geography since 1945_ (4th ed., 1991), which devotes only three pages to feminism. though rose brings together some of the substantive works in feminist geography, her primary concern is with the way geographers think and produce work, and she therefore focuses more on the "gender of geography" than the "geography of gender." [3] a lot is packed into this small volume (200 pages, including notes). rose argues that as a masculinist discipline, geography is stuck in dualistic thinking and in producing grand theories that claim to speak for everyone but that actually speak only for white, bourgeois, heterosexual males. though masculinism effectively excludes women as researchers and as research subjects, rose says that it is not "a conscious plot" by males (p. 10), and that both men and women are caught in it. and indeed, rose finds herself caught in it. she attempts to create a more personal geography, locating herself through her whiteness, her lower-middle class upbringing, her "seduction" by the university. (she is now a lecturer at queen mary and westfield college, university of london.) but she's not all that successful at maintaining this personalism. recognizing this, she admits how "extraordinarily difficult [it was] to break away . . . from the unmarked tone of so much geographical writing," admonishing her own "complicity with geography" (p. 15). at the same time, rose consistently tries to avoid overarching theories, which she believes are antithetical to feminism, and spends a good deal of text positioning authors of both masculinist and feminist writing. [4] rose's primary task is to mark the territory of masculinist thinking in geography. she demonstrates how just as there are many feminisms, so also there are many masculinisms, with boundaries that are not fixed and clear but permeable and unstable, and each invoked for particular purposes. overall rose discusses geographic thought at three scales: the scale of "places" (of humanistic geography), the scale of "landscapes" (of cultural geography), and the scale of individual "spaces" (of social and economic geography). she discusses the degree to which each associated branch of geography is embedded in masculinist thinking and/or holds promise for more feminist interpretations. [5] humanist geography, which would seem to share feminism's goal of recovering the places of individual and everyday experience, turns out to have constituted "place" itself as feminine. rose asserts that humanists talk about places as homes, in strictly idealized and feminized terms associated with women--as nurturing places, free of conflicts. rose argues that "home" may not be a place universally sought after, and may in fact be more like a prison for some women. the important point is that home's significance varies from person to person and from social group to social group. home may indeed signify refuge for some african american women, for instance, not as idealized mother but as an escape from racism. [6] it is at the scale of landscape that rose finds masculinism's most apparent contradictions, particularly because the study of landscape often rests on "geography's most embedded dualism"--nature/culture. rose explains how images of the female side, nature, invoke something to be heroically conquered through fieldwork, but also something to be revered and respected. masculinism, apparently, genders landscapes in whatever way seems most convenient for the purpose at hand, for example, by associating frontier lands with the female, a virgin awaiting penetration by male explorers, but at the same time signifying women as culture carriers, bringing "civilization" to those "savage" frontiers. both culture and nature are gendered, but as rose points out, one side is masculine and the other side is always the masculine idea of the feminine. thus it is dangerous to empower the feminine side of the dualism, as radical feminists attempt to do. instead, feminists need to destabilize the dualism itself, creating new categories to analyze how women relate to landscapes. as rose notes, monk and norwood's edited volume _the desert is no lady: southwestern landscapes in women's writing and art_ (1987) provides an excellent model for such work. this collection demonstrates how hispanic, native, and anglo women's images of the american southwest are quite unlike males', yet also quite different from each others'. women writers, photographers, and artists envisioned the desert land not in terms of its material resources to be exploited, a land awaiting metaphorical rape, but as a strong woman, unable to be conquered. the women artists' imagery is sexual, not in terms of domination or suppression but in terms of uniting with the productive and reproductive energy of the earth. [7] in masculinism, space itself appears ungendered, a seemingly open path to anywhere. but rose argues that some spaces offer particular constraints to women, and may in fact mean horror and violence to women, such as when we walk through the city at night. she writes about space as oppressive: i have to tell my own fears of attack in terms of space: when i've felt threatened, space suffocatingly surrounds me with an opacity that robs me of my right to be there . . . space almost becomes like an enemy itself. (143) masculinism also forces women to sense their own embodiment. whereas men's bodies are transparent to masculinism, women are conditioned to be aware of their bodies, as objects in space, taking up space right along with other objects. ultimately women are doubly affected by masculinism, then, because we move through space that has been gendered by a dominant ideology, with gendered bodies. [8] though it is wrought with contradictions of its own, rose cites socialist feminism's theorizing of the domestic sphere in terms of economic life as "undoubtedly one of the major achievements of feminist geography" (p. 121). the contradictions arise when trying to account for the diversity of women's experiences in production alongside their (seemingly) shared experiences in reproduction. on the reproductive side, feminist work has emphasized women's spatial limitations as they try to combine domestic and waged work. women, so the thesis goes, work closer to home to be nearer to childcare and schools, and are thus locked into female-segregated, part-time, and/or lower waged occupations, especially in the suburbs. this model turns out to be appropriate mainly for white, middle-class mothers, however. rose asserts that when emphasis has been shifted to production, feminism has made greater strides. research by feminist geographers such as linda mcdowell stresses difference in women's work, particularly by social class and geographic region, where gender relations are unevenly developed because capitalism itself is. [9] the book's conclusion left me a bit hanging, but that may be because rose is more interested in exposing the limitations of masculinist geography and surveying current feminist responses to it, than in laying out a more positive future trajectory for the discipline. rose succeeds admirably in marking the contested areas, and has shown how masculinism cannot represent the gendering of places, landscapes, or spaces. self-representation is key to women's advancement in geography, she says, as is recognizing our multiple axes of identity, and practicing "strategic mobility" by moving between the center of academic geography and its margin to ultimately subvert that center. [10] the book's structure--which has it in effect beginning in the middle, then looking backward (chs. 1-4) into masculinist geography, and then moving forward (chs. 5-7) into feminist geography--is wonderfully appropriate to its argument. yet it is also in the structure that the book reveals its most glaring flaws. perhaps it was edited too heavily, perhaps not heavily enough. but readers will find themselves constantly reminded of what's just been said, or previously been said in another chapter, or about to be said, so that instead of a gradual unfolding of themes, the discussion unfolds in short, awkward bursts. moreover, the dense text is difficult to plow through at times, and rose's heavy reliance on academic jargon threatens to place her among the many feminists whose work is inaccessible to the very population of geographers that most needs to read it. occasional misspellings don't help matters, and the book's three illustrations are merely adequately reproduced. [11] but who's complaining? in comparison to the enormous project rose has undertaken, these deficiencies can be overlooked. this book should be required reading for graduate seminars dealing with the history of geographic thought, and will be indispensable for feminist geographers and other social scientists grappling with feminist epistemology and who need the discussion wrapped up in a single volume. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------kolker, 'moving image reclaimed', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-kolker-moving.txt archive pmc-list, file kolker.994. part 1/1, total size 12280 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the moving image reclaimed by robert p. kolker department of english university of maryland robert_p_kolker@umail.umd.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by robert p. kolker, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [film clips available from jefferson.village.virginia.edu by anonymous ftp, in /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.994/video] preface: "the moving image reclaimed" is a twofold experiment. on the level of textuality, it is an attempt to write about films with moving-image examples present and available to be viewed, the way a paragraph from a novel or lines from a poem are available to the reader of literary criticism. but to make this experiment possible, much technical experimentation was necessary. moving images are packed with detailed information. they are analogue events. digitizing them is a prodigious task and transmitting them over the internet is even more prodigious. they are big, ungainly, and consume a lot of computer resources, so you will need to have patience as they come across the network. if you are receiving the clips over a dialup (slip) connection, you will need more than patience--you will need something to occupy your time (maybe a good book?). the clips in this essay are in mpeg format, but a *quicktime version* is also available (on average, the color quicktime clips will be at least 50% larger than their mpeg equivalents; black-and-white quicktime clips may be as much as ten times the size of the mpeg clips). whatever format you choose, you will need appropriate viewing software installed on your system. if you find that you don't have such software, you can find some *unsupported* programs, for various platforms, *here*. please note that, in viewing these clips, you may occasionally experience problems with color or frame-rate (if you are using the default mpeg viewer for windows, you might try choosing "ordered (256)" or "hybrid" under the "dither" menu; you will also find that some clips exceed the size allowed under the free version of the windows mpeg viewer. we recommend that you support shareware by paying for the full version of that software). all the images will look best on a video-display capable of 16 thousand or more colors: on 256 svga and vga displays there may be a phenomenon called palette flash, where colors look less than attractive. please also note that, although the quicktime clips do have a soundtrack, the mpeg clips are without sound ("mos" they called it in hollywood, mimicking german filmmakers just gaining a hold of the language: "mit out sound"). [1] textual access has been a major problem in the work of cinema studies. unlike our colleagues in literary and art criticism, film scholars' access to the text has been absolutely limited to still images, which are often enough not taken directly from the film under discussion. computer imaging is changing that. with relatively inexpensive video-capture hardware and software, it's now possible to digitize film images from a videocassette or laserdisc and put them to critical use, making the film as quotable as a novel or poem. published on-line, with image text and written text wrapped around one another, the work of film and television criticism becomes linked to its source, gives up a certain innocence, and claims a heightened authority (even responsibility). in fact, sources become reversed. the critical act becomes the source for the imagery and its meaning: the imagery is reclaimed, meaning becomes a result of the reclamation process in ways that correct and advance older methodologies of the field. [2] i recently wrote an essay on martin scorsese's debt to alfred hitchcock. its purpose was to discover a viable structure in scorsese's _cape fear_, a film that is part of that other reclamation process i spoke about: a work that calls to itself images from many other films as it plays and teases its audience with them. _cape fear_ is many things: a popular film scorsese made to help pay back a debt to universal pictures, the company that supported his earlier work, _the last temptation of christ_; and a remake of a 1962 film of the same name, which itself owes a debt to hitchcock's _psycho_. scorsese has always been interested in reclaiming hitchcock, and in fact made his own version of _psycho_ in 1976, called _taxi driver_. but the calls scorsese makes on hitchcock in _cape fear_ are nested very deeply. unlike the film's references to more recent mad killer movies, which audiences readily recognize, the hitchcockian quotations are coveted. this is celebration as ceremony, allusion as test as well as play. more modernist than postmodern. _cape fear_ cites three of hitchcock's lesser early fifties films, _stagefright_, _i confess_, and _strangers on a train_. it cites them and quotes from them, and takes an almost arcane pleasure in secreting them within its own structure. [3] to talk about them is one thing, and the essay that emerged from my research into the sources of _cape fear_ needs, like almost any conventional essay in film studies, a great deal of faith from the reader. even frame enlargements from the films in question will not adequately prove my assertions or my theorizing about allusion, citation, and quotation in modernist and postmodern practice. such a discussion needs visual proof, which only the moving images can provide. [4] to set the scene for scorsese's hitchcockian reclamations, i needed first to address larger notions of cinematic form. many filmmakers have attempted to absorb elements of hitchcockian structure in their films--basically because hitchcock did various formal tropes so well and with commercial success. in _vertigo_, to give one instance, hitchcock solves the problem of how to communicate his main character's response to heights by creating an elaborate visual effect, which is achieved by simultaneously zooming the camera's lens in one direction while tracking the camera in the other. difficult to imagine or even recall from the film. here is what it looks like: [film clip] _vertigo_, alfred hitchcock, paramount, 1958 [.6 mb] still more difficult to imagine is the that fact that this bit of technique has fascinated a variety of filmmakers, who have tried to improve upon it over and over again. spielberg does it often. this what it looks like in _jaws_, where he attempts to communicate police chief brody's surprise and anxiety at spotting the shark. [film clip] _jaws_, steven spielberg, universal, 1975 [.19 mb] [5] in its most complex version yet, scorsese recomposes it for a climactic moment in _goodfellas_, where the main character is about to betray his friends. [film clip] _goodfellas_, martin scorsese, warner bros., 1990 [2 mb] [6] this interaction of visual and explanatory texts not only proves a scholarly point, but explains intertextuality in an intertextual way. this becomes clearer in my main argument, which is, after all, about an intertextuality so essential to a filmmaker's style that one film haunts another through the very structure of its images. _strangers on a train_ and _cape fear_ are films about doubles: evil twins, subjectivities split in two, each one attempting to destroy the other. there is a sequence in _strangers on a train_, in which the mad bruno, who has committed a murder for his "other," the tennis player, guy. bruno emerges from the shadows, calling to guy. it is one of the most unnerving things hitchcock has done, for it presents a character seeing his shadow take on form before his eyes. [film clip] _strangers on a train_, alfred hitchcock, warner bros., 1951 [2.2 mb] the structural base of this sequence is the shot/reaction shot --a look at the character and a cut to what the character is looking at--the basic way hitchcock builds a viewer's comprehension of his character's situation (a construction basic to all cinema, that hitchcock used with particular finesse). in _cape fear_, scorsese keeps returning to the hitchcockian version of that structure and to the central episode of guy and bruno in the dark. here's a version of it. sam boden, the lawyer suddenly haunted by his past, sees his nemesis, his evil other, max cady, as if in a dream. [film clip] _cape fear_, martin scorsese, universal, 1991 [.26 mb] [7] perhaps the most famous sequence in _strangers on a train_ occurs when guy spots bruno staring menacingly from the audience at a tennis match. secret terrors in public places is a favorite hitchcockian gambit, a way to everyone's anxiety. [film clip] _strangers on a train_, alfred hitchcock, warner bros., 1951 [2.4 mb] scorsese quotes the passage quite directly, using a fourth of july parade instead of a tennis match. film clip] _cape fear_, martin scorsese, universal, 1991 [1.6 mb] [8] scorsese also inverts the hitchcockian gambit. he takes another sequence from _strangers on a train_, in which bruno appears to guy, once again stiff and menacing as his is in the tennis match, but this time in front of the jefferson memorial. [film clip] _strangers on a train_, alfred hitchcock, warner bros., 1951 [.95 mb] scorsese turns it into another nightmare vision. sam boden's wife, leigh, emerges from sleep to see max cady in a shower of fireworks (yet another hitchcock quotation, this one from _to catch a thief_) in the dead of night. [film clip] _cape fear_, martin scorsese, universal, 1991 [1.2 mb] [9] there's a terrific sense of play in scorsese's work of reclamation that is now transferred into the critical process. images created and recalled become images recreated and compared. the imagination of the critic and the filmmaker become commingled. even enhanced. we now see what the critic is talking about and, hopefully, understand how deeply films grow out of other films. [10] and it's quite possible to go beyond quoting images and actually intervene in their structure, inscribing the critical act within the images themselves. this is particularly useful in explaining how a filmmaker articulates narrative structure by framing and moving within a shot. a famous sequence from welles's _citizen kane_ becomes an animated expression of the complex shiftings of narrative point of view as figures change position and dominate or become recessive in the frame. [film clip] [film clip, annotated] _citizen kane_, orson welles, rko, 1941 [1.3 mb each] [11] more than critical inquiry, this computer-assisted methodology becomes a kind of performance. the image is shared between filmmaker, critic, and reader, and its former inviolability is replaced by active intervention and presentation. the aura of the inviolable and inevitable text is diminished and the authority of the critic heightened by access. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------barnard, '`imagining the unimaginable': j.m. coetzee, history, and autobiography', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-barnard-imagining.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.993. part 1/1, total size 30258 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- `imagining the unimaginable': j.m. coetzee, history, and autobiography by rita barnard rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu english department university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by rita barnard, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: attwell, david. _j.m. coetzee: south africa and the politics of writing_. perspectives on south africa 48. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 1993. coetzee, j.m. _doubling the point: essays and interviews_. ed. david attwell. cambridge: harvard university press, 1992. [1] david attwell's important new critical account of j.m. coetzee's work takes as its epigraph a statement from one of his interviews with coetzee, recently collected in _doubling the point_: i am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. i am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations--which are shadows themselves--of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. (341) the remark is in many ways characteristic of coetzee: it does not refer in a direct and unproblematic way to any one of his novels; and yet it captures their rigorous sense of their own limitations, as well as their muted utopian dimension. the allusiveness of the statement is also characteristic, in that it rewrites, rather than merely echoes, plato's allegory of the cave. deeply conscious, as always, of our inevitably mediated and tenuous sense of reality (perhaps, in this context, we might call it "history"), coetzee shares something of plato's skepticism about what the poet might do in the world: a body still chained in darkness can scarcely be an "unacknowledged legislator," nor a herald, nor even a truthful witness. (south african literature, coetzee once remarked, is "exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write in a prison" [doubling, 98]). yet the shadow-play he evokes here--and, he feels, in his fiction--is not quite the trivial passage of objects before the firelight which plato has us conceive. it is a shadowy premonition of the impossible, of a different way of seeing: one that can only begin at that moment when, first, the body is unshackled, and then the eyes turn to a new order. [2] this statement, though far more personal, is reminiscent of a moment in coetzee's 1986 essay, "into the dark chamber." the piece recalls how rosa burger, the protagonist of gordimer's _burger's daughter_, is thrown into utter confusion as she watches a "black, poor, brutalized" man cruelly whip his donkey in a drunken fury. the act brings to rosa's mind, in the rush of an instant, a vision of the entirety of human suffering and torture, especially politically motivated cruelty: "solitary confinement ... the siberias of snow or sun, the lives of mandela, sisulu, mbeki, kathrada, kgosana, gull-picked on the island" (doubling 367). but it does so in such a way as to render moral judgement impossible: here is "torture without the torturer," victim hurting victim. how does one proceed beyond this vision? coetzee asks. he ends his essay with an expression of his longing, with rosa, for a restoration of ethics, for a "time when all human acts ... will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment," for a society in which it will "once again be *meaningful* for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgement"--the gaze of one who has faced the light outside the prison-cave--"to be turned upon scenes of torture" (doubling, 368). [3] the imperative to proceed "beyond" is, of course not one that is often indulged in coetzee's novels, nor is it clear, from a strictly logical or materialist point of view, that such a move is really possible. what is at stake, when coetzee, and his critic/interlocutor, ponder this question, is the relationship between the imagination and the real, or, if you will, between textuality and history. this relationship is the main concern of david attwell's book. the project of _j.m. coetzee: south africa and the politics of writing_ could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the distance between two contradictory attitudes towards history on the novelist's part. the first position, discussed in attwell's opening chapter, finds its most forceful expression in coetzee's controversial address ("the novel today") to the _weekly mail_ book week in 1987. coetzee here insists on the discursive nature of history, and its difference from--and even its enmity to--the discourse of the novel. he describes the position of the south african novelist as follows: in times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.... (15) in the face of what we might call the dominant counter hegemonic discourse of the mass democratic movement, in which literature must become a weapon in "the struggle," coetzee resolutely refuses the "correct" position of supplementarity, and claims the separate discourse of the novel, of the story, as his own--beleaguered--terrain. [4] the second position, discussed in attwell's final chapter, emerges from coetzee's 1990 interview with the _washington post_, in which "real history" seems to be reaffirmed. %a propos% of francis fukiyama's (premature) post-cold war declarations about the global achievement of liberal democracy, the novelist observes: there is a certain controversy, isn't there, going on right at the moment in the united states about "the end of history"?... the position, expressed in a very crude way, is that the western democracies have reached a stage in their historical development in which development ceases because there is no stage beyond it.... that very way of seeing the history of mankind is a symptom of the first world ... moving to a plateau of inconsequentiality or irrelevance. it's actually the third world where history, real history is happening. and the first world has played itself out of the game (attwell, 124). this observation, with which attwell brings his study to its close, is read as a return to the site of history, "real history," as a place of privilege. [5] for attwell, whose approach to literature is theoretically eclectic but fundamentally historicist, and whose declared purpose is not only to explicate, but to offer a "tribute" to coetzee's oeuvre (7), coetzee's insistence on novelistic autonomy in "the novel today" essay presents something of a political and a methodological problem. as a south african academic, he is only too aware of the critical protest which this kind of position could- and did--elicit; namely, that coetzee is guilty of a decadent, elitist aestheticism.^1^ he seems somewhat embarrassed by the "chilly political choice" and the "exclusively and unhappily manichean" terms in which it is offered (16-17; trump 107). it is tempting, therefore, to speculate that this might be the reason why "the novel today"--surely one of coetzee's most provocative and least circulated pieces--is not included in _doubling the point_. [6] in fact, however, the main impulse in _j.m. coetzee: politics and writing in south africa_ is not to evade, but to challenge and complicate such a polarization of history and fictionality, by exploring the ways in which coetzee's novels are themselves contextualized. attwell offers the term "situational metafiction" as a way of suggesting that the tension between the two contradictory positions is both irresolvable and productive. the term, as he argues, is by no means paradoxical: "coetzee's figuring of the tension between text and history is itself a historical act, one that must be read back into the discourses of south africa where on can discern its illuminating power" (3).^2^ whether or not coetzee chooses to represent south african history is then far less important, in this study, than the fact that his work consistently registers, even when it tries to escape, the political pressures that shape the act of writing. the historical contextualization we see in attwell's text is not the kind coetzee excoriates in "the novel today": the kind that treats the novels' conclusions as checkable by history "as a child's schoolwork is checked by a school mistress" [3].^3^ attwell suggests that for coetzee, as for jameson, "history" %per se% is unrepresentable, but, as a political unconscious, leaves its mark on all forms of expression. the position is formulated as follows in _doubling the point_: "it is rare that history should emerge ... as necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. history, in [coetzee's] work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation ..." (66). [7] compared to the other three full-length studies of coetzee's work (by penner, dovey, and gallagher) attwell's is by far the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in its treatment of the south african context--historical, political, and literary. indeed, it is fair to say that only susan van zanten gallagher's _a story of south africa: j.m. coetzee's fiction in context_, makes much of an attempt to offer a historicist reading.^4^ attwell's book situates the novels not only in terms of political events--the soweto uprisings, the death in detention of steve biko, etc.--the kind of thing that gallagher, at her greater remove from south africa, also provides--but in terms of both the academic and political *discourses* prevalent in south africa at a given moment. [8] attwell is able, for instance, to relate the political stance of _dusklands_ (1974) to the emergence of a post liberal discourse in south africa during the seventies: a phenomenon shaped, in various ways, by the black consciousness movement, by beyers naude's study project on christianity in apartheid society (spro-cas), by the first contributions of a south african marxist historiography, and by the first challenges to the comfortable leavisite humanism that had dominated south african english departments up to that point. or, in the case of _waiting for the barbarians_ (1981), he is able to demonstrate that the novel, despite its fictional location and indeterminate time--and despite its stated theme of resistance to "the time of history" as the imposition of a vicious empire- responds rather specifically to the discourse and practice of the state at a particularly paranoid moment. in the wake of the soweto uprising, and the fall of colonial regimes to the north, the apartheid regime developed a "total strategy" to counter the "total onslaught" of terrorists, communists, and agitators at the border (not to mention those in the backyard, under the bed, and behind every bush). the novel's challenge to "empire's" cruel certainties in its quest for self-preservation and its elimination of the "other," clearly responds to this time of detentions, bannings, torture, and rumors of torture in south africa. moreover, as attwell argues, the very phantasmagoric remoteness of the novel's %mise-en-scene%, has the paradoxically representational dimension of mimicking the phantasmagoric character of the state's paranoid projections. as one who was subjected at school to classes in "youth resistance," who joked that the communists invented sex to seduce the afrikaner teenager, and who listened in astonishment to the callous excuses given for the deaths in detention in the years just before the novel's publication, i can only confirm the aptness of this contextualization: it is impossible for someone who lived through the late seventies in south africa to read the novel only as "being about" a fictive never-never land. [9] but to say this is to minimize the caution with which both attwell, and coetzee in _doubling the point_, approach the question of relevant "facts" and "contexts." (at the beginning of the latter book, for instance, we find coetzee pondering the problem of writing the history of his intellectual career: "but which facts? all the facts? no. all the facts are too many facts. you choose the facts insofar as they fall with your evolving purpose. what is the purpose in the present case?" [doubling 18].) attwell's introduction, significantly, offers a kind of apology for his own historicizing efforts: he recognizes that these might go against coetzee's "evolving purpose" (which attwell admits seems to be shifting, in the later novels, in the direction of a kind of self-exploding textuality that opposes the fixed structures of historical consciousness). [10] the reason for this deference lies in attwell's realization that coetzee's resistance to history is based on what the novelist sees as an ethical and liberatory imperative. in the interview i referred to at the beginning of this essay, coetzee reminds attwell--and all of us--that not just history and necessity, but also freedom, stands beyond representation (freedom is, as kant argued "the unimaginable"); and insists that (paradoxically) *because* of the way the overwhelmingly brutal facts of south african history tend to short-circuit the imagination, "the task becomes imagining [the] unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of the imagination to start taking place" (66-8). coetzee, in short, does not deny his own status as a prisoner of history--but insists on the importance of those shadowy projections: the need to also think of "people slipping off their chains." attwell's historicist study therefore remains constantly, and self critically aware of coetzee's urgent insistence on the qualified freedom of fiction. the result is the first reading of coetzee's work that contextualizes and politicizes coetzee's novels, even as it articulates the theoretical problem of "history" and recognizes the possible limitations of historically demystifying criticism.^5^ [11] the value and character of _doubling the point_ is rather more difficult to pinpoint. it is, as the subtitle announces, a collection of critical essays and interviews. but it is perhaps primarily an autobiography of sorts; and while, as i suggested above, the collection frequently reveals coetzee's connections to the modernist tradition, it has to be seen as a rather postmodern autobiography. it offers only a few moments of conventional first person recollection (notably in the essay "remembering texas"), as is consistent with coetzee's suspicions about any claim to self-presence--a suspicion that makes him favor the mode of the interview, "as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue" (19). what we end up with is, therefore, fragmentary and dialogic; and, while the collection does conclude with a very revealing retrospective statement in the final interview, this too is rather self-deconstructive. written in the third person, it identifies, as the pivotal moment of the intellectual life we have just reviewed, the essay on "confession and double thoughts": a skeptical exploration of the infinite nature of confession, of the impossibility to ever tell the truth in autobiography. [12] all this is not to say that many interesting "facts" about coetzee's life and thinking do not emerge from _doubling the point_; but that, as i have already suggested, the idea of a personal "history" is from the start problematic. as the final essay states, there is little distinction to be made between the writing of fiction, of criticism, and of autobiography: all of these are modes of storytelling--and in coetzee's hand stories are always fictions that will claim no final closure, that are skeptical even of skepticism. _doubling the point_ is thus an intriguingly contradictory text: authoritative (the rigor and range of coetzee's intellect inevitably give it that austere quality) and anti-authoritarian. [13] it is perhaps fair to say that none of the critical essays here--to turn to another aspect of _doubling the point_--are as good as, for instance, the introduction and the first chapter of _white writing_; nor (inevitably) does the collection, selected for the sake of a more or less chronological intellectual biography, have the thematic coherence of that earlier book. the essays do reveal an impressive range of intellectual work: in addition to the pieces on beckett, kafka, gordimer, and achterberg, already mentioned, _doubling the point_ includes discussions of tolstoy, dosteyevsky, gibbon, newton, rousseau, nabokov, musil, barthes, godard, girard, derrida, lacan, fugard, la guma, and also of advertising, censorship, and even rugby. i can live without some of the essays included here, especially those in the "popular culture" and the "syntax" subsections of the book (though attwell's attempts to relate them to the fiction are consistently interesting). but at least two of essays in the collection, the jerusalem prize acceptance speech and the essay on torture ("into the dark chamber: the writer and the south african state"), have always seemed to me essential to an understanding of coetzee's political vision. i am also delighted that the sardonic barthesian essay "the burden of consciousness in africa" (on the fugard/devenish film _the guest_ [1977]) will now be available to a wider audience. on the whole, it seems to me that coetzee is revealed in these essays as something quite rare, if not paradoxical: a very academic, very sophisticated autodidact. i don't think this assessment would strike him as out of line: coetzee observes at one point that he has no "field" as a literary scholar, and therefore frequently finds himself in the position of "reinventing philosophical wheels" (243). the results are sometimes extremely rewarding for the reader, and sometimes less so. 14] but the essays *per se*, do not make _doubling the point_: the book's extraordinary interest lies in the interviews, which are by far the most engaged, the most revealing, and the most suggestive for readings of coetzee's fiction yet to appear. one interview even offers a disarmingly candid assessment (or would the essay on confession rule out my use of the word "candid"?) of the reason why so many of coetzee's previous interviews seem so terse and unrevealing. coetzee quite frankly acknowledges his reputation for being "evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant" to journalistic interviewers (65), but suggests that his difficulty with the ordinary interview ultimately comes from a profound philosophical disagreement with their basic assumptions. on some level, he argues, they believe in the confession, whether as something that comes out of a legal interrogation, or (in a more rousseauvian mode) from the "transports of unrehearsed speech"; while for coetzee truth is in silence, and in the dialogic possibilities of writing--in the war between the counter-voices which the act of writing evokes within the writer. (the questions and answers here collected were written, not taped.) [15] comments like these illustrate perfectly what we may find in the best moments of _doubling the point_: observations that are both personally revealing, and that suggest, rather than dictate, ways in which we might read coetzee's novels. the remarks on the interview, for instance, present us with an extremely important caveat against reading coetzee too monologically, or against any simplistic identification of coetzee's position with a single character. let us apply this suggestion to a controversial example: in the case of _life and times of michael k._ we are not necessarily called upon to read the humble gardener as a figure for coetzee's putative political, or more exactly, a-political, position. the novel does not straightforwardly tell us (as such commentators as gordimer and steven clingman seem to have thought) to "cultivate our own garden" as michael k. does. (that position would seem to reach its limit after all when the garden is mined.) rather, the novel sets in motion a struggle (a "war" in the novel's terminology) between certain principles, possibilities, readings, and stories. [16] another revealing moment in _doubling the point_ can be discovered in coetzee's moving comments on suffering and the body in the interview preceding the section on "autobiography and confession." i cite his confession at some length: if i look back over my own fiction, i see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. that standard is the body. whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it *is* is the pain it feels. the body with its pain becomes the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (one can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, i'm sure.) ... let me put it baldly, in south africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. it is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (i would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. and let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one *grants* the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body *takes* this authority: that is its power. to use other words: its power is undeniable. (let me add, *entirely* parenthetically, that i as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. these fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.) (248) these comments are offered to account for the curious authority of friday, the mute, mutilated, unassimilable figure from _foe_, whom we are finally called upon to think of as standing outside language. (his home, we are told at the novel's end, is "a place where bodies are their own signs" [157].) but they remind us, more generally, of the importance of the body in all of coetzee's novels: the bitten ear of the hottentot child and the (unforgettable!) anal carbuncle of the explorer in _dusklands_, the broken feet and bloodied backs of the prisoners in _waiting for the barbarians_, the harelip and bony frame of the starved michael k., and the cancer that is slowly destroying elizabeth curren in _age of iron_. these remarks explain, moreover, why coetzee identifies so strongly with the moment in _burger's daughter_ i discussed above: that short circuiting of moral understanding in the face of human brutality is something that he shares, and tries to repair in his fiction. [17] at the conclusion of _doubling the point_, coetzee returns us again, surprisingly, to plato, with a simple insistence that we are somehow born with an idea of justice and truth. this is, as coetzee is all too aware, a vulnerable and perhaps a naive position, but it is the only way he finds himself able to explain his own marginal position--the paradox of the "colonial postcoloniality" of his texts; the fact that like the magistrate in _waiting for the barbarians_ he seems compelled to "choose the side of justice when it is not in one's material interests to do so" (394-5). the reconstruction of an ethical vision, against the odds of an unbearably violent history, is the imperative with which both these texts finally leave us: coetzee's writings, as attwell concludes, do project beyond their situation, "alerting us to the as yet unrealized promise of freedom" (125). ____________________________________________________________ notes ^1^ see for instance michael chapman's comments on _foe_ as a "kind of masturbatory release, in this country, of the europeanizing dreams of an intellectual coterie" (335). cited in attwell 127-8 fn. ^2^ in his essay "the problem of history in the fiction of j.m. coetzee," attwell elaborates on the theoretical position underpinning his book (trump, 128). ^3^ for a discussion of such readings, see teresa dovey, "coetzee and his critics: the case of _dusklands_," _english in africa_ 14 (1987): 15-30. ^4^ the title of dick penner's book, _countries of the mind_, declares candidly that his interest lies elsewhere; and teresa dovey, while deploying an extremely limited notion of south african discursive codes which coetzee subverts, has even less interest in any kind of historical specificity. (schreiner seems to be the only other south african writer she has actually read.) as attwell so neatly puts it, dovey challenges those naive critics who would turn coetzee's work into a supplement to history, but then turns it into a supplement to lacan (2). ^5^ there is an interesting discussion in _doubling the point_ of coetzee's increasing resistance to symptomatic readings in his own criticism: "why am i now suspicious of such suspiciousness?" coetzee asks himself (106). the answer he ventures is that demystificatory criticism tends to privilege mystification. attwell's criticism seems to me to be influenced by this discussion. (see, for instance, 118-19.) ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited attwell, david. "j.m. coetzee and the problem of history." trump 94-133. rpt. _poetics today_ 11 (fall 1990): 579-615. chapman, michael. "the writing of politics and the writing of writing: on reading dovey on reading lacan on reading coetzee on reading ... (?)" rev. of dovey. _journal of literary studies_ 4 (1988): 327-41. clingman, stephen. "revolution and reality: south african fiction in the 1980s." trump 41-60. coetzee, j.m. "author on history's cutting edge. south africa's j.m. coetzee: visions of doomed heroics." interview. _washington post_ 27 nov, 1990: c1, c4. ---. _foe_. new york: penguin, 1987. ---. "the novel today." _upstream_ 6 (1988): 2-5. dovey, teresa. _the novels of j.m. coetzee: lacanian allegories_. johannesburg: ad. donker, 1988. fukiyama, francis. "the end of history?" _national interest_ 16 (summer 1989): 3-18. gallagher, susan van zanten. _a story of south africa: j.m. coetzee's fiction in context_. cambridge: harvard university press, 1991. gordimer, nadine. "the idea of gardening." rev. of _life and times of michael k._ _new york review of books_ 2 feb. 1984: 3,6. penner, dick. _countries of the mind: the fiction of j.m. coetzee_. westport, ct: greenwood, 1989. trump, martin. _rendering things visible: essays on south african literary culture_. athens: ohio up, 1990): 94 133. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ouzgane, 'women and islam', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-ouzgane-women.txt women and islam by lahoucine ouzgane dept. of english, university of alberta louzgane@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by lahoucine ouzgane, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: ahmed, leila. _women and gender in islam: historical roots of a modern debate_. new haven and london: yale up, 1992. pp. viii + 296. cloth, $30.00 [1] leila ahmed's _women and gender in islam_ centers on the conditions and lives of women in middle eastern arab history. it is a response both to the growing strength of islamist movements, which urge a return to the laws and practices set forth in the core islamic discourse, and to the way in which arab women are discussed in the west. [2] the book is divided into three parts. "part one: the pre-islamic middle east" includes a chapter on mesopotamia and another on the mediterranean middle east. citing archeological evidence, ahmed points out that the subordination of middle eastern women became more or less institutionalized with the rise of urban centers in the valleys of the tigris and euphrates rivers between 3500 and 3000 b.c.e. these centers gave rise to military competitiveness, the patriarchal family, the exclusion of women from most of the professional classes, the designation of women's sexuality as the property of men, and the use of the veil to differentiate between "respectable" and "disreputable" women. challenging the assumption that islamic societies are inherently oppressive to women--a task that she undertakes throughout her book--ahmed stresses the fact that the "mesopotamian, persian, hellenic, christian, and eventually islamic cultures each contributed practices that both controlled and diminished women, and each also apparently borrowed the controlling and reductive practices of its neighbors" (18). [3] reviewing, for example, some of the salient features of byzantine society, ahmed notes that the birth of a boy (but not that of a girl) was greeted with cries of joy, that, "barring some general disaster, women were always supposed to be veiled" (26), and that the system of relying on eunuchs to enforce the separation of the sexes was already in place. to show continuity with the rigid byzantine customs, ahmed turns to classical greek, and specifically aristotelian, theories which conceived of women "as innately and biologically inferior in both mental and physical capacities--and thus as intended for their subservient position by 'nature'" (29). citing several scholars--sarah pomeroy, dorothy thompson, naphtali lewis, jean vercoutter, and christiane desroches noblecourt--ahmed finds that only the "remarkably nonmisogynist" culture of the new kingdom in egypt "accorded women high esteem" (31). but neither ahmed nor her sources explain this anomalous situation. the rest of the chapter outlines how, in the centuries immediately preceding the rise of islam, the politically dominant christianity brought with it "the religious sanction of women's social subordination and the endorsement of their essential secondariness" (34). [4] the four chapters of part two are grouped under the heading of "founding discourses." here, the text deals with arabia at the time of the rise of islam, carefully delineating the changes brought about by the new religion when it spread to the rest of the middle east. when muhammed became the established prophet, women lost their economic independence, their autonomy, and the right to a monogamous marriage. the period also witnessed the institution of the patrilineal and patriarchal marriage (aisha was ten years old when she was married to muhammed). after the prophet's death in 632, the mechanisms for controlling women's lives were more clearly articulated by the succeeding caliphs. under umar's reign (634-44), for instance, segregated prayers were established (with a male imam for the women); and polygamy and marriage of nineor ten-year-old girls were sanctioned. umar himself was very harsh toward women both in private and in public. [5] at the end of this chapter, ahmed makes one of the most important points of her argument: what has been consistently overlooked, she declares, is "the broad ethical field of meaning" in which these restrictive practices against women were embedded--"the ethical teachings islam was above all established to articulate" (62). her point has far-reaching implications for how we understand islam's attitude toward women. "when those teachings are taken into account," she says, the religion's understanding of women and gender emerges as far more ambiguous than this account might suggest. islam's ethical vision, which is stubbornly egalitarian, including with respect to the sexes, is thus in tension with, and might even be said to subvert, the hierarchical structure of marriage pragmatically instituted in the first islamic society. (62-63) to prove that islam recognizes the "identicalness of men and women and the equal worth of their labor" (65), ahmed quotes the following quranic verse: "i suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste, be he a man or a woman: the one of you is of the other." but even if one were to overlook the problem of translation (another translator, n.j. dawood, renders the passage in question this way: "i will deny no man or woman among you the reward of their labours. you are the offspring of one another"), it is hard to argue for a "stubbornly egalitarian" vision when the only quranic sura entitled "women" is addressed to men, and where one can read that "men have authority over women because god has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. good women are obedient. . . . as for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. then if they obey you, take no further action against them" (sura 4: 34). [6] from ahmed's point of view, muslim women suffered the worst excesses of the pragmatic teachings of islam under the abbasid dynasty ruling at baghdad (749-1258). the abbasid elite men kept enormous harems of wives and concubines and sanctioned polygamy and the seclusion of women; an enormous number of arab soldiers who arrived in irak took wives and concubines from the local non-muslim populations; and "one young man," we are told, "on receiving his inheritance, went out to purchase 'a house, furniture, concubines and other objects'" (83). to survive in this kind of atmosphere, women had to resort to manipulation, poison, intense rivalries, and falsehoods. ("zubaida, royal-born wife of harun al-rashid, jealous of his attachment to a particular concubine, was advised to stop nagging--and felt the need to make up for her jealous lapse by presenting al-rashid with ten concubines.") once again, ahmed observes, the ethical injunctions of islam were rarely translated into enforceable laws. only texts that orthodox theologians, legists, and philosophers (the likes of al-ghazali) created were--and continue to be--regarded as the core prescriptive texts of islam. but ahmed also makes it clear that this intense misogyny was neither originally nor exclusively muslim in character, but rather the consequence of a cultural negotiation between islam and "an urban middle east with already well-articulated misogynist attitudes and practices": [b]y licensing polygamy, concubinage, and easy divorce for men, originally allowed under different circumstances in a different society, islam lent itself to being interpreted as endorsing and giving religious sanction to a deeply negative and debased conception of women. (87) [7] "part three: new discourses" is narrow in focus- dealing mainly with egypt from early 19th century to the present--but crucial to a good understanding of islam and women today. the period witnessed the western economic encroachment on the middle east and the emergence of the "modern" states. while the inroads made by european goods in egypt were decidedly negative for women--who worked mainly in textiles--the process of change set in motion would prove broadly positive for them. most importantly, ahmed notes, the period saw "the emergence of women themselves as a central subject for national debate. for the first time since the establishment of islam, the treatment of women in islamic custom and law--the license of polygamy, easy male access to divorce, and segregation--were openly discussed . . ." (128). but the debates about "women" and social reform always took place in a european context, so to speak: the muslim society felt the need to catch up to a relatively "advanced" european culture. this, indeed is one of ahmed's central arguments. the problem with proponents of "improvement in the status of women," she observes, is that they had from early on couched their advocacy in terms of the need to abandon the (implicitly) 'innately' and 'irreparably' misogynist practices of the native culture in favor of the customs and beliefs of another culture--the european. (129) [8] ahmed extends this discussion in chapter 8: "the discourse of the veil"--one of the best treatments of the subject i have seen and, for me, the strongest part of ahmed's study. the chapter begins with ahmed's examination of qassim amin's _the liberation of woman_, a book that provoked intense and furious debate upon its publication in 1899 (with more than thirty books and articles appearing in response) and that is traditionally regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in the arab world. amin argues passionately for the abolition of the veil and for fundamental changes in culture, society, and even in arab character. of egyptian women he writes that they are not in the habit of combing their hair every day . . . nor do they bathe more than once a week. they do not know how to use a toothbrush and do not attend to what is attractive in clothing, though their attractiveness and cleanliness strongly influence men's inclinations. they do not know how to rouse desire in their husband, nor how to retain his desire or increase it. . . . (quoted in ahmed, 157) at this point, ahmed remarks that the fusion of the issue of women and culture and the expanded signification of the veil originated in the discourses of european societies: those ideas were interjected into the native discourse as muslim men exposed to european ideas began to reproduce and react to them and, subsequently and more persuasively and insistently, as europeans--servants of empire and individuals resident in egypt--introduced and actively disseminated them. (149) throughout this segment of her argument, ahmed insists that "the peculiar practices of islam with respect to women had always formed part of the western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of islam" (149). prior to the seventeenth century, western ideas about islam derived mainly from travelers and crusaders. the other source of western ideas of islam came from the narrative of colonial domination regarding the inferiority of all other cultures and societies, a narrative that successfully co-opted the language of feminism and whose thesis was that "islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized this oppression, and that these customs were fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of islamic societies" (151-52). if the situation of egyptian women was to improve, lord cromer deemed it essential that egyptians "be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization" because the practices of veiling and seclusion constituted "the fatal obstacle" to the egyptians' "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of western civilization" (quoted in ahmed, 153). [9] but when ahmed examines cromer's policies in egypt, they turn out to be extremely detrimental to egyptian women: he placed restrictions on government schools, raised school fees, and discouraged the training of women doctors because, as he declared, "throughout the civilized world, attendance by medical men is still the rule." ahmed also underscores the fact that "this champion of the unveiling of egyptian women was, in england, founding member and sometime president of the men's league for opposing women's suffrage" (1953). others besides the official servants of empire shared and promoted cromer's ideas. for the missionaries, the degradation of women in islam was legitimate ground for their attacks on native culture, so missionary-school teachers actively attacked the practice of veiling by trying to persuade girls to defy their families and not wear one. ahmed quotes a missionary woman's conviction that marriage in islam was "not founded on love but on sensuality" and that a muslim wife, "buried alive behind the veil," was regarded as "prisoner and slave rather than . . . companion and help-mate" (154). to show how insiduous and widespread this campaign against the veil was, ahmed cites the case of the well-meaning european feminist eugnie le brun, who earnestly encouraged young egyptian women to cast off the veil as their first step toward female liberation (154). [10] qassim amin, "son of cromer and colonialism," had apparently internalized the colonialist perception of egyptian culture, and his _liberation of woman_ merely replicated this perception. cromer's well-known pronouncements (on the differences between, on the one hand, the european man's close reasoning, his clarity, his natural logic, and his love of symmetry, and, on the other hand, the oriental's slipshod reasoning) are echoed in amin's assertion that for the most part the european man uses his intellect, but when circumstances require it, he deploys force. he does not seek glory from his possessions and colonies, for he has enough of this through his intellectual achievements and scientific inventions. (quoted in ahmed, 155) as colonialists and missionaries have always maintained, to change a culture, %il faut chercher la femme%. to make muslim society abandon its backward ways, amin argued, required changing the women--for whom, as noted earlier, he reserved his most virulent contempt: "the grown man is none other than his mother shaped him in childhood," and *this is the essence of this book. . . . it is impossible to breed successful men if they do not have mothers capable of raising them to be successful*. this is the noble duty that advanced civilization has given to women in our age and which she fulfills in advanced societies. (quoted in ahmed, 156; emphasis in original) [11] the irony here, ahmed argues, is that it is western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil: muslim men exposed to european ways felt the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because "their" women were veiled. amin's ideas can thus be explained only in the context of the authority and global dominance of the western world, for, as ahmed says, "the connection between the issues of culture and women, and more precisely between the cultures of other men and the oppression of women, was created by western discourse" (165). ahmed does not deny that islamic societies oppressed women: "they did and do; that is not in dispute." rather, she wants to emphasize "the political uses" of the idea that islam oppressed women, so as to challenge the "vague and inaccurate understanding of muslim societies," an understanding derived from what patriarchal colonialists identified as the sources and main form of women's oppression in islamic culture. in short, the attention given to the issue of the veil far outweighs its significance and obscures the real and substantive matters of women's rights, including their right to identify what *they* (and not cromer or amin) define as significant sites of struggle. [12] chapter 9, "the first feminists," looks at the two founding feminist discourses that appeared in egypt in the first three decades of this century. while the dominant voice, closely allied with the westernizing and secularizing tendencies of society, promoted the desirability of progress toward western-type societies, the alternative voice, wary of and opposed to western ways, searched for ways of articulating female subjectivity within a native islamic discourse (174). here, ahmed deals briefly with the work of such figures as huda sharawi, malak nassef, mai ziyada, alila rifaat, and nawal el-saadawi. for the first time, egyptian women themselves were exploring the implications of a male-gendered debate and its fixation on the veil. [13] in the last chapter, "the struggle for the future," ahmed examines the significance of a "new" phenomenon in egypt known as %al-ziyy al-islami% or the islamic dress: men complying with the requirement of modesty may wear arabian-style robes (rather than egyptian robes), sandals, and sometimes a long scarf on the head, or they may wear baggy trousers and loose shirts. women wear robes in a variety of styles. . . . but the skirts are ankle-deep and the sleeves long . . . and some of them, depending on how they personally interpret the requirement for modesty, wear face veils." (22021) ahmed's point is that the islamic dress might be seen as a democratic one, erasing class origins; it is also economical, and most importantly for women, it gives them a great deal of social mobility while preserving their native culture. ultimately, the islamic dress "is the uniform of arrival, signaling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity" (225). [14] as no other general survey of women and gender in islam exists, _women and gender in islam_ is a welcome contribution to the subject and particularly to the current debates about the "inherently misogynist" nature of islam. the book is a fascinating survey of islamic debates and ideologies about women and gender in the middle east, a part of the world that has exercised--and continues to exercise- a compelling influence on the western imagination. � wood, 'from technology to machinism', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-wood-from.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.594. part 1/1, total size 23408 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- from technology to machinism by brent wood methodologies for the study of western history and culture trent university bwood@trentu.ca _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by brent wood, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: conley, verena andermatt, ed., on behalf of miami theory collective. _rethinking technologies_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. [1] _rethinking technologies_ is a collection of twelve essays inspired (at least nominally so) by miami university's 1990 colloquium "questioning technologies." the volume is dedicated in memoriam to felix guattari, whose writings on technology and ecology the editors single out as specifically inspirational for much of the work it contains. guattari's thought is represented by his essay "machine heterogenesis," perhaps the most difficult in the volume, in which he seeks to go beyond heidegger by showing how machines manifest not being but "multitudes of ontological components" (26). we humans, according to guattari, participate in this "ontological reconversion" merely by accepting what it is that the machines offer us. [2] most of the essays in the volume relate directly or indirectly to heidegger's "the question concerning technology"; some refer also to other of his works. ingrid scheibler's "heidegger and the rhetoric of submission" focuses almost exclusively on a defense of heidegger's work against criticism it has endured from jurgen habermas. heidegger's major contribution to the discourse of technology was to ask that we think of technology not in terms of applied science but instead in terms of a representational "enframing" that prevents us from encountering the being of beings; editor conley suggests that "it may be possible to rethink technologies in terms other than enframing" (xi). conley sees the collection of essays that make up _rethinking technologies_ as an attempt to go both "through" and "beyond" heidegger, a move required primarily by two late twentieth-century developments: global ecological crisis and the "transformation of subjectivities" (xiii) brought about by the proliferation of communication technologies. [3] the essays are nominally organized into four groups: "questioning technologies," "technology and the environment," "technology and the arts," and "technology and cyberspace." these groupings, intended as "markers for the reader" (x) are largely specious. francoise gaillard's essay "technical performance: postmodernism, angst or agony of modernism" seeks the roots of the apparent political anemia of the arts under late capitalism, all but ignoring technology in the process. three other essays, scott durham's "the technology of death and its limits: the problem of the simulation model," alberto moreiras's "the leap and the lapse: hacking a private site in cyberspace," and avital ronell's "our narcotic modernity," look to literature for advice on the problems posed by the clash of the human and the technological, yet only durham's is grouped under the banner of "arts." the only case in which there is a productive dialogue between the grouping and the interior of the essay is that of teresa brennan's "age of paranoia." brennan's essay traces a metaphorical connection between the urge, in the infant, for control of the mother's breast and modernity's overstress of the visual and tendency to commodify (and, implicitly, degrade) the earth as a source of life. [4] presented with such a motley collection of ideas, one can proceed in either of two ways: take only what is useful to one's own field of study and dismiss the rest, or labour to make connections between the pieces that (hopefully) result in further insight, which may be still more heterogeneous with regard to the original collection. there is also the possibility that the latter approach may result in nothing but a headache and a subsequent recoiling to the safety of a good novel. at the risk of sounding disrespectfully flip, i suggest that this state of affairs may have been the founding moment of the three "appeals to literature" described above. it ought to go without saying that there is nothing dishonourable about such a move, in which art ceases to be mere illustration for theory and begins also to motivate and to define it. [5] in terms of the hard-core theory exemplified by contributors guattari and virilio, the three "appeals to literature" may appear marginal. i prefer to see them as the epitome of the "interplay" which conley feels we ought to find within _rethinking technologies_. i take the bold step of forming my own provisional groupings for the purposes of "making sense" of the heterogeneity of the collection. i would wish to imply all the standard logocentric disclaimers applicable to the previous statement were i not, in highlighting these three essays, making words the sort-of-center of my critique. perhaps i might venture to call it a "blind spot" as opposed to a "sort-of-center" in order to point out the absence of "words" as an explicit subject of discourse in the volume, for it appears that they are always lurking just over the authors' and editors' shoulders. [6] ronell focuses her essay around a meta-fictional passage linking flaubert's _madame bovary_ with america's contemporary "war on drugs." ronell equates the writer with the addict, and literature with drugs. she begins with a reference to the presence of drugs in heidegger's %gestell% (enframing) and %dasein% (being). addiction, in ronell's reading of heidegger, is a response to a vital urge, but in the end an inauthentic one: "addicted, %dasein% goes nowhere fast" (60). ronell provisionally accepts heidegger's assimilation of addiction under technology--"a certain type of 'being-on-drugs'" (62)--in order to deconstruct it. derrida's supplement pokes its head into the picture as an explanation of the literature-drugs analogy; each is an attempt to compensate for an absence that seems to have always been there. ronell argues that the two share a common and parallel history contemporaneous with modernity. moreover, literature itself has always worked to tell us about the very strictures of law with which both it and its intimate, drugs, have had an ambiguous love-hate relationship: "flaubert's book went to court: it was denounced as a poison" (64). [7] it is through the figure of emma bovary that ronell demonstrates her thesis: that the "structure of addiction" is "metaphysically at the basis of our culture" (64). as i read the documents i realized that [emma] was the body on which these urges started showing almost naturally, prior to the time the technological prosthesis became available on the streets. . . . she declared a war on the real, this unknown horror, she put out a call for a drug culture. she worked out of her own abysses, hunting down the imaginary phallic supplement. (68-69) ronell's open-ended essay allows one to conclude that it is not contradictory to see literature and drugs both in terms of heidegger's enframing and in terms of derrida's supplement--if one sees modernity itself as in some sense a product of the enframing. the word, in cybernetic terms, as *command* is in an ambiguous position in its literary function, part of a control system that is nonetheless other to the law. [8] from modern literary control system we move to scott durham's postmodern simulation model. durham's essay is inspired by j.g. ballard's novel _crash_, one of the original harbingers of cyberpunk. durham contrasts siegfried giedion's illustration of the hog slaughterhouse as a paradigmatic encounter between technology and organic life with ballard's use of crash-test dummies to alter that very opposition. giedion's vision is a modern one that is fated to "untimeliness": it can only appear in a retrospective in which the organic appears as an "irreducible living presence" precisely at the moment of its death in the mechanized slaughterhouse of a technologized modernity. ballard's is a postmodern one in which baudrillard's reversal of the dependence of simulation on actuality is presaged. by implication, durham's use of ballard to replace giedion also means a bracketing of heidegger. [9] in ballard's novel the power of the word as an effective cog in a technological apparatus reaches new heights when viewed as an analog of the simulation model. that the model is of human death prevents us from appealing to mortality to highlight human "life" as unique from technological "life." our deaths are now just as much a product of social engineering as our day-to-day routines. durham argues that baudrillard's hyperbole--"a certain phantasy of postmodernity as a totally operational system"--is most important not for its own truth or falsehood, but rather for "the effects of truth it exerts on those who entertain it" (161). _crash_'s protagonist, as a believer, dreams "of a fatal collision with elizabeth taylor that would launch him into a permanent afterlife on the far side of the screen" (163). durham recalls j.l. austin as he characterizes the ensuing accident as a "misfire": ballard's hero's planned "accident" is interrupted by a "real" accident in which he crashes (ironically) into a busload of tourists. in durham's eyes, the attempted enactment of baudrillard's hyperreality results merely in the displacement of the real/simulation opposition it might have sought to resolve. for durham this implies that in postmodernity the "real" is lived not merely as "that which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction" but also as that which "withdraws absolutely from reproduction" (166). this echo of heidegger is analogously ironic. [10] alberto moreiras takes durham and ronell one step further, gathering together heidegger and derrida, the word and the letter, analogy and cybernetics, and extrapolating them into the world of virtual reality through jorge luis borges's story "el aleph." the "aleph" in borges's tale is a mysterious site of revelation which moreiras uses as an analog of cyberspace. it is "one of the points in space containing all points" and also "the site of encounter where 'modern man' meets robotic control of reality" (195). in this scheme, the aleph is "a radical place of disjunction, where language breaks down" (195). since the aleph can never be expressed but merely indicated, and since it contains every point and therefore must contain itself, it is the place where the "ground of analogy breaks in excess" (196). moreiras likens this crisis of analogy to what occurs when virtual reality, as the evolutionary end-product of a "calculative-representational enframing of the world" (194) --an utterly enveloping representation--throws representation itself into question. once again we are presented with the "real" as "withdrawing excess." the place where this withdrawal is experienced is the "private site" of the essay's title. [11] an aleph is also, moreiras notes, "the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language" (198). we must then, by analogy, deal with cyberspace in terms of the the derridean concept of writing as both excess and lack. as one attempts to "hack" one's way into cyberspace, encountering only the concurrent withdrawal of the real, one finds oneself, as moreiras puts it, "engag[ing] cyberware as a writing machine" (198). here moreiras's own sloppiness with cyberlingo comes back to haunt him. in the proliferation of "cybertech," "cyberexperience," "cyberexcess" and "cyberware" in addition to "cyberspace," "cybernetic" and "cyborg," a consistent meaning for the object of his analogy is lost. his traditional recourse to %kybernetes% ("pilot or governor of a ship") as the root of "cybernetics" does not help; the "control" function is alluded to once and never again, giving way to discussion of the "lapse" and the "leap" of writing. [12] the role played by control in critiques of technology, and especially of "cybertech," cannot be overstated. n. katherine hayles's excellent essay "the seductions of cyberspace" appeals to the "cybernetic literature" of william gibson, thomas pynchon, william s. burroughs and vernon vinge, but in the end its principal source of motivation is another kind of science fiction: norbert wiener's _cybernetics_. wiener, in fact, occupies a place in _rethinking technologies_ not so very far from heidegger's. one is tempted to see the two thinkers as fraternal twins: complementary interpretations of an original union between humanity and technology. hayles highlights the "fetishistic drive for control" that is at the base of cybernetics and, though it is not as often admitted, at the base of cyberspace. this latter is evident in a reading of gibson, the originator of the term "cyberspace." hayles quotes from autodesk's john walker, who, inspired by gibson, defines a cyberspace system as "a three-dimensional domain in which cybernetic feedback and communication occur" (176). hayles makes the implicit connection between the drive for control over the physical world and the desire to escape the results of this drive by occupying virtual space. [13] here we must examine the multiple meanings of the word "virtual," which are the source both of the term's appeal and of its contradictory implications. in english, "virtual" has two connotations: one optical and one mechanical. a virtual world is one that exists, from the user's perspective, on the other side of the mirror: the illusory "place" which ballard's hero seeks. at the same time, it is thought of as "virtual" reality; that is, the illusion is so strong that we can behave as if it were "reality." the french %virtuel%, however, often translated simply as "virtual," offers yet another angle. the "virtual" in this case is contrasted with the "actual": virtuality is potentiality. the gathering together of these meanings in a single term guarantees that it will be slippery and not admitting of a univocal conclusion when put into question. as hayles notes, it is fallacy to believe that by entering a virtual "space" we will be able to escape the problems that will continue to plague our physical surroundings. nevertheless, she is unable to resist the temptation to interpret cyberspace as "opening up new vistas for exploration" (188), even while she warns us of the power of the cybernetic system over human behaviour. this, it seems to me, is the most important "seduction" of cyberspace. hayles suggests we (dominant westerners) take the opening up of cyberspace as an opportunity to "extend lessons learned from postcolonialism" (188). we ought at the same time to bear in mind the lesson ronell learns from literature: "drugs, as it turns out, are not so much about seeking an exterior, transcendental dimension . . . as they are about exploring fractal interiorities" (62). if "cyberware" constitutes, as moreiras suggests, "a writing machine," or even if, as it seems to me, it puts the derridean distinction between writing and speech into question, then it is vital that the option of *silence* be left open for us, and not dismissed as a technophobic desire to return to a pre-technological world. [14] silence is in fact the theme of scheibler's defense of heidegger. scheibler seeks to rescue "silence" from the connotation of submission or resignation, especially in light of heidegger's acquiescence to national socialism. making reference to several of heidegger's works, she reinterprets silence as meditation, a way of being and thinking that frees us from the objectification of the world (and ourselves) that is the result of representational thinking. meditative thinking, writes scheibler, "is the way in which human beings are involved directly and immediately in being" (126). she quotes from john anderson, who suggests that "meditative thinking begins with an awareness of the field . . . an awareness of the horizon rather than of the objects of ordinary understanding" (127). this type of silence is not submissive to authority but rather outside of authority; it is outside word and outside writing. it is interesting that while "putting on cyberspace" appears to be an opening up of the horizon, it is only accomplished by a shrinking-in of our awareness. it is an inverse relation of the sublime that we feel here: to comprehend the function of "cyberspace systems" within our own minds is an impossible task. the aleph, the point in space that contains all points, it turns out, is within us, and it expels our contemplation with all the force of a magnetic field. the contemplation of the function of the word within results in a flurry of exteriorized words in ecstasy and defense. [15] in the end, it appears that only felix guattari himself is capable of what conley advocates as the mission of _rethinking technologies_: to go through and beyond heidegger. guattari begins by invoking both heidegger and wiener; he proposes that both these perspectives be avoided in an attempt to "discern the thresholds of ontological intensity that will allow us to grasp 'machinism'" (13). machinism is guattari's "object of fascination," not technology as it is defined by heidegger, by wiener, by derrida, or by baudrillard. guattari raises the all-important question of machinic autopoiesis, but insists that this not be thought of in terms of "vital autonomy according to an animal model," but rather in terms of "enunciative consistency" (14). neither are machines to be related to their material manifestations. for guattari the machine is a complex apparatus of enunciation that does not obey the structure of the signifier. echoing austin once again, he asserts that machinic autopoiesis is characterized not by signification but by "effects, products . . . [and] particular services" (14). echoing wiener, guattari suggests that this autopoiesis is demonstrated through a seeking of disequilibrium. following francisco varela, guattari notes that one function of autopoietic machines is to reproduce themselves; breaking with varela, he suggests that autopoiesis ought to be thought of as a kind of life "specific to a mecanosphere that superimposes itself on the biosphere" (17). in this vision, machines exist co-extensively with their biological components. [16] the machinic in guattari's essay seems to occupy a position similar to that occupied by schizoanalysis in his other work. here he is able to trace machinic orderings through dimensions of asignifying semiotics (related to cybernetics but also surpassing it), technological, biological and even human components. the machine is a figure of heterogenesis which challenges our habit of thinking in terms of ontological homogeneity. this is the underlying thrust of guattari's analysis of machines. it is even a seduction to call these heterogeneric orderings "machines"; this verbal component, following the intuition that guattari is seeking to access the heterogeneity of which he writes, is itself part of a functioning machine whose access to our thought is through the word "machine" itself. guattari's article does not tell us anything about technology. its function is to instruct our thought about its own structures by forcing it to strain against them. as an enunciation guattari's work is neither writing nor speech, but a sinister attempt to reorient the belongingness of our own enunciations to a system of control. [17] i have focused only on half the essays that comprise _rethinking technologies_ not through a prior process of choosing but merely because they fell this way as i attempted to "make sense" of the heterogeneity which with they presented me. in this respect i am guilty of attempting to unify difference through recourse to the essential unit of control--the word. %mea culpa%. this is my own cross to bear. other contributors include, in addition to the aforementioned brennan, virilio, and gaillard, patrick clancy ("telefigures and cyberspace"), editor conley herself ("eco-subjects"), and jean-luc nancy ("war, law, sovereignty--%techne%"). in utterly pragmatic terms, i recommend the book as useful reading for graduate students as well as senior undergraduates preparing for graduate school. it is also useful for any philosopher or cultural theorist pursuing questions posed by the clash between technological proliferation and either ecology or shifts in our conception of subjectivity. --------------------------------end--------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------helmling, 'desire called jameson', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-helmling-desire.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.195. part 1/1, total size 24653 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the desire called jameson by steven helmling department of english university of delaware helmling@brahms.udel.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by steven helmling, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] fredric jameson's new book revisits problems treated in earlier work, with results suggested in the titles of its three chapters. the first, "the antinomies of postmodernism," queries whether the venerable hegelian-marxist problematic of the "contradiction," which the historical process ("the dialectic") will resistlessly "resolve," must now (or again) be rethought as "antinomy," a static, self-reinforcing overdetermination, a "stalled or arrested dialectic," jameson calls it, whose apparent lock on the future complements its erasure of the past (except as commodified nostalgia), to produce an "end of history" in which all difference and otherness, including that of the once-utopian future itself, homogenizes into a tepid, entropic, indifferent condition of always-already-more-of-the-same. where "permanent revolution" was, there shall "permanent reification" be--except that we must scratch that future tense: there (here) permanent reification now appears always already to have been, and promises (or threatens) always forever to remain. jameson has evoked this anxiety before; in the tortured prose of _postmodernism_ (1991) it underwrote a thematic as well as a practice of "the sublime"; but here he is much more explicit about the terms of the predicament, and as various therapeutics (including jameson's own "homeopathy") would have predicted, "explicitation"--the making conscious of this particular (political) unconscious--has helped to lower the temperature. [2] "utopia"--the authentic desire versus the marketable simulacrum--is a leitmotif throughout chapter 1; it becomes the main theme of chapter 2, "utopia, modernism, and death," in which an extended discussion of an only recently published early-soviet text, andrei platonov's "great peasant utopia," _chevengur_ (1927-8), reprises the "anxiety of utopia" considered in the "conclusion" to _postmodernism_. for me, the most interesting feature of this chapter is jameson's speculation that it may now at last be time to credit modernism's utopianism, rather than dismissing it as "ideological." (jameson's anti-modernism, like most academic anti-modernisms of the last two decades, was an animus more against academic appropriations of modernism than against modernism itself, as if in despair of even the possibility of a critique that might extricate modernism's ambitions and accomplishments from their domestication in an institutionalized "aesthetic ideology." can we yet entertain the challenge of adorno's observation that, authorial allegiances notwithstanding, modernist art was %de facto% left wing? jameson here indicates what a reconsideration of modernism in such a light might mean now.) [3] the last chapter, "the constraints of postmodernism," is to me the least satisfying of the three: a discussion of several contemporary architects (the cited texts include manifestos as well as buildings and drawings) from venturi, koolhaas, eisenman and rossi to "deconstructionists" and "neo(or "critical") regionalists," as if seeking in their differences some sort of contestation of what "the postmodern" might yet mean or become. jameson apparently wants to test whether the complacent, i'm-ok,-you're-ok "diversity" of a postmodern now might not already be reimaginable, as if in some future retrospect, as something more vitally conflicted "in the seeds of time" than has yet appeared. [4] i should say here, however, that my more or less obligatory attempt, as book reviewer, to provide a sketch of the "contents" of _seeds of time_ is, as would be the case with any jameson book, a futile undertaking. what jameson has to say can't be summarized, because of the complication of his way of saying it. the interest of his work cannot be localized to any particular problems it takes up, solutions it offers, or positions it fortifies and defends. on the contrary: jameson mobilizes his oft-noted "encyclopedic grasp of modern culture" not to find or propose a solution to every problem, but on the contrary, to problematize, as richly--as problematically--as possible, every possible solution; likewise his relation to any possible "position" is wary in the extreme, and most acutely so of those that might offer or impose themselves as his own. like apeneck sweeney, who's gotta use words when he talks to you, jameson must traffic in positions to critique them--but only under protest: no more than sweeney does jameson like it. most critique, partly because of its inevitably polemic motivations, operates on the model of the unmasking and the expose, announcing its findings with the triumphant "ah *ha*!" of discovery. by contrast, jameson's tone is a warier, wearier, "uh oh": not proclaiming successful conclusion, but facing up to whatever fresh prospect of obstacles and difficulties his analysis so far, in this text, on this page, in this sentence, has just now opened. [5] jameson has been committed to a critical prose of this unconventional kind--i.e., he has been telling us that this is how he is trying to write, and how he wants to be read--from the beginning. the program is implicit in his first book (1961), which celebrates sartre's leavening of the philosophical drive to formulation and conclusion with the existential (a.k.a. phenomenological, sc. aesthetic) particularizing temporality of the narrative artist. it is explicit in _marxism and form_ (1971), whose preface celebrates the "dialectical prose" of adorno, and whose last chapter projects a program for what jameson calls a "dialectical criticism." later, adapting barthes, jameson speaks of "the %scriptible%" and "the sentence"; and in his most recent work, especially _late marxism_ (1990) and _postmodernism_ (1991), this ideal of a "theoretical discourse" that refuses the false security (or resists the inevitable familiarization) of "positions" or "conclusions" is projected negatively, in opposition to that intellectual reification or commodification--jameson calls it "thematization"--that "dialectical criticism" would overcome. [6] a (critical) prose written on such principles is by now a familiar period feature, a veritable sign, all agree, of "the postmodern." but the strengths enabled by such an aversion to the usual sorts of argumentative closure entail certain drawbacks; among them, in jameson's case, the difficulty that while jameson's work seems ready at every moment to project itself boldly out into confrontation with whatever problematic it might discover or invent for itself, its programmatic inconclusiveness can seem at times simply (or rather, complicatedly) evasive. [7] in the present instance, for example: what is, so to speak, the time, the "moment," of _the seeds of time_? the two books jameson has published since the devolution of the soviet union three years ago merely collected material from before the fall. by now (as i write) it is 1994; surely, i thought, in this new book jameson will have something to say about the second world's cataclysm. not quite: the book offers itself as a reprint of jameson's wellek lectures at irvine, given in april 1991 (i.e., before the fall), but the text has obviously been enlarged and supplemented since, leaving many traces of what we might call a "self-difference" that is not merely temporal but historical: as if the text itself has suffered asynchronously (which is not to say diachronically) the differential seismic shocks of an "uneven development." thus "second world culture" may figure in the present tense on one page, in the past on the next, while "eastern europe" appears throughout as ex-socialist, but in the context of a rollback that seems to have proceeded only as far as the soviet border--i.e., as if the "moment" of this text were quite specifiably that of post-autumn 1989 but pre-, and without anticipation of, december 1991. it is a standard move of theory to "suspend" rather than to answer pressing questions, but this is a perplexing suspension from a critic whose best-circulated slogan is "always historicize!" [8] it is also, thereby, a telling sign or "symptom"--not simply of a residual nostalgia for the soviet experiment that can seem almost a form of denial in face of its demise, but of a larger, more general and systemic conflictedness agitating all jameson's projects. recall the affirmation in "metacommentary" (1971) of the necessity of interpretation: "we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so"; similarly, the imperative to "historicize" is *not* a "desire" to do so: in _the political unconscious_, its burden is of a facing-the-worst sort, a chastening "necessity" enforced by "the determinate ["inevitable"] failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history." since before _the political unconscious_, jameson's grim asides about "actually receding socialism" have owned *that* revolution's "inevitable failure" as an established fact. but that was then, this is now: while one kind of anti-soviet marxist might welcome the end of the ussr as good riddance to bad baggage, jameson is of the more scrupulous sort whose qualms about the ussr were more salient before the fall than after, and whose loyalties to it will likely prove more poignant after than before. [9] so rather than moralize or score points against jameson's "evasion," we can more fruitfully consider it as an instance of the later jameson's own constant theme, what the title of the last chapter of _the political unconscious_ calls "the dialectic of utopia and ideology": the eros-and-thanatos agon of utopian desire in its fated conflict with the reality principle, or (to use a vocabulary jameson favors) with that lacanian "real" which jameson has glossed as "simply [!] history itself." whatever else we might want to infer from this agon's enactment in the motions and the motives of jameson's prose, we can't ascribe any of this problematic's "political unconscious" to jameson himself: he is no doubt as "conscious" of it as anyone could be. [10] i put it this way to foreground what jameson has at stake in this effort to utopianize against the historical wind: the costs or conditions, the strains and contradictions (i-can't-go-on-i'll-go-on) of this beckettian but also promethean project. take for example the book's title, drawn from a passage of _macbeth_ slightly misquoted in the book's dedication to wang feng-zhen: "for who can look into the seeds of time / and say which grain will grow and which will not. . . ." the allusion is at once elegiac *and* defiant: both a farewell to the marxist dream of foretelling the plot of history's grand narrative, *and* a protest against the postmodern ideology's preemption of the future. such are the ambivalences enacted in jameson's prose, so often suspended between, or rather overlapping and thus positioned to draw on the libidinal effects of both, a refutation of postmodernism as the (false) ideology of "late capitalism" *and* a raising of the alarm against a world-historical adversary that is only too real. [11] hence the ambivalence we might name, with this volume's title in mind, the desire called "time." in jameson, the desire called utopia, as we've already remembered, is indissociable from a certain "anxiety of utopia"; and a cognate conflictedness belongs to "time," the temporal, the diachronic, narrative, "history itself." these last, it will be remembered, were stuff and substance of the "historicizing" program of _the political unconscious_, whose subtitle, "narrative as a socially symbolic act," made narrativity and/or historicity at once the determining limit point of the "ideological closure" by which utopian energies find themselves "contained," and the condition of possibility of any critique that would try (in utopia's behalf, even if not in its name) to open, breach, or at least contest that closure. _the political unconscious_, acclaimed in the united states, found a chilly reception elsewhere among althusserians hostile to its hegelian, "historicizing" program; and ever since, jameson has deployed "space" as a virtual watchword for "the postmodern," and (to make the "motivation" a bit more pointed) as the "other" of a putatively modernist "time"; the gesture has sometimes been so insistent as almost to seem a kind of penance for the earlier work's historicism. however that may be, some of the headiest moments (or topoi) in jameson's consideration of postmodernism have conjured with the atmospherics of "space": "architecture" ("spatial equivalents in the world system"), "demographics of the postmodern," "spatial historiographies," "cognitive mapping," a "geopolitical aesthetic," "signatures of the visual," heightened attention to the media of the eye, video, film, etc. [12] even at its headiest, jameson's account of postmodernism was more equivocal than many of his readers seem to have grasped; but my point in thus projecting "space" as a vehicle for jameson's enthusiasm for the postmodern generally is that the new book's title signals a renewed willingness to give "time" its innings, and in the context of a gesture most uncharacteristic for jameson, a self-retrospect occasioned by (and confessing) a change of mind about "the postmodern," springing, he says, from "a certain exasperation both with myself and with others, who have so frequently expressed their enthusiasm with the boundless and ungovernable richness of modern [%sic%: in context, read *post*modern] . . . styles, which freed from the telos of modern, are now "lawless" in any number of invigorating or enabling ways. . . . in my own case it was the conception of 'style'. . . that prevented me for so long from shaking off this impression of illimitable pluralism." [13] he goes on to make the connection of "personal style" with "the individual centered subject" (both of which the postmodern promised to leave behind), and of "period style" with "aesthetic or stylistic *totalization*" (both of which postmodernism's proliferation of borrowed styles, disjoined from their former motivations by an alientated practice of "pastiche," likewise affected to exorcise). but the disdain of "aesthetic or stylistic totalization," jameson cautions, should not extend to "political or philosophical totalization": it's a chronic theme of his that analysis must not disown the aspiration to totalization as a hegelian hubris, but rather must accept it as a necessity imposed by the abjection of our historical moment. once again, what the overhastily zealous would dismiss as an incorrect "*desire* called totalization," jameson stages as an inescapable "*anxiety* of totalization." [14] this desire/anxiety nexus has its own history; to an extent it is simply a generic feature of critique as such, the irresistible force of its meliorist motive in agon with the immovable object it aspires (with mere words) to change. but the anxiety and the desire tussle to different outcomes in different periods, different critics, and, within a given critic's %ouevre%, different works--and indeed, on different pages, even in different sentences. jameson's own career begins with desire in the ascendant. _sartre_ (1961) was a declaration of allegiance; and in _marxism and form_ (1971), a sheer excitement about a variety of western marxist classics seemed to attest a limitless field of critical possibility. _the prison-house of language_ (1972) cautioned (in its titular metaphor) against a focus on "representation" at the expense (or even exclusive) of the "referent"; yet it too reveled in the multiple critical prospects opened by structuralism. _fables of aggression_ (1979) introduced, and _the political unconscious_ (1981) consolidated, the darker themes of "inevitable failure" and "ideological closure," but in counterpoint (still) with an enlarged sense of hermeneutic possibilities--as if (to recall the eleventh thesis on feuerbach) the loss in our power to *change* the world could be compensated by our chance of an amplified *understanding* of it. but in _postmodernism_ (1991) and other writings of the '80s, that optimism receded before the "cultural logic of late capitalism." enter anxiety, by way of "the sublime," which jameson projected as "unrepresentable," and therefore inevitably baffling any hermeneutic effort brought to bear on it--as if critique's impotence to *change* the world now had to entail an inability to *understand* it as well. it was _postmodernism_, not only projecting and dramatizing this dilemma, but impaling itself on its horns, that set, for me, the high-voltage mark from which the books that followed (_the geopolitical aesthetic_, _signatures of the visible_, and now _the seeds of time_) have fallen back. [15] but fallback needn't mean loss, if anxiety's loss is desire's gain. much as i enjoyed the excitements of jameson's "sublime," i grew impatient with its premise, that "the logic of late capitalism" is unintelligible, while every day the lies seem more brazenly transparent than the day before. if, indeed, you can still think of them as lies, rather than as the monstrous and cynical boasting of "enlightened false consciousness." ("we call six percent unemployment full employment, because below that wages begin to rise!") in any case, since _postmodernism_, jameson has mostly reverted to making more sardonic(rather than sublime-) sounding kinds of sense--as if understanding the world is after all possible, and even, if not exactly desirable, still, incumbent upon us, %faute de mieux%, however much we may, on our gloomier days, find ourselves prey to "an increasing repugnance to do so." thus put, though, the case is not desire's gain at anxiety's expense, but rather anxiety's migration to a more settled and resigned abode. [16] but there persists the jamesonian vigilance lest "making sense" lapse into "thematization," and jameson's prose, even when its aims are most unequivocally (or most sardonically) hermeneutic, meets this danger with a wariness in which "making sense" typically means *un*-making some oppressively familiar, "common [ideological kind of] sense." even at its most staid, jameson's impulse in practice is less toward "making sense" than toward "making difficulties." the pursuit will qualify itself, or change the subject, or multiply its aspects, in a way to preempt any achieved "sense" of anything in particular, except the ardor and the difficulty/impossibility of the quest. i offer this as value-neutral description of jameson's peculiar power, not as criticism of a weakness: on the evidence, indeed, i'd say that jameson is *least* satisfying when he settles down to an extended discussion of something--in this new book, %e.g.%, the pages on _chevengur_ had, for me, their longueurs; and likewise, the consideration of architecture in the closing chapter, another connect-the-dots exercise based on one of those greimassian rectangles jameson so favors. the flashes come in (or through) the cracks, as asides, as details allowed their momentary expansions that can become, for the space of a paragraph or a page, a departure from the drill. escaping the dictates of "the drill" is the very condition of jameson's power. [17] hence the persistence, and the fascination, of a calculated "unrepresentability" in jameson's later work--if not as a %telos%, yet as an ever present %potentia% (desire) or %ananke% (anxiety) exerting pressure away from "sense" toward its unrepresentable other, whether that other be "utopian" or "sublime." which raises familiar quandaries: limits, boundaries, inside/outside, hither/"beyond," zeno's paradox of the infinitesimal that separates quantitative from qualitative change, etc. wallace stevens's adviso, that a poem should resist the intelligence *almost* successfully, licenses us to put it (again) that cutting the "almost" finer and finer is almost a period convention of that postmodern genre (or almost-genre? not-quite-genre?) called "theory"--a gesture enacting, i take it, a sense of the toils, the struggles, "the labor and the suffering" (hegel) as well as the self-inflicted scruples, the vigilance against hubris and %mauvaise foi%, of the hermeneutic will-to-understand--a desire tragically thwarted in an absurd world, and/or ("antithetically," in freud's sense), a hubris, an "omnipotence of thought," a %suppose savoir%, a crypto-totalitarian lust for "totalization" and "mastery" that is *properly* to be thwarted, distrusted, chastened, subverted. [18] in this unstable and shifting scene, eros and thanatos change places (or "perspectives") with dizzying facility; how to keep the dizziness from numbness, and the facility from facile-ness, are problems too many theorists negotiate altogether *too* successfully. jameson's "difficult" prose negotiates or (better) dramatizes them with more passion, as well as with more aplomb, than anyone else's, and with a flair in the performance that makes, despite jameson's own "resisitance to thematization," any dissociation of theme from practice "ultimately" unsatisfactory, even as it guards itself against, on the one hand, their premature or too-simple "synthesis," and, on the other, an aestheticization that reifies the dissociation itself. some such impossibly recursive and self-interfering "desire to desire" seems the very condition of the way we read (and write) now, drawing ambivalent satisfactions from a prose in which the satisfactions can't be said to count for more than the frustrations, and in which this (somehow) *is* the satisfaction, this continual deferral-yet-renewal of the promise (or mirage) of satisaction that keeps jameson writing his texts, and us reading them. enjoying our symptom? repugnance to do so? i-can't-go-on-i'll-go-on? to the contrary, there's no stopping him, or us. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------bernstein, '_libra_ and the historical sublime', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-bernstein-_libra_.txt archive pmc-list, file bernstei.194. part 1/1, total size 38000 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- _libra_ and the historical sublime by stephen bernstein department of english university of michigan flint bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by stephen bernstein, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] aside from their humor, don delillo's novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a %frisson% at the core of contemporary existence. frank lentricchia comments on delillo's "yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary america" ("american" 2), while arnold weinstein observes that "one is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in delillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems" (294). the terror is not simply the terror%ism% with which delillo is almost obsessively concerned, but also that of a sublime dimension of experience. again and again delillo's characters are faced with the inexplicability of events and the giddy suspicion, terrifying in its eventual impact, that a darker force determines reality. [2] the sublime appears in delillo's fiction in several forms. as john frow has shown, _white noise_'s airborne toxic event and the sunsets it subsequently influences trigger a representational inadequacy on the part of their viewers. jack gladney wonders why he should try to describe what the sunsets have become. this is not the eighteenth-century sublime of kant or burke, however, but one more specifically postmodern: "the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations" (176). the sublime of belatedness frow formulates does not exhaust delillo's excursions into the category; michael w. messmer reveals an "activist (kantian) sublime" (410) in _white noise_ which centers on the ability of the gladneys to respond to the terrifying sublimity of the airborne toxic event, to question the gains of science if they produce such aberrations. [3] in _libra_ delillo returns to the more familiar kantian sublimes of magnitude and ineffability. for kant the sublime "is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of %limitlessness%, yet with a super-added thought of its totality" (90). the result for the observer is an emotion "dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination . . .a negative pleasure" (91). kant's "mathematical" sublime is rooted in cognition, being that "in comparison with which all else is small"(97), while his "dynamically" sublime appeals more to imagination, raising it "to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature" (111-12). delillo's sublime will not share the more transcendental aspects of this model, as his characters are predictably limited, from the postromantic vantage of the 1950s and 1960s, in their ability to appreciate the sublimity of the imagination's sphere. [4] for kant "one who is in a state of fear . . . flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained" (110). containing as it does the account of terror which is largely absent from kant's, burke's model is similarly relevant to delillo. while delillo's readers may have the appropriate distance from his novels' terror to appreciate the sublimity of his depiction of a culture about to spin out of orbit, his characters do not. thus they are more helpfully considered in the burkean model, which holds that "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . .whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the %sublime%" (39); the imaginative response to the sublime, then, "is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror" (57). what we will see in _libra_ is a hybrid combination of kant and burke, a sublime which is manifested through magnitude and ineffability, exhausting the powers of enumeration or speech to give any representational account of it. at the same time this sublime will arouse a powerful terror, the terror so frequently noted in delillo's work which gestures frantically toward apocalypse. [5] this definition is obviously devoid of contemporary models of the sublime. frow alludes to lyotard, but the aesthetic program contained in the last pages of _the postmodern condition_ will not be particularly relevant to this investigation of _libra_. in a by now quite familiar formulation, lyotard charges the postmodern sublime to put forward "the unpresentable in presentation itself" (81). by this account we would have to consider delillo resolutely modern (in lyotard's schema), since his sublime will be that which is more concerned "to present the fact that the unpresentable exists" (78). probably more to the point in terms of specific periodization is fredric jameson's discussion of a postmodern sublime that can only be "adequately theorized" "in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions" (_p_ 38). [6] now this "other reality" is immediately recognizable to readers of delillo. it is the "world inside the world" of_libra_ (13), the massively structured shadow machinery which so covertly scripts the possibilities of quotidian existence. jameson acknowledges in delillo "the formal dilemma" presented by "a totalized world . . . finally unavailable for perception" (rev. 122), but in a slight departure from his model i would like to suggest that delillo's most important sublime occasions in _libra_ go *beyond* configurations of "economic and social institutions" and the "totalized world" to become attempts at the comprehension of history itself. for the committed marxist, of course, there is no difference between the terms, and i am merely performing a willful mystification of the great motor of culture. nevertheless, delillo's novel offers visions of society and economics which are at variance with another and much larger operator, and this is where levels of the text's sublime must be discerned. [7] there is, in fact, some difficulty in stratifying the sublime in _libra_ since it is so consistently present. in the %chiaroscuro% world of covert operations men are "light-sensitive"; the interruption of a past plot by internal security is fancifully allegorized as "light entering the cave of the ungodly" (22, 24). thus the various cia and former-cia agents inhabit an unrepresentable world of darkness, a gloom the magnitude of which is ungraspable by the isolated intellect. win everett's plot spins out of his control almost immediately, largely because he fails to foresee its ability to expand to fill the larger magnitude of the plotters' darkness. when everett first unfolds his plan to t. j. mackey and larry parmenter it is under a texas sky which "towered unbearably" (25), yet another reminder of the eighteenth-century sublime and its predeliction for natural settings which "make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might" (kant 110). [8] parmenter's wife beryl appears in _libra_ on only a few occasions, the "domesticated version" (cain 282) of the rarified intelligence-gathering absurdity of the career cia operatives. she runs "a small picture-framing shop" (124) and corresponds with friends by sending them newspaper clippings, isolated vignettes "that tell us how we live" (261). toward the end of the novel she watches replays of oswald's televised murder. "[t]his footage only deepened and prolonged the horror," the narrator comments; "it was horror on horror" (446). this horror arises from the fact that oswald's death is "not at all like the news items she clipped," that is, beryl is unable to decontextualize it from the magnitude of the exterior world: "she didn't want these people in her house" (446). oswald's death provides the sublime alternative--"the far reaching 'something' that . . . can never be named" (cain 287)--to her earlier desire to find "refuge only in irony" (259). in the videotape she is confronted again and again with a terror too present and unprecedented to be clipped and folded. but even this gives way: as anyone knows who sat through several days of coverage of the challenger explosion, tiananmen square, or a host of other recent news stories, repetition begets numbness. as beryl perceives, "after some hours the horror became mechanical. they kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. it was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. they began to seem timeless to her, identically dead" (447). the sublime is finally subsumed, *framed*, by the numbing repetition of the image as delillo pinpoints the moment in which one form of the sublime gave way to the other--the moment when the terror of kant's mathematical sublime (oswald and the world too vast to enumerate) recedes into the sublime frow discusses, that which leaves its subjects edgy through their inability to develop an appropriate specificity of representation. [9] in the world of the plotters and the experiences of beryl parmenter we see two versions of a socio-economic sublime, a sublime dependent upon the mental formulations of human actors fixed in social and historical specificity. this sublimity differs markedly, however, from the sublime as we might apply it to oswald and to the actual mechanisms of history in the novel. delillo himself mentions "coincidence and dream and intuition and the possible impact of astrology" as motivating forces in the novel (decurtis 55); he also speaks of "a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision" in contemporary life (decurtis 63). "this extraordinary wonder of things," he goes on, "is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions" (decurtis 63). this dread is activated in _libra_ as delillo gives it dimensions it never had in _white noise_. it is certainly true, as weinstein points out, that with the earlier novel's airborne toxic event delillo sheds light "on our deep-seated need to believe in the supernatural. in so doing he gives the disaster . . . the authority of subject not object, of agent not setting" (303). but in _libra_ this role is transferred to history itself, with an effect far more vast than jack gladney's fear of death. [10] as daniel aaron notes, "subways figure in the educations of both billy twillig and oswald" (79). the protagonist (in delillo's novels hero seems far too strong a word) of _ratner's star_ is shown the "substratum" by his third-rail inspector father; it becomes an important metaphor for the novel's constant dualities, its mirror worlds and the idea that "existence tends to be nourished from below" (_rs_ 4). but this below is also "the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness," and the walk billy and babe take through the subways is made for "the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of theban initiation" (_rs_ 4). the sublime traits of this chthonian realm are suggested in the earlier novel; in _libra_ the subway metaphor is even more fully developed. the novel's first sentence, "this was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track" (3), introduces the image immediately and its sublime characteristics are not far behind. [11] the subway is of course symbolic of the "world within the world" that oswald seeks throughout the novel, the inner workings of the external real. win everett suggests that "when the world is no longer accessible" one might be moved to "invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail"(148). and as thomas carmichael puts it, assassination for oswald becomes one way to escape "all that which would undermine the illusion of an unmediated access to the real and the sound assumption of a coherent and stable subjectivity" (214). in the sublime experience of the subway oswald already has intimations of such an approach to the real. in the train his "body fluttered in the fastest stretches. they went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control" (3). the sublimity of rapid movement is evoked as the novel's primal gesture and finds its own echo when one of the metamorphosed assassination plot's mercenaries, wayne elko, speculates that "they were making a crash journey over the edge" (379-80). so from the very first we understand oswald as someone craving a literal *rush*, one which will have to be metaphorically converted into the rush of history as it sweeps by. oswald thinks "the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him," and that "the name we give this point is history"(248). the point of no separation, the point of going over the edge, these become the novel's metaphysical analogia for the actuality of history. [12] seen in this light, oswald is, in frank lentricchia's words, "an undecidable intention waiting to be decided" ("_libra_" 201), the object of weinstein's formulation above waiting to be acted upon by history as subject. but what sort of subject %is% history? certainly on one level history is the plot, conceived by win everett and modified by t. j. mackey, against kennedy. but on a hazier and more complicated level there is something else happening in _libra_, a causality seemingly too eerie, too sublimely ineffable to be reducible to human intention. while everett plans to "create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it" (147), this intention is not enough to explain oswald's status as "a fiction living prematurely in the world," word made so fleshly that it arouses "the eeriest panic" in everett himself (179). delillo reaches for a more comprehensive mode for depicting this strangeness; as the novel's title suggests this will be astrology. thus, to quote lentricchia again, "astrology is the metaphor in _libra_ for being trapped in a system whose determinative power is grippingly registered by delillo's double narrative of an amorphous existence haphazardly stumbling into the future where a plot awaits to confer upon it the identity of a role fraught with form and purpose" ("_libra_"202). [13] the novel's chief proponent of astrological explanation is david ferrie, one of very few characters who look to an explanation for events external to the world of humans. astrology for ferrie is "the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs" (175) and thus is linked to what everett thinks of as "whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls" (148). but astrology's truth is sublimely ineffable. "we don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence," ferrie says at one point (172), effectively assigning a linguistic version of kant's mathematical sublime to the problem of causality. kant suggests that "in the case of the logical estimation of magnitude the impossibility of ever arriving at absolute totality by the progressive measurement of things of the sensible world in time and space was cognized as an objective impossibility, i.e. one of %thinking% the infinite as given, and not as simply subjective, i.e. an incapacity for %grasping% it . . ." (108). thus ferrie suggests that beyond the world of plots there is a level of cause that cannot be adequately cognized. the resultant effect is that of the sublime. "[w]hat history consists of," ferrie claims later, is "the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us" (321). in this formulation ineffability still plays the central role. the shadowy "they" who "aren't telling" are politicians and the media in this context, but given ferrie's usual tenor throughout the novel, the agent is far closer to the ominous and sublime "them" of _gravity's rainbow_. [14] ferrie eventually attributes all control over the assassination to the forces alluded to above. "truth isn't what we know or feel," he claims, "it's the thing that waits just beyond" (333), so that the explanation of how everything converges on dallas is also ineffable: "we didn't arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. we don't have that kind of reach or power. there's something else that's generating this event" (384). now if it were only ferrie who felt this way in the novel we would have to attribute such a conception of causality to his extreme peculiarity as a character. but similar thoughts, not so clearly articulated, appear elsewhere. "summer was building toward a vision, a history," oswald thinks several times during 1963 (322), while the crowd around the kennedy motorcade is "a multitude, a storm force" producing "the roar of a sand column twisting" (393, 394). [15] perhaps most striking in the novel as a sublime indicator of history's presence, however, is the dallas disc jockey russ knight, the weird beard. not only does his name allude homonymically to the darkness which resists attempts at causal explanation, but what his radio persona says provides some of the strangest passages in the book. in the novel's first transcription of his show, the weird beard is on the radio in jack ruby's car: "who is for real and who is sent to take notes? you're out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you're listening in secret is because you don't know who to trust except me. we're the only ones who aren't them" (266). the passage's relevance to ferrie's usual concerns are obvious, and the weird beard acts too to link several of the narrative's numerous characters. his listeners include win everett's daughter and wife as well as the men mackey sends to dallas for the assassination. knight is also present at an abortive press conference the dallas police try to arrange for oswald. even nicholas branch, the novel's beleagured historian of the assassination, has a note that "the dallas disc jockey known as weird beard was russell lee moore, who also used the name russ knight" (301). [16] the weird beard's genealogy in delillo's fiction goes back to his first novel, _americana_. in that work warren beasley (who even shares the beard's initials), fired from his job as a television weatherman after announcing that "the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. storm warnings up and down the subconscious" (94), has a radio program called "death is just around the corner" (93). beasley's show is pure talk "i know you're out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals" (232) talk which gives the narrator david bell "frightening dreams" (235), just as the weird beard inspires strange behavior in the everetts' daughter. [17] both disc jockeys attest to norman wacker's assertion that in "delillo's novels, mass culture is a spectral presence haunting and disorienting every appeal to grounds outside its protean representational fields" (69). for listeners of both the weird beard and beasley, this disorientation is sublime. unlike the numbness beryl parmenter develops to the televised image of oswald's murder, the eeriness felt by the radio listeners is unabated. to the assassins traveling west to dallas the weird beard is "an eerie voice rid[ing] across the long night," a voice speaking uncanny versions of the future: "tell you something,dear hearts, big d is ner-vus tonight. getting real close to the time. notice how people saying scaaaary things. feel night come rushing down. . . . danger in the air. . . . some things are true. some are truer than true. oh the air is swollen. did you ever feel a tension like right now? . . . all the ancient terrors of the night. we're looking right at it. we know it's here. we feel it's here. it has to happen. something dark and strange and dreamsome. weird beard says, night is rushing down over big d" (381-82). the deadpan summation of this passage is the sentence "raymo, wayne and frank had never been to dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean" (382), but the sentence is perfectly apposite to the operation of the historical sublime in the novel. since the three men are carnal manifestations of the larger ineffable, they are properly unaware of the greater force, the "subject not object" in weinstein's coinage, which directs their actions. [18] what is by now abundantly clear is that delillo signifies the operation of history through the sublime at nearly every step. the operations of the plotters are sublime at one level; the gradual shaping of the actual assassination sublime at another. for the former the organization of the plot on the president's life is a project which gradually gets out of control due to what is considered an inherent fault in human protection of secrets: "the thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal" (218). the plot veers away into the sublime darkness of plotting, but that darkness is to a great degree the product of human manipulation, the cloaking of cloak and dagger men. but the historical forces which gather their sublime strength in the areas of the novel i have just been reviewing operate on a far different level, on a literally awesome plane of ineffable cause. [19] a remaining question, however, is just what we can make of such a text, an historical novel with an ineffable model of historical process. the tendency toward unspeakability in delillo's writing has been maligned: john kucich, writing before _libra_'s publication, criticizes delillo's "lack of clarity, "which is actually, kucich believes, "a symptom of his own postmodern inability to reason out an alternative politics" (340-41). and theodor adorno, criticizing not delillo but the american attraction to irrational explanation, cites the "type of irrationality in which the total order of our life presents itself to most individuals: opaqueness and inscrutability. naive persons fail to look through the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society, but even the sophisticated ones cannot understand it in plain terms of consistency and reason, but are faced with antagonism and absurdities . . . . who wants to survive under present conditions is tempted to 'accept' such absurdities, like the verdict of the stars, rather than to penetrate them by thinking which means discomfort in many directions" (20). in the cases of both kucich and adorno the problem is, of course, mystification. the mysterious or ineffable can only mask a level of shrugged-off analysis and wind up as an opiate for the reading public. [20] surprisingly even delillo himself, in "american blood," the article that was _libra_'s genesis, writes that there is "no need" to "lapse into mystical fatalism" in quest of the truth of the assassination (24). as he goes on, "dallas remains unique in its complexity and ambiguity, in the sinister links, the doublings, the organized deceits, but we tend to see it now as simply the first of a chain of what we might call instances of higher violence--violence with its own liturgy of official grief, its own standards of newsworthiness, with its built-in set of public responses" ("ab" 24). in this view the "complexity and ambiguity," the very things which have helped mark the event's historical sublimity, recede before the ritual level of american violence. but there is a marked shift between "american blood" and _libra_, a shift that is again helpfully elucidated through delillo's own account. "my books are open-ended," he tells an interviewer, "i would say that mystery in general rather than the occult is something that weaves in and out of my work. i can't tell you where it came from or where it leads to" (decurtis 55). here, succinctly, we find the very ineffability which characterizes _libra_'s historical sublime. "i can't tell you" resonates with ferrie's conjecture that history is "the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us," and again questions of process are left in limbo. [21] what kucich, directly, and adorno, indirectly, criticize is the authorial refusal to confer a predetermined ideological closure on a given narrative. lentricchia has noted that "the telling assumption of delillo's media right reviewers is that he is coming from the left" ("american" 5). in the left critique the telling assumption is that delillo is a bourgeois apologist, writing from the "obvious privilege of the liberal middle-class intellectual" (kucich 334). but it is consoling to few members of the middle-class, i would guess, to be told that history is a mixture of chaos and fearsome sublimity. this is the message of _libra_, a model of history beholden to theories of chaos and the lack of certainty which has haunted western science throughout this century. [22] delillo is not alone in such conjecture either; toni morrison's _song of solomon_ and t. coraghessan boyle's _world's end_ both feature models of causality which finally rest on the random or the ineffable. for morrison the chaotic carelessness which results in the naming of the first macon dead (18) has vast historical consequences absolutely relevant to the name's literal and punning meanings, while the never explained scent of ginger haunts several of the novel's moments of historical revelation (185, 241, 324, 339). in boyle's novel, indebted both to pynchon and to grass, the historical currents of an upstate new york town are controlled by a grotesque dwarf, the dunderberg imp. though the imp resembles a character in the novel's present no confirmation of this link is ever made and the imp's meaning or purpose is never fully revealed. yet he governs traffic on the hudson, metaphorically the movement of time, a "capricious gnome . . . deranged and irresponsible" (170). [23] political motivation is not lacking in this company. morrison's novel is part of a larger project involving the reclamation of unwritten history and the nomination of the african-american subject. boyle uses _world's end_ as a satire of 1960s pop-existentialism while simultaneously hypothesizing a history of betrayal within the american labor movement. all three novelists seek some purchase on the sixties, the decade in which all the novels are chiefly set, and all three find that a level of sublime ineffability is central to such a project. it may be that despite a widespread effort by novelists, historians, and others there is nevertheless a strong current of feeling that we are not sufficiently distant from the sixties to be able to historicize them with any accuracy. [24] but in delillo's case there is an additional impetus for the sublime: a sense on the novelist's part of a larger and indescribable system at work. "it is just my sense that we live in a kind of circular or near-circular system," he tells decurtis, "and that there are an increasing number of rings which keep intersecting at some point, whether you're using a plastic card to draw money out of your account at an automatic teller machine or thinking about the movement of planetary bodies. i mean, these systems all seem to interact to me. . . . the secrets within systems, i suppose, are things that have informed my work. but they're almost secrets of consciousness, or ways in which consciousness is replicated in the natural world" (61). this quasi-mystical formulation again finds its predecessors in kant ("sublimity . . . does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind" [114]) and burke ("the %idea% of bodily pain . . . is %productive% of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it" [86, emphasis mine]). _libra_'s awesome historical sublime may simply have its roots in the related sublime of consciousness itself, and the impossibility of understanding the latter is writ large in the impossibility of encompassing the former. the resultant conceptual implosion leaves us with a better understanding of _libra_ as it points directly toward david ferrie's implicit description of the novel itself: "think of two parallel lines . . . one is the life of lee h. oswald. one is the conspiracy to kill the president. what bridges the space between them? what makes a connection inevitable? there is a third line. it comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. it's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. it's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. it has no history that we can recognize or understand. but it forces a connection. it puts a man on the path to his destiny" (339). [25] any supposed evasion of politics or history by delillo is thus a misreading of what we might call a depth politics; history's intention is the sublime intention of subjects, billions of them, and what novelist would want to claim certainty about what those intentions might be? perhaps, as a line in _mao ii_ asserts, "the future belongs to crowds" (16). still, we should not be quick to blame delillo for not wanting to predict the future, to divine the intentions of these crowds. _libra_ finally makes the same case for history that chaos theory has clarified about weather forecasting: the impossibility of grasping the plurality of details inherent in initial conditions renders any human attempt at understanding the present or forecasting the future proportionally deficient. like other aspects of the novel (the nicholas branch sections for example) and indeed the kennedy assassination itself, _libra_'s sublimes are variations on the theme of uncertainty, variations which drive home a stunning postmodern inheritance: what arnold weinstein terms "a special purgatory of epistemological murk, of never again seeing clear, of permanent exile in the realm of information glut and data overload" (311). if this is an evasion of political realities and a prescription for bourgeois comfort, then many of us should feel shortchanged. instead it appears that delillo has successfully transferred the infinite of the classical/romantic sublime to the postmodern conception of history itself. history is not acausal but too complex, too immense, to be reckoned by the unitary subjective mind. with the lens turned the right way, delillo's conversion of an eighteenth-century aesthetic to a postmodern analytic has the terrific--in every sense- flavor of whatever might remain as truth. ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited aaron, daniel. "how to read don delillo." _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke up, 1991. 67-81. adorno, theodor w. "the stars down to earth: the _los angeles times_ astrology column." _telos_ 19.1 (1974): 13-90. boyle, t. coraghessan. _world's end_. new york: penguin, 1988. burke, edmund. _a philosophical enguiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful_. ed. james boulton. london: routledge, 1958. cain, william e. "making meaningful worlds: self and history in _libra_," rev. of _libra_, by don delillo. _michigan quarterly review_ 29 (1990): 275-87. carmichael, thomas. "lee harvey oswald and the postmodern subject: history and intertextuality in don delillo's _libra_, _the names_, and _mao ii_." _contemporary literature_ 34 (1993): 204-18. decurtis, anthony. "'an outsider in this society': an interview with don delillo." _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke up, 1991. 43-66. delillo, don. "american blood: a journey through the labyrinth of dallas and jfk." _rolling stone_ 8 dec. 1983: 21-2, 24, 27-8,74. ---. _americana_. new york: penguin, 1989. ---. _libra_. new york: penguin, 1989. ---. _mao ii_. new york: viking, 1991. ---. _ratner's star_. new york: vintage, 1980. frow, john. "notes on _white noise_," _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke up, 1991. 175-91. jameson, fredric. _postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_. durham: duke up, 1991. ---. rev. of _the names_, by don delillo and _richard a_, by sol yurick. _minnesota review_ 22.1 (1984): 116-22. kant, immanuel. _critique of judgement_. trans. james creed meredith. oxford: clarendon, 1952. kucich, john. "postmodern politics: don delillo and the plight of the white male writer." _michigan quarterly review_ 27 (1988): 328-41. lentricchia, frank. "the american writer as bad citizen." _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke up, 1991. 1-6. ---, ed. _introducing don delillo_. durham: duke up, 1991. ---. "_libra_ as postmodern critique," _introducing don delillo_. ed. frank lentricchia. durham: duke up, 1991. 193-215. lyotard, jean-francois. _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_. trans. geoff bennington, and brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984. messmer, michael w. "'thinking it through completely': the interpretation of nuclear culture." _centennial review_ 34 (1988): 397-413. morrison, toni. _song of solomon_. new york: nal, 1977. wacker, norman. "mass culture/mass novel: the representational politics of don delillo's _libra_." _works and days_ 8 (1990): 67-88. weinstein, arnold. _nobody's home: speech, self, and place in american fiction from hawthorne to delillo_. new york: oxford up, 1993. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------hart, 'that was then: this is now: ex-changing the phallus', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-hart-that.txt archive pmc-list, file hart.993. part 1/1, total size 32087 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- that was then: this is now: ex-changing the phallus by lynda hart department of english the university of pennsylvania _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by lynda hart, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] in _a taste for pain_, maria marcus recounts an anecdote about a women's studies conference in 1972. germaine greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: "but how can we start a women's movement when i bet three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?" greer replied: "yes, we know women are masochists--that's what it's all about!"^1^ [2] twenty years later, i am more likely to hear the complaint that all women are masochists in the context of lesbians lamenting the scarcity of tops in the community. whether they are "real" butches, or the newly popular femme tops, a good top is hard to find; most lesbians prefer being bottoms. [3] while feminists continue to debate the pros and cons of lesbian sexual practices, "masochism," the term that has become synonomous for some feminists with internalized oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men. indeed if we are to follow leo bersani's argument, which strikingly concludes that "sexuality--at least in the mode in which it is constituted--could be thought of as a tautology for masochism," anti-s/m feminist arguments would be tantamount to barring women from sex altogether.^2^ [4] for feminists who are struggling to articulate a sexual subjectivity that does not submit to the psychoanalytic imperative of an exclusively masculine libido, which ineluctably consigns femininity to a masculinized fetish, bersani's theory might be welcomed since it takes us out of the discourse of the symptom into a "nonreferential version of sexual thought." parental identifications, which inevitably reify oedipus, are no longer constitutive; and the "lost object," which is relentlessly relegated to a feminized fetish, is diffused so that any object and any part of the body can become an erotogenic zone.^3^ this theory does not of course undo the historical/social attribution of masochism to women, but it does suggest a psychic model in which the sexual positions one takes up are not necessarily gendered. nevertheless, bersani implicitly assumes the now privileged masochistic position as a male preogative, and hence claims sexuality itself for men. this presumption is clearer in his essay, "is the rectum a grave?" when he describes the dominant culture's revulsion at the sight of a man seductively and intolerably imaged with "legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman."^4^ [5] this is a graphic enactment of freud's third form of masochism, "feminine masochism," which he also presumes to be occupied by a male subject in a feminine situation. the male subject in this space signifies "being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby."^5^ since women presumably already experience one or more of the above, the notion of a feminine "feminine masochism" is redundant at best, if not impossible. in short, linguistically masculine feminine masochism is performative; feminine feminine masochism is constative. the latter merely reports an adequation; it corresponds with the "facts." the feminist campaign to free women from their masochism was never then about giving up something that they had, but extricating women from something that they were. [6] although kaja silverman acknowledges that psychoanalytic sexual difference relegates female masochism to a virtually ontological condition when she defends her focus on male subjectivity by explaining that the female subject's masochism is difficult to conceptualize as perverse because it represents "such a logical extension of those desires which are assumed to be 'natural' for the female subject," she nonetheless accepts and repeats the terms of a psychoanalytic symbolic in which there is only one libido and it is masculine.^6^ women are denied sexual agency because they are incapable of mimesis. their options are to take up the position of passive "normal femininity," or to reverse the position and appropriate masculine subjectivity and its desires, in which case they can "perform" sexuality, but only through their "masculinity complex." bersani's desire is aimed at the pleasures gay men might experience from an alignment with femininity, as is silverman's, though her project is to produce a revolutionary subject in a "feminine" yet heterosexual man. both of these analyses add weight to feminist arguments against sadomasochism, for following their logic the lesbian masochist is either enacting the dominant culture's degradation of women or she is playing out the desire to be a man. even if she psychically occupies the position of a man with another man, she is still only a "fag hag" within the terms of sexual difference. these theories that posit male masochism as emancipatory thus continue to depend on the impossibility of desire between women. in this context, truth claims about lesbian sexuality such as this one made by jan brown, we practice the kind of sex in which cruelty has value, where mercy does not. what keeps those of us who refused to abandon our "unacceptable" fantasies sane is the knowledge that there are others like us who would not leave because we scream "kill me," at the moment we orgasm. . . . we lied to you about controlling the fantasy. it is the lack of control that makes us come, that has the only power to move us . . . .^7^ would easily fall prey to the argument that lesbian sadomasochists are merely reproducing heterosexist models, or at best, male homosocial ones. the referent for brown's "lies" can be located in earlier rhetoric by s/m practitioners who justified the acting out of their fantasies by claiming they were means of exorcising their real hold on the individual. tacitly accepting the feminist contention that s/m lesbians had internalized cultural misogyny, these defenses asked for a tolerant reprieve, a period of playing through the fantasies in order to transcend them. s/m then, ironically, became therapeutic, like a homeopathic cure. [7] theatrical metaphors were central to this defense. susan farr, for example, described s/m as "pure theatre," "a drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful." she cites the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue. even though, she acknowledges, much of the scene may be "pure improvisation," it is still "theater."^8^ this dialectic between the scriptural and the spontaneous is prevalent in early pro s/m accounts. on the one hand, there is the insistence that the scene is rigidly controlled, with a decided emphasis on the bottom's mastery of the limits. on the other hand, the eroticism depends on the anticipation that the limits will be pushed to the breaking point, that the "scene" will cross over into the "real." [8] to a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is "real" or performed is naive, since we are always already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies. the extent to which we recognize the presence of the edge of the stage may determine what kind of performance we are enacting, but willing ourselves to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the real, as s/m opponents would have it; rather, this will to forget is classical mimesis, which, as derrida points out, is "the most naive form of representation."^9^ nevertheless, it is precisely this most naive form of representation that would seem to be the most desirable of sexual performances. bersani's objections to the frequent theorization of such things as "the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism" as . . . "subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviours they appear to ape," rather than, "unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with, correlatively, "a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity" [gay macho], . . . "the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity" [butch-fem], or "fascism" [s/m], are clearly based on his contention that these sexual practices are not performative. parody, bersani states emphatically, "is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this."^10^ although bersani audaciously speaks for all gay men, i would have to agree with him and add that many lesbians know this too. self-conscious mimicry of heterosexuality is a side show; when the main act comes to town, we all want the "real thing," or, more precisely, we all want the real thing. that is, sexuality is always, i think, about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the real that eludes symbolization. [9] lesbian s/m erotica has become increasingly assertive about claiming dildoes as the "real thing." although strap ons are advertised as "toys," inside the narratives and testimonials of lesbian s/m practitioners references to an outside or a "model" are most often discarded in favor of descriptions that simply occupy the status of the real. so, for example, it has become common to speak of "watching her play with her dick," or "sucking her off," or "your dick find[ing] its way inside of me."^11^ as one contributor to _quim_ puts it: "when i put on a strap on i feel male. i feel my dick as real otherwise i can't use it well."^12^ rarely if ever does one find lesbian erotica that refers to the dildo as a joke, an imitation, or a substitute, whether these narratives are explicitly in an s/m context or in the more prevalent accounts of butch/femme vanilla erotica. on the contrary, the erotic charge of these narratives depends on both tops and bottoms, butches and femmes exhibiting nothing less than respect for the "phallic" instrument. [10] bersani's argument about gay macho depends on this notion of respect for masculinity as a model. but the slide from gay macho to lesbian butch-fem and s/m is too facilely made. whereas gay macho's "mad identifications" are between gay and straight men, which he argues is a "direct line (not so heavily mediated) from excitement to sexuality,"^13^ the identifications made by b/f and s/m lesbians follow a more circuitous route in which the condensations and displacements are more complex. most obviously, gay macho's relationship to straight masculinity remains a homo-sexual affair; whereas lesbian b/f and s/m, as long as we are caught within the logic of this binary, would be hetero sexual. in both cases, however, the erotic charge can only be articulated within the terms of a symbolic order that depends for its coherency on maintaining the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality. nonetheless, even within the terms of this symbolic order, which i presume is what bersani refers to when he speaks of sex "as we know it," there is already dissidence, rather than resemblence, in the image of a woman penetrating another woman with a dildo. although both might be interpreted as a yearning toward "masculinity," in the gay man's case it is a masculinity that the dominant culture at least marginally assigns to him and that he thus might willingly surrender. in the lesbian top's case, it is a "masculinity" that she aggressively appropriates without any prior cultural ownership only then to give it up. if we look at it from the bottom's perspective, there is quite a difference between the gay man who cannot "refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman," and the lesbian who is presumed by the dominant sexual order already to be a woman. [11] over a decade ago, monique wittig implicitly enjoined us to write the symbolic order with a slash through the article, just as lacan writes the woman, when she made her then startling announcment that "lesbians are not women."^14^ the straight mind, she pointed out, "speaks of the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the unconsious . . . giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality . . . ."^15^ returning to this article, it is interesting to remember that the example wittig chooses to demonstrate the material oppression effected through discourses is pornography. pornography, she argues, signifies simply that "women are dominated."^16^ thus wittig might be aligned with mackinnon when she argues that pornography "institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female."^17^ it is this position that bersani perversely asks us to reconsider when he temporarilly allies himself with mackinnon and dworkin only in order to argue for the necessity of proliferating pornography rather than banning it. however, if the ultimate logic of the radical feminist argument for the realism of porn is "the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented,"^18^ whether one takes up a position for or against pornography on this basis, are we not then already acceding to the "straight mind" that can only think homosexuality as "nothing but heterosexuality"?^19^ [12] what has fallen out of these discussions is heterosexuality as a social contract, one that as wittig argues can not only be but already is broken by practicing lesbians. for when we hear of "sex as we know it" or the ultimate logic of anti-porn feminists as the "criminalization of sex," this "sex" is always already heterosexuality, and implicitly, a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis. lacan seems to free us from this difficulty when he argues that the phallus is a signifier (without a signified), not a body part, nor a partial object, nor an imaginary construct.^20^ however, in her recent reading of lacan's "the meaning of the phallus," back through "the mirror stage," judith butler shows that lacan's denial of the phallus as an imaginary effect is "constitutive of the phallus as a privileged signifier."^21^ at the risk of reductively summarizing her nuanced argument, what butler's essay seems to conclude is that the symbolic is always only a masculine imaginary that produces the phallus as its privileged signifier by denying the mechanisms of its own production. [13] lacan's move to locate the phallus within the symbolic presumably breaks its relation of identity with the penis since symbolization "depletes that which is symbolized of its ontological connection with the symbol itself."^22^ just as magritte's painting of a pipe is not a/the pipe, so the penis and phallus are not equivalent.^23^ but, as butler points out, they do retain a priveleged relationship to one another through "determinate negation."^24^ if symbolization is what effects ontological disconnection, we might ask what happens to those "pipes" that are excessive to representation. would not those things that cannot take place within any given symbolic end up accorded a radically negative ontological status? would they not, in other words, become that which is real, and therefore impossible?^25^ [14] when wittig argues that rejecting heterosexuality and its institutions is, from the straight mind's perspective, "simply an impossibility" since to do so would mean rejecting the "symbolic order" and therefore the constitution of meaning "without which no one can maintain an internal coherence,"^26^ she seems to suggest that the straight mind simply denies the possibility of lesbianism. but phallocentrism/heterosexism does not merely secure its dominance through a simple negation. rather, it needs lesbianism as a negative ontology. it needs its status as both radically real and impossible. [15] that this is the case can be seen in silverman's reconceptualization of the borders of male subjectivity in which her analysis at once ignores lesbian sexuality and persistently depends on it as yet another instance of a constitutive outside. determined to undo the tenacious assumption that there are only two possible sexual subject positions, silverman ends by positing three possible "same sex" combinations: 1. two morphological men 2. a gay man and a lesbian [both occupying psychically masculine positions] 3. a lesbian and a gay man [both occupying psychically feminine positions].^27^ given silverman's sophisticated psychoanalytic rendering of the body's imaginary production, it might sound naive to suggest that the latter two positions are morphologically heterosexual, i.e., one of each. yet she retains the category of two morphological men, so there is obviously still some recourse to a materiality of the body outside its imaginary formations. [16] silverman concludes her book by asserting that her third paradigm for male homosexuality has the "most resonance for feminism," which she claims to represent politically.^28^ but what is striking is that this is the only place in her analysis where lesbianism is represented. for it is in this most politically productive model of male homosexuality that the "authorial subjectivity" can be accessed "only through lesbianism."^29^ what could this "lesbianism" be if not two morphologically female bodies, which oddly do not appear in her liberating models for "same-sex" desire? the feminism that silverman speaks for politically is once again a heterosexual feminism; for her ability to make cases for imaginary gay sexualities is only intelligible through the assumption of a lesbian sexuality that remains stable and constitutively outside her recombinations of the relationships between psychic identifications and imaginary morphologies. thus she depends on the orthodoxy of the impossibility of lesbian desire in order to challenge and break with the other orthodoxies that limit sexual choices for (heterosexual) women. [17] the model that proposes the impossiblity of lesbian desire, constructed as two morphological females with psychic feminine identities, is impossible within psychoanalytic terms precisely because there is no desire without a phallic signifier. in order for lesbianism to escape from its stabilizing function as the place-holder of a lack, butler's fictive lesbian phallus would seem to be indispensable. yet there is still in this formulation a submission to psychoanalytic orthodoxy; and lesbian sado masochists have thought of much more interesting ways to practice dominance and submission. [18] suppose we agree with bersani's argument that phallocentrism is "above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women,"^30^ and consider what value women might find in powerlessness. i would agree with tania modleski that from a heterosexual woman's perspective there might not be much to value in powerlessness.^31^ but from a lesbian perspective things look different. powerlessness, in bersani's argument, seems to mean little more than submitting to penetration. when he takes anatomical considerations into account, he refers to the "real" of bodies which are constructed in such a way that "it's almost impossible not to associate mastery and subordination with intense pleasures."^32^ if the value of powerlessness is equivalent to being penetrated, note that the "woman" in bersani's imaginary must be either a heterosexual female or a gay man. not only does bersani then retain an equivalency between the phallus and the penis, but he also reinforces a morphological conflation of the vagina and the anus. at the same time, he insists upon a fantasmatic gender distinction that depends on these anatomical parts as referents. bersani's argument, then, surely exceeds his intentions. for while he means to value the powerlessness of both men and women, it is paradoxically between these two penetrable orifices, which are at once the same and different, that on their front/to/back axis the illusion of an impermeable male body is sustained. as d.a. miller puts it: "only between the woman and the homosexual together may the normal male subject imagine himself covered front and back."^33^ [19] if, as butler argues, lacan retains a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis through "determinate negation," it is also possible to understand the valorization of a masochism that is explicitly male as further consolidation of this relation of equivalence. for male masochism, which presumably relinquishes the phallus by occupying the being of woman, would necessarily assume that she is the one who does not "have it." in other words, it is only by giving it up that one gets it. hence the continuing postulation that female masochism is impossible depends on the assurance that she has nothing to give up. the female masochist would have to give up something that she does not have; and if she were represented as giving it up, then it would have to be admittted that the phallus is nothing more than an imaginary construct. according to freud's narrative, women are presumed to have once "had" the penis. the phallus/penis as "lost object" always refers us to the past of a woman's body and the dreaded future of a man's body. hence the cultural horror associated with "becoming a woman." [20] lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the "real thing" instigate a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory "return" of the penis onto a woman's body goes beyond the "transferable or plastic property"^34^ of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the "real" of the penis. the lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating signifier that has no ground on which to rest. it neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it. lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. they occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. they make claims to the real without submitting to "truth." if the phallus was banned from feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification, and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus represented, as butler points out, as "vain and/or pathetic effort[s] to mime the real thing,"^35^ this "real thing" was at least two real things, which were only each other's opposites. there was not much difference between the straight "real thing," and the lesbian "real thing," since the latter was only the absence of the former. both these prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity between the phallus and the penis. without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who "has" the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who "has it" by giving up what no one can have. in the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears. that's why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are bottoms. ---------------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ maria marcus, _a taste for pain: on masochism and female sexuality_, trans. joan tate (new york: st. martin's press, 1981), 181. ^2^ leo bersani, _the freudian body: psychoanalysis and art_ (new york: columbia university press, 1986), 39. ^3^ ibid, 45. ^4^ leo bersani, "is the rectum a grave?" in _aids: cultural analysis, cultural activism_, ed. douglas crimp (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1988), 212. ^5^ sigmund freud, "the economic problem in masochism," _the standard edition of the complete psychological works_, trans. james strachey (london: hogarth press, 1966) vol. 19, 162. ^6^ kaja silverman, "masochism and male subjectivity" _camera obscura_, 17 (1988), 52. ^7^ jan brown, "sex, lies, and penetration: a butch finally 'fesses up," _the persistent desire: a femme-butch reader_, ed. joan nestle (boston: alyson publications, 1992), 412. ^8^ susan farr, "the art of discipline: creating erotic dramas of play and power," _coming to power: writings and graphics on lesbian s/m_ (boston: alyson, 1981) 185. ^9^ jacques derrida, "the theater of cruelty and the closure of representation," _writing and difference_, trans. alan bass (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1978), 234. ^10^ bersani, "rectum," 208. ^11^ _quim_, issue 3 (winter 1991), 10 and 13. similar language can be found in almost any issue of _on our backs_ or _bad attitude_. and, in fact, in periodicals such as the now defunct _outrageous women_ (which was published during the 80's) one also finds such references to "lesbian dicks," sometimes without the qualifier. what is apparent is that s/m dykes have always considered their dildoes to be the "real thing." ^12^ anonymous, _quim_ issue 3 (winter 1991), 36. ^13^ bersani, "rectum," 208. ^14^ monique wittig, "the straight mind," _the straight mind and other essays_ (boston: beacon press, 1992) 32. ^15^ wittig, 27-28. ^16^ ibid, 25. ^17^ catherine a. mackinnon, _feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law_ (cambridge, ma.: harvard university press, 1987), 3 and 172. ^18^ bersani, "rectum," 214. ^19^ wittig, "the straight mind," 28. ^20^ jacques lacan, "the meaning of the phallus," _feminine sexuality: jacques lacan and the ecole freudienne_, trans. jacqueline rose (new york: w.w. norton, 1985), 74-85. ^21^ judith butler, "the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary," _differences_, "the phallus issue," 4, no.1 (spring 1992), 156. ^22^ ibid, 157. ^23^ michel foucault, _this is not a pipe_, trans. and ed. james harkness (berkeley: university of california press, 1982). ^24^ butler, 157. ^25^ if the "realesbian" of lesbian-feminism was a socially impossible identity, so in the psychoanalytic symbolic are lesbians only possible in/as the "real," since they are foreclosed from the symbolic order--they drop out of symbolization. if they can be signified at all it is only as an algebraic x. given that the "real" is, in part, the brute, inscrutable core of existence, the "real" lesbian is in this sense coincident with the "realesbian." hence as both real/real, these figures make her "identical with [her] existence--self-identical--raw, sudden, and unfettered," but impossible to "see, speak or to hear, since in any case [she] is always already there." see catherine clement's illuminating discussion of the lacanian "real-impossible" in _the lives and legends of jacques lacan_, trans. arthur goldhammer (new york: columbia university press, 1983), 168 169. ^26^ wittig, "the straight mind," 26. ^27^ kaja silverman, _male subjectivity at the margins_ (new york: routledge, 1992), 381. ^28^ ibid, p.387. ^29^ ibid, p.383. ^30^ bersani, "rectum," 217. ^31^ tania modleski, _feminism without women: culture and criticism in a 'postfeminist' age_ (new york: routledge, 1991), 145-158. i agree with modleski that bersani loses the sympathy of a feminist reader when he "declines to factor in the 'history of male power'" (148). however, though she acknowledges that lesbian sadomasochists' arguments must be taken seriously and points to the unresolvable contradiction between the acting out of power and the presumption of consensuality, i take exception to her assertion that the "defining feature of s/m [is] the infliction of pain and humiliation by one individual on another" (154). as her own discussion indicates, the s/m relationship resists that definition. i have taken up these questions at length elsewhere. what is important to point out here is that modleski subtly posits the same distinction between "the feminist" reader and the "lesbian" that silverman holds. the former is a heterosexually-gendered subject, the latter is something like an "exception" to the feminist "rule." thus, once again, the "lesbian" becomes that (constitutive) "outside" that facilitates "the feminist" argument. ^32^ bersani, "rectum," p. 216. ^33^ d.a. miller, "anal rope," _inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories_, ed. diana fuss (new york and london: routledge, 1991), 135. ^34^ butler, p. 138. ^35^ ibid, p. 159. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------dainotto, 'excremental sublime: the postmodern literature of blockage and release', postmodern culture v3n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n3-dainotto-excremental.txt the excremental sublime: the postmodern literature of blockage and release by roberto maria dainotto dept. of comparative literature, new york university dainottr@acfcluster.nyu.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.3 (may, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by roberto dainotto, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. once a famous hellenic philosopher, [aesop's] master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he'd told that great sage the story of the king's loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. "but you don't have to worry, sire," he added, "you've no wit to shit." well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. for the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we've made--it's the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods. now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it's almost suffocating. boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it's as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. and there's some dejecta he's not sure he even recognizes. that foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. his own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, feel suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, zeus sent modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor. --robert coover, "aesop's forest" for this relief much thanks... --_hamlet_, i: i, 8 dedicatory epistle to the reader [1] the paper hereby presented is, properly speaking, a treatise on evacuation. as such, its ideal location would be between dominique laporte's _histoire de la merde_ and pietro manzoni's _merde d'artista_--works, in other words, secretly dedicated to friendly souls, or, as in this case, to the logorrheic interpreter of postmodernity. the author, but a humble hack, aims at the scholastic fame of having been able, if not to tap, at least to indicate a peculiar gap in postmodern criticism: for it appeared astounding to him that, among so many postmodernisms--"john barth's postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; charles newman's postmodernism, the literature of inflationary economy; jean-francois lyotard's postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; ihab hassan's postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of humankind..." (mchale 4)--the one concerned with the sublimity of evacuation had been so absolutely neglected. [2] to single out a certain sense of the sublime in contemporary literature, it is mandatory to impose severe limitations on and some critical selecting of the otherwise too heterogeneous material at hand. first, this research will be limited to north american fiction. second, the investigation will focus on one particular theme that seems to have grieved american literature since the fifties--a theme that goes under the name of "the crisis of consciousness."^1^ what is intended here by "critical selecting" is that pre-kantian form of judgement that constitutes the essence and very nature of the author's critical method: "i like it, or i don't." on this basis, i have not the least intention to encompass within this reading the "fast-food fictions" (pfeil 2) and minimalist melancholies of jay mcinerney or susan minot. they do not "fit," and, moreover, they get on my nerves. [3] of this critical scheme, the author is ready to admit that it is what nowadays seems to be the object of ridicule and scorn: it is, no doubt, a dogmatic scheme. it begins with an assumption about what contemporary american literature might be, and therefore it handles exclusively those works which "fit" into the scheme. in defense of this method, the author can only mention the innocence with which he is trying not to impose his assumption on any work. [4] if the reader finds this preamble to be redundant, or the following to be repugnant, let us make clear that these notes, "neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism" (hutcheon, _poetics_ ix), should be intended as an attempt to single out some strategies of aesthetic, and maybe also moral and political, survival within the limits of what jameson has so grimly called "logic of late capitalism"--or, in baudrillard's more pertinent formulation, the logic of fast-food, anorexia, bulimia, and obesity. henceforth, dear reader, consider the following as yet one more exercise in survival and digestion--an exercise morally and socially relevant of which the author professes himself to be a persevering practitioner. fables of digestion the term digestion itself is one of the interfaces between ideas of bodily and mental process. latin %digero% meant properly to force apart, to separate... --r.m. durling, "deceit and digestion in the belly of hell" inclusion and exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices. --george yudice, "feeding the transcendent body" [5] in this paper, the term "sublime" refers not only to a set of aesthetic practices and transcendental ideals that have manifested themselves in contemporary american literature, but also to certain features of our own life and culture, features that, to paraphrase geoffrey harpham, "have survived the loss of the ideological structures within which they emerged" (xi). loss and survival are two of the most remarkable traits of the sublime: since longinus, they mark the stages of the individual's confrontation with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption of the subject, which is first "scattered," and then joyfully reconstituted, "uplifted with a sense of proud possession...filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we felt" (longinus _on the sublime_ vii, translation mine). [6] there seems to be general agreement today about the fact that the first epochal horizon within which one can speak of postmodernity coincides with the alleged death of the subject--or, at least, with an "attenuation of the self," as lionel trilling puts it in _sincerity and authenticity_. from the "loss of the self" of wylie sypher, through the "divided self" of ronald laing, to the "deconstructed self" of leo bersani, the identity of the "i" is dramatically scattered. [7] one can locate the first symptoms of the vanishing emersonian self in the %schlemiel% of the literature of the fifties.^2^ undoubtedly, there are specific historical reasons that generate this sense of pessimism and loss. the crisis of consciousness in the literature of the fifties may well witness, in edmund wilson's words, the "homicidal and menacing schemes" of mccarthyan policy (wilson 128). at the turn of the new decade, ken kesey's _one flew over the cuckoo's nest_ warns against the clinical suppression of the subject in the political style of kubrick: "[they] try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want to" (kesey 57). as hendin puts it, society, as symbolized in kesey's asylum, "controls and infantilizes [the subject] in the name of the best interests of the inmates" (hendin 132). [8] and yet, the fiction of the sixties muses, with kesey's mcmurphy, an outside space ("we want to live out of this society," the king of the merry pranksters avows), the revival of the american dream, the fantasy of an ultimate frontier that, once crossed, will open onto the uncontaminated plains of ultimate innocence and freedom. although the themes of power and suppression undergo some variations, say, from kesey's dystopic vision to kerouac's beatnik quest, the literature of the sixties traces a neat line between a power reduced to mere symbol of evil and an adamic individual consciousness outside power and innocently extraneous to it. curiously enough, the writer of the sixties uses the themes of power and consciousness in a way that resembles thoreau's, whitman's, and hawthorne's more than it resembles any postmodern writer's: the walden of literature is still a sacred wood in which i sing myself far from the evil of civilization and far from its scarlet symbols of doom. but is there any such a space of innocence in the coming society of the spectacle? [9] postmodern statements on politics and society, from pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_ to coover's _the public burning_, persistently echo the gloomy tones of kesey's foucauldian clinic--but where is the ultimate frontier of innocence and freedom? america was the edge of the world. a message from europe, continent-seized, inescapable. europe had found the site for its kingdom of death, the special death the west has invented. . . . now we are in the last phase. american death has come to occupy europe. it has learned empire from its old metropolis. . . . is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? will our new edge, our new deathkingdom, be the moon? . . . gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling. (pynchon 722 23) or, as richard nixon admits in _the public burning_, some pages before being sodomized by uncle sam, "we cannot escape" (coover 8). [10] yet, the theory and practice of postmodernity may recast the question of "the crisis of consciousness," raised in the fifties and brought to its final "paranoid" conclusions in the sixties, in "a more positive mode of confrontation between subject and power" (olderman 124); the postmodern answer to this question attempts at producing new and different structures of survival--"new mutants," to say it with leslie fiedler. the argument i want to support with this paper can be summarized as follows: the claim of a death of the subject in postmodern discourse must be understood, %pace% all those critics who take the "death-theme" in absolute earnestness, as a "radical irony" (ihab hassan) which aims at reconstituting what one can call--%faute de mieux%--the "radical subject": a subject which stands to represent "the community of disappointed . . . literary intellectuals--and how many of us really stand outside this class?--whose basic need is to believe in the autonomy of self-fashioning."^3^ escape is impossible, since kesey's clinic is virtually everywhere, in "the crime labs . . . the records . . . the radios and the alarm system and the tv over the teller's cages . . . the cells and the jails and the schools and institutions . . . the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulation . . . the magnified maps of the city . . . the beats and patrols," as elkin's _bad man_ witnesses (70); and yet, the repressive project of society reveals itself inefficient to discipline the postmodern self-fashioning individual. [11] "i say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because i am invisible and live in a hole, i am dead. i am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. call me jack-the-bear, for i am in a state of hibernation." but what can ellison's bear do in the society of spectacle? how can trilling's "liberal imagination" survive the mystifications of mass-culture? and how can individual consciousness confront and survive a power disseminated in the most appealing forms of advertising, a power so forcefully obliterating reality with fictive simulacra? if "my life is a kind of simulation," as the protagonist of delillo's _mao ii_ believes (97), how can the subject reposition itself within a society that transforms everything into simulation, in which even the individual, as teresa de lauretis warns, is "continually engaged, represented, and inscribed" ("alice doesn't" 37)? in the last analysis, power is not framed within an inside that allows an outside innocence: power resides in the pre fabricated notions of "reality" that the subject lives, "a series of overlapping fictions [that] cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth" (coover, _burning_ 122). power is the ability of mass-media to create "static tableau--_the new york times_'s finest creation--within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold" (coover, _burning_ 192). [12] once reality and life have lost any ontological %arche%, and have become the result of a fictive construction, the radical subject, as coover puts it, must become "cynical about it...learn the rules and strategies . . . [and become] a manipulator" ("interview" 72); or, as jerome klinkowitz suggests, the radical subject must recuperate some sort of "transformative imagination" (_disruptions_ 16) to be able to change plots and life, drive force beyond exhaustion, and transform indifference and its simulacra. [13] indeed, the publication of berger and luckmann's _the social construction of reality_ (1967) had to convince a group of american authors, now labelled as "post-modernists," that the first step towards the %bildung%--or rather, a re-membering--of the radical subject was "to destroy the hold which these artificial constructions have on men, typically by forcing the very patterns and mythic structures to undermine themselves" (mccaffery, "checklists" 112). robert coover declares: men live by fiction. they have to. life's too complicated, we just can't handle all the input . . . all of them [fictions], though, are merely artifices- that is, they are always in some ways false, or at best incomplete. there are always other plots, other settings, other interpretations. so if some stories start throwing their weight around, i like to undermine their authority a bit, work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.^4^ thus, the dead "i" opens a breach in the institutionalized mythic structures, a breach in which s/he will find space enough for inventing new plots and new fables of identity: the radical subject survives the attempt of annihilation by virtue of his/her ability to transform social plots, "work variations, call attention to their fictional nature." [14] why, then, does postmodernism insistently repeat the litany of the dead at the same moment in which death is to turn into survival? one reason may be that postmodernism tries to re-enact a drama that takes place in daily life- the risk that the subject could be actually annihilated by his/her inability to confront overpowering social myths. most important, this dramaturgy allows postmodernism to celebrate an ironically initiatory rite, or "mythotherapy," as campbell tatham suggests ("mythotherapy" 155), that enacts the drama of a temporary collapse in order to subsequently reconstitute a new subject in a stage of sublime ecstasy: as a ritual, the death of the subject initiates the reader to confront overpowering structures and destroy their hold. "the process is part of our daily life," richard poirier tells us, "and no other novelist predicts and records it with pynchon's imaginative and stylistic grasp" (_v._ 5). indeed, pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_ might be the best example to illustrate this kind of ritualistic sublimation of the self. if "they" have transformed the self into a "poor cripple, [a] deformed and doomed thing" (_gr_ 720), living in the "master plan" of a continuous alienation; if the self has been ensnared in a plot that is trying to subject both humanity and the earth to the principle of economic exploitation--then it is "our mission to promote death," and to become, like katje and gottfried, "children who are learning to die" (_gr_ 175). as the narrator says, "we must also look to the untold," to a story different from the "master plan" that has constructed our very idea of identity (_gr_ 720). like slothrop's, the human self must first be "broken down" and "scattered" in order to overcome alienation and return as the benjaminian "bright angel of death" (_gr_ 738 ff.). in pynchon's novel, slothrop's "death" serves the purpose of recognizing fictions and social "master-plans" for what they are, thus liberating the subject from his/her dependency on artificial constructs. as ihab hassan argues, "revulsion against the self serves [postmodernism] as a link between the destructive and visionary impulses of modern apocalypse; it prepares for rebirth" (_postmodern turn_ 5). it administers last rites to all of human life. [15] coover's fictions are no less rich of ritualistic sublimations. coover, with his proclaimed interest in roger caillois' eucharistic rites ("interview" 74), repeatedly stages sacrificial public burnings, regicides, and other executions. in "aesop's forest" the artist/aesop, who has sinned against apollo, is, like orpheus, dismembered by the angry delphians--"one eye is gone, the other clouded, an ear is clogged with bees, his hide's in tatters."^5^ aesop's sacrilege consists in having denounced apollo's truth as a fable. [16] as aesop remarks, with a sense of tragic irony, "i told them the truth, they called it sacrilege." like the postmodern demiurge, aesop has de-mystified an absolute truth, but, in so doing, he has hypostatized his own construction as a new truth, allegedly free from any dionysian construction. men live by fictions, they have to. but some fictions, like aesop's "deconstruction" of apollonian truth, start throwing their weight around. when this happens, fictions can turn against their creator, and aesop's moralized animals join the delphians in the lynching of the author: they are on him: wolves, boars, apes, moles, toads, dancing camels, plucked daws, serpents, spiders, snails, incestuous cocks and shamming cats, hares, asses, bats, bears, swarms of tongueless gnats, fleas, flies and murderous wasps, bears, beavers, doves, martins, lice and dungbeetles, mice and weasels, owls, crabs, and goats, hedgehogs and ticks, kites, frogs, peacocks and locusts, all the fabled denizens of the forest, all intent in electing him into the great democracy of the dead. ("aesop's forest" 82) [17] at once, coover's story gives the idea of aesop-the-fabler's "radical" (anti-apollonian) activity, and of aesop-the-man's entrapment in his own "eloquent text of the forest." it is not less amazing to notice how aesop is dismembered by his own "fabled denizens" than to notice how the rosenbergs are sacrificed to the fable of american democracy in _the public burning_. to give credit to fictions is to put lives at stake. it is not surprising, in this context, that coover's narrative technique continuously aims at constructing "exemplary fictions"--fictions that, in robert alter's formulation, "flaunt their own condition of artifice" (_partial magic_ x) and that, by so doing, escape any hypostasis onto the plane of myth and absolute truth: %ejemplares% you [cervantes] called your tales, because "%si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso%," and i hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, i haven't strayed from your purposes, which i take to be manyfold. for they are %ejemplares%, too, because your intention was "%poner en la plaza de nuestra republica una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entratenerse sin dao del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que daan%"- splendid, %don miguel%! for as our mutual friend %don% roberto s. [robert scholes, in _the fabulators_] has told us, fiction "must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well being . . . we need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition"--and thus your %novelas% stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation. . . (coover _pricksongs_, 77) [18] coover's self-denouncing fictions, differently from aesop's moralities, do not permit "to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly"^6^--they do not establish any interpretive order. because, if aesop was the victim of an apollonian social order, he has become, quite paradoxically, the grantee for a classical order--think of la fontaine- which sees in aesop's fables the explicit moralities of "avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic." eventually, whether they were guilty or not of a radical and anti-apollonian statement, aesop's fables serviced another artificial but stable moral order. establishing the tradition of the aesopian genre tells enough about the institutionalization of fable and the fetishization of narrative constructs, as chenetier argues: "aesop['s] . . . transformations, a founding gesture for his particular world-view, [have become] a-dynamic and irreversible" ("ideas" 101). hence, coover's exemplary tale, in order to exercise "all the imagination we have . . . in good conditions," must dismantle the whole of aesop's mythologized apparatus. for reasons antithetical to those of the delphians, coover himself must sacrifice aesop--or his now overpowering plot--on the altar of the postmodern transformative imagination, in the "temple of the muses" ("aesop's forest" 81). [19] whatever happens to aesop, and whoever kills him, we know that his is a tragic end. but what happened to the postmodern subject, or, to a lesser extent, whatever happened to coover in aesop's forest? does the death of aesop stands to signify the death of the author %tout court%? does this coincide with lyotard's claimed death of grand narratives? coover's allegory is very careful about this: the felicitous announcement of the death of the author can well serve the political agenda of the fox, "that treacherous foul-mouth." should we give absolute credit to the wide-spread announcement of the death of narrative (another myth, indeed), the fox may engineer a subtle takeover and make us believe that its realpolitik is the ultimate demystification--we may find ourselves entrapped into peter sloterdijk's "cynical reason," the belief that, since ideologies are all equally false, one's behavior should then be absolutely determined by "particular interests." the problem with sloterdijk, as with our fox, is that they do not see in their "cynicism" a new fiction, a novel artificial construction: the "particular interest" is not more "real" than what has so far been deconstructed. interests, to paraphrase baudrillard, are never "free" from ideological determinations: "there is no basis on which to define what is 'artificial' and what is not. . . . no one experiences this [particular interest] as alienation" ("consumer society" 40). the grand narratives that have a hold on our life may be easily condemned and unmasked on the assumption that, much like the socratic "enlightened" rationalism according to nietzsche, they aspire to apollonian truth, forgetting that they are bound to the deceptive nature of the dionysian. however, what is striking is precisely the degree of forgetfulness that accompanies many annunciations of death and unmaskings of grand narratives: the authoritative announcement of the disappearance of authority, and the articulation of a total and comprehensive narrative of a postmodern condition in which it would be impossible to articulate any narration, surreptitiously establish, as coover suggests, a "foxy" and fraudulent totalizing order. if there is any difference between aesop's and coover's postmodernism, it is this: the "suspicion" aesop casts on apollonian order is recast by coover on the suspicion itself, with the result that the denunciation of myths does not acquire the status of an %aufklarung%, but rather, in bentham's formulation, of a "necessary fiction."^7^ in other words, the de mythification itself is the result of another fictive construction that can acquire "exemplarity" only if it recognizes itself as "fictive," thus avoiding any hypostasis onto the plane of absolute truth and enlightenment. whoever would execute the myth-maker and fight an order of reality must be fully aware that the logics on which s/he would perform the "de-mythification" are not devoid of a necessary fictional nature--or, in coover's own words, "it's all shit anyway" ("aesop's forest" 83). [20] more precisely, the death of the author/aesop prepares for a rebirth: once aesop's moralized forest "extinguishes itself around him," a new, exemplary forest can be created, and a new "self-conscious" author can take aesop's place. the execution of the author participates of a tribal ritual of initiation in which "killing the author," as frazer would say, "assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain author is transmitted to his successor." as in freud's "totemic meal," oral incorporation and its correlates--instalment and digestion of authority within the self--consume a patricidal act that sublimates the subject's desire for strength, authority, and life. the gerontion-like loss of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch that characterizes the narrator of "aesop's forest" must be counterbalanced by a will to eat: "even in such decline, the familiar hungers stir in him still... his appetite for power outlasting his power to move" ("aesop's forest," 68). [21] it is the same hunger that saves the characters of maxine hong kingston's _the woman warrior_ in their endless combat against the ghosts of patriarchal culture: "my mother won in ghost battle because she can eat anything.... all heroes are bold toward food.... big eaters win."^8^ in kingston's and coover's vocabulary, one must introject the myth for reasons of survival; only by following the drive of this appetite can the postmodern subject "learn the rules," and find alternative plots, "more pathways, more gardens, and more doors" (coover _pricksongs_, 19). in other words, if eating practices and "disorders," as julia kristeva suggests, may be the product of a hysterical resistance to (patriarchal) authority ("stabat mater"), it must be noticed that the postmodern resistance is not on the part of the anorexic, but, rather, of the bulimic. as the title (if not the argument) of sohnya sayres's article on "food and the agon of excess" suggests, postmodernism is a tale of bulimic excess, or, as george yudice puts it, the promise of "transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals" ("transcendent body" par. 3). as susie orbach's _the anorectic's struggle as a metaphor_ implies, even the anorectic's "hunger strike," a loss at the level of the physical, "replenishes" the body with the metaphors of an excess in respect to social codes. [22] but is "appetite" enough for the individual's survival? cannot eating rather be, as baudrillard's discussion on "the obese" insinuates, a "fatal strategy,"^9^ or simply produce a blockage? "as a child," kingston tells us, "i pictured a naked child sitting on a modern toilet desperately trying to perform until it died of congestion" (86). cannot the introjection of social structures, literary traditions, and aesop's moralities, actually paralyze the childlike postmodern imagination in some sort of congestion? or into a compulsion to repeat? indeed, the rather heavy meal can create a digestive disorder, a rampant dyspepsia, and a metabolic chaos. the "urgent message" of the postmodern author is hindered. the author "squats hastily, breeches down. ah!, what a plunging weight." can postmodernism overcome this moment of blockage, this compulsion to cite and repeat--this compulsion to death? one has reason for worrying: the signs shed in coover's forest seem to be aesop's and la fontaine's, rather than coover's own- "there's some dejecta he's not sure he even recognizes"! for the voracious postmodern individual, blockage is the real threat, and survival coincides with some sort of "digestive capability"--the power to actively transform authorities and traditions into fecal signs, into wastes from which the subject has to separate in order to constitute itself as a subject. it is the ability of forcing apart, separating one's individuality from that of the slain king. in the next section, i will try to associate the possibility of survival for the postmodern individual with a sublime ability to evacuate. this--it goes without saying--is a topic that the author, who is not free from certain academic scruples, has not the power to censor nor the happiness to approve. it is a topic that has been forced upon me by robert coover, for whom evacuation is "the closest we ever come to the gods." [23] and so, with a timid "can i?," i'd like to move to the second section. from citation to sublimation: metaphors of evacuation as if it were a game played by the sphincter muscle . . . --richard brautigan, _trout fishing in america_ [24] although several critics have commented on the subject, the key document in defining postmodern american literature remains john barth's "the literature of exhaustion" (1967). barth's radical announcement was that writers were facing "the used-upness of certain forms of exhaustion of certain possibilities" (29). from then on, the author could only cite and repeat old stories and earlier forms. it is evident that postmodern literature seemingly endorses barth's aesthetics of exhaustion: coover's repetition of aesop's fables, barthelme's rewriting of _snow white_, kathy acker's borgesian _don quixote_, equivocally suggest a compulsion to cite, quote, and repeat a whole literary tradition that disturbingly crops up in the postmodern literary body. "nobody had enough imagination," barth's ambrose muses at the end of _lost in the funhouse_ (97). the postmodern author is condemned to cite and repeat old stories, given forms and structures. or so it seems. because some questions can still be asked: is it possible to turn barth's aesthetic ultimacy, his entropic compulsion to cite, into a sublime strategy for the survival of the subject? can the citing subject be "uplifted with a sense of proud possession" above the cited material? and, if so: according to which paradigm can we define this "uplifting" as "sublimation," and in what terms? [25] suzanne guerlac, in her study on "longinus and the subject of the sublime," locates the force of the sublime in the humble practice of citation, in which the author takes "proud possession" of the given message (275). frances ferguson replies to guerlac by suggesting that citation rather promotes, to be fair to longinus, a "*suppression* of the author" (295; emphasis mine). despite the different conclusions they reach, both guerlac's and ferguson's arguments, as geoffrey harpham argues (198-199), are essentially correct, since the longinian sublime, in the last analysis, does not aim to promote auctorial individuality, but instead the unification of the author with a transcendent totality, or with a past re-presented by and in the citation. the author is thus "promoted" (guerlac) by dispersing him/her self within a "totality" (ferguson). when the longinian author recognizes the citation "as something he had himself produced," s/he is caught in the sublime experience because s/he feels as part of a transcendental creative energy. [26] from its very outset, postmodernism seems to tell a rather different story: postmodern citation can be more correctly imagined as a moment of blockage, in which the author is compelled to cite, to repeat,^10^ because a given totality--a literary tradition, a social given to which the author feels belated, or, as kathy acker puts it, some "great expectations"--*already* comprehends him/her. the problem for the postmodern author is that s/he, unlike longinus, tries to escape that totality, whose overpowering force blocks and paralyzes. donald barthelme's snow white, trying to narrate her own story, finds herself captured in a plot--grimm's _snow white_--from which she cannot escape: "oh i wish there were some words in the world that were not the words i always hear!" (6). whereas the longinian sublime contents the subject with a syntactical "sympathy" (the term is burke's) between subjective expression and absolute %logos%, postmodern technique tries to free the subject from the hierarchy of syntax, and hinges, as hayden white comments, on "a paratactical consciousness: a language of linear disjunction rather than narrative sequence" ("culture" 69). to put it in rhetorical terms, the organizing principle of postmodern narrative would be metonymy--the succession of unconnected elements --rather than metaphor--the link between the parts. accordingly, donald barthelme breaks syntactic hierarchy to introduce an element of error, a metonymic uncodifiable fragment, in the ordered space of social information: i have a number of error messages i'd like to introduce here and i'd like you to study them carefully . . . they're numbered. i'll go over them with you: undefined variable . . . improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode, that one's particular grave . . . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that's a bitch . . . no end statement. ("explanation" 79) the guerlac-ferguson debate suggests that longinus's holistic sublime may lose its usefulness to describe a postmodern strategy. the ironic tone of postmodern citation implies a different movement, namely, in paul bove's terms, "a radical break or rupture in the genetic pattern," in which the subject inter-relates dialectically with his/her genetic/historical predecessor, thus instituting "discontinuities" rather than syntheses.^11^ [27] if longinus's sublime and burke's "sympathy" do not "fit" postmodernism, neil hertz's "the notion of blockage in the literature of the sublime" tries to define the postmodern practice of citation in terms of kantian sublime. the enormous "accumulation of secondary discussion," the "proliferation of secondary comments," hertz argues, brings the postmodern author to face "a point of blockage: he [writes] of the threat of being overwhelmed by too much writing, and it may not be possible to go beyond that" (62 ff.) this "accumulation," an enormous difficulty to ex-press (etymologically: %ex premere%, to push out) new signs under "the pressure of the super ego," produces on the author/subject what hertz calls a "blockage," something emotionally similar to kant's fear and amazement in facing an overwhelming, "limitless" force. the subject/author feels impotent, constipated, quite dead. yet, hertz suggests, after the postmodern author posits this impossibility, after s/he installs such a monstrous accumulation impeding writing--after blockage is posited, writing flows out: a logorrhea, indeed, about the "impossibility" of writing. this process constitutes, according to hertz, the liberating experience of contemporary sublime--an experience organized on the double "mind's movement [of] blockage, and release." [28] let us consider, as an example of this mechanism of sublimation, linda hutcheon's _the politics of postmodernism_. the first chapter of this text is entitled "representing the postmodern," and it begins with a subchapter devoted to the discussion of "what is postmodernism?" that is to say: can post-modernism have any identity? hutcheon astutely plays on the oxymoron opened between the notions of "representation of postmodernism" and that of "postmodern impossibility of representation." how can we possibly represent, in fact, a phenomenon whose first given is that of unpresentability? impossibility rules the program of hutcheon's text, which is to represent the unpresentable. _the politics of postmodernism_ may be seen as some kind of allegory--quite literally an anagogic attempt--of postmodernism itself. the entire postmodernist project is re-enacted here as the desire to "project," and create, that which cannot be pinned down or mastered by representation. the transcendent object of desire is that which, according to lyotard, moves postmodernism toward the sublime: the postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations. (_postmodern condition_ 81) [29] the entire postmodern "representation" (or "postmodernism represented") is in it--the "post-modernist project," or, in other words, that ephemeral, brilliant moment of writing the impossibility of writing that by itself represents an entire era, and transcends the logical and stylistic possibilities of representation in the moment the unpresentable is finally presented: it seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees. (hutcheon, _poetics_ 2) [30] the "indeterminate," the "unpresentable," is thus transcended, as kant puts it, in the "representation of the limitlessness." the question "what is postmodernism?" poses to the reader an apparently unrecoverable "momentary check" (kant) to the possibilities of representing "an indeterminate reference"^12^; the feeling of impotence is then "followed at once by a *discharge* all the more powerful" (kant) in the moment the unpresentable is finally "connected with the mere presentation or faculty of representation, and is thus taken to express the accord, in a given intuition, of the faculty of presentation, or the imagination, with the faculty of concepts" (kant). the identity of postmodernism is given, albeit in a negative way, as discrepant from representation itself; or, rather, as ironic (negative) representation, as a representation that takes traditional (positive) representation ironically. [31] however, we have come a long way from kant's sublime. kant's was the attempt, once again, to reconstitute the excess of feeling within the notions of "unity," "integrity," and "coherence" sanctioned by the "ethical man." as hayden white has noticed, kant's sublime is some sort of disguised ideology which disciplines the suprasensible by reconciling it with the re-cognition of a social meaning in it. the individual, rather than freeing him/herself from overwhelming totalities, is eventually subjected to the overpowering force--a force of representation, or "faculty of concepts"--of the ethical man.^13^ by advocating the need for rupture, disjunction, and %differance%, the postmodern "improper use of hierarchy" might well fall out from any kantian categorization. in his insightful "sublime politics," donald pease implicitly maintains the necessity, for postmodernist poetics, of dropping out any argument about, and tendency toward, the sublime: despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes . . . the sublime, instead of disclosing a revolutionary way of being that is other than the ethical, in kant's rendition, is reduced to strictly ethical duties. or, put differently, the sublime makes the formation of an ethical character sound *as if* it is a rebellious task. (275-276; pease's emphasis.) [32] published in _boundary 2_ in 1984, pease's might be seen as a declaration of postmodernist intents. however, pease's refusal of the sublime may be contradictorily sublime in itself. what pease claims, in his elaborate discussion and description of so many theories of the sublime, is the necessity of dropping out, releasing a certain political embarrassment which seems to be the given of the sublime. by first citing an impressive mass of material on the sublime, and then proclaiming a repudiation of all these structures, pease's article offers a clear example of what i intend as the postmodern sublime, organized, indeed, on hertz's paradigm of blockage and release. not only does pease confront something as overwhelming as the sublime, but he also *exceeds* it, thus "uplifting" postmodernism beyond the possibilities of what is usually known as "the sublime." in pease's epistemological displacement, the "sublime" reaches what kant's conservatism represses: namely, the discontinuity between the given structures and the individual effort to transcend that given; pease's sublime results in the %differance% between self and world, present and past, referent (the "sublime politics") and sign (a discourse exceeding that referent). [33] dick hebdige, in "the impossible object: towards a sociology of the sublime," is more explicit than pease in affirming the existence of a postmodern sublime based on the ironic rejection of previous theories of the sublime and on the disruption of totalities. hebdige singles out what he calls "the pull towards the asocial sublime" in contemporary discourse: for hebdige, the mode of the "asocial sublime" is a celebration of the "camp vision," the vision of waste, trash, and excrement--an indirect citation of barthelme's "digging on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon." the ironic inversion of the sublime from kant and lyotard's totalizing aestheticizations (a re-engagement of the excess as aesthetic work), to the new "camp vision," explicitly aims at both resisting unity and locating the force of postmodern sublime within the realm of an anti-aesthetic %differance%. for hebdige, one of the most remarkable strategies of the postmodern sublime consists in the simultaneous citation and combination ("double coding," in umberto eco's or linda hutcheon's terminologies) of texts belonging to high and camp culture. the result of this peculiar citational practice is complexly disruptive and constructive at once: at the same moment in which hierarchy (high vs. low culture) is disrupted, the post-modern subject is "uplifted" with a sense of complete mastery of both fields: rather than surrender mastery of the fields, the critics who promulgate the line that we are living at the end of everything (and are all these critics men [sic]?) make one last leap and resolve to take it all- judgement, history, politics, aesthetics, value--out of the window. . . . the implication seems to be that if they cannot sit at the top of plato's pyramid, then there shall not be any pyramid at all. (hebdige 70) [34] as fred pfeil maintains, manipulation and digestion of culture in its entirety, from high to low, coincides with some sort of %jouissance%, of a pleasure that is, in the last analysis, the constitutive nature of postmodern subjectivity: [the postmodern subject] finds him/herself an extraordinarily well-rounded, complete cultural consumer and connoisseur, eminently capable of taking pleasure in a spectrum of choices . . . ranging from just a step ahead of mass culture . . . to just a foot short of high. (108) [35] at this point, we can start defining the specific features of a postmodern strategy of the sublime, which is --%on le sait!%--an anti-theory, a virtual subversion of all totalizing theories. hebdige's sense of metaphoric inversion from art to anti-art, from aesthetics to anti-aesthetics, from the "beautiful" to the sublime "camp vision," and from "exhaustion" to "mastery," no longer stresses the drama of "ultimacies," or the disintegration of identity; instead, it shifts into the strategy for the %bildung% of a new subject. this new subject confronts given structures to master them with some kind of keatsean negative capability.^14^ in his book on _the art of excess: mastery in contemporary american fiction_, tom le clair argues: recognizing their dependence on their culture's system of dissemination . . . novelists have two strategies to counter the homogeneity of mass-produced and institutionally controlled information. one strategy is to collect to excess and thus use against the dominant culture its own information. the other... (16) . . . but let us stay with the first of le clair's strategies of mastery: the postmodern sublime, to start with, is a strategy of "collection" and ex-cess (etymologically: %ex cedere%, to give out), in which the givens of an "accumulation of writing" (hertz), of a political embarrassment (pease), or of "mass-produced and institutionally controlled information" (le clair), lead not so much to a rejection, but rather to an introjection (admission of the problem, commentary, citation, allusion), which poses a blockage suddenly overcome by a release, an ironic "excess" which turns the manipulator against cultural givens. this sublime strategy of ingestion, ironic blockage, and final release, has been defined by arthur kroker and david cook as the privileged strategy of an "excremental culture": such a culture nourishes itself of the "pestilential spirit" of social and cultural entropic systems, to finally digest and drop out a fairly new message of disruption whose "psychological signs are those of . . . disaccumulation": "[postmodern art] exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay where the consumer culture of the passive nihilists does a reversal and in a catastrophic implosion flips into its opposite number" (10 ff.). not altogether differently, john barth's metaphor of disaccumulation in _lost in the funhouse_ suggests that "the final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history ... go on. go on. to turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid" (109). [36] ihab hassan, as far as i know, is the first critic who has defined the postmodern sublime as ironic discharge of the "infinite powers" that impede expression. hassan's metaphor is that of defecation overcoming the nausea brought about by constipation: nathaniel west, writing at the edge of our contemporaneity, first comes to mind . . . _the dream life of balso snell_, mock artist, proves to be a wet dream. more precisely, snell imagines that he ascends into the bowels of the trojan horse. this accords with his view of art as "sublime excrement." west seems to endorse this bilious irony: his own repugnance of life touches even his craft. his nausea, which no social dependency of the thirties can entirely explain, conceals itself in black comedy. a world of ugly doorknobs, dead dreams, and distressed loves, burns into the ash of parodic apocalypse. thus west, turning violence into dubious merriment, is the new satirist laughing at the wound within his laugh. thirty years after, william burroughs carries the excremental vision even farther. a devilish mimic, he transposes a world ruled by entropy, waste, and disease into a film of metallic laughter. (dismemberment_ 249) [37] the vision of excremental sublime, as "parodic apocalypse" of a subject opposing "a world ruled by entropy," certainly emerges in many postmodern works. we might think of pynchon's "defecation rites," or of the narrator of gass's _the heart of the heart of the country_ who asserts that "i want to rise so high that when i shit i won't miss anybody." federman's _the voice in the closet_ provides the (autobiographical) example of a thirteen-year old boy hidden in a closet to escape the nazis: "i was scared. and on top of that, in the middle of the afternoon i had to take a crap. and why not? so i unfolded one of the newspapers and took a shit on it" (47). after defecation, fear is overcome; the boy finds courage to leave the closet, and embarks to america. federman charges the scene with almost obvious allegorical implications: the closet becomes the tomb and the womb for the coming-into life of a new subject; defecation is the ironic release of the fear of death and annihilation. the same allegorical structure is at work in coover's _spanking the maid_. the "teacher" of coover's story has to realize that his victorian ideal of %bildung%--"feeding with spanking . . . that broad part preferred by him and mother nature for the invention of the souls"--is absolutely incorrect. for "that broad part" of the human body "seems more like a place for letting things out than putting things in." after a moment of apparent death, which is, in truth, only a digestive pause, the "invention of souls," the epiphany of the subject, happens in a water-closet, in a last heraldic effort to produce "spiritual" signs: "twitching amicably yet authoritatively like a damp towel, down a bottomless hole, relieving himself noisily" (102). even more explicitly, vonnegut's _slaughterhouse five_ offers fecal signs as allegorical signs of authorial consciousness and as the epiphany of the radical writer opposing war and its horrors: billy looked inside the latrine. the wailing was coming from there. the place was crammed with americans who had taken their pants down. the welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. the buckets were full or had been kicked over. an american near billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. moments later he said, "there they go, there they go." he meant his brains. that was i. that was me. that was the author of this book. (125) [38] this is the price that the subject has to pay for its survival. giving up any metaphysical consistency, this sort of subject becomes, quite literally, an excrement, a surplus that cannot be codified and inscribed in the fabricated notions of "reality." its "resistance" to codification institutes at the same time its absolute superfluity in relation to the symbolic order. its manipulation of codes and structures, in other words, cannot have any effectual consistency if not in establishing a %topos% in which subjectivity may exist, as a digestive process, in a sublime manipulation of pre-existing categories. [39] examples of excremental sublime in postmodern american fiction could multiply almost endlessly. however, i should discourage my reader from thinking that the excremental sublime is limited to the (many) cases in which fecal signs explicitly appear in the literary space; rather, excremental sublimity consists of a *narrative practice* which i have defined as a movement from blockage to release, and from longinian citation or kantian re-presentation to sublime digestive transformation. as such, it encompasses a more general postmodern trend: it includes any strategy of incorporating social myths and given plots--we might say: history and/as literary tradition--to finally release new stories and new modes of being. this new mode of being is the postmodern radical subject, who has survived the menaces of death and has "uplifted" him/herself with "joyful pride" in an act of ultimate %poiein%. in this sense, we might well conceive of the postmodern subject as a sphincter muscle performing its daily activity of retention, manipulation, and ex-pression; altieri seems to endorse this idea when he argues, rather aphoristically, that "as organ, the [postmodern] ego has its own rhythms of expansion and contraction . . . it is not a place to store experience, but a *way* of experiencing" (627; altieri's emphasis). [40] however, some mysteries are still unsolved: how can postmodern irony overcome the moment of blockage? and *how* can a subject be reconstituted--in his/her "way of being"- in spite of a power aggressively trying to "objectify" him/her? the postmodern answer to both questions is that the blockage--the "impossibility"--is not "real"; power is only a fiction. put like this, the answer may seem too blunt, and it certainly exacts sharpening in order to prevent excessive optimism. it is my assumption that the achievements of marcuse's _eros and civilization_ (1962) and norman o'brown's _life against death_ (1964) must be taken as defining features of the american postmodern sublime. for it is in these works that, through an alliance of marx and freud, the inevitable confrontation of subject and power takes place in a radically new fashion. exemplified (maybe at the excess) by theodore roszack's "the dialectics of liberation," the problem of "making a counter culture" during the sixties could be put like this: while both marx and freud held that man is the victim of a false consciousness from which he must be freed to achieve fulfillment, their diagnoses were built on very different principles. for marx, that which is hidden from reason is the exploitive reality of the social system. culture--"ideology" [. . .]--intervenes between reason and reality to mask the operation of invidious class interest. . . . for freud, that which is hidden from reason is the content of the unconscious mind. culture plays its part in the deception not as a mask concealing social reality, but rather as a screen on which the psyche projects itself in a grand repertory of "sublimations." [. . .] there we have the issue. is the psyche, as marx would have it, a reflection of "the mode of production of material life"? or is the social structure, as freud argued, a reflection of our psychic contents? (84-85) [41] what is power, then? social super structure, or father figure projected by the unconscious? philosophically, the issue raises the question of the locus of reality; politically, it poses the question of how liberation is to be achieved: by social or psychic revolution? marcuse's answer to these questions is that power is both a reality and a fiction: accordingly, he tries to develop a radical social critique out of the psychoanalytic assumption that power may be, after all, a projection, a myth. significantly enough, this freudian turn moves american radicalism away from marxist de-subjectification and, in a very emersonian way, puts the accent upon those "tendencies that have been attenuated in the post-marxian development of his critique of society [marx's, in his first writings], namely, the elements of communistic individualism."^15^ [42] marcuse's social critique hinges on the notion of "alienation." for marcuse, "alienation" does not have any of marx's (or hegel's) connotations. alienation is no longer a locus between labor and exploitation, but rather a disease that is rooted inside human beings. what the psychiatrist knows is that alienation results from acts of repression: the patient "forgets" his/her own construction of symbolic structures that the analytic anamnesis should re-present. marcuse emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in social changes: the subject must be conscious of his/her own projections; s/he must recognize, in other words, that "power" is nothing else than the re-presentation of an oedipal complex (_eros_ viii ff.). the impossibility, or blockage, is only a psychic construction, a story. [43] i will discuss the oedipal strategy of postmodern sublime, based on freud's notion of "anal character," in the next section. to bring the current section to a conclusion, let me notice how marcuse's social critique bears powerfully on postmodern narrative. larry mccaffery's _the metafictional muse_ provides a neat summary of how postmodern narrative can produce an anamnesis of the artificial construction of overpowering structures of "reality": in examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, [postmodern works] deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature: we observe writers trying to create stories, men struggling to break the hold of mythic patterns, desperate people inventing religious explanations for a terrible catastrophe. . . . yet, [postmodern narrative] is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems--such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics--are also fictional at their core. . . . [t]here exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. . . . [t]his tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them. (25-26) [44] the postmodern subject is thus the %locus% (maybe all-too literally a rhetorical %topos%) of consciousness; consciousness of the fictional nature of overpowering structures will finally allow the subject to imagine new plots, new stories, new lives to be told. let us think, in this context, of coover's maneuver in "aesop's forest": the imaginative power of the narrator is here absolutely impaired by the presence of his grand precursor--aesop. facing such an overpowering presence, the narrator can only cite the stories already told by the genius--aesop. but, as the scholar well knows, "aesop" is only "a fictional construct . . . [a] biography . . . reconstructed to satisfy the greek requirement, according to which all genres should have an inventor" (chenetier 97). the overpowering presence that impairs the subject turns out to be a mere fiction! as borges would put it, "[t]he fact is that every writer *creates* his own precursor."^16^ the blockage--the death--may be overcome by consciousness, thus uplifting the subject as the true crafter of his/her own narration. in this moment of sublime release, the %dejecta membra% are re-composed into subjective expression: "orpheus, dismembered, continues to sing" (hassan, _dismemberment_ 45). [45] ...you see, dear reader, how, step by step, singing along, citing, arguing, implying, yawning, digesting what has been already said, apologizing, we go on together from section to section! we are already at the end of the second section, and one hour ago the first one did not even exist yet. you see, this is the mystery and joy of the excremental sublime. there was a great silence, nothing that we could say to each other, no new story we could entertain each other with. in truth, you did not even exist, and neither did i. there was nothing, not even the excremental sublime. maybe only the embarrassing feeling of something that we wanted to say. and then, in this silence, a voice is heard, a voice that i want to compare to the growling of the bowels after a meal long retained, and the voice becomes stronger, and the story bigger, and nothingness a logorrhea.... maybe it was in this way that the world we live in was created--from the unintentional digestion of an apple.... [46] ... well, i was happy to find ourselves at the end of the second section, but now i am losing myself in superfluous details. and so, let us jump into our third section.... the postmodern subject: an epiphany of sorts i think of myself as a lyrical socialist,which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand. --robert coover, _whatever happened to gloomy gus of the chicago bears?_ [47] "all aesthetics has its root in repressed anal erotism," the psychoanalyst says (ferenczi 325). all writing, %on le sait!%, engages in some sort of coprophiliac activity. yet the paradigm of blockage and release that we have followed so far seems to suggest that the process --*the movement* from retention to release--is far more important, for the postmodern muse, than the final excremental result. it is this process, after all, that structures the intensity of postmodern narrative--a process of digestion of old and mythical structures that will indefinitely defer the production of an ultimate (fecal) meaning. in this sense, even the postmodern subject will be, as altieri has already told us, a "process," rather than a simple excremental left-over of our times.^17^ it is a subject, as kathy acker's _don quixote_ has it, that resists "capitulation to social control. . . . [t]o letting our political leaders locate our identities in the social" (18), and that continually refuses to end its manipulations and digestion into visible social signs. it is a subject, in other words, that finds in the process defined above as excremental sublime its %locus% and only %raison d'etre%. [48] another way to define this process, and thus identify our subject, is of course through freud's notions of "anal retentiveness" and "anal character": they [anal characters] seem to have been among those who refuse to empty the bowel when placed on the chamber, because *they derive an incidental pleasure from the act of defecation*. ("character" 28; emphasis mine) anal retention aims at finding "an incidental pleasure" in the moment of eventual defecation. pleasure is "incidental" to actual defecation, since it belongs more properly to the *process* of retention and release. such process is also, as the quoted passage suggests, an oedipal strategy, that is, a refusal of the law imposed by authority. if defecation is a pleasure, this pleasure cannot accept any external imposition or constraint: the subject must decide when, where, and how, this pleasurable activity shall take place. freud supplements the passage quoted above with a footnote which better highlights the oedipal *refusal* of a super-imposed law (i.e., the wish of the nurse) which tries to regulate defecation according to social (i.e., non-pleasurable) norms; the footnote runs like this: it is one of the best signs of later eccentricity or nervousness if an infant obstinately refuses to empty his bowel when placed on the chamber, that is, *when the nurse wishes*, but withholds this function at his own pleasure. naturally it does not matter to the child if he soils his bed; his only concern is not to lose the pleasure incidental to the act of defecation. ("character" 29; emphasis mine) [49] the fact that freud confers on the anal character the quality of an "obstinacy [which] may amount to defiance, [and] with which irascibility and vindictiveness may easily be associated" ("character" 28) should not pass unnoticed. the most distinctive traits of the anal character seem therefore to be those of a rebellious, almost anarchic energy; its main qualities, much more than "parsimony" and "order," seem to be, as freud's essay on "character and anal erotism" has it, "obstinacy," "vindictiveness," and "eccentricity." dispositions, in other words, which defiantly refuse social order. it is worth noting that freud, in _civilization and its discontents_, singles out in anal retention a "most remarkable" strategy for the "sublimation" of a particular kind of subjectivity, that is, an "original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis . . . of hostility to civilization" (43). thus, an "anal character" is the sublimation of an anti-social impulse, and the anal-retentive character might well be identified with coover's "anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand": s/he who survives a repressive society by disrupting its order, and by transforming its law into pleasurable fecal signs. [50] in this ironic negativity, in this reduction to a metabolic process, lentricchia's "radical subject" and "disappointed intellectual" seems to have been re-membered and brought back to life after a digestive nap; social reality has been redeemed from debord's consumer conformism, jameson's schizophrenia, and habermas's indifference. [51] "but," the fairy-tale reads, "there's always a 'but'". . . . like barthelme's "angel," my reader might be overtaken, at this point, by some fundamental questions (the question of angels in postmodern discourse has a considerable history, from barthelme to wim wenders): is redemption a mere narrative practice? is the sublimation of the subject a mere *narrative* freedom resulting from the disruption of notions such as "essence," %arche%, and "representation"? furthermore: what kind of hopes can we draw from a narrative that resolves any signification to excrementality? will digestion resist the inevitable commodification of our lives? will we prevent society from reducing our selves to excremental left-overs? henry kariel, in _the desperate politics of postmodernism_, woefully remarks that "we resist . . . by telling a story, by producing narratives that elaborately depict the drift of events as the sublime unfolding of the inevitable" (117). but what besides these stories and ephemeral resistance? what changes in "real life," or in the real life of our postmodern subjectivities--those wonderful entelechies of creation? however puzzling the term "real" may sound in the context of a postmodern condition, the doubt cannot be repressed; the angel, unaccustomed to doubt, falls into despair: "redemption is a fucking fiction anyway," _gravity's rainbow_ admonishes us; "it's all shit anyway," coover's forest resounds. maybe cornelius castoriadis is right in his jeremiad on "post-modernism as generalized conformism": even this allegory of the postmodern subject as excremental practice may be the, albeit sublime, manifestation of "the pathetic inability of the epoch to conceive of itself as something positive" (14). moreover, as yudice admonishes, it is difficult to discern any political relevance--if not coover's anal-retentive "anarchism"--in these narratives of *subjective* redemption: the aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the right or liberalism. we need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body. ("transcendent body" par. 36) undoubtedly, angels should start looking forward for a more "concrete" strategy of survival, a radical praxis that does not act only in the sacred wood of literary theory and in the groves of subjectivity, but also in the doomed world of production. until then, postmodern theory and narrative will play the role of praxis while praxis has no more role to play. [52] today that postmodernism, as hassan pontificates (in _selves at risk_) is at its dusk--or is it an ironic dusk preparing for another rebirth? today that postmodernism seems on the verge of its ultimate exhaustion, it is likely that we should surrender to the ultimate impossibility of reconstituting radical politics according to excremental practices. probably, the postmodern sublime is today an untenable strategy even for real subjects's survival. linda hutcheon, among many, advocates the necessity of going beyond postmodernism, of "using" it to "exceed" it: "postmodernism manipulates, but does not . . . (re)construct the structures of subjectivity . . . [we] may *use* postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order *to initiate* the deconstructive *first step*, but [we] *do not stop there*" (_politics_ 168; emphasis mine). postmodernism is dead! long live postmodernism! (but isn't there a sense of %deja vu% in hutcheon's forest? what is this initiation about?). today, failure faced, one feels that new doors must be open, new strategies found, new steps taken, new paths trodden. let us finally digest postmodernism! [53] . . . with a sense of deep elegy, a feeling of nausea and an unbearable burden in my constipated stomach, i conclude this paper with robert coover, postmodern virgil, with whom my own quest begun: this act is concluded the management regrets there will be no refund. (_pricksongs_ 256) --------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ see max f. schulz, _radical sophistication_, esp. 198 ff. ^2^ see franco la polla, _un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano_. ^3^ frank lentricchia, _ariel and the police: michel foucault, william james, wallace stevens_ (madison: u of wisconsin p, 1988), 96-97; on the notion of postmodernism as "aesthetic of self-formation" see also george yudice, "marginality and the ethics of survival." ^4^ robert coover, "interview with larry mccaffery," 68. in a slip of the tongue coover seems to echo sigmund freud: life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings to us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. in order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. "we cannot do with auxiliary constructions," theodor fontane tells us. . . . but one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others.... (sigmund freud, _civilization and its discontents_ 22 and 28) ^5^ robert coover, "aesop's forest" 82; see also hassan's metaphorization of postmodernism in the terms of the orpheus's myth, in _the dismemberment of orpheus_. ^6^ coover's active participation in aesop's lynching cannot pass unnoticed in the shift from "they'll be here soon," (75), referring to the delphians, to the final "we set him [aesop] on his bendy legs and stepped back, blocking any possible escape" (81). ^7^ on the centrality of bentham's notion of "necessary fiction" in american narrative, see guido carboni, _la finzione necessaria_; see also fred pfeil, _another tale to tell_. ^8^ maxine hong kingston, _the woman warrior: memories of a girlhood among ghosts_ (new york: vintage, 1989), 88 and 90. for the symbology of the ghosts as essence of patriarchy, see sidonie smith, "maxine hong kingston's woman warrior: filiality and woman's autobiographical storytelling." notably within feminism, "big eating" seems to counteract what kim chernin has called "the tyranny of slenderness" imposed on women by patriarchy; on this issue, see kim chernin, _the obsession. reflections on the tyranny of slenderness_, and susan bordo, "reading the slender body." ^9^ jean baudrillard, "the obese," _fatal strategies_; on the way food industry may re-code gastronomic excess into consumerism, see warren belasaco, _appetite for change: how the counterculture took on the food industry. 1966-1988_. ^10^ in postmodern narrative, "[c]haracters become the passive receptors of phenomena from outside; they become all ears, listening to the sounds of voices, noises from the street, literary parodies and emulations, music . . . compulsion to repeat" (poirier 9); anticipating for a moment, i would like to paraphrase lacan, in order to individuate in the "repetition compulsion" an ironic ("reversal") mode of affirmation of the subject in history but as difference from history: [the repetition compulsion] has in view nothing less than the historizing temporality of the experience of transference, so does the death instinct essentially express the limit of the historical function of the subject. this limit is death--not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as heidegger's formula puts it, as that "possibility which is one's ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (%unberholbare%)" . . . this limit represents the past in its real form, that is to say, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition. ("the function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis" in _ecrits_ 103; emphasis mine). ^11^ bove, _destructive poetics_ 37. examples of this break with genealogy: the abortion at the beginning of kathy acker's _don quixote_; the illegitimate child at the beginning of maxine hong kingston's _the woman warrior_. ^12^ references are to immanuel kant, _the critique of judgement_ 90-94. ^13^ see hayden white, "the politics of historical interpretation: discipline and desublimation." ^14^ charles altieri, in "from symbolist thought to immanence," stresses the importance of keats's notion of "negative capability" in the context of american postmodern poetics; he traces a genealogy from keats to olson. ^15^ herbert marcuse, _reason and revolution_, 294-295; another exemplary case of the psychoanalytic turn of marxism into "marxist humanism" is certainly erich fromm, _marx's concept of man_. ^16^ jorge luis borges, "kafka and his precursors," 201; borges's own emphasis. also tony tanner: "[postmodern writers suggest that] the plots men see may be their own inventions" (_city of words_ 156). ^17^ charles altieri, "from symbolist thought to immanence"; but is this idea of self-as-process a novelty of postmodernism? identity as a process of self-creation is, after all, a jungian idea. james olney confirms: "like the elements, individual man never is but is always becoming: his self, as c.j. jung will say some twenty-five hundred years after heraclitus--nor did man change much in the interim--is a process rather than a settled state of being" (james olney, _metaphors of self_ 27). and so, postmodernism is once again repeating the old, isn't it? and yet, john paul russo comments on olney's passage, "[i]t is hard to reconcile the two sides of this sentence: on one hand man is 'always becoming.' on the other, man has not changed 'much' in two and a half millennia" (john paul russo, "the disappearance of the self" 22). ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited acker, kathy. _great expectations_. new york: grove press, 1986. alter, robert. _partial magic: the novel as a self-conscious genre_. berkeley: u of california p, 1975. altieri, charles. 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"three checklists (coover, barthelme, sukenick)." _bulletin of bibliography_ 31 (1974): 112. mchale, brian. _postmodernist fiction_. london: methuen, 1987. olderman, raymond m. _beyond the waste land: a study of the american novel in the nineteen-sixties_. new haven: yale up, 1972. olney, james. _metaphors of self: the meaning of autobiography_. princeton: princeton up, 1972. orbach, susie. _hunger strike: the anorectic's struggle as a metaphor for our age_. new york: norton, 1987. pease, donald e. "sublime politics." _boundary 2_ 3 (spring/fall 1984). pfeil, fred. _another tale to tell: politics & narrative in postmodern culture_. london: verso, 1990. poirier, richard. _the performing self_. new york: oxford up, 1971. ---. "thomas pynchon's _v._." _new york times_, 1 may 1966. polla, franco la. _un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano (1962-1982)_. ravenna: longo, 1983. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. harmandsworth: penguin, 1987. roszack, theodor. "the dialectics of liberation: herbert marcuse and norman brown." _the making of a counter culture: reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition_. new york: doubleday, 1969. russo, john paul. "the disappearance of the self: some theories of autobiography in the united states, 1964-1987." _tuttamerica_ 29-30-31 (1986-87). sayres, sohnya. "glory mongering: food and the agon of excess." _social text_, 16 (winter 1986-87). schulz, max f. _radical sophistication: status in contemporary jewish-american novelists_. athens: ohio up, 1969. sloterdijk, peter. _critique of cynical reason_. trans. michael eldred. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. smith, sidonie. "maxine hong kingston's woman warrior: filiality and woman's autobiographical storytelling." _a poetics of women's autobiography_. bloomington: indiana up, 1987. sypher, wylie. _loss of the self in modern literature and art_. new york: random house, 1962. tanner, tony. _city of words: american fiction (1950-1970)_. new york: harper & row, 1971. tatham, campbell. "mythotherapy and postmodern fiction." _performance in postmodern culture_. eds. michel benamou & charles caramello. madison: coda press, 1977. trilling, lionel. _sincerity and authenticity_. oxford: oxford up, 1972. vonnegut, kurt, jr. _slaughterhouse five_. new york: dell, 1969. white, hayden. "the culture of criticism." _liberations: new essays on the humanities in revolution_. ed. ihab hassan. middletown: wesleyan up, 1971. ---. "the politics of historical interpretation: discipline and desublimation." _critical inquiry_ 9 (september, 1982). wilson, edmund. _the cold war and the income tax_. new york: signet, 1964. yudice, george. "feeding the transcendent body." _postmodern culture_ 1.1 (sep. 1990). ---. "marginality and the ethics of survival." _universal abandon? the politics of postmodernism_. ed. andrew ross. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988. � -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.594. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 119504 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu every issue of _postmodern culture_ carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _essays in postmodern culture_ 2) _black ice books_ 3) _black sacred music_ 4) _the centennial review_ 5) _chicago journal of theoretical computer science_ 6) _college literature_ 7) _contention_ 8) _differences_ 9) _discourse_ 10) _electronic journal on virtual culture_ 11) _eternal network: a mail art anthology_ 12) _genders_ 13) _hot off the tree_ 14) _information technology and disabilities_ 15) _inter-society for electronic arts_ 16) _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_ 17) _minnesota review_ 18) _modern fiction studies_ 19) _mtv killed kurt cobain_ 20) _nomad_ 21) _october_ 22) _rhetnet: a cyberjournal for rhetoric and writing_ 23) _rif/t_ 24) _sscore_ 25) _studies in popular culture_ 26) _tdr_ 27) _tonguing the zeitgeist_ 28) _virus 23_ 29) _vivid magazine_ 30) _zines-l_ calls for papers, panels, and participants: 31) _pmc-moo_ 32) _representations_ 33) _human computer interaction laboratory (university of maryland, college park), 11th annual symposium and open house_ 34) _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 35) _journal of criminal justice and popular culture_ 36) _the little magazine_: work, writing, electronic space, cyborg performance and poetics 37) _national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure_ 38) _postmodern culture_ 39) _psyche_ 40) _research on virtual relationships_ 41) _sixties generations: from montogomery to vietnam; an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars, artists, and activists_ 42) _splinter_ 43) _style: possible worlds, virtual reality, and postmodern fiction_ 44) _undercurrent_ networked discussion groups: 45) _femisa: feminism, gender, international relations_ 46) _holocaus: holocaust list_ 47) _newjour-l_ 48) _nii-teach_ 49) _popcult list_ research programs: 50) deadlines for neh programs, seminars, and fellowships resources: 51) _gopheur litteratures_ 52) _american lit. sublist_ 53) _english lit. sublist_ other: 54) spelunking with international artist 55) mark taylor and esa saarinen, _imagologies_ 1)------------------------------------------------------------- essays in postmodern culture now cordless: an anthology of essays from _postmodern culture_ is now available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) 2)------------------------------------------------------------- _black ice books_ _black ice books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident american writers. breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. the first four books include: _avant-pop: fiction for a daydream nation_ edited by larry mccaffery, this book is an assemblage of innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various other unclassifiable texts by writers like samuel delany, mark leyner, william vollmann, kathy acker, eurdice, stephen wright, derek pell, harold jaffe, tim ferret, ricardo cortez cruz and many others. 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"congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant." terry eagleton oxford university "in one bold stroke you seem to have turned _college literature_ into one of the things everyone will want to read." cary nelson "a journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy." robert con davis forthcoming issues: third world women's literature african american writing cross-cultural poetics subscription rates: us foreign individual $24.00/year $29.00/year institutional: $48.00/year $53.00/year send prepaid orders to: _college literature_ main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150 7)-------------------------------------------------------------_contention_ debates in society, culture, and science _contention_ is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 8)-------------------------------------------------------------_differences_ a journal of feminist cultural studies queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities (volume 3, number 2) edited by teresa de lauretis teresa de lauretis: _queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction_ sue ellen case: _tracking the vampire_ samuel r. delany: _street talk/straight talk_ elizabeth a. grosz: _lesbian fetishism?_ jeniffer terry: _theorizing deviant historiography_ thomas almaguer: _chicano men: a cartography of homosexual identity and behavior_ ekua omosupe: _black/lesbian/bulldagger_ earl jackson, jr.: _scandalous subjects: robert gluck's embodied narratives_ julia creet: _daughter of the movement: the psychodynamics of lesbian s/m fantasy_ the phallus issue (volume 4, number 1) edited by naomi schor and elizabeth weed maria torok: _the meaning of "penis envy" in women (1963)_ jean-joseph goux: _the phallus: masculine identity and the "exchange of women"_ parveen adams: _waiving the phallus_ kaja silverman: _the lacanian phallus_ charles bernheimer: _penile reference in phallic theory_ judith butler: _the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary_ jonathan goldberg: _recalling totalities: the mirrored stages of arnold schwarzenegger_ emily apter: _female trouble in the colonial harem_ single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals $48.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 9)-------------------------------------------------------------_discourse_ volume 15, number 1 special issue flaunting it: lesbian and gay studies kathryn baker: delinquent desire: race, sex, and ritual in reform schools for girls terralee bensinger: lesbian pornography: the re-making of (a) community scott bravmann: investigating queer fictions of the past: identities, differences, and lesbian and gay historical self-representations sarah chinn and kris franklin: "i am what i am" (or am i?): making and unmaking of lesbian and gay identity in _high tech boys greg mullins: nudes, prudes, and pigmies: the desirability of disavowal in _physical culture magazine_ joann pavletich: muscling the mainstream: lesbian murder mysteries and fantasies of justice david pendelton: obscene allegories: narrative structures in gay male porn thomas piontek: applied metaphors: aids and literature june l. reich: the traffic in dildoes: the phallus as camp and the revenge of the genderfuck single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals $50.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 10)-----------------------------------------------------------_the electronic journal on virtual culture_ we are very pleased by the great interest in the _electronic journal on virtual culture_. there are already more than 1,280 people subscribed. our first issue was distributed in march 1993. the future looks very interesting. editors are working on special issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture. the _electronic journal on virtual culture_ (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. ejvc is published monthly. some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. cyberspace monitor). if you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the virtual culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc. ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact ermel stepp, editor-in-chief, or diane kovacs, co-editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu cordially, ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu 11)------------------------------------------------------------_eternal network: a mail art anthology_ "eternal network: a mail art anthology" by chuck welch is to be published in fall 1994 by university of calgary press. the 42 chapter, 350 page text includes an index, 147 illustrations and six major appendices including the largest extensive listing of underground mail art zines in existence. a thorough listing of nearly 100 international private and institutional mail art archives appears in another important appendice. but what is mail art? mail art is a paradox in the way it reverses traditional definitions of art; the mailbox and computer replace the museum, the address becomes the art, and the mailman brings home the avant-garde to mail artists in the form of correspondence art, e-mail art, artistamps, postcards, conceptual projects, and collaborations. "eternal network introduces readers to a lively exchange with international mail art networkers from five continents. the book include snail mail and e-mail addresses, fax, and telephone numbers for many active mail artists. readers are invited to participate -to correspondance with global village artists who quickstep beyond establishment boundaries of art. among the forty-two distinguished contributors appearing in "eternal network" are new york city art critic richard kostelanetz; physicist, poet bern porter; director of the museum of modern art library, clive phillpot; famed fluxus artists dick higgins and ken friedman; university of iowa art historian and archival director estera milman, and mail art patron jean brown who has collected the world's largest assemblage of mail art material now undergoing documentation at the getty center for the history of art and the humanities. many of the forty-two chapters appearing in "eternal network" are original, unpublished essays pertaining to the origin and history of mail art networking, collaborative aesthetics, new directions for mail art networking in the 1990's, mail art projects exploring the interconnection of marginal on and off-line networks, mail art criticism and dialogue, and finally, parables, visions, dances, dreams, and poems that articulate the living mythology of mail art. edited by chuck welch, an active mail artist since 1978, "eternal network" makes an important first step towards introducing mail art to non-artists, artists, and academic scholars. for more information send e-mail to cathryn.l.welch@dartmouth.edu or write to "eternal network" po box 978, hanover, nh 03755. 12)------------------------------------------------------------_genders_ ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. ----------------------------- _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 13)------------------------------------------------------------_hot off the tree_ hott -hot off the tree -is a free monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including vr (virtual reality), neural networks, pdas (personal digital assistants), guis (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing. summaries are provided from the following sources: wall street journal, new york times, los angeles times, washington post, san jose mercury news, boston globe, financial times (london) ... time, newsweek, u.s. news & world report ... business week, forbes, fortune, the economist (london), nikkei weekly (tokyo), asian wall street journal (hong kong) ... over 50 trade magazines, including computerworld, infoworld, datamation, computer retail week, dr. dobb's journal, lan times, communications week, pc world, new media, var business, midrange systems, byte ... over 50 research journals, including ** all ** publications of the ieee computer and communications societies, plus technical journals published by at&t, ibm, hewlett packard, fujitsu, sharp, ntt, siemens, philips, gec ... over 100 internet mailing lists & usenet discussion groups ... plus ... * listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books; * listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences; * company advertorials, including ceo perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements. bonus: exclusive interviews with technology pioneers ... the next two issues feature interviews with mark weiser (head of xerox parc's computer science lab) on ubiquitous computing, and nobel laureate joshua lederberg on the information society to request a free subscription, carefully follow the instructions below send subscription requests to: listserv@ucsd.edu leave the "subject" line blank in the body of the message input: subscribe hott-list if at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: unsubscribe hott-list note: do *not* include first or last names following "subscribe hott-list" or "unsubscribe hott-list" the hott mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the university of california at san diego. the system automatically responds to the sender's return path. hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at ucsd. (i cannot make modifications to the list ... nor do i have access to the list.) for your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. if you have problems and require human intervention, contact: hott@ucsd.edu the next issue of the reinvented hott e-newsletter is scheduled for transmission in late january/early february. please forward this announcement to friends and colleagues, and post to your favorite bulletin boards. our objective is to disseminate the highest quality and largest circulation compunications (computer & communications) industry newsletter. i look forward to serving you as hott's new editor. thank you. ***************************************************************** david scott lewis editor-in-chief and book & video review editor ieee engineering management review (the world's largest circulation "high tech" management journal) internet address: d.s.lewis@ieee.org tel: +1 714 662 7037 usps mailing address: pob 18438 / irvine ca 92713-8438 usa ***************************************************************** 14)------------------------------------------------------------announcing a new electronic journal: information technology and disabilities below is information about the journal, including the table of contents for volume i, no. 1, as well as information on editorial staff and explicit instructions for subscribing or using the journal via gopher. it&d v1n1 table of contents 230 lines ********************************************* information technology and disabilities issn 1073-5127 volume i, no. 1 january, 1994 ********************************************* articles ********************************************* introducing _information technology and disabilities_ (itdv01n1 mcnulty) tom mcnulty, editor ********************************************* building an accessible cd-rom reference station (itdv01n1 wyatt) rochelle wyatt and charles hamilton abstract: this case study describes the development of an accessible cd-rom workstation at the washington library for the blind and physically handicapped. included are descriptions of hardware and software, as well as selected cd-rom reference sources. information is provided on compatibility of individual cd-rom products with adaptive technology hardware and software. ********************************************* development of an accessible user interface for people who are blind or vision impaired as part of the re-computerization of royal blind society (australia) (itdv01n1 noonan) tim noonan abstract: in 1991, royal blind society (australia) and deen systems, a sydney-based software development company, undertook a major overhaul of rbs information systems intended to enhance access to rbs client services as well as employment opportunities for blind and vision impaired rbs staff. this case study outlines the steps taken and principles followed in the development of a computer user interface intended for efficient use by blind and vision impaired individuals. ********************************************* the electronic rehabilitation resource center at st. john's university (new york) (itdv01n1 holtzman) bob zenhausern and mike holtzman abstract: st. john's university in jamaica, new york, is host to a number of disability-related network information sources and services. this article identifies and describes key sources and services, including bitnet listservs, or discussion groups, the unibase system which includes real-time online conferencing, and other valuable educational and rehabilitation-related network information sources. ********************************************* the clearinghouse on computer accommodation (coca) (itdv01n1 brummel) susan brummel and doug wakefield abstract: since 1985, coca has been pioneering information policies and computer support practices that benefit federal employees with disabilities and members of the public with disabilities. today, coca provides a variety of services to people within and outside government employment. the ultimate goal of all coca's activities is to advance equitable information environments consistent with non-discriminatory employment and service delivery goals. ********************************************* departments ********************************************* job accommodations (itdv01n1 jobs) editor: joe lazzaro lazzaro@bix.com k 12 education (itdv01n1 k12) editor: anne pemberton apembert@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu libraries (itdv01n1 library) editor: ann neville neville@emx.cc.utexas.edu online information and networking (itdv01n1 online) editor: steve noble slnobl01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu campus computing (itdv01n1 campus) editor: daniel hilton-chalfen, ph.d., hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu ********************************************* copyright (c 1994) by (it&d) information technology and disabilities. authors of individual articles retain all copyrights to said articles, and their permission is needed to reproduce any individual article. the rights to the journal as a collection belong to (it&d) information technology and disabilities. it&d encourages any and all electronic distribution of the journal and permission for such copying is expressly permitted here so long as it bears no charge beyond possible handling fees. to reproduce the journal in non-electronic format requires permission of its board of directors. to do this, contact the editor. editor-in-chief tom mcnulty, new york university (mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu) editors dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla daniel hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university editorial board dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla danny hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology alistair d. n. edwards, phd, university of york, uk joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va lawrence a. scadden, phd, national science foundation bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university ********************************************* about easi (equal access to software and information) since its founding in 1988 under the educom umbrella, easi has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. volunteers from easi have been instrumental in the establishment of _information technology and disabilities_ as still another step in this process. our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. we seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. easi makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists: easi@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a general discussion on computer access) and axslib-l@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a discussion on library access issues). to join either list, send a "subscribe" command to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. easi also maintains several items on the st. johns gopher under the menu heading "disability and rehabilitation resources". for further information, contact the easi chair: norman coombs, ph.d. nrcgsh@ritvax.isc.rit.edu or the easi office: easi's phone: (310) 640-3193 easi's e-mail: easi@educom.edu ********************************************* individual _itd_ articles and departments are archived on the st. john's university gopher. to access the journal via gopher, locate the st. john's university (new york) gopher. select "disability and rehabilitation resources," and from the next menu, select "easi: equal access to software and information." _information technology and disabilities_ is an item on the easi menu. to retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu leave subject line blank the message text should include the word "get" followed by the two word file name; for example: get itdv01n1 contents each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. do not include the parentheses with the filename when sending the "get" command to listserv. note: only one item may be retrieved per message to receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and either of the following lines of text: subscribe itd-toc "firstname lastname" subscribe idt-jnl "firstname lastname" (itd-jnl is the entire journal in one e-mail message while itd-toc sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.) to get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and the following single line of text: get author guidelin 15)-----------------------------------------------------------isea is the inter-society for the electronic arts. isea coordinates the continued occurence of the international symposia on electronic art (the isea symposia). 1988: utrecht, holland 1990: groningen, holland 1992: sydney, australia 1993: minneapolis, usa 1994: helsinki, finland 1995: montreal, canada isea publishes a monthly newsletter, both electronically and as a hard copy. associate membership is free of charge for one year. anyone interrested in membership info, aims and a sample newsletter, contact isea@sara.nl greetings, wim van der plas isea board 16)------------------------------------------------------------m/e/a/n/i/n/g a journal of contemporary art issues m/e/a/n/i/n/g, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts. m/e/a/n/i/n/g is published twice a year in the fall and spring. it is edited by susan bee and mira schor. subscriptions for 2 issues (1 year): $12 for individuals: $20 for institutions 4 issues (2 years): $24 for individuals; $40 for institutions * foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to canada: $5 * foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in u.s. dollars. all checks should be made payable to mira schor send all subscriptions to: mira schor 60 lispenard street new york, ny 10013 limited supply of back issues available at $6 each; contact mira schor for information. distributed with the segue foundation and the solo foundation 17)------------------------------------------------------------_minnesota review_ tell your friends! tell your librarians! the new _minnesota review_'s coming to town! subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new _minnesota review_ is published biannually and originates from east carolina university beginning with the fall 1992 special issue. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams, editor _minnesota review_ department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 18)-----------------------------------------------------------_modern fiction studies_ _mfs_, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, announces the following forthcoming special issues: february, 39.1: "fiction of the indian subcontinent" may, 39.3: "toni morrison" november, 40.1: "the cultural politics of displacement" barbara harlow, guest editor we also continue to accept submissions for forthcoming special issues on "autobiography, photography, narrative," timothy dow adams, guest editor (deadline: april 1, 1994); "postmodern narratives (deadline: october 1 1994); "sexuality and narrative," guest editor, judith roof (deadline: march 1, 1995). _mfs_ is published quarterly at purdue university and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and ibm-compatible floppy; please include a selfaddressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. send submissions to: patric o'donnell editor _mfs_ department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at pod@purccvm (bitnet); pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (internet). subscriptions to _mfs_ are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. back issues are $7 each. address subscription inquiries to: nel fink circulation manager _mfs_ department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389. 19)------------------------------------------------------------announcing the publication of a mini-multimedia 'zine, _mtv killed kurt cobain_, with text, graphic, and sound resource. _mtv killed kc_ was written and directed by mark amerika and produced by bobby rabyd for alternative-x, an electronic publishing enterprise at marketplace.com as *alternative-x* _mtv killed kurt cobain_ can be ftp'd from: ftp.brown.edu in the directory: /pub/bobby_rabyd it is in storyspace reader format, a standalone hypermedia template for the macintosh. send queries to st001747@brownvm.brown.edu bobby rabyd 20)----------------------------------------------------------- nomad an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences ************************************************************** manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields! nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. it is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. while our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, nomad strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls. manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. if possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5" macintosh disks, in either microsoft word or macwrite ii format, or by e-mail. each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and in black and white. pict, tiff, gif, and jpeg files on 3.5" macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via e-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). all artwork must be camera-ready. submissions by regular mail should include a sase with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages. subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues) send manuscripts and inquiries to: nomad, c/o mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, florida, 32306 (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu) ***************************************************************** "in nomad, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most appreciate them." ***************************************************************** 21)------------------------------------------------------------_october_ art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _october_ focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join _october_'s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! published quarterly issn 0162-2870. yearly rates: individual $32.00; institution $80.00; student (copy of current id required) and retired: $22.00. outside usa add $14.00 postage and handling. canadians add additional 7% gst. prepayment is required. send check payable to _october_ drawn against a us bank, mastercard or visa number to: mit press journal / 55 hayward street / cambridge, ma 02142-1399 / tel: (617) 233-2889 / fax: (617) 258-6779 / e-mail: journals-orders@mit.edu 22)------------------------------------------------------------* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * r h e t n e t * a cyberjournal for rhetoric and writing *rhetnet philosophy:* there are numerous places to talk on the internet, and scholars in all fields are there (and there and there and there) pouring forth rivers of words. amid the inevitable and voluptuous mundanity of those conversations reside moments of discovery, the fiery and spontaneous generation of knowledge, and even wisdom. these conversations, or parts of them, are worth saving and savoring. if we look at all of literature, including scholarly publication, as being one long, vast, intricate and diverse conversation, then the discussion online can be seen as part of the same discourse. the conversation is migrating to a new media, but the means of (attempting to) provide coherence are still developing. rhetnet is an effort to adapt the functions of academic print journals to the new environment. journals simultaneously serve as the medium of conversation and the repository for knowledge. rhetnet serves those purposes, but takes the shape of its native environment: cyberspace. the project is both radical and conservative. rhetnet provides rhetoric and internet students and scholars with the means of capturing, contextualizing, searching, and retrieving some of the intriguing and valuable conversations that occur on various parts of the net, but which currently lie scattered and forgotten in dusty corners of the virtual world. it provides a repository of netscholarship on rhetoric and writing. we envision it as a decentered, organic repository for all the stuff of the net that is of interest to the rhetoric and writing community, while also including space for various traditional types of scholarly discourse. *rhetnet purpose:* 1. to act as an archive for net conversations relating to rhetoric and writing. few existing places of discourse (mailing lists, newsgroups, chat systems, mu*s), make an effort to capture those conversations in a form that would allow them to be reviewed reflectively and commented upon in the future. they lack the archival intent that rhetnet provides. 2. to offer a place for original publication of articles and essays. we're interested in retaining some aspects of traditional scholarly publishing, or at least exploring the possibilities for the co-existence of network and print-oriented forms and sensibilities. 3. to create appropriate help sheets, conference tutorials, or workshops on accessing the journal and advice that will help new members of the net. 4. to promote netscholarship and community. *rhetnet editorial intent* the editorial management group is responsible for coordinating regular publication of refereed articles on rhetoric and writing, particularly as they are constituted in the network environments of a developing cyberspace. as the journal evolves, this traditional structure may meld with the forms of scholarship more native to the net, the forms that other aspects of the journal discover through exploratory approaches to network publication. anyone who is interested in being *actively* involved in the editorial or technological aspects of the journal is invited to join the editorial management group. like the various scholarly communities on the net, the main qualification for joining this effort is interest in writing, rhetoric, poetics, composition and critical theory, pedagogy, and online publication. institutional credentials are not relevant. a listserv list, rhetnt-l@mizzou1.bitnet, has been created to serve this effort, initially as a place to conduct asynchronous discussions about the project. the list is managed by eric crump. to subscribe, send email to listserv@mizzou1.bitnet or listserv@mizzou1.missouri.edu. leave the subject line blank and in the first line of the note, put: sub rhetnt-l your name anyone who has trouble subscribing should write to eric at lceric@mizzou1.bitnet or lceric@mizzou1.missouri.edu. 23)------------------------------------------------------------rif/t ******************************** rif/t, the electronic poetics journal, is interested in receiving proposals and/or submissions for a forthcoming special issue on charles olson. inquiries may be sent to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu rif/t is edited by kenneth sherwood and loss pequen~o glazier ******************************** 24)------------------------------------------------------------_sscore_ social science computer review g. david garson, editor ronald anderson, co-editor the official journal of the social science computing association, _sscore_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. now, when you subscribe to _social science computer review_, you automatically become a member of the social science computing association. quarterly subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions single issue: $20 please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. canadian residents add 7% gst duke university press/ journals division / box 90660 /durham nc 27708 25)------------------------------------------------------------_studies in popular culture_ dennis hall, editor. _studies in popular culture_, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292. please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. _studies in popular culture_, is published semiannually and is indexed in the _pmla annual bibliography_. all members of the association receive _studies in popular culture_. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to the executive secretary, diane calhoun-french, academic dean, jefferson community college-sw, louisville, ky 40272, for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes ixv are available for $225.00. 26)------------------------------------------------------------ ______ ______ ______ ######| ######\ ######\ ##| ##| ##\ ##|__##| ##| ##| ##| ######/ ##| ##|__##/ ##| ##\ ___________________ ##| ######/ ##| ##\_________________ the journal of performance studies t141 (spring 1994) tdr is a journal that explores the diverse world of performance. how does this relate to you? the journal emphasizes the intercultural, and the inter-disciplinary and spans numerous geographical areas and historical periods. tdr addresses performance issues of every kind: theatre, music, dance, entertainment, media, sports, politics, aesthetics of everyday life, games, play, and ritual. tdr is for people in the performing arts, the social sciences, academics, activists and theorists--anyone interested thinking about the "performance" paradigm. the journal, is edited by richard schechner of the department of performance studies, new york university, and is published quarterly by mit press. although tdr is not yet an electronic journal, you can browse through sample articles online and subscribe via e-mail from the electronic newsstand or directly from mit, the publisher (see directions below). check out our table of contents: ----------- // in this issue (t141 spring 1994) \\ ------------------------------------- //comments\\ tdr & nea: the continuing saga tdr comment by richard schechner (editor) in memory of utpal dutt by sudipto chatterjee in memory of robert w. corrigan by richard schechner //letters\\ free giveaway of his plays by richard foreman marxism, melodrama, and theatre historiography dan gerould responds eelka lampe responds to masakuni kitazawa native earth and jennifer preston a letter from alan filewood retiring or recharging? a letter from richard e. kramer //articles\\ muhammed and the virgin: folk dramatization of battles between moors and christians by max harris "a radiant smile from the lovely lady": overdetermined femininity in "ladies" figure skating by abigail m. feder tomas schmit: a fluxus farewell to perfection interview by gunther berghaus going going gone: theatre and american culture(s) by bradley boney whatever happened to the sleepy mexican?: one way to be a contemporary mexican in a changing world order by yareli arizmendi the new world border: prophecies for the end of the century by guillermo gomez-pena the other history of intercultural performance by coco fusco //book reviews\\ women and comedy: rewriting the british theatrical tradition (by susan carlson) reviewed by lizbeth goodman gender in performance: the presentation of difference in the performing arts (edited by laurence senelick) reviewed by kim marra the national stage: theatre and culture legitimation in england, france and american (by loren kruger) reviewed by susan manning actors and onlookers: theater and twentieth-century scientific views of nature (by natalie crohn schmitt), the actor's instrument: body, theory, state (by hollis huston), the end of acting a radical view (by richard hornby), acting (by john harrop) all reviewed by phillip b. zarrilli each tdr issue is filled with photographs, artwork, and scripts that illustrate every article. the journal, founded in 1955, is 7 x 10, and a 184 pages per issue. -------------------------------------------------------------- // come browse and subscribe \\ ------------------------------ 1. mit press online to access mit press online catalogs and subscription informaton: telnet techinfo.mit.edu /around mit/mit press/journals/arts/ you can also access mit via gopher in usa/massachusetts/mit/ to subscribe to tdr through mit press, send e-mail to: journals-orders@mit.edu mit press journals, 55 hayward street, cambridge, ma 02142-1399 usa. tel: (617) 253-2889 fax: (617)258-6779 2. the electronic newsstand you can browse through an article from our latest issue and obtain subscription information on the electronic newsstand. on gopher, go to: massachusetts/mit/interesting sites to explore/electronic newsstand/all titles/tdr:the drama review/ to subscribe to tdr through the electronic newsstand, send your name and address to: tdr@enews.com. or call: 1-800-40-enews. 27)----------------------------------------------------------- announcing the publication of: _tonguing the zeitgeist_ a new novel by lance olsen +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ so you want to be a rock'n'roll star? in a tomorrow that isn't distant enough, you'll have to sell your soul to mtv to pick up a guitar. and then they'll start carving you up, making you over in the mega-media image of glitter and bone.... lance olsen's many other books include the novel _live from earth_ and the first full-length study of the godfather of cyberpunk, william gibson. his work has appeared in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, among them _mondo 2000_, _vls_, and _fiction international_. to order: permeable press 47 noe street, suite 4 san francisco, ca 94114 bcclark@igc.apc.org isbn 1-882633-04-0, $11.95 28)-----------------------------------------------------------_virus 23_ for those brave souls looking to explore the secret of eris, you may wish to check out _virus 23_. 2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd. _virus 23_ is a codename for all erisian literature don webb 6304 laird dr. austin tx 78757 0004200716@mcimail.com _virus 23_ is the annual hardcopy publication of a.d.o.s.a, the alberta department of spiritual affairs. all issues are available at $7.00 ppd from: _virus 23_ box 46 red deer, alberta canada t4n 5e7 various chunks of _virus 23_ can be found at tim oerting's alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out). for more information online contact darren wershler-henry: grad3057@writer.yorku.ca 29)-----------------------------------------------------------vivid magazine the first issue of vivid magazine is now available. vivid is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. we are actively seeking contributions for the next issue. the magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment of a windows 3.1 help file. you will need windows 3.1 to read the magazine. the magazine will also be available via anonymous ftp at "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it: ftp ftp.gmu.edu username: anonymous password: (your email address) cd pub/library binary get vivid1.zip ----------------------------------------------------------------for more information on vivid, contact the editor, justin mchale. internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------30)------------------------------------------------------------_zines-l_ announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to _zines-l_ send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name 31)------------------------------------------------------------ _postmodern culture_ announces pmc-moo pmc-moo is a new service offered (free of charge) by _postmodern culture_. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of the journal and participate in live conferences. pmc-moo will also provide access to texts generated by _postmodern culture_ and by pmc-talk, and it will provide the opportunity to experience (or help to design) programs which simulate objectlessons in postmodern theory. pmc-moo is based on the lambdamoo program, freeware by pavel curtis. to connect to pmc-moo, you *must* be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet hero.village.virginia.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. if you have the emacs program on your system and would like information about a customized program for pmc-moo that uses emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail. 32)------------------------------------------------------------_representations_ new ventures in humanities scholarship published by the university of california press ". . . widely recognized as among the most innovative outlets for work in literary criticism, art history, and cultural history." --ludmilla jordanova, social history of medicine representations is a quarterly interdisciplinary forum offering imaginative and challenging approaches to the study of culture. since 1983, representations has devoted its pages to ground-breaking critical thought. recent special issues: number 29: "entertaining history: american cinema and popular culture," edited by carol j. clover and michael rogin number 30: "law and the order of culture," edited by rober post number 31: "the margins of identity in nineteenth-century england" number 33: "the new world," edited by stephen greenblatt number 37: "imperial fantasies and postcolonial histories" number 42: "future libraries," edited by r. howard bloch and carla hesse forthcoming special issues in 1994: number 47: eighteenth-century culture number 48: new understandings of eastern europe subscription information $33 individuals $23 students (with copy of id) $62 institutions (add $9.00 for foreign surface postage) send orders to: representations university of california press 2120 berkeley way, berkeley ca 94720 order by phone (510/642-4191) fax (510/642-9917) e-mail for an order form (journals@garnet.berkeley.edu) prices subject to change 33)-----------------------------------------------------------university of maryland, college park human-computer interaction laboratory 11th annual symposium & open house june 13, 1994 laying the foundation for the information super highway: human-computer interaction research june 14, 1994 superteaching in the electronic classroom: concepts, design and evaluation june 14, 1994 interfaces to imagination: art, music, and poetry in the digital village sponsored by center for automation research university of maryland with additional support from computer science center institute for advanced computer studies institute for systems research ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ registration ~~~~~june 13, 1994~~~~~ laying the foundation for the information super highway ( ) $150 industry full fee includes videotape, technical reports, handouts, demo disk and lunch buffet ( ) $110 faculty/staff university faculty & staff fee includes videotape, technical reports, handouts, demo disk and lunch buffet ( ) student free registrations without materials or lunch will be granted to full-time undergraduate and graduate students space permitting ~~~~june 14, 1994~~~~ superteaching in the electronic classroom ( ) $80 industry ( ) $50 faculty/staff ( ) student ~~~~june 14, 1994~~~~ interfaces to imagination ( ) $60 industry ( ) $40 educator/art practitioner ( ) student ~~~~~directions and parking info: please enclose a self addressed stamped envelope with your registration by may 27, 1994 to receive ___ a map and/or ____ a parking permit (indicate what you need). after may 27, permits cannot be requested, so plan to bring lots of quarters for parking meters. there is a 10% reduction for group of 4 or more from the same organization and registering together. contact teresa casey (see below) for details. since we cannot accept charge cards or cash, please enclose with your registration your check made payable to the university of maryland, or a purchase order with the reference cfar/hcil-oh94. mail to: teresa casey hcil av williams building university of maryland college park, md 20742-3255 e-mail: tcasey@cs.umd.edu 34)-----------------------------------------------------------********************* call for submissions ********************* _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 e-mail: keepc@qucd>queensu.ca 35)------------------------------------------------------------ the journal of criminal justice and popular culture call for papers scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria: issues: the journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. the journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice. submission procedures: to submit material for the journal, please subscribe to cjmovies through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow. to subscribe, send a message with the following command to listserv@albnyvm1: subscribe cjmovies yourfirstname yourlastname manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: the editors, journal of criminal justice and popular culture sunycrj@albnyvm1.bitnet or sunycrj@uacsc2.albany.edu managing editors: sean anderson and greg ungar editors journal of criminaljustice and popular culture, school of criminal justice, sunya 135 western avenue albany, ny 12222 internet: sa1171@albnyvm1.bitnet or gu8810@uacsc1.albany.edu list administrator seth rosner school of criminal justice, sunya sr2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or sr2602@thor.albany.edu 36)------------------------------------------------------------ call for work writing and electronic space cyborg performance and poetics _the little magazine_ is looking for writing and visual artwork which exists in the imagination of media still uncreated. for all of its power and fascination, electronic media are still limited by metaphors clumsily imported from print. james joyce and ezra pound were making hypertexts sixty years before the appropriate technology was created. we are looking for work which can be reproduced in the pages of _the little magazine_ but will inspire the engineers of the third millennium. although we are interested in adventuresome uses of the technology, it is not technology but vision which is lacking. we do not need virtual reality machines cranking out the same kind of misinformation that we get from television in even more addictive forms, but we are sick also of the polite, conventional thing literature has become. it is so comfortably contained in print. it is mediated and re-mediated (already); it is the subject of schools. we are not interested in work which exemplifies the theories of the past or even the hottest, most engaging theory of the present. we are interested in work which will call forth the media of the future. cyberpunk grow up! the deadline for the issue is december 15, 1994, but get in touch with us as soon as possible. we will try to find a way to publish important work even if it does not fit neatly into the usual literary magazine format. tell us about your writing, visual art, sound pieces, videos, multimedia performances, network art, and investigations of genres still unnamed. the editors _the little magazine_ department of english state university of new york at albany albany, ny 12222 (email to djb85@csc.albany.edu) 37)------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers, panels, and presentations national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure on october 14th, 15th and 16th, the center for art research in boston will sponsor a national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure. participants will explore the impact of the clinton administration's agenda for action and proposed nii legislation on the future of the arts and the humanities in 21st century america. the symposium will bring together government officials, academics, artists, writers, representatives of arts and cultural institutions and organizations, and other concerned individuals from many disciplines and areas of interest to discuss specific issues of policy which will effect the cultural life of *all* americans during the coming decades. to participate, submit a 250-word abstract of your proposal for a paper, panel-discussion or presentation, accompanied by a one-page vitae, by march 15, 1994. special consideration will be given to those efforts that take a critical perspective of the issues, and are concerned with offering specific alternatives to current administration and congressional agendas. the proceedings of the symposium will be video-taped, and papers and panels will be published on cd-rom. for further information, reply to: jaroslav@artdata.win.net via return e-mail. thank you, jay jaroslav --jay jaroslav, director jaroslav@artdata.win.net center for art research 241 a street boston, ma voice: (617) 451-8030 02210-1302 usa fax: (617) 451-1196 38)------------------------------------------------------------************************************* announcement and call for submissions _postmodern culture_ a suny press series ************************************* series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-becompleted north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 39)-----------------------------------------------------------+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for papers _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ (issn: 1039-723x). _psyche_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. _psyche_ publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. _psyche_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. _psyche_ also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version. types of articles: the journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff. research articles reporting original research by author(s). articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. peer reviewed. survey articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. these may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. more ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed. discussion notes critiques of previous research. peer reviewed. tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists. letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in _psyche_. screened by editorial staff. abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. book reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks. announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc. advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc. notes for authors unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of _psyche_, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to _psyche_ the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge _psyche_ as the original source of publication. subscriptions subscriptions to the electronic version of _psyche_ may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet 40)------------------------------------------------------------******************************************************* * * * research on virtual relationships * * * * have you had an interesting virtual relationship * * on electronic networks? a research team wants * * your story. material acknowledged and terms * * respected. both research articles and a * * general press (trade) book planned. * * * * mail to either address * * usa: canada: * * -or * * virtual, palabras * * p.o. box 46, box 175, stn. e * * boulder creek, toronto, ontario * * california 95006 canada m6h 4e1 * * * * e-mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca * * fax: (to canada): (416) 736-5986 * * -> please re-post to relevant network sites < * * ( a distributed knowledge project undertaking ) * ******************************************************* 41)------------------------------------------------------------ sixties generations: from montgomery to viet nam an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars, artists & activists second annual conference november 4-6, 1994 sponsored by _viet nam generation_ and hosted by western connecticut state university, danbury, ct call for papers, session proposals, readings, performance art pieces, and workshops. deadline for proposals: july 15, 1994. the first annual sixties generations conference was held march 4-6, 1993,in fairfax, virginia. it was sponsored by _viet nam generation_ and the american studies, film studies and african american studies programs of george mason university. sixty academic paper presentations, eight poetry and prose readings, one play reading and a concert filled three days. we also held a full-day roundtable discussion, "on the sixties in the nineties," featuring participants who were activists in the sixties and continue to be so today, including activists in sncc, sds, the black panther party, the yippies, various racial/ethnic formation, antiwar formations, political formations, women's groups and cultural workers. the event was such a success that _viet nam generation_ decided to do it again this year. [last year's program is appended to this call for papers.] we welcome submissions in all disciplines, in all topic areas related to the 1960s in the u.s. and internationally. scholarly presentations please send abstracts (250-500 words) describing your individual presentations, or collections of abstracts describing your panel proposals. panel sessions will be 90 minutes. folks interested in putting together whole panels should limit the number of presenters to three, and hold the length of individual presentations down to 20 minutes each, so that sufficient time will be left for audience responses. we welcome individual paper submissions on any topic related to the 1960s. individual presenters should also limit their presentations to 20 minutes. we will assemble individual presenters into panels. literary readings, video, film, and performance art if you are interested in reading prose or poetry, submit samples of your work (and tapes of previous of readings, if available). readings will be limited to 25 minutes per reader. we will consider videos, films, and performance art pieces of up to 45 minutes in length. please send samples, tapes, video clips, or whatever documentation is most suitable for your medium. workshop proposals activists interested in putting on workshops at the conference can propose either 40 minute or 90 minute sessions. please send a description of the workshop and related materials or publications. we welcome innovative ideas, so if you have an idea that doesn't seem to fit into one of the categories described above, write and tell us about it. submit proposals either in hard-copy or over email to: _viet nam generation_ 18 center road, woodbridge, ct 06525 fax: 203/389-6104 email: kalital@minerva.cis.yale.edu _______________________ the morning session will focus on recollections and reflections on people's involvement in movement work in the 60's. the afternoon session will focus on the value of the lessons and the continuing agendas and methods of the 60's movements as they affect the work of social justice in the 90's. we encourage conference participants to drop in on the roundtable and join the ongoing discussion. roundtable participants are also urged to visit other conference events and to join us for a cash bar, reception, and concert at the conclusion of the discussion. conference panels 9:00-10:30am panel 9: viet nam war film i "viet nam war film," cynthia fuchs; "the heart of darkness motif in vietnam war texts," david l. erben, univ of south florida; "warren beatty and the draft," katherine kinney, uc riverside 10:45am-12:15pm panel 10: sixties popular culture "folk songs and allusions to folks songs in the repertoire of the grateful dead," josephine a. mcquail, tennessee tech univ; "beatles, beach boys, leave it to beaver, mustangs, gto's freedom marches, a sexual revolution, a war and ptsd," john ketwig; "talking about the beatles," bernie sanders 1:30-3:00pm panel 11: performing arts "planet shakespeare: the bard in cold war america" susan fox, washington, dc; "shakespeare, kerouac & hedrick," donald k. hedrick, kansas state univ; "west african dance and race/culture and gender identity in los angeles african american communities," phylise smith, ucla panel 12: reinterpreting the sixties v "peace through law: john seiberling's vision of world order," miriam jackson, kent, oh; "reverend malcolm boyd and bishop paul moore, jr.," michael b. friedland, boston college; eros on the new frontier: the limits of liberal tolerance," louis j. kern, hofstra univ 3:15-4:45pm panel 13: the viet nam war "the national liberation front in south viet nam," ton that manh tuong; "the tet offensive and middletown: a study in contradiction," anthony o. edmonds;"the impact of the american antiwar movement on the south vietnamese urban youth struggle movement," nguyen huu thai panel 14: viet nam war film/drama ii "decentering genre: vietnam war films and portrayal of reality," catherine e. richardson, chattanooga, tn; "the death of the sixties: easy rider & and deliverance," margie burns, cheverly, md;"luis valdez and teatro campesino," dave derose, yale univ 5:00-6:30pm panel 15: music "folkore of the viet nam war," lydia fish, suny-buffalo; "in country songs," chuck rosenberg; "pilot songs of the viet nam war," chip dockery 7:30pm concert & reception o.v. hirsch chip dockery chuck rosenberg 42)------------------------------------------------------------_splinter_ _splinter_ is a new electronic publication that seeks texts in various states of unfinish prose poetry neither both your scraps your scrytch your fragments your language doodles unfinished stories unfinished scenes unfinished sentences experiments freewriting drafts of drafts outlines bits of dialogue directionless musings stanzas that never found their way into poems flashes that dead-ended scribbled down and never became no length guidelines / authors keep all rights rolling submission, no deadlines the contact address at this point is <dave1@gibbs.oit.unc.edu> send your submissions, subscription requests, questions, and comments (put splinter somewhere in the subject line) e-mail subscriptions are free and encouraged thanks 43)------------------------------------------------------------ special issue of _style_ on possible worlds, virtual reality, and postmodern fiction deadline for submission: november 30, 1994. to be published in 1995 contributions are solicited on the following topics: 1. the centrality of ontological questions in postmodernist fiction and the contribution of the theory of possibleworlds in capturing and formulating the ontological issue. inparticular: the stacking/embedding of realities, the transgression of ontological boundaries, the uses of recursive structures and their ontological implications. 2. virtual reality (vr) as a technological implementation of the philosophical concept of possible world. 3. challenges to the notion of actual world and alternatives to the "modal structure" in narrative universes. hypertext and the decentralization of semantic universes. the theme of the disappearance of reality in fiction and theory. 4. hyperrealism as parody of realism in postmodern culture. the philosophical basis of the concept of realism and its connection to virtual reality. 5. the thematization (especially in science fiction) of the concepts of virtual reality, parallel universes, alternative possible worlds, immersion in game-worlds, and interplanetary travel as a metaphor for movement across possible worlds. 6. game-theory and the concept of immersion in virtual worlds--as either thematized or implemented in postmodernist fiction or popular fiction. 7. the myth of virtual reality in contemporary culture and media. 8. virtual reality as a simulacrum. the role of simulacra (imitations, images, copies) in postmodern culture and fiction. the problematics of the relation between image and reality, sign and referent, original and copy and its implementation in postmodernist fiction. papers must be original contributions and will be refereed. length should be between 20 and 40 pages, double spaced. before submitting a paper, please contact the guest editor: marie-laure ryan 6207 red ridge trail bellvue, colorado 80512 or through e-mail: mmryan@vines.colostate.edu 44)------------------------------------------------------------u n d e r c u r r e n t call for manuscripts undercurrent is a free journal available on the internet through e-mail subscriptions. (see end of this message for how to subscribe for free.) we are seeking article submissions or queries with abstracts providing an analysis of the present in terms of discourses, events, representations, classes, or cultures. we seek to publish analysis of the present from diverse intellectual perspectives--feminist, historical, ethnological, sociological, literary, political, semiotic, philosophical, cultural studies, and so forth. we seek applied analysis rather than theory. any theoretical orientation ought instead to be apparent and immanent in your particular focus on the present. we especially encourage interdisciplinary work. article length varies according to your needs, anywhere from "short-takes" of 500-1000 words to "feature" of up to 7500 words. as its audience is potentially much broader than that of academic journals held only in university libraries, the style must account for an educated audience which is not necessarily familiar with either the jargon or the debates in a special field. undercurrent wishes to publish articles that address this broader audience while also conveying a vivid sense of how current academic scholarship can contribute to our understanding of the present. we are attempting to bridge the gulf between academia and the general reading public, a gulf which has allowed various misperceptions about academia to become politically overcharged in the popular media. all submissions will receive a reply, however no copies can be returned. any major citation format is acceptable, although endnotes must be used rather than footnotes due to the contingencies of various platforms for viewing electronic text. submissions and queries can be sent in any of the following ways, in order of preference: 1.> e-mail to "heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu" and note in the subject field that this is a submission to undercurrent 2.> mail a floppy diskette with your text in ascii or wordperfect (address below). 3.> mail two copies of your essay by traditional post to: undercurrent erick heroux dept. of english university of oregon eugene, or 97403 about free subscriptions: you can subscribe yourself to undercurrent by sending a one-line e-mail message: subscribe undercurrent yourname@domain.where address it to: mailserv@oregon.uoregon.edu problems or questions can be e-mailed to heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu 45)------------------------------------------------------------_femisa_ femisa@mach1.wlu.ca _femisa_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, _femisa_ was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the _international studies association_ keep in touch. more generally, i hope that _femisa_ can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the _international studies association_. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg 46)------------------------------------------------------------_holocaus: holocaust list_ holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need and internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu: sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com h-net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide _holocaus_ policy and to help stimulate contributions. _holocaus_ is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history. the moderator will solicit postings (by e mail, phone and even by us mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. the moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). it may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. anyone with suggestions about what _holocaus_ can and might do is invited to send in the ideas. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu 47)------------------------------------------------------------newjour-l@e-math.ams.org newjour-l aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project. first: newjour-l is the place to *announce* your own (or to forward information about others') newly planned, newly issued, or revised *electronic networked* journal or newsletter. it is specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of publication development and availability. it is also the place to announce availability of paper journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic networks. scholarly discussion lists *which regularly and continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or preprints* may also be reported, for those journal-like sections. we hope that those who see announcements on bitnet, internet, usenet or other media will forward them to newjour-l, but this does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number of duplicate messages. therefore, newjour-l is filtered through a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication. it does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by other lists. for example, sources like new-list describe new discussion lists; arachnet deals with social and cultural issues of e-publishing; vpiej-l handles many matters related to electronic publishing of journals. serialst discusses the technical aspects of all kinds of serials. you should continue to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to them. second: newjour-l represents an identification and road-mapping project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by michael strangelove, university of ottawa. newjour-l will expand and continue that work. as new publications are reported, a newjour-l support group will develop the following services -planning is underway & we ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us know: -a worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new e-publication for completion. this will provide detailed descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access characteristics. -an original cataloguing record will be created. -the fully catalogued title will be reported to national utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or searchers. -the records will feed a directory and database of these titles. not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. we thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable. subscribing: to subscribe, send a message to: listserv@e-math.ams.org leave the subject line blank. in the body, type: subscribe newjour-l firstname lastname you will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list. to drop out or postpone, use the standard listserv (internet) directions. acknowledgment: for their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank: michael strangelove, university of ottawa, advisor david rodgers, american mathematical society, systems & network support edward gaynor, university of virginia library, original cataloguing development john price-wilkin, university of virginia library, systems & network support birdie maclennan, university of vermont library, cataloguing and indexing development diane kovacs, kent state university library, advisor we anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. this project is co-ordinated through: the association of research libraries office of scientific & academic publishing 21 dupont circle, suite 800 washington, dc 20036 e-mail: osap@cni.org (ann okerson) 48)------------------------------------------------------------ * # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # * * * * !!!!! announcing !!!!! * * * * nii-teach * * * * # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # * scholastic network, scholastic inc. is pleased to announce a new list dedicated to the discussion of the national information infrastructure and its role in education. as you know, policy decisions made about the nii will affect how teachers and students use online services, how they will be accessed, how they will be paid for, and who will be able to get these services first. we are encouraging you to share your views on the nii and what it should offer teachers. moderators of this list are bonnie bracey, the arlington, va classroom teacher appointed to the nii advisory panel, leni donlan of cosn (the consortium for school networking) and jane coffey, a teacher-member of the scholastic network. this unmoderated list will only be on-line from march through june 1994. all classroom teachers and others interested in sharing feedback about education for the nii advisory group are invited to participate. to subscribe to nii-teach, send email to: nii-teach-request@scholastic.com leave the subject line blank. the text of the message should say: subscribe nii-teach yourfirstname yourlastname 49)-----------------------------------------------------------popcult@camosun.bc.ca popular culture the popcult list is now in place. it is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. the list will not be moderated. material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged. to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to: mailserv@camosun.bc.ca there should not be anything in the 'subject:' line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself. some keywords are: subscribe popcult help lists send/list popcult unsubscribe popcult it is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. do not include your name after subscribe popcult. in some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. i recommend, to start, that you put subscribe on one line, and help on the next line. that will give you a full listing of available commands. to send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc., send messages to: popcult@camosun.bc.ca owner: peter montgomery montgomery@camosun.bc.ca professor dept of english ph (604) 370-3342 (o) camosun college (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 foul bay road victoria, bc off. paul bldg 326 canada v8p 5j2 50)------------------------------------------------------------ neh +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ below is a full list of application deadlines for neh programs, plus contact numbers for individual programs. all telephone numbers are in area code 202. to receive guidelines for any neh program, contact the office of publications and public affairs at (202) 606-8438. guidelines are normally available at least two months in advance of application deadlines. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ division of education programs james c. herbert, director (606-8373) program / contact deadline projects beginning higher education in the humanities (lyn maxwell white; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + institutes for college & university faculty (barbara ashbrook; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 summer 1995 + science & humanities education (susan greenstein; 606-8380) 15 march 1994 october 1994 + core curriculum projects (fred winter; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + two-year colleges (judith jeffrey howard; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + challenge grants (thomas adams; 606-8380) 1 may 1994 december 1994 elementary & secondary education in the humanities (f. bruce robinson; 606-8377) 15 march 1994 december 1994 + teacher-scholar program (annette palmer; 606-8377) 1 may 1994 september 1995 special opportunity in foreign language education + higher education (lyn maxwell white; 606-8380) 15 march 1994 october 1994 + elementary & secondary education (f. bruce robinson; 606-8377) 15 march 1994 october 1994 division of fellowships & seminars marjorie a. berlincourt, director (606-8458) program / contact deadline projects beginning fellowships for university teachers (maben d. herring; 606-8466) 1 may 1994 1 january 1995 fellowships for college teachers & independent scholars (joseph b. neville; 606-8466) 1 may 1994 1 january 1995 summer stipends (thomas o'brien; 606-8466) 1 october 1994 1 may 1995 faculty graduate study program for hbcus (maben d. herring; 606-8466) 15 march 1994 1 september 1995 younger scholars program (leon bramson; 606-8463) 1 november 1994 1 may 1995 dissertation grants (kathleen mitchell; 606-8463) 15 november 1994 1 september 1995 study grants for college & university teachers (clayton lewis; 606-8463) 15 august 1994 1 may 1995 summer seminars for college teachers (joel schwartz; 606-8463) + participants 1 march 1994 summer 1994 + directors 1 march 1994 summer 1995 summer seminars for school teachers (michael hall; 606-8463) + participants 1 march 1994 summer 1994 + directors 1 april 1994 summer 1995 division of preservation & access george f. farr, jr., director (606-8570) program / contact deadline projects beginning library & archival research projects (vanessa piala/charles kolb; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 january 1995 library & archival preservation/access projects (karen jefferson/barbara paulson; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 january 1995 national heritage preservation program (richard rose/laura word; 606-8570) 1 november 1994 july 1995 u. s. newspaper program (jeffrey field; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 july 1995 division of public programs marsha semmel, acting director (606-8267) program / contact deadline projects beginning humanities projects in media (james dougherty; 606-8278) 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 humanities projects in museums & historical organizations (fredric miller; 606-8284) 3 june 1994 1 january 1995 public humanities projects (wilsonia cherry; 606-8271) 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 humanities projects in libraries (thomas phelps; 606-8271) + planning 4 february 1994 1 july 1994 + implementation 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 challenge grants (abbie cutter; 606-8361) 1 may 1994 december 1994 division of research programs guinevere l. griest, director (606-8200) program / contact deadline projects beginning scholarly publications (margot backas; 606-8207) + editions (douglas arnold; 606-8207) 1 june 1994 1 april 1995 + translations (helen aguerra; 606-8207) 1 june 1994 1 april 1995 + subventions (606-8207) 15 march 1994 1 october 1994 reference materials (jane rosenberg; 606-8358) + tools (martha b. chomiak; 606-8358) 1 september 1994 1 july 1995 + guides (michael poliakoff; 606-8358) 1 september 1994 1 july 1995 challenge grants (bonnie gould; 606-8358) 1 may 1994 december 1994 interpretive research programs (george lucas; 606-8210) + collaborative projects (donald c. mell; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 july 1995 + archaeology projects (bonnie magness-gardiner; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 april 1995 + humanities, science, and technology (daniel jones; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 july 1995 + conferences (david coder; 606-8210) 15 january 1994 1 october 1994 centers & international research organizations (christine kalke; 606-8210) + centers for advanced study 1 october 1994 1 july 1995 + international research 1 april 1994 1 january 1995 division of state programs carole watson, director (606-8254) each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines. addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the neh division of state programs. challenge grants program applications are submitted through the divisions of education, research, and public programs. deadline is 1 may 1994 for projects beginning december 1994. 51)------------------------------------------------------------_gopheur litteratures_ --> announcing the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal. address: gopher.litteratures.umontreal.ca 7070 or through the university of montreal main gopher: address: gopher.umontreal.ca the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal (udm) just happens to be the first gopher dedicated to teaching, research and publications on french literature, quebecois literature and francophone literatures, and also the first gopher to do so in french, albeit without the accents for the moment. (in the future we will offer the choice between ascii and iso-latin, as is currently being done on others gophers in the province of quebec.) the "gopheur litteratures" is **in construction**. this means it will be evolving. items on the main menu indicate a program of research conducted at the department of etudes francaises. the goal of the gopher is to offer electronic documentation on the departement d'etudes francaises, and to establish a resource center for information, tools, links, documents, local and international, to be used by the computing community of french scholars and students. all comments and suggestions of sites of interest to french studies should be sent to: gophlitt@ere.umontreal.ca christian allegre allegre@ere.umontreal.ca universite de montreal departement d'etudes francaises 52)------------------------------------------------------------*** american literature sublist, april 2, 1994 american lit anthology #1 (upgraded april 1994) one disk, 1.1 mbyte red badge of courage by stephen crane chicago poems by carl sandburg the call of the wild by jack london our mr. wrenn -romantic adventures of a gentle man by sinclair lewis renascence & other poems by edna st. vincent millay louisa may alcott one disk, 1.1 mbytes little women horatio alger one disk, 900 kbytes cast upon the breakers ragged dick or street life in new york struggling upward ambrose bierce one disk, 800 kbytes can such things be, the devil's dictionary willa cather two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (1.2 mbytes) -o pioneers! the song of the lark disk #2 (200 kbytes) -alexander's bridge james fenimore cooper #1 one disk, 1 mbyte, sgml the last of the mohicans nathaniel hawthorne one disk, 1.2 mbytes house of the seven gables the scarlet letter henry james two disks, both sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (900 kbytes) -the europeans, confidence disk #2 (1.2 mbytes) -roderick hudson, watch and ward jack london two disks, both sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (1.2 mbytes) -sea wolf, stories disk #2 (900 kbytes) -klondike, white fang herman melville two disks, sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (800 kbytes) -moby dick #1 disk #2 (690 kbytes) -moby dick #2 christopher morley one disk, 300 kbytes parnassus on wheels frank norris #1 one disk, 800 kbytes the pit edgar allan poe 28 tales on one disk, 1 mbyte these include the gold-bug, the murders in the rue morgue, the fall of the house of usher, etc. mark twain four disks, $10 each, $40 for the set disk #1 (1 mbyte) -tom sawyer, huckleberry finn disk #2 (1.1 mbyte) -a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court, tom sawyer abroad, tom sawyer detective, extracts from adam's diary, the great revolution in pitcairn, a ghost story, niagara, my watch, political economy, a new crime disk #3 (900 kbytes) -what is man? and other essays, the tragedy of pudd'nhead wilson (upgraded dec. 1993) disk #4 (1 mbyte) -a tramp abroad 53)-----------------------------------------------------------english literature sublist, april 2, 1994 ***beowulf to 1800 canterbury /beowulf/gawayne one disk, 1.1 mbytes canterbury tales by chaucer beowulf translated by francis gummere sir gawayne and the grene knyght (sgml) gammer gurton's needle (sgml) shakespeare five disks, each of which includes a glossary in addition to the shakespeare texts, $10 each, $50 for the set disk #1 (1.1 mbytes) -hamlet, lear, macbeth, othello, antony and cleopatra, julius caesar, romeo and juliet disk #2 (1 mbyte) -all's well that ends well, as you like it, love's labor's lost, midsummer night's dream , much ado about nothing ,taming of the shrew, twelfth night disk #3 (1.3 mbytes) -henry iv parts 1 and 2, henry v, henry vi parts 1, 2 and 3,, richard ii, richard iii disk #4 (1 mbyte) -tempest, winter's tale, cymbeline, measure for measure, merchant of venice, two gentlemen of verona, comedy of errors, sonnets, a lover's complaint, other poems disk #5 (1.3 mbytes) -coriolanus, troilus and cressida, henry viii, king john, pericles, timon of athens, titus andronicus, merry wives of windsor, rape of lucrece, venus and adonis ben jonson #1 one disk, 600 kbytes bartholomew fair volpone john milton one disk, 600 kbytes paradise lost, paradise regained moore/bacon/dryden/marvell one disk, 1.2 mbytes utopia by thomas moore new atlantis by francis bacon john dryden's translation of the aeneid poems by andrew marvell (sgml) john gay/john bunyan one disk 500 kbytes the beggar's opera pilgrim's progress ***1800-1918 jane austen #1 one disk, 1 mbyte persuasion northanger abbey emily bronte one disk, 675 kbytes wuthering heights wilkie collins two disks, sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (800 kbytes) -woman in white #1 disk #2 (800 kbytes) -woman in white #2 joseph conrad two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set disk #1 (1.1 mbytes) -lord jim, the secret sharer, the heart of darkness disk #2 (400 kbytes) -the nigger of the narcissus (sgml) charles dickens three disks, $10 each, $30 for the set disk #1 (600 kbytes) -a christmas carol, the chimes, the cricket on the hearth disk #2 (900 kbytes) -a tale of two cities disk #3 (1.1 mbytes) sgml -great expectations arthur conan doyle four disks, $10 each, $40 for the set disk #1 (1.1 mbytes) --the adventures of sherlock holmes, the casebook of sherlock holmes disk #2 (1.1 mbytes) -the return of sherlock holmes, a study in scarlet, the poison belt disk #3 (1.1 mbytes) -through the magic door, the memoirs of sherlock holmes, the sign of the four disk #4 (1 mbyte) -his last bow, the hound of the baskervilles, the valley of fear elizabeth gaskell #1 one disk, 300 kbytes, sgml some passages from the history of the chomley family h. ryder haggard #1 one disk, 500 kbytes king solomon's mines thomas hardy three disks, $10 each, $30 for the set disk #1 (800 kbytes) -far from the madding crowd disk #2 (1 mbyte) -tess of the d'urbervilles this disk is available in either sgml or plain ascii, please specify disk #3 (900 kbytes) -return of the native 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800 kbytes each the eustace diamonds, volume 1, two disks, 800 kbytes each can you forgive her?, two disks, 900 kbyte and 1 mbyte ************************************************** please let us know if you would like to receive by email other sublists (listed below), our complete current list of 240 disks, or information on how to order. non-fiction classics computers & networks history math modern languages philosophy religion science tools for librarians & serious researchers tools for teachers, counsellors & school administrators world & government fiction american literature children's lit english literature beowulf to 1800 1800 to 1918 science fiction/fantasy b&r samizdat express po box 161 west roxbury, ma 02132 samizdat@world.std.com 54)------------------------------------------------------------explore the urban unknown. spelunk under bridges in chicago with international artist. call keith at 313.995-3490. 55)------------------------------------------------------------ _i m a g o l o g i e s_ media philosophy mark c. taylor and esa saarinen available at better bookstores. for more information email: tracey@routledge.com ------------------------end of notices.594----------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------thompson, 'turn toward the past', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-thompson-turn.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.195. part 1/1, total size 14251 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- a turn toward the past by jon thompson department of english north carolina state university jthompson@unity.ncsu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by jon thompson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the title of carolyn forche's newest volume of poetry comes from a famous passage of walter benjamin's essay "theses on the philosophy of history," in which benjamin considers history's power to dishevel human order and any human understanding of the past. in section ix, part of which is excerpted as an epigraph to forche's volume, benjamin considers the possibility that this loss also brings about the loss of a present and a future: this is how one pictures the angel of history. his face is turned toward the past. where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. the angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. but a storm is blowing in from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. [2] tellingly, this passage from benjamin's essay emphasizes the destructive force of history. history here is perceived to be "one single catastrophe," and "paradise," or the dream of utopia, far from being capable of restoring order, only adds to the storm. in subsequent sections of the essay, however, benjamin insists upon the importance of a "hermeneutic of restoration" as a way of redeeming the past. for him the human imperative is to perform a hermeneutic of restoration as both a critical and social practice. for benjamin, history can live *meaningfully* only as a redemptive vision and practice. otherwise it becomes reified as a dead set of facts. the "weak messianiac power" of utopianism is its power not only to make sense of the catastrophe of history, but also to redeem history by recasting its losses as part of a teleological journey which ultimately culminates in the establishment of a just social order. in this way, past, present, and future regain their lost connectedness and become part of one seamless, meaningful continuum. [3] it is useful to recall benjamin's argument here in order to see how forche makes use of aspects of it while distancing herself from, or rejecting, others. as in section ix of benjamin's essay, in _the angel of history_ forche sees history as a catastrophe, particularly twentieth-century history. for her, the decisive moments of our history are its large-scale calamities--world war ii, fascism, the holocaust, hiroshima, the soviet invasion of czechoslovakia, el salvador, chernobyl. all of these events have a ghost-like presence in forche's poetry. past and present are affiliated through the repeated experience of political trauma. for forche, as for fredric jameson, history is what hurts. pain is history's most enduring common denominator. haunted by the weight of the dead, the volume speaks with a finely elegiac voice that gives it a singular intensity. the characteristic feeling in these poems is one of desolation. this feeling is evident even in relation to events not usually regarded as tragic, such as the fall of the berlin wall. in these poems, the awareness goes to what milan kundera calls "the unbearable lightness of being," the sense that freedom is, in its own way, as illusory as nonfreedom. so for forche, the fall of the wall ushers in an age of emptiness, filled only with the wreckage of the real brought about by both totalitarian and "democratic" governments. east and west have finally achieved a state of parity, but it is parity defined by moral nullity: the homeless squatters passed through the holes into empty communist gardens, and the people from the east passed from their side into a world unbearable to them. forche's volume attempts to convey her sense of the catastrophic nature of history *formally* by relying on poetic fragments. these are then linked together in thematically-related groups around the large-scale calamaties of the twentieth century. the continuity that exists between these poems therefore is ironic--the continuity of discontinuity. [4] the attempt of _the angel of history_, as forche acknowledges in the notes at the end, is to write a polyphonic poetry that breaks with her earlier mode of the first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poetry, a poetry that relies on the staging of multiple voices rather than just one. indeed, in many of the poems forche has rendered unknowable at least some of the distinguishing features of her earlier poetry. here the identity of the speaker and the addressee are frequently ambiguous, as are the events described, the time period, even the physical locations of many of the poems. there is an eerie indeterminacy to all of this. place, time, and identity fall away or become indistinct. instead of using the conventions of lyric poetry, forche orchestrates a variety of voices from the past and present which speak out of a largely decontextualized landscapes of pain. as the reader is led through these twentieth-century badlands, what dominates is the disembodied voice of the speaker-poet, and the odd, frequently grotesque, details here and there that come at the reader with surrealist force. thus, the poetry is not really polyphonic, for the voice of the poet remains central, and subordinates the other voices to its own. while these voices never contest or displace the central voice of the speaker, the blending of voices and the precise use of horrific detail evoke the nightmarish depths to twentieth-century history. this can be seen in the first two sections of poem ix, in the section entitled "the recording angel": it isn't necessary to explain the dead girl was thought to be with child until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open and a man's head placed where the child would have been the tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb in every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth and the corpse is never mentioned in the hours before his empty body was found it was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of desiring, yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived hundreds of small clay heads discovered while planting coffee a telescope through which it was possible to watch a fly crawling the neighbor's roof tiles the last-minute journey to the border for no reason, the secret house where sports trophies were kept that weren't sport's trophies someone is trying to kill me, he said. he was always saying this oranges turning to glass on the trees, a field strewn with them in his knapsack a bar of soap, a towel the size of a dinner napkin a map of the world he has not opened that will one day correspond to the world he has seen [5] the tendency of these poems is to generalize the experience of suffering. the various political systems responsible for specific forms of human pain are represented as vague and virtually indistinguishable principles of evil, wreaking death and destruction in the world at large. but there are other poems, arguably the most powerful ones in this collection, where forche blends surrealistic detail with a more sharply etched evocation of readily recognizable historical situations. the impact can be tremendous, as in this excerpt from "the garden shukkei-en" which explores the ethics of using the atom bomb on hiroshima: by way of a vanished bridge we cross this river as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain. she has always been afraid to come here. it is the river she most remembers, the living and the dead both crying for help. a world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation. the %matsu% trees brush her hair as she passes beneath them, as the shining strands of barbed wire. where this lake is, there was a lake, where these black pine grow, there grew black pine. where there is no teahouse i see a wooden teahouse and the corpses of those who slept in it. on the opposite bank of the ota, a weeping willow etches its memory of their faces into the water. where light touches the face, the character for heart is written. she strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw: i was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth do you think for a moment that we were human beings to them? she comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes. not an angel, but a woman where she once had been, who walks through the garden shukkei-en calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands. do americans think of us? [6] in rejecting the interiorities of her earlier, more romantic poetry, forche has opened herself more directly to the world of transindividual historical experience. _the angel of history_ is her most *worldly* poetic achievement to date. in it, she has freed herself from the solipsistic preoccupations of much contemporary american poetry, which by fetishizing subjectivity, removes the articulation of that subjectivity from the world that surrounds it and shapes it. and like the latin american and european poets who have apparently influenced her here, she succeeds in linking the destiny of the individual to that of the nation, and the world at large. in giving witness to the atrocities of the twentieth-century, and america's complicity in many of them, forche succeeds in questioning the legitimacy of power, and in particular, american power in this century. the tension of these poems is always the tension between the horror of atrocity and the controlled lyrical grace used to evoke it, as in "the garden shukkei-en." this tension establishes an ironic dissonance between life and its representation in art. although forche's poetry accentuates the chasm that separates the two, it also insists that art is only created in the world and, indeed, finally, is sculpted by it. [7] in adopting this subject matter and these poetic strategies, forche takes a major risk. for in bringing up the question of the legitimacy of power via a poetry of witnessing, she inevitably raises questions about the legitimacy of her own witnessing. what responsibilities does the poet have to human catastrophe? or alternately, to what extent may the poet distance herself from the horror of history and still remain responsible? and at what point does the witnessing of witnessed--and unwitnessed--human catastrophe pass from poetic and political necessity to the exploitation of the horror for dramatic effect? [8] it is one measure of forche's power and skill as a poet that she allows no easy answers to these questions. while _the angel of history_ repeatedly returns to them--sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not--forche seems deliberately to run the risk of incurring the charge of exploiting twentieth-century history as the price for witnessing it. there is considerable courage in this--the courage of a poet willing to assume the burden of engaging a history that includes, but transcends, the self. in invoking the example of walter benjamin, whose lyric reflections on history exist as a daunting measure for any poet or philosopher, forche runs a related risk. and although forche's work largely manages to fulfill this difficult charge, it still leaves open the question of the *sufficiency* of conceiving poetry as a means of recording history. does poetry so conceived offer us too much, or not enough? the poetic sequences that make up _the angel of history_ respond to this question time and again with a dramatic urgency born of ambivalence. to be sure, forche's predicament is not hers alone. it is the predicament of every engaged postmodern poet. her achievement is to have hammered it into a rare poetry of spareness and elegance and raw power. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------honoria, 'introducing mail art: a karen elliot interview with crackerjack kid and honoria', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-honoria-introducing.txt introducing mail art: a karen elliot interview with crackerjack kid and honoria by honoria honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by honoria, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. hubener: karen elliot is the founder of plagiarism and the 1990-1993 art strike. crackerjack kid has been active in mail art since 1978 and is the editor of _eternal network_, an illustrated mail art anthology scheduled for publication in 1993 by university of calgary press. honoria, a.k.a. mail art kisses for peace, touriste, and fake picabia sister, hails from austin, texas where she is the mailart editor of nd magazine. all three artists are active networkers who use both the international postal system and electronic mail links to distribute information, concepts, and sometimes a surprise wrapped in an enigma. karen elliot (hereafter ke): well, crackerjack kid, they say you compare mail art to crackerjack candy--that you like putting a surprise in everybody's mailbox. who have you surprised lately, and who in turn surprises you most often? crackerjack kid (hereafter cjk): i could say that nothing in mail art surprises me anymore, but it does. d. peepol of akron, ohio once mailed a lunch bag of black, sooty, perfumed dust and while i was opening it, the contents spilled over my lap onto the furniture and floor. a small tag remained in the sack with the startling announcement: "these are the last mortal remains of my dear aunty sarah." shmuel in brattleboro, vermont is only an hour down the road from me and yet s/he regularly sends add-on objects like driftwood, pistachios, walnuts, cryptic coded postcards, and most recently, a 3-d paper monoplane which arrived in an official plastic usps "body bag." among the most unusal items i've mailed are navel stamps and a sourdough bread baguette i carved into a phallus. i stuffed it into an oversized crackerjack box for the john bennett and cathy mehrl mail art marriage show. (h) one of the weirdest pieces of mail i received was a pop-up hand made splatter-painted paper sea skate from kevin in atlanta. somehow our correspondance evolved into sending each other fish. it became pretty challenging after the first dozen or so fish images. he even sent me some cut out ads for efficiency apartments. i sent him a photo of dried out, ugly as sin, cat-fish heads hanging on a texas barbed wire fence. i found a souvenir of florid, a wooden paddle in the shape of a fish, the toy kind with a rubber band and ball attached. i haven't sent it to him yet because our corresponding fishing hole gradually dried up. i still send him a bait fish every now and then and when he's in the mood (maybe now, after art*strike*) he'll get a reel and flop some more fish on the postal scales. another long term correspondent in indiana sends naive brightly colored drawings on envelopes with each letter. one of them was called mother bar-b-ques the cat. these don't have the verbal shock value of cracker's examples but if you saw them you'd agree on their dramatic weirdness levels. but let me tell you about the most relaxing piece of mail i ever received. it was from a correspondent in oregon, a liscenced massage therapist. he suggested flirtatiously that he and i engage in a mail fantasy. i told him i was a prude but would have a fantasy as long as it wasn't a sex fantasy. i told him i could use a licensed massage fantasy. he wrote back asking what scent of oil i wanted and what music. i answered rose with a hint of citrus and that mozart clarinet thing and he sent me a full body massage description in anatomical detail ending with a secret for turning on the parasympathetic nervous system and a $5 off coupon. (cjk) both honoria and i could go on forever about wacky mail because the sacred and profane are so commonplace in the mail art mailstream. there aren't any rules guiding what can and can't be sent. short of mail fraud, mailing bombs, drugs, or dirt from canada, most everything gets posted. there was a mail art show in california with a conceptual theme titled, "test the post office." objects mailed included an addressed water filled balloon. someone sent a fifteen feet long garden hose with over a hundred one cent stamps on the hose surface. a sly mail artist tested the honesty of the postal system by laminating and addressing a ten dollar bill; it arrived safely for the show in los angeles. (ke) you're planning on opening mail art here in this studio loft in soho. so am i right to assume you're having a "mail art opening?" (h) oh, most definitely! the public will open the mail that's accumulated at this address over the past three months. we decided to let the public take the unopened mail art off the walls and replace it with their own offerings. there are tables all over the studio with materials for making mail art. our show, is just one of several dozen other mail art shows and projects which simulateously carry on every month. you can get the newest mail art show listings by writing to ashley parker owens (73358 n. damen, chicago, il 60645). her "global mail" is a newsletter of international mail art events that's published three times yearly in january, may, and september. there are numerous other trade zines, bulletins, and mainstream magazines which regularly post mail art show listings, but i'm most impressed by the sheer volume of projects and shows in her publication. by the way, pmc readers can reach crackerjack kid via email (see list at end of interview). he also edits a mail art zine entitled _netshaker_. annual subscription is $12.00 payable by check or money order at po box 978, hanover, nh 03755. (ke) but where are the people you invited? aren't mail art shows supposed to be public events--places where mail artists can have a "coming out" and expose their secret, intimate, hidden mailstream correspondances! (cjk) well karen, i like how you accented dances because that's just what mail artists do, they dance to an off-beat, underground chant called "gift exchange." someone once said mail art was christmas in the mailbox everyday of the year, but we're here to let the public cut in on the dance. our show in part recalls the first mail art exhibition, the new york correspondance school show" curated in 1970 by marcia tucker at the whitney museum. that show incorporated the work of 106 people, all individuals who had mailed art to ray johnson. the irony was that johnson's work wasn't present because he asked his correspondents to submit their work to him instead. we've invited everybody in new york city to this show who has the last name elliot, or johnson--in honor of you and especially ray johnson who is the father of mail art. of course anybody else is welcome to send mail art too. (ke) holy akademagorrod! didn't ray johnson do that once--i mean, call everybody named ray johnson in the nyc phonebook to a new york correspondance school party? (h) not exactly karen, but ray johnson did have a "michael cooper, michael cooper, michael cooper club." there were two michael coopers who knew each other, and there was a third michael cooper that johnson knew. johnson arranged to have all the coopers meet each other. johnson has arranged a lot of meetings. his mail art goes back to the mid-forties and quite a few people in the art and non-art world have had at least a mailing or two, fragmentary riddles that add to his mythic legend. (ke) what does he mail? (cjk) cartoon characters like his bunny head, correspondence, mailings from previous works, and multilayered collages. ray johnson is a pun shaper who finds words within words and he's a master of wit who often mixes images with texts. but the best way to experience ray johnson is to interact with him by dropping something in his mailbox. his address is 44 west 7 street, locust valley, new york 11560. (h) also, a lot of pictures of ray johnson are sent throughout the network with invitations to intervene upon them. i received ray johnson's high school picture once from italy. i cut it in half and put it in two tv sets and sent it back. how many ray johnson bath tubs are there? that's a very popular project. you usually add yourself to the zeroxed pile of networkers taking a bath with ray johnson. one imagines the rubberstamp pad ink dissolving off the artists making a colorful bathtub ring. (cjk) ray johnson is also notorious for his institutional inventions. in the 1973 "death announcements" section of the new york times, johnson announced the demise of his new york correspondence school, which was shortly thereafter reborn as buddha university. numerous johnson inspired fan clubs grew under the rubric of the nycs. i mentioned the michael cooper club, but there was also the shelley duvall fan club, marcel duchamp fan club, the blue eyes club and it's japanese equivalent, "the brue eyes crub." johnson's network of mail art contacts has expanded in recent years to include phone calls which range from informative to mysterious. ray called me one evening two months ago to say that the first new york correspondence school meeting took place in a manhattan quaker meeting house. i was telling ray how spirited mail artists interested me, mail art that shakes, rattles, quakes, and rolls--artists who i'm fond of calling "netshakers." johnson said his meeting at the quaker house was just a meeting of friends, but he hoped that the people whould go into religious convulsions and do quaker shaking. (ke) i understand johnson's importance to mail art, but is there an association between ray johnson and the selection of this space for your mail art show? (cjk) yes, in an oblique way i chose the nyc location over the emily harvey gallery and jean depuy loft because this is where fluxus master george maciunas lived for awhile. maciunas and ray johnson knew one another. from 1960-61 maciunas ran ag gallery at 925 madison avenue, a performance space not far from where we are now. it's been said that soho started due to maciunas's establishment of the first soho cooperative building at 80 wooster street. johnson performed a "nothing" at maciunas's ag gallery just before it closed in july 1961. maciunas is credited as one of the founding members of fluxus. (ke) what's fluxus? (cjk) dick higgins, alison knowles, george maciunas and a small group of artists started a new "tendency" or intermedia perception--george maciunas named it fluxus. fluxus implies "the state of being in flux, of movement, ephemerality, playfulness, and experimentalism. this fluxattitude resulted in numerous publications, feasts, and fluxfests. one of those performances occured here when maciunas married billie hutching on february 25, 1978. wedding guests and the "wedding train," performed flux cabaret. (ke) so maciunas and johnson were both fluxus artists? (cjk) yes, although if maciunas were alive today, i doubt he or johnson would agree on any close interconnection through their work. neither mail art or fluxus are movements as much as they are tendencies. maciunas, unlike johnson or most of the fluxus artists, had an anarchistic, utopian vision whereas johnson's mail was actually correspondence art, an intimate, personal exchange between an individual or small group of people. it was the american fluxus artist ken friedman who took mail art out of the personal realm and into the international paradigm in which fluxus artists were engaged. friedman's 1973 omaha flow systems established the mail art ethic for shows like this one we're having. friedman brought his fluxus background to mail art in the pursuit of open, democratic, interactive exhibitions which encouraged viewers to participate. interaction with audiences has always been a fluxus characteristic. (ke) let's return to mail art shows for a minute. what shows have you entered, honoria? (h) my favorite mailart activity is entering mail art shows by submitting small pieces of art at the request of another networker in response to their chosen theme. i ended up painting hundreds of postcard sized figures and skeletons in response to the shadow project(s) commemorating the people vaporized by the wwii atomic explosion on hiroshima. i put some of them on a black poncho and wore them to a day of the dead celebration in austin and danced to cojunto music. you never know where mailart will go or send you. i used to work in an isolated and local competitive market (fine) art environment. now i feel the flow of art & ideas in and out of my studio room is part of a huge global art studio where we get together to gossip, philosophize, show each other new unfinished work, and communicate fresh ideas. the mailartist to mailartist communication uses all kinds of shortcuts that artist-to-general public, or even informed art historically astute public will not *get*. our jargon, in-jokes and creative playfulness are as slippery as freshly licked glue on the back of a 50 cent stamp about to be placed on a recycled envelope bound for japan. for instance, everyone i know outside the network thinks plagiarism is a naughty deceit. within the network plagiarism is an art movement. in fact, there have been festivals of plagiarism. recycling other artists images is a basic concept in mail art. (cjk) appropriation, sorting, and shuffling written texts is also a very correspondance kind of improvisational jazz you'll find in the mail art network. indeed, name sharing and detourning strategies began surfacing in mail art back in the early 1970s. dadaism, nouveau realisme, futurism, cobra, fluxus, and situationalism have all played varied influential roles in the mail art mailstream. (h) now karen, just between us girls, i want to know if you've been catching this drift? i've noticed a renewed interest in the actions and representations of women in the network. jennifer huebert (pob 395, rifton, ny 12471) just collected mail from women networkers who attended congresses in 1992. i'm looking forward to reading other people's views. in a huge network full of pseudonyms and correspondents who don't speak each others languages i think it's odd, but fun, to examine the yin/yang aspect of it all. one networker is named manwoman. (cjk) yeh, i know manwoman! s/he's a canadian pop artist, a musician, poet, and a shaman who has an on-going project to restore the sacred, mystical significance of the ancient swastika--before it was denigrated by national socialism. s/he believes in dreams and can analyze their symbolic significance. when i told manwoman that cathyjack and i were trying to have a child, s/he sent me a fertility chant which, low and behold, worked within a week after i received it in the mail. that makes manwoman more than just a charming individual--s/he's a very kind, gentle soul, a sage. there's a certain charismatic aura and mystery in meeting such people through the mail--pseudonyms like manwoman and michael voodoo help to create an unpredictable, unusual postal pantheon. (h) i have deduced from my correspondence that some mail artists perceive honoriartist as a male. maybe it's due to my fertile imagination (although to my knowlegdge my mail has never been responsible for a pregnancy) plus my connections and art collaborations with transvestites. then there's all this collaborating going on between many artists. however, in the process of the historification of mailart someone will get interested in who is actually who and what sex they are. i am quite content 2 be both or more. (ke) i can certainly understand reasons for creating fictive monikers, but judging by both of your comments it seems that fact is often stranger than fiction in mail art netland. now, on to a final question or two. readers of pmc have seen sporadic networker congress and telenetlink congress listings in their electronic forum throughout 1992. you (c.j. kid) and reed altemus have called attention to yourselves as facilitators of these congress events. what's this congress biz all about? (cjk) 1992 was the year of the world-wide decentralized networker congress, otherwise known as metanet, or nc92. the networker congresses were first proposed by swiss conceptual artist h.r. fricker in "mail art: a process of detachment," a text presented in march 1990 for my book eternal network: a mail art anthology (to be published in dec. 1993 by university of calgary press). in early 1991 fricker met with fellow swiss artist peter w. kaufmann and together they drafted an invitational flyer entitled, decentralized world-wide networker congress 1992. the congress call went out to anybody, "wherever two or more artists/networkers meet in the course of 1992, there a congress will take place." the networker congresses, like the mail art congresses of 1986, grew into a huge forum of 180 congresses in over twenty countries. (ke) sounds like an enormous project. how was it organized? (cjk) h.r. fricker and peter w. kaufmann sought active, creative input from networker artists on six continents. american artists lloyd dunn, steve perkins, john held jr., mark corroto, and i joined fricker and kaufmann early (summer 1991) in the development of the nc92 concept and served as active "netlink facilitators." final drafts of the networker congress invitations included netlink contacts from africa, south america, north america, asia, europe and australia. (ke) is it fair to assume that the networker artist has grown out of the mail art phenomenon? (cjk) i think so. the networker congresses were based on the acknowledgment that a new form of artist, the networker, was emerging from international network cultures of the alternative press, mail art community, telematic artists, flyposter artists, cyberpunks, cassette bands, rubberstampers and stamp artists. the year-long collective work by networkers of nc92 represents the first major effort among artists to cross-over and introduce diverse underground networks to each other. until this moment countless marginal networks, often operating in parallel directions, were unaware of one another. mail artists that network have a sense of what intermedia and interactivity involve--it's a consciousness which branches outward. one could say that mail art's evolution was based upon intermedia--the mailstream merging of zines, artist stamps, rubberstamping, correspondence, sound sculpting with audio cassettes, visual poetry, and artists' books. communication concepts have been the medium and message that mail artists use to bind together these divergent forms of expression. today, forms like stamp art have become genres unto their own, with proscribed criteria often veering towards normative art standards more than the spirit of a process. i read somewhere in lund art press that the most successful intermedia forms eventually cease to be intermedia. these creative forms evolve into the qualitative characteristics of techniques and styles and will finally become established media with names, histories and contexts of their own. indeed, the rarity of mail may come to pass with the continued escalation of postal rates. this may encourage more qualitative standards within the mail art network. (ke) well cracker--can i call you cracker? (crackerjack nods his head)--what's wrong with qualitative standards? (cjk) hey karen, didn't you know that when you're really good they call you crackerjack? really though, for me, the thrill of the process is being inventive, taking yourself somewhere you haven't been before. it can certainly go stale if you don't know when to let go, when to hold back from too much mail. burnout in mail art is rampant. i'm not a statistician, but to get a focus on what my mail art activities involve each year, i set about tallying all my in-out going mail for 1992. it revealed some startling figures to me. not including hundreds of email message, i've sent out over 1,150 mail art works and have received 1,250 pieces in return. these figures state that i usually answer most of the mail that i receive. it also shows that with all of my international mailings, i spend, on the average, about $1.20 postage on each item of mail art i send. that makes for an expensive passion! i might want to cut back. i might want to reconsider the investment of my time and energy, or i might decide to conserve the time, energy, and money for those i feel return the same intensity, joy, and playfulness of dialogue. the bottom line is that there are personal criteria for entering and leaving mail art. you definitely receive what you are willing to give and you quickly find out what your threshold for tolerance is. (ke) let's return to the networker congress concept. what kinds of congresses were there in 1992? (h) i was invited to a place i'd never heard of called villorba, italy by a long time correspondent, ruggero maggi, who sent me some wonderful kisses when i did my kiss show. i went to congress with the italians and wow, am i glad i did. long philosophical talks on the lawn of the beautiful villa fanna, videos of many networkers, performances, poetry, hours of exchanging, making, sending artworks, food, wine, joy, laughter, howling at the moon, walking barefoot in mudpuddles.... well, you can just imagine it took the wind right out of my mid-life crisis. this congress was dedicated to the great mail artist a. g. cavellini and they just made his archive into a museum. we just don't have time to get into cavellini and the philosophy of "don't make art make pr" and self-historification etc.. (cjk) among the scores of other congress themes were john held jr.'s fax congress, jennifer huber's woman's congress, miekel and & liz was's dreamtime village corroboree, my own netshaker harmonic divergence, rea nikonova and serge segay's vacuum congress, bill gaglione's rubberstamp congress, mike dyar's joseph beuys seance, guy bleus's antwerp zoo congress, and o.jason & calum selkirk's seizing the media congress. there were also numerous, on-going networker projects including peter kustermann and angela pahler's global tour as "netmailmen performers." throughout 1992 kustermann and pahler travelled, congressed, lectured, recorded a diary, and hand-delivered mail person-to-person. italian mail artist vittore baroni helped create and record a networker congress anthem, let's network together, and american mail artist mark corroto produced _face of the congress_ networker congress zine. (ke) so how do you think all these nc92 congresses worked? did they succeed or fail? (cjk) i think they were remarkable! most of the organizers of nc92 congresses have been active international mail artists. they have emerged from the networker year of activities with a deeper awareness of intermedia involvement in global network communities, and a realization that "i am a mail artist, sometimes." while many mail artists visited friends in the flesh, others, unable to travel, "meta-networker spirit to spirit" in the nc92 telenetlink congress, a homebased telecommunication project conducted with networkers using personal computers and modems. serbian and croat mail artists established networker peace congresses, one such congress taking place in a village where a battle raged around them. (ke) our on-line readers would probably like to know what your telenetlink congress was about. can you briefly state your objective? (cjk) my objectives were to introduce and eventually netlink the international telematic community with the mail art mailstream. i began forming an email list of telecommunication artists which i compiled from responses to my numerous nc92 telenetlink postings on internet, bbs', electronic journals, and usenet newsgroups. i began telenetlink in june 1991 by participating in artur matuck's global telecommunication project reflux network project. there i served as an active netlink between the telematic community on one hand, and the mail art network's decentralized world-wide networker congress, 1992. where these two projects intersected there were informal on-line congresses in which the role of the networker was discussed. conceptual on-line projects such as the spirit netlink performance drew in crowds of participants at the reflux network project link in the sao paulo bienale. (ke) haven't mail artists and telematic artists interacted through collaborative projects using mail and e-mail? (cjk) it comes as no surprise that pioneering telematic artists like fred truck, judy malloy, and carl loeffler were once quite active in mail art's early years, but efforts to combine both mail art and telematic forms were never fully approached. my telenetlink project was the first home-based effort to interconnect the telematic and mail art worlds. by netlinking both parallel network worlds, i found many common tendencies; internationalism, interest in intermedia concepts, respect for cultural diversity, humor, ephemerality, emphasis upon process art rather artifact, humor, global spirituality unencumbered by religious dogma, utopian idealism, experimentalism, and interest in resolution of the art/life dichotomy. prior to telenetlink there were mail artists such as mark block (u.s.), ruud janssen (the netherlands), and charles francois (belgium), whose efforts were aimed at introducing mail art through their own private bulletin board services, but netlinking mail art and the telematic community through mainframes on internet hadn't been explored. fewer than four dozen mail artists are actively using computers to explore communicative art concepts, but that number is rapidly changing now that computer technology is more affordable. still, some mail artists view their form as more intimate, tactile, expressive, and communicative than telecommunication art. other mail artists regard computers with mistrust, suspicion, even fear. likewise, i have heard telecommunication artists view mail art as a primitive, slow, outmoded, form of expression. i prefer to think of telematic art and mail art as useful tools for creative communication. it's not a matter of one form being superior to another. i think the time is right for mail artists and telematic artists to get acquainted--to netshake--to telenetlink worlds. here's a list of telecommunication artists who use mail art and email as intermedia forms. i think this is the best way honoria, karen elliot, and i can help pmc readers learn about mail art--to experience the direct contact. (ke) well, i think that's a good way to come full circle in this discussion. to know mail art and telematic art is to experience it. thanks honoria and crackerjack for opening up some possibilities to interconnect network communities. telenetlink contacts reed altemus: ip25196%portland.bitnet george brett: ecsvax!ghb@uncecs.edu burning press: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu. anna couey: couey@well.sf.ca.us crackerjack kid: cathryn.l.welch@dartmouth.edu keith demendonca: keithdm@syma.sussex.ac.uk fagagaga: ae705@yfn.ysu.edu pete fisher: pete.fischer@stjhmc.fidonet.org joachim frank: joachim@tethys.ph.albany.edu bob gale: bgale@well.sf.ca.us matt hogan: m91hogan.acs.syr.edu honoria: honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu hubener: 72630.2465@compuserve.com judy malloy: jmalloy@garnet.berkeley.edu artur matuck: am4g+@andrew.cmu.edu paul rutkovsky: prutkov@mailer.cc.fsu.edu> scot art: scot.art@f909.n712.z3.fidonet.org uncle don: dpmilliken@amherst.edu hicks, 'forward into the past', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-hicks-forward.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.594. part 1/1, total size 27986 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- forward into the past by jim hicks english department university of massachusetts, boston hicks@umbsky.cc.umb.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, v.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by jim hicks, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: latour, bruno. _we have never been modern_. trans. catherine porter. cambridge: harvard up, 1993. illich, ivan. _in the vineyard of the text. a commentary to hugh's %didascalicon%_. chicago: u. of chicago, 1993. [1] in his 1985 recension of the debate on postmodernism, gianni vattimo suggests that the arguments of each then major figure (lyotard, habermas, rorty) are determined (and undermined) by an illegimate appeal to "the state of things"--some version or other of the postmodern present (vattimo 105). whether or not metanarratives have been invalidated, whether the project of modernism is down but not yet out, and whether or not philosophy has lost its role as the unifier and arbiter of knowledge, the question is in some sense the same: where are we now and where do we go from here? although vattimo's own attempt to respond to such questions (which suggests "piety," "weakness," and "mourning" as key elements to a truly pomo stance) seems either intentionally perverse or downright funny, his reminder that "condition," "project," and "consensus" are each present-tense nouns remains a good place to begin, even in a now much-widened debate. two recent books which should be of particular interest to readers of _postmodern culture_ deliver additional stories about the state of things at present. clearly not your common or garden variety contributions to this field, both works suggest that the present and future of western civilization ought to be found in recalling our premodern past. [2] as an intervention into the contemporary critical fray, the book by bruno latour is the more direct. his title, _we have never been modern_, would seem to suggest his basic rhetorical strategy: "stop all the bickering, whining and posturing . . . modernism, postmodernism, modernity, it never happened, it's all a joke, *it never happened*." such an unfriendly tone, such an obvious attempt to grab the spotlight (and to foreclose the careers of so many, in so many fields), coming from someone other than a sociologist and historian of technoscience, from someone less beloved by those postmodern critics who have already made his acquaintance, from someone who wasn't speaking, after all, in the name of science, would no doubt cause only a ripple, passing through the critical pool as an instant of uncomfortable silence, a few heavy, disturbing seconds before the subject is changed. but when science talks, people listen. when science talks, we wait for an explanation. [3] it is, of course, precisely such expectations in regard to science that bruno latour has long opposed. in a marvelous series of books, including _laboratory life_ (with steven woolgar, 1979), _science in action_ (1987) and _the pasteurization of france_ (1988), latour argues that neither science nor society can be studied in isolation, that both are determined by means of the complex web of translations which join them together. thus, science, when it does speak, is heard only by subscribers to its network: a favorite analogy of latour's is to the termite, whose existence is impossible outside of its tunnels. _we have never been modern_ is explicitly a work which elaborates such translations (between "the emerging field of science studies" and "the literate public" [ix]), thus marking at most a new deviation in his work. latour justifies this turn, in part, by telling a story about the present. [4] that story begins with latour himself, engaging in the act which he characterizes as "modern man's form of prayer" (2), i.e. reading our daily paper. the stories that he finds there are familiar: the ozone hole, professor gallo's laboratory, frozen embryos, and others. (if latour had picked up an american paper, he might have pointed to stories about big business, condoms, guns and bible studies in our public schools, animal rights, pornography and sexual harassment, etc.) diverse as they are, such stories have in common the manner in which they knot together nature and culture: a single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections . . . . the horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors--none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story. (1) not that there's anything wrong with such stories; on the contrary, according to latour the imbroglio's the thing. as he tells it, such "hybrid articles" are the best evidence of where we are--of the current crisis. [5] implicated in this crisis is, among other things, the most essential characteristic of modernity: that critical stance which divides and conquers hybrids, purifying them of their monstrous quality through disciplinary ghettoization. given the chance, "the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will slice the delicate network . . . into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex . . . . by all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power" (3). hybrids themselves are nothing new; latour credits premodern cultures with the rigorous, even obsessive, thinking through of hybrids (a focus, he suggests, which explains why their production in such cultures is limited successfully). on the other hand, the will to purify--which of course cannot operate or develop without a constant fresh supply of hybrids--is for latour the mark of the moderns; their most fundamental purification is the dichotomy between nature and culture. this separation, a refusal to acknowledge networks of mediation, both creates new hybrid objects and makes them available for purification. (latour's key example, borrowed from steven shapin and simon schaffer, is boyle's air pump; the first "nonhuman witness" in modern science's "theater of proof," the air pump is for latour "the hero of the story" which created a new experimental community--one independent of both god and the republic--at the time of the emglish civil wars.) the nature/culture dichotomy also allows a modern to believe that the production of new hybrids, because they belong to the natural order, is without consequence for that of society--a dream from which to be modern is never to wake up. [6] once again, it would seem that the tone of latour's title, as well as that of his book, is clear. "reason has been sleeping, and breeding monsters, for three or four centuries now. wake up! *wake up*!" the author himself assures us otherwise: there is no false consciousness involved, since the moderns are quite explicit about the two tasks [of purification and hybridization] . . . . the only thing i add is the relation between those different sets of practices. (40) to do otherwise, latour is well aware, would be to participate in the logic of accusation, denunciation and revolution--discourses that are familiar by now, and extremely productive, but also quintessentially modern. instead, he proposes that we investigate the modern period with an anthropologist's eye, to write about ourselves with the ethnographic habit of "dealing calmly with the seamless fabric of . . . 'nature-culture'" (7). latour notes that "in works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated" (7). again it is the present state of affairs that enables this writerly position, this anthropology of the modern; modernism has become a "victim of its own success" (49), saturated by the hybrids that it has caused to proliferate. [7] such an anthropology, latour argues, would elaborate rather than anatomize relations between nonhumans and humans, between people, words and things. to be collected, sorted and followed rather than ghettoized and covered, the world would be seen as populated with "quasi-objects" and "quasi-subjects," the former as well as the latter viewed as actants in the networks of nature-culture. on the one hand, since nature and culture are not now, and never have been, separate, we have "never been modern" (at least not in the way the moderns would have it). but on the other hand, we must still learn to *stop being modern*, i.e. to stop trying to be, since "we have never really begun to enter the modern era" (47). in the place of such efforts is a new form of democracy, or perhaps its only real form, a "nonmodern constitution" in which "we have committed ourselves to providing representation for quasi-objects" (139). nonmodern, latour makes very clear, has nothing to do with the antimoderns: always on the defensive, they consistently believed what the moderns said about themselves and proceeded to affix the opposite sign to each declaration. . . . the values they defended were never anything but the residue left by their enemies. (134) indeed, when, in concluding, latour sketches out such a constitution, premoderns, moderns, and postmoderns all contribute--only the antimoderns get left out. this section, the most praiseworthy (but also the most hurried) in this short, dense book, will likely be elaborated in response to the polemics latour's essay will assuredly incite. [8] in my attempt to present somewhat carefully both the premises and the conclusions of _we have never been modern_, what has been left out is most of its contents. awaiting its readers, in addition, are an explanation of modern productivity, a sorting through of continental philosophy from hobbes to habermas and lyotard, a defense of "relative relativism" vis-a-vis nature-cultures, and a salutation of co-travelers as diverse as michel serres, charles peguy, and donna haraway. i should also add a warning-label for the disciplinarily over-identified: latour reserves some of his best barbs--full of language that sounds nothing if not denunciatory--for postmodern theorists; he considers postmodernism "a symptom, not a fresh solution" (46), one which mistakenly takes the moderns at their word, and is characterized at best by "intellectual immobility" (61). but equally important, and nearly as numerous, are the occasions on which latour attributes positive effects to postmodern practice (a practice to which, i imagine, some have even accused him of contributing). [9] in any case, the real strength of latour's analysis in this book, and a substantially new elaboration of his thought (also see, however, _irreductions_), is his emphasis on the determining, as opposed to determined, nature of the object during the modern period--particularly his demonstration of the hybrid character of that object. latour's analysis also displays the vices of its virtues; on occasion he retains the metalanguage of modern science as a ground for his investigations (e.g., "[modernity] is much more than an illusion and much less than an essence. it is a force . . ." [40]). a thinker such as latour, who in _science in action_ gives a powerful display of the network which connects the military-industrial complex to life in the laboratory, must at times feel constrained by that language which links science, war and the movement of capital. outside of science studies--i.e. through the door to women's studies and transnational studies that donna haraway, ashis nandy, and others have wedged open, there is of course a myriad of other documentation of the effects of modernist hybridization. it may be that both the angels in the house and the barbarians at the gate (i.e., humans seen as nonhumans) have other words to add to the nonmodern constitution, representations that they will provide themselves, given a place at the table. having read latour, and finding ourselves somewhat less reverent before the glow of modern technoscience, we may finally be ready to tune in. [10] it would also be possible, although parochial, to fault latour for beginning his analysis of the moderns with boyle and hobbes, thus granting them too quickly that forefather status which is already an old story within the annals of modernism. having never been modern, the west would be better revealed by focusing on a period where it didn't believe that it was. the second book under review here, an extended essay by the medieval historian, contemporary social critic, and all-around visionary ivan illich, does just that, with a twist. illich offers a meditation on the history of the book, conceived as an investigation into the symbolic gathering that shapes both reading practices and textual technologies. the twist is that he does so as an intervention into the current push toward computer literacy. the specific object of his analysis is hugh of st. victor's _%didascalicon%_ (c. 1128), a work which illich calls "the first book written on the art of reading" (5). directed at what illich sees as a watershed moment for western thought, the shift from a culture of the book to that of the information-based "bookish text," his commentary is also rich in insight into that historical moment. illich offers this meditation "in the hope that the transition from monastic to scholastic reading may . . . throw some light on a very different transition now" (4). [11] an earlier book by illich, _shadow work_, also contains an essay on hugh--entitled "research by people" (76-95). there illich argues that hugh provides a historical precedent for an alternative to "research *for* people" (i.e. "r & d . . . conducted by large institutions--governments, industry, universities, clinics, the military, foundations" [77]). unlike bacon (a key precedessor of "research for people"), hugh envisions science as a remedy for our fallen nature, not as a means to subjugate nature; hugh also includes the mechanical arts within his understanding of science, thus in some measure making him a precursor to the technoscience studies of latour. illich's commentary on the _%didascalicon%_, by focusing on the text as "object par excellence" (116), also parallels that of latour; both in fact demonstrate that "by centering our analysis on the object we turn this object into a mirror reflecting significant transformations in the mental shape of western societies" (_vineyard_, 5). [12] one of the most fascinating aspects of hugh's writings as discussed by illich is the medieval theologian's concept of the role of memory training in pedagogy. distinct from its later popularization in the renaissance, illich suggests that "hugh seems to have been the first one to seriously revive classical memory training, and was then the last major figure to propose memory as the sole or principal means of retrieving information" (45). not merely an eccentric or unusually skilled disciplinarian, hugh was also unique in his application of such training: the _%de arca noe%_, his memory book for experts, taught the construction of a complex, multicolored, almost monstrous, three-dimensional ark--"a space-time matrix built within the mind of the student and modeled on noah's ark" (37). the layout of this "moral and mystical ark," according to one scholar, would require 220 square feet of paper for a still readable blueprint (37-8). unlike the classical memory palaces, this mnemonic aid was not simply architectural--its function was to embody %historia%--and to provide a "mental home" for the student, thus become an intellectual pilgrim. according to illich, "the ark stands for a social entity, a process that begins with creation and continues to the end of time, what hugh calls 'the church'" (46-7). in effect, it is a virtual cathedral; for "the construction of cathedrals," no less than that of hugh's ark, "can be understood as a public creation of a symbolic universe of %memoria%: the solemnly celebrated reminiscence of %historia%" (38, n.30). latour would no doubt note the seamless fabric of nature-culture in such an achievement (as well as the rigorous, almost obsessive, thinking through of hybrids). [13] for illich, hugh's %arca% also marks a liminal moment in the history of the text. with his construction of a "mental home" for the scholar, hugh has begun to sever the text from the page, creating, in effect, a treasure chest which is also a floating signifier, a coffin from which the modern concepts of person and text will arise. in his _%didascalicon%_, hugh also makes evident the tremendous distance between his experience of the book and that form of %studium% which immediately followed him, created within the sanctuaries of the modern university. monastic reading was a "strenuous exercise" proscribed for the "frail or infirm" (57), a dictated and mumbled rehearsal of those %voces paginarum% which commanded each of the interior senses as well: "when hugh reads, he harvests; he picks the berries from the lines" (57); "for hugh, . . . the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood, his eyes must pick out the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables" (58); not merely an activity, for hugh reading is "a way of life" insofar as recitation both accompanies daily toils and organizes the day according to its various incarnations (59); the book was "swallowed and digested" by hugh "through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned" (60). this sensurround experience of the book passes away along with hugh, rooted out in the development of a bookish text. as for illich's intention in retelling this story, it is difficult not to see an uneven parallel with a comment he makes about hugh: "at the last moment of the old regime of the book, he proposes the %studium legendi% as a new ideal, a civic duty, and universal learning as a gratuitous, celebratory, leisurely intercourse with the book" (84). as readers of illich are aware, he has frequently written on the devastating effects of literacy on those outside the schools; the "threat of computer literacy" (5) is clearly more than a new and improved version of the same (see also _mirror_ 159-81 and 182-201). on the other hand, it seems to me that if today, "outside the educational system . . .there might be something like *houses of reading* . . . where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship" (3), subscribers to _postmodern culture_, if anyone, must know where to find them. [14] the story of the development of the bookish text also contains illich's principal thesis: that, in the hundred or so years after hugh's death, the book as object underwent a fundamental transformation and that "the effect of this reformatting of the page and book on the ethology and semantics of reading and, hence, on thought, was more fundamental than that of print" (114). "the principal effect of the latter invention," according to illich, "was to mechanize the procedure by which the twelfthor thirteenth-century page is still reproduced today" (114). among these innovations, a "set of about two dozen new graphic conventions" (119), illich describes the invention of alphabetical indexing, the recording of vernacular tongues alongside of latin script, the shift towards silent reading and self-penned texts, various changes in layout (which made distinct the various contribution to book-making by author, editor, and critic), and the development of the portable book. illich makes a strong case against either the technodetermination or the sociodetermination of this "scribal revolution" (116), arguing instead that "an eminently suitable and complex device already available within a society will be turned into a tool only at that historic moment when this task acquires symbolic significance" (72). (that he is here speaking of the circumstances surrounding the emergence, in latour's terms, of a new hybrid or nature-culture, is made clear by an earlier gloss on the "symbol": for hugh, "a symbol is a collecting of visible forms for the demonstration of invisible things" [32]; citing gerhart ladner, illich emphasizes an opposition between symbols and mere psychoanalytic or cultural "myths." on the contrary, for hugh symbols are "facts and events, phenomena in and beyond nature and history" [ladner, as cited by illich 32]). [15] the import of this thesis is startling, and worth emphasizing. applied to the present, it would suggest, for example, that the invention of comic books and baedekers might well have marked a more fundamental change than, say, that of the macintosh or cable tv. like latour, illich's purpose is to deflate easy, and disciplinarily safe, explanations by both constructivists and realists in the writing of history. for those that are familiar with illich's other writings, it is this emphasis which makes clear the connection between his work as medieval historian and that as radical social critic. to provoke a perspectival shift, one which challenges the most naturalized assumptions of a given field, is a longstanding, self-described role for his interventions: ivan illich, intellectual samurai and heretic for hire (see, for example, his comments in _mirror_ 10). [16] at the risk of letting this essay devolve from a book review into that most hated of primary school assignments, the book report, i have presented the above material from _in the vineyard of the text_ rather directly, without what is perhaps the usual degree of critical intervention. my intention in doing so has been twofold. first, to advance, without unnecessary injury, the seduction of illich's endeavor; whereas latour attempts to dismantle the modern mindset, illich lures his reader towards another. my second motive, less laudable, was more influential; not born even into the era of the bookish text, not to mention that of the culture of the book, i also wished to conceal my ignorance. [17] i will turn, by way of conclusion, to an important point which my quasi-neutral presentation of illich's arguments has enabled me to sidestep. there exists an obvious opposition between the two books which i have thus far presented together: latour wants to put an end to talk of our radical isolation, to appeals based on our unique difference as moderns; he doesn't believe in historical revolutions any more than in those of epistemology. illich, on the other hand, appears to offer just such an appeal; epistemological breaks are part and parcel of his sense of history. in fact, by reading these books together, i suggest my own sense of the present: i/we live in a moment where both positions are relevant (and revealing). if, as both latour and illich argue, the present is indeed a moment of crisis, latour's sense of possible futures is nearly as important as illich's search for precedents in our past. in the end, though, i side with illich, with that wondrous vocation which has called him to intervene, not just in studies of technology and society, but in the history of education, gender, art history and architecture, policy making, philosophy, and more, always with the intention of shaping the future by "lampoon[ing] the shibboleths of the year" (_mirror_ 10). in any case, if latour's most recent book, and today's newspapers, are any indication, the future--both ours and latour's--may ultimately be found in our premodern past. ____________________________________________________________ works cited illich, ivan. _in the mirror of the past_. new york: marion boyars, 1992. ---. _shadow work_. boston: marion boyars, 1986. ---. _in the vineyard of the text. a commentary to hugh's %didascalicon%_. chicago: u. of chicago, 1993. latour, bruno. _the pasterization of france and irreductions_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1988. ---. _science in action_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1987. ---. _we have never been modern_. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1987. latour, bruno and steven woolgar. _laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1986. shapin, steven and simon schaffer. _leviathan and the air pump: hobbes, boyle and the experimental life_. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1985. vattimo, gianni. "postmodernita e fine della storia." _moderno postmoderno_. ed. giovanni mari. milano: feltrinelli, 1987. --------------------------------end-----------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------potter, 'black modernisms / black postmodernisms', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-potter-black.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.994. part 1/1, total size 52613 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- black modernisms / black postmodernisms by russell a. potter english department colby college rapotter@colby.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by russell a. potter, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in the development of the cluster of intellectual and political movements that move variously under the banners of postmodernism, cultural studies, black studies, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, and american studies. in one sense, they have been almost *too* successful in gaining academic currency--some academics, it seems, have embraced them before they even quite knew what they were, happily tacking these new rubrics over the departmental doorframe in hopes that they would work the magic of keeping up with the theoretical joneses. and yet, at the same moment, these new fields have been attacked with unusual virulence by such veterans of the academy-bashing circuit as roger kimball and shelby steele. black studies, both in the u.k. and the u.s., has in particular felt this crisis, continuing to serve as a favorite target for the self-declared traditionalists even while it comes under pressure from newer "studies" competing for the same academic niches. earlier debates, such as those over the questions of canon and curriculum, are now overshadowed by far deeper and more ominous rumblings, as internal divisions have erupted in an academic left that was perhaps never as unified as its conservative critics liked to believe. and, just to turn up the flame a little higher, college and university budgets have begun to shrink, forcing many of the new generation of academic mavericks and activists into arguments over who will get how big a slice of the dwindling pie--or who will get no slice at all. the distant laughter of the conservative critics of the academy adds a sense of lurking despair to this morose game of musical chairs. [2] meanwhile, back in the "cultures" that these fields ostensibly study, the wheel of new subcultural formations and their commodified %doppelgangers% has been spinning with increasing speed. while this acceleration has been marked in rapid changes in video, film, multimedia, and hypertext, one of the most visible sites of change has been music; yesterday's rhythms of revolution are today's pricey national concert tours, and tomorrow's instant retrocompilation cd's. under such circumstances, academics who cast their hats into the ring of "popular culture" or "cultural studies" had best be prepared for a fast-forward free-for-all; if they emerge with something more than a handful of someone else's hair, they probably ought to get some sort of medal. the battered academic volvo suddenly finds itself caught between sound-system-loaded jeeps blaring ice cube on the one side and air-conditioned lexuses with the radio tuned to rush limbaugh on the other. it's culture wars with a vengeance, and yet it's also a time when there is an opportunity, however fleeting, for voices from within the academy to perform potent acts of cultural translation, acts which, even if they can't resolve the cacophony, can at least articulate what's at stake, and perhaps finally break through the strained dichotomies between "intellectual" and "popular" culture, and perhaps even take account of the interpenetration of such categories. that, after all, was supposed to be one of the benefits of the post-structuralist critiques that pried open this door in the first place; it seems strange that, a generation after barthes, people should still be discovering the mythologics of culture as though this were something never heard of before. [3] a large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very discourses post-structuralism has deployed to describe itself. as bell hooks put it back in the first issue of _postmodern culture_: the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. if radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.^1^ hooks's rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of postmodern critiques to ignore or tokenize black expressive artforms, but also the long-standing--and oftentimes justified--suspicion on the part of black writers and philosophers over what (if anything) postmodernism could possibly offer for the kinds of critical histories they were engaged with constructing. as recently as 1989, it was possible for cornel west to allow, in his essay "black culture and postmodernism," that "the current 'postmodernism' debate is first and foremost a product of significant first world reflections upon the decentering of europe."^2^ west, as one of the leading black philosophers of our time, saw both the parochial and ludic elements of postmodernism as signs of its insufficient engagement with black culture, even as he gestured toward "a potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism."^3^ yet in the light of critiques and analyses by scholars such as henry louis gates jr., eric lott, and paul gilroy, it has become increasingly evident that what had earlier been articulated primarily as the subcultural resistance of black artforms has in fact had a long and intimate relation with the founding dialectics of "western" modernism, and consequently of "postmodernism" as well. now, at last, it seems possible to begin to acknowledge the manifold ways in which black studies, and the histories and arts that it has engaged, have been and continue to be absolutely central to the questions raised by contemporary theory, and consequently to the numerous appropriations and figurations of blackness that have (in)formed modernist *and* postmodernist thought (as well as of the black artists and writers who have claimed and reclaimed a place in the genealogy of %avant gardes%). [4] still, both gilroy and rose, though for somewhat different reasons, tend to eschew the term "postmodern": gilroy prefers "anti-modern" or "counterculture of modernity"; rose uses the more materialist-inflected "post-industrial." gilroy has a healthy suspicion of the simplistic relativism of some avatars of postmodernism, and prefers to see these black cultural formations as oppositional modernities, rather than *post*modernities. interested primarily in reclaiming the territory of the modern as a movement instigated by the historical experiences and philosophical implications of black slavery and diaspora, he looks dimly on the kind of glib postmodernism of writers such as jameson, whose academic "we" never feels the need to account for its own racial, sexual, and gender presuppositions. rose, for her part, never directly addresses the implications of postmodern theory, though she makes ready use of many of its strands. her commitment to a thoroughly materialist account of the roots of black expressivities makes her suspicious of some of these strands, but she confines her critique to one or two writers who exemplify its worst qualities. both gilroy and rose are right, i think, to be wary, but at the same time their work raises questions which are absolutely fundamental to postmodernist theory and practice, and indeed draw forcefully on some of the same decentering discourses as some of the more political postmoderist texts. [5] i will discuss rose's book first since, despite the fact that it does not explicitly engage with the questions of (post)modernity, it works within a certain characteristic bind of one genre of academic postmodernism. for, both with "high" cultural formations (such as the writings of derrida or the post-haraway theorists of cyberspace) and with so-called "popular" formations (hip-hop, grunge, rock videos), the most common tone taken up by public intellectuals is that of the "bluffer's guide." what should we know about hypertext? what's the latest word on street culture? to audiences for whom such questions elicit a potent mixture of curiosity and anxiety, there is an endless hunger for articles or books that will give them a ready grip on the latest cultural movement. academic writers, especially those who like to work as activist public intellectuals, implicitly address this broader audience, and yet in their desire to fulfill its wishes for a synoptic overview of a critical issue, they often serve reductive ends. this is partly the doing of reviewers and readers, who are looking for ready-made rhetorical handles, but it is also part of academic writers' desire to enjoy a spotlight broader than the private accolades of students or colleagues. [6] the crucial question is that posed by michel de certeau in _heterologies_: "from what position do the historians of popular culture speak? and what object do they constitute as a result of that position?"^4^ for it is rarely in the interests of "insurrectionary knowledges" (such as hip-hop) that the historians or chroniclers of "culture," as constituted by the knowledges of semiotics, anthropology, or literary theory, have spoken. those on the right, informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of "the decline and fall" from a norman rockwell past into a piss christ present, explicitly oppose all insurrectionary arts; intellectuals on the left, unfortunately, have seemed more interested in making academic capital of the popular than in articulating to a broader audience just what the *value* of such insurrections might be. when it comes to books whose explicit subject matter, rap music, is among the chief targets of the moral panicists of the right, as well as a phenomenon frequently held up by those on the left as a sign that artistic political resistance is alive and well, the exemplary questions of the public intellectuals of the left and right go toe-to-toe, each trying to claim hip-hop as a centerpiece of their social agenda. it's a fight to the finish, as one critic's nihilistic gat-toting hoodlum is another's organic intellectual. as rappers say, "it's on." [7] and tricia rose, for one, is ready for the battle. _black noise_ is the kind of book you would like to send in a plain brown wrapper to everyone who dismisses rap music as a long-lived fad, mindless posturing, or minstrelsy for the '90s. she provides ample evidence for skeptics of the development of rap music, its place within hip-hop culture and black american culture in general, and its efflourescence in the face of all kinds of direct and indirect attacks. her opening chapter, "voices from the margins," effectively summarizes rap music's cultural imbrication at the level both of its production (she uses rap video as an example here) and of its consumption, with the associated questions of performance, audience, and technology. this segues nicely into the second chapter, "all aboard the night train: flow, layering, and rupture in postindustrial new york," where she provides a detailed social history of the south bronx as the primary site of the emergence of hip-hop culture. the history is crucial, and ought to be required reading for critics such as david samuels or c. delores tucker, clarion-callers of the "rap is a white plot" conspiracy theory. and, while writers such as david toop or stephen hagar have given more detailed accounts of the musical developments in the years leading up to hip-hop's ascendancy, rose offers an account that clearly demonstrates the links of all the musical and artistic dimensions of hip-hop culture to the material situation of young black and latino americans in new york city in the late 1970's and early '80's. [8] the latter part of this chapter extends rose's arguments, attempting to link certain productive hip-hop tropes, such as "flow" and "breaking," to the cultural histories she details. here, however, she seems to founder a bit, as she comes up against the age-old musicologist's conundrum of how to link form and content in a structure that is, to a large extent, not representational (or, on the *verbal* level, never *simply* representational). and, as attractive as it is to categorize rap music's formal features, unless such accounts explicitly address the material histories at stake, they quickly dissipate into hazy generalities (just what is "flow," anyway?). rose seems to sense this, as she quickly moves into a discussion of hip-hop culture's holy trinity of writing, breaking, and rapping, for each of which she offers succinct and suggestive accounting. as in other parts of the book, one has the sense that rose is more at home supplying cultural contexts than she is in producing close analyses of particular rap lyrics or hip-hop creations. [9] rose's next chapter, "soul sonic forces," takes a second drive by the same territory, and is considerably more successful. rose performs a difficult balancing act between those who would link hip-hop to pre-modern african-american or african traditions, and others who would rather see it as a wholly new innovation dependent on technology. for the most part, she is able to delineate the ways in which rap music partakes of both orality and technology, without being limited by the paradigms of either. unfortunately, as i alluded to earlier, she tends to see those who read rap as a "postmodern" artform as necessarily moving away from the materialist grounding of black studies, and does not allow for the possibility of a materialist postmodernism. nonetheless, she acutely cuts down to size those who disembody hip-hop, taking it as a postmodern machine without a driver, and thus forgetting the actual black communities who have produced and consume it. [10] at the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop's aesthetic with the questions of originality, production, and commodification that have long been points of contention among critics of african-american music. at least since adorno's attempt to trash jazz as mindless musical repetition--up there with religion as an opiate of the masses--critics have argued over the social implications of music and other artforms "in the age of mechanical reproduction." rose neatly sidesteps adorno, quite accurately observing that he assumes that "mass production sets the terms for repetition and that any other cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems of mass production, are subsumed by the larger logic of industrialization" (72). on the contrary, rose asserts, repetition, precisely because it antedates and post-dates industrial capitalism, is an ideal mode of resistance, both because it can re-appropriate and hijack technological machinery, and because it in fact makes a very potent agent for denaturalizing dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes art. [11] this offers rose another smooth segue into the question of sampling, which she quite accurately identifies as central to hip-hop's technological practices and aesthetic values. i wish that she would have taken up the critical ways in which, as she richly suggests, sampling challenges notions about originality and intellectual property, but she chooses instead to focus on the specific techniques which some of rap's best-known producers--such as eric "vietnam" sadler--use to "bring the noise." her interview with and analysis of sadler is fascinating, but at the end the theoretical issues raised *by* such practices are only touched on in passing. rose does, however, offer a salient critique of some of the past scholarship on sampling, again moving to complicate the all-too-easy dichotomies of technology *versus* community, or fragmented *versus* whole, that tend to underpin many analyses. [12] the central chapter, "prophets of rage: rap music and the politics of black cultural expression," finally enables rose to free herself from the work--necessary, but to some extent deadening--of sketching in the sociological and musical contexts of hip-hop; having made her points about the material situation of the music, she is free to assess its larger cultural engagements. and, at the beginning, she is forceful in articulating the intense, inevitably contradictory power of rap music in society. she offers a model--of "public" and "private" transcripts--which suggests the doubleness, the coded nature of rap lyrics. and as far as this analysis goes, she's right on the money. yet it's odd, given the substantial work done on the black tradition of signifying, that rose seems to eschew this model, choosing instead a rather generalized model that does not resonate as strongly as it might with other critical work in the larger field of black studies. nonetheless, the point is substantially the same, which is that rap lyrics play with what its listeners know (or don't), drawing them in even as it shape-shifts through tropological sequences that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to 'hook' its listeners like an angler snagging a trout. [13] rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop lyrics--paris's "the devil made me do it," krs-one's "who protects us from you?," l.l. cool j.'s "illegal search," and public enemy's "night of the living baseheads." her readings, while uneven in places, certainly demonstrate the potency of these lyrics, as well as their rhetorical fluidity. yet just at this point, where there is the greatest opportunity to analyze how rap lyrics work on the tropological level, rose instead reads all four lyrics in a basically narrative sense, comparing them with anecdotes from her own life, hypothetical reflections on the class dimensions of l.l. cool j.'s status as a wealthy entertainer, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the video for pe's "baseheads." there are salient social points in every reading, but only scattered observations on exactly how these raps managed to bum rush the mass-media stage, or on the promised "politics" of black expression. there is also, for the most part, no close reading of the tropological moves that structure these raps: it's rather like reading an account of a boxing match that talks only about strategy without offering any blow-by-blow details. [14] again, de certeau's question comes to mind: in presenting analyses of larger cultural movements, what is at stake? however much academic writers would like to eschew the role of talking heads, their commentary spliced in between footage of current or past events, is there another, more fully engaged role open to them? rose is clearly struggling with these questions, as anyone who writes such a book must, and expectations perhaps run too high. hip-hop is too vast to lend itself to ready analysis in any one book, as rose herself notes frankly in her preface, and however detailed or full her readings, they can't stand in for hip-hop culture as a whole. still, the modality of object and analysis, of the critic as commentator, suffuses much of this book, and gives it at times a frustrating distance from what it tries to bring most closely into view. rose is at times, it seems, uncertain just where to set the dial between the rhetorical distance of conventional criticism and the ready familiarity and engagement of a fan of the artform. having to explain every reference at every point can be deadening, and yet dropping allusions left and right risks leaving many readers scratching their heads. [15] rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is at her best when she can use specific material histories or social trends. her analysis of the politics of the decline in large-arena rap venues, which makes up the balance of her "prophets of rage" chapter, is compelling, and brings together numerous sources to make evident the repressive but often behind-the-scenes politics of large concert venues. yet this analysis, as acute as it is, does not quite fulfill the chapter's promise of an accounting of the politics of black musical expression, since it does not address studio recordings, magazine and newspaper attacks on rap, show-trials such as those of biz markie or 2 live crew, or the problem with rap's lack of radio exposure, all of which are at least as significant as the politics of live concerts--perhaps more, given that rap music today is primarily produced and consumed via *recordings*, despite its reliance on dialogic structures which remain fundamentally linked to acts of reception, call-and-response, and interlocution. [16] rose's final chapter, "bad sistas," is in fact her strongest, bringing together as it does her ability to read social structures--such as sexism and homophobia--not simply *alongside* but *within* the discourses of rap lyrics and media hype. she rightly rejects the sort of identity politics that thinks it solely the job of women rappers to answer male rappers' misogyny, or for that matter *assumes* that a woman rapper is necessarily a feminist rapper. she denounces the implicit heterosexism of many champions of hip-hop (in particular houston a. baker, jr. and nelson george). yet she does more than simply call such bias out on the carpet, but goes further, situating critical discourses over rap in relationship to the uneasy alliances between bourgeois, predominantly white feminism and black women whose struggles, while allied in a general sense with those of this feminism, have had to be contested within very different social and economic structures. she moves astutely from this analysis to a series of examples drawn from the raps and videos of artists such as salt-n-pepa, roxanne shante, and mc lyte, demonstrating the ongoing and complex verbal play via which women rappers dramatize their own multiple and at times contradictory positions in relation to their lovers, their rivals, and their homegirls. finally, she offers a refreshingly candid account of the ways in which black women's sexuality manages to be both openly expressive *and* resistant to objectification, a kind of feminism that, though reluctant to name itself as such, clearly has a potent and complex contribution to make to feminist theory and practice. ultimately, rose implies, the vernacular ethos of black women struggling against sexism and racism is the root and ground which feminism--particularly academic feminist theory--tends to overlook, even as it continually invokes its name. there are valuable grounds here for analysis of the larger relations between academic discourses and vernacular artforms and social structures: though there is no space in the book to develop them, i hope that rose (and others) will continue to do so. [17] _black noise_, despite its shortcomings--and some are inevitable in any book that tries to tackle a vibrantly living and changing artform--is without question the best book on rap music and hip-hop culture yet to appear. even though much of its time is spent detailing the backgrounds of the music, such backgrounding is an inescapable necessity when writing about a cultural formation so often attacked, distorted, and hyped within both the academic and the popular press, and about which there is so much misinformation and sheer ignorance. rose, admirably, does not try to over-simplify her topic, and at its best her book offers a snapshot of hip-hop with all its urgent and yet at times contradictory messages and tactics intact. with the appearance of rose's book, it is to be hoped that hip-hop critics inside and outside the academy will be able to move on toward a more detailed engagement with the numerous political, social, and aesthetic issues it raises, without having at every turn to stop and explain the basic issues and histories at stake. [18] one aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate hip-hop within the larger histories of black expressive arts, and still more broadly, within the critical debates over culture, identity, and (post)modernity that have helped define the terms for the social and intellectual struggles of the '90's. rose, concerned primarily with defending hip-hop as a cultural movement, only gestures toward these broader issues, and while identifying hip-hop as a "postindustrial art," she does not address exactly what that might mean from the point of the historical development of black arts. here the work of paul gilroy offers an apposite yet wholly supportive counterpoint; working with what seems at the outset an impossibly broad brush, gilroy sets out to demarcate the histories of what he calls "the black atlantic," in the process sketching out the fundamentals of a new, trans-national, yet non-reductive model of the interrelations between black diasporic cultures. and, while it is hard to compete with the dust-jacket accolades showered upon gilroy's book by critics such as anthony appiah or hazel carby, it is impossible to overstate the importance of his work to black studies, or to cultural studies as a whole. a radical scholar who nonetheless has a passion for carefully balanced observations, gilroy's book is forty theses on the door of cultural studies, and if the folks inside neglect to read them, they do so at their peril. few writers--maybe none--can combine as gilroy does a series of potent, historically articulated textual epiphanies with the broad yet meticulous brush of synthesis. precisely because the book is so thoroughly grounded in the particularities of black histories and artforms, there is no way to review it without attending to each of gilroy's specific investigations in turn--and yet to do this is to be reminded (as i suspect gilroy would want us to be) of the complexity as well as the continuity of black diasporic artforms. [19] central to gilroy's thesis is the claim that modernism(s) cannot be conceived of as european, that in fact the genealogy of modernism is from the outset bound up with black histories, cultural forms, and the historical experience of slavery. gilroy bases this claim not on a sweeping monumental survey, but on an incisive tropological tour through the tutor-texts of modernism, among which he includes not only hegel, nietzsche, and benjamin, but douglass, dubois, and c.l.r. james. but before making these specific cases, gilroy wants first to sketch in the problematics of contemporary cultural studies, within which blackness and modernity orbit in circles both of contest and exchange. gilroy's chronotope here is that of a ship, undertaking multiple transatlantic crossings, carrying slaves through the immeasurable horror of the middle passage, and in later times carrying the speech, song, and spirit of what gilroy sees as a fundamentally transnational black atlantic culture. as a sort of shot over the bow, gilroy fires the first of many broadsides at those whom he calls black "particularists" and "exceptionalists," and, rebel without a pause, directs an equal volley at the ostensibly allied fleet of the anti-essentialist position. black culture, he argues, need not answer the call to (mis)represent itself as wholly unified and ethnically absolute, nor need it disperse to the four winds of assimilation, appropriation, commodification, and reification. it can, in fact, very well claim for itself both *roots* and *routes* (gilroy's favorite trope, and one that resonates throughout this book) [20] yet in order to make such claims, gilroy must first do what very few in his position have done, and that is to critique the very field of cultural studies within which he stands. for, while in the u.s. black studies came up through the academy within a fairly consistent humanistic paradigm, in the u.k., black studies has been shaped by a long alliance with left intellectuals in the field of cultural studies. now that cultural studies itself has become such a popular u.k. export, gilroy has something to say about the nature of its cargo. he notes the conspicuous absence in the histories narrated by british marxists of the anti-colonial struggles of previous centuries, which plays into the pernicious and yet rarely explicit assumption that to be "british" was (and is) to be "white." as gilroy tells it, it's striking how the ostensibly revolutionary sentiments of british cultural studies at times partake as intensely of a kind of nostalgic nationalism as the far more reactionary ideologies of the most stodgy conservatives. this same nationalism underpins the logic of "american studies" in the u.s., and black studies as well; african-american culture is held forth as the paradigm and %fons sacrae% of blackness, against which what gilroy calls "u.k. blak" or the polymorphous black cultures of the caribbean are all too often marginalized. like marxists before them, critics within cultural studies seem blind to their own reliance on precisely the sort of nationalistic frames which erode their claims to larger mass formations. in the case of black diasporic cultures, this tunnel vision is particularly costly, as gilroy demonstrates forcefully in the chapters that follow. [21] much of the balance of the first chapter--"the black atlantic as a counterculture of modernity"--are devoted to an analysis of the writings of martin delany which, while valuable, seems peripheral to gilroy's project. gilroy's analysis of delany as a foundational force in the linkage of black masculinity and patriarchy to black national identity is forceful, but represents only one aspect of the ethos gilroy seeks to define. his threefold model of black consciousness is only sketched here, but it is highly pertinent: black modernisms have been edged on either side by a kind of longing for the "anti-modern" past and an anticipatory yearning for a postmodern yet-to-come" (37). delany works well as an exemplary thinker of the "past" element in this triad, but to lay out the other end of the spectrum gilroy turns to black music. for as he pointedly observes, music both forces an accounting with the extra-textual world and takes account of the performative vernacular dimensions of black culture, for which heavily literary accounts of black culture have so often failed to account, and yet which are so central. music, furthermore, serves as a force of continuum, reaching back to draw from african melodic and rhythmic *roots*, even as it is shaped by its own transatlantic *routes* of transmission, as when american r&b traveled to jamaica and was reborn as ska, which in turn gave rise to rock steady, reggae, and dancehall (each of which in turn has traveled both to and from the uk and us). whatever the textual and literary arguments gilroy makes--and they are compelling in and of themselves--music is his trump card, as it offers the clearest framework within which his thesis of the black atlantic as the "counterculture of modernity" can be materially demonstrated. [22] gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden (and at first, rather obscure) movement back to a discussion of hegel, and the central role of the master-slave dialectic in his philosophy and those of his peers and followers. it's a different tack (to maintain the nautical tropology), and yet a strategic one. all too often, the deep-seated racialism of hegel and those who wrote in his wake is glossed over, or (perhaps worse) admitted as though it were an incidental blot on an otherwise unblemished cloth. on the contrary, as gilroy insists, it is fundamental to the philosophical turns which led directly to modernism. slavery, he notes, was for a great period of time considered as a problem *internal* to the european "west": it was only after the moral campaign against it that it was jettisoned as if it were some sort of awful accident. the relation of slave and master changes and fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of slave and master--on this, both slavery's defenders and the first generation of its critics could agree: if it became at times an abstraction, its material presence was never far away. gilroy embodies this potent material corollary in stunning readings both of the narrative and life of frederick douglass and the case of margaret garner (which toni morrison used as the basis for _beloved_); the experience of escape--failed or successful--from the psychological bonds of slavery emerges as a kind of limit-experience which tests the very foundations of subjectivity. and more: douglass, for one, emerges as a signal modernist figure, not simply a self-made man, but a self *made* via a particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist smithies of the soul. [23] gilroy's next chapter finally addresses the central question of black music, and in many ways it's the most free-ranging and compelling reading in the whole book. it's refreshing to read a critic who knows the music thoroughly, whether he's writing about the fisk jubilee singers, miles davis, or eric b. and rakim. there is none of the usual critical hand-wringing over 2 live crew %et. al.%--gilroy knows enough to know that's not where it's at--nor is there the kind of list-of-names vertigo of a critic who's trying to link everything with everything. gilroy treats musicians as artists on their own terms, and finds linkages in their thought and performance that are the mortar of his larger claims. the fisk jubilee singers form one trope, with their extensive european tours making a signal moment for the european dimensions of black arts, even as they return later in the book to represent blackness to a young and still very northeasterly w.e.b. dubois. their modern counterparts have far more compact means of transportation, as the chronotope of the turntable replaces that of the ship, and the triangulation between uk blak, us soul and r&b, and caribbean musics is traced with attention to the ways in which it refutes any simplistic notion of africa (or the u.s., or anyplace) as *the* point of origin, even as it structures and propagates truly synthetic and recognizable black styles. by examining instances of transatlantic fusion such as those of soul ii soul, ronnie laws, and apache indian, gilroy articulates what he sees as a cultural formation that is both "constructed" and yet has (a) "soul," an essence if you will, a musical spectrum both whole and heteroglot, connected and fragmented. [24] it's a shame that gilroy doesn't develop this particular thesis further, and it is a potent corrective to the kind of reductive musical nationalism practiced by many black critics, even as it squarely claims for black music a "counterculture of modernity" which must be met on its own terms. still, while music is vital to his argument--forming, as he notes, a crucial mode beyond textuality and simple representation--gilroy has far broader ambitions, specifically the (re)clamation of black atlantic formations in literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. to this project, his re-examinations of dubois and wright are of the utmost importance, and not simply because of their travels and exiles (dubois to germany as a young man, and to africa as "the old man," and wright's move to france), but because they enable gilroy to rewrite the genealogy of blackness itself. [25] gilroy's analysis of dubois takes a twofold focus: a detailed re-examination of _the souls of black folk_, and a reading of some of dubois's long-neglected polemical novels (which, though fascinating, there is not room to discuss here). in the background of both, gilroy posits a surprising--even scandalous--connection: the thought that dubois's nationalism owed something to the german nationalism he encountered while studying in germany. yet at the same time as the power of national identity impressed itself on dubois, he could not fully follow the kind of black particularism espoused by precursors such as martin delany or alexander crummel, for the simple reason that he was particularly aware of the ways in which national and racial identities were formed and informed by a complex and often conflicting set of historical urges. gilroy sorts these out into three stages, which he associates with the three sections of _the souls of black folk_: the struggle against the institution of slavery, the struggle to win bourgeois rights and liberties, and the pursuit of spaces of black community and autonomy. he notes that the battle against racism is necessarily different in each of these phases, and also that the ways in which these stages overlapped each other led to the coexistence and conflict of what were, on a tactical level, very different struggles. the falling out between dubois and washington, for instance, is newly intelligible in this light, as education had a radically different role to play in the first two of these phases. the third stage--with all its attendant anxieties of assimilation and particularism--is, gilroy argues, the moment for the emergence of oppositional black modernisms: the third stage characteristically involves a deliberate and self-conscious move beyond language in ways that are informed by the social memory of the earlier experiences of enforced separation from the world of written communication. a countercultural sense of the inability of mere words to convey certain truths inaugurates a special indictment of modernity's enforced separation of art and life as well as a distinct aesthetic (or anti aesthetic) standpoint. music is the best way of examining this final aspect (123-124). the special significance of black spiritual songs for dubois, as well as the ongoing refiguration of black musics as the representative cultural productions of the black atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and suggests a still more potent claim. perhaps it is not, in fact, at the level of intellectual vanguards that the final phase of black struggle needs to take place, but precisely at the vernacular level. gilroy, however, leaves this possibility hanging as he offers a strong reading of _the souls of black folk_: while there is no space to reiterate his argument in the detail it deserves in the scope of this brief review, suffice it to say that it reveals strong and all-too-often neglected undercurrents, which militate toward a skeptical rejection of the broadconcept of "progress" or "progressivism" with which dubois is conventionally associated. the dubois who emerges in these readings has a richer and more complicated engagement with all three phases of black struggle, and his model of "double consciousness" marks not a flaw but a prophetic pointer toward a different kind of vision, a "second sight" which looks far beyond the fuzzy humanism of most modernist thinkers and toward the postmodern possibility of seeing split subjectivity as a critical asset. [26] gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling look at wright's career, focusing on his years in france. wright was faulted by many for his move to european turf, and to this day the books he wrote in france have been disparaged and neglected for failing to represent the kind of realist, experiential models of race that were central to the positive reception accorded his earlier novels. again, gilroy discovers an unexpected wright, a person engaged with european modernity not via the margin, but from the very questions that formed its center. wright's interest in nietzschean affirmation via negation (as one example of which wright offered the "dozens," the verbal ancestor of today's hip-hop disses), his engagement with existentialism, and his deliberate refusal of the simplistic representational terms which critics and publishers held forth as the condition for their renewed interest in his work, all become newly meaningful in gilroy's reading. for wright, to claim modernism as his own was a serious task, and grew as strongly and deeply from the same experiences as earlier had led him to write _native son_. in a compelling passage, gilroy quotes wright's comments on the subject, which might well be addressed to all of the detractors of his later work. wright claimed, in fact, that double consciousness--which he called "split subjectivity"--gave him a particular and potent slant on the crisis of modernity: i've tried to lead you back to the angle of my vision slowly . . . my point of view is a western one, but a western one that conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the west. am i ahead of or behind the west? my personal judgment is that i'm *ahead*. and i do not say this boastfully; such a judgment is implied by the very nature of those western values i hold dear. (qtd. 172) it's a shame that wright's angle of vision has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves, and gilroy offers a number of compelling readings of wright's later work which will, hopefully, renew interest in his later writings. [27] the final chapter, "not a story to pass on: living memory and the slave sublime," offers a fitting culmination of the book's syntheses, though gilroy is quite clear that his book only sketches the barest outline of black atlantic roots 'n' routes. the title epigraph, drawn from morrison's _beloved_, underlines the double valence of tradition in black cultures; it is the bearer both of "jewels brought from bondage" and of the unspeakable imprint of slavery. the bitter intertwining of pain and pleasure, so graphically evoked by morrison in the scene where paul d traces out the "chokecherry tree" of scar tissue of sethe's back, is brought into critical focus as gilroy traces the debates between fragmented and whole racial selves, between constructivist and essentialist polarities, and again brings forth a new possibility. gilroy shuns the "spurious security" of melaninism, and is critical of some of the more historically oversimplified versions of afrocentricity. and yet, nonetheless, he historically situates the appeal of these discourses, and in fact demonstrates compellingly the role of the yearning for such stability in the production of the heteroglot yet synaptically linked expressions of black diasporic experiences. the "catastrophic rupture" of the middle passage finds its compensation in acts of creation from materials at hand, from vernacular syntheses of speech and music, and in the deliberate engagement of these discourses with the european modernities whose ideology and aesthetics make for unexpected points of resonance. music, in particular, has the capacity both to "tell the history" (as jamaican dj prince buster puts it) and to *bear* the unbearable, extra-linguistic dimensions of what gilroy comes to call the "slave sublime." music, furthermore, is a profoundly *temporal* art, and in its rhythmic unfolding builds a time for community. the trope of time, as instanced in the nation of islam's question "what time is it?," and its multiple diasporic answers (sun ra: "it's after the end of the world"; the last poets: "time is running out"; flavor-flav's gargantuan timepieces), both embody and transcend historical time by, as gilroy puts it, "asserting the irreducible priority of the present" (202). because of this ability, music is capable of bearing the historical pain that is the legacy of black diasporic cultures, and gilroy offers a suggestive reading of percy mayfield ("hit the road, jack"; "please send me someone to love") as a synecdoche of this transvaluative engagement with melancholia and pain. [28] this gives gilroy the segue for his final and bold movement, an accounting of the historical borrowings and transformations that have linked black cultures in all corners of the atlantic to jewish beliefs, traditions, and intellectual syntheses. the most obvious vernacular link is of course the landscape of black spirituals, whose talk of bondage in "pharaoh's land" and dreams of "crossin' the river of jordan" draw from the old testament histories which slaves encountered in the caribbean and the americas. their previous systems of belief fragmented and eroded by the violence of the middle passage and the experience of slavery, black slaves' appropriation and use of the jewish experiences of slavery constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most profound "transvaluations of all value" ever accomplished. this early legacy formed the ground for later returns to jewish religious and political thought, in the process of which aspects of jewish nationalism, and the idea of black culture as "diasporic," grew readily. black atlantic religious practices such as those loosely coalescing about rastifarian religion are a testament to the vernacular potency of these connections; all the mythology of a return to ethiopia, the figure of sellasie as messiah, the myth of the black star liners which would carry desmond dekker's "israelites" back to the promised land, can be traced to this potent conjunction. gilroy gives a succinct and suggestive account of one person, edward wilmot blyden, an influential black caribbean writer and historian, and one of the founding fathers of pan-africanism. yet despite some of the patriarchal and parochial qualities of his work, blyden's engagement with jewish thought was, as gilroy shows, full and complex: blyden learned hebrew and studied jewish history with david cardoze, a rabbi on the island of st. thomas. it was blyden who made the historical connections between jewish and black experiences of slavery and dispersal, which were revived with the start of the negritude movement in france in the 1930's. [29] all this, of course, brings gilroy face to face with the claims of both black and jewish particularists, each of whom asserts that their collective experience is untranslatable, and that (for some) even to compare the two does violence to the sanctity and integrity of memory. gilroy does not offer a detailed critique of these claims, but makes a passionate and very compelling argument for renewed and continuing dialogue, a dialogue which might begin to theorize more fully the "redemptive power produced through suffering" as it works in a variety of very different historical circumstances. finally, gilroy, reflecting once more on morrison's _beloved_, looks outward and onward to the ethical and artistic power of history recovered and told via a process of "imaginative appropriation." it is at this level, indeed, that the questions gilroy raises become especially pertinent, since he clearly values some appropriations more than others. having voluntarily deprived himself of both the cudgel of anti-essentialism and the mystic unifying power of black particularism, gilroy cannot offer any ultimate criterion by which we might know which appropriations we ought to value. in any case, as he readily acknowledges, the complex hybridities and recurrent transits of the black atlantic render any such judgments temporary at best; what counts is an engagement with the questions they raise, and a refusal to trade the richness of uncertainty and heterogeneity for what gilroy sees as the poverty of dogmatic certainties. it's a difficult struggle, but one to which gilroy's own work makes an immeasurable contribution. cultural studies, it is to be hoped, will never be the same in the wake of the passage of gilroy's revolutionary work. notes: ^1^ bell hooks, "postmodern blackness," _postmodern culture_ 1.1 ^2^ cornel west, "black culture and postmodernism," in barbara kruger and phil mariani, eds., _remaking history_ (seattle: bay press, 1989): 87-98. ^3^ west, 96. ^4^ michel de certeau, _heterologies: discourse on the other_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986): 129 -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------benson, 'new political journalism', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-benson-new.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.595. part 1/1, total size 12360 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- new political journalism by thomas w. benson pennsylvania state university t3b@psuvm.psu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by thomas w. benson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: cramer, richard ben. _what it takes: the way to the white house_. new york: random house, 1992. [1] richard ben cramer's stated aim is to write an account of the 1988 presidential campaign that answers the questions of what kind of life would lead a man (in my lifetime all have been men) to think he ought to be president. . . . what in their backgrounds could give them that huge ambition, that kind of motor, that will and discipline, that faith in themselves? . . . what happened to those lives, to their wives, to their families, to the lives they shared? what happened to their ideas of themselves? what did we do to them, on the way to the white house? (vii-viii) [2] cramer follows the fortunes of six of the 1988 candidates--republicans george bush and bob dole, and democrats joe biden, michael dukakis, dick gephardt, and gary hart. the book's 1047 pages are divided into 130 chapters (and an epilogue) wherein cramer constructs an elaborate collage modeled on tom wolfe's _the right stuff_. cramer tells the story of each man's childhood, family, upbringing, career, and participation in the campaign of 1988 (apart from the epilogue, the story ends with the 1988 conventions, omitting most of the story of the fall campaign itself). in every case, these men are portrayed as the product of habits formed in childhood and youth, and in every case their virtues are shown to be--in the tragic genre--inseparably linked to the flaws that bring five of them to bitter defeat and leave the eventual winner a caretaker president ("the fact was, he wanted to be president. he didn't want to be president to do this or that. he'd do . . . what was sound" [797]). cramer, in layer after layer of storytelling, with a narrative voice granted the privileged knowledge and intimacy of fiction and the texture of elmore leonard dialogue, invites us to like and admire each of these men, invites us to see the world from each of six extremely different points of view, and then he throws them into the arena, along with their handlers, their wives, the press, and each other--and shows us that what we thought happened in the 1988 campaign was, in multiple, deeply ironic ways, a misrepresentation. [3] cramer argues that the press got it wrong. he most deeply admires gary hart and joe biden, who were driven from the race by scandals arising from charges of adultery (hart) and plagiarism (biden). in cramer's view, both were blackmailed by an arrogant press. cramer's bob dole is a fascinating reconstruction of a man stereotypically dismissed by the press as the attack dog of the republican party. dick gephardt is portrayed as a tough and deeply spiritual man whose gift for compromise is important to the function of congress. george bush is depicted as a decent and self-disciplined man who is utterly sincere in his commitment to personal friendship and honor as the basis for politics and government. cramer is most hostile, in my reading of the book, to michael dukakis, and his portrait of dukakis, though adding considerable detail and nuance, is in many ways close to the view offered by the press and the republicans in the 1988 campaign--an honest but out-of-it good-government governor who had no message about why he should be president and who wouldn't listen, hence bringing his troubles on himself. [4] the strengths and weaknesses of this epic book are embedded in two paradoxical rhetorical choices that are central to the work--they have to do with cramer's decision to focus on the "personal" side of the personal/political axis, and with the narrative technique of the book. [5] cramer begins from the widely shared complaint that the media coverage of campaigns, in interaction with the techniques of modern presidential campaigning, has thrown the focus of campaigning from issues to personality. but, argues cramer, the focus on personality has led the press and media into a corruption of their traditional and useful skepticism, resulting in a kind of pack journalism that takes as its role the day-to-day diminishment of candidates and, at opportune moments, the destruction of candidates in the feeding frenzy of rumored scandal. at the same time, the techniques of modern campaigning put the candidate into a "bubble" of press attention and secret-service isolation wherein a candidate, closeted with self-interested campaign gurus and hired guns, loses track of his real sources of personal strength. this is a story that needs to be told, and cramer tells it well, but at the cost of furthering the shift of public attention to private life as the source of what it takes to be president. hence, cramer condemns the shallowness of policy making in the context of the permanent campaign, where position papers are churned out as demonstrations of seriousness (and as bids for the allegiance of the policy wonks from whom advice is solicited), rather than as acts of genuine leadership. but cramer himself is so little interested in those policies that his complaint risks becoming self-contradictory, as when michael dukakis's pursuit of good government in massachusetts or joe biden's self-education in the bork hearings are framed not as policy issues but as demonstrations of the paradoxes of character. cramer in effect claims to long for a restoration of the public sphere, but he does so in a book that endlessly asserts the seamless dependence of the public on the private. part of his complaint about the public sphere is that, under present conditions, it distorts the reality of the private persons who are the candidates. this may well be true, but it fails to consider that a successful public sphere may depend on separation of public and private, and the cultivation of specifically public virtues. [6] cramer's preference for the private as the ground for the public has deep roots in tacit understandings of contemporary americans. such understandings, especially as they relate to politics, have been cultivated by highand lowbrow media at least since theodore white's _the making of the presidency_ (1961) and the leacock-pennebaker documentary _primary_, a behind-the-scenes account of the 1960 primary contest between hubert humphrey and john f. kennedy. cramer's book is consistent with the genre started by white and leacock-pennebaker, proposing to reveal the truth about politics by looking behind the public facade at the private actors. the doctrine of such a claim is strikingly confident that it knows how to discover reality, but the experience of reading cramer's text often induces a postmodern suspicion that the public role of the politicians in this book embodies not so much a distinction, however distorted, between public and private realms as a detachment of the political from any actual referent or subject. cramer argues for the stability and centrality of the private subject, but he sings a song of de-centered panic to seem to be someone, a song of simulation and simulacra. [7] a related paradox bedevils the narrative technique of _what it takes_. cramer's implicit argument is that, for all their faults, each of these men is a person of enormous strength, integrity, intelligence, and character, a man of "size," but that the karacter kops have diminished them in the versions we see in the newspapers and on television. further, even what we have been taught to see as transgressions are not, when the whole story is known, either very serious (if they happened at all) or particularly symptomatic of the true character of these men. to make this case, which he does with great success, in my view, cramer turns to the techniques of contemporary fiction and new journalism, and the rhetorical strategies of defense lawyers elaborated from the time of the ancient greeks, wherein admitted weaknesses are shown to be inseparable from more important strengths and, in any case, incompatible with the crime alleged (which, if the truth be known, was either an act different from the one charged, or was not committed by the accused, or did not happen at all). [8] cramer is excellent at reconstructing scenes and creating a nonlinear collage of episodes (the episodes are out of chronological order, but are clearly patterned to build the case for the defense), and he has a good ear for dialogue. his narrative voice employs a technique of reported inner monologue or snatches of speech reported without quotation marks or specific attribution, accompanied by frequent and complex shifts in narrative point of view. it is impossible to divine from the text where the racy diction is drawn from the speech of the participants and where it is simply the invention of a hip narrator in his _rolling stone_ mode. the narrative consciousness of the tale is presented as reliable and as privileged with access to the speech and thoughts reported or attributed. the effect is absorbing and convincing. cramer achieves coherence through thickly textured narration accompanied by repeated scorn at the pretensions of the press pack. but though it is all believable, it is nowhere documented. it is not even possible, given this technique, to determine which scenes cramer himself observed and which were reported to him by informants, or who those informants were. no doubt full documentation would have diminished the cumulative narrative effect and the text's seeming transparency, and no doubt it would have scared off some of the informants. hence, a reviewer cannot reasonably claim that cramer should have done it differently, but merely offer a note of caution (to which must be added the lament that instead of depositing his documentation, say, with a presidential library for eventual scrutiny by scholars, cramer ceremonially destroyed all of his files, notebooks, and interview tapes upon publication of the book). cramer repeatedly excoriates the press for following the wrong story, misreporting facts, and, most of all, presenting diminished and distorted stereotypes of political candidates (all of it premised on the inside dopester slogan that "everyone knows"--the security blanket of the press pack). in trying to redirect our understanding of these candidates, cramer offers a more deeply informed biographical account and a more richly textured psychological understanding, which are the achievements of his narrative method. but his implicit appeal to his reader to regard the press with increased skepticism surely invites an equal skepticism toward his own claims when he simply asks us to accept his unverifiable account. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------boros, 'cheered by battleship', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-boros-cheered.txt archive pmc-list, file boros.994. part 1/1, total size 10982 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- cheered by battleship by james boros jboros@ravenpress.com postmodern culture v.5 n.1(september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by james boros, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. in memory of kurdt cobain (1) apocalypse then it ended in an open shaftway, following lbj's example. by designating cauldron 19 as their sauce, mirages (against no odds) vented mighty grams of plenty, and cast visceral tracking smoke in henceforth unforeseen celebrations of danger. without too much grinding, her inappropriate spasm posed as a lofty cur: negation would only disprove gaiety in instances not involving firecrackers declared insipid by consensual bigotry. having agonized under lack of stress, the rambunctious turnip sought deadening solids as a means of obtaining "gaslight marginality" amidst dining vocations of porn. besides, where in charlie's hell is there room for another afghan recorder? they didn't intend to exclude any (or all) whirlpools, yet commuted out toward superior concomitance as stipulated by the father-in-law-to-be. after choking on phosphorescence, everything seemed easy! but, tagging along in front of her, olive branch swore enmity . . . before being drugged by collared stoolies in layered indonesian target gear. it took all our strength, and less, to meditate on daisies with their plasma turned inside out until ecumenical cowards could line the streets with surgery. plasticity was not one of his least appealing codices; despite eternity, certain amounts of clout swam through, only to find a shortage of beckoning gas bags at their perfectly tuned birthright calamity function. nodal 'tater within reach (and gravity well below norm), it sprung out of action at a pace which would certainly not make a vagrant tough wince twice. automotive vengeance, at least! "i am no longer a fatality." however, as common scents voraciously take dictation, enzyme plagiarism casts the entire apparatus in an elderly light, at least, that is, if "that damned beveller" cheats us out of native opportunities. eagles did not count: friday's children sped toward fate's waiting mint as if watchmakers were only milling around by the dozen. caulk? aggravate us, and find your true butler. this grieving advertisement put 'em in a vault with lather and resin, and prayed for the delivery of wounds. would non-systematic complaining prove fruity (or does vinegar bury its weeds)? she tried for the fourth level, but failed to chasten elaborate pins and needless violence . . . or so they did not think. with a spoke-like jerk, truculent adjectives bogged down in a grimey land war with outlandish paper goods, and delivered kitties' pauses to the breeze. we sang--and read comfortable pylons--before drifting off with choice albino zebras, nameless olympic runts with heads like extinguished candle wax. . . . on and on, reeling in daft plaque via assorted remora directionality . . . . semblances, forked like brazen espresso wallflowers, logged furiously against the wishes of "kelp," delegating crap to wealthy bunglers whose pouches struck mickey as naked. without releasing her grasp, she slept like a doll, and edited flatware stalks in glowing rapture as fishermen slapped sewage with crazy apoplexy. it was as if . . . (2) spokane joe traditions upheld with a pang, we jogged into sunbeams laden with molten beef, and skimmed the celebrants' tuscany while dimming flaps destined to be lamp-lit in a superficial vein. prognoses adhered to rougher points (like sawteeth) despite their having been abused in deep water. without the benefit of "coffee nerves," switchboards lit up for dour grapplings betwixt elegant sphincters of prostration; when they reached the podium, bess collapsed with our famous "mmmmmmm" sound. the first and final straw is that old donkey's reluctance, enough to make any child cry out for shears. upon crossing the lumbar nerve, it noted several uranium holster supplements making faces at crossfire emitted from one of the new england states. her dance resembled that of a thumbprint, water-logged janitors aside. (but couldn't this money welder deliver electricity outside of the allotted time?) it was pele's turn: without so much as a spitting tundra file, massive media churned bread into wafer-thin rafters, leaving *us* holding the balloon (and its constituency). television sags waywardly as tugboats get a grip on varnished chalices: this much we know. requests for itty-bitty steam lowered the issue of unwritten swordplay within cloaked banjo sex abbreviations, and the phalanx swung (mercifully) in another direction. one more planet: will the contest begin? . . . had somehow managed to lose its jugular! like fine wine, scalloped fabric-suckers wagged motorcyclical dumbfoundedness in suggestive napkin agendas christened at the time of lou's passing. (believe it!) a cordial was passed from lip to breast--and back again--throughout the following daytime, all of which didn't lead him to wring: "could gore, bladder bug that it is, send ripples across a translucency hound composed of elemental pragmatics, bracing epidermal survivors?" and on the cross, that cave-dweller, in a sort of gin-rummy trance, lit the first cracker of the session. it's comin' out of the hovel, fast! sassy and brained, she elbowed her wagon train into a fulcrum fire left behind by verticality gone wayward, and saw to it that end table #88 registered at the previous nebula. "goodness!" without bravura, and with a bold, medical wavering, our awning killed off the worm handler, seeing asylum (for the umpteenth time) as a jiggling puff of glandular boasting. because of chutzpah . . . their elliptical sense of ignorance proved fatal to straw women (for example, nudge ceremony scheduler pan). simplicity's argonaut selected six of the most bruised erasures, forcing limbo to pulsate with embraceable ruddiness in spite of applause directed at the nepalese border. shunting in a display of granular body-building, and bringing out a budgie with eyes like leptons, expositional tracking patellas sounded the heights of razor, primed elegance with jocular binges, and dragged polarity about by its sweaty atmosphere. things had never been so good. (3) long and dusty blow-hole there was a glob of nymphomania attached to version 0! we wrought ironic fat cells around context-bent westerlies begrudged to one poor, hollow actuarial knight (after jazz depicted bozo clocking molecular drips with a jigsaw). the picayune inertia so often associated with wobbly plowshares stood between middle-wing smilers and their raving shorelines; ask not what time cannot do for you, but then again, why? "kind of false hairline": connotes temporal gist apparatuses capable of withholding dregs as they blossom forth and back within a minute crevice perturbed by nautilus recession. a cheesy enterprise, fraught with rogue wattage (henceforth "marmot whiz hullabaloo"), and probed willingly by tensile demeanor, landed flat on its batch of troubling documentaries (after we glimpsed thirty-eight softies propping up unborn winches with, of all things, messages from saint hoofbeat). if re-routing formerly greeted cylinders evoked glistening alarm, they would simply extract wiggly einsteinium after counting *aqua vitae* as one o' the boyz. phenomenal! blathering pastiness was responsible for only 27% of xylem lossage, seeing as how everybody clapped like beetle sycophants while the remaining ingot lost gravity in a wilderness to the left of etiolated plane musculature. cleft in stogies (bottomed-out speed demonstrators), or parted down the middle (exasperating la-la-land butt), the very fabric of space and/or tiger ankle came forth to be massaged by trench coats laundered in photon brine by dry-mouthed caucasians. choices: (945) "opaqueness delivers"; (11) "lubricant repletion without sandy booklet"; (2006c) "memorial explosion truss." after a quick seizure, we drilled for newsprint, and attached a wire to symbols of age-old hemorrhage leaps. one should *not*, however, assume that her christ-like scissor hold pored over both the cape and intricate powder rhythms quacked out half-assedly by tours through attic fan wavelengths. without his ukulele, he was like a god, roaming the width of major network tummy-prose, glaring at polar strip joints with nauseating relief. . . . but, despite baseline twitch-amplifier deaths by the dozens of hundreds, it was not enough to knock the wind into vegetation. finally, with a warning, they converted to larger sizes, none of which looked like rotund/chalky mammoth residue. (see illustrations in all three telephony starch smolderings, esp. "neglected suitor: magneto.") options still available. july's wallpaper left no doubt as to the melody of buried cynicism. hadn't there been a choco-lobbyist in that corner? it wasn't uncouth, but there *were* brimstones placed metaphorically along the garden airbus . . . what comes up must . . . goes around and down! "her majesty" was unable to comply without backing into a hedge, all the while shining well-endowed ash quarters pocked with fashion. acid reindeer grovelled naughtily regardless of asteroids from pope, the binging hypochondriac, and his half-witted cardiac mime. our strength lies deep below this manifold juggler: chowder, regaining stolid spark-nipples as it directed a fierce tai-chi emergency, bowled a 2 and bowed out shrugging. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------markovitz, 'blurring the lines: art on the border', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-markovitz-blurring.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.994. part 1/1, total size 14414 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- blurring the lines: art on the border by jonathan markovitz department of sociology university of california, san diego jmarkovi@weber.ucsd.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by jonathan markovitz, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the first thing to note about _la frontera/the border: art about the mexico/united states border experience_ is that the exhibit's title is a bit misleading. the various pieces of work in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as "*the* . . . border experience. " instead, while it is possible to draw out some common themes, the exhibit represents an extremely diverse multiplicity of "border experiences. " but even this phrasing would make for a somewhat misleading title, because one of the central concerns of the project is to problematize the notion of "border" in a variety of ways. borders between mexico and the united states are only one set of oppositions which are interrogated, and to some extent (i'll conclude this review by questioning to what degree), broken down. the various art works in this exhibit also challenge the borders that divide: art and criticism; production and reception; public and private; religion and entertainment; communication and imperialism. [2] one of the outstanding works in the show, yolanda lopez's "things i never told my son about being a mexican," is a collage made up of various items from popular culture. newspaper articles are interspersed with a bag of "batman tortilla chips" and a _wonder woman_ comic book the cover of which shows wonder woman eating cafeteria-style rice and beans. according to the accompanying blurb, the work "highlights the otherwise subtle and persistent means by which the mass media defines mexican american identity. . . . [it] exposes racist subtexts in seemingly neutral expressions of contemporary popular culture. " this description is worth examining, since the collage itself presents the various items to us without any accompanying commentary, and it is not clear how we would know that the work "exposes" racism if the blurb did not tell us so. the blurb in fact is part of the larger apparatus by means of which the exhibit attempts to construct its audience. [3] the first thing to note in this connection is that while the collage as a whole is clearly about mexican-american identity, many of the individual artifacts are not. many people looking at the _wonder woman_ comic would not, for example, pay any attention to the food's cultural history. identity is "highlighted," therefore, only by juxtaposition of the various elements. seen together, the different items yield a common theme. but this theme is *racism* only to the extent that a prior agreement or orientation toward lopez's collage has been established among the audience--only to the extent that racism has already somehow been designated *the* object of attention. [4] one of the ways this prior orientation is established is through reviews of the exhibit, nearly all of which have focused on racism, imperialism, or border-zone policing practices. then, for those few who manage to come in to the exhibit without having seen any of the reviews, there are plaques on display at the museum's entrances which mention the same constellation of concerns. and finally, in addition to placing a descriptive/prescriptive blurb beside lopez's piece, the exhibitors have surrounded it with other pieces which depend on similar aesthetic strategies and are described in similar terms. my point here is that the piece only "works" as a statement on the racism of popular culture if (and because) the viewer has absorbed certain lessons in how to view it. this is as it should be: an exhibition of emergent artistic practices must fulfill the pedagogical function of training a suitable audience. but in this case the organizers' desire to establish "racism" as the audience's primary term of reference may have the effect of prematurely foreclosing some alternate readings. [5] these questions aside, there is much to applaud in the _frontera_ exhibition. lopez's collage in particular succeeds in challenging some deeply entrenched oppositions, or conceptual borders. to begin with, the artifacts she has collected will tend to disrupt any presumed border between high culture and low, art and trash. moreover, while individually the items might be examples of "naturalized" racism, collectively they can represent a syncretic appropriation of racist notions. in this sense, the piece is simultaneously an indictment of domination, and a gesture toward something different. there are other examples of "border crossings" within this piece, but i want to stop here, because i think that the notion of artistic syncretism is particularly useful for an understanding of the work adjacent to lopez's, cesar augusto martinez's "amor a la tierra en el sur de tejas," or "love of the land of south texas. " [6] martinez's piece appears to be a simple landscape--pretty, but not terribly interesting. on second glance, however, the work takes on an entirely new dimension. it turns out that the piece is painted on a "no trespassing" sign, an the accompanying text tells us that the sign is from the border. the text goes further to say that "by painting over a no trespassing sign, martinez presents the despair of immigrants who come with hope to an unwelcoming land. " while this may be true, martinez is surely representing something other than, and beyond, despair. the land is clearly unwelcoming, but martinez seems to be saying that it makes its appeal to him anyway. moreover, by transforming a hostile border sign into an artwork (an object that has already furthered his professional reputation), martinez has managed to turn the very symbol of his unwelcome and alien status to his advantage on this side of the border. i do not want to trivialize the despair that the blurb refers to, and i'll note that many of the other works in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that lots of people are not able to cross the border at all, and that many of those who do are forced to suffer extreme hardships. but it is precisely for this reason that martinez's work most clearly marks a moment of artistic syncretism. if it is only *because* of the problems of domination that martinez needs to appropriate a border sign, then the work is syncretic in that it moves beyond appropriation and into creation of new forms and possibilities for cultural transformation. in the process of appropriation, martinez has posed a serious challenge to the notion of borders. ^1^ the work makes it possible to see the border not as a line marking containment, but as just one more piece of canvas. repressive politics or transformative art? martinez poses the possibility that the border might be both at once. [7] david avalos deals with a similar set of issues in his "san diego donkey cart. " this piece focuses on tourism in border towns as a way of putting into question the prevailing norms of u. s. /mexican relations. the work is, in avalos's words "a simulacrum of a tiajuanan donkey cart. " these hand-drawn carts with photos of "friendly mexicans" are popular border attractions. avalos's sculpture substitutes a drawing of a "border patrol agent arresting an undocumented worker" for the traditional photo. the result is that "tiajuana and san diego's tourist trade is thus juxtaposed with the socioeconomic reality that underlies it and upon which it depends for its survival. " this is perhaps the one work in the exhibit best suited for a discussion of syncretism as a process. [8] the "original" border town donkey carts were already simulacra, appropriations of mexican culture for the purposes of a u. s. -dominated tourist industry. (donkey carts were used for transportation before they were used for tourism). moreover, construction of the tourist cart relied on a previous northern appropriation and construction of mexican identity, in the form of the stock figure of the "friendly mexican. " avalos's work is merely the next step in the process--a further re-construction. but the exhibit is quick to note that the process did not end here. [9] avalos's original donkey cart was a life-sized sculpture commissioned as a public work, and placed in front of a san diegan federal court house in 1986--a site from which it was quickly removed. a judge ordered it confiscated (a further act of "appropriation?") because of the "threat that it posed to public safety. " the work that's in the exhibit is, therefore, a reproduction of avalos's original simulacrum. avalos, however, refused to allow the judge's actions to go uncontested, and enlisted the aid of the aclu to fight for the cart's release and reinstatement. the case was ultimately dismissed, but avalos has now gathered the judge's statements along with magazine articles and various court documents into a booklet that has become an intrinsic part of the current exhibit. appropriation and transformation are unending. the "original" donkey cart now provides the occasion for a whole series of discussions that problematize u. s. /mexican borders, public/private distinctions, and individual/government relations. [10] this last of these oppositions is important because it is bound up with the categories of "tourist" and "friend. " avalos's work clearly links both of these generalized individuals to their respective governments. "tourist" becomes "*u. s. * tourist," and "friend" becomes "*mexican* friend. " this was of course, always the case, but forced recognition of the nationality of *both* categories (even in mexico, tourists can see "u. s. " as an invisible norm) denies the presumed innocence of the former. moreover, "friendship" is high ighted as an economic, rather than as an emotional relation, one which mexicans must take up as a strategy of survival. [11] though the exhibit includes far too many works for me to discuss or even describe, the three i've mentioned exemplify the kinds of border-crossing gestures that comprise it. virtually everthing in the exhibit is concerned to transgress or transform boundaries and to resist all efforts at containment. the question i'd like to end with, however, is this: what does it mean to group all of these works together, and contain them within the "borders" of museum walls?^2^ what is the relationship between the exhibit's various critiques of socio-cultural borders, and the borders of the institution in and through which the exhibit has its existence? there is an effort here to produce what bell hooks calls a space of "radical openness;" but is it not the case that this openness is brought to a kind of closure after all by the physical and social limitations of the museum's space? these are not trivial questions, yet nor are they easily decidable. we must bear in mind that cultural syncretism is an ongoing process whose effects, or lack thereof, cannot reliably be extrapolated from current arrangements. whatever its institutional position, the cultural work on and of the border represented by the _la frontera_ exhibition warrants our closest attention. notes: ^1^ i don't want to go too far here. undocumented workers provide cheap labor which is essential for many united states industries. despite political posturing and an ever increasingly abusive immigration system, employers rely upon, and are secure in their ability to maintain access to, this labor pool. in a very real sense then, border crossings (and appropriations of border markings) challenge very little. ^2^ one piece of art that is referred to in the exhibition's catalog was, in fact, *never* contained by museum walls. "arte reembolso/art rebate" by elizabeth sisco, louis hock and david avalos was more explicitly interactive and public than a museum would allow. the artists applied for an nea grant, and used the money to print up certificates for undocumented workers to sign. attached to these certificates were $10 bills (which were also nea money). when workers signed the certificates, they received the money. the idea i think, was to give back some of what was due, and to point out that, rather than an economic drain, these workers were actually vital parts of the u.s. economy. needless to say, the nea was not very pleased with this use of their funds. the resulting debates (in the mass media and within government circles) are ongoing. this piece, however, was commissioned to appear in conjunction with, and not as part of, the exhibition. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------chung, 'rethinking agency', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-chung-rethinking.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.595. part 1/1, total size 14863 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- rethinking agency by rebecca m. chung university of chicago rmc2@quads.uchicago.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by rebecca m. chung, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: mann, patricia. _micropolitics: agency in a postfeminist era_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1994. [1] _micropolitics_ argues that shifting gender roles help produce postmodern anxiety. according to author patricia mann, scholars have overlooked the importance of shifting gender roles to help explain the postmodern condition: "i formulated this theory of individual agency in response to gendered social transformations that i believe provide the basic foundation for all other social transformations today, and i call it a 'gendered micropolitics'" (1). mann claims that modernist paradigms miss the influence of micropolitics on the public sphere: "i am a postmodern philosopher in a quite literal sense. i believe that the social and political frameworks of modernism are exhausted and incapable of making sense of the most important contemporary problems" (1). moreover, these paradigms cannot account for facts of contemporary life: social "unmooring," female and male emotional neediness, the dependency of public success on private servicing, and the profound social transitions involved when women decide forever that homemaking is a choice, not an inevitability. a postmodern, postfeminist era has begun. while liberal discourses remain dominant, they are conflict-ridden and unstable as a consequence of the social enfranchisement of women, and the unmooring of women, men, and children from patriarchal kinship relationshps. the identification of humanity and masculinity is no longer normatively or structurally secured by the ailing institutions of late liberalism. and so, the actions of women and men, as well, have a peculiarly radical/constructive potential. yet it will remain difficult to appreciate or to act upon that potential so long as we continue to assume modernist visions of change and political agency. (25) [2] by ignoring new historical realities, scholars risk ignoring the material conditions foundational to emerging postmodern social practice. in fact, they altogether miss an opportunity to observe an emerging relationship between material and social practice. driven moreover by outdated theories about social behavior, scholars make incomprehensible what could be comprehensible--if the scholars would take seriously new theories, particularly theories inclusive of female experience. mann makes her position quite clear: "changing gender relations are the most significant social phenomenon of our time" (2). [3] _micropolitics_ effectively forestalls accusations of non-philosophical meandering by pointing out the limits of conventional philosophical practice: "perhaps we are [becoming] unphilosophical, but only insofar as we are placing demands upon our philosophical resources to which they are not yet capable of responding" (33). here, and throughout _micropolitics_ , mann is at her best when articulating the limits of conventional thinking vis-a-vis "philosophically interesting changes in the human condition" such as universal female enfranchisement, job protections, reproductive choice, non-patriarchal family structure, and presumptive female equality generally. using the canon of philosophy, _micropolitics_ demonstrates the uniqueness of current gender roles in anglo-european history. [4] in these ways _micropolitics_ purports to be about agency. unfortunately the social analyses run away from the concept. individual chapters omit any sustained engagement with the question of agency as they explore the consequences of female social enfranchisment in contemporary american society. [5] mann's analysis follows a pattern: she begins each chapter with a theoretical discussion of agency, then drops the topic in order to conduct an analysis of some current issue or event: the double duty workday, abortion, pornography, the history of liberalist individualism, women in the military, anita hill, sexual harassment, william kennedy smith, mike tyson, date rape, _thelma and louise_. the problem is that none of these specific analyses, grounded as they are in cultural criticism commonplaces, really requires a new thinking of gendered micro-political agency in the first place. readers informed about these events, but wondering how they might be reconsidered in light of the ongoing theoretical debates over postfeminist agency, will find themselves repeatedly provoked and then disappointed. [6] this digressive, or at any rate anti-climactic, structuring of the chapters reflects a general problem in the organizational logic of the book. one is grateful for the new terms and concepts mann introduces--but her capacity to produce these new concepts seem to outrun her capacity to arrange and order them. her sentences often contain more than one idea, her paragraphs more than one topic, her arguments more than one thesis. the frequent signposts and other attempts to manage information flow ("first, i will," "i define. . .") generally make the prose even more, rather than less, inefficient. in themselves these are often minor blemishes--and indeed they are closely allied with the book's strengths, with the richness and fertility of the author's thought. but one can't help feeling that_micropolitics_ would have profited substantially from more careful editorial attention. [7] more troubling are some of the book's underlying assumptions about gender and society. _micropolitics_ reproduces a presumptive white bourgeois heterosexuality by focusing almost exclusively on social issues significant to women intimate with (white) men: the double duty syndrome, abortion, pornography. _micropolitics_ does not question the assumption that these are the issues women care most deeply about. it leaves out of its analysis all those women for whom intimacy with men is a non-concern, or at least a marginal one. there are women who have scarcely any contact with men except in public, institutional settings. there are minority women who are even further removed from the kinds of white heterosexual relations the book examines. feminism has begun to recognize that the private practices of white patriarchy impose themselves with different force on different women, but mann's study seems untouched by this recognition. my point is not that the cultural matters mann takes up--heterosexual pornography, abortion law, freudian psychology, american political history, the inheritance of liberalism, and so forth--are necessarily the wrong ones. it is that feminist practice today has to mean, among other things, a willingness at least to consider how limited may be the relevance of such matters to the lived experiences of non-white, non-heterosexual women. [8] _micropolitics_ is bound to some other dubious assumptions as well. in respect to pre-modern forms of community and their relation to contemporary conditions, mann offers this observation: as serfs left the estates of feudal landowners, material forms of human neediness were unmoored from stable agricultural communities, and today as women leave the home to enter the workplace, psychic relational forms of human neediness are coming unmoored from patriarchal kinship relationships. (124) mann offers no evidence for this generalization about fedual times, nor does she cite any sources that suggest medieval affective life was fundamentally the same as late-twentieth century heterosexual bourgeois affective life. [9] admittedly, information on the emotional economy of serfs is scarce. but the relative experience of stability or upheaval in particular times and places can be indicated by reference to rates of enclosure or unemployment, the frequency of outbreaks of disease, the incidence of war or famine, and so forth. claims about non-elite pre-modern life need to be grounded in the historical records left by particular regions and communities. _micropolitics_ demonstrates no knowledge of the methodological complexity involved in this kind of historical reconstruction. mann's claims are not based in primary sources, concrete examples, but in marx's notoriously unreliable generalizations. as a result, potentially valuable concepts--such as that of "unmooring" in this instance--are drained of any specific historical meaning and end up dubiously signifying transhistorical features of the human condition. [10] finally, on the level of philosophical categories, the basic argument of _micropolitics_ seems at times confused. mann declares herself a critic of modernism and of the modernist conceptualization of the subject. yet the real object of her critique would seem to be the social constructivism of many postmodern thinkers. i believe that insofar as social identities are presently unstable we should stop focusing so intently upon these fragile notions of selfhood. instead, i suggest that we think more about the quality of our actions, or in the terminology of social thoery, upon our agency. in seeking to better understand our actions we will be confronting the moral and political issues of everyday life in the best way possible during a time of social confusion. we should think of ourselves as conflicted actors rather than as fragmented selves. (4) [11] here, as elsewhere, mann neglects to discuss how exactly agency was conceived in modernist thinking, what the problems or limitations of that thinking were, and how the concept might be rethought and resurrected for contemporary theory. far from offering a critique of modernism, she begins by lamenting the radical suspicion of agency within postmodernist paradigms, and proceeds to invoke, by way of a solution to this ostensible problem, what often appears to be a naive return to modernist assumptions. [12] this is not to say that _micropolitics_ has no critique of modernism to offer--only that its critique is not always very clearly delineated. mann's characterizations of early modern philosophers are sometimes admirably precise and astute. hobbes, she observes, was "the first great theorist/storyteller of modern forms of material agency, articulating the power of material desires and their anarchic implications within a society in which market-based economic structures had not yet developed" (132). here, both mann's historical sense and her philosophical penetration are brought nicely to bear as she conducts a reading of _leviathan_. her critique of the philosophical assumptions about free will and individual choice to which defenses of patriarchy frequently have recourse are also right on the mark: "if women freely choose to devote themselve to the happiness of their husbands and children, this, like any other freely undertaken course of action, must be understood as simply a matter of personal preference. but if we ask a doctor to diagnose our difficulties in sleeping and he responds that we apparently prefer not to sleep regularly, we will question his medical abilities" (50). on this relatively familiar territory, _micropolitics_ is lively and convincing. [13] the book's title, then, is somewhat misleading. _micropolitics: agency in a postfeminist era_, announces itself as a book about (individual) agency in a (culturally or socially) postfeminist situation. in short, it claims to examine the relationship between individuals and their larger circumstances. _micropolitics_ purports to resituate individual agency: a welcome intervention, given contemporary academic debates driven by constructivist analyses. yet the book does not firmly situate itself %vis a vis% modern and contemporary theories of agency, nor does it manage very well to articulate its theoretical concerns with the mass-media events it examines: the hill-thomas hearings, the tyson-washington trial, and so forth. though still of interest, these events do not in and of themselves help to bring the problem of agency into better focus, nor does mann's use of them suggest what might be gained by engaging that problem philosophically. hoping to appropriate, for the purposes of feminist theory, these seductive episodes of mass culture, mann was perhaps too much seduced by them herself, and in the end denies her readership the full benefit of her scholarly--her philosophical--expertise. [14] despite these weaknesses, _micropolitics_ is a welcome contribution to the postmodernist conversation. "what particularly excites me about the present historical moment," remarks mann, "is the conceptual strangeness of various social situations and relationships, and the sense that they can only be adequately comprehended through reworking our systems of signification to better articulate basic concepts" (206). yes--this is the excitement proper to postmodern studies. and by fostering that excitement in her readers, mann is helping to produce the kind of dispersed and various micro-interventions out of which a better set of social arrangements might emerge. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ulmer, 'metaphoric rocks: a psychogeography of tourism and monumentality', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-ulmer-metaphoric.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.594. part 1/1, total size 49024 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- metaphoric rocks: a psychogeography of tourism and monumentality by gregory l. ulmer english department university of florida, gainesville glulmer@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by gregory l. ulmer, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. an earlier version of this work was published in _the florida landscape: revisited_, a catalog for an exhibition curated by christoph gerozissis, lakeland, florida: the polk museum, 1992. an electronic predecessor was included, with the assistance of anthony rue, ina cultural studies world-wide web project at the university of florida called _re: wired_. "tradition is like spring-water that wells forth from the ground, flowing on forever. it is no abstract doctrine" (mysteries of the dream-time). project for a new consultancy [1] the state of florida has asked for advice. debilitated by the recession, embarrassed by its ranking as 43rd most livable state in america (based on categories such as income, crime rate, graduation rate, suicide and taxes), florida is giving renewed attention to its leading industry--tourism. the 1991 legislature created the florida tourism commission charged with devising a strategy for promoting tourism. one of the first acts of the commission was to hire the new york consulting firm of penn & schoen which, for a fee of $250,000, will assess what role the state should play in tourism promotion. [2] the florida research ensemble (fre--a faculty group at the university of florida that practices an experimental approach to arts and letters) took this situation as a good test for its new consultancy project. what knowledge resources are available for dealing with a state problem? if there is an agricultural problem the institute for food and agricultural sciences at the university of florida is called on for advice. but when there is a cultural problem, why does no one ask the experts in culture at the university for advice? why is the expertise of a public relations firm, and a new york firm at that, thought to be relevant to the issue of tourism in florida, while the expertise of professors in the liberal and fine arts is not considered relevant? this question is addressed as much to the professors as to the state agency, of course, since the arts and humanities disciplines traditionally have not thought of the culture industry as the applied dimension of their specializations. [3] a review of newspaper reports of planning thus far indicate that the "improvement of tourism" is being framed as a matter of advertising. the local tourism boards formed in response to the legislative initiative have been most concerned with "how and when to advertise and how to get the attention we need." perhaps because florida already attracts over 40 million visitors a year, less attention has been given to "what facilities and resources may be magnets for visitors." an early example of what to expect is the campaign commissioned by the state commerce department. during the winter of 1992-1993, an agency monitored bad weather in northern cities, placing full-page ads in newspapers following a blizzard: a photograph of a piece of toast with the words, "just a reminder that it's nice and toasty in florida." to this reminder we might add the rider: "safer than egypt." [4] assuming that these efforts did indeed focus touristic attention on florida, fre offers to consult with the tourism commission about how to improve the experience itself of the visitors to our landscape. fre's first step is to challenge the assumptions about cognitive jurisdiction, about what knowledge is relevant to which problems (star wars belonged to physics, tourism to public relations). the fact is that when it is a matter of invention, history shows that innovation almost always comes from outside a specialization. one definition of invention could be "a process by which the status of an idea is transformed from irrelevant to relevant." fre is not "competing" with penn & schoen for the pr job; we offer a different expertise, which until now has not been applied to tourism except in the negative mode of critique. our disciplines have said a great deal against tourism; the challenge for fre is to apply our knowledge to the design of an improved tourism. from tourism to solonism [5] there are many significant points of overlap between the arts and tourism. take for example the case of solon, one of the wisest of the ancient greeks, who is said to be both the first theorist and the first tourist. "the greeks," wlad godzich explains,"designated certain individuals to act as legates on certain formal occasions in other city states or in matters of considerable political importance. these individuals bore the title of theoros and collectively constituted a theoria. they were summoned on special occasions to attest the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance, and to then verbally certify its having taken place" (godzich). others could see and make claims, but these would have merely the status of "perceptions"; only the report of the theoria provided certainty, certifying the attested event such that it could be treated as fact. "what it certified as having been seen could become the object of public discourse." [6] travel was an essential element of archaic theoria. herodotus noted that theoria was the reason for solon's visit to the ruler of lydia. "originally theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview," e.v. walter comments. "the first theorists were 'tourists'--the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. solon, the greek sage whose political reforms around 590 b.c. renewed the city of athens, is the first 'theorist' in western history" (walter). this theoria "did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight. the term implied a complex but organic mode of active observation--a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. it encouraged an open reception to every kind of emotional, cognitive, symbolic, imaginative, and sensory experience." nor was the travel of a theoros always a response; it could also be a probe. the motive for solon's visit to lydia, where he went "to see what could be seen," was "curiosity": "and it was just this great gift of curiosity, and the desire to see all the wonderful things--pyramids, inundations, and so forth--that were to be seen that enabled the ionians to pick up and turn to their own use such scraps of knowledge as they could come by among the barbarians" (burnet). [7] let us take solon, then, as the emblem of the fre consultancy on tourism: in an improved tourism, the tourist will be a theoros, whose collective practice will constitute a theoria. it might be useful to coin a neologism to name this new vacationing--"soloning"--and its practitioners--"solonists." the solonist is a tourist functioning as "witness." tourism as invention [8] a "nation" is an idea--an idea with a history. there was a time before nations, and there may come a time after and without nations. meanwhile, the idea of "the united states" is undergoing a change, as evidenced by the confusion about how to commemorate the columbus quincentennial. the arrival in st. augustine from spain of the replica columbian flotilla in april, 1992, was a magnet not only for tourists but for protesters. it could have been an occasion to test the special gaze of the solonists, supporting an alternative to the opposition between unity and separatism. at this post-colonial moment, american national identity is being revised, in a process whose difficulties may be traced in the debates surrounding multiculturalism, political correctness, and hate crimes. the tourist as solonist will travel to see what is to be seen in order to reinvent our national identity. but what will be the nature of this site seeing? [9] tourism has already played an important role in the creation of representations that have shaped american national identity. a review of the history of two of the most important embodiments of american identity shows why the florida tourism commission turned to a public relations firm for advice, since pr played a crucial role in these symbolic inventions. both originated with booster groups as ways to increase and improve tourism in a specific place. [10] the first vacation spots in america were spas where people went to "take the waters." this custom, borrowed from europe, led eventually to the discovery of sea-bathing as a leisure activity. atlantic city, new jersey, is one of the sites where this new recreation evolved. there were only seven houses there when the railroad arrived in the 1850s (sutton). by 1900 over ten million dollars had been invested in hotels. in 1920, looking for a way to keep tourists at the beach through labor day, the business men's league decided to sponsor a fall frolic, which in 1921 introduced a beauty pageant. the first such contest had been held at rehoboth beach, delaware, in the 1880s, but was not repeated. herb test, a reporter hired to handle publicity for the atlantic city version, decided to call the winner "miss america." "it was decided in committee that newspapers in the atlantic city trading area would be approached with the suggestion that they use the beauty contest at atlantic city as a gimmick to increase circulation" (deford). the association with national identity was established from the beginning, with the first winner (a fifteen year old named margaret gorman) setting the pattern of a preference for the "civic beauty" of the "amateur" over the "brazen femininity" of professional models and actresses. it may be worth noting in the context of solonism that the early pageants were presided over by the figure of king neptune, the god who was the protector of atlantis. [11] mount rushmore, also known as the "shrine of democracy," offers a second example of booster inventiveness serving national identity. if "miss america" was meant to be the embodiment of our national ideal of womanhood, the rushmore monument "signifies the achievements of the united states as symbolized by the four great national leaders. washington represents the founding of the union; jefferson, the declaration of independence and the louisiana purchase; lincoln, the preservation of the union; and [teddy] roosevelt, the expansion of the country and the conservation of its natural resources" (tour book: north central, american automobile association). [12] in the early 1920s, doane robinson, state historian for south dakota, began thinking of ways to lure tourists to his state. having read of the work of guzton borglum (carving a monument to the confederacy on the face of stone mountain, georgia), robinson was giving a speech to a tourist promotion group when it struck him that a monument could be carved in the granite of the black hills. he proposed the idea on the spot, suggesting that the principal figure be chief red cloud, supported by other heroes of the old west such as general custer (smith). booster clubs in the area were enthusiastic, although they considered the idea impossible. borglum was recruited to the project, and changed its theme to the "founding fathers," to better realize his aim of "a monument dedicated to the meaning of america." after some twenty years the carving was completed, and today it attracts over two million visitors annually. the monument as rhizome [13] the fre consultancy concerns the design of the "magnet of attraction" for solonists. the lesson of atlantic city and mount rushmore is that there exists a "monumental" tourism--an activity whose motivation is economic but whose effect is symbolic, involving a visit to a place marked by a thing or an event that represents a collective value. it might be helpful to generalize from these examples, in order to discover their relevance to our own situation. [14] rushmore and miss america are products of what gilles deleuze and felix guattari call an "abstract machine"--a generative or inventive idea. to convey how such machines operate, the theorists use the metaphor of the rhizome, of which one of their favorite examples is the relationship between the wasp and the orchid. the relationship that plants form with insects, animals, people, the wind, in order to propagate, is a rhizome. joseph beuys used a similar example to express his understanding of creative thinking, stating that people make thought the way bees make honey. [15] let us continue the analogy, to say that tourism is rhizomatic--that it makes national identity the way bees make honey (the social function of the wasp, extended now to include all ethnicities). make a map, not a tracing. the orchid does not reproduce a tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. what distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. the map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. . . . the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. it can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. it can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways. (deleuze and guattari, 12) if tourists use maps, solonists are maps, or map-makers. tourism,then, becomes a "map" to post-columbian america. solonism as social sculpture [16] the purpose of "florida rushmore" is to introduce the tourist to solonism. this introduction should include some further suggestions for solonistic activities. to accomodate this need,there might be established at the site of the electronic monument a museum of cultural inventions, with displays tracing the contribution of arts and letters to american traditions, such as washington irving's invention of the myth of "columbus," or owen wister and frederick remington's invention of the "cowboy." the museum will sponsor exhibits from the history of the liberal and fine arts that might serve as models showing solonists how to become inventors themselves. [17] a series of projects by the german performance artist, joseph beuys, exemplify the nature of such exhibits. beuys developed the strategy of a politically therapeutic "social sculpture" in environmental works such as show your wound, in which he set up an installation in an ugly, dangerous place--selected as representative of a sick spot in the urban environment--the underground pedestrian area between two streets in munich (tisdall). in tallow he selected a similar site in munster, which he used as a cast for a giant sculpture using twenty tons of mutton and beef fat. this line of work led to his proposal for a free international university to be established in belfast, to function as an arts consultancy for resolving the dilemma of ireland. it is typical of beuys to seek out a wound, a sore spot, which is also a very concrete representation of the wider context of social failure. it is equally typical that the artist does not simply use this sore spot for a denunciation, but applies to it his own kind of dialectic. he attempts to heal the place (laszlo gloser, in tisdall). the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people's behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. this is demonstrated by the immense prestige of monaco and las vegas--although they are mere gambling places. our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. in a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such. (chtcheglov) the situationist inventors of psychogeography wanted chance to play a part in the creation of situations, as the "tourist" wandered aimlessly or drifted through the urban landscape. one experimenter in this vein used a map of london to explore an area of germany with which he was unfamiliar. in conventional tourism, getting lost is at best inconvenient, and at worst dangerous. the museum of cultural invention will have a "tourist hall of fame" commemorating tourist sacrifices to chance, such as the dutch tourist who happened to be in paris when the commune took over the city at the end of the franco-prussian war. because of his resemblance to one of the leaders of the rebellion, this tourist was executed on suspicion of being a communard (mercer). [18] when tourists add theoria (witnessing) to their itinerary, they expose a problematic dimension of the environment to a new kind of attention whose function would not be "spectacle" but "healing." the solonists might not rely only on chance to bring them to a sorespot. they would take advantage of maps, such as the one suggested by an alachua county commissioner, "alerting residents to crime-ridden areas that need to be avoided." the commissioner explained her proposal, motivated by the recovery of a murder victim's body in gainesville, "that certain wooded areas are havens for prostitution, selling drugs and other criminal activity." ordinary citizens use these same woods "to walk and meditate." [19] the point of solonism is that such places--all the forgotten and denied places, the leftovers (the unconscious)--must be put on the map and even visited if the landscape is to become a rhizome for national self-knowledge. we already have a place in florida that advertises itself as "an adventure without risk." solonism is an alternative to, a supplement of, this conventional tourism, and the solonist who tours places like those sore woods in gainesville is working more in the tradition of adventurers who accepted the risks of travel into the unknown. what might be the effect of this gaze, or of the circulation of this testimony preserved in home videos, snap-shots, and anecdotes? a post-columbian america cannot forget that adventurers are responsible for its existence, for better and for worse. [20] the solonists in their theoria might constitute a columbus 500 years the wiser, knowing something about the karstification of culture. in their visit to florida they learn that the idea of "america" is not "granite" (not igneous, however ingenious), but limestone, soluble in water, and with the rains becoming more acidic every year. florida rushmore [21] it is possible to formulate a specific proposal for the ftc, based on the above discussion. the proposal is based on the following steps of reasoning: 1. the state desires not only to promote tourism, but to improve it. 2. monumental practices (including events and celebrations as well as memorials) are magnets attracting tourists to specific sites. 3. tourism and monuments form a rhizome that in practice "constructs the unconscious" of a culture. 4. the state issue after 1992 concerns the revision of american national identity in the new post-colonial era of multiculturalism. 5. solonism names a new style of tourism as theoria, in which the process of cultural invention through tourism becomes self-conscious, reflective, and hence "critical." 6. critical tourism would allow citizens to participate directly in the continuing invention of "america." 7. conclusion: fre could improve tourism by designing a monument that exposes tourists to the experience of solonism. [22] our proposal is to build an electronic version of mount rushmore in florida, a version that will be in effect a revision and supplement of the original. the theoretical rationale for this choice is based on the psychological function of monuments, known as "mourning." the rhizomatic nature of tourism and monuments is due to the reciprocal relationship between the formation of individual and collective identity. the entry points to the network of american identity are marked by monuments. [23] in psychoanalytic terms, "mourning" refers to the process by which the self is constituted as a distinctly separate person yet part of the larger whole of society. the "loss" of unity with the mother's body is mourned by internalizing (introjecting) an image of the parents in the unconscious (and eventually other figures with whom the self identifies, forming what is known as the "superego"). the loss is compensated for by the symbolizing power (language) associated with such introjections. collective entities such as nations maintain their identity through a similar process of symbolization, mourning the loss of one generation of citizens after the other, back to the founding fathers. as the following citation suggests, monuments are to a nation what the superego is to an individual. [24] the oedipal resolution also governs the creation of a superego: and here too we find an important relation to the work of mourning and the elegy. at the most obvious level, we recall freud's suggestion that the superego is made up of the "illustrious dead," a sort of cultural reservoir, or rather cemetery, in which one may also inter one's renounced love-objects, and in which the ruling monument is the internalized figure of the father. (sacks) [25] an electronic rushmore produces a mourning identification that is flexible and diverse rather than one that is "carved in stone." a holographic monument "florida rushmore" uses the technology of holography and computers to create a continuously changing image of a face, projected in 3-d at the same scale as the rushmore heads (60 feet high). technology [26] holography is a method of lensless photography in which the wave field of light scattered by an object is recorded on a plate as an interference pattern. when the photographic record--the hologram--is placed in a coherent light beam like a laser, the original wave pattern is regenerated. a three-dimensional image appears. because there is no focusing lens, the plate appears as a meaningless pattern of swirls. any piece of the hologram will reconstruct the entire image (wilber). composite photography [27] nancy burson's computer-generated portraits are the model for the faces represented in "florida rushmore." burson has extended the technique of composite photography, invented by francis galton in 1877, to the medium of digital computer graphics. using software developed by richard carling and david kramlich, burson essentially reinvented photography. her technique of amalgamating and manipulating images has been used by the fbi to update photographs of missing children, and by people magazine to project the effect of age on celebrities. composites of everything from a lion/lamb through the heads of state of the nuclear powers to an oriental/caucasian/black (with features weighted according to current world population statistics) are said "to explore themes as universal as sexuality and race and concerns as common as beauty, celebrity, and political power." [28] that her technique is especially suited to psychogeography has to do with the historical affinity between psychoanalysis and photography. walter benjamin said that photography is to the visible world what psychoanalysis is to the mind. freud himself drew upon galton's composite technique to describe the logic of dreams. "what i did was to adopt the procedure by means of which galton produced family portraits," freud wrote, explaining the effect of condensation in one of his own dreams. "namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. in my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred; incidentally, the beard further involved an allusion to my father and myself through the intermediate idea of growing grey" (freud). a mystorical questionnaire [29] tourists visiting the monument would have an opportunity to fill out a questionnaire designed to elicit information indicative of the figures with whom they identify--figures that represent their "personalized" or internal rushmores. the questionnaire uses the formula of a genre called "mystory" (a neologism derived from "history"), that is a discursive equivalent of a composite photograph. a mystory condenses into one account information from the four main discourses used by americans: family anecdotes, school history textbooks, popular media, and disciplinary expertise. the computer uses the tourist's responses to the questions to identify four figures--one from each discourse area (family history, public history, entertainment, and career field)--as a representation of the individual's superego. in my own case, for example, a paper version of the mystory suggested that the heads on my personal rushmore are walter ulmer (my father), george armstrong custer, gary cooper, and jacques derrida. [30] the computer collects in its memory the composite face of each tourist's personal rushmore, randomly selecting a new one every fifteen minutes to be projected as the face of "florida rushmore." as andy warhol said, in media america, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. thus the rushmore of an electronic, post-colonial america will be as diverse as the population of the nation itself. the tourist may purchase a graphic printout of his/her composite as a souvenir. a tourist whose superego is projected as the national monument is awarded a commemorative hologram. burson's work has been praised for creating utterly believable faces "like the faces in our dreams, struck from life but recast by our concerns. it is an instrumental imagination, manifesting human inner vision." "florida rushmore" puts this imagination to work on the task of representing the continuing dream of a democratic, free america. part of its purpose is to remind citizens that "america" is precisely a "dream." a nation, like an individual, can come to know itself better by learning how to remember its dreams. the externalization of the psychological process of identification (mourning) demonstrated in the monument will make "florida rushmore" the founding site of solonism. [31] *location: the devil's millhopper sinkhole*. doane robinson's idea for a monument on mount rushmore was inspired in part by his love for the landscape of the black hills, especially the granite cliffs protruding above the forested hills. the geology of south dakota, in fact, was suited to the fixed concept of the nation common in the america of robinson's era. but the psychogeography of america has changed in the postmodern era, for which the limestone aquifer of florida is a better metaphor than is the bedrock of the plains and foothills of the north. as children sometimes write in their social studies reports, "we should not take our freedom for granite." [32] an excellent location for "florida rushmore," then, is the sinkhole known as "the devil's millhopper," where the flux of the electronic portraits figures the instability of the land itself. [33] two miles northwest of gainesville is the state geological site (the only one in florida), "the devil's millhopper," exemplifying one of the most unusual features of the florida landscape--the sinkhole. formed nearly 20,000 years ago, the sink is nearly 120 feet deep and 500 feet across at the top. since 1976 a 221-step wooden stairway takes the visitor to the bottom of the hole. "the sink got its name after fossilized bones and teeth were found there, and visitors termed the hole the lair of the devil" (marth). [34] "in general, sinkholes are the result of the action of water on the porous limestone substrate underlying northern florida, which is characterized by countryside riddled with shallow, interweaving networks of caves. when the ceiling of an underground cave has worn too thin from dissolution, it simply cannot support its own weight and collapses" (stubbs). sinkhole formation continues today, accelerated by human activity such as the heavy pumping of ground water. in the gulf coast city of dunedin, just since 1990 more than 172 homeowners reported structural damage because of sinkholes, causing an insurance company to discontinue homeowner insurance for the entire city. in 1981 a hole opened in winter park, florida, developing within a few hours into the size of a football field and as deep as an eight-story building, causing two million dollars in damages to swallowed and sunken property. within days the hole ranked as a major tourist attraction, and many people were seen wearing "sinkhole 1981" t-shirts. [35] a sinkhole is just one of several features of karst topography, which includes poljes, dolines, caverns, lapies, and the variety of plants, animals, and human habitation associated with such formations. the term "karst" originated as the proper name of the northwestern part of yugoslavia, including croatia, and was then generalized to refer to any area similarly rich in soluble limestone rock. the ethnic warfare underway in that region since the collapse of the soviet union represents a warning, of which karst may serve as a reminder, of one possible alternative to national identity. the value of locating "florida rushmore" at a sinkhole is that the karst geology may serve as a good analogy in a psychogeographical metaphor--the underground movement of water, "following the line of least resistance (greatest permeability) through fractures and cavities," creates the surface features of the landscape, analogous to the way the workings of the unconscious are manifested in symptoms. symptoms, in turn, are said to be personal monuments to forgotten traumas. [36] the geology itself, in other words, could be used to help tourists become solonists, by using landscape displays as allegories for social and psychological processes. freud himself used landscape as an explanation of his "structural" model of the psyche--divided into ego, superego, and id. let me give you an analogy; analogies, it is true, decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home. i am imagining a country with a landscape of varying configuration--hill-country, plains, and chains of lakes--, and with a mixed population: it is inhabited by germans, magyars, and slovaks, who carry on different activities. . . . a few things are naturally as you expected, for fish cannot be caught in the mountains and wine does not grow in the water. indeed, the picture of the region that you brought with you may on the whole fit the facts; but you will have to put up with deviations in the details. (freud, in erdelyi.) [37] the analogy is picked up in deleuze and guattari's notion of "faciality," having to do with the effects of power in the relationship of a state to its citizens. in terms of signification--as an abstract machine--a "face" is a system created by the relationship of black holes to white walls (deleuze and guattari). power circulates in this system through such facial rhizomes as the mother/child, two lovers, the celebrity/fan, the politician/voter. what the face is to the body, the landscape is to the environment (a system of surfaces and holes organized into significance, expressing relations of power). [38] although the original plans for mount rushmore called for the sculpting of the whole bodies of the figures, the final embodiment of the idea in the four heads relates the monument to the talking heads of the electronic era (anticipated by the "close-up" shot in cinema). "the face is produced only when the head ceases to be apart of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body." identification with this "face," that is, makes one not the member of a family, but the subject of a state. the karst topography of florida, with its multitude of flooded sinks, is a setting ideally suited to teaching the facial implications of landscape. metaphoric rocks [39] for our monument we will modify freud's analogy to fit our case: let "florida" represent the american psyche. it remains to be worked out how to fit the tenor to the vehicle in this metaphor, how to assign the divisions of the population (caucasian, hispanic, african-american, native american) and the economic activities (agriculture, mining, tourism) to the divisions of the structural model of the mind. but as freud said, there is a certain disorderly mixing among all these components, whether as nation or psyche. [40] we might begin with the old bones found at millhopper that could be associated with the themes of mourning (the bones found in a grave or tomb). for tourists to perform theoria does not require their full awareness of the method of metaphors from which are composed the myths holding together a nation. they do not need to be "experts" or "linguists" of national identity in order to become monumentally inventive. rather, monumentality is a kind of writing whose school is tourism. the matrix of geology, technology, and culture existing in the millhopper landscape make it an ideal location for bringing this symbolic practice (written mourning) into visibility. [41] freud compared psychoanalysis to archaeology, with the analyst sifting through the products of the unconscious the way an archaeologist penetrated the surface of the landscape to reconstruct the facts of a buried city, like schleimann at troy. contemporary archaeology includes the use of satellites and remote sensing technology, as in the discovery of the city of ubar, "a major hub of the frankincense trade that vanished beneath the desert sands of southern oman two millenia ago." the city perished in a disaster around a.d. 100. "evidence at the oman site indicates that much of the settlement fell into a sinhole created by the collapse of an underground limestone cavern" (bower). indeed, florida is in the same latitudinal belt as great deserts such as the sahara and the arabian desert, but being a peninsula and the proximity of warm ocean currents makes it one of the nation's wettest states. [42] the link between florida and ubar rests on more than the shared karst topography. researchers found the city by tracing ancient desert roads detected beneath the sand in pictures taken by the radar and optical cameras carried by the space shuttle challenger in 1984. the shuttles, of course, are launched from florida (including the spectacular, catastrophic explosion of challenger in 1986). this link suggests that a second version of "florida rushmore" could be added to the astronauts memorial located at spaceport usa, cape canaveral. [43] lawrence of arabia referred to ubar as "the atlantis of the sands," thus associating the destruction of atlantis with a sinkhole collapse. as the part of the continent to emerge most recently from the ocean, florida might be thought of as a natural atlantis (which was expected to rise again). some of the early maps of the new world, in any case, identified as "atlantis" the place columbus discovered. this allusion returns us to solon, who told the story of atlantis in plato's _timaeus_. [44] plato used a karst feature--a cave--as the setting for his famous allegory of enlightenment. many commentators on this allegory have observed that if plato were writing today, he would use the popular institutions of cinema and television instead of the fire and shadows to represent the world of the cave. in florida we might associate this allegory with our own "sunshine law," thus mapping a matrix of public access to information, sun bathing, and the representative of "the good" in the physical world (old sol). project pleasure-dome [45] another association between florida karst and electronic technology involves the writings of the first and most famous "tourist" visitor to florida (one who came sheerly out of curiosity). william bartram travelled to the alachua savanna in 1773, a karst polje now called "payne's prairie," that is part of the same local formation in alachua county that includes the devil's millhopper. "it is a level green plain, above fifteen miles over," bartram wrote, "and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. it is encircled with high sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil. the towering magnolia grandiflora and transcendent palm, stand conspicuous amongst them" (bartram). the indigenes called the prairie "alachua," meaning "big jug," referring to the stream that disappeared into a sinkhole, "into which the indians saw the waters continually flow without filling it." [46] it is said that samuel taylor coleridge's reading of bartram's travels (one of the most popular books of its day) influenced the dream that led to the writing of the poem, "kubla kahn," about the place "xanadu," in which "did kubla khan / a stately pleasure-dome decree: / where alph, the sacred river, ran / through caverns measureless to man / down to a sunless sea. / so twice five miles of fertile ground / with walls and towers were girdled round" (coleridge). [47] ted nelson, credited with coining the term "hypertext," named his plans for an "electronic literature" "project xanadu." both the network of underground rivers of florida karst, and the on-line computer network designed by ted nelson, may be recognized as "rhizomes." "the xanadu system,designed to address many forms of text structure, has grown into a design for the universal storage of all interactive media, and, indeed, all data; and for a growing network of storage stations which can, in principle, safely preserve much of the human heritage and at the same time make it far more accessible than it could have been before" (nelson). [48] what is the metaphoric lesson available at devil's millhopper? the limestone of florida--the aquifers, with their underground rivers, sinkholes, and springs--provide an immense reservoir for storing the groundwater essential to physical life in the region. the monuments of america similarly store the mythologies (the invented traditions) that are essential to the spiritual life of the nation. but don't forget the fates of atlantis and of ubar, which resonate with the story of the empire evoked in "kubla khan," subtitled, "a vision in a dream." as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, a mighty fountain momently was forced: amid whose swift half-intermitted burst huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: and 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever it flung up momently the sacred river . . . and 'mid this tumult kubla heard from far ancestral voices prophesying war! heeding this prophesy, associated in the poem with a classic feature of karst topography (a river that appears and disappears, as does the santa fe river at o'leno state park, in alachua county), fre proposes to add a school of monumentality to the pleasure-dome of florida tourism. ____________________________________________________________ works cited bartram, william. _travels of william bartram_. ed. francis harper. new haven: yale, 1958. bower, b. "desert sands yield ancient trading center." _science news_ 141 (feb.15, 1992): 100-101. burnet, john. _early greek philosophy_. london: a. and c. black, 1963. burson, nancy, richard carling, and david kramlich. _composites: computer-generated portraits_. new york: beach tree, 1986. chtcheglov, ivan. _situationist international anthology_. ed. ken knabb. berkeley: bureau of public secrets, 1981. coleridge, samuel taylor. _the portable coleridge_. ed. i. a. richards. new york: viking, 1950. deford, frank. _there she is: the life and times of miss america_. new york: viking, 1971. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism & schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota, 1987. erdelyi, matthew hugh. _psychoanalysis: freud's cognitive psychology_. new york: freeman, 1985. freud, sigmund. _the interpretation of dreams_. trans. james strachey. new york: basic books, 1955. godzich, wlad. "foreword: the tiger on the paper mat." _the resistance to theory_. ed. paul de man. minneapolis: university of minnesota, 1987. marth, del and martha j., eds. _florida almanac: 1992-1993_. gretna, la: pelican, 1992. mercer, charles. _legion of strangers_. new york: holt, 1964. nelson, theodor holm. _literary machines: the report on, and of, project xanadu_. edition 87.1. published by author, 1987. sacks, peter. _the english elegy: studies in the genre from spenser to yeats_. baltimore: johns hopkins, 1985. santner, eric l. _stranded objects: mourning, memory, and film in postwar germany_. ithaca: cornell, 1990. smith, rex alan. _the carving of mount rushmore_. new york: abbeville, 1985. stubbs, tom. "devil's millhopper." _florida wildlife_ (feb, 1972). sutton, horace. _travelers: the american tourist from stagecoach to space shuttle_. new york: morrow, 1980. tisdall, caroline. _joseph beuys_. london: thames and hudson, 1979. walter, e.v. _placeways: a theory of the human environment_. chapel hill: university of north carolina, 1988. wilber, ken, ed. _the holographic paradigm_. boulder: shambhala, 1982. ____________________________________________________________ illustration acknowledgements 1. j. v. luce, _the end of atlantis_. 2. tw recreational services, inc. 3. paul herrmann, _the great age of discovery_. 4. frank deford, _there she is: the life and times of miss america_. 5. national park service. 6. south dakota school of mining and technology. 7. _hammond nature atlas of america_. 8. kathleen ulmer. 9. sigmund freud, _new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis_. 10. pierre mion, _national geographic_ 165 (1984). 11. nancy burson, richard carling, david kramlich, _composites_. 12. _composites_. 13. state of florida department of natural resources. 14. state of florida department of natural resources. 15. andrew ortony, ed, _metaphor and thought_, (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1979). 16. r.c. benson and r.a. glaccum, _radar surveys for geotechnical site assessment_, (1979). 17. amedeo gigli, in giovanni caprara, _space satellites_, (new york: portland house, 1986). 18. ken marsh, _the way the new technology works_, (new york: simon & schuster, 1982). 19. ute klophaus, _wuppertal_. 20. ute klophaus. 21. benson and glaccum. ------------------------------end-------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------poster, 'techno-communities', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-poster-technocommunities.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.595. part 1/1, total size 6959 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- techno-communities by mark poster university of california, irvine mposter@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may,1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by mark poster, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: steven jones, ed., _cybersociety: computer-mediated communication and community_. new york: sage, 1995. [1] this collection of essays is the first volume i have seen that studies empirically and in their wide variety computer-mediated modes of communication in relation to the question of community. the two other books that come to mind, starr roxanne hiltz and murray turoff, _the network nation: human communication via computer_ (1978) and linda harasim, ed., _global networks: computers and international communication_ (1993), were either, in the former case, more narrowly focused on one form of electronic communication (computer conferencing), or, in the latter, more broadly concerned with all aspects of the social implications of computer communications. _cybersociety_ attempts to look specifically at the kinds of social relations formed through these distant, even disembodied communication practices. it raises the question of the relation of such communications to postmodern culture. jones's book promises to be the first of many to appear in the near future, for i have seen numerous studies of electronic communications posted at various ftp sites on the internet. these studies, including those in the present volume, vary in methodology from quantitative, empirical social science to theoretically inspired "literary" readings. the most interesting combine aspects of both strategies. [2] _cybersociety_ cannot possibly answer the urgent questions being raised about the nature of the relationships being formed on the internet. electronic communities are still inchoate, in the early phases of formation, and their membership is growing so fast and changing so rapidly that the object of study remains evanescent. judging by the studies included here, however, it is possible to see lines of social formation emerging in this electronic space, to begin to delineate its characteristics, and to draw comparisons with other forms of human interaction. what should be avoided are final judgments about the ultimate impact of electronic community upon "real" community. several of the essays in cybersociety contribute significantly toward these goals. [3] nancy baym's "the emergence of community in computer-mediated communication" explores the formation of social relations in a usenet group on soap operas (rec.arts.tv.soaps or "r.a.t.s."). in numerous ways she shows how participants adapted usenet technology to form elements of community, imitating yet altering patterns from face-to-face relations. she draws on various theorists of social forms to argue that usenet relations are indeed a form of community, and she argues convincingly that these internet facilities are becoming important to individuals as loci of identity formation. she wisely avoids technological determinism by indicating how the technology is shaped by users in ways unanticipated by designers or institutors. elizabeth's reid's equally compelling "virtual worlds: culture and imagination" explores the relations emerging on muds (multi-user dimensions) and moo (muds object oriented). reid's essay is a much-reduced excerpt from the full study to be found at ftp.eff.org:/pub/publications/cud/papers on the internet. her subject involves "real-time" conversations in text, as opposed to the messages found on usenet, and is so far more engaging and animated. the simulational structure of a moo is far different from that of a usenet newsgroup. here "rooms" are constructed textually and conversations take place within them, with sentences flashing quickly by on one's screen. subtlety and logically reid demonstrates how these electronic flickers may be construed as social space. [4] of special interest to _postmodern culture_ readers is the concluding essay, "the e-mail murders: reflections on 'deal' letters," by alan aycock and norman buchignani, two anthropologists from concordia university. concordia is the university where the disturbing shootings by valery fabrikant occurred in 1992, and this event is the focal point of the essay. the authors study the usenet newsgroup to which fabrikant posted before the murders, which continued to discuss the events during and after their occurrence, and which became implicated in the subsequent trial. the group sci.research.careers received fabrikant's complaints and initiated lively discussions of the case. aycock and buchignani, well-versed in ethnographic methods and well-read in poststructuralist theory, have a field-day with the ambiguities of e-mail postings in the dramatic context of these events. they conclude ambivalently that internet changes and does not change the nature of social relations, the status of authors and the voices of speakers. [5] another interesting essay examines usenet postings from the lens of hobbes's _leviathan_ to assess the nature of authority and control in cyberspace. another essay studies the formation of moral constraint on usenet through the development of "netiquette," or forms of proper postings. two essays look at computer games in relation to textuality and identity formation: one examines the narrative structure of nintendo games while the other looks at the question of postmodern simulation in simcity and other games. in addition, there is a piece on virtual reality technology in relation to gender. and steve jones has prefaced the entire volume with a clear, informative introduction to the subject and to the individual essays. even readers who find some of these essays dispensible will recognize that the book as a whole raises compelling questions about a stunning new arena of community formation. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[various], 'from: pmc-talk', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-[various]-from.txt archive pmc-list, file pmc-talk.194. part 1/1, total size 48537 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------from: pmc-talk thread: silber, strauss, and post-democratic politics in the academy (11/30/93 1/6/94) (excerpted from the discussion group pmc-talk@listserv.ncsu.edu) _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) the following texts are the property of their authors; quoted material is the property of the person making or publishing the quoted statement. where necessary, permission to republish has been obtained by the editors of _postmodern culture_. this selected compilation, as a whole, is copyright (c) 1994 by _postmodern culture_, all rights reserved. from: pmc-talk is an occasional feature of _postmodern culture_, consisting of excerpts from the discussion group pmc-talk@listserv.ncsu.edu. subscription to pmc-talk is independent of subscription to _postmodern culture_. to subscribe to pmc-talk, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to pmc@unity.ncsu.edu or use standard listserv procedures. ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 11-30-93. pmc-talk is the discussion group for the electronic journal _postmodern culture_ (pmc-list). subscription to pmc-talk is independent of subscription to pmc-list; if you are not subscribed to the journal itself, and would like to be, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to pmc@unity.ncsu.edu (internet). today's topics: boston univ.'s pres. silber --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------sender: "joseph h. hesse" <jhhes@mvax.cc.conncoll.edu> subject: boston univ.'s pres. silber hello. i am new to this list (to e-mail as well) and i feel a responsibility to produce some text for this list, rather than just sit in my room consuming the text of others. has anyone else been reading about pres. silber's recent letter to the faculty of boston university. there was an article today in the boston globe. they quote his letter as saying: "boston university has resisted the imposition of doctrines that would curtail intellectual and academic freedom. it is plain that some versions of critical theory, radical feminism and multiculturism, among other intellectual positions, are ideological in character and inhospitable to free intellectual inquiry." "marxism, structuralism, feminism, etc., do not, in and of themselves, threaten academic freedom, but each of these views is highly susceptible to being formulated as dogma, impervious to any arguments or evidence not already in conformance with the basic tenets of the dogma." "any university that takes academic and intellectual freedom seriously has an obligation to spot these epistemologies and head them off." the globe reports that areas of study that silber mentioned in an earlier report to the trustees were: "critical legal studies, revisionist history, afro-centrism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, the frankfurt school of critical theory, structuralism and deconstructionism, dance therapy, gay and lesbian liberation and animal liberation." i found so much of this article troubling, on so many different points, that i hardly know where to begin with a commentary on silber's statements. and so, i will wait and see if anyone is interested in this subject before i clutter up this list with my text. any comments or additional information on silber? joseph hesse jhhes.mvax.cc.conncoll.edu =================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-2-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: president silber of boston university's reported remarks call for submissions to nobodaddies call for papers: meeting of society for literature and science --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------sender: <mxk6@psuvm.psu.edu> subject: re: president silber of boston university's reported remarks as someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, i am profoundly disturbed by president silber's reported remarks. are we in for another round of mccarthyism in american academe? and in what ways is dance therapy a threat to the powers that be? ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-4-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: re: president silber of boston university's reported remarks re: silber -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: <mxk6@psuvm.psu.edu> subject: re: president silber of boston university's reported remarks >as someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, i am >profoundly disturbed by president silber's reported remarks. are we in for >another round of mccarthyism in american academe? and in what ways is dance >therapy a threat to the powers that be? don't you know that dancing leads to sex? ----------------------------------------------------------------from: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu (bart simon) subject: re: silber date: fri, 3 dec 93 8:40:58 pst forwarded message: > from michael.lynch@brunel.ac.uk thu dec 2 11:40:10 1993 > date: thu, 02 dec 1993 19:39:20 > from: michael.lynch@brunel.ac.uk (hsstmel) > to: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu > subject: re: silber file > message-id: <qcfe4468@hs-pc-38> > in-reply-to: <pine.3.05.9312011334.a21869-c100000@helix.ucsd.edu> > > > > i'm writing this in response to joseph h. hesse's message about > boston univ. president john silber. hesse quotes from an article > in the boston globe, regarding silber's response to a faculty > council inquiry about academic freedom. hesse states: "i found > so much of this article troubling, on so many different points, > that i hardly know where to begin with a commentary on silber's > statements." i too found this troubling. i spent six years at > boston university, and left two months ago after a very bitter > battle with the bu central administration over my tenure case. > i would be happy to discuss my case further with anyone who is > interested. however, in this message, i would like to elaborate > on hesse's message, and suggest that anyone who finds silber's > remarks ominous (and believe me, he substantiates his words with > deeds) should write to silber to give him a piece of your mind. > i recommend it highly; it is a rare opportunity to engage a > genuine tyrant in dialogue: > > john silber, president > boston university > 147 bay state road > boston, ma 02215 > > be sure to cc. the following parties: > > james iffland, chair > faculty council > department of modern foreign languages > boston university > 718 commonwealth ave. > boston, ma 02215 > [ .... ] > > alice dembner > higher education correspondent > boston globe > 135 morrissey blvd. > p.o. box 2378 > boston, ma 02107-2378 > [ .... ] > there is a genuine chance that if the academic community > supports iffland and faculty council against silber, that we will > see the end to 23 years of demoralization at bu. among the > reasons for getting involved in this battle are that bu, in the > aftermath of a faculty strike in the late '70s offers a model of > a university with a weakened faculty and an administration that > micromanages the faculty's academic affairs. administrators at > other universities may get ideas from this model. silber is not > the only problem at bu. his provost, a fellow named jon > westling, is a particularly nasty piece of work, as is the dean > of the college of liberal arts, dennis berkey. silber and his > gang oversee all appointments and promotions, and consequently > they have built a substantial base of support among faculty (and > especially department chairs). nevertheless, there are very many > faculty at bu who would rejoice if silber's reign came to an end, > but they rarely speak up for fear of getting their salaries > frozen, suffering departmental budget cuts, or being denied > tenure. > > the following is a series of quotations from the silber report > that gave rise to the current flap about academic freedom. the > administration's response to a very mild faculty council request > gives some indication of the orwellian atmosphere of the place. > > ----------------------------------------------------------> ----------------------------------------------------------> > excerpt from john silber, president's report to the trustees, > boston university, april 15, 1993, pp. 93-95. (the report was > delivered as a slide show, and then published for distribution > to parents and others at the time of boston university's > graduation ceremonies. it was not distributed to the faculty [though it was subsequently reprinted in the boston globe --ml].) > ---------------------------------------------------> > ". . . let me speak of another way in which the stewardship of > the board [of trustees] can be judged. beyond anything you've > seen so far, but just as important, this university has remained > unapologetically dedicated to the search for truth and highly > resistant to political correctness and to ideological fads. in > my view, it is not too much to say that among this country's > major research universities we are one of the very few that still > deserve to be called a university in the true meaning of the > term. . . . > > we have resisted relativism as an official intellectual > dogma, believing that there is such a thing as truth, and if you > can't achieve it, at least you can approach it. we have resisted > the fad toward critical legal studies, which i've mentioned > [earlier]. in the english department and the departments of > literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the > deconstructionists to take over. we have refused to take on > dance therapy because we don't understand the theory of it. we > have resisted revisionist history. we've resisted the fad of > allowing every student to do his own thing by determining his own > curriculum, thereby turning the university into a buffet in which > the student has whatever kind of mis-education he, in the midst > of his ignorance, decides he wants. in the philosophy department > we have resisted the frankfurt school of critical theory. > > across the board we have refused to accept hiring quotas, > either of females or of minorities believing that we should > recruit faculty on the basis of talent and accomplishment rather > than any other consideration. we have resisted the official > dogmas of radical feminism. we have done the same thing with > regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal liberation. we > have refused to introduce condom machines into university > buildings and thereby compete with drugstores. we refuse to > believe that students at boston university need a college > education in how to perform the sex act. we believe that > students in america who haven't figured that out before they get > to college are too dumb to come to college. and we have no wish > to share any responsibility whatsoever for what they do with > their knowledge. we will not serve as procurers or facilitators > of sexual liaisons. > > we have resisted the fad of afro-centrism. we have not > fallen into the clutches of the multi-culturists. we recognize > that western culture, so-called, is in fact a universal culture. > western mathematics is the mathematics of the world; western > science is the science of the world; and the western culture has > been philosophically oriented from the start toward finding the > truth, and starting to approach it as closely as possible. it > was in the western cultural tradition that people began to > develop courses in anthropology, in the history of foreign > countries and in comparative religions. buddhism, for example, > was brought into german universities by kant and by hegel. this > is a part of the very meaning of western culture and > civilization~not to be parochial, but to be universal in one's > concern." > > ---------------------------------------------------------------> ---------------------------------------------------------------> > the boston university faculty council got hold of this report, > and in recent weeks the council's committee on academic freedom > requested of silber that he "clarify" what he meant by "resisted" > in the above remarks. silber did not respond for a few weeks, > and faculty council chairman james iffland discussed silber's > report in the bu student newspaper (the daily free press). [....] [in response, silber's assistant general council wrote a letter to the student newspaper, in which he objected, incredibly, that silber's academic freedom was violated by the faculty council's questioning of silber's statement to the trustees. --ml] > ---------------------> another bu official was quoted in the boston globe (november 25, > 1993: 'bu official denies curbs on academic freedom' by alice > dembner): > "'no credible claims of violations of academic freedom have ever > been made against the university administration,' carol hillman, > vice president for university relations said in a statement. > 'prof. iffland's reported statements are nothing more than a form > of acadmic mccarthyism: innuendo based on secret 'evidence' that > does not in fact exist.'" > --------------------------> > silber finally did respond to the faculty council's request, but > as the quotations in joseph hesse's e-mail message indicate, he > dug in his heels. i am told that during a recent faculty > assembly meeting silber accused prof. iffland of being a liar and > a coward. clearly, the bu administration believes that a vicious > offense is the best defense against criticism. iffland and the > faculty council are being pilloried by silber's propaganda > machine. they need support. > > [the faculty council committee on academic freedom and the aaup are currently looking into questions about academic freedom at bu, including tenure and promotion cases, intrusive efforts by bu administrators to edit dissertations and dissertation abstracts, and numerous other complaints. --ml] ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-7-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: re: [anti-ideology politics] [ .... ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: jay lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> subject: re: digest ending 11-30-94 regarding the anti-ideology politics of dr. silber: my deepest sympathy to the faculty of bu to find the intellectual leadership (*is* that what presidents do in our universities?) of their institution entrusted to a political demagogue whose audience is clearly not the serious intellectuals of the bu faculty, but the media and the mass-market for fear-based, anti-intellectual politics. the specific targets mentioned by dr silber are exactly the intellectual movements of our time that challenge establishment orthodoxies and social and cultural privilege. his claim that they lend themselves to dogmatic formulations could be made about almost *any* belief system, including scientific rationalism (have a look at how science is taught at bu, or almost anywhere, for the evidence). the best defense of critical intellectual movements is their offense against established views. use the tools of these perspectives to demonstrate the ideological character of modernism, patriarchy, science, rationalism, and all the historically specific and still politically dominant intellectual formations which had their origins in the interests and values of a very small segment of humanity, who continue to be privileged by them. demonstrate exactly how these values, discourses, and practices do in fact favor the interests of one social caste over those of others. demonstrate the fallacies of its claims to universal validity independent of history and culture. and take the demonstrations beyond the academy to the same media, and wider political constituencies to which silber appeals. if he believes ideology has no place in the academy, convict him of his own ideology./ i recently had occasion to reply strongly to an editorial in a professional journal warning of the "slippery slopes of postmodernism". i am now on the editorial board of that journal. and i received a lot of support reaction from other professionals in the field, especially younger, more vulnerable ones, who confirmed my claim that such statements are not just statements of editorial opinion,b but, because of existing power relations, create a chilling effect on intellectual freedom. silber is apparently using his own position in a somewhat similarly irresponsible manner. it is actions like his which constitute the threat to academic freedom, not ideas that challenge the established wisdom. i think we have a responsibility to say so, publicly. jay lemke. city university of new york. bitnet: jllbc@cunyvm internet: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-14-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: [re: bu demagoguery] leo strauss -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: kessler <ime9jfk@mvs.oac.ucla.edu> subject: re: digest ending 12-7-93 i am working backwards, up the e-mail in my files, but re lemke's remarks about bu: what is a "political" demagogue, in distinction from a demagogue? 2) who are the "serious intellectual faculty" at bu, as distinct from the mere faculty? 3) name, please, the "social castes" we have in the usa, and i mean as "caste"? what journal is lemke helping to edit? he doesnt say? and pardon me if the answers are to be found in previous emails that i will work up the list to look at? and, while i am clear about the note from lemke, 4) how are faculty nowadays to be distinguished from the mass media, the politicos, etc.? they were not different in the borking of thomas, and the borking of bork, or the borking of guinier, etc. one cannot be a tenured mandarin and ride the rails of hardnosed politics to dc too, can one? one never know, nowadays, do one? as fw used to ask. jascha kessler, living in this post-kantian, if not post-cantian day of ours. ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: kv10@cornell.edu (kazys varnelis) subject: leo strauss the recent discussion of boston university president john silber on this list led me to wonder about his possible connection with the academic/political cult/conspiracy/movement around conservative academician leo strauss. while i didn't find any connection, i would like to bring up the question of leo strauss, who is a fascinating and terrifying ((post) modern) figure for me and i would like to know what other members of the list think about him and his work. for anyone who doesn't know who leo strauss is, the following article, ought to be a start. (i should mention that i have explicit permission from the nation to reproduce this article on pmc-list). for further reading i would probably start with: leo strauss, persecution and the art of writing, (glencoe, illinois: the free press, 1952) and shadia b. drury, the political ideas of leo strauss, (new york: st. martin's press, 1988). kazys varnelis ph.d candidate, history and theory of architecture cornell university [because the permission granted by _the nation_ covered only one posting in pmc-talk, most of the article has been deleted in this republication. anyone wishing to retrieve the original logs from pmc-talk can do so by anonymous ftp to ftp.ncsu.edu, cd pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-talk, and get 9312. or, of course, you could get the magazine... --ed.] the nation magazine, copyright (c) 1992, the nation company inc. november 2, 1992 section: vol. 255 ; no. 14 ; pg. 494 minority report; leo strauss column by christopher hitchens, [ .... ] the votaries of leo strauss form a sort of cult movement that is crucially ambiguous about the idea of elitism. the core belief of strauss himself, and the mantra of his many rather odd followers, most of them located in the academy and in the "think tank" culture, was: liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within mass society. the key word here is probably "within"; strauss made a special study of the esoteric and the cabalistic, and believed that since ancient times authentic philosophers had occluded their true meaning so as to make it clear only to a class of adepts. [ .... ] subscriptions: the nation, po box 10763, des moines ia 50340-0763. 1-800-333-8536. ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-17-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: leo strauss bu demagoguery re: the nation piece -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: jay lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> subject: leo strauss the posting about leo strauss did indeed push me to think further about the relation of the academy to democratic ideals. one can read there an invitation to an elitism with the rather serious modernist weakness that it imagines that one caste, narrow in its experience and view of the world, should project its own perspectives as universal and itself as fit to lead the whole of society. mistaking the part for the whole does not seem a very sound foundation for policy-making. but... just how realistic is it to imagine instead that someday everyone is society will take the time, have the interest, acquire the skills, to relate their own perspectives on policy to *any* model of the social system as a whole? some policies are purely local; for them a stakeholder model of participatory democracy seems reasonable. but other policies necessarily must be grounded in overviews that encompass relations among many social groups, agendas, activities. such overviews will always, in the division of labor, the specialization of perspective and interest, be the speciality of *some* groups in society. they need not be monolithically masculine, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual, christian, eurocentric, etc. but neither are they likely to encompass most members of a large, diverse society. they need not necessarily be allowed the power to impose their policy choices on the rest of us, but they will be in some sense in a better position to consider such matters. a lot of the time, a lot of us just won't care. and ... plato, at least, often sounds the theme that people in general need to believe in certain values, or gods, (or ideologies) for a social order to operate at all, and that there is a considerable danger to the social order (*any* social order, not just the ones we are critical of) when intellectual start to undermine general confidence in established beliefs. intellectuals are specialists in critique. we are not supposed to stop at anything (cf. descartes, nietzsche, postmodernism) in our critical inquiries. but there is a danger that we could (if we were listened to, which usually we are not) disturb the social order in ways that would lead to conditions far worse than those we are critical of. it seems very plausible to me that plato wrote with such notions in mind, and that his works do somewhat cloak his most dangerous ideas (in the indirectness of the socratic dialogues, in the famous allegories and "religious" passages, etc.). given the conditions under which many scholars and philosophers have written, even in modern times, not only a moral concern for the danger of their ideas to society as a whole, but a defensive concern for the danger of repercussions on themselves, may have led to a certain intertextual "encoding" of their messages. we are the intellectual descendants of an elitist tradition. we know that democratic ideals are the product of a bourgeois (and masculine, and middle-aged, and modernist, etc.) culture, which we pride ourselves on criticizing and deconstructing in every other way. so what exactly might a post-democratic politics be? jay. jay lemke. city university of new york. bitnet: jllbc@cunyvm internet: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: jay lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> subject: bu demagoguery jascha kessler asks a few questions about my remarks in the silber discussion. the first two seem miss the distinction between qualifiers and classifiers in english semantics. social "caste" is a rather useful idea for postmodernists, i think, since it allows us to refine the matrix of categorial social differences and name its smallest cells: class by gender by age by cultural background by .... the term may be less familiar, but the notion is a useful one, as in the work of pierre bourdieu and many feminist theorists. only one such caste has traditionally been politically dominant in our society. ... the journal i co-edit is _linguistics and education_ (thanks for the opportunity to advertise). as for what really seems to be bothering our correspondent, i'd say it is the touchy relationship between the political and the academic. personally, i'd be happy to see more intellectuals (and not many academics today are, i think) enter electoral politics, or even just the arenas of public opinion-making. what is being objected to in the case of dr. silber is an attempt, not within the context of civil politics but within that of an academic institution, to control opinion rather than to lead it. and i take it some are suggesting that he is motivated as much or more by the approval of such a move by those outside his university than by his responsibilities to the university itself. i am not, i hope, naive about the inevitable political dimensions of all institutions and indeed of all intellectual inquiry. but direct politically motivated efforts to control what are or are not acceptable theoretical perspectives within the academy should be resisted. the result of such efforts tends to intellectual monoculture, and extinction. jay. jay lemke. city university of new york. bitnet: jllbc@cunyvm internet: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: kessler <ime9jfk@mvs.oac.ucla.edu> subject: re: digest ending 12-14-93 re: the nation piece. why, one may ask, the phrase "cynical briefing"? why the use of the term briefing, and why the adjective. if one must not put one's trust in princes, neither should one put one's trust in "nations(s)." let us not forget where that journal is coming from, and who is the cynical editor of it, an unreconstructed stalinist, to say the best and the least of him, who assumes that his view of the world is a true one. talk about simpletons in the pm parish. str.is one thing; quayle is another. and william kristol is a lad with a rather superior education and iq, as indeed is his father. please don't start conflating strauss, straussians, kristol and quayle. it would be rather shoddy argumentation, about anything. thinking, it is not. kessler ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 12-19-93. [ . . . . ] today's topics: re: digest ending 12-17-93 [plato's ideas] re: digest ending 12-17-93 [avoiding bad faith] re: digest ending 12-17-93 [evil geniuses of poststructuralism] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: kessler <ime9jfk@mvs.oac.ucla.edu> subject: re: digest ending 12-17-93 one suggestion may be to ask, what is dangerous about plato's ideas? and to whom are they dangerous? and why are they dangerous? what is meant by "post-democratic"? alpha beta delta gamma, out of bottles? as huxley suggested in bravenew world? what is a caste? where are the intellectuals j lemke speaks of? what makes them intellectuals? professors are intellectuals? intellectuals are professors? such a glibness and fluency of talk is rather worrisome, as it assumes a complaisant audience, knowingness and agreement on categories as defining the world we live in according to this sort of academic argot. sentimental, suicidal, canting, and bullying in the extreme. as if the folks quoting a christopher hitchens did not realize that he publishes in journals supported by megabucks in foundations that are based upon extraordinary wealth. in italy years ago, this talk emanated from the "mink coat communists." in the states, today, it is the limousine liberals and their academic janissaries, who know not what they say or do. in a word, it is sheer bad faith. pontificating bad faith. kessler here, not even breathing hard, but waiting for a sign, give us a sign. ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: cywb000 <cywb@musica.mcgill.ca> subject: digest ending 12-17-93 i was distressed but not shocked by kazys varnelis' message to pmc-talk about strauss. the first two paragraphs of _the nation_ article seem to demonstrate well enough that the article is confusing, not very interesting, boring, probably easy to take apart. but who wants to comment? i was going to wait to hear other pmcers reactions, but would like to address this message by k. varnelis as a show of some kind of dissatisfaction with the ideas of, what i see as the l. strauss club, and show my support for those who counteract the ls club (perhaps by adding a "d" to the end of "ls"). a question in my own mind seems to be, "if i only had the force of a.r. stone or a. kroker-featured in the most recent mondo 2000-i could clear up my own confusion, and perhaps push this issue over the edge?" what little force i have is the wish to see a.r. stone, kroker, h. giroux, c. penley, and d. haraway (there are others) placed in the same room with these folks (the ls club). perhaps other pmcers can tell me if this leo strauss crowd would be an easy target. my reaction is central to the problem of epistemological battles that go on in individuals' lives everyday. by epistemological battle i mean the frustrations of everyday life-where proof and burden of proof are too overwhelming to accumulate against some wrong that is being committed to you or to anyone else. the aggression of silence is a good example. silence does not seem to be a discourse, and as marika finleyde monchy says, the "(silence of) death is not a discourse". an academic elite, or whatever is being referenced (i am not familiar with the texts being discussed; although i know that henri giroux has a major contention with bloom, and i side with giroux), seems to be a community of silence. it's hard to pin these kinds of opinions down, not simply because they are not available but because they are so unpleasurable. [it is obvious that they are available, k. varnelis was given permission to distribute the article in question.] the discussion on pmc has been a difficult one. the reason people and individuals arm our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with theories, words, texts, languages, codes, intellectual tools, etc., is specifically so individuals and people can, as bourdieu advocates, avoid bad faith, and get on with the business of creating. i suppose people and individuals might also arm our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with good vocal skills, good writing skills, and a bit of time to address all these potential threats to the creations and creativities many would like to see and do-not just an intellectual elite. i am dissatisfied with the issue at hand. it gets nasty but not nasty enough. perhaps alphonso lingis is monitoring pmc-talk and could respond. perhaps j. bigras could respond from the grave. i feel lucky that lemke is around; the bu situation is very gray. i hope we are living something postkantian. lemke, as for ""post-cantian"", well responded to. brennan murray wauters, cywb@musica.mcgill.ca ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: ayeaman@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu subject: re: digest ending 12-17-93 seems to me that there are some worthwhile points of view being discussed here beyond the slurs against what spivak ironically calls the evil geniuses of poststructural and postmodern inquiry. (see spivak's chapter in reading & writing differently.) i wonder, with a smile, if president silber took lessons in resistqnce from henry giroux? --andrew internet: ayeaman@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu dr. andrew r. j. yeaman 7152 west eightyfourth way #707 arvada, co 80003 (303) 456-1592 ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 1-4-94. [ . . . . ] today's topics: re: democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century post-democratic politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------sender: peter stupples, university of otago, new zealand pstupples@gandalf.otago.ac.nz i was struck by the importance of the issues raised by jay lemke in response to the leo strauss exchanges. is seems to me that the recent and current events in the former soviet union illustrate the problems involved in democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century. the communist system, as it had evolved under lenin and stalin, was clearly non-democratic and had also lost the support of the majority of russian intellectuals. communism, in the form it had genetically assumed, has been destroyed and replaced by a swiftly changing array of models that have the appearance of being democratic in the western tradition. these changes have been accompanied by an almost complete economic collapse. where stakeholders have had the opportunity to voice an opinion over the past few years they have tended to favour either 1. a return to a form of communism (better the devil you know we were better off under brezhnev there was a class system in operation in which everyone had a stake and knew the rules) or 2. an inchoate, archaic nationalism (russia for the russians, we need a slavonic solution to a slavonic problem, we are the only ones who know how to deal with our historical development). the academy, which was enthusiastically behind forms of socialism in 1917, no longer has a voice certainly not a voice that is listened to. however i was impressed on a visit to the russia provinces in may 1992 how well local governments were capable of running their own affairs, able to coordinate local groups of stakeholders into purposeful activity. there seems to be something that can be learnt from this, such as you cannot interfere with the genetic development of historical processes russia is going back to 1916 and rerunning the issues that are pertinent to it the power of *modern* central governments must be anti-democratic because of the distance from the stakeholders and the self-interests of a vast bureaucracy that is not answerable to those stakeholders. centralised government is a *modern* idea, it is paternalistic, at best the state looking after the less privileged, who remain without privileges, hope, education, a stake, but are kept fed, clothed and housed to stop them being a social nuisance post-modernist debates point to the break up of centralising tendencies in the interests of giving stakeholders and stakeholder groups a greater voice and giving room for a diversity of living-choices within communities. the platonic idea that people in general need to subscribe to a set of beliefs for social order to be possible is one of those leaps of faith that we no longer need to make. when all *beliefs* are undermined then we can all start looking at the construction of the real world, at the hopes and aspirations of real people and try to find the obviously very complex mechanisms that will allow them to flourish. this is not *post*-democratic politics but, perhaps for the first time, real democracy, the voice of the people, all the people, not simply being listened to by the political-class-patriachy representatives. we do not need beliefs but knowledge. beliefs distort any objective view of the world. knowledge leads to respect for the views and aspirations of others. government structures need to be deconstructed in a physical sense until they are responsive to local interests. policy-making should be local policy-making with pacts between localities to cover equity issues such as the funding of health and education. silber's comments are part of the defensive response of the patriarchy concerned about critical ideas that break down belief and reveal a real world and real issues that might be uncomfortable for the elite. leo strauss gives such ideas an intellectual gloss but are promted, it seems to me by a disrepect for the views of others, a quest for modernist simplicity at the expense of real-life diversity. sorry to go on at length and in such prolix randomness. but jay lemke posed a question on the nature of post-democratic politics and i thought it wortha response, even one hurriedly and badly put together. ----------------------------------------------------------------sender: jay lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> subject: post-democratic politics maybe pmc is more flame-proof than other lists, but kessler's effort to foreground critical perspectives and lament complaisance seemed somewhere between negative and incendiary in its tone. i certainly think it unwise to reply in kind. i also suspect that his specific questions were rhetorical (what makes someone an intellectual? why are/aren't professors intellectual? etc.) and his point that we should not take it so much for granted that the common wisdom of the moment on such matters is enough for our discussions. but we all know that every assumption, every few words of every discourse, presents an opportunity for endless critical re-examinations, none of which ever lead to definite conclusions, though they are certainly essential to the process of coming up with newer discourses that serve us in some practical ways. on pmc i assume that we are not in search of "truth" or old believers that somewhere there is one such true and flawlessly reasoned discourse which must then prove to be, if not the only useful one, then the most useful one. all the practices of life are carried on, often quite well, with discourses in which any of us could "find" numberless flaws. i read in kessler's message (digest 12-17-93) a certain impatience with political superficiality, suggesting someone who, like me much of time, is more satisfied by analyses of how power sustains privilege and wraps itself in pseudo-intellectual mystification and misdirection. but these are old discourses. they have been around and widely circulated in our communities for more than a couple of generations now. they feel old, modernist, not-ours. they seem wonderfully satisfying as critique and totally useless as a guide to constructive action. their political heart, which i largely share, needs a new voice, and their theoretical assumptions need a good post-modernist updating. what would a post-democratic politics be indeed? how can there be a democracy of equals when we have no idea how in practice to make a society of equals? when this ideal assumes a privileging of the isolated individual as the ultimate political unit, and we know that this assumption is itself a specifically bourgeois ideological creation? what is the context in which we pose the problem of politics but that of the bourgeois state, a creation, like many before it, for the imposition of control by some upon all. is there a solution to the paradox of scale in politics that what works in small communities does not generalize to extremely large ones? can an entity like a nation-state operate as a community except by illusion and artificial manipulation? how can there be a single ideal of politics in the absence of a coercively dominant ideology? if political ideals are inseparable from cultural systems as wholes, what other domains of cultural practice and belief most influence them? if all political critique is situated and positioned, then how is the modernist critique of capitalism, and the subsequent critical obsession with coercive power relationships itself limited, itself a product of masculine perspectives, of middle-class perspectives, of middle-aged perspectives, of european and judaeo-christian perspectives, and of their specific interests? i think that postmodernism has largely held back from critical confrontation with modernist political ideals (and i do not mean classical liberal representative democracy, i mean neo-marxist post-revolutionary participatory democracy) because we would also indict the political status quo and have not had any alternative to offer. it may also be because p-m is just crossing over from the humanities to the social sciences (by dissolving the modernist boundary between them). jay lemke. city university of new york. bitnet: jllbc@cunyvm internet: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu ======================================================================== pmc-talk digest: postings for the period ending 1-6-94. [ . . . . ] today's topics: postmodern politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sender: jay lemke <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu> subject: postmodern politics most of the replies i have had, on and off the list, to my queries about postmodernist, if not post-democratic, politics, have been seriously thoughtful and i am grateful for their perspectives. they all, as well as responses i have had to this question from others lately, point toward localism as the key. i am as much in favor of localism as anyone, for dealing with local issues, and in earlier posting i pointed out that the participatory democracy ideal seems workable locally, on the scale of relatively small human communities. many people also noted that the idea of nationwide (much less worldwide) political ideals or systems is a modernist, centralist one. and at least one person believed that they were not necessary to large-scale communities. but i do not think that these answers are good enough. even the premise of "think globally, act locally" assumes that local actions must take account of a larger view of needs and consequences. local actions interact. they contribute to emergent effects on higher scales of organization of self-organizing ecological-social systems. they produce conflicts which are not resolvable except by appeal to the interests of some larger system. some forms of action require trans-local cooperation, whether on the scale of large cities, nation states, world regions, or globally. our present political solution to these problems is an unstable compromise between the older nation-state system (treaties, eeclike confederations, wars, economic power-leveraging, etc.) and the emerging global economic-communication order (multinationals, economic interdependence, global information networks). the older system was already shifting from an ownersdecide model to an experts-and-managers-decide model as the scale and complexity of the systems to be controlled grew; that has now been accelerated by the transnational developments. this is not a system that entirely works; it is still biased by the disproportiate representation in it of elite caste interests, but it has the capacity in principle to take mass popular interests and perceptions into account, insofar as those trained to do so can in fact appreciate them. at least this is a model, however flawed, which has evolved naturally within the social system, and which faces up to the fact that many decisions require a degree of global knowledgeability that is not possessed locally. this basically technocratic political model is thoroughly modernist. it has a horrendous ideology that buries values issues under "expert-knowledge" issues. it regards its knowledge as objective rather than viewpoint-limited. it is still an elite successor to the previous elite, making common cause with it against the rest of us at the same time that it is displacing it. its worst failures result from the unrecognized subcultural bias of its perspectives. but at least it faces global issues realistically. localist politics seems to me to be romanticist and utopian by comparison. postmodernism, i believe, is itself a consequence of the strengthening of global integration, the second stage following colonialist-imperialist domination, when the exchanges across cultures (and to some extent genders and classes) have started to become more reciprocal as power differentials have leveled out somewhat. it is in that climate that the voice of the other could effectively challenge orthodoxies, even among the dominated. i do not really believe that localism is postmodernist. but neither do i believe in the modernist ideal of global homogenization to the culture of the presently dominant elite. diversity is good, we want it, and no one could have succeeded in getting rid of it in a viable world social order anyway. diversity implies a mosaic of differences, with coherence on local scales, and global integration based on horizontal interdependence rather than vertically imposed control. it is the world social-political order as ecosystem rather than as organism-writ-large, or as the patriarchal family-writ-large. how is this system going to deal with global issues? the very distinction between local and global is disappearing as the system becomes more integrated! it's getting harder and harder to find a strictly "local" issue, in terms of impact, means for effective action, causes, stakeholders .... granted that there are going to be many diverse local ways of coming to grips with these kinds of problems, each of those local communities will find itself already embedded in something larger, and limited in perspective within it. one can say, let's just go local and see what happens -let the system self-organize. perhaps we cannot get the kind of global perspectives on these systems needed to make better local decisions. certainly we cannot hope to control the systems from within them (or from the individual-level of organization), but we are still going to have to make decisions. those decisions are part of the activity of the system. if they are made strictly locally, i suspect the system will re-organize away from global integration, back toward greater local autonomy, and back toward the kinds of ideologies and political practices characteristic of that kind of system (neo-feudalism, anyone?). such a political alternative is not going to compete effectively with the present trend toward greater technocracy. what can? what should? (and if english had a plural interrogative pronoun, whats, i would have used it!) jay. ps. perhaps we have no choice but to evolve through technocracy to something else, something we couldn't envision until we're already living in the new postmodern global system. maybe that presumption releases us from moral responsibility for political vision. somehow, though, i doubt it. jay lemke. city university of new york. bitnet: jllbc@cunyvm internet: jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu ----------------------------end of pmc-talk.194-----------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------perloff, 'russian postmodernism: an oxymoron?', postmodern culture v3n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n2-perloff-russian.txt russian postmodernism: an oxymoron? by marjorie perloff stanford university 0004221898@mcimail.com _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by marjorie perloff, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [1] in the wake, first of %perestroika%, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the soviet union, the temptation has been great to align the "new russian poetry" with its american postmodernist counterpart. and since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto %samizdat% poetry are those associated with the language movement, most notably lyn hejinian, michael palmer, and jean day, as well as hejinian's collaborators (michael davidson, ron silliman, barrett watten) on the extraordinary travel book _leningrad_ (san francisco: mercury house, 1991), there is naturally a feeling on the part of the russian poets themselves that there are serious links between the russian and the american postmodernist avant-garde, whatever these much contested terms really mean. at a reading at new langton street last year, for example, when the question was put to alexei parshchikov and ivan zhdanov, "what american poets have influenced your work?" the immediate reply, i believe from parshchikov, was "the language poets." the same point is made by andrew wachtel and parshchikov in their introduction to kent johnson and stephen m. ashby's new anthology the third wave. "for both groups," they write, "the source of poetic production is found in language itself, and it is with this group that, for the first time, the former underground poets have entered into active poetic dialogue . . . in the last few years these contacts have increased as the soviet poets are actively translating and being translated by their newfound american poetic soulmates."^1^ [2] the new rapprochement between our two poetries has already made a difference, especially on this side of the globe. the influx of energy, enthusiasm, and daring, as well as a new range of source and thematic materials, surely stands behind such recent books as lyn hejinian's _oxota_, a long "novel in verse" on the model of pushkin's _evgeni onegin_ and clark coolidge's forthcoming _russian nights_. at the same time, the question remains, at least for me, whether the homologies between the two poetries are really as prominent as they are claimed to be. and a related question would be: given the enormous political, social, and cultural differences between our two countries over the past century, and given the long midcentury hiatus of the stalinist years, which largely suppressed the "modernism" to which recent developments are supposedly "post," can we expect to find comparable poetic paradigms? [3] take dmitri prigov's discussion of conceptualism in his manifesto "what more is there to say?" and mikhail epstein's elaboration on it, both included in _the third wave_. the conceptual art movement in the u.s. dates from the late sixties; as ursula meyer explains it in the introduction to her handbook by that title: the function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist's concern was the production of the work and the critic's was its evaluation and interpretation. during the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of conceptual art, which eliminated this division. conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts . . . . an essential aspect of conceptual art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. thus, many conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. more specifically: the conceptual art of joseph kosuth and vito acconci, of hans haacke and john baldessari took up the challenge presented by duchamp, "preferring the ideational over the visual" and rejecting the notion of a predominantly retinal art, where "meaning" is hidden by a set of visual signs. art as idea, art as information or knowledge: in practice, this meant that the catalogue could become the exhibition, or indeed, that there would be no exhibition at all, only a series of writings and blueprints. [4] now compare this aesthetic to epstein's account: what is conceptualism?. . . . almost any artistic work . . . is conceptual insofar as there lies within it a certain conception, or the sum of conceptions, which the critic or interpreter draws out. in conceptualism this conception is demonstrably separable from the live artistic fabric and even becomes an independent creation, or "concept" in itself. . . . a "break between the idea and the thing, the sign and reality, is created." and epstein cites a passage from dimitri prigov: the outstanding hero- he goes forward without fear but your ordinary hero- he's also almost without fear but first he waits to see: maybe it'll all blow over and if not-then on he goes and the people get it all. and he comments: behind these lines by dmitri prigov we easily recognize the formula that lies at the basis of numerous pathetic works about the fearless, all-conquering hero and his slightly backward but devoted comrades in arms. the typical problem with such odic writings is how to reliably hide the formula behind the clothing of linguistic beauty so as to make it frighteningly similar to a live person. the poet-conceptualist, on the other contrary, drags the formula out into the open from the sum of its aesthetic imprintings and changes of form, placing it as an independent fact before the reader's perception. . . . conceptualism . . . unmask[s] beneath the covering of lyrical soulfulness or epic picturesqueness the skeleton of an idea-engendering construct. (tw 270) for epstein--and his explanation accords with prigov's own as well as with lev rubinshtein's statement of his "conceptualist" poetics in _the third wave_--conceptualism evidently refers to the willingness to reveal the ideological base which a more conventional poetry would try to mask beneath a set of decorative trappings. but ironically, this urge to "expose" the ideologeme and separate it from its material embodiment is almost the antithesis of the conceptualism of our sixties and seventies, which rejected the notion of hidden meaning outright, making the case that psychological depth was itself an anachronism. whereas american conceptual art was an attack from the left on the vapidity and "prettiness" of late abstract expressionism and color-field painting, the soviet version is concerned to unmask the "aesthetic imprintings," designed to make socialist realist poetry and painting more palatable. conceptualism, in this sense, is more properly a form of parody or pastiche, a self-conscious mode of satire that takes nothing on faith and is determined to reveal precisely those inner motivations of poetic and artistic discourse that our own conceptualists have denied existed. [5] the other two movements described by epstein- metarealism and presentism--pose somewhat different problems for the anglo-american reader. "metarealism" (here epstein includes such poets as arkadii dragomoshchenko, nadezhda kondakova, viktor krivulin, olga sedakova, and ivan zhdanov) is defined as "the pull toward the construction of supertemporal models of reality," the emphasis being on metamorphosis, the process whereby "one thing %becomes% the other." metarealism, says epstein "has little in common with surrealism, since it turns not toward the subconscious but to a supraconsciousness" (tw 177). to which surrealists would respond that in practice, one can't quite separate the two. indeed, such precursors of surrealism as rimbaud and lautreamont made use of precisely the kind of imagery epstein describes; the passionately erotic, discontinuous, and hallucinatory poetry of dragomoshchenko, for that matter, immediately brings rimbaud to mind although there are no doubt important russian models as well. [6] the third major movement--presentism or the "poetry of presence"--is characterized by its "taste for contemporaneity and the technological plasticity of objects," but without the "social-aesthetic aggressiveness and evangelical utopianism" of futurism (tw 280). "presentism," writes epstein, "affirms the presence of an object, its visibility and tangibility, as the necessary and sufficient conditions of its meaningfulness." and his gives the example of parshchikov's "catfish," as a phenomenological lyric that tries to capture "the sum total of perceptions: [the catfish] in water and on land, waking and sleeping" (tw 281). [7] i find this account somewhat puzzling because postmodernism is generally characterized as precisely the calling into question of presence, of center, of organic wholeness, and so on. from the late sixties, when derrida published _ecriture et difference_, "presence" has been one of those terms whose role is to be negated in favor of its antithesis, "absence." how, then, do we deal with a poetry like parshchikov's? his own "conversation between an editor and a poet," reprinted in _the third wave_, doesn't help us very much. parshchikov says he "want[s] to be plugged into the search for a new descriptive language," but then adds that "there is no 'old' language, only the discovery of new ways, only the growth of language." and further: "biochemistry is leading us into a world where the border between the living and the dead is washed away. . . . and so i wrote about the concrete work on earth" (tw 24). [8] let us look more closely at the poetry itself. here is "begstvo--ii," (the original is represented here by my transliteration), together with michael palmer's translation in _the third wave_, and the word-for-word translation of parshchikov's poem by andrey patrikeyev: (peel. peel i priboy. myedlenuh, kak smyati pakyet tselofanovi shevelitsuh rasshiryayass zamootnyayetsuh pamyat. samalyot iz peska snizhayetsuh, takovim nye yavlayayass vnachalyeh voini mirov kroochye beryot poleen vpoot' sobirayass, ya chistil ot nassekomikh radyator, kogda novi ogon' spalil puluvinu zemyel', no nass nye nakreel, isskomikh pepyel byenzozapravki. peel i priboy. kroogom nikovo, kromye zaglavshevoso pribora vsadnik li zdyess myertsal, ili snybeo pyeskom possipali leeneeyu priboya vrabye blestyat kablooki i zoobi. tanyets tyanyetso, slovno bredyen vkogtyakh cherepakhi. zrya ya eeshchoo tebya, soboy nye yavlyayass; nass, vozmozhno, rassassivayet zyemla) flight michael palmer dust. sea-form and dust. slowly, the way a crushed cellophane packet stirs and expands, memory blurs. an airplane out of sand descends--not even a plane. at the start of the war of the worlds harsh wormwood takes command. preparing to set out, i was scraping bugs from the radiator when a new fire torched half the land, seeking but missing us. gas station's ashes. sea foam and dust. nothing around but this control panel in eternal malfunction was a rider shimmering there, or was sand scattered from the sky along the shoreline ... flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar. the dance fans out like a seine net in a turtle's claws. in vain i search for you, not knowing who i am maybe the earth dissolves us. (tw 26) "begstvo ii": word-for-word translation andrey patrikeyev (dust. dust and the surf. slowly like the moving crumpled plastic bag the memory expands, getting torrid. a plane made of sand is losing height, without being a plane. the smell of wormwood is more acute at the beginning of the war of the worlds. getting ready to set off, i was cleaning the radiator from insects when a new fire burned half of the lands, without reaching us whom it sought. the ashes of the petrol station. dust and surf. all around there is nobody but the instrument (measuring?) that is telling lies without reserve. was it a rider that glimmered here or was it sand that was strewn over the line of the surf ... heels and teeth glitter in the bar. the dance is like a drag net stretching in the claws of a tortoise. in vain i'm seeking you without being myself; maybe we are being dissolved by the earth.) [9] palmer's fine translation, generally quite close to the original (compare it the word-for-word translation by andrei patrikeyev), presents us with nature images in collision with those of industrialization gone awry. in this nameless and faceless landscape of "sea-foam and dust" (%peel i priboy%), memory expands like "a crushed cellophane packet," and the "gas station's ashes" cover the sand, which scatters like a mysterious airplane or, in the second stanza, like a "rider shimmering there," with "flashing teeth and flying heels in the bar." sea-foam, dust, wormwood, bugs, turtle's claws: these items from the natural world provide a mysterious backdrop, first for the "radiator," from which a "new fire" seems to erupt, "torch[ing] half the land, seeking but missing us," and then in line 9, for the unnamed "instrument" or "measuring" agent--palmer ominously calls it a "control panel in eternal malfunction." the poem inevitably raises the specter of chernobyl, although the meaning is not limited to that particular disaster, the imagery conjuring up any number of nightmare visions having to do with fire, earthquake, and apocalypse. whatever the referent, the poet presents himself as one who can make contact neither with the unnamed "you" nor with himself: the only reality seems to be one of wholesale "dissolution" (%rassassivayet zyemla%). [10] given its hallucinatory imagery, its lack of specification of "i" and "you," its strange conjunctions of unlike objects--rider with flashing teeth and radiator covered with bugs--it seems quite appropriate to call a poem like "flight" "meta-realistic" as well as "presentistic." yet the motive and mode of parshchikov's poem is, in many ways, quite different from, say, the poetry of his translator michael palmer. here, for example, is the opening of palmer's "notes for echo lake 1": he says this red as dust, eyes a literal self among selves and picks the coffee up memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening, a grey wall even toward which you move. it was the woman beside him who remarked that he never looked anyone in the eye. (this by water's edge.) this by water's edge. and all of the song 'divided into silences', or 'quartered in three silences'. dear charles, i began again and again to work, always with no confidence as melville might explain. might complain.^2^ [11] like "flight" palmer's "echo lake" has references to dust, to water's edge, and to the process of memory, but it is much more dislocated--or more strictly speaking, unlocated than parshchikov's "flight." in the latter, the scene, however dream-like, is a constant throughout, even as the positioning of the the poet's "i," however unspecified and generic, is clearly established. this specification is in keeping with the poem's formal structure: four stanzas, each rhyming abab with alternate masculine and feminine rhymes. in palmer's poem, on the other hand--and this would be equally true for, say, john ashbery or lyn hejinian or barrett watten--subjectivity splinters and scenes shift from moment to moment. "the grey wall . . . toward which you move," for example, gives way to "it was the woman," and a declarative sentence like "he never looked anyone in the eye," is followed by the pronomial phrase, "this by water's edge," where "this" has no specific referent. address too shifts, as we see in the "dear charles" passage. formally, the poem is prose--a fragmentary, gnomic prose that alludes to "events" and "objects" we cannot define, even though "notes for echo lake" is, broadly speaking, a lyric "about" the emptying out of the sign, the search for clues that might connect past to present, that might make sense of memory and desire. [12] to generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous, and my aim is by no means to set up some sort of neat presence/ absence dichotomy between our two poetries. but what may be helpful in drawing literary/cultural maps of the postmodern situation is to "thicken the plot," as john cage would put it, by finding the lacunae in the current narrative. one such link, whether overt or not, is french modernist poetry, not so much the poetry of dada or the full-blown surrealism of andre breton or robert desnos, as the %poesie brute% ("raw poetry") of pierre reverdy, rene char and other modernist poets who came of age after world war i. indeed, the poetry of parshchikov, of dragomoschenko, and other poets of the "third wave" seems much more analogous to the intense, elliptical, and mysterious lyric of a reverdy than to the disillusioned, cool, media-reactive postmodernism of late twentieth-century america. here, for example, is reverdy's "chemin tournant," which i reproduce in kenneth rexroth's translation: it is frightening grey dusty weather a south wind on strong wings dull echoes of water in the capsizing evening and in the soaking night spouting turning rough voices complaining a taste of ashes on the tongue the sound of an organ in tbe byways the pitching ship of the heart all the disasters of work when the fires of the desert go out one by one when the eyes drip like blades of grass when the dew falls barefoot on the leaves morning hardly risen somebody seeks a lost address on a lost road the stars brighten the flowers tumble down across the broken branches the dark brook wipes its soft scarce parted lips when the steps of the walker on the counting dial order the movement and crowd the horizon all cries pass and all times meet and me i walk to heaven my eyes in the rays noise about nothing and names in my head living faces everything that has happened in the world and this holiday where i have lost my time^3^ john ashbery, in an essay of the sixties, praised reverdy's poetry for its %transparency%, its presentation of factories and canals as "living phenomena," its "restoration to things of their true name, without the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory."^4^ the mysterious presence things assume in reverdy's poetry ("when the steps of the walker on the counting dial / order the movement and crowd the horizon") is not unlike the mysterious presence, in the middle of parshchikov's "sea-foam and dust," of a measuring "instrument" or "control panel" that has gone awry. [13] the issue is not, finally, whether parshchikov knew reverdy when he wrote his poem or whether the links between them are only coincidental. rather, i want to suggest--and i made a similar point in the case of arkadii dragomoschenko in a recent issue of _sulfur_^5^-that as literary and cultural historians, we should try to flesh in the picture, tracing lineages and cultural formations more accurately than we have done to date. take the simple fact that ashbery and palmer, themselves important to parshchikov, were great disseminators of the french "poetry of presence." such missing pieces in the coming into being of the postmodern puzzle will help us to define the momentum that has brought the _third wave_ brilliantly crashing on our shore. ----------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ _the third wave, the new russian poetry_, ed. kent johnson and stephen m. ashby (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1991), 9. subsequently cited as tw. ^2^ michael palmer, _notes for echo lake_ (san francisco: north point press, 1981), 3. ^3^ pierre reverdy, "turning road," _selected poems_, trans. kenneth rexroth (new york: new directions, 1969), 21. ^4^ john ashbery, "reverdy en amerique," _mercure de france_: pierre reverdy issue, 344 (january/april 1962): 111-12. i reproduce the whole passage and translate the key sentences in _the poetics of indeterminacy: rimbaud to cage_ (princeton: princeton university press, 1981), 35-37. ^5^ _sulfur_ 29 (fall 1991): 216-21. ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- a draft essay on russian and western postmodernism by mikhail epstein department of slavic languages emory university _postmodern culture_ v.3 n.2 (january, 1993) copyright (c) 1993 by mikhail epstein, all rights reserved. this text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. [this draft essay was circulated during postmodern culture's symposium on russian postmodernism. see sympos-1.193 to find where it was included in the discussion. included here are epstein's comments introducing the essay. --ed.] i suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the western one. the paper was presented at the mla conference in december 1991, at the same panel with marjorie perloff's and barrett watten's papers now proposed for this discussion. also, i will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely "ideological," "eastern" version of postmodernism as opposed to fredric jameson's influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non-western countries (mikhail epstein, _relativistic patterns in totalitarian thinking: an inquiry into soviet ideological language_. kennan institute of advanced russian studies. occasional papers, # 243. washington: woodrow wilson international center for scholars, 1991). what i am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism" became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). in particular, i would like to address you to the articles of vyacheslav kuritsyn "post-modernism: new ancient culture" and sergei nosov "literature and play," accompanied by editorial comments in _novyi mir_ (moscow), 1992, no.2. pp.225-239. [1] first of all, i want to discuss "the origins and the meaning of russian postmodernism," taking the idiom from the famous work of nikolai berdiaev _the origins and the meaning of russian communism_ (_istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma_, paris, 1955). communist teachings came to russia from western europe and seemed at first completely alien to this backward semi-asiatic country; however russia turned out to be the first nation to attempt to enact these teachings on a world-wide scale. berdiaev has shown convincingly that communism was intimately linked to the entire spirit of russian history long before russia learned anything about marxism. [2] the same paradox, in my view, relates to the problem of russian postmodernism. a phenomenon which seemed to be purely western, in the final analysis exposes its lasting affinity with some principal aspects of russian national tradition. [3] among the different definitions of postmodernism, i would single out as the most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the french philosopher baudrillard calls "simulation." other features of postmodernism such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of the oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem derivative of this phenomenon of hyperreality. models of reality replace reality itself which therefore becomes irrecoverable. [4] indeed, the previous dominant trends in western twentieth century culture such as avant-gardism and modernism were elitist in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society either because of an alienation from it (modernism) or because of an effort to transform it in a revolutionary way (avant-gardism). as for metanarratives such as marxism and freudianism, their main point was to unmask the illusions of consciousness (ideological perversions) in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production or libidinal energy. [5] yet once the concept of reality ceases to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, and elitist arts, which opposed it, begin to wane. [6] the appeal to a reality principle evokes the phenomena of great western science, philosophy, and technology and thus may be considered the cornerstone of all western civilization. according to this principle, reality must be distinguished from all products of human imagination and there are practical means which permit the establishment of truth as a form of correspondence between cultural concepts and reality. science, technology, and even the arts strove to break through different subjective illusions and mythological prejudices to the substance of reality by way of objective cognition, practical utilization, and realistic imitation respectively. the last great metanarratives of western civilization, those of marx, nietzsche, and freud, are still penetrated by this obsession with capturing reality and they relentlessly attempt to demystify all illusory products of culture and ideology. [7] during the twentieth century, however, an unexpected twist transformed these highly realistic and even materialistic theories into their own opposites. while marxism, freudianism, and nietzscheanism all appealed to reality as such, they also produced their own highly ideologized and aestheticized realities, and more sophisticated tools of political and psychological manipulation. reality itself disappeared, yielding to the most refined and provocative theories of realities and, next, to the practical modes of the production of reality. now in the late twentieth century, what is produced is objectivity itself, not merely separate objects. [8] there are different modes for the production of reality. one is a soviet-style ideocracy that flourished precisely on the basis of marxism, which claimed to denounce all ideologies as mystification. another is an american style psychosynthesis which includes the comprehensive system of mass media and advertising that flourished precisely on the basis of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, both of which claimed to denounce all illusions of consciousness. [9] in other words, what we now see as reality is nothing more than a system of secondary stimuli intended to produce a sense of reality, or what baudrillard calls "simulation." in spite of any seeming resemblances, simulation is the opposite of what was understood as imitation during the renaissance or the enlightenment. imitation was an attempt to represent reality as such without any subjective distortions. simulation is an attempt to substitute for reality those images which appear even more real than reality itself. [10] the production of reality seems rather new for western civilization, but it was routinely accomplished in russia throughout its history. ideas always tended to substitute for reality, beginning perhaps from prince vladimir who in 988 adopted the idea of christianity and implanted it in a vast country in which there was hardly a single christian. [11] peter the great ordered russia to educate itself and vigorously introduced newspapers, universities, academies. therefore they appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliberateness, the forced order of their origination. even the first factory in russia was built not out of some industrial need, but because czar anna decided to build a factory to match western development. in essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a "newspaper," this--an "academy," this--a "constitution"; but all of this did not grow naturally from the national soil, but was implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs--perhaps they will take root and germinate. too much came from the idea, the scheme, the conception, to which reality was subjugated. [12] in his book _russia in 1839_, marquis de coustine expressed this simulative character of russian civilization in a most insightful manner. "russians have only names for everything, but nothing in reality. russia is a country of facades. read the labels they have 'society,' 'civilization,' 'literature,' 'art,' 'sciences'--but as a matter of fact, they don't even have doctors. if you randomly call a russian doctor from your neighborhood, you can consider yourself a corpse in advance."^1^ one can ascribe this negative reaction to a foreigner's malevolence, but aleksandr herzen, for one, believed that marquis de coustine had written the most fascinating and intelligent book about russia. this frenchman had expressed most precisely the simulative character of an entire civilization, in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan. [13] this nominative civilization, composed completely of names,^2^ discloses its nature in russian postmodernist art, which shows us a label pulled off of emptiness. conceptualism, the prevailing trend in contemporary russian art, is a set of labels, a collections of facades lacking the three other sides.^3^ [14] the most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of russian civilization was, of course, petersburg itself, erected on a "finnish swamp." "petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary--%umyshlennyi %) and abstract city on earth," wrote dostoevsky in "the notes from the underground": the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction. [15] a shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. the realization of its intentionality and "ideality," simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra--in dostoevsky: "a hundred times, amidst this fog, i've been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: 'and what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn't this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn't it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, i think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?'"(_a raw youth_, emboldening mine--m. e.).^4^ [16] this vision could have just come off of the canvas of a conceptual artist, a postmodernist master such as eric bulatov, for example. contemporary russian conceptualism emerged not from the imitation of western postmodernism, but rather from precisely that petersburg rotten fog and dostoevsky's "importunate reverie." potemkin villages^5^ appears in russia not simply as a political trick, but as the metaphysical exposure of the fraudulence of any culture or positive activity. it is an outward appearance of a type which almost does not conceal its deceptiveness, but also does not destroy its illusion in a purposeful way, like hinduist maya should be destroyed. rather it is anxious to secure its preservation as an appearance, but in no way prepares to ground or fill it in. the intermediary stratum between "is" and "is not" is that edge along which the "enchanted pilgrimage" of the russian spirit slides. [17] after the bolshevik revolution, this simulative nature of reality became even more pronounced. all social and private life was subjugated to ideology, which became the only real force of historical development. those signs of a new reality of which the soviets were so proud in the thirties and fifties, beginning with stalin's massive hydroelectric plant on the dnieper river and ending with khrushchev planting of corn and brezhnev's numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. this artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts. communist %subbotniks%^6^ in the soviet union were examples of hyperevents which simulated "the feast of labor" precisely in order to stimulate real labor. [18] in baudrillard's definition of this phenomenon of hyperreal: "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--precession of simulacra--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [written by borges] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the empire, but our own. %the desert of the real itself%."^7^ [19] anyone who looks at a map of the former soviet union today will agree that such a huge country had to arise initially on the map before it could expand in reality. today we can address this phrase "the desert of the real itself" directly to what has remained from the soviet union. this country is originally poor not with commodities, comfort, hard currency, but with reality itself. all shortcomings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols themselves comprise the sole reality that survives in this country. [20] to sum up: reality as such gradually disappears throughout russian history. all reality of pagan rus' disappeared when prince vladimir ordered the introduction of christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. similarly, all reality of moscow rus' vanished when peter the great ordered his citizens "to become civilized" and shave their beards. all reality of "tsarist" russia dissolved when lenin and bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. finally, all soviet reality collapsed in several years of gorbachev's rule yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. probably, the ideas of capitalist market and free enterprise have now the best chance in russia, though they remain there once again pure conceptions against the background of hungry and devastated society. personally i believe that in a long run eltsin or somebody else will manage to create a sumulacrum of a market for russia. realities were produced in russia out of the ruling elite's minds, but once produced they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities. * * * [21] almost all investigators of postmodernism cite america as a wonderland in which fantasies become more real than reality itself. in this sense, however, america is not alone. russia, as distinct from europe, also developed as a realized dream. it is true that the postmodernist self awareness of soviet reality emerged later than parallel philosophical developments in the west. nevertheless, already in the mid-seventies, so-called conceptual art and literature became more and more popular in the soviet union, suggesting a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire phenomenon of soviet civilization. as distinct from realistic literature of the solzhenitsyn type, conceptualism does not attempt to denounce the lie of soviet ideology (from false ideas to a genuine reality). as distinct from metaphysical poetry of the brodsky type, it does not turn away from soviet reality in search of higher and purer worlds (from false reality to genuine ideas). conceptual painting and writing, as presented by ilya kabakov, erick bulatov, dmitry prigov, vsevolod nekrasov, lev rubinstein, vladimir sorokin, convey ideas as the only true substance of the soviet lifestyle. paradoxically, false ideas comprise the essence of genuine reality. [22] the erasure of metanarrative is another important feature of postmodernism that is worthy of explanation. in the soviet case, it is an indisputably marxist metanarrative. there is a common, though fallacious, belief that only under and after perestroika, have marxist teachings begun to dissolve into a variety of ideological positions. in truth, this dissolution began at the very moment when marxism was brought to russia and further progressed when it turned into marxism-leninism and soviet marxism. [23] perhaps more than other metanarratives, marxism relies on reality and materiality as the determinant of all ideological phenomena. when this teaching came to a culture in which reality had always been a function of powerful state imagination, a strange combination emerged: materialism as a form and tool of ideology. paradoxically, marxism was a catalyst for this transformation of russia into one great disneyland, though one less amusing than terrifying. before the bolshevik revolution, not all aspects of material life were simulated and some place remained for genuine economic enterprises. but now that russian ideology has assimilated materialism, all material life has become a product of ideology. [24] marxist teachings themselves also suffered a paradoxical transformation. on the one hand, marxism became the only theoretical viewpoint that was officially allowed by the soviet regime. for this very reason, it ironically grew to include all other possible viewpoints. internationalists and patriots, liberals and conservatives, existentialists and structuralists, technocrats and ecologists all pretended to be genuine marxists, pragmatically adapting the "proven teaching" to changing circumstances. in the west, marxism preserved its identity as a metanarrative, giving its own specific interpretation of all historical phenomena because it was freely challenged by other metanarratives (such as christianity and freudianism). in the soviet union, however, marxism became what postmodernists call pastiche, an eclectic mixture of all possible interpretations and outlooks. as an all encompassing doctrine penetrating into physics and theater, military affairs and children's play, soviet marxism was the ultimate achievement of postmodernism. [25] in western society, postmodernism is often regarded as a continuation of the logic of "late capitalism," a condition in which all ideas and styles acquire the form of commodities and become "manageable" and "changeable." in the soviet union, postmodern relativity of ideas arises from its own ideological, not economic, base. all those concepts previously alien to the essence of communist ideology, such as "private property" and the "free market," are now freely entering this ideological space, stretching it beyond its limits--allowing the ideology to embrace its own opposite. this is a process of de-ideologization, but not in the sense of daniel bell's understanding of the phenomenon in his famous book, _the end of ideology_. in the soviet union, de-ideologization means the end of the "particular" ideology which originally had a definite class character, social ideals, and aimed to inspire the proletariat to launch a socialist revolution and construct communism. the current de-ideologization of marxism in the ussr is a process of the universalization of ideological thinking as such, its final move from the realm of militant modernism to a more playful, relaxed, postmodern mentality. [26] this de-ideologization, or super-ideologization, of soviet marxism raises a vital question: are there two distinct postmodernisms, one western and one eastern, or is there a single, shared postmodernism? the best answer, in the author's view, is that "one-and-a-half" postmodernisms exist. the postmodern condition is essentially the same in the east and west, although it proceeds from opposite foundations: ideology and economics, respectively. late capitalism and late communism are polar opposites in terms of economic structure and efficiency, but economics alone does not determine culture as a whole. the fundamental underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism in the east are not economic, they are ideological. communism has proved to be a more radical challenge to capitalism than was originally thought, not only did it change the mode of production, it changed the relationship of base and superstructure in society.^8^ [27] a comparison of capitalist economics* and communist ideology* is imperative for elucidating the postmodernist traits common to both societies. such a "cross" examination would be more interesting than a parallel comparison; if one compares communist and bourgeois ideologies, or socialist and capitalist economics, little can be found beyond commonplace oppositions. it is far more relevant--even from a marxist-leninist perspective--to examine the common ground between communist ideology and capitalist economics, as the two perform identical functional roles in their respective social structures. the circulation of goods in capitalist society is essentially identical to the circulation of ideas in communist society. ideology, like capital, allows for the growth of surplus value, or, in this case, surplus evaluation. in a communist society, every concrete fact of the "material" world is treated ideologically, as evidence of some general historic tendency--its significance increases from one instance of ideological interpretation to the next. [28] the famous formula of a capitalist economy which marx suggested in _das kapital_ is "commodities--money--commodities," or "money--commodities--money." the same formula can be applied in modified form to the ideology of soviet marxism: "reality idea reality," or "idea reality idea." facts are exchanged for ideas in communist society in the same way as goods are exchanged for money in capitalist societies. ideas, as a sort of currency, acquire an abstract form of "ideological capital." they do not constitute material wealth, but the "correctness" of communist ideology. this "correctness," or absolute truth, compensates people for their labor ("heroic deeds and sacrifices"), as well as recoups the cost of so-called "particular" mistakes resulting from party policy. [29] what happens in the late stage of communist development? why does it move toward a "postmodernist condition" along the same path followed by "late capitalist" societies? totalitarianism was a superlative machine for accumulating and exploiting all sorts of ideas: leftist and rightist, revolutionary and conservative, internationalist and patriotic, etc.. however, this machine spawned a phenomenon bigger than itself. just as capital eventually outgrows the capitalist "machine" and becomes a self sufficient entity, soviet ideological capital has outgrown the "machine" of a particular personality or system of ideas and has become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea. such is the current state of soviet society under %glasnost'%. marxist ideology, the most powerful of all modern ideologies, is losing its identity and becoming only one possible interpretation of reality (in the soviet union, it would be the least probable one!). the expansion of marxist ideology overcame marxism as a form of modernity and created the postmodern condition in the ussr. [30] the overarching expansion of soviet ideology occurred in the brezhnev era, when the difference between facts and ideas was practically erased. ideology was gradually transformed from a system of ideas into an all-encompassing ideological environment which retained all possible alternative philosophical systems as latent components within itself. existentialism and structuralism, russophilism and westernism, technocratic and ecological movements, christian and neo-pagan outlooks--everything was compressed into the form of marxism, creating a sort of post-modernist pastiche. [31] one can easily anticipate a counter-argument: how can we refer to soviet postmodernism without a clear identification of soviet modernism? western postmodernism came after modernism, so where is the corresponding progression in soviet culture? [32] it is obvious, however, that russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period was predominantly modernist as such trends as symbolism and futurism indicate. as expressions of a highly utopian vision, the bolshevik movement and october revolution also can be seen as modernist phenomena. the same rigidly consistent style of modernist aesthetics was dominant in the twenties as mayakovsky's and pilnyak's works demonstrate. [33] in this sense, socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction of all possible stylistic devices including romantic, realist, and classicist models. andrei siniavsky's dissident interpretation (in a 1960 famous essay "on socialist realism") of soviet official literature as of a reborn classicism was one-sided, as were more conformist attempts to describe socialist realism in terms of amplified critical realism, or heroic romanticism, or combination of both. socialist realism was not a specific artistic direction in a traditional or modernist sense, it can be adequately approached only as a postmodernist phenomenon, as an eclectic mixture of all previous classical styles, as an encyclopedia of literary cliches. we should trust more to social realism's own self-definition: the unity of a method attained through the diversity of styles (or their mixture, or pastiche). "socialist realism is regarded as a new type of artistic consciousness which is not limited by the framework of one or even of several modes of representation...."^9^ socialist realism simulated successfully all literary styles beginning from ancient epic songs and ending with tolstoy's refined psychologism and futuristic poetics of a placard and a slogan. [34] the epoch of the thirties through fifties in the soviet union was clearly post*modernist, even though the prevailing term at the time was "anti*modernism." the furious struggle against "rotten bourgeois modernism" became the hall-mark of stalinist aesthetics. what was antimodernism in relation to the west was postmodernism in relation to the native, pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist culture. [35] in the sixties and seventies, another wave of modernism came into soviet literature: futurist, surrealist, abstractionist and expressionist trends were revived in literature, painting, and music. the twenties became the nostalgic model for this neo-modernism of the sixties as presented in andrei voznesensky and vasily aksyonov. [36] this explains why later, in the seventies and eighties, another wave of postmodernism arose in opposition to this sixties "neo-modernist" generation. for such postmodernists as ilya kabakov, boris grois, or dmitri prigov there are no figures more adversarial, than malevich, khlebnikov, and other modernists of the early 20th century, not speaking about the latter's successors in the sixties such as andrei voznesensky or vassily aksyonov. consequently, this postmodern generation feels a sort of nostalgia precisely for the typical soviet lifestyle and the art of social realism which provides them with congenial ideological material for their conceptual works. social realism is close to conceptualism in its antimodernist stance: they share highly conventional semiotic devices, the sets of cliches and idioms that are devoid of any personal emphasis and intentional self-expression. [37] these components of the postmodernist paradigm, which in the west were introduced simultaneously, took much longer to mature in soviet culture. the erasing of the semantic difference between idea and reality, between the signifying and the signified, had been achieved by the first soviet postmodernism (socialist realism); while the syntactic interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second postmodernism (conceptualism). although it would seem that these two processes must coincide, it took several decades for soviet culture to pass from one stage to another. [38] the point is that western culture has great respect for reality that is beyond signs. as soon as signs proved to be self-sufficient, they immediately acquired a playful dimension. the russian cultural tradition is much more inclined to view signs as an independent reality deserving of the greatest esteem. therefore it was extremely difficult to accept that these signs which substitute for reality may become objects of irony and aesthetic play. [39] western postmodernism includes two aspects: what can be called the substance of postmodernism, and the interpretation of this substance in postmodernist conceptual framework. in the soviet union, these two aspects developed separately. the period from the thirties to the fifties witnessed the emergence of postmodernism as a specific substance, including the ideological and semiotic dissolution of reality, the merging of elitist and mass culture into mediocrity, and the elimination of modernist stylistic purity and refinement. only in the late fifties, in the works of such poets as kholin, kropivnitsky, vsevolod nekrasov, vilen barsky, and then in the seventies, in the works of ilya kabakov, eric bulatov, dmitri prigov, and lev rubinstein, was the "substantial" postmodernism of soviet culture interpreted precisely in postmodernist terms. signs of heroic labor, collectivism, the striving for a communist future, and so on which previously were perceived seriously as the signified reality itself, now were perceived only at the level of signs themselves, which are susceptible to all sorts of linguistic games. in the 1980s soviet postmodernism finally overtook its second aspect and bloomed into a full cultural phenomenon comparable with its western parallel. [40] certainly, such postmodernist phenomena as borges's stories, nabokov's and umberto eco's novels or derrida's models of deconstruction have had a considerable influence on some contemporary schools of soviet writing, including conceptualism and metarealism. what is much more striking, however, is that the earlier soviet postor antimodernism still influences, though unconsciously, the contemporary american literary scene. for example, tom wolfe's recent manifesto "stalking the billion-footed beast"^10^ gained much attention with his attacks against modernism and his calls for a social novel which would combine fiction and reporting. wolfe involuntarily duplicates the very patterns that stalin's ideologists used in their relentless political tirades against russian pre-revolutionary and western bourgeois modernism. wolfe probably has never heard of zhdanov's infamous 1946 report debasing akhmatova and zoshchenko, let alone read it. nevertheless, wolfe's main points and even his choice of metaphors are the same as zhdanov's: they both compare writing to engineering, for example. wolfe also proposes that writers form brigades to pool their talents for an investigation of the amazing social reality in the united states, as it was in the soviet union of 1930's.^11^ [41] i do not go so far as to suggest that the aesthetic code of stalinism directly influenced such an "antimodernist" writer as tom wolfe. yet the terms of postmodernist debate apply equally well in such embarrassingly different conditions as the u.s.s.r. in the late forties and the u.s. in the late eighties. the striving for a postmodernist world view inevitably brings about an opposition to the abstractness and individualism of modernist writing; it also causes a turn towards common and stereotyped forms of language as imposed by the dominant social order. [42] in a broader perspective, postmodernism can be seen as a type of culture which was developed in both the west and the soviet union, although by different methods. the western version of postmodernism came chronologically later, though it was much more theoretically self-conscious. to try to isolate and identify a western-style postmodernism in twentieth century russian culture proved to be a difficult problem because the formation of specifically russian postmodernism had been divided into two periods. [43] the development of russian modernism was artificially stopped in the thirties, while in the west it developed smoothly up to the sixties. this accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the west, while two separate postmodernisms arose in soviet culture, in the thirties and in the seventies. this obliges us to compare not only russian postmodernism with its western counterpart, but also to examine the two russian postmodernisms: socialist realism and conceptualism. perhaps, it is the chronological gap between them that made both versions so ideologically charged, though in two opposite directions. the first postmodernism is explicitly heroic, the second one is implicitly ironic. nevertheless, if we identify them as two aspects and two periods of one historical phenomenon, these opposite tenets easily neutralize each other, comprising entirely "blank pastiche," to use fredric jameson's definition of postmodernism. [44] the tendency to perceive socialist realism and conceptualism as mutually s/t/imulating aspects of the same cultural paradigm presumably will get further support in the course of future reinterpretations of soviet history in terms of its integrity and the interdependence of its "initial" and "conclusive" phases. two russian postmodernisms complement each other and present a more complicated and self-contradictory phenomenon than western postmodernism which is concentrated in a single period of history. ---------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ marquis de coustine, _nikolaevskaia rossiia_. moscow: izdatel'stvo obshchestva politkatorzhan, 1930, p. 79. ^2^ is it not this "nominativity," this pure concern with names, that gives rise to the sinister power of the %nomenklatura%, that is those people selected by no one and by no means meriting their stature, but who are named "secretary," "director," or "instructor" and have received power by virtue of these names. ^3^ on contemporary russian conceptualism see mikhail epstein "after the future: on the new consciousness in literature," _the south atlantic quarterly,_ spring 1991, v.90, no.2, pp.409-444, and mikhail epstein, "metamorphosis: on new currents in the soviet poetry." _third wave: the new russian poetry._ ed. kent johnson and stephen m. ashby. university of michigan press, 1991, pp. 382-407. ^4^ dostoevsky has several variations on the theme of this vision, which affected him deeply, in _a weak heart_(1848), in _petersburg dreams in verse and in prose_(1861), and in the sketches for _the diary of a writer_(1873). ^5^ dummy villages erected, according to foreigners, by the order of prince potemkin along the route he was to take with catherine ii after the annexation of the crimea, 1783. this expression is used allusively of something done for show, an ostentatious display designed to disguise an unsatisfactory state of affairs, a pretence that all is well, etc. see _russian-english dictionary of winged words_, moscow: russkii iazyk, 1988, p.162. ^6^ voluntary unpaid work on days off, originally on saturdays. ^7^ j. baudrillard. _the precession of simulacra_. semiotexte: new york, 1983, 2. ^8^ for a critical discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled "basis and superstructure: reality and ideology," in marcuse, _soviet marxism_, 106-107. ^9^ _literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar'_. moscow: sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1987, p.416. ^10^ tom wolfe. "stalking the billion-footed beast. a literary manifesto for the new social novel." _harper's_ november 1989. ^11^ these issues are discussed at length in my article "tom wolfe and social(ist) realism." _common knowledge_, oxford university press, 1992, v. 1, no. 2, pp. 147-160. ryan, 'immersion vs. interactivity: virtual reality and literary', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-ryan-immersion.txt archive pmc-list, file ryan.994. part 1/1, total size 57033 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- immersion vs. interactivity: virtual reality and literary theory by marie-laure ryan dept. of english colorado state university mmryan@vines.colostate.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by marie-laure ryan, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] few of us have actually donned an hmd (head-mounted display) and dgs (data-gloves), and entered a computer-generated, three-dimensional landscape in which all of our wishes can be fulfilled: wishes such as experiencing an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; getting out of the body and seeing ourselves from the outside; adopting a new identity; apprehending immaterial objects with most of our senses, including touch; being able to modify the environment through either verbal commands or physical gestures; seeing creative thoughts instantly realized without going through the process of having them physically materialized. yet despite the fact that virtual reality as described above is still largely science-fiction, still largely what it is called--a virtual reality--there is hardly anybody who does not have a passionate opinion about the technology: some day vr will replace reality; vr will never replace reality; vr challenges the concept of reality; vr will enable us to rediscover and explore reality; vr is a safe substitute to drugs and sex; vr is pleasure without risk and therefore immoral; vr will enhance the mind, leading mankind to new powers; vr is addictive and will enslave us; vr is a radically new experience; vr is as old as paleolithic art. [2] this flowering of opinions is fanned by the rhetoric of the gurus of the technology: worldwide, vr is happening in protected pockets of technology; inside giant corporations, universities, and small entrepreneurial start-ups; in berlin and north carolina; covering japan and especially in the san francisco bay area. . . . a rare excitement is in the air, an excitement that comes from breaking through to something new. computers are about to take the next big step--out of the lab and into the street--and the street can't wait. (pimentel and texeira, 7) this sense of anticipation permeates all books about virtual reality. they are less concerned with what has been achieved so far than with what will be available in the (we hope or fear) very near future. we may have to wait until the year 2000 to see vr become an important part of our lives, but since it is depicted so realistically by its prophets, and since it exists very much in the popular imagination, we don't have to wait that long to submit the claims of its developers to a critical investigation. in this paper i propose to analyze vr as a semiotic phenomenon, to place it within the context of contemporary culture and to explore its theoretical implications. [3] my point of departure is this definition by pimentel and texeira: in general, the term virtual reality refers to an immersive, interactive experience generated by a computer. (11) while "computer generated" accounts for the virtual character of the data, "immersive" and "interactive" explain what makes the computer-assisted experience an experience of reality. to apprehend a world as real is to feel surrounded by it, to be able to interact physically with it, and to have the power to modify this environment. the conjunction of immersion and interactivity leads to an effect known as *telepresence*: telepresence is the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. . . . this [mediated environment] can be either a temporally or spatially distant *real* environment . . . or an animated but nonexistent *virtual world* synthesized by a computer. (steuer 76) [4] far from being restricted to vr, the features of immersion and interactivity can be regarded as the cornerstones of a general theory of representation and communication. the purpose of this paper is to explore the problematics of their textual implementation and to assess their significance for contemporary literary theory. immersion [5] since immersion depends on the vividness of the display, its factors are closely related to the devices that lead to realism in representation. a factor that comes immediately to mind is the projection of a three-dimensional picture. the introduction of perspective in painting took a first step toward immersion by creating a sense of depth that integrated the spectator into the pictorial space. but because the medium of painting simulates depth on a flat surface the spectator cannot break through the canvas and walk into the pictorial space. in the visual displays of vr the barrier disappears--there is no material plane of projection--and the user feels surrounded by a virtual world which can be freely "navigated" (as a standard metaphor of networking describes movement in cyberspace). [6] the creation of a 3d effect falls under a more general category that steuer (81) calls "depth of information." this depth is a function of the resolution of the display, i.e. of the amount of data encoded in the transmission channel. as the other main source of immersion steuer mentions the "breadth of information," a category defined as "the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented." breadth of information is achieved through the collaboration of multiple media: image, sound, olfactory signals, as well as though the use of technical devices allowing tactile sensations. vr is not so much a medium in itself, as a technology for the synthesis of all media. [7] sheridan (58) proposes another factor of telepresence which stands halfway between immersion and interactivity: control of the relation of sensors to the environment. in order to feel immersed the user must be able to move around the virtual space and to apprehend it under various points of view. the computer tracks his movements and generates the sensory data corresponding to his position in a continuously shifting display. the control of sensors can go as far as a leaving the body, relocating the center of consciousness into foreign objects and exploring in this way places and objects normally inaccessible to humans, such as the inside of a molecule, or the geography of a distant planet. [8] insofar as immersion is "the blocking out of the physical world" (biocca 25), it cannot be experienced if the user remains aware of the physical generator of the data, namely the computer. the "virtual reality effect" is the denial of the role of signs (bits, pixels, and binary codes) in the production of what the user experiences as unmediated presence. it is significant that pimentel and texeira title their first chapter "the disappearing computer": as in the %trompe-l'oeil% of illusionist art, the medium must become transparent for the represented world to emerge as real. vr represents in this respect the refutation of a popular myth: the personification of the computer as an autonomous mind (a myth fostered by artificial intelligence and its attempt to endow machines with creative thinking). as brenda laurel declares in a book stressing the need for aesthetic concerns in the design of software: "throughout this book i have not argued for the personification of the computer but for its invisibility" (143). jaron lanier, a leading developer of vr systems, echoes: "with a vr system you don't see the computer anymore--it's gone. all that's there is you" (lanier and biocca 166). the disappearance of the computer--which constitutes the culmination of the trend toward increasing user-friendliness in computer design--requires the replacement of arbitrary codes with natural modes of communication. binary coded machine instruction once gave way to the mnemonic letter-codes of assembly languages; assembly languages were in turn translated into high-level languages with a syntax resembling that of natural languages. then arbitrary words were supplanted by the motivated signs of icons on the screen. when machines are enabled to respond to spoken commands, the keyboard will become superfluous. next to go will be the screen and the sight of the machine: visual displays should occupy the entire field of the user's vision, rather than forming a world-within-the world, separated from reality by the frame of the monitor. last but not least, language itself must disappear, at least in those areas where it can be more efficiently replaced by physical actions. in the ideal vr system the user will be able to grab and move objects, to mold them through the touch of the hand, or to change their colors with the stroke of a virtual paintbrush. in this mode of communication there will be no need for the user to translate her vision into sets of precise instructions. purely visual thinking will be implemented by means of practical, non-symbolic gestures. as pimentel and texeira put it: simply, virtual reality, like writing and mathematics, is a way to represent and communicate what you can imagine with your mind. but it can be more powerful because it doesn't require you to convert your ideas into abstract symbols with restrictive semantic and syntactic rules, and it can be shared by other people. (17) the mystics of ages past (such as swedenborg, an esoteric philosopher of the xviiith century) had a term for this radically anti-semiotic mode of communication. they called it "the language of the angels." immersion and literary theory [9] through its immersive dimension, vr inaugurates a new relation between computers and art. computers have always been interactive; but until now the power to create a sense of immersion was a prerogative of art. it is significant that when attempting to describe the immersive quality of the vr experience, the advocates of the technology repeatedly turn toward a metaphor borrowed from the literary domain: for centuries, books have been the cutting edge of artificial reality. think about it: you read words on a page, and your mind fills in the pictures and emotions--even physical reactions can result. (wodaski 79) the question isn't whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. this is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game. (pimentel and texeira, 15) [10] the concept of immersion promoted by virtual reality bears thought-provoking affinities to recent theories of fiction based on the notions of possible worlds and of game make-believe. the possible-world theories of fiction come in many varieties (i.e. david lewis, umberto eco, lubomir dolezel, thomas pavel) and i cannot account for all of them; the following discussion is mainly a synopsis of my own approach. common to all theories, however, is a reliance on the semantic model of a set of possible worlds in which a privileged member is opposed to all others as the one and only actual world. the distinction actual/non-actual can be characterized absolutely, in terms of origin, or relatively, in terms of point of view. in the absolute characterization, the actual world is the only one that exists independently of the human mind; merely possible worlds are products of mental activities such as dreaming, wishing, forming hypotheses, imagining, and writing down the products of the imagination in the form of fictions. vr adds to this catalog of "accessibility relations" a mode of apprehension that involves not only the mind, but also the body. for the first time in history, the possible worlds created by the mind become palpable entities, despite their lack of materiality. the relative characterization of the concept of actuality--advocated by david lewis--regards "actual" as an indexical predicate: the actual world is the world from which i speak and in which i am immersed, while the non-actual possible worlds are those that i look at from the outside. these worlds are actual from the point of view of their inhabitants. among the modes of apprehension that enable us to contemplate non-actual possible worlds, some function as space-travel vehicles while others function as telescopes. in the telescope mode--represented by expressing wishes or forming conjectures about what might have been--consciousness remains anchored in its native reality, and possible worlds are contemplated from the outside. in the space-travel mode, represented by fiction and now by virtual reality technology, consciousness relocates itself to another world, and recenters the universe around this virtual reality. this gesture of recentering involves no illusion, no forgetting of what constitutes the reader's native reality. non-actual possible worlds can only be regarded as actual through coleridge's much quoted "willing suspension of disbelief." the reader of a fiction knows that the world displayed by the text is virtual, a product of the author's imagination, but he pretends that there is an independently existing reality serving as referent to the narrator's declarations. [11] the notion of pretense and the related concept of game of make-believe forms the core of kendall walton's theory of fiction. according to walton, a fictional text--as well as any type of visual representation--is a "prop in a game of make-believe" (11). the game consists of selecting an object and of regarding it as something else, usually in agreement with other players (author/reader, in the case of fiction.) just as a stump may stand for a bear in a children's game of make-believe, the picture of a ship is taken for a ship, and the text of a novel is taken for an account of real facts (an account which may or may not be regarded as accurate, as the case of unreliable narration demonstrates). players project themselves as members of the world in which the prop is a bear, a ship or a text of nonfiction, and they play the game by "generating fictional truths." this activity consists of imagining the fictional world according to the directives encoded in the prop. some of the fictional truths concern the players themselves, or rather their fictional alter ego. the reader of a fiction does not simply generate truths of the type "p is fictional" but also "it is fictional that i believe p." and if p relates the pitiful fate of a character, it will be fictional that the reader's alter ego pities the character. the emotions experienced in make-believe in the fictional world may carry over to the real world, causing physical reactions such as crying for the heroine. the affinity of walton's theory of fiction with virtual reality and its concept of immersion thus resides in his insistence on the participation of the appreciator in the fictional world. it is truly a theory of "being caught up in a story." [12] like computer-generated vr, possible-world and make-believe theories of fiction presupposes a relative transparency of the medium. the reader or spectator looks through the work toward the reference world. if the picture of a ship is experienced as the presence of a ship located in the same space as the viewer, it is not apprehended as "the sign of a ship." if readers are caught up in a story, they turn the pages without paying too much attention to the letter of the text: what they want is to find out what happened next in the fictional world. this reading for the plot focuses on the least language-dependent dimension of narrative communication. and if readers experience genuine emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters as literary creations nor as "semiotic constructs," but as human beings. [13] the literary devices which create a sense of participation in fictional worlds present many parallelisms with the factors leading to telepresence. one of the factors mentioned above was the projection of a three-dimensional environment. the literary equivalent of three-dimensionality is a narrative universe possessing some hidden depth, and populated by characters perceived as round rather than flat. by hidden depth i mean that the sum of fictional truths largely exceeds the sum of the propositions directly stated in the text. in a virtual world experienced as three-dimensional, the user knows that reality is not limited to what what can be seen from a given position: the outside conceals the inside, the front conceals the back, and small objects in the foreground conceal large objects in the background. similarly, in a narrative world presenting some hidden depth (let us call it a "realistic world") there is something behind the narrated: the characters have minds, intents, desires, and emotions, and the reader is encouraged to reconstruct the content of their mind--either for its own sake, or in order to evaluate their behavior. the procedures of inference relating to inner life would be inhibited in the case of the referents of human names in lyric poetry or in some postmodern novels where characters are reduced to stereotypes, actantial roles or allegories. when the reader feels that there is nothing beyond language, inference procedures become largely pointless. [14] as is the case in vr systems, the reader's sense of immersion and empathy is a function of the depth of information. it is obvious that detailed descriptions lead to a greater sense of belonging than sketchy narration. this explains why it is easier be be caught up in a fictional story than in a newspaper report. but in purely verbal communication--in contrast with the visual or auditory domains--depth of information may reach the point of saturation and create an alienating effect: the length and minute precision of the descriptions of a robbe-grillet, as well as their restriction to purely visual information, constitute a greater deterrent to immersion than the most laconic prose. [15] breadth of information is not literally possible in fiction, since we are talking about writing and not about multi-media communication. but insofar as it relays sensations through the imagination, literary language can represent the entire spectrum of human experience. this ability of language to substitute for all channels of sensation is what justifies the comparison of literature with a multi-media mode of communication such as vr. [16] another factor of immersion that seems at first glance impossible in textual communication is the control of the sensors. the reader only sees (hears, smells, etc.) what the narrator shows. but to the extent that the narrator's sensations become the reader's, fiction offers a mobility of point of view at least as extensive as that of vr systems. the development of a type of narrator specific to fiction---the omniscient, impersonal narrator--has freed fictional discourse from the constraints of real world and pragmatically credible human communication. the disembodied consciousness of the impersonal narrator can apprehend the fictional world from any perspective (external observer point of view or character point of view), adopt any member of the fictional world as focalizer, select any spatial location as post of observation, narrate in every temporal direction (retrospectively, simultaneously, even prospectively), and switch back and forth between these various points of view. fiction, like vr, allows an experience of its reference world that would be impossible if this reference world were an objectively existing, material reality. [17] the ultimate freedom in the movement of the sensors is the adoption of a foreign identity. as lasko-harvill observes, "in virtual reality we can, with disconcerting ease, exchange eyes with another person and see ourselves and the world from their vantage point" (277). this "exchanging eyes with another person" is paralleled in fiction by the possibility of speaking about oneself in the third person, or of switching between first and third when speaking about the same referent. (cf. max frisch, _montauk_.) but there is an even more fundamental similarity between the role-playing of vr and the nature of narrative fiction. as authors strip themselves of their real world identity to enter the fictional world, they have at their disposal the entire range of conceivable roles, from the strongly individuated first person narrator (who can be any member of the fictional world) to the pure consciousness of the third person narrator. [18] both vr and fiction present the ability to transcend the boundaries of human perception. just as vr systems enable the user to penetrate into places normally inaccessible to humans, fiction legitimates the representation of what cannot be known: a story can be told even when "nobody lived to tell the tale." of all the domain represented in fiction, no one transcends more blatantly the limits of the knowable than foreign consciousness. as dorrit cohn observes: "but this means that the special life-likeness of narrative fiction--as compared to dramatic and cinematic fiction--depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind works, how another body feels" (5-6). [19] the effacement of the impersonal narrator and his freedom to relocate his consciousness anywhere, at any time and in whatever body or mind conveys the impression of unmediated presence: minds become transparent, and events seem to be telling themselves. the mobility of the sensors that apprehend fictional worlds allow a degree of intimacy between the reader and the textual world that remain unparalleled in nonfiction. paradoxically, the reality of which we are native is the least amenable to immersive narration, and reports of real events are the least likely to induce participation. new journalism, to the scandal of many, tried to overcome this textual alienation from nonvirtual reality by describing real-world events through fictional techniques. in the television domain, the proliferation of "docu-drama" bears testimony to the voyeuristic need to "be there" and to enjoy fiction-like participation, not only in imaginary worlds, but also in historical events. against immersion [20] theories of fiction emphasizing participation in fictional worlds represent a somewhat reactionary trend on the contemporary cultural scene. immersion in a virtual world is viewed by most theorists of postmodernism as a passive subjection to the authority of the world-designer--a subjection exemplified by the entrapment of tourists in the self-enclosed virtual realities of theme parks or vacation resorts (where the visitor's only freedom is the freedom to use his credit card). according to jay bolter, immersion is a trademark of popular culture: "losing oneself in a fictional world is the goal of the naive reader or one who reads as entertainment. it is particularly a feature of genre fiction, such as romance or science fiction" (155). [21] as we have seen above, the precondition for immersion is the transparency of the medium. but we live in a semiotic age, in an age that worships signs. contemporary theories such as deconstruction teach us that the freedom of the mind must originate in a freedom from signs. so does virtual reality, in some respect, but while vr seeks this freedom in the disappearance of signs, contemporary cultural theories regard signs as the substance of all realities and as the prerequisite of thought. freedom from signs cannot be achieved through their disappearance but only through the awareness of their omnipresence, as well as through the recognition of their conventional or arbitrary character. the aesthetics of immersion is currently being replaced--primarily in "high culture" but the tendency is now stretching toward popular culture--by an aesthetics of textuality. signs must be made visible for their role in the construction of reality to be recognized. a mode of communication that strives toward transparency of the medium bereaves the user of his critical faculties. the semiotic blindness caused by immersion is illustrated by an anecdote involving the xviiith century french philosopher diderot. according to william martin, "he tells us how he began reading _clarissa_ several times in order to learn something about richardson's techniques, but never succeeded in doing so because he became personally involved in the work, thus losing his critical consciousness" (martin 58). according to bolter, this loss of critical consciousness is the trademark of the vr experience: "but is it obvious that virtual reality cannot in itself sustain intellectual or cultural development. . . . the problem is that virtual reality, at least as it is now envisioned, is a medium of percepts rather than signs. it is virtual television" (230). "what is not appropriate is the absence of semiosis" (231). [22] in reducing vr to passive immersion, however, bolter ignores the second component of the vr experience. if contemporary art and literature are to achieve an enhancement of the reader's creativity, it should be through the emulation of the interactive aspect of vr, and not through the summary condemnation of its immersive power. interactivity [23] interactivity is not merely the ability to navigate the virtual world, it is the power of the user to modify this environment. moving the sensors and enjoying freedom of movement do not in themselves ensure an interactive relation between a user and an environment: the user could derive his entire satisfaction from the exploration of the surrounding domain. he would be actively involved in the virtual world, but his actions would bear no lasting consequences. in a truly interactive system, the virtual world must respond to to the user's actions. [24] while the standard comparison for immersion derives from narrative fiction, the most frequently used metaphor of interactivity invokes theatrical performance. the simile captures a largely utopian dream of dramatic art: putting spectators on stage and turning them into characters: as researchers grapple with the notion of interaction in the world of computing, they sometimes compare computer users to theatrical audiences. "users," the argument goes, are like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding of the action than simply the fine-tuning provided by conventional audience response. . . . the users of such a system are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles. (laurel 16) [25] whereas immersion may be a response to a basically static form of representation, interactivity requires a dynamic simulation. a simulative system does not simply respond to the user's actions by displaying ready-made elements, it creates its data "in real time" according to the user's directions. like movies and narratives, a simulative system projects a world immersed in time and subjected to change, but while these media represent history retrospectively, fashioning a plot when all events are in the book, simulation generates events prospectively, without knowledge of the outcome. taken as a whole, a simulative system does not reproduce a specific course of events, but like a "garden of forking paths"--to parody the title of a short story by borges--it is open to all the histories that could develop out of a given situation. every use of the system actualizes another potential segment of history. the simulative system is like an alphabet containing all the books on a given subject, while the simulation itself is the writing of a potential book (except that there is no book left when the writing in completed). in a flight simulator, for instance, the user enacts the story of one particular flight out of a large set of possibilities by operating the keys that represent the control panel of the airplane. [26] the degree of interactivity of a vr system is a function of a variety of factors. steuer enumerates three of them, without claiming that the list is exhaustive: *speed*, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment; *range*, which refers to the number of possibilities for action at any given time; and *mapping*, which refers to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner. (86) the first of these factors requires little explanation. the speed of a system is what enables it to respond in real time to the user's actions. faster response means more actions, and more actions mean more changes. the second factor is equally obvious: the choice of actions is like a set of tools; the larger the set, the more malleable the environment. a vr system allowing an infinite range of actions would be like real life, except that in real life our choice of actions in a concrete situation is limited by pragmatic considerations. the factor of mapping imposes constraints on the behavior of the system. insofar as "mapping" is defined in terms of natural response, it advocates the disappearance of arbitrary codes. far from being associated with passive immersion, semiotic transparency is conceived by vr developers as a way to facilitate interactivity. the predictability of the response demonstrates the intelligence of the system. the user must be able to foresee to some extent the result of his gestures, otherwise they would be pure movements and not intent-driven actions. if the user of a virtual golf system hits a golf ball he wants it to land on the ground, and not to turn into a bird and disappear in the sky. on the other hand, the predictability of moves should be relative, otherwise there would be no challenge nor point in using the system. even in real life, we cannot calculate all the consequences of our actions. moreover, predictability conflicts with the range requirement: if the user could choose from a repertory of actions as vast as that of real life, the system would be unable to respond intelligently to most forms of input. the coherence of flight-simulation programs stems for instance from the fact that they exclude any choice of activity unrelated to flying. meaningful interactivity requires a compromise between range and mapping and between discovery and predictability. like a good narrative plot, vr systems should instill an element of surprise in the fulfillment of expectations. interactivity and literary theory [27] increasing the reader's participation in the creative process, and thereby questioning such distinctions as author/reader, actor/spectator, producer/consumer, has been a major concern of postmodern art. this does not mean that without these efforts reading would be a purely passive experience: theorists such as iser or ingarden have convincingly demonstrated that a world cannot emerge from a text without an active process of construction, a process through which the reader provides as much material as she derives from the text. but the inherently interactive nature of the reading experience has been obscured by the reader's proficiency in performing the necessary world-building operations. we are so used to playing the fictional game that it has become a second nature: as quasi native readers of fiction we take it for granted that worlds should emerge from texts. this explains why postmodernist attempts to promote active reader involvement in the construction of meaning usually take the form of self-referential demystification. as linda hutcheon writes: "the reader of fiction is always an actively mediating presence; the text's reality is established by his response and reconstituted by his active participation. the writer of narcissistic fiction merely makes the reader conscious of this fact of his experience" (141). the price of this consciousness is a loss of membership in the fictional world. in the narcissistic work, the reader contemplates the fictional world from the outside. this world no longer functions for the imagination as an actual world--this is to say, as an ontological center--but is expelled toward the periphery of the modal system, where it acquires the status of a non-actual possible world. the metafictional gesture of de-centering thus inverts a paradox inherent to fiction. insofar as it claims the reality of its reference world, fiction implies its own denial as fiction. by overtly recognizing the constructed, imaginary nature of the textual world, metafiction reclaims our "native reality" as ontological center and reverts to the status of nonfictional discourse about non-actual possible worlds. in order to enhance participation in, or at least awareness of the creative process, the metafictional gesture thus blocks participation in the fictional world. [28] but the reader's interest is difficult to maintain in the absence of make-believe. the most efficient strategy for promoting an awareness of the mechanisms of fictionality is not to block access to the fictional world, but to engage the reader in a game of in and out: now the text captures the reader in the narrative suspense; now it bares the artificiality of plots; now the text builds up the illusion of an extratextual referent; now it claims "this world is mere fiction." shuttled back and forth between ontological levels, the reader comes to appreciate the layered structure of fictional communication, a layered structure through which he is both (in make-believe) narratorial audience in the fictional world, and authorial audience in the real world. one of the most successful examples of this game of in-and-out is john fowles' _the french lieutenant's woman_. the fictional world may be eventually demystified as a textual construct, yet the text succeeds in creating an immersive experience. at times the reader regards the characters as human beings and invests an emotional interest in their fate; at other times he is made to acknowledge their status as literary creations. it is the memory of the immersive power of the text that engages his critical faculties during the self-reflexive moments. the object the reflexive activity is as much the phenomenon of immersion as the artificiality of fictional worlds. but if immersion alternates with an "interactive" stance toward the fictional world and the plural ontological levels embedded in the textual universe, the two experiences cannot occur at the same time. they imply mutually exclusive perspectives on the reference world. [29] when applied to traditional forms of text--that is, preserved and transmitted in book form--"interactivity" remains a largely metaphorical concept. it stands more for the reader's awareness of his collaboration with the text in the production of meaning than for personal initiative and decision making. not surprisingly, the textual mode in which the ideal of interactivity comes closest to literal fulfillment is hypertext, a form of writing made possible by the electronic medium. the idea of hypertext is well-known and i will do no more than summarize it. organized as a network of paragraphs connected by electronic links, hypertext offers at given points a choice of directions to follow. each choice brings on the screen a different chunk of text, to which are attached new branching possibilities. rather than consuming the text in a prescribed sequential order, the reader determines her own path of traversal through the textual network. [30] through the initiative given to the reader, hypertext realizes a very basic form of interactivity. as bolter observes: "the reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words" (158). if we equate "text" to one particular traversal of the network, then indeed every reading session generates a new text, and the reader takes an active part in this writing. in this view, "text" is not a static collection of signs but the product of a dynamic encounter between a mind and a set of signs. if the concept of text is indissoluble from the act of reading, the physical interactivity of hypertext is a concrete metaphor for the mental activity required by all texts. while every particular path of navigation through a hypertextual network brings to the screen different chunks of text, every particular reading of a non-electronic text highlights different episodes, links different images, and creates a different web of meaning. the difference between the experiences of hypertext and of traditional texts is mostly a matter of intensity, of awareness and of having no other source of pleasure than what nabokov calls "combinational delight" (69). in the absence of the distraction created by a dominating storyline, it is hoped that the reader will devote all of his attention to the tracking of links. [31] alternatively, the concept of "text" could be equated to the sum of possible readings, or rather to the written signs forming the common source of these readings. in the case of hypertext, this would mean that the text is the entire network of links and of textual nodes. according to this view, the interactivity of hypertext is not a power to change the environment, as is the case in vr systems, but merely a freedom to move the sensors for a personalized exploration. the reader may choose in which order she visits the nodes, but her choices do not affect the configuration of the network. no matter how the reader runs the maze, the maze remains the same. far from relinquishing authority (as bolter has claimed), the author remains the hidden master of the maze. the reader's actions could only modify the environment if the hypertextual system generated text in real time, as an intelligent response to the reader's decisions."^1^ as i have argued above, this is what happens in simulative systems. the computer calculates the position of the plane according to the user's input, rather than displaying a pre-calculated position. this will not happen in hypertext until it joins forces with ai--and until ai sharpens its story-generating capabilities. in the meantime, the closest to a hypertextual system operating in real time will be for the user to get on line with the author herself. [32] the fullest form of interactivity occurs when the reader is invited to contribute text to the network."^2^ this invitation may take one of two forms. the first possibility is the user adding text and links which become permanent parts of the system. when this input concerns a specific character, the user is less playing the role of the character in question than taking over authorial responsibilities for the writing of his fate. in other words, the user manipulates the strings of a puppet, playing its role from the outside. the other conceivable form of interactivity is more like playing a game of make-believe such as cops and robbers. the system defines a cast of characters by specifying their attributes. the user selects an identity from this repertory, and plays the role from the inside. she encounters other users playing other characters, and they engage in a dialogue in real time. this dialogue does not count as description of the actions of the character but as performance of these actions: the character's freedom to act is a freedom to select speech acts. of these two modes of contribution, only the second constitutes an immersive experience. the first may be addictive--as any game, any activity might be--but it maintains a foreign perspective on the fictional world. immersion or interactivty: the dilemma of textual representation [33] whether textual interactivity takes the weak form of a deliberate play with signs leading to a production of meaning, or the strong form of producing these signs, one consequence appears unavoidable: in literary matters, interactivity conflicts either with immersion or with aesthetic design, and usually with both. the strong forms of interactivity run most blatantly into the design problem: how can the contributions of the reader-turned-author be monitored by the system, so that the text as a whole will maintain narrative coherence and aesthetic value? an interactive system may be an alphabet for writing books, but the user should be prevented from producing nonsense. as laurel argues: "the well designed [virtual world] is, in a sense, the antithesis of realism--the antithesis of the chaos of everyday life" (quoted by pimentel and texeira 157). howard rheingold stresses the need for "scenario control": "they [vr developers] want a world that you can walk around in, that will react to you appropriately, and that presents a narrative structure for you to experience" (307). the control of a pre-determined narrative script imposes severe limits on the user's freedom of moves (think of the narrow range of choices in the children's books "choose your own adventures," where all the branches constitute a coherent story); but without this control the hypertextual network would turn into a multi-user word processor. in the worst case scenario, interactive fiction will be reduced to a bunch of would-be authors e-mailing to each other the fruits of their inspiration. [34] in the weaker forms of interactivity, design is easier to control, but immersion remains problematic. the reader of a classical interactive fiction--like michael joyce's _afternoon_--may be fascinated by his power to control the display, but this fascination is a matter of reflecting on the medium, not of participating in the fictional worlds represented by this medium. rather than experiencing exhilaration at the freedom of "co-creating" the text, however, the reader may feel like a rat trapped in a maze, blindly trying choices that lead to dead-ends, take him back to previously visited points, or abandon a storyline that was slowly beginning to create interest. the best way to prevent this feeling of entrapment, it seems to me, would be to make the results of choices reasonably predictable, as they should be in simulative vr, so that the reader would learn the laws of the maze and become an expert at finding his way even in new territory. but if the reader becomes an expert at running the maze, he may become immersed in a specific story-line and forget--or deliberately avoid--all other possibilities. he would then revert to a linear mode of reading and sacrifice the freedom of interactivity. [35] it would be preposterous to pass a global judgment on the intrinsic merit of hypertext: whether the maze is experienced as a prison or as the key to freedom depends on the individual quality of the text and on the disposition of the reader. but i would like to advance one general pronouncement concerning the immersive power--or lack thereof--of the genre: a genuine appreciation of a hypertextual network requires an awareness of the plurality of possible worlds contained in the system; but this plurality can only be contemplated from a point of view external to any of these worlds. [36] the various attempts by contemporary literature to emulate the interactivity of vr thus involve a sacrifice of the special pleasure derived from immersion. the more interactive, the less immersive the text. the texts that come the closest to combining both types of pleasure are those that orchestrate them in round-robin fashion through a game of in-and-out. the textual incompatibility of immersion and interactivity can be traced back to several factors. while immersion depends on the forward movement of a linear plot, interactivity involves (and creates) a spatial organization. while immersion presupposes pretended belief in an solid extratextual reference world, interactivity thrives in a fluid environment undergoing constant reconfiguration. while immersion looks through the signs toward the reference world, interactivity exploits the materiality of the medium. textual representation behaves in one respect like holographic pictures: you cannot see the worlds and the signs at the same time. readers and spectators must focus beyond the signs to witness the emergence of a three-dimensional life-like reality. [37] in computer-generated vr, immersion and interactivity do not stand in conflict--or at least not necessarily. immersion may offer an occasional threat to interactivity"^3^, but the converse does not hold. the more interactive a virtual world, the more immersive the experience. there is nothing intrinsically incompatible between immersion and interactivity: in real life also, the greater our freedom to act, the deeper our bond to the environment. [38] an obvious reason for this difference in behavior is the above-mentioned difficulty for texts to integrate the reader's input into a coherent narrative macro-structure. vr also experiences this type of problem when it attempts to turn users into the characters of a multi-media dramatic production. it is in very restricted domains regulated by narrowly defined "narrative" scripts--flight simulators, golf, paddle-ball, etc.--or in areas not subjected to the requirements of narrative logic--visual displays, or systems combining visual data with sound and dance--that vr systems achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity. [39] but there is a more fundamental reason for vr's ability to combine the two types of experience. in a textual environment, the tools of interactivity are signs. but signs are not the only mean of action. in the real world we can act with the body by pointing at things, manipulating them, and working on them with tools. we can also use the body as an instrument of exploration by walking around the world and moving the sensors. virtual reality, as its developers conceive it, reconciles immersion and interactivity through the mediation of the body. "our body is our interface," claims william brickemp in a vr manifesto (quoted in pimentel and texeira, 160). when the reader of a postmodern work is invited to participate in the construction of the fictional world she is aware that this world does not exist independently of the semiotic activity; hence the loss in immersive power. but the user of a vr system interacts with a world that is experienced as existing autonomously because this world is accessible to many senses, particularly to the sense of touch. as the story of saint thomas demonstrates, tactile sensations are second to none in establishing a sense of reality. the bodily participation of the user in virtual reality can be termed world-creative in the same sense that performing actions in the real world can be said to create reality. as a purely mental event, textual creation is a creation %ex nihilo% that excludes the creator from the creation: authors do not belong to the world of their fictions. but if a mind may conceive a world from the outside, a body always experiences it from the inside. as a relation involving the body, the interactivity of vr immerses the user in an world already in place; as a process involving the mind, it turns the user's relation to this world into a creative membership. the most immersive forms of textual interactivity are therefore those in which the user's contributions, rather than performing a creation through a diegetic (i.e. descriptive) use of language, count as a dialogic and live interaction with other members of the fictional world. i am thinking here of children's games of make-believe, and of those interactive hypertextual systems where users are invited to play the role of characters. these modes of interactivity have yet to solve the problem of design, but they point the way toward a solution of the conflict between immersion and interactivity: turn language into a dramatic performance, into the expression of a bodily mode of being in the world. notes: ^1^ some hypertexts erase certain pathways after the reader has taken them. this seems to be the closest so far to a self-modifying network responding to the user's input. but the pruning of links is pre-programmed into the text, so it does not constitute a response in real time. ^2^ this invitation is extended in "hotelmoo, the hypertext hotel" (originator and "proprietor": tom meyer of brown university), a hypertextual network placed in the public space and accessible through the internet. users may either visit the hotel as anonymous guests, in which case their limited (inter)activity resides in the freedom to choose a path through the network, or they can enter the system under the identity of a specific character. in this case they are allowed to contribute to the expansion of the network. ^3^ following mcluhan, steuer suggests that the vividness of a virtual world may "decrease a subject's ability to mindfully interact with it in real time" (90). if a computer-generated environment is so rich in "fictional truths" that its exploration offers great rewards, why would the user bother to work on it? works cited: biocca, frank. "virtual reality technology: a tutorial." _journal of communication_ 42.4 (1992): 23-72. bolter, jay david. _writing space. the computer, hypertext, and the history of writing_. hillsdale, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum, 1991. cohn, dorrit. _transparent minds: narrative modes for presenting consciousness in fiction_. princeton: princeton up, 1978. hutcheon, linda. _narcissistic narrative. the metafictional paradox_. waterloo, ontario: wilfried laurier up, 1980. joyce, michael. _afternoon, a story_. cambridge, ma: eastgate press, 1987. [computer program]. landow, george p. _hypertext. the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology_. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins up, 1992. lanier, jaron, and frank biocca. "an insider's view of the future of virtual reality." _journal of communications_ 42.4 (1992): 150-172. laurel, brenda. _computers as theater_. menlo park, ca: addison wesley, 1991. lasko-harvill, ann. "identity and mask in virtual reality." _discourse_ 14.2 (1992): 222-234. lewis, david. "truth in fiction." _american philosophical quarterly_ 15 (1978):37-46. martin, william. _recent theories of narrative_. ithaca and london: cornell up, 1986. nabokov, vladimir. _pale fire_. new york: random house (vintage books), 1989 [1962]. pimentel, ken, and kevin texeira. _virtual reality: through the new looking-glass_. intel/windcrest mcgraw hill, 1993. rheingold, howard. _virtual reality_. new york: simon & schuster, 1991. ryan, marie-laure. _possible worlds, artificial intelligence, and narrative theory_. bloomington: indiana up, 1991. sheridan, thomas b. "musings on telepresence and virtual presence." in _papers from sri's 1991 conference on virtual reality_. ed. teresa middleton. westport and london: meckler, 1992. steuer, jonathan. "defining virtual reality: dimensions determining telepresence." _journal of communications_ 42.4 (1992): 73-93. walton, kendall. _mimesis as make-believe. on the foundations of the representational arts_. cambridge and london: harvard up, 1990. wodaski, ron. _virtual reality madness_. sams publishing, 1993. [user manual for a computer game package] -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.993. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 68361 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu every issue of _postmodern culture_ carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _essays in postmodern culture_ 2) _black ice books_ 3) _black sacred music_ 4) _boundary 2_ 5) _the centennial review_ 6) _college literature_ 7) _contention_ 8) _differences_ 9) _discourse_ 10) _electronic journal on virtual culture_ 11) _genders_ 12) _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_ 13) _minnesota review_ 14) _nomad_ 15) _october_ 16) _rif/t_ 17) _sscore_ 18) _studies in popular culture_ 19) _virus 23_ 20) _vivid magazine_ 21) _zines-l_ calls for papers and participants: 22) _pmc-moo_ 23) _call for papers on don delillo_ 24) _electronic journal of virtual culture_ 25) _journal of criminal justice and popular culture_ 26) _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 27) _postmodern culture_ 28) _psyche_ conferences and societies: 29) _the network services conference_ networked discussion groups: 30) _femisa: feminism, gender, international relations_ 31) _holocaus: holocaust list_ 32) _newjour-l_ 33) _popcult list_ grants: 34) _duke university: travel-to-collections grants_ 1)------------------------------------------------------------- essays on postmodern culture available in december, 1993: an anthology of essays from _postmodern culture_ is forthcoming in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagments with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. --"i laughed, i cried. the feelgood critical book of the year." --jonathan beasley --"two thumbs up!" --chris barrett contents: george yudice, "feeding the transcendent body" allison fraiberg, "of aids, cyborgs, and other indiscretions: resurfacing the body in the postmodern" david porush and allison fraiberg, "commentary: an exchange" stuart moulthrop, "you say you want a revolution: hypertext and the laws of media" paul mccarthy, "postmodern pleasure and perversity: scientism and sadism" roberto maria dianotto, "the excremental sublime: the postmodern literature of blockage and release" audrey ecstavasia, "fucking (with theory) for money: towards an interrogation of escort prostitution" elizabeth wheeler, "buldozing the subject" bob perelman, "the marginalization of poetry" steven helmling, "marxist pleasure: jameson and eagleton" neil larsen, "postmodernism and imperialism: theory and politics in latin america" david mikics, "postmodernism, ethnicity, and underground revisionism in ishmael reed" barrett watten, "post-soviet subjectivity in arkadii dragomoshchenko and ilya kabakov" isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) _essays in postmodern culture_ will be available at the mla in toronto december, 1993 2)------------------------------------------------------------- _black ice books_ _black ice books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident american writers. breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. the first four books include: _avant-pop: fiction for a daydream nation_ edited by larry mccaffery, this book is an assemblage of innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various other unclassifiable texts by writers like samuel delany, mark leyner, william vollmann, kathy acker, eurdice, stephen wright, derek pell, harold jaffe, tim ferret, ricardo cortez cruz and many others. "one of the least cautious, nerviest editors going, larry mccaffery is the no-care bear of american letters." -william gibson. "a clusterbomb of crazy fiction, from a generation too sane to repeat yesterday's lies." -tom robbins _new noir_ stories by john shirley john shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence. "john shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell." -clive barker _the kafka chronicles_ a novel by mark amerika the _kafka chronicles_ is an adventure into the psyche of an ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters "mr amerika--if indeed that is his name--has achieved a unique beauty in his artful marriage of blake's lyricism and the ironin-the-soul of celine. are we taking a new and hard-hitting antonin artaud? absolutely. and much more." --terry southern _revelation countdown_ by cris mazza stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling loss of control. "talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity." --la times discount mail-order information: you can buy these books directly from the publisher at a discount. buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four for $25. we pay us postage! (foreign orders add $2.50 per book.) ___ avant-pop ___ new noir ___ the kafka chronicles ___ revelation countdown please make all checks or money orders payable to: fiction collective two publications unit illinois state university normal, il 61761 3)-------------------------------------------------------------_black sacred music_ a journal of theomusicology presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in blantyre, malawi in november of 1992, this volume represents a significant step for the african christian church toward incorporating indigenous african arts and culture into it liturgy. recognizing that the african christian church continues to define itself in distinctly western terms, forty-nine participants from various denominations and all parts of africa-uganda, kenya, malawi, mozambique, madagascar, mauritius, zimbabwe, zambia, sierra leone, cameroon--and the united states met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies for the indigenization of christianity in african churches. other special issues by single copy: the william grant still reader presents the collected writings of this respected american composer. still offered a perspective on american music and society informed by a diversity of experience and associations that few others have enjoyed. his distinguished career spanned jazz, traditional african-american idioms, and the european avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to opera. sacred music of the secular city delves into the american religious imagination by examining the religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music. includes essays on musicians robert johnson, duke ellington, marvin gaye, madonna, and 2 live crew. subscription prices: $30 institutions, $15 individuals. single issues: $15. please add $4 for subscription outside the u.s. canadian residents, add 7% gst. duke university press/box 90660/durham nc 27708 4) -------------------------------------------------------------_boundary 2_ an international journal of literature and culture paul bove, editor forthcoming in 1993: the violence of light in the land of desire; or how william jones discovered india / jenny sharp veiled woman and veiled narrative in tahar ben jelloun's _the sandchild_ / john. d. erickson the ideologies and semiotics of fascism: analyzing pound's _cantos 12-15_ / stephen hartnett lionel trilling, _the liberal imagination_, and the emergence of the cultural discourse of anti-stalinism / russell j. reising divine politics: virginia woolf's journey toward eleusis in _to the lighthouse_ / tina barr %saxa loquuntur%: freud's archaeology of the text / sabine hake deleuze's nietzsche / petra perry a tyranny of justice: the ethics of lyotard's differend / allen dunn thinking\writing the postmodern: representation, end, ground, sending / jeffrey t. nealon three issues annually subscription prices: $48 institutions, $24 individuals, $16 single issues. please add $6 for postage outside the u.s.. duke university press/ box 90660 /durham nc 27708 5) -------------------------------------------------------------_the centennial review_ edited by r.k. meiners _the centennial review_ is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the university and its environment. we are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. **special issue** poland: from real socialism to democracy winter 1993 guest editor: stephen esquith essays on events and ideas in recent polish history, culture, and politics. adam michnik: _an interview with leszek kolakowski_ marek ziolkowski: _the case of the polish intelligentsia_ marian kempny: _on the relevance of social anthropology to the study of post-communist culture_ plus: lagowski, narojek, szszkowska, buchowski, and others. please begin my _cr_ subscription: ___ $12/year (3 issues) ___ $18/two years (6 issues) (add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the us) please send me the special issue: ___ _poland: from real socialism to democracy_ name____________________________________________ address_________________________________________ city____________________________________________ state/county____________________________________ zip_____________________________________________ please make your check payable to _the centennial review_. mail to: _the centennial review_ 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing mi 48824-1044 6) -------------------------------------------------------------_college literature_ a triannual literary journal for the classroom edited by kostas myrsiades a triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving the needs of college/university teachers by providing them with access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of literature and experiencing old literature in new ways. "_college literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone teaching literature to college students." j. hillis miller university of ca, irvine "congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant." terry eagleton oxford university "in one bold stroke you seem to have turned _college literature_ into one of the things everyone will want to read." cary nelson "my sense is that _college literature_ will have substantial influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies." henry a. giroux "a journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy." robert con davis forthcoming issues: third world women's literature african american writing cross-cultural poetics subscription rates: us foreign individual $24.00/year $29.00/year institutional: $48.00/year $53.00/year send prepaid orders to: _college literature_ main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150 7) -------------------------------------------------------------_contention_ debates in society, culture, and science _contention_ is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...extremely important." alberta arthurs "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...superb." janet abu-lughod "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 8) -------------------------------------------------------------_differences_ a journal of feminist cultural studies queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities (volume 3, number 2) edited by teresa de lauretis teresa de lauretis: _queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction_ sue ellen case: _tracking the vampire_ samuel r. delany: _street talk/straight talk_ elizabeth a. grosz: _lesbian fetishism?_ jeniffer terry: _theorizing deviant historiography_ thomas almaguer: _chicano men: a cartography of homosexual identity and behavior_ ekua omosupe: _black/lesbian/bulldagger_ earl jackson, jr.: _scandalous subjects: robert gluck's embodied narratives_ julia creet: _daughter of the movement: the psychodynamics of lesbian s/m fantasy_ the phallus issue (volume 4, number 1) edited by naomi schor and elizabeth weed maria torok: _the meaning of "penis envy" in women (1963)_ jean-joseph goux: _the phallus: masculine identity and the "exchange of women"_ parveen adams: _waiving the phallus_ kaja silverman: _the lacanian phallus_ charles bernheimer: _penile reference in phallic theory_ judith butler: _the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary_ jonathan goldberg: _recalling totalities: the mirrored stages of arnold schwarzenegger_ emily apter: _female trouble in the colonial harem_ single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals $48.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 9) -------------------------------------------------------------_discourse_ volume 15, number 1 special issue flaunting it: lesbian and gay studies kathryn baker: delinquent desire: race, sex, and ritual in reform schools for girls terralee bensinger: lesbian pornography: the re-making of (a) community scott bravmann: investigating queer fictions of the past: identities, differences, and lesbian and gay historical self-representations sarah chinn and kris franklin: "i am what i am" (or am i?): making and unmaking of lesbian and gay identity in _high tech boys greg mullins: nudes, prudes, and pigmies: the desirability of disavowal in _physical culture magazine_ joann pavletich: muscling the mainstream: lesbian murder mysteries and fantasies of justice david pendelton: obscene allegories: narrative structures in gay male porn thomas piontek: applied metaphors: aids and literature june l. reich: the traffic in dildoes: the phallus as camp and the revenge of the genderfuck single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals $50.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 10) -----------------------------------------------------------_the electronic journal on virtual culture_ we are very pleased by the great interest in the _electronic journal on virtual culture_. there are already more than 1,280 people subscribed. our first issue was distributed in march 1993. the future looks very interesting. editors are working on special issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture. the _electronic journal on virtual culture_ (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. ejvc is published monthly. some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. cyberspace monitor). if you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the virtual culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc. ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact ermel stepp editor-in-chief of diane kovacs co-editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu cordially, ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu 11) ------------------------------------------------------------_genders_ ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. ----------------------------- _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 12) ------------------------------------------------------------m/e/a/n/i/n/g a journal of contemporary art issues m/e/a/n/i/n/g, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts. m/e/a/n/i/n/g is published twice a year in the fall and spring. it is edited by susan bee and mira schor. m/e/a/n/i/n/g #13 is a vivid mix of writings by artists and art historians. curtis mitchell's "working the park" considers the sublime and the abject through the travails of an installation artist's efforts at public sculpture; jordan crandall's "transactional space" speaks of new systems of art communication and production at the limits of information technology; jo anna isaak sheds new light on colonialist discourse in matisse's "the comfy chair"; painting illiteracy is considered in mira schor's "course proposal;" daryl chin's "those little white lies" critiques art history as an instrument of capitalism; an artist's spiritual sources are explored in david reed's "media baptisms." also in this issue: definitions of "art" by stewart buettner; book and video reviews by barry schwabsky, susan bee, johanna drucker, stephen o'leary harvey, and robert c. morgan. >from issue #13, spring 1993 "the sublime consists of a major dose of entropy, with the picturesque as only a condiment." -curtis mitchell "in all likelihood, what matisse actually saw of a harem was what any tourist would see -the high outer walls of the compound." -jo anna isaak "if 'good' painting is suspect and unseen, then it might help to look at some bad painting just as closely." -mira schor "the artwork becomes a marxist christmas tree on which are hung gaudy baubles of 'late capitalism.'" -daryl chin "rationality or belief don't work well now for painting. suspension--doubt, works best." -david reed subscriptions for 2 issues (1 year): $12 for individuals: $20 for institutions 4 issues (2 years): $24 for individuals; $40 for institutions * foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to canada: $5 * foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in u.s. dollars. all checks should be made payable to mira schor send all subscriptions to: mira schor 60 lispenard street new york, ny 10013 limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact mira schor for information. distributed with the segue foundation and the solo foundation 13) ------------------------------------------------------------_minnesota review_ tell your friends! tell your librarians! the new _minnesota review_'s coming to town! **now under new management** fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39): "pc wars" includes essays by: * richard ohmann "on pc and related matters" * michael berube "exigencies of value" * barry sarchett "russell jacoby, anti professionalism, and the politics of cultural nostalgia" * michael sprinkler "the war against theory" * balance chow "liberal education left and right" spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40): "the politics of aids" poetry, fiction, interviews, essays. topics include: * queer theory and activism. * public image of aids. * politics of medical research. * health care policies. subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new _minnesota review_ is published biannually and originates from east carolina university beginning with the fall 1992 special issue. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams, editor _minnesota review_ department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 14) ----------------------------------------------------------- nomad an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences ************************************************************** manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields! nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. it is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. while our editorial staff is comprized of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, nomad strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls. manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. if possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5" macintosh disks, in either microsoft word or macwrite ii format, or by e-mail. each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and in black and white. pict, tiff, gif, and jpeg files on 3.5" macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via e-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). all artwork must be camera-ready. submissions by regular mail should include a sase with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages. subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues) send manuscripts and inquiries to: nomad, c/o mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, florida, 32306 (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu) ***************************************************************** "in nomad, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most appreciate them." ***************************************************************** 15) ------------------------------------------------------------_october_ art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _october_ focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join _october_'s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! published quarterly issn 0162-2870. yearly rates: individual $32.00; institution $80.00; student (copy of current id required) and retired: $22.00. outside usa add $14.00 postage and handling. canadians add additional 7% gst. prepayment is required. send check payable to _october_ drawn against a us bank, mastercard or visa number to: mit press journal / 55 hayward street / cambridge, ma 02142-1399 / tel: (617) 233-2889 / fax: (617) 258-6779 / e-mail: journals-orders@mit.edu 16) ------------------------------------------------------------_rif/t_ e-poetry literary journal in all arts there is a physical component . . . we must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts. --paul valery this list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution of an interactive literary journal: _rif/t_ and related exchange, and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary poetics. _rif/t provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal. dynamic--not static, _rif/t_ shifts and riffs with the diction of "trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of exchange. archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry filelist. to receive a list of files send the command index e-poetry to: listserv@ubvm or listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu as the first line in the body of your mail message (not your subject: line). to subscribe to e-poetry, send the command sub e-poetry your name to: listserv@ubvm or listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu via mail message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not the subject: line). for example: sub e-poetry john doe owner: ken sherwood v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu 17) ------------------------------------------------------------_sscore_ social science computer review g. david garson, editor ronald anderson, co-editor the official journal of the social science computing association, _sscore_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. now, when you subscribe to _social science computer review_, you automatically become a member of the social science computing association. recent articles: social impacts of computing: codes of professional ethics ronald anderson teledemocracy and political science william h. dutton trends in the use of computers in economics teaching in the united kingdom guy judge and phil hobbs the essentials of scientific visualization: basic techniques and common problems steve e. follin psychology: keeping up with the state of the art in computing charles huff computer assistance in qualitative sociology david r. heise automating analysis, visualization, and other social science research tasks edwin h. carpenter >from mainframes to micros: computer applications for anthropologists robert v. kemper, ronald k. wetherington, and michael adler quarterly subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions single issue: $20 please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. canadian residents add 7% gst duke university press/ journals division / box 90660 /durham nc 27708 18) ------------------------------------------------------------_studies in popular culture_ dennis hall, editor. _studies in popular culture_, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292. please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. _studies in popular culture_, is published semiannually and is indexed in the _pmla annual bibliography_. all members of the association receive _studies in popular culture_. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to the executive secretary, diane calhoun-french, academic dean, jefferson community college-sw, louisville, ky 40272, for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes ixv are available for $225.00. 19) -----------------------------------------------------------_virus 23_ for those brave souls looking to explore the secret of eris, you may wish to check out _virus 23_. 2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd. _virus 23_ is a codename for all erisian literature don webb 6304 laird dr. austin tx 78757 0004200716@mcimail.com _virus 23_ is the annual harcopy publication of a.d.o.s.a, the alberta department of spiritual affairs. all issues are available at $7.00 ppd from: _virus 23_ box 46 red deer, alberta canada t4n 5e7 various chunks of _virus 23_ can be found at tim oerting's alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out). for more information online contact darren wershler-henry: grad3057@writer.yorku.ca 20)-----------------------------------------------------------vivid magazine the first issue of vivid magazine is now available. vivid is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. we are actively seeking contributions for the next issue. the magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment of a windows 3.1 help file. you will need windows 3.1 to read the magazine. the magazine will also be available via anonymous ftp at "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it: ftp ftp.gmu.edu username: anonymous password: (your email address) cd pub/library binary get vivid1.zip ----------------------------------------------------------------for more information on vivid, contact the editor, justin mchale. internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------issue 1 features: articles: what is cyberspace? what is hypertext? multiple fiction and multiple worlds. news items: "matrix news," a section featuring news items, notices and reviews concerning cyberspace. "treasure of the internet," a section which details interesting sites and services on the internet. experimental writing: poemtexts explodedview texts 21) ------------------------------------------------------------_zines-l_ announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to _zines-l_ send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name 22) ------------------------------------------------------------ _postmodern culture_ announces pmc-moo pmc-moo is a new service offered (free of charge) by _postmodern culture_. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of the journal and participate in live conferences. pmc-moo will also provide access to texts generated by _postmodern culture_ and by pmc-talk, and it will provide the opportunity to experience (or help to design) programs which simulate objectlessons in postmodern theory. pmc-moo is based on the lambdamoo program, freeware by pavel curtis. to connect to pmc-moo, you *must* be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. if you have the emacs program on your system and would like information about a customized program for pmc-moo that uses emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail. 23) ------------------------------------------------------------****************************************************** call for papers for "raids on the conscious: new essays on don delillo" a special cluster for _postmodern culture_, jan. 1994 ****************************************************** since the early seventies, don delillo's work (fiction, drama, and journalism) has played an important role in the literature of what has gradually become known as the "postmodern condition." delillo's novels and plays investigate the problem of subjectivity in an environment increasingly governed by, perhaps even constructed purely of information and its various modes of transmission. identity in delillo is dominated by a sense of anxiety concerning the formation of "self" from this patchwork of postmodern discourses, and is often further problematized by the lurking suspicion that there is no longer any stable referential framework behind the blizzard of signifiers; a suspicion that ideals, goals, and even individuality are categories as "empty" as poststructuralist theory tells us are the images, words, and digits with which we are surrounded; that identity is as arbitrary, illusory, and transient as the "sign." the breakdown of various western master narratives which is often at the heart of delillo's novels--a breakdown discussed by, among others, lyotard--contributes to this "vacuuming out" of substance. the result is a "postnarrative" world where the acontextual, the enigmatic, the arbitrary and fundamentally anti-rational continually threaten to become the sole reality--as in jorge luis borges' "tlon, uqbar, orbis tertius." furthermore, in delillo's works this cultural identity crisis often "bleeds" into the characters' private anxieties; in fact, the boundary between public and private is the barrier which delillo seems to believe the postmodern condition threatens to breach. some line has been crossed, and in delillo's work identity is now formed from the outside in, the product of a ceaseless anti-cartesian barrage of decontextualized messages and undifferentiated signals from without. the governance of this situation has devolved from powerful but recognizable individuals onto shadowy larger "bodies": corporations, intelligence agencies, the academy and, perhaps most importantly, terrorist organizations. beyond such barely tangible agents delillo posits a postmodern sublime, the force described in libra as the "world inside the world." papers are solicited which respond to these issues in delillo's work (fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible inclusion in a special issue (january, 1994) of the electronic journal postmodern culture, and in a hard cover edition to be published later in 1994 or in early 1995. papers should address the problems of how literature and other forms of public language support and/or resist the construction of the postmodern relationship of author, text, and reader; how these identities and their relationships are maintained, thwarted, or altered through a concatenation of public spectacle, random violence, and decontextualized language; and how the control of a massively disoriented narrative (or former narrative) of and about these identities increasingly depends upon a variety of illdefined and vaguely sinister "postindividual" agencies. comparative essays utilizing other authors, films, music and other forms of popular culture are welcomed. abstracts (250-500 words) should arrive no later than oct. 15th, and the *first* drafts of papers (15-30 pages) will be due no later than december 15th. inquiries, abstracts and rough drafts may be sent electronically to: glen scott allen at e7e4all@toe.towson.edu, or stephen j. bernstein at bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu or by regular mail to prof. glen scott allen or prof. stephen j. bernstein english dept. dept. of english towson state university university of michigan-flint towson, md 21204 flint, mi 48502 24) -----------------------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ call for articles ejvc: electronic journal of virtual culture ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ special issue: gender issues in computer networking issue editor: leslie reagan shade mcgill university graduate program in communications czsl@musica.mcgill.ca; shade@well.sf.ca.us ejvc is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computermediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction. this special issue of the ejvc will be devoted to gender issues in networking. despite the abundance of various private networks and the meteoric growth of the internet, this rapidly expanding user base does not include an equal proportion of men and women. how can women become equally represented in the new "electronic frontier" of cyberspace? issues to be discussed can include, but are not limited to, the following: * access issues--to hardware, software, and training. what barriers do women face? what are some success stories. * how can women be given the technical expertise to become comfortable and versatile with computer networking? * interface design: can there be a feminist design? * how can networking realize its potential as a feminist tool? * how can women scholars exploit networking's technology? * what information technology policies could be developed to ensure computer networking equity for women, as well as minorities? * how does one define computer pornography and "offensive" material on the net? should it be allowed? * how should sexual harassment on the net be treated? * are women-only groups necessary? * how do women interact on muds and moos? * what net resources exist for women? deadlines: december 1, 1993 (submission of abstracts) april 1, 1994 (submission of contributions) abstracts will be reviewed by the issue editor for appropriateness of content and overall balance of the issue as a whole. in turn, authors will then be invited to submit fulllength contributions, which will be peer-reviewed by the journal's normal editorial process before final acceptance for publication. the issue editor encourages correspondence about proposed contributions even before submission of an abstract. potential contributors may obtain a more detailed statement about the focus and range of this special issue by sending email to the issue editor with the subject line: ejvc issue or by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu, directory/pub/ejvc, get ejvc.shade.call. further information about ejvc may be obtained by sending e-mail to listserv@kentvm.bitnet or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu with one or more of the following lines in the text: subscribe ejvc-l yourfirstname yourlastname get ejvc welcome index ejvc-l also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu in the pub/ejvc directory. 25) -----------------------------------------------------------********************* call for submissions ********************* _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 e-mail: keepc@qucd>queensu.ca 26)----------------------------------------------------------- the journal of criminal justice and popular culture call for papers scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria: issues: the journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. the journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice. submission procedures: to submit material for the journal, please subscribe to cjmovies through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow. to subscribe, send a message with the following command to listserv@albnyvm1: subscribe cjmovies yourfirstname yourlastname manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: the editors, journal of criminal justice and popular culture sunycrj@albnyvm1.bitnet or sunycrj@uacsc2.albany.edu managing editors: sean anderson and greg ungar editors journal of criminaljustice and popular culture, school of criminal justice, sunya 135 western avenue albany, ny 12222 internet: sa1171@albnyvm1.bitnet or gu8810@uacsc1.albany.edu list administrator seth rosner school of criminal justice, sunya sr2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or sr2602@thor.albany.edu 27) ------------------------------------------------------------+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for papers _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ (issn: 1039-723x). _psyche_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. _psyche_ publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. _psyche_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. _psyche_ also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version. types of articles: the journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff. research articles reporting original research by author(s). articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. peer reviewed. survey articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. these may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. more ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed. discussion notes critiques of previous research. peer reviewed. tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists. letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in _psyche_. screened by editorial staff. abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. book reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks. announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc. advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc. notes for authors unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of _psyche_, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to _psyche_ the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge _psyche_ as the original source of publication. subscriptions subscriptions to the electronic version of _psyche_ may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet 28) ------------------------------------------------------------************************************* announcement and call for submissions _postmodern culture_ ************************************* _postmodern culture_ a suny press series series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-becompleted north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 29) ------------------------------------------------------------ nsc'93 the network services conference 1993 warsaw, poland, 12-14 october 1993 invitation networking in the academic and research environment has evolved into an important tool for researchers in all disciplines. high quality network services and tools are essential parts of the research infrastructure. building on the success of the first network services conference in pisa, italy, nsc'93 will focus on the issue of providing services to customers, with special attention paid to the actual usage of the various tools available. we will address the impact of today's global tools on service development and support, the changing function of traditional tools and services (such as archives), new services (such as multi-media communications), the future role of the library and the effects of commercialization of networks and network services. customer support at the institutional and campus level, and the role of support in accessing global services, will also be covered. talks, tutorials, demonstrations and other conference activities will address the needs of the research, academic, educational, governmental, industrial, and commercial network communities. tutorial sessions on specific network services have been integrated into the regular conference program. practical issues in the use of these services and tools will be covered in detail by experts. throughout the conference, participants will be able to get hands-on experience in the well-equipped demonstration area. nsc'93 is being organized by earn in conjunction with eunet, nordunet, rare, and ripe. to get a preliminary program and registration form, send e-mail to: listserv@frors12.bitnet (or listserv@frors12.circe.fr) in the body of the message, write: get nsc93 ann2 david sitman earn 30) --------------------------------------------------------- _femisa_ femisa@mach1.wlu.ca _femisa_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, _femisa_ was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the _international studies association_ keep in touch. more generally, i hope that _femisa_ can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the _international studies association_. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg 31)------------------------------------------------------------_holocaus: holocaust list_ holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need and internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu: sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com the holocaus policies are: 1. the coverage of the list will include the holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-semitism, and jewish history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes in the history of ww2, germany, and international diplomacy. 2. we are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the holocaust. in 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the us and canada teaching courses on the holocaust (154 in history departments, 67 in religion, and 46 in literature). an even larger number of professors teach units on the holocaust in courses on jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and world war ii (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. most of these professors own pc's, but do not use them for e-mail. we hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. _holocaus_ will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course. 3. h-net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide _holocaus_ policy and to help stimulate contributions. 4. _holocaus_ is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history. the moderator will solicit postings (by e mail, phone and even by us mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. the moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). it may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. anyone with suggestions about what _holocaus_ can and might do is invited to send in the ideas. 5. the tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. _holocaus_ is affiliated with the _international history network_. 6. _holocaus_ is a part of h-net, a project run by computer oriented historians at the u of illinois. we see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. our first list on urban history, _h urban@uicvm_, recently started up with wendy plotkin as moderator. _h-women_ is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like ethnic, labor, and us south. we are helping our campus jewish studies program set up _jstudy_ (restricted to the u of illinois chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _h jewish_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on jewish history. if you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write richard jensen, for we are now (as of late april) in a critical planning stage. 7. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu 32) ------------------------------------------------------------newjour-l@e-math.ams.org newjour-l aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project. first: newjour-l is the place to *announce* your own (or to forward information about others') newly planned, newly issued, or revised *electronic networked* journal or newsletter. it is specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of publication development and availability. it is also the place to announce availability of paper journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic networks. scholarly discussion lists *which regularly and continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or preprints* may also be reported, for those journal-like sections. we hope that those who see announcements on bitnet, internet, usenet or other media will forward them to newjour-l, but this does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number of duplicate messages. therefore, newjour-l is filtered through a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication. it does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by other lists. for example, sources like new-list describe new discussion lists; arachnet deals with social and cultural issues of e-publishing; vpiej-l handles many matters related to electronic publishing of journals. serialst discusses the technical aspects of all kinds of serials. you should continue to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to them. second: newjour-l represents an identification and road-mapping project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by michael strangelove, university of ottawa. newjour-l will expand and continue that work. as new publications are reported, a newjour-l support group will develop the following services -planning is underway & we ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us know: -a worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new e-publication for completion. this will provide detailed descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access characteristics. -an original cataloguing record will be created. -the fully catalogued title will be reported to national utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or searchers. -the records will feed a directory and database of these titles. not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. we thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable. subscribing: to subscribe, send a message to: listserv@e-math.ams.org leave the subject line blank. in the body, type: subscribe newjour-l firstname lastname you will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list. to drop out or postpone, use the standard listserv (internet) directions. acknowledgment: for their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank: michael strangelove, university of ottawa, advisor david rodgers, american mathematical society, systems & network support edward gaynor, university of virginia library, original cataloguing development john price-wilkin, university of virginia library, systems & network support birdie maclennan, university of vermont library, cataloguing and indexing development diane kovacs, kent state university library, advisor we anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. this project is co-ordinated through: the association of research libraries office of scientific & academic publishing 21 dupont circle, suite 800 washington, dc 20036 e-mail: osap@cni.org (ann okerson) 33) -----------------------------------------------------------popcult@camosun.bc.ca popular culture the popcult list is now in place. it is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. the list will not be moderated. material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged. to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to: mailserv@camosun.bc.ca there should not be anything in the 'subject:' line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself. some keywords are: subscribe popcult help lists send/list popcult unsubscribe popcult it is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. do not include your name after subscribe popcult. in some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. i recommend, to start, that you put subscribe on one line, and help on the next line. that will give you a full listing of available commands. to send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to: popcult@camosun.bc.ca -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- owner: peter montgomery montgomery@camosun.bc.ca professor dept of english ph (604) 370-3342 (o) camosun college (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 foul bay road victoria, bc off. paul bldg 326 canada v8p 5j2 34) ------------------------------------------------------------************************************************************ john w. hartman center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library duke university travel-to-collections grants 1993-94 three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to (1) graduate students in any academic field who wish to use the resources of the center for research toward m.a., ph.d., or other postgraduate degrees; (2) faculty members working on research projects; or (3) independent scholars working on nonprofit projects. funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to durham and local accommodations. the major collection available at the hartman center at the current time is the extensive archives of the j. walter thompson company (jwt), the oldest advertising agency in the u.s. and a major international agency since the 1920's. it is anticipated that the advertisements (1932+) and a moderate amount of agency documentation from d'arcy, masius, benton & bowles (dmb&b) will be available for research by autumn 1993. the center holds several other smaller collections relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and marketing. requirements: awards may be used between november 15, 1993 and december 31, 1994. graduate student applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a postgraduate program in any academic department and (2) must enclose a letter of recommendation from the student's advisor or project director. please address questions and requests for application forms to: ms. ellen gartrell, director john w. hartman center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library duke university box 90185 durham nc 27708-0185 phone: 919-660-5836 fax: 919-684-2855 email: egg@mail.lib.duke.edu deadlines: applications for 1993-94 awards must be received or postmarked by september 30, 1993. awards will be announced by the end of october. -----------------------end of notices.993--------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------holland, 'schizoanalytic reading of baudelaire: the modernist as postmodernist', postmodern culture v4n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n1-holland-schizoanalytic.txt archive pmc-list, file holland.993. part 1/1, total size 62562 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- a schizoanalytic reading of baudelaire: the modernist as postmodernist by eugene w. holland department of french language and literature the ohio state university eugeneh@humanities1.cohums.ohio-state.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.1 (september, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1993 by eugene w. holland, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] whether deleuze and guattari were actually "doing philosophy" in the _anti-oedipus_ or not, their last collaborative work (_qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_) may shed some light on the status of the concepts operating in that early work.^1^ unlike scientific concepts, which aim to stabilize and identify specific domains within the real, philosophical concepts operate according to deleuze and guattari as what we might call "transformers": they intervene in established philosophical problematics in order to de-stabilize them, reworking old concepts and forging new connections among the distinctive features composing them.^2^ what is distinctive about the _anti-oedipus_, in this light (and perhaps this is what makes its mode of intervention seem more than just philosophical), is that its de-stabilization of established problematics involves making new connections *with historical context*, as well as re aligning concepts into new constellations.^3^ a term such as "de-coding," then, will best be understood not in terms of any content of its own, but in relation to the concepts it transforms in the course of producing schizoanalysis out of the problematics of historical materialism and psychoanalysis in the wake of the events of 1968 in france, and--for the purposes of this essay--how it illuminates the transformative force of the works of that great 19th century figure of transition, charles baudelaire.^4^ my aim here will thus be not so much to explain what de-coding means as to show how it works and what it can do in the way of textual and socio-historical analysis of baudelaire. [2] since concepts as transformers intervene in other contexts instead of governing domains of their own, they have no independent, autonomous content, and depend instead on their use for whatever content we can ascribe to them. in other words, what makes philosophical concepts "user friendly" for deleuze and guattari is also what makes them so challenging: they are strategically underdetermined, and thus only take shape--to borrow one of deleuze's favorite polyvocal expressions--"au milieu": *in context* and *in between* their point of departure and a point of arrival or connection with some other phenomenon or event.^5^ connecting schizoanalysis with baudelaire for one thing endows the notion of de-coding with features- notably the linguistic or rhetorical tools of metaphor and metonymy for close analysis of poetic texts--it does not obviously possess in the _anti-oedipus_ itself; and at the same time it in turn situates the evolution of baudelairean poetics in the broader cultural and historical context of the emergence of market society, which is ultimately responsible for de-coding in the first place. the de-coding of modernism in baudelaire will, in this context, turn out to be not only what happens to an earlier romanticism he puts behind him with the invention of modernism, but also what happens to that modernism itself, especially in the late prose poems. by repositioning baudelaire in relation to and somehow already beyond the very modernism he contributed so much to inventing, a schizoanalytic reading can help situate baudelaire in postmodern context. but first, a few words about de-coding. [3] de-coding is, in the first place, deleuze and guattari's translation into semiotic terms of the concepts of rationalization and reification, by which weber and lukacs designated the historical replacement of meaning by abstract calculation as the basis of social order. more in agreement with lukacs than with weber, they explain this process as a function of the capitalist market and the predominance of exchange-value. to be more specific, de-coding is linked to axiomatization, the process central to capitalism whereby streams of quantified factors of production (such as raw materials, skills, and knowledges) are conjoined in order to extract a differential surplus; de-coding both supports and results from axiomatization, transforming meaningful qualities into calculable quantities. deleuze and guattari disagree radically with both weber and lukacs, however, in considering de-coding not as sterile disenchantment or hopeless fragmentation, but as the *positive* moment in the dialectic of capitalist development: as the potential for freedom and permanent revolution, opposed by the forces of re-coding and capitalist authoritarianism. [4] at the same time, however, that de-coding transforms rationalization and reification into semiotic terms, it translates the semiotics of lacanian psychoanalysis into historical terms. of central importance here is the pair of concepts that parallel de-coding and re-coding in the _anti oedipus_: de-territorialization and re-territorialization. derived from lacanian usage--where "territorialization" designates the mapping of the infant's polymorphous erogenous zones by parental care-giving--these terms come to designate a crucial dynamic of the capitalist market: the disconnection and reconnection of bodies and environments (e.g. the disconnection of peasants from common land by the enclosure acts in england, and their re-territorialization as wage-labor onto textile looms in the nascent garment industry). the primary difference between these parallel conceptual pairs is that de-territorialization and re territorialization operate on physical bodies and involve material investments of energy (as in production and consumption), while de-coding and re-coding operate on symbolic representations and involve investments of mental energy (as in cognition and fantasy). this dual transformation of concepts serves to hinge together labor power and libido (called social and desiring production in the _anti-oedipus_), and produces a revolutionary historical-materialist-semiotic psychiatry: schizoanalysis. i should note that the distinction between material and symbolic investments virtually disappears in deleuze and guattari's later works. but the benefits of retaining the term "de-coding"--for cultural and literary studies at least--are threefold: it designates semiotic processes that are legible as such in texts and cultural artifacts; it construes those semiotic processes in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic terms (following lacan); and it at the same time connects both texts and psychodynamics with history and political economy--attributing them ultimately to the spread of the market and the rhythms of capitalist development. [5] the translation of lacanian psychoanalysis into historical materialist terms depends on an ambiguity inherited from levi-strauss as to the status of the symbolic order--an ambiguity crucial to lacanian therapy: is the "symbolic order" a purely abstract, logical structure, or is it historical and concrete? for deleuze and guattari, the answer is clear: the symbolic order is historical; it is the actual ensemble of codes governing meaning and action in a given social formation. but for lacanian therapy, the symbolic order entails the following paradox: on one hand, the symbolic order is the basis of human identity-formation: in saying "i" and accepting a proper name derived from the name-of-the-father, the organism becomes a human subject spoken by the language-system, forever alienated from his or her "true" pre-linguistic being and dependent for any sense of self on the symbolic other. on the other hand, the symbolic order is an illusion, and the symbolic other is not a person but a *place*: the place occupied by the "%sujet suppose-savoir%" (the subject who is presumed to know, to possess authoritative knowledge)--and this is an *empty* place, occupied by the lacanian therapist only in order to refuse the imputation and indeed deny the very possibility of such knowledge and authority. to put this paradox in other terms, the symbolic order is lived in two different registers: from the perspective of the imaginary register, the symbolic order is centered on and governed by a symbolic other who possesses the phallus as sign of authority and from whom the individual derives his or her sense of fixed identity and meaning; from the perspective of the symbolic register, the symbolic order is a realm of fluid rather than fixed identities, the phallus is a sign of infinite semiosis rather than of stable meaning, and the other is a fictional persona in an empty place. following lacan, deleuze and guattari designate the symbolic register's radically fluid form of semiosis free from identity-fixations as "schizophrenia"--but they will ultimately locate and define it historically rather than clinically. [6] for although they acknowledge the radical implications this paradox of the symbolic perspective on the symbolic order entails *for therapy*, deleuze and guattari nonetheless insist that it has specific *historical conditions of possibility*. and insisting that the symbolic order is historical means exposing it irrevocably to difference, contingency, and change: by examining different social formations (in part iii of the _anti-oedipus_), they are able to show that the fiction of a centered symbolic *order* belongs to another, older social formation based on stable codes, and that capitalism by contrast thrives on and indeed fosters through de-coding the meaningless and identity-free "schizophrenic" semiosis characteristic of the symbolic register; hence the subtitle of the _anti oedipus_: _capitalism and schizophrenia_. the intervention of de-coding in lacanian psychoanalysis thus transforms a paradox lying at the heart of radical therapy into a recognition of historical difference, and produces the strong claim that the lacanian perspective is *made possible* by market de-coding under capitalism. [7] the crux of that historical difference is this: social relations in a coded symbolic order are qualitative and significant: women in tribal societies, for example, are valued as the source of life and the very cornerstone of meta-familial social relations in a kinship system fully charged with symbolic meanings. the basic social relations in the de-coded symbolic order of capitalism, by contrast, are quantitative and strictly meaningless: workers (of whatever gender) are equated as abstract, calculable amounts of labor-power within the cash nexus of the market. in this regard (though without using the term de-coding, of course), marx had already discerned an illuminating parallel between martin luther and adam smith: for luther, the essence of religion was not found in objects of religious devotion, but in subjective religiosity in general; and for smith, the essence of wealth was not found in objects of economic value, but in abstract productive activity in general. and smith's insight, marx argues, was made possible by the practice under capitalism of measuring value in terms of abstract labor-power. [8] to this parallel, deleuze and guattari add a third term: sigmund freud, whom they call "the luther and the adam smith of psychiatry."^6^ for freud, the essence of libidinal value is found not in the objects of desire, but in desire itself as an abstract subjective essence, as objectively-*under*determined, de-coded libido. freud's insight, too, deleuze and guattari argue, was made possible dialectically by the capitalist subsumption of all social relations under the market and exchange-value--except the relations of reproduction, which restrict desire to the abstract poles of the nuclear family. so between the extremes of daddy as oedipal agent of castration and object of identification and mommy as forbidden object of desire, market de-coding makes "all that is solid melt into air," as marx put it: the market "mobilizes" desire, in other words, by freeing it from capture by any stable, all-embracing code--only to recapture it, it must be said, via the re-coding of advertising, for example, which re-territorializes it onto the objects of the latest administered consumer fad.^7^ [9] within the framework of psychoanalysis, meanwhile, lacan takes the de-coding of desire one important step further than freud: it is not the actual persons of mommy and daddy that shape desire in the family, but rather the functions of the metonymic search for mother-substitutes as objects of desire and metaphoric identifications made in the father's name. and when such metaphoric identifications break down or are refused ("foreclosed"), according to lacan, the result is a predominantly metonymic form of desire no longer structured by the nuclear family or any other stable code, but mobilized by the infinite semiosis of language as a purely abstract signifying system devoid of meaning: schizophrenia. from the perspective of schizoanalysis, however, such a radically *un*structured form of desire constitutes not a clinical case or exception to the norm, but the very historical rule or tendency of capitalism; schizophrenia becomes the absolute horizon (or "limit") of social (dis)order and psychic functioning, produced by the de-coding processes of the market.^8^ [10] my claim is that baudelaire can be added as a fourth term in the series of parallels linking freud with luther and adam smith: because for baudelairean modernism, aesthetic value is found not in the objects of poetic appropriation, but in the activity of poetic appropriation itself--whence the oxymoron in the title of his major collection (_the flowers of evil_) and his claim to be able to extract modernist poetry from absolutely anything--from evil, from sheer boredom (spleen), or even from mud (as he says).^9^ abandoning and indeed actively rejecting the fixed values imposed in the symbolic order, baudelaire opts instead for a metonymic poetics that approaches the infinite semiosis of a completely de-coded symbolic register. in the modernity that baudelaire was among the first to diagnose, value--religious, economic, libidinal, poetic value- does not inhere in objects, but is subjectively (and even schizophrenically) bestowed. baudelaire is thus in an important sense the martin luther-adam smith-sigmund freud of poetry, an early champion of de-coding within poetry and aesthetics, and one representative of a world-historical transformation in this field just as luther, smith, and freud were in theirs. (there is another, less flattering sense in which baudelaire represents the luther-smith-freud of poetry, however, to which i will return below.) [11] it is this figure of baudelaire as epitomizing a crucial turning-point in the history of western culture at the emergence of modernism that the notion of de-coding enables us to recover from the so-called "rhetorical" school of deconstructive criticism. members of this school--i am thinking in particular of barbara johnson, and her ground breaking readings of matched pairs of baudelaire poems^10^- were among the first to see important epistemological or ideological implications in the jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy, when one or the other aspect of discourse predominates in a given literary text. in comparing verse and prose versions of the same poem, johnson argued that metaphoric discourse--predominating in the verse poems--represents delusory adherence to the metaphysics of identity, while metonymic discourse- predominating in the prose poems--entails heroic acknowledgment of uncertainty, contingency, and flux. but this seminal insight is then immediately recontained as an undecidable binary opposition--metaphor and metonymy are legible in both verse and prose, she insists--lest it open onto the historical conclusion that baudelaire's poetics evolved from predominantly metaphoric to predominantly metonymic, and that this evolution aligns with his rejection of romanticism and the turn to modernism. [12] this strategy of containment is based on a misreading of jakobson--who would surely have been very unhappy to hear the rigorous distinction he proposed between metaphor and metonymy considered "undecidable." according to jakobson, the metaphoric axis of discourse is based on the identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning "in absentia" (as saussure put it) "outside" the linear time of utterance. the metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification "within" time--that is, in the duration of utterance. the metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. jakobson thus concludes that every sign used in discourse has "two sets of interpretants . . . the code and the context."^11^ and we may surmise that when one set of interpretants diminishes in strength or importance, the other set will come to the fore. [13] this is precisely what happens in baudelaire: metaphoric poetics predominates in the early poetry, but gives way to metonymic poetics in the later poetry. the single baudelaire poem everyone is likely to be most familiar with--"correspondences"--is, ironically enough, the very poem *against which* nearly everything he later wrote is directed; it sums up a metaphoric poetics of romanticism expressing the harmonies enveloping man in nature outside of society and time--and it is this romantic poetics that is virulently rejected by baudelairean modernism, where metonymic reference to the present moment and context prevail, instead. [14] "correspondences" appears in an introductory group of poems that treat the relation between the misunderstood artist and his philistine society: the ungainly poet is cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in "the albatross," while in "elevation" he soars high above the mortifying world of earthly existence and "effortlessly understands/ the language of flowers and all silent things" (lines 19-20). such inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of the well-known fourth poem of the cycle, "correspondences," whose title and first phrase ("nature is a temple . . .") depict nature as a realm of equivalences between the divine and the human, a realm where everything ultimately appears to be just like everything else. the poem's insistent use of metaphor and simile promotes a poetic vision able to unite interior and exterior, essence and appearance into an organic whole. [15] in the opening poem of the following cycle, "beauty," things are very different. where "correspondences" abounds in metaphorical figures of equivalence, transparency, and wholeness, "beauty" insists instead on metonymical figures of exteriority, mechanical causality, and comparisons of degree. the temptations of metaphor and simile are proferred, but ultimately refused, as the poem dictates a very different form of poetic investigation. the simile of the poem's first line ("i am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone") is a case in point: a resemblance is proposed, but in terms so bewildering as to obscure the comparison they are supposed to serve. for what is so beautiful about a dream made of stone, or a dream about stone? we may be tempted to posit statuary as an interpretant for this opening simile: but then why does beauty-as-statue inspire in poets a love that is "eternally mute, like matter" (line 4), as the closing simile of the first stanza puts it? a poetically fruitful comparison would surely not silence poets, who of all people should be able to give it voice. [16] the opening simile of the second stanza reinforces these perplexities, by comparing beauty with a sphinx that is "incomprehensible" (line 5). and the strange juxtaposition in the next line ("i combine a heart of snow with the whiteness of swans" line 6) demonstrates how misleading external appearances may be: the swans' whiteness, suggesting innocence and purity, covers a snowy-white heart of coldness and cruelty. by the time we reach the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside have become completely undeterminable and appearances evidently deceiving: the poets remain transfixed by what beauty calls her "grand poses" (%grandes attitudes%, line 9), but are completely unable to determine their authenticity. she appears, she says (line 10), to have borrowed them from the proudest monuments: if she has borrowed them, are they really hers? and if she hasn't borrowed them, then why is she pretending to? no wonder the poets' love remains eternally mute: their metaphors prove unable to determine beauty's true inner nature. [17] yet it turns out that the inaccessibility of beauty's essence enables her actual effectivity in the last stanza of the poem: for i have, to fascinate those docile admirers, pure mirrors that render everything more beautiful: my eyes, my immense eyes of eternal light! (12-14) her identity lost in questionable comparisons of metaphorical *equivalence*, beauty's effects on things are henceforth measured in metonymical comparisons of degree: she renders things *more* beautiful. it is not through essences that beauty reaches poets, but through things; not by relations of interiority and transparency, but of exteriority and mechanical causality. denied access by the "pure mirrors [of] her eyes" to beauty's essence, the poets remain fascinated by proliferating images of the more and more beautiful things illuminated by them.^12^ [18] defying metaphoric appropriation and totalizing expression, beauty is henceforth to be appreciated through her incremental effects on the external world. and indeed, in the subsequent poems of the cycle (especially "the mask" and "hymne to beauty," which baudelaire added to the second edition of the collection), beauty appears only in fragments and random images, valued not for her (or as an essence), but for her contingent impact on the poet. this metonymic poetics intensifies in the "spleen" poems at the end of the first section of the collection, and reaches its zenith in the "parisian tableaus" section, with its insistent reference to scenes of second empire paris, despite the agonizing inability to confer meaning on those scenes. the de-coding of metaphor, meaning, and identity thus fosters not sheer meaninglessness, "undecidability," or the abyss, but rather metonymic reference to context--even if such reference must at the limit forgo any claim to stable meaning.^13^ [19] the poetics of metaphor and metonymy in baudelaire therefore do not represent the poles of an undecidable binary opposition, but terms in an historical evolution from romanticism to modernism. moreover, baudelaire's poetry does not merely reflect the processes of de-coding characteristic of modern capitalist society, it actively participates in them. it is true, of course, that baudelaire's life-span corresponds to the take-off period of modern french capitalism, with the banking elite coming to power in 1830, followed by the influx of californian and australian gold in 1849, and the founding of the first investment banks and the unification of markets by the rail system under napoleon iii in the 1850s and 60s. but even more important was baudelaire's personal investment in romantic-socialist hopes for the revolution of 1848, which was to crown the revolutionary tradition by finally bringing true workers' democracy to france. for when the radical democratic ideals of 1848 are crushed by the %coup d'etat% of napoleon in 1851, baudelaire (among many others) responds by actively repudiating his adherence to those ideals and adopting instead a stance of cynical disdain for modern culture and society. baudelaire's modernism emerges here, as defensive repudiation of the romantic enthusiasm he once shared for the figures of nature, woman, and the people. so in this literary-critical context, the introduction of the notion of de-coding transforms the deconstructive binary opposition metaphor/metonymy into a historical matrix for understanding the emergence of modernism in baudelaire as the metonymic de-coding of romantic metaphoricity in revenge for the shattered hopes and ideals of 1848. [20] central to baudelaire's evolution from romanticism to modernism is his notorious masochism, about which so much has been written (mostly from various psychoanalytic perspectives).^14^ schizoanalysis will insist upon transforming masochism from a psychological into a socio historical category, situating it in the period following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, when the literary works and essays of the "original" masochist, leopold von sacher-masoch, were so popular throughout europe. here i refer to deleuze's study of masoch, although it predates schizoanalysis and uses the discipline-bound terms "de sexualization" and "re-sexualization" in place of de-coding and re-coding.^15^ to derive the specificity of real masochism from masoch's own literary oeuvre, deleuze draws on the freud of _beyond the pleasure principle_, which explores the relationship between pleasure and repetition: what lies "beyond" the pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its grounding in repetition and the death instinct. under the influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure-principle becomes, as freud put it, "innately conservative": repetition grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present perception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling the pleasure-principle to operate and govern behavior. usually, repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what has previously been found pleasurable, which is to say that present perception is eroticized or "sexualized" and governed "conservatively" by memories of gratifications past. [21] but the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition operates independently of the pleasure-principle, "de-sexualizing" perception and repeating something not pleasurable, but extremely displeasurable, something traumatic. here repetition is severed from drive gratification, and serves instead as an ego-defense to reduce anxiety, by developing %ex post facto% the stimulus binding recognition-function whose absence occasioned the trauma in the first place. still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the de-sexualization of perception is *accompanied by the re-sexualization of repetition itself*: instead of repeating what was initially found pleasurable, pleasure is derived from whatever is repeated. now we might well expect desperate measures for reducing anxiety to proliferate in a de-coded symbolic order, which no longer protects the psyche from traumatic stimuli by binding them according to established codes of meaning. but the question remains: how can the repetition of pain, of all things- and especially one's own pain--reduce anxiety and procure pleasure? here, deleuze invokes the conclusion of reik's clinical study of masochism: accepting punishment for the desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.^16^ but he then goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment serve the end of obtaining pleasure? under what conditions does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before -> pleasure-after) become effective? this is where analysis of masoch's fiction proves illuminating. [22] masoch's hero typically arranges a mock contract according to which he willingly suffers regular and systematic domination and punishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. the functions of this fantasy-contract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly excludes the father, the usual authority-figure, and transfers his symbolic authority to the woman; then, by actively soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the symbolic authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it out, instead. with the father-figure excluded and his authority denied, the masochist hero ends up enjoying relations with the woman which the father normally prohibits. in the context of mid-19th century france, this fantasy-scenario presents an allegory of the anti-authoritarian ideals of 1848, with the de-coding of the father-figure in louis-philippe accompanied by re-coding on the mother-figure of marianne and the second republic. [23] yet, in a way deleuze does not fully appreciate, the masochistic *scenario* just described is in masoch's fiction embedded *within a narrative* that produces results very different from the utopian ideal projected by the contract. in masoch's stories, the father-figure supposedly excluded from the fantasy-contract suddenly re-appears, and is in fact joined by the woman in administering new forms of torture that exceed and thus break the terms of the contract. so at the end of masoch's stories, the masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for revenge. and the ex-masochist hero in masoch's stories indeed takes his revenge, with a ferocity bordering on sadism. the conclusion of masochian *narrative* thus represents not the anti-authoritarian utopia of idealized relations with the ideal mother-figure, as pictured in the masochistic *scenario*, but rather a vitriolic and often violent cynic who now despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to have taken his ideals and desires for reality. such is the story that masoch told--and that his innumerable readers throughout late-19th century europe read--over and over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event...that has already occurred. and for baudelaire, as for so many of his french contemporaries, the real event that represents as it were the return of the father ruining the mother-and-son's anti authoritarian utopia, is the incredible rise to power and %coup d'etat% of napoleon iii, the founding of the authoritarian second empire on the ruins of the democratic second republic. [24] what's more, anyone familiar with biographies of baudelaire will recognize this story of the return-of-the father destroying the mother-and-son's idyllic utopia as a *repetition*, from baudelaire's own childhood, of his mother's remarriage to an ambitious young military officer several years after the death of baudelaire's real father: this uncanny "coincidence" is for schizoanalysis what made baudelaire the lyric poet of his age, to paraphrase walter benjamin. in schizoanalytic terms, then, "masochism" is not the name of a psychological category, but a historical strategy for de-coding social authority while transforming romantic idealism into the disillusioned cynicism of modernism. [25] this is not to say that the evolution from romanticism to modernism in baudelaire can be understood as some kind of linear progression from metaphor to metonymy: metaphor doesn't simply disappear, but reappears in baudelairean modernism transformed by metonymization into a corrosive irony.^17^ our account of the de-coding of modernism in baudelaire, meanwhile, remains still too abstract as long as metonymy as a free form of desire induced by the market and metonymization as a formal development of baudelairean poetics are linked by mere parallelism: lacan's and johnson's quite different transformations of jakobson's concept of metonymy must be completed and brought to bear on the evolution of baudelairean poetics as a whole (not restricted to individual poems or pairs of poems, as in johnson and in jakobson himself). here, walter benjamin's own historicization of psychoanalysis via a reading of baudelaire constitutes an invaluable point of departure. what benjamin saw was that baudelaire's best poetry was formulated as a defense against the traumatic shocks typical of urban life in the de-coded symbolic order of nascent capitalism. baudelaire's shock-defense takes two forms, which correspond to the title of the well-known first section of _the flowers of evil_, "spleen and ideal." "ideal" designates a metaphoric defense that re-codes potentially traumatic experience in the nostalgic terms of a lost yet rememorable harmony with nature outside of time (as in "former life," for example); "spleen" designates a metonymic defense that defuses potential trauma simply by locating an experience as precisely as possible in time (see "the clock")--though at the cost, benjamin suggests, of robbing it of any lyric content.^18^ [26] as invaluable as it is, benjamin's reading overlooks the importance of the prose poem collection and even of the "tableaux parisiens" section added after "spleen and ideal" to the second edition of _the flowers of evil_--where a very different form of poetics and response to market de coding prevail. what benjamin didn't see is that cycles of protective re-coding alternate with cycles of exhilarated de-coding in the verse collection, as the poet alternately seeks out and then withdraws from contact with the real. nor was he able to appreciate the way in which the predominance of metonymic poetics transforms the cycles of de-coding and re-coding in the verse collection into *simultaneous* re-coding and de-coding in the individual poems of the prose collection, as the high-anxiety trauma and shock-defenses of earlier work give way in the later work to a very different defense based on psychic splitting. [27] historically speaking, once ambient de-coding reaches a certain threshold of intensity, whatever stability and coherence the ego may have possessed dis-integrate, and the unstable, split subjectivity of so-called borderline conditions replaces oedipal neurosis as the predominant form of psychological disturbance--as nearly all the post freudian psychoanalytic literature from fenichel to kristeva and kernberg attests.^19^ but in the case of baudelaire, who after all experienced de-coding at a considerably earlier stage of capitalist development, there had to have been a precipitating cause for severe splitting: it was, as i have suggested, his experience of napoleon's %coup d'etat%, which shook baudelaire's psychic structure to its foundations and propelled him from a relatively stable romanticism, through masochism, and into the supremely flexible, if not indeed self-contradictory, borderline condition characteristic of his modernism.^20^ borderline conditions by themselves, however (and regardless of the degree to which baudelaire "actually" lived or "merely" staged them in his poetry^21^), are not sufficient to account for baudelairean modernism; there had to have been some figure to serve as ego-ideal around which a new, post romantic personality could form, in order to sustain and sanction the enduring ambitions of baudelaire the writer: this figure, it turns out, was edgar allan poe. identification with poe as a fellow writer shunned by contemporary society fosters a narcissistic reaction to the underlying borderline condition, so that the extreme instability and psychic splitting characteristic of the latter become a new form of defense. [28] this is the stance that emerges in the "parisian tableaus" section of the second edition of _the flowers of evil_; it is epitomized in "the game" ("le jeu"), in which the poet sees himself in a dream sitting off in a corner at a gambling-house, silently watching the players and whores feverishly pursuing their ends, and is shocked that he actually envies them their "tenacious passion": i saw myself, off in a corner of the grim gambling-den, leaning on my elbows, silent, cold, and envious, envying the gamblers their tenacious passion, the old whores their dismal gaiety. and all of them cheerfully selling, right in front of me, one, his long-held honor, the other her good looks! and my heart was alarmed at my envy of these poor souls racing zealously toward the gaping abyss, who, drunk with their own passion, in the end all liked pain better than death and hell better than nothingness! (15-24) not only is the poet only an observer within the dream (lines 15-16), but he then takes his distance from this dream-self, cynically demystifying in waking consciousness the very passions he envied in the dream (lines 21-24). [29] such splitting appears even more starkly in the figure of the prose poem narrator, for whom it serves to establish a more or less comfortable distance from scenes of former selves in degraded commercial context--former selves (romantic idealists, most notably) who have been split off from the observing narrator yet retain a certain fascination as objects of his rapt attention and of poetic depiction.^22^ this narrative stance is most clearly illustrated in "loss of a halo," where the de-coding of romantic views of the poet's vocation, already accomplished on the level of poetics in "beauty," has become an explicit prose theme. in a brothel, the narrator runs into an acquaintance who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a %mauvais lieu%. the poet immediately launches into a long explanation of why he is there: while dodging on-coming traffic on his way across the boulevard, his halo dropped in the mud; not having the courage to retrieve it, he decided it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck. then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now "stroll about incognito, do nasty things, and indulge in vulgar behavior just like ordinary mortals." the acquaintance expects him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none of it: dignity bores him, and now he gets to enjoy himself. besides, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler picks it up and dares to put it on: "what a pleasure to make someone happy!--especially someone who would make me laugh! think of x, or z! wouldn't that be droll!" here we see the narrator exercising an invidious superiority over his interlocutor and other writers who still believe in the "aura" of an older, romantic version of the poet, one the narrator has left behind. [30] but this sense of superiority, it turns out, was not a given but an achievement, and was in fact achieved at the expense of baudelaire himself in an earlier incarnation. for the journal anecdote on which the poem is based reads very differently from the published version: here, the narrator does recover the halo, and still values it highly enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen.^23^ the lost halo, in this light, would be precisely the one awarded the romantic poet of "benediction" for his suffering at the beginning of _the flowers of evil_. this idealistic self has in the final version completely disappeared beneath the narrator's cynicism, having been projected onto x, z, and the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded ideal. moreover, the loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it has become an occasion for the narrator to attain a position of superiority over his fictional audience. and he is now at one remove from the experience: baudelaire has transmuted the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue, and in the process utterly rejected the romantic ideal of the poet he himself once espoused, if not embodied. such a position of serene indifference or actual disdain for cultural ideals characterizes baudelairean modernism at its apogee. and yet...and yet.... [31] and yet there are at least two senses in which baudelaire's prose poem collection goes far beyond the split stance of the modernism adumbrated in the "tableaux parisiens"--far enough, perhaps, to attain a certain postmodernism. for one thing, although baudelaire's identification with poe as martyr to a philistine society was supposed to elevate him above the crass world of commerce and mass-democratic society, the modernist poetics he developed turned out to be strictly complicitous with the capitalist market. by locating aesthetic value solely in the *activity* of poetic appropriation and distancing himself from the objects of that appropriation, baudelaire comes to occupy the position of what jacques attali calls the "designer" or "programmer," whose basic function within capitalism is to endow more or less worthless objects (such as "designer-jeans") with semiotic surplus-value in order to enable the realization of economic surplus-value by promoting their purchase by consumers; the most familiar form of programming, in other words, is advertising.^24^ this is the second sense in which baudelaire can be considered the martin luther/adam smith/sigmund freud of poetry, for each of these figures, too, re-imposed a moment of re-coding on the radical indeterminacy of de-coding, according to deleuze and guattari: luther re-codes pure religiosity onto scripture; adam smith re-codes abstract labor-power onto capital; freud re-codes polymorphous libido onto the oedipus complex. baudelaire, similarly, re-codes an increasingly metonymic poetics onto the prose poem narrator-as-programmer. [32] inasmuch as baudelaire's mature poetics functions in this way to valorize from the re-coded perspective of the borderline-narcissist narrator various forms of de-coded experience that have been distanced or rendered virtually meaningless in themselves, it acts in complicity with and even as a prototype for the kinds of debased commercial activity modernism was to have rejected and risen above. and this is a complicity that baudelaire himself acknowledges in the prose poem entitled "the cake," where inflated rhetoric endows a nearly worthless scrap of bread with so much semiotic surplus-value that it becomes the prized object of a fratricidal war.^25^ such recognition of the ultimate inseparability of high and low culture, of aesthetics and marketing, has become a hallmark of what we today call the postmodern condition--in large part because modernist "defamiliarization" has indeed become the all too familiar marketing strategy baudelaire "foresaw" it could, now used for selling everything from standard-brand beer to %haute couture% perfume. [33] and yet it must be said at the same time that baudelaire never whole-heartedly adopts the aloof and superior position of the modernist programmer: an abiding sympathy for his idealistic former selves remains a central feature of the prose poem collection, visible in the narrator's recurring shock of recognition that the poor victims of commerce and philistinism he has been watching from a distance are none other than the poet himself. nowhere in the prose poem collection is this more poignantly depicted than in "the old clown," in which the narrator happens across an aged carnival clown sitting alone, ignored by the joyous throngs surrounding him. while observing him, the narrator suddenly "feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria," and when he tries to "analyze [his] sudden grief," he realizes he has just seen an image of "the aging man of letters who has outlived the generation he had so brilliantly amused; [an image] of the old poet bereft of friends, family, children, worn out by poverty and the public's ingratitude"--an image, that is to say, of his very self. whereas the narrator of poems such as "loss of a halo" (and "the projects") manages to retain or quickly regain his composure in the face of former selves, defensive splitting in many other poems (including "a heroic death" as well as "the old clown") fails abruptly, putting the narrator back into agonzing contact with romantic ideals that are alive in memory despite their historical defeat (which is the theme of the prose poem entitled "which one is the true one?").^26^ [34] to be sure, there is a tendency in baudelaire to repudiate the romantic narrative of french history as progress toward social democracy in the name of modernism, a tendency to transform erstwhile idealism into pure cynicism. what could be more cynical than to capitalize on the defeat of one's ideals by adopting the position of programmer and contributing to the realization of surplus-value, including and especially one's own? such borderline-narcissist cynicism, incidentally, is precisely the stance of baudelaire's current-day, american avatar, madonna, who acts out degraded split-off selves who she knows will shock and sell, but always from an ironic distance that leaves her integrity as programmer and her command of a share of the profits intact.^27^ but baudelaire, it seems to me, never quite occupies such a position. and this is not just because (as bataille reminds us^28^) he represents in material terms a colossal failure as the "lyric poet of high capitalism"--unlike madonna. it is because, however much baudelaire repudiates narrative and history, he never manages to completely hide his profound sympathy and lasting identification with the victims of the capitalist market: he never fully occupies the modernism he himself invented. [35] is such identification with the victims on baudelaire's part a mere vestige of his erstwhile romanticism? biographically speaking, perhaps so. but i would argue that it becomes available or interesting to us under specifically postmodern conditions, when we become willing or able to see more in baudelaire than the invention of modernism for which he has been canonized. surely his recognition of the potential of modernist poetry for market programming has little enough to do with romanticism, and everything to do with postmodernism today. in any case, the anti universalizing and anti-individualist principles of schizoanalysis suggest a version of literary reception theory (akin to benjamin's "redemptive" literary history) according to which a process of socio-historical rather than narrowly psychological transference will make certain features of a literary work become visible when changed circumstances bring one historical moment into unexpected alignment with another.^29^ in this light, as our postmodernism rejoins baudelaire's preand/or post modernism by means of such historical transference, modernism appears in between as an attempt to capitalize on market reification itself, with its segregation of formal innovation in the restricted sphere of high culture from homogenizing repetition in the general cultural sphere, as a vehicle or opportunity for aesthetic development.^30^ and it would appear by now that this attempt has, if not failed in some simple and total way, then certainly run its course, accomplished all that it can--and is therefore being surpassed. [36] antonio negri has, to my mind, proposed the most acute way to situate this historical reconstruction of the relation between the premodern, modern, and postmodern in a figure such as baudelaire: in terms of the difference between merely formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor by capital.^31^ if, as marx said, society sets itself only the tasks it is able to accomplish, then we may understand the kinds of formal freedom and equality associated with romanticism, the sovereign individual, and representative democracy, along with the kinds of formal innovation associated with modernism, as historically necessary and indeed fruitful stages in the development of modern culture, but stages which have by now been superceded, as the full socialization of production under conditions of real subsumption renders the individual romantic subject obsolete, and calls for new developments in collective freedom, substantive equality, and general cultural innovation alike. in this light, "the voyage" (the concluding poem of the second edition of _the flowers of evil_) might be understood to prefigure, in its insistence on the value of unending travel for its own sake, the notion of permanent revolution as it appears on the historical horizon once capitalism has exhausted all of its positive potential--and more specifically to prefigure, in its strategic use of the anti-lyrical, plural personal pronoun "we" throughout, the kind of collective nomadism on a new earth that deleuze and guattari envisage in the _anti oedipus_ as the next stage of social development.^32^ ---------------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _the anti-oedipus_ (new york: viking, 1977) and _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_ (paris: minuit, 1991). ^2^ on the differences between philosophical concepts and scientific "functives" (%fonctifs%), see chapter 5 of _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_. while not deleuze and guattari's own, i have found the term "transformers" useful for capturing the operational value of deleuzo-guattarian concepts; so has reda bensma, in "les transformateurs deleuze ou le cinema comme automate spirituel," forthcoming. ^3^ this would be the "utopian" dimension of the philosophical concepts deployed in the _anti-oedipus_, according to _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_ (95). ^4^ on the relations of the _anti-oedipus_ to may 68, see my "schizoanalysis: the postmodern contextualization of psychoanalysis" in _marxism and the interpretation of culture_, nelson and grossberg, eds. (urbana: university of illinois press, 1988), 405-416, esp. 415. for a fuller treatment than is possible here of the evolution of baudelairean poetics from the perspective of schizoanalysis, see my _baudelaire and schizoanalysis: the sociopoetics of modernism_ (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993). ^5^ on the concept of friend and concepts as friends, see _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_, 8-10 and chapter 3, "les personnages conceptuels". on "milieu," see gilles deleuze and claire parnet, _dialogues_ (paris: flammarion, 1977), 69 and passim; and _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_, 94-96. ^6^ the _anti-oedipus_, 271. ^7^ karl marx and friedrich engels, "the communist manifesto" in _marx and engels: basic writings on politics and philosophy_, lewis feuer, ed. (garden city: doubleday, 1959) 6-41; the quotation is from p.10. ^8^ the _anti-oedipus_, 176-77; for a similar discussion of the relation between philosophy and the limits of capitalism, see _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_, 92-97. ^9^ "i have kneaded mud and made it into gold" (my translation), _oeuvres completes_ (paris: seuil, 1968), 763. ^10^ barbara johnson, _defigurations du langage poetique: la seconde revolution baudelairienne_ (paris: flammarion, 1979), 31-55; and _the critical difference_ (baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1980), 23-48. ^11^ roman jakobson, "two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbance" in _fundamentals of language_ (with morris halle) (the hague: mouton, 1956), 67-96; the quotation is from page 75. ^12^ for a more complete comparison of the poetics of "correspondences" and "beauty," see _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_, chapter 2. ^13^ on the metonymic poetics of the "spleen" poems and the "parisian tableaus," see _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_, chapters 3 and 5. on metonymic or "indexical" reference to context in baudelairean modernism, see ross chambers, _melancolie et opposition: les debuts du modernisme en france_ (paris: jose corti, 1987). ^14^ on baudelaire's masochism, see rene laforgue, _the defeat of baudelaire_ (london: hogarth, 1932); jean-paul sartre, _baudelaire_ (paris: gallimard, 1947); and leo bersani, _baudelaire and freud_ (berkeley: university of california press, 1977). ^15^ gilles deleuze, _presentation de sacher-masoch_ (paris: minuit, 1967). ^16^ theodor reik, _masochism in modern man_ (new york: farrar and rinehart, 1941). ^17^ for another, quite different account of metaphor in modernism, see david lodge, _the modes of modern writing: metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern literature_ (london: edward arnold, 1977); lodge draws exclusively on jakobson for his understanding of metaphor and metonymy, and not at all on lacan. ^18^ walter benjamin, _charles baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism_ (london: verso/new left books, 1973). ^19^ otto fenichel, "ego-disturbances and their treatment," in _collected papers_, 2 vols. (new york: norton, 1953-54), vol. 2, 109-28; otto kernberg, _borderline conditions and pathological narcissism_ (new york: jason aronson, 1975); julia kristeva, "within the microcosm of 'the talking cure'," in _interpreting lacan_, smith and kerrigan, eds., _psychiatry and the humanities_ vol. 6 (new haven: yale university press, 1983), 33-48. ^20^ "with all the talk of rights these days, there's one that everyone has forgotten about . . . the right to contradict oneself" (my translation) _oeuvres completes_, 291. on the contradictory nature of modernism, see charles bernheimer, _figures of ill repute: representing prostitution in nineteenth-century france_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1989). ^21^ as leo bersani put it, "i don't mean that baudelaire was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however, seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the world." _baudelaire and freud_ (berkeley: university of california press, 1977), 128. ^22^ for a fuller discussion of narrative splitting in a broader range of prose poems, see _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_, chapters 6 and 7. ^23^ the anecdote is found in "fusees" #11, _oeuvres completes_, 627. ^24^ jacques attali, _noise: the political economy of music_ (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1985), esp. 128-32. ^25^ for a more complete reading of "the cake," see _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_, chapter 7. ^26^ for discussions of "which one is the true one?" "a heroic death," and "the projects" along these lines, see _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_, chapter 6. ^27^ see david tetzlaff, "metatextual girl: patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> madonna," forthcoming; and my "baudelaire's madonna and ours," forthcoming. ^28^ see his essay on baudelaire in _literature and evil_ (london: calder and boyars, 1973). ^29^ on "historical transference" of this kind, see benjamin's "theses on the philosophy of history," in _illuminations_, hannah arendt, ed. (new york: schocken, 1969), 253-64; michel de certeau, _the writing of history_ (new york: columbia university press, 1988); dominick lacapra, _soundings in critical theory_ (ithaca: cornell university press, 1989); and the preface to _baudelaire and schizoanalysis_. ^30^ on the general and restricted spheres of culture, see pierre bourdieu, _distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1984). ^31^ see antonio negri, _marx beyond marx: lessons on the grundrisse_ (new york: bergin and garvey, 1984); and _the politics of subversion: a manifesto for the twenty-first century_ (london: polity press [basil blackwell], 1989), especially chapter 3, "from the mass worker to the socialized worker--and beyond" and chapter 13, "postmodern." ^32^ on the "new earth," see the _anti-oedipus_, 35, 131, 318-22, 367-82; and _qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_, 95; on nomadism as permanent revolution, see my "schizoanalysis: the postmodern contextualization of psychoanalysis," esp. 407. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[readers], 'selected letters from readers', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-[readers]-selected.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.995. part 1/1, total size 6551 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------selected letters from readers postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------copyright (c) 1995 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. ---------------------------------------------------------------------the following responses were submitted by pmc readers using regular email or the pmc reader's report form. not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited. ---------------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on kevin mcneilly, "ugly beauty: john zorn and the politics of postmodern music": i think a problem arises when defining postmodernity as the appropriations of pop culture as a sort of social critique -i think that, rather, attali is right on when he stakes the claim that it is indicative of its environment as well as discursive to it. pop culture requires itself as a lens to our vision and our voice. i would say that, rather than remark upon the music's instrumentality, he reiterates it in a very symptomatic pop-culture fetishism. pastiche is not by its nature a revolutionary form. the moments of "tension" between the segments are not noise in attali's utopian sense, nor any sort of revolutionary parody which critiques each pop-gem in turn (and i think it would be a big mistake to see his classical moments without their genre lens, too) but slippages between genre units. these slippages, or shifts, are fascinating because the genres are seen as coherent chunks -it's a pastiche, not a melange -and the listener is required to be a consummate pop-cult navigator who can identify the genres as they appear. it is these shifts that are operating in a movie like _pulp fiction_, where the slippages between gangster, boxing, film noir, kung-fu, etc. film are fetishized, nostalgic moments. the fun and the appeal of the film, and zorn's music, is based on the recognitions of each genre as they fly by in a flurry -one is left not with someone wiser to cultural production but someone self-satisfied with their own pop-connoisseurship. the clever aesthete. who needs more self-satisfied clever aesthetes? not me, that's for sure. and i think its a big mistake to consider zorn as critical of any sort of consumer repetition compulsion, considering his cd's mostly cost 25 dollars, and as i remember many repeat the same tracks/tricks. the only consumer awakening i see going on is the consumer who gets pissed at the fact that john zorn is screwing them over. like warhol, he's gotten rich from his reiterative postmodernity that supposedly attacks consumer culture. does that make sense to anyone? last, zorn treats the genres upon which whole undergrounds and cultures exist (hardcore punk, dub reggae) as pop culture chunks with all the depth of soundbites. as is typical of reiterations of capital, and capital itself: it wants you to think there is no outside of the system, and no difference between equally recognizable soundbites. recognition is the key. what matters is who can best navigate the cracks of the collage, instead of what is being elided in or just simply left out of the pop-chunks. and what is left out is whole discursive, critical cultures and registers -what we're left with is apolitical pop babble for hipster connoisseurs. i'm sorry if i sound too adversarial here, but i think it's a big problem to write the equation between pop collage and a coherent critique of pop culture. later, julian these comments are from: julian myers the email address for julian myers is: drm3@cornell.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on phoebe sengers, "madness and automation: on institutionalization": machinic analysis described by phoebe sengers brings to mind cellular automata and self-organizing system theory, but applied at higher levels of abstraction. the totalization could be described as the constraints imposed by the collectivity of the self-organizing automata on any other single automata -all the automata are linked, and each is limited to some degree by interactions with its neighbours. the active agents are more like processes, hence asubjective as the author states. just as any one machine can "escape" the totalizing force of other machines -and even the big, social machine -any single automata can be the seed for bifurcated reshaping of the entire system (this is, maybe, what history is all about). it would be interesting to develop such thought in mathematical terms. is there such a thing as postmodern physics? or as postmodern psychiatry? my secret thoughts are, i think, ancient ones too -we're missing something in physics, i know, and just maybe it has something to do with process and machines, as we are and everything is, in a way, both, but not in a cold, engineering sense; rather, as creative, substantial activity, as a.n. whitehead would put it. also, recently i came across a paper on schizophrenia in which the authors apply the work of prigogine et al. and complex systems theory to understanding the physical manifestations of machinic disorder. finally, to the question "what happened to me?" posed by the author. it is interesting, but why it happened is even more so. it happened to me too, but i had the good sense (or maybe i'm just poorer) not to fork over $10,000 to overpaid, uptight "professionals" to tell me i'm screwed up, and pretend to fix me (well, actually, here in canada i could of got the machine service for a lot less!). in any case, i know i am a faulty product -not a sterling one. i have no ability to persuade animal, vegatable, or mineral, and that is probably the central process of the machine: to persuade. because i am feeble at it, i am inferior, and my process is sometimes almost unbearable. ben romanin september 21, 1995 toronto romain@io.org --------------------end of letters.995 for pmc 6.1------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------bernstein, 'three poems', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-bernstein-three.txt archive pmc-list, file bernstei.994. part 1/1, total size 6797 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- three poems by charles bernstein dept. of english s.u.n.y. buffalo bernstei@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by charles bernstein, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [audio files available from jefferson.village.virginia.edu by anonymous ftp, in /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.994/sounds] soapy water from the absent father in dumbo (tenerife: zasterle press, 1991 -out of print). you've got to be patient sometimes--sounds like an anaesthetic, i'll be the doctor--but jump up into the next available hoop--nick calling "where are my galleys" they can't be lost in the mail because they went federal express. but something is always not there & if it's not apparent ingenuity (the mind's perennial ingenue) will think of it, rest enskewered. these are the saltine days--salty & soggy. the struts are finished, the shocks are leaking, & like the man says, there's always a simple solution- simple & stupid. with the rug pulled out turns out there was no floor. & float, flutteringly behind or in bed with what salience has no surety. the thing expressed--sounds like some sort of pizza franchise, especially with the choices now offered--broccoli, zucchini, belgian sausage, seven variety mushroom. no grade like the grade that blew the gasket. turns out to be slop corridor, 7 days to shapelier nail filings, was there sex before catholicism? it's not as if an economy of loss is not in- you can't say circulation because it is kind of anticirculation: all this nervous energy dissipates production & erodes accumulation- so you don't have to get so dramatic, talk about death & sex, or so moral, talk about idled hours--all that you ever need to lose is wasting away in anxiety's natural spring geysers. so let's bury that knife, & in the morning we can eat meat again. ------------------------------------------------------------ claire-in-the-building there is not a man alive who does not admire soup. i felt that way myself sometimes, in a manner that greatly resembles a plug. swerving when there were no curbs, vying nonchalantly against the slot-machine logic of my temporary guardians, dressed always in damp patterns with inadequate pixelation to allow for the elan she protested she provoked on such sleep-induced outings in partial compliance with the work-release program offered as an principled advance on my prostate subjection to tales altogether too astonishing to submit to the usual mumbo jumbo, you know, over easy, eat and run, not too loud, no bright floral patterns if you expect to get a job in such an incendiary application of denouement. my word! ellen, did you understand one thing frank just said, i mean, the nerve of these protestants, or whatever they call themselves or i ain't your mother's macaroni and cheese, please, no ice. is sand biodegradable? do you serve saws with your steak, or are you too scared to claim anything? no can't do. "i learned to read by watching wheel of fortune when i was a baby." by the time i was 5 you couldn't tell the slippers from the geese. that's right, go another half mile up the cliff and take a sharp left immediately after where the absolutely no trespassing sign used to be, you know, before the war. like the one about the chicken crossed the street because he wanted to see time fly or because he missed the road or he didn't want to wake up the sleeping caplets. a very mixed-up hen. "no, i can't, i never learned." by the time you get up it's time to go to sleep. like the one about the leaky boat and the sea's false bottoms. veils that part to darker veils. so that the fissure twisted in the vortex. certain she was lurking just behind the facade, ready to explain that the joke had been misapplied or was it, forfeited? never again; & again, & again. "maybe he's not a real person." maybe it's not a real purpose. maybe my slips are too much like pratfalls (fat falls). maybe the lever is detached from the mainspring. the billiard ball burned against the slide of the toaster (holster). that's no puzzle it's my knife (slice, life, pipe). the rip that ricochets around the rumor. as in two's two too many. "i thought you said haphazard- but if you did you're wrong." if you've got your concentration you've got just about everything worth writing home that tomorrow came sooner than expected or put those keys away unless you intend to use me and then toss me aside like so much worn out root beer, root for someone, bill, take a chance, give till it stops hurtling through the fog or fog substitute. save me so that i can exist lose me so that i may find you "that's an extremely unripe plum." "there's no plum like the plum of concatenation." plunge & drift, drift & plunge. the streets are icy with incipience. ------------------------------------------------------------ mao tse tung wore khakis who would have thought paul mccartney would be the perry como of the 1990s? the thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end in the studio backlot. the lions have left their lair and are roaming just by the subconscious. pp-warning: illegal received field on preceding line. bethel/'94: i just don't want any hippies come in here and steal my computer. in my experience i often misspell words. evidently bob dylan missed the exit and ended up in saugerties. you can sell some of the people most of the time, but you can't -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------kirschenbaum, 'cult of print', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-kirschenbaum-cult.txt archive pmc-list, file review-7.995. part 1/1, total size 22559 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the cult of print by matthew g. kirschenbaum department of english university of virginia mgk3k@faraday.clas.virginia.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by matthew g. kirschenbaum, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: birkerts, sven. _the gutenberg elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age_. boston: faber and faber, 1994. [1] it is tempting to begin by commenting on the fact that this review of the work of an author who is at best wary of, and often openly hostile to, the various new writing technologies, is appearing in the pages (so to speak) of a journal that is published and circulated solely through the electronic media of the internet. but since this is also a point we might do better to simply bracket at the outset, let me begin instead by saying that i agree with jahan ramazani's recent paraphrase of countee cullen: we need elegies now more than ever (ix). if the elegy, as ramazani writes, is itself an act of struggle against the dominant culture's reflexive denial of grief, then surely the elegiac sensibility must contain the potential for evoking badly needed forms of recognition in an era when the nightly news is brought to us by disney (15-16). [2] the merger of the american broadcasting company and the entertainment ensemble which this past summer brought us _pocahontas_ is, in fact, just the sort of phenomenon that gives rise to sven birkerts's project of presiding over the occasion of gutenberg's passing. in this collection of essays and meditations, however, his critique of our contemporary electronic environment belongs more properly to the tradition of the jeremiad than the elegy. birkerts, a critic, reviewer, and self-confessed "un-regenerate reader," has lately been appearing in such places as _harper's magazine_ to speak against what he describes as the onset of "critical mass" with regard to our media technologies. the components of this critical mass include, first and foremost, the internet and other on-line services, as well as hypertext systems, cd-roms and most other forms of multimedia, pcs in general and word processors in particular, fax machines, pagers, cellula rphones, and voicemail -in short, the whole riot of circuitry that has, over the course of the last decade or so, migrated from the showcases of consumer electronics fairs to our homes, offices, and classrooms. [3] it is no exaggeration to say that for birkerts, who holds that "language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle," this migration is anathema to the printed word as he knows it, and apocalyptic in terms of its broader cultural effects: as the world hurtles on . . . the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise. as we ponder that act, profound questions must arise about our avowedly humanistic values, about spiritual versus material concerns, and about subjectivity itself . . . . i have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what profundities the author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. (6) to understand birkerts's perspective here, we must turn to the model of reading he develops in the early essays of _the gutenberg elegies_. but first, i should note that the above passage allows us to glimpse at the outset a disturbing tendency in birkerts's thought: here and elsewhere, "the book" collapses far too readily into "serious literature," a category which in turn collapses too often into a familiar canon of novels, a canon which, whatever its merits or demerits, forms only one constellation in the gutenberg galaxy. [4] reading, for birkerts, is an insular activity. it allows him to transcend the quotidian order of things, and experience what he calls alternately "real time," "deep time," or: "duration time, within which events resonate and %mean%. when i am at the finest pitch of reading, i feel as if the whole of my life -past as well as unknown future -were somehow available to me. not in terms of any high-definition particulars . . . but as an object of contemplation" (84). one might wish to question whether this particular experience of time is truly unique to reading and print culture; victor turner and others, in the course of their work on ritual in oral societies, have documented numerous and strikingly similar accounts of temporal transcendence. yet for birkerts, it is precisely his anxiety over the "fate of reading," reading as understood and experienced in this way, that is at the foundation of his aggressive response to new media technologies. this is a position he sketches very early in the course of his work, and i will quote him on it at length: in my lifetime i have witnessed and participated in what amounts to a massive shift, a whole-sale transformation of what i think of as the age-old ways of being. the primary human relations -to space, time, nature, and to other people -have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. those who argue that the very nature of history is change -that change is constant - are missing the point. our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evolutionary accommodation have been short-circuited. the advent of the computer and the astonishing sophistication achieved by our electronic communications media have together turned a range of isolated changes into something systemic. the way that people experience the world has altered more in the last fifty years than in the many centuries preceding ours. the eruptions in the early part of our century -the time of world wars and emergent modernity -were premonitions of a sort. since world war ii we have stepped, collectively, out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. we have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable. this is why i take reading -reading construed broadly - as my subject. reading, for me, is one activity that inscribes the limit of the old conception of the individual and his relation to the world. it is precisely where reading leaves off, where it is supplanted by other modes of processing and transmitting experience, that the new dispensation can be said to begin. (15) this long passage both pinpoints the nucleus of birkerts's cosmology, and provides us with the basic outlines of narrative in which gutenberg becomes the signifier of our vanished origins. the themes presented here are reiterated throughout the book, though they are only rarely developed with any greater degree of detail. [5] while the tenor of birkerts's argument may strike some as idealistic or perhaps even simplistic, it is not my intention to begrudge him his convictions. much of what is written in _the gutenberg elegies_ seems to exist completely outside the ken of what have come to be accepted as the works defining the leading concerns of humanities scholarship in the past three decades. to ignore this body of work, with the exception of token jabs at roland barthes on a single occasion, seems to me distressing and irresponsible, but also a privilege birkerts assumes at his own risk. what i find more disturbing is the ease with which birkerts's own particular experience of reading is propagated as normative and universal. it is true that his authorial strategy is often unabashedly anecdotal and autobiographical; the longest essay in the book, "the paper chase," is a more or less engaging narrative of birkerts's own development as both reader and writer. many of the incidents he recounts here, from the endless fascination derived from arranging and re-arranging his bookshelves, to the realization that he is not, after all, the great american novelist, may strike readers as familiar, even endearing. but although the book is laced with such highly personalized reflections, all too often they slip seamlessly into blanket generalizations. witness, for example, the following shift from the first to the third person over the course of a page: if anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that i value the state a book puts me in more than i value the specific contents. indeed, i often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after i've finished it. i recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood i occupied, but i am less sure about the narrative details. it is almost as if the book were, as wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. (84) what reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. that, god or no god, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could somehow discern for ourselves if we could lay the whole of our experience out like a map. and while it may be true that a reader cannot see the full map better than anyone else, he is more likely to live under the supposition that such an informing pattern does exist. he is, by inclination and formation, an explorer of causes and effect and connections through time. he does not live in the present as others do -not quite -because the present is known to be a moving point in the larger scheme he is attentive to. (85) [6] it is clear that this reader is a romantic reader, and while i would not wish to deny birkerts any of the pleasures of reading that way, his model of our engagement with the written word -a model that occupies the first half of his book and is the basis for the all-out assault on electronic media that follows -is badly weakened by its uncritical and unselfconscious presentation of a highly stylized and idealized reading self. and i should add that this notion of an ideal originates not with me but with birkerts himself: one of his chapters is entitled "the woman in the garden," and it evolves out of a meditation on a victorian painting whose name he cannot remember, but which depicts, on a bench within a secluded bower, a woman lost in thought with an open book in her lap. (i am myself reminded of d. g. rossetti's "day dream.") that this particular painting represents not a transcendent ideal, but rather a distinct set of artistic conventions from a discrete historical moment, is the sort of critical awareness toward which birkerts, in his passion for print, is blind. [7] from here birkerts proceeds to a discussion of what he terms the "electronic millennium," as well as more specific considerations of cd-roms, hypertext fiction, and, somewhat incongruously, the recent commercial phenomenon of books-on-tape. the latter, however, actually proves to be the medium best suited to his taste: "in the beginning was the word -not the written or printed or processed word, but the %spoken% word. and though it changes its aspect faster than any proteus, hiding now in letter shapes and now in magnetic emulsion, it remains . it still has the power to lay us bare" (150). birkerts discusses a number of different audio books in the essay from which i quote ("close listening"), while his experience with cd-roms and hypertexts seems limited to the _perseus_ package developed by classics scholar gregory crane, and stuart moulthrop's interactive novel _victory garden_. and when birkerts confesses that he finds a recording of dudley moore reading oscar wilde's _the happy prince_ much the superior achievement, his misapprehension of the technologies he is ostensibly investigating appears near total. [8] it is also in these middle chapters that we begin to notice a certain rhetorical shift, one that is altogether in keeping with the conventions of the jeremiad. birkerts begins presenting extensive lists of what the future might have in store. in the chapter entitled "into the electronic millennium," for example, we find the following: here are some of the kinds of developments we might watch for as our "proto-electronic" era yields to an all-electronic future: 1. %language erosion%. . . . joyce, woolf, soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers. 2. %flattening of historical perspectives%. . . . once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely %mean% differently. the printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. . . . 3. %the waning of the private self%. we may even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. (128-30) a similar list appears in the chapter on cd-roms. my point here is not so much that birkerts's observations are uniquely misguided, for they are not very different from the positions others have articulated, albeit with somewhat less millennial urgency, in various ivory tower skirmishes for years. rather, my concern is that these lurid predictions manifest themselves at the expense of a more balanced account of ongoing work in the humanities that is engaging with such technologies as hypertext and the cd-rom in innovative and productive ways -work that when done well, i might add, is conducted with the same rigor that has characterized the best of more traditional forms of scholarship. [9] birkerts's claim that the classics will soon lie unread, for example, is not only stale, but it also displays complete ignorance of a project such as the text encoding initiative (tei). the tei is the result of an effort by an international committee of scholars and librarians to produce a set of guidelines for the standardized markup of electronic texts. as it is adopted by a growing number of libraries and other institutions, the tei will enable a vast body of printed material to be archived, indexed, and disseminated in a consistent manner. in time, a community library in, say, nome, alaska, will be able to deliver access to the same materials as are available to the patrons of the new york public library. the tei's 1600 pages of specifications also, i would argue, reflect a somewhat deeper and more thoughtful commitment to the word than simply a headlong rush to zap books into cyberspace. birkerts need not be impressed by any of this, but he ought to at least be cognizant of it when he writes, with regard to the development of electronic media, that "every lateral achievement is purchased with a sacrifice of depth" (138). [10] the final suite of essays in _the gutenberg elegies_ ponders more or less recent trends in literary and academic circles. one piece comments upon the eclipse of the homegrown trillingesque intellectual -described as a benevolent sage whose thought is accessible to the "intelligent layman" -by the inscrutable knowledge industry of the modern university (181). in another essay we meet the writerly counterpart to the gentle reader encountered earlier in the bower. this personage turns out to be youngblood hawke, a romanticized hollywood icon of a writer who, living in rural isolation, toils throughout the night to finish his first novel, wraps the manuscript in plain brown paper, and ships the whole thing off to the big city where it is promptly accepted by a major publishing house (198). the final essay in this section recounts the decline of the american literary tradition, and here birkerts has the misfortune of conceiving a certain "mr. case" as sort of postmodern teflon everyman who spends the whole of his day interfacing with computers and networks and the like, all the while removed from the world of nature (205-6). how, birkerts asks, can mr. case -into whom we are all gradually evolving -possibly provide an honest writer with the motivation to put pen to paper? birkerts is unaware that william gibson's protagonist in _neuromancer_ -a novel which received widespread acclaim when published in 1984, and which also, as everyone by now has heard, contains the first use of the word "cyberspace" -happens to be named . . . case. this is mere coincidence, i am sure, but cyberpunk fiction is not the only or even the most important literary trend to emerge from developments in electronic media. birkerts has no comment whatsoever on the recent proliferation of e-zines and other electronic venues for writing and publication, nor does he consider the phenomenon of the personal homepage and its implications for new forms of autobiography. but even laying these last points aside, the banality and pining nostalgia of these three pieces make it difficult to accept birkerts as a serious observer of the contemporary american literary scene, to say nothing of his views on technology. [11] _the gutenberg elegies_ closes with a coda entitled "the faustian pact," and if there were ever any doubts about the jeremiad being the hidden rhetorical structure of this text, those doubts are ended here. "i've been to the crossroads and i've seen the devil there," birkerts begins, and he ends with the admonition to simply "refuse it." in between, he proceeds to assemble a series of charges against technological change that culminate in an astonishing avowal: my core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth -from the judeo-christian promise of unfathomable mystery -and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. that we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. what *is* our idea, our ideal of wisdom these days? who represents it? who even invokes it? our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of competing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of absolute relativism. it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems -to act as if it's all just business as usual. (228) here there is no room left for compromise -one either embraces this worldview or one sees in it a black hole of anxieties and essentialisms. the utter insolubility of birkerts's position, combined with his blatant unfamiliarity with the electronic media he discusses, is the reason why reading _the gutenberg elegies_ so failed to move me. [12] in a recent _harper's magazine_ forum on technology in which he was a participant, birkerts said the following: "i have very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can accomplish and be. i don't have a computer. i work on a typewriter. i don't do e-mail. it's enough for me to deal with mail. mail itself almost feels like too much. i wish there were less of it and i could go about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment" (38). any implementation of technology on the scale of the internet brings with it its skeptics and naysayers. i would go so far as to say that those skeptics and naysayers are indispensable. this may strike some as patronizing, but i have yet, for example, to read an informed critique of class issues in relation to the net that matches the cogency of gary trudeau's _doonesbury_ strips depicting a homeless couple accessing on-line services through a terminal in the public library. the massive telecommunications bill now flying through congress is so much arcana to most of us when compared to the attractions of waco and whitewater. there is much work here for birkerts, and for like-minded others. but until birkerts at least acquaints himself with the technologies he so fears, he will not participate in this work in any meaningful way. works cited: barlow, john perry, sven birkerts, kevin kelly, and mark slouka. "what are we doing on-line?" _harper's magazine_ aug. 1995: 35-46. ramazani, jahan. _the poetry of mourning: the modern elegy from hardy to heaney_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1994. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------hood, 'laurie anderson and the politics of performance', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-hood-laurie.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.594. part 1/1, total size 16558 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- laurie anderson and the politics of performance by woodrow b. hood university of missouri--columbia c562611@mizzou1.missouri.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by woodrow b. hood, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: anderson, laurie. _stories from the nerve bible: a retrospective 1972-1992_. performed at the lied arts center, lawrence kansas, march 29, 1994. [1] performance theorist philip auslander has argued that whatever theoretical or empirical value finally attaches to the term "postmodernism," the contemporary performance artists that we call postmodern share a certain critical distance from modernism and are able to historicize the contemporary "in the brechtian sense of getting some distance on the world we live in and thus gaining a better understanding of it."^1^ gaining distance from the world of late capitalistic america seems indeed to be the focus of laurie anderson's new performance piece currently touring the united states and canada. the work is ostensibly to promote anderson's book _stories from the nerve bible: a retrospective 1972-1992_, but it more importantly offers a contextualization of anderson's art from the early 1970s up to current day. the event details the growth of anderson as an artist from her rougher beginnings like the song "walk the dog" to her more polished performance pieces from _empty places_. [2] the show is a work in progress and it may change from venue to venue as it tours the country over the next few months. this review is being based on the march 29th performance at the lied center in lawrence, kansas. though lawrence seems an unlikely venue for an anderson performance (she generally sticks to larger, more urban areas), she frequents this small, midwestern town for the sake of her friend and artistic mentor william s. burroughs, a local resident who was in attendance at the lawrence show. [3] the evening is rather brief--a little over one hour. the performance consists of anderson sitting in front of a keyboard with two microphones (one is processed and the other isn't) and a large sound board to her right. underneath the sound board lies a dat machine which plays the underscoring of anderson's readings from a collection of pages in front of her. [4] this is the most intimate anderson to date. the %mise-en-scene% has been stripped to its bare technical bones. the videoscreens, lasers, techno-gadgetry, and spectacle wizardry are gone. lighting effects consist mainly of gel changes and primarily only light her well enough to be seen. what one sees is anderson reflecting back on her career with an eye towards her future. she even says that the show is a retrospective about the future; by looking at where you've come from, you see where you're going. [5] the stories and talk-songs that comprise the performance are arranged by the series of associations based upon the "nerve bible"--by which she means the body.^2^ what the audience gets is an apparently free association of juxtaposed images and ideas; the responsibility of finding meaning in the juxtapositions is placed solely on the audience. the arrangement of the pieces may vary from night to night as anderson creates new material or deletes old, establishing a whole new arena in which meanings can be created. [6] anderson performs a sampling of performance pieces from all periods of her work. several of the pieces come from her most recent notes, and will presumably go onto her upcoming album, _bright red_ (produced by brian eno), and resurface on that album's multi-media promotional tour next year. she begins with the end of the _nerve bible_ book, by talking about the future in "my grandmother's hats," a story about her bible-thumping grandmother who kept waiting for the end of the world to arrive: . . . i remember the day she died, she was very excited. she was sitting in her hospital room waiting to die and she was very excited. she was like a small bird perched on the edge of her bed near the window and she was wearing this pink nightgown and combing her hair so that she would look pretty when i came to get her. and she wasn't afraid but then something happened that changed everything. after years of preaching and predicting the future, suddenly, she panicked. because she couldn't decide on whether or not to wear a hat. and so when she died she went into the future in a rush, in a panic, with no idea of what would come next.^3^ [7] from this point, anderson meanders around in her book, retelling earlier songs and monologues like "white lily," bits of "coolsville," and other previously presented material. other stories surface as anderson wanders back to the front of the _nerve bible_ book where she tells of being offered roasted dog by the chief of a tiny pacific island, panope, in 1980 and watching the cremation tapes of the father of the prince of ubud in 1984. [8] the most pronounced through-line one discerns in these scattered materials is that of anderson's emergence as an explicitly political artist. despite some marginal elements of political critique in her early periods, anderson primarily focused on examining american identity and myths; her early work contained no discernible political positioning. but a shift began with the 1989 performance of _empty places_. by then, anderson had come to feel that her work was too mainstream, part of the establishment; it had been institutionalized. as she told john howell, "i was tired of being "laurie anderson." i wanted to start over.^4^ using the same performance style and methodology she had mastered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she began to place a new emphasis on socio-political commentary. by the late 1980s, she had shifted away from the exploration of form to a new, subversive attack directed at the american status quo. [9] in this regard, anderson's career is consistent with the broader trajectory of american performance art from the 1970s to the present. other well-known artists such as diamanda galas, karen finley, and orlon have made marxism and cultural feminism standard elements of contemporary performance art. as auslander has remarked (here paraphrasing _new york times_ art critic andy grundberg): in place of the detached, often opaque ironies of postmodernism, young artists are displaying renewed interest in art that addresses spiritual values, on the one hand, and overtly polemical, political art addressed to the aids and censorship crises on the other.^5^ anderson herself is fully conscious of this turn or transition in her work. "like many people," she says, "i slept through the reagan era politically." when i woke up, everything looked really different. homeless men and women were living on the streets of new york, hundreds of thousands of americans were dead or dying of aids, and the national mood was characterized by fear, intolerance, and straight-ahead greed. suddenly everything seemed deeply unfamiliar. was this really my country? i decided to write about this new place, not because i had any solutions, but because i needed to understand how and why things had changed.^6^ [10] in _empty places_ anderson continued to employ her usual artistic practice of juxtaposing disparate images and objects, but there was a decisive change in her mode of operation. if anderson's early performances could have been called subversive at all, it was only in the broadest sense of the term: they questioned the established framework of american identity in an abstract way. but beginning with _empty places_ her work became subversive in the narrow sense: it mounted a direct and confrontational attack on the american political system. and in the five years since, anderson's work has become ever denser with political references and ever more aggressively counter-hegemonic. her _voices from the beyond_ tour, which resembled the current one in its lack of spectacle, was also read from notebooks and dealt with the contemporary political atmosphere of america as the events of the gulf war unfolded. she also did a piece on the 1992 presidential election for national public radio and a "rock the vote" psa for vh-1. [11] much of the newer work centers on more global political concerns. she describes an encounter with an israeli explosives expert which teaches her of the seductive power of bombs: "here i am, a citizen of the world's largest arms supplier, setting bombs off with the world's second largest arms customer, and i'm having a great time."^7^ the earlier anderson might have simply capitulated to this pleasure, rather than calling it into question. the question for her now is no longer that of the beauty of the image, but that of the articulation between particular political stances and particular ideas of beauty. _night in baghdad_, for example, examines the implicit aesthetics of media coverage of the gulf war, which enabled this hideous event to be represented as a sort of cross "between grand opera and the superbowl."^8^ [12] i do not mean to suggest that all of anderson's pieces now thematize national and international politics. there are moments in _nerve bible_ when she explores the relation between aesthetics and politics on more local or personal registers. she tells some interesting stories, for example, about her relationship with the early 1980s comedian andy kaufman. she recalls the confusions of art and life that kaufman sought to effect through his strange performances, and her own confusion when she served as one of the staged "victims" of his wrestling act. kaufman would dare women to come up on stage and wrestle him, and anderson was one of the women he hired to take him up on the challenge. she was not eager to participate in this seemingly sophomoric routine, she says, and only agreed to do it after she had consumed a few whiskeys and kaufman had goaded her with his offensive behavior. but once on stage she found that kaufman's aim was *really* to wrestle. he sought to unravel any distinction between the performance of violence and the reality, and this was a project with which anderson was simply not comfortable. [13] yet anderson was clearly drawn to kaufman and his attempts to break down the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life. she tells another story, about going to an amusement park with kaufman and doing the ride on which people enter a large drum and lie against a wall. the drum spins and the bottom drops out after the people have been anchored to the wall by centrifugal force. kaufman would wait until the ride was about to begin its spinning and the crew was checking the bindings to make sure everything was safe, and then he would start screaming, "we're all going to die!" what struck me as most significant in this part of anderson's show is that in telling this story she broke with her familiar, carefully controlled speaking rhythm and began screaming in the manner of kaufman himself. here, for the first time that i am aware of, anderson collapsed somewhat the always carefully judged distance between her performing and her personal life. the cool, controlled performance artist is perhaps giving way to a more personal, emotional storyteller. [14] the more personal anderson is on display after the performance as well, when, after leaving the stage for a few moments, she returns to take questions. anderson moves out of the performance mode at this point and seems to speak directly and candidly to the audience--about her creative practices, the relation of her stories to her actual life, and so forth. on this particular night, her most interesting remarks concerned the place of her art in a market economy. she argues that she tries to make a performance that does not rely on pop-star identification, on the desire to emulate and consume. she wants to avoid becoming a product for sale and wants to create a more resistant and viable art, an art that is not simply subsumed within institutions of power. [15] this kind of rhetoric comes somewhat uneasily from anderson, who after all maintains contracts with warner brothers records and harper/perennial books, and is arguably the most successful individual--the closest thing to a pop star--in the performance art genre. but anderson's ambigous stance is consistent with that of other politicized performance artists today. as auslander has remarked, postmodern political art has found that it "must position itself within postmodern culture, it must use the same representational means as all other cultural expression yet remain permanently suspicious of them."^9^ such a stance leaves us with many paradoxes and problems still to be worked out. but we are fortunate to have anderson among those who are performing such work. ____________________________________________________________ notes ^1^ philip auslander, _presence and resistance: postmodernism and cultural politics in contemporary american performance_ (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1992), 6. ^2^ laurie anderson, _stories from the nerve bible: a retrospective 1972-1992 (new york: harper perennial, 1994)_, 6. ^3^ anderson, _nerve bible_, 281. ^4^ john howell, _laurie anderson_ (new york: thunder's mouth press, 1992), 12. ^5^ auslander, 1. ^6^ laurie anderson, empty places: a performance (new york: harper perennial, 1991), back cover. ^7^ anderson, _nerve bible_, 273 ^8^ anderson, _nerve bible_, 276 ^9^ auslander, 23. ____________________________________________________________ works cited anderson, laurie. _empty places: a performance_. new york: harper perennial, 1991. ---. _stories from the nerve bible_: a retrospective 1972-1992. new york: harper perennial, 1994. auslander, philip. _presence and resistance: postmodernism and cultural politics in contemporary american performance_. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1992. howell, john. _laurie anderson_. new york: thunder's mouth press, 1992. ------------------------------end---------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------dennis, 'evocations of empire in a transnational corporate age: tracking the sign of saturn', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-dennis-evocations.txt archive pmc-list, file dennis.195. part 1/1, total size 70558 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- evocations of empire in a transnational corporate age: tracking the sign of saturn by dion dennis department of criminal justice, history, and political science texas a&m international university diond@igc.apc.org postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by dion dennis, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. i. tales of lost glory [1] in "american tune," paul simon gave an early if somewhat hazy voice to what is now a prolific and impassioned motif in premillennial american economic and political life. for many, "what's gone wrong" is the sum total effect of global structural changes upon the once mighty u.s. economy. it is the mass exodus to the third world of once lucrative manufacturing and management jobs from the u.s. and the subsequent replacement of the promise of stable and secure careers with "mcjobs" (coupland 5). concurrently, millions of middle-management positions have disappeared below the incessant waves of corporate "downsizing." what's gone wrong, writes political pundit kevin phillips, is that: people were starting to sense that the so-called middle-class squeeze was really much more: a sign of america's declining [economic] position . . . [and] a threat to their own futures and their children's. (_boiling point_ 163) and a fair number of those domestic jobs that were neither expunged nor exported across political boundaries in the '80s and '90s have reemerged at the american socio-economic margins--that is, at the urban core--in hong-kong-like or sao paulosque scenes, as described by roger rouse: in a hidden sweatshop in downtown los angeles, asian and latino migrants produce auto parts for a factory in detroit. as the parts leave the production line, they are stamped "made in brazil." ("mexican migration" 8) [2] auto parts are not the only simulated brazilian import. as barlett and steele note, income stratification patterns in the u.s. between 1959-1989 show a rapid acceleration of the gap between rich and poor. this gap occurs at the expense of a rapidly shrinking and disproportionately taxed middle-class. that is, much of the middle class is economically downwardly mobile (_america: what went wrong?_). coupland dubs this mass process brazilification: brazilification: the widening gulf between the rich and poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes. (_generation x_ ix) [3] all of this is a long way from the american techno-utopian workers paradise portrayed in the famed 16mm industrial cartoon, _king joe_ (1949). "king joe" was an animated factory worker whose work and leisure activities were meant to be an ideological sign. they depict the average (white-male, blue collar) american "joe" as the most productive and best materially compensated worker in world history. he was an early icon of the american empire that emerged in the post-wwii period. according to walter russell mead: the basis of the american empire after 1945 was economic. the military might that seems so awesome is the result of wealth. america rose to power because the rest of the world was exhausted. as the world recovered from the war, it was inevitable that america's relative power would weaken. (_mortal splendor_ 54) [4] since 1973, the material equivalents of king joe and his realm have all but vanished. his kingdom now serves as social history and the ground for parody, nostalgia and simulation. as europe and east asia recovered from the effects of global and/or civil wars, new or resurrected industries, many nurtured by u.s. cold war deterrence and containment strategies, provided stiff competition in a swiftly globalizing marketplace. as rival corporations concentrated their resources in transnational mergers and acquisitions, the feasibility of setting in motion mobile production, capital and information strategies at sites across the globe seemed as enticing as it was necessary. in the third world, u.s., european and asian transnational corporations (tncs) developed an economic environment characterized by low wages and low corporate tax rates. unions were absent or ineffective and corrupt. child labor could be easily and inexpensively procured. environmental and/or safety regulations were non-existent or often easily circumvented. these competitive advantages accelerated the exodus of rust-belt manufacturing jobs. and with the mobility that the digitalization of business activity provides, the new world order can be construed as a period of shifting flows of globalized capital and migrant bodies along information highways of magnetic oxide. [5] as main street yielded to the mall and woolworth's succumbed to walmart, the factories that typified the heavy industry of the northeast were shuttered. decrepit brick automobile plants and rusting steel mills, surrounded by sagging cyclone fences and barbed wire, littered deserted urban tableaus as if they were the modernist ruins of king joe. two or three generations of eastern european immigrants may have been steel workers or auto assemblers. but in the new international labor market, gary, indiana became a mausoleum for the protestant ethic. and flint, michigan achieved cinematic celebrity through the sad but tough eyes of fred roth, a county sheriff's eviction agent (_roger and me_). [6] in the early post-wwii period, the idea and practice of social mobility had been a simple thing. social and economic mobility was marked by a generational and spatial event such as a move into a "better" community. mobility meant a unidirectional move from the crowded tenements of the inner city outward in concentric rings to emerging bungalow suburbs. (often, this took the form of overt and collective acts of racism known as "white flight.") alternatively, this notion of mobility also refers to the depopulation of small family farms and rural towns, as youthful and not-so-youthful labor-seeking masses, displaced by the industrial efficiencies of agribusiness, emptied into the world's service and industrial megacenters. migration across space was tied to aspirations of upward economic mobility or the push for survival. as rouse points out, each of several variants of the spatial concept of migration implies the idea of movement between two well-defined communities. the migrant's dominant allegiance is assumed, in the long run, to belong to one of these distinct communities only ("mexican migration" 10-13). [7] but this assumption, rouse claims, is inadequate to describe current formations of social reproduction. it fails to account for the complex impacts of major transglobal circuits on the way we produce, reproduce, transmit and circulate goods, services, images and information, relations of power, economic benefits, bodies and social roles. we now traverse ambiguous and conflicted sites shaped by vectors of converging and diverging economies. we are hailed by intersecting and paradoxical constructions of meaning and identities. and, in a world that is simultaneously more totalizing and chaotic (the future seems unpredictable but coca-cola and disney motifs are everywhere), alienation mixes with anxiety, resentment resonates with resignation and hope bonds with nostalgia on a mostly downward socio-economic escalator. it may well be, as christopher lasch (_the minimal self_) and r.j. barnet and john cavanaugh (_global dreams_) have suggested, that entire populations are now deemed economically expendable. to understand how these economic marginality effects have occurred is to grapple with complexity. this marginality is a product of an intricate and mobile hardware mix of robotics, computerization, and automation of modes of production and control. it has been nurtured by the extensive use of subcontractors, suppliers and temporary workers (many of the latter comprise neo-cottage industries of ersatz "independent contractors"). spurred by the high debt levels of the leveraged buyout (lbo) frenzy of the mid and late 1980s, the impetus to simultaneously raise productivity, while cutting personnel and production costs, allowed for internal structural reconfiguration of businesses that maximized output per employee over the short term while minimizing the total number of employees. one result has been an incessant wave of layoffs across industrial and information-based corporations. another outcome is that the application of microchip-based technologies has already transformed fields of power on the global economic and political stages. it has reshaped the direction and purpose of higher education. it has essentially altered the fields of work, imagination, self-expression and play in the culture industries. to understand something of its genealogy is to recognize the postmodern reconfiguration of fields of work, culture and knowledge. ii. fear of losing: security-seeking subjects constituted at the altar of risk among the objects of the law, security is the only one which embraces the future; subsistence, abundance, equality, may be regarded for a moment only; but security implies extension in point of time with respect to all the benefits to which it is applied. security is therefore the principal object. (jeremy bentham, cited in gordon 19) [8] one arizona state university professor, working recently with upper-division undergraduates in a course on the politics of social movements, asked his students to pen their inscriptions of danger (with the idea that social movements are, in some sense, a response to perceived dangers and, by extension, shape security concerns). the excerpts below illustrate bentham's point: (student a): i fear that i may become a nameless cog in a corporate machine . . . that i will become a wealth creating device used by some at the expense of others . . . that i will be judged only on my ability to feed the wealthy and powerful . . . because there will be no other way to maintain a reasonable standard of living . . . (student b): the principal danger . . . is the uncertainty of my future. in a society which is dominated by change one is never able to predict or control their future with reliability. going through proper channels and procedures no longer guarantees [anything]. . . . will i join the quickly growing fraternity of unemployed university graduates? (student c): the major danger is the pressure to quickly graduate while there is a shortage of jobs. loan payments start stacking, the pressure is on to land a good paying job and your parents are staring at you as if you accomplished nothing but managed to spend half their life savings. "go to college," "invest some time in your future through education." what happened to the old cliche about a college degree assuring happiness and prosperity? (student d): [i fear] the immense uncertainty of facing the growing, intense competition for fewer and fewer jobs . . . . (student e): i'm worried that when i finally have my degree the world will have progressed to the point where you have to have a degree to be a "ditch digger." (student f): my danger lies in the fear of failure due to circumstances beyond my control. i have always been responsible . . . . however, when outside forces impose upon my life, i find it difficult and frustrating. (ashley) these are tangible concerns, about the extension of personal security, into the future that are largely rooted in structural changes in the u.s. economy. although u.s. economic productivity has increased seventy-five percent since 1970, this gain was realized with a five percent net reduction in the labor force ("the end of jobs" 48). this growth in output has been the combined result of belated responses, such as wage and work-rule concessions on the part of unions in response to fierce global competition; organizational restructuring in the wake of lbos; the entrance of japanese firms and heteroglot capital into the u.s. real estate, financial and labor markets and the productive application of electronic and digital technologies to previously labor-intensive tasks. and there are no signs that the inverse relationship between material productivity and employment levels will soon abate. not surprisingly, the expectation of downward socioeconomic mobility is now widely perceived as the norm. [9] concurrently, electronic and digital technologies have despatialized work sites while the functional divisions between a domestic residence (home) and work dwindle. all the while, u.s. workers confront vigorous transnational competition against less expensive skilled intellectual labor and semi-skilled product labor. similarly, the diffusion of media ensembles and mcdonaldization of the planet create struggles for the survival of pre-electronic cultures. in all these scenes, complex and visceral senses of loss, anger, disaffection, alienation and economic marginality present new problems for older and newer regimes of security. one key alteration in the objects of security is the shifting of risk-management and security concerns away from notions of "generalized risk" spread throughout a population toward those that reinscribe the self as primary bearer of an individualized risk. this is the (philosophically) neo-liberal notion of self as a unique site of enterprise (espoused by both rush limbaugh and bill clinton): work for the worker means the use of resources of skills, aptitude and competence which comprise the worker's human capital, to obtain earnings [that are] the revenue on that capital. human capital is composed of an innate component of bodily and genetic equipment and an acquired component of aptitudes produced as a result of investment in the provision of appropriate environmental stimuli such as education. economically, an aptitude is defined as a quasi-machine for the production of a value . . . akin to a consumer durable which has the peculiarity of being inseparable from its owner. the individual is in a novel sense not just an enterprise but the entrepreneur of himself. (gordon 44) [10] the self becomes the primary site for continuous self-surveillance and self-construction. the notion of the self as human capital is part of the project that globally reinscribes social reality in terms of market logics (and away from notions of race, ethnicity and group or place-based definitions, except as a demographic segment to be worked upon by the seductions of consumption). as a bicapitalized "good," the self circulates as a mobile commodity. deeming the self as the site of self-enterprise also suggests that one is constantly absorbed in self-reconstruction, self-maintenance and self-preservation (of self as a capital investment). it is the conceptual brace for the application of regimes of oversight such as total[izing] quality management (or cqi--continuous quality improvement) on self-presentations, where standardization of self-presentation is the object and goal of tqm in service organizations. it informs bill clinton's calls for "permanent retraining." it is the key assumption in the shifting paradigms of risk that hail subjects to take "responsibility for preventive care." it resonates with peter drucker's recent pronouncements on the current attributes of the corporation. [11] for drucker, corporations are now "temporary institutions." vigorous organizations are now inherently destabilizing (and this is a desirable state of affairs). as a harvard business review abstract icily puts it: the organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. (_new society_) [12] as noted elsewhere, there is an affinity between these world views, contemporary sociobiological theories and older forms of social darwinism (_license and commodification_). some proponents, such as michael rothschild, assert that hyperindustrial capitalism, with its emphasis on an information economy, is an isomorphic expression of our "natural" genetic makeup. that is, for rothschild, capitalism is not merely a human construct but the essential expression of life itself (_bionomics_ xi-xii). for those on an unstable or downwardly mobile economic vector, this is a harsh judgment. [13] it is these shifts in economic, perceptual and demographic fields that have generation xers so worried. is it possible, then, in the context of a hyperglobalizing economic and information infrastructure; a despatialized and derealized physical and cultural environment; an ascending "fin de millennium" consciousness and among a demographic bulge of "grumpies" (grown-up mature professionals) and aging baby-boomers facing economic decline and intimations of mortality, that a mythology of a "golden age" has emerged? for blonsky american mythology is now in transition from that of being a sense of a fresh beginning to that of looking back at a golden age. once we lived in a shining city in a time of perfection. this is why, taking a trivial example, our 'business books' so emphasize quality, performance, all the other sorry signifiers. roman jakobson wrote that 'a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is what it chooses either to represent or omit . . . or conceal.' we always have to ask how a myth is able to deny what it is affirming while simultaneously remaining affirmative. let there be quality, excellence, all the positivities, say the business books, meaning: there was [once] strength, there [once] was vigor, there [once] was coherence. (_american mythologies_ 500-501) and for barbara stern, a marketing professor at rutgers, this is but one expression of historical nostalgia: historical nostalgia expresses the desire to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the past viewed as superior to the present. no matter whether the long-gone era is represented as richer and more complex or simpler and less corrupted, it is positioned as an escape from the here and now. (_historical and personal nostalgia_ 14) [14] that is, historical nostalgia is an idiom of resistance, perhaps as escape, although it is implicated in more complex and active political fields than mere escapism. bill clinton has groused about such resistances (as a political problem) in two october 1993 speeches. not so coincidentally, the subject of those speeches were claims about the changing shape of security concerns: we are living in a time of profound change. no one fully see[s] the shape of the change or imagine[s] with great precision the end of it. but we know a lot about what works and what doesn't. and we know that if we do not embrace this change and make it our friend . . . it will become our enemy. and yet all around i see people resisting change, turning inward and away from change. and i ask myself why. when i listen . . . i hear a longing for yesterday. but i tell you my friends . . . yesterday is yesterday. if we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow. (_remarks at unc_) [15] but clinton is not just contesting a mere politics of memory. if it were so, marketing his programs would be a much easier job. but what clinton faces is a kind of hyper-real pastische. for example, stephanie coontz, in her book on 20th century u.s. families, _the way we never were: american families and the nostalgia trap_, describes the arrangement of those imagistic television fragments that shape her students' perceptions of "the traditional family": [stereotypical] visions exert a powerful pull and with good reason, given the fragility of many modern communities. the problem is not only that these visions bear a suspicious resemblance to reruns of old television series, but that the scripts of different shows have been mixed up: june cleaver suddenly has a grandpa walton dispensing advice in her kitchen; donna stone, vacuuming the living room in her inevitable pearls and high heels, is no longer married to a busy modern pediatrician but to a small town sheriff who, like andy taylor of "the andy griffith show," solves community problems though informal, old-fashioned common sense. (8-9) [16] these recombinant video scripts occupy a significant part of the global cultural imagination. as such, they are active in fields of cultural, political and economic discourse and desire. the simulated world of an endless "nick at night" or tbs presents--_the dick van dyke show_ or _the brady bunch_--provide the building blocks of an active social imaginaire. as appadurai suggests: the past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory [but] is a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be had as appropriate. . . . the crucial point is that the u.s. is but only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes. . . . the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work and a form of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. ("disjuncture" 273) [17] the imagination, as a contestable social practice, works in complex, highly active and disjunctive spheres of cultural and political signs. these signs are consumed, altered, recirculated and their meaning is constantly renegotiated. these are fields of signification through which aspects of %de facto% social contracts are negotiated and renegotiated. modifying appadurai's taxonomy somewhat, i call these signifying fields iconospheres. and it is in our peculiar time and space of global dreams, transnational corporatist practices and technological redisciplining that the promise of a reemergent pax americana is extended to anxious citizen-consumers in a post-sovereign world. and these promises are constructed and circulated with those iconospheres that form the agitated nexus for the politics of signification, of which the sign of saturn, as a promise of plentitude and security, is a prominent example. iii. signifying practices, sovereignty and the search for security: the sign of saturn [18] for most, the globalization of the u.s. economy has generated persistent and troubling socio-economic problems. one famous problem-effect has been a destabilization of durable and legitimating american myths. for example, the decline of the american dream (which has been declared vanished or dead in some quarters and dismantled, diminished or reduced "to a nap" in others) has become an incessant and conspicuous motif in political discourse. electronic and print media recite narratives of recoveries and reversals. well-heeled think-tanks formulate ideological etiologies of character, consequences and countermeasures. policy recommendations are then routinely dispensed on the shape of education, the family, job training or enterprise zones. for tncs and their governmental allies, the task has been to recover the iconography of the american dream as a positivity in a time of dislocation and disaccumulation. more specifically, iconocrats at tncs and corporatist-shaped administrations cultivate a claim that transborder information and production practices do not represent the death of the american dream. in the amended account, the american dream is resurrected, phoenix-like, in the promised embodiment of a postindustrial, information-driven, "next generation" form. [19] for public relations bureaucrats (iconocrats), the "problem" is how to reorganize public fields of attitudes and perception toward acceptance of this revised american dream in a new world order. it is about the engineering of consent. [20] several specific pr events and corporatist retooling projects (promising economic salvation via hypertechnological deployment) are the saturn school of tomorrow and gm's saturn subdivision. these projects, in their public relations and workplace reconfiguration practices, are part of the reorganization of economic practices and public spaces yoked, by iconocrats, to an assortment of repetitively invoked signifiers. in each, the common theme is an implicit pledge of a return to an age of economic plentitude and technological preeminence--a "golden age." collectively, the ensemble of signifiers that may be deployed, directly or indirectly, in such representational efforts form what kristeva called an intertext. for her, intertextuality is any text [that] is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity. (37) [21] kristeva's initial definition does not begin to exhaust the power and range of the notion of intertextuality, which is derived from bakhtinian notions of dialogism and heteroglossia. (both concepts underscore the active and constant renegotiation of the denotative and connotative meanings of signifiers in changing and mutually constitutive material and semiotic fields.) in an alternate formulation, she describes intertextuality as "the transposition of one or more multiple sign systems into another," with the production of new accretions of meaning (cited in stam et al. 204). this sense may be extended to include the reader's grasp of the relations between a text and all the other relevant past, present and future texts. as such, the intertext of an imperial signifier such as saturn may include all depictions of saturn and/or any and all possible imperial signifiers within an actively and plausibly constructed intertextual chain (stam 205). like barthes' notion of the readerly text, these various frames of reference provide a preassembly of (conventional) signifying units. as such, a series of intertextual frames may be constructed. these units are usually intended to bolster specific sets of meanings, suture troublesome narrative gaps and mold the direction of reader's/viewer's inferences about the account through a series of intertextual prompts. [22] bakhtin's notion of a deep generating series, developed in a response to the soviet monthly _novy mir_ in 1970, delineates a typology of sign systems and signifying practices that are relevant to the analysis of historical, intertextual semiotic field ("response" 5). for bakhtin, a deep generating series forms rich constellations of elaborate and highly productive (political, cultural, social) signifying systems. deep generating series have extensive histories and a profusion of meanings and usages that routinely cross cultures, idioms, representational forms and temporal periods. conceptually mining the layers of meaning in such deep generating series is akin to a type of linguistic and cultural archeology. the sign of saturn, with a genealogy of two dozen centuries, is just such a deep generative series. iv. "saturnizing america": contexts, texts and intertexts [23] on the morning of wednesday, may 22nd, 1991, president george bush was in st. paul, minnesota. he began his day with a tour of an experimental magnet school, the saturn school for tomorrow. during the walkaround tour of the refurbished ywca building, bush, a personal computer novice, seemed mesmerized as fifth, sixth and seventh graders sat at computer terminals working on assignments. as if imitating star trek's mr. spock, bush repeatedly uttered "fascinating" in response to the ensembles of technological largess and preadolescent skill displayed for him (johnston). with its emphasis on computerized "personal growth plans," interactive video, word processing, modems, lego-logo robotics and hypercards, proponents claim that learning is project-based, student-centered and active. according to saturn teacher-proponent thomas king: [we] use the ics discourse system (which allows the teacher to see student answers typed at their keyboards hooked to the teacher's computer) . . . students have access to interactive integrated learning systems (ilss) . . . . hundreds of lessons on reading, math, writing, science . . . are always available. . . . these ilss pre-test and then select lessons [for students]. . . . reports are generated for staff, students and parents . . . . ils is also tied to . . . math manipulative classes [and] whole language instruction. . . . because of the assumption of passivity of textbooks, saturn students almost never use them. ("the saturn school") [24] on that may morning, george bush was still basking in the political afterglow of victory in the gulf war. it was a military exploit that was perceived as the high-tech triumph of computer-guided heat seeking "smart bombs" and "patriot missiles" over second-rate soviet scuds. for bush, the saturn school of tomorrow, with its routine use of high-technology in the service of pedagogy, was "a school for a new world order." waxing enthusiastically, bush declared that this pilot project was breaking the mold, building for the next american century, reinventing, literally, starting from the bottom up to build revolutionary new schools, not with bricks and mortars, but with questions and ideas and determination. we're looking at every possible way to [reinvent] schools while still keeping our eyes on the results. (_macneil/lehrer_) [25] for bush, just as the technology-based gulf war victory had "finally gotten that monkey [of moral and performative doubt provoked by the vietnam war] off our back" (bush 1991), the application of such computerized ensembles to presumably intractable and systemic educational problems would provide comparably swift and productive results. such results would dispel those open questions of moral malaise, economic insecurity and performative deficits that beset the next generation of americans. that is, bush's sense of education is instrumentalist and techno-utopian. his notion of desirable educational horizons appears to consist of the social production of a durable political allegiance best expressed through the superior technical competence of citizen-subjects. the idea of education as critical reflection seems noticeably absent. for bush, war and education are but dual aspect of a single project funneled through a common technological imperative: [image: bush.gif] [audio clip: bush.au] the american soldiers manning our patriot stations perform such complex tasks with unerring accuracy. and they, along with the children in our schools today, are part of the generation that will put unparalleled american technology to use as a tool for change. (_remarks at raytheon_) [quicktime clip: bush.mov] [26] through the matrix of bush's rhetoric on the relations between technology, education and war, several points are worth mentioning. saturn, as a technologically imbued sign, is a marker of a project of self-restoration. (this is signified by the phrases of "revolutionary new schools and the determination employed in building [them].") and, for bush, the saturn school of tomorrow is a desirable and innovative prototype for securely anchoring the project of civic rejuvenation in schools. (this is signified by the positive connotation of "mold-breaking.") furthermore, in the second excerpt (from the raytheon speech) bush, in his lavish praise of american techno-competence, condensed the identities of soldiers and schoolchildren ("soldiers along with children") as mutually engaged in the service of the patriotic by way of the technological. the intertext formed by these statements is meant to signify a redemptive recouping of american might through manifestations of techno-efficiency. (this is signified by the phrase "[they] deployed patriot missiles with unerring accuracy." in doing so, they "put unparalleled american technology" in service of the "next american century.") and who are they? soldiers and children, exemplars of institutionally docile and technically efficient patriots (all of them--citizens and missiles). [27] but saturn, as signifier, is part of a larger, more complex and intricate intertextual system. for example, the saturn signifier adopted by the school was transposed from general motors' highly visible and expensive project to reinvent its behemoth corporate practices and redress its well-deserved negative public image. as an early participant in the saturn school for tomorrow project explains: a planning committee met for a three-year period beginning in 1986 to envision a new schooling process. a major catalyst was american federation of teachers' (aft) president al shanker's exhortation for a 'saturn project' to re-tool american education, just as general motors' saturn automobile project was to invent a 'quality team' approach to challenge [the] japanese. (_macneil/lehrer_) [28] by appropriating the signifier saturn, shanker tacitly acknowledged that the public schools had common ground with gm. that is, both have been widely perceived to be competitive product and market failures with bloated bureaucracies and negative public images. like gm, the schools needed extensive reform to reduce costs and increase productivity in a new world economic order. but gm had funded saturn corporation, its symbol of self-transformation, with a capital investment of 3.5 billion dollars. saturn's first seven years were devoted to intra and interorganizational negotiation, the development of infrastructure and the implementation of new labor and management practices. aft's president al shanker was calling for an infusion of money on a similar scale, similar processes of negotiation and a similar request for patience. in return was the promise of reshaping administrative and pedagogical practices toward corporatist "quality" circles and reinscribing students as "customers," "consumers" or "clients." this is consistent with what david payne, a teacher at the saturn school, said about how the goals of the project were shaped: what we've done at [the] saturn [school] is we've looked at what the futurists, what the business leaders, and what the education leaders say people are going to be able to do in order to be successful in the 21st century. (_macneil/lehrer_) [29] for a variety of tactical reasons, educational bureaucracies eagerly absorbed the intertext of gm's saturn signifier, shaping it and being shaped by it. but gm's saturn is a only one point of emergence for the sign of saturn. in the next section, we consider how gm's saturn signifier relates to relevant past saturnian texts. v. the long and winding road: saturn as gm's bid to rescue a moribund empire [30] by the early 1980s, the threat to general motors' long-term future took a complex but identifiable shape. one facet of the threat was the substandard quality of its vehicles and the (then) well-deserved reputation that followed. by 1985, the chevrolet celebrity, citation and chevette, oldsmobile ciera, buick century and pontiac 6000 were legendary for a myriad of serious and endemic manufacturing defects. the sheer number and frequency of factory defects across gm's cookie-cutter divisions was a major public relations embarrassment. [31] another menacing threat to the once proud flagship of "the industry of industries" was structural. for example, a january, 1992 article in _fortune magazine_ claimed that despite improvements in quality, mammoth capital investment and even with massive cutbacks, [gm] lagged behind major competitors in almost every measure of efficiency. by some key standards--how many worker hours it takes to assemble a car--gm was an astounding 40% less productive than ford. in 1991 gm lost, on average, $1500 on [each] of the more than 3.5 million [vehicles produced] in north america. it ended [1991] with 34% of the u.s. market. in 1979, [its share of a larger u.s.] market was 46%. [reform efforts] had been crippled by middle-management . . . and the uaw. perceptive managers see a company that is building better cars . . . but has yet to confront enormous structural problems: says one: 'there is a monumental challenge ahead. we can make great products. but can we do that and make money?' (taylor et al.) [32] since 1953, when then gm president "engine charlie" wilson uttered the notorious aphorism that "what's good for country is good for general motors" and vice versa, gm has become something of a synecdoche for the u.s. economy. and it is in the context of confronting an external threat (the "rising sun" of japanese economic power as signified by automotive imports) with a deteriorating base of productive power (the "setting sun" of u.s. economic power as signified by gm) that the sign of saturn surfaced. according to one account: saturn was conceived [in 1982 as] an all-out, all american effort to beat the japanese in the small car market. starting from scratch, saturn would slash costs and boost quality by using the best technology and organization . . . show[ing] gm how a car company should be run in the 21st century. roger smith set the stakes when he formed saturn as an independent subsidiary, proclaiming it "the key to gm's long-term competitiveness, survival and success. (taylor et al.) [33] in giving their small-car project the code-name of saturn, gm's public relations unit invoked a chapter in the history of the cold war. in 1957, the soviet union launched the world's first orbiting satellite, the sputnik. for the u.s. government, electronic and print media and public opinion, complaisant in an assumption of technological superiority, the reaction to sputnik's success was alarm, panic and paranoia. newspaper and magazine headlines issued dire warnings about soviet superiority in space. frenzied prophecies about the likelihood of a soviet nuclear attack from orbiting satellites were in wide currency. sputnik's success was seen as the dominant threat, in technological form, to u.s. sovereignty and national security. the federal government mobilized resources as if in a national emergency. congress created nasa and funded countless science and technology initiatives on multiple institutional levels. [34] in the 1950s and 1960s, both the pentagon and nasa were fond of naming their technological projects and specific pieces of hardware after mythological greek and roman gods or characters. for example, early intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbms) were christened as the atlas or titan series. nasa's space ventures were designated as the mercury and apollo projects. in line with this, a set of rockets deployed in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the saturn series, marked those technological events that soared past early soviet space accomplishments, never to look back. the saturn project became the symbol of an ideological triumph made possible through a successful recouping of technological preeminence. deployed at the height of economic and military dominance, the saturn project became a signifier for an epic narrative, one in which a resourceful redeployment of technological talent repelled a perceived threat to sovereignty and security. [35] by the time of gm's inauguration of its saturn project in the early 1980s, the globalization of social, political and economic arrangements had already recast u.s. socio-economic practices. in its legitimating narrative, the neo-conservative movement had already constructed an american mythology that roughly corresponded with gm's symbolic move to reappropriate elements of a certain moment in american history, through the redeployment of the sign of saturn. that moment was 1962-1963. it was just before the tragic tide of assassinations, just before a massive escalation of u.s. involvement in vietnam and just before the significant expansion of transfer payments and entitlement programs initiated by the "great society." it was just before the onset of urban riots and campus demonstrations. it was just prior to psychedelia and the widespread burnings of flags and draft cards. it was at the dawn of an environmental movement that soon exposed long-term toxic consequences of unregulated industrial and agricultural practices. and it was just before intensive and novel forms of business regulation were set in motion. the fiscal budgets for the years of 1962-1963 were also the first to employ, in a very measured way, the practice of federal deficit spending. as walter russell mead notes: the art of economic management was, people believed, nearly perfected. . . . the kennedy tax cuts nipped a recession in the bud, giving a classroom demonstration of effective government management. . . . the so-called kennedy round of tariff cuts resulted in the closest approach to pure free trade that world had ever known. . . . economists believed that [key] economic problems had been solved. (_mortal splendor_ 44) [36] this was the zenith of the pax americana. quickly idealized as camelot (1964), this is the proximate, if somewhat variable (1955-1973), temporal referent for prolific narratives of "a golden age." gm, by transposing the profuse threads of social history, imperialist nostalgia and contemporary security concerns onto the saturn car corporation, seemed to be saying, to workers, commodity markets and potential customers (in a deliberately intertexutal way): participate in this reinvention of socio-technological fields and we (implicitly) promise a return to a stable and secure saturnian order ("the golden happy age" _webster's_). even at this layer, the sign of saturn is a productive and revealing intertextual site. but it is only one of a profuse series of intended and unintended intertextual meanings. these are discussed below. vi. the sign of saturn as a metonym for the imperial 60s: intertexts of dominance, domesticity, dissent, decadence and danger [37] common to these various sites, signs, and practices associated with the sign of saturn is the promise of a new "golden age." saturn signifies both the result and the means under which this (mythological) golden age effect will reappear. a confident, orderly and recognizable domesticity will reemerge and flourish by means of intensive digitalization of social fields. the contemporary function of the scientific and ideological success of the saturn rocket in the early '60s was to serve as a symbolic center for a remembrance of a still reclaimable politics of dominance and a restoration of economic security. whether it is invoked by a u.s. president, a pilot educational project, a president of the american teachers' federation or general motors, the deployment of the sign of saturn, in this way, is a conscious public relations gesture designed to tap into current public habits of historical nostalgia and the abiding american creed of techno-utopianism. [38] but both the social history of the 1960s and the intertext of saturn exceed these attempts to denotate and domesticate both social history and the range and meaning of saturn, as a sign of an imperial period. as bakhtin says: no living [sign] relates to its object in a singular way: between the [sign] and its object, between the [sign] and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien [signs] about the same object, the same theme, and this is . . . the specific environment that the [sign] may be individualized and given stylistic shape. indeed, any utterance finds the object at which it was directed already overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist, entangled . . . [and] enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of value judgments and accents [that] weave in and out of complex interrelationships . . . . this is the social atmosphere of the [sign]. (_dialogic_ 276) [39] and this is true of the sign of saturn. even a quick glance at websters' delineations of several aspects of the word saturn is revealing: a. saturn n., l. saturnus, connected with serere, to sow. 1. in roman mythology, the god of agriculture and husband of oops, the goddess of the harvest, identified with the greek god chronos. . . . 3. in alchemy, lead (the metal); b. saturnian, adj., from saturnius, of saturn. 1. pertaining to the roman god saturn, whose reign was called "the golden happy age"--hence, prosperous, contented, happy and peaceful; c. saturnine (fr. saturnien, sad, sour) 1. heavy, grave, gloomy, morose, glum, phlegmatic; d. saturnalia (l. belonging to saturn) excess, orgy, orgiastic rituals (performed in times of the roman empire at the winter solstice). (1611) [40] that the generative intertextual series of saturn is deeply embedded in the pax romana is almost too obvious to mention. general motors' use of the sign is eerily resonant of several connotative intertexutal aspects of the deep generative series of saturn. for example, gm's saturn complex, at spring hill, was built in the midst of tennessee farmlands (agriculture). the saturn car corporation, with its innovative technological arrangements and reshaped labor/management social fields, was intended, at spring hill, to sow the seeds (serere) that would lead general motors, in time (chronos), from the current saturnine period (phlegmatic, gloomy) with its bloated workforce and inefficient management practices to a saturnian period (prosperous and happy time). one evocative connotation is that gm, through the sign of saturn, intends to (metaphorically) conjure up a social and economic alchemy (of practices) that will transmute (dense, dead weight) lead into gold (saturnian). [41] general motors' iconocrats, conflating the (older) deep generative series of saturn with the political and economic dominance of the 1960s (represented by the saturn rocket), covered all the major connotative fields but one. that omission is the signifier of excess, the saturnalia. and that was, undoubtedly, an intentional exclusion. but the self-described "counterculture," of the 1960s, as a sign of excess, was the arational twin, the alternative face of the american empire--a drugged-out nietzschean dionysus shadowing the rationalizing technocrat apollo. [42] these saturnalian aspects were rendered by tom wolfe's chronicle of the merry pranksters (_acid test_). these were the "summers of love" and protest and of sexual promiscuity and recreational use of marijuana and hallucinogens. there was a significant revival of interest in pagan practice and ritual. drugs, anti-war demonstrations, riots and the sense of revolution were an integral part of daily life on urban streets. as one popular chronicle stated, it was a time when, out of hubris, anger, indignation, idealism, impatience, curiosity or noble sentiment, many were "storming heaven" (stephens). [43] these activities are now often portrayed as self-absorbed and part of a treacherous rounds of excess. the panoply of the dead rock 'n' roll icons of the period--jimi hendrix, janis joplin and jim morrison--routinely signify the deleterious effects of dangerous orgies of sex and drugs--a saturnalia. in retrospect, it is likely that some of the behavioral excesses of the '60s were the result of (then) emerging technological deterritorialization. the onset of commercial jet travel, the invention and expansion of television and satellite communications, the construction and expansion of the interstate highway system that hastened enormous changes in the demographics of the urban core and the northeastern industrial belt, all of these generated novel expressions of desire and opened up new forms of physical and psychological mobility. it was these fields of desire and mobility that became the objects for our current round of intensive reterritorializations. according to deleuze and guattari: capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency [of the mobility of bodies, consciousness and information] while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary or symbolic territorialities attempting to recode, rechannel persons. . . . everything returns or recurs: states, nations, families. that is what makes the ideology of capitalism "a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed." there is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. the more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows . . . the more its ancillary apparatuses . . . do their utmost to reterritorialize. (_anti-oedipus_ 34) [44] for public and corporate administrators in the post-watergate, post-vietnam era, the paroxysm of events characteristic of the late 1960s required the invention of new wrinkles on a benthamite techno-political problematic of governance. in the face of unruly generational "mobs" and ersatz liberation movements, the technical issues focused on how to redesign, redeploy or invent architectural and informational regimes to fix and intensify the surveillance of movement and activities of those bodies, identities and allegiances that escaped a normalizing gaze. in a general sense, the social construction of danger inscribed and ascribed to those who would "turn on, tune in and drop out" on the streets of san francisco, circa 1969, resembles the way english paupers were portrayed (as a threat to social order) in the early and mid-19th century: [it is indolence] intensified to the level of social danger: the spectre of the mob; a collective [and] urban phenomenon. it is a composite and [ominous] population which 'encircles' the social order from within . . . . it is a magma in which are fused all the dangers which beset the social order, shifting along unpredictable, untraceable channels of transmission and aggregation. the definition [of hippies?] does not work essentially through economic categories . . . images put the stress on feelings of fluidity and indefiniteness, on the impression, at once massive and vague [of menace]. (procacci 158) [45] then, as procacci asserts, and now, as i claim, social morality is often equated with the idea of order: "the moral element is order, that order which liberal society [embraces] as [the] vital need" (159). that is, order as morality, grafted onto the economic and all summed up in the term "personal security," is the rationale for ongoing projects of reterritorialization. and these modes of postmodern reterritorialization--the commercialization of public space represented by the mall and the new american city, the intensification of digital regimes of surveillance, the commodification and licensing of information and icons formerly external to direct market logic and the renarration of the 1960s as a reclaimable apollonian project--are all activities of governance (except the last) whose emergence predates the 1960s but whose organizing principle remains consistent with both cold-war-era themes of security and the newly emergent objects for novel security concerns (such as enforcement of a convertible abstract intellectual property rights of the tncs). vii. conclusion [46] gilles deleuze has depicted historical configurations of governance, including the nation-state, as specific, localized and variable "immanent models of realization" of mobile global capital formations. he makes a persuasive argument that modern nation-states are but one of several possible modes of territorialization (_a thousand plateaus_ 454). for deleuze, capitalism may develop an economic form of governance that would render the state superfluous. he says that: capitalism is not short on war cries against the state, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization. (454) [47] the dispersion of commodities (coca-cola, levi's), transnational cultural iconographies (disney, mtv) and technological ensembles of hyperindustrial capitalism (satellite dishes), are highly effective, in certain moments and sites, at "authorless" tasks of nation-state deterritorialization. often, the result is a subsequent reterritorialization of identity and desires, primarily recognizable within global consumption circuits such as malls, suburban housing configurations or televised home shopping networks. generally, this is accompanied by local stylistic adjustment while stroking the population through the propagation of a reassuring ideology of a free, secure and stable domestic identity, heroically reaffirming itself through repetitive acts of commodity consumption. within u.s. national technocratic circuits, i argue that the sign of saturn functions in a similarly janus-inflected way. as a signifier for a promise of a return to a "happy and prosperous" pax americana, it is deployed as a pledge (rooted in highly selective constructions of memories of an imperial 1960s) that functions to discipline potential and acutal discontented u.s. subjects in an era of disaccumulation and downward mobility. to do this, iconocrats had to re-encode the streams of desires, dissent, death and excess that the late '60s represented. they emerged as streams of consumables, as "lifestyles," or as new and more finely attenuated "market segments" within reinvented realms of collectively marketed but privately consumed pleasures. or, other practices, the saturnalia, have been reinscribed, as in the age of aids and the war on drugs, as cautionary moral tales. collectively, many remember the fate of those humans as a series of cautionary tales about the effects of succumbing to dangerous, corrosive and indolent practices. [48] there are many aspects of the 1960s that, at different points in time, embody more than a single connotative aspect of the sign of saturn. often, a denotative construction of an icon of the 1960s exorcises personal history or political programmatic from an officially sanctified (and sanctifying of the present) remembrance. for example: the passage of a national civil rights day, to honor the selective reconstruction of dr. martin luther king, jr., elevated a pre-selma (1965) iconography of king as proof that "the system works." the historical reality of the last years of king's life, which was spent in critical reflection and action in response to an emerging transnational corporate order (1965-1968), has been all but completely erased (smith). there is a lesson here: states, and the icons that legitimate states, are absorbed into the order of tncs. but they are given new economic, iconic and policing functions. they become a bureaucratic tool for a corporatist reterritorialization. (think about fortune 500 sponsorship of pbs programming or the still unfolding effects of nafta and gatt.) [49] likewise, the sartorial and sonic styles of the period have become the object of nostalgic aestheticization, even among those (nationally and globally) who longingly gaze back to a world they have never lost. this is also a postmodern irony that appadurai characterizes as "nostalgia without memory" ("disjuncture" 272). much of the electronic social %imaginaire% is tied to a memory of a nation-state empire that obscures full reflection on the effects of corporate transnationalism. regardless of the sophistication of saturnian promises, it seems unlikely that the cultivation of a national hypertechnical competency will dent these transnational flows in favor of the reconstitution of the economically-predominant nation-state, at least in the near term. already, forty-seven of the world's one hundred largest economies are tncs (barlow). [50] the iconography of global dreams and a new world order dominated by the repetitive commercial simulacra of tncs is reminiscent of foucault's characterization of pre-cartesian discursive regimes. like the four similitudes that shaped representational fields in the middle ages, the video, audio, and digitized products of the infoconglomerates could be characterized by first and foremost, the plethoric yet absolutely poverty-stricken character of this knowledge. plethoric because it is limitless. resemblance never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if it refers back to another similitude, which then, refers to others . . . . for this reason, this knowledge will be a thing of sand. (_the order of things_ 30) [51] whether this type of judgment will be visited upon our ways of knowing and doing is still unclear. but it will be up to us to reflect upon the consequences of these regimes of distraction and consumption. it will be up to us to decode their products and imagine, from a conceptual space outside of these effects, thought and representational possibilities that will resist and exceed the material and semiotic poverty of these practices. works cited: appadurai, arjun. "disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy." in _the phantom public sphere_. ed. bruce robbins. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. ashley, richard k. _student responses to questions on perceived dangers_, in politics of social movement, undergraduate class, spring 1993, arizona state university (unpublished). bakhtin, m.m. _the dialogic imagination: four essays by m.m. bakhtin_. trans. caryl emerson and michael holquist. ed. michael holquist. austin: university of texas press, 1981. ---. "response to a question from the _novy mir_ editorial staff." _ speech genres and other late essays_. trans. vern w. mcgee. eds. caryl emerson and michael holquist. austin: university of texas press, 1986, 1-9. barlett, donald l. and james b. steele. _america: what went wrong_. kansas city: universal press syndicate, 1992. barlow, maude. "global competitiveness: corporate canada's new theology." _the action canada network action dossier_ 38 (dec. 1992). n. pag. e-text downloaded from the internet. barnet, richard j. "the end of jobs." _harpers_ 287 (1720), september 1993, 47-52. barnet, richard j. and john cavanaugh. _global dreams: imperial corporations and the new world order_. new york: simon and schuster, 1994. blonsky, marshall. _american mythologies_. new york: oxford university press, 1992. bush, george. _remarks by the president at the raytheon corporation factory, massachussettes_. february 15, 1991. clinton, bill. _remarks by the president at the university of north carolina, chapel hill_. october 12, 1993. office of the press secretary document path retrieval/.data/politics/pres.pres.clinton/unc.1012'.october 12, 1993. coontz, stephanie. _the way we never were: american families and the nostalgia trap_. new york: basic books, 1992. coupland, douglas. _generation x: tales for an accelerated culture_. new york: st. martin's press, 1991. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. ---. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. helen r. lane, robert hurley, and mark seem. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983. dennis, dion. "license and commodification: the birth of an information oligarchy." _humanity and society_ 17 (1993), 48-69. drucker, peter f. "new society of organizations." _harvard business review_ 70 (1992). abstract 92503. n. pag. downloaded from the hbr gopher on the internet. foucault, michel. _the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences_. new york: vintage books, 1973. gordon, colin. "governmental rationality: an introduction." _the foucault effect: studies in governmentality_. eds. graham burcell, colin gordon and peter miller. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991, 1-52. johnston, oswald. "bush visits st. paul school to highlight education goals." _los angeles times_ 23 may 1991, a 31. _king joe_. produced by arkansas state college, 1949. king, thomas. "the saturn school of tomorrow: a reality today." _t h e journal_ 19:2 (april 1992). kristeva, julia. _the kristeva reader_. ed. toril moi. new york: columbia university press, 1986. lasch, christopher. _the minimal self: psychic survival in troubled times_. new york: w.w. norton, 1984. _macneil/lehrer newshour_. "corporate classroom," transcript #4038, may 22, 1991. educational broadcasting and gweta, transcript #4038. n. pag. e-text downloaded from nexis/lexis. mead, walter russell. _mortal splendor: the american empire in transition_. boston: houghton mifflin, 1987. moore, michael, dir. _roger and me_. 1988. phillips, kevin. _boiling point: democrats, republicans and the decline of middle-class prosperity_. new york: harper collins, 1993. procacci, giovanna. "social econony and the government of poverty." _the foucault effect: studies in governmentality_. eds. graham burcell, colin gordon and peter miller. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991, 151-168. rothschild, michael. _bionomics: the inevitability of capitalism_. new york: henry holt, 1990. rouse, roger. "mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism." _diaspora_ 1 (1991). smith, kenneth l. "the radicalization of martin luther king, jr.: the last three years." _journal of ecumenical studies_ 26:2 (1989), 270-289. stam, robert, robert burgoyne, and sandy flitterman-lewis. _new vocabularies in film semiotics: structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond_. new york: routledge, 1992. stern, barbara. "historical and personal nostalgia in advertising text: the fin de siecle effect." _journal of advertising_ 21.4 (1992). n. pag. retrieved e-text from nexis/lexis. stephens, jay. _storming heaven: lsd and the american dream_. new york: atlantic monthly press, 1987. taylor iii, alex, alicia hills moore, and wilton woods. "can gm remodel itself?" _fortune magazine_. january 13, 1992. n. pag. e-text downloaded from nexis/lexis. _webster's new 20th century dictionary_, unabridged. 2nd edition. new york: simon and schuster, 1983. wolfe, tom. _the electric kool-aid acid test_. new york: farrar, strauss and giroux, 1968. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ziarek, 'uncanny style of kristeva's critique of nationalism', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-ziarek-uncanny.txt archive pmc-list, file ziarek.195. part 1/1, total size 63640 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the uncanny style of kristeva's critique of nationalism by ewa ziarek department of english university of notre dame krzysztof.ziarek.2@nd.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by ewa ziarek, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. once again, politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance. --iris marion young a paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent they recognize themselves as foreigners. --julia kristeva [1] nancy fraser's influential critique of kristeva points to the central difficulty in kristeva's theory and to a strange paradox in its reception.^1^ within the space of the same essay, fraser reads kristeva's work as both a traditional psychoanalytic elaboration of subjectivity--and therefore irrelevant for social theory--and as a devastating critique of social relations--to which social theory has to respond. on the one hand, she argues that kristeva's work "focuses almost exclusively on *intra*subjective tensions and thereby surrenders its ability to understand *inter*subjective phenomena, including affiliation . . . and struggle"; on the other hand, she claims that kristeva's thought "is defined in terms of the shattering of social identity, and so it cannot figure in the reconstruction of the new, politically constituted, *collective* identities and solidarities that are essential to feminist politics."^2^ fraser's essay addresses two important questions to kristeva in particular, and to psychoanalysis in general. first, it asks about the relation between the psychic and the social, between the decentered self and the "shattered social identity." second, it inquires whether group formations and social affiliations are conceivable without a reference to collective identities.^3^ [2] in kristeva's 1989 _etrangers a nous-memes_, translated into english as _strangers to ourselves_, this difficult intersection between the split psychic space and the fractured social identity leads to a rethinking of the possible ways of being in common in the wake of the crisis of the religious and national communities. in this text, kristeva focuses on the status of the foreigner/stranger in the context of the historical and political conceptions of social identities, in particular, in the context of the enlightenment's dissolution of religious ties and the subsequent emergence of the modern nation-state: "with the establishment of nation-states we come to the only modern . . . definition of foreignness: the foreigner is the one who does not belong to the state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality."^4^ kristeva argues, however, that this "legal" definition merely covers over the deeper symptom provoked by the appearance of the foreigner: "the prickly passions aroused by the intrusion of the *other* in the homogeneity of . . . a group" (st, 41). the foreigner provides the best exemplification of the "political" logic of the nation-state and its most vertiginous aberration--the logic that founds and con-founds the distinctions of man and citizen, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, civil and political rights, and finally, law and affect: "the difficulty engendered by the matter of foreigners would be completely contained in the deadlock caused by the distinction that sets the *citizen* apart from *man* . . . the process means . . . that one can be more or less a man to the extent that one is more or less a citizen, that he who is not a citizen is not fully a man. between the man and a citizen there is a scar: the foreigner" (st, 97-98). seen as the aporia of the enlightenment and, especially, as the impasse of its political rationality, the figure of the scar both enables and prevents a clear separation between myth and reason, the archaic and the modern, affect and law, same and other. fracturing the imagined unity of the national body, the figure of the foreigner--a supplementary double of the enlightenment's political rationality--anticipates the freudian "logic" of the uncanny. [3] kristeva's strategy to rethink social affiliations at work in modern nation-states from the marginal and ambivalent position of the foreigner parallels the project of homi k. bhabha to interpret the narrative of the nation from "the perspective of the nation's margin and the migrants' exile."^5^ not surprisingly, both kristeva and bhabha turn to freud's discussion of the uncanny in order to underscore not only the duplicity and ambivalence of the margin but also the threat it poses to the homogeneity of the national identity. this emphasis on the liminality fissuring the unity of the nation from within serves as a corrective to the accounts of nationality, which presuppose the imaginary unity of the people or "the sociological solidity of the national narrative" (dn, 305). while rightly criticizing kristeva's too hasty embrace of the pleasures of exile, bhabha at the same time credits her for "a powerful critique and redefinition of the nation as a space for the emergence of feminist political and psychic identifications" (dn, 303). [4] bhabha refers here to kristeva's analysis of the double temporality undercutting the continuity of the national historical narrative in "women's time." in _strangers to ourselves_ kristeva not only focuses far more explicitly on "the critique and redefinition" of the national space, but intertwines this political diagnosis of the aporia in the logic of nationalism with an inquiry into the possibilities of an ethics of psychoanalysis--an issue only briefly broached in "women's time." in the context of ethics, the foreigner becomes the figure of otherness as such--otherness inhabiting both the inter and the intra-subjective relations: "in that sense, the foreigner is a 'symptom' . . . : psychologically he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an *other* and with others; politically, he underscores the limits of nation-states and of the national political conscience" (st, 103). posited in this double way, the figure of the foreigner in kristeva's argument opens a space where politics is entwined with ethics. as kristeva insists, "the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics," because both are fundamentally concerned with the critique of violence and with the elaboration of different ways of being with others. not dependent upon violent expulsion or "peaceful" absorption of others into a common social body, psychoanalysis, kristeva argues, "sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others" (st, 192). in this essay i would like to ask what notion of alterity is implied by the intersection, or perhaps, a disjunction, between politics and ethics. [5] kristeva finishes her _strangers to ourselves_ with a reading of freud's concept of the uncanny, arguing that the freudian essay might implicitly create a discursive space for a different concept of sociality divorced from the violence of xenophobia underlying national affiliations. as has been frequently pointed out, the freudian uncanny belongs to the specific historical formation of the enlightenment, emerging as the obverse side of the modern subject and its scientific, secular rationality.^6^ kristeva supplements this discussion by arguing that the uncanny has to be understood as the counterpart of yet another legacy of the enlightenment--the disintegration of religious communities and subsequent formation of the modern nation-states.^7^ this discursive location of the critique of nationalism and its forms of social affiliations is at the same time the most valuable and the most problematic aspect of kristeva's analysis because it brings into sharp focus the uneasy relationship between the disintegration of the psychic space and the transformation of the social space. it might be worth recalling that despite more and more frequent references to the uncanny in the political context (as, for instance, in bhabha's case, the uncanny underscores the ambivalence and liminality of the national space), kristeva's choice of this particular essay is rather odd in the context of psychoanalysis: as far as the psychoanalytical interpretation of the social formation is concerned, freud's _group psychology and the analysis of the ego_, _civilization and its discontents_, or _moses and monotheism_, for instance, would be more logical, and seemingly more rewarding, texts. although kristeva is first to admit the absence of explicit political concerns--"strangely enough, there is no mention of *foreigners* in the %unheimliche%" (st, 191)--she argues that it is precisely this silence that is strange, itself uncanny: "are we nevertheless so sure that the 'political' feelings of xenophobia do not include, often unconsciously, that agony of frightened joyfulness that has been called %unheimlich% . . . ?" (st, 191). [6] on the basis of the explicit parallel between the political feelings of xenophobia and the affect of the uncanny, kristeva argues that the condition of non-violent being with others lies in the renunciation of the imaginary subjective unity and in the subsequent acceptance of alterity within the self: delicately, analytically, freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. that is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us. (st, 192) no matter how ethically admirable, kristeva's thesis is bound to disappoint as an answer to the political violence of nationalism and xenophobia. the idea of welcoming others to our own uncanny strangeness not only appears individualistic, it also risks psychologizing or aestheticizing the problem of political violence, not to mention the fact that the focus on the uncanny might obfuscate specific historical and political genealogy of nationalism and the memory of its victims--issues kristeva herself raises only briefly in the historical part of her analysis. we seem to be confronted here with a dangerous reduction of the political crisis to a psychologism of sorts--to an unchangeable psychological trait, like, for instance, the subjective fear of one's internal otherness. written in non-technical and sometimes personal style, the whole project might even strike us as banal. it might appear so at first, especially when kristeva's thesis is left unqualified or extracted from the overall argument of the text. the question with which we are confronted here is whether the crisis in the social relations, and especially the crisis of nationality, can be explained (and perhaps redressed) by the analysis of the disintegration of the psychic space. [7] needless to say, kristeva inherits this difficulty from freud. contrary to her claim that freud does not speak about foreigners in "the 'uncanny'," there are of course numerous political references to foreigners in the freudian text: from the strangers destroying the %heimlich% character of one's country to the protestant rulers who "do not feel . . . %heimlich% among their catholic subjects"; from the conspirators and revolutionaries whispering the "watchword of freedom," to those who are "deceitful and malicious toward cruel masters." it would be rather difficult to imagine more explicitly "political" examples of social unrest. all of them suggest a crisis of national affiliation, a subversion of political authority, and an erosion of communicability as a consequence of this subversion. if we recall that religion and the army are freud's privileged instances of the libidinal group organization, then these "political" examples of the uncanny are not merely casual references but in fact paradigmatic cases of a disintegrated community. the problem remains, however, because these political examples are not intended to illustrate the social crisis but to exemplify the subjective affect--the dread evoked by castration anxiety, repetition-compulsion, or the uncanny doubling. nonetheless, there remains something excessive about the sheer multiplications of these political instances--and this excess of the political leads us to the difficult question whether this subjective anxiety can figure as a possible transformation of the social. [8] for kristeva, this excess of the political in "the 'uncanny'" is a subtle reminder of the difficult circumstances of freud's life, in particular, of his experience of anti-semitism: "freud's personal life, a jew wandering from galicia to vienna and london, with stopovers in paris, rome, and new york (to mention only a few of the key stages of his encounters with political and cultural foreignness), conditions his concern to face the other's discontent as ill-ease in the continuous presence of the 'other scene' within us" (st, 181). however, kristeva locates "the 'uncanny'" not only in freud's historical context but also in her own. _strangers to ourselves_, and especially, _nations without nationalism_ (a text which includes an open letter to harlem desir, a founder of %sos racisme%) is meant to speak to the contemporary crisis of national identity in europe generated by the opposite tendencies of economic consolidation and ethnic particularisms: on the one hand, the growing economic integration of the european community; on the other hand, the disintegration of the soviet block and the subsequent rise of nationalism and ethnic violence in eastern europe, the rise of anti-semitism, the unification of germany, the increasing violence against immigrants (especially non-european immigrants), and finally, the rise of french chauvinism in response to the crisis of french national identity.^8^ in this context, one should also mention the ambiguity of kristeva's position as a bulgarian living in france and attempting to speak as a cosmopolitan intellectual (as she admits, tongue in cheek, "i am willing to grant the legitimacy of the ironic objection you might raise: it is beneficial to be a cosmopolitan when one comes from a small country such as bulgaria"^9^). [9] despite the pressure of these immediate political concerns, however, kristeva's reading of freud still suggests a certain displacement of politics--the politics of psychoanalysis does not emerge from an explicit discussion of the political. the specific character of this displacement becomes apparent if we recall that kristeva attempts to articulate the politics of psychoanalysis by reading an essay that is preoccupied, perhaps more explicitly than other freud's texts, with aesthetics. aware of the difficulties that this uneasy relation between politics and aesthetics creates, especially in the aftermath of modernist aestheticism, kristeva situates freud's and her own work at the crossroads of modernity described by walter benjamin: between the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics.^10^ the implication of her argument is that aesthetics cannot secure its autonomy, that it is perpetually haunted by its repressed and yet intimate relation to politics. in this particular case, kristeva, like benedict anderson and homi bhabha, is interested in the place of aesthetics in the construction of national narratives. all three of these writers focus on aesthetics in order to oppose, in bhabha's words, the temptation of historicism presuming the self-evidence of the event and the transparency of language. yet, in contrast to the linearity of realistic narrative evoked by anderson as the model of national community, both kristeva and bhabha turn to the aesthetics of the uncanny in order to underscore the ambivalence and heterogeneity underlying national affiliations. [10] in kristeva's case, however, this recourse to aesthetics performs yet another function--it provides a certain mediation between the crisis of the psychic space, or what kristeva calls the "destructuration of the self," and the transformation of social relations. therefore, it is only by disregarding this mediating role of aesthetics that we can confuse kristeva's critique of nationalism with psychologism, that is, with the explanation of social crisis in terms of unchangeable psychological phenomena. the attempt to seek in the aesthetics of the uncanny what jay bernstein calls "an after-image" of an alternative political practice is intertwined specifically with the question of affect and its place in social relations.^11^ i would like to suggest that kristeva's reconstruction of an alternative "group psychology" on the basis of aesthetics and affectivity repeats hannah arendt's strategy to recreate kant's political theory--the missing fourth _critique_--on the basis of the _critique of aesthetic judgement_.^12^ what arendt retrieves from kantian aesthetics is, first, an alternative sense of politics based on judgement rooted in affect--that is, on the mode of thinking the particular without the reference of the encompassing totality, rather than on the rational free will elaborated in the second _critique_--and second, a model of political %sensus communis% implied by such a judgement. the greatest achievement of kantian aesthetics, according to arendt, lies in the destruction of the assumption that the judgements of taste, and therefore affectivity, lie outside the political realm. what aesthetics has in common with politics, therefore, is the presupposition of a certain community on the basis of the communicability of judgements and an inscription of affectivity in the public sphere. the turn to aesthetics allows, therefore, to supplement the discussion of nationality and political community based on rational will with the haunting question of affectivity and judgement.^13^ [11] although kristeva shares with arendt an approach to aesthetics as a place holder for the absent or alternative sense of politics, both ultimately appeal to different aesthetic phenomena and arrive at a different understanding of community. arendt turns to the pleasure in the beautiful in order to reconstruct a community based on identification with others--achieved "by putting oneself in place of everybody else" and by sharing a commitment to public communicability of judgements, which, needless to say, presupposes a certain transparency of language. kristeva, on the other hand, derives the alternative sense of politics neither from the aesthetics of the beautiful nor from the sublime, but rather from the freudian aesthetics of the uncanny. in repeating the freudian move "beyond the pleasure principle" on the level not only of psychoanalysis but also of aesthetics, she points to the far more drastic consequences of supplanting rational will with the notions of affect than arendt is willing to acknowledge. by confronting us with the confusion and uncertainty of judgement, the negative affect of the uncanny reveals the erosion of the communicability of language and the instability of communal boundaries. [12] let us recall that freud's analysis of the uncanny opens an inquiry into a "remote region" of aesthetics, neglected by the standard works of the discipline: "as good as nothing to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature . . . rather than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion."^14^ in other words, the subject-matter freud discusses is itself uncanny, which, although marginalized and removed from the field of aesthetics as such, nonetheless haunts even its most "obtuse" theoreticians. freud sets up the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the beginning of the essay in terms of a corrective supplement: psychoanalysis illuminates what the traditional field of aesthetics fails to elaborate by adding a negativity of the uncanny to the positive articulations of the beautiful and the sublime. the implication of freud's argument is that even the kantian articulation of the sublime is not radical enough since the initial pain generated by the failure of imagination to present the sublime object is compensated by the pleasure in the idea of the practical reason, "surpassing every standard of sense."^15^ [13] by the end of freud's discussion, however, the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics is reversed: now it is psychoanalysis that is confronted with a residue of aesthetics, a residue which not only exceeds its competence but also questions its main premises of interpretation: we might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, *and what remains probably calls for an aesthetic valuation* . . . . one thing we may observe which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the instances which *contradict* our hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction and literary productions. (u, 401, emphasis added) the remains of aesthetics contradict the hypothesis of psychoanalysis (in particular, freud's exclusion of the intellectual uncertainty or the confusion/conflict of judgement) and call instead for an "aesthetic valuation" of psychoanalysis itself. the most disquieting instance of the uncanny calling for such "an aesthetic valuation" occurs, according to freud, when "the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality" and "then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility" (u, 405). the confusion of judgement brought about by the affect of the uncanny is perhaps most devastating in this case because it questions the boundaries of the common world, the progressive development of community, the surmounting of animalistic beliefs by modernity, and finally, the very distinction between the real and the imaginary: "there is a conflict of judgement whether things which have been 'surmounted' and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible" (u, 404). characterized by the absence of any positive affect and by the confusion of judgement, the uncanny questions not only the parameters of aesthetics but also the boundaries of being in common--the boundaries which freud's own libidinal theory of political bonds sets up in _group psychology_. itself the menacing double of _group psychology_, the uncanny haunts and unravels the communal bonds of identification produced by eros. as homi bhabha remarks, "the problem is, of course, that the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space; the paranoid projections 'outwards' return to haunt and *split* the place from which they are made" (dn, 300). [14] i would now like to suggest more specifically how kristeva's analysis of the affect and the confusion of judgement produced by the uncanny intervenes in the concept of community represented by modern nationalism. as benedict anderson has argued in his influential _imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism_, the formation of modern nation states is characterized by the imaginary logic of identification. a nation can be defined, therefore, as an imagined political community, because despite the physical dispersion of population, despite the conditions of exploitation and inequality, and, we have to add, despite the arbitrariness of language, the members of the nation imagine their belonging together as "communion," comradeship, or fraternity: "the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history."^16^ by the end of his discussion of the institutions and social processes that enable the rise and spread of nationalism--in particular, the appearance of the modern conception of "empty" historical time and arbitrary language, the convergence of capitalism with print technology, and the growing reading public--anderson surprisingly admits that this institutional and cultural analysis fails to explain the crucial role of affect in the formation of national consciousness. it cannot explain why nation, the imaginary social formation dependent on the emptiness of time and language, inspires nonetheless self-sacrificing love among its members. even more problematically, anderson's discussion fails to show the relation of this love to the hatred of racism: "it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousnesses, in themselves, do much to explain the *attachment* that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations . . . it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love."^17^ put in a different way, the mysterious "attachment" points to a curious tension between the rhetoric of emptiness, so consistently stressed in anderson's analysis of language and temporality, and the semblance of organicism and "fraternity" produced by imaginary identification. although unexplained, affect is crucial in the formation of a national affiliation because it mediates between the emptiness of time and language, and the imaginary organic unity of the nation. affect thus converts the empty signs into the emblems of "communion" and reifies the arbitrary signifiers into the expression of empathy. [15] anderson's acknowledgement of the importance of affect, which nonetheless is left without a theoretical elaboration, can help us to situate the political implications of kristeva's reading of the uncanny. like slavoj zizek, kristeva underscores the ambivalent role of affectivity in the process of national identification. for zizek, let us recall, it is the enjoyment of the shared substance, of the "national thing" uniquely embodied in the particular way of national life, that fills in the symbolic emptiness and thus endows the national bond with its seeming sociological solidity. the enigmatic "national thing" fills the void on several levels: on the political level--the void of the sovereign power created by democracy and capitalist economy; on the moral level, the void of the supreme good created by kant's formal conception of the categorical imperative; and, on the linguistic level, the void created by the arbitrary character of the sign. a collective fantasy, the function of nationalism is similar to the kantian transcendental illusion of a direct access to the thing: "this paradox of filling-out the empty place of the supreme good defines the modern notion of nation. the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern *nation* is the same as that of vampires and other living dead: . . . their place is constituted by the very break of modernity."^18^ as zizek argues, national affiliation cannot be sustained merely by symbolic identification; it requires the supplementary function of affect, transforming the emptiness of formalism into the imaginary solidity of national community.^19^ [16] what kristeva's discussion of the uncanny emphasizes is the ambiguity of such a supplement: the imaginary identification that fills the linguistic void becomes in turn a source of threat. thus, the temporal and linguistic void not only undercuts the process of positive affective identification but also changes the very nature of affectivity at work in the formation of nationality. perpetually threatened by the irruption of the irreducible difference within the imagined communal unity, the national bond is inseparable from the negativity of the uncanny. as the semiology of the uncanny suggests, the communal desire to "invalidate the arbitrariness of signs" and to reify them "as psychic contents" does not generate the feeling of belonging but its opposite, a threatening experience of strangeness (st, 186). anderson himself comes close to acknowledging the uncanniness of the national imagination when he considers its striking icon, the tomb of the unknown soldier. instead of producing the fantasy of organic unity, the void of the tomb--indeed, a fitting figure for the emptiness of historical time and the gaps of arbitrary language--turns the national imagination into something ghostly: "void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly *national* imaginings."^20^ if the arbitrariness of the sign opens a space for the secular national identification, it at the same time prevents the transformation of this void into "organic solidity."^21^ as the primary reminder of the ghostly character of the imaginary identification, the figure of the foreigner disorients the judgment about belonging to the common world and thereby reveals the glaring gaps and discontinuities beneath the national affiliation. by juxtaposing the ideal of political love with the uncanniness of the "ghostly national imaginings," kristeva strives for a different conceptualization of belonging together, in which mutual affective identification is undercut by the very gaps and discontinuities of language. [17] as i have suggested at the beginning of this essay, another mediation between the disruption of the psychic space and the reconfiguration of the social relations is performed, in kristeva's argument, by ethics. despite the numerous but nonetheless cryptic references to and remarks about ethics in her work, the reconstruction of the specific meaning of "ethics" in kristeva's project is not an easy undertaking. this is perhaps the case because kristeva's ethics of psychoanalysis does not offer a positive program--it does not formulate a set of rules for a new morality--but merely demands respect for an inassimilable alterity: "psychoanalysis is then experienced as a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, toward an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable" (st, 182). if kristeva's analysis of aesthetics reveals an ambivalent role of affectivity in the formation of social relations, the turn to ethics calls for the transformation of this affect--of the political love haunted by the hatred of the other--into respect for alterity. [18] the "respect for the radical form of otherness" not only contests the reification of language (where the arbitrary signs become emblems of the communion with others) but also demystifies the identity of the symbolic order itself. as kristeva writes in "women's time," the entwinement of aesthetics and ethics points to the limits of the symbolic as a system of exchange--a system, which sets equivalences among diverse elements: "it seems to me that the role of what is usually called 'aesthetic practices' must increase not only to counterbalance the storage and uniformity of information by present-day mass media . . . but also to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, the *community* of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equates."^22^ the concern for the irreconcilable moves kristeva to criticize both the imaginary communion of %einfuhlung% and the contractual community of language in so far as the symbolic totality subsumes differences into a system of equivalences. not merely a celebration of linguistic indeterminacy, the respect for the irreconcilable poses a new demand for ethics in order to emphasize the *responsibility* which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable wherever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another, are constituted . . . . what i have called "aesthetic practices" are undoubtedly nothing other than the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.^23^ this reference to responsibility suggests that the linguistic instability does not suspend the necessity of judging but reverses the stakes of judgement. if the aesthetic of the uncanny points to the impasse of judgement, ethics shifts the priority from the subjective faculty of judgment to the experience of being judged. as kristeva's famous formulation of the subject-in-process/on-trial suggests, the instability of the symbolic order and the fragility of subjective identity do not imply subjective complacency or the "happy" celebration of linguistic multiplicity but impose responsibility in the face of judgement coming from the other. [19] as i have argued elsewhere, such a minimal formulation of ethics that posits a "respect" for the irreconcilable in place of any positive program recalls levinasian ethics.^24^ based likewise on the "respect" for the irreducible alterity, levinas's thought protests against the assimilation of otherness to the order of the same--against the absorption of alterity to the order of the subject, community, or linguistic totality. in order to prevent the assimilation of the other, which amounts in the end to the violent constitution of the other's identity, levinas underscores the irreducible exteriority or the excess of alterity overflowing both social formation and signifying systems. yet, in what way can the freudian notion of the uncanny open such a non-violent relationship to "the irreconcilable otherness" in levinas's sense? perhaps one could risk a claim that the levinasian ethic is itself uncanny, since encountering the other it describes always involves a profound displacement of the subject, an insurmountable disturbance of the domestic economy, a disruption of propriety and property--a calling into question of everything one wishes to claim as one's own. in an uncanny resemblance to psychoanalysis, levinas's ethics takes us back to "the infancy of philosophy" in order to cure reason from its allergic reaction to "the other that remains other": western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. from its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other--with an insurmountable allergy.^25^ the heteronomous experience we seek would not be an attitude that cannot be converted into a category, and whose movement unto the other is not recuperated in identification.^26^ although it disrupts the economy of the proper, the heteronomous experience of "the fundamental strangeness" in levinas's work does not reproduce anxiety or fright, as is the case with the uncanny. on the contrary, it commands the subject to ethical responsibility for the other. consequently, if kristeva's re-reading of the uncanny is to clear the ground for ethics, this interpretation has to negotiate the passage from fright--what levinas calls "insurmountable allergy"--to responsibility. [20] in order to see how kristeva navigates this passage from the horror of the other toward the respect for the irreconcilable, we need to clarify the difference between the alterity at the basis of levinas's (and kristeva's) ethics and the kind of otherness that manifests itself in the experience of the uncanny. as kristeva is well aware, the experience of the uncanny does not consist in the encounter with the irreducible alterity of the other person--it is certainly not the face to face encounter in the levinasian sense--but, on the contrary, it brings an unsettling recognition of the subject's own strangeness. underscoring the otherness that inhabits the subject from within, freud's analysis of the uncanny points to "an immanence of the strange within the familiar" (st, 183). not surprisingly, then, kristeva suggests that the notion of the uncanny both belongs to and disrupts the "intimist" romantic filiation: "with the freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche . . . integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an *otherness* that is both biological *and* symbolic and becomes an integral part of the *same*" (st, 181). kristeva argues, however, that this difficult recognition of the irreconcilable alterity within the self is precisely what enables a non-violent relation to the other. in other words, the ethical encounter with the other, with the foreigner and the stranger, is inconceivable without the acknowledgement of alterity inscribed already within the most intimate interiority of the self. thus although the uncanny is not equivalent to ethics, in so far as it "reconciles" us with the irreconcilable within ourselves, it opens its possibility. [21] kristeva's reading suggests an "improper" parallel between the strangeness disrupting the intimacy of the self from within and the irreducible exteriority of the other eluding any form of internalization. this strange parallel is what shatters any proper distinction between interiority and exteriority, immanence and transcendence. needless to say, kristeva's interpretation of the uncanny repeats its paradoxical logic: the instability of the opposition between the inside and the outside, between interiority and exteriority, is %unheimlich par excellence%. in freud's well-known linguistic analysis, the ambivalence of the word "heimlich"--what is familiar, intimate, belonging to the home--"finally coincides with its opposite, 'unheimlich'." for kristeva this instability of logic, the uncertainty of conceptual boundaries, is itself both a source and a symptom of the uncanny. she adds, however, another twist to this already convoluted and unstable logic by arguing that the uncanny coincidence of the most intimate interiority with the threatening exteriority is at the same time what upholds their radical non-coincidence. put in a different way, "the immanence of the strange within the familiar" preserves the transcendence of the other in levinas's sense. [22] this added twist is at the core of the double movement of kristeva's argument: the first part of her argument, following freud's analysis, performs a certain internalization or inscription of otherness within the subject, whereas the second part reasserts the radical exteriority and non-integration of alterity. kristeva claims that in order to elaborate an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable, otherness has to be seen as already constituting the subject from within: "a first step was taken that removed the uncanny strangeness from the outside, where fright had anchored it, to locate it inside, not inside the familiar considered as one's own and proper, but the familiar potentially tainted with strangeness and referred to . . . an improper past" (st, 183). this is what freud refers to when he claims that "this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression" (u, 394). such externalization of what remains "irreconcilable" within the subject is especially emphasized by freud in the context of the uncanny doubling: it is "the impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself" (u, 389). consequently, kristeva argues that the exteriority of the uncanny is merely an effect of a defensive projection of the narcissistic self: "the archaic, narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien *double* . . . . in this instance the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self" (st, 183). [23] the first part of kristeva's argument unravels, then, defensive projections, but at the high price of a radical disintegration of the subject. by relocating "the irreconcilable" within the self, the uncanny might be more appropriately described as a destructuration of the self: "in short, if anguish revolves around an *object*, uncanniness, on the other hand, is a *destructuration of the self*" (st, 188). why does the paradoxical disintegration of the self remain for kristeva a necessary condition for the acknowledgement of the radical exteriority of the other? the implication of kristeva's approach to ethics is that the encounter with irreducible alterity can emerge only at the end of a rigorous analysis of the way the other constitutes and is in turn constituted within the subjective experience. by confronting us with the difficulty we have in relation to the other ("the uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty i have in situating myself with respect to the other" [st, 187]), the experience of the uncanny reveals the "fascinated rejection of the other" at the very center of the imaginary constitution of self. [24] to explain what kristeva means by the "fascinated rejection of the other," we need to turn now to her earlier work on the aporia of the primary identification--the aporia persisting in all the subsequent identifications in psychic life. reworking of the mechanism of primary identification in _tales of love_, kristeva not only stresses the semantic emptiness underlying this process but also calls attention to two very different modalities of otherness. understood as a metaphorical shifting, primary identification functions as the transference of the not yet ego--the beckettian not-i--into the place of the other. the other functions here as "the very possibility of the perception, distinction, and differentiation . . . that ideal is nevertheless a blinding, nonrepresentable power--a sun or a ghost."^27^ called by kristeva "the imaginary father," this other provides a place of unification, which is produced by a metaphorical condensation of the drive and the signifier. yet if the transfer to the place of the other opens the possibility of the fragile transformation of the not-i into an ego, this unification is threatened by the emptiness of transference and, even more so, by the abjection of the "unnamable" otherness of the mother: primary identification appears to be a transference to (from) the imaginary father, correlative to the establishment of the mother as "ab-jetted." narcissism would be that correlation (with the imaginary father and the "ab-jetted" mother) enacted around the central emptiness of that transference.^28^ i would like to stress two points in kristeva's diagnosis of the aporia of primary identification. first, the objectless identification both preserves the emptiness of transference (which kristeva sees as an antecedent to the symbolic function) and, at the same time, provides the means of defense against this void--it functions as a screen over the emptiness of transference. second, as an obverse side of the fascinated rejection of the other, primary identification provides the means of defense against abjection. [25] we might say that the aporia of the objectless identification sets up two modalities of otherness and a double operation of displacement constitutive of the narcissistic self: on the one hand, the other becomes a metaphorical destination of sorts (even if this destination is only "seeming"), a place of a possible unification for the archaic not-i; but on the other hand, the unnamable otherness of the abject turns the fragile position of an i into a permanent exile. as kristeva writes, abjection can be described as a perpetual displacement, disrupting even a temporary crystallization of identity: "the one by whom the abject exists is thus a *deject* who places (himself) . . . and therefore *strays* instead of getting his bearings . . . instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so concerning his place: '*where* am i?' instead of 'who am i?'."^29^ [26] although in _the tales of love_ kristeva argues that abjection has to be offset by identification in order to demarcate an archaic narcissistic space, she nonetheless ends her discussion once again with the figure of an exile, which anticipates the predicament of the foreigner in _strangers to ourselves_. the work on identification prior to the mirror stage produces, paradoxically, a strayed narcissus "deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial with a prehistory bearing, wanting for love."^30^ this narcissus in the throes of abjection can be read as an interruption of the primary identification, as the mark of a prior relation to the other that cannot be subsumed into even a "seeming" destination for an i. by repeating the effects of such an interruption, every subsequent encounter with the other provokes the narcissistic crisis: "strange is indeed the encounter with the other--whom we perceive . . . but do not 'frame' within our consciousness. . . . i do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because i negate him" (st, 187). is the rejection of the foreigner a narcissistic defense against the profound displacement experienced in the encounter with the other? [27] if such a violent rejection of the other is to be surmounted, then the i has to give up the fantasy of the proper self: proper self "no longer exists ever since freud and shows itself to be a strange land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed" (st, 191). although the uncanny shatters the imaginary integrity of the self, kristeva argues that this destructuration of the self is a resource rather than a threat: "as . . . source of depersonalization, we cannot suppress the symptom that the foreigner provokes; but we simply must come back to it, clear it up, give it the resources *our own essential depersonalizations provide*, and thus only soothe it" (st, 190, emphasis added). depersonalization becomes a "resource" when, by undoing the defensive projections, it enables an encounter with the absolutely other. it is at this point in her discussion that kristeva shifts the emphasis from the "irreconcilable" within the self to the encounter with the other who "activates" the experience of the uncanny--the other of death, the other of femininity, or finally, the foreigner: "while it surely manifests the return of a familiar repressed, the %unheimliche% requires just the same the impetus of a new encounter with an unexpected outside element" (st, 188). the impact of this new event remains ambiguous--it may lead either to psychosis or to an opening toward the new, toward the absolutely other: the uncanny experience "may either remain as a psychotic *symptom* or fit in as an *opening* toward the new, as an attempt to tally with the incongruous" (st, 188). the resolution of this ambiguity depends on whether or not the self is successful in "a crumbling of the conscious defenses, resulting from the conflicts the self experiences with an other" (st, 188). such an opening toward the new and the incongruous, if we recall kristeva's earlier definition, constitutes precisely an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable: "strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other who shocks me" (st, 187). this is perhaps the most clear instance in kristeva's reading of freud where the abyss within the subject maintains the abyss between the subject and the other, pointing to the limits of both subjective integration and intersubjective identification. [28] since individual or collective identity is inextricably bound with a "fascinated rejection of the other," kristeva argues that only a departure from that logic of identity--from the affective %einfuhlung% at the heart of the organic %gemeinschaft% to be sure, but also from its opposite, from the equivalences set up by the symbolic totality--can create non-violent conditions of being with others. no longer based on the common affective bond or the symbolic equivalences, the non-violent relations to others have to preserve the irreducible non-integration of alterity within the common social body: "freud brings us the courage to call ourselves disintegrated in order not to integrate foreigners and even less to hunt them down, but rather to welcome them to that uncanny strangeness, which is as much theirs as it is ours" (st, 192). such a disintegrated community might appear, to refer to jean-luc nancy's argument, "inoperative."^31^ indeed, the paradoxical mode of solidarity with others--a solidarity which respects differences between and within subjects rather than seeking their reconciliation--does not work in the sense that it fails to produce a common essence. and yet, it is the only mode of being with others that refuses to obliterate alterity for the sake of collective identity. as kristeva writes, with this notion of solidarity, we are far removed from a call to brotherhood, about which one has already ironically pointed out its debt to paternal and divine authority--"in order to have brothers there must be a father" . . . on the basis of an erotic, death bearing unconscious, the uncanny strangeness--a projection as well as a first working out of death drive-. . . sets the difference within us . . . and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being *with* others. (st, 192) notes ^1^ kristeva's work has produced many controversies and debates among feminist critics. see for instance, judith butler, "the body politics of julia kristeva," _gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity_ (new york: routledge, 1990), 79-93; ann rosalind jones, "julia kristeva on femininity: the limits of a semiotic politic" _feminist review_ 18 (1984): 46-73; jacqueline rose, _sexuality in the field of vision_ (london: verso, 1986), 151-57, and the collection of essays, _ethics, politics, and difference in julia kristeva's writing_, ed. kelly oliver (new york: routledge, 1993). ^2^ nancy fraser, "the uses and abuses of french discourse theories for feminist politics," _boundary 2_, 17 (1990): 98. ^3^ in contrast to fraser's powerful critique of kristeva's project, iris young advances quite a different interpretation of kristeva's politics. in her influential essay, "the ideal of community and the politics of difference," _social theory and practice_ 12 (1986), young focuses precisely on what kind of a reconstruction of social relations could emerge from kristeva's notion of the subject as a heterogenous process. according to this reading, kristeva's theory not only does not "surrender the ability to understand intersubjective phenomena" but, on the contrary, it allows for a reconceptualization of group solidarity and political community beyond the notion of collective identity. for young this different sense of belonging together corresponds to a different sense of politics--which she calls the politics of difference. however, if young's commitment to the politics of difference has been accepted within a large circle of feminist theorists--witness the proliferation of the recent anthologies like _practicing the conflict in feminism_, ed. marrianne hirsch and evelyn fox keller (new york: routledge, 1990)--her claim about the political significance of kristeva's theory remains much more controversial. ^4^ julia kristeva, _strangers to ourselves_, trans. leon s. roudiez (new york: columbia up, 1991), 96. subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as st. ^5^ homi k. bhabha, "dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation," _nation and narration_, ed. homi k. bhabha (london: routledge, 1990), 291. subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as dn. one can also mention here a parallel project by tzvetan todorov, _on human diversity: nationalism, racism, and exoticism, in french thought_, trans. catherine porter (cambridge: harvard up, 1993). ^6^ see for instance mladen dolar, "'i shall be with you on your wedding-night': lacan and the uncanny," _october_ 58 (1991): 6-23, p. 7. ^7^ my argument at this point opposes norma claire moruzzi's reading of kristeva's _strangers to ourselves_. by ignoring the leading role of the freudian concept of the uncanny in the structure of kristeva's argument, moruzzi sees kristeva "resorting to the traditional comforts of enlightenment humanism." see norma claire moruzzi, "national abjects: julia kristeva on the process of political self-identification," _ethics, politics, and difference in julia kristeva's writing_, 140. ^8^ the famous 1989 incident "l'affaire du foulard"--the expulsion from public school of three young women from north african families who insisted on wearing head-scarves--is but one instance of the tensions accumulating around immigrants in france, especially around islamic immigrants from north africa. for a detailed discussion of the role of this incident as a background for kristeva's text, see moruzzi, "national abjects," 136-142. ^9^ julia kristeva, _nations without nationalism_, trans. leon roudiez (new york; columbia up, 1993), 15. ^10^ the politicization of aesthetics in kristeva's argument is intertwined with the problem of translation. one of the few instances where freud *does* raise the issue of foreigners is during his terminological discussion of the uncanny in foreign languages. although he cites the greek word %xenos%, the word in which the strange coincides precisely with what is foreign, freud immediately dismisses this new interpretative perspective by insisting that "foreign dictionaries tell us nothing new" and that other "languages are without a word for this particular variety of what is fearful." what is raised yet not pursued in this example is the complex relation between the uncanny and the foreign, between the national language (represented both by the mother tongue and the mother's body) and translation. yet these seemingly futile exercises in translation (exercises that seem to reassure us about the good fortune of the native tongue by reminding us that foreign etymologies do not contribute anything new to the discussion) paradoxically situate the problematic of otherness at the limits of translatability--the limits that seem to affect primarily the language one wishes to call one's own. by underscoring the important historical role national literatures and the philologies of national languages have played in the formation of modern nation-states, kristeva at the same time underscores the political significance of this necessity and the impossibility of translation as the limit of nationalism. ^11^ j.m. bernstein, _the fate of art: aesthetic alienation from kant to derrida and adorno_ (university park: the pennsylvania state up, 1992), 11-16. ^12^ hannah arendt, _lectures on kant's political philosophy_, ed. ronald beiner (chicago: u of chicago p, 1982). ^13^ for an interesting discussion of arendt's theory of judgement and of the controversies her theory has created, see maurizio passerin d'entreves, _the political philosophy of hannah arendt_ (london: routledge, 1994), 101-138. ^14^ sigmund freud, "the 'uncanny'," _collected papers_, vol. 4, trans. joan riviere (new york: basic books, 1959): 368-69. subsequent references to this essay are marked parenthetically in the text as u. ^15^ immanuel kant, _critique of judgement_, trans. j.h. bernard (new york: macmillan, 1951), 89. ^16^ benedict anderson, _imagined communities: reflections on the origin and the spread of nationalism_ (london: verso, 1991), 26. ^17^ benedict anderson, _imagined communities_, 141. ^18^ slavoj zizek, _tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology_ (durham: duke up), 222. zizek's analysis of the "thing" is based on lacan's _the ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, the seminar of jacques lacan_, book 7, ed. jacques-allain miller, trans. dennis porter (new york: norton), 19-84. ^19^ in light of kristeva's discussion, zizek's analysis would be particularly useful for explaining the "mystical" form of nationalism, based on the secret notion of %volksgeist%, the origins of which kristeva traces, beyond german romanticism, in the writings of herder. rather than positing one model of national identification, however, she insist on the specificity of various historical forms of nationalism--in particular, on the difference between organic %volksgeist% rooted in blood and soil and far more contractual idea of nationality implied by montesquieu's %esprit general%. nations without nationalism, 30-33. ^20^ anderson, 9. ^21^ that is why homi bhabha suggests, for instance, that the national imagination needs the pedagogical to produce the semblance of "organic solidity." ^22^ julia kristeva, "women's time," trans. alice jardine and harry blake, _the kristeva reader_, ed. toril moi (new york: columbia), 210. ^23^ julia kristeva, "women's time," 210. ^24^ see my discussion in "kristeva and levinas: mourning, ethics, and the feminine," _ethics, politics, and difference in julia kristeva's writing_, 62-78. ^25^ emmanuel levinas, "the trace of the other," trans. a. lingis, _deconstruction in context_, ed. mark taylor (chicago: u of chicago p, 1986), 346. ^26^ levinas, "the trace of the other," 348. ^27^ julia kristeva, _tales of love_, trans. leon roudiez (new york: columbia, 1987), 41-42. ^28^ julia kristeva, _tales of love_, 41-42. ^29^ julia kristeva, _powers of horror: an essay on abjection_ (new york: columbia up, 1982), 8. ^30^ _tales of love_, 382. ^31^ jean-luc nancy, _the inoperative community_, ed. peter connor, trans. peter connor et al. (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1991). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------carr, 'optical allusions: hysterical memories and the screening of pregnant sites', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-carr-optical.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.195. part 1/1, total size 38279 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- optical allusions: hysterical memories and the screening of pregnant sites by karen l. carr english department colby college klcarr@colby.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by karen carr, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] i am caught, embedded in the footsteps that lead into this moment of time in which i am frozen. there, pushing itself up, out, around, in front of everything else, the large round belly that forces time into position. this is no moment of death; nor is it a moment of life. . . . caught, transformed, transfixed. . . . a death mask? a memory? a moment in which i will always be living, always be dying. breath never leaving dust on the glossy surface. [2] ultrasound uses sound waves to create an image of the fetus on a screen which is viewed by the patient, the ultrasound technician and (later, separately) the doctor. like freud, inquiring into the deaf mind, the ultrasound can be seen as an attempt to investigate the deafness of the pregnant body by producing sight. sight and sound are linked via the medium of the ultrasound machine itself as well as the doctor who must be on hand to interpret its imagery. like the psychoanalyst, the doctor is the agential figure. the image, like the memory of the hysteric, may come from the body but once it is brought into being and made visual, it has traversed the line between a "raw" visual conglomeration and into a "real" baby. this transformation of fetus to baby via the image cannot happen without the doctor. fuzzy gray images floating, fragmented on the screen become hands, feet, penis, mouth, eyes, heart as soon as the doctor interprets them. [3] the ultrasound technician is caught between patient and doctor in this configuration. s/he may point out bodily parts and confer gender on the fetus, as long as the fetus looks "healthy." often, the pregnant woman can diagnose a "problem" herself just based upon the amount of silence in the room. the technician, then, becomes the person with a secret. the "baby" is in effect hidden in and by the image until the doctor can step in to bring it forth and make it clear and whole. it is in the process of revealing that which the patient cannot see that the doctor becomes the first agent of the developing fetus' subjectivity. ultrasound, in its opening of the pregnant body, becomes a marker of reality. once the doctor constructs the image on the screen, sign and referent are brought together. the pregnant body is no longer concealing a private mysterious event; rather, it is holding a "life" that we can check in on--visit--via our ability to see. in the ideological terrain of modern reproduction, this technology functions so as to change fetuses into babies, possible existence into "life" and private into public. [4] certainly, the rise of "fetal rights" cannot be separated from the rise in fetal technologies which allow us access to the fetus via images or via the pregnant body itself in uterine pre-partum surgery. medical technologies which allow sight of the fetus engender a reproductive world in which, much like foucault's notion of panopticism, "i am seen therefore i am." indeed, rosalind petchesky argues that, from the clinician's standpoint, fetal imaging becomes "a kind of panoptics of the womb."^2^ [5] the reproductive (pregnant) body exists as spectacle--it is always a profoundly sighted body that doesn't exist apart from being seen. there is the external sense of people looking, but with technologies such as ultrasound, there is also the internal sense that the fetus itself is, somehow, looking. representations of the fetus by anti-choice groups focus on this notion of the fetus by accentuating its human qualities--the tiny hands and fingers, organs and sensory apparati--ears, eyes, mouth. when this technique works, it is a means of setting up internal surveillance for the woman who is pregnant. not only is the state watching but so is the human-like fetus itself. the pregnant body then is circumscribed by a visual line that is both in and out, private and public. [6] the pregnant woman takes on the job of surveillance herself, by "humanizing" and making real the fetus inside, by internalizing the camera eye and pulling the conglomeration of cells that is fetus into the ultrasonically constructed "whole" baby--"not only 'already a baby,' but more--a 'baby-man,' an autonomous, atomized mini-space hero."^3^ this view is supported by medical and social ideologies which encourage women to view their fetuses as children from the moment they know they are there. in an episode of "murphy brown," for instance, murphy talks about the "little voice inside her" which helped engender her decision to continue her pregnancy. pregnancy manuals, pamphlets at doctors' and midwives' offices frequently refer to the fetus as "your baby," especially when directing women to refrain from "unhealthy habits which might harm the baby." an american cancer society poster, circulated in the early 80s, depicted a fetus with a cigarette in its mouth to "really show" the ill-effects of smoking during pregnancy. like ultrasound, the image of the smoking fetus worked by humanizing the fetus, by giving it representation within its womb environment. once the "secret" of the womb environment is exposed, that environment too must be socially constructed via narrative, much like dora's bodily secrets. once societal forces have gained sight, they must also construct representations which keep the fetus in circulation, in service of the ideology of pregnancy which demands rights for a fetus. this self-surveillance and social surveillance is what enables the legal regulation of the pregnant body. it is as if the woman who takes drugs, smokes or drinks during pregnancy has failed at policing herself, at merging the lines of public and private sight on top of her body. she becomes the ultimate transgressor because she has failed in her task to give the fetus subjectivity--to bestow upon it an identity which, once there, needs to be protected and nurtured at all costs. in other words, the woman who fails to be her own cop fails because she refuses to conflate pregnant body with mother by participating in the social mandate that the fetus become subject well before birth. [7] in the realm of reproductive technologies, sight rather than language becomes the crucial determiner of subjectivity. the fetal "body" that has been constructed by medicine and culture is one that needs no words; indeed, as peteshky makes clear, it only need have the "silent scream" of the movie which anti-choice groups have used so effectively.^4^ if subjectivity is a process that is recognized and mediated by legal discourse and ideology, then the fetus, found in the moving glops of a video screen, is subject. lacan's infamous mirror instead becomes a video display screen where looking at and looking out produce images through which subjectivity is granted. it hardly matters that the fetus, unlike the child in the mirror, has no recognition of its own shape, or its mother's. what matters is that it has been found, caught by the zig-zagging sound waves, caught by the photograph that freezes its "babyhood," its subjectivity for all the world to see. in her discussion of reproductive discourse, valerie hartouni quotes from a physician's description of ultrasound: physician michael r. harrison puts the issue this way: it was not until the last half of this century that the prying eye of the ultrasound (that is, ultrasound visualization) rendered the once opaque womb transparent, stripping the veil of mystery from the dark inner sanctum, and letting the light of scientific observation fall on the shy and secretive fetus. . . . the sonographic voyeur, spying on the unwary fetus finds him or her a surprisingly active little creature, and not at all the passive parasite we had imagined." no longer a "medical recluse" or a "parasite," the fetus has been grasped as an object of scientific observation and medical manipulation, not to mention anthropomorphic imagination."^5^ [8] as i look at my fetus, floating at me from within the sound hollow cavern of my womb, i am, in a sense, re-sutured even as i am being fragmented. my uterus, on display, lit up like some video game is, paradoxically, the means to my fragmentation as well as my access to "wholeness." it is this very fragmentation that the ultrasound machine attempts to re-absorb into an ideology of wholeness that includes sighting the fetus and granting it subjectivity even as it still resides in the body. birth, as kristeva talks about it in "motherhood according to bellini," is no longer the only possible moment of dual subjectivity; rather, the pregnant woman becomes holder of two subjectivities, two gazes out at the moment that her fetus is sighted/sited.^6^ during my own ultrasound, as the fetus careened off the walls of my uterus, its hands over its ears ("does it hurt the fetus?" i asked. "oh no; they can't hear any of this. it has no effect on them."), it suddenly turned and faced the screen, peering out like some sort of amphibious alien, caught in a screen that can only contain. it was an unsettling moment--one in which my fetus became too real. in looking out at the screen--a random and coincidental movement--the fetus had returned my gaze, somehow. and that changed everything. it is the photograph moving--turning real, taking on eyes and mouth, pressing its face up against the screen like a child pushing/disfiguring his face against a window and leaving fog. barthes writes, "if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. for the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the real and the live."^7^ [9] at the moment that i imagine a gaze for the fetus in side me, i am granting it life in death. the fetus remains as a death, as a mystery, a question until it prods one of the senses. a heartbeat, a kick or a sighting (which can be done long before a heartbeat can be heard or a kick felt) bring it into possibility--into the world of the live. by looking out from the screen, looking back out, the fetus is both real and live; in looking out at me, it becomes real precisely because it is alive--precisely because it is moving through me like some wind up toy in a small box. [10] fetus. baby. baby. fetus. these terms have become polarized as all positions within the "debate" about the right to choose abortion have relied upon the most far-reaching extremes of opposition in advancing their arguments. the "pro-life" position relies upon the assertion of life at any and all moments while the "pro-choice" position walks right into the argumentative terrain mapped by the anti-choice crusaders by opposing a construction of life with a construction of tissue, of fetus. the pregnant woman is caught in this discursive net, floating somewhere between the terms of scientific technicality and procreative astonishment. to be pregnant and construct a "baby" out of the mass of cells rapidly splintering inside is to move precariously close to a political position in which "life" becomes the operant term for the thing, the stuff of the body's hidden insides. for a feminist committed to intervention, it is a retracing of the line between public and private as the fantasies of kicking, twirling, suckling babies must be kept "in," lest they fall into the hands and mouths of the "wrong side," in this case, the anti-choice marauders. thus, the personal must be re-inscribed away from the political as the deployment of the transformation of fetus to baby can become quite problematic. similarly, the pregnant woman who doesn't want to be pregnant must counter the narrative seduction of life, baby, gurgling, etc. and reconceive "baby" as "fetus." pro-choice constructions of pregnancy and abortion make this quite difficult however, by assuming that the choice of abortion must, necessarily, be "difficult," "painful," etc. abortion stories are filled with descriptions of just this sort of abortion and only work to reinforce the boundary between women who have abortions for the "right" reasons and with the proper amount of guilt and suffering and women who "take it lightly," "do it as a form of birth control," or have frequent abortions. this moralistic position only reinforces the arguments of those who violently oppose women's ability to act and move with any agency and autonomy. the construction of "right" and "wrong," good and bad abortions is similar in effect to early twentieth century eugenecists' constructions of fit and unfit mothers, and is, at its core, an argument that is still based on a conceptualization of the fetus as life, not tissue and cells. the expectation of, indeed, the demand for suffering and levity, trauma and pain belies any attempt to construct the stuff of pregnancy as cellular matter. if this were the case, then the arguments about abortion by those committed to its continued availability would be radically different, based not on an ethic of "choice," a false either/or pluralism which only further obscures the issue, and is the continual re-circulation of similar logic, but rather on a construction of pregnancy which works its way out, which accounts for the vast, overwhelming and contradictory constructions of pregnancy that circulate around and on top of anyone who finds herself in that position. rather than seeing everything as either/or, and expecting women to grieve...or not, to find it hard...or not, it's important to keep the complexity hanging, to juggle the very multiple and deeply contentious images that construct pregnant subjectivities. the notion of choice is an overly reductive one, one that circulates in such a way that it brings to mind choices like lemonade vs. ice tea, french fries vs. baked potato and quickly reduces anything else in its signifying sphere--abortion, sexuality, etc.--to the same. as so many people arguing against the notion of sexual "choice" show, the concept remains locked in its binaristic prison where all choices are available from a menu of two items. sexuality? choice or biology. who would choose such a life? why aren't there more? abortion? choice (i.e., death) or "life." but the choice is never an easy one. no one is saying that it's easy, only that the choice be hers. [11] appeals to women to have ultrasound tend to construct ultrasound as a harmless diagnostic tool which can help the "mother" personalize the fetus, to make it more "real," setting it up as a sort of pre-birth bonding tool while at the same time convincing women of its necessity to insure a healthy pregnancy. it's meant to put women's minds "at ease" in appeals, again to the unknown terrors of pregnancy--ill health, disabilities, death. as rosalind petchesky and valerie hartouni have both pointed out, ultrasound also functions as an ideological tool in that its personalizing of the fetus often sways women who might otherwise have wanted abortions. [12] hartouni describes the "study" (based, as she points out, "on only two, entirely unrelated interviews") of ultrasound that led to the making of _the silent scream_: fletcher and evans noted that ultrasound imaging of the "fetal form" tended to foster among pregnant women a sense of recognition and identification of the fetus as their own, as something belonging to and dependent upon them alone. constituting the stuff of maternal bonding, "the fundamental element in the later parent-child bond," such recognition, fletcher and evans claimed, was more likely to lead women "to resolve 'ambivalent' pregnancies in favor of the fetus."^8^ the rhetoric of ultrasonography clearly bears them out; ultrasonographers use language of personhood when describing the floating fetus, not language of it-hood. fetuses are often referred to as he/she (indeed, conferred on the screen as he/she), pregnant women are told to notice how cute he/she is, how he/she is sleeping, looking, sucking her/his thumb, etc. the language is active, the fetus made alive and real by the sound screen. the imaging of ultrasound can also work beyond the resolution of "ambivalent" feelings about a particular, specific pregnancy. as a recent article in the _providence journal_, makes clear, the experience of ultrasound can consolidate ambivalent feelings about abortion in general. after finally "seeing" a "live" "daughter" (with "arms, legs, face, beating heart, life") on the ultrasound screen after two successive miscarriages, the author determines that: i now find the slogan "my body, my choice" amazingly arrogant. if there is one lesson i have learned through this year, it is that i do not create life. life passes through me. . . . i do not create life, i house it. i did nothing different with any of my four children, but two lived within my womb and two died there. life-giving is beyond my power, beyond my body, beyond my choice.^9^ [13] rosalind petchesky discusses the need to see ultrasound and other reproductive technologies as more than simply "an omnivorous male plot to take over their [women's] reproductive capacities," because this view assumes a "transhistorical need," while also denying any possibility of women being "agents of their own reproductive destinies."^10^ this is a crucial point, one that is too quickly and easily overlooked in the discourse on/of reproductive technologies. while ultrasound can be looked at as simply another aid to feminine fragmentation, the fragmentation itself is too often dismissed as automatically problematic. here it is useful to consider haraway as she takes a view of fragmentation which encompasses the various technological apparatuses that have become part of the web of interpellative factors. haraway writes: a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.^11^ to dismiss ultrasound, then, as a re-fragmentation of the female body is to insist that fragmentation is something that we should fight against. that we have abandoned the humanist model of "the individual", nicely rounded and whole, but left in place the desire for a physicality that is somehow free of the variety of cultural signposts that meet at the body, is a mistake. we need to be able to affirm the very fragmentation which we would fight, to welcome the screaming eyes of the fetus glaring/gazing back. the very subjectivity that ultrasound constructs for the fetus in the service of anti-choice, pro-nuclear heterosexual family ideology also operates in such a way that the pregnant woman herself is able to attempt to make sense of a process (pregnancy) which is always already a profoundly fragmenting, disjunct enactment. [image: carr.ultra1.gif] [14] both of my children were dressed in their names the day we saw them on the ultrasound screen. like clothing on a naked body, their names, gendered and "personal," reached over and marked the quickly moving forms that swam across the screen. the siting of my sons, in the names we had picked for them, changed the way i perceived myself as a pregnant woman. no longer floating polymorphous possibilities--boys stared out at me from behind a screen which had suddenly granted them gender. no matter how much i thought that i had thought and theorized my way out of gender, when my boys were called into shape by the sight and language of the ultrasound technician, they existed, from that moment on, both separate and apart from me. boys in my body. my body in boys. the fragmentation was no more complete or incomplete than it had been before i was allowed the sight of my two male fetuses; it was only more real. [image: demi.gif] [15] in the infamous pregnant nude and glamour photographs of demi moore in _vanity fair_, a highly erotic, decorated pregnant body stares at the viewer.^12^ moore is neither apologetic nor shy, reluctant or removed from her sensuality; indeed the photographs are informed by the genre of glamour movie star photos. the pictures of moore provoked enough controversy for the magazine to wrap that particular issue before it went out to stores and newsstands. [16] the attempts, on the part of the magazine, to keep the pregnant body (especially the naked pregnant body) out of view is part of a cultural history in which the pregnant female body is a sight of both idolization and embarrassment. the pregnant body is perhaps the most visible marker of heterosexual sexuality--the x was here grade school desk graffiti transferred to the body of women. at the same time that the pregnant body can exist so as to re-establish, or disrupt the ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family, it is also meant to exist in a de-sexualized zone, as though all women were the virgin mary of christianity. on the one hand, pregnant bodies are patted and stroked by random strangers on buses, on streets, in classrooms, yet on the other hand, their sexuality is a contained one--sexuality with a reason. for the pregnant woman to stand as a sexualized body even while she's pregnant (presumably, the reason to be sexual/have sex is already inside her, so why would she want more?) is to transgress the boundary not only of sexuality and desire, but also of inside and outside. sexuality occurs even as the fetus is in the body; the sexuality continues, around, on top of, next to the fetus. the pregnant woman who is represented as erotic is crossing the boundaries, even as they exist inside her. [17] there is a looking at that photographs of demi moore engender. she is pregnant woman as spectacle without being specimen. she is a pregnant body that exists firmly outside of medical representation; her luxurious green gown, her diamonds, her sophisticated, cutting edge haircut all push her further away from the image of pregnant woman as medical subject who needs to be helped, medicated or somehow pathologized. indeed, these are the very features of pregnant representation which allow it in the first place. moore's huge diamond wedding ring glares off her finger and the fashion that her pregnant body exudes and performs is that of completely "right" pregnancy: her body is not excessive beyond its pregnant status, and her status within society is firmly entrenched in and reiterated by the poses she strikes. moore, then, can resist pathologization because she has already been granted that power by her acquiescences to other normalized expectations: heterosexuality, marriage, wealth, status and beauty. still, within the rather tight frame of acquiescences which the particularity of moore's body reasserts, there is a space being made for an alternate representation of the pregnant body. the photographs of moore work against pathologization by instead constructing moore in the discourse of eroticization which works directly against the aims of medical constructions of pregnancy which seek to de-eroticize the pregnant woman's body by various means, from dictates that women not eat too much when they're pregnant so they don't "gain too much weight" (wouldn't want to mix excesses) to lack of adequate information about various sexual practices/positions as pregnancy progresses. pregnant women are supposed to "glow" with the flush and excitement of impending motherhood and the subsumation of self into other; clearly, against this ideology, the glow of orgasm, of sexuality in progress, poses enormous resistance which leads, as in the case of vanity fair, to a reduction of sight--ironically, a move that only transferred the locus of sight from public to private. [18] sighting, then, always depends upon who is being looked at. in the case of ultrasound technology, the thing being sighted is the fetus--the raison d'etre for the entire field of obstetrics, and, it is presumed, for the woman lying on the table. in a photograph of demi moore, pregnant, it is not her baby we see; we don't have access to the inside; all we see is the swollen belly poking out--the maternal body that is entirely absent from the ultrasound picture. the ultrasound picture, as petchesky has pointed out, becomes part of the family record, part of the evidential world of the family photo album; it exists as an "origin" for the fetus floating in its bit of outer space.^13^ as rosalind kraus observes: "the photographic record . . . is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion, and in that sense the camera is a projective tool, part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole."^14^ in my own photo albums, the ultrasound photos start my sons' pictorial record; photographs of me pregnant exist in another album entirely, one that ostensibly traces "me." [19] within the representational space that ultrasound constructs, women are, for a moment, suspended from their bodies--caught in the impossible "elsewhere" between self and other, organism and machine. the machine itself becomes the very instrument of recognition, through the ability of the woman to "site" her own body, and, like the hysteric, enact it. the woman's body becomes the very means to link public and private, inside and outside via its performative fragmentation. for it is the machine itself--standing in the room, hooked to the belly of the woman by its long thick tangled cords--that represents, finally, the impossible fusion of those boundaries even as it tries to enact them. thus, she is left fragmented by the very blurring of boundaries which ultrasound enables. the female body traversed by ultrasound, rummaged through via cesarean sections, is one through which the location of boundaries has been effected. it is, then, a sited body--one that can no longer exist merely as the "natural" pregnant body which so inexplicably holds and contains contradictions. the ultrasound screen shows us that containment is no longer possible--that private and public, inside and outside have all merged at the site of the fragmented pregnant body. there are no longer any clear lines of corporeal representation which we can depend upon; nothing makes this more clear than the process of ultrasound in which the pregnant body is left suspended somewhere between memory and its performance, presence and lack, transgression and suture. [20] i lay on the cool slab of padded stretcher watching as she moves the instrument across me. she tilts the screen towards me, but not enough so that i can really see. what can i see anyway? is there anyway to see in those blurs of shadows and light bouncing across the screen without her there? she becomes the eyes that this technology takes from me. yet i am the one who is asked to fashion the gaze that she produces--to turn and twist and interpret until i have called the fetus in from its shadows, from its blurry frozen lines and taken it, like the picture book snapshot i hold in my hand, and made it real. yet i have no sight here. i am blind as my seeing sees nothing but light moving and pulsing. skull/baby, skullbaby, skull...baby. she moves the instrument and as she pushes buttons on the screen the fetus turns from baby to skull, from human to skeletal monster--all sunken sockets and splintered silence. each time the face of the baby retreats, i long for its return as i so much want to participate in this drama of creation. here, in the ultrasound room, is where the "life" is created. here is where i know there is no turning back. here is where the howling ghostly possibility becomes real. here is where the sewing begins, and the aural images of feet, head, heart, spine, bone are all taken and pieced together and handed back to me like the fuzzy snapshots i clutch so carefully. here is where the notion of wholeness becomes reified through a collection of the pieces of the phantom fetal body. no longer just part of the mother, a dreamlike possibility hovering somewhere in still fluids. the very wholeness of the maternal/fetal body is made possible, if not complete, by this ultrasonically induced act of interpellation. pieces identified. fragments made whole until a body has been made within a body which is then expected to be nothing more or less than self-sacrificing vessel for the remaining months of occupation. mother and child are called forth there in the darkened screen blazing room, made whole by the relief of separation healed, fragmentation sited, sighted and repaired. [image: carr.ultra2.gif] [21] skull. baby. skull. baby. where are we left then? i carry both fetus and baby inside me. i carry a political fetus, insofar as i challenge anyone refusing or restricting me based upon my increasingly public body. people stare at my abdomen before they meet my eyes. they have expectations, demands, desires for that abdomen as it juts out beyond the usual circumference of private space. oh, you're not due until then? hmm...maybe it's twins. you're not drinking are you? smoking? eating junk food? lifting, straining, pulling, sniffing, breathing or otherwise exposing the baby.... so my public baby is a fetus, one that must remain my body, one that must enlarge the circumference of the spaces of the private rather than those of the public. but my private fetus is a baby. late at night when it starts its musical tumbling through the air of me, it is a baby in me. late in pregnancy when i am tilted large, my breath overtaking me with each small step, my bladder lost in the organ crush inside me, my ligaments stretching in all directions each time i move, it is only the baby in me, not the fetus, that keeps me distanced from my body in a necessary recognition of a temporary state. not me. later still, pushing and screaming with sweat, pains erasing all consciousness of time, space and motion, it is only the thought of a baby--slippery and soft, fingers curled in tiny sharp-nailed fists--that even begins to justify this pain. my public fetus remains a secret to my private baby just as my private baby remains a secret to my public identification as a pro-choice feminist. fragments. splintery pieces which will never meet. there is no outside. only complicated and complicitous circulations--motions, movements. [22] a postmodern positics (politics and positionality) of pregnancy recognizes and retains that complicated, twisted and contradictory experiences of pregnant subjectivity without expecting pregnant women to fall into either of the waiting binaries of sad silence or eerie effusiveness. narrative air tunnels, blowing and pulling wait on either side of the pregnant woman as she must filter her experience into one wholesale ideological adoption or another. rather than watch, if not assist, in the propulsion of women into one side or another, in the easy sewing up of experience into neat and tidy bundles, we need to return to the fragmented subject and not expect that, when it comes to things like pregnancy, a de-centered, atomized subjectivity will suddenly be rendered whole. this expectation is itself a retreat to a body-based subjectivity rather than an embodied one, as it takes the fact of bodily transformation (pregnancy) and reads it as constitutive of the resulting re-sutured subjectivity. pregnancy becomes the thing which must provoke action to one side or another rather than a site of conflictedness itself. the pregnant subject is called to beat a hasty retreat from the field of fluid, partial and provisional identity and race to a position from which her body will not define her, yet the very necessity of the race is engendered by the change of her somatic status. [23] we are left then, with images--images floating, bending, bursting--that themselves constitute pregnant bodies, pregnant subjectivities. fragmented, dispersed, disjunct--they reach in all directions simultaneously, and threaten to rip apart ideologies like jagged lines of lightning severing the sky. notes: ^1^ maurice merleau-ponty, _the visible and the invisible_ (evanston: northwestern up, 1968), 139. ^2^ rosalind pollack petchesky, "foetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction," _reproductive technologies: gender, motherhood and medicine_, michele stanworth, ed. (minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1987), 69. ^3^ petchesky, 64. ^4^ petchesky, 64. ^5^ valerie hartouni, "containing women: reproductive discourse in the 1980s," _technoculture_, constance penley and andrew ross, eds. (minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1991), 38. ^6^ julia kristeva, "motherhood according to bellini," _desire in language: a semiotic approach to art and literature_, leon roudiez, ed. (new york, columbia up, 1980). while kristeva's essay is an intersting look at the fragmentation that occurs in and out of the maternal body, it ultimately reinforces the romanticized view of the semiotic, in which the privileged route of access is through a pregnant body, thus reinforcing naturalistic and restrictive ideas about women and pregnancy. ^7^ roland barthes, _camera lucida_, trans. richard howard (new york: hill and wang, 1981), 79. ^8^ hartouni, 37. ^9^ lori stanley roeleveld, "my turn" (weekly column), _providence journal_, sun., june 27 1993: e-3. ^10^ petchesky, 72. ^11^ donna haraway, "a manifesto for cyborgs," _feminism/postmodernism_, linda nicholson and nancy fraser, eds. (new york: routledge, 1990), 196. ^12^ _vanity fair_, august 1991: cover, 96-101, 142-150; august 1992: cover, 112-119, 188-192. ^13^ petchesky, 70. ^14^ rosalind kraus, "a note on photography and the simulacral" _the critical image_ carol squiers, ed. (seattle: bay press, 1990), 19. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------pyle, 'superhero meets the culture critic', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-pyle-superhero.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.994. part 1/1, total size 14672 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the superhero meets the culture critic by christian l. pyle department of english university of kentucky uk00028@ukpr.uky.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by christian l. pyle, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] although the "superhero" has been a staple of american mass media since the emergence of superman in 1938, a definitive study of the genre has not appeared. therefore, i greeted the american edition of reynolds's book (first published in london by b. t. batsford in 1992) with enthusiasm. its potential seemed substantial, as suggested by the back cover copy: the popular figure known as the superhero has exerted such a strong and mushrooming influence upon society, morality, and politics that a mythology now pervades our culture. . . . here is a study of this superhuman creation, revealed as a proliferating symbol whose dimensions over sixty years of comic book history have been rendered to satisfy the demands and expectations of the popular audience. this fascinating book shows how the superhero has become a vivid figure in the mainstream of modern culture. this is a description of the book that popular culture scholars and postmodernists have needed: a wide-ranging yet detailed study of the proliferation of the superhero myth. regrettably, reynolds's _super heroes_, while it has several merits, is not that book. [2] reynolds begins with "a first-stage working definition of the superhero genre" expressed in seven criteria: 1. the hero is marked out from society. he often reaches maturity without having a relationship with his parents. 2. at least some of the superheroes will be like earthbound gods in their level of powers. other superheroes of lesser powers will consort easily with these earthbound dieties. 3. the hero's devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law. 4. the extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his surroundings. 5. likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature of his alter-ego. certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos. [by taboos, reynolds will explain further on, he refers to myths in which the hero gains strength through abstinence.] 6. although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws. 7. the stories are mythical and use science and magic indiscriminately to create a sense of wonder. (16) rules 1 and 3 are accepted facets of the american hero, as true of natty bumppo and huck finn as they are of superman and batman. rules 4 and 5 are also familiar and straight forward (although rule 4 could use a footnote regarding heroes who alternate between mundane surroundings and fantastic realms, such as outer space, asgard, or astral planes). rule 2, however, is flawed in a way that points to a major weakness of reynolds's book: its forshortened historical perspective. [3] parallel to the "earthbound god" tradition of costumed heroes stemming from superman is the "masked man" tradition of heroes with no real "superpowers." the best-known comic book example is batman, but he was preceded by other comic book heroes (the crimson avenger), pulp fiction heroes (the spider, the black bat), and radio heroes (the lone ranger, the green hornet). batman, the subject of three sections within _super heroes_, is obviously in reynolds's mind when he refers to "superheroes of lesser powers." one could argue that batman's above-average intelligence, athletic ability, weaponry, or fear-instilling costume are "powers," but reynolds does not go into that. instead he defines the super-ness of such heroes in terms of their interaction with the superman crowd. this idea, as well as reynolds's lengthy discussion of continuity later in the book, depends upon the existence of a "universe" in which all the characters owned by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world. however, the idea of a fictional universe is more recent than reynolds seems to realize. he links it to superhero teams (37-38), but, prior to the emergence of marvel in the 1960s, the adventures of superteams were isolated from the solo adventures of the teams' heroes. (i don't mean to be overly pedantic, but one could ask if the green lantern appearing in _all-american comics_ is the same character as the justice society member appearing in _all-star comics_, just as we ask if the quentin of _the sound and the fury_ is the same character as the quentin of _absalom, absalom!_). the formation of a universe in which casual allusions are made between titles really only began with marvel and was integrated into dc only recently. [4] the failure to consider how the genre has changed over time is the central flaw of reynolds's study. a perusal of the dates of texts he selects for close readings (1938, 1940, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1986-87, 1987) shows that his real interest/background is in the comics of the 1980s. however, reynolds does not qualify his generalizations as to which parts of comics history they apply. also, he makes no attempt at delineating critical periods of the genre except for references to the "golden age"/ "silver age" distinction used by fans, a distinction which is useful for separating, say, the "golden age flash" from the "silver age flash," but which lacks a scholarly foundation. [5] reynolds's best points tease us because, though fascinating, they remain always underdeveloped. for example, in his chapter on costumes, reynolds discusses how costumes function differently depending on the hero's gender: the costumed heroine may be frankly the object of sexual attraction, and therefore (for many male readers) will constitute the object of their gaze, as well as the subject or protagonist through which they engage with the action of the text. so, whilst for the superhero the transformation into costume can best be achieved with something as instantaneous as billy batson's "shazam," which calls forth the invincible captain marvel, for the superheroine the process can (at least potentially) be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease. and thus the (male) reader is called upon to 'read' both heroines and villainesses as objects of desire- 'good girls' and 'bad girls' maybe, but objects of the same rhetorical logic. (37) before we can accept this point as valid, we need a detailed comparison of typical transformation scenes of heroes and heroines. the issue is further complicated by the use of an atypical strip tease (from _the sensational she-hulk_) as an illustration for the section. if the gender discussion were expanded, reynolds would also have to deal with the homoeroticism question, especially since superwomen in skintight outfits are considerably less popular with the primarily male readership than supermen in skintight outfits. anyone familiar with the critical literature will know that the question has been a major issue since frederic wertham asked it in _seduction of the innocent_ in 1954. by asserting that the gaze is exclusively heterosexual, reynolds evades the homoeroticism issue altogether. [6] another major issue of the wertham era was the implied fascism of the superhero, who (coincidence?) was born just as the nazi "supermen" were marching across europe. in his sixth criterion for the genre, reynolds refers to the potential "patriotism" of the hero. here he may be thinking of all the early 1940s covers with heroes toting flags, fighting alongside troops, or selling war bonds. while he doesn't really deal with the fascism question, he discusses the conservativism of the genre: a key ideological myth of the superhero comic is that the normal and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through heroic action --and defended over and over again almost without respite against an endless battery of menaces determined to remake the world for the benefit of aliens, mutants, criminals, or sub-aqua beings from atlantis. the normal is valuable and is constantly under attack, which means that almost by definition the superhero is battling on behalf of the status quo. into this heroic matrix one can insert representatives of any race or creed imaginable, but in order to be functioning superheroes they will need to conform to the ideological rules of the game. the superhero has a mission to preserve society, not to re-invent it. (77) having made this relatively straightforward point, reynolds then teases us once again with a more provocative argument that he never fully elaborates. in a somewhat tentative fashion, and using what seem to be nonrepresentative (and mostly quite recent) texts, he suggests that "nuances and subtleties which function as irony and satire" can undercut the superhero's tendency toward political conservatism (79). one would have liked reynolds to go further here, but he chooses rather to evade what perhaps seems to him too complex and highly-charged a topic. [7] a third evasion in _super heroes_ is that of the role of corporate mass production and commodity culture in the genre. superheroes are not just fictional characters, they are registered trademarks. reynolds considers how continuity constrains the creativity of writers and artists in the superhero industry, but he does not deal with the role of the editor whose concerns include sustaining sales and maintaining a corporate image. [8] a final flaw of reynolds's book is that it does not reference or discuss previous works which make similar points. reynolds's discussion of continuity, for example, would be enriched by a consideration of umberto eco's well-known 1972 essay "the myth of superman." reynolds argues that "intertextual and metatextual continuity create a subsidiary world in which the process of time can be kept under control. while this process does not exactly abolish history from superhero comics, it does divorce the superheroes [sic] lives from their historical context" (44). but eco had already announced this divorce twenty years ago. he explained that if superman stories were true narratives, placing their events in real time, superman would be, like the rest of us, "consumed" by events until he would eventually grow old and die, a fate which cannot befall a mythic figure (333-334). to avoid this, observed eco, superman stories "develop in a kind of oneiric climate--of which the reader is not aware at all--where what has happened before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy" (336). this is by no means the only instance where reynolds fails to make the obvious reference. another example is his discussion of the superhero costume as a fetish, which runs along lines very similar to those of gillian freeman's argument in her study of pornography (the last chapter of which is devoted to superhero comics). [9] the strength of reynolds's study is its emphasis on close readings of specific texts--often, indeed, of specific pages and panels. most of the previous studies of superheroes have prefered to analyze the basic premise of a series rather than a specific story. reynolds's "key texts" chapter is especially strong in this regard. its detailed readings of _the uncanny x-men_, _batman: the dark knight returns_, and _watchmen_ draw attention to the distinctive skills of particular writers and artists. in reference to reprinted _x-men_ pages, for example, reynolds describes how penciller john byrne "employed a style of sequential art that was 'cinematic' in the sense that it constantly interpreted each panel and each segment of the narrative from an implied and subjective point of view" (86). the detail of reynolds's analyses makes up in depth for what they lack in breadth. [10] in the last few years, the university press of mississippi's studies in popular culture series, under the general editorship of m. thomas inge, has placed several worthy volumes on the bookshelves of comics scholars, including joseph witek's _comic books and history_, inge's own _comics and culture_, and a reprint of coulton waugh's _the comics_. reynolds's contribution does not measure up to the tradition those predecessors established, but it does offer a promising starting point for the scholar who wants to write a more thorough and definitive study. works cited: eco, umberto. "the myth of superman." _diacritics_ 2 (1972): 14-22. rpt. in _contemporary literary criticism: modernism through poststructuralism_. ed. robert con davis. new york: longman, 1986. 330-344. freeman, gillian. _the undergrowth of literature_. the natural history of society series. london: nelson, 1967. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mcneilly, 'ugly beauty: john zorn and the politics of postmodern music', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-mcneilly-ugly.txt archive pmc-list, file mcneilly.195. part 1/1, total size 41266 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- ugly beauty: john zorn and the politics of postmodern music by kevin mcneilly department of english university of british columbia mcneilly@unixg.ubc.ca postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by kevin mcneilly, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] i wish to look at a particular postmodern achievement, the music of composer john zorn, in order to assess both the nature of a political praxis and to "define" the postmodern pragmatically, in the practice of art rather than only in theory. zorn's music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener in a manner that a great deal of conventional and commercially-produced music, when it casts itself as soother or anaesthetic, does not. but zorn achieves this affectivity, ironically, by exploiting and exploding both convention and commercial form. [2] form itself, in so far as it is tied both to social production and aesthetic convention, provides a correlative for the dialectic of the social and aesthetic spheres, and thus offers an inroad into the problem of a postmodern praxis. music, jacques attali asserts, manifests by its very nature as an "instrument of understanding," a "new theoretical form" (_noise_ 4). music, that is, as attali understands it, can provide a viable, fully realized conjunction of the theoretical and the practical, a form of theorizing which coincides with a formal practice.^1^ to grasp the practice of music, then, within a postmodern context, is in some sense to arrive at a theoretical position %vis-a-vis% the postmodern, especially--as the aesthetic delimitation of music as a sphere of cultural activity is broadened to encompass the theoretical--toward a decidedly political praxis (cf. arac ix-x, xxx-xxxi). but where, for attali, that broadening takes on a decidedly utopian character, the "newness" and "originality" of zorn's music, if we may speak in such terms, lie exactly in its self-conscious refusal to accept either the original or the new as valid categories of artistic expression, in either the compositional or the performative sphere. the politics of zorn's music, its affective thrust, emerges from within the formal manifestations of a parodic, technocratically-saturated postmodern musicality, and also delineates a significant political current running through postmodernism in general. in its parodies of genre and received form, as well as its antagonistic postures, zorn's music assumes a political force. [3] the most immediately audible characteristic of john zorn's music is its noisiness. abrasive, loud, fast, unpleasant, disjunctive, zorn's musical textures are never sweet or satisfied in the conventional sense; one has only to hear the primal screams of yamatsuka eye [sound file: naked.au] on the first two recordings by zorn's naked city band, the punk-jazz thrash of his ornette coleman tribute, _spy vs. spy_, or his slippery, choppy, clanging arrangements of works by kurt weill or ennio morricone [sound file: gbu.au (arrangement of morricone's "the good the bad and the ugly")], to realize that neither a bathetic classical prettiness nor a pretentious romantic resolution has any place in his work, except as an antagonism. nor does his work admit the conventions of modern and contemporary chamber music unproblematically. a work for string quartet, _forbidden fruit_ [sound file: fruit.au], incorporates "turntables" played by christian marclay, in which random, distorted snatches of pre-recorded music cut across the already fragmented textures of the strings themselves. a work for chamber ensemble such as _cobra_ not only uses conventional orchestral instrumentation including harp, brass, woodwinds and percussion, but also incorporates electric guitar and bass, turntables, cheesy organ, and sampled sounds ranging from horse whinnies and duck calls to train whistles, telephone bells and industrial clanging. zorn, while affirming his own position as a "classically-trained" composer, fuses the materials of the "classical" world with pop music, hardcore punk, heavy metal, jazz (free and traditional), television soundtracks, and sound effects (%v%. woodward 35-6). his work is consistently eclectic, hybridized, and polysemous. [4] his music, in fact, comes to consist in noise itself, or rather, in the tensions between noises. as a self-declared product of the "info age," zorn taps into the diverse currents of sound and background emerging from the mass media--particularly television, radio and commercial recordings--that permeate contemporary life; all forms of sound, from white noise to beethoven, from duck calls to bebop, become raw materials for the composer; musical sound, that is, need no longer be tempered or tonal in any preconceived manner (though tempered music, as well, may be used within composition as raw material on the same level as any other noise). only the noise available to the social listener determines the limitations, if any, on composition. music, then, as jacques attali posits, becomes simply "the organization of noise," constituting "the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society" (_noise_ 4). zorn, in like fashion, cites boulez's definition of composition as simply the "organization of sound" (woodward 34). [5] but noise, for zorn, is not simply haphazard or natural sound, the audible "background" that encroaches on a work such as cage's _4'33"_, as the audience is forced by the tacit piano to listen to its own shufflings, or to the urban soundscapes that emerge through an open window. such music, which attali approves as the harbinger of a new age of composition and of listener-involvement in autonomous musical production, freed from the aesthetic and social restraints of the recording industry, zorn calls the "dead, lifeless music" of "boring old farts," of whom, for him, cage is a leading example (woodward 35). rather, zorn includes in his own palette pre-recorded music, quotations and generic parodies--all of which attali, following adorno, suggests are correlative to social control, to the consumption of mass replications and the "death of the original" (_noise_ 87, 89). noise, for zorn, is always impure, tainted, derivative and, in the romantic sense of the term, unoriginal. [6] attali sees the appearance of the phonograph record as a cementing of the relation between "music and money," and of the deritualization of music and the limitations of the aesthetic powers of the composer-musician by his or her own technologies and tools: an acoustician, a cybernetician, [the musician] is transcended by his tools. this constitutes a radical inversion of the innovator and the machine: instruments no longer serve to produce the desired sound forms, conceived in thought before written down, but to monitor unexpected forms. . . . [t]he modern composer . . . is now rarely anything more than a spectator of the music created by his computer. he is subjected to its failings, the supervisor of an uncontrolled development. music escapes from musicians. (115) attali's utopian vision, of what he calls a new age of "composition," involves a return to the original, liberated, primitive noise of the thinking, active individual, to a form of personal musical pleasure where the listener, in listening, becomes a composer, rewriting music as his or her own noise: noise, as music, is, attali argues, to be "lived," no longer stockpiled (133-5). zorn removes himself, decidedly, from any such idealistic primitivism. parody, simulation and replication, developed in increasingly volatile and fragmented forms, noisily inform--and deform--the lived experience of music. rather than attempt to dispense with the musical commodity, to withdraw from a culture of simulation and replication, zorn revels in that commodification itself, happily abdicating compositional control both to the technologies of repetition and to the improvisational wills of those who play "his" music. the "score" of _cobra_, for instance, consists not of notated music %per se% but rather of a set of rules which players, as they interact during the performance, must follow. zorn, just as attali suggests of all composers in an age of repetition, is not interested in maintaining absolute creative control over the tonal, harmonic and rhythmic substance of his music; that control, instead, remains in the hands of his players. his music is not aleatory, in the sense that works by boulez or lutoslawski or cage involve sets of "chance operations" that remain within the ego-dominated sweep of the composer's will; zorn, rather, abdicates the position of composer in all but name, preferring to become himself a performer or a player among other players, a participant in a collective noise-making which, despite their differences, resembles in practice attali's vision of compositional noise-making: listening, composing and living simultaneously in what adorno would call a "non-identical identity," a collective which does not obliterate the individual elements it collects. [7] noise, in the widest possible sense, is thus central to zorn's aesthetic, especially if we approach that aesthetic with political interest. in a 1988 interview, edward strickland asks zorn if the duck-calls in his early free improvisations--represented by _yankees_ [sound file: yankees.au], his 1983 collective recording with derek bailey and george lewis--are an attempt to get back to nature, a direction of which attali would certainly approve. zorn says no: i just wanted some kind of raucous, ugly sound . . . . i don't think they're ugly. i find them beautiful. it's like thelonious monk's title "ugly beauty." people used to think his playing was ugly, now it's recognized as classic. (strickland 138) the abrasive raucousness, zorn implies, of his duck calls and other paraphernalia, used on yankees and in his early improvised trios (recorded on _locus solus_), is an attempt to alter how people hear, just as monk's playing changed the way listeners perceived how a melody functioned within an apparently discordant harmonic context. noise, as sound out of its familiar context, is confrontational, affective and transformative. it has shock value, and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music an easy fluency, a secure familiarity, or any sort of mollification. noise, that is, politicizes the aural environment; zorn's music is difficult in the sense that adorno finds schoenberg's music difficult--not because it is pretentious or obscure, but because it demands active participation from the listener (as well as from the players, who are themselves listeners). as organized sound, this music demands from the very beginning active and concentrated participation, the most acute attention to simultaneous multiplicity, the renunciation of the customary crutches of a listening which always knows what to expect, the intensive perception of the unique and the specific, and the ability to grasp precisely the individual characteristics, often changing in the smallest space. . . . the more it gives to listeners, the less it offers them. it requires the listener spontaneously to compose its inner movement and demands of him [%sic%] not mere contemplation but praxis. (_prisms_ 149-50) the political dimension of zorn's music, that is, involves the creation of a new form of attention, of listening.^2^ noise, for zorn, shocks the listener into awareness, provokes just such a creative praxis. [8] but whereas adorno's schoenberg and attali's cage both defy the repetition inherent in commodification and in forms of social control, zorn embraces that repetition, as he moves from noise %per se% to what he calls his "block" method of composition: i think it's an important thing for a musician to have an overview, something that remains consistent throughout your whole life. you have one basic idea, one basic way of looking at the world, one basic way of putting music together. i developed mine very early on--the idea of working with blocks. at first maybe the blocks were more like just blocks of sound . . . noisy improvisational statements, but eventually it came back to using genre as musical notes and moving these blocks of genre around. . . . ("zorn on zorn" 23) zorn's noise, that is, manifests itself in two distinct, though contiguous, forms: the improvisational and the imitative, the creative and the derivative, the chaotic and the parodic. and it is the second of these aspects of noise, particularly as it emerges in chunks of genre-music, that comes increasingly to interest zorn as his career progresses. [9] genre has been taken, as marjorie perloff and others have pointed out, as anathema to postmodern aesthetic practice, particularly in its post-structuralist manifestations (_postmodern_ 3). the dissolution of generic barriers has, after all, been a paramount concern of many contemporary writers, painters and musicians. but, as perloff rightly indicates, that dissolution in fact makes the concept of genericity even "more important," since genre itself is situated at the point of departure for any such negative practice (4). postmodern genre, she asserts, finally attempting to define that which refuses definition, is characterized by its appropriation of other genres, both high and popular, by its longing for a both/and situation rather than one of either/or. (8) her key example of such appropriation is john cage, not the cage of _4'33"_ but the cage of _roaratorio_ [sound file: roar.au], his award-winning "play" for radio. [10] cage's "composition" is really a sixteen-track sound collage, based on a version of james joyce's _finnegans wake_ processed into cagean mesostics through a series of chance operations. in an effort to free himself, as he asserts in an interview published with the text of the piece, from melody, harmony, counterpoint and musical "theory" of any kind, to create a music which will turn "away from [codified, institutionalized] music itself," cage mixes together ambient sound, irish traditional music, sound effects ranging from bells and thunderclaps to laughter and farting, and spoken words (_roaratorio_ 89). the finished product is a shifting, restless, decentred panorama of sound and human activity. but zorn--for whom, as i have already indicated, cage serves as an antitype, despite their many similarities of method and concern--does not wish to dispense with the trappings of "music itself" so much as to run music itself through his deconstructive compositional mill. noise, that is, neither cuts across nor undoes genre, as cage suggests it should in _silence_ (%v%. perloff 216). rather, genre becomes noise itself, another form of sound to be appropriated, used and abused. [11] zorn's _spillane_ [sound file: spillane1.au], like cage's _roaratorio_, is a collage of sorts, based on text; the contrast between the two indicates not only the composers' divergent aesthetics, but also their contrary political stances. where cage, for instance, appropriates and transforms a rather exclusive, "difficult" text of high modernism by james joyce, zorn uses a cut-and-paste parody of pulp detective fiction as the basis for his work. cage's work begins softly, with his own almost chant-like voice at a low, subtle level; zorn's piece begins with an earth-shattering scream. where cage's collocated noises (musical and "found") meld together into a shifting, hypnotic soundscape, zorn's blocks of genre both jar against each other and threaten to come apart from within, as each musician plays his or her set of "licks" and parodies, both in combination with and in opposition to the others. cage's piece is synchronous, deep, and--considering even the medley of constantly shifting sound--largely static; zorn's work, by contrast, is linear, immediate and highly dynamic. zorn's music is somewhat tied mimetically to its "subject," as we travel disjunctively through the soundscape of mike hammer's mind [sound file: spillane2.au]; cage refuses mimetic links altogether--as perloff points out--preferring not simply to add appropriate sound effects to joyce's prose, but to provoke a sense of harmony in difference, through the production of "simultaneous layers of sound and meaning" (216). again, where cage wishes to dispense with accustomed musical sound altogether, in favour of synthetic new "field" of musical activity, zorn is perfectly willing to maintain the trappings of soundtrack and sound effect, but he arranges those parodic reiterations of genre in a disjunctive, disturbing, confrontational manner. cage's is a politics of exclusion and abandonment, his music demanding a wilful participation which the comfortable, impatient, media-saturated listener is often unwilling to give. zorn, on the other hand, offers the semblance of that comfort, simulates the attributes of popular culture, in order to confront and to engage that same listener, whose thirty-second attention span, so programmed by television advertising, can be accessed directly by thirty-second blocks of sound. cage stands aloof from his audience, at a somewhat elitist distance, while zorn unashamedly baits a hook with snatches of the familiar and the vulgar. in "mass society and postmodern fiction" (1959), irving howe complains that, as jonathan arac summarizes, "the post-modern was a weak successor to the vigorous glory of literary modernism, brought about because mass society had eroded the artist's vital distance" (xii). cage's preference for joyce, and zorn's for mickey spillane, suggestively reproduce just such a rift between high modern and postmodern artistic practices. [12] the notion of the musical "block" is taken up by gilles deleuze and felix guattari in _a thousand plateaus_, when they attempt to distinguish what they call "punctual" and "linear" or "multilinear" systems. the punctual, for deleuze and guattari, as cognitive structuration, is organized by coordinates, determined points; such systems, they write, "are arborescent, mnemonic, molar, structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization," of determination and discrimination, of an absolute didacticism. one of their key examples of the punctual is the time-line, which, despite its apparent kinesis, represents closed historical scheme. linear or multilinear systems, by contrast, are dismantling systems, and oppose themselves to the punctual: free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this intention. one elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. a punctual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer, philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a springboard to jump from. history is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or only reshape it). (295) their example of such a history-maker is pierre boulez, whom they see as a kind of radical historian--they may have in mind his forays as a conductor into the history of western music, although their sense of nonpulsed and serial music here tends to point to boulez's own compositions as acts of history: when boulez casts himself in the role of the historian of music, he does so in order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case, invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon. and in each case it is a different diagonal, a different technique, a creation. moving along this transversal line, which is really a line of deterritorialization, there is a *sound block* that no longer has a point of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to another [as in "punctual" systems], since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized rhythmic block that has abandoned points, coordinates and measure, like a drunken boat that melds with a line or draws a plane of consistency. speeds and slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction, sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. (296) what deleuze and guattari describe here sounds more like free improvisation than boulez's meticulous compositions, but they nevertheless point to a disjunctive form of composition in %non sequitur% blocks which displays a surprising kinship to zorn's method. (zorn himself practices the kind of proliferative free improvisation toward which deleuze and guattari gesture.) the act of freeing line or block, however, does not occur in the absolute dispersal of pulse, tonal centre or convention that deleuze and guattari find in boulez's serial compositions, not in zorn. in fact, given that the writers want to maintain a "punctual" presence against which they can discover themselves musically free, or within which they can negotiate one of their deterritorializations, such absolute claims--with their a-historicizing move to liberation--are suspiciously reified. rather than play out a complete liberation, that is, zorn's music negotiates the doubling of punctual and multilinear which deleuze and guattari initially suggest, reasserting--contingently, temporarily--familiar generic boundaries as it simultaneously seeks to extricate itself from closed system or form. zorn's music, in other words, follows that diagonal trajectory between the reified and the liberated, continually dismantling and reassembling- deterritorializing and reterritorializing, in deleuze and guattari's terms--our terms of aural reference, inserting itself into the stream of a musical history only to dismantle immediately that comfortable historical sense. whereas boulez, in other words, removes himself from the ironic doublings of that diagonal--in a manner which seems to appeal to deleuze and guattari's need for a complete liberation of sound and mind--zorn, through his amalgam of popular idiom, genre and noise, revels in that irony. [13] zorn's method, as he has stated, is "filmic." many of the composers he admires--ennio morricone, carl stalling and bernard herrmann especially--work exclusively on soundtracks for popular movies and cartoons. the blocks of sound emerge in the context of developing shifting moods for soundtracks; zorn's recent _filmworks 1986-1990_, for instance, assembles from three different films a series of blocks of diverse, genre-based compositions. but zorn's composition, as we have seen with _spillane_ and others, also involve genre-shifts within themselves. the use and abuse of quick blocks of genre to shock the accustomed listener dominates, for instance, zorn's arrangement of "hard plains drifter" [sound file: hard.au], a composition, or rather series of compositions, by avant-garde guitarist bill frisell. the piece, played by frisell's instrumentally-mixed quartet (cello, electric guitar, electric bass, percussion), shifts abruptly over thirty-six blocks among twelve different keys (suggesting, peculiarly, a block-oriented serialism), numerous tempi and instrumental combinations (trios, duos, solos), "from r&b, to country & western, reggae, hardcore, free-form squalls, and morricone western psychedelia" (diliberto 18). at no point does zorn's arrangement attempt to abandon its generic or conventional musical ties: those ties, rather, are exploited and segmented, to the point where, while retaining their ironic, parodic thrust and remaining recognizable to the t.v.-and-radio-saturated ear, they throw the accustomed listener off balance; the listeners who know their pop-culture, that is, have their expectations jolted, scattered, smashed and re-arranged. zorn's work is never quite unrecognizable, "boring," or estranging to such a listener, as cage's--for instance--may tend to be. rather, the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres remain intact. zorn himself exploits the expectations of a repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so to speak, on their ears. zorn's organization of noise consists not in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre. [14] the use of genre within the context of a mass consumer audience thus gives zorn's music a socio-political character which the music of cage can only attain, as attali has indicated, negatively, by forcing the listener away from music %per se% (as an organ of institutional power) and toward the individual, to a new order of music. zorn, by contrast, uses the "old" order, the status quo of popular culture, to shock his listeners into an awareness of their mired condition. cage's music, from attali's perspective, lays claim to a utopian thrust which zorn's work, unremittingly ironic as it is, will not accept. composition, then, as the arrangement of sounds (generic, noisy or otherwise), does not necessarily offer us an authentic, contemplative access to "what is," as cage's zen-oriented pieces are somewhat pretentiously intended to do; rather, zorn disrupts all forms of contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with the world, a praxis, as adorno says. [15] despite zorn's claims to dislike notation, his music is in fact meticulously structured both in its conception and in its execution. he does not, as stockhausen has, force musicians unaccustomed to improvisation merely to think about "the vibrations of the stars" and to play what they feel. he composes, he says, for players he knows to be capable of stretching musically without much notated music; his model--surprisingly perhaps--as he repeats in various interviews, is duke ellington, whose music is "collaborative," according to zorn, as it melds the diverse, distinctive voices of ellington's orchestra into a "kind of filmic sweep" (santoro 23). zorn asserts that, when he composes for his "family" of players, he writes in such a way as not to limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure within which they can work; the tension between noises--intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive--which we have been examining in zorn's music is thus reproduced on a compositional level, as zorn seeks to balance improvisational freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself. [16] i want, in conclusion, to examine the political implications of one of the most notorious of those structures, the game. zorn's game pieces, bearing titles derived from various sports and board-games like _lacrosse_, _archery_, _pool_, and _cobra_, involve complex and often difficult sets of rules to be followed by musicians and freedom. when asked if he has an "overall view" of a game piece he was composing in 1988, zorn was typically cautious: no. not at all. the thing is not written in time, it's from section to section and in that sense it's being created spontaneously by the players in the group. . . . i have a general idea of what's possible in the piece, the way somebody who writes the rules to baseball knows there'll be so many innings and so many outs. but you don't know how long an inning is going to last and how long the guy's going to be at bat before he gets a hit. so there are a lot of variables, and it should be that way because these are improvisers and that's what they do best. (chant 25) zorn offers a set of rules, and lets the players complete the melodies, tempi, harmonies and transitions. his "composition," in this sense, becomes--to borrow a term from miles davis--controlled freedom, or structured freedom, the contradiction-in-terms indicating a both/and rather than an either/or situation in performance. [17] cage, again, provides an illustrative contrast to zorn. whereas cage's computer-generated mesostics move toward the obliteration of compositional intention almost entirely by establishing strict rules for the processing of phonemes and morphemes of language, as cage himself indicates, for instance, in his introduction to _i-vi_, zorn transfers compositional intention largely to the performer, such that he or she is permitted to function within a predetermined context of group interaction, whose only expressive constraints consist in that interaction. cage, again, moves toward obliteration of the creative will, while zorn engages that will differentially. [18] the "score" of _cobra_ [sound file: cobra.au] illustrates this push toward engagement. it consists of a series of hand signals, each of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. any one of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of the piece and to alter the type of interaction; zorn's function as conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. players may also, individually or in groups, engage in "guerrilla tactics," for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions (for a more complete description of the piece, see strickland 134-37 or the sleeve notes to the hatart release of _cobra_). the game itself is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional "classical" music and subverting that hierarchy from within the "composition" itself. no two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within the same parameters, as collective communal works. [19] zorn, by refusing the score from within the context of score-bound composition, thus creates, on stage in performance, a functional community, a group interaction in which the individual creative will cannot be subsumed by the collective whole in which it participates; confrontation and shock, while still present in the blocked genre-and-noise-based structure of the piece, give way strangely enough to a form of "utopian" promise, a promise which zorn--always incredulous--has rather steadfastly refused to admit. but, unlike attali's utopia, zorn's community of creative will does not remove itself from the arena of technological replication; rather, it moves from within the economies of consumption and repetition that characterize the mass media and the mass-market to fracture and remake creativity itself. as linda hutcheon has asserted of postmodernist parody, a category in which we may include zorn's generic replication and mass-media noise making, it is "*not* essentially depthless, trivial kitsch," a replay of empty forms to satisfy the hollow consumer strategies of the music industry, "but rather it can and does lead to a vision of interconnectedness" (_poetics_ 24). cage has indicated that he too wanted to move toward a notion of the non-constraining, communal and participatory score, the score which serves not as an absolute but as a provisional "model" for performance: that's what i'd like. it's a fascinating thing and suggests at least, if not a new field of music at least a new field of activity for people who are interested in sounds. (_roaratorio_ 91) ironically, zorn, not cage, has established just such a "new field," but from within the very forms of consumer and political regulation which have threatened--according to both attali and adorno--to obliterate the creative will altogether. the praxis zorn's music encourages is not new, in the sense that the exhausted avant-garde of modernist practice requires that we "make it new." rather, that praxis, as zorn's music demonstrates, exists as potential within all fields of human activity, even those--especially those--which the mass audience, for its own anaesthetic comfort, has consistently managed to turn against itself. zorn's music, that is, turns its own form against itself, becoming what he calls a stimulating, uncomfortable, "ugly beauty," and emerges remade, having reshaped the fundamental ways in which we listen, both to each other and to the world around us. notes: ^1^ the direct correspondence between theorizing and music assumed by attali may be illuminated by adorno's commentary on mahler. arguing against programmatic and thematic analyses of mahler's symphonies, adorno asserts that: ideas that are treated, depicted or deliberately advanced by a work of art are not its ideas but its materials--even the "poetic ideas" whose hazy designations were intended to divest the program of its coarse materiality. . . . in [mahler's] work a purely musical residue stubbornly persists that can be interpreted in terms neither of processes nor of moods. it informs the gestures of his music. . . . mahler can only be seen in perspective by moving still closer to him, by entering into the music and confronting the incommensurable presence that defies the stylistic categories of program and absolute music. . . . his symphonies assist such closeness by the compelling spirituality of their sensuous musical configurations. instead of illustrating ideas, they are destined concretely to become the idea. (_mahler_ 3-4) ^2^ discussing the filmic or "picaresque" shape of his compositions, his uses of blocks of sound and rapid-fire shifts from texture to texture, section to section, zorn suggests that his music demands a similar attentiveness: it's made of separate moments that i compose completely regardless of the next, and then i pull them, cull them together. it's put together in a style that causes questions to be asked rather than answered. it's not the kind of music you can just put on and then have a party. it demands your attention. you sit down and listen to it or you don't even put it on. (strickland 128) </pre> works cited: adorno, theodor. _prisms_. 1967. trans. s. and s. weber. cambridge: mit press, 1981. ---. _mahler: a musical physiognomy_. 1971. trans. e. jephcott. chicago: university of chicago press, 1992. arac, jonathan, ed. _postmodernism and politics_. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986. attali, jacques. _noise_. 1977. trans. b. massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1985. bailey, derek, george lewis and john zorn. _yankees_. audio recording. celluloid oao, 5006, 1983. cage, john. _roaratorio_. ed. klaus schoning. konigstein: athenaum, 1982. ---. _roaratorio_. audio recording. athenaum, 3-7610-8185-5, 1982. ---. _silence_. middletown: wesleyan up, 1961. ---. _i-vi_. cambridge: harvard up, 1990. chant, ben. "john zorn--game plan." _coda_ 221 (august 1988), 24-25. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus_. 1980. trans. b. massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. diliberto, john. "bill frisell: guitars & scatterations." _downbeat_ 56.5 (may 1989), 16-19. frisell, bill. _before we were born_. audio recording. elektra/nonesuch, 9 60843, 1989. hutcheon, linda. _a poetics of postmodernism_. new york: routledge, 1988. mcgowan, john. _postmodernism and its critics_. ithaca: cornell up, 1991. perloff, marjorie, ed. _postmodern genres_. norman: university of oklahoma press, 1988. santoro, gene. "john zorn: quick-change artist makes good." _downbeat_ 55.4 (april 1988), 23-25. strickland, edward. _american composers: dialogues on contemporary music_. bloomington: indiana up, 1991. woodward, josef. "zornography: john zorn." _option_ (july/august 1987), 32-36. zorn, john. _filmworks 1987-1990_. audio recording. elektra/nonesuch, 9 79270, 1992. ---. _spillane_. audio recording. elektra/nonesuch, 9 79172, 1987. ---. _cobra_. audio recording. hatart, 60401/2, 1990. ---. _spy vs. spy_. audio recording. elektra/musician, 9 60844, 1989. ---. _naked city_. audio recording. elektra/nonesuch, 9 79238, 1989. ---. _torture garden/naked city_. audio recording. shimmy disc, s039, 1990. "zorn on zorn." [advertisement] _downbeat_ 59.3 (march 1992), 23. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------brown, '"early spring" and "equinox"', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-brown-early.txt archive pmc-list, file brown.196. part 1/1, total size 3538 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "early spring" and "equinox" by cory brown ithaca college cbrown@ithaca.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by cory brown, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. early spring it is early evening of a spring late, very late in coming--so late, in mid-april the deep crescents and parabolas of snow in the yard, resisting even an imperceptible slide down the subtle slopes on a chilly gray evening, seem something new grass may simply latch onto to grow on and carpet right over. and the child's swing in the yard, and the clothesline too, are moving back and forth in a way which, to me, represents a motion seemingly knowing. like someone slowly rocking--toes, heels, toes, heels--someone who's been standing a long while, say, in a cold snow waiting for a bus, foothills of the ozarks or rockies in the distance, implacable and unforgiving as they block the early evening sun- and the grayness begins to bear down as she ponders the disease which has taken a mind she thought was well secured and robbed it of its house, its room of memory, his own street's name, his spouse's name- her name!--their children's faces, indiscriminately the minutest details that surfaced their lives then slowly sank to what she thought was an inviolable core. -------------------------------------------------------------- equinox it is dark outside, sixteenth of april and the stars are turning and turning, but the equinox is weeks to come it seems. dolls around the house, mice and bears, a cow and little doll boys and girls, are seemingly mesmerized by the sound the dryer makes late at night, when animation's at a standstill and cars and trucks on the nearby highway are hushed. hush my sweets, your bangs are growing sweetly into your eyes, but we will trim them back. and your ankles sometimes ache in your growing pains, like my knees do when the world suggests that you will suffer one day before you die. and the word "die" sends the ache up my thighs and into my chest. there are small baskets of varying sizes around the house; one from easter a few days ago casts its handle's arched shadow onto the yellow wall. and the globe atop another table goes untouched, australia catching day after day of sunshine and dust. it is too much, at times, to synthesize the desires, to subliminate the question, to wonder how long the child's marble will remain misplaced beneath the wicker chair before a chance encounter brings to light its green translucence. -------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------nealon, 'theory that matters', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-nealon-theory.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.994. part 1/1, total size 30370 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- theory that matters by jeffrey t. nealon department of english pennsylvania state university jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by jeffrey t. nealon, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] judith butler has certainly produced a body of work that matters. it matters not only because it takes "theory" into the realm of difficult socio-political analysis, but also because it does so without sacrificing the complexities, hesitations and difficulties that necessarily surround such a project. for butler, theory matters precisely as practice, as material response to specific (and often horrific) political situations: it is an analysis of how these situations have come to be structured as they are, and how they can be changed without simply reinstituting the very same normative interpellating discourses that gave rise to such situations in the first place. in _bodies that matter_, butler takes up "the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface" (9, italics removed). and it is precisely in accounting for identity as the product of still-conflicted exclusionary normative practices that butler asks us to consider the possibility of reinscribing "our" heterogeneous present and future. while categories of identity certainly cannot and should not be abandoned in such a project, butler nonetheless argues for the theoretical and political necessity "to learn a double movement: to invoke the category, and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest" (222). it is because her work has this relentlessly dual focus--calling for concrete responsive action in the present while preserving the possibility, indeed necessity, of a reinscribed future--that butler's work matters so singularly and crucially. _bodies that matter_ is a book very much written in the margins of 1990's _gender trouble_, itself a kind of feminist rewriting of butler's vastly underrated (or at least underquoted) book on hegel and contemporary french thought, _subjects of desire_ (1987). there is, in other words, a great deal of _bodies that matter_ devoted to correcting or complicating certain (mis)readings of _gender trouble_, especially those readings that took it to be arguing for an understanding of gender as a performance. as butler writes, if she were arguing that gender was a performance, "that could mean that i thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night" _(bodies,_ x).^1^ but as butler makes clear time and again in _bodies that matter_, her notion of gender as perform*ative* is not simply equatable with understanding gender as a perform*ance*; "the reduction of performativity to performance," she writes, "would be a mistake" (234). [2] but how, then, are we to understand this crucial distinction? drawing from foucault's work on discursive formation, derrida on speech act theory and iterability, and eve sedgwick's work on queer performativity, butler fashions a notion of performative identity that "must be understood not as a singular or deliberate 'act,' but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (2).^2^ according to butler, because the subject is the product of specific constraining normative frames, it cannot simply choose its gender as actors pick parts in plays; but, at the same time, because these compulsory normative frames never merely determine a subject without simultaneously opening spaces of resistance (in other words, because interpellation sometimes *fails*), agency is made possible and efficacious precisely because of and within these frames. "and if there is *agency,*" butler writes, "it is to be found, paradoxically, in the possibilities opened up in and by that constrained appropriation of the regulatory law, by the materialization of that law, the compulsory appropriation and identification with those normative demands . . . moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical" (12).^3^ the subject, in other words, is itself a product of interpellating codes, and therefore it cannot simply enforce a critical distance between itself and these codes. if there is to be subversion of identities, it must be subversion from within, a reinscription rather than a supposed remaking %ex nihilo%. [3] as the book's subtitle might suggest, butler's theoretical apparatus is quite specifically constructed out of a consideration of the category "sex" within the normative frames of compulsory heterosexuality. as butler argues, "sex" is itself such a performative or citational practice: "sex" is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. this productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity. discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make. paradoxically, however, this productive capacity of discourse is derivative, a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of *re*signification, not creation ex nihilo. . . . [w]hat is *invoked* by the one who speaks or inscribes the law is *the fiction* of a speaker who wields the authority to make his [sic] words binding, the legal incarnation of the divine utterance. (107) as speech-act theory argues, performatives seem to found a situation that they merely cite: the judge's "i now pronounce you man and wife" or the midwife's "it's a girl" pretend to be the "legal incarnation of the divine utterance," when on further examination either speech act is actually "a form of cultural iterability": such performatives iterate interpellating codes; they do not somehow found a wholly new state. a subject is, then, always cited *into* an identity, but, in what is only a seeming paradox, it is precisely the necessity of repeating these interpellating citational codes--of constantly identifying oneself before the law--that offers possibilities for subverting or rearticulating identity. the necessity of repetition opens the possibility of repeating these codes with a difference: "i now pronounce you man *as* wife" or "it's a lesbian." as butler writes, "since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure" (108). [4] if this were as far as butler's work went, it would certainly be a valuable enough contribution to feminist theory--which remains, on butler's reading, mired in an unproductive and divisive essentialism/constructionism debate. certainly a notion of citational performativity allows us to see past the limiting binarisms of this debate to explore the ways in which particular historical and social interpellations give rise to specific subjectivities; likewise, and perhaps more importantly, it allows us to see the ways in which those interpellations contain the very terms of their own reinscription. if butler's work were to stop here, however, it would leave open the question of how one gets from a notion of the citational *construction* of identity to the *subversion* or reinscription of that identity; it would leave unanswered the question of how one gets from interpellation to resistance--or, more accurately and pressingly, how one gets from the possibility of resistance to its actual activation or articulation. [5] and it is precisely her intricate and nuanced consideration of this question that makes butler's _bodies that matter_ not merely timely, incisive, and challenging reading, but essential reading. _bodies that matter_ certainly clarifies _gender trouble_'s arguments about an identificatory citational interpellation that carries the possibility of its own subversion; however, in _bodies that matter_ butler goes a step further, taking up the critical question of how constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies. the latter domain is not the opposite of the former . . . ; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside . . . to claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the 'materiality' of sex is forcibly produced. (xi, italics removed) butler here asks us to take a step past the platitudinous understanding that "everything is socially constructed," and move toward an examination of the *specific* exclusions by which social construction secures identities. as she writes, "thinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself" (xi), and such a rethinking entails accounting not only for the production of normative identities, but the simultaneous production of unlivable, abject identities--though such sites may turn out, in a painful paradox, to be primary among the potential sites for normative identity's subversion. [6] in other words, while it is certainly important and productive to point out that "'sex' is a regulatory ideal ... that will produce its remainder, its outside" (22), it is another matter altogether to account for the ways in which such "remainder" subjectivities are produced in specific historico-cultural situations *as* abjected, produced as by-products of the violent exclusions that secure normative identities. as butler writes in the service of that project: there is an 'outside' to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute 'outside,' an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive 'outside,' it is that which can only be thought- when it can--in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. the debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that 'everything is discursively constructed'; that point . . . refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. (8) the upshot of butler's notion of performativity, in other words, is *not* that everything is structur*ed*, but rather that everything is dependent on struct*ures*--linguistic, institutional, political--that are cited and recited in any specific case; and, she argues, it is precisely an attention to the material specificity of the "constitutive 'outside'" in any particular case that would allow us to respond to and reinscribe the multiple exclusions that make an identity possible or livable, while making other identities impossible or unlivable. the constructionism debate, in other words, needs to pay attention to the *specificity* of the restrictions that make possible the social construction of a particular normative ideal; as butler insists, for example, an analysis of the workings of contemporary homophobia is *not* equal to or simply metaphorizable as an analysis of contemporary racism (18). [7] in fact, butler argues that feminism itself is necessarily founded on similar exclusions, and loses much critical force if it does not engage its own grounding restrictions (29). for example, butler takes up bell hooks's thematization of the drag balls portrayed in jennie livingston's _paris is burning_ as misogynist. butler points out that with this charge hooks "makes male homosexuality *about* women." in turn, this reduction of the specificity of drag offers a troubling "way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity" (127). in other words, such feminist readings of _paris is burning_ misfire when they read it solely in terms of a supposed male-identified femininity, rather than as a multiple, conflicted renegotiation or "site of the phantasmatic promise of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimation" (130).^4^ similarly, butler argues that irigaray's work runs a parallel risk when it reads the exclusion of the feminine as the master or paradigmatic exclusion in philosophical, cultural or political life. while butler affirms the importance of irigaray's feminist reading of plato, she nevertheless hesitates, asking after the multiple exclusions that secure normative identity in plato's texts: there are good reasons, however, to reject the notion that the feminine monopolizes the sphere of the excluded . . . this xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized others, and those whose 'natures' are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. . . . irigaray does not always help matters here, for she fails to follow through the metonymic link between women and these other others, idealizing and appropriating the 'elsewhere' as the feminine. but what is the 'elsewhere' of irigaray's 'elsewhere'? (48-49) it is this "metonymic link between women and these others" that butler's text helps us to form. while it would seem that feminism loses critical force and focus if it concerns itself with exploring exclusions other than the exclusion of the feminine, butler persuasively argues that the opposite is the case--that feminism is doomed to inefficacy unless it takes up the multiplicity of exclusions that actually form the seemingly totalized category "feminine." [8] while such collective identifications under common-cause signifiers ("woman," "queer," "african american") are indispensible for the project of recognition within a conflicted democracy, butler argues that the persistence of *dis*identification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. (4) again, butler here reemphasizes the importance of a kind of double movement: the necessity of identification coupled with the necessity that this identificatory movement be open to reinscription. as she insists throughout _bodies that matter_, there is no stable identificatory site of "femininity" or "queerness," and, in fact, ensuring the multiplicity of such identificatory sites is critical to feminist and queer body politics. i take the upshot of butler's discussion here to be that feminism, for example, cannot protect its identificatory sites from being inhabited by drag queens, phyllis schlafly, james joyce or whomever. in fact, to turn a foucaultian phrase, butler asks us to consider what it costs us to protect such seemingly stable sites of contestation from contestation itself? in other words, what normativizing practices are reified and extended in protecting a site of stable identificatory femininity? this is perhaps butler's most poignant question to identity politics; as she writes, "it seems important, then, to question whether a political insistence on coherent identities can ever be the basis on which a crossing over into political alliance with other subordinated groups can take place, especially when such a conception of alliance fails to understand that the very subject-positions in question are themselves a kind of 'crossing,' are themselves the lived scene of a coalition's difficulty" (115). [9] however, and just as importantly, butler's is not merely an empty celebratory gesture toward a contentless "postmodern" multiplicity.^5^ as she writes, "one might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. but such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply" (229-30). how is it, we might ask, that simply *recognizing* the multiplicity of possible identificatory sites (or is that *cites*?) "underestimates the radical challenge to the subject" that butler wants to pose? to answer this question, perhaps we need to turn to butler's continuing engagement with lacan. butler takes very seriously lacan's freudian vocabulary of "foreclosure" as the suturing constitution of the subject. such foreclosure, of course, creates both the subject and the exclusions that she calls us to attend to throughout _bodies that matter_. for example, butler points out that within the constraints of lacan's compulsory heterosexuality, the "feminized fag and phallicized dyke" become the uninhabitable positions which are foreclosed in the taking up of compulsory heterosexuality, "a move that excludes and abjects gay and lesbian possibilities" (96). but what happens, butler asks, when those abjected sites, by and through their very exclusion or foreclosure, become sites of subversive desire and identification? what happens, in other words, "if the taboo becomes eroticized precisely for the transgressive sites that it produces" (97)? certainly, lacan would have taught us that this is just how desire works (98ff), but what happens when we subject the lacanian analysis of sexual difference to a kind of symptomatic lacanian reading? [10] what happens (if i can try to extrapolate from an intensely nuanced, sustained and careful reading) is that the monologizing lacanian oedipal law of signification--expropriation from the real into the symbolic under the threat of castration--loses its absolute privilege. certainly, as butler notes, lacan's version of resistance to interpellating norms--desire necessarily cathecting onto forbidden objects, the power of the imaginary to resist the law of the symbolic--has proven productive for his feminist readers. in fact, the imaginary has proven to be the productive hinge by which to read lacan against lacan's own foreclosure of other economies. as butler writes: this version of resistance has constituted the promise of psychoanalysis to contest strictly opposed and hierarchical sexual positions for some feminist readers of lacan. but does this view of resistance fail to consider the status of the symbolic as immutable law? and would the mutation of that law call into question not only the compulsory heterosexuality attributed to the symbolic, but also the stability and discreteness of the distinction between symbolic and imaginary registers within the lacanian scheme? it seems crucial to question whether resistance to an immutable law is *sufficient* as a political contestation of compulsory heterosexuality, where this resistance is safely restricted to the imaginary and thereby restrained from entering into the structure of the symbolic itself. (106) here, butler argues that we must pay attention to the specificity of the subject's foreclosures and the resistances that they enable; in other words, resistance to the law of the father is to be found in inhabiting and reinscribing *specific* abjected subjectivities rather than simply lamenting the necessity of such foreclosures--reading them as necessary if regrettable symptoms of the law of the father- or concentrating on the imaginary spaces of freedom that such foreclosures seem to allow. finally, butler suggests that this resistance of and to foreclosure breaks down the wall between the lacanian symbolic and imaginary: "if the figures of homosexualized abjection *must* be repudiated for sexed positions to be assumed," she argues, "then the return of those figures as sites of erotic cathexis will refigure the domain of contested positionalities within the symbolic" (109). [11] the key concept that butler wants to rescue from lacan is that of resistance, or more precisely, of the resistance to foreclosure through desire. while foucault and derrida are helpful in the project of enabling resistance--showing how it is possible if not inevitable--it seems that for butler, lacan allows us to demonstrate how resistance happens, how it is engendered and made concrete through foreclosure itself. butler departs from lacan, however, by questioning his reduction of all such response or subversion to the very terms of the originary loss or foreclosure of the real: in other words, butler questions the monologizing reduction in lacan of all laws to the symbolic law of failure, lack, and expropriation from the real. for butler, lacan (and, for that matter, slavoj zizek) reduces all resistance to a symptom of oedipal expropriation--reduces all laws to the law of lack--and thereby reduces the complexity of specific historical and cultural power relations that foreclose specific identities at specific times to pave the way for normativity. in lacan and zizek, the consistent failures or misrecognitions of the subject all point to the same monologizing drama of oedipal expropriation. for butler, such subjective misrecognition calls to be read otherwise, not as a symptom of the law of the father but as the condition of its subversion. as she writes, "the resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation" (237, originial emphasis removed). if there is a notion of lacanian failure or "lack" running through butler's work, it is, perhaps, "failure" as that which enables and calls for another reading, another response, another movement. misrecognition is the moment or movement of critique in butler's work--the *exposure* of the weakness or inefficacy of the negative or normative; but it is this other or second move--working that weakness by reinscribing it--that makes butler's work so decisive and important. it is this movement that takes _bodies that matter_ a step beyond _gender trouble_.^6^ [12] based on this theoretical ground, which i have only rather idiosyncratically begun to sketch here, butler goes on to supply a series of painstakingly careful analyses of identity, race and gender in a wide range of discourses and texts--lacan, _paris is burning_, act up, willa cather, nella larsen, slavoj zizek, queer theory. it is here, with these specific analyses, that butler makes a decisive intervention: a critical, insightful, necessary intervention. an intervention that matters. notes: ^1^ see, for example, seyla benhabib's critique of _gender trouble_ in _situating the self_ (new york & london: routledge, 1992): "along with the dissolution of the subject into yet 'another position in language' disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-reflexivity, and autonomy. the subject that is but another position in language can no longer master and create that distance between itself and the chain of significations in which it is immersed such that it can reflect upon them and creatively alter them. the strong version of the death of the subject thesis is not compatible with the goals of feminism. . . . if we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?" (214-15). ^2^ the linchpin figure here is derrida, specifically his reading of performativity and speech act theory in "signature event context" (in _margins of philosophy_. tr. alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press, 1982, 307-30). as derrida writes, "every sign . . . can be *cited*, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. this does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring" (321). for derrida, one can't play substantives against performatives precisely because citational performatives make the supposed plenitude of substantives possible in the first place: "the condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity" (328). ^3^ compare butler's _gender trouble_ (new york & london: routledge, 1990): "the subject is not *determined* by the rules through which it is generated because signification is *not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition* that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. in a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; 'agency,' then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition" (145). ^4^ butler's point, we should note, is certainly not that drag is unproblematically subversive: as she writes, there is "no necessary relation between drag and subversion" (125). see also 231 on this question. ^5^ as butler writes about this kind of postmodern pragmatist constructionism, "it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification" (53). butler likewise remains suspicious of the "liberal" multiculturalist position which would ask us to walk a mile in the other's shoes: "sympathy involves a substitution of oneself for another that may well be a colonization of the other's position *as* one's own" (118). ^6^ certainly, _gender trouble_ formulates the questions before us in _bodies_: "theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed 'etc.' at the end of the list. through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. this failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated 'etc.' that so often occurs at the end of such lines?" (_gender trouble_ 143). _gender trouble_, it seems to me, gestures toward such readings, but does not actually supply them. _bodies that matter_ goes on to demonstrate precisely the "political impetus" of a certain "failure." this would, however, also be the point at which one could open a dialogue with butler concerning the problematic hegelian legacy of this notion of lack or misrecognition. in pursuing this question, which there is no time to do here, we could perhaps turn to blanchot's work on the weakening of the negative in hegel (see, e.g., "literature and the right to death" in blanchot's _the gaze of orpheus_. tr. lydia davis. barrytown, ny: station hill, 1981, 21-62; and _le pas au-dela_. paris: gallimard, 1973). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ulmer, 'unthinkable writing', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-ulmer-unthinkable.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.594. part 1/1, total size 19882 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- unthinkable writing by gregory l. ulmer english department university of florida at gainesville glulmer@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by gregory l. ulmer, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: _perforations_ 5 (1994): "bodies, dreams, technologies." public domain, inc., p.o.b 8899, atlanta, ga 31106-0899. info@pd.org [1] described as a media-kit journal of theory, technology, and art, _perforations_ is just one facet of public domain's activities. jim demmers, robert cheatham, and chea prince (pd's coordinating committee) also sponsor "working papers"--"a series of presentations devoted to the various crises of legitimation, representation, and communication." held at various venues around atlanta, recent sessions addressed "the new alien in science fiction," "madonna, paglia, camp, queer theory, and pomo feminism," "mirror, myopia, modesty, weakness, failure, scandal." their kiosk project-in-progress (demonstrated at siggraph 93) will be a series of interactive hypermedia stations as alternative public sites for displaying electronic arts. pd also engages in video and public access cable television production, and provides internet access for arts organizations. [2] in short, pd has learned one of the fundamental lessons of the information age: the goal is not to design only a product--a tape, a form, a performance--but also the institutional frame capable of receiving that product. they approach the electronic as an "apparatus" consisting not only of technology but also of institutional practices and individual behaviors (ideological subject formation). functioning as a relay site (a booster switching node operating as an information wild card), pd represents a new kind of creative activity that challenges the old subject/object divisions separating criticism from art: you cannot study pd without having them study you back. for now, though, i am going to consider one of their products--number 5 in their series of media kits. [3] _perforations_ 5 is a collector's item not only because it is a limited edition but because it constitutes an exhibition of the status of multimedia in this brief transitional moment of the convergence of media between the book and the computer: after the desire to write with sound, image and text together has spread to the general citizenry but before the technology capable of democratizing such writing is widely available. the kit comes in a large box, the receipt of which is better than getting a crate of florida citrus and almost as good as christmas. the contents: an oversize "adult comic" (black drawing on yellow paper)-"brain-dead dog," by tom zummer; a book-length loose-leaf anthology of writings by a diverse group of contributors, including pd members; an equally diverse tape anthology of video works; an audio cassette of music by dick robinson (side one) and michael century (side two); a computer disk with a hypertext ("genetis") authored in story space by richard smyth. the kit is a snapshot of this moment when the media are suspended in their separate technologies, yet brought into virtual contact with one another under the theme that heads the issue: "bodies, dreams, technologies." [4] in the same way that some people watch "television" rather than any one particular program, one way to read _perforations_ is to scan or surf it as a whole: browse through the colored pages of the anthology with the cassette playing in the boombox, the tape going in the vcr, while flipping the screens of "genetis" on your mac. the natural medium for _perforations_, in other words, might be cd-rom, with all the pieces hyperlinked to bring out the pattern that emerges from the wholistic reading. the title suggests the nature of this pattern (the interface of bodies-dreams technologies) but not the specific quality--the feel or effect--of the collection. rather than trying to name that effect, i want to follow a personal thread that forms the whole into a constellation for me. [5] my point of entry is richard smyth's "genetis." smyth, who just completed his ph.d. in the cultural studies program at the university of florida, has been testing the genre of mystory that i introduced in _teletheory_ as a support for electronic reasoning. to see how smyth adapts mystory to his own purposes and how it looks in the context of _perforations_ clarified for me some of the outstanding questions about electronic style. "genetis" (self-described as a "rhizography") is arranged in five "plateaus" (alluding to deleuze and guattari)--myth, parable, allegory, legend, theory. the "legend" plateau refers to the "florida school" experimental approach to cultural studies--the search for the institutional practices of schooling appropriate for an electronic apparatus. the shorthand code for these new practices is "dream logic," extracted from psychoanalysis. [6] smyth conceptualizes his dream logic with the help of deleuze/guattari's metaphor of the rhizome, the vehicle of which is any kind of swarming animal or vegetable system (rat dens or crab grass). the basic point of the rhizome as an interface metaphor, however, is best seen in deleuze's use of the orchid/wasp relationship as an example for conceptualizing an alternative to representation. instead of the semiotic idea of signs as icons, indexes, or symbols, the rhizographic notion of signifying relationships is that of the symbiotic interaction of two different species systems (orchids and wasps). meaning circulates in the manner of the exchange between two systems which has to do with fertility and not with signs. the part of the vehicle activated in this metaphor is that of the passage from one system to another. smyth organizes "genetis" in terms of the co-presence in different dimensions of his experience of the psycho-dream theme. these dimensions include the major discourses of the "popcycle"--family, school, academic discipline, and entertainment or popular culture. [7] the dream-body-technology theme recurs throughout the kit, beginning with "brain-dead dog," which, having been brained by a flying brick, somehow obtains access to the electro-magnetic spectrum, where it fuses with a virtual robot. descriptions of dreams appear in many of the texts, as in chea prince's introduction (dumped like a tangled parachute into a tree by a pink cloud of energy, he finds many other people there discussing a similar experience). as in "genetis," the texts move freely through the different discourses of the popcycle. the legitimated theories of the academic disciplines are well represented throughout, but the peculiar quality of this kit is the emphasis it gives to various kinds of denigrated knowledge--pseudo-knowledge from the scientific point of view--such as everything having to do with para-psychology, the para-normal. thus there is a piece by mark macy, "when dimensions cross," about the astral body and making contact with the spirit world. the crucial element in this piece is the role that electronic technologies play in attempts to make contact with the dead. the spirit world makes use of the physics of radio, television, computers, to send messages into the world of the living. another way this theme recurs is in the figure of the golem, introduced in michael century's "quartet for a solo piano," entitled "the chela of golem." the program note refers to the ancient tales in jewish mysticism about an "artificial person" (a kind of automaton) created by chanting various combinations of letters. goethe's "sorcerer's apprentice" is a variant of this story. [8] at one level, the juxtaposition of academic theory with the discourses of denigrated knowledge has the effect (recalling surrealism) of separating out "research" as a formal activity, to feature "research" in terms of its own artistic properties. e.k. huckaby, for example, authors "two false studies," concerning "some relationships b-tween semen & ectoplasm." the cumulative result of the many readings dealing with the paranormal, linking technology with various spiritualisms, fantasies, legends, and dreams, is to establish an allegorical commentary effect. the allegory suggests that electronic equipment is the prosthesis not of the analytical mentality, in the way that print turned out to be, but of this wild desire for knowledge outside the logical, rational, empirical restrictions of the legitimate disciplines. the computer is the prosthesis of the body, capable of harnessing, managing, organizing, manipulating into a dream logic the desires that have sustained a fascination with the bodily mysteries of life, death, and the after-life. the implication of the electronic apparatus, with hypermedia writing, is that we now have equipment capable of fusing the analytical resources of print culture with the emotional resources of audio-visual entertainments. [9] foregrounding the denigrated knowledge of mystical matters is a symptom of a boundary crisis (in this case, the boundary dividing what discourses and objects are "proper" for study). this territory of the boundary is in fact the one staked out for exploration and experimentation by this journal. the significance of the name for the journal- "_perforations_"--is clarified in the interview with prince and cheatham about the pd project on "the doll universe." "it is with the proliferation of ostensible boundary conditions that a condition of perforation sets in," cheatham observes. "sort of like a hyper-dimensional cluster of interpenetrating soap bubbles. in deleuze and guattari's term, more 'lines of flight' begin to appear just as a (virtual) function of these intersecting boundaries." the doll universe concerns those two most problematic boundaries--the one separating the living and the dead (animate and inanimate) and identity (separating the inside from the outside of the person). "technology seems to be developing certain chiasmatic qualities here." the apparatus is a "social machine," and this kit evokes the emerging cyborgization of experience, approached from the side of arts, letters, imagination, fantasy, desire. [10] the problematics of death and identity engage that part of the apparatus concerned with subject formation (subjectivation). to return to "genetis," smyth structures the relationships or boundary crossings of the popcycle by analogy with the twin spirals of dna. the fertilizing crossing that interests him in particular is between his disciplinary knowledge of poststructural psychoanalysis and his personal experience of a dysfunctional family that led to his breakdown. the structuralist principle embodied in smyth's use of the dna spiral is that any two systems when juxtaposed create a commentary effect in which each explains the other. the effect is generative rather than representational: it is not that sound explains color, but that their correspondences create a pattern that produces intelligibility. smyth helps clarify what is at stake in the kit as a whole--how to write the unconscious. [11] according to the theory there is such a thing as thinking with the unconscious, but by definition this thinking is not accessible to the thinker. freud himself had no analyst, but through a process of self-analysis he devised a method for moving between dreams and theory. the mystorical genre that smyth employs is more closely related to freud's self-analysis than to the institutionalized method that resulted from it. in "genetis" smyth shows something to himself, using not the talking cure but a written one. nor is "cure" an appropriate term, since there is nothing clinical about this practice. rather, this kit evokes what it is to write with the emerging "middle voice" theorized by the french, neither active nor passive (it is the boundary crisis of this distinction) but in which the writer receives what is addressed elsewhere. this boundary writing makes possible a new level of experience (just as alphabetic literacy made possible the experience of selfhood, as eric havelock has argued)--an experience that is not without risks. [12] the effect of the mystory is to set in motion a flow across boundaries (perforations), to write across the division separating inside from outside (personal from collective, private from public)--to bring into visibility the situation of the person within the social order (the imbrication of the imaginary in the symbolic). gilles deleuze theorized this interface zone between the heights of propositional discourse and the depths of the body in terms of the logic of sense. deleuze learned from nietzsche not to be "satisfied with either biography or bibliography; we must reach a secret point where the anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing" (_the logic of sense_ 128). later deleuze phrases this convergence in terms of limit experiences, thinking of f. scott fitzgerald's alcoholism, with reference to the impossible experience of death: are we to speak about fitzgerald's and lowry's alcoholism, nietzsche's and artaud's madness while remaining on the shore? are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? are we to take up collections and create special journal issues? or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerilla--just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? (157) [13] here is the challenge of the new writing emerging in the electronic apparatus, somewhere between knowing and doing (the opposition and dilemma of creativity ever since the ancients split theory and practice into separate concepts). the destruction of the body and its social consequences, as in alcoholism, resonates with the dysfunctional family in smyth's mystory. this resonance in turn brings to mind perhaps the single most brilliant piece in the kit, "the hidden world of the visual analogue," an excerpt from "the iconography of abuse," by stevens seaberg (seaberg's book is distributed as a fort?/da! book by public domain). the complete book is described as "over 100 pages of text and 200 illustrations showing the transformation of feelings resulting from child abuse into emblematic, metaphoric and allegorical forms as they appear in the works of artists like michelangelo, durer, hogarth [etc] . . . ." using the analogy of how the puppeteer's gestures are repeated in the movements of the puppet, seaberg traces a pattern linking the striking arm of the abuser and the defending arms of the abused to a series of images, scenes, designs, and works of all kinds. [14] what interests me in this thread that i have been following through the kit is the way it brings into focus something reported to me by several people who have experimented with mystory, which is that the experience can be very disturbing. the nature of the form/method is that it allows one to write without thinking--to write things that are precisely not thinkable. each part of the whole is written separately (each plateau of the popcycle is entered into the data base). when the parts are arranged into a pattern (lining up the perforations, the way alan turing cracked the code of the nazi enigma engine during the world war by lining up the holes punched in the tapes) the experience of the middle voice begins, for the authors recognize themselves in a portrait-without-resemblance (the wasp finds its orchid). public domain approaches this risk at a more collective level, having in mind the work of georges bataille. bataille's general economy was designed to teach the capitalist world to shift from the individual point of view from which it made sense to accumulate wealth, to the general point of view of death (of being already dead) from which vantage point the waste of life could be appreciated, and the uselessness of accumulation. [15] at the core of "bodies, dreams, technologies," then, is an ancient bit of wisdom, and an age-old desire. the shaman's power, after all, was the ability to cross over into the realm of the dead (which anyone could do, of course); but the shaman could return again to the living and make use in this world of what had been learned from the dead. _perforations_ 5 suggests that this shamanistic method is still operative in the forces producing the electronic apparatus. what is the computer really for? for going into this zone between, this perforated region of crossings, which until now only a few special individuals were able to negotiate--shamans and artists and crackpots. the promise of the emerging electronic equipment--presuming the invention of the enabling institutionalpractices and individual behaviors and attitudes--is the massification, popularization, general availability to the ordinary citizen of writing death. the prosthetic shaman--that is one purpose, one possibility, of the computer. [16] meanwhile, the "call for stuff" for _perforations_ 6 has been issued, under the title "the uncanny refutation of the apocalyptic: ghosts, leaks, stains." the latter part of the title refers to that which may be overturning the traditional "human/nature/divinity" as we move to the technological era's version of a millennium. contact public domain for further information. --------------------------------end------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------wilkie, 'postmodernism as usual: "theory" in the american academy today', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-wilkie-postmodernism.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.995. part 1/1, total size 21314 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- postmodernism as usual: "theory" in the american academy today by rob wilkie hofstra university rwilkie1@hofstra.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by rob wilkie, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: mas'ud zavarzadeh and donald morton. _theory as resistance_. new york: guilford press, 1994. [1] by opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, postmodern theory offered the potential to radically transform the object of literary studies. no longer would intellectual work in the humanities be limited to the scholarly documentation and annotation of "great works" or to the fetishization of cultural artifacts. by making visible the ideological processes by which meaning is naturalized, such work held the possibility of challenging existing institutional structures (academic disciplines and specializations) as well as the ideologics that legitimated their rule. above all, the aim of such work was directed toward deconstructing the category of the bourgeois individual as the linchpin of a liberal humanism complicit with a variety of dominations along lines of race, class, and gender. put to practice in a thoroughgoing way, such work would make serious demands on existing institutions, not to mention the power arrangements and modes of production those institutions reproduce and legitimate. many ways of escaping precisely these consequences have thus emerged. in their contestatory work, _theory as resistance_, mas'ud zavarzadeh and donald morton argue that at present, the political center of the academy is powerfully reconstituting itself through negotiating its relationship with "theory." in their book zavarzadeh and morton explore the ways in which the "unrest" caused by the theoretical "battles" of the 1980's is now being settled and managed. [2] zavarzadeh and morton make a strategic intervention into conventional understandings of recent changes in the humanities. curricular change is currently attacked by conservatives who argue that the humanities has abandoned its moral mission of preserving transhistorical aesthetic and philosophical values, instead offering a crassly politicized understanding of culture in order to satisfy the demands of militant activists. much "left" response to these claims has been little more than weak attempts to "defend" and preserve such small reforms as have taken place. _theory as resistance_, however, intervenes in this debate from a far different angle, arguing that current reorganization in the humanities, premised on a pluralistic adoption of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, in fact only helps to contain current historical transformations by producing more liberalized institutions capable of training and managing "multicultural" workforces. thus, the debate between the "right" and "left" (that is, between the outmoded and emergent sections of the academy) has already been won by those representing a new postmodern center. and, as zavarzadeh and morton argue, the effect of this "recentering" has been to suppress more radical positions which call not for piecemeal reform of the institutions that manage intellectual production, but for transformation in the mode of production itself. [3] in each of the essays in their study, zavarzadeh and morton chart the emergence of an "anti-conceptualism, an "anti-theory theory" premised on a rejection of *theory as critique*. that is, they argue what has taken place in academy is an accommodation of the "insights" of postmodern theory to the needs of an uncertain and unstable domestic economy and global situation. in other words, the up-dating of practices in the humanities is related to other current sites of institutional "damage control" as the contemporary university currently finds itself, like all other bourgeois institutions, pressured by a range of internal and external crises. the pressures brought to bear on the academy by economic change, particularly the pressures toward privitization, are making their effects visible in the increasing emphasis on institutional "flexibility." as a result, the postmodern theories most valuable to current institutional rearrangements are those "ludic" postmodern theories which premise the liberation of "difference" on the abolition of systemic critique. and under this postmodern regime, zavarzadeh and morton argue, the category of the autonomous subject, though reconceived and rendered more flexible, remains essentially intact. [4] both traditionalists and "theorists" (using "theorists" as zavarzadeh and morton do, to indicate progressive liberals who have updated their liberalism through an adoption of a postmodern "ludic liberation") envision the need for a change in the humanism that contemporary society has outgrown. and both pursue this change through inclusionary curricular reforms that seek to "expand" the subjectivity of the student. zavarzadeh and morton argue that the seeming opposition between traditionalists and theorists is a false one: the battle lines that have been drawn divide not over principles and concepts -*what* is to be done and *why* -but merely over pragmatics -*how* it is to be accomplished. the traditionalists still see merit in the literary canon and in the survey course that sets a "moral" base from which the student can learn about human "experience," while the "theorists" wish to expand the curriculum to include postmodern texts and poststructuralist theory in order to "expand" the human "experience." but there is no fundamental ideological difference in this opposition: the bourgeois subject of the traditional curriculum has not been expelled from the theorists' academy, merely updated. [5] what zavarzadeh and morton explicate throughout these essays is how the positions of the traditionalists and theorists prop each other up in an effort to manage the real threat to their business as usual: materialist criti(que)al theory. such a critical practice would not only offer a sustained critique of the politics of culture but also demonstrate the complicity of both "old" and "new" pedagogical positions in the very political/economic situations they (either "morally" or "ludically") pretend to subvert. through a detailed analysis of the historical determinants that have brought the american university to its current state of being, zavarzadeh and morton challenge the "progressive" e ommonsensical understanding of the recent changes to the humanities and show how the current postmodern university does nothing but continue to reproduce the subjectivities necessary for the maintenance of late capitalism. [6] within the framework of capitalism, education needs continually to reproduce the workers/consumers necessary for capitalism's survival. like the changes made to american education during the industrial revolution, when the classroom was adapted to fit the needs of the routinization, repetition, and division of discourse/labor of the factory, postmodern capitalism requires incoherent/"plural" subjectivities willing to fulfill the transitory needs of multi-national corporations. as zavarzadeh and morton point out, "the humanists and the theorists who participated in the debate over the change of curriculum, were therefore acting within the historical conditions of postmodern capitalism, which demanded change since it no longer had any use for the older humanities" (11). [7] the traditional humanities curriculum, grounded in a theory of the individual necessary to the early stages of capitalism's growth, is "based upon the idea that the individual is the cause and not the effect of signification" (55). according to this way of thinking, the "self," an ahistorical entity, is "free" from economic and social restraints and is able to "enter into transactions with other free persons in the free market but is, at the same time, obedient to the values of the free market that legitimate the existing political order" (58). the immanent nature of the traditional humanities curriculum keeps people focused on their "self" while searching out the "eternal truths." any critique that arises, therefore, remains trapped at the level of an analysis of discrete individuals while deflecting a systemic and materialist critique of institutional situations *as a whole*. [8] while the traditional humanities curriculum was necessary for a post-industrial-revolution ideology, contemporary technological revolutions and the subsequent growth of multi-national corporations now call for a new "indefinable subject." as late capitalism found itself running out of markets and faced with the growing numbers of the technological underclass (the increasing disparity between the have and have-nots based upon their access, or lack of access, to recent technological advancements), it became necessary to update the means of production of labor. zavarzadeh and morton point out that "the change of the curriculum is, in short, a response to the change of the labor force . . .the rising labor force requires skills that go beyond the linear and empirical and produce in workers an understanding, no matter how elementary, of systems operations in general" (139). [9] although postmodern and poststructural theories were originally assumed "inherently" to oppose the traditional understandings of "self," zavarzadeh and morton argue that the indeterminacy and "playfulness" of meaning of a "ludic postmodernism" gave late capitalism the methods needed for its reproduction. the humanities curriculum could be filled with a piece-meal "theory" that made use of theoretical terms stripped of their oppositional potential. this has occurred, zavarzadeh and morton argue, because the discourses that have been absorbed into the academy are those which achieve their intellectual effects from a postmodern revision of categories like "experience," "identity," and "power," as well as from an explicit or implicit dismissal of categories like "totality," "critique," "contradiction," and "ideology." because of the rejection of these latter categories, categories that have been fundamental to marxist and other radical theories of revolutionary social transformation, the postmodernism of the academy can support *local change* and reform, while simultaneously arguing that *systemic change* is impossible. the focus of zavarzadeh's and morton's argument is on those uses of postmodern theory which firmly separate the "local" from the "global," and attempt to forestall any rearticulation of the two by associating systemic conceptualization with authoritarian politics. [10] one of zavarzadeh and morton's most compelling analyses is found in chapter 4, "the cultural politics of the fiction workshop," where they inquire into one of the most ideologically protected spaces in the academy. although it has not historically been perceived as the most "serious" site of literary study, the creative writing program has come, under the pressures brought to bear by critical theory on the bourgeois subject, to be regarded as the last bastion of the "self." "the fiction workshop is not a 'neutral' place where insights are developed, ideas/advice freely exchanged, and skills honed. it is a site of ideology: a place in which a particular view of reading/writing is put forth and, through this view, support is given to the dominant social order" (92). as detailed in chapters four and five, the commonsensical understanding of the fiction workshop as the "free" expression of the "self" through "unmediated" creativity has enabled its acceptance by both traditionalists and "theorists." based upon a bourgeois understanding of the "self," the fiction workshop reproduces an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. "the dominant fiction workshop...adheres to a theory of reading/writing that regards the text's meaning as "produced" less by cultural and historical factors than by the imagination of the author as reflected in the text 'itself'" (85). in reaction against the discrediting of the author as authority, and enabled by the incessant "play" and plurality opened up by poststructuralism, the university has created a space in which the proponents of capitalism can revert to a site of pre-theory that privileges "the human subject" by means of "heavy emphasis on aesthetic experience, on style (as the signature of the subject) and on such notions as 'genius,' 'inspiration,' 'intuition,' 'author,' and 'authority'" (75). as a result of grounding the fiction workshop on the sanctity of "experience" and the pseudo-equality of "free" expression, the university has preserved a site where both notions of a "free" individual and an equally "free" ahistorical knowledge can be "freed" from the "threat of theory." [11] the fiction workshop, through the "violent separation of 'reading' from 'writing'" (87), reproduces not just the idea of the "self" as "individual" and "unique," but also an understanding of the self's servitude: the subjectivity necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist economy is the "free" individual who can "create" what is needed. it is through the fiction workshop's "acceptance" of opinion, *without any critique of "opinion" itself*, that future writers learn only to reproduce the dominant ideology, i.e. what is most immediately intelligible as "what is needed." the ideological inviolability of the ruling regime of "truth" results, as zavarzadeh and morton argue, in "the socially dominant class [having] the final say in the designation of what is 'real' . . . and what is 'nonreal' . . . in a society." (85) [12] the separation of "reading" and "writing" also reproduces an acceptance of a particular economic system. the future writers, who through the unquestioning basis of the fiction workshop "learn" to reproduce the commonsense, become the "boss"; while "the scholars/critics/editors not only accept but indeed enthusiastically define themselves as the subjects of reading. . . . the separation of 'readers' from 'writers' interpellates them as different 'experts,' 'professionals' whose unique expertise cannot possibly be undertaken by 'others'" (87-88). this dichotomy is what keeps people willing to accept the oppressions of capitalism as inevitable; the "writers" of the commonsense are reproducing the "real" world, as they have been taught to "see" it, and the "readers" are perfectly willing to internalize that world so that at the end of the cycle it appears "realistic." [13] theories that seek to raise questions about the "free-ness" of "opinion" and "creativity," such as the ones presented by morton and zavarzadeh, often get dismissed as "authoritarian" since they pressure the very notion of freedom necessary to the "managed democracy" of capitalism. as morton and zavarzadeh argue, "experience" is not a given but is mediated through language and through the way one has been taught to "read" culture. but traditionalists and "theorists" understand "'creativity,' . . . [as] the ability to transcend the political, the economic, and in short the 'material' conditions of writing." since this understanding of "freedom" structures the fiction workshop, students enter an ideological space in which their "ideas" get reaffirmed without any questions about the "production" of those "ideas," questions such as, where did they come from? or, what interests do they serve? the group of discourses that zavarzadeh and morton collect under the rubric of "ludic postmodernism" have helped further this tendency by privileging an understanding of meaning in which the slippage of signification results in an inability to permanently "fix" any notion of "the real." as zavarzadeh and morton argue, this "playful" conception of meaning, with its concomitant notion of a constant, nearly "accidental" shifting of identities, reproduces a revamped pluralism in which every position is given an "equal" footing. since "real" meaning cannot be determined, poststructuralist theory legitimates our ignoring of the historical and political framework in which the writing subject is situated. [14] in its entirety, zavarzadeh and morton's book is a call to arms. as a result of the recent acquisition of "theory" by the american university, they insist, it is now more than ever imperative that those who wish a revolutionary change begin "what amounts to a daily hand-to-hand combat with the liberal pluralism that underlies today's resistance to theory" (1). one must engage in an oppositional pedagogy which forces the "invisible" reproduction of the status quo out into the open. it is necessary to produce students who can recognize the entrapments of the dominant ideology as political/economic constructs used to benefit a small few. teachers must introduce concepts involving the "material" nature of "ideas," that one does not simply have/hold an idea "for no reason" but because it enables a particular political position. students must be forced to account for their "opinions" and learn to conceptually visualize what "owning" such an idea means. we must not simply fill our curriculums with an unquestioning "plurality" which only restructures the traditional notions of literature and "self" by reproducing author as authority. an oppositional pedagogy is one that does not seek to "interact" with students on a "humanistic" level, but instead attempts to make the "invisible" boundaries of the classroom (as a politically constructed site)"visible" so that students could eventually challenge the reigning concepts of "knowledge." [15] one hopes that this call to arms will find other ears as receptive as my own. yet, as the authors recognize, their critical materialist agenda is neither easily presented nor easily carried out. the american university is a highly resilient institution. the postmodern adjustment of this institution has now penetrated well beyond the "elite" universities where it began and is bringing changes to the humanities curriculums even in secondand third-tier colleges. but these changes are far from the kind of fundamental restructuring of the academy and its disciplines that once seemed to be in the offing. on the contrary, as zavarzadeh and morton demonstrate, the "expansion" of curriculums to include multicultural texts alongside more traditional canonical material, as well as the elevation of "creative writing" as a site of special privilege, are effecting a containment and erosion of materialist critical theory. by restructuring the boundaries of the center to include only those parts of "theory" which serve to reproduce current political positions, the university has managed to present theory which aims at actual change as "extreme," "irrational," and "totalitarian." within and against such an institution, truly critical theorists face a daunting task. but with _theory as resistance_, zavarzadeh and morton have made a good start. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------wald, 'anna deveare smith's voices at twilight', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-wald-anna.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.194. part 1/1, total size 23525 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- anna deveare smith's voices at twilight by gayle wald princeton university gwald@pucc.princeton.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4, n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by gayle wald, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: the mark taper forum production of "twilight: los angeles, 1992," a work-in-progress that is part of the "on the road: a search for american character" series conceived, written and performed by anna deavere smith. directed by emily mann. set design by robert brill. costume design by candice donnelly. lighting by allen lee hughes. original music by lucia hwong. [1] i saw anna deavere smith's one-woman performance "twilight: los angeles, 1992" on a cool november evening at mccarter theatre in princeton, new jersey--more than three thousand miles and worlds away from the site of the first multiracial urban uprising in u.s. history. mccarter was home to the east coast premiere of smith's performance, which had played to near-universal critical acclaim at the mark taper forum in los angeles, and which was directed by mccarter's artistic director, emily mann. though the people in the theater that evening had each paid twenty-five dollars to see "twilight," i suspect that many of them had long forgotten (if they had ever acknowledged) the social and economic despair that gave rise to what urban theorist mike davis has called "the most violent american civil disturbance since the irish poor burned manhattan in 1863." indeed, by last november, the trial of the l.a. four for the near-fatal beating of truck driver reginald denny--played in many press accounts as a racial counterbalance to the near-fatal beating of rodney king--had taken center stage in the white public imagination. [2] when smith's performance had ended and the audience had offered its respectful, though not impassioned, applause, a friend of mine overheard a white woman sitting in the row behind us. turning to her companion, she said in a polite if-you-can't-say-anything-good-don't-say-anything-at-all tone of voice, "well, i wouldn't exactly call it entertaining, but..." the woman never completed the sentence, never said what she *would* have called "twilight." nor did she explain to her companion what she meant by "entertaining," though clearly the term carried political, as well as aesthetic, value. her gloss on "twilight" also contained an unintended irony: entertainment, or the production of glossy self-representations, is, after all, the dominant business of los angeles. in one sense, i could understand how the woman's expectations could have felt somewhat let down if by "entertaining" she also meant diversionary; though "twilight" is at times highly amusing, its effect is to memorialize the voices of l.a. in another sense, "entertainment" is one of the many challenges posed by "twilight," a work which seeks to generate theatrical compassion through smith's hallmark technique of literal impersonation. * * * [3] the mood on princeton university's campus was unusually tense the morning after the verdicts were announced in the first trial of police officers koon, powell, wind and briseno. after a dreary night spent watching cnn's live aerial television footage of fires that burned through a twenty-five-block area of central l.a., a group of princeton's african american and latino students--joined by some asian americans and whites--staged a midday rally in front of firestone library (named after the rubber magnate). the students spoke of their rage at the verdicts and at the beating, their sorrow at the loss of life and the damage to neighborhoods, and of their alienation from some of their white friends, many of whom viewed the trial in simi valley as an anomalous miscarriage of justice. an asian-american student implored the assembly to work together to combat racism and discrimination on campus. some students voiced concern about friends and relatives living in los angeles; others spoke of their apprehension about family sixty miles away in new york, where the possibility of rioting still loomed large. [4] ironically, april 29, 1992 was also the date set for the new york premiere of smith's "fires in the mirror: crown heights, brooklyn and other identities," her award-winning one-woman show about the conflict between hasidic jews and africanand caribbean-americans spurred by the death of a seven-year-old black child, gavin cato. (when her opening was canceled, smith joined demonstrators protesting the king verdict in times square.) "fires," a play which enacts the relatively clear-cut dispute between visibly distinct minority communities who share the same new york city neighborhood, is the spiritual and aesthetic forebear of "twilight," a work which takes on the considerably more complex task of documenting the multiracial, multilingual and geographically dispersed communities of los angeles. both draw upon a rigorous performance technique that smith has been developing for over a decade, in which she interviews people and then "performs" them verbatim. [5] for smith, who is also associate professor of drama at stanford, the performance of real people's real words originally functioned as a theatrical exercise, a way of investigating how different characters embody or inhabit language differently. smith used linguistic and performative "found objects"--clips from often baroque late-night talk shows, for example--to investigate the possibility of "entering" character through the meticulous repetition of that character's language, including body language. in rehearsal for "twilight," smith listened repeatedly to tapes of her interviewees, then practiced until she had incorporated the voices well enough to "wear" the characters' words. the technique, she contends, entails both theft--the appropriation of others' voices--and gift--a mode of re-presenting or returning others' voices to them. (sister souljah once refused smith an interview, claiming that smith was "the sister who wants to take my words.") as her work in "fires" and "twilight" demonstrates, such impersonation, or "re-iteration," as smith prefers to call it, lends itself particularly well to highly charged media spectacles such as the crown heights conflict and the l.a. uprisings, precisely because these are wars of image *and* voice. a crucial part of the public spectacle that was "l.a." entailed the struggle of voices speaking on behalf of besieged communities to broadcast their beliefs over the steady din of talking heads reporting official estimates of property damage. in newspaper and television accounts, the rioting itself was often portrayed as what happens when words do not suffice. [6] for the mark taper forum production of "twilight," smith interviewed more than 175 people, including movie stars (angelica houston) and politicians (maxine waters). with help from four dramaturges--one black, one latino, one white and one asian--she later selected twenty-odd characters to be included in the work. smith's performances are, by definition, always works-in-progress, since she adds or subtracts characters to suit the needs of particular audiences or her own evolving ideas. the twenty-one people that she performed at mccarter ranged from the well known (reginald denny and former l.a. police chief daryl gates) to the lesser known (angela king, rodney's aunt, and maria, juror #7 in the federal king trial, whose character was added two weeks into the l.a. performance of "twilight"). john lahr's review of "twilight" in _the new yorker_ describes a performance in which smith did her show for seven hundred l.a. high school students. in the middle of performing julio menjivar--a lumber salesman and driver who was arrested for no apparent reason as part of the police round-ups during the riots--smith interrupted her description (in spanish) of the police abuse. "i don't think i should say what the police said," she told the audience. "your teachers will mind." when the kids shouted back their encouragement, smith continued: "get up, motherfucker! get up!" [7] on stage smith, a light-skinned african american woman, performs barefoot, wearing a plain white shirt and loose, dark pants; in addition to changes in voice, posture and affect, she signifies the "feel" of characters with simple costume changes: a hat taken on or off, the addition of earrings or a string of pearls, a cigarette hanging loosely from the side of the mouth, a man's striped tie and blazer. brief blackouts demarcate the shifts between characters, shifts which are left intentionally ragged so that smith's audience can witness the uneven process of metamorphosis between, for example, mrs. young-soon han, a korean-american and former owner of a liquor store, and twilight bey, a young african american male and an organizer of the gang truce between the cripps and the bloods. [8] bey's self-consciously oracular voice, distinct from the bureaucratese of some characters and the informal, conversational expression of others, literally has the last word in "twilight." bey steals the show, but not in the conventional sense; though his is not the most arresting or profound voice of the performance, it is the one that lends "twilight" its title and serves as its coda, a surrogate voice for smith's voice. in a brief essay about the development of "twilight," smith explains that she was inspired both by bey's words and by the rich metaphorical potential of his name. twilight is a time of danger, when objects ordinarily visible in broad daylight are obscured, and the time of day when much of the first rioting occurred. twilight is also a time of liminality and, more importantly, *creativity*--a time, smith writes, that "asks more of our vision." here are bey's words, spoken by and through smith, as he analyzes the relation between "twilight" and the growth of a prophetic voice: so twilight is that time between night and day limbo i call it limbo so a lot of times when i've brought up ideas to my homeboys they say twilight that's before your time that's something you can't do now when i talked about the truce back in 1988 that was something they considered before its time yet in 1992 we made it realistic so to me it's like i'm stuck in limbo like the sun between night and day [9] shaman, prophet and intermediary (in the gang wars), ever attentive to the disruptive power of his language, bey's character is a stand-in for smith's own (absent) voice as performer. watching her perform each of the twenty-one characters in "twilight" with obvious care and generosity - even a bewildered daryl gates, who seems genuinely mystified at how he became a national symbol of police oppression following "the rodney thing" (a telling slip)-i had the sense that smith, too, wants to be a peacemaker of sorts, a multilingual interlocutor who constructs her own unique theatrical voice from the select fragments of others' voices. bey's is the privileged voice of "twilight" because, in his role as leader of the gang truce, he exemplifies an analogous spirit of smith's performance, which is communication across seemingly insurmountable lines of hierarchy and difference. [10] through smith, who embodies in her performance the very tape recorder that she uses to conduct interviews, "twilight" brings to audiences such as the one in princeton voices that would not normally get a public hearing. people from south l.a. and koreatown are magically transported to a stage in new jersey--not through conventional media such as tv, but through "real" physical proximity and presence. with the effect of a verbal patchwork quilt, the pieces sewn together by her own constant bodily presence, smith's performance constructs an imaginary--and highly intimate --conversation among twenty-one people who will *never* share the same room together, then presents this conversation to an audience that has paid twenty-five dollars a piece to listen. in contrast to the "outside" social realities that furnish white voices their immediacy and authority, the defining power of the soundbite, in the safe space of the theater, smith gives all the voices in "twilight" equal representation. everyone has his or her five minutes before the footlights, from the director of the farabundo marti national liberation front to the korean storeowner whose brain was partially blown out by a stray bullet. [11] moreover, the voices smith performs are not homogenized through journalistic "smoothing out" (a technique applied liberally to the frequent slips of tongue and verbal lapses committed by heads of state, for example); neither are they necessarily translated for their audience. in one remarkable sequence, smith performs chung lee, president of the korean america victim's association, speaking in korean as english subtitles are projected on screens at either side of the theater. while selecting performance material from the archives of her interviews, smith says she generally looks for the "bumps" in the flow of a speaker's words and phrases. her interests lie, paradoxically, in the moments when language "fails" rather than when it succeeds too well, when she believes it speaks us most thoroughly. her monologues communicate as often through stammering and hesitation, when speakers are tongue-tied, as through moments of linguistic and tonal clarity. like the woman overheard by my friend during the princeton performance of "twilight," smith's characters speak through ellipses, innuendo, intonation and accent. [12] "twilight" harbors an implicitly populist agenda of breaking down the conventional binary between the "high" - and obviously highly stylized--language of the stage and the "low," and *no less stylized*, language of everyday speech. smith does not construct a multicultural national literature merely by introducing "real" voices into a highly charged aesthetic arena (though in and of itself, this would perhaps constitute a progressive political act); rather, she subtly shifts the contours of this arena by finding the "poetry," as she calls it, in ordinary language. "everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry," smith writes in the introduction to the recently published book version of _fires in the mirror_. "the process of getting to that poetic moment is where character lives" (xxxi). later in the same essay, she notes that "character" lives in the digressions, the ways (of universally "bad" grammar, of "ums" and "uhs") through which we get to the "point." by mimetically reproducing the details of various characters' fissures in speech, smith makes it possible for people to talk--not only to say the sorts of things that are sometimes forbidden or veiled in public discourse, but also to say things in ways that are not usually allowed in the theater. [13] yet it's at the precarious line between mimicry and parody that smith's work potentially backfires, or at least loses its political potency. while parody promises pleasure for its audience, mimicry seems the more difficult--and possibly the more radical--of the two modes. closely related to parody, satire depends upon a cultural community that speaks, to a greater or lesser degree, a common language. mimicry, in contrast, requires that the subject "become" the object of her imitation. unlike parody, which effects a distance from the thing being mocked in order to provoke a self-conscious laughter, mimicry diminishes critical detachment and compels one to a more direct - though not necessarily less discriminating--engagement with the "other." smith sees mimicry as a way of facilitating a radical empathy, of enabling a transformative slippage across socially produced identities of race, nation, gender, and class. "the spirit of acting," she writes, "is the *travel* from the self to the other" (xxxvi). [14] perfect mimicry of the other is, of course, a utopian desire, an impossible fantasy exemplified by madonna, who in "vogue" sings that it doesn't matter whether you're black or white, a boy or a girl. as homi bhabha has written in the context of colonial subjects, the very precondition for mimicry is the residue of difference--the "almost the same, *but not quite*"--that distinguishes self from other. mimicry has the potential to de-naturalize dominant voices, as when smith's performances (of an anonymous talent agent, the former president of the l.a. police commission, the legal counsel for officer briseno, or even reginald denny) dramatize, and thus unmask, the privilege of white speakers. the implicit challenge of smith's performance style lies in inhabiting these kinds of voices while keeping mimicry and parody in tension. of the characters she performs, smith writes: "i try to close the gap between us, but i applaud the gap between us. i am willing to display my own *unlikeness*" (xxxviii). [15] it might seem strange, therefore, that "anna deavere smith" is absent from "twilight." or rather, she's everywhere present, in the form of a desire which is the structuring absence of the performance. moments in the performance when characters call attention to smith's (invisible) presence are disruptive in this regard, making explicit the ways in which "smith" mediates our experience of them, as well as the ways in which their own self-representations are shaped by her presence. elvira evers, a panamanian-american cashier whose life was saved when a stray bullet penetrated her back and lodged in the elbow of her unborn baby, speaks to an invisible smith, asking her midway through the monologue whether it's alright to bring out her little girl. it's a crucial moment, not just for transforming monologue into dialogue, but for foregrounding the ways in which smith's own voice may have a legitimizing, or hindering, effect upon others' expression. [16] ever since "fires in the mirror" catapulted her to the pages of _people_ magazine and the couch on arsenio hall's late-night talk show, smith's work has been almost universally acclaimed. (according to one account, now that smith has become a commodity in her own right, she signs a waiver that guarantees that after a certain threshold she will share profits with her interviewees.) the obvious political merit of "twilight"--appreciated equally by critics from both the "mainstream" and "alternative" presses --lies in its portrayal of the irreducibility of voices in the noisy public discourse of "l.a." whereas the television news pitted riotous "black rage" against indignant white propriety, or black rage against korean-american cupidity (the role formerly assigned jewish inner-city merchants), or black rage against korean-american industriousness (the divisive "model minority" image), "twilight" offers a more complex rendering. as gloria naylor writes in _mama day_, there's not just two sides to the story in l.a.--my side and your side--but four sides, including "an outside, and an inside. all of it is truth" (230). [17] "twilight" is a great leveler, a fact which may be simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. while smith aspires to burst through the limitations of a narrow ethnocentrism, the democratic impulse that guides "twilight" can tend to obscure the ways in which these voices are in violent struggle with one another. like all of us, smith herself is part of this process. when the mark taper forum originally commissioned her to create "twilight," some local artists protested that the theater was importing a commercially and critically successful "outsider" to speak *their* voices. crusades for cultural justice are often figured in such terms, as conflicts over the ownership of voices and representations. this is not to impugn smith's voice; indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of "twilight" is smith herself--in particular, the obvious respect and care she demonstrates for the voices entrusted to her. at its best, however, "twilight" embodies a dialectic: not only does smith speak for and as "others"; these others also infuse and speak for her. ---------------------------------------------------------- works cited bhabha, homi. "of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse." _october_ 28 (spring 1984): 125-133. lahr, john. "under the skin." _the new yorker_ 69, 19 (june 28, 1993): 90-94. naylor, gloria. _mama day_. new york: vintage, 1988. smith, anna deavere. _fires in the mirror_. new york: anchor books, 1993. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------hooper, 'lamentation', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-hooper-lamentation.txt archive pmc-list, file hooper.595. part 1/1, total size 41592 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the lamentation by virginia hooper postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by virginia hooper, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press.<hr invocation</h2> %philosophical speculation and recent history alike had prepared the way for an understanding of the process by which, in times long past, the gods had been recruited from the ranks of mortal men.% -jean seznec, _the survival of the pagan gods_ *a*nything that serves as a hint or reminder of the past, either of two prayers in the canon beginning with the word %memento%, the first being for the living, the second for the dead, each serving as a reminder of the past. at the line of the apparent meeting of the sky with the earth, the bounds of one's observation, knowledge and experience unfold upon the point where the observer stands. the great circle of a celestial sphere cutting the center of the mind midway between its zenith and nadir, revealing a layer of memory characterized by the presence of one or more distinctive centers of attraction. i came to know her again, to perceive her as identical with the one i had previously known. so related, as two concepts, that if the first determines the second, then the second determines the first. the quotient obtained in dividing unity by a number or expression. to pursue for the purpose of catching; to range over an area in search of game; to chase, drive away, or pursue with greed; to search for eagerly. to search for until found; to find after a search. to utter the loud, mournful wail of a dog, wolf, or other animal. to utter such a cry in pain, grief or rage. the first part of the romance began on an ancient instrument of execution, a horizontal piece near the top, upon which condemned persons were fastened until they died. a sacred symbol in many ancient religions, consisting basically of two intersecting lines. the emblem of christianity, a representation of the cross upon which christ died. any severe trial, affliction or suffering. anything that resembles or is intermediate between two other things: a cross between poetry and prose. the accidental contact of two wires so that current from one flows to the other. the geometric mean of two numbers. to move or pass from one side to the other; go across; traverse. to draw a line across. to obstruct or hinder; thwart. our paths had crossed. it had crossed my mind this might happen. she made me promise to tell the truth by making the sign of the cross over my heart. she insisted i mark a cross on the palm of my hand, as though paying a fortuneteller. choose implies an act of will: to choose a side. select emphasizes careful consideration and comparison: to select the best cookie from a tray. to pick is to select because especially well fitted or appropriate. cull means to select and collect at the same time: to cull striking passages from a book. to prefer is to favor mentally, often without any overt act: she preferred me for no other reason. but she had also thwarted it. this much i could remember, but not easily. memory, remembrance, retrospect, recollection and reminiscence refer to the recalling of one's past experience. memory is the mental faculty by which this recall takes place; remembrance is the act of bringing something to mind: her eyes were like sapphires. retrospect is the turning of the mind to the past, and recollection the voluntary calling back of what has been learned or experienced. of the two, retrospect suggests contemplation or careful consideration of the past, while recollection is more specific and aims to recapture a single fact or event for some immediate practical purpose. reminiscence implies the narration and savoring of past events. the card had been drawn. the fool represents the absence of all things real or imagined. it is the beginner's mind and the concept of nothingness. "now that you've come, stay a while." either of the terms of the story that, separated in the premises, are joined in the conclusion, so that they are eternally happy. we met by the edge of the sea. effect, consequence, result, outcome and upshot refer to events or circumstances produced by some agency. effect stresses most strongly the presence and force of an agency, since its correlative is cause. popular usage often substitutes consequence for effect, though strictly a consequence is merely that which comes afterward in time and is not necessarily connected causally with its antecedents. result suggests finality, or that effect with which the operation of a cause terminates. outcome suggests a result that makes visible or evident the working of an agency, and upshot suggests a decisive or climactic result. she had sent me hunting for causes. a determinant, antecedent,motive and reason refer to events or circumstances prior to others. a cause produces a necessary and invariable effect; it may be used in the sense of the determinant to mean one of the prior factors that influence the form, details or character of the effect without being its sole cause. an antecedent refers merely to that which goes before in time, and does not necessarily imply any causal relationship. a motive is the inner impulse that guides intelligent action: a reason, the explanation given. reason, purpose, motive, ground and argument are compared as they denote the basis of a human action. a reason seeks to explain or justify an action by citing facts, circumstances, inducement and the like, together with the workings of the mind upon them. reasons may include purpose and motive as internal or subjective elements, and also grounds and arguments that are external or objective. the purpose of an action is the effect that it is intended to produce; its motive is the inner impulse that sets is in motion and guides it. i returned to the edge of the sea. the beginning of the existence of anything; a primary source. the point at which the axes of a cartesian coordinate system intersect: the point where the ordinate and abscissa equal zero. a quarter section of a circle, subtending an arc of 90 degrees, with a movable radius for measuring angles, used in navigation, surveying and astronomy. in a cartesian coordinate system, any of the four sections formed by the intersection of the x and y axes. moving counter-clockwise from the upper right-hand quadrant, they are called the first, second, third and fourth quadrants. beginning, commencement, opening, initiation and inauguration refer to the earliest period of existence. beginning is the broadest term and is applied freely to human and nonhuman activities. initiation, besides the particular sense of the beginning of membership in an organization, refers to the beginning of things created by human effort or ingenuity: the initiation of our friendship was marked by great relief. this was as far as i could go without adopting the method of the cross-word puzzler, which is to use the answers already secured as clues for the solution of the more difficult riddles that remain. the first quadrant %if transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely -nonsense.% -edmund husserl, _cartesian meditations_ *b*eing in the shadow of someone superlative, spinning round a magical orbit, forming the essential part of the symmetry, climbing stairs that led the way on a day that imposed upon us to stay in the house, i met her trying to see out the window. she had told me to sit down and pause a moment, then she'd give me a reason not to go. i began to cry. "but why?" she asked. "you can have your cake and eat it too, if you like." she was writing her memoirs, she would later explain to me. "how come?" i asked her. she handed me some ice-cream for the cake. "i should be on my way, you see, i'm on my bike following a course on the far side of a wave which brought me here. i guess it's high time i got somewhere." she told me to sit a moment, not to go, that much of her time was spent in dealing with her own endeavors. tiresome, it became. after our exchange, she asked my name. i could not remember and said i would prefer to omit that part of the game in favor of such activities as keeping warm from the cold. this apparently struck her as delightful, that the verification of so small a percentage of her theory could so powerfully strengthen her belief in its totality. the blank in my mind began to obsess my thoughts, as i sank back into a chair to gaze out her window and lengthen the vision of days i would spend with her, each vintage of an hour before the passage into nightfall. to confuse or perplex; mystify. to solve by investigation or study; to puzzle over. to attempt to understand or solve. a toy, word, game, etc., designed to test one's ingenuity or patience. puzzle, problem, enigma, conundrum, riddle and mystery signify any difficult or perplexing matter. a puzzle is usually intricate but can be solved by ingenuity and patience; many puzzles are made for amusement. a problem usually demands special knowledge and good judgement; formal problems are given to students to test their learning and skill. an enigma is something said or written whose meaning is hidden and can only be inferred from clues. a conundrum is a baffling question, the answer to which depends upon some trick of words. conundrums are also called riddles, but a riddle is usually less playful in character: the riddle required my response. a mystery was originally something beyond human comprehension, but the word is now freely applied to perplexing situations. *d*uring the recurring period within which certain events occurred and completed themselves, during the days we came to know one another, she began to teach me many things beyond the level of my previous understanding, forming a bond as though we were a daughter and mother. there were many and assorted books upon her shelves, each afternoon requiring that we find a niche to settle in, while she revealed her special knowledge pertaining to the arts of magic and the stars. "time is an abstraction from change," she began explaining to me. i replied that this was possible to see. "it's secret rests in two bodies of attraction, and in the knowledge there concealed. we must distinguish between two different types of change. the first of an event taking place before our eyes, the second of an event having already occurred. in the first, we detect an event as randomly dispersed, and in the second, it is the memory that is meant. imagine, if you can,measuring the relative pace of those two seagulls in their flights." i looked to see through her window the one intent upon overtaking the other, following in a regular and persistent pattern. "we observe the spatial disposition of things and we follow their temporal succession, but to perceive them moving forward in progression requires the sense of each. as to where their wings will take them and when, each seagull follows the pattern determined in the search for its lover. in this direction, all creatures go." journey, voyage, tour, excursion and pilgrimage denote a going from one place to another. journey is the general term, implying no particular distance or means of locomotion, but the tendency is to restrict it to travel by land; voyage is commonly reserved for travel by sea. a tour is a journey to a number of different places by a circuitous route. a trip is a short journey. both tour and trip imply a return to the starting point; this is made explicit in excursion, which describes a temporary departure from a place. a pilgrimage is a journey to a destination held in reverence. to succeed in time or order. to seek to overtake or capture; to follow the customs of a country. to watch or observe closely: she followed the course of her life. i had, no doubt, followed her here. to understand the course, sequence or meaning of, as an explanation. to come after as a consequence or result: the effect follows the cause. to follow through to the end, as an argument. in card games, to play a card of the suit led. a stroke in billiards that causes the cue ball, after impact, to follow the object ball. *t*he beautiful formlessness of the sea, a landscape that was not land, but the end of the land, upon this edge i stood and stared, wedged between two waves of remembrance, each of which afforded me an avenue of admittance. and standing along this rocky shore, i knew then that i was paired to both. the tide gathered itself as the wind brought to me the sight of the seagulls in their constancy, the faithfulness of their purpose. the silence drew away from me as the rim of my vision parted in such a way that a faint, undersea light filtered across the sand, exposing each pebble and shell as the wreckage of some other abandoned landscape, as though seeing from the bottom of a pool, their fixed shape, the glimpse of some other time and place i can't dispel. by the beautiful formlessness of the sea, i remembered my given name. following an imaginary line, i had started the descending flight which had led to my residence. after a moment, she stood beside me and we talked of my understanding. i had made a big decision not to leave, to stay right here in the house and under no condition allow myself to be taken back. it would be difficult, but i planned a counterattack i knew should work if i used all my hope. anyhow, the first important step was to tell her my intention. by now we were some distance from the house, as we walked along the shore. a quarter of an hour passed before we turned back. i told her to hold on to me by all means because i hadn't been discharged at all. i had somehow managed to get out! she took my hand, "you've only followed the route i made for you." we stood together facing her large house by the sea until the sun was finally gone. events here, i plainly saw, were beyond my own power. emblem, symbol, sign and token agree in denoting a visible representation, usually of something intangible. an emblem appeals most strongly to the eye. in this strictest sense, it is a pictorial device, as a seal, badge, flag, etc., or, less frequently, some object which represents or suggests a religious, familial, political or similar group, either through fitness or historical connection: the seashell became the emblem of our love. in less strict use, emblem is sometimes interchanged with symbol, a word with much broader application: the cross is the emblem (or symbol) of christianity. a symbol may be pictorial or not; its connection with its original may be historical, conventional or purely arbitrary. a sign may be an arbitrary symbol, or it may be the outward manifestation of inward character. token is applied chiefly to a symbol which represents a pledge: a kiss is a token of love. bend, bow, crook, turn and twist mean to change the form or direction of a thing. bend and bow suggest a smooth curve, but bend may also be used for angular or irregular turns: she bent my path toward her. crook means to bend into a hooklike shape. turn refers to a change in direction rather than a change in shape, while twist suggests a great or violent force: to turn the course of a stream, to twist my arm. bend, bow and stoop refer to bodily positions. bend is used of any departure from an upright stance: to bend over the table. bow is usually formal, and describes a forward and downward inclination of the head or upper body. *b*y hook or by crook, i had been found in her book. without defense or protection, being without means, lacking the conditions necessary for any particular kind of validation, as of a contract or promise, i was conferred into a precise point, a mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours led me to embark upon a course toward her side, an apprentice washed in by the raging sea, standing perpendicular above the teeming foam, seeking shelter and one to please. on a day that imposed upon us to stay in the house, she took me into her pleasure as though i had strayed into her presence without there having been any need or reason. a longing bred and borne on the very ground where i had come to stand, a simple enough provocation to awaken the desire for her and violent storms at sea. absorbed upon the forms that made her image, i was protected by the sea's fortification, wishing for nothing more than to work beside her spellbound through these days that promised to be forever ongoing, as all things are governed by her intelligence. the second quadrant %all that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests.% -virginia woolf, _to the lighthouse_ "*w*ould you care to take a trip to the lighthouse?" she asked on a day that imposed upon us to stay out of the house. i said that this sounded like a lovely thing to do. "we can pack a picnic basket and spend the whole day right smack on the island," she boasted, "and completely surrounded by water." the attraction was undeniable and not a little risque. "if it appeals to you in the slightest, a night in the lighthouse could be arranged." i carefully considered the thought. what did this portend? "well, yes, of course," i replied to the pleasure, "but we must rise with the seagulls." she nodded her head. "which means, of course, we must go early to bed," she declared to me. i knew it was clearly unwise to argue this point. in any case, i was quick to endorse the event and certainly had no wish to appear untaught in the particulars of my inclinations. but her point was well taken that a day and a night spent in the lighthouse would surely be divine. we were definitely in sympathy. so the imagined milieu of one foggy night's indulgence did not provoke dissent from me. i had heard strange tales about this joint! and besides, a slight respite would be nice. so the next morning we set our sails toward our goal, tacking into the wind, rising with each cresting wave. "what makes a sailboat go?" i thought to ask. "the wind -that is what." she handed me the flask of wine. "but the wind will sometimes behave in a very odd way." she leaned back against our bedroll, dipping her hand into the basket for a slice of camembert cheese. "otherwise, how could we sail directly against the force which is pushing us? the wind's force passing over our sail's surface creates a lift upon the topside, a contrary vacuum occurs on the backside. this vacuum causes our boat to zoom ahead. any attempt to locate this power is useless, but the laws assure us it is there. this wondrous effect is also assisted by the essential detail of the centerboard keel, maintaining our upright position. and so, there are two forces -one from water, the other from air -known as the parallelogram of power. a boat is capable of sailing into the wind, with the wind, or at right angles to its destined position. we have two sails lending us power. the first channels air across the main and is a quarter of its size. the larger and the smaller unite in concert to provide the proper angle in their opposition. air rushes through their division; from this the vacuum springs." i enjoyed her explanation, but better was the wind against my face and, now and then, the sprays of mist washing over us. she handed me a sandwich i couldn't resist of avocado and alfalfa sprouts. "i think i comprehend what makes our sailboat go and all those other things, but my mind is somewhat vague concerning the proposition of opposition." she told me not to worry. "sit back and enjoy your sandwich." i obeyed and figured by now we must be halfway there. from one perspective i saw our home receding into the distance, and from another emerged the lighthouse's existence. everything seemed as it should, with no other objective required then the one at hand. we clowned and snickered the rest of the way, savoring every glorious snack. any movement of air, especially a natural horizontal movement; air in motion naturally. any powerful or wonderful force: it was the wind's pleasure to serve them. the direction from which a wind blows; one of the cardinal points of the compass: they gathered from the four winds. a suggestion or intimation: to get wind of a plot. the power of breathing. breath as expended in words, especially as having more sound than sense; idle chatter. the wind instruments of an orchestra; also, the players of these instruments. to receive a hint of: the deer got wind of the hunter -hurrah! to sail in a direction as near as possible to that from which the wind blows. a sandwich is made from two thin slices of bread, having between them meat, cheese, etc., only it is highly improper to eat an animal, so an avocado may be substituted, or even a banana if one desires. sometimes an eggplant is tasty. any combination of alternating dissimilar ingredients pressed together. day alternated with night. to change from one place, condition, etc., to another and back again. existing, occurring or following by turns; reciprocal. we alternated steering the rudder while our legs were sandwiched together. it was a very pleasant voyage. *t*he abandoned lighthouse stood on a slight eminence of land located in the center of the island. on all sides, the ground sloped gently away until the shore met the lapping affection of the water's edge. we climbed out of our boat. "we should wedge our craft up among the rocks so it will stay safe from the tide. perhaps on the far side where the highland faces north." while we performed our task with diligence, the sun had waited to place itself beneath the darkening sky and now, as evening came, was nowhere to be found. "now tell me, have you ever seen such a splendid retreat?" she asked with evident joy. i had to agree. anyone would. "let's put our bags away, then we'll sightsee around the place. we can gather some mesquite for roasting our fish. afterward, we'll wade the sound for a clam and an oyster or two." this seemed to specify precisely what we'd do for dinner. "put your sweater on, you'll catch a chill." she handed me my knapsack. i couldn't help but stop and admire the conical structure of rusticated stone, a crown of tiny windows encircling the top. we followed the winding path toward the door, when suddenly a drop of rain splashed down. seeing i was scared, she told me to trust her. we wound our way up the spiral stairway and began to unpack. "this storm is going to be a rough one, so we'd better plan to camp inside. as i recall, there's a dry supply of wood stored down below. we'll light a fire and make ourselves at home." i trembled as the first crack of lightning bathed the facets of the room in separateness, a faint and subtle apprehension stretched my fears undone, directing my intelligence back upon its own confusion. she had left me standing alone in order to acquaint me with another part of myself, some unfelt, frightening quarter i hadn't known. shadowing this initial agitation, my desire to bring her back into my presence prevailed against her absence, and suddenly she reappeared. "i found some nice dry mesquite." i turned to see her standing at the stairs, a sign of reassurance that pinned me to ground. "the fear that i just had while you were nowhere to be found, i do not understand it -i have never suffered such nightmares in my sleep." she answered, "this was merely a device to hear you call my name, as a young, tame animal left unfenced will do when unattended." i stared in disbelief. she had put me to a proof. "your voice is strong and resonant. a fine thing. you have learned from me." she worked to build the fire. "our calls are in accord." i understood nothing of this, only that she'd been restored to me. only that, without her, i had yearned to be with her. "i hope this is not a lesson you will prolong." she answered that the test was tried, then sighed relief. a device used in a timepiece for securing a uniform movement, consisting of an escape wheel and a detente or lock, through which periodical impulses are imparted to the balance wheel. a typewriter mechanism controlling or regulating the horizontal movement of the carriage. to clasp or unfold in the arms: hug. to accept willingly; adopt, as a religion or doctrine. to avail oneself of: to embrace an offer. surround; include; contain. to have sexual intercourse with. to hug one another. to grasp. we made love after the fire was made. affording approach, view, passage or access because of the absence or removal of barriers, restriction, etc.; unobstructed; unconcealed; not secret or hidden: an open heart. expanded; unfolded: an open flower. i revealed to her . my fear, she revealed to me her need. afterward, we took a rest and played a game involving a loop of string stretched in an intricate arrangement over the fingers and then transferred to the other player's hands in a changed form. to engage in sport or diversion; amuse oneself; frolic. to act or behave in a way that is not to be taken seriously. to make love sportively. to move quickly or irregularly as if frolicking: the lights played along the wall. to discharge or be discharged freely: a fountain playing in the square. to perform on a musical instrument. to give forth musical sounds. to move or employ (a piece, card, etc.,) in a game. to decide a tie by playing one more game. "*t*he rain has stopped," i observed in anticipation of gathering a portion of our dinner from the profusion of estuaries that graced our small island in a lacework of tidal pools and shallow coves. she had prepared my expectations with her many stories which had ensnared me into their narrative. "can we go out now and lurk around in the dark?" my excitement was hardly in exclusion to the hunger our lovemaking had awakened, and in participation, i knew we could summon together the varied delights of a seafood platter. since our bedrolls were made, the unpacking done, her permission was easily obtained. this night was a mysterious place where land and water intertwined, eroding any sense of where imagination began, all combined to form this nocturnal vantage point. she said i was untrained in the proper method of catching a clam. i was unafraid and told her so. but still, she insisted on the wrongs and rights of stalking our supper in a definite manner. "the interaction between two communities, one below water, the other above, is not to be treated carelessly. i will not permit you to begin this enterprise until adequate measures are taken." i knew she was attempting to chasten my imprudence, directing me against the act of some taboo. i began to cry. "you must learn these things, my love, i'm sorry to upset you. but until my satisfaction is assured that you comprehend the laws of our environment, i will restrain your actions." my sense of shame had spoiled my appetite, as a different sort of gravity defined itself to me. she explained that i had neglected to observe the rite of blessing which connected the clam to her next home. "its soul mustn't leave a cavity behind. you have to give the clam name." the simple rightness of this gesture afforded me an enlightenment i had not know. "after you christen the creature, she will forever be your friend." i asked if there were any particular requirements in the selection of a name. "the title should serve a simple fitness to the form." i carefully considered the issue. "well, i guess i need to meet the clam and conduct a proper interview." she nodded in approval. we walked across the island to where a curve of land created a small pool enclosed by peninsular protections. the water's surface remained unbroken as a tranquil divider between this world and that. another frame of mind penetrated my intentions as i stared through to this undersea society. i glanced at her just once then plunged my hand into its depths and seized a clam. i tenderly placed the creature up on a rock at eye-level. i faced it squarely and tried to start a conversation. "i understand you have no name." the clam would not respond to me. this seemed an excellent opportunity to examine the streamlined shape of her protective shell. clearly, a fine design. "forgive me this inconvenience, but it's my instruction to inform you that other worlds request your company. you probably have a little anxiety. as a matter of fact, the same has recently happened to me. i did react with fear at first, but now i see the richness of this polyphony. your new home will expose you to many colors of seduction, as mine has, and some beautiful, unfamiliar shoreline." the clam began to stir at my suggestion. i felt the urge to give her an affectionate pat on the head. with this, she cracked her shell and whispered, "it would be my pleasure to commence a journey." i explained she must reveal some attribute of herself to me, some insight upon which to seal our acquaintance. she confided that the treasure of her heart was the happiness of her home, a singular bliss of satisfaction. regarding this, our sentiments did not diverge. so, i took an oath to keep her shell as a memento of our friendship and christened her *lily of brisco.* before long, i had cultivated the companionship of two oysters, four mussels, a periwinkle, three crabs and one lobster. we spread a blanket on some slabs of stone, and on account of our wet clothes, we had to strip to nothing. the calm after the storm hummed a pleasing divertimento, as the night began to spin its own diminuendo. to rest on the surface of a liquid, supported by the upward pressure of the liquid; also, to be carried along gently across the surface. to move lightly and effortlessly, as if buoyed across: she floated dreamily about. in weaving, the filling threads that are passed under or over the warp threads without being engaged. flock, herd, drove, bevy, covey, gaggle, gam, pack, pride, swarm, litter, hatch and brood denote an assemblage of animals. flock is applied to birds and to small mammals, now usually sheep or goats. larger animals, as cattle and elephants, form a herd; when gathered together to be driven, they are a drove. other terms are fairly restricted in application: a bevy of quail, a covey of partridges, a gaggle of geese, a gam of whales, a pack of dogs or wolves, a pride of lions, a swarm of bees. all the offspring born at one time form a a litter or a hatch or brood. the shape or contour of something as distinguished from its substance or color; external structure. the body of a living being. the particular state, appearance, character, in which something presents itself: energy in the form of light. the style or manner in which the parts of a poem, play, picture, are expressed or organized: to use traditional forms. proper arrangement or order. a formula or draft, as of a letter, used as a model or guide. the intrinsic nature of something as distinguished from the matter that embodies it. essence. to give a specific or exemplified shape to: guesswork forms the larger part of this theory. to shape by discipline or training. to take shape by winding around a fixed point in recurrent curves, until a framework emerges of an interior structure. to come out of one's shell. the third quadrant %if we see a city as a puzzle or set of riddles, we will believe ourselves closer to its heart when lost or going nowhere in particular.% -robert harbison, _eccentric spaces_ "*i*t's quite provoking," she said after a long silence, "to watch the flames dancing around the log." we were nestled deep into the sofa, snug and warm, drinking cognac. she seemed at a loss for words. i asked her if, by chance, she was cross with me. "not at all," she hastened to inform, "i'm merely considering what we'll write into our travelogue." happy to be home again after our brief absence, i stared toward the fire with hopes of seeing what she saw. nothing was there but flames and a log, as far as my eyes could tell. i knew she saw things in ways i did not, that an object conveys to her a life, and all that it personifies. i looked into the fire again and wished for her to share what it was prevailed in there. pleading for an explanation, i begged her to confide in me. "it's time you learned to gaze with your own imagination. i will guide you when you need me, but i want your own direction to define itself. although, you should confide in me, so as not to follow through a maze of mishaps, or plunge into a backslide." i reflected on my new instruction then stared inside my cognac glass. her attention went back upon the fire. after a diligent few minutes, i eagerly declared, "oh look! there's a tempest brewing in my snifter." "let me sneak a look before it swells to swifter proportions." she peeked with some discretion, despaired in resignation, and told me i was off the track. apparently my vision was impaired. "i'm just reporting what i found." she wrapped her arm around me, evidently still fixed in thought, her mind behind closed doors. "you teach me language," i complained, "and yet it rarely serves or works to my advantage." an explanation not forthcoming, i felt inclined to quit this game, resolve it to the background of my thoughts, label it a trick to confound my senses. outside our window, a bough of cedar brushed against the pane, distracting my obsession from the issue close at hand. mindful of her mood, i carefully slipped away toward the window and drew the pulley of the drapery, intent upon finding the clue that had lured me near, knowing well it must pertain to the inner workings of imagination, somehow. that which induces or is used for inducing. in a pleading, the allegations that introduce and explain the issue in dispute. the window inspired her interest. desire for knowledge of something, especially of something novel or unusual. anything that retrains or controls. a border of concrete or stone along the edge. an enclosing or confining framework, margin, etc. to protect or provide with a curb. a wayward inclination was curbed by her instruction. belonging to the immediate present; in progress: the current point. passing from one person to another; circulating, moving, running, flowing. a continuous onward movement, as of water. any perceptible course, movement or trend. a line continuously bent, as the arc of a circle. a curving, or something curved. the locus of a point moving in such a way that its course can be defined by an equation. any line that, plotted against coordinates, represents variations in the values of a given quantity, force, characteristic, etc. something that conceals or separates: the curtain of darkness weighed heavily across the night. passage back. withdrawal. retrogression. to return to the mean value of a series of observations. sing a a song of six pence until the song sings of itself, having equal sides and equal angles, unfolding flat upon the table to disclose one red rose, two orchids, three african daisies, seven irises, eight tulips and a bunch of freesia. to move together. *b*ent on discovery, i stared through the window pane and loosened my attachment to the warm protection of the room. gradually, i began to feel the evening's chill dissolve my awareness into separate facets, each aspect of my self folding inward as elaborate reconstructions reflecting one upon the other to reveal an internal architecture precise in its perfection. a spiral stairway winding in a crystal chain led down toward the center, a second curving back in opposite direction. the trickling sound of water drew me closer. i descended step by step into a honeycomb of courts and chambers. here were untold riches. all sorts of geometrical configurations -their patterns extended infinitely, by turns seeming to compound and simplify. i saw no lack of subtleties and symmetries to explore, though i chose a simple one which repeated a two-sided motif of dark horizontal leaves, another of light vertical leaves. each shape clearly a form of translation, weaves of parallel shifts in either horizontal or vertical direction. just as i'd begun to see that both light and dark patterns were no more than identical reflections, it became clear to me that a dark leaf could be turned once through a right angle into the opposite position of a neighboring leaf, then always rotating around the same point where its stays, turning again into the next position, and again around the same point, to continue coming back upon itself through a sphere. and then. . . her voice. i found myself standing before the window again, mesmerized by the snow silently falling in the dark, my nose pressed upon the glass, my breath fogging up the scene. the field outside our house was covered in a velveteen blanket of white. but the spiral staircase was gone. everything my imagination yielded up had vaporized upon the pane, leaving only the vaguest understanding. a light, portable barrier for horses or runners to leap over in races. a race in which such barrier are used. an obstacle or difficulty to be surmounted. formerly, a sledge on which condemned persons were dragged to the place of execution. to leap over. to make cover, or enclose with hurdles, obstacles, etc. a movable framework, as on interlaced twigs or branches, used for temporary fencing. the outer coating of certain fruits or seeds, especially of an ear of corn. any outer covering, especially when relatively worthless. appearance presented to the mind by circumstances. a looking or facing in a given direction: the southern aspect of the house. any configuration of the planets. a category of the verb indicating the nature of the action performed in regard to the passage of time. phase, aspect, side, facet and stage denote one of a number of different appearances presented by an object. phase differs through change in the object; aspect differs through change in the position of the observer. the fourth quadrant %the experience of art acknowledges that it cannot present the perfect truth of what it experiences in terms of final knowledge. here there is no absolute progress and no final exhaustion of what lies in a work of art. the experience of art knows this of itself.% -hans-georg gadamer, _truth and method_ *t*he sound of morning waves broke against the shore outside our bedroom window. i heard their soft retreat across the sand pulling them back into the body of their container, hesitating as though the sand were their detainer, until the subtle lulling washing to an fro awoke me from my sleep. eager to explore to world i had discovered the night before, refreshed by dreams of intimation, filled with inspiration, knowing now this world is something other than it seems, i reconsidered what it was i had uncovered. or was it just a metaphor? silently, i dressed and made my way down the hall, pausing briefly to admire a gilded frame encaging hand-drawn birds pressed beneath the glass -a cormorant, laughing gull and snowy egret. i had gotten her to admit these were the things she'd done to pass the time before i came. some were done in watercolor, others with a conte crayon. even now, she set aside a part of our morning for me to render what it was that captured my attention. i painted pictures she called abstraction -the process of extraction from natural forms the shapes of my conviction, then shuffling them together, as though inside a blender, and calling it my art. every morning i would hurry to examine the color of the day. i loved the way the sky would lift above the sea, the contrast of two worlds where this seam divided air from water, where liquid blue dispersed across the scene in a bleeding azure value continuous as the canvas on which i painted. a theme would finally emerge. i can't say why, but next i would be working in the studio, mixing a thin wash of some new color. after creating the desired transparency, i would begin to put my vision on the canvas. without the need for any preparation, an image would come forward. the saturation of the pigment might be analogous to the nature of the light, though sometimes fancy led another way and where i ended up could be a trifle odd. but none of this mattered to her. she saw lilacs blooming on the horizon, bathed in hearts of watery foliage, their delicate parts opening in the mist. or maybe she found tracks across the snow, traces of a presence yet to scatter with the wind. or a cookie dipping in a cup of tea, bringing back some memory of life before i came. today the light is clear and luminous, the clarity of winter's spareness filling the air with a climate of intention awaiting my invention ------------------------------cut here -----------------------------naylor, '"mired sublime" of nathaniel mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-naylor-mired.txt archive pmc-list, file naylor.595. part 1/1, total size 54880 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the "mired sublime" of nathaniel mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_ by paul naylor department of english the university of memphis pknaylor@msuvx1.memphis.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by paul naylor, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. we are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural sameness, effectively imposed by the west, to a pattern of fragmented diversity, achieved in a no less creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world. -edouard glissant [1] edouard glissant's incisive sentence--which inaugurates a series of essays, first published in 1981, devoted to the possibilities and difficulties of a cross-cultural poetics--registers the rhetorical-political shift from sameness to diversity that structures so many of the current debates over multiculturalism. although the martinican poet and critic raises a familiar charge against the west, that it imposed rather than proposed sameness, i want to draw attention to the curative, utopian dimension of glissant's diagnosis. diversity, while fundamentally fragmented, can be "achieved in a no less creative way" than sameness. and it is this curative dimension that opens up one possibility for a cross-cultural poetry and poetics: the representation of the moment, enacted in a text, when traditions cross paths, and sameness yields to diversity to achieve a more rather than less creative encounter. [2] american literature in this century has witnessed its own series of attempts to produce a cross-cultural epic poem capable of telling the "tale of the tribe"^1^--a tale including not only american but world history as well. this series of "world-poems" begins with _the cantos_ of ezra pound and continues in louis zukofsky's _a_, h.d.'s _trilogy_ and _helen in egypt_, robert duncan's _passages_, and, as i will show in this essay, nathaniel mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_. each of these works, in their own distinct way, holds out the possibility of a utopian vision created in and by poetry. yet not all of these poems enact the passage from sameness to diversity that marks glissant's definition of cross-cultural poetry. pound's declaration in _the spirit of romance_ that "all ages are contemporaneous" (6) has the unfortunate effect of reducing diversity to a transcendent sameness in the service of an all-encompassing view of world history, an effect all too evident in parts of _the cantos_. as mackey argues in his study of the 20th century american world-poem, "gassire's lute: robert duncan's vietnam war poems," these poems allow for more diversity as we move closer to the present and as they begin to admit the impossibility of composing an all-encompassing tale of the human tribe. this admission, however, does not close the door on the possibility of a world-poem; on the contrary, it opens the door for the kind of creative encounter between cultures that glissant calls for--an encounter based on the recognition of the irreducible diversity of the disparate cultures that populate the world. nathaniel mackey, i contend, achieves just such an encounter in his world-poem, _song of the andoumboulou_. [3] for the last ten years, mackey, an african-american writer intent on exploring both sides of the hyphen, has investigated a remarkably wide range of subjects and forms. he has published two full-length volumes of poetry, _eroding witness_ and _school of udhra_; two volumes of an on-going work of epistolary fiction, _bedouin hornbook_ and _djbot baghostus's run_; a major collection of essays, _discrepant engagement_; numerous articles on music, literature, and culture, and he has co-edited _moment's notice_, an anthology of poetry and prose inspired by jazz. mackey is also the founding editor of the literary journal _hambone_, which eliot weinberger rightly calls "the main meeting-place for third world, american minority and white avant-gardists" (232). yet despite the wide range of subjects and forms his writing undertakes, mackey's work almost always gathers around the fact of song. the essays deal with baraka and the blues, creeley and jazz; the epistolary fiction is comprised of letters from "n," a member of a jazz band, the mystic horn society; and many of the poems are dedicated to musicians such as john coltrane, don cherry, jimi hendrix, pharoah sanders, and cecil taylor. [4] for mackey, song, a term that includes poetry, creates the possibility of what he terms a "discrepant engagement" between cultures. the phrase serves as both a title for his recent book of essays and as a description of his reading of the cross-cultural moment. mackey defines the term in relation to the name the dogon of west africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits. they call it the "creaking of the word." it is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. in its anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings "bass," voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend. (_engagement_ 19) discrepant engagement, then, not only denotes a theory of cross-culturality; it enacts one in the structure of its definition. the crossing traditions of dogon and western cosmologies and philosophies of language allow mackey to present a second crossing, one in which traditions of sense and nonsense, noise and word, encounter one and other. mackey uncovers in this second opposition the cross-cultural moment shared by both traditions, although the judgment concerning that moment's value is clearly not shared. this opposition animates most of mackey's writing and generates the cross-cultural recognition embodied in the moment of song. [5] mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_ presents this illusive and allusive moment, this discrepant engagement, when two traditions of poetic cosmology--the dogon tradition of west africa and the american tradition of the world-poem--cross paths.^2^ for mackey, the cultural judgment concerning the value of song coincides with the way a given culture reacts to the opposition between noise and word, with how much "creaking" a culture tolerates in its words. if we recall mackey's contention that the "founding noise" of language also serves to remind us of a tradition's "axiomatic exclusions," then it follows that a culture's definitions of and judgments about noise have political as well as aesthetic implications. [6] glissant offers a useful interpretation of the politics of noise he finds at work in the "jumbled rush" of sound that composes martinican creole. "this is how the dispossessed man organizes his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise," glissant contends. "so the meaning of a sentence is sometimes hidden in the accelerated nonsense created by scrambled sounds. but this nonsense does convey real meaning to which the master's ear cannot have access" (124). the "scrambled sounds" of creole hide meaning from the master; the dispossessed find a form of subversion in the noise ignored by those who possess, and they hide meaning most often in song. in mackey's work, song inhabits this ambiguous ground. in the words of "n," mackey's "namesake" correspondent in his epistolary fiction, "did song imply a forfeiture of speech or was it speech's fulfillment?" (_run_ 160) as we will see, mackey's poetry and poetics offer a deliberately ambivalent answer to this question. [7] in _gassire's lute,_ mackey describes the world-poem in light of duncan's understanding of pound's, h.d.'s, and charles olson's initial attempts to produce such a poem. "the world-poem is a global, multiphasic work in which various times and various places interpenetrate. it is no accident, as duncan sees it, that this sort of work began to appear during the period of the two world wars, a time when national divisions and hostilities were at the forefront. what he puts forth is a sense of the world-poem as a dialectical, oppositional response to the outright disunity of a world at war" ("lute" iii, 152). the world-poem, then, is by design a cross-cultural work. it seeks to represent in collage or serial form the "luminous moments," to use pound's phrase, that transcend temporal and cultural boundaries in order to overcome the nationalistic tendencies that led to two world wars. yet both the world-poem in particular and the practice of collage in general raise significant questions concerning the relation of the author to the material appropriated from other cultures. does the author necessarily underwrite the values of all the sources on which he or she draws? is the author claiming "mastery" over these sources, or does he or she attempt to set up a more dialogic relationship with them? and given the often unwritten strictures against overly discursive language in these genres, how does the author make his or her relation to the source texts evident? i am not suggesting that mackey answers all of these questions directly in his version of the world-poem. there are, as we will see, potential incongruities between the material he borrows from dogon cosmology and his own position as author; there are, for instance, incongruities between the dogon treatment of gender and sexuality and mackey's that are not fully addressed or worked out in the poetry. nevertheless, mackey's concept of a "discrepant engagement" between cultures allows room for such unresolved incongruities without undermining the worth of his project. [8] furthermore, mackey does address in _gassire's lute_ the general problem of authorship and inspiration in a way that sheds light on his understanding of the possible dangers involved in the authorship of a world-poem. mackey's book investigates the ways in which the story of gassire's lute provides a connection between previous instances of the world-poem and brings the subjects of war and poetry face to face with each other. but, more significantly, it also investigates the ways in which that story announces the cross-cultural moment in at least three of those poems--pound's _the cantos_, olson's _the maximus poems_, and duncan's _passages_--and the ways in which the modernist aesthetic governing the world-poem comes under fire. as mackey informs us, pound found the story in leo frobenius' and douglas fox's _african genesis_ and incorporated it in canto lxxiv, so the story brings african culture directly into the mix of the american world-poem. frobenius first heard the story when he was working with the soninke of mali, who inhabit the same region of west africa as the dogon ("lute" i, 86-89). gassire, the son of the king of the mythical city of wagadu, following a fierce battle, hears a partridge singing the %dausi%, an african epic song, and determines to trade his role as military leader for that of singer. he orders a special lute to be made but is warned by the craftsman that the lute will only sing if its wood is stained with the blood of gassire's sons. he is so entranced with the song of the %dausi% that he willingly accepts this price, which leads to the death of his eight sons and the destruction of wagadu. [9] for mackey, the story of gassire's lute becomes a parable about the dangers of song and poetry, about the dangers of placing oneself in the path of daimonic inspiration at the expense of human life. "taken seriously, the notion [of inspiration] complicates and unsettles what we mean by 'human,' since if we're subject to such invasions our susceptibility has to be a factor of what being human means" ("lute" i, 96). throughout _gassire's lute,_ mackey interrogates the possibility that the poets producing the various world-poems under consideration may in fact be susceptible to just such a danger. in particular, he cites duncan's analysis of "pound's refusal to look at the possibility that the ideal might be a party to what betrays it, 'that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure, with the obscene--what goes on backstage'"("lute" iii, 160). according to this line of argument, pound trusted his muse too much; he refused to question the source of his inspiration and, as a result, was unable or unwilling to see the ways in which the sublime may be intertwined with the political horrors he sought to denounce in _the cantos_. [10] mackey contends that duncan avoids this trap because his poetry exhibits a "willingness to question or corrupt its own inspiration" ("lute" ii, 159). i want to extend this argument to mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_ and argue that he, like duncan, courts a muse that makes this questioning an integral part of inspiration--a questioning that intentionally leaves both the poet and reader enmeshed in a "mired sublime" (_udhra_18). however, unlike a number of postmodern poets and theorists, mackey does not unequivocally dismiss the possibility of transcendence through, among other things, song. he contends that song can embody "a simultaneous mystic thrust. immanence and transcendence meet, making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well" (_engagement_ 235). as we will see as we examine his world-poem, mackey offers a revised notion of transcendence--a notion that incorporates the social and political realms and that not only protects against dangerous notions of inspiration and the reduction of diversity to sameness but holds out the possibility of a truly curative cross-cultural poetry as well. [11] mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_ begins in his first book of poetry, continues in his second, and new sections have been appearing recently in poetry magazines such as _new american writing_, _sulfur_, and _river city_.^3^ because of the on-going and open-ended nature of the series, mackey's poems are not easy to enter, nor are they susceptible to an authoritative reading since they too include a certain amount of "founding noise" in their form as well as their content. this difficulty is augmented by the fact that the andoumboulou are virtually unknown outside of a small group of west african anthropologists. even for the interested, information on the andoumboulou is scarce at best. mackey is aware of only two instances in which the andoumboulou are mentioned--in the liner notes to francois di dio's _les dogon_, a recording of dogon music, and in marcel griaule and germaine dieterlen's _the pale fox_--both of which mackey cites as epigraphs to songs 1-7 in _eroding witness_ and songs 8-15 in _school of udhra_ respectively. in the first instance, di dio reveals that "the song of the andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits. for this reason the initiates, crouching in a circle, sing it in a whisper in the deserted village, and only the howling of the dogs and the wind disturb the silence of the night" (_witness_ 31). in the second instance, griaule and dieterlen place the andoumboulou in the context of dogon cosmology, wherein the andoumboulou are the product of the incestuous coupling of the yeban and reside in the earth's interior. as a result of this coupling, the andoumboulou "attest to ogo's failure and his lost twinness" (_udhra_ 1). as we will see, exploring the possibility of a reconciliation of this lost twinness animates the utopian dimension of mackey's world-poem. [12] although these citations might not provide the reader with a great deal of information about the andoumboulou, they do provide mackey with enough inspiration to begin his series of poems. "what really bore most on my initial senses of what would be active in that sequence was the actual music, the 'song of the andoumboulou' on that album, a funereal song whose low, croaking vocality intimates the dead and whose climactic trumpet bursts signal breakthru [sic] to another world, another life" ("letter"). admittedly, an author's comments on his or her own work do not provide a privileged interpretation of that work; nevertheless, mackey's gloss of his world-poem brings to the fore two issues that prove crucial for an understanding of the work: the centrality of song and the possibility of transcendence through song. first, note that the music rather than the mythology of the dogon initially sparks his interest and that it is the blurring of the boundaries between song and noise, the "croaking vocality," that catches his attention in particular. second, note that this particular kind of song opens the poet up not only to the possibility of encountering the past (the "dead") but to the possibility of encountering "another world, another life." mackey's conception of transcendence should not be confused with either a judeo-christian or a symbolist conception; nevertheless, the possibility of transcendence animates his cross-cultural poetic project. [13] although mackey's understanding of transcendence will unfold more fully as my argument develops, his desire to leave open the possibility of temporal or historical transcendence suggests ways in which his treatment of the andoumboulou moves beyond a mere antiquarian interest in dogon mythology. according to mackey, it wasn't until i read _the pale fox_ in the course of writing _school of udhra_ that i found out the andoumboulou are specifically the spirits of an earlier, flawed or failed form of human being--what, given the dogon emphasis on signs, traces, drawings, etc. and the "graphicity" noted above, i tend to think of as a rough draft of human being. i'm lately fond of saying that the andoumboulou are in fact us, that we're the rough draft. ("letter") for mackey, then, the song of the andoumboulou is also potentially "our" song--the song of a form of humanity that is not quite finished, that is still in process of becoming more than it presently is. as we will see, the reconciliation of the "lost twinness" mentioned above becomes a central preoccupation of mackey's world-poem, and that reconciliation may suggest a way in which humanity might move beyond the "rough draft" stage of development. thus, mackey's remarks on his world-poem not only raise important questions concerning our access to history and tradition; they also suggest the ways in which his series of poems may develop the kind of curative dimension glissant calls for since they hold out the possibility of humanity going through another "draft" or revision--a revision that recognizes rather than reduces diversity. [14] the original "song of the andoumboulou," as mackey points out, is a dirge sung by the elders of the dogon. his world-poem opens with this moment of lament: the song says the dead will not ascend without song. that because if we lure them their names get our throats, the word sticks. (_witness_ 33) first, what are we to make of the verb in the opening line? if we listen to the version of the "song of the andoumboulou" recorded by di dio, the song does not "say" anything if we construe that term strictly. the song seems to explore the preor post-articulate terrain of chant and groan, whisper and sigh rather than a definite ground of meaning or direct communication. yet the mood or tone of the song is unmistakably that of a funereal chant; i doubt many listeners, even those unfamiliar with african music, would take the song to be part of a festive occasion. [15] both the recording of the "song of the andoumboulou" and the first two stanzas of mackey's poem, then, bring the listener and reader up against the opposition between word and noise that figures prominently in his notion of a discrepant engagement. so the initial cross-cultural engagement between the dogon song and his own embryonic poem takes place on the contested terrain between word and noise. "there's something, for me at least, particularly 'graphic' about recourse to that strained, straining register, the scratchy tonalities [of the dogon singers] to which the lines 'their names get / our throats, the / word sticks' allude" ("letter"). the direct connection mackey makes here between the dogon song and the lines from the second stanza of his first "song" hinges on the hesitant if not inhibited act of expression. nevertheless, while the "word sticks" in the singer's throat, the "founding noise" of the song "says" something which both precedes and exceeds that word and which, furthermore, precedes and exceeds the singer as well. perhaps, then, we can extend glissant's contention that the noise or "jumbled rush" of sound in creole speech deliberately conceals meaning from the master to include the contention that the noise inherent in both versions of the "song of the andoumboulou" deliberately conceals meaning from an equally domineering master--the master of meaning who demands that all linguistic sounds make rational sense. [16] this extension of glissant's argument brings us face to face with the mystical element inherent in dogon cosmology and in mackey's poetry and poetics. the term "mysticism," like the equally troublesome term "transcendence," is, for contemporary western readers in particular, often overwhelmed by its judeo-christian connotations, and, as a result, the term needs to be used in a carefully qualified manner. w.t. jones defines mysticism as the "view that reality is ineffable and transcendent; that it is known, therefore, by some special, nonrational means; that knowledge of it is communicable, if at all, only in poetic imagery and metaphor" (jones 424). i want to add song to jones' list of the means by which nonrational knowledge may be communicable since the mystical moment in dogon cosmology and mackey's poetry transpires in song as well as in imagery and metaphor. furthermore, nonrational knowledge of the transcendent and ineffable nature of reality may not be communicable at all. song, imagery, and metaphor can suggest or intimate that knowledge, but they cannot make it explicit or absolute. yet song, imagery, and metaphor can make explicit their own limits and, %via negativa%, draw attention to that which transcends those limits. thus, the dialectic of word and noise that comprises the discrepant engagement occurring between the dogons' "song of the andoumboulou" and mackey's is best understood as part of a movement that simultaneously reveals and conceals a reality that transcends any attempt to represent it in a strictly rational mode of communication. this dialectical understanding of the relation between word and noise, therefore, mitigates against hubristic assumptions about the possibility of an all-encompassing tale of the tribe. yet it also leaves unresolved--perhaps intentionally, perhaps not--the potential incongruities between the author's stance and those of the cultural materials on which he or she draws. [17] song, imagery, and metaphor, for mackey, come together in the tradition of lyric poetry--a tradition with close ties to western romanticism and the claims for transcendence that accompany it. yet mackey's understanding of the transcendent moment in lyric poetry cannot simply be equated with romanticism. the transcendent moment for a romantic such as coleridge, for instance, allows access to the "infinite i am" of the judeo-christian tradition (coleridge 263). in coleridge's poetics, lyric poetry is one of the primary means by which one can transcend the finite, material world of the senses and move into the infinite, immaterial world of god's presence. for mackey, on the other hand, the transcendental tradition of lyric poetry allows access to "modes of being prior to %one's own% experience," to "[r]ecords of experience that are part of the communal and collective inheritance that we have access to even though we have not personally experienced those things" ("interview" 48). mackey's conception of transcendence, then, is best understood in a sociological or historical rather than theological or metaphysical sense--as a human to human rather than a human to divine encounter. in short, mackey offers a "horizontal" rather than "vertical" notion of transcendence. for mackey, language is one of the primary means of attaining this moment of transcendence since "in language we inherit the voices of the dead. language is passed on to us by people who are now in their graves and brings with it access to history, tradition, times and places that are not at all immediate to our own immediate and particular occasion whether we look at it individually and personally or whether we look at it in a more collective way and talk about a specific community" ("interview" 54). yet language is only one means of transcendence, and, due to the "founding noise" inherent in the word, it does not hold out the possibility of absolute transcendence. [18] an equally important means of transcendence for mackey is found in human sexuality. in "song of the andoumboulou: 1," we are told that "the dead don't want / us bled, but to be / sung. // and she said the same, / a thin wisp of soul, / %but i want the meat of / my body sounded%" (_witness_ 35). i read the lines in italics as pertaining to that which both "she" and the "dead" desire: to be "sounded" in song, not as disembodied entities but as beings composed of flesh. thus, two themes that are truly cross-cultural, sex and death, meet in the act of song--an act that purports to take the singer and the listener beyond the limits of their own experience but not out of their own bodies in order to share the sacred common ground of generation and degeneration. as we move through mackey's poems, both of these themes take on mythological proportions to such a great extent that in "song of the andoumboulou: 7" "n," the same "n" who is the protagonist in mackey's fiction, admits to having "been accused of upwardly displacing sex" (_witness_ 54). understanding how this "upward" displacement functions in the poems will help shed light on the possibility of reconciling the "lost twinness" through the potential transcendence in sexuality. [19] "song of the andoumboulou: 3" is an extended instance of this "upward displacement," and, as such, it deserves close attention. the following passage is from the poem's first section: what song there was delivered up to above where sound leaves off, though whatever place words talk us into'd be like hers, who'd only speak to herself . . . (a hill, down thru its hole only ants where this was. the mud hut was her body.) embraced, but on the edge of speech though she spoke without words, as in a dream. the loincloth, he said, is tight, which is so that it conceals the woman's sacred parts. but that in him this worked a longing to unveil what's underneath, the word the nommo put inside the fabric's woven secret, the book wherein the wet of kisses keeps. (_witness_ 39-40) the first two stanzas set the scene of transcendence, which transpires in song and in the space between silence, "where sound leaves off," and signification, the "place words talk us / into," a place likened to "her." following a parenthetical element, "she" appears "on the edge of speech," speaking "without words"--a condition reminiscent of the paradoxical way the song "says" in the first poem of the series. this passage implicitly brings together the issues of language, song, transcendence, and sexuality, but to understand how these concerns are explicitly connected, we need to consult what is perhaps the primary source for the study of dogon cosmology, marcel griaule's _conversations with ogotemmeli_. [20] griaule's book records his unique discussions with ogotemmeli, a blind dogon sage, which took place in 1946 and which still stands as the most intimate and authoritative account of dogon cosmology available. mackey signals the importance of these conversations for his world-poem by prefacing the first poem with an epigraph from the book. yet not until "song of the andoumboulou: 3" does the full impact of ogotemmeli's narrative become evident. in his commentary on the symbolic import of the dogon women's clothing, ogotemmeli tells griaule that "'the loin-cloth is tight . . . to conceal the woman's sex, but it stimulates a desire to see what is underneath. this is because of the word, which the nummo put in the fabric. that word is every women's secret, and is what attracts the man. a woman must have secret parts to inspire desire" (griaule 82). clearly, the last four stanzas of the section from "song of the andoumboulou: 3" cited above are a poetic paraphrase of ogotemmeli, and the common thread that runs between the two passages concerns the essential role concealment plays in desire. but this concealment provokes hermeneutical as well as sexual desire since what is longed for "underneath" the loin-cloth is "the word." according to ogotemmeli, amma, the originary god in dogon lore, created the earth from a lump of clay and, after fashioning female genitalia in the form of an ant hill, proceeded to have sex with his creation--an act ogotemmeli calls "the primordial blunder of god" (17). this act eventually led to the birth of twin spirits, called nummo (spelled "nommo" in mackey's version), who determined to bring speech to their speechless mother, the earth. "the nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions" and formed a loin-cloth for their mother. but "the purpose of this garment was not merely modesty": the "coiled fringes of the skirt were therefore the chosen vehicle for the words which the spirit desired to reveal to the earth" (19-20). [21] to the extent that mystical discourse simultaneously reveals and conceals the reality that exceeds rational understanding, then the connection between language and sexuality as potential media of transcendence becomes more apparent if we explore not only the role the image of the loin-cloth plays in dogon cosmology but the image of weaving as well. for the dogon, as griaule points out, "weaving is a form of speech, which is imparted to the fabric by the to-and-fro of the shuttle on the warp" (77). as ogotemmeli explains, "the weaver, representing a dead man, is also the male who opens and closes the womb of woman, represented by the heddle. the stretched threads represent the act of procreation"; and the "word . . . is in the sound of the block and shuttle. the name of the block means 'creaking of the word.'. . . it is interwoven with the threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric" (73). thus, the image of weaving brings us in contact with the primary elements of dogon cosmology and mackey's poetics. the word and its creaking (the "founding noise" upon which the word is based) are essential parts of the procreative craft which produces the clothing that provokes the desire "to unveil what's underneath"--a desire never fully satisfied in and by song or poetry. [22] as i argued earlier, the form of the world-poem raises troublesome questions concerning the author's relation to the cultural materials on which he or she draws, and mackey's use of dogon cosmology here is a case in point: by granting the essentialist notions of gender and sexuality implicit in dogon cosmology such a prominent place in his world-poem, mackey risks an unsavory equation of dogon notions of gender and sexuality with his own. the all too familiar representation of woman as the passive provoker of desire and of man as the aggressive unveiler of truth is not one with which i suspect mackey identifies. and although mackey does not address this issue directly in _song of the andoumboulou_ in a manner that draws a clear distinction between his views on this matter and the dogons', he does, particularly in the recently published sections of the series, explore notions that are consonant with a more contemporary understanding of gender and sexuality. i will return to this issue later; for now, let me suggest that the reconciliation of "lost twinness" will prove to be bound up with a less essentialist understanding of gender and sexuality. [23] to return to the connection between language and sexuality depicted in ogotemmeli's account, this sexualized image of the origin of language has strong implications for the notion of poetic inspiration that underlies mackey's world-poem. recall his argument in _gassire's lute_ concerning the dangers of an unquestioned allegiance to the all-encompassing claims of a transcendent source of inspiration and the ways in which such claims can blind a poet to the possible complicity between poetry and politics. "song of the andoumboulou: 5," which carries the significant subtitle "%gassire's lute,%" opens with "she"--whom i take to be the same "she" encountered in songs 1 and 3--warning the poet to "'beware the / burnt odor of blood you / say we ask of you" (_witness_ 44). the demand for blood clearly alludes to the story of gassire's lute, but the important point here is that those that "she" represents, the "we" of the third line, do not necessary make the demand that "you," which i take to be the poet, say they do. this subtle qualification situates the origin of the demand in the human realm of the poet rather than in the realm of "she" and "we." is it possible, then, that the poet can be accused of "upwardly displacing" the demand for blood in much the same way as he admits to "upwardly displacing sex"? read this way, mackey's poem enacts the kind of questioning of the source of inspiration that he finds in duncan's poetry--a questioning that becomes increasingly prominent in the sections of _song of the andoumboulou_ that appear in mackey's most recent book of poetry, _school of udhra_. [24] the sections of mackey's world-poem included in his second book continue to investigate the possibility of transcendence, but the poems take on a more personal tone as they turn their attention to love as a potential means of transcendence, and, as a result, a reconciliation of "lost twinness." the site of the investigation is also more personal in these poems since they take place, for the most part, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking: not yet asleep i'm no longer awake, lie awaiting what stalks the unanswered air, still awaiting what blunts the running flood or what carries, all our mistress's whispers . . . (_udhra_ 3) with one foot in the realm of waking reality and one in the realm of dream, the poet awaits the whispered message that will allow him to ascend into the latter realm--a moment that occurs in "song of the andoumboulou: 10." [25] in this poem the poet is again awaiting sleep as he sits "up reading drafts / of a dead friend's poem" (_udhra_ 5). as sleep arrives, the poet envisions himself with legs ascending some unlit stairway, saw myself escorted thru a gate of unrest. the bed my boat, her look lowers me down, i rise from sleep, my waking puts a wreath around the sun. (_udhra_ 5) the image of the stairway appears earlier in "song of the andoumboulou: 5," when "she" informs the poet "that all ascent moves up / a stairway of shattered / light" (_witness_ 44). in the passage cited above, "she" also plays a crucial role, although one that cuts against the grain of traditional expectations. rather than being the vehicle of the poet's ascent--which, for example, is the role beatrice plays in dante's epic--it is "her look" that brings the poet back down into waking reality, an act that results in his celebratory gesture toward the sun. thus, "she" appears to lead the poet toward an earthly rather than other-worldly experience of transcendence. [26] i suggest this earth-bound transcendent experience is the experience of love, "and what love had to do with it / stuttered, bit its tongue" (_udhra_ 9). love, like song, testifies to the dimensions of reality that exceed articulation, that can only be hinted at in a form of discourse that draws attention to its own limitations. throughout mackey's poetry and poetics, the phenomenon of stuttering stands as just such a form. in "sound and sentiment, sound and symbol," his major critical piece concerning the transcendent possibilities of music and the representation of such possibilities in literature, mackey argues that the "stutter is a two-way witness that on one hand symbolizes a need to go beyond the confines of an exclusionary order, while on the other confessing to its at best only limited success at doing so. the impediments to the passage it seeks are acknowledged if not annulled, attested to by exactly the gesture that would overcome them if it could" (_engagement_ 249). this interpretation aligns stuttering with mystical discourse, which, like stuttering, simultaneously eludes and alludes to that which exceeds articulation and transcends the "exclusionary order" of rational discourse. [27] "song of the andoumboulou: 14" (_udhra_ 12-14) offers the most complete rendition in the series of the connection between love, transcendence, mysticism, and the limits of language. in this poem, the poet confronts "what speaks of speaking," which is "boxed in but at its edge alludes / to movement . . ." self-reflexive language, while "boxed in," can nevertheless point beyond itself to the "needle of light" the poet "laid hands on." confronting this light, which i take to be the same as that found at the top of the "shattered stairway" mentioned earlier, puts the poet in a position in which, although "move[d] to speak," he finds his "mouth / wired shut": mute lure, blind mystic light, lost aura. erased itself, stuttered, wouldn't say what although the elliptical grammar creates a certain amount of "founding noise" in this passage and makes any reading tentative, the subject of the verbs seems to be the light encountered by the poet. read this way, the light effaces itself and leaves only a stuttering trace of its presence. again, stuttering should not be seen as merely a sign of a failure to communicate but as a "two-way witness" to that which exceeds communication. thus, both the transcendent experience and its object prove to be evanescent, which does not necessarily mean they are illusory; the fact that they do not endure does not mean that they never occurred. it does imply, however, that any representation of either the experience or the object of that experience as stable or eternal falsifies both. [28] as the poem comes to a close, the poet's encounter with the "mystic light" causes a similar reaction on his part: saw by light so abrupt i stuttered. tenuous angel i took it for. took it for lips, an incendiary kiss, momentary madonna. took it for bread, condolences, cure. . . the first line signals the moment of transcendence in which the subject and the object, the poet and the light, share the experience of stuttering--one that is transitory at best. note that the light is figured here in feminine form, as an angelic "madonna" whose message comes as a kiss that is "tenuous" and "momentary" rather than authoritative and eternal. yet despite the evanescent quality of the kiss, it provides, among other things, a curative experience for the poet, an experience that reaches its apogee in "song of the andoumboulou: 15," the last in the series published in _school of udhra_. [29] at the beginning of this poem the poet moves "back down the steps" (_udhra_ 15) of what i read as the "shattered stairway of light," yet this movement does not necessarily indicate a movement from one world to another. as i argued earlier, mackey's notion of transcendence is best understood in physical rather than metaphysical terms. his reading of the moment of transcendence in duncan's poetry provides an equally revealing insight into the same moment in his poetry. according to mackey, the point of duncan's poetry and poetics "is that we live in a world whose limits we make up and that those limits are therefore subject to unmaking. the 'irreality' the poem refers to is not so much a stepping outside as an extending of reality. this is the meaning of the cosmic impulse or aspiration, the cosmic mediumship to which the poem lays claim" ("lute" iv, 194). for mackey, song and love, both of which are anchored in the material realm of the body, are two of the means by which such an extension of reality occurs: the rough body of love at last gifted with wings, at last bounded on all but one impenetrable side by the promise of heartbeats heard on high, wrought promise of lips one dreamt of aimlessly kissing, throated rift. . . (_udhra_ 15) unlike a traditional christian conception of utopia, wherein the soul gets its "wings" only after leaving the body behind, the wings in this poem, which serve as a figure for the means by which the experience of reality is extended, are given to the "rough body / of love." note also that this body is bounded by the promise rather than fulfillment of transcendence. furthermore, this promise confronts an "impenetrable" element that, much like the "founding noise" inherent in language, curbs any claims for an unalloyed experience of transcendence and leaves a "rift" in the promise that cannot, and perhaps should not, be overcome. [30] this scene of provisional transcendence is as close as mackey comes to a reconciliation of the "lost twinness" that may move humanity beyond the "rough draft" stage of the andoumboulou. and it also marks the point at which mackey's own notions of gender and sexuality may move beyond the essentialist notions of dogon cosmology discussed earlier. throughout the recently published sections of "song of the andoumboulou," the distinctions between "he" and "she" merge into a "we" that: would include, not reduce to us . . . he to him, she to her, they to them, opaque pronouns, "persons" whether or not we knew who they were . . . ("song of the andoumboulou: 18") this "we" does not reduce to either "he" or "she" but to an inclusive notion of humanity that suggests an understanding of gender that views men and women as having their essence in collective rather than gender-specific pronouns. i am not claiming that this invocation of a collective understanding of gender resolves all of the problems raised by mackey's appropriation of dogon cosmology in his world-poem; it does, however, point in the direction i suspect mackey will continue to explore as his on-going world-poem develops and works its way toward a reconciliation of the "lost twinness" that marks the "rough draft" of a form of humanity that is still in process. [31] the curative dimension of mackey's world-poem, then, occurs as it extends our conception of reality beyond the "exclusionary order" of rational discourse--an order that has based its exclusions on essentialist notions of race and gender. what mackey's _song of the andoumboulou_ attempts to cure us of is the desire to reduce the representation of diversity and difference to the kind of all-encompassing sameness that compromises some of the initial instances of the american world-poem. as mackey argues, there is a troubling measure of american imperialism implicit in the very idea of a world-poem, which may indeed "reflect a distinctly american sense of privilege, the american feeling of being entitled to everything the world has to offer[.] it may well be the aesthetic arm of an american sensibility of which cia-arranged coups, multinational corporations and overseas military bases are more obvious extensions" ("lute" iii, 160). the fact that mackey's poetry conceals as much as it reveals, like the loin-cloth in dogon cosmology, stands as his attempt to quell the appetite of such an omnivorous genre, an attempt that situates us in a "mired sublime," a sublime that offers us "no way out / if not thru" (_udhra_ 18). [32] yet this result is no more to be overcome than deplored since, as mackey contends, the "saving grace of poetry is not a return to an edenic world, but an ambidextrous, even duplicit capacity for counterpoint, the weaving of a music which harmonizes contending terms" ("lute" iv, 199). mackey's use of the musical metaphor of counterpoint here resonates with edward said's use of it in _culture and imperialism_ to figure his understanding of the dynamics of a truly cross-cultural encounter between peoples and texts. "in counterpoint," said points out, "various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work"--a counterpoint that "should be modelled not . . . on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble" (51 and 318). it is in this sense that the counterpoint in mackey's poetry between "founding noise" and articulate word and between african and american poetic traditions opens the way for the kind of creative cross-cultural encounter that edouard glissant contends marks the "massive transformation" that is shaping our present history. the hope the promise mentioned above holds out is that the new song this transformation helps compose will be more inclusive without being more reductive, that it will be a song which does not insist on resolving all the tension involved in a "discrepant engagement" between cultures, and that, as a result, it will be a song more consonant with this diverse world and those embodied in and by it. notes: ^1^ * i would like to thank john duvall and tom carlson for their careful reading of this essay, and nathaniel mackey for discussing his work with me in a friendly and helpful manner. ^2^ the phrase is ezra pound's, although he claims to derive it from rudyard kipling. for a history of this phrase and of three american poems that attempt to tell such a tale, see michael bernstein, _the tale of the tribe_ (princeton: princeton university press, 1980). ^3^ these are not the only traditions woven together in mackey's poetry; elements of european, arabian, latin and south american traditions also make their presence felt in the poems. although an examination of all of these traditions would prove illuminating, such a task is too ambitious for a single essay. ^4^ mackey has recently recorded strick: _song of the andoumboulou 16-25_. this recording is available from spoken engine co., p.o. box 771739, memphis, tn 38177-1739. works cited: coleridge, samuel taylor. _biographia literaria_. _selected poetry and prose of coleridge_. ed. donald a. stauffer. new york: modern library college editions, 1951. glissant, edouard. "cross-cultural poetics." _caribbean discourse_. trans. j. michael dash. charlottesville: university press of virginia, 1981. 97. griaule, marcel. _conversations with ogotemmeli_. trans. ralph butler. london: oxford university press, 1965. jones, w.t. _history of western philosophy: the twentieth century to wittgenstein and sartre_. new york: harcourt, brace, jovanovitch, inc., 1975. mackey, nathaniel. _discrepant engagement: dissonance, cross-culturality, and experimental writing_. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993. ---. _djbot baghostus's run_. los angeles: sun & moon press, 1993. ---. _eroding witness_. urbana and chicago: university of illinois press, 1985. ---. "gassire's lute: robert duncan's vietnam war poems, i." _talisman_ 5 (fall 1990). ---. "gassire's lute: robert duncan's vietnam war poems, ii." _talisman_ 6 (spring 1991). ---. "gassire's lute: robert duncan's vietnam war poems, iii." _talisman_ 7 (fall 1991). ---. "gassire's lute: robert duncan's vietnam war poems, iv and v." _talisman_ 8 (spring 1992). ---. "an interview with nathaniel mackey." ed foster. _talisman_ 9 (fall 1992). ---._ school of udhra_. san francisco: city lights books, 1993. ---. "song of the andoumboulou: 18."_ poetry project newsletter #149_ (april/may 1993). ---. personal letter to the author. december, 19, 1993. pound, ezra. _the spirit of romance_. new york: new directions, 1968. said, edward, w. _culture and imperialism_. new york: vintage books, 1993. weinberger, eliot. "news in briefs." _sulfur_ 31 (fall 1992). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------evenson, 'rewiring the culture', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-evenson-rewiring.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.196. part 1/1, total size 13151 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- rewiring the culture by brian evenson department of english oklahoma state university evenson@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by brian evenson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: marcus, ben. _the age of wire and string_. new york: knopf, 1995. [1] pierre klossowski, in _sade, my neighbor_, offers two statements that might serve to introduce the startling, and often transgressive, vignettes of ben marcus's _the age of wire and string_. the first is the assertion that "it is not by arguments that [he] can obtain the assent of his interlocutor but by complicity" (27). the second is the realization that "reason itself . . . is but a form of passion" (67-8). [2] _the age of wire and string_ thrusts into the forms of reasonable thought a great deal of passion, revivifying dead ways of speaking by short-circuiting them. the formal genres of both the hard and social sciences are manipulated by eccentric but nearly invisible narrators who, having emptied objective forms of their original content, fill them with highly original visions of the world. by applying extreme subjective pressure to the objective world, marcus warps and splays the forms of capture we have come to expect. where marcus differs from less successful experimenters is that rather than merely allowing science to turn inward, revealing the subjectivity innate to any apparently objective process, he forces the subjective pressure to deflect again outward -thus revealing an objectivity that can only be reached through the subjective. in pursuing a line of flight that cleaves through a progression of selves and then flees outward, marcus offers an array of voices to lay bare the whole of contemporary culture. [3] _the age of wire and string_ is a non-system masquerading as a system. it is referred to, in the mock-argument at the book's beginning, as a device for "cataloging a culture." the book consists of eight divisions of stories which parse the culture into eight broad interrelated topics -sleep, god, food, the house, animal, weather, persons, the society. each section is supplemented by a list of terms which sets out to define words that may or may not be relevant to the fictions of a particular section. these include objects as promising as: fudge girdle, the crumpets of cooked or flattened chocolage, bound or fastened by wire. this garment is spreadable. . . . (43) math gun, the 1. mouth of the father, equipped with a red freckle, glistening. it is shined by foods, dulled with water, left alone by all else. 2. his pencil. . . . (26) arkansas 9 series organization of musical patterns or tropes that disrupt the flesh of the listener. (122) [4] the arrangement of the book and the definition of terms seem formal and orderly enough, and on the surface _the age of wire and string_ seems to offer a fictional world holding the same sort of relation to the real world as does borges' uqbar. however, the orderliness of the surface is quickly disrupted, and it becomes clear that what marcus offers is not a single world but elements of several similar, but not completely compatible, worlds. though the pieces all have some relation, they cannot be thought of as generating a single alternate reality; instead, the space they create is heterotopic, bringing together disparate elements whose connection cannot be adequately mapped, but which are joined nonetheless. how is one to bring together, for instance, the introduction (in montana) of clothing made from food products, the song's capacity for mutilating the body of a man on horseback, sleep's ability to forestall the destruction of the house, a string's tendency to fall in the shape of the next animal to be slain, and the more passionate and worldly spectacle of the mad invader who ties up everyone in the house and forces them to watch as he commits suicide? the impact of the book can be found less in the individual pieces than in the connections which spread from text to text, which make a rhizome of the different pieces and which allow one to travel from one disparate locale to another. [5] within the text, the author's name, as an administrative function by which to gather the book into a whole, falls under suspicion, for one discovers multiple definitions for "ben marcus, the," including: 1. false map, scroll caul, or parchment . . . a fitful chart of darkness. when properly decoded, it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction. . . . 2. the garment that is too heavy to allow movement. . . . 3. figure from which the antiperson is derived; or, simply, the antiperson. it must refer uselessly and endlessly and always to weather, food, birds,or cloth. . . . (77) the ben marcus becomes three functions, all of which mock the way in which we think through significance and proprietorship in fiction, the different functions far from compatible. [6] throughout the stories, marcus performs the theft and adaptation of a variety of speech genres. he is able to treat certain styles and manners of speaking -certain forms of expression that give in their rightful or common context the seductions of convincingness (scientific discourse, prayer, technical writing, historical lecture, encyclopedia entries) -in ways that expose the strategies and seductions of the forms, opening them to new types of content. by bringing together accepted forms of discourse with unexpected content (in the attempt, for instance, to scientifically define a dog as a mode of heat transference, or in the offering of a prayer meant to preserve the wires of the house) the devices that allow for a form's power of seduction are revealed and neutralized. but, by passing into new contexts, these forms are given a new power. they persist as walking frames over which a transient mythology begins to spread, vying to establish itself as the new truth. [7] the whole world rewires itself, connections being established where none were believed to exist before. what might have once begun as the simple act of branching a plug into a wall socket becomes a transgressive and sublime ritual, as an almost imperceptible character tries to piece together a collapsed life, perhaps believing that what has gone wrong on a human level must be corrected or else natural laws will collapse. what results is a technical explanation of the oddest kind: intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household's walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. as such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. this is achieved with the dead wife. she must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. but it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. (7) here the narrator reveals himself only in the definition of intercourse as a superstitious act, in the formal, technical framing of necrophilia, and in his attempt to thrust the experience on the reader by using the second person. the result is a transgressive act framed in measured terms and careful language, at once more beautiful and more disturbing than the usual approach to such acts can be. [8] the nature of transgression itself as an artistic project is defined in another piece, "the golden monica," which takes for its utterance the mode of academic discourse. here it becomes clear that for marcus, as for klossowski's sade, the aesthetic purpose is not so much to convince the reader as to establish complicity. as marcus suggests elsewhere, "members alternate performing and watching, until there is no difference" (137). "the golden monica" serves to extrapolate this statement, speaking of "the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the american house in order to extinguish himself" in the presence of the inhabitants of the house (47). he binds the inhabitants in such a way that they must watch him, and then settles in the middle of them as he conducts a self-made ritual which will culminate in his demise. after the suicide, the narrator postulates, one of the members of the family will somehow manage to get free of the restraints and flee the house. once outside, startled and moved by what he has just experienced, he will falsely confess to having murdered the suicided intruder, taking the blame upon himself. "the act of doing and watching are interchangeable here," the narrator suggests. "[the] spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing," the viewer thus taking the actor's actions as his own (48). such purpose seems to be behind several of marcus's stories, in that he often attempts to place the reader in a position from which it is difficult to gain a safe distance from the transgressions depicted. though the forms of the language at times allow a narrow respite, the movement through the language and the rearrangement of the world of each story by the necessarily active reader give him or her a much more consciously role than is usually the case. such a sense of one's own participation in and creation of a text potentially ends in the recognition that there is more affinity than we would care to admit between seeing and doing. [9] wordplay has often been a mainstay of experimental writers, but marcus's linguistic extravangances here work in a way they seldom can in the merely experimental. marcus's verbal manipulation is successful because it is not overused and does not exist for its own sake. indeed, there are no idle experiments here, no manipulations for the sake of trying to prove the author's cleverness. there is, however, a proliferation of new definitions and redefinitions, and in this we have what seems to be a movement to increased distinction. on the other hand, these definitions often sabotage themselves, and we can find a word so purposefully burdened with meanings that it becomes meaningless. in some of the fictional pieces, this burdening shifts into a destruction of distinction between signifiers. thus, in "arm, in biology," we find the term arm used in a number of ways -as a physical part of the body, as a percussion instrument, as an element of a machine, and as a medical device -with the definition sliding imperceptibly from one area to another, at once all of them yet none. what is under threat, then, are the rational distinctions made at the base of language -our ability to separate things off from one another through our words. what is gained is a revelatory short-circuiting of language that, in making the connections that rational thought would find invalid, understands the shaping of language to be a passionate affair, vibrant and alive. moving from satires of scientific classification to the simultaneous lampooning of the fashion industry and historical truth, _the age of wire and string_ is an alarming and exacting book which reveals american culture in ways that will always remain hidden to the more conventional "professional disclosers" (3) of the culture. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------plotnitsky, 're-: re-flecting, re-membering, re-collecting, re-selecting, re-warding, re-wording, re-iterating, re-et-cetra-ing,...(in) hegel', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-plotnitsky-re.txt archive pmc-list, file plotnits.195. part 1/1, total size 75926 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- re-: re-flecting, re-membering, re-collecting, re-selecting, re-warding, re-wording, re-iterating, re-et-cetra-ing,...(in) hegel by arkady plotnitsky robert penn warren center for the humanities vanderbilt university postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by arkady plotnitsky, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] hegel's philosophy and its impact can be mapped in a variety of ways, and they resist any unique or definitive mapping. one could argue, however, that the jucture of three concepts --consciousness, history, and economy--persists across, if not defines, hegel's work. adam smith's political economy was a major influence on hegel during his work on _the phenomenology of spirit_. no less significant was the very political economy surrounding the emergence or production (in either sense) of the book, which is both one of the greatest documents of and one of the greatest reflections on the rise of industrial and politico-economic modernity. from the _phenomenology_ on, economic thematics never left the horizon of hegel's thought, the emergence of which also coincides with the rise of economics as a science, which conjunction is, of course, hardly a coincidence. "hegel's standpoint," marx once said, "is that of modern political economy [%hegel steht auf dem standpunkt der modernen nationalokonomie%]."^1^ this is a profound insight into hegel's thought and work--his *labor*--and the conditions of their emergence. both in terms of the historical conditions of these thoughts and work--their political economy (broadly conceived)--and in terms of the resulting philosophical system, one can speak of the fundamental, and fundamentally interactive, juncture of history, consciousness, and (political) economy in hegel.^2^ economic thematics have had central significance in a number of key developments in modern and postmodern, in a word post-hegelian, intellectual history--in marx, nietzsche, freud, heidegger,bataille, lacan, althusser, deleuze, derrida, irigaray, and others. from this perspective, one could even suggest that all post-hegelian criticism and theory is fundamentally "economic"--post-smithian. they are profoundly related to economic models, metaphors, and modes of inquiry; or conversely, and often interactively, to dislocations or deconstructions (here understood as *constructive* dislocations) of such "economies" as traditionally or classically conceived. [2] this essay explores the implications of the conjunction of consciousness, memory, history, and economy in hegel, strategically centering this conjunction around the concept of economy and linking it to the economy and the economics of collecting. taking advantage of the double meaning of both the german word "%sammlung%" and the english word "collection" as signifying both accumulation and selection, and of the english signifier "recollection" as a translation of german %erinnerung%, i consider the conjunction of selecting, accumulating (or conserving), and expending principles operative in hegel's work and the processes at stake there.^3^ [3] although most of hegel's texts may be invoked here, i shall refer most specifically to _the phenomenology of spirit_, particularly the last chapter, "absolute knowledge," and the long closing paragraph of the book. this paragraph begins with the image of a gallery--"the gallery of images, endowed with all the riches of spirit"--and ends with hegel's concept of history in one of its most condensed but also most powerful articulations. the concept of history as a collection emerges as a culmination of, interactively (and sometimes conflictually), both the closure or enclosure (which may here be distinguished from the "end") of history and of hegel's book itself, and perhaps, as derrida says, the (en)closure of the book as a structure, and, one might add, as an economy and a form of collecting. hegel, derrida says in _of grammatology_, "is the last philosopher of *the book* and the first thinker of *writing*"--two very different forms of economy and of collecting.^4^ [4] i consider this economic configuration and the transformation of the key concepts involved in it via bataille's concept of general economy, which may be seen both, and often simultaneously, as the most radical extension and the most radical dislocation of the hegelian economy. the relationships between hegel's and bataille's economic frameworks reflect a more general situation or a possibility of reading hegel, which has played a significant role on the modern intellectual scene, from nietzsche and heidegger to deleuze, derrida and irigaray, and which i consider here in terms of economies of collecting. this situation may be described as follows. [5] first, the hegelian economy offers a paradigmatic classical economy of collecting or of "economy." it does so by introducing both the metaphorical relationships between different forms of collecting (or other forms of organization) and the metonymic extensions and causalities that a given collection or organization necessarily entails. such extensions and their economies--historical, cultural, and political--can in turn be configured in terms of collecting, but are not reducible to these terms, or indeed to any given terms.^5^ it follows, to a degree against hegel, that no collection, or any other form of organization, can be fully self-contained. second, the hegelian economy (*in this reading*) carries within itself the seeds of the dislocation of the classical understanding of collecting or economy, including political economy, and entails a radical reinterpretation of both. [6] accordingly, i shall argue that one can map the classical understanding and practice of collecting (and other classical theoretical and political "economies") on the model or a class of models introduced by hegel; and also that one can critically reorganize the classical field(s) of theory and practice by reorganizing the hegelian program (in either sense), or, more precisely, by understanding how the latter can be reorganized.^6^ as a number of key recent approaches argue, this reorganization can in part be accomplished from "within" hegel's "own" text, to the degree that either denomination--"within" or "own"--or indeed the phrase "from within hegel's own text"--can apply in view of the reorganization at issue, which refigures (reorganizes) all these terms and the *terms* of their conjunction. one of the fundamental consequences of this reorganization is that the hegelian field (or any other classical field), and even less so the reorganized critical (non-classical) field emerging in the process, cannot be fully contained within itself, or perhaps within anything, which would also imply a radical reorganization of (the field of) the concept of "ownerships" and "property"--textual, intellectual, and politico-economic.^7^ the "within-ness" (a certain "within-ness") of hegel's program or text does not disappear. a certain "within" is an always possible and, at certain points, necessary articulation produced by a given reading. such an inscription can be either classical or critical, or both, in part because classical inscriptions do not disappear or lose their value altogether, but must instead be resituated and redelimited in a refigured critical field. all such inscriptions, however, classical or critical, and their very possibility and necessity, become refigured in an irreducibly complex interplay of many an "inside" and many an "outside" (or "classical" and "critical," or any other opposition of that type) that can exchange their roles at any point and, in certain cases, interminably pass into each other. indeed any "inside" or "outside" becomes rigorously possible only under these conditions.^8^ the economy of stratification of hegel's text must be reorganized accordingly, and--which is my point here--it offers an extraordinarily rich (although, of course, not unique) model of the general economy (including in bataille's sense) of such a reorganization. [7] at one level, the hegelian economy--the economy of the hegelian spirit, %geist%--may and perhaps (at *one* level) must be read as that of the most discriminating spirit, the very spirit (in either sense) of discrimination--of collection as selection and *selectivity*. it is only through this (economy of) selectivity and selection that a fully containable organization becomes possible in hegel--at the level of spirit. the latter, it is worth stressing, must be distinguished from any human economy, individual or collective, even though spirit, as understood by hegel, enacts and accomplishes its labor only through participating collective humanity--the *collectivity* of actual human history [%wirckliche geschichte%], conceived by hegel as world history [%weltgeschichte%]. the latter is governed by the same principle of selectivity and discrimination; or rather it is governed by the economy of spirit which is governed by this principle. spirit becomes an assembly--a collection (in process)--of ideas and figures for history, including those *of* history itself. these ideas and figures are, *then*, enacted in actual human history as the objective form of spirit's existence in the world.^9^ as hegel writes: "the movement of carrying forward the form of its [spirit's] self-knowledge is the labor which it accomplishes as actual history."^10^ [8] the dynamics of the historical process (which hegel's term for history "%geschichte%" primarily designates) as conceived by hegel is, thus, reciprocal and interactive. without this reciprocity, and without the joint labor of spirit and humanity--and nature--spirit's production, collection, and re-collection would not be possible. the economy of spirit's reciprocal interaction with nature emerges with extraordinary power and brilliance in hegel's concluding elaborations on sacrifice in the _phenomenology_ (493). this economy is, however, laboriously configured and analyzed throughout the _phenomenology_ and other of hegel's major works, most extensively, of course, in "philosophy of nature" in the _encyclopedia_. in view of this reciprocal or interactive economy the very question of hegelian *idealism* may need to be reconsidered, and in some measure it has been in recent approaches to hegel. a much more "materialist" hegelian philosophy may emerge as a result. this new hegelian "materialism," however, would--and this may be the most significant point here--be quite different from the classical (and some more recent) marxist materialism, which has wanted to appropriate hegel (as a kind of early "marx") for quite some time, perhaps indeed since (and before) early marx and ludwig feuerbach. this classical marxist materialism, of which fredric jameson's work can be offered here as a recent example, is, ironically, dialectical or (classically) hegelian, in contrast to what may be called general-economic materialism of nietzsche, bataille, and derrida, which is counter dialectical.^11^ some contours of (a possibility of) such a counter-dialectical "hegel" will be suggested later in this essay. to return for the moment to a more classical--or more classically hegelian or hegelianist--hegel, however, the overall historico-political and politico-economic process is governed by spirit's selective productivity, organization, and spirit's memory and recollection [%erinnerung%] and their unerring discrimination. "the *goal* [%ziel%]" of this process, "absolute knowledge, or spirit that knows itself as spirit, has for its path the *recollection* [%erinnerung%] of the spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the *organization* of their realm."^12^ [9] coupled with consciousness and self-consciousness--finally as the absolute self-consciousness of absolute knowledge--this ideal memory, or this ideal of memory, becomes the model of history. the economy of spirit is the ideal realization of the historical model developed by hegel. history itself--%geschichte%--as conceived of by hegel *is* this, finally (in absolute knowledge), fully conscious and fully selfconscious, absolute memory of spirit.^13^ as hegel writes in the final sentence closing, but again not quite finishing, the book (or history): their preservation [i.e., the preservation of preceding historical spirits], regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is history; but regarded from the side of their philosophically comprehended organization, it is the science of knowing in the sphere of appearance; the two together, as conceptually comprehended history, form alike the interiorization and the calvary of absolute spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which spirit would be lifeless and alone.^14^ [10] what hegel calls here conceptually comprehended history [%die begriffene geschichte%] is not a collection of historical "facts" (a concept that is profoundly ambiguous, if not altogether problematic, already for hegel) but the collection--history and encyclopedia--of ideas and, crucially, of the relations between ideas. the same economy defines the later _encyclopedia_, as encyclopedia or collection of ideas and, again, the relations between them, rather than facts or contents--the first and, it appears, the last project of that type. both the _phenomenology_ and the _encyclopedia_ also, reciprocally, inscribe the history of these ideas and relations, as do all of hegel's major works. what hegel calls "the notion" or "the concept" [%das begriff%] or, in later works, the idea [%die idee%] designates this historico-theoretical collection and re-collection as a dynamic--heraclitean--and multi-linear or manifold process. the notion is a concept in the process of temporal and historical transformation that both unifies and differentiates along many lines, rather than a single abstract, static or dogmatic configuration conceived as a finished structure or conglomerate--collection--of ideas. the hegelian collection--the history and (political) economy of spirit--may be read as enacting an (en)closure, an (en)closure of itself and all other things within itself. but it has perhaps no end, is never finished. in this sense, contrary to a common (mis)reading, there may be no end of history for hegel.^15^ one can think of this (en)closing economy on the model of some major museums, such as the louvre and the british museum, at a certain "late" point in their history, when a certain completion--a closure and enclosure--may be ascertained without presupposing a termination, either in terms of internal organization or in terms of external connections. [11] such collections may also need to be seen as collections of collections, libraries of libraries, or economies of economies (with various organizing and dislocating economies operating at and between different levels). this double, or further iterated, structure is equally at work in the economy of the hegelian spirit and, at a certain level, in that of any collection or library--for example, those consisting of a single object, which concept becomes in turn provisional as a result. collection, or collectivity, always comes "before" (meant here logically rather than ontologically) "single objects" of which it is composed.^16^ every single object must be seen as a complex intersection of many "collections." some such "collections" are separate from and sometimes historically precede a given collection--a collection to which such an object may (be claimed to) belong in one way or another--and others are indissociable from, although not always identical to, this collection. it again follows that no object and no collection can ever be identical to itself, even at any given moment, let alone, as hegel realized, in its historical becoming. the very concept of a single moment itself becomes provisional on both grounds, in the end, more radically provisional than any classical economies of temporality--classical "collections" of moments, such as the line or the continuum--would allow for. more generally, it follows that the complex comes (logically) before the simple, and all three concepts and the relationships among them must be refigured as the result. this refiguration is one of the key junctures of derrida's analysis, which may be seen (and has been seen by derrida himself) as the analysis--a general economy--of the complex always coming before the simple, whereby the before is replaced by what derrida calls "the strange structure of the supplement . . . by delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on."^17^ [12] while *history* [%geschichte%] is, thus, irreducible, science [%wissenschaft%] or philosophy--in short, *theory*--is the fundamental principle and *calculus* of historical *accounting* and collecting in hegel.^18^ science or philosophy determines what counts, what must be selected, collected, or conserved and what, conversely, is to be discounted, discarded, or abandoned. one also can--and at certain points must--reverse the perspective and make history the calculus and accounting of theory or science. both perspectives are clearly entailed by hegel's elaborations cited earlier. one can consider most museums and collections through this double economy--on the one hand, that of more or less causal or more or less arbitrary historical (for example, chronological) contingency, and, on the other, that of conceptual organization broadly conceived (via aesthetic, ideological, political, or other economies, and their interactions). most museums and collections have always been and, for the most part, still are arranged according to this double economy. the classical ideal pursued by both philosophical (or, conversely, historical) projects and museums or collections is the unity--and, ideally, an unambiguous and unproblematic unity--of both. this unity, furthermore, is understood as a reflection of an organized, structured historical and cultural process--that is, precisely what hegel calls history [%geschichte%] as the history of spirit or spirituality. hegel's philosophy and writing may, thus, be seen as a paradigmatic program (in either sense)--a universal software--for configuring such interactions and historical mediation [%vermittlung%] that is necessary in order to accommodate them. such an economy and the synthesis of history and science (or ideology) it entails may be--and in hegel's case, certainly are--extraordinarily complex, especially in view of the historical or historico-political mediation they may entail, as they do in hegel. for, while history and science are irreducibly intertwined and should, ideally, be united in hegel, the play of symmetries and asymmetries (and hierarchies) between them are fluid, and often indeterminate or undecidable, allowing for either position and often necessitating continuous, if not interminable, oscillations between them. [13] this interplay may be conceived more classically within a hegelian economy. its more radical aspects, however, emerge once it becomes apparent that hegel's "software" entails another--by now, in the wake of nietzsche, heidegger, bataille, lacan, deleuze, derrida, and others, equally paradigmatic--"machine" or "counter-machine"--unperceived or at least insufficiently perceived by the first. this second "machine" makes the conception and the operation of the first hegelian machine both possible within certain limits and impossible within the global limits envisioned by hegel. the understanding of this second (hidden) "machine" requires what bataille calls a general economy. i shall consider this "hidden"--counter-hegelian or counter-hegelian/hegelian machine--presently. first, a few more (or more or less) hegelian points should be stressed. [14] the hegelian economy just described is defined by and defines the hegelian dialectic and economy of the %aufhebung%, which is based on the triple meaning of the german word itself--(selective) negation, conservation, and supersession. this economy becomes a collection, a museum of history, governed by the laws of dialectic and the %aufhebung%. in the final paragraph of the _phenomenology_, defining history as "the other [than nature's] side of [spirit's] becoming . . . a *conscious*, self-*mediating* process--spirit emptied out into time," hegel invokes, indeed begins with, the image of a gallery, which is also a gallery of historical images: "this becoming presents a slow moving succession of spirits, *a gallery of images*, . . . endowed with all the riches of spirit[%geist%]" (emphasis added).^19^ collection may, thus, be seen as an initiating grounding metaphor for the hegelian economy. conversely, as i have indicated, collections in various fields, from micro-economies of private collections (be they those of coins, stamps, books, or whatever) to major museums (whatever they collect--for example, coins, stamps, or books) form economies (in every sense conceivable) over which hegelianism reigns--which is not surprising, given how great this realm is and how much it has collected by now. in addition to actual collections and museums, a great many theories of collecting, including some very recent ones, are governed by this type of economy--economy of selective accumulation and the forms of consumptions (or expenditure) based on it.^20^ i must bypass here many specific economic forces--acquisition, chance, exchange, arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and so forth--involved in practices and economies, private and public, of collecting, and structuring them both from within and from without--via, to paraphrase althusser, their multifarious apparatuses, economic, ideological, political, cultural, or still other. the borderlines between all such "insides" and "outsides"--for example, between private and public--are irreducibly indeterminate and undecidable. the principles of collectability as selectivity and discrimination at issue here, however, and related classical forms of consumption and expenditure, govern most historico-politico-economic frameworks, including most accounts of the practices of collecting, and these practices themselves. hegel's philosophy may be seen as a kind of generative calculus or program, an ur-program--a universal conceptual software--for all such theories, which is not to say that it can be reduced to them. [15] hegel's is, arguably, the most complex and comprehensive classical economy defined by these principles, and, conceivably, the most complex and comprehensive *classical* economy undermining these principles. how classical, then, can it finally be, or, more precisely, to what extent can one read it classically, or only classically? the history of contemporary readings of hegel appears to suggest that there may be no decidable or determinate answer to this question. arguably the main reason for this undecidability or indeterminacy (which are not the same) is that, even if (only) against its own grain, the hegelian economy irreducibly implies indiscriminate accumulation, unaccountable losses, unreserved--unprofitable and sometimes destructive--expenditure and waste. "the riches of spirit" can neither be contained--as in a gallery, for example--by this spirit itself, nor can they, or any actual gallery, be managed without loss or waste; the very concept of richness, or conversely of poverty, must be refigured accordingly. hegel, as both bataille and derrida argue, "saw it without seeing it, showed it while concealing it," even if it is read within an economy which remains that of consumption without or by suspending--forgetting, repressing, and so forth, but thus also reserving--that which bataille and derrida see as expenditure without reserve.^21^ i shall, then, consider now, proceeding via both bataille and derrida, how this "hidden" hegelian/counter-hegelian machine emerges from "within" the "classical" hegelian machine (though unperceived by it), and why it cannot be circumvented by the classical hegelian machine and indeed makes the latter possible and, crucially, indeed necessary within certain limits. [16] it is not only the many often magnificent images of expenditure, waste, and destruction (including those enacted by spirit itself) permeating the _phenomenology_ and most of hegel's works that are important. (some of this imagery is associated more often with nietzsche and bataille than with hegel, who is, however, partly responsible for the genealogy of these images in nietzsche and, along with nietzsche himself, in bataille.) more significantly, the hegelian economy (including, by definition, that of the %aufhebung%, in view of its negating aspects) *depends*, indeed *is predicated*, on loss and expenditure. this dependence, and the irreducibility of the unproductive expenditure, are a fundamental general consequence of bataille's general-economic analysis, and no system--hegel's, hegelian, or other--can circumvent the unproductive expenditure within the processes it considers and remain a rigorous description and analysis of these processes. conversely, a rigor of an analysis, such as hegel's, would introduce the possibilities and indeed necessities of general-economic efficacities (in bataille's sense), even sometimes by virtue of trying to circumvent them or to rethink them in classical terms, which is, as will be seen, *rigorously* impossible. obviously (post-)nietzschean, (post-)freudian, (post-)lacanian, (post-)derridean economies of theoretical "repression" are often operative in such situations. the theoretical process at issue, whether in hegel or elsewhere, is, however, not reducible to repression--whether to any one of these different economies of repression or to their combination.^22^ [17] as both derrida and bataille stress--as do most major readers of hegel, such as heidegger, kojeve, hyppolite, lacan, blanchot, de man, and others--the power of the negative may be the most crucial aspect of hegel's thought and writing. the conservative and productive aspects of the hegelian economy remain crucial, and hegel's understanding of the economies of time and of history as constructive rather than as only destructive is central to his philosophy. the point here is not to suspend this economy but instead, to the degree that it becomes problematic, reinscribe it within a different economy of both consumption (or conservation) and expenditure, and conceivably also produce a different reading of hegel or a different form of hegelianism, or conversely a different form of departure from hegel or hegelianism. [18] the role of economies of expenditure, destruction, and death--of negativity--is crucial in hegel. the economy of the history of spirit is predicated on the economy of the negative--death and sacrifice--inscribed as a certain double negative which can no longer be read as the return to a positive. certainly it cannot be read--for nothing in hegel can ever be--as a return to the original positive of such a double negative.^23^ "the self-knowing spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit [%grenze%]: to know one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. . . ."^24^ the hegelian economy may be seen not even so much as an economy of conservation, consumption and gain, but as an economy defined by the ability to sustain and to survive enormous losses and turn them into gains, if "gain" is a word that can be used to describe this--in the deep, including nietzschean, sense, *tragic*--economy. this tragic economy defines the experience (also in hegel's sense of experience [%erfahrung%]) of spirit, as at once the artist [%kunstler%], the collector, the curator, and the viewer of his gallery, slowly moving through a collection, whose immense material and spiritual wealth he must digest--and, perhaps imperceptibly to hegel himself, he is also, and again simultaneously, a buyer and an auctioneer. at a certain level one must, in fact, always function in all these capacities simultaneously, whatever one does. at the end of the _phenomenology_ and its interminable last paragraph (perhaps deliberately suggesting the process it describes), this process is inscribed in the famous double economy--both spiral and phoenix--the economy of death and rebirth. hegel writes: this becoming presents a slow moving succession of spirits, the gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of spirit, moves thus slowly just because the self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. as its fulfillment consists in perfectly *knowing* what *it is*, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its *withdrawal into itself* in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence--the former one, but now reborn of the spirit's knowledge--is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of spirit. in the immediacy of this new existence the spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier spirits. but recollection, the *interiorization*, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. so although this spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts.^25^ [19] at stake here is obviously much more than an economy of collecting--or creative process or historical dynamics in general--even though the latter is, as we have seen, irreducible in hegel, and even though this and related elaborations show how much is at stake and how high such stakes are in collecting. it may be suggested that what is at stake in this "economy" or "non-economy" is, by definition, more than anything--"infinitely" more, one could say, were the very concept of infinity not radically problematized as a result. the question, as will be seen presently, is how this excess of everything, including "everything-ness" itself, is configured. this economy is reiterated perhaps even more dramatically--or again tragically--in an even more famous passage in hegel's "preface" on "tarrying with the negative." that passage continuously attracts consideration, and continues to remain at the center of critical and philosophical attention on the contemporary intellectual scene.^26^ arguably the main reasons for its significance is that, of all hegel's passages, it appears to demonstrate most dramatically--or tragically--the power of negativity and, by implication, of expenditure in hegel. thus this passage again makes the hegelian economy one primarily of sustaining and, however tragically, elevating and benefiting from immense, even (with qualifications just indicated) infinite losses. the resulting economy of expenditure-consumption and accumulation-collecting may be much closer to nietzsche, bataille, and derrida than it may appear. hegel writes: this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure "i". death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. lacking strength, beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. but the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. it wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. it is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say something that is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. this tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. this power is identical with what we earlier called the subject, which by giving determinateness as existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus [this subject] is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.^27^ [20] hegelian mediation (and nothing for hegel, not even immediacy, is, as is clear in this passage, interesting or even possible without mediation) is, thus, above all a mediation through the negative and an ability to convert the negative into a tragic affirmation. nietzsche's great phrase may well be most fitting here, although one can also (or simultaneously) read it as the positive power of spirit.^28^ this is, of course, a crucial and complex nuance, which, in the end, may define the difference or proximity between hegel, on the one hand, and nietzsche, derrida, and bataille on the other, or, in bataille's terms, the difference between the perspectives of restricted and general economy. the question, that is, becomes whether the negative, expenditure, death are still in the service of the positive, consumption/conservation, meaning, and truth, as they perhaps are in hegel; or whether they are tragically affirmed and even celebrated as expenditure without reserve and unredeemable loss and waste of meaning, truth, and so forth. the difference, in short, is between meaningful and meaningless expenditure--and yet a meaningless expenditure without nihilism, that is, as nietzsche puts it, affirming and celebrating rather than denying life under these tragic conditions. for one can still assign meaning--either positive or negative--to loss of meaning, either positively, as hegel perhaps does, or negatively, nihilistically, by denying life, either of which would be short of the (general economic) perspective of nietzsche, bataille, and derrida. bataille's whole meditation on general economy may be seen as that on this passage, leading him, however, to realization that "the energy of thought" at stake there, or that (excessive) energy which should be at stake there--cannot be meaningfully utilized. as will be seen presently, "[this] *excessive* energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning." [21] under all conditions, however, here as elsewhere, the point would be not to dismiss any of the possibilities just indicated or still other possibilities that may emerge in the processes at issue, for, at the very least, such positions or ideologies do have powerful practical effects. instead, one the point is the necessity to refigure them within a richer and more interactive matrix or matrices. both the productive and destructive aspects of the hegelian economy may, in fact or in effect, well be more symmetrical than implied by the economy of %aufhebung% as (or if read as) an ultimately conserving and productive economy. or both aspects may be (re)configured as more, or more or less, symmetrical effects of another economy (which bataille approaches in terms of general economy, understood as theory or "science"). this symmetry does not eliminate the possibility of overcoming the negative at certain points, including and especially via "tarrying with the negative," or other local asymmetries. this symmetry would prohibit an economy that would be always--or finally--able to do so, as the hegelian spirit is claimed to be able to do. it may well be that "material" or "corporeal" (mortal) negativity finally always defeats us (although all such concepts as "material" and "corporeal" may in turn need to be radically refigured as a result). that is, although we may never know when or how, all collections are going be destroyed at some points--i mean now, radically destroyed, so that even memory of them would finally be erased, as george herbert profoundly grasped it in his "church monuments": . . . what shall point out them, when they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat to kiss those heaps, which know they have in trust? (14-16). ^29^ [22] this dissipation--this dis-collection and dis-recollection--may well include, as both herbert and hegel perhaps knew, that ultimate, and ultimately hegelian, collection, which is our civilization. or, as we know now and as hegel perhaps did not know, it may also include that ultimately ultimate, and ultimately counter-hegelian, collection, the collection of elementary particles, that is, our universe--if it is a collection in any sense, which is far from clear. in both nietzschean and heideggerian vein, jean-francois lyotard responds to the possibility of this "absolute" (can one still use this term here?) in his discussion of "the death of the sun" in his "can thought go on without a body."^30^ the death of the sun, however, is a (*very*) small event on the scale of the universe, as nietzsche pointedly and poignantly observes at the opening of his great, and now seemingly uncircumventable, early lecture "uber wahreit und luge im ausermoralischen sinne" (on truth and falsity in their extra-moral sense). [23] general economy is opposed by bataille to classical or "restricted" economies, like that of hegel's philosophy or marx's political economy, which would aim or claim to contain irreducible indeterminacy, loss, and non-selective--excessive--accumulation within the systems they describe. general economy entails the fundamental difference between the classical (restricted-economic) and the counter-classical or postclassical (general-economic) understandings of the relationships between the economies of collecting and broader cultural economies, to which a given collection is metonymically connected. restricted economies (theories) would make economies of collecting either fully conform to a given classical economy (process or theory) or place them fully outside such an economy. general economy would see these relationships as multiply and heterogeneously interactive--or interactively heterogeneous--sometimes as metaphorically mirroring each other, sometimes as metonymically connected, sometimes as disconnected (and connected to alternative systems), without ever allowing for a full hegelian synthesis, assuming that hegel himself in fact or in effect allows for it.^31^ as bataille writes: the science of relating the object of thought to sovereign moments in fact is only a *general economy* which envisages the meaning of these objects in relation to each other and finally in relation to the loss of meaning. the question of this *general economy* is situated on the level of *political economy*, but the science designated by this name is only a restricted economy--restricted to commercial values. in question is the essential problem for the science dealing with the use of wealth. the *general economy*, in the first place, makes apparent that *excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be utilized. the excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning*. this useless, senseless loss *is* sovereignty [emphasis added].^32^ [24] the connections between bataille's concept--or his economy--of general economy and hegel are multileveled and complex. some--such as its relation to hegel's dialectic of master and slave or those proceeding via marx, as here--are more immediately apparent (what bataille calls "sovereignity" here is expressly juxtaposed by him to, or is an ambivalent displacement of, the hegelian mastery [%herrschaft%], as well as a corresponding economy in marx); others--such as those related to other dimensions of sovereignty and sacrifice--would require a more complex tracing. given my limits here, i shall take a shortcut, via derrida, which will also allow me to introduce derrida's own (general) economy through this context. as derrida writes in _differance_: here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of *differance*, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage. we must not hasten to decide. how are we to think *simultaneously*, on the one hand, *differance* as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, *differance* as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? it is evident--and this is the evident itself--that the economical and the noneconomical, the same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought *together*. if *differance* is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it evident, in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short works of dissipating the mirage and illogicalness of *differance* and would do so with the infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with, having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of *differance*. elsewhere, in a reading of bataille, i have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and, in a new sense, "scientific" *relating* of the "restricted economy" that takes no part in expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that *takes into account* the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it can be put thus. i am speaking of a relationship between a *differance* that can make a profit on its investment and a *differance* that misses its profit, the *investiture* of presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss, with death. through such a relating of a restricted and a general economy the very project of philosophy, under the privileged heading of hegelianism, is displaced and reinscribed. the %aufhebung%--%la releve%--is constrained into writing itself otherwise. or perhaps simply into writing itself. or, better, into taking account of its consumption of writing.^33^ [25] this passage, too, may be seen as a translation--a translation-transformation--and is certainly a commentary or a general economic rereading of hegel's passage on "tarrying with the negative." one should also point out the significance of the economic thematics and metaphorics in this passage, derrida's (general) *economy*--disassemblage and discollecting, or rather assemblage-disassemblage and collecting-discollecting--of*differance*, and his theoretical matrix in general. as derrida proceeds, his elaboration--his interminable (un)definition of *differance*--extends into (or by way of) an interesting political metaphor: "it [*differance*] differs from, and defers, itself: which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver or proxies might 'exist,' might be present, be 'itself' somewhere, and with even less chance that it might becomes consciousness."^34^ without elaborating this point, it may be pointed out that this (general) economy would, at bottom, describe any political collectivity, which is, at bottom, always bottomless--abyssal--in this sense. derrida's metaphor, thus, is (perhaps uniquely) cogent here. the politics and economics, micro and macro, of collecting would, it follows, conform to the same economy; and it is this--by definition, general--economy that is my main concern at the moment. though imperceptible to hegel himself, this dislocating economy or co-economy is, thus, correlative to the hegelian economy; or, more precisely, the (overtly posited) hegelian economy is an effect of an efficacity, simultaneously economic and counter-economic (or, conceivably, neither) that produces both economies and their interactions. as i indicated earlier, this efficacity makes hegel's or spirit's collection and recollection--as memory and history without unaccountable and unprofitable losses--both possible and, finally, impossible. in derrida's words, such an efficacity, *differance*, "produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible."^35^ it also makes possible different readings of hegel, specifically from those which would read the hegelian economy as that of absolute consumption or even a more qualified reading as suggested here; or, conversely, readings of, for example, bataille's economic theory or derrida's general economy as forms of hegelianism, "hegelianism without reserve." [26] whatever hegel's overt designs may have been, the hegelian economy is closer to andy warhol's collection of "junk," consisting of indiscriminately accumulated products of modern or postmodern--"late"--capitalist consumption and unprofitable expenditure, although the latter aspect is somewhat less apparent in warhol's practice of collecting.^36^ warhol's art has been linked to hegel (by arthur danto, for example) along different lines--via the question of self-consciousness and hegel's notion of the death of art. the point is not discountable, and it can, i would argue, be made all the more interesting by relating to warhol's practices of collecting. the warhol economy combines or interrelates his art and his collecting. it relates to the overall configuration or economy of artistic production in the industrial and postindustrial world, which, next to duchamp, warhol perhaps understood best, and which, next to duchamp's, his art indeed reflects with great selfconsciousness. this is why the question of selfconsciousness in warhol's art and his collecting are profoundly related, both metaphorically and metonymically. their conjunction again profoundly reflects the metonymic or structural causality in lacan and althusser's sense, which defines the capitalist economy and cultural system, and thus the cultural logic of all capitalism--early or late. taking another shortcut here, one might say that, not unlike warhol, hegelian %geist% is, again, simultaneously the artist, the viewer--the consumer (and the costumer)--the art collector and the junk or garbage collector, the buyer and the auctioneer. one of the profound ironies of warhol's collection is, of course, that it no longer exists, it was sold at an auction and thus, at least in part, returned to the junk economy. it is perhaps unavailable, unreconstitutable in spite of the obvious reproducibility of some of its objects--but not all and in the end, strictly speaking, none. one cannot authenticate them, however, even though the project of reconstituting the warhol collection--and his spirit, his ghost or geist--by re-collecting all the items is conceivable. such a project would be an interesting, if by now a bit tiresome, example of postmodernist cultural studies. [27] it is important, however, that warhol's collection can no more be seen as an absolutely indiscriminate accumulation or waste than can the hegelian spirit as fully avoiding or controlling waste, expenditure and excess. as i have stressed throughout this essay, arguable the most crucial point here is the fundamentally interactive character of all collecting, or of other economic processes which economies of collection metaphorically represent or to which they are metonymically connected. general economies and general economics (a possible alternative translation of bataille's"%economie generale%") are always interactive in this sense. such interactive economies and the economics of "collecting" that they imply would make a *complete* or completely definable collection impossible not only in practice (which would certainly be recognized by hegel), but also in principle (a principle of which hegel might not have been altogether unaware either). this impossibility applies not only globally--in the sense that it is in fact, in practice and in principle, impossible to complete a given collection--but also to any subset of a given collection, even to any *single* object, thus making the notion of a single item of a collection and, by implication, the notion of a single object of any kind impossible in full rigor. in this radical sense of both excessive--irreducible--accumulation and excessive--irreducible--loss, a complete collection is never possible, even if all given items, such as all paintings of a given painter, are assembled together. for one thing, such a completeness can never be assured: a new object can always be discovered and lead to rearrangements of the "whole," or some items may prove to be forgeries. more significantly and more fundamentally, no given principle or set of principles can ever contain the intellectual, psychological, social,political, or monetary forces shaping a given collection or any given collectivity--theoretical, cultural, or political. [28] let me return here, by way of conclusion, to my title. as it indicates, the overall economy just considered would apply at the level of language itself, fundamentally undermining the possibility of a purely philosophical (or otherwise fully containable) language. this *ideal* has governed the history of philosophy from plato on, however complex such conceptions of philosophical language may be. hegel's text cannot contain--*collect* or *re*-collect--the field of its language and the possibilities indicated here by the grapheme "re-," in a contained plurality (or ambiguity, undecidability, indeterminacy, and so forth) exemplified by the (economy of the) %aufhebung%--not even *ideally*, in principle, at any level, actual or ideal, let alone in practice. a variety of german graphemes must be used here, and in fact one needs other english graphemes as well. this multiplicity could not be contained even if one were to utilize every single "re"-word available at the moment, let us say all those contained in all available dictionaries, german or english, although it also follows, of course, that this availability in turn cannot be taken for granted under these conditions, and is, in fact, never strictly determinable.^37^ [29] this iterability or dissemination is irreducible, and not only--and indeed not primarily--for practical reasons of potential magnitude of possibilities (or necessities) involved. "iterability" and "dissemination," as understood by derrida, link indeterminacy and multiplicity in a complex interplay in which relative causalities or efficacities can be reversed: in some cases, potential multiplicities of determination reduce the power of determination at any given point; in other cases, the structural--built in--elements of chance increase the multiplicity of potential outcomes (and it may be shows that these two configurations, while overlapping or interactive in many cases, are not fully equivalent); in still other cases, more interactive and complex economies of efficacities and effects emerge. [30] finally, this interplay would dissalow one to configure or determine such efficacities in any given form, however complex its articulation may be. no conceivable selection or even collection of terms, concepts, or even frameworks can absorb it. as such, it can be juxtaposed to or be seen as an ambivalent displacement of hegelian *controlled* plurality, that of the %aufhebung% or of the phoenix economy discussed earlier--if once again they can be read strictly in this way, rather than closer to, if not quiteconverging with, the (general) economy suggested here. this dissemination cannot, thus, be seen as implying a full but hidden or unavailable plurality or plentitude. a very different conjunction of, jointly, insufficiency andexcess is at stake--an economy simultaneously collecting, un-collecting, and over-collecting (and, of course, under-collecting). the multiplicity, incompleteness, and randomness at stake here are structural, irreducible--that is, they cannot be seen as partial manifestations (due to some classically defined deficiency of knowledge) of completeness, unity, or causality which are not available--a collection whose full reserves are never seen or catalogued. this structural decataloging is not due to the fact that our resources of time, space, energy, or whatever might be necessary are inadequate for approaching an actual, but hidden, totality of plentitude. the insufficiency of that type does, of course, exist, too, and can be extremely powerful, often allowing one to make a similar theoretical point at this--classical--level. the unreserved economy at stake here, however, is more profound and fundamental than any classical economy of that type might suggest. for this unreserved economy disallows the existence of such a hidden totality or reserves unavailable to our account, just as (and indeed correlatively) it disallows the existence of any complete reserves, collections (or collectivities), or accounts, at any level, be they historical, theoretical, economic, or political. all relationships defining collecting (or history and economy), such as those between history and science as considered earlier, would have to be restructured accordingly. [31] the same economy would apply to reiterating, or re-etceterating, hegel himself--his ultimately uncontainable, uncataloguable, uncollectible work, or works: while they do exist and must (it appears) have been written at some point, they cannot be fully located (present) either in a "text itself" (an expression no longer possible either) or in the conditions of their production (or/as reception), but must instead be seen as emerging in a complex interaction between both and, conceivably, within something that is neither. what would, from this perspective, constitute hegel's complete works or a collection of all his writings, even if one could be assured a possession of the extant manuscripts and editions, which is in fact impossible? there is a structural uncollectibility at stake here. such a library of hegel is closer to the library of alexandria, always already burned, as it were. for the economy at stake here is, as i said, always--and indeed, in a deep sense, always already--*tragic*. one might even try to see it as a kind of phoenix economy in reverse, something that, at the higher conceptual and material (including technological) levels, proceeds from resurrection to death, again in a kind of (post-) hegelian double negative which does not return to the original positive. it may be something close to what benjamin, conceivably also with hegel in mind, envisions in his famous picture, via klee's work (in benjamin's *collection*), of the angel of history, although the latter image has itself become by now just about as un-resurrectable intellectual cliche--not unlike a reproduction of a photograph of klee's painting, or of benjamin himself (also quite ubiquitous, cliche-like, by now), painted over by an imitator of warhol. [32] it also follows, however, that in this economy, destruction cannot be absolute either, and in turn is never assured, even if one tries to burn all the books, which has often been attempted, and not only in science fiction. to end with another of benjamin's titles--"unpacking my library"--we are always in transit, as benjamin was on his way to america, without an assurance of arrival, even if one arrives geographically speaking. we are always unpacking, packing and repacking our libraries and galleries, individual and collective, of books and images, endowed with the riches and poverty of matter and spirit, or both or perhaps neither. one may need a very different un-nameable or un-writable, even if "writing" is taken in derrida's sense, to approach these "resources" and "reserves," whose (un)economy may need as yet unheard of forms of philosophy and economics alike. notes: ^1^ "okonomisch-philosophische manuscripte (1944),"_marx/engels gesamtaufgabe, erste abteilung_ (berlin: marx-engels verlag, 1932), 3:157. ^2^ it may not be a unique defining juncture in hegel, and it is no longer possible to speak in terms of unique or uniquely determining (or uniquely determined) junctures anywhere. it is difficult, however, to circumvent such terms in hegel--which is about as much as one can say about anything called "fundamental." ^3^ in addition to being a metaphor of market and management (from the greek %oikos% and %oikonomia%, house and household), economy is, of course, also a metaphor from physics, a metaphor of energy, play of forces, and so forth, which cluster of metaphors also plays a significant role in hegel's work, for example, in "force and the understanding" [%kraft und verstand%] of the _phenomenology_. economy also designates science or other forms of account or the representation of a given *economy* as a process of the play of forces, as in "political economy" or "general economy" in bataille, just as in the historical field, the word history may designate both--historical process and its representation--both of which may in turn be seen as economies (in the two senses just indicated). i have considered various aspects of the economy metaphor in hegel and other figures to be discussed here, in _reconfigurations: critical theory and general economy_ (gainesville, fl.: university press of florida, 1993). ^4^ _of grammatology_, trans. gayatri c. spivak (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1974), 26. ^5^ one might also think this dynamics in terms of althusser's concepts of the metonymic or structural causality, introduced, via lacan, in _reading capital_ and, according to althusser, constituting marx's "immense theoretical revolution" (_reading capital_, tr. ben brewster [london: verso, 1979], 182-94). my analysis here would imply, however, that this "immense theoretical revolution" (which is perhaps no less althusser than marx) should be seen as a (materialist) extension--or again an extension-dislocation--of the economy offered by hegel, rather than, as althusser argues, only in juxtaposition to it. ^6^ the term "critical reorganization" may well be preferable to "deconstruction" here, although most deconstructions that could be invoked here are in fact or in effect also reorganizations in this sense, sometimes, certainly in derrida, explicitly and pointedly so. ^7^ the question of "property" (traversing near the totality of the semantic field of the term) played an especially significant role in nietzsche, heidegger, bataille, and derrida, and their relationships with hegel (and each other). as will be seen in more detail later, it follows that the very possibility of a totality of any semantic field and the very denomination "semantic field," too, become problematic as result. ^8^ cf. derrida's discussion in _of grammatology_ (30-73). ^9^ the status of this "then" becomes complicated and, finally, problematic in view of the irreducible role of "actual human history" in this process, and, it has often been argued, is never quite resolved by hegel (either in the _phenomenology_ or elsewhere). what derrida calls "supplementarity" and, therefore, a general-economic form of theorizing (to which derrida's supplementarity conforms) become, at the very least, necessary here. whether and to what degree hegel's framework itself approaches supplementarity is in turn a complex and, conceivably, finally undecidable question. leaving a further discussion of these issues for the later part of this essay, one might say here that in hegel spirit is always "ahead" of humanity within a certain reciprocal economy--as, one might suggest with caution, some human beings may sometimes be seen as "ahead" of a given group or collectivity, while still depending on this group. ^10^ _hegel's phenomenology of spirit_, trans. a.v. miller (oxford: oxford university press, 1977), 488. all subsequent references are to this edition. the german edition used is _phanomenologie des geistes, werke im 20 banden_ (frankfurt am mein: suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 3. ^11^ cf. fredric jameson, _late marxism: adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic_ (london: verso, 1990), 241. i have considered jameson's work in _reconfigurations_ (245-96). ^12^ _phenomenology_, 493. ^13^ this memory, again, should not be confused with any form of human memory, individual or collective. ^14^ _phenomenology_, 493; translation modified. ^15^ the question of the end of history, in hegel and in general, have resurfaced recently in the context of the *historico*geopolitical reconfiguration (the emphasis is, i think, due here) in the wake of the collapse of the soviet union and the (so-called) communist eastern europe. derrida's discussion in _specters of marx_ (new york: routledge, 1994) is especially pertinent here. ^16^ of course, the very (classical) concept of ontology becomes problematic under the conditions of general economy; and, to the degree that one can apply classical language here, the proposition just offered may be given a certain ontological sense as well, even though one can, loosely speaking, start a collection with a single object or add a single new object to a given collection. this way of speaking is very loose (although in practice often functional) because the very concept of "a single object" becomes highly provisional here; and indeed one may well question in what sense, if at all, one can still speak of "collection" under these conditions. rhetorically and strategically, however, the proposition that a "collection" precedes "a single object" would retain its effectiveness, especially within the (en)closure of classical concepts. ^17^ _speech and phenomena and other essays on husserl's theory of signs_, trans. david b. allison (evanston: northwestern university press, 1973), 89. for derrida's deconstruction of classical temporality see _speech and phenomena_ and his "ousia and gramme" (in _margins_), in the latter essay in the context of hegel and heidegger. the question itself, however, is central throughout derrida's work. ^18^ these metaphors have crucial significance for hegel, in view of newton's or leibniz's calculus, on the one hand, and adam smith's political economy, on the other. ^19^ _phenomenology_, 492. ^20^ thus, susan stuart's discussion of collecting in _on longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection_ (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1984) still largely conforms to this hegelian economy, in spite of its materialist and (in a certain sense) deconstructive aspiration. ^21^ although the concept of general economy recurs throughout derrida's texts, i refer here most specifically to derrida's essay on bataille and hegel, "from restricted to general economy: a hegelianism without reserve," _writing and difference_, trans. alan bass (chicago: university of chicago press, 1979). the sentence just cited is from this essay (260). ^22^ nor is it, i think, reducible to de manian economy of "blindness and insight" (to the degree that the latter can be described only in these terms), which is significant for understanding the processes at issue here, and which must be seen as different from other economies just mentioned. the concepts of "repression" in all of these texts would require a lengthy analysis. ^23^ systems where the double negation of an object a is not, in general, equal to a do exist even in mathematical logic, for example, in the intuitionistic mathematics of l.e.j. brouwer and a. heyting. while the double negations at issue here are, obviously, more complex, they would not allow one simply to dispense with classical logic, mathematical or philosophical, which must instead be refigured within new theoretical economies. ^24^ _phenomenology_, 492. ^25^ _phenomenology_, 492. ^26^ most recently, hegel's passage served as the conceptual center of slavoj zizek's, post-lacanian, _tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel and the critique of ideology_ (durham: duke university press, 1993). ^27^ _phenomenology_, 19. ^28^ thus, see hegel's elaborations on reason [%vernunft%], which concept may understood via a conversion of a negative relation to otherness into a positive one (_phenomenology_, 139). ^29^ an assembly of "church monuments" can in turn be seen as a collection. in many ways it offer a paradigmatic case of collection as monumentalization with significant metaphoric (and metonymic) potential and implications for our understanding of all collecting. herbert's poem, of course, itself comes from a collection (in either sense) called _the temple_, which, too, designate an economy of spirit, and may be considered from the perspective developed here, as can many other poetry collections, especially those which themselves deal--as, for example, do shakespeare's _sonnets_--with the economies (productive or dislocating, or both) at issue. herbert's poem clearly refers to his own writing as well and to the economy of writing and reading--and history--in general, as monumentalization. as such the poem and its "rhetoric of temporality" offers a powerful allegory (also in de man's sense) of all the processes just invoked and of their interaction. ^30^ see "can thought go on without a body," _the inhuman_, trans. geoffrey bennington and rachel bowlby (stanford, ca.: stanford university press, 1991). ^31^ i have considered such relationships more generally under the heading of "complementarity," conceived on the model of niels bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics, in _in the shadow of hegel: complementarity, history and the unconscious_ (gainesville, fl.: university press of florida, 1993), and in _complementarity: anti-epistemology after bohr and derrida_ (durham: duke university press, 1994). ^32^ "methode de meditation," _oeuvres completes_ (paris: gallimard, 1970--), 5:215-16. ^33^ _margins of philosophy_, trans. alan bass (chicago: university of chicago press, 1982), 19. ^34^ _margins of philosophy_, 20-21. ^35^ _of grammatology_, 143. ^36^ there are other crucial "political economies" involved--such as those of sexuality and gender--which would require a separate analysis. ^37^ while a number of words available (at a given point) in any given language or in any combination of languages is finite (although again not necessarily determinate), and even if it were finite or determined, the number of possible combinations, any one of which may become necessary at some point in processes such as that described here, is potentially infinite. it is infinite because the number of sentences we may construct is potentially infinite, for example, in view of the fact that we can construct sentences with numerals %ad infinitum%--such as "one needs *one* word in order to approach the concept at issue," "we need *two* words in order to approach the concept at issue," etc. it is important to keep -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------wood, 'bring the noise! william s. burroughs and music in the expanded field', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-wood-bring.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.195. part 1/1, total size 39276 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- bring the noise! william s. burroughs and music in the expanded field by brent wood methodologies for the study of western history and culture trent university bwood@trentu.ca postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by brent wood, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] music, it seems, has always been the art that most easily eludes the grasp of theory. perhaps it is the spectator relationship implied by "theory" that allows the visceral vibrations of music, even art music, to remain unaccounted for. as frith and goodwin (1990) have pointed out, in the discourse of cultural studies the "textual" analysis of music itself--as opposed to lyrics, iconography or consumption--remains extraordinarily immature when compared with treatment of the visual arts. popular music in particular poses a challenge to cultural theorists who must bridge the gap between traditional musicology, which tends to isolate music from its socio-political context, and sociological or anthropological perspectives which handle music's physical presence poorly. post-modernist theory has dealt with many such contextual challenges in its encounters with visual pop art in sculpture, painting, film, and even television. why, then, is it so often necessary, when confronted with academic music commentary, to ask with mcclary and walser (quoting _bloom county_'s billy and the boingers), "yeah, but did we kick butt?"^1^ [2] one obvious reason that music is so resistant to theory is the difficulty of representing the object of study verbally. musicians have enough trouble communicating to one another what they hear in their aural imagination without bringing in non-musicians to complicate the picture. as sound has become easier to record and to reproduce, however, the concept of sound as an object manipulable by artist (and consumer) has become less far-fetched. it seems we have reached a point where it has become necessary to think of music as operating in an "expanded field" if we are to have any possibility at all of comprehending public enemy and stravinsky, woody guthrie and john cage, michael jackson and the dead kennedys (all available in the same digital format at the same retail outlet) as instances of one and the same "art."^2^ the difficulty of commenting on music through the written word has been eclipsed by the possibilities of commenting on musical objects by manipulating copies of them with the help of sound-reproduction technology. as laurent jenny observed a generation ago, whenever new technological possibilities come into the hands of artists there is a tendency for the various arts to blend into one another.^3^ this occurs not only stylistically and thematically but also technically. in other words, modernist intertextuality explodes into a post-modernist inter-mediality. in 1994, with spoken word an mtv fad and william s. burroughs advertising nike products, it is past high time to examine the sort of music-poetry which is forming today, and which constitutes a major "post-modernist" project in music. [3] why characterize this tendency as a "project"? because it is, naturally, a "work-in-progress." as a time-based art, it exists "in progress" as a moment of resistance to the results of the technological acceleration of the 20th century. the project today is essentially a continuous experiment in %bricolage% using the mechanical and verbal and sonic tools of commerce. it has perhaps become necessary to make use of jacques attali's argument for music-as-theory in order to get a grip on the currents which are most prominent in the project.^4^ attali hears currents of social (re)organization in the commercialization of sound, noise and rhythm; in these general terms, the post-modernist music project is about intervening in those patterns with new patterns, sculpting with garbage, found objects, and reclaimed enemy weaponry. this is a form of theory that doesn't meet the requirements of the print-based academy. whether it has the stereotypical "punk" stylistic trappings or not, we can confidently give a name to this localized, ever-changing, music-in-the-expanded field, theory-project. that name is "cyberpunk." [4] i will now seek, in spite of the argument i have just made, to retain a modicum of credibility while attempting to describe and comment, in written words, on five interrelated instances of this project. the preceding three paragraphs may be read as a contextualization for the following review of five more-or-less-recent sound recordings in which the confluence of musical streams traceable to euro-american and afro-american sources forms a whirlpool around the venerable figure of william s. burroughs. these recordings include burroughs's own _dead city radio_ (1990) and _spare-ass annie_ (1993); the revolting cocks' _beers steers and queers_ (1991) and _linger ficken good_ (1993); and the ministry/burroughs collaboration _just one fix_ (1992). the reader will find that, like the music under study, i will end up attempting to explain the effects of various pieces by comparing them with other well-known musical texts. perhaps i can justify my (electronically produced) literary commentary by offering it as a sort of annotated discography to contemporary recordings which can only be located as music within an expanded field. it will be up to the reader to take action (or not) in her or his sonic sphere. [5] the motivation for this review springs from a question that was posed to me over the recent television advertisement for nike which features william burroughs. in the ad, burroughs appears on a miniature tv set being kicked around by joggers. "the purpose of technology is to aid the body, not confuse the mind," says the bard. nike isn't selling shoes, of course; it's selling a mainstream counter-culture, and burroughs is only the most recent icon chosen by the champ of hip footwear. the question is, how did we get from spike lee to bull lee? it's no secret that burroughs has been rediscovered by a younger generation for whom the beats and hippies that he once inspired are no more than the stuff of which movies are made.^5^ receiving much less media attention than his appearance in van sant's _drugstore cowboy_ (1988), or cronenberg's adaptation of _naked lunch_ (1992), however, has been burroughs's 1990 cd _dead city radio_, which has had a measurable influence through the medium of college radio if nowhere else. [6] _dead city radio_ grew out of a 1981 appearance by burroughs on _saturday night live_ during which he read "twilight's last gleaming" while an old nbc radio orchestra recording of "the star spangled banner" was played.^6^ hal willner, then music co-ordinator for snl, was struck by the power and grace of burroughs's reading voice. willner grew interested in expanding the project of putting burroughs on tape, and travelled to burroughs's home in the university town of lawrence, kansas to do the job. the majority of the music on _dead city radio_ is drawn from those same nbc radio orchestra archives, and all the spoken word from the lawrence sessions. willner, on the recording's liner notes, claims to have chosen the music in order to highlight burroughs's quintessentially american attributes. indeed, the effect of burroughs's critiques of american government, christian morality, racism, homophobia, and drug wars when set against the nbc orchestra's nostalgic "program music" is a powerful one. [7] in 1993 burroughs's familiar aging figure, in hat and tie, appeared once again in the popular music racks in another willner production entitled _spare-ass annie and other tales_. once again, willner had taken tracks from the lawrence sessions and set music to them; this time it was with the aid of the disposable heroes of hiphoprisy, the multi-cultural hip-hop group whose earlier popular recording "television--the drug of a nation" echoed burroughs's own feelings about the addictive american psychology. in stark contrast to the symphonic textures of _dead city radio_, most of the musical material of _spare-ass annie_ consists of relaxed hip-hop grooves created from looped sound-samples. not only had burroughs had been brought from the past (back) into the future (a copy of the one he once imagined in his 1960's experimental fiction), he had also been "crossed-over" from white culture into black, a vital step in the passage from the beat-jazz of cronenberg's _naked lunch_ to a role as technological soccer-ball kicked around by shoes the size of michael jordan's over the beat of a dj. it is apparent that burroughs now occupies a position with respect to mainstream corporate culture analogous to the one assumed by public enemy and other artists who specialize in cultural appropriation to make their critiques. bring the noise! [8] the creation of silence through noise-making has an honourable history. since white people deemed black people's music to be noise several centuries ago, black people have had the lead in communicating publicly through noise. in twentieth-century art music, white european and american experimental composers, such as john cage and iannis xenakis, began to play with the possibilities of noise. since capital hit popular music in a big way, however, its principal figures have been jimi hendrix and johnny rotten, black and white icons for noise-resistance in popular music. today, amid the never-ending war of words that characterizes our cybernetically-organized society, the control of communication technology is vital for any kind of resistance to the seductions of commercial culture. public enemy's chuck d called hip-hop "tv for black america"; in just this way, i would argue, cyberpunk music is the underground info-highway for white youth. burroughs's influence on ministry's al jourgensen and paul barker is evident throughout their work, including that done in the guise of the revolting cocks on the cds _beers, steers and queers_ and _linger ficken good_. special tribute was paid when burroughs's voice and text were used on ministry's 1992 cd single "just one fix." [9] all five recordings examined here use sound-reproduction technology to collage together a wide range of material, including readings from previously published texts, commercial film and television soundtracks, a variety of sound effects, and clips or imitations of advertising lingo. these are recombined with minimal new musical material. the effectiveness of the resulting tracks depends entirely on a redefinition of "noise" and a recognition of the necessity of throwing back the word-garbage and music-garbage which rains down upon us from corporate culture machines. the contrast between the various elements which make up a composition is the source of its success or failure in composition terms. the role of "noise" is central, not only in the form of distortion, white noise and background noise, but also as a paradigm for the creation of silent space in a soundscape saturated by mass media. burroughs is the perfect candidate for this kind of textual re-arrangement, since much of his own work is self-consciously the rearrangement of the work of others, designed to function in just this way. what follows here is an attempt to read the various takes on william burroughs texts that have surfaced in the expanded field. [10] _dead city radio_ is destined to become a classic in the burroughs catalogue. the performances by the nbc orchestra and various other sources are lush, and generally work with the texts by evoking a mood which is recognizable to the listener from other media experiences.^7^ the opening track, "william's welcome" is the exception on the album, a collectively produced soundscape for which burroughs provides soundbites which are subjected to pink floyd-style electronic manipulation. in the majority of the tracks, music and text are overlaid to create a feeling of twisted americana. this tactic is especially evident in "kill the badger" and "thanksgiving prayer," both of which retell burroughs's own "ugly american" story. in the first, the central role is occupied by burroughs's former counsellor at the los alamos boys school to which he was sent as a child. the music for this piece, an aaron copeland-like bit of orchestral program music, is made to feel terrible and twisted by the text. in the same way the "pomp and circumstance" march of "thanksgiving prayer" is made sad and ironic by burroughs's black version of grace, the blunt imagery of which, contrasted with the orchestra's moody modal tensions, recalls in mood nothing so much as morrison's "american prayer."^8^ [11] other noteworthy pieces on the disc include "ah pook the destroyer," "where he was going" and "apocalypse." "ah pook" succinctly iterates burroughs's standard warning against the tools of death (time, control, and junk). the warning is set against minimalist electronic accompaniment by john cale reminiscent of much of laurie anderson's recent work. the effect here is more like the science-fiction of anderson's earlier sound-recordings or of the ministry pieces which i will deal with presently. "after-dinner conversation/where he was going," burroughs's take on hemingway, is perhaps the most sumptuous piece on any of the discs under review. the story is a variation on hemingway's classic short story "snows of kilimanjaro," reset in a gangster-movie rural midwest. it uses church organ, sound effects, and mild electronic voice manipulation to achieve the effect of a radio play heard as an electronic sunday night bedtime story. the preoccupation with death continues into the series of "moralist" texts (in burroughs's special sense of that word) that form a suite of interconnecting sound-poems culminating in "apocalypse." in some segments burroughs reads from the bible over a background of mock middle eastern music that could have been borrowed from _ben-hur_. "apocalypse" itself is a monumental work, beginning with a celebration of an animist theology represented by hassan i. sabah: "consider a revolutionary statement. . . . nothing is true, everything is permitted." burroughs here explains the meaning of this soundbite whose citations continue to grow more common. the text, reminiscent of _naked lunch_, is, according to liner notes, drawn from an experiment with silk screen done in collaboration with artist keith haring, to whom the album is dedicated. the nbc orchestra here supports the feeling of apocalypse, changing intensities, moving from mood to mood like a ballet piece, at times seemingly imitating stravinsky's "sacre du printemps." burroughs's reading of "the lord's prayer" functions as an appropriate culmination of the suite. this is in turn complemented by the piece which follows it and concludes the cd, a curiosity in which burroughs sings a german love to piano and clarinet accompaniment. the album is thus wrapped by instances of burroughs's lean positivism, which, as in his written work, just barely manages to rescue the whole from an utterly nihilistic cynicism. [12] in all the orchestral pieces on _dead city radio_ there is an element of ironic commercial nostalgia that is not provided by the contemporary rhythms of _spare-ass annie_. the musical arrangements on the second cd, which is either a "quick fix" attempt to surf the wave of burroughs's marketability or simply a poorly conceived project, are not nearly as rich as on the first. on the whole, _spare-ass annie_ is a very curious disc, one which will accordingly take its place in the curiosity bin next to other attempts to bring white media figures into the world of black-inspired popular music, such as leonard nimoy's unforgettable recording of "proud mary." the spoken texts used here are not as essential to burroughs's oeuvre as are those on _dead city radio_, nor are they as well performed. worse still, it sounds as if burroughs's distinctive speech patterns have been electronically altered to fit the beats put down by the disposable heroes, either by digital editing, severe compression, or (ironically) by noise reduction systems. the result is that he occasionally winds up sounding something like barney rubble. [13] in general, the cyclical nature of the sample-loops works against burroughs's speech. as any mixer knows, the rhythm track is the track that is laid first. burroughs's tracks are thus by definition the rhythm tracks. when these are combined with the beats of the disposable heroes, both layers begin to sound as if they are off-time with one another. chopping up burroughs's vocal gestures to better fit the overlaid digital rhythms only makes matters worse. the loops of his vocals on "last words of dutch schultz (this is insane)" and "words of advice for young people" are comic in their attempt to make burroughs's words into a popular refrain. the inescapable fact is that burroughs's particular brand of poetry has no rhymes--the quintessential element to spoken rap/hip-hop rhythm in america.^9^ [14] there are a few noteworthy moments on the recording. "the last words of dutch schultz" features a contradictory tape-loop similar to ones burroughs once prescribed for therapeutic use.^10^ the listless repetition of "but i am dying / no you're not," however, ends up sounding clumsy and uninspiring. while the text of "warning to young couples" is largely pointless, there is an amusing simpsons-like irony achieved by attaching bouncy "leave it to beaver" type music to a story of dogs chewing babies to death. "one god universe," a companion piece to "ah pook the destroyer" from _dead city radio_, is also tolerable, and highlights the anti-thermodynamic cosmology that supports much of burroughs's work. the music here is reminiscent of funky 1960s style pop and the reggae that grew from it, which at least dovetails with burroughs's penchant for keif-smoking.^11^ there are two longer pieces on the recording, both drawn from burroughs's early work. "did i ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?," one of his most famous comic routines, is a major disappointment. however dull peter weller's reading of it in cronenberg's _naked lunch_, that rendition is nevertheless more satisfying than the terrible one on _spare-ass annie_. "junky's christmas", a piece that went unpublished in written form until _interzone_ (1991), doesn't work as well as sandra bernhard's "white christmas," to which it is comparable in form if not in spirit, but it gets by, its musical component alternating between christmas carols and rhythmic themes typical of incidental television fare. [15] also in the vortex spinning around burroughs is the work of al jourgensen and his cohorts in their bands ministry and the revolting cocks. as burroughs in the 1960s used the "pulp texts" of his childhood as raw material for his anarchist text-and-image-collage, so revco uses "video pulp" for their industrial pop music. the frontier theme so prominent in burroughs's narratives is treated by revco on the title track of their 1991 cd _beers steers and queers_. employing black-originated hip-hop sampling and rhyming techniques, the cocks rhythmically cut pop culture sound-bites into their work in a way comparable to burroughs's importing of pulp texts into his fiction. this is, aside from the rhythmic clash, the principle area in which _spare-ass annie_ is lacking. _beers, steers and queers_, like much of the _spare-ass annie_ material, consists primarily of a sequenced dance beat. in this case, the beat is deliberately distorted to sound as if the speakers can't handle the volume. the only tonal portions of the composition are samples of banjo and bells from the soundtracks of the films _deliverance_ and _the good the bad and the ugly_. the "rapped" lyrics concern the hypocrisy of american society as exemplified by texan culture.^12^ dialogue from _deliverance_ setting up a homosexual rape scene opens the piece and recurs between flat recited rhymes mixing double entrendres of morality and depravity, righteousness and fellatio, such as "the truth is hard to swallow," "there is a law man, there is the raw man, who is the right and who is the wrong man," and "get in my face." the blatantly offensive images of homosexual activity operate for revco just as they do for burroughs, innoculating their work against commodification while drawing into question conventional definitions of morality. the double-meaning of "revolting" is the central feature of a tension here as the piece concludes, "texas has religion--revolting cocks are god!" as in burroughs's best work, morality and brutality are pushed so close together that a feeling of great discomfort results. [16] revco's next release, _linger ficken good_, opens with an unashamed burroughs rip-off entitled "gila copter." the opening of "gila copter" prefaces revco's typical digital punk/funk sound with a free rhythmic soundscape. although the spoken text is free of rhyme, it does have identifiable refrains, all included in a narrative format and returning at unpredictable intervals. this use of refrain is in contrast with the predictable and much less effective use on _spare-ass annie_. "gila copter" is a highly self-conscious piece which introduces the album as if it were an advertisement included within the product.^13^ the text begins as a sales pitch but quickly degrades into crypto-political advice. the plea here is for silence, to be achieved by turning off the televisual manipulation of "the american prime-time victim show." hey kids---you want a soundtrack that's gonna make you feel tense--let you express your frustration--make you scared, want to run out and buy a gun? you're looking for another rock and roll record that'll make you feel like a victim. you love to be a victim, you love the american prime-time victim show. hey bells, gila copters, machine guns--listen to that--listen to that--kill for allah--kill for jesus. . . . all that 1980s shit is over--brothers and sisters--we're going to turn the volume down. the voice subsequently begins to take on a suspiciously incestuous quality which throws a wrench into the interpretive works. it is just enough to taint the text with doubt and irony and reinforce the edge of perversity that runs through much of burroughs's work. in contrast to the cocks' typical punk-style vocals, the vocalist here has a low raspy drawl imitative of burroughs, clear but electronically treated. "chopper" sound effects and other television noise drones throughout the piece, erupting in a violent distorted cameo at the transition between the free rhythmic introduction and the bass/noise-percussion groove which constitutes the majority of the tune. [17] although burroughs's most popular writing seldom treats technology explicitly, his experimental work from _naked lunch_ to _the soft machine_ (1967) does. what makes ministry burroughs's digital-era %doppleganger%, however, is not only the theme of the spoken (or sung) texts, but the use of technology by the ordinary citizen to shatter the control system's hold on emotional manipulation. to this end the last and title tune from _linger ficken good_ (in which the revolting cocks are aided by the revolting pussies and, apparently, by their revolting offspring) is an excellent example of postmodernist, underground, digital kitsch that revels in both its commerciality and its marginality in commercial terms. in this respect revco's work begins to resemble the "intentional failure" of andy kaufman's characters foreign man (resurrected as latka gravas in _taxi_) and tony clifton, or that of sandra bernhard in _without you i'm nothing_ . [18] "linger ficken good" is a fold-in of magnificent qualities when heard in these terms, a montage of advertising and pornography. like bernhard's or kaufman's work, it is titillating and amusing at first, but demands the audience's endurance and eventually gives rise to a level of sensibility above the merely commercial.^14^ the music consists of six minutes of a jazz-style walking bass with sequenced high-hat and scratching samples providing a simple beat. over this repetitive but ever-changing groove various voices enter and leave: a male vocal chants "finger licking good" over a panting female "more," with a chorus of "e i e i o"; the line "this is porno for your mind--porno for your crotch" is answered by an offhand comment of "family entertainment" and the sound of a chicken clucking. the result is a re-serving of the naked lunch, this one including meat which must have been processed in the world of david lynch's _eraserhead_. in the second segment of the piece, the (male) members of the band are introduced by female voices as if in a television special. in a call-and-response format, with their own voices providing an ostinato of "linger ficken good," the "revolting pussies" chant the names of the cocks as if they were salivating over the possibility of getting a taste. the third segment is a simulated interview with a black male, ostensibly a studio-musician in the cocks' employ. he runs through all the members of band, telling the listener their nicknames and insulting their musical abilities. "kiss my ass" he snorts, " . . . punks"; the last word is spit out just as the music is pulled out from under him for a precious moment of silence. the fourth segment is another variation on this theme, with the pussies rhyming the qualities of their favourite cocks in response to an endlessly looped sample asking, "who's your favourite cock?" the effect here is of a child repeatedly pulling the cord of a talking doll. the irony inherent in the cocks' name becomes clear in the piece's repetitive (but not sampled) denouement, a group of children singing a commercial jingle melody "it's a revco world--it's a revco world" in warbly harmony. this clever elision of the "revolting cocks," already a pun, into the banal ad-speak "revco" further confuses the position of the cocks with respect to the corporate music machine and solidifies their ties to the tradition of malcolm maclaren style "punk." this piece is a particularly extreme example of music in the expanded field; there is no element which is not to be heard as if between aural quotation marks. [19] "just one fix," a cd single put out by ministry in 1992, features burroughs himself as this kind of quotable sonic text. like much of ministry's work, the track begins with a scream; the subsequent vocals are distorted and mixed into the noise that forms the body of the track and its various remixes. burroughs's words are clipped carefully and mixed in with other noise textures, rather than being featured in their own right and played against a contrasting sonic background. the piece has an electronic dance beat which, like all ministry work, is hypnotic in effect, lending burroughs's words a sense of delirium. "smash the control images; smash the control machine" are sampled and repeated on the "12" edit," while the "quick fix edit" features a slightly longer text in which burroughs confesses an ambivalent position, presumably as an american or as a communication machine, with respect to the control machine as a whole. "to put it country simple, there are some things on earth that other folks might want--like the whole planet." burroughs admits, "i am with the invaders--no sense trying to hide that." he makes his standard call for quiet, at which point a gap is inserted in the spoken text to allow the noise-samples compiled by ministry to occupy the principal listenting space. the samples sound variously like highway traffic, airport noise and creaking machinery. the atmosphere of _nova express_ is reconfigured in burroughs's muffled claims that "there is no place else to go--the theatre is closed . . . cut music lines--cut word lines." burroughs is here alluding to a universe which is entirely pre-scripted, like a biologic film running in a theatre which no one is allowed to leave. ministry in their aggressive, chaotic composition are attempting to do just as burroughs recommends--"cut music lines" and "cut word lines" by scrambling the codes through which commercial music manages the feeling and intellect of its audience. the products of commercial culture, including television and popular music, are here exposed as techno-drugs manipulating the addictive psychology of an audience that demands "just one fix."^15^ [20] there are of course other sound-recordings by other artists which exemplify the tendencies outlined at the beginning of this article. i have chosen to focus on burroughs because his work speaks to me, and through it i have been able to connect with contemporary sonic counter-culture. i can only assume that it is because burroughs is surely nearing death that corporate america can push him. he has become a grand old man of counter-cultural resistance, just crazy enough that his intentions are not clear to the masses. like that of ministry and revco, his revolutionary message is partially submerged in texts that promote themselves as commercial pleasure-devices, such as the five reviewed here. i hope the reader will forgive me for celebrating the theoretical possibilities of music in a wholly verbal format, and for repeatedly relating the musical texts in question to others in other musical spectra. i may not have been able to say whether or not any of the cd's under review truly "kicked butt," but i hope i have been able to outline some of the ways in which butt can be kicked today with nothing more than a cd player, a sampler, a tape deck and a tv set. notes: ^1^ susan mcclary and robert walser pose this question in their essay "start making sense! musicology wrestles with rock" (frith and goodwin 1990). ^2^ rosalind krauss (1979) has written of "sculpture in the expanded field" bounded by the limits of site-construction, axiomatic structures, marked sites and sculpture. analogously, one might think of a four-cornered field bounded by music, soundscape, advertising and poetry. her essay "sculpture in the expanded field," originally printed in _october_ 8 (spring 1979), appears in foster, 1983. ^3^ jenny's essay "la strategies de la forme" from _poteique_ 27 (1976) is referred to by zurbrugg in his essay "burroughs, barthes and the limits of interxtuality" in the burroughs issue of the _review of contemporary fiction_ (1984). ^4^ in his book _noise_, french economist and writer jacques attali makes it plain that he intends "not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music" (attali 1985: 4). ^5^ besides van sant's and cronenberg's film (the latter released in cooperation with a re-release of burroughs's written work by grove, his first american publisher), the current burroughs revival has been fueled by viking's publication of burroughs's early work _queer_ (1985) and _interzone_ (1989) as well as the newly written _the cat inside_ (1986) and _the western lands_ (1987) and by the popularity of burroughs-influenced cyberpunk science-fiction (particularly gibson's _neuromancer_ (1984)). ^6^ "twilight's last gleaming" is one of burroughs's earliest and most often re-told tales, appearing in various forms at various times in burroughs's career, including on _dead city radio_ and in _interzone_ as well as (in a folded-in form) in _nova express_ (1964). the tale is one burroughs came up with as a young man in tandem with friend kells elvins, a black comedy in which all the "basic american rotteness" pent up in the titanic's passengers and crew spills out when they have to run for the life-boats. ^7^ other short sonic compositions to complement burroughs's reading were contributed by donald fagen, cheryl hardwick, lenny pickett, sonic youth and chris stein. ^8^ this is ironically, for those familiar with _american prayer_'s "lament for my cock," followed by some amusingly banal pronouncements by burroughs on the topic of snakes. ^9^ the speech rhythm problem is highlighted in a peculiar way by pieces in which ras i. zulu and michael franti read from the opening of _nova express_. this folded-in creation only barely hangs together when uttered by burroughs, and gives a positively bizarre when read in jamaican and afro-american speech rhythms. ^10^ in _the job_ (odier 1974), burroughs recommends several guerrilla tactics involving tape recorders and cameras for various purposes. one tactic, designed to shake the mind out of its habitual deference to authority, is to assemble a tape in which contradictory commands alternate at high speed. ^11^ see burroughs's biographers morgan (1988) and miles (1992) for information on the role of cannabis in the composition of _naked lunch_ and its experimental spin-offs. ^12^ the piece can be heard as an amusing retake of the many white blues rip-offs concerning mistreatment in texas, such as johnny winter's "dallas" or creedence clearwater revival's "the midnight special." its mood also recalls mailer's _why are we in vietnam_. ^13^ the effect is similar to the one created by they might be giants' "theme from flood" from _flood_ (1990). ^14^ my comparison is based on philip auslander's chapter on kaufman and bernhard in his 1992 book _presence and resistance: postmodernism and cultural politics in contemporary american performance_. ^15^ at the risk of doing exactly what frith and goodwin decry, i must describe the cover art of _just one fix_. it is a multimedia painting by burroughs himself, entitled "last chance junction and curse on drug hysterics" consisting of a montage of newspaper articles (an ann landers column on drugs, an ap clip about religious fundamentalists and the end of the world, and a photograph of a steam engine with the caption "casey's last ride"), painted all around and over with random-looking squiggles of black and yellow. works cited: attali, jacques. _noise: the political economy of music_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1985. auslander, philip. _presence and resistance: postmodernism and cultural politics in contemporary american performance_. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1992. burroughs, william s. _naked lunch_. new york: grove, 1959. ---. _nova express_. new york: grove, 1964. ---. _the soft machine_. new york: grove, 1967. ---. _queer_. new york: viking, 1985. ---. _the western lands_. new york: viking penguin, 1987. ---. _interzone_. ed. james grauerholz. new york: viking, 1991. foster, hal. ed. _the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture_. seattle: bay press, 1983. frith, simon and goodwin, andrew, eds. _on record: rock, pop and the written word_. new york: pantheon, 1990. gibson, william. _neuromancer_. new york: ace, 1984. jenny, laurent. "la stratgie de la forme". _poetique_ 27 (1976). miles, barry. _william burroughs: el hombre invisible_. london: virgin, 1992. morgan, ted. _literary outlaw_. new york: holt, 1988. odier, daniel. _the job_. new york: grove, 1974. zurbrugg, nicholas. "burroughs, barthes and the limits of intertextuality." _review of contemporary fiction_ (spring 1984). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------anson, 'intermedia '95', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-anson-intermedia.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.595. part 1/1, total size 13977 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- intermedia '95 by wendy anson postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by wendy anson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: _the 10th annual international conference and exposition on multimedia and cd-rom. march, 1995. moscone convention center, san francisco, ca. the crowds, some like sheep, run here, run there. one man start, one thousand follow. nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. all rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say "damn great" many times, get very tired and go home. --japanese visitor, american centennial exposition, 1876 (qtd. in allwood, 57) [1] crowds in record numbers overflowed the conference and exhibit halls as the "10th annual international conference & exposition on multimedia and cd-rom" got underway in san francisco's gargantuan moscone hall. laser "sunrays" fanned out over the packed hall as keynote speaker glenn jones (ceo jones international, ltd.) heralded the dawning new age of a kind of harmonic convergence: "....technologies [will] drive us together"; there will be an "historic coming together" with "a kaleidoscope of new electronic tools" in a world where "boundaries of all kinds . . . are disappearing." [2] no mistaking the millenial and apocalyptic tone: "it is intense. it is big. it roots through every marketplace, every vested interest--an environment leaving virtually nothing untouched, and it has a life of its own. in its path is turbulence, disruption, the mooing of sacred cows, destruction, opportunity and reformation. . . . it is after us all and none of us can hide. convergence is nothing less than the process of reconfiguring civilization itself." [3] then jones parted the digital rays to reveal mr. charlton heston, who introduced jones' latest cd-rom product, "charlton heston presents the bible." [4] technically a trade show, the self-styled "largest dedicated multimedia event in the world" probably has enough bells, whistles, cannily crafted and elaborately staged product launches and disingenuous yokings of commerce and religion to land it squarely in the venerable tradition of the international exhibitions. [5] according to john allwood, the exhibition movement "goes back to the roots of our culture" as far as old testament notables including king ahasuerus, who "spread his wealth and importance before his visiting nobles and princes." medieval fairs gave visitors and traders the chance to "exchange news and participate in the highly human activity of 'one-upmanship'" (allwood, 7) [6] england's "great exhibition of the works of all nations" at the crystal palace, completely dedicated to displaying industrial trade and "forwarding the upward progress of industrial civilization" (allwood, 8) with its display of manufactured goods from various countries in sorted categories in one location was in 1851 the first international exhibition (or expo, world fair, exposition universelle, weltausstellung, exposicion internacional). [7] "goods sent from america [to england's expo] included colt revolvers, a case of 'cheap american newspapers," a model of niagara falls, the goodyear vulcanised india rubber trophy, false teeth, and 'an intolerable deal of starred-and-striped banners and pasteboard effigies of eagles with outspread wings'" (allwood, 22), thereby perhaps launching the international kitsch movement. [8] the likely antecedents of the fetching young girls in their national costumes serving food in their native restaurants at the american centennial exposition (1876) are the attractive young women draped over machinery at today's trade shows. [9] latest products of industry and technology are on proud display at the expositions and world fairs: the american centennial showcased the typewriter, the telephone, and edison's duplex telegraph which could send two messages over one wire at the same time; other world's fairs introduced the phonograph and automobile, and left behind formidable souvenirs including the eiffel tower and chicago's field columbian museum of natural history. [10] visitors oohed and aahed. [11] "what a sight is there!" enthused a crystal palace visitor. "neither pen nor pencil can portray it" (allwood, 22). [12] thackeray raved: "sheltered by crystal walls and roof, we view/ all products of the earth, the air, and seas, . . . extracting good from out the meanest sod; rivalling nature's works, and making him a god" (allwood, 21) [13] victor hugo on paris's 1867 exposition universelle: "to make a circuit of this place, . . . is literally to go around the world. all peoples are here, enemies live in peace . . . on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron" (allwood, 43). [14] intermedia had its share of kitsch with logo-emblazoned t-shirt and plastic bag giveaways, visiting virtual valeries, technology announcements, and high-flown sentiments about comings-together. but it's true that its attendees were more jaundiced. [15] set up in 1986 by bill gates to introduced cd-rom's expanded storage technology, intermedia annually highlights "the burgeoning new multimedia and cd-rom industries" and celebrates the cd-rom as "leading the way in the multimedia technology revolution." [16] but at the '95 convention there was little reverence granted cd-rom technology or product; rather, people were possessed by a kind of nostalgia for the future, already hungry for the latest innovation. an audience member at the "evolutionary landscape" conference challenged the viability of the medium with the advent of full-service on-line. voyager ceo and digital publishing eminence bob stein, sounding more beseiged than whimsical, described the on-going challenge of trying to launch a product within a nascent industry characterized by the incessant tweaking of its technology. he reminded that the printing press was invented in 1454, but the first novel, pamela, didn't show up until 300 years later. yet he added somewhat plaintively apropos the product that had launched and still sustained his company, "we always considered it a transitional medium." [17] the split between rhetoric and reality, what we can envision and what we've got at the moment, was jarringly apparent in the geography of the convention: in the conference halls, it was the big vision--or furtive dream--convergence, universal access. to be a latter day walter benjamin who could stroll cyberspace at will, with no bounds, a %flanuer% in paris. to be able to move about "at random" in a "hypertext" universe where one could invent connections and spark new syntheses. [18] ...and, on the exhibit floor, the merchants feverishly plyed their wares, much of it "multi-purposed" content that had found its way onto cd-rom because the rights were cheap and available. not so much hypertext links to the city of light; more like arbitrary catalogues leading to dead ends of data. [19] the 3-day conference progressively polarized as attendees shunted from the contemplative halls of "why not" and "why" to the rude stalls of buy, buy, buy. [20] who or what could heal the radical schism, tie up the loose ends? maybe it would be the same entity the at&t exec was evoking in the "evolutionary landscape" conference: the one who'd wire the last 50 yards into the house. whoever it was who'd supply the broadband and/or set top box and/or p.c. interface to deliver the eagerly awaited new world of content, services and link-ups where we get all the rich archives of cd romdom as well as every conceivable connection to the outside world and to each other. we're all buying--or at least we're ready to buy. but who's building? so far nobody. because who's paying? the issue's unclear. and will be until the technology shakes down. there's a lot of money to be lost if you put your money on the wrong horse--set top box? p.c.? fiberoptics, satellite? [21] (and once built, what would these last 150 feet look like? given the profit-centered players, one attendee worried it would be "big pipes in, little pipes out" since all the contenders might be more concerned with "selling us things rather than hav[ing] us create them.") [22] despite its stated intention of celebrating the cd-rom, intermedia '95 ended with no clear notion about the technology. still, the question was posed: whether or not as the press releases proclaimed, the cd-rom would "lead the way" in cyberspace developments, did it at least have a future? [23] voyager's stein was confident. "it's the nature of the human beast to collect. people want to own stuff, carry it around. they'll want to own things as opposed to access things." [24] the ubiquitous, user-friendly cost-effective cd-rom is ideally suited to storing vast amounts of data which can be accessed in any number of ways and can be (and usually is) enhanced by all kinds of visual, textual and sound effects. the latest in particular can claim good production values, with a look and content that oftentimes boast of sophisticated market-research. yet the steady thud of shovelware digging its own grave signals that people are in fact particular about the cd roms they do seem to collect. [25] walter benjamin, collector %par excellence%, wrote his paean to collecting and ownership in "unpacking my library." for benjamin, the urge to collect an object was not tied to its functional or utilitarian value. rather, the value lay in the thing in itself. the item's patina opened entire worlds surrounding the object (including "period, region, craftsmanship, former ownership" [benjamin, 60]) to its possessor. [26] best-selling and critically praised game and leisure cd-roms outside the shoot-em-up "twitch game" category probably demonstrate that the fully realized cd-rom medium, too, can uniquely open worlds for the user/collector and ultimate %flaneur% to explore. [27] the cd-rom's "archived adventure" is often counterposed to the freedom of access and movement available on-line. yet, paradoxically, the best and most enduring products provide the user precisely that sense of freedom, of wandering at will. (it is true, after all, that one cannot wander randomly within a random world. benjamin roamed paris.) [28] as in a well-constructed play, choices narrow not in predictable, linear sequence, but in a necessary and probable logic leading to the fleshing out of the "object," the final embodiment of the fully dimensional world that the user/protagonist has unfolded in "playing the game." [29] "myst" comes close to the ideal of a compelling, highly "roamable" world whose parameters (though implicit) are all the while reassuringly clear. [30] it may be true that the most successful adult cd-roms ("'myst' has sold an estimated 750,000 units and is still topping many cd-rom monthly sales charts more than a year after its release" [_billboard_, 68]) provide the user with benjamin's ideal (as per arendt) of "inhabiting the city the way he lives in his own four walls" (arendt, 21). [31] the cd-rom interactive medium seems up to now unique insofar as it offers the user a tightly demarcated world wherein anything is possible. [32] whither intermedia '96? its stated mission is "continuing the multimedia revolution and inventing the next decade." with such a tall order, organizers might look to the internet multicasting service of washington, which just announced plans for the first "world's fair in cybserspace" (lewis). [33] this world exposition will be designed to be accessible from personal computers linked to the internet, and also from a network of public 'internet planetariums' in cities throughout the world. [34] "our eiffel tower is 1.2 terabytes of disk space," explained internet multicasting service president carl malamud (lewis). the data base will serve as a "public park" which will feature displays of environmental technologies, a "future of media" pavilion, and linkups with museums' information centers. [35] the annual interop trade shows, attended by internet developers and users, have already decided to make this first cyberspace world exposition their key theme for next year's gathering. works cited allwood,john. _the great exhibitions_. london: macmillan, 1977. arendt,hannah. "introduction." _illuminations_. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken, 1969. benjamin, walter. "unpacking my library." _illuminations_. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken, 1969. _billboard_ (february 18, 1995). lewis,peter h. _the new york times_ (march 14, 1995), c2. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------woodman, 'plunder squad', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-woodman-plunder.txt archive pmc-list, file woodman.995. part 1/1, total size 2906 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- p l u n d e r s q u a d plunder squad is a twenty-minute video program by charles woodman and scott davenport woodman@tmn.com date: mon, 11 sep 1995 16:59:49 -0400 postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by charles woodman and scott davenport, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [this is a hypermedia project, containing both images and video clips. both can be viewed through ftp, through jefferson.village.virginia.edu by ftp, in: /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.995/images or /video. (see contents for further instructions)] a self defining object "plunder squad" is entirely constructed of appropriated elements from tv cop shows in rerun, reality-based police dramas and pulp novels. within "plunder squad," multiple parallel streams of text and image, each containing widely disparate narrative elements, compete for the viewer's attention. these elements, designed to move the viewer/reader through a narrative to its conclusion, provoke in us a desire to resolve these unstable layers into a congruous story . in this case, however, there is no story. instead the resolution of narrative is replaced by an accumulation of elements deprived of their structure. the impulse to complete a narrative string is thwarted by both the disjunction of those elements and the sheer volume of visual information. the horizontal left to right movement of text across the screen mimics the reading process and the reader's rush to narrative closure while the shifting fields of video image and aural noise mock this attempt at coherence. accidentally, images and texts combine, inform and comment on each other. pulled from the stream of mass culture, these reclaimed narrative moments reveal the mechanics of their effect even as they shed the burden of content. as our focus shifts between the moving layers we may chose to drift within the video -we may overload -we may find ourselves watching only a glowing object moving across our screens. thanks to rick provine for technical assistance no story no context no message no resolution no moral if you would like to see this program in its entirety please contact the artists. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------thwaites, 'facing pages: on response, a response to steven helmling', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-thwaites-facing.txt archive pmc-list, file thwaites.995. part 1/1, total size 35850 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- facing pages: on response, a response to steven helmling by tony thwaites department of english university of queensland tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.oz.au postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by tony thwaites, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] steven helmling's "historicizing derrida"^1^ reads derrida's writings, and particularly the huge corpus of other writings which have grown up around them, as lacking an essential "historically informed awareness" (1) which he proposes in part to supply. [2] a starting place, then, a place where two -at least two -sets of texts face each other. a program: "historicizing derrida" is to be taken in the objective rather than the subjective sense the construction allows. derrida does not historicize, derrida is to be historicized. helmling's first sentence elaborates on what this "historicizing" might involve: accounts of derrida stress his work's diversity, and handle it in various ways; but none that i know of *narrativizes* this diversity, whether to relate it to its historical period, or to consider it as a corpus with a development, a record of internal tensions or contradictions - in short, a history -of its own. (1) historicizing is above all to be the *narrativizing* of the particular *development* which is proper to a corpus: *its own* story, resulting from its own *internal* contradictions. it is a matter of constructing a chronology, from early to late, as marked by the original french publication dates. a staggered schedule of translation may have obscured this particular chronology, but now that most of the derridean corpus is available in english it is possible to gain an overdue "historically informed awareness of derrida" (1). translation, in other words, has no real historicality: all it does is obscure history, the *real* history, the one to be narrativized. once we have bracketed off such features as incidental to the *real* history of "derrida" -and they would seem to include anything involving "derrida" after the publication dates and anywhere else but in france -we find that this chronology is marked by a single and massive break, whose shorthand is "may 1968." the texts written before and after this divide are significantly different: the earlier ones have "a hopeful (even apocalyptic) sense of possibility," while the later are marked by a "steady-state pathos" closer, it would seem, to the existential despair of sartre and beckett (5-6). later in the essay, this distinction become equivalent to another, between "derridean 'writing' ... as grammatological *theme* [and] as 'perverformative' *practice*" (24, emphases in original). if _of grammatology_ was a "project of liberation," it was only as an "early excitement" from which the later writings have unfortunately strayed (5-6). [3] it's not difficult to raise all sorts of objections to this schema. even if we were to grant in all its vastness the reduction of historicity to bibliographical sequence, the proposal simply wouldn't work in its own terms. derrida's writing just doesn't fall into anything like such a simple before-and-after pattern, as indeed helmling himself points out. in a careful piece of close analysis, for example, he shows very well that the pre-1968 _grammatology_ has its own elaborate rhetoricity which is quite irreducible to the constative (8-10). it would not be hard to find similar examples in all of the earlier work. on the other hand, neither do constative, argued and expository texts or texts of direct political intervention cease after the magic date. indeed, one of helmling's more elaborate statements of this before-and-after schema (24) comes immediately after a paragraph most of whose examples point out the *simultaneity* of both constative and perverformative features, and thus the impossibility of maintaining that preand post-1968 distinction. i add french publication dates to underline the point: in _glas_ [1974] itself, for example, the left-hand column, on hegel, proceeds expositorily, in sharp (and highly deliberate) contrast with the hyper-"perverformative" right-hand column on genet. such "inter"-effects, effects *between* philosophy and literature, are almost always at play when derrida uses the double-column format; he gets like effects by putting similarly dissonant texts inside the covers of the same book -in _the truth in painting_ [1978], for example, between the material on kant and hegel in "colossus" [i.e., "the colossal," part 4 of "parergon," 1974] on the one hand, and the diary or postcard ("envoi" [%sic%] -like) format of cartouches" [1978] and the dialogue of "restitutions on the other; or in _margins_ [1972] itself, the contrast between "tympan" [1972] and such pieces as "white mythology" [1971]. here, again, a helpful marker is the 1968 divide that marks and inaugurates the break between the "apocalyptic" derrida of _writing and difference_ and _of grammatology_ and the later "perverformer" . . . (23-24) but helmling has just shown, this very moment, that 1968 marks no such break, and his earlier analysis of the "exergue" from _of grammatology_ has shown that neither does it inaugurate it. something quite interesting is going on here. it's not simply that helmling is *wrong* about derrida, though he is certainly that too. what is far more interesting about it is that he also points out quite clearly just *where* he is wrong about derrida and the precise aspects of derrida's texts which show this, *and* in the very same passages in which he asserts derrida's error. helmling both misreads derrida extensively and in that very misreading gets things right. it is a pattern we shall see again. [4] conceptually, the problems soon multiply. what helmling offers as an internal history, powered by the internal necessities and developments of the corpus under study, depends on that massive reduction of the entire field of historicality to that of publication, an act of abstraction which is marked rather than alleviated by the recognition of the need to "relate [derrida's work] to its historical period." in its focus on this *development* of what is already specified as internality, helmling's historicization risks not seeing what occurs other than as development of what is already given, and thus of proposing, despite itself, a programmatic determinism. as this development is linear and unidirectional, this also occludes the ways in which history is necessarily and irreducibly also retroactive, even in the details of the ways in which texts face each other. zizek puts it memorably: the repressed returns not from the past but from the future^2^, and the significant event is constructible as such only in the light of hindsight. helmling's "historicizing," though, seems to be able to conceive of historiography only as transparent, secondary and unproblematic. all of this is a worryingly *singular* history, too: everything which is historical, genuinely historical, will line itself up on this one vector of publication dates punctuated by 1968. and as the omission of translation from consideration shows, what falls by the way includes the ways in which "derrida" has been a very different thing in, say, france, the uk, the us and australia: each of these, and more, would require their own complex chronologies, plural and diffuse, irreducible to each other in the concrete materialities of their specific modes of institutional, professional, pedagogical, economic and political existence. but even within these, the timelines surely proliferate and divide as one considers the various disciplines within which "derrida" is done: "derrida" in philosophy is not the same set of practices -*or even concepts* -as it is in literary criticism, and both differ again from the uptakes of "derrida" in, say, architecture and the social sciences. it is odd that helmling can claim a "historically informed awareness" of derrida only by the total bracketing-off of the ways in which "derrida" is already, *as the very condition of its existence*, a massive, diffuse set of practices which are irreducibly and simultaneously material, social, and, yes, political, whatever that politics might be. and it is, to say the least, distinctly ironic that a claim for genuine historical awareness and political realism should have as its model the succession of publication dates in french editions of derrida. [5] throughout helmling's argument, "historicizing" seems to be a matter of invoking certain grand signifiers which are monolithic, globalising and almost entirely without discernible materiality. thus, for instance, "one 'historicizing' answer" to the question of why derrida's confrontations with his contemporaries such as foucault, lacan and levinas tend to be more anxious affairs than his critiques of past giants such as hegel involves philosophy's status in our current historical moment in the west. here the "contest of faculties" motif appears, and with it the philosophy/literature opposition . . . . for two centuries and more, western culture has worried that poetry, or "imaginative" literature generally (and in most versions of this anxiety, religion, too), must lose power as modernity advances. the fortunes of philosophy in the modern world are similarly troubled . . .^3^ (21) what is "our current historical moment in the west?" who are "we" that this is "our' moment? is it only one? helmling and i both work in english departments, but the "english" course and degree, indeed the university itself, mean different things in the united states and australia; they do different things, within different relays of pedagogy, governmentality, commerce and the cultural industries, within different histories. we do not simply share a "current historical moment," but are placed differently in a series of complex overlapping and differential historical temporalities. is "philosophy's status" the same everywhere in these? (even if the chronologies of publication and availability of the contested texts are quite different for anglophones and francophones?) where precisely *do* the "'contest of faculties' motif" and "the literature/philosophy opposition" "appear?"^4^ it is a massive synecdoche which says "western culture" instead of the vastly smaller set of specific sites in which such contests and oppositions are shorthands for very real issues and contestations; it's also a synecdoche which it is really only possible to make from certain positions. while it makes noises of urgency and unswervable import (what could be more pressing than "our current historical moment in the west?" -at least for us in the west, if that's where australians are), it also avoids saying anything in the slightest bit specific about the historicities and politicalities of philosophy and literature, either as concrete historical and political practices themselves or about their actual or possible relations to other such practices: the occasion for the invocation of our "current historical moment in the west" is, after all, a consideration of the protocols of what philosophers do . . . . instead, what is offered as "historicizing" turns out to be a commonplace drawn from, of all people, *matthew arnold*.^5^ [6] or again, having characterized derrida's "perverformative" writing in texts such as "tympan" as a "special writing, an elite or avant-garde writing . . ."^6^ (26), helmling adds: it seems a version of a thematic as old, in western culture, as the book of job, if not of the _iliad_, the conflict between collective salvations and individual ones. (27) now this is, to say the least, highly dubious history, literary, social or otherwise. even if the _iliad_ *is* in some way about "salvation" (an assertion i can treat only with a great deal of scepticism), it makes no sense at all to see either _job_ or homer in terms of an *opposition* of the individual and collective. that is, certainly, a thematic common enough in some forms of *literary criticism* over the last eighty years or so, if not quite over all of western culture" %per se%. in other words, it is a relatively contemporary concern which has arisen in a particular nexus of disciplines, and is here being written back into previous texts to produce a tradition. its effect is to remove the entire question of the individual and the collective from the historical, making it into an eternal verity like "human nature" and "life" -ironically enough, here in the name of historicizing and politicizing. [7] helmling's vast brushstrokes paint a history of ideas of the most idealizing kind. there is a huge leap between abstractions such as "western culture" and concrete questions of what cultural formations such as the literary actually entail: their existence within certain institutions and cultural industries, their specificities of class, sex, ethnicity, their strategies of class distinction, their economics and pedagogies, and so on, and so on. invocation of commonplaces from a moral-political high ground serve only to obscure and even trivialise the very politicalities of critical practices they supposedly champion.^7^ in reducing the complex temporalities of texts to single linearities, and the question of relationships among texts to ruptures marking out oppositions, helmling produces an eminently mythic topos. once narrativized by "historicizing," it inevitably produces a story of the fall, or its symmetrical opposite, the apocalypse, or both: once "derrida" was apocalyptic, but now it's lost it. [8] helmling's judgement on the fallen derridean "perverformative" after-texts can hardly be surprising then, given as it is by the initial setting-up of the problem. what may be more surprising, though, is the complex misgiving of its demurral: and i'm afraid my first answer can't help sounding a bit moralistic: 'perverformativity' diffuses the political application, or ambition, of derrida's work. (26) that "i'm afraid" is on the one hand a way of making a bottom-line statement of an unpalatable truth which can neither be retracted nor modified ("that's just the way it is, i'm afraid"). on the other hand, it's a marker of a real apprehension in its apology for introducing the moralistic into a discussion of the political. the unease is in the sheer excess of qualifications: well, yes, this *is* moralistic, or at least it *sounds* moralistic, if only *a bit* and for a *first answer*; what's more, this first answer is rapidly going to become a last word, as the matter is out of my hands, it *can't help* sounding like this, that's simply the way things are, *i'm afraid*. if it can't help sounding moralistic, it's because that's exactly what the argumentative strategy here is: in its insistence on a certain position beyond negotiation or reconsideration, beyond contingency and event, moralism, in the pejorative sense both postulated and feared, is precisely the stance of withdrawal from the vicissitudes of the political: *this, i'm afraid, is non-negotiable: the bottom line*. and it worries the argument that at this point the only way it can progress is through such a move. a split has opened up again, which all its qualifications cannot close, only note. [9] the occasion for this nervous, diffident, even apologetic introduction of moralism is a move in which "application" comes to define "the political" itself. outside of "application," nothing can be political or have anything to say about the political; but it can *become* political if it applies itself in the right way, by immersing itself in and allowing itself to be determined by the criteria to which it dutifully applies itself. what "derrida" can contribute, if it is of true political will to undergo these loyolan exercises, is the obedient offer of its special skills to a project whose aims, means, conceptualisation and limits are already fully known and remain unchanged by its arrival: all that "derrida"'s arrival affects is the strategies its skills might enable in working towards those ends. [10] this asymmetry of "application" is perhaps at its clearest in helmling's persistent conflation of deconstruction and %ideologiekritik%, as stated most concisely in an early footnote: "metaphysics" as analogy or synecdoche for "ideology" seems to me the self-evident premise of any "political" deconstruction, though only michael ryan, so far as i know, has made this premise explicit, in _marxism and deconstruction: a critical articulation_ (baltimore and london: johns hopkins university press, 1982), and not until chapter 6, "the metaphysics of everyday life": "the deconstruction of metaphysics can be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology" (117). (footnote 2) ryan's range of possible relations between deconstruction and marxism is somewhat wider than a straight application of the former to the latter, though it is still far too concerned with showing them to be at bottom the same thing rather than with the more complex questions of the complementary and sometimes highly disjunct politicalities of two historically, conceptually and contextually specific discourses. were this to be taken into account, we would have minimally to augment ryan's statement with a rider: the deconstruction of metaphysics *cannot* be integrated with the critique of ideology because metaphysics is also the infrastructure of *critique*. there must always be something left over in such an "integration," which can thus no longer simply be an integration. ryan recognizes this: to the extent that metaphysics is the infrastructure of ideology, the two cannot be coterminous. but for helmling, the two are simply and unproblematicly analogous: one is the other, and that's self-evident; deconstruction, if it is to have any political application at all, can only be %ideologiekritik%.^8^ [11] in this reconfiguration of the relations between two discourses as exclusively a matter of "application," a distinction and an elision are being made at the same time. on the one hand, the distinction is between "the political" and "the apolitical," or "the historical" and "the ahistorical." the two need to be distinguished from each other very sharply for the argument to have any force. they have different moral values, for a start: derrida does not historicize. but as the very narrative here is of *making* political, of historicizing and narrativizing and giving sight where there was only blindness before, the two cannot be held altogether separate: derrida must be historicized. one term becomes the other, if it tries very hard (or alternatively not enough), or gets a little help. the simple and necessary possibility of movement from one to the other means that they can never be as far apart as on the other hand they need to be. in this conceptual-pragmatic economy, the distinction between them can only be one of an uneasy vigilance, which is always in danger of finding itself empty because all that is necessary to it is that it be a vigilance in making distinction. "politically oriented criticism" *in this sense* -and here is the pity -is all too easily criticism which exhausts itself and its efficacity in this vigilance. [12] on the other hand, the simultaneous elision on which this distinction relies is that of *the political* with *position*. that is, rather than being an affair of what arkady plotnitsky characterizes as "the irreducible complexity of the heterogeneous"^9^ and the differences and differends which arise from the positional, "the political" becomes the name for a certain range of actual positions. what is *between* positions is collapsed *into* position, and this in turn -given helmling's emphasis on the constative as the favoured mode of the political -is collapsed into the *pro*position. the political is the propositional, the thematic, the referential. in that the "erverformative"resists reduction to the constative, it does not lend itself to the political, but must be redefined as purely linguistic, formal, immanent: the %aufhebung% of speech/writing proposed in derrida's early work was projected as belonging to the future (or, at a minimum, *a* future). by contrast, the point of "perverformativity" is its immanence in the "letter" ideally indissociable from, and hence to be consumed in, the "present" of the reading experience itself, without any remainder of "the thetic" or any "thematization" importing anything for, or importable into, a future. (27) we may question whether %aufhebung% is really an accurate description of a series of investigations into what in "writing" refuses to be subsumed into "speech." more importantly, can the immanence of performativity in the letter really be sustained for a moment? what performative force *can* the statement "i declare you married" have outside of the elaborate social-political-economic-religious-ethical-governmental apparatuses which support it, and only within which marriage becomes a possibility? indeed, it is hard to see how any of even the classical austinian illocutionaries such as contracts, promises, warnings, condolences and greetings -let alone the altogether more complex issues of derridean "perverformativity" -can in any sense at all be "consumed in the 'present' . . . without any remainder . . . importable into a future^10^. odder still, though, in the very next sentence this hermetically sealed present from which nothing whatsoever passes into the future comes by quite unspecified means to *determine* that future, and with an absolute and iron law: the future . . . becomes . . . the future anterior, a "will have been," a future determined by what preceded it, by the logic of "event" and of "outcome" -a continuity of present and future that makes the future, inescapably, "the same" as the present, thus foreclosing any possibility of change, revolution, rupture, etc., that would make it "different" from or "other" to the present. (27) grammatically, the "will have been" of the future anterior is not at all a matter of "a future determined by what preceded it:" that would be a possible -but certainly not even then a necessary -use of the simple future, the "will be." the future anterior is a much stranger tense, of a future which has not yet arrived and is itself yet to be determined, but which determines retrospectively, in its turn, the past which *will have been* for that future. invoking a past which has itself not yet arrived, or is always in the process of arriving, the future anterior not only describes the empirical delays attendant on any historicity, but also, in its complex textual folding, the very structure of historicity as perpetually renewed wager. [13] there is a strange blinkering going on here, through that elementary error in tenses: its effect is to allow two alternatives which logically exclude each other -a total and absolute granulation of time into an endless series of independent and monadic presents, and the equally total and absolute determinism of a single eternal present -to be collapsed into absolute equivalents. the move begs, i would suggest, to be read in the same way as the "kettle logic" from _jokes and their relation to the unconscious_^11^: as a parapraxis giving away and at the same time attempting to manage an unease. what is being pushed out of consideration at the cost of this radical incoherence is again just the same sort of temporality we saw emerging at other points of unease in helmling's text. it resonates with the ways in which the before-and-after-1968 scheme refuses to behave itself, and in which helmling's very statements of it are contradicted in advance not only by the "derrida" to which they opposed themselves, but also by helmling's own text in the act of positing them; and with the ways in which the very possibility of "application" relies on and is marked by an anxiety about the reversibility of what it needs to insist is one-way, the direction of authority itself. [14] helmling's text wants to posit a history which has a single and linear temporality as the development of the internal logic proper to its object. within this history, the relations texts have to each other are oppositional: early texts face late, constative face "perverformative," "historicizing" face "historicizable." but over and again, whenever helmling tries to argue this point his own text shows manifest unease -*performs* its own unease -at its insistent inability to maintain those very properties even for itself, as the distinctions collapse in the very passages which attempt to shore them up. on the one hand, helmling explicitly answers and demolishes his own particular argument against derrida, complete with scholarly protocols of evidence from the texts in question, *before* he even presents that argument. on the other hand, to the extent that the evidence for that demolition is already there in derrida's texts, they have *already* given an answer. on both counts, helmling's argument arrives too late for itself, answered in advance not only by derrida but also *by itself*. it finds its arguments refuted in advance, by a text which refuses for all that to place itself in any relation of simple opposition to helmling's, but is instead implicated in it liminally. where helmling's text wants to assert its coherence of purpose, it finds itself divided against itself; and where it wants to draw a clear opposition, it finds itself unable to sustain the distinctions. [15] it must be emphasised that this is not just a matter of aporetics. what begins to emerge across the multiple ruptures helmling's argument has to negotiate and the legible indecision to which that gives rise, is a very different set of temporalities and spatialities from those he proposes, and quite irreducible to the linear sequence which is his model. these temporalities and spatialities are those of the *performativity* within which and as all such argument takes place. here, certainly, we must be careful: "performativity" here would have to be recast not in terms of willed acts by individual subjects, but as the very possibility of that subject's appearance in the social, within a sheaf of multiple and already social, political, institutional histories which alone (and without necessarily delimiting) give the "performative" its locutionary force and possibilities. "performativity" in this sense would be, among other things, a way of naming the time and space of the institution so thoroughly absent from consideration in helmling's account. in its complex, open and eddying temporalities and its fractal, invaginated spatialities, such "performativity" would no less describe quite precisely those very features of helmling's argument which that argument cannot itself account for, and before which it exhibits such distress. in particular, given the non-totalizability of the histories from which the performative takes its locutionary force^12^, it describes the ways in which response itself -structurally, institutionally, historically -is never simply a matter of conceptual opposition, but always part of a claim in a wager on the future. the dynamics of that wager -within which a certain modernist vanguardism would be a possible if by now somewhat pre-empted move of doubtful efficacity -are yet to be outlined. notes 1. steven helmling, "historicizing derrida," _postmodern culture_ 4.3 (may 1994). all references to this article will appear as parenthetical paragraph numbers in the main text. 2. slavoj zizek, _the sublime object of ideology_ (london: verso, 1989), 55-56. 3. i'm not being flippant in suggesting that there may be a more immediate, perfectly concrete and pragmatic answer to the question of derrida's nervousness, and one which doesn't involve recourse to abstractions like "our current historical moment in the west." live people argue with you. i feel much more apprehensive about helmling's reply than i ever did about getting e-mail from freud in the last paper i wrote. 4. here helmling joins a number of other projects of winnowing derrida's writings to separate the good (or at least politically or disciplinarily acceptable) from the bad. see, for example, christopher norris, _derrida_ (cambridge: harvard up, 1987), or rodolphe gasche, _the taint of the mirror: derrida and the philosophy of reflection_ (ithaca: cornell up, 1986). 5. via that most arnoldian of contemporary british critics, terry eagleton (34), the early chapters of whose literary theory: an introduction (oxford: blackwell, 1983) accepts and re-inflects arnold's fears of a decline in religion, and whose critique of raymond williams in criticism and ideology (london: verso, 1978) traces his own genealogy back to arnold through williams, leavis and eliot. 6. ". . . a writing whose whole point is to be *different* from (or 'other' to) writing in general, writing at large, writing-as-usual . . ." but *derrida's* point is that there *is* no writing in general, and in particular no normative writing from which one measures deviations. there are *specific* forms, modes, genres, practices of writing, all of which can be specified only in their differences. 7. for a particularly thorough version of this argument, see john guillory, _cultural capital: the problem of literary canon formation_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1993). 8. to rehearse the differences very briefly: %ideologiekritik%, as helmling uses the term throughout, *opposes* knowledge and non-knowledge as truth and falsehood, sight and blindness, politicality and apoliticality, or political effectivity and ineffectivity. the pairings line up, and in each pairing one term excludes the other. with derrida, though, what is at stake is the ways in which knowledge and non-knowledge are *implicated* in each other. non-knowledge becomes a condition and possibility of knowledge. it is what makes knowledges possible, but in the same movement is also what makes their completion impossible -and this, it should be added, in a way which has nothing whatever to do with the "existential absurdity" with which helmling conflates it (4-5), but everything to do with the insistent openness of such a structure to what lacan designates "the encounter with the real" (jacques lacan, _the four fundamentals of psychoanalysis_ (harmondsworth: penguin, 1977), 51-5). in helmling's version of %ideologiekritik%, knowledge and non-knowledge are *exterior* to each other, at least ideally; in "derrida," they are *liminal* to each, forming each other's internal and external limits. in the one case, they abut along a geometrical boundary; in the other, they are fractally invaginated into each other. 9. arkady plotnitsky, _in the shadow of hegel: complementarity, history, and the unconscious_ (gainesville: up of florida, 1993), 300. 10. to say nothing of the entire category of *exercitives*, which austin significantly states as "troublesome" and "difficult to define" (austin, 151) for their very diversity, frequency and multiplicity of function. when expositives "are used in acts of exposition involving the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references" (160) - and they include performances of affirming, denying, conjecturing, accepting, asking, answering, revising, deducing, analysing, explaining and interpreting -we may doubt there is any such thing as a *non-*performative, purely constative text. for all the reservations it is necessary to make about austin's strictures on the "serious" or normative speech act, and the formalism of any attempt to locate "locutionary force" within language itself, the great value of the category of performativity is precisely -even if as much against austin as with him -in its resistance to the decontextualization on which helmling's "historicization" of derrida depends. j. l. austin, _how to do things with words_ (oxford: oxford up, 1962). 11. sigmund freud, _jokes and their relation to the unconscious_ (harmondsworth: penguin, 1976), 100. 12. and here, the reference to derrida is certainly useful: this is of course a central argument of "signature event context," in _writing and difference_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1982), 309-330. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------causey, 'mapping the dematerialized: writing postmodern performance theory', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-causey-mapping.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.195. part 1/1, total size 22630 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- mapping the dematerialized: writing postmodern performance theory by matthew causey department of literature, communication and culture georgia institute of technology matthew.causey@lcc.gatech.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by matthew causey, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] in _postmodernism and performance_, a title in the _new directions in theatre_ series from macmillan, author nick kaye questions the possibility of attaining an adequate definition of the postmodern performance. if the 'postmodern event' occurs as a breaking away, a disruption of what is 'given,' then 'its' forms cannot usefully be pinned down in any final or categorical way . . . definitions cannot arrive at the postmodern, but can only set out a ground which might be challenged. (145) echoing paul mann's position in _the theory-death of the avant-garde_ that theory facilitates the undoing of the avant-garde, that cultural criticism enacts a theory-death on the object of its discourse, kaye notes criticism's collusion in the construction of postmodern performance. he asserts that the organizing compulsion of criticism is antithetical to the strategies of postmodern aesthetic practices, which are designed to frustrate foundationalist thinking. kaye's refusal to reproduce the normal organizational categories leads him to draw together a wide range of contemporary american cultural events--performances of kaprow, brecht, and finley; dance works of cunningham and the judson dance theater; music by cage; theatre work by foreman, kirby, wilson, and the wooster group--treating them all as more or less exemplary postmodern confrontations with, and disruptions of, the modernist cultural project. [2] it seems that every book entitled _postmodernism and blank_ is required to begin with a rehearsal of the story of architectural postmodernism, and kaye obligingly does so. focusing on the architectural practices of portoghesi, klotz, and jencks, he locates the key feature of postmodernism in a "falling away of the idea of a fundamental core or legitimating essence which might privilege one vocabulary over another" (9). he then offers a brief account of philosophical postmodernism, which is to say of poststructuralist interrogations of history and meaning--interrogations which kaye rightly claims are reproduced almost wholesale in much postmodern performance. having thus sketched the rough contours of postmodernism as he understands it, kaye proceeds to construct his more detailed argument about the relation between postmodernist and modernist art. he starts by glossing the modernist art theory of clement greenberg and michael fried. greenberg's article "after abstract expressionism" (1962) and fried's "art and objecthood" (1967) are, according to kaye, the signal texts of modernism's institutionalization, the texts that provided a systematic theoretical basis for the various assumptions and attitudes that had long informed the american cultural scene. greenberg argues in a para-hegelian manner that the history and progress of modernist art is a march toward purification, a divesting of art of all extraneous material, culminating in the work of art realized as a wholly manifest, self-sufficient object. kaye quotes greenberg's theory that the modernist project in art is to demonstrate that many of the "conventions of the art of painting" are "dispensable, unessential" (25). greenberg's model of art historicity champions the works of noland, morris, and olitksi as representing the modernist ideal of a totally autonomous art: their color fields seeped into the fabric of a dematerialized canvas achieve a coalescence of literalism and illusionism. as greenberg wrote in "modernist painting," the essence of modernism lies, as i see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself--not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. (qtd by kaye, 101) [3] the transitional stage between greenberg's defense of field painting and fried's attack on minimalism is only briefly mentioned by kaye but constitutes a critical moment in the history he narrates. in answer to the call for an autonomous art and maintaining that the canvas was inherently representational, artists such as donald judd and robert morris furthered the quest for an essential art form through minimalist sculpture. the artists created, through the absence of connecting parts, artificial color, or representation, minimalist sculptures that were realized as pure objects of indivisible wholeness. the "literalness" of minimalist sculpture was meant to supplant the illusionism of the canvas. the objecthood of the object (the thingness of the thing in heideggerian terms) became the object of art. however, michael fried spotted a problem in the work of the minimalists. he argued that the minimalist objects surrendered their objecthood by foregrounding the space that they occupied and the duration of the spectator's experience of observation. fried asserted that the minimalist object was time-dependent and hence spectator-dependent, and that it was therefore theatrical and therefore not art. [4] in fried's view, "art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre" (141). for fried, the theatrical is severed from the modernist ideal of a wholly manifest thing-in-itself by virtue of its contingent unfolding in real time, its moment-by-moment dynamic with a receiving audience, its adherence to the paradigm of subjectivity. the experience of witnessing the modernist paintings of olitski or noland or the sculpture of anthony caro has, according to fried, literally no duration, "because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest" (145). the properly modernist goal is an instantaneousness and presentness characterized by the collapse of the subjectivity of the spectator into the objectivity of the work. theater and performance, which work toward presence but not toward modernist presentness, are on this account effectively voided as non-art. [5] having restaged the modernist arguments of greenberg and fried, kaye proceeds to demonstrate the postmodernist--or more accurately anti-modernist--counter projects that have sought to disrupt any foundationalism or essentialism and have thrown into question the concepts of authenticity, wholeness, meaning, and originality. if one accepts greenberg and fried's model of modernism, then performance's inherent disruption of the autonomous art work, its spatial and temporal specificity, its very "messiness," or what kaye calls its "evasion of stable parameters, meanings and identities" (35), make performance the perfect field on which to stage postmodernist rejections of modernist imperatives. [6] certainly kaye is not the first to make this claim for performance's special stature in postmodernity. in _the object of performance_ (a book to which kaye is indebted), henry m. sayre quotes from a catalogue for an exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the hirshhorn museum (1982) written by howard fox, which states that theatricality may be considered that propensity in the visual arts for a work to reveal itself within the mind of the beholder as something other than what it is known empirically to be. this is precisely antithetical to the modern ideal of the wholly manifest, self-sufficient object; and theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of post-modernism. (9) quite apart from the modernist desire to create the thing-in-itself, the desire for the de-materialization of the art object has run concurrently and in some cases has prefigured the modernist projects, reflecting lyotard's suggestion that the postmodern is, in fact, premodern. it is no mere anomaly that the history of the euro-american avant-garde carries with it a series of performative experiments: symbolist and expressionists theatre, the futurist %serate% and dadaist %soiree%, surrealist drama, happenings and performance art. my point is that performance's qualifications as postmodern or anti-modern have been well established. greenberg and fried's derriere-garde notions of authenticity, purity, essence, reside in a historical, foundationalist, and essentialist discourse that has been thoroughly discounted from a postmodern position, voided of relevance in a contemporary model of art. i would question the validity of a continued rehearsing of their arguments to sustain performance's value. fried's "art and objecthood," not unlike benjamin's "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (whose assertion that an original is degraded through its mechanical repetition is problematized, not to say invalidated, in a digital age) is by now a tediously familiar argument with far too little contemporary resonance to function as the point of emergence for a "new vision" of postmodern art. [7] aside from this over-reliance on polemic against already discredited theoretical positions, there is a problem, too, in kaye's reliance on theoretical discourse as such. kaye is keenly aware of theory's collusion in manufacturing, narrativizing, and concretizing abstract "trends" in art. yet his own procedure reproduces, perhaps inevitably, that very tendency. by positioning postmodern performance as essentially a philosophico-aesthetic response to modernist art, kaye simply disregards the concrete history--the cultural, political, and technological realities--of postmodern society, and the significance of this social field for the emergence of postmodern artistic practices. the point here is rudimentary: what engenders an art work is not only the theory and practice of previous schools, but a complex set of relations among contemporary social and cultural phenomena. the seductive labyrinth of "pure" art theory is finally of little use unless the theorist attempts, as edward said has suggested, to address its "worldliness." this is a move that kaye never makes, and as a result his theoretical discussion seems to take place in too isolated an arena of philosophical conceits. however, he astutely challenges some traditional theories, in particular, sally banes's positioning of postmodern dance as modernist in the greenbergian sense. [8] a large portion of the book deals with the theories and practices of modern and postmodern dance and this section is greatly indebted to the writings of sally banes for both its historical perspective and its theoretical model. countering banes, kaye challenges "the very possibility of a properly 'modernist' performance and in turn . . . the move from a modern . . . to a postmodern dance" (71). like banes, kaye traces american modern dance through the work of martha graham and doris humphrey, among others, and their rejection of conventional languages of classical dance and the formlessness of isodora duncan's "free dance." modern dance relied instead on a formalistic expressionism aimed at representing the "inner life." the judson dance theatre (1962-64), which included the choreographer/dancers lucinda childs, steve paxton, yvonne rainer, trisha brown and david gordon, defined itself as postmodern, on the grounds that their work abandoned modern dance's representational strategy of expression. sally banes has disputed this claim, defining their work as more correctly modernist, in the greenbergian sense, in that their minimalist strategies sought to reduce dance to pure movement, severing its connection to expression and representation. kaye counters banes's view by arguing that, far from rehearsing greenberg's program through dance, the historical postmodern dance's reduction of dance to simply 'movement', or even the presence of the dancer alone, attacks the very notion of the autonomous work of art, revealing a contingency, and so an instability, in place of the center the modernist project would seek to realize. (89) kaye is here maintaining fried's argument that a modernist project in performance is impossible. banes might counter with her position that each art form has its own distinct positioning of the postmodern, or in other words, rather than constructing a metanarrative of modernism perhaps a local narrative of particular works would uncover more useful critiques. [9] the value of _postmodernism and performance_ lies not in kaye's attempt to theorize postmodern performance as the perfect counter-project to high modernism, but in his discussion of individual performance and dance works. aside from offering stimulating analyses of well-known works, he brings to light some more obscure but important pieces, such as "first signs of decadence" from michael kirby's structuralist workshop. [10] kaye isolates three unifying elements in many of the postmodern works he approaches (an unavoidable but decidedly non-postmodernist tactic). the first is the *deflation or dematerialization of the art object* as an autonomous whole, in favor of an emphasis on the spectator's construction of that object as an image in the mind. george brecht in speaking of his fluxus inspired "event-scores," such as _water yam_ (1962), said that "for me, an object does not exist outside people's contact with it" (43). brecht may very well be the most radical artist in kaye's collection, insofar as his performance works were "less concerned with the disruption or breaking down of a 'work' than with a catching of attention at a point at which the promise of a work, and the move toward closure, is first encountered" (40). brecht's *water yam* is presented as a boxed collection of white cards with black text that states various instructions or actions. one card reads, "three aqueous events." under the "title" are placed the words "ice, water, steam." as kaye notes, the "event scores" of brecht can be read as a poem or procedural notation. considered as a score, the card seems to be even more open and unclear, as it becomes an ambiguous stimulus to something or other that is yet to be made or occur. in doing so, it places its own self-sufficiency into question and explicitly looks towards a decision yet to be made. (40) [11] from kaye's standpoint, one of the foremost postmodern theater companies is richard foreman's ontological-hysteric theatre, which carries out the shift from art as object to art as receptive event and also fulfills kaye's second criterion of postmodern performance in its *disruption of the meaningful*. the ontological-hysteric theatre has developed a performance-wrighting that stages the production of image, its immediate demise through discourse, and the persistence of a (re)appearing ideology. kaye quotes foreman who wrote, as stella, judd, %et al.% realized several years ago . . . one must reject composition in favor of shape (or something else). . . . why? because the resonance must be between the head and the object. the resonance between the elements of the object is now a dead thing. (49) foreman's performance works generally use a deceptively traditional style with a strict proscenium configuration and the trappings of the conventional stage. what foreman does with that tradition is to turn the image-manufacturing into a "reverberation machine" constantly undoing the image, colliding it against expectation, asking the spectator to think, to put the pieces back together in a new manner. [12] kaye writes clearly about michael kirby's structuralist workshop, an important but often overlooked moment in american avant-garde theatre. the workshop, a loosely aligned group of nyc theatre artists, whose most productive work was done in the mid to late seventies, is likewise concerned with the structuring of performance in the mind of the spectator, "a recognition of relation and contingency" (48). in an interview with kaye, kirby said that 'structure' is being used to refer to the way the parts of a work relate to each other, how they 'fit together' in the mind to form a particular configuration. this fitting together does not happen 'out there' in the objective work; it happens in the mind of the spectator. (48) not unlike foreman, kirby employs the effects of the realistic stage only to complicate the reception of that aesthetic gesture through antithetical staging structures. in _first signs of decadence_, a work analyzed by kaye, kirby structures the staging through a "complex array of rules to which the interaction of characters as well as entrances, exits, lighting, music, and even patterns of emotional response, are subject" (57). kirby is attempting, in his words, to set up a "tension between the representational and non-representational aspects through which the performance is always being torn apart" (57); torn apart to disrupt meaning, content and closure and to open contingencies that in turn activate the spectator's thinking. [13] the third feature or tactic of postmodern performance, according to kaye, is its "*upsetting [of] the hierarchies and assumptions that would define and stabilize the formal and thematic parameters of [the performance] work*" (142). the performance work of the wooster group, in existence for nearly twenty years and a spin-off company from richard schechner's performance group, ideally fits kaye's depiction of the anti-modernist move in postmodern performance. the wooster group, under the direction of elizabeth lecompte, has created a radical form of performance-wrighting that includes a collision of appropriated texts from such diverse categories as traditional modern drama (_our town_, _the crucible_), popular culture (cable-tv, japanese sci-fi films), personal narratives (family suicide), and the taboo texts of pornography and blackface caricature. the fragmented texts are cut-up, reworked and edited into a larger mediatized performance work that consistently undoes its own authority. both philip auslander and david savran have written about the wooster group's political postmodernism, which effects a disempowering of the performance's status as a "charismatic other." an image played out in a wooster group performance is allowed to present itself without a moralistic posturing from the performer. when the company used black-face on white actors they made no effort to let the audience off the hook by pointing to the gesture and condemning it. instead, the spectator was forced to articulate a response, to take responsibility for how he or she would respond. the effect is powerful and has led to acrimonious debates and funding rejections for the company. [14] one difficulty in theorizing postmodern performance is the sheer size of the territory that the term "performance" maps out. it extends far beyond the theatre and galleries to include the total flow of the televisual, the indigenous performance, the intertextuality of the postmodern cityscape within which we perform daily, the postorganic domain of virtual environments and cyberspace. a drawback of _postmodernism and performance_ is that kaye's examination focuses on too narrow a series of performances from downtown nyc, and neglects this larger field. though kaye notes that postmodern performance has forgone the genres and the spatiality of modernism, he doesn't seem to recognize that our performance theory needs to follow that lead. nonetheless, kaye's analyses of the specific performances are insightful and provocative. whatever my specific reservations, _postmodernism and performance_ is an important and thought-provoking addition to a troubled field. works cited: fried, michael. "art and objecthood." _minimal art: a critical anthology_. gregory battcock, ed. new york: e.p. dutton & co., 1968. sayre, henry m. _the object of performance: the american avant-garde since 1970_. chicago: the university of chicago press, 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------fulton, 'other frontier: voyaging west with mark twain and _star trek_'s imperial subject', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-fulton-other.txt archive pmc-list, file fulton-v.594. part 1/1, total size 60221 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- an other frontier: voyaging west with mark twain and _star trek_'s imperial subject^1^ by valerie fulton dept. of english colorado state university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by valerie fulton, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. in the twenty-fourth century, there will be no hunger, and there will be no greed. --gene roddenberry, to actor jonathan frakes [1] following in the footsteps of another primetime television drama, _northern exposure_, which has featured both franz kafka and federico fellini in recent programming, _star trek: the next generation_ bridged its 1992 and '93 seasons with a cliffhanger that meshed the cast of fictional star fleet officers with another "real-life" historical figure, samuel clemens. this trend of having writers and avant-garde film makers appear in popular t.v. series suggests not so much an acceptance of the sort of cultural criticism going on in academia today as it does an appropriation of high cultural figures by the corporate television industry. the industry "sells" kafka and fellini to the viewer, complete with the signifying props that have come to denote intellectualism--dark clothing, moodiness, an aura of mystery--all of which serve to take the place of any real attempt to engage the potentially subversive ideas expressed either in kafka's fiction or in fellini's films. such strategies of appropriation are particularly important to a show like _northern exposure_, whose success depends less on the images of alternative living it presents than on the standard t.v. equation of thriving capitalism--its main characters include an ambitious doctor, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a restaurant owner--with kantian altruism, here reenforced by the program's background cast of righteous but predominantly voiceless native americans. [2] this process by which commodification finally stifles alternative discourse is described well in susan willis's study, _a primer for daily life_. willis uses the california school system's promotion of "earthquake kits" to demonstrate how consumer packaging can result in a series of items' "complete condensation to the commodity form" (165). she differentiates between camping out, which relies on articles developed for military use yet can also be used to stage anti-military protests, and the earthquake kit itself, the contents of which merely "embody the simulated remembrance of how they might have been used if purchased for a camping trip, but . . . do not give access to social practice or its guerrilla theatre reversal" (168). the process by which high cultural figures become reduced to t.v.'s commodity form differs only in the sense that few americans are aware of the originary ideas behind a signifying figure. when a friend once defended _northern exposure_ to me on the ground that "a show that quotes nietzsche can't be all bad," she hit on the central problem. we live in a culture where "nietzsche" is a metonym for intellectual thought much in the way that "kleenex" is a metonym for something to wipe one's nose on: to appreciate, even identify with, the t.v. character who quotes from _beyond good and evil_, one hardly needs to have read or even to know of the text. networks can thus extend their appeal to (and in the process help define) the "thinking american," whose pleasure comes from seeing the metonymic association in this unfamiliar context, while at the same time risking neither their mainstream audience nor their corporate sponsorship. [3] the appearance of samuel clemens on _star trek: the next generation_ confirms the idea that intellectual thought can be reduced to the least common denominator of the commodity form. moreover, clemens's appearance on the show underscores the extent to which t.v. programs themselves may unintentionally reproduce ideological assumptions that we consume, store, and later regurgitate. _star trek: the next generation_, a show about the future's altruistic exploration of life on other planets, tacitly helps to perpetuate the conventional u.s. wisdom that acts of imperialism by our government against third world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving, benign rather than aggressive. clemens's appearance on the episode in question as an inquisitive and bothersome fixture of the western american frontier situates him firmly in a past where the imperial self was a fixture both dominant and heroic. this portrayal does more than belie the strong anti-imperialist tenor of clemens's later work. in being asked to consume the writer as a frontier artifact we are not only encouraged to believe that star fleet command--and, by extension, the television viewer--has progressed beyond the sort of "frontier mentality"^2^ americans have come to associate with acts of wrongful acquisition; we are simultaneously *dis*couraged from practicing the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative modes of discourse and lead toward social change. i. "*to boldly go where no one has gone before*" [4] _star trek: the next generation_'s u.s.s. enterprise, the flagship for an entire fleet of federation vessels, has as its "continuing mission" a duty to "explore strange new worlds" and to "seek out new life forms." since it also has the weapons capacity to annihilate a small planet, crew members sometimes find themselves obliged to reassure species from less technologically advanced worlds that, remarkable as it may seem, the arsenal is for defensive purposes only. unlike the incredulous life form who believes weapons are made to be used, american t.v. viewers have little trouble accepting the show's nonviolent premise--in large part because we are accustomed to the routine stockpiling of nuclear and other advanced weapons for the protection of our country's "national security." yet the program itself, which pretends to see through twentieth-century self-deceptions by presenting our time in retrospect as avidly militaristic, provides its viewers with still another rationale. the federation's star fleet officers are not inclined to act aggressively, _star trek_ tells us, because everything they need is already at their disposal. in other words, the show relies on marx's early notion that human nature is bound to the mode of production to explain how future generations have become more "civilized" and "humane." the material substances used to reenforce this notion are, not coincidentally, food and energy.^3^ here human agency has been removed from the mode of production altogether: "food replicators" provide all crew members with abundant, effortless, computer-generated meals, while the "warp coil" draws on a fictitious energy source to power the enterprise through space. when not burdened by the exigencies of frontier travel, _star trek_'s crew is free--with some help, of course, from the holodeck's simulated landscapes--"to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" (marx, 53). nor is this multiplicity of roles limited to recreational practice. although there is an ostensible division of labor among the program's main characters, star fleet commanders not only manage to avoid disaster by employing the critical methodologies or expertise of absent crew members, they also pool information to discover unified solutions to most of the emergencies that threaten their ship. [5] but if _star trek_ implies that the future will liberate us from alienating modes of production, the program is finally unable to conceive a community based on marx's notion of mutual ownership rather than on the principles of state control. star fleet is, after all, a military organization, and like all military organizations its order of command follows a strict hierarchy. the crew members' willingness to obey their superiors is so routine, in fact, that _star trek_'s writers appear to have become bored with it; their invention of the renegade "q," a representative from a "nearly omnipotent" life form, allows for the intrusion of byronic skepticism without the threat of a specific challenge to the status quo. for instance, "q" mocks the egalitarianism which prompts captain jean-luc picard to call his first officer "number one" by reminding commander riker that he is, in the established order, no better than "number two." yet "q" himself, who wields seemingly infinite power for personal rather than altruistic reasons, does not present a more attractive alternative to star fleet's hierarchical model. in fact, his character suggests that to be freed from the controlling mechanisms of an "illusory community" (marx, 83) is to become capricious, childlike, and unresponsive to the rights of others. [6] that _star trek_ portrays an ideal future community in which humans have surpassed twentieth-century greed and aggression while at the same time relying on recursive models of the state apparatus is an unavoidable paradox; the show can, after all, do no more than pretend to know a future we have yet to live. for that reason, i will not question its least probable expedients--that all aliens converse in perfect english, that humans can interbreed with alien life forms, that most planets seem atmospherically conducive to human life, etc..^4^ rather, i concentrate on the show's central paradox, the fact that its future orientation coincides with the exploration of "strange new worlds," something americans perceive as a completed historical task. as i have already suggested, the erasure of the present moment from this formulation helps to direct viewer attention away from the fact that exploration, conquest, and colonization continue to be routinized parts of twentieth-century american economic policy. just as important, however, is the extent to which this erasure reveals the future's dependence on and connection with the past. frontier travel can never signify an absolute departure, since not only does this idea imply that our invention of new experience or of new means of socialization is possible; it suggests that we are able to describe otherness without reverting to the language and ideological constructions of the same. as derrida argues in "psyche: the invention of the other," "invention does not create an existence or a world as a set of existents"; it "discovers for the first time . . . what was already *found* there" (338, original emphasis). moreover, while invention "presupposes originality," it will "only receive its status of invention" when it is "protected by a system of _conventions_ that will ensure . . . its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a lineage, a pedagogical tradition, a discipline, a chain of generations" (316, original emphasis). [7] tzvetan todorov, writing about columbus's voyage to the caribbean, provides a means to address these ideas in relation to a logic of frontier exploration. because guided by a system of absolute conventions and beliefs, columbus "knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth already possessed" (17). thus, confronted by natives who tell him that cuba is an island rather than part of the asian continent, "he decides to eliminate" this information and "challenges the quality of his informants" (21) instead of altering his initial hypothesis. he is likewise unable to register diversity in language; the "only two possible" ways he can behave when forced to communicate with indians are "to acknowledge [their foreign tongue] as a language but to refuse to believe it is different; or to acknowledge its difference but to refuse to admit it is a language" (30). as todorov argues, columbus's inability to perceive otherness stems from his belief that spanish language and culture do not constitute "one convention among others, but [are] rather the natural state of things" (29). such foundational thinking is central to most notions of frontier exploration and conquest.^5^ consider, for instance, the statement of purpose used to introduce _star trek: the next generation_. the federation's goals are both "to seek out new civilizations" and "to boldly go where no one has gone before"--missions that clearly contradict each other unless read through the lens of frontier ideology, which grants new civilizations existence only to the extent that the originary culture has "found" them. ii. "prime" surveillance [8] in carrying out their mission of frontier exploration, star fleet officers are at all times bound to obey the "prime directive," a policy designed by _star trek_'s writers to underscore the future's first commitment to justice and humanity. the ordinance, which prohibits all federation personnel from interfering with the cultural development of less advanced worlds, bears a striking resemblance to the mandate now issued at federal parks and wilderness areas throughout the u.s., usually in the form of a sign cautioning against the destruction of a "fragile ecosystem" and requesting that visitors leave everything as they found it. because the federation takes an anthropological interest in developing cultures, but is prevented by the prime directive from openly engaging in their study, research teams descend to the planet under investigation and conceal themselves either behind an electronic blind or within surgically altered bodies; like the twentieth-century field biologist, their objective is to collect observable data without disturbing subjects or taking them outside their natural habitat. [9] these measures bear a less obvious but important resemblance to current naturalist strategies in the extent to which both justify surveillance as the necessary precondition for scientific research and, ultimately, the greater good of humanity. i do not wish to suggest that the surveillance of wilderness areas or game preserves is in itself problematic, but simply to point out how readily a logic of "stewardship" translates into a logic of imperialism.^6^ on a recent episode of _star trek: the next generation_ entitled "first contact," commander riker has been disguised and sent on a recognizance mission to determine whether a species about to attain warp drive is ready to assume to the sort of responsibilities federation officials deem necessary in using such advanced technology. unfortunately, riker is hospitalized on the planet's surface; the surgeons who operate notice his strange internal structure and conclude that he is a different species from themselves. although this series of events might easily have led to a critique of star fleet surveillance practice, the episode focuses instead on the threat these aliens' recognition of commander riker poses to the prime directive, which picard must violate if he wishes to save his first officer's life. the show encourages us to identify with picard's "human" dilemma before we consider the inconsistency presented by his "away team"'s surveillance procedures, in large part because it portrays the aliens themselves as xenophobic--so much so that they resolve to postpone warp drive testing until they can face a universe in which their culture is neither dominant nor central. this resolve, culminating in a refusal to join the federation alliance, reconstitutes the marginal and particularly non-human status of the alien race; unlike their leading scientist, who prefers to accompany the crew of the enterprise rather than live among outmoded ideas and technology, the others are content to remain behind. that picard's largesse permits them this freedom, moreoever, obscures a more pressing issue--the impossibility of their ever regaining the cultural autonomy they seek. like the earth's remaining predators, which roam our wilderness parks while human advocates tag them, keep track of their procreative habits, and lobby for their protection, the aliens have already been inscribed within star fleet's cultural heritage. they have been seen, regardless of whether they choose to see. [10] in "the eye of power," michel foucault evokes the "panopticon" as a conceptual model for the enlightenment's more general goal, first to erradicate "any zones of darkness . . . established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation," and then to realize "the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men's hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each" (152). instead of the social attainment of this goal, however, what emerges is a disciplinary system in which authority becomes "a machinery that no one owns" and "class domination can be exercised just to the extent that power is dissasociated from individual might" (156). foucault's rejection of "ownership" as the primary means of attaining and inscribing power is especially pertinent to a discussion of _star trek: the next generation_, since most property on board the enterprise is collective, and money no longer exists as a form of exchange within the federation's economic system. in fact, one might argue that the bodies of the crew members themselves have become the abstract property (in deleuze's sense of "abstract machinic" arrangements)^7^ of the moral capital established at the interface between federation members and the all encompassing surveillance mechanism within which they live and work. this device, the ship's computer network, no longer represents the strictly _visual_ surveillance that foucault theorized, but is instead a kind of "infosensorium" internalized in the body-*as*-computer, with the result that the frontier of the body itself becomes "colonized" as a self-monitoring machine.^8^ [11] not surprisingly, and despite the fact that the computer is used as frequently to obtain information about federation staff as it is to investigate other, possibly hostile life forms, _star trek_ viewers are discouraged from making an overt connection between the constitution of power relations and the surveillance of crew members. instead, they are asked to see the computer as a direct extension of benign human agency, a tool no better than the individuals responsible for its use. potential anxiety about the dangers of surveillance technology is further minimized- while, ironically, the process by which the body becomes machinic is advanced--by giving the computer a human counterpart. ship's counselor deanna troi, a genetic mixture of the human and betazoid races, has inherited powers of mental telepathy that enable her to bring others' hidden emotions to light much in the same way that a computer probe can determine their physical structure.^9^ however, the counselor escapes becoming the mere agent of surveillance practice in large part because, as she is also portrayed, she is a feminine woman who loves chocolate, gossip, and romantic settings. channelled through this familiar and nonthreatening human personality, troi's telepathic powers emerge as little more than a refined form of "female intuition." thus, while the television viewer may be able to trivialize her role as a federation officer, it is almost impossible to imagine troi as an alien endowed with the potential to "access" human minds. [12] as these examples suggest, surveillance technology intersects frontier ideology at the level of the distinction between self and other. the concept of an "imperial self" is especially important: regardless of a given star fleet officer's race, that officer's success as a member of the federation is contingent on how closely his or her actions correspond to the specifically *human* ideals of hard work, loyalty, and compassion; aliens, on the other hand, are those who do not willingly subordinate their cultural impulses to the dominant model. for the american television viewer, this ought to be a familiar concept, since it is directly analogous to the commonly held belief that marginalized peoples should be accepted only to the extent that they assimilate white, middle-class notions of culture and value. dissent among star fleet officers, when it occurs, is thus an effect not of bad federation policy, but rather of covert intrusions from the outside which conspire to make federation personnel "other"--much in the same way that rising suburban crime rates are thought to result not from discriminatory u.s. economic policies, but instead from the immigration of ethnic minorities into predominantly white neighborhoods. likewise, aliens who serve as members of star fleet command must continually prove their allegiance to the federation, usually through confrontations with their native cultures that are designed to reconfirm the superior ideological position they have adopted. for instance, the program's klingon security officer, lieutenant commander worf, has not merely chosen to join the federation; his father has been wrongly denounced as a traitor by the klingon high council, a mistake that makes worf "alien" to his own people while at the same time showcasing the autocratic, rash, and narrow-minded impulses of the klingon race. [13] ultimately, characters like worf allow _star trek_'s writers a convenient means of circumventing the prime directive, since all such characters engage in a continual conversion to the federation's higher goals and principles. moreover, as the figure of one-of-a-kind android data suggests, the conversion must take place even when there are no originary cultural impulses to challenge those of the federation. lieutenant commander data's ambition to become "more human" in particular belies the facile multiculturalism implied both by ordinances like the prime directive and by star fleet's ready tolerance of other cultures' cursory habits of mind--their holidays, foods, ornamental objects, etc.. designed to resemble an anatomically correct caucasian male, data is a perpetual human drag show whose attempts at imitation result in a series of comedic postures. despite the fact that they may initially suggest multiplicity or play,^10^ data's approximations reaffirm, in the long run, the forces of social hegemony on board the enterprise, since, of course, these gestures signify each time the dominant rather than suggest an alternative ideological commitment. data's choice to become the same thus points once again to the surveillance mechanisms that, in a foucauldian sense, constitute disciplinary power: by watching, acting, imitating, data demonstrates how "the effects of power" circulate "through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions" (foucault, 151-2). iii. high plains data [14] in all the ideological assumptions that _star trek: the next generation_ and its american television viewers share, a complex and contradictory notion of individualism predominates. just as we are encouraged to "be ourselves" and are at the same time bombarded by stimuli that ensure dominant forms of mimetic desire, just as we are trained to believe that "all people are created equal" while at the same time asked to compete in an economy that routinely discriminates against women and minorities, so does _star trek_'s position contend that individualism is both desired and improbable. i have already suggested the extent to which the program's tacit imperialism complicates notions of autonomy and difference. here, i would like to comment on _star trek_'s attitude toward radical individualism. on the one hand, the program advocates personal achievement and self-determination, two individualistic qualities necessary for movement within the federation's ranks. captain picard, for instance, has achieved his dominant status precisely *because* he is willing to take risks and work outside the strict parameters of the law. it is important to realize, however, that picard's autonomy is contingent on an ideological commitment to and ideal understanding of the status quo so strong that even his insubordination constitutes obedience to the federation's larger goals and principles; in attaining the highest position of power, picard has become synonymous with power and its agencies alike. by constrast, the radicial individual invariably poses a threat to both ship operations and the cooperative efforts of star fleet command. frequent episodes demonstrate that individual crew members who have succumbed to the invasive influence of some alien culture or identity must be subdued, brought back in line; moreover, given the extent to which federation culture is meant to exemplify the most advanced stage in a strict teleological progression, individuals who evince revolutionary or renegade tendencies often come to be associated with the past.^11^ [15] "time's arrow," the two-part episode which features samuel clemens, is readily able to engage this process by which radical individualism is marginalized and suppressed, since the story's premise involves travel to a time which most u.s. citizens recognize as one of vigilantes and solitary gunmen. the first episode in particular draws on the american frontier's symbolic resonance to construct a contrast between past and future habits of mind. it begins with the discovery that archaeologists have unearthed android data's decapitated head from a cavern beneath twenty-fourth century san francisco alongside "several artifacts from the 1800s--a watch, eyeglasses, a gun."^12^ that data's positronic circuitry should be placed alongside items which federation technology has rendered obsolete makes immediately clear the juncture between past and future. but the decision to focus on data is also more subtly significant. data's state of deleuzian "human becoming"^13^ places the android in a perfect position to confront the frontier past, since not only do self fashioning and a lack of feeling define both the android's and the hollywood outlaw's %modus operandi%; data's unique status as a life form makes him the ideal candidate to assume a guise of radical otherness. [16] in fact, the first part of "time's arrow" features data as a type of the "man with no name" persona clint eastwood has popularized in westerns like _high plains drifter_. having unwittingly followed a group of aliens through the time portal that connects the planet devidia two with nineteenth-century earth, data finds himself on the streets of frontier san franscisco armed with nothing but his clothing and star fleet communicator badge. he immediately uses the latter as collateral in a poker game, earning him both the means to continue researching the mystery of his anachronistic "death" and the admiration of bellboy jack london, who becomes his faithful sidekick. data's success in manipulating the economic resources around him to serve his own interests and his ability to command respect despite the fact that he occupies a position of complete anonymity are only two features he shares with eastwood's nameless drifter. though motivated by a sense of urgency ostensibly unrelated to the concerns of those around them, both figures form a temporary alliance with certain of these others in order to overpower a common enemy. thus, data's search for the cause of his own destruction becomes inextricably bound with star fleet's investigation into a series of deaths on nineteenth-century earth; these deaths, attributed to cholera but really the work of aliens from the planet devidia two, give common, humanitarian cause to data's mission while at the same time displacing the role of radical otherness from the android to the parasitic devidians, who have travelled back in time to feed on human energy. [17] that lieutenant commander data's presence in frontier america can be justified only when the android undermines his claim to individuality finally separates him from the character eastwood portrays in _high plains drifter_. the drifter, a ghost who has returned for the most personal of reasons--to avenge his death--can never transcend the limitations of this condition to join the citizens with whom he has organized; the spectre from some existential spirit world, he must remain adrift and solitary. the android's limitations, on the other hand, guarantee that he reacts impersonally even to his own death. in fact, far from sensing a need to vindicate himself, data considers his disembodied head to suggest a point of commonality between him and the humans he emulates; he "seems to take solace in the fact that he is now mortal" (6). the obvious point is that androids cannot feel for themselves. it is also worth noting, however, that data has been cast in the role of hollywood outlaw not so much because of his facile resemblance to this figure, but because he is the character least able to carry the role to its logical conclusions. just as data can do no more than approximate the actions of his human counterparts, so can he do no more than signify an image of radical individualism already contained and commodified by american consumer culture. iv. the viewer "sitting in darkness"^14^ [18] data is not the only figure in "time's arrow" to occupy a commodified position. the two-part episode also features a representation of samuel clemens that relies heavily on the writer as a familiar cultural icon. despite the fact that clemens left san franscisco in 1866, at the age of thirty-one, the show depicts him in the guise of the white-haired, white-suited curmudgeon whom americans readily recognize--in large part because a white-haired, white-suited automaton "mark twain"^15^ greets millions of visitors each year to disney's frontierland. representations like disney's serve to foster an image of the writer as presiding over and to some extent creating our frontier past; that clemens has come for so many americans to signify this past may account for _star trek_'s willingness to make him--rather than a sheriff, mayor or other politician--the proper authority to negotiate between the time travelers and their nineteenth-century ancestors. however, _star trek_ grants this position of unprecedented power to a literary figure only on the condition that clemens remain a commodified cultural object. the program's underlying message is that oppositional thought, like radical individualism, must either be suppressed or contained within the dominant ideological structure. [19] interestingly, clemens enters the program's narrative as an oppositional and potentially disruptive force. after eavesdropping on a conversation in which he discovers that data is an "invader" from the future, clemens explains to a san franscisco reporter that he "wrote a book about" time travel which "chronicles the tale of a man of our era who fouls sixth century by introducing newfangled gadgets and weapons, all in the name of progress" (9). this frankly anti-imperialist gloss of _a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court_^16^ typifies clemens's initial response to the federation, whose motives he compares to those of the spanish, dutch, and portugese (11). skeptical about whether the u.s.s. enterprise can really be a "ship of peace," the writer objects that this is "what all conquerors say" (11); he also resists star fleet operations by stealing into data's hotel room, sabotaging the android's "time-shift detection device," threatening members of the crew's "away team" at gun point, and thwarting picard's entry back through the time portal. [20] insofar as clemens works to undermine what he perceives as a threat to "all humanity" (9), his actions are not unlike the patriotic resistance efforts of general washington, joan of arc, and deposed phillippine leader emilio aquinaldo, whose ideals clemens thought should be "held in reverence by the best men and women of all civilizations."^17^ far from seeming heroic, however, clemens's solitary efforts to save his race are made to appear intrusive and wrong-headed. his chief mistake, the episode makes clear, lies in an inability to see the "real menace" (9). "newfangled gadgets and weapons" are not the problem; as one of the enterprise crew explains to clemens, technological advances have led to "the end of poverty and the cooperative ways of the united federation of planets" (11). the problem is instead the devidians, who have used advanced technology for the purpose of harvesting, storing, and consuming human energy. the devidians--not members of the u.s.s. enterprise--are the "real" imperialists; even the fact that the deaths for which they are responsible have been attributed to cholera suggests a comparison with north america's first european colonists, who spread this and other communicable diseases to the native population. that the aliens have traveled to nineteenth-century san francisco in order to obtain their "only source of nourishment" (11), moreoever, suggests that imperialist activity is somehow particular to america's frontier past. certainly, this is the lesson samuel clemens learns. "slightly less cynical" by the program's end, the writer not only claims that his discovery of the twenty fourth-century time travelers constitutes his "greatest adventure"; he thanks data "for helping a bitter old man to open his eyes and see that the future turned out pretty well" (12). [21] by priviledging an image of clemens as the teller of "great adventures" and displacing his anti-imperialist sentiments with expressions of vaguely patriotic optimism, _star trek_ encourages its viewers to contextualize his work in a way that undermines the full complexity even of those aspects it engages. and insofar as the process by which clemens evolves from "bitter old man" to advocate for an enlightened future relies on the substitution of one discrete ideological position for another--insofar as it relies, that is, on the substitution of a "mistaken" position for the "truthful" one--the program actually neglects to engage one of the most salient features of his late work, its nietzschean skepticism. according to clemens, no one group or civilization may claim the right to dominate another on the ground that it occupies a superior ethical position; each is instead alike in "knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government," and "each [is] proud of its fancied supremacy."^18^ he also dismisses outright the concept of altruism, one of those qualities to which we have attached a "misleading meaning." charity, benevolence, and self sacrifice exist for clemens only to the extent that they serve to gratify individual "self-approval"; a man must content "his own spirit first--the other person's benefit has to always take _second_ place."^19^ [22] these ideas go far toward explaining clemen's specific objections to imperialist policy. consider, for instance, the following passage from his essay "to the person sitting in darkness": the blessings-of-civilization trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a daisy. . . . but christendom . . . has been so eager to get at every stake . . . that the people who sit in darkness . . . have become suspicious of the blessing of civilization. more, they have begun to examine them. this is not well. the blessing of civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be better, in a dim light. (286) he continues by noting that this package of exported "blessings" is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our civilization which we reserve for home consumption, while _inside_ the bale is the actual thing that the customer sitting in darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. (287) clemens not only shows how imperialists commodify values like "love," "gentleness," and "mercy" (286) in order to manufacture a fair business exchange out of what might otherwise be seen as the exploitation of another culture; he also suggests that for the "person in darkness" to accept the "blessings-of-civilization" package, she must learn to value "mere outside covers" more than "actual things." thus clemens considers ideology--not "progress" or "newfangled gadgets"^20^--the imperialist's most powerful tool of oppression. that is why, at the conclusion of _a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court_, all hank morgan's firepower and "civilizing" inventions together cannot undermine the foundations of catholicism; that is why, at the end of "the war prayer" (1904-5), the "aged stranger" who asks those around him to reconsider their use of christianity as a justification for violence is dismissed as a "lunatic" by the rest of the congregation (682). clemens would have been especially wary of a society like the united federation of planets, which claims that advanced weapons and technology have enabled altruism, since for him all "material advantage" amounts to "the same thing"; it cannot change the fact that human beings "seek the contentment of [a] spirit" which is "indifferent to . . . man's good" and is intent only on "satisfying its own desires."^21^ [23] in "to the person sitting in darkness," clemens acknowledges not only that successful strategies for marketing a benevolent american identity are necessary "for the sake of business," but that it is the skillful communicator's duty to "arrange [the other culture's] opinions for [it]" (291). what was once the imperialist's imperative is now, in today's "global economy," the duty of those corporate agencies that manufacture televisual and other mass-produced representations for the purpose of securing control over the world's consumer marketplace. a recent trend in cultural studies has been to suggest that such representations can produce a wide spectrum of possible responses, including those conducive to the exploration and transformation of our routinized selves. this assumption, formulated in part to counter the belief that film, television, and popular fiction are "low" media, the opiate of an easily manipulated mass audience, has yielded a great deal of useful material.^22^ nonetheless, i think it is possible to overstate the progressive impact televised subject matter has on individuals, regardless of their socio-economic status or educational background. the danger lies in focussing too much on the cultural critic's attempt to rescript an isolated representation or set of representations for the purpose of empowering marginal discourse, while at the same time downplaying the economic dominance of those managerial forces responsible for placing the representation in its original televised context. for instance, constance penley's article "feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture" demonstrates how fanzine versions of the relationship between captain kirk and mr. spock reconceptualize ways of looking at gendered and sexual identity in order to serve interests not addressed by the _star trek_ series.^23^ however, the fact that certain fans have rescripted the show's intended parameters by no means changes _star trek_'s patriarchal treatment of women or its dismissal of romantic relationships in favor of such male gendered themes as aggression and conflict. nor does penley's article explain why the same fans whose stories transform kirk from a womanizer into spock's willing sex partner feel that the feminist agenda implicit in the transformation is one they must repudiate. one might in fact argue, as penley herself suggests,^24^ that the tension between these two marginal discourses--"slash lit" and feminism--effectively reveals the power of hegemonic ideological representations not only to dominate the mainstream, but also to make difficult any form of sustained collective resistance to it. [24] but it is also important to realize the extent to which dominant managerial positions can retain their power even though they learn to "sell" marginal representations, a point that becomes apparent when the discussion moves from naturalized gender roles on the first _star trek_ series to naturalized versions of the imperial self on _star trek: the next generation_. the product of two distinct historical periods--one in which the women's movement had not yet begun to gain a popular american audience, the other in which "reaganomics" owed its success to arms' proliferation and u.s. intervention in third-world countries such as panama and nicaragua--each television series may be said to contain ideological concerns that reflect and generate contemporary anxieties about the infiltration of a potentially disruptive "other" into the mainstream.^25^ where the two differ is in the degree to which they see both the marginalization of women and the colonization of consumer subjects as necessary for corporate capitalism's growth and perpetuation. while it is possible to coopt women into the system as producers, and therefore to enfranchise interests like feminism, women as a group are just one target in corporate capitalism's ongoing need to colonize *a* subject, whatever its provisional "frontier." _star trek: the next generation_'s reconstitution of an imperialist ideology thus mirrors the more general process by which television programs work to colonize, represent, and even produce consumer interests. the containment and commodification of alternative discourse--especially that which, like clemens's, questions the nature of capitalism itself--is a necessary part of the process. given this conundrum, one thing is certain: although cultural critics must continue to examine the progressive possibilities that exist in popular social texts such as _star trek_, we must also align our analyses of diverse cultural representations with an examination of the monolithic cultural capital that commodifies diversity for profit, while threatening to manage our critical attention as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ many thanks to the readers at _postmodern culture_, and to paul trembath, for helping with the revision of this essay. ^2^ the latest gene roddenberry spin-off, _star trek: deep space nine_, suggests a resurgence of interest in the frontier as a place both of infinite possibility and of violence, hardship, and continual strife; this change from _star trek: the next generation_'s view of space as predominantly colonized, ordered, and governed may reflect the u.s.'s recent swing from years of reagan prosperity to the current economic recession and a renewed interest in libertarian politics. ^3^ the threat of world hunger and the depletion of our natural resources pose two of the greatest challenges to the environmental, economic, and humanitarian policy of our century. ^4^ recent episodes have attempted to provide an explanation for some of these phenomena. for instance, the preponderance of humanoid life forms in the galaxy is the result of one ancient species' having centuries ago seeded several planets with its own dna; thus, there is a "real," not merely coincidental, genetic kinship among the cardassian, human, klingon, and romulan races. similarly, the enterprise computer's "universal translator" is responsible for making sure that all communication on board the ship is conducted in english. these justifications are merely cosmetic, however, and do little to explain the show's decidedly anglo-centric bias, a condition that is behind the program's decision to designate english as the federation's official language in the first place. other evidence for the bias includes our solar system's designation as sector "001," and the fact that the federation's prestigious star fleet academy is housed not just on planet earth, but in the city of san francisco. ^5^ thinking about the frontier remains foundational as long as one assumes that the progression from "here" to "there" is unilaterally one-dimensional. new writing on the frontier discards this belief, stressing instead what gayatri spivak calls the "interanimating relationship" between margin and center. in the forefront of such work is gloria anzaldua's _borderlands/frontera: the new mestiza_ (san francisco: spinsters-aunt lute, 1987). _the frontier experience and the american dream: essays on american literature_, edited by david mogen, mark busby, and paul bryant (texas a & m university press, 1989) also works to challenge traditional notions of the frontier by approaching the idea of "new territory" from a number of possible angles, including canon formation and ethnic studies. ^6^ just a few of the many recently published books which consider the ethics of wildlife and resource management are walter truett anderson's _to govern evolution_ (n.y.: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1987); alfred w. crosby's _ecological imperialism_ (n.y.: cambridge, 1986); bill devall's and george session's _deep ecology_ (salt lake city: peregrine smith, 1985); and rosemary rodd's _biology, ethics, and animals_ (n.y.: oxford, 1990). views on the subject range from anderson's belief that it is lamentable but imperative that people act on the behalf of other species to devall's and session's call for human beings to assume a decentered subject position in relation to the world that both surrounds and encompasses us. ^7^ for an explanation of this sense of the word "machinic," see gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _anti oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_, trans. robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lane (minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1983), 36-41; for a discussion of "abstract" machines see ronald bogue, _deleuze and guattari_ (new york: routledge, 1989), 131-5 and 145-9. for a critique of foucault's "panoptic" view of power as it can apply to _star trek_'s computerized re-centralization of power in federation bodies, see jean baudrillard, _forget foucault_ (new york: semiotext(e), 1987), 11-12, and arthur kroker and david kook, _the postmodern scene: excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics_ (new york: st. martin's press, 1986), 170-81. in the terms of this paper, deleuze and baudrillard are uncharacteristically compatible, since both deleuze's notion of "machinic arrangements" and baudrillard's notion of "dead power" theorize power as a field of immanence which is neither centrist nor diffuse, but rather effected in the collective attentions of bodies themselves. such a view of power explains the absolute coextensivity of computer monitors to federation bodies aboard the enterprise--a coextensivity within which power is so all-pervasive it virtually disappears into the experience of "life" itself. ^8^ for a discussion of the body as a kind of "frontier" whose power to affect and be affected is always open to decoding and re-territorialization--particularly in the alluring presence of capital--see gilles deleuze, "capitalism," in _the deleuze reader_ (new york: columbia u press, 1993), 241-44. ^9^ there is in fact some claim for describing troi as the computer's offspring--at least insofar as the same actress who plays troi's mother (majel barrett) also speaks the part of the enterprise's voice-activated computer. ^10^ butler, for instance, suggests that "drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself--as well as its contingency" (137). ^11^ for this reason, both federation uniforms and federation equipment are pictured as sleek, spare, and antiseptic. the self-willed klingon "warrior," by contrast, assumes a beowulfian guise and inhabits a ship the contents of which are as dark and labrynthian as any medieval hall's. ^12^ quotations from "time's arrow: part one" (teleplay by joe menosky and michael piller) and "time's arrow: part two" (teleplay by jeri taylor) are taken from john sayer's synopses of both episodes in _star trek: the next generation: the official magazine_ 23 ('92-'93 season): 6-8; 9-12. the current citation comes from page six. all future references to either episode will appear parenthetically. ^13^ see deleuze's and parnet's chapter, "a conversation: what is it? what is it for?" (1-35), for a discussion of "becomings." although _star trek_ defines the goal to become human as a goal to become the same--and as such precludes the deleuzian possibility of an invention of "new forces" (5)--the program constantly exploits data's non-human status to produce multiple plots, multiple variations on a theme, multiple encounters, so that there is what might more productively be called *the constant illusion of data's becoming*. ^14^ clemens's essay "to the person sitting in darkness" (1901) was a response to america's role in the boxer rebellion. ^15^ to mention clemens's famous pseudonym is implicitly to acknowledge the extent to which the writer commodified his own identity in order to facilitate the sale of his work. throughout this essay, however, i have not only deliberately avoided noting the many, sometimes glaring inconsistencies between the opinions clemens expressed in the form of political satire and the actions of his daily life; i have also attempted to engage the writer only at the level of his work. not surprisingly, _star trek_ collapses clemens's ideas and life into a single "personality." at their farewell meeting, picard expresses a wish that "time would have allowed [him] to know [clemens] better," to which the writer replies: "you'll just have to read my books . . . . what i am is pretty much there" (12). ^16^ _star trek_'s reading of _a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court_ again illustrates the program's tendency to simplify clemens's work. in fact, as werner sollors points out, the novel is not easily reduced to a clear or stable interpretation; it has been "embattled by interpreters" who question whether it constitutes "light and humorous praise of worthy progress" or is instead "a bitter and gloomy anticipation of the century of nuclear holocausts and mass genocides" (291). ^17^ samuel clemens, "thirty thousand killed a million," 52. ^18^ samuel clemens, "what is man," 399. ^19^ "what is man," 352, 342. ^20^ clemens, in fact, was fascinated by inventions and "newfangled gadgets." as john lauber notes in the preface to his biography of the writer, he was even "an inventor in a small way, patenting a self-pasting scrapbook and a self-adjusting vest strap, copyrighting a game to teach historical facts, even imagining microprint" (xi). ^21^ "what is man," 394, 393. ^22^ for just a few of the many examples of work that rescripts dominant representations in the service of a more progressive agenda, see patricia mann's work on agency, _micro-politics: agency in a postfeminist era_ (minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1994), jane tompkins's _sensational designs_ (new york: oxford u press, 1985), and john ernest's "economies of identity: harriet e. wilson's _our nig_," _pmla_ (vol. 109, no. 3: may 1994), 424-438. ^23^ penley's argument focusses on the phenomenon of "slash lit," or the reconceptualization of the platonic friendship between a televisual "buddy" pair like kirk and spock in the form of a sexually explicit gay relationship. ^24^ she comments: "we would indeed love to take this fandom as an exemplary case of female appropriation of, resistence to, and negotiation with mass-produced culture. and we would also like to be able to use a discussion of k/s [the "slash" relationship between kirk and spock] to help dislodge the still rigid positions in the feminist sexuality debates around fantasy, pornography, and s & m. but if we are to do so it must be within the recognition that the slashers do not feel they can express their desires for a better, sexually liberated, and more egalitarian world through feminism; they do not feel they can speak as feminists, they do not feel that feminism speaks for them" (492). ^25^ the shift from naturalized representations of gender to naturalized representations of the imperial self is announced even in each program's introductory remarks. while the crew of _star trek_'s enterprise embark on their voyage of discovery "where no *man* has gone before," the postfeminist members of _the next generation_ venture "where no *one* has gone." ---------------------------------------------------------------- works cited butler, judith. _gender trouble_. new york: routledge, 1990. clemens, samuel. "thirty thousand killed a million." _the atlantic monthly_ 269 (april 1992): 52-65. ---. "to the person sitting in darkness." _the complete essays of mark twain_. ed. and with an introduction by charles neider. new york: doubleday, 1963. ---. "the war prayer." _the complete essays of mark twain_. ed. neider. doubleday, 1963. ---. "what is man?" _the complete essays of mark twain_. ed. neider. doubleday, 1963. deleuze, gilles, and clair parnet. _dialogues_. trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. new york: columbia, 1987. derrida, jacques. "psyche: the invention of the other." _acts of literature_. ed. derek attridge. new york: routledge, 1991. foucault, michel. _power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings_. ed. colin gordon. trans. gordon, colin, leo marshall, john mepham, and kate soper. new york: pantheon, 1980. lauber, john. _the invention of mark twain_. new york: hill and wang, 1990. marx, karl, and frederick engels. _the german ideology_. ed. and with and introduction by c.j. arthur. new york: international publishers, 1988. penley, constance. "feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture." _cultural studies_. ed. grossberg, lawrence, cary nelson, and paula treichler. new york: routledge, 1992. sollors, werner. "ethnicity." _critical terms for literary study_. eds. lentriccia, frank, and thomas mclaughlin. chicago: chicago u p, 1990. todorov, tzvetan. _the conquest of america_. trans. richard howard. new york: harper, 1984. willis, susan. _a primer for daily life_. new york: routledge, 1991. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------boy, 'biding spectacular time', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-boy-biding.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.196. part 1/1, total size 17677 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- biding spectacular time by a.h.s. boy spud@nothingness.org postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 a.h.s. boy, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford unversity press. review of: "guy debord." _the society of the spectacle_. trans. donald nicholson-smith. new york: zone books, 1994. (numbers between brackets refer to numbered theses in the book.) [1] for decades, guy debord's _the society of the spectacle_ was only available in english in a so-called "pirate" edition published by black & red, and its informative - perhaps essential -critique of modern society languished in the sort of obscurity familiar to political radicals and the avant-garde. originally published in france in 1967, it rarely receives more than passing mention in some of the fields most heavily influenced by its ideas -media studies, social theory, economics, and political science. a new translation by donald nicholson-smith issued by zone books last year, however, may finally bring about some well-deserved recognition to the recently-deceased debord. _society of the spectacle_ has been called "the _capital_ of the new generation," and the comparison bears investigation. debord's intention was to provide a comprehensive critique of the social and political manifestations of modern forms of production, and the analysis he offered in 1967 is as authoritative now as it was then. [2] comprised of nine chapters broken into a total of 221 theses, _society of the spectacle_ tends toward the succinct in its proclamations, favoring polemically poetic ambiguities over the vacuous detail of purely analytical discourse. there is, however, no shortage of justification for its radical claims. hegel finds his place, marx finds acclaim and criticism, lenin and rosa luxemburg add their contributions, and debord's own insights are convincingly argued. it becomes evident quite quickly that debord has done his homework -_society of the spectacle_ is no art manifesto in need of historical or theoretical basis. debord's provocations are supported where others would have failed. the first chapter, "separation perfected," contains the fundamental assertions on which much of debord's influence rests, and the very first thesis, that the whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. all that was once directly lived has become mere representation. establishes debord's judgment; the rest attempt to explain it, and to elaborate on the need for a practical and revolutionary resistance. [3] by far debord's most famous work, _society of the spectacle_ lies somewhere between a provocative manifesto and a scholarly analysis of modern politics. it remains among those books which fall under the rubric of "oft quoted, rarely read" -except that few can even quote from it. a few of the general concepts to be found in _society of the spectacle_, however, have filtered down into near-popular usage. for example, analyses of the gulf war as "a spectacle" -with the attendant visual implications of representation and the politics of diversion -were commonplace during the conflict. the distorted duplication of reality found in theme parks is typically discussed with reference to its "spectacular nature," and we are now beginning to see attempts to explain how "cyberspace" fits into the framework of the situationist critique. (cf. _span_ magazine, no. 2, published at the university of toronto.) but this casual bandying about of vaguely situationist notions by journalists and coffee-house radicals masks the real profundity of debord's historical analysis. much more than a condemnation of the increasingly passive reception of political experiences and the role of television in contemporary ideological pursuits, _society of the spectacle_ traces the development of the spectacle in all its contradictory glory, demonstrates its need for a sort of parasitic self-replication, and offers a glimpse of what may be the only hope of resistance to the spectacle's all-consuming power. [4] fully appreciating _society of the spectacle_ requires a familiarity with the context of debord's work. he was a founding member of the situationist international, a group of social theorists, avant-garde artists and left bank intellectuals that arose from the remains of various european art movements. the situationists and their predecessors built upon the project begun by futurism, dada, and surrealism in the sense that they sought to blur the distinction between art and life, and called for a constant transformation of lived experience. the cohesion and persuasive political analysis brought forth by debord, however, sets the situationist international apart from the collective obscurity (if not irrelevance) of previous art movements. _society of the spectacle_ represents that aspect of situationist theory that describes precisely how the social order imposed by the contemporary global economy maintains, perpetuates, and expands its influence through the manipulation of representations. no longer relying on force or scientific economics, the status quo of social relations is "mediated by images" [4]. the spectacle is both cause and result of these distinctively modern forms of social organization; it is "a weltanschauung that has been actualized" [5]. [5] in the same manner that marx wrote _capital_ to detail the complex and subtle economic machinations of capitalism, debord set out to describe the intricacies of its modern incarnation, and the means by which it exerts its totalizing control over lived reality. the spectacle, he argues, is that phase of capitalism which "proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life . . . is mere appearance" but which remains, essentially, "a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself" [10]. in both subject and references, we see debord tracing a path similar to marcuse in _counter-revolution and revolt_, in which marcuse describes the motives and methods behind capitalism's "repressive tolerance" and its ability to subsume resistance, maintain power, and give the appearance of improving the quality of everyday living conditions. debord's global cultural critique later finds an echo in the work of scholars like johan galtung, the norwegian peace research theorist who established a similarly pervasive analysis of cultural imperialism. it is the situationist focus on the role of appearances and representation, however, that makes its contributions to political understanding both unique and perpetually relevant. [6] the spectacle is the constantly changing, self-organizing and self-sustaining expression of the modern form of production, the "chief product of present-day society" [15]. an outgrowth of the alienating separation inherent in a capitalist social economy, the spectacle is a massive and complex apparatus which serves both the perpetuation of that separation and the false consciousness necessary to make it palatable -even desirable -to the general population. the bourgeois revolution which brought about the modern state is credited with founding "the sociopolitical basis of the modern spectacle" [87]. the longest chapter of the book, "the proletariat as subject and representation," follows the development of the modern state in both its free-market and state capitalist forms, and attempts to describe how this development increasingly led to the supersession of real social relations by representations of social relations. later chapters cover the dissemination of spectacular representations of history, time, environment, and culture. the scope of debord's critique is sufficient to demonstrate that the spectacle is more than the brain-numbing flicker of images on the television set. the spectacle is something greater than the electronic devices to which we play the role of passive receptors; it is the totality of manipulations made upon history, time, class -in short, all of reality - that serve to preserve the influence of the spectacle itself. much like foucault's discipline, the spectacle is an autonomous entity, no longer (if ever) serving a master, but an entity which selectively chooses its apparent beneficiaries, for its own ends, and for only as long as it needs them. consequently, resistance is difficult and the struggle is demanding. [7] on the one hand, debord faults marxists for their rigid ideologizing, their absorption in an archaic understanding of use value, and their faith in the establishment of a socialist state to represent the proletariat. on the other hand, he criticizes the anarchists for their utopian immediatism and their ignorance of the need for a historically grounded transformational stage. debord's own offerings in _society of the spectacle_ are generally vague, beginning with claims like consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. [53] [8] in the chapter on "negation and consumption," debord outlines the theoretical approach of the situationists, distinct from that of contemporary sociology, which he claims is "unable to grasp the true nature of its chosen object, because it cannot recognize the critique immanent to that object." the situationist, according to debord, understands that critical theory is dialectical, a "style of negation" [204] -and here we find the description of what has become perhaps the most well-known tactic of the situationists, %detournement%. this strategy, at a theoretical level, is a manifestation of the reversal of established logic, the logic of the spectacle and the relationships it creates. at a practical level, %detournement_ has found its expression in comic strips, whose speech bubbles are replaced by revolutionary slogans; utopian and apparently nonsensical graffiti; and the alteration of billboards. this latter tactic, first introduced in _methods of %detournement%_ (1956), involves the radical subversion of the language -both textual and graphic -of the modern spectacle. in its most common form, it involved taking comic strip speech bubbles or advertising copy and replacing them with revolutionary slogans or poetic witticisms. the point, according to debord, is "to take effective possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented" [187]. this "unified theoretical critique," however, can do nothing without joining forces with "a unified social practice," and this is where debord's scholarship fails him despite its veracity. the situationists were, after all, a group of intellectuals, and not factory workers -a fact which debord himself did not hesitate to acknowledge. he firmly believed, however, that "that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes" was the only hope for a return to real life. [9] despite their predominantly intellectual status, however, the situationist international has had its share of practical influence. one of their members is credited with writing the bulk of _on the poverty of student life_, the tract published by the students of strasbourg in 1966 and often cited as a catalyst for the events of may '68. the situationists played a role in those events as well, seeing in them the first real possibility of a general strike -a modern commune -in their time. but it may be greil marcus, in his book _lipstick traces_, who has done the most in recent times to promote the visibility of the situationists. _lipstick traces_ follows the history of punk rock back to the tradition of dada and situationist theory. both jamie reid (creator of much of the graphic "look" of punk) and malcolm mcclaren (self-styled "creator" of the sex pistols) acknowledge the influence of the si on their own work, and the legacy of punk rock may well be the last great youth movement which involved not only a musical revolution, but total social critique (with a soundtrack). [10] plagued by constant internal battles (in which debord, in his best andre breton manner, irrevocably excluded virtually every member over the course of 15 years, in a hail of harsh criticism each time), and so determinedly revolutionary that it alienated most of its potential sympathizers, the si finally disbanded in 1972. it's a bit ironic, in this light, that the latest translation of _society of the spectacle_ is brought to us by nicholson-smith, who was himself excluded from the si in 1967 along with his colleague christopher gray. together, their translation efforts account for a large part of the major si texts available in english -an admirable testament to their belief in the significance of situationist theory. this new translation addresses a number of awkward points in earlier translations, but is not without its own inconvenient or clumsy prose. debord writes in a difficult manner; style is not his strongest point. but nicholson-smith sometimes forsakes fidelity in favor of his own sense of consistency and clarity, even when these things were lacking in the original. the result is a bit less awkward, but also a bit less debord. [11] when debord released his _comments on society of the spectacle_ nearly 20 years after the original publication, he had several comments to make on the importance of recent events, but virtually no revisions to his original theses. his reflective judgment was not in error. the concise _society of the spectacle_ remains an accurate depiction of modern conditions. debord's only addition to his original critique was, however, cynical and foreboding. whereas the spectacle in 1967 took on two basic forms -concentrated and diffuse, corresponding to the eastern block and american social structures, respectively -we have now reached the era of the integrated spectacle, which shows less hope and exercises greater control than ever before. the spectacle now pervades all of reality, making every relationship manipulated and every critique spectacular. in this age of disney, baudrillard, the total recuperation of radical chic, and the dawn of virtual worlds, we need to familiarize ourselves with the situationist critique. the recent hype surrounding the internet and the regulation of digital affairs -not to mention the very structure of virtual relationships we are beginning to feel comfortable with -are perfect candidates for evaluation. the speed of life, the pace of the spectacle, is proportional to the speed of computers and communication. true criticism is plodding, historically situated, and unwilling to accept the immediate fix of reformism. the challenge today is to recover the situationist critique from the abyss of the spectacle itself. debord concluded _society of the spectacle_ by stating that "a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide its time" [220]. not by waiting, but through the unification of theoretical critique and practical struggle of which "the desire for consciousness" is only one element. note: the situationist international published their works with an explicit anti-copyright notice which states that the writings may be "freely reproduced, translated, or adapted, without even indicating their origin." with this in mind, the situationist international archives were established at http://www.nothingness.org/si. the reader will find there a number of debord's works translated in their entirety, as well as texts in the original french, situationist graphics, and links to other situationist-related sites. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------beller, 'cinema, capital of the twentieth century', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-beller-cinema.txt -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- cinema, capital of the twentieth century by jonathan l. beller literature department duke university _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by jonathan l. beller, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society. --karl marx, _grundrisse_ cinema 3: towards a dialectical film of the cinema (books) [1] what is cinema? by posing the infamous question yet again i mean to set forth the task of thinking the development of the concept of cinema and of cinema itself in terms of political economy and social organization. [2] let me begin this kind of thinking about cinema with a quick discussion of the "capital cinema" shown and shown up by the coen brothers in their 1992 film, _barton fink_. in the film, capital cinema is the name of the late 1930s pre-war hollywood production studio which, according to the story, makes cinematic expression possible. this company, as a representative of the studio system, is used by the coen brothers to demonstrate that cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation *and* an economic form, that is, a site of *economic* production. as factory and as economic system cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and its war economy. as a factory of representation capital cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, capital cinema dictates limits to forms of consciousness %per se%. [3] the film _barton fink_, in which the jewish writer barton (john turturro) falls from celebrated playwright to abject existentialist hack as he tries to make the shift from new york playwrighting to los angeles screen writing, is about the spaces and sensibilities which fall out of (are absent from) a cinema which is a fully functioning component of the capitalist economy. the movement from new york to los angeles marks the movement for barton, but also for representation in general, into a new era. the climax of the film occurs when the film confronts the limits of its own conditions of representation. [4] indeed, the thesis of _barton fink_ is that there remains an unrepresentable for cinema: experience that refuses commodification. although such unrepresentability of experience occurs in the film via specific instantiations of race (jewishness), gender (the wife who has written all of her alcoholic husband's books), sex (the homoerotic tensions in the hotel room scenes) and class (the inner life of the encyclopedia salesman), it is perhaps even more interesting to think about invisibility as a general case in capital cinema--a predicament of disenfranchised elements in others and in ourselves. the writer barton is trying to create a script about the real man, about "everyman," but when the film finally encounters everyman's never told biography, the biography of the failed encyclopedia salesman (john goodman) and the biography that barton, being preoccupied with his script, has not had the time to listen to, the encounter is and can only be indirect, off-screen as it were, and that, as a crisis. at the moment of the encounter between cinema and the experience of "everyman," a conflagration erupts. inside the frame the film set is burnt, while outside the frame in the space beyond the film the very edges of the frame burst and flame--the medium literally self-destructs as the reality principle of the film is destroyed in the confrontation of its limits.^1^ as a film steeped in the protocols of profit, the particular experiences of goodman's mad encyclopedia salesman, that is, the myriad experiences of failure in capitalism, fall below the threshold of knowing possible in capital cinema and are precipitated only as effects. these effects, much like a labor strike, confront the mode of production as a crisis and halt its smooth functioning. the experience of everyman, nearly uncommodifiable by definition, cannot be represented in capital cinema.^2^ its emergence threatens to destroy the medium itself. [5] if consciousness in late capitalism, generally speaking, functions like (as) cinema--relatively unable to think beyond the exigencies of capital, then it is important to note at the outset that cinema as consciousness is overdetermined by capital *regulation*. cinema, as money that thinks, fuses the protocols of representation and capitalist production. this claim remains relatively unproblematic until one takes cinema not only as a form of representation but as consciousness itself. the idea, simply put, is that something like the coen brothers' capital cinema manufactures not just films, but consciousness in general, complete with its possibilities and lacunae.^3^ this consciousness can be shown to be hegemonic if what i call the cinematic mode of production has fully infiltrated (some aspects of) our minds and converted them into money that thinks. such thinking money is money of a special form, not money as a mere medium of exchange but, in short, money as capital. the screenwriter for the studio, like the professor for the university and the citizen for the state must be a source of profit. capital consciousness has a variety of perceptual possibilities, thresholds and limits. in explaining this idea more fully it will be useful to turn to the cinema of deleuze's cinema books, that is, to a cinema conceived as consciousness %par excellence%. although deleuze does not dwell on the relationship between cinema and consciousness %per se%, cinema, at least in its incarnation in the masterpiece, is for him the ur-form of consciousness which challenges state-forms, the very process of mechinic assemblage. no longer a consciousness pared down and limited by the constraints of a body, of a subject, of a state, and no longer a consciousness taken as ideal, cinema in the cinema books is expanded consciousness, consciousness unbound--free-ranging, multi-perspectival and rigorously material- consciousness itself. [6] my present motivation for such an inquiry into the political economy of consciousness and hence of cinema, as well as for an inquiry into the _cinema_ of deleuze, is suggested by the idea of "cultural imperialism." in as much as the phrase suggests not just "culture," but "imperialism" as well, and in as much as we keep in mind that imperialism is an economic undertaking as well as an ideological and libidinal one, this phrase today remains an incomplete thought. i mean to suggest here that whatever the project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the presence of the fantasy called postcoloniality.^4^ rather, as world poverty indexes readily show, the pauperization process is intensifying. the "expiration" of national boundaries and the so-called "obsolescence" of the nation state only imply that these national forms are being superseded (sublated) even as they continue to do their work.^5^ the thesis here is that cinema and cinematic technologies- television, telecommunications, computing, automation--provide some of the discipline and control once imposed by earlier forms of imperialism. furthermore, the media work to organize previous forms of discipline and control, which remain extant. transnationalism, which finds its very conditions of possibility in computing, telecommunications and mass media, implies that these media are playing a fundamental role in new modes of value production and value transfer. the cinema, i shall be arguing, is a first instance of these other "higher forms" of mediation. with the globalization of capital it may turn out that economic expansion is presently less a geographical project and more a matter of *capturing* the interstitial activities and times between the already commodified endeavors of bodies. *every movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value*. i am speaking here of media as cybernetics, of capital expansion positing the body as the new frontier. [7] we are thus dealing with two distinct yet interactive sets of relations here. in the first set, capital cinema regulates perception and therefore certain pathways to the body. it is in this sense that it functions as a kind of discipline and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor process (e.g., taylorization). the second moment, related yet distinct from the first, is the positing by capital cinema of a value productive relationship which can be exploited--i.e., a tapping of the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value. [8] before turning to deleuze i would like to sketch in brief some of the basic characteristics of the larger project upon which i am currently working, provisionally entitled _the cinematic mode of production_, and then to show how such a project might occasion a rethinking of deleuze's cinema books. my argument with respect to deleuze is that the cinematic mode of production as a world historical moment is already implicit in deleuze's work; it is immanent. however, in the name of and desire for a "non-fascist politics," he represses the concept of the mode of production generally in and as the concept of "the machinic assemblage." though it is immanent, deleuze refuses to think cinema in dialectical relation to capital.^6^ the cinematic mode of production [9] _the cinematic mode of production_ proposes a situation and a name for the dominant mode of production during the historical period that begins at the turn of our century and is just now drawing to a close. during this period capitalism and its administrators organize the world more and more like a film: modern commodity production becomes a form of montage. much as film stock travels along a particular pathway, eventually to produce a film-image, capital travels along its pathways to produce commodities. as in the assembly of films, capital is edited while moving through its various determinations in commodity production. today, with the convergence of the once separate industries for image and other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity %par excellence%), we are in a better position than ever before to see the global dynamics of the cinematic mode of production and to reckon some of its consequences. [10] the key hypotheses and claims of my work are: 1) cinema simultaneously images and enacts the circulation of economic value. it images *the patterns of circulation of economic value itself* (capital).^7^ 2) this circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor. i should emphasize here that all previous forms of capitalized labor remain intact; however, looking as labor represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction. though this tendency is becoming dominant, which is to say that the relationship between consciousness and the state is more important than ever before, all previous forms of exploitation continue. when a visual medium operates under the strictures of private property, the work done by its consumer can, like ground rent, be capitalized and made to accrue to the proprietor of the medium. in other words, some people make a profit from other people's looking. the ways in which this profit is produced and channeled fundamentally defines the politics of cultural production and the state. 3) such a revolutionary method for the extraction of value from the human body has as profound an effect on all aspects of social organization as did the assembly line--it changes the dynamic of sight forever, initiating what can be thought of as a visual economy. as i shall sketch briefly, this economy has been developing for some time. 4) understood as a technology capable of submitting the eye to a new disciplinary regime, cinema may be taken as a model for the many technologies which in effect take the machine off the assembly line and bring it to the body in order to mine it for labor power (value).^8^ 5) the advent of such a new method of value-transport and value-extraction demands a new contribution to the critique of political economy.^9^ [11] the hypothesis that vision, and more generally human attention, are today productive of economic value can be supported by showing that the labor theory of value, especially as discussed by marx, is *a specific instance of a more general hypothesis which is possible concerning the production of value*. this i call *the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention*, or *the attention theory of value*. it is derived from the way in which capital process occupies human time in the cinema and in other media. assuming for the moment that human attention is a value-adding commodity sought by capitalized media, it can be shown that if to look is to labor, then at least a partial solution to the dilemma posed to the political economist by the very persistence of capitalism presents itself. we should recall that for the radical political economist today, capitalism thrives in apparent violation of the labor theory of value and the law of the falling rate of profit. these two limitations on the expansion of capital cause marx, lenin, luxemburg and others to predict a critical mass for capital--a catastrophic point beyond which it cannot expand. unable to expand and hence unable to turn a profit, fully globalized capital, remember, was expected to self-destruct. the law of value was to have been overcome and a world in which any of us, should we so desire, could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize at night was to have come into being. clearly, and despite the globalization of capital, this auto-annihilation has not happened. i am suggesting that, from the standpoint of capital, as geographical limitations are in the process of being fully overcome by capital, capital posits the human body as the next frontier.^10^ [12] in order to follow the developmental trajectory of ever expanding capital (of which cinema is so crucial a part) one must give thorough consideration to the cyberneticization of the flesh--what virilio calls "the habitation of metabolic vehicles."^11^ like the road itself (the productive value of which marx intuited but never showed), such machine-body interfaces clearly shift the distribution of the body over its machinic linkages, opening up many more sites and times for the production of value, multiplying, as it were, the number of possible work sites. capital expands not only outwards, geographically, but burrows into the flesh. this corkscrewing inward has profound consequences on life-forms. seeing how modern visual technology tools the body for new labor processes during the twentieth century suggests parallel studies of other arts, technologies and periods, past, present and future. art as cultural artifact is interesting, but art and culture as technology shot through with historical, libidinal and visual necessity promises a more compelling account of human (cybernetic) transformations. the technologically articulated body does not undergo transformation in order to merely reflect new social relations or express new desires; the retooling it undergoes is endemic to the economics of social production and reproduction--a necessary *development* of social relations. [13] because cinema as a perceptual medium is nothing less than the development of a new medium for the production and circulation of value, a medium no less significant in the transformation of human relations than the railroad track or the highway, human endeavors generally grouped together under the category "humanities" and (perhaps) once experienced as realms of relative freedom can be, and *are being* figured as economically productive. the entire history of cinema remains as a testament to this practice; advertising, television and culture generally today testify to it. [14] certain relationships between looking and value already are and will continue to become sites of extensive legislation and political struggle. the mapplethorpe photos, the pink triangle, english words in french advertising, and images of sex in american films shown in the philippines are examples of some of these relationships; others include corporate competition for industry standards in high definition television, satellite communications and computing. here, at the most general level, i am speaking about the commodification of culture and mediation, about *culture as an interface between bodies and the world system*. much work has already been done on this problem of the commodification of culture, but none is fully conscious of the problem of the quantitative as opposed to the merely qualitative or metaphorical capitalization of culture.^12^ a sense of the quantification of cultural value as capital proper begins to shed light on how radical indeed the qualitative shifts in culture have become. the corollary here is that academic, philosophical, historical and aesthetic concerns are essential aspects of socio-economic transformation- haptic processes that integrate the body with social production in general. the amalgamation of the labor involved in such process as the production of cultures, identities and desires, is already and will continue to be the way in which political blocs, however ephemeral, are formed and persist in postmodern society. the movement-image^13^ [15] as i mentioned, we might imagine for a moment that at a certain point in history (taylorism and fordism) the world began to be organized more and more like a film.^14^ as geoffrey nowell smith points out, the form of assembly line production easily invokes montage--hence, the french phrase %chaine de montage%, but the circulation of capital itself may as well be thought of as a kind of cutting.^15^ much as film stock is edited as it travels along a particular pathway to eventually produce a film-image, capital travels along its various pathways to produce commodities--it is edited as it moves through its various determinations in assembly line production. like the screen on which one grasps the movement of cinematic production, capital is the standpoint or frame through which one can see the movement of value, the scene in which emerges a moment in the production process. *capital provides the frame through which one observes economic movement*. the finished commodity or image (commodity image) results from a "completed" set of movements. cinema, then, is already implied by capital circulation; dialectical sublation is a slow form of film.^16^ thus marx's _grundrisse_, a nike sneaker, and a hollywood film all share certain systemic movements of capital to create their product/image. [16] we can trace proto-cinematic technologies even further back in historical time. the standardized production of terra-cotta pots, the roman minting of coins, the gutenberg press and the lithograph mentioned by walter benjamin in "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" could all be taken as early forms of cinema.^17^ like shutter, frame and filmstock, each technology mentioned above repeats a standardized and standardizing act while striking an image that subjugates the eye to a particular and consequential activity. from the recognition of money to the reading of print, these activities place the eye within the discipline of a visual economy which corresponds to the type and speed of the mode of production. *for each mode of production there necessarily exists a particular scopic regime*. with the advent of cinema and the speeding up of individual images to achieve what is called "the persistence of vision" (that is, the illusion of a smooth continuity of movement among individuated images) there was an equally dramatic and corresponding shift in the relation of the eye to economic production. from the historical moment of the viewer circulating before the paintings in a museum to the historical moment of images circulating before the viewer in the movie house, there is an utter transformation of the visual economy, marked not least by the movement from what benjamin called "aura" to what today postmodern theory calls "simulacra." this movement was accompanied by a changeover from yesterday's ideology to today's spectacle. with the increased speed of its visual circulation, the visible object undergoes a change of state. in apprehending it, the textures and indeed the very properties of consciousness are transformed. [17] the greek casts for terra-cottas and coinage, the woodcut, the printing press, the lithograph, the museum, all of which benjamin elaborates as pre cinematic forms of mechanical reproduction, are also all technologies designed, from one point of view, to capture vision and to subjugate it to the mechanics of various and successive interrelated economies. these forms of mechanical reproduction, with their standardized mechanisms and methods of imprinting are, in effect, early movies. that upon its emergence the "aura," which benjamin theorizes, is found not on the visual object but in the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived (it accompanies the gaze, the gazing) is consistent with benjamin's dialectical thesis that the sensorium is modified by the experience of the modern city. the development of film, like the development of the metropolis, is part of an economy which has profound effects on perception.^18^ that modernization modifies perception is also consistent with the dialectical notion that in the production and reproduction of their own conditions human beings modify themselves. perception's aura, i suggest, is the subjective experience of the objective commodification of vision. [18] because of the increased intensity of the image's circulation, the simulacrum produced by mass media is, far more than the painted masterpiece, utterly emptied out and means only its own currency in circulation. the "original" and hence any possibility of the "copy" are liquidated in the frenzy of the circulation of the postmodern image.^19^ with the pure simulacrum, we are looking at the pure fact of other people's looking at a particular nodal point in media flow. the simulacrum is primarily an economic image; a touchstone for the frenetic circulation of the gaze.^20^ [19] aura as "a unique distance" never was anything other than the slow boiling away of the visual object (the painting, for example) under the friction of its own visual circulation. the painting in the museum becomes overlaid with the accretions of the gazes of others on its surface. this statement is merely a reformulation in visual terms of lukacs' analysis of commodity reification: "underneath the cloak of a thing lay a relation between men [sic]."^21^ with the painted masterpiece, which, as a unique object, has been seen by so many others, the viewer's image of it is necessarily measured against all other *imagined* viewers' images. that is, his or her perception of it includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object--the sense of the number and of the kind of looks that it has commanded. this abstracted existence, which exists only in the socially mediated (museum reproductions, etc.) and imagined summation of the work of art's meaning (value) for everyone else (society), accounts for the fetish character of the unique work of art. the relations of production in the production of the value of art are abstract and hence, because they have heretofore lacked a theory, hidden.^22^ because the visual fetish emerges when one cannot see the visual object in its totality (the totality of looks in which it has circulated), we may grasp that part of the object's value comes from its very circulation. the fetish character intimates a new value system; the aura intimates visual circulation in a visual economy. as i have proposed, this circulation is productive of value in the classical terms of the labor theory of value.^23^ [20] what benjamin understood as "information"--that is, events, "shot through with explanation"--the rise of which coincides with the fall of the story, the decline of experience and the dawning of modernity, is now recognizable as a predominant feature of new forms of mediation in the capitalist economy.^24^ in the intensification of the logic of capitalist information society, the pure and immediate visible object becomes ever more recondite, the oceanic bond with it ever more distant. as the distance between the eye and the originary visual object approaches infinity, aura passes into simulacrum.^25^ [21] as with information, which must appear "understandable in itself," and the coin, so with binary code and the media byte.^26^ the media byte is media understood in two determinations: 1) as its particular content, mediation in its synchronic form, and 2) as part of a system of circulation. as with all objective forms that must be reified (taken out of capital circulation, at least conceptually) in order to be constituted as objects, the media byte travelling at a certain speed (in the form of a nineteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, for example) has a fetish character or aura. as the image accelerates, the aura undergoes a change of state and becomes simulacrum. simulacra travel so fast, circulate among so many gazes, that the content (as context, as socio-historical embeddedness) is sheared from the form, making the history of their production ungraspable. indeed, to a certain extent the category "history" no longer applies to them. the simulacrum has value and nobody knows why. this result should be taken as a gloss on the famous phrase "the medium is the message." the aura, in its conversion to simulacra, means the regime of mediation. the specter of the visible (aura) has become the substance of the visual (simulation). *in the visual arena as well, exchange value overtakes use-value, forcing vision itself to partake directly in the dynamics of exchange*. hence today there is an almost palpable integument overlaying society. this integument can no longer properly be described as "ideology" (since ideology is a concept welded to a narrative and therefore quasi historical core), but is more adequately denoted by the term "spectacle."^27^ [22] aura, then, is to ideology as simulacrum is to spectacle. in the simulacrum, the particular content of a message, its use value, is converted into nothing but pure exchange value. the amplitude of the message itself is liquidated under the form that it takes. media bytes realize their value as they pass through the fleshy medium (the body) via a mechanism less like consciousness and more like the organism undergoing a labor process--call it an haptic pathway. new synapses uniting brain and viscera are cut and bound. internal organs quiver and stir. we arise from our seats in the cinema and before our television sets remade, fresh from a direct encounter with the dynamics of social production and reproduction. [23] properly speaking, contemporary media bytes do not have an aura, but have become simulacra. the term aura is better reserved for the painting hanging on the gallery wall--its circulation among gazes transpires at a slower speed. as i noted, the painting's aura derives from the gap between what one sees and its status as a work of art in circulation. one covets the authentic knowledge of an object that is slowly boiling away under the gazes of passers-by only to be reassembled as an abstraction of what the many eyes that have gazed upon it *might* have seen. the painting becomes a sign for its own significance, a significance that is an artifact of its circulation through myriad sensoriums. simulation occurs when visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation. liquidated of its traditional consents and intimating the immensity of the world system, the affect of the visual object as simulacrum is sublime. [24] put simply, the aura is benjamin's name for the fetish character of vision.^28^ it is the watermark of the commodification of sight. the frustratingly mystical properties of the aura are due to the fact that it is the index of the suppression of the perception of visual circulation. the aura is the perception of an affect and indicates the moment where the visual object is framed by the eye with the desire to take it out of circulation. like the fetish, it marks the desire to convert exchange value into use value, to free the object from the tyranny of circulation, and to possess it. the fetish character of the commodity is the result of capital's necessary suppression of the knowledge of the underbelly of production, i.e., exploitation; it is the mystification of one's relationship to the products for consumption. here, this mystified relation, expressed most generally, is our inability to think the production of value through visual means, that is, our inability to thoroughly perceive the properties and dynamics of the attention theory of value in the production of aesthetic, cultural and economic value. the fetish marks the independent will of objects, their monstrous indifference to our puny desire, their sentience, that is the registration of their animation in circulation. commodity fetishism is the necessary ruse and consequence of free enterprise, and its sublimity is the antithesis of social transparency. this sublimity is further intensified (as is social opacity) with simulation in the postmodern.^29^ the aura, as the visual component of the fetish, specifies the character of representation, visual and otherwise, under capitalism during the modern period. simulation, which occurs at a higher speed and greater intensity of visual circulation, specifies the character of representation in the postmodern period. the time-image [25] it is important to think for a moment that for deleuze cinema is to our period what capital was to marx's. of course the parallel is not strict since, if you will allow me to misrepresent both thinkers slightly, capital is for marx a matter of development, while cinema is for deleuze an ontological condition. however, i put it this way not because i want, with deleuze, to posit cinema as consciousness %par excellence%, but because i want, against deleuze, to make an historical claim for cinema as the consciousness %par excellence% of twentieth century capitalism. [26] for marx, capital posited a universal history of which capital the idea was the culminating moment, in that it allowed us to grasp universal process. the name of the work, _capital_, is the hypostatization of the machinic logic that had the world in its grip: a process as a thing (capital), which, when actualized as process (movement) unlocked the secret dynamics between the historical construction of the world and of consciousness. capital the idea, with its ability to deploy the concepts developed in _capital_, was precisely the consciousness of capitalism, at once the realization and representation of the material and conscious processes of capital itself: its specter, if you will. _cinema 1_ and _cinema 2_ can be taken also as names for modes of production, spectral projections of cinematic circulation in the discourse of philosophy. [27] if "cinema" as the process and the sign for the dominant mode of production does not immediately have the same resonance as "capital," one need only begin to think of cinematic relations as an extension of capitalist relations--the development of culture as a sphere of the production line. thus cinema is at once a sign for itself as a phenomenon and its process, as well as a sign for capital as a phenomenon and its processes. cinema here marks a phase in the development of capitalism and capital's utter modification (metamorphosis) of all things social, perceptual, material. [28] the cinema for deleuze is nothing if it is not a force of deterritorialization. so too, we must remember, was capital for marx: simultaneously the most productive and destructive force unleashed in human history. but the cinema, for deleuze, is an industrial strength modifier of consciousness capable, in its strong form, of unweaving the most arborescent and solidified of thought formations, the most reified of perceptions--it annihilates traditional thought forms as well as tradition itself. hence its attraction for philosophy. cinema, like capital, is also a relentlessly material practice which can be recapitulated in the movement of concepts. deleuze works "alongside" the cinema, producing cinema's concepts in order to deploy cinema's deterritorializing forces within the discourse of philosophy. this way of working is to be taken at once as a kind of representational verisimilitude, a performance of cinematic movement/time in the discourse of concepts, and also as a polemic against philosophy that takes on the statist forms purveyed by freud, lacan, marx and other theorists whose work excises from the realm of possibility certain kinds of movements (desires) and blocks their becoming. deleuze is interested here neither in ideology critique nor in psychoanalysis, the two dominant modes of film theory at the time of writing; he builds his assemblages around the work of %auteurs%, whom he takes as machines who produce certain distinct kinds of forms. [29] to write cinema as an agent of deterritorialization, deleuze eliminates most of it. he makes a distinction at the beginning of _cinema 1_ between the work of the great directors--who are to be compared "not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers," and all the rest of cinema's products, what he calls, "the vast proportion of rubbish in cinematic production."30 we will have to consider all of cinema, but for deleuze, "we are talking only of masterpieces to which no hierarchy of value applies."^31^ this leaves him one or two hundred directors at most, and their commentators. we are left to assume that the rest, the producers of "rubbish," recapitulate state forms. [30] the translators of _cinema 1_ say that "[t]he book can . . . be seen as a kind of intercutting of cinema and philosophy," but even given that cinema is a force for the unweaving of existing structures, conceptual and otherwise, deleuze must keep philosophy itself from arborescence, that is, from becoming a reterritorializing practice that would undo the cinema and put the breaks on desire.^32^ however, this means that deleuze must write, as it were, without history. as i have noted, to accomplish this unweaving he conceptualizes filmmakers as other great philosophers, painters, and writers have been conceptualized by the new critics and their legacy, that is, as %auteurs%, geniuses. desire, the animus of movement, is to deleuze what power, the animus of immobilization, is to foucault: the name for praxis, the ether of relations, the field of the event. to release desire (that is, the becoming molecular of the molar, the destratification of the stratified) and to weave by unweaving is precisely the desire of deleuze. how then but through the debunking of history to keep philosophy from producing a field of stratification, from undoing the work deleuze sees performed by cinema and that he would himself perform in the force field of philosophy (and again in the world) by filming cinema with his numerous and extraordinary descriptions/abstractions of its relations? in short, how to keep philosophy from becoming a state form? [31] the difficulty of the cinema books is a partial answer to these questions. the fact that there is only one periodization in the books provides another answer. their concepts are neither hierarchized nor even serialized. although the concepts emerge from each other and draw on each other, they are not locked into any strict array. yet, for all that, they have the aura of a profound interdependence. as do the films he writes about, the movement of deleuze's concepts sets up alternate economies of forces. these alternate economies are economies of movement, of time, of knowing, which are not/have not yet been produced on a massive scale. this refusal of stratification, the refusal of concepts to become knowledge in foucault's sense of the word, makes deleuze's concepts of the cinema as difficult to understand within their "system" as it is to understand the "system" itself. his "system," if one had but world enough and time, would, i fear, end up like the proverbial chinese emperor's map of the kingdom that is as big as the kingdom itself--not much of a map for the chinese emperor, not much of a system for the philosopher. the system is manifest rather as a mode of production--one learns one's way around by following a path and by wandering about. deleuze is not building a system, he is making pieces, pieces for us to use in our own constructions, pieces at once so delicately, precisely and *precariously* placed that as soon as we touch them, they become something else. cinema is for deleuze a machine that makes machines. deleuze machines concepts from cinema's flows. the consistency of the flow of deleuze's concepts one from the other, their complex yet ultimately undecidable relations to an unconceptualizable whole of cinema (hence _cinema 1_, _cinema 2_), negates what for deleuze is fascistic understanding, an understanding that takes the form of recognition, of history. this recognition which for deleuze and guattari confirms the cliches of pre-fabricated thought, prevents the encounter.^33^ the ostensible consistency of method in the cinema books, a consistency that withstands a thousand variations of angle, illumination and content, is here at once the sign of the game of philosophy and its undoing as a state form in deleuze's terms. [32] this fluidity then is very much like the _grundrisse_, the first draft of _capital_, with one important (historical) difference: it is "post dialectical," non-hierarchical and non-totalizing. like the cinema books, the _grundrisse_ is also not a solid; it is as well precisely a representation of production *process*. in the _grundrisse_ one cannot understand the commodity form without understanding the entire process of exchange. one cannot understand exchange without understanding circulation and production. one cannot understand circulation and production without understanding money. one cannot understand money without understanding wage labor. one cannot understand wage labor without understanding necessary labor time and surplus labor time. one cannot understand these without understanding the falling rate of profit and so on until one can see the grand functioning of all aspects of the model, each mutually interactive and as a result mutually defined. the constituent concepts of capital flow into each other to create an image of social totality similar in form to the grand spiral that deleuze sees in eisenstein. deleuze's concepts, on the other hand, all precisely defined and interactive, create discrete images of a totality that are individuated and non interdependent. as with marx, the process of this totality occurs off-screen, as it were, but unlike with marx its architecture cannot, even in theory, be grasped in its entirety. for deleuze the process of consciousness is unremittingly material but can never be fully conceptualized. the concepts abstracted from the materials that make up a filmic thought arise from the way the elements combine with each other, but then fall away, necessarily positing a world outside. however, unlike a dialectical logic, the logic embedded in the concept tells us nothing final about what *is* beyond the frame: hence the plateau, the %auteur%, the assemblage. the method here is not differentiation and sublation, but differentiation and *transgression*. one moves across, not through and beyond. but the necessity of moving across the infinity of proliferations, the tireless press of movement, becomes a beyond--quantity becomes quality, even for deleuze. this beyond is precisely the conditions of possibility for the time-image. even though he does not write "in the name of an outside," an outside appears. the precision of deleuzian concepts, taken together with the impossibility of finding an underlying logic which explains them in their totality, makes them figurations of the fact of a beyond: they are sublime. [33] recall the way each of the sections in the cinema books ends--with phrases like "the three time images all break with indirect representation, but also shatter the empirical continuation of time, the chronological succession, the separation of the before and after. they are thus connected with each other and interpenetrate . . . but allow the distinction of their signs to subsist in a particular work"^34^ or, "it is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic [sic.], and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a circulation: the noosphere."^35^ what i am interested in here is the motion of the phrasing. in the cinema books a summary of what came before is already a going after. these are examples of the deleuzian cut, which as it finishes something off, begins it anew in another key. always leaving something behind, always moving on to something else, the deleuzian cut is always, infinitely in between. [34] the mode of production in the cinema books is well described in _a thousand plateaus_. in the chapter entitled "how do you make yourself a body without organs?" deleuze and guattari say: this is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. it is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing the lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a bwo. connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram,' as opposed to still signifying and subjective formations. we are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the plane of consistency.^36^ deleuze understands such occupation and tipping as characteristic of the cinema. whether in the dialectical yearning of the image he notes in eisenstein, the interval he expostulates in vertov, the free and indirect discourse of pasolini, the duration of the time-images from the films of ozu, the effect present in the masterpiece is one of an actual retreading of perception and hence of thought. cinema "connects, conjugates and continues," making us pass over into something else. for as deleuze says, "cinema's concepts are not given in cinema . . . . cinema itself is a new practice of images and signs whose theory philosophy must produce as a conceptual practice."^37^ for deleuze, this practice checkmates pre-fabricated thought and releases desire, either pushing thought beyond itself into its own unthought, or, as deleuze puts it by paraphrasing artaud, making thought aware that it is "not yet thinking."^38^ as the body undergoes new forms of viscerality, new forms of thought are produced. [35] i am suggesting that the encounter with the paralysis of thought, the encounter with the immensity of the not yet thought that results for deleuze in an encounter with the sublime, marks at once a moment in the retooling of our sensoriums and cinema's encounter with the immensity of, for lack of a better term, the world system. the retooling of the sensorium that occurs in the encounters with the unrepresentable occasions in the work of deleuze a retooling of philosophy. though i can only suggest it here, it should turn out that the experienced events in the cinema are from the standpoint of capital experiments about what can be done with the body by machines and by the circulation of capital. not all of these visceral events turn out to be equal. the structures and intensities of surrealism, for example, seem thus far to have had greater possibilities for capital expansion (e.g., mtv) than those of suprematism. deleuze's conceptualization of these events (the encounters between machines, value and minds) is, as he himself admits, a finding of concepts for forms. _cinemas 1 and 2_, it seems to me, grapple in the language of concepts with the %darstellung% of cinema in a manner similar to the way in which marx's _capital_, or better, the _grundrisse_ (because there one sees the thought happening) grapples with the %darstellung% of capital. deleuze's books are at once an attempt to translate the logic of cinema into an explicitly conceptual language, and an excrescence of cinema. with respect to the body, geography, labor, raw material and time, one might well imagine cinema to have become the most radically deterritorializing force since capital itself. [36] to show the relevance of deleuze's cinema to the visual economy and the cinematic mode of production, i have noted that there is really only one explicitly historical thesis in the cinema books, a thesis which at once unifies and divides the two volumes. "why," asks deleuze, "is the second world war taken as a break [between the movement image and the image, between _cinema 1_ and _cinema 2_]? the fact is that in europe, the post war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe . . . . [these] situations could be extremes, or, on the contrary, those of everyday banality, or both at once [deleuze's exhibit a is the neo-realism of rossellini]: what tends to collapse is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action image of the old cinema. and thanks to this loosening of the sensory-motor linkage, it is time, 'a little time in the pure state', which rises up to the surface of the screen. time ceases to be derived from the movement, it appears in itself . . . .^39^ [37] the emergence of what deleuze calls the time image is a result of the increase in the number of situations to which we do not know how to respond. for deleuze it leads directly to the sublime, and he produces it as such. that the time-image is also a response to the informatics of culture and to informatics itself, to what benjamin called in "the storyteller" a decline of experience, should also be clear: "was it not noticeable after the [first world] war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent--not richer, but poorer in communicable experience."^40^ shock, whether from war, from modern life in the metropolis, or from the profusion of information, severs organic (low speed, traditional, non-metropolitan) human relationships. deleuze notes that, "the life or afterlife of cinema depends upon its internal struggle with informatics."^41^ here in _cinema 2_ deleuze, again very close to the benjamin of "the storyteller," writes with the desire to ward off the categoricality of capital-thought, that is, the degradation (reification) of thought and experience which comes with the mass communicational regime--information's procrustean bed. for deleuze the category of the time-image, with its attendant sublimity, its ability to cancel or bully thought and identification, names a multiplex of forms that cinema (the ultimate body without organs) as contemporary consciousness actualizes as resistance to molarity, to the field of stratification, to the plane of organization of which a key player is capitalism and its perceptual order. this perceptual order is marked by the stratification (reification) essential to capital process. its overcoming (as well as its recoding) must be taken as a form of labor. indeed such overcomings and recodings take place all the time. in the social sciences they are referred to as informal economy or disguised wage-labor.^42^ [38] elsewhere in _cinema 2_, cinema's struggle with the informatics of capitalism is made more explicit: the cinema as art lives in direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within, as the most intimate and indispensable enemy. this conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. the only rejoinder to the harsh law of cinema--a minute of image which costs a day of collective work--is fellini's: 'when there is no more money left, the film will be finished.' money is the obverse of all images that the cinema shows and sets in place so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film . . . .^43^ deleuze argues that the film within the film is in one way or another a film about the film's economic conditions of possibility. one should take the citation from fellini at once literally (when the filmmaker runs out of money his film is finished) and absolutely (when and if the money form becomes obsolete film will be outmoded, which in a way it is). though deleuze says disappointingly little about film's direct relation with "a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within," it is clear that for him cinema as forms of thought is locked into a dire struggle with capitalism. the cinema of masterpieces is at once enabled and threatened by the schizophrenia of capital. for deleuze the criteria of the masterpiece is the schizophrenic relation to hegemony. [39] after writing that "the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money," deleuze goes on to claim that in cinema "we are giving image for money, giving time for image, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end."^44^ though one might be tempted to claim that this is not for deleuze an implicit recognition of the dialectical relationship between cinema and money--on the contrary, the relationship between time and money, with respect to cinema, is one of reciprocal presupposition, a reciprocal relationship that is not dialectical but, as deleuze emphasizes, "dissymetrical"--i should note here that deleuze's example to illustrate the dissymetricality of the relationship between cinema and money is marx's expression m-c-m, which he contrasts to c-m-c. the formulation c-m-c, deleuze writes, "is that of equivalence, but m-c-m is that of impossible equivalence or tricked dissymetrical exchange."^45^ though for marx it is the very mystery of the dissymetrical relationship money-commodity-money which produces for him a critique of political economy (that the second "money" is greater than the first "money" raises the whole question of the production of value), for deleuze this dissymetricality produces the category of the unthought, "money as the totality of the film."^46^ "this is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. if it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of equivalence."^47^ [40] "it is this unthought element which haunts the cinema of the time-image (e.g., _citizen kane_ and the unthought and unthinkable rosebud which conditions the chrono-logical unfolding of the film)."^48^ taking _citizen kane_ as a point of analysis, there are three things that i would like to establish here. first, in refusing to think political economy, or rather, in flirting with the idea of political economy in order to do something else, deleuze is playing a game--*his* internal struggle with informatics. he ends the section on m-c-m and dissymetrical exchange not by invoking the mysteries of the production of value, but by repeating the line from fellini, "and the film will be finished when there is no more money left." at once, in the next section, he begins his writing of cinema anew--the film is not yet finished. second, deleuze's flirtation with political economy *takes the form of his concept of cinema*--his flight from political economy follows what he believes cinema itself to be accomplishing. the unthought or the unthinkable that drives the time-image is, for deleuze, the *non-differentiated condition of consciousness--it is that which cannot be made conscious*. for example, the investigation into "what is the thing (the being) called rosebud"^49^ drives _citizen kane_, and causes it to deploy for deleuze what he calls "sheets of past." "here time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored."^50^ deleuze continues: in relation to the actual present where the quest begins (kane dead) they [the sheets of past] are all coexistent, each contains the whole of kane's life in one form or another. each has what bergson calls "shining points," singularities, but each collects around these points the totality of kane or his life as a whole as a "vague nebulosity."^51^ as is nearly always the case with deleuze's _cinema_, the metaphysics posited by the masterpiece in question are the metaphysics of cinema generally--the film functions as an allegory for cinema. in the passage above, kane stands in for cinema: his being, "the totality of kane or his life as a whole," is given by the being of cinema which culminates this time in a "vague nebulosity." in a new key the vague nebulosity which the sheets form marks again the totality that exceeds mapping of which i spoke earlier; it is in the glowing rhizome of cinema in general that deleuze finds the "shining points," the concepts. by using the films as figures of the concepts he is describing, deleuze shows that the films *are* the concepts. "the hero acts, walks and moves; but it is the past that he plunges himself into and moves in: time is no longer subordinated to movement but movement to time. hence the great scene where kane catches up in depth with the friend he will break with, it is in the past that he himself moves; this movement %was% the break with the friend" (italics in original).^52^ the fact that this movement *was* the break with the friend is the demonstration that in the cinema of the time-image movement *is* subordinated to time since in effect the movement renders the time of the break. hence my second point, that deleuze's flirtation with political economy takes the form of his concept of cinema, is confirmed because a more general rule applies: deleuze's flirtation with everything that the cinema touches takes the form of his concept of cinema. _cinema_ is composed of homologies of cinema. it is in the search for rosebud, and in cinema itself, and finally in reality itself as well ("temporality showed itself as it really was"), that the sheets of past are all coexistent. thus for deleuze the film figures an ontological (ahistorical) condition. film itself achieves the ability to mime the being of time, and deleuze mimes the film. it is because he puts film in the tradition of art and philosophy and because, in spite of himself, he finds truth *there*, in the forms set forth by spinoza, bergson and peirce, that he does not see the temporal relations deployed by _citizen kane_ as an emergent historical condition. [41] _cinema_ is composed of homologies of cinema, yet certain homologies are discarded. here, in order to make my third point with respect to _citizen kane_ and the cinema books, *that the unthought of the cinema books is production itself*, it will be useful to recall that rosebud, the unthought in _citizen kane_, embodies the matrix of desires which inaugurated kane's empire building--rosebud is the repository of desire for and by the forces of capitalist production, the originary formation in the biography of kane's libidinal economy. it is also a question: how does this rosebud, which is at once forgotten, a child's toy, an eternally blossoming flower, and an anus, relate to kane's libidinal economy? are kane's libido and economy fused in the intensity with which the object must be held onto even in the face of the final and necessary letting go, or in the eternal return of a dissatisfaction caused by the cessation of movement which must necessarily occur at the bottom of a hill, or, again, in the hidden and ever renewing promise of a mobility dependent upon a generalized homogenization of the landscape and brought about by a snow that brings with it mobility across all obstacles as well as communion with a certain childhood bliss? though one could extend this list of questions to include questions about technology and speed and the constitution of childhood, whatever constellation of anality and the holding on to things, and release, of the rhythm of circulation, of the homogenizing and mobilizing effects of money one decides upon, it is perhaps most important at this point to remember that the empire which kane builds is a media empire. rosebud, the unthought, is at the core of a capitalist media project. [42] the fact that all of _citizen kane_'s great temporal gyrations through sheets of past are not about presenting the mystery of anyone but precisely of citizen kane, the capitalist media mogul, and his relation to rosebud, that obscure object of his desire, is not in itself sufficient proof to show that the time-image has at its core an inadequately explored economic component. nor can we take deleuze's using the formula m-c-m to explain cinema's dissymetrical exchange with money as adequate evidence for the necessity of doing a political economy of cinema, and therefore as adequate evidence for the need to posit something like the attention theory of value. even if such an account might help to explain what deleuze cannot: namely, cinema's sheer existence as an *industry*, but also its presence at the provenance of the transformation of the terms of production via new forms of mediation; and even if deleuze's many other flirtations with cinema as the formal equivalent of capital formations tempt us to think that cinema is capital of the twentieth century; we can conclude only that a line of thought is cut off in the cinema books. deleuze writes, "what [welles] is showing--already in _citizen kane_--is this: as soon as we reach sheets of past it is as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave, time gets out of joint, and we enter into temporality as a state of %permanent crisis%" (italics in original).^53^ however tempting it might be to suggest that the transformation of temporality in cinema is much more akin to lukacs' concept of the spatialization of temporality in "reification and the consciousness of the proletariat" or to ernst bloch's synchronicity of the nonsynchronous in "nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics"^54^ than is here admitted, or however much the undulations of great waves and the state of permanent crises sound like descriptions of capital's cycles of boom and bust, we can only conclude that deleuze ignores this line of inquiry because he operates with an %idee fix% that cinema, that is the masterpieces of cinema, operate in excess of capital, are indeed its unthought. this unthought is for him at once the dissymetrical exchange with money, and outside of political economy. my *suggestion* here is that it is precisely in the region of excess, in the overloading of forms, that we find the creation of new possibilities for production.^55^ the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous is only one of them. [43] if deleuze's cinema books are to be taken as an enactment of the organizational possibilities of cinema in the discourse of philosophy, then his _cinema_ is within cinema; it is a film within a film and therefore, *even by his own logic*, a film about money. the philosophical praxis which goes under the name of _cinema_ is a sign of the world system--a projection in the arena of philosophy of the cinematic mode of production. what remains to be done here is to suggest the role of cinema in political economy. cinema 3: the money-image [44] new german filmmaker wim wenders films the cinema as such in his explicitly multinational and hence self-consciously contemporary work, _until the end of the world_. there, optical machines interfaced with computers and the human sensorium allow the blind to see through the eyes of another person. this other person, the filmmaker, so to speak, must go out to see things and then during the playback of the images remember them with the feelings he had for them in order that the images may pass through his consciousness and into the consciousness of the blind. the filmmaker's role, in a manner a la vertov and kino-eye, is to aid those who, in post-industrial society, cannot see because of their bio-historical restrictions. the filmmaker does not, however, as in vertov, have to create an image of totality, simply an image rooted to the world by passing through a human and humanizing mind. [45] but in the late capitalism of _until the end of the world_, visual representation and the unconscious are portrayed on a convergent course. furthermore, they are impacted in a third term, the commodity. in a new innovation, the same technology which allows the blind to see is used to record and replay an individual's dreams by cutting out the filmmaker other. one of the characters involved in the research on this new technology develops an addiction to the ghostly colored electronic shadows of her own pixilated dreams that flicker then vanish only to coalesce once again as, for example, liquid blue and yellow silhouettes walking hand in hand on a blood red beach. endlessly she watches the movement of the abstracted forms of her desire mediated and motivated only by technology *and her own narcissism*, rather than seeking an encounter with the outer world through another visual subject. her addiction feeds on her dreams and her dreams feed on her addiction. this video within a film is capital's shortest circuit--an environment where the individual immediately consumes her own objectification. staring endlessly at video, only breaking off in order to sleep, she is immersed in the time of the unconscious and cannot be reached from outside. the time of the unconscious secreted on the screen is taken also as the ur-time of late capitalism--a temporality resulting from the infinite fluidity and plasticity of a money that responds to desire before desire can even speak, and a desire which, no matter what else it is, is desire for money, the medium of the addiction. as emphasized by the setting, a james bond style cave full of high tech imaging equipment staffed by aboriginal people in the middle of the australian outback, the strange outcroppings of capital circulation are under scrutiny here. in late capitalism three strands, representation, the unconscious and the commodity, tend to converge in the image.^56^ [46] a different filmmaker might have ended such a history of the world and its cinema here, with a time image marking the end of the world, but wenders, who has always painfully yet often beautifully believed in the world, ends the film with a knowing farce: returning not exactly to earth, but to the logical time of official world history, the video junky kicks the habit and gets a little perspective on the planet by working in an orbiting shuttle for green space. despite wender's partial yet inadequate ironizing of such "political" alternatives which utilize the money consciousness system with a little perspective, i think that we can take _until the end of the world_ as exemplary of deleuze's argument that "%the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation% [italics his]. what the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money . . . . the film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time."^57^ in the strange temporality of _until the end of the world_, the plot breaks down where the video starts. the video interludes drip with the temporality of pure mediation. locked into the circuits of economic flow, the time-image is a money-image as well. [47] the time/money-image that reveals the end of thoughtful action and the impetus to the narcissism of philosophy (or even to the masochist's elation in sublimity) is not, as deleuze might have us think, the sole province of the latter half of the twentieth century. nor, i should add here, is it the only form of the money-image--only the most philosophical of them. in _the time machine_ of h.g. wells, which is contemporary with the beginning of cinema, we have another harrowing time-image of the end of the world: the lonely time traveller sits in his now ancient time machine on the last beach at the end of the world, a cold thin wind arising as the giant red sun, gone nova, droops into the final sky. to avoid the giant crabs that slowly close in on him at the end of eternity, he first moves on a hundred years only to find them still on the beach, so he moves forward a few million more. the giant crabs are gone and the only living creature to be seen is a black sea dwelling football-like animal that takes a single leap out of the dark ocean. the thin wind blows and in the twilight snow falls. this scene suggests that the forces of reason capable of producing the time traveller's time machine are also capable of hailing the foreclosure of the human species. wells's time image at the end of the nineteenth century as well as wenders's at the end of the twentieth put forth two images of time and its ruins, or better, its ruining, at the end of the world. this "a little time in its pure state" is at once a meditation on the consequences of rationality, and equipment for living. if we reconstitute ourselves in the presence of the sublime, perhaps we become inured to it as well. in our responses, conscious, unconscious, visceral, what have you, we incorporate the terms and protocols of the new world as it incorporates us. [48] what do the time machines of h.g. wells and of the cinema have in common? is not wells's late nineteenth-century time machine already a form (in deleuze's terms) of "post-war" cinema, a device for the utter severing of the sensory-motor link? i am suggesting that the cinema machines this severing, that it is not a mere response to an objective historical situation that can be reified under the sign of the war. rather, such a severing ought be thought of as a tendency of convergent logics and practices. antonio gramsci, recall, in his essay "americanism and fordism," predicted the necessary emergence of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type in which sensation and movement are severed from each other.^58^ one must consume such severing to produce it in oneself. after all, like the spectator, the time craft just sits there utterly motionless as night and day alternate faster and faster, as the solid buildings rise and melt away, and then, still accelerating, as everything goes gray and the sun becomes a pale yellow and finally a red arc racing around the sky. _the time machine_'s bleak registration of the infinite extensionality of a time which yields only emptiness and extinction emerges only out of the theory and practice of a scientific rationality which we know that wells associated with specialization, capitalism and imperialism. the time machine is the consciousness of these formations. in many ways the story of the _time machine_ works much like max horkheimer's assertion in "the end of reason" that the concentration camps are the logical result of instrumental rationality.^59^ rationality to the point of irrationality; temporality to the point of extinction--these are the trajectories emerging out of a cultural logic which the very form of deleuze's ultimately aestheticizing thought elides. [49] in processing the time-image we produce our own extinction, a necessary condition for many of today's employees.^60^ in capitalism our labor confronts us as something alien, as marx said. today we work (consciously and unconsciously) to annihilate our own constitution as subjects and make ourselves over as information portals able to meet the schizophrenic protocols of late capitalism. just as in one era at the behest of social organization we built ourselves as consolidated subjects, in another mode of production we dismantle and retool.^61^ today we are schizophrenics. [50] if cinema is a time machine then perhaps its sublime is precisely the image of our own destruction (as subjects, and therefore, in the "free world," as a democracy). the pleasure we get as we consume our own annihilation marks a contradiction as absolute as that which emerges, for example, from the awe inspired by the latest i-max film (an excellent name for a late capitalist medium), _blue planet_. as our eyes, like those of wenders' video junkie, experience the exhilaration of digging deeper and deeper into the infinite resolution of six story tall images of entire continents shot from outer space, the film proposes with far less irony than wenders's green space that space observation might aid in saving the visibly eroded planet still-swirling majestically below us. this proposition conveniently elides the notion that the present condition of an earth that requires saving is a direct result of the very technology (optical, military, communicational--and the economics thereof) which offers us such breathtaking and "salvational" views. the message of the universal project of science (which can here be understood to be one with the universal project of "good" capitalism) is reinforced by the moving image of the awesome and eternal earth. if in the time images of deleuze's "masterpieces" we confront the many forms of our own annihilation, "the impower of thought," and elsewhere, "the destruction of the instinctive forces in order to replace them with the transmitted forces"^62^, and if in the time images of our popular culture we confront the apotheosis of production/destruction dynamic of capitalism, then we must confront the question of the significance of the aestheticization and philosophization of sublimity in lieu of a political economy of the time-image. we must question the aestheticizing reception of modernists. and if, as fredric jameson says, the spectacle which we consume in late capitalism is the spectacle of late capitalism itself^63^, we must challenge the aestheticizing reception of the postmodernists as well. as today's images hold us rapt, it is our own sensory-motor responsiveness which is being retooled and replaced with an aesthetic and aestheticizing function. what future society might emerge from an apt political economy of aesthetics? politics [51] could we rethink the hold of the cinema on our eyes by producing another way of thinking about it which at once takes seriously the sublime, the internalized relation of the cinema with money, the function of cinema as time machine, and yet which does not reproduce either aesthetics or philosophy or repeat the work of ideology critique or of psychoanalysis? [52] i believe it is possible. one might begin to think, for a moment, of cinema not only as an aesthetic or philosophical occasion, but as a variation of other media like the road or the railroad track or money: a mental pavement for creating new pathways of commodity flow. marx never resolved the question of the productive value of the road.^64^ cinema presents an occasion where the question of the productivity of the road and the question of mediation in general take on new forms. as an instrument capable of burrowing into the body and connecting it to new circuits, cinema and mass media in general are deeply imbricated in economic production and circulation in the world system. indeed, cinema performs a retooling of the sensorium by initiating a new disciplinary regime for the eye. [53] it should come as no surprise that the labor necessary to produce the manifold forms of our systemic compatibility is our own. on an immediate level this claim implies that we work for big corporations when we watch their advertising, but more generally, our myriad participations in the omni present technology fest are, in addition to whatever else they're doing, engaged in insuring the compatibility of our sensoriums with prevailing methods of interpellation. these interpellations reach us not only by calling us into identification in the althusserian sense but by calling us to rhythms, to desires, to affects. daily we interface with machines in order to speak the systems-language of our socio economic system. the retooling of ocular and hence corporeal functions is not a one time event; retreading vision, sensoria, and psyches requires constant effort. it is important to note that we are thinking of organic transformation channeled not only through discourse, but through visual practice. (one must, of course, at this point acknowledge the ear as well.) though certain hardware remains standard for a time, even the screen, for example, has undergone many modifications in its movement from movie to tv to computer. today the screen is again being superseded by virtual reality--in the so-called "fifth generation" of computer technology we will be inside information.^65^ however, micro-adjustments and calibrations of the practices of concrete bodies are being made all the time: as fashion, as sexuality, as temporality, as desire. [54] i would like to recapitulate briefly two propositions concerning the question of value: 1) the perception that images pass through the perception of others increases their currency and hence their value. vision adds value to visual objects. often this value is capitalized. inevitably this value changes the form or the character of the image, not least because this value is the bio-technological placing of the image in circulation, its very mediation. if circulation through sensoria creates value (recall the painted masterpiece) then this value is the accruing of human attention on the image. because the images circulate in regulated media pathways (channels), the media itself becomes more valuable as its images do. [55] 2) in what the sociologists might call informal economy, value is produced by viewers as they work on their own sensoriums. in other words, some of the effort in the near daily remaking of the psyche is provided by the labor time of the viewer. this tooling of the body to make it amenable to commodity flow--to make it know how to shift times and to operate at the different speeds that the non-synchronicity of late capitalism demands, to make it address certain ideologies and desires, to elicit certain identifications--requires human labor time and is productive of value.^66^ thus at a formal level the value of media and of images is increased, while at an informal level we work on ourselves so that we may work in the world. though it is important never to forget that in the present regime of sensorial production, all earlier forms of exploitation (wage labor, slavery, feudalism) coexist with the visual and the sensual production of value that i have described, if to look is to labor, then one finds the possibility of such labor accruing to circulatory pathways of our own choosing or even making rather than pathways chosen for us. where we put our eyes makes a difference. if we look at things normally obscured, or if we rechannel our perceptions and our perceiving via our own intellectual production, we might--through endeavors such as alternative video, writing, performance, etc.--build some of the circulating abstraction that make possible confrontational cultural practice. the labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. it is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else. [56] one might think of the cinema as an instrument (along with radio, television, telecommunications) that has, without our really noticing, been the harbinger of a new regime for the production and circulation of economic value at a new level of economic practice as well as of economic conceptualization. aesthetics and philosophy would then be secondary media (access roads) activated by the cinema. other cinematic attractions, for example, narrative, circus acts, street shows, identity politics and terrorism, imply other cinematic methods for the harnessing of human attention potentially productive of value; we would do well to follow up the hypothesis of the productive value of human attention.^67^ [57] if we can dare to think that human attention is productive of value, all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back (as well as those of radio and tv) and scrutinized for the multifarious ways in which they have begun a global process of repaving the human sensorium, opening it up to the flow of ever newer and more abstract commodities. at the same time, because we have all been converted into performers and multitudes, they have rendered anything like what used to be meant by democracy utterly and literally unthinkable. the "masterpieces" could also be studied for their participation in certain visuo-economic practices and their resistance to others, though their interest (and status) might dwindle for many. and, i should add, new canons of masterpieces would be (are being) produced by people with different market shares, people who labor and are enfranchised by circuits for the circulation of capital partially antagonistic to the dominant.^68^ we witness (and participate in) these alternate circuits in the amalgamation of the attention of blocks of viewers in, for example, gay cinema, cinema of the african diaspora, or third world cinema. [58] what if one thought of cinema not so much as a factory for the production of concepts, but as a factory for the production of a consciousness more and more thoroughly commodified, more and more deeply integrated in a world system? in a world organized like cinema, consciousness becomes a screen on which the affects of production are manifest. what if one thought of cinematic technologies, with their ability to burrow into the flesh, as a partial solution to the problem of expansion faced by the full globalization of capital? in a fully globalized situation, capital expands not outward, spatially and geographically, but *into* the body, mining it of value (_videodrome_). in this schema, television viewers work in a sort of cottage industry performing daily upkeep on their sensoriums as they help to open their bodies to the flow of new commodities. when we come home from work and flip on the tube, our "leisure time" is spent paving new roads. the value produced (yesterday and elsewhere by labor time, but in advanced societies by human attention) accrues to the shareholders of the various media. it is tabulated statistically in what is called ratings and sold to other employers (advertisers) at a market value. but if, for example, we put our eyes elsewhere, or rechannel our viewings into different media, we might build some of the circulating abstractions which make possible medium scale confrontational cultural practice. [59] vision becomes a form of work. bodies become deterritorialized, becoming literally machinic assemblages, cyborgs. the extension of the body through the media, which is to say the extension of the media into the body, raises myriad questions about agency, identity, subjectivity, and labor. question for the next century: who (what) will control the pathways in which our attention circulates? technologies such as cinema and television are machines which take the assembly line out of the space of the factory and put it into the home and the theater and the brain itself, mining the body of the productive value of its time, occupying it on location. the cinema as deterritorialized factory, human attention as deterritorialized labor. global organization as cinema--the potential cutting and splicing of all aspects of the world to meet the exigencies of flexible accumulation and to develop new affects. consciousness itself as cinema screen as the necessary excrescence of social organization. cinema as a paradigm of corporeal calibration. each body machine interface may well be potentially productive of value--how else could there have been a deleuze? notes the author wishes to thank eleanor kaufman, paul trembath, jeff bell, jonathan beasley, and jim morrison for their helpful comments on the manuscript while in progress. ^1^ by "reality principle" i mean the set of logics, conventions and strategies by which the film creates the reality effect of the narrative and the %mise en scene%. the term is particularly apt since it is the eruption of various repressions in the form of walls dripping ooze and sinister sounds which in the film threatens the integrity of the reality principle before its final catastrophe. sigmund freud's elaboration in _beyond the pleasure principle_ of the reality principle as that principle which replaces the pleasure principle and works "from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world" coincides precisely with my thesis here that consciousness in its dominant forms is the cinematic excrescence of social organization. to put it very crudely, capitalist production, organized more and more like movie production, produces certain difficulties and contradictions which must be resolved in cinema/consciousness. sounding somewhat like max weber, freud tells us that "under the influence of the ego's instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the %reality principle% [italics freud's]. this latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure." in his development of this formulation freud could well be describing the representational strategy of capital cinema: "in the course of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego [or in this case, the film]. the former are then split off from this unity by a process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction." that freud uses the trope of cutting is perhaps no accident. if the "incompatible" instincts succeed "in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure . . . . much of the unpleasure that we experience is %perceptual% unpleasure [italics freud's]. it may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus--that is, which is recognized by it as 'danger'." the ego here can be seen at once as the psychic consequence of a repressive social order pitted against a polymorphously perverse body and as a theater of perception. as a matrix of mediation it occupies the bio-social space which during this century has been overtaken by cinema in the special sense of the word which i attempt to develop here. all of the above citations of freud come from _beyond the pleasure principle_, trans. james strachey (new york and london: w.w. norton, 1961); pp. 4-5. ^2^ this point can be made more forcefully still if we see, with walter benjamin, the category of experience fundamentally at odds with the commodification of culture during a certain historical juncture. experience and narrative are in decline because of the emergence of rationality as shock and information. see "the storyteller," in walter benjamin, _illuminations_ (new york: schocken books, 1969), pp. 83-109. ^3^ as i have noted elsewhere, during the twentieth century the world is organized more and more like a film; commodity production becomes a form of montage. commodities, the results of the cutting and editing of materials, transport systems, and labor time take on the status of filmic objects which are then activated in the gaze on the screen of consciousness. the transformation of consciousness, wrought by the cinematic organization of production and the transformed status of objects, is tantamount to consciousness's full-blown commodification. ^4^ by the fantasy of postcoloniality i mean fantasy in the same spirit in which it appears as "the first world fantasy of the free world" in neferti xina m. tadiar's essay "sexual economies in the asia-pacific community," in _what is in a rim: critical perspectives of the pacific region idea_, ed. arif dirlik (boulder: westview press, 1993), pp. 183-210. tadiar notes that the first world fantasy of the free world is "the shared ground upon which the actions and identities of its participants are predicated--it is a field of orientation, an imaginary determining the categories and operations with which individuals as well as nation-states act out their histories" (183). my use of the term encompasses a somewhat smaller constituency, intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. nonetheless it derives, as does tadiar's from slavoj zizek, for whom a fantasy construction "serves as a support system for our 'reality' itself: an illusion which is structuring our effective, real social relations and which is masking thereby some insupportable, real, impossible kernel" (205, n. 1). in this case the kernel is the persistence of the processes of colonialism itself which are the very conditions of possibility for the institutional construction and deployment of the fantasy of postcoloniality. ^5^ one need only think of the crucial role borders and passports continue to play in regulating immigration. precisely because people can't move, capital, with its ability to cross borders, can pit one national population against another as they compete to sell themselves ever more cheaply than their neighbors. for an excellent discussion of the new form of the nation state see arif dirlik's essay, "post-socialist space time: some critical considerations," in _global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary_, eds. rob wilson and wimal dissanayake (duke university press, 1994 [forthcoming]). ^6^ in thinking the relationships between cinema and capital there is, to my mind, plenty of room to disagree with deleuze about the fascistic, statist, stratifying, "outcome known in advance" character of marxism. despite the lessons of deleuze and guattari about the mode of analysis requisite for the combatting of fascism, antonio negri, with his emphasis on radical autonomy and revolutionary subjectivity, provides one alternate example, while gramsci, whom deleuze never ventures to touch, provides another. ^7^ for a more complete discussion of this sketch of an idea see my essay "the circulating eye," _communication research_ (sage publications, vol. 20, no. 2, april 1993), pp. 298-313. ^8^ see my essay on _robocop 2_ entitled "desiring the involuntary," which discusses the cyberneticization of the flesh as a further realization of what cinema has been doing to its audiences all along, in _global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary_ (cited above). ^9^ two related lines of thought: first, that the new technologies for mining economic value from human flesh produce a new type or class of worker equipped to meet the protocols of flexible accumulation (by this logic, all tv viewers are involved in "cottage industry"); and second, that an elaboration of the dynamics, properties and economic relations of "infomercial" labor will help to theorize other kinds of informal economies. ^10^ i develop this idea in an essay on s. eisenstein, i.p. pavlov and f.w. taylor, "the spectatorship of the proletariat." ^11^ paul virilio, _speed and politics_ (new york: semiotext(e), 1986). ^12^ i am thinking here of the work of pierre bourdieu, jean baudrillard, and jean-francois lyotard as well as that of walter benjamin, theodore adorno and other members of the frankfurt school. more recently, the very interesting work of jennifer wicke, mark seltzer and anne friedberg has addressed the commodification of vision and visual culture. it is my contention that though all of these thinkers see the logic of commodification at work in the articulation of cultural forms, commodification remains for them largely metaphorical, a code. ^13^ i should note here that my use of the term "movement-image" differs somewhat from that of deleuze's use of the term. my critique of his work necessarily demands an adaptation of certain aspects of his language and a refusal of other aspects. though i accept the category "movement-image" just as i accept the category "cinema," i cannot argue with deleuze at every point along the way, at every point along *his* way, if i am to say what i want to say even in this preliminary way. to show the dialectical aspects of the movement-image i need to tell another story--one that does not find the movement-image in the masterpieces, but the masterpieces in it. ^14^ in david bordwell, janet staiger and kristin thompson, _the classical hollywood cinema: film style and mode of production to 1960_ (new york: columbia university press, 1985), janet staiger has noted that "hollywood's mode of production has been characterized as a factory system akin to that used by a ford plant, and hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films." though i do not disagree with this i am arguing the opposite as well: rather than cinematic production copying fordism, i would argue that it is an advance over fordism. cinematic production uses the practices of fordism but begins the dematerialization of the commodity form, a tendency which, more than anything else, characterizes the course of economic production during this century. rather than requiring a state to build the roads that enable the circulation of its commodities, as did ford, the cinema builds its pathways of circulation directly into the eyes and sensoriums of its viewers. it is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for new commodities. ^15^ geoffrey nowell smith points this out in his introduction to _eisenstein volume 2: towards a theory of montage_, eds. michael glenny and richard taylor (london: bfi, 1991). ^16^ in the cinema, the technologies for the organization of production and of the sensorium converge. film/capital is cut to produce an image. today, the convergence of the once separate industries for image production and for other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity %par excellence%) realizes a new and hybridized form: the image-commodity. ^17^ walter benjamin, _illuminations_, pp. 217-251. ^18^ "the film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. the film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus--changes that are experienced by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present day citizen" (_illuminations_, p. 250, n. 19). ^19^ deleuze, in a characteristic and brilliant reading of plato, provides an analysis of simulation and suggests that it has always haunted the house of philosophy. what i find characteristic about this essay is that in locating the need for idealism to banish simulation in greek philosophy, deleuze elides the historical problem of simulation: why is it possible to make this analysis now? see "the simulacrum and ancient philosophy," in _the logic of sense_, ed. constantin v. boundas (new york: columbia university press, 1990). ^20^ instead of withering away like the state, the fetish character of vision, the mystical warping of the visual field surrounding the visual object of perception called "aura," has achieved, in the situation of televisual reproduction under capitalism, a change of state on par with the change in the status of the object itself: today's equivalent of aura is the simulacrum. this change of state in the object's specter raises questions about the changing characteristics of mediation and the historical causes thereof. ^21^ georg lukacs, "reification and the consciousness of the proletariat," in _history and class consciousness_ (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1971). ^22^ here it is is important to note that i am speaking about the production of value generally. whether or not this value will be capitalized depends upon a variety of factors, including how pervasively capital has prevaded the arena of the work of art's "consumption." ^23^ that benjamin at one point extracts the aura from the solitary seer's gaze upon a tree branch serves only to prove that the supplemental excess of vision that is the aura is not particular to any one moment in an economy of vision, but is distributed along all nodal points in the economy of sight. that which benjamin called "distance" is actually the irreducibility of the visual object into a static object free from the visual circulation which eventually annihilates the visual object as an object of sight. this finally is as simple as the fact that we cannot look at the same thing forever and that things impel us to look at other things. the way in which our gaze moves is directly related to the way in which our bodies and our eyes are plugged into the economy itself. "distance," then, is a form of vibration between the two determinations of mediation. like the commodity, the object of vision occupies two states simultaneously, it is at once a thing, a use value, and a place holder in the syntax of an economy of vision, an exchange value. the experience of unbridgeable distance registers the impending disappearance or submergence of any visual object back into the regulated circulation of vision itself. distance, that is, aura, is the poignant registration of the visual object's oscillation between its two determinations: an object of vision, and a moment in the circulation of vision. ^24^ _illuminations_, p. 89. benjamin notes in "the storyteller," the essay from which this citation is taken, that "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it," (_illuminations_, p. 89). storytelling in the essay is pitted against the production of events designed for easy consumption, that is, what benjamin presciently calls "information." the clash of storytelling and information in this wonderful essay stages the confrontation of two modes of production which also clash in "the work of art," the pre-industrial and the modern. ^25^ information, as it turns out, has less use-value outside of the circuits of the market than did storytelling. it is not knowledge really; to function it must remain in channels. it is important here to distinguish between mediation %per se%, as in the mediation of events by a medieval manuscript or the transportation of sugar cane on a barge, and mediation in its self-conscious form; that is, media as media that, like the commodity in circulation, has both a particular component (use value) and an abstract component (exchange value) in every "byte." to understand media thus is to argue that each infinitesimally small slice of media has value both in its content, its information, and in its form as media itself. media as media always posits and refers back to the circulatory system in which it has and is currency. ^26^ _illuminations_, p. 89. ^27^ what benjamin only peripherally perceives about the phenomenon that he dubs aura is that it is an artifact of a visual economy. his perception of it marks a shift in the speed of the circulation of visual economy. the aura, as observed and constructed by benjamin, is a primordial form of the exchange value of the visual object produced by the systematic circulation of looks, and hence of "images," in an emerging economy of sight. the labor power accreting to the visual object gives it a certain palpable agency; that is why compelling objects look back. in the moment of their looking at us, we encounter the indifference of the value-system to our own being. in the postmodern, objects look back at us with such intensity that they see through us. in their indifference to our individuality is their sublimity. benjamin records earlier experiences of this kind of event. quoting proust, he transcribes, "some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them," adding, "(the ability it would seem, of returning the gaze.)" as benjamin notes, "to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return." in his effort to define the auratic he quotes valery as well: "to say, 'here i see such and such an object' does not establish an equation between me and the object....in dreams, however, there is an equation. the things i see, see me just as much as i see them" ("on some motifs in baudelaire," in _illuminations_, pp. 188 and 189). the concept of the aura is the semi-conscious acknowledgement of the work or image as simultaneously commodity and currency--as being at once itself (an object) and a moment in the circulation of vision. as with storytelling itself, which for benjamin becomes a topic on the eve of its extinction, the aura becomes observable as soon as there is a transformation in the status of objects. visual objects, like the events that are no longer held in an organic relation by storytelling but instead appear as information, appear via a new mode of production in the modern. this mode of production functions at a new speed. ^28^ through the eye one may grasp the dynamics of circulation in general. because such disappearance of authenticity is at once more clearly marked in the realm of the visual (benjamin, berger, baudrillard) and, simultaneously, at present more characteristic of late capitalism, i will here restrict my comments to the visual component of aura. ^29^ if one takes the fetish as an intimation, to the abject individual, of the power of the world system, then it could be said that simulation as spectacle is a dim version of the sublime; it occurs when the shutter on the lamp of the unrepresentable is just barely open. if simulation is an excess of reference without a clear referent, then the sublime is an excess of referent without adequate reference. all the simulation in the world cannot represent the world system, even though the sublimity of such a spectacle evokes its ominous presence. this dual inadequation between a symbolic which cannot represent its object and an object which cannot find its symbolic representation defines the semantic field of the postmodern condition. ^30^ gilles deleuze, _cinema 1: the movement-image_, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (minneapolis: the university of minnesota press, 1986), p. xiv. ^31^ _cinema 1_, x. ^32^ _cinema 1_, xii. ^33^ gilles deleuze and claire parnet, _dialogues_, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (new york: columbia university press, 1987). ^34^ gilles deleuze, _cinema 2: the time-image_, trans. hugh tomlinson and robert galeta (minneapolis: minnesota press, 1989), p. 155. ^35^ _cinema 2_, 215. deleuze defines the noosphere as follows: "the noosphere is the sphere of the noosign--an image which goes beyond itself towards something which can only be thought" (_cinema 2_, 335). ^36^ gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _a thousand plateaus_, trans. brian massumi (minneapolis: university of minnesota press), p. 161. ^37^ _cinema 2_, 280. ^38^ _cinema 2_, 167 ^39^ _cinema 2_, xi. for a thumbnail sketch with which to see the difference between the movement-image and the time-image, think of the difference between griffith and antonioni, or between eisenstein and tarkovsky. ^40^ _illuminations_, 84. ^41^ _cinema 2_, 270. ^42^ see _the informal economy: studies in advanced and less developed countries_, eds. alejandro portes, manuel castells and lauren a. benton (baltimore: thge johns hopkins university press, 1989). i am suggesting that in the humanities such informal practices occur in the sphere of literature, film, criticism, television, style, politics, etc., in short, culture. the negotiation of value at the level of consciousness is at once socially necessary labor and unregistered in the gnp. ^43^ _cinema 2_, 77. ^44^ _cinema 2_, 78. ^45^ _cinema 2_, 78. ^46^ _cinema 2_, 77. ^47^ _cinema 2_, 78. ^48^ for this comment i am indebted here to the readers at _postmodern culture_ whose valuable suggestions are to be found doing their work throughout this paragraph, the previous one, and the one that follows. ^49^ _cinema 2_, 105. ^50^ _cinema 2_, 105. in the context of another discussion, this sentence might well describe the relationship between history (historical sheets) in the spatialized present of the postmodern. i add this thought because my project in this section is to show the historical conditions of possibility for deleuze's thought and for the resonance of this thought in us. to argue that what deleuze finds uniquely in the cinema is at present part of a generalized perceptual bathosphere seems to me to be a precondition for the suggestion i am making here concerning media's pre eminent place in political economy. political economy is the unthought of media theory even as it is the empirical if mystified practice of media itself. ^51^ _cinema 2_, 105-6. ^52^ _cinema 2_, 106. ^53^ _cinema 2_, 112. ^54^ ernst bloch, "nosnsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics," trans. mark ritter, _new german critique_, no. 11, 1977 pp. 22-38. ^55^ though deleuze would most likely agree with this statement, he would not however be in accord with the idea that production as such can be productively thought about in terms of political economy. the machinic assemblage, for example, is for him precisely a mode of production that avoids what he takes to be the oedipalizing tendencies of marxism which returns all variations to the law of value. whether or not deleuze is correct on this matter i leave to readers to decide. here i would only like to suggest that the philosophical sources upon which deleuze draws so heavily in the cinema books, namely henri bergson and charles s. peirce, particularly with respect to their work on quality--which arises from a certain excess and manifests itself in time--might be analyzed using the strategy adopted by georg lukacs in his analysis of kant. by posing the question, what has capital done to perception and consciousness, or alternately, how are models of perception and consciousness and the consciousness they depict utilized by capital, the work of these philosophers might take on a new significance. peirce defines thirdness, the category that in part gives rise to deleuze's category of the time-image, as "that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future" (_philosophical writings of peirce_, ed. justus buchler, new york: dover publications, 1955; p.91). this idea of a guiding persistence manifest in such formulations as "not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists" (91), might well be considered in the light of the emergence of organizational relations which inflect the construction and the circulation of objects, i.e, developments in capital circulation which orchestrate the temporality of objects and thus change the character of their significance. such affects might be briefly classed as aura, fetish, or the ideology of private property, but their variety might be, finally, as diverse as affect itself. bergson too, who claims that "our perception . . . is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within" (_matter and memory_, trans. nancy margaret paul and w. scott palmer [garden city: doubleday, 1959], p. 215), might be studied in light of the diminishing agency of subjects and the increasing agency of things. ^56^ the flattening out of the space between the unconscious and representation is precisely the argument implicit in a variety of socio-linguistic analyses from orwell to baudrillard: things *are* as they appear, all of the would-be contradictions, yesterday's contradictions, are on the surface, and since they are on the surface they are no longer contradictions. the space of the fold that registers alienation has all but disappeared. when dystopia is no longer recognizable as such, we are in the postmodern; as in much of the work of tarkovsky, we *are* the unconscious. to the orwellian trinity war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, we may add a maxim for the theorist: consciousness is unconsciousness. ^57^ _cinema 2_, 78. ^58^ for gramsci, americanism implied not only a routinization of work experience, but the concomitant necessity of "breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing of productive operations exclusively to the mechanical physical aspects" (302). "it is from this point of view," gramsci tells us, that one should study the "puritanical" initiative of american industrialists like ford. it is certain that they are not concerned with the "humanity" or the "spirituality" of the worker, which are immediately smashed . . . . "puritanical" initiatives simply have the purpose of preserving, outside of work, a certain psycho-physical equilibrium which prevents the physiological collapse of the worker . . . . american industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. it is in their interests to have a stable skilled labor force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts. (303) hence, for gramsci, americanism implied not only a reorganization of work, but a reorganization of cultural forms. antonio gramsci, "americanism and fordism," in _selections from the prison notebooks_, ed. and trans. quintin hoare and goeffrey nowell smith (new york: international publishers, 1971), pp. 277-318. ^59^ max horkheimer, "the end of reason," in _the essential frankfurt school reader_, eds. andrew arato and eike gebhardt (new york: continuum, 1987), pp. 26-48. ^60^ see noam chomsky, "notes on nafta: the monsters of mankind," in _the nation_, march 29, 1993, pp. 412 416. chomsky argues that the necessary condition of transnational corporations is the destruction of democratic consciousness. in any case they are acting as if it didn't exist and putting policy into place to insure that it doesn't exist at least at the level of representation. how much more effective when the mass media engages the microcosms of our own sensibilities to work in tandem with the macrocosmic interests of transnational capital. ^61^ this is the basic %mise en scene% of cyberpunk. ^62^ in the program of the masochist from _a thousand plateaus_, 155. ^63^ spoken from the podium during the conference _visions from the post-future_, duke university, spring, 1993. the idea here is, as i understand it, also one of the central theses of _the geopolitical aesthetic_ (bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press, 1992). ^64^ marx thought that the road was built with surplus labor time (surplus value) that was somehow taken out of circulation in its use as road and hence ceased to be capital. elsewhere, however, it is clear that the roads are necessary for capital circulation, i.e., that they are constituted with what should be necessary labor time. clearly, surplus labor cannot be necessary labor without forcing the implosion of the labor theory of value since capital is built, that is, realizes a profit, precisely on this split. marx couldn't decide if roads were profitable or not. by taking cinema, and more generally mass media, as higher forms of the road, some of these problems begin to resolve themselves precisely because of the increase in intensity of circulation and in the increasing frequency of the production of "roads." ^65^ as a citation in howard rheingold's _virtual reality_ says, "computer programming is just another form of filmmaking." rheingold describes the generational development of computers as a slow meshing of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, a gradual decreasing of the distance between the mind and the machine. at first one handed punched cards to an operator. then one could input information oneself. then there was a switch from base two to primitive code words, and after that more common language and the screen. in the fifth generation (vr) we will be *inside* information, able to fly through information spaces, making simple physical gestures, such as pointing, which will then activate complex computerized functions. ^66^ i would venture as well that it is this unrecognized value producing activity along with other kinds of informal economy (attention) described as disguised wage labor, both in third world economies by political scientists and in patriarchal economies by feminist socio-linguists, that make up the bulk of the unacknowledged maintenance of the world. ^67^ to repeat, such a theory should in no way obscure the plight of workers whose exploitation continues to take on the forms already visible at the beginning of the industrial revolution. as einstein's equations reduce to newton's at low velocity, so too ought the attention theory of value reduce to the labor theory of value at low velocities of monetary circulation, that is, at velocities lower than the speed of cinema. ^68^ canons are themselves excellent examples of the kind of institutional entrenchment possible by garnering the value produced by attention. the existence of a canon, already and obviously a politics, is one of the myriad forms in which attention is organized and which continues to organize attention. --------------------------------end-----------------------------berger, 'cultural trauma and the "timeless burst": pynchon's revision of nostalgia in _vineland_', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-berger-cultural.txt archive pmc-list, file berger.595. part 1/1, total size 68330 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- cultural trauma and the "timeless burst": pynchon's revision of nostalgia in _vineland_[1] by james berger department of english george mason university jberger@osf1.gmu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by nathaniel mackey, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] nostalgia has a bad reputation. it is said to entail an addiction to falsified, idealized images of the past. nostalgic yearning, as david lowenthal writes, "is the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present" (21). the political uses of nostalgia are said to be inevitably reactionary, serving to link the images of an ideal past to new or recycled authoritarian structures. and it is true that nostalgia has played major roles in many of the reactionary and repressive political movements of this century--in nazism's reverence for the "%volk%," in socialist kitsch, and, in the united states, in reaganism's obsession with idealized depictions of family life in the 1950s. most recently, nostalgia has been described as a masculine response to feminist threats to patriarchal privilege.^2^ [2] nostalgia has certainly kept some bad company. and yet, it seems to me, the critiques of nostalgia have not addressed important questions concerning the mechanics of how the past is transmitted into the present and how it might best be used. postmodern texts and readings, as michael berube has noted (with reference to _gravity's rainbow_), place great emphasis on problematics of "transmission and reinscription; not on overturning the hierarchy between canonical and apocryphal but on examining how the canonical and apocryphal can do various kinds of cultural work for variously positioned and constituted cultural groups" (229). in this essay, i will reevaluate nostalgia as a form of cultural transmission that can shift in its political and historical purposes, and thus bears a more complex and, potentially, more productive relation to the past than has generally been allowed in recent discussions. [3] i will reconsider the possibilities of nostalgia through a discussion of thomas pynchon's 1990 novel, _vineland_, a book whose low critical reputation parallels that of the term in question. in fact, _vineland_ has been criticized precisely for its nostalgia, for a politics that exhibits an overly comfortable longing for those good old days of the movement and the attempt at revolution.^3^ indeed, _vineland_ seems, in its story's emphasis on repairing the broken family, to veer toward an almost reaganesque nostalgia. the novel ends with a family reunion; its final word is "home." [4] _vineland_ works its way, however, to a very troubled home, and its "sickness"^4^ is not a conventional nostalgia for idealized sites of origin. its concern, rather, as it returns to the 1960s from the vantage of the reaganist 1980s, is with how cultural memory is transmitted, and it portrays the ideological distortions, marketing strategies, and the variety of nostalgias through which americans in the 1980s apprehended the 60s. central to pynchon's conception of how the past inhabits the present is the notion of trauma. _vineland_ returns to the 1960s not as to a site of original wholeness and plenitude, but, rather, as to a site of catastrophe, betrayal, and cultural trauma. moreover, the past in _vineland_ is not simply a place to which a nostalgic text may return. rather, it is the traumatic past that persistently leaps forward into the present. [5] and yet, as pynchon presents it, along with the traumatic return of the past into the present (a return which is necessarily marked according to the prevailing reaganist and consumerist ideologies) is another, utopian, element. the utopian, or revelatory, moment is simultaneous with the traumatic moment. and so, in effect, pynchon's nostalgia is a nostalgia for the future, for possibilities of social harmony glimpsed at crucial moments in the past, but not ever yet realized. pynchon's portrayal of this congruence or simultaneity of trauma and utopian possibility resembles walter benjamin's use of the term %jetztzeit%, the critical moment of historical, redemptive possibility which continues to erupt into the present even after many previous failures. like benjamin's use of %jetztzeit%, _vineland_'s nostalgia possesses an ethical and political urgency, an imperative to use its glimpse of utopian potential to try to change an unjust history. and, like the %jetztzeit%, _vineland_'s utopian/traumatic vision constitutes a kind of pivot or wedge by which a given historical record can be loosened, opened, made available to change. where pynchon's account of nostalgia chiefly differs from benjamin's treatment of %jetztzeit% is in pynchon's attention to the mechanics of how the traumatic/utopian cultural memory is transmitted. through his pervasive use of popular culture imagery and tone, pynchon emphasizes that historical trauma and the possibilities of working through the trauma do not, as would seem to be the case in benjamin's "theses," burst unmediated into the present. rather, the insistent return to, and of, the past as a site both of catastrophe and of redemptive possibility will always take particular cultural and ideological forms. in _vineland_, these will be the forms of american consumerism and reaganism in the 1980s.^5^ *** [6] in _vineland_'s first sentence, zoyd wheeler (frenesi's ex-husband, father of their daughter, prairie) wakes up in the summer of 1984,^6^ and prepares for an odd ritual. each year, in order to receive his mental disability check, zoyd must commit some public act that testifies to his insanity. a hippie, pot-smoking, small time rock and roll playing, long haired freak of the 60s, zoyd is a picturesque character; he is very 60s. in fact, zoyd is part of a government funded program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity, and the opening scene of the novel is a comic conflation of representations of the 60s in the age of reagan: a hippie wearing a dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self and property-destroying act which is broadcast live on television. [7] one of the greatest threats of the 60s, according to the right, was its blurring of gender divisions. the hippie was already feminized by his long hair and lack of aggressivity (although at the same time he was--inexplicably--appealing to many women). zoyd's dress heightens the gender confusion but, through its absurdity, disarms it. this hippie, in his ridiculous k-mart dress, can be no threat to traditional masculinity--he's just crazy. but with his chain saw, the 60s representative is also a physical danger. he's charles manson, the hippie as satanic mass killer. and with the reintroduction of a physical threat, the sexual threat also returns as zoyd, now armed as well as cross-dressed, enters the loggers' bar. [8] the figure of zoyd at the log jam brings together parodies of feminism, gay activism, and senseless 80s violence all as progeny of the old 60s hippie. and this is precisely the reaganist view of the 60s: a source of political and especially sexual violence and chaos. as this opening scene of _vineland_ suggests, reaganism had (and the new right continues to have) an overriding interest in subsidizing and perpetuating the memory of the 60s in these terms. and so the 60s enter the 80s in _vineland_ as the reaganist 80s would want to see them, as an aging hippie wearing a dress hurtling through a window for the local news. [9] the social upheavals of the 1960s--centering around rapid changes in thinking about race, gender relations, sexuality, nationalism and the american military, the power of corporate technocracy and marketing--constituted america's central trauma for the new right. all the reaganist themes return to the 60s and attempt in some way to undo the incomplete changes of that decade. as the feminist historian rosalind pollack petchesky describes it, the new right is in large part "a movement to turn back the tide of the major social movements of the 1960s and 1970s" (450). and this view from the left no more than reinforces the right's own self-description. reagan was elected governor of california in 1966 largely by campaigning against student radicals. a hippie, reagan said, was someone who "dresses like tarzan, has hair like jane, and smells like cheetah" (cannon, 148), and he promised to "clean up the mess at berkeley," in particular the "sexual orgies so vile i cannot describe them to you" (gitlin, 217).^7^ richard viguerie, the right wing fund raiser, claimed in the early 80s, it was the social issues that got us this far, and that's what will take us into the future. we never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. we talked about the communist onslaught until we were blue in the face. but we didn't start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues. (quoted in davis, 171) these "gut level issues," which revolve primarily around race, sexuality, and violence, point directly back to the social conflicts of the 1960s and define that decade as the central site of trauma in recent american history. [10] but zoyd is not the only relic from the 60s who returns. while zoyd's return is an orchestrated, well-funded gesture of propaganda, pynchon shows also how the traumatic memories of the 1960s return involuntarily and somatically, as historical symptoms which inhabit and haunt the 1980s. it is in this symptomatic sense that ghosts play such important roles in _vineland_, and ghosts are, indeed, ideal figures to portray the return of historical traumas. the ghost is propelled or, more accurately, compelled from the past into the present, and bears a message, invariably of a crime. yet, in another sense, the ghost does not *bear* the message; it *is* the message: a sign pointing back to a traumatic event and forcing that event, in a disguised or cryptic form, back into memory. the ghost is an urgent, intolerable reminder of trauma: in other words, a symptom. and it is usually a symptom not only of an individual crime, but also of an underlying social sickness which extends into the present.^8^ [11] in _vineland_, ghosts appear in several forms. watching the documentary footage that her mother, a radical filmmaker, shot during the 60s, prairie becomes possessed by frenesi, as by a ghost. prairie understood that the person behind the camera most of the time really was her mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she could absorb, conditionally become, frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there. . . prairie floated, ghostly light of head, as if frenesi were dead but in a special way, a minimum-security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by projector and screen were possible. (199) [12] frenesi's vision of the 60s, as a bodily experience, inhabits prairie, and time--and the supposed barrier in time posed by death--is porous, a "minimum-security arrangement," so that the past can actually exist, physically, in the present. history, for pynchon, is the alien, uncanny presence which is also that which is most familiar; it is what has formed and informed the present suddenly encountered as other, as dead. history is the living dead, buried once but come out of its grave, so that the line between living and dead (at least as they function historically) becomes blurred.^9^ [13] the most prominent ghosts in _vineland_ are the thanatoids. although dead, these beings are physical and social. they eat, live in communities, watch television, and can hold conversations with living people. and the thanatoids are, for the most part, victims of traumas of the 1960s. weed atman, betrayed by frenesi during the rebellion at the college of the surf, returns as a thanatoid. the text notes that "since the end of the war in vietnam, the thanatoid population had been growing steeply" (320), and vato and blood, the wreckers/ferrymen who convey the disoriented, traumatized dead/undead to thanatoid village, are themselves vietnam veterans strangely in thrall to a vietnamese woman who (in more ways than one) balances their accounts. the thanatoids' traumas, as in psychoanalytic descriptions of the symptom, are not in their memories--indeed, the thanatoids are only dimly aware that they may be dead--but on their bodies. on seeing her first thanatoids, dl tells takeshi, "some of these folks don't look too good." "what do you expect?" takeshi replies. "what was done to them--they carry it right out on their bodies--written down for--all to see!" (174). [14] the thanatoids are symptoms--physical marks on the social body--of the traumatic 60s now haunting and contributing to the traumas of the 80s. and yet, the thanatoids are also ridiculous, another absurd remnant (like zoyd at the novel's opening) of the psychedelic 60s. and in this tension, between a serious, portentous return of historical trauma and its representation as a comic schtick enacted under the aegis of mass media, we see a crucial feature of pynchon's literary technique in _vineland_, his representation of history, and his version of nostalgia. a ghost of the 60s can return in the 80s only as its own simulation: a ghost playing a ghost, a "thanatoid," a ghost expressed in technical jargon, a mediated, postmodern ghost of the reagan era with an alarm watch that beeps out "wachet auf." yet, the 60s continued to return, albeit in these ridiculous, ideologically tinted, "fetishized" forms, because of their traumatic, indeed apocalyptic, place in american history.^10^ *** [15] having shown, through the returns of zoyd and the thanatoids, how the 60s were rewritten as chaotic, infantile, and ridiculous in the reaganist 80s, pynchon also sets out in _vineland_ to explore why the 60s failed. the social movements of the 60s failed, in pynchon's account--as did earlier radical movements--because of certain betrayals. and political betrayals in _vineland_ are inevitably linked to sexual betrayals; in fact, to failures of sexual purity or chastity. both zoyd and frenesi describe political loyalty in sexual terms. zoyd asks hector zuniga, the dea agent, "`why this thing about popping my cherry, hector?'" frenesi says to flash, her second husband, "`tell you what. . . . *i'll* cross *your* picket line if *you'll* go get fucked up your *ass*, ok? 'n' then we can talk about busted cherries--'" (352). this stress on political or sexual purity, ultimately, i will argue, is intentionally misleading. as is the case with _vineland_'s language and its depiction of how the past enters and inhabits the present, purity is never in fact an option, and pynchon derails even those myths of purity that he describes most compellingly. [16] frenesi, nevertheless, does betray the movement, her lover weed atman, her husband zoyd, and her daughter prairie as a result of her sexual obsession for her worst political enemy, the federal prosecutor brock vond. frenesi's failure, her "helpless turn toward images of authority," is at the center of pynchon's portrayal of the failures of the 1960s. and frenesi fatalistically conjectures that "some cosmic fascist had spliced in a dna sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control." indeed, frenesi fears "that all her oppositions, however good and just, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by . . ." (83). reciprocally, brock vond's authoritarian politics are based on a fear of women and of physicality that seems typical of right wing politics in general. his sadistic control over frenesi is a form of revenge against a feminine part of himself and an expression of rage against his own vulnerability--all of which we see in his recurring dreams of being raped by his feminine alter-ego, the madwoman in the attic (274). [17] the full revelation of the connection between sexuality and power comes during the "apocalypse" at tulsa, when frenesi joins brock for a weekend of sex and strategy. what is unveiled, as the "weathermen" of tulsa nervously acknowledge "the advent of an agent of rapture" (212) and the radicals at the college of the surf feel the sense "of a clear break just ahead with everything they'd known" (244), is the gun: "`sooner or later,'" says brock, "`the gun comes out'" (240). and the gun, as frenesi understands it, is an extension of the penis: "men had it so simple. when it wasn't about sticking it in, it was about having the gun, a variation that allowed them to stick it in from a distance. the details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world" (241). [18] what is further revealed at tulsa is the link between brock's gun/phallus and frenesi's choice of revolutionary technology, the camera. frenesi had believed that the camera worked in opposition to the gun, that its focus made possible a form of "learning how to pay attention" which could "reveal and devastate" the sources of social injustice (195). brock, however, persuades her that the camera is simply another way, alternate but parallel, of "sticking it in from a distance." "`can't you see,'" he tells her, "`the two separate worlds--one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real?'" (241). the full revelation that emerges from frenesi and brock's relationship is that the world, and all possibilities of human action and desire, are circumscribed by destructive, interconnected, and all-encompassing logics of sex, power, and representation. [19] frenesi can see no way out of this sexual, political, representational impasse. the only alternative would seem to be a kind of heideggerian withdrawal from politics, sexuality, and representation--which is, in effect, also a nostalgia for some pure, aboriginal condition of being untainted by human imprint. such a withdrawal and nostalgia is the effect of the parable that sister rochelle recites to takeshi fumimota, retelling the story of the fall. originally, in sister rochelle's account, "`there were no men at all. paradise was female.'" and the first man was not adam, but the serpent. "it was sleazy, slippery man," rochelle continued, "who invented `good' and `evil,' where before women had been content to just be. . . . they dragged us down into this wreck they'd made of the creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honkytonk saloons." finally, drawing her moral with regard to dl, with whom takeshi is now linked through their attempt to undo the effects of the ninja death touch, sister rochelle solicits takeshi not to "commit original sin. try and let her just be" (166). [20] rochelle's admonition to "let her just be"--free, that is, from impositions of notions of "good" and "evil," and from all conceptual subdivisions and labels--recalls heidegger's dictum in the "letter on humanism" that "every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. it does not let beings: be. rather valuing lets beings: be valid--solely as the objects of its doing" (228). from rochelle's heidegerrian perspective, all forms of inscription--the gun, the camera, the phallus--are equally guilty. all constitute forms of "enframing," through which the world is not encountered on its own terms but as a standing reserve" available strictly for use.^11^ and all contribute toward the construction of the "world picture," the representation whose reality replaces that of the world itself: hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. what is, in its entirely, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. (130) [21] what is necessary, heidegger contends, is to create a kind of openness or clearing in which being can become present on its own terms, which can be accomplished by humanity's maintaining combined attitudes of alert passivity and nurturing. in _vineland_, this role is taken by zoyd, who both nurtures his (and frenesi's) daughter prairie and is able to let her be. zoyd is a father with the qualities of a mother, a father without the phallus, whose penis is only a penis. he is not quite a void--some figure for feminine absence entirely outside the symbolic order; he is...a zoyd: passive but capable, a laid-back fuck-up but a good parent, out of the loop but very much in the symbolic. and prairie, as her name implies, is the clearing, the opening, which zoyd allows to come into presence and who may become the site of a new political-sexual-symbolic order not based on the gun, the camera, and the phallus. [22] this would be a straight heideggerian reading, for which pynchon has provided plenty of cues. but the book is too complex and excessive to allow us to stop here. in the first place, prairie is not simply a clearing. she is also a subject, and a daughter in search of her mother--more importantly, as it turns out, in search of her mother's history. she is aided and guided by dl and takeshi, who have their own history to work through, and who do not just let prairie be. if prairie is the opening out of the closed sado-masochistic symbolic-political system embodied by brock and frenesi, she achieves this status not merely through the heideggerian presencing suggested by sister rochelle's injunction. she needs the help of a man and woman whose relation, like that of frenesi and brock, is mediated by a death touch. [23] pynchon, then, advances sister rochelle's heideggerian alternative but does not, finally, accept it. at the same time, however, pynchon suggests the importance of heideggerian attitudes of withdrawal in the late 1960s as the new left was falling apart. for heidegger's opposition to all forms of "enframing" can be translated in the context of the late 60s to two instances from popular culture: to the beatles' quietist slogan, to "let it be," and to the rolling stones' parodic response, to "let it bleed." that is, the heideggerian position in the late 1960s suggests attitudes both of passive withdrawal and of terrorism. [24] the beatles' song and album of 1969 spoke of a miraculous epiphany "in my hour of darkness" when "mother mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be." like the sentiments in "revolution" ("if you go carrying pictures of chairman mao/you're not gonna make it with anyone anyhow"), "let it be" advocates a withdrawal from a political activism which, in 1969, appeared to have utterly failed. and political activists in 1969 seemed to be faced with two alternatives: either to retire into some more private world of small community, religion, family, graduate school and let the larger world be; or to immerse themselves in the political chaos and violence, break down the barriers of their own scruples and repressions, not resist violence but become violent. to become a terrorist in that context was to "go with the flow," or as the title of the rolling stones' song put it, to "let it bleed." [25] "let it bleed" was released apparently in response to the vapid quietism of "let it be," but the tone of the song seems to belie the violence of its title. it is reassuringly melodic, without the sinister, if theatrical, edge of songs from "beggar's banquet" (such as "street fighting man" and "sympathy for the devil") which was released a year earlier. in fact, it seems in its tone and lyrics to reassert the sense of community that by 1969 had all but disappeared from the radical movements: "we all need someone we can lean on/and if you want to, you can lean on me..." but there is a strange sarcastic drawl that mick jagger gives to the word "lean" that immediately puts the assertion of community in question. and as the song continues, it appears to be not about community but about dismemberment and the unencumbered exchange of bodily fluids. "we all need someone we can lean on" is succeeded by "...dream on," "...cream on," "...feed on," and finally "...bleed on." in the verse, a woman tells the singer that her "breasts will always be open," and jagger responds that she can "take my arm, take my leg/oh baby don't you take my head." and at the end of the song, having sung, "you can bleed all over me" he sings "you can come all over me." the sarcastic emphasis on "lean" indicates that the mutual dependence and reciprocity implied by the opening line will in fact resolve into a mutual disintegration and a dissolution of both subjectivities into an undifferentiated flow of desire. the song proceeds from the mutuality of "lean" to a succession of self-shatterings: the unconscious (dream), orgasm (cream), cannibalism (feed), and bleeding (whether of a wound or of menstruation), and finally conflates the emissions of blood and semen. by the end of the song there is nothing but flow, unrestricted by any physical or social structure. to "let it bleed," then, means to eliminate all distinctions and values: to let desire desire, to let flow flow. it is, though with a shift of emphasis, really not so different from letting being be. "let it bleed," i suggest, constructs a rock and roll version of the desiring machines of deleuze and guattari's _anti-oedipus_. [26] deleuze and guattari are named in _vineland_ at the wedding of mafioso ralph wayvone's daughter as authors of _the italian wedding fake book_, to which billy barf and vomitones (disguised as gino baglione and the paisans) resort when it becomes clear that they do not know any appropriate songs for an italian wedding. they are only mentioned once, without elaboration, and it may be only another pynchonesque throwaway, but if we follow the logic from sister rochelle's "let her be" to heidegger, the beatles, and the rolling stones, the reference to deleuze and guattari extends the _vineland_'s exploration of how to contend with the "cosmic fascist" which has contaminated sex, politics, and representation. [27] published in 1972, _anti-oedipus_, like "let it be" and "let it bleed," responds to the perceived catastrophic breakdown of the 60s social movements. it is to the political, and libidinal, utopianism of herbert marcuse and norman o. brown what the weathermen were to the earlier communitarian idealism of the sds. that is, it is a form of theoretical terrorism conceived in the collapse of hope in effective politics. the major problem deleuze and guattari address, and the problem which for them invalidates conventional political action and belief, is precisely the problem raised by frenesi and brock's relationship, that of an inner fascism which structures sexuality, politics, and representation and which is apparently inseparable from these latter structures. as michel foucault writes in his preface to _anti-oedipus_, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. . . . and not only historical fascism, the fascism of hitler and mussolini--which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively--but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. (xiii) for deleuze and guattari, there is no structure, no boundary, no form of identity which is not a blockage of the flow of desire, a flow which they posit as the only and necessary alternative to inner fascism. desire alone is revolutionary. it is not governed (contra freud) by the oedipal conflict and its subsequent repressions, nor (contra lacan) by some even more primal lack. desire is nomadic and universal, and "does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures"; it is only "through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type 'couple,' 'family,' 'person,' 'objects' (292-93). [28] this relation between structure, desire, and inner fascism seems to describe the political sadomasochism of brock and frenesi and to provide a theoretical context for the catastrophes of the new left in the late 60s. and if the problem is structure %per se%, any solution, as deleuze and guattari elaborate, must begin with destruction. what follows seems impossibly vague--the creation of subject (rather than subjugated) groups which can cause "desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinate the socius or the form of power to desiring-production" (348)--but the initial task is clear: "destroy, destroy. the task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction--a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. destroy oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration" (311). [29] _anti-oedipus_ marks a point in the history of theory which, both temporally and in spirit, parallels the moment of fragmentation, catastrophe, and apocalypse when, for the new left, all forms of reasonable politics--either of working within the system or even of resisting it--became impossible. "let it be" or "let it bleed." and yet, oddly, the quietist beatles/heideggerian position blurs into the revolutionary or terrorist stones/_anti-oedipus_ position. both are post-apocalyptic responses to catastrophes perceived as all-encompassing and irreversible, as coterminous with the entire existing order. both are complete rejections of that order, and embrace instead some incipient revelation outside of what the current, failed order is able to articulate. [30] it is only during times of massive cultural despair that such attitudes can appear as workable political positions, and pynchon presents these absolute critiques of a phallic economy in the context of that late 60s moment when the counterculture tried utterly to divest itself of "amerika" only to find those same forces of power and sexuality in itself. yet we are not meant to see a heideggerian or deleuze-guattarian position as providing the novel's moral or political or redemptive energy. these positions, rather, represent initial, immediate, post-apocalyptic spasms. heidegger's is a voice from the grave (in heidegger's case, the grave of the german national %dasein%) in which all human acts appear flattened in the radiant (non)perspective of being. deleuze and guattari's is the voice of the revenant who has risen from the grave to devour the living. both, in fact, are variations of thanatoid postures, the resentful, traumatized, passive-aggressive (or aggressively passive) attitude of the living dead. *** [31] the moment of trauma, the apocalypse of the late 1960s--the moment that returns and is returned to--contains the revelation that all social structures, all human acts and culturally inflected desires, are inhabited by the cosmic fascist. at this same traumatic-apocalyptic moment, however, _vineland_ also depicts alternatives which entail neither quietistic withdrawal nor terrorism. the first of these alternatives is karmic adjustment, _vineland_'s parodic combination of psychoanalysis and eastern religion. the second is the recurring vision of utopian possibility which, in _vineland_, emerges at the same moment as does cultural trauma and inevitably returns with it as well. and these two forms of return--the working through of trauma and its symptomatic reincarnations by means of karmic adjustment, and the returns of utopian vision--in combination constitute _vineland_'s revised nostalgia. [32] dl chastain and takeshi fumimota are the first characters in the novel to attempt to "balance" their "karmic account" (163). their whole relationship, it must be noted, doubles that of frenesi and brock vond. in fact, when they first meet, in a tokyo brothel, takeshi has accidently taken brock's place as a customer, and dl (who was to meet and assassinate brock) is disguised as frenesi. in this role, dl mistakenly administers to takeshi the ninja death touch, an esoteric martial arts technique which results in death up to a year after its application--acting, as doctors later tell takeshi, "like trauma, only--much slower" (157). dl and takeshi's relation, like that of frenesi and brock, is marked by trauma: the death touch stands in for the cosmic fascist. [33] but while frenesi and brock arrive at a point of apocalyptic resignation whose dual forms are quietism and terrorism--"let it be" and "let it bleed"--dl and takeshi, with the help of sister rochelle, enter the business of karmic adjustment. although sister rochelle advises takeshi to "let her just be" (a strategy which, as we have seen, is insufficient), she also insists that dl and takeshi remain together, and that they balance their karmic account through dl's "working off the great wrong you have done him" (163). this work involves, first, intensive therapy for takeshi on what appears to be an enormous high-tech acupuncture machine, the "puncutron." ultimately, however, the process of healing consists of dl and takeshi, gradually and with great resistance, creating for themselves a sexual relationship outside the reach of the death touch. [34] while working on balancing their own karmic account, dl and takeshi encounter the thanatoid community and transform their personal karmic labor (as the reaganist entrepreneurial spirit would have it) into a small, high-tech, service industry based on treating unresolved thanatoid traumas. the thanatoids, they observe, are victims "of karmic imbalances--unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty" (173). and in the course of their work, dl and takeshi became slowly entangled in other, often impossibly complicated, tales of dispossession and betrayal. they heard of land titles and water rights, goon squads and vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and developers always described in images of thick fluids in flexible containers, injustices not only from the past but also virulently alive in the present day. (172) [35] the injuries and betrayals to be healed, then, are sexual and personal, but also social and historical; and pynchon's portrayal of karmic adjustment suggests that similar therapies can be applied to both types. karmic adjustment resembles, though on a broader scale, the freudian process of "working through," of learning to substitute a narrative remembering of trauma in place of a symptomatic repetition. as freud wrote in _beyond the pleasure principle_, a victim of trauma "is obliged to *repeat* the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, *remembering it* as something belonging to the past" (18).^12^ in _vineland_, frenesi and brock, dl and takeshi, the thanatoids, and american culture as a whole in the 1980s all are engaged in repeating traumatic conflicts of the 1960s (which themselves, in pynchon's view, repeated such earlier traumas as the suppression of the wobblies and the mccarthyist purges), and karmic adjustment provides a way to work back to those traumatic moments and retell them so as to make possible new histories and new futures. [36] at the same time, the whole karmic adjustment business is somewhat dubious. it is, after all, partly a scam. as takeshi explains to dl, "they [the thanantoids] don't want to do it, so we'll do it for them! dive right down into it! down into all that--waste-pit of time! we know it's time lost forever--but they don't!" (173). it is also, as the thanatoid ortho bob dulang reminds the two entrepreneurs, "wishful thinking" (171). moreover, karmic adjustment, the ninja death touch, dl's whole martial arts education, sister rochelle's kunoichi sisterhood all are part of _vineland_'s comic treatment of the american interest in eastern religion which took off in the 60s and reached a commercialized apotheosis in the 80s. like the thanatoids as symptoms of historical trauma, karmic adjustment as the working through of those symptoms is a joke, a bit of recycled 60s absurdity. [37] and yet, it is precisely as joke, as absurdity, that we can see karmic adjustment as a figure for pynchon's novelistic technique in _vineland_. traumas of the past return and are repeated as symptoms; but these symptoms may be outfitted in ridiculous historical costumes and take bizarre cultural forms. indeed, _vineland_ itself is one of these ridiculous costumes and bizarre forms. _vineland_'s structure and style, its status as comic routine, an 80s parody that approaches fredric jameson's notion of postmodern "pastiche"--a parody that has lost its moral axis and become indistinguishable from what it presumably had set out to satirize--enact the novel's sense that postmodern cultural memory will be linked, inevitably and inextricably, to the consumer culture in which it is formed. as a "postmodern historical novel," _vineland_ occupies a cultural position analogous to that which it creates within itself for karmic adjustment. [38] in its persistent and affectionate use of the cultural forms which it at the same time identifies as traumatic symptoms, _vineland_ verges on becoming what michael berube calls, in his discussion of _gravity's rainbow_, a pynchonian "pornography." berube describes this "pornography" in political and historical, rather than in sexual, terms as a "regressive anamnesia that recreates illusory, prelapsarian (or prelinguistic) unities through a complex mechanism of dismemberment and reconfiguration; and since," berube continues, "nostalgia itself works by much the same dynamic, pynchon's 'pornography' gives us fresh purchase on the cultural critique of nostalgia as well" (248). if _vineland_ did nothing more than show the inescapability of postmodern cultural forms, then it would be a "pornography" in berube's sense. hanjo berressem comes close to making this claim when he argues that "_vineland_'s main theme is the complicity of the subject with power" (237) and that in its inscriptions of popular and media culture, the novel "acknowledges thematically as well as structurally that literature (as well as criticism) is never innocent" (236). while the latter statement is certainly true, what needs to be added to berressem's lacanian examination of pynchon's aesthetic strategies in _vineland_, and what removes the novel from the status of nostalgic "pornography," is the decisive role of historical trauma in helping both to create and to destabilize the postmodern cultural forms that the novel employs. the novel cannot help but be complicit, nostalgic, "pornographic,"--a part of the symbolic order--and yet it consistently returns to those historical moments that disrupt its "regressive anamnesias." it continually stumbles on what slavoj zizek calls the "rock" of the lacanian real: "that which resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is always missed but none the less always returns, although we try . . . to neutralize it, to integrate it into the symbolic order" (69). [39] _vineland_'s stylistic and thematic insistence on its whimsical deflections through american consumer culture, its role as schtick or pastiche, should not blind us to its historical seriousness and accuracy. consider that dl is an american military brat who puts the death touch on an asian man through a displacement of american domestic concerns, then is linked to him by guilt. this sounds historically familiar. and the novel's depictions of betrayals and repressions of and within the old and new lefts are essentially accurate: the i.w.w. in the northwest really was brutally repressed by local and federal authorities during the first world war. the f.b.i. in the 1960s really did infiltrate and subvert leftist movements. hanging the "snitch jacket" on radical leaders (as frenesi did to weed) really was a common tactic. lenient regulations regarding federal grand juries in the early 1970s really did allow federal prosecutors (like brock vond) to conduct open-ended investigations of people and organizations who had not been accused of any crime.^13^ and, most generally, as historians such as sara evans have pointed out, much of the new left's failure was, in fact, due to its inability to conceive of an egalitarian sexual politics.^14^ [40] part of _vineland_'s project, then, is to represent the transmission of the social traumas of the 1960s into the 1980s, and to suggest a method--which, in the 1980s, can only be parodic--of coming to terms with these traumas. but trauma is not all that returns in _vineland_ from the 1960s. pynchon also describes a utopian, communitarian, vision and energy as having provided the basis for 60s radicalism, and then returning to indicate a moral and political axis for confronting neo-conservative and reaganist politics of the 1980s. frenesi, in the mid-60s, "dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she'd seen in the street, in short, timeless, bursts..." (117). the model for such a community is frenesi's radical film collective, 24fps, and it is important to note that this group explicitly dedicates itself to a kind of visual-political revelation: they went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. they particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. when power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. who could withstand the light? (195) [41] frenesi's vision is a form of witnessing and is meant to be transmitted--as it is, twenty years later, to her daughter, prairie, who, seeing her mother's films, "could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty" (210). [42] these utopian moments, "timeless bursts" of light, liberation, and possibility, are the sites of pynchon's revised nostalgia. along with the disasters and failures of the 1960s, whose traumatic residues continue to haunt the landscapes of the 1980s, pynchon also locates moments of vision that leap outside their traumatic histories. these moments, in the first place, oppose the social injustices of their time. secondly, they indicate alternative, communitarian, non-domineering, non-acquisitive forms of social life. we see these forms partly embodied in the social fabric of 24fps and in the early days of the "people's republic of rock and roll" at the college of the surf. these forms of idealistic, politically committed communal life resemble the ideal sara evans describes in personal politics as the "beloved community."^15^ and, finally, the "timeless bursts" of utopian feeling are unsuccessful; they are never achieved, but exist and are transmitted primarily as vision--and so it is fitting that pynchon portrays this utopian vision as the work of radical filmmakers. [43] pynchon's revised nostalgia, then, is for sites of unrealized possibility; and it is a nostalgia which, as if akin to the social traumas that surround it, returns of its own accord, together with those traumas, and opposing them. in this revised nostalgia, it is not so much that we seek to return to a site of original wholeness; rather, the unrealized possibility of social harmony and justice itself compulsively returns, providing an alternative to existing conditions and a motive for changing them. _vineland_ describes a post-apocalyptic (or post-traumatic) and utopian nostalgia whose longing, amid the traumatic effects of historical crisis and disaster, is for yet unrealized forms of community. this nostalgia shoots into the present as a "timeless burst," but it entails the effort to work through historical trauma and to construct the social relations which it has imagined. [44] _vineland_'s revised nostalgia, then, is quite distinct from the nostalgias attributed to it by its critics--the "60s nostalgic quietism" attributed to it by alec mchoul. pynchon does describe in _vineland_ these more conventional processes of nostalgia, the ways in which specific traumatic and political memories are obscured by memories of fashion and by universal laments about "the world," "the business," and human nature. and pynchon shows how the nostalgic machinery which has already obscured the wobblies, the second world war, and mccarthyism is now at work on the 60s.^16^ pynchon's nostalgia for the "timeless bursts" of the 1960s is, rather, more akin to walter benjamin's idea of "%jetztzeit%," that urgent "time of the now," the pivotal moment in which the history of oppression can be rewritten. and we should note that benjamin, anticipating the fate of the thanatoids, writes that "*even the dead* will not be safe from the enemy if he wins" (255, benjamin's emphasis). [45] pynchon, like benjamin, gives a new political meaning to the pain of the returning past, and demonstrates that nostalgia need not have only a negative or reactionary value. pynchon's revised nostalgia does not constitute (as, for instance, does reaganist nostalgia) a leapfrogging back past historical trauma to some imagined age of solid family values. it emerges, rather, directly out of the moment of greatest trauma, out of the moment of apocalypse itself. thus, the family reunion with which the novel ends is not, despite superficial resemblances, a paean either to the "family values" of the new right or to a middle-aged new leftist's yearning for vanished youth. even prairie's eventual reunion with her mother, frenesi, turns out to be, ultimately, beside the point. her more important encounter, and reconciliation, is with the thanatoid weed atman, the former revolutionary whom frenesi had caused, or allowed, to be murdered back at the college of the surf. weed, in turn, "still a cell of memory, of refusal to forgive," can only work through his "case," his obsession "with those who've wronged [him], with their continuing exemption from punishment" (365) by means of this relationship with the daughter of the woman who betrayed him. prairie, touching weed's hand, is "surprised not at the coldness . . . but at how light it was, nearly weightless" (366). it is this relationship that gives his existence weight and allows him, like the tails of the thantoid dogs, to "gesture meaningfully in the present" (367). [46] the physical presences and meaningful gestures of these ghosts of history in _vineland_ allow us finally to distinguish pynchon's revised nostalgia from the genuinely regressive nostalgia of a work like _forest gump_. _gump_, of course, brings the 60s back to the present through its extraordinary "documentary" special effects scenes that show us forest shaking hands with lyndon johnson, as well as forest participating both in the vietnam war and in anti-war protests. forest redeems the traumas of the 1960s, but the redemptive formula in that film lies in being oblivious to politics--and to adult sexuality--altogether: in simply (that is, *very* simply) being "human." this vision of an apolitical, virtually infantile, "humanity" that can redeem a damaged national history is probably, unfortunately, the source of the movie's enormous appeal. this vision is also a large part of the appeal of reaganism and of the current neo-reaganist republican ascendency. in _vineland_, however, every human feeling and relation springs from political-historical premises and is laden with political consequences. while _forest gump_ firmly separates the traumatic from the redemptive, in _vineland_ the two are always fused. the real reunion at the end of _vineland_ is of the living with the dead: a reunion with the traumatic past (now at least partially "karmically adjusted") and with the utopian sense of possibility that flashed into being at the same apocalyptic moment. notes: ^1^ thanks to michael prince and to the anonymous readers for _postmodern culture_ for their help in revising this essay. ^2^ "in the imaginative past of nostalgic writers," write janice doane and devon hodges, "men were men, women were women, and reality was real. to retrieve 'reality,' an authentic language, and 'natural' sexual identity, these writers fight the false, seductive images of a decadent culture that they believe are promoted by feminist writing" (3). ^3^ see, for example, brad leithauser's ridicule: "how delightful it is as one's joint-passing youth is now revealed to be no mere idyll but--wow! neat!--the stuff of great art" (10). alec mchoul criticizes _vineland_'s politics as "60s nostalgic quietism" (98), and alan wilde writes that "by locating the ideal in the lifetime of his characters, pynchon betrays again his nostalgia for the regretted time before the eclipse of 'the analog arts . . . by digital technology'" (171). see also ellen friedman's more sweeping critique of _vineland_ as an example of an american male nostalgia for the vanishing privileges of patriarchy, in which "even the most radical expressions of rebellion and discontent . . . are suffused with nostalgia for a past order, for older texts, for the familiar sustaining myths" (250). ^4^ recall that "nostalgia" was originally a medical term designating a physical illness experienced by travellers far from home. ^5^ pynchon's fiction has continually returned to historical trauma, and has presented historical trauma in terms that are both catastrophic and revelatory--that is, in apocalyptic terms. the german colonial genocide in southwest africa (treated both in its own right and as a precursor to the nazi genocide of european jews), the slaughters of world war i relived by brigadier pudding in his masochistic, copraphagic encounters with katje at the white visitation, the ongoing bureaucratic-scientific control procedures practiced by "the firm" in _gravity's rainbow_, and the implicit emptiness and oppression of the tupperware america presented in _the crying of lot 49_ all stand as portents for some potentially all-encompassing and definitive disaster. further, they are revelations that this disaster has, in reality, been present all along; that we live, as _gravity's rainbow_ would have it, always along the trajectory of the rocket. _vineland_'s complex response to the apocalyptic question that ends _the crying of lot 49_--"either there was some tristero . . . or there was just america"--goes beyond the binarism of that question and, i believe, beyond the curative potential contained in the vague countercultural "counterforce" of _gravity's rainbow_. in _vineland_, there is "just america"; but there is a great deal to be retrieved and reworked in that traumatic legacy. ^6^ it is hard to remember now, only nine years later, all the cultural weight attached to that orwellian year. for forty years, 1984 served as the measure of our social fears. especially during the crises of the 1960s, 1984 loomed ahead as a prophecy. people could say in 1968, either there will be a revolution or it will be 1984--either way, the apocalypse. 1984, in effect, replaced the millennium. in _vineland_, 1984 marks an ironic conflation of the anticlimax of orwellian prophecy and the high water mark of reaganism. for a discussion of the millennial significance taken on by orwell's novel, see hillel schwartz' _century's end: a cultural history of the fin de siecle from the 990s through the 1990s_. particularly useful is the bibliographic note 75 on page 356. ^7^ see also john b. judis, who writes that "reagan invented the tactic, which became a hallmark of the new right, of targeting the white working class by campaigning against the civil rights, antiwar, and countercultural movements of the 1960s" (236). finally, gary wills suggests that for the right, "the 'lifestyle' revolution was the more serious [threat] because it was the more lasting phenomenon: it changed attitudes toward sex, parents, authority, the police, the military" (340). ^8^ think, for example, of literature's most famous ghost. hamlet's father is "doomed for a certain term to walk the night" first in order to purge his own sins; then he appears to hamlet to narrate the trauma of his murder; but finally, his appearance goes beyond just personal and familial trauma and is a general sign that "something is rotten in the state of denmark." ^9^ in a similar way, the becker and traverse families, in eula becker's narrative, become living memorials to the labor movement: "be here to remind everybody--any time they see a traverse, or becker for that matter, they'll remember that one tree, and who did it, and why. hell of a lot better 'n a statue in the park" (76). and for frenesi, of course, "the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back..." (71). ^10^ for the right, the apocalypse of the 60s lay in the very fact that those radical social movements took place and, in part, succeeded. the conservative commentator robert nisbet pounded this apocalyptic chord when he wrote, "...it would be difficult to find a single decade in the history of western culture when so much barbarism--so much calculated onslaught against culture and convention in any form, and so much sheer degradation of both culture and the individual--passed into print, into music, into art and onto the american stage as the decade of the nineteen sixties" (quoted in kevin phillips, 18). for the left, of course, the catastrophe of the movements of the 1960s lay in their apparent failures. although historians like petchesky, maurice isserman, and michael kazin have pointed out that the reaganist reaction to the 1960s presupposed that the radical movements in some measure had succeeded, the presence of reaganism as the dominant political force in the 1980s led the left--and certainly led pynchon--to conclude that they had failed. ^11^ see especially "the question concerning technology": enframing "banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. . . . where enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing. they no longer even let their own fundamental characteristics appear, namely, this revealing as such" (27). ^12^ cf. freud's earlier essay, "remembering, repeating, and working-through," in which he describes at greater length the roles of memory and narrative in treating neuroses. ^13^ see frank j. donner's _the age of surveillance_, as well as todd gitlin's and tom hayden's accounts of the 1960s. ^14^ pynchon is historically accurate in pointing to sexuality and gender relations as particular problems for new left politics. as stokely carmichael commented in 1965, "the only position for women in sncc is prone." sara evans, barbara epstein, barbara ehrenreich, and alice echols have written compellingly of the sexual turmoil and contradictions in the new left as rebellion against the restrictive gender roles of the 1950s had very different implications for men as for women. as echols writes, "by advancing an untamed masculinity--one that took risks and dared to gamble--the new left was in some sense promoting a counterhegemonic . . . understanding of masculinity," but one at odds with any feminist sense of gender roles (16). a very interesting text from the 60s that treats this problem is eldridge cleaver's _soul on ice_, in which cleaver, a convicted rapist, argues that sexuality is always incompatible with political action, that the political activist must be a kind of eunuch in order to be effective and uncorrupted--an extreme position taken by a man with his own extreme problems, but its implications are still part of current debates, as when andrea dworkin in her discussion of pornography writes, "the left cannot have its whores and its politics too" (217). ^15^ the vision of a "beloved," or "redemptive" community that informed the early civil rights movement, evans writes, "constituted both a vision of the future to be obtained through nonviolent action and a conception of the nature of the movement itself" (37). in showing how this sense of community was taken up by the new left in the early 1960s, and then adopted by feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the new left's fragmentation, evans, much like pynchon, tells the story of the historical transmission of a utopian vision. ^16^ for prairie, the 1960s are initially just a set of cliches. she watches her mother's films of demonstrations and remarks on the "'dude...with the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth . . .' 'you mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?' 'right on, sister!'" (115). or, as hector zuniga, the former dea officer and aspiring film producer tells zoyd, "*caray*, you sixties people, it's amazing. ah love ya! go anywhere, it don't matter--hey, mongolia! go way out into smalltown outer mongolia, ese, there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin up, two fingers in a v, hollering, 'what's yer sign, man?' or singin 'in-a-gadda-da-vida' note for note" (28). and we should note in hector's ridicule of 60s nostalgia the repeated presence of pynchon's favorite recurring consonant, perhaps a parodic nostalgia for his own productions from the 60s. works cited: benjamin, walter. _illuminations._ trans. harry zohn. new york: schocken, 1969. berressem, hanjo. _pynchon's poetics: interfacing theory and text._ urbana and chicago: u of illinois press, 1993. berube, michael. _marginal forces/cultural centers: tolson, pynchon and the politics of the canon._ ithaca and london: cornell up, 1992. cannon, lou. _reagan._ new york: g.p. putnam, 1982. cleaver, eldridge. _soul on ice._ new york: dell, 1968. coontz, stephanie. _the way we never were: american families and the nostalgia trap._ new york: basic books, 1992. davis, mike. _prisoners of the american dream: politics and economy in the history of the american working class._ london: verso, 1986. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia._ [1972]. trans. robert hurley, mark seem and helen r. lane. minneapolis: u of minnesota press, 1983. doane, janice and devon hodges. _nostalgia and sexual difference: the resistance to contemporary feminism._ new york and london: methuen, 1987. donner, frank j. _the age of surveillance: the aims and methods of america's political intelligence system._ new york: knopf, 1980. dworkin, andrea. _pornography: men possessing women._ new york: dutton, 1989. ehrenreich, barbara. _the hearts of men: american dreams and the flight from commitment. _ garden city and new york: anchor, 1983. epstein, barbara. "family politics and the new left: learning from our own experience." _socialist review_ 12 (1982): 141-61. evans, sara. _personal politics: the roots of women's liberation in the civil rights movement and the new left._ new york: vintage, 1979. freud, sigmund. _beyond the pleasure principle_. _the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud. _ trans. james strachey. london: hogarth press, 1955. 18:7-64. ---. "remembering, repeating and working-through." _s.e._ 12:147-156. friedman, ellen g. "where are the missing contents? (post)modernism, gender, and the canon." _pmla_ 108 (1993): 240-52. heidegger, martin. "the age of the world picture." _the question concerning technology, and other essays. _ trans. william lovitt. new york: harper and row, 1977. 115-54. ---. "letter on humanism." _basic writings._ ed. david farrell krell. new york: harper and row, 1977. 189-242. ---. "the question concerning technology." _the question concerning technology, and other essays._ trans. william lovitt. new york: harper and row, 1977. 3-35. isserman, maurice and michael kazin. "the failure and success of the new radicalism." _the rise and fall of the new deal order: 1930-1980._ ed. steve fraser and gary gerstle. princeton: princeton up, 1989. 212-42. jameson, fredric. _postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism._ durham: duke up, 1991. judis, john b. _grand illusion: critics and champions of the american century._ new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 1992. leithauser, brad. "any place you want." _new york review of books_ 15 march 1990: 7-10. lowenthal, david. "nostalgia tells it like it wasn't." _the imagined past: history and nostalgia._ ed. malcolm chase and christopher shaw. manchester and new york: manchester up, 1989. 18-32. mchoul, alex. "teenage mutant ninja fiction (or, st. ruggles' struggles, chapter 4)." _pynchon notes_ 26-27 (1990): 97-106. petchesky, rosalind pollack. "antiabortion and antifeminism." _major problems in american women's history._ ed. mary beth norton. lexington, ma: d.c. heath, 1989. 438-452. phillips, kevin p. _post-conservative american: people, politics and ideology in a time of crisis._ new york: randon house, 1982. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: penguin, 1973. ---. _vineland_. new york: penguin, 1990. schwartz, hillel. _century's end: a cultural history of the fin de siecle from the 990s through the 1990s._ new york: doubleday, 1990. wilde, alan. "love and death in and around _vineland_, u.s.a." _boundary 2_ 18 (1991): 166-80. wills, gary. _reagan's america: innocents at home._ new york: doubleday, 1987. zizek, slavoj. _the sublime object of ideology._ london and new york: verso, 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mackey, 'song of the andoumboulou: 23', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-mackey-song.txt archive pmc-list, file mackey.595. part 1/1, total size 5660 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- song of the andoumboulou: 23 by nathaniel mackey postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by nathaniel mackey, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press.<hr size=8> this poem originally appeared in _sulfur_ 34 (spring 1994). %audio clips are provided here in .au format and .wav format. sound players are available from the institute's ftp site for aix 3.25, windows 3.1 and macintosh.% --%rail band%- another cut was on the box as we pulled in. fall back though we did once it ended, "wings of a dove" sung so sweetly we flew... the station hotel came into view. we were in bamako. the same scene glimpsed again and again said to be a sign... as of a life sought beyond the letter, preached of among those who knew nothing but, at yet another "not yet" cerno bokar came aboard, the elevens and the twelves locked in jihad at each other's throats, bracketed light lately revealed, otherwise out... eleven men covered with mud he said he saw. a pond filled with water white as milk. three chanting clouds that were crowds of winged men and behind the third a veiled rider, shaykh hamallah... for this put under house arrest the atavistic band at the station reminded us, mediumistic squall we'd have maybe made good on had the rails we rode been ogun's... souls in motion, conducive to motion, too loosely connected to be called a band, yet "if souls converse" vowed results from a dusty record ages old . toothed chorus. tight-jawed singer... sophic strain, strewn voice, sophic stretch... cerno bokar came aboard, called war the male ruse, muttered it under his breath, made sure all within earshot heard... not that the hoarse nyamakala flutes were not enough, not that enough meant something exact anymore... bled by the effort but sang even so, keita's voice, kante's voice, boast and belittlement tossed back and forth... gassire's lute was djelimady tounkara's guitar, soundiata, soumagoro, at each other's throat... tenuous kin we called our would-be band, atthic ensemble, run with as if it was a mistake we made good on, gone soon as we'd gotten there . neither having gone nor not having gone, hovered, book, if it was a book, thought wicked with wing-stir, imminent sting... it was the book of having once been there we thumbed, all wish to go back let go, the what-sayer, farther north, insisting a story lay behind the story he complained he couldn't begin to infer... what made him think there was one we wondered, albeit our what almost immediatelv dissolved as we came to a tunnel, the train we took ourselves to be on gone up in smoke, people ever about to get ready, unready, run between what, not-what. and were there one its name was ever after, a story not behind but in front of where this was, obstinate "were," were obstinate so susceptible, thin etic itch, inextricable demur . beginningless book thought to've unrolled endlessly, more scroll than book, talismanic strum. as if all want were in his holding a note only a half-beat longer, another he was now calling love a big rope, sing less what he did than sihg, anagrammic sigh, %from war the male ruse% to %"were" the% %new ruse%, the what-sayer, sophic stir... sophic slide of a cloud across tangency, torque, no book of a wished else the where we thumbed %performers: royal hartigan (drums), nathaniel mackey (vocals), hafez modirzadeh (tenor saxophone).% -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------sengers, 'madness and automation: on institutionalization', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-sengers-madness.txt archive pmc-list, file sengers.595. part 1/1, total size 54334 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- madness and automation: on institutionalization by phoebe sengers literary and cultural theory / computer science carnegie mellon university postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by phoebe sengers, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. institutionalization, october 11-18, 1991. what happened? [1] the week was bizarre, inexplicable, intense. the week had a story, the story of a breakdown, a story whose breakdown delineates the workings of the psychiatric machine. this machine, operating on a streaming in/out flow of people, is not only institutional but institutionalizing; its inputs become *institutionalized*. it works where it breaks down; "the social machine's limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions" (_anti-oedipus_ 151). the breakdown of its patients is reflected onto the ward; in its case, however, breaking down is productive and creates the institutional moment. understanding that experience of institutionalization, making it explainable, means reading that story and following its lines of flight. what results is a patchwork narrative, neither coherent nor choosy about its sources. the aim is not purity of form, but an answer to "what happened?" that respects the complexity of the institutional moment and a diversity of viewpoints on that moment. nevertheless, from this patchwork emerges an effective understanding of social machines in general and the possibilities for agency even at the moment of subjugation; the narrative of this singularity leads to a general strategy for escape from totalization based on the postulates of machinic analysis. *what happened* [2] %in the middle of september, i started to get depressed. by the middle of october, things had progressed to the point that i could no longer function: i couldn't read or write and was having trouble walking. i went to see a counselor and told him, 'i think i need to go to the hospital.' he took me to western psychiatric institute and clinic.%^1^ [3] the fastest way into and out of theorizing about insanity is to state that people are labeled insane if they fail to correspond to social norms. such a statement fails to take into account the experience of many mental patients who have committed themselves or of people who are seeking treatment outside the institutionalized stream. for these people the experience of being "crazy"--schizophrenic, depressed, or anxious, to follow the clinical classification--is routed through feelings of misery and, often, physical symptoms like an inability to concentrate, insomnia, or involuntary movement. this is not to deny that these physical symptoms bear the mark of the social formation ("[i]t is a founding fact--that the organs be hewn into the socius, and that the flows run over its surface" [_anti-oedipus_] 149). it is only to state that insanity and institutionalization are more complicated than a mere labeling on the part of a social organization. insanity is something experienced both from the individual and from the social point of view. [4] i do not pretend to be able to (re)present the real institutionalization, the real experiences of mental patients. instead, i want to consider the period of institutionalization as a moment where two flows come into contact with each other: that of the institution, with its labels and categories, ready to take in new input, and that of the individual, who leaves his or her everyday life to become, for a while, a more-or-less functioning member of the social community under the auspices of the ward. corresponding to these two flows there are two points of view or modes of representation of the conjunctural period to be considered, that of the institution and that of the patient. [5] for the institution, any particular institutionalization is just a moment in its history, though each of these moments is in the strictest sense *essential*--the institution really only consists of the sum of these institutionalizations. for the individual, ripped from his or her normal existence and deprived of his or her accustomed social context, the commitment is a traumatic event, but one that is not constitutive--in most cases, the institutionalization will last only a moment in the scale of their lives. the meeting of the institution and the patient is a point of conjunction of the paths of two very different social machines. here, i would like to consider the disand conjunctions between the ways in which these two social machines deal with their shared moment. by considering their respective representations of that moment--particularly the gaps between those representations--i hope to gain an understanding of how the processing of both machines comes to constitute the process of treatment in the institution. [6] %i had to wait a long time in the emergency room before i was checked in. after a long wait someone took my temperature. after another long wait i talked to a counselor. after yet another long wait i talked to the psychiatrist.% %while i was waiting someone was brought in from the state penitentiary. they locked him in a little room. he was screaming and kicking the door. the screaming went like this: 'society has made me this desperate! i was only arrested because i'm black and living in a white world.' all the staff in the room, including the receptionist, put on latex gloves. they put a crying woman in a private room so she wouldn't be bothered by this man. they asked me to move, too, so i wouldn't be so dangerously close to the room where they had him locked up.% [7] as the soon-to-be-patients stand on the threshold of entering the institution, they are immediately confronted with its first moment of breakdown. there is a conflict between two functions of the mental hospital: its function as a site of medical care or rehabilitation and its role as a custodian of certain more dangerous elements of society. as erving goffman discusses in "the medical model and mental hospitalization," the stresses and gaps between these two models are felt keenly within the institution, which currently prefers to underscore the service model. "each time the mental hospital functions as a holding station, within a network of such stations, for dealing with public charges, the service model is disaffirmed. all of these facts of patient recruitment are part of what staff must overlook, rationalize, gloss over about their place of service" (30). nevertheless, the institution continues to be able to operate on both registers ("no one has ever died from contradictions" [_anti-oedipus_ 151]). [8] this presents a quandary for the mental patient. s/he is generally all too aware of being incarcerated despite the staff's assurances that s/he is only there "for your own good." "[o]ur conversation [had] the character of an authoritarian interrogation, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules. of course neither of them was the chief of police. but because there were two of them, there were three. . . ." (blanchot 18). though the institution claims to work on the medical metaphor, it differentiates patients according to how well they fit into the service model. in the case of the man in the emergency room, the patients (i.e., i and the other woman) that are more or less "normal" are treated courteously and are even physically separated from the "problem patient." he is considered dangerous and alien; the staff dons gloves to avoid coming into contact with him. the patient occupies a troubled status; s/he is at the same time the "good patient," being treated for an illness more or less external to him or her, and the "bad patient," fundamentally flawed and not allowed to go outside; the latter status is all the more real for being denied. [9] the most seditious example of this is the status of the "voluntary" patient. the involuntary patient, who is committed to the institution by legal forces and against his or her will, is at least somewhat explicitly incarcerated. the voluntary patient is, for all intents and purposes, equally though more surreptitiously incarcerated. this is because one's status as voluntary is ephemeral. as soon as the patient shows signs of resisting doctor's orders or of attempting to leave prior to "cure," s/he can be and often is committed by the hospital, whose financial clout is often such that the patient's legal representation can only look puny by comparison. voluntary status, the ghost of the service model, lives on the cusp of existence, to disappear precisely when it is most needed. [10] %then two big white men went into the room and gave the black man a shot. he was still kicking and screaming. later they went into the room again. i heard the receptionist talking on the phone. she said, "they've already given him twice the normal dosage and he's still not calm."% %they brought me papers to sign myself in. i joked with the nurse. "this is so i can still run for president, right?" she didn't think it was funny.% [11] the moment of entrance into the institution is a symbolic one. it is accomplished through "order words" (_plateaus_ 80)--deeds that occur entirely through an act of signification. in the case of the institution, the order word is the signature. the papers i sign mean that i no longer have a right to speak for myself before the law. once i have signed the paper, my signature is worthless. this gives the signature on the commitment form an eerie status--a signature, sealing its own inability to seal. [12] the signature, despite or perhaps thanks to its paradoxical status, is central to the institution. it is what binds the patient to the institution; it is what controls the flow of patients in to and out of the institution. the patient arrives, bound by his or her own signature or by that of a doctor. the patient may not leave, even if s/he came voluntarily, without the signature of a proxy^2^: the psychiatrist, competent, as though by an act of conservation of agency, to speak for two. [13] the signature is itself a proxy for the law. maurice blanchot writes, behind [the doctors'] backs i saw the silhouette of the law. not the law everyone knows, which is severe and hardly very agreeable; this law was different. far from falling prey to her menace, i was the one who seemed to terrify her.... she would say to me, 'now you are a special case; no one can do anything to you. you can talk, nothing commits you; oaths are no longer binding to you; your acts remain without a consequence.' (14-15) in this respect, the patient stands beyond the grasp of the arm of the the law. but it would be more appropriate to say the patient is jettisoned by the law. "when she set me above the authorities, it meant, you are not authorized to do anything" (15). the law deprives the mental patient, not only of his or her culpability, but also of his or her ability to speak. "of course you had what they called an [sic] hearing but they didn't really want to hear you" (washington 50). the category of the "insane," then, is defined by its inability, socially speaking, to speak for itself. it is a category without legal status in the narrowest sense. [14] the breakdown of the institution at the moment of entrance, then, is mirrored by a breakdown of the social machine of the patient. it would be better, perhaps, to speak of a breakout: the patient is no longer seen as a functioning member of society. this is a catch-22 for the patient trying to affect reform or even just trying to voice his or her experience; how can a group of people %defined% by an inability to speak find a voice in society? by definition this should be impossible, except perhaps for the gap between "insane" (insane as a social label, from the point of view of the institution) and insane (insane as an experiential label, from the point of view of the labeled individual). in the mental reform movement, as well as in this paper, one often finds such voices stemming from ex-patients: "we, of the mental patients' liberation project, are former mental patients" (liberation project 521). "insanity" in the first person is invoked as a category of nostalgia. [15] the mental patients' liberation project is a good example of one such reform project. the project aims to get basic civil rights protection for patients in asylums. the problem of establishing civil protection for individuals held to be outside of civil society is approached in their project statement by a loosening of the term "we," which is used alternately to mean the "former mental patients" of the project and patients currently in asylums. "we have drawn up a bill of rights for mental patients. . . . because these rights are not now legally ours we are now going to fight to make them a reality. . . ." (522). by blurring the categories patient/ex-patient the project also blurs their respective legal statuses, pulling the patient into the realm of the law occupied by the ex-patient. the project still speaks %for% the patient, but with some sleight of hand its voice appears to come out of the patient's mouth. [16] in the same statement, the liberation project also plays the role of the law for the mental patient. the project presents the patient with a bill of rights; rights, the project grants, without true legal status but "which we unquestioningly should have" (522). a major concern of this bill is the legalization of the mental patient: "you are an american citizen and are entitled to every right established by the declaration of independence and guaranteed by the constitution of the united states of america" (523). the project thus solves its theoretical problem handily--it plays the parts of the constituencies that cannot or do not want to appear on the stage. [17] %after i had waited for a total of seven hours they took me upstairs. when we got to the 11th floor (the depression ward) i was met by a disoriented-looking patient, who said, "you'll like it here. we all help each other get better." i thought to myself, "oh no! i'm going to be locked on a floor with all these strange people."% [18] the moment of the signature has passed. as far as the hospital is concerned, the patient has already been classified into the type that will determine how s/he will be processed for the rest of the stay. for the patient, however, the order word is not enough to change his or her entire system of functioning. his or her point in the social hierarchy has changed but this change has not yet manifested itself in the realm of action. the machine is still running, just as it did before. on entry into the social situation of the ward its old system of functioning will choke; the machine will have to reprogram itself. [19] %my clothes and all my belongings were searched and they took everything they thought was "dangerous" out of it. that includes my contact lens solution and my tampons. i said, "what could i possibly do with my tampons?" the staff person checking me in couldn't think of anything. but those were the rules.% [20] although the commitment took place at the moment of the signature, the %institutionalization% really begins here. this is the moment at which the patient is made to realize the rights and privileges s/he has lost by seeking help within the institution. the incoming patient is stripped, searched, given hospital clothing, and led onto the ward identified only by a hospital bracelet. no one on the ward knows the patient, who is reluctant to circulate with the other patients, people from whom until recently s/he was protected by the comforting arm of the law. any attempts to identify with the staff, however, will soon be rebuffed; the patient becomes forcibly alienated from the person s/he thought s/he was and must assume a new role. [21] from the point of view of the institution, this is a dangerous moment. a new element has been absorbed but at this point it still retains marks of the outside world. these now out-of-date attributes must be removed as quickly as possible. erving goffman points out, "many of [the admission] procedures depend upon attributes such as weight or fingerprints that the individual possesses merely because he is a member of the largest and most abstract of social categories, that of human being. action taken on the basis of such attributes necessarily ignores most of his previous bases of self-identification" ("institutions" 16). the institution must create a deterritorialized space onto which to reterritorialize its input. [22] once the incoming patient has been sanitized, s/he is more easily adapted to the role the institution has planned for him or her. "admission procedures might better be called 'trimming' or 'programming' because in thus being squared away the new arrival allows himself to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operations." institutionalization becomes mechanization; the humanity of the patient is stripped away and replaced by a robotic faciality. the issue is not whether the patient is comfortable in the new role; from the point of view of the institution, the patient can only be dealt with in so far as s/he is mechanized. stripped of individuality, individual psychotherapy no longer makes sense; in the hospital, the model is group therapy. the model for the psychology of the mental patient is a robot psychology, working mechanically in the roles of the automated patient, parry^3^, and his analyst, eliza^4^. [23] %after a while, i had a headache. i went to the nurses' station and knocked. after a couple of minutes of ignoring me, someone came. i asked for a tylenol. "has your doctor approved it?" she asked. "i don't have a doctor." "well, then you can't have any." after a couple more equally humiliating trips to the nurses' station i gave up, even though by then my new doctor had given me permission to take two tylenol every four hours.% [24] changing arbitrary people into cogs in a machine takes some filing down of resistance. in the institution, the most innocuous requests are taken as an opportunity to regulate the life of the patient more closely. "[t]he inmate's life is penetrated by constant sanctioning interaction from above, especially during the initial period of stay before the inmate accepts the regulations unthinkingly. . . . the autonomy of the act itself is violated" ("institutions" 38). the patient is made to feel that any unusual activity--one that is not already structured by the institution--requires too much effort. s/he becomes more passive; the authority of the institution is reinforced. [25] the power of deciding over the patient's life does not disappear; it is given to the psychiatrist. "incarcerating institutions operate on the basis of defining almost all the rights and duties the inmates will have. someone will be in a position to pass fatefully on everything that the inmate succeeds in obtaining and everything he is deprived of, and this person is, officially, the psychiatrist." ("medical model" 35) the psychiatrist has an enormous amount of power over his charges. blanchot: "[t]hese men are kings" (14). but it is not the individual psychiatrist who has gained agency; s/he too must play within the parameters of the game. "almost any of the living arrangements through which the patient is strapped into his daily round can be modified at will by the psychiatrist, %provided a psychiatric explanation is given%" ("medical model" 36; emphasis mine). [26] %soon i started meeting the other patients. at first i thought that would be a little scary. but it turned out they were no weirder than the average person you meet on a bus. one of them was even a psychologist himself! when i arrived, there was only one patient on the ward who had lost grips with reality. she talked a lot, very enthusiastically. i've met a lot of people like that on the bus, too.% %there was only one scary person on the ward. she showed up a couple of days after i did. she wore latex gloves all the time, thought she had all sorts of horrible diseases and tried to get everyone to take care of her. we were afraid of her and thought she should have been on a different floor.% [27] as far as the institution is concerned, all patients on a ward are the same (except as differentiated by whatever deed-reward system has been put into place). nevertheless, outside the purview of the institution the patients remain a heterogeneous group. thus the patients will coalesce into social groups on the basis of educational level, race, neighborhood and so forth. in particular, the patients on the ward repeat (though without institutional support) the same status differentiation of sane/insane as on the outside; those patients perceived to be "more insane" are treated with a similar kind (though not a similar level) of distancing as the "saner" patients themselves receive at the hands of social organization. thus, the patients think the strange woman should have been on a different floor--just like the rest of society, they want to be separated from her. [28] the paradox is that the strange woman (we dubbed her "latex lady") actually comes to embody the institution. her preoccupation with disease and desire for care reflect the "medical model of hospitalization" erving goffman points towards, while her perpetual donning of latex mirrors the less appetizing aspects of the institution. we considered it in bad taste; it reminded us of our loss of agency, which we were all too willing to gloss over just as the staff did. she brings forth the same kind of stratification within the hospital that the hospital brings forth in society. this stratification is different in that it has no legal backing and this is what brings about the fear in other patients. they realize that under the law they have no protection against her because they belong to the same class of undesirables. [29] %i started meeting the staff then, too. that is when you realize what your status is. the patients still treat you like a human. the staff treats you like you've lost the right to speak about yourself. everything you do is treated as a symptom. you'd better not confide in any of them since they report to each other. you run into your psychologist and he says, "i hear you had a hard group therapy session." in that respect, there is no privacy.% [30] the mental hospital treats the "whole patient" (as much of him or her as the hospital can recognize): for the institution there is no room for excess. "all of the patient's actions, feelings, and thoughts--past, present, and predicted--are officially usable by the therapist in diagnosis and prescription. . . . none of a patient's business, then, is none of the psychiatrist's business; nothing ought to be held back from the psychiatrist as irrelevant to his job" ("medical model" 34-5). all information about the patient is funneled to his or her psychiatrist. for all intents and purposes s/he becomes the patient's institutional alter ego. "throwing open my rooms, they would say, 'everything here belongs to us.' they would fall upon my scraps of thought: 'this is ours' " (blanchot 14). the psychiatrist takes over the legal role of the patient: s/he alone can make decisions about what kind of medication (including over-the-counter) the patient can take, what kinds of "privileges" the patient can have and whether the patient will be allowed to go home. [31] now that the psychiatrist has taken over the agency of the patient, everything the patient does is treated as symptomatic. the patient can no longer act, only signify. "right before their eyes, though they were not at all startled, i became a drop of water,a spot of ink" (blanchot 14). the patient's actions only function insofar as they are informational--they only *act* as ciphers, which it is then the responsibility and right of the doctor to decode. as a cipher, a patient's words can never be taken seriously as such; rather than being understood to refer to their intended meaning, the words are used to place the patient in the narrative of the doctor's diagnosis. "when you spoke, they judged your words as a delusion to confirm their concepts" (robear 19). the institution makes a double movement--it ciphers the patient in order to *de*cipher him or her. the patient's acts are robbed of meaning so that another system of meaning can be imposed. though the patient cannot speak, the patient is always already signifying, against his or her will. [32] we already noted that the patient has lost the right to speak. now we see how his or her language is re-routed, being cited to the patient as the rationale of his or her loss of control--"my story would put itself at their service" (blanchot 14). the patient's desires, agency, and subjectivity have been elided; his or her words become the voice of the doctor and, through him, the judge. no longer a person, the staff often also no longer considers the patient to be a worthy addressee. goffman notes, often he is considered to be of insufficient ritual status to be given even minor greetings, let alone listened to. or the inmate may find that a kind of rhetorical use of language occurs: questions such as, "have you washed yet?" or "have you got both socks on?" may be accompanied by simultaneous searching by the staff which physically discloses the facts, making these verbal questions superfluous. ("institutions" 44) by this point, the patient %qua% human agent has been written out of the institutional picture. the patient has no social choice but to turn to his or her fellows. [33] %the main kind of therapy is talking to the other patients. once you realize your status in the hospital you'd much rather talk to them than the staff anyway. there is no hope of fruitful discussion with the psychologist at all. he or she is just someone you see for five minutes a day and who asks if you've been feeling suicidal.% [34] %we patients talked about a couple of different things. we were all depressed so we spent a lot of time talking about how pathetic we were and about our miserable problems. another popular topic of conversation was medication. almost everyone was medicated, so we spent a long time discussing our medication and rumors about what different drugs (or treatments, such as shock therapy) would do to you. finally we spent a lot of time complaining about being in the hospital and being treated like a mental patient. this was usually done when there was no staff around. one common comment was, "the people on the outside are just as crazy as we are. we just had the sense to get treatment."% [35] the mental institution's functioning is predicated on the value of treating individuals, not groups or situations. the individual is separated from society, treated, and then like as not returned to the situation in which the original symptoms were brought about. the unspoken implication is that the individual is at fault for any problems that occured. at the same time, modern psychiatry has had a hard time explicitly laying the blame for the genesis of insanity on individuals or just their bodies %per se%--and blame it is, as the discourse of insanity maintains discreet moral overtones. both institutional psychiatry and antipsychiatry have used the notion of "schizophrenogenic" and other dysfunctional families to describe a situation in which someone becomes insane because of the madness of his or her world. "madness, that is to say, is not 'in' a person but in a system of relationships in which the labeled 'patient' participates" (cooper 149). indeed, it seems that if one's world lacks logical coherence the only *sane* response is to go mad. [36] all this calls into question the utility of labeling the individual patient as insane in contrast to the rest of society. if the problems are inherent in the structure of society, it might make more sense to treat that structure than to lock up the walking wounded. "[the law] exalted me, but only to raise herself up in her turn. 'you are famine, discord, murder, destruction.' 'why all that?' 'because i am the angel of discord, murder, and the end.' 'well,' i said to her, 'that's more than enough to get us both locked up' " (blanchot 16). [37] %the end result was that many patients felt a strong bond with the other patients but were a lot less enthusiastic about the staff and doctors.% %after a couple of days in the hospital i was starting to get claustrophobic (in its usual metaphoric sense). none of the windows open--since patients might be tempted to jump out--so the ward never got fresh air. i started to feel like i was living in a fishbowl, constantly observed.% [38] here is where the patient and non-patient are truly differentiated: by the very experience of being in the hospital itself. this is particularly true of people with schizophrenia, whose terms of hospitalization are generally longer than those of anxious or depressed people. some psychiatrists claim they "[need not] fear that it is [their] diagnosis which separates a schizophrenic person from his family and peers" (freedman %xviii%). but in the most material sense it does: it is the justification for the removal of that person from his or her surroundings and their depositing into the institutional machine. [39] in fact, the notion that the institution itself participates in the construction of its patients' insanity has developed currency in the psychiatric community, who label it "institutional neurosis" (cooper 129). the effect of the institution is not limited to the changes we have already seen a person must make to adapt to the hospital situation. david cooper sees the structure of the hospital ward as reproducing the conditions of the schizophrenogenic family, thereby creating, not a curative climate, but one that fosters the development and maintenance of insanity. documented effects of the asylum on its inmates lead some people to believe that "[w]hat [psychiatry] attempts to cure us of is the cure itself" (seem %xvii%) and to speak of "the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions" (_anti-oedipus_ 5). "one is left with the sorry reflection that the sane ones are perhaps those who fail to gain admission to the mental observation ward. that is to say, they define themselves by a certain absence of experience" (cooper 129). [40] %i wanted out. but that wasn't so simple.% %if i checked myself out (since i was a voluntary) i would have to wait three days before they let me go. if they let me go. a number of my fellow voluntary patients were committed by the hospital (or threatened with commitment) when they tried to leave. this was rumored to be because the hospital was afraid of being sued. and even if they did let me go, it would be "ama," against medical advice, and i would forfeit my right to come back if i should take a turn for the worse. the only option was to fool the doctors into thinking i was better.% [41] the anti-psychiatric community is well aware that many patients manipulate the doctors into letting them out prior to any basic change in them that can be correlated with cure. "i am quite sure that a good number of 'cures' of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to %play at being sane%" (laing 148). but consider what a patient needs to be able to do in order to "play at being sane." among other things, the patient must have enough control of him or herself to be able to play a role, s/he must be able to monitor him or herself well enough to understand what his or her social role is expected to be, and s/he must be suspicious of the doctors and/or the psychiatric institution. in short, s/he must be able to function in his or her role to the satisfaction of the institution. fooling the doctors is therefore equivalent to being healthy for the institution. the nature of the institution means *there can be no question* of whether the patient is "really" better, or only pretending; the two states are identical. [42] this is due to the paradoxical fact that the institution's control over the patient is limited by the very mechanisms it uses to gain control over him or her. <bf>the institution can only control the patient insofar as s/he is mechanized</bf>. there are aspects to the patient that the institution cannot even see, let alone do anything about. for instance, some (perhaps most) patients get very good at playing the part of the patient. these patients may use their acting abilities to shorten their length of stay or to get a hospital bed as an alternative to sleeping in prison or on the street (i myself took advantage of their ignorance to read what might be considered subversive literature--%anti-oedipus% and %the birth of the clinic%--without any problems). %one flew over the cuckoo's nest% is usually cited as an example of the power of the institution over its charges: mcmurphy, by defying nurse crachett, places himself in the way of smooth running and is crushed by the institutional machine. but in the same novel chief bromden has staked out a territory of agency: he pretends to be deaf, stays away from the moving parts and hence finds space to maneuver. [43] the certainty of the existence of such territories is a consequence of the gap between the institution's mechanized view of the patient as symbol and the patient's view of him or herself. the patient as agent always exists in a space beyond the totalizing view of the institution and is hence after a certain point invisible to it. "the whole of me passed in full view before them, and when at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too. very irritated, they stood up and cried out, 'all right, where are you? where are you hiding? hiding is forbidden, it is an offense,' etc." (blanchot 14). on the one hand, this gap between agent and role means there can be no question of a "real" or "objective" cure; on the other, it provides some play in the system where the denied agency of the patient can work. [44] %i actually was feeling somewhat better. the pressure of constant observation was returning me to a normal level of repression and i got some tips from some of the more seasoned patients on what the doctors looked for. after three more days i was allowed to go home.% %now when i think back to my time in the hospital the main impression i have is one of being trapped. i also got pretty good at ping-pong. a few weeks after i got out of the hospital, i received a final reminder--the bill, $11,000.% [45] money is a theme running discreetly under the surface of the institutional situation. many of the deprivations of freedom the patients suffer (not being able to go for a walk, for example) can be traced to worries on the hospital's part of being sued. the fact that the patient is paying to be in the hospital runs in strange counterpart to this loss of agency. after all, the patient is being held accountable for the bill, even though s/he has no control over the length of the stay (witness recent allegations of hospitals unnecessarily committing people for their insurance money). this brings a new twist to henry miller's comment: "the analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means money in his pocket" (henry miller; cited in seem %xv%); in this case, it is every minute he detains you. [46] in the end, then, the legal status of the patient is restored to him or her in the form of the bill. the hospital says, in effect, "you are now a legally responsible person--we entrust you with the ability to pay us." but the patient is not merely returned to his or her former existence. as we have noted, the hospital stay leaves marks, both intended and unintended, on the functioning of the now ex-patient and "mental health survivor" (beeman 11), while the hospital churns on, processing new patients. [47] in my case, i was left in a state of confusion, insistently wondering *what* had *happened*. my experience had been intense, mysterious, inexplicable; the process of finding some order and meaning in it is reflected in the paragraphs above, which were mostly written while slowly returning to sanity in the months after the institutionalization. as months turned to years it became apparent that it was not the week of institutionalization that had marked me most strongly; rather, it was the analysis that had made it comprehensible that continued to live on in me. over time, it became distilled into a general technique of analysis which i found tremendously useful in all situations where institutions attempt to totalize and circumscribe individuals. i had learned to escape, not merely from the psychiatric institution, but from all totalizing institutions. this *machinic analysis*, with its roots in experience, reached the plane of the theoretical with its politics still intact, allowing those politics to be applied to superficially radically different situations. *postulates of machinic analysis* [48] while the analysis of this institutionalization has consisted of a patchwork of diverse voices, it is not amethodical. in fact, its methodology is unexpectedly strengthened in that the affinity of the explanation with the narrative of my experience removes that methodology from the realm of the purely theoretical. the analysis makes the story explainable, while the story makes the analysis understandable. the analysis is rhizomatic, its roots in a schizoanalysis inexorably leading, like avital ronell's schizophrenic, to the metaphor of the machine: "i am unable to give an account of what i really do, everything is mechanical in me and is done unconsciously. i am nothing but a machine" (118). [49] instead of describing society in terms of grand individual subjects and the utilitarian institutions and systems with which they come into contact, machinic analysis describes it in terms of *machines*: systems of rules, procedures, habits, that operate, that take input and produce output, that couple with other machines: social, technical, economic. machines are processes in society that cut across individuals and across institutions; they allow one to theorize history and political action without depending on a coherent subject as the subject of history. [50] machinic analysis is not only an explanation of a single event--it tells what happened--but a strategy which, though derived from a singularity, generalizes into (1) a mechanics of escape from subjugation and (2) a form of analysis with purchase that goes beyond the scene of psychiatric institutionalization to all situations where institutions are mechanically constructing subjects. in all these cases, a machinic analysis can trace out lines of flight for the subjugated individual and suggest strategies for delineating the limits at which mechanizing institutions can no longer appropriate their input. this generalized analysis, distilled from this particular example, works because it is based on the following postulates: 1. *machines are asubjective*. what i mean here is that a machinic analysis does not posit psychological states or experiences on the part of the individuals involved. the psychiatric institution is a social machine which channels an in/out flow of bodies, labels and categorizes them, and attempts to route them into a method of functioning which will allow it to manipulate them in terms with which it is familiar. the patient, too, has certain accustomed methods of functioning, which break down when they come into contact with the institutional machine and have to be recalibrated for processing. such recalibration will always be incomplete, since it is only done with an eye to the limited modes whereby the institution understands the patient; additional modes of functioning which the institution cannot account for are not excluded. this analysis allows one to talk about what concretely happens in spaces where institutions and individuals meet without trying to pin down the subjectivity involved. it is assumed that these social formations can only be discussed within the limited framework they afford. 2. *machines focus on process, not on structure*. while structuralism focuses on cultural manifestations as structure, schizoanalysis is interested in these manifestations as process. the psychiatric institution is not a static structure of meanings in which a subject is inserted; it is a method of operation which necessarily involves not only meanings and principles but also concrete actions and effects. this is not the age-old distinction between synchrony and diachrony revisited. rather, it leads directly to a politics of engagement. structures are to be interpreted; processes, on the other hand, are to be tinkered with--one can be engaged in a *mechanics* and in *experimentation*. mechanics means that one deals with the social formation in question as a process and sees it as changeable through tinkering. experimentation refers to the fact that this style of analysis is not complete when the intellectual work is done; institutions must be dealt with as concrete formations. an analysis that has no effects in practice must be jettisoned. 3. *machines do not operate in isolation*. machines, as process, have input and output. they work with and in the context of other machines. the psychiatric machine works in conjunction with a legal machine, which both provides the psychiatric machine with some of its input and conditions much of its workings. technologists sometimes forget that technical machines work in the context of social machines, through which they come into being and without which they cannot be evaluated. analysis via machinery demands always going beyond the limited context in which the machine views itself to ask what things it hooks up with, what it works with, how other processes allow it to come into being. this means politics, purchase, and, paradoxically, the enablement of an immanent critique through a reunderstanding of the limits of the system and of the outside forces invisibly at work on it. 4. *machines are engaged in a process of incomplete deand encoding*. this is because machines do not operate alone, but work upon other objects and machines. when an input comes in, it must be deterritorialized, i.e. have the markings of previous machinery removed, and reterritorialized, i.e. reunderstood in the context of the current process. in the case of the psychiatric institution, this means the process of taking in a new patient and recoding it to be manipulated by the institutional machinery. this encoding process ignores the subjectivity of the oncoming object; instead, a faciality is constructed for the input, which will have an effect on but does not constitute the range of expression, action, and experience for that individual. *machines necessarily leave out something of the objects they process*. 5. *machines do not need to be coherent*. this type of analysis does not expect either patient or institution to be rational and coherent; in fact, the opposite is expected, because of each machine's limited point of view. and there is no need for social machines to be coherent. "the death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they %engender%, and on the infernal operations they regenerate" (deleuze 151). just as freud analyzed human consciousness by noting how it breaks down, analysis of machines is an analysis of the ways in which they misfire, and how those misfirings allow the machines to function. 6. as noted above, in the case of the psychiatric institution, there is a disjunction between its legal and service functions. it functions simultaneously as an alternative prison for those who cannot be contained by the law alone and as a locus of rehabilitation for the ill. both of these functions overcode the hospital stay, though the institution itself prefers to stress its medical aspects. while the institution can ignore its legal function--though simultaneously fulfilling it--the patients cannot; their position outside the law is keenly felt in such aspects as not being able to discharge oneself, not being able to go for walks, and being locked in a ward with patients who are perceived as insane(r). the legal function, while ostensibly not at work, plays an important role in keeping the patients in their place: continuously faced by these restrictions, they are all the more likely to be worn down into the mould the institution has prepared for them. thus, the contradiction between the hospital's self-presentation as a service machine and status as semi-penitentiary is not debilitating to the institution but functional. [51] based on these principles, machinic analysis engages the following argument: 1. machines are asubjective, so they can be thought of as pure process. 2. because they are processes, they operate on input and generate output. 3. because they operate on input and output, they must work in the context of other machines. 4. because machines operate on circuits occupied by other machines, each machine encodes and decodes its input and output not in absolute terms but with respect to its own limited methods of functioning. 5. because machines encode and decode in a non-transcendental fashion, *there is always space left for the individual being operated on and limits outside of which the system's totalizations no longer hold*. [52] in the case of the psychiatric institution, the stated function of hospitalization is to take in those who are labeled "insane" and return them to some level of normality. we see that the institutional machine does not function at this ideal level in its performance of its task. through a machinic analysis we discover that the institutional nature of the ward, with its emphasis on a mass-produced patient, demands a total abandonment of agency on the part of the patient, who is reduced to a cipher. at the same time, by insisting on seeing the patient only in the most reductive ways, it leaves an unmonitored gap between the ideal and the actual patient, a space where the real patient can maneuver. the psychiatric institution not only does not accomplish its stated function of total enclosure and cure, it cannot accomplish it. the institutional moment works both through and despite the point where the institution breaks down: the point at which its visions of totalization obscure the limits of its own system of encoding. works cited: beeman, richard p. "court appearance." _in the realms of the unreal: "insane" writings_. ed. john g. h. oakes. new york: four walls eight windows, 1991. 10-11. blanchot, maurice. _the madness of the day_. trans. lydia davis. new york: station hill press, 1981. colby, kenneth mark. _artificial paranoia: a computer simulation of paranoid processes_. new york: pergamon press, 1975. colby, k.m., j.b. watt, and j.p. gilbert. "a computer method of psychotherapy: preliminary communication." _the journal of nervous and mental disease_ 2 (1966): 148-152. cooper, david. "violence and psychiatry." _radical psychology_. ed. phil brown. new york: harper colophon, 1973. 128-155. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lane. new york: viking press, 1977. ---. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. ellison, ralph. _invisible man_. new york: vintage, 1972. freedman, daniel x. foreword. _the meaning of madness: symptomatology, sociology, biology and therapy of the schizophrenias_. by c. peter rosenbaum. new york: science house, 1970. %xvii% %xix%. goffman, erving. "on the characteristics of total institutions." _asylums_. new york: anchor, 1961. 1-124. ---. "the medical model and mental hospitalization." _radical psychology_. ed. phil brown. new york: harper colophon, 1973. 25-45. kesey, ken. _one flew over the cuckoo's nest_. new york: signet, 1962. laing, r.d. _the divided self_. baltimore: penguin, 1959. mental patients' liberation project. "statement." _radical psychology_. ed. phil brown. new york: harper colophon, 1973. 521-525. robear, james walter, jr. "reality check." _in the realms of the unreal: "insane" writings_. ed. john g. h. oakes. new york: four walls eight windows, 1991. 18-19. ronell, avital. _the telephone book: technology--schizophrenia--electric speech_. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1989. seem, mark. "introduction." _anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. by gilles deleuze and felix guattari. trans. robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lane. new york: viking press, 1977. %xv%-%xxiv%. washington, karoselle. "the killing floors." _in the realms of the unreal: "insane" writings_. ed. john g. h. oakes. new york: four walls eight windows, 1991. 48-52. weizenbaum, j. "eliza--a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine." _communications of the association for computing machinery_ 1 (1965): 36-45. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------schwartz, 'it's only rock 'n' roll?', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-schwartz-its.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.196. part 1/1, total size 11538 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- it's only rock 'n' roll? by jeff schwartz american culture studies bowling green state university jeffs@bgsuvax.bgsu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by jeff schwartz, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: simon reynolds and joy press. _the sex revolts: gender, rebellion, and rock 'n' roll</cite>. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1995. [1] _the sex revolts_, which appeared this past spring from harvard university press, is unquestionably a major publication in the field of popular music studies. but it is also a deeply troubling one, one which points to significant problems concerning the status of popular music within the academy, and particularly within cultural studies. [2] reynolds and press offer a typology of cultural narratives of gender which dominate rock, mainly the rebel, who must escape the smothering femininity of mother, home, family, committed relationships, etc. for the freedom of the open road, the all-male world of adventure, and the possibility of machine-like autonomy, and the mystic, who seeks reunion with the lost maternal through mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and the embrace of nature (xiv). they conclude by surveying attempts by female artists to negotiate with these dominant narratives. the book is organized in these three sections: rebel misogynies, into the mystic, and lift up your skirt and speak, and each section proceeds through an exhaustive survey of artists both well-known (the rolling stones, led zeppelin, the doors, pink floyd) and obscure (john's children, radio birdman, can). [3] as the first book devoted entirely to how gender is treated in rock, _the sex revolts_ deserves our attention and even our praise. yet it also calls out for some serious criticism, since it is in some important respects a deeply flawed piece of work. it is my hope that in beginning to excavate these flaws, i will be embarking on the kind of critical engagement with the book that will assure not its undoing but rather the productive unfolding of some of its unrealized potentialities in the coming years. [4] essentially the book suffers from three glaring weaknesses. first, although the dust jacket features a warhol portrait of mick jagger with pink lipstick and green eye shadow, promising a decadent, cynical, knowing attitude towards gender performance, reynolds and press present a version of rock which is completely heterosexualized. their examples are chosen to support their theory, not to complicate it. queer musicians are not featured (a scan of the index reveals no entries for david bowie, lou reed, tom robinson, melissa etheridge, or elton john, to pick some prominent names at random), and those male artists who do appear who have made sexual ambiguity part of their persona, such as jagger, iggy pop, brian eno, and kurt cobain, are treated only with regard to the putatively heterosexual content of their lyrics. likewise, female artists' use of sexual ambiguity is read as negotiation with the maculinist dominant narratives of rock, without any possible queer connotations. such a blindness to the complex performativity of gender and sexuality within rock 'n' roll is astonishing, and constitutes a real obstacle to understanding. [5] the second serious flaw in the book is the authors' almost exclusive emphasis on lyrics. reynolds and press seldom discuss the non-lyrical dimensions of the music, and when they do they resort to vague and highly impressionistic language. thus, for example, the music of trobbing gristle is said to have "mirrored a world of unremitting ugliness, dehumanization, and brutalism. they degraded and mutilated sound, reaching nether-limits that even now have yet to be under-passed" (91). these are perhaps valid things to say about throbbing gristle, but they don't go very far toward explaining what the music actually sounds like or how the sounds can be understood as mirroring such social conditions as "dehumanization." it is unlikely that a book on film, painting, fiction, or any art form other than popular music could be published by a major academic press if it contained no formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question. this is not to say that only musicologists should write about popular music. given the culturally conservative character of contemporary musicology, this would be a poor idea. but those of us in cultural studies who write about music have an obligation to acquire some familiarity with its mechanics, just as film scholars learn the conventions of camerawork and editing. [6] the lack of rigor in popular music scholarship is due to the failure of popular music to be accepted in the academy as anything other than a (more or less transparent) social symptom. courses on topics such as "rap and african-american politics" or "madonna and postmodern feminism" are widespread, while those on the formal aspects of popular music or on popular artists as composers and performers are scarce to nonexistent. the basic tools needed for serious analysis of music are monopolized by a musicology which has little interest in popular music or or in the socio-political concerns of cultural studies. this situation has begun to change in the past decade. but the changes have come almost entirely from within musicology, where a new generation of radical musicologists (such as brett, mcclary, and walser) has been slowly emerging. a corresponding shift within cultural studies has not yet materialized. [7] with musicology still largely hostile to, and cultural studies still largely incapable of rigorous engagement with, popular musical forms, a kind of semi-scholarship has tended to fill the void. if one runs through the list of university press books on popular music, one finds mostly books written by non-academics or by academics whose primary work is as journalists. the tendency has, i suspect, been exacerbated by university press editors, who, increasingly confronted with a bottom line, are likely to see their popular music titles as a best bet for the coveted crossover market. i do not intend here to marshall a defense of the academic gates against the journalistic barabarians. my point is simply that the particular circumstances of contemporary academe have given the field of popular music studies a somewhat anomalous set of contours -contours whose limitations are evident in the book under review. [8] to be blunt, _the sex revolts_ is not a scholarly book. and while in some respects this is refreshing, it also leads to the third and greatest of the flaws i am enumerating. in their handling of cultural theory -of the range of theoretical materials from which contemporary cultural study draws its assumptions and practices - reynolds and press are often clumsy and irresponsible. names familiar to pmc readers are dropped every few pages: kristeva, irigaray, deleuze and guattari, virilio, theweleit, sartre, burroughs, marinetti, bataille, sade, nietszche, bachelard, caillois, catherine clement, marjorie garber, etc. but there is no evidence that these different and in some cases quite contradictory thinkers have been seriously or systematically engaged. their names are simply tossed off as the authors string together well-known theoretical catch phrases and brief, striking quotations. the text is no more than %garnished% with contemporary theory, and this window dressing can't obscure the fact that reynolds and press are basically working with a jungian myth-symbol criticism that emerged back in the 1960's. admittedly, twenty years ago this approach produced greil marcus's masterful _mystery train_, but it also gave us such foolishness as david dalton's study of james dean (wherein dean is osiris) or, more recently, danny sugerman's tedious book on guns 'n' roses (axl rose is a shaman) -not to mention the works of camille paglia. [9] paglia, in fact, is one of the more frequently cited theorists in _the sex revolts_, along with robert bly and joseph campbell. and the habitual recurrence to these three, whose work is more or less compatible with the pseudo-jungian approach of reynolds and press, leads to their unlikely -not to say hilarious -combination with other cultural theorists whose work is conspicuously incompatible with such an approach. bly, for example, is yoked together with the brilliant theorist and historian of the nazi imaginary, klaus theweleit; paglia is paired variously with sartre, kristeva, and ferenczi (85-86). [10] as i said, it is not a scholarly book. and yet it is one that i think will be genuinely valuable to scholars in a field which offers so few points of productive departure. _the sex revolts_ has the great advantage over other works in the field that it at least poses some of the important questions, and gestures, however haphazardly, toward some of the theoretical tools that could be used to answer these questions. even a conceptually bizarre combination like bly/theweleit might lead to a worthwhile mutual interrogation once it is unpacked from reynolds and press's rather artless framework and taken up by someone more adept at contemporary cultural and political theory. for all its faults, _the sex revolts_ succeeds in suggesting some of the productive directions that an as-yet barely emergent, more rigorous and thoroughgoing cultural study of popular music might take. works cited: brett, philip. elizabeth wood, and gary c. thomas, eds. _queering the pitch: the new lesbian and gay musicology_. new york: routledge, 1994. dalton, david. _james dean: the mutant king_. new york: st. martin's press, 1974. marcus, greil. _mystery train: images of america in rock 'n' roll music_. new york: plume, 1975. mcclary, susan. _feminine endings: music, gender, and sexuality_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1991. sugerman, danny. _appetite for destruction: the days of guns n' roses_. new york: st. martin's press, 1991. walser, robert. _running with the devil: power, gender, and madness in heavy metal music_. havover, nh: wesleyan up, 1993. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------bahri, 'disembodying the corpus: postcolonial pathology in tsitsi dangarembga's 'nervous conditions'', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-bahri-disembodying.txt archive pmc-list, file bahri.994. part 1/1, total size 69402 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- disembodying the corpus: postcolonial pathology in tsitsi dangarembga's 'nervous conditions' by deepika bahri school of literature, communication, and culture georgia institute of technology deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by deepika bahri, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] directing his "attention to the importance of two problems raised by marxism and by anthropology concerning the moral and social significance of biological and physical 'things,'" michael taussig argues in _the nervous system_ that "things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of healing, are not 'things-in-themselves,' are *not only* biological and physical, but *are also* signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity" (83). if taussig's observation with regard to the cultural analysis of an illness and its treatment in the usa in 1978 is extrapolated to a very different scene but not so distant time, the machinations of illness in a fictional case study reveal the usually syncopated socio-personal reciprocity taussig suggests. the scene is rhodesia on the brink of its evolution into the nation now named after a ruined city in its southern part. the "subject" under analysis is nyasha, the anorexic, teenage deuteragonist of tsitsi dangarembga's 1988 novel _nervous conditions_ (a title inspired by sartre's observation in the preface to _the wretched of the earth_, that the native's is a nervous condition^1^). the novel, narrated in the first person by nyasha's cousin tambu, catalogues the struggles of the latter to escape the impoverished and stifling atmosphere of the "homestead" in search of education and a better life, as well the efforts of other women in her family to negotiate their circumstances, offering the while a scathing critique of the confused and corrupt social structure they are a part of. tambu's movement from her homestead, which symbolizes rural decay, to the prosperous, urban mission of her uncle introduces us to a cast of characters scarred by encounters with the savagery of colonialism in the context of an indigenously oppressive socius. one of many characters in the novel suffering from a nervous condition, young nyasha demonstrates in dramatic pathological form what appears to ail an entire socio-economic construct. if "the manifestations of disease are like symbols, and the diagnostician sees them and interprets them with an eye trained by the social determinants of perception" (taussig 87), and if, as susan bordo argues in "the body and reproduction of femininity," "the bodies of disordered women . . . offer themselves as aggressively graphic text for the interpreter--a text that insists, actually demands, it be read as a cultural statement" (16), nyasha's diseased self suggests the textualized female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, western narrative, and her complex relationship with both. not surprisingly, nyasha's response to this violence on the body is not only somatogenic but it is to manifest specifically that illness which will consume that body. [2] the pathological consequences of colonization, signaled in the heightened synaptic activity which, according to fanon, produces violence among colonized peoples, take shape in nyasha in the need to target herself as the site on which to launch a terrorist attack upon the produced self. according to sartre, the violence of the settlers contaminates the colonized, producing fury; failing to find an outlet, "it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves" (18). the quest for an outlet takes grotesque forms in nyasha through the physical symptomatology of disorder. but it would be entirely too simple to attribute her disease to the ills of colonization alone: nyasha responds not only as native and other, she responds as *woman* to the ratification of socially en-*gendered* native categories which conspire with colonial narratives to ensure her subjectivity. the implication of precapital and precolonial socio-economic systems in the postcolonial state, moreover, makes a simplistic oppositionality between colonizer/colonized meaningless. her response to western colonial narratives which enthrall as they distress at a time when she is also contending with her burgeoning sexuality in a repressed society, further complicate any efforts to understand and explain her pathology. living on the edge of a body weakening from anorexia and bulimia, nyasha's involuntary reaction to the narratives competing for control over her, i would suggest, appears to be to systematically evacuate the materials ostensibly intended to sustain her, empty the body of signification and content to make "a body without organs" (bwo) in deleuze and guattari's terminology, and thereby to reveal and dismantle (although never completely) the self diseased by *both* patriarchy and colonization. as tambu's narrative unfolds, the female body as text itself is being rewritten as protest, attempting to rid itself of the desires projected on it, even if hybrid subjectivity prevents it from purging them all.^2^ the "body talk" invoked in my reading, informed largely by postmodern (despite the "realist" mode of narration) and feminist concerns, also resonates with postcolonial, social, and psychological ones. many of these approaches are of unlike ilk, and none of them can be explained fully within the scope of this essay. rather, the interplay of these positions is used to shed light on a case that defies simple theoretical models. readers will note the use in this essay of western and non-western theorists, often with widely ranging positionings: given the "hybrid" culture being described in the novel and the range of apparata necessary to understand nyasha's condition in terms that were medical as well as socio-political, feminist as well as postcolonial, physical as well as psychological, it seemed specious to confine the theoretical apparatus to non-western theory or a particular feminist or postcolonial perspective. more importantly, it seemed less useful. none of these perspectives, however, preclude the analysis of body as metaphor and illness as symbol. [3] nyasha's recourse to a stereotypically western female pathological condition ^3^ to empty herself of food, the physical token of her anomie *and* a significant preoccupation of african life, is ironic and fitting as dangarembga forces a collocation of native and colonial cultural concerns to complicate our ways of reading the postcolonial. nyasha's accusatory delirium, kamikaze behavior and oneiroid symptoms are at once symptomatic of a postcolonial *and* female disorder whereby the symptom is the cure, both exemplified in her refusal to occupy the honorary space allotted her by colonial and patriarchal narratives in which she is required to be but *cannot* be a good native and a good girl. this entails her rejection of food (metonymic token of a system that commodifies women's bodies and labor and sustains male authority), of a socio-sexual code that is designed to prepare her for an unequal marriage market while repressing her sexuality, and of an educational system which has the potential to emancipate women and natives but functions, instead, to keep them in their place and even further exacerbate their ills. [4] in "killing the hysteric in the colonized's house", sue thomas has argued for a reading of the novel as a narrative of loss of cultural and maternal affiliations, invoking grosz's suggestion that hysteria is a tragic self-mutilation that symptomatizes inarticulable resistance (27). hysterical overcompliance with domination, she suggests, characterizes all the major characters in the novel. while this is well substantiated in her essay, i will argue that the *female* body is a very particular space that is marked in ways that narrativize elaborate systems of production, cultural and economic. the recoding of these systems in the text, elaborated in the story of tambu's introduction into and misgivings about the cycle, the adult women's struggles within it, and nyasha's articulation of structural imparities is a staging of these narratives in performative terms that bears illustrative witness to the violence done to the female body in the successive scenes of pre and postcolonial zimbabwe. nyasha's war with patriarchal and colonial systems is fought on the turf of her own body, both because it is the scene of enactment of these systems and because it is the only site of resistance available. this reading suggests that the performativity of female resistance needs to be at the heart of a feminist postcolonial politics. [5] it would be well to acknowledge the centrality of dangarembga's feminist agenda before attempting to transpose a postcolonial reading on the novel. in an interview with rosemary marangoly george and helen scott, the author claimed that her purpose was "to write things about ourselves in our own voices which other people can pick up to read. and i do think that _nervous conditions_ is serving this purpose for young girls in zimbabwe" (312). tambudzai, the young female narrator's missionary education tells only of "ben and betty in town and country" (27), not of her own people; _nervous conditions_ is an attempt at telling zimbabwean girls stories about themselves to counter the lingering narrative in which zimbabwe remains a remote control neo-colony administered by toadies like nyasha's western educated father, babamukuru and his ilk who are still "painfully under the evil wizard's spell," and will continue the colonial project (50). women's stories do not easily see the light of day in zimbabwe because, according to dangarembga, "the men are the publishers" and "it seems very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about" (qtd. in george 311). these stories, however, must be told. early in the novel, tambu tells us that the novel is not about death though it begins with the ironic admission "i was not sorry when my brother died" (1); rather it is about "my escape and lucia's; about my mother's and maiguru's entrapment; and about nyasha's rebellion [which] may not in the end have been successful" (1). the postcolonial critic should be wary that any overarching theory proposed be mediated by dangarembga's emphasis on the feminist preoccupations of the story for the novel ends with the reminder: "the story i have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom i loved, and our men, this story is how it all began" (204). that the novel opens with the prefiguring of her brother nhamo's death to make way for tambu's tale is a poignant reminder of the symbolic starting point of female narrative. far from making a postcolonial reading less tenable, however, dangarembga's feminist proclivities are useful in explaining the dense nature of power relations in the postcolonial world in a way that colonial discourse (including western feminist discourse) typically fails to do. [6] in _third world women and the politics of feminism_, chandra talpade mohanty complains that western feminists "homogenize and systematize" third world woman, creating a single dimensional picture. they also assume a "singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy" which is reductive. ultimately, "western feminisms appropriate and 'colonize' the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries" (335). dangarembga's representation of women of different ages, classes, educational qualifications, and economic capacities, makes composite and reductive sketches of the third world woman if not impossible, difficult. the women in this novel are neither simply victims, nor inherently more noble than the men; rather, their stories illustrate the difficulty of separating problem and solution, perpetrator and victim, cause and effect. that they are uniquely positioned to bear the brunt of native and colonial oppression, however, is vividly demonstrated: even issues of class and status are ultimately subservient to and informed by a pervasive but complex phallocentric order; this tambu clarifies when she marvels at "the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness" (116). the patriarchal order is supported by the colonial project, pre and post capitalist economy, and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, traditional cultural codes. by layering gender politics with the atrophying discourse of colonialism, dangarembga obliges us to recognize that the power structure is a contradictory amalgam of complicity and helplessness--where colonizer *and* colonized, men *and* women collude to produce their psycho-pathological, in a word, "nervous" conditions. what ails nyasha, then, is not simply an eating problem but a rampant disorder in the socio-cultural complex that determines her fate as woman and native on the eve of the birth of a new nation. [7] the novel dramatizes the intersections of personal and national history on the one hand ^4^ and the feminist and postcolonial on the other through nyasha's attempts to escape her own assigned narrative as woman and colonized subject. colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal national culture conspire to produce an imperiled nyasha and a nation in crisis. symptoms of the latter abound in the repetitive images of rural poverty, female disempowerment, and continuing colonialism in educational and economic institutions while nyasha's crisis is evident in her hysteric, nervous condition and endangered body. given this, one could read nyasha's story as yet another vignette of victimage, but, apart from dangarembga's own criticism of such a narrative, ^5^ there are other reasons for reading it as a text of possibilities for survival, agency, and re-creation. several third world feminist critics reject the discourse of victimage in feminist and minority discourse. mohanty objects in "under western eyes" to the "construction of 'third world women' as a homogeneous 'powerless' group often located as implicit *victims* of particular socio-economic systems" (338). spivak complains that "there is a horrible, horrible thing in minority discourse which is a competition for maximum victimization . . . . that is absolutely meretricious."^6^ this is not to say that nyasha is not victimized but to acknowledge that it is quite another thing to cast her as victim. western feminists also recognize this distinction: naomi wolf's recent _fire with fire_, for instance, issues a call to women to eschew the rhetoric of victimage. nyasha is conscious of victimization but hardly content to remain a victim; regardless of the caliber or effectiveness of her methods of opposition, she/her body are the enunciation of protest against *and* the story of victimization. a reading of nyasha as victim fails for another interesting reason: this is because the text reveals the ways in which she is quite complicit with the oppressive order she so abhors. in this sense, too, she emerges less as victim than as the mediated product of a conflicted narrative. [8] reading female praxis as narrative of relative "agency," in _the beauty myth_ naomi wolf tells us that anorexia and bulimia begin "as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation" (198), although it is not the myth of female beauty alone that contaminates nyasha--she is rejecting the very basic processes, the *business* of living in a colonized world where she shares the dual onus of being colonized and female. wolf also tells us that "eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. but surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you" (198). nyasha leaves us in no doubt that she is aware of the oppressive forces that seek to bend her to their will. in one of her many pedagogic moments, she warns tambu that "when you've seen different things you want to be sure you're adjusting to the right thing. you can't go on all the time being whatever's necessary. you've got to have some conviction . . . . once you get used to it, it's natural to carry on and become trapped" and then it becomes clear that "they control everything you do" (117). hardly, it would seem, is this the language or sensibility of a passive victim. nyasha's potential for agency cannot be acknowledged until one understands that the "[body] still remains the threshold for the transcendence of the subject" (braidotti 151). through the diseased female body as text is made visible the violence of history, and through its spontaneous bodily resistance, the possibilities for rupturing and remaking that text. control over the body is a gesture of denial of representative abject/subject status for nyasha since "the proliferation of discourses about life, the living organism, and the body is coextensive with the dislocation of the very basis of the human subject's representation" (151). [9] the teleology of nyasha's anorexic and bulimic practices is intimately linked to her revulsion at the mandate to represent herself as good girl and good native in particular instances of infractions against her sense of self in the novel. tambu speaks of the time babamukuru confiscates nyasha's copy of d.h. lawrence's _lady chatterley's lover_ which is objectionable for its depiction of female sexuality. appalled at this invasion of her rights, and what might be seen as a persistent barrier to her development into sexual agent rather than sexualized commodity, nyasha, indicating the etiology of her symptoms, refuses to eat for the first time in the novel (83). tambu next alerts us to nyasha's quiet rejection of her meal when she is scolded by her father for not responding to her primary school headmaster and thereby shaming him; it is tambu who tells us that her cousin's behavior stems from her dislike of being spoken in the third person, because "it made her feel like an object" (99). in preparing for her standard six exams, too, nyasha loses her appetite, signaling the much greater apotheosis of internal conflict to follow at her o-levels. her withdrawal from the family and rejection of food after the confrontation over her late arrival from the school dance, and subsequently on another later arrival from school where she has stayed to study, then, comes as no surprise. layered in between these specific instances are general references to nyasha's disdain of fatty foods in the interest of maintaining a more desirable body shape; this quest for "commodification" as an attractive object is not recognized by her as destructive and, interestingly, is not textually linked directly to starvation or anorexia. instead, the usually appearance-centered practices of anorexia and bulimia become narrativized as artful, if grotesque, protest that will prevent nyasha's maturation into full fledged commodified "womanhood," even as she embraces the abjection that comes from seeking a "pre-objectal relationship," becoming separated from her own body "in order to be" (kristeva 10).^7^ [10] the question of control is focal and must be located within the matrix of complex power relations to understand the significance of nyasha's rebellion. ^8^ patriarchal society, colonial imperialism, and capitalist economy function by controlling and commodifying the subject's body and labor; the female subject in this cultural and social economy, well documented in _nervous conditions_, is assessed by the ability to reproduce (she goes into labor), to provide sexual release (the labors of love), and to work (home, farm, market labor). prostitution and pimping are extreme representations of the annexation of female labor while the marital institution within oppressive narratives is a quotidian, usually sanctioned, appropriation. female labor in this novel denotes a woman's exchange value in the socio-familial and matrimonial economy. it is necessary to understand the role of female labor in the novel and the reason why it is not available as a site of resistance to grasp fully the implications of nyasha's default choice of the physical body as the locus for rebellion. women are not only expected to work and work for men, their value and worth are determined by work, although it does not make them "valuable" in any intrinsic, meaningful sense. in "re-examining patriarchy as a mode of production: the case of zimbabwe," cindy courville explains that "women's exploitation and oppression were structured in terms of political, economic, and social relations of the shona and ndebele societies" (34). under colonial capitalism, however, women became the "'proletariat' of the proletariats, becoming more subordinated in the new socio-economic schemes, and often losing their old and meaningful roles within the older production processes" (ogundipe-leslie 108). [11] tambu reveals that "the needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate" (12). women are intended to enable *men* to attain value through their labor: netsai and tambu, therefore, must labor so their brother nhamo can attend school. they may not enjoy the fruits of their own labor: "under both traditional and colonial law, they [african women] were denied ownership and control of the land and the goods they produced. it was the unpaid labor of women and children which subsidized the colonial wage" (courville 38). nhamo, in fact, steals tambu's labor--the maize she has been growing in a scant spare time to buy an education--and squanders it in gifts to friends, while her father steals her prospects by keeping the money babamukuru has sent him for tambu's school bills.^9^ interestingly, while the maize does serve to keep her in school, ^10^ and later allows her admission to the mostly white sacred heart convent, we can assume from her aunt maiguru's trajectory and her own pursuit of it that she will continue to be schooled in the ways of a societal economy that will use her labor to support and enable the colonial and patriarchal order which will deny her, as it has maiguru, the fruits of that labor. maiguru, the most educated woman in the novel, is just as qualified as her husband babamukuru (a little publicized fact that surprises tambu when she learns of it) and just as instrumental in helping to maintain the mission lifestyle that nhamo and tambu find so dazzling, but her knowledge and her labor are never acknowledged: they have been annexed to serve a societal order which awards the fruits of that knowledge and labor as well as the associated prestige to babamukuru, lending him authority, as a result, over the entire extended family, including his older brother. babamukuru, in effect, has "stolen" her labor to enhance his position. to the untrained eye maiguru appears to be incapable of suffering because she "lived in the best of all possible circumstances, in the best of all possible worlds" as tambu says, ironically echoing candide's unfortunate and misguided philosopher pangloss. to this nyasha replies that "such things could only be seen" (142). education, then, which might free women like maiguru from service to capitalism and patriarchy becomes yet another token of exchange, further alienating them from the "home" economy of agricultural subsistence in favor of urban wage service.^11^ when she and her husband return to their uneducated, struggling relatives, it is to further heighten the impoverishment of the homestead, and the need to escape from it. it is nyasha who points out that the education of solitary family members will not solve the ills of rural poverty: "there'll always be brothers and mealies and mothers too tired to clean latrines. whether you go to the convent or not. there's more to be done than that," she tells tambu who believes that education will "lighten" their burdens (179). near the end of the novel, tambu herself wonders, "but what use were educated young ladies on the homestead? or at the mission?" (199). admittedly comprehension has only begun to dawn on her at that stage, but a fuller realization seems to be clearly indicated. [12] babamukuru, his young nephew nhamo, and son chido, however, embrace colonial capitalism and education because they are usually compatible with and in fact, uphold traditional patriarchy. courville tells us that "the colonial state sanctioned and institutionalized the political and legal status of african women as minors and/or dependents subject to male control" (37). educational degrees, in this economy, are fodder for men's appetites for control. witness the following scene. on his return from england, babamukuru is comically greeted by a rousing chorus of admirers who extol his abilities, while ignoring maiguru's comparable achievements: "our father and benefactor has returned appeased, having devoured english letters with a ferocious appetite! did you think degrees were indigestible? if so, look at my brother. he has digested them" (36). indeed, men can digest degrees as well as the food prepared by women since both sustain their stature while failing to "nourish" the women. their lot, educational status notwithstanding, is defined by service to and for men. courville claims that while "some social aspects of african patriarchy were repugnant to european culture . . . colonial authorities recognized the significance of patriarchal power in mobilizing the labor of women" (38). that none of the women in the novel ever refuse their labor is no oddity since we learn that female labor may not be and is not withheld for fear of punishment; netsai's failure to carry her empty-handed brother's bags at tambu's suggestion, for instance, results in a sound thrashing and her conclusion that she should have just done it "in the first place" (10). nor is nhamo's behavior unusual; while tambu acknowledges that "nhamo was not interested in being fair," she insists he was not being obnoxious, merely behaving "in the expected manner" (12). netsai, needless to say, never refuses to carry his bags again. even tambu, who appears to demonstrate a keen sense of outrage at the injustice of a patriarchal order while at the homestead, participates in all the labor intensive tasks on the homestead while the men await service. one of the few instances of her failure to be a "good girl," evident to her uncle in her refusal to attend the christian ceremony that is to sanction her parents' otherwise "sinful" marriage of many years--an embarrassing and humiliating proposition to tambu, is also, predictably, punished with a beating and a sentence of domestic labor; interestingly, before she issues an outright refusal, tambu confesses to a muscular inability to leave her bed, prompting her uncle to ask if she is "ill" and then to dismiss maiguru's affirmative response with injunctions to get the girl dressed; this event is an adroit linking in the novel of its major themes, revealing the nexus of relations between illness, body, labor, colonialism, patriarchy, and the female subject. [13] nyasha, too, who is seen laboring on the homestead along with the other women, including maiguru, at the family's christmas gathering, is clearly being prepared for a lifetime of service to the men in her life despite her relatively privileged economic status. since labor cannot be denied in the phallocratic order--at least not with impunity, the body then becomes the site of conflict for control. i realize that the dichotomy between labor and the body here is problematic since it is the body that labors, but in this instance we need to separate the two to recognize the extent to which nyasha's body as text is scripted, and how that text might be reinscribed as protest. [14] in a certain sense, nyasha's understanding of bodily dimensions has been shaped, if not determined, by her brief exposure in england to the western desire for the "svelte, sensuous" womanly frame (197); she is preoccupied with her own figure and urges her unofficial pupil tambu not to eat too much (192). her sense of the ideal self, then, has already been appropriated by an aesthetic that does not recognize the wide-hipped, muscle bound female form as beautiful; this same constitutional african female frame is prized for its capacity to produce labor and to signal the subject's relatively superior status because it suggests that the subject is well-fed, a beautiful thing in societies that experience food shortages. tambu and nyasha's aunt lucia, for instance, "managed somehow to keep herself plump in spite of her tribulations . . . . and lucia was strong. she could cultivate a whole acre single-handed without rest"; these twin attributes qualify her as an "inviting prospect" to takesure, tambu's father, and, dangarembga hints, babamukuru (127). nyasha's attraction to the western ideal of femininity must be mediated, then, by her understanding of the exploitative usurpation of the healthy african female body. on a visit to the homestead, tambu's mother, mainini, pinches nyasha's breast after remarking that "the breasts are already quite large" and then asking when she is to bring them a son-in-law (130). nyasha's pathology and her belief that "angles were more attractive than curves" (135), i would insist, is not simply rooted in her desire for slimness (which it might be) but also in a rejection of the rounded contours of the *adult* female body primed for the shona matrimonial and social economy. [15] the role of food as a pawn in this struggle for control over the body is a crucial one. wolf notes that "food is the primal symbol of social worth. whom a society values, it feeds well" and "publicly apportioning food is about determining power relations" (189). she concludes that: "cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat" (190-91). this pattern is made amply clear at the christmas reunion at the homestead where babamukuru and maiguru provide the victuals. maiguru jealously guards the meat, insisting that the rotting meat be cooked and served despite its tell-tale green color, but not to the patriarchy who are served from meat that has been stored in the somewhat small refrigerator. the able women at the homestead must cook and serve the dwindling food, eating last and little, typically without complaint. they, in fact, sleep in the kitchen but their labor produced in their assigned space is not theirs to enjoy, except as scraps. [16] in babamukuru's household, women do not eat least although they must wait till he is served. even here, maiguru replicates the practices of the homestead, fawning over her husband and eating his leftovers. babamukuru puts out a token protest at her servility, following it up with a rebuke to nyasha for helping herself to the rice before he is quite finished. he, nevertheless, prides himself on his table and would have been gratified by wide-eyed and poorly-fed tambu's silent observation that "no one who ate from such a table could fail to grow fat and healthy" (69). in this case, however, it is important to note that the ability to provide plentifully gives babamukuru prestige even though maiguru's labor is just as important in accounting for the ample table. refusal to eat at such a table is tantamount to a direct challenge to his authority. he repeatedly insists that nyasha "must eat her food, all of it" or he will "stop providing for her--fees, clothes, food, everything" (189). given this, it may be somewhat easier to understand nyasha's inability to stomach the food intended to "develop" her into a valuable commodity for the market, and to serve as a token doled out to enhance her father's stature and to exercise his control over her, exhibited in multiple other ways as well. [17] babamukuru is obsessed with control in general, control over women in particular, and control over his girl-becoming-woman daughter, how much she eats, how she dresses and speaks to the elders in the family, how often and how much she talks with boys, and what she reads, all measures designed to fashion her into a "decent" woman. perhaps it might be more accurate to add that he is "pathetically" obsessed, being himself implicated in a societal system that puts men of means and education in the slot of caretaker and guardian so he must maintain and improve, juggling old and new ways, or find his own position as "good boy" (defined by a different but no less compelling rubric) jeopardized. nyasha's body and her mind, then, are pressed into babamukuru's strangely distorted project of asserting his control and preserving his status in society lest it be challenged: "i am respected in this mission," he announces, "i cannot have a daughter who behaves like a whore" (114). nyasha's questionable behavior, punished with a merciless beating, consists of coming in ten minutes later than her brother chido--who is not subject to the same rules anyway--and cousin tambu--who seldom challenges her uncle's authority or taxes him with the need to exert it--from a school dance. the survival of patriarchal ideology, of which babamukuru is torchbearer, depends on its enactment on nyasha's very person. this should not be surprising since, in postcolonial terms, the female body has often been the space where "traditional" cultural practices that ensure male control over it, encoded in words like "decency," must be preserved. babamukuru chooses which parts of traditional culture and modernity (represented through colonial education and ways) nyasha is to adopt and exhibit to maximize his status as colonial surrogate and %de facto% clan elder--a schema analogous to his acceptance of maiguru's earnings (the fruit of her western education), while insisting on her compliance with the traditional requirement of wifely obedience. the claims of traditional society, of colonial and precolonial modes of production, and of western aesthetics on nyasha's body, i would argue, together produce her pathological response. fanon's contention that "colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric disorders" (249) must be complicated by the observation that it is not only the colonial war nyasha is fighting on the turf of her body but also a battle with the megalomaniacal patriarchal control represented by babamukuru of whom she says: "sometimes i feel like i am trapped by that man" (174). her "anti-colonial" war, moreover, is complicated by her own collusion with the corrupt system she is fighting--her unwillingness to relinquish the accent acquired from her brief stay in england, her criticism of the racist dominion of colonizers while remaining standoffish with her compatriots at school, and the lack of effort at regaining her native language or contact with homestead relatives--visible to tambu but unacknowledged, or unknown to her except in her sense of herself as "hybrid," is also a factor in the war of ideas and values being narrativized on her corporeal bodily space. nyasha, "who thrived on inconsistencies," according to tambu, seems to internalize the conflicts posed by her surroundings till her tongue, body, and mind seem together to want to carry the struggle to a dramatic conclusion (116). [18] the body under siege, then, is not surprisingly the space for resistance. moreover, nyasha has exhausted the options for legitimate engagement with oppression through official means. having attempted and failed at reasoning with her father, no "usual" recourse remains. in her view, other adult women in the novel offer no viable alternatives. nyasha is quite certain that her "mother doesn't want to be respected. if people did that they'd have nothing to moan about" (78-79). having witnessed her mother maiguru's feeble and feckless flutters for freedom, when she briefly runs away to her brother's only to return five days later,^12^ nyasha, who elsewhere concedes that her mother is rather "sensible," must look for other means of resistance. maiguru's state of "entrapment," foretold for the reader in the very beginning of the novel, and reflected in her admission that she chose "security" over "self," is precisely what nyasha is seeking to avoid. aunt lucia, too, who is supposed to be an unmanageable free spirit and, commendably, rejects her paramour takesure's questionable support, ultimately disappoints nyasha by resorting to propitiate babamukuru. to nyasha's complaint that "she's been groveling ever since she arrived to get daddy to help her out. that sort of thing shouldn't be necessary," lucia pragmatically responds, "babamukuru wanted to be asked, so i asked. and now we both have what we wanted" (160). nyasha fails to appreciate that lucia's strategies are essential to her. in the final tally, maiguru, "married" to patriarchy, and tambu's mother, too tired and too traditional to engage in a sustained struggle with it, her mind never being hers to make up, remain trapped (153) while tambu--with her "finely tuned survival system" (65), and lucia are the ones who will "escape," both having learned the value of survival and relative empowerment over enactments of dramatic protest, but effecting their escape in different ways. but then nyasha does not have the benefit of hindsight endowed on the reader by tambu's prefiguring of the fate of the women in the story. her critique of women's ingratiating and subservient ways, however, is instructive. [19] the implication of women in oppressive cultural codes--the craft and guile evident in their quest for survival and advancement--is undeniably an issue here. women provide the mainstay of patriarchal structures. in her novel, _le pique-nique sur l'acropole_, louky bersianik presents a stunning embodiment of female complicity in the image of women as petrified pillars supporting the temple of erectheion in athens. acropolis, the bastion and symbol of traditional western patriarchal thought is the site of a long male banquet at which women have served as handmaidens. the homestead and the mission, too, are a picnic for men that women will cater. maiguru, lucia, and tambu's sporadic gestures of resistance are ultimately "permissible" infractions because they are followed by propitiatory gestures consonant with compliant performances of femininity and so do not seriously challenge the extant order; they "play" the system and attempt to prevail within rather than without it, ultimately gaining some modicum of satisfaction by way of security, a job, or an education--none of which, we are being told through nyasha's expostulations and actions, is adequate compensation. %a propos% of this issue, however, is the observation that nyasha herself seems to decide to give in to babamukuru's authority because "it is restful to have him pleased (196). the strategies adopted by maiguru and lucia--and on occasion nyasha herself--are survivalist in nature in contrast to her ultimate recourse to violent and destructive ones. her seeming acquiescence toward her father--a survivalist tactic--is followed, however, by a more solipsistic, private regimen of rebellion: she tells tambu "that she had embarked on a diet, to discipline [her] body and occupy [her] mind" (197). the diet and the disease become for her a holy mission; rudolph bell in _holy anorexia_ "relates the disease to the religious impulses of medieval nuns, seeing starvation as purification" (qtd. in wolf 189). to borrow fanon's words yet again, "this pathology is considered as a means whereby the organism responds to, in other words adapts itself to, the conflict it is faced with, the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure" (290).^13^ or as wolf puts it, "the anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: by starving, she masters it" (198). taking recourse to anorexia and bulimia then becomes for nyasha a pathetic means of both establishing control over her body in the only way possible and relinquishing control by giving in to a learned western pathology. [20] but let us pause. there are two issues of import here: a.) rejection of food has already been read in terms beyond the vocabulary only of anorexia and bulimia; b.) it is not only food that is being rejected by the bodily organism. with regard to the first, let us remember that tambu's mother also abjures food to protest her departure for the mission at first, and then sacred heart because she thinks education and english-ness will kill tambu as it has nhamo (184). before her departure for the mission, tambu speculates that "at babamukuru's i would have the leisure . . . to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body," the latter having been a considerable preoccupation for homestead women (59). that nyasha can afford the luxury of refusing food is certainly relevant, but it becomes less significant in light of mainini's gesture. refusal to eat is a time honored and cross-cultural form of protest. gandhi's program of %satyagraha%^14^ and fasting were pivotal in india's fight for freedom. it is interesting to pose the case of a teenage girl, hyper-conscious of the territorial offenses against her, along the same spectrum of protest activity that accommodates gandhi's lofty project of non-cooperation. the difference is that female lives are usually confined to the private sphere; female protests usually do not find outlet in public ways although one might argue that "the distinction between what is public and what is private is always a subtle one," especially if one reads the female body as implicated in the economy of male and societal desire (strachey 66). and lest we overlook the obvious, nyasha, after all, is only fourteen years old when she begins to stage her gestures of protest. [21] her rejection of food is linked to a whole set of other associated unpalatable realities: the anorexic herself tells us that the fuss is about something else altogether, "it's more than that really, more than just food. that's how it comes out, but really it's all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad" (190). nyasha's commodity status in the sexual economy, for instance, is exposed implicitly through her anorexic behavior intended to erode the body and prevent its blossoming into womanhood; but it is also exposed explicitly in a discussion on "private parts" between the cousins. the suppression of her sexuality at the same time that she is being groomed for an equipoisal matrimonial market, her fear that a tampon is the only thing that will enter her vaginal orifice "at this rate," and her recommendations, albeit playful, to tambu about the relative advantages of losing one's virginity to the sanitary device rather than to an insensitive braggart, suggest the disbalancement of the market system that would ensue, should the girls choose to transform sexual restriction into abstinence or "devalue" themselves by accidentally rupturing their precious membranes (119; 96). the threat is a potent one because virginity is desirable in unmarried women and functions symbolically, with "the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body" (douglas 11). the vulvic crime nyasha gestures at has the content of a vaginal betrayal of the patrimonial body of the state--it is the denial of heterosexual exchange, of the preservation of expected social narratives. while there is no textual evidence of her having lost her virginity thus, nyasha's larger project of making the body itself disappear by denying it nourishment tacitly promises to accomplish something of the same objective. [22] tested, tried, and unsuccessful as "good girl," it remains for nyasha to fail as "good native." confronted with her "o" level exams, nyasha transforms a test situation into a veritable trial of the soul, testing the very mettle of history. attracted and repelled in almost equal measure by colonial educational and cultural systems, nyasha reacts in a foreseeably conflicted manner to the variety of concerns weighing on her mind: she becomes obsessed with passing the exams which will test her on the colonizer's version of knowledge even while she is aware that this education is a "gift" of her father's status, and the "knowledge" itself is questionable. as her body spurns food, her mind is rejecting what the colonizers have called knowledge, and evincing a hysteric, physical revulsion to "their history. fucking liars. their bloody lies" (201). nyasha's "body language" is as loud and clear as her words for she is tearing her book to shreds with her teeth as she rages. but what is the substitute? dangarembga explains that "one of the problems that most zimbabwean people of my generation have is that we really don t have a tangible history we can relate to" (qtd. in wilkinson 190-91). not available to nyasha are the (his)stories heard in whispers from the margins, in the brief accounts given by tambu's grandmother^15^ who speaks of the history that "could not be found in the textbooks" (17), about the "wizards" who were avaricious and grasping and annexed babamukuru's spirit: "they thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator" (19). the knowledge she has been fed is less easily digested by nyasha than it is by the good native, babamukuru, although he too, incidentally, suffers from bad nerves. nyasha's protest transpires exponentially: "they've trapped us. but i won't be trapped. i'm not a good girl" (201). the moral content of "goodness," like the symbolic content of "womanhood," are recognized by nyasha as inherently bankrupt. her acute sensibility scans "goodness" as a managerial tool, rather than a moral imperative, that keeps women and natives in line. ironically, nyasha's dramatic indictment of colonial education, delivered in the language and in an approximation of the accent of the colonizer, speaks eloquently of an embattled and muddled consciousness attempting to regain control. nyasha fails in multiple ways as "good native": both in her failure to accept the totality of colonial education and in her failure to renounce it completely. [23] ultimately, then, food is only the metonymic representation of all that nyasha cannot accept and understand. her dwindling body boldly enacts the pervasive and aggregate suffering and bewilderment of colonized women caught between opposing as well as joined forces. clearly, she also does not have the stomach for the deception and lies of the colonial project or the pathetic mimicry of this project by natives like babamukuru and his confused and endearment mouthing consort, maiguru. "it's bad enough," she laments, "when . . . a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well!" (147). having learned the discourse of equality and freedom, young and confused though she might be, nyasha recognizes that the native has failed to adopt the more salubrious aspects of western humanism. the truth is that natives could learn different lessons from colonial education. instead, the overwhelming preoccupation with food and food presentation, the "eyeing and coveting" of dresses outside the mission church, tambu's visualization of a convent education in terms of a smart and clean "white blouse and dark-red pleated terylene skirt, with blazer and gloves, and a hat" (183), the ritualized attention to hierarchy at gatherings, unbridled materialism and lust for goods and items of "comfort and ease and rest" evident in the mission as tambu catalogues babamukuru and maiguru's household effects (70), the incongruous adoption of western diet and the presence and prevalence of a servile, laboring class in the very hearth of the mission, among other symptoms of a community in crisis, testify to endemic class divisions heightened by a total capitulation to commodity fetishism. the embrace of selective items of westernization by babamukuru and others, even nyasha, to the exclusion of its more useful possibilities is exposed throughout the novel. the potential for communicating the principles and values of western education is clear to babamukuru who does not approve of tambu's desire to go to the mostly white school because association with white people would cause girls "to have too much freedom," a consequence incompatible with their eminently desirable development into "decent women" appropriate for the marriage market (180). [24] at the same time that the potential for emancipation promised by the colonial encounter is left frustrate by the natives' refusal to accept the better part of western humanism, the failure of colonizers themselves to exercise those same principles which serve to legitimize their sense of superiority over "less civilized" natives is exposed through nyasha's revolt. nadel and curtis explain the psychology of colonial dominion in their introduction to _imperialism and colonialism_: "underlying all forms of imperialism is the belief--at times unshakable--of the imperial agent or nation in an inherent right, based on moral superiority as well as material might, to impose its pre-eminent values and techniques on the 'inferior' indigenous nation or society" (1). in _the conquest of america: the question of the other_, tzvetan todorov demonstrates that colonialism exerts its control by extending the principle of equality only when it withholds from its others the principle of difference. principles of democracy, freedom, and independence, that fueled the american and french revolutions as well as reforms in much of the western world did not, for instance, stand in the way of colonialism. nor did concessions to minorities in the developed world encourage officials to extend the same to colonized subjects. the excesses of african patriarchy, for instance, which repulsed european sensibilities, were tolerated "in the interest of colonial profit" while the condemnation of polygynous marriages resulted not from a concern for women but from a need "for the reproduction of the labor force" (courville 38). these contradictions are glaringly obvious to young nyasha. the colonizer's formula for accommodating the native, as she astutely observes, is to create "an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself" (178); "but, she insisted, one ought not to occupy that space. really, one ought to refuse" (179). [25] the net impact of nyasha's "refusal" seems less important than that in her, dangarembga has offered not only a textbook example of the havoc wrought by colonial and patriarchal systems, but a narrativization of the body itself in terms of conflict and resistance and its angry longing for a better, less perplexing world. in bodily terms, nyasha almost succeeds in destroying herself, in achieving, if not the body without organs--which is admittedly unrealizable anyway, at least a grotesquely unhealthy remainder of her original self. the anorexic, after all, is effectively unwomanned and left a shell of herself: "the woman has been killed off in her. she is almost not there" (wolf 197). but the woman that dies is the abject self that has never enjoyed the luxury of self-determination, that is no real woman but an insubstantial changeling who functions as token and currency in the labor and matrimonial market. nyasha's pathological persona enacts a multi-pronged assault on a complex and interwoven system that involves the body and the mind, patriarchy and the female body, colonialism and history, reinscribing the text of history and psycho-social sexuality, of corpus and socius (deleuze and guattari 150). nyasha has attempted an attack on the corporeal to annihilate the symbolic. what is left is the bwo which is "what remains when you take everything away. what you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances [sic] and subjectifications as a whole" (151). whether the violence of her rebellion has left her more "stratified--organized, signified, subjected" must be determined in light of the only choices that remained; for finding out how to make the bwo is "a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. it is where everything is played out" (161;151). [26] nyasha's offensive against her bodily self reenacts the narrative of violence on woman and native while at the same time gesturing at the possibility of agency: signaling from the bathroom and the bedroom (her favorite retreats) that a more pervasive insurgence, a more public and widespread struggle by women for freedom from the patriarchal and colonial order may be soon to follow. this promise is manifested not only in tambu and lucia's "escape," but in recent campaigns against female abuse in zimbabwe and organized assistance for abused and disenfranchised women. these struggles must be recognized no matter what shape they are in; a responsible reading must reinstate female praxis to a central place in feminist and postcolonial politics. given such a reading, one might say that regardless of the fact that tambu is mildly disapproving of her cousin's behavior, the text of nyasha's "bodybildungsroman" (in kathy acker's memorable neologism) does tell zimbabwean girls stories about themselves in terms that expose the crises they are likely to encounter. nyasha's condition reveals to her cousin her own impending crisis; when the cornerstone of one's security begins to "crumble," she admits that "you start worrying about yourself" (199). the import of nyasha's theatrics might be measured in terms of its placement within the larger context of female and postcolonial existence in a society struggling to reconcile competing and conflicted narratives. the promise of something gained is evident in the textual arrangement of the narrative as well, in the parting words of tambu, who had once said "it did not take long for me to learn that they [whites] were in fact more beautiful [than blacks] and then i was able to love them" (104), and who at the end of the novel ominously remarks that "seeds do grow" (203) and "something in my mind began to assert itself" (204). the novel, after all, is a kunstler and bildungsroman which catalogues tambu's maturation even as she functions as the amanuensis of nyasha's performances. tambu's changing consciousness is the stuff of hope; it is no less than the promise of a different text, a whole new corpus, in the future. notes: ^1^ "the status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent" (20). ^2^ for this last realization, i am indebted to my friend ritch calvin\koons who collaborated with me on a performance dialogue on the novel at the international conference on narrative literature in vancouver in 1994. ^3^ nyasha begins to engage in starvation (anorexic) and purging (bulimic) activities when she is fourteen. anorexia and bulimia are provisionally being described as western female pathologies because, according to naomi wolf, "anorexia and bulimia are female maladies: from 90 to 95 percent of anorexics and bulimics are women" and most western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics (181; 183). i would suggest that industrialization and development in the ersatz third-world countries and contact with "first world" cultures may be producing a similar profile among women in the developing world although research in this area remains scant. nyasha's illness, interestingly enough, is not recognized by a white psychiatrist because "africans did not suffer in the way we had described" (201). at a conference in november 1993, i heard a graduate student paper on anorexia based on research for her dissertation. the student had been interviewing women anorexics in western countries and was surprised when i suggested that she might investigate instances in the non-western parts of the world. she had never considered the possibility. for the moment, it would appear, anorexia and bulimia remain western preserves. ^4^ this is noted by sally mcwilliams in her analysis of the novel: "their [nyasha and tambu's] personal histories are undergoing radical repositioning at the same time as their political histories are altering" (111). ^5^ in her interview with george and scott, the author states, "western literary analysis always calls nyasha self-destructive, but i'm not sure whether she is self-destructive" (314). ^6^ forthcoming interview. see complete reference in "works cited." ^7^ kristeva suggests that the ultimate abjection occurs at the moment of birth, "in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10). ^8^ this paper does not discuss colonialism and patriarchy as pathologies although this aspect of all projects of domination is an important one to bear in mind nor does it investigate the case of babamukuru as controlled by colonial education and traditional cultural codes--fruitful subjects for quite another discussion. ^9^ jeremiah also "steals" his daughter and pregnant sister-in-law, lucia's labor when he takes credit for thatching a roof they have been slaving to mend. ^10^ a white woman in town gives her money for the maize entirely because she misconstrues tambu's enterprise for "child labour. slavery" (28), the only language available for explaining tambu's presence in the city as a seller of green maize. she nevertheless takes pity on tambu and gives her money for the school fees after mr. matimba, her headmaster explains (and exaggerates) her predicament. ^11^ in the interest of fairness, one must acknowledge that education does not free babamukuru either from service to patriarchy and neo-colonialism. it is nyasha once again who recognizes that "they did it to them too . . . . to both of them [babamukuru and maiguru] but especially to him. they put him through it all" (200). his positioning within these systems, however, is so different from maiguru's that his story, in some ways the same as that of the women, still tells a different tale that would require a significantly different critical model to explain it. ^12^ nyasha complains that "she always runs to men . . . . there's no hope" (175). ^13^ it may be useful to note at this juncture that both fanon and dangarembga were trained in medicine and psychology. ^14^ hindi for passive resistance. ^15^ in her interview with george and scott, dangarembga explains her rationale for the grandmother figure: i didn't have a grandmother or a person in my family who was a historian who could tell me about the recent past. and so i felt the lack of such a history very much more. i'm sure that other zimbabwean women who perhaps did have that need fulfilled in reality would not have felt such a lack, such a dearth as i did, and would not have felt so strongly compelled to create a figure like the grandmother's in _nervous conditions_. (311-12) works cited: bersianik, louky. _le pique-nique sur l'acropole: cahiers d'ancyl_. montreal: vlb editeur, 1979. bordo, susan. "the body and reproduction of femininity: a feminist appropriation of foucault." _gender/body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing_. ed. alison m. jaggar and susan bordo. new brunswick, nj: rutgers up, 1992. braidotti, rosi. "organs without bodies." _differences_ 1.1 (winter 1989): 147-61. courville, cindy. "re-examining patriarchy as a mode of production: the case of zimbabwe." _theorizing black feminisms: the visionary pragmatism of black women_. london: routledge, 1993. 31-43. dangarembga, tsitsi. _nervous conditions_. seattle: seal, 1988. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. douglas, mary. _purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo_. london: routledge, 1966. fanon, franz. _the wretched of the earth_. trans. constance farrington. new york: grove, 1963. george, rosemary marangoly, and helen scott. "an interview with tsitsi dangarembga." _novel: a forum of fiction_ 26 (1993): 309-19. grosz, elizabeth. _sexual subversions: three french feminists_. sydney: unwin, 1989. kristeva, julia. _powers of horror: an essay on abjection_. trans. leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia up, 1982. mcwilliams, sally. "tsitsi dangarembga's nervous conditions: at the crossroads of feminism and postcolonialism." _world literature written in english_ 31.1 (1991): 103-112. mohanty, chandra talpade, et al. _third world women and the politics of feminism_. bloomington: indiana up, 1991. ---. "under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses." _boundary 2_ 12.3/13.1 (spring/fall 1984): 333-58. ogundipe-leslie, molara. "african women, culture, and another development." _theorizing black feminisms: the visionary pragmatism of black women_. london: routledge, 1993. 102-117. nadel, george h. and perry curtis, eds. _imperialism and colonialism_. new york: macmillan, 1964. sartre, jean-paul. preface. _the wretched of the earth_. by frantz fanon. trans. constance farrington. new york: grove, 1963. 7-31. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. forthcoming interview in _between the lines: south asians on postcolonial identity and culture_. ed. deepika bahri and mary vasudeva. philadelphia: temple up, 1995. strachey, lytton. _queen victoria_. london: collins, 1968 [1921]. taussig, michael. _the nervous system_. new york: routledge, 1992. thomas, sue. "killing the hysteric in the colonized's house: tsitsi dangarembga's nervous conditions." _journal of commonwealth literature_ 27.1 (1992): 26-36. todorov, tzvetan. _the conquest of america: the question of the other_. trans. richard howard. new york: harper, 1984. wilkinson, jane. _talking with african writers: interviews with african poets, playwrights and novelists_. london: heinemann, 1990. wolf, naomi. _the beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women_. new york: anchor-doubleday, 1991. ---. _fire with fire: the new female power and how it will change the 21st century_. new york: random house, 1993. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------barker, 'nietzsche/derrida, blanchot/beckett: fragmentary progressions of the unnamable', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-barker-nietzschederrida.txt archive pmc-list, file barker.995. part 1/1, total size 71707 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- nietzsche/derrida, blanchot/beckett: fragmentary progressions of the unnamable by stephen barker school of the arts university of california-irvine sfbarker@uci.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by stephen barker, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. i. parallax: toward a nietzschean genealogy of the paramodern fragment [1] to attempt any genealogy, let alone a nietzschean one, of the kind of fragment one confronts in nietzsche, derrida, blanchot, and beckett, and to do so within the context of the faux-postmodern,^1^ is to invite more and less obvious problems of orchestration, content, and performativity. since my desire is to %demonstrate the effect% of the paramodern fragment and its vertiginous effect, from philosophy to "literature," i will desire here instead to move a %poiesis% of the conception and the use of this disruptive and transgressive site; at this site we will discover a poetic nietzschean and a critique of what derrida in _truth in painting_ calls the parergonal, as a parasite, and thus marginal and contiguous to something - something that may be a nothing -ostensibly %not% in any margin, a fragmentary circularity. [2] what is the work of which the marginal, the parergonal, the fragmentary, is outside? how is one to map this exchange, of terms and of texts, and how will this economy of the marginal, the transgressive, the nameless, or unnamable, operate within the aestheticized space of writing and reading? [3] the work required to address these questions, adumbrated in nietzsche's questions at the beginning of _beyond good and evil_, is the work of philosophy: the will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect -what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! what strange, wicked, questionable questions! . . . until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. we asked about the %value% of this will. suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? (1) for nietzsche, the nature of the philosophical enterprise, which is simultaneously a poetic exercise, is imbued with the interrogation of the "strange," the "wicked," and the "questionable." the work of philosophy is a ubiquitous %vielleicht%, the "perhaps" of the circular question of value. in nietzsche's own work, when "we finally come to a complete stop" we are, like heraclitus, just beginning to %re%value the stasis by which our questioning is marked. these opening fragments of _beyond good and evil_ have come to fascinate derrida more and more in recent years, with their implicit questions not only of truth and value but of the transgressive desire for %untruth% that transparently shines through the cruder truth-questions with which we seem to occupy ourselves. this subtler work is addressed by derrida as work to economize on the abyss: not only save oneself from falling into the bottomless depths by weaving and folding the cloth to infinity, textual art of the reprise, multiplication of patches within patches, but also establish the laws of appropriation, formalize the rules which constrain the logic of the abyss and which shuttle between the economic %and% the aneconomic, the raising and the fall, the abyssal operation which can only work toward the releve and that in it which regularly reproduces collapse. (_truth in painting_, 37) but the collapse of the abyssal operation, described in such vertiginous language by derrida (as both a fall and %releve%) does not and cannot occur, as derrida shows, because of the laws of formalization beyond which the law, and the articulation of the law, cannot go, and which must therefore remain the nameless name. the fall and the %releve% are both consummate transgressions, by which the law of genre, and thus of aculturation, is formed. in derrida's elliptical shard, as he economizes on the abyss, the fragment behaves as such: no grammatical sign to open, no period to close the period of its semantic passage: an imitative strategy of abyssal subversion. thus is the shard, like fragmentarity itself, revealed as oxymoronic: as a parergon in the imperative voice; a parodic work outside the work operating, it seems, %sui generis%, within earshot of blanchot's %noli me legere% but reading nonetheless. [4] if, as nietzsche declares, the world is a work of art that gives birth to itself, does it give birth wholly? in part? can a fragment be born? what is the gestation of a fragment, on and as the margin? and how is this metaphorical and dialectical birth, split from itself as both general and regional economy, in bataille's terms, finally transgressive?^2^ of what would such a transgressive, fragmented birth consist, and how would it delimit and define the world thus born? these questions lie at the metaphorical core of, and are perpetually addressed by and in the work of blanchot and beckett, as they are in that of nietzsche and derrida, (de)forming a web of associational vectors linking strategies of writing and reading. any (apocryphal) core of this work is radically metaphorical, and thus a function of the connectives, the affinities and tropic tightropes, by which metaphorical associations are forged: the core is and is not a core, but always dispersed out into magnetic, imagistic constellations; meaning and value (as revaluation), so-called, are functions of this elementalism. [5] %[stage direction: "nietzsche" and "derrida," voices in a conversation outside time, as though these voices were speaking into cups connected by a wire, stretched taut like zarathustra's parodic tightrope; on this discursive filament a tropic dance takes place. two figures appear on the wire/tightrope: a tightrope walker, sliding across the humming wire; then, second, a darkly liminal figure, who harries the first, disrupting the performance. there is danger of a fall, but always counteracted by the danger of a releve; no fall occurs. story's end, like that of all fragmentary stories, is the (impossible) death of transgression itself -and of the fragment; the figures suspended on the filament of discourse are "blanchot's the step not beyond (le pas au-dela)," the tightrope walker, and "beckett's the unnamable (l'inommable)," the ironist.]% [6] nietzsche and derrida as philosophers of the fragment; nietzsche for a poetics of aphoristic compactness, derrida for highly-styled fragmentary and interrogative treatments of marginality and presence. beckett and blanchot as poets of the fragment. beckett knew nietzsche and blanchot but not derrida; blanchot knows nietzsche, derrida, and beckett. nietzsche read none of the others; derrida reads all. %voila pour l'histoire%. [7] transgression is never complete(d). transgression means inherent structures and strategies of reversal and subversion in which, for example, nietzsche aestheticizes the world ("a work of art that gives birth to itself"), but as a world of existential -bodily - proportions; he very strategically goes [not] beyond (another kind of %jenseits%, another dimension of [%pas%] %au-dela%), into a dionysian collapsing together of aesthetic categories and genres that form the creative labyrinth of thought. this collapsing, a disordering and fragmented reconstruction of generic distinctions and definitions, is also a transgression of derrida's law of genre, an admixture of sensory data and rational aesthetic. codes of beauty, and even of being, threaten to shatter and fall before this nietzschean reinscription, in becoming functions of parallax. nietzsche's perspectivism, manifested in both "thought" and writing -itself a synaesthetic disordering and yet the beginning of the transgressive order of the fragment -originates in what appears to be the solipsistic madness of the anthological, in "radical, secular self-creation" and the "dionysian impulse of self-submersion" (aschheim, 51). perspectivism is a function of experience in the world, of the moment of experience both blanchot and beckett seek so diligently and which is always chimerical. the chronicling of that metaphoric search produces the anthology of fictive selves and their stories, while simultaneously producing the generative conditions of work under which such stories can be produced. since self-creation demands an accounting for excess in the form of that dionysian impulse, such stories are always alien. the resultant radical synaesthesia produces incandescent fragments as enigmatic as heraclitus's, and like the heraclitan fragment simultaneously infused with wit and weight, with an unbearable lightness and an inconceivable portentousness. [8] to lay out a paramodern map, then, pointing toward an aesthetic of disruption characterized by nietzsche, clarified and codified by derrida, implemented by blanchot and beckett, one might start with five propositional fragments: 1. (%transposing the modern; the paramodern permutation%): addressing the paramodern means confronting the possibilities of a transgressive permutation of the modern, subtle but radical, from a humanistic, artist-centered revolutionary viewing of the world to a para-humanist, mediatized, %theorized% positionality which is not a worldview. the human being, as such, beginning with the body, is placed beyond the margin of the paramodern, and what remain are surrogates, echoes, mechanized %topoi% of the "space of the individual" in an economy of identification and consumption that cannot return to the subjective substance of the modern, but that floats next to the tenacious, energetic modernist world, a parasite on it and its transpositions from the enlightenment and romanticism. 2. (%the nietzschean world and its synaesthesia%): nietzsche synthesizes this permutated world in his aesthetic ("a work of art that gives birth to itself"), which consists of a strategic denigration of the rational positivist tradition of anthropomorphic agency written out of the elevation of reason, repression and suppression of emotion, circumscription of the imagination, and privileging of the artist-eye perspective. for nietzsche the world consists of an absolute parallax, infinite points of view determined and defined by and within a fragmented poetic fabrication. nietzsche's anti-representationalism sets the terms for the performative theoretical space of paramodern synaesthesia as a sensory disruption, a "euphoric disorientation" producing a "dizzying pleasure" (auslander, 12). 3. (%the nonmoral inherent in the nietzschean paramodern%): as nietzsche lays it out in "on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense" and _beyond good and evil_, the %jenseits% of the nonmoral sense transcends the longing, the guilty morality of which herd society (characterized by %ressentiment%) consists, and further of the apocryphal establishment of a higher plane of morality producing the ambivalent effects of, on the one hand, a soaring (and dizzying) freedom from guilty constraint (cf. "the songs of prince vogelfrei") and, on the other, an acknowledgement that to be free of the constraints of conventional morality one must accept a refinement out of existence, assigning one's agency (as will-to-power) to language, narrative, and semantic/semiotic structures, which are now, in the paramodern, the loci of the primal drives-as-other. 4. (%the theoretical tightrope%): for the paramodern, this ambivalence itself consists of the theorization of the world, acceptance that experience is indeed virtual experience, hyper-experience, self-conscious without self, in the hypothetical fabrication of a self-position from which self-operations take place within the limits of discourse. if this is all-too-familiar familiar territory, it is chiefly because we paramoderns have accepted the %theoretical frame% of the world in which we live. in the paramodern, this relinquishing of the apparent substance of human power out of systems of sign-formation (which is not to say of communication) means that all immediacy is theoretical/hypothetical. the world is the space of theory that gives birth to itself. at the same time, this is to say that it is %poeticized%, subject to and a function of its fabrication within that theoretical framework: "the world as a %work of art that gives birth to itself%;" and on which we gaze with indifferent passion, trying to understand who, where, and what we are in this discursive, theorized, and mediatized ("videated") world. in the guise in which i want to discuss it here, this theorizing of the world is itself a zarathustran tightrope, and since in this pervasively theorized paramodern world of hyper-fabrication and hyper-poetics, as nietzsche pointed out so presciently, style is everything, i want to explore the nature of a possible paramodern style, and more particularly the aphoristic/fragmentary, "parergonal" style predicated in nietzsche's and derrida's aphoristics, and how their contribution to paramodern disruption illuminates the work and the world of paramodern %poietes% whose subject-positions are named "maurice blanchot's _le pas au-dela_" and "samuel beckett's _how it is_." 5. (%why and how disruption?%): but why the "disruption" of the paramodern? it is axiomatic that in the paramodern the ironic-modern becomes the parodic-postmodern, and that the permutation we generally call postmodernism concerns itself centrally with the parallel and orchestrated subversion of modernist strategies of worldand self-formation, "revealing" them as such. this is precisely what arnold toynbee had in mind for the term "postmodern" when, in the early 50's, he first used it: to indicate a disruption of the culminative and evolutionary humanist project of modernism which, however revolutionary and innovative its fringes might have been in the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, is always grounded in assumptions about the myth of artist-presence and the validity of the experientially-contexted poetic, however much it might be critiqued and, seemingly, undermined by the "post-" (and this is why "post-modern"is such a bad designation for the machinations of the paramodern-modern). modern(ist) self-focus, that is a focus on the self, provides the culminative crisis of reality-formation that humanism fermented in the premodern world; it requires a tendentious and strategic response. this is why nietzsche did not "write a philosophy," as such, but always toward a philosophy of the future -a future that could never come, since the very nature of "a philosophy," as a constellation of reasoned and ordered structures within the rational-positivist or, now, humanist, mode, is self-serving, myopic, and finally of questionable soundness, however much it may struggle to retain its validity. the paramodern, then, is disruption -of meaning, of style, and of the philosophic and poetic project. the paramodern is pararather than postbecause of the collusive element at its core. the law, in this case subject-centered modernism, is in a necessary collaboration with its violation. thus, transgression and its re-inscription are always, as john gregg shows, incomplete: "the law always survives the infraction because the latter is in the service of the former" (13).^3^ the most telling transgression in the paramodern is precisely where blanchot and beckett mark it: at the inception of the subject-claim they want to subvert. gregg claims that blanchot -and the same is as true or truer for beckett - "situates the origin of reading at the very moment that the author is dismissed from the work. . . . reading is thus the disappearance of both a personal author %and% a personal reader" (57). in this emergent disruption lies the origin of the %noli me legere% which characterizes all four of these writers' works, and which begins in the very (de)structure of the text itself.^4^ %aphorism% from the greek %aphorizein%, to mark off, divide, from %apo%(from) + %horizein% (to bound) = from or outside the bounds, across the threshold [liminal, transgressive]. %fragment% from the latin %frangere%, to break = (n) a part broken away from the whole; broken piece; detached, isolated, or incomplete part; a part of an unfinished whole; (v) to break into fragments. [9] nietzsche is said to write aphoristically -but in fact this is rarely true. while whole sections of _beyond good and evil_, _the gay science_, _zarathustra_, and other works are "truly" aphoristic -that is, liminal, most are fragments that not only do not close and do not aid memory, but actively thwart these -in favor of the active forgetting required for the breakage of the fragment, not the closure of the aphorism. [10] the fragment is will-to-power as art, "itself" consisting of difference and of the dialectical tension between general and regional economies, consisting further of %not% will, %not% power, %not% a step beyond, distilled in the fragmentary, as these nearly-contiguous fragments from nietzsche ("the will-to-power as art") demonstrate: the work of art where it appears without an artist, e.g. as body, as organization. . . . to what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage. the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself. the phenomenon "artist" is still the most transparent - to see through it to the basic instincts of power, nature, etc.! also those of religion and morality! "play," the useless . . . . all art exercises the power of suggestion over the muscles and senses. . . . the aesthetic state possesses a superabundance of means of communication, together with an extreme receptivity for stimuli and signs. it constitutes the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures -it is the source of languages. the artist who began to understand himself would misunderstand himself. one is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call "form" as content, as "the matter itself." to be sure, then one belongs in a topsy-turvy world: for thenceforth content becomes something merely formal -our life included. we possess art lest we perish of the truth. (_the will to power_ 796-822) [11] nietzsche's thematic, fragmentary coagulations across the white patches on the page, fragmentation whose weight and meaning collapse in on themselves, is an interrogative critique. nietzsche's paramodern consists of the step (not) beyond what heidegger calls "the quest for the proper word and the unique name" to a %topos% "without nostalgia" (though not without memory); "that is," as derrida says, "the outside of the myth of a purely material or paternal language . . . in a certain nietzschean laughter and a certain step of the dance." (see _margins of philosophy_, 27). this is the tightrope logic of nietzsche's paramodern fragment. extra-aphoristic liminality underlies the contestation of apollinian particulars "existentially made comfortable to what %can be known%," as ofelia schutte points out (21). the dionysian principle of dynamic continuity is violated to such an extent that dionysus' only recourse is to take revenge on humanity "by condemning it to perpetual fragmentation" (21). fragmentation, then, is the dionysian threat in reaction to reason and the law. [12] in nietzsche, this dionysian threat becomes a transgressive practice, in which fragmentary style is part of an effort to "atomize" poetic discourse and philosophy, to "return" it to its basic semantic and grammatical ingredients. only interpolations of sense emanate from the %noli me legere% of nietzsche's fragmentary logic, marking a portentous opening from and to a void. fragmentation is for nietzsche an inescapable solipsism, carefully and energetically distinguished from and in contradictinction to what he calls "philosophy so far." his aphoristic and fragmentary works are themselves, as he calls them in _the gay science_, %freigeisterei%, "free-spirit works," thus marking their extra-moral sense and their play on (and away from) the surface. in this transgressive (non-) designation in which the aphorism, or the fragment, is to be seen as the free spirit, at the same time one must remember that the %freigeisterei%, in their flight from reason and the law, must accept in that flight the slippage that makes them "%vogelfrei%," "free-birds," as in the songs of prince vogelfrei with which _the gay science_ concludes. these "free-bird songs" begin with a short poem "to goethe," the first stanza of which declares that, das unvergangliche ist nur dein gleichnis! gott der verfangliche ist dichter-erschleichnis . . . [the intransitory is but your parable! god the ineluctable is poetic pretension . . . ] (_gay science_, 350) here nietzsche borrows shards and fragments from goethe's chorus mysticus at the conclusion of _faust_, part two, where goethe makes precisely the opposite claim: "what is %destructible% is but a parable." nietzsche's appropriation from and parody of goethe's parabolic song, here in the song of the free-bird, compounds the transgressive nature of the %vogelfrei%, who is not only a %freigeist% but also (as nietzsche points out) an escaped criminal, a bird who has broken free and who can (and should) be killed on sight; that is, whose freedom is dramatically curtailed by the sentence of death and marked by a double transgression, commission of a crime and escape from prison.^5^ the %freigeist% is a quintessentially liminal figure adumbrating those in blanchot, beckett, and the paramodern. [13] thus the outcome of nietzsche's strategic fragmentation is a radical atomism insisting that we "cannot legitimately group together individual momentary experiences or sensations" (mcgowan, 72), but then %do just that%, precisely to show that the "legitimation"of such a grouping is always its illegitimacy, its danger, the manifestation of %die treibe%, the "drives" (nietzsche's word, not yet freud's) both within and (not) beyond writing. this atomism is echoed in the elementalistic language strategies of blanchot and beckett, in which the most fundamental elements are examined for inclusion and rejection. [14] but in a reversal of expectation as dramatic as anything in these texts, the nietzsche-position on the fragment and thus to the nature of meaning can present itself in all of its duplicity, as these two contiguous fragments from _beyond good and evil_ demonstrate: (222) poet and liar. -the poet considers the liar a foster brother whom he did out of his milk. hence his brother remained weak and wretched and never even attained a good conscience. (223) vicarious senses. -"our eyes are also intended for hearing,"said an old father confessor who had become deaf; "and among the blind he that has the longest ears is king." this juxtaposition emphasizes the atomism and synaesthesia -the poetic violence -of the nietzschean disruption which, as a disruption of the senses, is for nietzsche a gateway to pre-semiotic writing drives, and at the same time a strategic and parodic juxtaposition of (not) logical discourse, another step (not) beyond. thus art, for nietzsche, in its very subjectivity is an exploding of the subject as chimerical aesthetic object, an ontological de-realizing that undermines and destroys the law-as-subject and replaces it with the tension of and in language-as-other(ing), a "reduction of the subject to an effect of antagonistic forces" (sloterdijk, 16), the drives by which writing operates. [15] derrida, like nietzsche, plays within the forcefield of those enigmatic and antagonistic %treiben%; derrida's writing recapitulates the %vogelfrei%-position taken a step (not) beyond nietzsche's. in derrida's quasi-aphorisms it is impossible to discern what the fragment's "trajectory" might be: it is always a function of the parergon of declaration, semiotically marginal or liminal. the fragment, as derrida says, knows of no proper itinerary which would lead from its beginning to its end and back again, nor does its movement admit of a center. because it is structurally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning. there is no end to its parodying play with meaning, grafted here and there, beyond any contextual body or finite code . . . . its secret is rather the possibility that indeed it might have no secret, that it might only be pretending to be simulating some hidden truth within its folds. its limit is not only stipulated by its structure but is in fact intimately con-fused with it. (133) for derrida, as for nietzsche, the fragment's fragmentation is both limit and ineluctable transgression of the limit. derrida's playful anthropomorphism in this passage operates as a paramodern reminder of the modernist notion of immanent meaning, itself fragmented in the paramodern and pointing toward an evolutionary developmental step (not) beyond nietzsche: as derrida remarks, "if nietzsche had indeed meant to say something, might it not be just that limit to the will to mean which, much as a necessarily differential will to power, is forever divided; folded and manifolded" (133). the "differential will to power" to which derrida points finds its difference (and of course its %differance%) in the gulf between text (as other) and decoder of text, but also within the tensions and textures of difference within the fragment-heap of the paramodern text itself. [16] to investigate both the inner and outer differential wills to power manifested by the paramodern text, we must return to the nietzschean notion of the %vogelfrei% and its appropriation in derrida's articulation of "%les paroles soufflees%," words spirited away from (and to) the law, %mots voles%. for derrida, word theft (sometimes euphemistically called "appropriation"), by reader, writer, and text "itself," by the paramodern %vogelfrei% in language and culture, and thus within experience itself, is the theft of a trace. thus the transgression is an act outside the law that enforces the law. the poetic logic of the fragment and its disruption in both nietzsche and derrida is the theft of a trace from any quasi-originary source and from any %telos% of value or meaning. for the free-bird, this theft, and its resultant mortal danger (that is, the return of the dionysian) produces, to cite a nietzschean fragment, "the greatest danger that always hovers over humanity, and still hovers over it," which is "the eruption of madness -which means the eruption of the mind's lack of discipline." if for a moment we seem to have come full circle to an echo of platonism, derrida immediately adds that this greatest danger, madness, is not to be eradicated nor suppressed, but rather needs to be "%eternally defended%" (_the gay science_, 76), as the very core of the paramodern disruption. nietzsche's reference to a lack of discipline alludes not to chaos nor nihilism but to "an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with and within poetry," in which poetry (and %poiesis%), as the art of making and of making whole) is "continuously avoided and contradicted" (_the gay science_ 92). all such (anti-) poetry theory and practice (what nietzsche calls "everything abstract") becomes the parodic focus of a strategic re-incursion into the modernist agenda, and "wants to be read as a prank against poetry and as with a mocking voice" (_the gay science_, 92). [17] for derrida, as for nietzsche, this "madness" is a question of death and of the disruption of a theoretical %topoi% without hysteria, the transgression of the law that is the law. for derrida, fragment-thinking insists on its radical liminality and leads to the most abyssal of dialectically encrypted thoughts. here derrida takes up the genealogical baton and creates conditions for a paramodern %poiesis%: how are we to think %simultaneously%, on the one hand, %differance% as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, %differance% as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? (_margins of philosophy_, 19) in this impossible simultaneity of thinking, what i have called fragment-thinking, lies the seed of the "impossible presence" which, as "irreparable loss of presence," reveals the death instinct as a theoretical condition at the center of every human exchange, every "economy." thus the death instinct is not merely nihilistic nor morbid, which would be but another inscription of modernism, but a parallel or virtual subject-position for the concept, as derrida has shown: the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself. essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. (_ margins_, 11) any play of differences must of course involve both space and time, and must involve the re-theorization of the space in which it occurs. in "aphorism countertime," some reflections on writing, time, and the fragment within the context of a critique of the proper name in _romeo and juliet_, derrida disfigures the proper name of aphorism by calling attention to the fact that the apocryphal originary whole of any fragment is built not only on the death but on the denial of the/any whole and on the destruction of sequential logic, even while recalling a sequential logic that hovers like a shadow across the texts derrida's aphoristic fragments from "aphorism countertime"show: 1. as its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation (%apo%), it terminates delimits, arrests (%horizo%). it brings to an end by separating, it separates in order to end (%finir%) and to define (%definir%). [inherent in the end is the difference by which we know that an end cannot occur, a law that defies the law.] 2. an aphorism is an exposure to contretemps. it exposes discourse -hands it over to contretemps. literally -because it is abandoning a word [%une parole%] to its letter. [the word is thus always stolen.] 3. the aphorism of discourse of dissociation: each sentence, each paragraph dedicates itself to separation, it shuts itself up, whether one likes it or not, in the solitude of its proper duration. its encounter and its contact with the other are always given over to chance, to whatever may befall, good or ill. nothing is absolutely assured, neither the linking nor the order. one aphorism in the series can come before or after the other, before and after the other, each can survive the other -and in the other series.</dd> 4. this aphoristic series crosses over another one. because it traces, aphorism lives on, it lives much longer than its present and it lives longer than life. death sentence. it gives and carries death, but in order to make a decision thus on a sentence of death, it suspends death, it stops it once more. 5. there would not be any contretemps, nor an anachrony, if the separation between monads only disjointed interiorities. (attridge, 416) not only so-called interiorities are disjointed by fragmentary separation; the law of the fragment is not one of absolute disintegration nor of erosion but of proliferation and expansion. the paramodern fragment is a network transgressing without transforming, opens without ending, just as the last aphorism in a series is not closed but hangs suspended, as nietzsche and derrida show, truncated and never concluded. as nietzsche so emphatically declares, any seeming finality of %content% is undermined and synaesthetized by %form%. enter the tightrope walker. [18] %content synaestheticized by form%: this is what blanchot refers to as the step (not) beyond, %le pas au-dela%, and which in the book of that enigmatic name forms the central strategy of juxtaposition, looping, and %pharmakon%-logic. blanchot's is a fragmentation of oscillatory complexity, a play of arching connections and non-sequituurs that inserts itself into the textual space and into narrativity, producing there a virtual narrativity and a radically undermined mimetic theory of literature and of narrative. blanchot enters the marketplace of reversal in which "nothing is absolutely assured, neither the linking nor the order, that "gives and carries . . . a sentence of death" but which at the same time "suspends death, . . . stops it once more." this space is prohibition and transgression, denial and passing (not) beyond of the subject, just as nietzsche's paramodern aesthetics enacts at once the prohibition/denial and the transgression/displacement of the subject/artist. we see before us the potential for a metalepsis to the "sentence of death:" if subjectivity is now a "contained, agonistic entity" (sloterdijk, x), then any pretense to representation is the result of this agonistic, a function of the inherent tensions between forces, and is %not mimetic%. here, the positionality named "aesthetic subject" or "aesthetic object" is a purely dialectical constellation emphatically not a mirror or reflection of a "self" emphatically not "unified" but unrepresentable and contaminated. ii. blanchot's fragmented subject [19] good reasons exist for the historical suppression of play/%differance%/writing. they entail terrible burdens: the %frisson% of "absolute loss," death, dissolution, anxiety -in nietzschean terms, the forgetting of apollinian order and reason and the remembering of dionysian suffering. thus literature, in the paramodern, reveals what it conceals: its movement toward and play with its own disappearance in silence, at the threshold of discourse. this movement is a forgetting and forgetfulness of the subject-position; in derrida, it is the advent of %differance% and the liminality of the law and its transgression; in beckett, it is the approach to silence and its corollary, the parodic gesture of the impossible heap of meaning. absence in and of the text, and of the textual subject. [20] blanchot manifests this absence by radically fragmenting the subject position: "'i' never arrives there, not as an individual that i am, this particle of dust, nor the me of all that is supposed to represent the absolute consciousness of self: but only the ignorance that incarnated the i-that-dies in accessing this space where, dying, he never dies as 'i,' in the first person" (gregg 16). impossible to know who is speaking (no "who" is speaking), an inevitable outcome of the perpetual and ubiquitous failure of any metaphoric leap to the %ubermensch%. thus, blanchot's text (_le pas au-dela_) is testimony to the absence, the impossibility, of testimony; quasi-testimony as fragment, %trace%, always performative evidence of a %poiesis%. [21] signs of the simulation of testimony by a quasi-subject pervades _le pas au-dela_, such that any page is characterized and marked by its appearance, from the diamond-shaped bullets marking each fragment to the page's "look" of fragmented sparcity. characteristics of this double page as emblematic of the work are such things as multiple voices, lists, key terms and obsessions, complete diffusion of subject-position: blanchot's page 64-65 appears here. image available from jefferson.village.virginia.edu by ftp, in: /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.995/images (see contents for further instructions). [22] blanchot's text is, as derek attridge points out, a "turning back on the literary institution, . . . linked to the act of a literary performativity and a critical performativity" attempting to "question, analyze, and transform this strange contradiction, this institutionless institution" (41). like nietzsche's and derrida's, blanchot's text explores the aphoristic click of %difference% and the fragmentary ellipsis of differance with an obsessive regard for %contretemps% and the ramifications of dissociation. blanchot has listened to derrida echo nietzsche in admonishing that writing is "a performance of theoretical propositions in the poetic 'space'" (kamuf 144), just as derrida has listened to blanchot the (paramodern) poetic formalist in exploring the "invention" of an aesthetic "truth" by remembering and appropriating %poiesis% (meant here as "invention," in the greek sense) %as a simulacrum%. paramodern %poiesis% sees that literary "truth" is the discursive theoretical link between derrida's confrontation of aphorism/fragment in "aphorism countertime" and blanchot's similar confrontation in _le pas au-dela_. the spaces of poetry and of philosophy (or, as here, theory) circumscribe each other and "take each other's measure" (kamuf, 145). [23] in so doing, these spaces enact their own tightrope walk of steps taken and not taken. blanchot is obsessed in this text with both the texture and the tendentiousness of additive fragments oscillating within a strategic slippage. for blanchot in _le pas au-dela_, this slippage takes a particularly nietzschean form recalling and offering testimony to zarathustra and the tightrope: transcendence, transgression: names too close to one another not to make us distrustful of them. would transgression not be a less compromising way to name "transcendence"in seeming to distance it from its theological meaning? whether it is moral, logical, philosophical, does not transgression continue to make allusion to what remains sacred both in the thought of the limit and in this demarcation, impossible to think, which would introduce the never and always accomplished crossing of the limit into every thought. even the notion of the cut in its strictly epistemological rigor makes it easier to compromise, allowing for the possibility of overstepping (or of rupturing) that we are always ready to let ourselves be granted, even if it is only a metaphor. (27) blanchot is here troubled by the dialectical tension not only of impossible transcendence and impossible transgression but also between the fragmentary elements of blanchot's book (i.e. its contiguity) and whatever "message" the text offers us (i.e. its continuity). this particular fragment occurs in a section of the text exploring the notion of "luck," and is immediately followed by the statement, at the beginning of the next fragment, that "it is not only with the law that luck has a remarkable relationship" (27). blanchot goes on to point out, very much within the context of his suggestion of the slippage of "transcendence" %into% "transgression," that desire and luck operate within the ineluctable slippage between law as limit and transgression, the transgression of the law being the inception of another law, etc., as derrida so clearly points out.^6^ [24] this play of transcendence and transgression, luck and desire, inevitably finds its way into the parodic play of "voice" in blanchot, which amounts to "the obscure combat between language and presence, always lost by one and by the other, but all the same won by presence, even if this be only as presence of language" (31), given that, as "blanchot"'s "voice" "tells" "us," %i am not master of language. i listen to it only in its effacement, effacing myself in it, towards this silent limit where it waits for one to lead it back in order to speak, there where presence fails as it fails there where desire carries it. (30)% blanchot's impossible claim of "self-effacement" ("i efface myself in language, and therefore am and am not its master") occurs in the discursive play of desire, luck, and transgression. [25] fragmentarity speaks directly to the ontology and teleology of the text. but this paramodern fragmentarity remains without referent to a whole, as a non-representational space emblemizing and echoing nietzsche's atomistic dispersion; the space of the %simulacrum%. blanchot: the fragment. there is no experience of it, in the sense that one does not admit it in any form of present, that it would remain without subject if it took place, thus excluding every present and all presence, as it would be excluded from them. fragments, marks of the fragmentary, referring to the fragmentary that refers to nothing and has no proper reference, nevertheless attesting to it, pieces that do not compose themselves, are not part of any whole, except to make fragmentary, not separated or isolated, always, on the contrary, effects of separation, separation always separated, the passion of the fragmentary effects of effects. (49) here, early in _le pas au-dela_, blanchot has read the fragment-world as beckett will read it, as a virtual series, a mobius strip that demonstrates the "passion of the fragmentary effects of effects" and is always the "effect of separation." in this passage, blanchot narrates the enervation of the fragmentary, down to the helix of self-referential repetition: since the fragment cannot take place in any present, it cannot be part of experience and, further "would remain without subject if it took place." this future conditional is the most unreliable of markers, a double exclusion, refusing presence and to be present. its referent: nothing. "nevertheless," blanchot teases, the non-reference of the paramodern fragment (which we are reading; a double immersion in subject-denial) continues to "attest" to reference in "pieces that do not compose themselves" and "are not part of any whole." [26] fragmented, atomized, but never isolated. the paramodern fragment transgresses even separation to become a "separation always separated," the division of division, for which no cure exists. here the %paramodern% death wish surfaces again, and will not conceal itself. the "fragmentary effects of effects," tending toward the beckettian heap, circles on itself in a stasis of language that is at once still and in motion. like the paramodern fragment, the fragmentary %effect% (which is death itself, an effect that cannot take place) piles itself before us relentlessly and limitlessly. as for nietzsche and derrida, for blanchot the acknowledgement of the paramodern fragment produces the death-effect in and of language, as a threshold or fold of a slippage in which each proper step (%pas%) is a misstep. the "%pas%" of the completely passive -the "step /not beyond"? -is rather the folding back up, unfolding itself, of a relation of strangeness that is neither suffered nor assumed. transgressive passivity, dying in which nothing is suffered, nothing acted, which is unconcerned and takes on a name only by neglecting the dying of others. (122) in "folding" itself, that is in its articulation, the slippage of the paramodern fragment, the %pas% or %ne pas%, unfolds itself, revealing itself as a nonreferential space whose relativism is "completely passive" and internalized with no duration and no presence. what blanchot calls the "transgressive passivity" of the fragment and of fragmentivity, as a constitutive "dying in which nothing is suffered, nothing acted" brings us abruptly face to face with the fragmentary strategy of the unnamable. in "taking a name only by neglecting the dying of others," the liminal and transgressive step onto the tightrope of the paramodern, then, signals the entrance to the realm of the unnamable, the paramodern jester. [27] as though bearing the weight of baudrillard's dead hand of the past, blanchot has been a co-visionary in beckett's unnamable cosmos. while beckett's _the unnamable_ operates through an alternative logic of excess, in which another use is made of the liminal language of the fragment, it is closely related to blanchot's strategy in the last two fragments we have considered. [28] beckett, however, sees the fragment in a more microscopic (elemental) way: in _the unnamable_ the fragment is part of a sea of undifferentiated fragments in which the play of %differance% is minutely interstitial, dramatically demonstrated in the syntactic structuration of the page itself and its denial of the subject-position of the writer or the reader. blanchot has demonstrated some of this: segments that seem to flow together eventually swirling around themselves until they begin to chase their own momentum, finally achieving a kind of static circularity that denies syntactic progression and the "period" of prose or poetry in its duration as writing and for the consciousness of the reader. the expected release of information in the fragmentarity of blanchot, as in beckett, is halted, indeed imploded, and yet %goes on%: it can't go on; it goes on. _the unnamable_ consists entirely of these unstructured and yet highly structured reversals of expectation, bringing character, substantiality, and any veracity of narrative radically and unresolvedly into question. iii. beckett's unnamable meaning to mean [29] beckett's %recit% (or is it actually a novel?) consists of eighteen paragraph-like divisions, the first seventeen of which are caught, like blanchot's, derrida's, and nietzsche's, on a tightrope somewhere between fiction and abstract discourse. they tell a story -without telling a story; they mark or trace a virtual story in what must be called the "storyesque." we can recognize the genealogy of the story-fragment through nietzsche in these sections, and the taxonomy of the story/theory aphorism through derrida. but for beckett, these short, first-person narratives then develop into something quite different. the eighteenth quasi-paragraph, the final one in the text, is 157 pages long, and goes through a series of disintegrative steps (%pas%) that turn the "paragraph" increasingly in on itself until its very punctuation disintegrates (the final three pages are without full stops -with the exception of the final enigmatic period, the mark of closure with [the book stops] and without [satisfaction in the conclusion of the narrative is withheld] closure). this last section consists of a series of often-aphoristic phrases linked together by commas, which syntactically connect all the phrases into appositives even when they seem to "represent" full-stop positionalities, and seem to indicate, in their (non)sense, sentence-divisions. [30] if beckett is playing, as are nietzsche, derrida, and blanchot, with the energization and enervation, the exhaustion and exhilaration, of style, his poetics of disruption and fragmentation requires an energy opposite to that required of the reader in nietzsche's aphoristic experiments. his style is subtly and powerfully anti-representational, rewriting the relationship between the individual word and image and their cumulative result, seemingly attempting to form an additive agency (to "amount to something," as in beckett's image of the impossible heap in _endgame_ and elsewhere) but always problematizing that agency through a fragmented aphoristics that denies morality, "author," subject, and %telos%, fabricating a solipsistic prose. [31] the very idea of the first-person, with all of its claims to agency, is undermined in beckett, who uses it to confess the absolute conundrum of the paramodern storyteller. "where now? who now? when now?" (3) the text begins, setting out the terse, journalistic conditions by which the quasi-narrator will proceed. then, a few lines later, "what am i to do, what shall i do, what should i do, in my position, how proceed? by aporia pure and simple?" [32] as the nietzschean logic of the fragment has shown us, "aporia pure and simple" is impossible. on the other hand, we have seen the way in which impossibility discourses with possibility %chez% blanchot, and that this aspect of tightrope logic is a seminal aspect of the transgressive texts of blanchot and beckett. to recall libertson's words, since paramodern art is "a mobilization of possibility which . . . realizes too late its essential rapport with impossibility, and realizes that its unwavering trajectory toward failure is its only 'authenticity,'" the impossibility of aporia becomes %more than% possible; indeed, it becomes the general economy of failure through which beckett operates, and within which the discourse of "possibility" and "impossibility" is the mark of the regional economy of criticism attempting to do it justice. this is what blanchot means when he declares, in _l'entretien infini_, that "%l'interdit marque le point o&ugrave; cesse le pouvoir. . . .% elle designe ce qui est radicalement hors de portee: l'atteinte de l'inaccessible, le franchissement de l'infranchissable" (308). this outside-of-reach-ness to which blanchot refers is the aporia of possible/impossible within which both blanchot and beckett write. [33] for beckett, this discourse of fragments in their liminal heap requires something more than aporia, since the gaps by which we recognize the paramodern are held in place by the gestures of a poetic prose operating in the tightrope logic of %poiesis% we have visited in blanchot. this "something more" beckett immediately provides: "i should mention before going any further, any further on, that i say aporia without knowing what it means. can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares?" aporia compounded by aporia. once we have looked it up, discovering that ephectic means "lost in rhetoric" -can one indeed be lost in rhetoric otherwise than unawares? -and that the aporia is deepened (if this were not impossible) by beckett's qualification and explanation of it, one is forcibly reminded of the radical resistance to readability beckett's %noli me legere% presents, keeping all questions unresolved, in flux, in a perpetual %agon% inhabiting, beckett seems to tell us, the very nature of language itself. this is to be "one's" "experience" of it. but beckett goes on: can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? i don't know. with the yesses and the noes it is different, they will come back to me as i go along and how, like a bird, to shit on them all without exception. the fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that i shall have to speak of things of which i cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that i, which is if possible even more interesting, that i shall have to, i forget, no matter. and at the same time i am obliged to speak. i shall never be silent. never. (291) to be silent (further echoes of hamlet), one must possess a silent "i," or cease to operate in a world of %differance;% one must erase the differend. alternatively, one might float at the very edge of silence with impunity, even transgress its law. and indeed, beckett has here produced not paragraphs, not aphorisms, but paragraph-elements declaring that if meaning is in the surface of the text (if it is anywhere), if the representative or mimetic quality of the text is truly eradicable while not eradicating the text itself, as nietzsche called for (i.e. if the subject disappears, leaving only the "base metal" of writing itself), then this is the result: an insular, hermetic, self-conscious prose that, while radically self-aware, remains subjectless and interstitial. or, as the characterless voice of the unnamable occupying the subject position in _the unnamable_ says: i'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that i am they, all of them, all of those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that i'm something quite different, a quite different thing" (386) this "i" to which the writing in _the unnamable_ refers, as "a quite different thing," is in fact something quite %diff&eacute:rant%, inscribed as other, precisely as beckett indicates in his non-characterological narrative. important, further, to remember that _the unnamable_ is written in the "first person impossible" beckett adopts for his subject-less texts of liminal subjectivity in which the upright pronoun does not represent any subject but the voided subject position, "this dust of words." indeed, beckett further inscribes the otherness of the subject-position in this dizzingly detached anti-space by going on (without going on): . . . i'm something different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that i listen, and that i seek . . . . (386) %et que j'ecoute, et que je cherche. . .% a poetics of desire, of remnants and remains. here, any notion of the transcendental teleology of aphorism is eradicated; what remains, as remains, is the impossible heap, in equivalency, transmuting and permutating before our eyes into their own negations, authorizing the page on which they are to be found, and simultaneously, opaquely, remaining behind, earthbound yet afloat. beckett operates here as the ironist on a tightrope of paramodern discourse, a perpetual-motion machine poised at the threshold of the abyss yet always slipping on away from it, forcing us to rely on these substantial and insubstantial words. and why? toward what end?: the storyesque, as we have confronted it in blanchot: . . . to have them carry me into my story, the words that remain, my old story, which i've forgotten, far from here, through the noise, through the door, into the silence, that must be it, it's too late, perhaps it's too late, perhaps they have, how would i know, in the silence you don't know, perhaps it's the door, perhaps i'm at the door, that would surprise me, perhaps it's i, perhaps somewhere or other it was i, i can depart, all this time i've journeyed without knowing it, it's i now at the door, what door, what's a door doing here, it's the last words, the true last, or it's the murmurs, the murmurs are coming, i know that well, no, not even that . . . (413) beckett's pseudo-teleology here, the death-wish parodied into the word-wish for silence beyond the door, the threshold, of words which, like the door of the law in kafka's parable, cannot be and cannot %but% be transgressed, permits only the slippage of discursive permutations back into the fold of words, even if they take the form of quasi-words mechanically anthropomorphosed - murmurs, always "far from here" and always "too late," but with the tendentious possibility of "carrying me [the objective pronoun] into my story," always in the future conditional. in this notion of the transgressive fragmentation of language, the door of sense can only be opened (transgressed) in the storyesque, and always operates to occlude the subjecthood of experience that would cross over. this dialectic of limitation and limitedness, of the possible and the impossible, points toward the nameless non-transcendence of the fragment. indeed, as beckett concludes, "how would i know?" [34] to be at the threshold of those longed-for end-words, behind which might be the impossible silence; to define, as beckett's quasi-protagonist does, that space ("what's a door doing here, it's the last words, the true last"); and then to slip (not) beyond that defining certainty into the contingent fragmentarity by which story is (not) in the storyesque ("the last words, the true last, or it's the murmurs, the murmurs are coming") in murmurs that are "here," and then not "here," and then not known at all. . . . this unnamable condition is the resistance to synthesis, the unreadability of what bataille calls "supplication sans espoir" (_l'experience interieure_, 47). no wonder beckett ends (and begins) _the unnamable_ with a critique of "going on," finishing with "i can't go on, i'll go on," having started with "keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." as derrida says, there is no name for it. . . . this unnamable is not an ineffable being which no name could approach. . . . this unnamable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names. (_margins of philosophy_, 26) "the chains of substitutions of names" define beckett's strategic effacement as the signature of a radically problematic presence of law as separation in the condition of an eternal simulacrum. for nietzsche, derrida, blanchot, and beckett, %poiesis% is unavoidable simulacrum, what derrida calls %ineviterability%. the othering at the center of paramodern %poiesis%, and its inscription of the unnamable, is, derrida claims, "prenomial"(_margins_, 26), ineviterable, transgression that "dislocates itself." thus beckett's impossible heap, what linda hutcheon calls "a flux of contextualized identities" (_a poetics of postmodernism_, 59), wanders, refusing to follow lines of symmetrical and integral inverses, at play, announcing or testifying to "the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end" (_margins_, 7). [35] progressions of the unnamable, proceeding from nietzsche's elementalism, which initiates the critique of narrative as well as of truth. in the paramodern, such legitimation is always its own illegitimation and its danger, "the manifestation of the drives beyond and within writing" (mcgowan, 72), revealing an "originary violence" (mcgowan 117) repressed by the metaphysics of narrativity in an effort to "embody a logic of self-preservation," while "%differance% points toward self-dissolution," stepping (not) beyond the master/slave dialectic of disrupted representations endemic to discourse itself. "progressions of the unnamable," "poetics of disruption"; these are themselves oxymoronic literary spaces of contradiction, since to "make" such a "poetics" must be to step (not) beyond %poiesis%, an internal call for another limit there on the tightrope of paramodern discourse, the step (not) beyond. notes: ^1^ i have explored, in a series of essays, the strategic parallel strategy of subversion within the so-called modern, at least from the enlightenment to the present. because this mapping clearly shows the dialectical nature of a subversive parallel aesthetic texturality at work, i have jettisoned the common "postmodern," as a ruinously-flawed %meconaissance%, and adopted the more accurate "paramodern," which also contains, as shall become increasingly obvious here, the reverberation of the parasite, which is precisely the way in which the paramodern should be read. ^2^ no discussion of blanchot, beckett, the marginal, and transgression can proceed without reference to bataille who, throughout his work, explores the nature of excess and the creative negativity of the margin. bataille's discussion of the economy of transgression (general and regional) can be found in the _oeuvres completes_ vii-viii. see also joseph libertson's _proximity: levinas, blanchot, bataille and communication_ (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1982), chapter two, for a discussion of transgression in bataille and blanchot. one must distinguish between bataille's notion of transgression as general economy and of "failure as a virtue" (gregg, 15) and foucault's notion of transgression, as laid out in his "a preface to transgression," published in 1963. for foucault, as roy boyne points out, transgression is "magnetic, wonderful, unnameable, and waiting to reveal the face of the absolutely unacceptable" (boyne 80-81). many of the themes developed in this essay are adumbrated in foucault's transgressive which, though it at first appears to be a metaphysical or transcendental phenomenon, is finally an issue of identity and madness: "our face in an %other% mirror, not the face of the other seen through our mirror, the mirror of reason" (boyne 81). for foucault as for bataille, an uncrossable limit cannot exist except as a "non-positive affirmation," which is just the sort of abyssal space blanchot and beckett introduce. ^3^ gregg has a good deal to say, very usefully, about the relationship between the transgressive and the economy of the law. his _maurice blanchot and the literature of transgression_ (princeton, 1994) is a fine study of the ways in which blanchot relates, through bataille's regional and general economy, to the nietzschean world of contingency. gregg adumbrates a thorough sense of the paramodern in his work, particularly in his sense of the vertiginous inherent in blanchot's writing. gregg states that at the heart of the aesthetic experience is the transgression of the law. this is emblemized in orpheus' turning -for the second time -to look at eurydice, thus losing her forever. that turn is the unavoidable, endemic transgression of the divine law, the turn "marks the point at which power and mastery cease to be his overriding concerns and are replaced by the dispossession of fascination" (47). this turning symbolizes for gregg the central elements of transgression: impatience and desire. orpheus' glance is in fact the %success% of the aesthetic process, since in it he maintains the %distance% between the impossible figure of eurydice and himself, producing the perpetual "approach to an ever-receding horizon that remains perpatually out of reach" (47). this transgression of success itself -the "failure"of art is indeed its success, as gregg shows libertson pointing out, renders art a "mobilization of possibility which . . . realizes too late its essential rapport with impossibility, and realizes that its only unwavering trajectory toward failure is its only 'authenticity'" (146; gregg 48). this inversion of so-called success and so-called failure is an emblematic marker for both blanchot and beckett, as it is for nietzsche and derrida. ^4^ as a parody of the %noli me tangere% with which jesus confronts mary magdalene immediately following the resurrection, this %noli% marks the exclusion of any possible "writer" from any conceivable text. if christ is the inspiration for the transgressive nature of the disruptive texts of nietzsche/derrida/blanchot/beckett, mallarme is the catalyst: "the volume takes place all alone: done, been" (gregg 57). as both limit and unavoidable invitation to transgress the limit/law, the text circulates between these poles in a series of looped returns concentrated in the aphorism. ^5^ for blanchot and beckett, the issue of transgression and the fragment is integrally enmeshed with the theme of death. transgression, in writing, is a spectacle in which culture witnesses the illegal without committing it. but the transgression -the "text itself," and in the texts in question this is compounded by the paramodern strategies of fragmentation and parody -leads finally to sacrifice, in which death itself is transferred to a figurative other [see gregg 14]. the fragment takes the form of the emblematic %sparagmos%, parodying the nature of the sacrifice without giving up its agency. ^6^ for blanchot, as we have seen, "transgression" is a "less compromising way to name" "transcendence," since "transgression" always re-introduces the notion of the limit and the law "into every thought." in this circularity, every advance is a regression, every success a failure, every completion another opening. the same strategy of reversal takes place in beckett's work. works cited: auslander, philip. _presence and resistance: postmodernism and cultural politics in contemporary american performance_. ann arbor: the u of michigan p. 1992. bataille, george. _l'experience interieure_. 1943. -----. _oeuvres completes_ vii-viii. paris: gallimard. 1973. beckett, samuel. _the unnamable_. new york: grove press. 1958. blanchot, maurice. _l'entretien infini_. paris: gallimard. 1969. -----. _the infinite conversation_. trans. susan hanson. minneapolis: u of minnesota p. 1993. -----. _the step not beyond_. albany: suny press. 1992. boyne, roy. _foucault and derrida: the other side of reason_. london: unwin hyman. 1990. derrida, jacques. 'aphorism countertime.' _jacques derrida: acts of literature_. new york: routledge. 1992. -----. _margins of philosophy_. trans. alan bass. chicago: u of chicago p. 1972. -----. _the truth in painting_. trans. geoff bennington and ian mcleod. chicago: u of chicago p. 1987. goethe, johan von. _faust_. trans. philip wayne. baltimore: penguin books. 1962. gregg, john. _maurice blanchot and the literature of transgression_. princeton, n.j.: princeton up. 1994. hutcheon, linda. _a poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction_. new york: routledge. 1988. kamuf, peggy. _a derrida reader: between the blinds_. new york: columbia up. 1991. libertson, joseph. _proximity: levinas, blanchot, bataille, and communication_. the hague: martinus nijhoff. 1982. mcgowan, john. _postmodernism and its critics_. ithaca, n.y.: cornell up. 1991. nietzsche, friedrich. _beyond good and evil_. trans. walter kaufmann. new york: vintage books. 1966. -----. _the gay science_. trans. walter kaufmann. new york: vintage books. 1974. -----. _thus spake zarathustra_. trans. walter kaufmann. new york: vintage books. 1966. -----. _the will to power_. trans and ed. walter kaufmann. new york: vintage books. 1968. shutte, ofelia. _beyond nihilism: nietzsche without masks_. chicago: u of chicago p. 1984. sloterdijk, peter. _thinker on stage: nietzsche's materialism_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p. 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------selinger, 'important pleasures and others: michael palmer, ronald johnson', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-selinger-important.txt archive pmc-list, file selinger.594. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 91423 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- important pleasures and others: michael palmer, ronald johnson by eric murphy selinger department of english george washington university selinger@gwis.circ.gwu.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by eric murphy selinger, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] are the pleasures of experimental poetry important?^1^ william wordsworth certainly thought so. the "experiment" of _lyrical ballads_ was published, he tells his readers in the "preface," in the hope that it "might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quality of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart" (153). such pleasure is not, he hastens to add, "a matter of *amusement*" or mere "*taste*." rather, the "immediate pleasure" that the poet is to supply is an "homage" to "the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels, and lives, and moves." the pleasure of poetry testifies to the beauty of the universe and the dignity of man; it inculcates the linked romantic values of social comradeship and natural inquiry. "we have no sympathy," the poet tells us, even with those in pain, "but what is propagated by pleasure"; likewise "we have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn up from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone" (166-7). [2] it's hard for me not to play oscar wilde to these earnest pronouncements. *how are you, my dear william? what brings you to experimental poetry? oh, pleasure, pleasure! what else should bring one anywhere?* it's still harder not to read them as historical artifacts, relics of an aesthetic and a psychology that poe, dostoevsky, lautreamont, and freud, among so many others, have debunked, and which research into the brain's endorphin reward-system has yet to revise and reinscribe into general repute. but if his talk of pleasure sounds a little out of date, wordsworth's insistence on the social and political importance of "experimental" poetry still echoes in academic accounts of such verse (and prose) in the last decade.^2^ peter quartermain thus speaks of the "moral imperative" that underwrites a tradition of "disjunctive poetics" from stein and zukofsky to susan howe; and he quotes william carlos williams's warning that while "it is difficult / to get the news from poems," people "die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there" (20). jerome j. mcgann, in a polemical moment, declares that the variety of experimental verse called language poetry "does not propose for its immediate object pleasure," but rather exposes the "illusions of pleasure" that capitalist culture has "constructed," thus allowing readers to "gain a certain freedom from their power" ("response," 312).^3^ even the cheery and skeptical marjorie perloff, who opens her volume _poetic license_ by describing postmodern "poe(t)heory" as "a very pleasurable activity," closes it with a stern reminder of the task at hand: "what [susan] howe calls the 'occult ferocity of origin' is an obstacle only a persistent 'edging and dodging' will displace," she tells her readers, "if we are serious about 'taking the forest'" (5; 310).^4^ [3] there's something suspect about pleasure, after all. the "text of pleasure," in barthes' terms, "contents" us; it "comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a *comfortable* practice of reading" (14). comfortable? the shame of it. such a comfortable practice reduces poetry to what wordsworth called "a matter of amusement . . . as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or frontiniac or sherry" (166), and what michael palmer has more recently disparaged as "a kind of decor in one's life . . . the kind of thing for hammock and lemonade" (127). in an "age of media" (perloff) when pleasure has become a "cultural commodity" (gilbert 249), in a period when "no writing," so it's said, "can offer a comfortable place to be" (reinfeld 152), how much more *important* seems barthes' "text of %jouissance%, the text that imposes a state of loss . . . that *dis*comforts . . . [and] brings to a crisis [one's] relation with language" (14, my emphasis).^5^ the pleasure one takes in such loss, discomfort, and crisis--such threat, anxiety, and terror, to borrow three terms from palmer's "conversation"--seems less to be stressed than the "profound human risk" it involves, the way reading and writing return to sublime status as confrontations with "the mysteries of reference" (126-7). these are the pleasures of what's difficult, a struggler's just rewards. [4] i have a certain sympathy for this rhetoric of risk and mystery. but since wordsworth justified the difficulties of romantic experimental poetry by invoking the political and epistemological importance of pleasure, it seems oddly incomplete to justify the difficulty of postmodern experimental work through invocations of disruption, subversion, and mystery--threats to, overwhelmings of, our knowledge and our power--while leaving the matter of pleasure to languish, all-but unaddressed.^6^ (even burke, after all, calls the test of the sublime *delightful* horror.) not all experimental poetry gives the same pleasures, of course. not all pleases, or even aims to please. but it seems time to reopen the question of pleasure, and not simply in the terms that the poets themselves have articulated. in this essay, therefore, i explore two texts, michael palmer's _sun_ (1988) and ronald johnson's long poem _ark_ (c. 1970-1990), which have not only given me pleasure, but also brought me to reflect on the sources and the implications of that enjoyment, the degree to which it comes from reading against the poet's grain. like wordsworth's "experiment," with its violation of the "formal engagements" expected by the public, both texts require readers to "experience an evacuation and failure of their customary reading privileges," at least those connected to straightforward syntax, narrative structure, and a coherent speaking subject (mcgann, "response," 312). but i find that both also restore me, eventually, to a sense of my readerly capacity, though they do so in the names of very different, even opposed, aesthetic and ethical traditions. palmer is a poet of the sublime, if of that limited sublimity of shock which lyotard finds at the heart of the postmodern. johnson, by contrast, is a poet of the beautiful. a rare vocation in experimental verse, at least in the last twenty years. and, perhaps, an *important* one as well. [5] what are the pleasures of michael palmer's work? according to mr. william logan in his _new york times_ review of _sun_, "reading mr. palmer's poetry is like listening to serial music or slamming your head against a street-light stanchion. somewhere, you're sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing, but for most people the only pleasure it can possibly have is the pleasure of its being over."^7^ four years earlier, in the same publication, palmer had found a more insightful and more sympathetic critic: perhaps one of the "masochists" that logan has in mind. for while rosemarie waldrop found palmer's _first figure_ to be "a meditation on language that will not stay within the range of comfort," she still finds that the poems there "seduce us immediately," in part because of the way the poet attends to "the wounds inflicted by consciousness," and to "the fault within our perception, our language, our mind." the "acute intelligence" of his investigations gives pleasure, apparently, as does the poet's willingness to confess and explore the way that language fails us. she quotes two lines from "french for april fools": "once i could not tell of it / and now i cannot speak at all" (14). [6] in _sun_ the poet continues to seduce through his attention to faults and wounds and incapacities. but the unspeakable and dumbstriking "it" of the earlier book takes on a political cast, as palmer moves to write a poetry as responsive, in some sense, to adorno's stern dictum about art after auschwitz as it is to the horrors of war. this was, in retrospect, perhaps to be expected. like the work of so many other poets in the 1980s, _sun_ evinces a "return to history, politics, and the social as vital concerns" for american verse after the well-mannered domestic epiphanies of the ford and carter years (gilbert 247-8). and, like other poems written in the decade's disjunctive "period style . . . with all its exaggerated dislocations and shifts of reference," it displays an "urge to make the pleasures of poetry somehow answerable to the intransigent realities of the social and political world" (243). but unlike most of the poetry of "textured information" that gilbert describes, _sun_ does not range a plethora of skittery local pleasures against a nagging political conscience, with pleasure "given the decided advantage" (265). the balance swings decisively in favor of concience, making the pleasure one takes in the resulting moral double-binds more nervous, more thoughtful, more significant. [7] palmer has long been interested in the way politics might inhabit poetry as something more than subject matter, particularly when by "politics" we mean something like "atrocity." in an interview from the mid-eighties, for example, palmer disdains the "poets' shuttle down to nicaragua and so on to *get* material, everyone acting like la pasionaria or something--which seems to me ultimately a complete betrayal of what is to be meant by the political," since in such work the poets "appropriate" their material and are "more than anything else, announcing in stale poetic language, 'look how much human feeling and fellow feeling i have,' self-congratulatory in that regard" ("dear lexicon" 12; 26). we might think of _sun_ as a counterpoint to efforts like carolyn forche's _the country between us_, which however shocking in its subject matter may be said to soothe us in its familiar grammar, forms of reference, and moral compass; enough so, in fact, for the book to appear as a telling allusion on the series _thirtysomething_.^8^ "there is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs," palmer writes (84). too easy, too descriptive a movement from the first to the second would seem, for him, to belie them both; too great a distance, as when the artist keeps his eye only on aesthetic reflexivites, "closing mr. circle with a single stroke," and the project is equally worthless (83). [8] the book thus aches. it's torn between the desire to "leave the initiative to words," in mallarme's lovely phrase, and a sense that words are "dumb," now, and "mangled by use," although somehow, somewhere else they might yet find their power again (37; see yenser 296). "what matters is elsewhere," a voice here says: "is other fires, with words streaming from faces before those fires. actual words elsewhere. objects elsewhere and the words to revive them" (33). the reader often catches references to a horrific, political world "elsewhere": "a necklace burning" (44); "a woman bent double in the street / screaming money money" (69). we read of what seem to be african famine victims- "the dead" who are "amid sand the few fragments / / bowl bread violet / curve swollen outward / / of flies gathered / at lips and eyes" (20)--and that desolate %nature morte% returns in a later horrific simile, where the pages of a book are, we're told, "spread out / before you in the sun / curled like leaves / black as tongues" (43). but the relationship of tongues to pages spread out in _sun_, the fragments of lives to the fragments of verse, is deeply vexed, both because of the way that such horrors are experienced by the poet, and because of what he has called "a certain level of violence in all areas of address": that is, i take it, a certain guilty and appropriative aspect to naming and represenation itself ("dear lexicon," 12). [9] let me begin with the first of these vexations, the poet's experience of "the political." in many poems of the last decade, as gilbert observes, "the world of social and political struggle presents itself . . . in a heavily mediated, prepackaged form, as information in a news broadcast" (268). while the primal scene of watching tv is rarely as visible in palmer as in gilbert's example, robert hass's "berkeley eclogue," and while palmer will not deploy hass's lyrical or self-critical "i," the two bay area poets share a keen moral consciousness of the distance between their private lives and poetic work and those "other fires" and "actual words elsewhere" (_sun_ 33). wanting not to "mis-appropriate" the political pain of others, palmer has said, he tries instead "to allow them a presence that's more reflective of the way they do occur in our--i don't know if you'd call it image-bank or simply day to day experience, which is *not* an experience of those things but which is an experience of the *images* of those things" ("dear lexicon," 13). the dead who "multiply / far from here" are piled "(as words this high)" (20); or they flicker into our lives through "the glass box" of tv, on whose screen "everything is named difference, and is always the same for that reason, since you've watched it many times before, counting the limbs" (35). [10] and the media's mediation goes yet deeper, if one may use metaphors of psychological depth in this flattened postmodern context. for while carolyn forche can and will insist on a clear distinction between what williams called "the news from poems," in which the "stress on close reading, irony, and the fiction of textual depth" will "open up more complex visions of historical circumstance" than the "degenerate form of art, neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction, never true to objective truth or subjective reality" that is "the news" broadly speaking, palmer cannot (12). any would-be "poetry of witness" in _sun_ finds itself already infected by political and cultural cliches, the "words that come from within" inflected by, drawn from, entangled in a social and linguistic world that refuses to be held at a safe and critical distance (bernstein, 39). the "impure poetry" of our messy media age must confront, not the sweat and smoke, urine and lillies, stains and shames that neruda describes in his essay of that name (128), but a more troublesome impurity of self. in "the image-base / where first glyphs are stored," palmer observes, "lucy and ethel, the kingfish / beaver and pinky lee / are spoken, die and undie / for you"; and this linguistic and vampiric resurrection for our sakes is immediately compared to "a war viewed from poolside / by philosophers and sheiks, / / senators and dialectician-priests" (74)--a series of targets drawn, i find, from the entry for "superior, unaffected observers" in a dictionary of %images recues%. [11] when we look into our hearts and write, what we see there was broadcast before. indeed, part of the disdain that palmer feels for the "anglo-american empirical tradition" of poetry--that tradition where "a poem is a place in which you tell a little story" that "easily mirrors a shared emotional experience" in "a sort of consumer verse . . . where the function of the work and the mechanisms of the poem do not admit a certain level of mystery" ("conversation," 126)--may stem from the way that such "little stories" construct and constrict our emotional lives by invoking a series of "conventional affective signs" we no longer recognize as, in fact, conventional ("dear lexicon," 27).^9^ those stories that surface in _sun_ are therefore quickly interrupted, often in order to draw the reader's attention to the shared language and imagery that does not so much produce as *replace* "experience" when one tunes in to the externalized common consciousness of television (see birkerts 61). "a word is coming up on the screen," one poem in _sun_ begins: in the meantime let me tell you a little something about myself. i was born in passaic in a small box flying over dresden one night, lovely figurines. things mushroomed after that. my cat has twelve toes, like poets in boston. upon the microwave she sits, hairless. the children they say, you are not father but a frame, waiting for a painting. like, who dreamed you up? like, gag me with a spoon. snow falls--winter. things are aglow. one hobby is southeast asia, nature another. as a child i slept beneath the bed, fists balled. a face appeared at the window, then another, the same face. we skated and dropped, covering our heads as instructed. then the music began again, its certainty intact. . . . (31) what i learn about this speaker tells me mostly about my own familiarity with the skittering, flash-cut movement, not just of "channel surfing," but of any televised discourse. "flying over dresden? wait- i thought it was passaic... what? oh, yes, look at those *lovely* figurines." the very eagerness with which i seize on "mushroomed," as in mushroom clouds, "twelve toes," as in mutations, "winter" and "aglow," as in a nuclear winter, "southeast asia" and "dropped, covering," a childhood in the sixties, suggests how pre-processed my ideas of what a baby-boomer autobiography would look and sound like have become. later mentions of "the union dead," of freud, of a levi-straussian "discourse in the tropics," prompt the same unsettling response, as i note both the literary and critical references and my glad response at their discovery. "does the central motif stand out clearly enough?" the speaker demands. impatient for the restoration of certainty, for the music to begin again, one succumbs to the lure of words already on "the screen": perhaps the same one through which, elsewhere in _sun_, "words / pass unrecognized, thinking us" (73). [12] facing the "34,000 words spread out before me / words like incarnadine, tide and cheer," palmer watches, as his readers do, the language of shakespeare slip into the language of advertising (65). but unlike eliot or mallarme, he has no hope to purify the language of the tribe; and unlike ashbery or bernstein he will not revel in the "klupzy" possibilities of cliche and mediate discourse. a poet who changed his own name after college, palmer is instead haunted by the "mysteries of reference," the problem of naming-as-such (see reinfeld 96-7). words in this book will say things on their own, as when "lace" whispers out of "necklace" (15), but words never *say things*, in a rilkean, orphic sense of the phrase, and the fact that they do not is frequently remarked on and deeply felt. (indeed, rilke's %dinggedichte%, thing-poem "the panther" shows up in a quick, sad, snapshot address: "panther, you are nothing but a page / torn from a book"; while the first imprecation "don't say things / (you can't say things)" comes from eurydice, who thus admonishes orpheus in palmer's version of the rilke poem "orpheus. euridice. hermes" [12; 24].) [13] palmer's exploration of "the sign itself" is, in part, political. in its exploration of "the mystery of how words refer and how they can empty out of conventional meanings and acquire meanings that threaten the very way that we talk to each other," he has said, poetry can expose a deep and conflicted level of language, thus "giv[ing] the lie to political rhetoric" and enacting a form of liberation, "even when [the poem] is not thematically a 'workers, throw off your chains' poem" ("conversation" 127; 136). one might argue with the logic here: a scrupulous, demanding, naive faith in reference gives the lie to political rhetoric far more quickly and effectively than this deconstructive strategy, although it pays for that efficacy with risks of its own (see argyros 81). but in his concern palmer exposes one of the central shames of contemporary poetry: a sense that the old romantic ideal of authentic naming, like that of wordsworth's "real language of men," has become the facile lingua franca of the talk show; or, worse, that it simply reinforces the old master narratives and their "discourse of power" ("interview" 6).^10^ as he worked on the "baudelaire series" which makes up the second part of _sun_, palmer observed a growing "recognition of a certain level of violence in all areas of address . . . whether that be erotic address or a more discursive form of address and so on . . ." ("dear lexicon," 12). against rilke's hope that "perhaps we are *here* in order to say: house / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window," to "say them *more* intensely than the things themselves / ever dreamed of existing" and thereby display "how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours" ("the ninth elegy," 201), palmer might thus be said to pose the familiar qualms of foucault. "we must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things," foucault writes in "the discourse on language," "or, at all events, as a practice we impose on them" (229). we may make things "ours" through words, as rilke says, only in the guilty mode of appropriation (229). [14] palmer locks horns with this dilemma in a number of ways, but most notably by insisting on the incorrigible arbitrariness of the sign, of "words / the opposite of names" ("sign," _first figure_, 43). in the place of rilke's intimate, authentic naming here we find an ungrounded "calling." what "we" have written is "something called the human poems" (5); "clouds" are "called crescent birds" (9); "this is a hazardous bed / called perilous night" (14). the long penultimate poem called "sun" begins with insistant and slippery callings, and closes with equally pluralized signatures: day one is called tongues (62) day one is called trace (63) call it alpha in lyre call it ceterae or last nights, the blue guide, grid, the private experience of the blinking man call it ones (split open) call it a scratch band from duluth (63-4) ................................ because the words disgusted me why write? signed schelling, signed an arm or a door, signed the desert to the west _____________ this is how one pictures the angel of history signed series b, signed a or letter of a, signed bakhtin's names ............... this was the trouble with the sun-dial or saint dial signed writing itself [77] the poem that follows, also called "sun," may thus begin with stark commands to name one's acts: "write this. we have burned all their villages / write this. we have burned all the villages and the people in them" (83). but within a few lines what palmer calls the "mysteries of reference" reassert themselves, complicating both the act of writing and our sense of what is to be named. write this. we have adopted their customs and their manner of dress write this. a word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an x in the notebook it says, it is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets beyond the boundaries of speech i now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing mr. circle with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her, experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf. (83) [15] the poem cannot simply indict, or witness to, american actions in southeast asia--a location signaled by the loquat leaf, the burning villages, and later references to a "plain or jars of plain of reeds" and "neak luong"--for to do so, to *name* them, would be both to "mis-appropriate" them for the poet's purposes and to collaborate in a mode of representation in which naming and power are uncomfortably allied. yet the text cannot interrogate writing itself, the very shapes of words, without risking mere evasiveness, its linguistic turn from the burnt villages to the use of suffixes revealed as a form of escape. the trace of self-loathing in that reference to "closing mr. circle" echoes similar moments from elsewhere in the text, as when, in the previous poem called "sun," a speaker's direction "let's call this the quiet city / where screams are felt as waves" soon turns to smug self-congratulation: "my speech explaining the layers went very well" (61). [16] to name the damage, to "say things," is perforce to speak the language of the fathers. to be silent, or simply aesthetical, would prove just as complicitous (see "dear lexicon" 13). the affective appeal of _sun_, at least to me, lies in its teasing-out of this uneasy double-bind. i find the heart of the volume in a short poem, the tenth section of the "baudelaire series," that takes the ambivalence of palmer's project as its subject. the poet calls it, in an interview, "the adorno poem" ("dear lexicon," 31), but i read it as his "mozart, 1935": a poem written to investigate his deep suspicion of beauty, for which his recurrent trope is music. you'll recall wallace stevens's original: "poet, be seated at the piano. / play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / its envious cacchination." but where stevens implores the poet to "be thou . . ./ the voice of this besieging pain" (131-2), palmer sees no such option: a man undergoes pain sitting at a piano knowing thousands will die while he is playing he has two thoughts about this if he should stop they would be free of pain if he could get the notes right he would be free of pain in the second case the first thought would be erased causing pain it is this instance of playing he would say to himself my eyes have grown hollow like yours my head is enlarged though empty of thought . . . do the "enlarged" head and "hollow" eyes mirror the swollen bellies and hollow eyes of the suffering, or simply display a vapidity "empty of thought" because the notes have been gotten right at last? would an end to the performance not negate the pianist himself? would a halting, stumbling performance, which would end no pain at all, somehow redistribute it, perhaps more justly? "such thoughts destroy music," the poem concludes; "and this at least is good" (19). [17] palmer's mistrust of music, of beauty, allies him with a broad range of postmodern aesthetic theory, for which jean-francois lyotard is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman. for lyotard beauty lapses into kitch, while all true art is known by shock and contradiction, by its limping imperfection. "every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the angel and, at best, comes out limping," he writes in _heidegger and "the jews"_ (34). adorno, too, according to lyotard, "understands well that to make beautiful art today is to make kitsch; that even authenticity is precluded. . . . it is important, very important, to remember that no one can--by writing, by painting, by anything--pretend to be witness and true reporter of, be 'equal' to the sublime affection, without being rendered guilty of falsification and imposture through this very pretension" (34; 45).^11^ what we have, in effect, is a sad sublimity, an art boiled down to that simmer of deprivations from which we "do not experience a simple pleasure," but rather at best "an ambivalent enjoyment" (lyotard, "the sublime and the avant-garde" 206). palmer's repeated references to jazz, especially to pianist thelonious sphere monk, suggest the bluesy, sweet and sour pleasure to be had. if _sun_ features divided characters called "a-against-herself" and "g for gramsci or geobbels," after all, it also claims a character called "t. sphere" who "speak[s] in the dark with [his] hands," perhaps playing the tune that palmer cites whose "name is let's call this" (85). [18] the broken beauty of monk's playing is an apt model for palmer's acheivement. and yet my pleasure in catching this musical allusion, like that i have taken in pointing out his references to rilke, to the "human poems" of peruvian poet cesar vallejo, and, in a faltering allusion to someone "by the name of ceran / or anlschel," to the jewish poet paul celan (whose "death-fugue" appears in a later reference to "black milk, golden hair /. . . / and a grave in the air" [21; 78-9])--all this pleasure in context is remarkably unmixed, which suggests that, as a reader, i'm at home here after all.^12^ this is, perhaps, a problem. if the "text of jouissance" that barthes describes "unsettles the consistency of our tastes, values, and memories" (14), _sun_, for me, does nothing of the sort. instead of "that other music, sort of gasped out now by the synthetron" (35) i hear the myth of orpheus, broken but replayed throughout the text; i hear the saving humor, get the jokes, i thematize discontinuities. the "we" that confesses "write this. we have burned all the villages and the people in them" doesn't really implicate the poet or his readers, i can't help but feel, but rather people like the "senator . . . proud and erect" who "want[s] desperately to read" certain moaning poems, but will not let himself (32), or like the speaker who objects to palmer's gestures at the unpresentable in a condescending tone: "how lovely the unspeakable must be. you have only to say it and it tells a story" (37).^13^ and as rosemarie waldrop intimated of the poems in _first figure_, even palmer's sense of the failures of language, of poetry, give pleasure. there's a pathos to them, as though he were the rightful ruler of some troubled land, who tells us how he'd love to help, just with a word- but can't. [19] my reading of _sun_ is admittedly partial. i have made little of the two central sections, the poems called "c," and, more important, i have hemmed in much of the possibility that palmer's poetic struggles to maintain, collapsing the expansive and mysterious wave of significations here into a single and quite limited performance of the text. in so doing i have, in effect, transformed _sun_ from a resistant, disjunctive text, one that offers a sublime intensification of the sense of being through its elements of shock, into a source of what pierre bourdieu calls "cultivated pleasure," which "feeds on . . . intertwined references, which reinforce and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art," including, in this case, works of art which ostensibly unseat cultivation and intellectual privilege (499). i have, more than likely, displayed that "paradoxical relationship to culture made up of self-confidence amid (relative) ignorance and of casualness amid familiarity, which," as bourdieu remarks, "bourgeois families hand down to their offspring as if it were an heirloom" (66). be that as it may, my reading has also, i hope, revealed something else. in addition to the pleasures of palmer's diction--the way, for example, he plays off a resonant (not to say portentous) hoard of words like "house" and "sky" and "rain" and "sun" and "words" against unexpected addresses to "king empty," "mr. duck and mr. mouse," and "fred who fell from the trapeze / / into the sawdust / and wasn't hurt at all" (6)--and alongside the pleasures of aesthetic liberation that are so great a part of any experimental art's appeal--the sense that restraints on one's own conceivable new work have been lifted, including restraints one had not known were there; the pleasures of "permission given," as grenier says of stein (204)--_sun_ offers a pleasure that even william logan might appreciate: that of inventing coherence and assigning value, of exercising those mental faculties that allow one to build and inhabit a meaningful world. [20] this stress on explicatory and contextualizing readings, on matters and pleasures of "meaning," may seem to go against palmer's experimental grain. (somewhere at my back i hear ed dorn's laughing gunslinger: "*mean*? / questioner, you got some strange / obsessions, you want to know / what something *means* after you've / seen it, after you've *been* there.... / ... / how fast are you / by the way? [28-9].) on the one hand, palmer seems to call for such a reading, so long as it does not aspire to closure or absolute authority. "when that structural rigidity of a closed form begins to tremble and we begin to feel the anxiety of losing structure," he says in his "conversation" with lee bartlett, "it can be a terrifying experience. to be resolved, it calls for a dwelling in the poem. you have to decide what your relationship to the poem is. it is a kind of poetry that insists the reader is part of the meaning, that the reader completes the circuit" (127-8). i take it that he means, therefore, that the terror *is* to be resolved, the circuit thus completed, though not closed. _sun_ itself, on the other hand, takes a more critical stance toward my (admittedly) traditional and academic reading: my picking out of references; my efforts at explication; my displacement of local language events in the name of "central" themes. as i savor the final lines about a "village . . . known as these letters--humid, sunless," i may quickly note in the margin one last evasion of rilkean naming ("known as") and a bit of wordplay that reinforces the distance between signs and signifieds (even those villages known as "these letters" are "sunless," unreached by _sun_ itself). but such marginalia, and the critical ease they suggest, sit poorly with the evident longing and unhappiness of the text. the resonant biblical allusion that closes out the book weighs this sort of "relationship" between reader and text, this sort of resolution, and finds it wanting. i am judged for my very ability to know that i am judged, and certainly for any pleasure i may take in that recognition. is it only such worry and unsettlement that proves one's readerly "dwelling"? "the villages are known as these letters," palmer writes. "the writing occurs on their walls" (86). [21] i've said that _sun_ aspires to the sublime--at least to that sublimity described by lyotard, which "does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it" (_heidegger_ 47). yet how fallen, how changed a sublimity this is! lyotard's definition gives no sense, as in longinus, that sublimity "is a kind of height and conspicuous excellence in speeches and writings," and that emotions like "lamentation, pain, and fright" stand far below it (8; 50). for longinus, a sublime passage shows its author's greatness, and rather than passing judgment on listeners might lead them to greatness as well. asyndeton, hyperbaton, abundance, breaking off in the middle of a statement--all of these rhetorical techniques, familiar from _sun_, have their place in this older conception, but angst is not their object, however much it may lead to a chastened, desirable "dwelling." we need not look back as far as longinus for examples of this older and encouraging sense of the sublime, in which terror leads to a resurgent and invigorated, rather than chastened, brio of being. in this strain emerson writes of the sublime poet milton that "the fall of man was the subject of his muse, only as a means whereby he might help to raise man again to the height of his divine nature and proportion" ("ethical writers," _early lectures_ 362). that lift would be a rather different pleasure from the sorts i've explored so far, its importance clearly different as well. and we may find it in the work of ronald johnson. [22] i introduce johnson through milton because in the last twenty years he has written an epic called _ark_ over which his poem _radi os_, a rewriting-by-excision of _paradise lost_, rests like a cathedral's dome. in _radi os_ and the foundations, the spires, and the ramparts of _ark_ we find an experimental poet still committed, for all his difficulties, to coherence, completion, a blend of sublime "too-muchness" and a beauty of resolution. where palmer is a "versionary" poet, uneasy with naming and reference as they take part in the discourse of power, johnson is an unabashed visionary: one who finds that language and art do not impose on human or even inhuman nature, but rather grow out of the world of "things" themselves, since "lawful utterance is a natural as well as human phenomenon" (finkelstein, _utopian moment_, 92). "matter delights in music, and became bach," johnson explains in one "beam" of _ark: the foundations_ (beam 7). or, as he plucks his theme out of milton in _radi os_: "o / tree / into the world, / man / the chosen / rose out of chaos: / song." [23] johnson is only eight years palmer's senior, but his epic strikes one as something closer to a generation older, a fine example of the "immanentist" postmodernism of the 1960s. it shares that older faith in a wordsworthian "high argument" for the exquisite fit between the mind and external world; it remains untroubled by the "urgent and deeply anxious desire" to reconcile pleasure and politics characteristic of the 1980s (see altieri 29-49; gilbert 243). indeed, its most urgent and axious desire seems to be to answer to the world that johnson sees described by contemporary science: a world as occluded as that of politics by the "scenic mode" of the later 1970s. as he wrote _radi os_, the poet explains, "i was taken over by blake, but with my vision of the physical universe and . . . able to try to figure out how we order the universe now. blake couldn't even look at newton. i felt if i were to do this i would have to be a blake who could also look at what we know of modern cosmology." the results, which i have explored at length elsewhere, bear out the poet's sense that "instead of being a rather flippant work of just simply putting lines and cutting out words," it is "a cosmology of the mind"; but it is in _ark: the foundations_ that the poet most clearly brings together his passions for the natural and the human sciences ("interview," 84). [24] beam 1 of the foundations thus begins with this sunrise: over the rim body of earth rays exit sun rest to full velocity to eastward pinwheeled in a sparrow's eye --jupiter compressed west to the other- wake waves on wave in wave striped white throat song ............................... as if a several silver backlit in gust the centering of these lines, their evident poise, their less-evident numerical balancing (three lines of three words, one of ten, one of one, one of six, then ten once more), enact a world of more than just bilateral symmetries. they invite, also, those basic questions of *meaning* that dorn's gunslinger mocks one for. *why* the paradox of rays that "rest to full velocity"? well, photons will "rest" at the speed of light, and must be hindered or slowed to keep them from doing so; and the sun will fire out photons when electrons in its constituent atoms, raised to a higher quantum level by the impact of one photon, "rest" to a lower energy level as the atom sends out another. some sunrays are "pinwheeled" because they enter the pinwheel-shaped iris of the bird's eye, while others, reflected back to earth from jupiter, are "compressed" or refracted by the earth's atmosphere as the other planet sinks below the horizon. (since a sparrow's eyes are on the opposite sides of its head, "able to see the seed beneath its bill--and at the same instant the hawk descending," as beam 4 explains, the bird may see both eastward and westward sights at the same time.) the "wake" of those rays, which are themselves waves, or wavicles, wakes an answer in the sound waves of the white throat song, so that as each bird joins in separately--"several" meaning "relating separately to each individual involved"--it is as though spots of silver "backlit," or reflected, lit-back the sunlight. they do so "in gust," or keen delight, as well as in gusts, or surges of melody; and human song, poetry, which sings from the electrically sparkling "nervetree," is by extension an equally natural and reflective pleasure, since "out of a stuff of rays, particles, and pulses" comes the poet who notes down and writes up the scene, himself "the artificer of reality" (beam 12).^14^ [25] it's from such links and correspondences, sometimes direct, sometimes a poet's licenced stretch, that johnson builds his _ark_. they are not new connections. his little rhyme, "perceive, perceive! reality is 'make' believe" (beam 8) puts "make" in quotes to remind us that the real is what makes us believe in it, as well as what we make through our belief; but that's a thought we find in coleridge. though the biology and physics he invokes will mark him as of our time, this invocation is itself predicted by wordsworth's "preface," with its insistence that the poet "converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, though labour and length of time, the man of science has raised up in himself" (168). finkelstein calls johnson an "unquestionably traditional, even derivative" poet (_utopian moment_ 91); and indeed, he finds he can draw on other visionary poets and mystics with only minor revisions, as when his vision of a holy fire "where the inner regions, tangled along polarized / garland, run faster than the outer" (beam 3) gives a copernican and atomic cast to dante's cosmology, revising with a quick, corrective twist. [26] like palmer, johnson eschews both the grand, romantic "i" and the oral, organic forms romanticism sponsors. but where palmer dwells on, or in, the "mysteries of reference," moving through threat, anxiety, and terror on his way to the ambivalent enjoyments i have already discussed, johnson turns to such modes as concrete poetry, quilt, and collage in order to celebrate a different mystery: the way that "things" may be "said" or sung or troped into being. in _ark: the foundations_ we find any number of shattered words and squared off blocks of print, that is to say, but none prompt much threat or fret. in beam 5, paradoxically entitled "the voices," we find o moon %in%m%in%d%in% a e a e a e a e a e w v w v w v w v w v while in beam 13 we find a vision of creation-as-division, of flux transfigured by the efflux of a %fiat lux%, embodied in the luxurious and luminescent square- f lux f lux f lux f lux f lux f lux f l ux f lux f lux f lu x f lux f lux f lux --and in beam 24 we warm ourselves at the comforting strobe of earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth where the eye picks out "hearth" and "heart" and "ear the art" in what the curmudgeonly william harmon calls "a harmlessly moralizing telegram of values" (221). i've already mentioned _radi os_, in which johnson writes a poem by erasing, or etching away, in an "infernal reading," most of the first four books of _paradise lost_. in "beams 21, 22, 23" of _ark: the foundations_, subtitled "the song of orpheus" and opening with seven lines from _radi os_, johnson similarly ventilates the book of psalms in order to discover an orphic tale hidden within.^15^ in beam 25, subtitled "a bicentennial hymn," johnson plays charles ives, stitching snippets from the "battle hymn of the republic" into "i have seen him in the watchfires / full sail, the _ruffles and flourishes_ / sifting out a glory / loosed lightning to answer / arching on." to match a spire of prospero's songs to ariel, "snipped from roger tory peterson's _a field guide to western birds_" (ark 37) there is an answering "invisible spire" of ariel's songs in response, which "consists of a tape recording" of spliced and altered birdsongs, including "a nocturne for loon and full orchestra" and an "adagio for thrushes and woodpecker quartet" (ark 38). despite the poet's desire to build "a poem which needs no reference except itself," other "invisible" elements to be found outside the poem include surprisingly relevant illustrative quotes in the oed ("planting," 2). look up "caryatid," for example--since light's angels are in beam 1 named as "caryatid / to the tides of day"--and you'll find a quote from tennyson: "two great statues, art and science, / caryatids, lifted up / a weight of emblem": a fit figure for johnson's work. look up %daimon% (from beam 10's kabbalistic %cum% leibnitzian couplet "%daimon% daimond monad i / adam kadmon in the sky"), and you'll find thoreau: "it is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid." [27] at a somewhat lower level than its announced architectural design, _ark_ is structured, like palmer's _sun_, along a highly decentralized network of connections. the hand-print that forms beam 18 displays the whorls of fingerprints, a "rhyme" for earlier references to the whorl of galaxies and to a snail's spiralled shell. the first stage of a cell-division diagram, found in beam 25, the "bicentennial hymn," looks like a sunrise, and ends with twin cells pressed against each other like two hemipheres of the brain, or like the "balanced dissent" of the united states, of matter and anti-matter, and of other divided, procreative pairs mentioned elsewhere in the text. "prosper / o / cell," that bicentennial beam begins: a bit of wordplay that reminds one of, among other things, the many lions in the text, each one an ari-el, or lion of god. these are linked to the initial figure of the sun--the lion's mane recalls the sun's corona--and they are linked to the many flowers here as well, both because "where the bee sucks, there suck i," and because many flowers have a corona of petals which unfold in answer to sunlight, so that the "answering chrystanthemum" of beam 12 is as much a reflection as birdsong and the poet's verse. the "beast" of "splendor" is "mil/ lion-hued" (beam 14); and near the end of the poem johnson mentions the leonids, a shower of shooting stars that fall in mid-november from the constellation leo: a reference that looks back to and glosses lines from the start of the book, where falling stars were said to "comb out" the moon's "lumen / horizon / in a gone-to-seed dandelion" (beam 1). [28] i could run a riff like this from _sun_ as well. stephen yenser all but does so in his review for _poetry_. but it wouldn't be as satisfying, since, while palmer's net is set to trap the fathers, johnson's threads out past the bounds of his text, connecting with the "link and bobolink" of the world at large (yenser 298, 300).^16^ even when it is not a *comfortable* read--and many passages, especially in the later or "higher" sections, still keep me at a distance, at least when i read to trace connections and work up "meanings" _ark_ is nonetheless an unabashedly *comforting* one. this self-described "darkling lion" of a poet, like thomas hardy's "darkling thrush," gives "carolings of such ecstatic sound" that we may well think there "trembles through / his happy good-night air / some blessed hope, whereof he knows" and palmer's unaware. that hope seems less specifically religious than it is a faith in the coherence and complexity of the world described by the physical sciences, where "trees, coastlines, and clouds" share their fractal structure with our lungs, bowel-linings, and neural networks, where "the golden mean appears to describe bronchial architecture as well as it does the proportions of the parthenon," and where other biological forms are built from the pattern of a fibonacci series (argyros 341-2). the threat and anxiety one may confront when faced with the mystery of reference are matched here--overmatched--by a possibility more "truly deserving of our awe and terror": "the possibility," as alexander argyros observes, "that beauty may be a perfectly natural occurence," and that the perceiving and reflective mind may itself be a "real, emergent feature of a resourceful universe" (287; 352, note 2). [29] argyros speaks of awe and terror, both elements of the sublime. yet "what we gain from such an understanding," he goes on, "is a deeply satisfying sense of connectedness with the rest of the natural world" (287): a sense more properly associated with the beautiful. it is just this vision of nature as a cosmos, of a world where beauty and complexity bootstraps its way out of chaos, that overwhelms and (in a crash of thunder and flash of lightning) spurs the poet, mid-life, into song: the circumambient! in balanced dissent: enlightenment -on abysm bent. angels caged in what i see, externity in gauged antiphony. (mid-age. brought to my knee.) 1935-70 the altitude unglued a god in a cloud, aloud exactitude the flood. (beam 2) the lawfulness and "exactitude" of lightning, and our ability to know and describe it, is as dazzling as the bolt itself. and such lines implicitly promise that our experience of the poem to come will be a similar interweaving of shock and comprehension, of brilliant and even excessive immediate impressions that will answer to reflection and systematic inquiry. but such rational activity, such successful efforts to know and to describe, do not pluck us out of the transient material world into a supersensible realm, or show the supersensible to be our final destination, as kant tells us that sublimity will do. rather, the sublime here seems not opposed to, but a constituent part of the experience of beauty: a conjunction that, of classic theorists, only wordsworth will allow. [30] so far i have dwelt on the foundations of ark, for in them the poet sets out "all themes necessary to the work ahead, to have room to turn around in over the years" ("planting," 3). as ark goes on, its movement seems increasingly self-referential, with less space given to reflecting on specific matters of perception and more to publishing the banns of this engaging spousal verse, with its "strains / legion and ingenious / put to the uses of blessing" in which "s h / a p e / s / abound enobled" (ark 46, _fountain i_). the earlier concern with cosmic and evolutionary detail has hardly been abandoned--we are, are we not, the ennobled "a p e / s" who abound near the fountain--but as we ascend through the spires to the ramparts we also find a number of poems in the imperative mode, instructions to us and to the poet himself compressed into such elegant depictions of the project as the _herm_ of ark 40: man %oeuvre% artillery: (hand-work & art-skill) askance full act, exact as skull. dance howbeit about us, ply 'nocount' abyss plumb crazy core such moments help keep ark from foundering on its own romanticism, if only by reminding one of johnson's commitment to the poem as *object*: a pattern of sound to which what i have called "meaning" is, if not irrelevant (that does the poet a disservice), then certainly only a partial experience of the "hand-work & / art-skill" at hand. (johnson's teacher in this is zukofsky, rather than wordsworth.) their frequent vernacular humor reminds us that linguistic self-reference need not be at the service of disruption or anomie, but may rather be a form of self-creation, a fractal flowering. [31] like few other contemporary poets, johnson seems to me what robert duncan called an "artist of abundancies." he has built a poem in which "every particular is an immediate happening of meaning at large," and in which "the old doctrine of correspondences is enlarged and furthered in a new process of responses, parts belonging to the architecture not only by the fittings . . . but by the resonances in the time of the whole in the reader's mind, each part as it is conceived as a member of every other part." certainly johnson "delites in puns, interlocking and separating figures, plays of things missing or things appearing 'out of order'"; and as duncan would lead us to expect, he does so not because these throw us back on the enforced mediation of language or force us to confront the mysteries of reference %per se%, but because such strategies "remind us that all orders have their justification in an order of orders" beyond the poetic work (ix). what johnson adds to duncan's vision, drawing his faith from the world of physics, is that this "order of orders" has its own methods of self-reference, which the poet's most self-conscious and reflexive work may thereby faithfully address. palmer's _sun_ is still invested in a version of the fall, in which consciousness and nature, language and being, are at odds. this is a lasting myth, one that answers to an evident and ineluctable psychological fact that we may call alienation, nausea, or melancholia, depending on our theoretical bias. but as ontology it may have run its course. nature, far from being mute and mournful (see benjamin 329-30), may be more-than-metaphorically linguistic, as self-organizing and self-referential, as woven from airy nothing, as we are. [32] i have been, i recognize, essentially uncritical regarding johnson's use of science. the poet's tone invites such naivete. johnson can be corny as kansas in august, as when he builds an arch of the names for groups of animals, "a tribe of goats / a sculk of foxes, a sett / of badgers, riches of martens," and so on, and then in a charming and inevitable gesture ushers them into his ark: "a shrewdness / of apes, labour of moles / *all in the same boat*" (ark 83, _arches xvii_ in _ark: the ramparts_, 185). he can't resist a pun, it sometimes seems, or the way one word can turn to another with a flip of vowel or consonant. "no mapped puddle skipped a pebble," he writes in ark 47, and we watch the doubled "p" of "mapped" turn a series of playful cartwheels. i suspect that these two immediately recognizable features of his work are linked, and that what joins them is a willingness to embrace both a shameful, infantine joy in rhymes and tongue-twisters, and the equally somatic pleasure children find in having their expectations, including their expectations of order and coherence in the world, raised and answered, even surfeited. in the same issue of _acts_ as palmer's "dear lexicon" interview, after all, appears a little poem called "my cat," taken from johnson's "the imaginary menagerie": "i have a cat named chaos / i teach to dance / crisscross, toss, and loss / across expanse. / / chaos in the corner, / chaos on its head. / / order out of chaos -/ hanging by a thread" (106). this is not one of johnson's major works. but it exemplifies the older poet's lack of embarassment over both nursery-rhyme simplicity and a child-like love of the enticingly coherent. [33] johnson's ability to make the sublime serve the purposes of beauty, rather than standing as an end in itself, may have something to do with this embrace of the embarassing or shameful, as opposed to the abject (see turner, _beauty_, 1-2; 17-32). it certainly puts him at odds with much modern experimental verse. "beauty is difficult," says beardsley to yeats at several points in the _cantos_ (see 74 and 80). "beauty is easy," johnson reponds. "it is the beast that is the secret" (beam 14). he can have a hard time with that beast, with making his poem, as he himself puts it, "a mirror held / to the horror." if he gives us prospero and ariel, there's no caliban or sycorax in sight, and the monsters that thoreau says we must dare to suckle--this in beam 15, a quoted "cornerstone"--seem to me rather few and far between. guy davenport finds a "brave innocence" in the poet's willingness to avoid the roles of "conscience," "political guide," and adviser on "contemporary and fashionable anxieties." "mr. johnson might just as well be writing in any century you might arbitrarily name," he observes," for all the mention he makes of his times" ("geography" 194). other critics have been less approving.^17^ in either case, here too he is unusual. we need to look beyond anglo-american poetry to find his spiritual kin, since the modernist he most calls to mind, as palmer recalls rene char, is the spanish poet jorge guillen, whose _cantico_ (_canticle_) is, like ark, at once a hymn to light and to the triumphant pleasures of finding oneself "invented" by a world that makes us its "legend," a "well-made" world that calls us to its praise (see "m_s all_" ["beyond"] and "beato sill_n" ["blessed armchair"], respectively). _cantico_ and _ark_ have both been accused of a tendency to slight the social, to sidestep history--a charge that guillen responded to in poems and essays for much of his later career (see the "introduction" to _affirmation_, 22), and one that johnson steadies himself for when he explains that "unlike other long american poems of the century, _ark_ was conceived to be a poem *without* history. a dangerous undertaking . . ." ("planting" 2). dangerous, at least in part, because without personal or social history for ballast, the poem may seem merely aesthetic, not *important*, a pleasure with nothing at stake, since by and large we no longer trust with whitman that "passionate friendship" mirrors a "harmonic universe" (davenport, "whitman" 15) or with coleridge that "'tis the sublime of man, / our noontide majesty, to know ourselves / parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!" and that "this fraternises man, this constitutes / our charities and bearings" ("religious musings," 107; ll. 44-48). [34] we may be wrong in this mistrust--it may yet prove, as frederick turner claims, that "what william james called 'the will to believe' is written in our genes," that "teleology is the best policy," and that, "paradoxically, it is utopian to attempt to do battle against our natural idealism," the instinctive itch that leads us "to expect more order and meaning in the world than it can deliver," and therefore to change the world to meet our expectations (100). with its faith in the order and beauty of the world johnson's poem leads the reader to expect more coherence and meaning in *it* than the poem often allows at first glance, and as the text is "changed" through annotations and efforts at close reading it more than requites one's patient, puzzling scrutiny. i doubt that this aesthetic exchange has much of a social effect, just as i doubt palmer's meditations on the mystery of reference have; but *ark* rewards, rather than judges, a reader's effort to make it cohere, leaving the mouth and ear satisfied in its music, and the intellect, also, new and tender and quick. two stanzas from guillen's "mas alla" capture this surge of narcisstic satisfaction: todo me comunica, vencedor, hecho mundo, su brio para ser de veras real, en triunfo. soy, mas, estoy. respiro. lo profundo es el aire. la realidad me inventa, soy su leyenda. -salve!^18^ such pleasures are certainly utopian, as finkelstein explains, offering a critical purchase on the world (98-101). but i suspect that breathing in that "brio para ser" is its own reward, that it corresponds to a movement through a crisis when the world felt as inalterably other and abject, a crisis palmer and lyotard help us envision, into the exaltation and confirmation of self that longinus describes, where one feels that "nature did not decide that man would be a low or ignoble animal; but leading us into life and into the whole cosmos as if into a kind of world's fair to be, in a way, its observers, and to be lovers of the esteem which comes to those who compete" (177)--in this case who compete by "wrestling the old ineffable" into experimental verse (johnson, beam 30). [35] palmer and johnson often seem to me halves of a single, greater poet: one who would unite, not innocence and experience, that old mutt and jeff, but emerson's duo: experience and intellect. "every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth," emerson writes in "love." "but all is sour, if seen as experience. . . . in the actual world--the painful kingdom of time and place--dwell care, and canker, and fear. with thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy" (328). dante wrote from in both worlds, as did eliot, pound, and guillen. chartres to johnson's watts towers, james merrill's epic of love and science, _the changing light at sandover_, is the nearest that contemporary poetry comes to this inclusiveness. (i suspect that its use of narrative is central to that accomplishment, although it would take another essay to make the argument.) [36] but we need not push for such a synthesis. if there's little of johnson's holy light in _sun_ or palmer's sweet, hebraic ache in _ark_, the aesthetics of the second book suggest that we may yet have an experimental poetry that aspires to beauty, to the reader's satisfaction--a poetry that starts from something remarkably close to the world-view of the natural classicists, that is to say, without yielding their new formalist results. this seems to me, whatever its ethical import, an *important* aspiration, for it gives a ringing answer to barthes' sense that we are kept at a distance from the "keen" pleasures of reading "the work," as opposed to those of playing out "the text," by the "rather depressing knowledge" that "today, one can no longer write 'like that'" (80). in its assurance of a link between the self-referential construction of the poem and the mathematical coherence of the natural world, johnson's work reminds us that the stochastic, "shit happens" poetics of what gilbert calls "textured information" may be at least as much of an imposition on the ordering impulse of the human mind as linguistic structure and closure are a human imposition on the buzzing, booming chaos of events. and in its restoration of pleasure as a "grand and elementary principle" nearly thirty years after lionel trilling declared that "the ideal of pleasure has exhausted itself, almost as if it had been actually realized and had issued in satiety and ennui," leaving an ideal of experiences that lie beyond the pleasure principle in its wake, _ark_ nags us with the thought that the pursuit of sensations of self-awareness, though they lie in pain, may be as specialized and privileged a pursuit as the one it disdains, the enlightened, %echt% american pursuit of happiness. [37] on the news this early evening, after all, i will hear about villages burning. out my window, by nothing but an accident of birth, i will see a scene far closer to johnson's _spire on the death of l.z._ (ark 34): bees purring a cappella in utter emerald cornfield till the cows come purple home this is paradise the "mysteries of reference" in palmer's poetic can better accomodate my experience of imaged awfulness than the revelatory epiphanies of johnson. yet somehow the mysteries of construction invoked throughout _ark_ offer a way *through* my not-uncommon sense of shame at such juxtapositions, into a response equally proper to the world i inhabit, to the work i have at hand, and to the life and work those burned-out villagers ought also by rights to enjoy. perhaps we need not, like the proverbial englishman, mistake discomfort for morality, as though only through guilt and struggle could our pleasures be excused (85). to say at death that "head wedded nail and hammer to the / work of vision / of the word / at hand," the _l.z._ elegy goes on, "that is paradise." there is still work--beautiful, wild work--to be done. ---------------------------------------------------------------- notes ^1^ this essay grows out of my discussion of johnson and palmer at the 1992 mla poetry division panel, chaired by robert van hallberg, on the question, "are the pleasures of experimental poetry important, and when?" ^2^ i will leave aside, for now, the history of this anhedonism. but it is worthy noting that in 1965 two essayists remarked on its importance. "our contemporary aesthetic culture does not set great store by the principle of pleasure," lionel trilling writes in "the fate of pleasure," "and it may even be said to maintain an antagonism to the principle of pleasure." susan sontag, thinking of a slightly different set of artists, observes that "in one sense, the new art and the new sensibility take a rather dim view of pleasure," since "the seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense--the pleasures of a melody that one can hum after leaving the concert hall, of characters in a novel or play whom one can recognize, identify with, and disset in terms of realistic psychological motives," and so on. she hastens to add, however, that in another sense "the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever," since it "demands less 'content' in art, and is more open to the pleasures of 'form' and style" (302-3). ^3^ the key tension in mcgann's "response to altieri" seems to me not that between capitalism and language work, but rather between pleasure and freedom: a distinction that places him in a broad tradition of thinkers for whom, as trilling says of dostoevsky, "disgust with the specious good of pleasure serves as the ground for the affirmation of spiritual freedom" (76). ^4^ to be fair, i should mention perloff's essay on "the word as such: l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry in the eighties," which stresses the aural enjoyment of "language" work: "words, that is to say, are not dependable when it comes to signification, but the play of their sounds is endlessly pleasurable" (_the dance of the intellect_, 232). in her most recent book, perloff returns to the discourse of pleasure, since if we are willing to "'go with it'" we may be "amused" by language work, and find such poems "elaborately sounded . . . appealing in their music" (_radical artifice_, 205). yet i am struck, once again, by the way perloff feels impelled to close out _radical artifice_ on a horatorical note, describing john cage as "preoccupied with . . . ultimately political topics." as her clinching comment on his work this observation anticipates an audience for whom the "aural," "visual," "dialectic," "semantic," "or for that matter, literary" paths through cage's work are less important than his underlying political concern. ^5^ "_pleasure / bliss_," writes barthes: "terminologically, there is always a vacillation i stumble, i err. in any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete" (4). that said, however, barthes makes good use of his perpetually faltering paradigm; and handled with all due lightness, the pair prove a useful heuristic. ^6^ this inattention to pleasure is hardly limited to those who write about experimental verse. as barbara packer has argued, "the analysis of mechanisms of delight, which used to be as important a part of the old rhetorical education as moral improvement, has been pushed to the margins of critical discourse," so that professors of english lack a sophisticated and respectable language for deliberating the pleasures of chaucer, as well as charles bernstein (26). when pleasure *is* mentioned, as when roger gilbert finds that the sentences of ron silliman's _what_ "give pleasure . . . through their wit, their allusiveness, their visuality, their phonetic texture, their descriptive precision, or their sheer unlikeliness," delight is still writ small, a matter of local "*fun*" rather than a "grand elementary principle" (261). ^7^ i quote this in the knowledge that palmer can give as good as he gets. in 1987, when _sulfur_ published a review by sven birkerts critical of john ashbery's _selected poems_, then invited masthead members to respond, palmer called the article "diffuse and pointless," and wrote that he heard in its accusations of an ashberian "nihilism" "the all-too-familiar whine of the bourgeois subject, threatened with the loss of its delights, its constituted meanings and its empty identity" (154). ^8^ the fact that michael steadman had been too busy with his job at the advertising firm daa to read forche's collection was meant to reinforce our sense that he was being drawn inexorably away from the political concern of his youth in the 1960s--and also from his emblematically named wife, hope. ^9^ palmer's distrust of telling a little story--his distrust, it is safe to say, of narrative--may also be illuminated by mcgann's comments on the nonand anti-narrative impulse in language poets. "narrativity is an especially problematic feature of discourse, to these writers, because its structures lay down 'stories' which serve to limit and order the field of experience, in particular the field of social and historical experience. narrativity is, in this view, an inherently conservative feature of discourse, and hence it is undermined at every point" ("contemporary poetry" 267). for a convincing counter-argument in favor of narrative, however, see argyros' chapter "narrative and chaos" (307-322). ^10^ perloff's chapter "the changing face of common intercourse: talk poetry, talk show, and the scene of writing" (_radical artifice_ 29-53) is perhaps the best available exposition of the first of these embarrassments, especially in her withering reading of philip levine's poem "to cipriano, in the wind." i am not sure, however, that a poetry of *moderate* artifice--say a poetry that embraces the traditional artificialities of meter, rhyme, and theatrical or performative selfhood, of the sort we find in merrill or pinsky--would prove less cogent a response than perloff's radical poetics to this "changing face." ^11^ in the "acts" interview, it is worth noting, palmer calls "a man undergoes pain . . ." the "adorno poem" ("dear lexicon" 31). ^12^ palmer has written and spoken of vallejo and celan as poets who evince "a politics that *inheres*" ("the flower of capital," 164). they are vital proof that "political significance can manifest itself in the most deeply privatized--apparently--work," and that one can write a poetry in which the political world does not become "*decor*" and which is itself not "ultimately self-congratulatory, in that you get to say you're on the right side, and then sell it" ("dear lexicon" 14, 12). although i attribute these "human poems" to vallejo, since a collection by that name was translated by clayton eshleman and published by grove press in 1968, according to eshleman's 1978 retranslation of the same posthumous texts "there is no evidence that vallejo himself even contemplated such a title as _poemas humanos_" (xx): a buried slipperiness of naming that echoes a key theme in palmer's text. in celan, it is also worth noting, palmer finds "a kind of . . . *rebuke* to adorno" ("dear lexicon" 14). the poet discusses his work as a "network of quotation" in the "dear lexicon" interview: "i don't go around expecting everyone to have a footnoted edition of my works. on the contrary, i could footnote it myself if that were the intent. i'm not just setting up an industry of 'seeking out,' though i'm delighted by the surprise of someone . . . finding out where i've stolen this or that" (18). ^13^ while i'm tempted to add that senator to my earlier list of easy targets, palmer *has* been subject to absurd objections from those in power, his poetry "officially condemned by a committee of texas congressmen as pornographic" (reinfeld 99). ^14^ johnson does not segregate his literary and scientific ranges of reference. the line "all night the golden fruit fell softly to the air" interweaves yeats's "golden apples of the sun" and the fall of photons into the gravity well of the earth, and takes note of the fact that the silver apples of the moon *are* the golden ones, reflected. in this "reeled world" (beam 1) all things pun one another, and poets, who get to know and articulate their correspondences, are themselves shaped from "linkings, inklings, / around the stem & branches of the nervetree--/ shudder and shutterings, sensings," beings for whom "sense *sings*" (beam 8). ^15^ this ventilation, called "palms," composed from at least one word from each psalm, quoted in order, retells the myth of orpheus and euridice as it recapitulates a number of key images and passages from the rest of the foundations. for example, the opening imprecation to "be / the man that walk in the way of day and night / like a tree of water . . ." helps us gloss an otherwise obscure reference to "one" who is "*water to touch, all knowledge*" in beam 1. since the brain's "wrinkled lobes of flesh are more sensitive than the surface of water" (beam 12), it seems *we* are that aqua-tocatta. johnson's bible, like "orpheus' sermon" in dickinson's poem 1545, has "a warbling teller" in more ways than one. ^16^ i take this phrase from john shade, in nabokov's _pale fire_, for whom "it sufficed that i in life could find / some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / of correlated pattern in the game, / plexed artistry, and something of the same / pleasure as they who played it found" (ll. 811-15; 36-7). in the last beam of _ark: the foundations_, we find a "bobolink / sphericling the hereabouts" (beam 33). ^17^ norman finkelstein notes that johnson's work can "seem too naively exalted, lacking in an awareness of specifically social conflicts" (_utopian moment_ 94). harmon, too, comments that "given johnson's cosmic scale, the human race . . . hardly registers in any historical, political, social, or psychological details" and "shows up only as the inventor of language" (219). wordsworth once more: "the knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure," we read in the "preface" to _lyrical ballads_; "but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings" (168). ^18^ julian palley translates these lines as "everything yields / to me -victor, made world -/ its determination / to be triumphantly real. / / i am; i am here and now. / i breathe the deepest air. / reality invents me. / i am its legend. hail!" (31). ----------------------------------------------------------- works cited altieri, charles. _enlarging the temple_. lewisburg, pa: bucknell up, 1979. argyros, alexander. _a blessed rage for order: deconstruction, evolution, and chaos_. michigan up, 1991. barthes, roland. "from work to text." _textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism_. josue v. harari, ed. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1979: 73-81. ---. _the pleasure of the text_. richard miller, trans. new york: hill and wang, 1975. benjamin, walter. "on language as such and on the language of man." _reflections_. peter demetz, ed. edmund jephcott, trans. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1978: 314-332. bernstein, charles. "stray straws and straw men" _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_. bruce andrews and charles bernstein, eds. carbondale: southern illinois up, 1984. birkerts, sven. _the electric life: essays on modern poetry_. new york: william and morrow, 1989. bourdieu, pierre. _distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste_. richard nice, tras. cambridge: harvard up, 1984. davenport, guy. _the geography of the imagination_. new york and san francisco: pantheon, 1981. ---. "whitman a century after his death." _yale review_ 80 (4), october 1992: 1-15. dorn, edward. _gunslinger_. durham and london: duke up, 1989. duncan, robert. _bending the bow_. new york: new directions, 1968. eagleton, terry. _the ideology of the aesthetic_. oxford: basil blackwell, 1990. emerson, ralph waldo. _the early lectures of ralph waldo emerson_. vol. 1. stephen whicher and robert spiller, eds. cambridge: harvard up, 1959. ---. _essays and lectures_. joel porte, ed. new york: library of america, 1983. finkelstein, norman. "the case of michael palmer." _contemporary literature_ 29 (4), winter, 1988: 518-537. ---. _the utopian moment in contemporary american poetry_. revised edition. lewisburg: bucknell up, 1993. forche, carolyn. "twentieth century poetry of witness." _american poetry review_, march / april 1993: 9-16. foucault, michel. "the discourse on language." _the archeology of knowledge_. a.m. sheridan-smith, trans. irvington, 1972. gilbert, roger. "textured information: politics, pleasure, and poetry in the eighties." _contemporary literature_ 33 (2), summer 1992: 243-274. grenier, robert. "tender buttons." _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_. bruce andrews and charles bernstein, eds. carbondale: southern illinois up, 1984: 204-207. guillen, jorge. _affirmation: a bilingual anthology, 1919-1966_. julian palley, trans. norman, ok: u of oklahoma p, 1968. harmon, william. "the poetry of a journal at the end of an arbor in a watch." _parnassus_ 9.1 (1981): 217-232. johnson, ronald. _ark: the foundations_. san francisco: north point press, 1980. n.p. ---. _ark 50: spires 34-50_. new york: dutton, 1984. ---. _ark: the ramparts (arches i-xviii)_. _conjunctions 15_, spring / fall 1990: 148-189. ---. "interview." conducted by barry alpert. _vort_ 9, 1976 (johnson / davenport issue): 76-85. ---. "the planting of the rod of aaron." _northern lights: studies in creativity_. 2, 1985-86: 1-13. ---. _radi os_. berkeley: sand dollar press, 1977. n.p. logan, william. "ancient angers." review of _blood and poetry_, by thomas kinsella and sun, by michael palmer. _the new york times book review_, may 28, 1989: 24. longinus, dionysus. _on the sublime_. james a. arieti and john m. corssett, trans. new york and toronto: edwin mellen press, 1985. lyotard, jean-francois. _heidegger and "the jews"_. andreas michel and mark roberts, trans. minneapolis: minnesotta up, 1990. ---. "the sublime and the avant-garde." l. liebmann, g. bennington and m. hobson, trans. _the lyotard reader_. andrew benjamin, ed. oxford: basil blackwell, 1989: 196-211. mcgann, jerome j. "contemporary poetry, alternate routes." _politics and poetic value_. robert von hallberg, ed. u of chicago p, 1987: 253-276. ---. "response to charles altieri." _politics and poetic value_. robert von hallberg, ed. u of chicago p, 1987: 309-313. nabokov, vladimir. _pale fire_. new york: berkeley books, 1968. neruda, pablo. "some thoughts on impure poetry." _passions and impressions_. margaret sayers peden, trans. new york: farrar, straus, giroux, 1983: 128-129. packer, barbara. "browsing happiness." _ade bulletin_ 100, winter 1991: 26-30. palmer, michael. "conversation." interview by lee bartlett. _talking poetry: conversations in the workshop with contemporary poets_. lee bartlett, ed. new mexico up, 1987: 126-143. ---. "counter-poetics and current practice," _pavement_, vii (1987), 1-21. ---. "'dear lexicon': an interview by benjamin hollander and david levi strauss." _acts_ 5, vol. 2 (1), 1986: 8-36. ---. _first figure_. san francisco: north point press, 1984. ---. "interview with michael palmer." conducted by keith tuma. _contemporary literature_ 30 (1), spring 1989: 1-12. ---. "response to birkerts." _sulfur_ 19 (spring 1987), 153-4. ---. _sun_. san francisco: north point press, 1988. perloff, marjorie. _the dance of the intellect_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1985. ---. _poetic license: essays on modernist and postmodernist lyric_. evanston, il: northwestern up, 1990. ---. _radical artifice: writing poetry in the age of media_. chicago: chicago up, 1991. quartermain, peter. _disjunctive poetics: from gertrude stein and louis zukofsky to susan howe_. cambridge up, 1992. reinfeld, linda. _language poetry: writing as rescue_. baton rouge & london: louisiana state up, 1992. selinger, eric. "i composed the holes: reading ronald johnson's _radi os_." _contemporary literature_ 33 (1), spring 1992: 46-73. stevens, wallace. _the collected poems_. new york: vintage books, 1982. turner, frederick. _beauty: the value of values_. charlottesville and london: virginia up, 1991. ---. _natural classicism: essays on literature and science_. new york: paragon house, 1985. vallejo, cesar. _the complete posthumous poetry_. clayton eshleman and jose rubia barcia, trans. berkeley: california up, 1978. waldrop, rosmarie. "calling all ants." review of _first figure_, by michael palmer. _the new york times book review_, dec. 1, 1985: 36. yenser, stephen. "open house." review of _sun_, by michael palmer. _poetry_. aug. 1989: 295-301. ---------------------------------end---------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.196. part 1/1, total size 61073 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. ---------------------------------------------------------------- publication announcements * essays in postmodern culture * disclosures * guy debord's films subtitled * the electronic labyrinth * rachitecture 1.6 * newjour * bright lights film journal * internet and library information science * lusitania 7 * acadia * mail-order books on russian history and culture * centennial review * the minnesota review conferences, calls for papers, invitations to submit * calls for papers in english and american literature * hyptertext '96 * 5cyberconf * chaos, death and madness y * mwendo * standards * national graduate student cultural studies conference * gender and space: south/southeast asia * call for papers: public access computer systems review * blast 5: drama * on-line fiction writers workshop * call for help polish internet * culture and poverty: call for papers * creative time conference ---------------------------------------------------------------- * essays in postmodern culture: an anthology of essays from postmodern culture is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern - from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound), 0-19-508753-4 (paper) to order a copy by e-mail, click here ---------------------------------------------------------------- * disclosure disclosure a journal of social theory [disclosure: a journal of social theory] http://www.uky.edu/~sdwyer0/disclose.html issue 5: reason incorporated editor's foreword part i: non-reflective rationality and the cyborg body politic o interview with hubert dreyfus: what makes an expert system? o essay by thomas strong: plastic heart, black box, iron cage: instrumental reason and the artificial heart experiment o poetry by michael caufield: isaac newton died a virgin o review essay by susan mains: bodily regimes part ii: "as if the world were split in two:" contesting dualisms o essay by dianne rothleder: the end of killing, the law of the mother, and a non-exclusionary symbolic o review essay by christine james: reconceptualizing masculinity o poetry by beth harris: the faggot's claim to name, or deconstructing the breeding game o interview with timothy mitchell: archeology of modernity in *colonizing egypt* and beyond part iii: saving "rationality" by listening to its critics? o essay by bryan crable: method as the embodiment of reason o poetry by carol denson: cultch o interview with russell berman o review essay by arnold farr: theory and rationality: extending the habermas/foucault debate postscript: poetry by michael caufiend: i was just getting started when o artwork by chris heustis, richard pennell ... ---------------------------------------------------------------- * english subtitles for guy debord's film society of the spectacle the films of guy debord have been an occult presence. available at first only by pilgrimage to the rue de cujas, they became completely inaccessible in the mid-1980s when debord withdrew them from circulation. in january of this year, two older films and a new video collaboration with brigitte cornand were broadcast on french tv, shortly after debord's suicide. the vcrs were running. through the machinations of ediciones la calavera, debord's film version of _the society of the spectacle_ is now available in an english-subtitled ntsc version on vhs video. it may now enter the arena of theory and practice in the english language world. the subtitles are by keith sanborn. proceeds will go to fund further subtitling projects. costs for individuals: $25 u.s. for locations in the usa. $30 u.s. for locations elsewhere. payment must be in advance in u.s. dollars only in u.s. postal money orders for us addresses. no cash. no personal checks. no c.o.d.'s. international orders must be in travellers checks in u.s. dollar. all u.s. orders will be sent priority mail. tapes sent outside the u.s. will go by u.s. first class mail. make money orders or traveller's checks payable to: "keith sanborn." send orders with payment to: ediciones la calavera p.o. box 1106 peter stuyvesant station new york, ny 10009 smile, karen elliott is watching. also available under the same terms on ntsc vhs: rene vienet's _can dialectics break bricks_? for more information contact, keith sanborn at mzero@panix.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- * the electronic labyrinth _the electronic labyrinth_, a book-length study of hypertext fiction and software, is now available on the internet as freeware. _the electronic labyrinth_ provides a critically-informed introduction to the field of hypertext, with a special emphasis on its potential for use by authors and other creative artists. it provides a history of the development of the form, discussions of key terms and concepts, and reviews of many pc and macintosh-based authoring systems. the emergence of hypertext is placed in the context of the literary tradition of non-linear approaches to narrative, such as those employed by cortazar, nabokov, borges and pavic. special attention is paid to works created specifically for computerized hypertext,including michael joyce's _afternoon, a story_, john mcdaid's _uncle buddy's phantom funhouse_ and stuart moulthrop's _dreamtime_. _the electronic labyrinth_ can be obtained using ftp (file transfer protocol). the site address is: qsilver.queensu.ca. login as anonymous and provide your email address when you are prompted for a password. once logged on, change to the directory containing _the electronic labyrinth_ by typing: cd /pub/english/hypertext if you are running microsoft windows 3.1 or 3.11, then download the winhelp version (lab_win.zip). this is the preferred format, since it is the only one which preserves the hypertext structure of the document. otherwise, retrieve either the rich text format file (lab_rtf.zip) which retains the formatting of the text, or the ascii format file (lab_asc.zip) which does not. finally, if you are unable to unarchive a zip file, retrieve lab_asc.txt, which is a plain text file. for more information on installing _the electronic labyrinth_, retrieve the reame.txt file with the command: get readme.txt if you encounter problems, please send email to: robin.escalation@acm.org ---------------------------------------------------------------- * rachitecture 1.6 *rachitecture* is my version of architecture on the internet. as a 'net based newsletter, its only function is to get you out there to have a look around. of course, what is out there is always changing, and what seems interesting does too. if it is indeed true that for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction, this release of rachitecture is definitely an expression of that insistent dialectic. as an expression of my continued interest in the realm of actual buildings and physical lessons, let's look to christopher alexander's speech "domestic architecture" from the "@ home conference" in that essay alexander asks "what does it really take to build up a world in which our houses sustain and enlarge childish, innocent life in us?" and i will suggest that it goes beyond space planning with clients and requires us as architects to ask "what does it really take to build up a world in which our houses sustain and enlarge our lives and the lives of our children." william mcdonough, who is the dean of the architecture program at the university of virginia is trying to answer those questions in and exciting and responsible way. in his essay "design, ecology, ethics and the making of things" he outlines his position. because of his tenure at the university, uva is sponsoring a number of exciting projects that are using the computer technologies to help foster sustainable development both here and abroad. the urban poverty and sustainable development project, is just one example, in which architects and planners from the united states and brazil are using the world wide web to help develop plans for sustainable developments in rio de janeiro. of course using technology to help develop sustainability has been something of a buggaboo in the environmental movement, obviously it must be brought to bear. at the global network for environmental technologies they are thinking about the ways in which technology can be used for a sustainable future at a national scale. in general, architecture and architectural thinking lends itself to thinking about patterns and systems (in a cybernetic way) that can be useful for thinking about sustainable development in general, and sustainable settlements (ie planning ) in particular. and i think that it is important for architects to begin to consider the ways in which we can contribute to and help direct these dialogues. for background information on sustainable deveopment see the international institute for sustainable development in winnipeg. they have a very good calender of international conferences, and are co hosts of "developing ideas," an electronic forum on creating sustainable societies. for most architects, however it is important to think clearly about what we can do about discipline at regional and local scales. prior to becoming the dean at uva, william mcdonough worked closely with the city of chattanooga to help develop their sustainability program and he is currently working on the redesign of the trade center renovation that embodies his principles of buildings as "living machines." most of us work at the smaller scale of the individual building and lot. for those of us who are working at that level we need both useful precedents, like the ecohouse and useful sources of information about what materials to use and where to get them. like this list from the rainforest action network. of course, there are other options, perhaps more radical proposals, like those made by nomadic research labs, who have been trotting around for years on bicycles called behemoth - they have some interesting notions about nomadics that might give traditional architects pause to rethink the focus of their attention. don't know about you but i've missed the aphorisms. so there it is. comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. rachitecture is available through email subscription, if you want to subscribe or be taken off the mailing list write me and on the subject line write "rachitecture." gsd96cpc@gsd.harvard.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- * newjour newjour, the internet list for reporting and announcing new on-line electronic journals, announces a major improvement in its archive. the result is an important new tool for those who track the explosive growth in on-line internet serial publishing, or simply for those who wish to see what is available in particular subject areas. the url is simple: http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour the archive is maintained by mhonarc software which not only displays the entries in html, but takes all urls in the messages and turns them into links, so when you read an entry describing a journal that offers a url, you can immediately click and go to the site described. there is searching software and a reverse chronological index to let visitors check the newest material first. (suggestions for other ways to improve the presentation are very welcome.) as of 3 p.m. pacific time, sunday, october 22nd, 1995, the newjour archive contains 975 items. newjour distributes its reports to 2200 subscribers on all seven continents (list subscription instructions below). its archive goes back to august 1993, but the last half year has seen a remarkable boom in initiatives reported. the list began as an activity of the association of research libraries in connection with its famous _directory of electronic scholarly journals, newsletters, and discussion lists_, now in its fifth edition. arl has enriched the scope of the directory project and the partnerships that create it, and newjour now represents a collaboration between arl, the yale university libraries, the center for computer analysis of texts (ccat) at the university of pennsylvania, and the university of california at san diego library with their excellent library and systems staff. to subscribe to newjour, send e-mail to: majordomo@ccat.sas.upenn.edu with no subject and include the simple message "subscribe newjour" you may also choose to receive a single daily message compiling all the day's messages in one "digest." to do that, send to the same address the message: "subscribe newjour-digest" the www newjour archives are provided as a service by the data services unit of the social sciences and humanities library of the university of california, san diego: jim jacobs abe singer marsha fanshier for questions about the arl directory, contact: patricia brennan, communications coordinator (patricia@cni.org), or dru mogge, electronic services coordinator (dur@cni.org) the co-owners/moderators of the newjour service are: ann shumelda okerson james j. o'donnell yale university university of pennsylvania ann.okerson@yale.edu jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- * bright lights film journal bright lights film journal: http://www.crl.com/~gsamuel/bright.html bright lights film journal is a glossy, 8-1/2" x 11" popular-academic hybrid of movie analysis, history, and commentary, looking at classic and commercial, independent, exploitation, and international film from a wide range of vantage points from the aesthetic to the political. a prime area of focus is on the connection between capitalist society and the images that reflect, support, or subvert it -movies as propaganda. written by curdled critics and excitable academics. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * internet and library and information services the graduate school of library and information science at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign announces the publication of: _the internet and library and information services: a review, analysis, and annotated bibliography_ by lewis-guodo liu occasional paper no. 202, december 1995 the literature on the internet and library and information services has emerged and expanded since 1990 into a rich corpus -both in quantity and variety. yet little effort has been made to organize this literature. the internet and _library and information services: a review, analysis, and annotated bibliography_ examines the literature and provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography containing 446 items on the internet and library and information services. the selected items are classified into twenty-seven topical categories such as: business resources; government information; legal, ethical, and security issues; public libraries; and user's needs and human cognition. lewis-guodo liu observes in his accompanying essay that the literature is predominantly descriptive and argues that more analytical research needs to be performed in the future. this bibliography focuses on providing information on the characteristics of the literature in the hopes to facilitate scholarly research and policy-making in this area. _the internet and library and information services: a review, analysis, and annotated bibliography_ (occasional paper 202), by lewis-guodo liu. issn 0276 1769. 91 pp. $8.00 + $3.00 shipping ($1.00 for each additional copy) in the u.s. international orders add $5.00 shipping ($1.50 for each additional copy). orders should be prepaid to the university of illinois and sent to: the publications office graduate school of library and information science university of illinois at urbana-champaign 501 e. daniel street, champaign, il 61820 telephone orders: (217) 333-1359 ---------------------------------------------------------------- * lusitania #7: sites and stations announcing the publication of lusitania #7: sites and stations: provisional utopias publication date: january 1995. authors include: david hickey, miwon kwon, friedrich kittler, paul virilio, john miller, raoul bunschoten, celeste olalquiaqa, hani rashid & lise antic couture. description of contents: steel & glass towers, once were a manifestation of our utopian dreams now they recede into the distance. las vegas is up ahead, an oasis, whose sole function is distraction, entertainment and spectacle. this is the end of the road. nothing beyond but wasteland. like the emerald city of oz, all that glitters is not utopia. since venturis "learning from vegas," this city of lights has been architecture's worst nemesis. the future was not supposed to be like this. today, design bureaucrats have usurped and decorated the place of visionary architects. the emblematic indulges in the academic. what is presented in _sites and stations: provisional utopias_ is a challenge to architects to retrieve and deliver unsuspected possibilities of new tomorrows, from the forbidden vision of the utopian. trim size 7 in. by 9 1/2in. page count: 256 pgs stock: 100grm japanese woodfree cover: laminate 260 grm artboard binding: perfect binding language: english/ korean illustratons: 32 pgs color 64 pgs b&w isbn price: $15.00 lusitania #7 is available at a discount of 20% for orders of between five and nine copies and at a 30% discount for order of 10 or more. for more information contact carol ashley: e-mail: lusitani@panix.com fax: (212) 732 3914 phone: (212) 619 6224 mail: lusitania press 104 reade st. 2nd flr. ny, ny 10013-3864 ---------------------------------------------------------------- * acadia hi, my name is kemper james and i'd like to introduce you to acacia. it's a brand new little ezine on the web! we have poetry, music, stories, and a little insight into who we are . . . the 50's was the "he" decade, the 60's was the '"we" decade, the 70's was the "she" decade, and the 80's the "me" decade . . . so what's left for us childern of the 90's? come and find out. please visit us, write us, and yes, even add a link to our page at: http://bchi.com/acacia/acacia.html e-mail: kemper@ripco.com keywords: ezine, ezines, journal, literature, poetry, music, stories, young people thanks, see you there! ---------------------------------------------------------------- * mail-order books on russian history and culture please, have a look at http://www.dux.ru/win/guest/phenix/pap.html phenix-atheneum publishers www page "phenix" publishers was founded in may, 1990 when its main establisher, the russian language publishers "atheneum" in paris, decided to move from france to russia. the most important spheres of activity of "phenix" are search and annotated publications of original source documents on the political, social and cultural history of russia in the xix-xx centuries. the documents are published in almanacs, collections and as separate books. memoirs, diaries and letters as well as official documents found in state and private archives, form for the most part the contents of the volumes that have already came out. modern historical studies published by "phenix" are based on the same archive materials. the themes of publications are rather broad in scope: religion, science, painting, literature, theatre, political repressions, resistance, revolutions, wars, politics, etc. special series are dedicated to biographies, the history of separate regions, emigration. well-known slavic scholars richard davis, john malmstad, richard pipes and marc raeff contribute to the publishers. since 1995 a periodical of modern prose, poetry and critics "postscriptum" has been published, as well as the poetical series "masterskaya." in may of 1995 "phenix" was awarded the elite petersburg prize "severnaia palmira." sincerely, ivan krasnyj st.petersburg, russia ivan@krasnyj.spb.su ---------------------------------------------------------------- * centennial review [image] ---------------------------------------------------------------- * the minnesota review [image] ---------------------------------------------------------------- * cfp@english.upenn.edu calls for papers in english & american literature for the last two years, the english department at the university of pennsylvania has kept a collection of call for papers, conference announcements, etc., on english and american literature, on penn's english web and english gopher. to facilitate the exchange of information on upcoming conferences and publication opportunities, penn english has created an electronic mailing list, cfp@english.upenn.edu. we encourage conference or panel organizers and volume editors to find the largest possible audience for their announcements by posting them on this list. announcements can include upcoming conferences, panels, essay collections, and special journal issues related to english and american literature, and can include calls for completed papers, abstracts, and proposals. the boundaries are flexible: all english-language literatures, cultural studies, queer theory, bibliography, humanities computing, and comparative literature (even when not concerned specifically with english or american literature) are within the pale. conferences or panels devoted exclusively to literature not in english, to music or art, to history, etc., are excluded unless they are relevant to students of english and american literature, as are lecture series, regular meetings of small local societies, fellowship opportunities, etc. subscribing to subscribe to the list, address a message to listserv@english.upenn.edu do not send subscription messages to cfp@english.upenn.edu. the subject line can be anything, but the body of the message should read subscribe cfp there should be nothing else: no name, no e-mail address. you should receive a confirmation message after a few minutes. if you have any questions, contact jack lynch at the address below. archive of announcements those interested in the calls for papers need not subscribe to the list directly. the announcements will be archived (within a few days of their posting) and available on the world wide web at http://www.english.upenn.edu/cfp/ and on the english gopher at gopher://gopher.english.upenn.edu/11/announce/cfp there they'll be grouped under rubrics (such as renaissance, american, theory, gender studies) to make browsing easier. they'll remain there until the conference has taken place. please check to see whether they've been posted already before sending additional copies. posting announcements all panel organizers and volume editors are encouraged to make their calls for papers or proposals on cfp@english.upenn.edu. calls can take any format in the body of the message. the subject line, though, should be as informative as possible (to enable browsers to find relevant announcements quickly), and should take the following form: cfp: topic of conference (deadline; conference date) messages that don't conform to this standard may be rejected. the subject line has to fit in 67 characters, so be both brief and clear in describing the topic of the conference. some tips: o rather than a cryptic panel title like "imagined encounters," use a descriptive entry like "new world in 16th-c." o put dates in numerals, in american notation (month/day). specify the year only if the conference is more than a year in the future. include both the deadline for submissions and the date of the conference. o in the case of major conferences where the name of the conference will be more useful than the dates (e.g., mla, asecs, nassr, kalamazoo), specify that instead. o if the conference takes place outside north america, or if it's a graduate-student conference, note that as well. some examples: cfp: communities & communication (10/2; 12/1-12/2) cfp: inst. for early am. hist. & culture (9/30; 5/31-6/2) cfp: improvisation & virtuosity (3/1; mla) cfp: 18th-c. short story (8/18; asecs) cfp: romanticism in theory (denmark) (2/1; 6/28-6/30) cfp: meaning in middle ages & ren (grad) (6/30; 9/29-9/30) etiquette preface the subject lines of all announcements with "cfp," and make the descriptions as clear as possible, to enable subscribers to sort through incoming mail. please check to see whether announcements have already appeared on the list before sending additional copies. remember, it may take several days for an announcement on the list to appear on the english web or in the english gopher. in order to keep traffic to a minimum, the mailing list is strictly for announcements, not for discussions of conferences. advertisements of commercial products or services not directly related to the purpose of the list are forbidden. other matters to unsubscribe, address a message to listserv@english.upenn.edu (not cfp@english.upenn.edu!) reading just "unsubscribe cfp" (don't include your name or address). if you have any questions, write to jack lynch at jlynch@english.upenn.edu. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * hypertext '96 advance program hypertext '96 seventh acm conference on hypertext washington dc, usa march 16-20, 1996 ---------------------------------- full details at this url: http://acm.org/siglink/ht96/ *we still need student volunteers* . . . email to capps@cs.unc.edu ---------------------------------- "docuverse takes form . . ." in the '70s ted nelson coined the term "docuverse" to describe a global network of interlinked and personalizable information. now, two decades later, the docuverse is taking form. graphics and computing technology now bring inexpensive hypermedia technology to everyone, and the world wide web is linking all those everyones together. technical papers the latest research results in www development and use, hypermedia documents, systems, models, concepts. courses we are offering two days of courses prior to the conference. topics include document design and critique, www basics, hmtl 3.0 and style sheets, java for www applications, netscape 2.0 enhancements, educational use of hypermedia, legal issues, collaboration environments, hytime, hyper-g, and more. system demonstrations working research systems will be demonstrated. posters short presentations of work in progress. workshops there are four pre-conference workshops in which researchers will meet to discuss developments in specific technical areas. doctoral consortium a workshop in which ph.d. students will meet to discuss research topics and results, critique of the field overall. by invitation, see the web pages for details. ---------------------------------- for information e-mail to ht96-info@cs.unc.edu david stotts (general chair) catherine marshall (program chair) department of computer science hypermedia research lab university of north carolina department of computer science chapel hill, nc 27599-3175 texas a&m university college station, tx 77843-3112 stotts@cs.unc.edu marshall@bush.cs.tamu.edu phone: (919) 962-1833 phone: (409) 845-9980 fax: (919) 962-1799 fax: (409) 847-8578 ---------------------------------------------------------------- * 5cyberconf 5cyberconf june 6th to 9th, 1996. madrid, spain hosted by "fundacion arte y tecnologia de telefonica" 5cyberconf is an international conference that addresses the social, political and cultural implications of cyberspace from a critical standpoint and encourages discussion between theoreticians and practitioners. hosted for the first time in europe, this fifth edition of cyberconf considers computer-human interface breakthroughs, our fascination and weariness with disobedient technology, the role of synthetic behaviour in virtual design, and the increasing importance of cross-cultural contributions to the electronic community. in the 90's cyberspace has reached a critical mass. the tools to construct and navigate virtual worlds are becoming increasingly affordable, intuitive and widespread. the rise in bandwidth and dropping prices have provoked the exponential growth of the online population (or is it the other way around?). as the net becomes a mainstream hit, how has the transition from science fiction to reality changed cyberspace? conference format 5cyberconf is scheduled to start on thursday afternoon, june 6th and take place over three and a half days. there will be 8 keynote speakers, 18 plenary sessions, special events, a videoconference link-up and a banquet dinner on sunday, june 9th. all sessions are designed to foster discussion. presentations will be in english and spanish with simultaneous translation. themes o inter-face lift: how are the boundaries of the computer-human interface disappearing? is the "window onto the world" metaphor exhausted? can we unframe our synthetic worlds? what can replace the cartesian grid as a reference for non-linear worlds? o cyber sick-and-tired: who is leaving cyberspace and why? what are the different forms of cyber-sickness? is the body rejecting interfaces that ignore it? what are the old and new psychological disorders manifested in or caused by cyberspace? what are the different forms of cyber-tiredness? how can we counteract the disenchantment brought about by the unfulfilled promises of the cyber-hype industry? who is buying the media's portrayal of cyberspace as dirty and dangerous? who is winning the battles to control or dominate access? o technology good, people bad (virtual perversions): when will the predicted death of "outmoded" dualisms finally happen? is accepting our own cyborgness the only way to explore post-humanism, or are there other, as-yet-unimagined, ways? how do we create new languages to describe unprecedented experiences? how has the language of cyberspace changed since the first cyberconf? o digital third worlds: are there digital ethnic groups? how can ceremony and language be used in the retro-colonization of cyberspace? can the international economic system be de-virtualized? what kinds of non-digital virtuality are there? what are the experiences of new online communities in countries where access is relatively recent, and how are their contributions changing the time and space of cyberspace? who are the new marginals? the "global village" and other myths. o crash technology: what is seductive about technology out-of-control? what would be the uses of a "personal dis-organizer"? what is technological correctness? how will our ethics be transformed by the ability to "undo" our virtual actions? will artificial intelligence finally deliver an automaton that disobeys? what is cyber-pain (and where to find it)? o synthetic behaviour (recombinart): can cyberspace behaviour be "rendered" (as in designer-behaviour)? what constitutes interesting behaviour? will synthetic behaviour change what we mean by normal behaviour? what is the virtual equivalent of the undead? what proposals challenge the dead/alive binary (videogames, military simulators, etc.) as the primary paradigm of virtual interaction? call for abstracts to submit an abstract for the potential inclusion of your paper in the 5cyberconf programme, please follow these format guidelines: title of the paper author(s) institutional affiliation, if any chosen 5cyberconf theme (from the list above) abstract, 500 words maximum brief biography, 100 words maximum audiovisual equipment requirements contact information (email preferred) there are two ways to submit: 1) email 5cyberconf@ceai.telefonica.es with the subject "5cyberconf submission" or 2) mail both a printed copy and a pc or mac diskette to the address given below. the selection will be done by an international and a local committee made up of academics, theorists, artists and technicians in the field. submission of an abstract indicates the submitter's intention and capability to write and present the corresponding, full length paper, if chosen. papers will be alloted a half hour for presentation and may be in english or spanish. please be advised that the selection committees will not consider abstracts that are not formatted as stated above nor papers that have been previously published. all papers will be published in a bilingual edition of the proceedings, which will be available in late 1996. deadlines: deadline for reception of abstracts: february 15, 1996 notification of selection for presentation: march 15, 1996 deadline for registration: may 1, 1996 for more information: http://www.telefonica.es/fat/ecyb.html#a1.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------- * chaos, death, and madness: the use of the disruptive in literature and the arts chaos, death, and madness: the use of the disruptive in literature and the arts the 5th annual conference on language and literature baylor university april 12-13, 1996 plenary speakers: dr. katherine hayles dept. of english, ucla and dr. melissa dowling dept. of history, smu we invite papers to be submitted for consideration in all areas of literature and the arts. however, we are particularly interested in papers dealing with disruption. suggested topics include: o madness or feigned insanity o deconstructing the status quo o gender relationships and violence o the grotesque or carnivalesque o creating order through disruption o fear or constructive terror o structure and disruption in the arts o war and the warrior o chaos theory o representations of death submissions due by february 12, 1996 please send a 1-2 page abstract along with your paper. detailed abstracts without papers will be considered, but if they are accepted, the completed papers are due by march 28, 1996. send all responses to: warren edminster english department baylor university waco, tx 76798 or email to: james_mckeown@ccis01,baylor.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- * mwendo mwendo, a black literary magazine, is currently accepting submissions for the 1996 issue. works of poetry, personal essays, commentaries, short stories, and artwork are welcome. literary works are limited to 1,000 words (max). submission deadline is february 29, 1996. (e-mail submissions are welcomed!) include sase for return of materials. mwendo, coe college, 1220 first avenue ne cedar rapids, ia 52402 (e-mail: gkaruri@coe.edu) ---------------------------------------------------------------- * standards standards, the first international journal of multicultural studies on the world wide web, is now accepting submissions for the spring, 1996 issue, to be posted online in march, 1996. the current online issue is our fifth anniversary edition, titled "survival," and includes a retrospective of our first four volumes, previously published on the page by the university of colorado and stanford university. features this issue include an introduction by marlon riggs; a tribute to audre lorde, with original poetry by lorde first published in standards; "on bombs, memory, and survival: a scientist recalls hiroshima and nagasaki," by gene d. robertson, a scientist who worked on the after-effects of the manhattan project; as well as works by aurora levins morales, essex hemphill, benjamen alire senz, and cordelia candelaria. we are especially pleased to introduce to a global readership new and emerging writers and artists who are finding creative solutions to the challenges of difference. individual works address topics of race, gender, ethnicity, color, physical ability, class, sexuality, incest, domestic violence, aids, rape, and, above all, resistance and survival. the current issue is dedicated, with affection and admiration, to the memory of award-winning black gay film-maker and scholar marlon t. riggs. inquiries regarding our journal may be sent to via email to: standard@colorado.edu. submissions of original, unpublished fiction, prose, poetry, drama/performance art, photography/visual art, and all points in between, may be submitted by the same link, throughout the year. we will occasionally consider reprints; include original publication information. if you publish a not-for-profit print journal on multicultural issues: the next volume of standards will include a tribute to the best of the multicultural journals around the world. editors may submit up to five (5) entries previously published in their pages; we will select one piece each, from as many as 15 international journals, to appear in our internet pages. we will also include a listing of progressive, not-for-profit multicultural print journals around the world, including submission and subscription information. texts will appear in their original languages, and should be accompanied by an english translation. deadline for this issue: february 1, 1996, for inclusion in our spring, 1996 issue. by email attachment, use either a word for mac file or as an ascii/text only file. visual art should be sent as either gifs or jpegs, preferably compressed. hard copies, when necessary, may be submitted to: canela a. jaramillo, editor standards: an international journal of multicultural studies university of colorado office of academic affairs, campus box 40 boulder, colorado, 80309-0040, usa. no original materials can be returned. please include a return email address or, for hardcopies, a self-addressed, stamped envelope. copyrights revert to the author, and are shared by the standards editorial collective, for reprinting only. text in languages other than english and spanish are accepted, with accompanying translation to english. (in opposition to the negative effects of current "english only" laws on the burgeoning latino/spanish speaking populations in the united states, we have printed some "spanish only" texts in the current volume.) please allow three weeks for queries; six to eight weeks for editorial consideration of complete submissions. standards is a not-for-profit publication, and does not pay for any submissions; we can, however, extend individual works, in a sophisticated format, to a growing international audience of readers who are involved in every aspect of cultural studies. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * national graduate student cultural studies conference c a l l f o r p a p e r s 10th annual national graduate student cultural studies conference: citing cultural locations: performing personal theoretical occasions binghamton university, binghamton, ny. april 19, 20, 21, 1996 this conference challenges the boundaries established within the traditional academic setting and those placed around the academic site. it acts against illusions of a separation between theoretical production and lived experience. opening up the discussion of cultural studies to include performances, political activism, and creative expression, we will explore the occasions where the personal and the theoretical meet and the performances that spring from them, particularly with regards to transforming both the public and academic spheres. send 1-2 page abstracts to: nat'l graduate cultural studies conference ln 2441/library tower binghamton university binghamton, ny 13901 or email to: bc05319@binghamton.edu deadline: february 15th ---------------------------------------------------------------- * gender and space: south/southeast asia call for papers we invite critical essays for an interdisciplinary anthology on the conceptualization of space in south and southeast asian contexts in the 19th and 20th centuries. the emphasis is on a feminist analytics of women's and men's experiences of space in such topics as political, social, and/or psychic cartographies of imperialism, nationhood, urbanization, technological production (cyberspace, etc.), (e)migration, enforced/chosen exile, and cosmopolitanism. papers might also consider how narratives (visual, written, spoken, enacted), spatial designs, and sociocultural practices configure race, class, gender (also transgendering), sexuality, religion/spirituality, and the politics of public and private realms inside, between, and outside predetermined boundaries. countries: thailand, malaysia, myanmara (burma), nepal, india, laos, indonesia, singapore, pakistan, afghanistan, bangladesh, sri lanka, vietnam, cambodia, and the philippines. send 2-3 page proposals or papers (25-30 pages) by may 15, 1996 to: esha niyogi de (ucla) at idr2end@mvs.oac.ucla.edu or by regular mail to: sonita sarker women's and gender studies macalester college 1600 grand avenue st. paul, mn 55105 office phone: (612)696-6316 fax: (612)696-6430 e-mail:sarker@macalstr.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- * public access computer systems review _the public-access computer systems review_, an electronic journal established in 1989, is issuing a call for papers on scholarly electronic publishing activities on the internet. the journal has published a number of papers on this topic in the past, and the editors are interested in exploring contemporary e-publishing projects and perspectives. potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to: o state-of-the-art overviews of the e-publishing of books, journals, preprints, and other materials. o case studies of "second-generation" e-journals that utilize html; graphic images; acrobat, postscript, and similar distribution tools; search engines; and related discussion lists to overcome the limitations of ascii text or to provide new capabilities not found in print publishing. (similar case studies about other types of scholarly electronic materials would also be welcome.) o discussions of how libraries are (or should be) integrating scholarly electronic materials into their collections (especially preservation issues), participating in efforts to develop relevant standards and improved finding tools, and leading the way with digital library and similar projects. o critiques of the rapidly changing role of copyright in the internet environment and how it may influence the future of scholarly publishing for good or ill. o thoughtful position papers, manifestos, and calls for action that illuminate the potentials and perils of scholarly electronic publishing or suggest new directions. see the journal's home page for more background information about the journal, including author guidelines. if you would like to participate, please contact the editor-in-chief at cbailey@uh.edu and indicate what target date you would like for submission (the journal has a flexible publication schedule). papers can be submitted to either the refereed articles or communications (editor-selected) sections of the journal. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * blast 5: drama call for participation we invite you to develop a scenario for blast 5. we are looking for submissions that make use of our contemporary experience of stories. these stories, increasingly nonlinear and hypertextual, contradictory and irresolute, are built upon an ever-expanding multiplicity of media, their lines of continuity networked into complex webs. the blast 5 project takes the form of a year-long drama composed of scenarios, intercutting real life, artificial life, scripted life, telematic life, and afterlife. the setting for blast 5, "crossroads," appears below. in some manner, your scenario should engage this setting and the blast 5 drama that departs from it. your scenario can take any form, but we encourage those that evoke action. the developing storylines will be hyperlinked and can be accessed at any time through the blast 5 "theater of operations" site on the world wide web (http://www.interport.net/~xaf/), or they may be relayed to you by someone who is participating in the project. some form or aspect of your scenario -such as a score, script, recording, recipe, game, diagram, index, drawing, letter, plan, prop, map, mask, code -can be included in the blast 5 "vehicle" and/or in the various blast 5 "stage sets." these vehicles and stage sets are environments where the scenarios are played out. they provide a way for participants to engage your scenario and possibly assume roles in it. scheduled stage sets include the sandra gering gallery in new york in late 1996, and the "blast_stage" on the pmc-moo [telnet: hero.village.virginia.edu 7777] at various times. the blast 5 theater of operations site on the world wide web may also operate as a stage set (or a part of one), and other stage set locations may be announced. the blast 5 vehicles are portable stage sets that individuals may buy or lease. they will be available for purchase at galleries (through sandra gering gallery) and bookstores (through distributed art publishers/d.a.p.). to submit a proposal, please send a short informal summary of your project to: blast 334 east 11 street #2b new york, ny 10003 usa tel (212) 677-8146 fax (212) 505-6562 email xaf@interport.net the project begins on february 1, 1996, and continues for a period of at least one year. proposals may be submitted at any time during this period, however editorial review meetings are held on march 1, may 30, and september 1. we encourage you to contact us first to discuss any questions you might have before you submit your proposal. a conference will be scheduled to coordinate with the stage set at the sandra gering gallery in late 1996. we are also requesting papers for presentation at this event. please inquire as to themes and deadlines. blast 5 is produced by the x-art foundation, a nonprofit artmaking entity based in new york. blast is an art publication that involves its participants in new experiences of reading and content production. for information on the xaf and blast, please visit http://www.interport.net/~xaf/ or contact us for further information. editors: marlena corcoran, jordan crandall, ricardo dominguez associate editors: sean bronzell, antoinette lafarge, heather wagner, adrianne wortzel setting sixth avenue's nothing but old highway six as it passes through town. by some bad roll of the dice, i live at 1212, the intersection of highway six and the train tracks. oh, it's not a bad neighborhood. there is no neighborhood. it's just where the line from the north pole to the gulf of mexico crosses the line from the george washington bridge to the pacific ocean. something called a town. at night when the trucks roll down so-called sixth avenue, i hear them coming from far away. the noise peaks and becomes a rattle as the truck passes. the bed settles as the truck pulls away. for a long, long time it gets fainter and fainter. at last i know it's gone and left me lying here in the wide midwestern night. the doppler effect. we drew it on graph paper in school. we didn't learn to calculate how it feels when a bell curve of loneliness peaks at your front door. on rainy nights sometimes the lightning strikes the rails out on the prairie. the jolt travels many miles, setting off warning signals all along the way. ding, ding, ding, flash. before i learned better, i'd wait for the train. why sleep now, i'd think, when any minute a distant rumble will turn to a grinding, shrieking, slow train crawling across sixth avenue. ding, ding, flash. nothing. rain. "it's nothing," mumbles my husband. "lightning on the tracks." i think of the pioneers who laid this grid on miles and miles of nothing. not all of them made it. what about that fiddler from bohemia. they buried him at the crossroads. i shake my husband and make him promise one more time. if i die, don't bury me here. -stay, "crossroads" ---------------------------------------------------------------- * on-line fiction writers workshop a group called book stacks is now hosting an on-line fiction writers workshop. we are hoping to turn this into a forum in cyberspace where fiction writers can present drafts of short stories or novel chapters for comment and critique by other writers and interested readers. writers of all experience levels are welcome to present their work, and everyone is encouraged to provide constructive criticism. if possible, i would very much appreciate it if you could mention this on your zine. the url is: http://www.books.com/scripts/newcon.exe. from there, click on the link to the fiction writers' workshop. thanks. dc palter fiction editor abiko quarterly ---------------------------------------------------------------- * call for help polish internet this is a request for help on behalf of the polish internet. we have one single internet provider in poland: nask. nask has, because of an agreement with polish telecom, a monopoly on lines connecting poland with the rest of the world. universities, schools and, commercial internet providers have to get their access from nask. prices for internet service are high. a complete account with slip etc. costs around $60 a month. telephone costs are $3.7 per hour. if you take into account that wages of around $350 per month are considered normal it is clear why internet is not used by so many people in poland. and now nask has announced that too many people are using the internet and that they need more money to keep the lines open. they decided that from january, 1996, they would raise the prices, and that they would calculate costs per bytes sent or received. yes that's right, we have to pay for letters you send us and we have to pay for www pages you download from us. this will mean the end of most internet activity in poland. if you want to know the details you can find them at: http://galaxy.uci.agh.edu.pl/~szymon/protest-eng.html http://www.put.poznan.pl/hypertext/isoc-pl/battle.html or by email: protest@uci.agh.edu.pl that's why we, marta dubrzynska, webmaster of the centre for contemporary art in warsaw, (http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/culture/csw/) and michiel van der haagen, net user (http://www.atm.com.pl/com/michiel/) ask your help. can you make it clear to our government and nask that this policy is disastrous for polish culture, economy and education? please check out these www adresses and react. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * culture and poverty: call for papers call for papers culture and poverty _the radical history review_, an independent, academic journal of history, politics, and culture published by cambridge university press, plans a special issue for fall 1997 devoted to the theme of culture and poverty. this issue is conceived as both a political and scholarly intervention. it will present work that examines the production of poverty through political, economic, and cultural practices; illuminates the ways in which discourses on poverty and wealth have been shaped, controlled, and deployed; and suggests how scholars on the left might intervene in public debates on the production of wealth and poverty within and across national boundaries. we seek papers which: o examine the role of culture in the construction and representation of poverty and wealth. o investigate the ideological workings of hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality within popular representations of poverty. o study cultural representations of poverty and processes of cultural imperialism with a transnational or comparative perspective. o explore how dominant discourses on poverty have been contested and reconstructed within poor communities. o challenge narratives and ideologies that criminalize and pathologize poor people. o make connections between representations of poverty and policy making processes. o investigate narratives of assimilation and upward mobility in the construction of race and class. o examine the cultural production of poverty through photography, fine art, literature, film, video, television, music and other cultural forms. o suggest strategies for intervention in public debates on poverty and culture including submissions which experiment with alternative forms for diverse audiences. o adress methods for teaching courses that deal with these issues. please send submissions to: managing editor, radical history review tamiment library 70 washington square south new york, ny 10012. inquiries to adina back or kevin murphy at aqb2865@is2.nyu.edu or to the rhr office at 212-998-2632. submission deadline: november 15, 1996 ---------------------------------------------------------------- * creative time -april 22 creative time is sponsoring a three-day conference spread over three weeks, and held at the new school in new york city. the april 22nd evening is devoted to internet culture and community; participants to date include lisa brawley, shawn wilber, and alan sondheim. there will be active participation from the net as well. for further information, contact alan sondheim: sondheim@panix.com. our conference session will discuss on-line communities and relationships, and how these are resulting in social realignments everywhere. the session will be in part on-line, with participants around the globe. the topics will include the politics and formats of on-line communities, net sex, love and death in cyberspace, and more. the on-line component will most probably use voice technology instead of text. ------------------end of notices.196 for pmc 6.2---------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------nealon, ''junk' and the other: burroughs and levinas on drugs', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-nealon-junk.txt archive pmc-list, file nealon.995. part 1/1, total size 71898 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- 'junk' and the other: burroughs and levinas on drugs by jeffrey t. nealon department of english the pennsylvania state unversity jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by jeffrey t. nealon, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the metaphysical desire . . . desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. it is like goodness -the desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it . . . . [desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger. --emmanuel levinas, _totality and infinity_ junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: _the algebra of need_. the face of "evil" is always the face of total need. a dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control . . . . i never had enough junk. no one ever does. --william burroughs, _naked lunch_ [1] "just say no!" odd advice indeed. say no to what or to whom? say no to a threat, to something that will draw you too far outside yourself. say no because you want to say yes. say no because, somewhere outside yourself, you know that this "you" owes a debt to the yes, the openness to alterity that is foreclosed in the proper construction of subjectivity. of course, "just say no" never says no solely to a person -to a dealer or an addict; rather, you "just say no" to the yes itself -a yes that is not human but is perhaps the ground of human response. the constant reminder to "just say no," then, is always haunted by a trace of the yes. as william burroughs asks, "in the words of total need, '*wouldn't you?*' yes you would."^1^ [2] in _crack wars: literature, addiction, mania_, avital ronell argues that the logics of drug addiction can hardly be separated from the discourse of alterity. as she writes, in the exterior or alterior space of addiction, "you find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owing, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. this relation -to whom? to what? -is no more and no less than your liability -what you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist."^2^ ronell is, of course, no simple apologist for a romantic celebration of intoxication; as she writes, "it is as preposterous to be 'for' drugs as it is to take up a position 'against' drugs,"^3^ but it is the case that the logics of intoxication, as well as the kinds of desire that one can read in spaces of addiction, are inexorably tied up with current critical vocabularies of alterity and identity: postmodern thinkers increasingly understand alterity as a debt that can never be repaid, a difference that constitutes sameness, the incontovertiblity of a continuing obligation to someone or something "other." [3] of course, the leisurely space of recreational drug use most often can and does serve to produce isolated reveries that cut the subject off from alterity, but the serial iteration of episodes of intoxication -what one might clinically or etymologically call "addiction," being delivered over to an other -brings on another set of considerations.^4^ for example, as william burroughs characterizes the junk equation in our epigraph from _naked lunch_ it necessarily begins in an economy of simple need over which the subject exercises a kind of determinative imperialism: junkies want, on the surface, to be inside, to protect and extend the privilege of the same; they want the pure, interior subjectivity of the junk stupor -with "metabolism approaching absolute zero" (_nl_, p. xvii) - to keep at bay the outside, the other. [4] but that economy of finite need and subjective imperialism quickly shows an economy of desire, an infinite economy of "total need" which breaks the interiority of mere need. in _naked lunch_ burroughs writes, in the voice of the smug, bourgeois "opium 'smoker,'" how low the other junkies "whereas we -we have this tent and this lamp and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and warm in here nice and warm nice and in here and nice and outside its cold . . . . its cold outside where the dross eaters and the needle boys won't last two years not six months hardly won't stumble bum around and there is no class in them . . . . but we sit here and never increase the dose . . . never -never increase the dose never except tonight is a special occasion with all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold." (p. xlvii, burroughs's ellipses) here, the junkies' increasing need for junk shows a finite economy of subjective determination turning into an infinite economy of inexorable exposure to the outside: "but we sit here and never increase the dose. . . never - never increase the dose never except tonight." the junkies' need draws the junkies outside, despite themselves, from their warm tent to the place of "all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold." according to burroughs, the junk user, as he or she necessarily increases dosage, is drawn inexorably from the warm protective interior (the fulfilled need) of use to the cold exterior of addiction -the revelation of "total need" beyond any possible satisfaction. as burroughs writes about his addiction, "suddenly, my habit began to jump and jump. forty, sixty grains a day. and still it was not enough" (p. xiii). addiction, it seems, inexorably mutates from a question of fulfilling need to something else: something other, finally, than a question with an answer; something other than a need that could be serviced by an object or substance. [5] in other words, addiction takes need to the point where it is no longer thematizable as subjective lack; as need becomes addiction, the junkie is no longer within the horizon of subjective control or intention. as burroughs writes in _junky_, "you don't decide to be an addict . . . . junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to an increased enjoyment of life. junk is not a kick. it is a way of life."^5^ "junk" opens onto an unrecoverable exteriority beyond need, an economy that we might call infinite or "metaphysical" desire, following emmanuel levinas's use of the term in our epigraph.^6^ for levinas, the desire at play in the face-to-face encounter with the other cannot be confused with a simple need; rather, it is a "%sens unique%," an unrecoverable movement outward, a one-way direction: a "movement of the same toward the other which never returns to the same."^7^ and, as burroughs's sailor reminds us, there may be no better description of addiction: "junk is a one-way street. no u-turn. you can't go back no more" (_nl_, p. 186). however, within burroughs's exterior movement, we will have to encounter an other other than the levinasian widow, stranger or orphan -an other, finally, that is other to the human and the privileges of the human that the philosophical discourse of ethics, including levinasian ethics, all-too-often takes for granted. an inhuman other -an other that is other even to the enigmatic alterity that one encounters in the face to face. what happens, we might ask, when one comes face to face with junk, the other of %anthropos% traced in burroughs's "the face of 'evil' [that] is always the face of total need"? levinas in rehab [6] for levinas, to be sure, drug intoxication is far from an experience of alterity. in fact, he writes that "the strange place of illusion, intoxication, [and] artificial paradises" can best be understood as an attempt to withdraw from contact with and responsibility for the other: "the relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. it is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother."^8^ according to levinas, intoxication brings only a greater intensification of the subject's interiority, a refusal of "fraternity" as exterior substitution for the other. [7] in fact, intoxication or junk addiction brings to the subject only the disappearance of the world and the concomitant submersion in the terrifying chaos of what levinas calls the %il y a% ["there is"] -a radical givenness without direction that is similar in some ways to sartre's experience of "nausea."^9^ as levinas describes the %il y a% "the being which we become aware of when the world disappears is not a person or a thing, nor the sum total of persons and things; it is the fact that one is, the fact that *there is*."^10^ for levinas, the *there is* is the indeterminate, anonymous rustling of being qua being. as adriaan peperzak comments, the %il y a% is "an indeterminate, shapeless, colorless, chaotic and dangerous 'rumbling and rustling.' the confrontation with its anonymous forces generates neither light nor freedom but rather terror as a loss of selfhood. immersion in the lawless chaos of 'there is' would be equivalent to the absorption by a depersonalized realm of pure materiality."^11^ a phenomenological-methodological link between his earliest and latest texts, the %il y a% is an unsettling fellow traveler for the entirety of levinas's career. curiously, the %il y a% performs a kind of dual function in his texts: as peperzak's summary makes clear, the first function is the ruining or interruption of a self that would think itself in tune with the harmonious gift of being. in the expropriating experience of the %il y a% (a "depersonalized realm of pure materiality"), being is indifferent to the subject. the %il y a%is the anonymous murmur that precedes and outlasts any particular subject. as levinas writes, "being is essentially alien [%etranger%] and strikes against us. we undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us" (_e&e_, p. 23/28). so for an ethical subject to come into being at all, such a subject must not only undergo the experience of being as the %il y a% he or she must go a step further and *escape* from it. as peperzak continues, "with regard to this being, the first task and desire [of the ethical subject] is to escape or 'evade' it. the source of true light, meaning, and truth can only be found in something 'other' than (this) being."^12^ [8] against the heideggerian injunction in _being and time_ to live up to the challenge of being's gift of possibility, levinas offers a thematization of being as radical *impossibility*: for levinas, existence or being is the terrifying absurdity named by the %il y a% and this indolent anonymity functions to disrupt the generosity and possibility named by heidegger's %es gibt% ["there is" or "it gives"]. for levinas, existence is a burden to be overcome rather than a fate to be resolutely carried out; the existent is "fatigued by the future" (_e&e_, p. 29/39) rather than invigorated by a heideggerian "ecstacy *toward the end*" (_e&e_, p. 19/20).^13^ to be an ethical heideggerian %dasein% must live one's life authentically in the generous light of being's possibility, an ontological multiplicity revealed by the ownmost possibility of one's own death.^14^ according to levinas's reading of heidegger, at its ethical best any particular %dasein% can live *with* or *alongside* other %dasein% each authentically related to his or her own ownmost possibility. ethics, if it exists at all, rests not in %dasein%'s relation to others but in the authenticity of its relation to its own death as possibility -and by synecdoche, the relation to being's generosity. in heidegger, then, the relation with others is necessarily inauthentic, always subordinated to %dasein%'s authentic relation with neutral, anonymous being-as-possibility.^15^ [9] for levinas, on the other hand, if one is to be an ethical subject, one must *escape* the dark, anonymous rumbling of being; in order for there to be a subjectivity responsive to the other, there must be a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of its wallowing in the solipsistic raw materiality of the %il y a%. out of the *there is* of anonymous being, there must rise a *here i am* [%me voici%] that nonetheless retains the trace of the hesitation and debt -what levinas will call the "passivity" - characteristic of the %il y a%'s impossibility. as he writes, hypostasis is subject-production, the introduction of space or place into the anonymous murmur of being: "to be conscious is to be torn away from the *there is*" (_e&e_, p. 60/98). [10] subjectivity is torn away from the anonymity of the *there is* by a responding to the other that is not reducible to any simple rule-governed or universalizing code; the ethical subject is, in other words, a responding, site-specific performative that is irreducible to an ontological or transhistorical substantive. as levinas writes, the body is the very advent of consciousness. it is nowise a thing -not only because a soul inhabits it, but because its being belongs to the order of events and not to that of substantives. it is not posited; it is a position. it is not situated in space given beforehand; it is the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself. . . . [the body as subjectivity] does not express an event; it is itself this event. (_e&e_, pp. 71,72/122,124) this is perhaps the most concise statement of levinas's understanding of a subjectivity that rises out of the %il y a% through hypostasis: the subject comes about through a performative response to the call of the other, through the bodily taking up of a "position," "the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself." here the subject is brought into being through a radically specific performative event or saying, but it will be a strange "being" indeed, insofar as being is generally understood to be synonymous with a generalizable, substantive said. [11] of course, the levinasian subject is a kind of substantive; it has to have a body -a place and a voice -in order to respond concretely to the other. it cannot merely languish in and among a network of possible responses to the other. rather, the subject is an active, responding substantiation: "it is a pure verb . . . . the function of a verb does not consist in naming, but in producing language" (_e&e_, p. 82/140). he goes on to explain: we are looking for the very apparition of the substantive. to designate this apparition we have taken up the term *hypostasis* which, in the history of philosophy, designated the event by which the act expressed by a verb became designated by a substantive. hypostasis . . . signifies the suspension of the anonymous *there is*, the apparition of a private domain, of a noun [or name, %nom%] . . . . consciousness, position, the present, the "i," are not initially - although they are finally -existents. they are events by which the unnameable verb *to be* turns into substantives. they are hypostasis. (_e&e_, pp. 82-83/140-42) the performative hypostasis is the birth of subjectivity, but the ethical network of substitution or signification that a subject arises from -this network of performative responses that must precede, even if it is finally inadequate to, any particular response -also necessarily makes that hypostatic subject a non-coincident one, open to alterity. the subject that arises in the hypostasis is not a simple substantive or noun, even though it necessarily becomes one through a trick of syntax. as levinas writes, "one can then not define a subject by identity, since identity covers over the event of the identification of the subject" (_e&e_, p. 87/149-50). identity, even when all is said and done, is not something that the subject *has*; identity is, rather, the "event of the identification" that i *am*, and this "originary" hypostatic "event" is (re)enacted or traced in the subject's continuing performative responses to the call of alterity. [12] hence, it is the pre-originary debt that any subject owes to this prior network of substitution-for-the-other that keeps subjectivity open, keeps the saying of performative ethical subjectivity irreducible to the simple said of ontology. levinas will call this a network of "fraternity" or "responsibility, that is, of sociality, an order to which finite truth -being and consciousness -is subordinate" (_otb_ p. 26/33). sociality, as substitution of potential identities in a serial network of performative subjectivity, both makes identity and response possible and at the same time makes it impossible for any identity to remain monadic, static, and unresponsive: the subject always already responds in the movement from the anonymous "one" to the hypostatic "me;" the subject responds in the very subjection of identity, the very act of speaking. [13] however, this hypostasis is *not* the intentional act of a subject; it is, rather, subjection in and through the face-to-face encounter with the other person. as levinas writes, "the localization of consciousness is not subjective; it is the subjectivization of the subject" (_e&e_, p. 69/118). thus, "here i am" rises out of the *there is* as an accusative, where i am the object rather than the subject of the statement, where i am responding to a call from the face of the other. as jan de greef writes, "for levinas the movement [of subjectivity] does not go from me to the other but from the other to me . . . . *here i am (%me voici%*) -the unconditional of the hostage - can only be said in response to an 'appeal' or a 'preliminary citation.' convocation precedes invocation."^16^ it is to-the-other that one responds in the hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the %il y a% the face of the other, and its call for response-as-subjection, is the only thing that can break the subject's imprisonment in the anonymous %il y a% and open the space of continuing response to alterity. as levinas sums up the project of his _existence and existents_, "it sets out to approach the idea of being in general in its impersonality so as to then be able to analyze the notion of the present and of position, in which a being, a subject, an existent, arises in impersonal being, through a hypostasis" (p. 19/18). as the evasion of the "impersonal being" that is the %il y a% hypostasis (as the concrete performative response to the face or voice of the other person) is the birth of the ethical levinasian subject. [14] such a subjection to the other makes or produces a subject at the same time that it unmakes any chance for that subject to remain an alienated or free monad. as levinas writes, "the subject is inseparable from this appeal or this election, which cannot be declined" (_otb_, p. 53/68), so the subject cannot be thematized in terms of alienation from some prior state of wholeness; in levinasian subjectivity, there is an originary interpellating appeal of expropriation, not an originary loss of the ability to appropriate. identity and alterity, rethought as performative response, are fueled by the infinity of substitution, not by the lack and desire for reappropriation that characterizes the evacuated lacanian subject. and this levinasian responding signification or substitution leaves the subject inexorably responsive to the founding debt of alterity: "signification is the one-for-the-other which characterizes an identity that does not coincide with itself" (_otb_, p. 70/89). there is, in other words, no subject unbound from other because the process of subject formation (the production of *a* subject) takes place in and through this common social network of iterable substitution. in the terms levinas uses most insistently in _otherwise than being_, identity is a performative "saying" that is irreducible to a substantive or ontological "said"; insofar as substitution or signification literally makes and unmakes the subject in the diachronic project of saying "here i am," such an ethical entity -both subject of and subject to alterity -is literally otherwise than being, other-wise than an ontological, synchronic, or substantive identity.^17^ the "saying" is *beyond* essence because it makes the "said" of essence possible without ever being merely reducible to it; just as infininte metaphysical desire subtends and traverses mere subjective need, the performative ethical saying is before and beyond the substantive ontological said.^18^ the junk con [15] if we return to burroughs and the question of drugs, then, it seems fairly clear why, for levinas, intoxication or addiction is not akin to ethical subjectivity: because intoxication is a wallowing in the terrifying materiality of the %il y a%'s "impersonal being," a state where the call or face of the other counts for nothing. strictly speaking, there can be no response to alterity -no saying, substititution, or signification -from an entity immersed in anonymous being: in the %il y a% an ethical subject has yet to arise through a hypostasis. perhaps we could take, as a concrete example of such anonymous immersion without ethical response, burroughs's narration of his last year of addiction in north africa:^19^ i lived in one room in the native quarter of tangier. i had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. . . . i did absolutely nothing. i could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. i was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. if a friend came to visit -and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit -i sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision -a grey screen always blanker and fainter -and not caring when he walked out of it. if he died on the spot i would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. wouldn't you? (_nl_, xiii) surely this is a portrait of drug use beyond the production of pleasure or nostalgia for it; rather, this is a portrait of addiction as the horror of immersion in the %il y a% where the addict does "absolutely nothing," save an interminable staring at anonymous objects, wallowing in a state of sheer materiality.^20^ [16] from a levinasian point of view, however, more disturbing than burroughs's portrait of the "bare fact of presence" (_e&e_, p. 65/109) in the interminability of addiction is the accompanying renunciation of a relation with the other: "if a friend came to visit . . . i sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision . . . and not caring when he walked out of it." and even more horrific than the mere ignoring of the other is the callous disregard shown by the addict for the other's very being: "if he died on the spot i would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. wouldn't you?" there is little for any ethical system to admire in these lines, and they seem particularly to bear upon levinas's concerns about a subjectivity for-the-other: here burroughs's junkie is inexorably and completely for-himself; even the death of the other would not disrupt the interiority of the same. in fact, the death of the other would have meaning only insofar as it could feed the privilege of sameness -as long as the other had some cash in his or her pockets to feed the junkie's habit. [17] however, the approval or condemnation of such behavior is not the location of the ethical in this scene. that which calls for response here is, rather, burroughs's insistent and strategically placed question, "wouldn't you?" i would suggest that the callous disregard shown here is, on an other reading, a kind of absolute exposure -an exposure more absolute and limitless than the relations "welcoming" that it would seem one owes to the corpse or the friend. "wouldn't you?" calls me to non-reciprocal substitution-for-the-other, interpellates me through a saying that is irreducible to a said. such a saying calls not for moral judgment, but for ethical response to my irreducible exposure to the other. [18] it is crucial, i think, to forestall any reading of burroughs's "wouldn't you?" that would endorse a kind of perspectival notion of alterity -where "wouldn't you?" would be read as asking or demanding each reasonable participant in a community to see issues through the eyes of the other.^21^ for burroughs, that kind of subjective imperialism is not the solution but rather problem of control itself, "sending" as "one-way telepathic control" (148) projected from "i" to "you." if "_naked lunch_ is a blueprint, a how-to book" (203), perhaps it calls for a kind of hesitation before the other, a responding other-wise: "how-to extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall . . . . doors that open only in *silence* . . . . _naked lunch_ demands silence from the reader. otherwise he is taking his own pulse" (203, ellipses in original). such a burroughsian "silence" is not a simple *lack* of response (how can one read without responding, without attention?); rather, it is the hesitation before response -an attention that does not merely project itself as the theme and center of any encounter, does not merely take its own pulse. there is, in other words, a gap or "silence" between the other and myself, and that gap is precisely my inexorable exposure to the other -that which comes before what "i" think or "i" do. [19] indeed, in levinasian terms the "welcoming" of the face of the other is precisely this inexorable exposure before a decision: the yes before a no (or a known), saying before a said, the openness or "sensibility" of the body-as-face that precedes any experience of knowing. these are all what levinas calls "my pre-originary susceptiveness" (_otb_, p. 122/157).^22^ as he writes, "sensibility, all the passivity of saying, cannot be reduced to an experience that a subject would have of it, even if it makes possible such an experience. an exposure to the other, it is signification, is signification itself, the one-for-the-other to the point of substitution, but a substitution in separation, that is, responsibility" (_otb_, p. 54/70). according to levinas, the openness to the other -sensibility, saying, signification -cannot finally be reduced to an "experience" of the other; that would be to suture a subjective void, to reduce the saying of the other to the said of the same, and to collapse the subjective "separation" necessary for levinasian "responsibility." the other, then, must be attended to not in terms of my experience but in terms of my substitution and separation -not in terms of my project but in terms of my subjection. [20] that being the case, it seems that one can frown on burroughs's portrait of addiction as "unethical" only by reducing it to an "experience" of addiction that leads to an utter disregard for the ethics of response. but burroughs's levinasian insistence on the consequences of total need as absolute exposure would seem to oblige us to attend to this episode somewhat differently -not in terms of the obviously unacceptable ethical behavior represented by burroughs's junkie, but rather in terms of the condition of absolute exposure that is prior to any ethical action: the question of substitution for-the-other. in other words, the instructive levinasian moment here is not the one in which the junkie might rummage through the dead friend's pockets, but the moment where that relation is thematized in terms of an absolute exposure that makes such an action possible, if not inexorable: "wouldn't you?" [21] the desiring junkie-subject is never a "said," never a complete or alienated synchronic monad. he or she is constantly in diachronic process; the junkie-subject "nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger."^23^ the "i" that is the junkie is characterized by a "saying" that constantly keeps the junk-addled subject in touch with its subjection the other: if the reagan-bush drug slogan "just say no!" seems to put forth a certain faith in intentionality and the choosing monadic subject (when it clearly evidences the opposite), burroughs's insistence on the junkie's question, "wouldn't you?", inexorably directs us outside ourselves, to that somewhere between, before or beyond the same and the other. finally, and perhaps to the chagrin of levinas, i'd like to suggest that the radically exterior levinasian ethical subject is always a junkie, moving constantly outside itself in the diachronic movement of desire, a responding, substitutable hostage to and for the other. [22] perhaps, however, this opens a certain moral question, but moralizing about junk can begin only when one reads the junkie's inability to "just say no" as a subjective weakness. levinas, who clearly has no interest in such a moralizing ethics, offers us a way to read burroughs's episode in wholly other terms. on a levinasian reading, the problem with junk -as with the %il y a% so closely related to it -is not the absence or evasion of self or destiny; the problem is, rather, the absence or evasion of the other or response. as levinas writes, the concept of "evasion" -so precious to those who would moralize about drugs sapping the subject's will -already presupposes an unrestrained freedom of the will: "every idea of evasion, as every idea of malediction weighing on a destiny, already presupposes the ego constituted on the basis of the self and already free" (_otb_, p. 195n/142n). while the anti-drug crusader sees addiction as a fall from or evasion of will, levinas asks us to read addiction as the continuation or logical extension of an almost pure imperialist will, an extension perhaps of the nietzschean will-to-power that would rather will nothingness than not will at all.^24^ [23] for the "just say no" moralistic version of drug rehabilitation, the dependency of the addict needs to be exposed and broken so the subject can be free again. if there were a levinasian rehab, it might proceed in exactly the opposite way -by exposing the dream of subjective freedom as symptom of addiction rather than a cure for it; such a "cure" might hope to produce not a sutured subject, free again to shape its own destiny, but rather "an ego awakened from its imperialist dream, its transcendental imperialism, awakened to itself, a patience as a subjection to everything" (_otb_, p. 164/209). for a levinasian ethical subject to come into being, it is clear that "the *there is* is needed" (_otb_, p. 164/209). however, in levinas the *there is* functions not as the drug counselor's negative portrait of an unfree self, but as a kind of deliverance of the self from its dreams of subjective imperialism. such a deliverance calls for a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the %il y a% into responsibility, out of the interiority of self into the face-to-face as "the impossibility of slipping away, absolute susceptibility, gravity without any frivolity" (_otb_, pp. 128/165). can i tug on your coat for a minute? [24] finally, though, this leaves us with any number of unanswered questions and potentially unhappy resonances between levinas's discourse and the moralizing ethics that he denounces. first, there is the odd question of will. levinas offers an interesting rejoinder to those who would read the junkie as will-less, but when he argues that intoxication is evasion -"slipping away" from responsibility, away from a "gravity without any frivolity" -and as such is in fact an act of will, he returns full circle to a very traditional discourse on drugs, a discourse perhaps more sinister than the discourse of subjective weakness. for levinas, it seems that intoxication is a brand of turpitude, a willful renunciation of citizenship and responsibility -"murder of the brother." certainly, a thematization of the drug user as a passive dupe is inadequate, but levinas's portrait of the willful druggie may prove to be even more troubling. both thematizations seem to avoid the question of desire as it is embodied in intoxicants, in something other to or other than the human subject and its will. [25] this problem of the will is related to levinas's insistence on "overcoming" or evading the %il y a% it seems that the overcoming of the %il y a% in ethical face-to-face subjectivity is an avoidance of the very thing that interrupts and keeps open this relation without relation. in other words, levinas's analysis seems to beg the question of how we can protect the face-to-face's authentic ethical disruption (calling the subject to respond) from the %il y a%'s seemingly inauthentic disruption (sinking the subject into anonymous fascination). [26] this doubling of disruptions is especially puzzling since the %il y a%-as unethical disruption -seems to be in a position of almost absolute proximity to the material network of ethical substitution out of which arises a specific "passive" ethical subjectification. as levinas writes, "the oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity. . . . the recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity identified in the said is constituted" (_otb_, pp. 104-05/132-33). this "hither side of the presnt" [%en deca du present%] is the debt that ontology owes to the undeniable proximity or approach of the other, the inexorable upshot of something on *this* side of the transcendental hinter world.^25^ this transcendent (but not *transcendental*)^26^ "something" on the hither side - the legacy of phenomenology in levinas's thought -has various names in various levinasian contexts: desire, the other, substitution, the face, the body, signification, sensibility, recurrence, saying, passivity, the one-for-the-other. this is not, as it would seem at first, a confusion on levinas's part -an inability to keep his terminology straight. it is, rather, central to his project: signification, as substitution for the other, calls for a specific substitution or response in each situation. just as, for example, in derrida's work the economy of %pharmakon% is not the same as the problem of %supplement% (each is a radically specific response to a paticular textual situation), the constant shifting of terminology in levinas is crucial to the larger "logic" of his thinking. [27] there remains, however, something of a "good cop, bad cop" scenario in levinas's thematization of such a pre-originary discourse.^27^ fraternity and responsibility are the pre-originary good cop: holding me accountable to the other and the others, they function as a debt that must be returned to time and again. the %il y a% on the other hand, is the pre-originary bad cop: exiling me to a solipsistic prison without visitors, it is a horror that must be overcome if i am to be an ethical subject. certainly, either way there would have to be a hypostasis to bring the subject from the pre-originary network into a specific position in or at a particular site: whether thematized as benign or menacing, the pre-originary network of fraternity or the %il y a% is not itself response, even though (or more precisely *because*) it makes response possible. saying in levinas is an act, first and foremost; as lyotard puts it in his essay on "levinas's logic," it is a doing before understanding.^28^ [28] levinas posits a pre-originary network -a prescriptive call before denotative understanding -to keep open the (im)possibility of further or other responses. such a network is structurally necessary in his text to account for the subject's not coinciding with itself, but in terms other than alienation, loss or lack: levinas's discourse can separate itself from the existentialist or psychoanalytic thematization of the other as my enemy only if there is a pre-originary expropriation, such that there can be no simple alienation as a separation or fall from wholeness. certainly both the revelation of the trace of "fraternity" and immersion in the %il y a_ perform this pre-originary function of ruining and opening out the interiority of monadic subject. the question remains, however, concerning how levinas can protect his discourse of fraternity from the _il y a_ and what are the consequences of such a protection. [29] levinas's reasons for insisting on the primacy of the face-to-face are easy enough to understand: as we have seen, in an attempt to save something like %mitsein% in heidegger from the monadic interiority of %dasein%'s fascination with "anonymous" death and being as possibility, levinas introduces the ethical as the exterior irreducibility of human contact in the face-to-face (in _otb_ the animated ethical "saying" that is irreducible to the neutrality of the ontological "said"). but the ethical, we should note, is thematized here strictly in humanist terms -the *face* and the *voice*. [30] burroughs allows us to pose an essential question to levinas: what happens when one encounters, within the world rather than in the realm of being, the "face" of the inhuman (as junk) and the "voice" that makes voice (im)possible (as an anonymous serial network of subjective substitutions)? if, as we have seen, levinas's problem with heidegger is that %dasein%'s relation with being is posed in terms of *possibility* rather than *impossibility*, one has to wonder then about levinas' own evasion of the radical impossibility named by the *il y a* -about the work done in his own discourse by the face and the voice. in other words, levinas's posing of the other in terms of the face and the voice may surreptitiously work to evade the "experience" of the impossible that is alterity measured on other-than-human terms. [31] to unpack this question, we could perhaps turn back to burroughs -specifically, his "christ and the museum of extinct species," a story that, among other things, points to the ways in which extinction haunts existents. the domination of "man" has brought about the extinction of its other -animals -but this extinction haunts "man" as it experiences its closure; and "man" is constantly kept in touch with the extinction of animals -with its other - by the virus of language: "what does a virus do with enemies? it turns enemies into itself . . . . consider the history of disease: it is as old as life. soon as something gets alive, there is something waiting to disease it. put yourself in the virus's shoes, and wouldn't you?"^29^ of course, "wouldn't you?" is the junkie's question from _naked lunch_ the question of the "inhuman" junkie posed to the human society, the question which should merely reveal the need of the junkie -who seemingly justifies himor herself with this response - but which also reveals the structure of infinite desire which grounds all mere need. this, finally, returns us to the quotation marks around the "'evil' virus" in the quotation from burroughs that serves as one of this essay's epigraphs: junk is an "evil" to human culture -to thinking and action -because it is quite literally inhuman, that which carries the other of %anthropos%: "junk" brings the denial of logos, the sapping of the will, the introduction of impossibility, and the ruining of community. one must be suspicious of anyplace in burroughs's text where he seems to be moralizing; it seems that the liminal states that "junk" gestures toward make its ham-fisted identification as merely "evil" impossible, insofar as this liminal state quite literally names the exterior field of alterity in which any particular opposition must configure itself. [32] "junk" forces us to confront the face of that which is wholly other -other even to the other person. and it is also here that one can call attention to burroughs's continuing fascination with the "virus"; as benway introduces the concept to the burroughs %oeuvre% in _naked lunch_, "'it is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life from. it may at one time have been capable of independent life. now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. it can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another -the renunciation of life itself, a *falling* towards inorganic, inflexible machine, toward dead matter'" (p. 134). the virus, famously related to language in burroughs, carries or introduces the alterity-based temporality of the postmodern subject, which "may at one time have been capable of independent life. now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter": between the individual and the "parasitic" network of iterable substitution from which it arises. [33] insofar as levinas teaches us that the individual is nothing other -but nothing less -than a hypostasis within the shifting categories of substitution for-the-other, his own account of subjectivity as such an iterable substitution would seem to create problems for the privileging of the category "human." levinas himself warns us "not to make a drama out of a tautology" (_e&em_, p. 87/150), not to mistake the hypostasis of subjectivity for an originary category of supposed discovery or self-revelation. both levinas and burroughs force us to acknowledge that the parasitic network of substitution, which seems merely to feed on the plenitude of human identity, in fact makes the plenitude of that identity (im)possible in the first place.^30^ but this very logic of the iterable network of performative identity would seem to pose essential questions to levinas's thematization of identity and alterity by questioning his insistence on what he calls the "priority" of the "human face"^31^ and voice (and concomitant evasion of "junk" as radical material iterability). despite levinas's well-taken criticisms concerning ontology's fetishizing of "anonymous" being, it may be that the wholly other is traced in other than human beings. that (im)possibility, at least, needs to be taken into account; and the attempt to analyze such an (im)possibility in terms of burroughs's thematization of "junk" helps to draw levinasian ethical desire outside the human, where it is not supposed to travel. [34] in the end, it seems to me that levinas attempts to exile the very thing that makes his discourse so unique and compelling: the irreducibility of the confrontation with the wholly other. in his insistance that the subject must overcome the crippling hesitation of the %il y a% to respond to the other, levinas offers us an important rejoinder to those ethical systems that would be content to rest in generalizations and pieties. levinas insists instead on an ethics of response to the neighboring other in the light of justice for the others. but when levinas argues that one is subjected solely by other humans in the face-to-face encounter, he elides any number of important ethical considerations. first is the role of inhuman systems, substances, economies, drives and practices in shaping the hypostatic response that is both the self and the other. certainly levinas teaches us that the subject is never a monad: it is always beholden to the other in its subjection; it is always a hostage. but if subjective response is a "saying," the material networks of languages and practices available to the subject in and through its subjection need to be taken into account. the subject's daily confrontation with interpellating inhuman systems is, it would seem, just as formative as his or her daily confrontation with the humans that people these systems. [35] as levinas insists, contact with something anonymous like "work" is not of the same order as contact with coworkers. people overflow the roles they are assigned within such systems; larry in accounting is *more* than larry in accounting. what we do at work or have for lunch today sinks into anonymity, while in our face-to-face meetings - on break from our tasks, over cigarettes and coffee - larry somehow isn't simply consumed or forgotten. if we attend to his difference as difference, larry can't sink into anonymity. burroughs, however, teaches us also to ask after the lunch, cigarettes and coffee, which may not disappear into anonymity quite so quickly. neither, he might add, should the spaces in which we work and the systems that parse out such space, and therefore frame many of our daily face-to-face encounters. these "inhuman" considerations likewise call for response. [36] certainly, levinas recognizes this when he brings the third into the drama of the face-to-face. as he writes of social justice, "if proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would not have been any problem."^32^ but the others confront me also in the face-to-face with the other, and demand that the "self-sufficent 'i-thou'" relation be extended to the others in a relation of justice. here levinas -responding, always, to heidegger -is careful not to pose the relation of social justice with the others as an inauthentic falling away from the authenticity of the face-to-face: "it is not that there first would be the face, and then the being that it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity."^33^ while the face-to-face has a certain quasi-phenomneological priority in levinas - there has to be the specificity of *bodily* contact and response if one is to avoid mere pious generalizations - the face to face opens more than the closed loop of my repsonsibility for you: insofar as "the face qua face opens humanity," my responsibility for the others is inscribed in my very ressonsibility for you. the specific other and the social-historical realm of others cannot be separated in the revelation of the face-to-face.^34^ [37] but even in his thematization of justice, there nevertheless remains the trace of levinas's most pervasive ethical exclusion, an absolute privilege of the same that lives on in this discourse of the other: "justice" in levinas -infinite response in the here and now -remains synonomous with "humanity"; justice is owed to the others who are as human as the other. the face-to-face extends my responsibility to all that possess a face; the saying of my response to the other human's voice extends to all other humans' voices. i must respond to -and am the "brother" of -only that which has a voice and a face. but what about the face of systems, the face of total need confronted in intoxicants, or the face of animals? as levinas responds, i cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called "face." the human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. i don't know if a snake has a face . . . . i do not know at what moment the human appears, but what i want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being . . . . [w]ith the appearance of the human -and this is my entire philosophy -there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.^35^ in thematizing response solely in terms of the human face and voice, it would seem that levinas leaves untouched the oldest and perhaps most sinister unexamined privilege of the same: %anthropos% and only %anthropos% has %logos% and as such %anthropos% responds not to the barbarous or the dumb or the inanimate, but only to those who qualify for the privileges of "humanity," only to those deemed to possess a face, only to those recognized to be living in the %logos% ^36^ certainly, as the history of anti-colonial and feminist movements have taught us, those who we now believe unproblematically to possess a "face" and a "voice" weren't always granted such privilege, and present struggles continue to remind us that the racist's or homophobe's first refuge is a distinction between humanity and its supposed others. [38] in addition, we might ask about those ethical calls of the future from "beings" that we cannot now even imagine, ethical calls that donna haraway categorizes under the heading of the "cyborg [which] appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed."^37^ certainly, the historical and theoretical similarities that haraway draws among the discourses surrounding her title subjects, _simians, cyborgs, and women_, should force us to ask after and hold open categories that have not been yet recognized as ethically compelling.^38^ as judith butler maintains in her work on performative identity, "the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less 'human,' the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. these excluded sites come to bound the 'human' as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation."^39^ the "human," in other words, may name the latest -if certainly not the last -attempt to circumscribe a constitutive boundary around ethical response. of course, the permeability of this boundary is traced in nearly all the crucial socio-ethical questions of today. from abortion to cryogenics to cybernetics, from animal research to gene therapy to cloning, we see the ethical necessity surrounding the "disruption and rearticulation" of any stable sense or site we might offer to define (human) life itself. and any strong or useful sense of ethics would seem to entail that such response is not limited from before the fact. [39] in the end, levinas's insistence on the "human" as sole category of ethical response further protects and extends the imperialism of western subjectivity -what butler calls, in another context, an "imperialist humanism that works through unmarked privilege" (118). despite the levinasian advances toward a non-ontological ethics of response as substitution for the other, levinas nevertheless also extends the privilege of "man," which, as haraway reminds us, is quite literally the "the one who is not animal, barbarian or woman."^40^ and to quote selectively from levinas's citation of pascal, "*that* is how the usurpation of the whole world began:" with the protection of the category "human" from its others.^41^ *special thanks are due here to sherry brennan, rich doyle, celeste fraser delgado, william j. harris, john proveti and alan schrift for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper.* notes: ^1^ william burroughs, _naked lunch_ (new york: grove, 1992), p. xi. further references will be cited in the text as _nl_. ^2^ avital ronell, _crack wars: literature, addiction, mania_ (lincoln and london: university of nebraska press, 1992), p. 57. ^3^ ibid., p. 50. ^4^ addiction is from the latin %addictus%, "given over," one awarded to another as a slave. ^5^ william burroughs, _junky_ (new york: penguin, 1977), pp. xv-xvi. ^6^ while they share similar concerns, levinas's conception of desire and alterity remains in sharp contradistinction to lacan's, insofar as the lacanian horizon of desire for the "great other" is tied to a conception of lack. for both lacan and levinas, desire is animated by its object, but the hegelian conception of desire as lack or insufficiency (failure to complete itself) remains characteristic of desire in lacan: the upshot of the oedipal drama is the lamentable expropriation of the self from the real into the symbolic. though ostensibly the locus of ethics in lacan, the other in fact remains my enemy, the marker for that which constantly frustrates the animating ontological desire of returning to "essence," returning to myself. as lacan writes in book ii of the _seminar_, desire is "a relation of being to lack. this lack is the lack of being properly speaking. it isn't the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists" [_the seminar of jacques lacan_, book ii, trans sylvana tomaselli (cambridge university press, 1988), p. 223]. compare levinas, where desire is "an aspiration that is conditioned by no prior lack" ("meaning and sense," p. 94). as he writes, "responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence.... i exist through the other and for the other, *but without this being alienation*" (_otb_, p. 114/145-46, my emphasis). in levinas, being for-the-other -which he will call "substitution" -exists *before essence*, before the real; hence, for levinas there can be no alienation from and or nostalgia for the return to self: "substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself" (_otb_, p. 124/160). for lacan, need (as loss of the real) subtends and traverses desire. for levinas, the opposite is the case -any conception of loss or lack is subtended by the infinite, which exists before the distinction between lack and plenitude. ^7^ levinas, "meaning and sense," trans. alphonso lingis, _collected philosophical papers_, ed. alphonso lingis (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1987), pp. 75-108, p. 91, italics removed. ^8^ emmanuel levinas, _otherwise than being, or beyond essence_, trans. alphonso lingis (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1981), p. 192n. originally published as _autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence_ (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1978). p. 110n. further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as _otb_, with the translation page number cited first, followed by the page number of the french. ^9^ for his engagement with sartre, see levinas's "reality and its shadow," trans. alphonso lingis, _the levinas reader_, ed. sean hand (cambridge, ma: basil blackwell, 1989), pp. 129-43. certainly more could be said on this topic, insofar as sartre's _nausea_ likewise owes a tremendous debt to heidegger's 1929 lecture on the nothing, "what is metaphysics?" suffice it to say, levinas is interested in an *other than* the distinction between being and nothingness. see _otb_: "not *to be otherwise*, but *otherwise than being*. and not to not-be. . . . being and not-being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being. or else the negativity which attempts to repel being is immediately submerged by being. . . . the statement of being's *other*, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness -the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence" (p. 3/3). ^10^ emmanuel levinas, _existence and existents_, trans. alphonso lingis (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1978), p. 21. originally published as _de l'existence a l'existant_ (paris: fontaine, 1947), p. 26. further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as _e&e_, with the translation page number cited first. ^11^ adriaan peperzak, _to the other: an introduction to the philosophy of emmanuel levinas_ (west lafayette: purdue university press, 1993), p. 18. ^12^ ibid., p. 18. ^13^ the horror of the %il y a% is, in levinas's concise words, "fear *of* being and not [heideggerian] fear *for* being" (_e&e_, p. 62/102, my emphases). ^14^ for more on this point, see john llewelyn's "the 'possibility' of heidegger's death," _journal of the british society for phenomenology_ 14.2 (1983), pp. 127-38, p. 137: "the distinction between a possibility which something *has* and a possibility which something *is* compels us to take notice that heidegger writes not only of death as a possibility of being, a %seinsmoglichkeit%, but also of death as a %seinkonnen%. a %konnen% is a capacity, power or potentiality. ontic potentialities are qualities which things have and may develop, as a child may develop its potentiality to reason. but being towards death is an ontological potentiality, a potentiality of and for being. %dasein% *is* its death itself." ^15^ see martin heidegger, _being and time_, trans. john macquarrie and edward robinson (new york: harper and row, 1962), p. 308: "%dasein% is authetically itself only to the extent that, *as* concernful being-alongside and solicitous being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self." for more on this question, consult r.j.s. manning, _interpreting otherwise than heidegger: emmanuel levinas's ethics as first philosophy_ (pittsburgh, duquesne u p, 1993), pp. 38-53. ^16^ jan de greef, "skepticism and reason," trans. dick white, _face to face with levinas_, ed. richard a. cohen (albany: suny press, 1986), pp. 159-80, p. 166. ^17^ here levinas seems to have much in common with judith butler's recent work on performative identity in _gender trouble_ (new york: routledge, 1990). for butler, like levinas, to say that subjective agency is "performative" is *not* to say that agency doesn't exist or that all agency is merely an ironic performance; but rather it is to say that such agency is necessarily a matter of *response* to already-given codes. the performative subject does not and cannot merely found its own conditions or its own identity, but at the same time this subject is not merely determined in some lock-step way; as butler writes, "the subject is not *determined* by the rules through which it is generated because signification is *not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition*" (p. 145). certainly, focusing on the question of gender would open up a considerable gulf between their projects (see footnote 39), but there is at least some traffic between butler and levinas on the question of identity and performativity. ^18^ see _otb_, p. 13/16: "in its *being*, subjectivity undoes *essence* by substituting itself for another. qua one-for-the-other, it is absorbed in signification, in saying or the verb form of the infinite. signification precedes essence . . . . substitution is signification. not a reference of one term to another, as it appears thematized in the said, but substitution as the very subjectivity of a subject, interruption of the irreversible identity of the essence." ^19^ levinas specifically points his reader to blanchot's _thomas the obscure_ for the experience of the %il y a% (_e&e_, p. 63n/103n). see also levinas's _sur maurice blanchot_ (montpellier: fata morgana, 1975), esp. pp. 9-26, and his interview on the %il y a% in _ethics and infinity_, trans. richard cohen (pittsburgh: duquesne university press, 1985), pp. 45-52. for more specifically on blanchot, levinas and the %il y a% see simon critchley, "%il y a% -a dying stronger than death (blanchot with levinas)," _oxford literary review_ 15.1-2 (1993), pp. 81-131, esp. pp. 114-19; joseph libertson, _proximity: levinas, blanchot, bataille and communication_ (the hague: martinus nijhoff, 1983), pp. 201-11; edith wyschogrod, "from the disaster to the other: tracing the name of god in levinas," _phenomenology and the numinous_, ed. simon silverman phenomenology center (pittsburgh: duquesne university press, 1988), pp. 67-86; and paul davies, "a fine risk: reading blanchot reading levinas," _re-reading levinas_, eds. robert bernasconi and simon critchley (bloomington: indiana university press, 1991), pp. 201-28. ^20^ as levinas writes in a similar context, "one watches on when there is nothing to watch and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful. the bare fact of presence is oppressive; one is held by being, held to be. one is detached from any object, any content, yet there is presence, . . . the universal fact of the *there is*" (_e&e_, p. 65/109). ^21^ see, for example, jurgen habermas's _philosophical discourse of modernity_, trans. frederick lawrence (cambridge: mit press, 1990), pp. 296-98. ^22^ compare levinas's _totality and infinity_, trans. alphonso lingis (pittsburgh: dusquesne university press, 1969), p. 197: "the idea of infinity, the overflowing of finite thought by its content, effectuates the relation of thought with what exceeds its capacity. . . . this is the situation we call welcome of the face." ^23^ ibid, p. 34. ^24^ see the final lines of friedrich nietzsche, _on the genealogy of morals_, trans. walter kaufmann (new york: vintage, 1967), essay iii, section 28. ^25^ see levinas, "reality and its shadow," p. 131. ^26^ levinas wishes to rescue a notion of transcendence as phenomenological self-overcoming, but shorn of its contological intentionality. davies defines "transcendent" as follows: "that is to say, for levinas, [the transcendent subject] can approach the other *as* other in its 'approach,' in 'proximity'" ("a fine risk," 201). ^27^ this may be more accruately -or at least philosophically -posed as a "good infinite, bad infinite" situation, which would bring us to a consideration of hegel, for whom levinas's alterity would be precisely a kind of bad (unrecuperable) infinite. it seems clear what hegel protects in his exiling of the bad infinite: it keeps the dialectical system safe from infinite specular regression. here, however, i would like to fold levinas's skepticism concerning hegel back onto levinas's own text: why the exiling of the %il y a% as a bad infinite, and what privilege is -however surrepticiously -protected by or in such a move? see rodolphe gasche, "structural infinity," in his _inventions of difference: on jacques derrida_ (cambridge: harvard press, 1994) for more on the hegelian bad infinite. ^28^ jean francois lyotard, "levinas' logic," trans. ian mcleod, _face to face with levinas_, ed. richard a. cohen (albany: suny press, 1986), pp. 117-58, pp. 125, 152. ^29^ william burroughs, "christ and the museum of extinct species," _conjunctions_ 13 (1989), pp. 264-73, pp. 272, 268. ^30^ compare jacques derrida's discussion of aids in "the rhetoric of drugs," trans. michael israel, _differences_ 5.1 (1993), pp. 1-24, p. 20: "the virus (which belongs neither to life nor to death) may *always already* have broken into any 'intersubjective' space . . . . [a]t the heart of that which would preserve itself as a dual intersubjectivity it inscribes the mortal and indestructible trace of the third -not the third as the condition of the symbolic and the law, but the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond." ^31^ see the interview "the paradox of morality" in _the provocation of levinas_, ed. robert bernasconi and david wood (london: routledge, 1988), pp. 168-80, p. 169. ^32^ quoted in peperzak, _to the other_, p. 180. ^33^ levinas, _totality and infinity_, p. 213. ^34^ this is contra peperzak's _to the other_, which casts levinas as a metaphysician profoundly disdainful of the social or material world: "the secret of all philosophy that considers society and history to be the supreme perspective is war and expolitation. . . . as based on the products of human activities, the judgment of history is an unjust outcome, and if the social totality is constituted by violence and corruption, there seems to be no hope for a just society unless justice can be brought into it from the outside. this is possible only if society and world history do not constitute the dimension of the ultimate. the power of nonviolence and justice lies in the dimension of speech and the face-to-face, the dimension of straightforward intersubjectivity and fundamental ethics, which opens the closed totality of anonymous productivity and historicity" (pp. 178-79). ^35^ levinas, "the paradox of morality," pp. 171-72. for more on the question of animality in levinas, see john llewelyn's _the middle voice of ecological conscience: a chiasmic reading of responsibility in the neighbourhood of levinas, heidegger, and others_ (london: macmillan, 1991), pp. 49-67. see also simon critchley's treatment of this topic in _the ethics of deconstruction: derrida and levinas_ (cambridge, ma: blackwell, 1992), pp. 180-82. ^36^ compare heidegger's translation of this aristotelian privilege in "the origin of the work of art," trans. albert hofstadter, _poetry, language, thought_, ed. albert hofstadter (new york: harper and row, 1971), pp. 15-89, p. 73, 76: "language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the open for the first time. where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant and animal, there is also no openness of what is . . . . the primitive . . . is always futureless." ^37^ donna j. haraway, _simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature_ (new york: routledge, 1991), p. 152. ^38^ certainly to have recognized women, gays and lesbians or post-colonial peoples as ethically compelling subjects has not solved their respective social and political problems; no ethical system can promise that. my point here is that the recognition of "humanity" is not -and historically has not been -a self-evident or ideology-free procedure. ^39^ judith butler, _bodies that matter_ (new york: routledge, 1993), p.8. ^40^ haraway, _simians, cyborgs, and women_, p. 156. for a critique of levinas's thematization of the feminine, see luce irigaray's "the fecundity of the caress," trans. carolyn burke in _face to face with levinas_, pp. 231-256, and her "questions to emmanuel levinas: on the divinity of love" in _re-reading levinas_, trans. margaret whitford, pp. 109-19. for an outline of the debate and something of a defense of levinas, see tina chanter, "feminism and the other" in _the provocation of levinas_, pp. 32-56. ^41^ the third epigraph to otb, _pensees_ 112, reads: "'. . . that is my place in the sun.' that is how the usurpation of the whole world began." -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------pavlovic, 'demystifying nationalism: dubravka ugresic and the situation of the writer in (ex-) yugoslavia', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-pavlovic-demystifying.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.595. part 1/1, total size 18120 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- demystifying nationalism: dubravka ugresic and the situation of the writer in (ex-) yugoslavia by tatjana pavlovic romance languages deparment university of washington pavlovic@u.washington.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by tatjana pavlovic, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: ugresic, dubravka. _fording the stream of consciousness_. evanston: northwestern university press, 1993. ugresic, debravka. _in the jaws of life and other stories_. evanston: northwestern university press, 1993. i envy the 'western writer.' i envision my colleague the western writer as an elegant passenger who travels either without luggage or with luggage that is elegantly invisible. i envision myself as a passenger with a great deal of luggage all pasted with labels, as a passenger who is desperately trying to rid himself of this burden which sticks to him as if it were his very fate. -dubravka ugresic, "baggage and belles lettres" [1] these lines exemplify dubravka ugresic's refusal to be plotted in the recent narratives of national revival proliferating throughout croatia and the other republics of (ex)-yugoslavia. dubravka ugresic is the author of three novels--_stefica cvek u raljama zivota_ (_stefica cvek in the jaws of life_); _forsiranje romana-reke_ (_fording the stream of consciousness_); and _zivot je bajka_ (_life is a fairy tale_)--as well as of short stories, screen plays, and anthologies and criticism of russian avant-garde literature. her fiction is not overtly political but her playful obliqueness is in itself the expression of an implicit political stance. [2] what seems frivolous on the surface has serious implications in the context of balkan politics today. in all her writing, ugresic rejects the nationalistic fiction of a fixed and immobile identity constructed through blood, the secret soil of one's origin, the distinctiveness of national character, the metaphysical privileging of one's ethnic group, and other monolithic discourses. like deleuze and guattari, ugresic sees literature as being fundamentally "like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression" (quoted in massumi 179). ugresic is a "nomad," perpetually traveling on the border between "high" and "low" culture, between "kitsch" and "art." she "deoriginates" her fiction through the use of cliches, of a multiplicity of genres, and of a continual masquerade of styles. she challenges the unity of the nationalistic narratives that have recently proliferated throughout ex-yugoslavia; she stands and moves in the borderlands, occupying sites of difference in the strategic manner described by homi bhabha: "never entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional...a pressure, and a presence, that acts constantly, if unevenly, along the entire boundary of authorization" (bhabha 297). [3] ugresic has written of two opposed currents in the yugoslav literatures: "one which contests the so-called tradition of national literature, demystifies the notions of so-called great literature, usurps entrenched systems of genres, defends the autonomy of literature, and bespeaks a cultural cosmopolitanism-while the other, its antipode, endorses the very same notions that the first group questions" ("made in yugoslavia" 10). in unapologetically embracing the first of these currents, ugresic responds to the totalitarian currents which have manipulated literature in eastern europe. after 1948, yugoslav literature was fairly free from the aesthetic norms of socialist realism advocated in other eastern european countries. post-war croatian and serbian literature was known for creative explorations of different genres and styles. the yugoslav writer was placed on the border between east and west. this border culture allowed the intermingling of traditional political concerns with avant-garde and later postmodern aesthetics. such a culture was also premised upon a promiscuous cross-fertilization of the various yugoslav nationalities. ugresic herself is a product of this intermingling of styles and cultures. she observes that the "yugoslav writer lived in a common cultural space of different traditions and languages that intermixed and intercommunicated. it meant knowing latin and cyrillic alphabets, reading serbian, croatian, macedonian, and slovene writers. it meant living in zagreb, having a publisher in belgrade, printing a book in sarajevo, having readings in ljubljana, skopje, pristina. it meant living in different cultures and feeling they were his own" ("intellectuals as leaders" 679). [4] nonetheless, for fifty years, discourse in yugoslavia was subordinated to the demands of a hegemonic titoist politics. "%bratstvo i jedinstvo%" (brotherhood and unity) was all too often an excuse for demanding narrow-minded conformity. but in the last few years, the cliches of serbian and croatian nationalism have simply taken over the space formerly occupied by the slogans of communism. ugresic's playful cosmopolitanism, her twisting of gender stereotypes, and her refusal of politically prescribed rhetoric together define her writing as a practice of resistance. [5] the physical and metaphorical breakup of the former yugoslavia has unleashed a collective paranoia, involving the surfacing of old, worn-out myths of each of the ethnic groups. writers and intellectuals have unfortunately contributed to this. even the most cosmopolitan writers have become virulently nationalistic. ugresic sardonically remarks that milorad pavic, the writer of the famous _dictionary of the khazars_, has "traveled the world explaining to the jews that his khazars were really jews, dropped in on croatians to hint that the khazars might have been croatians, claimed to the basques that the khazars were none other than basques. today, after joyfully sliding into the serbian warrior camp, pavic explains that the khazars are simply serbs" ("intellectuals as leaders" 681). in serbia and croatia alike, ugresic remarks, "instead of interculturality we are witnessing a turn to cultural egocentrism" ("made in yugoslavia" 11). [6] ugresic's novel _fording the stream of consciousness_ was published in zagreb in 1988. the setting of this novel is an international literary conference taking place in zagreb. the conference is attended by writers and literary critics from both east and west europe and the united states, as well as critics and writers from zagreb. literary critics and writers are the source of endless delight for ugresic's sharp eye. ugresic ironically analyses cliches and idiosyncracies of both west and east in the novel, presenting them primarily but not exclusively through the eyes of a zagreb writer named pipo fink and a nameless minister of culture, a communist party hack who started out as a butcher in pre-second world war days. as the minister observes at the beginning of the novel, "the ones from the eastern block came to buy their wives bras and panties, and the ones from the west to wash their cevapcici down with plenty of sljivovica" (_fording_ 29). [7] indeed, each writer of the conference parodically embodies a national type. mark stenheim, the american, lists his numerous educational degrees from various universities, from writing programs, and even from deep sea fishing school, obsessed with the fear that he will not be considered sufficiently intellectual. for his part, the czech writer, jan zdrazila, is tormented by guilt as he works for years on his lengthy and unpublishable "masterpiece," while earning his living by censoring the works of other writers. yugoslav writers are not spared irony, either. when jean-paul flagus, one of the writers visiting the conference, enters the writers club and asks the bartender where are the yugoslav writers, the response he gets is "writers? we have no writers. no writers, no literature. life writes the novels in this country; nobody gives a damn about literature" (_fording_ 61). [8] indeed, ugresic takes to the limit the notions of the work of literature as a form of life and of life as a fictional construction. truth, lie, copy, simulacrum, cliche, high art, film, "real life," and writing are intermingled to the point of indistinguishability. it is appropriate that the literary conference ends with a banquet at which the characters actually eat all the dishes described in madame bovary. the novel itself combines a wide variety of genres and styles: it includes elements of a detective and mystery story, together with diary fragments, parodic rewrites of previous literary works, film-noir allusions, and pastiches of the fantastic literary tradition. the information constructed by any one narrative voice challenges, undercuts, and supplements the perspective of the other voices. the text exposes its seams and discontinuities, and the effect is a constant dislocation of meaning. the montage of voices and perspectives leads to a condition of fragmentation, flux, and continual transformation. ugresic rejects the creation of a unified theory, of an absolute meaning, and of the search for some ultimate truth (whether ideological, artistic, or philosophical). _fording the stream of consciousness_ starts with a quote from voltaire: "'how can you prefer stories that are senseless and mean nothing?' the wise ulug said to the sultans. 'we prefer them because they are senseless.'" there is no "truth" and "meaning" in ugresic's text; we can see how it functions but not what it means. [9] this continual play also leads ugresic to question the idea of the "originality" of the literary work. one of the writers at the conference, the enigmatic and idiosyncratic jean-paul flagus, rejects the idea of originality and embraces the role of author as mass producer: "a literary andy warhol producing a series of cloned stories, cloned novels. all one need do is make the reading public believe they represent 'brilliant' cynicism, a 'dazzling' recycling of everyday experience" (_fording_ 186). flagus, however, is later revealed to be an international scammer and forger working in so-called "literary espionage"; in revenge for his own feelings of literary incompetence and mediocrity he manipulates the lives of other writers at the conference as if they were themselves characters in a novel. (flagus and his mysterious servant raul are themselves ugresic's sly versions of the characters of mephistopheles and behemoth in bulgakov's _the master and margerita_.) elsewhere in the novel, a real-life friend of ugresic is recorded as commenting that "more often than not, good literature comes from trash" (_fording 220_). ugresic herself plays the postmodern game of "literary appropriation," or recycling trash, with great glee in some of her other works: most notably in the short story "a hot dog in a warm bun." this story "plagiarizes" and updates gogol's "the nose," making what was merely implied in the original story hilariously explicit. in ugresic's rewrite, the phallic order is disrupted when an actual penis (rather than a nose) becomes detached from its owner and creates confusion wherever it appears. sexual and textual politics are conflated, and identities and points of origin become unrecognizable. [10] as this example implies, ugresic simultaneously mocks the cultural authority of literature and its institutions, the political constraints imposed by both communist and nationalist regimes, and the subordinate position of women in traditional yugoslav society. in connection with the latter, there is a wonderful scene in _fording the stream of consciousness_ where two young women writers take revenge on a vicious male literary critic who accuses them of writing "women's literature that represents the lava of babble as it issues from kitchens the world over, in short kitchen literature." they decide to torture him accordingly, with kitchen utensils: "let the bastard stew in his own juice. picture a meat-grinder or an electric knife if you are up for castration" (_fording_ 132). [11] ugresic's previous novel, _%stefica cvek u raljama zivota%_ (_steffie speck in the jaws of life_), is literally "kitchen literature" since it begins and ends in that traditionaly female space. it is an ironic deconstruction of the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in traditional yugoslav culture. the title character's unrelieved sexual frustration is a result of her futile attempt to conform to the myths of feminine passivity. she is a good natured but lonely typist from zagreb, trapped within fiction, especially the cliches of women's magazines, lonely hearts advice colums, fairy tales, and traditional folk wisdom. (all of these sources are woven into the texture of ugresic's book). stefica's attempts to find a man invariably end in calamitous mishaps: for all the male characters she meets are equally trapped in the ridiculous limitations of their roles as virile seducers. [12] in terms of form as well as content, ugresic works to subvert the phallic order of conventional narrative. there is no hierarchical distinction between the different sorts of discourses that make up the book: authorial self-reflection, inane newspaper clippings, and popular sayings. ugresic realizes the impossibility of escaping cliches, and so she embraces them instead. the novel's subtitle is "patchwork story": instead of a table of contents, we are given a set of pattern instructions for knitting a garment: tacking, hemming, fastening, interfacing, the author's zigzag stitch, and so on. in place of a conventional conclusion, the novel trails off into a series of supplements to be used as the reader desires, so that the story can be expanded indefinitely. a whole range of endings, from happy to tragic, is made available. the author even at one point asks her mother, the next door neighbor, and assorted female friends for advice on what to do next. [13] the novels i have been discussing were written at a time when communist yugoslavia was starting to fall apart, but when nobody yet foresaw the tragedies that are taking place today. gender politics and nationalist politics are yet more strongly intertwined now, as the former yugoslavia is torn apart by civil war. in addition, the nationalistic and strongly catholic government of croatia seeks to restrict women's right to abortion, and to push women out of the workplace and other public spaces, and back into traditional family roles. in such a context, there is all the more value in ugresic's playfully ironic fictions. in an authorial interruption in _fording the stream of consciousness_, ugresic writes, "i love my country because it is so small and i feel sorry for it." indeed, in the face of recent events, this hypothetical cosmopolitan balkan country has shrunk to virtual invisibility. but ugresic's prose still provides a refreshing counterweight to the recent flood of self-glorifying nationalistic novels, plays, and essays emerging from the former yugoslavia. as hans magnus enzensberger remarks, we don't need "the national writer exalting the mysterious spirit of his own tribe and denouncing the inferior crowd next door in a constant flood of verse epics" ("intellectuals as leaders" 686). or as nietzsche cleverly put it, "i only attack causes that are victorious; i may even wait until they become victorious" (_ecce homo_ 232). works cited: bhabha, homi k. "dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation." _nation and narration_. london: routledge, 1990. magnus enzensberger, hans. "intellectuals as leaders." _partisan review_ 4 (1992). massumi, brian. _a user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia_. cambridge: the mit press, 1992. nietzsche, friedrich. _ecce homo_. new york: vintage books, 1969. ugresic, dubravka. "baggage and belles lettres." _san francisco review of books_ 17.2 (fall 1992). ---. "made in yugoslavia." _san francisco review of books_ 15.2 (fall 1990). ---. "a hot dog in a warm bun." _formations_ 5.2 (summer-fall 1989). ---. "intellectuals as leaders." panel discussion in _partisan review_ 4 (1992). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------fulton, 'three poems', postmodern culture v4n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n3-fulton-three.txt archive pmc-list, file fulton-a.594. part 1/1, total size 7961 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- three poems by alice fulton dept. of english university of michigan alice.fulton@um.cc.umich.edu _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.3 (may, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu copyright (c) 1994 by alice fulton, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. == it might mean immersion, that sign i've used as title, the sign i call a bride after the recessive threads in lace == the stitches forming deferential space around the firm design. it's the unconsidered mortar between the silo's bricks == never admired when we admire the holdfast of the tiles (their copper of a robin's breast abstracted into flat). it's a seam made to show, the deckle edge == constructivist touch. the double equal that's nowhere to be found in math. the dash to the second power == dash to the max. it might make visible the acoustic signals of things about to flame. it might let thermal expansion be syntactical. let it add stretch while staying reticent, unspoken as a comma. don't get angry == protest == but a comma seems so natural, you don't see it when you read: it's gone to pure transparency. yes but. the natural is what poetry contests. why else the line == why stanza == why meter and the rest. like wheels on snow that leave a wake == that tread in white without dilapidating mystery == hinging one phrase to the next == the brides. thus wed == the sentence cannot tell whether it will end or melt or give way to the fabulous == the snow that is the mortar between winter's bricks == the wick that is the white between the ink [--------------------------------------------------] southbound in a northbound lane "_a fetish is a story masquerading as an object._" --robert stoller her anatomically-correct smile turned to frown when she turned upside down: the inflatable naked woman the student body tossed, cum laude, through the graduating bleachers. like gossip, a bubble bred for turbulence, she tumbled to the ph.d.'s, who stuffed her under their seats. i think the trick to falling is never landing in the palm of someone's hand. the lyric, which majored in ascent, is free now to labor and cascade. what goes up must == waterfalling means the story visits tributaries at a distance from itself. consider what it takes to get us off the ground: what engines laying waste to oil. i'd rather hit the silk from a span and let gravity enhance my flight. though the aerodynamics of jets are steadystate and can be calibrated, i'd rather trust a parachute, which exists in flux and can't be touched by mathematical fixations. in what disguise will she arrive - whose dissent is imminent yet unscripted - offensive as necessary? whose correct context is the sky. arrive like something spit out of a prism in a primary tiger bodice. be modern as an electronic vigil light, precisely delicate as nylon, the ripstop kind, that withstands 40 pounds of pull per inch. spectators, if we jump together, we'll bring the bleachers down. "i was frightened. my flesh hissed and i thought i'd perished, but the sensation of descent vanishes once the body stops accelerating. it's astonishing how nothingness firms up. air takes on mass. the transparent turns substantial. i stretched out on that dense blue bed until the canopy expanded like a lung shoved from my body, plucking me off the nothing matt. what held me up was hard to glimpse but intimate as mind or soul. i sensed it was intensely friendly. i almost thought it cared for me." if you can't love me, let me down gently. if you can't love me, don't touch me. if we descend together like olympic skydivers or snowflakes we can form patterns in freefall. like a beeswarm, we can make a brain outside the body. when falling is a means of flying, the technique is to release. how many worlds do you want, my unpopular bodhisattva? let's sneak one past the culture's fearless goalies, be neither one nor the other, but a third being, formerly thought _de trop_. before i throw my body off, my enemy of the state, i'm going to kneel and face the harsh music that is space. [--------------------------------------------------] call the mainland nature hates a choir. have you noticed the lack of chorus in the country every dawn? the birds spent the night looking down on earth as that opaque, unstarred space. the vivacious soundscape they create at day must be their amazement that the planet's still in place. no wait. time out and whoa. there i go - coating the birds' tones with emotion, hearing them as my own. i know, i know. yet i can't say birds aren't feeling in their hollow bones some resonance of glad that night has passed. i can't claim their hearts don't shake when the will to live another day in the cascade of all that is is strong. emotion makes its presence felt in flesh. maybe you've noticed -the body speeds its reflexes and is moved. it moves. it makes the heart, lungs, and gut remember their lives like sleepers between bouts of sleep. while more serene delights are intellect selective, without cardiac effect: the mind sparks at a borges story or elegant proof in math, a bliss that doesn't shift across the blood brain barrier. such heady pleasures are never for the birds. to be key rather than bit player, of independent means - to sound your own agenda in polyphonic overlay as day takes shape == as day takes shape the birds begin their final take. they'll never know themselves as symbols of the sublime. transcendent messy shrines == whose music won't stoop to unison or climax: tell them i said hi. -----end file---------------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.595. part 1/1, total size 70169 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------i. publication announcements: 1) essays in postmodern culture 2) the tribe of john 3) minnesota review 4) gruene street 5) public culture 6) the walker percy internet project 7) queer-e 8) lucinda folio 9) proverb studies 10) modern fiction studies ii. conferences, calls for papers, invitations to submit: 11) feminist generations 12) language machines 13) tinfish 14) centennial review 15) questions of identity 16) crossroads in cultural studies 17) penn state conference on rhetoric and composition 18) toposthesia 19) hellas 20) critical mass 21) (post)colonialism and culture in an american context 22) suitcase: a journal of transcultural traffic 23) texts and images 24) patheticism 25) sigir '95 26) drake university conference on popular music and culture 27) capitalism and the postmodern 28) cath '95 iii. other: 29) sima handbook on running a www service 30) nyu in cracow 31) thematic bibliographies in computer processing of linguistic communications 32) crew 33) humanities canada 34) woodrow wilson fellowships ------------------------------------------------------------------------------publication announcements: * essays in postmodern culture: an anthology of essays from postmodern culture is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) to order a copy by e-mail, click here. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the tribe of john: ashbery and contemporary poetry the tribe of john: ashbery and contemporary poetry, ed. susan schultz. coming in june from the university of alabama press. contributors include charles altieri, charles bernstein, bonnie costello, donald revell, andrew ross, and john shoptaw. the book offers new readings of ashbery's work, as well as investigations of the cultural contexts of contemporary american poetry. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * minnesota review [department of english, east carolina university, greenville, nc 27858-4353] back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * gruene street gruene street: an internet journal of poetry and prose invites submissions of prose (750-3500 words) and poetry (under 60 lines) for its premiere issue to appear late summer/early fall 1995. the editors of gruene street seek to provide an outlet for high-quality work that merits a sophisticated on-line audience, hoping to publish writing that at least aspires to the quality of work that appears in literary journals such as kansas quarterly, cimmaron review, prairie schooner, etc.--providing an alternative to the 'zines and zine-like publications that seem to dominate the net. gruene street accepts multiple and simultaneous submissions as well as previously-published work. **** submission guidelines in brief **** fiction no obvious genre-fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc.) excerpted novels ok. see poetry. poetry no real form/content limitations (except length). please, no *gratuitous* sex/violence with no other purpose but shock value --if your attempting some sort of poetic rendition of oliver stone's open to almost anything if it's well done. essays open to a variety subjects that might be of interest to a general/academic audience including education (i.e. critical pedagogy, reform), literary and cultural studies, non-sectarian political perspectives, liberation theology, postmodern/postcolonial as long as it is somewhat accessible and not caught up in its own cleverness, has *something* to say etc.++ we have a particular interest in publishing well-written essays (including analytical book reviews) and anticipate receiving far more fiction/poetry than non-fiction--so if in doubt, give us a try. submit manuscripts via e-mail to editors at in ascii text or html format. if your work is already somewhere on the www (such as your home page) send your url. for more detailed info contact the editors at aff@tenet.edu or check out our home page on the world wide web: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/hpp/gruene.html back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * public culture [the university of chicago press, journals division, p.o. box 37005, chicago, il 60637 usa. fax 312/753-0811] back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the walker percy internet project the walker percy internet project seeks to raise appreciation for the formidable contributions to modern thought and fiction that walker percy, md, has left as a compelling legacy to humanity. percy's provocative integration of philosophy, science, and art together througout his writings is nothing less than strikingly original, and his "diagnostic" vision as a thinker and novelist remains a unique, if not invaluable, critical perspective on the human crisis in the late 20th-century. the worldwideweb site is designed to accommodate the general internet browser by providing an introduction to percy and his thought as well as serve as a comprehensive, up-to-date database for the professional researcher of percy. it may be reached by using a web-browser such as mosaic or netscape by entering the following url: http://sunsite.unc.edu/wpercy/ the site is located at the university of north carolina at chapel hill, archive of the "walker percy papers." your interest and comments are invited! henm@mail.utexas.edu henry p. mills publisher of 2510 thornton road #17 --the walker percy project- austin, tx 78704 512/441-7977 (w) 512/448-4273 (h) 512/441-7999 (fx) back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * queer-e vol. 1. no. 1 contents the directions for downloading/transfer of files will be operative as of friday may 26 1995. table of contents part i. 1. a few words about the *queer* in queer-e by the editorial collective 2. queer-e subscribers : roundtable discussion call for responses part ii. critical essays 3. "queer sex habits (oh, no! i mean) six queer habits: some talking points" ........................................... eve kosofsy sedgwick 4. "(dis)ordered selves: dangerous transactions" ........................................... lauren wilson 5. "the radical faerie movement: an introduction to a queer spirit pathway" ........................................... william rodgers 6. "heart of darkness: the disquiet body of electronic communication" ........................................... alan sondheim 7. "clothes make the man: cross-dressing and gender performance in sidney's _the countess of pembroke's acadia_" ............................................ lisa quinn 8. "*the queer cautious girl*: adela quested and gender performance in e.m. forster's _a passage to india_" ............................................. george piggford part iii. creative writing and poetry 9. "whitehalle" (short story) .............................................. top epps 10. "like a book fragments: a dialogue" .............................................. molly rhodes 11. "heaven;" "'til death;" "commandments;" "speaking;" "proceed" .............................................. deborah pletsch-owen 12. "colder season;" "grief;" "jewelry;" "lunch;" "harvest" .............................................. jon adams part iv. notes from the front: *queer* politics and activism 13. "business as usual: on queer pride day 1994" .............................................. marina gonzalez part v. book reviews (and request for book reviewers) 14. "what becomes a closet most?" .............................................. lynda goldstein (attached to this file is a list of books we have in our office waiting for reviewers) 15. "the political body and the body politic" .............................................. maureen phalon part vi. 16. queer-e notices, announcements and calls for submissions file directions on how to retrieve queer-e articles from the qrd: articles can be retrieved from the queer resources directory by several different methods. by world wide web: point your browser at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/media/journals/queer-e-v1.n1 by gopher: point your client at gopher.qrd.org, select "queer resources", "qrd", "media", and "journals" in that order. by ftp: point your client at ftp.qrd.org and change directory to /pub/qrd/media/journals/queer-e-v1.n1 by return email: send mail to ftpmail@qrd.org containing only: open cd /pub/qrd/media/journals/queer-e-v1.n1 get article.# quit where you fill in the appropriate value of #, from 0 (table of contents) to 16 (notices/submissions, etc.) you can request as many articles as you like by simply increasing the number of "get" requests in your message to ftpmail. please send any difficulties to the queer resources directory staff at staff@qrd.org, not the queer-e editorial collective. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * lucinda folio: resonant photo-art stock reproduction quality (32-bit) photographic art now available on-line for immediate use. download through your www-browser. additional pixel-data can be provided for especially large scales or ultra-fine resolutions. the lucinda folio consists of 619 original photo-works, presented on the net as a regularly changing selection of 20-30 images. a published monograph is a possibility and there is also interest in a digital-print (iris) version of the folio. these images print-up best when floated on a four-colour black or dark neutral background; well-suited to stochastic screening. the resolutely, optical edges of the imagery in the _lucinda folio_ are the distinctive result of home-made photographic apparatuses used to capture these studied conjunctions of composed colour, surface texture, and ambient lighting. at times, they seem to embody a lost, intrinsic, immediacy and fascination with moments of internalized perception and play. improbable poetry at best. all the photographs (untitled) were taken throughout north america in the early seventies through the mid-eighties. with a few noted exceptions, none of the photographs have ever been previously published. http://www.teleport.com/~bbrace/bbrace.html back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * proverb studies de proverbio: an electronic journal of international proverb studies, volume 1 number 1 1995 (issn 1323-4633) is edited by dr. teodor flonta at the department of modern languages-italian (university of tasmania, australia) (email: teodor.flonta@modlang.utas.edu.au) and it is a scholarly refereed journal. the first issue contains articles on a variety of issues concerning paremiology (proverb studies) ranging from the perception of proverbiality to proverb use in hitler's 'mein kampf', which can be of interest for non scholars also. de proverbio can be viewed at http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/ "de proverbio: an electronic book publisher" is located in the de proverbio database of de proverbio: an electronic journal of international proverb studies, volume 1 number 1 1995. two books are published there already: lettera in proverbi (isbn 1 875943 01 3), written in the sixteen century by an italian humanist (edited by t. flonta) and a second edition of english-romanian dictionary of equivalent proverbs (isbn 1 875943 00 5) teodor flonta tel. (002) 202321 department of modern languages (italian) international +61 02 202321 university of tasmania fax. (002) 207813 gpo box 252c international +61 02 207813 hobart tasmania 7001 australia e-mail: teodor.flonta@modlang.utas.edu.au url: http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/ back -------------------------------------------------------------------------conferences, calls for papers, invitations to submit: * mfs: modern fiction studies mfs: modern fiction studies invites submissions for these forthcoming special issues: narrative and history (spring, 1996) deadline: 1 august 1995 this special issue will focus upon the interrelation between the discourses of fiction and the discourses of history. we will consider a broad range of issues related to intersections of fiction and history. questions to be addressed might include: what are the differences between the writing of fiction and the writing of history? how is the fictionality of history, and the historicity of fiction, revealed in the narratives of fiction and history? what is the nature of the "historical" in modernity and postmodernity, and how is the historical narrated? what are the horizons of the historical, and how are certain events and eventualities--the "end of history," nuclear apocalypse, the holocaust--represented? what is the relation between event, representation, and the non-representable in history? what strategies do so-called "people without history" employ to forge the discourse of their own historical narratives? what possibilities exist for an interdisciplinary space between the rhetorics of fiction and the disciplines of history? essays submitted for this issue should offer exploration of these and other issues related to the linkages between fiction and history via intensive readings of fiction/histories placed within developed and appropriate theoretical contexts. gertrude stein (fall, 1996), guest-edited by marianne dekoven deadline: 30 march 1996 this issue will be devoted to essays on gertrude stein in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of her death. while a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches will be welcome, this issue will be particularly interested in revisionary views of stein deriving from cultural studies, as well as from feminist and lesbian theoretical and critical approaches. the 50th anniversary of her death, nearly coinciding with the turn of the century, is also an occasion for new assessments of stein's position within emerging histories of the twentieth century, in relation, for example, to studies of american literature, culture, thought, politics; traditions and counter-traditions of women's writing and lesbian writing; feminism and women's history; expatriation; the avant-garde and its subcultures; literary experimentation; modernism and postmodernism; canon and anti-canon; genre, narrative, autobiography; and the visual arts. essays are invited on this and other topics related to the work of gertrude stein. essays submitted for these special issues should range from 20 to 35 pages in length and should conform to the mla style manual. please submit three copies of the essay along with sase for return of the manuscripts. address submissions and inquiries to: patrick o'donnell, editor, modern fiction studies, department of english, heavilon hall, purdue university, west lafayette in 43907-1389. inquiries may also be addressed to pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu, and pod@matrix.mdn.com back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * feminist generations an interdisciplinary, international, all-ages conferences bowling green state university february 2-4, 1996 u.s. feminists in the 1990s understand the contemporary projects of feminism as part of a process that has its roots in the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the suffrage movement of the early 20th century. as people come of age who can take women's rights for granted, two "generations" of active feminists now co-exist, demonstrating the basic yet tenuous success of the contemporary movement. yet we also find ourselves facing cultural and generational gaps, which we believe represent both challenges and opportunities. through this conference, we hope to forge and reinforce relationships among ourselves as we share three days of cultural events representing the diversity and richness of many different "feminist generations." the conference's featured speakers will be faith ringgold, feminist performance artist, quilt maker, and children's book author, and michelle wallace, feminist critic, scholar, and novelist. ringgold's work will also be exhibited in the fine arts center gallery, bowling green state university. we invite presentations (papers, performances, media productions, creative works, and panels) addressing the diverse meanings of "generations" in feminist scholarship and action. interrogating the meanings of the terms and experiences of "first," "second," and "third" wave feminisms/feminists. exploring and contrasting the evolution and experiences of international feminisms. interpreting the bodies of feminist politics, arts, expression, and works through the "feminist generations" of the past and present. exploring the challenges posed by a culture increasingly defined as "post-feminist." we welcome submissions be pre-college-age scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, independent researchers, performers, activists, artists, and members of all feminist generations. child-care and educational programs for older children will be available. please send 250-word abstract, proposal, or project description (with slides, video, or audio excerpts, if appropriate). performers should submit an abstract along with a list of space and supporting prop requirements. the deadline for proposals is october 2, 1995. send proposals to: "feminist generations" women's studies program bowling green state university bowling green, oh 43403 (419) 372-7133 femgen@bgnet.bgsu.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * language machines the english institute 1995 program 54th session august 24-27, 1995 harvard university new work on technologies of literary and cultural production, from a variety of historical, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives. i. pens directed by peter stallybrass elizabeth pittenger, "writing machines" jonathan goldberg, "the female pen: writing as woman" meredith mcgill, "the duplicity of the pen" ii. presses directed by john brenkman franco moretti, "narrative markets, c. 1850" jeffrey masten, "pressing subjects; or, the secret lives of shakespeare's compositors" vinay dharwadker, "the fine print of poetry in modern indian culture" iii. screens directed by nancy vickers marsha kinder, "the dialectics of transmedia screens: from joseph andrews to carmen sandiego" mary ann doane, "screening time" n. katherine hayles, "the condition of virtuality" iv. voice directed by joseph r. roach jay clayton, "the voice in the machine" gregory ulmer, "the unheimlich maneuver: first aid for virtual speakers of cyber-pidgin" peggy phelan, "performing talking cuers" for more information and registration materials, contact: suzanne marcus conference coordinator the english institute center for literary and cultural studies 61 kirkland st. cambridge, ma 02138 617/496-1006 marcus@binah.cc.brandeis.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * tinfish tinfish, a journal of experimental poetry, with an emphasis on work from the pacific region, welcomes contributions. please write to the editor, susan m. schultz, at 1422a dominis street, honolulu, hi 96822, or dept of english, 1733 donaghho road, university of hawaii, honolulu, 96822. the first issue will be free to anyone who asks for a copy (and you can do this over email). please spread the word. and many thanks to those who responded to my earlier query. susan schultz sschultz@uhunix3.uhcc.hawaii.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * [image] the centennial review is interested in receiving essays concerned with the contemporary institution and production of poetry. essays may be of any theoretical orientation, concerned with any writer or group of writers. possible areas of interest include (but are not limited to): the institution, development, and ideology of creative writing programs in the university; poetry as oppositional discourse; the relationships of poetry and theory in recent literary institutions; creative writing as a mode of study and reflection; poetry in postmodern communicative and intellectual paradigms. address queries and contributions to: r. k. meiners the centennial review 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing, mi 48824-1044 fax: (517) 432-1858 cenrev@msu.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * questions of identity: the (post) modern transformation of ethics, culture, and politics research seminar series the research seminar series will run for the whole of the 1994/95 academic year. presentations by academics from the university in the field of social, cultural and policy studies will be convened to run alongside invitations to visiting and external speakers. it is expected to attract a distinguished list of international speakers. the series will coincide with the launch of a new journal, self and agency: a journal of contemporary social issues. it can provide the basis for publications in a special edition as well as a planned two day conference to be held at the university of derby. for further information please contact steve webb on: tel: (uk) 01332 622222 ext.: 2230 fax: (uk) 01332 514323 e-mail:s.webb@derby.ac.uk back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * crossroads in cultural studies an international conference july 1-4, 1996, tampere, finland cultural studies is not a one-way street between the centre and peripheries. rather, it is a crossroads, a meeting point in between different centres, disciplines and intellectual movements. people in many countries and with different backgrounds have worked their way to the crossroads independently. they have made contacts, exchanged views and gained inspiration from each other in pursuing their goals. the vitality of cultural studies depends on a continuous traffic through this crossroads. therefore the conference organizers invite people with different geographical, disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds together to share their ideas. we encourage international participation from a wide range of research areas. the conference is organized by the department of sociology and social psychology, university of tampere, and network cultural studies. the organizing committee represents several universities and disciplines. organizing committee international advisory board pertti alasuutari (chair) ien ang (australia) marko valo (secretary) jostein gripsrud (norway) pirkkoliisa ahponen lawrence grossberg (usa) katarina eskola kim schroder (denmark) pasi falk marja-liisa honkasalo eeva jokinen mikko lehtonen kaisu rattya matti savolainen annika suoninen soile veijola speakers will include: ien ang * pasi falk * paul gilroy * jostein gripsrud * jaber f. gubrium * lawrence grossberg * eeva jokinen * sonia livingstone * anssi perakyla * kim schroder * soile veijola call for papers and coordinators as you will see below, many people have already volunteered to organize sessions on a wide variety of topics, but there is still the opportunity to add to the list. so please complete the preliminary abstract form if you would like to give a paper or offer to organize a session. there will also be a book exhibition, and publishers are requested to contact the organizers. the second announcement and invitation programme, including more information about the conference, its side-events, and a registration form will be available in september. at this stage we assume that the conference fee including lunch and coffee will be about 1000 fim ($210) and hotel accommodation double $70 and single $60 (with breakfast included). the conference will be held in tampere hall that is the largest congress and concert centre in the scandinavia. opposite to the university of tampere, tampere hall is within easy walking distance from the centre of the city and its many services. the unique architecture clearly reflects the activities for which the building was built: conferences, exhibitions, concerts and ballet. list of sessions: anthropology and cultural studies: influences and differences body in society cultural studies and space cultural encounters in mediterranean cultural approaches to education diaries and everyday life encountering with otherness in cultural border-crossings ethnography and reception: dilemmas in qualitative audience studies feminist and cultural approaches to tourism history and theory of cultural studies (inter)net cultures and new information technology life stories in european comparative perspective media culture in the everyday life of children and youth new genders: the decay of heterosexuality post-socialism and cultural reorganization risk and culture social theory and semiotics study of institutional discourse the culture of cities the narrative construction of life stories voluntary associations as cultures youth culture this document is also made available in gopher and www (world wide web) -systems. you can always find the updated version from the following addresses: with www-browser (for example lynx, mosaic, netscape) use the following url (universal resource locator): http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/sosio/culture/ with gopher you can execute the following command: gopher-p 1/information_in_english/university/departments/sosio_sosiopsyk/ culture vuokko.uta.fi 70 or if the command above fails, connect your gopher to address: vuokko.uta.fi 70 and follow the path starting by: "16. information in english/" back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the penn state conference on rhetoric and composition july 12-15, 1995 the penn state conference on rhetoric and composition, now in its 14th year, offers a generous mixture of plenary and special-interest sessions in a relaxed atmosphere. a four-day gathering of teachers and scholars, the conference provides occasion to reflect on composition and rhetoric and opportunity to discuss professional concerns with nationally known speakers and interested colleagues. this year's special topics sessions include: gender and writing, miriam brody and sharon crowley, respondents. rhetorics of disciplinary and professional authority, john angus campbell, susan peck macdonald, and james boyd white, respondents. current situations of composition, jacqueline jones royster and kurt spellmeyer, respondents. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * toposthesia a virtual anthropology information singularity call for submissions for a new electronic hypermedia webspace topothesia means a "viewing or touring of fictitious or imaginary places." it's a place for unravelling the complex intersections of humanity, technology, and imagination. topothesia is not quite an electronic journal. it's an information singularity (is) a place for information accretion. you throw us data, and if it happens to be sympatico with the direction of the webspace, it sticks. for the "mission statement" ("vision") of topothesia, view the following url using your web browser: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/anthro/topothesia.html. here are some possible imaginary spaces... the anthropology of science, technology, and computing (what i call anthro-of-stc); examples might include ethnographies of defense installations, computer labs, video production studios, or so forth... speculations about future technologies and their potential human impacts (what i call anthrofuturism) examples might be space colonization, virtual reality, genetic engineering, life extension, androids, etc... the anthropology of net.culture/cyberculture/virtual culture (what i call cyberanthropology) examinations of sociocultural, linguistic, or even political (censorship, access, privacy, control, equity, etc.) dynamics of various parts of cyberspace, such as muds/moos, the web, internet relay chat, electronic newsmedia, usenet, bbses, online services, etc. discussions of anthropological concepts and concerns found in science fiction... discussions of ways to that technological methods are affecting the social sciences for good or ill content analysis software, cd-rom, video editing equipment, online databases, etc... "human factors" (or their neglect thereof) in technological design... you get the idea, run what you've got by us, if any of this even sounds remotely like what your stuff is about. we want to first see a pre-html abstract of the work. tell us whether you want your work to go in the "perspectives and offerings" section or the "main engine" section. if it's just for perspectives and offerings (we expect things for this area to be short), we'll look over the abstract and tell you whether it's going in the current is or not... or if we don't want it at all. if it's for the main engine, we'll ask you (if we like the abstract) for the document, and then the whole text will be peer-reviewed (mostly by the editorial board, but perhaps some outside review as well) and then sent back to you with suggestions for revisions, corrections, etc. if you've got things you want to see "in print" fast, send 'em to p & o; if you want the benefits of the formal scholarly process (as well as the delays), tell us it's for me... if we like your stuff, we give you the ftp address. do not mail submissions to the journal address. we will not take anything that way. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * hellas call for submissions hellas, a journal of poetry and the humanities, is a literary and scholarly semiannual devoted to a rationalist reform of the arts. of the 160 pages of each issue, 40 are devoted to poetry, especially metrical, that avoids prosaism and meaninglessness. the remainder is devoted to prose of different kinds, including not only serious scholarship, but a sprinkling of learned entertainement. some general remarks on submissions: 1. every submission must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. 2. it is advisable to query first by email or regular mail with an abstract and a copy of the essay's first page. 3. footnotes should follow chicago style. 4. submissions must appeal to the non-specialist. please note that, although the "maximum length" of each section may occasionally be exceeded, brevity will aid a submission's chances of acceptance. queries and abstracts, but not essays or poems, may be emailed directly to the address of gerald harnett, the editor-in-chief: harnett@alumni.upenn.edu essays finely written and rigorously coherent studies of modern poetry, renaissance literature and ancient literature. one essay in each of these three areas, and another in philosophy, is used in each issue. essays in other areas, such as medieval or enlightenment literature, are also occasionally taken. especially sought are studies of classicism, neoclassicism and the relations between ancient and modern literatures. include sase. maximum length: 10,000 words. history hellas would like to publish essays in ancient, medieval and renaissance history, preferably with some pertinence to literary studies, of interest to the general reader. these may be scholarly or casual, but must be readable. maximum length: 10,000 words. ars poetica essays on technical matters such as meter, poetic diction and trope. maximum length: 5,000 words. divertimenti amusing essays on literary subjects. maximum length: 3,000 words. forum opinion on issues stirring the world of arts and letters. maximum length: 3000 words. ultima thule a forum wherein the enlightened opposition, such as there is, may display higher nervous system functions and vocalization skills. both serious and humorous essays are welcome. maximum length: 5,000 words. editorial board renaissance studies: william kerrigan and gordon braden classical studies: barry baldwin modern poetry studies: christopher clausen philosophy: john ellis and eva brann ars poetica: david rothman forum: joseph aimone poetry: gerald harnett advisory board: richard wilbur, anthony hecht, x.j. kennedy, molly peacock editor-in-chief: gerald harnett hellas is published by the aldine press, ltd., a nonprofit corporation. contributions in cash or kind are tax-deductible. subscriptions: 1 yr.: $14. 2 yrs.: $24. foreign subscriptions: $4 extra per year. issued semiannually. issn 1044-5331. send payment with subscription ord back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * critical mass call for papers now inviting submissions for critical mass vol. 5.1 critical mass is in its fifth year. we continue to publish the critical and creative work of graduate students of english: innovative essays on literature issue 4.2 contains: cynthea masson, "desire waiting for a response: fantasizing theories of the lesbian love letter" sharon hamilton, "kissing clarissa" nancy pearson, "the edenic myth in stephen friesen's _the shunning_" fiction by michael kohn; poetry by kathy mac; and reviews by julia swan and michael greene. submissions to should follow mla format. to facilitate our process of anonymous reading, the author's name should not appear on the manuscript. please include a self-addressed, self-stamped return envelope. send your submissions to: critical mass department of english dalhousie university halifax, nova scotia canada b3h 3j5 you can also send e-mail inquiries and abstracts (or, if you feel up to it, the entire document) to critmass@ac.dal.ca. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * (post)colonialism and culture in an american context call for papers despite an explosion of scholarship elaborating colonial discourses and postcolonial theory, the colonial contours of the contemporary united states remain virtually unexplored, untheorized, and undocumented. in an effort to broach these issues, i am organizing a collections of essays for publication that will initiate interdisciplinary engagements of the intersections of (post)colonialism and culture in an american context broadly defined. i am interested in papers addressing the distinct, heterogeneous, and conflicting forms of (post)colonialism in the contemporary u.s. i am seeking cultural, literary, interpretive, and critical accounts from across the disciplines that offer specific histories, ethnographies, and/or theories of (post)colonial america. i welcome contributions concentrating on a variety of substantive and conceptual issues, from the practices, relations, and conditions which legitimate, challenge, and reconfigure (post)colonial sociocultural formations to the imagined communities, cultural identities, and political struggles produced within (post)colonial contexts. possible questions include: (1) what are the relationships between postcolonialism and specific colonial histories? (2) does colonialism imprint the signifying practices constitutive of america and americans? in what ways does colonialism fashion sociocultural formations in the contemporary u.s.? how have these changed over time? what spaces and forms of resistance disrupt colonial patterns, practices, and precepts? (3) does postcolonialism characterize (some, any, all, none of) the sociocultural formations of the u.s.? are theories of postcolonialism applicable in/to an american context? what insights do they provide? in america, how do postcoloniality and postmodernity intersect, collude, collide, and contest? i would like, moreover, to produce a multicultural collection, attentive to diverse cultures and contexts; thus, i strongly encourage contributors concerned with americans of african, asian, caribbean, european, hispanic, native, and pacific descent. individuals interested in contributing should send a one page abstract by 30 june 1995 to c. richard king (cking@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu) department of anthropology, university of illinois, urbana, il 61801. i also encourage scholars interested in participating but unsure how their research or ideas might fit within the scope of this project to contact me as soon as possible, so that we can begin discussing their relevance and contribution. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * suitcase: a journal of transcultural traffic suitcase invites individuals working in any discipline to consider submitting material for publication and electronic conferencing. suitcase is heavily engaged in trafficking ideas, images, and cultural artifacts across (in)visible disciplinary, ideological, national, and international borders. it provides a space for exchange and translation between those working within institutions of knowledge and culture, and the public, connecting people locally, nationally, and transglobally to start conversations between different contexts and positions. it urges the development and use of new, radical idioms that attempt to dismantle some of the barricades that stand between theorists from different disciplines, artists, activists, and the public. in addition to academic papers, suitcase publishes political commentary, cultural analysis, translations, cartoons, pulp theory, photographs, fiction, reportage, world statistics, interviews, travelogues, disaporic correspondences, meditations, and memoires, an eclectic spectrum of texts, genres, and images that constitute an increasingly transglobal cultural repertoire. suitcase is published biannually in old fashioned (but ecoesque) ink and paper and is selectively available on the internet via the worldwideweb where it holds forums and exhibits synopses of submissions. email: suitcase@humnet.ucla.edu listserv: to subscribe, send a message with "subscribe suitcase-l" in the body to maiser@humnet.ucla.edu; then use suitcase@humnet.ucla.edu for correspondence. www: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/suitcase/suitcase.html tel:310.836.8855 fax: 310.825.0655 back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * texts and images a graduate student conference october 6 & 7, 1995 at the university of houston-clear lake by providing a forum for the scholarly exchange of ideas, this conference will continue the multi-disciplinary dialogue defining and dissolving the boundaries of a post-modern society. topics of the conference will include: critical theory transdisciplinary humanities cultural & ethnic studies writing in the 21st century gender studies: beyond polarity eco-philosophy history and the humanities the future of multimedia in the humanities linguistics static art in a kinetic society for more information: texts and images graduate student conference university of houston-clear lake 2700 bay area blvd. box 77 attn: dagmar corrigan, hgsa houston, tx 77058 or email corrigan@cl.uh.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * patheticism 18 & 19 aug 1995 a conference to be held at trinity college dublin seeks participants from various disciplines to theorize the irony-free zone as a necessary consequence of the attenuation of the autonomous subject. patheticism: attempts to synthesize disparate accounts of pathos and the pathetic. indicates a desire to move beyond the bounds of irony via an unapologetic occupancy of a position which is from the outset acknowledged to be untenable. is the post-camp valorization of mediocrity and self-deprecation, the slacker ethos of paralysis, the democracy of failure, and any other excesses of hyper-individual introspection (from any era). possible topics: the greek concept of pathos, the quixotic novel, pathetic narrators (sterne, dostoevsky, nabokov), pathetic characters (bartleby, svejk, murphy), the pathetic as anti-sublime, indie rock and/or fanzine culture, pathetic fallacies, melancholia, the revenge of the object, the abject pathetic, impoverished or residual artworks (annette messager, mike kelley, joseph beuys), morrissey, hamlet complexes, straight queers, etc. submission deadline has passed, but for more information on the conference: edward m. lorsbach school of english arts building trinity college dublin 2, ireland e-mail: elorsbch@otto.tcd.ie telephone: +353 01 608 1111 fax: +353 01 671 7114 back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * sigir '95 revised april 3, 1995 -------------------------------------- sigir '95 18th international conference on research and development in information retrieval -------------------------------------- seattle, wa, usa july 9 july 13, 1995 sponsored by acm sigir in cooperation with dd (denmark) cepis-eirsg (europe) gi (germany) aica-glir (italy) ipsj (japan) bcs-irsg (uk) conference program and registration information, including descriptions of tutorials and workshops is available at: ftp.u.washington.edu (public\sigir95\program) or via www at url: http://info.sigir.acm.org/sigir/conferences/sigir_95_adv.pgm.txt; or contact sigir95@u.washington.edu to request a copy of the program by mail. sigir'95 is an international research conference on information retrieval theory, systems, practice and applications. ir groups within the computing societies of denmark, europe, germany, italy, japan and the united kingdom are cooperating sponsors. the conference will be valuable to those interested in the theory of information retrieval as well as those responsible for system design, testing and evaluation. topics include distributed ir and the internet, efficiency techniques, text summarization, natural language processing, fusion strategies, user studies, search interfaces, and education in ir. attendees will learn about the underlying foundations for the emerging global information infrastructure, which depends upon searching, browsing, publishing, indexing and other processing of text and multimedia information collections. six pre-conference tutorials will cover both beginning and advanced topics. the main program consists of 40 contributed papers as well as two panel discussions, poster sessions, and demonstrations. the conference will be followed by five post-conference research workshops on topics of great current and general interest: visual information retrieval interfaces; z39.50; ir and databases; curriculum development for ir; and automatic construction of hypermedia. sigir95 c/o convention services northwest 1809 seventh avenue, suite 1414 seattle, wa 98101 usa fax: +1 206-292-0559 email: sigir95@aol.com registration queries to: +1 206-292-9198 (ask for sarah amendola) back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * drake university first annual conference on popular music and culture call for papers possible topics for discussion who to contact drake university will sponsor their 1st annual conference on popular music and culture april 5 & 6,1996. critics and scholars interested in popular music and the directions that the study of music might take outside of, or across, music departments are asked to consider the following: the communicative roles of music and musicians, the means by which music gets to its audiences, and the ways in which music is interpreted and used in a variety of contexts. interested presenters should submit two copies of their paper to conference organizers by august 1, 1995. papers should be final drafts (or nearly so) as the organizers plan to edit a collection of essays that includes selected papers developed specifically for this conference. the conference, to be held over three days, will be conducted in plenary session format. in addition to panel presentations, the conference will feature a number of invited lectures/presentations/musical events. keynote speakers include andrew goodwin, author of dancing in the distraction factory: music television and popular culture (minnesota/routledge) and cathy schwichtenberg, editor of the madonna connection (westview press). the goal is to aid in the creation of a community of scholars whose interests lie in the study of popular music and music culture. the concluding sessions of the conference will focus on creating and sustaining this community through the development of journals, mailing lists, internet projects, collaborative work, and future conferences on the topic of music/culture. a sampling of topics that might be explored: 1. representations of music/musical representations 2. fan behavior 3. musical genres/musical theories 4. gender and popular music 5. race and popular music 6. popular music and technology 7. video/film/radio/computer music 8. noise 9. sampling and the politics of covers 10. rituals, locations 11. music histories 12. dance and music 13. music and identity 14. music studies and methodologies 15. teaching popular music 16. fashion and music 17. performers/performances interested presenters and participants should contact the organizers: john sloop department of speech communication drake university (515) 271-2714 thomas swiss department of english drake university (515) 271-2265 back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * capitalism and the postmodern socialist review is currently seeking articles for a special issue on contemporary developments in the analysis of capitalism and practices of anti-capitalist resistance in the midst of our postmodern age. we are looking for analyses which help us understand the mechanisms--and subjectivities--behind current events: from chiapas to the chase manhattan bank, and from the implosion of the subject to the collapse of the dollar in the international markets. from postfordism to postcoloniality, sr is committed to furthering the debate around the relationships between postmodernism and capitalism. possible topics for papers include: would capitalism be better understood as a dispersed set of practices rather than a systemic totality? how might this transform our understanding of what constitutes significant social change? how is the production of subjectivities implicated in capitalist technologies and organizations? is marxism and postmodern analysis irreducibly antagonistic? what are new models of resistance and mobilization in activist political struggles? what are the connections between capitalist processes and these emerging activist tactics and strategies? how can postmodern theoretical approaches be useful for rethinking capitalism? how would an analysis of capitalism be useful for strengthening postmodern analysis? how can aspects of social organization such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, among others, be incorporated within an overall frame of historical materialist analysis and class politics? deadline for submission to socialist review for this special issue is august 1, 1995. articles should be around 25 pages long. please submit to: socialist review, 1095 market st., suite 618, san francisco, ca 94103, attn: capitalism and the postmodern. for more information call (415) 255-2296 or e-mail at socrev@zbbs.com. back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * cath '95 (computers and teaching in the humanities) the cath '95 conference will be held at royal holloway, university of london, egham, surrey, from 5th-7th september 1995. the conference is organized by the office for humanities communication and the computers in teaching initiative centre for textual studies (both at the university of oxford), and the english department, royal holloway. the theme of this year's conference is computers and the changing curriculum. topics may include practical experiences of the use of computers in teaching, and approaches taken by the teacher in integrating computing into courses, describing problems as well as successes, plus examples of student feedback. further information including a draft programme and costs is available from: christine mullings office for humanities communication oxford university computing services 13 banbury road oxford ox2 6nn tel: 01865-273221 fax: 01865-273221 email: cath95@oucs.ac.uk back -------------------------------------------------------------------------other: * sima handbook on running a www service i am pleased to announce the release of the handbook "running a world-wide web service". this handbook (70+ pages) was funded by the support inititiative for multimedia applications (sima). the handbook is available to subscribers of the sima reports. subscription costs 50 pounds, and subscribers will receive 15+ reports. further details from anne mumford (a.m.mumford@lut.ac.uk). copies of the handbook only (single or bulk copies) can be obtained from me. details of the prices will be announced shortly. the handbook is, of course, available on www! it is mirrored at a number of locations, listed below. please access a nearby copy. uk http://info.mcc.ac.uk/cgu/sima/handbook/handbook.html http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ucs/www/handbook/handbook.html usa http://scholar2.lib.vt.edu/handbook/handbook.html http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/handbook/handbook.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cns/handbook/ singapore http://www.arnes.si/books/www-handbook sweden http://www.ub2.lu.se/kelly/handbook.html turkey http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/www/handbook/ please note that, due to pressure of work, i am unable to deal with individual questions related to the contents of the handbook :-( brian kelly computing service university of leeds leeds west yorkshire ls2 9jt my url back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * nyu in cracow nyu in cracow is a 5 week summer program on the modern history and experience of jews in eastern europe, organized in conjunction with the jagiellonian university (founded in 1364). both undergraduate and graduate students can choose from a selection of courses that include introduction to yiddish folklore and ethnography (taught by barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett), east european government and politics (jan gross), modern history of east european jewry (david engel), the holocaust: destruction of european jewry (lucjan dobroszycki), yiddish literary landscapes (david roskies), language courses in yiddish and polish, and others. the faculty also includes christopher browning and piotr wrobel. the program runs from july 3 to august 4, 1995. four weeks are spent in cracow and there is a one week study tour of jewish galicia. students take two courses for 8 points of undergraduate or graduate credit. they will be housed in the modern dormitories provided by the jagiellonian university, classes will be held in a beautifully renovated nineteenth-century prayer house in the old jewish quarter of cracow. special excursions to the ancient wieliczka salt mine (a unesco designated cultural treasure) and auschwitz-birkenau concentration camp have been arranged. for further information, please contact: jonathan lipman 6 washington square north 998-8018 lipmanj@acfcluster.nyu.edu back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * thematic bibliographies in computer processing of linguistic communications for the last 17 years i have been compiling a series of fully indexed thematic bibliographies in the general field of computer processing of linguistic communications. many of the themes covered are related to the use of computers in the humanities. i gather the references by scanning hundreds of journals and conference proceedings. the references are then indexed with the help of a thesaurus holding more than 3800 keywords. members of iath can help me update my bibliographies by "emailing" me the list of papers they have authored or coauthored. this will allow me to crosscheck the information i already have and give me indications on where to look for more material. some of the themes and sub-themes covered are listed below. the figures represent the number of references for the sections published in 1994. -computer assisted language teaching (8010 ref.) computer assisted teaching of writing and composition (2070 ref.) aids to text composition (440 ref.) lexical/grammatical error detection/correction (500 ref.) collective text creation (90 ref.) text revision (220 ref.) text style checking (210 ref.) readability analysis (200 ref.) foreign language teaching (1900 ref.) -computer mediated communications (5680 ref.) hypertext (1500 ref.) hypermedia (550 ref.) computer conferencing (550 ref.) electronic mail (400 ref.) electronic publishing (370 ref.) computer interviewing (100 ref.) multimodal communication (100 ref.) linguistic games (150 ref.) -electronic document processing (4260 ref.) document editing (2400 ref.) document coding/marking (420 ref.) document typesetting (540 ref.) document indexing (360 ref.) -literary computing (4060 ref.) literary style analysis (700 ref.) literary criticism (190 ref.) literary concordances and indexes (840 ref.) -computational character processing (4120 ref.) -quantitative and statistical linguistics (3100 ref.) -machine translation (8070 ref.) -computational text generation (2870 ref.) -computational text understanding (3830 ref.) -computational lexicology and lexicography (5910 ref.) -optical character recognition (3700 ref.) -computational parsing (5180 ref.) -computational morphology (2350 ref.) for more information contact: conrad f. sabourin sabourco@ere.umontreal.ca back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * crew compact for responsive electronic writing the compact is a call for participation in reciprocal or responsive hypertext. the world wide web as we now know it is a vast archive and indexing system. as such it's pretty darned cool, but there are limits. you can point to another document, but you can't make that document point back to you. at present, the best you can do is ask the author of a document to include a link to your work. the compact endorses this practice and seeks to build a community of support for it. the compact is a voluntary, non-binding agreement -more or less like a parliamentary resolution. if you take the compact seriously, you can use it to advertise your willingness to accept links from other readers and writers -turning your little corner of the web into a much more open hypertext environment. for more details about the compact for responsive electronic writing, visit http://www.ubalt.edu/www/ygcla/crew/crew.html; or contact stuart moulthrop (samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu). back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * humanities canada what is the humanities canada project? the canadian federation for the humanities (cfh) invites you to visit and explore an ambitious project that will be of real benefit to the entire humanities community in canada. the bilingual project, entitled humanites canada / humanities canada (hc), is designed as an electronic information service that will perform several important functions for canadian humanists. first among these functions will be the creation of a window on humanities resources available on the "information highway." scholars in the humanities have begun to reap some of the benefits of the emerging "highway," but it is still a common complaint that materials pertinent to humanities studies are difficult to locate and access. humanities canada will make a significant contribution at just this point by making possible simple and rapid connections to the resources of major libraries, government departments, on-line text archives, electronic journals, archives of digitised art and sound, academic job announcements, and many other services. the role of cfh member societies cfh member societies have the opportunity not only to exploit the resources already available on the world-wide computer networks, but also to make distinct contributions in their areas of interest and specialisation. space is being reserved on the project servers for each member society to "publish" materials of use to its members and to others working in the same discipline. one society, the canadian association for translation studies (association canadienne de traductologie), has already taken advantage of the humanities canada project to make available information regarding their goals, information on membership in cats, a directory of the cats executive and contact people, a call for papers for their annual congress at the 1995 learneds at the uqam, invitations to participate in two special seminars to be held at the montreal learneds, and a detailed description of the society's journal (ttr) including the tables of contents of previous issues. another society, the canadian association of classicists, is using the project facilities to publish on-line their electronic newsletter and to archive its back-issues. the humanities canada project will also be an ideal place to disseminate discussion documents and position papers related to annual meetings, to archive documents related to the society or its field of interest, to "publish" academic writing, to display art, and to seek out potential members from a world-wide audience. how does one connect to humanities canada? humanities canada is presently under construction and exists in both "gopher" and world-wide web (www) formats: gopher://fceh-cfh.umontreal.ca:7071 http://137.122.12.15/humcanada.html contributions to hc are made available at both sites to ensure maximum access to the project's contents and offerings. in addition to the two server sites, an e-mail discussion list (humcan-l) is also being launched in order to provide a forum where one can ask questions related to hc and about how to contribute to it. it will also be the perfect place to post announcements and comments related not only to the hc project, but also to questions touching on information technology and the humanities in the canadian context. to subscribe to humcan-l, send e-mail to listproc@cc.umontreal.ca with the following line in the letter body (not in the subject line): subscribe humcan-l [first name] [last name] you will receive a confirmation of your subscription and a welcome message explaining all you need to know to interact with the list and post your messages and questions. anything else? further information related to the humanities canada project is available from the project co-managers who may be reached at the following e-mail addresses: christian allegre allegre@ere.umontreal.ca alan d. bulley bulleya@ere.umontreal.ca the executive of the canadian federation for the humanities may be reached at cfhxt@acadvm1.uottawa.ca humanites canada / humanities canada (hc) is the electronic information service of the canadian federation for the humanities (cfh). back ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * woodrow wilson fellowships woodrow wilson international center for scholars fellowships in the humanities and social sciences 1996-97 located in the heart of washington, d.c., the center awards approximately 35 residential fellowships each year for advanced research in the humanities and social sciences. men and women from any country and from a wide variety of backgrounds (including government, the corporate world, the professions, and academe) may apply. applicants must hold a doctorate or have equivalent professional accomplishments. fellows are provided offices, access to the library of congress, computers or manuscript typing services, and research assistants. the center publishes selected works written at the center through the woodrow wilson center press. fellowships are normally for an academic year. in determining stipends, the center follows the principle of no gain/no loss in terms of a fellow's previous year's salary. however, in no case can the center's stipend exceed $61,000. travel expenses for fellows and their immediate dependents are provided. the application deadline is october 1, 1995. for application materials write to: fellowships office, woodrow wilson center, 1000 jefferson drive s.w., si mrc 022, washington, dc 20560. tel: (202)357-2841. ************************patricia b. wood*********************** wwics/the fellowships office voice: (202) 357-2841 1000 jefferson drive, s.w. fax: (202) 357-4439 mrc 022 3rd floor washington, dc 20560 back --------------------------end of notices.595--------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------walker, 'seizing power: decadence and transgression in foucault and paglia', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-walker-seizing.txt archive pmc-list, file walker.994. part 1/1, total size 66553 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- seizing power: decadence and transgression in foucault and paglia by john v. walker university of toronto jwalker@epas.toronto.ca postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by john v. walker, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence--we have to create ourselves as a work of art. --michel foucault introduction/apologia [1] the 1990s have to this point occasioned a new space, a new opportunity for those who are still interested to (re)read the works of french critic/philosopher michel foucault. james miller's _the passion of michel foucault_, for instance, a meticulously researched and well considered book, calls into question north american "foucauldian" scholarship, which he feels enshrined foucault as a . . . canonic figure whose authority (the authors) routinely invoked in order to legitimate their own brand of "progressive" politics. most of these latter-day american foucauldians . . . are committed to forging a more diverse society in which whites and people of colour, straights and gays, men and women . . . can . . . all live together in compassionate harmony--an appealing if difficult goal, with deep roots in the judeo-christian tradition. (384) miller finds foucault's "progressive" followers to be victims of their own misreadings, willful or otherwise, of a thinker whose transfigurative radicality stretches far beyond "accepted" limits. "unless i am badly mistaken" miller writes, "foucault issued a brave and basic challenge to nearly everything that passes for "right" in western culture--including everything that passes for "right" among a great many of america's left-wing academics" (384). [2] even more controversial on this issue than miller is camille paglia, whose _sexual personae_ has of late caused such a stir in academic circles. in her earlier provocative essay, "junk bonds and corporate raiders: academe in the hour of the wolf," a lengthy and often hilarious skewering of postmodern scholarship's excesses, david halperin becomes the unlucky symbol of all that has gone wrong (in paglia's view) with north american academia. halperin's _one hundred years of homosexuality_ is here lampooned as the soppiest sort of politically correct, liberal-humanist scholarship, with actual knowledge and research taking a back seat to the recitation of currently fashionable dogma concerning the fate of the marginalized and disempowered in western society. [3] who is ulimately culpable, in paglia's eyes, for the sloppy scholarship of halperin and others like him? none other than michel foucault. [4] paglia dismisses halperin as a mere foucault acolyte, one of those "well-meaning but foggy humanists who virtually never have the intellectual and scholarly preparation to critique foucault competently," but who instead merely rehash the "big daddy's" own shaky (in her opinion) arguments in a quest for personal legitimacy ("junk" 174). supporting paglia's depiction of halperin as a self-appointed defender of the foucauldian faith is his own somewhat petulant criticism of miller's book recently published in _salmagundi_.^1^ [5] at first glance, then, it appears that nothing could be more diametrically opposed than the views of paglia and foucault: paglia goes to great lengths to legitimate such a notion, and her most vocal critics often fit snugly (smugly?) into the "american foucauldian" category delineated by miller, creating the impression of a sort of binary split between the two camps. [6] what i have found, however, upon a close reading of key texts by both authors, is the reversal of this idea, a collapsing of the supposed space between the two. my "positive" paglian reading of foucault will suggest that, contrary to what paglia herself has said, michel foucault's work and life are the %epitome% of the aesthetic propounded in _sexual personae_, an aesthetic which finds its culmination in *dandyism*: rather than opponents, they are actually comrades in transgression and decadence, fighting what is forever fated to be a losing battle "against nature." the problem with power [7] "the soul is the prison of the body" (_discipline_ 29). it was with this famous line from his critically lauded 1975 opus _discipline and punish_ that michel foucault solidified his fame among post-woodstock rousseauian academics in north america. rousseau's theory, as enunciated in _the social contract_ and other works, that the human subject was basically an innocent victim of corrupt societal forces, seemed, at least, to dovetail neatly with foucault's expressed view that, contrary to christian theology, what was thought of as the human soul was not something "born in sin and subject to punishment" but was rather a phantom imposed from without by "methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint" and thus a key factor "in the mastery that power exercises over the body," or "bio-power" (29). [8] in the rousseauian/hippie slang of post-1960s radicals, "getting back to the garden" meant isolating and removing these power operations so that the human subject could live in a democratic, mutually caring, "natural" state of equanimity and bliss. "power" thus became a catch-all phrase for converted foucauldians, begetting seemingly endless studies isolating the fate of its "victims" within the patriarchal confines of wasp history and literature. or as paglia puts it, for foucault and his supposed coterie of social constructionists, "power becomes a 'squishy pink-marshmallow word' which 'caroms around picking up lint and dog hair' but ultimately leads nowhere" ("junk" 225). paglia's expression of disdain for utopian liberal theories (she calls _sexual personae_ "a book written against humanism" ["cancelled" 106]) is hardly surprising, coming from an unabashed fan of nietzsche and sade. yet the alignment of foucault, who claims the same influences, with such theories is quite problematic. [9] take, for instance, foucault's derisory comments on humanism during an interview in 1971: "in short, humanism is everything in western civilization that restricts the *desire for power*: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized" ("revolutionary" 221-2). humanism is for foucault "antiquated," an "insipid psychology" whose emphasis on the benign goodness of the originary subject constitutes a trap, fixing the individual within a binary good/evil framework which guarantees nothing but continued subjection (miller 172). in the interview, he goes on to advocate the liberation of the subject's will-to-power through "desubjectification," or limit-experience brought about through both political and cultural means, including: the suppression of taboos and the limitations and divisions imposed upon the sexes . . . the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions which form and guide the development of a normal individual. *i am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it only accepts in literature.* ("revolutionary" 222; emphasis mine). this is foucault's invocation of the realm identified by nietzsche as the "dionysian," which for humanists may conjure up visions of a pastoral utopia, but, for both foucault and paglia, evokes something far more dangerous indeed. "the dionysian," as paglia says, "is no picnic" ("sexual" 7). nietzsche, apollo, dionysus [10] any "positive" co-reading of foucault and paglia must consider nietzsche, a seminal figure in the (remarkably similar) formative genealogies of both critics. nietzsche's reformulation of the greek myths of the gods apollo and dionysus is central to the thought of each. beginning with _the birth of tragedy_, he organizes existence around two binary drives, the apollonian and the dionysian, "formative forces arising directly from nature" which are later depicted by the "human artist" (24). apollo is for nietzsche "the god of all plastic powers," the "principium individuationis" who fixes the limits of self and culture through the illusion of form, an artificer (21-2). dionysus, on the other hand, represents the entire chaotic realm of eternal motion and flux which form strives to control, obscure, and deny. transgression into the dionysian realm risks the disintegration of the individual subject (a state of "madness") and its subsequent reintegration into the whole: "the mystical jubilation of dionysus" states nietzsche, "breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being" (97). [11] the dichotomy which emerges from greek culture and continues through the history of the west, then, is a nature/culture opposition: the apollonian socrates introduces the "illusion that thought . . . might plumb the farthest abysses of being and even *correct* it. . . . strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed" (93-4). western art, as a mirror of the human psyche, becomes in part a record of this basic struggle and the differing responses to it in various epochs. in _the birth of tragedy_, at least, nietzsche implies that both drives should unfold in a sort of perpetual cycle or spiral: "only so much of the dionysian substratum of the universe" he says, "may . . . be dealt with by that apollonian transfiguration; so that these two prime agencies must develop in strict proportion, conformable to the laws of eternal justice" (145). later, in response to what he perceives as an imbalance in apollo's favour originating with the age of reason, nietzsche places greater emphasis on the dionysian, equating it with the all-important will-to-power (hollingdale 198-9). [12] both foucault and paglia subscribe, with slight differences in emphasis, to this nietzschean formula. miller notes foucault's basic concurrence with nietzsche's binary thesis that "every human embodies a compound of nature and culture, chaos and order, instinct and reason . . . symbolized . . . by dionysus and apollo" (69). almost all of foucault's work is concerned on some level with variations on this theme, the apollonian drive variously taking the names "limit" (i.e., "preface to transgression") and "power" (_discipline and punish_). the apollonian, in contrast to the timeless, immanent realm of the dionysian, is a *historical* force, embedded within our culture in a tangled network of conflicting paths "crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers" ("space" 249). characterized by the use of "reason" in the post-enlightenment era, it actively de-limits the chaotic flux of the dionysian and produces both society, on the macrocosmic level, and personality, or "the subject," on the level of the individual. "i think," says foucault that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, i hope remain the question: what is this reason that we use? what are its historical effects? what are its limits, and its dangers?. . . . if it is extremely dangerous to say that reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. . . . if critical thought itself has a has a function . . . it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity . . . and at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers. ("space" 249) [13] within our current western %episteme% (or historical period), one characterized by a post-enlightenment faith in reason and concomitant loss of belief in god, foucault locates sexual experience as the final borderline lying between apollonian rationality and the dionysian realm of the unknown. as we shall see, he valorizes those writers and philosophers whose lives and works reside at the "limit of madness--astride the line separating reason from unreason, balanced between the dionysian and the apollonian," where it is possible to glean information beyond this binary split and then transmit its dissonant content to others (miller 107). miller goes so far as to state: "i take all of foucault's work to be an effort to issue a license for exploring . . . and also as a vehicle for expressing . . . this harrowing vision of a gnosis beyond good and evil, glimpsed at the limits of experience" (459). as we will see, however, foucault, unlike nietzsche, does not end in a full embrace of dionysus, but instead comes to regard the manipulation of apollo by the subject as key concept. [14] camille paglia devotes an entire chapter of _sexual personae_ to the struggle between apollo and dionysus, and explicitly adds an archetypal sexual element to the equation which remains implicit in nietzsche's analysis (his comparison of the dionysian to the "maternal womb" of nature being one example). for paglia, on the symbolic level, the apollonian is a masculine swerve away from "mother nature" (no idle cliche for her): the western construction of identity, of culture, of artifice, emanates from man's desire to repel the murky, "daemonic" liquidity from which he sprang and to which he must finally return. paglia's sexualization of apollo and dionysus provides an interesting angle from which to approach foucault's own theory and praxis of aesthetic transgression, or "apollo daemonized," as she calls it (_sexual_ 489-511). this is an apollonianism at the furthest threshold of extremity, one which runs the risk of a complete implosion back into the dionysian--nature's final revenge. breaking down the subject: the "experience book" [15] foucault's path to decadent enlightenment entails a double movement: first, the realization of what i will (somewhat ironically) call "true nature"--the chaos of dionysus--and the resulting "desubjectification" or dissolution of the subject; secondly comes what paglia calls the "daemonization of apollo," in which the subject seizes control of what foucault calls the "author-function" and (re)creates itself as pure exteriority--an %objet d'art%. [16] for foucault, "writing," be it historical, philosophical or literary, in our modern era finds its value in radicality, in contesting the underlying assumptions of western culture. the momentary dissociation of those lines which constitute and enclose the western subject or personality is the aim of the "experience-book," which attempts "through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme" (_marx_ 31). some of its key agents appear frequently throughout foucault's work: nietzsche, sade, bataille. "it is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a 'limit-experience' that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson i've learned from these authors" states foucault, underscoring the centrality of this concept for his own work. (31-2). [17] in early essays such as "preface to transgression" and "language to infinity," foucault, like the poststructuralist version of roland barthes, luxuriates in the notion of a textual space composed of a self-referential language liberated from any grounds, exulting the primacy of the signifier, its groundless and irreducible plurality. such texts, defined in _the order of things_ as "heterotopias," "dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source" (xviii). the heterotopic text, then, is a text at the limits which consistently threatens to violate its ordered apollonian boundaries. this happens, for instance, at the extremes of bataille's erotic prose where language "arrives at its confines, overleaps itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter . . . at the limit of its void, speaking of itself in a second language in which the absence of a sovereign subject outlines its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of its discourse" ("preface" 48). [18] foucault's heterotopic "experience-book" is an active agent, a work of "direct personal experience" (including the experience of writing) rather than a dry theoretical exercise (_marx_ 38). the end result of this experiential process is the knowledge that the "truth" of language and the life it represents is one of pure fictionality, exterior and irreducible to any singular, definable, and immanent reality (which is not the same thing as saying that this "reality" [nature--the dionysian] doesn't exist--a key point). skittering across the surface of the world, the empty bodies of both language and humans create meaning through collision, through the persuasiveness of impact. the 'experience-book' thus works simultaneously as both theory and praxis: the author/subject becomes dissociated through the act of creating this heterotopic labyrinth, the result being subsequently transmitted to others as an "invitation . . . to slip into this kind of experience" (_marx_ 33, 36, 40; see also _the discourse on language_ 215). [19] what we find, i believe, upon examination of some of foucault's key works, is that this "de-subjectifying" experience mirrors the processes of mystical schools such as buddhism which pursue the breakdown of the ego through direct means such as meditation, resulting in the recognition that the material world and the 'meanings' we assume inhere within it (including the meaning of the "i," the ego-self that operates within that world) are %maya%, or illusion. foucault remarks in a 1978 interview that the whole problem of de-subjectification is directly related to the operations of "mysticism," which he feels are analogous to his task of liberating a "kind of glimmering," an "essence," through the workings of the experience-book (miller 305). miller notes that, when confronted by an audience of bewildered american post-structuralists regarding this realm of "occult"--or literally, "unknown"--essence (surely a sin of the greatest magnitude in their eyes!), foucault "had trouble specifying" just what he meant, but also refused to back down (305). yet those so troubled by the philosopher's stance here only betray their ignorance of his work. gilles deleuze, who as paul bove points out, "associates foucault with some prophetic visionary capacity" ("foreword" xxxii), points out that the nature/culture, rational/irrational, apollo/dionysus spiral "from the beginning (was) one of foucault's fundamental theses." for foucault, he says, there exists a binary split between the ultimately indecipherable forms of "visible" content (nature) and forms of articulable expression (language), "although they continually overlap and spill into one another in order to form each new stratum of form of knowledge" (deleuze 61, 70). [20] the strategic avoidance of certain key terms or organizing concepts (such as apollo and dionysus, or the language of eastern mysticism) is, it seems, a central feature of french post-structuralism, obscuring any underlying notions of system and totalization, concepts which the school as a (very loose) whole ostensibly rejects. it also reveals an anxiety of influence, a burning desire to appear wholly original and "difficult" at all times. this in part explains the supposed "gulf" dividing foucault and paglia. [21] paglia prides herself on verbal directness. far less obliquely than foucault, for instance, she places the aforementioned binaries within a mystical framework, correctly pointing out that much of the deconstructive method has previously been "massively and coherently presented . . . in hinduism and buddhism" ("junk" 214). in the religions of the east, she says, "the unenlightened mind sees things in terms of form, but the enlightened mind sees the void . . . cf. the apollonian versus dionysian dichotomy in the west" ("east" 151). paglia makes connections; foucault, whose entire premise, as hayden white points out, is *rhetorical* (114), obscures them: "who ever thought he was writing anything but fiction?" foucault asks (_marx_ 33). this is why some liberal humanist academics are able to embrace foucault: they are misled by his deliberate evasiveness. his distaste for the term "nature" (human or otherwise), especially, leads them to believe that he sees life shaped *only* by an external power which (de)forms pristine, innocent subjects into tattered, deformed victims of power, a totalized apollonian universe. paglia, accepting this misreading as accurate, ends up mistakenly pummeling a potential ally. de-structuralism: discovering "true nature" [22] in reading foucault, it is central to differentiate between concept of the unified subject, the self as an apollonian construct, and a human nature which, in contrast, is revealed to be part of that limitless realm of form-less essence (or "void") which precedes and follows the material world of bodies (in eastern mysticism, this essence is called %atman%, and the larger realm, %brahman%). as he points out in his touchstone essay "nietzsche, genealogy, history," it is the task of the "genealogical historian" to scramble received notions of a "true" self at the base, of a "nature" or "soul" which "pretends unification or . . . fabricates a coherent identity" (81). through the movements of the experience-book, this "natural self" is revealed not to be a unified, coherent whole, but instead a dionysian conundrum, a tangled subjectivity; not "a possession that grows and solidifies, (but) . . . an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within and underneath" (82). the body, as "the locus of this dissociated self" and thus inseparable from it, is thus revealed to be "a volume in perpetual disintegration" (83). [23] paglia's view of nature basically coincides with foucault's. true nature, or the "chthonian," is at base is nothing benign, but rather a "grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forces bob, gasping for life" (_sexual_ 30). this residue from which humanity springs poses a constant threat for a people who confuse societally constructed identities, or %personae%, constructed in defence, with dionysian human "nature": "we speak of falling apart, having a breakdown . . . getting it all together" paglia says. "only in the west is there such conviction of the apollonian unity of personality. . . . but i say that there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian" (104, 73) [24] foucault agrees: this search for "the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature" is burst asunder by the genealogist's revelation that nature contains not "a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that (things) have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated . . . from alien forms" (78). for both foucault and paglia, it is this act of fabrication (the "ordering" process which becomes a foucauldian buzzword: _the order of things_; "the order of discourse") issuing forth not in an isomorphic relation, but in the line of defense and control versus the unknowable, which informs our problematic western rationalism. [25] true nature, or dionysian reality, is thus identified as the "non-place" of mutation, where rules are formed, transgressed, and re-formed. embracing the language of eastern mysticism, paglia notes that ultimate reality is "the space that holds all that happens. . . . %sunyata%, voidness" ("east" 151). this "void" then, ultimately has no discernible connection to events occurring within it, and its eruptions into the apollonian sphere are always revolutionary: "suddenly, things are no longer perceived or propositions articulated in the same way" (deleuze 85). as a result, "only a single drama is ever staged in this 'non-place': the endlessly repeated play of dominations" which strive to arrest its flux, becoming "fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations . . . and gives rise to the universe of rules" ("genealogy" 85). [26] it is, then, not a question of metaphysics, of uncovering something eternal and true *underlying* any given set of rules, for true nature can never be deciphered. the philosophy of nietzsche, the writings of sade and bataille, and foucault's own genealogical histories thus expose the structures of "civilized" life (including language) as fictions whose successive "interpretations" fix its limits in "the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which . . . (have) no essential meaning" ("nietzsche" 86). as paglia explains, this apollonian power-play is paradoxical: rules and order have proven to be humanity's greatest defense against the void, serving as the basis for religion, ritual, and art; however, contrary to current politically correct, liberal-humanist thinking, all of these modes, including art, are in no way exempt from the amorality and cruelty inherent in the application of the arbitrary and empty "rules" which are its basis. "art," she says, is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. . . . art is order. but order is not necessarily just, kind or beautiful. order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. art has nothing to do with morality. . . . before the enlightenment, religious art was hieratic and ceremonial. after the enlightenment, art had to create its own world, in which a new ritual of artistic formalism replaced religious universals. . . . the artist makes art not to save humankind, but to save himself. (_sexual_ 29) the artist, as a creator of worlds whose laws are self-contained, is thus necessarily engaged in transgression: freeing the subject(ed) through the dispersal of inherited, stultifying rules, s/he must formulate the world anew, impose a new interpretation, a counter-discourse. rather than deconstruction, i would label this spiral %de-structuralism%, a movement encompassing both structure and its antithesis. astride the line: sade [27] for both foucault and paglia, the marquis de sade's work initiates the de-structuralist spiral: his libertines not only realize true nature, but also sow the seeds of the movement "against nature," resulting in a denaturalized art-world wherein, according to foucault, "every language that has been effectively pronounced" has been consumed and then "repeated, combined, dissociated, reversed, and reversed once again, not toward a dialectical reward . . . but a radical exhaustion" ("language" 61-2). for sade, limits are not defined by religion, as god has been decentered by the emergence of enlightenment "man," who now becomes the %raison d'etre% of the universe. it is thus "man's" most profound, and ultimately inexplicable, dionysian experience--sex--which marks the borderline of rationality, where thought and language break down into white noise on the threshold of life and death. [28] foucault locates the initial stage of the transgressive movement in sade's total affirmation of nature as a state of chaotic flux, a forever dissonant madness which affirms everything (and therefore nothing) at the same time. this is sade's "ironic justification" of the "inanity" of rousseau's philosophy, with its "verbiage about man and nature" (_madness_ 283). "within the chateau where sade's hero confines himself" writes foucault, it seems at first glance as if nature can act with utter freedom. there man rediscovers a truth he had forgotten, though it was manifest. what desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself? . . . the madness of desire, insane murders, the most unreasonable passions--all are wisdom and reason, since they are part of the order of nature. (282) foucault points out that the sadean subject's transgression is not a simple movement of black into white (which would mean its annihilation), but rather a straddling or puncturing of the binary wall. the subject's outer, societal "self" is momentarily broken down and reintegrated with the dionysian continuum, finding "itself in what it excludes ... perhaps recognizes itself for the first time" ("preface" 34-6), a move analogous to the nirvanic (re)union of %atman% and %brahman% in eastern mysticism. [29] "enlightenment," then, for the sadean subject, is this realization of a true nature from which it is nevertheless alien. this essence-less-ness, revealed through dionysian limit-experience as an "affirmation that affirms nothing" (36), leads to a paradox central to the foucauldian spiral: for a living subject on the material plane of existence, dionysus always leads *back* to apollo. every "total" affirmation of nature is thus an anti-affirmation which in turns affirms the exteriority of man; consequently, sadean "bodies of self and other become objects (rather than sensitive beings) on the threshold between life and death" (during 82), as seen in the following passage from sade's _justine_: 'this torture is sweeter than any you may imagine, therese,' says roland; 'you will only approach death by way of unspeakably pleasurable sensations; the pressure this noose will bring to bear upon your nervous system will set fire to the organs of voluptuousness; the effect is certain; were all the people who are condemned to this torture to know in what an intoxication of joy it makes one die, less terrified by this retribution for their crimes, they would commit them more often. . . . . (443) [30] this second phase of sadean transgression thus establishes the subject's (re)embrace of the apollonian, this time with the self-conscious realization that the structural "rules" binding it are, at base, empty: the subject realizes its status as an object. henceforth, "the relation established by rousseau is precisely reversed; sovereignty no longer transposes the natural existence; the latter is only an object for the sovereign, which permits him to measure his total liberty," his distance from the void (_madness_ 283). having expelled the binary virus, bodies, be they human or textual, take on the appearance of rhetorical tropes, the articulable *creating* meaning through freeplay on the surface of the visible. metaphysics becomes *phantasmaphysics*: the event . . . is always an effect produced entirely by bodies colliding, mingling, or separating. . . . they create events on their surfaces, events that are without thickness, mixture, or passion. . . . we should not restrict meaning to the cognitive core that lies at the heart of a knowable object . . . we should allow it to reestablish its flux at the limit of words and things, as what is said of a thing . . . as something that happens. ("theatrum" 172-4) [31] paglia calls sade "the most unread major writer in western literature," and analyses his work from a vantage point which sheds light on foucault's later move towards dandyism. sade liberates our true nature from the shackles of a rousseau-inspired liberal humanism which "still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials" (_sexual_ 2). especially resonant for paglia in sade's _juliette_ is the protagonist's remark that "man is in no wise nature's dependent," but "her froth, her precipitated residue" (237). "sadean nature, the dark hero of _sexual personae_," says paglia, "is the dionysian or, the cthnonian . . . raw, brute earth-power" ("cancelled" 105). in nature's realm, humanity enjoys no favoured status, indeed is no more or less important than a plant. [32] acts are thus without any essential meaning or value--within nature's operations, "marital sex is no different from rape" (_sexual_ 237). the result of this realization, paglia explains, is that sade, as a male steeped in enlightenment reason, swerves away from this unpalatable truth of 'mother' nature, seen in the intricate sexual configurations of his libertines, with their emphasis on sodomy as a "rational protest against . . . procreative nature" (246). foucault's subtle remark regarding the "great, sparkling, mobile, and infinitely extendible configurations" in sade ("language" 61) finds its humourous echo in the very unsubtle paglia: sade's libertines, she says swarm together in mutually exploitative units, then break apart into hostile atomies. multiplication, addition, division: sade perverts the enlightenment's apollonian mathematic. a schoolmaster's voice: if six valets discharge eight times each, how many valets does it take to . . .? (_sexual_ 241) [33] for paglia, then, sade's perversion of the apollonian structures--the organizing of "dionysian experience into apollonian patterns"--is of critical importance in the evolution of the %fin de siecle% decadence of the 1890's which she champions (241). sade's characters, after being "plunged into dionysian sewage" at the point of limit-experience, re-emerge as orgiastic "meat puppets"^2^ in which "no mysteries or ambiguities" reside, these having been "emptied into the cold light of consciousness" (237). if sexual activity mirrors the chaos of true nature, sade's libertines proceed to render the act distinctly un-natural, each dionysian transgression generating more apollonian verbalizing (the de-structuralist spiral): "learned disquisitions go on amid orgies" says paglia, "as in %philosophy in the bedroom%, with its rapid seesaw between theory and praxis. . . . words generally sail on through ejaculation (239). sadean sex and identity are not finally realized in the expression of the libertines' internal, dionysian "natural" urges, but in the apollonian artifice of their own self-theatre or sexual personae, the "'tableaux' and 'dramatic spectacles' of interlaced bodies" of which both sadomasochism and aestheticism become a logical extension (242-3, 246-7). and it is michel foucault, writer of fictive histories, proponent of the experience-book, who takes enacts this sadean imperative, turning theory into praxis and finally losing his life in the battle against nature. decadence as enlightenment: the shiny, empty subject [34] what is enlightenment? aldous huxley: "to be enlightened is to be aware, at all times, of total reality in its immanent otherness . . . and yet be in a condition to survive as an animal . . . to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning" (63). one foot in; one foot out, embodying a state of constant self creation/critique--what the buddha called %paranirvana%--is the essence of de-structuralism. to know true nature and be able to live with this knowledge. foucault, like the buddha, finally determines that such a state cannot be reached through formulaic means; each person has to find his or her path to "enlightenment" (miller 283). this does not mean, however, that he is against offering some general ideas re: ways to get there. [35] in the latter stages of his career, foucault becomes increasingly concerned with the second, reconstructive movement of transgression, moving beyond the final nietzschean embrace of the dionysian and its states of madness and dissolution, back toward a place where a transfigured form of living is possible. in "what is an author?," published in 1969 ^3^, foucault concurs with the poststructuralist, barthesian notion that heterotopic fiction, which dissociates and deconstructs the subject-self, has occasioned the death of the author. however, he points out, as with all acts of dionysian transgression, the apollonian ordering process quickly seals the gap left by the author's disappearance: the empirical author may have died, but other control mechanisms fill the void. the author's name, for instance, functions not like a proper name, but a "name-brand," indicating not only ownership of the "branded" material, but a certain kind of discourse or product tied to it. and literary critics, aping the methods of christian exegesis, also act as agents of control by subsuming contradictions, expelling "alien" texts, and generally ordering the disorderly body of the author's works (105-13). [36] in the 1979 revised text ^4^, foucault adds some subtle closing remarks which hint at his blossoming interest in dandyism. "i seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author" he says. such a notion is now seen as naive, however, as it discounts the second phase of the transgressive spiral: a pure state of unfettered dionysiac bliss for textual and/or human bodies is now deemed "pure romanticism" (119).^5^ the key, instead, is a *transformation* of the author-function: i think that, as our society changes . . . the author-function will disappear, and . . . that fiction . . . will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced (my emphasis 119). this last statement is typical of the cagey foucault, an easily glossed-over hint at his developing interest in an apollonian praxis. what could he mean by this "experience" of the author-function? [37] if we follow the thought-line of camille paglia, the answer gradually comes into focus. the subtitle of _sexual personae_ is _art and decadence from nefertiti to emily dickinson_, and to be sure, decadence for her represents the apex of modernity, the culmination of the apollonian impulse underlying western culture. for paglia, decadent art, the logical extension of the total immersion in and subsequent swerve away from nature seen in sade (ignored by early romantics such as wordsworth, with his benign rousseauism), is embodied in the person of the dandy, who seeks to encompass both movements of the spiral by turning life into art, thereby de-forming and arresting its insidious, deleterious power: romantic imagination broke through all limits. decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. . . . its nature theory follows sade and coleridge, who see nature's cruelty and excess. art supplants nature. the objet d'art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality. it is. . . . an apollonian raid on the dionysian, the aggressive eye pinning and freezing nature's roiling objects. (389) [38] mark edmundson points out that, for paglia, the decadent sensibility is important because of its recognition that "giving up to nature means unconditionally surrendering to the erotic and destructive drives"--ritual and artifice frustrate nature's grinding powers of decomposition (310). paglia rightly locates french culture as the spawning ground for literary decadence, beginning with balzac's _sarrasine_ and then flowering in the works of baudelaire and huysmans, whose _against nature_ is a virtual guide to decadent/aesthetic practice, and finally spreading to britain in the person and writings of oscar wilde. [39] logically enough, considering how closely his work follows the paglian genealogy toward decadence, foucault finally makes a great effort to place himself within such a lineage, embracing the theories of baudelaire via greek ethics in the effort to seize control of the author-function and create a "beautiful life." in 1983, for example, foucault explains to paul rabinow, editor of _the foucault reader_, his interest in a greek-influenced personal ethics "beyond the law," marked by the apollonian manipulation of the raw dionysian matter of the self, divorced from the coercions of any external power. "the idea of the %bios% as a material for an aesthetic piece of art . . . fascinates me" he says. "the idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with . . . an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure" ("ethics" 348). the rules of the game called art--or artifice--foucault goes on to explain, must be rescued from the hands of the "experts" he vilifies in _discipline and punish_: "why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?" he asks (350). [40] it should come as no surprise that camille paglia propounds the decadent theories of charles baudelaire in _sexual personae_; it may, however, discomfit some foucauldians to see their man doing exactly the same thing in one of his final published essays, "what is enlightenment?," which he requested occupy a central position in _the foucault reader_ (miller 332). for, as paglia points out, baudelaire is no humanist, no lover of his fellow man or (especially) woman--he equally rejects reformers and do-gooders" and "condemned rousseauism in all its forms," a stance enthusiastically shared by paglia (_sexual_ 429). baudelaire's program of %dandysme%, especially as outlined in %the painter of modern life%, is elitist and hierarchical, stressing the need for the artist/dandy to withdraw from society in order to begin the work of self-authorship. nature is not even granted the status given it by sade; for baudelaire it is a virus which threatens the stability of the self-artifact. the baudelairean dandy thus fulfills paglia's "first principle of decadent art": the (re)creation of the self as a "manufactured object" (391). this use of civilizing power against civilization is deemed a "daemonization of the apollonian" (489-511). [41] baudelaire's theories find artistic praxis in joris-karl huysmans' novel _against nature_, whose protagonist, des esseintes, remarks that "nature . . . has had her day. . . . the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible" (37). des esseintes' rejects the "visible" world of nature for an "articulable," aesthetic environment: he idolizes sade and baudelaire. huysmans's depiction here of baudelaire's journey through the dionysiac and (re)emergence as an emptied apollonian exteriority is acute: literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations. . . . baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine. . . . there, near the breeding ground of intellectual aberrations and diseases of the mind--the mystical tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime--he had found . . . ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. he had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind that had reached the october of its sensations . . . he had shown how blight affects the emotions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away, and nothing remains but the barren memory of hardships, tyranny and slights, suffered at the behest of a despotic and freakish fate. (146) past the petty concerns of a stultifying humanism, baudelaire had plunged headlong into the dionysian, exhausting its seemingly limitless excitations, emerging purged of all that might have previously been considered "essential" or "natural": he "had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible," knowledge gleaned from the limits of experience (huysmans 148). and it should be pointed out that this knowledge, leading to the rejection of nature, leads also to the rejection of the female gender. "woman is the opposite of the dandy. therefore she must inspire horror" writes baudelaire. "woman is *natural*, that is to say abominable" (qtd in %sexual% 430). likewise, des esseintes suffers a nightmarish vision of woman as mother-nature trying to devour him (105-6) and indulges in affairs with a "mannish" woman and a schoolboy (110-117). [42] as foucault points out in "the right of death and power over life," if sade had shown "man" to nothing more than a meat puppet which had mutated out of the 'non-place' of nature, "subject to . . . no other law but its own," he, as well as bataille, had failed to complete the spiral back into the apollonian, a movement crucial for the critique of our present episteme. they, as well as nietzsche, with his cry "i, the last disciple of dionysus" at the conclusion of %twilight of the idols% (110), remain semi-immersed in deadly dionysian nature, the "society of blood" characteristic of the pre-enlightenment age (148-50). as a result, though "subversive," they provide no definitive answers for the problem of an ultra-apollonian, post-enlightenment power which seeks to *produce* subjects so to "normalize" and control them: "a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than . . . destroying them" (136). in "what is enlightenment?" (in part a strong reading of kant's essay of the same name), foucault credits baudelaire and his disciples for bringing the line of thinking begun by sade to fruition, addressing this contemporary problematic by using "man" as the raw material for an artistic elaboration, for the production of %personae%, remaking the meat puppet as manufactured object. typically, foucault skirts the nature-female issue even as he embraces it, though he does briefly cite baudelaire's abhorrence of "vulgar, earthy, vile nature" as a touchstone (41).^6^ [43] for foucault, baudelaire's modern ethos, or "limit-attitude," encompasses both movements of the transgressive spiral, "beyond the inside-outside alternative" ("enlightenment" 45). as we saw in huxley, enlightenment entails a constant awareness of the dionysian whilst mastering the apollonian. just as the dissociated flux of the visible is continually transfigured, framed, and articulated by the decadent artist (as in the experience-book), the body's 'perpetual disintegration' is transfigured through this same ritual application of apollonian lines, an "ascetic elaboration of the self" which again connects the foucauldian quest to the operations of mysticism (42). deleuze identifies this action as a "folding" of outside power relations "to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its unique dimension" (100). this seizure of power "is what the greeks did: they folded force [and] made it relate back to itself. far from ignoring interiority, individuality, or subjectivity they invented the subject [and] discovered the 'aesthetic existence'." deleuze cannot overstress the importance of this "fundamental idea" underlying foucault's work, that of a "dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them" (101). [44] this "seizing of bio-power" over one's self, then, is the "experience of the author-function" foucault hints at in the revised "what is an author?," and represents his departure from the thought of his oft-quoted mentors, sade, nietzsche, and bataille. it also goes very much against the grain of the thinking which characterizes present-day north american society: the cult of confession and the clamouring of "victims" of various kinds for equality on _donahue_ and _oprah_ (which foucault sneeringly alludes to as "the californian cult of the self") are "diametrically opposed" to dandyism, which stresses creation, not confession ("ethics" 362). foucauldian enlightenment thus stands "in a state of tension" with humanism" ("enlightenment" 44). the apollonian dandy actually *seeks* to marginalize him or her self, and rejects any attempts to uncover the soul, which is already known to contain the void. "modern man," says foucault, "is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself". and, he adds ominously, this endeavour has no "place in society itself, or in the body politic," but can only be "produced in another, a different place, which baudelaire calls art" (42). [45] for both paglia and foucault, decadence/dandyism constitutes an ironic reversal: it deploys the ultra-apollonianism of the modern epoch against itself, substituting art-worlds for "real" worlds. the ordering process that subjects bodies is instead used to liberate them through self-creation and containment. bodies produce not more malleable bodies measured by their use-value in the service of power, but impenetrable, beautifully "useless" art objects--a sterile productivity. paglia on _sarrasine_: balzac frustrates sex by deforming nature. sarrasine reviles zambinella: "monster! you who can give birth to nothing!". . . . [but] zambinella is the first decadent art object. the transsexual castrato is an artificial sex, product of biology manipulated for art. zambinella does give birth--to other art objects. first is sarrasine's statue of him/her; then a marble copy commissioned by the cardinal. . . . the sterile castrato, propagating itself through other art works, is an example of my technological androgyne, the manufactured object [who] teems with inorganic seed. (_sexual_ 391) dandyism and beyond: the order of death [46] through the seizure of power on a microcosmic level, dandyism points the way toward new and different modes of being. here in our own postmodern %fin de siecle%, in opposition to both humanism and the thriving "californian cult of the self," the decadent impulse has mutated into new and interesting forms. for novelist kathy acker (herself a foucauldian), this has entailed inhabiting the traditionally "male" realms of bodybuilding and tattoo art in the attempt to de-naturalize and "textualize" the body, thereby "seiz(ing) control over the sign-systems through which people 'read' her"--the self as counter-discourse. (mccaffery 72). likewise, the currently flourishing "cyberpunk" movement finds its basis in "the impulse to invent a hyperreality and then live there" (porush 331). for foucault, the decadent impulse leads to the "theatre" of gay sadomasochism, which he sees as "a kind of creation, a creative enterprise" in which the body's biological sexuality can be subverted or "desexualized." playing his role against nature to the hilt, foucault denies that these practices disclose "s/m tendencies deep within the unconscious" but are the "invention" of "new possibilities of pleasure" (miller 263). [47] it is doubtful that foucault really believed this. when deleuze speaks of dandyism as a state where "one becomes, *relatively speaking*, a master of one's molecules" (123), he makes an important qualification. as an advocate of the doctrines of decadence, foucault must have surely been aware of another theme inextricably tied to it: the inevitable victory of nature. in the work of baudelaire, of huysmans, and in wilde's _the picture of dorian gray_, the scenario is the same: "the self as an artificial enclave. . . which nature secretly enters and disorders" (_sexual_ 421). the fate of the dandy is most brilliantly critiqued in huysmans's novel in the grotesque episode where des esseintes acquires a large tortoise and attempts to turn into an %objet d'art%, painting it gold and encrusting it with jewels. to his consternation, the turtle dies, "unable to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it" (62). later, while sampling his many perfumes, des esseintes is overcome by nausea: "discrimination collapses back into nondifferentiation" paglia notes, and "all the aesthete's exotic fragrances begin to smell disgustingly alike," this being the scent of death (_sexual_ 435). residing astride the line between apollo and dionysus, the enclosed or folded subject risks implosion back into the immanent realm. "it all comes down to syphilis in the end" says des esseintes (huysmans 101), who is finally forced to leave his artificial paradise and return to the world to quite literally save his life. [48] it was, of course, not syphilis, but aids, the postmodern plague, which facilitated nature's revenge upon foucault. and when paglia, in her anti-poststructuralist mode, derisorily remarks that "foucault was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system" she is absolutely correct ("junk" 241). but her criticism of him for this implies that, unlike those decadents she praises in _sexual personae_, foucault somehow had no idea what he was doing, or what the stakes were. paglia is being duplicitous if she seriously intends to make such an argument. her valorization of the gay male, the sadean sadomasochist, and all those decadents whose swerve from procreative, liquid nature results in the "world of glittering art objects" found in western culture should include the embrace of the life and work of foucault, who, as the evidence shows, knew exactly what he was doing. as deleuze says, "few men more than foucault died in a way commensurate with their conception of death" (95). in her zeal to tar all post-structuralists with the same brush, paglia, so commendable in many other ways and the recipient of a great deal of unfair criticism herself, does a great disservice to foucault. notes: ^1^ see "bringing out michel foucault" by david halperin in _salmagundi_ 97, winter 1993. ^2^ the term "meat puppets" is cyberpunk jargon, and is borrowed here from larry mccaffery's interview with kathy acker, where mccaffery comments that sade is "using the tools of rationality to reveal what we *really are*--meat puppets governed by the reality of bodily functions" (76). ^3^ in _language, counter-memory, practice_, 113-138. ^4^ in _the foucault reader_, 101-120, and in _textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism_, 141-160. josue v. harari sees this second version of the essay as marking a shift in emphasis "crucial to an understanding of foucault's work" (43); james miller notes that foucault's increasing emphasis on apollonian power/order occasioned a split with the more dionysian-oriented deleuze (287-298). ^5^ paglia's contention that foucault's obsession with power was occasioned by the failure of may, 1968, student and worker revolt in paris is partially correct ("junk" 216), but as seen in earlier essays such as "preface to transgression" foucault had always been aware of the inevitable nature of the apollonian: the nature of the transgressive spiral is such that "no simple infraction" can exhaust it; incursions into the dionysian are always quickly bound in again by order (35). ^6^ in his otherwise unremarkable new biography of foucault, david macey makes two observations crucial for this paper: (1) foucault, macey explains, was known for "vehement declarations of his loathing of 'nature'," going so far as to turn his back on sunsets to make his point! (60); (2) foucault also is characterized by *some* (though not all) of his friends as a misogynist, a side he apparently showed rather selectively (xiv, 55, 455). both of these points make sense when foucault is placed in the line of the baudelairean dandy so admired by paglia. works cited acker, kathy. "reading the body." _mondo 2000_. by larry mccaffery. issue no.4, 1991. 72-77. bove, paul. foreword. "the foucault phenomenon: the problematics of style." _foucault_. by gilles deleuze. trans. and ed. sean hand. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986. vii-xl. deleuze, gilles. _foucault_. trans. and ed. sean hand. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986. during, simon. _foucault and literature: towards a genealogy of writing_. new york: routledge, 1992. edmundson, mark. "art and eros." _the nation_, new york, vol 250, no. 25, june 25, 1990. 897-99. rpt. in _contemporary literary criticism_ vol. 68. ed. roger matuz. 309-311. foucault, michel. _the archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language_. trans. a. m. sheridan smith. new york: pantheon books, 1972. ---. _discipline & punish: the birth of the prison_. trans. alan sheridan. new york: vintage books, 1979. ---. "language to infinity." _language, counter-memory, practice_. trans. donald f. bouchard and sherry simon. ed. donald f. bouchard. new york: cornell up, 1977. 53-67. ---. _madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason_. trans. richard howard. new york: vintage books, 1988 ---. "nietzsche, genealogy, history." _the foucault reader_. ed. paul rabinow. new york: pantheon books, 1984. 76-100. ---. _the order of things_. ed. r. d. laing. new york: tavistock/routledge, 1989. ---. "on the genealogy of ethics." _the foucault reader_. by paul rabinow. 340-372. ---. "a preface to transgression." _language, counter-memory, practice_. 29-52. ---. _remarks on marx_. trans. r. james goldstein and james cascaito. new york: semiotext(e), 1991. ---. "revolutionary action: until now." _language, counter-memory, practice_. 218-234. ---. "right of death and power over life." _the history of sexuality, vol. 1._ new york: vintage books, 1980. ---. "space, knowledge, and power." _the foucault reader_. trans. christian hubert. 239-256. ---. "theatrum philosophicum." _language, counter-memory, practice_. 165-198. ---. "what is an author? (1)" _language, counter-memory,practice_. 113-138. ---. "what is an author? (2)" _the foucault reader_. 101-120. also in _textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism_. ed. josue v. harari. ithaca: cornell up, 1979. 141-160. ---. "what is enlightenment?" _the foucault reader_. trans. catherine porter. 32-50. harari, josue v. "critical factions/critical fictions." _textual strategies: perspectives in post-structuralist criticism_. ithaca: cornell up, 1979. 17-72. hollingdale, r.j. appendices h. _twilight of the idols and the anti-christ_. by friedrich nietzsche. new york: penguin, 1978. huxley, aldous. _the doors of perception and heaven and hell_. toronto: granada publishing, 1984. huysmans, joris-karl. _against nature_. trans. robert baldick. new york: penguin, 1959. macey, david. _the many lives of michel foucault_. london: random house, 1993. miller, james. _the passion of michel foucault_. new york: simon & schuster, 1993. nietzsche, friedrich. _the birth of tragedy and the genealogy of morals_. trans francis golffing. new york: doubleday, 1956. nietzsche, friedrich. _twilight of the idols and the anti-christ_. trans. r.j. hollingdale. new york: penguin, 1978. paglia, camille. _sexual personae: art and decadence from nefertiti to emily dickinson_. new york: vintage books, 1991. ---. "east and west: an experiment in multiculturalism." _sex, art, and american culture_. new york: vintage books, 1992. 136-169. ---. "junk bonds and corporate raiders: academe in the hour of the wolf." _sex, art, and american culture_. 170-248. ---. "sexual personae: the cancelled preface." _sex, art and american culture_. 101-124. porush, david. "frothing the synaptic bath." _storming the reality studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction_. ed. larry mccaffery. durham: duke up, 1991. 331-333. sade, marquis de. _justine_. _the olympia reader_. ed. maurice girodias. new york: quality paperbacks/grove press, 1965. 407-448. white, hayden. "michel foucault." _structuralism and since_. ed. john sturrock. new york: oxford up, 1979. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------yule, 'waxing kriger', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-yule-waxing.txt archive pmc-list, file yule.195. part 1/1, total size 29927 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- waxing kriger by jeffrey yule department of english ohio state university jyule@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by jeffrey yule, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] after they waxed kriger, he was supposed to stay dead. kriger, that kriger anyway, was a rare one. wanted nothing to do with reconstitution. reconstruction was okay, for light stuff. you lose an arm or some brain tissue, maybe even a whole lobe, of course you get that fixed. he wasn't a fundamentalist. but the part about no reconstitution was supposed to have been an actual clause in his contract. that was the word out about it, anyway. of course you hear rumors about all sorts of things in this business and a lot of it's crap. still, i think that story was true. i say that because i talked to him about it once. not much, but it was enough. [2] i'm not saying the guy took me into his confidence. he didn't. i'm no big operator myself, but kriger--well, that kriger anyway--he was good, as big a deal as everybody says. he didn't talk much to people like me, only even ran into 'em every once in a while and never for very long. we were just subcontracted labor. but i did a job for him in belize once, and that's where i got the impression the stories were true. down there, they called him the man, %el hombre%, but the way they said it was like in capital letters--%el hombre%. they wanted to call him %el hombreisimo%, you know, like he was the most incredible of men, but he didn't like the way it sounded. so it was %el hombre%, pronounced like with capital letters. and with the job he did, he earned that too. during some down time on that job, i asked him what he thought about reconstitution. i was thinking about it for myself for after i could afford it, but i was also curious about him. even then he had quite a reputation. what he said was, "guys get re-sti clauses, they don't have to worry much anymore. they get sloppy." [3] he said it like he'd seen it happen, and i guess that's why he didn't go in for reconstitution. he didn't want to get soft. maybe because his work was his art or maybe because if he got soft, he wouldn't pull down the same sort of money on each job. maybe both. and maybe he was right, because he was sharp then. he was almost too good. [4] you still hear a lot of stories about kriger, but who the hell knows for sure what happened and what didn't? i don't know that anyone could ever sort it all out now. but i know this for sure. on that belize job, we had two teams setting up perimeter diversions for him so he could go in solo somewhere else along the line, into this guy's compound. no names, okay? but you know the type. the guy had his hands in some of this and some of that, major supply contacts with different organizations, some of them competing--mafia, tong, yakuza, everybody. as a consequence of his clientele, he's a real security freak, trying to make sure nobody's going to pay him a visit--cut him up, kidnap him, maybe even make an example of him. mess him up bad but keep showing his reconstitution company that he's alive so they can't replace him. he was a real paranoid operator. too much white powder and cash will do that to people. given the type, of course, his place is wired every which way: motion sensors, ir trip beams, countermeasures, everything. we even ran into some cyborged guard dogs his security people were running off an ai system. nasty things--godawful tough to kill. plus he's got guards all over the place with ir equipment. but it's a very strange situation. there's this self-contained, high-tech fortress, built right into the side of a mountain, right? but the people who grow the man's plant live in huts, so all around this place things are strictly stone age, third world. [5] apparently the target had connections with somebody in the government and he stepped on the wrong toes. so uncle says, "central, wax that problem." central takes a look and thinks, "what we need here is deniability and lots and lots of insulation because this is an ugly situation that's just waiting to blow up in our faces." so they contract it out to kriger, and he subcontracts out for support and i get a spot on a diversion team. it was my first big job and to me it was exceedingly smooth, almost supernatural. we did our thing and he did his. he didn't say how and nobody asked, but we all wondered. he went in and waxed the guy rough. napalm, i think, one of those mini-flamethrower rigs. i guess they sent the guy a vid of the way it went after his reconstitution, one of those, "next time, there better not be a next time" kind of messages. after that job, everybody called kriger "the man," with capitals. and he really absolutely was. he was the best in the business, maybe the best ever. i've done some other big jobs where security was tight, but i've never seen anything tighter. i'm telling you, that place was seamless. and those goddamned dogs. believe me, you don't know how hard those are to deal with unless you've ever tried to shake one and found out that there was no other way but to kill it. even with the diversions, i have no idea how kriger got past everything and to the target. that was impressive enough. but he also cooked the guy and vidded it. he didn't just go in and nerve gas the place or even find the guy and shoot him. he found out where he was, got to him, did his things for fifteen, twenty minutes at least, and %then% he left. i never saw anything like it. [6] but that was a long time ago. kriger himself got it, let's see, about four, four and a half years ago now. any number of people were supposed to have done it. there were a lot of rumors at the time. some people thought central might have been behind it because kriger was getting too wild, taking on contracts they didn't like. with central you never know, especially with uncle getting sloppy sometimes, a little old and not so much on the cutting edge anymore. sometimes the parts just don't do what the head tells them when things get to that point, so that talk about central might've been right. i heard some other people talking about a year later who thought a renegade state might've done it. again, no names, okay? but there were sure people who he crossed in some of those governments, and some of them he'd really pissed off doing it. to me that theory makes a lot more sense than a central-directed hit, but it's damn near impossible to say. it could've been any number of people or groups that killed him. maybe it was a government-sanctioned job or maybe something that an intelligence clique put together. could even have been one or another terrorist groups behind it. he'd thrown a few wrenches into the moving parts of some of their operations over the years and taken out some of their people doing it. it might've been corporate or a criminal organization or maybe some independent contractor looking to make a name for himself with the right people. it could've been a combination of things. shit, for all i know it could've been the guy he cooked with napalm on that belize job. [7] i'm not saying there aren't people who know. i'm sure there are, but there you're talking about people who move in higher circles than me. i'm strictly middle level, right? that's something i'm not ashamed of either. maybe i could've made it in those circles--the money's certainly attractive--but there's just too much pressure. there were people i worked with who went that way, and they were always walking around like they couldn't afford to relax for a split second. this one guy went through two, three stomachs in something like eight years. ulcers. you got other people who'd be burning holes through their noses with powders or needing liver transplants because of the drinking and the drugs. sure the money's good, but what did they do but spend it on extra security, bribes, transplants, and reconstructions. now maybe some of %those% people know who waxed kriger, but they're the ones who have to worry about the fact that they know. screw that. there are a few things that i can tell you, though. [8] just after it happened, there was a rumor that it was a clean hit, a sniper, and that it went down in dresden when he was on vacation or some sort of bullshit. that's one story, the main one everybody heard for about a year. there was also talk that it was one of those old m-9 grenades launched into his car outside of los angeles. either way, though, it was supposed to have been gentle. but it was probably rough no matter what you heard. on this security job a few years ago i had to liason with a computers op who had a thing for hardware and the merc scene, and he'd heard of kriger and was all hard to talk to me about him and about the business. said he had some good information to trade, and it was down time, so i figured, why not? he showed me this vid clip he'd turned up which his source said was a partial copy of the kriger hit. i'm no vid expert, but i watched the thing and it looked like the genuine article. the guy told me he got it in trade from an ai that pops up now and then on the net. maybe or maybe not. i didn't even bother trying to check into it. it fell into my lap so i gave it a look, sure, but i wasn't going to go poking around in something that might end up giving somebody a reason to come and step on me. but, like i said, it looked genuine enough. [9] the clip is short, maybe a minute and a half long. the picture was a little jumpy, like the computer they used to edit the thing couldn't smooth it out completely. looked like it was shot by someone wearing a concealed camera and following along on backup while the rest of the team did the actual job. at first it's a stable picture, though. you see this guy who looks like kriger come into a building, a big hotel lobby or maybe something corporate, a place with marble floors, lots of metal, glass, suspended balconies, fountains, like that. a man in uniform, the concierge or corporation toad boy, whatever, comes from behind the counter to meet kriger, reaches out to shake his hand, and the picture jumps a little as the person with the vid equipment gets up. from that point on, it stays a little jumpy, but it's still a good, clear sequence. [10] on the balcony out of kriger's field of vision, you see a guy suddenly looking very bothered. he's probably someone on kriger's security team, and it looks like he's seeing something he doesn't like. i had the computer kid enhance the image, and what it looked like to me was that he was trying to use a throat mike to tell kriger or somebody else that something looked funny, but he wasn't getting the message through. either he was getting jammed or the people that waxed kriger had some sort of interference software on-line and they were jamming and sending all clear signals at the same time on the skip frequencies kriger's people were using. it's a pain in the ass to do, but you can pull it off if you've got an ai with an expert system hookup that's fast enough to track the shifts from frequency to frequency. the thing is, though, if the people whose signal you're substituting for find out quick enough, your operation's probably blown because the whole target team finds out what's going on instantly. [11] kriger's people apparently had some sort of countermeasure that picked up the problem or something else tipped kriger off because he all of a sudden veers away from the concierge-type guy. in the upper right of the picture, you see the guy who was having trouble with his throat mike go for a gun. he gets some shots off at one or more people who aren't in the picture. then he just gets absolutely raked by small flechette fire--the things hit his whole left side in a wave. one second you see him and the next you lose sight of that half of his body in a red mist. it was very messy--painful, too, i bet--but it looked like the people who planned it probably meant for him to live. the computer liason guy couldn't give me a good enough image to be sure, but i don't think the stuff they used was meant to do a lot of deep tissue damage. it was just supposed to take off the skin and mess up the muscle--that way even if you've got a guy pumped with endorphin analogs, he won't be able to do anything because the muscles are too torn up and he doesn't have enough blood to run them anyway. [12] while this is going on, kriger's moving away from the concierge. this guy's still got his hand out, and there's the start of a surprised look on his face as kriger turns away from him. then *this* guy takes a wave of flechette fire at about a three quarters full angle, and this time the hit team was obviously using something that would do deep tissue damage. it looks like most of his right side just explodes. but you only see that for a second because the camera's following kriger, who would've taken that flechette wave full in the back and gone down if he hadn't gotten out of the way. as it is, he takes some fire from the outside edge of the scatter pattern, and you see some blood on him but not much. he was probably wearing light armor fabrics, so his clothes took a lot of the kinetic energy out of the stuffbefore it got to him. if it hadn't just been some some scatter, though, it would've torn him up too, even if he was wearing a tougher fabric. that's probably why the hit team tried to use the heavier flechettes on kriger. those things pretty much sandblast anything up to a medium-grade body armor right off a target. the hotel guy wasn't wearing anything like that, though, and he just got torn up. [13] by this time, i suppose that any security kriger had must have been out of the picture, if there was even anybody else still standing when the guy with the throat mike realized things were going sour. that's how it goes on rough waxes: targets have to be cut completely loose from their support. kriger must have known he was on his own by then. while he's running, he lays down some flare grenades and suddenly it's like he's inside his own little supernova, which i suppose threw a tangle into the plans of whoever was running the op because you can't draw a bead on somebody who's inside that sort of lightsource. but of course the tradeoff is that kriger can't see anything either, so if he's firing, he's firing blind too. you can't tell for sure, but before he threw down the flares it looked like he was headed for a cluster of furniture next to a fountain. looked like the best available cover. [14] now even though the camera's still going, all you see for about three, four seconds is a lot of white light, until kriger's flares burn out. then the person with the camera pans around trying to find kriger. you see some more bodies, although it's hard to say for sure which were on the hit team and which were with kriger. most of them are either still armed or lying near weapons, though, so it looks like the only person hurt who wasn't involved was the concierge, but--if he was a crooked, greedy, or corporate--he might not have been an innocent bystander anyway. you also see four people moving in toward the furniture where kriger was headed when the camera last had him. they've all got filter masks on and they're launching cannisters in a standard spread pattern. there's no visible gas, though, so they were using something colorless, a mild nerve agent probably--something that would cause a lot of pain and either full voluntary muscle paralysis or at least a lot of problems with motor function and reflex. [15] then three of these four get slammed in quick succession, all within about five centimeters dead center of their sternums, by something high caliber. blows right through any armor they were wearing. these three are write offs--no doubt in my mind they were dead before they hit the floor. whatever they got hit with probably tore them to pieces internally. no surprise there. a guy who doesn't go in for reconstitution certainly wouldn't treat the squad hitting him gently. anyway, one of the guys who was firing the gas cannisters gets to some cover without getting shot. from the camera angle, i couldn't see where the shots came from that killed the three who were with him, and i'm not sure that he could either. certainly, though, this guy's got reason to be careful. it's no surprise that he doesn't come into the picture again. [16] at about this point, the person carrying the camera must have gotten involved in the operation, because the picture you see from then on isn't just a vid of the hit anymore. it's an operative's-eye view. you see everything from the perspective of someone a lot closer to the ground, like what an op sees when he's trying to stay low enough to avoid drawing fire. the camera shows this guy taking a winding course from cover to cover toward the place where it looks like kriger was headed. a few times you even see his rifle barrel come into the picture. then the camera carrier must have gotten the all clear because the picture jumps, and you can tell he's gone into an upright position. the camera moves forward smoothly after that and, after going around this huge marble-backed leather couch that's been chewed up by fire, you see kriger on the floor, eyes open, teeth clenched, and his muscles all knotted up. he's twitching a little too, his nerves obviously not firing right. looks like he'd taken some more fire, too, something high caliber in the left leg. there was a lot of blood, some of it splattered all the way to the edge of the fountain. the camera stays on kriger for about three seconds and no one touches him during that time. then the clip ends. [17] the guy who showed me the thing said he didn't know if kriger got away or, if he was killed, how it was done. he said he asked the ai who traded him the clip, and the thing either didn't know or wouldn't tell. as far as i'm concerned, that's just as well. like i said before, it's not like kriger and i were friends, but i had a lot of respect for the man's work. i had no reason to want to see someone mess him up on camera. this merc groupie asks me all these questions, like was it possible maybe that kriger could've gotten away or something, and the answer to that is absolutely not. before the clip ends what you see is an immobilized target. kriger wasn't going anywhere alive. [18] what it looked like to me is this: it was supposed to be a rough wax, and it started out well enough and should've gone smoothly except that kriger was just too good at what he did. after the point where he veered away from the guy who was getting ready to shake his hand, things went badly for the hit team. counting the downed bodies and figuring that even if only half of them were part of the hit, kriger and his people took down something like ten or eleven of them. and that's just counting the bodies i could see. the fact that the person with the camera started out on backup and had to move into an active role also tells me things didn't go well. but it looks like they wanted to do as clean a job as they could. the hotel guy getting killed was probably a mistake. based on everything else, i'd say they just wanted kriger dead and the people on his security team out of the picture while they killed him. they got what they were after, but it took too long, they took too many losses, and it was messy. [19] after all that, it's hard to imagine that the hit team killed kriger quickly. obviously, someone had reason to make sure he died rough because what you see in the vid is a very expensive job. there wouldn't have been any sense in going to all the trouble of cutting him off from his support and immobilizing him if they were just going to pop him in the head and make extra sure afterward with a few more shots to the heart and spine. so, no, i didn't see what happened exactly, whether it was corrosives or inflammables or what, but i don't doubt they picked a bad way for kriger to die. [20] what surprised me was that he turned up again at all. this was about six or eight months after i saw the vid clip. i got a call from this guy with an accent, asking am i free to do support on an external job, something in the baltics, but, again, no names, all right? he also tells me the pay and gives me a few general details. i say, maybe, who wants to know? "the job is to do support for kriger. same sort of scenario as before. take it now or not, but no more questions either way," he said. "sounds interesting," i tell the guy. "but last i heard, kriger was dead." "just a rumor. in or out?" i wondered if maybe it was a set up to take me out because i'd seen that partial clip of the kriger hit, but it didn't figure. people don't need to go to that kind of trouble to kill guys like me. they had my job pickup number, which is at a public location. the line was secure but they wouldn't have had any problem tracing it and just meeting me outside to blow me away if they wanted to. so the offer looked as safe as any other. and i was curious about it. so i tell the guy, "i'm in." "fine. you'll hear from me again this time tomorrow. be ready to move out any time after that. you'll get half up front and half on completion. we supply the hardware. you can bring anything else you want so long as the total weight is under thirty-five kilos. questions?" "no." "fine. tomorrow then." and so i was in. [21] except that i was hired help for a diversion team, it wasn't much like the belize job. i never knew what the operation was about exactly, and it didn't matter. i saw kriger and i wanted to talk to him, see if he remembered me, but the opportunity never came up. he briefed us and made sure everything was clear. he looked like i remembered. sounded the same. there were no differences i could see, so i started to wonder if maybe the vid clip i saw was fake--still, you're not supposed to be able to tell the re-sti copy from the original. so i wasn't sure. but something happened that convinced me that this wasn't the same kriger i worked with in belize. [22] like i said, i didn't know what the objective was on this job. i just knew what my team was supposed to do: make a lot of noise and draw as much attention as possible so kriger could get in there and do his thing. there was another diversion team too, which means he had as much backup there as in belize. so the time comes and we do our jobs. but the thing i notice right away is that this isn't a tight target area. there's security, sure--some armed guards, some motion sensors. but it's just a little more than enough to keep the amateurs off the grounds--radio shack hardware and rent a cops. nowhere near what kriger went up against in belize. i think there was just one guard with ir equipment, and he was an easy take down, probably didn't even have any special training. there was nothing remotely as much a problem as those cyborged dogs were, either. the site wasn't even self-contained. they had people coming and going on a daily basis. the place was a little sloppy, really. i remember thinking at the time that whoever paid for the job must have had paranoid fits. any competent solo operator could have handled it without diversions, probably without a support team either if it came down to that. [23] but i get paid to do my job whether they need me there or not, so i did what i was supposed to do: set off some charges, got a fix on the guard with the ir equipment and made sure they dropped him. we even managed to draw a guard squad completely outside their perimeter. plain amateurs. no security team worth anything gets drawn out like that. it looked to me like having two diversion teams along was serious overkill. but we wrapped up the job and got to the rendezvous for airlift out. and that's where i saw the difference between this kriger and the man i saw in the vid, twitching on a floor waiting to get waxed. because this kriger showed up at the rendezvous shot, and he looked like he'd barely made it out. he gave me that feeling you hate to get. i don't know how to describe it, exactly. you have to experience it yourself, maybe. it's the feeling you get off people whose op went bad. it's like a smell almost, or a kind of metal taste in your mouth. you work enough jobs and you can pick it up off even some of the very best people. and we all picked it up off kriger. he even looked a little rattled, scared or pissed off maybe. maybe something else. and then it occurred to me. [24] whoever brought him back must have edited his psychic makeup, mellowed him on reconstitution--probably so they could get him to go in for more frequent brain tapings. that way he wouldn't lose so much memory if he got killed again. see, somebody who's at most willing to have a lobe replaced isn't going bother going in for recordings as often as a reconstitution company's clients would. and, like i said, kriger wasn't a reconstitution client, so whoever brought him back must have done it on their own initiative. they were treating him as a long-term investment. he was a kept operator at that point, probably. if they'd tinkered with him enough to change his mind about reconstitution, they might've done more. made him a career corporate boy or central op, any number of things. that's some nasty black bag medical, but there are people out there bent enough to do most anything for a price, so it happens sometimes. [25] but the people who did it didn't get what they were after. serves them right, too, the fucks. an op has a clause in his agent's contract, it ought to be honored. but those helix robbers not only ignored the clause, they tinkered with the man's psych profile and memory. the thing is, though, that when you take away from an operator like kriger the thing that gives him his edge, what you end up with isn't an operator like kriger. you get something a lot less than that, a guy who maybe looks the same and acts the same and seems the same but who isn't the same. the kriger i knew got inside a place and did a job that i wouldn't have believed was possible if i hadn't been there myself. he got waxed later, sure, but that's reality. nobody's invulnerable. and even though the hit they put on him was first quality, he still took a lot of their people with him. kriger, that kriger, was the genuine article. that guy on the baltics job, he was just a cheap copy, a meat puppet. you wanna know the truth, i felt sorry for him. the original kriger, i bet he'd rather be dead than going around like that. but the copy, he probably doesn't even know. probably just feels like something's wrong and can't figure out what. it's a shame, really. poor son of a bitch. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------hammer, '"just like eddie," or as far as a boy can go: vedder, barthes, and handke dismember mama', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-hammer-just.txt archive pmc-list, file hammer.995. part 1/1, total size 57087 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "just like eddie,"^1^ or as far as a boy can go: vedder, barthes, and handke dismember mama by stephanie barbe hammer centers for ideas and society university of california riverside hamm@citrus.ucr.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by stephanie barbe hammer, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. 1. can't find a better man^2^ [1] a feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, i grab the wheel and direct a critical detour from the wild and wooly trail mapped out by greil marcus in _lipstick traces_. i track his assumption that rock culture -the stars of whom have replaced both heroes and cinema icons -provides a useful, crucial set of metaphors for thinking about contemporary high-culture, and extend the route with my conviction that both high culture writers and theorists are canonized within and beyond academe in ways that mimic the vagaries of rock and roll "fame."^3^ marcus notes in his earlier work, _mystery train_, that rock music is not so much an object of interpretation as an interpretive enabler for our own particular situation -a hermeneutic which "acts upon" the listener/viewer and which produces different meanings at different moments (street on marcus, 157). so, i will use one man to get another; i leave marcus i and turn on eddie vedder, lead singer of pearl jam, whom i turn into an apparatus rather than a mere object (although he is this also) in order to shed light upon the work of roland barthes and peter handke. it is also apropos; barthes repeatedly expressed his admiration for such underground masculine icons as professional wrestlers (one wonders what he would have made of grunge), while handke has frequently cited rock lyrics in his most seemingly neo-classical works, as in the pastoral poem _beyond the villages_ (_uber die dorfer_), which is prefaced by a quote from creedence clearwater revival. [2] i would like barthes and handke to meet (and jam) on eddie vedder's stage for several reasons. first, i bewail their relegation to the esoteric heights of high literary endeavor; they have become so "important" that no one knows who they are, as opposed to vedder who is so unimportant that everyone knows about him. like the critically acclaimed art films that no one sees and that can't be found on video, and the avant-garde art exhibitions which no one goes to, barthes and handke are writers that no one reads, because their work can't be located at super crown or at b. dalton. no one, meaning, regular people; no one meaning everyone who isn't an intellectual. second, i distrust the fact that they have consistently been written about in such complete accordance with the stereotypes about french and german language and culture which have functioned for at least 200 years (i.e. since the enlightenment). third, i suspect that eddie vedder is indeed "important," in spite of himself. fourth, in my fem-fan capacity, i want to introduce questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure/pain to the mix of rock and roll, cultural studies, postmodern writing and see how they play, for play they must. will their (my) presence wreck the party which is postmodernism/ity? maybe, or maybe their presence make any party more interesting, as leslie gore once tearfully implied. joni mitchell, simone de beauvoir, bjork, desree, and avital ronell second that emotion -that it is necessary for girls to deconstruct boys who deconstruct. [3] clear nationalist biases are at work in the general understanding of barthes and handke, and these transparently "obvious," genetic differences between the french and the german -between a wry ironic pederasty and an ascetic, parzival-like heterosexuality -are tempting, for they look very neat; barthes and handke become, according to such orientations, mere inverted mirrors of each other, and on the surface (if only there) this binary holds. the french one moved from semiotic criticism to a writing which increasingly proclaimed itself to be personal, eccentric, and unscientific -a creative writing which made the essay into a kind of internal theater, a critical strip-tease which resembled the disreputable joints barthes frequented on the night he was killed. not surprisingly, the written words about barthes mimic the perception of him; they spill over the pages in a testimonial to bliss, they break the rules, they invoke photography and cinema, erotica and pornography. barthes' work is so idolized, particularly in the united states, that over 500 essays have appeared on him in the past 10 years, and greg ulmer asks a highly pertinent question when he muses "what interests me about barthes, is why i am interested in him" (219). what ulmer uncovers but does not discuss is the degree to which puritanical american academe looks with awe at european (particularly french) high theory, and projects upon it its unspoken desires/fears, as d.h.lawrence already noticed a frighteningly long time ago. [4] it is consequently not at all surprising that much less has been written on peter handke, who has made a writerly move which looks directly opposite to that of barthes'. handke has more or less abandoned the theatrical and novelistic works which made him famous, and has oriented himself toward the essay, towards essays about essays (as in _versuch uber die jukebox_), and towards fragments such as _noch einmal fur thucydides_. in handke's case critics speak in hushed tones about pain, about language as torture, about aesthetics, romanticism, the german tradition, a hard, cold sort of beauty, about the theories of benjamin, of lacan, of a poststructuralism which is deadly serious, and of course, inevitably, a little about fascism. [5] feminine france versus the masculine *vaterland*: manly, wounded, spiritual german; effeminate, decadent, self-indulgent french. the legacy of ww ii -the german soldiers marching under the arc de triomphe on one hand, and on the other, actress arletty condemned to death for sleeping with the enemy (she responded that her heart belonged to france but that her ass belonged to the world) as infantile america looks on like freud's child at the primal scene? [6] it is because of this reception that i would like to speculate as to what would happen if we read handke and barthes together -one with the other -against vedder, who is, as we shall see, the infantile american boy turned inside out. what if we used eddie vedder to ask the same questions of both barthian and handkesque textual corpuses? i look forward hopefully to these provisional answers: the one, obvious -that both barthes and handke are enriched, problematized, foregrounded not only as eccentric individuals who write against the grain, but as compelling exponents (with, rather than instead of vedder) of the episteme which we call the late 20th century, postmodernity, the end of the millennium; the other perhaps less so -that textual pleasure can be found sometimes in very unexpected places. this/my act of "conjoining seemingly isolated forms" (polan, 57) is, of course, itself a pleasure, a political practice, and an (intellectual ?) attempt to understand this particular cultural moment. [7] when placed against vedder on the stage/screen of rock, barthes and handke's dichotomous identities make a more resonant kind of sense. roland barthes retains his frenchness but may now be considered, arguably, the david bowie of %ecriture% (a metaphor that would have no doubt pleased him) -glamorous, androgynous, slick, smart in both senses, constantly undergoing theoretical/stylistic ch-ch-changes; barthes was a beautiful surface in love with surfaces, an author whose gestures in _the lover's discourse_ approach in many ways those of the composer-performer of "modern love." like bowie, barthes was one of the first to pose/perform such questions -to ". . . play games with gender [which] were genuine challenges to existing assumptions" (street, 173). adulated in the late 60's, handke, for his part, resembles a literary neil young who shone too brilliantly in the woodstock years, and now as a still skinny middle-aged rocker appears strident, unappealing, and disturbing in some unfathomable way -a brilliant, but unpredictable talk-show guest.^4^ men of too much critical substance, handke and young produce vaguely satirical, understatedly ironic works which point to a multivalent critique of our culture and society that cannot be reduced or thematized. "a man needs a maid" and _the goalie's anxiety_. 2. "son" she said, "i've a little story for you." [8] in the autobiographical rock hit by pearl jam, entitled _alive_, an agonized angry male singer relates the traumatic encounter with his mother, where she tells him that his real father died when he was thirteen. it is an imperfect memory, badly mangled, but filled with conflicting emotions, and as a mnemonic shard, it cuts into the singer, whose voice vibrates with pain. in "alive" that currently notorious, hysterically unauthentic lyricist-performer eddie vedder conjures up a well-known specter -the specter of the mother, speaking. she is a complete cipher, as mothers of the western tradition generally are, her motivations for telling are unfathomable (guilt, cruelty, warning?), although they resonate with distant meaning. the person known only as "she" uses a historically embedded, mysterious language that he does not appreciate and cannot understand to tell a story -what else? - a bad story about the father. she carelessly narrates the father's death, and thereby asserts through that information -which like that of jocasta is told to the adult son too late, and when it is least expected - her own subversive primacy in the patriarchal family. this apparently triumphant telling, performed before the adult son in his bedroom is an outrage, charged with a sexual resonance familiar to other bedroom encounters between mothers and sons -oedipus, hamlet, proust's marcel. but, the real outrage, the son hints, occurs much earlier. the scandal consists in the mother's absence -in fact that the boy was alone at home when the father died; the mother was not there with *him*. and where was she? we never know. at the end of the song, the son disclaims the mother's power; she cannot authorize his existence as the father could; he is, it seems, alive in spite of rather than because of her. [9] in this manner, the son of eddie vedder's song/poem compensates for paternal absence by an erasure of the overweening maternal presence, and this act of compensation takes the form of a scrambled portraiture which fragments speech, and silences the sybill-like powerful mother, the mother who belatedly tells the truth about the father, and the son uses his own narrative power to delay and defer what her presence connotes about the father: it testifies to his insufficiency, to his lack, and more threateningly perhaps, to the possibility that he may not matter so much after all, and that consequently the son -the future father -may not matter so much either. but the son pays the price for such an exchange; his own language -the language with which he usurps the mother's story about the father -is literally broken english, so greatly impoverished that it cannot complete the sentences it tries to formulate, and it can just barely make sense. the filial act of remembrance which dismembers the mother ricochets on the son; he retroactively silences her but she, in turn, withers his grammar. the son's speech is language made poor, a linguistic economy pared down to the subsistence level of rage, and this rage has spoken volumes to millions who have heard _alive_ and who have purchased pearl jam's first album. does not this rage conceal a longing? what is really being spoken here? 3. wounds in the mirror waved [10] in his essay "parabiography" (_georgia review_, 1980), ihab hassan aptly suggested that there was something unprecedented about the challenge posed by autobiography to the late 20th century west: autobiography has become . . . the form that the contemporary imagination seeks to recover. . . yet . . . autobiography is abject unless, in the words of michel leiris, it exposes itself to the "bull's horn." for writing about ourselves we risk cowardice and mendacity; and more, we risk changing ourselves by that writing into whatever an autobiographer pretends to be. the image invented by leiris and invoked by hassan combines the masculine spectacle of the matador with an equally masculine writing practice which risks something like castration -as though the writer were reliving in his text the masculine tragedy of _the sun also rises_. the writer of autobiography is at once odysseus, hemingway, and freud -a modern, epic hero and the psychoanalytic author/subject; he must negotiate perils, he must analyze himself, he must resist all outside pressure; he must display himself and still remain manly. he must avoid abjectness -an interesting word connoting a dangerously feminine state of passivity as well as a moral and social state of utter inferiority. like bunyan's christian, he must steer between the pitfalls of cowardice and falsehood (thou shalt not bear false witness about thyself) but there is also something of a pagan striptease at work here -one thinks of the lithe, undressed bull-dancers from the walls of knossos courting danger as they vault over the stylized bull. and hassan's bull? what might it signify? the bull here seems to signify at once the genre of autobiography, the practice of writing, and the problem of language as a whole -one which the human sciences have eloquently agonized over again and again during the course of our century in their own matadorian performance of angst. hassan implies that the beast of literary language threatens the contemporary writer's project not just to invalidate it, but -much more theatrically -to tear it, to punch holes in its argument, and then to bring it down (the literal meaning of %abject% [past tense of the latin %abicere%], to lay it low, to unman it before the roar of the crowd -the jeering spectators. and yet without the horn and without the danger of the horn there can be no writing, there can be no audience, there can be no pleasure in the spectatorship of this spectacle of pain. there is then also in hassan's formulation the suggestion that aesthetic pleasure is generated by the pageantry of individual pain, at least at far as autobiography is concerned. [11] even a casual observer of contemporary rock culture cannot help but think of the ambiguous polysemous spectacle presented by eddie vedder and consider how well it fits this paradoxical description of the postmodern autobiographer. vedder's songs are usually at once frankly and fraudulently autobiographical: either based on his "real" life experiences referred to obliquely in the media releases about him or sucked out of people whom he ostensibly knows and whom he chooses to impersonate. he performs their narrative half-lives for them, employing a deep and powerful vocal instrument to give voice precisely to voices which cannot possibly *sound* anything like *his*; his impersonations are frequently feminine, juvenile or both ranging from physically abused little girls, mentally abused boys, young girls forcibly committed to insane asylums, a lonely old woman in a small town, a young woman trying unsuccessfully to leave her lover, to small animals; he is never a practitioner of but almost always the victim of violent aggression, an avid sexual desirer with a gun "buried under his nose," an angrily prone body stretched out (suggestively) at the feet of a disembodied "you" characterized only by a "crown." he is the passive, hysterical other waiting for the lover to arrive ("you're finally here and i'm a mess"), the quintessential "nothing" man, read a man who isn't, a man whose masculinity is zero. [12] vedder's gestalt is similarly complicated. his name connotes both the insincere, boyish, and sexually dubious trouble-maker of "leave it to beaver" and the sinister powers of darth vader; its spelling also connotes edie sedgwick -warhol's ill-starred debutante. he is long haired, diminutive, dressed childishly in a pastiche of ill-fitting masculine gear -the 60's flannel shirt (lumberjacks, hippies), over the t-shirt (manual laborer), over too large shorts. he hunches over the microphone in an almost disappearing act (in a clear stylistic rejection of the histrionics of mick jagger and jagger's heavy-metal male descendants) and yet at the same time he remains elusive, satiric, false, gymnastic.^5^ he self-consciously performs an unwillingness to perform (at the 1993 mtv video awards he walked up to the podium with a camcorder pointed at the t.v. camera) and then throws himself off the top of the stage for good measure, allowing himself -perhaps - to be caught and borne up by his audience.^6^ vedder's performances are so immensely popular, because he would appear to expose himself to hassan's bull's-horn on a regular basis. he mimes being gored, but the performance contains a whiff of "real" danger; he is an autobiographical tight-rope walker limping on the wire with a broken leg whom "we" -mostly young white men, but also, increasingly, young women, and now, a literary critic - watch with fascination, wondering if he will fall like kurt cobain -his nihilistic and now deceased grunge %doppelganger%, rock culture's current schiller to vedder's survivalist version of goethe. together they form the pop culture masculine monument of our moment -a space where cultural myth and spectacle enter into conflict (polan, 56). [13] hassan's complex and powerful description of autobiography projected upon the spectral video image of eddie vedder marks out a space where the christian and the pagan interlock, where the classical tradition runs into late capitalism, where hemingway meets augustine meets the _odyssey_ meets the rat-man and they all meet the beatles. it is perhaps for this reason that there is something arch about the anxious cluster of images displayed in "alive." the absent father, a present mother made absent, a longing for her which hides behind a longing for him, the shifting of negative emotion onto her problematic ontology and psychology, and the problem of language -these "issues" re-rehearse the simultaneously hysterical and mundanely familiar symptoms of a masculine crisis of (artistic) self-representation which has been discussed by just about everybody in the united states -by such cultural critics as katja silverman and by _iron john_ author robert bly; it has become a common subject on talk-shows, as the popularity of _men are from mars, women are from venus_ testifies.^7^ [14] vedder, barthes, and handke are important in this regard, not because they are doing something essentially "different" from mainstream culture, but because they have upped the ante in the crisis of masculinity. they undertake a frantic, frenetic, deeply ironic and highly self-critical series of performative attempts to revise the genre called autobiography at the same time as they struggle to complete, kill off, and have done with the modern. using vedder's example, we can see that barthes and handke share a surabundance of common interests of which the most important (for *this* essay) are: a regard for spectacle, an obsession with the photograph, a fixation on the dead mother, and a love-hate relationship with language. unabashed narcissists, they have taken montaigne's caveat to the nth degree and beyond (park, 392) -"%je suis moi-meme la matiere de mon livre%" ("i am the [feminine] matter of my book") -but, barthes and handke, just like eddie, dismantle the %matiere/stoff% of autobiography toward the imagining of a new textual body, one that does not confront but rather submits itself %de facto% to the bull's horn; the goring is in fact the pre-text, and the text which follows is constituted around the wound, around and because of the tear. it is the very failure of the autobiographer which constitutes the textual spectacularity of barthes and handke and the pleasure in pain which might open up new possibilities for writing. like vedder, barthes and handke go as far as boys can; owners of the phallus, they enact the vaginal wound in their go arounds with mother and with the mother tongue (language); they court abjection for our wonder, and dream of a freedom which must always fail. 4. the picture kept will remind me. [15] barthes has already insisted on the aesthetic possibilities offered by failure in _degree zero of literature_, and this notion of failure is connected to another problem, tantalizingly expressed (but when isn't barthes tantalizing?) in _the pleasure of the text_: no object is in a constant relationship with pleasure . . . . for the writer, however this object exists; its not the language [%le langage%], it is the mother tongue[%la langue maternelle%]. the writer is someone who plays with his mother's body . . . in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take to the limit of what can be known about the body. . . . (_the pleasure of the text_, "langue/tongue" 37) earlier in this work in a section called "babil/prattle", barthes discusses boredom in terms of a writing which is infantile, which indiscriminately adheres not to %la lange% but to %le langage%, which -in a wonderful gender-bender -he makes into a masculine wet nurse, the mother's impossible, false surrogate. here in the passage just quoted he affirms the oedipal pleasure of language; his play is with %la langue maternelle% -his mother's tongue (feminine speech versus masculine writing) and the native language, and perhaps by analogy that feminine organ which resides in another, forbidden, unspeakable mouth -the truly (re)productive one. this act performs an erotic game with the speaking body of the mother, to see what there is of her that the son/writer can recognize in himself. for barthes, the advantages of reorienting the conception of language as a carnal, feminine, sexual, fertile, and physically vocal presence are many. through this play, the pederast son recaptures and improves upon the lost infantile primal intimacy with the mother, described by theresa brennan as the language of the flesh, the primal code which circulates between/in the mother-unborn child, and which persists in the mother/baby dyad. to play with the body of the mother is to at once refuse the notion of language as patriarchal law (a la lacan) and to assert a different kind of imperative and a different kind of unity -not the murderous adulation of father and son -the middle man in the oedipal triangle has been so to speak eliminated, as he was in barthes' own life -but the prior pleasure where son and mother are one. thus, barthes' gesture reasserts the power of language -not in its capacity as phallic authority but in its maternal (w)holenesss. the play of language can be "foreplay" in its most literal sense, the first play, that which precedes the other, secondary, and implicitly inferior play -namely that of heterosexual coitus - where the mother must submit to a fatherly penetration. [16] but in this passage barthes' play is also afterplay, a reversed funeral rite in which the enraged bacchante, barthes, tears asunder the body of the goddess, the dionysian mother, in an attempt to consume her power - desire become appetite become bloodlust -as body of the mother disintegrates into pieces. desire and rage, glorification and disembowelment, celebration and mourning, the pleasure of pain -these animate and radiate the body of barthes' mother within the body of barthes' own texts (think, for example, of the reading of phedre in _on racine_). [17] yet, barthes's radical and radically honest portrayal of the conflicting drives at work in the masculine play-practice on %la langue maternelle% fails drastically in his final work, _camera lucida/la chambre claire_ -a work torn very literally between a study of the aesthetics of photography and a quest for the essence of barthes' dead mother.^8^ it is a strange book, self-consciously fragmented as is most of barthes' later work but dramatically lacking the sensual exuberance of the earlier writing. further, in the account of his final days with his mother, barthes falls back into very role of male nurse which he dismissed so contemptuously in _the pleasure of the text_ for he himself becomes the male mother who infantilizes the mother back into a child, recuperating her into the patriarchal order -giving birth to her, so to speak, as a zeus produced athena, a product of head-sex parthenogenesis. during her illness, i nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than from a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph. (72) the fact that barthes' mother is only recognizable to him as a girl-child in the photograph at the winter garden suggests that his apparently unconditional adulation of his mother and his celebration of her power is not what it appears to be. her relegation in memory to the softness of crepe de chine and the smell of rice-powder -a combination which reminds us of the technology of photo making (silver grains deposited on smooth paper) - suggests that barthes can talk about his mother only in terms of the proustian project (blau, 86), that is to say in terms of a %fin-de-siecle% sentimentality which glosses over the surface but which does not permit the other to speak. the autobiographer/critic senses this shift in tonal gears; he makes contradictory claims -proclaiming that he has found the truth of his mother and then admitting: in front of the winter garden photograph i am a bad dreamer who vainly holds out his arms toward the possession of the image; i am golaud exclaiming "misery of my life!" because he will never know melisande's truth. (melisande does not conceal but she does not speak) . . . (100) unable to reconstruct, to give voice to, the mother, and by connection to the "%langue maternelle%," the book on photography breaks down, returns to the surface linguistically and phenomenologically. the result is utter banality. i know our critics: what! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something i know at first glance? (115) and yet there is something suspect about this relentless sweep across the surface, about this intellectual abjection. barthes tells us that he will not show the winter garden photograph of his mother to his reader, so that in this book peppered with photos, the most important one is held back (sarkonak, 48). barthes insists that we will not see anything in it -it is too personal, and that it will mean nothing to us, but i think instead, that this very gesture itself is highly significant;^9^ it is the selfish maneuver of an overgrown child who can only pretend to share, and who can perhaps, only pretend to love, and as such displays the fallacy of his own "%a la recherche d'une maman perdue%," because he doesn't in the end want to find her, and he certainly doesn't want us to. the critic lawrence kritzman anticipates this reading of barthes when he notes that "like the abandoned child, the lover finds himself in a state of solitude, the consequences of which reveal the inability to complete separation because of a past which cannot be extricated from the present. . ." ("the discourse of desire," 860). [18] thus, the passionate postmodernist critic reverts to an elegant dandyism (j. gerald kennedy refers to barthes' "extravagant devotion," 386) -to an impressionistic modernism and to a nineteenth century sentimentalism - when, as an autobiographer, he discusses his mother's death. i will observe in passing how important it has been for a number of critics to defend barthes on this particular point; although critics decry sentimentality everywhere else, it is -curiously -not only admissible but somehow crucial for barthes when it comes to his mother (see blau, woodward, hoft-march), as though she were the alibi both for his pederasty and for his postmodernity - at once maternity and modernity. [19] oddly, barthes reveals himself here to be much like peter pan, the alter-ego of the victorian pederast j.m. barrie; like the boy who would not grow up, barthes prefers the prepubescent girl-mother who cannot threaten him and he will ship her out the moment she possesses even the glimmer of agency (especially sexual). he has indeed dismembered mama in the ostensible act of remembering her, in giving her presence he has ensured her absence, much as the dishonest chevalier des grieux erases the object of his desire even as he outlines compulsively how she has done him wrong (hammer, 48). as is the case in that false confession written in 1732, barthes uses the absence of the literal "%matiere%" of "%moi-meme%" - what domna stanton calls the feminine "matter/mater" which constructed the "moi-meme" called roland barthes out of herself -to reveal the falsity of the autobiographical subject and to foreground the emptiness of the whole "i remember mama" enterprise. [20] yet, this self-conscious fissure (or what anselm haverkamp calls the exposed aporia, 259) is precisely one of the places where barthes is terribly important to us, as jane gallop remarks: barthes and proust . . . male homosexuality and the mother, strange bedfellows, yet to be retheorized, in the wake of feminism (133). to his credit, barthes explicitly exposes the uneasy connection between pederasty and mother-love in the book by juxtaposing the narrative about the mother's missing picture with the display of the erotic mapplethorpe self-portrait. mapplethorpe as maternal stand-in -a beautiful young man grinning off-center at the camera - tells us, as much as anything does, what the book is really about. but the maplethorpe self-portrait may also stand-in for barthes himself. as his own autoerogenous object-author barthes uses himself as a text and camera; he opens the autobiographical aperture and freezes himself in a series of positions doomed to insufficiency and incompleteness. so, even as _camera lucida_ fails - unable to recover the happy sexuality which barthes dreams of ("the breast which nourishes a sexuality devoid of difference" [kritzman, 856-7, "the discourse of desire"]) -it also looks beyond itself to something unsayable -to a kind of knowledge of the mother, his mother which belongs only to love. as kennedy notes in his essay, "rb, autobiography, and the end of writing," this love is not reducible to linguistic formulation, as this passage and its failure to actually "say" what it wants to makes clear: in the mother, there was a radiant, irreducible core: my mother. it is always maintained that i should suffer more because i have spent my whole life with her; but my suffering proceeds from *who she was*; and it was because she was who she was that i lived with her . . . for this originality was the reflection of what was absolutely irreducible in her, and thereby lost forever . . . for what i have lost is not a figure (the mother), but a being; and not a being but a *quality* (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. (_camera lucida_ #31, 75) barthes's impossible book culminates with an impossible affirmation -that of the persistence of a love made rich by a suffering that was itself an aesthetic expression and which he could not dispense with -that cannot be reduced to a bloodless theory. neither reduced nor resuscitated, barthes' mother is relegated to the uneasy ontology of the unseen photograph, the private, %punctum% that only the author can see. 5. i got bugs [21] one problem (at the very least) remains. that "she" is not more recuperable for pederast, mother-loving barthes than she is for hysterically straight mother-hating vedder speaks to the impossibility of situating mother within anything possessing even the vaguest resemblance to the standard masculine autobiographical project.^10^ risking abjection is not enough. 6. when she couldn't hold, she folded [22] the son's ecstatic union with the mother who is and is not he, the playing with a permeable body in a way which is not intrusive but inclusive and at the same time the rage to tear the mother apart to take to the limit her body's recognition, the mourning for her loss, the use of this entire complex for writing for the practice of %langue%, a remembrance of the mother which fails and which is tied to an investigation of aesthetics which also fails -how might this string be invoked for peter handke? there is no linguistic foreplay in handke, only after play, for, it is to the disjunction from mother that handke repeatedly returns -the alienation between claire and delta benedictine in _short letter, long farewell_, the bicycling mother who dreams of going crazy as her toddler looks on dazed in _wings of desire_, the motherless kaspar, a postmodern lost boy, the dead mother's problematic legacy in _through the villages_ -but of course nowhere more powerfully than in _a sorrow beyond dreams_ (_wunschloses ungluck_), his self-proclaimedly failed attempt to document his mother's life and suicide. like gertrude stein on alice b. toklas, handke decides to tell the story that the feminine other cannot or will not tell about herself, although the son is implicated in his mother's story in ways that the female lovers are not. from the outset, handke's play with the barthian %langue maternelle% -in german, the feminine word %die muttersprache% -is a both oedipal and necrophiliac act of necessity; it is overtly about death and death is as, camus -one of handke's most importance influences -has noted, a dirty and not always terribly interesting business. and perhaps it is orphic too -handke's attempt to call his mother back from the dead, and from the living death that was her existence - not through the power of song, but through the clenched mundanities that he documents in his writing. he also writes about her perspective intermittently as "%man%" (one/masculine) and as "%sie%" (she) signifying the gendered impossibility of talking about her -implicating us and himself, by necessity in our own mothers' pain under the rule of that false universal "%das ewig mannliche%," the eternal masculine. [23] and there is a great deal of pain here. want, discomfort, disgust, and rage for and against his mother, for and against himself as her son and, as a man, as the accomplice in the society which victimized her -a society which reduced her existence into a village game called " tired/exhausted/sick/dying/dead" (249). handke is relentlessly unsentimental as regards the entire project (jerry varsava notes that handke "strips proust bare," 122) -he criticizes his enunciations about her even as he speaks them: . . . the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences -have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence i am afraid of losing my balance. . . i try with unbending earnestness to penetrate my character. . . she refuses to be isolated and remains unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper. (264-5) this mother cannot be so easily anatomized, as rainer nagele notes (399); she is protean, when fragmented she does not becomes surface but rather a morass which engulfs the son: now she imposed herself on me, took on body and reality, and her condition was so palpable that at some moments it became a part of me. (282-3) rather it is the son's words that splinter about him in his attempt to make her congeal. [24] not surprisingly, the body of handke's mother appears not as cosmetic surface but as bodily fluid and as dirty anality. it is the malodorous spittle used to clean the children's faces; tears wept in the toilet; it is an embarrassing fart during a mountain hike with handke's father -it is the hidden excrement in the underpants of the deceased -impure ejaculations, fetishized elements of a lost body that should not be seen thus, and whose viscosity continually contrasts with the photographs which handke mentions at crucial moments in anironic, poignant counterpoint. it seems significant that handke never worries about the "reality" of the photographs he discusses,and this is all he has to say about the matter in this particular work: the fiction that photographs can "tell us" anything - . . . but isn't all formulation, even of things that have really happened more or less a fiction? . . . (253) so much for barthes' theory of photography. [25] and yet it is in handke's text about his mother, rather than in barthes', that we find a kind of ecstasy, that pleasure in the spectacle of pain heralded by hassan -one that we are summoned and positioned to share, for handke's text is one of both of rage and celebration; his mother's suicide speaks to him of a kind of courage which borders on a feminine and feminized notion of heroism: yes, i thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to myself: that does it, that does it, that does it, good, good good. and throughout the flight i was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. (292) it is here, and not in barthes, that we run into the disruptive, unsettling nature of a "%jouisaance%" which, as jane gallop has argued, goes beyond "the pleasure principle", not because it is beyond pleasure but because it is beyond principle (gallop, 113), and which unites pleasure with emotion with fear, with disruption, with loss of control -jouissance qua catharsis qua abjection, in kristeva's rather than hassan's sense, that which unravels "identity, system, order" (kristeva, 10) [26] thus, it is not the child but the war veteran and the concentration camp victim whom maria handke resembles; she is not the writer-son's mind-child but his hero, an antigone/anne frank -a tragic victim of a tyrannical state. and as in the ancient tragedy, it is the moral implications of burial which motivates the entire story; at the end of this piece we discover that handke is enraged by the depersonalizing effects of his mother's funeral, that it is at the cemetery that he decides he must write about her. this rage is maria handke's clearest legacy to her son, an emotion which grounds an aesthetic and an ethic which arguably informs all of handke's writing thereafter: a refusal to never not be angry, a hatred of authority and institution, a hatred of the father, a hatred of austria - all this as a monument to the rage of his mother a way to let it speak, a way for the son to recall and use the silenced, outraged muttersprache. katherine woodward has argued that barthes refuses normal mourning in _la chambre claire_, but this seems far truer for handke, as a self-conscious practice, as an act of atonement. in this way, handke sees through the oedipal romance at the heart of his own narrative manoever and rejects it; realizing that his rage is his mother's rage, that the two are intertwined and inextricable, handke goes eddie vedder one better; he foregrounds and then refuses to tell the tale of the "bad" mother and pathetically victimized, neurotic son; he sees through the misogyny of that strategy and will not fall for it, although he clearly feels its power. [27] in this way handke becomes both the avenging fury and fugitive son (orestes) to the specter of his own mother's death, or to use another classical analogy, if barthes is a wannabe zeus, handke is a self-crippled hephaestus, who throws himself down the father's stairs for the sake of themother. is it any wonder that -despite the bewildering array of first person narrators and writer-doubles who populate handke's work -that handke himself is never to be found in any of them? autobiography becomes for him the absence of the subject, especially himself, and this is perhaps his scriptible manner of atoning for the erasure which his mother underwent herself. i remember the dismembered mama and i dismember myself, the body of my text, so that she may be protean, so that she may live in me. handke's literary transsexualism -his wanting so much not to be a man, and to be she. 7. all my pieces set me free^11^</h2> [28] in barthes and handke, the son plays with the corpse of the mother and together they give birth to writing where the problems of %langue% vs langage, of personal utterance versus societal formula, of pleasure, pain, of aesthetics, play themselves out on paper through the spectacle of the son's remembrance of the dead mother and haunt us precisely because they do not succeed. in barthes, we witness the death throes of the modern, the recapitulation of the high-style dandyism of wilde, proust, and the rupture of the victorian mama's boy (how i suffered with maman but i alone understood her) in the face of the photograph and the mass visual media which it portends; from this perspective one of the things being mourned in _la chambre claire_ is certainly modernity itself. in handke, we witness the postmodern acceptance of the photograph and of visual culture in general as artifacts of artifice, as well as a linguistic exuberance which operates in the very interstices of exhaustion^12^ -a quirky artistic masculine life which struggles from out and on behalf of the body of the mother. and in vedder -against whose projected image this essay has played itself out? -where the other (tongue) is all but cut out, leaving a trail of body parts in her (its) wake -a hand, a breast, blood - consequently leaving the critic with little to "work" with? in eddie vedder's self-obscuring spectacle and in grunge as a whole we can see both -the self-consciously doomed struggle of the "low" modernism of 60's rock with its pomo double, punk -jim morrison meeting sigmund freud and devo. but to this menage a trois we must add a fourth figure; for eddie vedder's wounded masculinity travels through morrison, freud, and devo to a different, oddly indeterminate gender-destination. looking at his performances, i am reminded of janis joplin reborn as a generation-x boy in shorts. eddie vedder, like roland barthes and peter handke, reverses the pinocchio principle, and dreams of being a real girl. *do* call me daughter. [29] thus, in all three autobiographical practioners we see not just the crisis of masculinity but a struggle to rethink the masculine subject as feminine if not downright feminized, and it seems significant that this occurs in both the self-avowedly homosexual and in the determinedly heterosexual male texts which i have considered here. many feminist critics have regarded this move with apprehension^13^ -an apprehension by which i am repelled and to which i am also attracted. on one hand, it is hard not to see the autobiographical gestures of vedder, barthes and handke as important, for they take on and try to say something new about that most difficult of contemporary topics -love (as eilene hoft-march has noted in her essay on barthes)-and they contemplate possibly the most difficult of western loves to talk about -difficult in the sense that it is controversial, notorious, theoretically and politically embedded and at the same time for feminism crucial to rethink and revise: the love between/of the son and/for the mother. hopefully this essay has suggested that the tortured mechanics of this love are still everywhere in western culture -from oedipus to rock and beyond. 8. she dreams in colors she dreams in red [30] crucial, and yet . . . this piece on autobiography, on postmodernism/ity and on the woundedness of performing boys will not close without my own ambivalence, a personal variation on e. ann kaplan's reservations about the postmodern versus the feminist (kaplan, 38). what "we" - our postmodern culture -have yet to move beyond (where indeed no man has gone before) is that this love for/from mother, still, expresses itself best over mother's dead body, around the edges of her missing photographs, over and against the linguistic traces which testify to and yet still seek to erase her actual presence. the failure of the aesthetic enterprise discussed here -the as far as a boy can go pomo prime directive -is one, then, which we should theorize, discuss, and even admire, but which we should not accept. for, even as i write, from around the margins of the photograph, from behind the performance of wounded masculine annihilation, and against the hateful image of yoko ono as rock and roll's maternal black widow extraordinaire, an outrageous maternal body materializes before our very eyes. clad in wings on the cover of _vanity fair_ (june, 1995) or exposing a slightly rounded postpartum stomach and braless, t-shirted, imperfect breasts on the cover of _rolling stone_ (august, 1995), she demands to be seen and heard, requires our attention, defies our judgment, makes money, achieves fame not as the safely silent feminine object of mourning, but as bad mom mourner who fronts the co-ed, sexually multivalent band, called, appropriately, hole: i want to be the girl with the most cake someday you will ache like i ache. (courtney love) notes: ^1^ i> in wim wenders' quintessentially strange, overwrought male-bonding road movie, _im lauf der zeit_ (_kings of the road_, 1975) the protagonist sings along with an old recording whose refrain is "just like eddie." *for k, with love. also thanks for rg, jg, and in particular dd for staging a dress rehearsal of this gig at the ucr comparative literature spring colloquium in 1994.* ^2^ all frame lyrics by eddie vedder. ^3^ i.e. the "coolness" of post-structuralism has been affirmed by a recent article in the computer-tech magazine _wired_, (where, incidentally roland barthes is included as an important progenitor) in much the same way as _spin_ confirms the angst of eddie vedder (who is displayed on the cover). ^4^ for a more lengthy discussion of handke's reception in the 80's and 90's, see my essay "on the bull's horn with peter handke" in _postmodern culture_, september 1993. ^5^ see for example, vedder's recent, deeply parodistic photographic self-portraits in _spin_ (january 1995). ^6^ in this way, vedder skews and violates the standard rebellious, macho stances of male rock performance which are geared to reinforce masculine identity values in male viewers (see toney and weaver, 568 ff.). ^7^ i concur with dana polan's caveat that popular culture is not "necessarily" free from the constraints of ideology (kaplan, 52). indeed what is interesting about pearl jam is precisely this performative tension between the ideological and the subversive. ^8^ elissa marder also argues persuasively that _camera lucida_ may be read also as a revelation of the "essence" of contemporary history -that of %cliche%. see works cited. ^9^ haverkamp falls for barthes' line (265). ^10^ similarly, maurice berger notes "one of the greatest lessons implied in his writing was one he never fully understood: that men . . . should be able to ask form rather than demand, love." (berger, 122). ^11^ which provides an interesting intertext with wayne koestenbaum who observes, "masculinity sucks; it divides into pieces" (koestenbaum, 79). ^12^ or as handke put it in a january 1994 interview/performance, "lassen sie mich mit modernismus!" (handke, "die einladende schweigsamkeit," 18). ^13^ see in particular carole-anne tyler's brilliant essay "boys will be girls: the politics of gay drag." works cited: barthes, roland. _la chambre claire_. cahiers du cinema. galimard/seuil 1980. -----. _camera lucida_. trans. richard howard. noonday: new york, 1981. -----. _the pleasure of the text_. farrar strauss giroux: new york, 1975. berger, maurice. "a clown's coat." _artforum_. (april 1994) 82-122. blau, herbert. "barthes and beckett: the punctum, the pensum, and the dream of love." _the eye of the prey: subversions of the postmodern_. indiana up; bloomington. 1992. brennan, theresa. _the interpretation of the flesh: freud and femininity_. london: routledge, 1992. gallop, jane. "feminist criticism and the pleasure of the text." _north dakota quarterly_. 54.2 (spring 1986). 119-32. -----. "beyond the %jouissance% principle." _representations_ 7 (summer 1984). 110-115. hammer, stephanie barbe. "on the bull's horn with peter handke: debates, failures, essays, and a postmodern livre de moi." _postmodern culture_. (september, 1993). electronic journal. -----. _the sublime crime_. siup: carbondale, 1994. handke, peter, hermann beil, and claus peymann. "die einladende schweigsamkeit." _theater heute_ (january 1994). 14-18. haverkamp, anselm. "the memory of pictures: roland barthes and augustine on photography." _comparative literature_ 45.3 (summer 1993). 258-79. heath, stephen. "barthes on love." _substance_. 37/38 (1983). 100-6. hoft-march, eilene. "barthes' real mother: the legacy of _la chambre claire_. _french forum_ 17.1 (january 1992). 61-76. kaplan, e. ann. "feminism/oedipus/postmodernism." _postmodernism and its discontents_. london: verso, 1988. 30-44. kennedy, j. gerald. "roland barthes, autobiography, and the end of writing." _the georgia review_ 35.2 (1981). 381-398. koestenbaum, wayne. " my masculinity." _artforum_ april 1994. 78-122. kritzman, lawrence. "roland barthes: the discourse of desire and the question of gender." _modern language notes_ (sept 1988) 103.4. 848-864. marcus, greil. _lipstick traces: a secret history of the 20th century_. cambridge: harvard up, 1989. -----. _mystery train_. new york: plume, 1990, 3rd edition. marder, elissa. "flat death: snapshots of history." _diacritics_ 22. 3/4 (fall-winter 1992). 128-44. nagele, rainer. "peter handke: %wunschloses ungluck%." in _deutsche romane des 20. jahrhunderts_. ed. paul michael lutzeler. konigstein: athenaum, 1983. 388-402. park, clara claiborne. "author! author! reconstructing roland barthes." _hudson review_. 43.3 (autumn 1990). 377-98. pearl jam. _ten_. contains "alive" and "go." lyrics by eddie vedder. epic records, 1991. -----. _v.s._ lyrics by eddie vedder. epic, 1993. -----. _vitology_. lyrics by eddie vedder. epic, 1994. polan, dana. "postmodernism and cultural analysis today." _postmodernism and its discontents_. ed. e. ann kaplan. london: verso, 1988. 45-58. sarkonak, ralph. "roland barthes and the specter of photography." _l'esprit createur_ 23.1 (spring 1982). 48-68. sirius, r.u. "pomo to go." _wired_ june 1994. 54-8. _spin_. december 1993. cover story. "eddie's world." _spin_. january 1995. cover story. "eddie vedder breaks his silence." stanton, domna. "the mater of the text: barthesian displacement and its limits." _l'esprit createur_ 22.1 (summer 1985). 57-72. street, john. _rebel rock: the politics of popular music_. oxford: basil blackwell, 1986. toney, gregory t., and james b. weaver. "effects of gender and gender role self-perceptions on affective reactions to rock music videos." _sex roles_ 30. 7/8 (april 1994). 567-83. tyler, carole-anne. "boys will be girls." _inside/out_. ed. dina fuss. new york: routledge, 1991. 32-70. ulmer, gregory. "barthes' body of knowledge." _studies in twentieth century literature_. vol. 5, no. 2 (spring 1981). 219-35. varsava, jerry a. "auto-bio-graphy as metafiction: peter handke's _a sorrow beyond dreams_. _clio_ 14.2 (1985). 119-135. woodward, kathleen. "freud and barthes: theorizing mourning, sustaining grief." _discourse_ 13.1 (1990-91). 93-110. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------page, 'women writers and the restive text: feminism, experimental writing and hypertext', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-page-women.txt archive pmc-list, file page.196. part 1/1, total size 58353 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- women writers and the restive text: feminism, experimental writing and hypertext by barbara page vassar college page@vassar.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by barbara page, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] it was while reading my way into a number of recent fictions composed in hypertext that i began to think back on a tendency of women's writing which aims not only at changing the themes of fiction but at altering the formal structure of the text itself. in a useful collection of essays about twentieth-century women writers, called _breaking the sequence: women's experimental fiction_, ellen friedman and miriam fuchs trace a line of authors who subvert what they see as patriarchal assumptions governing traditional modes of narrative, beginning with gertrude stein, dorothy richardson, and virginia woolf, and leading to such contemporaries as christine brooke-rose, eva figes, and kathy acker. they write: although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms -nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and decentering -are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (3-4) among contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing nonlinear, antihierarchical and decentered writing, but many women who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of "realist" narrative from a consciousness stirred by feminist discourses of resistance, especially those informed by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. the claim of friedman and fuchs cited above is itself radical, namely that such women writers can produce themselves -as new beings or as ones previously unspoken -through self-conscious acts of writing against received tradition. a number of the contemporary writers i discuss in this essay make a direct address within the fictive text to feminist theory, rather more as a flag flown than as a definitive discursive marker, in recognition of themselves as engaged with other women in the discursive branch of women's struggle against oppression.^1^ for some writers of this tendency, hypertext would seem to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing, notwithstanding an aversion among many women to computer technologies and programs thought to be products of masculinist habits of mind. my argument is not that the print authors i discuss here would be better served by the hypertext medium, but that their writing is in many respects hypertextual in principle and bears relation to discourses of many women writers now working in hypertext. [2] these women writers, as a rule, take for granted that language itself and much of canonical literature encode hierarchies of value that denigrate and subordinate women, and therefore they incorporate into their work a strategically critical or oppositional posture, as well as a search for alternative forms of composition. they do not accept the notion, however, that language is hopelessly inimical or alien to their interests, and so move beyond the call for some future reform of language to an intervention -exuberant or wary -in present discourses. i focus in particular on writers whose rethinking of gender construction enters into both the themes and the gestural repertoire of their compositions, and who undertake to redesign the very topography of prose. at the most literal level of the text -that of words as graphic objects - all of these writers are leery of the smooth, spooling lines of type that define the fictive space of conventional print texts and delimit the path of the reader. like other postmodernist writers, they move on from modernist methods of collage to constructions articulating alternatives to linear prose. the notion, for example, of textuality as weaving (a restoration of the root meaning of "text") and of the construction of knowledge as a web that has figured prominently in the development of hypertext has also been important in feminist theory, though for rather different purposes.^2^ like other postmodernist writers, also, many of these women experimentalists are strikingly self-reflexive, and write %about% their texts %in% the text. one important difference, though, concerns the self-conscious will among these writers not simply to reimagine writing as weaving but rather to take apart the fabric of inherited textual forms and to reweave it into new designs. for all of these authors, restiveness with the fixity of print signifies something more than a struggle going on under a blanket of established formal meaning. their aim is to rend the surface of language and to reshape it into forms more hospitable to the historical lives of women and to an esthetic of the will and desire of a self-apprehended female body that is an end unto itself and not simply instrumental. one frequent mark of this new writing is the introduction of silence, partly as a memorial to the historical silencing of women's voices, but also as a means of establishing a textual space for the entrance of those "others" chronically excluded from the closed texts of dogmatists and power interests. [3] as my point of departure, i want briefly to describe carole maso's 1993 novel, _ava_, her fourth book in order of composition, though published third. this text unfolds in the mind of a thirty-nine-year old professor of comparative literature named ava klein, who is dying of a rare blood disease, a form of cancer. the book, divided into morning, afternoon and night, takes place on the last day of ava's life, the same day in which president george bush draws his line in the sand of the persian gulf states, inaugurating a war. against this act and all the forces of division and destruction it symbolizes, against the malignancy of cancer and of militarism, maso poses the unbounded mind of ava, whose powers of memory and desire abide in the emblematic figure of a girl, recurring throughout the text, who draws an a and spells her own name. ava's narrative is in fragments that in the act of being read acquire fuller meaning, through repetition, through their discrete placement on the passing pages, through variation, and also through the generous space between utterances that gives a place to silence and itself comes to represent a certain freedom -of movement, of new linkage, of as-yet-unuttered possibilities. here is how the book begins: morning each holiday celebrated with real extravagance. birthdays. independence days. saints' days. even when we were poor. with verve. come sit in the morning garden for awhile. olives hang like earrings in late august. a perpetual pageant. a throbbing. come quickly. the light in your eyes precious. unexpected things. mardi gras: a farewell to the flesh. you spoke of trieste. of constantinople. you pushed the curls from your face. we drank five-star metaxa on the island of crete and aspired to the state of music. olives hang like earrings. a throbbing. a certain pulsing. the villagers grew violets. we ran through genet and wild sage. labyrinth of crete, mystery of water, home. [4] in a polemical preface to _ava_, maso argues that much of current commercial fiction, in attempting to ward off the chaos and "mess" of death with organized, rational narratives, ultimately becomes "death with its complacent, unequivocal truths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis." in this preface, maso traces her resistance to traditional narratives back to feelings of dissatisfaction with the "silly plots" of stories her mother read aloud to her as a child. in order to stop "the incessant march of the plot forward to the inevitable climax," she would, she recalls, wander away, out of earshot, taking a sentence or a scene to dream over. often she would detach the meanings from the words her mother read, turning the words into a kind of music, "a song my mother was singing in a secret language just to me." bypassing the logos of stories, then, she walked into a freer space where she was able to invent, or rediscover, another tempo and ordering of language felt as a sensuous transmission from the mother's body to hers. "this is what literature became for me: music, love, and the body." (from _ava_ 175-76) [5] this is the beginning, but not the end or sum of maso's fiction. rather like adrienne rich's "new poet" in her "transcendental etude," she walks away from the old arguments into a space of new composition, where she takes up fragments of the already spoken with a notable lack of anxiety about influence. in the stream of her narrative one hears formal and informal voices of precursors and contemporaries, male and female, along with patches of fact, history, even critical discourse that figure as features of the rhythmic text, the writing of a richly nourished adult mind -ava klein never more alive than on the day of her dying: garcia lorca, learning to spell, and not a day too soon. ava klein in a beautiful black wig. piled up high. and i am waiting at what is suddenly this late hour, for my ship to come in - even if it is a papier-mache ship on a plastic sea, after all. we wanted to live. how that night you rubbed "olio santo" all over me. one liter oil, chili peppers, bay leaves, rosemary. and it's spaghetti i want at 11:00 a.m. maybe these cravings are a sign of pregnancy. some late last-minute miracle. the trick of living past this life. to devour all that is the world. because more than anything, we wanted to live. dear bunny, if it is quite convenient we shall come with our butterfly nets this friday. you will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom - unlike the more classical texts -which are not texts that delimit themselves, are not texts of territory with neat borders, with chapters, with beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little disquieting because you do not feel the border. the edge. how are you? i've been rereading kleist with great enthusiasm and i wish you were around to talk to and i realize suddenly, i miss you. (113) [6] for ava, thinking and feeling go together, and reading is sensuous, rendering literal the definition of influence, so that whole passages of her text -still unmistakably her own -are washed in the colors of an admired author: woolf, garc&iacute;a lorca, beckett, and others. ava's reading is finally a species of her promiscuous engorgement with life, and of a mind that declines to wall off speaking from writing or to isolate recollection, narration and description from meditation and analysis. in the passage above, for example, a snatch of a letter to edmund wilson ("bunny") from the lapidary lepidoperist nabokov stands next to a bit from helene cixous that graphically tails off into broken borders which in turn begin to enact an expansion of the text of the sort that cixous calls for. the book, curiously, achieves unity in the act of reading, as the rhythmic succession of passages induces a condition approaching trance. the effect is both aural and visual: when spoken, real time must pass between utterances; when read, real space must be traversed by the eye between islands of text. [7] in an essay that itself intermingles argument and reflection with quotation from her own novels and from precursor writers and theorists, maso points to images that both ground her ambition and suggest alternatives to linear prose: "_ava_ could not have been written as it was, i am quite sure, if i had not been next to the water day after day. incorporating the waves." and, "the design of the stars then in the sky. i followed their dreamy instructions. composed in clusters. wrote constellations of associations." attributing independent will to genres, she describes the "desire" of the novel to be a poem, of the poem to be an essay, of the essay to reach toward fiction, and "the obvious erotics of this." (notes 26) the desiring text rebels against the virtual conspiracy between "commodity novelists" and publishers to lock a contrived sense of reality, shorn of its remoteness and mystery, into "the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character." as a lyric artist in large prose forms, maso explains that writing _ava_ i felt at times . . . like a choreographer working with language in physical space. language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. shapes that then regather and re-form making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being. (notes 27) she names as precursors virginia woolf of the _waves_ and gertrude stein, in stein's remark, "i have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense. . . ." (28, 27) in place of plot she aims to "imagine story as a blooming flower, or a series of blossomings," for example, and makes space in the text for "the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. %precious, disappearing things%." (27) and here the italicized words, from the second section of _ava_, both incrementally repeat a line from the opening of the book -"precious. unexpected things" -and underscore the ethical, as well as esthetic impulse in maso's fiction. (_ava_ 186) [8] for maso, the attraction of the novel is its unruly, expansive refusal of perfection. she argues that, because we no longer believe that the traditional stories are true, we can no longer write tidy, beginning-middle-end fiction, even if this means that we must "write notebooks rather than masterpieces," as woolf once suggested. (notes 29) the gain will be "room and time for everything. this will include missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. amendments, erasures, illusions." instead of the "real" story, we shall have: "the ability to embrace oppositional stances at the same time. contradictory impulses, ideas, motions. to assimilate as part of the form, incongruity, ambivalence." (notes 30) and for maso, who has the confidence to found imagination on her own experience, this form of fiction, that does not tyrannize and that allows "a place for the reader to live, to dream," leads not to the "real" story but to "what the story was for me": "a feminine shape -after all this time." (notes 30, 28) [9] in an essay that is something of a tour-de-force, entitled ":re:thinking:literary:feminism: (three essays onto shaky grounds)," poet and theorist joan retallack, like maso, addresses what is -or can be -of particular import for women in the refiguration of writing toward nonor multi-linear, deor re-centered prose, by means of a revaluation of the terms traditionally affixed to the subordinated figure of the feminine: an interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what western culture has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence, empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics; open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist discontents. (347) in thinking about why for her the writing of women today seems particularly vibrant with potential, retallack underscores the worth both of productive silence, that gives place to the construction of new images and meanings, and of collaboration, that empowers writer and reader to "conspire (to breathe together) . . . in the construction of a living aesthetic event." (356) while denying a turn toward essentialism, she argues that the historical situation of women now provides a particularly fertile "construction site" for new writing, one important feature of which is its invitation to the active participation of others in an ongoing textual process: i'd like to suggest that it is a woman's feminine text (denying any redundancy), which implicitly acknowledges and creates the possibility of other/additional/simultaneous texts. this is a model significantly different from bloom's competitve anxiety of influence. it opens up a distinction between the need to imprint/impress one's mark (image) on the other, and %an invitation to the other's discourse% . . . (358. my italics) against those feminists who despair of entering a language over-coded with misogyny, retallack argues that "language has always overflowed the structures/strictures of its own grammars," and that "the so-called feminine is in language from the start." (372) in this regard, retallack supplies a validation of maso's ready, unanxious introduction of quotation from male authors in what she calls her feminine text. [10] that prose writers like maso and poet/theorists like retallack do not stand alone is indicated, for example, by the 1992 anthology entitled _res*urgent*: new writing by women_ which has been co-edited by lou robinson and camille norton. it brings together a generous selection of writers who mix genres of verse and prose freely and embed manifesto or critique both in the narrative and the topography of the writing. _res*urgent*_ is divided into two, or perhaps four, parts -"transmission/translation" and "collaboration/spectacle" -as it moves from single-author texts to collaborative and to performative texts. lou robinson writes in the introduction: everywhere in these prose pieces i find that unpredictable element in the language which forces consciousness to leap a gap where other writing would make a bridge of shared meaning . . . , a sense of something so urgent in its desire to be expressed that it comes before the words to say it, in the interstices, in the rhythm: marina tsvetaeva's "song in the head without noise." . . . this is writing that swings out over a chasm, that spits. (1) [11] among the most interesting pieces in _res*urgent*_ are the collaborations, including one by daphne marlatt and betsy warland, entitled "reading and writing between the lines," that undertakes a punning reclamation of the term "collaboration" itself. their endeavor resembles that of retallack, when she reclaims the word "conspire" by reminding readers of its root meaning as "to breathe together" and applies it to the notion of opening the authorial text to the discourse of others. in their piece, marlatt and warland, "running on together," write their way through the self-betrayal of collaboration in its political sense to a celebration of co-labial play, in the lips of speech and of women's sex: "let me slip into something more comfortable" she glides across the room labi, to glide, to slip (labile; labilis: labia; labialis) la la la "my labyl mynde . . ." labilis, labour, belabour, collaborate, elaborate . . . . . slip of the tongue "the lability of innocence" . . . . . labia majora (the "greater lips") la la la and labia minora (the "lesser lips") not two mouths but three! slipping one over on polarity slippage in the text you & me collabi, (to slip together) labialization!) slip(ping) page(es) like notes in class o labilism o letter of the lips o grafting of our slips labile lovers "prone to undergo displacement in position or change in nature, form, chemical composition; unstable" [12] this word play owes most, perhaps, to irigaray's feminist displacement of the phallus as the central signifier in the sexual imaginary, particularly as articulated in lacan. in "this sex which is not one," she writes: "woman 'touches herself' all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. thus, within herself, she is already two -but not divisible into one(s) -that caress each other." (24) although irigaray's language is open to the criticism that it may lead to biological essentialism, we should bear in mind that all language is shot through with metaphors, many derived from the body, and that some of the boldest interventions by innovative women writers have been through an insistence on speaking the body in new terms as a way of breaking the hold of traditional discourses that denigrate and demonize the female body. this is a move against a crippling inheritance of ideology, as nicole ward jouve points out: "the whole idea of %sex% talking is itself symbolic, is itself discourse; the phrase is a turning around and reclaiming of 'male' discourse." (32) it is also a move, as we have seen in maso, toward the discovery, in material forms commonly associated with the feminine, of structures capable of inspiring new forms of writing. for collaborative writers marlatt and warland, the co-labial slippage between two and one opens the text to a commingling of voices about the unsanctioned commingling of women's bodies, thus enacting a double subversion of the lacanian law. the effect is not that of reductive essentialism but rather of the frank erotics maso refers to, an imaginative discursive enactment of the "desire" of one text for another. [13] at some points in marlatt and warland's text two voices march down separate columns of type in a way reminiscent of kristeva's antiphonal essay-invocations,^3^ but at others, they merge into pronominal harmony and a playful syntactic break-up, reminiscent of stein, that shakes loose the overdetermined subject: to keep (y)our word. eroticizing collaboration we've moved from treason into trust. a difficult season, my co-labial writer writing me in we while we are three and you is reading away with us - who? you and you (not we) in me and are you trying to avoid the autoall of us reading, which is what biographical? what is 'self' writwe do when left holding the ing here? when you leave space floor, watching you soar with for your readers who may not the words' turning and turning read you in the same way the their sense and sensing their autobiographical becomes comturns i'm dancing with you in munal even communographic in the dark learning to trust that its contextual and narrative sense of direction learning to (carol gilligan) women's way of read you in to where i want to go thinking -and collaborating. although the commotion in words the connotations you bring are different we share the floor the ground floor meaning dances on . . . the verbal strategies here are familiar enough to contemporary readers: the deconstructive questioning (whose is (y)our word?) that exposes the instability of subject and object; the reclaiming of terms and unmaking of conventional syntax; the diologism of the blocked texts. the antiphonal effect of the double columns in fact puts eye-reading into crisis, just as, conversely, the broken, parenthesized, multiplication of signifiers baffles a single voice reading aloud in sequence. unlike many collaborative writers, marlatt and warland refuse to distinguish between their two voices by use of a different type face or placement on the page. in maso's _ava_, influences naturalize and borders among texts break; in marlatt and warland, collaboration undermines the notion of writing as intellectual property: we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. it is no coincidence, i think, that prose of this kind floats in generous, unconventional volumes of space, seeking escape, it would seem, from the rigid lineation and lineage of the print text. [14] just as the potential for self-circling narcissism in maso's text is overcome by an ethics of regard for the external world, so similarly in many of the texts in _res*urgent*_ is celebratory subjectivity matched by an engaged politics, even -in charles bernstein's words - by the "need to reground polis," through "an act of human reconstruction and reimagining." (200) some, like co-authors sally silver and abigail child, directly link self-renovation with revolutionary politics, as when they urge women to "defeat coherent subjectivity on which capitalism, idealism is based." (167) for others, though, political positioning has been made difficult by the very fragmentation of the culturally constructed self, owing to a painful severance from a home base. in _res*urgent*_, the editors' decision to select "melpomene tragedy" from theresa hak kyung cha's _dictee_ highlights this phase of alienation and the yearning it engenders. in this chapter of her book, cha writes from exile in america to her mother in south korea and from a cultural dislocation caused by war that is felt as the separation of the self from a machine-produced screen image. in half-broken syntax, she makes a fervent and bitterly ironic appeal to the traditional female personification of tragedy to intervene against the war machine that invented and shattered her: arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than her own. suffice melpomene, to exorcize from this mouth the name the words the memory of severance through this act by this very act to utter one, her once, her to utter at once. she without the separate act of uttering. [15] in cha's _dictee_, each chapter enunciates through formal and visual means a distinctive matter, often contrapuntal or even contradictory to that in other sections of the book. its method of including writing in several languages and visual artifacts from east and west, and its experimental form in fact led scholars of the 1980's who were gathering the heritage of asian american writing to shun _dictee_ for a time, as lacking ethnic integrity. the composition escapes the boundaries of a single cultural identity, just as its form steadily resists confinement within the print book. as scholar shelley sunn wong explains, _dictee_ "instantiates a writing practice that stumbles over rather than smoothes out the uneven textures of raced and gendered memory." (45) at the very front of the book, for example, before the title page, appears a photograph of korean graffiti etched in stone on the wall of a japanese coal mine, by one of many workers forced into exile and labor. the words read in translation: mother i miss you i am hungry i want to go home. wong regards cha's placement of this text -the only words in _dictee_ in the korean language -that reads vertically from right to left, ending at the extreme lefthand margin, as a provocative move against conventional writings and readings that encode and enforce oppressive hierarchies: "instead of leading the reader into the work, the directional movement of the frontispiece begins to usher the reader back out of the text. within the context of narrative development, the frontispiece thus functions not to forward the narrative but, rather, to forestall it." (46) [16] the tendencies of the kind of writing i have been describing receive fresh realization in the medium of hypertext. one of these, a collaborative fiction called _izme pass_, by carolyn guyer and martha petry, seems particularly congruent with those in _res*urgent*_, both in its politics and in its formal concerns. _izme pass_ came about as the result of an experiment in writing proposed for the journal _writing on the edge_. the editors first asked hypertext novelist michael joyce, best known for his hyperfiction _afternoon_, to compose a story. then they invited other authors to revise or augment his text into a collaboration. carolyn guyer and martha petry, each of whom had been at work on a hyperfiction of her own, took up the challenge but refused to accept joyce's fiction, called _woe, or a memory of what will be_, as a prior or instigating text. recognizing a patriarchal precept in the positing of a master text, they set about to create an independent construction that would also transgressively subvert and appropriate _woe_. (79) in an on-screen map they placed a writing space, containing fragments of joyce's text, into a triad with spaces containing parts of their own works-in-progress, then added a fourth, new work, called "pass," woven of connections they created among the other three texts to produce an intertextual polylogue: [image] [17] as guyer and petry explain: "almost immediately we began to see how this process of tinkering with existing texts by intentionally sculpting their inchoate connections had the ironic effect of making everything more fluid. _izme pass_ began to affect _rosary_ [petry's work] which poured its new character back into _quibbling_ [guyer's work] which flowed over into _woe_ and back through _izme_." (82) at the level of textual organization and of structural metaphor, _izme pass_ mocks _woe_, which graphically emanates from a "mandala," an asiatic diagram for meditation supposed to lead to mystical insight: [image] instead, they designed a diamondor oor almond-shaped map headed by a "mandorla," the asiatic signifier of the yoni, the divine female genital: [image] [18] appropriations and revaluations of the sort illustrated here constitute critique as an internal dynamic of this hypertext. because it is written in the storyspace program, however, _izme pass_ takes the further step of opening itself to interventions by readers turned writers, who can if they choose add to, subtract from, or rearrange the text. in this respect, the politics of hypertext allows for one realization of the feminist aim articulated by retallack: it provides "an invitation to the other's discourse." it pushes further those disruptions of the "real" story maso calls for, allowing for effects of the sort she lists, including "missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. amendments, erasures, illusions." like all hypertexts, _izme pass_ prohibits definitive reading; the reader chooses the path of the narrative. the graphical device of notating linked words, moreover, sometimes introduces further narrative possibilities. opening _izme pass_ through its title, the reading begins with this figure of a female storyteller: when a woman tells a story she is remembering what will be. what symmetry, or assymetry, the story passes through the orifice directly beneath the wide-spread antlers, curved horns of ritual at her head, just as it passes through the orifice between her open legs. labrys. how could she not know? when a woman tells a story it is to save. to husband the world, you might say. thinking first to save her mother, her daughter, her sisters, scheherazade tells, her voice enchanting, saving him in the bargain. when a woman tells, oh veiled voice, a story. in _izme pass_, words linked to other texts can also signify in the passage on-screen. here, for example, the linked words %a story; passes through; passes through; mother; daughter; her sisters; saving him in the bargain% yield a narrative surplus, becoming syntactic in themselves and creating resonant juxtapositions. in this case, the linked words sketch an incipient story having many "passes," constellated around a family of women, that predicates the saving of a man. [19] proceeding into the text through the word "story" itself, on a first pass one arrives at a text space under the title "stones," that gives a definition of "cairns" and suggests one metaphor -or several -for communal story-writing: cairns: the cumulative construction of heaps of stones by passers-by at the site of accidents, disgraces, deaths, violence, or as remembrances (records) of journeys. it is as if the stones in their configuration, in the years of their leaning against one another, learn to talk with one another, and are married. nested in the "stones" box at the map level is an assemblage of writing spaces that themselves graphically depict a sort of cairn and produce a textual neighborhood, so to speak, of thematic materials associatively linked to the notion of stones: [image] such a rich site as this offers a host of possibilities to the reader. i might for example linger at the level of this screen to examine the variety of materials gathered into the cairn. or i might choose a text and follow the default path where it leads, out of this screen to other locations in _izme pass_. if i choose to click on "stonestory 1," at the center of the cairn, i am transported abruptly to a narrative line: "she said, when i was little i held stones up to my crotch to feel the coldness.'" following the default path from this space, i navigate next to a space titled "a wedding," containing this text: beside her groom, the cool stone closed tightly in her palm. just before the ceremony he had given her a small jade butterfly, signal of his intent. he wanted to learn her, and one of the first things he knew was that jade was her stone. %piedras de ijada%, stones of the loin. and then after that to a space titled "delight": his. delight. is what she seeks. in this shade which she herself creates, his mind turned inward, she might hold him in her palm so, brief reprieve. another, he says. again. [20] another click on the default path returns me to "stonestory 1," establishing a tight narrative circle that i realize has moved me swiftly through ritual passages of a female eroticism that has been symbolically associated with and mediated by stones. deciding at this point to investigate the adjacent "stonetory 2," i navigate into the prophetic speech of a woman, here again unnamed: "she said, in order to move mountains you've got to know what stones are about.'" the default path in this case issues outward into a journal entry about a sort of female demosthenes, with the words "she gathered a pearl in her mouth, an o within an o . . . ," and then on to a screen entitled "scheherazade," one of _izme_'s key figures, i realize, recalling the "stories" text with which my reading began. backtracking to the journal entry about "an o within an o," i take note of the growing significance of circles in _izme_, and decide to revisit a screen i had previously encountered in my survey of the cairn, entitled "salt," and i read: [image] the alchemical symbol was the same for water as for salt (representing the horizon, separation and/or joining of earth and sky) symbol of purification and rebirth tastes like blood and seawater, both fluids identified with the womb [21] within this configuration of _izme_'s texts, circles have produced associations among: the form of a woman's body, rituals of sexual passage, prophetic speaking, female storytelling and, here, a mystical perception of cosmic order. because i am exploring _izme_ as an open text, that is, one that allows, even encourages, the reader to intervene as a writer,^4^ i now decide -unthinkable in one too well-schooled in reading closed print texts -to make a link and add a new text, by joining the o motif to the passage i quoted above in this essay, from irigaray's "this sex which is not one." but where to place it? in order to answer this question, i find myself attending more closely than i might otherwise do to how the structure of _izme_ and its thematic nodes interact. finally, i decide simply to nest my new text within the salt, so to speak, by dragging a writing space i create into the interior of the "salt" space, linking it to the irigaray passage from the alchemical symbol on a path that i name "like lips": [image] [22] in all of the texts under discussion here, there is a dynamic relation between feminist thematics and textuality, a relationship that intensifies in a hypertext such as _izme pass_, with its complex interweaving of disparate writings and its invitation to the reader to move freely both among texts and between texts and syntactic maps. not all hypertexts by women are as unconstrained or open as those, like _izme pass_, although many nevertheless contain aspects of what one might call hypertextual feminism. judy malloy's lyrical fiction _its name was penelope_, for example, presents only a handful of choices at any given moment of reading, through labels that may be clicked on to carry the reader into sections titled "dawn," "sea" (subdivided into four sections: "a gathering of shades," "that far-off island," "fine work and wide across," "rock and a hard place") and "song." because the text screens of the "dawn" and "sea" sections have been programmed by the computer to produce a sort of random rearrangement with each successive reading, the contexts and nuances of any given passage change with different readings, even though one's movement through a sequence is relatively linear. though restrictive by comparison with _izme pass_, the structure malloy adopts strengthens the analogy she intends between the text screens we read and the photographic images her artist-protagonist, ann mitchell, is trying to work into assemblages. [23] the "it" named penelope in malloy's fiction is a toy sailboat, the inciting image of her strategic reconsideration of the odyssey. in her story, anne mitchell, though a weaver of images like her wifely forebear, does not stay put but rather wends her way through relationships and sexual liaisons, evading "that far-off island," malloy's version of calypso, on which, malloy remarks in her introductory notes, "[i]n these days, some married women artists feel trapped." (11) penelope's compounded, disjunctive structure corresponds with and seems to arise from the narrator's restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire: *that far-off island* on the telephone he told me a story about working in an ice cream store when he was 14 years old. i looked through the box of photos that i keep by my bed while i listened. repeatedly in the narrative, the pursuit of art draws anne away from a lover and the "island" of monogamous, domesticated sex: *that far-off island* we were looking at contact sheets in his kitchen. my coffee sat untouched in the center of the table. where his shirt was unbuttoned, dark hairs curled on his chest. i got up and began to put the contact sheets back into the manilla folder. "i have to go," i said. [24] unlike its classical antecedent, malloy's _penelope_ is spare rather than expansive, made of vignettes rather than continuously developed action or panoramic description. malloy, however, argues that _penelope_, a narrabase, as she calls it, is not stream of consciousness, like parts of joyce's _ulysses_, though it does bear a resemblance, she believes, to dorothy richardson's _pilgrimage_, "that strove to be the writing equivalent of impressionist painting," just as _penelope_ "strives to be the writing equivalent of the captured photographic moment. . . ." (notes 13) the analogy between the on-screen texts of _penelope_ and sequences of photographs prompts the reader's reflection upon the nature of each medium. a photograph can be read as a composed image of visual objects removed from time and stilled into permanence, or as a momentary arrest of motion in time, pointing back toward a just-gone past and forward to a promised future. similarly, though the lines of any on-screen writing are set (at least in a read-only text), and may seem as isolated as a single photograph found on the street, in the varied sequences one reads, the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, poised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing. [25] in light of this interrelation of theme and structure in _penelope_, malloy's decision to set the texts in "song" - which tells a partial tale of a love affair -into a fixed sequence nudges the reader to consider how this differently designed episode relates to the rest of the fiction. "song" offers something of a romantic idyl, and something of a threat to malloy's edgy contemporary woman artist, fearful that sexual desire may lead her to yield to a man who would fill all of her space and time with his demand for her attention and care. and so the set sequence of "song," threaded through with images of a recording tape that is ravelled and rewound, comes to an end that allows either for a replay of its looping revery, in accordance with the textual program, or instead to a new departure, either through the active agency of the narrator within the fiction, who takes up the instrument of her work, or of the reader, who reaches out for a selection other than [next]: ------------------------------------------------------------- *song* across the brook, three teenage boys sat on a rock, drinking beer. i took out my camera. --------------------------------------------------------------- end of song if you press <next>, the chorus will begin again. ---------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | next | sea | song | | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------- thus, in malloy's _penelope_, the interplay of hypertextual freedom and sequential constraint -an artifact of the electronic medium itself -surprisingly produces a variant enactment of the dilemmas and decisions her woman artist struggles with inside the fiction. [26] in all of the works i have been discussing, the conscious feminism of the writer animates her determination not simply to write but to intervene in the structure of discourse, to interrupt reiterations of what has been written, to redirect the streams of narrative and to clear space for the construction of new textual forms more congenial to women's subjectivity. and all of these writers have understood that their project entails both the articulation of formerly repressed or dismissed stories and the rearticulation of textual forms and codes. it is for this reason, perhaps, that feminist theory and textual practice can be of particular pertinence to theorists of hypertext who recognize a radical politics in the rhetoric and poetics of hypertextual writing. and this is why, i believe, hypertext should prove to be a fruitful site for innovative writing by women, despite a deep-dyed skepticism and resistance toward its claims and demands. [27] in her hypertext novel _quibbling_, excerpts of which provided material for _izme pass_, carolyn guyer embeds passages from a diary that reflect her sense of writing at a critical moment of change in relations between women and men. importantly, she conceives that where they are placed textually will affect how they can develop and how they will encounter one another. here, for example, is one such passage; its title is, significantly, "topographic": 8 sept 90 i wonder what would happen to the story if i changed how i have it organized right now. i've been keeping all the various elements of it gathered separately in his/her own boxes and areas just so i could move around in it and work more easily. but it strikes me that each of the men is developing as himself and in relation to his lover, while the women are developing as themselves but also kind of like sisters. each man has his box as a major element, or cove, but each woman has her own box %within% the nun area. like a dormitory, gymn&aelig;ceum, or a convent. i've thought a number of times lately to bring each woman into her lover's box and make each cove then a marriage box, but have not done it. the topography of the story speaks as it forms, as well as when the reader encounters it. i believe what i was (am) doing is helping the women stay independent. also, giving them access, through proximity, to each other. in many ways, topography %is% the story of this writing, and it is remarkable that women, so long objectified and imprisoned in male fantasies of the feminine as territory, earth, _terra incognita_, should incorporate into the struggle to achieve self-articulation the remaking of both the material and figurative space in which they live, or will live after the earthquake that shakes down the myriad symbols and structures that have constricted them. even in the handful of hypertextual fictions that have been written thus far, the potential for projects of radical change in representational art is evident. especially for women writers who self-reflexively incorporate thinking about texts into fiction and for women who wish to seize rather than shy from the technological means of production, hypertext -which peculiarly welcomes and makes space for refraction and oppositional discourses -can be inviting, even though it rightly arouses a suspicion that its assimilative vastness may swallow up subversion. [28] this suspicion is confirmed provocatively by stuart moulthrop and nancy kaplan in a discussion of what they regard as the "futility of resistance" in electronic writing: "where a resistant reading of print literature always produces another definitive discourse, the equivalent procedure in hypertext does just the opposite, generating not objective closure but a further range of openings that extend the discursive possibilities of the text for 'constructive' transaction." (235) the very openness of hypertext, initially appealing to writers of resistance discourses, carries the risk that their voices may simply be absorbed into the medium, precisely because, as moulthrop and kaplan explain, "it %offers% no resistance to the intrusion." (235) the subversions and contestations in _izme pass_, however, suggest that resistance is possible at least at the level of syntax or structure. similarly, as her diary in _quibbling_ indicates, guyer wishes to structure gender-specific boundaries and communities into her text, in an effort to preserve her fictive women's independence from men while giving them proximity to other women. while the principle of linking perhaps does open a text to limitless discursive possibility, as moulthrop and kaplan argue, when a graphic mapping is used, as in storyspace documents, new possibilities for demarcation and affiliation appear. this protocol, however, carries its own hazard; although any writing in an open electronic text is both provisional and discursively extendable, graphic maps or syntactic displays can reinscribe enclosure and hierarchy. [29] in differently structuring the text spaces of men and women in _quibbling_, guyer moves toward the encoding of difference at the level of structure, but then, through the reflexive interpolation of the diary, she shifts the signification of those spaces into history, by analogy to women's communities in the dormitory, convent or gymnaeceum. historians of women have viewed such places variously, either as sites of confinement or as sites where women have achieved both supportive community and freedom from servitude. while giving scope to the independence of women, in _quibbling_ (and in the collaborative _izme pass_) guyer places emphasis on the importance of women's communities through both structure and story. in _penelope_, malloy lays emphasis on the development of women's subjectivity: like the individualistic woolf with her room of one's own, anne mitchell seeks a place where she can concentrate her attention and do %her% work, like maso who wants to write, not the "real" story, but what "the story was %for me%." (my italics) there is ample room in feminism for both tendencies; one can easily imagine an ava or an anne mitchell at work within the fictive space of _quibbling_. the direction hypertext and its fictions will take in this volatile moment for textuality and for gender relations is not altogether clear, but if hypertext is to realize its potential as a medium for inclusive and democratic writing, it is profoundly important that women's desire and creative will should contribute to its future shapings. as guyer writes, "the topography of the story speaks as it forms," and a more hospitable topography will speak a fuller, richer story, one that can, as retallack argues, invite those former others into an ongoing shared discourse. notes: ^1^ on the matter of "writing the feminine," two questions are likely to be raised right away: (1) does the very term impose an invidious construction of the dyad masculine/feminine, such that the "feminine" locks writers into otherness, lack, and erasure; (2) does "writing the feminine" limit or liberate the writer, or perhaps achieve some other unanticipated result? i intend to take up these questions less in reference to theory than to the practice and professions of women writers who regard themselves as feminist or who regard their texts as examples of writing the feminine. ^2^ see for example nancy k. miller, "arachnologies: the woman, the text, and the critic." ^3^ kristeva's "stabat mater," for example. ^4^ in her essay, "fretwork: reforming me," carolyn guyer describes her dismay on finding that someone had taken up her invitation to add writing to a work of hers, because she first judged that it was not good and then felt guilty because she "was imposing cultural values as if they were universal, absolute standards." in this essay she searches for theoretical and figurative means by which to incorporate and embody "the challenges of multicultural communities," uncovering along the way the trap of perfectionism (as maso has also done in her argument for the messiness of the novel) and, by contrast, the privilege, as she defines it, "in sharing rather than in the owning of knowledge." this leads her to argue for the value of opening art to differences that alter contexts and restore the vitality of dynamic process rather than the stillness of mastery. guyer's argument calls to mind john cage's advocacy of aleatory composition. works cited: bernstein, charles. _a poetics_. cambridge, ma and london: harvard up, 1992. cha, theresa hak kyung. _dictee_. 1982, berkeley: third woman p, 1995. friedman, ellen g., and miriam fuchs, eds. _breaking the sequence: women's experimental fiction_. princeton: princeton up, 1989. guyer, carolyn. "fretwork: reforming me." unpublished. ---. _quibbling_. eastgate systems. software, 1991. macintosh and windows. guyer, carolyn and martha petry. _izme pass. writing on the edge_ 2.2 (spring 1991). eastgate systems, 1991. software. macintosh. ---. "notes for izme pass expose." _writing on the edge_ 2.2 (spring 1991): 82-89. irigaray, luce. _this sex which is not one_. trans. catherine porter. ithaca: cornell up, 1985. joyce, michael. _afternoon_. eastgate systems, 1987. software. macintosh. ---. _woe. writing on the edge_ 2.2 (spring 1991). eastgate, 1991. software. macintosh. jouve, nicole ward, with sue roe and susan sellers. "where now, where next?" _the semi-transparent envelope: women writing -feminism and fiction_. eds. roe, sellers, jouve, with michele roberts. london and ny: marion boyers, 1994. kristeva, julia. "stabat mater." _the kristeva reader_. ed. toril moi. ny: columbia up, 1986. malloy, judy. _its name was penelope_. eastgate systems, 1993. software. macintosh and windows. maso, carole. _ava_. normal, il: dalkey archive p, 1993. ---. "onava." _conjunctions_ 20 (may 1993): 172-76. ---. "notes of a lyric artist working in prose: a lifelong conversation with myself, entered midway." _american poetry review_ 24.2 (march/april 1995): 26-31. miller, nancy k. "arachnologies: the woman, the text, and the critic." _the poetics of gender_. ed. nancy k. miller. ny: columbia up, 1986. 270-95. moulthrop, stuart and nancy kaplan. "they became what they beheld: the futility of resistance in the space of electronic writing." _literacy and computers: the complications of teaching and learning with technology_. eds. cynthia l. selfe and susan hilligoss. ny: modern language association of america, 1994. 220-37. retallack, joan. ":re:thinking:literary:feminism: (three essays onto shaky grounds)." _feminist measures: soundings in poetry and theory_. eds. lynn keller and christanne miller. ann arbor: u of michigan p, 1994. 344-77. rich, adrienne. _the dream of a common language: poems 1974 1977_. new york: norton, 1978. robinson, lou, and camille norton, eds. _res*urgent*: new writing by women_. urbana and chicago: u of illinois press, 1992. wong, shelley sunn. "unnaming the same: theresa hak kyung cha's _dictee_." _feminist measures: soundings in poetry and theory_. eds. lynn keller and christanne miller. ann arbor: u of michigan p, 1994. 43-68. some other hypertext works by women arnold, mary-kim. _lust. eastgate quarterly_, 1:2 (1993). cramer, kathryn. _in small & large pieces. eastgate quarterly_, 1:3 (1994). douglas, jane yellowlees. _i have said nothing. eastgate quarterly_, 1:2 (1993). jackson, shelley. _patchwork girl, by mary shelley and herself_. eastgate systems, 1995. larsen, deena. _marble springs_. eastgate systems, 1993. mac, kathy. _unnatural habitats. eastgate quarterly_, 1:3 (1994). moran, monica. _ambulance: an electronic novel_. electronic hollywood, 1993. smith, sarah. _king of space_. eastgate systems, 1990. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------barbiero, 'first amendment in an age of electronic reproduction', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-barbiero-first.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.196. part 1/1, total size 24252 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the first amendment in an age of electronic reproduction by daniel barbiero barbiero@enigma.com postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 daniel barbiero, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford unversity press. review of: ronald k.l. collins and david skover. _the death of discourse_. boulder, co: westview press, 1995. [1] what, in an age of electronic mass communication, is the status of the first amendment? specifically, what is or should be the scope of first amendment protection, given the seeming ubiquity electronic dissemination has afforded commercial speech and entertainment? ronald collins and david skover raise and explore just such questions in their book, which examines the contemporary culture of free expression in the overlapping contexts of popular culture and commercial discourses. [2] (in the interests of full disclosure, i should mention here that i know collins and skover and have discussed some of these issues with them in connection with the articles - subsequently and substantially rewritten -on which this book is based. i am acknowledged in the book for my part in these informal dialogues.) i [3] collins and skover contend that there are operating at present two cultures of expression. the first, roughly corresponding to the political and intellectual elites, is that of discourse, while the second, roughly corresponding to mass cultures, is that of "the new free speech." by their definition, "discourse" is speech resounding "with reason, with method, with purpose" (ii), while the new free speech consists in the "vernacular of the popular culture . . . in the service of self-gratification" (ii). although the deliberative discourse of the elites has traditionally been afforded full first amendment protection, this same protection has been increasingly granted to other forms of expression, thus creating a "wide gulf" separating the kind of (vernacular) expression now meriting protection from the deliberative speech the first amendment was designed to protect (iii). given this situation, the authors ask, "can the high values of free expression be squared with the dominant character of mass communication in our popular culture?" (vi). [4] collins and skover's answer to this question is set out over the course of the book's three main sections. in the first, they describe what they take to be the general problem created by contemporary first amendment interpretation, while in the other two they look at the specific issues involved in determining the constitutional status of commercial speech and pornography. [5] in the first section, the authors describe the defining problem of first amendment interpretation as a "paratrooper's paradox." the image of the paratrooper is meant to convey the notion of one parachuting "into a territory hostile to old notions of free speech" (2). and the "paratrooper's paradox" consists in the difficulty of reconciling a provision created to protect discursive speech from government tyranny with a culture accustomed to invoking that protection for even the most trivial forms of expression. [6] the second section is devoted to an examination of the constitutional status of commercial speech. the argument is that modern, image-based advertisers demand constitutional protection by claiming association with the information-based advertising characteristic of a previous era (84). and yet, the authors hold, it is just such image-based advertising that, far from furthering the original goals of the first amendment, is threatening to turn "america's marketplace of ideas . . . [into] a junkyard of commodity ideology" (64). [7] in the third section, the authors examine the debate over whether or not full constitutional protections should apply to expression with an exclusively, or almost exclusively, sexual content. collins and skover choose pornography not only as a first amendment test case, but also as the symbolic epitome of a debased culture of expression. to this end, they construct a fantasy anti-utopia they call "pornutopia," which is presented as the logical culmination of the intersection of commercialism, the electronic mass media, and indiscriminate first amendment protection. although the authors point out that such a state "is %not quite% america as we %now% know it" (117, emphasis in the original), they wish to offer a hypothetical object lesson in what happens when expressive freedoms create an atmosphere in which discourse is degraded, electronic technologies are put at the service of profit and pleasure (130), and "private passion overrides %public reason% as the key rationale for constitutional protection of expression" (127, emphasis in the original). [8] what the authors wish to establish overall is that in a mass culture saturated with television and advertising, the effective exercise of first amendment rights is threatened more by what they call the "huxleyan" scenario than by an "orwellian" scenario. while the orwellian scenario is the familiar one of state suppression of speech,the huxleyan scenario involves the relatively novel danger of the trivialization of (serious) speech through a "tyranny of pleasure" (5). though not discounting the potential danger to free expression posed by state intervention, the authors assert that within the context of contemporary first amendment culture, "the orwellian evil is not likely to pose a clear and present danger to traditional first amendment values" (21). [9] for collins and skover, the orwellian-huxleyan dichotomy is the key to understanding the current debate over first amendment protections (29), and, they note, this dichotomy does not admit neat solutions along traditional ideological lines (22). in order to show this, the authors outline three potential scenarios in which the first amendment and contemporary reality might be made to square (22-28). these are the classical, the modern, and the reformist. in the classical scenario, various forms of expression may be regulated in the interests of protecting deliberative discourse. in the modernist scenario, fears of state repression of expression -the orwellian problem -lead to a laissez-faire approach in which all forms of expression are protected. the reformist scenario is a sort of compromise attempt to provide the greatest latitude for expression while still promoting deliberative values. which do they prefer? [10] given the logic of their argument, and their evident distaste for consumer culture and commercial speech, one would expect them to declare that discursive expression alone is deserving of protection, and that either the classical or reformist position would set things right. but they do not. instead, they assert that if we wish to preserve a culture of expression in which orwellian dangers are minimized, then neither of these two positions will work. attempting to put either into force would result in a situation they describe as destroying the first amendment in order to save it (168) -that is, imposing potentially tyrannical restrictions on expression in order to promote only the "high-value" deliberative discourse appropriate to the serious discussion of weighty issues. at the same time, though, they appear ambivalent toward the modern position which, while significantly expanding the scope of first amendment protection, has brought about the "death of discourse." [11] rather than choosing from among these three alternatives, collins and skover call for a "bottom-up," "cultural approach" (iv) that would recognize that first amendment principles are as much a function of what people actually do with expression as they are a function of what elites say those principles should be (177). adopting the cultural approach means rejecting what they call the "deliberate lie": that protecting trivial expression will foster deliberation and rational discourse (169). they conclude that "once we confront the reality of first amendment hypocrisy, we will no longer wish to perpetuate it" (177). ii [12] although collins and skover call for a bottom-up analysis that would by necessity be rooted in the actual expressive habits and inclinations of mass culture, they clearly display a distrust of certain aspects of that culture. in this respect their book continues a well-established tradition, as an overview of postwar critiques of mass culture readily reveals (e.g. bulik; jay, chapter 6). in their alarm over mass culture's threat to critical thinking one hears echoes of fromm (fromm 277); in their accusation that advertising debases language and stunts thought, one hears echoes of marcuse (marcuse 95). and like that of some of these earlier critics of mass culture, collins and skover's perspective is informed, though by no means wholly determined, by a mandarin outlook. such an outlook is made explicit when they state that "if the philistines have invaded america's culture, it is not because television forced open the gates of the popular mind. rather . . . it has everything to do with the nature of popular democracy" (18). [13] but although they take the mandarin position in regard to the content of contemporary media culture, their cultural approach allows them to take a more sympathetic position on the forms associated with that culture, some of which they wish to incorporate into their work. in an attempt to recreate in a print medium some of the features of a computer environment, the authors punctuate their text with icons, table windows, and dialogue boxes; citations are to popular songs as well as to the more traditional books and articles. in an afterword about the book, the authors even claim that the book is "interactive and multi-media" -but by interactive they simply mean that they intend the reader to attempt to develop his or her own answers to the problems they pose. (it would not be too far off the mark, in fact, to see the entire book as a full-length exercise in devil's advocacy.) the multi-media aspect is a bit more complicated. though it mostly consists in the citations to non-print sources, it includes the construction of "virtual dialogues" at the end of each of the book's three sections. what the authors have done is to quote letters they solicited from or conference discussions they held with their colleagues, and assemble them to appear as if they have been transcribed from a real-time discussion involving all the participants. the effect is reminiscent of the digitally manipulated images one frequently runs across in cyberspace -convincing records of events that never actually took place. [14] the authors' borrowings from the culture(s) at large are not limited to these cyber-conventions, however. for they adopt something of the hyperbolic tone of commercial culture as well. in fact it is in this atmosphere of hyperbole that the book's main weakness lies. partly this is the result of the authors' occasional indifference to substantiating the often sweeping claims they make. for example, they assert that "pornography is a banal expression of the excess of possessive individualism and the demand for instant gratification. pornography offers the possibility of prolonged, repeated possession of pleasure by individuals who have been disabused of faith in a public truth. they merely want to deny, put off, or delude themselves about the inevitability of death" (161). nowhere is any evidence offered for this generalization, which is likely to strike many readers as an example of the arbitrary interpretation of an ambiguous situation. this is unfortunate, because the authors do bring genuine insight to the intellectual equivalent of trench warfare that characterizes much of the current debate on pornography. in other instances, available evidence bearing on a claim may be treated selectively. in making claims for the cognitive and behavioral effects of television, for example, the authors admit that studies attempting to establish just such effects are "indeterminate" (19); their response is to dismiss these studies and appeal instead to a series of hypothetical assertions that they claim are supported by "ample experiential evidence" (19), none of which is given. [15] in fact, the book's hyperbole threatens to cross over into jeremiad. for although collins and skover explicitly disavow adherence to a "hell-in-a-handbasket" viewpoint, their rhetoric frequently creates the opposite impression. during a virtual dialogue in which they deny precisely this charge, they remind their critic that "the commercial culture appears low only from the lofty place of traditional first amendment values. in one important sense, low or lofty is of no moment to us" (106). perhaps not, but they spend much of the book describing a crisis in which the low threatens to overwhelm the lofty. they speak of an "electronic commonwealth [that] belittles the american mind by degrading discourse" (15); they entitle one section of their analysis "the decline of citizen democracy and the rise of consumer democracy" (77); they predict that, should entertainment culture continue in its current course, "deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image-driven onanism" (117); and they warn of the "high ideals of madisonian discourse" being "invoked to protect the low practices of mass communication" (176-7). the authors' rhetoric of decline recalls the kind of critique nicholas zurbrugg has characterized as consisting in a reductive, "apocalyptic fallacy" (zurbrugg 5). drawing on the work of john cage, zurbrugg shows that the postmodern situation need not be interpreted apocalyptically, that one can find in postmodern technologies of communication and reproduction the potential for new and fruitful modes of representation and conceptualization (8-9). though zurbrugg perhaps carries his optimism too far, he is surely right to reject the posture of apocalyptic hand-wringing. and indeed, when pressed, collins and skover admit the justice of such a critique (e.g., 19). the trouble is that, having made this concession, they immediately return to their rhetoric of catastrophic decline. [16] indeed, the author's reliance on the rhetoric of decline threatens to undermine their conclusion. for in the end it is difficult to reconcile their denunciation of contemporary culture as a "debauched dystopia" (177) with their hope that a cultural approach to first amendment rights will have a salutary effect on the exercise of those rights. confronting and refuting expressive hypocrisy calls for a particularly active intellectual engagement; but it is exactly this, they have been arguing, that has been all but washed away in flood of entertainment-induced passivity. thus it would seem we can either accept at face value their description of the utter degradation of contemporary expression, or we can accept the prescriptive program of unmasking implicit in their cultural approach - but not both, since the former would seem to preclude the latter. iii [17] it may be best to see this book as an elaborate thought experiment designed to illuminate a real problem but worked out through various hypothetical conditions and extreme or hyperbolic gambits (the first of which is the "paratrooper's paradox" itself).^1^ even if we reject the terms of collins and skover's analysis, we may agree that they have identified a problem of real moment in american culture -the problem of effectively maintaining a first amendment whose interpretation has long been intractably bifurcated. [18] the bifurcation in first amendment interpretation consists in the distinction between high-value speech, which is deemed worthy of full protection, and low-value speech, which is not. speech with political intent or content is uncontroversially considered high-value speech, even if the attribution of political intent and content may in particular cases be controversial. other types of speech -commercial speech, for example -are considered low-value, and historically have not been accorded full first amendment protections. this bifurcation of expression on the basis of political intent and content is a function of madisonian standards. what happens, though, when madisonian standards are superseded in a broadened interpretation of first amendment protection? [19] the question is not idle, since it might be argued that the madisonian standard has largely been replaced in actual practice by the standard of self-realization. the principle of self-realization, which holds that individuals should be allowed to cultivate themselves in order to attain a state of total personhood (however defined), would expand first amendment protections on the assumption that allowing the broadest possible scope of expression will promote the democratic goal of allowing the greatest number of people to realize themselves. and in fact this principle can be seen to be at least implicit in first amendment interpretation since the 1950's, particularly as embodied in the opinions of supreme court justices william o. douglas and hugo black. as cass sunstein shows, douglas and black did much to push first amendment intepretation toward an "absolutist" position (sunstein 4-7) compatible with distributing protection on the grounds of self-realization. [20] but such grounds are not always self-evident. collins and skover illustrate this in a virtual dialogue on the problem of determining the status of sexually-explicit expression (154-9). determining high-value expression (in this case, art) from low-value expression (in this case, obscenity) is in and of itself difficult -internal or content-based standards, for instance, have a tendency to be murky and often seemingly arbitrary. but as the authors and their virtual debate partners show, it is also true that the application of the self-realization standard -i.e., that a given work is not obscene (that it is art and therefore has redeeming value) because it contributes to self-realization and thus furthers democratic principles - is itself highly elastic and perhaps ultimately no less arbitrary than the evaluation of the work's internal features. [21] what strikes the authors as noteworthy is that, even when the self-realization standard is used, there may still be a discrepancy between the ideals invoked by defenders of freer free expression, and the value of the expression thus protected. the authors explain this discrepancy by maintaining that despite the explicit invocation of the self-realization principle (when in fact it is explicitly invoked), the de facto principle behind much current extension of first amendment protection is that of self-gratification. they conclude that defenders of the modern first amendment have found themselves having to "cloak the self-gratification principle in the garb of something more ennobling" (43). [22] it is this that is behind the authors' prescription that we become more honest in acknowledging the true motivations behind the current distribution of first amendment protection. such honesty would, presumably, go far toward ending what the authors see as the hypocrisy of those invoking the principle of self-realization in order to justify expression that is in fact geared toward self-gratification. [23] truly taking the "cultural approach" seriously, it seems to me, would entail going further and recognizing that the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification is itself an unsteady one. much like the distinction between "true" needs and those that are, to paraphrase fred dretske's expression, cognitively derived desires (dretske 128-9), the distinction between self-realization and self-gratification may simply be the distinction between two points at different locations on a spectrum.^2^ if this is so, then it may be that the most honest approach would be to acknowledge that self-gratification may indeed be a contributing factor toward self-realization. would this bring on the apocalypse? some no doubt will think so. but it very well may be that encouraging the greatest range of deliberation means tolerating a corresponding diversity in the relative values of expression produced. notes: ^1^ two assumptions seem to be required to accept the "paratrooper's paradox." one must first assume an absolutist interpretation of the first amendment in which "mass advertising's pap . . . [is elevated] to the level of fundamental discourse" (113), and then assume that any situation in which this is not the case represents intolerably tyrannical regulation. the first assumption does not describe an actual situation -as evidenced by, e.g., the prohibition of television advertising for hard liquor and cigarettes -and the second does not seem inevitable. ^2^ it is worth recalling the rationale behind the 1952 supreme court decision extending full protections to motion pictures. as justice tom clark wrote, "the line between . . . informing and entertaining is . . . elusive" (de grazia 619). works cited: bulik, louanne. _mass culture criticism and dissent_. bern: peter lang, 1993. de grazia, edward. _girls lean back everywhere: the law of obscenity and the assault on genius_. new york: random house, 1992. dretske, fred. _explaining behavior: reasons in a world of causes_. cambridge: mit, 1988. fromm, erich. _escape from freedom_. new york: avon, 1969. jay, martin. _the dialectical imagination: a history of the frankfurt school and the institute of social research, 1923 1950_. boston: little brown, 1973. marcuse, herbert. _one dimensional man_. boston: beacon, 1964. sunstein, cass. _democracy and the problem of free speech_. new york: the free press, 1995. zurbrugg, nicholas. _the parameters of postmodernism_. carbondale: southern illinois up, 1993. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------stoekl, ''round dusk: kojeve at "the end"', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-stoekl-round.txt archive pmc-list, file stoekl.994. part 1/1, total size 55126 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- 'round dusk: kojeve at "the end" by allan stoekl departments of french and comparative literature pennsylvania state university postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by allan stoekl, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the postmodern moment has been characterized as one of the loss of legitimacy of the master narratives--social, historical, political; hegelian, marxist, fascist--by which lives were ordered and sacrificed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^1^ [2] the demise of the great story, which gave direction and purpose to struggle and violence, has opened a space for a proliferation of conflicting modes of interpreting and speaking. of course those modes can only be partial: they can never aspire to the horrifying totalization promoted by overarching certainties. and they will likely interfere with each other, cross over, meld and (self) contradict, because the possibility of their autonomy has been given up; at best we can say that they are "language games" now, rules for representation, argument, and analysis; no longer are they the ground of teleology, satisfaction, and self-certainty. [3] but there is a problem with this kind of argument, as i see it. it's not that i do not find it "true," because of some kind of empirical counter-evidence, such as: the old nationalist narratives still hold sway; history is still slouching toward a goal; history isn't slouching toward a goal, but it is nevertheless still slouching, etc. one can probably develop all sorts of arguments based on empirical observation concerning the postmodern. or one can just as easily "deconstruct" the master stories from within, by taking them apart while still, necessarily, acting in full complicity with them (for what "space" could be said to open beyond their margins?). the problem, as i see it, is that this kind of argument is closely tied to the "end of history" arguments that were current in the immediate postwar period, and that have recently had a renewed but highly contested efflorescence.^2^ this is of course immensely ironic, because philosophers such as lyotard--spokespersons of the postmodern--have informed us that the possibility of a larger teleology is lost for good, along with the knowledge that flowed from it. but there still is a larger knowledge, after all--the one that proclaims the death of the possibility of a larger knowledge. whether arrived at empirically or logically, this awareness comes at the end of a series of historical actions and tragedies, and the certainty associated with it is no doubt due to lessons derived from those failures. this history will still have the form of a narrative, albeit one that lacks, perhaps, the power of retrospective justification that characterized the hegelian model. its lessons might be purely practical, or they might be derived from a study of the incoherences or contradictions of the earlier paradigms. the net result, whatever the means of their determination, development and (self) cancelling, will be a generally valid knowledge that mandates the end of generally valid knowledges. the language games that proliferate, then, in a postmodern epoch will be allowed and encouraged to do so only because the way has been opened by yet another master narrative: the narrative of the end of narratives. the freedom to be enjoyed by the games is the result of the master story's knowledge--but, to be sure, the games' actions, their orientations, will not be determined by it. they will be independent of it--but the preservation of their semi-autonomous functioning is nevertheless the goal of a postmodern theoretical project (such as one that affirms adjudication between different, conflicting, games). further, it is their guarantee that they will participate in a stable postmodern order: without the postmodern narrative and its powers of harmonization, they would risk falling into particularist discourses into which "nationalist" ideologies are prone. [4] is this postmodern version of things that different from a theory of the "end of history" that envisages a state founded on the mutual recognition of free subjects? on the surface, yes: the postmodern view concerns itself not with subjectivity, consciousness as productive labor, and the like, but on the recognition of difference between partial discourses and "constructed" cultures. the posthistorical model seems almost quaint with its emphasis on codified law and the state as guarantor of a freedom identifiable with labor and construction. but beyond these evident differences there may be a more fundamental similarity. [5] just as the postmodern presents language games as independent of transcendent social reason, so too the posthistorical imagines the moment of the ultimate end of history as a kind of definitive break, after which life will go on, but in which unidirectional history will be supplanted by "playful" activities that may be enjoyable in themselves, but that will by necessity not be recuperable in any larger social or historical scheme. the state at the end of history will be as unconcerned with these ludic activities--sports, arts, love making, and so on--as the postmodern regime will be with justifying the logic of the language games of what we would call the cultures, subcultures, and micro-cultures whose disputes would be subject to its acts of arbitration.^3^ [6] on the surface of it at least, alexandre kojeve's take on hegel in his _introduction to the reading of hegel_ can be seen as being not an attempt at the ultimate vindication of a "grand" historical and philosophical narrative--the triumph of the end of history and the univocal (self) satisfaction of the entire population of the earth--but instead the surprising mutation of that certainty, that knowledge, into a postmodern generation of discourses and styles.^4^ history as narrative triumphs, but it also ends: its termination is the opening for the proliferation of poses and play that is literally post modern. rather than contradicting kojeve, then, or demonstrating the extent to which a hegelian modernism is null and void, a rigorous postmodern might see itself as deriving from a completion and fulfillment of a dialectical project. it *might*. [7] the postmodern, we could argue, has already come part of the way. it has posited a knowledge--the authority of its own text--that in spite of itself stands as a knowledge at the end of a long history of illusions. it takes itself as a stranger to, and grave digger for, the hegelian tradition. kojeve, on the other hand, at least recognizes the inescapability, the inevitability, of the univocal truth of his own system. but he is blind to the consequences of the termination of history: the proliferation of signs and acts that, by their very nature as partial constructions, challenge the totalizing power of the concept. [8] to get any further we will have to look at certain key passages of kojeve's _introduction_. most often in footnotes and asides, he grapples with the really crucial questions: what does it mean for "man" to "die"? what will come "after" the end of history? if "man" is dead, what will remain of human labor? what will be the status of the "book" in which knowledge resides? the answers to these questions will enable us to consider in more detail the problem of the relation been posthistory and the postmodern. [9] according to most historians of french philosophy of the twentieth century, it was kojeve who single-handedly popularized hegel in france, through a brilliant series of lectures in the 1930s. after decades of idealist neo-kantianism, the hegel that kojeve preferred was a welcome change: history could now be seen as a dialectical progression in which man ineluctably moves toward a social satisfaction in which the desire for recognition--and the recognition of the other's desire for recognition--is fulfilled. the posthistorical state alone is capable of recognizing man for what he is: beyond all superstition, all theology, man is the creative/destructive agent whose labor ends in the recognition of all by all through the mediation of the state. the labor of hegel's slave, its destructive and formative action, "transforms" "natural given being": man is the "time that annihilates [nature]" (158). but in the end all transformative labor ceases. history comes to an end because, eventually at least, the labor leading to full reciprocal recognition will have been carried out: at the end of history, there will be nothing new to accomplish. [10] now the end of history for kojeve is the ultimate ideological weapon because it justifies, retrospectively, just about anything that went before that made its arrival possible. man for kojeve is a type: the master, the slave, the philosopher, and, at the end, the impersonal hegel (and his reader, kojeve), that is, the wise man (%le sage%). the negativity that made the arrival of the end possible will, in retrospect, be judged moral, no matter how it seemed at the time. and since man himself is defined as temporality and negation (irh 160), even the bloodiest violence or the grossest injustice, if necessary for the eventual completion, will be (or will have been) good. the true moral judgments are those borne by the state (moral=legal); states themselves are judged by universal history. but for these judgments to have a meaning, history must be completed. and napoleon and hegel end history. that is why hegel can judge states and individuals. the "good" is everything that has made possible hegel, in other words the formation of the universal napoleonic empire (it is 1807!) which is "understood" by hegel (in and through the _phenomenology_). what is good is what exists, the extent that it exists. all action, since it negates existing givens, is thus bad: a sin. but sin can be pardoned. how? through its success. success absolves crime, because success--is a new reality that *exists*. but how to judge success? for that, history has to be completed. then one can see what is maintained in existence: definitive reality. (ilh, 95) [11] this is the "ruse of reason": reason acting in and through history reaches its end in ways that might seem to have nothing to do with accepted ("christian") morality. certainly anyone attempting to judge the morality or immorality of events before the end of history will be incapable of it; only with hegel (and kojeve) will the true value and morality of actions be evident. not only do the ends always justify the means, but they do so retroactively, so that agents ("people") will never be competent to judge the acceptability of their own behavior. the "owl of minerva flies at dusk," to use a hegelian formulation: only when the outcome is final and its corresponding overview are grasped can all preceding events be fully *known*.^5^ [12] but in a way all this is irrelevant: since history for kojeve is already ended, everything that takes place now is a purely technical "catching up" process. the end of history was achieved at the battle of jena: napoleon's conquering forces brought the egalitarian ideals of the french revolution, codified and implemented by the state, to others. from now on history will only be a series of lesser battles of jena, leading to the implementation throughout the world, by bureaucratic governments, of rights and liberties. what at first might seem to be the ultimate 1930s justification of ruthlessness at any cost (indeed stalin comes to replace napoleon for kojeve in the pre-world war ii period) leads inevitably, in the late 40s and 50s, to a recognition that the difference between ideologies is largely irrelevant. how one arrives at the "classless" society, the society of the mutual recognition of the desire for recognition, is of no interest to the "wise man": it is a purely *technical* question. the seemingly great postwar problem of the conflict of ideologies, or the question of the defense of soviet ideology in the face of american pressure (merleau-ponty, _humanisme et terreur_, sartre, _les communistes et la paix_) simply does not exist for kojeve. the end of history is the end of ideology. in a "note to the second edition" of the _introduction to the reading of hegel_, inserted in 1959, kojeve states: "one can even say that, from a certain point of view, the united states has already attained the final stage of marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all the members of the "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates" (irh, 161, note). [13] ideology, in the end, is thus utterly unimportant: it too fades away once history is at an end. if it contributes or has contributed to that end it is good, if not bad. like all means it is justified by the end, but *at* the end it has no specificity other than its "success." from the perspective of the end, all bloody action is over: it can be judged, but it no longer is effective. in time and as time man is free to act, but he does not know; at the end of time, history is known, but man can no longer act (he has nothing more to do)--hence he no longer even exists. at the end, there are no longer even any means to be justified. history and its ideologies are a matter of utter indifference. [14] this leaves an enormous question, one typical of the 1950s. the completion of history is perfectly ahistorical, but ahistory itself is a function of history. true, we are now delivered from history, action, and all the hard--and ambiguous--moral questions. the machine of history has functioned so well that it has erased itself: its mechanism was the unfolding of truth, but now that we are in the definitive era of truth, history has ceased to exist, and its moral conundrums are irrelevant. at the end of history, ideology is finished, and so ceases to exist: but "man" therefore no longer exists either. the %selbst%--that is, man properly so-called or the free individual, *is* time and time is history, and only *history*. . . . and man is essentially *negativity*, for time is *becoming*--that is, the *annihilation* of being or space. therefore man is a nothingness that nihilates and that preserves itself in (spatial) being only by *negating* being, this negation being action now, if man is negativity,--that is, time--he is not eternal. he is born and he dies as man. he is '%das negativ seiner selbst%,' hegel says. and we know what that means: man overcomes himself as action (or %selbst%) by ceasing to oppose himself to the world, after creating in it the universal and homogeneous state; or to put it otherwise, on the cognitive level: man overcomes himself as *error* (or "subject" opposed to the object) after creating the truth of "science" (irh, 160; emphasis in original). [15] man dies at this strange juncture point between history and the end (in both senses of the word) of history. in the future, after the end, kojeve tells us that "life is purely biological" (ilh, 387). but this is a, and perhaps the, crucial question for kojeve: if history stops, if man and time and negating labor is dead, how then is man any different from the animals? he had originally constituted himself *against* nature ("but man, once constituted in his human specificity, opposes himself to nature"); nature for kojeve is timeless and can in no way be incorporated in the dialectic. no "dialectics of nature" can therefore be conceived within the kojevian reading of hegel.^6^ but if man is an animal, history itself is not so much completed as dead. it will be--or is now, since history is *already* ended, in principle at least--as if history had never existed. [16] kojeve presents two approaches to this problem in the long footnote to his interpretation of chapter viii of the _phenomenology_ (irh, 158-62), a passage of which i have already cited. first he states that man indeed is an animal, but a happy one, "in *harmony* with nature or given being." true, he no longer can engage in productive historical activity, "action negating the given, . . . the subject *opposed* to the object." but he has plenty of other consolations: "art, love, play, etc. etc.--in short, everything that makes man *happy*" (irh, 159). this is a "world of freedom" in which men "no longer fight, and work as little as possible." [17] it sounds almost too good to be true: the world itself is transformed into a vast, postmodern southern california, its inhabitants concerned above all with training their bodies and trading their automobiles and art objects. it is here that one recognizes with a start the perfect transformation of a hegelian modernism into an anti-hegelian, but soft, postmodernism: at the end of history history is replaced with a heterogeneous collection of lifestyle choices. indeed we learn, in the footnote added to the second edition of 1959, that kojeve had earlier (in the immediate postwar period, "1948-58") seen the "american way of life" as the true posthistorical regime--although he also saw the soviet union and the chinese communists as nothing other than "still poor americans" (irh, 161). the only larger coherence is a general lack of coherence: one is free to cultivate one's own interests and ignore the larger movement by which all personal activities are justified. the new human animals will "recognize one another without reservation," but this recognition will be of the right of each one to be completely different, in what promise to be mainly physical pursuits. [18] in a second footnote added in 1959 (the first dates from 1946), kojeve objects to his own theory. reading his earlier note quite literally, he argues that if all action is eliminated from human life, man will actually be not an american, but an animal: "if man becomes an animal again, his acts, his loves, and his play must also become purely 'natural' again. hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of history, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs. . . . 'the *definitive annihilation* of man *properly so-called*' also means the definitive disappearance of human discourse (%logos%) in the strict sense. animals of the species %homo sapiens% would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign 'language,' and thus their so-called 'discourses' would be like what is supposed to be the 'language' of bees. what would disappear, then, is not only philosophy or the search for discursive wisdom, but also that wisdom itself." (irh, 159-60; emphasis in original) [19] the posthistorical, in other words, must be saved from any threat of animality--that is, of purely unreflected-upon behavior. kojeve does not really consider the consequences of "art, love, play, etc. etc." because, fortunately, he has another example of activity "after the end of history." this is, surprisingly enough, japan: the "american way of life" is now replaced by a model of japanese culture that has been "at the end of history" "for almost three centuries." while "american" posthistory is associated with sheer animality, japanese culture is seen by kojeve as a pure *formalism*. unlike the animal, man continues to be a "subject opposed to the object," although "action" and "time" have ceased. forms are opposed to one another, and values themselves come to be "totally *formalized*"--the japanese tea ceremony, noh theatre, even the suicide of the kamikaze pilot represent an opposition to the object that, while empty, nevertheless continues to be an opposition: man is now a snob. it is as if the armature of labor, negation and historical activity continues to function, but in a void, since there can no longer be any negating or any history. [20] in this model, "opposition" continues, and so man does too. the difference between the two versions (that of '46 and that of '59) lies in the fact that while the first proposes an activity that can be purely individual, so long as it is in accord with nature, the second, "japanese," entails a struggle for recognition, and therefore derives its power from the earlier, and decisive, master-slave dialectic. after all, the purpose of snobbery, of dandyism, is to be recognized by the other, even if that recognition is totally meaningless. thus a society is implied, and a culture; this was not the case, finally, for the "animals," no matter what their "way of life" might have been. [21] but the larger posthistorical culture--if such a thing can even be written of--will be unthinkable because absolute knowing will play no part in it. kojeve inadvertently indicates the irrelevance of the wise man--of reflexive consciousness at the end of history--by choosing the example of the japanese: if they were carrying out posthistorical acts one hundred years before the birth of hegel, hegel and his book, and kojeve in their wake, need never have existed. history culminates in perfect *indifference* to wisdom. from the other side of the end of history, it now appears clear that the _phenomenology_ is perfectly pointless. purely formal activities therefore will take place, and will have meanings, perhaps, within certain posthistorical cultures; those cultures, however, will exist in perfect isolation, without a larger wisdom to unify them and give them meaning. here, then, is yet another kojevian postmodernism, this time one based not on the particularity of desires but on the multiplicity and radical non-congruence of separate cultures. absolute knowing finds its completion in a series of social practices or lifestyles which are united only in the fact that as formal activities each one is precisely a lack of knowledge of the whole. the snob's gesture is a forgetting, willful or not, of the larger significance--or insignificance--of his or her act. its success can be judged only by its immediate impact: the dandy walking his lobster on a leash can bask only in the recognition given *here* and *now*. the act excludes any larger "meaning." [22] how then, under these circumstances, can one say that history is ended? it does not seem that, if the japanese (as represented by kojeve) are to be our models, there can be any history or historical consciousness at all. elsewhere--in passages and footnotes dating from the original (1947) publication of _introduction la lecture de hegel_--it seems that kojeve himself recognized the necessity of historical memory and historical text--and thus of the writing of the _phenomenology_ itself--for the ultimate completion of history. a few pages after the footnote that i have discussed, kojeve writes: "it is first necessary that *real* history be completed; next, it must be *narrated* to man; and only then can the philosopher, becoming a wise man, *understand* it by reconstructing it %a priori% in the _phenomenology_" (irh, 166). kojeve adds in a footnote appended to this passage (more precisely, to the phrase that ends "narrated to man"): "moreover, there is no real history without historical memory--that is, without oral or written memoirs." [23] here we are back at our earlier problem: if the japanese constitute an ahistorical end of history, a posthistorical moment that has nothing to do with history, how can *they* be said to be human? if man is determined in and through history, then it would seem that the japanese, in their sophisticated and useless labor, are no more human than are the bee-like posthistorical animals that kojeve in 1959 saw as implicit in his earlier footnote (of 1946), and rejected. the natural--the realm of the inhuman that, for kojeve at least, simply had nothing to do with human activity, time, or history--seems to triumph once again. in the case of the simple human-animals we might say that the owl of minerva flew, but that its flight seen from a posthistorical perspective was the equivalent of the movement of any other animal, the owl of minerva being no different from any owl--no matter how endangered--in the forest. for the kojevian japanese, however, and for all the rest of us who will necessarily emulate them, the owl of minerva need never have flown in the first place. perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't; in any case it is now stuffed and resides in a european museum, where it is routinely photographed by hurried groups of japanese tourists. [24] what, finally, is the status of the book--the _phenomenology_ itself as a summation of history and embodiment of wisdom--at the end of history? this is perhaps the most important question in kojeve's hegelianism, and, characteristically, he never poses it explicitly; instead, we must try to formulate an answer on the basis of two elliptic and ironic footnotes. yet, as we will see, the status of "self-consciousness" *at* and *after* the end of history will remain very much in question. [25] the first question, which arises in kojeve's discussion of the third part of chapter viii of the _phenomenology_, is the role of the wise man, the post-philosopher (or %sage%), in the establishment of the posthistorical regime. at one point kojeve writes: "one can say . . . that, in and by the wise man (who produces absolute science, the science that entirely reveals the totality of being), spirit 'attains or wins the concept'" (ilh, 413). he soon modifies this, though, in a footnote (ilh, 414). if the wise man--hegel, kojeve, the "authors" of the _phenomenology_--are those who "produce" science, the true end of history and reign of self-consciousness will be possible only when mediated by the state. the state, in effect, will guarantee the recognition of the freedom of all by all; the satisfaction it provides will do away with all opposition between subject and object, for-itself and in-itself. this clearly implies more than the personal teaching of a single person: rather what is at stake now is the universalization of a definitive doctrine contained in a book. kojeve writes: to turn out to be true, philosophy must be universally recognized, in other words recognized finally by the universal and homogeneous *state*. the empirical-existence (%dasein%) of science--is thus not the private *thought* of the wise man, but his words [%sa parole%], universally recognized. and it is obvious that this "recognition" can only be obtained through the publication of a book. and by existing in the form of a book, science is effectively detached from its author, in other words from the wise man or from man [%du sage ou de l'homme%]. (ilh, 414) [26] this is a passage fraught with difficulties, but one that is well worth considering. it is recognition, first of all, that determines truth; the truth of the book is determined by its recognition by the state. the book consists of the words--or literally, the word--of the author, but the book itself, on publication, is detached not only from the wise man, but from man himself. the detachment and recognition of the book is the determination of its truth--which in turn guarantees the universality and homogeneity of the state. the book is detached from man himself; presumably at this point man has nothing more to do, and passes from the scene (as we will see in yet another footnote, discussed below). [27] but note that the "private thought" of the wise man is not at stake here. rather his words are recognized, and this makes them "true"; the same gesture by the state--recognition--*makes it a state*. truth and statehood are generated reciprocally, at the same instant, by the same act. [28] now if they are the result of the immediacy of what seems to be a purely formal act, truth and statehood cannot be generated out of reading. kojeve never explicitly poses the question, but it is in any case an obvious one: does anybody *read* this book? who? are recognition and reading the same thing? it does not seem likely: reading here does not appear as a social or even physical/psychological phenomenon: it is not a question of the appropriation of the wise man's teaching, the reading of the book on the highest levels of government, its dissemination through the schools, etc. for that is an interminable process: reading necessarily implies interpretation, misinterpretation, questioning, rephrasing, codification. there is none of that here: in a single gesture, in one movement, the book and the state are "recognized." recognition, then, has nothing to do with reading--and by reading i mean, on the simplest level, a bare acquaintance with the contents of the book. the word will be "recognized," it seems, without having to be deciphered. [29] my interpretation is borne out in another footnote that comes some twenty-five pages before the one i have just discussed. it explicitly links the death of man to the book as inanimate, and presumably unread, object. once again this note attempts to face the ultimate problem: the fate of man "after" the closing of history: the fact that at the end of time the word-concept (%logos%) is *detached* from man and exists--empirically no longer in the form of a human-reality, but as a book--this fact reveals the *essential finitude* of man. it's not only a given man who dies: man dies as such. the end of history is the *death* of man properly speaking. there remains after this death: 1) living bodies with a human form, but deprived of spirit, in other words of time or creative power; 2) a spirit which exists-empirically, but in the form of an inorganic reality, not living: as a book which, not even having an animal life, no longer has anything to do with time. the relation between the wise man and his book is thus rigorously analogous to that of man and his *death*. my death is certainly mine; it is not the death of an other. but it is mine only in the future; for one can say: "i am going to die," but not: "i am dead." it is the same for the book. it is my work [%mon oeuvre%], and not that of an other; and in it it is a question of me and not of anything else. but i am only in the book, i am only this book to the extent that i write and publish it, in other words to the extent that it is still a future (or a project). once the book is published it is detached from me. it ceases to be me, just as my body ceases to be mine after my death. death is just as impersonal and eternal, in other words inhuman, as spirit is impersonal, eternal and inhuman when realized in and by the book. (ilh, 387-88, footnote; kojeve's emphasis) [30] we see now posthistorical man as an "animal," no longer carrying out a task or striving toward self-consciousness. but "he" is not *just* an animal--a bee or beaver--because he has the word, the logos, which guarantees his movement from the human to a kind of higher-order animality. (this difference is something that kojeve seems to have forgotten when he wrote the 1959 addendum to his long footnote on "animality," discussed above.) but clearly the book is not something to be read: there can be no *labor* of interpretation or inculcation. for that reason the book is explicitly presented as dead, as "inorganic" (%i.e.%, lifeless) material. [31] the death of man is not, strictly speaking, the death of self-consciousness. the latter is externalized, frozen on the pages of a book. the message is absolute: as koj&egrave;ve states, "the wise man who reveals what is through the word [%parole%] or concept reveals it definitively: for what is thus remains eternally identical to itself, no longer modified by uneasiness [%inquietude%] (%unruhe%)" (ilh, 413). the dead message, moreover, is a dead me (or a dead man), because it is the highest wisdom of me (the wise man, hegel, kojeve), preserved intact forever, apparently well beyond the labor of interpretation. the connection between the book and "my death" is, then, not merely a metaphor: it is both "me" in the sense that it consists of my remains, and at the same time it is *not* me, or my living project. it is my dead body. and the dead bodies of trees. [32] if we can understand the role played by the book in kojeve, we will be able to grasp both the status, and the radical limitation, of absolute knowledge as it is both the book and the book's *reading*. [33] time is circular, but it is not cyclical. hegelian time, according to kojeve, can only be run through (%parcouru%) once (ilh, 391). this is because the end is a return to the state before which the human commences: the one in which an opposition between man and his world does not exist. that opposition, in and through which man exists (and creates himself) in time and action, is history. at the end, the opposition between man and world is overcome, and ceases to exist: history ends and man dies. the difference between beginning and end is that at the end, and after it, "identity is revealed by the concept. . . . it is only at the end of history that the identity of man and world exists *for* man, as revealed by human discourse" (ilh, 392). [34] there is a certain irony in all this, upon which koj&egrave;ve does not dwell. the end is the "discursive revelation of its beginning"--yet the higher knowledge that is the end, the "comprehension of anthropogenic desire, as it is revealed in the _phenomenology_" (ilh, 392), is a human comprehension ("*for* man") that nevertheless marks the end of man. in an impossible moment man both understands and ceases to exist. his understanding and death would seem to have to be simultaneous, as well as definitive. after the end, there is no man left to whom discourse can reveal the unity of man and world. [35] hence the strange status of the book. the book, we are told, is the "empirical existence of science" (ilh, 394). its return is also its definitive termination, because then the "totality of discourse is exhausted [%epuisee%]" (ilh, 393). there can only be one book, then, that contains the defunct but definitive science. as we've already seen, kojeve compares this book to a dead body, separated for ever from its consciousness/author. [36] discourse as well then returns to nature; man is dead, action is over, and the "empirical existence of science is not historical man, but a book made of paper, in other words a *natural* entity" (ilh, 394). [37] but if all this is the case, why would anyone *read* the book? if historical action is at an end, and if man is dead, there would be no point in doing so. yet not to do so would consign all of human history--and absolute knowledge--to a kind of absolute forgetting. in that case there would be a return to the origin not on the higher level of comprehension, but on the lower level of simple repetition. [38] that clearly is not an option either, so the book must be read. the crucial question then is: what is reading? whatever it is, it will be the task of the posthistorical animal/dandy. reading is not action or historically significant labor of any sort--all that is over, ended. and since the cycle only returns to its origin once, it cannot be a reading that entails any individual interpretation or thought: it can only be a sheer repetition of the one, definitive, return of science and knowledge. kojeve writes: certainly, the book must be read and understood by men, in order to be a book, in other words something other than paper. but the man who reads it no longer creates anything and he no longer changes himself: he is therefore no longer time with the primacy of the future or history; in other words he is not man in the strong sense of the word. this man is, himself, a quasi-natural or cyclical being: he is a reasonable *animal*, who changes and reproduces himself while remaining eternally *identical* to himself. and it is this "reasonable animal" who is the "absoluter geist," *become* spirit or completed-and-perfect [%acheve-et-parfait%]; in other words, dead. (ilh, 394) [39] the end of history, which had promised so much, with its state as a kind of institutionalized utopia, mediating through law the mutual recognition of the "anthropogenic" desire of all men, becomes a kind of necrotopia of reading. the book cannot not be read.*^7^ but what is commonly understood by "reading"--a personal understanding and a perhaps wayward interpretation that can, and does, discover new things in the text--is out of the question here. the book cannot therefore be read, either--or we must totally redefine reading. reading in the kojevian sense will become an animalistic or dead repetition of discourse, its exact repetition by the dead. this is the strange end of the kojevian mock theology that would replace heaven with the state,^8^ and of a mock existentialism that would resituate the recognition and reign of death definitively as satisfaction and stasis.*^9^ [40] reading, then, becomes as "natural" as the book--it is not an action in time; it is not, on other words, a human activity. the book is an "objective reality," the only possible realization of philosophy, which must be recognized by all persons--%i.e.%, by the state--in order to be true: mere intention is not enough (ilh, 414, note). it is when kojeve considers the "objective" existence of the work that we see the problem in his conception of reading, for he can only see publication as subjecting the work, the book, to the "danger [that it will be] changed and perverted" (ilh, 414, note). kojeve sees this risk of "perversion"--of interpretation, in other words--as a regrettable consequence of the necessity of the work to be "the objectively-real that maintains itself"--%i.e.%, to be a work that is published and circulated as a real, solid object--rather than a "pure intention" that "fades away [%s'evanouit%]"--%i.e.%, that is an idea beyond appropriation by all of society, or by the state (ilh, 414, note). kojeve, in other words, can only see reading as a function of the passive reproduction of what is "objectively-real"; all deviation from an imagined definitive meaning (or absolute knowledge) can only be "perversion." [41] in light of this it is hard to see why kojeve makes a strong distinction between the book as mere paper and the act of reading. reading as the pure repetition of a dead, frozen state will be as "material" as the thudding pileup in a warehouse of the unread copies of a book. hermeneutics becomes hermetics: the act of reading now is the automatic reproduction of a hermetically sealed text, and of a "knowledge" so remote that there is no place in it, or around it, for human action: thinking, rethinking, questioning. cultural reproduction made possible by this reading will be the mere repetition %ad infinitum% of the assent of the dead, of animals. so much for the paradise on earth that kojeve saw as replacing the bad-faith paradise of all organized religion. [42] we see here a complete reversal from the position at the outset of history, when man confronted nature and transformed it through his labor. that view presented a radical duality between a dialectical man and inert nature.^10^ now it is nature--as the material book, and as the dead reading of the book--that has become dialectical, or at least post-dialectical, whereas man is simply dead. nature has triumphed, but its triumph is of no concern to the "human animals"--the americans or japanese, bees or dandys, it hardly matters--who engage in their fragmentary and formal activities which are of no relevance whatever to the genesis, triumph, or demise of man. [43] it is here that we can draw some conclusions about the radical--and significant--difference between the posthistorical and the postmodern. the posthistorical, as we've just seen, posits a radical break, an unbridgeable gap, between definitive knowledge and the freeplay of posthistorical action. the book can contain nothing of interest to say about the residual uses to which leftover negativity, in the form of human action, will be put "after" the end of history. in other words it has nothing at all to say about the present or the future. indeed the few pronouncements kojeve makes on this subject are all in footnotes, as if they were tangential to the main body of the text. the postmodern, on the other hand, puts forward a "knowledge" that arrives at its end by *recognizing* the necessity of the proliferation of what we might call "unbound" discourses and language games. it recognizes its death as definitive knowledge in and of the proliferation of partial knowledges, activities, and languages. rather than being essentially closed to them, as indifferent as mere paper or rote reading, it is open to and dependent on them: it is the very knowledge of their incompletion that makes its completion--a provisional completion, to be sure, but a completion--possible. [44] posthistorical knowledge always comes too soon--the owl of minerva always takes off well before dusk--because it closes off the possibility of, and is blind to, human activity, even though activity will obviously continue, albeit without benefit of wise man or book. postmodern knowledge, on the other hand, comes too soon as well, but for the opposite reason: because its larger truth must be ignored by the very activities that justify it. if posthistorical knowledge knows too little, postmodern knowledge knows too much. the postmodern is always already in advance of the partial activities it defines: if those activities were themselves to recognize fully the postmodern, they would simply fall under its aegis: they would be coherent parts of a larger narrative, and thus fully modern, and ultimately posthistorical. and yet these activities, these games, are thoroughly dependent on a postmodern knowledge *which they must not know*: without the overarching knowledge of the postmodern, they would be indistinguishable from any other human narratives, "primitive" or "modern," which have nothing whatsoever to do with the postmodern. and without their *definitive* blindness, at the end of modernity which is the postmodern, they would only be components of a higher knowledge, fully recuperated by it. they, in other words, in order to be postmodern, must in some sense be as blind to postmodern knowledge as posthistorical knowledge would be to them. [45] and yet the kojevian posthistorical might be more postmodern than the postmodern. it, after all, is ignorant, locked in its perfect, one-time circularity. it does not, and must not, concern itself with, or know, that which comes after it, in an inevitable but supplementary relation. it is the sheer performance, in other words, of the blindness of partial knowledges and practices that the postmodern can only *know*. the posthistorical is therefore the *enactment* of the postmodern in and through its absolutely necessary lack of awareness of itself as postmodern; this lack is nothing more than the %a priori% failure and completion of postmodern knowledge. the posthistorical will always again come *after* the postmodern, supplementing it with its radical not-knowing. the posthistorical owl also always flies too late--well after dusk. notes: ^1^ see section 9, entitled "narratives of the legitimation of knowledge," of jean-francois lyotard's _the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge_, trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi (minneapolis: the university of minnesota press, 1984), pp. 31-37. ^2^ see, in this context, francis fukuyama's neo-kojevian celebration of the _new world order, the end of history and the last man_ (new york: the free press, 1992). jacques derrida has recently criticized fukuyama for the incoherence of his approach: either the end of history is a kind of eschatology, a pure logical necessity beyond empirical proof, or it is empirically verifiable, in which case it loses the attributes that give it its necessity, and also its attractiveness. one cannot, however, demonstrate the logically necessary (or the "messianic") by invoking empirical observations. see derrida, _spectres de marx_ (paris: galilee, 1993), pp. 112-20. derrida, at the end of the same chapter ("%conjurer--le marxisme%," pp. 120-27) also considers some of the kojevian footnotes that i discuss in this article. i would argue that one could extend derrida's critique of fukuyama to kojeve himself: for kojeve too history is ended because it is a logical necessity that it end: therefore he is largely indifferent to what comes next. yet at the same time kojeve points to empirical evidence--america, the soviet union, japan, the defeat of the nazis--to back up his thesis. ^3^ on the postmodern and adjudication between language games in conflict, see lyotard's _the differend: phrases in dispute_, trans. georges van den abbeele (minneapolis: the university of minnesota press, 1988). ^4^ _the introduction to the reading of hegel_ (new york: basic books, 1969) is an english translation (by james h. nichols, jr.) of certain sections of kojeve's _introduction la lecture de hegel_ (paris: gallimard, collection "tel," 1980). the editor of the english edition, allan bloom, has omitted much of the material of the 1938-39 lectures. when possible, then, i quote from the official english translation, giving page numbers from it, following the letters "irh." when a citation is not found in the english edition, i provide my own translation and cite the page number of the french edition, following the letters "ilh." the reader will note that the pagination of the now widely available french edition from which i quote is different from that of the original french edition (paris: gallimard, 1947). ^5^ "one more word about teaching what the world ought to be: philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching . . . the owl of minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall" (hegel, _preface to the philosophy of right_). ^6^ kojeve could never admit that a dialectics of nature was conceivable. prior to human desire, there is simple identity. judith butler writes: "kojeve views nature as a set of brutally given facts, governed by the principle of simple identity, displaying no dialectical possibilities, and, hence, in stark contrast to the life of consciousness" (_subjects of desire: hegelian reflections in twentieth century france_ [new york: columbia university press, 1987], p. 67). maurice blanchot rewrites this unreadability in his 1948 novel, _le tres-haut_. in this fiction the book becomes the journal of a perfect civil servant of a posthistorical state, a civil servant who is at the same time a subversive challenging the state through the very act of writing. the book for blanchot becomes an allegory of the collapse of political allegory, since all writing on the state is both fully recuperable by it, and is also its death, its extinction. meaning itself is in a twilight zone of perfect representation of the state--so perfect it's inhuman, or posthuman--but is also, by the very fact that it is a written representation, the death of that state, but a never dying death. (the curse of death is that it cannot die.) such a text is perfectly circular, but also unreadable: nothing can ever happen in this state, and there is nothing more to be said, and certainly nothing more to read--but this nothing, this self-cancelling law, will be repeated endlessly, in exactly the same form. see my preface to the translation i have done of this novel, entitled _the most high_, forthcoming from the university of nebraska press. ^7^ this is a gambit that comes out quite clearly in kojeve's article "hegel, marx, et le christianisme" (_critique_, 1, 3-4 (1946): 339-66. see, for example, p. 358: "thus--a supremely curious thing [%chose curieuse entre toutes%]--man is completed and perfected, in other words he attains supreme satisfaction, by becoming conscious, in the person of the wise man, of his essential finitude." kojeve thus links the most profound desire of religion (as he sees it)--to guarantee man perfection and satisfaction--to that which religion most abhors: mortality. ^8^ as mikkel dufrenne notes (p. 397), kojeve's stress on finitude and mortality establishes his hegelianism as a revisionary heideggerianism. see "actualit de hegel"--a review of kojeve's _introduction_ and jean hyppolite's "genese et structure de la phenomenologie de l'esprit chez hegel"--in _esprit_, 16, 9 (1948): 396-408. ^9^ see note 5, above. dufrenne for his part sees this duality between a nondialectical nature (the "%en-soi%") and dialectical man the "%pour-soi%") as a key inheritance from existentialism--one which poses plenty of problems for philosophers such as sartre, in _being and nothingness_. how indeed does the "%pour-soi%" arise if the "%en-soi%" is closed? how can the two be reconciled beyond a mere "as if"? for dufrenne, this is the origin of the thematics of failure (&eacute;chec), anguish and despair in sartre: "a linear series of failures cannot be taken for a dialectic" (dufrenne, 401-03). ^10^ this statement should not be taken as a "criticism" of the postmodern, or an attempt to condemn it by "associating" it with the posthistorical. as is made clear in blanchot's novel (see footnote 7, above) there is no logical space outside of the postmodern--or the posthistorical, for that matter--from which such a "criticism" could be carried out. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------pazderic, 'hard bodies', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-pazderic-hard.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.995. part 1/1, total size 10448 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- hard bodies by nickola pazderic university of washington nickola@u.washington.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by nickola pazderic, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: susan jeffords. _hard bodies: hollywood masculinity in the reagan era_. new brunswick, new jersey: rutgers university press, 1994. 212 pp. peter lehman. _running scared: masculinity and the representation of the male body_. philadelphia: temple up, 1993. x, 237 pp. [1] in many ways the books of peter lehman and susan jeffords read well together. both books are concerned with representations of the male body in popular media and how these representations become part of the prevailing ideologies of contemporary life. both books are concerned with the implications of "hard" or the "phallic" representations of masculinity in particular. both writers argue convincingly that the machismo which these representations reflect, encourage, and perpetuate, "work[s] to support patriarchy" (lehman, 5). while the books share in this important fundamental concern, the books come to possess an interesting difference in their efforts to link popular representations with actual political and social conditions. this difference points to an important methodological implication for the study of masculinity in a patriarchal society. [2] jeffords's interpretive reading of reagan era films chronicles the stunning confluence of cinematic representations of the masculine "hard body" and the official ideologies of the reagan administration. neither the films nor the ideologies evolved in an historical vacuum. one of the strengths of jeffords's work is its ability to bring the films and the ideologies into mutual focus by interpreting them as part of a broader historical narrative of postwar american triumphs and errors which both undergirds and is produced by the films and ideologies. [3] in brief, the narrative maintains that america in the 1950s experienced a glimpse of utopia which was soon eclipsed by lack of resolve during the later-vietnam war period. the country came to a crisis of purpose which was marked by nixon's resignation and the fall of saigon. the ford and carter years were a period of anxiety and malaise in which indecision and femininity came to the fore in public life. the narrative maintains that this period of weakness came to an end with the election of reagan and the imposition of his agenda of national restoration, individualism, and technological advancement. that this narrative is not unfamiliar to any american who has lived through the past decades is, in part, testimony to the power of movies such as those of the _rambo_ series (1982, 1985, 1988), which, as jeffords reads, depict and reinforce a longing "that only a return of the 'physical king' could resolve" (11). [4] the "return of the 'physical king'" in the guise of ronald reagan was both prefigured in the writings of people such as richard nixon and robert bly and reinscribed through such films as the _back to the future_ trilogy (1985, 1989, 1991). for as jeffords states: ronald reagan fulfilled "both nixon's and bly's desires for the united states and for men by restoring economic and military as well as spiritual strength" (11). while it is certain that bly and nixon would agree on few things, jeffords's reading tellingly reveals shared presuppositions about just what a male (and the state) is and should be: i.e., sharply delineated, assertive, tough, and, when necessary, violent -in short, a "hard body." once the "hard body" was in place, the narrative was reinscribed both on the literal body (through the survived assassination attempt) and on film, through such ideologically obvious films as the _robocop_ series (1987, 1990) and in less obvious films such as the _back to the future_ series. jeffords's fascinating reading of the _back to the future_ films illuminate how marty mcfly, when he returns to the past in order to save the present of the people of hill valley, actually mirrors the reworking of the past that was a part of political life during the reagan era, thereby legitimating the practice and the narrative. in the first of these two films, mcfly returns to the 1950s. by intervening on behalf of his wimp father, he alters the course of history, changing his family from dysfunctional to prosperous. this forgetting and reworking of the past, which was prefigured by bly and nixon, was central to reagan's ability to capture the public imagination through his often apocryphal (but never politically vacuous) recollections (e.g., reagan's public recollections of movie scenes as historical facts). [5] the looping character of historical prefigurings and recollections serves patriarchal predilections, yearnings, and practices in contemporary society. following in the fashion and the analysis of poststructuralists, many critics have come to term this form of domination as it exists, especially in theory and in ideology, phallocentricism. peter lehman's primary concern is to disconnect the theoretical and ideological presence of the phallus from the actual lived conditions of many, though surely not all, men. in order to disconnect representations from reality, lehman posits a distinction between penises, which "are all inadequate to the phallus" (10), and the phallus itself, which "dominates, restricts, prohibits, and controls the representation of the male body, particularly its sexual representation" (9). by way of this distinction lehman seeks to illuminate male subjectivities without ossifying sexual differences -a problem which is recognized to exist within some feminist writings. lehman states: "men desire and fear, and sometimes desire what they fear, in ways that confound any simple notions of male subjectivity" (8). [6] lehman's book avoids the pitfall of pity by illuminating how the discourses of both men and women come to be influenced, if not determined, by preconceptions of "hard" masculinity. in chapter eight, "an answer to the question of the century: dick talk," lehman analyzes the movie _dick talk_ (1986). in this movie a group of women engage in a round-table discussion about female sexual pleasure. the conversation continually returns to the topic of the penis, its ize, its function, and its erotic potential. (thus, the question of the century: what is the size of the average erect penis?). the irony of the film is that, however liberating and counter-patriarchal the women's irreverant discussion may appear, its constant recurrance to the theme of phallus, penis, erection serves ultimately to reinscribe the very terms of a masculinist hegemony. such an irony will be familiar to readers familiar with the anthropological literature on the role of hegemonic oppositions in the discourse of subdominant groups; in many instances, hegemonic groups serve as an other in relation to which the subdominant constitutes its own identity. there is a tendency as well for the hegemonic group to serve as something of a fetish for the subdominant. it is clear that the male penis has become something of a fetish for the women in the film, and that this relation to the penis limits the subversive potential of their "dick talk." [7] lehman's book also addresses itself to representations of the penis in medical discourse. in this discourse lehman finds a similar, though perhaps more thoroughly veiled, fetishization of the penis. lehman points out that although modern medical journals have displaced the language of pleasure and desire in favor of the language of statistics, they preserve in all its urgency the "question of the century." the journals' statistics serve to call forth and rehearse, as well as to assuage in a "professional" and "objective" manner, men's anxieties as to the normal and sufficient size of their penises. and in this way the medical discourse helps to preserve the special fetishistic allure, as well as the concrete social efficacy, of the phallus. [8] lehman and jeffords seem to share a hope that by bringing the prevailing narratives and conceptions of masculinity into examination, we can perhaps, one day, find a way to diminish their hold over our daily lives. the chief difference is that lehman moves further toward unsettling the egregiously masculinist representations that jeffords merely traces across the recent cultural scene. by marking some of the fault lines between the ideal of the "hard body" and the more ambiguous and unstable realities of lived male experience, lehman helps us to locate points of potential resistance to the dominant ideology. such potential is, of course, temporary, for the dominant ideology, and the representations that comprise it, are capable of rapid adjustment and transformation when challenged. but lehman is right to locate the ground for hope on the plane of ordinary people, and in the spaces that open up between the lives these people actually lead and the socio-sexual ideals to which they can never quite measure up. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------berger, 'ends and means: theorizing apocalypse in the 1990's', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-berger-ends.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.596. part 1/1, total size 43299 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- ends and means: theorizing apocalypse in the 1990's by james berger george mason university jberger@gmu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by james berger, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: lee quinby. _anti-apocalypse: exercises in genealogical criticism_. minneapolis and london: u of minnesota p, 1994. stephen d. o'leary. _arguing the apocalypse: a theory of millennial rhetoric_. new york and oxford: oxford up, 1994. richard dellamora. _apocalyptic overtures: sexual politics and the sense of an ending_. new brunswick: rutgers up, 1994. [1] the apocalypse would be the definitive catastrophe. not only final and complete, but absolutely clarifying. out of the confusing mass of the world, it would unmistakably separate good from evil and true from false, and expel forever those latter terms. it would literally obliterate them -expel them from memory; inflict on them what the book of revelations calls the "second death" or, as slovoj zizek calls it, "absolute death."^1^ evil and falsehood would be %purged%. it would be as if they had never existed. the revelation, then, the unveiling unhidden by the apocalypse would be the definitive distinguishing of good from evil, or godly from ungodly -all made possible, of course, by a violent cataclysm that shatters every surface. [2] this is the standard apocalyptic scenario, portrayed in texts from revelations to steven king's _the stand_. but sometimes, especially in the last century or so, there have been complications. it may be that when the seals are broken and absolute evil identified and isolated, the blessed will look across the abyss and see themselves. melville's indian hater story (in _the confidence man_), conrad's _heart of darkness_, and horkheimer and adorno's _dialectic of enlightenment_ provide revelations of this sort -"we had to destroy the village in order to save it." enlightenment is indistinguishable from barbarism. moral distinctions themselves compose the surface that is shattered, and under that surface is a universal murderous chaos. this shift in apocalyptic sensibilities exemplifies the cataclysmic transition into modernity -the sense, in marx's phrase, that "all that is solid melts into air."^2^ [3] if the anti-religious apocalypse of the %doppelganger% is the apocalypse of modernity, the apocalypse of the postmodern is that of baudrillardian simulation. in baudrillard, the catastrophe is the end of the whole apocalyptic hermeneutic itself. there can be no unveiling because there is nothing under the surface: there is only surface; the map has replaced the terrain. commodification is universal, and no longer even under the interpretive control of notions of the "fetish." what, after all, would there be for the commodity to disguise? not only "god," but also "labor relations" or "material conditions" would be without revelatory value. [4] these visions of the end as they appear in fiction, in social movements -and even in social theory -emerge out of a wide range of social and historical contexts. apocalyptic thought has long been, and continues to be, a political weapon for the dispossessed.^3^ but it has also been, for a century or so, a form of playful despair among intellectuals. great power politics for forty years after the second world war were devoted to making apocalypse possible, then simultaneously threatening and preventing it. and apocalyptic representations in american popular culture have channelled widespread anxieties over nuclear cataclysm and general social breakdown into viscerally compelling -we might even say addictive -forms of entertainment. fear of apocalypse -of that merging of clarity and oblivion -itself merges with fascination and desire for such a definitive, and perhaps even ecstatic, catastrophe. and this desire for an end to the world must then be considered in relation to the apocalypticist's attitude toward his own particular society and toward the "world" in general. what degree of hatred for the world - for world %as world%: the site of procreation and mortality and economics, and the site as well of language and representation -is necessary to generate the wish to end it entirely? where does this hatred come from? all in all, what historical and psychological alignments can bring about such bizarre, but frighteningly common, imaginings? [5] these are some of the questions a study of apocalyptic movements or representations should try to answer. in this review i will discuss three important recent attempts at describing and theorizing some of the ways the world is imagined to end. [6] lee quinby's _anti-apocalypse: exercises in genealogical criticism_ is a provocative and far-ranging book impelled by passionate political commitments. quinby uses methods of foucauldian genealogy to decipher and, she hopes, deactivate the apocalyptic tendencies she sees as pervasive in contemporary american culture and politics. quinby's analyses range from blue jeans advertising to contemporary feminism, henry adams's philosophy of history as a prototype for baudrillardian irony, zora neale hurston's short stories, and a chapter of what she calls "pissed criticism" discussing the controversies surrounding andres serrano's "piss christ." [7] quinby claims that apocalyptic thinking is a primary technology of "power/knowledge" in america today, and that in its combined religious, technological, and ironic forms it authorizes economic, political, and cultural repressions and perpetuates a repressive status quo. quinby further claims that genealogical analysis is the best method for opposing apocalyptic regimes and their "claims of prophetic truth" (53). quinby's study is ambitious and perceptive. at the same time, i find some of her key terms and arguments not sufficiently developed, and i question her reliance on foucault as an antidote to apocalyptic thinking. [8] quinby characterizes apocalyptic thinking as a belief system that "insists on absolute and coherent truth" (47) and relies on "self-justifying categories of fixed hierarchy, absolute truth, and universal morality" (55). she claims that "absolute monarchy and the vatican, for example, are structured in accordance with principles of apocalypse" (63). and, crucially, apocalyptic micro-structures remain even when power has been significantly decentered. apocalyptic thinking, then, for quinby, is above all a technique for perpetuating power through existing institutions -whether they be monarchial or the more diffuse mechanisms of commodity capitalism. in attacking these institutions and their ideologies, quinby claims to be attacking an apocalyptic tendency that underlies them. [9] like the foucault of _discipline and punish_, quinby is critiquing tendencies toward totalizing thought in which methods of control are inculcated and enforced through discourses and institutions into the smallest forms of behavior. but not every form of totalization is apocalyptic. to cite her own examples, monarchies and the catholic church hierarchy are decidedly opposed to apocalypse. their beliefs in hierarchy and absolute truth serve to sustain and perpetuate an existing order, not to explode and overturn it. those already in power have no reason for locating a final revelation in the violent collapse of the world as it stands. dostoevsky's story of the grand inquisitor can still, i think, serve as an example of the probable response of any institutional authority to the second coming. it is far more likely - indeed, it is widely documented -that apocalyptic thinking arises in contexts in which individuals and groups feel themselves to be radically without power. [10] quinby partly recognizes this historical and definitional problem. she acknowledges that apocalyptic thinking has also been characteristic -has, in fact, been inspirational -in certain feminist movements. quinby's feminist apocalypticism is pragmatic: "the most crucial point to stress is that feminist apocalypse has often been a powerful force for resistance to masculinist oppression." and she argues that a contemporary oppositional feminism can be "made possible through the twin legacies of apocalyptic and genealogical thought and activism" (36). i find this position plausible; at the same time, i would argue that it seriously undermines the book's principal arguments in opposition to apocalyptic thinking %per se% (especially its identification of apocalyptic thinking with dominant hierarchies) and it reinforces a reader's sense of the vagueness of quinby's definitions. [11] a second problem in _anti-apocalypse_ arises, for me, in quinby's uncritical use of foucault. quinby uses foucauldian genealogy as a method for demystifying american regimes of apocalyptic power/knowledge. as foucault writes in "nietzsche, genealogy, history," genealogy seeks to analyze the non-teleological "emergence" of knowledge and power -an emergence that is without any single, epistemologically privileged origin and that does not lead toward a preordained or necessary ending. foucault explicitly describes genealogy as anti-apocalyptic in its refusal "to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending" (88). what foucault does not acknowledge, however, and what quinby also fails to recognize, is the powerful apocalyptic component to foucault's own genealogical thinking. if we take genealogy in its more modest forms, as a critique and demystification of institutions and ideologies, and as an insistence and continuing demonstration of historical contingency (in opposition to teleological master narratives), then genealogy differs very little from the actual practice of professional historians. the recent controversy over the enola gay exhibit at the smithsonian institution is instructive in this regard. the curators sought to employ, in nietzschean terms, a critical history to retell the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima. they were opposed by veterans groups and political conservatives who effectively reinstalled a %monumental% history in which truman's decision was incontestably right on every political and moral level. and yet, the historiography on which the curators relied -the work of scholars like gar alperovitz and michael sherry -is entirely in the mainstream of the historical profession. the nietzschean-foucauldian opposition between critical and monumental history is apt, but in this case it pits not "genealogists" but professional historians against popular perceptions and political demagoguery. the "historian" whom the genealogist is intended to oppose is a straw man drawn from nineteenth-century hegelian and whiggish models. [12] where foucault goes beyond what is now the normal practice of the historical profession, he tends to veer into apocalyptic tones and imagery. the most striking instance, of course, comes at the end of _the order of things_ where foucault predicts that the post-enlightenment notion of "man" constructed by the human sciences will "be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." and foucault's genealogy is less a critique of the institutions and permeations of power than it is an apocalyptic shattering of the discursive unities and continuities that he sees as providing their foundation. genealogy, then, is a kind of %total% critique that sees the false continuities of "humanism," and first among these the idea of continuity itself, extending from the largest institutions and social practices to the most intimate habits of the body and of consciousness. thus history, as genealogy, for foucault "becomes 'effective' to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being -as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself" ("nietzsche, genealogy, history" 88). genealogy would be the revelatory catastrophe thrust in the midst of every form of power/knowledge. foucault was an apocalyptic thinker, and it would be helpful if quinby, as a foucauldian critic of apocalyptic texts, would consider foucault as a model to be analyzed and critiqued rather than merely employed. [13] the great strength of _anti-apocalypse_ lies in the range and provocativeness of its specific analyses, although, on my reading, important connections remain elusive. for instance, the link quinby makes -via the pun "eu(jean)ics" -between contemporary fashion advertising and early twentieth-century discourses of eugenics is intriguing, but relies too much on the cleverness of the pun. i never fully understood either the historical or the conceptual connection between these two discourses of human perfection. likewise, i would like to think that henry adams can provide a model for late twentieth-century "ironic" apocalyptic thinking (such as that of baudrillard), but quinby's analysis of _the education_, while valuable in itself, does not convince me of this connection. her idea of the "ironic apocalypse" is intriguing, but should probably be linked more clearly with notions of the post-apocalyptic or post-historical. quinby's most powerful chapter, for me, was the one dealing with the controversy surrounding serrano's "piss christ." here, quinby's close analysis and her political anger combine to describe serrano's photograph as a powerful (apocalyptic? anti-apocalyptic?) attack on existing power structures that well deserves their panicked responses. [14] quinby's most important thesis in _anti-apocalypse_ concerns the prevalence of an apocalyptic sensibility throughout contemporary american culture. quinby is wrong to attribute this sensibility only to those in power, and to equate apocalyptic thinking with the maintenance of institutional power and hierarchy. and yet, an apocalyptic sensibility %is% a presence in american institutions, especially, but not exclusively, since the rise of reaganism and the new right. there needs to be an historical and theoretical perspective that can analyze an extraordinarily broad array of apocalyptic phenomena, ranging from _star wars_ the movie to "star wars" the missile defense system, and from the apocalypticists of waco and oklahoma city to the academic theorists of postmodernity. [15] stephen o'leary in _arguing the apocalypse: a theory of millennial rhetoric_ takes on part of this project. o'leary proposes that we stop regarding belief in apocalyptic prophecies as purely irrational, if not psychotic, and that we, rather, examine apocalyptic pronouncements as forms of rhetoric: that we seriously consider the possibility "that people are actually persuaded by apocalyptic arguments" (11). o'leary's book is in part a contribution to rhetorical theory, along the lines drawn by kenneth burke's writings on "dramatism." it is in part a contribution to a rhetoric of theology, again following the contributions of burke. o'leary's knowledge of these fields is thorough, and he describes apocalyptic rhetoric as an attempt at theodicy that justifies the existence of evil in the world by redefining temporality: by promising an end to time, and therefore to evil. he also distinguishes apocalypse in a tragic "frame" (using burke's term), in which the end is simply the end, from apocalypse in a comic "frame" in which no end need be final, and regeneration is always possible. [16] although o'leary's erudition is impressive, it seems to me that some of these discussions will be of interest chiefly to students of rhetoric and theology. his analyses intervene in highly specialized debates that detract from his larger arguments. of more value and interest, i believe, are his accounts of specific american apocalyptic movements and texts. his descriptions of the millerite movement of the 1830s and 40s, of the writings of hal lindsey, and of the apocalyptic tenor of the new right in the 1980's and 90's are compelling and contribute greatly to our understanding of these important apocalyptic phenomena. o'leary's narrative of the growth of the millerites makes clear the importance of the "total critique" in apocalyptic thinking. o'leary shows how miller's prophecies gained their greatest popularity among those who had previously been involved in the early nineteenth-century reform movements -abolition and temperance -and that "the shift from social reform to millerism resulted from a growing perception that the evils of american society were systemic, rooted not only in ignorance and apathy but also . . . in the nature of the cosmos" (128). likewise, o'leary argues effectively that the popularity of lindsey's writings grew not only out of general nuclear anxieties and the cold war, but also in reaction to the social dislocations of the 1960's. christian right wing apocalypticists of the 1970's of course regarded the soviet union as the great apocalyptic adversary; but they also came to see the united states itself, in its depraved condition, as a kind of babylon that likewise merited destruction. [17] given these perceptive historical accounts, it is strange that o'leary ultimately downplays the role of social context in favor of his rhetorical model. describing apocalyptic writings and movements as responses to social turmoil and destabilization (or, as he terms it, "anomie") ultimately explains nothing, o'leary argues. "if anomie is caused by experiences of disaster," he writes, "which in turn are defined as events that cannot be explained by received systems of meaning, then we have not really added anything new to our conceptual vocabulary; having defined disaster in terms of symbolic communication, anomie becomes endemic to the human condition and so loses its explanatory power. for all symbolic systems, all hierarchies of terms, find their limit in the inevitable confrontation with the anomalous event" (11). [18] this last statement is true, and yet not all systems and hierarchies feel the need to %invent% some ultimate anomalous event that shatters all systems and hierarchies. in negative theology, for instance, the anomalous event is god who supports the hierarchy that cannot explain or represent him. and responses to genuine historical disasters need not take apocalyptic forms, as alan mintz and david roskies have shown with regard to jewish history. disasters of all kinds can be assimilated into existing historical narratives if institutional or symbolic structures remain intact. [19] o'leary is right, then, to reject a mechanistic model of "anomie" as a trigger for apocalyptic thinking. but he does not add to our understanding when, describing the crisis that produced millerism as "not simply economic or political," he concludes that "in the terminology of this study, it can be described as a breakdown of the comic frame, the revelation of the apparent inadequacy of the optimistic view of history that inspired reform efforts" (98). this breakdown would seem to be expressly economic and political, and the new terminology needed is not that of comic vs. tragic frames or of generalized theodicy but is rather a terminology that can describe the millerite's, and other apocalypticists', overpowering %desire% for a cataclysmic end of the world. [20] while o'leary cites instances of this desire in miller's writings, he does not recognize or analyze it as such, even as he characterizes one passage as having an "intensity that verges on the orgasmic" (114). such an insight regarding the "orgasmic" nature of apocalyptic outbursts seems exactly right, but o'leary does not pursue its implications. instead he consolidates these apocalyptic erotics into a weberian vocabulary as a display of "charismatic excitement" that is, in turn, a product of "a rhetorical construction of temporality" (115). but when miller writes, "o, look and see! what means that ray of light? the clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! amazement fills the universe with awe! he comes! -he comes! behold, the saviour comes! lift up your heads, ye saints, -he comes! he comes! -he comes!" (in o'leary, 114), a theorist of apocalypse must investigate this extraordinary wish for salvation, culmination, the end to the known world, and for personal survival after that end -or for the ecstasy of oblivion. [21] in his widely read _the sense of an ending_, frank kermode described apocalyptic desire in terms of a theory of narrative, positing a universal urge on the part of finite human beings to imagine the end of the story in which they find themselves always in the middle. kermode, however, is never fully able to account for the violence of apocalypse, or for the fact that the catastrophic revelation is always of something wholly other. kermode's narrative theory can account neither for the passionate joy felt in imagining universal catastrophe, nor for the overwhelming hatred of the world that accompanies apocalyptic imaginings. in a sense, o'leary's theory of apocalyptic rhetoric extends kermode's thinking. o'leary conceives of apocalyptic discourse as a means of resolving unanswerable questions concerning evil and time, of creating a narrative structure that brings those stories to a conclusion. but both kermode and o'leary are silent on what we might term the "%sensation% of an ending": the end as emotional-sensual release, and as spectacle. [22] o'leary's discussion of the apocalyptics of reaganism and the new, and christian, right is insightful and raises important questions concerning the role of apocalyptic thought in american history as a whole. o'leary argues that as the right gained power in the 1980's, its perspective shifted from a tragic to a comic frame without, however, losing its sense that an apocalyptic ending was coming soon. o'leary is concerned with trying to explain the movements for conservative "reform" of american culture and politics, movements that a millerite or hal lindsey position would reject as useless given the inevitability and imminence of the end. this shift is partly, as o'leary points out, a result of achieving power and realizing that such reform may actually be possible. the outsiders became insiders, and the hardcore apocalypticists moved further to the margins -among the branch davidians and in the militias. but o'leary maintains that the apocalyptic impulse is retained ambiguously on the political right, combined with what he calls, quoting nathan hatch, "civil millennialism," that is, "the establishment of a civil society that would realize millennial hope" (189). [23] this last point, i believe, is of even greater importance than o'leary grants it. susan sontag's comment in 1967 that america is a country equally apocalyptic and valetudinarian is especially apt when applied to reaganism. for reagan's cold war fervor, his apparent eagerness to go to the edge of the abyss with the evil empire -"make my day" -coexisted with no perceptible contradiction with his unreflective nostalgia for a largely imaginary "america" that existed before a) the communist menace; or, b) the 60's; or, c) the industrial revolution. furthermore, in a remarkable transposition, this site of nostalgia, for reagan, came to be seen not only in the past, but as actually achieved in the present -under his presidency. the apocalypse, in a reaganist view (and this is true also for his successors on the right, the newtists) will take place in some final struggle, against somebody, yet to come; but, in a more important sense, the apocalypse has already happened. reaganist america, i would argue, regards itself as already %post%-apocalyptic. [24] reaganism should be seen not only in relation to right wing christian apocalyptic discourses of the 1970's, as o'leary effectively portrays it. it also needs to be considered in a larger history of american millennial thinking, a history in which the founding and existence of america is itself regarded as a fundamental apocalyptic rupture, a salvific divide between old and new political, economic, and spiritual dispensations. america in this view -as a new jerusalem, a city on the hill -is perfect, and post-apocalyptic, from its inception.^4^ and yet, also from its inception, america has been faced with the political, economic, and class antagonisms that beset any country -and with the racial catastrophes (involving both african-americans and native americans) that have been its unique encumbrance. thus, throughout american history, we see a confrontation between a vision of american post-apocalyptic perfection and the facts of social tensions, crimes, and disasters. [25] the characteristic response of reaganism to this encounter has been denial. racism, for example, from a reaganist perspective, used to be a problem; fortunately, however, the problem has been solved; and, since there are no lasting effects, it was never really a problem in the first place. america was perfect in its orgins, and has developed perfectly to its perfect %telos%. the problem, according to reaganism, lies with those malcontents who seek to "revise" america's perfect history. [26] and yet, the crimes and catastrophes of the past -whether in the context of psychoanalytic theory or in history - cannot be denied without consequence. they continue to return and, in various forms, inhabit the present. i would suggest that o'leary is right to reject social "anomie" as a determining factor in apocalyptic discourse. a better heuristic concept would be the psychoanalytic notion of trauma, for trauma encompasses not simply a momentary disorientation, however severe, but also a theory of temporal transmission and of the mechanisms of repression and denial of that transmission. thus, the tension o'leary describes in reaganism between comic and tragic apocalyptic frames can be thought of more fruitfully as the continuing, conflicted responses to historical traumas in the context of an ideology, or mythology, that denies the possibility of trauma. [27] one of the principal virtues of richard dellamora's _apocalyptic overtures: sexual politics and the sense of an ending_ is its recognition of the central importance of historical trauma and its aftermaths in the shaping of apocalyptic sensibilities. dellamora's study is more specialized than either quinby's or o'leary's -it concerns the formations and disintegrations of certain constructions of male homosexual identity around particular historical crises, namely the oscar wilde trial and the onset of aids -but its theoretical and methodological implications are more far reaching than those of the other two books. historical catastrophe, for dellamora, shatters existing narratives of identity. it renders them impossible but, as it forces their repression, it also enables their return in a variety of symptomatic forms. catastrophe functions as apocalypse in creating a historical rupture that obliterates forms of identity and cultural narrative. but apocalypse in this sense must be understood in terms of trauma, for these identities and narratives are not fully obliterated. what is forgotten eventually returns, changed and misrecognized. dellamora shows how such misrecognitions can result in further repressions; and he shows also instances in which repressed stories are purposefully remembered -instead of being acted out and repeated. [28] dellamora contends that "the most notable feature of the history of the formation of male sexual minorities [is] the repeated catastrophes that have conditioned their emergence and continued existence" (1). specifically, dellamora writes, the wilde trials of the 1890's, brought to an abrupt, catastrophic close an unprecedented efflorescence of middle-class male homosexual culture in england. the advent of aids occurred at the end of a decade of dramatic gay subcultural development. the evident contrast between these crises and the aspirations, efforts, and accomplishments of the immediately preceding years makes it inevitable that both periods will be cast within apocalyptic narratives of before and after. (31-32) [29] dellamora describes the development of late nineteenth-century "dorianism," the construction of english middle-class male homosexual identity based on the imaginative retrieval of ancient greek models. he describes the elaboration and problematizations of this construction in pater's _marius the epicurian_ and wilde's _the picture of dorian gray_. and, in a particularly brilliant chapter analyzing e.m. forster's story "albergo empedocle," dellamora shows forster's literary response to the shattering of "greek" identity brought on by the wilde trials and the labouchere amendment of 1885 banning homosexual activity. in this after-the-end narrative, the greek spirit, along with open homosexual identity, has been forgotten. the story's protagonist, through some mysterious metempsychosis, becomes greek, that is, receives the infusion of an obliterated identity -and is subsequently judged insane by his baffled and concerned family and friends. in dellamora's interpretation, the social repressions and amnesias of the post-greek world of "albergo empedocle" have become so complete that a return of the repressed can appear only as a traumatic wound in the heterosexual social fabric -an illness that deprives its subject of any role in that world. [30] dellamora's concern then is with the vicissitudes of cultural transmission through traumatic-apocalyptic moments of rupture, discontinuity, and outright suppression. in a compelling final chapter on alan hollinghurst's _the swimming pool library_, dellamora shows the blockages and reopenings of several narratives of homosexual freedom and repression. in the wake of the aids epidemic having wiped out the 1970's "paradise" of sexual openness, hollinghurst's protagonist gradually discovers, through oral testimony and rediscovered documents, a forgotten history of repression that preceded that brief era of openness. and the apocalypse of aids also reveals a white middle-class orientation of that lost paradise -its ambiguous status as a colonialist "cruising" of the third world. in dellamora's reading, _the swimming pool library_ portrays cultural apocalypse in both its destructive and revelatory aspects, as it approaches those "motivated absences that mark the history of gay existence" (191). [31] in the middle of his book, dellamora examines another set of blocked transmissions of homosexual narratives. these are instances in which liberal or left wing literary intellectuals have appropriated important features of gay culture while suppressing their specifically sexual contexts and implications. dellamora discusses j. hillis miller's use of walter pater as a precursor of literary deconstruction, frank kermode's dismissal of william burroughs as representative of an avant-garde apocalyptics that lacks the proper skeptical attitude, david cronenberg's cinematic transformation of burroughs's _naked lunch_, and fredric jameson's criticisms of andy warhol. dellamora's central point is that these liberal or leftist heterosexual discourses emphasize the "difference" or "dissidence" of these texts in the abstract, but cannot or will not articulate their specifically gay differences and oppositions. miller, for instance, having placed pater in the company of wilde, proust, michelangelo, and leonardo, ultimately "proceeds to defend deconstruction by dissociating it from %being-homosexual%" (70). cronenberg's _naked lunch_, dellamora argues, "identifies with burroughs as artistic iconoclast" while separating itself "from the 'womanly' burroughs who is a sexual pervert" (121). in a particularly interesting and provocative discussion, dellamora takes issue with jameson's criticism of warhol's art as postmodern ahistorical pastiche. citing warhol's series of reproduced photographs of robert rauschenberg's family in the rural south in the 1920's, entitled ironically (after agee and evans) "let us now praise famous men," dellamora counters jameson's claim that warhol consistently elides history, claiming instead that it is jameson who, in his readings of warhol, elides the gay and working class histories that warhol has, in fact, inscribed. while dellamora does not make the point explicitly, it would seem from these instances that homosexual desires and gay cultural sensibilities are, for liberal heterosexuals as well as for reactionaries, traumatic intrusions that must be re-routed through an apocalyptic forgetfulness in an attempt to constitute a post-apocalyptic world in which such things could never have existed. [32] one question i have for dellamora concerns his interpretation of jacques derrida's 1980 essay "of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy." dellamora sees two distinct moments in derrida's account of apocalyptics: first, an analytic moment seeks to extend the enlightenment impulse toward demystifying the power claims implicit in apocalyptic discourse; second, an affirmative moment, recognizing the fictional, thus potentially heuristic, nature of apocalyptic discourse, seeks, in dellamora's words, "to mobilize the discourse on behalf of subordinated individuals and groups" (26). this distinction strikes me as overly neat, and it misses a necessary middle step that problematizes the two that dellamora mentions. what is missing is derrida's unsettling conclusion that %all% utterance is apocalyptic. if, as derrida writes in a passage quoted by dellamora, the apocalyptic tone is "the possibility for the other tone, or the tone of another, to come at no matter what moment to interrupt a familiar music," the political consequences of such an intrusion remain ambiguous. the sudden derailment that constitutes the apocalypse, derrida continues, is "also the possibility of all emission or utterance" (in dellamora, 26). elsewhere in the essay, derrida asks, and if the dispatches always refer to other dispatches without decidable destination, the destination remaining to come, then isn't this completely angelic structure, that of the johannine apocalypse, isn't it also the structure of every scene of writing in general? (87) [33] apocalypse as the continual destabilization of every meaning, origin, and end is, finally, for derrida, inherent in language. it joins derrida's earlier terms of linguistic destabilization such as "trace" and "differance," but with the difference that in the case of "apocalypse," the social and political effects are likely to be more immediate. as derrida writes, "nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre" (89), but "conservative" must be taken here to mean any impulse to perpetuate an existing order. apocalypse, for derrida, is the desire, embodied in language, for a continual revelatory catastrophe, a continual unveiling of whatever lies hidden beneath any social veil. as i read derrida's essay, apocalypse remains recalcitrant to any particular politics. [34] this derridean quibble aside, however, i regard dellamora's _apocalyptic overtures_ as the best work on apocalyptic literature to appear since kermode's _the sense of an ending_. it does, i believe, exactly what a book on apocalyptic sensibility should do. it emphasizes the role of catastrophe both as destruction and as revelation; it places actual and imagined catastrophes in specific historical contexts; it analyzes the role of desire in apocalyptic imagining; and it pays close attention to the mechanisms of cultural transmission and repression of historically traumatic events. and together with its theoretical and methodological merits, _apocalyptic overtures_ tells stories of the suppressing, forgetting, and remembering of gay culture and catastrophe that need to be told and heard. notes: ^1^ we read in revelation (20:14), "[t]hen death and hades were flung into the lake of fire. this lake of fire is the second death; and into it were flung any whose names were not to be found in the roll of the living." zizek then cites de sade, distinguishing between natural, biological death and absolute, or symbolic, death: "the destruction, the eradication, of the [natural] cycle itself, which then liberates nature from its own laws and opens the way for the creation of new forms of life %ex nihilo%" (134). ^2^ marshall berman, of course, took this phrase as the title of his excellent book on the experience of modernity. michael phillipson sums up very well the apocalyptic perception of the modern when he writes, "the modern experience . . . cannot be comprehended in the languages of the past, of tradition, and yet we do not find ourselves except in this present -hence the need for . . . a language without history, without memory . . . a language against representation" (28). ^3^ norman cohn's study of the relations between medieval apocalyptic movements and economic and political struggles remains compelling after almost forty years. see also adela yarbro collins' work on the historical context of the book of revelation, and anthologies edited by sylvia l. thrupp and paul d. hanson. ^4^ for accounts of the importance of apocalyptic strains in american ideologies, see tuveson, bercovitch, slotkin, and boyer. works cited: alperovitz, gar. _the decision to use the atomic bomb, and the architecture of an american myth_. new york: knopf, 1995. bercovitch, sacvan. _the american jeremiad_. madison: u of wisconsin p, 1978. boyer, paul. _when time shall be no more: prophecy belief in modern american culture_. cambridge, ma and london: harvard up, 1992. collins, adela yarbro. _crisis and catharsis: the power of the apocalypse_. philadelphia: westminster, 1984. derrida, jacques. "of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy." _semeia_ 23 (1982): 63-97. foucault, michel. "nietzsche, genealogy, history." _the foucault reader_. ed. paul rabinow. new york: pantheon, 1984. 76-100. ---. _the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences_. new york: vintage, 1973. hanson, paul d., ed. _visionaries and their apocalypses_. philadelphia: fortress, 1983. jameson, fredric. _postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_. durham: duke up, 1991. kermode, frank. _the sense of an ending: studies in the theory of fiction_. london: oxford up, 1966. mintz, alan. _hurban: responses to catastrophe in hebrew literature_. new york: columbia up, 1984. roskies, david g. _against the apocalypse: responses to catastrophe in modern jewish culture_. cambridge, ma and london: harvard up, 1984. sherry, michael s. _the rise of american air power: the creation of armageddon_. new haven and london: yale up, 1987. slotkin, richard. _gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century america_. new york: harper perennial, 1992. thrupp, sylvia l., ed. _millennial dreams in action: studies in revolutionary religious movements_. new york: schocken, 1970. tuveson, ernest lee. _redeemer nation: the idea of america's millennial role_. chicago and london: u of chicago p, 1968. zizek, slavoj. _the sublime object of ideology_. london and new york: verso, 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[readers], 'selected letters from readers', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-[readers]-selected.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.595. part 1/1, total size 6642 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------selected letters from readers postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------copyright (c) 1995 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. ---------------------------------------------------------------------the following responses were submitted by pmc readers using regular email or the pmc reader's report form. not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited. ---------------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on valerie fulton, "an other frontier: voyaging west with mark twain and star trek's imperial subject": i am writing in regard to valerie fulton's article 'an other frontier: voyaging west with mark twain and star trek's imperial subject' (pmc 4.3. may 1994). while i enjoyed this critical reading of star trek: the next generation, i felt that valerie fulton's article did not fully examine the complexity of the series, and particularly of the well documented viewer's responses to the series. fulton discusses naturalization of imperialist discourse in st: tng. she alleges that the federation is engaged in imperialist "exploration, conquest and colonization" of the cultures they come into contact with. she points out that the federation does not colonize in order to gain material wealth--they already command an unlimited supply of food and energy. it's imperialism, jim, but not as we know it? the federation is concerned, not with material but rather with cultural enrichment (picard, the captain of the enterprise, is an amateur archaeologist). a cultural plunder of the other could be as damaging as material plunder, but the federation never pillages the treasures belonging to the 'alien' cultures it comes into contact with. the prime directive has been created by the federation in an attempt to maintain the autonomy of the other. the exploration of the frontier in star trek: the next generation is no simple process of colonization but an ongoing negotiation with the other. of course, the federation cannot help but influence the cultures it bumps into in its exploration of the galaxy, and the process of exploration and the humanist pursuit of knowledge does involve a certain amount of cultural imperialism. however, the series st:tng does not "tacitly help to perpetuate the conventional u.s. wisdom that acts of imperialism by our government against third world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving, benign rather than aggressive." what has become known as 'the star trek phenomenon' prevents such perpetuation. the star trek universe provides a framework in which questions raised by the confrontation with the self and other can be explored. rather than agreeing that, through star trek "we are simultaneously discouraged from practicing the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative modes of discourse and lead toward social change," i would argue that star trek provides a vital site for this kind of self-scrutiny. the extraordinary level of engagement with the viewer that star trek manages to elicit is evidence of the impact that this series has had on western culture. the many discussions relating to the show on the internet and in fanzines, at star trek conventions and in front of the tv ensure that star trek is never passively accepted but is discussed, analysed, and critiqued, endlessly. correspondingly, if the series does have an imperialist discourse, then this discourse is also endlessly discussed, and analysed by viewers. i hope that valerie fulton pursues her interest in star trek, and that this interest leads her to watch many more episodes, and also to look at the rich and exciting culture of star trek fandom. sincerely ali smith resident artist wollongong city gallery wollongong nsw australia s.indlekofer-osullivan@uow.edu.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on kevin mcneilly, "ugly beauty: john zorn and the politics of postmodern music": i simply wanted to note how much i enjoyed the article on the beauty of zorn's composition. his music does indeed incite the body, while the mind is simultaneously belied by the raucousness and anti-musical sound of it all. such composers, of which there are few indeed, require the listener to participate, like it or not. may more people learn to appreciate the incorporation of listener and performer. these comments are from: lane mcfadden the email address for lane mcfadden is: lanemcf@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on dion dennis, "evocations of empire in a transnational corporate age: tracking the sign of saturn": i really don't know where to start... i thought your article here to be truly fascinating and for those who just maight have an open mind very educational... thank you for writing it... i've long watched american jobs (since the late seventies) move from this country and in to mexico, right across the border from my home town of laredo, texas... just watching the manufacturing expansion over there without the needed expansion of the normal support structure such as roads, sewers, water treatment, building inspectors, and the like only emphasized the fact that this was waton greed in action. to me this pursuit of profit without any regard for the consequences of such actions would come back to haunt us all... now we have the 3rd world inside our own national boundaries and it is both a shame and despicable... as a middle aged white man stuck working for what seems to be a "profits impaired" airline i am very worried about my future... i spent many days between 1987 and 1992 looking for another job the the prospect were to say at best quite grim... this isn't how the so called "american dream" was suppose to work was it? again thanks for posting the article... these comments are from: russell harris the email address for russell harris is: harris1@ix.netcom --------------------end of letters.595 for pmc 5.3------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v4n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v4n2-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.194. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 126050 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements _postmodern culture_ v.4 n.2 (january, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu every issue of _postmodern culture_ carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. journal and book announcements: 1) _essays in postmodern culture_ 2) _black ice books_ 3) _black sacred music_ 4) _the centennial review_ 5) _chicago journal of theoretical computer science_ 6) _college literature_ 7) _contention_ 8) _differences_ 9) _discourse_ 10) _electronic journal on virtual culture_ 11) _eternal network: a mail art anthology_ 12) _genders_ 13) _hot off the tree_ 14) _information technology and disabilities_ 15) _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_ 16) _modern fiction studies_ 17) _minnesota review_ 18) _nomad_ 19) _october_ 20) _rif/t_ 21) _sscore_ 22) _studies in popular culture_ 23) _virus 23_ 24) _vivid magazine_ 25) _zines-l_ calls for papers, panels, and participants: 26) _pmc-moo_ 27) _association for history and computing conference (uk branch) 28) _4cyberconf: 4th international conference on cyberspace_ 29) _art and virtual environment symposium_ 30) _chaos and society conference_ 31) _electronic journal of virtual culture_ 32) _journal of criminal justice and popular culture_ 33) _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 34) _the linguistics of humor_ 35) _literary texts in an electronic age_ 36) _national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure_ 37) _postmodern culture_ 38) _psyche_ 39) _research on virtual relationships_ 40) _screensites 94_ networked discussion groups: 41) _femisa: feminism, gender, international relations_ 42) _holocaus: holocaust list_ 43) _newjour-l_ 44) _popcult list_ job openings: 45) princeton university: humanities consultant research programs: 46) deadlines for neh programs, seminars, and fellowships resources: 47) _gopheur litteratures_ 1)------------------------------------------------------------- essays in postmodern culture now cordless: an anthology of essays from _postmodern culture_ is now available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) 2)------------------------------------------------------------- _black ice books_ _black ice books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident american writers. breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. the first four books include: _avant-pop: fiction for a daydream nation_ edited by larry mccaffery, this book is an assemblage of innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various other unclassifiable texts by writers like samuel delany, mark leyner, william vollmann, kathy acker, eurdice, stephen wright, derek pell, harold jaffe, tim ferret, ricardo cortez cruz and many others. "one of the least cautious, nerviest editors going, larry mccaffery is the no-care bear of american letters." -william gibson. "a clusterbomb of crazy fiction, from a generation too sane to repeat yesterday's lies." -tom robbins _new noir_ stories by john shirley john shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence. "john shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell." -clive barker _the kafka chronicles_ a novel by mark amerika the _kafka chronicles_ is an adventure into the psyche of an ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters "mr amerika--if indeed that is his name--has achieved a unique beauty in his artful marriage of blake's lyricism and the ironin-the-soul of celine. are we taking a new and hard-hitting antonin artaud? absolutely. and much more." --terry southern _revelation countdown_ by cris mazza stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling loss of control. "talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity." --la times discount mail-order information: you can buy these books directly from the publisher at a discount. buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four for $25. we pay us postage! (foreign orders add $2.50 per book.) ___ avant-pop ___ new noir ___ the kafka chronicles ___ revelation countdown please make all checks or money orders payable to: fiction collective two publications unit illinois state university normal, il 61761 3)-------------------------------------------------------------_black sacred music_ a journal of theomusicology presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in blantyre, malawi in november of 1992, this volume represents a significant step for the african christian church toward incorporating indigenous african arts and culture into it liturgy. recognizing that the african christian church continues to define itself in distinctly western terms, forty-nine participants from various denominations and all parts of africa-uganda, kenya, malawi, mozambique, madagascar, mauritius, zimbabwe, zambia, sierra leone, cameroon--and the united states met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies for the indigenization of christianity in african churches. other special issues by single copy: the william grant still reader presents the collected writings of this respected american composer. still offered a perspective on american music and society informed by a diversity of experience and associations that few others have enjoyed. his distinguished career spanned jazz, traditional african-american idioms, and the european avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to opera. sacred music of the secular city delves into the american religious imagination by examining the religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music. includes essays on musicians robert johnson, duke ellington, marvin gaye, madonna, and 2 live crew. subscription prices: $30 institutions, $15 individuals. single issues: $15. please add $4 for subscription outside the u.s. canadian residents, add 7% gst. duke university press/box 90660/durham nc 27708 4) -------------------------------------------------------------_the centennial review_ edited by r.k. meiners _the centennial review_ is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the university and its environment. we are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. please begin my _cr_ subscription: ___ $12/year (3 issues) ___ $18/two years (6 issues) (add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the us) please send me the special issue: ___ _poland: from real socialism to democracy_ please make your check payable to _the centennial review_. mail to: _the centennial review_ 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing mi 48824-1044 5)-------------------------------------------------------------_chicago journal of theoretical computer science_ editors: stuart kurtz, michael o'donnell, and janos simon, university of chicago "i want to commend both the mit press and the mit libraries for their vision in publishing the chicago journal of theoretical computer science... the north carolina state university libraries will be subscribing to this ground-breaking electronic journal. i can assure you that we will do all that we can to make our faculty and students aware of this exciting new publication" - susan k. nutter, director of libraries, north carolina state university please join in our vision of a new relationship between publishers and libraries we have a vision that university presses and university libraries, working together, can publish and maintain electronic scholarly journals which provide: * peer-reviewed and high-quality papers * continuity and name-recognition * quicker and wider dissemination of information * enhanced search and retrieval mechanisms * lower costs than print journals * guaranteed future access to the contents our vision begins with . . . chicago journal of theoretical computer science the mit press and the mit libraries are pleased to announce the publication of a ground-breaking electronic journal to begin publication in spring of 1994. edited by stuart kurtz, michael o'donnell, and janos simon at the university of chicago, the journal will publish high-quality, peer-reviewed articles in theoretical computer science and is designed to meet the following needs: * the scholar's desire for quicker peer review and dissemination of research results; * the library's need to develop systems and structures to deal with electronic journals and know to what degree electronic journals might relieve budget pressures; * the publisher's need to develop an economic and a user model for electronic dissemination of scholarly journals. ground-breaking: * published by an established journals publisher, the mit press, working with the mit libraries to guarantee library concerns are addressed; * committed to publishing a level of quality equivalent to standard print journals with the goal of increasing acceptance of electronic publication in the tenure review process; * committed to fast turnaround in the peer review process in order to attract high-quality manuscripts and communicate research results more quickly to the scholarly community; * sold on a subscription basis for fees comparable to standard print journals to both libraries and individuals in an effort to develop an economic model that will encourage publishers to develop electronic journals (initial subscription prices of $125/year for institutions and $30/year for individuals); * published on the basis of trust in libraries and scholars to pay for what they use and to follow established copyright and fair use guidelines; * archived at mit libraries and university of chicago with commitment to keep text compatible with latest standards, and assurance of authoritative version of text. what a subscriber gets: * article-by-article publication, beginning with approximately 15 articles in 1994 (equivalent to a triannual standard paper journal) and including possible paper delivery if demanded by customers; * notification by e-mail of article title, author, and abstract when articles are ready, and the ability to retrieve them from the press's wais server via ftp or gopher, in either latex source file or postscript form; * articles published with an associated file of forward pointers for referral to subsequent papers, results, and improvements that are relevant to the published article; * advertisements and notices available upon request from file server at mit; * access to continually updated archive located at mit. as a library subscriber you have permission to: * store the journal on any file server under your control, and make it available online to the local community to print or download copies; * print out individual articles and other items for inclusion in your periodical collection; * place the journal on the campus network for access by local users or post article listings and notices on the network to inform your users of what is available; * print out individual articles and other items from the journal for the personal scholarly use of readers; * print out articles and other items for storage on reserve if requested by professor, student, or university staff; * share print or electronic copy of the journal with other libraries under standard inter-library loan procedures; * convert material from the journal to another medium (i.e. microfilm/fiche/cd) for storage. for subscription information please contact: journals-orders@mit.edu 6) -------------------------------------------------------------_college literature_ a triannual literary journal for the classroom edited by kostas myrsiades a triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving the needs of college/university teachers by providing them with access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of literature and experiencing old literature in new ways. "_college literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone teaching literature to college students." j. hillis miller university of ca, irvine "congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant." terry eagleton oxford university "in one bold stroke you seem to have turned _college literature_ into one of the things everyone will want to read." cary nelson "my sense is that _college literature_ will have substantial influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies." henry a. giroux "a journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy." robert con davis forthcoming issues: third world women's literature african american writing cross-cultural poetics subscription rates: us foreign individual $24.00/year $29.00/year institutional: $48.00/year $53.00/year send prepaid orders to: _college literature_ main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150 7) -------------------------------------------------------------_contention_ debates in society, culture, and science _contention_ is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...extremely important." alberta arthurs "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...superb." janet abu-lughod "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 8) -------------------------------------------------------------_differences_ a journal of feminist cultural studies queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities (volume 3, number 2) edited by teresa de lauretis teresa de lauretis: _queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction_ sue ellen case: _tracking the vampire_ samuel r. delany: _street talk/straight talk_ elizabeth a. grosz: _lesbian fetishism?_ jeniffer terry: _theorizing deviant historiography_ thomas almaguer: _chicano men: a cartography of homosexual identity and behavior_ ekua omosupe: _black/lesbian/bulldagger_ earl jackson, jr.: _scandalous subjects: robert gluck's embodied narratives_ julia creet: _daughter of the movement: the psychodynamics of lesbian s/m fantasy_ the phallus issue (volume 4, number 1) edited by naomi schor and elizabeth weed maria torok: _the meaning of "penis envy" in women (1963)_ jean-joseph goux: _the phallus: masculine identity and the "exchange of women"_ parveen adams: _waiving the phallus_ kaja silverman: _the lacanian phallus_ charles bernheimer: _penile reference in phallic theory_ judith butler: _the lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary_ jonathan goldberg: _recalling totalities: the mirrored stages of arnold schwarzenegger_ emily apter: _female trouble in the colonial harem_ single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals $48.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 9) -------------------------------------------------------------_discourse_ volume 15, number 1 special issue flaunting it: lesbian and gay studies kathryn baker: delinquent desire: race, sex, and ritual in reform schools for girls terralee bensinger: lesbian pornography: the re-making of (a) community scott bravmann: investigating queer fictions of the past: identities, differences, and lesbian and gay historical self-representations sarah chinn and kris franklin: "i am what i am" (or am i?): making and unmaking of lesbian and gay identity in _high tech boys greg mullins: nudes, prudes, and pigmies: the desirability of disavowal in _physical culture magazine_ joann pavletich: muscling the mainstream: lesbian murder mysteries and fantasies of justice david pendelton: obscene allegories: narrative structures in gay male porn thomas piontek: applied metaphors: aids and literature june l. reich: the traffic in dildoes: the phallus as camp and the revenge of the genderfuck single issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage) subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals $50.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage) send orders to: journals division indiana university press 601 n morton bloomington in 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 10) -----------------------------------------------------------_the electronic journal on virtual culture_ we are very pleased by the great interest in the _electronic journal on virtual culture_. there are already more than 1,280 people subscribed. our first issue was distributed in march 1993. the future looks very interesting. editors are working on special issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture. the _electronic journal on virtual culture_ (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. ejvc is published monthly. some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. cyberspace monitor). if you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the virtual culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc. ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact ermel stepp editor-in-chief of diane kovacs co-editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu cordially, ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu 11) ------------------------------------------------------------_eternal network: a mail art anthology_ "eternal network: a mail art anthology" by chuck welch is to be published in fall 1994 by university of calgary press. the 42 chapter, 350 page text includes an index, 147 illustrations and six major appendices including the largest extensive listing of underground mail art zines in existence. a thorough listing of nearly 100 international private and institutional mail art archives appears in another important appendice. but what is mail art? mail art is a paradox in the way it reverses traditional definitions of art; the mailbox and computer replace the museum, the address becomes the art, and the mailman brings home the avant-garde to mail artists in the form of correspondence art, e-mail art, artistamps, postcards, conceptual projects, and collaborations. "eternal network introduces readers to a lively exchange with international mail art networkers from five continents. the book include snail mail and e-mail addresses, fax, and telephone numbers for many active mail artists. readers are invited to participate -to correspondance with global village artists who quickstep beyond establishment boundaries of art. among the forty-two distinguished contributors appearing in "eternal network" are new york city art critic richard kostelanetz; physicist, poet bern porter; director of the museum of modern art library, clive phillpot; famed fluxus artists dick higgins and ken friedman; university of iowa art historian and archival director estera milman, and mail art patron jean brown who has collected the world's largest assemblage of mail art material now undergoing documentation at the getty center for the history of art and the humanities. many of the forty-two chapters appearing in "eternal network" are original, unpublished essays pertaining to the origin and history of mail art networking, collaborative aesthetics, new directions for mail art networking in the 1990's, mail art projects exploring the interconnection of marginal on and off-line networks, mail art criticism and dialogue, and finally, parables, visions, dances, dreams, and poems that articulate the living mythology of mail art. edited by chuck welch, an active mail artist since 1978, "eternal network" makes an important first step towards introducing mail art to non-artists, artists, and academic scholars. for more information send e-mail to cathryn.l.welch@dartmouth.edu or write to "eternal network" po box 978, hanover, nh 03755. 12) ------------------------------------------------------------_genders_ ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. ----------------------------- _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 13) ------------------------------------------------------------_hot off the tree_ hott -hot off the tree -is a free monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including vr (virtual reality), neural networks, pdas (personal digital assistants), guis (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing. summaries are provided from the following sources: wall street journal, new york times, los angeles times, washington post, san jose mercury news, boston globe, financial times (london) ... time, newsweek, u.s. news & world report ... business week, forbes, fortune, the economist (london), nikkei weekly (tokyo), asian wall street journal (hong kong) ... over 50 trade magazines, including computerworld, infoworld, datamation, computer retail week, dr. dobb's journal, lan times, communications week, pc world, new media, var business, midrange systems, byte ... over 50 research journals, including ** all ** publications of the ieee computer and communications societies, plus technical journals published by at&t, ibm, hewlett packard, fujitsu, sharp, ntt, siemens, philips, gec ... over 100 internet mailing lists & usenet discussion groups ... plus ... * listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books; * listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences; * company advertorials, including ceo perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements. bonus: exclusive interviews with technology pioneers ... the next two issues feature interviews with mark weiser (head of xerox parc's computer science lab) on ubiquitous computing, and nobel laureate joshua lederberg on the information society to request a free subscription, carefully follow the instructions below send subscription requests to: listserv@ucsd.edu leave the "subject" line blank in the body of the message input: subscribe hott-list if at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: unsubscribe hott-list note: do *not* include first or last names following "subscribe hott-list" or "unsubscribe hott-list" the hott mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the university of california at san diego. the system automatically responds to the sender's return path. hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at ucsd. (i cannot make modifications to the list ... nor do i have access to the list.) for your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. if you have problems and require human intervention, contact: hott@ucsd.edu the next issue of the reinvented hott e-newsletter is scheduled for transmission in late january/early february. please forward this announcement to friends and colleagues, and post to your favorite bulletin boards. our objective is to disseminate the highest quality and largest circulation compunications (computer & communications) industry newsletter. i look forward to serving you as hott's new editor. thank you. ***************************************************************** david scott lewis editor-in-chief and book & video review editor ieee engineering management review (the world's largest circulation "high tech" management journal) internet address: d.s.lewis@ieee.org tel: +1 714 662 7037 usps mailing address: pob 18438 / irvine ca 92713-8438 usa ***************************************************************** 14) ------------------------------------------------------------announcing a new electronic journal: information technology and disabilities below is information about the journal, including the table of contents for volume i, no. 1, as well as information on editorial staff and explicit instructions for subscribing or using the journal via gopher. it&d v1n1 table of contents 230 lines ********************************************* information technology and disabilities issn 1073-5127 volume i, no. 1 january, 1994 ********************************************* articles ********************************************* introducing _information technology and disabilities_ (itdv01n1 mcnulty) tom mcnulty, editor ********************************************* building an accessible cd-rom reference station (itdv01n1 wyatt) rochelle wyatt and charles hamilton abstract: this case study describes the development of an accessible cd-rom workstation at the washington library for the blind and physically handicapped. included are descriptions of hardware and software, as well as selected cd-rom reference sources. information is provided on compatibility of individual cd-rom products with adaptive technology hardware and software. ********************************************* development of an accessible user interface for people who are blind or vision impaired as part of the re-computerization of royal blind society (australia) (itdv01n1 noonan) tim noonan abstract: in 1991, royal blind society (australia) and deen systems, a sydney-based software development company, undertook a major overhaul of rbs information systems intended to enhance access to rbs client services as well as employment opportunities for blind and vision impaired rbs staff. this case study outlines the steps taken and principles followed in the development of a computer user interface intended for efficient use by blind and vision impaired individuals. ********************************************* the electronic rehabilitation resource center at st. john's university (new york) (itdv01n1 holtzman) bob zenhausern and mike holtzman abstract: st. john's university in jamaica, new york, is host to a number of disability-related network information sources and services. this article identifies and describes key sources and services, including bitnet listservs, or discussion groups, the unibase system which includes real-time online conferencing, and other valuable educational and rehabilitation-related network information sources. ********************************************* the clearinghouse on computer accommodation (coca) (itdv01n1 brummel) susan brummel and doug wakefield abstract: since 1985, coca has been pioneering information policies and computer support practices that benefit federal employees with disabilities and members of the public with disabilities. today, coca provides a variety of services to people within and outside government employment. the ultimate goal of all coca's activities is to advance equitable information environments consistent with non-discriminatory employment and service delivery goals. ********************************************* departments ********************************************* job accommodations (itdv01n1 jobs) editor: joe lazzaro lazzaro@bix.com k 12 education (itdv01n1 k12) editor: anne pemberton apembert@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu libraries (itdv01n1 library) editor: ann neville neville@emx.cc.utexas.edu online information and networking (itdv01n1 online) editor: steve noble slnobl01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu campus computing (itdv01n1 campus) editor: daniel hilton-chalfen, ph.d., hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu ********************************************* copyright (c 1994) by (it&d) information technology and disabilities. authors of individual articles retain all copyrights to said articles, and their permission is needed to reproduce any individual article. the rights to the journal as a collection belong to (it&d) information technology and disabilities. it&d encourages any and all electronic distribution of the journal and permission for such copying is expressly permitted here so long as it bears no charge beyond possible handling fees. to reproduce the journal in non-electronic format requires permission of its board of directors. to do this, contact the editor. editor-in-chief tom mcnulty, new york university (mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu) editors dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla daniel hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university editorial board dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla danny hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology alistair d. n. edwards, phd, university of york, uk joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va lawrence a. scadden, phd, national science foundation bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university ********************************************* about easi (equal access to software and information) since its founding in 1988 under the educom umbrella, easi has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. volunteers from easi have been instrumental in the establishment of _information technology and disabilities_ as still another step in this process. our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. we seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. easi makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists: easi@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a general discussion on computer access) and axslib-l@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a discussion on library access issues). to join either list, send a "subscribe" command to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. easi also maintains several items on the st. johns gopher under the menu heading "disability and rehabilitation resources". for further information, contact the easi chair: norman coombs, ph.d. nrcgsh@ritvax.isc.rit.edu or the easi office: easi's phone: (310) 640-3193 easi's e-mail: easi@educom.edu ********************************************* individual _itd_ articles and departments are archived on the st. john's university gopher. to access the journal via gopher, locate the st. john's university (new york) gopher. select "disability and rehabilitation resources," and from the next menu, select "easi: equal access to software and information." _information technology and disabilities_ is an item on the easi menu. to retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu leave subject line blank the message text should include the word "get" followed by the two word file name; for example: get itdv01n1 contents each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. do not include the parentheses with the filename when sending the "get" command to listserv. note: only one item may be retrieved per message; do not send multiple get commands in a single e-mail message to listserv. to receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and either of the following lines of text: subscribe itd-toc "firstname lastname" subscribe idt-jnl "firstname lastname" (itd-jnl is the entire journal in one e-mail message while itd-toc sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.) to get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and the following single line of text: get author guidelin 15) ------------------------------------------------------------m/e/a/n/i/n/g a journal of contemporary art issues m/e/a/n/i/n/g, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts. m/e/a/n/i/n/g is published twice a year in the fall and spring. it is edited by susan bee and mira schor. subscriptions for 2 issues (1 year): $12 for individuals: $20 for institutions 4 issues (2 years): $24 for individuals; $40 for institutions * foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to canada: $5 * foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in u.s. dollars. all checks should be made payable to mira schor send all subscriptions to: mira schor 60 lispenard street new york, ny 10013 limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact mira schor for information. distributed with the segue foundation and the solo foundation 16) ------------------------------------------------------------_modern fiction studies_ _mfs_, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, announces the following forthcoming special issues: february, 39.1: "fiction of the indian subcontinent" may, 39.3: "toni morrison" november, 40.1: "the cultural politics of displacement" barbara harlow, guest editor we also continue to accept submissions for forthcoming special issues on "autobiography, photography, narrative," timothy dow adams, guest editor (deadline: april 1, 1994); "postmodern narratives (deadline: october 1 1994); "sexuality and narrative," guest editor, judith roof (deadline: march 1, 1995). _mfs_ is published quarterly at purdue university and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and ibm-compatible floppy; please include a selfaddressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. send submissions to: patric o'donnell editor _mfs_ department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at pod@purccvm (bitnet); pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (internet). subscriptions to _mfs_ are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. back issues are $7 each. address subscription inquiries to: nel fink circulation manager _mfs_ department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389. 17) ------------------------------------------------------------_minnesota review_ tell your friends! tell your librarians! the new _minnesota review_'s coming to town! subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new _minnesota review_ is published biannually and originates from east carolina university beginning with the fall 1992 special issue. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams, editor _minnesota review_ department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 18) ----------------------------------------------------------- nomad an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences ************************************************************** manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields! nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. it is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. while our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, nomad strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls. manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. if possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5" macintosh disks, in either microsoft word or macwrite ii format, or by e-mail. each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and in black and white. pict, tiff, gif, and jpeg files on 3.5" macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via e-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). all artwork must be camera-ready. submissions by regular mail should include a sase with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages. subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues) send manuscripts and inquiries to: nomad, c/o mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, florida, 32306 (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu) ***************************************************************** "in nomad, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most appreciate them." ***************************************************************** 19) ------------------------------------------------------------_october_ art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _october_ focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join _october_'s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! published quarterly issn 0162-2870. yearly rates: individual $32.00; institution $80.00; student (copy of current id required) and retired: $22.00. outside usa add $14.00 postage and handling. canadians add additional 7% gst. prepayment is required. send check payable to _october_ drawn against a us bank, mastercard or visa number to: mit press journal / 55 hayward street / cambridge, ma 02142-1399 / tel: (617) 233-2889 / fax: (617) 258-6779 / e-mail: journals-orders@mit.edu 20) ------------------------------------------------------------_rif/t_ e-poetry literary journal in all arts there is a physical component . . . we must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts. --paul valery this list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution of an interactive literary journal: _rif/t_ and related exchange, and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary poetics. _rif/t provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal. dynamic--not static, _rif/t_ shifts and riffs with the diction of "trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of exchange. archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry filelist. to receive a list of files send the command index e-poetry to: listserv@ubvm or listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu as the first line in the body of your mail message (not your subject: line). to subscribe to e-poetry, send the command sub e-poetry your name to: listserv@ubvm or listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu via mail message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not the subject: line). for example: sub e-poetry john doe owner: ken sherwood v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu 21) ------------------------------------------------------------_sscore_ social science computer review g. david garson, editor ronald anderson, co-editor the official journal of the social science computing association, _sscore_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. now, when you subscribe to _social science computer review_, you automatically become a member of the social science computing association. quarterly subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions single issue: $20 please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. canadian residents add 7% gst duke university press/ journals division / box 90660 /durham nc 27708 22) ------------------------------------------------------------_studies in popular culture_ dennis hall, editor. _studies in popular culture_, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292. please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. _studies in popular culture_, is published semiannually and is indexed in the _pmla annual bibliography_. all members of the association receive _studies in popular culture_. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to the executive secretary, diane calhoun-french, academic dean, jefferson community college-sw, louisville, ky 40272, for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes ixv are available for $225.00. 23) -----------------------------------------------------------_virus 23_ for those brave souls looking to explore the secret of eris, you may wish to check out _virus 23_. 2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd. _virus 23_ is a codename for all erisian literature don webb 6304 laird dr. austin tx 78757 0004200716@mcimail.com _virus 23_ is the annual hardcopy publication of a.d.o.s.a, the alberta department of spiritual affairs. all issues are available at $7.00 ppd from: _virus 23_ box 46 red deer, alberta canada t4n 5e7 various chunks of _virus 23_ can be found at tim oerting's alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out). for more information online contact darren wershler-henry: grad3057@writer.yorku.ca 24)-----------------------------------------------------------vivid magazine the first issue of vivid magazine is now available. vivid is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. we are actively seeking contributions for the next issue. the magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment of a windows 3.1 help file. you will need windows 3.1 to read the magazine. the magazine will also be available via anonymous ftp at "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it: ftp ftp.gmu.edu username: anonymous password: (your email address) cd pub/library binary get vivid1.zip ----------------------------------------------------------------for more information on vivid, contact the editor, justin mchale. internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------25) ------------------------------------------------------------_zines-l_ announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to _zines-l_ send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name 26) ------------------------------------------------------------ _postmodern culture_ announces pmc-moo pmc-moo is a new service offered (free of charge) by _postmodern culture_. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of the journal and participate in live conferences. pmc-moo will also provide access to texts generated by _postmodern culture_ and by pmc-talk, and it will provide the opportunity to experience (or help to design) programs which simulate objectlessons in postmodern theory. pmc-moo is based on the lambdamoo program, freeware by pavel curtis. to connect to pmc-moo, you *must* be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet hero.village.virginia.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. if you have the emacs program on your system and would like information about a customized program for pmc-moo that uses emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail. 27) ------------------------------------------------------------ahc'94 -hull conference association for history and computing uk branch conference the seventh annual conference of the association for history and computing (uk branch) will be held at the university of hull between 12 and 14 april 1994. as well as existing members of the association, we are anxious to see those of our "mainstream" colleagues who have so far resisted the blandishments of information technology, but think they might now want to get involved -particularly with the impending arrival of courseware products coming out the teaching and learning technology program (tltp). the "major" theme of the conference will be to explore what computerate historians have to learn from disciplines cognate with history, or those from which we have traditionally filched elements of our methodology. we hope to have sessions which focus on anthropology, art history, economics, geography, sociology and textual studies, with reference to time-frames ranging from the medieval to the near-contemporary. the "minor" theme is to be the role of computing in the modern history curriculum, broadly defined: from what's going on in secondary schools and colleges post-national curriculum; through the undergraduate program, with special reference to tltp products; to the it component of postgraduate training courses being developed under the 1+3 arrangements favored by esrc and the british academy. we shall, of course, be issuing invitations to a number of keynote speakers, but would be very grateful to receive offers of papers on any of the subjects identified above. further particulars and booking forms can be obtained from steve baskerville, dean of the school of arts, university of hull, cottingham road, hull, hu6 7rx. phone: 0482-465684 (secretary: louise danby). e-mail: s.w.baskerville@amstuds.hull.ac.uk ten years ago, before the celebrated westfield conferences that gave life to the ahc, there was a select gathering of people interested in historical computing met at hull to discuss their common interests. we would like to see as many of you as possible come here again in 1994 to discuss the agendas of the next decade! steve baskerville university of hull 28) ------------------------------------------------------------4cyberconf: 4th international conference on cyberspace, may 1994 in may of 1994, the banff centre is virtually the only place to be the banff centre for the arts, in banff, alberta, canada will host two important conferences on cyberspace and virtual reality. the first conference, 4cyberconf, to be held may 20 through 22, is a prestigious annual event that brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the implications of cyberspace. immediately following is the art and virtual environments symposium to be held may 23 and 24. this event focuses on artistic approaches to virtual reality, providing an opportunity for critical inquiry of the political, practical and aesthetic concerns around new media and cultural practices. over the course of the two conferences, the work of eight groups of artists who have completed virtual environments at the banff centre will be installed at various sites. participants may register for either or both events. 4cyberconf the fourth international conference on cyberspace may 20, 21, and 22, 1994 the banff centre for the arts introduction 4cyberconf deals with the issues of cyberspace on many different levels. the technologies of virtual reality, networking and digital media are investigated from a critical standpoint that examines their social and cultural impacts and meanings. this conference considers cross-cultural contributions to the space and time of cyberspace, embraces the challenge of design for virtual environments and cybersound and suggests a new perception of space that challenges conventional views. cyberspace is a space in flux where shared identities collide with discussions of diversity and the most potent constructions are the discussions that define and delineate these new environments. in the matrices and the nets, there is a growing society that ranges from architects to aboriginal artists to anarchists, from cyborgs to silicon valley sophisticates to cyberpunks. 4cyberconf offers the opportunity for exchange within and between these confluent and diverse interests. conference format the fourth conference on cyberspace is scheduled to take place over three days, with regular sessions, demonstrations and a "birds of a feather" meeting space for conference participants to exchange ideas and information. in addition, there will be an evening round table discussion on friday, may 20th and a dinner on sunday, may 22nd. call for panel and paper proposals this is a call for paper and panel proposals, approximately twenty of which will be selected by the program committee for development and presentation at the conference. papers submitted by individuals will be grouped by the program committee by theme. the following is a list of the general topics of interest to the program committee. economics of cyberspace everyone talks about the information economy but few are willing to face up to its implications: a nation's wealth will be based on the information it produces. commercial services may become the primary focus of the net. our copyright laws will need to be totally rewritten for cyberspace. intellectual property will become the most valued commodity of this new economy. who will determine what's public domain and what's privatized? this session will deal with those issues and will provide a forum for exploring a dramatically different approach to economic issues. the sounds of cyber cyberspace will be an environment vibrant with sound. while much of the technical investigation of virtuality has concentrated on the image, some of the richest and most compelling results have been achieved with audio. this theme will focus on the aesthetics, theory and practice of creating sound in immersion environments, as well as the synergy of sound and image in virtual space. diversity, technology and cyberspace it is tough out there on the planetary streets, but is cyberspace a territory with a better immigration policy? how do individuals and groups gain access to cyberspace? are technologies culturally, linguistically and gender specific? are questions of authenticity relevant in cyberspace? how can technology be created and applied to serve the needs of varied communities, such as aboriginal groups and those from the myriad of cultural diasporas? how are the social constructions of body, gender, desire, race, place, economy and language built in cyberspace? what is imported, what is modified and what is created in human interaction and meaning within cyberspace; how does it then affect other experiences? cyber narratives how and to whom are stories being structured and told in cyberspace? what are the entertainment industry`s distribution outlets? what tools are available to create cyber tales and do these permit creative expression? what are the structures of interactive texts? what is the relationship between reading and authoring, viewing and creating? are there existing forms of criticism for example, architectural, literary, film, media, art, cultural studies relevant to describing cyber stories? what new critical tools do we need? are there genres in cyberspace? the poetics of cyberspace: designing the virtual traditional concepts of design travel poorly in cyberspace. papers are invited that investigate the new design issues that must be resolved if virtual environments are to become compelling, evocative and effective. new tools and new approaches and the role of the design profession in cyberspace are critical aspects of this investigation. submission guidelines proposals for papers and panels should be presented in abstracts of approximately 1000 words. panel proposals should include abstracts of papers. copies of illustrations and photographs can be submitted at this time. persons proposing a panel should contact potential panelists prior to submitting. all proposals are due in hard copy and on disk at the address below by february 15, 1994. papers selected for presentation, either as part of a theme session or a panel, are due may 1, 1994, in hard copy and digital form. selected presenters will be notified by march 15, 1994. the final papers should be between 3000 and 6000 words. papers will be allotted a half hour for presentation. panels should not exceed one hour. videotapes, recordings and other forms of presentation will be considered as part of panels or as a component of sessions. submitted material on videotape, optical disk, film, and other media, will be returned. brief biographical information may accompany submissions on a separate page. because all accepted abstracts will be published as the collected papers of the fourth conference on cyberspace and available at the conference, we ask that you observe the following format guidelines: proposals should be printed on one side of 8.5" x 11" paper, single spaced, with one inch margins and in 12point times-roman, unless there is specific artistic purpose to breaking this convention. do not number the pages. provide six copies, and a floppy disk with both ascii and word versions. the first page should start with: title (proposed session) your name your affiliation body of paper or abstract deadlines february 15, 1994 deadline for submission of papers, abstracts and proposals inclusion in 4cyberconf. march 15, 1994 notification date of selection for presentation: april 8, 1994 deadline for registration for both conferences: (late registration will be available as space permits and at an extra charge) note: submission of an abstract or proposal indicates your intention, obligation, and capability to write/present/demonstrate the corresponding, fulllength work if chosen. all materials should be sent to: 4cyberconf the fourth international conference on cyberspace submissions media arts the banff centre for the arts box 1020-8 banff, alberta, t0l 0c0 canada e-mail 4cyber@acs.ucalgary.ca phone: 403-762-6652 fax: 403-762-6665 29) ------------------------------------------------------------the art and virtual environments symposium may 23 and 24, 1994 the banff centre for the arts the art and virtual environments symposium will be held immediately following 4cyberconf and is intended to facilitate dialogue and debate among artists, presenters and participants. this is an invitation to attend this two-day event that will include presentations and discussions on art, culture and new media technologies in the 1990s. in addition, virtual environment artworks will be exhibited and discussed by the artists. since many of these works will never be shown again, this symposium represents an opportunity to experience and analyze some of the worlds that are shaping developments in virtual reality. the eight groups of artists who participated in the art and virtual environments project, include: will bauer and steve gibson; toni dove and michael mackenzie; diane gromala, marcos novak and yacov sharir; perry hoberman; ron kuivila; brenda laurel and rachel strickland; michael naimark; michael scroggins and stewart dixon. over the past three years, these artists have explored this innovative medium at banff and in the process developed important advances in the field. presentations on art and virtual environments will be made by writers and thinkers invited to investigate current cultural practices. speakers may include frances dyson, n.katherine hayles, michael heim, erkki huhtamo, rob milthorp, margaret morse, jeanne randolph, allucquere rosanne stone, nell tenhaaf, gene youngblood and others. writings on art, culture and virtual environments have also been commissioned to stimulate discussion and analysis of culture and new technologies. the end result is one of the most important critical investigations in the short history of virtual reality. the art and virtual environments project, undertaken by the computer applications and research program at the banff centre for the arts, has been funded by the department of canadian heritage and citi (centre for information technologies innovation). the banff centre gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions of the art and virtual environments project sponsors: silicon graphics inc., alias research, the computer graphics lab in the department of computing science at the university of alberta, apple canada, the intel corporation, and autodesk inc. location both conferences will be held at the banff centre, banff, alberta, canada. the centre provides a comfortable setting nestled in one of the most picturesque environments in north america. founded in 1933, the banff centre has evolved into an exciting, multidisciplinary entity that is an experience unto itself. artists, academics, professionals, business leaders, administrators and scientists come here to learn in an efficient, service-oriented setting that happens to be surrounded by some of the most breathtaking mountain wilderness in the world. banff is located 125 kilometers, or a scenic 1 1/2 hour drive, west of the city of calgary. the calgary international airport services daily flights from most major centers in canada, the united states, europe and the orient. bus service is available directly from the airport or downtown calgary. for further information regarding registration please contact: virginia campbell the banff centre for conferences box 1020 station 11 banff, alberta canada t0l 0c0 tel: (403) 762-6202 fax: (403) 762-6388 30) ------------------------------------------------------------chaos and society conference universite du quebec a hull chaos and society conference june 1-2, 1994 this is a summary of the information that will shortly be available on the university of quebec gopher. anybody who wants more information, or a hard copy of this information (plus a small ad to be posted on a physical bulletin board), should contact: prof. pierre lemieux pierre_lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca 1. about the university the universite du quebec a hull (uqah) is a branch of the university of quebec. it is located in hull, in the province of quebec (canada), just across ottawa in the national capital region. 2. the chaos and society workshop at uqah the june conference is organized by the chaos and society workshop, directed by prof. alain albert et prof. pierre lemieux. the objective of the chaos and society workshop is to stimulate research on the relations between chaos theory, complexity and the study of society (especially the idea of a spontaneous or anarchistic order). one of the topics that has raised some interest recently at the workshop were the ideas discussed by prof. albert and lemieux on the possibilities of building models of artificial anarchy. 3. the june 1-2, 1994, chaos and society international conference 3.1. general description the objective of the conference is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of academics and scholars interested in the interface between chaos and complex-system theory and the social sciences. this two-day conference is to be held on june 1 and 2, 1994, in the hull-ottawa region (canada). formal papers will be presented and discussed. papers can be presented in either english or french. (most will probably be in english.) we are exploring the possibility of simultaneous translation during some of the lectures and discussions. examples of topics of interest: . what is the significance of the chaos paradigm for the social and humane sciences (including economics, sociology, political science, ethnology, philosophy...)? to which extent can society be analyzed as a chaotic, complex or living system? . what can nonlinear dynamic simulation techniques contribute to the study of society? . what is the meaning of information, evolution, and spontaneous order in the social sciences as compared to the physical sciences? . to which extent were these elements already present in some schools of social sciences (v.g., the austrian school of economics)? . after artificial life, what is the future of artificial economics, artificial politics, artificial sociology, etc.? . what is their relevance to contemporary problems? we expect a group of 50 to 75 participants, mainly academics, at the conference. they will include: 1) authors of papers; 2) discussants who will comment on the papers and start the workshop-type discussion. 3) simple participants (academics, scholars, students, government officials and business executives) who will be able to attend the lectures and participate in discussions. here is a tentative schedule as of december 15, 1993: wednesday, june 1 8:45-10:30 opening, paper, comment and discussion 10:30-11:00 coffee break 11:00-12:45 paper, comment and discussion 13:00-14:45 lunch for all participants 15:00-16:30 workshops i, ii, iii 16:30-17:00 coffee break 17:00-18:30 workshops i, ii, iii 19:00 dinner for all participants thursday, june 2 8:45-10:30 paper, comment and discussion 10:30-11:00 coffee break 11:00-12:45 paper, comment and discussion 13:00-14:45 lunch for all participants 15:00-16:30 workshops i, ii, iii 16:30-17:00 coffee break 17:00-18:30 workshops i, ii, iii 18:30 end of conference the organizing committee is made of . dr. jacques plamondon, professor of philosophy of science and president of universite du quebec a hull (uqah) . prof. paul bourgine, director of the artificial intelligence and artificial life laboratory, cemagref (antony, france) . dr. bernardo huberman, research fellow, xerox parc . prof. alain albert, professor of economics, business administration department, uqah . prof. pierre lemieux (conference director), visiting professor of economics, business administration department, uqah 3.2. call for papers any person interested in presenting a paper must e-mail a one page abstract to the organizing committee before january 31, 1994. each submission must contain the author's name, affiliation, address, telephone, fax and e-mail numbers. the organizing committee will reach a decision on accepted papers and notify the authors in february. accepted authors will then be asked to send their papers (hard copy and electronic version) before april 30, 1994, so that they be made available to discussants in time. papers may be in english or french. they will later be published in the conference proceedings. please send abstracts to: pierre_lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca 3.3. registration registration fees (in canadian dollars) category before feb. 28, 1994 fromfeb. 28 to april 30 academics 150 250 students 150 150 others 300 500 the registration fees include dinner on june 1 and lunches on june 1 and 2. registration fees will be reimbursed if registration is canceled before april 30, 1994. all registration must be paid before april 30, 1994. please make your check to the order of "universite du quebec a hull." ________________________________________________________ registration form first name, middle initial, last name: title: name and title preferred on badge: occupation: organization/company: address: telephone: fax: e-mail: i would like to register as: author of paper discussant participant please send check (to the order of "universite du quebec a hull") to prof. pierre lemieux date: please note that all registrations must be paid by check before april 30, 1994. (special rates apply before february 28; see above.) please make your check to the order of "universite du quebec a hull" and send to: prof. pierre lemieux universite du quebec a hull p.o. box 1250, station b hull, quebec j8x 3x7 canada fax: 1 (819) 595-3924 e-mail: pierre_lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca 3.4. hotel accommodation, information and registration forthcoming. 3.5. logistics information located on the quebec side of the ottawa river, hull is only a few miles from the national capital of canada and 10 miles from the ottawa international airport. 3.6. important deadlines to remember january 31, 1994 authors who want to submit papers must have sent a one-page abstract. see "call for papers". february 27 last date to register at reduced tariff. see "registration". february 28 accepted authors will have been notified by organizing committee. see "call for papers". april 29 last date to cancel registration and get a reimbursement. see "registration". april 30 authors must have sent their papers. see "call for papers". last date to register. registration fees must be received at uqah. see "registration" 4. whom to contact for any information on this conference, please contact: prof. pierre lemieux universite du quebec a hull p.o. box 1250, station b hull, quebec canada j8x 3x7 tel.: 1 (819) 595-3833 fax: 1 (819) 595-3924 e-mail: pierre_lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca 31) ------------------------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ejvc: electronic journal of virtual culture ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ejvc is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computermediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction. information about ejvc may be obtained by sending e-mail to listserv@kentvm.bitnet or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu with one or more of the following lines in the text: subscribe ejvc-l yourfirstname yourlastname get ejvc welcome index ejvc-l also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu in the pub/ejvc directory. 32) -----------------------------------------------------------********************* call for submissions ********************* _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: _hypertext fiction and the literary artist_ 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 e-mail: keepc@qucd>queensu.ca 33) ------------------------------------------------------------ the journal of criminal justice and popular culture call for papers scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria: issues: the journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. the journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice. submission procedures: to submit material for the journal, please subscribe to cjmovies through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow. to subscribe, send a message with the following command to listserv@albnyvm1: subscribe cjmovies yourfirstname yourlastname manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: the editors, journal of criminal justice and popular culture sunycrj@albnyvm1.bitnet or sunycrj@uacsc2.albany.edu managing editors: sean anderson and greg ungar editors journal of criminaljustice and popular culture, school of criminal justice, sunya 135 western avenue albany, ny 12222 internet: sa1171@albnyvm1.bitnet or gu8810@uacsc1.albany.edu list administrator seth rosner school of criminal justice, sunya sr2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or sr2602@thor.albany.edu 34) ------------------------------------------------------------call for papers: the linguistics of humor high quality papers are solicited for a symposium on the state of the art in the linguistic analysis of humor to be held at the forthcoming ishs '94, the annual meeting of the international society of humor studies in ithaca, ny (june 22-26, 1994). papers in all areas of linguistics dealing with theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of the study of humor, joking, laughter, etc., from the point of view of linguistics are invited for the first ever symposium on the linguistics of humor. send three copies of a one page (250 words max) abstract to salvatore attardo, youngstown state university, dept. of english, youngstown, oh, 44555-3415, usa. e-mail attardo@cc.ysu.edu. e-mail submissions (ascii text, tex/latex or binhexed macintosh msword) are encouraged. abstracts should state name, affiliation and address of the author(s) and state clearly the problem(s) addressed, the solution(s) provided, and the methodology adopted. an extra page for references, examples, etc. is allowed. references and citations should use the lsa or humor style sheets. deadline for abstracts: february 15, 1994. submitters will be notified of acceptance by march 20, 1994. authors should register for the ishs conference with m. a. rishel, writing program, 375 roy h. park school of communications ithaca college, ithaca, ny 14850. ph. (607) 274-3324, fax (607) 274-1664, e-mail rishel@ithaca.bitnet. if you have already submitted an abstract to m. a. rishel and wish to be considered for the symposium, submit the abstract to s. attardo with a cover letter clearly stating this fact. 35) ------------------------------------------------------------ conference announcement literary texts in an electronic age: scholarly implications and library services 31st annual clinic on library applications of data processing april 10-12, 1994 graduate school of library and information science university of illinois at urbana-champaign electronic technologies are not replacing the book so much as they are changing its form and its role in scholarship. rising interest in electronic texts is evident in the development of new computational approaches to the study of literature, the appearance of electronic text centers on university campuses, and an expanding publishing industry in electronic books. this conference will examine the role of electronic texts in the humanities and the implications of these technologies for libraries. conference speakers will discuss this latest development in the human pursuit of the literary arts from a variety of perspectives, including the production and acquisition of electronic texts, strategies for storage and dissemination, software for the retrieval and analysis of electronic texts, problems of bibliographic control and intellectual property, and publishing trends. offered in conjunction with the conference is an optional preconference workshop in the practical use of standard generalized markup language (sgml) in the organization of electronic texts for interchange and research. conducting the workshop will be c.m. sperberg-mcqueen, an editor of the recently released guidelines for text encoding and interchange, a textrepresentation standard based on sgml syntax. who should attend: this conference will be of interest to librarians, academic computing staff, publishers and distributors of electronic texts, and humanities scholars interested in the possibilities of electronic texts. program sunday, april 10 11am-5pm registration 1-4:30pm preconference workshop on using standard generalized markup language (sgml) c. m. sperberg-mcqueen editor, text encoding initiative university of illinois at chicago 5-6:30pm reception 6:30-7:30pm dinner 8pm keynote address (lincoln hall theater) authors and readers in an age of electronic texts jay david bolter professor school of literature, communication, & culture georgia institute of technology monday, april 11 8-9:30am electronic texts in the humanities: a coming of age susan hockey director center for electronic texts in the humanities rutgers and princeton universities the text encoding initiative: electronic text markup for research c. m. sperberg-mcqueen editor, text encoding initiative university of illinois at chicago 9:30-10am break 10-11:30am electronic texts and multimedia in academic libraries: a view from the front line anita lowry head, information arcade, main library university of iowa humanizing information technology: cultural evolution and the institutionalization of electronic text processing mark tyler day associate librarian indiana university 11:30am-1pm lunch (on your own) 1-2:30pm cohabiting with copyright in an electronic environment mary brandt jensen director, law library professor, school of law university of south dakota standards, interconnections, and the nonprofit domains michael jensen electronic media manager university of nebraska press 3-5pm software demonstrations 5-7pm dinner (on your own) 7-9pm software demonstrations tuesday, april 12 8-9:30am the feasibility of wide-area textual analysis systems in libraries: a practical analysis john price-wilkin information management coordinator alderman library, university of virginia the scholar and his library in the computer age james w. marchand professor department of germanic languages and literature university of illinois at urbana-champaign 9:30-10am break 10-11:30am the challenges of electronic texts in the library: bibliographic control and access rebecca guenther network development and marc standards office library of congress project gutenberg: trying to give away a trillion etexts by the end of 2001 michael s. hart, professor of electronic text executive director of project gutenberg etext illinois benedictine college 11:30am-1pm lunch (on your own) 1-2:30pm durkheim's imperative: the role of humanities faculty in the information technologies revolution robert a. jones professor, department of sociology university of illinois at urbana-champaign the materiality of the book: another turn of the screw terry belanger university professor, university of virginia general information location: except as noted, all conference events will take place in the illini union on the campus of the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, 1401 w. green st., urbana, illinois. registration and fees: the fee for the conference is $340 ($380 after march 11, 1994), which includes the sunday night dinner, refreshments, and a copy of the clinic proceedings. registration for the optional sgml workshop is $40. registration is limited, and early registration is recommended. a limited number of reduced-fee registrations are available for those who might otherwise be unable to attend; for consideration, submit a written request by march 11, 1994. transportation: champaign-urbana is served by twa, midway express, american eagle, and northwest commuter. amtrak service is available from chicago and points south. champaign is located 135 miles south of chicago on interstate routes 72, 74, and 57. accommodations: rooms have been allocated for participants at the hotels listed below. participants must make their own reservations, and should do so before march 9, 1994. please indicate that you are attending the library data processing conference. illini union university inn 1401 w. green st. 302 e. john st. urbana, il 61801 champaign, il 61820 (217) 333-1241 (217) 352-8132 single: $54 + tax single: $54 + tax double: $62 + tax double: $61 + tax continuing education units: participants will earn 1.1 ceu for attending this meeting. refunds: refunds will be made if you find that you cannot attend and you notify us in writing by march 16, 1994. you must cancel your own hotel reservations. if you would like more information about the clinic, please call (800) 982-0914 or (217) 333-2973, or send your question via electronic mail to dpc@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu. ----------------------registration form------------------------- literary texts in an electronic age: scholarly implications and library services 31st annual clinic on library applications of data processing april 10-12, 1994 graduate school of library and information science university of illinois at urbana-champaign registration form name ____________________________________________________________ title____________________________________________________________ organization name________________________________________________ business address_________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ phone number (___)_______________________________________________ email address____________________________________________________ registration fees: $340 ($380 after march 11) ________ $40 sgml workshop ________ total fees ________ method of payment: __check enclosed (make payable to gslis/university of illinois) __charge to credit card __visa __mastercard card #___________________________exp. date_______ signature________________________________________ any special needs (access, meals, etc.)?_________________________ _________________________________________________________________ if there are issues you are especially interested in, or if you have particular questions about the topics that will be addressed at this conference, please write them below. we will pass them along to the speakers. _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ you may register by mail by sending this form to the address below, by phone (217-333-2973 or 800-982-0914), by fax (217-244-3302), or by electronic mail (dpc@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu). university of illinois at urbana-champaign graduate school of library and information science library and information science building 501 e. daniel st. champaign, illinois 61820-6212 36) ------------------------------------------------------------ call for papers, panels, and presentations national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure on october 14th, 15th and 16th, the center for art research in boston will sponsor a national symposium on proposed arts and humanities policies for the national information infrastructure. participants will explore the impact of the clinton administration's agenda for action and proposed nii legislation on the future of the arts and the humanities in 21st century america. the symposium will bring together government officials, academics, artists, writers, representatives of arts and cultural institutions and organizations, and other concerned individuals from many disciplines and areas of interest to discuss specific issues of policy which will effect the cultural life of *all* americans during the coming decades. to participate, submit a 250-word abstract of your proposal for a paper, panel-discussion or presentation, accompanied by a one-page vitae, by march 15, 1994. special consideration will be given to those efforts that take a critical perspective of the issues, and are concerned with offering specific alternatives to current administration and congressional agendas. the proceedings of the symposium will be video-taped, and papers and panels will be published on cd-rom. for further information, reply to: jaroslav@artdata.win.net via return e-mail. thank you, jay jaroslav --jay jaroslav, director jaroslav@artdata.win.net center for art research 241 a street boston, ma voice: (617) 451-8030 02210-1302 usa fax: (617) 451-1196 37) ------------------------------------------------------------************************************* announcement and call for submissions _postmodern culture_ ************************************* _postmodern culture_ a suny press series series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-becompleted north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 38) -----------------------------------------------------------+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ call for papers _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ (issn: 1039-723x). _psyche_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. _psyche_ publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. _psyche_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. _psyche_ also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version. types of articles: the journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff. research articles reporting original research by author(s). articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. peer reviewed. survey articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. these may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. more ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed. discussion notes critiques of previous research. peer reviewed. tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists. letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in _psyche_. screened by editorial staff. abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. book reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks. announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc. advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc. notes for authors unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of _psyche_, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to _psyche_ the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge _psyche_ as the original source of publication. subscriptions subscriptions to the electronic version of _psyche_ may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet 39) ------------------------------------------------------------******************************************************* * * * research on virtual relationships * * * * have you had an interesting virtual relationship * * on electronic networks? a research team wants * * your story. material acknowledged and terms * * respected. both research articles and a * * general press (trade) book planned. * * * * mail to either address * * usa: canada: * * -or * * virtual, palabras * * p.o. box 46, box 175, stn. e * * boulder creek, toronto, ontario * * california 95006 canada m6h 4e1 * * * * e-mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca * * fax: (to canada): (416) 736-5986 * * -> please re-post to relevant network sites < * * ( a distributed knowledge project undertaking ) * ******************************************************* 40) ------------------------------------------------------------screensites 94 april 22nd and 23rd, 1994 the graduate program in communications mcgill university montreal, quebec, canada call for abstracts screensites 94 is a conference organized by the students of the graduate program in communications, mcgill university. papers, presentations, panel discussions, and informal gatherings will discuss the screen as sites of knowledge, control, culture, aesthetics, interaction, power and experience. this conference will give participants a chance to present their ongoing research to an audience from a wide variety of disciplines and fields. the "screen" occupies an increasingly significant position in 20th century culture. new cultural sites and structuring metaphors inevitably accompany screen-dependent media such as film, television, virtual reality, and computers. these phenomena deserve continued critical attention. this conference seeks submissions that will enhance our understanding of the screen-its lure, its formal properties, its varied uses, its economy, and its ubiquity. should metaphors of sight be the favored analytical preoccupation when describing the screen and the fixation of its viewers, or would metaphors of "site" hold greater promise? do screens have distinct, cross-contextual implications or are "effects" more usefully understood as they are determined and/or discovered by users, producers, viewers or spectators? how might the contributions of communication studies, film theory, cultural studies, queer studies, and performance theory be helpful in elaborating the utility of screenor nonscreen-specific modes of analysis? papers addressing issues of class, race, ethnicity, taste and proclivity, gender and orientation are encouraged along with interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical approaches. screensites 94 will be held at the graduate program in communications building which is located on the main campus of mcgill university in the centre of downtown montreal. for more information please call 514/398-7667 or make contact by e-mail: cywb@musica.mcgill.ca. send abstract or paper submission on disk or hard copy, by mail or fax to: screensites 94 graduate program in communications mcgill university 3465, rue peel montreal, quebec h3a 1w7 tel.: 514/398-7667 or 514/398-4110 fax.: 514/398-4934 electronic mail: cywb@musica.mcgill.ca submission deadline: 28 february 1994 fin la meme-chose en francais (sans accents): a l'ecran 94invitation a soumettre des projects de conferences a l'ecran est un colloque organise par les etudiant-es du program d'etudes superieures en communications de l'universite mcgill. conferences, sessions plenieres, et rencontres informelles seront l'occasion de se concentrer sur l'ecran, et sur l'ecran en tant que source d'information, de controle, de culture, d'esthetique, de societe, de pouvoir et d'experience. ce colloque donnera l'occcasion aux participant-e-s de presenter leurs recherches a un public provenant d'un grand nombre de disciplines au program d'etudes superieures en communications. l'ecran occupe une position importante dans la culture du vingtieme siecle. de nouveaux sites culturels et de nouvelles metaphores accompagnent inevitablement les media qui dependent de l'ecran: le cinema, la television, la realite virtuelle et les ordinateurs. ce colloque sollicite des soumissions que contribueront a notre comprehension de l'ecranq sa predominance, son attrait, ses proprietes et ses divers usages. les systemes d'echanges symboliques que determinent la valeur culturelle et economique sont aussi dignes d'interet. par exemple, les metaphores visuelles devraientelles etre au centre de nos preoccupations lorsqu'on s'interesse a l'ecran et a ses publics, ou devrait-on plutot utiliser a des metaphores de lieux? les ecrans ont-ils des implications concretes qui persistent a travers les contextes, ou doit-on s'attarder aux effets qui sont determines et/ou decouvents per les utilisateurs, les productrices, ou les spectateurs? quelles sont les contributions des domaines des communications, des etudes du cinema, des etudes culturelles, des points de vue "marginaux", des theories de la performance face a ces questions? les conferences traitant des questions de classe, de race, d'ethnicite, de genres et d'orientation sont encouragees, de meme que les approches interdisciplinaires et multi-theoriques. le program d'etudes superieures en communications est situe sur le campus de mcgill, au centreville de montreal. pour plus d'information, veuillez composer le (514) 398.76.67 ou communiquer per courrier electronique a l'adresse suivante: cywb@musica.mcgill.ca 41) ------------------------------------------------------------_femisa_ femisa@mach1.wlu.ca _femisa_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, _femisa_ was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the _international studies association_ keep in touch. more generally, i hope that _femisa_ can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the _international studies association_. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg 42) ------------------------------------------------------------_holocaus: holocaust list_ holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need and internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu: sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com the holocaus policies are: 1. the coverage of the list will include the holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-semitism, and jewish history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes in the history of ww2, germany, and international diplomacy. 2. we are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the holocaust. in 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the us and canada teaching courses on the holocaust (154 in history departments, 67 in religion, and 46 in literature). an even larger number of professors teach units on the holocaust in courses on jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and world war ii (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. most of these professors own pc's, but do not use them for e-mail. we hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. _holocaus_ will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course. 3. h-net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide _holocaus_ policy and to help stimulate contributions. 4. _holocaus_ is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history. the moderator will solicit postings (by e mail, phone and even by us mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. the moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). it may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. anyone with suggestions about what _holocaus_ can and might do is invited to send in the ideas. 5. the tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. _holocaus_ is affiliated with the _international history network_. 6. _holocaus_ is a part of h-net, a project run by computer oriented historians at the u of illinois. we see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. our first list on urban history, _h urban@uicvm_, recently started up with wendy plotkin as moderator. _h-women_ is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like ethnic, labor, and us south. we are helping our campus jewish studies program set up _jstudy_ (restricted to the u of illinois chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of _h jewish_, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on jewish history. if you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write richard jensen, for we are now (as of late april) in a critical planning stage. 7. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu 43) ------------------------------------------------------------newjour-l@e-math.ams.org newjour-l aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project. first: newjour-l is the place to *announce* your own (or to forward information about others') newly planned, newly issued, or revised *electronic networked* journal or newsletter. it is specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of publication development and availability. it is also the place to announce availability of paper journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic networks. scholarly discussion lists *which regularly and continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or preprints* may also be reported, for those journal-like sections. we hope that those who see announcements on bitnet, internet, usenet or other media will forward them to newjour-l, but this does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number of duplicate messages. therefore, newjour-l is filtered through a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication. it does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by other lists. for example, sources like new-list describe new discussion lists; arachnet deals with social and cultural issues of e-publishing; vpiej-l handles many matters related to electronic publishing of journals. serialst discusses the technical aspects of all kinds of serials. you should continue to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to them. second: newjour-l represents an identification and road-mapping project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by michael strangelove, university of ottawa. newjour-l will expand and continue that work. as new publications are reported, a newjour-l support group will develop the following services -planning is underway & we ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us know: -a worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new e-publication for completion. this will provide detailed descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access characteristics. -an original cataloguing record will be created. -the fully catalogued title will be reported to national utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or searchers. -the records will feed a directory and database of these titles. not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. we thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable. subscribing: to subscribe, send a message to: listserv@e-math.ams.org leave the subject line blank. in the body, type: subscribe newjour-l firstname lastname you will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list. to drop out or postpone, use the standard listserv (internet) directions. acknowledgment: for their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank: michael strangelove, university of ottawa, advisor david rodgers, american mathematical society, systems & network support edward gaynor, university of virginia library, original cataloguing development john price-wilkin, university of virginia library, systems & network support birdie maclennan, university of vermont library, cataloguing and indexing development diane kovacs, kent state university library, advisor we anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. this project is co-ordinated through: the association of research libraries office of scientific & academic publishing 21 dupont circle, suite 800 washington, dc 20036 e-mail: osap@cni.org (ann okerson) 44) -----------------------------------------------------------popcult@camosun.bc.ca popular culture the popcult list is now in place. it is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. the list will not be moderated. material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged. to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to: mailserv@camosun.bc.ca there should not be anything in the 'subject:' line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself. some keywords are: subscribe popcult help lists send/list popcult unsubscribe popcult it is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. do not include your name after subscribe popcult. in some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. i recommend, to start, that you put subscribe on one line, and help on the next line. that will give you a full listing of available commands. to send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to: popcult@camosun.bc.ca owner: peter montgomery montgomery@camosun.bc.ca professor dept of english ph (604) 370-3342 (o) camosun college (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 foul bay road victoria, bc off. paul bldg 326 canada v8p 5j2 45) ------------------------------------------------------------humanities consultant job posting: princeton university the position of humanities computing consultant at princeton university is part of a dynamic and forward-looking team of instructional and media specialists whose mission is to support teaching and learning. please submit resumes to the address below -e-mail submissions are particularly welcome. apply promptly, as we would like to fill the position immediately. you may also send questions about the position directly to me: balestri@phoenix.princeton.edu. diane balestri manager, instructional and media services princeton university search reopened humanities consultant information services within cit at princeton university seeks a consultant to support faculty members and students in humanities disciplines who use information technologies in teaching and research. the consultant will join the instructional and media services group. responsibilities include: proactive consulting with humanities departments and faculty about instructional and research needs; identifying, installing, testing, and documenting software tools and applications; supporting faculty and students in software use. in addition, the consultant will work closely with the language laboratory coordinator on acquisition, installation, and use of software and multimedia applications for language instruction. the consultant will provide expertise in text data bases and text analysis for faculty in all disciplines and expertise in word processing and printing with non-roman characters and fonts. qualifications: minimally, a master's degree in a humanities discipline. excellent knowledge of one or more foreign languages required. strong background (at least two years) supporting computer users in one or more of the humanities disciplines taught at princeton. knowledge of both instructional and research applications is required, as is the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to move easily among a variety of hardware platforms, including intel-based and macintosh systems. must enjoy outreach to faculty in humanities disciplines and must possess superior oral and written communications skills. application deadline: february 10, 1994. send resume and letter of application to bruce finnie, computing and information technology, 87 prospect avenue, princeton university, princeton nj 08544; 609-258-3943 (fax) ; finnie@pucc.princeton.edu (e-mail). princeton university is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. 46) ------------------------------------------------------------ neh deadlines +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ below is a full list of application deadlines for neh programs, plus contact numbers for individual programs. all telephone numbers are in area code 202. to receive guidelines for any neh program, contact the office of publications and public affairs at (202) 606-8438. guidelines are normally available at least two months in advance of application deadlines. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ division of education programs james c. herbert, director (606-8373) program / contact deadline projects beginning higher education in the humanities (lyn maxwell white; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + institutes for college & university faculty (barbara ashbrook; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 summer 1995 + science & humanities education (susan greenstein; 606-8380) 15 march 1994 october 1994 + core curriculum projects (fred winter; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + two-year colleges (judith jeffrey howard; 606-8380) 1 april 1994 october 1994 + challenge grants (thomas adams; 606-8380) 1 may 1994 december 1994 elementary & secondary education in the humanities (f. bruce robinson; 606-8377) 15 march 1994 december 1994 + teacher-scholar program (annette palmer; 606-8377) 1 may 1994 september 1995 special opportunity in foreign language education + higher education (lyn maxwell white; 606-8380) 15 march 1994 october 1994 + elementary & secondary education (f. bruce robinson; 606-8377) 15 march 1994 october 1994 division of fellowships & seminars marjorie a. berlincourt, director (606-8458) program / contact deadline projects beginning fellowships for university teachers (maben d. herring; 606-8466) 1 may 1994 1 january 1995 fellowships for college teachers & independent scholars (joseph b. neville; 606-8466) 1 may 1994 1 january 1995 summer stipends (thomas o'brien; 606-8466) 1 october 1994 1 may 1995 faculty graduate study program for hbcus (maben d. herring; 606-8466) 15 march 1994 1 september 1995 younger scholars program (leon bramson; 606-8463) 1 november 1994 1 may 1995 dissertation grants (kathleen mitchell; 606-8463) 15 november 1994 1 september 1995 study grants for college & university teachers (clayton lewis; 606-8463) 15 august 1994 1 may 1995 summer seminars for college teachers (joel schwartz; 606-8463) + participants 1 march 1994 summer 1994 + directors 1 march 1994 summer 1995 summer seminars for school teachers (michael hall; 606-8463) + participants 1 march 1994 summer 1994 + directors 1 april 1994 summer 1995 division of preservation & access george f. farr, jr., director (606-8570) program / contact deadline projects beginning library & archival research projects (vanessa piala/charles kolb; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 january 1995 library & archival preservation/access projects (karen jefferson/barbara paulson; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 january 1995 national heritage preservation program (richard rose/laura word; 606-8570) 1 november 1994 july 1995 u. s. newspaper program (jeffrey field; 606-8570) 1 june 1994 july 1995 division of public programs marsha semmel, acting director (606-8267) program / contact deadline projects beginning humanities projects in media (james dougherty; 606-8278) 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 humanities projects in museums & historical organizations (fredric miller; 606-8284) 3 june 1994 1 january 1995 public humanities projects (wilsonia cherry; 606-8271) 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 humanities projects in libraries (thomas phelps; 606-8271) + planning 4 february 1994 1 july 1994 + implementation 11 march 1994 1 october 1994 challenge grants (abbie cutter; 606-8361) 1 may 1994 december 1994 division of research programs guinevere l. griest, director (606-8200) program / contact deadline projects beginning scholarly publications (margot backas; 606-8207) + editions (douglas arnold; 606-8207) 1 june 1994 1 april 1995 + translations (helen aguerra; 606-8207) 1 june 1994 1 april 1995 + subventions (606-8207) 15 march 1994 1 october 1994 reference materials (jane rosenberg; 606-8358) + tools (martha b. chomiak; 606-8358) 1 september 1994 1 july 1995 + guides (michael poliakoff; 606-8358) 1 september 1994 1 july 1995 challenge grants (bonnie gould; 606-8358) 1 may 1994 december 1994 interpretive research programs (george lucas; 606-8210) + collaborative projects (donald c. mell; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 july 1995 + archaeology projects (bonnie magness-gardiner; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 april 1995 + humanities, science, and technology (daniel jones; 606-8210) 15 october 1994 1 july 1995 + conferences (david coder; 606-8210) 15 january 1994 1 october 1994 centers & international research organizations (christine kalke; 606-8210) + centers for advanced study 1 october 1994 1 july 1995 + international research 1 april 1994 1 january 1995 division of state programs carole watson, director (606-8254) each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines. addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the neh division of state programs. challenge grants program applications are submitted through the divisions of education, research, and public programs. deadline is 1 may 1994 for projects beginning december 1994. 47) ------------------------------------------------------------_gopheur litteratures_ --> announcing the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal. address: gopher.litteratures.umontreal.ca 7070 or through the university of montreal main gopher: address: gopher.umontreal.ca gopher servers are sprouting like mushrooms these days. not only universities have gopher servers, but also departments now. they can be very useful tools to locate information and students here are very fond of them. they are also the first step towards much more sophisticated modes of accessing collections of research and bibliographic data, e-texts, etc... the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal (udm) just happens to be the first gopher dedicated to teaching, research and publications on french literature, quebecois literature and francophone literatures, and also the first gopher to do so in french, albeit without the accents for the moment. (in the future we will offer the choice between ascii and iso-latin, as is currently being done on others gophers in the province of quebec). the "gopheur litteratures" is **in construction**. this means it will be evolving. items on the main menu indicate a program of research conducted at the department of etudes francaises. the goal of the gopher is to offer electronic documentation on the departement d'etudes francaises, and to establish a resource center for information, tools, links, documents, local and international, to be used by the computing community of french scholars and students. all comments and suggestions of sites of interest to french studies should be sent to: gophlitt@ere.umontreal.ca christian allegre allegre@ere.umontreal.ca universite de montreal departement d'etudes francaises � -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------bell, 'response to jonathan beller's essay, "cinema: capital of the twentieth century"', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-bell-response.txt archive pmc-list, file bell.994. part 1/1, total size 17780 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- response to jonathan beller's essay, "cinema: capital of the twentieth century" by jeff bell dept. of history and government southeastern louisiana university, hammond fhg$2395@altair.selu.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by jeff bell, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] jonathan beller has set forth an interesting and provocative account of the relationship between cinema and what he takes to be the condition for the possibility of cinema--i.e., capital. beller draws upon many resources to support this thesis, from the film _barton fink_ to the work of gilles deleuze, and generally the arguments are well thought out and thought-provoking. in particular, beller argues, and rightly i believe, that with cinema capital extends its domain onto and into the conscious attention of individuals, and with this a new form of exploitation is made possible. as beller puts it, capital cinema can be used to tap "the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value" (par. 7). or again, "some people make a profit from other people's looking" (par. 10). the basic argument is marxist, yet beller supplements it by stressing the significance of human attention as a form of labor, a labor that is productive of value, and hence productive of surplus value when exploited under capitalism. [2] in support of this basic argument, beller brings in an enlightening discussion of the transition from aura (following walter benjamin) to simulacra. in both cases human attention constitutes value. in looking at a work of art, for example, there is what one actually sees, and there is the fact that many others have seen this same thing. the gap between what one sees and the circulation of this artwork among many other gazes defines, for beller, the "aura" of this work, an aura which gives value to the work. a simulacrum, on the other hand, results when "visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation" (par. 23), and this liquidation is the result of a speeding up of the circulation of these visual objects. value in this case is nothing more than the circulation of the object among many gazes, and thus value is cut free from anything having to do with the object itself. in the words of a recent television commercial, "image is everything!" [3] i do not have much to add to beller's fine discussion of these issues, and for the most part i agree with what he says. what i want to respond to is beller's use of deleuze's _cinema_ books to support his arguments and his effort, through a critique of this work, to distance himself from deleuze. more precisely, i want to respond to beller's three chief criticisms of deleuze's theory of cinema. the first and most important criticism is that deleuze, according to beller, ignores and "refuses simply to think" the fact that cinema is a capitalist industry. a second and related criticism is that deleuze only discusses the masterpieces of cinema while ignoring everything else. and finally, beller claims that deleuze's "aestheticizing thought" overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. by responding to these charges on behalf of deleuze, i hope to clarify some of the central issues that are at stake in beller's work and contribute to the important discussion which this work has begun. [4] although deleuze, according to beller, refuses "to think political economy," he does flirt with it. such flirtation becomes clear when deleuze cites fellini: "when there is no money left, the film will be finished." beller finds in fellini's remark, and in deleuze's treatment of it, evidence for the claim that cinema is always "in one way or another a film about the film's economic conditions of possibility" (par. 38). this is only a flirtation, however, for beller believes deleuze says "disappointingly little" about cinema's own conditions of possibility--i.e., capital. deleuze may not say much about the economic conditions of possibility in his _cinema_ books, and perhaps he is to be faulted for this, but much is said on these matters in deleuze and guattari's book _anti-oedipus_. central among their claims in this book is that capitalism is a functioning assemblage of processes, interactions, codings and overcodings; however, the %raison d'etre% of capitalism is the decoding of flows. in other words, the pursuit of surplus value hinges upon creating new markets, new values, needs, etc. (i.e., the "new and improved" syndrome of capitalism); and yet to do this requires decoding or deterritorializing existing markets, existing values, needs, etc. to return to beller's example discussed above, the transition from aura to simulacra entails the decoding of value, a value which is tied to the "traditional contents" of art (i.e., qualities of the visual art object itself), so that new values and needs can be created--i.e., value as tied only to the circulation of the object among many observers. this example betrays the very process of capitalism for deleuze and guattari, and for that reason they would agree with beller's analysis. but capitalism, and this is the crucial point, must continually avoid complete deterritorialization, complete decoding; in short, it must avoid schizophrenia. consequently, every process of decoding and deterritorialization entails a simultaneous recoding and reterritorialization. without this capitalism could not function. on this point, deleuze and guattari are quite explicit: "one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale."^1^ thus, although simulacra result from a decoding of aura, simulacra are nevertheless set forth as new values, as new standards and codes. [5] with this in mind we can see that yes, for deleuze and guattari that capitalism as decoding and deterritorializing process (or what deleuze refers to in the _cinema_ books and elsewhere as the "genetic," "differentiating" element) is the condition of possibility for cinema. however, this unthought and unthinkable differentiating condition is also the exterior limit of capitalism and cinema, the limit which must be pushed back. consequently, capitalism and cinema find themselves recoded and reterritorialized upon existing values, existing standards, existing relative limits. on this basis we can understand deleuze's treatment of fellini's statement. just as capitalism itself requires the reterritorialization of its deterritorializaing tendencies, so too does cinema's deterritorializing process require reterritorialization, and it is precisely money which fulfills this role and which fellini laments. the deterritorialization of a fellini film does not go unchecked, but is reterritorialized by the financial backers of the film with their budgetary constraints. there is thus a double role of money which needs to be stressed here, for although deleuze and guattari emphasize the deterritorializing aspects of money and capital, they also point out the reterritorializing and stratifying processes associated with money, and it is the latter process which deleuze is referring to when he claims that "cinema as art lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. this conspiracy is that of money."^2^ put more simply, cinema as art, as a process which creates new values, new ways of looking at the world, etc.; this cinema confronts the demands of financial backers who want to see a profit from a film, who don't want something new so much as something that sells. and we need not look far in the history of film to find a successful film that is widely imitated with the hopes of "cashing in" on its success. this is the reterritorializing conspiracy of money, a conspiracy filmmakers who are not in the "mainstream" constantly confront (such as fellini, orson welles, antonioni, etc.) [6] this brings me to the second of beller's criticisms--i.e., deleuze's emphasis upon the masterpieces of cinema at the expense of everything else. for beller, recognizing that human attention is productive of value leaves open the possibility that "all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back" (par. 58). they could be brought back because human attention, even of the non-masterpiece variety, is assumed to be capable of creating new ways of seeing, valuing, etc.. deleuze's point is not that new values are produced only within the work of a few "recognized" masters; rather, his point is very nietzschean in that he claims that all new values have been produced and created away from the marketplace. from what we have said above, we can see that this does not mean that new values, in particular new values associated with cinema, must be produced in isolation from capital and capitalism, but only that these values always entail a process of deterritorialization, and this occurs apart from, and at odds with, the reterritorializing conspiracy of capital and capitalism. when something new is said, or when a film shows us a different way of looking and feeling, this happens, for deleuze, because of a deterritorialization of existing values and codes; but these films are always exceptional for deleuze, because for the most part films are made on the basis of the security of what is already known to sell (i.e., money as reterritorializing). that this tendency is especially so with respect to cinema as art, in contrast to the many other arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, poetry, etc.), should be obvious: i.e., it takes a large capital investment simply to make a film. investors are subsequently more apt to back the film which has the greater chance of returning their initial investment with a profit. to capitalize on cinema, therefore, takes roughly one of two tracks: either the financial backers act on the basis of what is already known about public taste, etc., in order to decide which project will be profitable; or they risk losing their investment by supporting a project that is novel and yet risks not being accepted. it should be clear that the first track is the more common, and yet, and this is deleuze's point, masterpieces always result from the second approach. this is not to say that all films made from this second approach are masterpieces; to the contrary, and again deleuze is explicit on this point, if a masterpiece truly says something new it will be at odds with the reterritorializing tendencies of capital, but it does not follow from this that every film that is at odds with these tendencies does say something new. [7] in reference to literature, though we could apply this to cinema just as easily, deleuze makes some comments which get to the heart of beller's concerns as well as his difficulties with some of what deleuze is arguing. in an article titled "mediators" in his book _pourparlers_, and in a section of this article titled "the conspiracy of imitators" (which should recall the conspiracy with which cinema as art is confronted, the conspiracy beller claims is discussed "disappointingly little"), deleuze claims that "fast turnover [of books, but equally films] necessarily means selling people what they expect: even what's "daring," "scandalous," strange and so on falls into the market's predictable forms. the conditions for literary creation, which emerge only unpredictably, with a slow turnover and progressive recognition, are fragile."^3^ what the market is interested in, or what capital as reterritorializing is interested in, is what is predictable; and it is precisely this conspiracy of imitators which authors and filmmakers, if they are interested in creating something new (i.e., in deterritorializing predictable forms and codes), run up against. [8] this brings us finally to beller's final criticism that deleuze's "aestheticizing thought" overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. on the one hand, beller is certainly correct to make this claim. the time-image does indeed entail the possibility of leading to extinction. deleuze often recognized this possibility, however, and in _thousand plateaus_ for example he pointed out the dangers of making one's self a body without organs. the danger is that to make one's self a body without organs one must deterritorialize themselves, but if this deterritorialization goes too far this could lead to our self-destruction and extinction. in a reference to carlos castaneda's distinction between the nagual and tonal, which corresponds roughly with the distinction between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they claim that "the important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. . . . you have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual."^4^ in other words, to deterritorialize, and this is just what deleuze believes the time-image does, is also to risk deterritorializing too much, with the result being the extinction and destruction of self with which beller was concerned. [9] the time-image, or deterritorialization, if it can avoid the black hole of self-annhilation by holding on to some reterritorialization, can then create something new, can produce new values. to create a new way of seeing the world with cinema is therefore a very risky affair. one risks either succumbing to the conspiracy of imitators who will only financially back a film which imitates a given formula for success; or one risks deterritorializing given values and standards too much with the result that the film, and consciousness which was beller's concern, collapses into the black hole of self-destruction and extinction. deleuze was quite aware of both dangers and yet argues that if we are going to change the way things are we must face these dangers nonetheless. deleuze would agree wholeheartedly with beller's following claim: "the labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. it is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else" (par. 56). deleuze's thought and work is motivated by just this type of revolutionary concern; however, deleuze cites the dangers inherent in revolutionary activity. every revolution, whether in politics, economics, or cinema, risks collapsing into the stratifying stranglehold of tyranny and fascism, the conspiracy of imitators; or it risks exploding into the chaos of anarchy and self-destruction. deleuze would agree with beller's call for revolutionary change, but would caution us to beware of its dangers. notes: ^1^ _anti-oedipus_. translated by robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lane (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983), 246. ^2^ _cinema 2_. translated by hugh tomlinson and robert galeta (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1989), 77. ^3^ _pourparlers_ (paris: les editions de minuit, 1990), 175. translation mine. ^4^ _thousand plateaus_. translated by brian massumi (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987), 162. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------chapman, 'male pro-feminism and the masculinist gigantism of _gravity's rainbow_', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-chapman-male.txt archive pmc-list, file chapman.596. part 1/1, total size 60569 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- male pro-feminism and the masculinist gigantism of _gravity's rainbow_ by wes chapman illinois wesleyan university wchapman@titan.iwu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by wes chapman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the title of tania modleski's _feminism without women_ refers, modleski explains, to a confluence of two political/intellectual trends: the subsumption of feminism within a "more comprehensive" field of gender studies, accompanied by the rise of a "male feminist perspective that excludes women," and the dominance within feminist thought of an "anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,' however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed" (14-15). the two trends are linked, modleski argues, because "the rise of gender studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the tendendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of identity and the subject" (15). these trends are troubling for modleski because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a "new phase" in feminism but rather feminism's "phase-out" (5). [2] my concern in this essay is with male-authored work on gender of the type identified by modleski, and in particular with its intersections with anti-essentialism (which, for the purposes of this essay, i will define broadly as the belief that gender is socially constructed). although not all male-authored gender criticism by men is radically anti-essentialist^1^, i believe that the confluence between anti-essentialism and male-authored work on gender exceeds mere theoretical justification. anti-essentialism is both symptom and cause of a deep anxiety which i take to underlie much gender criticism written by men today, an anxiety about being a male subject in a society in which male subjectivity has been identified as a problem. on the one hand, an awareness of the social construction of the self can lead to a heightened anxiety in men about gender, as it implies an awareness of the complicity of male subjectivity with social structures which are oppressive to women. on the other hand, male anxiety about gender can encourage an anti-essentialist viewpoint, both because anti-essentialism appears to offers hope that positive changes in gender identity are possible and because anti-essentialism can diffuse personal responsibility by shifting the object of critique from the self to social codes which have "always already" constructed the self. [3] in speaking in this way about "men," "male subjectivity," and the like, i am not at all presupposing that all men in contemporary culture are alike. i do think that the anxiety i am identifying is widespread, but it is not universal, and even for those men who feel such anxiety there are many ways to respond, including the direct backlash against feminism identified by susan faludi and others. my interest in this essay lies with a fairly narrow spectrum of men: those men who accept to some degree the charge that male subjectivity is a political problem of some kind -male anti-masculinists, for lack of a better term, since not all can be considered pro-feminist.^2^ i wish to explore the relationship between anti-masculinism and anti-essentialism in male authors and to determine whether anti-essentialism is a viable political strategy for male anti-masculinists. to this end i shall examine a text by a male writer, _gravity's rainbow_ by thomas pynchon, in which the relationship between an anxiety about gender and a anti-essentialist view of the self is particularly complex and revealing.^3^ i shall argue that, just as modleski suggests, anti-essentialism in the novel does indeed serve to decenter women's perspectives, and that, while anti-essentialism has been and still is an important part of pro-feminist men's understanding of their gender identities, it is not a sufficient base for a politics which is not merely anti-masculinist but pro-feminist. [4] late in _gravity's rainbow_, the narrator describes a culvert in the middle of a narrow road. there is a variety of graffiti in it from those who have taken shelter there, including a drawing of a man looking closely at a flower. in the distance, or smaller, appears to be a woman, approaching. or some kind of elf, or something. the man isn't looking at her (or it). in the middle distance are haystacks. the flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl. there is a luminary looking down from the sky, a face on it totally at peace, like the buddha's. underneath, someone else has written, in english: %good drawing! finish!% and underneath that, in another hand, %it is finished, you nit. and so are you.% (gr 733)^4^ like everything else in _gravity's rainbow_, the drawing resists rigid interpretation. the culvert where the drawing is found is the place where geli tripping will find tchitcherine and turn him away from his obsessive quest to kill his half-brother enzian; we could take the drawing as a foreshadowing of this event. in this interpretation, the man would be tchitcherine, the flower would be enzian (%enzian% is the german word, after all, for gentian-flower), and the elf-woman would be geli, approaching to work her magic. if this interpretation is correct, then the drawing is a powerful symbol of the possibility for good in pynchon's universe, for geli's diversion of tchitcherine is an important instance in the book where the power of love triumphs over a character's obsession with destruction. [5] but there are too many ominous signs in this drawing to be so hastily optimistic. indeed, the drawing can be seen as an icon of the modern state as pynchon sees it, where sexuality is brought into the service of a routinized, militaristic state. if the flower suggests the enzian or gentian flower, then the man's intense attention to it is an ominous sign, for although the character of enzian is presented sympathetically in the novel, his name was given to him by blicero, the sadistic captain in love with death, after "rilke's mountainside gentian of nordic colors, brought down like a pure word to the valleys" (gr 101-2). in rilke's ninth duino elegy, the gentian is that which partakes of both the permanent transcendent world which continues beyond death and the physical earth; it is the "pure word" which is physical reality transformed within the human spirit (69). blicero's version of rilke is more frankly sinister: he yearns to "leave this cycle of infection and death" by transforming the life which surrounds him into a "new deathkingdom" -the military industrial technocracy which produces and fires the rocket (gr 723-4). as khachig tololyan points out, too, *enzian* was the name of an anti-aircraft rocket which german military scientists worked on but did not complete before the war ended (41). the flower, then, is an emblem of the routinized, labyrinthine "structures favoring death" that the novel protests, of which blicero is first patriarch. [6] the buddha figure in the sky, too, is an ill omen within the novel's world. earlier in the novel slothrop sees some figures in the sky, "hundreds of miles tall," which stand impassive like the buddha^5^; these are quickly associated with the angel that the narrator describes as standing over lubeck on the palm sunday raid, one of the massive bombing raids on germany which prompted the germans to retaliate with the v-1 (214-215). this raid is figured as a scene of willing submission to sexual violence: "sending the raf to make a terror raid against civilian lubeck," says the narrator, "was the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the a4s" (215). the luminary smiling so benevolently upon this scene, then, is one of the malignant cosmic entities in the novel which look on with indifference as human energies are brought into the service of death. [7] the buddha has other disturbing connotations within the iconology of the novel as well: the amoral unification of subject and object which is the aim of zen buddhism becomes a metaphor for submission to the all-subsuming technology of the rocket. when a problem arises in the design of the rocket, fahringer, one of the technicians at peenemunde, takes his zen bow into the woods to practice drawing and loosing. the rocket for this fahringer was a fat japanese arrow. it was necessary in some way to become one with rocket, trajectory, and target -"not to will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of the firer. the act is undivided. you are both aggressor and victim . . ." (gr 403) if human beings have stepped out of the role of firer, then the rocket has begun to fire itself, according to its own needs; technocracy has grown so far out of control that it no longer seems to serve human motives at all. the buddha in the culvert scene thus again suggests the surrender of the personal and human to the technocracy, to blicero's "structures favoring death." [8] finally, the caption of the drawing also suggests this movement towards death. finish! urges the first hand. but the desire to finish, to close down, is shown in the novel to lead to determinism or death: pointsman's obsession with the ultimate mechanical explanation and its determinism are a way of finishing the process of understanding; blicero's "mission to promote death" is an attempt to be finished with death by somehow transcending it. the second writer acknowledges this: "%it is finished . . . and so are you%." [9] the political critique of this passage has two objects. insofar as the flower is associated with blicero and the rocket, the passage is a critique of a technology of war which is so far out of control that it seems to be serving purposes of its own, and of the routinization of society which makes that technology possible. but it is also a critique -and this is my main concern here -of the masculinist patterns of thinking which provide such a system its driving force. if, as tchitcherine suggests, the great problem of the state is to "get other people to die for you" (gr 701), then one effective way to accomplish this is to sexualize the machinery of death. the state is therefore dependent on a masculinist coding of sexuality such that all its citizens will respond sexually to a scenario of dominance and submission. hence the grotesque eroticism of the rocket: "fifty feet high, trembling . . . and then the fantastic, virile roar . . . cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky . . . oh, so phallic" says thanatz (gr 465). paradoxically, this emblem of sexual violence and death promises a kind of eternal life, by transforming (in good rilkean fashion) nature, where death and decay are the normal course of things, into something not in nature's sphere. this transformation is also figured as sexual conquest: "beyond simple steel erection, the rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained mother nature . . ." (gr 324). [10] one of the mechanisms by which the system assures a sexual response to the rocket is pornography. in the culvert scene, the flower, shaped like a young girl's genitals, is an icon of pornography, and thus the deflection of sexuality from human partner to an economy of objectified images. the man in the drawing is oblivious to the woman in the background; he is wholly absorbed in the sexual image of the flower. the state is dependent upon this deflection of sexuality; "an army of lovers can be beaten," run the slogans on the walls in the zone (gr 155). to love is to want to live, and to care for others; neither emotion is useful to the state, the great need of which has "always been getting other people to die for you." pornography is one of the war's diversionary tactics, a means of drawing sexuality into its own service. as vanya says of the slogan an army of lovers can be beaten, it's true . . . look at the forms of capitalist expression. pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction -ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer -all these novels, these films and these songs that they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that absolute comfort. . . . the self-induced orgasm. (gr 155) the masturbator, physical or emotional, is the ideal citizen: isolated from others by the steady stream of images which seems to be available for every need - not only sexual needs, but spiritual ("pornographies of christian love"), aesthetic ("pornographies of sunsets"), and intellectual ("ah, that sigh when we guess the murderer") -he or she is unlikely to form the bonds with other people which threaten the effectiveness of the "structures favoring death" by affirming the value of life. [11] pornography, then, is for pynchon a means by which the state wields power over its citizens at the micropolitical level. as such, it is also an important factor in the formation of sexual identity, particularly male sexual identity.^6^ "pornography is this society's running commentary on the sexual for me," writes stephen heath (3). in the novelistic universe of _gravity's rainbow_, this is so thoroughly true that pornography seems to be specially tailored to every citizen. when pirate prentice, for instance, receives via rocket military orders written in an ink which requires an application of sperm to be visible, he finds included with the message a pornographic picture which has anticipated all of his private sexual preferences: the woman is a dead ringer for [pirate's former lover] scorpia mossmoon. the room is one they talked about but never saw . . . a de mille set really, slender and oiled girls in attendance . . . scorpia sprawled among fat pillows wearing exactly the corselette of belgian lace, the dark stockings and shoes he daydreamed about often enough but never - no, of course, he never told her. he never told anyone. like every young man growing up in england, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could they (they?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty . . . how else would they know? (gr 71-2) there is a vicious political cycle operating here. on the one hand, pirate prentice's complicity with the "structures favoring death" is assured by his response to the sexualization of those structures (he literally gets his orders by ejaculating on their exciting new military equipment). on the other hand, his sexuality has been conditioned by the images which they have been providing him all his life. for thomas pynchon as for oscar wilde, life imitates art; the several discourses of society -movies, books, opera, popular music, etc. -create those who consume them. in _gravity's rainbow_, von goll's propaganda film about black troops in germany precedes reports from germany about the schwarzkommando, as if the film had literally given life to the people. the gang-rape scene from alpdrucken spawns shadow-children, both the literal flesh and blood kind like ilse and a series of replays: margherita erdmann, continuing her history of becoming the roles she plays, replays the scene with slothrop, who in turn finds that "someone has already educated him" in the fine art of sexual cruelty (gr 395-6). [12] social-constructionist theories of this type can be articulated in a number of ways. a pure anti-essentialist position holds that there is no "natural" self or "natural" order whatsoever, that identity is entirely constituted by discourse and that the concept of the "natural" is merely another social construction. a more romantic position holds that there is a natural self or a natural order, but that selves are made over in unnatural forms by a unhealthy society. pynchon's version has elements of both. an important figure of the "natural" in _gravity's rainbow_ is the image of the titans, an "overpeaking of life" from "the world just before men" (720), prehuman, pre-social, as originary as rousseau's nature. humanity is described as being "counter-revolutionaries" against this force, "nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising." but humanity is "only nearly as strong" as the titans, because "a few keep going over to the titans every day," go to see "all the presences we are not supposed to be seeing -wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods -that we train ourselves away from to keep from looking further even though enough of us do. . . ." (gr 720). thus a "natural order" seems to provide a rallying point for the rebellion against the routinized technocrary of blicero's "structures favoring death"; in general the image of the titans, and nature generally, is invested with a powerful charge of political nostalgia and political hope. [13] but pynchon undercuts the political value of the "natural" even as he maintains it. nature may contest the dominance of the "structures favoring death," but we perceive and understand nature only through social discourses -and social discourses are ideological. thus the titans have an ambiguous resonance in the novel: on the one hand, they are associated with the "overpeaking of life" that predates death-obsessed humanity, but they also bring to mind the space helmets at the mittelwerke (the helmets "appear to be fashioned from skulls . . . perhaps titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms," gr 296-7); the image of the titans thus suggests technological militarism as well as vital nature. how one %sees% is crucial, and pynchon never allows the reader an extra-ideological perspective from which to see. for example, the language of the passage quoted above seems to imply that we can see the "wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods" of nature, if we cease to "train ourselves away" from them, and that we can "leave their electric voices behind"; in short, that nature will indeed offer a moment of redemptive vision. but that vision turns out to be highly ambiguous; it is a vision of "pan -leaping - its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful serpent, its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky -into the sure bones of fright --" (gr 720-1). the serpent recalls kekule's famous (or, in pynchon's universe, infamous) dream of the benzene ring, which pynchon implicates in the rise of the german military-industrial complex (gr 412); the rainbow recalls the parabola of the rocket. moreover, in a typical pynchonian narrative shift, the character through whose consciousness we experience this ambiguous vision changes over the course of the passage. it seems at the beginning of the passage to be geli tripping, the young witch whose magic is life affirming; as marjorie kaufman puts it, "geli tripping's nurture is clearly special and specialized; open to every natural and supernatural force of the universe, loving, 'world-choosing,' her magic is some antique survival, come undiluted from the fruitful past" (gr 204-5). but by the end of the passage the vision has become gottfried's, who, as blicero's lover and willing victim, the chosen passenger of the 00000, is firmly headed toward the deathkingdom; he has turned away from whatever the titans might have to say to him. more importantly, so have we, by virtue of the position the narrative puts us in: we approach the narrative with geli and turn away with gottfried, never to know exactly how the vision has been co-opted. thus there are traces of the romantic quest for revelation from nature in _gravity's rainbow_, but the reader perceives the "natural" only through a constantly shifting series of perspectives and discourses. [14] the theory of ideology which is implied by pynchon's qualified anti-essentialism can only be described as paranoid: the very complexity of the involvement in oppressive structures which is implied by an identity constructed or conditioned by discourse argues for some sort of hidden design. much of the comedy in the pornographic scene sent to pirate prentice, for example, comes from its absurd specificity -the de mille set, the corselette of belgian lace. horrified that his most personal desires have been co-opted into the service of the state, prentice can only wonder paranoically if they have monitored everything that he saw and read since puberty. paranoia has enormous political significance in _gravity's rainbow_, for it implies an acute awareness of the self within larger political processes. paranoia is not only, in pynchon's words, "the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that *everything is connected*" (gr 703), it is also a recognition of the place of the self within that constellation of connections: everything is connected, and it is connected to %me%. this is partly a sense of persecution, but just as importantly it is a recognition of complicity, of being used. for instance, the elaborate system of sexual coding implied by the pornographic drawing sent to pirate prentice seems to be designed not to destroy him, at least not immediately, but rather to use him; and the depth and complexity of prentice's complicity in the war can only be measured by imagining paranoically that "they (they?) have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty." slothrop's paranoid quest for the mystery stimulus, too, is a way of acting out an anxiety about complicity in oppressive structures: in searching for information about who or what or how he somehow has been conditioned to respond sexually to the rocket, he is in a sense asking about how he came to be coded sexually as he has been, how he himself has been written by the codes of dominance and submission. he finds no answers, just an infinite series of connections that do not add up to a coherent narrative. he cannot see the source of his coding as a male, because there is no outside point from which to see it: that coding is quite literally himself. [15] what the novel offers as political praxis, then, cannot be a disentanglement from masculinism, for that would be an attempt to step outside of language and the self. rather, what the novel offers is a disruption of coding in general -a failure of coherence, a breakdown in the narrative. i began my reading of the drawing by noting that it does have an optimistic interpretation, that it can be interpreted as a foreshadowing of tchitcherine's diversion from his quest to kill enzian. by conventional standards, the story of tchitcherine ends in anti-climax (pun intended). we expect, after hundreds of pages of build-up, that the hunter shall either find the hunted, or alternatively be killed by the hunted; that's the way hunting tales are supposed to go. instead, tchitcherine simply fails to recognize enzian, begs from him cigarettes and potatoes, and passes by him on the road (734-735). the novel here, by defying our expectations of what stories are like, in effect denies our own desires as readers to "finish" the story; it says, in a sense, "it is finished, and so are you." in this way the novel mocks the masculinist coding that we ourselves bring to the novel -our desire for that moment of "redemptive" violence (whether the hunter's or the hunted's makes no difference) which resolves all suspense, ties up loose ends, and leaves us with an illusion of control. similarly, to read the drawing as a foreshadowing of this redemptive anti-climax requires that we ourselves will disrupt our masculinist patterns of reading, that we avoid subduing the text, forcing it to a single interpretation or a conventional expectation. [16] pynchon's politics of disruption is, up to a point, analagous to the politics of parody espoused by judith butler in _gender trouble_. in this rigorously anti-essentialist text, butler argues that a feminist politics does not require a concept of a subject as the agent of political change in order to be effective. arguing that the subject is an effect of signification, and signification is a "regulated process of repetition" (145), butler claims that new identities are possible, and only possible, by a process of "subversive repetition" (146): if the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e. new possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes of heirarchical binarisms, then it is only within the process of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible. (145) pynchon's rewriting of cultural codes, a replication-with-a-difference similar to the "repetitive signifying" advocated by butler, also implies a "subversion of identity." the narrative of slothrop's quest for identity, for example, does not end, as we feel such a quest story should, with a climactic realization, but with his gradual dispersal until he is "scattered all over the zone" (gr 712). as molly hite puts it, slothrop has lost his identity; he is no longer a unified character. however unsettling this outcome may be, one implication is that he has escaped control, for it his phallocentric identity that has "placed" him in the apocalyptic pattern. . . . he [has become] radically uncentered, a fate that brings him to the opposite extreme of his initial characterization as a personified penis. (118-9) the analogy between butler's parody and pynchon's extends only so far, however, because of the differences between their cultural positions. butler is a lesbian feminist; the "subversive repetition" she has in mind is drag, which, "[i]n imitating gender . . . implicitly reveals the imitative nature of gender itself -as well as its contingency" (137). but this reading of drag applies only within its cultural context. a straight male who, in the company of other men, dresses up in women's clothes in mockery of women is surely reinforcing the "naturalness" of gender roles within that circle of men by emphasizing the otherness of women. butler acknowledges this when she writes that "[p]arody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony" (139). i would argue that one of the most significant factors in deciding whether repetitions subvert or reinforce the status quo is the cultural context of the act of repetition, including the cultural position of the person performing the repetition. the drag performer, by subverting codes of gender and sexuality, opens up a space for an alternate sexual identity disallowed by hegemonic culture. the performer brings a particular sexual history to the performance, and thus is prepared to occupy the space consituted in the act of performance. but what cultural space is opened up by a performance of subversive repetition by a straight male, whose identity is thoroughly legitimated by the hegemonic culture? the space which straight men are prepared to occupy by their sexual histories is simply their usual cultural positions. this is why slothrop must simply disperse at the end of the novel; as power operates in and through his identity, and there is no alternate identity for him to occupy, his only political recourse is to cease to occupy any subject position whatsoever. what r.w. connell calls "exit politics" -the attempt "to oppose patriarchy and . . . to exit from the worlds of hegemonic and complicit masculinity" (220) -is imaginable only if there is an alternate state or position to which to exit. [17] non-existence is not a viable subject position, so the novel's necessarily incomplete rewriting of masculinism cannot help but reduplicate the masculinist ones it renounces. thanatz and blicero we might expect to revel in the imagery of sexual sadism, but it is the narrator who describes the rocket as a system "won . . . away from the feminine darkness," the narrator who describes the raf raid as the look which says "hurry up and fuck me." it is as if the novel is protesting a gender coding which it has itself set up. this is, i would argue, exactly what it is doing, quite self-consciously; the point is precisely that the coding of sexuality and gender that ensures our complicity in oppression are not "out there" somewhere, apart from us, but inside ourselves. eschewing the possibility of ever standing outside of ideology, the novel can only gesture to a position outside the problem, a position which it cannot itself imagine, by a kind of masculinist gigantism which reveals its own absurdity. the technic of the novel is like the male minstrel shows roger mexico and seaman bodine give at the end of the novel in which they belt each other with "gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises, cunningly detailed, all in natural color. . . . seems people can be reminded of titans and fathers, and laugh . . ." (gr 708). [18] this masculinist gigantism can is by no means self-evidently pro-feminist. _gravity's rainbow_ often reads like a male fantasy gone out of control: the phalli are a little too large, the female characters too eager to bed down with slothrop, the victims of sadists far too eager about their own pain.^7^ and because the narrative doesn't offer final readings, it is never quite clear how much really is mockery or disruption and how much is the residue of real assumptions about gender. these exaggerations self-consciously invite a feminist critique, from an outsider's perspective. but the novel itself does not supply that critique; it can only inflate or dislocate the discourses of its own crimes, and so at once gesture to a newly written self and reduplicate an old and tiresome one. [19] that this politics of discourse may tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism is suggested by the one direct and i think suggestive reference in the novel to a contemporary feminist, m. f. beal.^8^ felipe, one of the argentinian exiles, makes "noontime devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock" which, he believes, "embodies . . . an intellectual system, for [felipe] believes (as do m.f. beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals" (gr 612). m. f. beal was (or is) a friend of pynchon's, author of two novels, _amazon one_ and _angel dance_, several stories, and _safe house: a casebook of revolutionary feminism in the 1970's_. david seed, who has written most about the relationship of pynchon and beal, explains that the reference to beal in _gravity's rainbow_ refers to a conversation that pynchon and beal had about "the limits of sentience" (227): "beal implicitly humanized the earth's mantle (containing of course rocks and minerals) by drawing an analogy with skin. . . . " (32) in effect, beal was espousing what we would now call a gaia philosophy^9^; as seed writes, "[i]f there is such a thing as mineral consciousness then the earth's crust becomes a living mantle and man becomes a part (a small part) of a living continuum instead of being defined against an inert environment" (227). there is a version of this belief in "mineral consciousness" in _safe house_: only recently have a few modern men begun to learn anything about life and what they are learning is that the only difference from the point of view of chemistry between living and non-living substances is their ability to reproduce themselves. (86) as in her discussions with pynchon, beal here minimizes the distinction between plants and animals on the one hand and "non-living" beings like minerals; if the "only difference" between them is the ability to reproduce, then in other ways they are the same (so, perhaps, rocks are sentient, as beal had argued to pynchon earlier). [20] one tenet of gaia philosophy is that the earth acts as a conscious organism to protect itself. in _safe house_, beal speculates that one mechanism by which the earth might be trying to protect itself is what she calls a "strategic retreat" -the possibility that "adult women given the choice will choose to live without [men] -to eat, sleep, work, rear children and dwell without them" (87) -in other words, female separatism. beal wonders whether the contemporary urge toward separatism might be not just a conscious choice by particular women but a manifestation of some larger biological necessity: could it be that we are witnessing an unfathomably significant genetic reflex for species survival? could it be that the dna code has been triggered by some inscrutable biological alarm system from the threat of male violence and annihilation? could it be that this is some ancient reoccurring pattern which has activated female response over the millennia to withdraw, to protect and defend themselves and their progeny? (87) for beal, man has turned away from the earth to "violence and annihilation," just as for pynchon humanity has turned away from the titans to the "structures favoring death." but for beal, this turning away is specifically coded according to gender; the "man" in the previous sentence refers to men, not to humanity. conversely, women are a key part of the earth's counter-struggle: the earth is triggering in women, who are open to the message of survival because they "have always known all things are alike and precious," a "genetic reflex for species survival," which consists of a disentanglement from "male violence and annihilation." in _gravity's rainbow_, the genderedness of beal's vision is lost; the titans in greek mythology were half male and half female. [21] _safe house_ was published in 1976, three years after _gravity's rainbow_, so it is impossible to be certain whether beal had in fact worked out within a specifically feminist framework the belief in "mineral consciousness" which pynchon attributes to her. but it seems to me likely that she had, or at least likely that beal was a feminist by that point, and that that feminism was part of her discussions with pynchon. if the critique of masculinism in _gravity's rainbow_ was influenced by beal, then we can see the novel a kind of appropriation and recentering of feminism; pynchon subordinates his critique of masculinism to a critique of militarism, and in so doing defuses the genderedness of his subject. within the play of pluralized discourses in the novel, none of them privileged, none of them untainted by the structures of power, the issue of gender is subsumed within the issue of gender discourses. but if everyone is trapped within masculinist discourse, then masculinism is not a problem of men at all; it is a role one takes on or steps out of, as greta erdmann steps so easily out of the role of masochist in alpdrucken and into the role of sadist with bianca. [22] that this dispersal of responsibility may serve to conceal rather than challenge gender roles is made particularly apparent by those passages where the novel addresses the reader directly, for, as bernard duyfhuizen points out, the "you" to whom the narrator speaks is male or male-identified.^10^ for example, the narrator addresses the reader at one point as a viewer of a pornographic movie: of all her putative fathers . . . bianca is . . . closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure i know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker . . . she favors you, most of all. (gr 472) the word *you* in this passage, as throughout the book, disallows the reader any distance from the objectifying, abusive attitudes which it critiques. but to the extent that this passage and others like it assume that the narrative's *you* and *we* include everyone, it falsifies the actual positions of men and women with respect to social discourses. i doubt very much that many female readers can feel comfortable identifying with the "you" who says "count me in" and "probably some hooker." men are by far the greater consumers of pornography; men constitute by far the larger proportion of rapists and sexual abusers; women are far more frequently the victims of rape and sexual abuse. "we" may all have been at the movies, as the narrator says, but we have been watching different shows, and more importantly have watching the shows from quite different cultural positions. _gravity's rainbow_ conceals this positionality with its dizzying profusion of discourses; what susan bordo calls the postmodern "dream of being everywhere" collapses in key moments to a "view from nowhere" which is in fact a male-centered view (143). [23] one of the values of anti-essentialist theories for pro-feminist men has been their ability to provide pro-feminists with a critical distance from their own subjectivities, and thus to help make visible and problematic what has been transparent. the masculinist gigantism of _gravity's rainbow_ serves this end well, writing out in extra large letters the cultural codes that form male gender identities. but the example of _gravity's rainbow_ also shows that while an awareness of the social construction of gender may be necessary condition for the disruption of this transparent male-centeredness, it is not a sufficient condition. post-modern moves to decenter the self, to argue that the self is nothing more than an interweaving of "larger" discourses, can marginalize women's issues quite as easily as the most traditional of humanisms. male pro-feminists must take account of the power of social discourses to constrain, define and constitute identity, but at the same time, they must take account of their position within social discourses, as members of a particular gender, class, race, geographic region, religion or creed, educational background, age, language, etc. [24] judith butler argues that the "etc." at the end of such a list of positions is a "sign of exhaustion as well as the illimitable process of signification itself. it is the supplement, the excess that necessarily accompanies any effort to posit identity once and for all" (_gender_ 143). i don't disagree with this, but the key phrase here, in my opinion, is "once and for all." it is surely true that identity cannot be posited once and for all; words such "woman," "man," "straight," "gay," "middle class," etc. are all totalizations of massively complex sets of practices, discourses and conditions which are not self-identical even within a particular culture at a particular time and are still less so when viewed historically and cross-culturally. these sites of instability are, as butler makes clear both in _gender trouble_ and _bodies that matter_, potential sites of subversion and democratization, and the task of thinking beyond the limits of these terms, whether by deconstruction or redefinition, must continue. yet if these terms cannot be fixed, nevertheless they can and must be deployed, because they continue to deploy us. butler herself makes this argument cogently in _bodies that matter_: ". . . it remains politically necessary to lay claim to 'women,' 'queer,' 'gay,' and 'lesbian,' precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowing" (229). here too, the differences in subject position matter considerably. the context for this remark is a discussion of the affirmative resignification of "queer"; "men" and "male," while surely in need of resignification, hardly need the same kind. but the claim that masculinity and male privilege has on men, "prior to our full knowing," must also be acknowledged, not to fix male identity but to identify clearly what is at stake in it. as michael kaufman reminds us, what is most important in thinking about gender is not "the prescription of certain roles and the proscription of others," but rather that "it is a description of actual social relations of power between males and females and the internalizations of these relations of power" (144). [25] _gravity's rainbow_ also shows, i think, the limits of a pro-feminist politics based too exclusively on anti-essentialist theories. simply to disperse one's identity throughout the cultural fabric, as slothrop does in the end of the novel, is not a viable alternative; nor is it adequate simply to gesture to the complicity of one's own identity in oppressive structures. ultimately, pro-feminist men need to work towards positive subjectivities which neither co-opt feminism nor revel masochistically in self-abasement,^11^ but reconcile self-fulfillment with recognition of women as subjects. because these are subjectivities which must be lived as well as theorized, the complexity of factors which make up subjectivity cannot be accounted a single theory, whether essentialist or constructionist; it is always necessary to deploy a number of ways of seeing even to negotiate, much less account for, such complexity. my last point, then, is that some of those ways of seeing require a notion of self, of personal identity. such a notion need not be essentialist, in the sense of supposing that there is some self which pre-exists and is outside of social discourses. but we must find a way to speak not only of constructed selves and signification but also of personal motives and individual responsibility, kindness or self-deception, housework and personal relationships. no single discourse will be adequate to the task. notes: ^1^ for example, victor seidler is openly hostile to post structuralist theories of gender construction, in part because they make it difficult for men to "recognize the poverty of one's experiences and relationships," discounting the very category of experience as "exclusively a construction of language or discourse" (xii-xiii). ^2^ in the introduction to _against the tide_, michael kimmel distinguishes among three kinds of response to feminism: anti-feminist, masculinist, and pro-feminist (9-15). these categories, i would argue, are useful for characterizing %direct% male responses to feminism, but require the addition of an additional category, that of anti-masculinist, to take account of %indirect% responses to and appropriations of feminism, such as pynchon's. feminism has entered into men's consciousness in subtle and concealed ways; the results have often been positions which call for a redefinition or repudiation of masculinity but which are not necessarily feminist. for discussion of an early example, see my "blake's visions and revisions of a daughter of albion," forthcoming in _blake: an illustrated quarterly_. ^3^ the male-authored texts modleski discusses date from the 1980's, but i see this particular era of "feminism without women" as part of movement with longer historical roots. (in my discussion below, i will mention only texts which respond to or appropriate the most recent wave of feminism and thus fall approximately into the same historical moment as the texts discussed by modleski, but texts by writers such as william blake and james joyce can be seen as examples of the same phenomenon associated with earlier feminist movements.) early men's liberation texts such as warren farrell's _the liberated man_ (1974) and jack nichols' _men's liberation_ (1975), roughly contemporary with _gravity's rainbow_, are predicated on the assumption that gender is socially constructed, and are suffused with an anxiety about gender (sometimes in the form of overcompensation, as when farrell attempts to negate the idea that "%women's liberations is a threat to men% (italics in original) by outlining "twenty-one specific areas in which men can benefit from what is now called women's liberation" 175). texts like these, along with writings by derrida and lacan (for discussion of whose appropriation of "woman" see heath 4, 6-7), are important male-authored pretexts for the outpouring of male gender criticism in the 1980's. jonathan culler's "reading as a woman" in _on deconstruction_ (a text which does not seem to me to reveal significant gender anxiety) is the earliest anglo-american male-authored text i know of (besides pynchon's) which deconstructs gender. jardine and smith's _men in feminism_ (1987), some essays of which are discussed by modleski, was a high point of male self-consciousness of gender anxiety, focusing to a considerable degree on the "impossibility" of men's relationship with feminism identified by stephen heath in "male feminism" (1984) and on women's skepticism towards male feminism, exemplified by elaine showalter's "critical cross-dressing: male feminists and the woman of the year" (1983). this "impossibility" is discounted by joseph a. boone in "of me(n) and feminism: who(se) is the sex that writes," the opening essay in _engendering men: the question of male feminist criticism_ (1990), a volume which, aside from the opening and closing essays, consists not of feminist criticism but of male-centered gender criticism. the distinction is made clearly in claridge and langland's _out of bounds: male writers and gender(ed) criticism _(1990), despite that volume's origin in an mla panel called "male feminist voices." although in general male gender critics have followed this trend away from feminist criticism toward gender criticism, issues of gender anxiety still resurface in such texts as roger horrock's _masculinity in crisis_ (1994) and r.w. connell's _masculinities_ (1995). ^4^ thomas pynchon, _gravity's rainbow_ (new york: viking, 1973), p. 733. references to _gravity's rainbow_ are cited in the text, abbreviated gr. ^5^ slothrop and geli tripping also create huge shadow-figures in the sky when they stand (and dance, and make love) on the brocken at sunrise (i am indebted to molly hite for making the connection between this scene and the impassive figures associated with the palm sunday raid). as are so many scenes which feature geli, this is a scene of ambiguous possibility; geli and slothrop in effect occupy the same position as the palm sunday bombers, but within that position they make love, they attend to their own pleasure rather than the needs of blicero's deathkingdom. this ambiguity is reinforced by the passage's reference to titans, an image the ambivalent political value of which i will discuss below. clearly the impassive figures in the sky, angels of death though they may be, are not all-powerful, even if their influence is inescapable. ^6^ see "against the avant: pynchon's products, pynchon's pornographies" in _marginal forces/culture centers: tolson, pynchon and the politics of the canon_, in which, reading pynchonian pornographies as a form of "anamnesia," michael berube also argues that pornographies are crucial in forming and controlling sexual identities (252-255). ^7^ i am implicitly disagreeing here, albeit mildly, with marjorie kaufman's conclusions in "brunnhilde and the chemists: women in _gravity's rainbow_," surprisingly one of the few critical works on this novel to use an explicitly feminist methodology. kaufman takes issue with a letter by adrienne rich which asks, "what are the themes of domination and enslavement, prurience and idealism, male physical perfection and death, 'control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort,' 'the turning of people into things.' . . . the objectification of the body as separate from the emotions -what are these but masculinist, virilist, patriarchal values?" (225). kaufman replies that "if what ms. rich means is that male-oriented literature supports those 'themes' as positive values, then pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_ can be read as a thinly disguised treatise written to support the views of radical feminism and its analyses of 'patriarchal history' and 'patriarchal society'" (225). she continues on to say that "such a reading commits violence to the novel," asserting that "ms. rich's conflation of events turns the complex world into a simplistic dogma of sexual means and ends" (225). while i agree that an image must be read in a particular context, and that the political valence of an image can be complex, i don't find it "simplistic" to ask whether a preponderance of masculinist images carries a load of political baggage regardless of how any individual image is used or undercut. ^8^ given the scarcity of biographical data on pynchon, it is difficult to identify precisely just how indebted pynchon was intellectually to the feminist movements of the 1960's. although beal is the only feminist directly identified, i suspect that pynchon's debts to the feminist movement were both broad and deep, for there were several feminists interested, as pynchon was, in the confluence of sexuality and militarism. a few well-known examples: in the "scum (society for cutting up men) manifesto," valerie solanis lists a series of crimes for which the male, because of his "obsession to compensate for not being female" is responsible; the first of these is "war" (578). in "no more miss america!," woman's objectification as sex symbol is linked directly with the military: "the highlight of [miss america's] reign each year is a cheerleader-tour of american troops abroad-last year she went to vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit. . . . the living bra and the dead soldier" (586). the fact that geli tripping is a witch may allude to the "phenomenon" (the word is robin morgan's, 603) of witch, a loose collection of feminist groups or perhaps simply a style of feminism of the late 1960's. as for other feminist groups of the time, for the witch covens patriarchy, militarism, and economic exploitation were interlinked; thus the washington d.c. witch coven hexed "the united fruit company's oppressive policy on the third world and on secretaries in its offices at home ('bananas and rifles, sugar and death,/ war for profit, tarantulas' breath/ united fruit makes lots of loot/ the cia is in its boot')" (morgan 604, morgan's emphasis). _gravity's rainbow_ does not directly allude to the documents identified above, and pynchon may never have read them. however, they show that some of the gender issues that pynchon was interested in were current in feminist circles at the time; pynchon, presumably living within some kind of countercultural network at the time, could have been exposed to these issues from similar sources. if this is so, then what i identify later in this essay as a marginalization of women's issues is all the more acute. ^9^ i am indebted to stuart moulthrop for making this connection. ^10^ i am indebted to molly hite for pointing out to me the implicit maleness of the "you" in the novel, but see bernard duyfhuizen's "a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt: the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_." ^11^ modleski, discussing the masochistic element in some male feminist criticism, notes that the masochist does not necessarily cede power to the punitive mother nor call into disrupt the hidden power of the law of the father (69-74). works cited: beal, m.f., and friends. _safe house: a casebook of revolutionary feminism in the 1970's_. eugene, or: northwest matrix, 1976. berube, michael. _marginal forces/cultural centers: tolson, pynchon, and the politics of the canon_. ithaca: cornell up, 1992. boone, joseph a. "of me(n) and feminism: who(se) is the sex that writes." in boone and cadden, 11-25. ---, and michael cadden. _engendering men: the question of male feminist criticism_. new york: routledge, 1990. bordo, susan. "feminism, post-modernism, and gender-skepticism." _feminism/postmodernism_. ed. linda j. nicholson. new york: routledge, 1990. butler, judith. _bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex_. new york: routledge, 1993. ---. _gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity_. new york: routledge, 1990. chapman, wes. "blake's visions and revisions of a daughter of albion." _blake: an illustrated quarterly_ (forthcoming). claridge, laura, and elizabeth langland. _out of bounds: male writers and gender(ed) criticism_. amherst: u of massachusetts p, 1990. clerc, charles, ed. _approaches to *gravity's rainbow*_. columbus: ohio state up, 1983. connell, r. w. _masculinities_. berkeley: u of california p, 1995. culler, jonathan. _on deconstruction_. ithaca: cornell up, 1982. duyfhuizen, bernard. "a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt: the reader-trap of bianca in _gravity's rainbow_." _postmodern culture_ 2.1 (1991): 37 pars. online. www. faludi, susan. _backlash: the undeclared war against american women_. new york: anchor/doubleday, 1991. farrell, warren. _the liberated man, beyond masculinity: freeing men and their relationships with women._ new york: random, 1974. heath, stephen. "male feminism." _dalhousie review_ 64.2 (summer 1984): 70-101. rpt. in short form in jardine and smith, 1-32 (page refs. are to this volume). hite, molly. _ideas of order in the novels of thomas pynchon._ columbus: ohio state up, 1983. horrocks, roger. _masculinity in crisis_. new york: st. martin's, 1995. jardine, alice, and paul smith, eds. _men in feminism_. new york: methuen, 1987. kaufman, marjorie. "brunnhilde and the chemists: women in _gravity's rainbow_." in clerc, 197-227. kaufman, michael. "men, feminism, and men's contradictory experiences of power." _theorizing masculinities_. ed. harry brod and michael kaufman. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 1994. 142-163. kimmel, michael s., and thomas e. mosmiller. _against the tide: pro-feminist men in the united states 1776-1990_. boston: beacon, 1992. modleski, tania. _feminism without women_. new york: routledge, 1991. morgan, robin. _sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women's liberation movement_. new york: vintage-random, 1970. nichols, jack. _men's liberation: a new definition of masculinity_. new york: penguin, 1975. "no more miss america!" in morgan 584-7. pynchon, thomas. _gravity's rainbow_. new york: viking, 1973. rilke, rainer maria. _duino elegies_. trans. c. f. macintyre. berkeley: u of california p, 1961. seed, david. _the fictional labyrinths of thomas pynchon_. iowa city: u of iowa p, 1988. seidler, victor j. _recreating sexual politics: men, feminism and politics_. london: routledge, 1991. showalter, elaine. "critical cross-dressing: male feminists and the woman of the year." _raritan_ 3:2 (fall 1983). rpt. in jardine and smith, 116-132. solanis, valerie. "the scum (society for cutting up men) manifesto." excerpted in morgan, 577-583. tololyan, khachig. "war as background in _gravity's rainbow_." in clerc, 31-67. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[readers], 'selected letters from readers', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-[readers]-selected.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.596. part 1/1, total size 24013 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------selected letters from readers postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ------------------------------------------------------------ copyright (c) 1996 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. -------------------------------------------------------------- the following responses were submitted by pmc readers using regular email or the pmc reader's report form. not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited. index to letters on this page about _postmodern culture_ schwartz review of _sex revolts_ spinelli's "radio lessons for the internet" other offerings ------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on [vol. 6, no. 2]: like every other issue. people act before they think. the history of acrylic can be told in terms other than analysis: polymerization of substance is not a fictive lacquer but an immanent rechaining of actual potential. see the movie stalingrad. war indeed. these comments are from: paul freedman the email address for paul freedman is: pfreedma@osf1.gmu.edu *first of five letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on nice job: this page has been very helpful in my 11th grade english research paper, and i just wanted to thank the builder of this site. it's is hard to find text referances these days. you did a great job and i probably used this source more than any of my others... these comments are from: jon trejo the email address for jon trejo is: nebula@prairienet.org *second of five letters on this topic* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on critique: perhaps this imminent frenzy of critical post-production will calm the peripheral aesthetics, where subject remains pure. to the extent that modern creation depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. elaine scarry: "it is when art has become to its makers a fiction that critique begins." if this is the case, if self-esteem arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to rule over each of our bodies -and establish the moral and political gravity of their own. what is at issue here are analyses of self and analogies of it. we will burrow into the histories of critique because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of creation. we will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. critics of creation already manipulate the self of their discourse in order both to attack their violent egoism and to conceive the struggle itself along imaginary lines. vast energies will be expended not only on the histories and rhetoric of the creation of the self, but on the mechanism of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the "violence" of the intellect, on the "mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" that, for nietzsche, make up what is called truth. these comments are from: scott morris the email address for scott morris is: sm92+@andrew.cmu.edu *third of five letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on _postmodern culture_ dear mr. unsworth: just cruising this morning in my favorite area of interest which could be broadly defined as cultural/critical theory and came upon your paper about your efforts at pmc. what i would like to tell you is that although i am a long time home pc dabbler your journal was the primary reason i finally gained access to the internet. i came across some files from it that had been uploaded to a bulletin board (temple of the screaming electron) in california. they fell like manna into a relatively parched, but beautiful, rural environment in which i live. when i finally realized that your magnificent journal was only accessible online i signed up with my local service provider. i'm a union teamster living in rural vermont so i don't have a lot of access to the sort of stuff you have in your journal and you provide access to from your website. our local library is swell, computerized too, but a computer search under postmodernism or poststructuralism or derrida or baudrillard or jameson produces zero hits. thank you. finley *fourth of five letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on just trying to create communication: i just wanted you to know that i really appreciate what you are doing. it would an honor if you keep in touch, or send your messages, and what's new. by the way, this is my first time on the net, so do you know how postmodern issues are touching music? i mean, for me, i am trying to apply my ways and senses over the music that i am composing, and i have to say, the results are fascinating, even to me. these comments are from: issa boulos the email address for issa boulos is: imad-ibrahim-boulos@worldnet.att.net *fifth of five letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on schwartz's review of _sex revolts_, pmc 6/2: in pmc 6.2, jeff schwartz raises a particular problematic that is continually grappled with at conferences on popular music and in examining books featuring popular music studies -the serious examination of the music itself. schwartz's concerns about musicology being "hostile" (with the exception of "radical" musicologists brett, mcclary, and walser) and cultural studies being "incapable of rigorous engagement," completely overlooks the role that ethnomusicology may play in the explication of not only the social/cultural context of popular music, but also the "formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question" (schwartz). i think young ethnomusicologists (like myself) and musicologists are bringing the study of popular music into the academy without fear of invalidation. i know it will be necessary to teach music-lovers how to articulate "real" musical information in more musicological and ethnomusicological ways then that currently practiced in general. the american public is being musically educated almost entirely by music critics (i.e., vh1's _four on the floor_). my own research in ethnomusicology specializes in popular/vernacular music and gender. i examine issues of gender and popular music from the standpoint of music-making experiences practiced in the everyday and in institutional contexts (i.e., handclapping games, double-dutch, and the music-making process involved with sampling). musical analysis or semiotic analysis of music need not be represented as conventional music notation, but there are quite a few advantages to being able to enlighten the "resistant" musicologists by showing them the legitimate structural features of, for example, the musical grooves of public enemy through conventional notation. or to highlight the complex musical forms located within various genres of popular music, everyday music-making, and to attempt to represent the subjective listening experience so highly prized among popular music affecionados. schwartz ultimately raises a critical issue, which musicology, ethnomusicology, culture studies, and sociology need to seriously engage through actual musical and semiotic analysis of the codes that shape musical sound, the meanings that inflect musical appreciation and discourse, and the elements of sound the function both within and without modern conventions of music theory and aural cognition of popular music. popular music studies must move past the constant re-interpretation of fan-dom and star-dom with its stereotypical gender codes. it's time to struggle with how pitch, timbre, tone, rhythm, dance, and the more significant compositional process of live and recorded music-making shape and problematize social codes and individual expression of gender, race, ethnicity, class, kinaesthetics, sexuality, and sexual preference (to name only a few of the dimensions that represent identity in popular music). for example, the music and the roles that women artists play in the creative process as musicians, producers, performers, etc., such as me-shell ndege ocello (bi-sexual neo-funk composer and bass player), alanis morisette (eclectic vocalist and composer), tori amos (classical pianist and alternative rock composer exploring sexuality and religion), k.d. lang (lesbian "performance artist" of song), boss (gangster rap duo), or the incredible rap finale by ursula rucker on the roots debut cd (1994) are telling us a great deal about problematizing conventions of musical sound, grain of voice, and style that extends beyond popular music and engages the sounds of classical and "world" musics. ultimately, it's the music that is turning us on. making us think about other music and style. changing our ways of seeing, hearing, and talking about the world, its subcultures, and its people through music. continuing to privilege the social context of popular music can only serve to perpetuate the hegemonic and dialectical appreciation of western "high" art music as an autonomous musical phenomenon. i appreciate schwartz's review of _sex revolts_ for publicly acknowledging this critical need in the study of popular music. these comments are from: kyra d. gaunt the email address for kyra d. gaunt is: kgaunt@umich.edu *first of three letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on "the sex revolts" review: bravo! excellent critique not only of this work but of the genre of "pseudo-musicological" journalistic views of popular music. as a composer and writer on all kinds of music (like riot grrrl, etc.), i know well that the writing in this area has been largely compiled by journalists, music critics, etc. even the musicologists you name, however (brett, mcclary and walser), tend to rely less on their critical faculties when approaching this music (see esp. the use of metaphor in, say, mcclary's "feminine endings"). if i may request a response, i'd like to know what you thought of _queer noises_, the new british book on pop music's undercurrent of homosociality. i, personally, found it less than successful (i don't even remember the author's name, at this point! oh, wait, i think it's john gill.) anyway, just curious. thanks again for the interesting review. these comments are from: renee coulombe the email address for renee coulombe is: rcoulomb@ucsd.edu *second of three letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on schwartz: review of press/reynolds' _sex revolts_: while i'd concur with most of schwartz's assessments of _sex revolts_, i wish he'd been able to spend more time on the problems of analyzing specifically musical aspects of pop. while musicological analysis, if wielded carefully, can yield important insights into the musical workings of pop, its applicability is limited by the terms of its own historical development, as mcclary, walser, %et al%, point out (even if sometimes they ignore their own advice). the basic problem is that most post-war popular music, certainly in america and in england, and to varying degrees elsewhere, valorizes texture and rhythm far more than melodic or harmonic information. no big revelation this -but since those last qualities are the qualities around which western musicological analysis has grown, that analysis is relatively ill-equipped to address what makes pop work: the complex affective semiotics of its rhythmic and textural spatiality, the way the *sound* hits you. to resort to impressionistic, vague language here often seems the only alternative to the failure of more rigid, analytical language to come even close to conveying the impact and effects of the music under analysis: it's like nailing the wind to the water. (i succumb to my own diagnosis, it seems . . .) sound often begins to seem irreducible, non-repeatable, impossible to reproduce. rap producers, for instance, often justify sampling as the only way to capture a complete sonic precis of particular old records: only those instruments, those musicians, in that room with those mics, recorded on that board by a particular recording team -and only on that take -bear exactly the sonic signature desired. if even sound seems incapable of speaking itself, what chance has language -except in its attempt to fray, fuzz, distort its own bounds, in imitation of music itself? which makes me wonder: why does schwartz think a more rigorous and scholarly engagement with cultural studies thinkers would lead to a less impressionistic account of the workings of the music itself -as his last criticism strongly implies, following immediately upon his critique of reynolds and press's musicological shortcomings? the writers he mentions resort to rather imagistic language in their work on music - while conventional musicology fails notoriously to describe the musicality (as its performers must engage it) even of its native, proper music, the western art music tradition. these comments are from: jeffrey norman the email address for jeffrey norman is: jenor@csd.uwm.edu *third of three letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on [spinelli's "radio lessons for the internet," pmc 6.2]: i just finished reading the very interesting article comparing the internet to the early days of radio. i would have to agree with you that the internet is currently over-utopianized. however, i do believe that the capability of people to become producers rather than consumers is very strong on the internet. for example, imagine if musicians and underground film makers could put their work onto the internet! i think it would be extremely cool if people could broadcast their work through the internet, cheaply and with high-quality. however, this might not happen if the protocols of the internet increasingly become owned by corporations. for example, the premier streaming audio standard on the net is currently realaudio; do you realize how expensive it is to buy a realaudio server? to service only one-hundred people costs something like five or ten thousand dollars; it's crazy. but you did raise a very interesting point. why is the internet so much more interested in the "process" than the "destination"? and why are most of the discussion groups on the internet oriented around consumption? those are two very interesting points "you" (if i am talking to the writer of this article) brought up. the thing that always bothers me is: if i could completely recreate society, how would i do so? what am i asking society to do anyway? what is the "good life"? is it to make sure no one ever goes hungry? is it to attempt to achieve the ideal of justice? personal freedoms? is it to better enjoy the material comforts of life, or is it to reach for something higher? a lot more questions than answers! anyway, good article. hope you have some interesting responses to what i have sent you. these comments are from: brad pmc neuberg the email address for brad pmc neuberg is: bkn3@columbia.edu * first of two letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on "radio lessons for the internet:" the rhetorical tone of early radio and early internet definitely have striking similarities. however, i would suggest to mr. spinelli to also look into the developments in internet technology to see that the internet may be headed in the direction of radio and television. without the specific newspaper article next to me, i have read that many cable television providers and even satellite television providers are looking into ways of creating a "cable modem", a one-way modem that acts as a high speed receiver. while advocates of the cable modem point to its significantly higher speed than a traditional phone modem, they also assume that users will spend more time "downloading content" than uploading. as the cable modem provides inexpensive access to most homes (many would use an "internet terminal" to browse web sites and launch remote applications), the individual's ability to transmit information will be just as limited (possibly by only having a phone line out) or eliminated altogther. also, the economic limitations of broadcast on the internet are as real as those in radio: an inexpensive fm transmitter and antennae might cost in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a used transmitter with a 1500 watt capacity. a web server with a fast enought connection to the internet to allow large numbers of users is similarly priced. however, as an internet user, i can at least transmit responses to other individuals broadcasts and even make information accessible to lay people. these comments are from: jack mchale the email address for jack mchale is: jmchale4@ix.netcom.com *second of two letters on this topic.* --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on [barker's "nietzsche/derrida, blanchot/beckett: fragmentary progressions of the unnamable," [pmc 6.1] although perhaps your various digressions on the theme of fragments might at some time and at some place disclose an aperture onto the very view which every fragment, by force or by cunning, forces onto the reader, at least in nietzsche, it remains an open question as to the difference between a fragment and an aphorism. think, for example, of novalis, from whom nietzsche undoubtably received the art of anti-hegelian writing you are so fond of . . . now, the serious question only begins after you have said what you desired to say, namely, can we articulate the difference, and hence the movement, from the fragment to the aphorism. my claim is simple: until you acheive the style of thinking -or writing -where the aphorism sheers away from the mere fragment, you invariably miss the point of what blanchot will name the writing of the disaster and derrida will urge us to call the margin. these comments are from: chad finsterwald the email address for chad finsterwald is: pfinster@acs.bu.edu --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on paul mann's "the nine grounds of intellectual warfare": clausewitz took the extremely difficult subject of warfare and explained it in simple, understandable terms. you have taken a relatively simple econcept ("i critique, therefore i'm not!") and spun so much hyperbole into it that it requires a dictionary and a case of beer to get through it. i found many pearls of wisdom, but the oyster shells are up around my waist. i wonder if you didn't fall into the pit you dug for others. these comments are from: mike johnson the email address for mike johnson is: b205s1.ssc.af.mil --------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on thomas pynchon's _vineland_: when i stumbled on a remaindered hardbound of _vineland_ (while working in my local barnes & noble non-superstore, since closed) i was amazed that anyone could capture the stresses of trying to keep the experiences of living in the '60s (in my case, in central square, cambridge ma) as a new left activist both alive and moving through what has been made of them by their direst opponents (the new right whose neoascendancy now controls congress). surely nobody who lived those years and is still living them as a forwardable experience has any illusion as to what actually happened, least of all pynchon. laborious academicization of the book is a form of engagement, but dissipates its gravity, by breaking it down into a series of discretionary notes. for a non-academic poet & journalist, this acts as an unnecessarily self-checking reduction of what a survivor like myself uses as an encoded, portable experience. i'm not disabled by the '60s: i'm infuriated by the inability of non-participants to appreciate its continuing effects on the survivors as beneficial. this is no illustrated cartoon history we lived. i might also mention that _vineland_ is (as was not even noted) in california. we who lived the '60s in cambridge, ma had a dramatically different experience only some of which has been preserved as fiction (by marge piercy in _dance the eagle to sleep_) since we did not intend it to be fictionable while we lived it. finally, when i sent one of my copies of _vineland_ to john brennan, a boston college (class of '63) classmate who later got his phd at u.c.-davis, i inscribed it: "an american mahabharata." i suggest you see it as that: a minatory epic of reversals as terrifyingly instructive to warring imperial clans who knew they were -the 60s was the civil war of my generation. that the new right appears to have won is evident; that they will control its history is not, citing this essay as an attempt to refute it. thanks for the intent. i'm sure pynchon appreciates it. i do. now write it again as a popular article that the general public can digest. the ideological action continues in the public world, not the rarified section of the illustrated/annotated edition. pynchon didn't write _alice in wonderland_, he wrote _vineland_ (ca). these comments are from: bill costley the email address for bill costley is: sunset@gis.net -----------------end of letters for pmc 6.3-----------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------cass, 'cyberspace, capitalism, and encoded criminality: the iconography of theme park', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-cass-cyberspace.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.595. part 1/1, total size 22664 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- cyberspace, capitalism, and encoded criminality: the iconography of theme park by jeffrey cass texas a & m international university jeffreycass@delphi.com postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by jeffrey cass, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] the creators and advertisers of theme park (a cd-rom based computer game, available in ibm and macintosh formats) promise potential consumers much in their simulations: the thrill of designing one's own theme park attractions (including rides and soft drink concessions), the drama of competing against rival parks, and "experiencing the joys of management, including hostile takeovers and real-time arbitration." they tease potential consumers into vicariously exercising corporate power by advertising their game with primal and seductive (and recognizable) icons--adam and eve. with the above caption flanking adam's well-muscled body, the potential consumer is directed to gaze at adam gazing at eve.^1^ temptress eve, standing under the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, alluringly holds out for adam's pleasure the apple into which she has already bitten. adam has not yet bitten into the apple (although he curiously holds in his right hand a fig leaf in front of his groin, as if intuitively knowing that he will bite into the apple). behind eden, however, lies the future theme park: medieval castle, roller coaster, a gigantic hamburger (representing food and drink concessions), and a grinning purple demon to the left of eve. most interestingly, in back and to the side of the hamburger, pink phallic projections erupt, suggesting the contiguousness of food consumption and sexual appetite. the demon expectantly watches the scene playing out in eden and awaits the "fallen" guardians of eden to take possession of _theme park_. [2] in his essay "see you in disneyland," michael sorkin writes: at disneyland one is constantly poised in a condition of becoming, always someplace that is "like" someplace else. the simulation's referent is ever elsewhere; the "authenticity" of the substitution always depends on the knowledge, however faded, of some absent genuine. . . . the urbanism of disneyland is precisely the urbanism of universal equivalence. in this new city, the idea of distinct places is dispersed into a sea of universal placelessness as everyplace becomes destination and any destination can be anyplace. (216-7) sorkin's pointed reference to the "urbanism of disneyland" and its cultural transformation of public space resonates very strongly with _theme park_ and its metamorphosis of public space into cyberspace. the creators' astonishing exploitation of adam and eve iconography links, even as it attempts to merge or conflate, a mythically encoded past and an equally encoded corporate future. potential consumers, the advertisement suggests, can be corporate bosses--grinning purple demons--and can playfully craft their own geographies and destinations and cities--in short, their own disneyland. just like the demon, they may indeed corrupt other adams and other eves with their newly acquired knowledge in their newly imagined eden, but this new eden results from the play of the human mind and not from the exhausted, implicitly unimaginative mind of some "pooped" lord, a postmodern reference perhaps to nietzsche's death (or in this case exhaustion) of god. more importantly, consumers' acceptance of theme park has rendered the physical disneyland obsolete except as an abstract diagram to be simulated. whereas disneyland, according to sorkin, "still spends its energies on sculpting . . . physical simulacra," _theme park_, like its cousins on the internet, sculpts cyberspace. knowledge of sorkin's "absent genuine" can now completely disappear because consumers no longer need to travel physically; they need only "manage," it must be stressed, their emerging _theme park_s and any "simulacra" that lend their virtual corporate bosses the illusion of power. [3] in order to eliminate the "absent genuine" theme park's advertisers deliberately skew temporal and historical sequences. adam and eve, for example, hide their nakedness even though their shame should result from eating the forbidden fruit and not in the anticipation of eating it. in effect, the iconographic representation of adam and eve is a prolepsis: potential consumers must already have "fallen" into knowledge in order to comprehend the benefits of possessing _theme park_. this is why they are already at the gate, gazing upon the gazers, the primal scene recorded as cybertext. within the logic of this system, there are no prelapsarian or "sinless" consumers; hence, they will find little reason to resist the temptations of the game. and since they clearly already populate the geography of _theme park_ (one can see figures walking behind the medieval gates and riding the modern roller coaster), viewers of the advertisement have the opportunity to manipulate and control fellow consumers by subsuming them within the confines of their own _theme park_, one that competitively challenges the legitimacy (and solvency) of other, less imaginative _theme park_s. consumers can play at being god (the absent "pooped" lord) because god is "play"--a play of cyberspace signifiers that cannot settle upon "genuine" signifieds like "punishment," "fear and trembling," or the "fall." the game ironically fabricates the illusion of a hermeneutically closed system, one in which consumers no longer need an "absent genuine" to validate their actions because they themselves possess the authority to validate their own actions. [4] furthermore, the advertisement also manifests a capitalist ideology that deliberately conflates temporal and historical distinctions even as it acknowledges them, for _theme park_ promotes capitalist management practices within a pastiche of medieval and futuristic, pre-modern and postmodern architecture that towers above the pastoral landscape inhabited by managers adam and eve and their future _theme park_. it is a hybrid judeo-capitalist imagination, then, that sculpts cyberspace and has the instrumental power to artificially recreate myth and history in order to recontextualize old, familiar icons and situate them in new formats. borrowing from eco and baudrillard, albert borgmann believes that technological "hyperreality" (such as that suggested by the advertisers of _theme park_) is "an artificial reality, to be sure, but it is not a poor substitute. it surpasses traditional and natural reality in brilliance, richness, and pliability" (_crossing_ 83). _theme park_ embodies this "brilliance, richness, and pliability" by permitting capitalism to reterritorialize space, to recast it into more profitable, but less terrifying shapes. no longer the cruel, dark factory of the nineteenth century that exploits powerless workers and aggrandizes rich industrialists, capitalism has "managed" to camouflage its sinister underbelly by redefining itself as the virtual "theme park"--the collector of mercurial technologies, the purveyor of imaginative freedom. in short, the _theme park_ becomes the exploiter of simulated fields of human resources. uncannily presiding over capitalism's transformed domain is the grinning, purple demon--the advertisers' reification of "capital"--who channels consumer desire into newly emerging commodity formats. [5] borgmann correctly frames these commodities as "alluring" but not "sustaining" precisely because [t]he realm of commodity is not yet total . . . we must sooner or later step out of it into the real world. it is typically a resentful and defeated return, resentful because reality compares so poorly with hyperreal glamour, defeated because reality with all its poverty inescapably asserts its claims on us . . . . (96) borgman distinguishes between the "glamour" of hyperreality and the "poverty" of reality in order to delineate the "symmetries" between the two, ultimately contending that discussion of the hyperreal and the real raises "theological" issues, such as the nature of divinity and grace (96-7). implicitly, however, such a distinction does much more, for the easy temptations of _theme park_ falsely promise that we can indeed escape the "poverty" of "reality" through cyberspatial hyperreality, false promises which the iconography of _theme park_ reiterates. the conventional serpent in the garden has been replaced by serpentine vines, the very vines wrapped around the tree of knowledge and used by adam and eve to hide their nakedness. curiously, directly behind the tree of knowledge stands the roller coaster, whose serpentine course all too clearly parallels its mythical counterpart in eden. predictably, however, the creators and advertisers of _theme park_ fail to inform potential consumers that their acquisition of corporate power in cyberspace does not satiate capitalist desire, it exacerbates it. there is always another )apple to bite, another roller coaster to ride, another consumer to control. player/consumers may feel free to select or refuse products, without recognizing that they are themselves produced into desiring them. free will and choice become powerful illusions that deflect hard questions about the cyber-capitalist ideologies that remake "reality" through simulation. the competitive, frequently harsh world of capital and work is excised from the playful contours and boundaries of _theme park_ in order to encourage consumerist desire. enclaves of voracious capital "manage" to conceal themselves within the exterior trappings of an amusement park, of disneyland. [6] in his book _the metaphysics of virtual reality_, michael heim argues that the "allure" of computers is not merely "utilitarian or aesthetic" but "erotic" (85). he writes: instead of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or amusments, our affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a marriage to technology. rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace carries the scent that once surrounded wisdom. the world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, but also captures our hearts. we feel augmented and empowered. our hearts beat in the machines. this is eros. (85) heim's intersection of erotic desire with the miracles provided by "technology" collapses the distinctions between the body and the machinery of technology and fetishizes eros: it "captures" our hearts, and "our hearts beat in the machines." "our affair with information machines" may indeed derive from an insatiable desire for "the world rendered as pure information," but heim's subsumption of marriage within the confines of eros has the effect of trying to stabilize desire, redirecting it to worthier, "truer" goals. an unabashed platonist, heim believes eros must be educated "toward the formally defined, logical aspect of things" (88). he concludes by arguing that "the spatial objects of cyberspace proceed from the constructs of platonic imagination . . . in the sense that information in cyberspace inherits the beauty of platonic forms" (89). [7] unfortunately, heim's platonism aestheticizes the political. naturalizing the ("symbiotic") relationship between the computer user and cyberspace aestheticizes their interaction, removing a whole range of signification--eros, technology, cyberspace--from the political and cultural choices that help shape the consumer and his desire for the "refreshing play with surfaces" that heim claims the consumer ultimately transcends. far from "augmenting" or "empowering" the consumer, the "erotic" desire encouraged by cyberspatial interraction succeeds only in aggravating desire for "toys" and "amusements." finally, heim seems to assume that cyberspace is an independent entity, affirming yet again an age-old duality that promises but cannot truly deliver imaginative freedom. in fact, cyberspace works within us every bit as much as we work within it, but by acquiring the baubles promised by cyberspace technology, even heim's platonic ones, we accede to the myth-making of those, like the creators of _theme park_, who wish us to believe in the illusion of consumer independence because, without it, the secret ideology of capitalism is exposed: cyberspatial interraction does not merely activate (or satiate) latent desire, it produces it. not coincidentally, frederic jameson has described cyberspace as the "reification of the world space of international capital," tacitly recognizing that the forces of capitalism work to colonize and order cyberspace in the same manner that they have already colonized and ordered "world space." [8] it is with some surprise, then, that mark dery, who correctly acknowledges that at the "heart" of cyberculture lies "the most fundamental of all political issues, that of control," would nonetheless assert that cyberculture's "intuited awareness, submerged in the mass psyche, that the world-machine of industrial capitalism is running down, its smooth functioning impeded by dislocation and dissent, is part of the secret history of the twentieth century" ("cyberculture" 513, 519). dery assumes, as do other exponents of late capitalism, that the "world machine of industrial capitalism" has little flexibility, that it cannot mutate or "morph" as easily as the killer android in _terminator 2_ (to which dery alludes at the beginning of his essay). dery may scorn disney's carousel of progress ("it's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow") or flint's auto world ("he's my buddy"), but these theme-park attractions do not symbolize the decreasing control and power of multinational corporations; rather, they illustrate the scornful way in which "the world machine of capitalism" cynically views the consumers it shapes. as layoffs continue, it replaces the human with non-human producers while at the same time it outrageously claims that this shift to industrialization without workers ultimately benefits jobless workers. ironically, corporate interests create the killer android in _terminator 2_, not some alien intelligence or practitioner of cyberart. capitalism will not be much bothered by the machine theater of pauline, heckert, macmurtrie, and goldstone or the body art of stelarc or hacker clubs like the legion of doom or the cyberrocking nine inch nails or the cyborgs of michael jackson videos any more than factory owners in the nineteenth century were much bothered by the luddites. [9] like the purple demon, corporatist agendas are oddly hidden in plain sight, lying submerged within a game like _theme park_, and requiring a critical distance to disarm their seductiveness. advertised, packaged, sold--even information itself is dispensed by "data merchants" (theodore roszak's phrase) who idolize the machines that plug us into cyberspace and who encourage the rest of us to idolize them as well. much as satan in the garden of eden invites eve to eat the forbidden fruit, the grinning purple demon invites us, potential cyber-gamesters, to "fall" into theme park (interestingly, the land is on a downward slant) and learn the profitability of hoarding, trading, and selling data. the more data we have, the greater leverage we can exert on our competitors. as roszak informs us, however, the collection of sheer data does not necessarily signify greater understanding;^2^ indeed, the possession of mega and gigabytes of information becomes for the consumer an end in itself, a kind of technological solipsism that serves no public or collective interest. [10] yet such solipsism does serve the corporate manipulation of consumer appetites. far from fostering an unfettered exploration into the boundaries of random and spontaneous human desire, corporate concerns in cyberspace would prefer to heavily police such desire and channel it into more predictable, and hence controllable, venues. policing such desire, of course, presupposes a nameless criminality that threatens the capitalist ideology underwriting the complex web of social, political, and economic arrangements produced by cyberspace's datastreams. in these potentially profitable but highly volatile transfers of data, the computer hacker becomes the dangerous "other" whose systemic intrusions render a capitalistic ethos apparently vulnerable, but this seeming vulnerability oddly permits the creation of a corporate enemy who paradoxically becomes a necessary part of cyberspace's architecture. [11] commodity and criminality are thus inextricably linked, encoded into the iconography of _theme park_ and, by extension, imported into the very fabric of cyberspace. far from offering a politics of change, therefore, the importation of commodity and criminal desire into cyberspace iterates their traditional opposition and perpetuates the ideological status quo even as "the increase in technical devices" (benjamin's phrase) promises social, cultural, and political change. ultimately, _theme park_ reifies a politics of war, a fascism that remains quite willing to sacrifice individuals in order to maintain one's personal status, authority, and power within the established parameters of the "game." as walter benjamin prophetically writes: all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. war and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. this is the political formula for the situation. the technological formula may be stated as follows: only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. (241) the creators of _theme park_ attempt to "render politics aesthetic" by transforming the cruel, competitive world of commodity production and consumption into a "game"--a game whose grinning purple demon inculcates the values of "the traditional property system" even as the player's use of cyberspatial technology demonizes and criminalizes those who might oppose his or her quest for domination, that simple desire to win. the machines we use to achieve that domination promise, as jameson argues, only "reproduction" and not "production" (225). in the iconographic and mythic terms of theme park, we only succeed in cybernetically reproducing the conditions of the fall; we do not and cannot produce a new eden. notes: ^1^ adam's left hand stretching towards eve may symbolize the left hand path, connoting the occult, particularly in the form of hidden rituals and magic, the basis of _theme park_'s allure. see colin wilson, _the occult_. new york: vintage, 1973 (1971). ^2^ in _the politics of information_ roszak writes: "but in all cases, we are confronted by sprawling conceptions of information that work from the assumption that thinking is a form of information processing and that, therefore, more data will produce %better% understanding" (roszack's emphasis, 165). works cited: benjamin, walter. "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." _illuminations_. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken books, 1968. borgman, albert. _crossing the postmodern divide._ chicago and london: university of chicago press, 1992. dery, mark. "cyberculture." _south atlantic quarterly_ 91:3, summer 1992: 501-523. heim, michael. _the metaphysics of virtual reality._ new york, oxford: oxford university press, 1993. jameson, frederic. "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism." _storming the reality studio. a casebook of cyperpunk and postmodern fiction_. durham and london: duke university press, 1991: 219-228. roszak, theodore. _the cult of information. a neo-luddite treatise on high tech, artificial intelligence, and the true art of thinking._ berkeley, los angeles: university of california press, 1994 (1986). sorkin, michael. "see you in disneyland." _variations on a theme park_. the new american city and the end of public space_. ed. michael sorkin. new york: hill and wang, 1992: 205-232. _theme park_. advertisement. wired. july 1994: 6-7. wilson, colin. _the occult._ new york: vintage books, 1973 (1971). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------consenstein, 'memory and oulipian constraints', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-consenstein-memory.txt archive pmc-list, file consen.995. part 1/1, total size 107182 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- memory and oulipian constraints by peter consenstein department of french borough of manhattan community college pxcbm@cunyvm.cuny.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by peter consenstein, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] although oulipo (ouvroir de litterature potentielle -the workshop for potential literature) does not want to be considered a literary school, or to overtly advance specific ideologies or theories, its goals portray an understanding of literature that merits outline and critique. oulipo was founded in 1960 by francois le lionnais and raymond queneau. the oulipians emphasize the use of formal constraints in their literary production in reaction to the emphasis placed on "ecriture automatique" by the surrealists. although a mathematical equation is usually at the base of their constraints, oulipians also pay tribute to literary history by declaring all structures of all various genres of past eras open to innovation. in so doing, they define their relationship with french literature: it is one of direct innovation on the stockpile of texts of differing genres, and their goal is to offer new forms to future writers by elucidating the potential of past literary forms. in essence, they work actively with literary history and do not submit to its domination. by "working under constraint" they have raised their level of consciousness because -their dictum -if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them. such a level of consciousness controls how they are perceived, and received. their relationship with the past, their work with literary genres, and their capacity to shape their own reception, outlines a relationship with literature with which postmodern theorists ought to be acquainted. [2] oulipians innovate upon the architecture of genres not to "blur," "transgress," and "unfix" boundaries, but to grasp a genre's potential.^1^ the oulipian notion of potenitality goes in two directions: on the one hand it attempts to build structures in a systematic and scientific manner; that which is potential %is that which does not yet exist%. on the other hand, oulipians strongly believe that potential and inspiration are codependent. by acting systematically and scientifically oulipians focus and clarify, not "blur," their approach to genre transformation. although the result may be a certain "unfixing" of boundaries, it is done in the guise of literary progress, of testing the relationship between expression and construct, and not on ideological grounds. the connection between inspiration and a scientific approach to literature was made by raymond queneau in his 1937 novel _odile_.^2^ if, as i argue throughout my essay, the structure of oulipian works both recalls %and% further mutates past genres of literature, must their work then be considered postmodern, or, as queneau argues, simply the work of a "true" poet? [3] raymond queneau, one of the founders of oulipo, was one of many authors, such as georges bataille and michel leiris, rejected by the surrealists. passages from his 1937 _odile_ reveal hints of oulipian thought, a profound appreciation of mathematics, as well as a rejection of the surrealist definition of "inspiration." _odile_'s main narrator explains that the french language is simply incapable of expressing entities that exist in "other" worlds, worlds beyond daily experiences. some people, states the narrator, believe that the world of "nombres et des figures, des identites et des fonctions, des operations et des groupes, des ensembles et des espaces" (of numbers and figures, of identities and functions, of operations and groups, of sets and spaces), is simply a world of abstractions based upon nature. they believe that once humans apply reason to the world of abstractions, they construct "une demeure splendide" (a splendid dwelling). the narrator denounces this point of view as the most vulgar possible, and declares that the world of equations is like the science of botany, because in a world independent from the human mind great discoveries are made. his concern, however, is for the language used to express them. confusion, stemming from the mode of expression and not from science itself, leads to a lack of appreciation of scientific discovery. in fact, he concludes, logistics could be considered the "philology" of mathematics (26-28). in this obvious mixture of science and literature -logic and philology -it is easy to infer that philology must examine literature in a more "logical" fashion, determining if its accomplishments fulfill its premises. the formation of oulipo fulfills his literary premise, it is his literary "logic." oulipians devise constraints, either from past literary forms or from mathematical conundrums, and attempt to realize their potential by applying them to a text. the constraint is the logic of the text; the text realizes the potential of a logical, pre-conceived, and pre-evaluated equation. [4] further, queneau addresses the notion of inspiration, held captive by the surrealists, and submits it to his "philogogy." he decries the opposition of inspiration to technique. "on peut difficilement tenir pour inspires" (it is difficult to consider as 'inspired') he states, "ceux qui devident des rouleaux de metaphores et debobinent des pelotes de calembours," (those who unroll bobbins of metaphors and who unwind balls of puns). he examines surrealist technique and determines that it does not realize its potential: metaphors and puns do not add up to "inspiration." his initial thinly veiled reference to the surrealists is followed by a more virulent attack: mais ils ont perdu toute liberte. devenus esclaves des tics et des automatismes ils se felicitent de leur transformation en machine a ecrire; ils proposent meme leur exemple, ce qui releve d'une bien naive demagogie. l'avenir de l'esprit dans le bavardage et le bredouillement! ("but they have lost all their freedom. having become slaves to twitches and automatic reactions, they congratulate themselves for having been transformed into typewriters; they even offer themselves as examples, which indicates a simply naive demagogy. the future of the mind resides in chatter and mumbling!") the author then discusses inspiration vis-a-vis the "true" poet. a true poet is above the "more" and the "less" of inspiration because he or she possesses both inspiration and technique, and here queneau's words are famous: "le veritable inspire n'est jamais inspire: il l'est toujours; il ne cherche pas l'inspiration et ne s'irrite contre aucune technique, (he who is truly inspired is never inspired: he always is; he does not look for inspiration and is not bothered by any sort of technique) (158-159).^3^ although in 1937 queneau had not conjured up the term "constraint," it is clear, through his concern for the potential of language and his understanding of inspiration, that he must trace a new path. it is also clear, in his definition of the "true" poet, that technical prowess is essential to artistic creativity. again, is this postmodern, or is it in direct correlation with the original latin definition of "artis" as a skill?^4^ [5] in 1960, at cerisy-la-salle, at a conference dedicated to raymond queneau and that revived dubellay's famous "defense et illustration de la langue francaise," the initial group, first called s.l.e., short for "selitex," or "seminaire de litterature experimentale," was founded (lescure, "petite histoire . . . "). original members include noel arnaud, jacques bens, claude berge, andre blavier, paul braffort, ross chambers, stanley chapman, marcel duchamp, jacques duchateau, francois le lionnais, jean lescure, raymond queneau, jean queval, albert-marie schmidt, and the second wave of members includes marcel benabou, italo calvino, luc etienne, paul fournel, harry mathews, georges perec, and jacques roubaud. is oulipo a unique movement? in marjorie perloff's opinion, not at all. her 1991 study _radical artifice_ suggests that the application of "artifice" to text production is a world-wide phenomenon. she posits duchamp's readymades, and john cage's compositions as a contemporary "recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a %made thing%" (27-8). artifice, she contends, makes audiences aware of "how things happen." oulipians are exemplary of a form of artifice she terms "procedurality" (139), and i will illuminate their challenge to the literary world. [6] in my essay, two of the most famous oulipian works, perec's _la vie mode d'emploi_^5^ and calvino's _if on a winter's night a traveler_^6^, will be studied. jacques roubaud's _la boucle_, recently published, participates in his literary "project," which i have studied in depth. _la boucle_ is also, i will argue, the fulcrum of oulipian efforts in that it exploits a constraint that is derived from the physiological act of memory, amplifying and embodying a principle oulipian goal which involves measuring the potential of past literary forms, and devising a constraint that not only realizes its potential, but also produces a work that is entirely new. although genres are transformed by testing their potential, traces of the past are left behind; the past is remembered and modified at the same time. for that reason, _la boucle_ involves the telling of roubaud's life. could it therefore be said that he is voluntarily participating in its destruction because he consciously modifies it? does he commit a sort of literary suicide? the question of memory, its biological, psychological, and literary functions, are intertwined in roubaud's latest master constraint. [7] one cannot take lightly roubaud's recent declaration^7^ stating that we are living in both the "epoque des tetes vides" (era of empty minds) as well as in the "epoque des tetes refaites" (era of remade minds) (152-3). although he is referring directly to the role of memory in contemporary society, he is also underlining yet another factor of postmodern transformation, that being the movement from the age of the written word to the age where the image dominates. by "empty minds" roubaud underlines the distance between eras where texts and words filled the mind, through their memorization. by "remade minds" he refers to our era where hard drives, cd-roms, and video and cyber imagery, dominate. why though does his declaration, with the use of the word "tete," seem so personal? [8] within the oulipian version of literature, as i will soon detail, personal "life" and the "life" of literature are one. however, based on the above declaration it could also be said that roubaud espouses a traditional if not %romantic% notion of literature: one's personal life is entwined with, both actively and passively, not only nature in its enormity, but also the enormity of the body of works commonly understood as "literature." the oulipian version of this relationship is expressed through pressing contemporary aesthetics. for example bartlebooth, a central figure of georges perec's _la vie mode d'emploi_ understood that to conceive of a project that might describe "la totalite du monde" (the world in its totality) (156), a romantic concept, would in its enormity constitute its ruin. nevertheless, bartlebooth did construct a rigorous life-long project. thus, a reversal occurs in that the development of a project, or a constraint, be it literary or personal, no longer needs to either reflect (mime) or modify the world, but it does govern one's life. such a project would be "restreint sans doute, mais entier, intact, irreductible" (restrained of course, but complete, intact, irreducible). this, in essence, is the underlying and sufficiently satisfying oulipian goal; to build bricks -lives, books -bricks that have personal, restrained, complete, intact and irreducible features, bricks that build on the edifice of literature. the constraint at work in _la boucle_ by jacques roubaud crystallizes these goals in a manner not yet seen, while at the same time it resonates with a transitory quality that obliquely reflects our epoch. [9] the personal side of roubaud's literary project must be emphasized: like many oulipian endeavors his project %functions%, and for him its function is nothing less than a life preserver. in the "avertissement" to the project's first "branch," _le grand incendie de londres_,^8^ roubaud places his project at a par with his "existence," he terms his decision to embark on the project "vitale," in fact the project represents an "alternative a la disparition volontaire" (alternative to willful disappearance) (7). in terms of oulipian approaches to literature i am initially stressing the terms "project" and "function" and will later relate them to the act of memory, while at the same time i am strongly inferring that these are not simply cold, "scientific" machinations, the projects themselves are imbued with a personal conscience, and this is crucial when looking upon oulipian writing through a postmodern eye glass. roubaud's story itself is not my target of analysis, but the implicit meaning of the literary constraint that governs its narration will be. for example, roubaud chooses to narrate his life story in the present in order to illuminate the difference between one's life, which is forever in the past, and the telling of one's "story" (recit). [10] in essence an oulipian constraint is an act of memory as well as an assertive inscription of contemporary innovative artifice. the constraint roubaud employs in _la boucle_ is an oulipian constraint %par excellence% in that it crystallizes and focuses on the actual physiological act of memory, its formalities. it is in a sense a "meta-constraint"^9^ because if a constraint records a model or a preliminary architecture of thought, or if it innovates upon a genre of literature, then roubaud's constraint crystallizes, gives literary form to, the recollection and reshaping of the past: memory. [11] the constraint employed in _la boucle_ is a tri-partite three dimensional framework. the work is divided into three main parts; the "%recit%" is followed by "%incises%" and then "%bifurcations%." within each of the three above named main divisions there exist three main constants: 1) each division contains six chapters, 2) each of the six chapters contains a limited, numbered, and repetitive set of sections, resembling a sort of complex metrical scheme, and 3) each of the sections contains a quasi-fixed number of paragraphs. not only does the architecture of each of the three main divisions repeat itself, but so does the alignment of the subject matter. chapter 1 of the "%recit%" is expanded upon in the first "%incise%" entitled "%du chapitre 1%'" (in fact the numbered sections of "%chapitre 1%" make explicit reference to the numbered sections of "%du chapitre 1%"). chapter 1 and the incision entitled "du chapitre un" are then expanded further in "%bifurcation a%." his autobiographic structure resembles the actual physiological act of memory, yet, from another angle, the tri-partite architecture also %functions% as a mnemonic device for helping to remember. physiologically speaking, memory is itself a three stage process: an event is encoded, stored, then retrieved. [12] studies on the function of the brain in the act of memory suffer from a sense of frustration because they reveal extremely high levels of complex brain activity, because of the fact that memory involves different physiological and psychological components. for example, scientists are not sure exactly where information is stored or its channels of transmission.^10^ information itself can be categorized as "episodic" or "semantic" yet the two are intertwined. the above categories of memory refer to that which is consciously remembered versus "implicit" memory that accounts for "coordinates in space and time"^11^ (12). semantic memory refers to "retention of factual information in the broadest sense," providing information about the world that exists beyond one's immediate circle of vision (13). episodic memory refers to the "personally experienced past" and although it depends on semantic memory it "transcends" it. above all episodic memory is "unique." the synapses themselves are studied in relation to their "plasticity," or their capacity to "vary their function, to be replaced, and to increase or decrease in number when required" (thompson, 11). given the various stimuli at work when memory is both encoded and retrieved, and that all five senses participate at various levels of intensity, the act of memory is complex indeed. [13] roubaud's complex constraint, which i believe portrays the manner in which the retrieval of memory sparks new memories, responds to an oulipian principle requiring that the text speak of the constraint being employed.^12^ the initial "recit" of chapter one, in this case memories of the author's room as a child, his home, his backyard, neighborhood, childhood games, etc., is driven by detailed descriptions, in bold type on the page, of recalled images or flashes. those images awaken new thoughts and reflections, which make up the corpus of _la boucle_. in fact the first page and a half of the book, except for the first sentence, is in bold type. subsequently, at the first section of the first "incision," roubaud returns to and muses upon the initial image. in the first incision he literally cuts into the initial image, attempting to draw sparks from it which he might use to ignite more memories, memories that define the importance of his life's initial image. finally, in "bifurcation a" he returns once again to the bedroom of his childhood and finds himself able to evoke even more remembrances. [14] reflecting the actual function of memory, roubaud works to decode his encoded past, and thoroughly incurs the impact the present moment has on a past memory; hence his insistence on remaining in the present. for example, the book opens with the following sentence in regular font: "pendant la nuit, sur les vitres, le gel avait saisi la buee" (during the night, ice had seized the mist) (11). "le gel" has seized "la buee" (vapor, mist, steam). one agent of nature has transformed another: "le gel" (frost) has taken that which pictorially represents the ephemeral, and has made it into that which is more solid, more manageable, more "real." the tense of the verb "saisir" -the "plus-que-parfait " -also imbues the opening line with a sensation of "previous" time. the event took place before the immediate past, and, given that we are at the very beginning of the novel, a sort of pre-time is implied. the use of the "plus-que-parfait" renders the night of the first sentence a metaphor, a metaphor for an unknown time, mysterious and dark, looming and lengthy. the narration continues, in bold font, in an effort to succinctly situate and then examine the importance of the above incidence of memory, a memory that roubaud calls his "souvenir premier" (40). [15] the description of the frozen moisture, un lacis de dessins translucides, ayant de l'epaisseur, une petite epaisseur de gel, variable, et parce que d'epaisseur variable dessinant sur la vitre, par ces variations minuscules, comme un reseau vegetal, tout en nervures, une vegetation de surface, une poignee de fougeres plates; ou une fleur. (11) ("a network of translucid drawings, having some thickness, a slight layer of frost, variable, and since the thickness was of variable grades it engraved upon the window, these miniscule variations, like a biological network, full of nerve endings, a vegetation on a surfacei, a handful of flat ferns, or a flower.") reveals a flower, (_la fleur inverse_ is the title of the first chapter and one of his works on troubadorian poetry^13^) a "reseau" (network), an important consideration in his theory of rhythm,^14^ and then finally the word "nervures" (nerve endings) an opening to ideas about synapses, brain functions, and the interconnection of memories. in the nine sections that compose the opening chapter, roubaud explores the significance of his initial image in relation to the enterprise he has just begun, that of remembering. much as frost transforms condensation, the act of memory transforms the event being remembered. when a memory is relived a destruction occurs that engenders the construction of a new world because the role the event played is reevaluated. the same could be said about roubaud's modification of the autobiographic genre of literature: reading _la boucle_ *reminds* the reader of other autobiographies while also modifying his or her perception of them, and his or her future encounter with autobiographies. [16] the role of the flower functions within the same paradigm of destruction and construction. roubaud's relationship to the flower lies within a troubadorian conception of love, expressed in a poetic voice: "sous la voix, comme sous le gel de la vitre, il y a le neant nocturne des choses perissables et disparues" (below the voice, like below the frost on the window, there is the nocturnal nothingness of things perishable and long gone) (23). troubadorian love underlines a premise whose accomplishment or realization -the act of love -was not necessary. lurking behind the joy of love was "le gel de l'accomplissement, la ferocite du reel melange de mort. il y a l'envers de la fleur d'amour. . . " (the frost of accomplishment, the ferocity of reality mixed with death. there exists the other side of love's flower. . .) in roubaud's memory of the frozen window lurks all that has been forgotten, and all that occurs as memory surfaces on the present pages of his novel. [17] when he returns to his initial image in the first "insertion" he reflects upon the use of the word "nervures," and reinforces the accuracy of its usage. in the first insertion he discusses the use of the term in relation to the branches of his literary "projet." the image of nerve endings returns in his discussion of the title of the second chapter "le figuier," a fig tree whose "nervures veinees" (veined nerve endings) (59) dominated the backyard of his uncle's home. since the fig tree existed as a living thing that broke into the kitchen of the house, it therefore "tenait son pouvoir de disjonction" (held its power of disruption). roubaud suggests that the tree's ability to dislodge the provencal hexagonal floor-tiles ("tomettes") of the kitchen corresponds to the act of memory, since its power evoked his initial "prise de conscience de la dissymetrie" (consciousness of dissymmetry) (272). the fig tree worked to invade the memories, the floor-tiles, of the kitchen of the present, and effected his literary project by representing the multitude of directions his memory could travel. its power of "dissymmetry" forced him to invent -and thus continue in the troubadorian tradition of "finding," "trouvere" -a new division of his novel, which he calls the "entre-deux-branches" (between-two-branches). not only does the division satisfy numerological necessities of the novel's constraint by crystallizing the need for a "frayage," it also participates in the "*la grande feuille de memoire*," (*the great leaf of memory*) (276). thus the initial image of condensation "seized" by frost, its "nervures," participates in the construction of the novel, indeed the entire literary project, because it reflects the functioning of memory. [18] memory is voyage in two directions: . . .les deductions de la memoire different sensiblement selon la direction choisie pour les exhiber. et la comprehension du moindre souvenir est a ce prix. ainsi, tout simplement, dans un voyage, le paysage du retour n'est pas, pour celui qui l'accomplit, identique a celui de l'aller. (30-1) ("memory's deductions differ subtlely according to the direction chosen to reveal them. and the understanding of the smallest recollection reflects the choice made. thus, simply put, while traveling, the countryside of the return trip is not, for the traveler, identical to the countryside as it was initially perceived.") roubaud's reference to the troubadorian flower and his musings on the functioning of memory coincide, while at the same time reflecting a contemporary physiological understanding of memory. "le parcours inverse suit le parcours direct comme son ombre, son fantome. . . . chaque image du passe est donc un *double*, revele par le mouvement qui l'entraine, qui sera seulement arbitrairement arrete par la mise en mots" ("the inverse trajectory follows the direct trajectory like its shadow, its ghost . . . each image of the past is therefore *doubled*, highlighted by the trail of its movement, that will only arbitrairely be stopped when it is put into words.") [19] information is processed in the same manner, but its retrieval, or reappearance are in a sense "plastic." roubaud's constraint resembles the plasticity of synapses and challenges the genre of autobiography. speaking solely on brain function in memory in an article entitled "concepts of human memory" endel tulving states: i use the term synergistic ecphory (p.c. -retrieval) to express and emphasize the idea that the outcome of an act of memory depends critically not only on the information contained in the engram (p.c. -encoding) but also on the information provided by the retrieval environment, or retrieval cues. "synergistic" serves to remind us that ecphory, the main component process of retrieval, is governed by these two sources of relevant information, one derived from the past, the other one representing the present. (7) the sum of the past and the present is the synergistic resultant of _la boucle_'s literary constraint. roubaud's insistence on writing an autobiography in the present, and not attempting to relive the past, touches upon the heart of his literary project; it is life confirming, and the constraint guarantees its transmission. the present effects the past, transforms the past, and the oulipian constraint that roubaud has devised exemplifies that phenomenon; the synergy of the constraint, its reflux, loyally reflects not only the act of memory, but also its capacity to shape the present. the magnitude of a memory is forever transformed by its retrieval and integration into the present: a past event itself is unchangeable, but the perception of an event evolves. memory is the locus of the "plasticity" of history. for this reason i have chosen to depict his constraint in the following manner: image available from jefferson.village.virginia.edu by ftp, in: /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.995/images (see contents for further instructions). [20] the "depiction"^15^ that i have composed reflects both the actual composition of _la boucle_ as well as my own manner of perceiving its function. the "depiction" represents a cross-section of the novel; only the first chapter of each of the three main divisions of the text is depicted. if the work were to be depicted in its entirety it would unfold to the right in order to portray the remaining five chapters. other than appearing something like branches of a tree, the expected correlation, i chose to represent the number of paragraphs per section as resembling, albeit crudely, nerve endings in the brain. although they seem disconnected, that is not so, they belong to the construct of the text system. not only can each of the sets of "nerve endings" act upon the one to its side -thus supporting the narration's linearity -it also affects the "nerve ending" below it, in the corresponding chapter of the following division. i hope the above model gives a sense of how the "plasticity" of memory, with its intertwining stimuli, does in fact formally guide the construction of the text.^16^ [21] in georges perec's _la vie mode d'emploi_ the puzzle functions not only as a central theme of the novel, or "novels" as indicated on the title page of the book, but also as a generating apparatus of its constraint(s).^17^ perec adhers to the oulipian dictum that the constraint participate in a text's story, whereas specific puzzles themselves reinforce the oulipian theories of literature i am discussing: literary constraint as the reconstruction, "aide-memoire," almost the resurrection, of a %life%. harry mathews, another member of oulipo, speaking directly to perec in an interview^18^ clearly stresses how the notion of constraint permeates the novel in that it functions both in the construct of the novel, as well as in defining the character of the main protagonists. les trois personnages principaux du livre sont tous soumis a des contraintes: bartlebooth se donne des contraintes pour remplir le vide de sa vie; winckler ne choisit pas une contrainte mais en subit une dont il se sert pour se venger; enfin valene choisit une contrainte ressemblant etrangement a la votre pour emplir non pas sa vie mais plus modestement sa toile. celle-ci neanmoins, a la fin du livre, reste pratiquement vierge, dissolvant tout ce que je venais de lire et montrant que tout etait a recommencer. c'est comme si tu avais mis en scene trois experiences yde la contrainte.(54) ("the principal protagonists of the book are all under constraint: bartlebooth gives himself constraints in order to fill the voids in his life; winckler does not choose a constraint but submits to one in order to abstract vengeance; finally valene chooses a constraint that strangely resembles your own in order not to complete his life, but his canvas. nevertheless this final constraint, at the end of the book, remains practically unused, dissolving all that i just read and showing that everything had to recommence. it is as if you had intertwined three different realizations of a constraint.") mathew's comments are interesting in that he outlines "three experiences of constraint" within perec's novel, and all three relate to one's life (it goes without saying that the different "experiences of constraint" contained within _la vie . . ._ illuminate why it is a true "tour de force"). one of perec's protagonists, as mathews points out, uses constraint to "fill the emptiness of his life," another submits himself to a constraint to abstract revenge, and a third uses constraint not "to fulfill his life," but rather "his canvas." this third experience of constraint, states mathews, demonstrates that "everything had to start anew," thus emphasizing a constraint's potential. working under constraint, as gilbert adair,^19^ the translator of perec's _la disparation_ declared, "turned out to be liberating in a certain sense, because it forced you down certain paths which you would otherwise never have taken" (17). the notion of constraint, of working under constraint, serves to construct both a life and a literary work in both practical and unseen manners. [22] while it is true that the notion of puzzle functions at different levels of the novel(s) i will delimit my study by first looking upon how what bernard magne has termed perec's "metaconstraints" (116), which i describe below, effect the entire construction of the novel. i will then discuss how the composition of the character bartlebooth, the different states of mind attributed to him, his goals and his procedures, resemble the artisanal and technical work of perec himself as author and as member of oulipo, connecting yet again, constraint and one's personal life. perec's own life, as his biographer david bellos^20^ indicates, is engaged in remembering, and the subject of his literary work, from _les choses_^21^, to _la disparition_^22^, to _tentative d'epuisement d'un lieu parisien_^23^, involves recording, in exacting detail and for posterity, lives and places, both forgotten and remembered. [23] a fundamental architectural constraint of _la vie. . ._ is a 10x10 square that superficially represents the facade of a parisian apartment building in which live the occupants/protagonists of the novel(s). in order to touch upon all of the windows of the apartment building, and thus develop and interelate the stories of the building's occupants, perec utilized what is known in chess terms as the knight's tour. the knight's tour, usually performed on an 8x8 chessboard, allows the knight to go around the board touching every square. the author's use of the knight's tour on his 10x10 facade, a mathematical feat in and of itself, of a parisian apartment building designates the order of the chapters: the order of the knight's tour on the chessboard-facade, touching all the windows, dictates the appearance of the characters behind them. the depth to which the 10x10 square "constrains" the novel does not stop here. [24] magne indicates that "each chapter of the novel can be likened to a syntagmata of 42 elements each of which has been selected from a paradigm of ten alternatives" (116). the sequence of the ten alternatives is always different because selection is made from the "graeco-latin bisquare," a grid containing all the possible combinations of the first ten integers, encompassing the entire combinatory of the number ten. said grid, a 10x10 box, corresponds to the grid within which perec works to construct the order of his chapters because it too coincides with the facade of the parisian apartment building. by overlaying the graeco-latin bisquare on the 10x10 chessboard-facade, the author determined the contents of each chapter. in fact, the entire list of 42 themes was constructed before the actual writing of the novel: "au terme de ces laborieuses permutations, j'en arrivai a une sorte de "cahier des charges" dans lequel, pour chaque chapitre, etait enumeree une liste de 42 themes qui devaient figurer dans le chapitre" (at the end of each of these laborious permutations, i arrived at a sort of "book of inventory" in which, for each chapter, a list of 42 themes that would figure in the chapter was enumerated) ("quatre figures . . ." 392). the 42 themes were divided into ten groupings of four each, leaving room for two extra "themes." these "themes," not truly themes but possibilities of further permutations within the mechanics of the construction, were termed "faux" and "manque" which magne has translated as "gap" and "wrong"; these further permutations underline the role of the "clinamen," another important component in the theory of oulipian constraints. [25] the clinamen plays a role in oulipian constraints, in the reconstruction of genres, and in relation to recollection. a clinamen is an epicurean notion formulated in response to early atomist theory as articulated by democritus. it assures the creation of new forms because it represents a deviation from the norm; atoms could not create worlds unless, declares epicurus, a minimal deviation occurs. moreover, epicurus' notion of clinamen functions as an "un atome de liberte" within his philosophy. the "atom of liberty" justifies "le mouvement volontaire des vivants et la responsabilite morale de l'homme" (the voluntary movement of living creatures, and the moral responsibility of man)^24^ (871). a clinamen can "justify" man's moral responsibility by demanding of him the consciousness of will in deviating from societal norms. [26] the oulipians hold dear to the notion of clinamen in relation to the constraint, their "raison d'etre."^25^ they hold dear to this notion for the same reason epicurus did; the essential elements of their constraints must, in order to create a world (oeuvre, text) deviate from the norm in an arbitrary fashion so that the constraint is not constrictive, so that the contstraint maintains its creative potential. [27] as i have stated, the constraints in _la vie . . ._ determine the interactions of the novel's characters. comparing the unfolding of perec's epic of a parisian apartment house to the great nineteenth century novels by stendahl, flaubert, and zola for example, it becomes clear that the origin of representation has shifted. no longer is the author attempting to imitate life, as did zola's in _germinal_"^26^ where the target of his mimetics is, as the sub-title proclaims, the "histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second empire." by inventing his own constraints, arbitrary and thus reflective of the author's mind, perec allows his own machinations to guide him to both artistic, and of course personal, discovery. his observations of society are no less personal than those of the great nineteenth century authors, yet the constraints reflect his inner pathways more self-consciously than does the narrative architecture of a flaubert. although ultimately both a perec and a stendahl, zola, or flaubert, depict society, and none would claim pure objectivity, perec's self-determined constraints propose another adventure. he understands that inspiration comes from within and he plays the role of a barthian "scriptor."^27^ the clinamen guarantees a place for spontaneity, for further permutation, and also assures the novel's future, and the unpredictability of (its) life. the mnemomics of the chessboard, as i shall later reveal, is a mnemotechnique that supports perec's own need to remember, for remembrance is the foundation of the future. [28] research into the various constraints at work in _la vie . . ._ began directly after its publication with the special 1979 issue of _l'arc_ dedicated to perec, which contained his "quatre figures pour _la vie mode d'emploi_." david bellos, the english translator of _la vie . . ._, contributed his 1989 article entitled "perec's puzzling style"^28^ while hans hartje, bernard magne, and jacques neefs, also made important discoveries. it is only in 1993^29^ that the publication, photographically reproduced, of perec's own "cahier des charges," the notebook which divulges the exact elements of each chapter, occured. until the publication of the "cahier des charges" the greatest difficulty for researchers had been to ascertain the alternatives or "rubrics" of the 10 groupings (alternatives) of forty-two "themes." ^30^ [29] given the list of elements at work in perec's narration, the question concerning the definition of a "theme" within the context of oulipian constraints deserves reflection. it deserves reflection because the definition of a theme is here subsumed in the working of a constraint. in essence, the constraint determines the novel's themes; the theoretical consequences of working under constraint are such that the novel is "constraint-driven" not "theme-driven." an outcome of the oulipian credo could be termed a "constraint-theme," and since the themes are "constraint-driven," and integrated into predetermined configurations, they are more easily retrievable, more easily remembered, because of the inherent system of classification. the themes are the common denominators of both the novel and the protagonist's "life." [30] the list of "themes" that comprises chapter twenty three contains such elements as "the," "chat," "triangle," "manteau," and "tapis de laine." respectively they belong to the categories "boissons," "animaux," "surfaces?," "vetements," and "tissu (nature)." these "objects" can not be considered "themes"; they are "items" which must somehow be made to %fit in% to the story being told, they are the pieces of the puzzle that each chapter represents and they "disappear," or take on a specified form, once the chapter is composed. as such, they belong to the conscious challenge the author presented himself, and they pertain as much to the world being described, as to perec's self-discovery through game theory. once the chapter is composed the "list" is fully integrated into the story; the list itself "disappears" and diminishes in importance, and the novel continues to recount its epic tale. [31] as well, for perec the person, the constraint must disappear. in fact, he viewed the importance of the constraint as minor *after* the novel's completion. in an interview conducted in 1981^31^ he stated that he simply no longer remembered the constraints he used, and that "d'une certaine maniere, je m'en moque. je veux dire que c'etait tres tres important au moment ou je le faisais . . .," (in a certain way, i could care less. i mean it was very, very important when i was doing it . . .) however once he had resolved the complexities of his constraints, "cela n'a plus d'importance" (it was no longer important)(53). the completed novel is the philological result of the contraints logic. the whole, a sum of its parts, is the author's ultimate gift, and the reader's knowledge of the logic is not always necessary. once a puzzle has been completed it is no longer a "puzzle": a puzzle must puzzle. [32] i too entertained "une certaine idee de la perfection" (a certain idea of perfection) (157). before i knew that the actual "cahier des charges" had been published i disassembled each of the chapters dedicated to bartlebooth in order to resurrect the chapter's original architecture, and to obtain a clear picture of the specific themes attributed to the protagonist. even with such a picture, the puzzle was not solved, its pieces did not represent the final product: bartlebooth. knowledge of the elements that compose said protagonist provides insight into the construction of a narration, however it does not indicate, by any means, a mastery of the narration's intent, which cannot be obtained through any single approach. instead, it demonstrates a constraint's limitations: a constraint acts only to indicate the bearings of a text's directions and not its ultimate destination. it is the map towards discovery, it is not the voyage itself. [33] any attempt to "analyze" the protagonists of such a novel through thematic dissection, is an exercise in futility; it is like attempting to grasp the intricacies of a puzzle by examining its pieces. especially since the character of bartlebooth embodies the dichotomy of art and life. art represented bartlebooth's "mode d'emploi" for life itself: art was the blueprint, the "techna" for life, much like perec's constraints acted as the narration's "mode d'emploi." bartlebooth simply "n'avait pas de soucis d'argent" (had no money problems) (154) and therefore had the leisure of leading life free of financial constraints; this does not infer that he was free of constraint, but he did have the leisure to design his own. bartlebooth became himself through art. valene, the artist who spent ten years teaching bartlebooth the art of "aquarelle" (waterpainting) and who narrates a good part of the first of the five bartlebooth chapters, declares that bartlebooth demonstrates a "totale absence de dispositions naturelles" (a total absence of natural abilities) (154). it was not waterpaints that interested bartlebooth, it was what he wanted to do with them; through art (technique) he would acquire a "natural ability," reflecting perec's, and queneau's, view that constraint equals inspiration. bartlebooth spent ten years learning how to translate onto paper the nuances of nature, he then traveled the world for twenty years, had his paintings transformed into puzzles, attempted to solve the puzzles for twenty years, and had them all restored to their original state of blank canvas; this was his life project, his life's "constraint." perec too dedicated an enormous time period to his endeavor, signing _la vie . . ._ "paris, 1969-1978" (602). in the first bartlebooth chapter a question was asked: "que faire?" (what is there to do?) and the answer was "rien" (nothing) (157): "rien," the blank canvas, symbolized his goal. all he had was a "certaine idee de la perfection" and his life revolved around pursuing it, all the while acknowledging its impossibility. [34] in order to make his protagonist credible perec too had a plan. perec "constructed" bartlebooth through the use of a pre-determined set of places, characters, dates, decors, allusions to exterior works, and various events and activities -his "alternatives"; these are the components of his narration. perec revealed and then employed the tools of the art of narration to give life to a personality who lacked "dispositions naturelles." analogously, bartlebooth dedicated his own life to the apprenticeship of an art, and then to making it disappear. bartlebooth's personality is revealed through his project, his approach to building a life. perec's personality, in his attempt to write a novel in "today's fashion,"^32^ is revealed through the constraints he embedded in his tale. the method of his narrative art is perec, and through his constraints he has guaranteed that he too will be remembered. [35] in _petit traite invitant a la decouverte de l'art subtil du go_,^33^ published in 1969 or the same year perec started _la vie..._, the authors draw a parallel between the game of "go" and writing. the authors understand as "paradoxal" the fact that "on puisse s'adonner a un jeu qu'on ne maitrisera jamais" (it is possible to abandon oneself to a game that one will never master) (41). their incapacity to master the game entails commiting actions that players are doomed to "repeter servilement" (repeat servilely). the committement to playing a game of such tradition and subtility means that the players repeat actions "sans les avoir jamais vraiment assimile;s, sans pouvoir en faire la critique, sans pouvoir en inventer d'autres, des coups parfois millenaires" (without having ever truly assimilated them, without the ability to analyze them, without the ability to invent others, moves that are sometimes a thousand years old). it is clear that perec's invented method of constructing persona, his "cahier des charges" composed of paradigmatic "themes," is a shuffling of "thousand year old moves," or narrative techniques and literary allusions overpowerfully pre-existent. for the authors of _petit traite . . ._ the weaving of black and white stones on the "go" board is simply the drawing of "des lignes, des reseaux, des zones agreables a regarder" (lines, networks, and zones that are pleasant to look at) (42). the beauty of the "go" strategies emanates from the fact that they are part of a "chemin infini," an "infinite path"; the activity of playing "go" they state, can be compared to only one thing: "l'ecriture." perec rearranged the "the thousand year old moves" of narration to put his mark on genre evolution, on the constructive signifiers of literature. in so doing he recalls the works of raymond queneau, who demonstrated in his famous _exercises de style_^34^ that literary effects, whether they be the romantic style of the authors of the nineteenth century or the sensation of %"ecriture automatique,"% are the results of a limited set of rhetorical and structural operations, and that any good artist-author-rhetorician could master them. [36] by spending his life in the pursuit of remembering (traveling the world in order to record -paint -the places visited), reconstructing, and then effectively forgetting (having his works destroyed), bartlebooth made himself a "life." the protagonist's memory was governed by his self-imposed constraint in the same way that the narrator's art -the ability to create a "personnage" and in this case to construct a "user's manual" for life itself -was governed by lists of items that, after death, remain as the mementos of one's "life." perec's constraints allowed him to bring to the forefront the elements of narration that have been used through the centuries in the creation of fictive protagonists. mimesis of an outside world becomes unnecessary stimulus as the technique of art (narration in this case), its "mode d'emploi," becomes the source of memory that is being "mimed"; life does not imitate art, they combine to create, they contend with each other in a rhythmic fashion; art is life is art through unifying rhythm. [37] perec once said: "i represent myself as something like a chess player and playing a chess play with the reader and i must convince him, or her, to read what i wrote and he must begin the book and go until the end"^35^ (26). the active participation of the reader, who mediates and thus becomes implicated in the novel's constraints, is an essential element of the oulipian concept of literature. one of the best oulipian examples of the reader's role is apparent in italo calvino's _if on a winter's night a traveler_. [38] _if on a winter's night a traveler_ is composed of twenty-two chapters; twelve numbered chapters interspersed with ten titled chapters. all of the numbered chapters have "you," the second person pronoun, the reader, as their main character, whereas the titled chapters all represent incipits, the beginning chapters, of various novels by various authors including of course, _if on a winter's night . . ._. the novel's tension is built upon "your" search for the continuation of the novels that "you" have begun. calvino's work then, like the perecian puzzle, snares the literary analyst in a trap. if _if on a winter's night . . ._ recounts the tale of a reader's encounter with novels that have no conclusion, then to capture the work in its finality is impossible. without conclusions, calvino's novel becomes a reflection of the perpetuity of literature, and its analysis is the novel's continuation. any reading of _if on a winter's night . . ._ puts one in the position of the "you" of the novel who will always be searching, whereas the book itself does "end" with the reader finally married to another reader; the final scene finds one reader in bed with the "other" reader who is finishing calvino's _if on a winter's night . . . ._ the novel is a tautological hall of mirrors that concerns the act of reading, while controlling it at the same time. [39] in his expository essay "comment j'ai ecrit un de mes livres,"^36^ calvino indicates that the figure of a square is the model of the constraint that governs the numbered chapters, where "you" are the main protagonist. the constraint functions in the following manner: each corner of the square represents an element of the relationship between the reader and the novel, the reader and other readers, the reader and fake novels, the reader and the "author," the "author" and the reader, the reader and the state, etc. "your" various actions, and the relationships "you" are involved in, occupy the four corners of the square. the narration advances both clockwise around the square, and, at various intervals, opposing corners of the square interconnect, thus prolonging the narration. the number of squares per chapter increases by one until the sixth chapter; at that point chapter seven also comprises six squares, whereupon the number of squares per chapter decreases until, like the first chapter, chapter twelve is composed of one "square" of events. [40] the title of calvino's article refers intertextually to raymond roussel's famous essay "comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres."^37^ roussel's works have often been viewed by the members of oulipo as pre-oulipian.^38^ aside from the titles, the two articles contain similarities and differences. both roussel and calvino limit the number of constraints they choose to discuss. roussel discusses what he terms a "procede tres special" (11) (a very special procedure) at work in four texts: _impressions d'afrique_, _locus solus_, _l'etoile au front_ and _la poussiere de soleils_, whereas calvino reveals only one of many constraints at work in _if on a winter's night . . ._ both authors utilize poetic language: calvino's discourse is in quatrains and couplets, as i will soon detail, and roussel explains that his procedure relates to rhyme (23). the initial similarities between the two articles indicate that, on the one hand, preliminary meditations of a text's structure is not limited, in neither time or place, to oulipo; on the other hand, poetic language is a language of constraint %par excellence% whose "procedures" can be applied to the construction of any genre of literature. [41] michel foucault, in his book _raymond roussel_,^39^ believes that the posthumous publication of _comment j'ai ecrit . . ._, works to "propager le doute" (propagate doubt) (13). by revealing the fact that a secret exists, roussel undermines the reader by imposing a "informe, divergente, centrifuge" (shapeless, divergent, and centrifugal) (19) sense of anxiety. said anxiety is provoked by roussel's use of "rhyme," or what he himself termed "combinaisons phoniques" (phonetic combinations) (23). words are imbued with a fragility different than the power of tropes; foucault says they are both "anime et ruine, rempli et vide" (animated and ruined, filled and emptied) by the sense that a second word exists, that there meaning is contained in both words, or neither, or a third, or none at all (20). roussel's essay is integral to his work because it reveals his procedure, includes biographical notes, as well as hommage to jules verne and to the imagination. foucault attributes roussel's narrative acrobatics to the author's view of perpetuity, to his need to know that the end is a return to the beginning, and finally to an expression of "folie." [42] calvino, however, is researching the cross-roads between science and literature, believing that a "wager"^40^, can exist between literary and scientific languages. said "wager" would permit both parties to gain. literature supplies the scientist with "imaginative courage in taking a hypothesis to its ultimate consequences," while the the language of mathematics repairs the "disrepair that words and images have fallen into as a result of being misused" (37). further, calvino recognizes that the purpose of literature is not realized unless the reader approaches it with "%critical% reflection," (36) and his expository essay "comment j'ai ecrit . . ." is part of his strategy to snare, and ultimately seduce, the reader. according to carl d. malmgren^41^ , calvino is trying to "find a way out of" the "dead end for narrative" enacted by "postmodernist metafiction" (106). in fact, patricia waugh indicates that calvino's emphasis on the reader completes "barthes statement: that the %death% of the author makes possible the %birth% of the reader."^42^ by referring to raymond roussel, and by investing his reader with, in a sense, the authority of authorship, calvino is committing a double act of memory. he invests his skills with the weight of literary precedence, and distributes his investment to his readers, his "stock" holders. [43] as i stated earlier, the structure of "comment j'ai ecrit . . ." strongly resembles a poem. either four or six sentences follow each square. each sentence describes the event or persona that occupies each of its corners; two other sentences are added each time opposite corners interrelate. thus, the figure of a square precedes either a single "quatrain" (a sentence per corner) or a "quatrain" and a "couplet" (the opposite corners interrelating). in essence, the seventeen page article summarizes in a poetic fashion all the events that occur in the numbered chapters of _if on a winter's night . . ._ , and the constraint can thus be viewed as a fixed form of poetry, using traditional stanza composition. by embedding poetic conventions into his work, calvino has invested it with a time-tested mnemonic device, limited and repetitive stanzas. [44] calvino informs the readers, at the end of "comment j'ai ecrit . . ." that the squared model of constraint is an "adaption personelle" (personal adaptation) (44) of a. j. greimas' structural semiology. calvino has, in a rhythmic and combinatory fashion derived from stanza structure, explored various permutations of the relationship between the reader, the book he and/or she is reading, and the completion of the various novels contained therein. by informing us that the particular square upon which he has chosen to model his constraint is no %ordinary% square, but the "%same%" model of a square used by a. j. greimas to represent aspects of structural semiology, calvino links his constraint to the manner in which the seme signifies. thus, the constraint underpins not only the reader's quest for the novel's conclusion, but ultimately the novel's meaning. by contrasting calvino's essay to that of roussel, the difference between the possible gain stemming from calvino's "wager," and roussel's injection of a "sense of anxiety" into his writing, can be clearly detected. calvino plumbs the mine of literary creativity, whereas roussel was seeking salvation. [45] calvino's constraint guarantees that the novel's "completion," in the sense of its ultimate %meaning%, is entirely dependent upon "you," whether "you" be the reader *of* the novel or the reader *in* the novel. calvino's narrative trickery guarantees that literature cannot exist without "you"; his constraint has completely embedded the reader into the tale. two key sentences in "comment j'ai ecrit..." underline the extent to which a reader "destabilizes" yet at the same participates in a novel's meaning: "le livre lu et le livre ecrit ne sont pas le meme livre" (the written book and the read book are not the same book) (37) and "le livre lu par chaque lecteur est toujours un autre livre" (the book read by each reader is always another book) (42). [46] all the various permutations of the reader's role, of the reader's relationship with other readers, as well as with other authors, do not bring _if on a winter's night . . ._ to a conclusion, its meaning remains in eternal flux. a wiley feinstein^43^ finds that the "doctrinal core" of _if on a winter's night . . ._ is that the author finds himself in a "horrifying double bind." this is caused by "readers, [who] in their demanding capriciousness and insatiability, are as impossible to live with as they are to live without" (152). feinstein obviously makes reference to the difficulty men and women experience living with each other, and the "double bind" to which he refers is comparable to the eternal marriage whence there is no divorce, the marriage between author and reader. the cement of this marriage is literature, life, and memory. both author and reader pursue the novel(s), and use it to embody and transform the need to tell, and to listen to, stories. marriage, a complex binary operation %par excellence% based on shared and eternal memories -"till death do we part" -of stories told and heard, such that personal ones are indistinguishable from those shared. [47] as i previously suggested, the constraint in roubaud's _la boucle_ reflects the physiological act of memory, or, in reverse logic, the physiological act of memory has been transformed into a literary constraint: he has demonstrated how the present moment always renders memory plastic. perec's puzzling mathematics describe the virtually infinite combinatory (possibilities) of life's events, and calvino devised permutations that take into account the reader's impact on the novel's ultimate meaning. the reason that their constraints inscribe them indelibly into the present moment of literary history is that the constraint is a mnemonic device. [48] when roubaud addresses questions within _la boucle_ that pertain to the autobiography as a literary genre he bemoans the demise of the "arts de la memoire." he asserts that the novelist is a "victime inconsciente d'une mutation historique: l'exteriorisation du souvenir" (unconscious victim of an historical mutation: the exteriorization of memory) (322). the %ars memorativa% were memory techniques that underpinned not only erudition, but also both self-esteem and self-identity; they were the method by which one became learned, and constructed one's inner library. [49] mary carruthers, in _the book of memory_^44^, not only describes mnemonic techniques of the past, but she too underlines their importance in relation to becoming learned. from her vantage point, medieval writers viewed learning as, . . . a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information into patterns, organizational principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered . . . (2) during the eras she studies, %memoria% and mnemotechniques engendered more than what is presently viewed as "memorizing." %memoria%, the mother of the muses, and subsequently the %ars memorativa%, consists of elements, such as %prudentia% or %meditatio%, that are the backbone of a medieval scholar's classical education. said %ars%determine one's "education and character," (187) and also maintain one's ethical standards. in essence, carruthers' book examines the lofty and often metaphysical goals of the well-rounded medieval scholar, and, more importantly, the process by which said goals were achieved. [50] there are parallels between mnemonic devices of old and oulipian constraints. amongst the many different mnemonic devices invented, two different elements of roubaud's constraint, the use of mathematics as well as the use of specified loci, are elements of many earlier memory tools. for instance, carruthers offers the "numerical grid" as an example of an "elementary memory design." the text to be memorized was divided into limited passages which were assigned numbers and then placed into imaginary "bins"; the "bins" were then formed into a diagram. each numbered "bin" was "titled" with the text's opening words. highly ornate opening letters, common to medieval texts, served as visual means of remembering first sentences, thus stimulating the synesthetic traits of memory. [51] similarly, roubaud created a numerical grid of sorts to write _la boucle_. visually, he underscores the recollection of actual images (flashes) by using bold typefacing; his interjections, in fact the entire passage of "incisions," is in a different font size. he reproduced, indented on the page and in an entirely new font, tracts of his grandmother's journal. now, when looking upon his constraints within the epistemology of a philological education, the connection between literary and personal lives, and both of their needs to remember the past, is clear. his constraint reflects the physiological act of memory by remembering the formal training of our literary forerunners. [52] looking upon the constraints that govern _la vie mode d'emploi_ by georges perec, two classical mnemonic tools are apparent; the first is "architectural mnemonics," and the second is the chessboard. a manner in which one sets %tracti%, or other texts for that manner, to memory was to build a place to store them. carruthers underlines the importance of places by referring to both cicero's _rhetorica ad herennium_, book iii, and then tully's _ad herennium_: she determines that places should serve as background to memory, and these different backgrounds provide spacing. such spacing was often specifically architectural. carruthers finds that tully used vocabulary from roman architecture, such as "'aedis' (a house), 'intercolumnium' (the space between columns, a colonnade), 'angulus' (a recess), 'fornix' (an arch)" (139). by using the facade of a parisian apartment block to construct a narrative, perec has committed a specific architectural design to memory, and after having thoroughly "digested" his work, those apartment blocks can never look the same for the reader; their facades contain stories. [53] carrruthers also reveals that jacopo da cessola, a dominican friar from the 1300's, wrote "an allegorical treatment of the game of chess" in what was one of "the most popular of late medieval ethical manuals" (144). the ethical texts to be memorized from the manual were placed into a grid, and the grid was precisely a chessboard "filled with images." the form of the manual adopted the mnemotechniques familiar to medieval audiences, which was "the form of a grid filled with images, familiar . . . as a basic format for the page of memory." almost naturally then, perec's graeco-latin bisquare and the chessboard coalesce. the narration's constraint allows it to be easily set to memory, much like the work of the domincal friar jacopo da cessola. drawing on contemporary -the apartment house -images, on ninteenth century narrative techniques, and medieval mnemonics, erec committed his story (history) to french cultural memory. he offered the reader grids, mathematical combinations, architectural space, facades, chessboards and chess pieces, as well as the spontaneity of clinamen, as stimuli for recording the "life" of a building. as such, the reader, implicated and invested in the process, commits his or her own life to memory, and reevaluates the various components that build stories, and lives. the grid-like combinatory, its architectural space, as well as the chessboard and its pieces, compose a novel that is the basis of life's "mode d'emploi." [54] calvino's constraint in _if on a winter's night a traveler_ starts with the figure of a box. as previously stated, the number of boxes increases, arrives at a plateau, and then decreases. on the opening page of the article "comment j'ai ecrit un de mes livres" an illustration of the boxes regularly increasing and decreasing resembles a bar-graph or a grid-like diagram. much like in mnemotechniques of the past, limited information about the texts is contained within the boxes. below the novel's surface lies the fundamental building blocks of memory, the original grid to be filled with the profound texts of one's %memoria%. [55] the interspersal of the incipits of novels and the reader's pursuit of them, is also an act of memory; in medieval times the reader completes the book by committing it to memory. so does the reader of/in _if on a winter's night . . ._ carruthers calls the act of reading in medieval times a "'hermeneutical dialogue' between two memories" (169). she emphasized the extent to which metaphors for eating, digesting, and even harvesting underpin %meditatio%, also related to the act(ion) of reading (168). rumination and murmuring versus silent reading, %legere tacite% versus %viva voce%, are employed at different moments to assure the text's committal to different levels of memory. such active readings define a different sort of reader; a reader who is not an "interpreter" but the text's "new author, or re-author" much like, "petrarch has re-spoken virgil; 're-written virgil'" (168). when attempting to grasp calvino's _if on a winter's night a traveler_, it is quite evident that there is only one author, italo calvino himself. but when attempting to analyze the narration, there exists many authors, fictive and even plagiarizers of fictive authors. and since the chapters where "you" are the main character sustain and represent the essence of the novel's tension, it could easily be said that "you" are part-author of the book. therefore, the dominant constraint of the novel demands that the reader assume the responsibility of "authoring" the novel, and of being a participant in the renovation of the genre. calvino's constraint actively engages memory. it acts to construct a novel where active reading functions as did the %memoria% of medieval scholars, by participating in meaning. [56] as early as 1967 in the article "ecriture et mass-media"^45^ perec maintains that a "changement de fonction" is occurring in the arts that provides "un echange plus reel entre l'oeuvre et le spectateur" (a more concrete exchange between the work and the audience) (8). mass-media, he affirms, offers the writer a space where "le simultane et le discontinu" (the simutaneous and the discontinuous) can create "irruption dans l'ecriture" (irruption within writing) (9). narration must no longer resemble the linearity of a river, models of writing can adapt the form of "l'arbre" (a tree), "l'epi" (a stalk), and "des tiroirs" (drawers) (9). based on the new physical forms that mass-media offers to a writer, mimesis is no longer a necessity, and discontinuity as well as simultaneity can be fully integrated into a work. in other words, writing can, and must, embrace abstract thought. in order to clearly communicate such thought, a writer's work depends upon exchange, whether it be between puzzle and puzzle-maker (_la vie . . ._), between reader and author (_if on a winter's night . . ._), or between the past and the present (_la boucle_). in the rejection of mimesis, and the adoption of the philosophy of writing under constraint, oulipian writers incur the responsibility of "falsifying" the past, portrayed by the various authors in _if on a winter's night . . ._ even though they transform past texts, they do pay homage to their predecessors, they are "remembering" them, by encoding the present moment of literary evolution with contemporary versions of past literary endeavors. [57] roland barthes' memorable essays, "la mort de l'auteur," and "de l'oeuvre au text"^46^ consider the activity of contemporary textuality, and help situate the texts i am studying. perec suggests that narration must no longer be linear, and can integrate "the simutaneous and the discontinuous" into its production, much like barthes, in declaring the death of the author and the birth of the "scriptor," declares that "il n'y a d'autre temps que celui de l'enonciation, et tout texte est ecrit etenellement %ici% et %maintenant%" (64) (there is no other time than the moment of declaration, and all texts are written in the eternally here and now.) the eternal %hic et nunc% -roubaud's insistance on the present tense, for example -executes the perecian simultaneous and discontinuous, thanks to the postmodern, and/or oulipian, heightened sensitivity to the textual signifier. barthes calls the signifier the "%apres-coup%" (after-shock) of meaning because it cannot infinetly refer to an unspeakable signified, but it embodies, and plays, the text's "%jeu%" (72) (game). the "%game%" corresponds directly with contemporary, derridean, notions of "%ecriture%," with the oulipian constraint, and with the epistemology of mnemotechniques. after having considered three oulipian texts, can i not logically conclude that the constraints that reinforce genre architecture are a blueprint, the set of rules, the "%mode d'emploi%," of the textual game played by author and reader? and participating in that game (a personal game of memory and addition?), contributes to both the past and the future of literary architectural evolution. [58] our consciousness of literary evolution returns us in time to previous eras where form, and emphasis on exchange, predominated; to ancient greek theater and the orality of the odyssey. which is why calvino states that there is no true "original book." to believe that an author, or a computer for that matter, could generate novels, or a new form of literature, is to believe that an original story exists, be it told or untold: "l'ordinateur-auteur de romans est un reve comme le pere des recits" (the computer-novelist is a dream much like the existence of the father of all stories) (33) he states in "comment j'ai ecrit . . ." no original tale exists, there are only innovations and replications of last genres and of past tales. in the chapter entitledy "cybernetics and ghosts" (_the literature machine_ 3-27) he states that "the true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order" (13). writers, he believes, are "already writing machines" (15)^47^ because they are always elaborating upon the architecture of preceding genres, always contending with and remembering the literary past. [59] calvino offers what he terms a writer's "combinatorial mechanism" (21) as a way of contending with the literary past, and expanding upon the barthian notion of the signifying game. in the mechanism's search for the "new," a permutation "clicks," and then a "shock" (22) occurs. on the one hand, the "shock" takes the form of a text that "becomes charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately: an unconscious meaning" (21). on the other hand, the "shock" will *not* occur if the writer is not "surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society" (22). even after the "click" and the "shock," the process of evolution is far from finished because "once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading" (15). then "the work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on contact with the eye of the reader" (16). thus for calvino, and i would add for the members of oulipo in general, the "combinatorial mechanism" is human, societal, and cultural. the game of their "%ecriture%," based on the above metaphors, involves abstraction, and cannot be solitary; it includes the past, all of society, and the lives of the reader and the writer. as scientists and writers, oulipians use abstract means of self-discovery. abstract paths are true to their nature, even if literature, and "%litterateurs%," find them difficult to follow. [60] the ultimate goal of devising a constraint is to discover one's unconscious, one's inner %life%, through permutations of the past, through a conscious plunge into the combinatory of literature. silas flannery, one of the fictive authors in _if on a winter's night . . ._, declares that "memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form" (181); in other words the form cannot be hermetic, it cannot be infallible, and in a sense, such infallibility is impossible because "you," the reader, are the ultimate variable, the clinamen of literature. "you" bring (your) life to the text by remembering, by making the game new through memory, by making the game worth playing. [61] i have stated that roubaud's constraint in _la boucle_ resembles the physiological act of memory. it functions as "meta-constraint" for the entire oulipian project, and although the oulipians pay strict attention to questions of language and to literature's inner structures, their goal is to explore the humanity of abstract thought. as calvino says, authors are %already% writing-machines. david bellos, in his studies of _la vie . . ._, discovered a "giant reverse diagonal acrostic" (17) where perec hid the word "ame" (soul). the author's soul, an intangible yet essential element of his life, drives the novel's constraint. a consciously determined constraint is the path, the philosopy, the "philological logic," of self-discovery. mimesis still drives the oulipian author, however their target of replication is no longer nature, but the structures of literature, and the application of abstract thought to the production of texts. [62] the oulipian constraint is a philosophical approach to life. roubaud states that an essential perecian question is the eternal "que faire?" (what does one do?) and that perec answers clearly: "rien" (nothing).^48^ for perec the constraint was, states roubaud, "la question-reponse decisive de la vie" (the decisive question-answer of life). since "rien," or zero for a mathematician, represented perec's solution to life's equation, then the intrigue lies in how to arrive at nothing. the constraint remains the quintessential means -"la question-reponse" -at arriving at nothing, at guaranteeing that bartlebooth's paintings be reduced to virgin canvas, only after life was lived, only after the constraint was applied, only after as roubaud states "d'immenses efforts" (58). a constraint represents a consciousness of life, and an acceptance of death, of worthlessness, but without rousselian anxiety. by raising questions about "life," about one's soul, about mastery over the novel's language and construct, perec embraces what bellos has termed "unpostmodernist concepts." is oulipian "%ecriture%" postmodern in its romantic desire to discover the soul through literary adventure? [63] cybernetic analysis offers a good foil for understanding oulipian work. david porush in _the soft machine_^49^ views cybernetic fiction as "the diminution of the role of the human presence or persona in favor of some deterministic, clockwork fictional universe operating apparently through its own agency" (157). also, he indicates that cybernetic fiction is composed of a "typical congruence between form and function, the concern with linguistic artifice, the constructedness or emphasis on structure for structure's sake" which describes oulipian concerns. from the oulipian point of view, however, a machine already exists in all of us. the oulipian novel-machine now targets the self, it utilizes -_la boucle_, for example -a physiological act as the target of mimesis, implying a new level of unity of book and self, book-self. in fact, the constraint can be considered constitutive of the self, an exploration of one's capacity, of one's *potential*: the constraint is the machine's engine. [64] the book is a true "buckle," _la boucle_, highlighting the link between one's inner machine and one's consciousness. the search for machine-like qualities can end because "the author is already a writing-machine." oulipian textuality engages in a ludic exchange with literature, mediated by the constraint cum machine, forcibly modifying the economics and the stakes of individual cultural exchange. much like culture can be seen as a field of commonalities and differences, so too can the structure of memory. individuals process cultural information, remember it, makes it their own, in a machine-like way. oulipian constraints are exemplars, equations, allegories, of the consciousness of process. [65] the oulipian consciousness of process can be seen as a plea. roubaud's comments about the "epoque des tetes vides," and the "exteriorisation du souvenir," reinforce this plea directed at a society that has been termed "post-literate." it is a plea to respect the capacity to remember, to utilize the structures of literature as not only a means of reflecting on the architecture of thought, but as a means of constructing our own inner library, one where reader and author are co-authors.^50^ in earlier times the book was a tool to be integrated into one's memory, it was to be added to a thinker's "private" and %interior% "collection." roubaud calls the description of exterior objects, contemporary media, "lent" (slow), "morsele" (in pieces), and a "multiplication de details preleves crument" (a multiplication of details crudely deduced). he contrasts them to what he calls a "vision globale" contained within a "reel interieur." the constraint in _la boucle_, an interior adventure depicting roubaud's abstract understanding of memory, confirms that a life occurred, secures it, and inscribes that life in literary memory. the "exteriorisation du souvenir" indicates, then, an historic reversal in thinking. the reversal in thinking is that instead of the medieval habit of permitting a well-organized memory to "complete" the book, our epoch searches for a method to reclaim, restore, and replicate the interior structure of memory so as to resurrect, secure, and inscribe our book. we stand on the threshold of allowing images alone to record our memories -images and bytes. to allow our "souvenirs" to remain "outside" or exteriorized, is the equivalent of weakening the use of language. with it goes the syntax and the organization of thought that language provides, that the brain provides. roubaud works as a contemporary troubadour, finding and/or inventing new means of expression. i have termed his latest constraint a meta-constraint because it is a tool for remembering to remember. [66] the oulipians practice what roubaud called "plagiat par anticipation" (plagarism by anticipation); time barriers are destroyed. an oulipian constraint is a constraint that must have a clinamen, a constraint that must be fallible, a constraint that guarantees an enormous flexibility of meaning, and finally it is a constraint that, if well construed, will always "disappear." the foundation of the constraint is that it is an act of memory. memory of literature, memory as an art form, memory that evokes what one of calvino's "authors" might term "la bibliotheque infinie." if time barriers are destroyed, if the library is infinite, and if the constraint is a means of self-discovery, i then ask: is oulipian "ecriture" postmodern, or simply the work of queneau's "true poet"? notes 1. see marjorie perloff's "introduction" to marjorie perloff, ed., _postmodern genres_, (oklahoma: u of oklahoma p, 1988) 3-10, as well as ralph cohen, "do postmodern genres exist?," same volume, 11-27. an interesting quote from cohen's essay is pertinent to oulipian texts: "the generic concept of combinatory writing makes possible the study of continuities and changes within a genre as well as the recurrence of generic features and their historical implications" (14). the formal result of realizing a structure's "potential" is often a mathematical combinatory. within potential literature lies the remnants of the past, therefore a past memory accompanies innovation, and is in fact essential to it. 2. paris: gallimard, {1937}, 1964. 3. jean lescure, "petite histoire de l'oulipo," in oulipo, _la litterature potentielle_ (paris: gallimard, 1973) 24-35 makes the following remarks concerning queneau's famous quote: "it has not been sufficiently noted what an important revolution, what a clear mutation, this simple sentence introduced into a conception of literature that was still given to romantic effusions and subjective exaltations. in fact, this sentence revealed a revolutionary concept of the objectivity of literature, and opened, as of that moment, literature to all possible kinds of manipulation. simply put, like mathematics, literature could be *explored*" (28). 4. in _radical artifice_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1991) marjorie perloff asks, in relation to poetic structure: ". . . what happens after modernism?" (137). she suggests that "a prosody based on intonational contours" is the problem, and that the result is that contemporary poets, in what she terms "the most common postmodern practice," "take the existing meters and stanza forms and [ ] treat them parodically" (138). a different approach to poetic structure, perloff maintains, is "*constraint* or *procedurality*," best practiced by oulipo. she views the oulipian approach, "a procedural poetics," as applicable to both "prose" and "verse" (her quotations, 139). once perloff has claimed oulipian "procedural poetics" to be postmodern, they conform to her own theoretical paradigm, and i ask if this too reflects the age-old academic tendency to label and compartmentalize? 5. paris: hachette, 1978. 6. orlando: harcourt brace jovanovich, {1979} 1981. 7. _l'invention du fils de leoprepes_ (saulxures: circe, 1993). 8. paris: seuil, 1989. 9. although bernard magne, "transformations of constraint" review of contemporary fiction xiii:1 (spring 1993) 111-123, defines a metaconstraint as "a constraint which modifies a constraint" (118) i am referring to a constraint that serves as an overview of the entire oulipian project. if the constraint at work in la boucle represents a formalization of the act of memory, then it is a metaconstraint in that all oulipian constraints serve the same purpose. 10. richard f. thompson, "the memory trace," richard f. thompson, ed., _learning and memory_ (boston: birkhauser, 1989) 11-13. here thompson states that "the greatest barrier to progress" in understanding learning and memory has been the "problem of localizing the neuronal substrates" (11). in relation to locating "the memory trace" he describes a process that might "involve a number of loci, parallel circuits, and feedback loops." the following structures are thought to be implicated: "the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, and cerebal cortex" (12). 11. see endel tulving, "concepts of human memory," larry r. squire et al, eds. _memory: organization and locus of change_, (new york: oxford up, 1991), 3-32. 12. certain principles guide their work; in their texts "le mode de fabrication est tantot indique, tantot non." (the means of production is sometimes revealed, sometimes not) (v) oulipo, _la bibliotheque oulipienne_ v.1, (paris: editions ramsay, 1987). two complementary principles are enunciated by jacques roubaud, who is also a professor of mathematics: 1) "la definition d'une contrainte est ecrite suivant la regle fixee par cette contrainte" (the definition of a constraint is written according to the rule established by said constraint) (iv), in other words a constraint defines itself as it implements its own rules. 2) that "un texte suivant une contrainte parle de cette contrainte" (a text under constraint speaks of that constraint) (90) oulipo, _atlas de litterature potentielle_ (paris: gallimard, 1981). 13. see roubaud's works on troubadorian poetry which include the following titles: _les troubadours_ (paris: seghers, 1971) and _la fleur inverse_ (paris: editions ramsay, 1986). 14. not only does roubaud define his theory of rhythm in the following terms: "la theorie du rythme abstrait est l'entrelacement d'une famille de theories ayant en commun une combinatoire sequentielle hierarchisee d'evenements discrets consideres sous le seul aspect du 'meme' et du 'different'" (the theory of abstract rhythm is the intertwining of a family of theories that have in common a sequential and hierarchised combinatory of discreet events considered under the sole aspect of the "same" and the "different"), a definition put forth in the series of seminars he offered through the "centre de poetique comparee," a department of the "institut national des langues et civilisations orientales," but in an interview he goes so far as to state that "le fond essentiel de la memoire est plutot de nature rythmique" (the essential depth of memory is of a rather rhythmic nature) (100): "les cercles de la memoire -entretien avec aliette armel" _magazine litteraire_, (juin, 1993) 96-103. 15. the "*" indicates that number of paragraphs within the section varies. 16. the structure of the rest of the novel is as such: chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ------------------------------------------------------------- # of sections in "recit" 9 + 9+ 11+ 6+ 6+ 6 = 50 # of sections in "incises" 17+ 14+ 19+ 5+ 9+ 17 = 81 # of sections in "bifurcations" 14+ 5+ 14+ 17+ 1+ 14 = 65 total 40+ 28+ 44+ 28+ 16+ 40 = 196 the mathematical constraint of the novel reveals distinct numerological patterns. said patterns exist both within each of the three main divisions -the "recit," the "incises," and the "bifurcations" -and across the divisions. the mathematical constraint thus governs the novel's development in a linear manner and in a cross-sectional manner: on the one hand it could be said that it reflects the way an event is encoded in different areas of the brain and also the way an event is recalled, always stimulating various other memories. on the other hand it functions as a numerical grid functions in mnemotechniques, allowing the author to distribute and organize specific moments of memory in order to oversee the manner in which memories interplay, affect, and counter-affect one another. 17. perec indicates in "quatre figures pour _la vie mode d'emploi_" oulipo, _atlas de litterature potentielle_ (paris: gallimard, 1981) 387-395 that of "trois ibauches indipendantes" (three independant outlines), (387) that i will soon discuss and that structure the novel, the third, which "allait devenir l'histoire de bartlebooth" (was going to become the story of bartlebooth) was discovered while working on a "gigantesque puzzle reprisentant le port de la rochelle." perec decided that all of the stories contained in the novel would be built "comme des puzzles" which would render the story of bartlebooth "essentielle" (388). 18. georges perec, "'%ce qui stimule ma racontouze%'" _tem texte en main_ i (printemps 1984) 49-59. 19. lisa cohen, "the purloined letter," _lingua franca_ 5:2 (jan.-feb. 1995) 16-19. 20. _georges perec -a life in words_ (london: harvill, 1993). 21. paris: julliard, 1965. 22. paris: denoel, 1969. 23. paris: c. bourgois, 1990. 24. jacques brunschwig, "epicure," _dictionnaire de philosophes_, v.1 (paris: p.u.f., 1984) 866-873. 25. in my research i found many different references, by many different authors, to the clinamen, for example: paul braffort, "f.a.s.t.l. formalismes pour l'analyse et la synthese de textes litteraires" in oulipo, _atlas de litterature potentielle_ (paris: gallimard [1988], 1981) 108-137, states that "le role du clinamen se precisa peu a peu (mais ici de difficiles recherches sont encore necessaires)" (the role of the clinamen will slowly become more precise (but here difficult research is still necessary)) (108-9) which gives an idea as to the importance and complexity of the clinamen in his own research; he continues: "bref, on se proposait de plus en plus de rendre explicites les jeux de contraintes dont un auteur ne saurait se passer, afin d'y rendre possibles calculs et deductions rigoureuses (au "clinamen" pres)" (110) (in brief, we were proposing more and more to make the constraining games that an author could not pass over more explicit, in order to make possible rigorous calculations and deductions [to the nearest "clinamen"].) italo calvino, in "prose et anticombinatoire" _atlas . . ._ 319-331, declares: "cela montre bien, pensons-nous, que l'aide de l'ordinateur, loin d'intervenir en *substitution* a l'acte createur de l'artiste, permet au contraire de liberer celui-ci des servitudes d'une recherche combinatoire, lui donnant ainsi les meilleurs possibilites de se concentrer sur ce "clinamen" qui, seul, peut faire du texte une veritable oeuvre d'art" (this shows, we think, that the help of a computer, far from intervening as a substitute for the creative act of the artist, allows for, au contraire, his liberation from the servitude of combinatory research, giving him the greatest possibility to concentrate on this "clinamen" which, alone, can make of a text a veritable work of art) (331). this citation accords to the clinamen the status of the "creative act of the author" and, much like epicurus indicates the clinamen's capacity to create a "world," calvino's terms this creation "a veritable work of art." jacques roubaud, "air" oulipo, _la bibliotheque oulipienne_, v.1 (paris: slatkine, 1981) 83, the poet describes the form of the poem he entitled "air," and dedicated to raymond queneau, in the following terms: %"une case vide -longueur des syllabes -dans la table est comblee, minimalement, par ce sonnet selon les regles et aussi quelque ironie. un clinamen dans le compte des lettres, par absence et exces, dit le destinataire. comme la parenthese a la ligne en plus, coda."% (an empty space -the length of syllables -in the table is filled, minimally, by this sonnet written according to the rules as well as a little irony. a clinamen in the letter count, by absence and excess, says the addressee. like a parenthesis with an extra line, coda.) here roubaud employs a clinamen in order to claim originality. in the following haiku, roubaud, "io et le loup -dix-sept plus un plus plus un haiku en ouliporime", la bibliotheque . . .323-333, the poet purposely misspells the word "clinamen" in order to create a true clinamen which will coincide with the theme of the haiku, dedicated to oulipo: iii: oulipo (16) xlinamen l'heterogramme est doux le lipogramme est prolixe le tautogramme cherche les hapax. (pour jean queval) (329) finally, francois caradec, "la voie du troisieme secteur", oulipo, la bibliotheque oulipienne, v.3 (paris: seghers, 1990) 157-181, researches a "troisieme secteur" which he calls "para-pata-littirature" (160) and declares that the clinamen shall play the role of a "frange" (fringe), or a condition which exists between two notions: "je retrouve le double d'une lettre datie du 20 octobre 1972 dans laquelle je me permettais, inergiquement d'ailleurs, un certain nombre de suggestions. au nom du clinamen, je proposais la notion de 'franges,' parfois simplement par 'usure' simantique, 'franges' qui permettaient ` l'occasion de 'frangir' les limites imposies un peu arbirtairement par frangois le lionnais . . ." (166) (i discover the copy of a letter dated october 20, 1972, in which i allowed myself, even energetically, a certain number of suggestions. in the name of the clinamen i was proposing the notion of "fringe," sometimes only by semantic "wearing away," "fringes" allowed at that moment "to fringe" the limits imposed somewhat arbitrarily by francois le lionnais. . .) the preceding evidence supports the notion that the oulipians cling to the clinamen as an obligatory stage in creating something "new," in allowing a constraint to reach its potential. 26. paris: bibliotheque-charpentier, 1928. 27. in fact, in _la disparition_ perec espouses the role of "scriptor" consciously. in the first paragraph of the "post-scriptum" one reads: "l'ambition du 'scriptor,' son propos, disons son souci, son souci constant, fut d'abord d'aboutir a un produit aussi original qu'instructif, a un produit qui aurait, qui pourrait avoir un pouvoir stimulant sur la construction, la narration, l'affabulation, l'action, disons, d'un mot, sur la facon du roman d'aujourd'hui" (the ambition of the "scriptor," his proposal, let's say his concern, his constant concern, was first off to produce a product as original as it is instructive, a product that would have, that could have a stimulative power on the construction, the narration, the affabulation, the action, let's say, in a word, on the fashion of today's novel) (309). 28. _pn review_ 15:6, 68 (1989) 12-17. 29. georges perec, eds. hans hartje, bernard magne, jacques neefs, _cahier des charges de la vie mode d'emploi_, (paris: cnrs editions, 1993). 30. the forty-two elements at work in each chapter are the following: (16-20) 1) position 2) activite 3) citation 1 4) citation 2 5) nombre 6) role 7) troiseme secteur 8) ressort? 9) murs 10) sols 11) ipoque 12) lieu 13) style 14) meubles 15) longueur 16) divers 17) age 18) sexe 19) animaux 20) vetements 21) tissus 22) tissus 23) couleurs 24) accessoires (nature) (matiere) 25) bijoux 26) lectures 27) musiques 28) tableaux 29) livres 30) boissons 31) nourriture 32) petits meubles 33) jeux et 34)sentiments 35) peintures 36) surfaces jouets 37) volumes 38) fleurs 39) bibelots 40) manque 41) faux 42) couples (translation: 1) position 2) activity 3) quote 1 4) quote 2 5) number 6) role 7) third sector 8) spring? 9) walls 10) floors 11) epoch 12) place 13) style 14) furniture 15) length 16) diverse 17) age 18) sex 19) animals 20) clothing 21) cloth 22) cloth 23) colors 24) accesories (natural) (material) 25) jewelry 26) readings 27) musics 28) paintings 29) books 30) drinks 31) food 32) small furnishings 33) games 34) feelings 35) paint 36) surfaces and toys 37) spaces 38) flowers 39) knicknacks 40) wrong 41) gap 42) couples) 31. georges perec, "'%ce qui stimule ma racontouze%'" _tem texte en main_ i (printemps 1984) 49-59. 32. see note 27. 33. pierre lusson, georges perec, jacques roubaud (paris: christian bourgois, 1969). 34. paris: gallimard, 1947. 35. "the doing of fiction" _review of contemporary fiction_. xiii:1 (spring 1993) 23-29. 36. oulipo, _la bibliotheque oulipienne_ vol. ii (paris: editions ramsay, 1987) 26-44. 37. paris: jean-jacques pauvert, 1963. 38. see francois le lionnais, "a propos de la littirature expirimentale," oulipo, _la littirature potentielle_ (paris: gallimard, 1973) 246-249. 39. paris: gallimard, 1963. 40. "two interviews on science and literature," _the literature machine_ (london: martin secker & warburg, 1987) 28-38. 41. "romancing the reader: calvino's _if on a winter's night a traveler_" _review of contemporary fiction_ 6:2 (summer 1986) 106-116. 42. quoted by ian rankin, "the role of the reader in italo calvino's _if on a winter's night a traveler_" review of contemporary fiction 6:2 (summer 1986) 124-129. 43. "the doctrinal core of _if on a winter's night a traveler_," _calvino revisited -u of toronto italian studies 2_, (toronto: dovehouse editions inc., 1989) 147-155. 44. new york: cambridge up, [190] 1993. 45. _preuves_ 202 (dec. 1967) 6-10. 46. _le bruissement de la langue_ (paris: seuil, 1984) 61-67, 69-78. 47. perec also has been called "une machine a aconter des histoires" _cahier des charges_, 7. 48. jacques roubaud. "preparation d'un portrait formel de georges perec." _l'arc_ 76 (1979) (54-60). 49. new york: methuen, 1985. 50. see also barthe's statement in _le bruissement de la langue_, (paris: seuil, 1984): ". . . le texte demande qu'on essaie d'abolir (ou tout au moins de diminuer) la distance entre l'ecture et la lecture, non point en intensifiant la projection du lecteur dans l'oeuvre, mais en les liant tous deux dans une mee pratique signifiante" (the text asks one to try to abolish (or at least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, not at all by intensifying the projection of the reader onto the oeuvre, but in linking the two together in the same signifying practice) (75). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------downing, '_multiplicity_: %una vista de nada%', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-downing-_multiplicity_.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.996. part 1/1, total size 14532 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- _multiplicity_: %una vista de nada% by crystal downing messiah college cdowning@mcis.messiah.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by crystal downing, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: _multiplicity_. dir. harold ramis. columbia pictures, 1996 [1] _multiplicity_, a showcase containing entertaining displays of michael keaton's acting range, is not a great film. the showcase itself, however, with its startling lack of depth, reflects off its slick surfaces the postmodern "transvaluation of values" that fredric jameson descried years ago in his now famous _new left review_ article.^1^ _multiplicity_ (directed and co-written by harold ramis, of _animal house_ and _ghostbusters_ fame) is not a "postmodern film" in the sense that it develops "new rules of the game" which devalue the hegemonic perceptions and semiotic practices that encode mainstream movies (a la lyotard); instead, it is a stylistically traditional entertainment vehicle whose *content* reflects the ineluctable power of what jameson has called "the cultural logic of late capitalism," wherein "depth is replaced by...multiple surfaces" (j 62). [2] in the film, keaton plays doug kinney, a beleaguered, though conscientious, foreman for a construction company, married to the lovely, though lackluster, laura (andie macdowell) who put her career on hold to mother their two young children. doug's multiplicity of stressful responsibilities leave him no time to finish remodelling his own home, to help out with the kids so laura can return to work, or to engage in any leisure activity whatsoever. after a tantrum-like display of frustration on one of his many job sites--a "scientific" institute on the malibu shore--doug meets dr. owen leeds (harris yulin), who, with no compunction at all, offers to clone for (and from) doug a second self who can help him on the job. with a gesture toward keaton's eponymous role in _mr. mom_ (1983), doug soon discovers that, even with his professional activities alleviated, running a home with children still allows him no leisure time, so he has a second clone made to handle the house chores. these two clones then clone a fourth doug to help out with the housework in their own apartment above the garage (which, though in full sight of the house, is never detected by doug's family as housing three not-very quiet look-alikes). this third clone, extracted not from the *original* doug but from one of his clones, turns out to be a near idiot: "you know how sometimes when you make a copy of a copy, it's not quite as sharp as the original?" doug's first two clones explain. "original" is the operative word here and signals a problematizing not only of "origins," but also of the autonomous, unified, "authentic" self of modernism. [3] the film itself mocks the mystifications of modernism when doug first goes to dr. leeds' office to discuss his problems. we cut to a full-screen picture of doug's talking head lying on a black leather couch, spilling out his frustrations to the "doctor." as soon as we recognize this icon of psychoanalysis, it is undermined by dr. leeds' response to doug: "i'm not a psychologist." modernism's depth model of the human psyche--which must be plumbed to discover the "origin" of behavior--is decentered by dr. leeds' solution: a replication of the body, the surface of behavior. we have here what jameson describes as the postmodern "shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology...in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject" (j 63). [4] the displacement of identity is reinforced by a trick the film plays on its audience: we see doug, after the first cloning operation, waking up on a gurney to stare at an image of himself standing in the shadows. because the camera looks over the shoulder of the well-lit doug on the gurney to view the darker image which stands before him (and us), we identify with the waking man, amazed to see a replicant before him. however, we quickly learn that the man with whom we have "identified" is actually the clone. it is as though we have been given a visual instantiation of the de-centered self which defines postmodern subjectivity. [5] _multiplicity_ quite consciously explores doug's fragmented subjectivity by giving each clone a different manifestation of his "personality." made while doug was still recovering from a testosterone-induced tantrum, in which he destroyed construction materials with a huge metal wrench while water powerfully ejaculated from a vertically erect pipe, the first clone embodies the macho side of doug, not only kicking ass while on the job but trying to get some while off. the second clone appears soon after a scene in which the "original" doug unsuccessfully tries to wrap up some pizza while struggling to talk on the phone above his children's ruckus. this clone, therefore, adept at the home arts, loves to cook and is a master at wrapping up leftovers, and keaton plays him as doug's "feminine side." and then, of course, the third clone, made in both senses *without* doug, gestures toward the "death of the subject" altogether; he is constructed from the superficial signifiers that mold doug's other selves. in fact, all the clones are quite literally "socially constructed," made, we have seen, without much reflection on the part of doug, by one who garners "authority" in our culture, a scientist who "authors" doug's various subject positions. [6] these plural positions are mis-taken to be one "autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual" (j 63) when doug's wife makes love to all three in the same night and notices no difference--no authentic self that is missing--except that their bodies function differently: one cries, one is "athletic" and one has an erection as premature as his diction. laura has experienced the postmodern simulacrum as baudrillard has defined it: "reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image."^2^ [7] the concept of the simulacrum is also employed by jameson; however, he privileges plato's definition of the term--"the identical copy for which no original has ever existed"--to foreground the postmodern obsession with surfaces, wherein "the history of aesthetic styles displaces 'real' history" (j 67). jameson's reference to plato is redolent of the "allegory of the cave," in which people turn their backs to the "real," naively convinced that the images on the surface of the cave wall, merely "shadows" of the real, comprise all that exists. significantly, then, when the writers of _multiplicity_ describe doug's radically deficient third clone as "a copy of a copy," they echo plato's indictment of the poet, who, "restricted to imitating the realm of appearances, makes only copies of copies, and his creation is thus twice removed from reality."^3^ they go one step further, however, causing the viewer to question, with all postmodernists, the "reality" of platonic "origins"; for the "original" doug appears to have little substance other than the various subject positions he fails to coordinate in one body. just as one of his construction sites is titled "%vista de nada%" (sight of nothing) doug is the site of nothing other than his performance functions. [8] "%nada%," for the modernist, as reflected in ernest hemingway's famous lines "our %nada%, who art in %nada%, %nada% be thy name," meant that "in the absence of a god each person must take responsibility for his own actions."^4^ there is no such faith in existential authenticity for the postmodernist; as the "authentic" doug admits, "i am not in my own life." even when he presumably "gets it together" for the denouement, he achieves no self-transforming enlightenment; at the end of the movie doug has the exact same perception as at the beginning: he needs to spend more time relaxing and with his family. he is even shown doing the same activity at the end of the film as in the opening scene: coordinating the demolition of a concrete driveway. the only difference is that the later construction work is for his own home, with a view to winning back the favor of his wife. the "happy ending" of _multiplicity_ is grounded in the reification of commodity: doug's four selves turn a shabby los angeles bungalow into a gorgeous house, complete with outdoor fountain, fit for the glossy pages of _better homes and gardens_. this construction, like the earlier condominium construction, like the very construction of doug's subjectivity, looks not to some transcendent ideal of human connectedness or godly benevolence, but only to a %vista de nada%. [9] appropriately, ramis sets the film in los angeles, its opening aerial sequence of endless intersecting freeways and relentlessly drab buildings concretizing a true %vista de nada%. however, what makes the location especially significant to _multiplicity_ is its mythic association with the simulacrum: the locus of "the rise of hollywood and of the image as commodity" (j 69). in hollywood, as jameson notes, we get the "'death of the subject' in the institution of the star" (j 68). indeed, even the "original" and "authentic" doug kinney is "an identical copy for which no original has ever existed" since he is merely a fictional character (even if obliquely named after one of ramis' late friends, doug kenney). and michael keaton, like any movie star, displaces his subjectivity as he becomes identified with the characters he plays. in fact, we might see keaton's various film roles as his clones, constructed by the hegemony of hollywood which replicates roles, as los angeles does its freeways, if even taking them in different directions. (i think especially of harrison ford's multiplicity in the _star wars_ films, the indiana jones movies, and the tom clancey showpieces.) indeed, keaton's doug is a replicant of keaton's "mr. mom," and andie macdowell is a replicant of the straightwoman she played in another ramis film: _groundhog day_, whose plot is based upon the diachronic replication of a day in a weatherman's life (bill murray) rather than upon the synchronic replications of _multiplicity_. [10] hollywood even creates marginal "copies of copies": idiot fans who seek to act and dress like characters from their favorite films, mimicking the shadows on the walls inside movie theaters. without these simulacrum servers, businesses in los angeles like star wares, reel clothes, and it's a wrap, which sell, for outrageous prices, clothing once worn in "the movies," could not survive. as the owner of reel clothes states, "ninety percent of my customers are l.a. residents looking for something to wear to work,"^5^ fulfilling jameson's sense, expressed over a decade ago, that "we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of *our own current* experience" (j 68, emphasis mine). [11] ramis ends _multiplicity_ with a simulacrum of another beach town. the three clones, at doug's behest, have gone off on their own, and have ended up in florida running a pizza parlour called "three guys from nowhere," an obvious echo of a california chain called "two guys from italy." the name appears on a sign above the door, also inscribed with three cartoon heads which look a lot like the iconic figures of "manny, moe, and jack" once used on the sign for "pep boys" automotive stores. thus the film ends with yet another manifestation of postmodernism: what jameson calls "pastiche." while parody usually has a purpose, "pastiche" is the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated, nostalgia-generating signifiers--like "two guys from italy" and "manny, moe, and jack"--which entirely empties them of any meaning other than recognizability. they are signifiers cut off from their origins, severed from any transcendental signified; they are signifiers like doug, doug, doug, and, yes, even doug. notes: ^1^fredric jameson, "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism," _new left review_ 146 (july-aug 1984) 53-93. quotations cited in my text as (j). ^2^ jean baudrillard, "the orders of simulacra," _simulations_, trans. philip beitchmann (new york: semiotext(e), 1983) 150. ^3^ as summarized by hazard adams, ed., "plato," _critical theory since plato_ (new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1971), 11. ^4^ the first quotation is from ernest hemingway's short story "a clean, well-lighted place" _the hemingway reader_, ed. charles poore (new york: scribners, 1953) 421; the second quotation is spoken by a paradigmatic existentialist portrayed by woody allen in _crimes and misdemeanors_ (dir. woody allen, orion, 1989). ^5^ "brief brush with fame," _patriot news_ (harrisburg, pa) 5 aug. 1996: c1. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------melehy, 'images without: deleuzian becoming, science fiction cinema in the eighties', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-melehy-images.txt archive pmc-list, file melehy.195. part 1/1, total size 73158 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- images without: deleuzian becoming, science fiction cinema in the eighties by hassan melehy dept. of french and italian vanderbilt university melehyh@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by hassan melehy, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. to overturn platonism: what philosophy has not tried? --michel foucault^1^ [1] there are two things i would like to do in this paper: elaborate on some deleuzian concepts and examine recent science fiction cinema from hollywood and its periphery (canada, britain, and the usually suspicious european transplants, whose films enter into "mainstream" flows or circulation). ideally, i will do both in the same act, working the concepts and showing how they work themselves into and out of the movies in question,^2^ producing a configuration that says something about philosophy and its relation to other aspects of the world as well as about the importance of the films. the mapping of various relations that will occur in the process will not take either philosophy or film studies as starting points or guiding frameworks, will not explicitly reject the integrity of either, but rather will reach into an interdisciplinary field that resists accusations of eclecticism yet refuses to call itself an institutional unity. i would like, among other things, to argue for the consideration of gilles deleuze as a philosopher because of (not in spite of) his interest in non-philosophical practices, in a nomadic entrance into cinema, in conducting "one of the finest contemporary reflections on the liveliness and grandeur of the seventh art" (bensmaia 57). in his reflection he makes connections between aspects of this art and trajectories of the philosophical project that may be discerned running through his books. i would also like to argue for the appreciation of science fiction films from the eighties as participating in the production of philosophical concepts, while, in their capacity as movies and especially "b" movies, they wrest these concepts from the institutional closure that the term "philosophical" might tend to impose on them. [2] an evident place to start is with deleuze's work on the cinema, which has received less critical attention than many of his other texts. this is in part because of their relatively recent appearance and translation but also in part, i suspect, because the connections deleuze tries to make between philosophy and cinema are very demanding--because the concepts he produces are new, unknown, alien to traditional film studies, and particularly illustrative of deleuze's treatment of philosophy as a foucauldian "system of dispersion" (foucault, _archeologie_ 44-54) rather than an institutional unity. to begin with the _cinema_ books, then, one would have to proceed through extensions of the multidirectionality of their project and would not be able to avoid various enlistments of other sections of deleuze's work. this process can't start by summarizing the books or by taking a set of statements from them as a guiding principle in critical analysis of the films.^3^ it must rather select a line in them, with a certain agenda in mind, and follow it through various materials as it gathers layers--other texts of deleuze, the films in question--and work with the becomings that take place. [3] what i would like to do is see the cinema books in light of deleuze's earlier alliance of his own philosophical project with that of nietzsche's as something that would contribute to the overturning of platonism.^4^ and i would like to see the films as contributing to the same event, by seeing them in light of certain deleuzian concepts--becoming, image, multiplicity, body without organs, assemblage, becoming-animal, simulacrum, the machinic, becoming-woman, etc. (which deleuze himself has gathered from a variety of planes--hence deleuze's "counter history" of philosophy [douglass 47-48]). their examinations of, among other things, the cyberneticization of the human organism--the destabilization of its organic structure--and the displacement of a grounded notion of the real by the simulacrum of the televisual image do not simply constitute a social or aesthetic epiphenomenon, but rather participate in the emergenc(e)(y) that deleuze's efforts map, as well as, in so far as in their images they present crystallizations of philosophical concepts, disturb the unified and privileged discourse of philosophy, something the latter retains from its platonic legacy. this is the period in which it may be said that "there is no more philosophy in the sense that metaphysics has become impossible as a discourse, simply because it is realized in the contemporary world" (lyotard 45)--that is, in which philosophy can no longer be an autonomous, self-crowning discipline. one begins, then, to see philosophy and philosophers at the movies. [4] deleuze's writing on cinema may be seen as directly tied to the task of overturning platonism in that it bears on freeing the image from the hold that %mimesis% has placed on it throughout the history of the west (bogue, especially 77-78). constituting as much a treatise on henri bergson as an appreciation of the cinema, the two books work with a concept of image that may be attributed to the earlier french philosopher. the following definition goes a long way, i think, toward illuminating the importance deleuze assigns to the cinema in the revaluation of experience and philosophy's relation to the actual world: "matter, in our view, is an aggregate of 'images.' and by 'image' we mean a certain existence which is more than what the idealist calls a *representation*, but less than that which the realist calls a *thing*,--an existence placed half-way between the 'thing' and the 'representation'" (bergson x; quoted in douglass 51). this notion of image is a direct challenge to the platonic dualism that would hold the "representation" in a subordinate relation of %mimesis% to the "thing." to say that "matter" is made up of images is to suggest that consciousness apprehends and inhabits its world in a way fundamentally different from that conceived in the traditional subject-object relationship that has dominated western thinking since descartes--indeed that it is not the exclusive property of the organic human being at all. hence deleuze may speak of the "machine"--here and elsewhere--not in opposition to the organic but as an assemblage of elements in motion, as extending vitality through movement into all of matter.^5^ if cinema becomes a locus of the image in the twentieth century--one of the "social and scientific factors which placed more and more movement into conscious life, and more and more images into the material world" (_cinema 1_ 56)--it must be seen as nothing else than the plane on which this transformation in philosophy takes place. [5] deleuze acknowledges that bergson did not find much use for the early cinema in demonstrating his theses on movement: bergson wanted to free movement from its conception as a sequence of privileged instants, from its subordination to the immobilizing representation of the thing, and to allow it to be considered as belonging to matter and hence to matter's intertwining with consciousness (1-11). nonetheless deleuze pays homage to his predecessor in showing that bergson's conception of the material universe, the "infinite set of all images" (58), involves precisely the identification of image and matter that the cinema makes available after its first twenty or thirty years. the image is the movement that belongs to matter, the latter no longer subordinate to a frozen, single-frame representation or an accompanying ideal form, but in constant flow, all of its elements interacting: "this is not mechanism, it is machinism. the material universe, the plane of immanence, is the *machinic assemblage of movement-images*. here bergson is startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, metacinema" (59). the cinema becomes what deleuze, writing with felix guattari, elsewhere terms a "map" (_plateaus_ 12-13)--it doesn't separate itself from and raise itself up as a mimetic image of the world, but rather weaves itself into the world, becoming the world as the world becomes it, each and both a multiplicity rather than a unity or part of a duality. if the cinema begins as a series of mimetic representations, each frame giving an isolated idea of the thing, it immediately transforms: "if these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as the moments of actualisation of a transcendent form. . . . the remarkable or singular instant remains any-instant-whatever among the others" (_cinema 1_ 5-6). in its placement in the cinematic series, an instant of this type cannot claim a superior position; each image constitutes a portion of the machinic interaction of matter. this machinic interaction, this assemblage or %agencement%, is a whole, if not the whole, a universe, and each of its portions is a set of moments in and of motion, a segment of time or %duree%. with the bergsonian concept of the image, which deleuze sees actualized in the cinema, there is no matter that may be abstracted as an ideal form from its reality in time (10-11; also bogue 83-84). [6] though deleuze devotes much of _cinema 1_ to producing "a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs" (_cinema 1_ xiv)--masterfully borrowing from and adapting the semiotics of charles peirce as he gives detailed attention to his examples drawn from the history of cinema--my interest here bears more strongly on the outcome of the study of signs and images, which occurs in the second book. this is the advent of "a direct time-image" (ix), the completion, as it were, of the valorization of the bergsonian image, whose links with the project of overturning platonism i would like to comment on here. in this type of image time is no longer subordinate to movement: that is, it is not in sequential segments of movement that time is viewed. the image is freed from its placement in a sequence; instants do not need to follow their order as determined in movement, but may all become available to view, such that a restrictive picture to which the world must conform^6^ is no longer possible. there is no more progression of time such that all past moments are seen to be contributing to the constitution of the present; rather, they begin to assume directions and vitalities of their own, and present and past cease to be a dualism. again deleuze acknowledges his predecessor: "bergson's major theses on time are as follows: the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved" (_cinema 2_ 82). time first becomes available as time-image with orson welles's _citizen kane_ (1941), in which "time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored" (105). in this film, the present is constituted through several parallel narratives of the past, not always congruent with each other. none of them manages to make any greater claim to reality than the others, yet all permeate the present and are part of what makes it a complex reality, unbounded by narrative closure ("rosebud" remains, largely, a floating signifier). [7] it is in relation to such a multiplicity of possible worlds that deleuze introduces another concept of fascination to him, that of leibniz's "incompossibility": "leibniz says that the naval battle may or may not take place, but that this is not in the same world: it takes place in one world and does not take place in a different world, and these two worlds are possible, but are not 'compossible' with each other" (130).^7^ a figure from deleuze's "counter history" of philosophy, leibniz presents a challenge to the platonic heritage in which our understanding of the world may reflect only one, noncontradictory reality. "he is thus obliged to forge the wonderful notion of incompossibility (very different from contradiction) in order to resolve the paradox while saving truth: according to him, it is not the impossible, but only the incompossible that proceeds from the possible; and the past may be true without being necessarily true" (130).^8^ but deleuze wants to free the incompossible worlds from the restrictions that leibniz places on them: still a party to the ascendancy of the west as self-instituting dominance, leibniz leaves it up to god to choose which of the possible worlds will exist (_the fold_ 63). the cinema's direct time-image may take philosophy a step beyond, as deleuze states in connection with alain robbe-grillet's _l'homme qui ment_, "contrary to what leibniz believed, all these worlds belong to the same universe and constitute modifications of the same story" (_cinema 2_ 132). [8] so, for deleuze, the cinema becomes a part of the counter history of philosophy, constitutes a series with the latter's imagery, in that it participates in the shaking loose of the platonic dualism of reality and representation in a way that is akin to the flashes that are available in various philosophical texts. deleuze makes the cinema accessible to philosophy in a way that it perhaps has not been before, in large part because of its status as image--and particularly, as deleuze shows, bergsonian image. the cinema is simulacrum, phantasm, excluded from philosophy's world of admissible representations because of the threat it poses to the ordered world of "true" representations, copies determined by their originals. [9] but as deleuze demonstrates in "plato and the simulacrum," the distinction is problematic in the platonic dialogues themselves. it is possible that it is not a distinction of opposition, but rather of degree: to participate is, at best, to rank second. the celebrated neoplatonic triad of the "unparticipated," the participated, and the participant follows from this. one could express it in the following manner as well: the foundation, the object aspired to, and the pretender. . . . undoubtedly, one must distinguish all sorts of degrees, an entire hierarchy, in this elective participation. is there not a possessor of the third or the fourth rank, and on to an infinity of degradation culminating in the one who possesses no more than a simulacrum, a mirage--the one who is himself a mirage and simulacrum? (255) deleuze's example is from the _statesman_, which distinguishes "the true statesman or the well-founded aspirer, then relatives, auxiliaries, and slaves, down to simulacra and counterfeits" (255-256). the simulacrum and the good representation--the copy or the icon--may then be seen as constituting a series with one another. it is possible, then, that the "original" is instituted through a ruse on the part of those in "second" place to maintain their place in the hierarchy, and that they designate the false pretenders, the simulacra, the phantasms, as dangerous because in essence the latter are the same as they are: and their nature as simulacrum threatens the stable order--which is the same thing as the tyranny--of the situation.^9^ [i]t may be that the end of the _sophist_ contains the most extraordinary adventure of platonism: as a consequence of searching in the direction of the simulacrum and of leaning over its abyss, plato discovers, in the flash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places in question the very notions of copy and model. the final definition of the sophist leads us to the point where we can no longer distinguish him from socrates himself--the ironist working in private by means of brief arguments. was it not necessary to push irony to the extreme? was it not plato himself who pointed out the direction for the reversal of platonism? (256) [10] and it may then be said that this division in the founding discourse of western philosophy--that between the discovery of the value of the simulacrum and the ruse by which this value is hidden in order to maintain a hierarchy--persists through the history of philosophy, leaving traces of itself that may be discerned only if philosophy is read, as it were, against itself, against the determinations on its own understanding of itself that it would enact. throughout the history of western metaphysics philosophy is able to maintain itself as a discourse on being only by instituting a simulacrum of itself. "affirming the rights" (262) of simulacra, overturning platonism, is thus to free philosophy from the restrictions it has placed on itself from the outset. it is to link up with a series that has always been available in philosophy, but that has been repressed. in the age of the cinema as locus of the image, the world may reveal itself as image, image reveal itself as simulacrum, philosophy recover simulacrum. and the latter in so doing may redefine its own relation to the world. philosophy may function according to one of its most traditional tasks, as "the art of forming, of inventing, of fabricating concepts" (deleuze and guattari, _philosophie_ 8), and elaborate the relation of thought and matter not as one of opposition--as between subject and object--but as one of coinhabitation, intertwining, or machinic assemblage. [11] in this age of the image, and in about the same period in which deleuze's philosophy has been written--in the very decade of _a thousand plateaus_ and the cinema books--there appears a variation on the image in the form of specifically technological phantasms. in its various manifestations--television, computer-generated images for television and cinema that can't be distinguished from images of "real" objects--it displaces the cinematic image, effectively suppressing the latter's effectiveness. it may be seen as a kind of %coup de force%^10^ against the productivity of the cinematic image, imposing a world picture that is a veritable microcosm, a severance of the relation of thought and matter, a last and tyrannical effort on the part of metaphysics to preserve the domination of a homogeneous, limited, and overwhelming reality. but on the other hand it is the outcome of the emergence of the image as deleuze describes it: the distinction between virtual and actual worlds, and between imagination and reality, and even between subject and object, is less tenable than ever; any world at all may come into being on the little screen, and the world itself begins to be composed of the picture elements or pixels that make up its own simulacrum. the power to produce worlds is redirected to the production of a single, untouchable world; what we see is the ultimate simulacrum enacting the ultimate exclusion of the simulacrum.^11^ [12] where is this %coup de force%, as well as the conflicts that ensue from it, most visible, and where are its effects represented? in the cinema: in that particular cinema that takes an interest in the technological production of phantasms, in the accompanying transformation of the human body in its ever more intimate interaction with machinery, in the role of the televisual image in relation to consciousness--and that also reflects on its own dependence on the technology of special effects as well as the restriction of its own images through mass production on videocassettes. the genre that makes phantasms out of the material of the extreme truth-telling discourses of the technological sciences is of course science fiction. i am referring to a group of science fiction films that appeared, in my view, as something quite new to cinema in the 1980s, precisely because they may be seen as participating in as well as criticizing, in a sometimes painfully concentrated way, the technological conditions in which the phantasms are produced. [13] i would like to examine these movies with the deleuzian notion of the image, as well as a number of other deleuzian concepts, in mind. the films may be said to constitute a set, or an arrangement, or an assemblage, in the ways that they address and interact with the conditions. as i have mentioned, they are what might be considered "b" movies, often cheaply made, and occasionally expensive but deemed unworthy of serious consideration because participating in some of the forces of which they at least partially reflect on--pretenders, simulacra with regard to the "art" of cinema. there has, of course, been some attention paid to them, as there has been to the genre of science fiction, in which the reasons for their being received a certain way are understood, acknowledged, and taken as an object of criticism. often enough, this attention is paid in connection with deleuze and certain deleuzian concepts, because of the affinity the latter machinic assemblage has with the transformations of the body, spatiality, temporality, and the very idea of the human being represented in science fiction and its recent cinema.^12^ [14] one figure, in several senses of the term, that recurs in science fiction film from the eighties is that of the cyborg, the cybernetic organism from science and science fiction, which is a "coupling" of machine and animal, and which provides, in the destabilization of the organic structure of the human being, a site for different sorts of becoming.^13^ the cyborg often appears as something monstrous--as it should be, since the intermeshing of human and machine defies a number of traditional oppositions (spirit/matter, life/death, among others)--and is seen, inscribed in hollywood narrative codes, as incarnating something evil or potentially evil. the cyborg is usually violent; it is so in its essence, as it is the product of machinery making ruthless incisions into flesh. but evaluation should be disengaged from the prescriptive ideological systems that operate in the films, and offered the chance to present something that marks a fundamental transformation in the human being that may well have very progressive aspects. in their valorization of the simulacrum and their contestation of metaphysical oppositions, i would like to argue, these movies undermine the ideological systems in which they function. since in every instance an effort is made at producing an identification between the point of view of the spectator and that of the cyborg, the violence of the human-machine relation (the cyborg relation--i would rather see the cyborg as a relation than as a thing or a unity) should be seen as a figuration of the violence of the everyday interface of human beings and technology, particularly televisual technology, that results in the imposition of the strictest of world pictures, the programmed redirection of desires, and an unprecedented hierarchization of the flesh. [15] in james cameron's _the terminator_ (1984), for example, the cyborg, played by an appropriately stony arnold schwarzenegger, is described as a "hyperalloy combat chassis" with human flesh "grown for the cyborgs" on the outside, produced by a machine intelligence whose purpose is to exterminate the human population. ostensibly a simulacrum built for infiltration, this cyborg may be seen as a quaint metaphor for the human-machine relations the film's dystopian vision depicts: human beings have allowed machinery to run them, until they are little more than pieces of flesh hanging on the periphery. but the intertwining of organism and machine is more complex and subtle^14^. it is by way of machinery--not as accessory or extension, but body part--that the terminator will be defeated: reese, the resistance fighter played by michael biehn, is sent back in time from the dark future (2029) to stop the terminator's mission, which is to kill sarah connor (linda hamilton), future mother of resistance leader john connor, in contemporary los angeles. the time travel machinery (which penley suggests is a kind of figure of the cinema ["time travel" 66]), then, not only is essential to the continuation of life--both the life of reese, from 2029 to 1984, and that of humanity--but also enhances life, transforms it, turns it into something else by freeing it from the constraints of linear time (part of a system of determined %mimesis%). [16] the time travel machinery is explicitly connected to the cinematic apparatus through its use in the production of the narrative. relying on a simple, standard hollywood story, _the terminator_ removes the time of the narrative from the requirement of conformity to linear progression. the narrative moves, of course, toward a future: killing the terminator, saving sarah, during the course of the movie, and of course then saving humanity farther in the future. but it plays with the relationships of past, present, and future: the film uses a customary technique of flashing back, so that the past may be employed to endow the present with sense. but these are reese's flashbacks, and so are representations of the future; and this past is as malleable as the future, since saving sarah would save the resistance movement through the preservation of its leader's life. the same type of sense is derived from references to the past as from those to the future. in one sequence, a sound overlap is used for a cut from a junkyard in the present, in which a moving industrial vehicle is seen, to a similar vehicle in the future. the change is registered when the vehicle's treads are seen rolling over skulls. but the sound overlap and the visual similarity work together to give the effect of a continuity between moments that would otherwise be discontinuous; and in the time sequence of reese, the cut is to the past, while in "our" time sequence it is to the future. the machinery becomes the cinematic machinery, in its production of images bringing the past, the future, and the present to inhabit each other, their relations of causality, sense-determination, and even sequence transformed. [17] and later in the film the cyborg relation is seen as having a direct effect on the view of the spectators, both as violence and as creating the capacity to see the production of the restrictive images, exactly what the televisual apparatus would disallow. this sequence involves close-ups of the cyborg eye--several in a quickly cut succession--which has already been identified as participating in the viewer's perspective, through a number of point-of-view shots done in "cybervision."^15^ the terminator's sight is composed of red-tinted pixels, as though mediated by a television screen, as would be that of most of the spectators watching the film, with the advent of movie viewing on vcrs well established by 1984. the sequence is an evident reference to %un chien andalou%:^16^ there is an extreme close-up of the eye as the cyborg cuts into it with an exacto knife. where bunuel and dali were concerned with a metaphor involving the cutting process of cinematic production, depicting it as a cutting into the viewing apparatus of the spectator, cameron turns the image into that of a surgical machine incision. what is revealed beneath the human eye surface is a camera lens--moving around, microprocessor controlled, all-seeing, its aperture dilating and contracting. the cyborg cutting--identified with the cinematic/televisual apparatus--reveals and promotes the affinity between human and machine views. [18] _the terminator_ attempts to delineate what, in the present, would constitute a progressive cyborg relation--one that would have the effect of dehierarchizing the human body--and a repressive one. deleuze and guattari make a comparable distinction between types of bodies without organs, which may assist in understanding the different cyborg relations. the body without organs (bwo), it must be affirmed, "is not at all the opposite of the organs. the organs are not its enemies. the enemy is the organism. the bwo is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism" (_plateaus_ 158). the organism is a structure that hangs the organs on it as subordinated bits of flesh. and, further, the organism can destroy the body in its attempt at strict, hierarchical layering, which itself produces a kind of body without organs. take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a bwo that opposes the organizations of the organs we call the organism, but there is also a bwo of the organism that belongs to that stratum. *cancerous tissue*: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the "other" bwo on the plane of consistency. (162-163) the globe-encompassing machinery itself of _the terminator_, reproducing itself to no end, growing formless flesh to put on the mechanical frames, is akin to this second type of bwo, cancerous. and though, in the end, the human-machine relation seems to be sorted out with the "human" in the superior position--the film's ideological inscription, or unreflective metaphysical determination, shows here--cameron's engagement of the cinematic apparatus in the exploration and deployment of the cyborg relation tends to weaken that hierarchy. [19] another movie that plays with the double possibility of the cyborg relation, the body without organs, is _robocop_ (1987), directed by paul verhoeven, a filmmaker of dutch origin who would set spending records after his arrival in hollywood. _robocop_ is the first of his exclusively u.s. productions, and is lower budget, less afraid of transgressing hollywood convention, and less ideologically entrenched than his subsequent efforts (_total recall_, _basic instinct_--though these too have a number of noteworthy qualities, in a rebarbative imbalance with their overt inscriptions). there are moments when _robocop_ engages in a detailed critique of the late-capitalist management of flesh, of the technocratic colonization of the human body--even though it seems to reaffirm the benevolent paternity of the corporate structure at the end, in keeping, one would suppose, with verhoeven's own position in the film industry. [20] the story concerns a detroit police officer, murphy (peter weller), who is brutally executed by criminals (whose own connections with and participation in the corporate structure is made patent--verhoeven for the most part avoids the manicheanism of traditional u.s. representations of illegality). he is mutilated, his right arm shot off by high-tech shotgun blasts, his legs destroyed, before being killed. his flesh, it turns out, fits right into the plans of the corporation--omni consumer products (ocp), a caricature of reagan-era privatization and malignant corporate growth--that has taken over the operation of the detroit police. the company will build a cyborg, made of machinery and murphy's remains. according to bob morton (miguel ferrer, with exquisite ruthlessness), the executive in charge of production, "we get the best of both worlds: the fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, on-board computer-assisted memory, and a lifetime of on-the-street law-enforcement programming. it is my great pleasure to present to you--robocop." this bigger and better police officer is the result of already-existing company policies concerning human flesh. when it is being discussed whether the cyborg transformation should involve "total body prosthesis"--the complete subordination of the flesh to the machinery--one executive remarks, "he signed the release forms when he joined the force; he's legally dead--we can do pretty much what we want to." the creation of this law-enforcement product is presented as a continuation of the operation of the organized crime group--particularly when it is established that the group is directed by one of ocp's top executives. [21] robocop is, to an extreme degree, a cancerous body without organs, a "body of war and money" (_plateaus_ 163). the corporate extensions are evidently cancerous, with their proliferation into all areas of life ("good business is where you find it")--and the robocop project even follows the failure of another law-enforcement device, a comically monstrous robot that in a display of corporate brutality kills an executive in the ocp boardroom during a demonstration gone awry. in this meeting, before the robot goes haywire, the ceo of ocp, the old man (dan o'herlihy), speaks of the "cancer" of crime--the very same processes, evidently, as those which move the corporation, which the corporation will turn against some of its own human elements. but through the engagement and %mise-en-scene% of the cinematic/televisual apparatus, the cancerous proliferation of images that _robocop_ depicts and participates in--its overtly stated appeal is "classic" hollywood action--is undermined. there are a number of sequences done in "cybervision"--these are almost too unsubtly reminiscent of the tv screen, with their pixelated composition and the corner-inset flashbacks, the latter exactly like those on the news programs that constitute segments of the film's narrative. verhoeven goes out of his way to show the ties between this cyborg pov and the constitution of our own televisually mediated experience, as though the time lines of our lives, and the memories by which we narrate these time lines, were determined entirely by the editing of news program videotape. [22] the most interesting of these sequences is the one that effects a transition from murphy's point of view to that of robocop--its time sequence is delimited by the cyborg's machine functioning. it begins after murphy's execution, in a frantic urban emergency room, with attempts to revive him. the medical machinery already makes its incisions into his body, the technologization of the flesh quite under way before the event of the cyborg's construction. the recurring shot is murphy's point of view, intercut with a reverse shot of his dead eyes. the camera participates directly in the cyborg relation: the gaze is dead, but still sees, indicating broader possibilities of life than those offered by the organic alone. this relation, instituted between the spectators and the image, is then placed inside the represented cyborg; the cyborg then becomes a figure of the cinematic/televisual apparatus. at the moment of murphy's death the screen goes black; the image begins to come back on, exactly as a tv screen would light up. it is clear that it is robocop's pov. the image disappears a few times, sometimes because of a technical error, sometimes because the cyborg is shut off, but we see and hear nothing that is not seen and heard by the cyborg: this includes conversations about him, in a very cinematic/televisual way, under the pretense that he (the camera and microphone) is not there. [23] in this interweaving of flesh and machinery that works through the characters on screen and at the same time cuts across the relation between the screen and the spectators, a subversive and transgressive bwo is produced, at least at certain moments in the film. as a point in the corporate grid of control, robocop undergoes a type of individuation; there is no more unified consciousness for him, but rather the capacity to move in that grid and to form unanticipated linkages with other elements in the network. though robocop's recovery of the identity "murphy" is ideologically inscribed as a triumph of individualism, it may rather be seen as the affirmation of what deleuze and guattari call a "haecceity."^17^ the production of a cyborg identity in the corporate structure gives way to the possibility for the subjected body to become something quite different. [24] this notion of becoming, through haecceity as a mode of individuation, involving transformations on the "molecular" level that do not allow for the persistence of the organic unity of the "molar" individual, is exemplified in the most viscerally horrific of this set of films, _the fly_ (1986). this movie was directed by david cronenberg, a canadian who, though often working with u.s. money, remains mostly in toronto, deterritorializing the hollywood system of production. _the fly_ is arguably one of the finest cinematic renditions of the deleuzoguattarian concept of "becoming-animal,"^18^ as it involves the transformation of a man into a monstrous genetic hybrid of a human being and a housefly.^19^ a remake of an earlier hollywood movie whose setting is montreal, the distinctive feature of this version is that neither human being nor fly, in the process of teleportation that takes place on the molecular level, retains any trace of its composition as a molar entity. in the 1958 movie, two creatures result from the transference, a human being with a fly's head and a fly with a human head; in cronenberg's, there is only one remaining, a multiplicity of various fly and human parts and characteristics. [25] the teleportation devices in this film--this set of films always produces images of flesh-altering machinery--are explicitly figures of electronic reproduction. in a conversation over lunch, the inventor, seth brundle (jeff goldblum), and the journalist, ronnie quafe (geena davis), compare the disgusting results of attempts to transport organic matter to what they are eating, fast food--an excellent example of a copy without an original. and when brundle steps out of the telepod after successfully transporting himself, he remarks, "is it live or is it memorex?"--he repeats an advertising slogan that may be considered a hallmark phrase of the "precession of the simulacrum." the telepods figure the valorization of the simulacrum, which also entails the essential transformation of the spatiotemporal coordinates in which %mimesis%, and the institution of molar entities as those constituting the nodes of reality, take place. brundle's purpose in creating the telepods is to overcome a phobia, that of being transported physically. from now on, movement will not be required to submit to the cartesian grid of space; lines of motion will be valorized, freed from their subordination to fixed points; travel will more and more resemble the cuts of cinema and, to a greater extent, tv. time will be transformed in that it won't be measured according to movement, will no longer be constituted as the gap between two places. brundle, becoming-simulacrum, becoming-image, ceases to be a molar entity: he is not a man but rather a becoming-animal.^20^ he loses his scientist's clear consciousness, his dominating subjectivity, and becomes a haecceity by way of this becoming-fly. he discovers what has happened to him through assistance from his computer--his scientific mind has always functioned in interface, through forming an assemblage, with the machinery--which prints its description of the event on its screen: "fusion of brundle and fly at molecular-genetic level." at this level, the molecular plane of consistency, the organic being cannot retain its integrity, its molar composition, and must engage in becoming. [26] the body without organs that brundle becomes (in the mutation his external organs fall off and his internal organs become useless) is, as in _robocop_, one in which there is a fight between the cancerous and the productive kinds of bwo. but the possibility that these two could form an intersection, that the cancer might actually work toward a transformative productivity, is raised. describing his mutation to quafe, brundle says that the fusion is showing itself as a "bizarre form of cancer." further along in the process of transformation, he terms his affliction "a disease with a purpose--maybe not such a bad disease after all"; he remarks that the disease "wants to turn me into something else, . . . something that never existed before." we see here an instantiation of what cronenberg terms a "creative cancer," elaborated in a number of his works (rodley 80).^21^ and though the transformation does end up being destructive--"brundlefly" becomes violent, almost murders, and brings on its own death--the moments in which transformation becomes possible are of interest here. cronenberg produces these images in the machinic assemblage of the cinematic apparatus: the molecular, machinic transformation is represented as a series of figures flashing across the computer screen, the latter shot in cutaway so that it fills the movie screen. such an image of the computer screen is frequently used as an establishing shot for sequences in brundle's lab, as though, to follow the rhetoric of north american editing convention, it constituted and determined the space depicted in the assemblage of shots that compose the sequence. and there is an identification of the fly's eye, belonging to the molecular transformation, and the machinery of cinema in the opening sequence: it is an unrecognizable image, the view from an insect's composite eye, with the cinematic colors separated, movements discernible but not attributable to any entity, until it transforms and reveals itself to be a shot from the ceiling of the convention where brundle and quafe first meet and the unity of the narrative begins. [27] other movies in this set show the cyborg coupling, the assemblage of machinery and human being that turns out to be machinic and thereby productive of becomings, molecular transformations, as being both repressive and transgressive. ridley scott's _alien_ (1979), a british production and historically the first of the set, elaborates a relation of self and other in which self, combating other, cannot maintain integrity and must reveal to itself that it is a becoming, in a series and molecular relation with the other rather than in opposition to it. the alien--in constant mutation throughout the movie, at one point incubated in the guts of a human being, whom it subsequently destroys by disemboweling him in its "birth"--is placed in homologous relation with the human beings themselves in their spaceship. the computer that runs the ship--the consciousness that inhabits the machinery--is called "mother," and has a biological relation to the crew: they are "born" in its interior at the outset of the movie--the ship brings the crew into life, awakening them from their prolonged sleep in chambers that look like incubators. this "birth" sequence is preceded by a series of shots, moving down one corridor after another of the ship, figurative of endless machine intestines (greenberg). the human-machine coupling, as well as the intestinal birth that will be reproduced later with the alien, suggest monstrosity, the elusion of pregiven forms and the bypassing of normal routes of genetic reproduction. the coupling is monstrous because it produces a cyborg relation and because it produces the film's monster. but on the one hand, it limits life, and on the other extends it multidirectionally: the alien kills ruthlessly, but the relationship that ripley (sigourney weaver), the crew's one surviving member, reworks with the machinery is what provides the possibility of transgressing the limitations. [28] and in john carpenter's overlooked gem _they live_ (1988), the cyborg relation takes the form of the possibility of reprogramming, or even rewiring, the human brain. the movie begins as a critique of reaganism, unusually stark for hollywood of the period: it takes place in a very contemporary urban u.s., depicted of images borrowed from depression-era cinema. john ford's _the grapes of wrath_ (1940) and preston sturges's _sullivan's travels_ (1941) are distinct references--the film announces its participation in an instituted system of representation.^22^ what becomes immediately evident is the disparity between the images of everyday life and those seen on numerous television screens. the narrative follows the main character, played by professional wrestler roddy piper, a nomadic member of the lumpenproletariat (who goes unnamed, but is identified in the credits as "nada": a movement without solid form, a haecceity), who, sleeping on the streets, settling in a camp for the homeless, cannot avoid exposure to electronic representations of extreme affluence. after suggestions of a proto-fascist police state, in which the poor are constantly under surveillance and attack, the movie reveals its surprise: none of what anyone is seeing is real, since a signal is transmitted directly into the brain, by a tv broadcasting company, to construct perception. everything looks quite "normal," when quite a lot is wrong: the film's dramatization bears on the capacity of simulated images to declare themselves as real, and thus exclude the production of alternative images. [29] what turns out to be the case, when "nada" gains the capacity to see, is that there has been an alien invasion, the earth is being exploited, treated as "their third world." in the simulacrum-world, the aliens look like human beings; they maintain a social hierarchy through control of corporations, recruiting human collaborators through a proliferation of consumerism. and the "reality" of the consumerist images that "nada" sees is a shock: instead of advertising's pretty pictures, he sees a bombardment of blatant commands. "marry and reproduce" is the "real" content of an ad depicting a woman on the beach; "stay asleep," "do not question authority," and other messages appear regularly; money becomes white sheets of paper with the words "this is your god" printed across it. the urban landscape, with such phrases plastered across it, are an evident reference to barbara kruger's collages: their ugliness and blatancy, in continual interference with seeing, uncannily calls attention to the functioning of a society of consumption. it is the "society of the spectacle" in which nothing may be seen that isn't preconfigured in a determined system. [30] though the distinction that _they live_ makes between the simulacrum-world and the "real" one may at first sight seem to be a simple dualism, the relation is more complicated. "nada" is able to engage in resistance by transforming the destructive cyborg relation into a productive, machinically transgressive one. the apparatus with which he discovers the simulation is a pair of dark glasses, manufactured and distributed by the underground movement. wearing them he can see the aliens and the commands. but these "real" images are themselves constructed: besides being a visual pun on the "society of the spectacle(s)," the glasses are borrowed from 1950s 3-d movie viewing^23^--the image looks more "real" because it is more faked. and the "real" world appears in black and white, reminiscent of both classic science fiction cinema and the television of the same period. this world is just as much a construction, an assemblage of images taken from instituted systems of representation, just as much a simulacrum; but it is the simulacrum that breaks the hold of the image that declares itself to be real. it does this through "nada's" nomadic practice of transformation, becoming-machine. putting the glasses on also then becomes a figure for the act of going to see this "b" science fiction movie, a construction of images by which the constructed nature of the images of everyday life, determined by mechanisms of economic and social repression, is revealed. [31] a similar problematic is explored in the film from this set that treats most thoroughly the concepts i have introduced, a film to which carpenter gives a number of admiring nods, cronenberg's _videodrome_ (1982).^24^ this movie also concerns the transmission of a mind-altering signal. the target is civic tv, a toronto cable operation that specializes in sex and violence; the signal would induce hallucinations in the viewer, as part of a global conspiracy by a multinational called spectacular optical. "we make inexpensive glasses for the third world and missile guidance systems for nato," says barry convex (les carlson) to max renn (james woods), manager of civic tv and the guinea pig for the videodrome signal. the company, as it were bringing the world into focus, has interests in spectacles, the spectacle, and domination through representation: its interest in civic tv derives from the station's transmissions of sexual violence because of their capacity to initiate a cutting into the spectator's perceptual apparatus. max finds himself cut into, after several days of watching the "videodrome" tapes: in front of the television, his face lit by the flicker of the screen (in the movie all images seem in one way or another generated by tv), he discovers a new orifice in his abdomen. he assumes the position of spectator to the horrific corporeal transformation to which he is subject: the opening is distinctively vaginal, but it also functions, according to the traditional masculine viewpoint identified by psychoanalysis, as a wound, a phantasm of the castration anxiety. but this initial coding of the orifice is reconfigured; just as deleuze and guattari suggest that freud's characterization of the castration anxiety results from a molar conception of the human body, and that rethinking the latter as a machinic assemblage may give way to a release from the limitations of strict sexual division,^25^ max is able to give way to the transformation and engage in a productive becoming-woman. he is not losing his body, but becoming a body without organs; he is losing his molar composition as a man, a dominant male, the integrated subject of the spectacle. [32] his transformation is molecular: as in _the fly_, it is the effect of a "creative cancer." the videodrome signal induces a brain tumor, which will become "a new organ, . . . a new outgrowth of the human brain," according to media theorist professor brian o'blivion (jack creley) who only appears as a televisual image. this freely acting organ--the organic composition of the body is losing its grip--will allow hallucination, or, as it turns out to be the case, the production of simulacra such that the hold of instituted reality ceases to be viable, reveals itself to be the ruse of a simulacrum. and the transformation is machinic, occurring when max engages in a coupling with his video equipment: in a bizarre sequence the tv screen bears the image of his lover, nicki brand (deborah harry), first her face and then just her mouth in enormous proportion, as the vcr displays the contours and motions of desirous flesh. neither the vcr nor nicki, in their merging, are organically female, with the multiple machine parts functioning as all manner of sexual organs whose molar gender specificity has been dislocated. max moves toward the large, open mouth, as it gives him "head," transforming his head as well as his other organs in this machinic assemblage. [33] in the mutation, max spends some time as a product of the corporate engineering, a cancerous bwo whose control he is completely under. his new orifice also functions as a video slot--in the completely passive position, forced open, in which the shows his station runs would place the female sexual organs--so that he may be "programmed" by spectacular optical to eradicate the opposition, a movement directed by bianca o'blivion, the daughter of the media image. but his transformation advances as he reconfigures the machinery, activating the creative and transgressive aspects of the cancer: the program becomes the destruction of the repressive force, spectacular optical--max turns the corporation's own weapons against it, using the gun he had obtained in company service. [34] _videodrome_'s violence is troubling, its mutilated bodies often seeming to be equivalent to those represented in civic tv's programming, gratuitous. however, the idea of violent death undergoes a reconfiguration at the end of the movie, when max turns the gun against his own head, a final transgression of the limits imposed by the organic composition of the body. at the sound of the shot the screen goes black; the credits run, marking the film's own limit, the end of its possibilities of representation.^26^ after considering several possible endings that would show max after this "death," which becomes a transformation of life, cronenberg opted for this one as the best (rodley 97). its effect is to affirm an incapacity to depict what is effectively the end of a metaphysical system, the becoming of the body without organs, within a system of cinematic and televisual representation that is still quite infected with %mimesis%, by the simulacrum that excludes the production of simulacra. such a cinema can go to the limit, and can show the limit, but cannot yet move to the intertwining and coinhabitation of thought and matter, the liberation of the image from its platonic determination. its indirect presentation, its "presenting the unpresentable," which by all means leaves a feeling of incompleteness at the end, also resists a recuperation by the forces that would subordinate the image to %mimesis% and, through a limitation of the possibilities of thought, promote a complete spectator passivity. notes: ^1^ foucault, "theatrum philosophicum" 166. translation slightly modified. ^2^ deleuze, _cinema 2_ 280: "[philosophical theory] is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. a theory of cinema is not 'about' cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, anymore than one object has over others." ^3^ marie-claire ropars-wuilleumier suggests of these books--and this could be said of all of deleuze's writing: "in the form of organization they adopt--that of non-linearity--and in the conceptual order they engage--that of divided thought--the two books defy any synthesis other than a disjunctive one. and even this sort of synthesis might betray an exposition that takes the form of a becoming" (120). ^4^ in a 1967 essay entitled "plato and the simulacrum," which appears as an appendix to the 1969 _logic of sense_. ^5^ deleuze and guattari, _plateaus_ 256: "this is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages." ^6^ it is this determination of representation that heidegger sees occurring with descartes, as the culmination of western metaphysics, following groundwork laid by the greeks. the latter is evident in plato's designation as %eidos%, something seen, of the ideal form that determines the being of a thing (131 and 143-147). ^7^ leibniz elaborates this concept in the theodicee, 414-416. ^8^ a treatment of the idea of incompossibility that deleuze gives in his recent book on leibniz may be of interest here: "leibniz innovates when he invokes a profoundly original relation among all possible worlds. by stating that it is a great mystery buried in god's understanding, leibniz gives the new relation the name of incompossibility. we discover that we are in a dilemma of seeking the solution to a leibnizian problem under the conditions that leibniz has established: we cannot know what god's reasons are, nor how he applies them in each case, but we can demonstrate that he possesses some of them, and what their principle may be" (_the fold_ 59-60). ^9^ deleuze acknowledges jacques derrida's closely related work on writing as simulacrum in plato, its being viewed as a threat to the paternal order of the transmission of the logos, in "la pharmacie de platon"; _logic_ 361:2. ^10^ i purposely use the term that foucault chooses to describe the exclusion of madness by a restrictive and tyrannical reason--of a certain production of phantasms by institutional order--at the outset of modernity, in _histoire de la folie_, 56-59 (this section, on descartes, does not appear in the abridged english translation, _madness and civilization_); i wish to mark the phenomenon i am describing as a repetition of that event. ^11^ _cinema 2_ 265: "the electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death." ^12^ most notably: see bukatman, "postcards from the posthuman solar system," and "who programs you?"; and stivale, "mille/punks/cyber/plateaus." ^13^ i am, of course, bringing in donna haraway's notion of the cyborg, from her 1984 "a cyborg manifesto." stivale is very interested in possible rapprochements between haraway's idea of the cyborg and various deleuzoguattarian concepts, such as the "machinic" and the "body without organs." ^14^ constance penley goes into some detail on the ambiguities of the human-machine relations in the film in her "time travel, primal scene, and the critical dystopia." ^15^ the term is cameron's, from the script. ^16^ cameron, as well as a number of the other directors i will consider, is fairly liberal with references, to both film and television history. his purpose is one that, after the new wave, may be called a traditional cinematic one: to call attention to the fact that this sequence of images is part of a coded system of representation. the practice becomes quite interesting, though, when it is coupled with representations of the technological production of images, and when the cinematic references are adapted to comment specifically on the electronic age, as in this sequence. ^17^ _plateaus_ 261: "a season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. they are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected." see also stivale 71-72. ^18^ for elaborations on molar unities and molecular transformations, as well as on becoming-animal, see _plateaus_, ch. 10, "1730: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible," 232-309. ^19^ cronenberg's own term for the genre that _the fly_ delineates is "metaphysical horror" (rodley 134). ^20^ _plateaus_ 292: "there is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence." ^21^ this intersection or hybrid of two types of bwo would seem to be a transformation of the concept put forth by deleuze and guattari; they speak of the "dangers" and the necessary "precautions" involved in the fabrication of the bwo, since there is the possibility of "cancerous tissue" (_plateaus_ 162-163). but we should also be cautious about making such a clear-cut distinction in their concept: they speak of a cancer cell as becoming "mad," a term that cannot be separated from the various critical works on the history of psychiatry, mental illness, and insanity (especially foucault's), which designates, in one way or another, the proliferation of phantasms or simulacra as well as the latter's repression. the cancer cell may transgress the organic composition of the "healthy" cell--the transformations the cell undergoes in its submission to the hierarchy may give way to its capacity to be productive, creative. ^22^ see note 16. ^23^ a later u.s. edition of guy debord's manifesto has as its cover photo the image of a crowd wearing 3-d glasses. ^24^ the remarks that follow derive from a paper that i co-wrote with larry shillock, delivered at the 1992 mmla convention in st. louis, entitled "cronenberg's videology." i would like to add now that i owe many of the observations on the films in the present paper to lengthy viewing sessions and discussions with larry over the last few years. ^25^ _plateaus_ 256: "when little hans talks about a 'peepee-maker,' he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. does a girl have a peepee-maker? the boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of castration. it is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance). does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. chairs don't have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for example." ^26^ bukatman, "postcards" 353-354: "wren [sic] may in fact be approaching the body without organs when he fires at his temple, but that's precisely the point at which the film has to end. this re-embodying is inconceivable: even the imagination can only approach its condition." works cited: (for the french texts that i cite, the translation is in each case mine. --h. m.) _alien_. dir. ridley scott. brandywine, 1979. bensmaia, reda. "un philosophe au cinema." _magazine litteraire_ 257 (1988), 57-59. bergson, henri. _matter and memory_. trans. nancy margaret paul and w. scott palmer. london: allen & unwin, 1911. bogue, ronald. "word, image and sound: the non-representational semiotics of gilles deleuze." _mimesis, semiosis and power_. ed. ronald bogue. mimesis in contemporary theory: an interdisciplinary approach 2. philadelphia: john benjamins, 1991, 77-97. bukatman, scott. "postcards from the posthuman solar system." _science fiction studies_ 55 (1991), 343-357. ---. "who programs you? the science fiction of the spectacle." _alien zone: cultural theory and contemporary science fiction_. ed. annette kuhn. new york: verso, 1990, 196-213. debord, guy. _the society of the spectacle_. detroit: black and red, 1983. deleuze, gilles. _cinema 1_. trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1986. ---. _cinema 2_. trans. hugh tomlinson and robert galatea. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1989. ---. _the fold_. trans. tom conley. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. ---. "plato and the simulacrum." _the logic of sense_. trans. mark lester and charles stivale. new york: columbia university press, 1990, 253-266. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. _qu est-ce que la philosophie?_ paris: minuit, 1991. ---. _a thousand plateaus_. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. derrida, jacques. "la pharmacie de platon." _la dissemination_. paris: le seuil, 1972, 69-197. douglass, paul. "deleuze and the endurance of bergson." _thought_ 67 (march 1992), 47-61. _the fly_. dir. david cronenberg. brooksfilms, 1986. foucault, michel. _l'archeologie du savoir_. paris: gallimard, 1969. ---. _histoire de la folie a l'age classique_. paris: gallimard, 1972. ---. "theatrum philosophicum." _language, countermemory, practice_. ed. donald f. bouchard. trans. donald f. bouchard and sherry simon. ithaca: cornell university press, 1977, 165-196. greenberg, harvey r., m.d. "remaining the gargoyle: psychoanalytic notes on _alien_." _close encounters: film, feminism, and science fiction_. ed. constance penley et al. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1991, 83-104. haraway, donna. "a cyborg manifesto." _simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature_. new york: routledge, 1991, 149-181. heidegger, martin. "the age of the world picture." _the question concerning technology and other essays_. trans. william lovitt. new york: harper and row, 1977, 115-154. lyotard, jean-francois. "que peindre?" interview with bernard macade. _art press_ 125 (mai 1988), 42-45. penley, constance. "time travel, primal scene, and the critical dystopia." _close encounters: film, feminism, and science fiction_. ed. constance penley et al. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1991, 64-6. _robocop_. dir. paul verhoeven. orion, 1987. rodley, chris, ed. _cronenberg on cronenberg_. london and boston: faber and faber, 1992. ropars-wuilleumier, marie-claire. "the cinema, reader of gilles deleuze." trans. dana polan. _camera obscura_ 18 (1988), 120-126. stivale, charles. "mille/punks/cyber/plateaus: science fiction and deleuzo-guattarian becomings." _substance_ 66 (1991), 66-84. _the terminator_. dir. james cameron. hemdale, 1984. _they live_. dir. john carpenter. alive films, 1988. _videodrome_. dir. david cronenberg. filmplan international, 1982. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------strenski, 'ethics of ethnocentrism', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-strenski-ethics.txt archive pmc-list, file review-7.595. part 1/1, total size 16020 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the ethics of ethnocentrism by ivan strenski university of california, santa barbara eui9ias@mvs.oac.ucla.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by ivan strenski, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: tzvetan todorov, _on human diversity_. trans. catherine porter. cambridge: harvard university press, 1993. [1] intellectual historian-cum-literary critic tzvetan todorov has given us a series of thoughtful essays on a cluster of issues of wide current concern: ethnocentrism, humanism, scientism, racism, nationalism, universalism, cultural relativism, exoticism, and the like. todorov seeks further to identify the leading french thinkers on these subjects, and in doing so to identify the main proponents of what he believes are the key "ideologies" or "justifications" of french "colonial conquests" (xiii). partly because of the luster of french thought, todorov believes that this study will constitute nothing short of "research into the origins of our own times" (xii). [2] these ambitous intentions may well go unrecognized in america, however, where the book's publishers have created a false impression of the author's aims and of the scope of his work. in translating the original french title, _%nous et les autres: la reflexion francaise sur la diversite humaine%_, as _on human diversity_, the editors at harvard have pushed aside todorov's broadly dialectical and dialogical purposes in favor of their much narrower concerns. a nuanced and thoughtful book that seeks to guide our thinking about how we should behave toward one another has been served up as yet another contribution to the banal and stifling american conversation about "diversity." readers of the book will perhaps be amused by the irony here: a foreign book dealing with ethnocentrism is given a very specifically american (i.e., ethnocentric) packaging before being offered to a domestic readership. but in any case, the book itself should come as a pleasant surprise, addressing as it does a refreshingly broad range of us/them questions and offering a number of provocative theses. [3] to begin with one of the book's more important themes, todorov asserts that perhaps the first error we should eliminate from our thinking about the us/them issue is the dichotomy of "us" and "them" itself. he points out that these categories are highly provisional and unstable in any event, and that one of "them" may be felt to be a lot more like me than one of "us." (we see this instability at work in the tendency of white suburban men to identify more closely with murder suspect o.j. simpson than with murder victim ron goldman.) todorov's aim is to have us judge in terms of "ethical" principles, not in terms of some presumed membership in one or another group of "us." [4] todorov also threads his way through such issues as the relation of colonial domination to humanitarian universalism. in chapter one, "the universal and the relative," he slides from one end of the dialectic to another, covering a range of opinion on the question of the purported unity or diversity of the human species and its values. are we one or infinitely many? and, if many, of what significance are the differences? is there a "universal scale of values," and "how far does that scale extend"? here, todorov performs a useful service for this and future discussions by stipulating the usage of key terms. thus, for him, "ethnocentrism" is taken to name the "most common" version, indeed a "caricature," of universalism. this holds that we all are one, because the "other" is basically just like "us." it affirms both the form of universality and a "particular content." thus, it has been a commonplace of french ethnocentric universalists to claim both that the human species and its values are essentially one (and thus, universal), and that these values happen to be best embodied in france. all men seek liberty, equality and fraternity, %n'est ce pas%? [5] todorov brings out the clever strategems by which universalism often masks ethnocentrism. this is notoriously so in the way french imperialism often justified its expansionist ventures in terms of bringing (french, of course) "civilization" to the "savages." [6] but todorov is too wise in these matters to let the facile critique pass that universalism *always* hides a more sinister ethnocentrism. sometimes nations can act in behalf of humanity. sometimes they can rise above national interest. had he written this book more recently, todorov might have had something in mind like the french humanitarian and military actions in rwanda. compared to the sorry parade of supposedly shrewdly calculated self-interested american inactions, %medicins sans frontieres% acted in behalf of humanity, despite their specific national origins. is it only accidental that they should be french? one also thinks of the french rushing in troops (in the name of humanity) to prevent greater loss of innocent life in rwanda. despite the cynicism which attended this military action, the french succeeded in turning the tide against further genocide. they also acted in effect to seal the victory of the anglophone tutsi minority over the francophone hutu, thereby opposing what would seem to be their own national interests. was it only an accident again that it should have been france who behaved in this way? many a self-interested and narrowly national evil has been perpetrated in the name of humanity. but, if they are habituated to thinking about the larger human species, perhaps some nations can at times overcome their own interests. [7] todorov argues further that universalism is not the only villain in perpetuating colonialism. any available justification will serve colonialist ambitions: if not universalism, then %lebensraum%. besides, todorov argues, ideologies such as (ethnocentric) universalism seldom, if ever, "motivate" colonial enterprises; they merely serve as post-facto "self-legitimations." indeed, for todorov, universalism isn't even the primary legitimating mechanism for colonial violence--scientism is. "scientism," he says, is the most "perverse" and the most effective ideological weapon in the armory of ethnocentrism and racism, because it so easily passes undetected. people are rarely "proud of being ethnocentric," whereas they often "take pride in professing a 'scientific' philosophy." here, diderot becomes a major exemplar of "scientific ethnocentrism," as do renan, who makes a religion of science, and gobineau, with his fully elaborated scientific racialism. todorov's discussion of this aliance between the scientific and the colonial is on the whole fully persuasive. certainly science has served the needs of modern racialism all too efficiently; both hitler and stalin, we must recall, boasted that their ideologies were strictly scientific. [8] perhaps the most compelling recurrent theme of the book is that of the "tragic duality" between humanism or universalism and nationalism or patriotism. the "man" is not the "citizen." humanitarian patriots, epitomized by those who sought to spread universal humanism after the french revolution, bear a heavy responsibility for the wars that raged in europe from the late eighteenth century to the end of the first world war: "these wars were accepted all the more easily in that they were presented as invested with the prestige of the french revolution and the humanitarian ideal." those who try thus to reconcile humanity and patriotism court disaster, because they inevitably bend humanity to the interests of the particular nation. [9] but the radical *separation* of "man" and "citizen" is tragic in its own way, since it locks us into moral relativism. are there, asks todorov, no "crimes against humanity"? can we no more than shrug our "ethical shoulders" at the nazi extermination camps, viewing them as legitimate expressions of german culture? is the tribal custom of clitoridectomy a cultural practice which, rather than judging in their typically self-righteous way, europeans should try better to "understand from the native's point of view"? or, is it a fearsome affront to the very *humanity* of women? [10] some sort of reconciliation is necessary between humanity and particularity. todorov believes that this reconciliation is not possible at the level of empirical human nature, but rather at the level of how we think--at the level of "culture." culture, he argues, is something close to being "natural" in the sense that it is "given" and thus pre-exists the individual, but it is also something like a contract (since it is willed), and can be acquired or affected by education. but while we can specify these universal contours of culture in general, there is no unity of the species on the level of a *particular* cultural feature. what is universal is "not one quality or another, but the capacity to acquire any of them." "the french language is not universal," observes todorov, but "the aptitude for learning a language is." we need, he argues, to become critical of the particular features of our own culture without ceasing to recognize that it is culture itself that enables us to become "human." [11] in listing these key themes which are woven through todorov's essays, i am also indicating that _on human diversity_ lacks a single strong central thesis or major argument. this is a deliberate feature of todorov's writing--he conceives of it as a process, as offering an "itinerary" rather than a blue print. to be sure, those who are looking for a single-minded and tightly organized discussion will be disappointed by such an approach. the book is in places too cursory, in places too digressive. but todorov's intentions show a wisdom of their own. because he eschews heavy documentation and a strict architectonic of argument, _on human diversity_ seems able better to maintain a compelling and powerful moral compass. the book's unity is moral, rather than logical or thematic. what holds the various essays together is todorov's insistence on always inserting ethics into the analysis and the practice of politics. todorov realizes that ethics cannot replace politics, but he also believes that ethics can exercise a crucial restraining function within the political field. [12] this ethical orientation amounts to a kind of neo-humanism, and todorov concludes his volume with an ethically-inflected defense of humanism against its various unnamed french detractors (levi-strauss? derrida? foucault?). instead of seeing humanism as generating its own auto-toxins, todorov argues that it has been distorted and undermined by irrepressible holistic impulses. nationalism, racialism, and totalitarian utopianism are all monstrous reinventions of ideals originating in holistic ideology. citing the seminal and often misunderstood work on the hindu caste system of french anthropologist and social thinker louis dumont, todorov urges that we must learn to "temper" the humanitarian ideal of the enlightenment by putting it into play with "values and principles from other perspectives." only in this way will we find "new [benign] expressions for the repressed holistic values" whose subjugation to individual freedom was part of the price we paid for the triumph of humanist individualism. [13] aside from elaborating, in his loosely-structured way, this humanist articulation of ethics with politics, todorov reflects autobiographically on both the personal and the institutional contexts from which his particular orientation has emerged. in his preface, todorov recalls his experiences as a zealous young "pioneer" living under a stalinist regime. during this time, he remarks, he "came to know evil," even while he was inhibited from acting against it. the more formative moment came, however, after stalin's death, when relief and hope gave way to an awareness that things would not really change. todorov confronted with increasing frequency the "vacuity of the official discourse," a lofty orwellian language whose real function was to mask the apparatus of domination. the "evil" he had come to know was not to be located in the dictator after all, but in the whole social and discursive system of which the evil dictator was but a symptom. in the wake of this recognition, even todorov's strong faith in marxist principles would wither. fortunately, he was able to migrate to france, where he resumed his studies in the human and social sciences in paris. [14] todorov's honeymoon with the west was, however, soon over. among his politically obsessed french academic colleagues, he found the same absence of "an ethical sense" which he once thought peculiar to the stalinist east. of these western intellectuals, todorov observes sarcastically that the "goals that inspired them were most often variants of the very principles i had learned to mistrust so deeply in my homeland." almost as frustrating as this sclerotic and inhumane marxism among his french academic colleagues, however, was the %petit-bourgeois% professionalization and the crabbed compartmentalization of the modern university. [15] todorov's institutional goal, therefore, has been to map out new approaches to matters that he believes have been avoided or mishandled by intellectuals more rooted than he in the particular political postures and disciplinary arrangements of the western academic system. instead of adjusting himself to the contours of this system, he has rebelled against it. _on human diversity_ is something like a culmination of that rebellion, a book written from a totally deviant point of departure, one that, in its unfashionably humanist ethics and in its declared preference for the "moral and political essay" over conventional scholarship in the human or social sciences, must offend both the radical left and the conservative defenders of disciplinary specialization. [16] it is hard in a few lines to celebrate how well the episodic and thoughtful meditative style of this extended moral essay works to heap, bit by bit, a weight of historical evidence onto the reader about the moral implications of the issues coming visibly to a head in our time. but it does. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[readers], 'selected letters from readers', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-[readers]-selected.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.996. part 1/1, total size 2989 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- selected letters from readers postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------copyright (c) 1996 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, the institute for advanced technology in the humanities. ----------------------------------------------------------------the following responses were submitted by pmc readers using regular email or the pmc reader's report form. not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited. ----------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on theoretical obsolescence: i enjoyed reading your post i am an avid reader of delillo (tried unsuccessfully to finish pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_, it seems like it's time for another shot) i wholeheartedly agree that delillo can be in no way considered a postmodernist. postmodernism, "the corpulence, the lack of pace, discernment, and energy"(_mao ii_) is precisely what he is fighting. his aim, i believe is to make the individual theoretically obsolete, for it is only in the "mohole-intense" realm of reality, the shadow of void-core rationality, that an individual can find life. anyway, it was thought provoking, and delillo deserves a lot of attention. these comments are from: joshua jones the email address for joshua jones is: twilligon@aol.com ----------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on cyborgs: i have an article soon to be published in the journal for the american academy of religion that explores the history of cyborg discourse, and examines some possible reasons for the dearth of participation by traditional religious voices in it. the idea of a cyborg's bisexuality provides an interesting nuance to the argument i've been making that i would like to discuss w/your author. given the very high level of interest in the article i have written, i would also be interested in helping to organize a cross-disciplinary cyborg conference if you know of anyone planning such an event. these comments are from: brenda e. brasher, phd assistant professor of religion and philosophy, mount union college, alliance, ohio the email address for brenda e. brasher is: brenda@nauticom.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------bartolovich, 'have theory; will travel: constructions of "cultural geography"', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-bartolovich-have.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.995. part 1/1, total size 36023 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- have theory; will travel: constructions of "cultural geography" by crystal bartolovich literary and cultural studies carnegie mellon university crystal+@andrew.cmu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by crystal bartolovich, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: peter jackson and jan penrose, eds. _constructions of race, place, and nation_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1994. *traffic* %(trae-fik), sb%. . . . 1. the transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade; hence, trade between distant or distinct communities. - oed cultural geographers are now experimenting with a range of new ideas and approaches, their aversion to theory now firmly overcome. these developments have drawn extensively on contemporary cultural studies and on other theoretical developments across the social sciences. but the traffic has not been in one direction: there is now at least the potential for repaying this debt by informing cultural studies with some of the insights of social and cultural geography. -peter jackson, <cite>maps of meaning</cite> [1] i have chosen the above passage from peter jackson's _maps of meaning_ (1989) as the starting place for a discussion of his more recent book, _constructions of race, place and nation_, a collection of essays he edited with jan penrose, because its "trade" metaphor ("traffic"/"debt") calls attention in an economical fashion to a troubling aspect of both texts: a tendency to view "cultural studies" as a sort of theory warehouse for traditional disciplines, and to see "theory" as a stockpile of portable commodities ("ideas and approaches") ready to be transported anywhere interchangeably. as jackson and penrose put it in their introduction, geographers have become "increasingly sensitive to debates in cultural studies" (19). in this essay i will pursue the limits of this "sensitivity" insofar as it can be traced in _constructions_. the academy -from its perspective -is comprised of disciplines with well-defined, although semi-permeable, borders. indeed, the "trade" image argues -linking the previous book even more firmly to the concerns of the more recent one -that disciplinary boundaries function rather like those of nation-states (before they were unsettled by transnational capital). minimally, it assumes that controlled and accountable transactions (import and export) are negotiated among distinct scholarly domains. the very desire to set the balance of payments aright between "geography" and "cultural studies," however, is already to undermine cultural studies understood as a postdisciplinary, critical practice. [2] since i will be criticising _constructions_ largely on the grounds of its investments in "geography" as a discipline -investments that i think render a "sensitvity" to "cultural studies" impossible -i want to make my own institutional position and interests as explicit as i can from the start: i teach in a literary and cultural studies program at carnegie mellon university. in spite of the profound difficulties of doing so, we are committed to attempting to resist disciplinary structures, not only to make a "place" for ourselves, but also because the current organization of the university renders it problematic to cultural studies politically, intellectually, and practically. attempts at transdisciplinarity threaten power bases of departments, which jealously guard their faculty lines, resources, and boundaries for reasons that often have more to do with self-reproduction than intellectual conviction -as most department members will readily acknowledge. crises induced by university funding cuts have intensified these border fortifications. in a terrain of entrenched disciplines, it is very difficult indeed to pursue the kind of postdisciplinary practice toward which cultural studies has been moving. given these conditions, the common gesture of traditional disciplines looking to cultural theory to revitalise themselves without in any way questioning their own disciplinary integrity can be seen as destructive to cultural studies. i address this state of affairs in the following pages. [3] a more sympathetic reader might object to my critique of _constructions_ on the grounds that it is a "specialist" book whose primary agenda is not, after all, positioning itself in relation to cultural studies. in any case (the defender of the book might add), its heart is in the right place; at a time of right-wing backlash against the left in the academy, and traditionalist backlash against "theory" and "cultural studies," a book such as _constructions_, which attempts to bring the highly charged issue of racism to the attention of a generally conservative discipline, is surely not an enemy.^1^ the book -after all -deals with a very important topic. without disputing these points, i am still left with the conviction that the collective effect of dozens of books like _constructions_ is to keep in place the disciplinary structure of the university that cultural studies is attempting to break down. if the transdisciplinary tendency of cultural studies were simply an incidental preference for the new and an anarchic preoccupation with smashing up the old, then ,<ite>constructions_ would be quite right to refuse to join in. however, since cultural studies has been suspicious of inherited disciplines insofar as they have been participants in the very sorts of oppressions that _constructions_ attempts to bring to the attention of geographers, perhaps it might have taken more notice. anthropology (fabian), history (de certeau), english (viswanathan), 'oriental' studies (said) -even geography (blaut) -have all come under question as disciplines in recent years for the ways in which they have helped to "construct" and maintain racism, (neo)colonialism, exploitation, and many other not so very admirable realities. attention to the role of "geography" in the processes of racism _constructions_ describes would not only make it a stronger book; it would render it more politically useful since it is, after all, published by two university presses (minnesota acquired the u.s. rights from university college london press) and directed largely to an academic audience. [4] the disciplinary investments of _constructions_ are explicit. most of the essays were earlier given as talks at the 1992 annual meetings of the association of american geographers, and assume a geographer as reader. as the editors explain in the preface: "besides the application of social construction theory to particular empirical materials, the following chapters are also united in their adoption of a geographical perspective" (v). they add: "we hope the volume will help clarify some of the highly charged issues that revolve around notions of 'race' and 'nation' as well as contributing to the development of a more rigorous social construction approach within geography" (vi). the marketing categories ("geography/ sociology") printed on the back cover of the book confirm that the university of minnesota press agreed with this editorial self-assessment of audience. [5] instead of pursuing the racisms in which this very audience can be implicated, however, _constructions_ describes racism as if it only existed in a world beyond geography and the university.^2^ even alastair bonnett's discussion of "anti-racism and reflexivity" manages to evade any hint that "social geography" might be complicit with the world of secondary school teachers he discusses. social geography is for him merely the medium in which racism can be studied; it, apparently, can do so without participating in that world. i cannot imagine a position that could be further from that of the two prominent cultural theorists, gayatri spivak and paul gilroy, bonnett includes in his bibliography. whereas both of these theorists have been relentlessly critical of disciplinary neutrality, and scrupulous in interrogating their own positions and interests, bonnett simply brings their work "home" to geography, domesticating it, as if this were not a fraught andproblematic gesture. he disparages "auto-critique" and "textual reflexivity" which he describes as insufficiently attentive to "wider political and social processes that structure and enable people's attitudes and activities" (166). yet he never pauses to wonder what those processes might be in his own case as a researcher, contenting himself with examining others without considering where their struggles touch (or not) his own - not as an "individual" but precisely as a subject situated in "wider political and social processes that structure and enable . . . [his] attitude's and activities" as a geographer. [6] cultural studies, on the other hand, is a critical practice that few of its practitioners would feel comfortable taking for granted in the way bonnett's article takes "geography" for granted. iain chambers has recently put it this way: cultural studies "cannot rest content within an inherited discipline, invariable paradigm, or fixed set of protocols. it exists as an act of interrogation: a moment of doubt, dispersal, and dissemination. it reveals an opening, not a conclusion; it always marks the moment of departure, never a homecoming. criticism practised in this manner, in this style, cannot pretend disciplinary recognition . . ." (121-2). the contributors to _constructions_ show little evidence of such interrogation of themselves as geographers -or even the desire for it. [7] the book is divided into four sections of two articles each, with section titles that echo key texts and problematics in cultural theory. and yet the book evades discussion of the tensions that might confront the articulation of such texts and problematics with "geography." its first section, "constructing the nation," offers an essay by jan penrose on "social constructions of nation, people, and place" in scotland and the u.k. and a piece on "immigration and nation building" in canada and the u.k. a second section moves to a consideration of "constructions of aboriginality" with two articles, one by kay anderson and one by jane jacobs, focusing on australia. a third section takes up "places of resistance" with a study of co-op housing in new york city by helene clark and a discussion of struggles to acquire state funding for muslim schools in the u.k. by claire dwyer. the final section, "politics and position," contains the essay - briefly discussed above -by alastair bonnett on how self-consciously school teachers deal with questions of race in u.k. classrooms, and a piece by peter jackson on police/minority relations in toronto. [8] according to the editors, the "central argument" of all the chapters concerns the "constructed nature of 'race,' place and nation" (19). the book is, in fact, maddeningly repetitive in making this point. yet, while the volume is adamant in its claim that "'race,' place and nation" are constructs, none of the contributors seems to worry much that "geography" is as well. as the editors note in their closing remarks: "ironically, for a collection of geographical essays, we may have achieved greater sophistication in our theorisation of 'race' and nation than we have collectively achieved in theorising the significance of place" (207). one effect of this inattention to "place" -especially the institutional situation and investments of its contributors -is that "geography" has much the same status in this book as the uncritical acceptance of "nation" which the book purports to unsettle. as michel de certeau has reminded us concerning history writing: "all historiographical research is articulated over a socio-economic, political, and cultural place of production" (58). he advocates the making visible of this "place" as part of any history-writing project so that usually unaccounted for interests might more easily be exposed. this is not, i would suggest, a merely academic matter. as jane jacobs, in one of _construction_'s more interesting pieces, notes (without, alas, unsettling the editors' disciplinary certitude): "geography has long been seen as a discipline complicit with imperial intent" (100). "new approaches" will not in themselves expose, interrupt or resist this "complicity." [9] new approaches, however, are what we get in _constructions_, described in ways which the writers are careful to announce are specific to the concerns and methodologies of geography, which are opposed to "textuality." in her "constructing geographies," for example, kay anderson notes: "to conceptualise localities as unidimensional byproducts of economic regimes would seem to be as restricting as the approach growing out of some branches of cultural studies that places/landscapes are mere 'texts' to be 'read' for their cultural meaning" (85). the antidote to the supposed semiotic excesses of "some branches of cultural studies" is a "realist" approach that anderson associates with the work of geographers such as diane massey and p. bagguley, who investigate "spatial ranges of the many causal elements that impinge on a local area" (84; anderson is quoting bagguley here). such an approach, anderson admits, has the limitation of a too heavy emphasis on the economic, "as if the process of place-making can be wholly captured by measuring statistical changes over time in labor forces, gender relations, market pressures and so on" (84). in any case, the effect of anderson's gesture (aside from further disseminating a misunderstanding of textuality) is that "cultural studies" is coded as excess so that cultural geography, on the other hand, can become the science of the sensible middle.^3^ [10] this "middleness" is perhaps best exemplified in jackson's own contribution to the volume, an essay on "police-community relations" in toronto which ends with the following sentences, musing about the potential for "riots" in that city: "the liberal conclusion would suggest that recognising the need for change will help prevent any further deterioration of police-community relations. the more radical conclusion suggests that blacks have every right to protest, by what ever means necessary, while they continue to be faced with differential policing and institutionalised racism" (198). the narrow set of options (for example, might not "whites" think that protest of some kind is in order?), and the emphasis in the article on police-"black" relations rather than "community" more broadly understood, takes the pressure off the white reader -and the author as well. in jackson's discussion, "blacks" are engaged in a (perhaps legitimate) battle with "the police" that does not seem to implicate anyone "outside" this nexus. [11] at the beginning of his "conclusion" section, jackson nods in the direction of subject-positioning ("i would like to reflect on my position as a white english academic evaluating the problems of another society in situations of heightened social tension"), but his reflections actually have the effect of attenuating his stand on the issues he raises. in the end, taking sides is difficult, he muses, because all the folks he interviewed were nice to him personally, and the leader of the major black anti-police-violence organisation is suspect because he beats his wife, and so on (no information on the "private" lives of other interviewees, it should be noted, was provided; one need not excuse violence against women to note this discrepancy). since the world is so complicated, jackson equivocally decides "it is possible to be both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of police-community relations in toronto" (197). [12] indeed, in his zeal to be "balanced" and to let his interviewees (ostensibly) speak for themselves and (supposedly) not guide the reader's analysis of the situation unduly, he allows troubling racist assumptions into his article without any qualification. here, for example, is the chair of the police services board speaking as recorded and represented by jackson: "[people] have to understand that there are some things that police officers simply have to do. they do have to stop people at three in the morning and ask them where they're going if they don't seem to belong to the neighborhood. those are validpolicing exercises and the community has got to understand that" (184). one might wonder how it is that "neighborhood" and identity become intertwined (i.e. what structures these relations) so that attributions of "belonging" can be determined to be a "valid" police activity. while he claims to be against "racism," apparently such questioning does not enter into jackson's understanding of how one might be anti-racist. by focusing ultimately on the personalities of individuals he interviews (and himself), rather than the conflicts between groups, he manages to render a situation of explicit systematic racism less clearcut. this tendency to focus on "individuals" -in several of the articles as well as in editorial assumptions -helps the editors and contributors maintain a certain blindness to their institutional position as "geographers" as well. [13] the editors' concluding comments particularly emphasise "individuality": "as individuals, we must locate ourselves within the intersecting matrix of human identity and difference in order to become aware of our potentially common position" (202). this humanist appeal to a universal belies the nod to the politics of difference that surface from time to time in the volume. more importantly, however, as de certeau has suggested, the "place left blank or hidden through an analysis which overvalue[s] the relation of individual subjects to their object might be called an institution of knowledge" (60). institutional critique is bypassed in the jackson and penrose volume because the contributors are depicted as atomised "individuals" without apparent structuration ("place") as a group. by leaving this "place" uninvestigated, _constructions_ preserves a certain tidiness for "geography" that contrasts markedly with what angela mcrobbie has described as the [desirable] "messiness" of cultural studies: "precisely because it is so embedded in contemporary social and political processes, because, for example, the recent changes in europe affect how we think about culture . . . cultural studies must continue to argue against its incorporation into what is conventially recognized as a 'subject area'" (722). resisting "incorporation," however, is difficult if cultural theory is continuously appropriated by scholars who are in no way troubled by the functioning of traditional disciplinary boundaries. [14] the academic situation of "cultural studies" as outre, as the exotic foreign land from which geography can import theoretical necessities and perhaps a few methodological luxury goods, brings up the question of disciplinary difference and relations with which i opened this essay. one way in which the boundary issue often manifests itself in cultural studies is in terms of "tensions." for example, the historian catherine hall once commented in the question period after a talk -specifically when asked about "textual approaches" to history -"it [your question] makes me think about what the tensions are for me between doing history and being a feminist, which is the productive political tension out of which my work comes. and then the tensions between being a historian, being trained as a historian, and then trying to learn new kinds of methods through the development of cultural studies and associated activities" (273). hall's work, unlike _constructions_, constantly foregrounds the conflicts attendant with operating in a traditional discipline while working toward "cultural studies." [15] do folks in cultural studies need to read books like _constructions of race, place and nation_? janet wolff has made a strong case for a less dismissive approach to the products of mainstream disciplinary research: "i . . . want to argue strongly against exiling critical cultural studies to its own separate enclave." she suggests that interventions outside of cultural studies on issues of concern to its practitioners are too quickly "written off as traditional, mainstream, or conservative" when they instead might be read for productive "contradictions" which render their easy assimilation into the merely conservative difficult: "i think we are now in an excellent position to pursue the study of culture within disciplines and on the margins of disciplines, as well as in the newly cleared space of interdisciplinary studies" (716). the problem with wolff's perspective is that it helps keep intact disciplinary boundaries which are themselves part of the problem of forming cultural studies as a "critical practice" in the academy today. [16] fortunately, there are other ways of envisioning the "travels" of theory -and the academy. edward said, for example, in theorising the movements of theory, saw this process as undermining the disciplinary closure that the jackson and penrose volume takes for granted. "to prefer a local, detailed analysis of how one theory travels from one situation to another," said writes, "is also to betray some fundamental uncertainty about specifying or delimiting the field to which any one theory or idea might belong" (227). he has in mind literary studies in particular and muses: "the invasion of literary discourse by the outre jargons of semiotics, post-structuralism, and lacanian psychoanalysis has distended the literary critical universe almost beyond recognition. in short, there seems nothing inherently literary about the study of what have traditionally been considered literary texts" (228). surveying this terrain with a sigh, said concludes: "in the absence of an enclosing domain called literature, with clear outer boundaries, there is no longer an authorised or official position for the literary critic" (230). [17] with neither clear boundaries nor an absolute ground to rely on, the theorist (and critic) must be highly flexible and vigilant if he is not to fall prey to mere mechanistic application of theories to situations for which they cannot possibly be fully adequate. "a breakthrough can become a trap," said warns, "if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly" (239). to combat against this dilemma, he argues that all theory must be supplemented with "critical consciousness," which he describes as the "awareness of the difference between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported . . . above all . . . critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict" (242). when we read _constructions_ with said's warning in mind it quickly becomes obvious that the book lacks such "critical consciousness." following a general practice of "application" rather than interrogation, it fails to consider what it might mean to move theory from something it calls "cultural studies" and make it serve the interests of something it calls "cultural geography." [18] i will end with one of the more egregious examples of this sanctioned ignorance at work. throughout _constructions_, the signifier "race" is enclosed in scare-quotes. according to an editors' note, "the word 'race' appears in quotation marks to distance ourselves from those who regard 'race' as an unproblematic category. for a discussion of thisstrategy, see gates (1986)." however, when we turn to "gates (1986)," the introduction to the 1985 issue of _critical inquiry_ devoted to "'race,' writing and difference," we do not find a "discussion of this strategy." in fact, in the body of the text of this issue, attention is relatively infrequently drawn to "race" in this way -certainly not as ubiquitously as in the jackson and penrose book.^4^ what we find, rather, is a call for the development of critical tools appropriate to specific situations -and an abandonment of the uncritical application of methods and theories drawn from elsewhere: "i once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but i now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures" (13). [19] when jackson, penrose, and their contributors "imitate" and "apply" what they mistakenly presume to be gates's gesture, they are forced into bizarre formulations, such as: "she [vron ware] prefers to write of the *mutual constitution* of 'race' and gender, rather than implying that any one 'dimension' has priority over the other. (a similar argument could, of course, be made for the mutual constitution of 'race' and nation, or of each of these categories and particular places.)" (18). in sentences like these, the scare quotes single "race" out, again and again, giving it "priority" in the text, undermining ware's point in their presentation of it. this gesture is certainly hierarchical and even oddly segregationist in its implications. are we really to think (following the logic which the editors' themselves attribute to the scare quotes as discussed above) that race is a more problematic category than gender? or, more to the point, that ware would claim that it was? not only does the thoughtless, knee-jerk universal typographical privileging of the category of race in _constructions_ fall far wide of developing a site-specific set of strategies for theorising race matters, it also weirdly distances the reader and writer from dealing with race rigorously once the scare quotes are relied on to do the work of "calling attention" to the constructedness of the category. [20] in _the black atlantic_, paul gilroy has recently moved beyond simply observing the mutual imbrication of current notions of "race" and "nation" and called for a critical practice which resists the logic of the nation-state by refusing to assume (as all the essays in jackson and penrose assume) the "nation-state" as the logical or necessary (albeit "constructed") unit of analysis, whether alone or in "comparison" with other nation-states. for gilroy, such a reconstitution of space opens up the possibility of seeing the production of identities (specifically "black" identities in his book) as more mobilely and complexly negotiated than the focus on "national" units of analysis permits. the demand in _black atlantic_ to imagine other spaces of analysis than those that we inherit through the academic disciplines and "every day" life have implications for how we might think the university as well. the import/export logic of books like _constructions_ needs to be persistently critiqued if a more worldly politics is to emerge in an institutional space where, currently, disciplines defend their perceived boundaries more often than they imagine other spaces, other ways of seeing, other worlds. notes: ^1^ on the homogeneity and conservatism of geography (from a specifically feminist perspective), see gillian rose's _feminism and geography_: "the white bourgeois heterosexual masculinities which are attracted to geography [as a discipline], shape it and are in turn constituted through it" (11). ^2^ the false division between "the university" and "the world" becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain as universities are reorganized as corporations serving transnational capital. maseo myoshi puts it this way: "we know that the university is actually a corporation in style and substance. it is integrated into transnational corporatism, in which its specific role is being redefined. we the faculty are participants in many facits of this enterprise: the students we teach, the knowledge we impart, the information we disseminate, the books we write, the perspectives we open, the life-style we adopt, the conferences we organize, the scholarly associations we belong to -all are enclosed in seamless corporatism" (77). along these lines, gayatri spivak also has observed of intellectual production "there is interest, often unperceived by us [theorists], in not allowing transnational complicities to be percieved" (256). see also her "reading the world." ^3^ textuality is so often misrepresented as the reduction of the world to a book that anderson's contention is not surprising. it is, nonetheless, incorrect. contrast her view with michael ryan's: "'text' names that interweaving of inside and outside through the process of reference which puts in question the philosophical desire to posit a pure outside to space, history, and materiality -as a transcendental realm of ideality (meaning) -or a pure outside to differentiation and referential realtions as a positivist materiality that would be of a completely different order than the differential or realtional structure of a language which refers to it (idealism turned inside out), or a pure nature prior to all culture, institution, technology, production, or artifice, by virtue of which such things can be termed derivative degradations rather than 'natural' necessities" (23). ^4^ a more accurate citation would have been paul gilroy's _'there ain't no black in the union jack_', which does enclose "race" in scare quotes throughout, a gesture which gilroy repeats in _black atlantic_. houston baker notes in his introduction to the 1991 reprint of _ain't_, however, that "gilroy and the black british cultural studies project of which he is a member can lead us, i believe, to both a more analytical and a more practical sense of race than the quotation-marked provisionality and embarrassed silences that have characterized our academic past." works cited: blaut, j. m. _the colonizer's model of the world_. guilford press, 1993. baker, houston. "forward" in _there ain't no black in the union jack_. paul gilroy. chicago: u of chicago p, 1991. certeau, michel de. _the writing of history_. trans. tom conley. new york: columbia up, 1988. chambers, iain. _migrancy, culture, identity_. london and new york: routledge, 1994. fabian, johannes. _time and the other: how anthropology makes its object_. new york: columbia up, 1983. gates, henry louis, jr., ed. "editor's introduction" in "race, writing and difference." (_critical inquiry_ 12, autumn 1985). reprinted chicago: u of chicago p, 1986. gilroy, paul. _the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness_. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard up, 1993. -----. _there ain't no black in the union jack_. chicago: u of chicago p, 1991. (first published in 1987). grossberg, lawrence, cary nelson, and paula treichler, eds. _cultural studies_. new york and london: routledge, 1992. hall, catherine. "missionary stories: gender and ethnicity in england in the 1830s and 1840s." in grossberg, nelson, and treichler. hall, stuart. "cultural studies and its theoretical legacies." in grossberg, nelson, and treichler. jackson, peter. _maps of meaning: an introduction to cultural geography_. london: unwin hyman, 1989. ----and jan penrose, eds. _constructions of race, place and nation_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1994. mcrobbie, angela. "post-marxism and cultural studies." in grossberg, nelson, and treichler. miyoshi, maseo. "sites of resistance in the global economy." _boundary 2_ 22.1 (spring 1995): 61-84. rose, gillian. _feminism and geography: the limits of geographical knowledge_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993. ryan, michael. _marxism and deconstruction: a critical articulation_. baltimore and london: johns hopkins up, 1982. said, edward. _orientalism_. new york: vintage books, 1979. -----. "traveling theory." in _the world, the text, and the critic_. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard up, 1983. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. "scattered speculations on the question of cultural studies." in _outside in the teaching machine_. new york and london: routledge, 1993. -----. "reading the world." in _in other worlds_. new york and london: routledge, 1988. viswanathan, gauri. _masks of conquest: literary study and british rule in india_. new york: columbia up, 1989. wolff, janet. "excess and inhibition: interdisciplinarity in the study of art." in grossberg, nelson, and treichler. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------pelt, 'queering freud in freiburg', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-pelt-queering.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.995. part 1/1, total size 13812 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- queering freud in freiburg by tamise van pelt idaho state university vantamis@fs.isu.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by tamise van pelt, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: the twelfth annual conference in literature and psychology. june 21-24, 1995, freiburg, germany. *queer* v. 1. to bring out the difference that is forced to pass under the sign of the same. 2. to require to speak from the position of the other. [1] postcards mailed from freiburg im breisgau in germany's black forest during the week of june 18, 1995 bore the apt cancellation: %freiburg hat was alle suchen% (freiburg has what everyone is looking for). appropriately, then, eighty desiring subjects from four continents came to freiburg to map the territory of freudian and post-freudian studies at the twelfth annual conference in literature and psychology. the four-day conference was sponsored by albert-ludwigs-universitat (once home to erasmus, husserl, and heidegger), the universities of paris x (nanterre) and vii (jussieu), the laboratoire d'anthropologie litteraire (paris), and the instituto superior de psicologia aplicada (lisbon). united states sponsor was the institute for psychological study of the arts at the university of florida, conference coordinated by andrew gordon. papers in english and french were delivered at the conference location, the kolpinghaus, while papers in german were delivered at the nearby akademie. several clear themes emerged from the collective theoretical effort; gender binary as the foundational construct of psychological analysis proves inadequate to the demands of contemporary theorizing; psychological theories reveal their limits and internal contradictions when read against literary implications; and the postmodern's dystopian and utopian impulses push psychoanalysis for a response. [2] linguistic constructions and gender issues were quite literally on the table when a translation of the first day's menu announced that lunch was to be "bird in estrogen sauce." at this point, conference participants had already hear bernard paris's (florida) plenary address on karen horney's "one great love" -not for the men in her life but rather for her actress/daughter brigitte. later, they would gaze at the martial codpieced statuary women adorning freiburg's kaufhaus. consequently, the bird positioned itself amid a chain of signifiers of gender slippage, a slippage thematically relevant to several conference panels. william spurlin (columbia) reviewed the work done by heterosexuality in traditional freudian theory, interrogating freudianism's insufficient critical attention to it's own position vis-a-vis the heteronormative thinking of the social and cultural institutions of which it is a part, but also interrogating queer theory's tendency to "[reduce] freud's theories of homosexuality to the homophobic ideologies of his time." another alternative view of psychoanalytic gender -a view of gender as space -was provided by virginia blum (kentucky) who drew on feminist geography to critique lacan's "parable of the train station where gender is 'entered' via the doors marked 'ladies' and 'gentlemen'," reading lacan's story in connetion with klein's case study of little dick's train therapy and freud's writings on hans's traumatic childhood train ride. [3] a unique human gargoyle clings to the first-story gutter of freiburg's munster u l frau. with its head and hands gripping the cathedral facade and its fanny facing the cobblestone street, a strategically placed drainpipe seems to invite the most literal of anal readings. in fact, the irreverent aperture points from the cathedral toward freiburg's government offices, a perptual gothic mooning of secular authority. similar obeisance to freudian authority was continually evidenced by conference participants seeking to honor freud as much in the breech as in the observance. kathleen woodward (center for twentieth century studies, wisconsin-milwaukee) initiated the reevaluations with her critique of freud's developmental notion that mature guilt replaces immature shame, shame being merely a primitive emotional response to the disapproving gaze of another. shame takes on a performative dimension in recent gay and lesbian theory, woodward argued, and shame takes on differing "temporal dimensions" relative to cultural locations themselves inseparable from gender, race, and sexual preference. in the spirit of woodward's critique, claire kahane (suny, buffalo) paid similar respects to freud's construction of mourning as an obsessional involvement with the lost object. kahane posed the difficult questions that pushed freud's object-dependent definition beyond its ability to answer: "what if the mourned object was missing in the past?" "what if there was no object to mourn?" the holocause demands the response to just such questions, kahane pointed out, since the holocaust dead signify holes in their families' history, absences in the "genealogy of the subject." [4] freud was not the only analyst whose work found itself reexamined. ulrike kistner (univeristy of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa) examined deleuze's use of a "world without other" to separate the concept of perversion from its moral entanglements. kistner challenged the "slippage between structure-other, others, and literary characters" evident in deleuze's deployment of _friday, or the other island_ to reread perversion. she pointed out that tournier's narrativity itself defines new relations between neurosis/repression and perversion/defense, relations that exceed deleuze's analysis. shuli barzilai (hebrew university of jerusalem) interrogated the political/personal involvements displayed in lacan's critique of sandor ferenczi's 1913 essay "stages in the development of the sense of reality," suggesting that lacan's debate with ferenczi sometimes overstepped "the bounds of polemical decorum." nancy blake (illinois, urbana) found lacan's mirror stage essay limited in its capacity to theorize the bodily constructions in anne sexton's poetry, sexton tending to locate the womb "outside the bodies of women" in a scramble of layers that exceeds the lacanian imaginary. indeed, the very practice of psychoanalytic reading was itself reexamined when norman holland (florida) reread his own 1963 freudian analysis of fellini's _8 1/2_, positioning himself as a reader response critic "who believes that spectators construct their experience of a film," and finding his own prior reading inadequate. clearly, the twelfth international conference was no mere reiteration of our fathers' psychoanalysis. [5] freud's intellectual influences were evident, however, and some speakers chose to emphasize freud as source. in a visual alchemy, robert silhol (paris vii) literally drew for his audience the transformation of freud's models of the ego presented in "on narcissism," _beyond the pleasure principle_, and "the ego and the id" into lacan's model of the subject, schema z. all told, freud fared best with his hungarian readers. laszlo halasz (institute for psychology, hungarian academy of sciences) found in freud's archaeological interpretation of jensen's _gradiva_ the model for history. halasz's freudian view of history as a "series of regressions, fixations, and repetitions" culminating in refamiliarization seemed particularly poignant in light of the contemporary bloodshed in eastern europe, where refamiliarization is a culmination devoutly to be wished. similarly, antal bokay (janus pannonius university) found in early freudian hermeneutics the models for postmodern praxis, linking past to present affirmatively. (the hungarians' willingness to mine freud's contributions rather than his limitations recalled for me a position articulated by another eastern european scholar, at catherine belsey's seminar on shakespeare and the sexual relation at the university of virginia in 1993. the concept of the decentered subject whose instabilities were so readily embraced by belsey's largely american audience had far less romantic appeal in romania than in the u.s., the romanian scholar pointed out.) thus the freiburg conference's many perceived theoretical conjunctions and disjunctions served as reminders of the radically contextual, historically contingent nature of critical values. there, as elsewhere, the reception of theory was contingent upon the socio-political in/stabilities framing each participant's intervention into psychoanalysis. [6] the statue of an elegantly dressed young man faces the main entry of freiburg's gothic cathedral. it stands farthest from the door, even farther from salvation than the statues my tour guide insisted on referring to as the "stupid virgins." the young man's elegance fools no one; his back crawls with the creatures of nature's dark underbelly, with snakes and spiders and loathsome grotesques. he is a clear signal to the illiterate faithful, a graphic incarnation of the end times the doorway depicts, a demand for the examination of spirit. a visual blitz, centuries before the postmodern, yet oddly consonant with it. aptly, then, postmodernism was as significant an area of inquiry as gender studies for freiburg's visiting theorists. james sey (vista university, south africa) asserted that the millennial tendency of postmodern techno-culture to view the body as obsolete cannot be separated from the cultural pathology of serial killings and mass murders so frequently on media display. in a similar end times mood, jerry fleiger (rutgers) used zizek's discussion of lacanian anamorphosis to read three works by baudrillard, lyotard, and zizek himself from an avowedly "paranoid" slant, noting that all three works share a concern with the dehumanizing apects of technology characteristic of postmodern life. art, fleiger argued, makes us see that we *can't* see everything, that we ourselves occupy a paranoid position from which art looks back at us. [7] the dystopic visions of postmodern technology were extended by marlene barr's (vpi) exploration of the "dystopian gaze" directed at the objectified prostitutes in amsterdam's red light district. barr contrasted dutch window culture with an alternative utopianism offered by the paintings of bill copley and claes oldenburg in amsterdam's stedelijk museum. this utopian contrast to the bleakness of postmodern techno-vision sounded a note echoed in several presentations. angelika rauch (cornell) found in the freudian dream image a heiroglyphic desire for the better that paralleled similar desires in the romantic historicism of novalis and schlegel. henk hillenaar (university of groningen, netherlands) offered a psychoanalytic rereading of the dismissive attitudes toward mysticism that have colored the interpretation of the relationship between the french preceptor fenelon and the mystic madame guyon. only sarah goodwin (skidmore) emphasized the darker side of the romantic vision, exploring a romantic uncanny that "subtly associates the pressures of the marketplace with a bodily uneasiness," both in freud and in the dancer's performance of the ballet based on hoffman's "der sandmann." [8] all in all, the twelfth annual conference in literature and psychology was a successful and substantive production. the thirteenth annual conference is tentatively scheduled for july 1996 in boston, massachusetts. for more information, contact andrew gordon, the institute for psychological study of the arts, department of english, university of florida, gainesville, fl 32611 usa, agordon@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu. the institute list, psyart, can be subscribed to by sending the message: subscribe psyart [1st name] [last name] to listserv@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu; bibliographies of the 1993 and 1994 conferences are available online. proceedings from the 1995 freiburg conference will be published, forthcoming 1996. the volume can be obtained from prof. doutor frederico pereira, instituto superior de psicologia aplicada, rua jardim do tabaco, 44, 1100 lisboa, portugal, dir@dir.ispa.email400.marconi-sva.pt. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------yuknavitch, 'differentia', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-yuknavitch-differentia.txt archive pmc-list, file yuknavit.994. part 1/1, total size 32070 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- differentia by lidia yuknavitch nubin@gladstone.uoregon.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by lidia yuknavitch, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else's property but because their life was "laborious," devoted to bodily functions. --hannah arendt i talk to myself. when you are out of the room of the world, things speak to one another. probably they leave you out of the talk altogether when you leave the room. there is truth in that, or something like it, something too small to know. there is a species of logic resting in the space between molecules of air, between white and white, little extraordinary happenings, little meanings between words. there is something obscene about our boxing it all in--conversations, the page, the frame, the caught expression. that is why pictures make you ashamed, that is why movies swallow you up. i know i am babbling. i am only telling you this because i had a premonition about this story. i saw, not unlike a nightmare, what would happen so clearly, so perfectly, i could have touched the facts of it with my tongue. so i guess this is all really like talking to oneself. what i am talking about now is an image, a single, cannibalized image. i say cannibalized because that is what we did. one image, three writers, three texts, three mouths, three murders committed among species of intellect. we saw something and we did what writers do, we wrote. the problem is that i am stuck and they are not; that is, the two men i know have moved on all right. the air has again filled their lungs, their words are their words, their groins quiver as before, their hands are recognizable to them, they move as if motion were not a series of stilted, jerky, pornographic moves. it is me that is paralyzed. i am an intelligent woman. i look for things between seeing and saying, i try to catch them, write them down. but something happened between what i saw and what i wrote. i mean, usually i can take an image right to paper, give or take a day or two, i can bend whatever it is i am feeling toward metaphor and flight. but something different happened to me with this one. there is no other way to do this. i will put you at the scene: it was from our car driving along a freeway that we saw it. me and my lover. two dead horses on the road's shoulder, precisely paralleled in all respects--their brown horse bodies at the same angle, their horse heads and noses pointing at some invisible object long gone and unimaginable, the last thing they saw, sky maybe, because that's all you can see in their too-open dead eyes, their paired gray entrails winding like twin slithers out of the slit and gashed bellies, insides ripped out or spilled on the road, saliva, and again their eyes, unbearably open. and then the car was past them, our eyes rolling back toward the past and the brain, our breath sucked back into our lungs through our mouths in a gasp, our mouths, unguarded, animal-like, open, tongues lolling, our minds pressed back and in as if by wind. it was not the same as slowing for an accident. with that you know, as all the other cars slowing know, that you are hoping to see carnage, you are hoping to see signs of wrecked bodies. but when you get there it is almost always just smashed-up cars, isn't it. and don't our hearts sink a little as we speed back up, weren't we wishing for something overwhelming? we could have seen a dead dog, a dismembered deer, a flattened raccoon or mangled cat, anonymous guts even; any one of these would have passed as normal. but not these, looking to us as if they had been deposited from the horse trailer by some expert psychopathic movie director: in scene one they are two beautiful brown velvet asses and black silken tails exposed from within the vehicle meant to transport animals on the move. in the second scene they have spilled carefully out onto the pavement with little to no change, a brilliant shot, cut to the star's face recording a disfigured horror in the rear-view. no one could have arranged it more perfectly, i mean it was stunning, truly, dead horses. it wasn't like sympathy, and i suppose it could not have been empathy, but something closer to the shock of the too-beautiful. what care had been taken! so gently placed. the round curves and swells unmatched on any human, unmatched of course because these were what we call beautiful animals. bridled or free, dead seems wrong for these. you know what i mean, too much. think of the movie the black stallion, or back to your first viewing of national velvet. or how many times have we winced when, in the western, the horses are seen falling down a hillside when the rider is shot? you have to understand, we were in a car, traveling at perhaps seventy or so. at seventy there is no stopping, no slowing down to question. like the time we passed two neon horse-sculptures on highway five and spent the next week trying to figure out what in the world we had seen. it wasn't until the newspaper verified our sighting--an artist had planted them in a farmer's field--that we knew. strange comparison. their open eyes, their necks alongside one another, the soft warmth and fuzz between the nostrils, the memory of them running head to head, manes whipping, snorts, or grazing docile and mighty, all this from movies and television. images that stick in your brain like they happened, ripping up through the thing itself with flashes of color, sound, light, shape and particle over what can be said was seen. dead horses. in the film version of equus, richard burton loses his mind to the desire of a boy. there is a horse, a magnificent heat and flesh quiver, there is writing and god too close to the drama. anyone who has seen the movie has been convinced by the scene: the boy naked legs splayed on the bare back of the sweating dip of muscle the ritual chanting the perversion of speech the movement of words into body his body its body the roaring sweat the bleeding grown the bit at the mouth the foam the release . . . who among us can bear it away? it is easy to picture a man losing his mind to the desire of a boy. it is easy to see action killed, the sheer temperature and senseless beauty of desire. he, the man i love, was only giving me a lift to meet another man. it was a ride from one man to another, no one meant any harm, the man i lived with transporting me to the man i worked with, and me between them, me the journey between them. my lover and i, the other man, writing, three writers. both men carried weight. can i say they were like words? yes, words have convulsed me before. when a woman has a mind, she is compelled to ask, from where and why? this passion, ideas, what orbit have i chanced to cross which drives me to think and spins me into this world? a woman has to ask, which me is it today, this year? and in relation to what? only then can she dress as before and move around as always. and so it was that in our driving our talk froze in our throats and ears, because the horses stopped all conversation in the cab of the blue pick-up truck, the dash instruments filled the dead air with the silence of their functioning, stupid. i think we commented or said oh. up against the slobber of excess one often comments. i don't remember what he was saying before the horses. i can almost say he was telling me about performance art, the visceral, the raw materiality, about the way arnold swartzkogler's dismembering his own member or some other man's crawling naked on his belly over broken glass or some woman pulling a scroll from her vagina put you inescapably at the site of your own body. it preceded the horses in effect anyway. his mouth, my mouth, the words out of the mouth. i am certain that i was listening before we were struck with the blow of two sentences in both our minds: that cannot be what it looks like, and, that is exactly two perfectly paired dead horses on the side of the road. and then we were gone. in the nothing of that image whatever our words were were stolen, escaped me now. what i remember is that we said nothing. so it was that he drove me, me dizzy but of course carrying on like anyone would, to a meeting with the other man. as if this were every day. he drove me up to the door of a cafe so familiar i didn't recognize it. i opened the blue metal car door, i saw the metal arms and shapes of the car door innards, i gave him an intimate glance, he blew me a kiss, i slammed the door, the sound, harsh and horribly familiar, i raised my hand to wave, familiar, he drove away, i was through the cafe door and into the room and over to a table and down in a chair and the other man across the table from me greeted me, as you would expect, everything was as expected. a series of prepositions directed me entirely, the background music in the cafe could be either classical, minor notes with decrescendo, or perhaps modern, disconnected and dissonant jazz. you must be aware that this was a necessary meeting, for some reason, some particular reason one could definitely articulate, one knows one's work after all. it had to do with my writing, some place where we, me and the other man i mean, intersected. he was my teacher. i learned what steps to take a little clearer every time we met. the thing is, on a literal level, i really had learned to despise this man, his too-groomed black hair slick as a record album, his sculpted, lightly browned skin, his black eyes, his unbelievably dough-like mouth, almost pliable. his hands waving around, his words filling the air. me breathing all this in, regurgitating most of it back, so as to metaphorize into brilliance like his. occasionally i stole words, used what he said when i wrote. this seemed pleasing to him. i am certain that i have used some of his words here, or else they were mine but in the cycle of his producing and consuming and my reproducing them they were sucked into this. that's what an intelligent woman understands. we ordered cappuccino, or maybe it was some other coffee drink which has been designed cleverly away from labor and heat and broken backs. disfigured beauty. maybe it was cafe au lait. we were talking about some topic as if a cellular division had occurred, we carried the trace of a shared thing in our voices, or, we were simply copying each other. this doubling is quite ordinary, really, and also quite necessary for the growth of a woman's intellect, but not her body, ironically. for example, when my lover speaks to me about performance i feel the urge to strike him, but instead i stroke some part of his flesh, touch him, skin on what appears to be kin, or more, mouth on the image of mouth, maybe we even make love eventually. my legs up against his shoulders, his hands kneading the swells of my body, the thrusting, the yielding, the necks straining, all the curves in flux and pulsing as in a race or contest. at any rate, he speaks and i am touched by our inability to be one another, a moment of pure violence which is what i take to be love. i would never say the things he is saying to me and i am glad, i am full and spilt over with our samelessness. i live for it. i run home to it at night, i ache to feel it inside me, i am sorry to slam the car door and hear the truncated difference severed by metal. so i'm missing my lover even in the cafe because the echo of the car door slamming has worked like a palimpsest, i am making love after conversation and i am seeing the horror-vision, pulses pounding against thin epidermis, sweat producing itself, saliva collecting in the pockets of the mouth, heart begging amplification over voice, or blood surging inside veins and ears as if to say forget words all together--we said, of course, nothing of this. so it was that all i could feel in my mind as this ridiculously brilliant man spoke to me was the urge to fuck my lover, or worse, the urge to write it all down. as has always been like truth to me, sex follows violent images words sounds scenes rather consistently. but within this clearest of desires, i mean, the fatal image of the horses and the unfiltered wanting, this repulsive, beautiful man was filling the space between us with duplications of his own persistent face, hands, eyes, thoughts. he was saying something about writing and mirrors, and i heard the word mirror, i swear to god i heard it, and i saw like the face in front of me what i saw in the moment after the horses: i saw the words, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, because of course my rear-view mirror was my only access to the past. the words, dead horses, shrinking and blurring into distance and light. i don't know what he said but i am certain that i was listening, that i nodded my head as he did, that i raised my hand toward my chin and rested my head there, which he followed, that i creased my brow either as his or preceding his brow creasing, that i responded with a pre-arranged face and body made up of all the writing he had told me to read and all the writing i was, and he repeated me, or i him, and then again the same whatever he said, i said. the word, conversation was an indivisible movement between us, the words, a series of cafe gestures endlessly repeated over the course of an hour. none of this noticed in the moment. but you would have, had you been there, you would have been struck by the two mimes. two too sculpted heads, two pairs of shoes or watches or colognes which carried prices over and above the salaries of those serving, those subjects of literature and art and what to do about them. his white shirt and his black echoed in my black blazer and white chemise, in my cornea, in the typed words on the menus, in the condiments, everything following everything else as if one thing were the other. we were talking about writing and writing made us in its own image. poor black and white copies mimicking every word they'd ever felt in their lives. somewhere in the very back of my mind i was thinking of something i wanted to write down when i got home. once in an argument my lover asked me why i always wrote about sex, was i a fucking whore or something. he had unwritten permission to speak to me this way because of love. anyway, in the instant before i answered i saw a ticker-tape answer jerking in front of my eyes like a waking dream that said, yeah, i am, and all the language i had been learning for the last twenty-eight years flew out of my brain and a new language blew out: sex is death. sex is life. sex is oxygen. sex is poison. sex is prison. sex is gism on your lip. sex is in someone's ass, cunt, mouth, any hole you can get into and come. sex is a silver blade slicing open your worst fear you paranoid fuck like maybe a deep gash across your cock or scrotum or from your balls to your rectum which is the same as your dumb little need to be in control, to be on top of things. sex is you hitting me with your stupid little question and me getting a black eye and telling all your friends. what would you say it is? i'll try not to laugh. after you have answered, why don't you explain it to me because i can be a very good listener what you think sex should be for me too. then everything will be clear and hunky-dorey like spam. o.k.? and then of course i snapped out of it and realized that all that was a little excessive an answer to the small innocence of a question asked out of jealousy and anger. so all i said was, actually, i have yet to write about real sex and yes, i was once a prostitute as an effect of my first marriage. by the way, i love you out of my mind. beautiful--we say that word over and over again between us in the cafe over the white tablecloth stretched like a stage between us, sometimes for or to literature and art, or to ourselves, or to the deserts we have ordered which are red and oozing some thick sweet liquid and also in flames, set on fire and brought to our table as the impossible delicious combination of life and death that they are. the beautiful desert, we salivate and anticipation drips our faces. the unexpected, the tortured but silent red and swollen forms being burned alive, just plain old strawberry flambe. the beautiful desert, the beautiful poem, the beautiful lover, his beautiful hands or skin, your own beauty, even the waiter's blue black skin and the way he slides across the black and white checkered floor, effortlessly (having been trained and paid in small medium wage increments to do so), and most of all the way the waiter says cahn ah get you anythin ils, trinidadian or something like that, the white and the black in a decade where everyone is supposed to be enlightened, all are beautiful. everything and one and word is reflected in every other thing and one and word. the cacophony of words too loud, and i am able to think to myself, most likely because of the tear the dead horses have made, i am able to articulate in my mind's eye that this is work. work is making the unbearable beautiful. work is the repetition of this man's words and clothes and hair and eyes and smell and writing exactly on top of me, and i am up and through everything he is, whether or not my hating him enters the picture or not, and all this makes perfect sense to me. if i have not learned how to become this man fully it is only because the dead horses and moments like that have always interrupted the xeroxing. strange saviors. if i become him, i will be in his image, i will be the black words on the white page, i will be the black skin of the waiter and the white tiles and napkins, the teeth, the tablecloth, i will be reflexive with anything i see. beautiful. the meeting thus far begins to seem successful to me because i have realized quite by chance even in the midst of the transfusion that what i want is power, the power of work, of writing, of him. i was the star all along and only pretending to be the underdog. but what i want to do when i get there is attack from the inside out, be the maggot eating the dead thing, turning rot into alive. i also realize that the reason i hate him is that i am not actually him yet and this comforts me. he keeps trying to convince me that he has desire for me but i don't want him i want to be him and then kill him and let all the waiters and horses and women talking to themselves into the tower for a big party. i look into the waiter's eyes longingly, i know i could love him. and then i'm looking down into my dark brown liquid and of course it's the horses again, that is the way an intelligent woman's mind works, did they suffer, was the death instantaneous, what speed were they traveling at, perhaps seventy, like us, what shock does a horse feel, does it, as a very brilliant man once explained to me, lose its horse soul and what if there exists no shaman, no magic to retrieve it? is horse shock the convulsion that it is to us, do their minds spasm as their bodies realize impossibility, what are "dead horses?" i am immediately sad and tragic inside and i want my lover inside this cavity, this literal chasm where verisimilitude masquerades. i want his man echo. i am writing a journal entry. i want to hear him reciting to me opposite and unknowable populations of painful difference and people who will remain separate no matter what i do not want to write stories right over their bodies or learn their languages or interpret their art i will not, cannot be them, have them, never ever. i want resistance to win so we can have love. i want my lover to read raw poems to me and not talk about them so that i can know what i am not, so that i can know what i've made too much like me, what we've made of and into ourselves. and he will, too. he is trustworthy that way. and we will be sucked up in each other's eyes with the ecstasy of two people who cannot be one another, and our bodies will lunge and devour one another, the words of our love will happen in bursts of semen and wet sticky and spilt estrangement. we will have arrived out of time. i want my lover to read poems to me about the dead and the native and the animal and the criminal and the insane and the violent and the unjust so i can feel. i swirl my espresso around in the too fragile cup and the man who is teaching me asks me a question. did i forget he was there for a moment? it is quite possible, though he would not believe it, the dead horse flashbacks are indistinguishable in time. can i give you a lift somewhere i think is what he said. i can't be certain that he said this, but i am certain that we left money behind and that i rode in his car. i must have asked for a ride to the library because that is where he began to take me. you must see it, magnified to cinematic proportions, being in a car again with a man, the shape of the windshield shaping vision, or the square frame of the window sectioning off sections of what i could see, one of us driving, one of us a passenger, our moving, our dumb static presence contained inside motion and time, 25 mph, 30 mph, 45 mph until i finally came out with it, said the words which turned the wheels in the direction of the carnage even though i had described very little of what i had actually seen. he followed my words with his hands on the steering wheel and his foot on the pedal and his eyes on the road. he followed me because he too is a writer and he remembers that one cannot look away from an accident. or perhaps it remembers him. we are all helpless that way. as that movement, that illogical car movement toward something as if something would be there when you arrive, as that movement carried us the whole cafe conversation finally dawned on me. the further the car mindlessly traveled, like a recording or like vomiting up the previous night the sentences came: death is the beautiful site or scene of beauty's most powerful moment, death marks its passing, beauty is death and death beautiful, death is the sublime, a paradigm case for the experience of the sublime, the ground itself undoing itself, we are both before and after death always, his love is so powerful it kills her, her death, beauty, even the angles are envious, the poem, his love, his life are produced by death, after all, could this love or beauty happen without death? who was speaking? what happens in returning? what desires drive us and what place do we expect to arrive at? and who are these characters in our minds, a and b, interchangeable, and how is it that a says to b we have no time like the present? why do we ever bother to write about irony? for minutes or hours we drove up and down a one mile stretch of road. at some point what we could see was nothing, darkness or night. the more we could not find the horses the more anxious i became, my body again murmured the same utterances, writing itself, pulse, adrenaline. i knew where they had been but because the place was empty, or because sameness and difference were bleeding in my ears, i believed that i had forgotten. we drove back and forth so that i became hysterical, and he kept suggesting his apartment, how he wanted to see me naked, and i was even more hysterical, and he suddenly said you are becoming hysterical. each time i looked over at him i was nauseated by his sheer brilliance, his black pant legs on his seat and my black pant legs on mine, his two eyes looking into my two eyes and mine into his, his window and door parodying the window and door on my side. i felt i could strike him. i demanded that he pull the car over at the place where i knew dead horse had wounded the world. we were pulling over. he was asking how i knew this was the place. i got out of the car and slammed the door. he got out of the car like an echo. see the gravel i said, don't you see where the gravel reveals two bodies were here? i don't see he said. it just looks like gravel he said. we said the word gravel between us three times. we didn't have raincoats. it was quite dark. i dropped to my knees. he was very frustrated, he dropped down beside me and said this is ridiculous, there is nothing here. obviously they have removed them he said. i spread my hands out across the gravel and now mud and moved them around. oh jesus he said. finally some words heaved up from my belly, up from my hands on the gravel and through my palms against the grain of the road, against rocks and cement, after awhile of course the flesh tore, my hands becoming raw and my blood mixing with jagged edged real road made by men. so too my knees came conscious because of the faint pain coming through the weight of me bearing down on them, the gravel puncturing flesh as gravel does. there is a difference between being thrown down onto gravel and the will of slamming and scraping one's hands again and again on the road for no reason except that reasonability doesn't make any sense to a crouched figure on the side of the road, bleeding, wiping her face with her sliced hands, crying, the cuts, the red, the dark, the moans. the throwing one's body out onto the road in front of speeding cars. the man grabbing at you and pressing himself down on top of you through his own uncontained excitement. the vomit. the urine. the come, the blood, the shit. performance. i can hear them hear the mutating whinnies of two surprised beasts thrown for an instant into air hear the extraordinary thud of their bulk falling from their man-made trailer to gravel and asphalt can't you hear them can't you smell the shit and piss and spilt blood and heat i can see them each of them as well as both of them together can't you see them ripped open can't you let go of me can't you see them see me is this what it takes how far into my flesh until the anger is in focus not fictionally justafiable just in focus and why can't we just leave it at that that i am a reproduction i am reproducing i am anger and repetition and i am learning to live with it cars passing would have seen this in the path of their headlights: two crouched over black and white figures on the road's shoulder, very much the same, making little if any sense, as if searching for something together, wreckage upon wreckage. although, you might not make that last observation, having only seen a flash of the two huddled black shapes in your white headlights. i had no choice. people are dying all over the world and we are writing their stories. i clawed at his face until i was blind and unconscious. i have dreams of a bloody face, of the impossibility of human expression. i am in the hammock on the back porch. it has been unseasonably warm. i have a deep tan, i am brown all over except for where the bandages were. my hands hold tiny white scars. for a time i couldn't make love: the scabs on my knees reopened every time i bent them, as if the joint itself had changed somehow, as if i was meant to stand. my lover has been reading poems to me. soon my hands will be healed. the other man has written an essay on memory and pain. my lover is writing a performance piece concerning the mutilation of flesh. as i remember this, there is massacre in eastern europe. as i picture these phrases, the gaza strip is bleeding between peoples. my hands are white and smally textured. they repeat themselves uselessly. the lover's poem some bodies stay put others release themselves like air like light over the incomprehensible world over the small human cities over the dumb world. some bodies leak radiance, letting you think love will wash over you, letting you think the night will not penetrate the room of thick sweet. but some bodies are just dead, deadening silences dead of the dead deathly afraid of the beauty of death beautiful as a death laid bare like a body before you. these are love, these are what we long for. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------spinelli, 'radio lessons for the internet', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-spinelli-radio.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.196. part 1/1, total size 53644 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- radio lessons for the internet by martin spinelli department of english state university of new york at buffalo martins@acsu.buffalo.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by martin spinelli, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. for the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. in its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. it allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system.^1^ [1] these words were not written in celebration of the internet, as one might expect, but were were written about radio decades ago by german broadcaster and poet, hans magnus enzensberger.^2^ enzensberger critiques mono-directional media and argues for a democratizing and empowering media rife with promise for the masses in a language that has recently found new currency with the net's rise in popularity. [2] the ease with which enzensberger's radio essay could be mistaken for a contemporary tract about the internet attests to the similarities between the utopian rhetoric once used to promote radio and the rhetoric now being used to promote the internet. this essay is a study of the promises made for two emergent media: radio and the internet. three common aspects arise in a close examination of the independent popularization of radio and the internet: (1) the emergent medium is instilled with hopes of initiating utopian democracy, providing for universal and equal education, and bringing a sense of belonging to a community; (2) cultural investment in these hopes is encouraged by people in power and exploited for commercial gain; and (3) the rhetoric of these promises obfuscates any real understanding of the material place of the emergent medium in society (such as who has knowledge of its use, how is it used, how is it produced, how is it consumed, how it addresses both basic and inessential needs) and ultimately defuses any potential for social change the emergent medium might have had. after an analysis of the emergent media of radio and the internet, and their utopian rhetoric, i want to suggest a less naive, more responsible rendition of the net and a way of describing the net that conceives of citizens as genuine producers, not consumers. [3] that it operate in the "public interest, convenience or necessity" was the mandate handed down to radio in the communications act of 1934. but from its infancy as a laboratory experiment, through its advent on the market, radio was conceived by its creators not as a public service but as a consumer product. david sarnoff, the future president of national broadcasting company, is often given credit for being the visionary employee of the marconi company who first imagined popular radio. in 1916, in a letter to the company's general manager, he described the "radio music box" which would "make radio a 'household utility' in the same sense as the piano or phonograph."^3^ this letter, notably empty of ideas of public service, concludes with a generally overlooked table of projected radio sales which figures that $75 million can be made selling radio sets in the first three years they are put on the market.^4^ this document of the seminal moment in american radio shows only a profit motive driving the production of radio. [4] originally the companies that manufactured radio sets were the same companies that produced broadcast programs. as the federal government fumbled to insure standards and regulate the industry, programming was used to motivate people to consume radio sets.^5^ by the end of the 1920s, with network broadcasts beginning to cover the most populated areas of the u.s., radio began to enter the minds of social thinkers. writers, politicians and educators began to characterize radio as the fertile ground where the seeds of a better life would take root and mature. [5] "[a]nything man can imagine,"^6^ was how martin codel, a newspaper editor and later a radio theorist, described the promise of radio in 1930, nearly a decade after the first radio ad quoted nathaniel hawthorne to sell suburban homes to manhattanites.^7^ codel exemplifies the utopian strain in writing about radio, rhetoric that would be detached from any political agenda and unconscious of profit motive. radio was nothing short of magical. [t]hat anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses!^8^ codel finds in the emergent medium a most interesting space: reality and fantastic projection overlap and become indistinguishable. this overlap, happening in the virtual space of radio, shifts the consideration of life possibilities from an everyday physical space to an ethereal, magical one. for codel, before radio life possibilities were confined to what could be done in the material world; after radio there are no limits. the possibilities of the emergent radio are but virtual possibilities; they take place not in a material space, not in the space of a physical being in the physical world, but in the virtual and surrogate world provided by the emergent medium. radio has created a new space that has not been fully understood. its conditions and limits are as yet so vague that radio can give rise to any utopian plan or individual desire. the shift in focus onto the surrogate space of the emergent media, the place where real desires seem to find virtual or "occult" answers, will ultimately allow virtual or simulated equality to stand in for actual equality while the switch goes unnoticed. [6] the feeling of fulfillment offered in the surrogate space of radio was a key element in the rhetoric of democracy and equality which evolved around the promotion of the emergent medium. the codel-style euphoria that characterized earlier thinking on radio began to crystalize and soon led to the suggestion that buying a radio was like buying a seat in political chambers in that it promised a greater feeling of participation in a national democracy as well as a sense of access to that democracy not dependent on class status. rudolf arnheim, a german psychologist of media and communications effects, wrote in 1936 that the democratizing power of radio was so complete that it made class distinctions irrelevant, and the very concept of class an anachronism: wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. it insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralization, collectivism and standardization. naturally its influence can only be extended to those who have a set, but from the very first there has nowhere been any attempt to reserve wireless reception as a privilege of certain classes, as it might have happened had the invention been at the disposal of feudal states.^9^ while egalitarian and inclusive in proclamation, arnheim's conception of a public does not include all the people in a society. as arnheim describes radio as a requirement for contemporary civilized life, membership in his public begins to be defined in terms of consumption: rather it is the case that wireless, like every other necessity of life from butter to a car and a country house, is accessible to anyone who can pay for it, and since the price of a wireless set and a license can be kept low, wireless, like the newspaper and the film, has immediately become the possession of everyone.^10^ the class limitations of his "everyone" are obvious; "everyone" means car owners and those that own a second (country) home, not urban laborers or people who walk or use public transportation. (but even if we accept arnheim's premise that everyone may claim a radio as a birthright, the previous element of his argument is similarly untenable: that equality of access to the emergent medium makes for social equality. in saying all people are now %a priori% equal by virtue of access, arnheim renders inappropriate any attempt to describe the economic realities that separate different classes. here the rhetoric of the emergent medium covers up class distinctions while not erasing them.) for arnheim, the "universal commodity"^11^ of radio confers citizenship; it is a "necessity" for citizens in a national culture. in order to be counted, one must tune in. this will soon evolve into: in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer. [7] in returning to david sarnoff we again find an elaboration of this ethic of consumption. in testimony before the federal communications commission, sarnoff describes consumption not only as a sign of membership in a national culture, but as a quasi-patriotic act that feeds other american (free market) ideals. before the fcc, as president of the largest producer of receiving sets in the world (rca),^12^ and chairman of the board for the first and largest radio network (nbc),^13^ sarnoff skirts implications of monopoly while defending competition as an abstract principle.^14^ sarnoff cloaked himself in the rhetoric of the social benefits of listenership in order to defend against federal anti-trust action. because the emergent medium of radio could be conceived as a great leveler, it had a social value beyond price: [t]he importance of broadcasting cannot be measured in dollars and cents. it must be appraised by the effect it has upon the daily lives of the people of america - not only the masses who constitute a listening audience numbered in the tens of millions, but the sick, the isolated, and the under-privileged, to whom radio is a boon beyond price. the richest man cannot buy for himself what the poorest man gets free by radio.^15^ the maintenance of the quality of radio as a social tool was more important than trust-busting. and because it is a tool that legitimates capitalist competition while feeding american myths of equality and equal opportunity in spite of class, sarnoff could be given free reign to develop it in its current form. the emergent medium is described as existing beyond pecuniary value because it benefits all sectors of society; therefore it should transcend any critique of monopoly capitalism. [8] what belies the true nature of this proclaimed public space is that its ownership and management were to remain decidedly in private hands. apparently unaware of the implicit contradiction, a 1939 nbc informational pamphlet exclaims: "fortunately for the united states, the democratic answer to the programming problem was found in private enterprise."^16^ as is to be expected, neither sarnoff nor nbc nor rca articulates the limits of a democracy based on the idea of citizen-as-consumer fostered by private enterprise capitalism.^17^ how could they when their fortunes depend on nurturing a nation of consistent consumers? [9] the rhetoric of radio's power to democratize brought with it a renewed interest in the idea of community. arnheim found in radio a sense of community defined in terms of use and interest, rather than proximity or economic relation. he explains how a national unity and identity are produced out of a collapse of geographic space: wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation.^18^ this replaces an old social order in which [t]he relation of man to man, of the individual to the community, of communities to one another was originally strictly determined by the diffusion of human beings on the surface of the earth. spatial propinquity of people -so we used to think -makes for a close bond between them, facilitates common experience, exchange of thought and mutual help. distance on the other hand makes for isolation and quiet, independence of thought and action . . . individuality and the possibility of sinking into one's own ego. . . .^19^ what would come about with the end of "distance" might today might be described as the totalitarian effects of a medium or its potential for control.^20^ radio can collapse a regional sensibility, displace independence and individuality, unify the national community, and make possible a general standardization. the emergent medium of radio, he says, both homogenizes and colonizes: just as it incessantly hammers the sound of "educated speech" into the dialect-speaking mountain-dweller of its own land, it also carries language over the frontier.^21^ radio, for arnheim at least, is a collector of individuals into some unified conception of a society, not a purveyor of choice. [12] the utopian rhetoric of early radio often described this colonization as "education." collected in a celebratory volume on the first decade of radio published in 1930, joy elmer morgan, then the editor of _the journal of the national education association_, sees the emergent medium of radio as an educational tool ripe with potential. earnestly, he declares radio a revolutionary tool on par with the invention of moveable type. as with moveable type, radio's revolutionary nature lies in its ability to generate a unified cultural identity. for morgan, education comes to mean a complete integration into this cultural identity: it will give to all that common background of information, ideals, and attitudes which binds us together into a vast community of thinking people. it is giving the school a new tool to use in its daily work. no one can estimate the stimulus which will come into unfolding life as radio brings it into instant contact with the great thoughts and deeds of our time.^22^ [13] morgan also finds in radio a useful kind of isolation or bracketing off individual experience which insures a fidelity to the common cultural identity. in removing the unpredictable variable of interactivity found in the public school classroom, radio codifies experiences and allows for controlled learning in isolation. radio makes possible distance-learning from home by turning the home into a sacrosanct schoolroom: [radio] has helped to keep people in their homes and in that way to preserve the integrity of home life. no other agency can take the place of the home as a force for excellence and happiness. in it are the issues of life. in a very real sense it is the soil into which the roots of human life reach for spiritual nourishment and security. whatever radio can do to strengthen the family circle is clear gain; whatever it can do through widespread instruction, looking toward better home practices in such matters as housing, nutrition, family finance, home relationships, home avocations, contributes to a better life.^23^ radio is the proposed antidote for the very social fragmentation it encourages. it is a provider of stability that works toward an america of happy homes while it limits broader human interaction. socializing or organizing outside of the highly structured and morally regulated familial unit (communication that might lead to uncontrollable political union for example) is thus prevented. as morgan continues, radio becomes more than just a force that keeps a family together. it provides a virtual example of an appropriate life: "increasing numbers of people will catch a vision of what intelligent living really means." the emergent medium civilizes and humanizes as it educates: through experience, through study, through habits of industry and reflection, and through long years of right thinking and right doing, there comes into individual life a unity and a quiet sense of power and happiness which are the highest of human achievements. we believe radio has a contribution to make here both in the school and in the home. it widens the family circle and the school circle to include the ablest teachers, the most earnest preachers, and the noblest statesman.^24^ here consumption rhetorically becomes a productive act. because it is tied to values of self-discipline and industry, radio has the power to turn buying and passive listening into things more than refining and educational. consumption itself imparts "habits of industry" and provides a feeling of diligence. [12] a survey of today's radio landscape fails to reveal the flowering of what was then seen as nascent democracy, community, and educational potential. for a case study i look to buffalo, new york, where (with the exception of three small independent holdouts) all commercial radio stations are now owned by four large media companies. the result is a dominance of talk radio and classic hits programming as these same companies fight over the same "average consumer."*^25^ [13] the recent decades of fcc deregulation allowed for format changes by freeing stations from having to employ news personnel and reducing or eliminating community service broadcasting requirements. but, because regulations preventing large-scale corporate ownership remained intact, the real homogenization of radio content did not occur until 1992 when fcc deregulation made it possible for a single company to own up to 49 percent of some radio markets.^26^ consolidated ownership, when coupled with the programming deregulations of past years, has lead to a massive increase in the broadcast of canned programming (pre-recorded programs produced outside of the local region and distributed via satellite or postal carrier) in buffalo. [14] hearing the listening choices diminish, and noticing in particular the lack of local bands now receiving air time, the buffalo common council launched an investigation of local broadcasting in 1994. their public study describes "a virtual blackout of local music"^27^: only one song in roughly 900 played on commercial radio came from a local band without a national record contract. the council invited the management of local stations to a public forum to address concerns about the lack of local context and content in broadcasts and the reduced variety in program offerings. instead of appearing at the forum, the management of wkse-fm (consistently one of the top rated music stations in buffalo) sent a letter to the council stating that they had "no legal or moral obligation to play music by local musicians" and that there were no fcc guidelines indicating that they should even consider the issues raised by the council: we retain the services of the country's best broadcast consultants, research companies, and in-house employees to make decisions on our playlist. i can assure you that at no time has any data or direct input from our listeners ever given us reason to believe that a true demand exists for more music by local artists. it is our opinion that our ratings would be damaged and our profitability impaired if we were to increase our commitment to local musicians. . . . meanwhile, we would encourage the local musicians coalition to strive to continually improve the quality of their work. only then can they hope to gain a contract with a recording company who can promote them into a position to be played on our airwaves.^28^ this letter emphasizes clearly and repeatedly that the profit motive exclusively, not any conception of community, is guiding the development of this radio station. the capitalism of deregulated commercial broadcasting does not even have room for the ideas "local" or "community." in order for a band to be described as a local success it must have a national contract. regional interest is simply not a category. it should further be noted that stations' playlists do not even represent a kind of populist democracy in terms of most simple popular opinion determining what gets played. marketing analysts are employed not to determine general popularity but only to define what is the most sellable or what will be the most appealing to an audience of consumers.^29^ here again membership in a public would be defined as an ability to purchase. the management of wkse-fm has even failed to understand how, by only making available limited musical choices calculated to appeal to a targeted audience, they might help determine the musical taste and interest of local consumers. the station plays what is popular to increase listenership and advertizing revenue, but they have not recognized that what they play influences what gets bought and what is popular. simply put: people will not buy music they have never heard before. [15] local music is not the only avenue presented for the expression of community. talk radio has received much popular press for facilitating democracy. but this democracy is wholly inflected by a profit motive as well. arbitron ratings for the buffalo market (autumn, 1995) show that a single and delineable demographic constitutes the audience for all the top talk shows. the fight to attract this demographic between every daytime talk show has eliminated content difference and reduced what might have been an exchange of ideas to a repetition of the single ideology of the target demographic. in buffalo the hosts of all the daytime shows on all the top rated talk stations are exclusively right of center, libertarian, and populists (rush limbaugh, g. gordon liddy, or locally-based equivalents). for an active demonstration of the counter-democratic operation of these programs we need only examine the way the callers are handled: all calls are carefully screened to prevent airing anything that might shock listeners into turning off their radios. guests and callers with views opposed to those of the host/audience are invited to speak only in so far as the host may confirm carefully predicted listener fears about an issue or to provide an opportunity for the host to engage in %ad hominem% or to assert his verbal prowess. should a caller slip past the screener and seriously threaten the host/audience he or she is quickly and easily disconnected and the host is given ample time to recontextualize the caller in an unthreatening manner or to dismiss the caller as simply abhorrent. talk radio "democracy," like "the latest news," or "the greatest hits of the '70s," is simply a programming format aimed at a specific demographic to insure faithful listening and (indirectly) steady consumption by the target audience. as with the radio of the 1930s, today's talk radio offers only a promise of democracy. [16] the utopian rhetoric that surrounded the emergent medium of radio functioned largely to obscure a profit motive; and, in a celebration of consumption-as-citizenship, the needs for real democracy, fulfilling community, and equality in education were not realized even in a virtual sense in the surrogate space of radio. the same hopes have become staples of internet theory. as with radio, the utopian promotion of the net under the rubrics of democracy, community, and educational opportunity, will serve only to obscure economic and representational disparity and thwart any democratizing potential the net might have. [17] in a recent _forbes_ magazine column, house speaker of the 104th congress, newt gingrich, gushes with praise for the democratizing, liberating potential he sees in the internet: the information age means . . . more market orientation, more freedom for individuals, more opportunity for choice. government must deal with it.^30^ he seeks both to highlight the virtual potential of the information age, and to characterize government in its familiar role as antagonistic regulator of liberating emergent media. [18] as it is typically characterized by internet promoters, access to the net is another great social leveler which does away with government and gives equal weight to everyone's voice. when gingrich asserts, "everybody's an insider as long as you're willing to access [the information on the net],"^31^ "access" becomes not simply a supplement to democracy, but the only way democracy can now work. in strikingly similar terms to the discussion of early radio, the emergent medium of the internet can end the oligarchy and provide us with genuine democracy. for gingrich, the internet is not just a corrective to democracy, it is democracy. [19] in january 1995, gingrich testified in front of the house ways and means committee about the democratic imperative of access to information through the internet. he said: if we're moving into the information age, don't we have to figure out how to carry the poor with us? don't they have every right to have as much access as anybody else? . . . [m]aybe we need a tax credit for the poorest americans to buy a laptop.^32^ gingrich neglects to acknowledge a basic economic reality in his assertion that a tax-credit-for-access would equal opportunity: he does not mention or is not aware that the vast majority of poor people would not save enough through an annual tax credit to buy even the most basic software package. [20] the scope of net promotion is not confined to guaranteeing democracy. an evangelical zeal has evolved within internet rhetoric. being online offers a kind of salvation which must be heralded to everyone. in this way gingrich's internet functions as morgan's radio did: maybe private companies ought to do it. but somehow there has to be a missionary spirit in america that says to the poorest child in america, "internet's for you. the information age is for you." there's an alternative to prostitution, drug abuse and death, and we are committed to reaching every child in this country. and not in two generations or three generations; we're committed this year, we're committed now.^33^ the recourse again to private ownership/management is more than a rehash of the now standard "smaller government" rhetoric. its implications are capitalist colonization and perpetuation of a market. if private companies supply people with simply another way to consume wrapped in the promise of equal opportunity, money would soon find its way back to those owners in the form of training classes, always "affordable" user fees, and the sale of ancillary computer products and services each with additional attendant promises. money that could be returned or given to the disenfranchised to improve their real lives (to buy clothes or food, to build new schools, or to rent busses to transport angry voters to washington to lobby congress or protest) is channeled back into the accounts of private companies. the virtual possibilities of "anything man can imagine" cover up real, material disparities with the promise of the benefits of access. [21] the official vision for the internet from the white house, _the national information infrastructure: agenda for action_, is also utopian. on the first page we encounter language that could have been lifted directly from morgan's tract on radio and education: "the best schools, teachers and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability. . . ."^34^ this education is still based in some school somewhere, and maintains the rather traditional concept of education with students, teachers, and courses. described in this way its disruptive force is not revealed. what this description lacks however is an acknowledgement of the real economic and political problems that can come with this idea of collapsed geography and local context. carried to fruition, a centralized model of distance learning would electronically shift larger and larger blocks of the student population to what are currently considered the "best" schools. increasing virtual enrollment at these (almost exclusively suburban) schools would cause a shift in public educational dollars from poorer schools less prepared to deal with the "information age" to schools already in possession of liberal technology budgets. even better programs would then be created at the these large affluent schools. as poorer urban schools have funding decreased and are forced to close due to declining enrollment, poorer students who are currently excluded from the information age by the economic realities of their own lives and educational facilities would then be even further removed from the physical sites of education and would ultimately have less access to educational materials. these students will be left behind in the race to virtualize education. [22] the _agenda_ continues, "vast resources of art, literature, and science are now available everywhere."^35^ beyond the overstatement (fewer than four hundred books are currently available online for the cost of access alone), this assertion reveals the _agenda_'s monolithic spirit. what the _agenda_ does not observe is that a fixation on a global community of art and literature will cause the destitution of locally relevant art and literature in the same manner that radio has meant the destitution of local music in our buffalo example. while it is true that the net could be used as an archival site for regionally specific culture, this seems outside its purview. couched in the _agenda_'s language of "best" and "greatest" is the belief that "art" means images from the louvre, not ballads from appalachia. in addition to the problems of what is and will be available in the globalized community of the _agenda_, there is the more interesting notion of what the _agenda_ calls "universal access." following a vow to promote private-sector ownership of the net, the _agenda_ articulates its second objective which reads: extend the 'universal service' concept to ensure that information resources are available to all at affordable prices. because information means empowerment -and employment -the government has a duty to ensure that all americans have access to the resources and job creation potential of the information age.^36^ it continues: as a matter of fundamental fairness, this nation cannot accept a division of our people among telecommunications or information "haves" and "have-nots." the administration is committed to developing a broad, modern concept of universal service -one that would emphasize giving all americans who desire it, easy, affordable access to advanced communications and information services, regardless of income, disability, or location.^37^ as with gingrich, "affordable access" to the emergent medium is made available to all. but what these official promoters have failed to recognize is that access by itself is meaningless and unimportant. [23] there are, however, political gains of all sorts in the promotion of access to information as a social curative. political thinking about the net is most often condensable to this: "if we give welfare mothers laptops they can get their benefits and do their shopping online and we can end the wasteful bureaucracies of food stamps and wic; after access they shouldn't be found asking for better schools because the best courses and teachers are already online; and they won't need better ways of holding their elected officials accountable -protests and boycotts now being irrelevant -because dissent can now be sent neatly to congress electronically." in this system a mere feeling of representation in a community must replace actual representation. [24] as with radio's early promoters, the _agenda_ promises classlessness in an information age: "it can ameliorate the constraints of geography and economic status, and give all americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them."^38^ "ameliorating constraints" is code for effacing real class difference. [25] "democracy" in the _agenda_, as in arnheim's radio, means the act of consuming. vice president al gore, in his contribution to the _agenda_, goes so far as to say, "we can design a customer-driven electronic government."^39^ those without the technology, or without the opportunity to learn how to use this very class-bound technology, are left without representation in his electronic government. this conflation of the consumer with the voter can do nothing to realize any genuine democratic potential of the net. again, the implication is that one must be buying the emergent medium to have representation. [26] a similar kind of virtual/consumptive inclusion is evident in the assertion of community on the net. howard rheingold's _the virtual community_ (1994) offers an excellent reference for this new community spirit as embodied in the well of san francisco (a typical fee-based computer network). the need for a fulfilling sense of community was so strong among the well's creators that its 1985 design goals included the credo: "[the well] would be a community."^40^ the conception of the electronic space as community existed before the space did. even the name "well," is a forced acronym designed to evoke an image of a traditional village resource. it stands for "whole earth 'lectronic link." [27] included in those goals was the belief that the well should be profit making. in trying to realize this goal the virtual value of electronic community becomes apparent; in telling the history of the well rheingold invokes one of the well's architects, matthew mcclure, whose vision was to "facilitate communications among interesting people" at "a revolutionary low price": to reach a critical mass, [the architects] knew they would need to start with interesting people having conversations at a somewhat more elevated level than the usual bbs stuff. in matthew's words, "we needed a collection of shills who could draw the suckers into the tents." so we invited a lot of interesting people, gave them free accounts, called them "hosts," and encouraged them to re-create the atmosphere of a paris salon -a bunch of salons.^41^ the virtual community of the net is artificial even on its own terms: the communal feeling did not grow out of shared interests, but was formed by bribes, discount prices, and contrived social interaction. its "community" was a commodity the well's creators could then market like any other. [28] but in spite of the celebration of the well as the new informal meeting place, a space that has replaced the pub, the cafe, and the park, rheingold somehow manages to claim that the highest achievement for his electronic community is its ability to transport the user to yet another community. he describes the well as "a small town" with "a doorway that opens onto the blooming, buzzing confusion of the net."^42^ movement, not destination is the real goal. this reveals that the net has clearly not replaced the corner coffee shop in that its greatest achievement is always transporting the user out of a community, leaving whenever a community promises to become recognizable or delineable. no real community, in the sense of actual interaction or exchange of something (ideas, goods, etc.) is ever sufficient. clearly the promise of connection is more important than what is being connected to, this is the impulse that led to the virtualization of the idea of community in the first place. the eagerness to abandon and move on, rather than to work in and develop a community, mirrors the promise of that first radio ad: the better world is always just through the next gateway, ready-made and without those noisy neighbors. it also reveals that a buffet of choices is more important than developing the potential of the options or spaces already available. this is the same thinking that promises 500-channel television.^43^ [29] despite utopian rhetoric's complicity with monopoly capitalism and its actual denial of real democracy, community, and educational opportunity in promising their virtual equivalents, there may yet be value in the utopian expression of the emergent media. the value certainly does not exist in the "electronic commons" promised by the _agenda_,^44^ any more than it existed in the almost identical "america's town meeting of the air" of the rca of the 1930's.^45^ in light of past failures, i would like to argue for a smarter, more aware, set of ideas to guide our thinking, a set of ideas conscious of the material realities of the "information age" and the internet that does not pretend "affordable access" is social penicillin. [30] to do this i would like to return to enzensberger whose theory of the media may yet unlock any real potential for social change that might exist in the net. enzensberger would not have us see in emergent media a panacea or a pacifier for the disenfranchised, but the power to "mobilize." this mobilization is not the virtual movement of telnetting from san francisco to milan, nor is it access to the library of congress at affordable prices. it is the mobilization of production -that is, a public identified as producers, not consumers. any democratic potential in an emergent medium must lie in its ability to facilitate the organization of non-virtual politics, not in vacuuming political action into itself. [31] on only a few occasions have i experienced a glimmer of this kind of mobilization: the february 1995 "freely espousing" multi-city demonstration against cuts to the national endowment for the arts, the national endowment for the humanities, and the corporation for public broadcasting. protests and marches were planned and the net was used to help organize them and arrange their simultaneous occurrence. distribution lists such as poetics were used to provide information used for speeches and posters, and texts of angry letters were posted to be downloaded and mailed to politicians. it must be emphasized however that this example does not address "access" as an issue of class and shows the net being used for mobilization by people on the cultural margins but not the economically disenfranchised. [32] other, primarily aesthetic, versions of this mobilization exist within the net. mobilization on the net happens around textual poaching,^46^ the reinflection of texts already generated by the medium in order to elaborate new meanings or uses to discrete users. the anti-hegemony project^47^ poached texts and formats from news oriented usergroups to illustrate the vacuity of traditional news coverage and to poke fun at the group of writers spontaneously involved in producing the project. also, the currently difficult to regulate transfers of information (if not ownership and access) of the net facilitate valuable copyright violations which occasionally make available everything from philosophical texts to pornography otherwise locked up by publishing company capitalism and intellectual property law. but as the technology of information control and intellectual property law evolve to service the needs of private enterprise these useful moments will doubtlessly become more scarce. [33] but in spite of these moments of genuine productive potential and sparks of mobilization, the current system of ownership and management of access generally renders the productive activity on the net framed by consumption on all sides. in order to produce anything, whether news story or parody, we must not only buy a modem but access time for every minute of our productive activity. the argument can be made that there are costs of consumption involved in every productive activity. but the one-time purchase of a computer or typewriter, and the continuous cost of paper to print on, are minimal (and get less and less significant over time) when compared to the 3 dollar an hour (plus extras) charge of most access providers. and interestingly, the vast majority of information produced on the net (the writing of user groups and chat rooms) already seems to revolve almost exclusively around other consumptive activities: the consumption of goods or of other media products. and further, it must be restated that the cultural community or democracy of the net, in so far as it consists of a collection of producing subjects, is still extremely class bound. observing that a kind of creative enfranchisement exists for those with the money and the education to use the net does not minimize the efficacy of our critique of the gingrichian classless democracy proclaimed by internet promoters. [34] corporate ownership of the media, says enzensberger, is simply antithetical to a conception of citizen-as-producer and only affords the most co-opted and simulated form of production: to this end, the men who own the media have developed special programmes which are usually called "democratic forum" or something of the kind. there, tucked away in the corner, the reader(listener/viewer) has his say, which can naturally be cut short at any time. as is the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. it is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback.^48^ the responsible role then for those in possession of the technology of use is to insure not a universal access to what has already been produced, but to insure a universal knowledge of media production which grows out of, and contributes to, an understanding of material social relations. this means more than simply making the economic and class realities of human relations more central to the subjects of the media; it means actually using the media to enact a change in material circumstances. revolutionaries of all stripes learned this decades ago, hence broadcasting centers are always the first things seized in a political overthrow. [35] neither the internet, nor radio, is some kind of %deus ex machina% of democracy, community, or education. the net is only an emergent medium, existing in a specific context with a real set of material confines, and possibly with a real potential. but it is a potential that will remain unrealized if we allow the drive to virtualize to obscure its material base and the economic realities of our culture. notes: ^1^ hans magnus enzensberger, "constituents of a theory of the media," _new left review_ 64 (1970) 15. ^2^ enzensberger's career as a writer, broadcaster and critic spans various genres and addresses various audiences. after having attended several german universities as well as the sorbonne, enzensberger could have easily entered academe, but he chose initially to engage with the world on a more populist level. he joined radio stuttgart and began producing radio essays. during years of radio work, journalism, writing poetry and criticism, and guest lecturing in the 1950's and 1960's, enzensberger evolved as a protegee of the frankfurt school. in 1964, on the event of his first public address as the poet-in-residence at frankfurt university, he was introduced by theodor adorno. his works of criticism, poetry, novels and plays interrogate a broad range of topics (spanish anarchism, cultural progress and barbarism, documentary fieldwork, communication technology, etc.) and have always been informed by political analysis. in 1968 he gave up a fellowship at wesleyan university and left the united states in protest of the vietnam war. hans magnus enzensberger, _critical essays_, ed. r. grimm and b. armstrong with a forward by j. simmon (new york: continuum, 1982) xi-xv. "constituents of a theory of the media" serves as both a series of observations about the genuine potential of emergent media and as a site of utopian hyperbole about emergent media, it therefore makes an excellent point of departure for our discussion. ^3^ radio corporation of america, principles and practices of network radio broadcasting -_testimony of david sarnoff before the federal communications commission november 14, 1938 and may 17, 1939_ (new york: rca institute technical press, 1939) 102. ^4^ rca 104. ^5^ robert hilliard and michael keith, _the broadcasting century_ (boston: focal press, 1992) 28-29. ^6^ martin codel, "introduction," _radio and its future_, ed. martin codel (new york: harper & brothers publishers, 1930. new york: arno press and the new york times, 1972) xi. ^7^ hilliard 30. ^8^ codel xi. ^9^ rudolf arnheim, _radio_, trans. margaret ludwig and herbert read (london: faber & faber, 1936; new york: arno press and the new york times, 1971) 238-39. ^10^ arnheim 239. ^11^ arnheim 239. ^12^ rca 10. ^13^ hilliard 48. ^14^ sarnoff says, "our policies are based on the belief that the public interest . . . will best be served by a strong, prosperous, and growing radio industry, and by vigorous competition which results in better service to the public and greater stimulus to the industry." (rca 7) ^15^ rca 12. ^16^ national broadcasting company, inc., _broadcasting in the public interest_ ([new york]: national broadcasting company, 1939) 10. ^17^ the emphasis on "private enterprise" in the american discourse of radio owes much to the extensive use of radio by fascist european governments at this time. it only took a few casual references to nazi germany to create a popular fear of the idea public ownership (government management) of radio in america. this fear of fascism was used by sarnoff and others to stall the regulatory efforts of the fcc. for an example of this fear of government managed media see thomas grandin's _the political use of the radio_ (geneva: geneva research institute, 1939). ^18^ arnheim 232-233. ^19^ arnheim 227. ^20^ these totalitarian aspects, viewed as favorable by arnheim in the emergent medium of radio, are almost always absent from discussions of the emergent medium of the internet. but if this totalitarian potential is found to be essential in one emergent medium it probably also exists in another. obviously today an internet promoter would not laud this potential but conceal it. ^21^ arnheim 223. ^22^ morgan 68. ^23^ morgan 71. ^24^ morgan 74. ^25^ anthony violanti, "uneasy listening," _the buffalo news_ 22 april 1994, "gusto" section: 20. one local politician describes the state of the city's radio as "below banality." see also violanti's "morning madness," _the buffalo news_ 10 march 1995, "gusto" section: 18. ^26^ david franczyk, _the state of buffalo radio_ (buffalo: the buffalo common council, 1994) appendix e. ^27^ franczyk 11. ^28^ franczyk, appendix d. ^29^ "the myth is, of course, that the american public gets the programming it wants (and can thus blame no one but itself for the banality of mass culture); the reality is that the american public gets programming calculated to attract the "commodity audience" with limited concern for what most [people] actually desire." (henry jenkins, _textual poachers_ [new york: routledge, 1992] 30) ^30^ newt gingrich, "newt's brave new world," _forbes_ 27 february 1995, "asap" section: 93. ^31^ gingrich 93. ^32^ "gingrich pushes computers for poor," _the los angeles times_ 6 january 1995: a18. ^33^ gingrich 93. ^34^ the white house, _the national information infrastructure: agenda for action_ (washington, d.c.: the white house, 1993) 3. ^35^ the white house 5. ^36^ the white house 5. ^37^ the white house 8. ^38^ the white house 12. ^39^ the white house 17. ^40^ howard rheingold, _the virtual community_ (new york: harperperennial, 1994) 43. ^41^ rheingold 42. ^42^ rheingold 10. ^43^ for a discussion of the social ramifications of this virtual movement, and an understanding of the virtual ideology that it facilitates, see arthur kroker and michael a. weinstein, _data trash: the theory of the virtual class_ (new york: st. martin's press, 1994). ^44^ the white house 15. ^45^ rca 12. ^46^ henry jenkins, in his _textual poachers_, provides a useful model and vocabulary in his discussion of tv series fans as producers of a kind of cultural community. fans of _star trek_ pirate stories and characters from the series to produce new stories in fanzines, songs and videos. armed with copyright attorneys the owners of the series object to this appropriation. fanzines draw attacks from hollywood because they short-circuit the desired distribution and consumption of a product: new products with roots in an old series are distributed without any involvement of, or profit to, network tv or hollywood. but because the commodity of the net is different from that of hollywood or network tv -it is access or means of consumption/distribution not an image or story -the poaching metaphor must be deployed differently to describe would-be alternative culture on the net. since the "text" in the case of the net is access, "poaching" would resemble something like stealing blocks of aol time for non-profit or anarchist purposes. ^47^ archived at the electronic poetry center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ ^48^ enzensberger 22. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------colwell, '"deleuze, sense and the event of aids"', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-colwell-deleuze.txt archive pmc-list, file colwell.196. part 1/1, total size 53126 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "deleuze, sense and the event of aids" by c. colwell villanova university ccolwell@ucis.vill.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by c. colwell, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. . . . and the moral of that is - "take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves." --the duchess.^1^ [1] aids, like cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our biological, social and moral existence together into a complex disease entity that is much more than the physical interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism. it presents those already marginalized individuals and communities most affected by it (so far) with personal and political challenges that threaten their social and their physical existence. and it presents the scientific and medical community with a challenge and puzzle that equals, if not surpasses, those that have preceded it. but it is a mistake to separate these two arenas (social/political and scientific) as they inscribe on one another their codes of sense and meaning in a hyper-dialectic of transcription and reverse transcription. it is, as such, a mistake to take the biological objects offered to us by science (specifically the hiv virus) as referents free from infection by meanings ideally supposed to be excluded from its domain. what i will attempt in the following is to mobilize gilles deleuze's notion of sense, as he presents it in _the logic of sense_,^2^ as a strategy for understanding the direction that the meaning of aids has taken and as a means of multiplying other directions that it might take. [2] as a preliminary sketch of the strategy that i will draw out of deleuze i want to distinguish between three levels, strata or series that his discussion of sense will deal with: thoughts, things, and sense/events. thoughts, insofar as they have meaning (are meaningful, make sense), are a function of language, i.e., the form and matter of their expression is that of language. but meaning is about or of things.^3^ as michel foucault notes in _the birth of the clinic_, the problem lies in the relation between words and things.^4^ _the logic of sense_ is directed at that gap between words and things in an attempt to understand what it is that bridges the gap, what inhabits the interval. briefly, deleuze uses the term "states of affairs" to refer to things and begins his analysis of words with propositions. between the two he locates a realm of "sense" and "event" (which he equates as two sides of a plane without thickness). it seems to me that it is to the sense/event that we must direct our attention if we are to address the multi-faceted (social, political, economic and scientific) phenomenon of aids. [3] the first section of this essay is an explication of deleuze's notions of sense and event as a propadeutic to addressing the specific sense/event of aids. deleuze's approach is particularly useful here as it provides a conceptual strategy that accounts for the complex interactions between those arenas of meaning that are traditionally (and mistakenly) held separate while avoiding the mirror image errors of positivism and linguistic idealism to which much of post-kantian philosophy of language is prone. in the second section i turn to the sense/event of aids, addressing in particular the social, political, economic and scientific dominance of the hiv model. i conclude by suggesting the ways in which this strategy allows us to pervert and transform the current hegemonic model of aids in all its facets. let me stress at this point that i am using deleuze's work as a %strategy% here instead of as a conceptual model. as will become clear towards the end of this essay i am less concerned with developing a "better" conceptual model of aids than i am with perverting the dominant model(s). i. sense/event [4] although, as jean-jacques lecercle notes,^5^ deleuze largely bypasses those thinkers who have treated the question of sense in the last century, it is worth briefly addressing gottlob frege's analysis of sense. in his seminal paper "on sense and reference (meaning)"^6^ frege distinguishes between the "mode of presentation" of a sign (sense) and that which the sign designates (reference). his purpose here is to give an adequate account of the functioning of propositions that contain signs that either have no referent (e.g., propositions in which "odysseus" is the subject) or cases in which propositions containing different signs have the same referent ("morning star," "evening star," and venus). while frege rehearses a form of neo-positivism and privileges reference (due to its truth value function) to the detriment of sense there is one point worth noting here. frege asserts that sense has a certain objectivity, that it is not subjective since it can be, and is, the property of more than one thinker. as such, frege equates sense with thought (here thought is not the result of a thinker's mental activity but that which a thinker "grasps") and positions it between the subjective ideas of thinkers and the objects to which thought %refers%. [5] the striking thing is that frege moves the consideration of sense out of the realm of both subjects and objects. that is, a philosophy of sense is neither a philosophy of the subject (phenomenology/existentialism) nor a philosophy of the object (positivism), although in the end it is on the side of the object, the referent, that frege positions himself.^7^ this notion of sense as residing in the "in-between" is one of the two notions i want to retain from frege. as to the second, deleuze plays on the multiple meanings of the french word %sens%, "meaning," "direction" or sense as a faculty of perception. while i will mobilize all of these meanings i also want to retain frege's use of the term as a "mode of presentation." [6] deleuze arrives at the realm of sense from two directions, one beginning with words or propositions, the other beginning with things or states of affairs. from the standpoint of words, he begins with three relations within the proposition: denotation, (which links the proposition to particular things); manifestation (which links the proposition to the beliefs, intentions, etc., of a speaker); and signification (which links the proposition to general or universal concepts) (ls 12-14).^8^ the problem arises when we seek to understand which of these relations is the primary one, i.e., which functions as the ground of the other two. depending on one's standpoint, each of the three relations offers itself as primary. in speech (%parole%), manifestation is primary since it is the "i" which begins (to speak). this is, of course, descartes' position in which the cogito functions as the ground of all propositions; it is the i which, e.g., denotes %this% piece of wax (ls 14). in language (%langue%) however, it is signification which is primary. in language, propositions appear "only as premise[s] or conclusion[s]" (ls 15); here "this is a piece of wax" is a conclusion that subsumes its object under a universal category. (deleuze does not offer the standpoint from which denotation would appear as primary but it is obvious enough: the "this-now-here" of sense certainty.)^9^ deleuze argues that when we seek the primary relationship we find ourselves in a circle, "the circle of the proposition" (ls 17). none of these relations will function as the principle of the proposition, as the condition of the possibility of the proposition, as the link or relation between the proposition and what is external to the proposition.^10^ [7] that relation is the fourth dimension of the proposition, sense. it is "%the expressed of the proposition% . . . an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition" (ls 19). note that deleuze reprises frege's notion that sense lies in between, though now it lies in between propositions and states of affairs instead of in between ideas and objects. sense functions as the condition of the possibility of denotation, manifestation and signification (and thus of truth value -but also of paradox), as the linkage between propositions and events and, as such, between ideas and objects. sense is the "coexistence of two sides without thickness . . . %the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs%" (ls 22). that is to say that sense is a characteristic of both words and things. it lies in between but is also at the surface of both and identified with neither (it is identified with the event to which i shall return to below). [8] to a certain extent deleuze leaves sense undefined and this necessarily so, since the sense of a proposition can never be an object of denotation or signification of the same proposition, as it is always presupposed in denotation and signification (ls 29-30).^11^ that is, when one makes the sense of a proposition (p1) explicit in another proposition (p2) the second (p2) always has another sense which is itself presupposed and so on in an infinite regress. as such, any proposition that attempts to offer a definition of sense will itself require another sense.^12^ moreover, sense is a property of expressions that have no denotation, manifestation, signification or expressions in which these functions miscarry, i.e., absurd and nonsensical statements. we get a clearer idea of sense by seeing how deleuze distinguishes it from good sense and from common sense and how he links it with nonsense. good sense is the sense of signification (ls 76). it is the sense that is ordered in one direction only, the sense of linear thinking.^13^ it is the sense, as deleuze says, that "foresees" (ls 75), that is able to extrapolate from the present and the past in order to predict the becoming of the future based on past and current models. it is "good" sense precisely because it identifies the past, present and future as the same, as a repetition of the same in the face of the other (a repetition that denies the possibility of the repetition of difference). common sense is the sense that governs denotation (particularly the application of signification in denotation: this is a piece of wax) and manifestation (ls 77-8). it "identifies and recognizes" (ls 77). it identifies and recognizes both the self, the "i" that manifests, and the things which the self experiences. the two function complementarily as the identity of common sense provides a beginning and end (and thus a direction) for the movement of good sense and the action of good sense in bringing the manifold of experience under the categories of general signification provides the matter without which identity would remain empty (ls 78). sense, itself, underlies both good and common sense in that it allows for multiple directions other than the one that any particular manifestation of good sense adopts, and, as the virtual ground of all actual identities, it potentially fragments any particular identity formed by common sense. [9] nonsense, absurdity, expressions which violate the rules of good and common sense, have sense too, i.e., are sensical and sensible. "a round square" and "i am every name in history" respectively denote an impossible object, equate two inconsistent categories and fragment the identity of the one who speaks. yet they nonetheless %make% sense and function expressively. the best example of this is lewis carroll's _jabberwocky_: %twas brillig and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe%^14^ even prior to humpty dumpty's definition of these terms this poem functions, it expresses . . . something. the notion of sense that deleuze elaborates is one that grounds the functioning of language in its widest range, that includes nonsense and the absurd rather than excluding such expressions to fit a theory. nonsense is not the absence of sense; it is sense that fails to result in denotation or signification or manifestation. the import here is that (non)sense^15^ grounds the possibility of meanings, directions of thought, of research, and modes of presentation that are cut off by the illusory clarity of good and common sense.^16^ [10] moreover, because the _jabberwocky_ makes sense it functions to transport us into the event of the slaying of the jabberwock. and it is through the event that the second avenue to the realm of sense lies. before examining deleuze's theory of the event it is worth pausing a moment to look at what counts as events. michel de certeau says that "the event is first and foremost an accident, a misfortune, a crisis."^17^ writing on deleuze, foucault speaks of the event as "a wound, a victory-defeat, death," the last being the "best example,"^18^ while in the context of nietzsche he says it is a "reversal of a relationship of forces" in response to "haphazard conflicts."^19^ deleuze takes a similar position on the event, considering it primarily as some sort of calamity. my point in raising this issue is to note the emphasis in deleuze's work since in what follows i will adopt a wider view of what counts as an event. it seems to me that the synchronic state of a science functions as a state of affairs as it is the set of static relations between bodies (theories, methodologies, experimental technologies, laboratory practices, objects of knowledge, etc.) in an immediate present. as such, it will give rise to its own sense/event. [11] events are the effects of the interactions of bodies but are not themselves bodily, corporeal (ls 4). deleuze distinguishes events from states of affairs, which are the static set of relations that bodies, things, are found in at a particular point in time. when bodies interact they produce effects, events, which are not coextensive with themselves, insofar as they are states of affairs, and which do not inhere in the same time. the time of states of affairs is rectilinear time, a time of "interlocking presents," that flows in a single direction, from past to future but in which, strictly speaking, past and future do not exist except as boundaries of the present (ls 4, 61-2). the time of the event, however, is a time without a present, a time of an unlimited past and an unlimited future, a time that is expressed in the infinitive form of verbs (ls 5, 61-2). to a great extent, the distinction is between the brute existence of physical things (both in themselves and in their static relations to one another) and the subsistence of an incorporeal entity that floats on the surface of things and constitutes the movement and duration of their becoming and of their sense. [12] take disease. as a state of affairs we have a relation between two bodies, two organisms, an infectious organism and a human body. at any particular moment in the course of this disease there will be various states of affairs, an infection, the reproduction and multiplication of the microbe, a fever, an immunological response, a recovery, an exacerbation, etc. but the disease as an event does not inhere in the present. what is in the present is, on the one hand, biological interactions between infectious and infected organisms and, on the other hand, malaise, pain, suffering, etc. the disease, however, is always just past, and yet to come, more appropriately, it is always becoming, always expressed in the infinitive of the verb. as lecercle notes, the actors in the midst of the event do not experience it as the event, as a single identity, even though the event inheres in all of their actions.^20^ insofar as we perceive the person with a disease, insofar as we sense her as having this disease, insofar as we treat and investigate her disease our attention is directed to something more than the body before our eyes, our treatment protocols, our instruments and our diagnostic devices, more than the series of bodies that present themselves to the medical gaze. our technologically extended and enhanced senses are directed to the event of the disease, an event that is manifested in the body in front of us but which is never immediately present to us either temporally or spatially. [13] this second path to the realm of sense leads through the event because deleuze equates sense and the event, indeed, sense is a "pure event" (ls 19, cf. 22). sense and the event both lie in the "in-between" of words and things. they are the same "thing" from different aspects, two sides of a plane without thickness. each aspect adheres to its respective dimension, sense to words, events to things, and to each other, sense/event. the in-between realm of sense/events is the place, or, rather, "non-place," in which words and things mingle, rub up against each other, consorting with one another to produce effects. the issue of causality is important here since there are, at least, three series of cause-effect relations. the first series operates at the level of things, bodies producing effects on other bodies, changes in the states of affairs of those bodies (the scalpel that cuts, the organism that infects). the second series is that in which the interaction of bodies produces events (being cut, being sick). these events are ideational or incorporeal entities that have "logical or dialectical attributes" (ls 5), i.e., entities that have sense and which can generate meaning. [14] the third series is that of the interaction of events themselves, in which events produce effects on each other. the causal relation here is a weak one, deleuze calls it a "quasi-cause" (ls 6), partly because there is no necessary relation between cause and effect among events, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing whether the causes that produce the effects in events are those that arise from things or from other events. insofar as deleuze depicts events as hovering over things we may describe two horizontal series of causal relations (among things and among events) and one vertical series that flows from things to events. [15] following this it seems to me that we can describe two other series of causal relations. the first (or fourth) is the horizontal relation between propositional structures. as georges canguilhem says, "%theories never proceed from facts% . . . [t]heories arise only out of earlier theories . . . facts are merely the path -and it is rarely a straight path -by which one theory leads to another."^21^ lastly, there is a transverse relation that moves from propositional structures to the level of the sense/event in which our ability to make explicit the sense of events can produce effects on meaning (with the proviso that we always presuppose another sense in doing so). it is by this avenue that we may produce transformations in the event itself. however, we must describe these relations as "quasi-causal" in nature because there is no strict necessity in operation that links these causes and effects. that is, good sense is not able to predict the effects of making the sense of an event explicit and common sense is not able to govern the denotation or manifestation of identities that arise as the effects of doing so. [16] in order to bring this conceptual strategy to bear on the event of aids i need to turn to one last notion in deleuze, that of "actualization." in a discussion of henri bergson's theory of evolution^22^ deleuze opposes the virtual-actual distinction to the possible-real distinction in order to show that actualization is the "mechanism of creation" (b 98). here, the relation between the possible and the real is attributed to a "theological model of creation" in which the real is simply one of the many possibles, all of which resemble the real, that has been brought into existence.^23^ actualization, on the other hand, is the process in which the virtual differentiates itself in the active creation of something new, an actual which does not resemble the virtual from which it arose (b 97). the best example here is the relation between an organism and the genetic code of its dna. it is through a process of actualization that the virtual structure of a strand of dna generates an organism, the organism (phenotype) bearing no resemblance to its genotype. [17] we are now in a position to state the relation between sense/events and the meaning of propositions (denotation, manifestation, and signification as well as what frege would term reference). sense is the ground or condition of meaning, and thus of truth, but it is not a ground in the sense that it simply covers a wider range of possibilities, i.e., it does not stand in relation to reference as the possible to the real.^24^ instead, it has the relation of virtual to actual, meanings are generated by actualizing lines of difference from sense/events. this opens up a second possibility for transformation, this time the transformation of the propositional meaning of the event. precisely because meaning does not stand in a relation of resemblance to sense, or to the event, the sense/event grounds multiple possible meanings. [18] we should note at this point that deleuze's notion of the sense/event does not function as either an epistemology or a metaphysics. that is, it does not function as a method for distinguishing between the truth and falsity of a particular proposition or set of propositions. and it does not provide us with a foundation for distinguishing between reality and appearance. instead, the argument is that for any event, multiple meanings are possible, that the event can be actualized in multiple ways. and this allows for the possibility that the event of aids can be actualized in another way than it has been so far. again, this is why i take deleuze's work to be %strategic% rather than conceptual model building. rather than offering us a new way to construct the event it shows us the possibility of re-eventualizing the event, of setting it in motion again, of producing a thaw in the frozen river of "knowledge" that has fixed the event along a particular line of actualization. ii. the sense/event of aids [19] with the general outlines of this conceptual strategy in place i will now turn to the event of aids. what i will show is that the relations of (quasi)causality and lines of actualization of aids run through the in-between of sense/events in an extremely complex manner. the essential point here is that aids is not a single phenomenon, a repetition of the same, but a multiplicity whose identity is, at best, illusory. following that i will argue that we must turn our attention to the senses of these events in order to adequately confront them. [20] my concern here is with the scientific, economic, political and social hegemony of the hiv model of aids and the correlative emphasis on the search for a cure/vaccine to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease. since 1984 it has been taken as a fact that hiv is the necessary and sufficient cause of aids.^25^ i say "taken as a fact" not because there are no qualified dissenters from this view but because hiv has become the dominant model in the four registers listed at the beginning of this paragraph to the exclusion of all other possibilities. hiv may well be the sole cause of aids (and %if% we are lucky we will eventually find out whether or not this is the case) but the troubling aspect is that other avenues of research and treatment (not to mention prevention) have been effectively marginalized. given the stakes, to say "troubling" is to say the least. [21] the dominance of this model is due to a number of reasons both within and outside the domain of what we nominally call science. "science" is taken to be that language which accurately represents the world in a universalized system of signification in which signs refer to independent objects and the system of their relations to one another. it appears as an empirical endeavor in which the facts of the matter provide their own conceptual structure by means of revelation to sufficiently rigorous and insightful researchers. while this image has been criticized by a number of authors (e.g., paul feyerabend, foucault, thomas kuhn) it remains the dominant model socially, politically, economically and scientifically (by this last i mean that scientists themselves largely retain this image of their work). with regard to aids the point is that scientific propositions that identify hiv as the cause of aids appear to establish a universal and uncontestable reference free of significant effects of the sense of those propositions, the mode of presentation of those propositions and the mode of presentation of the theories and observations which generate those propositions. [22] but if deleuze is right, the always unexpressed sense of these propositions, theories, observations and the multiplicity of correlative and contiguous propositions, what foucault calls a discursive formation, functions as their ground, as the virtuality from which they are actualized. let me now turn to what i take that sense or senses, at least in part, to be. [23] as donna haraway has shown, immune system discourse, and correlatively, disease discourse, are structured around the concept of identity and individuality where the primary task of the immune system is the differential identification of self and non-self and the defense of the (self-same) individual against foreign intruders.^26^ political/military metaphors are not misplaced here as they permeate immune system discourse as they have done the discourse of both disease and the body for at least the last two centuries. on the one hand, epidemics such the one of cholera in paris in the 1830's were perceived as foreign invasions (and continue to be: syphilis sent back in the blood of soldiers returning from foreign wars, aids is the invasion of the heterosexual community by the gay or drug abusing communities).^27^ on the other hand, the body's cells were described as closed, individual organisms with their own borders and identity at both the advent of cellular theory and well into this century.^28^ the sense of both immune system and disease discourse adheres to the surface of the propositions that deploy the terms self, non-self, individual, identity, border, attack, defense. [24] moreover, the shift from vitalism/mechanism models of life to the information system model of dna has not produced any fundamental change in the political/military sense of medicine and biology. all that has changed is the conception of the attack/defense structures. with the development of genetic models of heredity and the advent of dna, the body (and all other forms of life) becomes the phenotypical expression of a genotype, a code, carried in the recesses of the cells that constitute it. disease becomes a battle between information systems, those of the body and of the disease organism with a third system, that of medicine, intervening on the side of the body. this sense of disease becomes particularly apparent in both aids and auto-immune diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus). part of the genetic code is the program for the development of defense mechanisms, the immune system, but precisely because it is a program it carries the possibility of errors occurring both within the code itself and in its translation. auto-immune diseases (which can be either congenital defects in the code or defects produced by infectious agents or a combination of the two in which a pathogen activates a dormant gene) are caused by "errors" in the code that turn the body against itself in a physiological death drive. in this context hiv appears as an alien infiltrator that invades the body's most fundamental structure and perverts the code that produces and maintains its identity. if auto-immune diseases are evidence of traitors within the body then hiv appears as a subversive foreign agent that recruits and produces traitors. and it appears as such precisely because of the way the sense/event of medicine and disease has been actualized. [25] modern medicine is constituted largely as a discipline of intervention that confronts disease as an entity to be combatted and defeated. for the most part even preventative measures are simply efforts to identify disease at an early stage in order to initiate a counter-attack before a beachhead is secured. this is due both to the dominance of the germ model of disease, disease as an invader, and to the institutional reorganization of medicine that foucault has dubbed the "birth of the clinic." the clinic or hospital is where the body is placed in a position of hyper-individuation as it is removed from its socio-environmental context in favor of a controlled, universally reproducible setting in which the environment has no effect on the disease process other than those intentionally produced by medical intervention (in the ideal scenario^29^) in order to isolate the disease process from all the other processes in which the body is enmeshed. the clinic enjoys a privileged position in the medical community; it is the site of teaching, the site of research, the site with the highest concentration of technology and new treatment modalities, the site where those on the cutting edge of the profession want to be. as such, it becomes the standard, the norm, for the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease. [26] the production of the ideal, neutral setting in which to isolate and treat diseases and the diseased has as its correlate the construction of the ideal, neutral social environment. the structure of medicine as interventional and the correlative invention of the neutral site for the study and treatment of disease constitutes the body's environment, insofar as it is of medical interest, as either neutral or threatening. either the environment acts as a factor or co-factor in the production of disease or it remains neutral. that is to say that social environments only appear as potentially invasive, as alien, to the body insofar as they appear at all as a factor in the generation or transmission of disease. in the social, political and economic structures of the western world the neutral environment (outside the clinic) is the white, bourgeois, suburban and rural domain of monogamous heterosexuals. [27] lastly, we may note the long genealogy that has linked sex and sexuality to pathology. as foucault has ably shown, sex and sexuality have been constituted as harboring within them an always present pathological element that can manifest itself along moral, psychological, and physiological lines in the individual generating a danger to both the individual and the species.^30^ sex is an autochthonous danger to the defense of the self precisely because it is a drive within oneself (one's self) that violates the defensive borders of the self by exposing the body to an other, to a non-self that harbors a potential invader. sexuality is always, at least potentially, a double agent opening the back door of the citadel and admitting foreign insurgents. [28] these are some of the senses into which the disease we now call aids irrupted. the sense/event of aids mingles and interacts with the sense/events of medicine, biology, the immune system, sexuality and the environment in the in-between. it is here that it becomes, as avital ronnell has said, an historical event rather than a natural calamity.^31^ as an historical event it is caught up in the genealogy of these other sense/events that allows its propositional determination not only as a viral infection that disrupts the functioning of the immune system but also as an alien invader (whether it be from the "dark continent" or from the [gay and/or promiscuous] "aliens" among us), as moral retribution for abominations of nature, as divine retribution for the same, as "nature's way of cleaning house," etc.^32^ the construction of aids as an essentially gay disease (and hence one that affects those undeserving of "our" full social, political, economic and scientific intervention in the cause of eliminating "their" suffering) is not simply the result of imaginations fueled by %ressentiment% (although this element cannot and must not be ignored). it is a complex of propositions whose ground lies in the realm of sense/events. that is, all of the actualizations of all of the sense/events, all of the propositional meanings that arise from the sense/events, outlined above enter in to the constitution of aids as a "gay" disease. moreover, the search for a singular and self-same cause of the disease elicits the construction of a singular and self-same "alien" presence that imports the disease into "our" midst -despite however illusory both of those identities are. [29] but this ground in sense/events does not have the relation of resemblance to its current manifestation as the possible does to the real. it is a virtuality, or series of virtuals, from which one line of actualization has been realized. the sense/event(s), along with the mixture of sense/events in which it is immersed, is not determinative of any particular line of actualization in the strong sense. sense/event as ground of both sense and nonsense, truth functional statements and the absurd, is the ground of multiple avenues of meaning; it does not fix meaning, it enables it (that is, it enables both its fixation and the perversion of that fixation). [30] at this point, let me return to the question of the dominance of the hiv model of aids. despite the fact that prominent researchers, robert root-bernstein and peter duesberg among others, have provided significant evidence and coherent arguments that hiv is not a sufficient, and may not be a necessary, cause of aids there has been little research done along the lines that they suggest.^33^ indeed, those who have dared to publicly argue along these lines have had their research funds cut off. the reasons for this are multifold. economically, the hiv model has generated enormous income for the manufacturers of hiv tests and antiviral drugs. politically, it has allowed governments to claim that they are acting responsibly and to assure a frightened populace that the cause has been found with the concomitant implication that the risk has been decreased, that the scientific will to knowledge continues to have the power to protect them. socially, it has strengthened the identification of the threat with body fluids of those already marginalized and feared and furthered their exclusion in the interests of the safety of the "general population." its hegemony lies in its positing of a singular and identifiable non-self that functions as an invader and internal insurgent as opposed to multiple-antigen models that propose complex interactions in which no single, and thus identifiable, enemy is present. [31] to be sure, aids research is not entirely monolithic -if it were, neither roots-bernstein's nor duesberg's work would be known or published. nonetheless, such research is marginalized to the extent that the social-political-economic actualization of aids has effectively fixed hiv as the necessary and efficient cause. and this actualization functions in a spiral manner insofar as our social, political and economic capital is invested in scientific research on hiv which then provides support for the continuing reinvestment of capital. [32] moreover, the hegemony of the hiv model focuses the direction of research toward the discovery of a magic bullet, a cure or vaccine that will overthrow the disease and render it harmless. because the social environment is presented as either neutral or hostile it appears as something to be defeated instead of a milieu that can be transformed. and as the environment of aids has been actualized as sexual in nature, sex becomes an enemy to be defeated either through abstinence or its imprisonment within the legitimized perimeter of monogamous heterosexuality. this mode of presentation has functioned to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease by lowering a cone of silence over the discourse of safer sex and iv drug use. [33] that is to say that the fixation of one line of actualization, the one that runs through hiv, has established this retrovirus as a functional referent for both the popular imagination and the economically and politically legitimized scientific/medical community. it establishes a single meaning of the disease, single direction for research, a single perception of the infected and diseased. and it does so because it is both good sense and common sense, a means of foreseeing the future (hopefully) and a means of identifying the threat. it stabilizes and freezes the event, shifting us from the uncertainty of becoming of the event to the safety of the being of the referent. [34] following this it seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about how we can respond to the sense/event. on the one hand, we have the project of counter-actualization.^34^ by making the sense of the event explicit we return to the virtuality of the sense/event, to the series of virtual singularities that make up the sense/event, in an attempt to allow the formation of new lines of actualization, the formation of new structures of propositional meaning, new designations, manifestations, significations and referents. the sense/event is repeated but as a repetition of difference in place of the repetition of the same. on the other hand, the mobilization of virtual singularities holds open the possibility of transformations at the level of the sense/event itself, at the level of the interactions of the various sense/events that underlie, overlap, and interconnect with the sense/event of aids. these two operations are not fundamentally distinct in any manner. instead, they are two ways of thinking about the mining of sense and the effects it might produce. [35] to return to the sense/event of aids, to the realm of the in-between, is to re-eventualize sense and the event, to set them moving again, to find in its becoming the multiplicity of other possibilities, of other lines of actualization, to other lines of research, to the possibility that aids is not the unitary and univocal disease that it is presently constructed as. the means to do so is by taking care of the sense, by mining the realm of sense/events in order to make its sense explicit, by remaining suspicious of the senses we presuppose in making sense of that sense. to do so is to produce, hopefully, shifts in the sense of aids, shifts in the mode of presentation of aids, shifts in the direction of aids and shifts in the meaning of aids. [36] our project, then, is one of counter-actualization, undoing the lines of actualization in order to re-eventualize the virtual elements of the sense/events. the problem that appears to arise at this point is that of how we are to prevent other noxious lines of actualization, new lines that continue to increase suffering rather than decrease it. but this is a false problem or, more accurately, a bad formulation of the problem that supposes that we have control over the lines of actualization or over sense/events, that our causal interactions are more than quasi-causes whose effects we have the good sense to predict and the common sense to identify and control. but it is precisely the case, as foucault has shown us so well, that this is the sort of control, the sort of power/knowledge, that we do not have. the best we can do is to pervert the actualizations that we find and wait to see what is actualized in the wake. the tactics and strategies of counter-actualization, of the mining of sense, are those of the nomad, the guerilla fighter, the terrorist. counter-actualization is a street fight that attacks sedentary blockages and obstacles in order to set things moving again and then waits (im)patiently for new sedimentations, new blockages, new obstacles, new struggles.^35^ [37] we cannot simply take care of the sense and allow the words to take care of themselves. the duchess is wrong there. indeed, taking care of the words is a part of taking care of the sense. and if we do not take care of the sense, the words will surely take care of us. i wish to extend my thanks to constantin v. boundas for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. my thanks also to lisa brawley of postmodern culture and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. notes: ^1^ lewis carroll, _alice's adventures in wonderland_ & _through the looking glass_ (new york: bantam books, 1981) 68. ^2^ gilles deleuze, _the logic of sense_, trans. mark lester, (new york: columbia up, 1990). hereafter cited in the text as ls. ^3^ this is, of course, too simplistic. but i leave aside here the reflexive issues of meanings that are about thought, language, meaning itself, etc. ^4^ michel foucault, _the birth of the clinic_, trans. a.m. sheridan-smith (new york: vintage books, 1975) xi. see also _the order of things_ (new york: pantheon, 1970): the original title of this work is _les mots et les choses_. ^5^ jean-jacques lecercle, _philosophy through the looking glass_ (la salle: open court, 1985) 92. ^6^ gottlob frege, "on sense and meaning," trans. max black, _translations from the philosophical writings of gottlob frege_, ed. peter geach and max black (oxford: basil blackwell, 1982) 56-78, hereafter cited in the text as sr. there is some debate over whether to translate the term "%bedeutung%" (as frege uses it) as "meaning" or "reference." following j.n. mohanty's practice i shall use "reference" at those places where i do not use both terms. see _husserl and frege_ (bloomington: indiana up, 1982) 43-4. ^7^ michel foucault, introduction, _the normal and the pathological_, by georges canguilhem, trans. carolyn fawcett, (new york: zone books, 1989) 8; cf. foucault, "theatrum philosophicum," _language, counter-memory, practice_, ed. donald f. bouchard, (ithaca: cornell up, 1977) 175-6. nor is the philosophy of sense a philosophy of the concept for deleuze, but of the conditions in which concepts appear. ^8^ we may note here that, on frege's terms, denotation and signification fall under the heading of reference while manifestation is a form of sense. ^9^ g.w.f. hegel, _phenomenology of spirit_, trans. a.v. miller, (new york: oxford up, 1977) 58-66. the relation in which the denotation of a pure this breaks down nearly immediately into an dialectic between the i and the this-now-here. see michael hardt, _gilles deleuze: an apprenticeship in philosophy_ (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993) for reasons why deleuze would ignore hegel at this point. ^10^ philip goodchild offers a lucid description of this problem in "speech and silence in the _mumonkan_: an examination of the use of language in the light of the philosophy of gilles deleuze," _philosophy east and west_ 43.1 (1993): 1-18. ^11^ lecercle argues that the positive definition of sense is that of a paradoxical element that links the series of signifiers and the series of signifieds, always in excess in the first and lacking in the second. see lecercle, 101-2, cf. ls 48-51. aids is always excessive in the series of signifiers that are deployed around it (see note to paula treichler below) and remains lacking in a number of ways as a signified. ^12^ this creates what in platonic scholarship is known as the third man problem. one might argue that despite this sense could still be defined. however, i take deleuze to argue that sense is an aleatory function that cannot be captured in any proposition precisely because it cannot be contained within language. ^13^ see rene descartes, _discourse on method_, in particular part 3 in _discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy_, trans. donald cress (indianapolis: hackett publishing co., 1980), 12-7. ^14^ carroll, _looking glass_ 117. ^15^ cf. _difference and repetition_, trans. paul patton (new york: columbia up, 1994) 64, on non-being. nonsense, on this view, is not the negation or absence of sense but sense as a problematic. ^16^ one might well wonder at this point what nonsense has to do with the event of aids, particularly with the scientific and medical aspects of the disease. what the history of science shows us is that propositions that had denotations or significations (or referents) in the past (under previous paradigms or in previous discursive formations) no longer have those referents. moreover, and perhaps more importantly, propositions that currently have referents did not have them in the past. foucault points out that gregor mendel's statements regarding hereditary traits were not truth-functional in 19th century biology ("discourse on language," _the archaeology of knowledge_, trans. a.m. sheridan-smith [new york: pantheon books, 1972] 224). they were taken to be absurd or nonsense and in the context of the dominant scientific theories of the day they were just that, even though they are presently not only truth functional but, to a certain extent, true. my point is that sense and nonsense function at a level prior to what foucault would describe as the underlying order that structures an %episteme%. this is why i have not referred to foucault's discussion of the in-between in _the order of things_, xx-xxi. ^17^ michel de certeau, "history: science and fiction," _heterologies: discourse on the other_, trans. brian massumi (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1986) 205. ^18^ foucault 173-4. ^19^ foucault, "nietzsche, genealogy, history", _language, counter-memory, practice_, 154. ^20^ lecercle 98. ^21^ georges canguilhem, _a vital rationalist_, ed. francois delaporte, trans. arthur goldhammer (new york: zone books, 1994) 164. italics in the original. ^22^ gilles deleuze, _bergsonism_, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (new york: zone books, 1988). hereafter cited in the text as b. ^23^ john rajchman, _philosophical events_ (new york: columbia up, 1991) 160. ^24^ cf. deleuze, _difference and repetition_, 153. ^25^ mirko grmek, _history of aids_, trans. russell maulitz and jacalyn duffin (princeton: princeton up, 1990) 68. ^26^ donna haraway, "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: constitutions of the self in immune system discourse," _simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature_ (new york: routledge, 1991) 203-30. ^27^ see francois delaporte, _disease and civilization_, trans. arthur goldhammer (cambridge: mit press, 1986); and susan sontag, _illness as metaphor and aids and its metaphors_ (new york: anchor books, 1990). ^28^ canguilhem 168. ^29^ this is of course an ideal as there are always nosocomial infections, to name but one unintended effect. ^30^ michel foucault, _the history of sexuality, vol. i: an introduction_, trans. robert hurley, (new york: vintage books, 1980). ^31^ avital ronnell, "a note on the future of man's custodianship (aids update)," _public8_ (toronto: public access, 1993) 56. ^32^ see paula treichler, "aids, homophobia, and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification," _aids: cultural analysis, cultural criticism_(cambridge: mit press, 1989) 31-70, for a discussion of the multiplicity of meanings that have been generated around aids. ^33^ see robert root bernstein, _rethinking aids: the tragic cost of premature consensus_ (new york: the free press, 1993). let me note here that there are serious problems with the sense of root-bernstein's own argument which tends to portray certain sexual activities as inherently dangerous. nevertheless, the multiple-antigen-mediated-autoimmunity (mama) model answers a number of questions that hiv model does not, in particular why some individuals have been infected with hiv for over ten years without developing aids or any symptoms thereof. ^34^ i take this term from constantin boundas. ^35^ one of the most remarkable examples of this sort of activity is the activity of act-up (aids coalition to unleash power). see douglas crimp and adam rolston, _aids demographics_ (seattle: bay press, 1990). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------martinot, 'spectors of sartre; nancy's romance with ontological freedom', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-martinot-spectors.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.995. part 1/1, total size 24118 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- spectors of sartre; nancy's romance with ontological freedom by steve martinot univ. of california at berkeley marto@ocf.berkeley.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by steve martinot, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: jean-luc nancy. _the experience of freedom_. stanford: stanford up, 1993 [1] if there were a movie version of jean-luc nancy's book _the experience of freedom_, the scene would be a dark cabaret and dance hall. in it, the air is smoke-filled and murky, though there are few people in the place. in the background, one hears heidegger's music; it has his tonality, his phraseology, his syntax, played in his favorite key. on the dance floor, nancy is dancing with heidegger himself. they dance closely and intimately. in a dark corner of the cabaret, someone is leaning against the wall, watching martin and jean-luc dance. he is thin, gaunt, tough looking, in a black beret and turtleneck sweater; a gauloise hangs from the corner of his mouth. he slowly approaches the dancing couple; his walk is lithe, like a boxer. it is sartre. he taps heidegger on the shoulder, as if to cut in. nancy turns on him shrilly, "oh go away! it is dead between us. i'm with someone else now." sartre smiles. "but i taught you that dance which you're trying to make him do." nancy cuts him off, with an expression of disdain, arrogance, and piety all at once. "why don't you just leave us alone?" sartre shrugs, and wanders over to the bar to continue watching the dancers, who dance more stiffly now and with some space between them. heidegger begins to look a little out of place. nancy sighs and says to no one in particular, "i wish i knew some more worldly people, a poet perhaps in a beret and cigarette; i could really go for one of them. too bad there aren't any around." [2] in _the experience of freedom_, nancy maneuvers between two languages, that of heidegger -of being, presencing, withdrawing, and the ontological difference -and that of sartre -of freedom, nothingness, precedence, and transcendence. the secret charm of this book, behind its patina of rigor, is that while nancy owns one language and disowns the other, he ends up speaking them both. but there is an aura of hesitancy, of appearing to "reinvent the wheel," in dispensing with sartre (a tradition, it seems, that has become self-defeating) that truncates nancy's project. [3] in the last chapter, which is a series of "fragments" (culled perhaps from the "cutting room floor" of other chapters), nancy tells what he knows about what he has done. speaking of the difference, forgotten by metaphysics, between being and beings, he says: but this difference %is not% -not even %the% "ontico ontological difference." it is itself the very effacing of this difference -an effacing that has nothing to do with forgetting. if this difference is not, it in effect retreats into its own difference. this retreat is the %identity of being and beings:% existence. or more precisely: freedom. (167) that is, freedom is to be the arche, the deconstruction of the ontological difference (and of heidegger with it). furthermore, nancy has just asked, "how might a discourse of freedom correspond to its object? how might it 'speak freely' in speaking of freedom?" (148). to be still asking this at the end of the book suggests that his project of "setting freedom free" is really a question of language, one whose central problematic is not articulation but the inarticulable; that is, the problem of freedom is one of textual form. [4] nancy posits the following. with heidegger, who taught philosophy how to move anterior to subjectivity, anterior to beings and to thematization (philosophy) itself, the thematization of freedom came to an end. nothing can happen except in freedom. "existence as its own essence is nothing other than the freedom of being" (23). the problem becomes how not to abandon existence and essence to each other; existence must be "freed" if thought is to have anything left to think (9). freedom must be thought again. yet the means to do so have been exhausted. the ontology of subjectivity traps itself between principles of freedom and the freedom that founds subjectivity. the freedom reflected in history, evil, liberty, etc., cannot be made an idea without falling into those things. if, like god, freedom contains all in itself, unlike god, it must belong to finite being since infinite being cannot be free. the question becomes that of liberating freedom from infinitude while preserving the inarticulability of its anteriority. thus, nancy's starting point is that freedom is anterior to all that is anterior in philosophy, and to all foundations; if he is to find an articulation, as he argues he must, it will be through a notion of the experience of freedom. [5] these are the stakes in thematizing freedom. the stakes for nancy himself extend to how to rethink certain issues in the light of rethematized freedom. those issues are 1) sharing or community and 2) the possibility of evil (evil will be addressed below). "sharing freedom" occupies the center of nancy's text, just as *care* does in _being and time_, and *being-for-others* does in _being and nothingness_; it is where nancy makes a connection with the social. sharing is where "we already recognize freedom" (74). on this issue, he essentially adopts a heideggerian stance: one's relations to others are anterior to an "i" and make the "i" possible. this is perhaps the weakest argument in the book because it retreats most heavily into a reliance on heideggerian rhetoric. [6] the strength of the book is how nancy grounds this endeavor in a notion of an experience of freedom, for which he does not use language descriptively but rather formally, through the strength of a structure. to address the "experience of freedom," both kant and heidegger must be surpassed, the former toward a factuality of freedom (22), and the latter toward the existent's (dasein's) decision to exist as an obligation to the undecidable limit of its freedom (28). for nancy, the experience of freedom becomes thinking as experience, thinking knowing itself as freedom and knowing itself as thought (59). in sum, freedom presents itself unrepresentably as and in the experience of experience. [7] if this invokes sartre's sense of the term %erlebnis%,^1^ it is also noteworthy in iterating the structure sartre gives the *non-thetic* self-awareness of the for-itself that he calls %conscience(de)soi% (though nancy does not want it to). both structures are self-referential (thought referring to itself as thought per se), and both rely on parallel notions of obligation (of dasein to exist and of the for-itself's "having to be"). like disaffected lovers, the two thinkers appear to couch the same idea in inverted terms in order to appear to be at odds. nancy: "thinking cannot think without knowing itself as thought, and knowing itself as such, it cannot not know itself as freedom." (59) sartre: "freedom is nothing other than existence. . . that of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it." (_bn_, 543; _en_, 520, translation modified) though there is a distinction between "mode" and "knowing" (to which we shall return), the quarrel nancy picks with sartre is more gratuitous. for nancy, freedom is the "foundation of foundation" (35), and he claims sartre's notion is different, that it is "foundation *in default* of foundation" (97). but for sartre, "foundation comes into the world through the for-itself," both as the contingency of being and as idea (_bn_,100). nancy makes his accusation because he interprets sartre's sense of nothingness and lack as absence rather than as difference (cf. _bn_,105). one can imagine sartre shrugging and saying, "feel free." perhaps nancy would try again, saying, "freedom has the exact structure of the subject" (90). [8] for nancy, if freedom is what cannot be founded on anything else, since all foundations are discovered in freedom, it attains a certain factuality. "freedom belongs to existence not as a property, but as a fact" (29). and sartre would agree, though in/on his own terms (as usual): the facticity of the for-itself (freedom) is that the for-itself "is not, it is in order not to be" (_bn_,101). that is, its essence is its inarticulability -which is nancy's essential point as well. nancy understands freedom through its incomprehensibility, sartre through its inarticulability as such ("the for-itself is always other than what can be said about it" -_bn_, 537). [9] but the inarticulable is only approachable in form, as a construction rising above the plane of language, a textual form that does not itself "mean," though it brings meaning into inarticulable play as that construct. the textual form nancy deploys is interesting. "freedom is the infiniteness of the finite as finite" (172); "experience . . . is the act of a thought which does not conceive, or interrogate, or construct what it thinks except by being already taken up and cast as thought, by its thought" (20). in paraphrase, an inarticulable (freedom, experience) is something that cannot be constituted by an aspect of being except insofar as that aspect generates itself and as the very mode of its self-constitution. in each case, it is self-referential across the difference of an iteration, and self-referentiality is the structure of what both is not and is only that structure (what gasche has called a heterology ^2^). another example: "experience: letting the thing be and the thing's letting-be, and the thing-in-itself . . . is existence" (89). again, there is a double mode of self-referential iteration, which is not dialectical because there is no contradiction. as iterative, it relies on nothing other than itself for its articulation, and as self-referential, it means prior to meaning; thus, as a structure, it gives reality to the inarticulable. nancy uses this structure as a logic; it is not a simple form of reasoning, and a lot gets packed into it. [10] but this is a structure, or mode of descriptive reasoning, that had already come into its own in sartre; it is what gives _bn_ its charm (and for some its inaccessibility). for sartre, freedom, the being of the for-itself, constitutes the inarticulable (what escapes the cogito - _bn_, 90) at the core of consciousness; consciousness is always both thetically conscious of itself as not being what it is conscious of, and non-thetically of itself as conscious. the thetic and the non-thetic are incommensurable, inseparable, and constitutive of a self-referentiality whose structure is that its essence is its existence as an inarticulable. it too is non-dialectical; the condition for dialectical negation is commensurability. here, the difference from nancy's approach can be made explicit. in nancy's structure (of the experience of experience), it is the knowing of freedom that parallels what for sartre is non-thetic. sartre would not couch it in terms of knowing because that would imply a subject matter. if, for nancy, the experience of experience is nothing other than experience as such, and freedom is the transcendental of experience, as experience, then experience repeats the structure of self-referential incomensurability (and fulfills the function) that sartre gives to consciousness (87). sartre, however, would find nancy's approach to the inarticulable incomprehensible, and nancy faults sartre for being too articulatory. such is life. [11] what is nicely ironic in this homology is that nancy's deconstruction of being and beings gives structure in turn to a fundamental ambiguity in sartre's notion of freedom. the ambiguity has been noticed by many commentators, who decry that sartre can say one is free even if in chains (which even sartre condemned on one occasion as utter rationalism).^3^ for sartre, though freedom is an absolute to which one is condemned, it remains conditioned by tactical choice and situational constraint. that is, inseparable from ontological freedom, there is what could be called situational freedom, reflected in the strategies and tactics by which one realizes one's project. each is the condition of the other in the sense of being and beings (or %langue% and %parole% in saussurean semiotics). one can be situationally unfree only if there is an absolute, inescapable freedom, as a trace conditioning the possibility of deprivation. absolute freedom is the trace in all situational freedom and unfreedom, from which it differs and is deferred. thus, the irony is that while nancy arrives at a singular freedom from a deconstructed ontological difference, sartre begins with a singularity that must in turn be read as revealing within itself an interior difference, an ontological difference of freedom. [12] when nancy devotes part of a chapter to sartre, he dispenses with this difference. he critiques a passage from _cahiers pour une morale_,^4^ one of sartre's posthumous works. it is a work sartre promised at the end of _bn_, in 1943, and then chose not to publish. it belongs to the negative category of "works sartre refused to publish," and its publication, in 1983, must be attributed to %l'autre-sartre% (or a-sartre, for short), that is, to a different author from the author of "works sartre chose to publish." in what sense is man possessed by freedom? sartre interpreted this thought in his celebrated formulation: "we are condemned to freedom." now this is certainly not the sense in which freedom should be understood, unless we confuse a thinking of the existence of being with an "existentialism." for sartre, this "condemnation" means that my freedom . . . intervenes in order to found . . . a project of existence . . . in a situation of "determinism" by virtue of which i am not free. (96) nancy then goes on to quote a-sartre describing the situation of a person beset by tuberculosis, who is both unfree against the disease, and still free. in a passage nancy ellipses out, a-sartre says, for my life lived as ill, the illness is not an excuse, but a condition. thus, am i still without surcease, transformed, undermined, reduced and ruined from elsewhere, and still free; i am still obliged to render myself to account, to take responsibility for what i am not responsible. wholly determined and wholly free. (_cm_, 449) nancy then remarks, "the condemnation to freedom is itself the consequence of a condemnation to necessity." but in _bn_, sartre says, "i am condemned to be free. this means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free" (_bn_, 537). and a-sartre adds that one is free before the illness and free after it, implying the necessity to assume responsibility for one's life, not to be condemned to it. [13] sartre speaks here on the ontological plane; a-sartre's sense of "wholly determined and wholly free" is a statement of ontological difference. nancy reduces both to the ontic. in his discussion, he imposes a kantian sense of causality upon sartre to revise this sense of the determined. he ignores a-sartre's notion that one must give oneself the given (_cm_, 448) -which means that one's freedom is always the condition through which the world's adversities are understood. nancy reads being "condemned to freedom" as being imprisoned in the necessity to surpass, "to make a life project out of every condition" (97). nancy doubles causality (100ff) in which one becomes (willfully) causal in the world "because" the world causes one to do so. nancy appears on the verge of attributing to sartre the approach of bureaucratic marxism which held people to be "determined" by their class background and origin -and which sartre had rejected [14] but the shadow of a more unfortunate politics accompanies nancy's argument with sartre. for instance, in the 60s, the era of the civil rights movement, ghetto rebellions, and the demand for affirmative action, radicals argued that the overthrow of jim crow wasn't enough, that a social environment had been created by racism that had to be taken into account; i.e., until the vestiges of discrimination, separate and unequal schools, apriori condemnation, and a social reality of being watched, noticed, singled out, and continually re-racialized had been expunged, rebellion and affirmative action would be necessary. in effect, to become a subject, one had to find a way actually to confront, contest, and contradict that given environment and its influences (cf. fanon). reactionary thinking responded by twisting and revising the argument to render the social environment causal, viz. discrimination caused the rebellions, and impoverishment caused family breakdown and uneducability. black people were seen as no more free in rebellion than under jim crow. if that social environment was to be changed governmentally, through bureaucratic control of civil rights programs and new regulations, these become the first steps toward the new, contemporary criminalization of blackness of the 90s, which grounds itself in causal arguments. the logic of nancy's argument is to place sartre philosophically in the latter category rather than alongside fanon, a singular violence to sartre. and the shadow lengthens when nancy says, freedom . . . matters to us. . . . we have always been defined and destined in her [freedom]. always: since the foundation of the occident, which also means since the foundation of philosophy. our occidental philosophical foundation is also our foundation in freedom. (61) is philosophy (and therefore freedom) only occidental? is this what nancy wants to substitute for the (kantian?) causality he finds in sartre? one hesitates to ask just how exclusive this "us" of his is to be. [15] ultimately, it has a religious tinge. if the "experience of freedom relates the inarticulable to thematization" (97), a different (ontological) difference emerges between unknowability and experience, in terms of a thread nancy introduces at the inception of his project when he poses two contextualizing questions: 1) why is there something? and 2) why is there evil? (10). he follows heidegger's lead in "the essence of truth,"^5^ where heidegger articulated freedom both as truth ("exposure as the disclosedness of beings") and as "mystery" (the concealment of being) (41). nancy recasts "the identity of being and beings" as a distinction between a singular unknowability and the singularity of freedom, that is, between a oneness that connotes mysticism and a unitarity that connotes reification. in nancy's exposition, the religious dimension of this confluence of mysticism and reification (of freedom) is given a certain reality. he confronts evil in terms of a similar dilemma as that which besets christianity; viz. if god is good, then where does evil come from? if freedom is good, then where does evil come from? and he refers to his own ontology as an "eleutherology" (a referrence to zeus as eleutherius, the god of freedom) (19). in effect, this term metonymizes a dream of a dual poetics, between a miltonic loss of paradise and a lyotardian paganics. [16] for nancy, evil is the ruin of good, not just its opposite; evil must be decided upon, as this ruin, in a renunciation of freedom and a hatred of existence (for which auschwitz is the icon). evil is thus unleashed on the good, on the promise of the good, of freedom, and on freedom itself. but freedom itself is this unleashing; thus, evil is freedom's self-hatred. (like milton, nancy reifies evil.) though the wicked being awaits its unleashing, the unleashing of evil is nevertheless the first discernibility of freedom (just as, for heidegger, the tool first becomes discernible as equipment when it is broken). the unleashing of evil, the hatred of existence as the absence of all presence, substitutes itself for the ground of existence (127-30). one is left thinking that evil is actually the completion of nancy's ontological difference of freedom. [17] again, sartre shrugs. for nancy, evil is the fact of auschwitz. for sartre, evil is the nazi occupier's face, or that of any occupation or invading army, under the aegis of a multi-level knowledge of auschwitz. for nancy, sartre would be in bad faith seeing evil as always elsewhere; for sartre, evil is always elsewhere if the perpetrator of evil must see his act as good in order to have chosen it at the moment of perpetration. and it is in this sense that, for sartre, conflict between people becomes possible, while for nancy, it would have to involve a conflict of existence at the level of the inarticulable. notes: ^1^ jean-paul sartre, _being and nothingness_, trans. hazel barnes (new york: washington square press, 1966); p. 271. citations hereafter given in the text as _bn_. translated from %l'etre et le neant% (paris, gallimard, 1943), cited in the text as _en_. ^2^ rudolph gasche. _the tain of the mirror_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1986); p. 91ff. ^3^ on this question, see wilfred desan, _the tragic finale_ (cambridge: harvard university press, 1954); thomas flynn, _sartre and marxist existentialism_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1984); and david detmer, _freedom as a value_ (lasalle, ill: open court, 1988). ^4^ jean-paul sartre, _cahiers pour un morale_ (paris: gallimard, 1983). citations given in the text as _cm_; translations are mine. ^5^ in _basic writings_, ed. david krell (new york: harper and row, 1977). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------plate, 'lacan looks at hill and hears his name spoken: an interpretive review of _gary hill_ through lacan's "i's" and gazes', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-plate-lacan.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.196. part 1/1, total size 27714 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- lacan looks at hill and hears his name spoken: an interpretive review of _gary hill_ through lacan's "i's" and gazes by s. brent plate institute of the liberal arts emory university splate@emory.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by s. brent plate, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: _gary hill_. exhibition at the guggenheim museum soho. may 11 august 20. organized by chris bruce, senior curator, henry art gallery, seattle. [d]esire, alienated, is perpetually reintegrated anew, reprojecting the %idealich% outside. it is in this way that desire is verbalised. here there is a game of see-saw between two inverted relations. the specular relation of the %ego%, which the subject assumes and realizes, and projection, which is always ready to be renewed, in the %idealich%. -jacques lacan^1^ [1] gary hill's video and installation art challenges a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) view of perception by showing the mediated nature of the viewing subject's interaction with the artwork. hill investigates the relationships %between% bodies, words, images, and technology. while much of hill's work in the past has focused on single-channel videotapes, his recent exhibition at the guggenheim soho (11 may 20 august) is a display of 13 room-sized installations, artworks within which the viewer's body must move. furthermore, by incorporating philosophical and literary texts (e.g., writings of wittgenstein, heidegger, blanchot) into his videos and images, hill manages to confront the incessant relationship of words and images in a strikingly original way in artistic practice. [2] hill's exhibition spaces are spaces of and about %media% (sing. %medium%) in two senses of the word. as the _american heritage dictionary_ defines it, a "medium" is, "1. something . . . that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes. 2. an intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on." this dual definition makes it possible to consider the term 'medium' in aesthetic categories of form and content. medium as content is "%something% between." medium as form is a "substance through which %something else% is transmitted." hill's art investigates each sense of the term, and both of them together. [3] though essays about hill are pocked with poststructural references, hill makes no explicit mention of lacan in his installations or video works. yet, hill and lacan seem to share affinities for what lacan calls the "function of seeingness."^2^ that is, they each explore the space of mediation between the viewer and the object viewed. this relation is a see-saw game of desire and projection, and is, finally, constitutive of subjectivity. [4] in the following i take lacan's theory of subjectivity and the interrelated notion of "the eye and the gaze" as an orienting point. from there i create a "conversational re-view" of hill's recent exhibition. as this exhibition included thirteen installations -each abundantly rich enough in content to summon its own essay -i will concentrate on only three particular installations. [5] the dense opening quote of lacan serves as a preface to the following reading of hill's installations. within the quoted passage resides the catalyst that is %desire%, the notion of %projection%, and a relation between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. in further comparing hill and lacan, i suggest that through the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic one of lacan's underlying motifs is to reconceive the relation of the word and the image within the realm of subjectivity. while it is clear that lacan privileges the symbolic over the imaginary (and hence also, the word over the image), they each remain vital in the construction of the subject. [6] turning to lacan's mediated view of "the function of seeingness," there is found a distinction between the eye and the gaze. to clarify this distinction, lacan provides what are perhaps the simplest of his diagrams (91): [image] the first diagram portrays the geometral perspective set up in renaissance schema (notably that of alberti) of a singular point-of-view taking in the whole of the other (object) through the eye. as the agent of vision, the subject is the "cartesian subject, which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective" (86). as the still point of singular perspective, the subject is affirmed in her or his position. lacan's conception is duplicitous in its combining of the simple, now common-sensical notion of perspective with the modern view of the singular and unitary subject. [7] entering hill's exhibition space, the viewer comes upon a room containing the installation _learning curve_ (1993). here the viewer/subject finds a seat, and the eye is given "something to feed on" (101). sitting in a chair at a schooldesk, the viewer faces forward (the only way possible) and finds the lines of the edge of her or his desk fanning out a long way away from the chair toward a screen at the far end of the schooldesk. (the desk is approximately 8' long.) the viewer sits at the "point" of the triangular schooldesk which, due to its size, shifts from being a mere desk to a spatial plane -separating, but also connecting -the seated viewer to the image on the screen. projected on to the screen from a video projector above the head of the seated viewer is the moving image of a seemingly endless breaking wave. metaphors of drowning hardly need be mentioned as one quickly becomes captivated by the image of a perfect wave, curling right into infinity. _learning curve_, 1993 [image] [8] without mention of lacan, commentator robert mittenthal states that, "to sit in _learning curve_ is to become part of the piece; one is physically supported by the same object that focuses one's attention on the pure visual space of the projected wave. the chair forces the viewer into a single-point perspective."^3^ the single point of the eye in this installation is matched by the "projection" of the wave. the light is projected from a singular point (the video projector above the head of the seated viewer) and spreads out to the site where the screen is filled by the projected image. projected lines of light exactly match the lines of the desk, thereby conflating the viewer's position of seeing with the projector, and with the projected image. [9] lacan's comments on the imaginary realm of projection are fitting here: "each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in his status, in his stature, in his static, his desire is projected outside."^4^ in _learning curve_, the subject constitutes her or his self in the static schooldesk, and desire is projected to the screen in front. desire is desire of a wave, the %idealich%, the fluid motion, the amniotic fluids. to be identified with a wave . . . to be there . . . to be, there. . . . [10] while the single-point perspective of _learning curve_ and of lacan's renaissance diagram entails a position of mastery -where everything flows from the eye/i - slippage is already occurring. the sight of the other (the perfect wave, the imago) enthralls, captivates, and causes the viewing subject to begin to dissolve because the other is finally only the image of the subject her or him self %projected% onto the other. for a final entry into subjectivity, the other must become more than a screen for a projected image of the subject. the subject must enter a field of visual relations (the symbolic) where she or he is the one seen as well as the one seeing. [11] lacan's theories of subjectivity confound the subject of visual mastery. the single-point perspective corresponds to a singular subject position, and lacan is out to foil and complicate this notion associated with "modern science." in so doing, lacan inverts the first diagram, and the subject is now seen in relation to the gaze (see diagram 2, above). the gaze is a web of which the subject is but one (but not one) piece: "we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. . . . [the] gaze circumscribes us" (75). further inverting the first diagram's effects, the gaze "is that which turns %me% into a picture" (105), with light moving in the opposite direction. the point of light is projected from the site of the other (the gaze) on to the subject through a "screen." the subject is constituted by this pre-existing screen, a pre-existing set of symbols which creates a grid for the other(s) to perceive the subject. [12] hill, in a separate but related installation, _learning curve (still point)_ (1993), likewise inverts the triangle of vision. now, rather than a large screen opposite the viewer with lines extended out, the viewer sits at the "base" of the triangular desk. the edges of the desk converge at a video monitor at the end of the long desk. the schooldesk and the seat are similar in each installation, only now the image of the wave is displayed in the small form of a 5" video monitor, making it difficult for the viewer to identify with and be captivated by the image. furthermore, the light is also reversed. with the first installation (as with lacan's first diagram), light is projected from the point of perspective, the "geometral point." now the light originates from the far end, from the "point of light" (due to the fact that a video %monitor% has replaced a video %projector%). here the light is projected onto the viewer from the place of the other. the subject/viewer becomes, in essence, "the screen." _learning curve (still point)_, 1993 [image] [13] further comparing _learning curve (still point)_ to the gaze, mittenthal, again without reference to lacan, suggests of hill's installation that "one imagines a california schoolboy daydreaming of surfing, suddenly called upon to answer one of his teacher's queries."^5^ the schooldesk becomes the site of "the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire" (85), the desire to be surfing, that is, to be elsewhere. coextensive with this desire is the element of surprise, and one must wonder why mittenthal, who neither quotes lacan nor surfs, brings in the element of surprise in the viewing of %these% waves rather than the others. perhaps his imagined response to sitting in this position is tinged with the voyeuristic shame of peering through a keyhole: "the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame" (84). this shame brings the viewer out of her or his self (out of the surfing daydream) into the realm of others, and therefore also becomes a realization by the subject of her or his role within the larger symbolic order. [14] lacan further complicates the relation of the eye and the gaze by overlapping the first two diagrams, creating a more comprehensive "field of vision." the eye and the gaze are brought together in a third diagram (106) and placed on opposing sides. [image] here the viewing subject is not simply either the master of perception (as in the renaissance schema), or objectified within the gaze. rather, only the subject -the human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence of man -is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. he maps himself in it. how? in so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. %the screen is here the locus of mediation%. (107; emphasis mine) it is, finally, at the site of the screen -at the point of the medium -that the subject's identity is negotiated. [15] in lacan's third diagram we are brought back to the relation of the imaginary and the symbolic: "the moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic" (118). in the register of the imaginary, the subject/viewer projects her or his own imago onto the screen. there the projected imago comes into contact with the other side of the screen, on which is portrayed the image through which the subject is seen by others in the symbolic realm. while the gaze circumscribes the subject, the site of the screen becomes the site where the eye and the gaze meet. out of this sutured relation, this discourse in the field of the other, this sight in the field of vision, identity springs. [16] at this point lacan shifts his oft-quoted "man's desire is the desire of the other," to say "that it is a question of a sort of desire %on the part of% the other, at the end of which is the %showing% (%le donner-a-voir%)" (115). lacan makes his final turn against the realm of vision and states that this %showing% is connected with the desire to see, and that desire is %fascination% (latin: "the evil eye"). too much fascination turns to envy (%invidia%): "the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the %petit a%, the separated %a% from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction" (116). here it is the symbolic (and language) which will rescue the subject from the power of annihilating envy. and "where can we better picture this power than in %invidia%?" (115). and perhaps, where can we better picture lacan's notions than in video? [17] one would have to imagine a continually spinning swivel chair at a schooldesk intersecting hill's two installations to relate the overlapping third diagram. but this wouldn't quite get us to the point (however still). fortunately, if we move into the next room, we come upon an installation which provides a clearer manifestation of the subject's relation to vision. the installation places the subject/viewer in the overlapping third diagram of lacan, but in an even more fluid way than lacan imagined (or, was able to chart). [18] this next room is the site of the installation _beacon (two versions of the imaginary)_ (1990). _beacon_ is a simple design with complex content. the "beacon" ("a signalling or guiding device; a source of guidance or inspiration")^6^ is a piece of aluminum pipe, 6" in diameter and 54" in length. the pipe is suspended from the ceiling and comes to rest about 78" from the floor, just high enough for most people to walk under, yet just low enough to cause many to feel they have to duck to pass under it. powered by a motor, the beacon spins slowly in a darkened room (approximately 20'x40') providing all the light for the room. the light which is here provided is given by two 4" video monitors placed in each end of the pipe. the video image is then projected out by projection lenses which cap the ends of the pipe. (note that in this set-up the image can be seen two ways, by looking into the pipe -though no one would actually do this -and by looking at the projected image on the wall.) the beacon spins in a circular motion, and since it is placed off-center in a rectangular room, the projected images vary in size, sometimes filling a good part of a wall, sometimes a small square. finally, four speakers are placed in the corners of the room, with the sound sometimes "following" the moving images, sometimes not. [19] the fact that i have used the word "sometimes" four times in the last two sentences suggests that _beacon (two versions of the imaginary)_ gives a sense of chance. many of hill's works provide for chance, yet this chance springs out of a polished and precise technological medium (even the appearance of the polished aluminum pipe itself gives a "smooth" feel). in _beacon_ there is a motor, a system, and an array of electronics controlling the piece. hill arranges the installation to allow the blips in the circuitry (the slips, the elisions) to show through. even so, it sometimes seems the blips may be intentional, wired into the circuitry, and that may be, but hill allows an even greater interruption (a much greater inbreaking of the real in lacanian terms): the presence of the viewer in the space of the installation. the viewer is not a detached viewer here. the viewer is part of the room, part of the installation, and this interaction creates chance elements beyond the technical apparatus of the piece. similarly, there is no position from which to take in the entirety of the piece, no place for a singular point-of-view. as the beacon spins, projecting its light onto the walls, viewers are caught in the searching path of light, their silhouettes outlined against the wall for others to see. hill asks in a short writing on _beacon_, "what will you do when you are in the light?"^7^ [20] and i, as an observer and participant, watched what others did in the light, realizing that i, at the same time, was being watched. when i viewed the installation, there were on average five to ten others in the room at once -so there was a necessary negotiation taking place between bodies and between bodies and the revolving light. most often people would move aside, attempting to get out of the light for fear of disrupting someone else's view. the problem was that there were two sides to the beacon and to move out of the light meant an almost continual movement. one could stand directly under the beacon and always remain out of the light (standing at the geometral point, even if it is spinning), but due to the height mentioned above one kept feeling as if the pipe would hit one's head, which would create an even more intense feeling of being a spectacle. hence, there were few people who ever did stand close to the pipe. the perpetual escape from the light mixed with the revolving images and the viewer's desire to see the images meant quite simply that the viewing involved a lot of bodily movement within the space of the installation. [21] there were others who -either due to an exhibitionist streak, or to a resignation that there was no escaping from the panoptic light -merely remained in their positions and allowed the light to cast their shadows on the wall. but of course, from this bold position there was still no way to see the entirety of the installation; one had to choose which image to look at. and then there were the younger ones who would jump up into the space of the light just to be seen, or would create fun shadows of dogs or butterflies with their hands, wanting to show a part of their selves and have an other take notice. [22] but let me leave aside the formal nature of the piece and address the content. what sounds are emanating from the speakers? and what exactly are the images being projected onto the walls? a text is being read. various voices in somber tones recite a text of maurice blanchot. ironically, the "imaginary" in the title does not refer to lacan, but to blanchot's short essay "two versions of the imaginary." likewise, the images often correspond to this text. sometimes there is an image of the printed essay itself, with the camera (like an eye) following along the pages and lines being spoken. sometimes there is an image of a person reading the text. other times there is a still shot of a person as the spoken text continues, leaving the simple view of a face moving across the walls. [23] blanchot's essay is complex and obscure, and i will only point out a few of the more important elements as it relates back to hill's video work. "two versions of the imaginary" chiefly concerns the role of the image within language. the image brings forward places and times which are "absent" in the current perception to remake them as somehow present. in other words, linguistic images are a representation. but it is the relation between presence and absence in the image which for blanchot provides the possibilities of power and fascination. [24] the essay begins with this enigmatic paragraph (and the quotes i give here are also quotes heard spoken within hill's installation): but what is the image? when there is nothing, that is where the image finds its condition, but disappears into it. the image requires the neutrality and the effacement of the world, it wants everything to return to the indifferent depth where nothing is affirmed, it inclines towards the intimacy of what still continues to exist in the void; its truth lies there. but this truth exceeds it; what makes it possible is the limit where it ceases. hence its dramatic aspect, the ambiguity it evinces, and the brilliant lie with which it is reproached.^8^ the image is a two-sided coin (perhaps even an effaced one), or a two-sided screen: showing limits as well as giving the experience of limitlessness. this, i would suggest, is blanchot's version of the suture between the lacanian imaginary and symbolic. [25] in the subject's perception, according to blanchot, to see an event as an image is not to be infinitely removed from the originary thing itself. rather, "to experience an event as image is not to free oneself of that event . . . it is to let oneself be taken by it . . . to that other region where distance holds us, this distance which is now unliving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things" (87). just as a cadaver is typically thought to come "after" the being itself, the image, if all it did were to imitate a "real" thing, would be subordinated as a secondary event. but for blanchot, contrarily, the image is "not the same thing distanced, but that thing as distancing" (80-81). the perception of the image exists in an in-between place, a mediated site. [26] blanchot's two versions of the imaginary are intertwined and stitched together. one version brings us to lacan's imaginary, the site of "universal unity." the other version, through its emphasis on limits, recalls lacan's symbolic: "what makes [the image] possible is the limit where it ceases." subjectivity is created through splits and gaps enlisting desire and the need of mediation, a mediation working internally and externally. [27] concluding my own stitched together review, i return to the site of hill's installation _beacon_. the installation is an experience, a passing through (%ex-peri%: "pass through"), both in the sense that one must cross the room to continue the rest of the exhibition, and in the sense that one passes through a series of mediations while in the room. among these mediations there is, of course, the need for negotiating space with other bodies in a darkened room. then there is the negotiation with the revolving light; inevitably, the image is projected onto the viewer's body for all others to see, the subject is caught in the gaze. correlatively, the interception of light by the body leaves a dark spot (%scotoma%; blind spot) on the wall in the midst of the image, leaving others with a fractured, incomplete view. there is also the space of the viewer existing between the two images on opposing walls. while the images originate at the same point (the pipe) they are cast to opposite ends of the room. from there the two images develop a relationship with each other -there are times when the book is shown on one wall while the person reading is imaged on the other wall -and, as hill states, "perhaps one forms the other's projection across time."^9^ across time and space, the viewer occupies the space between. [28] clearly, in hill's art, what you see is not what you get; there is a space opened up for mediation and negotiation. that space is a space the subject/viewer enters. in the midst of these interventions the subject's body takes on the place of mediation. in lacanian terms, the body becomes the site of identity, the image and the screen, a site projected on to, and a site projecting itself. it is a space between text and image (between spoken words and projected images) and between the symbolic and the imaginary (between others in a room and one's own bodily negotiation to remain out of the light). notes: ^1^ _four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis_, trans. alan sheridan. (new york: norton, 1978) 174. ^2^ _four fundamental concepts_ 82. all further quotes given in text. ^3^ "standing still on the lip of being: gary hill's _learning curve_," _gary hill_, exhibition catalog, essays by chris bruce, et al. (seattle: henry art gallery/university of washington, 1994) 92. ^4^ "the see-saw of desire," in _the seminar of jacques lacan; book 1: freud's papers on technique, 1953-1954_, trans. john forrester (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) [fr. 1975] 171. ^5^ "standing still on the lip of being" 93. ^6^ _american heritage dictionary_, 3rd ed, (boston: houghton mifflin, 1992). ^7^ "beacon (two versions of the imaginary)," _gary hill_ 25. ^8^ "two versions of the imaginary," _the gaze of orpheus: and other literary essays_, trans. lydia davis, (barrytown, ny: station hill press, 1981) 79. further quotes from this essay are given in text. ^9^ "beacon (two versions of the imaginary)" 25. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.994. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 174699 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v. 5 n. 1 (september, 1994) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. i. journal and book announcements: 0) live at the ear 1) essays in postmodern culture 2) black ice books 3) the centennial review 4) chicago journal of theoretical computer science 5) college literature 6) contention 7) convergence 8) electronic journal on virtual culture 9) eternal network: a mail art anthology 10) fine art forum 11) genders 12) hot off the tree 13) information technology and disabilities 14) inter-society for electronic arts 15) leonardo 16) m/e/a/n/i/n/g 17) minnesota review 18) modern fiction studies 19) mtv killed kurt cobain 20) nomad 21) october 22) representations 23) revista alicantian de estudios engleses 24) rhetnet: a cyberjournal for rhetoric and writing 25) rif/t 26) sscore 27) studies in popular culture 28) tdr 29) tonguing the zeitgeist 30) virus 23 31) vivid magazine 32) zines-l ii. calls for papers, panels, and participants: 33) pmc-moo 34) cultural cartographies: mapping the postcolonial moment 35) afritech 1995: an electronic conference 36) convergence: art, culture and the national information infrastructure 37) cwrl: computers, writing, rhetoric, and literature/learning" 38) einstein meets magritte 39) electronic journal of communication/la revue electronique de communication 40) feminist economics 41) gates 42) hypertext fiction and the literary artist 43) journal of criminal justice and popular culture 44) kant congress: "kant and the problem of peace" 45) the little magazine: work, writing, electronic space, cyborg performance and poetics 46) mechanisms of desire: deleuze, masoch and the libidinal economy of fur 47) network services conference 48) open city 49) postmodern culture: a suny series 50) psyche 51) queer-e 52) reading rock 'n' roll: theoretical approaches to popular music 53) research on virtual relationships 54) sixties generations: from montgomery to vietnam; an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars, artists, and activists 55) society for the study of symbolic interaction symposium 56) splinter 57) straight with a twist: queer theory and the subject of heterosexuality 58) style: possible worlds, virtual reality, and postmodern fiction 59) transformation: marxist boundary work in theory, economics, politics, and culture 60) undercurrent 61) understanding the social world: towards an interrogative approach 62) virtual reality world, 1995 iii. networked discussion groups: 63) deleuze-guattari list 64) electronic poetry center (buffalo) 65) femisa: feminism, gender, international relations 66) fiction-of-philosophy 67) holocaus: holocaust list 68) newjour-l 69) nii-teach 70) popcult list 71) scholia iv. research programs: 72) dead-artist desert trailer park v. resources: 73) gopheur litteratures 74) american lit. sublist 75) english lit. sublist 76) tap vi. other: 77) spelunk with international artist 0) ------------------------------------------------------------- live at the ear edited by charles bernstein a compact disc from elemenope productions / oracular laboratories recordings conceived and produced by richard dillon digitally remastered archival recordings of 13 poets reading at york's ear inn, with a 32 page booklet including substantial excerpts from the texts of the poems, photos, and brief statements from the poets. ideal for personal collections as well as for classroom use and course adoption. contents: 1. susan howe reading from "speeches at the barrier," in europe of trusts. recorded october 22, 1983. (6:41) 2. ron silliman reading from oz. recorded april 12, 1986. (6:01) 3. leslie scalapino reading from "bum series" in way. recorded december 13, 1986. (4:52) 4. ted greenwald reading from you bet. recorded january 31, 1981. (6:05) 5. rosmarie waldrop reading from reproduction of profiles. recorded december 15, 1984. (6:01) 6. alan davies reading "shared sentences" from active 24 hours. recorded february 4, 1989. (4:42) 7. barrett watten reading from under erasure. recorded january 2, 1993. (5:45) 8. erica hunt reading from "cold war breaks," in local history. recorded may 20, 1990. (4:28) 9. bruce andrews reading "i knew the signs by their tents." recorded march 12, 1988. (5:43) 10. hannah weiner reading from spoke. recorded october 10, 1983. (5:40) 11. steve mccaffery reading from "the curve to its answer," variant in theory of sediment. recorded january 11, 1985. (5:10) 12. ann lauterbach reading "opening day" from clamor. recorded january 4, 1992. (4:38) 13. charles bernstein reading from "dark city," in dark city. recorded january 4, 1992. (6:44) how to order: send $15.95 plus $2 p&h to elemenope productions 7 market square, suite 281 pittsburgh, pa 15222 for cod orders or further information call 800-240-6980 or fax 412-301-9919 1) ------------------------------------------------------------- essays in postmodern culture: . . . now cordless an anthology of essays from postmodern culture is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practicalengagements with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) to order a copy by e-mail, click here. 2) ------------------------------------------------------------- black ice books black ice books is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident american writers. breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. fiction collective two publications unit illinois state university normal, il 61761 3) ------------------------------------------------------------- centennial review edited by r.k. meiners the centennial review is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the university and its environment. we are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. $12/year (3 issues), $18/two years (6 issues) (add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the us) recent special issue: poland: from real socialism to democracy please make your check payable to the centennial review. mail to: the centennial review 312 linton hall michigan state university east lansing mi 48824-1044 4) ------------------------------------------------------------ chicago journal of theoretical computer science editors: stuart kurtz, michael o'donnell, and janos simon, university of chicago we have a vision that university presses and university libraries, working together, can publish and maintain electronic scholarly journals which provide: peer-reviewed and high-quality papers continuity and name-recognition quicker and wider dissemination of information enhanced search and retrieval mechanisms lower costs than print journals guaranteed future access to the contents the journal will publish high-quality, peer-reviewed articles in theoretical computer science and is designed to meet the following needs: the scholar's desire for quicker peer review and dissemination of research results; the library's need to develop systems and structures to deal with electronic journals and know to what degree electronic journals might relieve budget pressures; the publisher's need to develop an economic and a user model for electronic dissemination of scholarly journals. sold on a subscription basis for fees comparable to standard print journals to both libraries and individuals in an effort to develop an economic model that will encourage publishers to develop electronic journals (initial subscription prices of $125/year for institutions and $30/year for individuals); for subscription information please contact: journals-orders@mit.edu 5) -------------------------------------------------------------- college literature a triannual literary journal for the classroom edited by kostas myrsiades a triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving the needs of college/university teachers by providing them with access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of literature and experiencing old literature in new ways. forthcoming issues: third world women's literature african american writing cross-cultural poetics subscription rates: us foreign individual $24.00/year $29.00/year institutional: $48.00/year $53.00/year send prepaid orders to: college literature main 544 west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150 6) -------------------------------------------------------------- contention: debates in society, culture, and science contention is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 7) ---------------------------------------------------------------- convergence the journal of research into new media technologies as you may know we are launching a new academic journal of research into new media technologies to be called convergence. to help network across disciplines and generate discussion into the nature of convergence we would like to invite you to contribute to a debates section in the first issue. we are seeking contributions of approximately 1000 words that would explore the convergence of critical approaches and methodologies from different disciplines in the study of the new media. for example how could contemporary theories of the reader contribute to the analysis of a multimedia or hypertext product; or how have the achievements of ai contributed to the debate concerning the creation and construction of virtual worlds; or how can the methodologies of anthropology be appropriated in the study of the consumption of the new media; or to what extent have the conventions of realist representation shaped our analyses of new media products. if you would like to contribute please submit your copy by 1st november 1994 to the editors at: convergence@vax2.ac.luton.uk 8) --------------------------------------------------------------- the electronic journal on virtual culture we are very pleased by the great interest in the electronic journal on virtual culture. there are already more than 1,850 people subscribed. our first issue was distributed in march 1993. the future looks very interesting. editors are working on special issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture. the electronic journal on virtual culture (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. ejvc is published monthly. some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. cyberspace monitor). if you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the virtual culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc. ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact ermel stepp editor-inchief of diane kovacs co-editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to: byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm / listserv@kentvm.kent.edu ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu 9) ---------------------------------------------------------------- eternal network: a mail art anthology "eternal network: a mail art anthology" by chuck welch is to be published in fall 1994 by university of calgary press. the 42 chapter, 350 page text includes an index, 147 illustrations and six major appendices including the largest extensive listing of underground mail art zines in existence. a thorough listing of nearly 100 international private and institutional mail art archives appears in another important appendice. but what is mail art? mail art is a paradox in the way it reverses traditional definitions of art; the mailbox and computer replace the museum, the address becomes the art, and the mailman brings home the avant-garde to mail artists in the form of correspondence art, e-mail art, artistamps, postcards, conceptual projects, and collaborations. "eternal network introduces readers to a lively exchange with international mail art networkers from five continents. the book include snail mail and e-mail addresses, fax, and telephone numbers for many active mail artists. readers are invited to participate -to correspondance with global village artists who quickstep beyond establishment boundaries of art. among the forty-two distinguished contributors appearing in "eternal network" are new york city art critic richard kostelanetz; physicist, poet bern porter; director of the museum of modern art library, clive phillpot; famed fluxus artists dick higgins and ken friedman; university of iowa art historian and archival director estera milman, and mail art patron jean brown who has collected the world's largest assemblage of mail art material now undergoing documentation at the getty center for the history of art and the humanities. many of the forty-two chapters appearing in "eternal network" are original, unpublished essays pertaining to the origin and history of mail art networking, collaborative aesthetics, new directions for mail art networking in the 1990's, mail art projects exploring the interconnection of marginal on and off-line networks, mail art criticism and dialogue, and finally, parables, visions, dances, dreams, and poems that articulate the living mythology of mail art. edited by chuck welch, an active mail artist since 1978, "eternal network" makes an important first step towards introducing mail art to non-artists, artists, and academic scholars. for more information send e-mail to cathryn.l.welch@dartmouth.edu or write to "eternal network" po box 978, hanover, nh 03755 10) -------------------------------------------------------------- fine art forum _____________________________________________________________ ___] | \ | ____] \ __ ___ ___] | | | \ | | / \ | | | __] | | \ | ___] ____ \ __ / | | | | \ | | / \ | \ | _| _| _| __| ______] _/ _\ _| _\ _| :::::: .::::. :::::. :: :: ::. .:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :::. .::: :::: :: :: :::::' :: :: :: ::: :: :: :: :: :: ':. :: :: :: ' :: :: '::::' :: ':. '::::' :: :: a r t + t e c h n o l o g y n e t n e w s _____________________________________________________________ distributed by leonardo-isast on behalf of the art, science,technology network _____________________________________________________________ contents: editorial: paul brown inet art contests: richard kadrey assets '94: ephraim p. glinert ars electronica center: christian.bauer blast magazine bonn exhibition: akke wagenaar carnival in isea94 j. a. mannis chaos in wonderland: cliff pickover new arts-related listserv: steve schrum 11) ---------------------------------------------------------------- genders ann kibbey, editor university of colorado, boulder since 1988, genders has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, genders continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. genders is published triannually in spring, fall, winter single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 12) ---------------------------------------------------------------- hott hot off the tree hott -hot off the tree -is a free monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including vr (virtual reality), neural networks, pdas (personal digital assistants), guis (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing. summaries are provided from the following sources: wall street journal, new york times, los angeles times, washington post, san jose mercury news, boston globe, financial times (london) ... time, newsweek, u.s. news & world report ... business week, forbes, fortune, the economist (london), nikkei weekly (tokyo), asian wall street journal (hong kong) ... over 50 trade magazines, including computerworld, infoworld, datamation, computer retail week, dr. dobb's journal, lan times, communications week, pc world, new media, var business, midrange systems, byte ... over 50 research journals, including all publications of the ieee computer and communications societies, plus technical journals published by at&t, ibm, hewlett packard, fujitsu, sharp, ntt, siemens, philips, gec ... over 100 internet mailing lists & usenet discussion groups ... plus ... listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books; listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences; company advertorials, including ceo perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements. bonus: exclusive interviews with technology pioneers ... the next two issues feature interviews with mark weiser (head of xerox parc's computer science lab) on ubiquitous computing, and nobel laureate joshua lederberg on the information society to request a free subscription, carefully follow the instructions below send subscription requests to: listserv@ucsd.edu leave the "subject" line blank in the body of the message input: subscribe hott-list if at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: unsubscribe hott-list note: do not include first or last names following "subscribe hott-list" or "unsubscribe hott-list" the hott mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the university of california at san diego. the system automatically responds to the sender's return path. hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at ucsd. (i cannot make modifications to the list ... nor do i have access to the list.) for your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. if you have problems and require human intervention, contact: hott@ucsd.edu david scott lewis editor-in-chief and book & video review editor ieee engineering management review (the world's largest circulation "high tech" management journal) internet address:d.s.lewis@ieee.org tel: +1 714 662 7037 usps mailing address: pob 18438 irvine ca 92713-8438 usa 13) -------------------------------------------------------------- information technology and disabilities announcing a new electronic journal: information technology and disabilities below is information about the journal, as well as information on editorial staff and explicit instructions for subscribing or using the journal via gopher. editor-in-chief: tom mcnulty, new york university (mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu) editors: dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla daniel hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university editorial board: dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla danny hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology alistair d. n. edwards, phd, university of york, uk joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va lawrence a. scadden, phd, national science foundation bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university about easi (equal access to software and information): since its founding in 1988 under the educom umbrella, easi has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. volunteers from easi have been instrumental in the establishment of information technology and disabilities as still another step in this process. our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. we seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. easi makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists: easi@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a general discussion on computer access) and axslib-l@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a discussion on library access issues). to join either list, send a "subscribe" command to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. easi also maintains several items on the st. johns gopher under the menu heading "disability and rehabilitation resources". for further information, contact the easi chair, norman coombs, ph.d. nrcgsh@ritvax.isc.rit.edu, or the easi office: easi's phone: (310) 640-3193 easi's e-mail: easi@educom.edu individual itd articles and departments are archived on the st. john's university gopher. to access the journal via gopher, locate the st. john's university (new york) gopher. select "disability and rehabilitation resources," and from the next menu, select "easi: equal access to software and information." information technology and disabilities is an item on the easi menu. to retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu leave subject line blank the message text should include the word "get" followed by the two word file name; for example: get itdv01n1 contents each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. do not include the parentheses with the filename when sending the "get" command to listserv. note: only one item may be retrieved per message; do not send multiple get commands in a single e-mail message to listserv. to receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and either of the following lines of text: subscribe itd-toc "firstname lastname" subscribe idt-jnl "firstname lastname" (itd-jnl is the entire journal in one e-mail message while itd-toc sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.) to get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and the following single line of text: get author guidelin 14) --------------------------------------------------------------- inter-society for the electronic arts isea is the inter-society for the electronic arts. isea coordinates the continued occurence of the international symposia on electronic art (the isea symposia). 1988: utrecht, holland 1990: groningen, holland 1992: sydney, australia 1993: minneapolis, usa 1994: helsinki, finland 1995: montreal, canada isea publishes a monthly newsletter, both electronically and as a hard copy. associate membership is free of charge for one year. anyone interrested in membership info, aims and a sample newsletter, contact isea@sara.nl greetings, wim van der plas isea board 15) --------------------------------------------------------------- leonardo now published by the mit press beginning with the 1993 volume, the mit press became publisher of leonardo. a scholarly bimonthly, the journal is the official publication of leonardo/the international society for the arts, sciences and technology (isast). over twenty-five years ago leonardo's founding editor established it to provide an international channel of communication between artists, particularly those who used science and developing technologies in their creations. today, leonardo is a leading journal for anyone interested in the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts and music. it currently reaches over 2,000 readers worldwide. leonardo primarily focuses on interactions between the visual arts, science and technology. the journal also covers media, music, kinetic art, performance art, language, environmental and conceptual art, computers and artificial intelligence, and legal, economic, and political aspects of art as these areas relate to the visual arts or use the tools and ideas of contemporary science and technology. leonardo features editorials, illustrated articles by artists writing about their own work, historical and theoretical perspectives, reviews, technical articles, resource directories, art/science forums, and sound/music technology explorations. past articles include "mathematics for the garden of the mind," and "orchestrating digital micromovies." frequently, leonardo presents special issues on state-of-the-art developments: art and social consciousness (published october 1993) art and virtual reality (published august 1994). subscribers can also get the companion annual leonardo music journal, which comes with a cd and features the latest in music, multimedia art, sound science, and technology. in september 1993, the mit press began publishing leonardo/isast's leonardo electronic almanac, a monthly, edited electronic journal and electronic archive, world-wide web server, and mosaic server accessible via the internet. leonardo electronic almanac documents the use of new scientific and technological media in the contemporary arts. about the executive editors leonardo's executive editor, roger f. malina--son of the journal's founding editor, frank j. malina--is an astronomer at the center for extreme ultraviolet astrophysics, university of california, berkeley, and an author on art and technology issues. leonardo electronic almanac's executiveeditor, craig harris, is a composer, multimedia artist, educator, and researcher of the impact of new technologies on future creative environments. review copies are available at the discretion of the publisher. published bimonthly, leonardo journal annual subscription rates (5 issues plus 1 leonardo music journal issue) are $65.00 for individuals, $320.00 for institutions, and $45.00 for students and retired persons. published monthly, leonardo electronic almanac annual subscription rates are $15 for leonardo journal subscribers and $25 for non-leonardo journal subscribers. prices subject to change without notice. for ordering information, contact the mit press journals circulation department,(617) 253-2889 (phone), (617) 258-6779 (fax), or journals-orders@mit.edu. 16) -------------------------------------------------------------- m/e/a/n/i/n/g a journal of contemporary art issues ] m/e/a/n/i/n/g, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts. m/e/a/n/i/n/g is published twice a year in the fall and spring. it is edited by susan bee and mira schor. subscriptions for 2 issues (1 year): $12 for individuals: $20 for institutions 4 issues (2 years): $24 for individuals; $40 for institutions foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to canada: $5 foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in u.s. dollars. all checks should be made payable to mira schor send all subscriptions to: mira schor 60 lispenard street new york, ny 10013 limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact mira schor for information. distributed with the segue foundation and the solo foundation 17) -------------------------------------------------------------- minnesota review tell your friends! tell your librarians! the new minnesota review's coming to town! subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new minnesota review is published biannually and originates from east carolina university beginning with the fall 1992 special issue. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams, editor minnesota review department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 18) -------------------------------------------------------------- modern fiction studies mfs, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, announces the following special issues: february, 39.1: "fiction of the indian subcontinent" may, 39.3: "toni morrison" november, 40.1: "the cultural politics of displacement" barbara harlow, guest editor mfs is published quarterly at purdue university and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and ibm-compatible floppy; please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. send submissions to: patric o'donnell editor mfs department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at pod@purccvm (bitnet); pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (internet) subscriptions to mfs are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. back issues are $7 each. address subscription inquiries to: nel fink circulation manager mfs department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 19) -------------------------------------------------------------- mtv killed kurt cobain announcing the publication of a mini-multimedia 'zine, mtv killed kurt cobain, with text, graphic, and sound resource. mtv killed kc was written and directed by mark amerika and produced by bobby rabyd for alternative-x, an electronic publishing enterprise at marketplace.com as alternative-x mtv killed kurt cobain can be ftp'd from: ftp.brown.edu in the directory /pub/bobby_rabyd it is in storyspace reader format, a standalone hypermedia template for the macintosh. send queries to st001747@brownvm.brown.edu (bobby rabyd) 20) -------------------------------------------------------------- nomad an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields! nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. it is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. while our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, nomad strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls. manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. if possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5" macintosh disks, in either microsoft word or macwrite ii format, or by e-mail. each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and in black and white. pict, tiff, gif, and jpeg files on 3.5" macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via e-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). all artwork must be camera-ready. submissions by regular mail should include a sase with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages. subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues) send manuscripts and inquiries to: nomad, c/o mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, florida, 32306 msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu 21) -------------------------------------------------------------- october art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year-old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, october focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join october's exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! published quarterly issn 0162-2870. yearly rates: individual $32.00; institution $80.00; student (copy of current id required) and retired: $22.00. outside usa add $14.00 postage and handling. canadians add additional 7% gst. prepayment is required. send check payable to october drawn against a us bank, mastercard or visa number to: mit press journal / 55 hayward street / cambridge, ma 02142-1399 / tel: (617) 233-2889 / fax: (617) 258-6779 / journals-orders@mit.edu 22) -------------------------------------------------------------- representations new ventures in humanities scholarship published by the university of california press ". . . widely recognized as among the most innovative outlets for work in literary criticism, art history, and cultural history." --ludmilla jordanova, social history of medicine representations is a quarterly interdisciplinary forum offering imaginative and challenging approaches to the study of culture. since 1983, representations has devoted its pages to ground-breaking critical thought. subscription information $33 individuals $23 students (with copy of id) $62 institutions (add $9.00 for foreign surface postage) send orders to: representations university of california press 2120 berkeley way berkeley ca 94720 order by phone (510/642-4191) fax (510/642-9917 journals@garnet.berkeley.edu prices subject to change 23) -------------------------------------------------------------- revista alicantina de estudios ingleses editor emeritus pedro jesus marcos perez editors enrique alcaraz varo jose antonio alvarez amoros (alvarez@vm.cpd.ua.es) the revista alicantina de estudios ingleses is a well-established international journal intended to provide a forum for debate and an outlet for research involving all aspects of english studies. it welcomes articles from a wide range of fields and from scholars throughout the world. the revista alicantina de estudios ingleses is considered the standard spanish journal in its field and it reflects the state of english scholarship in spain and in other european countries. send contributions (essays or reviews recorded on wordperfect 5.1 or later), books for review, and subscription queries to jose antonio alvarez amorls, department of english, university of alicante, p.o. box 99, e-03080 alicante, spain. we are also happy to make exchange arrangements with other journals in the field of the humanities. send your proposals to the above address. 24) -------------------------------------------------------------- r h e t n e t a cyberjournal for rhetoric and writing rhetnet philosophy: there are numerous places to talk on the internet, and scholars in all fields are there (and there and there and there) pouring forth rivers of words. amid the inevitable and voluptuous mundanity of those conversations reside moments of discovery, the fiery and spontaneous generation of knowledge, and even wisdom. these conversations, or parts of them, are worth saving and savoring. if we look at all of literature, including scholarly publication, as being one long, vast, intricate and diverse conversation, then the discussion online can be seen as part of the same discourse. the conversation is migrating to a new media, but the means of (attempting to) provide coherence are still developing. rhetnet is an effort to adapt the functions of academic print journals to the new environment. journals simultaneously serve as the medium of conversationand the repository for knowledge. rhetnet serves those purposes, but takes the shape of its native environment: cyberspace. the project is both radical and conservative. rhetnet provides rhetoric and internet students and scholars with the means of capturing, contextualizing, searching, and retrieving some of the intriguing and valuable conversations that occur on various parts of the net, but which currently lie scattered and forgotten in dusty corners of the virtual world. it provides a repository of netscholarship on rhetoric and writing. we envision it as a decentered, organic repository for all the stuff of the net that is of interest to the rhetoric and writing community, while also including space for various traditional types of scholarly discourse. a listserv list, rhetnt-l@mizzou1.bitnet, has been created to serve this effort, initially as a place to conduct asynchronous discussions about the project. the list is managed by eric crump. to subscribe, send email to listserv@mizzou1.bitnet or listserv@mizzou1.missouri.edu leave the subject line blank and in the first line of the note, put: sub rhetnt-l your name anyone who has trouble subscribing should write to eric at lceric@mizzou1.bitnet or lceric@mizzou1.missouri.edu 25) -------------------------------------------------------------- rif/t rif/t, the electronic poetics journal, is interested in receiving proposals and/or submissions for a forthcoming special issue on charles olson. inquiries may be sent to: e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu rif/t is edited by kenneth sherwood and loss glazier 26) -------------------------------------------------------------- sscore social science computer review g. david garson, editor ronald anderson, co-editor the official journal of the social science computing association, sscore provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. now, when you subscribe to social science computer review, you automatically become a member of the social science computing association. quarterly subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions. single issue: $20. please add $8 for postage outside the u.s. (canadian residents add 7% gst) duke university press/ journals division / box 90660 /durham nc 27708 27) -------------------------------------------------------------- studies in popular culture dennis hall, editor. studies in popular culture, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292 please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. studies in popular culture is published semiannually and is indexed in the pmla annual bibliography. all members of the association receive studies in popular culture. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to: the executive secretary diane calhoun-french academic dean jefferson community college-sw louisville, ky 40272 for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes i-xv are available for $225.00. 28) -------------------------------------------------------------- tdr the journal of performance studies ...you may have never heard of us, yet you may be interested in... _____________________________________________________________ ______ ______ ______ ######| ######\ ######\ ##| ##| ##\ ##|__##| ##| ##| ##| ######/ ##| ##|__##/ ##| ##\ ___________________ ##| ######/ ##| ##\____________________ -the journal of performance studies t142 (summer 1994) - tdr is a quarterly journal that explores the diverse world of performance. how does this relate to you? the journal emphasizes the intercultural, inter-disciplinary and spans numerous geographical areas and historical periods. tdr addresses performance issues of every kind: theatre, music dance, entertainment, media, sports, politics, aesthetics of everyday life, games, play and ritual. tdr is for people in the performing arts, the social sciences, academics, activists and theorists -anyone interested in thinking about the "performance" paradigm. the journal is edited by richard schechner of the department of performance studies, new york university, and is published quarterly by the mit press. although tdr is not yet an electronic journal, you can browse through sample articles available on-line through the electronic newsstand and order via e-mail from the mit press. for subscription prices and ordering information, contact the publisher: mit press journals 55 hayward street cambridge, ma 02142 tel: 617-253-2889 fax: 617-258-6779 email: journals-orders@mit.edu or, access the mit press online catalog: telnet techinfo.mit.edu, under around mit/mit press/journals/arts/ or via gopher by typing "gopher gopher.mit.edu". to browse through an article from our current issue, logon to the the electronic newsstand: via telnet: gopher.internet.com (login name: enews). via gopher: gopher.internet.com (port 2100). via the gopher menu, go to: north america/usa/general/the electronic newsstand/all titles/ tdr: the drama review 29) -------------------------------------------------------------- tonguing the zeitgeist a new novel by lance olsen so you want to be a rock'n'roll star? in a tomorrow that isn't distant enough, you'll have to sell your soul to mtv to pick up a guitar. and then they'll start carving you up, making you over in the mega-media image of glitter and bone.... lance olsen's many other books include the novel live from earth and the first full-length study of the godfather of cyberpunk, william gibson. his work has appeared in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, among them mondo 2000, vls, and fiction international. to order: permeable press 4 7 noe street, suite 4 san francisco, ca 94114 bcclark@igc.apc.org isbn 1-882633-04-0, $11.95 30) -------------------------------------------------------------- virus 23 for those brave souls looking to explore the secret of eris, you may wish to check out virus 23. 2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd. virus 23 is a codename for all erisian literature don webb 6304 laird dr. austin tx 78757 0004200716@mcimail.com virus 23 is the annual hardcopy publication of a.d.o.s.a, the alberta department of spiritual affairs. all issues are available at $7.00 ppd from: virus 23 box 46 red deer, alberta canada t4n 5e7 various chunks of virus 23 can be found at tim oerting's alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. check it out). for more information online contact: darren wershler-henry grad3057@writer.yorku.ca 31) -------------------------------------------------------------- vivid the first issue of vivid magazine is now available. vivid is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. we are actively seeking contributions for the next issue. the magazine ispresented in the colorful, graphics environment of a windows 3.1 help file. you will need windows 3.1 to read the magazine. the magazine will also be availablevia anonymous ftp at "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it: ftp ftp.gmu.edu username: anonymous password: (your email address) cd pub/library binary get vivid1.zip for more information on vivid, contact the editor, justin mchale. internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu 32) -------------------------------------------------------------- zines-l announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to zines-l send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name 33) -------------------------------------------------------------- postmodern culture's pmc-moo pmc-moo is a service offered (free of charge) by postmodern culture. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can meet others interested in postmodernism and participate in poetry slams, conferences, and other special events. pmc-moo has its own mailing lists on postmodern literature and theory. to connect to pmc-moo, you must be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet hero.village.virginia.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. note: if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. no special client software is required to use pmc-moo, but clients can make it easier to participate. for a sample client-based login, telnet to hero.village.virginia.edu and give "pmcdemo" as your login i.d. (hit "enter" when prompted for a password). 34) ------------------------------------------------------------- cultural cartographies call for submissions for graduate student conference cultural cartographies: mapping the postcolonial moment march, 24 26, 1995 postcolonial theory is at a crossroads in both its academic and political receptions. this conference intends to map interdisciplinary approaches to postcoloniality--textual, theoretical, political. exploring problems of nationhood, ethnicity, historicity, intertextuality and subjectivity will help us to interrogate existing models of postcoloniality and, perhaps, devise alternative ones. we welcome papers, creative manuscripts, and panel proposals that exhibit a variety of critical and literary engagements with postcolonial discourse. panels may be specific to a national or regional literature, to a single author or theorist, to political movements as they are refigured textually, to representations of gender and race, and to the applicability of eurocentric theory to non-eurocentric texts. creative reading sessions may be organized by genre, by theme, and by formal strategies. conference features include a creative reading by novelist bapsi sidhwa, author of cracking india, and an address by c. rhonda cobham-sander, professor at amherst college and research fellow at the national humanities center. in addition, the best graduate paper will recieve a $100 prize, sponsored by postmodern culture. please send or email a detailed 1 2 page abstract by december 2, 1994 to: jonathan beasley egjob@unity.ncsu.edu or david hatfield baffle@unity.ncsu.edu please send or email creative work by december 2, 1994 to: caitlin cary ccary@unity.ncsu.edu english department tompkins hall, box 8105 north carolina state university raleigh, nc 27695-8105 35) ------------------------------------------------------------- afritech '95 electronic conference the afritech list is now available for use by prospective registrants for the afritech '95 electronic conference. the list will serve as the point of registration for the conference, keep prospective participants up to date, and provide a forum for input into the development and administration of the conference, scheduled for january 20-22, 1995. see announcement below for details on the conference and for joining the list. "science, technology, and african-americans: perspectives and issues for cross-disciplinary debate" january 20-22, 1995. afritech '95 will provide an opportunity for participants to engage in two-and-a-half days of cross disciplinary debate and discussion on a variety of topics related to technology and the african american experience. researchers, educators, and practitioners will be able to interact with participants from around the world by signing on to different discussion groups within the conference, from home or office. this conference is sponsored by the planning committee for the mid-year electronic conference of the "technology and the african-american experience workshop group." the first annual international workshop on "technology and the african-american experience" was held last may 20-22, 1994, at howard university, washington, dc. the workshop was planned to bring together those who were doing research, or interested in doing research on the following topics: workplace technology and workers; urban infrastructure and transportation engineering; environmental justice; health and medicine; engineering and engineering education; computers, communication and information technologies; inventors and inventing; unexplored research frontiers in technology; issues of public policy, politics; and government involvement with technology. the mid-year electronic conference will focus on these same topics and registrants will be able to present papers and/or participate in the conference at the following levels: area chair, panel chair, panelist or discussant, presenter of a paper, or to just attend. the afritech list will serve as the communication source keeping prospective participants informed and up-to-date on the development of panels for the conference, registration, and provide a forum for input into the development and administration of the conference. joining the list will also establish a preregistration list for participating in the conference. please feel free to notify your colleagues of this list and invite them to subscribe. in addition to subscribing to the list, participants will also need to decide ona preferred level of participation for the electronic conference. papers, abstracts and levels of participation should be submitted according to the following deadline dates, after subscribing to the list: area and panel chairs: committed by september 24, 1994 presenters of papers: submit topics by october 7, 1994 discussants (panelists): committed by october 7, 1994 abstracts of papers: submitted by december 10, 1994 other attendees: late registration ends, december 20, 1994. to subscribe to the list and receive further details on both the conference and the list, send an e-mail message to: listserv@cms.cc.wayne.edu with the message: subscribe afritech as the only line in the body of the message (without the brackets). if you have questions about the list of the electronic conference send an e-mail message to rosie l. albritton (list-owner and chair of the planning committee for the electronic conference) at ralbrit@waynest1(or) ralbrit@cms.cc.wayne.edu, or see phone and fax numbers listed below. rosie l. albritton, ph.d. assistant professor library & information science kresge library 106 wayne state university detroit, michigan 48202-3939 phone: (313) 577-6203 fax: (313) 577-4172 36) ------------------------------------------------------------- convergence: art, culture and the national information infrastructure dear colleague: a critical time is at hand for the institutions that hold our artistic and cultural heritage, the individuals who create it, and everyone who would benefit from those resources. we are on the threshold of a leap in communications similar in scope to the advent of electricity and the introduction of the telephone. in a just-over-the-horizon information landscape of almost unlimited potential, policies and legislation that are being debated today, will determine, quite possibly for decades to come, just how much territory one has access to, how easily, how often, and at what cost. but the rate at which these decisions are being made may leave the arts and humanities at the periphery, just at the moment when the stresses on our society beg for them to be returned to the center. on october 14-16, 1994, the center for art research, in cooperation with the new art center and the mit artificial intelligence laboratory, is organizing a professionally-facilitated three-day conference at the american academy of arts and sciences in cambridge, massachusetts, on the subject of "arts and humanities policy agendas for the national information infrastructure." the format of the conference will be that of an open, ongoing, managed conversation. a highly-skilled issue-neutral facilitator will foster a collaborative process and insure that all ideas that surface in the open forum are woven into the ongoing conversation. a conference of this type encourages participation, communication, and results. "convergence" will offer an unprecedented opportunity for focusing and advocacy, and a chance to help forge enlightened telecommunications-policy in cooperation with major cultural, political and technological stakeholders. the next eighteen months will see crucial telecommunications-policy decisions being made. we hope you will be able to attend the conference and participate in the process. sincerely, jay lee jaroslav, director center for art research information infrastructure project mit artificial intelligence laboratory cambridge, massachusetts additional information if you wish to receive complete convergence printed materials, including a poster/brochure and list of participants, please contact the convergence conference office the new art center box 300 / 61 washington park newtonville, ma 02160 usa tel. (617) 964-3424 fax. (617) 630-0081 internet: conf@nac.tiac.net if you wish to register immediately, fill out the registration form that follows the information request form. the world wide web url for the convergence conference is: http://www.ai.mit.edu/events/convergence/convergence-main.html jay lee jaroslav, director (jaroslav@ai.mit.edu) center for art research information infrastructure project mit artificial intelligence laboratory 545 technology sqare, room ne43-795 cambridge, ma 02139-4301 617.253.5814 37) ------------------------------------------------------------- cwrl computers, writing, rhetorics and literature/learning. the hypertexan e-journal of the computer writing & research lab at the university of texas at austin. editor: john slatin assistant editors: michael davis, mafalda stasi, greg vanhoosiercarey, susan warshauer. as the title implies, the main topics of this electronic journal will be issues of textual production in electronic media and the relocation of humanities in a cyberspace community; with particular attention to the pedagogical aspects of all of the above. starting from may 1994, cwrl will be available for anonymous ftp at the university of texas gopher gopherhost.cc.utexas.edu, port 70. (sut-austin/ut gopher test labs/drc division of rhetoric and composition ftp area). together with the latest issue, there will be abstracts of older articles. those older issues will be sent through e-mail by request, or will be available via anonymous ftp from the next machine at the lab. (at your e-mail address prompt, type ftp auden.en.utexas.edu; log on as anonymous; for your password write your e-mail address. go into the appropriate directory by typing cd pub, then cd cwrl. type get to import whatever article file you want. logout by typing bye). article submission is open to all: the editors will select the most interesting and relevant articles for publication. a copy of this statement and call for papers will be posted to the internet and to several mailing lists, and also will be available at our gopher site, together with the guidelines for publication format. the formatting style will be the same as that used by pmc and other established e-journals in the field (see immediately below). please try and limit yourselves to 5000 words. the authors will also have to include a 300-words abstract of their article. please send articles and queries to: cwrl@auden.en.utexas.edu. the submission deadline for the first issue is april 15, 1994. copyright is retained by the author. pmc submission guidelines: 'essay documentation should follow the current mla format, using parenthetical documentation with notes reserved for discursive text. because underlining, bold-facing, and other text-formatting features are not available in this medium (at present), pmc uses the following conventions: _underlining_ *boldfacing* %italics% ^superscript^ (for note numbers) because there are no pages in electronic text, we use paragraph numbers, set off to the left of the paragraph indentation. we format essays with a five-space left-hand margin to accomodate paragraph numbers, single-spaced lines, and sixty characters of text per line (which allows the margin plus the line to fit in a standard 65-character word-processing line)'. 38) ------------------------------------------------------------- einstein meets magritte an interdisciplinary reflection on science, nature, human action and society conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the vrije universiteit brussel may 29 / june 3, brussels, belgium never before has humanity made such an attempt as now to take its fate into its own hands (science and technology). the increasing speed of current global changes, however, leads to a sense of disorientation. need this paradox be resolved, and if so, can it be dealt with from a perception that knowledge and actions lead to ever larger fragmentation? different attitudes prevail, involving respectively: (1) an attempt to reconstitute a form of unity, often projecting the hope that the alleged unwanted effects of scientific and technological progress will become comprehensible and eventually controllable; (2) a relativist attitude, depicting the modern worldview, with its instruments and products (western science and technology), as one among many conceivable,and probably not the most desirable, course for humanity. each of these attitudes tends to portray the other as a caricature. 'relativists' stigmatize attempts at unification as dictatorial, unfeasible and naive. relativism, in its turn, is said to lead anywhere and nowhere at all. the aim of the conference is to gather scholars from different domains, inviting them to set up a dialogue between the above attitudes, and integrate the more relevant insights of both into a new perspective on global change. we have taken up the two myths of albert einstein and rene magritte, because we believe that where they 'meet' some significant clues might be revealed. how does science (producing knowledge and technology) confront art (producing revelations and sensations)? do we have to oppose life 'within object' (the conscious ordering of the physical and social world, symbolized in 'einstein') to a form of life 'beyond object' (symbolized in the imagery of magritte)? tentative list of invited speakers: zygmunt bauman, leeds university, united kingdom. rosi braidotti, university of utrecht, the netherlands. bob edwards, cambridge university. united kingdom. murray gell-mann, caltech and santa fe institute, usa. adolf grunbaum, university of pittsburgh, usa. jurgen habermas, university of frankfurt, germany. douglas hofstadter, indiana university, usa. julian jaynes, princeton university, usa. daniel koshland, university of california, berkeley, usa niklas luhman, university of bielefeld, germany. constantin piron, university of geneva, switserland. michel serres, sorbonne-stanford, france. isabelle stengers, university of brussels, belgium. zeev sternhell, hebrew university of jerusalem, israel. bas van fraassen, princeton university, usa. francisco j. varela, ecole polytechnique in paris, france. james watson, cold spring harbor laboratory, new york, usa four workshops will be held during the conference on the following themes: 1. science, society and the university. 2. the nature of life (and death). 3. a world in transition. 4. worldviews and the problem of synthesis. conference proceedings "einstein meets magritte : an nterdisciplinary eflection on science, nature, human action and society", will be published, including contributions of participants. anyone wishing to take part in the conference, or to receive a second announcement containing a more complete programme, should fill in the reply form and return it to us. conference secretary: linda dasseville dinf, vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, 1050 brussels, belgium. tel: 32 2 629 34 90, fax: 32 2 629 34 95, e-mail: einmag@vub.ac.be for more information concerning the 'scientific aspect' of the conference contact: diederik aerts tena,vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, 1050 brussels, belgium tel: 32 2 629 32 39 or 32 15 22 07 05 fax: 32 2 629 22 76 or 32 15 22 51 98 e-mail: diraerts@vub.ac.be or: christiaan sybesma, biof,vrije universiteit brussel, pleinlaan 2, 1050 brussels, belgium tel: 32 2 629 32 69 e-mail: csybesma@vnet3.vub.ac.be the conference is part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the 'vrije universiteit brussel', which was founded in 1969 as a separate university from the 'universite libre de bruxelles'. it is co-organised by clea, an interdisciplinary research centre at this university investigating the possible ways of integrating different worldviews. 39) ------------------------------------------------------------- electronic journal of communication/la revue electronique de communication submissions are invited for an issue of the electronic journal of communication/la revue electronique de communication on: "the role of rhetoric in contemporary society" rhetoric may be viewed as a means for accomplishing goals within the constraints of society. therefore, as society changes, rhetorical theory and practice should also evolve. among the most important changes in today's social world are innovations in new communication technologies (such as cellular telephones, cable television, and computer networking), global political and ecconomic realignments following the fall of communism, renewed focus on domestic concerns at the federal level, and heightened cultural fragmentation. accordingly, this issue is devoted to exploring the role rhetoric plays in our changing contemporary society. although this topic may be interpreted in a variety of ways, three particular approaches are suggested. first, essays may adopt a conceptual approach to address the role of rhetoric in contemporary society, reflecting on the nature and function of rhetorical practice or theory in today's society. second, manuscripts may address the rhetorical possibilities and effects of the recent explosion of electronic media (e.g., television, cable, cd-roms, e-mail). third, papers may critically analyze particular instances of situated rhetorical discourse in the 1990's. questions regarding the appropriateness of a potential submission may be directed to the special issue editor. all submissions must be received in electronic form (ascii text file over bitnet/internet or by dos disk) by the special issue editor by december 2, 1994. (it is not possible to process submissions on paper or by fax; individuals wishing to send papers on mac disks should contact the special issue editor.) all essays will be blind reviewed. specific submissions guidelines may be obtained from the special issue editor. william l. benoit special issue editor, electronic journal of communication/la revue electronique de communication commwlb@mizzou1 (bitnet) / commwlb@mizzou1.missouri.edu (internet) department of communication--115 switzler university of missouri, columbia columbia, mo 65211 (314) 882-0545 (314) 882-4431 40) ------------------------------------------------------------- call for papers feminist economics feminist economics, journal of the international association for feminist economics. feminist economics is a new and innovative journal dedicated to developing an interdisciplinary discourse on feminist perspectives on economics and the economy. the first issue of the journal, which will be published by routledge, will appear in early 1995. the journal solicits high quality contributions from a broad spectrum of intellectual traditions in economics. the journal also welcomes contributions which treat economic issues from cross-disciplinary perspectives, including work in anthropology, cultural studies, critical race theory, gender studies, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, post-colonial studies, public health, psychology, science, technology and society studies, and sociology. specifically, feminist economics seeks submissions which: advance feminist inquiry into economic issues affecting the lives of women, men, and children; provide a feminist rethinking of theory and policy in diverse subfields and related areas of economics, including those not directly related to gender; provide insights into the relationship between gender and power relations in the economy and in the construction and legitimation of economic knowledge; extend feminist theoretical, historical, and methodological insights into economics and the economy; provide feminist insights into the underlying constructs of the economics discipline and into the historical, political, and cultural context of economic knowledge. the journal also welcomes very short essays of 1000 to 1500 words on topical theoretical, methodological and policy issues as well as comments on previously published articles. authors should submit five (5) typewritten double-spaced copies of their manuscripts (in english) and an abstract of no more than 200 words. (for those based outside of north america, western europe, australia, and new zealand, authors may submit three (3) rather than five copies of their manuscripts.) manuscripts must be original and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. while the title of the paper should appear on the first page of the manuscript, in the interests of double-blind reviewing, the author's name and address should not be included in the text. author's information should be given on a separate accompanying page together with the title. articles should be written as clearly and as concisely as possible, with the goal of broad accessibility to an audience of economists, scholars in related fields, and feminists concerned with economic issues. all manuscripts should be sent to: diana strassmann, editor, feminist economics ms 9, rice university, 6100 main street, houston, texas 77005-1892; (713) 527-4660; dls@rice.edu 41) ------------------------------------------------------------- gates requests for contributions gates is a new international journal promoting greater access to technology, engineering and science. the first issue was published recently. contributions are sought for issue 2, due out at the end of the year, and future issues. journal focus: gates is directed to professionals committed to creating greater access to technology, engineering and science. the journal focuses on groups who are currently under-represented in education and employment in these areas, with a particular emphasis on women, people with disabilities, and people from minority ethnic backgrounds. this list is suggestive only, and articles relating to any group underrepresented in these disciplines will be considered for publication. the contents may be of interest to educators and careers advisers at the primary, secondary and post-secondary levels, parents, employers, and members of these under-represented groups. the journal is dedicated to advancing knowledge and to providing a forum for public debate on questions of access to technology, engineering and science. sections of the journal: gates publishes research articles, literature reviews, case studies of successful interventions, and descriptions of events and new resource materials. the journal is divided into three sections. the first section contains refereed articles describing original research or reviews of research. manuscripts are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has not previously been published in a peer review journal, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. each article will be forwarded to two reviewers from an international panel of reviewers. acceptance or rejection will depend on the reviewers' reports. relevant comments will be forwarded anonymously to the first author. the second section of the journal contains descriptions of case studies. the third section provides constructive comments on issues raised by authors of refereed articles, summaries of interviews, reviews of new books and other resources, announcements of conferences, and any matters which may be of interest to readers. contributions are welcomed for any of the three sections. contributions can be sent to the editors gates deakin university victoria 3217 australia fax: +61 52 27 2028 email: gates@deakin.edu.au further information regarding presentation and submission of manuscripts can be obtained from these addresses or by anonymous ftp from pub/gates at rana.deakin.edu.au subscribers and sponsors are welcomed also. the individual annual subscription rate is aud25 (australia) and aud30 (overseas), approximately us$23, and the institutional rates are double the individual rates. 42) ------------------------------------------------------------- hypertext fiction and the literary artist hypertext fiction and the literary artist is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: hypertext fiction and the literary artist 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 keepc@qucd>queensu.ca 43) ------------------------------------------------------------- the journal of criminal justice and popular culture call for papers scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria: issues: the journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. the journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice. submission procedures: to submit material for the journal, please subscribe to cjmovies through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow. to subscribe, send a message with the following command to: listserv@albnyvm1: subscribe cjmovies yourfirstname yourlastname: manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: the editors journal of criminal justice and popular culture sunycrj@albnyvm1.bitnet or sunycrj@uacsc2.albany.edu managing editors: sean anderson and greg ungar editors journal of criminal justice and popular culture school of criminal justice, sunya 135 western avenue albany, ny 12222 internet: sa1171@albnyvm1.bitnet or gu8810@uacsc1.albany.edu list administrator: seth rosner school of criminal justice, suny sr2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or sr2602@thor.albany.edu 44) ------------------------------------------------------------- eighth international kant congress with "kant and the problem of peace" march 1-5, 1995 memphis, tennessee usa the kant-gesellschaft e.v. (bonn) has authorized the university of memphis, in collaboration with the north american kant society, to host the eighth international kant congress. the congress will be held march 1-5, 1995 in the crowne plaza hotel, memphis, tennessee, usa, in conjunction with the featured conference series, ``kant and the problem of peace.'' opening session welcoming ceremonies: representatives of the kant-gesellschaft, the north american kant society, the university of memphis, the city of memphis, the state of tennessee, the united states of america and the federal republic of germany. opening addresses: mary gregor (san diego state); jules vuillemin (paris). kant and the problem of peace symposium topics: freedom; religion; history; law; government; society; morality; politics. speakers include: henry allison (san diego), shlomo avineri (jerusalem), reinhard brandt (marburg), sharon byrd (augsburg), jean ferrari (dijon), george fletcher (columbia), georg geismann (munich), volker gerhardt (berlin), paul guyer (pennsylvania), joachim hruschka (erlangen),`jan joerden (frankfurt/oder), leonid kalinnikov (kaliningrad), wolfgang kersting (hannover), pauline kleingeld (st. louis), pierre laberge (ottawa), bernd ludwig (munich), rudolf makkreel (emory), jeffrey murphy (arizona state), onora o'neill (cambridge), francoise proust ( paris), patrick riley (wisconsin/harvard), ludwig siep (muenster), ernest weinrib (toronto), reiner wimmer (tuebingen), allen wood (cornell). kantian themes symposium topics: mathematics; psychology; logic; deduction; pre-history; dialectic; science; opus postumum; phenomenology; kantians; ethics; aesthetics; teleology; space; hegel; 3rd critique; critical theory; kant research today. speakers include: karl ameriks (notre dame), richard aquila (tennessee), john atwell (temple), marcia baron (illinois-urbana), manfred baum (wuppertal), graham bird (manchester), james bohman (st. louis), daniel breazeale (kentucky), vladimir bryushinkin (kaliningrad), jill buroker (san bernardino), robert butts (western ontario), mario caimi (buenos aires), wolfgang carl (goettingen), martin carrier (heidelberg), bernd doerflinger (mainz), stephen engstrom (pittsburgh), eckard foerster (stanford), christel fricke (heidelberg), michael friedman (chicago), ludger honnefelder (bonn), rolf-peter horstmann (munich), stephen houlgate (depaul), fumiyasu ishikawa (sendai), klaus kaehler (cologne), patricia kitcher (san diego), jane kneller (colorado state), manfred kuehn (purdue), rudolf langthaler (vienna), claudio la rocca (pisa), beatrice longuenesse (princeton), rudolf malter (mainz), francois marty (paris), thomas mccarthy (northwestern), ralf meerbote (rochester), j. n. mohanty (temple), susan neiman (yale), frederick neuhouser (harvard), jean petitot (paris), robert pippin (chicago), carl posy (duke), gian-carlo rota (mit), walter schaller (texas tech), dennis schmidt (villanova), sally sedgwick (dartmouth), thomas seebohm (mainz), nancy sherman (georgetown), david stern (toledo, ohio), dieter sturma (lueneburg), roger sullivan (south carolina), burkhard tuschling (marburg), james van cleve (brown), michael young (kansas), guenter zoeller (iowa). the rawls legacy speakers include: barbara herman (southern california), thomas hill (chapel hill), christine korsgaard (harvard), susan neiman (yale), john rawls (harvard), andrews reath (raleigh). kant reception in eastern europe speakers include: karol bal (wroclaw), leonid kalinnikov (kaliningrad), rado riha (ljubljana), leonid stolovich (tartu), andrei sudakov (moscow). kant reception in asia speakers include: arindan chakrabarti (delhi), golam dastagir (dhaka), steven palmquist (hong kong), terence hua tai (taipei), shin-chi yuas a (kyoto). kant dissemination speakers include: paul guyer (pennsylvania), manfred kuehn (purdue), winfried lenders (bonn), rudolf malter (mainz), nellie motroschilova (moscow), werner stark (marburg), miroslav zelazny (torun). current work on the philosophy of kant this section consists of a series of colloquia containing c. 100 refereed contributions on all aspects of kant's work and influence. --for registration information please contact: organizing committee eighth international kant congress department of philosophy the university of memphis memphis, tennessee 38152 u. s. a. (tel:+901-678-3356; fax: +901-678-4365; e-mail: robinsonh@msuvx1.memphis.edu ) --for hotel reservations, contact crowne plaza hotel (specifying "kant congress rate"), 250 n. main, memphis, tennessee 38103 u.s.a. (tel: +901-527-7300; fax +901-526-1561). --for special air fares and other travel arrangements, contact ann scobie, hanover travel, 0 n. evergreen st., memphis, tennessee u.s.a (tel: +901-276-4404; fax +901-276-4494). 45) ------------------------------------------------------------- the little magazine writing and electronic space cyborg performance and poetics the little magazine is looking for writing and visual artwork which exists in the imagination of media still uncreated. for all of its power and fascination, electronic media are still limited by metaphors clumsily imported from print. james joyce and ezra pound were making hypertexts sixty years before the appropriate technology was created. we are looking for work which can be reproduced in the pages of the little magazine but will inspire the engineers of the third millennium. although we are interested in adventuresome uses of the technology, it is not technology but vision which is lacking. we do not need virtual reality machines cranking out the same kind of misinformation that we get from television in even more addictive forms, but we are sick also of the polite, conventional thing literature has become. it is so comfortably contained in print. it is mediated and re-mediated (already); it is the subject of schools. we are not interested in work which exemplifies the theories of the past or even the hottest, most engaging theory of the present. we are interested in work which will call forth the media of the future. cyberpunk grow up! the deadline for the issue is december 15, 1994, but get in touch with us as soon as possible. we will try to find a way to publish important work even if it does not fit neatly into the usual literary magazine format. tell us about your writing, visual art, sound pieces, videos, multimedia performances, network art, and investigations of genres still unnamed. the editors the little magazine department of english state university of new york at albany albany, ny 12222 djb85@csc.albany.edu 46) ------------------------------------------------------------- mechanics of desire: deleuze, masoch, and the libidinal economy of fur deleuze's is one of the rare analyses of masochism which do not anchor themselves in either psychopathology or political victimhood. this theory informed, but not necessarily theory bound, interdisciplinary anthology focuses on the dynamics and problematics of desire as they arise out of the deleuze-masoch encounter. contributors are asked to deploy either or both of these texts as points of departure in exploring the traversals or restrictions involved in the masochistic scenario and its intensities, law and its contracts, body and its perversions. contributions on closely related topics will also be considered. address texts (essays, photographic essays, scripts, prose, etc ... )to fadi abou-rihan department of philosophy university of toronto, toronto ontario, canada m5s 1a1. e-mail: abouriha@epas.utoronto.ca final submissions by march 15 1995 47) ------------------------------------------------------------- the network services conference 1994 nsc'94 great western royal hotel london, england, 28-30 november 1994 open computer networking is no longer the sole domain of universities and research institutions. today, governments, schools, public organizations, commercial enterprises and private individuals are actively using and supplying information over the global internet. how will these various network communities cooperate and interact? how will the academic and research community adapt to the new network reality? how will the network and networking tools now available stand up to the explosion in number of users and amount of information available? how will we train novices? what will we pay for and what will be for free as the commercialization of the network progresses? will we be inundated by advertising over the net? these are only a few of the questions facing network service providers and users alike. building on the success of the previous network services conferences in pisa (1992) and warsaw (1993), nsc'94 will focus on the issue of providing services to customers, paying special attention to the exciting developments in global tools and services. we will address the impact of the new global tools on service development and support, the changing function of traditional tools and services (such as archives), new services (such as multi-media communications), the future role of the library and the effects of commercialization on networks and network services. customer support at all levels, and the role of support in accessing global services, will also be covered. talks, tutorials, demonstrations and other conference activities will address the needs of the research, academic, educational, government, industrial, and commercial network communities. nsc'94 is being organized by the earn (european academic and research network) association in cooperation with the internet society, rare, ripe, nordunet and eunet. 48) ------------------------------------------------------------- open city call for submissions utopian thinkers have imagined open cities in many ways. whether material or virtual, all versions propose to establish a transparent, cosmopolitan metropolis, a place where culture can be efficiently exchanged. one version is ernst junger's novel heliopolis, a cybernetic fantasy in which a world of fluid information enfolds all societies, including a south pole city. today his sun city is being promoted in the notion of an open web of virtual cities on the net which, it is claimed, will join differences in a great liberal conversation. indeed, the 'net's intersections, its accidental encounters and air of intimacy, recall a sensuous version of the open city--the urban romanticism of walter benjamin's parisian flaneur or alfred kazin's a walker in the city. in other open cities the conversation is more severely limited--in the rational space of japan's kansai science city, for example, which is to be built on an island of garbage to extract profit from the research community that will live there among the modems. in the city--london's financial district--openness is more explicitly a matter of control. ira bombs have provoked government street blockades and comprehensive video surveillance that prevent the flight of jittery foreign capital. theories of openness invoke a territory free of limits, but reintroduce closure in disguised form. every effort to enact universality or transparency generates homogeneity and foreclosure--the very ideology of openness itself signals the closure it seeks to banish. it is a dilemma that offers no easy way out. the task of open city is to think this impasse in its complications, knots, and difficulties--to sustain the open city in its troubling process of construction. to this end we invite you to send us your written or graphic work in the genre of your choice by october 1, 1994. alphabet city is an interdisciplinary magazine of culture and politics. its next issue, fascism and its ghosts, will be on the stands in september. mail: box 387 station p toronto canada m5s 2s9 facsimile: 416 538 1210 internet: submit_opencity@intacc.net.web 49) ------------------------------------------------------------- postmodern culture postmodern culture a suny press series series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be completed north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 50) ------------------------------------------------------------- psyche an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness (issn: 1039-723x). psyche is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. psyche publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. psyche publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. psyche also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version. types of articles: the journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff. research articles reporting original research by author(s). articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. peer reviewed. survey articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. these may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. more ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed. discussion notes critiques of previous research. peer reviewed. tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists. letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in psyche. screened by editorial staff. abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. book reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks. announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc. advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc. notes for authors: unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of psyche, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to psyche the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge psyche as the original source of publication. subscriptions: subscriptions to the electronic version of psyche may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet 51) ------------------------------------------------------------- queer-e call for reviewers queer-e, the interdisciplinary electronic journal of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies is seeking article reviewers in the following disciplines: philosophy (all areas, but especially contemporary american and continental) cyberculture feminism/women's studies transgender studies/activism film/media/communications reviewers for queer-e will be asked to review no more than three articles in any one calendar year. reviewers are asked to agree to a "double-blind" review process (i.e. reviewers will not know the identity of the article's author, and the author will not know the identity of his/her reviewers). queer-e will provide a "review-form" upon which reviewers can make their comments to the author, and their recommendation to the editorial collective of queer-e. if you would like to volunteer your time to queer-e in this manner, please send the following information to : 1. a short biography detailing your academic and/or activist expertise 2. a short list of your publications and other work in the field of queer studies 3. an idea of what sort of articles you would be most interested in reviewing, or most able to review for queer-e. queer-e e-journal update/request thank you to everyone (nearly 500 of you!) who has shown interest and given support by subscribing to queer-e: an interdisciplinary journal of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer writing. the premiere issue, expected late this autumn, is under construction. do you have a manuscript, book review, conference paper, or maybe part of your dissertation, that you would like to have published, to share with the other 499 subscribers/readers? if so, why not consider sending it to us to be considered for inclusion in our first general issue? we have extended the deadline until august 1st, so there is still time to contribute. please feel free to contact the editorial collective to discuss any writing projects you have on hand or in progress. we look forward to receiving your work! the queer-e editorial collective c/o queer-e-approval@vector.casti.com for information about subscribing to queer-e, or to receive a copy of the call for papers, mail a post that says: info queer-e-text to majordomo@vector.casti.com 52) ------------------------------------------------------------- reading rock 'n' roll: theoretical approaches to popular musics. call for submissions original essays and proposals are solicited for an essay collection, tentatively called reading rock 'n' roll: theoretical approaches to popular musics. duke university press has expressed interest in considering the volume for publication. though a handful of rock lyrics are now regularly included in intro to lit anthologies, we have not been generally encouraged to take rock lyrics, live and recorded performances, and music videos seriously, or to employ the analytical tools of literary criticism in order to read them. with the rise of cultural studies, however, and the resultant blurring of the traditional boundaries between high art and popular entertainment, these ostensibly low-brow texts have begun to look every bit as complex, ironic, and deserving of serious study as their high-culture counterparts. in particular, we are interested in exploring rock music's relation to other forms of discourse, both in the ways it has appropriated and reconfigured them and how it has begun to be appropriated by artists from other media as a source of allusion, quotation, and mise en scene--a kind of cultural shorthand. this volume hopes to probe some of these intertextual tensions, and the various new protocols of reading they suggest. among questions and topics that might be explored: * how does contemporary musical practice affect our thinking about issues of quotation, allusion, plagiarism, and piracy? * how has the presence of openly gay and lesbian musicians influenced the politics of contemporary popular music? * is musical technology driving rock, or is rock driving the technology? * how have popular musics been adapted by and adapted themselves to madison avenue and "the cultural logic of late capitalism"? * can popular musics make an important intervention in gender and other culture wars? + musical and verbal self-consciousness in rock since the british invasion + ironic reframings of rock (a la spinal tap, beavis & butt-head, wayne's world, etc.) + rock's appropriation of other forms (classical, jazz, world music, etc.) + the resurgence of interest in disco and other "bad" musics: the knack, the village people, peter frampton, the bee gees, kc & the sunshine band, etc. + the new trans-generational duos: bono & sinatra, costello & bennett, beavis & butt-head & cher, etc. interested authors should write, phone, or e-mail with queries, or send 1-2 page abstracts (or completed essays of 20-35 pp., chicago style) by 31 march 1995, to: kevin j. h. dettmar department of english box 341503 clemson university clemson, south carolina 29634-1503 (803) 656 5397 (office) (803) 653 9122 (home) (803) 656 1345 (fax) dkevin@clemson.edu (e-mail) william richey department of english university of south carolina columbia, south carolina 29208 (803) 931 5265 (office) (803) 765 0763 (home) (803) 777 9064 (fax) 53) ------------------------------------------------------------- research on virtual relationships ******************************************************* * * * research on virtual relationships * * * * have you had an interesting virtual relationship * * on electronic networks? a research team wants * * your story. material acknowledged and terms * * respected. both research articles and a * * general press (trade) book planned. * * * * mail to either address * * usa: canada: * * -or * * virtual, palabras * * p.o. box 46, box 175, stn. e * * boulder creek, toronto, ontario * * california 95006 canada m6h 4e1 * * * * e-mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca * * fax: (to canada): (416) 736-5986 * * -> please re-post to relevant network sites < * * ( a distributed knowledge project undertaking ) * ******************************************************* 54) ------------------------------------------------------------- sixties generations: from montgomery to viet nam an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars, artists & activists second annual conference november 4-6, 1994 sponsored by viet nam generation and hosted by western connecticut state university, danbury, ct call for papers, session proposals, readings, performance art pieces, and workshops. sixties folk, i'm once again posting the call for papers for our "sixties generations" conference in november. i'm hoping to see many of you there, and to meet many of you for the first time, face to face. proposals have been coming in at a steady pace and it looks like this year's conference will be even more informative and entertaining than last year's. (the program for last year's conference is appended to this post.) one of the features of this year's conference will be a sixties-style coffeehouse, during which we'll feature the work of poets and writers. we feel that the mix of academics and artists/writers and activists makes for a lively gathering and a great environment for interdisciplinary work. i encourage you to participate by submitting scholarly papers/panels, proposing to read your work, stage your performance piece, or hold workshops on activism. see you there, kali tal the first annual sixties generations conference was held march 4-6, 1993,in fairfax, virginia. it was sponsored by _viet nam generation_ and the american studies, film studies and african american studies programs of george mason university. sixty academic paper presentations, eight poetry and prose readings, one play reading and a concert filled three days. we also held a full-day roundtable discussion, "on the sixties in the nineties," featuring participants who were activists in the sixties and continue to be so today, including activists in sncc, sds, the black panther party, the yippies, various racial/ethnic formation, antiwar formations, political formations, women's groups and cultural workers. the morning session will focus on recollections and reflections on people's involvement in movement work in the 60's. the afternoon session will focus on the value of the lessons and the continuing agendas and methods of the 60's movements as they affect the work of social justice in the 90's. we encourage conference participants to drop in on the roundtable and join the ongoing discussion. roundtable participants are also urged to visit other conference events and to join us for a cash bar, reception, and concert at the conclusion of the discussion. conference panels 9:00-10:30am panel 9: viet nam war film i "viet nam war film," cynthia fuchs; "the heart of darkness motif in vietnam war texts," david l. erben, univ of south florida; "warren beatty and the draft," katherine kinney, uc riverside 10:45am-12:15pm panel 10: sixties popular culture "folk songs and allusions to folks songs in the repertoire of the grateful dead," josephine a. mcquail, tennessee tech univ; "beatles, beach boys, leave it to beaver, mustangs, gto's freedom marches, a sexual revolution, a war and ptsd," john ketwig; "talking about the beatles," bernie sanders 1:30-3:00pm panel 11: performing arts "planet shakespeare: the bard in cold war america" susan fox, washington, dc; "shakespeare, kerouac & hedrick," donald k. hedrick, kansas state univ; "west african dance and race/culture and gender identity in los angeles african american communities," phylise smith, ucla panel 12: reinterpreting the sixties v "peace through law: john seiberling's vision of world order," miriam jackson, kent, oh; "reverend malcolm boyd and bishop paul moore, jr.," michael b. friedland, boston college; eros on the new frontier: the limits of liberal tolerance," louis j. kern, hofstra univ 3:15-4:45pm panel 13: the viet nam war "the national liberation front in south viet nam," ton that manh tuong; "the tet offensive and middletown: a study in contradiction," anthony o. edmonds;"the impact of the american antiwar movement on the south vietnamese urban youth struggle movement," nguyen huu thai panel 14: viet nam war film/drama ii "decentering genre: vietnam war films and portrayal of reality," catherine e. richardson, chattanooga, tn; "the death of the sixties: easy rider & and deliverance," margie burns, cheverly, md;"luis valdez and teatro campesino," dave derose, yale univ 5:00-6:30pm panel 15: music "folkore of the viet nam war," lydia fish, suny-buffalo; "in country songs," chuck rosenberg; "pilot songs of the viet nam war," chip dockery 7:30pm concert & reception o.v. hirsch chip dockery chuck rosenberg 55) ------------------------------------------------------------- the society for the study of symbolic interaction the society for the study of symbolic interaction will hold its 1995 gregory p. stone symposium on may 19-21, 1995 at drake university in des moines, iowa. the symposium theme is "talking at the borders: marking and blurring interactionist boundaries," with program and events being organized by andrew herman, joseph schneider, and allen shelton of the department of sociology at drake. contributions in various forms focusing on articulations of symbolic interactionist sociology and cultural studies, including deconstruction, poststructuralism, poststructuralist feminism, critical theory, postmarxism, queer theory, subaltern or postcolonial studies, and american pragmatism are especially invited. general topics include new forms and practices of ethnography; the critical analysis of the mass mediated images and technologies that make up "the popular"; the implications of the critique of the humanist "subject" for interactionist work; issues surrounding new technologies of writing the social; critical pedagogy; the queering of sexuality, gender, and identity; and the ethics and politics of a possible interactionism that lies past the post(s). various formats for involvement will include the standard conference paper, "review"-type sessions that focus on a single issue or piece of work; seminar/colloquia formats involving small numbers of participants, and guided discussions of readings distributed prior to the conference. deadline for proposed participation is 1 december 1994. a detailed call is in preparation. persons interested in receiving this mailing, or in other information about the conference, should contact herman (ah7301r@acad.drake.edu; 515-271-2936), schneider (js2861r@acad.drake.edu; 515-271-2158) or shelton (as0441r@acad.drake.edu; 515-271-4594). the relevant mailing address is department of sociology, drake university, des moines, iowa 50311. 56) ------------------------------------------------------------- splinter splinter is a new electronic publication that seeks texts in various states of unfinish prose poetry neither both your scraps your scrytch your fragments your language doodles unfinished stories unfinished scenes unfinished sentences experiments freewriting drafts of drafts outlines bits of dialogue directionless musings stanzas that never found their way into poems flashes that dead-ended scribbled down and never became no length guidelines / authors keep all rights rolling submission, no deadlines the contact address at this point is dave1@gibbs.oit.unc.edu send your submissions, subscription requests, questions, and comments (put splinter somewhere in the subject line) e-mail subscriptions are free and encouraged thanks 57) ------------------------------------------------------------- straight with a twist: queer theory and the subject of heterosexuality call for papers for a collection of essays with the title---straight with a twist: queer theory and the subject of heterosexuality---theorists and critics are invited to submit essays which explore the political and discursive boundaries of sexual identity, with particular attention to the problem of "straight" negotiations of "queer" theory. among the issues that might be addressed would be: the "queer" as a discursive formation and its relations to the designations "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," and "straight" and the experiential fields they represent; the critical appropriation/deployment/proliferation of the word "queer" by heterosexually identified theorists (can "straights" be "critically queer?"); the tension between anti-foundationalist theories of sexuality and identity politics; confronting homophobia from within (i.e., one's own); the relation between "straight" readings of "queer" theory and other negotiations of difference, such as "male feminism," "white" readings of "ethnic and minority" theory, etc.; the question of the body; pedagogical and curricular problems; specific readings in literature, film, and mass culture. please send inquiries, proposals, or fully written papers by january 15, 1995 to: calvin thomas department of english literature and language 115 baker hall university of northern iowa cedar falls, ia 50613 calvin.thomas@cobra.uni.edu 58) ------------------------------------------------------------- style special issue of style on possible worlds, virtual reality, and postmodern fiction deadline for submission: november 30, 1994. to be published in 1995 contributions are solicited on the following topics: 1. the centrality of ontological questions in postmodernist fiction and the contribution of the theory of possible worlds in capturing and formulating the ontological issue. in particular: the stacking/embedding of realities, the transgression of ontological boundaries, the uses of recursive structures and their ontological implications. 2. virtual reality (vr) as a technological implementation of the philosophical concept of possible world. 3. challenges to the notion of actual world and alternatives to the "modal structure" in narrative universes. hypertext and the decentralization of semantic universes. the theme of the disappearance of reality in fiction and theory. 4. hyperrealism as parody of realism in postmodern culture. the philosophical basis of the concept of realism and its connection to virtual reality. 5. the thematization (especially in science fiction) of the concepts of virtual reality, parallel universes, alternative possible worlds, immersion in game-worlds, and interplanetary travel as a metaphor for movement across possible worlds. 6. game-theory and the concept of immersion in virtual worlds--as either thematized or implemented in postmodernist fiction or popular fiction. 7. the myth of virtual reality in contemporary culture and media. 8. virtual reality as a simulacrum. the role of simulacra (imitations, images, copies) in postmodern culture and fiction. the problematics of the relation between image and reality, sign and referent, original and copy and its implementation in postmodernist fiction. papers must be original contributions and will be refereed. length should be between 20 and 40 pages, double spaced. before submitting a paper, please contact the guest editor: marie-laure ryan 6207 red ridge trail bellvue, colorado 80512 mmryan@vines.colostate.edu 59) ------------------------------------------------------------- transformation: marxist boundary work in theory, economics, politics, and culture transformation is a new bi-quarterly journal edited by mas'ud zavarzadeh, teresa ebert, and donald morton. it is devoted to classical marxist analysis of urgent contemporary issues by bringing back into present discussions such concepts as class, mode of production, labor theory of value, surplus value, exploitation, . . . the first issue, transformation 1: post-ality: marxism and (post)modernism, will be published in november, 1994 (publisher: maisonneuve press, 301-277-7505). we are now receiving texts for the second issue. call for papers for consideration for issue 2 transformation 2 the "invention" of the queer: marxism, lesbian and gay theory, capitalism transformation 2: the "invention" of the queer engages queer theory as an advanced form of bourgeois social theory from a marxist perspective. (post)modern social and cultural theories, and especially queer theory, routinely claim that marxism lacks a theory of gender/sexuality and is in fact so fundamentally flawed that it cannot produce one. transformation 2 contests the question of sexuality through the discourse of invention (as in such recent books as the invention of ethnicity, the invention of renaissance woman, the invention of pornography, heuretics: the logic of invention . . . ). invention is the latest concept being deployed in ludic theory to try to solve the historical impasse of social constructionism. while the "constructionist" view of the (homosexual) subject has become the dominant "progressive" view today, it is a cultural constructionism promoted by those who are hostile to a rigorous, determinate constructionism through economics, class, and the social division of labor, but who think it "unethical" to rule out the effects of such factors as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, . . . (all theorized as effects of culture, representation, textuality, or ahistorical "matter"). as "constructionism" has increasingly turned "ethical," it has also turned "inventionist" --that is, it has become a question of "invention," implying idealistically that social change has everything to do with the subject's "inventiveness" in a technicist (often called "technocultural") sense ("self-fashioning" in new historicism, "cyborg mutation" in haraway, "electric speech" in ronell, "performance" in butler, "choreography" in drucilla cornell, "architecture" in jameson). transformation 2: the "invention" of the queer argues that "constructionism" is not so much "exhausted" (as we are told in such texts as fear of a queer planet), but rather has reached an historical impasse of which the new discourse of "invention" is symptomatic. transformation 2 will critique today's dominant "ethical and technicist constructionism/inventionism" as a mystification that blocks a rigorous theorization of the materiality of the subject in general and of the homosexual-as-queer in particular. it investigates sexuality through ideology critique by focussing on such issues as homosexuality and/in the social division of labor; queer theory and the new pornotopia; genetics and identity; commodity fetishism and "queer" readings of marx; cybersex and libidinal economy; imperialism and (homo)sexual exploitation; (post)modern indeterminacy and aids pedagogy; text/sex--tech/sex; queering the internet; (re)inventing the body; lusting and the politics of lust . . . we are seeking both shorter critiques of 10 to 12 pp. on the queer and the everyday, as well as longer inquiries of 20-25 pp. please send texts, proposals, and inquiries for consideration by the editorial collective to donald morton, department of english, syracuse university, syracuse, new york 13244-1170. 60) ------------------------------------------------------------- u n d e r c u r r e n t call for manuscripts undercurrent is a free journal available on the internet through e-mail subscriptions. (see end of this message for how to subscribe for free.) we are seeking article submissions or queries with abstracts providing an analysis of the present in terms of discourses, events, representations, classes, or cultures. we seek to publish analysis of the present from diverse intellectual perspectives--feminist, historical, ethnological, sociological, literary, political, semiotic, philosophical, cultural studies, and so forth. we seek applied analysis rather than theory. any theoretical orientation ought instead to be apparent and immanent in your particular focus on the present. we especially encourage interdisciplinary work. article length varies according to your needs, anywhere from "short-takes" of 500-1000 words to "feature" of up to 7500 words. as its audience is potentially much broader than that of academic journals held only in university libraries, the style must account for an educated audience which is not necessarily familiar with either the jargon or the debates in a special field. undercurrent wishes to publish articles that address this broader audience while also conveying a vivid sense of how current academic scholarship can contribute to our understanding of the present. we are attempting to bridge the gulf between academia and the general reading public, a gulf which has allowed various misperceptions about academia to become politically overcharged in the popular media. all submissions will receive a reply, however no copies can be returned. any major citation format is acceptable, although endnotes must be used rather than footnotes due to the contingencies of various platforms for viewing electronic text. submissions and queries can be sent in any of the following ways, in order of preference: e-mail to heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu and note in the subject field that this is a submission to undercurrent mail a floppy diskette with your text in ascii or wordperfect (address below). mail two copies of your essay by traditional post to: undercurrent erick heroux dept. of english university of oregon eugene, or 97403 about free subscriptions: you can subscribe yourself to undercurrent by sending a one-line e-mail message: subscribe undercurrent yourname@domain.where address it to: mailserv@oregon.uoregon.edu problems or questions can be e-mailed to heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu 61) ------------------------------------------------------------- **************************************************** * * * understanding the social world: * * towards an integrative approach * * * * * * july 17th 19th 1995 * * the university of huddersfield, uk * * * * first international conference including * * themes on: identity, the self, social * * cognition, agency/structure, social * * constructionism, multi-disciplinary * * methodology, individual/society, * * and postmodernity and society * * * * call for participation * * * * papers, symposium, posters * * * **************************************************** included below are details regarding the conference coordinator, brief details regarding the background of the conference, submission details, and registration and accommodation costs. further details regarding invited speakers, publication of papers, venue details and entertainment during the conference will be available in august of this year. conference coordinator for further details regarding this conference please contact: david nightingale school of human and health sciences the university of huddersfield queensgate huddersfield hd1 3dh, uk email: social-conference@hud.ac.uk phone: (0484) 472461 or (0484) 422288 extension 2461 fax: (0484) 472794 please note: david nightingale will be unavailable from july 14th until august 1st. conference background this conference seeks to draw together and highlight recent developments within the social sciences and related disciplines that offer an account of human activity that transcend purely individualistic or structuralist accounts of the human condition. increasingly, psychologists, sociologists and many others, are recognising that a full account of social activity necessitates an explanation in terms of both the person and the world that this person inhabits. it is towards an understanding of this social world that this conference is addressed. submissions although this conference has been organised around a number of themes (identity, the self, social cognition, agency/structure, social constructionism, multi-disciplinary methodology, individual/society, and postmodernity and society), papers that reflect the title of the conference but cannot be readily categorised in terms of these themes, are also welcomed. in this sense the themes should be viewed as suggestive rather than prescriptive. all papers will be reviewed for submission. all submissions must be received by no later than 27th january 1995. individual papers (30 minutes) individual papers of 30 minutes duration (20-25 presentation, 5-10 minutes discussion). submissions should include a cover page; indicating author(s), affiliation, complete address, phone number, email address and relevant theme (if appropriate). submissions must include a 200-250 word abstract and brief summary (no more than 750 words) of the papers relevance to the subject area. papers may be submitted in either hard copy to the conference organiser (send 3 copies) or in electronic form. electronic proposals are preferred and must be sent in pure ascii text (to social-conference@hud.ac.uk). abstracts will be published at the conference. symposia (2 2.5 hours) symposia (up to a maximum of 6 papers). submissions should include a cover page for each paper within the symposium; indicating author(s), affiliation, complete address, phone number, email address and relevant theme (if appropriate). submissions must include a 200-250 abstract of the symposium and brief summary (no more than 1500 words) of the symposium's relevance to the subject area. in addition, a 200-250 word abstract of each paper must be included. symposia may be submitted in either hard copy to the conference organiser (send 3 copies of each paper abstract and the symposium summary) or in electronic form. electronic proposals are preferred and must be sent in pure ascii text (to social-conference@hud.ac.uk). abstracts will be published at the conference. posters those wishing to submit posters to this conference should send a 750 word summary outlining the proposed content of the poster. poster submissions may be submitted in either hard copy to the conference organiser (send 3 copies) or in electronic form. electronic proposals are preferred and must be sent in pure ascii text (to social-conference@hud.ac.uk). other forms of participation those interested in presenting their ideas in a different format should contact the conference organiser. registration fees up to 17th april after 17th april delegates and speakers 60.00 75.00 concessionary* 30.00 ---- day rate 35.00 40.00 *concessionary rates apply for under-graduates, post-graduates, the unemployed and the retired. the above fees include morning coffee and afternoon tea but not meals. accomodation and meals please note that accommodation is full-board only whole conference 110.00 (monday evening wednesday lunch, inclusive) day 1 55.00 (mon. eve tues. lunch) day 2 55.00 (tues. eve wed. lunch) conference dinner 25.00 (tuesday evening) please feel free to contact the conference coordinator regarding this event: david nightingale (social-conference@hud.ac.uk) 62) ------------------------------------------------------------- virtual reality conference dear colleagues, thanks for the interest you showed in the "virtual reality vienna'93". we are now proud to present a new conference, slightly moved from vienna (austria) to stuttgart (germany), bigger and hopefully of even more quality! this conference is actually the fusion of the three biggest virtual reality conferences in europe. expect the best... any suggestion and proposal is welcome. yours, christian bauer c/o christian bauer & freunde hoettinger gasse 8 a-6020 innsbruck austria / europe tel +43 512 29 57 60 fax +43 512 28 16 98 email chris@well.sf.ca.us (if the above adress doesn't work...) information on the "virtual reality world 1995" 21st to 23rd february of 1995 in stuttgart, germany the "virtual reality world 1995 (vrw'95)" is an international conference on virtual reality, with speeches, tutorials, exhibits and social events. vrw'95 is a fusion of the three main virtual reality events in europe: 1. "virtual reality forum '93 and '94" organised by the fraunhofer institutes iao and ipa 2. "virtual reality conference" in london sponsored by mecklermedia 3. "virtual reality vienna '93" sponsored by idg austria main sponsor for the vrw'95 is idg conferences and seminars / computerwoche verlag gmbh,germany. mecklermedia is organizing the exhibit and the two fraunhofer institutes do the scientific supervision. the agenda is organized by the fraunhofer institutes iao and ipa and christian bauer, the initiator and agenda-coordinator of the "virtual reality vienna '93". some figures: the organizers of the vrw'95 plan to have 500 conference attendees from about 25 countries and more than 3000 visitors of the exhibition. on the first day, the 21st of february 1995, tutorials will be offered, on the follwoing two days there will be about 50 speeches from international experts. the vrw'95 claims to be the leading european event. more information on the vrw'95 will follow in the next weeks. the chairmen of the programme committee are: prof. h.-j. bullinger, iao prof. r.-d. schraft, ipa finally some persons, who already agreed to speak on the vrw'95: prof. nat durlach, mit prof. ken kaplan, harvard dr. sandra helsel, virtual reality world ben delaney, cyberedge journal dr. ian hunter, mit prof. edouard bannwart, art + com dr. robert stone, aarl prof. gerd hirzinger, german aerospace establishment prof. nadja thalmann, university of geneva dr. lew hitchner, xtensory howard rheingold, writer 63) ------------------------------------------------------------- deleuze-guattari list the list deleuze@world.std.com, a forum for discussion of the works of french theorists gilles deleuze and felix guattari, has changed its name to deleuze-guattari. to subscribe, send the message: "subscribe deleuze-guattari" (no name necessary) to: majordomo@world.std.com for more information about the list, send the message: "info deleuzeguattari" to: majordomo@world.std.com eric davis moderator deleuze-guattari 64) ------------------------------------------------------------- the electronic poetry center (buffalo) the mission of this world-wide web based electronic poetry center is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the united states and the world. the center will provide access to numerous electronic resources in the new poetries including rif/t and other electronic poetry journals, the poetics list archives, a library of poetic texts, news of related print sources, and direct connections to numerous related poetic projects. the center's first phase of implementation is scheduled for august 1, 1994. a subscription to the e-poetry list provides a subscription to the electronic journal rif/t and e-poetry center announcements. subscriptions to e-poetry to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu inquiries, suggestions for center resources, submissions to rif/t, and other mail may be directed to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu the center is located at gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift (currently, the prototype is under construction but operational.) gopher access: for those who have access to gopher, type gopher wings.buffalo.edu (or, if you are on a ub mainframe, simply type wings) at your system prompt. first choose libraries & library resources, then electronic journals, then e-journals/resources produced here at ub, then the electronic poetry center. (note: connections to some poetry center resources require web access, though most are presently available through gopher). world-wide web access: for those with world-wide web or lynx access, type www or lynx at your system prompt. choose the go to url option then go to (type as one continuous string) gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift participation in the electronic poetry center (buffalo) for those interested in helping us build the center, our goal is to provide a single internet site that offers a doorway into the different poetic projects out there in the electronic (and paper) poetics world. we would like to offer access to information about poetics and poetry activities, electronic poetry journals, texts in progress, etc. we are currently developing a library of electronic poetry/poetics texts (submissions to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu). the center has other exciting possibilities: 1. circulation of electronic journals with an emphasis on direct links to those of relevance to center concerns; 2. reviews of recent print and electronic publications. (brief reviews may also be submitted electronically to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu); 3. direct links to other related electronic sites; 4. multimedia resources. sound and graphics relating to poetry. 5. building our small press alcove, a place for little magazine and book announcements. the point of including announcements of paper resources is to provide a listing of interesting work for people to look at; they can then write or e-mail the publisher to obtain publications. (send announcements to lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu or magazines/books to loss glazier, e-poetry, p.o. box 143, getzville, ny 14068-0143); 6. ultimately, the center could also offer collaborative projects (perhaps for specific groups of writers), lists and/or archives of other lists, and texts-in-progress, as things develop. the "buffalo" in the title of the center is not meant to suggest that this activity is limited to buffalo, only to give the "visitor" a sense of place, i.e., where the mainframe that's providing this service is "located." vigorous writing wants to "circulate." on this new electronic terrain, the electronic poetry center will serve as a gathering place or point of entry for a range of poetic efforts. how to contact us please contact us with your suggestions, texts, sound files, and graphics files to submit, or if you have expertise in these areas. let us know what you think (this is meant to be a center that grows with your ideas) by posting to this list, sending mail to e-poetry, or to loss glazier (lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu) or kenneth sherwood (v001pxfu.ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu) privately. the archive is administered in buffalo by e-poetry and rif/t in coordination with the poetics list. loss glazier for kenneth sherwood and loss glazier in collaboration with charles bernstein 65) ------------------------------------------------------------- femisa femisa@mach1.wlu.ca femisa is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, femisa was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the international studies association keep in touch. more generally, i hope that femisa can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the international studies association. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg 66) ------------------------------------------------------------ fiction-of-philosophy a new electronic forum for the discussion and presentation of philosophical fiction, fictional philosophy, and everything in-between the fiction-of-philosophy: as in the fiction-of-crime, the category encompasses both `philosophical fiction' and that aspect of philosophy which encounters fiction as a mode of inquiry. philosophical fiction would include the novels of bataille, ballard, gibson, sartre; works of jabes, michaux, lautreamont, karl kraus; poetry of lucretius, susan howe, holderlin; the philosophical micro-narratives of baudrillard, nietzsche, and barthes; lingis' exhilerated accounts of the other/gender, kathy acker's deconstruction of sexualities and politics, and other writers/writings too numerous to mention... why this list? because "creative" and theoretic writing are inter-woven yet distanced by the history of faculties, and because new formations carry the possibilities of new modes of thinking through our overheated postmodern cultural terrain. the list has as goals both the discussion of the fiction-of philosophy in general or in reference to specific authors; and the presentation of creative work that may bear on current issues of theory. fiction-of-philosophy: fop, defined in the older roget: "...swell, dandy, exquisite, coxcomb, beau, man about town, spark, popinjay, puppy, prig, jackanapes, carpet knight, dude" extended into situationist, raconteur, flaneur... existing-between, passing for the other, the spy in the house of love who came in from the cold. the threads on the list might include presentations and discussions of creative work by the participants, cross-postings addressing relevant issues, discussions/critiques/group readings of specific literary works, and discussions of more general issues ranging from the interface between poetry and philosophy, to the narratology of the site of writing-philosophy (heidegger's forest, jabes' desert, ballard's high-way). this list is open to everyone interested in philosophy and theory, on any level. fiction-of-philosophy is brought to you by the spoon collective, a group of net citizens devoted to free and open discussion of literary and philosophical issues on the internet. based on the collective's philosophy, please be aware that posts containing language or subject matter that some might find offensive may appear on the list from time to time, and such posts will not be censored. however, we would also like you to know that racial or other bias slurs will not be tolerated; there are other sites on the internet for them. to (re)subscribe, send the message: subscribe fiction-of-philosophy to majordomo@world.std.com to send a post, send to: fiction-of-philosophy@world.std.com to unsubscribe, send to majordomo@world.std.com unsubscribe fiction-of-philosophy to find out who is on the list, send the message: who fiction-of-philosophy if you have any difficulties or more questions concerning the list, contact the list moderator, sondheim@panix.com please note that there are no archives available as yet. alan sondheim sondheim@panix.com 67) ------------------------------------------------------------- holocaus: holocaust list holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need and internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to: listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com the holocaus policies are: 1. the coverage of the list will include the holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-semitism, and jewish history in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as related themes in the history of ww2, germany, and international diplomacy. 2. we are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the holocaust. in 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the us and canada teaching courses on the holocaust (154 in history departments, 67 in religion, and 46 in literature). an even larger number of professors teach units on the holocaust in courses on jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and world war ii (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. most of these professors own pc's, but do not use them for e-mail. we hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. holocaus will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course. 3. h-net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide holocaus policy and to help stimulate contributions. 4. holocaus is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history. the moderator will solicit postings (by email, phone and even by us mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. the moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). it may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. anyone with suggestions about what holocaus can and might do is invited to send in the ideas. 5. the tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. holocaus is affiliated with the international history network. 6. holocaus is a part of h-net, a project run by computer-oriented historians at the u of illinois. we see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. our first list on urban history, h-urban@uicvm, recently started up with wendy plotkin as moderator. h-women is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like ethnic, labor, and us south. we are helping our campus jewish studies program set up jstudy (restricted to the u of illinois chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of h-jewish, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on jewish history. if you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write richard jensen, for we are now (as of late april) in a critical planning stage. 7. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu 68) ------------------------------------------------------------- newjour-l@e-math.ams.org newjour-l aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project. first: newjour-l is the place to announce your own (or to forward information about others') newly planned, newly issued, or revised electronic networked journal or newsletter. it is specially dedicated for 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searchers. the records will feed a directory and database of these titles. not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. we thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable. subscribing: to subscribe, send a message to: listserv@e-math.ams.org leave the subject line blank. in the body, type: subscribe newjour-l firstname lastname you will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list. to drop out or postpone, use the standard listserv (internet) directions. acknowledgment: for their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank: michael strangelove, university of ottawa, advisor david rodgers, american mathematical society, systems & network support edward gaynor, university of virginia library, original cataloguing development john price-wilkin, university of virginia library, systems & network support birdie maclennan, university of vermont library, cataloguing and indexing development diane kovacs, kent state university library, advisor we anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. this project is co-ordinated through the association of research libraries, office of scientific & academic publishing, 21 dupont circle, suite 800 washington, dc 20036 [e-mail: osap@cni.org (ann okerson)] 69) ------------------------------------------------------------- nii-teach scholastic network, scholastic inc. is pleased to announce a new list dedicated to the discussion of the national information infrastructure and its role in education. as you know, policy decisions made about the nii will affect how teachers and students use online services, how they will be accessed, how they will be paid for, and who will be able to get these services first. we are encouraging you to share your views on the nii and what it should offer teachers. moderators of this list are bonnie bracey, the arlington, va classroom teacher appointed to the nii advisory panel, leni donlan of cosn (the consortium for school networking) and jane coffey, a teacher-member of the scholastic network. this unmoderated list will only be on-line from march through june 1994. all classroom teachers and others interested in sharing feedback about education for the nii advisory group are invited to participate. to subscribe to nii-teach, send email to: nii-teach-request@scholastic.com leave the subject line blank. the text of the message should say: subscribe nii-teach yourfirstname yourlastname 70) ------------------------------------------------------------- popcult popcult@camosun.bc.ca the popcult list is now in place. it is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. the list will not be moderated. material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged. to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to: mailserv@camosun.bc.ca there should not be anything in the 'subject:' line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself. some keywords are: subscribe popcult help lists send/list popcult unsubscribe popcult it is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. do not include your name after subscribe popcult. in some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. i recommend, to start, that you put subscribe on one line, and help on the next line. that will give you a full listing of available commands. to send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to: popcult@camosun.bc.ca owner: peter montgomery montgomery@camosun.bc.ca professor dept of english ph (604) 370-3342 (o) camosun college (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 foul bay road victoria, bc off. paul bldg 326 canada v8p 5j2 71) ------------------------------------------------------------- scholia reviews scholia aims to provide critical reviews of publications in the field of ancient greek and roman art, archaeology, history, literature and philosophy as soon as possible after they appear. the editors also believe that reviews should be as detailed, informative and comprehensive as possible. in order to make it possible for the journal to provide reviews of this kind, given the constraints under which it is produced, reviews will be published over the international electronic network to registered subscribers. subscription to the electronic reviews is free and without restriction. once published, the reviews will be archived at the university of natal, durban and the university of pennsylvania, usa, from which they can be retrieved by gopher or ftp. instructions on how to retrieve reviews electronically will be published in the journal itself along with a list of books received. the editor reserves the right to publish the full text of a review in the journal itself. contributors of reviews are therefore requested to submit an abstract (300-500 words) together with the full text of their review. contributions should preferably be sent by e-mail or on disk followed by one clearly printed copy by air mail. how to subscribe to scholia reviews in order to receive electronic reviews from scholia simply send a request to scholia@owl.und.ac.za. your e-mail address will be added to the distribution list of scholia reviews. how to obtain scholia reviews by gopher gopher to owl.und.ac.za and follow the path: campus information system-->faculty information-->classics-->scholia reviews the reviews are classified by the year in which they appeared e.g 1 (1992) and are listed by number, author, title and reviewer e.g. (1) perkell, vergil's georgics (davis). how to obtain scholia reviews by ftp (file transfer protocol) ftp to owl.und.ac.za. when you are asked for your name type: anonymous when asked for a password type in your email address and press enter. you do not have to use upper case letters. then type: cd pub/und/classics/reviews you can then list the contents of the directory by typing: ls to read a file type more followed by the filename (these are unix commands). files are listed by year, number and author e.g. 92-1-perkell = review number 1, 1992, review of perkell, vergil's georgics. scholia reviews at pennsylvania scholia is pleased to announce that the reviews of the journal are now available on the ccat gopher at the university of pennsylvania. we hope that access to the reviews will be more convenient at this location. we are grateful to professor james o'donnell and the university of pennsylvania for making this possible. gopher access gopher to ccat.sas.upenn.edu and look under menu item 8 (electronic publications and resources). scholia reviews appear as item 19. gopher bookmark the gopher bookmark that will let you or anybody else add this to their own gopher menu is: type=1 name=scholia reviews (classical studies) path=1/scholia host=ccat.sas.upenn.edu port=5070 url: gopher://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:5070/11/scholia ftp access the ftp address is also ccat.sas.upenn.edu, login as anonymous, then cd pub cd scholia ls j.l. hilton reviews editor: scholia 20 july 1994 72) ------------------------------------------------------------- dead artist desert trailer-park offers scholarships and studio-space for qualifying applicants contact: bbrace@netcom.com for info as time goes by, it is the established patterns of thought, the known arguments, the self-perpetuating truths which become the principal defenders of the structures in place. ..the active vocabulary needed to question, even to simply discuss them, has withered away. | the dead-artist desert trailer-park is located in the american | southwest desert. i basically inherited (after paying back-taxes) | an isolated, derelict trailer-park which is being | transformed without the interference of cultural bureaucrats | into a working resource for creative pursuits. the financial | overhead is practically non-existent; intelligent applicants are | told the location of the trailer-park and given written permission | to abide there. usually some structural and creative contribution | is made to the park during your stay. no application fees, slides, | references, or resumes are required or desired. a questionnaire is | sent to all applicants. the current residents will invite new | applicants to visit. applications for the next season are being | perused now; an electronic response is preferred. only the artists capable of dragging the mystic power out of themselves seem able to work productively within the breakdown of our society... 73) ------------------------------------------------------------- gopheur litteratures announcing the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal. address: gopher.litteratures.umontreal.ca 7070 or through the university of montreal main gopher: address: gopher.umontreal.ca gopher servers are sprouting like mushrooms these days. not only universities have gopher servers, but also departments now. they can be very useful tools to locate information and students here are very fond of them. they are also the first step towards much more sophisticated modes of accessing collections of research and bibliographic data, e-texts, etc... the "gopheur litteratures" at the universite de montreal (udm) just happens to be the first gopher dedicated to teaching, research and publications on french literature, quebecois literature and francophone literatures, and also the first gopher to do so in french, albeit without the accents for the moment. (in the future we will offer the choice between ascii and iso-latin, as is currently being done on others gophers in the province of quebec). the "gopheur litteratures" is in construction. this means it will be evolving. items on the main menu indicate a program of research conducted at the department of etudes francaises. the goal of the gopher is to offer electronic documentation on the departement d'etudes francaises, and to establish a resource center for information, tools, links, documents, local and international, to be used by the computing community of french scholars and students. all comments and suggestions of sites of interest to french studies should be sent to: gophlitt@ere.umontreal.ca or christian allegre allegre@ere.umontreal.ca universite de montreal departement d'etudes francaises 74) ------------------------------------------------------------- american literature sublist american lit anthology notices.994.html#1 (upgraded april 1994) one disk, 1.1 mbyte red badge of courage by stephen crane chicago poems by carl sandburg the call of the wild by jack london our mr. wrenn -romantic adventures of a gentle man by sinclair lewis renascence & other poems by edna st. vincent millay louisa may alcott one disk, 1.1 mbytes little women horatio alger one disk, 900 kbytes cast upon the breakers ragged dick or street life in new york struggling upward ambrose bierce one disk, 800 kbytes can such things be, the devil's dictionary willa cather two disks, $10 each, $20 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (1.2 mbytes) -o pioneers! the song of the lark disk notices.994.html#2 (200 kbytes) -alexander's bridge james fenimore cooper notices.994.html#1 one disk, 1 mbyte, sgml the last of the mohicans nathaniel hawthorne one disk, 1.2 mbytes house of the seven gables the scarlet letter henry james two disks, both sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (900 kbytes) -the europeans, confidence disk notices.994.html#2 (1.2 mbytes) -roderick hudson, watch and ward jack london two disks, both sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (1.2 mbytes) -sea wolf, stories disk notices.994.html#2 (900 kbytes) -klondike, white fang herman melville two disks, sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (800 kbytes) -moby dick notices.994.html#1 disk notices.994.html#2 (690 kbytes) - moby dick notices.994.html#2 christopher morley one disk, 300 kbytes parnassus on wheels frank norris notices.994.html#1 one disk, 800 kbytes the pit edgar allan poe 28 tales on one disk, 1 mbyte these include the gold-bug, the murders in the rue morgue, the fall of the house of usher, etc. mark twain four disks, $10 each, $40 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (1 mbyte) -tom sawyer, huckleberry finn disk notices.994.html#2 (1.1 mbyte) -a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court, tom sawyer abroad, tom sawyer detective, extracts from adam's diary, the great revolution in pitcairn, a ghost story, niagara, my watch, political economy, a new crime disk notices.994.html#3 (900 kbytes) -what is man? and other essays, the tragedy of pudd'nhead wilson (upgraded dec. 1993) disk notices.994.html#4 (1 mbyte) -a tramp abroad 75) ------------------------------------------------------------- english literature sublist april 2, 1994 beowulf to 1800 canterbury /beowulf/gawayne one disk, 1.1 mbytes canterbury tales by chaucer beowulf translated by francis gummere sir gawayne and the grene knyght (sgml) gammer gurton's needle (sgml) shakespeare five disks, each of which includes a glossary in addition to the shakespeare texts, $10 each, $50 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (1.1 mbytes) -hamlet, lear, macbeth, othello, antony and cleopatra, julius caesar, romeo and juliet disk notices.994.html#2 (1 mbyte) -all's well that ends well, as you like it, love's labor's lost, midsummer night's dream , much ado about nothing ,taming of the shrew, twelfth night disk notices.994.html#3 (1.3 mbytes) -henry iv parts 1 and 2, henry v, henry vi parts 1, 2 and 3,, richard ii, richard iii disk notices.994.html#4 (1 mbyte) -tempest, winter's tale, cymbeline, measure for measure, merchant of venice, two gentlemen of verona, comedy of errors, sonnets, a lover's complaint, other poems disk notices.994.html#5 (1.3 mbytes) -coriolanus, troilus and cressida, henry viii, king john, pericles, timon of athens, titus andronicus, merry wives of windsor, rape of lucrece, venus and adonis ben jonson notices.994.html#1 one disk, 600 kbytes bartholomew fair volpone john milton one disk, 600 kbytes paradise lost, paradise regained moore/bacon/dryden/marvell one disk, 1.2 mbytes utopia by thomas moore new atlantis by francis bacon john dryden's translation of the aeneid poems by andrew marvell (sgml) john gay/john bunyan one disk 500 kbytes the beggar's opera pilgrim's progress ***1800-1918 jane austen notices.994.html#1 one disk, 1 mbyte persuasion northanger abbey emily bronte one disk, 675 kbytes wuthering heights wilkie collins two disks, sgml, $10 each, $20 for the set disk notices.994.html#1 (800 kbytes) -woman in white notices.994.html#1 disk notices.994.html#2 (800 kbytes) - 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"strategy" is an embattled concept-metaphor and unlike "theory," its antecedents are not disinterested and universal. "usually, an artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy"(_oxford english dictionary_) -gayatri chakravorty spivak, _outside in the teaching machine_ one of the founding assumptions of this book is that no social category exists in privileged isolation; each comes into being in social relation to other categories, if in uneven and contradictory ways. but power is seldom adjudicated evenly -different social situations are overdetermined for race, for gender, for class, or for each in turn. i believe however that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire. -anne mcclintock, _imperial leather_ [1] in a recent interview, ironically entitled "in a word," gayatri chakravorty spivak revisits the term "strategy," and argues for the use of precise critical "strategies" in academic scholarship. as the quotation above indicates, her notion of "strategy" strives for a political accountability, for a situated reading that prioritizes a local context that by definition cannot function as a blanket "theory" that is then applied to all like-sounding cases. "a strategy suits a situation," she reminds us, "a strategy is not theory." while spivak's work on "strategic essentialisms" is well known, and often misunderstood as an excuse to proselytize on the virtue of academic "essentialisms," her particular articulation of the critical necessity of the notion of "strategy" itself has often been overlooked. [2] i begin my review of anne mcclintock's _imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest_ with an invocation of spivak's notion of "strategic" readings to situate mcclintock as one such admirably engaged and embattled "strategic" reader. mcclintock's collection of essays wrestles with situating and balancing the problematic variables of race, class, and gender in readings of the colonial context within a range of hermeneutical discourses. while it is critical commonplace in current academic parlance to speak of the imbricated discourses of race, class, and gender, mcclintock calls for a critical reading of empire that demands a rigorous re-conceptualization and historicization of such utterances. race, gender, and class, she argues, are to be called "articulated categories" that "are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively. rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways." (5) these categories thus do not derive their signification from a fixed point of origin, but instead are "articulated," unfolded from uneven and often opposing locations. operating within such a methodological framework, mcclintock's book offers three related critiques of "the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention of industrial progress"(4). each critique points up the tendency in earlier critical work to overemphasize one term of the articulation at the expense of the others. for instance, mcclintock demonstrates how the cult of domesticity in late nineteenth-century england has as much invested in hierarchies of race as it does in traditional taxonomies of gender. or that imperialism has as much to do with gender asymmetries (both within and without the colonial context) as it does with the more pronounced impositions of class and race. [3] mcclintock's heuristic gestures reflect the same kind of constant structural scrutiny that she brings to bear on the analytical categories of race, class, and gender. one of her preliminary moves is to locate herself firmly at the juncture of a range of traditionally separate theoretical schools: an abiding concern of the book is to refuse the clinical separation of psychoanalysis and history . . . and to rethink the circulation of notions that can be observed between the family, sexuality and fantasy (the traditional realm of psychoanalysis) and the categories of labor, market and money (the traditional realm of political and economic history) (8). mcclintock similarly refuses to conceive of time and history as a binary of before and after, with the post-colonial condition comfortably cushioned from an oppressive colonial past; she points instead to the urgent continuity of historical patterns. the plotting of time and histories, she argues, is nothing more than "a geography of social power" (37). [4] in this essay, i will pursue the limits of mcclintock's claim for such critical practices insofar as they can be traced in her book, and in turn pose a series of questions: first, given the scattered, albeit connected, chronologies of the book's individual essays (which begin with rider haggard's sketch map of the route to king solomon's mines, and end with a more contemporary map of south african politics), does mcclintock manage to achieve the kind of precise historical and theoretical intervention she herself calls for? second, is the scale of mcclintock's project simply too ambitious, too wide-ranging, too methodologically fragmented to produce readings that are coherent and "strategic?" _imperial leather_'s table of contents reads like a model for a cultural studies collection, with sections on a dizzying array of issues from an essay on race, cross-dressing, and the cult of domesticity, to another on commodity racism and imperial advertising. does mcclintock, in her effort not to privilege one category over another as an organizing trope for her analysis of different cultural pheonomena, end up with a more radical version of the "commonplace, liberal pluralism" that she so abhors (8)? third, how does mcclintock's book add to the current scholarship on the structures of colonial discourse? the past few years have seen a prolific and rich widening of critiques in the area of colonial discourse analysis. christopher lane's _the ruling passion: british colonial allegory and the paradox of homosexual desire_, ali behdad's _belated travellers: orientalism in the age of colonial dissolution_, ann stoler's _race and the education of desire: foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things_, and david spurr's _rhetoric of empire_ are just some examples of the diverse cultural-studies based critiques of empire that have recently emerged. does mcclintock offer us something that we won't already find elsewhere in this rapidly emergent field? [5] the first, and most persuasive section of mcclintock's book is entitled "empire of the home." this section attempts to situate genealogies of imperialism within the european domestic landscape, and specifically within the cult of domesticity. "discoveries" of the colonies appear as belated gestures where the "inaugural scene is never in fact inaugural or originary: something has always gone before" (28). and that "something [that] has gone before," mcclintock argues, is something that is staged internally within the bedrooms and boardrooms of the european metropole. mcclintock expands the notion of domesticity to include "both a space (a geographical and architectural alignment) and a social relation to power" (34). using material examples of commodity racism such as a 1899 pears soap advertisement, she demonstrates how discourses of scientific racism and commodity fetishism conflate in scenes of marketable "imperial domesticity." the pears' image "shows an admiral decked in pure imperial white, washing his hands in his cabin as his steamship crosses the threshold into the realm of empire" (32). access to imperial spaces is arrived at through the cleansing powers of a domestic product that significantly promulgates a version of imperial domesticity that is %without% women. colonialism may well be metaphorised as the benevolent expansion of the english family and its accompanying domestic habits, yet it is a family that is structurally inflexible and exclusively male. [6] mcclintock's most successful location of the convergence of racist, classist, and sexist structures in the production of late nineteenth-century bourgeois english domesticity lies in her analysis of the infamous arthur munby/hannah cullwick affair. arthur munby, a well-known victorian barrister (1829-1910), was discovered, posthumously, to have "loved hannah cullwick , "servant born at shifnal," for forty-six years, and for thirty-six of those years to have secretly harbored cullwick as his "most dear and beloved wife and servant" (76). mcclintock not only points to the myriad connections between work and sexuality that found this "particularly victorian, and particularly neurotic" relationship (77), but further demonstrates how this dynamic is artfully managed through a victorian order of things that relies on learned and interconnected discourses of race, class, and gender. munby's urban projects and elaborate typologies of working-class women collide, mcclintock reminds us, with the distinctly "imperial genre" of travel ethnographies: "like the colonial map, munby's notations [and photographs] offered a discourse of the surface and belonged -like the musuem and exhibition hall -to the industrial archive of the spectacle" (82). working-class women, like the racialized 'natives' dotting the imperial landscape, become subject to, and object of a similar masculinist order of colonial logic. and the genre of munby's photograph, as malek alloula's _colonial harem_ has also stridently articulated in a related context, is %the% imperial site/sight of choice. [7] unlike earlier readings of the affair that cast cullwick as the beleaguered lower-class victim of an oppressive master, mcclintock however chooses to emphasize the couple's shared investment in the maintenance of this s/m dynamic. throughout the various roles cullwick adopts for her master's pleasure (from servant to mistress, from class to race transvestism), she stages, for mcclintock, not merely her master's fantasies, but also her own. the couple's desires can converge because and not despite of their articulated class and gender positions. and the site at which they do indeed converge most markedly is in their mutual fetishization of race. munby, in stride with the discourses of victorian degeneration, imagines cullwick, not just as transgressively "male" but also as "black." at her most desirable (for munby, that is), cullwick is presented "in a grotesque caricature of the stigmata of racial degeneration: her forehead is flattened and foreshortened" (107). cullwick, too, stages her most effective rebellion against munby's authority when she refuses to relinquish control of a "slave-band" that marks her as racialized, even as she is performing other roles. in a radical re-writing of freud and theories of fetishism, mcclintock grants cullwick, the woman, the ability to fetishize. the filthy leather "slave-band" as fetish stands in not for the phallus, but for the concealed/missing component of cullwick's/womens' labor. [8] i find mcclintock's fusing of psychoanalytical categories of the fetish with categories of race and class persuasive but also problematic. while mcclintock's careful placement of munby and cullwick within a dense history of freudian disavowal and displacement of early objects of desire (such as the elusive and yet everpresent maid-figure) is compelling, i am less struck by her reading of race in such an analysis. mcclintock does not fully problematize cullwick's and her own conflation of slavery with gender and class oppression. such conflations have been vehemently opposed by many african american feminist critics, such as carla peterson and hortense spillers, who argue that to make such analogies in experiences is to elide the very specificities and brutalities of the history of slavery. herein lies the main challenge to mcclintock's heuristic battles: her continued appeal to the analogical as well as to the intensely different structures of analysis within the categories she is exploring. in other words, race is to class as class is to gender, and so on and so forth. within such analogs, race can only approximate gender, never stand in or substitute for it. yet, to argue, as she does, that race, class, and gender participate in mutually generative relationships is to erase the binary structures of the analogy, and to arrive at problematical dialectical moments such as the one cited between slavery and gender oppression. i am not suggesting that there is an easy way out of this quandary, but merely that mcclintock appears to have overlooked such potential pitifalls in an otherwise dense argument. [9] mcclintock's second large section, entitled "double crossings," moves our gaze from the domestic body of cullwick's performances to the larger domestication of the market of empire. in this instance, the history of english soap production and advertisement functions as an allegory for the whitewashing of empire. imperial advertisements for different brands of soap invoke images of the monkey (monkey brand soap), or of an evolutionary racism, to sell not just commodities but a particular version of positivist history: "civilization is born [such images imply] at the moment of first contact with the western commodity" (223). commodities in their crossings to the colonies suggest the possibility of a different brand of colonial mimcry. the native is not encouraged to aspire to the public status of an englishman, but only to adopt his private habits and accoutrements; to buy, but never to participate in the trading of such commodities. the poetics of colonial cleanliness become "a poetics of social discipline" (226). but as mcclintock's prior section has already demonstrated, such boundaries and fantasies of colonial control are rarely maintained. myths of native idleness, lassitude and filth are crucial to the reification of such commodity exchanges, myths that, mcclintock points out, are easily dismantled through close historical readings of the particular colonial labor context. fetishism appears disruptively here, too, as in the case of hannah cullwick, manifested in the uncanny quality of commodity exchange processes, especially as they involve indigenous practices and products. colonial feminists, like olive schreiner, further interrupt the hegemony of western commodity discourse through their focii on gendered and racialized forms of production. [10] again, as in my critique of the earlier section, i will argue that mcclintock falters in her analysis of the category of race. race, as is refracted through the multiple images of soap advertisements in this section, does not transcend its traditional binary of black and white. mcclintock restricts her analysis to the african continent, ignoring the similarly powerful reverberations such racialized commodities had on other colonies, such as india. extending her critique to india, or even gesturing toward its perverse racial position (india begins to be read in heavily racialized terms only after the rebellion of 1857) would permit mcclintock to interrogate conflicting discourses of race in simultaneous moments of colonial history. similarly, i would add that just as units of analysis like race and gender have their particularized locations in history, so also do discourses of critical inquiry. if we are urged to localize the fetish, we must concurrently localize the post-colonial theory that mcclintock uses in its precise political and historical moment. while mcclintock expends considerable effort in explicating and situating psychoanalyis and freud within a distinct genealogy of theoretical negotiations, she is less prone to do so with regard to post-colonial theory and its practitioners such as homi bhabha. [11] mcclintock's final section, "dismantling the master's house," provides a contemporary and powerful closure to her first two sections. using the political struggles of men and women in south africa, this section explores the crucial thread of historical continuity, exposing the disruptive kernel of colonial oppression that contaminates any neat division of the colonial past from the putatively post-colonial present. the theoretical purchase of terms such as hybridity takes on a markedly political valence in contexts such as south africa, where narrative ambiguities perform tasks that few politicians can accomplish. mcclintock uses the example of a collaborative literary text, _poppie nongena_, produced through the labor of a white and a black woman, as one site of hybrid resistance. elsa joubert, a white afrikaans writer and mother, transcribes in this text the orally transmitted history of a black woman, "poppie nongena" recorded during the bloody soweto uprising of 1967. [12] i will end as i began with a reference to gayatri chakravorty spivak. in an interview republished in _the post-colonial critic_, spivak compares the project of sustained critical inquiry to the daily cleaning or brushing of one's teeth. both, she argues, need to be undertaken in the spirit of daily maintenance, and unlike a surgical operation, should not be expected to bring about a drastic recovery or change. mcclintock's book asks for a similar critical vigilance in our analysis of the categories of race, class, and gender. thus, even if at times mcclintock's text appears maddeningly repetitive and heavily over-burdened with disparate topics, it is her commitment to constant rereadings of empire that we most remember. the post-script to her book, "the angel of progress" sums up this gesture and warns us against the dangers of critical lethargy: without a renewed will to intervene in the unacceptable, we face the prospect of being becalmed in a historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back spellbound at the epoch behind us, in a perpetual present marked only as "post." (396) works cited: spivak, gayatri chakravorty. "in a word." _outside in the teaching machine_. new york: routledge, 1993. ---. _the post-colonial critic : interviews, strategies, dialogues_. new york : routledge, 1990. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------wood, 'resistance in rhyme', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-wood-resistance.txt archive pmc-list, file review-7.996. part 1/1, total size 13288 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- resistance in rhyme by brent wood trent university bwood@trentu.ca postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by brent wood, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: russell potter. _spectacular vernaculars: hip-hope and the politics of postmodernism_. albany: suny, 1995. [1] _spectacular vernaculars_ is the most recent book on hip-hop to appear on university library shelves, and the first to deal squarely with hip-hop as a specifically postmodern phenomenon. [2] did i say "phenomenon"? russell potter would have my head. the central claim potter makes in the intriguing introduction to _spectacular vernaculars_ is that hip-hop culture constitutes a "highly sophisticated postmodernism" (potter, 1995: 13). by characterizing hip-hop as a "postmodernism," rather than a "postmodern phenomenon," potter begins to build his case for understanding hip-hop as a self-conscious political *practice*, not merely as a collection of commodities and customs. furthermore, he means to insist, against paul gilroy to whose work potter often refers, that hip-hop is fundamentally a *post*modernity rather than an instance of *oppositional* modernity (4). [3] hip-hop, in potter's view, is a successful postmodern guerilla resistance against both the new right and the corporate juggernauts that rule economic life in north america. moreover, argues potter, hip-hop is a resistance which has had "more crucial consequences than all the books on postmodernism rolled into one" (13). on the other hand, hip-hop is not simply a postmodernist praxis complementary to the postmodernist theory purveyed in the academy, but also a theoretical practice in its own right. [4] why hip-hop ought to be thought of as postmodernist rather than modernist has something to do with the guerrilla nature of its strikes and the ruthlessness with which it employs capitalist weaponry and the found objects of the postindustrial urban mediascape. unlike richard shusterman's 1991 essay "the fine art of rap," which discussed the postmodern aesthetics of hip-hop music, _spectacular vernaculars_ is concerned with hip-hop's political dimension. ultimately, for potter, hip-hop *cannot* be modern because it operates, in sun-ra's words, "after the end of the world." potter also makes reference to shaber and readings' characterization of the postmodern as marking a "gap" in "the modernist concept of time as succession or progress" (3). potter compares this kind of interruption in a culture's perception of historical time to the interruption in musical time caused by the use of the sample in hip-hop music. he also relates it to the concept and practice of "signifyin(g)" as defined by henry louis gates, which implies a different relationship between the present and the past than the one supposed by modernism. as a "signifyin(g)" practice, hip-hop is always reclaiming, recycling, and reiterating the past, rather than advancing from it. [5] the book's title, "spectacular vernaculars," plays on the double meanings of each of the words (and is a bust-ass four-syllable rhyme besides). the vernacular meaning of "vernacular" is something like "language of the common people," and to his credit potter makes an effort to speak in the language of the street. that he does not wholly succeed is probably inevitable, given his theoretical reference points and academic orientation. "vernacular"'s ancestry is more to the point of the book. it can be traced back to the latin %vernaculus%--"a slave born in his master's house." "spectacular" refers not only to the quality of potter's rhyme, but also to debord's _society of the spectacle_. thus hip-hop is read fundamentally as a use of media and capital by the common people to further their own ends, rather than the ends of the hegemonic power structures which we generally assume are in control. [6] _spectacular vernaculars_ is divided into five chapters, which deal, respectively, with hip-hop in terms of art; language; the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality; tactical resistance; and political theory. [7] potter begins by characterizing hip-hop as a vernacular art, and seeks to demonstrate what he feels are its essential aspects. he argues that its fundamental practice is one of *citation* (or signifyin(g)), and that, as a result, hip-hop necessarily resists the categories of production and consumption. three versions of the song "tramp" are presented to illustrate this point: lowell fulsom's 1966 "original" solo version, otis redding and carla thomas's 1967 duet re-make, and salt 'n' pepa's 1987 hip-hop track of the same name, which samples from and refers to the earlier versions. this treatment of a song lyric in its entirety and its evolution is one of the book's high points. unfortunately, this is the only in-depth "reading" in the book. the remainder of its arguments are supported only by short quotations. [8] the second chapter, "postmodernity and the hip-hop vernacular," has little to do with postmodernity %per se% but much to do with the vernacular as a language of resistance. potter uses the medieval troubadours, malcolm x, and deleuze and guattari as reference points as he builds a case for "black english" as a resistant vernacular. he then takes this argument to another level, citing the subversive verbal and representational practices of rappers paris and da lench mob (ice cube's crew) as building on this vernacular premise. paris is cited to demonstrate the use of layered sampled dialogue (in this case, george bush's), while da lench mob's record _guerillas in the mist_ is offered as an illustration of how hip-hop deals with racist verbiage from the likes of the lapd. [9] the title of the third chapter, "the pulse of the rhyme flow," is also somewhat estranged from its subject matter. its subtitle, "hip-hop signifyin(g) and the politics of reception," is more to the point. potter deftly shows how rappers' rhetorical strategies are often misunderstood by their audience, and how "moral panic" can be used as a tool of powerful interests to keep insurrectionary culture at bay. he also deals here with inflammatory issues of sexism, violence, and homophobia in hip-hop, and with the question of black "authenticity." in the end, potter concludes, hip-hop is a culture whose roots and flowers are mixed and many. hip-hop is not purely the domain of straight black men from the ghetto, although that image is often put to use by both rappers and the forces of moral panic. its roots spread deep into the african diaspora, and its flowers transcend class, gender, sexuality, and nation. [10] the fourth chapter is devoted to the politics of resistance, showing how hip-hop relays history to a society of amnesiacs. potter calls hip-hop a "cultural recycling center" and a "counter-formation" of capitalism" (108). here the central reference point is michel de certeau's theory that consumers trace their own paths through the commodity relations with which they are presented. thus the "eavesdropping" of white kids on black culture (ice cube's term), potter argues, can be read as an invaluable step toward an anti-racist society. the book's final chapter continues this thread, emphasizing hip-hop's multi-cultural and international aspects, and argues that essentialist definitions of what counts as "black" and "white" are ultimately more useful to the "powers that be" than to the people who are held in their thrall. [11] _spectacular vernaculars_ concludes with some insightful commentary on the relationship of academics to hip-hop, focusing on an interview between krs-one and michael lipscomb. potter argues that lipscomb continually misses krs-one's main thrust by insisting on literal interpretations of language and conventional definitions of politics. here potter reminds us that "some real ground would be gained" by a dialogue between the sociologists of popular culture and the "vernacular cultural expressions" (153) they find so intriguing. [12] potter's book is positioned as a translator between these two cultures and their respective dialects, yet it is obviously directed squarely at the academy. no young hip hopper is going to read a book where rhyme is referred to as "homophonic slippage" and quotations from de certeau open the chapters. rather, potter accomplishes much the same thing that tricia rose accomplished with _black noise_ in clearing up the prejudices toward rap music and hip-hop in general that exist in the academy. [13] rose, however, eschews the term postmodernism and succeeds without it. potter's own formulations of the postmodern as an interruption in a collective sense of time and history and of hip-hop as a spectacularly resistant political practice are convincing enough in context, but in the end may leave the theoretically-oriented reader unsatisfied. reference to james snead's worthy essays are absent from _spectacular vernaculars_, as is detailed consideration of the work of cornel west. furthermore, since we are dealing here with time and tradition, one can't help but feel that there ought to be some consideration of west african concepts of rhythm, music, and social organization, and the cosmology that goes with them. [14] in one sense, "hip-hop and the politics of resistance" might have been a more accurate subtitle for the book. for it is at its best when recounting hip-hop's political history and serving up readings of the discourse between rappers and the media, rappers and politicians, and rappers and critics. potter's lens is a wide-angle one; he clearly considers himself a part of the culture in question, and he writes from a political position that is progressive without becoming preachy. [15] one final issue is the relative neglect of aesthetics (postmodern or otherwise), a neglect which tends to reduce hip-hop's musicians and poets to speech-writers and celebrities. after all, there is more to the hip-hop story than the self-consciously political, and there is more to the political itself than can be consciously thought. the greatest power of hip-hop is rhythmic and is *felt* as strongly as it is *heard*, yet the musical and poetic dimensions of hip-hop are hardly touched on here. [16] in spite of these criticisms, _spectacular vernaculars_ stands up as a complement to other recent academic writing on hip-hop such as brian cross's _it's not about a salary_, rose's _black noise_, david toop's _rap attack_ and michael brennan's "off the gangster tip." it's never what potter says that disappoints, but occasionally what he doesn't say, especially given the book's tantalizing title, the unresolved questions of african-american culture's relationship to postmodernism, and the power of hip-hop rhyme and rhythm. works cited brennan, michael. "off the gangsta tip: a rap appreciation, or forgetting about los angeles." _critical inquiry_ 20.4 (1994): 663-693. cross, brian. _it's not about a salary: rap, race and resistance in los angeles_. ny: verso, 1993. potter, russell. _spectacular vernaculars: hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism_. albany: suny press, 1995. rose, tricia. _black noise_. hanover: wesleyan up, 1994. shusterman, richard. "the fine art of rap." _new literary history_, 22.3 (1991): 613-32. snead, james a. "on repetition in black culture." _black american literature forum_ 154 (1991): 146-154. ---. "racist traces in postmodernist theory and literature." _critical quarterly_ 33.1: 31-39. toop, david. _the rap attack_. london: pluto, 1984. ---. _rap attack 2_. london: serpent's tail, 1991.</dd> -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------shadle, 'schama and the new histories of landscape', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-shadle-schama.txt archive pmc-list, file review-6.596. part 1/1, total size 22655 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- schama and the new histories of landscape by mark shadle eastern oregon state college mshadle@eosc.osshe.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by mark shadle, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: simon schama. _landscape and memory_. new york: a.a. knopf, 1995. mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. -owen barfield, _poetic diction_ [1] lithuanian bison protected so they could be annihilated for "sport" by goring as an incarnation of tacitus's transformed "wild man" of germania, royalist robin hoods masquerading as mythological green men, the maniacal, neo-roman hydraulics of renaissance fountain builders, and whole drawing-rooms of mad englishmen climbing mt. blanc with a pack train of gourmet food -these are just a few of the fascinating eccentricities of simon schama's latest book, _landscape and memory_. but beyond its appetizing details, this book is an intriguing example of the increasingly problematic process of writing history in postmodern times. [2] schama's project is a controversial one. besides examining the complex interpenetrations of nature and culture, he considers the difficulty of placing an environmental ethic within a postmodern "autobiography of history." he also considers the tension between the individual and the communal, and between myth and history in light of "new historicist" perspectives. schama begins by following his lodestone of henry thoreau's notion (and magritte's before him) that both "the wild man" and "wilderness" are more a matter of what we carry "inside" us than an exterior reality. he argues that the cultural appropriation of landscape may not be an entirely bad thing. in fact, he argues that this should be "a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration" (9). after praising their ability to make "inanimate topography into historical agents," and "restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors" (13), schama dismisses environmental historians like stephen pyne, william cronon, and donald worster for their similarly "dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor" (13). schama also steers clear of environmental critics like max oelschlaeger, whose call for new myths schama paraphrases as the need to "repair the damage done by our recklessly mechanical abuse of nature and to restore the balance between man and the rest of the organisms with which he shares the planet" (13). instead, schama describes his own book as: "a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation" (14). [3] this new book will be accompanied by five filmed bbc television programs that will air in america. unlike professor schama's previous works -including _patriots and liberators: revolution in the netherlands 1780-1813_, _two rothschilds and the land of israel_, _the embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of dutch culture in the golden age_, _citizens: a chronicle of the french revolution_, and _dead certainties (unwarranted speculations)_ -this one seeks an audience beyond historians. ironically, though, it is this book for non-specialists which calls the nature of history most radically into question. [4] instead of being yet another explanation of what has been lost, schama wants his book to be an exploration of "what we may yet find" (14). certainly he is right that old myths -and the behaviors they generate and are generated by -are still with us. but while schama's "range" (historically and geographically) is vast, his internal summaries and conclusions about what we "may yet find" are curiously slight and vague. notice, for example, his way of letting krhushchev's response to his uneasy inheritance of the european forest drift into mystery when he says: "but although for a century or more, the rulers of russian empires, from tsar nicholas i to general secretary nikita khrushchev, liked to show off their royal hunt, there was, at the same time, something about the heart of the forest that remained irreducibly alien; impenetrable, resistant" (53). khrushchev, here, is a stand-in for all the heads of state who regularly exploit a "mythological bath" in nature on their way to becoming "super-natural." [5] schama makes it clear that this paradoxical relationship between nature and culture is a venerable one when he describes "rome's mixed feelings about the forest" (83). he explains it this way: "on the one hand, it [the forest] was a place which, by definition, was 'outside' (foris) the writ of their law and the governance of their state. on the other hand, their own founding myths were sylvan" (83). even though the world since john locke has extended divine law into a natural law that extends culture into nature, it should no longer be ironic that a "macho" politician like khrushchev, who liked to indulge his "feral nature" in the forest, would try to subdue it with his "virgin lands" project. similarly, donna haraway has shown how the gun-totin' teddy roosevelt both fed upon and horribly distorted nature with chauvinism and racism through the gorillas exhibited in the natural history museum in new york city."^1^ [6] schama's book presents us time and again with this basic problematic, reminding us that landscape myths and memories have both "surprising endurance" and a "power to shape institutions that we still live with" (15), and that landscapes themselves "are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock" (61). far from hoping to unravel actual nature from its mythological or ideological representations, schama aims to show just how mutually entangled these categories really are. it should be acknowldeged, he says, "that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery" (61). [7] schama does not seem fully to appreciate the tragedy of this "muddling," now being learned everywhere, which is that playing out our own mortality against the immortal "image" of the forest can quickly kill nature while some subconscious human feeling of immortality for our species goes on. a redwood is not merely the hot air of metaphor, but the slow growth of actual wood and a giant ecosystem through the cool air of several millennia. no nursery of metaphor can regrow it without the soothing coastal fog of time. while schama does not "deny the seriousness of our ecological predicament, nor . . . dismiss the urgency with which it needs repair and redress" (14), he never cites the best accounts of how nature was wrestled into submission in america (e.g. wendell berry's _the unsettling of america_, or richard slotkin's _regeneration through violence_), nor does he discuss the most thoughtful and esoteric attempts to recycle and transform old histories and myths in order to find again or anew what charles olson calls, in _poetry and truth_, an "actual world of value."^2^ this destination/process is the central work of olson's three-volume set of poems to reclaim gloucester, massachusetts, _the maximus poems_.^3^ [8] schama could appreciate olson's careful approach to myth and history as it came out of his readings in pre-socratic greek culture. in _the special view of history_, olson follows out and shapes heraclitus's notions that "man is estranged from that which is most familiar" and that "what does not change is the will to change" (olson). this is brilliantly elaborated by sherman paul: one lesson [of olson's wanderings in mexico] was that there were people who were not estranged from the familiar, who lived in the physical world and knew how to attend it closely, to make it a "human universe." another was the realization that since time does not alter the fact that they were like us, there is no "history." in the enthusiasm of his discovery of the mayan world, the only "history" olson acknowledged was the "second time . . ." this does not mean that he transcends history. instead it tells us what his preparatory poem declares: that civilizations decline when there is no will to change.^4^ while postmodern writers like olson would agree with schama that "place is a made thing," and that language is slippery, they have worked hard to imagine an intertwined world of creatures and language "placed" not in the noun of history but in the histori/city of the only absolute we can still believe in: "man is, he acts."^5^ while the entanglements of myth and history can contribute stability to society, they can also close it off to certain individuals, groups, cultures. [9] to clarify this, we need to consider the recent history of history. "postmodern history" (as opposed to histories of the contemporary or postmodern period) has inherited the tension between incremental, authorial scholarship ("our civilization") on the one hand, and autobiography (at once "my-story/stery" and the "his/her-story" implicit in charles olson's translation of herodotus' "istorin'" as "to find out for yourself") on the other. the new historicism is the most prominent example of the kind of fractured historical practice this tension has produced. in the course of displacing both traditional historiography and the intellectual history of ideas, the new historicism has opened the practice of history to the institutional and discursive violence inherent within the discipline itself, to the ways in which historical interpretation has functioned to shut out certain stories, to shut down possibilities of negotiation and exchange. while stanley fish has seen the value and efficacy of new historicists' work as essentially limited to the classroom (where, for example, it has helped to produce a new, multicultural canon),^6^ hayden white locates in their practice a more thoroughgoing (pronounce it thoreau-going) and olsonian transformation of the subjects and objects of historical knowledge: what they [the new historicists] have discovered . . . is that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches, at least as many as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum; that . . . to embrace a historical approach to the study of anything entails or implies a distinctive philosophy of history; and that . . . finally one's philosophy of history is a function as much of the way one construes one's own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one's knowledge of "history" itself.^7^ [10] while schama remains in many ways a traditional historian, this book takes on something of a new historicist cast. in the "introduction," he gives his account a post-structuralist frame and a feel for the kind of situational and environmental ethics that have characterized much new historical work when he says: "my own view is necessarily . . . historical, and by that token much less confidently universal. not all cultures embrace nature and landscape myths with equal ardor, and those that do, go through periods of greater or lesser enthusiasm" (15). using the work of mary lefkowitz and norman manea, schama castigates both mircea eliade in europe and joseph campbell in america as structuralist myth-lovers and ultimately as hero worshipers impatient with democracy (133). [11] yet there is the residue of the structuralist-idealist in schama when he confesses that "it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with. national identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland" (15). despite his clear recognition that this "national identity" has been the engine of such political catastrophes as nazism, schama seems to place himself at least partly under its peculiar spell. [12] schama apparently wants to have it both ways. the tension between his philosophy of history and his practice of history escalates in his accounts of visiting the sites of his jewish heritage in poland, or his american in-laws in the redwoods of the american west. in these places schama "re-places" himself as historian to re-incscribe landscape. working more in the sub-tradition of american literary history epitomized by fred turner in _the spirit of place_, where turner revisits the sites and communities of some famous american writers, schama tries here to feel the effects of history.^8^ having absorbed both the need for "objectivity" from the sciences and the value of situated subjectivity from the humanities, schama, more than many historians, finds that the garden of personal narrative presents him with a tangle of difficult choices. [13] historians can no longer easily decide which rhetorical and stylistic devices to use. ironically, this is because we have set our "his/her-stories" aside, as something for the province of "expert" historians writing for incredibly diverse audiences, rather than as the responsibility of the more local "tribe." what schama's alternately scholarly and autobiographical approach reminds us of is the call to "compose" the rough draft of any history as something personal. out of several observations of revisited sites and serendipitously created intersections of texts, the "my-story/stery" becomes the "his/her-story," inclining not toward the complete abstraction of some "universal" audience, but toward the scattered members of what composition scholars lisa ede and andrea lunsford call a new or "invoked" audience who have lived in the places/events (however metaphorically idealized or mythologized) under question.^9^ out of the seed of personal observation stem a description and analysis that will, in their greatest and final abstractions, paradoxically challenge the limits of an individualistic perspective. [14] barry lopez explains this process in what might have been a perfect epigraph for schama's book: it is through the power of observation, the gifts of the eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward, it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. for as long as our records go back, we have held these two things dear, landscape and memory. . . . each infuses us with a different kind of life. the one feeds us, figuratively and literally. the other protects us from lies and tyranny. to keep landscapes intact and the memory of them, our history in them, alive, seems as imperative a task in modern time as finding the extent to which individual expression can be accommodated before it threatens to destroy the fabric of society.^10^ yet the beauty of this process is accompanied by a danger which lopez also describes: the intense pressure of imagery in america, and the manipulation of images necessary to a society with specific goals, means the land will inevitably be treated like a commodity; and voices that tend to contradict the proffered image will, one way or another, be silenced or discredited by those in power.^11^ [15] the increasing resistance to this "pressure of imagery" has led in american studies to a critical engagement with myth-symbol, as for example in frederick turner's _beyond geography_, where turner argues that we americans have substituted mythology for history.^12^ such an argument relies on the notion of a history distinct from mythology. schama's rather different engagement with myth-symbol, with its emphasis on the complex interweaving of myth and history in european experience, can assist americans in better understanding their own situation. in this respect his book can be seen as extending a project that links together such diverse work as raymond williams's study of the politics of ideas in _the long revolution_ and evan connell's tracking of a wanderlust of business in _a long desire._^13^ [16] schama's book demonstrates the need in america to dive back into a european past of "mythological history" and "historicized mythology," but it also implies a need to study what we have lost of other venerable histories and mythologies around the world. lopez, continuing his discussion of the danger of image and mythology, helps us appreciate this postmodern urge to "get behind the greek" when he says: all local geographies, as they were defined by hundreds of separate, independent native traditions, were denied in the beginning in favor of an imported and unifying vision of america's natural history. the country, the landscape itself, was eventually defined according to dictates of progress like manifest destiny, and laws like the homestead act which reflected a poor understanding of the physical lay of the land.^14^ [17] lopez's concerns are being acted upon in america by a host of reflective, often multicultural, writers -writers who are in many cases important postmodernist historians in their own right, drawing on "folk" cultures that comprised "postmodern" knowledges and strategies long before the modern language association staked out that term and territory. this work, by writers like ishmael reed, gerald vizenor or leslie silko, schama does not examine in any direct way. but there are many points of potentially fruitful contact between such work and his, since both are centrally concerned with the ways "landscape" is produced and consumed by those who would claim merely to be observing or exploring or preserving it: writers, artists, tourists, museums, governments, corporations, and of course historians. [18] ultimately, the great value of schama's book would seem to lie in the urgency of the questions it raises rather than the clarity or completeness of the answers it can provide. in his admirably idiosyncratic way, schama is wrestling with the central problem at the intersection of history and nature, the problem of how to put memory and interpretation positively to work in the natural world. once we have deconstructed the mythological, morally-informed landscapes of the past, where are we to locate what olson calls the "actual world of value"? notes: ^1^ donna haraway, "teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city 1908-1936," _culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social theory_, ed. nicholas dirks, geoff eley and sherry ortner (princeton: princeton up, 1994). ^2^ wendell berry, _the unsettling of america: culture and agriculture_ (san francisco: sierra club books, 1977). richard slotkin, _regeneration through violence: the mythology of the american frontier, 1600-1800_ (middletown, connecticut: wesleyan up, 1971). ^3^ charles olson, _the maximus poems_ (berkeley: u of california p, 1983). ^4^ sherman paul, _olson's push: origin, black mountain and recent american poetry_ (baton rouge: louisiana state up, 1978) 29. ^5^ charles olson, _the special view of history_ (berkeley: oyez, 1970) 34. ^6^ stanley fish, "commentary: the young and the restless," _the new historicism_, ed. h. aram weeser (new york: routledge, 1989)315. ^7^ hayden white, "new historicism: a comment," in weeser, 302. ^8^ fred turner, _the spirit of place: the making of an american literary landscape_ (san francisco: sierra club books, 1989). ^9^ lisa ede and andrea lunsford, "audience addressed/audience invoked: the role of audience in composition theory and pedagogy," _college composition and communication_ 35.2 (may, 1984)155-171. ^10^ barry lopez, "losing our sense of place," _teacher magazine_ (feb., 1990) 188. ^11^ lopez, 42. ^12^ frederick turner iii., _beyond geography: the western spirit against the wilderness_ (new york: viking press, 1980). ^13^ raymond williams, _the long revolution_ (new york: columbia up, 1961). evan connell, _a long desire_ (new york: columbia up, 1961). ^14^ lopez. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------cresap, 'bisexuals, cyborgs, and chaos', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-cresap-bisexuals.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.596. part 1/1, total size 27497 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- bisexuals, cyborgs, and chaos by kelly cresap university of virginia kmc2f@virginia.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by kelly cresap, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: marjorie garber. _vice versa: bisexuality and the eroticism of everyday life_. new york: simon & schuster, 1995. [1] is it possible to conceive of bisexuality without resorting to binary logic? the very nomenclature of %bi%sexual seems to declare faith in a certain form of dualism. where, after all, might one locate bisexuality except %between% heterosexuality and homosexuality, as a predilection involving %both% sexes? harvard literary scholar marjorie garber goes to considerable lengths in her new book to reveal the fallacies of such ways of thinking. she ushers bisexuality into a postmodern realm where it may be seen in fruitful interaction with anti-dualistic discourses and practices such as those of cyborg culture and chaos theory. [2] garber strategically avoids providing a clear-cut, delimited view of her central topic in _vice versa: bisexuality and the eroticism of everyday life_. a reader's search for hard definitions is contraindicated by the book's sheer proliferation of material, which includes excursions into cultural and literary history, scientific and pseudoscientific inquiry, mythology, etymology, fact, fiction, and anecdote. through the course of 584 pages, bisexuality amasses a bewildering diversity of connotations. [3] indeed, without garber's sustaining critical presence, the views of bisexuality registered in the book would threaten to devolve into a kind of pluralistic rampage. we ascertain from "common wisdom" that "everyone is bisexual" and that "there is no such thing as bisexuality" (16). bisexuality is either the most "natural" or the most "perverse," "the most conservative or the most radical of ideas about human sexuality" (250). conceivable in terms of experience, essence, or desire (176), it presents a janus-faced (365) or sphinx-like (178-80) emblem of enigma. it is alternately chic and "creepy" (146), ubiquitous and invisible (267); a "whole, fluid identity" (56) and a "phantom proposition" (481); a practice predating antiquity (252) and a contemporary fad (219). bisexual tendencies can be expressed concurrently or sequentially (30) as well as defensively, ritually, situationally, experimentally, and "technically" (30); they may also involve triangulated desire (423-35) or erotic substitution (435-42). persons who behave bisexually do not necessarily identify as such, and (appropriately enough) vice versa. we learn from journalistic and cinematic accounts that bisexuals are creatures of "uncontrollable impulses" (93), the "ultimate pariahs of the aids crisis" (_newsweek_, 1987); that the bisexual male is "the bogeyman of the later 1980s" (_new york times_, 1987); and that the bisexual female's known proclivities include vampirism (_the hunger_) and serial murder (_basic instinct_). such accounts mingle with discussion of long-standing stereotypes which cast bisexuals as fence-sitters (21), double agents (94), and swingers (20); as people who are habitually flighty, promiscuous (28), confused, irresponsible (56), opportunist (351), indecisive (360), going through a phase (345), devoted to group sex (476), attracted to anything that moves (55), guilty of wanting heterosexual privilege (20), and incapable of making commitments (56). further, the situation of bisexuality is "either allegorically universal or untenably conflicted" (473); and coming out as bi would be easy for a dozen reasons, hard for a dozen reasons (67-8). [4] garber intervenes in this topical maelstrom to assert that bisexuality acts as one of the great destabilizing forces of postmodern culture: "bisexuality means that your sexual identity may not be fixed in the womb, or at age two, or five" (86); it "unsettles ideas about priority, singularity, truthfulness, and identity" (90). "bisexuality marks the spot where all our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis" (368); it presents "the radically %discontinuous% possibility of a sexual 'identity' that confounds the very category of identity" (513). [5] however, rather than simply declare bisexuality a dissolver of categories and proclaim herself a sexual agnostic, garber devotes the bulk of _vice versa_ to documenting the concrete cultural and social histories that inform contemporary notions of bisexuality. she chronicles varieties of western bisexual experience in a great many guises and milieux: in bohemian circles from bloomsbury to the harlem renaissance to georgia o'keefe's new mexico; in the confined space of barracks, prisons, and boarding schools; in the u.s. congress, the mormon church, hollywood, the world of early psychoanalysis; in the irreducibly plural affections of dozens of historical figures, from plato and shakespeare to bessie smith and sandra bernhard.^1^ with what the boston _globe_ has called "a doctoral candidate's rigor and a channel-surfer's restlessness,"^2^ garber assesses the multifold bisexualities emerging from a range of cultural artifacts, including memoirs, novels, plays, movies, nonfiction, newspapers, letters, academic journals, talk shows, advice columns, fanzines, "slash" lit, and song lyrics. [6] this material, taken together, clearly militates against the notion that %any% individual can claim a "sexual identity" that is either unwavering or fully comprehendible. readers of all sexual orientations will find that the engaging wit and eloquence of _vice versa_ belie its disconcertingly open-ended questions about the stubborn liminalities of human behavior and desire. casting about for a way of conceptualizing bisexual politics, garber enlists the metaphorical use of miscegenation and hybridity made (respectively) by donna haraway and homi k. bhabha (88-9). concluding her chapter on bisexuality and celebrity, garber writes, "the cognate relationship between postmodernism and bisexuality merely underscores the fact that %all% lives are discontinuous" (150). [7] what are the consequences of such destabilization and discontinuity? what cultural fallout attends garber's assessment of bisexuality as a resolutely non-homogeneous, category-unsettling phenomenon? [8] her book, like the topic it addresses, arouses intensely ambivalent response.^3^ even while gay author and activist edmund white charges garber with neglecting the more unnerving implications of her research, he confesses that her book left him profoundly unnerved. in white's view, garber focuses on the playfully "transgressive" side of her topic "at the expense of a deeper discussion of the threat that bisexuality poses to the orderly separation of gender roles, and of the corresponding rage that bisexual behavior can provoke."^4^ yet _vice versa_ clearly prompts white to carry on such a deeper discussion himself, at least as regards his own past. the conclusion of his review finds him looking askance at his post-stonewall "conversion" to a "full" gay identity, and at the way this conversion made him invalidate his previous sexual experience with women: i must confess that garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether i myself might not have been bisexual had i lived in another era. . . . following a tendency that garber rightly criticizes, i denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. after reading "vice versa," i find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.^5^ [9] certainly one of the virtues of garber's book is its ability to elicit this kind of self-reinterpretation. it's not just that people will need to revise their position on the kinsey scale (either retroactively or otherwise), but that they will be newly aware of how inadequate this and other scales are at accounting for the fluctuations and undercurrents of a sexual life. _vice versa_ will also serve to help countermand the tendency in gay and lesbian circles to "reclaim" as homosexual any and all historical personages who displayed same-sex desire at any point in their lives. however, such factors only begin the task of reckoning with the pandora's-box contents of the book. [10] without wanting to impose an artificial consensus on garber's scholarship, nor to downplay the specific and urgent rights-based agendas of the contemporary bisexual movement (of which both garber and myself are members),^6^ i find it useful to describe _vice versa_ in intellectual terms as a species of chaos theory, and to hazard garber's bisexual as a counterpart to the cyborg in donna haraway's writings. (i use the word "hazard" here advisedly.) [11] in _chaos bound_, n. katherine hayles defines cultural postmodernism as "the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions. we can think of this as a denaturing process."^7^ hayles speaks of interrelated waves in postmodern culture that have acted to denature language, context, and time. the next wave, she writes, "is the denaturing of the %human%. while this fourth wave has yet to crest, it is undeniably building in force and scope" (266). [12] hayles's account of this fourth-wave project focuses on donna haraway's ironic political myth, "a cyborg manifesto." hayles finds the denaturing of the human sphere exemplified in how haraway's cyborg works to "undo" three distinct sets of opposites: human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical (284).^8^ the purported effectiveness of such "undoing" of opposites needs a caveat, which i will provide later in this review. at present i wish to explore the implications of this logic for garber's text. [13] key passages in haraway's essay might lead us to assume a close likeness between her cyborg and garber's bisexual: the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation (150). the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence (151). my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work (154). cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualiesms in which we have explained our bodies and our tooles to ourselves. this is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (181). while sensing a potential affinity between haraway's cyborg and garber's bisexual, i am nonetheless aware of the risk involved in announcing a family resemblance. haraway specifically states: the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity (150). re-reading this passage in the context of _vice versa_, i was immediately struck with two questions: why does haraway assume that bisexuality necessarily constitutes a "seduction to organic wholeness"? why does haraway's notion of bisexuality seem to have nothing to do with garber's? [14] the species of bisexuality haraway refers to here is in fact one from which both she and garber take pains to distance themselves. garber singles out for ridicule the "holistic" notion of bisexuality popularized in this century by followers of carl jung. in her chapter "androgyny and its discontents," garber lambastes jung for his static universalist notions of masculinity and femininity, showing how the intrapsychic union of "anima" and "animus" espoused by jung constitutes an etherealized form of the practice of compulsory heterosexuality. _vice versa_ mercilessly exposes a host of skeletons in the closet of jungian psychology: essentialism, egocentrism, romanticism, puritanism, sexism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism (208-19). garber shows how traces of such elements persist in a host of jung-influenced practices: in the writings of joseph campbell (215-6), mircea eliade (218), june singer (214 ff.), and camille paglia (2212); as well as in the men's movement (224-5) and in certain cross-dressing and transgendered circles (225-9). garber instances radical-feminist theologian mary daly as one of androgyny's outspoken malcontents. (although elsewhere in the book garber criticizes the idea of pauline conversions, she presents this one approvingly.) daly initially favored the idea of "psychic wholeness, or androgyny," then "recanted" from the position, finding the word androgyny "confusing," "a semantic abomination," and describing the androgynous ideal as the equivalent of "john travolta and farrah fawcett-majors scotch-taped together" (216). [15] in garber's reconstructed sense of the term, as distinguished from jung's and haraway's usage, the bisexual may be said to collaborate in hayles's project of denaturing the human sphere. like haraway's cyborg, garber's bisexual works to "undo" certain prevailing oppositions -though the principal oppositions involved in this case are not human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical, but rather 1) homosexual/heterosexual, 2) masculine/feminine, and 3)sexual/platonic.^9^ [16] garber problematizes the first of these three fundamental dyads in a number of ways: a) by looking at "borderline" cases which raise general doubts about the viability of a linear gay/straight continuum;^10^ b) by revealing the specific shortcomings of quantified indexes such as the 7-point kinsey scale and the klein sexual orientation grid (28-30); and c) by citing judith butler and gayle rubin, whose scholarship has shown how normative claims are culturally produced within what butler has called "a heterosexual matrix for desire" (161). within this matrix, butler argues, bisexuality is "redescribed as impossible" by the patriarchal law that "produces %both% sanctioned heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality" (183-4). in a similar vein, garber quotes feminist mariana valverde: "although bisexuality, like homosexuality, is just another deviant identity, it also functions as a rejection of the norm/deviance model" (250). [17] in connection with the second dyad, garber extends the discussion of her previous book _vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety_. her chapter on androgyny deconstructs not only jungian psychology but related concepts such as hermaphroditism and the myth of unisexuality.^11^ [18] with respect to the third dyad, garber argues that there is an unavoidably erotic component in amorous childhood and adolescent friendships (ch. 13), as well as in the teacher/student relationship (ch. 14). the realm of pedagogy is %institutionally% bisexual, garber asserts, noting that classroom transferences occur regardless of the sexual predilections students and teachers display outside the class setting. [19] as this list suggests, few social or psychological institutions remain uninterrogated in the pages of _vice versa_. in addition to those already mentioned, marriage (chs. 16, 17), monogamy (chs. 18-21), "normalcy" (297-303), the "conversion" narrative (ch. 15), and even theories of ambidexterity (ch. 12) all come up for revisionist scrutiny. [20] i see garber's bisexual as a potential complement or corrective to haraway's cyborg. haraway and garber both create a "powerful infidel heteroglossia" which charts paths away from a unitary sense of self; but the paths they select diverge in important ways. despite the masculine/feminine dyad discussed above, garber's bisexual would hardly be overjoyed at the prospect of living in haraway's "world without gender."^12^ even if such a world were imaginable, would it be advisable? providential? fun? in haraway's talk of "ideologies of sexual reproduction" and the "informatics of domination," one is left to wonder what place, if any, remains for garber's "eroticism of everyday life." the very style of garber's book -its affable wordplay, countless anecdotes, vigorous readability -stands as an implicit rebuke to haraway's manifesto, with its ascetic ironies and pinched, semi-automaton syntax. [21] at the same time, a greater appreciation for what haraway means by situated knowledges might have helped garber to curb her occasional tendency toward grandiosity. garber's chapter on freud ends with this pronouncement: "bisexuality is that upon the repression of which society depends for its laws, codes, boundaries, social organization -everything that defines 'civilization' as we know it" (206). despite the element of irony in the final words, garber leaves open the possibility here, as elsewhere, that bisexuality carries the potential for shaking western civilization to its very foundations. such a cataclysm would be a tall order indeed for a movement which is bedeviled with problems of visibility and representation, and which is unlikely to yield a politically empowering event equivalent to the stonewall riots. [22] this matter of "pull-apart" opposites, and of cultural theory encroaching on realpolitik, calls for a caveat. john guillory, rearticulating a concern that has become almost ritualized in the field, recently criticized the cultural studies tendency toward fostering claims about the supposed across-the-boards subversiveness of certain marginalized practices.^13^ this tendency, he suggests, arises as a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment in the midst of a widening credibility gap: in the absence of persuasive totalizing narratives about politics or economics, cultural studies brings ingratiating relief in the form of crypto-totalizing discourse about neglected minorities. guillory specifically takes judith butler to task for intimating that historically entrenched binaries about gender can be fully "subverted" through the auspices of drag performance.^14^ a similar argument could be made about some of garber's claims for bisexuality -her occasional habit of resorting to breathless superlatives (does bisexuality really mark the spot where %all% of our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis [368]?), and of relying on a plethora of literary close readings where broader historical analysis is called for. in _vice versa_, bisexuality at times seems to be elevated to the status of a full-fledged sociopolitical paradigm shift by surmise and enthusiasm alone, by the sheer prettiness of thinking it so. [23] yet it must also be argued that bisexuality %is% an unusually volatile and productive site of present contestation, and it is not garber's duty to undersell the potential of a movement whose parameters are still manifestly in flux. what eve sedgwick asserted of her book _epistemology of the closet_ may be said as well of _vice versa_: a point of the book is %not to know% how far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the syntax of a 'broader' or more abstractable critical project.^15^ [24] nor, %pace% edmund white, should garber be burdened with the task of enumerating every one of bisexuality's discontents. the enormous misconceptions and prejudices that still saturate most discussions about bisexuality, even among the highly educated, form their own inverted justification for the kind of playfully affirmative treatment garber provides. many readers, faced with the carnivalesque inversions and crosscurrents found in _vice versa_, will feel a sense of vertigo akin to the kind fredric jameson has described about the encounter with postmodern architecture: we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . the newer architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions.^16^ notes: ^1^ a sampling of individuals from the present century: mattachine society founder harry hay, married to a woman and actively gay (73-4); patricia ireland, whose bisexuality came under political censure when she became the president of n.o.w. (72-3); writer john cheever, described by his daughter as a man who loved men but disliked homosexuals (403); first lady eleanor roosevelt (76-8); ex-congressman robert bauman, who pled "nolo contendre" to charges of homosexual solicitation, and whose marriage was subsequently annulled by the catholic church on grounds of "mistake of person" (71); and painter larry rivers, for whom the term "trisexual" is coined ("he'd try anything") (448). ^2^ joseph p. kahn, "the new book on bisexuality," _boston globe_, 6 sept. 1995, 80. ^3^ see also rita mae brown, "defining the new sexuality," _los angeles times book review_, 30 july 1995, 2,9; and frank kermode, "beyond category," _new york times book review_, 9 july 1995, 6-7. ^4^ edmund white, "gender uncertainties," _the new yorker_, 17 july 1995, 81. ^5^ ibid. ^6^ garber traces the roots of nineties bisexual activism through the gay and lesbian movement to seventies feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties (86-7). she acknowledges that the activist and theoretical sides of bisexuality are by no means interchangeable: "the two strands of bisexual thinking, the identity-politics, rights-based arguments for visibility on the one hand and the theoretical, deconstructive, category-questioning arguments for rethinking erotic boundaries on the other are not always easily combined" (87). for biographical material on garber, see kahn, 75, 80. ^7^ n. katherine hayles, _chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science_ (ithaca: cornell up, 1990) 265. ^8^ see donna j. haraway, "a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century," _simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature_ (new york: routledge, 1991) 149-81. the material hayles refers to is found in pp. 151-4. ^9^ garber writes, "if bisexuality is in fact, as i suspect it to be, not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges the easy binarities of straight and gay, queer and 'het,' and even, through its biological and physiological meanings, the gender categories of male and female, then the search for the meaning of the word 'bisexual' offers a different kind of lesson . . . the erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being" (656). ^10^ see note 1. ^11^ regarding the potential for "destabilizing" the man/woman divide, garber's bisexual shows an affinity with the drag queen as figured in judith butler. see butler's "bodily inscriptions, performative subversions," _gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity_ (new york: routledge, 1990) 128-41, and note 14 below. ^12^ haraway, 181. ^13^ john guillory, "system without structure: cultural studies as 'low theory,'" keynote presentation, gwu "intersections" conference, washington, 30 march 1996. an earlier formulation of this oft-reiterated concern is found in peter stallybrass and allon white, _the politics and poetics of transgression_ (ithaca: cornell up, 1986) 177-8. ^14^ guillory singles out butler's scholarship as an unusually intelligent and influential (rather than unusually vulnerable) example of this practice. butler herself, of course, is not unaware of the problem. she spends a considerable portion of _gender trouble_ making similar objections to this tendency in the writings of julia kristeva, michel foucault, and monique wittig (79-128). further, she has made a number of clarifications about her own claims for drag performativity in "critically queer," _glq_ 1:1 (1993): 21, 24, 26-7; see also butler's _bodies that matter_ (new york: routledge, 1993). in _gender trouble_ butler writes, "feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism" (13). ^15^ eve kosofsky sedgwick, _epistemology of the closet_ (berkeley: u of california p, 1990) 12. ^16^ fredric jameson, _postmodernism; or, the cultural logic of late capitalism_ (durham: duke up, 1991) 38. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------arsenault, 'toward an indexical criticism', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-arsenault-toward.txt archive pmc-list, file arsebrin.595. part 1/1, total size 82616 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- toward an indexical criticism by joseph arsenault tony brinkley university of maine tony_brinkley.academic@admin.umead.maine.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by joseph arsenault and tony brinkley, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. part i *i(a). saying* [1] *legein*--a 1951 lecture by heidegger on heraclitus offers a series of readings of the greek word legein, and, in response to the semantics of the word, discovers "the beginning of western thinking, [when] the essence of language flashed in the light of being" ("logos" 78). "we have stumbled," heidegger writes, "upon an event whose immensity still lies concealed in its long unnoticed simplicity," that "the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as legein, [as] laying [%legen%]," so that "saying and talking occur essentially as the letting-lie-together-before [%das bei-sammen-vor-liegen-lassen%] of everything which, laid in unconcealment, comes to presence" (63/8). as a sign, heidegger suggests, legein "refers to the earliest and most consequential decision concerning the essence of language" (63). "where did it [the decision] come from?" he asks (63). he does not answer this question historically but philosophically. "the question reaches into the uttermost of the possible essential origins of language. for, like the letting-lie-before that gathers [%als sammelndes vor-liegen-lassen%], saying receives its essential form from the unconcealment of that which lies together before us [%der unverborgenheit des beisammen-vor-liegenden%] . . . the unconcealing of the concealed into unconcealment [that] is the very presencing of what is present [%das anwesen selbst des anwesenden%] . . . the being of beings [%das sein des seienden%]" (64/8). from another perspective, one might have said instead that legein becomes the evidence of a different event, the offering up of language to philosophy (specifically, and quite recently, to heidegger's philosophy). but, whatever the reading, is legein as evidence a saying, is it a sign in the sense that legein speaks of signs? if not, then--as evidence--legein might be the sign of a semantics for which legein itself does not speak. [2] what does legein say? [3] *what legein says may be different from what legein shows*--to put this another way, what heidegger says with legein may turn out to be distinct from what use of legein (the offering up of language to philosophy, and specifically to heidegger's philosophy) indicates. not that heideggerian philosophy is not alive to the indications: the interpretation of legein as evidence (as what we will refer to later as an index) shapes heidegger's presentation of language. already in _being and time_ (1927) he writes that "legein is the clue [%der leitfaden%, the guide] for arriving at those structures of being [%der seinsstrukturen%] which belong to the beings we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or [in] speaking about it [%des im ansprechen und besprechen begegnenden seienden%]" (47/25. translation modified). and: "in the ontology of the ancients, the beings encountered within the world [%das innerhalb der welt begegnende seiende%]," and which are taken as an example "for the interpretation of being [%ihrer seinauslegung%]," presuppose that the being of beings "can be grasped in a distinctive kind of legein [%in einem ausgezeichneten legein%]" that "let[s] everyone see it [the specific being] in its being [%in seinem sein%]" (70/44. translation modified). whatever the turns in perspective between heidegger's earlier and later writing, the approach to legein as a clue and guide, as %leitfaden%, is not abandoned. nor is the interpretation of the clue (of what saying shows) as indicative of the ontological difference between being and beings. as a complement to the semantics of legein, there is always this semantics as well, a semantics of showing, a complement to be found not only in heidegger's writing but in the writing of his contemporaries as well. a concern with %showing% may itself be indicative of a collective project in which any number of collaborators knowingly or unknowingly participate (in this essay we will be concerned, in addition to heidegger, with wittgenstein, peirce, benjamin, arendt, and celan, but this list--like the essay-should be regarded as open-ended). at the same time, inasmuch as a concern with showing (and with what shows-up) will have as a kind of remainder what does not show-up, or what remains concealed, or what might be selected to go unnoticed, a reading of evidence which restricts itself to the relations between being and beings can turn out to be at the expense of the specific historical referents to which evidence points but which a turn toward being conceals. the second part of this essay will be concerned specifically with the way particular histories can turn up. [4] *what does legein say?*--the word can be translated as %talking% or %saying%, as %expression% ("logos" 60). heidegger says (60) that legein can also be translated as %laying down before% (like the german %legen%), as %lying% (like the german %liegen%), and as %arranging%, or %gathering together% (like the german %lesen%). elsewhere heidegger writes that translation requires "thoughtful dialogue" in which "our thinking must first, before translating, be translated" ("anaximander" 19). it is in "thoughtful dialogue" with legein that heidegger finds that "the saying and talking of mortals comes to pass from early on as legein." heidegger's reading of legein might be regarded as an instance of legein, i.e. as an example of the decision it describes: "legein properly means the laying-down and laying-before [%niederund vor-legen%] which gathers itself and others" ("logos" 60/4), and these actions in turn have "come to mean saying and talking" (61). henceforth, to express is "to place one thing beside another, to lay them together [%zusammenlegen%] . . . to gather [%lesen%]" (61/5). this makes them available for reading, but "the %lesen% better known to us, namely, the reading of something written remains but one sort of gathering, in the sense of bringing-together-into-lying-before [%zusammen-in-vorliegen-bringen%]" (61/5). there is also "the gleaning at harvest time [%die ahrenlese%]" that "gathers fruit from the soil," a "gathering" that involves "a collecting which brings under shelter" (61/5). this "safekeeping that brings something in has already determined the first steps of the gathering and arranged everything that follows" (61). it has arranged it as a sheltering. for "what would become of a vintage [%eine lese%] which had not been gathered with an eye to the fundamental matter of its being sheltered" (61/6). this %sheltering%, according to heidegger, the laying side by side in a selected order, is also what is meant by saying. it determines that saying (legein) will be "from the start a selection [%eine auslesen%] which requires sheltering": "the selection [%die auslese%] is determined by whatever within the crop to be sorted shows itself to-be-selected [%als das erlesene zeigt%]" (62/6). it shows itself to-be-selected in terms of "the sorting [%das erlesen%]" or "the fore-gathering [%das vor-lese%]" that "determines the selection [%die auslese%]" (62/6), so that "the gatherers [%die lesenden%] assemble to coordinate their work" according to the "original coordination [that] governs their collective gathering" (62/6). this governance determines the essential choice in the selection of "things [to] lie together before us" (62), of that which "lies before us [and] involves [%angliegt%] us and therefore concerns us" (62/7). saying produces this lying before that involves and concerns us, and that is selected to be sheltered by the saying--a sheltering, heidegger says, that is the equivalent of truth, of unconcealment (aletheia). so that saying means "shelter[ing]" and "secur[ing] what lies before us in unconcealment [%des vorliegenden im unverborgenen%] . . . the presencing of that which lies before us into unconcealment [%das anwesen des vorliegenden in die unverborgenheit%]" (63/7). at the same time, implicit in heidegger's reading is the understanding that what will also be involved is a selection of what will %not% be included, sheltered, selected, a selection of the excluded that will then remain in concealment (letheia, untruth), and henceforth go without saying. [5] *what does the selection exclude?*--heidegger's reading of legein might be exemplary in this regard as well. fundamental to this reading is the recognition of an exclusion in what is said. inasmuch as saying is a %presencing of what is present%, and presencing (%das anwesen%) can%not be included% as what is present (%das anwesende%). inasmuch as the %saying of what is said% cannot be included as %what is said%. [6] then how does one know the presencing of what is said? one might say that, in addition to what is said, heidegger points it out, but this pointing out--this showing of the saying of what is said as the presencing of what is present--would be indicative of a semantics that remains unsaid. [7] of what, without saying, does legein give evidence? *i(b). showing* [8] *"[t]he lighted and the lighting"*--in a 1942-43 lecture course on parmenides, heidegger uses the distinction between "the lighted and the lighting" to indicate the difference between unconcealment (aletheia, truth) and the unconcealed: on the one hand, "the determining radiance, the shining and appearing" of aletheia; on the other hand, the "ones who look and appear in the light" of this truth (_parmenides_ 144). in a 1954 lecture, also on parmenides, heidegger employs the same figure of speech to distinguish between presencing and what is present: "every presencing [is] the light in which something present can appear" ("moira" 96); while "what is present attains appearance [%erscheinen%]," in this appearance "presencing attains a shining [%scheinen%]" (97/48). [9] is this then how legein gives evidence of what it cannot say, of what occurs in addition as the saying? [10] all these distinctions might be interpreted as more of what is said, as what through this saying is made present. given such an interpretation--which is also a reading for which the meanings of legein allows--the evidence of what legein cannot say will remain concealed. a concealment that heidegger calls the destiny of western thinking. insofar as western thinking is restricted to this semantics of legein. [11] but isn't it precisely the work of a heideggerian reading that, while it restricts thinking to this semantics, it approaches thinking in a way that exemplifies a different semantics, one in which what is said gives evidence of what it cannot say? so that the writing is not so much a gathering, laying before and in front, sheltering, selecting, or saying, as it is an indication of what can%not% be gathered, laid before and in front, sheltered, selected, said? inasmuch as heidegger points to a distinction between what is said and the saying as something that is %not% said, but that nevertheless can be shown %in% what is said and %by% what is said? so that through the unconcealment (truth, aletheia) of what is said, the unconcealment of legein as presencing is %shown%: "the presencing (of what is present) manifests itself [%das anwesen (des anwesenden) selbst zeigt%] . . . the manifold shining of presencing itself [%das vielfaltige scheinen des anwesen selber%]" ("moira" 98/48)? [12] how else might we approach this shining? [13] *cf. wittgenstein's _tractatus_ (1921), where a distinction like the difference between lighting and lighted also occurs*--in the _tractatus_, the distinction between %saying% and %showing% will be adopted to account for what propositions can and cannot say, where "what %can% be shown [%gezeigt%] %cannot be% said [%gesagt%]" (4.1212). the _tractatus_ regards propositions as logical pictures, saying as a kind of picturing: "a picture [%bild%] can picture [%abbilden%, depict or represent] any reality whose form it has" (_tractatus_ 2.171. translation modified). what a "picture cannot picture [is] its [own] form of picturing [%form der abbildung%]; it shows it" (2.172. translation modified). a picture cannot picture its own form of picturing because a "picture pictures its object from without (this standpoint is its form of representation)" (2.173. translation modified), i.e. its form of picturing. a picture cannot picture its form of picturing (this standpoint from without) because it "cannot . . . place itself outside its [own] form of representation" (2.174), outside its own standpoint. a picture's form of picturing can only be displayed, i.e. shown by the picture without being pictured. it cannot be represented; it can only be exhibited. [14] the _tractatus_ anticipates the radiance to which heidegger refers, the shining in what is lighted of the lighting (the presencing of what is present that "manifests itself [%selbst zeigt%]" ["moira" 98/48]). "there is indeed the inexpressible [%unaussprechliches%]," wittgenstein writes in 1921. "this %shows% itself [%dies zeigt sich%]" (_tractatus_ 6.522). one might speak of the semantics of this display. wittgenstein said as much in a 1919 letter to russell, commenting on work toward the _tractatus_: "the main point is the theory of what can be expressed (%gesagt%) by propositions--i.e. by language (and what comes to the same, what can be thought)--and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (%gezeigt%); which, i believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy" (quoted in anscombe, 161). but should the concern with a semantics of showing be restricted to "what cannot be expressed . . . but only shown"? specifically should it be restricted to what is shown by an expression but which the expression cannot express? [15] in connection with heidegger's _being and time_, wittgenstein said (1929) that while "we do run up against the limits of language" and "are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said," this "inclination, the running up against, %indicates something%" (_conversations_ 68-69). given wittgenstein's subsequent understanding (1930s--1940s) of language as not singular but plural (the plurality is indicated by the many language-games that wittgenstein can devise), one might say that the limits of one language (for example, a language of depiction) turn out to be %within% another (for example, a language of display). in running up against the limits of one language (or language-game), i might be part of another language (game) in which %there is something indicated%. *i(c). toward an indexical criticism* [16] *deixo*--we will say that, together with the semantics of legein, there is another semantics which seems to be its complement, a showing alongside the saying. [17] for the moment we will restrict the reference of showing to the saying of what is said, i.e. to legein as it is indicated in what is said. [18] perhaps this semantics is always alongside and complementary to the semantics of legein, indicative at each moment, but subordinate, so that the showing is always of the production of what is said. [19] a comment of aristotle's may be illustrative in this regard (suggestive precisely because it is presented as unexceptional, involving a kind of distinction one makes--%without argument%--in the process of making an argument). aristotle says that when "what is said [legetai] is not alike," but "appears so because of the expression [lexin]," what i take to be the same "because of the expression [lexin]" can be "shown [edeixen]" to be different (178a). [20] on the one hand, lexin or legein (expression). also lexo or lego (to tell, to speak, to say, to express, to lay in order, to arrange, to gather, to select). and the lexical. also, legibility. [21] on the other hand, edixa or deixo (to point out, point towards, to show, display, bring to light, to tell, to indicate). also deigma (sample or example), paradeigma (paradigm). and dike (the way, custom, justice), which may "originally [have] meant the 'indication' of the requirement of the divine law" (hugh lloyd-jones 167). also the %deictic%, the %indexical%. gestures and signs that point (this) out. [22] this then might be a complement for a semantics of legein, a semantics of deixo in addition. the significance for aristotle lies in what is pointed out about what is said, and here too showing has been restricted to saying, i.e. to the reality constituted by saying. but showing in words might also be directed elsewhere, in response to what is shown in other circumstances, to material displays that are not first of all a matter of legein but of deixo. just as %saying% is open-endedly nuanced in its semantics, won't %showing% be as nuanced? so that the showing of what cannot be said might be only part of an open-ended existential continuum of the instances in which showing can meaningfully occur? [23] *the indexical*--how might one describe the semantics of deixo? cf. peirce, where the nuances of showing serve to distinguish each of his three categories of signs. not that this is always the emphasis in peirce's writing. insofar as he approaches the study of signs as a study of representations, the semiotics he offers might still fall within the realm of legein, as a re-presentation or re-presencing. so that when he writes that "a sign, or %representamen%, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (_elements of logic_ 135)--that "it must 'represent' . . . something else" (136), so that "for certain purposes it [a sign] is treated . . . as if it were the other" (155)--this might be taken as an interpretation of the way words participate in presencing. but %at the same time% (often in the same passages, so that we are emphasizing a distinction that emerges in peirce's thought but is not held strictly apart from representation), peirce approaches signs as referential. then a sign is "anything which determines something else (its %interpretant%) to refer to an object to which [it] itself refers (its %object%)" (169). inasmuch as reference is a pointing--it %indicates% its referent, which peirce calls its %object%, in such a way that another sign, which pierce calls the %interpretant% of the first, will point to the same referent as the first (the reference of the second sign is %determined% by the reference of the first)--%meaning becomes a showing%. [24] it is the status of the object (or referent) and of the interpretant that distinguishes an index from peirce's other two categories of signs: a symbol or icon requires interpretation to be meaningful--regardless of any referent--whereas an index is meaningful regardless of interpretation: "an %index% is a sign which would, at once lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as [a] sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not (170). even if the bullet-hole were never seen, even if an interpretant were never determined, the bullet-hole would still refer to the gun-shot. [25] but in a sense, given peirce's theory of reference, all signs will be indexical. inasmuch as reference involves an existential (or material) relation, and the determination by a sign of an interpretant involves an existential (material) relation between the two (the relation of %determining%), any interpretant might be regarded as an index of the sign that determined it--whether anybody reads the interpretant as an index or not. one might say that insofar as a sign determines the reference of an interpretant, it is indexical in the sense in which peirce writes that deictic words like "this" or "that" are indexical: "the demonstrative pronouns, 'this' and 'that,' are indices . . . [because] they call upon the hearer . . . [to] establish a real connection between his mind and the object; and if the demonstrative pronoun does that--without which its meaning is not understood--it goes to establish such a connection; and so is an index" (162). in the same way, an interpretant is also an index because a real connection is established with the referent. given a theory of meaning as a theory of reference, meaning might be regarded as deictic, "more or less detailed directions for what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant" (163). this connection would be the interpretant; the interpretant would also be an index of the sign that determined this reference. [26] within an indexical semantics one might then distinguish: as %object% or %referent%, what shows itself to be shown (the shot fired into the wood); as %sign%, the showing of what shows itself to be shown (the bullet-hole as a sign of the shot); as %interpretant%, the pointing out--more or less interpretative in its gesture--that responds to this showing (the deictic gesture by which i indicate %this% as the sign that a shot was fired). at the same time, the interpretant will also be an index of the sign that determined this reference. one might say that any interpretant indexes its production. ^1^ [27] *reading heidegger and wittgenstein indexically*--crucial to heideggerian philosophy seems to be the understanding that what is present indexes presencing even when this reference goes unrecognized. if saying is a presencing, then what is said (presenced) becomes an index of the saying (presencing). as an index, what is said exists in an indexical relation with the saying and can determine an interpretant to refer to the saying (presencing) as well. so that the interpretant is in turn an index of the power of what is said (what is present) to determine a reference to the saying (presencing) that it indexes. [28] and with respect to wittgenstein's work in the _tractatus_: in representing the world, a picture (%ein bild%) simultaneously indexes its form of picturing, and can therefore determine an interpretant to refer to this form of picturing as well. thus the interpretant will index the power of a picture to determine a reference to its form of picturing. however, the indexing by the picture of its form will occur regardless of interpretant. [29] *we might want to explore a range of indexical reference that exists regardless of interpretation, the bullet-hole, for example, as a historical instance*--to the extent that the bullet-hole determines a saying, the saying will also be an index of the bullet-hole. inasmuch as the bullet-hole is an index of the shot, the saying will also be an index of the shot. but then the saying of this, although a presencing of what is present, as %this% index of the past, would be secondary to the bullet-hole and to the shot that was fired, about which i still know very little, but of which indices remain, regardless of what i know. what happened once can be presented now, determined not only by the bullet-hole in the molding, but by its legibility as a sign at this moment, the complexity of indices, the complexities at this moment of reading: an existential, material tangle. %what cannot be said% might now have an additional resonance, not so much the logical or ontological constraint, but the existential, the material constraints on interpretation--that only a portion of what is indexed will be possible for me to interpret (though another interpreter might be able to interpret more or less). given the determinants of possibility (including, perhaps, a sense of the freedom to interpret or the willingness to interpret). given the legibility and illegibility of a sign at any given moment, of "an image [%ein bild%, a picture] of the past [%der vergangenheit%, of pastness] which unexpectedly appears" (benjamin, "theses" 255/270), "flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized" (255/270), the possibilities of reading its "historical index [%historische index%]" (benjamin, "n" 8/577). "the image that is read," walter benjamin writes, "i mean the image at the moment of recognition [%das gelesene bild, das bild im jetzt der erkennbarkeit%], bears to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse, that lies at the source of all reading [%den stempel des kritischen, gefahrlichen moments, welcher allem lesen zugrunde liegt%]" (benjamin, "n" 8/577-78). [30] *then how would an indexical criticism elaborate an alternative, or a complement, to the semantics of legein?*--from the perspective of an indexical criticism, the semantics of legein seems to be restricted to a self-referential interpretation of its deictic gestures, to an indexing of the interpreting by what is interpreted. this restriction can also be read as an evasion of other indications that demand and exceed an interpretation, but that the deictic gestures of the interpretation can point out. where interpretation as a %deictic gesture% is a more or less adequate response, a more or less responsive gesture (a saying in response to the indices that address you). [31] to approach an indexical criticism, one can begin by approaching what we have interpreted as the semantics of legein at a point where it %indicates% its own limits, but, in indicating those limits, it also marks its participation in a continuum of other indications, the indices and displays of an existential or material referentiality. to paraphrase wittgenstein, we run up against limits and the running-up-against points to something--i.e. to a semantics of pointing out, indexing, showing--in which the indications of saying, representing, legein participate. it may turn out to be one of the gestures of legein to offer its saying as universal, to restrict semantics to its designations of meaning, and to offer encounters with its limits as an encounter with limits in general. so that what the running-up-against points to seems to be self-referential. where an indexical criticism might begin is by questioning this universal claim. as if the limits we run up against could never point to something %else%. part ii *ii(a). a farmhouse* [32] *someone shows you the picture of a house, a white house as presented in a black and white photograph, or, actually off-white, a house that is slightly gray*--you are asked what it is. you say, "this is a house." perhaps you should say, "this was a house," or, "then, this was a house." or: "now, this is a picture of what then was a house." in such ways a saying of what can be said responds to a presenting of what is present. as what was present is presented again. or this index of an event in this way shown. [33] you are told, "this was a farmhouse," that the photograph presents the picture of a farmhouse. [34] but inasmuch as the photograph is a picture of a house under construction, it offers perhaps what was not yet a farmhouse. the photograph of a building that was still to become a farmhouse, presenting as a picture what was not yet present to present. in the process of presenting, indexing the presencing of a farmhouse. behind are pine trees (if asked, you will say, "these are pine trees,") but in front, what is not yet a farmhouse. [35] then: "this is an index of its construction." or: "this is the index of its presencing." this house, you are told, was built of bricks. [36] *but this does not look like a farmhouse. it may have been presented as such, you see the bricks in the picture that you were told were the bricks of the farmhouse, but the building is massive*--eventually you are told that this was never simply a farmhouse, that the presencing of this present was a deception. this, you are told, is what the photograph is a picture of: in late 1943, at treblinka 2, after the camp had been demolished, a farm was created and "the bricks from the gas chambers were used for the farmhouse. . . . the deserted fields were plowed, lupine was sown, and pine trees were planted" (arad 373). subsequently, "a ukrainian . . . name[d] . . . strebel who had been a guard in treblinka brought his family and began farming the area" (373). this was witnessed by franciszek zabecki: strebel, zabecki said, sent "for his family from the ukraine . . . they all lived there until the arrival of the russians" [quoted in sereny 249]). [37] then here are bricks from the treblinka gas chambers; this is a farmhouse.^2^ [38] farmhouses were also built at belzec and sobibor. odilo globocnik wrote to himmler that "for reasons of surveillance, in each camp a small farm was created which is occupied by a guard. an income must regularly be paid to him so that he can maintain the small farm" (quoted in arad 371). the first of the three houses was built at belzec where, after the camp had been dismantled (december 1942), "the whole area was plucked clean by the neighboring population." "after leveling and cleaning the area of the extermination camp, the germans planted the area with small pines and left," but "at that moment, the whole area was plucked to pieces by the neighboring population, who were searching for gold and valuables. that's why the whole surface of the camp was covered with human bones, hair, ashes from cremated corpses, dentures, pots, and other objects" (edward luczynski, a polish eyewitness, quoted in arad 371). in october 1943, ukrainians, under german command, were sent from treblinka and sobibor to belzec in order to restore the devastation. this work established the pattern to be followed later, first at treblinka and then at sobibor, toward the end of 1943, but the success of the operation was limited. even in 1945 and thereafter, the farm continued to attract "masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand" (rachel auerbach, member of the polish state committee for the investigation of nazi war crimes on polish soil, quoted in arad 379). "the area was dug up again and again" (arad 379). *ii(b). %"[u]ber seinen schatten"%* [39] *toward an indexical criticism*--we wish to consider the situation into which specific evidence places us. when we run up against the limits of language, one limit we run up against may turn out to be historical, that we come to a point when we can no longer say %this%, without %this% indicating %something more as well%, a limit to what words can say--that we run up against--as the history of what else they have said. wittgenstein wrote in the _tractatus_ that the book would "draw a limit . . . to the expression of thoughts," where "what lies on the other side of the limit [%janseits der grenze liegt%, lies beyond the limit] will simply be nonsense [%unsinn%, rubbish]" (preface). what lies beyond the limit of the expression of my thought may be historical, however--including the histories those expressions carry with them. if, as wittgenstein later found, the semantics of many words are determined by their use, are determined then as well by the situations in which words have occurred--"the meaning of a word [%die bedeutung eines wortes%] is its use in the language [%ist sein gebrauch in der sprache%]" (_philosophical investigations_ 20); "if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its %use%" (_the blue and brown books_ 4)--then the semantics of a word will be inseparable from the histories of its recurrence. [40] *"how hard i find it is to see what lies in front of my eyes [%vor meinen augen liegt%]!" wittgenstein wrote in 1940 (_culture and value_ 39)*--under the influence of a linguistics that emphasizes the arbitrary or conventional nature of signs, it is always possible to ignore the existential force of the indexical, to reduce the index to a category of the deictic which itself has been reduced to a gesture dictated by convention. [41] but insofar as even when dictated by convention, the deictic (or any sign) is specific to particular circumstances or situations in which it occurs, inasmuch as in each case it becomes evidence of its occurrence (and therefore historical), it will continue as an index in peirce's sense (i.e. as an existential signifier), whatever the hermeneutic conventions which permit this recognition or exclude it. in the 1930s and 40s, wittgenstein found that we will not know what a remark means--since we will not know its use--if we restrict interpretation to a generalized reading. when i say that "i know that that's a tree [%ich weis, das das ein baum ist%] this can mean all sorts of things [%kann alles mogliche bedeuten%]" ("on certainty" 45. translation modified); it will continue to mean all sort of things--although in principle more than in practice--until i know the specific use, i.e. a specific history. "i look at a plant that i take for a young beech and that someone else thinks is a black-currant. he says 'that is a shrub' [%er sagt 'das ist ein strauch'%]; i say it is a tree [%ein baum%]" (45). or: "we see something in the mist which one of us takes for a man [%einen menschen%], and the other says, 'i know that that's a tree [%ich weis, das das ein baum ist%]" (45). or: "someone who was entertaining the idea [%dem gedanken%] that he was no use any more might keep repeating to himself 'i can still do this and this and this.' if such thoughts often possessed him [%ofter in seinem kopf herum%] one would not be surprised if he, apparently out of all context, spoke such a sentence [as 'i know that that's a tree'] out loud" (44-45). or: if "i had been thinking of my bad eyes again and it [the statement] was a kind of sigh, then there would be nothing puzzling about the remark" (45). [42] i can also imagine a circumstance in which i no longer understood this sentence, "though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind" (44). i no longer understand this sentence: "it is as if i could not focus my mind on any meaning" (44), i.e. on any use. at that moment what might otherwise be recognized as historical, might appear to be an arbitrary sign (i imagine that these words could mean anything), but here too the use (even in apparently lacking a specific history) is the index of a specific history. [43] *"it would be difficult," peirce writes, "to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality" (172)--* the referent of the conventional sign is general (the notion of a tree, rather than any specific tree), but this referent "has its being in the instances which it will determine" and by which it "will indirectly . . . be affected" (143). the tree in relation to specific trees and to specific uses of the word. through use, both the word and the generality of its reference "will involve a sort of index" (144). as jakobson says of saussure, even arbitrary signs (or what we may choose to regard as arbitrary signs) do not turn out to be arbitrary: what may be "arbitrarily described as arbitrary is in reality a habitual, learned contiguity, which is obligatory for all members of a given language community" (28). this will mean, however, that for members of a community, the contiguity is not arbitrary but existential, a history determining of what is said, what is said indexing this history (the saying of what is said becomes specifically historical). peirce writes that the conventional sign, "once in being, spreads among the peoples. in use and in experience, its meaning grows. you write down the word . . . but that does not make you the creator of the word, nor if you erase it have you destroyed the word. the word lives in the minds of those who use it. even if they are all asleep, it exists in their memory" (169). given any sign, the determination of interpretants is unbounded. each in turn determines, the sequence of interpretants accrues incrementally, references accumulate. [44] the point of departure may not be arbitrary, arbitrarily the arbitrary sign; it may be the index, the existential sign, indicative of the histories that are determining for members of a community. then given the histories into which things have been gathered, the word "tree" will never be %only% the sign for a tree unless the word's history is denied. since the sign becomes a historical tangle. [45] *"no one can jump over his own shadow"*--in 1935, heidegger used this expression for those who are entangled in the destiny of being (_introduction to metaphysics_ 167), and it is this destiny, he says, in 1935, that in connection with "national socialism" has concealed from its followers "the inner truth and greatness of the movement [%der inneren wahrheit und grose die bewegung%]" (166/152). heidegger adds, however, that entanglement--this entanglement or a "different entanglement"--cannot be avoided, inasmuch as it is the destiny of being, because "no one can jump over his own shadow [%keiner springt uber seinen schatten%]" (167/152). [46] in 1953, heidegger revised "%die bewegung% [the movement]" to "%dieser bewegung% [this movement]," no longer referring to national socialism as he had in 1935, in a way (as a listener recounts) that "the nazis, and only they, meant their own party" (walter brocker, quoted in poggeler 241). at the same time, in 1953, heidegger also added in a parenthetical phrase an interpretation of "the inner truth and greatness of %this% movement" as "the encounter between global technology and modern man," a revision that allows national socialism not to be an "indication of new well-being," but a "symptom of decline" (christian lewalter, quoted in habermas, "work" 451). ^3^ heidegger subsequently adopted this reinterpretation as having been there from the beginning, as "historically belonging" and "accurate in every respect" (quoted in habermas, "work" 452).^4^ [47] but "no one can jump over his own shadow." in 1962, while writing _eichmann in jerusalem_, hannah arendt reconnected this saying to "the movement": "it was in the nature of the nazi movement that it kept moving, became more radical with each passing month," while its members "psychologically . . . had the greatest difficulty in keeping up with it, or, as hitler used to phrase it, that they could not 'jump over their own shadow'" (63). one might say that in what arendt writes (and specifically for heidegger as a prospective reader, given his reticence on the subject that _eichmann in jerusalem_ addresses, given that he would have had to make the decision either to read or not to read a book of which he could not have been unaware, inasmuch as arendt had written it, so that, even in not reading the book, he would at least have needed to turn from its address), "an image of the past . . . unexpectedly appears . . . flash[ing] up at the instant . . . it can be recognized" and "bear[ing] to the highest degree the stamp of the critical, dangerous impulse that lies at the source of all reading."^5^ *ii(c). %"[e]in rechtes licht"%* [48] *"how can one hide himself before that which never sets?"*--in the summer of 1943, heidegger commented on this fragment of heraclitus (diels 16: to me dunon pote pos an tis lathoi), reading "that which never sets" as being, presencing, %das anwesen%: "each comes to presence," heidegger writes ("aletheia" 119). "[i]n what else could that exceptional character of gods and men consist, if not in the fact that precisely they in their relation to the lighting can never remain concealed? why is it that they cannot? because their relation to the lighting is nothing other than the lighting itself, in that this relation gathers men and gods into the lighting and keeps them there" (119-120). but if "mortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering which lights everything present in its presencing," nevertheless "they turn from the lighting, and turn only toward what is present" (122). turning toward being and away from being, mortals hide themselves--or hide from themselves the awareness of--that which never sets. or, as heidegger wrote later, in 1946, "every epoch of world history is an epoch of [this] errancy" ("anaximander" 27). [49] but perhaps, with respect to history, that which never sets is not the light of being, but that which is there to come to light, the historical reference of indices, traces, evidence, reference produced from the referent. where what brings them to light is our ability to respond to their persistence. i might hide myself from its legibility, but that which never sets might be the historical force of this lingering. [50] *dike*--from the perspective of the semantics heidegger offered in the 1930s and 40s, legein can also be approached as deictic gesture, the gesture of legein is dike, which heidegger, in 1946, does not translate (as has been customary) as %das recht% (justice), but instead translates as %das fug% (order). just as adikia, which has traditionally been translated as %das unrecht% (injustice), is translated as %das un-fug% (disorder) ("anaximander" 41-43/326-28). so that the gesture of legein is not justice but ordering, and the resistance to the gesture is not injustice but disorder. in 1935 heidegger wrote that "if dike is translated as 'justice [%gerechtigkeit%]' taken in a juridical, moral sense, the word loses its fundamental metaphysical meaning" which "we translate . . . with order [%fug%]" (_introduction to metaphysics_ 135/123), as "the overpowering" that "imposes" and that "compels adaption and compliance" (135). this "overpowering as such, in order to appear in its power, %requires% a place, a scene of disclosure," it needs beings that can be interpreted as its productions. to be human, i.e. to be-there (%da-sein%) is to be this interpreter of beings. where the text is the interpreter's existence (%dasein%): "the essence of being-human opens up to us only when understood through the need compelled by being itself. the being-there [%da-sein%] of the historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself [i.e. "the being-there of historical man"] should shatter against being " (_introduction to metaphysics_ 136-37/124. translation modified). in this light heidegger spoke of being as dike, as %das fug%: "being [%das sein%] as dike [%das fug%] is the key to being [%das seienden%] in its structure [%seinem gefuge%]" (140/127. translation modified). [51] *and of those who resist this structure, resisting its claim of origins*--those beings "stand in disorder [%im un-fug%]," heidegger writes, resistant to an order (%ein fug%) that decrees that they appear, then disappear, according to their selection, as they are said and as they are harvested. in disorder "they linger awhile, they tarry [%indem sie weilen, verweilen sie%]," they are unwilling to go. "they hang on [%sie verharren%]. . . . [t]hey advance hesitantly through their while [%die weile%], in transition from arrival to departure. they hang on; they cling to themselves [%sie halten an sich%]. when what lingers awhile [%die je-weiligen weilend%] hangs on, it stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on . . . each dominated by what is implied in its lingering presencing [%im weilenden anwesen selbst%] . . . the craving to persist. . . . inconsiderateness impels them toward persistence, so that they may still present themselves [%sie noch anwesen%] as what is present [%als anwesende%]" ("anaximander" 45-46/331. translation modified). those who linger resist order precisely as their struggle, in presencing themselves as what is present, resisting the presencing of dike, the ordering force of being. "when what lingers awhile delays . . . stubbornly follows the inclination to persist in hanging on, . . . [it] no longer bothers about dike, the order of the while [%den fug der weile%]" (45/331). [52] *or is dike the justice of a specific display?*--given the etymological connection between dike and deixo (to show, to point out, to display). so that the translation of justice as overpowering order might be at the expense of pointing this out, in 1935-46, despite the justice that pointing this out might oblige. perhaps those who linger persist as a way of pointing this out. their disorder might then be just.^6^ [53] *lingering*--in claude lanzmann's _shoah_, filip muller, a survivor of %sonderkommando%, at auschwitz-birkinau, recalls the moment in crematorium ii when the prisoners from the czech family camp were to be killed and he chose to join them in the gas-chamber. "i went into the gas chamber with them, resolved to die," but "a small group of women approached . . . right there in the gas chamber . . . . one of them said . . . 'your death won't give us back our lives. that's no way. you must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice [%das unrecht%] done to us" (164-65). [54] *someone offers you the picture of a house*--if dike is "the order of the while," would it not be dike, this order, which is displayed when a farmhouse replaces gas chambers (as the building blocks of the one become the building blocks of the other. in the photograph of the farmhouse, the image of the bricks is visible, dark shadowing the white)? [55] then what you see might be dike under construction, the order of a particular presencing as it presences what becomes present (at the expense of what is made absent). [56] or would dike require attention to what lingers in the picture, in testimony, pointing out what this was? [57] if the photograph of the farmhouse brings to display what this was, then the photograph of the farmhouse always offers what only lingers. it leads to the question as to what was here before what was here, of what lingers in the lingering, "impelled . . . toward persistence." it indicates the dike of your response. [58] *translation*--heidegger imagines translation as a crossing over: "in the brilliance of this lightning streak . . . we translate ourselves to what is said . . . so as to translate it in thoughtful conversation" ("anaximander" 27). the result is not so much a sense of the past ("we translate ourselves to what %is%"--not what %was%--"said") nor of a present positioned in relation to the past, but a primordial force, the sense of the originating coming to language, which we can only inadequately sustain, where the "thoughtful translation of what comes to speech . . . is a leap over an abyss" that "is hard to leap, mainly because we stand right on the edge" (19), we lack distance (the perspective offered by %what was%), we are too close to jump without falling short ("we are so near the abyss that we do not have an adequate runway for such a broad jump" [19]) unless our "thinking is primordial poetry" (19), the lightning streak. "because it poetizes as it thinks, the translation which wishes to let the oldest fragment of thinking itself speak [the anaximander fragment is the oldest surviving text of greek philosophy] necessarily appears violent" (19). this violence, in particular, as an alternative to any historicism (including philological tradition) that would distance the primordial force. [59] but--without hiding from this force by taking refuge in a more comforting historicism--can we let the oldest fragment, this beginning (assuming that it is), only speak in this way (primordially, assuming that it would) as primordial poetry in 1946? in 1948 paul celan imagined a conversation with someone who demands "a bath in the %aqua regia% of intelligence" that would "give their true (primitive) meanings back to words, hence to things, beings, occurrences" (_prose_ 5). because "a tree must again be a tree, and its branch, on which the rebels of a hundred wars have been hanged, must again flower in spring" (5). to which celan imagines in reply: "what could be more dishonest than to claim that words had somehow, at bottom, remained the same!" (6). [60] *questioning*--in 1933, in connection with "true knowing [%wissenschaft%, science] in its beginning," heidegger said that while "two and a half millennia [have] passed since this beginning . . . that has by no means relegated the beginning itself to the past . . . . [a]ssuming that the original greek %wissenshaft% is something great, then the %beginning% of this great thing remains its %greatest% moment," and "the beginning %exists% still. it does not lie %behind% us as something long past, but it stands %before% us," it "has invaded our future; it stands there as the distant decree that orders us to recapture its greatness" ("the self-assertion of the german university" 32. translation modified). in 1946, developing the same thought slightly differently, heidegger writes that it is not the beginning that "stands %before% us," but we who stand before it, this beginning being separated from us by an abyss on whose edge we stand and that we can only leap poetically. in 1933, heidegger says as well that "if our ownmost existence stands on the threshold of a great transformation," this threshold nevertheless requires that "the greeks' perseverance in the face of what is, a stance that was initially one of wonder and admiration, will be transformed into being completely exposed to and at the mercy of what is concealed and uncertain, that is, what is worthy of question," a "questioning [that] will compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable" ("the self-assertion of the german university" 33). in 1933, this questioning, which seemed to have "come together primordially into %one% formative force" (37), as "the glory and greatness of this new beginning" (38), involved heidegger's engagement with national socialism, an engagement in which he hoped (he said later ^7^) to influence the future of the movement, for example by advocating a leadership that would allow for opposition from its followers ("all leadership must allow following to have its own strength . . . to follow carries resistance within it. this essential opposition between leading and following must neither be covered over nor, indeed, obliterated altogether" ["the self-assertion of the german university" 38]).^8^ it is possible to accept this explanation, even to find it supported by what heidegger said in 1933, and still question how accurately he focused or questioned what %was% inescapable, already in 1933 and later, where this questioning would "compel us to simplify our gaze to the extreme in order to focus on what is inescapable." in 1933 heidegger said that "it is up to us whether and how extensively we endeavor, wholeheartedly and not just casually, to bring about self-examination and self-assertion . . . . no one will prevent us from doing this. but neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the west fails and the west starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness. . . . each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision" (38). hiding oneself from that which never sets. [61] *translation*--benjamin speculates (1923) that a translation "issues from the original--not so much from its life as from its afterlife [%uberleben%, survival]" ("the task of the translator" 71/58). perhaps as an index is a survival, a lingering of its referent. in the arcades project, it is as %afterlife% that historical understanding occurs: "historical 'understanding' is to be viewed primarily as an after-life [%ein nachleben%] of the understood" ("n" 5/547), producing "an image . . . in which what has been [%das gewesene%] and the now [%dem jetzt%] flash into a constellation" ("n" 8/578. translation modified). translations of dike might be regarded as specific images, where a difference (not ontological but historical) occurs between the specific time to which an image belongs and the specific time it comes to legibility. translation as an image, the translation of dike as a coming to legibility: "the historical index of the images [%der historische index der bilder%] doesn't simply say [%sagt%] that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily [%er sagt vor allem%] that they only come to legibility at a specific time [%das sie erst in einer bestimmten zeit zur lesbarkeit kommen%]" (8/577. translation modified). or is this saying, a showing? [62] *in this light*--in contrast to heidegger's focus on beings that stand in disorder, tarrying, craving to persist, benjamin, in a letter (april 14, 1938) to gershom scholem, distinguishes between different illuminations (where heidegger questions the response to the light, benjamin questions the lighting): "the point here is precisely that things whose place is at present [%derzeit%] in shadow [%im schatten%] . . . might be cast in a false light [%ins falshe licht%] when subjected to artificial lighting [%kunstliche beleuchtung%]. i say 'at present' because the current epoch, which makes so many things impossible, most certainly does not preclude this, that a just light [%ein rechtes licht%] should fall on precisely those things in the course of the historical rotation of the sun [%im historischen sonnenumlauf%]" (_correspondence_ 216-17/262. translation modified). not tarrying but awaiting the "just light" and avoiding any artificial lighting: perhaps what this "just light" illuminates is a justice waiting to be found, perhaps as a lingering of dike. the persistence of this lingering, benjamin suggests, even when no longer in what is present, can be found in the index of the past: "the past carries with it a temporal index [%einen zeitlichen index%] by which it is referred to redemption" and because of which "nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history" ("theses" 254/268). where heidegger marks the difference between ontic relations among beings and the ontological distinction that separates being from beings (ontic and ontological differences as defining of primordial relation), benjamin distinguishes between %die gegenwart% (the present) and %die jetztzeit% (the time of now), between the relation, on the one hand, "of the past to the present," and on the other, "of the past to the moment" ("n" 8), "the present as the 'time that is now' [%der gegenwart als der 'jetztzeit'%]" ("theses" 263/279. translation modified). so that a past becomes legible, and %then% gestures from the past to indicate the moment when %this is now%. %now% responds to %then%, to the past's address. the %then% constitutes as %now% the time that is historical. what comes to be read responds to the possibilities of the reading in which it is awakened. in 1940, benjamin wrote that "as flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history" ("theses" 255). the historian "must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations" (255). [63] *to what else then might legein point?*--in this essay, we began by talking about the presencing of what is present and the saying of what is said as if both were not also gestures of power, but what is striking about the semantics of legein--at least as it is offered by heidegger--is the specific physicality of its force, that saying at the same time is a laying out before me, an act apparently predicated on my ability to produce (or, perhaps, reproduce) whatever i say as something that will remain in this position--spread out before me, subject to selection and harvesting. from this perspective, the gestures of legein will turn out to be productive of certain histories. [64] and if what i am saying is, for example, "you," does this mean that in saying "you," i also cause (or attempt to cause) you to lie there, spread out before me? [65] perhaps with heidegger in mind and in response, celan writes in 1959 of "the snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed. / crystal on crystal, / meshed deep as time, we fall, / we fall and lie there and fall [%wir fallen und liegen und fallen%]" ("%schneebett% [snow-bed]" 120-21). and in 1963: "unwritten things" that have "hardened into language" are "laid bare" like rocks from the ground. "the ores are laid bare [%es liegen die erze blos%] . . . thrown out upward, revealed / crossways, so / we too are lying [%so / liegen auch wir%]" ("a la pointe aceree" 192-93). [66] *translation--*heidegger says that unless what is said (presenced, gathered) is interpreted in the light of the saying (the presencing, the gathering), a concern for what is said can turn us away from the saying (presencing, gathering). from the beginning, however, this turning away has been the destiny of being: "presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present [%unversehens wird das anwesen selbst zu einem anwesenden%] . . . [it] is not distinguished from what is present [%das anwesende%]. . . [and] the oblivion of the distinction, with which the destiny of being begins and which it carries through to completion, is all the same not a lack, but rather the richest and most prodigious event: in it the history of the western world comes to be borne out." because "what now is [%was jetzt ist%] stands in the shadow [%im schatten%] of the already foregone destiny of being's oblivion [%der seinvergessenheit%]" ("anaximander" 50-51/335-36). [67] but %what% is %now%, in 1946, what oblivion has being produced? [68] with respect to the semantics of legein and to the pre-socratic thought to which he looks for the origins of this semantics, heidegger writes that "our sole aim is to reach what wants to come to language . . . of its own accord . . . the dawn of that destiny in which being illuminates itself in beings" ("anaximander" 25), so that "in our relation to the truth of being, the glance of being, and this means lightning, strikes" (27). because "only in the brilliance of this lightning streak can we translate ourselves to what is said" (27). "[i]t is essential that we translate ourselves to the source" (28). [69] *but in doing the work of translation, in finding an originating semantics (assuming that it is originating) "what wants to come to language" in 1946*--given the selection and harvest that coincides with heidegger's hermeneutic project (albeit concealed from him, or from which he seemed later to turn away). in whose persistence the dawn might be reflected, but reflected in a different light. when (at minsk, august 1941) "they had to jump into this and lie face downwards . . . they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot and then they were shot . . . himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave---a sort of triangular hole--and was looking in" (quoted in gilbert 191); when (in november 1943, at majdanek, during the %erntfeste%, the harvest-festival action) the naked "were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before" (quoted in browning 139); when (during the same action, at poniatowa) "we undressed quickly" and went into "the graves . . . full of naked bodies. my neighbour from the hut with her fourteen-year-old . . . daughter seemed to be looking for a comfortable place. while they were approaching the place, an ss man charged his rifle and told them: 'don't hurry.' nevertheless we lay down quickly, in order to avoid looking at the dead. . . . [w]e lay down, our faces turned downwards" (quoted in gilbert 630). [70] *in 1940*--shortly before his suicide at port bou in 1940, benjamin wrote of "the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate [%dem triumphzung, der die heute herrschenden uber die dahinfuhrt, die heute am boden liegen%]" ("theses" 256). he imagined the historian who "dissociates himself from" the procession, who "regards it as his task to brush history against the grain" (256-57). with respect to his task, benjamin wrote in 1936 that the "method of this work [is] literary montage," because "i have nothing to say, only to show [%ich habe nichts zu sagen. . . . nur zu zeigen%, to indicate, to point out] . . . [to] let it come into its own [%zu ihrem rechte kommen lassen%, into its right, into its justice]" ("n" 5/574. translation modified). "the historical index of images doesn't simply say that they belong to a specific time, it says primarily that they only come to legibility at a specific time" (n 3, 1).^9^ notes: ^1^ to emphasize the existential as well as the indicative character of indices, is to approach the indexical somewhat differently from those who interpret it primarily in terms of its indicative function. cf., for example, arthur burks, who by emphasizing this function at the expense of the existential, finds that "to begin with, peirce confuses the cause-effect relation with the semiotic relation" (679). from burks' perspective, "the function of an index is to refer to or call attention to some feature or object in the immediate environment of the interpretant" (678); with respect to the bullet hole, however, peirce says that the interpretant is not crucial. so long as the existential relation exists, the index refers or indicates whether or not there is interpretation. cause-effect relations are particularly significant indexically because they illuminate the way in which a sign (the index) can be produced by its referent and consequently serve as evidence. it is in terms of the interpretant that burks denies peirce's assertion that "a weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind" (peirce 286). a weathercock is not an index, burks says, because "the interpretant does not use the weather-cock to represent or denote the direction of the wind" (burks 679), i.e. does not use it to indicate; but representation and denotation (the use of a sign) are not fundamental to an indexical reference. as the bullet hole is an index of the history that produced it, the weathercock is an index of the wind's force; a photograph of the weathercock will be an index of something that has happened. ^2^ a copy of the photograph can be found in klee, dressen, and riess, p. 248, where it is captioned: "the end of treblinka. a farm is built to give future visitors the impression they are in a 'normal' area." a copy can also be found in sereny, between pp. 190-91, where it is captioned: "the house built at treblinka after the camp had been demolished, in which a ukrainian farmer was to be installed. if questioned, he would claim that he and his family had lived there for years." ^3^ lewalter offers this interpretation in _die zeit_, 13 august 1953, as a response to an article by habermas, "on the publication of lectures of 1935," in the _frankfurter allgemeine zeitung_ of 25 july 1953. habermas had written of the 1953 text of the 1935 lectures: that "heidegger expressly brings the question of all questions, the question of being, together with the historical movement of those days [i.e. 1935]" ("lectures" 192). given this connection, habermas asks if "the planned murder of millions of human beings, which we all know about today, also [can] be made understandable in terms of the history of being as a fateful going astray?" (197). the question leads habermas to the possibility of "think[ing] with heidegger against heidegger" (197). ^4^ heidegger supported lewalter in a letter to _die zeit_, 24 september 1953. rainer marten, who worked with heidegger in 1953 on the publication of _introduction to metaphysics_, recalls in the december 19-20, 1987 issue of _badische zeitung_, that heidegger added the parenthesis at the time of publication (habermas, "work" 452). ^5^ as a rhetorical device, we might refer to the dilemma arendt offers heidegger as a %caieta%, naming arendt's strategy after an episode in the _aeneid_ (we are indebted to robert dyer for this reading of virgil). at the end of book 6, after leaving the underworld through the gateway of false dreams, aeneas lands briefly in italy at a place that will henceforth be named for the nurse aeneas buries there ("caieta . . . your name points out your bones [%ossaque namen . . . signat%] . . . if that be glory [%si qua est ea gloria%]" [7:4-5]). as virgil's contemporaries knew, caieta's name not only predates virgil's naming, but refers to the place where cicero was murdered, a crime in which octavian was an accomplice (cicero, who at the time was nursing octavian's political career, was murdered by mark antony's assassins but with octavian's acquiescence, as a choice octavian made on the way to power). inasmuch as the _aeneid_ is addressed to octavian as well as those familiar with the recent past, the caieta episode in the aeneid works to indicate a buried memory. virgil says nothing. recent history is silently indicated both for octavian and others when as readers they come to caieta. they can perpetuate this silence or they can break it (though perhaps at some political risk), but either way the silence is marked. with respect to _eichmann in jerusalem_, the caieta that arendt offers heidegger leaves him with the dilemma, either to choose not to read, thereby marking (or re-marking) a silence he has already chosen, or to respond to a text which repeatedly marks this silence he has chosen for himself (which for even sympathetic readers can seem "scandalously inadequate" [lacoue-labarthe 34] and "beyond commentary" [levinas 487]. both are referring specifically to the only break in the silence to be found in heidegger's public remarks, the 1949 bremen lecture in which he compared the final solution to "agriculture [which] is now a mechanized food industry," and is "the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers" [quoted in schirmacher 34]). once it is produced, an index can be like that; it addresses you whether or not you turn away, marking your response as additional evidence, whether or not anyone chooses--as arendt did choose--to underscore the marker. ^6^ heidgger's translation of dike can be supported by passages from homer, for example from the _odyssey_, when antikleia tells odysseus that her existence as disembodied life or psyche ("she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream" [11.207-8]) is "the way [dike, the order of things] for mortals when they die" (11.218). as such dike produces her as a lingering. like the psyches of the slain suitors, "psychai, eidola kamonton [psyches, images of the outworn, those whose work is done, or who have met with disaster]" (24.14), the dead whose lives odysseus as an agent of dike has worked "to gather [lexaito]" into a lingering (24.106). in 1935, heidegger uses this reference to "the slain suitors [%der erschlagenen freier%]" as "an example of the original meaning of legein as to 'gather [%sammeln%]'" [_introduction to metaphysics_, 105/95]). ^7^ cf. the 1966 _der spiegel_ interview, "only a god can save us": "my judgment was this: insofar as i could judge things, only one possibility was left, and that was to attempt to stem the coming development by means of constructive powers which were still viable" (92). ^8^ cf. parvis emad's interpretation of heidegger's understanding of leadership: "the rectoral address does not mention %anything% that would connect it to a totalitarian worldview. on the contrary, heidegger introduces a daring notion of leading and following that is diametrically opposed to nazism. heidegger talks about a leading and following in which resistance is present and which thrives on resistance. what could be more alien to nazism's demand for unconditional and total obedience?" (xxiii). ^9^ in 1942, two years after benjamin's suicide and in response to news of the deportation of friends from the gurs internment camp to auschwitz, arendt wrote a poem titled "wb": "dusk will come again sometime. / night will come down from the stars. / we will lie [%liegen%] our outstretched arms / in the nearnesses, in the distances" (quoted and translated in young-bruehl 163/485. translation modified). works cited: where both english translations and german texts are quoted, page references are first to the english translation, then to the german original. versions of the essay were delivered at the 20th century literature conference (louisville, kentucky) in february 1995, and at the philosophy interpretation culture conference (binghamton, new york) in april 1995. we would like to thank steven youra with whom we have worked closely in formulating many of the perspectives presented here. anscombe, g. e. m. _an introduction to wittgenstein's tractatus_. london: hutchinson university library, 1959. arad, yitzhak. _belzec, sobibor, treblinka. the operation reinhardt death camps._ bloomington: indiana university press, 1987. arendt, hannah. _eichmann in jerusalem_: a report on the banality of evil. new york: penguin books, 1977. aristotle. _on sophistical refutations._ trans. e. s. forster. loeb classical library. cambridge: harvard university press; and london: william heinemann, 1955. a greek-english edition. benjamin, walter. "n [theoretics of knowledge; theory of progress]." trans. leigh hafrey and richard sieburth. _walter benjamin: philosophy, history, and aesthetics._ ed. f. gary smith. a special issue of _the philosophical forum_, 15:1-2 (fall-winter 1983-84): 1-40. "das passagen-werke."_gesammelte schriften._ volume 5. ed. rolf tiedemann. frankfurt: suhrkamp verlag, 1982. ---. "the task of the translator." _illuminations._ trans. harry zohn. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken books, 1969. 69-82. _illuminationen._ frankfurt: suhrkamp verlag, 1969. ---. "theses on the philosophy of history." _illuminations._ trans. harry zohn. ed. hannah arendt. new york: schocken books, 1969. 253-64. _illuminationen._ benjamin, walter and gershom scholem. _the correspondence. 1932-1940._ ed. scholem. trans. gary smith and andre lefevere. new york: schocken: 1989. briefwechsel 1933-1940. frankfurt: suhrkamp verlag, 1980. browning, christopher. _ordinary men. reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in poland._ new york: harpercollins, 1992. burks, arthur w. "icon, index, symbol." _philosophy and phenomenological research_ 9 (1949): 673-89. celan, paul. "a la pointe aceree." _the poems of paul celan._ trans. michael hamburger. london: anvil press poetry, 1988. a german-english edition. 192-95. ---."the straitening [%engfuhrung%]." _poems._ 136-49. ---."snow-bed [%schneebett%]." _poems._ 120-21. ---._collected prose._ trans. rosmarie waldrop. manchester, uk: carnet, 1986. emad, parvis. "introduction to heinrich wiegand petzet," _encounters and dialogues with martin heidegger, 1929-1976._ trans. emad and kenneth maly. chicago and london: university of chicago press, 1993. gilbert, martin. _the holocaust. a history of the jews of europe during the second world war._ new york: henry holt, 1985. habermas, jurgen. "martin heidegger: on the publication of the lectures of 1935." trans. william s. lewis. _the heidegger controversy._ ed. richard wolin. new york: columbia university press, 1991. 91-116. 186-197. ---."work and weltanschauung: the heidegger controversy from a german perspective." trans. john mccumber. _critical inquiry_ 15:2 (1989): 431-456. heidegger, martin. "aletheia (heraclitus, fragment b 16)." _early greek thinking._ trans. david farrell krell and frank a. capuzzi. new york: harper and row, 1975. 102-23. _vortrage und aufsatze._ pfullingen: verlag gunther neske, 1954. ---._being and time._ trans. john macquarrie and edward robinson. new york and evanston: harper and row, 1962. _sein und zeit._ tubingen: max niemeyer verlag, 1963. ---._introduction to metaphysics_. trans. ralph manheim. garden city, new york: anchor, 1961. _einfuhrung in die metaphysik._ tubingen: max niemeyer verlag, 1966. ---."logos (heraclitus, fragment b 50)." _early greek thinking._ 59-78. vortrage und aufsatze. ---."moira (parmenides viii, 31-41)." _early greek thinking._ 79-101. vortrage und aufsatze. ---."'only a god can save us': der spiegel's interview with martin heidegger." trans. maria p. alter and john d. caputo. _the heidegger controversy._ ---._parmenides._ trans. andre schuwer and richard rojcewicz. bloomington: indiana university press, 1992. ---."the anaximander fragment." _early greek thinking._ 13-58. _holzwege_. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1963. ---."the self-assertion of the german university." trans. william s. lewis. _the heidegger controversy._ 29-39. homer. _the odyssey._ trans. a. t. murray. loeb library. cambridge: harvard university press; and london: william heineman, 1919. a greek-english edition. jakobson, roman. _verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time._ ed. krystyna pomorska and stephen rudy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1985. klee, ernst, will dressen, volker riess, eds. _"the good old days": the holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders._ trans. deborah burnstone. new york: the free press, 1991. lacoue--labarthe, philippe. _heidegger, arts, and politics._ trans. chris turner. oxford: blackwell, 1990. lanzmann, claude. _shoah_. new york: pantheon books, 1985. german quoted from the film. levinas, emmanuel. "as if consenting to horror." trans. paula wissing. _critical inquiry._ 15:2 (1989): 485-488. lloyd-jones, hugh. _the justice of zeus._ berkeley: university of california press, 1971. peirce, charles sanders. "elements of logic." _collected papers of charles sanders peirce._ volume two. ed. charles hartshorne and paul weiss. cambridge: harvard university press, 1931. poggeler, otto. "heidegger's political self-understanding." trans. steven galt crowell. _the heidegger controversy._ 198-244. schirmacher, wolfgang. _technik und gelassenheit._ freiburg, 1984. sereny, gitta. _into that darkness: an examination of conscience._ new york: vintage books, 1983. virgil. _aeneid._ trans. h. r. fairclough. loeb classical library. cambridge: harvard university press; and london: william heinemann ltd., 1976. a greek-english edition. wittgenstein, ludwig. _the blue and brown books._ oxford: basil blackwell, 1958. ---._culture and value_. ed. g. h. von wright and heikki nyman. trans. peter winch. chicago: university of chicago press, 1980. a german-english edition. ---._notebooks: 1914-1916._ ed. g. h. von wright and g. e. m. anscombe. trans. anscombe. oxford: basil blackwell, 1979. a german-english edition. ---._on certainty._ ed. g. e. m. anscombe and g. h. von wright. new york: harper and row, 1972. a german-english edition. ---._philosophical investigations._ trans. g. e. m. anscombe. oxford: blackwell, 1953. a german-english edition. ---._tractatus logico-philosophicus._ trans. c. k. ogden. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1981. a german-english edition. translations at times modified. ---._wittgenstein and the vienna circle: conversations recorded by friedrich waismann._ ed. brian mcguinness. trans. joachim schulte and brian mcguinness. oxford: basil blackwell, 1979. young-breuhl, elizabeth. _hannah arendt: for love of the world._ new haven and london: yale university press, 1982. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mann, '"the nine grounds of intellectual warfare"', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-mann-the.txt archive pmc-list, file mann.196. part 1/1, total size 94786 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "the nine grounds of intellectual warfare" by paul mann department of english pomona college pmann@pomona.claremont.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by paul mann, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] *prediction* (1994): we are about to witness a rise of "war studies" in the humanities. on your next plane trip the person beside you dozing over a copy of sun tzu's _art of war_ might not be a corporate ceo but a professor of philosophy. there will soon be whole conferences on warfare; more courses in liberal arts curricula on the theory and literature of warfare; special issues of journals on war studies published not by historians or social scientists but by literary critics; new studies of the culture of the %kriegsspiel%; new readings of homer, kleist, crane. books of gender criticism on the subject of war are already appearing, and essays on clausewitz are now liable to turn up in literary journals and books of critical theory.^1^ and we will hear more and more of the sort of moral outrage critics exercised during the gulf war over the way the video-game imagery of computer simulations displaced grievous bodily harm. [2] perhaps this imminent frenzy of production will open another front in the current campaign against the aesthetics of ideology. to the extent that modern warfare depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. elaine scarry: "it is when a country has become to its citizens a fiction that wars begin."^2^ if this is the case, if war arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to teach us to read war critically -and, along the way, to establish the moral and political gravity of their own work. what is at issue here, however, are not only analyses of war but also analogies of it. we will burrow into the archives of warfare because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of warfare. we will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. gender critics already study war discourse in order both to attack its violent phallicism and to conceive gender struggle itself along strategic lines. we have theory wars, pc wars, linguistics wars, gerald graff's culture wars, avital ronell appropriating the war on drugs for a theory of reading.^3^ vast energies will be expended not only on the archives and rhetoric of warfare but on the warcraft of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the "violence" of the question, on the "mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" that, for nietzsche, make up what is called truth.^4^ [3] we will pursue the subject of warfare because we will increasingly see a relationship between our own activity and warfare. let me articulate the law that governs this movement: %critical discourse always tends toward the eventual phenomenalization, as objects of study, of the devices that structure it%. war becomes a field of critical study when critics come to believe, however obliquely, that criticism has always been a field of warfare. and warfare not only in the narrow terms of intellectual difference, but in the most material terms as well. if, for clausewitz, war is an extension of policy, for paul virilio the reverse is true: politics and culture are, from the outset, extensions of warfare, of a %logistical economy% that encompasses and ultimately exhausts all of society. standard critiques of the coordination of scientific research with the "military-industrial complex" are already being extended to include the ideological state apparatus; for virilio, technology as such is a logistical invention and in one way or another always answers logistical demands, and the same point will be made about technologies of representation.^5^ the humanities are in a mood to see the complicity of what enzensberger called the "consciousness industry" in the military-industrial-knowledge complex, to see themselves at one and the same time as ideological agents of the state's "war machine" and as warriors against the state.^6^ i will have more to say about this contradiction. [4] to repeat: the object of criticism is always a symptom, if you will, of the structure of critical discourse itself, always a phenomenalization of the device. but this device tends to appear in a surrogate form, still dissimulated and displaced; it appears and does not appear, makes itself known in ways that further conceal its stakes. and it always appears too late, at the very moment it ceases to function: a kind of theory-death, a death that is not a termination but a particular sort of elaboration. now, everywhere we look, critics will be casting off their clerical mantles and rhetorical labcoats for suits of discursive armor; the slightest critical aggression or %ressentiment% will be inflated with theoretical war-machines and territorial metaphorics.^7^ at the same time, the very rise of war discourse among us will signal the end of intellectual warfare for us, its general recuperation by the economics of intellectual production and exchange. it might therefore be delusional -even, as some would argue, obscene, given the horrible damage of real war -to think of this academic bickering as warfare, and yet it remains a %trace% of war, and perhaps the sign of a potential combat some critical force could still fight. [5] it would be a mistake to assume that this metamorphosis of discourse as war into discourse on war has occurred because criticism has become more political. on the contrary, criticism has never been more than a political %effect% - "policy" carried out, and in our case dissipated, by other means. the long process of seizing politics as the proper object of criticism is one more tardy phenomenalization of the device. what we witness -and what difference would it make even if i were right? -is not proof of the politicization of criticism but an after-image of its quite peripheral integration with forms of geopolitical conflict that are, in fact, already being dismantled and remodeled in war rooms, defense institutes, and multinational corporate headquarters. war talk, like politics talk, like ethics talk, like all critical talk, is nostalgic from the start. while we babble about territories and borders, really still caught up in nothing more than a habitual attachment to disciplinary "space" and anxious dreams of "agency," the technocrats of warfare are developing strategies that no longer depend on any such topography, strategies far more sophisticated than anything we have imagined. and we congratulate ourselves for condemning them, and for our facile analogies between video games and smart bombs. [6] i would propose two distinct diagnoses of the rise of war talk. on one hand, war talk is merely another exercise in rhetorical inflation, intended to shore up the fading value of a dubious product, another symptom of the imaginary politics one witnesses everywhere in critical discourse, another appearance of a structural device at the very moment it ceases to operate. on the other hand, war talk might still indicate the possibility of actually becoming a war machine, of pursuing a military equivalent of thought beyond all these petty contentions, of realizing the truth of discourse as warfare and finally beginning to fight. it will be crucial here not to choose between these diagnoses. in the domain of criticism they function simultaneously, in a perpetual mutual interference; there is no hope of extricating one from the other, no hope of either becoming critical warriors or being relieved of the demand that we do so. [7] the real task of this prediction is thus not to make any claim on the future, but rather to pursue a sort of genealogy, in nietzsche's or foucault's sense, in reverse: a projective genealogy, so to speak: an account not so much of the future as of the present, of the order of knowledge at this very moment. war here is a way to theorize discourse as collective behavior, to reconceive shifting positions, alliances, defenses, attacks, casualties and losses, logistical strengths and weaknesses, the friction and fog of discursive conflict. i will sketch out nine grounds of intellectual warfare: logistics, logomachia, fortification, the desert, the screen, number, high ground, chaos, and the cemetery.^8^ these grounds are not exhaustive and do not constitute a singular field; they are not arranged in a logical sequence and do not amount to a single argument moving toward a single conclusion. war looks different from the vantage of each ground. during a given campaign an army or a writing might find itself, at different times, in different tactical situations and encounters, occupying several or all of these grounds, and deploying its forces in different arrangements. in this essay, the nine grounds do not amount to any telos, any whole, nor even an intellectual position, but in my movement among them i hope to indicate, in the most preliminary and doubtless futile manner, strategies for a critical writing that might actually learn from the war machines it studies. i. logistics: [8] it is commonplace to reduce intellectual production to economic terms. there is a vast, indeed a surplus critique of the commodification of thought, but critics are only just beginning to believe, as perhaps our travelling ceo has long believed, that there is some advantage in seeing their own business as warfare, and that it is possible to do so because culture, business, and defense are always %to some degree% integrated.^9^ any executive who entertains the notion that he or she is a corporate warrior is no doubt engaged in a fantasy, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the utility of such fantasies, their ability to inspire performance. and perhaps we too should make a more rigorous accounting of our own investments in various critical ideologies, which so often presume to combat the institution while sustaining its discursive economy by the very means of our attacks. everyone is aware that thought has been reified and transformed into a commodity, but that awareness has never inhibited production. the critique of the commodity produces perfectly marketable commodities. the half-conscious fantasies of the truth-warrior energize the intellectual economy quite as much as the samurai fantasies of the corporate factotum fuel the marketplace. [9] virilio would argue that they are not fantasies at all; stripped of narcissistic ornament, we would still have to see ourselves as soldiers. writing in the high years of the cold war, virilio developed a theory of "pure war," global war so efficient it never needs to be fought, rather like william burroughs's notion that a functioning police state needs no police. what is most crucial for virilio's conception of the warfare state is his extreme emphasis on logistics. "logistics is the beginning of the economy of war, which will become simple economy, to the point of replacing political economy" (pw 4). the invention of the city as such lies in logistical preparation for war. war is not an aberration, the negation of the truth of civilization, so much as its origin; or rather, civilization depends on an origin and order that forever threaten its destruction. and in a sense we have returned to this logistical origin: if we can say that war was entirely strategic in past societies, we can now say that strategy is no more than logistics. in turn, logistics has become the whole of war; because in an age of deterrence, the production of arms is already war. . . . deterrence is the development of an arms capacity that assures total peace. the fact of having increasingly sophisticated weaponry deters the enemy more and more. at that point, war is no longer in its execution, but in its preparation. the perpetuation of war is what i call pure war, war which is acted out . . . in infinite preparation. [however,] this infinite preparation, the advent of logistics, also entails the non-development of society . . . , peace as war, as infinite preparation which exhausts and will eventually eliminate societies. the total peace of deterrence is total war pursued by other means. (pw 1-93, 139, 25) one could argue that the stakes have changed: the cold war is over and smaller wars are heating up; one could also argue that this is merely another case of total deterrence, and not yet achieved. in any event, to whatever degree a discrete militarization of the peacetime economy has occurred, in virilio's model this logistical "endocolonization" depends on the production of technical knowledge. indeed technology has its very origin in logistical demands: technology arises from the need for weaponry, "from the arsenal and war economy" (24). but it is not a matter of armaments alone: "the war-machine is not only explosives, it's also communications, vectorization. it's essentially the speed of delivery. . . . it's war operating in the sciences. it's everything that is already perverting the field of knowledge from one end to the other; everything that is aligning the different branches of knowledge in a perspective of the end" (20). there is, here, no viable distinction between defense research and peacetime applications of science. technology as such is a function of total logistics. every form of knowledge supports the warfare state. analogous if less exaggerated claims have been made by alvin and heidi toffler in _war and anti-war_, a lay account of the reliance of post-cold war strategy on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. it would seem that the end of the cold war and the collapse of virilio's global deterrence, which has resulted in drastic cutbacks in defense budgets and damage to the american economy as a whole, only exacerbates the logistical demand. weapons now have to be smarter because we cannot afford so many of them; fighting forces now have to be more skilled, more mobile, and more cybernetically coordinated to deal with the realities of post-cold war conflict. tactical advantages are measured in technological terms rather than by sheer force of troop numbers. war, the tofflers argue, is now about technical knowledge, increasingly fought by means of knowledge, and perhaps, in the future, over knowledge, over technological capabilities. "cyberwar" is no longer science fiction: the acquisition, systematization, and deployment of technical knowledge have become the ground and stakes of bloody wars.^10^ [10] as the economy in general and technological development in particular come to be seen in logistical terms, so the critical industry too will be taken as a logistical system, and war discourse as pure war carried out by other means. but it is all too easy to conflate military, technological, and intellectual production. it might be that the forces of deterrence or nuclear war really do extend into criticism, into the study of texts, into the colloquium and critical journal, but even if there is some economic coordination between them, it would be a mistake to elide their differences. there is no question that military success is increasingly determined by access to technical knowledge and that logistical development is a laboratory for new technologies, but to recognize this is not to prove that all fields of knowledge are connected to military research in the same ways. such claims will certainly be made, with fantastic effects, just as the critical truisms that fictions are informed by political realities and that politics is dependent upon fictive forms are turned around, without careful examination of the reversability of these propositions, into the quite dubious but productive thesis that therefore criticism of these fictions constitutes political action. what pure war indicates, however, is that intellectual warfare is not oppositional: it is a form of systems-maintenance, and a feature of the status quo of capital. [11] hence war discourse will cast intellectuals as agents of a general logistical economy and at the same time offer them an array of quite useful and quite delusional critical fantasies about their combat for and against the warfare state. but let me suggest another economics here, another fantasy, one not restricted to the familiar terms of use and exchange-value for the military-industrial-knowledge complex, but based as it were on waste-value: a general economy, in bataille's sense: an economy like that of the sun, which gives life but is utterly indifferent to it, burns itself out as fast as it can, expends most of its energy into the void. bataille's image of war-economics is the ritual practice of the potlatch, a form of symbolic combat most likely associated with funerary observances, but which he sees as a solar means of purging the superabundance of natural and cultural energy. the purpose of art and thought is the purest expenditure, waste, %depense%.^11^ intellectual warfare can be seen in this light, as ritualized combat whose value is that it has no value: a means of squandering useless wealth. intellectual production is the production of superfluities tricked out with beautiful illusory truths, and we meet to exchange ideas only in order to destroy thought itself with these ludicrous gifts. ii. logomachia: [12] the quasi-conflictual structure of the colloquium; the nationalization of intellectual outlooks (e.g., french vs. anglo-american feminism, english studies vs. german philology in the wake of the first world war); the "diversification" of disciplines carried out as the conquest and colonization of discrete areas of academic territory, and all the ensuing turf wars between departments, methodologies, etc.; rising concern about the invasive, "violent" force of interrogation and argument in even so innocuous an act as literary interpretation; all the petty jockeying for personal advantage that will pass for intellectual combat: these are horizonal phenomena, indications of more prevalent and insistent orders of conflict that structure intellectual work and, perhaps, work in general. [13] beyond these familiar instances, imagine for a moment (it is a fable, not philosophy) that hegel, or at least kojeve's hegel, was right: consciousness, history, civilization begin with combat: "man, to be really, truly 'man,' and to know that he is such, must . . . impose the idea he has of himself on beings other than himself," in a fight to the death in which no one dies, and in which the stakes are only recognition, the establishment of a certain narcissistic regime, the invention of nothing more than the subject.^12^ perhaps then the first violence is the formal and ideal reduction of the complexity of conflict to a dialectical system. let me modulate the fable a bit further: when imposition is collective, the fight becomes battle. when it is strategically directed, it becomes warfare. when we fight to impose not our own idea but an idea that has been imposed upon us, and with which we identify so intensely it is as if the idea were our own, we become soldiers. [14] the soldier is essential to the dialectic: neither master nor quite simply slave but the device that mediates between them. the soldier is slave as hero, risking death in order to impose the master's will on another slave. perhaps intellectual soldiers too are not slaves who can comprehend their slavery and still revolt but hoplite phalanxes marshalled in order for the day of intellectual battle; plato's guardians in the chariot of reason, and a chariot is, after all, a military transport. [15] it is not even precisely that some specific other has imposed his idea on us: the master is always in part a figure out of our own imagination, out of our desire and fear, a stand-in for a "true" master we can never quite locate and who need not even really exist, and we confront "death" in his name, in various surrogate forms, so that we will never have to confront our death. any veteran of combat could testify to the folly of this project, even though the veteran might only have shifted his or her own allegiance to another ideal. [16] the slave's fear of death is thus overcome as a warrior fantasy, itself in the service of a master the slave has to some degree invented. for the intellectual warrior as well, fear of death -of not being recognized, and thus of not being -is not overcome but displaced, sublimated, pursued through a vast array of surrogates, including the sublime study of death. intellectual warfare is not a culmination of the master-slave dialectic but its proxy, its aesthetic. the sentimental violence of dialectics. [17] today almost everyone seems to believe that, at the end of this struggle, what we confront is not the triumph of absolute reason but the collapse of the entire project, the idea, the hope and dream of the absolute. i would argue that this %theoretical% collapse is the event-horizon, the phenomenal threshold, of intellectual warfare. the theoretical abandonment of the absolute is rarely accompanied by its disappearance: the absolute returns in a ghostly form, haunting precisely those discourses that claim to have left it behind, and that continue to orient themselves around its evacuation. nevertheless, this half-waking from the half-dream of absolute reason returns us to a primal dialectical scene, to a war for recognition now %without stakes%. in the farcical relativism that results, dominance is ever more explicitly a matter not of truth but of force. and if we discover that we have never gone further, that force is all that ever mattered, can we say that the dialectic ever occurred at all? [18] this self-consuming conflict is visible from another perspective. if war, as an extension of logistical, tactical, and strategic knowledge, is an extension of thought, it also ruins thought. it exceeds every effort of dialectical containment. the same forces that drive military conflicts past the limits of rational control, in clausewitz's view, drive the idea of war past the limits of conception. as daniel pick observes, for clausewitz, war is always to be understood as subordinate to political will. that is an iron law. but it also slips out of control, threatening to become jubilantly and anarchically autonomous. it is willed, but all too prone to chance and accident. . . . the practice of war, clausewitz contends, can be shown to undermine the consistency of thought and theory upon war. . . . [war is] an idea, an abstraction, a supposed structural necessity; but also . . . an impossible subject, the subversive force in the account that seeks to master it.^13^ the "friction" of war can never be reduced to a system. that is why clausewitz distrusts theory, even as he engages in what would seem to be a theoretical exercise. according to garry wills, that is also why clausewitz insists on the distinction between theory and %kritik%, the broadest empirical assessment possible in any strategic or tactical situation, without reference to absolute laws of warfare that the realities of battle may well disprove, with disastrous results for those who adhere to them. it is not that clausewitz refuses any generality -his dictum about war as politics is certainly theoretical, and rules of warfare are proposed everywhere in his text -rather that tactical and strategic considerations should never be determined by rules alone; rules need to be tested, and what is most important is close critical observation of the field of battle from the highest empirical ground available. but if wills believes that the distinction between theory and %kritik% resolves the problem of analyzing the friction of war, pick is just as adamant that theory and %kritik% themselves are at war in clausewitz's own analysis, in any consideration of warfare, and the notorious inconsistencies of _on war_ reflect the truth of this conflict. %kritik% is compromised by its own forms of friction. as peter paret observes, in published studies of war even the most factual descriptions of battle ought to be printed in a different colored ink to indicate the discrepancy between a battle and every account of it.^14^ war is absolute force pushed past the limit of dialectical recuperation; it involves the theoretical experience of the destruction of theory, which cannot be alleviated by any resort to empiricism. [19] jacqueline rose makes a similar point in respect to freud. as a fundamental instance of human aggression, war could be said to constitute a proper field for psychoanalytic investigation, an object of scientific knowledge. the problem is that [if] freud offers . . . an explanation of war, he does so by means of the death drive. but the death drive, and hence the truth of war, operates, it has so often been pointed out, as the speculative vanishing point of psychoanalytic theory, and even more boldly, of the whole of scientific thought.^15^ hence war is not only an object of knowledge but its "crisis," its proper logomachia, "the instability, the necessary failure, of knowledge as resolution that [freud] places at the foundation, or limit, of all scientific thought."^16^ war . . . operates in freud's discourse, and not only in that of freud, as a limit to the possibility of absolute or total knowledge, at the same time as such absolute or total knowledge seems over and again to be offered as one cause -if not %the% cause -of war. . . . the end of war [is] the end of knowledge. (16-17) what is most challenging about this formulation is that the destruction of knowledge, its vanishing point, is both its foundation and its limit, the condition of its existence even as it destroys it. the impossibility of knowledge becomes the very order of knowledge. this device too must eventually rise into discourse and manifest itself as a proxy object of inquiry. iii. fortification: [20] nothing is more important to the intellectual than a position. even the fabled collapse of foundations has done little to change this: %economically, discursively%, this collapse turns out to be yet another position, something to believe in and hold true, the consolidation of "flows," "drift," etc., into the most familiar academic architecture. you must have a position, and if you do not, one will be assigned to you, or you will simply not exist. the homology of position as standpoint and position as job, budget line, fte, is a matter of a great deal more than analogy or vulgar marxism. with a position, everything is possible. you are supported by a truth, a discipline, a methodology, a rhetorical style, a discursive form, a mode of production and exchange. you know where you stand, you recognize yourself by your position; you see yourself there because you see yourself seen there. your position is your identity and value; it authorizes your work, circulates it, constitutes it as property, lends you the security of ownership. but at the same time nothing is possible with a position. to hold a position is to be held by it, to be caught up in its inertial and economic determinations, to be captured by an identity that you might not, finally, believe to be quite your own. nothing could be more difficult than really, substantively, radically to change one's mind, change the forms in which one works, risk everything by leaving behind a position on which, it seems, everything has come to rely. [21] the position is a fundamental form of civilization. recall virilio's remark that the city itself originates in a position, a garrison, a defensive posture, a logistical form.^17^ to adopt the terminology of _a thousand plateaus_, the position is a "sedentary fortification" of "state armies"; it is entirely contained by the state apparatus.^18^ in academic criticism, the symbolic place of the state is occupied and held by the text or %oeuvre%, around which the defending force of commentaries is deployed; in a field such as english or comparative literature, the state or national form of the text is clearly and hence problematically manifested. the critic defends the text by the elaborate construction of interpretations around it; at the same time, in a kind of fractal homomorphism, the critic's own position is defined and defended by the construction of the paper circle of his or her own works. the more forces occupy a position, the stronger it will be. the barrage of words projected from the most heavily fortified strongholds (currently: new historicism, postcolonial criticism, certain orders of gender and race theory) can repel critiques by sheer force of numbers. indeed, conflict between positions is itself one of the chief means by which they are defined. as rose points out, for freud war "not only threaten[s] civilization, it can also advance it. by tending towards the conglomeration of nations, it operates [not only] like death [but also] like the eros which strives to unify" (16). in intellectual warfare, the strategic form of this erotic unification is the discipline, in every sense of the word.^19^ mechanisms of regimental identification are crucial here. it would be impossible to overestimate the importance of %esprit de corps% to garrisoned forces. healthy competition keeps troops battle-sharp and singles out the most effective officers, but such conflict must be contained and focused toward strategic goals. [22] if, on one hand, it is a mistake to refer to intellectual %movements%, since their force is always institutional, static, on the other hand it is the fixity of the intellectual position that proves to be illusory. a position must not only be held, but advanced. the surrounding territory must come under its influence and control. furthermore, as clausewitz indicates, defenses tend to become offensive. it is not simply that the best defense is a good offense; defenses, like attacks, exceed the limits of strategic reason. the escalating, offensive character of nuclear deterrence has long been noted. so also for the provocative force of the most striking cultural formations: defensive postures escalate beyond the power of whatever threat they face. more importantly, the position is never more than a temporary establishment: once consolidated, its termination is assured; the more force it generates, the more certain that its walls will be breached. that is virilio's brief against deterrence: it exhausts its own resources, it destroys the societies it defends. there is no indefensible position, and no position that can be defended for very long. at the moment a position is founded, its destruction has begun. defections to other positions, other cities of words, are doubtless already under way. [23] the intellectual position is therefore not simply a ground, let alone a foundation, however attached to or identified with it its garrison becomes, even in the act of arguing that there is no foundation. on the contrary, the position turns out to be a point along a vector, a line of advance or retreat, a temporary encampment, a bivouac, of strategic or tactical importance alone, and supportable only by means of its relation to other positions, other forces, counterforces, and logistical agencies all along the line. there is no question that the strength of the sited force's investment in its ground, however temporary, is crucial. but in the end every position will turn out to have been a relay-point or intersection, the temporary location of an intellectual army whose grounding is not to be measured by its "rightness" -the archaic notion of %truth proven by combat% may be said to survive only in the academy -but by its force and resistance in relation to other quantities of force, velocity, intensity, logistical power, tactical skill, etc., all of which will not only support but eventually help to detach that army from its ground. in psychoanalytic terms, it would be necessary to see the texts that a writer deploys around his or her position as defense mechanisms of another order, that is to say, as symptoms, but not only of an individual pathology: rather as encysted trouble-spots on the intersecting curves of discursive forces about which the intellectual is often barely, if at all, aware, and which no one -no chaos theorist of discursive physics -will ever be able to map. [24] the position is surrounded by a "border," a "margin." this circular, flat-earth topography mirrors larger discursive models, which still map everything in terms of centers, lines of defense, and antagonistic margins. it is little wonder that questions of colonialism have become so pressing: here too we encounter a phenomenalization of the discursive device. modern critical production consistently sees itself as a matter of hegemonic centers (e.g., defenses of tradition) and marginal oppositions. but insofar as one wishes to retain this topography of margins and centers -and in the end there might not be much to recommend it -it might be better to see the marginal force as a function and effect of the center, the very means by which it establishes its line of defense. military commanders might be unlikely to deploy their most troublesome troops along their perimeter, but in intellectual warfare the perimeter is marked out and held primarily by troops who imagine themselves in revolt against headquarters. this is the historical paradox of the avant-gardes: they believe they are attacking the army for which they are in fact the advance guard. the contradiction does not dissolve their importance, it marks their precise task: the dialectical defense and advance of discursive boundaries. it might therefore indicate the fundamental instability of cultural positions, but it does nothing to support the strictly oppositional claims of marginal forces. that is why postcolonial criticism remains a colonial outpost of an older critical form. [25] without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus. marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or women's studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its primary orientation is toward the institution. the fact that the institution might treat it badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. any intellectual who holds a position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most part, only an operational device. it is a critical commonplace that the state is not a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and fragmentary agencies of production. this is often taken as a validation for the political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be facilely deconstructed and critics can still congratulate themselves on their "resistance." but the contrary is clearly the case. the most profitable intellectual production does not take place at the center (e.g., romance philology), where mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. it will be argued that resistance is still possible; %nothing i propose here argues against such a possibility%. i wish only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position, however oppositional it imagines itself to be. resistance is first of all a function of the apparatus itself. what would seem to be the transgressive potential of such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the counterpolitical claims of the position. fantasies of resistance often serve as alibis for collusion. any position is a state agency, and its relative marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. effective resistance must be located in other tactical forms. iv. desert: [26] the %standpoint%, identification with and defense of one's own thought, the demand that one be on one's own side, that one stand by one's word, is so standard a feature of intellectual ethics and politics that it has been taken completely for granted. but the entrenched position is a vestige of archaic forms of warfare. the tofflers argue that the gulf war demonstrated the failure of entrenchment -iraq's older, industrial, sedentary strategy -against advanced military technologies of speed, stealth, and coordinated intelligence. "[t]he allied force was not a [conventional military] machine, but a system with far greater internal feedback, communication, and self-regulatory adjustment capability. it was . . . a 'thinking system'" (80). for napoleon as well, virilio notes, "the capacity for war [was] the capacity for movement" (wc 10). in the same manner, those bound to intellectual positions remain blind to the tactical advantages of mobility and secrecy, and the new war studies will be used to suggest strategic figures outside the position's fortified walls. [27] i will return to the %precisely% oxymoronic, self-canceling figure of secrecy in a later section. here, i will proceed by suggesting that the new war studies should come to quite rigorous and unromantic terms with the nomadology of deleuze and guattari.^20^ in their work, the war machine is essentially exterior to the state, even if the state appropriates it. the problem is, therefore, how to pursue exteriority in disciplinary and epistemological structures that are themselves entirely defined by their institutional interiority. it will certainly not be through any of the current specular and spectacular modes of narcissistic identification with the "other." one should treat every text that peddles its vicarious nomadism while elaborating the most conventional analyses with the greatest suspicion, and at the same time with some confidence, perhaps still quite groundless, that an intellectual nomadology might still be carried out elsewhere.^21^ it is necessary to comprehend the force of extremely difficult ideas: the nomadic war-machine's exteriority to the state and its precise relation to battle; the nomads' territorial engagement with smooth space, without "striation," interiority, or chrono-historical organization; their indifference to semiological systems and their particular epistemological orientations (ornament instead of sign, ballistics and metallurgical science, numbering, speed, etc.); the strange relation of _a thousand plateaus_ to texts that would seem to treat the same matters in a more disciplinary way -its relation, for instance, to psychoanalysis and philosophy (and what is the strategic connection between this book and deleuze's extraordinary and in many ways quite scholarly treatments of the history of philosophy?); indeed, the very ontology of the nomadic %idea% itself: all of these must be explored in considerable detail, without ever descending to any merely exegetical commentary, and without reducing what is at stake in this book to an intellectual position. deleuze and guattari challenge us to rethink our whole relation to books and to writing, to the very order of our thought -a task in which they themselves often fail. one must begin by reading them at a loss, but a loss that is not only the result of their work's difficulty, which careful analysis would eventually overcome; rather, a loss that reaches down into our deepest epistemological attachments. it will be necessary, for instance, to reconceive the very notion of intellectual rigor (the order of argument, demonstration, proof) and communicative clarity: not to abandon them for the sake of some impressionistic indulgence, but to relocate them outside the striated space of the state apparatus that has always provided their structure. one might find oneself, for instance, no longer putting forth positions, outlining, defending, and identifying oneself with them: one might find oneself engaged in an even more severe, more rigorous discipline of affirming ideas without attaching oneself to them, making them appear (as baudrillard suggested in another context) only so as to make them disappear.^22^ one might find oneself developing a logic that is no longer striated and arborescent (a trunk and its branches) but smooth, rhizomatic, turbulent, fractal, self-interfering, labyrinthine, subterranean. i am fully aware of how treacherous, how complex and self-contradictory a gesture it is even to refer to these ideas in such a form and such a forum as this one, how properly absurd it would be to pursue writing, to pursue knowledge itself, in the following manner: the hydraulic model of nomad science and the war machine . . . consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another. . . . the nomadic trajectory . . . distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. . . . [s]edentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by "traits" that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. the nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. it is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. . . . [t]he nomad is on the contrary %he who does not move%. whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge. (tp 363, 380-81) how shall we read this passage, which so clearly bears on the organization of thought itself, even in respect to the question of the historical, empirical factuality of its account? how shall we read work that conceives nomadism in a way that has nothing to do with the standard distinction between stasis and movement, that never defines nomadism simply as movement opposed to sedentary positions? can we ourselves move and distribute our thought across a deterritorialized discursive field, now conceived as smooth space, living off it without attachment to or support of any state form? and how can one %write% nomadically, since deleuze and guattari consign writing to the state apparatus?^23^ what then is writing to them? one's very attempt to appropriate nomadology in a critical essay serves as another instance of the state's never quite successful appropriation of the war machine, and of the never fully addressed logistical-economic order of one's own thought. [28] let me advance here -as a preliminary gesture toward work being carried out elsewhere and precisely %in other forms%, and perhaps only in order to help put an end to the delusional use of such terms as nomadology, deterritorialization, and the rhizome in almost every academic forum that tries to employ them -a tactical figure that has nothing to do with sedentary and fortified positions: the %assemblage%. i am concerned here with the "numerical" organization of intellectual work.^24^ such work is of course highly institutional, hierarchical, regimental: intellectuals labor as individuals but their individualism is for the most part the atomic form of social and discursive systems entirely reliant on this atomization. the assemblage represents a mode of intellectual organization quite distinct from the pyramid scheme of individual in the service of discipline (whatever its ideological orientation) in the service of institution, etc., under which the professional intellectual currently labors. the notion of the assemblage can be traced, along one of its lines, to the nomad on horseback. the constellation "man-horse-stirrup" is a primary instance of an assemblage: a technological extension that transforms the subject it would seem to have served, installing the subject in another sort of instrumental relation and, in effect, in another ontology. "[t]here are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages."^25^ even so subjectivist a notion as %desire% is transformed here: assemblages are "passional, they are compositions of desire," but desire "has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, engineered desire" (tp 398). what is at issue is the projective movement of desire, its ballistic force out of anything like a subject-position into something more like a "relay" on an extensive line of flight across smooth, nomadic space. "the problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model of the monument. an ambulent people of relayers, rather than a model society" (377). we are confronted with a different order of logistics itself: in a sense, the importance of lines of communication overtakes the importance of the strategic positions they were once thought only to support. there is clearly room here for a certain kind of analysis of cybernetic developments in critical exchange, although here too one must avoid indulging in any romance of technological transformation. if the assemblage of writer-software-network offers nomadic possibilities, no one would deny that the state has already recuperated this technology (the internet is the home shopping network of the knowledge industries). that is why it is crucial to focus not only on the technological assemblage, but on its mode of circulation: the network's accessibility for packs and bands that %in their assembling% do not serve institutional interests, whatever their day-jobs and unavoidable investments. clearly the role of the hacker is suggestive here, not because of the quite trivial outlaw romance of hacking, nor because of any particular damage hackers might manage to inflict on this or that data base, but because of the form and force of the relay itself. imagine banding together with others in temporary, mission-oriented, extra-institutional units, with specific, limited, tactical and strategic goals. not the death or transcendence of the subject (not any metaphysics at all); not a post-bourgeois utopia of drifts; surely not the establishment of any new isms; rather the transitory platooning of specific on-line skills and thought-weapons in mobile strike forces in the net. perhaps the resurgent interest in the situationist international will be less valuable for its polemics against the "spectacle," which only serve an already over-represented critique of representation, than for the organizational models offered by its particular forms of intellectual labor: the situationist council as a nomadic war machine. the %practice% of such organization would affect the forms of thought itself. assemblages will serve as the auto-erosive becoming-machine of what was never exactly the intellectual "subject." the transformation might already be occurring, on-line, even as the network surrenders to the apparatus of the newly transformed state. [29] the task is to develop a war machine "that does not have war as its object." it is a persistent theme for deleuze and guattari: the war machine only takes military conflict as its primary object when it is appropriated by the state; nomadology indicates other directions and ends. reducing the war machine to warfare: in the realm of intellectual warfare, that would involve reducing it to conflicting binaries, to dialectics. if warfare as such indicates the most reduced dialectical forms of positionality and negation (no use imagining oneself "beyond dialectics," since the %beyond% still drags the dialectic along with it), even the state army's distribution of its forces might already suggest a more nomadic form of organization: deployed like a herd across a whole field, communicating rhizomatically, etc.^26^ witness then this strange twist on clausewitz: the distinction between absolute war as idea and real wars seems of great importance. . . . the pure idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary, but that of a war machine which does not have war as its object, and which only entertains a potential or supplementary relation with war. thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among others, as in clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to the idea, the invention of the idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the %nomos%. . . . the other pole seem[s] to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities," has as its object not war, but the tracing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. at this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the state and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by states. (420, 422) it is crucial to note that deleuze and guattari are not critics, of clausewitz or anything else. for all its talk of "against the state," very little about their work has to do with critical dialectics. they are committed rather to a certain %affirmation%, generated perhaps most of all out of their nomadic encounters with nietzsche's thought. in that sense, a proper approach to their work will never take the form of elaborating critical objections to it, even when they would seem to be warranted. nonetheless, i would argue that the greatest obstacle to deploying nomadology in a smooth space outside the state lies in the fact that nomadology, or something like it, might also represent the current form of the state's own development. sedentary armies are being defeated and replaced by nomadic strategies still directed toward warfare, in the service of deterritorializing states.^27^ if the end of global deterrence has hardly resulted in anything resembling a more pacific internationalism, but rather in a more ferocious and, it is often claimed, atavistic nationalism -represented in western eyes, as usual, by africa (e.g., rwanda) and the balkans -at the same time we are also witnessing a reorganization of the state apparatus through the movement of multinational capital, information technologies, and high-tech international military interventions, as in somalia and the gulf. it is tempting, for some, to see these changes as signs of a shift from an old world order to a newer, braver one, but one ought to see them instead as the most complex of knots. the bosnian conflict represents at one and the same time an especially vicious nationalism and the resurgence of nomadic war machines; the allied forces of the gulf war represent interests at one and the same time external to the state and entirely in its employ; multinational capital represents at one and the same time a nomadic form of deterritorialization and the state's attempt to survive what it believes to be its imminent demise. in the light of these events intellectual warfare confronts the complexities of its own appropriations and lines of flight. it also confronts massive proof of its utter triviality. v. screen: [30] much of what we will be given to read in the new war studies will be rehearsals of older critiques of representation, heated by a certain love-hate toward cyber-technology; critiques of aestheticized violence as violence against real suffering, with the critic posing heroically beside the figure of the real. this moral reconnaissance of video games and smart bombs will be accompanied by historicist accounts of the spectacular aspects of warfare, perhaps along the lines of virilio's _war and cinema_, in which, it is argued, "war is cinema and cinema is war," a "deadly harmony . . . always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon" (26, 69). this facile but suggestive conflation of military and cinematic epistemologies into a single logistical project will also lend itself to the familiar critique of the phallic violence of the cinematic "gaze." the limit of these reflections is liable to be the logic of the "simulacrum," greatly reduced from its development in either baudrillard or deleuze. let me suggest that the problem before us is not, however, only the spectacularly telegenic appearance of the gulf war but the fact that these critical reflections on spectacular screens are produced on the spectacular screens of critics' computers. it will be necessary to investigate the cybernetic and epistemological apparatus of critical debates in the light of developments in military technology and the conduct of actual warfare, but it will be some time before the extraordinarily complex ways in which their integration occurs can be adequately described, and one should avoid collapsing differences between these networks. they are not to be mapped onto each other in any sort of simple homology; the means by which intellectual "cyberwar" serves the state remain, to some degree, obscure. i would hope that enough thinkers soon become sufficiently bored with the standard critical tropes about military simulation to move on to a more incisive critique of the connections between our software and the military's. [31] for the moment, this one observation: %simulation% means that intellectual warfare is always fought on %other% grounds. it is precisely the sort of virtual war it condemns. it is not a pure extension of politics but a form of ritual warfare, a phenomenon of the ritual dimension of politics and of the political deployment of ritual. war games of every kind present us with modes of simulation, of surrogation, that should not be addressed solely by reference to some terrible, displaced reality that criticism can or cannot locate behind the veil of the video image.^28^ what we witness is rather the oblique necessity of virtual violence itself, of surrogate conflicts even in the very critique of surrogacy: the necessary satisfaction of a demand for warfare that war alone cannot fully satisfy. [32] so perhaps we still face nothing more than a %mirror%: all discursive warfare is autoaggressive. we sacrifice ourselves in the name of an ego-ideal and become the enemy that we behold. vi. number: [33] if discursive combat is decided by might more than by right, we should allow for the remote possibility that intellectual warfare can be quantified, measured, calculated, perhaps with the sorts of empirical tools that have been developed in recent years by such social scientists as j. david singer, k.n. waltz, and magnus midlarsky, in their studies of international conflict.^29^ given the friction and fog of war and the difficulties it poses for any sort of analysis, however, it might also be advisable to entertain the folly of empirical, systems-oriented research in this area. the contradiction is vital: intellectual warfare is just as quantifiable as any form of military engagement, which is to say, absolutely and hardly at all. [34] in the critical discourse of war, number operates exactly as kant predicted in the analytic of the sublime. the determination of quantity is overwhelmed by a clausewitzian escalation of force past its measurable limit, which is then taken as its true destination. the mathematical sublime is the suppressed dream of every empirical study of warfare. [35] hence the intellectual war machine will pursue the potential of number in deleuze's sense as well, no longer a quantity in the striated space of the state, the university, the discipline, but a determining movement or speed through smooth, nomadic space (tp 381); a mode of transit rather than a measured sum. deleuze's "numbering number" could be said to begin at the point where the mathematical sublime leaves number behind for %x%, for the infinite; number then rediscovers itself outside striated space, no longer the perpetual trace of the imminent loss of numerical representation, but a singular space in which one actually moves -a space still entirely outside the current occasion. vii. high ground: [36] is this what pierre bezukov hoped to observe when he climbed a fortified hill to gaze down on the battle of borodino? kant: "war itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a measure a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude."^30^ perhaps that is what tolstoy would have us believe pierre did see: all the sublimely ennobling horrors of war. but let us imagine that he also witnessed the sublime from another perspective, that he saw the flatness of the abyss, a flat figure of lofty visions of bottomless depths. [37] in daniel pick's account of the war machine, two contending forces are in play: the increasing technical efficiency and rationalization of warfare, and an insistent figuration of war as a destructive energy that surpasses every effort of rational control. warfare "assumes a momentum of its own which is difficult, even impossible to stop. . . . battle is now nothing more than the autonomy . . . of the war machine," the "unstoppable engine of war" (11). it is as if this machine obeyed the familiar logic of the frankenstein mythos, in which the most rationalized human technology must eventually reveal its madness and destroy everything, including its creator. war too is reason's war against itself: "nothing less than a catastrophic eclipse of sense, a bestial and mechanical descent into anarchy" (20). no %kritik% can ever master it; one can never rise to the exact height above battle, high enough to see but not so high that one loses its detail, because the exact height doesn't exist; it is an ideal standpoint. in respect to war, thought always shoots past its mark. that is why there is a war in _on war_. "questions of friction, illness, madness, morals, fear and anarchy continuously need to be mastered by [clausewitz], converted back into manageable currency which enables decision-making. he presides over and marshalls his thoughts, like a general seeking to retain control over potentially wayward troops" (40); and, as every reader of clausewitz, including clausewitz himself, knows full well, the war in _on war_ gets out of hand. that is part of the attraction of the new war studies: even as warfare becomes a function of knowledge production it reveals itself as the transgressed limit of knowledge, as the very agent of its destruction. the thought of war is the sublimely desirable experience of thought's abyss. [38] war is sublime.^31^ the theory-war in clausewitz's text, the war between knowledge and everything proper to it that surpasses and destroys it, signals the way war takes its place beside tragedy as a sublime %for% philosophy, theory, and critical studies. the sublime of war study is one of theory's recuperated figures of its own imaginary abyss, an abyss in which it seeks its deepest reflection. whatever the truth of war, what we witness here first of all is thought's fascination with an imaginary and quite compelling depth projected out of an obscure "drive" for its own "death." if the self-destruction of the family in classical tragedy is an interior form of this paper abyss, the contemplation of warfare serves as one of its public forms, as the sublime for a %political% criticism, already scaled down from the recent, imaginary apocalypses of nuclear criticism.^32^ "the issue," rose writes, seems to be not so much what might be the truth of war, but the relationship of war to the category of truth. . . . friction, dissolution, fluidity . . . surface in defiance of a resistant totalization. . . . in clausewitz's text, war seems to figure as the violent repressed of its own rationalization. it becomes, so to speak, the unconscious of itself . . . an intruder or foreign body that fastens and destroys. it is the perfect image of the alien-ness that freud places at the heart of human subjectivity, the alien-ness whose denial or projection leads us into war. in clausewitz's text, the theorization of war seems finally to be taken over by its object. the attempt to theorize or master war, to subordinate it to absolute knowledge, becomes a way of perpetuating or repeating war itself. (23-24) under the aegis of a critique of war technology, critical discourse becomes a machine that both rationalizes the contests of thought and surpasses rational control. the end of this conflict, of intellectual warfare as such, is a terminal image of reason's self-destruction, of the %endlightenment%, an ideal we will fight to the %death% to fall short of. hard critical knowledge will no more lead us past this end than knowledge of war leads humanity past armed conflict. viii. chaos: [39] consider what clausewitz calls the fog of war -its untheorizable turmoil, error, accidents, chance, the sheer disorientation of combat terror. the fog of war is quite literally noise, war's resistance to language, to objectification, to the code: both its problematic and its seductiveness, the limit of its intelligibility and the depth of its sublimity. [40] there are two approaches to this fog. one can try to burn it off with the bright intensity of analysis, as if it were only a surface effect, even though everything would lead one to believe that fog is an irreducible element of war, something that must be taken into account, that cannot simply be withdrawn. then perhaps one ought instead to attempt to map this fog, not in order to eliminate it but to put it to use. the fog of war might be more than an enemy of reason: it might be a tactical advantage. [41] but how to map the fog of war? i anticipate an increase in references to chaos theory, discourse analyses deploying language like the following: military interest in turbulent phenomena revolves around the question of its negative effects in the performance of weapons systems or the effects of air drag on projectiles or water drag on submarines. but for our purposes, we want an image not of the external effects of turbulent flows, but of their internal structure. we are not concerned here with the destructive effects that a hurricane, for instance, may produce, but with the intricate patterns of eddies and vortices that define its inner structure. . . . in order to better understand turbulence, we must first rid ourselves of the idea that turbulent behavior represents a form of chaos. for a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. today we know that this is not the case. indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. the multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behavior of millions and millions of molecules. viewed in this way, the transition from laminar flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization.^33^ it remains to be seen whether and to what extent the turbulence of intellectual warfare obeys the theoretical laws of chaos. perhaps it will become possible to map the way epistemic breakthroughs stabilize themselves as singularities and fractal "eddies within eddies" (de landa), increasingly dense, detailed, and localized skirmishes in entropic disciplinary subfields. i imagine that the effect would be at one and the same time to deepen the breakthrough, by intensifying subconflictual areas within the field, and to dissipate it. again: resistance, subversion, opposition, etc., stabilize quite as much as they destabilize. the deepening specificity of gender criticism, for instance, might represent the regulation of gender conflict as much as its disruptive potential: its increasing density becomes the paradoxical mark of its dissipating force. it is just as likely, however, that attempts to apply chaos physics within analyses of discursive warfare will constitute nothing more than another set of tropes, another pipe dream of a scientific humanities, another mathematical sublime: the same contradictory desire for the rational conquest of phenomena that seem to escape reason and the autodestruction of reason in the process that one finds in clausewitz. [42] even if fog cannot be reduced to a science without being caught up in the mechanics of critical sublimity, one might still pursue its tactical uses. there is no question that the military is committed to deploying the fog of war. the importance of disinformation, propaganda, jamming, covert operations, "psyops," and so on increases as warfare becomes more dependent on technical and tactical knowledge. as the power of reconnaissance and surveillance grows, so does the tactical importance of stealth technology. virilio remarks that, in the hunt, the speed of perception annuls the distance between the hunter and the quarry. survival depends on distance: "once you can see the target, you can destroy it" (wc 19, 4). thus, from now on, "power is in disappearance: under the sea with nuclear submarines, in the air with u2s, spyplanes, or still higher with satellites and the space shuttle" (pw 146). "if %what is perceived is already lost%, it becomes necessary to invest in concealment what used to be invested in simple exploitation of one's available forces -hence the spontaneous generation of new stealth weapons. . . . the inversion of the deterrence principle is quite clear: unlike weapons which have to be publicized if they are to have a real deterrence effect, stealth equipment can only function if its existence is clouded with uncertainty" (wc 4). for virilio, stealth is not a matter of radar-immune bombers alone: it involves a vast "aesthetics of disappearance" that reaches an order of perfection in state terrorism: until the second world war -until the concentration camps -societies were societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the foucauldian sense. the great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists, brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and public opinion which now ban concentration camps. you can't isolate anything in this world of ubiquity and instantaneousness. even if some camps still exist, this overexposure of the world led to the need to surpass enclosure and imprisonment. this required another kind of repression, which is disappearance. . . . bodies must disappear. people don't exist. there is a big fortune in this technology because it's so similar to what happened in the history of war. in war, we've seen how important disappearance, camouflage, dissimulation are -every war is a war of cunning.^34^ the methods of strategic disappearance developed by terrorist states are the most insidious form of secrecy. that is why virilio, the anti-technologist, believes that the technology of secrecy must be exposed. every order of stealth weaponry is purely and simply a threat. the aesthetics of disappearance must be reappeared. for virilio, as well as for the reconnaissance cameras whose history he records, success depends on the logistics of perception, on closing the distance between the critic and his quarry. but what if critics are not only hunters; what if they are the quarry as well? [43] michel de certeau points out that, for clausewitz, the distinction between strategy and tactics is determined not only by scales of conflict (war vs. battle) but by relative magnitudes of power. strategy is for the strong, and it is deployed in known, visible, mapped spaces; tactics is "an art of the weak," of those who must operate inside territory controlled by a greater power; it takes place on the ground of the "other," inside alien space.^35^ it must therefore deploy deception in the face of a power "bound by its very visibility." de certeau suggests that even in cases where the weak force has already been sighted, it might use deception to great advantage. this is another lesson from clausewitz: "trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a 'last resort': the weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategist will be able to use deception." in the "practice of daily life," in spaces of signification, in the contests of critical argument, such a tactics of the weak would also apply: lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the %absence of power% just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power. from this point of view, the dialectic of a tactic may be illuminated by the ancient art of sophistic. as the author of a great "strategic" system, aristotle was also very interested in the procedures of this enemy which perverted, as he saw it, the order of truth. he quotes a formula of this protean, quick, and surprising adversary that, by making explicit the basis of sophistic, can also serve finally to define a tactic as i understand it here: it is a matter, corax said, of "making the worse argument seem the better." in its paradoxical concision, this formula delineates the relationship of forces that is the starting point for an intellectual creativity that is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property. (38) and yet it is rare that any of this ever occurs to critics, who seem to believe that "subversion" consists of vicarious identification with subversives, and of telling everything one knows to one's enemies. [44] it is nonetheless already the case that, in critical discourse, behind all the humanistic myths of communication, understanding, and interpretive fidelity, one finds the tactical value of misinterpretations. in an argument it is often crucial for combatants not to know their enemy, to project instead a paper figure, a distortion, against which they can conceive and reinforce their own positions. %intelligence%, here, is not only knowledge of one's enemies but the tactical lies one tells about them, even to oneself. this is so regular a phenomenon of discursive conflict that it cannot be dismissed as an aberration that might be remedied through better communication, better listening skills, more disinterested criticism. one identifies one's own signal in part by jamming everyone else's, setting it off from the noise one generates around it. there is, in other words, already plenty of fog in discursive warfare, and yet we tend to remain passive in the face of it, and for the most part completely and uncritically committed to exposing ourselves to attack. imagine what might be possible for a writing that is not insistently positional, not devoted to shoring itself up, to fixing itself in place, to laying out all its plans under the eyes of its opponents. nothing, after all, has been more fatal for the avant-gardes than the form of the manifesto. if only surrealism had been more willing to lie, to dissimulate, to abandon the petty narcissism of the position and the desire to explain itself to anyone who would listen, and instead explored the potential offered it by the model of the secret society it also hoped to be. intellectual warfare must therefore investigate the tactical advantages of deception and clandestinity over the habitual, quasi-ethical demands of clarity and forthrightness, let alone the narcissistic demands of self-promotion and mental exhibitionism, from however fortified a position. if to be seen by the enemy is to be destroyed, then intellectual warfare must pursue its own stealth technology. self-styled intellectual warriors will explore computer networks not only as more rapid means of communication and publishing but as means for circumventing publication, as semi-clandestine lines of circulation, encoded correspondence, and semiotic speed. there will be no entirely secure secrecy, just as there are no impregnable positions -that too is virilio's argument -but a shrouded nomadism is already spreading in and around major discursive conflicts. there are many more than nine grounds, but the rest are secret. ix. cemetery: [45] when the notion that knowledge is not only power but a mode of warfare has gained sufficient currency, criticism will take it upon itself to develop the strategic implications of thought, and to combat the coordination of the "knowledge industries" with the military-industrial complex. here, however, on this final ground, already razed by the self-consuming turbulence of battle, the project of war study is neither to serve the state nor to oppose it, but rather to trivialize the very idea of war, as we trivialize everything we take up as sublime. [46] even as it imposes itself with unprecedented force, intellectual warfare is already dead. it is death carried out by other means. do not mistake this claim. it has nothing to do with saying that war talk will stop; on the contrary, we will be subjected to it as never before precisely because it is dead. let me repeat this essay's fundamental law: the object of criticism is always a phenomenalization of some systemic device of discourse, and it always appears in a surrogate form at the very moment it is no longer functional. the task in respect to the knowledge and critique of war is thus not developmental but %simulacral%, a term whose own recent fate attests to its truth. everything that baudrillard's theory of simulation was about happened to the theory itself: the sublime disappearance of its own referent through its obscene overexposure, its precipitous reduction to a mere bit of intellectual currency that quickly expended all its value and force. but what if that is the task of intellectual warfare as well: not to advance and defend the new truths of war but to ruin them in the very act of construing them, to level whatever criticism has assigned to itself of war's sublimity, to recast it in the proxy forms of mental war toys and pitch them about in mock combats, in ritual battles for possession of the dead, waged in the name of the dead and on dead ground, and most of all to cast their shades across the future. [47] we -and who really is speaking here? is it the dead themselves? -we come to fight discourse's war against itself. we are soldiers of an intellectual "suicide state" that practices the politics of its own disappearance (pw 90). war for us is no longer an idea, a historical object, or even a sublime image: all these are only symptoms of an autoaggressive drive, a rage for self-destruction, a turbulent movement that distributes and evacuates every image and idea. we are like kleist's kolhaas or penthesilea, in a question posed by deleuze and guattari: "is it the destiny of the war machine, when the state triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the state apparatus, or %to turn against itself%, to become a double suicide machine?"^36^ it is certainly one task of _a thousand plateaus_ to avoid reducing its field to such alternatives, such ethico-political choices -to project and affirm different possibilities. but here, at this moment and on this ground, imagine kolhaas on the scaffold, reading the future of the state in a text that he always carried close to his heart but never before considered, and swallowing it without uttering its truth at the very instant he expires. notes: ^1^ see, for instance, susan griffin, _a chorus of stones: the private life of war_ (new york: doubleday, 1992); miriam cooke and angela woollacott, eds., _gendering wartalk_ (princeton: princeton up, 1993); cynthia enloe, _the morning after: sexual politics at the end of the cold war_ (berkeley: u of california p, 1993); garry wills, "critical inquiry in clausewitz," in w.j.t. mitchell, ed., _the politics of interpretation_, special issue of _critical inquiry_ (chicago: u of chicago p, 1982, 1983) 159-80; mette hjort, _the strategy of letters_ (cambridge: harvard up, 1993). ^2^ elaine scarry, _the body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world_ (new york: oxford up, 1985); cited in john muse, "war on war," _war after war_, ed. nancy j. peters (san francisco: city lights books, 1992) 55. ^3^ randy allen harris, _the linguistics wars_ (oxford: oxford up, 1993); gerald graff, _beyond the culture wars: how teaching conflicts can revitalize american education_ (new york: norton, 1992); avital ronell, _crack wars: literature, addiction, mania_ (lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1992). ^4^ friedrich nietzsche, "on truth and lie in an extra-moral sense," _the portable nietzsche_, ed. and trans. walter s. kaufmann (new york: vintage books, 1954) 46. see also avital ronell, "support our tropes," in _war after war_ 47-51. on war as a metaphor for argument, see george lakoff and mark johnson, _metaphors we live by_ (chicago: u of chicago p,1980). ^5^ carl von clausewitz, _on war_, trans. michael howard and peter paret (princeton: princeton up, 1976); paul virilio, _speed and politics_, trans. mark polizzotti (new york: semiotext(e), 1986); virilio and sylvere lotringer, _pure war_, trans. mark polizzotti (new york: semiotext(e), 1983); virilio, _war and cinema: the logistics of perception_, trans. patrick camiller (london: verso, 1989). ^6^ hans magnus enzensberger, _the consciousness industry: on literature, politics and the media_, ed. michael roloff (new york: seabury press, 1974). ^7^ one example of %ressentiment% calling itself war: sande cohen, _academia and the luster of capital_ (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993). ^8^ the figure of the nine grounds is taken from sun tzu, _the art of war_, trans. thomas cleary (boston: shambhala, 1991) 88-105. this is not a scholarly edition, but precisely the sort of volume one might pick up in an airport, one of a series of "spiritual" handbooks including buddhist and taoist texts and works by thomas merton, marcus aurelius, and rilke. sun tzu's own grounds are, of course, quite different; it would be interesting to develop the grounds he stipulates as grounds for intellectual war as well. ^9^ the question of degree is crucial. if certain orders of humanistic discourse tend to suppress the strategic aspects of cultural exchange, the new war discourse will exaggerate them. ^10^ alvin and heidi toffler, _war and anti-war: survival at the dawn of the 21st century_ (boston: little brown & co., 1993). on the figure of "cyberwar," see james der derian, _antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed, and war_ (cambridge, ma.: blackwell, 1992). ^11^ georges bataille, _the accursed share: an essay on general economy_: vol. i (consumption); vols. ii (the history of eroticism) and iii (sovereignty), trans. robert hurley (new york: zone books, 1988, 1991); "the notion of expenditure," in _visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939_, ed. allan stoekl, trans. stoekl et al. (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1985) 116-29. ^12^ alexandre kojeve, _introduction to the reading of hegel: lectures on the phenomenology of spirit_, ed. allan bloom, trans. james h. nichols, jr. (ithaca: cornell up, 1969) 11. ^13^ daniel pick, _the war machine: the rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age_ (new haven: yale up, 1993) 7-8. ^14^ peter paret, _understanding war: essays on clausewitz and the history of military power_ (princeton: princeton up, 1992) 85. ^15^ jacqueline rose, _why war? -psychoanalysis, politics, and the return to melanie klein_ (oxford: blackwell, 1993) 18. rose's chief text from freud is "why war?" (1932) in _the standard edition of the complete psycholgical works_, ed. and trans. james strachey (london: hogarth, 1955) 22: 195-215. ^16^ in zizek's vigorous defense, hegel has already accounted for this crisis, and attempts to reduce the dialectic merely to its most formal and totalizing elements misconceive, among other things, the perpetual surplus of negation. see slavoj zizek, _enjoy your symptom: jacques lacan in hollywood and out_ (new york: routledge, 1992); _for they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor_ (london: verso, 1991); and _tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology_ durham: duke up, 1993). ^17^ see also john keegan's account of fortification in _the history of warfare_ (new york: knopf, 1993) 139-52. ^18^ gilles deleuze and felix guattari, _a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, volume ii_, trans. brian massumi (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987), 389-90. ^19^ one must, of course, refer here to foucault's vast elaboration of this term in _the archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language_, trans. a.m. sheridan smith (new york: harper and row, 1976); _discipline and punish: the birth of the prison_, trans. alan sheridan (new york: vintage, 1977); _language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews_, ed. donald f. bouchard, trans. donald f. bouchard and sherry simon (ithaca: cornell up, 1977); _power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977_, ed. colin gordon, trans. colin gordon, leo marshall, john mepham, kate soper (new york: pantheon books, 1980); and other works. ^20^ see _a thousand plateaus_, especially plateau 12: "1227: treatise on nomadology -the war machine," 351-423. for deleuze's most relevant preliminary explorations of nomad thought, see _nietzsche and philosophy_, trans. hugh tomlinson (new york: columbia up, 1983), and _the logic of sense_, ed. constantin v. boundas, trans. mark lester with charles stivale (new york: columbia up, 1990). ^21^ there are several instance of the former in a recent issue of _yale french studies_; nomadology there is rarely more than an interpretive prosthesis for sedentary academics. see francoise lionnet and ronnie scharfman, eds., _post/colonial conditions: exiles, migrations, and nomadisms_, spec. issue of _yale french studies_ 82:1 (1993). ^22^ jean baudrillard and sylve&grave;re lotringer, _forget foucault_, trans. philip beitchman, lee hildreth, and mark polizzotti (new york: semiotext(e), 1987) 127-28. ^23^ i have already suggested that the very procedures of this essay constitute, at least for me, an exploration, quite preliminary and by no means successful, of the mode of nomadic thought itself. a ground is not a sort of geo-narcissistic foundation, a stand that is more plausible the more solid and immovable one can make it, but a strategic field across whose surface one moves and deploys one's forces for the duration of a particular tactical encounter, in a manner that uses and may even defend the ground but does not finally attach itself to it. at all points, one must take into account the multiplicity of grounds and the fact that the field or ground itself changes given the forces in conflict upon it. this would seem to resemble wills's version of clausewitzian %kritik%, put into motion; insofar as that is the case, one cannot be too attached to the idea of nomadism either: as i argue at various points (grounds 2 and 7), the chaos of conflict itself militates against the full clarification of any tactic, and one must avoid the facile opposition of theory and %kritik% (i.e., practice). and one must also avoid becoming too attached to deleuze and guattari, or to "nomadology," or to any body of thought, lest one turn one's own work into sedentary commentary on a position. ^24^ for the deleuze-guattari treatment of nomadic numbering, see _a thousand plateaus_ 387-94. ^25^ deleuze, with claire parnet, _dialogues_, trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam (new york: columbia up, 1987) 93. ^26^ on the figure of the rhizome, see the introduction to _a thousand plateaus_ 3-25. ^27^ manuel de landa, _war in the age of intelligent machines_ (new york: zone books, 1991) 11 ff. ^28^ it is by no means in order to defend baudrillard's %position% that one notes how, in this context, critics who dismiss the notion of simulation in the name of some political or historical reality are themselves caught up in the very same "precession of simulacra." baudrillard: "the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it marks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum." _simulations_, trans. paul foss, paul patton, and philip beitchman (new york: semiotext(e), 1983) 11. for baudrillard's notion of strategy, see _fatal strategies_, ed. jim fleming, trans. philip beitchman and w.d.j. niesluchowski (new york: semiotext(e), 1990). ^29^ see, for instance, magnus i. midlarsky, ed., _handbook of war studies_ (ann arbor: u of michigan p, 1989). ^30^ immanuel kant, _critique of judgement_, trans. james creed meredith (oxford: oxford up, 1986) 112-13. ^31^ we might also call war the sublime of the state. as pick remarks, in clausewitz, "friction occurs %within% war, rather than in the nature of the relation of war to politics," but "a more radical interrogation of war is also implied; we glimpse a war machine which threatens the political state with something madder, more disabling and disruptive than the dominant formulation of _on war_ suggests" (32-33). war is the state's own limit text, its proper transgression of itself, its essential and constitutive surplus, its seductive symptom of the death drive. ^32^ see klein, richard, ed., _nuclear criticism_, spec. issue of _diacritics_ 14.2 (summer 1984). ^33^ the first passage is from de landa, 14-15; the second is cited by de landa (15) and is taken from ilya prigogine and isabelle stengers, _order out of chaos_ (new york: bantam books, 1984) 141. see also james gleick, _chaos: making a new science_ (new york: penguin books, 1987). ^34^ _pure war_ 88-89. see also virilio, _the aesthetics of disappearance_, trans. philip beitchman (new york: semiotext(e), 1991). ^35^ michel de certeau, _the practice of everyday life_, trans. steven rendall (berkeley: university of california press, 1984) 37. ^36^ _a thousand plateaus_ 356. heinrich von kleist, _the marquise of o-and other stories_, trans. david luke and nigel reeves (london: penguin books, 1978). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------epstein, '%hyper% in 20th century culture: the dialectics of transition from modernism to postmodernism', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-epstein-hyper.txt archive pmc-list, file epstein.196. part 1/1, total size 67375 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- %hyper% in 20th century culture: the dialectics of transition from modernism to postmodernism by mikhail epstein emory university russnme@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by berghahn books, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. this essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, _russian postmodernism: new perspectives on late soviet and post-soviet literature_, written by mikhail epstein, alexander genis, and slobodanka vladiv-glover, and published by berghahn books (providence, rhode island and oxford). publication is scheduled for spring, 1997. the isbns are as follows: 1-57181-028-5 (cloth) and 1-57181-098-6 (paper). thanks to dr. vladiv-glover, who translated and edited the original russian language version of this essay. it was then revised and extended by the author. 1. the modernist premises of postmodernism [1] the first half of the 20th century evolved under the banner of numerous revolutions, such as the "social," "cultural" and "sexual," and revolutionary changes in physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, literature and the arts. in russia, momentous changes took place in spheres which were not the same as those in the west. but both worlds were united through a common revolutionary model. this fact explains the typological similarities, which have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, between western postmodernism and contemporary russian culture, which is evolving, like its western counterpart, under the sign of "post": as post-communist or post-utopian culture. [2] our analysis will deal with the laws of cultural development of the 20th century which are shared by the western world and russian society, nothwithstanding the fact that this was russia's epoch of tragic isolation from and aggressive opposition to the west. it was russia's revolutionary project which distinguished her from the west, but it was precisely through this "revolutionariness" that russia inscribed herself into the cultural paradigm of the 20th century. [3] revolutions are certainly a part of the modernist project. in the widest meaning of the term "modern," this project is a quest for and reconstruction of an authentic, higher, essential reality, to be found beyond the conventional, arbitrary sign systems of culture. the founding father of modernism was in this respect jean-jacques rousseau, with his critique of contemporary civilization and discovery of a primal, "unspoilt" existence of man in nature. the thought of marx, nietzsche and freud, which exposed the illusion of an ideological self-consciousness, discovered an "essential" reality in the self-propagation of matter and material production, in the life instinct, in the will to power, in the sexual drive and in the power of the unconscious. these discoveries were all creations of modernism. [4] in this same sense, james joyce, with his discovery of the "stream of consciousness" and the "mythological prototypes" underlying the conventional forms of the "contemporary individual," was a modernist. the same can be said of kazimir malevich, who erased the multiplicity of colors of the visible world in order to uncover its geometric foundation, the "black square." velimir khlebnikov, who insisted on the essential reality of the "self-valuable," "trans-sense" word, affirmed the shamanistic incantation of the type "bobeobi peli guby" in place of the conventional language of symbols. although antagonistic to artistic modernism, the communist revolution was a manifestation of political modernism. it strove to bring to power the "true creators of reality," who "generated material well-being" -namely the working masses. these masses would bring down the "parasitic" classes, who distort and alienate reality, appropriating for themselves the fruits of the labour of others by means of all manner of ideological illusions and the bureaucratic apparatus. [5] on the whole, modernism can be defined as a revolution which strove to abolish the arbitrary character of culture and the relativity of signs in order to affirm the hidden absoluteness of being, regardless of how one defined this essential, authentic being: whether as "matter" and "economics" in marxism, "life" in nietzsche, "libido" and "the unconscious" in freud, "creative elan" in bergson, "stream of consciousness" in william james and james joyce, "being" in heidegger, the "self-valuable word" in futurism or "the power of workers and peasants" in bolshevism. the list could go on. [6] postmodernism, as is known, directs its sharpest criticism at modernism for the latter's adherence to the illusion of an "ultimate truth," an "absolute language," a "new style," all of which were supposed to lead to the "essential reality." the name itself points to the fact that postmodernism constituted itself as a new cultural paradigm in the very process of differentiating itself from modernism, as an experiment in the self-enclosure of sign systems, of language folding in upon itself. the very notion of a reality beyond that of signs is criticised by postmodernism as the "last" in a series of illusions, as a survival of the old "metaphysics of presence." the world of secondariness, that is, of conventional and contingent presentations, proves to be more authentic and primary than the so-called "true reality," in fact, "transcendental" world. this critique of "realistic fallacy" nurtures diverse postmodern movements. one of these, russian conceptualism, for instance, exposes the nature of soviet reality as an ideological mirage and as a system of "supersignificant" signs projected by the ruling mind onto the empty place of the imaginary "signified." [7] our task is to explore the intricate relationship of modernism and postmodernism as the two complementary aspects of one cultural paradigm which can be designated by the notion "hyper" and which in the subsequent analysis will fall into the two connected categories, those of "super" and "pseudo." if russian and western postmodernism have their common roots in their respective modernist past and the revolutionary obsession with the "super," so also the current parallels between western postmodernism and its russian counterpart, their common engagement with the "pseudo," allow us to glimpse the phenomenon of postmodernism in general in a new dimension. this new depth, which it acquires through the comparison, is projected as the path leading out of a common revolutionary past, whose heritage both postmodern paradigms -the russian and the western one - are striving to overcome. [8] paradoxically, it was the revolution as a quest and an affirmation of a "supersignified," a "pure" or "essential" reality, which has led to the formation of the pseudo-realities, constituted by hollow, non-referential signs of reality, with which postmodern culture plays in both russia and the west. [9] what follows is an attempt to analyze "the modernist premises of postmodernism in the light of postmodern perspectives of modernism," or, simply speaking, the interdependence of the two historical phenomena. my argument will focus on the variety of modernist approaches, in physics (quantum mechanics), in literary theory (new criticism), in philosophy (existentialism), in psychoanalytic theories and practices (sexual revolution), in soviet social and intellectual trends, such as "collectivism" and "materialism" -which expose the phenomenon of "hyper" in its first stage, as a revolutionary overturn of the "classic" paradigm and an assertion of a "true, essential reality," or "*super*-reality." in the second stage, the same phenomena are realized and exposed as "*pseudo*-realities," thus marking the transformation of "hyper" itself, its inevitable transition from modernist to postmodernist stage, from "super" to "pseudo." what i want to argue is the necessary connection between these two stages, "super" and "pseudo," in the development of 20th century cultural paradigm. the concept of "hyper" highlights not only the lines of continuity between modernism and postmodernism, but also the parallel developments in russian and western postmodernisms as reactions to and revisions of common "revolutionary" legacy. 2. "hyper" in science and culture [10] a series of diverse manifestations in the arts, sciences, philosophy and politics of the 20th century can be united under the category "hyper." this prefix literally means "heightened" or "excessive"; its popularity in contemporary cultural theory reflects the fact that many tendencies of 20th century life have been brought to a limit of development, so that they have come to reveal their own antitheses. [11] the concept of "hyperreality" in the above sense of the prefix "hyper" has been advanced by the italian cultural semiotician umberto eco and the french sociologist and philosopher jean baudrillard, both of whom relate it to the disappearance of reality in the face of the dominance of the mass media. on the face of it, mass communication technology appears to capture reality in all its minutest details. but on that advanced level of penetration into the facts, the technical and visual means themselves construct a reality of another order, which has been called "hyperreality." this "hyperreality" is a phantasmic creation of the means of mass communication, but as such it emerges as a more authentic, exact, "real" reality than the one we perceive in the life around us. [12] an illustrative example is the influential movement in the art of the 1970's and early 1980's, called hyper-realism. works produced by this movement included giant color photographs, framed and functioning as pictures. details, such as the skin on a man's face, appeared in such blow-ups that it was possible to see every pore, every roughness of surface, and every protuberance not normally visible with the naked eye. this is the "hyper"-effect, which allows reality to acquire an "excessively real" dimension due entirely to the means of its technical reproduction. [13] according to baudrillard, reality which is firmly entwined in a net of mass communication has disappeared completely from the contemporary western world, ceding its place to hyperreality which is produced by artificial means: reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferrably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. from medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. but it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. it becomes %reality for its own sake% the fetishism of the lost object . . . the hyperreal.^1^ [14] this paradox was discovered by quantum physics long before the advent of the theoreticians of postmodernism. it was the scientists who first discovered that the elementary particles, that is, the objects of observation, were largely determined by the measuring instruments. the reality which was revealed to the physicists from the late 1920's onwards came to be increasingly recognised as a "hyperreality," since it was constituted by the parameters of the measuring equipment and the mathematical calculations. in the words of the american physicists heinz pagels, "it is meaningless to talk about the physical properties of quantum objects without precisely specifying the experimental arrangement by which you intend to measure them. quantum reality is in part an observer-created reality. . . . [w]ith the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world."^2^ [15] the most challenging methodological question in present-day physics, engaged in the modelling of such speculative entities as "quarks" and "strings," is the question of what is in fact being investigated? what is the status of the so-called physical objects and in what sense can they be called "physical" and "objects," if they are called into existence by a series of mathematical operations?" [16] quantum mechanics became the first discipline to admit to its hyper-scientific character or, more precisely, the hyper-physical nature of its objects. in getting ever closer to the elementary foundations of matter, science is discovering the imaginary and purely rational character of that physical reality, which it allegedly describes but which in fact it invents. in the past, discoveries and inventions could be clearly distinguished: the former revealed something that really existed in nature, the latter created something that was possible and useful in technology. in the present, there are no such strictly delimited categories of discoveries and inventions, since all discoveries tend to become inventions. the difference between discovery and invention has become blurred, at least as far as the deepest, originary layers of reality are concerned. the more one penetrates into these layers, the more one finds oneself in the depths of one's own consciousness. [17] in the same way, the more perfect instruments for the observation of physical reality are used, the less can it be detected as reality in a proper sense, as something different from the very conditions of its observation. this is precisely the creation of "an observer-created reality" which makes the case for baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. the notion of "hyperreality," in relation to cultural objects, was introduced by baudrillard in his book _symbolic exchange and death_ (1976), half a century later than niels bohr laid foundation for the new understanding of physical objects as "influenced" by human intention (1927). it is the improvement of instruments for the observation and reproduction of physical and cultural reality that dimmed out reality as such and made it interchangeable with its own representations. in his statement "from medium to medium, the real is volatilized . . ." baudrillard refers to the most authentic and sensitive means for the reproduction of reality, such as photography, cinema, and television. paradoxically, the more %truthful% are the methods of representation, the more dubious the category of %truth% becomes. an object presented with the maximum authenticity does not differ any more from its own copy. hyperreality supplants reality as truthfulness makes truth unattainable. [18] alongside the hyperphysical objects, there are several other parallel processes generating the "hyper," emerging particularly in the timespan of 1920's to the 1930's. these spheres of "hyperization" are so diverse and at such distance from one another that it is impossible to speak about a direct influence between these processes. rather, they describe a new limit of being and perception, at which russia and the west had simultaneously arrived. 3. hyper-textuality^3^ [19] in the human sciences the same thing takes place as in the natural sciences. along with hyperphysical objects emerges what could be called hypertextuality. the relationship between criticism and literature undergoes a change. the modernist criticism of the 1920's and 1930's, as represented by the most influential schools, such as russian formalism and anglo-american new criticism, and later structuralism, attempts to free itself from all historical, social, biographical and psychological moments, integrated into literature, in order to separate the phenomenon of pure literariness. this literariness of literature is analogous to the "elementary particles" of the texture of literature, its ultimate and irreducible essence. [20] criticism is engaged in purifying the stuff of literature by separating from it all those additional layers, with which it was encumbered by schools of criticism of earlier times: the enlightenment, romanticism, realism, the biographical, psychological and historical criticism, the criticism of naturalism and symbolism, and all other critical fashions of the 19th and early 20th century. that is, criticism now wanted to free literature from an imposed content in order to turn literature into pure form, to reduce it to the "device as such," to the text in itself. everything which was valued in literature -the reflection of historical reality, the author's world view, the influence of the intellectual trends of the times, the inferred higher reality of symbolic meanings -all of this now seemed naive and old-fashioned and extraneous to literature. [21] but as the process of purification of literature from all non-literary elements continued to reduce literature to the text itself, so the process of appropriation of that text by criticism developed alongside it, until the text was transformed into a thing wholly dependent on and even engendered by criticism. the literary work thus becomes a textual product, created in the modernist critical laboratory by means of the splitting of literatures into "particles" or structural elements and by virtue of the separation of literature from the admixtures of "historicity," "biographicality," "culturalness," "emotionalism," "philosophicalness," considered alien and detrimental to the text. [22] in the same manner as textual criticism, quantum mechanics splits the physical object -the atom -into so many minimal component parts whose objective existence fades into ideal projections of the methods of observation and the properties of the physical measuring appartus. pure textual signs, excised from literature in the manner of the smallest irreducible particles or quants, are equivalent to ideal projections of the critical methodology. since these signs are purified of all meanings, supposedly imposed by the author's subjectivity and extraneous historical circumstances, the critic is the only one empowered to read them as signs carrying meanings or signs with potential meanings. it is the critic who determines the meanings of those signs, intially purified of all meanings. [23] the paradoxical result of such a purification of literature has been its increasing reliance on criticism and on the method of interpretation. both formalism and anglo-american 'new criticism' make literature accessible to the reader through the intermediary action of criticism itself. literature thus becomes a system of pure devices or signs, filled with meanings by a criticism according to one or another method of interpretation. in other words, criticism bans literature from its own territory and substitutes the power which the writer used to exercise over the mind of the reader by the power of the critic. [24] in the mid-60's, the result of this modernist overturn was reflected in the words of the english critic george steiner who complains about this new status of a critic as the master of a hyper-textuality: "the true critic is servant to the poet; today he is acting as master, or being taken as such."^4^ similarly, umberto eco remarks that "at present, poetics are coming more and more to get the upper hand of the work of art. . . ."^5^ and according to the writer saul bellow, "criticism tries to control the approaches to literature. it confronts the reader with its barriers of interpretation. a docile public consents to this monopoly of the specialists -those 'without whom literature cannot be understood.' critics, speaking for writers, succeeded eventually in replacing them."^6^ [25] certainly, all these negative responses to the modernist revolution in criticism belong themselves to anti-, rather than postmodernist consciousness; more precisely, they designate the very limits of modernism. postmodernism emerged no sooner than the reality of text itself was understood as an illusionary projection of a critic's semiotic power or, more pluralistically, any reader's interpretative power ("dissemination of meanings"). the critical revolution which began with russian formalism in the 1920's and continued with structuralism in the 1950's-1960's ended with a brief reaction in the 1960's when lamentations about "the critical situation" and the domination of critic over creator became popular. with the advent of postmodernism, both modernist enthusiasm for the "pure" reality of text and antimodernist nostalgia for the "lost" reality of literature became things of the past. 4. hyper-existentiality [26] hypertextuality as a phenomenon of literary criticism parallels the phenomenon of the hyper-object created by physical science. another form of "hyper" can be found in one of the leading western philosophical trends between the 1920's to the 1950's. european existentialism turned to the authentic reality of individual existence, to "being as such," which precedes any categorization, every rational generalization. with this, existentialism seemed to subject the "abstract," "rationalistic" consciousness of idealistic systems from plato to descartes and hegel to crushing criticism. [27] yet it is the case that as early as dostoevsky's _notes from underground_, russian literature pointed to the process of the production of being or of "pure existence" from a[n] [abstract] consciousness which dissolved all concreteness and formalness of being. this "pure being" was constituted by the temporal duration of a permanence. existence thus became a pure abstraction of being, produced by consciousness and deprived of all characteristics which might impart concreteness to it. in his concreteness, a man is either one or another entity, he is either lazy or diligent, a clerk or a peasant and so on. dostoevsky's %underground man%, one of the first existentialist (anti)heroes in world literature, is not even capable of rising to the definition of a good-for-nothing, or an insect. his consciousness is infinite and even "sick" in its "excessiveness"; it destroys the definitiveness which enslaves the "dull," "limited" people of action, pushing towards that ultimate limit of existence at which a human being is nothing concrete but only %is%, simply exists. not only couldn't i make myself malevolent, i couldn't make myself anything: neither good nor bad, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. . . . [a] wise man can't seriously make himself anything. . . . after all, the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia. . . . i practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake, and so on %ad infinitum%. that is really the essence of all thinking and self-awareness. . . . and finally, "soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.^7^ [28] thus existentialist critique of routine forms of existence ("neither a hero nor an insect"), paradoxically, brings forth even more abstract kind of existence, "a method of being born from an idea." the quest for such absolute being, which precedes all rational definitions and general classifications -such as psychological traits or the attributes of belonging to a profession -is not less abstract and rational than such classifications. it is even more abstract. it is the limit of the abstraction of being, which is also an abstraction of singularity, resulting in a kind of "hypersingularity," which is only itself and which is alien to all forms of typicality. such is the result of the existential quest. this "hypersingularity," based on the "in-and-for-itself" (to borrow a hegelian term), is the highest possible abstraction, which clings to the "tip" of the self-conscious consciousness, dissolving all qualitative determinateness. this it does in the same way as quantum physics dissolves the determinateness of matter to obtain elementary particles as projections of mathematical description. precisely because of its "elementariness," existence thus becomes the metaphysical "quant," the ultimate, indivisible particle of "matter" or existence-as-such -a derivation of the most speculative type of consciousness, which objectifies itself in the form of "being as such." the existentialist self-definition "i am" is much more abstract than "essentialist" definitions like "i am a reasonable being" or "i am a lazy man." [29] in hegel, the absolute idea develops through its embodiment in increasingly concrete forms of being, according to the principle formulated as "the progression from the abstract to the concrete." starting with kierkegaard, being itself becomes a form of abstraction. this is the abstraction of "the particular," the unique "this one here," which applies equally to any concrete form of existence, from insects to human beings, from the peasant to the artist, who are completely dissociated from any typical features of the genus, which hegel still endows with the concreteness of the manifest idea. contrary to a conventional opinion, kierkegaard is a much more abstract thinker than hegel. hegel's thought proceeds from the abstract idea to its specific manifestations, whereas kierkegaard's thought proceeds from concrete idea to abstract singularity. hegel's idea goes through the process of concretization through being; the existentialists' being itself goes through a process of abstraction through the ultimate generalization of the idea of "being." thus being becomes "pure being" or an almost empty abstraction, a "hyperbeing," the form of heidegger's and sartre's "nothing." [30] sartre's _la nausee_ demonstrates how the "unhappy" consciousness of roquentin, not bound by anything and raised to the highest degree of abstractness, suddenly encounters -but in reality engenders -the abstract texture of being, of the roots and of the earth, stubborn in its absurdity and inducing nausea. this absurdity, which the existentialist consciousness discovers everywhere as the revelation of a "true" reality, which has not been distorted or generalised, and which is given anterior to any act of rationalization, is in fact "hyperreality." it is the product of a rational generalisation, which singles out in the world such an all-embracing trait as the "irrational." [31] existentialism is not a negation of rationalism but rather its ultimate expansion, a method of rationalistic construction of the universal principle of irrationality, designated as "will" by schopenhauer, as "life" by nietzsche, as "existence" and "the individual" by kierkegaard. this irrationality is much more cerebral and abstract than all the forms of rationality which divide being into concrete types, into essences, into laws and into concepts. rationality always contains at least a certain dose of concreteness because it is always in a determinate relation with "some thing," it is "the sense of a concrete thing," the rationality of something which needs to be defined or specified from a rational point of view. "irrationality" does not demand such concretisation, it is "irrationality as such," "the absurdity of everything," it represents "an all-embracing absurdity." it betrays its ultimate generality precisely through its totally and nausiatingly indiscriminate relationship to the concrete things. the irrational world, which ostensibly eschews rational definition, is a product of the most schematizing rationality, which negates all concrete definitions of things and which finds its ultimate expression in abstractions such as "existence as such," "the particular as such." [32] at this ultimate level of abstraction, being is only the opposite of non-being. as sartre asserts in _being and nothingness_, consciousness, or being-for-itself, in its freedom from all ontological determinations, is pure nothingness emerging from itself and nullifying, or, to use a sartrean term, "nihilating" the substantial definitions of the exterior world. the type of existence of the for-itself is a pure internal negation. . . . thus determination is a %nothing% which does not belong as an internal structure either to the thing or to consciousness, but its being is %to-be-summoned% by the for-itself across a system of internal negations in which the in-itself [the world of objects] is revealed in its indifference to all that is not itself.^8^ as hazel e. barnes comments, in sartre "consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness. thus nihilation is that by which consciousness exists."^9^ therefore, the phenomenon of existence is determined by the series of "internal negations," proceeding from the consciousness as pure nothingness. in this case, the absurdity of being, as it appears to the nullifying consciousness, can be understood as the derivative of this nothingness, of this abstraction that strips concrete things of their meaning. one would imagine that there is nothing more abstract than "nothing," since it is draws itself away from all peculiarities and specificities of being; but being, as it is posited in existential philosophy, is even more abstract than non-being, since it emerges as the second order projection of this nothingness. this is no longer that nothingness which has a reality in-and-for-itself, like the self-effacing nothingness of self-consciousness. this is a nothingness which has lost that intimate relationship to its for-itself and which is turned towards the absurd being which surrounds it, which is pure abstraction, deprived of even the concreteness of self-consciousness and of self-negation. this being is simple nonentity -a being-for-no-one. [33] behind the apparently authentic and self-evident "existence as such" postulated by existentialism, one can detect the hyper-reality of a reason abstracted from itself in the emptied form of ultimate irrationality. it is a conceptual abstraction to such a degree that it abstracts itself from its own rational foundation in order to affirm itself as its own opposite -as being as such, ungraspable by reason, unconcretizable and untypifiable. there are two degrees of abstraction: a moderate abstraction, which is confined to the sphere of reason, and an extreme abstraction, which goes beyond the limits of reason. when rational abstraction goes as far as to abstract from rationality itself, it converts into the concept of universal irrationality. this form of abstracting reason from reason is the one which gives rise to the notion of the non-sense of pure being. 5. hyper-sexuality [34] in the 20th century, the "hyper" phenomenon is also in evidence in the sphere of intimate personal relationships, in which experimentations with sex come to the fore. war is declared on the puritanism of the 19th century and the entire christian ethics of "asceticism." the sexual instinct is set up as the primordial reality, underlying thought and culture. the nietzschean celebration of the life of the body prepared european society, which had experienced the trauma of the first world war and the explosion of aggressive emotions, for the acceptance of psychoanalysis, which becomes the dominant intellectual trend of the 1920's. the scientific work of sigmund freud and wilhelm reich and their pupils, the artistic discoveries of surrealists, joyce, thomas mann, d.h. lawrence, henry miller and others, the new freedom of sexual mores characteristic of the culture of jazz and cabaret -all of these things placed the 1920's under the banner of the so-called "sexual revolution." the "basic instinct" is sought in theory and art, and extracted in pure form as the "libido." [35] but, as already noted by many critics, in this pure form, the "basic instinct," abstracted from all other human capabilities and driving forces, is nothing but an abstract scheme, the fruit of the analytic activity of reason. in the words of the english novelist and religious writer, c.s. lewis, "lust is more abstract than logic; it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness."^10^ moreover, the notion of an "abstract lust" emanates from a bookish, post-logical conception of %desire%, generated by the theorizing of the sexual revolution. the passionate dionysiac ecstasy of the "flesh as such" thus becomes like the burning fantasy of the onanist, who through pure mental effort separates this flesh from the great diversity of the individual spiritual and physical qualities of the desired "object." on an individual level, such exaggerated fantasies may lead to the exhaustion of physiological potency. on the scale of western civilization, it was a construction of still another level of hyper-reality: the artificial reproduction of bodily images, more bright, tangible, concentrated, hypnotically effective than the physical reality of the body, and therefore evoking mental ecstacy while eroding the properly physical component of attraction. thomas eliot noticed about lawrence's novels: "his struggle against over-intellectualized life is the history of his own over-intellectualized nature."^11^ as is the case with existentialism, the struggle against rationalism is an expression of over-rational approach, an abstraction of "existence of such" or "flesh as such." [36] critics often point to this internal contradiction of lawrence's creativity: "[h]is world of love [is] more strangely and purely abstract than that of any other great author. the more intense and urgent it is the more it is a world inside the head. . . . [t]he 'phallic consciousness' seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair, making _lady chatterly_ one of the most inflexibly highbrow novels ever written."^12^ it is interesting that bayley still uses the prefix "hyper" to characterize the intellectual component of lawrence's erotic images, while today we would rather identify them as "hypersexual." in the first case, %hyper% means "super," while in the second case "pseudo" or "quasi": the critic's implication is that lawrence's images are %super%-intellectual, but %pseudo%-sexual. this evolution of %hyper%'s predominant meaning from %super% to %pseudo% constitutes the very core of %hyper%'s dialectics, as will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. [37] hypersexuality, as one might call this "rationally" abstracted and hyperbolised sexuality, emerges in the theories of freud and in the novels of d.h. lawrence, as well as, on a more basic level, in the upsurge in the circulation of pornographic writing. pornography is the very bastion of hypersexuality which presents the condensed simulacra of sexuality: glossy photographs and screen images of unthinkable sex, of unimaginably large breasts, powerful thighs and violent orgasms. [38] even the theory of psychoanalysis, for all its scientific caution and sophistication, reveals this hyper-sexual, and more broadly hyper-real, tendency. the world of the unconscious, proclaimed by freud to be the primal human reality, was discovered or invented by consciousness, as its internal, in-depth "self-projection." this invention assumed the proportions of another reality, preceding and exceeding the reality of consciousness itself. true to its ultimate destiny in the 20th century, consciousness thus creates something other than itself out of itself in order to surrender to this other as something primal and incontestably powerful. a more likely explanation of this phenomenon is that it is not at all a primary or "pre-existing" reality, opposed to consciousness from within, but that the unconscious is constructed by consciousness itself as a form of self-alienation of consciousness, which then sets itself up as a "super-real" entity dominating the latter. hyperreality is a mode of self-alienation of consciousness. the freudian unconscious thus becomes one of the most pronounced and hypnotically convincing projections of consciousness "outside itself." as derrida remarked, "the 'unconscious' is no more a 'thing' than it is a virtual or masked consciousness," the continuously delayed consciousness which can never come to terms with itself.^13^ [39] even freud admitted that the discovery of the unconscious as a force dominating consciousness must serve the overall increase in the power of consciousness itself. psychoanalysis is a process of decoding and illuminating the unconscious, which would allow consciousness to regain control over this "boiling cauldron of desires." in other words, consciousness discovers the unconscious in its 'underground' in order to resume dominance over it. thus psychoanalysis is the method of penetrating into those spheres of consciousness which consciousness itself had declared to be beyond its penetration; through the symbols of the unconscious, consciouness plays hide-and-seek with itself. [40] as distinct from quantum mechanics, which recognizes its physical object to be prestructured by consciousness %a priori%, psychoanalysis sets up the conscious structuring of its psychical object as its final goal. but in both cases the physical and psychic realities prove to be at least partially projections or functions of the intellect, which observes and analyzes them. perhaps psychoanalysis would benefit methodologically if it followed the example of quantum mechanics and recognized that the observed attributes of the unconscious were primarily determined by or even derived from the very conditions of its observation and description. [41] the significance of the sexual revolution, theoretically dominated by psychoanalysis, did not consist of the fact that organic life and instinctual life changed the modes of their existence from one being dominated by consciousness to one of dominance. that was only the ideological intention, the "wishful thinking" of the revolution. where instinct dominated -in the intimate sphere, in real-life sexual relations -there it had always been dominant. the sexual revolution was in fact a revolution of consciousness, which had learned to produce life-like simulations of a "pure" sexuality, which were all the more "ecstatic" the more abstract and rational they became. the result of the sexual revolution was not so much a triumph of "natural" sex as a triumph of the mental over the sexual. sex thus became a spectacle, a psychological commodity, reproduced in infinite phantasies of seduction, of hypersexual power, of a hyper-masculinity and a hyper-femininity. this "hyper," which renders sexual images into mass products of popular culture, is a quality missing from nature. it is a quality introduced by a consciousness with infinite powers for abstraction and generalization.^14^ 6. hyper-sociality [42] the four processes indicated so far, which led to the creation of hyperobjects -namely: the hyperparticles of quantum mechanics, the hypersigns of literary criticism, the hyperbeing of existentialism and the hyperinstincts of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution -were processes taking place in the advanced western societies of the 20th century. within the communist world, however, similar processes of "hyperization" were taking place at the same time, during the 1920's and 1930's, and these extended over the whole social sphere. even communism itself, its theory and practice, could be viewed as the typically eastern counterpart of the "hyper"-phenomenon. [43] soviet society was obsessed with the idea of communality, of the communalization of life. individualism was castigated as the gravest sin and a "cursed remnant of the bourgeois past." collectivism was proclaimed the highest moral principle. the economy was built on the communalization of private property, which came under the jurisdiction of the entire people. the communal was placed infinitely higher than the individual. communal existence was considered to be prior and determinative in relation to individual consciousness, in full accordance with karl marx's formula: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."^15^ in factories, in kolkhozes, in party meetings, in penal colonies, and in urban communal apartments, a new man "of communist future" was produced -a conscientious and effective cog in the gigantic wheel of the collectivist machine. [44] but this new type of sociality, infinitely tighter and denser in its imperatives compared to the earlier (pre-revolutionary) one, was nothing but another instance of hypersociality and a simulacrum of communality. in fact, the social bonds which unite people were rapidly being destroyed. towards the middle of the 1930's, even people in familial relationships, like husbands and wives, parents and children, could no longer trust one another in all respects; their party loyalty and social obligations forced them to denounce and betray even their closest friends. the civil war and the process of collectivization destroyed the natural ties among members of the same nationalities and professional communities. "the most tightly-knit society in the world" (a cliche of soviet propaganda) was an aggregate of frightened, alienated individuals and tiny, weak social units of families and friends, each of which was trying on his or her own to survive and to withstand state pressure. [45] even the base of the entire state pyramid rested on the will of a single individual, who regulated according to his own needs or judgement the work of the whole gigantic social mechanism. and it is curious that it is precisely communism, with its will to %communality%, which always and everywhere gave rise to the %personality% cult: in russia, in china, in north korea, roumania, albania and cuba. this is not accidental but is the expression of the hypersocial nature of the new society. communism is not a natural, primary sociality, arising on the basis of biological and economic connections and needs, which unite people. it is a sociality constructed consciously, according to a plan, emanating from the individual mind of the "founder," and enacted by the individual will of "the leader." [46] the "pure" sociality of the communist type is similar to all those modernist models of "hypers" described above: the "pure" sexuality of psychoanalysis, the textuality of new criticism, and the elementariness of quantum mechanics. communism thus represents some sort of hypnotic quintessence of the social body, which excludes and destroys everything individual and concrete by virtue of its exclusive abstractness -and for this very reason reveals, in the final analysis, its purely individualistic and speculative origin. if we conventionally qualify the pre-modernist state of civilization as "traditional," then traditional sociality made provisions for the whole gammut of individual diversity and for private forms of property, just as traditional sexuality included the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual intimacy of two people, and just as the traditional work of art gave expression to the views of the author and the spirit of the age. but the "hyper," by virtue of its artifically constructed character, is the "extract," the "quintessence" as it were, of one particular property or sign to the exclusion of all others. hypertextuality excludes all illusions of a separable, distinct content (opposed to form), hypersexuality excludes the notion of a "spiritual intimacy," or "sexual relation."^16^ in similar fashion, hypersociality excludes the "illusion of independence and personal freedom." "hyperization," the process enacted by modernism and realized by postmodernism, achieves this exclusion precisely because it represents the hypertrophy of an abstract property, its heightening to an absolute, "super" degree. 7. hyper-materiality [47] the same applies to the basis of the basis of the soviet %weltanschauung% -"scientific materialism." from its point of view, physical matter comes first, is primary while consciousness and spirit are secondary. reality is through and through material and even thought represents only one form of the "movement of matter," along with physical, chemical, and biological forms of the same movement. such is the postulate of this philosophy, aspiring towards a completely sober, scientific approach to reality, verified by experience. "the world is moving matter, and nothing exists which would not be a specific form of matter, its property or a form of its movement. this principle took shape on the basis of the achievements of scientific cognition and man's practical mastery of nature."^17^ [48] but as is well-known, in practice soviet materialism never tried to conform to the laws of material reality but strove instead to refashion this reality. the material of nature was subjected to merciless exploitation, pollution and destruction, the material life of the people was brought into decline, the economy was subordinated not to the material laws of production but to entirely idealistic five-year plans and ideological edicts of the successive party congresses. as andrei bely remarked at the beginning of the 1930's, the dominance of materialism in the ussr brought about the voiding of matter itself. materialism was, in essence, a purely ideological construct, which raised the primacy of material into a theoretical absolute. in practice, materialism annihilated the material. "matter," which is thus aggrandized and separated from the principles of spirituality, consciousness and aim-orientedness, becomes a simulacrum of matter, destructive of matter as such. just as hypersociality served the cult of the singular personality, so hypermateriality became a means of legitimating abstract ideas in their scholastically enclosed finality. the materiality of this materialism was thus the same "hyper" phenomenen as "collectivism," "the libido," "the elementary particle" and "the pure text." [49] it is significant that out of the six spheres of "hyperization," three are traditionally subsumed under the term "revolution": the social, sexual and scientific. but three other "hypers" -hyperexistentialism, hypermaterialism and hypertextuality -can equally well be qualified by the term "revolution," since they, too, developed in a movement of complete reevaluation of values: from essentialism to existentialism (the revolution in western philosophy); from idealism to materialism (the revolution in soviet philosophy); from "idea" and "content" to form and device and text (the revolution in criticism). to this we can add the revolution in the means of communication -the mass media revolution -which led to the birth of tv, video and computer technologies, producing a reality on the screen, perceived as more real than the world beyond the screen. 8. from super to pseudo [50] the very nature of the revolution appears in a new light - as the means or force productive of hyperphenomena. in its straightforward aims, the revolution is a %coup% -it sets up one antithesis in the place of another: matter in the place of thought, the collective in the place of the individual, the text in place of its content, the instinct in the place of the intellect. . . . but paradoxically it is revolution itself which demonstrates the impossibilty of reversal and expands, rather than eliminates, the power of the "suppressed." that which is victorious in a revolution, gradually turns out to subordinate itself more and more to the very thing which it was supposed to have vanquished. materialism has thus turned out to be much more detrimental to the notion of matter and much more scholastic and abstract than any idealistic philosophy anterior to it. communism has turned out to be more favorable for the abolute affirmation of a singular, almighty individuality than any kind of individualism which preceded it. literature reduced to a text and to a system of pure signs turns out to be much more dependent on the will of the critic than "traditional" literature, filled with historical, biographical and ideological contents. matter, reduced to elementary particles, turns out to be a much more ideal entity, mathematically construed, than matter in the traditional sense of the term, having a certain inertia mass. sexuality reduced to pure drive turns out to be much more cerebral and phantasmagorical than the ordinary sexual urge, which results in a total state of enamouredness in the physical, emotional and spiritual sense. it is the "purity," the "quintessentiality" as the goal of all the above-named revolutions -pure sociality, pure materiality, pure sexuality and so on -which transforms them into pure antithesis and negations of themselves. that is why pure reality is ultimately a simulation -a %simulacrum% -of the property of "being real." [51] let us return to the initial meaning of the prefix "hyper." unlike the prefixes "over-" and "su[pe]r-," it designates not simply a heightened degree of the property it qualifies, but a superlative degree which exceeds a certain %limit%. (the same meaning is found in words like "hypertonia," "hypertrophy," "hyperinflation," "hyperbole" . . .) this %excess% is such an abundant surplus of the quality in question that in crossing the %limit% it turns into its own antithesis reveals its own illusionary nature. the meaning of "hyper," therefore, is a combination of two meanings: "super" and "pseudo." "hyper" is such a "super" that through excess and transgression undermines its own reality and reveals itself as "pseudo." by negation of a thesis, the revolutionary antithesis grows into "super" but finally exposes its own derivative and simulative character. [52] certainly, it is neither the classic hegelian dialectics of thesis and antithesis with subsequent reconciliation in synthesis, nor the modernist model of negative dialectics elaborated in the frankfurt school (theodor adorno and herbert marcuse), with an irreducible opposition of a revolutionary antithesis to a conservative thesis. *postmodernist dialectics* (if it is still possible to combine such heterogeneous terms) *implies neither reconciliation nor revolution but the internal tension of irony. antithesis, pushed to an extreme, finds thesis inside itself, moreover, exposes itself as an extension and intensification of this very thesis*. revolutionary negation proves to be an aggrandizement, a hyperbole of what is negated. antithesis circles back on thesis, as its disguised and exaggeratated projection. [53] in this way, materialism proves to be not a negation of idealism, but its most radical and militant form, ruthlessly destructive in regard to materiality. communism proves to be not a negation of individualism, but its most voluntarist form ruthlessly destructive in regard to communality. the "hyper" is the "other" of the initial quality ("thesis"), its "second order" reality, its virtual intensity. the excess of quality turns into the illusion of this quality whereas its opposite which was intently negated actually becomes heightened. [54] thus hypersociality heightens the power of an individual over society. it is a sociality raised to a political and moral imperative, to an absolute degree of "oughtness" or "duty," which is no longer connected to any particular being, like mother, father, child, one's neighbour and so on, but which, instead, destroys all such particulars in order to absolutize an ultimate individuality or particularity in the "personality cult." the meaning of "hyper" in this instance subdivides further into the following: "super" and "pseudo." *hyper*sociality is thus simultaneously a *super*sociality and a *pseudo*sociality. that is, the social factor is subject to such a degree of intensification that it exceeds and negates all the particularities which initially made up the social. thus the social becomes the virtual "other" of the social, which through its phantasmic growth fills a space which does not belong to it -the space of the particulars and, therefore, of the social itself, which it stifles. [55] historically, intensity and illusion, "super" and the "pseudo" evolve in the development of "hyper" only gradually, as two successive stages. its first "revolutionary" phase is represented by the "super." this is the phase of the enthusiastic discovery or construction of new realities: of the socialist "supersociety," of the emancipated "supersexuality," of the elementary "superparticle," of the self-referential "supertext," of the self-propelled "supermatter." the first half of the 20th century was mainly preoccupied with the revolutionary advancement of all these "super" phenomena. they germinated in the 1900's to 1910's in the theoretical soil of marxism, freudianism and nietzscheanism; in the 1920's and 1930's, these "super" theories take on practical form -as the social, sexual, scientific, philosophical and critical revolutions. [56] this is followed in the second half of the 20th century by a gradual realization of the virtuality of all these ubiquitous superlatives. "hyper" flips to its other side and second stage -"pseudo." the transition from the "super" to the "pseudo," from the ecstatic illusions of pure reality to the ironic realization of this reality as a pure illusion, accounts for the historical transformation of european and russian culture in the 20th century which can also be described as the movement from modernism to postmodernism. [57] from this standpoint, gorbachev's perestroika (meaning literally, "reconstruction") and derrida's deconstruction can be seen as isomorphic stages in the development of soviet hyper-sociality and western hyper-textuality.^18^ both exemplify a transition from the "super" stage, manifested in the rise of communism and formalism ("new criticism") in 1920's-30's, to the "pseudo" stage of 1970's-1980's. both demonstrate that "structuredness" (in the form of ideally structured society or structuralist conception of textuality), which was the goal proclaimed by communist and formalist-structuralist movements, manifests only the illusion of social integrity or logical coherence. in the same way that gorbachev revealed the illusory character of socialism, which proved to be a utopian communality of alienated individuals, derrida exposed the illusory character of structuralism, of the very notion of "structure" which proved to be a utopian communality of actually decentered, dispersed, disseminated signs. [58] the "pseudo" phase is the common denominator for all the crises taking place at the end of the 20th century in place of the constructs of the early 20th century: social, scientific, philosophical and other revolutions. under the sign of the "pseudo," all of the following phenomena undergo a crisis: the crisis of structuralism in the human sciences, the crisis of the concept of elementariness in physics, the crisis of leftist projects and freudian marxism in political ideology, the crisis of materialism, existentialism and positivism in philosopy, the demise of soviet ideocratic system and communist society -such are the consequences of world-wide metamorphosis of "hyper" from "super" to "pseudo." it is a crisis of the utopian consciousness as such, followed by the construction of parodic "pseudo"-utopian discourses. [59] in its historical evolution from the "super" to the "pseudo," the "hyper" only now becomes revealed in its full significance, as the necessary connection and succession of its two phases, modernism and postmodernism. modernism viewed its revolutionary accomplishments as a breakthrough into metaphysically "pure" reality of the super: supersexuality, supermateriality, supersociality -whereas postmodernism reveals the full range of the hyper's dialectics, as an inevitable conversion of "super" to "pseudo." from a postmodernist perspective, socialist revolution, sexual revolution, existentialism, materialism are far from being those liberational insights into the highest and "truest" reality they claimed to be. rather they are intellectual machines designed for the production of pseudomateriality, pseudosexuality, pseudosociality, etc. thus postmodernism finds in modernism not only the target of criticism, but also the ground for its own play with hyperphenomena. these hyperphenomena would be impossible if not for those revolutionary obsessions with the "super" that gave rise to the tangible "voids" and flamboyant simulacra of contemporary civilization, including non-sensical, empty forms of totalitarian ideologies which gave rise to russian postmodernism. [60] in the final analysis, every "super" phenomenon sooner or later reveals its own reverse side, its "pseudo." such is the peculiarly postmodernist dialectics of "hyper," distinct from both hegelian dialectics of comprehensive synthesis and leftist dialectics of pure negation. it is the ironic dialectics of intensification-simulation, of "super" turned into "pseudo." [61] every revolution of the first half of the 20th century is doubled and cancelled out with its own "post" of the century's end. these "posts" are sprouting in all cultural spaces where the most radical changes and dramatic reversals occurred in the modernist era. contemporary society is postmodern, postcommunist, post-utopian, post-industrial, post-materialist, post-existential, and post-sexual. at this point, the dialectics of "hyper," which shaped the ironic wholeness of 20th century culture, comes to its complete self-realization. ---------------------------------------------------------------- january 1994, atlanta ---------------------------------------------------------------- notes: ^1^ jean baudrillard, _selected writings_, ed. mark poster (stanford: stanford up, 1988) 144-145. ^2^ heinz r. pagels, "uncertainty and complementarity," _the world treasury of physics, astronomy, and mathematics_, ed. timothy ferris (boston: little, brown and co., 1991) 106. ^3^ as a reader will see, the concept of "hyper-textuality" in the context of this article has nothing to do with the "hyper-text" in commonly-understood, "electronic" sense of the word. "hyper" is used here in the sense "super" and "pseudo" which relates it to the concepts of "hyper-sexuality," "hyper-sociality," etc. ^4^ george steiner, _human literacy_, in _the critical moment. essays on the nature of literature_ (london, 1964) 22. ^5^ umberto eco, "the analysis of structure," ibid. 138. ^6^ saul bellow, "scepticism and the depth of life," _the arts and the public_, ed. james e. miller jr. and paul d. herring (chicago-london: u of chicago p, 1967) 23. ^7^ fyodor dostoevsky, _notes from underground/the double_, trans. jessie coulson (london: penguin books, 1972) 16, 26, 27. ^8^ jean-paul sartre, _being and nothingness_, trans. hazel e. barnes (new york: washington square books, 1966) 256, 257. ^9^ sartre 804. ^10^ c.s. lewis, _the allegory of love_ (new york: oxford up, 1958) 196. ^11^ cited in _d.h. lawrence: a critical anthology_, ed. h. coombes (harmondsworth: penguin education, 1973) 244. ^12^ john bayley, _the characters of love_ (new york: basic books, 1960) 24, 25. ^13^ jacques derrida, "differance," _a derrida reader. between the blinds_, (new york: columbia up, 1991) 73. ^14^ in more detail the phenomena of hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality, though in different terms, are considered in my articles "kritika v konflikte s tvorchestvom" ("criticism in conflict with creativity"), _voprosy literatury_ (moscow, 1975) 2: 131-168; and "v poiskakh estestvennogo cheloveka" ("in search of a natural human being"), _voprosy literatury_, (1976), 8: 111-145. both articles are included in my book _paradoksy novizny. o literaturnom razvitii xix-xx vekov_ ("the paradoxes of innovation. on the development of literature in the l9th and 20th centuries") (moscow: sovetskii pisatel', l988). the affinity between these two modes of %hyper% (hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality) is formulated in the following way: "what is the general meaning of the paradoxes examined in the articles about 'critical situation' and 'sexual revolution?' in one case criticism attempts to extract from its object, literature, the most 'literary' essence and to isolate it from non-literature; as a result, it takes up the priority that was designed for the text purified from all 'metaphysical' contaminations. in another case, literature (and art in general) attempts to extract from its object, a human being, the most 'natural' essence, to purify it from all 'intellectual' contaminations; the result is the devastation of nature itself and the triumph of pure rationality" (_paradoksy novizny_ 249). ^15^ k. marx. "marx, engels, lenin: on dialectical materialism," preface, _a contribution to the critique of political economy_ (moscow: progress publishers, 1977) 43. ^16^ compare lacan's "there is no sexual relation." "a love letter (une lettre d'amour)," _feminine sexuality: jacques lacan and the ecole freudienne_, ed j. mitchell and j. rose, trans. j. rose (london: macmillan, 1983) 149-161. ^17^ _a dictionary for believers and nonbelievers_, trans. catherine judelson (moscow: progress publishers, 1989) 336. the same formulation can be found in all soviet textbooks of dialectical materialism. ^18^ derrida's own comments on the relationship between the concepts of "perestroika" and "deconstruction" can be found in his small book on his trip to moscow in 1990. _zhak derrida v moskve: dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia_ ("jacques derrida in moscow: a deconstruction of the journey") (moscow: rik "kul'tura," 1993) 53. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------butler, 'bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's %d'est%', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-butler-bordering.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.995. part 1/1, total size 15784 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's %d'est% by kristine butler university of minnesota butle002@maroon.tc.umn.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by kristine butler, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: chantal akerman. "bordering on fiction: chatal akerman's _d'est_." walker art center, minneapolism, minnesota. june 18-august 27, 1995 [1] chantal akerman's career as a filmmaker spans more than twenty-five years. her cinematic oeuvre has explored and problematized theoretical questions of the visual and aural languages of cinema and their implications for cinematic representation, placing her alongside such franco-european directors as chris marker, alain resnais, jean-luc godard, marguerite duras, and agnes varda. akerman's filmography to date includes some thirty-two films, ranging from shorts to feature length productions, from documentary to narrative fiction; she has shot in color and black and white, from video to 16mm to 35mm. throughout her career, akerman has been consistently concerned with exploring, exposing, and stretching the limits of cinematic genres with a unique style of difference and deferral within repetition. [2] akerman's cinema is born of a certain perceived loss of the real, born of a critical look at the very elements that make up the cinematic medium itself. the cinema, drawn from the beginning toward the celebration of movement, has tended increasingly to exploit such developments in cinematic technology as make possible a "seamless" cinema, inducing ever more persuasively "realistic" effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction. this drive toward seamlessness - a drive both aesthetic and commercial -led jean-luc godard and other new wave directors to react against the technical perfection, the slick "realism" of hollywood, by, for example, abandoning directional microphones and carefully mixed sound tracks in favor of a single omni-directional microphone, and by employing a style of editing which would allow the editor's work to show. as godard's work evolved, his style became a reflection on the cinematic process, filmed by an increasingly self-conscious apparatus that sought to expose, rather than conceal, the site of production. though akerman's work is very different from godard's, she shares with him a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible. [3] "bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's _d'est_," now enjoying a ten-week run at the walker art center in minneapolis before it moves to the jeu de paume in paris, is in many ways a conceptual continuation of her earlier work in films such as _jeanne dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles_ (1975), _les rendez-vous d'anna_ (1978), _news from home_ (1976) and _histoires d'amerique_ (1988). the installation also represents a branching out for akerman, in which she re-poses questions about the cinematic process and the construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space. "bordering on fiction," akerman's first museum installation, is a work which raises questions about the film itself as an artistic construction and the act of viewing such a construction. [4] funded in part by the bohen foundation and %etant donnes%, the french-american endowment for contemporary art, and conceived by akerman, kathy halbreich (then beal curator of contemporary art at the museum of fine arts, boston, and currently the director of the walker art center), susan dowling (producer for wgbh television), michael tarantino (an independent curator and critic), and later joined by bruce jenkins (film and video curator for the walker art center) and catherine david (then curator at the galerie nationale du jeu de paume in paris), "bordering on fiction" represents a multinational collaboration on the coming together of the european community, and "the concomitant rise of nationalism and anti-semitism."^1^ the installation itself consists of three integrated "movements" corresponding to the three galleries in which the exhibit is contained. upon entering the first gallery, visitors are confronted with a darkened room where the finished version of _d'est_, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in germany, poland, and russia in three trips during 1992 and 1993, runs continuously. a second room holds 24 video monitors arranged into eight triptychs, all simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. the third gallery contains a single video monitor and a pair of small speakers placed on the floor, with akerman's voice reciting passages from the hebrew bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. as we the viewers move forward through the installation, we move conceptually backward through a deconstruction of the filmmaking process, both from the final product to the artist's vision of the work, and from the technologically "finished" film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks. [5] akerman's previous work shares affinities with what serge daney has called the "cinema of disaster"^2^ -cinema that emerges from the desire to come to terms with, and the impossibility of finding language for, contemporary disasters such as the holocaust and the bombing of hiroshima. like marguerite duras and alain resnais's collaboration _hiroshima, mon amour_, and more recently, claude lanzmann's _shoah_, akerman's _d'est_ treats themes of personal crisis in the midst of social upheaval, of disaster and its aftermath, as well as the personal and societal stakes of remembering and/or forgetting that upheaval. watching _d'est_, one has the sense of passing time, of waiting, and of the uncertainty born of daily life that continues in the midst of despair. akerman focuses on moments preceding or following the events of daily life: she films people waiting in train stations, snowy streets at dawn, people walking, sitting in their kitchens, standing, waiting in long lines, quietly conversing. "all exteriors are places of passage and transit, traversed or occupied by an errant humanity laden with baggage and packages and heading toward an improbable destination."^3^ akerman has consistently focused on the events of daily life in her work, reversing the hierarchy of public and private, a principle which she considers specifically feminist. as she says about her 1976 film _jeanne dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles_: "i *do* think it's a feminist film because i give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. they are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. a kiss or a car crash come[s] higher, and i don't think that's an accident . . . ."^4^ in _jean dielman_, the repetitive and ultra-normal nature of a housewife's daily routine opens out onto pathology. in _les rendez-vous d'anna_ (1978), the filmmaker protagonist's travels from germany through belgium to paris take the form of a routine of waiting in hotel rooms and train stations, chance and planned encounters, and frustrated phone calls to her lover in italy. this concern for the daily, for privileging the personal over the national or the political, is at the basis of _d'est_ as well, a film which focuses on the personal without a single named character, without narrative, but rather formally and compositionally, through examination of the film itself as both a theoretical possibility and a finished product, and the conditions that provide for its creation and reception. [6] in all of akerman's work there is a quality of filmic composition that is almost musical, akin to such composers as john cage or steve reich. like cage and reich, whose musical compositions are based on a principle of difference and repetition, akerman's filmic compositions exist to be varied in time and in space, while retaining certain grains of the original "theme," as a sort of fluctuating loop. _d'est_ exists on a principle of deferment. built on a system of formal and thematic oppositions that seem fairly simplistic - exterior vs. interior, day vs. night, summer vs. winter, silence vs. noise, crowds vs. individuals, long vs. short sequences, fixed vs. moving cameras -the film, instead of presenting a binary composition of conflict and resolution that one might expect from a documentary, presents ruptures, frustrated attempts, and deferred resolutions. [7] about her reasons for making _d'est_, akerman writes: why make this trip to eastern europe? there are the obvious historical, social, and political reasons, reasons that underlie so many documentaries and new reports -and that rarely indulge a calm and attentive gaze. but although these are significant, they are not the only reasons. i will not attempt to show the disintegration of a system, nor the difficulties of entering into another one, because she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preoccupations. this undoubtedly will happen anyway; it can't be helped. but it will happen indirectly.^5^ _d'est_, though it is ostensibly "about" the fall of the eastern bloc, renounces the authoritative voice of the documentary, eliminating the voiceover and narrative structure which would typically weave through and connect the various moments. what we have instead is a continuous montage of images and sounds, which lends to the installation a sense of obsessive repetition and looping, the sound often existing as a counterpoint to the image, rather than as its complement. intentionally, voices are not "selected" by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if "naturally." the camera moves slowly, deliberately, in lateral movements, not stopping to focus on anything, not making exceptions, filming people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same impartial eye. akerman recorded the sound for the film live, then remixed it in its entirety; often the sound is the dominant element of the sequence and exceeds the image and its duration. in addition, the sounds themselves are often startling in their lack of immediate "relevance" to the image: the seemingly paradoxical nature of their presence or absence relative to the image track, relegates the sound to function as "noise" or interference. the viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond. [8] the apparatus is thus an integral part of the film, impossible to ignore. the effect is troubling, taking the spectator/listener out of a position of passivity associated with the "natural" or realistic pairing of image to sound, of lips to voices, of objects to the sounds we associate with them. the viewer must either be frustrated in his or her attempt to focus, stop, develop a story, or else must allow for the camera's refusal to weave, out of these disparate parts, an easy, coherent narrative. the camera's "choice" of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, eventually exposes the arbitrary nature of any narrative one could choose to recount: certain shots or frames seem to be echoes of other, past narratives, testifying to the depth of our own investment as viewers in the cinematic tradition and the expectations that we have as consumers of different types of visual media. thus _d'est_, while questioning the primacy of the image and the subservient, verifying nature of the sound track, and exposing the medium of film in its mechanical composition, also questions the production of discourse about eastern bloc countries in the aftermath of the cold war, in post-communist society, through the media, and the spectator's consumption of the products of these discourses. [9] akerman's cinematic style is uniquely suited to the demands of a museum installation as a space made for wandering. in her past work, she has developed a film language in which the lateral movements of the camera suggest the wandering of a subject at once spectator and participant. _d'est_, though it is certainly informed by akerman's cinematic work, is not simply a film, but an event: the very personal movement of each museum goer, who walks, sits, looks or does not look, listens to out-of-sync noises and dialogue, leaves or does not leave, echoes the movement of the installation itself; we as an audience are caught up in the waiting, the absence of knowing when, or if, something will "happen," as the notion of "happening" itself comes into question. [10] "bordering on fiction" opened at the san francisco museum of modern art on january 18 for a three-month run. following its visit to the walker from june 18 to august 27, it will make successive stops at the galerie nationale du jeu de paume in paris, october 23-december 3; the societe des expositions du palais des beaux-arts de bruxelles/vereniging voor tentoonstellingen van het paleis voor schone kunsten brussel in brussels, december 14 to january 10, 1996; the kunstmuseum wolfsburg, wolfsburg, germany, april to july 1996, and the ivam centre del carme in valencia, spain, september to november 1996. notes: ^1^ cited in halbreich and jenkins, _bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's %d'est%_, published on the occasion of the exhibition (minneapolis: walker art center, 1995) 8. ^2^ see serge daney on %ecriture du desastre% in _cine journal 1981-1986_ (paris: editions cahiers du cinema, 1986). ^3^ catherine david, "_d'est_: akerman variations," in halbreich and jenkins, _bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's %d'est%_, 61. ^4^ halbreich and jenkins, _bordering on fiction: chantal akerman's %d'est%_, 51. ^5^ cited in halbreich and jenkins, 20. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------smalec, '(re)presenting the renaissance on a post-modern stage', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-smalec-re)presenting.txt archive pmc-list, file review-5.996. part 1/1, total size 19561 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- (re)presenting the renaissance on a post-modern stage by theresa smalec university of western ontario tsmalec@julian.uwo.ca postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by theresa smalec, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: susan bennett, _performing nostalgia: shifting shakespeare and the contemporary past_. london and new york: routledge, 1996. [1] to say that susan bennett merely extends the questions that prevalent scholarship asks about postmodern culture's obsession with re-presenting the past is to neglect the keen conceptual shifts that her new book performs. her opening chapter reveals more than a bid to contest standard definitions of nostalgia as a longing for the mythical past, as a desire to keep things intact. rather, "new ways to play old texts" refigures this conservative praxis of longing as radically linked to political change. nostalgia becomes "the inflicted territory where claims for authenticity (and this is a displacement of the articulation of power) are staged" (7). this term provides the pivotal foundation for bennett's exploration of "how *particular* vested interests project their desires for the present through a multiplicity of representations" (3) of renaissance texts. [2] to reconceptualize how shakespeare's authority both figures and fails to appear in postmodern experience, _performing nostalgia_ unsettles the power that literary culture ascribes to the written word. bennett insists that the collisions between genre, gender, race, and nation which incite debate among textual scholars have generative counterparts in contemporary performance. aptly titled "performance and proliferation," her second chapter aligns historical power with the realm of corporeal ritual; it surveys a decade of those "verbal and gestural repetitions which activate remembering" (9). specifically, this chapter traces the production methodologies and reception economies of twelve different stagings of _king lear_ that occurred in britain between 1980 and 1990. [3] initially, bennett probes the possibility of (dis)articulating _lear's_ overarching "greatness" within the parameters of british public television and mainstream (commercial) theatre. within the bounds of the royal national theatre company, the renaissance theatre company, the royal shakespeare company, and the bbc, she attends to those specific combinations of factors and agents that "suggest the potential for an innovative and perhaps radical reading of this canonical text" (40). and yet, to complicate the lens through which a notable range of postmodern criticism identifies and champions transgression, bennett takes up the royal national theatre company's 1990 production of _king lear_. she summons this re-presentation for two interrelated reasons: first, to assess the extent to which an orthodox british stage may serve as the site on which individual directors' and actors' revisionary idiosyncrasies are actualized; second, to locate and to explicate the "*matrix* of material conditions" (41) through which politically engaged renditions of shakespeare are necessarily produced and received. [4] bennett begins with deborah warner's direction of the royal national theatre company's 1990 version of _lear_. mindful again of the too-hasty suppositions that accompany our contemporary appetite for subversion, she notes that warner might easily be marked as "challenging tradition by virtue of her biological coding" (40). after all, she is not only a woman directing shakespeare, "but one doing it at a particularly prestigious theatre" (40). moreover, there is warner's resolve to put red plastic noses on king lear, king lear's fool, and even on the dead cordelia. as anticipated, scholarly accounts of this staging promptly align emancipatory change with the visible surface of things. one example is anthony leggatt's _shakespeare in performance_, a text which endorses the view of anthony sher, who played lear's fool: "we began with the red noses and...it was immediately successful. there is something very liberating about wearing a red nose, both externally and internally" (40). ^1^ [5] to problematize this faith in a singular agent's power to unfetter the bodies that act out a text as prescriptive as _king lear_, _performing nostalgia_ confronts the multiple, interrelated forces that sway not only the production but the %reception% of this particular play. on one hand, it is clear that certain personal, bodily gestures bear the power to fill in the "gaps of the shakespeare corpus" (2). the details that an individual director cites as missing from the script can be made to return through an embodied representation. in this sense, the highly visible yet unsanctioned red noses worn by lear and cordelia "%become% the text" (2) to supplant the locus of power traditionally bestowed upon the word. deborah warner's desire to disrupt _king lear's_ status as a standard of solemnity is suddenly manifest. or, from another perspective, the shocking crimson that marks cordelia's corpse signals a potent strategy through which feminist translators of shakespeare may avow the brutality toward women that male directors regularly efface. [6] on the other hand, bennett observes that transformative agency is never "the sole or unique possession of director, actor, spectator or critic" (41). rather, modification relies on the mesh of circumstances out of which verbal and bodily forms of transgression emanate. to curtail the intervention intended by warner is the fact that a "specific viewing community" (46) *recognizes* her revision and interprets it as merely mimicking one that has gone before. while the novelty of red noses may liberate a younger generation of eyes, bennett's archival research shows that london's premier theatre critics saw the "innovation" as "something rather less new" (40). precisely because of its lasting impression as "the first mainstream red nose _king lear_ of the decade" (41), the royal shakespeare company's 1982-3 production appears both in memory and in published reviews as warner's source text, as an influence that perversely subsumes both her own authority and that of the bard. [7] while this turn of events is far from promising, _performing nostalgia_ does not forsake _king lear_ and other shakespearean plays as "visible and thus significant sites for the contestation of cultural power" (48). consistently cutting-edge in terms of the dramatic topographies that it surveys, this valuable work looks beyond mainstream theatres and beyond theatre itself to those *other* spaces where reconstructions of the present by way of the renaissance past can and do occur. one fascinating example is bennett's account of the public works company welfare state and its seven-year residency in the northern english town of barrow-in-furness; amongst other things, the working-class town's single employer produces nuclear submarines. it is at this improbable locus that welfare state initiates a site-specific performance and filming; since the idea is to create work for and *with* the local population, barrow-in-furness's economic climate directly informs the project's concerns. significantly, welfare state facilitates the community's oppositional political engagement through a nuclear age _king lear_. here, as in her analysis of barrie keeffe's racially and socio-economically inflected _king of england_ and in her reading of women's theatre group's _lear's daughters_, bennett underscores the potential for micropolitical change. in these noteworthy contexts, the act of restaging "takes up a global awareness of shakespeare's plays and resituates it in the %specific% experience of a community audience" (55). a pivotal inference can be derived from this attention to the often-neglected role of communal reception; precisely through a production's focus on the possibility of dialogue and interaction with its target audience, the point of proliferation shifts from "what have we done to shakespeare's play" to "how can this material be useful to us?" (56). [8] _performing nostalgia's_ third and fourth sections move shakespeare out of straightforward performance studies to assess more disturbing histories of influence alongside the concerns that currently haunt the discourses of popular culture and post-colonialism. chapter three, "not-shakespeare, our contemporary," examines the discord between the idealized authority of shakespeare's texts and those other, less than perfect renaissance city comedies and revenge plots that we recycle in order to justify our *own* post-modern obsessions with sex, violence, and power. brad fraser's 1993 production, _the ugly man_, figures as a potent example of bennett's determination to "*situate* the desire for desire," to ask "*for whom*" such chilling nostalgia is "spoken, embodied and subsequently read" (7). [9] fraser models his play after thomas middleton's classic drama, _the changeling_. as portended by this antecedent text, _the ugly man_ charts the devastating repercussions of an outsider's entry into a small, sequestered community. crucial, however, is bennett's scrutiny of *why* the gay, edmonton-born playwright conflates middleton's unmerciful legacy with the seemingly innocuous heterosexual love plot of pop culture's _archie_ comics. the initial effect of this unlikely combination is a medley of horrid laughter. forrest, a hideously disfigured and newly-hired farm hand, becomes obsessed with the beautiful virgin veronica, the daughter of his multimillionaire employer. although veronica is engaged to wed a respectable young man, her inability to find meaning or pleasure in the monogamous, matrimonial relationships that society sanctions incites her to acts of deviance. after coaxing forrest to help enact her unlawful deeds, she finds herself sexually indebted to the ugly man upon whom she cannot bear to look. as the action progresses, the tension intensifies between forrest's and veronica's sadomasochistic desires and the heteronormative laws imposed by a rural community; despite his brute strength and her physical allure, their socially unviable yearning culminates in a spectacle of gore. by the end of the play, virtually every character is mutilated or murdered in the most depraved of ways. [10] bennett aptly notes that on the surface of things, fraser's fixation with scenes of gratuitous violence and sexual degradation does little more than restate the morally numbing message of a range of postmodern spectacles. in short, he locates the impact of his production in a "surfeit of images, rather than articulating any content or analysis of those images" (84). however, her analysis of _the ugly man's_ historical echoes does not end on this note of dismissal, nor in a homogenization of the play as merely another exhibit in popular culture's parade of radical chic. rather, she reviews its too-evident purchase on jacobean apathy by undertaking an "activity of radical reading that might *defamiliarize* our own desires and dissatisfactions in the present tense" (94). this is to say that she recognizes and brings to the foreground the anti-heterosexist agenda that haunts the unspeakable subtext of fraser's visual excess. she discerns the conspicuous consumption and seizures of power from which forrest and veronica derive their fulfillment as fraught with desire for political change. once it is situated in the right-wing, neo-conservative, and homophobic context of alberta (the province where fraser grew up and came out as a gay man), the meaning of his spectacle changes. for a *specific* community of viewers, _the ugly man_ can be perceived as an articulation of presence forged in resistance to heteronormative tyranny. [11] to close this cutting reappraisal of the past in performance, bennett's chapter on "the post-colonial body" probes the long-neglected anti-colonial uses to which shakespeare's _the tempest_ might yet be put. to do so, she draws on recent feminist extrapolations of the same/other antagonism that is habitually staged through the figures of prospero and caliban. in response to the oversimplified view that "'we' now participate in a historical moment which is not only postmodern but post-colonial" (119), she insists that closer attention must be paid to those %other% bodies which are elided in our wary scrutiny of traditional polarities. in her words, "the potency of the prospero/caliban tropology has served to mask the sites in _the tempest_ of patriarchal colonization" (125). moreover, "the play's women (miranda and the textually absent/silent sycorax) have not been much read for their participation in (and destabilization of) what otherwise becomes a hegemonically male contest" (125). [12] as an overdue complication and corrective to the androcentric discord of _the tempest's_ same/other paradigm, bennett summons laura donaldson's 1992 study, _race, gender and empire-building_. her subsequent analysis reconsiders donaldson's assertion that "the crucial question raised by the coupling of miranda with caliban...is why these two victims of colonialist prosperity cannot 'see' each other." pivotally, the answer she offers is one that almost all cultural materialist and new historicist writings on _the tempest_ omit: "the intervention of the performing body" (129). while it is undeniable that these modes of criticism attend diligently to *discursive* performance, bennett underscores the very real deficiency posed by "almost always ignoring, and so explicitly or implicitly negating the implications of an intervented presentation" (129). as demonstrated by her interdisciplinary reading of how miranda's feminine body is regulated in both shakespeare's script and in peter greenaway's 1991 film, _prospero's books_, "the relationship between discursive performance and physical mode of presentation is not only complex but crucial" (130). [13] "the post-colonial body" ends in an effort to think about both _the tempest_ and its colonial bodies as texts that were in fact conceived *as* performance. as bennett rightly observes, this requires careful reference to "ideas about the body in circulation at the time of its original realization" (130). ironically, however, she undermines her determination to historicize the seventeenth-century body by invoking michel foucault's 1978 text, _the history of sexuality_, as a principal source of authority. my critique of this maneuver is not meant to denounce foucault's confident account of the jacobean period as "a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse and open transgression." nevertheless, it strikes me that any endeavor to assess the degree to which performing bodies of this era "made a display of themselves" ^2^ requires a more rigorous look at temporally specific commentaries on the productions that rivetted early modern audiences. to make up for this fissure in what is otherwise a solid analysis, bennett effects a close and provocative reading of _the tempest's_ opening scene between father and daughter. mindful again of the radical difference between reading miranda on the page and viewing her body on the living stage, she charts (from the perspective of production) *why* it is so important that "the language used by prospero draws constant attention to the body he addresses" (130). not only does his repeated reference to miranda's heart, hand, eyes, and ears provide for the actors "a code of gestural and physical representation"; it also "supplies the spectator with an itinerary for the gaze" (131). most significantly, the combination of prospero's rhetoric and miranda's visible body alerts us (the ostensibly post-colonial audience) to the status of spectacle that still marks the feminine body. in a white, masculine, western political and sexual economy, feminine corporeality retains its troubling legacy as "the battlefield on which quite other struggles than women's have been staged." ^3^ and yet, the enabling power of performance lies in its ability to show that the woman's body, which is often *presented* as passive, is not naturally so. enacting a particular subject position *self-consciously* can restore agency to those who lack it. within such enactments lies the potential for social and political change. [14] acutely vigilant of the multiple and often conflicting political investments that subjects of the present make in re-presenting the past, _performing nostalgia_ does a remarkable job of speaking across the gaps that riddle our postmodern tense. time and again, readers will be struck by the book's topographical, conceptual, and disciplinary versatility. from britain's famed commercial theatres to the steel towns of the working-class, from jacobean decadence to the struggles for reform that tread our contemporary stages, from literature to theatre, from theory to praxis, _performing nostalgia_ is relentlessly hopeful reading for students, professors, viewers, and performers alike. notes: ^1^ alexander leggatt, _shakespeare in performance: king lear_ (manchester: manchester up, 1991). ^2^ michel foucault, _the history of sexuality, volume i._, trans. robert hurley (new york: pantheon, 1978). ^3^ mary jacobus, evelyn fox keller, and sally shuttleworth, _body/politics: women and the discourses of science_ (london: routledge, 1990). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------golumbia, 'hypercapital', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-golumbia-hypercapital.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.996. part 1/1, total size 59008 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- hypercapital by david golumbia university of pennsylvania postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by david golumbia, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. [1] some of liberal democracy's deepest convictions rest on assumptions about free (or nearly free) and complete access to information. these assumptions, tied to our dreams about liberal american democracy at least since the passage of the bill of rights, go something like this: more information is generally better than less information; the more widely information is disseminated, especially throughout the general populace, the better; perhaps most crucially, the wider, cheaper and more comprehensive the popular access to information the better. we might imagine the most radical element of this liberal dream of democratization in the utopian (and not coincidentally, borgesian) image of a vast library containing accessible copies of every printed, public or significant (but how to decide this, and who?) document in human history, open all hours, admitting all, forbidden and forbidding to none.^1^ [2] yet in several domains today, radical doubts have begun to be raised about the project of total information access, and even moreso about the liberal-democratic vision it is supposed to inform.^2^ often, these doubts have been phrased politically, especially with regard to underlying theoretical politics that are, to be sure, crucial for understanding the structure of our public and private life. ^3^ in less academic spheres, grave concerns about the ultimate effects of multinational conglomerate, corporate control of the media (especially journalism) have been raised, most strongly though not at all exclusively by noam chomsky. ^4^ yet these various criticisms have not yet come full circle: for what is unexamined--or more accurately what is displaced--in the dream of total information access itself is precisely capital, and the inextricable linkages of capital to the american democratic project. [3] the dream of total access endures even in many of the most radical critiques of capitalist society--if nowhere else than in the implicit claims for the value of additional information that arise in the seemingly endless processing of textual and cultural critique. to the degree that every interpretation is another text, every additional text advances the implicit belief that more information can contribute, in some minor way at least, to a better world. [4] moreover, the state of much recent "media," "culture," and "information" phenomena suggests a rapid conglomeration of knowledge-technologies, within which the total processing and also the general neutralization of information remain largely unexamined. as profound as their impact on the state of culture may be the rows of cultural studies and feminist and race-critical volumes lining our bookstores, the glossy (or more often today, matte-coated) journals that accompany them, speak to a version of the dream of ultimate information, a state of pure processing power in which just telling the story under enough pressure and from the right angle will make it available for the right agents, perhaps even provoke emancipatory action. [5] but to what degree is this implicit vision a covert version of the dream of total information access? for however deliberately difficult (and here, just for a second, can one not begin to understand their canny prescience in this regard) jacques derrida's critical texts, or those of gilles deleuze and felix guattari, jacques lacan, helene cixous, even michel foucault, is not part of the vision of cultural studies to "interpret" these texts, to "do things" with them, to make their critical energy available? and what does it mean to carry out these actions--in the name of a personal professionalism, a personal egotism, an institutional necessity, to which almost none of us can claim meaningful resistance--what does it mean to put them forward as part of a system of information whose very essence may not be primarily, as we thought, accessible and useful knowledge, but instead the "filthy lucre" of capital? hyperactivity [6] we must set aside some of the most directly urgent of these issues for the remainder of what follows. for in order even to suggest that they have substance, we have a great deal of work to do at their heart, which is namely the equation, or isomorphism, or at the very least proximity, of what we today call "information" and what we have historically called "capital." it may well be--and this again would require an analysis outside the scope of this essay--that this isomorphism has existed throughout the history of capitalism. there is certainly a hint of this view in some recent writings on the development of print technology and print culture.^5^ but whether it has created the isomorphism, or merely exposed it, or both, the current development of hypertext, and its specific realization on the world wide web, now bring the capital/information relationship forward with special force. [7] for while in many ways the hype surrounding the so-called "information revolution" is all too extreme, all too politically suspect, in other ways--of course the ways less traveled by the popular media--the consequences of this revolution have been radically underplayed. already we see glimmers of a change in the very notion of disseminated information: we already face imaginative difficulties, unthinkable a few years ago, about what kinds of information-bearing things would fill our ideal library. [8] furthermore these changes, in a sense mechanical, have been accompanied by "gestalt shifts" so subtle, profound, and rapid as to still be, for all their force, scarcely visible. once we assumed that information was fragmented, disparate, characteristically hard to access, requiring trips or journeys or hour upon hour in dusty archives. today for many of us the paradigm is changing. now we assume that information about what is happening now is available from a small collection of central sources (chiefly television, radio and newspapers, and, more frequently today, online services), and even that the phenomenal quality of an event's "happening" is determined to a significant degree by its reception in these various media. one encounters more and more a series of rhetorical gestures in which a reporter, a news program, or a talk show becomes a focal stage where events must be reported or else lack full credibility. [9] the default source for information is becoming these centralized spigots: how many of us have rapidly become used to accessing the mla directory from our home or office or (at worst) library computers, when only a few decades ago no compilation of recent journal articles was available at all, even in print form? if one multiplies the very idea of archived and indexed information both with the rapidly multiplying archives and indexes themselves, and with the logarithmically expanding capacity of computer hardware and software to store and to access information, one has a sense of the scale and force of the liberal dream of total access to information, only better than before: at one's fingertips, even in one's own home--even in everyone's home.^6^ [10] yet the price for this dream is higher than it seems, in many ways directly proportional to the mixing of capital and information in our culture. as the internet and world wide web weave themselves in so many guises into so many parts of our culture, they bring with them the venture capitalists, corporations (from "above the garage" types to multinationals), and entrepreneurial "free spirits" whose actions often seem little more than the glazed, robotic, displaced expressions of the selfish gene, capital. and unlike the direct efforts of capitalists to control information flow by controlling its sources, the internet and web provide a fully-distributed system that, paradoxically, naturalizes and ever more profoundly insinuates capital into our own social and psychological economies. [11] to take a specific example, many users of a university information system may tend to think of their internet and web access as cost-free. capitalists, however, note the hardware, software and system maintenance costs and count them as hidden in lower salaries and higher tuition prices. this rationalization in mind, the capitalist asks how he (please allow me the naive demonization of calling the capitalist "he") might make money from the system. his ability to answer is limited, for his thoughts of "profit margin" and "gross revenue" interrupt other, deeper trains of thought. you or i email a colleague, or use a web browser to access the contents of the latest issue of _postmodern culture;_ the capitalist asks how much the browser costs me, who put up the server, its maintenance costs, and so on. "as one put drunk..." [12] more to the point, the capitalist looks at the operation of the web and the internet, or at least takes advantage of them, in technical terms. these systems operate via a networking standard referred to as the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (more commonly known by the acronym tcp/ip). the world wide web and the internet, while technically distinct systems, share these protocols where computer networking is concerned. this is visible to users when they access electronic mail--an internet function--via a web browser, such as netscape navigator, can most often at the same time access electronic mail sent through the internet. each computer connected to these systems is assigned a tcp/ip address, which users may occasionally see in its numerical form--a sequence of four integers between 1 and 254 separated by periods. the internet and world wide web operate by computers passing information among these various addresses. [13] what the computers on these networks send each other, taking advantage of the rules set out in the tcp/ip protocols, are called packets.^7^ a packet is some amount of information (for example, the contents of a brief email message, or a segment of a world wide web page) stored within a kind of electronic envelope. the envelope is marked with an address--part of which includes one of the tcp/ip addresses for the destination computer--that tells various servers and routers along the network where to pass the packet and what ultimately to do with it (making the forms of information on the internet quite virus-like, in a sense that burroughs likely did not have in mind). depending on the complexity of the operation, even a single transaction on the internet can involve the exchange of many packets: depending on how the packets are sized, hundreds or thousands of packets can travel between a single personal computer and a host computer in a short period of time. [14] everything that travels the internet or the world wide web is a packet. a single email message might be broken into one or many packets, each with its own address. just so my point is not lost, a request for information on the internet is carried in just the same way as the information itself is carried: as a packet. by clicking on a hypertext link to an article in _pmc,_ for example, you send one or more packets to your server, which sends them on through a series of leaps eventually to _pmc_'s server, which opens the packets, interprets the request they contain, and complies with the request by returning to the requesting computer (including the requesting computer's web browser) the many packets constituting an article or review. [15] internet capitalists see these packets, best case scenario for profit-making, as tiny units of money. sites on the world wide web are rated by how many "hits" they receive each day--that is, by the number of requests they receive--or, in more sophisticated business models, by the number of distinct users logging in to the site each day.*^8^ this may sound something like a library deciding to buy more copies of a book that is checked out frequently. it is more similar to television networks charging higher prices for advertising on programs with better nielsen ratings. but it is also fundamentally different from either of these relatively crude feedback systems. for no previous system allows tracking of each user's actions in precise detail, nor for that tracking to become itself a piece of information in the very system of information which both the consumer and the sponsor use. even nielsen ratings have to proceed on the assumption that several thousand nielsen families form a representative sample of the american populace. the internet and the world wide web promise exact, numerical statistics on every piece of information that goes in--every request, every posting--and every piece that goes out. lest this strike some readers as hyperbole, i note that already two prominent web software providers--open market and netscape itself--sell commercial providers of web sites exactly this kind of microscopic user tracking, of which users themselves likely remain altogether unaware. [16] there exists a significant amount of pressure to turn our online data systems into a (de)centralized information super storage house that becomes more and more authoritative, more and more, in foucault's phrase, the "information source of record."^9^. we are accustomed to accessing much of the best of this information today for free, but we must be attentive to the degree to which that lack of cost may be a culture-wide "loss leader" for a great payout to come--for the moment when so much information has been logged in these systems that we have no choice but to pay up when fees are requested.^10^ [17] it is a payout whose form we may not immediately recognize. corporate capitalists would love to charge us per packet--so many cents for each packet sent out, so many for each packet we receive. unsurprisingly, such proposals are frequently favored by the telephone and cable companies that would most likely profit most highly from them, and opposed by "information advocates" generally. but the more canny capitalist realizes that a better way is to provide access itself at little or no cost--buried in tuition, or cheaply at $9.95 a month--while charging for content. charging not the user but the sponsor--the advertiser. [18] online advertising is nothing new. it's been around with some full force for five or ten years, old hat already in our "rapidly changing technological world." many of us have already learned to mock, dismiss or "ignore" the schwab or toyota or sears button at the bottom of our computer screens, in much the same way we (tell ourselves that we) mock, dismiss or "ignore" advertisements on television. but what if every time you access a certain magazine, database, or paper, a "hit" is counted that translates almost instantaneously into higher ad revenues for the sponsor of the page you've accessed? fixity...or, forget it [19] we continue to understand our short-range information future in metaphors whose terms we know well--email, that's like a letter or phone call; web page, that's like a page of a book or magazine, a segment of a tv program. these are inaccurate or at best incomplete comparisons, in ways corporate capitalists have not fully realized yet, but surely will. new technologies like java and activex, only the first of many to follow, even recent versions of netscape's navigator, hint at just some of the information-technology changes that may arrive sooner than any of us may realize. java and active x, for example, can be used in part to develop what internet "evangelists" call, somewhat generically, "applets." unlike what we know as applications, applets perform specific tasks relatively independent of the totality of system operations.^11^ sophisticated applets in some sense resemble the "agents" that have become so entrenched in futurist versions of artificial intelligence in its commercial applications. [20] whatever the full implementation might look like, it is clear that our future desktop pcs or notepads or pdas or whatever they are will contain fragmentary or miniature information retrieval and requesting subsystems that fit only loosely into more general architectures. these miniature elements will be highly adaptable and highly customizable. they will also be highly interactive with systems and functions "outside" of our own personal computer interfaces. as bill gates has suggested somewhat famously, someday soon intelligent agents will seek out the best-priced airline tickets for us. [21] my system (the one on my home computer or standard internet server, the one that has logged every request i have made during my use of the system) might not only guess in advance the kind of information i am seeking. it might very well actively seek out that information in response to only the most general sorts of instructions from me. and at every stage as my "agent" combs through the trillions of packets and the trillions of files available, every action my agent takes is logged, compiled and even anticipated, and accommodated for by subtle shifts in the value of the very packets navigated by my agent, which is itself no more than a collection of packets. furthermore the information about my agent's activities is collected and transported as packets. together these packets swim in a largely unregulated, largely unregulatable soup of constantly-self-correcting information.^12^ [22] within that soup, the distinction between "free" and "for profit" becomes obscured if not lost altogether. it seems plausible to suggest that the distinction between "information" and "capital" becomes obscured if not lost altogether. and the name of that soup, at least the word we have that most closely describes it today, is hypertext. medium/message [23] the radical potential of hypertext has often been described, by george landow and others, in terms of its capacity to destabilize the nature of the written page and to conform the flow of information to the user's cognitive expectations and whims, replacing the stability of the author-function with the inherently variable practice of the user-function.^13^ this is not the place to read in detail landow's _hypertext_ or any of the wide range of other works that offer compelling visions for the radical potentials of hypertext. nor is it the place to consider in detail the many forms that hypertext may eventually take. what concerns me here is what is so rapidly coming to dominate our contemporary hypertextual field: the overwhelming extent to which the development of that field has been in the service and the control of the forces of capital; the degree to which too much of our theorizing and fantasizing about hypertext's possibilities have simply overlooked the plain facts of capitalist control and development of a new media tool; and, perhaps most importantly, what the specifics of capital's influence on hypertext augur about social relations and information relations in the near future. for now, with the first widespread realization of the hypertextual vision, we are beginning to see that our early dreams for hypertext concealed buried prejudices about individualism, liberal democracy and total information access that fail to account for the ever-changing face and power of capital. [24] as such dreams so characteristically do, this vision of the future "forgets" about capital and places us in a psuedo-utopia where the power of capital and commercialism are veiled.^14^ as we see in sf movies from the 1950s to today (with the notable exception of "corporation" sf horror films such as _alien),_ we characteristically forget to "brand" our future. the persistence of this "forgetting" is itself fascinating, and speaks to a crucial and under-remarked feature of capitalism. buried in that forgetting is some kind of covert dream that the next new technology will somehow eliminate the need for corporations, for branding, even for capital itself: for our utopias often appear neo-socialist in nature, radically "egalitarian" in a way that even our visions of democracy often are not. it is no accident that this forgetting serves so well capital's need for the most aggressive technological innovation. perhaps it is this amnesia that led us to forgot that hypertext would be implemented, manipulated, created and owned by capital and its agents. as crucially, we "forgot" that hypertext would be a flexible medium whose agents, applications, utilities, applets, viewers, browsers and compilers would be largely owned and designed by corporations. [25] as theorists have noted, hypertext distinguishes itself from previous "new media" because of its flexibility, its inherent ability to be shaped by not only its users but its designers (think, for example, of the rapid proliferation of features in successive versions of the various web browsers). but it is this very flexibility that makes it such a powerful tool of capital reappropriation--indeed, hypertext augurs whole new forms of capital, which is to say, whole new instances of the same old thing. [26] never before have we had sustained and long-term examples of capitalism in which the unit of exchange itself--not merely the means by which the unit of monetary exchange is delivered--is developed and controlled to such a great extent by capital.^15^ while every media revolution has brought with it significant emancipatory potential as well as significant potential for exploitation (and we are no longer surprised that exploitative potentialities win out so often over emancipatory ones), i am suggesting here that hypertext is a special case, or more accurately a new kind of case. as importantly, i want to suggest an economic thesis that i lack anything like the space i would need here to develop here: that what we now call information may learn to replace, or to supplement, what we now call money in the systems of exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital. in an explication of the crucial notion of circulation in social production, marx writes that, circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation. as much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. their own collisions with one another produce an *alien* social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. (_grundrisse,_ 196-197; emphasis in original) ^16^ the world wide web offers a startling new instance of this process of circulation, and especially of the ways in which capital itself uses the process of circulation to create forms that exist "independent of the individuals." something we had until just recently understood to be an unalienated labor process--the composition of one's own thoughts into written or spoken form--now suggests itself as a commodity that can be fetishized, alienated, abstracted from its individual "maker" and distributed, for profit, disseminated, valued (and this done in some cases without the choice, conscious or unconscious, of the subject herself). and so where hypertext offers itself in terms of emancipatory potential for subjects, the web suggests a further enmeshment of human subjects into the naturalized economy of capital. specters, subjects [27] for what are subjects? what if not the products, the packets, of language, of meaning, of the stuff we obliquely call information, and its transmission? what might it mean for "the subject" to have the guts of the information system to be profitized, commoditized, capitalized? [28] we can only touch on these matters here. but to the extent that we fail to understand how our subjectivities and psyches are themselves produced by the capital-regulated flow of information, ^17^ we remain extremely vulnerable to--even prisoners of--changes in that flow, especially when those changes are made and controlled by capital. as stuart moulthrop has written of hypertext (in a mode perhaps somewhat more hopeful than mine here), "changes in technology...suggest possibilities for a reformation of the subject, a truly radical revision of identity and social relations" ("rhizome and resistance," 299-300). [29] in _specters of marx,_ jacques derrida writes that if the "mystical character" of the commodity, if the "enigmatic character" of the product of labor *as commodity* is born of "the social form" of labor, one must still analyze what is mysterious or secret about this process, and what the secret of the commodity form is. the secret has to do with a "%quid pro quo%." the term is marx's. it takes us back once again to some theatrical intrigue: mechanical ruse or mistaking a person, repetition upon the perverse intervention of a prompter, %parole soufflee,% substitution of actors or characters. here the theatrical %quid pro quo% stems from an abnormal play of mirrors. there is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. men no longer recognize in it the *social* character of their *own* labor. it is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. (_specters of marx,_ 155; emphasis in original) there is a disturbing homology between the "abnormal play of mirrors," the process by which we fail to recognize the social character of our own labors, the process of becoming "spectral"--and the advent of what i want to call, in a very preliminary fashion, hypercapital. for to the "hard" capital that is its substance, the information superhighway sees us, the subjects of capital, as nothing more than nodes of production, sites for debits and credits, shells of consumerism and fetishism that exist merely to instantiate or to reify the meta-flow of hypercapital. not that these processes of reification or instantiation are unnecessary; indeed, at least as currently constituted, they are vital to the continued existence of the flow of capital. yet their roles within that system become increasingly determined beforehand. [30] in this disturbing sense, the subject under hypercapital threatens to become ever more restricted and proscribed than even the kinds of subjects we now observe under late capitalism. for again, the conversion of the majority of textually-based information into digital form--linked by a variety of communications and hypertextual mechanisms--suggests a radical centralization of semantic and social exchange, an exchange lubricated by capital in an unprecedented sense. talking with one's neighbors, organizing politically, any number of more and less collective forms of social action have heretofore been largely proscribed only by governments in their more authoritarian modes. now such activities appear ripe not only for consistent and imperceptible monitoring and (nigh-permanent) recording, but also for exchange as units within a global system of capital that may readily compensate for, even anticipate, subversive or dissenting movements within the system. internationalists [31] perhaps even more significant than its threats to westernized subjects, the glare of a fully-capitalized information flow poses tremendous challenges to developing countries and whatever hope they currently have for non-capitalist development (or even capitalist development apart from the control of western-based multinational corporate culture). [32] these threats start with the most basic usages of language. for not only has the medium of communication on the internet been mainly english and almost entirely western; not only do current communication systems make usage of non-western alphabets nearly impossible; not only does the usage of english on the us defense department-created internet represent yet another kind of "loss-leader" to the prepaid westernization of the subject throughout the world--but the very language of the packets, switches, applets and programs that fuel the machines making the information system operate are themselves almost entirely dominated by western languages, mainly english. while other western languages--especially spanish, french, and german--generally can be accommodated through this media, it is still the case that the internet and world wide web represent the most significant opportunity since mass-market publishing for broad-based lexical, discursive and linguistic standardization. (and this when we have only begun to understand what linguistic standardization has meant for the continued growth and power of capitalism.) [33] while these criticisms extend mostly to the power of capital to maintain all aspects of subjectivity in extremely disturbing ways, they fail to capture what is perhaps most disturbing about the global information extension of capital. for as marxian economic theorists have argued with great vigor over the last fifty or so years, classical marxist theory provides an inadequate account of the reliance of "developed" capitalist economies on the exploitation of "underdeveloped," "third world" economies and labor.^18^ [34] while we in the west can pretend to understand the effects of hypercapital on the creation of western subjectivities and suggest critiques within a system that may always already be compensating for these critiques, developing countries outside of the west and developing populations within the western context face even more brutal challenges. talk of information "haves" and "have-nots" obscures the extent to which whether to have or not have access to the global information superhighway presents developing populations with a very real hobson's choice--a choice between two equally impossible choices. for to remain "off" the superhighway in any effective sense may come to mean staying away from huge swaths of information that are absolutely vital to any sustainable economy. yet to get on may mean contributing to an economics designed to exploit not only individuals and their subjectivities but whole cultures and subcultures. (and of course this presentation of the subject avoids any mention of the degree to which many "developing" countries lack the basic infrastructure necessary for information technologies like telephones.) [35] to the extent that western capitalist development inaugurates a process of underdevelopment, in which the very lifeblood of the west is formed from the labor and raw materials of non-western peoples, the global medium of exchange that is hypercapital suggests whole new ways of refining that process for the service of western capital. the globalization of corporate capitalism increasingly makes governmental and national borders irrelevant though they remain highly relevant for the nationalist and fundamentalist fervors that capital at best incubates and at worst creates as the marks of its own displacement. intellectual labor mimics the global mobility of capital as, for example, when students from india and east asian countries attend classes in the us in computer science and engineering, where they learn to program in versions of the current master western language. with foreign investment dollars and the backing of the corporations and governments that have facilitated this "knowledge transfer," many of these young people will return home as neo-capitalists to set up vast networks of information retrieval and manipulation, whose centralized functions, we can surmise, make any hope for anti-imperialist governance that much more remote. [36] insofar as hypercapital appears abstracted and metaphorical, it is nevertheless a powerful construct built upon the lives and blood of real persons (ourselves included), whose labor becomes the stuff of capital through direct exploitation and through the processes of alienation. %il n'y a pas de hors-tissu% [37] for all of this essay's quasi-apocalyptic fervor--not meant to be taken unambiguously, not meant to suggest that technological development is always or only wrong--it can only hint at the base fear that lurks in opposition to the more optimistic dreams beneath hypertext. for as capital comes to control so many aspects of our instantaneous and personal interactions to degrees it could not have imagined before, it comes to a new level in what has been a chief mission, a chief %raison d'etre,% of capital all along: not only to shape but to define, not only define but to own in the sense unique to capital--our selves. [38] as a writer and interpreter, i cannot help but participate in the dream with which this essay began: a dream of total access and also total knowledge that will, somehow, prove emancipatory "in the end." such a dream seems unavoidable to me, at least as i as subject am constituted. in the great "outwork" to _dissemination,_ derrida writes of a similar dream as it is instanced in earlier moments in our tradition, specifically in the works of mallarme and hegel. derrida writes of mallarme's vision of "all finite books [becoming] opuscules modeled after the great divine opus, so many arrested speculations, so many tiny mirrors catching a single grand image," and suggests that the ideal form of this would be a book of total science, a book of absolute knowledge that digested, recited, and substantially ordered all books, going through the whole cycle of knowledge. but since truth is already constituted in the reflection and relation of god to himself, since truth already knows itself to *speak,* the *cyclical* book will also be a *pedagogical* book. and its preface, propaedeutic. the authority of the encyclopedic *model,* a unit analogous for man and for god, can act in very devious ways according to certain complex mediations. it stands, moreover, as a model and as a normative concept: which does not, however, exclude the fact that, within the practice of writing, and singularly of so-called 'literary' writing, certain forces remain foreign or contrary to it or subject to violent reexamination. (_dissemination,_ 46-47; emphasis in original) [39] like all products of capitalism, our most strident attempts to totalize information contain the marks of their own deconstructions; they inscribe contradictions that the full-on spirit of capitalism will neither admit nor condone. yet the power and force of hypercapital, the enmeshment of the production of "money" and "credit" and capital with the production of information, hint at a world in which dissent, even deconstruction, become so reliably accommodated in the information-capital-feedback flow that we may never consistently know the effects or ends of our political and politico-critical efforts. in this sense hypertext and the world wide web amplify, exacerbate, exponentiate the trajectories on which derrida has always situated "the book."^19^ [40] the world of corporate capitalism is dominated by actors who do not truly see the play of which they are a part, and dicta whose consequences are themselves beyond the ken of all but the most foresighted of capitalists. with regard to technological innovation, the guiding principle of corporate capitalism is clearly this: one determines whether something should be done by asking whether it can be done. this ruling--one might in a more classical moment call it "amorality"--puts neither capitalists per se nor dissenters in power. instead it leaves capital itself, surely as naturalistic a phenomenon as any other, in charge. i mean to suggest here that we do not know what capital has in store for us; and that, unless the chief actors in capitalism's play learn an altogether new sense of responsibility to our collective future, we may learn what (hyper)capital is thinking all too soon--and all too ambiguously. notes: i appreciate helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from stuart moulthrop, lisa brawley and suzanne daly. ^1^ for interesting discussions of borgesian tropes in hypermedia, cf. brook, "reading and riding" and moulthrop, "reading from the map." ^2^ most directly in work by critical legal studies scholars and other cultural critics and philosophers surrounding issues like hate speech, freedom of the press, and even free speech. for the purposes of this essay i set aside the very complicated questions surrounding these issues, which are both affected by, and have an impact on, the problems i discuss here. it is notable, though, that the current debates surrounding issues of free speech--both left-versus-right debates, and debates between different parties of the left--themselves seem problematically fractured by issues of capital and corporate control, as in the case of sexually explicit material (in that it is largely produced by the most exploitative and abusive capitalists). this essay is meant to suggest that solutions to these problems will not become any more straightforward as information access and production become more universally networked. ^3^ most of the political critiques of hypertext work at this level--for example, the cited essays by moulthrop and landow--but see brook and boal, eds., _resisting the virtual life,_ especially the essays by besser, hayes and neill. spinelli suggests something like the view offered here when he notes that, like ones made for the internet and world wide web, promises for social democratization made in the early days of radio contained the implicit command that "in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer" ("radio lessons," 6). ess, "political computer," offers very much the liberal-utopian view of the internet, in a somewhat advanced theoretical form, which this essay seeks to mark out as problematic. ^4^ see, for example, chomsky, _the chomsky reader, deterring democracy, necessary illusions, letters from lexington,_ and "media control," and herman and chomsky, _manufacturing consent_. ^5^ see, for example, eisenstein, _printing press;_ warner, _letters of the republic;_ and erickson, _economy of literary form;_ de grazia and stallybrass, in their "materiality of the shakespearean text," offer a theoretically advanced survey of some of the problems regarding print technology in the english renaissance, on which also see wall, _imprint of gender._ mcgann's _textual condition_ remains a touchstone in the theoretization of print culture and its ideology. ^6^ some of the consequences of this particular part of current information technology are explored in chapter 3, "foucault and databases: participatory surveillance," of poster, _mode of information_. ^7^ arick's _tcp/ip companion_ is a widely-used guide to the networking protocols used on the internet and the world wide web, though there are literally hundreds of volumes on the subject. ^8^ a single web page can be made up of many separate files (for example, several graphic files and a text file). each access to one of these files constitutes a "hit." "hit counts" are therefore not a good measure of the number of actual persons using a given web page, except for very crude purposes, since a single person accessing a single page can result in ten, twenty, or even more hits. one of the challenges to corporations attempting to profit from the web has been to develop accurate ways to log individual use. the solutions to this challenge that have been offered so far (and in many cases, implemented without much public comment), as mentioned below, have been remarkably invasive of pre-electronic standards of "privacy." ^9^ again, chapter 3, "foucault and databases: participatory surveillance," of poster, _mode of information,_ provides an excellent gloss on these tendencies. ^10^ a certain cultural-technological trajectory deserves comment here. at many points in history, certain database and record-keeping technologies have seemed "stable" or "permanent," with the attendant sense that the data they contain are permanent in that form. yet at nearly every stage a future stage of technology has appeared soon enough on the horizon, in which the data stored by the previous technology has found additional, far more centralized, extensive and in some cases insidious uses than would have seemed possible in the earlier stage. this certainly accounts, for example, for the amount of information stored in credit reports, and for the importance of social security numbers. thus, while an individual's use of a particular web site may seem somewhat unimportant if used by a single marketer or web site producer, it seems quite plausible that this information will very shortly be available on a much more global and integrated basis. that is, although this information may seem at least partially local today, its growth into a centralized and highly invasive system may not only be inevitable; it may be imminent. ^11^ this is oversimplified; the line between "operating system" and "application" and "applet" may in fact blur considerably as technology develops. java, for example, which was developed largely for applet creation, has already been used to create fully-featured applications. ^12^ i should emphasize that one of the key features of the web implementation of hypertext is precisely its strong reliance on sophisticated feedback mechanisms (mechanisms which do not seem implicit in the idea of hypertext itself, but which do seem ever-present in capitalism, in a variety of more-and-less crude forms). feedback and recursive systematization are hallmarks of recent work in computer science no less than in what we might loosely call "consumer technology"--they are no less present in professional products for advertisers than in sophisticated academic research programs like artificial intelligence and connectionism. i can only nod toward the degree to which much of the latter research has been carried out, unsurprisingly, with capital from the military and from technology-drenched corporations. it is important as well to note the degree to which value itself is a largely feedback-based concept--from the crudest capitalist notions (wherein, famously, an item is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it) to far more sophisticated economic analyses, marxist and neoclassical. ^13^ see, most famously, george landow's _hypertext._ the exchange in rosenberg, "physics and hypertext," and moulthrop, "rhizome and resistance," includes interesting speculation on the terms that have been used to state the politics, emancipatory and otherwise, of hypertext. ^14^ as such it is striking how rarely landow in _hypertext,_ or the authors in his edited volume _hyper/text/theory_ (but for brief parts of the moulthrop and ulmer essays included there), to say nothing of the main part of the recent literature on hypertext, and without denying the emphasis frequently placed on discussions of the politics of hypertext, situates these technological advances in the capitalist system we inhabit. two exceptions are moulthrop's "you say you want a revolution," which, through a discussion of marshall mcluhan, at least in principle gestures at some of the problems i discuss here; and spinelli's "radio lessons," which includes important reflections on the near-monopolistic control of radio and its implications for future media development. ^15^ in this respect the world wide web may be meaningfully thought of in a sequence of the development of the unit of exchange in the world system, a development that has been in modern times largely led by western interests and powers. i am especially thinking of the movement toward a credit economy and the recent discussions, often hyperbolic, about a cashless society. while it is probably not accurate to say that capital played no role in developing the unit of exchange in early modern society--if for no other reason than the central role played by capital in western governments--it still seems true that recent developments in electronic funds transfer, electronic credit, "smart cards," atms, and so on, and then the added interest in developing web-based capital equivalents, represent a new kind of corporate-capitalist intervention in the system of exchange. for a discussion of the effects on marxist economic theory necessitated by the enormous growth in credit over the last century, see kotz. for a fascinating account of the history of money and thought about money that has a great deal of significance for the issues discussed here, see shell, _money, language, and thought_. ^16^ the %locus classicus% for marx's discussion of circulation is _capital, volume 2;_ also see _capital, volume 1,_ especially parts i, ii and vii. ^17^ for a telling though largely unconscious instance of this process, see dretske, _knowledge and the flow of information,_ as well the attendant discussions of that work in recent philosophy of mind. ^18^ a chief advocate for this view in recent marxist theory is sweezy, especially in his _modern capitalism_ and _theory of capitalist development._ one of the clearest indications of us hegemony in the world wide web and the internet occurs in the assigning of what are known as domain names. a domain name occurs on the internet as the part of an email address that follows the "@" sign (for example, in the address yourname@aol.com, the domain name is aol.com), or the first part of a world wide web address (or url, for uniform resource locator--for example, the beginning part of _pmc_'s url: jefferson.village.virginia.edu). the final segment of a domain name provides the actual "domain" for the site. in the us, there are six domains: edu, for educational institutions; com, for commercial providers; org, for non-profit organizations, net, for technical providers of network services; mil, for military users; and gov, for governmental organizations. yet in all other countries, the domain name is a country abbreviation: britain is uk, japan is jp, canada is ca, and so on. every domain name from these countries ends with the country identifier. the impression left on a casual user is that us domains are multiple, mobile and professional, where non-us domains are essentially foreign. this parallels remarkably certain patterns of racial representation within the us, where non-whites are characteristically stereotyped by singular "foreign" characteristics while whites (most often white men) are represented as having a wide range of defining traits and skills, a formation i discuss at some length in golumbia, "black and white world." ^19^ this is part of poster's argument in chapter four, "derrida and electronic writing," of _the mode of information_. works cited: arick, martin r. _the tcp/ip companion: a guide for the common user._ boston, london and toronto: qed publishing group, 1993. besser, howard. "from internet to information superhighway." brook and boal, eds., 59-70. brook, james. "reading and riding with borges." brook and boal, eds., 263-274. brook, james, and iain a. boal, eds. _resisting the virtual life: the culture and politics of information._ san francisco, ca: city lights books, 1995. chomsky, noam. _the chomsky reader._ ed. james peck. new york: pantheon books, 1987. ---. _necessary illusions: thought control in democratic societies._ boston, ma: south end press, 1989. ---. _deterring democracy._ london and new york: verso, 1991. ---. "media control: the spectacular achievements of propaganda." westfield, nj: open magazine pamphlet series, pamphlet #10, 1991. ---. _letters from lexington: reflections on propaganda._ monroe, me: common courage press, 1993. de grazia, margreta, and peter stallybrass. "the materiality of the shakespearean text." _shakespeare quarterly_ 44:3 (fall 1993). 255-283. derrida, jacques. _dissemination._ (1972). trans. barbara johnson. chicago, il: u of chicago p, 1981. ---. _specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international._, 1993. trans. peggy kamuf. new york and london: routledge, 1994. dretske, fred. _knowledge and the flow of information._ cambridge, ma: the mit press/bradford books. eisenstein, elizabeth. _the printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern europe._ new york and cambridge: cambridge up, 1979. erickson, lee. _the economy of literary form: english literature and the industrialization of publishing, 1800-1850._ baltimore, md: johns hopkins up, 1996. ess, charles. "the political computer: hypertext, democracy, and habermas," 1994. in landow, ed., _hyper/text/theory,_ 225-267. golumbia, david. "black and white world: race, ideology, and utopia in _triton_ and _star trek._" _cultural critique_ 32 (winter 1995-96): 75-96. hayes, r. dennis. "digital palsey: rsi and restructuring capital." brook and boal, eds., 173-180. herman, edward s., and noam chomsky. _manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media._ new york: pantheon books, 1988. kotz, david m. "accumulation, money, and credit in the circuit of capital." _rethinking marxism_ 4:2 (summer 1991): 119-132. landow, george p. _hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology._ baltimore, md: johns hopkins up, 1992. ---, ed. _hyper/text/theory._ baltimore, md: johns hopkins up, 1994. marx, karl. _grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft),_ 1858. london and new york: penguin books/new left review, 1993. ---. _capital: a critique of political economy, volume 1._, 1867. trans. b. fowkes. new york: vintage books, 1977. ---. _capital: a critique of political economy, volume 2_, 1865-70). trans. david fernbach. new york and london: penguin books/new left review, 1978. mcgann, jerome j. _the textual condition._ princeton, nj: princeton up, 1991. moulthrop, stuart. "you say you want a revolution? hypertext and the laws of media." _postmodern culture_ 1:3 (may 1991). 53 paragraphs. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/ pmc/issue.591/moulthro.591. ---. "reading from the map: metonymy and metaphor in the fiction of 'forking paths.'" _hypermedia and literary studies._ ed. paul delany and george landow. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 1991. ---. "rhizome and resistance: hypertext and the dreams of a new culture." (1994). in landow, ed., _hyper/text/theory,_ 299-319. neill, monty. "computers, thinking, and schools in 'the new world economic order.'" in brook and boal, eds., 181-194. poster, mark. _the mode of information: poststructuralism and social context._ chicago: u of chicago p, 1990. rosenberg, martin. "physics and hypertext: liberation and complicity in art and pedagogy." landow, ed., _hyper/text/theory,_ 268-298. serexhe, bernhard. "towards another 'brave new world'?" _ctheory: theory, technology, and culture_ 19:1-2. global algorithm 1.10, 7/3/96. http://www.ctheory.com/ ga1.10-deregulation.html. shell, marc. _money, language, and thought: literary and philosophic economies from the medieval to the modern era,_ 1982. baltimore and london: johns hopkins up, 1993. spinelli, martin. "radio lessons for the internet." _postmodern culture_ 6:2 (january 1996). 35 paragraphs. http:// jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/ pop-cult.196.html. sterling, bruce. "unstable networks." _ctheory: theory, technology, and culture_ 19:1-2. global algorithm 1.9, 6/26/96. http://www.ctheory.com/ ga1.9-unstable_networks.html. sweezy, paul m. _the theory of capitalist development,_ 1942. new york: monthly review press, 1953. ---. _modern capitalism and other essays._ new york and london: monthly review press, 1972. wall, wendy. _the imprint of gender: authorship and publication in the english renaissance._ ithaca, ny and london: cornell up, 1993. warner, michael. _the letters of the republic: publication and the public sphere in eighteenth-century america._ cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1990. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------brown, '"my name in water," "adumbration," "offering," and "depth perception"', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-brown-my.txt archive pmc-list, file brown.596. part 1/1, total size 6135 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "my name in water," "adumbration," "offering," and "depth perception" by cory brown ithaca college cbrown@ithaca.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by cory brown, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. my name in water the kids are in the bathtub screaming and splashing, my wife on the phone discussing a book on australian aborigines, whether we should even bother reading literature anymore, and you would think by the way i'm scribbling in the corner i was trying to write my name in water. but i can't even begin a poem let alone put the rhapsodic, quintessentially-barbaric yet sumptuous touch on the last line - you know, the one with such transcendental finality you would think the bard himself had risen to scribble out a few last, sad, desperate lines. which reminds me of a poem i heard had been found on the desk of a college professor killed in a car accident a few days before the last days of school, when the forsythia are in full bloom and tulips no longer purse their lips for the kiss of spring. the poem is entitled "last instructions to my students," which to me signifies a most profound joke. i mean, it had been an %accident% for christ's sake! it's as if god himself were pointing to that title and saying, "see! see! %this% is what i mean." which is to say, folks, that life is so meaningful you simply can't take is seriously. let me give you another instance: it is a different day now and spring is in full bloom; the tulips on the side of the house have all been picked by my four-year-old, little purple and white-striped tulips plucked in the innocence of youth, and the sun is out now after a brief storm this morning and there's a lull in the day. what i mean to say is there may come a time, perhaps even today, when i'll notice i had forgotten to do something very important and then realize i had been squandering my time writing. then like in a dream, i will remember the way my two-year-old's hair curls up from his head, and how he'll sometimes be swinging in his swing with me pushing him, and off to the side there will be a puddle from a brief storm and i'll look over and see the perfect reflections it gives of the now cloudless blue sky, and i'll stare into that puddle and not even think about my name. -----------------------------------------------------------adumbration i experienced the annular eclipse today as an adumbration. as something extraordinary i wasn't quite conscious of at the time. you see, i had forgotten it was coming and a rainstorm was moving in that hour, so when it got very dark i sensed that this was simply one of those eerie moments when a storm blankets the sky to remind us of the structure of normalcy. later, when i dropped the lawnmower off, al the repairman, with his deep, sweet anchorman voice, shaking hands, and whisky breath, said he watched it through welding glass and described the ring as moving around the moon. how charming, i thought, and then i imagined the fury of that ring, its enormity. on my walk, the sun was shining on the wet, fresh-plowed black soil, and even the old cornstalks seemed to glow, pale brown as they were and dirty in their tired late spring appearance. i was making my regular ring around the apple orchard edged now with full-blooming pear and cherry trees. the tiny blooms themselves i thought of as rings of fragile tissue bursting with color. my dog made her run around me again and again and the sun continued to pulse its brilliance down onto the growing alfalfa fields, onto trilliums in the woods, jack-in-the-pulpits and mayflowers blooming or preparing to bloom; and down onto cars and trucks on the highway, bug-sized from where i was -their little motors buzzing in the distance, the road in the bright sun burning around the lake. -----------------------------------------------------------offering what am i doing? is it enough to say i know, or don't trust you? what's wrong with that, that you would have to be relied upon to know the question is rhetorical and serious. i'm barely alive to you, sometimes the poems says. and i say nothing, i can't help it (the poem, that is). that is how i am keeping it all in hand. half in hand and half getting out of hand is how to pass it along to you in your life that i am offering to myself, for you. -----------------------------------------------------------depth perception so i was telling creeley how i once got a piece of chaff stuck in my eyelid so each time i blinked it scratched my cornea, but i had to keep the combine going even though i couldn't tell with just one eye how close the header was to the ground -no depth perception you know. i'll never know how closely he was listening. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.195. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 144906 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. i. journal and book announcements: 1) essays in 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an ever more complex web of information. _chorus_ features essays (from a variety of humanistic perspectives) introducing computer-related and/or network-accessible tools and resources, or discussing the impact of it on research and education single and comparative (humanities-oriented) reviews of pc and macintosh software of special interest to academics and educators in the humanities a home-computing section presenting thoughtful reviews of popular educational/entertainment software with a humanities-oriented content a internet tools section providing links and reviews to various shareware and commercial packages for pc and macintosh computers links to humanities-related resources around the net and a form-based search facility a "variety page" presenting insightful and entertaining bits and pieces from around the net for more information, or to submit software or print publications for review, please contact todd blayone (project coordinator, mcgill university; chorus@bud.peinet.pe.ca). _chorus_ is made possible through the sponsorship of peinet, prince edward island, canada. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5) _collapse_ * * * * * * * * * ccc ooo l l aaa pppp ssss eee ***** ***** ***** c o o l l a p p s e e * * * * * * * * * c o o l l aaaa pppp ssss eeeee c o o l l a a p s e ccccc ooo l l aaaa p ssss eeee collapse experience total mobilisation.....as the schizotechnomediawhores from the future hack you into planet cyberia in issue 1 (order now!!!!!!!!!!!!! out 30/1/95) contributions from uk usa europe and tokyorama-nova free cassette featuring dr nick land and alan boorman --ambient techno and libidinal materialism collide head on in the matrix --a unique,full-on digital audio experience arthur kroker computer artrocity: --the postmodern scene is a panic site.... disney goes virtual-pop-sex kant and the alien internet identity crisis rom mania cyberrevolution 2007 the death of sense in simculation[tm] midi psychosis more more more more more more c y b e r o t i c s / s h o r t f {r} i c t i o n / r a b i d t e c h n o t h e o r y / k t e c t o n i c s d e l i r i o u s s u p p u r a t i o n s/ p s y c h o t o p o l o g i c a l s c a p e l a n d s/ s c h i z o t e c h n i c s w i t h a t t i t u d e/ d i s m e m b e r e d n e o g r a p h i c s/ s p e {w} e d t e x t s you desire it buy it to order: in u.k. three pounds ten pence including p & p cash/cheque/p.o. elsewhere six us dollars or local equivalent inc. p & p cash/international money order cheques etc. payable to "collapse" to: collapse 76 leicester street leamington spa warwickshire cv32 4tb u.k. efforts are being made to find a good distribution deal...if you can help, or if you can provide advertising space on walls, in other journals, or thru contacts, please get in touch: pyudo@csv.warwick.ac.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6) _college literature: a triannual literary journal for the classroom_ edited by kostas myrsiades no longer restricting its focus to pedagogical approaches to particular works of literature . . . college literature has widened its scope to include important theoretical matters as well . . . an impressive editorial vision. celj awards committee _college literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the leading journals in its field, important reading for anyone teaching literature to college students. j. hillis miller forthcoming issues: february 1995 third world women's inscriptions june 1995 african american writing october 1995 non-western poetics before european colonialism february 1996 general issue june 1996 gay and lesbian studies: politics, pedagogy, performance subscription rates: us individual $24.00/year institutional: $48.00/year send prepaid orders to: college literature 210 philips hall west chester university west chester, pa 19383 (610) 436-2901 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7) _contention: debates in society, culture, and science_ contention is: "...simply a triumph from cover to cover." fredrick crews "...the most exciting new journal that i have ever read." lynn hunt "...an important, exciting, and very timely project." theda skocpol "...an idea whose time has come." robert brenner "...serious and accessible." louise tilly subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from: journals division indiana university press 601 n. morton bloomington in 47104 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8) _c-theory_ _ctheory_, the on-line journal of theory, technology, and culture sponsored by the _canadian journal of political and social theory_, is pleased to announce the panic encyclopedia on the world wide web, at the url: http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/ctheory/panic/panic_contents.html _the panic encyclopedia_ is the definitive guide to the postmodern scene. from panic art, panic astronomy, and panic finance, to panic sex, panic fashion, and panic elvis, the _panic encyclopedia_ is the (panic) reader's guide to the fin-de-millenium. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9) _denver quarterly_ donald revell and the new editor, bin ramke, announce the establishment of the lynda hull poetry award of $500 for the best poem published in a volume year first winner to be announced in the summer 1995 issue subscriptions: one year--$15 two years--$28 three years--$40 send your order to the denver quarterly, department of english university of denver, 2199 s. university blvd., denver, co 80208 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10) eastgate systems eastgate systems, publishers of serious hypertext since 1982, are happy to announce that the eastgate web site is now open for visitors. http://www.eastgate.com/~eastgate/ you'll find news of regional, national, and international hypertext events information about every eastgate title web demonstrations of several well-known hypertexts information about eastgate authors a hypertext bibliography pointers to other hypertext sites throughout the web mark bernstein eastgate systems, inc. 134 main street watertown ma 02172 usa voice: (800) 562-1638 in usa +1(617) 924-9044 eastgate@world.std.com compuserve: 76146,262 applelink:eastgate ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11) _the electronic journal on virtual culture_ _the electronic journal on virtual culture_ (ejvc) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity. ejvc is published monthly. some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. cyberspace monitor). if you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the virtual culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc.) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact ermel stepp, editor-in-chief, or diane kovacs, co-editor, at the e-mail addresses listed below. you can retrieve the file ejvc authors via anonymous ftp to: byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm / listserv@kentvm.kent.edu ermel stepp, marshall university, editor-in-chief mo34050@marshall.wvnet.edu diane (di) kovacs, kent state university, co-editor dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12) _fineart forum_ fineart forum volume 9, number 1 january 15, 1995 _________________________________________________________________ ___] | \ | ____] \ __ ___ ___] | | | \ | | / \ | | | __] | | \ | ___] ____ \ __ / | | | | \ | | / \ | \ | _| _| _| __| ______] _/ _\ _| _\ _| :::::: .::::. :::::. :: :: ::. .:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :::. .::: :::: :: :: :::::' :: :: :: ::: :: :: :: :: :: ':. :: :: :: ' :: :: '::::' :: ':. '::::' :: :: a r t + t e c h n o l o g y n e t n e w s _________________________________________________________________ distributed by griffith university, division of information services on behalf of the art, science and technology network (astn) _________________________________________________________________ contents: editorial: paul brown idea: annick bureaud new media site visits: paul brown 12hr-isbn-jpeg: brad brace ieee cg & a: r.a.earnshaw acadia '95: branko kolarevic tencton: morgan bottrell alt.fringeware and www: fringeware daily alternate realities corp: david bennett ars ad astra: roger f. malina art of love www: joseph flicek cd-rom show: mike leggett artnetweb: r. murphy art's birthday: roland alton-scheidl art building: bas van reek berlin videofest 95: simon biggs broken chain letter: fringeware daily copper country gallery: jane patterson digital media perspectives: fringeware daily tv show on cyberspace: diane petzke eaea95: bob martens eff moving: fringeware daily elsevier on-line: paul brown epic: kathleen williamson flypaper: ken feingold future of work: fringeware daily getty web site: james bower walter lieberman: henry lieberman moci www: robin petterd harvestworks air 95: john mcgeehan idom-web: chris adie we make memories: fringeware daily isea 95 _robotic_art_thing: simon penny leonardo collaboration meeting rooms: roger malina ecaade listserver: charles brown picture element: annette weintraub mathart: stewart dickson mediamatic new sub info: geert-jan strengholt electronic cafes: cynthia rubin movie database: jon lebkowsky netscape: catharine evans megalopolis: alan koeninger the nii awards october: michael darden intnl.assoc.of pastel societies: james few photo gallery: celeste brignac the planetary collegium call: roger malina on line poetry: david steuer multidisciplinary periodical: linda heron position available ca, usa position listing ny, usa: annette weintraub prix ars electronica: paul brown qut 1994 bava online: bill fisher sattilite dreaming: kathleen williamson slipknot: felix kramer information superhighway call: michael brodsky symmetry: kevin murray the place: urban diary: joseph squier transconference: peter gruenfelder internet typeface design project: reficul invitation to join utne-buzz announcement list wscg95 conference programme "running a www service": kerry blinco zero-one digital shifts: paul brown new subscribers subscription and access information disclaimer _________________________________________________________________ subscription and access information: to subscribe to fineart forum email digest: email to: fineart_request@gu.edu.au with the message: sub fineart first-name last-name to cancel your subscription: email to: listproc@gu.edu.au with the message: unsub fineart world-wide-web url: australia (note change!!): http://www.gu.edu.au/gart/fineart_online/home.html usa: http://www.msstate.edu/fineart_online/home.html gopher (no longer supported & out of date!): gopher://gopher.msstate.edu/11/online_services/fineart_online _________________________________________________________________ editor: paul brown (p.brown@gu.edu.au) www directory: jane patterson (jpatters@willamette.edu) online bibliography: hudson oliver (ho1@ra.msstate.edu) astn president: annick bureaud (bureaud@altern.com) astn 57 rue falguiere, paris, france astn advisory board chair: roger malina, leonardo-isast correspondents: italy francesco giomi (art@vm.idg.fi.cnr.it)(art@ifiidg) isea wim van der plas (isea@mbr.frg.eur.nl) germany georg c. puluj (g.puluj@artivity.spacenet.de) support also provided by: division of information services, griffith university, queensland the international society for art, science and technology isast the inter-society for the electronic arts isea _________________________________________________________________ send submissions of items to be published in fineart forum to fineart@gu.edu.au mail: paul brown, editor fineart forum division of information services griffith university qld 4111, australia +61 7 875 5286 voice, +61 7 875 5314 fax _________________________________________________________________ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13) _genders_ since 1988, _genders_ has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, tv, and film. today, _genders_ continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines. _genders_ is published triannually in spring, fall, and winter. single copy rates: individual $9, institution $14 foreign postage, add $2/copy subscription rates: individual $24, institution $40 foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription send orders to: university of texas box 7819 austin tx 78713 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14) _hott_ hot off the tree _hott_ -hot off the tree -is a free monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including vr (virtual reality), neural networks, pdas (personal digital assistants), guis (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing. summaries are provided from the following sources: wall street journal, new york times, los angeles times, washington post, san jose mercury news, boston globe, financial times (london) ... time, newsweek, u.s. news & world report ... business week, forbes, fortune, the economist (london), nikkei weekly (tokyo), asian wall street journal (hong kong) ... over 50 trade magazines, including computerworld, infoworld, datamation, computer retail week, dr. dobb's journal, lan times, communications week, pc world, new media, var business, midrange systems, byte ... over 50 research journals, including all publications of the ieee computer and communications societies, plus technical journals published by at&t, ibm, hewlett packard, fujitsu, sharp, ntt, siemens, philips, gec ... over 100 internet mailing lists & usenet discussion groups ... plus ... listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books; listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences; company advertorials, including ceo perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements. bonus: exclusive interviews with technology pioneers ... the next two issues feature interviews with mark weiser (head of xerox parc's computer science lab) on ubiquitous computing, and nobel laureate joshua lederberg on the information society to request a free subscription, carefully follow the instructions below send subscription requests to: listserv@ucsd.edu leave the "subject" line blank in the body of the message input: subscribe hott-list if at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: unsubscribe hott-list note: do not include first or last names following "subscribe hott-list" or "unsubscribe hott-list" the hott mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the university of california at san diego. the system automatically responds to the sender's return path. hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at ucsd. (i cannot make modifications to the list ... nor do i have access to the list.) for your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. if you have problems and require human intervention, contact: hott@ucsd.edu david scott lewis editor-in-chief and book & video review editor ieee engineering management review (the world's largest circulation "high tech" management journal) internet address:d.s.lewis@ieee.org tel: +1 714 662 7037 usps mailing address: pob 18438 irvine ca 92713-8438 usa ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15) _idea/international directory of electronic arts_ _idea_ covers the whole range of activities in the field of art and technology with a truly multidisciplinary approach computer art, computer animation, video, interactive art, networking, holography, laser light, computer music, sound works, space-sky art, performing art, computer literature and poetry, robotic art, virtual reality. bilingual french/english, this unique directory includes in this third edition more than 3000 addresses world-wide, covering: organizations, artists, people, and periodicals. editorial address: chaos 57 rue falguiere 75015 paris france fax: 33/1/43 22 11 24 email: bureaud@altern.com order address: john libbey and company ltd 13 smiths yard summerley street london sw18 4hr england fax: 44/81/947 26 64 price: pounds 24 / us $ 38/ ff 195 (add 10% for postage and packing) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16) information technology and disabilities editor-in-chief: tom mcnulty, new york university (mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu) editors: dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla daniel hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university editorial board: dick banks, university of wisconsin, stout carmela castorina, ucla danny hilton-chalfen, phd, ucla norman coombs, phd, rochester institute of technology alistair d. n. edwards, phd, university of york, uk joe lazzaro, massachusetts commission for the blind ann neville, university of texas, austin steve noble, recording for the blind anne l. pemberton, nottoway high school, nottoway, va lawrence a. scadden, phd, national science foundation bob zenhausern, phd, st. john's university about easi (equal access to software and information): since its founding in 1988 under the educom umbrella, easi has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. volunteers from easi have been instrumental in the establishment of information technology and disabilities as still another step in this process. our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. we seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. easi makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists: easi@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a general discussion on computer access) and axslib-l@sjuvm.stjohns.edu (a discussion on library access issues). to join either list, send a "subscribe" command to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. easi also maintains several items on the st. johns gopher under the menu heading "disability and rehabilitation resources". for further information, contact the easi chair, norman coombs, ph.d. nrcgsh@ritvax.isc.rit.edu, or the easi office: easi's phone: (310) 640-3193 easi's e-mail: easi@educom.edu individual itd articles and departments are archived on the st. john's university gopher. to access the journal via gopher, locate the st. john's university (new york) gopher. select "disability and rehabilitation resources," and from the next menu, select "easi: equal access to software and information." information technology and disabilities is an item on the easi menu. to retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu leave subject line blank the message text should include the word "get" followed by the two word file name; for example: get itdv01n1 contents each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. do not include the parentheses with the filename when sending the "get" command to listserv. note: only one item may be retrieved per message; do not send multiple get commands in a single e-mail message to listserv. to receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and either of the following lines of text: subscribe itd-toc "firstname lastname" subscribe idt-jnl "firstname lastname" (itd-jnl is the entire journal in one e-mail message while itd-toc sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.) to get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu with no subject and the following single line of text: get author guidelin ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 17) inter-society for the electronic arts isea is the inter-society for the electronic arts. isea coordinates the continued occurence of the international symposia on electronic art (the isea symposia). 1988: utrecht, holland 1990: groningen, holland 1992: sydney, australia 1993: minneapolis, usa 1994: helsinki, finland 1995: montreal, canada isea publishes a monthly newsletter, both electronically and as a hard copy. associate membership is free of charge for one year. anyone interrested in membership info, aims and a sample newsletter, contact isea@sara.nl greetings, wim van der plas isea board ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18) _james joyce quarterly_ james joyce quarterly volume 32 fall 1994 through summer 1995 richard breckman perils of marriage in _finnegans wake_ john gordon "ithaca" as the letter c vicki mahaffey fascism and silence: the coded history of amalia popper michael bruce mcdonald "circe" and the uncanny, or joyce from freud to marx ira b. nadel "forget-me-not": joycean bibliography friedhelm rathjen "molly through the garden/ reaching for the bloom": a joycean look at eglinton's dana magazine robert spoo unpublished letters of ezra pound to james joyce coming in the near future: a special issue on joyce and the archives and the thirty-year jjq index. university of tulsa james joyce quarterly tulsa, ok 74104-3189 please enter _____ renew _____ my subscription to the jjq: united states 1 year 2 years 3 years individuals $17 $33 $49 institutions $18 $35 $52 elsewhere individuals $19 $37 $55 institutions $20 $39 $58 payable in u.s. dollars only. we cannot accept eurochecks. add $10 per year for overseas airmail. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19) _leonardo_ now published by the mit press beginning with the 1993 volume, the mit press became publisher of _leonardo_. a scholarly bimonthly, the journal is the official publication of leonardo/the international society for the arts, sciences and technology (isast). over twenty-five years ago leonardo's founding editor established it to provide an international channel of communication between artists, particularly those who used science and developing technologies in their creations. today, leonardo is a leading journal for anyone interested in the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts and music. it currently reaches over 2,000 readers worldwide. leonardo primarily focuses on interactions between the visual arts, science and technology. the journal also covers media, music, kinetic art, performance art, language, environmental and conceptual art, computers and artificial intelligence, and legal, economic, and political aspects of art as these areas relate to the visual arts or use the tools and ideas of contemporary science and technology. leonardo features editorials, illustrated articles by artists writing about their own work, historical and theoretical perspectives, reviews, technical articles, resource directories, art/science forums, and sound/music technology explorations. past articles include "mathematics for the garden of the mind," and "orchestrating digital micromovies." frequently, _leonardo_ presents special issues on state-of-the-art developments: art and social consciousness (published october 1993) art and virtual reality (published august 1994). subscribers can also get the companion annual _leonardo music journal_, which comes with a cd and features the latest in music, multimedia art, sound science, and technology. in september 1993, the mit press began publishing leonardo/isast's _leonardo electronic almanac_, a monthly, edited electronic journal and electronic archive, world-wide web server, and mosaic server accessible via the internet. _leonardo electronic almanac_ documents the use of new scientific and technological media in the contemporary arts. published bimonthly, _leonardo_ journal annual subscription rates (5 issues plus 1 _leonardo music journal_ issue) are $65.00 for individuals, $320.00 for institutions, and $45.00 for students and retired persons. published monthly, _leonardo electronic almanac_ annual subscription rates are $15 for _leonardo_ journal subscribers and $25 for non-leonardo journal subscribers. prices subject to change without notice. for ordering information, contact the mit press journals circulation department,(617) 253-2889 (phone), (617) 258-6779 (fax), or journals-orders@mit.edu. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20) _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_ a journal of contemporary art issues _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts. _m/e/a/n/i/n/g_ is published twice a year in the fall and spring. it is edited by susan bee and mira schor. subscriptions for 2 issues (1 year): $12 for individuals: $20 for institutions 4 issues (2 years): $24 for individuals; $40 for institutions foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to canada: $5 foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in u.s. dollars. all checks should be made payable to mira schor send all subscriptions to: mira schor 60 lispenard street new york, ny 10013 limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact mira schor for information. distributed with the segue foundation and the solo foundation ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21) _minnesota review_ subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. the new _minnesota review_ is published biannually and originates from east carolina university. send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to: jeffrey williams editor minnesota review department of english east carolina university greenville, nc 27858-4353 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 22) _modern fiction studies_ _mfs_, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, is published quarterly at purdue university and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and ibm-compatible floppy; please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. send submissions to: patrick o'donnell editor mfs department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at pod@purccvm (bitnet); pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (internet). subscriptions to mfs are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. back issues are $7 each. address subscription inquiries to: nel fink circulation manager mfs department of english heavilon hall purdue university west lafayette in 47907-1389 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 23) mtv killed kurt cobain announcing the publication of a mini-multimedia 'zine, _mtv killed kurt cobain_, with text, graphic, and sound resource. _mtv killed kc_ was written and directed by mark amerika and produced by bobby rabyd for alternative-x, an electronic publishing enterprise at marketplace.com as alternative-x _mtv killed kurt cobain_ can be ftp'd from: ftp.brown.edu in the directory /pub/bobby_rabyd it is in storyspace reader format, a standalone hypermedia template for the macintosh. send queries to st001747@brownvm.brown.edu (bobby rabyd) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24) _nomad_ an interdisciplinary journal of the humanities, arts, and sciences manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields! _nomad_ is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. it is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. while our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, _nomad_ strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls. manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. if possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5" macintosh disks, in either microsoft word or macwrite ii format, or by e-mail. each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and in black and white. pict, tiff, gif, and jpeg files on 3.5" macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via e-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). all artwork must be camera-ready. submissions by regular mail should include a sase with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages. subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues) send manuscripts and inquiries to: nomad, c/o mike smith 406 williams hall florida state university tallahassee, florida, 32306 msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25) _october_ art | theory | criticism | politics the mit press edited by: rosalind kraus annette michelson yve-alain bois benjamin h.d. buchloh hal foster denis hollier john rajchman "october, the 15-year-old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. its nonprofit status, its cross disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines." --village voice as the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _october_ focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts. come join october's exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. subscribe today! number 70, fall 1994 __the duchamp effect__, a special issue the back cover of october's latest special issue appropriately features a black-and-white, 1966 photograph of andy warhol filming marcel duchamp. like warhol's camera, this october issue, entitled the duchamp effect, looks at the enduring legacy of duchamp in late-twentieth-century art practices. review copies are available at the discretion of the publisher. issn 0162-2870. published quarterly, annual subscription rates are $32 for individuals, $90 for institutions, and $22 for students and retired persons. for ordering information, contact the mit press journals circulation department, (617) 253-2889 (tel), (617) 258-6779 (fax), or journals-orders@mit.edu. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26) _representations_ new ventures in humanities scholarship published by the university of california press ". . . widely recognized as among the most innovative outlets for work in literary criticism, art history, and cultural history." --ludmilla jordanova, social history of medicine representations is a quarterly interdisciplinary forum offering imaginative and challenging approaches to the study of culture. since 1983, representations has devoted its pages to ground-breaking critical thought. subscription information $33 individuals $23 students (with copy of id) $62 institutions (add $9.00 for foreign surface postage) send orders to: representations university of california press 2120 berkeley way berkeley ca 94720 order by phone (510/642-4191) fax (510/642-9917 journals@garnet.berkeley.edu prices subject to change ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27) _revista alicantina de estudios ingleses_ editor emeritus pedro jesus marcos perez editors enrique alcaraz varo jose antonio alvarez amoros (alvarez@vm.cpd.ua.es) the _revista alicantina de estudios ingleses_ is a well-established international journal intended to provide a forum for debate and an outlet for research involving all aspects of english studies. it welcomes articles from a wide range of fields and from scholars throughout the world. the _revista alicantina de estudios ingleses_ is considered the standard spanish journal in its field and it reflects the state of english scholarship in spain and in other european countries. send contributions (essays or reviews recorded on wordperfect 5.1 or later), books for review, and subscription queries to jose antonio alvarez amorls, department of english, university of alicante, p.o. box 99, e-03080 alicante, spain. we are also happy to make exchange arrangements with other journals in the field of the humanities. send your proposals to the above address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 28) _studies in popular culture_ dennis hall, editor. _studies in popular culture_, the journal of the popular culture association in the south and the american culture association in the south, publishes articles on popular culture and american culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. the journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the united states, canada, france, israel, and australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. please direct editorial queries to the editor: dennis hall department of english university of louisville louisville ky 40292 tel: (502) 588-6896/0509 fax: (502) 588-5055 bitnet: drhall01@ulkyvm internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu all manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the english department, university of louisville, louisville, ky 40292 please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. black and white illustrations may accompany the text. our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current mla stylesheet is a useful model. please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. the editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts. studies in popular culture is published semiannually and is indexed in the pmla annual bibliography. all members of the association receive studies in popular culture. yearly membership is $15.00 (international: $20.00). write to: the executive secretary diane calhoun-french academic dean jefferson community college-sw louisville, ky 40272 for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. volumes i-xv are available for $225.00. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 29) _tdr_ ######| ######\ ######\ ##| ##| ##\ ##|__##| ##| ##| ##| ######/ ##| ##|__##/ ##| ##\ ##| ######/ ##| ##| -the journal of performance studies -t144 (winter 1994) tdr is a quarterly journal that explores the diverse world of performance. the journal emphasizes the intercultural, inter-disciplinary and spans numerous geographical areas and historical periods. tdr addresses performance issues of every kind: theatre, music dance, entertainment, media, sports, politics, aesthetics of everyday life, games, play and ritual. tdr is for people in the performing arts, the social sciences, academics, activists and theorists--anyone interested in thinking about the "performance" paradigm. the journal is edited by richard schechner of the department of performance studies, new york university, and is published quarterly by the mit press. although tdr is not yet an electronic journal, you can browse through sample articles available on-line through the electronic newsstand and order via e-mail from the mit press (see directions below). in this issue (t144 winter 1994): /tdr comment ---------- "i no longer subscribe to tdr" by richard schechner in memory of huang zuolin by faye c. fei /letters, etc. ------------- a review response--a letter from loren kruger susan manning responds "jerzy tymicki" revealed, a letter from kazimierz braun /articles -------- dan baron cohen: resistance to liberation with derry frontline culture and education--an interview by lionel pilkington the alabama a. and m. thespians, 1944-1963: triumph of the human spirit--by glenda e. gill double bodies: androgyny and power in the performances of louis xiv--by mark franko virtual reality: performance, immersion, and the thaw--by jon mckenzie the steps of the river bank--by eugenio barba masks or faces re-visited: a study of four theatrical works concerning cultural identity--by william h. sun and faye c. fei theatre/archaeology--by mike pearson with comments by julian thomas the power team: muscular christianity and the spectacle of conversion--by sharon mazer /book reviews ------------ contemporary feminist theatres: to each her own by lizbeth goodman--review by jill dolan queering the pitch: the new gay and lesbian musicology edited by philip brett, elizabeth wood, and gary c. thomas--review by edward david miller upstaging big daddy: directing theatre as if gender and race matter edited by ellen donkin and susan clement--review by peggy phelan vested interests: cross-dressing & cultural anxiety by marjorie garber; crossing the stage: controversies on cross dressing edited by lesley ferris--reviews by amy robinson caesar antichrist and visits of love by alfred jarry- reviews by john bell to browse and subscribe: 1. for subscription prices and ordering information, contact mit press journals 55 hayward street cambridge, ma 02142 tel: 617-253-2889 fax: 617-258-6779 email: journals-orders@mit.edu or, access the mit press online catalog: telnet techinfo.mit.edu, under around mit/mit press/journals/arts/ or via gopher by typing "gopher gopher.mit.edu". 2. to browse through articles from our back issues, logon to the electronic newsstand: via telnet: gopher.internet.com (login name: enews). via gopher: gopher.internet.com (port 2100). via the gopher menu, go to: north america/usa/general/ the electronic newsstand/all titles/ tdr: the drama review ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 30) _vivid_ _vivid_ magazine is now available. vivid is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. we are actively seeking contributions for the next issue. the magazine ispresented in the colorful, graphics environment of a windows 3.1 help file. you will need windows 3.1 to read the magazine. the magazine will also be availablevia anonymous ftp at "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it: ftp ftp.gmu.edu username: anonymous password: (your email address) cd pub/library binary get vivid1.zip for more information on vivid, contact the editor, justin mchale. internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 31) _zines-l_ announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc to subscribe to zines-l send a message to: listserv@uriacc.uri.edu on one line type: subscribe zines-l first name last name ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 32) pmc-moo postmodern culture's pmc-moo pmc-moo is a service offered (free of charge) by postmodern culture. pmc-moo is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can meet others interested in postmodernism and participate in poetry slams, conferences, and other special events. pmc-moo has its own mailing lists on postmodern literature and theory. to connect to pmc-moo, you must be on the internet. if you have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by typing the command telnet hero.village.virginia.edu 7777 at your command prompt. once you've connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to pmc-moo. note: if you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777 at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port number. no special client software is required to use pmc-moo, but clients can make it easier to participate. for a sample client-based login, telnet to hero.village.virginia.edu and give "pmcdemo" as your login i.d. (hit "enter" when prompted for a password). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 33) _alphabetum_ _alphabetum_, a new journal of international literature, invites critical articles on world literature. the editorial board, composed of literature professors from a number of different international institutions (australia, europe, north and south america), welcomes submissions representing different schools of literary criticism and individual perspectives. the articles should be written in one of three languages: english, spanish or french. the manuscripts should be between fifteen and twenty pages (double spaced), following the mla style. book reviews are also accepted and they should be four to five pages long. send each manuscript in duplicate along with a self addressed envelope. manuscripts and subscriptions ($15/individuals, $20/institutions) should be sent to the editor, pol popovic, 5111 north 10th street, suite 124, mcallen, texas 78504, usa. for more information, including submission requirements, write or call the editor, pol popovic, universidad de monterrey, humanidades, apartado postal 738, garza garcia, nuevo leon, c.p. 66250 mexico, tel. (8) 338-50-50 ext.198 or 252, fax: (8) 338-3135 or 336-42-02, e-mail: ppopovic@ummac01.mty.udem.mx (e-mail has been a very cheap and effective way of communication with our foreign collaborators). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 34) acadia '95 preliminary call for participation acadia '95 conference october 19-22, 1995 university of washington, seattle computing in design: enabling, capturing, and sharing ideas for more than a decade the association for computer aided design in architecture (acadia) has provided a forum for presentation and discussion of innovative application and integration of computer technology in architectural education and practice. now, more than ever, we face many new and still some old challenges, problems, and issues, some of which are critical to our mission and future as designers, educators, and researchers. the acadia '95 conference will address the emergent theoretical and practical issues in design education and practice in a series of paper presentations, workshops, and panel discussions. abstracts due ...................... march 1, 1995 e-mail:branko@rossi.arc.miami.edu tel:(305) 284-6521 fax:(305) 284-2999 workshops/panels due ............... april 11, 1995 e-mail:lnk@psu.edu tel:( 814) 865-0877 fax:( 814) 865-3289 exhibition due ..................... may 16, 1995 e-mail:brj@u.washington.edu tel:(206) 543-2132 info: branko kolarevic technical chair, acadia '95 university of miami school of architecture 1223 dickinson drive coral gables, fl 33146-5010 u s a e-mail:branko@rossi.arc.miami.edu tel:(305) 284-6521 fax:(305) 284-2999 http://www.caup.washington.edu/acadia95/acadia95.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 35) _convergence the journal of research into new media technologies_ _convergence_ is a new refereed academic journal which addresses the creative, social, political and pedagogical issues raised by the advent of new media technologies. as a research journal it will provide a forum both for monitoring and exploring developments and for publishing vital research. published biannually and adopting an inter-disciplinary approach convergence will develop this area into an entirely new research field. the principal aims of _convergence_ are: to develop critical frameworks and methodologies which enable the reception, consumption and impact of new technologies to be evaluated in their domestic, public and educational contexts to contextualise the study of those new technologies within existing debates in media studies, and to address the specific implications of the increasing convergence of media forms to monitor the conditions of emergence of new media technologies, their subsequent mass production and the development of new cultural forms to promote discussion and analysis of the creative and educational potentials of those technologies, and to contextualise those cultural practices within wider cultural and political debates. papers on any of the following areas are welcomed: the move from traditional media to multimedia, gender and technology, convergence of satellite media technologies and terrestrial broadcasting, cable and telecommunications, control and censorship, copyright, electronic publishing, media policy, interactivity, education and new technologies, tv/computer screen interfaces, myths and representations of technology, problems of definition and terminology, and virtual reality. copy for first issue accepted until 5th january 1995 copy deadline for second issue 30 march 1995 submission details: two hard copies and where possible one disk copy (macintosh word5 compatible) of all articles should be sent to the editors with the following information attached separately: name, institution and address for correspondence, telephone, fax and email address. papers should be typed on one side of the sheet with endnotes in accordance with the mla style sheet (abbreviated form available on request). authors should also enclose a 50 word biography and an abstract. proposals for articles or completed papers should be sent to: juliaknight/alexis weedon, editors, convergence, school of media arts, university of luton, 75 castle street, luton, lu1 3aj, united kingdom. tel: 0582 34111, fax: 0583 489014 email: convergence@vax2.luton.ac.uk ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 36) _culture and tradition_ the editors of "culture and tradition" are now accepting submissions for issue 17. your manuscript should be of interest to folklorists, canadian in focus, and should conform to the guidelines outlined below: _culture and tradition_ is published annually and with cooperation of etudiants en arts et traditions populaires de l'universite laval de quebec and the folklore students association of memorial university of newfoundland. the editors welcome manuscripts on any subject of interest to folklorists. these should be scholarly articles of ten to twenty typed, double-spaced pages, and may be accompanied by photographs or drawings. articles submitted on disk in wordperfect format would be greatly appreciated. our range of topics includes the traditional arts, music, cuisine, architecture, values, beliefs, cultural psychology and sociologic structure of regional, ethnic, religious, and industrial groups in canada. studies based on original fieldwork in eastern canada are especially welcome. we also accept book, record and film reviews, and brief notes appropriate to the journal's focus. submission deadline: 31 march, 1995. papers, subscriptions or any correspondance may be sent to: culture and tradition department of folklore memorial university of newfoundland st. john's, newfoundland canada a1c 5s7 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 37) _cwrl_ _computers, writing, rhetorics and literature/learning_. the hypertexan e-journal of the computer writing & research lab at the university of texas at austin. editor: john slatin assistant editors: michael davis, mafalda stasi, greg vanhoosier-carey, susan warshauer. as the title implies, the main topics of this electronic journal are issues of textual production in electronic media and the relocation of humanities in a cyberspace community; with particular attention to the pedagogical aspects of all of the above. cwrl is available for anonymous ftp at the university of texas gopher gopherhost.cc.utexas.edu, port 70. (sut-austin/ut gopher test labs/drc division of rhetoric and composition ftp area). together with the latest issue, there will be abstracts of older articles. those older issues will be sent through e-mail by request, or will be available via anonymous ftp from the next machine at the lab. (at your e-mail address prompt, type ftp auden.en.utexas.edu; log on as anonymous; for your password write your e-mail address. go into the appropriate directory by typing cd pub, then cd cwrl. type get to import whatever article file you want. logout by typing bye). article submission is open to all: the editors will select the most interesting and relevant articles for publication. the formatting style will be the same as that used by pmc and other established e-journals in the field. please try and limit yourselves to 5000 words. the authors will also have to include a 300-words abstract of their article. please send articles and queries to: cwrl@auden.en.utexas.edu. copyright is retained by the author. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 38) eaea95 the second in a series of biannual conferences on architectural endoscopy, eaea '95 vienna aims at a critical investigation of today's endoscopic culture with a focus on three themes: spacescapes: the re-design of spatial experience high tech & low cost: the choice of appropriate technology the next generation: the implementation of applications the deadline for extended abstracts will be closed on may 15th on-line information is available on the information server of tu vienna (info.tuwien.ac.at) under 'international activities'. please submit your e-mail-address in order to receive latest information. eaea-conference office c/o department for spatial simulation vienna university of technology karlsplatz 13/2561 a-1040 vienna, austria tel.: +43-1-58801-3382 fax: +43-1-5041147 e-mail: bmartens@email.tuwien.ac.at ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 39) ethicomp95 an international conference on the ethical issues of using information technology 28th, 29th and 30th march 1995 queen's building, de montfort university leicester uk co-directors: simon rogerson, department of information systems, de montfort university terrell ward bynum, director research center on computing and society, southern connecticut state university the programme of events for ethicomp95 provides an excellent forum for stimulating debate on fundamental issues relating to the development and use of information technology and information systems. there will be an opportunity to consider approaches based on the different cultures and countries of both conference presenters and conference delegates. the three-day conference consists of three parallel themes. each theme will comprise a series of papers and workshops. there will be three broad themes within the conference programme 1) ethical development this is concerned with the use of development methodologies and the consideration of ethical dilemmas, user education and professionalism. 2) ethical technology this is concerned with the advances in technologies and the likely ethical issues they raise as they are applied to business and societal problems. 3) ethical application this is concerned with developing ethical strategies which allow technology to be exploited in an ethically acceptable way. conference attractions include * keynote presentations will be given by professor walter maner, bowling green university, us. professor maner has been a leading authority on computer ethics in us for over 25 years. he has produced many books and papers on the subject and has been prominent in establishing the subject as a mandatory element of computer science education accredited by acm and ieee. mrs elizabeth france, data protection registrar, uk. before taking becoming data protection registrar, mrs france was head of the home office's information and pay services division. a member of the committee for the co-ordination of computerisation in the criminal justice system and of the ccta's computers committee mrs france has extensive experience of national computing policy making. professor jacques berleur, namur, belgium. professor berleur was chairman of the ifip task group which has produced the strategic report entitled "ifip framework for ethics" and recently endorsed by ifip. this work establishes an approach to addressing computer ethics from a global perspective. * presentation of refereed papers * interactive workshops * information stalls and interactive demonstrations * bookstall with books and journals on computer ethics * conference dinner at the prestigious location of bosworth hall key benefits * an update of the current and future ethical dilemmas facing is/it * an opportunity to exchange ideas on ethical practices with colleagues from different work environments and cultures * guidance on how to develop and implement more acceptable systems * research-oriented and practically-oriented sessions providing a unique opportunity for knowledge dissemination who should attend educators, researchers and practitioners in the field of is/it decision makers in industry and commerce responsible for the application of is/it accommodation belmont house hotel telephone (+44) 533 544773; fax (+44) 533 470804 bed and breakfast daily rate--double: 79 ponds, single: 63.5 pounds (state dmu rate) the grand hotel telephone (+44) 533 555599; fax (+44) 533 544736 bed and breakfast daily rate--double: 76 pounds, single: 58 pounds (state dmu rate) stoneycroft hotel telephone (+44) 533 707605; fax (+44) 533 706067 bed and breakfast daily rate--double: from 33 pounds, single: from 24 pounds it is recommended that accommodation is booked well in advance. details are correct at time of going to press. fees and registration the conference fee of $375 includes conference proceedings, refreshments, lunches and the conference dinner. all conference fees must be paid in sterling by cheque or money order in advance. registration paid in full on or before 15th february 1995 will receive a $25 discount. the fee will then be $350 fees are inclusive of vat to register please provide the following information and include a cheque or money order for the appropriate amount made payable to de montfort expertise. these should be sent to sue colledge ethicomp95 external relations de montfort university the gateway leicester lei 9bh uk tel: (+44) 533 577354 fax: (+44) 533 577533 accommodation should be booked direct with the hotels. joining instructions will be issued approximately two weeks before the date of the conference. cancelled bookings may incur a cancellation fee. if written notification of cancellation reaches us later than 10 days before the conference commences we reserve the right to charge the full fee. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 40) _empirical inquiry into hypertextualizing composition_ call for papers: scott lloyd dewitt and kip strasma invite submissions for a collection of essays that explores the issues of hypertext, empirical research, and writing pedagogy entitled, empirical inquiry into hypertextualizing composition. submissions should describe empirical research studies that investigate the influence of hypertext on students' writing processes. we are especially interested in submissions that represent a wide range of teaching strategies and sites (k-12, two-year college, university, etc.). writers should prepare a two-page, single spaced proposal that reveals the study's focus, its research methodology, and its current status. submit two copies of your proposal by 1 june 1995 (deadline extended) to: dr. scott lloyd dewitt assistant professor, english the ohio state university--marion campus 1465 mt. vernon ave., morrill hall marion, oh 43302-5695 work: 614-389-osum (6786), x-6211 home: 614-294-2971 sdewitt@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu, or dewitt.18@osu.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 41) _gates_ _gates_ is a new international journal promoting _greater access to technology, engineering and science_. the first issue was published recently. contributions are sought for issue 2, due out at the end of the year, and future issues. journal focus: _gates_ is directed to professionals committed to creating greater access to technology, engineering and science. the journal focuses on groups who are currently under-represented in education and employment in these areas, with a particular emphasis on women, people with disabilities, and people from minority ethnic backgrounds. this list is suggestive only, and articles relating to any group underrepresented in these disciplines will be considered for publication. the contents may be of interest to educators and careers advisers at the primary, secondary and post-secondary levels, parents, employers, and members of these under-represented groups. the journal is dedicated to advancing knowledge and to providing a forum for public debate on questions of access to technology, engineering and science. sections of the journal: _gates_ publishes research articles, literature reviews, case studies of successful interventions, and descriptions of events and new resource materials. the journal is divided into three sections. the first section contains refereed articles describing original research or reviews of research. manuscripts are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has not previously been published in a peer review journal, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. each article will be forwarded to two reviewers from an international panel of reviewers. acceptance or rejection will depend on the reviewers' reports. relevant comments will be forwarded anonymously to the first author. the second section of the journal contains descriptions of case studies. the third section provides constructive comments on issues raised by authors of refereed articles, summaries of interviews, reviews of new books and other resources, announcements of conferences, and any matters which may be of interest to readers. contributions are welcomed for any of the three sections. contributions can be sent to the editors gates deakin university victoria 3217 australia fax: +61 52 27 2028 email: gates@deakin.edu.au further information regarding presentation and submission of manuscripts can be obtained from these addresses or by anonymous ftp from pub/gates at rana.deakin.edu.au subscribers and sponsors are welcomed also. the individual annual subscription rate is aud25 (australia) and aud30 (overseas), approximately us$23, and the institutional rates are double the individual rates. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42) hypertext fiction and the literary artist hypertext fiction and the literary artist is a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers. the project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication. we would like to request writers to submit their works for review. publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. we are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format. to avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. send works on disk (ibm or mac) or hardcopy to: hypertext fiction and the literary artist 3 westcott upper london, ontario n6c 3g6 keepc@qucd>queensu.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 43) _inter\face electronic literary magazine_ voices voices to the left to the right near and far rise up and be numbered. resurrect the voices past and present, those lost from constant screaming, those buried in layers of silence. summon them to rise as phoenixes and proclaim "i am woman." i, am woman. --tanya manning "women on the net(work)" is the focus for inter\face's tenth issue (coming spring 1995). this issue is especially dedicated to providing women writers an electronic forum for the multiplicity of their voices. metaphorically the title "women on the net(work) stands for the magazine operating as a net to catch the multiplicity of writings by women that may typically go unknown. the search for subjects and forms of discourse are unrestricted. whether you write in a "technological/mechanical" voice or "renaissance/romantic" style, we're interested. whether your poems or stories are of topical relevance to politics or race relations, women's rights or women's magic, sexual orientation or erotica, or anything unmentioned, we want you to contribute your work. the criteria for this issue is simple. to preserve the writer's integrity and promote the writer as publisher, editing of content is minimal. in the spirit of accepting "contributions" as opposed to "submissions," we believe in your right as a writer to say whatever you want to say in the way you want to say it. however, we do ask of you to limit for publishing fairness your contributions to three separate pieces. please send your entries no later than february 14, 1995 to interfac@cnsunix.albanu.edu. for more information, please contact tanya manning at tm5498@cnsvax.albany.edu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 44) _the journal of criminal justice and popular culture_ call for papers scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria: issues: the journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. the journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice. submission procedures: to submit material for the journal, please subscribe to cjmovies through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow. to subscribe, send a message with the following command to: listserv@albnyvm1: subscribe cjmovies yourfirstname yourlastname: manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: the editors journal of criminal justice and popular culture sunycrj@albnyvm1.bitnet or sunycrj@uacsc2.albany.edu managing editors: sean anderson and greg ungar editors journal of criminal justice and popular culture school of criminal justice, sunya 135 western avenue albany, ny 12222 internet: sa1171@albnyvm1.bitnet or gu8810@uacsc1.albany.edu list administrator: seth rosner school of criminal justice, suny sr2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or sr2602@thor.albany.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 45) kant congress eighth international kant congress with "kant and the problem of peace" march 1-5, 1995 memphis, tennessee usa the kant-gesellschaft e.v. (bonn) has authorized the university of memphis, in collaboration with the north american kant society, to host the eighth international kant congress. the congress will be held march 1-5, 1995 in the crowne plaza hotel, memphis, tennessee, usa, in conjunction with the featured conference series, ``kant and the problem of peace.'' opening session welcoming ceremonies: representatives of the kant-gesellschaft, the north american kant society, the university of memphis, the city of memphis, the state of tennessee, the united states of america and the federal republic of germany. opening addresses: mary gregor (san diego state); jules vuillemin (paris). kant and the problem of peace symposium topics: freedom; religion; history; law; government; society; morality; politics. speakers include: henry allison (san diego), shlomo avineri (jerusalem), reinhard brandt (marburg), sharon byrd (augsburg), jean ferrari (dijon), george fletcher (columbia), georg geismann (munich), volker gerhardt (berlin), paul guyer (pennsylvania), joachim hruschka (erlangen), jan joerden (frankfurt/oder), leonid kalinnikov (kaliningrad), wolfgang kersting (hannover), pauline kleingeld (st. louis), pierre laberge (ottawa), bernd ludwig (munich), rudolf makkreel (emory), jeffrey murphy (arizona state), onora o'neill (cambridge), francoise proust paris), patrick riley (wisconsin/harvard), ludwig siep (muenster), ernest weinrib (toronto), reiner wimmer (tuebingen), allen wood (cornell). kantian themes symposium topics: mathematics; psychology; logic; deduction; pre-history; dialectic; science; opus postumum; phenomenology; kantians; ethics; aesthetics; teleology; space; hegel; 3rd critique; critical theory; kant research today. speakers include: karl ameriks (notre dame), richard aquila (tennessee), john atwell (temple), marcia baron (illinois-urbana), manfred baum (wuppertal), graham bird (manchester), james bohman (st. louis), daniel breazeale (kentucky), vladimir bryushinkin (kaliningrad), jill buroker (san bernardino), robert butts (western ontario), mario caimi (buenos aires), wolfgang carl (goettingen), martin carrier (heidelberg), bernd doerflinger (mainz), stephen engstrom (pittsburgh), eckard foerster (stanford), christel fricke (heidelberg), michael friedman (chicago), ludger honnefelder (bonn), rolf-peter horstmann (munich), stephen houlgate (depaul), fumiyasu ishikawa (sendai), klaus kaehler (cologne), patricia kitcher (san diego), jane kneller (colorado state), manfred kuehn (purdue), rudolf langthaler (vienna), claudio la rocca (pisa), beatrice longuenesse (princeton), rudolf malter (mainz), francois marty (paris), thomas mccarthy (northwestern), ralf meerbote (rochester), j. n. mohanty (temple), susan neiman (yale), frederick neuhouser (harvard), jean petitot (paris), robert pippin (chicago), carl posy (duke), gian-carlo rota (mit), walter schaller (texas tech), dennis schmidt (villanova), sally sedgwick (dartmouth), thomas seebohm (mainz), nancy sherman (georgetown), david stern (toledo, ohio), dieter sturma (lueneburg), roger sullivan (south carolina), burkhard tuschling (marburg), james van cleve (brown), michael young (kansas), guenter zoeller (iowa). the rawls legacy speakers include: barbara herman (southern california), thomas hill (chapel hill), christine korsgaard (harvard), susan neiman (yale), john rawls (harvard), andrews reath (raleigh). kant reception in eastern europe speakers include: karol bal (wroclaw), leonid kalinnikov (kaliningrad), rado riha (ljubljana), leonid stolovich (tartu), andrei sudakov (moscow). kant reception in asia speakers include: arindan chakrabarti (delhi), golam dastagir (dhaka), steven palmquist (hong kong), terence hua tai (taipei), shin-chi yuas a (kyoto). kant dissemination speakers include: paul guyer (pennsylvania), manfred kuehn (purdue), winfried lenders (bonn), rudolf malter (mainz), nellie motroschilova (moscow), werner stark (marburg), miroslav zelazny (torun). current work on the philosophy of kant this section consists of a series of colloquia containing c. 100 refereed contributions on all aspects of kant's work and influence. --for registration information please contact: organizing committee eighth international kant congress department of philosophy the university of memphis memphis, tennessee 38152 u. s. a. (tel:+901-678-3356; fax: +901-678-4365; e-mail: robinsonh@msuvx1.memphis.edu ) --for hotel reservations, contact crowne plaza hotel (specifying "kant congress rate"), 250 n. main, memphis, tennessee 38103 u.s.a. (tel: +901-527-7300; fax +901-526-1561). --for special air fares and other travel arrangements, contact ann scobie, hanover travel, 0 n. evergreen st., memphis, tennessee u.s.a (tel: +901-276-4404; fax +901-276-4494). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 46) mechanics of desire: deleuze, masoch, and the libidinal economy of fur deleuze's is one of the rare analyses of masochism which do not anchor themselves in either psychopathology or political victimhood. this theory informed, but not necessarily theory bound, interdisciplinary anthology focuses on the dynamics and problematics of desire as they arise out of the deleuze-masoch encounter. contributors are asked to deploy either or both of these texts as points of departure in exploring the traversals or restrictions involved in the masochistic scenario and its intensities, law and its contracts, body and its perversions. contributions on closely related topics will also be considered. address texts (essays, photographic essays, scripts, prose, etc ... )to fadi abou-rihan department of philosophy university of toronto, toronto ontario, canada m5s 1a1. e-mail: abouriha@epas.utoronto.ca final submissions by march 15 1995 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 47) pompidou center project a new multidisciplinary periodical: call for comments ***************************************************** the following document presents the broad outlines of a new publication currently being developed by the centre national d'art et de culture georges-pompidou, paris (france). it is also available on our new www server, at url http://www.cnac-gp.fr/ we are informing internet users of this project so as to generate a discussion and so that your ideas and comments can be used to modify and enrich our plans. you will also find a questionnaire to help us know the people interested in this publication. --daniel soutif directeur du departement du developpement culturel 1. a project for the pompidou center ************************************ 1.1 the multidisciplinary approach ================================== as a place of development and experimentation for all creative disciplines (literature, music, visual arts, photography, video, architecture, design, cinema, new technologies), the centre national d'art et de culture georges pompidou has always prioritized the multidisciplinary approach. as a venue for exhibitions, meetings, performances and debates, it has always advocated maximum access for the general public. but the center is not only a showcase for modern creation, it is also a cultural production center in its own right with its own, distinct publishing policy. for all these reasons, the center is in a unique position with regard to multimedia publishing. the center is now planning to create a new type of periodical bringing together a variety of approaches and media. the idea is to extend the scope of the old publication, traverses, which looked at man's relation to his environment, culture and production as reflected in various themes or problems, and confronted with differing viewpoints and disciplines. by going further into the new technologies, its successor will set out to appeal to a younger and more varied audience in addition to the traditional readership of traverses, which consisted mainly of intellectuals, teachers, artists, researchers and students. 1.2. the postulate =================== the founding principle of this new publication is that we are today seeing a radical shift in the relations between the different spheres of knowledge. this is due both to the decline in the opposition between the "exact" sciences and the human sciences, and to the transformation of the means of access to knowledge as a result of the new communication technologies. and yet there remain barriers between the various disciplines. one of the aims of this publication will be to explore the multidisciplinary idea in and through the new technologies, to serve as an experimental platform for the creation of a new arena of knowledge, capable of setting up interactions between different disciplines, works and techniques, though without seeking to imitate the encylopaedia. the idea is not to build a "consensus" between the arts, sciences, technology and the various schools of philosophy, but to generate productive tensions of meaning between their different languages. 1.3. contents ============== this periodical will thus go beyond the frontiers running between culture and society, art and technology, to a level where these areas of activity interact. each issue will focus on a major contemporary issue and will be able to draw on the resources of the pompidou center, with its wealth of written documents, sound archives (interviews, lectures, music), iconography (the photo library of the museum of modern art) and video recordings. the theme--and title--of the first issue, which is currently in preparation, will be "literature and software engineering." 2. a new type of publication **************************** 2.1. the central role of the new technologies ============================================== the new technologies will by definition be at the heart of this publication, both for the possibilities they represent and the questions they raise. this publication will seek to generate and discover unexpected new ways of relating reading and writing. working on the principle that the new technologies can complement, rather than compete with, the culture of the book, it will be one of the first publications to allow its users to combine the pleasure of reading the printed word with the advantages of "intelligent" reading assisted by computer: representation of a text's textual organization, dynamic annotation, access to a wider corpus of texts, iconographic, audiovisual and sound documents, etc. 2.2. connecting up with the internet ===================================== going beyond the traditional method whereby the contents of a publication are determined by an editorial committee, it will be possible to experiment with the selection and enrichment of the themes and topics by opening them up to discussion on the internet. at a later stage, articles from back issues and excerpts will be made available on the internet. 2.3. a publication on two media =============================== publication will be annual. the editorial characteristics of the periodical will contribute to its novelty. each issue will be designed as an intellectual event, in close link with the pompidou center. the publication will have its own independent resources for design, production and distribution. the publication will take the form of two products, sold together: a printed edition, comprising several hundred pages, and featuring unabridged commissioned articles together with accompanying illustrations, a cd-rom to allow for the combination of writings: stills, animated images and sounds. the designers of the project see these two forms of reading--traditional and electronic as perfectly compatible. the aim is to combine both modes of textual access and appropriation. it is worth pointing out some of the reading operations and types of textual presentation available on the electronic version. for example: linguistic exploration and analysis (vocabulary, style, syntax); representation of the textual organization; presentation of the various stages of the texts (manuscripts), up to the final version presented on paper; some of the more theoretical texts will be accompanied by their reference texts, thus allowing for association and contextualisation; dynamic annotation of the text by the reader, whereby the act of reading becomes an act of writing; availability of aids to literary creation such as generators, especially for the first issue, "literature and software engineering." the possibility of letting some authors create their own cd-rom sequences. 2.4. reaching an international audience: the question of language ================================================================== we are currently looking into the question of language. should we offer a publication that is entirely bilingual (french and english)? or one which reflects its global reach by publishing contributions in their original language as well as in french? should we offer a full french translation alongside the original version of texts by non-french contributors, or just abstracts? questionnaire we would like to know your thoughts about this project. please reply to the following few questions and return via email to "revue@cnac-gp.fr" thanks for your time! 1. who are you? 2. how old are you? 3. where do you live? 4. which language(s) do you speak? 5. would you read this publication in french? 6. would you read a bilingual version of this publication (french and english)? 7. which computer platform do you use: mac? pc? other (specify which one)? 8. what is your profession/activity? 9. your impressions, suggestions, thoughts about this project: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 48) postmodern culture postmodern culture a suny press series series editor: joseph natoli editor: carola sautter center for integrative studies, arts and humanities michigan state university we invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics to jeffrey dahmer, rap music to columbus, the presidential campaign to rodney king--and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies. this series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-becompleted north-south superhighway to truth and onto postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs," formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths. by developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes. accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style" that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiplenarratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational." inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to: joseph natoli series editor 20676jpn@msu.edu or carola sautter editor suny press suny plaza albany, ny 12246-0001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 49) _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ you are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of _psyche: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness_ (issn: 1039-723x). psyche is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. _psyche_ publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. _psyche_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. as an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. _psyche_ also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version. notes for authors: unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail. submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-200 word abstract as well. note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. in the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of psyche, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors. any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ascii. if that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally. authors of accepted articles assign to psyche the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- they clearly acknowledge _psyche_ as the original source of publication. subscriptions: subscriptions to the electronic version of _psyche_ may be initiated by sending the one-line command, subscribe psyche-l firstname lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to: listserv@nki.bitnet ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 50) _queer-e_ call for reviewers queer-e, the interdisciplinary electronic journal of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies is seeking article reviewers in the following disciplines: philosophy (all areas, but especially contemporary american and continental) cyberculture feminism/women's studies transgender studies/activism film/media/communications reviewers for queer-e will be asked to review no more than three articles in any one calendar year. reviewers are asked to agree to a "double-blind" review process (i.e. reviewers will not know the identity of the article's author, and the author will not know the identity of his/her reviewers). _queer-e_ will provide a "review-form" upon which reviewers can make their comments to the author, and their recommendation to the editorial collective of _queer-e_. if you would like to volunteer your time to _queer-e_ in this manner, please send the following information to : 1. a short biography detailing your academic and/or activist expertise 2. a short list of your publications and other work in the field of queer studies 3. an idea of what sort of articles you would be most interested in reviewing, or most able to review for _queer-e_. do you have a manuscript, book review, conference paper, or maybe part of your dissertation, that you would like to have published, to share with the other subscribers/readers? if so, why not consider sending it to us to be considered for inclusion in _queer-e_? please feel free to contact the editorial collective to discuss any writing projects you have on hand or in progress. we look forward to receiving your work! the queer-e editorial collective c/o queer-e-approval@vector.casti.com for information about subscribing to _queer-e_, or to receive a copy of the call for papers, mail a post that says: info queer-e-text to: majordomo@vector.casti.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 51) _reading rock 'n' roll: theoretical approaches to popular musics_. call for submissions original essays and proposals are solicited for an essay collection, tentatively called _reading rock 'n' roll: theoretical approaches to popular musics_. duke university press has expressed interest in considering the volume for publication. though a handful of rock lyrics are now regularly included in intro to lit anthologies, we have not been generally encouraged to take rock lyrics, live and recorded performances, and music videos seriously, or to employ the analytical tools of literary criticism in order to read them. with the rise of cultural studies, however, and the resultant blurring of the traditional boundaries between high art and popular entertainment, these ostensibly low-brow texts have begun to look every bit as complex, ironic, and deserving of serious study as their high-culture counterparts. in particular, we are interested in exploring rock music's relation to other forms of discourse, both in the ways it has appropriated and reconfigured them and how it has begun to be appropriated by artists from other media as a source of allusion, quotation, and mise en scene--a kind of cultural shorthand. this volume hopes to probe some of these intertextual tensions, and the various new protocols of reading they suggest. interested authors should write, phone, or e-mail with queries, or send 1-2 page abstracts (or completed essays of 20-35 pp., chicago style) by 31 march 1995, to: kevin j. h. dettmar department of english box 341503 clemson university clemson, south carolina 29634-1503 (803) 656 5397 (office) (803) 653 9122 (home) (803) 656 1345 (fax) dkevin@clemson.edu (e-mail) william richey department of english university of south carolina columbia, south carolina 29208 (803) 931 5265 (office) (803) 765 0763 (home) (803) 777 9064 (fax) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 52) research on virtual relationships ******************************************************* * * * research on virtual relationships * * * * have you had an interesting virtual relationship * * on electronic networks? a research team wants * * your story. material acknowledged and terms * * respected. both research articles and a * * general press (trade) book planned. * * * * mail to either address * * usa: canada: * * -or * * virtual, palabras * * p.o. box 46, box 175, stn. e * * boulder creek, toronto, ontario * * california 95006 canada m6h 4e1 * * * * e-mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca * * fax: (to canada): (416) 736-5986 * * -> please re-post to relevant network sites < * * ( a distributed knowledge project undertaking ) * ******************************************************* ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 53) _splinter_ splinter is a new electronic publication that seeks texts in various states of unfinish prose poetry neither both your scraps your scrytch your fragments your language doodles unfinished stories unfinished scenes unfinished sentences experiments freewriting drafts of drafts outlines bits of dialogue directionless musings stanzas that never found their way into poems flashes that dead-ended scribbled down and never became no length guidelines / authors keep all rights rolling submission, no deadlines the contact address at this point is dave1@gibbs.oit.unc.edu send your submissions, subscription requests, questions, and comments (put splinter somewhere in the subject line) e-mail subscriptions are free and encouraged. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 54) _straight with a twist: queer theory and the subject of heterosexuality call for papers for a collection of essays with the title---straight with a twist: queer theory and the subject of heterosexuality---theorists and critics are invited to submit essays which explore the political and discursive boundaries of sexual identity, with particular attention to the problem of "straight" negotiations of "queer" theory. among the issues that might be addressed would be: the "queer" as a discursive formation and its relations to the designations "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," and "straight" and the experiential fields they represent; the critical appropriation/deployment/proliferation of the word "queer" by heterosexually identified theorists (can "straights" be "critically queer?"); the tension between anti-foundationalist theories of sexuality and identity politics; confronting homophobia from within (i.e., one's own); the relation between "straight" readings of "queer" theory and other negotiations of difference, such as "male feminism," "white" readings of "ethnic and minority" theory, etc.; the question of the body; pedagogical and curricular problems; specific readings in literature, film, and mass culture. please send inquiries, proposals, or fully written papers by january 15, 1995 to: calvin thomas department of english literature and language 115 baker hall university of northern iowa cedar falls, ia 50613 calvin.thomas@cobra.uni.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 55) _transformation: marxist boundary work in theory, economics, politics, and culture_ _transformation_ is a new bi-quarterly journal edited by mas'ud zavarzadeh, teresa ebert, and donald morton. it is devoted to classical marxist analysis of urgent contemporary issues by bringing back into present discussions such concepts as class, mode of production, labor theory of value, surplus value, exploitation, . . . the first issue, transformation 1: post-ality: marxism and (post)modernism, will be published in november, 1994 (publisher: maisonneuve press, 301-277-7505). we are now receiving texts for the second issue. call for papers for consideration for issue 2 transformation 2 the "invention" of the queer: marxism, lesbian and gay theory, capitalism transformation 2: the "invention" of the queer engages queer theory as an advanced form of bourgeois social theory from a marxist perspective. (post)modern social and cultural theories, and especially queer theory, routinely claim that marxism lacks a theory of gender/sexuality and is in fact so fundamentally flawed that it cannot produce one. transformation 2 contests the question of sexuality through the discourse of invention (as in such recent books as _the invention of ethnicity_, _the invention of renaissance woman_, _the invention of pornography_, _heuretics: the logic of invention_ . . . ). invention is the latest concept being deployed in ludic theory to try to solve the historical impasse of social constructionism. while the "constructionist" view of the (homosexual) subject has become the dominant "progressive" view today, it is a cultural constructionism promoted by those who are hostile to a rigorous, determinate constructionism through economics, class, and the social division of labor, but who think it "unethical" to rule out the effects of such factors as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, . . . (all theorized as effects of culture, representation, textuality, or ahistorical "matter"). as "constructionism" has increasingly turned "ethical," it has also turned "inventionist" --that is, it has become a question of "invention," implying idealistically that social change has everything to do with the subject's "inventiveness" in a technicist (often called "technocultural") sense ("self-fashioning" in new historicism, "cyborg mutation" in haraway, "electric speech" in ronell, "performance" in butler, "choreography" in drucilla cornell, "architecture" in jameson). transformation 2: the "invention" of the queer argues that "constructionism" is not so much "exhausted" (as we are told in such texts as _fear of a queer planet_), but rather has reached an historical impasse of which the new discourse of "invention" is symptomatic. transformation 2 will critique today's dominant "ethical and technicist constructionism/inventionism" as a mystification that blocks a rigorous theorization of the materiality of the subject in general and of the homosexual-as-queer in particular. it investigates sexuality through ideology critique by focussing on such issues as homosexuality and/in the social division of labor; queer theory and the new pornotopia; genetics and identity; commodity fetishism and "queer" readings of marx; cybersex and libidinal economy; imperialism and (homo)sexual exploitation; (post)modern indeterminacy and aids pedagogy; text/sex--tech/sex; queering the internet; (re)inventing the body; lusting and the politics of lust . . . we are seeking both shorter critiques of 10 to 12 pp. on the queer and the everyday, as well as longer inquiries of 20-25 pp. please send texts, proposals, and inquiries for consideration by the editorial collective to donald morton, department of english, syracuse university, syracuse, new york ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 56) _u n d e r c u r r e n t_ call for manuscripts _undercurrent_ is a free journal available on the internet through e-mail subscriptions. (see end of this message for how to subscribe for free.) we are seeking article submissions or queries with abstracts providing an analysis of the present in terms of discourses, events, representations, classes, or cultures. we seek to publish analysis of the present from diverse intellectual perspectives--feminist, historical, ethnological, sociological, literary, political, semiotic, philosophical, cultural studies, and so forth. we seek applied analysis rather than theory. any theoretical orientation ought instead to be apparent and immanent in your particular focus on the present. we especially encourage interdisciplinary work. article length varies according to your needs, anywhere from "short-takes" of 500-1000 words to "feature" of up to 7500 words. as its audience is potentially much broader than that of academic journals held only in university libraries, the style must account for an educated audience which is not necessarily familiar with either the jargon or the debates in a special field. undercurrent wishes to publish articles that address this broader audience while also conveying a vivid sense of how current academic scholarship can contribute to our understanding of the present. we are attempting to bridge the gulf between academia and the general reading public, a gulf which has allowed various misperceptions about academia to become politically overcharged in the popular media. all submissions will receive a reply, however no copies can be returned. any major citation format is acceptable, although endnotes must be used rather than footnotes due to the contingencies of various platforms for viewing electronic text. submissions and queries can be sent in any of the following ways, in order of preference: e-mail to heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu and note in the subject field that this is a submission to undercurrent mail a floppy diskette with your text in ascii or wordperfect (address below). mail two copies of your essay by traditional post to: undercurrent erick heroux dept. of english university of oregon eugene, or 97403 about free subscriptions: you can subscribe yourself to undercurrent by sending a one-line e-mail message: subscribe undercurrent yourname@domain.where address it to: mailserv@oregon.uoregon.edu problems or questions can be e-mailed to heroux@darkwing.uoregon.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 57) understanding the social world **************************************************** * * * understanding the social world: * * towards an integrative approach * * * * * * july 17th 19th 1995 * * the university of huddersfield, uk * * * * first international conference including * * themes on: identity, the self, social * * cognition, agency/structure, social * * constructionism, multi-disciplinary * * methodology, individual/society, * * and postmodernity and society * * * * call for participation * * * * papers, symposium, posters * * * **************************************************** conference coordinator for further details regarding this conference please contact: david nightingale school of human and health sciences the university of huddersfield queensgate huddersfield hd1 3dh, uk email: social-conference@hud.ac.uk phone: (0484) 472461 or (0484) 422288 extension 2461 fax: (0484) 472794 please note: david nightingale will be unavailable from july 14th until august 1st. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 58) virtual futures 1995 call for papers virtual futures 1995 may 26-28, 1995 university of warwick coventry, england virtual futures 1995 is an interdisciplinary event that examines the role of cybernetic and specifically dissipative or non-linear models in the arts, sciences, and philosophy. the conference explores the relationship between postmodern philosophy and chaos theory, with topics ranging from: information technology, hypertext and multimedia applications, virtual reality and cyberspace, c3, complexity theory, cyberfeminism, artificial life and intelligence, neural nets, and nanotechnology. literary themes such as apocalypse, narcotics, cyberpunk science fiction, and annihilation are all welcome. philosophically, the conference emphasizes materialist schools of continental philosophy and neurophilosophy, with a particular stress laid on the work of the french philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari. of particular interest are papers tracing the theoretical implications of technology in regard to the future of economics, politics, and culture. invited speakers include (* has accepted invitation): *kathy acker, author of empire of the senseless *hakim bey, author of temporary autonomous zone *pat cadigan, author of synners and fools *manuel delanda, author of war in the age of intelligent machines *james der derian, author of antidiplomacy & virtual security *michael hardt, co-author of labour of dionysus *gwyneth jones, author of white queen *richard kadrey, author of metrophage & the covert culture sourcebook *marilouise & arthur kroker, editors of ctheory *nick land, lecturer in continental philosophy at warwick university *brian massumi, author of the user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia *alan moore & *david jay, writers, musicians, and performance artists *stephen pfohl, author of death at the parasite cafe *sadie plant, cyberfeminist-lecturer in cultural studies at birmingham university *david porush, author of cybernetic fictions *alan sondheim, cybermind moderator *stelarc, performance artist *vns-matrix, cyberfeminist collective from australia mike davis, author of city of quartz keith ferrell, editor of omni max more, editor of extropy, a leader of the extropian movement orlan, performance artist ed regis, author of the great mambo chicken and the transhuman condition rudy rucker, author of the fourth dimension r.u. sirius, writer and journalist if you would like to present a paper at virtual futures '95, please send a 250 word abstract before march 1st to virtual futures '95, the centre for research in philosophy and literature, university of warwick, coventry, cv4 7al, england. phone: (44)(0203) 523523 x2582, fax: (44)(0203)523019. e-mail can be sent to the following address: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59) virtual reality world dear colleagues, thanks for the interest you showed in the "virtual reality vienna'93". we are now proud to present a new conference, slightly moved from vienna (austria) to stuttgart (germany), bigger and hopefully of even more quality! this conference is actually the fusion of the three biggest virtual reality conferences in europe. expect the best... any suggestion and proposal is welcome. yours, christian bauer c/o christian bauer & freunde hoettinger gasse 8 a-6020 innsbruck austria / europe tel +43 512 29 57 60 fax +43 512 28 16 98 email chris@well.sf.ca.us (if the above adress doesn't work...) information on the "virtual reality world 1995" 21st to 23rd february of 1995 in stuttgart, germany the "virtual reality world 1995 (vrw'95)" is an international conference on virtual reality, with speeches, tutorials, exhibits and social events. vrw'95 is a fusion of the three main virtual reality events in europe: 1. "virtual reality forum '93 and '94" organised by the fraunhofer institutes iao and ipa 2. "virtual reality conference" in london sponsored by mecklermedia 3. "virtual reality vienna '93" sponsored by idg austria main sponsor for the vrw'95 is idg conferences and seminars / computerwoche verlag gmbh,germany. mecklermedia is organizing the exhibit and the two fraunhofer institutes do the scientific supervision. the agenda is organized by the fraunhofer institutes iao and ipa and christian bauer, the initiator and agenda-coordinator of the "virtual reality vienna '93". some figures: the organizers of the vrw'95 plan to have 500 conference attendees from about 25 countries and more than 3000 visitors of the exhibition. on the first day, the 21st of february 1995, tutorials will be offered, on the follwoing two days there will be about 50 speeches from international experts. the vrw'95 claims to be the leading european event. more information on the vrw'95 will follow in the next weeks. the chairmen of the programme committee are: prof. h.-j. bullinger, iao prof. r.-d. schraft, ipa finally some persons, who already agreed to speak on the vrw'95: prof. nat durlach, mit prof. ken kaplan, harvard dr. sandra helsel, virtual reality world ben delaney, cyberedge journal dr. ian hunter, mit prof. edouard bannwart, art + com dr. robert stone, aarl prof. gerd hirzinger, german aerospace establishment prof. nadja thalmann, university of geneva dr. lew hitchner, xtensory howard rheingold, writer ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 60) deleuze-guattari list the list deleuze@world.std.com, a forum for discussion of the works of french theorists gilles deleuze and felix guattari, has changed its name to deleuze-guattari@jefferson.village.virginia.edu. to subscribe, send the message: "subscribe deleuze-guattari" (no name necessary) to: majordomo@jefferson.village.virginia.edu for more information about the list, send the message: "info deleuze-guattari" to: majordomo@jefferson.village.virginia.edu eric davis moderator deleuze-guattari ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 61) the electronic poetry center (buffalo) the mission of this world-wide web based electronic poetry center is to serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in formally innovative writing in the united states and the world. the center will provide access to numerous electronic resources in the new poetries including rif/t and other electronic poetry journals, the poetics list archives, a library of poetic texts, news of related print sources, and direct connections to numerous related poetic projects. the center's first phase of implementation is scheduled for august 1, 1994. a subscription to the e-poetry list provides a subscription to the electronic journal rif/t and e-poetry center announcements. subscriptions to e-poetry to: listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu inquiries, suggestions for center resources, submissions to rif/t, and other mail may be directed to: e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu the center is located at gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift (currently, the prototype is under construction but operational.) gopher access: for those who have access to gopher, type gopher wings.buffalo.edu (or, if you are on a ub mainframe, simply type wings) at your system prompt. first choose libraries & library resources, then electronic journals, then e-journals/resources produced here at ub, then the electronic poetry center. (note: connections to some poetry center resources require web access, though most are presently available through gopher). world-wide web access: for those with world-wide web or lynx access, type www or lynx at your system prompt. choose the go to url option then go to (type as one continuous string) gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift participation in the electronic poetry center (buffalo) for those interested in helping us build the center, our goal is to provide a single internet site that offers a doorway into the different poetic projects out there in the electronic (and paper) poetics world. we would like to offer access to information about poetics and poetry activities, electronic poetry journals, texts in progress, etc. we are currently developing a library of electronic poetry/poetics texts (submissions to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu). the center has other exciting possibilities: 1. circulation of electronic journals with an emphasis on direct links to those of relevance to center concerns; 2. reviews of recent print and electronic publications. (brief reviews may also be submitted electronically to e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu); 3. direct links to other related electronic sites; 4. multimedia resources. sound and graphics relating to poetry. 5. building our small press alcove, a place for little magazine and book announcements. the point of including announcements of paper resources is to provide a listing of interesting work for people to look at; they can then write or e-mail the publisher to obtain publications. (send announcements to lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu or magazines/books to loss glazier, e-poetry, p.o. box 143, getzville, ny 14068-0143); 6. ultimately, the center could also offer collaborative projects (perhaps for specific groups of writers), lists and/or archives of other lists, and texts-in-progress, as things develop. mail to e-poetry, or to loss glazier (lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu) or kenneth sherwood (v001pxfu.ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu) privately. the archive is administered in buffalo by e-poetry and rif/t in coordination with the poetics list. loss glazier for kenneth sherwood and loss glazier in collaboration with charles bernstein ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 62) femisa femisa@mach1.wlu.ca femisa is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate. formally, femisa was established to help those members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the international studies association keep in touch. more generally, i hope that femisa can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the international studies association. to subscribe: send one line message in the body of mail-message sub femisa your name to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca to unsub send the one line message unsub femisa to: listserv@mach1.wlu.ca i look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you. owner: deborah stienstra stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca department of political science university of winnipeg ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 63) fiction-of-philosophy a new electronic forum for the discussion and presentation of philosophical fiction, fictional philosophy, and everything in-between the fiction-of-philosophy: as in the fiction-of-crime, the category encompasses both `philosophical fiction' and that aspect of philosophy which encounters fiction as a mode of inquiry. philosophical fiction would include the novels of bataille, ballard, gibson, sartre; works of jabes, michaux, lautreamont, karl kraus; poetry of lucretius, susan howe, holderlin; the philosophical micro-narratives of baudrillard, nietzsche, and barthes; lingis' exhilerated accounts of the other/gender, kathy acker's deconstruction of sexualities and politics, and other writers/writings too numerous to mention... why this list? because "creative" and theoretic writing are inter-woven yet distanced by the history of faculties, and because new formations carry the possibilities of new modes of thinking through our overheated postmodern cultural terrain. the list has as goals both the discussion of the fiction-of philosophy in general or in reference to specific authors; and the presentation of creative work that may bear on current issues of theory. fiction-of-philosophy: fop, defined in the older roget: "...swell, dandy, exquisite, coxcomb, beau, man about town, spark, popinjay, puppy, prig, jackanapes, carpet knight, dude" extended into situationist, raconteur, flaneur... existing-between, passing for the other, the spy in the house of love who came in from the cold. the threads on the list might include presentations and discussions of creative work by the participants, cross-postings addressing relevant issues, discussions/critiques/group readings of specific literary works, and discussions of more general issues ranging from the interface between poetry and philosophy, to the narratology of the site of writing-philosophy (heidegger's forest, jabes' desert, ballard's high-way). this list is open to everyone interested in philosophy and theory, on any level. fiction-of-philosophy is brought to you by the spoon collective, a group of net citizens devoted to free and open discussion of literary and philosophical issues on the internet. based on the collective's philosophy, please be aware that posts containing language or subject matter that some might find offensive may appear on the list from time to time, and such posts will not be censored. however, we would also like you to know that racial or other bias slurs will not be tolerated; there are other sites on the internet for them. to (re)subscribe, send the message: subscribe fiction-of-philosophy to majordomo@jefferson.village.virginia.edu to send a post, send to: fiction-of-philosophy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu to unsubscribe, send to majordomo@jefferson.village.virginia.edu unsubscribe fiction-of-philosophy to find out who is on the list, send the message: who fiction-of-philosophy if you have any difficulties or more questions concerning the list, contact the list moderator, sondheim@panix.com please note that there are no archives available as yet. alan sondheim sondheim@panix.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 64) holocaus: holocaust list holocaus on listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu holocaus@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups ("lists") at the university of illinois, chicago. it is sponsored by the university's history department and its jewish studies program. to subscribe to holocaus, you need and internet or bitnet computer account. from that account, send this message to: listserv@uicvm.bitnet or listserv@uicvm.uic.edu sub holocaus firstname surname use your own firstname and lastname. you will be automatically added. you can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (we have about 100 subscribers around the world right now). owner: jimmott@spss.com holocaus is moderated by jim mott (jimmott@spss.com), a phd in history, and is a part of h-net, a project run by computer-oriented historians at the u of illinois. we see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. h-net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. details of the h-net plan are available on request from richard jensen, the director, at: campbelld@apsu or u08946@uicvm.uic.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 65) mcluhan list "even mud gives the illusion of depth" --marshall mcluhan the marshall mcluhan center for global communications in association with the center for media science (both non-profit) are releasing a veritable mountain of information in 1995, updating mcluhan theory and using mcluhan insights to analyze the world we live in, and "project" trends over the coming months and years. the medium is still very much the message! these two associations have incredible resources to share -all the mcluhan archives, as well as individuals who wrote and lectured with marshall. the process of "updating" mcluhan theory to 1995 has been years in the making! the result will be a detailed analysis of the interplay between technology and culture. this information affects everyone on the planet, and will be shared. project mcluhan will also release information gleaned from so-called "alternative media," non-traditional media which nonetheless gather and distribute information which may be of interest. topics (keywords) include technology, computers, culture, sight & sound, advertising, marketing, communication, humour, lifestyles, health, rumour, enigmas and much more. there is no charge to be on the e-list. to join the list send a short email to: mclr@inforamp.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 66) popcult popcult@camosun.bc.ca the popcult list is now in place. it is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. the list will not be moderated. material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged. to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to: mailserv@camosun.bc.ca there should not be anything in the 'subject:' line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself. some keywords are: subscribe popcult help lists send/list popcult unsubscribe popcult send messages to: popcult@camosun.bc.ca owner: peter montgomery montgomery@camosun.bc.ca professor dept of english ph (604) 370-3342 (o) camosun college (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 foul bay road victoria, bc off. paul bldg 326 canada v8p 5j2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- postcolonial the spoon collective would like to announce the creation of a postcolonial mailing list. postcolonial is an electronic forum for discussion and experimentation rooted in postcolonial literature, film, and theory. postcolonial is an open list all interested parties are invited and encouraged to participate. specific information about the list is below. to subscribe to postcolonial, send the message: subscribe postcolonial to: majordomo@lists.village.virginia.edu to post a message to postcolonial, send your post to: postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu the (im)propriety of the term "postcolonial" will hopefully be addressed on the list. for now: "we use the term 'post-colonial'...to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day" (bill ashcroft, et al. _the empire writes back_. 1989). postcolonial literature and film generally includes the cultural productions emerging out of the experience of colonization. postcolonial theory and criticism interrogates the relations between culture and imperialism. it frequently is concerned with creating agency for the marginalized and with recovering lost cultural histories. feminist questions are, of course, germane to this discussion. the roles of academia and the internet in postcolonial power relations merit discussion as well. a list of representative authors and directors might include: literature: chinua achebe, george lamming, aime cesaire, sara suleri, salman rushdie, buchi emecheta, jamaica kincaid, michelle cliff, marguerite duras, farida karodia, ayi kwei armah, nuruddin farah, nadine gordimer, bessie head, v.s. naipaul, wole soyinka, simone schwarz-bart, derek walcott, anita desai, hanif kureishi, c.l.r. james, etc. film: claire denis, ketan mehta, farida ben lyazid, ken loach, peter ormrod, horace ove, srinivas krishna, ousmane sembene, gurinder chada, pratibha parmar, the sankofa film collective, mira nair, marguerite duras, etc. theory: homi bhabha, partha chatterjee, amilcar cabral, frantz fanon, ranajit guha, gayatri chakravorty spivak, edward said, trinh t. minha, ngugi wa thiong'o, abdul jan mohamed, etc. this is an "open list"--posts on all aspects of the above issues and more will be welcomed. it is open to general discussion, group readings of published works, the sharing and critique of participants' works-in-progress, and creative appropriations of the texts across a variety of disciplines. this list is unmoderated in the sense that all posts are sent out without the need for approval. however, if you are interested in serving as coordinator of the list (not approving posts but instigating, trying to maintain discussion, and helping with administrative tasks), please contact the spoon collective: spoons@jefferson.village.virginia.edu postcolonial is brought to you by the spoon collective, a group of net citizens devoted to free and open discussion of philosophical issues on the internet. based on the collective's philosophy, please be aware that posts containing language or dealing with subject matter that some might find offensive may appear on the list from time to time, and such posts will not be censored. for that reason, if you are not interested in receiving such posts, please do not subscribe. other spoon lists include: avant-garde, bataille, baudrillard, blanchot, cybermind, deleuze-guattari, feyerabend, fiction-of-philosophy, film-theory, foucault, frankfurt-school, french-feminism, lyotard, marxism, nietzsche... please address any questions, comments, or concerns that are not appropriate for the list as a whole to: spoons@jefferson.village.virginia.edu this announcement created by dan kern of the spoon collective. special thanks to mia carter for her help. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 68) virted: virtual reality and education virted on listserv@sjuvm.bitnet or listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu virted is an open, unmoderated discussion list for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in the uses of virtual reality in education and learning. we look forward to the exchange of ideas related to virtual reality. in this forum we hope to explore the use and potential uses of virtual reality environments in both traditional and alternative educational settings, the effects of virtual reality environments upon the learning process, and the efficacy of using virtual reality as an educational delivery system. review of research, publications and observations related to educational uses of virtual reality are welcome and encouraged. our mission is to shed light on this new avenue of education and learning which takes place in both text based environments as well as graphic environments. to subscribe, send the following command in the body of mail to listserv@sjuvm on bitnet or listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu on the internet: sub virted yourfirstname yourlastname for example: sub virted jane doe owners: valorie j. king p.j. lucas dr. robert zenhausern ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 69) new media site visits stuart glover is program manager for writing at arts queensland and also who is also preparing a policy statement for the queensland government on new media. he's looking for places to visit and short-term attachments in the usa and europe at oranisations and institutions that are familiar with the use of new media technology in writing/publishing/libraries or government adminstration and policy. his study will cover network publishing as well as cd-rom and other emerging forms. stuart glover arts queensland gpo box 1436 brisbane qld 4001 australia +61 7 225 8106 voice (freecall 008 175 531 in australia) +61 7 224 4077 fax (freefax 008 175 532 in australia) p.brown@gu.edu.au please put attn: stuart glover in the subject field ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 70) leonardo www collaboration rooms the leonardo www site announces a new service : the collaboration meeting rooms which provide a mechanism for interested individuals and organisations to find collaborators with specific skills, experience or interests. projects seeking collaborators can post requests for collaborators, persons interested in collaborating can contact project organisers. the leonardo www collaboration meeting rooms are accessible on the leonardo electronic members forum on: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/leonardo/members.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 71) on line poetry we are featuring an on-line poetry series for the nuyorican poets cafe, a a burgeoning center for poetry slams in the heart of the east village in nyc. the site features works by promising, young poets such as maggie estep and reg e. gaines. http://marketplace.com:80/obs/books/holt/books/aloud/index.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 72) cyberanthropology page cyberanthropology is cyborg anthropology given a dmt hit from terrence mckenna. it's what malinowski would have done if he had mondo 2000 to read. it's a humanities refresher for the posthuman! still in the preliminary stages, but aimed at the cyberanthropologist interested in computer-mediated communications (cmc), postmodernity, hypermedia, modern primitivism, hyperreality, virtual communities, virtual reality, cyberculture, technoculture, and the changing landscape of the human interface with technology. please: send me your essays, if you're a prospective cyberanthropologist. send me gifs or mpegs or aus you think might spice the place up. tell me of links you think would be kool for my cyberanthropology page. most of all, tell me what you think of the stuff that's on there now (mostly my essays.) the url is http://www.clas.ufl.edu/anthro/seeker1_s_cyberanthro_page.html --seeker1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- end of notices for january, 1995 -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------evans, 'two poems', postmodern culture v5n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n1-evans-two.txt archive pmc-list, file evans.994. part 1/1, total size 5459 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- two poems by michael evans mrevans@delphi.com postmodern culture v.5 n.1 (september, 1994) copyright (c) 1994 by michael evans, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the behavior of bodies, the motion of clocks an orbit is a way of keeping time- not a metaphor for life together with another life--a body and a body at odds with the room's linear constraints. (the room itself is not a metaphor for how we live.) the bed does not unfold like two hands --one circling the other and transparent- as if loneliness (the beating silence of these days he lives without speaking) were enough to suggest that time and distance are measured with the same equation. at night, he sets the clock to an hour that already exists (thinly, as light) beyond the orbits he understands- the comings and goings of doctors, this routine of pills. he listens to the elliptical path of his breathing and he knows the universe will not collapse in time to save his youth (for yourself, sir, shall grow old as i am, if like a crab you could go backward). he dreams himself a young man, but wakes to nothing less than he is. he is not allowed a mirror and does not look at his hands. breathing, he counts himself to sleep. were he a crab, he would give up this shell. ------------------------------------------------------------- the love songs of leonardo da vinci 1 between the eye and the object seen there is another kind of perspective which, by the atmosphere, in a single line of the same size, is able to distinguish the remotest (as a couple) and represent them in a picture --between my eye and them- more than another and a somewhat equal- them and the same density of them and in a single line make them appear and almost of the same as the atmosphere. there is a perspective which the atmosphere attracts to them- their images exist- and not their forms merely. there is a kindness between them able to make the nearest above and of its same color, the more distant bluer. between the single line of them, between the eye and moon of them- without suffering- they are the same. among them, a rose does the same and other perfumes. 2 spechio in the mirror of the room, these two (their bodies) stand among the others, apart- in the light from a single window, they are the same (equal and almost) --if each should notice the other (their shadows opposite the window) in the mirror above the sofa- should see (as if distance is abbreviation) the other at an angle that is the angle of the body- if each should touch the glass to touch the other, isn't it the other who will understand this distance between them?- (the other reaching out to touch) the eye of the other (in the mirror) will see him (his finger on the glass) touching his own. 3 on the cause of generation no part of the body is always the same. the shadow of the other and of the self like two hands in front of a candle- which one is twice as dark? which one moved across the body moves more slowly? i will not breathe within the light leaking through the curtain and the reflection of the moon. there is proportion to the breadth of shadow--the nearer, the deeper it appears (as light, only opposite). but if direct, how long before the eye sees at a distance another shadow move the body such that light is of an equal size? at that moment, stars take on the shape of stars and the angle of the skin is impossible to compass. it's the calculus of living that we need. touch me. touch the surface of these bodies placed next to each other- the same and nearly opposite. come in and mingle with them. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[readers], 'selected letters from readers', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-[readers]-selected.txt archive pmc-list, file letters.196. part 1/1, total size 8068 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------selected letters from readers postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edudress> ---------------------------------------------------------------- copyright (c) 1996 by the authors, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. ---------------------------------------------------------------- the following responses were submitted by pmc readers using regular email or the pmc reader's report form. not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited. ----------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on stephanie barbe hammer, "'just like eddie' or as far as a boy can go: vedder, barthes, and handke dismember mama" (september, 1995) i really appreciated reading your article on eddie, but some of your information is incorrect. first, eddie did have a paternal figure during his childhood. his mother was married to a man named mueller, whom eddie frequently refers to in many of his earlier songs, even before his times with pearl jam. mr. mueller is the man who caused the immense troubles in eddie's and his mother's lives. however, mr. mueller was not eddie's true father, he was actually his "step-father." if you look in the cover sleeve to _ten_, eddie's god-given name is listed. it is actually eddie louis severson iii, but it was quickly changed to mueller early in his life. unfortunately, eddie did not find this out until age thirteen, hence the line in the song "alive." when his mother finally divorced mr. mueller, his name was changed to vedder, which was actually his mother's maiden name. again, i found your article and references to be one of the best i've seen in a long while, but i was unsure if you were aware of the actual background of eddie's childhood. therefore, i decided to give you a quick rundown. i think if you would include this info. in your article somehow, it would make it even better. thanks again, bill angione these comments are from: bill the email address for bill is: angionwt@muc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------stephanie hammer responds to bill angione: thanks very much for writing and for your response. actually, i was aware of vedder's background, but for the purposes of the essay i am interested in the %imaginaries% (rather than "realities") constructed by the autobiographical material. likewise, i do not investigate or, for that matter, even mention barthes' and handke's "real" relations with their mothers, but rather seek to unpack the twists and tangles that emerge in the texts. still your point interests me a lot. what is it about vedder and perhaps about rock in general (and grunge?) that makes us want to get "the facts right"? i think part of vedeer's fascination as a performer/celebrity lies in his ability to play the border between truth and fantasy, and i also wonder if we don't bring romantic (rather than modern) expectations to the rock artist -expecting him/her to be authentic, original, tortured, addicted, and a host of other qualities which western culture first assigned to people like byron and e.t.a. hoffmann. i would be curious to know what you and others think about this in conjunction with the "difficulty" of approaching rock from any sort of theoretical-analytical perspective. really, your comment is very rich and thought-provoking. thank you again. stephanie hammer ----------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on peter consenstein, "memory and oulipian constraints" (september, 1995) i've just read peter consenstein's text about oulipo: there are several things that i didn't understand, because i was lacking references or because my english is not good enough, but found it very interesting. i've been interested in the works of oulipo for a while, and have started making a web page about it with some friends (the url is: http://alpha.univ-lille1.fr:28080/~bruhat/oulipo/ but everything still is under construction!). another aspect of oulipo which seems interesting to me is its strong link with mathematics (i happen to be a math student, by the way). francois le lionnais who played a very important role in the foundation of oulipo was a mathematician, as was roubaud, and queneau himself was very interested in mathematics (what was said about "odile" really made me feel like reading it!). in a his latest book, _poesie etcetera menage_, roubaud said that when creating oulipo, they also referred to nicolas bourbaki (a collective pseudonym of a group of french mathematician created in the 30's), but in a somewhat parodic, "non-serious" way. they referred as well to the surrealists, but mostly as a "counter-example," because of all the fights and polemics which happened between the surrealists. for example, they decided that all the members of oulipo were life members, in order to avoid the problems of exclusion, schism, etc. in fact, they ostensibly remained members even after their death, unless they committed suicide after doing a special declarartion about it in front of a lawyer. . . ! good example of oulipian humor! well, . . . it's pleasant to see some things about oulipo on the web. i wonder what present members would say about it. (i think claude berge, who's a math researcher in paris, has an email account . . . if you're interested.) best regards, estelle souche these comments are from: estelle souche the email address for estelle souche is: esouche@ens.ens-lyon.fr ----------------------------------------------------------------pmc reader's report on phoebe sengers, "madness and automation: on institutionalization" (may, 1995) i found the article on institutionalisation extremely interesting. what a pity this kind of article never appears in psychiatric journals. psychiatrists act as if the event of psychiatric hospitalization is value-neutral and benevolent to the client when, as your article shows, the experience for the recipient of such care is more like a trip through a chamber of horrors. more and more patients are objecting to this method of defining and managing madness, yet psychiatry itself seems oblivious to the human rights issues involved in enforced incarceration and treatment. the status of "voluntary hospitalization" is well described in your paper especially its easy conversion to involuntary status. another ominous development is the advent of the compulsory community treatment order, with which patients can be forced to submit to drug treatment on an out-patient basis, so that the hospitalization can be continued interminably. since the drugs used are highly brain-damaging, the fear this "treament" instills can be enormous. thanks again for a most interesting paper, which i will recommend to my clients. these comments are from: l. achimovich the email address for l. achimovich is: achimova@cleo.murdoch.edu.au.h.edu.au ------------------end of letters.196 for pmc 6.2---------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------fredman, '"how to get out of the room that is the book?" paul auster and the consequences of confinement', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-fredman-how.txt archive pmc-list, file fredman.596. part 1/1, total size 99025 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "how to get out of the room that is the book?" paul auster and the consequences of confinement by stephen fredman notre dame stephen.a.fredman.1@nd.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by stephen fredman, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. i. [1] reading the novels of paul auster over the years, i find myself drawn back again and again to his first prose text, _the invention of solitude_ (1982), especially to its second half, "the book of memory," a memoir-as-meditation, in which auster confronts all of his central obsessions, obsessions that return in various forms to animate his subsequent novels.^1^ one of the most resonant images from "the book of memory" that recurs in auster's later work is that of "the room of the book," a place where life and writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes dangerous encounter. in the present essay, i would like to examine the room of the book through three interpretive frameworks that will help to make its dimensions apprehensible. these frameworks represent dynamic issues that arise from within the room of the book, issues that account for some of the characteristic complexities of auster's work: 1) a contest between prose and poetry that colors much of his writing; 2) a parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity that he constructs with great effort; and 3) a pervasive preoccupation with holocaust imagery. in my reading of auster's prose, the postmodern inquiry into the relationship between writing and identity metamorphoses into a confrontation with a series of gender issues, oriented around the father, and then metamorphoses again into an interrogation of the particularly jewish concern with memory. using memory to probe the ruptures in contemporary life, auster returns ultimately to the unspeakable memories of the holocaust, thus laying bare ways in which the postmodern is inescapably post-holocaust. [2] to set the stage, we will look at an exemplary dramatization of the equation between "the room" and "the book" in _ghosts_ (1986), the second volume of auster's _new york trilogy_. the protagonist of _ghosts_, blue, has recently completed an apprenticeship to a master detective, brown, and the novel narrates blue's first "case," in which he hopes to establish an identity as self-sufficient "agent." blue has been engaged by white to "keep an eye on" black, a simple "tail job" that turns out to be much more demanding than blue could have imagined. it's not that black is difficult to follow; in fact, he hardly ever leaves his room. from his own room across the street, blue, using binoculars, can see that black spends most of his time writing in a notebook and reading. in order to record black's activities, blue takes out a notebook himself and begins to write, thus initiating the equation between the room and the book. [3] after nearly a year of tailing black, following him on long walks and watching him read and write, blue begins to find his lack of knowledge about black, white, and the case unbearable. unsuccessful in his attempt to precipitate a disclosure from the ever-elusive white, blue realizes that his perpetual spying on the nearly sedentary black has rendered blue a virtual prisoner in his own room. it dawns on him that black and white may be in collusion, and that in fact %he% may be the one under surveillance: if so, what are they doing to him? nothing very terrible, finally -at least not in any absolute sense. they have trapped blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. yes, says blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. he feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. this is strange enough -to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. but if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. he could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to forget himself. but this book offers him nothing. there is no story, no plot, no action -nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. that's all there is, blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. but how to get out? how to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room? (nyt 201-2) [4] not an intellectual or even much of a reader, blue has been metamorphosed into a writer -that is, into someone who lives inside a book. every other aspect of his life has been taken away from him -he has abandoned his fiancee, his mentor refuses to offer advice, etc. -and he realizes the terror of the writer: "there is no story, no plot, no action -nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book." this primal condition of the writer in the present age -imprisoned, facing a blank page without the structures of story, plot, or action to support him - has become blue's life, and he begins to suspect that black (or white?) has planned it that way, willing this monstrous metamorphosis. [5] blue's suspicions that his life has been captured by a book are confirmed during two visits to black's room. in the second, blue crosses the street one night when black is out and steals a pile of papers stacked on black's desk. when he begins to read them, blue sees that they are his own weekly reports; this means that black and white are the same person and that, in some mysterious way, blue and black have been writing the same book. with these realizations, blue collapses into vertigo and enters a state of irresolvable doubleness: for blue at this point can no longer accept black's existence, and therefore he denies it. having penetrated black's room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of black's solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. to enter black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. but this is precisely where black is, even though blue does not know it. (226) [6] when blue realizes that black is his double, he also becomes aware that black's room is the uncanny scene of writing, which blue, who had never conceived of himself as a writer, had been afraid of entering all along. in confronting black's solitude, he meets his own; in confronting black's writing, he recovers his own and realizes that he has become a writer. when he walks across the street to black's room one more time, blue finds out why black/white has hired him. upon entering the room, blue encounters black pointing a revolver at him, intending to end both of their lives. in the ensuing dialogue, blue, the bewildered detective, tries one more time to understand what has been happening: you're supposed to tell me the story. isn't that how it's supposed to end? you tell me the story, and then we say good-bye. you know it already, blue. don't you understand that? you know the story by heart. then why did you bother in the first place? don't ask stupid questions. and me -what was i there for? comic relief? no, blue, i've needed you from the beginning. if it hadn't been for you, i couldn't have done it. needed me for what? to remind me of what i was supposed to be doing. every time i looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. you were the whole world to me, blue, and i turned you into my death. you're the one thing that doesn't change, the one thing that turns everything inside out. (230) [7] black has turned blue into his ideal reader, for whom every moment of black's existence in a room writing a book has been full of unfathomable meaning. and by allaying the writer's constant fear that the external world will dematerialize during his residence in the space of writing, blue's gaze has "turn[ed] everything inside out" for black, making his writing into a fateful, and ultimately fatal, act. having created this external witness to his internal activity as writer, black has also transformed his reader, blue, into a double, into a writer himself. black has kept blue trapped in a room, with blue's gaze fixed upon black, in a successful effort to enclose himself in the space of writing until the demands of the book are met. and because blue is also the writer of the book, its demands cannot be fully met until blue comes to understand that all along he has been author of his own fate. when blue achieves this recognition, the story that black is writing ends in death -but not quite as black had planned. for blue is now the author, who physically overpowers black and beats him, presumably to death, as though doing away with an insufferable mirror, which has kept him confined inside the room that is the book. ii. [8] for whom can it be said that entrapment within the room that is the book is intolerable? certainly blue, who has always thought of himself as a man of action, rather than a reader, finds it so: "he feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life" (nyt 201-2). but through the character of blue, auster also paints a portrait of a type of writer about whom blue knows nothing: the modern poet. it is the modern (male) poet whose condition is most fully epitomized by the statement, "there is no story, no plot, no action - nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book" (202). in the course of explaining why he became a performance poet, david antin has characterized this solipsism of the modern poet in derogatory terms: as a poet i was getting extremely tired of what i considered an unnatural language act going into a closet so to speak sitting in front of a typewriter and nothing is necessary a closet is no place to address anybody (antin 56) although he may be perverse in antin's terms, auster is powerfully drawn to this "unnatural language act," for the image of the lonely poet trapped inside the room that is the book haunts his writing. on another level, though, it is not self-enclosure that constitutes an "unnatural act" in auster's writing, but rather the intrusion of poetry into narrative prose. his fiction and memoirs have remained remarkably open to poetry and to what are thought of as poetic concerns, and this openness results in unusual pressures on the writing, pressures that account for many of its salient characteristics. [9] typically, if we call a novel "poetic," we mean that it has a "lyrical" quality, like andre gide's _l'immoraliste_ or virginia woolf's _the waves_, or we mean that the words have been chosen with particular relish for their sound and exactitude, as in the stories of guy davenport or in michael ondaatje's _the english patient_. auster's fiction, however, is not especially lyrical in its rhythm or its diction; indeed, its tone is deliberately flat, in the manner of factual statement. and although by carefully portraying dilemmas of understanding he creates characters whose driving concerns are epistemological, his exactitude is of a phenomenological or hermeneutic sort, rather than a matter of heightened verbal precision. in other words, the poetic element in auster's fiction is not a "formal" concern. instead, it can be located in his engagement with a range of the fundamental issues that have defined twentieth-century poetry: the materiality of language, the relations between words and objects, the commanding presence of silence, the impact of prose upon poetry, and the ways in which, as marina tsvetaeva puts it, "in this most christian of worlds / all poets are jews" (quoted by auster, ah 114). [10] just as the identity of the poet hides in the character of blue, these poetic issues hide among the more immediately noticeable metafictional qualities of auster's writing. admittedly, a general description of his fiction might make it hard to differentiate auster's work from that of any number of postmodern novelists, for whom poetry would be the least of their concerns. to give such a general description of auster's fiction in a single sentence, you could say that his books are allegories about the impossibly difficult task of writing, in which he investigates the similarly impossible task of achieving identity -through characters plagued by a double who represents the unknowable self -and that this impossible task takes place in an irrational world, governed by chance and coincidence, whose author cannot be known. and then it would be easy to construct a map of precursors and sources as a congenial modern terrain in which to situate auster's work: the textual entrapments of kafka, beckett, borges, calvino, ponge, blanchot, jabes, celan, and derrida; the psychological intensities of poe, hawthorne, melville, thoreau, dickinson, dostoevsky, and freud; the paranoid overdeterminations of surrealism, magic, alchemy, and kabbalah. this capsule description and list of affinities and affiliations slights two important features: auster's extensive work as a poet and as a translator of french poetry and the crucial ways in which his narrative prose stages an encounter between poetry and the novel. [11] for many novelists at the beginning of their careers, poetry may function as a form of finger exercises, but in auster's case there was a curiously persistent vacillation. in an interview with larry mccaffery and sinda gregory, he chronicles some of the dodges he took between verse and prose, before his decisive turn to fiction: "i had always dreamed of writing novels. my first published works were poems, and for ten years or so i published only poems, but all along i spent nearly as much time writing prose. i wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, i filled up dozens of notebooks. it's just that i wasn't satisfied with it, and i never showed it to anyone" (ah 291). reportedly, he became so frustrated with his efforts at fiction that he stopped altogether in the mid-seventies, restricting himself to composing and translating poetry and to writing critical essays. the poems, as auster rightly notes, initially "resembled clenched fists; they were short and dense and obscure, as compact and hermetic as delphic oracles" (ah 293), but during the later seventies they began to open up: "the breath became somewhat longer, the propositions became somewhat more discursive" (ah 294). finally, though, at a time of acute emotional and financial distress, he reached a profound impasse: "there were moments when i thought i was finished, when i thought i would never write another word" (ah 294). having touched bottom, as many of his characters do, auster was ready for a breakthrough, which he says came when he attended a dance rehearsal: "something happened, and a whole world of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. i think it was the absolute fluidity of what i was seeing, the continual motion of the dancers as they moved around the floor. it filled me with immense happiness" (ah 294). the next day he began writing _white spaces_ (1980; d 101-110), his one work of what i would call "poet's prose," which he describes "an attempt on my part to translate the experience of that dance performance into words. it was a liberation for me, a tremendous letting go, and i look back on it now as the bridge between writing poetry and writing prose" (ah 295).^2^ [12] over the past two centuries, poets have attested again and again to a liberating sensation when they begin to write poetry in prose. one might expect such freedom to be a result of escaping from the rigorous demands of meter and rhyme; but instead, it's as if the poet finds him or herself on the other side of a heavily fortified wall - outside the "closet" -able for the first time to step beyond the tiny social space accorded to verse and to take command of some of the vast discursive reservoirs of prose. in auster's case, it's as if verse (ordinarily associated metaphorically with dance) were frozen stock still, while prose (usually imagined as plodding) were free to dance; where his verse "resembled clenched fists," his poet's prose represented "a tremendous letting go." a truly generative work for auster, _white spaces_ marks the moment when prose and poetry actually meet in his writing; out of this moment arises auster's central poetic project in prose: the investigation of the scene of writing. it is an immense project -a kind of detective assignment that may well take him the rest of his career. in _white spaces_, auster records a primary investigative discovery, at once phenomenological, mystical, and social: writing takes place in a room. in the following passage, he begins to explore this room: i remain in the room in which i am writing this. i put one foot in front of the other. i put one word in front of the other, and for each step i take i add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. it is a journey through space, even if i get nowhere, even if i end up in the same place i started. it is a journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real. (d 107) [13] in this work of poet's prose, auster insists over and over again on the physicality of writing. he makes this physicality graphic by welding together three distinct spaces: the room, the space in which writing is enacted; the interior space where writing happens in the writer; and the space on the page the words occupy. in _white spaces_, as later in _ghosts_, auster represents the physicality of writing by an equation of the room with the book: "i remain in the room in which i am writing this," he says, as though he were occupying the "white spaces" of the page, the mind, and the room. whichever way he turns in this symbolic architecture, the writer seems to find his physical body trapped: when he writes, it enters into the closed space of the book; when he gets up from the book, it paces the narrow confines of the room. this claustrophobic situation draws attention to what antin might deplore as the marked leaning toward solipsism in auster's writing, a tendency that we will look at from different vantage points in later sections of this essay. at this point, however, it is important to note that the outside world does manage to break through the self-inscribed mental sphere of auster's characters, imposing actual consequences upon their ruminations and conjectures. in the passage above, he acknowledges at least the idea of interpenetration between the mental and the social worlds by locating, in the manner of wallace stevens or marianne moore, an "imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real." iii. [14] auster is not, of course, the first writer to figure the book as the allegorical scene of writing. in particular, two french poets who wrote extensively in prose, stephane mallarme and edmond jabes, have provided auster with important examples. he has translated mallarme's poetic fragments on the death of his young son, _a tomb for anatole_ (1983) (some of which appears first in _the invention of solitude_), and mallarme's notion of a grand book that includes the entire world hovers in the background of auster's explorations of the scene of writing. but even more directly pertinent to auster's obsessions are those of jabes, the jewish egyptian poet, whose remarkable seven volumes of meditative and oracular poet's prose, _the book of questions_ (1963-73), have had a shaping hand in auster's poetic narratives.^3^ auster makes explicit the connection between jabes and mallarme in an article he wrote originally in 1976 for _the new york review of books_, in which he links the jewish themes of _the book of questions_ to central issues animating modern french poetry: although jabes's imagery and sources are for the most part derived from judaism, _the book of questions_ is not a jewish work in the same way that one can speak of _paradise lost_ as a christian work. . . . the book is his central image -but it is not only the book of the jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the midrash), but an allusion to mallarme's ideal book as well (the book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). finally, jabes's work must be considered as part of the on-going french poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. (ah 113-14) [15] although jabes himself has no wish to deny his placement within french poetic tradition, he takes great pains, in a subsequent interview that auster conducted with him, to differentiate his notion of the book from that of mallarme: "mallarme wanted to put all knowledge into a book. he wanted to make a great book, the book of books. but in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge itself is ephemeral. the book that would have a chance to survive, i think, is the book that destroys itself. that destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it" (ah 164). jabes favors a midrashic approach to the book over an idealist one, a text composed of questions rather than answers, a book from which one can at least provisionally escape.^4^ like midrashic commentary upon scripture, jabes's _book of questions_ proceeds by locating anomalies or paradoxes or gaps in understanding, using such questions to generate further writing -as if one first had to become lost in order to be found. such characterizations of jabes's work may sound like re-statements of deconstructive truisms -and one should note the profound impact jabes's writing has had upon derrida and other french theorists -but there is also a desire for truth and wholeness in jabes's work (regardless of the difficulty of articulating such things) that seems at odds with deconstruction as a movement, and this desire is something auster unashamedly espouses as well. jabes pursues a wholeness based in fragments, and he claims to maintain an awareness of the entire book at every moment of writing, so that the whole exerts an irresistible pressure that determines the composition of the book word-by-word: when i say there are many books in the book, it is because there are many words in the word. obviously, if you change the word, the context of the sentence changes completely. in this way another sentence is born from this word, and a completely different book begins . . . i think of this in terms of the sea, in the image of the sea as it breaks upon the shore. it is not the wave that comes, it is the whole sea that comes each time and the whole sea that draws back. it is never just a wave, it is always everything that comes and everything that goes. this is really the fundamental movement in all my books. everything is connected to everything else. . . . at each moment, in the least question, it is the *whole* book which returns and the *whole* book which draws back. (ah 168) [16] his highly elaborated notion of the book as the central poetic principle of writing -as that which holds open the space of writing -allows jabes to make a radical distinction between the novel and the (poetic) book. although _the book of questions_ has characters, dialogue, and an implicit story, and although it is classified on the jacket of the english version as "fiction," jabes vehemently rejects the storytelling function of the novel as undermining the writer's fidelity to the book. for the book makes moment-to-moment demands that jabes believes should supersede the commitment to telling a particular story. he complains, the novelist's high-handed appropriation of the book has always been unbearable to me. what makes me uneasy is his pretense of making the %space% of the book the space of the story he tells -making the subject of his novel the subject of the book. . . . novelistic fiction, even when innovative, does not, from my point of view, take charge of the totality of [the risk involved in writing]. the book loses its autonomy. . . . a stranger to the book, its breath, its rhythm, the novelist imposes an exterior, exclusive speech: a life and a death, invented in the course of the story. for him the book is only a tool. at no moment does the novelist listen to the page, to its whiteness and silence (jabes _desert_ 101). [17] as a poet in a textual age, jabes locates the space of poetry within the book, which has a life of its own. aided by the evidence that a vital jewish imagination has been able to survive within the book for two millennia, he seeks to defend this space from incursions by those lesser poetic talents, the novelists, who impose the stories of particular characters over the mysterious imperatives of the book. in his own investigations of "the space of the book," auster takes seriously the challenge issued by jabes, endeavoring to enter the room of the book by attending to its "whiteness and silence." like jabes in _the book of questions_, auster writes a prose animated by the poetic issues of investigating and responding to the "white spaces" of the book. unlike jabes, however, auster also has a commitment to the novel, and a deep tension arises in his prose from a confrontation between narrative and the book. at the beginning of his published prose, with _the invention of solitude_ and _the new york trilogy_, auster's fidelity resides primarily with the book. this results in a flatness of characterization and in a dialogue that appears more like its surrounding descriptive prose than like the speech of discrete characters; likewise, the narrative of his early novels seems wholly governed by plot. over the course of his four subsequent novels, _in the country of last things_, _moon palace_, _the music of chance_, and _leviathan_, auster expands his ability to create realistic characters and begins to elaborate narratives that unfold beyond the exigencies of plot. still, his characteristic explorations of the scene of writing take place within a palpable tension between novel and book. [18] auster's first book of prose, _the invention of solitude_, contains a jabesian text, "the book of memory," in which he explores the space of writing through an obsessive attention to the book that nearly rivals the poetic fixation of jabes. and yet auster does not, like jabes, wholly eschew narrative, for the "book of memory" brims with anecdotes and little stories; it is here that auster begins to create a fiction of the book. in his article on jabes, auster gives a summary description of _the book of questions_ that applies equally well to his own "book of memory:" "what happens in _the book of questions_, then, is the writing of _the book of questions_ -or rather, the attempt to write it, a process that the reader is allowed to witness in all its gropings and hesitations" (ah 111). "the book of memory" begins with a literal enactment of "listen[ing] to the page, its whiteness and silence": "he lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. it was. it will never be again" (is 75). then, we continue to "witness in all its gropings and hesitations" the further attempts to write the book: later that same day he returns to his room. he finds a fresh sheet of paper and lays it out on the table before him. he writes until he has covered the entire page with words. later, when he reads over what he has written, he has trouble deciphering the words. those he does manage to understand do not seem to say what he thought he was saying. then he goes out to eat his dinner. that night he tells himself that tomorrow is another day. new words begin to clamor in his head, but he does not write them down. he decides to refer to himself as a. he walks back and forth between the table and the window. he turns on the radio and then turns it off. he smokes a cigarette. then he writes. it was. it will never be again. (is 75) [19] as in _ghosts_, auster creates a scene of writing that is both book and room, and for which the question of identity is inseparable from the writing of the book. "the book of memory" is an autobiography, in which the author "decides to refer to himself as a." in order to create enough distance to be able to see himself. he places himself at a turning point -"it was. it will never be again." - which allows him to investigate the present in terms of the past, utilizing memory as a kind of book that, in jabes's terms, "destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it" (ah 164): "the book of memory" destroys memory by making it into a book. likewise, the present sense of self is an enclosure created anew over and over again by interrogating the past. in other words, the question that blue asks in _ghosts_, "how to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?" (nyt 201-2), animates "the book of memory" as well. the room and the book are thematized in many ways in "the book of memory:" a. describes the room in which he lives and writes (as well as a number of significant rooms in his past) in obsessive detail; as in the old art of memory, he portrays memory in architectural terms, comprised of rooms in which contiguous impressions are stored; in addition, a. explores the principles that determine such contiguity -chance, coincidence, free association. [20] like thoreau, whose _walden_ he plays with in _ghosts_, auster is fascinated by solitude; many of the images that recur throughout "the book of memory" evoke solitary enclosure, such as the references to jonah in the whale, to pinocchio in the shark, to anne frank in hiding, and to george oppen's phrase "the shipwreck of the singular." regardless of the imagery with which it is portrayed, enclosure within the room of writing invokes not just a sense of aloneness but an actual claustrophobia in auster's characters: "it is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole" (is 77). ultimately, what we have been considering as a poetic anxiety about the room of writing is revealed as a fear of death, a fear so acute that a. tries to evacuate his life out of the present in order to observe it safely, albeit in a disembodied fashion, from the future: christmas eve, 1979. his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. whenever he turned on his radio and listened to the news of the world, he would find himself imagining the words to be describing things that had happened long ago. even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as "nostalgia for the present." (is 76) [21] in this passage, auster employs four different methods of displacing the present: by portraying a. as bouncing between the past and the future, hearing first a report of present events as though it were referring to the distant past, and next trying to imagine himself looking at the present from the future; then, in the last sentence, by having a narrator locate himself at a future point, "later," looking back upon a. in the "present" moment; and finally, by giving this alienated condition the label "nostalgia for the present," which further congeals and reifies it. there is, of course, a long genealogy behind the enactment of extreme alienation in modern literature - especially, for this text of auster's, in jewish writers: kafka, freud, scholem, benjamin, celan, jabes, barthes, anne frank, george oppen, charles reznikoff, henry roth, etc. but in "the book of memory" auster deploys the effects of alienation in a particularly active way that he shares with a smaller circle of writers, like samuel beckett and the john ashbery of _three poems_. these writers create what i have called elsewhere a translative prose, which is always engaged simultaneously in investigating identity and writing, bringing forth a tenuous fiction from the ever-new exigencies of the book.^5^ at one point in "the book of memory," auster invokes translation as an image for what occurs when one enters the room of the book: for most of his adult life, he has earned his living by translating the books of other writers. he sits at his desk reading the book in french and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in english. it is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. every book is an image of solitude. . . . a. sits down in his own room to translate another man's book, and it is as though he were entering that man's solitude and making it his own. (is 136) in the act of translation, identity is both found and lost: rewriting the words of another writer is a profoundly intimate form of relationship, in which the translator finds identities melting, mingling, or repelling one another. the translator invades the solitude of the space of writing, and the intruder never knows whether he or she will leave that violated solitude with a sense of self fortified or weakened by the encounter. for blue, in _ghosts_, this penetration into another's solitude results in a terrifying %mise en abime%: "having penetrated black's room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of black's solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own" (nyt 226). like the later fictional character blue, "a. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating" (is 136). [22] out of this meditation upon translation, though, a. achieves a realization that gives the ghostly existence of translation a new sort of life: "it dawns on him that everything he is trying to record in "the book of memory," everything he has written so far, is no more than the translation of a moment or two of his life -those moments he lived through on christmas eve, 1979, in his room at 6 varick street" (is 136). translation not only renders the writer a ghost enclosed in the room that is the book; it is also a way out. for the moment that inaugurates "the book of memory" -the recognition that a.'s life and his writing have been on a collision course that has finally eventuated in their complete merging, a recognition provoked when he sits down at his desk and writes, "it was. it will never be again." (is 75) -also begins a translation of that moment out of itself. the only way to get out of the room that is the book is by writing the book, for writing translates the moment that inaugurates the book into an ongoing present that opens out of the memory of that moment. auster makes explicit the notion of escape through the translation of memory by citing the example of pascal's "memorial," an ecstatic testimony that was sewn into the lining of the philosopher's clothes as a constant reminder of his moment of mystical illumination, on the night of november 23, 1654 (137). the memory of such a moment illuminates the space of writing, so that as the writer dives into the memory he can see a way of moving beyond his solitude and out into the world and, ultimately, into history: as he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). what he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on christmas eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on varick street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. (139) [23] the poet is trapped in narrative prose, the writer is trapped in the book, the "agent" is trapped in the room: can these figures use memory to come out into the world, into history? one way of looking at this conundrum would be to notice that for both pascal and a., memory already includes simultaneously an inside and an outside: when pascal writes his memory and then sews it into his clothing, he gives it a double exteriority, which matches the way that a. moves both inward and outward by writing about what he remembers of christmas eve, 1979. but thinking of memory in this way offers too easy a solution to auster's dilemma. we can complicate the notion of memory by seeing it not only as a matter of interiority and exteriority, but also as an interplay of remembering and forgetting. from the latter perspective, we will have to hold off deciding whether to accept auster's affirmation that memory leads out of the room and into history, until we have looked at what his text actively forgets. iv. [24] in order to think about what is repressed in "the book of memory," i would like to bring a second framework into play, which is that of the parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity embedded in the text. "the book of memory" is ostensibly a book of mourning, for a.'s father has just died and his grandfather dies during its composition. the previous half of _the invention of solitude_, "portrait of an invisible man," treats the death of auster's father and his subsequent discovery that his paternal grandfather was murdered by his grandmother. throughout "the book of memory," auster reflects upon the relations of fathers and sons, brooding particularly on his feelings toward his own young son in the midst of his reflections upon the traumas and losses inscribed within the continuity of generations.^6^ the mood of the text is one of melancholy, veering between hopelessness, nostalgia, and obsessive self-regard, but its desperately sought goal seems to be the regeneration of a life through writing. in this context, the room of the book receives a different set of figurative equivalents from those found in _ghosts_. in the latter, the room of the book is a place where blue is trapped, and where he is forcibly initiated into the brotherhood of writers. in "the book of memory," the room of the book is figured as a void, a place of nothingness or meaninglessness, a site for the confrontation with death. auster makes explicit a metonymic chain of rhyming words that underlies this particular figuration of the room as scene of writing: "room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room" (is 159-60). [25] the implication of this chain of equivalents is that the room of the book is a place where death can be transformed into rebirth. but this can only happen, auster asserts, if we take meaninglessness as a first principle. by meaninglessness, auster has a specific denial in mind, that of the motivated connection between any two factors: like everyone else, he craves a meaning. like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. the connection exists. but to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. at his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle . . . . (147) by enshrining meaninglessness as first principle, auster seems to be striking a blow against the conventions of the novel, which rest upon the assumption that a meaningful connection between events can be constructed; without this assumption, the ideological work of the novel as creator of identity within a social world would collapse. auster undermines the ideological basis of the novel by telling a series of stories in which coincidences and connections are never sufficient to ensure identity. [26] auster asserts the "principle" of meaninglessness several times in "the book of memory," particularly when discussing coincidence or chance. after telling a story about m., a friend who finds himself living in paris in the exact same attic room where his father had hidden from the nazis twenty years before, a. notes the further coincidence that he, too, lived in such a %chambre de bonne% and that it was where his own father had come to see him. these thoughts cause a. to "remember his father's death. and beyond that, to understand -this most important of all -that m.'s story has no meaning" (81). in this passage, the principle of meaninglessness is associated directly with a.'s father's death, and beyond that with the equation of the room of the book with the tomb. from this void, however, comes a.'s impulse to write, to make of his memorializing book a site of regeneration, to find himself anew within the act of mourning. recognizing that m.'s story is meaningless, a. counters, nevertheless, this is where it begins. the first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. to be reduced to saying nothing. or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. and then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts. (81) [27] but what does haunt auster and his character in this experience of nothingness? he offers a clue to his haunting in the equations quoted earlier: "room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room." these equations take us beyond the ostensible subject of mourning into a repressed but highly significant motivation of the writing; to tie the room and the tomb with the feminine image of the womb brings in gender considerations to a narrative that is otherwise almost exclusively masculine. it seems to me that in this text terms like "nothingness" and "meaninglessness" are gendered feminine, and that based upon this equation women are rendered as void and men are imagined as self-generating. having projected so many desires upon the notion of nothingness, it's as though auster then takes the buddhist image of the "pregnant void" and splits it in half, assigning the void to women and pregnancy to men. in "the book of memory," auster attempts a kind of parthenogenesis, using the room as a womb to give birth to the book, without the intervention of the feminine. let me offer some illustrations to make this assertion convincing. [28] in a discussion of paris and of a composer he meets there, s., who becomes a father figure to him, a. gives a striking description of the room as a place at once claustrophobic (to the body) and infinitely generative (to the mind) -a masculine womb. he begins the description by noting, "these are his earliest memories of the city, where so much of his life would later be spent, and they are inescapably bound up with the idea of the room" (89). having highlighted the room's significance, a. goes on to describe first its claustrophobic quality: "s. lived in a space so small that at first it seemed to defy you, to resist being entered. the presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it. it was impossible to move inside it without contracting your body to its smallest dimensions, without contracting your mind to some infinitely small point within itself." here, the claustrophobia seems to affect both the body and the mind, as though the room were attempting to squeeze both down to nothingness. for the mind, however, this extreme form of contraction results in its opposite, a sudden expansion, inaugurated by becoming aware of the contents of the room: for there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. it was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of one man's inner world, even to the slightest detail. s. had literally managed to surround himself with the things that were inside him. the room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought. this was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination. (89) [29] in this masculinist fantasy of self-generative creativity, the enwombing room is "like the skin of some second body around him," capable of giving birth to the solitary artist's works of art, without the intervention of woman, or even of the body. this is a kind of male "hysteria," in which the wandering womb of the room takes on the generative qualities of the composer's inner life.^7^ the most fully realized image of masculine birth in "the book of memory" is that of pinocchio, who is sculpted into being by his father, and this image, as i shall later demonstrate, runs as a leitmotif throughout the text. another major image of masculinist self-generation, leibniz's monadology, recurs at several points in the text and also partakes of the psychological disturbance of male birth. for instance, further on in the same meditation that produces the equation of room with tomb and womb, a. imagines that language is a kind of monadology, a matrix of rhyming words that "functions as a kind of bridge that joins opposite and contrasting aspects of the world with each other:" language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements -cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids - are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. for each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it. (160) [30] a. ascribes tremendous potency to language, imagining it as the matrix of being, as the genetic matter of the world. he sums up this apotheosis of language by invoking leibniz: "language, then, as monadology, to echo the term used by leibniz" (160). the monadology is the interconnected network of the "monads" that compose the universe, each of which is affected by the motion of all the others. after a long quote from leibniz, auster concludes, "playing with words in the way a. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. language is not truth. it is the way we exist in the world" (161). this seemingly heideggerean recognition, that language "is the way we exist in the world," is given a particular twist, though, by a.'s fantasy that "language . . . is an infinitely complex organism" with "cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids," as though language were not just a mode of existence %in the world% but a replacement for life %in the body%; for, when "it is possible for events in one's life to rhyme as well" (161), the monadology of language has taken over everything. at the end of this three-page meditation on the power of language, a. arrives at the mysterious recognition that, in fact, everything is beginning to rhyme for him: what a. is struggling to express, perhaps, is that for some time now none of the terms has been missing for him. wherever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if it were all suddenly converging in him and happening to him at once. coincidence: to fall on with; to occupy the same place in time or space. the mind, therefore, as that which contains more than itself. as in the phrase from augustine: "but where is the part of it which it does not itself contain?" (162) [31] to see interconnections can be a result of a visionary heightening of consciousness, or, with the sense that "the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed," it may well be that a. is experiencing a moment of sheer paranoia. if this is a moment of paranoia, it must have a causal connection to a.'s masculinist notion of self-generation, of mind outside body in a room. in fact, a.'s imagining of the human mind as the entire monadology goes far beyond leibniz, whom auster quotes as cautioning that "a soul, however, can read in itself only what is directly represented in it; it is unable to unfold all at once all its folds; for these go on into infinity" (161). in his more paranoid rendition of a monadology, a. has taken something like robert duncan's poetic conceit about "the structure of rime" and inflated it into the fantasy of a wrinkle-free existence, in which all interconnections are apparent to the mind.^8^ [32] the gender implications of this fantasy of disembodiment are most disturbingly represented in an earlier scene in the text, in which a., "for no particular reason," wanders into a topless bar in manhattan. in a completely detached tone of voice, auster describes how a. "found himself sitting next to a voluptuously naked young woman," who invites him into the back room. "there was something so openly humorous and matter-of-fact about her approach, that he finally agreed to her proposition. the best thing, they decided, would be for her to suck his penis, since she claimed an extraordinary talent for this activity." at the moment of ejaculation, the leibnizean monad is revealed as an image of masculine parthenogenesis: as he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells -or roughly the same number as there are people in the world -which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. and what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. or, as leibniz put it: "every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe." for the fact is, we are of the same stuff that came into being with the first explosion of the first spark in the infinite emptiness of space. or so he said to himself, at that moment, as his penis exploded into the mouth of that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten. (114) [33] in this passage the conjunction of woman as nothingness with masculine parthenogenesis is made explicit. the sexual function of the woman is located in the mouth, not in the womb, and absolutely no connection, aside from mechanical friction, is made between the woman and the man. not only is the woman nameless, but her name is actively erased by a.'s seemingly unnecessary final qualification: "that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten." there is a barb in that statement, which we will have to look at momentarily. in the meantime, note the careful working out of a parthenogenic procreation: the emotionless ejaculation is converted into a purely mental reverie -as though the phallus were the mind, capable of generating the entire world by its explosive satisfaction. the woman's role in this fantasy of masculine self-generation is "effaced" (that is, she is rendered faceless), and as recipient of the exploding penis she becomes mute. [34] a few pages further on in "the book of memory," a. makes a seemingly technical reference to "solitude," a song recorded by billie holiday (whose heart-wrenching vocal style registers unforgettably the effects of masculine aggression). following the technical reference, a. notices that the mention of billie holiday and an immediately prior description of emily dickinson's room ("it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse" [123]) constitute "first allusions to a woman's voice. to be followed by specific reference to several" (123). but he does not deliver on this promise. instead, he launches into an odd speculation: "for it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth -assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak -it comes from the mouth of a woman" (123). this conjectured truth never arrives in the text, where, ironically, the only thing that "comes from the mouth of a woman" is a.'s penis. it's as though billie holiday and emily dickinson are invoked only to be silenced. the question arises, then, why this desire to erase the woman's voice? [35] a clue to answering this question appears in a passage describing a.'s relationship to the one other character in "the book of memory" who is denied a name -also a woman. a. is telling a story about his two-year-old son's sudden illness and resultant stay in the hospital. the fearful parents spend every waking hour with him: his wife, however, began to show the strain. at one point she walked out to a., who was in the adult sitting room, and said, "i give up, i can't handle him anymore" -and there was such resentment in her voice against the boy, such an anger of exasperation, that something inside a. fell to pieces. stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness, and in that one instant all the newly won harmony that had been growing between them for the past month vanished: for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her. he stormed out of the room and went to his son's bedside. (108) the woman-without-a-name in "the book of memory" is a.'s wife. in the passage above, his repressed anger begins to leak out. her statement, "i give up, i can't handle him anymore," is something one expects to hear from the mother of a two-year-old at least daily. but its effect upon a., who has transferred the force of his anger at his wife to an excessive doting upon his son (which appears in many passages of "the book of memory"), is to break through the shell of his repression. rather than commiserate with her, "a. fell to pieces," that is, he became angry: "stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness." what is "stupid" and "cruel" in the context of a marriage, though, is not the anger itself but the reported repression of it for so many years: "for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her." if these two characters have suppressed conflict for so many years, it's no wonder that their marriage is falling apart and that a.'s anger toward women has reached a bizarre climax in his attempt to exclude them completely from the room of the book. the parthenogenic fantasy running through "the book of memory" and the masculine genealogy of fathers and sons that auster constructs in the entire _invention of solitude_ must arise, at least in part, from the unacceptably explosive potential that resides in a bottled-up anger toward women. one important facet of this psychic economy is a.'s transforming his anger and sense of betrayal into a smothering identification with his son: in the passage quoted above, for instance, a. "stormed out of the room and went to his son's bedside," shifting his affection and allegiance from wife to son. in his identification with the son, auster writes the mother out of the family romance; he effects this erasure by portraying a.'s wife as her son's betrayer and by shifting the focus of the divorce drama onto the relationship of the parents to the son. [36] if this is a book of mourning, a book of confrontation with death, then the fatality that looms largest within it but is given least expression is the death of a marriage. at one "ghostly" level, this is a book of divorce, a book of memory born from the almost total suppression of the memories of a marriage. a. allows his nameless wife very few appearances, and in none of them does she represent any of the positive creative qualities of regeneration that a. so desperately seeks. for instance, he figures their marriage as hopelessly unproductive from its outset: "he remembers returning home from his wedding party in 1974, his wife beside him in her white dress, and taking the front door key out of his pocket, inserting the key in the lock, and then, as he turned his wrist, feeling the blade of the key snap off inside the lock" (145). rather than explore the interior landscape of his marriage in order to understand how what we might interpret as a symbolic castration took place, a. retreats to a room and writes a book of self-regeneration, in which he invents a masculine genealogy of creativity that will substitute for his father's emotional distance and will also mourn the father's recent death. from the perspective of this fundamental inability to confront the breakdown of his marriage and his feelings about women, it's the connection between death and divorce that makes the most striking "coincidence" in the book: "two months after his father's death (january 1979), a.'s marriage collapsed" (101). in his desperate attempt to deny the true consequences of his divorce -the collapse of his ability to relate to women in a mutually beneficial manner -a. turns, as we have noted, to his son: "it was quite another thing for him to swallow the consequences it entailed: to be separated from his son. the thought of it was intolerable to him" (101). v. [37] within the masculine genealogy of this text, all of a.'s hopes for regeneration are transferred to his son. his feelings toward his son are not just those of the understandably protective father in such potentially damaging circumstances, but they also partake of a messianic desire for deliverance that the son is imagined as fulfilling. throughout _the invention of solitude_ auster cultivates a fantasy, most fully represented by the pinocchio story, that the son will rescue the father.^9^ like gepetto, a. as father hides in the room of the book, creating his own son parthenogenically as his savior. given the depiction in "portrait of an invisible man," the first half of _the invention of solitude_, of auster's own desperately wounded father (who witnessed his father's murder at the hands of his mother), the provenance of this desire for the son to rescue the father is painfully apparent as a patrimony auster inherits. this desire is not, however, only a feature of auster's psychological makeup, a response to his father's maddening emotional distance; it also corresponds to the desire to rescue their parents experienced by children of holocaust victims and survivors. the connection between auster's personal history and a post-holocaust sensibility runs throughout "the book of memory." of all the scenes of hiding in a room rehearsed in the text, the most central thematically is that of anne frank, writing her own identity in a book while hiding from the nazis. to consider further the relationship of a masculine redemptive genealogy to hiding within the room of the book, we must begin investigating the third framework, which is the post-holocaust imagery pervading "the book of memory." [38] i say "post-holocaust" because, although he includes a number of scenes from the holocaust itself, auster is a jewish writer born after the war, and so what's pertinent, both in his recounting of holocaust material and throughout the text, is the way his imagination has been infected by the holocaust. although his secularity and his close reliance upon protestant american writers like poe, hawthorne, thoreau, and melville may inadvertently hide the pervasiveness of the jewish context for his writing, auster provides a significant gauge of this context in his essays, collected in _the art of hunger_. of the nineteen essays, eleven discuss secular jewish writers, all of whom have had telling influences upon auster's writing: laura riding (2), franz kafka (2), louis wolfson, charles reznikoff, paul celan, edmond jabes (2), george oppen, and carl rakosi. for jews like auster, born after world war ii, two paramount realities demand attention: the holocaust and the state of israel. auster makes mention of israel in "the book of questions" only by reproducing an encyclopedia entry about a relative, daniel auster, who became the first mayor of jerusalem after independence (85). daniel is also the name of a.'s son (who is the only character given a full name in the text), so that this coincidence ties his israeli relative into the genealogy a. is constructing. the invocation of israel takes place, significantly enough, within the context of an extended meditation upon and identification with anne frank. during this meditation, auster identifies anne frank's room directly with the room of the book, setting forth the post-holocaust thematics of his text. [39] on a short trip to amsterdam, ostensibly to look at art, a. finds himself confronted by the traces of anne frank. as in his entry into the topless bar, a. goes to anne frank's house "for no particular reason." by this point in the narrative, it is clear that this phrase indicates not chance but overdetermined motives: for no particular reason (idly looking through a guide book he found in his hotel room) he decided to go to anne frank's house, which has been preserved as a museum. it was a sunday morning, gray with rain, and the streets along the canal were deserted. he climbed the steep and narrow staircase inside the house and entered the secret annex. as he stood in anne frank's room, the room in which the diary was written, now bare, with the faded pictures of hollywood movie stars she had collected still pasted to the walls, he suddenly found himself crying. not sobbing, as might happen in response to deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world. it was at that moment, he later realized, that the book of memory began. as in the phrase: "she wrote her diary in this room." (82-3) anne frank's room of the book, in which she wrote her diary, supplies an originary moment for "the book of memory." entering this room, a. experiences not just a psychological but an ontological pain, as if the condition of hiding imposed upon anne frank by the threat of the holocaust had now become the condition of being in the world. two paragraphs later, a. imagines this claustrophobic ontology as "a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years" (83) -as though every post-holocaust experience of solitude, every self-encounter, were haunted by anne frank's absolute isolation. looking out her window at children's toys in a yard, a. wonders "what it would be like to grow up in the shadow of anne frank's room" (83), in the shadow of that breath-stopping solitude. in a figurative sense, all jews after the war grow up within this shadow. whenever auster enters the room of the book, he seems to find it enveloped by this shadow, as if his writing were a repetition-compulsion brought about by the trauma of the holocaust. in an ironic juxtaposition, a. quotes a famous saying of pascal, "all the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room" (83), as though anne frank's life in the room of the book were a reproach to the monastic psychology of hiding and self-incarceration as a freely chosen way of life. growing up figuratively in the shadow of anne frank's room, a. feels trapped inside the room of the book; he %chooses% not his location but his identification with anne frank as writer, as though his overwhelming task of mourning were given concretion and containment by her room and her book. [40] not only does a. identify himself with anne frank, but he also notes that "anne frank's birthday is the same as his son's" (83), thus placing her into the genealogical chain of fathers and children, rather than opening up for her occupation the closed space of the feminine. following this recognition of a kind of post-holocaust kinship between anne frank and himself, a. quotes from an extraordinary document of familial trauma: "israel lichtenstein's last testament. warsaw; july 31, 1942," in which one of the resistance fighters of the warsaw ghetto, knowing he is about to die, asks not "for gratitude, any monument, any praise. i want only a remembrance" (84). lichtenstein asks for remembrance of himself, of his wife, and especially of his preternaturally gifted daughter: "margalit, 20 months old today. has mastered yiddish perfectly, speaks a pure yiddish. . . . in intelligence she is on a par with 3or 4-year old children. i don't want to brag about her. . . . i am not sorry about my life and that of my wife. but i am sorry for the gifted little girl. she deserves to be remembered also" (84). traumas of this magnitude -involving the obliteration of individuals, of communities, and, most poignantly for a., of marvelous children -are suffered not only by those who experience them; they are passed on to future generations as unfinished projects of mourning. at the family level (in traumas such as auster's father's witnessing of his father's murder) and at the societal level (in traumas such as the holocaust or american slavery), unbearable memories are braided within the continuity of generations, so that the trauma maintains a virulent force, which has the ability to yank a member of a succeeding generation out of the present and into its secret room. when a. imagines the continuity of generations, he cannot call up a biblical plenitude within which to reside; instead, the trauma displaces him into a realm of isolation, in which the generations are squeezed into an individual body -itself incapable of inhabiting the present: when the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. he looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. he imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. inexplicably, he is moved by this. it is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. it is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels . . . . inexplicably, he finds himself shaking at that moment with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forward and backward, into the future and into the past. and there are times, often there are times, when these feelings are so strong that his life no longer seems to dwell in the present. (81-2) [41] when he is transported out of the present by trauma, a. lives in a genealogical world in which time is speeded up and fathers and children subsume one another: "each time he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would look like as a grown-up. each time he saw an old person, he would try to imagine what that person had looked like as a child" (87). this blakean vision of the "mental traveller," whose "life no longer seems to dwell in the present," takes on a possibly misogynist twist when a. gazes at women: it was worst with women, especially if the woman was young and beautiful. he could not help looking through the skin of her face and imagining the anonymous skull behind it. and the more lovely the face, the more ardent his attempt to seek in it the encroaching signs of the future: incipient wrinkles, the later-to-be-sagging chin, the glaze of disappointment in the eyes. he would put one face on top of another: this woman at forty; this woman at sixty; this woman at eighty; as if, even as he stood in the present, he felt compelled to hunt out the future, to track down the death that lives in each one of us. (87) the post-holocaust haunting by death dovetails with a.'s inability to imagine regeneration through the feminine, such that fertility and fecundity are replaced by dissolution and decay. a. ends this passage with a dispiriting quotation from flaubert: "the sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton" (87). [42] casting aside the feminine as a source of regeneration, a. turns to the hope that the son can rescue the father. when the father has suffered an unbearable trauma, it is natural for the son to entertain the fantasy of rescuing the father. an impulse of this sort must be at work, for instance, in _maus_, art spiegelman's remarkable holocaust narrative. by foregrounding his difficult relationship with his father during his telling of the father's tale of survival, spiegelman subtly inscribes the son's desire to rescue the father into the narrative. in "portrait of an invisible man," auster presents himself as trapped within trauma, incapable both of rescuing his father and of mourning him satisfactorily, for complete mourning would require exorcising the trauma, and this he is unable to do: "there has been a wound, and i realize now that it is very deep. instead of healing me as i thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. at times i have even felt the pain of it concentrated in my right hand, as if each time i picked up the pen and pressed it against the page, my hand were being torn apart. instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever" (32). [43] to attempt the rescue of his unburied father, a. goes into the room of the book and begins to write, seeking through writing to find his way back to the present: "the world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. only one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. and if he does not manage to find this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another" (79). it sounds as though a. is setting himself a phenomenological project of learning to inhabit the room, as in the saying by heidegger, "but we do not want to get anywhere. we would like only, for once, to get just where we are already" (heidegger 190). but instead of proceeding to register his sense of location in phenomenological terms, a. turns figurative immediately and begins to remember stories: "life inside the whale. a gloss on jonah, and what it means to refuse to speak. parallel text: gepetto in the belly of the shark (whale in the disney version), and the story of how pinocchio rescues him. is it true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one's father to become a real boy?" (79). through the intertwined stories of jonah and pinocchio a. tries to understand what it means to live in the room of the book and how such dwelling might result in a rescue of the father. thinking about jonah's residence inside the whale, a. notes that the whale "is by no means an agent of destruction. the fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea" (125). such confinement represents incarceration as salvation, a kind of symbolic death that is "a preparation for new life, a life that has passed through death, and therefore a life that can at last speak" (125). [44] the room of the book is an alchemical site, in which auster hopes to make death speak life through the regeneration of the father by the son. in "the book of memory," this alchemy makes its fullest appearance when a. meditates upon _pinocchio_ as he reads the story to his young son. noting how "the little boy never tired of hearing the chapter about the storm at sea, which tells of how pinocchio finds gepetto in the belly of the terrible shark" (130), a. quotes pinocchio's charged exclamation, "oh, father, dear father! have i found you at last? now i shall never, never leave you again!" (131). on one level, this exclamation gives direct expression to the feelings of these particular readers: "for a. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion" (131). on another level, this exclamation reiterates a.'s desire to recover his own father and, beyond that, to recover a patrilineal power from the dead that will enable him to speak. in his own life, as in the story of pinocchio, the reunion with the father has become essential for the son's regeneration: as a. notes, the bulk of _pinocchio_ "tells the story of pinocchio's search for his father -and gepetto's search for his son. at some point, pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. but it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father" (132). [45] when this reunion happens, however, the story is far from over. for regeneration to take place, for pinocchio to become a "real boy," for a. to redeem his traumatized father, the boy must emerge from the belly of the shark with his father upon his back. the parthenogenically created boy must give birth to himself out of the womb/tomb. this image resides at the core of auster's fantasy of regeneration through the room of the book, and he has a. meditate upon it intensively: the father on the son's back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of aeneas bearing anchises on his back from the ruins of troy that each time a. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing . . . certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupations: cassandra, for example, predicting the ruin of troy, and thereafter loss, as in the wanderings of aeneas that precede the founding of rome, and in that wandering the image of another wandering: the jews in the desert, which, in its turn, yields further clusters of images: "next year in jerusalem," and with it the photograph in the jewish encyclopedia of his relative, who bore the name of his son. (133) in this swirling series of associations, the greco-roman "master"-civilization is brought into conjunction with the "wandering" jewish culture and with a.'s own family. here, the jewish son carries his tradition upon his back, redeeming "hebraism" in the face "hellenism." the story of pinocchio is so seductive for a. because of the redemption of the fathers (and, proleptically, of the son) that it promises. [46] for a.'s son, who spends an entire summer dressed as superman, this fantasy of omnipotence and salvation is as irresistible as it is for his father: and for the little boy to see pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be "good" and could not help being "bad," for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of revelation. the son saves the father. this must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. and this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined. %puer aeternus%. the son saves the father. (134) through the regenerative figure of the %puer aeternus%, the son gives birth to the father -and thus to himself as "a real boy." this represents the son's wish-fulfillment of the overcoming of the father's trauma, as well as the post-war jew's fantasy of saving the victims of the holocaust. through the agency of the "incompetent little marionette," a mere simulacrum of a boy, the world of the fathers is to be redeemed. at the same time, however, a. as father remains only too aware of his own son's vulnerability. in a meditation upon sons who die before their fathers, a. muses upon an imaginary stack of photographs: "mallarme's son, anatole; anne frank ('this is a photo that shows me as i should always like to look. then i would surely have a chance to go to hollywood. but now, unfortunately, i usually look different'). . . . the dead children. the children who will vanish, the children who are dead. himmler: 'i have made the decision to annihilate every jewish child from the face of the earth'" (97-8). these are the children whose fathers were unable to rescue them; their fate is encompassed by himmler's chilling anti-redemptive vow: for if there are no children, then there is no one to rescue and no one to do the rescuing. vi. [47] it is time to return for a final look at the central question of this essay: what happens, then, inside the room of the book? answer: a book of memory is being written. by engaging in such writing, auster follows a central command reiterated throughout the jewish scriptures: remember! the jewish historian, y. h. yerushalmi, notes that "the verb %zakhar% [to remember] appears in its various declensions in the bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with israel or god as the subject, for memory is incumbent upon both" (yerushalmi 5). remembering is a central activity of jewish culture, a form of commemoration that takes the place of priestly rituals, sanctifying the present through linking it to the past. in the passover seder, for instance, the celebrants are enjoined to place themselves directly into the biblical scenes of deliverance, in order to understand that they are celebrating not something done by god for their ancestors but something done for themselves. as a. writes himself deeper and deeper into the room of the book, his relationship to memory undergoes a change: memory, when made active, need not be only a means of hiding from the present by residing in the past; instead, it can be a way of allowing the past, with all its traumas, to inform a more fully lived in present. "as he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world)" (139). [48] by claiming that writing effects a dual movement -both inward and outward -a. posits a way for memory to lead him at least partially outside his confinement in the room of the book. to the extent that the memory of trauma can function as restorative -as, in kabbalistic terms, %tikkun% (a mending of the broken vessels of creation) - there is an opportunity for the writing that occurs in the room of the book to re-imagine not only individual experience but also history. from this perspective, a. begins to realize that his initial entry into the room of the book ("he lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. it was. it will never be again" [75].) contained a far greater potential than he was aware of at the time: what he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on christmas eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on varick street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immmersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. . . . if there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. (139) a. believes that memory will never "make sense" of the past, but that it is instead a necessary form of vision that keeps the past alive in the present. when he is inhabiting the room of the book in this way, a. seems to be writing as though his very life depended upon it, for the traumatic world of the fathers represents a burden this latter-day pinocchio must carry in order to become "a real boy." [49] as a post-holocaust narrative, _the invention of solitude_ takes the memory of trauma as the groundless ground from which writing and life begin. the past cannot be possessed or made whole, but trauma and memory can become generative forces. thinking about jabes's poetry as a response to the holocaust, auster speaks of the writer's duties with regard to such memories: "what he must do, in effect, is create a poetics of absence. the dead cannot be brought back to life. but they can be heard, and their voices live in the book" (ah 114). when the survivors emerged from the camps after world war ii, their nearly uniform reaction to the holocaust was expressed in two words: "never again!" this meant, we must remember so that the moral revulsion created by these memories will prevent such situations from ever recurring. the last line of "the book of memory" seems to allude to this resolution: "it was. it will never be again. remember" (172). these words bring "the book of memory" full circle, repeating the inaugural statements of the book and adding to them the command, "remember." can this injunction to remember trauma create the conditions for understanding history? in his famous image of the angel in the "theses on the philosophy of history," walter benjamin gives us a figure for history who stands open-mouthed at the traumatic wreckage of history piling up at his feet without cessation (benjamin 259). this gesture bears a family resemblance to the "crying without sound" that overcomes a. in anne frank's room, a reaction that arises not only "in response to deep inner pain," but also "purely in response to the world. it was at that moment, he later realized, that the book of memory began" (82-3). [50] as a writer, auster has made use of the room of the book as a way to interrogate the relationship of writing to history, through an invocation of memory. with respect to "the book of memory," the question that needs asking is whether memory makes it possible for auster to witness the world in such a way that he succeeds in releasing himself from the confining quality of the room of the book. on balance, i think we would have to answer that question in the negative, particularly in light of his refusal to remember the issue of divorce and of his unacknowledged anger toward women. but i would like to applaud the seriousness of auster's attempt to place issues of writing at the center of issues of living. confronting head-on the situation of "a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book" (nyt 202), auster makes of that situation an incredibly rich field of meditation, in which profound intellectual, historical, and personal issues arise and ask to be heard. as we have seen, auster's room of the book houses a fascinating struggle between the absolutizing qualities of poetry and the narrative investment in fictional characters; it functions for the male writer both as a site of retreat from engagement with women and as an alchemical retort in which a parthenogenic theory of creativity can be proposed; and it becomes a space of hiding and torment, in which the irresolvable problems of writing with reference to the holocaust can be embodied. within the room of the book, auster stages with compelling expertise central dilemmas of the writer, dilemmas that will not go away. to blue's question, "how to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?" (nyt 202), the only decisive answer would be to walk out of the room that is the book. but for the writer, infinitely vulnerable to accusations of not living up to the moral claims enunciated in the writing, to walk out of the room of the book would be impossible: it would mean to stop writing.^10^ notes: ^1^ in "paul auster, or the heir intestate," an excellent short essay on _the invention of solitude_, pascal bruckner also makes a strong case for the centrality of this book in auster's oeuvre. ^2^ for a definition of poet's prose, see fredman xiii, 1-2. ^3^ on the back cover of _from the book to the book: an edmond jabes reader_, auster writes: "i first read _the book of questions_ twenty years ago, and my life was permanently changed. i can no longer think about the possibilities of literature without thinking of the example of edmond jabes. he is one of the great spirits of our time, a torch in the darkness." see finkelstein for a short consideration of auster's relationship to jabes (48-9); for more extended discussions of jewish elements in auster's work, see finkelstein (48-53) and rubin (60-70). ^4^ when jabes speaks of a "book that would have a chance to survive," he means also a book whose reader would have a chance of surviving %it%. see marc-alain ouaknin's _the burnt book_ for a fascinating meditation, via jabes and levinas, on the creative necessity of an escape from the book. ^5^ perloff argues strongly for the contribution of beckett to contemporary poet's prose. there is a discussion of ashbery's "translative prose" in fredman, 101-35. ^6^ for a useful application of notions of genealogy to auster's _moon palace_, see weisenburg. ^7^ in many ways, auster's fantasy of masculine self-generation is similar to melville's in _moby-dick_ - an analogy quite appropriate in light of a.'s characterization of s.'s room as "the womb, the belly of the whale." in chapter 95 of _moby-dick_ (350-51), a character also wears "the skin of some second body around him," namely the "pelt," or outer covering, of the whale's penis. having skinned and dried it, the "mincer" wears the sheath to protect himself from boiling blubber. melville presents this investiture as a form of primitive phallus-worship (and then, as he does so often in _moby-dick_, compares jeeringly the "primitive" with the christian: "what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a pope were this mincer!" [351]); but interestingly, by turning the phallus into a sheath, the mincer has, in effect, invaginated it. ^8^ "the structure of rime," one of duncan's two open-ended poetic sequences, first appears in _the opening of the field_. although duncan calls the structure of rime "an absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance [that] establishes measures that are music in the actual world" (13), he does not allow the mind to imagine itself as privy to this "absolute scale." he ascribes this knowledge, instead, to a feminine presence, whom he designates in "often i am permitted to return to a meadow" as the "queen under the hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded" (7). as in leibniz, interconnectedness remains for duncan "folded within all thought" (7). ^9^ it is interesting to note how auster, in crafting a jewish interpretation of the pinocchio story, makes nothing of the puppet's embarrassingly prominent nose. see gilman, especially chapter 7, "the jewish nose," for reflections on the stigma of the nose and the history of the "nose job." ^10^ auster was recently given the opportunity to walk out of the room and yet continue writing. in the midst of shooting a film, _smoke_, for which auster wrote the screenplay, the director, wayne wang, auster, and one of the actors, harvey keitel, were having so much fun they decided to improvise another film. auster outlined the screenplay on the fly and even directed _blue in the face_ for two days when wang took sick. after describing the joys of working with actors like keitel, michael j. fox, roseanne, lou reed, jim jarmusch, lily tomlin, and madonna, auster was asked by a journalist if he plans to direct or write screenplays again. he answered in the negative, but noted a signal benefit from the endeavor: "it was a great experience, it got me out of my room" (chanko 15). works cited: antin, david. _talking at the boundaries_. new york: new directions, 1976. auster, paul. _the art of hunger_. new york: penguin, 1993. abbreviated ah. ---. _disappearances: selected poems_. woodstock, ny: overlook press, 1988. abbreviated d. ---. _the invention of solitude_. 1982. new york: penguin, 1988. abbreviated is. ---. _the new york trilogy_. 1985, 1986, 1986. new york: penguin, 1990. abbreviated nyt. ---, ed. _the random house book of twentieth-century french poetry_. new york: random, 1982. barone, dennis, ed. _beyond the red notebook: essays on paul auster_. philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, 1995. bruckner, pascal. "paul auster, or the heir intestate." barone 27-33. benjamin, walter. _illuminations_. trans. harry zohn. new york: harcourt, 1968. chanko, kenneth. "'smoke' gets in their eyes." _entertainment weekly_ 281/282 (june 30/july 7, 1995): 14-15. duncan, robert. _the opening of the field_. new york: grove, 1960. finkelstein, norman. "in the realm of the naked eye: the poetry of paul auster." barone 44-59. fredman, stephen. _poet's prose: the crisis in american verse_. 2nd. ed. cambridge: cambridge up, 1990. gilman, sander. _the jew's body_. new york: routledge, 1991. heidegger, martin. _poetry, language, thought_. trans. albert hostadter. new york: harper, 1971. jabes, edmond. _from the book to the book: an edmond jabes reader_. trans. rosmarie waldrop. hanover, nh: wesleyan up, 1991. ---. _from the desert to the book: dialogues with marcel cohen_. trans. pierre joris. barrytown, ny: station hill, 1990. melville, herman. _moby-dick_. norton critical edition. ed. harrison hayford and hershel parker. new york: norton, 1967. oppen, george. "of being numerous." _collected poems_. new york: new directions, 1975. 147-179. ouaknin, marc-alain. _the burnt book: reading the talmud_. 1986. trans. llewellyn brown. princeton: princeton u p, 1995. perloff, marjorie. "between verse and prose: beckett and the new poetry." _the dance of the intellect: studies in the poetry of the pound tradition_. cambridge: cambridge up, 1985. 135-54. rubin, derek. "'the hunger must be preserved at all cost': a reading of _the invention of solitude_." barone 60-70. spiegelman, art. _maus: a survivor's tale i and ii_. new york: random, 1986, 1991. weisenburg, steven. "inside _moon palace_." barone 130-42. yerushalmi, yosef hayim. _zakhor: jewish history and jewish memory_. 1982. new york: schocken, 1989. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------shepherdson, 'history and the real: foucault with lacan', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-shepherdson-history.txt archive pmc-list, file shepherd.195. part 1/1 (subpart 1/2), total size 121480 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- history and the real: foucault with lacan by charles shepherdson department of english university of missouri at columbia postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by charles shepherdson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the entrance into world by beings is primal history [urgeschichte] pure and simple. from this primal history a region of problems must be developed which we today are beginning to approach with greater clarity, the region of the mythic. --heidegger, the metaphysical foundations of logic ^1^ the oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure. --lacan, television ^2^ by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. --foucault, madness and civilization ^3^ the historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity. --derrida, "cogito and the history of madness" ^4^ satire [1] in spite of the difference between english and continental philosophy, there is a link between foucault and writers like swift, as there was between nietzsche and paul ree: "the first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses *concerning the origin* of morality," nietzsche says, "was given to me by a clear, tidy and shrewd--also precocious--little book in which i encountered for the first time an *upside-down and perverse* species of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely *english* type . . . _the origin of the moral sensations_; its author dr. paul ree" (emphasis mine).^5^ taking this upside-down and perverse english type as a starting point, let us begin with the strange tale by jonathan swift.^6^ [2] at the end of _gulliver's travels_, after returning from his exotic and rather unexpected voyage to the land of the houyhnhnms, where the horses are so wise and discourse so eloquently, while humans sit up in the trees throwing food at each other and defecating on themselves, our poor traveller goes back to his homeland, where he is so dislocated that he cannot even embrace his wife or laugh with his friends at the local pub (being "ready to faint at the very smell" of such a creature, though finally able "to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason"); and in this state of distress, he goes out to the stable and sits down with the horses, thinking that maybe he will calm down a bit, if only he can learn to whinny and neigh. [3] in swift, how is it that this voyage to the land of the houyhnhnms and yahoos is not simply an amusing story about some ridiculous foreign land? how is it that this "topsy-turvy world," this inverted world (%die verkehrte welt%), where horses display the highest virtue and humans are regarded with disgust because they are so filthy and inarticulate--how is it that this is not merely an amusing departure from reality, an entertaining fiction, but also a revelation of the fact that our own world, the world of reality, is itself inverted, already an absurd fiction, a place where human beings are already disgusting irrational filthy inarticulate and comical creatures, worthy only of satirical derision? how is it that the inverted image turns out to reflect back upon the real one--that what begins as the very reverse of our normal world, an absurd, excessive, and foreign place, a world of science fiction, where madmen wander freely in the streets and objects in nature are inscribed with strange insignias, written on their surfaces by god, turns out to be both foreign and yet also a picture, both exotic and yet precisely a mirroring of our own world, by which we are brought to see ourselves? [4] this is a question of fiction and truth, but it is also a question of history, a question concerning genealogy. how is it that genealogy, which wanders around in what is most distant and unfamiliar--not the old world where we recognize ourselves, finding continuity with our ancestors, but a strange and unfamiliar land--turns out to be, at the same time, an account of our own world, a history of the exotic that is also *our own* history? [5] before we turn to the historical aspect of the question, let us stay a moment with the problem of fiction. for the exotic tale told by swift captures the problem art posed for plato: the problem is not that art produces an illusion, that it is merely a copy of what already exists in reality, or even a deranged, imaginary substitute; the problem is rather that art rebounds upon the world, that it discloses a dimension of truth beyond immediate reality, a truth that competes with what plato regarded as the proper object of philosophy. as lacan says, "the picture does not compete with the appearance, it competes with what plato designates as beyond appearance, as the idea."^7^ in the artistic competition, it is not the still life of zeuxis that wins the prize, a work so accomplished that even the birds come down to peck at the imaginary grapes; it is rather the veil of parrhasios, the illusion painted so perfectly that zeuxis, upon seeing it, asks parrhasios to remove this veil so that he may see the painting of his competitor. this is the difference between the level of the imaginary and the level of desire. the function of art is to incite its viewer to ask what is *beyond*. art is the essence of truth: it leads us not "to see," as lacan would put it, but "to look." for the human animal is blind in this respect, that it *cannot simply see*, but is *compelled to look* behind the veil, *driven*, freud would say, beyond the pleasure of seeing. this is where we find the split between the eye and the gaze that lacan takes from merleau-ponty. this is where the symbolic aspect of art emerges, as distinct from its imaginary dimension. and it is here that the question of true and false images must be replaced with a question about language. [6] if we return now to satire, it is clear that at one level, the satirical, inverted picture of the world, in which everything is rendered in an excessive form, may well evoke our laughter and entertain us, but the true function of satire, as a form of art that is also a political act, must be situated at another level, where the inverted image rebounds upon the so-called normal world, and shows that this world is itself already inverted. at the first level, we have an illusion, the false reality of art that distracts us from the truth, like a distorted mirror-image that captivates us while alienating us from reality; at the second level, we have an image that, precisely because of its unreal character, shows us that there is no reality, that reality itself is already an inverted image in which we are not at home. this is where the image goes beyond a picture, true or false, mimetically accurate or surrealistically bizarre; this is where art has to be understood, not in terms of the imaginary and reality, but in its symbolic function, its function as representation. the implication is that as long as we remain content with a discussion of the image and reality, fiction and truth, we will in effect repress the question of language. the place of enunciation [7] let us now pass from satire to consider the historical issue, the problem of how these stories that foucault constructs for us (the strange laboratory of doctor caligari or the fantastic clinic of boissier de sauvages), however distant and unfamiliar, operate neither as "mere" fiction, nor simply as truth, neither as an entertaining disclosure of strange practices long ago forgotten, nor as a compilation of facts about the past, but rather by rebounding upon us, to show us who we are for the first time, as if in spite of everything these bizarre images were portraits of ourselves. in an interview from 1984, francois ewald asks, "why turn your attention to those periods, which, some will say, are so very far from our own?" foucault replies: "i set out from a problem expressed in current terms today, and i try to work out *its* genealogy. genealogy means that i begin my analysis from a question posed in the present."^8^ [8] with this remark, foucault stresses the fact that the position of enunciation, the point from which he speaks, is always explicitly thematized in his works. this feature gives his writings a dimension that can only be obscured if one views them as a neutral, descriptive documentation of the past (history), or as an attempt to construct a grand methodological edifice (theory). this is the point at which foucault's work touches on something that does not belong to history, or even to philosophy, something we might speak of as fiction. "if philosophy is memory, or a return of the origin," foucault writes, "what i am doing cannot, in any way, be regarded as philosophy; and if the history of thought consists in giving life to half-effaced figures, what i am doing is not history either."^9^ this is also the point at which we may understand his work as a kind of action, what foucault calls a "making of differences." [9] the new historicism, which often views foucault's work as revealing the specificity of various historical formations, without appealing to grand narratives of continuous emergence, or to universal notions (of "humanity" or "sex" or "justice"), nevertheless also regards his work as an effort at knowledge (rather than as a practice). if foucault's work is taken as a form of historicism, by which the real strangeness and diversity of historical formations is revealed (and, to be sure, this captures *one aspect* of his work), such a view nevertheless subscribes to the idea that his work is a variety of *historical knowledge*, which aims at *the truth about the past*: which is to say (a) *a truth* that is partial, no doubt, and elaborated from within a historical perspective, but that still *shows us* what was previously hidden, like any form of hermeneutics (the secret normalization being installed under the guise of "liberal" institutions such as psychiatry, or the modern judicial system), and at the same time (b) a truth *about the past*, since it is always a question, in this perspective, of re-reading the archive, a question of *historical* knowledge, knowledge that is bound to the past since, according to the often-quoted position, the archaeologist can by definition have no knowledge of his own archive, and thus cannot address the truth about his own discursive arrangement. given this virtually canonical stress upon the "historicist" aspect of foucault's work, which is thought to reveal the contingent moment in which things are given a historically specific form, one might take pause at foucault's remarks in _the archaeology of knowledge_: "my discourse," he writes, does not aim to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of truth. on the contrary, its task is to *make* differences. (205, original emphasis) [10] there are in fact two separate questions here. first, how are we to construe the relation between the present and the past? for if history traditionally represents itself as a neutral recounting of the past, at the level of knowledge, foucault by contrast, however much he may insist upon the documentary and empirical nature of his work, nevertheless also emphasizes that the work is not written from the standpoint of eternity, as a knowledge or representation that would have no place of birth, but rather has an origin of its own, in the present. what is the function of memory in genealogy, if it is not simply the recollection of the past, in the name of information or knowledge? with this question, we come close to the psychoanalytic problem of memory: what does it mean to say that in dredging up the past, repeating it, going back across the river to where the ancestors lie buried, one is concerned, not so much with what really happened--with what leopold von ranke called "the past as it really was in itself"--but rather with intervening, rewriting the past, producing a shift in the symbolic structure of the narrative that has brought us to the point where we are now?^10^ as is often said, freud's discovery concerning the symbolic nature of the symptom also meant that he had to shift his focus--to abandon his initial and "realist" interest in getting the patient to remember exactly what had happened, and to recognize instead that fantasy was every bit as real as reality. this is why it is correct to say that psychoanalysis begins with the displacement of the theory of trauma. with this displacement, freud abandons the idea that the primal scene is a real event that took place in historical time, and recognizes instead that the trauma has the structure of myth, and that human history as such differs from natural, chronological time, precisely to the extent that it is subject to myth. [11] this first question about genealogical memory and the relation between the present and the past is consequently linked to a second question about truth and fiction. how are we to understand the peculiar duality in foucault's work--the patient, archival research, the empiricist dedication, and on the other hand his continual assertions that he has never written anything but fictions? can we genuinely accept both of these features without eliminating one? in fact foucault believes that the standard histories are the product of institutions that write grand narratives culminating in the discoveries of the present, tales of the gradual emergence of truth and reason. these histories, according to foucault, are false, and can be replaced with a more accurate account by the genealogist, who is not seduced by the mythology of a prevailing narrative. [12] but what are we then to make of his claim that he has never written anything but fiction? is it simply a stylish, french gesture that forms part of the public image of foucault, a rhetorical aside that has no serious philosophical weight? to say this would be to refuse the statement, not to take it seriously. or does the remark simply mean that he knows he might not have all his facts straight, and that one day someone may find it necessary to improve his account, in short, that his account is true but contingent, or true but written from a perspective? to say this would be to remain within the arena of knowledge, in which a "relativism" is endorsed that covertly maintains the very commitment to truth which it seems to overcome, by admitting that it is "only a perspective," while simultaneously insisting upon a rigorous adherence to documentary evidence that tells the truth better than the grand narratives of the received history. what is this vacillation that makes genealogy neither an operation of knowledge, a true (or at least "more true") account of the past, nor simply a fable, a distorted image, an entertaining but bizarre representation of a time that is foreign to us? if we ask about the nature of genealogical knowledge, the fiction that genealogy is, how can we distinguish it from this dichotomy between the imaginary and the true? once again, it is a question of language, a question that cannot be resolved at the imaginary level, by appeal to the dialectical interplay of image and reality. [13] foucault touches here on the very structure we find in swift, whereby the function of satire is not simply to create a strange and unfamiliar world, but rather to return, to rebound upon the present, such that the real world is shown to be itself a parody. slavoj zizek explains the shift from the imaginary to the symbolic in the following way, arguing that we will only misconstrue the relation between the image and reality if we attempt to resolve it dialectically (by showing that the image and reality are interwoven, that the image is a fiction that nevertheless rebounds upon the true world with formative effects, as hegel shows in the _aesthetics_). for there is a point at which the relation between the distorted image and the real thing becomes unstable, beyond all dialectical mediation, a point at which, moreover, it loses the *generative* force that is given in the concept of productive negation. the fact that the inverted image turns out not to be an inversion, but to reveal that the normal world is itself already inverted, calls into question the very standard of "normality" by which one might measure invertedness.^11^ freud says something similar about hallucination when he elaborates the concept of "the reality principle." according to the usual, "adaptive" view of analysis, the analyst seeks to replace the patient's "delusions" by adjusting the client to "reality." the patient's "narcissism" and the ego's pleasure principle are thus opposed to the "reality principle." but lacan stresses that, contrary to the usual interpretation, freud's "reality principle" is not simply *opposed* to the pleasure principle, as a "pre-linguistic" domain (the "external world"). on the contrary, "reality" is the strict counterpart of the ego, and is *constructed* as much as the ego is, though not in exactly the same way. thus, "reality" is not simply opposed to the realm of delusion or hallucination, but constituted *through* the formation of the "pleasure principle." consequently, as freud himself discovered, analytic technique must abandon the aim of "adjusting the patient to reality," and the entire framework which sets the "imaginary" against the "real": it is not by means of shock therapy or behavior modification or any other adaptive technique (which are all governed by a *certain conception* of "reality"), nor through any "reality-testing," that one modifies a hallucination or fantasy; on the contrary, it is only through a symbolic action that the mutually constitutive relation between the "imaginary" and the "real" can be realigned.^12^ this is why lacan spoke of analysis as a way of working on the real by symbolic means.^13^ [14] to understand the relation between the imaginary and reality when it is regarded from the standpoint of the symbolic, consider the example of adorno's remarks on totalitarian authority. how does the liberal individual, the free, authentic moral subject, stand in relation to the oppressive totalitarian dictator (the figure parodied by charlie chaplin)? according to martin jay, adorno described the typical authoritarian personality by *reversing* all the features of the bourgeois individual: as zizek puts it, "instead of tolerating difference and accepting non-violent dialogue as the only means to arrive at a common decision, the [totalitarian] subject advocates violent intolerance and distrust in free dialogue; instead of critically examining every authority, this subject advocates uncritical obedience of those in power" (slightly modified).^14^ from one standpoint--what one might call standpoint of "realism," the imaginary level where reality is brought face to face with its distorted image--these two are in complete opposition, mutually opposed ideals charged with all the pathos and investment of realist urgency; but from the standpoint of satire, from the standpoint of fiction, which asks about representation itself, the authoritarian personality reflects its image back onto the bourgeois democratic subject, and is revealed as already contained there, as the truth of the liberal individual, its constitutive other--or, to put it differently, *its common origin*. [15] this common origin is at play in _madness and civilization_, when foucault speaks of the peculiar moment when madness and reason first come to be separated from one another, and are shown to have a common birth. this raises a question about history, for foucault seems to suggest that the common origin of madness and reason is always *concealed by historical narrative*. the usual history of madness is a discourse of reason *on* madness, a discourse in which reason has already established itself as the measure, the arena within which madness will appear; it is therefore a history in which madness is relegated to silence. as a result, the standard history, according to foucault, is one in which a separation between madness and reason has already occurred, thereby concealing their original relation. derrida stresses this point when he cites foucault's own remark that "the necessity of madness is linked to the *possibility* of history": history itself would seem to arise only insofar as a separation has been made between madness and reason. to go back to their common origin would thus be not *simply* to aim at writing history, *but also* to raise a question concerning the very possibility of history.^15^ this would be, as derrida puts it, "the maddest aspect of foucault's work."^16^ [16] thus, the peculiar identity which links the liberal individual with the obscene and tyrannical force of fascism *must be disavowed*, and the best form of disavowal is narrative: what is in fact an original unity, a structural relation linking the reign of terror with the rise of free democracy and the rights of man, is best concealed by a *genetic* narrative, in which the original condition is said to be one of pure freedom, liberty, fraternity and equality, an ideal which eventually comes to be corrupted by a degenerate or perverted form. in this case--what we might call the case of realism, the imaginary level where the true reality is set over against its distorted image--we would be *tempted to denounce* the authoritarian personality as an extreme distortion of the natural order of things, by measuring this degenerate form against the liberal, democratic individual; we would seek a return to the origin, before it was contaminated by the tyrannical violence of a degenerate form; but in the second case, when we see with the eye of the satirist who recognizes that the natural order of things is already a parody, we have to recognize that the supposedly natural state of things, the normal, liberal individual who has "natural rights" and a native capacity for moral reflection, is itself already inverted, that it contains the totalitarian authority in its origins, not as its opposite, not as its contradiction, not as its degenerate or perverted form, but as its repressed foundation, its internal "other."^17^ in lacanian terms, the first relation of aggressive, mirroring opposition (in which the communist and the democrat face off) is imaginary, whereas the second relation (in which they are mutually constitutive) is symbolic, which means that it can only be grasped at the level of language, and not by a return to some mythical origin--the liberation of our supposedly innate but repressed libido, or the restoration of our so-called "natural" democratic rights. [17] the point here is not simply to dwell on the purportedly shocking revelation concerning the symptomatic link--what one might call the equiprimordiality--of totalitarianism and democracy, but rather to show that the ideal of the liberal individual (whose right to freedom is accompanied by an inborn capacity for tolerance, and whose healthy conscience is the sign of an innate moral disposition, and so on), is a construction whose supposedly natural status is a fiction. this amounts to dismantling the idea that totalitarian governments are a *secondary* formation, the corruption of an origin, or the *perversion* of what would otherwise be a natural system of equally distributed justice. *that* story of the origin and its subsequent perversion is a myth, in the sense in which lacan uses the word when he writes that the oedipus myth is the attempt to give epic form to what is in fact the operation of a structure. this is where rousseau is more radical than other "state of nature" theorists: his explanation of the social contract relies on the idea that originally, before any conventions or institutional constraints were established, human nature took a certain form, but as his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this original state is purely mythical, a fiction that his own political discourse confronts as such, whereas other writers who engage in the "state of nature" argument rely unequivocally on a theory of "human nature" that is always *presupposed rather than demonstrated* (as is suggested by the hobbesian model, in the fact for example that when i agree to leave your acorns alone if you agree to leave mine alone, i am *already* operating as the rational agent whose existence is supposed to be *generated* by the social contract, and not presupposed as original--since originally nature is said to have been merely violent and aggressive, and thus dependent upon the arrival of law for its rational coherence).^18^ we thereby see that the symbolic order forces upon us a confrontation with the equiprimordiality of two opposed positions which an historical account would regard according to a genetic narrative, as sequential, and also as hierarchically ordered in such a way that one position can be regarded as natural, while the other is treated as a cultural product--the choice being left open as to whether one prefers a "return to nature," or a celebration of the "higher law" of culture, though in either case the common origin has been repressed. the "historical sense" [18] in his essay on nietzsche, foucault distinguishes the work of the historian from the first genealogical insights that go under the name of "the historical sense": "the historical sense," he writes, gives rise to three . . . modalities of history [all of them deployed against the pious restoration of historical monuments]. the first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition.^19^ the historian's gaze is thereby distinguished from that of the satirical genealogist: the *historian* offers this confused and anonymous european, who no longer knows himself or what name he should adopt, the possibility of alternate identities, more individualized and substantial than his own. but the man with historical sense will see that this substitution is simply a disguise. historians supplied the revolution with roman prototypes, romanticism with knight's armor, and the wagnerian era was given the sword of the german hero. (160, emphasis added) "the genealogist," foucault continues, will know what to make of this masquerade. he will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing. . . . in this, we recognize the parodic double of what the second _untimely meditation_ called 'monumental history'. . . nietzsche accused this history, one totally devoted to veneration, of *barring access* to the actual intensities and creations of life. the parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that *"monumental history" is itself a parody*. genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival." (160-61, slightly modified) fiction [19] parody is of course only one of the lessons foucault takes from nietzsche. if we ask more generally about the relation of genealogy to fiction, we may recognize the peculiar "distance" that genealogy inhabits--not the transcendental distance that allows a perfect view of the past, and not the distance of escape, the distance of an imaginary world that takes us away from reality, but the distance of words. in an essay on robbe-grillet, foucault writes: what if the fictive were neither the beyond, nor the intimate secret of the everyday, but the arrowshot which strikes us in the eye and offers up to us everything which appears? in this case, the fictive would be that which names things, that which makes them speak, and that which gives them in language their being already apportioned by the sovereign power of words. . . . this is not to say that fiction is language: this trick would be too easy, though a very familiar one nowadays. it does mean, though, that . . . the simple experience of picking up a pen and writing creates . . . a distance. . . . if anyone were to ask me to define the fictive, i should say . . . that it was the verbal nerve structure of what does not exist.^20^ later in the same essay, foucault returns to the word "distance": i should like to do some paring away, in order to allow this experience to be what it is . . . i should like to pare away all the contradictory words, which might cause it to be seen too easily in terms of a dialectic: subjective and objective, interior and exterior, reality and imagination. . . . this whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced with the vocabulary of distance. . . . fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, the light in which they are to be found and their inaccessibility. (149) [20] thus, when we ask (in regard to jonathan swift and his satirical text) how the inverted image is not just an entertaining fiction, a journey to the underground world of the marquis de sade, or the exotic dungeons of bicetre, but rather an image that reflects back upon the normal world, the "arrowshot" that returns to "strike us in the eye," we cannot understand this in terms of the opposition between "fiction and truth." this answer, even if it proceeds beyond opposition to a sort of dialectical interplay, in which the imaginary and "reality" interact, is insufficient, because it does not adequately confront the role of *language*.^21^ if we wish to understand language, then, we cannot rest content with a dialectical solution, according to foucault: "reality and imagination," foucault says: "this whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced." when we speak of fiction then, we are no longer in the realm of truth and falsity; we have passed from the image to the word, from the opposition between reality and imagination, to the symbolic. image and word [21] this discrepancy between the image and the word is the source of foucault's constant preoccupation with the difference between seeing and saying, perception and verbalization, the level of visibility and the function of the name. if, as we have seen, the relation between the image and reality is not a matter of productive negation, in which the encounter with an alien image cancels out our own self-knowledge and requires us to be transformed; if the dialectical account of the image and reality somehow obscures the role of language, perhaps this is because there is a difference between the image and the word, a gap or void that, according to foucault, is not sufficiently confronted by phenomenology. perhaps "distance" names the lack that separates the symbol from the domain of perception, evidence, and light. "fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, *the light* in which they are to be found *and their inaccessibility* (149). perhaps "distance," in naming the lack of any dialectical relation between speech and vision, also amounts to a refusal of all attempts to generate a stable historical unfolding, the gradual emergence of an origin, or the teleological production of something that had to be gradually constructed through the handing-down of a common tradition. perhaps "distance" is the name for why foucault refuses to participate in the husserlian response to the crisis of the human sciences (see ak, 204). [22] in that case, language would not only destabilize the usual dialectic between fiction and truth; it would also call for a reconfiguration of the concept of history, one in which things would retain their inaccessibility, beyond all phenomenological retrieval, even the retrieval that might seem to operate in archaeology itself. this would bring archaeology very close to what foucault speaks of as fiction. such a revision of historical knowledge is evident in the remark already cited, where foucault remarks that his work does not aim "to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things . . . the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of the truth. on the contrary, its task is to *make* differences" (205, original emphasis). [23] such a making of differences, such a disruption of phenomenological retrieval, can only be grasped through maintaining the *space* that separates the image and the word, the instability that keeps the relation of perception and language perpetually subject to dislocation: in _the birth of the clinic_, his analysis shows that modern medicine was organized precisely through a mapping of discourse that would coincide with the space of corporeal visibility, and that this perfect formalization of the field can be maintained only through a metaphysics of the subject, a modern philosophical anthropology. the first sentence of _the birth of the clinic_ reads: "this book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze."^22^ in _the order of things_ we find a similar gesture when foucault discusses the image painted by velasquez: in one sense, it would be possible to regard this painting as a complete display, a gestalt, the manifestation of all the techniques of representation at work in classical thought, the very image of representation, in which the distance between the visible world and its verbal representation would be definitively closed within the confines of the encyclopedia.^23^ in order for this to be possible, foucault says, all that is necessary is that we give a name to the one spot at which the surface of the painting seems incomplete (the mirror at the back which does not reflect, but which should show the subjects being painted, who will eventually appear on the canvas whose back we see in the painting called las meninas): this hole could be filled with the proper name, "king philip iv and his wife, mariana" (ot 9). foucault continues: but if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided . . . then one must erase those proper names. (9) the play of substitutions then becomes possible in which, as foucault shows, the royal subjects alternate place with the spectator of the painting, who also becomes the object of the painter's regard. in this opening, this void that marks the relation between the image and the word, we can begin to approach what lacan calls the question of the real. repression and power [24] let us now see if we can carry these remarks over into foucault's analysis of power. in an interview with bernard henri-levi, foucault remarks that movements of humanitarian reform are often attended by new types of normalization. contemporary discourses of liberation, according to foucault, "present to us a formidable trap." in the case of sexual liberation for example, what they are saying, roughly, is this: 'you have a sexuality; this sexuality is both frustrated and mute . . . so come to us, tell us, show us all that. . . . ' as always, it uses what people say, feel, and hope for. it exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it is enough to cross the threshold of discourse and to remove a few prohibitions. but in fact it ends up repressing."^24^ [25] power, according to foucault, is therefore not properly understood in the form of juridical law, as a repressive, prohibitive agency which transgression might overcome, but is rather a structure, a relation of forces, such that the law, far from being simply prohibitive, is a force that generates its own transgression. in spite of the claims of reason, the law is always linked to violence in this way, just as the prison, in the very failure of its aim at reform, reveals that at another level it is an apparatus destined to produce criminality (lacan's remarks on "aim" and "goal" would be relevant here). this is why foucault rejects the model of law, and the idea that power is a repressive force to be overthrown. transgression, liberation, revolution and so on are not adequately grasped as movements *against* power, movements that would contest the law or displace a prohibition; for these forms of resistance in fact belong to the apparatus of power itself. transgression and the law thus have to be thought otherwise than in the juridical, oppositional form of modernity, which is invested with all the drama and pathos of revolutionary narratives; we are rather concerned with a structural relation that has to be undone. [26] we can see here why foucault says that genealogy is not simply a form of historical investigation. it does not aim at recovering lost voices, or restoring the rights of a marginalized discourse (speaking on behalf of the prisoners, or recovering the discourse of madness). genealogy does not participate in this virtuous battle between good and evil, but is rather an operation that goes back to the origins, the first moments when an opposition between madness and reason took shape, and came to be ordered as a truth.^25^ this distinction between genealogy and historical efforts at recovering lost voices bears directly on foucault's sense of the ethical dimension of genealogy: "what often embarrasses me today," he says, is that all the work done in the past fifteen years or so . . . functions for some only as a sign of belonging: to be on the 'good side,' on the side of madness, children, delinquency, sex. . . . one must pass to the other side--the good side--but by trying to turn off these mechanisms which cause the appearance of two separate sides . . . that is where *the real work* begins, that of the present-day historian (emphasis added).^26^ beyond good and evil [27] this is not to say that there is no difference between the fascist and the liberal, madness and reason. this game of dissolving all differences by showing that you can't tell one thing from another is not what is at stake.^27^ the point is rather to refuse to reanimate the forces of moral approbation and censure--denouncing the enemy and congratulating oneself on having achieved a superior stance--and rather to ask how one is to conduct an analysis. foucault's work often reaches just such a point, where he seems to pass beyond good and evil. [28] in books like _discipline and punish_, and even as early as _madness and civilization_, he says that, as terrible and oppressive as the imprisonment of the insane may be, as intolerable as the torture and public humiliation of criminals may seem to us today--we who look back with our enlightened eyes--it is not our censure of this barbarism that foucault wishes to enlist. what really matters, for us today, is not the deficiency of the past, but the narrative that reassures us about our own grasp on the truth, our possession of more humane and rational methods. as horrific as the tale of the torture of damiens may be in the opening pages of _discipline and punish_--and it is a story, a little image or vignette, that frames this long mustering of documentary evidence, as velasquez's artful painting frames the meticulous and patient discourse on knowledge in _the order of things_ (see also the opening of _the birth of the clinic_)--this scene of torture, which captures the eye and rouses the passions, is not offered up as a spectacle for our contempt. to be sure, it does tempt the appetite of our moral indignation, but also our satisfaction in ourselves, our certainty that we have arrived at a better way. but the genealogy of the prison is not the story of the progressive abandonment of an unjust system of monarchical power, and the emergence of a more democratic legal order; it is the story of the formation of the modern police state, a network of normalization *which is concealed by the conventional history* of law and justice. *that* history is a narrative written by the conquerors, in which the truth *about the present* is lost. counter-memory [29] it is the same in _madness and civilization_. foucault's work is often written *against* a prevailing narrative, as a kind of counter-memory: it is usually said, he tells us, that the liberation of the insane from their condition of imprisonment constitutes an improvement, a sort of scientific advance--a greater understanding of the insane, and a progressive reform of the barbaric practices which previously grouped the insane together with the criminal and the poor. but this story only serves the interests of the present; it is not the true history, but a history written by the conqueror. for the fact is that the organization of this supposedly liberal and scientific discipline of psychiatric knowledge only served to produce greater and more diversified forms of subjugation, a greater and more subtle surveillance of the minutiae of interior mental life. the body has been freed, foucault says, only for the soul to become a more refined an effective prison: you watch too much tv., you eat too much, you don't get enough exercise, you waste your time, you criticize yourself too much, and you should be ashamed for feeling guilty about all this, for dwelling so much on your pathetic problems. this is "the genealogy of the modern 'soul'."^28^ "th[is] soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy." it was once the body that was put in prison, but now "the soul is the prisoner of the body" (dp 30). and it is on the basis of this modern psychological soul that "have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism" (dp 30), whose handbooks can be found on the bestseller lists, and whose various institutional forms are distributed across the entire social network, from outpatient clinics to recreational packages. it is *that* contemporary regime, and not the earlier incarceration of the insane, that captures foucault's attention. it is the story we tell ourselves, and not the barbarism of the past, that foucault wishes to interrogate. that is why he does not simply produce a history for us, but also tells us the usual story, and asks us to think about who it is that tells that story, *who is speaking* in the received narrative. [30] in _the history of sexuality_, we find a similar gesture: it looks as if the victorians repressed sex, and perhaps it could be shown that repression is not an adequate concept, that in fact power does not operate by means of repression, but that there was rather an incitement to discourse, a complex production of sexuality. and yet, however much ink has been spilled over this thesis, the central focus of this first volume is not simply on whether there was "repression" among the victorians, or something more complex, but also on the way in which the usual story of liberalization is a history written by the conquerors, their fiction. [31] we may return here to our basic question. in fact it is incorrect to say that whereas the victorians repressed sex, we have liberated it. our knowledge of the past should be altered in this respect. but foucault does not simply drop the usual history, in order to replace it with a better one. he is not simply interested in the truth, a better method, a more accurate history. he does not simply reject the false narrative, but asks: if it is so often told, what satisfactions does the received story contain? this is a question about the present and not about the victorian era. if this story of repression is told so often, who does it please and who does it celebrate? who is the subject that enunciates this history? for the story of liberated sexuality, or the promise of its liberation, does contain its satisfactions: even if it is not the truth, foucault writes at the beginning of the first volume, the narrative of sexual repression among the victorians, has its reasons, and "is easily analyzed," for we find that "the sexual cause--the demand for sexual freedom . . . becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause".^29^ the received history is thus a lie that has its reasons. how now? these brave europeans! that they should *need* to tell such tales about their ancestors! "a suspicious mind might wonder," says foucault (hs 6). [32] it is therefore not the oppressiveness of victorian life that interests foucault at this point, nor even a revised account of the past; what concerns him is rather our story, the narrative we have consented to believe.^30^ there may be a reason, he writes, that makes it *so gratifying for us* to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker's benefit. if sex is repressed . . . then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate *transgression*. . . . [o]ur tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and *we ardently conjure* away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. (hs 6-7, emphasis added) history, theory, fiction [33] in short, it is true that foucault wishes to tell us a different history, to show us that sex in the nineteenth century was not in fact repressed, but rather incited to speak, articulated in many new discursive forms, and not simply silenced or prohibited. it is also true that this argument, this revised history, contributes at another level to a *theoretical* elaboration of power. but we cannot be satisfied with this operation of knowledge. for in addition to the revised history, and beyond the theoretical doctrine, what ultimately drives foucault is a desire, not to construct a more accurate history (the truth about the past--that of the historian), or to erect a great theoretical edifice (a universal truth--that of the philosopher), but to dismantle the narratives that still organize *our present experience* (a truth that bears on the position of enunciation).^31^ "i would like to explore not only these discourses," foucault writes, but also the will that sustains them . . . the question i would like to pose is not 'why are we repressed?' but rather, 'why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?' (hs 8-9) it is the same in _discipline and punish_, when foucault responds to an imaginary reader who wonders why he spends so much time wandering among obsolete systems of justice and the obscure ruins of the torture chamber. "why?" he replies. "simply because i am interested in the past? no, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. yes, if one means writing a *history of the present*" (dp 31, emphasis added). it is this counter-memory, this interplay between one story and another, that leads us to consider the relation between history, theory, and fiction. transgression and the law [34] although foucault's refusal of the repressive conception of power appears in his discussion of the victorians, one does not have to wait for the _history of sexuality_ to find this thesis on power, this rejection of the theory of power as prohibition, the so-called repressive hypothesis, which generates so many discourses of resistance and liberation. in 1963, foucault formulates a similar claim in his "preface to transgression."^32^ curiously enough, this formulation also has to do with sexuality. [35] foucault begins his essay with the same focus on the present: "*we like to believe* that sexuality has regained, in contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth which has long been lingering in the shadows" (lcmp 29, emphasis added). but as writers like bataille have shown us, transgression is not the elimination of the law by means of a force or desire that might be thought to pre-exist all prohibition. it is not the restoration of an origin, a return to immediacy, or the liberation of a prediscursive domain, by means of which we might overcome all merely historical and constituted limits.^33^ on the contrary, "the limit and transgression depend on each other" (lcmp 34). "transgression," foucault writes, "is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside" (lcmp 35). long before his final books on the relation between sexuality and ethics, these remarks already have consequences for our conception of the ethical. transgression is therefore not the sign of liberation; it "must be detached from its questionable association to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it . . . it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive" (lcmp 35). this is what would be required if we were to think the obscure relation that binds transgression to the law. [36] let us add that these reflections on the limit, on power and transgression, are not simply formulated as an abstract philosophical question, as though it were a theoretical matter of understanding power correctly. on the contrary, foucault's claims only make sense if they are seen as part of his understanding of history. it is a question of the *contemporary* experience of transgression, in which the concept of the limit does not take a kantian form, does not entail a line that cannot (or should not) be crossed (a logical or moral limit), but is rather a *fold*, the elaboration of a strange non-euclidean geometry of space, another mathematics, in which the stability of inside and outside gives way to a limit that exists only in the movement which crosses it (like a moebius strip, the two sides of which constantly disappear as one circles around its finite surface--as if the point at which one passes from one side to the other were constantly receding, so that the mathematization of space, the difference between one and two, were constantly being destabilized).^34^ [37] in short, this concept of transgression has a historical location: it is clearly bound up with the epoch for which anthropological thought has been dismantled. foucault puts the history very concisely in the "preface to transgression," where he uses the categories of "need," "demand" and "desire." in the eighteenth century, foucault writes, "consumption was based entirely on need, and need based itself exclusively on the model of hunger." this formulation will be developed in _the order of things_ when foucault elaborates the enlightenment's theory of exchange and its political economy, in their fundamental dependence on the concept of natural need. "when this element was introduced into an investigation of profit," when, in other words, the natural foundation of need was reconfigured by an economics that aimed to account for the *superfluity* of commodities, an economics that went beyond natural law, explaining the genesis of culture through *a demand that exceeded all natural need* (what foucault calls "the appetite of those who have satisfied their hunger"), then the enlightenment theory of exchange gave way to modern philosophical anthropology: european thought inserted man into a dialectic of production which had a simple anthropological meaning: if man was alienated from his real nature and his immediate needs through his labor and the production of objects . . . it was nevertheless through its agency that he recaptured his essence. (lcmp 49) for *contemporary* thought, however, this shift from need to demand will be followed by yet another dislocation, a shift from demand to desire, in which the conceptual framework of modernity no longer functions; and this time, instead of labor, sexuality will play a decisive role, obliging us to think transgression differently than in the form of dialectical production. [38] this new formation is not a return to "nature," but an encounter with language. "the discovery of sexuality," foucault argues, forces us into a conception of desire that is irreducible to need or demand (the requirements of nature or the dialectical self-production of culture that characterizes anthropological thought). "in this sense," foucault writes, "the appearance of sexuality as a fundamental problem marks the transformation of a philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy based on *a being who speaks*" (lcmp 49-50). the same historical shift is stressed in _madness and civilization_: this book, which might at first glance seem to include an indictment of freud, as one of those who participate in the modern, psychiatric imprisonment of madness, in fact argues that freud marks an essential displacement in relation to psychiatry, a displacement that coincides with what the "preface to transgression" regards as the end of philosophical anthropology: that is why we must do justice to freud.^35^ between freud's _five case histories_ and janet's scrupulous investigations of _psychological healing_, there is more than the density of a *discovery*; there is the sovereign violence of a *return*. . . . freud went back to madness at the level of its *language*, reconstituted one of the elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; . . . he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with unreason. . . . it is not psychology that is involved in psychoanalysis. (mc 198) the break with psychology that arrives with freud marks the end of philosophical anthropology. lacan [39] if, as we have seen, resistance belongs to the apparatus of power, and is consequently not so much a threat to power, as a product, an effect of power (just as the totalitarian state is structurally linked to the founding of the democratic community, which would seem to be opposed to it in every respect), then it is the obscure, symptomatic relation between the two that foucault's conception of power obliges us to confront. [40] lacan says something similar about transgression and the law: we do not enjoy in spite of the law, but precisely because of it. this is what the thesis on jouissance entails: jouissance is not the name for an instinctual pleasure that runs counter to the law (in spite of the biological paradigm that still governs so many readings of freud); it is not the fulfillment of a natural urge, or a momentary suspension of moral constraint, but quite the contrary: it is lacan's name for freud's thesis on the death drive, the name for a dimension of (unnatural) suffering and punishment that inhabits human pleasure, a dimension that is possible only because the body and its satisfaction are constitutively denatured, always already bound to representation. jouissance is thus tied to punishment, organized not in defiance of the repressive conventions of civilization, not through the transgression of the moral law, but precisely in relation to the law (which does not mean "in conformity with it"). this is precisely foucault's thesis on the productive character of power, even if it does not entail a complete theoretical overlap with lacan in other respects. [41] slavoj zizek reminds us of lacan's paradoxical reversal of dostoevski here: "against [the] famous position, 'if god is dead, everything is permitted,'" lacan claims instead that "if there is no god . . . everything is forbidden." zizek remarks: how do we account for this paradox that the absence of law universalizes prohibition? there is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as 'transgression,' is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered--when we enjoy, we never do it 'spontaneously,' we always follow a certain injunction. the psychoanalytic name for this injunction, this imperative to 'enjoy!' is superego. (slightly modified)^36^ we find here, in the relation between the law and transgression, not a simple opposition of outside and inside, prohibition and rebellion, cultural conventions opposed to natural desires, but rather a paradoxical relation of forces, not the newtonian system of natural forces, the smooth machinery in which every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, not a physics of libido based on natural law, a theory of charge and discharge, tension and homeostasis, but a more peculiar form of power, one that takes us away from natural law toward the law of language, in which force is tied to representation.^37^ [42] here the space of the body is given over to the unnatural network of discourse and its causality. in this framework, the relation between law and transgression is such that the rule of law appears not to "repress" or "prohibit," but to produce its own exception, not to function but to malfunction, thereby making manifest the incompleteness of the law, the impossibility of closure, the element of lack that destabilizes the structural, symbolic totality. as a result, moreover, the symbolic order itself appears to function only on the basis of this exception, this peculiar remainder, this excess--as though the very rule of law somehow depended upon a level of malfunction and perverse enjoyment (what freud called the "death drive," and what lacan formulates in terms of *jouissance*).^38^ now this is precisely how the prison seems to function in relation to the "criminal element" that it supposedly aims at eliminating: for the prison acts not simply as a limit or prohibition, but carries within it a perverse productivity, a level of sadistic enjoyment that kafka represented so well, by generating the illusion that behind the mechanical operation of a neutral, anonymous, bureaucratic law there lay an obscure level of sadistic enjoyment, a peculiar agency that *wants* the criminal to exist, in order to have the pleasure of inflicting punishment (this other who is imagined to enjoy is one aspect of the father, a perverse manifestation lacan gestures toward with the word "pere-version," perversion being a "turning-towards the father" in which the father is outside the law).^39^ this is the point of jouissance that marks the excess that always accompanies the law, an excess that freud called "primary masochism."^40^ this excess is not a natural phenomenon, a primordial force that disrupts the polished machinery of culture; it is rather a peculiar feature of culture itself, not a matter of natural law, but an effect of language which includes its own malfunction--the "remainder" or "trace" of what did not exist before the institution of the law, but remains outside, excluded, in an "a priori" fashion that is logical rather than chronological. this is what lacan understands as the relation between the symbolic and the real. freud: the myth of origins and the origin of myth [43] freud explains this relation between the law and transgression in _totem and taboo_, by giving us two equiprimordial aspects of the father. this conception of the paternal function does not simply reduce to the figure of prohibition or law, as is so often said, but reveals a primordial split by which the law is originally tied to a perversion of the law. we should note here that in this text, which seeks to account for the *origin of the law* (and freud even refers to darwin), freud does not conceive of desire as a natural fact that would eventually, with the advent of culture, come to be organized by various prohibitions. he does not seek, in other words, to provide a genesis, a genetic narrative, in which the law would be subsequent to desire, like the imposition of a convention or social contract upon what would otherwise be a natural impulse; nor, conversely, does he follow the usual historicist argument according to which desire is simply the product of the law, the effect of various cultural prohibitions. freud's account, in effect, abandons the genetic narrative, and gives us instead an account of the origin that is strictly and rigorously mythical. that is the radicality of _totem and taboo_.^41^ [44] freud's mythic account thus gives us two simultaneous functions for the father: one is the father of the law, moses, or god, the giver of language and symbolic exchange, the father who represents the limiting function of castration; the other is the father of the primal horde, the mythical figure who, before he is murdered, possesses all the women, and is (therefore) precisely the one outside the law, the one whose enjoyment has no limit, who does not rule with the even hand of disinterested justice, but rather takes an obscene pleasure in arbitrary punishment, using us for his sport, devouring his children like chronos, feeding his limitless appetite on our sacrifices and enjoying the pure expression of his will--"the dark god," as lacan puts it: not the christian god of love and forgiveness, who keeps together the sheepish flock of the human community, but the god of terror and indifferent violence, the god of abraham and job, so much more clearly grasped in the judaic tradition.^42^ the symbolic and the real: jouissance [45] we can therefore see in freud the precise relation between prohibition and this peculiar excess, between the law and violence, that foucault develops in his remarks on power. this explains why foucault argues that the contemporary experience of sexuality is a central place in which the relation between the law and transgression demands to be rethought, beyond the legislative, prohibitive conception that characterizes modernity. this obscure, symptomatic relation by which the law is bound to its own transgression, to that dimension of excess, violence and suffering, can perhaps be seen in its most conspicuous form in america: with all its defiant freedom and carefree self-indulgence, america does not show itself as the land of freedom and pleasure, but may be said to display the most obscene form of superego punishment: you must enjoy, you must be young and healthy and happy and tan and beautiful. the question, "what must i do?" has been replaced with the higher law of the question: "are we having fun yet?" the imperative is written on the coke can: "enjoy!" that is american kantianism: "think whatever you like, choose your religion freely, speak out in any way you wish, but you must have fun!"^43^ the reverse side of this position, the guilt that inhabits this ideal of pleasure, is clear enough: don't eat too much, don't go out in the sun, don't drink or smoke, or you won't be able to enjoy yourself!^44^ [46] thus, as foucault argues in his thesis on power, it is not a matter of overcoming repression, of liberating pleasure from moral constraint, or defending the insane against the oppressive regime of psychiatry, but of undoing the structure that produced these two related sides. such is the distance between the kantian position and that of foucault and lacan: the law no longer serves as a juridical or prohibitive limit, but as a force, an imperious agency that does not simply limit, but *produces an excess* which kant did not theorize, a dimension of punishment and tyranny that it was meant to eliminate.^45^ this is the kind of logic addressed by foucault in _discipline and punish_, when he asks, for example, whether the very failure of the prison as an institution, the malfunction of the law, the fact that the prison seems to be a machine for organizing and proliferating criminality, is not in fact part of the very functioning of the prison: that the law includes this excess which seems on the surface to contradict it. lacan puts kant together with sade in order to show the logical relation between them, in the same way that we might speak of the obscure relation between the rights of man and the reign of terror--two formations which, from an imaginary point of view, are completely opposed and antithetical, but which turn out to have an obscure connection.^46^ [47] in lacan's terminology, the establishment of the symbolic law, the (systemic) totalization of a signifying structure, cannot take place without producing a remainder, an excess, a dimension of the real that marks the limit of formalization. something similar occurs in foucault: where the kantian formulation gives us an anthropology, a form of consciousness that is able, freely, to give itself its own law, and thereby to realize its essence, foucault speaks instead of an apparatus that produces the criminal, the insane, and the destitute, all *in the name of the law*--so that the excess of sade is the strict counterpart of kant, and not his contradiction or antithesis. it should come as no surprise that foucault mentions, in connection with kant's text, "what is enlightenment?," that it raises, among other things, the question of "making a place for jewish culture within german thought." this text, which kant wrote in response to a question that had been answered two months earlier by moses mendelssohn, is part of his effort to elaborate a "cosmopolitan view" of history, in which the promise of a community of man would be maintained; it is thus, according to foucault, "perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny." and yet, as foucault points out, history produced for us a paradoxical perversion of this common destiny. contrary to everything kant might have hoped for, foucault remarks, "we now know to what drama that was to lead" (we 33). it is this product, this excess, this remainder which accompanies the very morality meant to exclude it, that foucault addresses by his formulation of power as a relationship that does not take the form of justice and law (nor, we might add, of mere tyranny, mere "force" or exploitation, the simple "opposite" of law), but is rather productive, a force that must be conceived in relation to this excess or remainder that lacan calls jouissance.^47^ the "origin" of foucault's work (origins against historicism) [48] what would it mean to focus on this element of excess, as it appears *in foucault's own work*, this strange relation between the symbolic and the real, the law and its own disruption--as though the meticulous *order of things*, the symbolic totality governing thought, were in fact confronted with a fundamental disorder, a domain of chaos or nonsense that falls outside representation, but nevertheless remains present, like a traumatic element that cannot be put in place, or given a name within the encyclopedic mastery of foucault's work, but that continues to haunt it like a ghost, or like the perpetual possibility of madness itself? commentators who take pleasure in the encyclopedia of knowledge are not very happy with this grimace that emerges demonically behind the lucid surface of foucault's pages. it would be better, and we would feel less anxiety, if foucault confined himself to the documentary procedures that constitute historical research, or if he would be content with the elaboration of great theoretical models--archaeology, or genealogy, or the theory of "bio-power." these are the things the commentaries would prefer to discuss. [49] and foucault does in fact devote himself to both these tasks--the task of the historian and that of the philosopher. _the order of things_ for instance is both a history and a contribution to the theory of history. but something else emerges in his work, something that is neither history nor theory, something we might call fiction, but that is perhaps more accurately grasped in terms of what lacan calls the real--that element that has no place in the symbolic order, but manifests itself as a trauma that cannot be integrated, and not only as a trauma, but often, in foucault's work, in the forms of laughter, anxiety and fiction. it is this distress and this laughter that might be called the *origin* of foucault's work. perhaps more attention could be devoted to these places where foucault refuses to identify his work with the accumulation of historical knowledge, or with the discipline of history, which has nevertheless tried to renew itself by appeal to foucault. "i am not writing a history of morals, a history of behavior, or a social history of sexual practices"--foucault makes such remarks again and again (such remarks do not keep his readers from proceeding as if this were precisely his project). "i had no intention of writing the history of the prison as an institution," he says; "that would have required a different kind of research."^48^ [50] what do such claims mean for foucault's relation to the discipline of history? one approach to this question would be to lay out the distinctions that separate genealogy from traditional history: history is continuous, genealogy is discontinuous; history is always the history of reason, a narrative written from the point of view of gradual discoveries and progressive clarification; genealogy is the recounting of acts of aggression, violent usurpations, interpretations that made certain statements valid and ruled out others. and so on. such distinctions are important, but we might also return here to the link between genealogy and fiction, a link we have already touched upon, which could be understood as the aspect of foucault's work that brings him closest to lacan. this approach would have to entail a consideration of the way in which foucault's work, far from aiming to give an abstract, neutral, descriptive account of the past, for the sake of knowledge, in fact always *begins* from within a particular situation, and may perhaps be more accurately understood as an act--an act aimed at the present, rather than a knowledge serenely directed elsewhere, towards the past, the place of the other, where it can be contained. [51] this emphasis on the particular situation of writing does not merely mean that foucault writes from a perspective, like anyone else, and that he acknowledges this while some others do not. it means rather that the entire analysis, however descriptive and documentary it may be, is explicitly governed by the position in the present ("genealogy means that i begin my analysis from a question posed in the present" kritzman 262). in short, unlike the "new historicism" with which foucault is so often confused, genealogy is not *an elaboration of knowledge* that admits to having a perspective, in the sense that it may one day prove to be inadequate, or to be only one point of view, but rather *an act* that bears on the present, on what lacan calls the position of enunciation. the same holds for psychoanalysis: its aim is not to uncover the truth about the past, contrary to many commentators; it does not seek to discover "what really happened," as if a realist view of the past could address the questions proper to psychoanalysis.^49^ on the contrary, it is directed at what lacan calls imaginary and symbolic elements, at the narrative which, however real or fabricated, has brought the client into analysis. in a similar way, genealogy is irreducible to history; it is not a discourse *on the past* that admits to having a perspective, and will eventually be seen as the product of its time, but rather a discourse *on the present*, something like an *analysis* of the position from which it speaks. to maintain a realist view of history, however partial, limited, and subject to revision, is to read genealogy as if it were reducible to history; to maintain a realist view of the past in psychoanalysis, according to which it is the task of the analyst to know what really happened, and to given this knowledge to the patient, in the interest of reflection, introspection, and self-knowledge, is to abandon what lacan calls the ethics of psychoanalysis, replacing it with the false reassurance of a supposed science of the past, in which the objectivity of the researcher is covertly secured, and the analyst is secretly maintained as the subject supposed to know. [52] thus, in contrast to the historian, the genealogist not only speaks, like everyone, *from* a particular place in the present (the crocean thesis), but directs his attention *to* that place, in order to act upon it. this place, this point of departure, might in fact be called *the origin* of foucault's books. this is as much a philosophical question as it is historical, or rather, it raises the problem of the relation between philosophy and history: "since the 19th century," foucault says, "philosophy has never stopped raising the same question: 'what is happening right now, and what are we, we who are perhaps nothing more than what is happening at this moment?' philosophy's question therefore is the question as to what we ourselves are. that is why contemporary philosophy is entirely political and entirely historical" (kritzman 121). to the extent that foucault's work bears on his own position of speech, it cannot be reduced to historical research, or regarded as the proliferation of knowledge about the past, but must be considered as an event, an intervention in the present. if we examine the position of enunciation, this origin that serves as the finite point from which foucault speaks, we will be led along a trajectory that links history, theory, and fiction. this is the point at which his work may be characterized as an encounter with the real, a moment when foucault's thought reaches its own limits. [53] let us look in closing at _the order of things_ in order to grasp more clearly how foucault's work bears on its own place of enunciation, and issues in a form of anxiety that we have spoken of in terms of fiction, and that might also be called an encounter with the real. we will consider two examples in which the book encounters its own contingency. the first example is drawn from the descriptive content of the book, its concrete, historical exposition. the second example comes from the theoretical framework, where foucault addresses the problem of his method. the first example involves an interplay of light and shadow; the second takes up the question of laughter and anxiety. example one: the backward glance [54] at the very beginning of chapter 9, foucault concludes his discussion of the classical age: "classical thought can now be eclipsed. at this time, from any retrospective viewpoint [%pour tout regard ulterieur%], it enters a region of shade" (314/303). before proceeding with his apparent task of accumulating knowledge, before bringing more archaeological evidence to light, foucault finds it necessary to hesitate here, weighing this further. already it is clear, however, that precisely the eclipse of classical thought has made possible its manifestation to the retrospective gaze. for as foucault repeatedly points out, classical discourse is invisible as long as it functions; it only shows itself in its demise, to retrospection (as though history were the tale of orpheus). obviously this does not mean that the classical age knew nothing about representation. on the contrary, they took great trouble to examine it in detail. but this examination, which foucault explores in chapters 3 and 7, and especially in the section titled "idealogy and criticism," consisted in demonstrating how that discourse functioned, how it exercised its representational capacities; it did not suspend representation in order to examine its conditions of possibility. thus, once it was no longer maintained in its functioning, classical discourse became visible as such in its demise. one began to ask not about the methods by which we might arrive at clear and distinct representations, but rather about the horizons within which representation can arise: a transcendental arena was opened in which actual representations were now only a surface effect, whose conditions of possibility had to be provided elsewhere, outside or beneath representation. [55] this analysis, however, does not simply give a description of events in intellectual history. it suggests that the classical age could not have understood itself in the way that the archaeologist understands it. the very nature of representation in the classical age functioned by means of a kind of invisibility, which was removed only with the death of classical thought: the moment it becomes visible to the archaeologist is also the moment that the age of reason acquires the status of myth. there is here, and throughout this book, a question as to *how historical difference can be known*, how one period, with its dense, opaque construction of knowledge, its specific discursive possibilities, and its own empirical orders, can "communicate itself," or at least "show itself," to the backward glance of another. this is a question concerning historical knowledge, a question which moves foucault beyond the historicist procedure of explaining a period by articulating it in terms of the concepts and values it would have had regarding itself. if we acknowledge foucault's vocabulary of "eclipse" and "manifestation," moreover, we will recognize another question, quietly sustained, entirely *unheard* by the historians whose guide-books have no use for it, concerning *light and shadow*, in which it becomes clear that the gaze of the archaeologist is not only explicitly finite, located rather than transcendent or purely objective, but also that the position from which the archaeologist looks is a central thematic issue in the book. these two questions overlap, as the first example already indicates: entering a region of shade, one period will suddenly show itself to the retrospection of another. it is the death of thought that makes history possible, but in death, the object is lost, irrevocably given over to a world of shadow, an alterity that we can only present to ourselves through a memory supported by the protective power of myth. at this juncture, the text requires of us a sustained inquiry into the complex, heideggerian meditation on truth as the interplay of %lethe% and %aletheia%, a meditation which forms the minimal background against which the question of the *truth* of foucault's historical representations can begin to be read. [56] pushing on however, let us only note here that the death of classical thought, its entrance into a land of shadow, is also its manifestation--for the first time?--as foucault will go on to indicate: a region of shade. even so, we should speak not of darkness but of a somewhat blurred light, deceptive in its apparent clarity [%faussement evident%], and hiding more than it reveals [%et qui cache plus qu'elle ne manifeste%]. (314/303) not only does the classical age appear only in the moment of its eclipse, but it also shows itself deceptively, with a false evidence, hiding more, in its manifestation, than it reveals. thus, before offering us further historical information, before unearthing more knowledge to the light of day, foucault will finish this paragraph: when [classical] discourse ceased to exist and function. . . . classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to us. (315/304) in passages such as these, foucault makes it unmistakably clear that archaeology cannot possibly be regarded as a new methodology that would finally provide a means of access to a transcendental point of view, a kind of linguistic formalization that would turn history into a genuinely rigorous science. for this book, this history of forms of representation, it will not be possible to dismiss the question of the truth of history and historical representations. this is not at all to say that the book is simply content to offer its account as somehow less than "true," and thus as "fictional" in some trivial sense (as if it were already self-evident what truth is, and as if history does not oblige us to engage in a question *concerning* truth). the point is not to ask whether foucault's account is truth or fiction, an accurate archaeological picture of the past or the expression of the present perspective; the point is rather to raise the question of the relation between the content of the book, its historical exposition or knowledge, and its functioning as a discursive practice, the degree to which it intervenes in the forms of thought that have produced it. the question concerns the difference between its character as *knowledge* and its character as an *event*. not only does the text refuse to function as a new foundation for historical knowledge, the discovery of the so-called archaeological method, not only does it resist the transcendental model according to which it (archaeology) would provide the conditions of possibility governing discourse at a certain time; it also issues in a thought concerning the relation of representation and death (of which the phrase "retrospective gaze" is only the most obvious example). [57] there is a second example in which it becomes clear that foucault's book, passing between history and theory, between concrete historical exposition and theoretical reflection upon history itself, begins to open up a question that belongs to neither of these two dimensions of his book, a question that is neither a matter of historical information, nor a matter that concerns the theoretical apparatus of archaeology, its methodological procedures ("discontinuity," "episteme," "discursive regularity," etc.). this example is drawn from the preface to the book, where foucault speaks of a certain "experience." we must proceed carefully here, for this "experience," which belongs neither to history nor to theory, is what foucault expressly calls the *origin* of his work. example two: the middle region [58] in _the order of things_, foucault wants to give us a history, a revised account of the past, which would replace the usual story of the gradual development of the human sciences, their slow emergence out of error and superstition, into their current state of scientific sophistication. at this level, his work is historical and documentary. at another level, _the order of things_ develops a theoretical reflection on history itself; it is a contribution to the archeological method. these two aspects of the book have been given the most attention--the content of his historical reconstruction, and the theoretical position it entails. but there is another aspect of the book that is perhaps more fundamental, the status of the book as an act, an event, and perhaps even an *experience*. [59] this is a peculiar feature of the book, one that does not fit very well with its historical and methodological aspects. in _the order of things_, he speaks of it as "the pure *experience* of order" (13/xxi, emphasis added)--not the particular order which characterizes the classical age, or our own anthropological era, and not the order of foucault's own book, the great, encyclopedic system of archaeological knowledge, but rather the experience of what he calls "order itself [%en son etre meme%]" (12/xxi) and "order in its primary state [%l'etre brut de l'ordre%]" (12/xxi). the passage is well-known: the fundamental codes of a culture, he writes, establish for every man . . . the empirical orders with which he will be dealing, and in which he will be at home. at the other extremity of thought, there are scientific theories or philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general [%pourquoi il y a en general un ordre%]. (11-12/xx) we must hesitate here on a point of translation (a point, one might add, of representation). there are, on the one hand, fundamental codes, those which establish the empirical orders which govern a particular historical period, and, on the other hand, reflections upon those empirical orders, scientific or philosophical efforts to explain "pourquoi il y a en general un ordre," that is, why generally speaking there is an order such as this one. the english text says "why order exists in general," but it is not at all a question of "order in general," or of why order "exists." rather, it is a matter, in the case of scientific theories or philosophical efforts at reflexive knowledge, of determining the general configuration (%en general%) of an order like this (%un ordre%), determining the empirical situation of those who act and know. [60] with this distinction between the empirical codes and philosophical reflection, we are of course on familiar ground: these two levels, one which is determining for all concrete investigation and another which seeks to analyze that determination, will appear again in great detail in chapter nine, in the context of what foucault calls "the empirical and the transcendental." in that context foucault characterizes "man" as a figure that appears to mediate between and unify precisely these two orders, one of empirical determination, and one of theoretical reflection upon that empirical determination, by means of which the external, empirical determination of thought from outside (by conditions of speech or labor of physiology) can be reflected upon, manipulated, and "taken in hand," as heidegger might say. man is thus the figure who, in spite of being totally given over to external, contingent, historical determination, can nevertheless--or precisely for this reason, precisely on the basis of this empirical, concrete existence--alter the conditions of existence, and thereby make his own history, come to stand at the origin of what would otherwise precede and determine him. [61] the passage continues. between these two levels, the empirical and the transcendental, there is another level: "between these two regions," he says, "lies a domain which, though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental": it is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical order prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them . . . frees itself sufficiently to discover that they are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact . . . that order *exists* [%qu'*il y a* de l'ordre%] . . . [and] by this very process, [comes] face to face with order in its primary state [%l'etre brut de l'ordre%]. (12/xx-xxi, original emphasis) "this middle region," he adds, "can be posited as the most fundamental of all," for it is here, "between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order, there is *the pure experience of order*" (13/xxi, emphasis added). "the present study," he writes, "is an attempt to analyze *that experience*" (13/xxi, emphasis added). [62] this experience cannot be situated at the level of historical knowledge; nor can it be understood as an element within the theoretical framework of archaeology. it is neither a piece of historical knowledge, nor part of the theoretical apparatus, but an excessive moment, something that calls into question the other levels of foucault's analysis, exceeding and contradicting them, marking their contingency--something outside the symbolic system that is unthinkable, beyond representation, but that nevertheless marks the point of trauma, and shows the incompleteness of the very symbolic structure that has been established with such masterful and encyclopedic comprehensiveness. this is what lacan calls the encounter with the real, something that falls outside the operation of knowledge, the deployment of the signifier. foucault speaks of it in terms of anxiety, and also in terms that bring us back to the question of literature. [63] let us recall foucault's remarks on the origin of_ the order of things_. "this book," foucault says, "arose out of a passage in borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as i read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought--*our* thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age" (7/xv). later he adds, "the uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read borges is certainly related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed" (10/xviii-xix).^50^ this distress is also the anxiety of the aphasiac who creates a multiplicity of groupings, only to find that they "dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity . . . teetering finally on the brink of anxiety" (10/xviii). [64] it is clear that these remarks are meant to rebound upon archaeology itself. if we return the previous question, we can see that in spite of his interest in producing a revised history, a truer history, and in spite of his effort to construct a theoretical edifice--or rather precisely because of these things, these patient, empirical, documentary procedures--there emerges a level of anxiety that cannot be mastered by the operation of knowledge, historical or theoretical, a level that foucault addresses explicitly in his preface. to read foucault's text for its historical analysis, or for its methodological innovations, would be to refuse this experience, this encounter with the real, this domain of anxiety in which the symbolic operation of archaeological knowledge comes face to face with its own contingency. reading without this encounter is reading in the name of man. [65] we know that heidegger's work undergoes a similar deformation, in which the effort to locate an origin for metaphysics perpetually recedes--being located first sometime after the greek term %aletheia% was converted into %homoiosis%, and then perhaps earlier, already in plato and aristotle, who did not really think aletheia as such, and then perhaps even earlier, in the pre-socratics. we know that this displacement of the origin is accompanied by a symmetrical difficulty regarding the place of enunciation, -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the position from which heidegger speaks, namely the moment of the "end" of metaphysics, its termination, closure, or perhaps its perpetual, and perpetually different repetition. the question about the end of metaphysics is not simply a *historical* question, a matter of recording birth and death, but a question about history itself. but it is also not simply a *theoretical* question, a matter of determining the proper conceptual approach to the problem of origins and ends. it is also a matter of encountering the place from which one speaks--not for the sake of a transcendental reflection upon the conditions which would validate one's own discourse, but for the sake of a movement that would exhaust what is most tedious and repetitious in one's own speech, to let it go, and make room for something else. notes: ^1^ martin heidegger, _the metaphysical foundations of logic_, trans. michael heim (bloomington: indiana university press, 1984), 209. ^2^ jacques derrida, "television," trans. denis hollier, rosalind krauss, and annette michelson, _television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment_, ed. joan copjec (new york: norton, 1990), 30. translation modified. ^3^ michel foucault, _madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason_, trans. richard howard (new york: vintage, 1965), 288. ^4^ jacques derrida, "cogito and the history of madness," _writing and difference_, trans. alan bass (chicago: university of chicago, 1978), 60. henceforth cited in the text as wd. ^5^ friedrich nietzsche, _on the genealogy of morals_, trans. walter kaufmann (new york: vintage, 1967). ^6^ this essay was first given as a lecture at the collegium phaenomenologicum in perugia, italy, in 1993. i thank the directors, charles c. scott and philippe van haute, for the invitation, and for their hospitality. ^7^ jacques lacan,_ the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis_, trans. alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1978), 112. translations are occasionally modified; see _le seminaire, livre xi: les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse_, ed. jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 1973). ^8^ michel foucault, "the concern for truth," interview with francois ewald. _ michel foucault: politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writings_, ed. lawrence d. kritzman (new york, routledge, 1988), 255-67. cited from 262, emphasis added. this volume will henceforth be cited as "kritzman." ^9^ michel foucault,_ the archaeology of knowledge_, trans. a.m. sheridan-smith (new york: pantheon books, 1972), 206. references will henceforth appear in the text preceded by ak. ^10^ leopold von ranke, _sammtliche werke_ (leipzig: verlag, 1867). see also leonard krieger, _ranke: the meaning of history_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1977), and hayden white, _metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe_ (baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1973). in _the archaeology of knowledge_, foucault conjures up an imaginary interlocutor, who challenges him to distinguish his work from structuralism, and then upon hearing foucault's reply, says "i can even accept that one should dispense, as far as one can, with a discussion of the speaking subjects; but i dispute that these successes [of archaeology, as distinct from structuralism] give one the right *to turn the analysis back on to the very forms of discourse that made them possible*, and *to question the very locus in which we are speaking today*." instead, the interlocutor argues, we must acknowledge that "the history of those analyses . . . retains its own transcendence." foucault replies, "it seems to me that the difference between us lies there [much more than in the over-discussed question of structuralism]" (202). ^11^ slavoj zizek,_ for they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor_ (new york: verso, 1992), 13. ^12^ see sigmund freud, "instincts and their vicissitudes," vol 14, 117-40; "formulations of the two principles of mental functioning," vol 12, 218-26; _an outline of psychoanalysis_, vol 23, 144-207; esp. "the psychic apparatus and the external world," 195-207. all references are to _the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud_, trans. and ed. james strachey et al. (london:hogarth press, 1953). lacan's account of pleasure and reality is scattered throughout his work. but see "la chose freudienne," _ecrits_ (paris: seuil, 1966), 401-36; and "d'une question preliminaire a tout traitment possible de la psychose," _ecrits_, 531-83. available in english as _ecrits: a selection_, trans. alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1977). see "the freudian thing," 114-45, and "on a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," 178-225. see also _the seminar of jacques lacan, book ii: the ego in freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954-55_, jacques-alain miller, trans. sylvana tomaselli, with notes by john forrester (new york: norton, 1988), 134-71, and _book vii, the ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-60_, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. dennis porter (new york: norton, 1992), 19-84. see also moustafa safouan, _l'echec du principe du plaisir_, (paris: seuil, 1979); in english as _pleasure and being_, trans. martin thom (new york: macmillan, 1983). ^13^ in his essay on psychosis, lacan makes it explicit that the categories of "reality" and the "imaginary" not only *overlap*, but are themselves structured *through* the symbolic. thus, "reality" no longer has the status of a "true reality" that one might oppose to an "imaginary" or "fictional" construction, and in addition, the fact that these two categories are in some sense mutually constitutive is itself the result of language. thus, whereas the animal might be said to "adapt to reality" (in the usual sense of that word), the human being "adapts" (if one can still use this word) by means of representations that are constitutive of both "reality" and the "imaginary." see jacques lacan, "d'une question preliminaire a tout traitment possible de la psychose," _ecrits_ (paris: seuil, 1966). a portion of this volume has appeared in english. see "on a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis" in _ecrits: a selection_, trans alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1977). henceforth references will appear in the text preceded by e, french pagination first, english (whenever possible) second; in this case, e 531-83/179-225). ^14^ zizek, 14. see also martin jay, _the dialectical imagination_ (london: heinemann, 1974). ^15^ foucault makes just such a remark in "the concern for truth": "the history of thought means not just the history of ideas or representations, but also an attempt to answer this question. . . . how can thought . . . have a history?" (kritzman 256). ^16^ derrida, wd 34. ^17^ to develop this properly, one would have to explore foucault's remarks on the specifically modern form of "the other," as he explains it in _les mots et les choses: une archeologie des sciences humaines_ (paris: galimard, 1966); _the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences_ (new york: random, 1970). references will henceforth be to both editions, french first, english second. as he says in "the retreat and return of the origin," for modern thought, the origin "is very different from that ideal genesis that the classical age had attempted to reconstitute . . . the original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself. . . . paradoxically, the original, in man, does not herald the time of his birth, or the most ancient kernel of his experience . . . it signifies that man . . . is the being without origin . . . that man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneous with his own existence" (331-32). ^18^ jacques lacan, _television_, 30. see also jean-jacques rousseau, _discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite_, in _oeuvres completes_, eds. bernard gagnebin and marcel raymond (paris: gallimard, 1964), vol 3. also, thomas hobbes, _leviathan_, ed. michael oakeshott (oxford: blackwell, 1946). ^19^ michel foucault, "nietzsche, geneology, history," _language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews_, ed. donald f bouchard (ithaca, cornell up, 1977), 139-64. cited from 160; henceforth cited in the text as lcmp. ^20^ michel foucault, "distance, aspect, origine," _critique_, november 1963, 20-22. cited from raymond bellour, "towards fiction," in _michel foucault: philosopher_, trans. timothy j. armstrong (new york: routledge, 1992), 148-56. ^21^ see jean hyppolite's remarkable but succinct discussion of hegel on just this point, in _the structuralist controversy: the languages of criticism and the sciences of man_, ed. richard macksey and eugenio donato (baltimore: johns hopkins, 1970). this suggests that what we are here calling "dialectic" in fact refers not so much to hegel as to a received version of "dialectic." ^22^ michel foucault, _the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception_, trans. a.m. sheridan smith (new york: vintage, 1973), ix. ^23^ another relevant discussion of this painting from a lacanian perspective is pierre-gilles gueguen, "foucault and lacan on the status of the subject of representation," _newsletter of the freudian field_, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 (spring/fall 1989), 51-57. ^24^ michel foucault, "power and sex," interview with bernard henri-levi in kritzman, 110-24. cited from 114. ^25^ "a few years ago, historians were very proud to discover that they could write not only the history of battles, of kings and institutions, but also of the economy . . . feelings, behavior, and the body. soon, they will understand that the history of the west cannot be dissociated from the way its 'truth' is produced. . . . the achievement of 'true' discourses . . . is one of the fundamental problems of the west." see kritzman, 112. ^26^ kritzman, 120-1. ^27^ bernard henri-levi points out that because foucault suggests that there is a relation between the (mistaken) thesis asserting sexual repression and those practices which aim at liberation, he has sometimes been misunderstood to argue that they are the same: "hence the misunderstanding of certain commentators: 'according to foucault, the repression or liberation of sex amounts to the same thing'" (kritzman, 114). foucault replies that the point was not to erase the difference between these two (or between madness and reason), but simply to consider the way in which the two things were bound to one another, in order to recognize that the promise of liberation takes part in the same conceptual arrangement that produced the idea of repression, to such a degree that the very aim of liberation often "ends up repressing" (as in the case of psychoanalysis, perhaps). this is why foucault regards psychoanalysis with such suspicion, in spite of the connections we are pursuing between foucault and lacan. the question is whether psychoanalysis indeed remains trapped within the modern discourses of liberation that were born alongside what foucault regards as the "monarchical" theories of power (what he also speaks of as the "repressive hypothesis"), or whether, as foucault sometimes suggests, psychoanalysis in fact amounts to a disruption of that paradigm, just as genealogy does. ^28^ michel foucault, _discipline and punish: the birth of the prison_ (new york: vintage, 1977), 29. henceforth cited in the text as dp. ^29^ michel foucault, _the history of sexuality: an introduction_, trans robert hurley (new york: vintage, 1978), 6. henceforth cited in the text as hs. ^30^ the paper by jana sawicki responding to a paper by issac balbus shows very clearly the difference between a genealogical perspective and the "modern" discourses of liberation. these two papers offer an admirable example of the contrast between a "marxist" analysis and a feminism that is influenced in part by genealogy. in her remarks, sawicki shows how the promise of a liberated future is haunted by the "most virulent" forms of humanism, in the sense that liberation carries with it a normative componant that that would itself escape genealogical analysis. see isaac balbus, "disciplining women: michel foucault and the power of feminist discourse" and jana sawicki, "feminism and the power of foucaultian discourse," in _after foucault: humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges_, ed. jonathan arac (new brunswick: rutgers university press, 1988). ^31^ just as with psychoanalysis, there is here a focus on the past, and an elaboration of general principles, but the final word bears on the subject who is speaking, for that is where the reality of history lies. ^32^ michel foucault, "preface to transgression," _language, counter-memory, practice_, 29-52. the essay was first published as "hommage a george bataille" in _critique_, nos. 195-96 (1963), 751-70. ^33^ at the end of hs, foucault makes a similar point: sex is the most refined product, and not the origin; it is what one might call a discursive effect and not a "natural" basis that is shaped by various restrictions or prohibitions. the question we are asking, with lacan, however, is whether "sex" is simply or entirely discursive. to speak of the "real" is not to speak of a "pre-discursive reality" such as "sex," but it is to ask about what "remains" outside representation (as madness, for foucault, is left in silence or in shadow by the discourses of reason. ^34^ i am thinking here of lacan's reflections upon the body itself as structured by such limits--the eyes, ears, and other orifices seeming to participate in just this dislocation of euclidean space. see jeanne granon-lafont, _la topologie ordinaire de jacques lacan_ (paris: point hors ligne). i have discussed this briefly in "on fate: psychoanalysis and the desire to know," in dialectic and narrative_, ed. dalia judowitz and thomas flynn (new york: suny, 1993). ^35^ see derrida's recent remarks on this sentence in "etre juste avec freud," in _penser la folie: essais sur michel foucault_ (paris: galilee, 1992), 141-95. ^36^ slavoj zizek, 9-10. ^37^ it is true that the "mechanics" of libido at one point occupied freud, when he still believed it possible to measure libido according to a model of charge and discharge, homeostasis and tension: but something always disturbs this model, and freud's use of such paradigms always follows them to the limit, to the point where they collapse, rather than elaborating them as a satisfactory answer. this does not keep his commentators from taking the bait, and putting their faith in an engine freud has dismantled. ^38^ nestor braunstein, _la jouissance: un concept lacanien_ (paris: point hors ligne, 1990). ^39^ see catherine millot, _nobodaddy: l'hysterie dans la siecle_ (paris: point hors ligne, 1988). ^40^ see "the economic problem of masochism," _standard edition_ vol 19, 155-72. ^41^ sigmund freud, _totem and taboo_, standard edition, vol. 13, 1-161. ^42^ see the end of "vital signs: the place of memory in psychoanalysis," _research in phenomenology_ 1993, 22-72. ^43^ see foucault's "what is enlightenment?" trans. catherine porter, in _the foucault reader_, ed. paul rabinow (new york: pantheon, 1984), esp. 35-36. henceforth cited in the text as we. see also zizek's remarks on kant in _for they know not what they do_, 203-9 and 229-37. in "what is enlightenment?" foucault's question is very close to lacan's: what linkage, what common origin, do we find between these two fathers, terror and enlightenment? ^44^ zizek argues that racism is another symptom in which the moral law reveals its dependence on this excess: the reason we hate the jews is that they have too much money; the blacks have too much fun; the gay community has too much sex, and so on. the formation of the law that limits pleasure will always produce a locus in which the "stolen" pleasure resides, a place where we can locate the "original" satisfaction that has supposedly been given up, or "lost": namely, in the other [or in the paranoia that confuses the other with the other of jouissance]. the myth of an original state of nature, a natural plenitude that was lost when we agreed to sign the social contract, would thus be linked by psychoanalysis to the mythology that is always constructed in order for racism to operate. ^45^ this thesis has been elaborated in considerable detail by slavoj zizek, in _the sublime object of idealogy_ (new york: verso, 1989). ^46^ jacques lacan, "kant avec sade," _ecrits_, 765-90. "kant with sade," _october_ 51 (winter 1989), 55-75. ^47^ the discussion of foucault and derrida by ann wordsworth ("derrida and foucault: writing the history of historicity," _postructuralism and the question of history_, ed. derek attridge, geoff bennington, and robert young (cambridge: cambridge up, 1987), 116-25) mentions the fact that the question of violence is one of several points at which these two thinkers, in spite of their apparent conflict, comes closest together. foucault points out that madness and reason are not distinguished by natural necessity or by right, but only by the contingency of a certain formation of knowledge, and that history itself can be understood as occurring precisely because of the inevitability (the "law") of such contingent formations, and not as the unfolding of a fundamental "truth" of culture or human nature (teleological or merely sequentially continuous). derrida himself says this "amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently in history; or rather that this exclusion, this difference between the fact and the principle is historicity, the possibility of history itself. does foucault say otherwise? 'the necessity of madness is linked . . . to the possibility of history'" (wd 310). like foucault and lacan, so also foucault and derrida are much closer than their current academic reception would suggest. ^48^ kritzman, 256-7. see also 121, 262, 112. ^49^ see charles shepherdson, "on fate: psychoanalysis and the desire to know," _dialectic and narrative_, ed. thomas r. flynn and dalia judowitz (albany: suny press, 1993), 271-302. ^50^ as nietzsche remarks in the _genealogy of morals_: "on the day when we can say with all our hearts, 'onwards! our old morality too is part of the comedy!' we shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the dionysian drama" (21-2). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------yervasi, 'confessions of a net surfer: _net chick_ and grrrls on the web', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-yervasi-confessions.txt archive pmc-list, file review-1.996. part 1/1, total size 21435 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- confessions of a net surfer: _net chick_ and grrrls on the web by carina yervasi university of michigan cly@umich.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by carina yervasi, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: carla sinclair, _net chick: a smart-girl guide to the wired world_. new york: henry holt and company, 1996. "an ironic dream of a common address" [1] not since reading donna haraway's 1985 "a manifesto for cyborgs" have i thought so much about gender and machines, or more accurately, about women and computers, modems, and network connections. harking back to the "manifesto," we might consider that the day has arrived when part woman, part machine working in/on the net may be staging that perfect "coupling." or, this is at least one image of women and the net evoked by web guide guru carla sinclair in _net chick: a smart-girl guide to the wired world_. taking up the challenge to see where technology and gender intersect on the web, sinclair offers an abundantly informative (and by no means exhaustive, as she herself acknowledges) internet guide and e-dress book for "cyberchicks." in the introduction sinclair initially sets out to dispel two popular notions: that the cybercareer world is male-dominated and that the web is an all-"boyz" club. throughout the rest of the book, she interviews women who have successful careers using the internet, gives advice on necessary software and hardware (e.g. ergonomic chairs) and, finally, reviews important websites (mostly created by women) and newsgroups, which sinclair believes are especially useful to women. [2] that _net chick_ should arrive when it did into the print and paper publishing world of the internet guidebook "genre" is worthy of mention. fortunately, sinclair, co-editor of '80s zine _boing!boing!_ and co-author of _the happy mutant handbook_, still believes in introductory accessibility. as internet guidebooks go, way too many uninspiring and corporate-centered tomes have appeared in the past two years. _net chick_, however, is the first non-corporate, and intensely personal internet guide to combine photographs, cartoons, history, interviews--as well as the main attraction; urls and online newsgroup addresses. sinclair's book is very different from the commercially generated "internet guides." they often tend to look and feel (hefty) like the manhattan yellow pages, positioning paid-for ads in between large (expensive) or small (cheaper) directory entries (cf. _the internet yellow pages_; _microsoft bookshelf internet directory_; _new riders' official world wide web yellow pages_ ). most of the websites discussed in _net chick_ are personal home pages. not that sinclair has anything against commercial sites ("mersh sites"), but she is more interested in the independent sites because they "are created by individuals who want to share and show off ideas, information, and art" (10) and presumably don't share a commercial concern for profit margin. [3] _net chick_ is a sort of _our bodies, ourselves_ for the '90s computer grrrl generation, for the "cyberchick": the "female internet explorer" (234). this book may not read as a manifesto for technocratic or webworld subject/object relations, but it is and will prove to be invaluable for a variety of net surfing publics. as a guide and resource, its target audience is specifically women. it is an indispensable tool for those who teach women's studies or contemporary culture and want to integrate more electronic media into their courses. moreover, it has especially inspiring e-dresses for those who are simply seeking a grrrl-related beauty, health, or spiritual tip while surfing the web. in other words, this guide is part fluff and part real stuff. so wait not, fair grrrlie: hie thee to a modem connection and get thine ass online! --kristin spence, foreword [4] and what is a net chick or a net grrrl anyway? being a net chick for sinclair means "having a modem," using a keyboard "to navigate through...cyberspace," and, ultimately, "becoming empowered by...acces to and knowledge of the internet" (6). sinclair's "grrrl" is the "same as chick, except grrrls can be even tougher" (235). i imagine that a net grrrl is a combination of tank girl, roseanne, and valerie solanas, whereas a net chick throws a bit of barbie/cindy crawford into the mix. cybergrrrls (with apologies to aliza sherman whose "cybergrrl" is a regular feature in her website: http://www.cybergrrl.com) are akin to indy rock's riot grrrls. and according to the spoof _cyberpunk handbook_, they "are fierce girls who like tech [because] [g]rrrls with tech experience are irresistible. nothing is more attractive than a fierce, blazing, ninja-type grrrl right now, and if she knows unix...the world is hers. hrrrs" (31). evidently, anyone (any woman) with access to the internet can be a net chick. [5] for newcomers to cyberor internet culture who want to explore the feminist and post-feminist wired world, sinclair's book is an important first stop. she includes a comprehensive "abc's" to the internet in the appendix and gives a clear explanation of many online services available with such stats as service fees, percentage of women users, most popular topics, etc. (220-221). for those who have successfully surfed the net and have a few bookmarks already tagging their favorite sites, her guide will help to build a personal cybrary with other informative sites and addresses. [6] keeping in mind these possible user-groups, it would appear that sinclair's purpose in putting this book together is two-fold: to get people to think about gender and technology and to get more women involved in the internet and cyberculture in general. terms like "community" and "communication" are fundamental in understanding sinclair's encouragement for women to join chat groups, surf the web, and ultimately create their own home pages. as suggested by the australian network for art and technology online newsletter--whose url i found through a link from australian e-zine _geekgirl_ (http://www.next.com.au/spyfood/geekgirl)--"collaboration replaces the individual author whose rotting corpse of privileged solitary genius long ceased to nourish the cultural body of ideas" (2). well, maybe sinclair doesn't push cooperation that far, but she does see the internet as the newest locus for putting communication skills to use. in this sense, then, sinclair has written this woman-centered guidebook in order to develop, through a general understanding of the potential of cyberspace, informed publics and future "cyberchick" web surfers. [7] brief introductions providing the basics about the world wide web begin each section. in chapters like "sexy" and "stylin'," or "media freak" and "entertain me!" or in the health chapter, "feelin'...groovy," sinclair attempts to deal with all matters "femme" and wired in what she considers "post-feminist" chick cyberspace. by subdividing the chapters into "profiles," "interviews," "hot sites," and "tips," she tries to capture the quirky cross-over cyber/print nature of the book. as sinclair contends: "_net chick_ [is] the only guide to stylish, post-feminist, modem grrrl culture" (5). this claim is true. it is the only *printed* guide that directly addresses women and the internet. for online guides sinclair recommends "webgrrls!--women on the net" (http://www.cybergrrl.com/) and "voxxen worx" (http://www.phantom.com/~barton/voxxen.html). on the very last page of her guide, sinclair includes the always-changing, always-updated url of her net chick web site: "the net chick clubhouse" (http://www.cyborganic.com/people/carla) where links can be found to most of the other always-changing net chick sites in her book. [8] one significant feature of this guide is the use of interviews with some of the pioneering women on the web. sinclair promises that readers will "meet the gals who are involved with cyberculture and how it relates to sex, style, the media, entertainment, recreation, health, employment, and political issues" (11). in light of this promise, _net chick_, *g-url* guide extraordinaire, doubles as a cultural history of women working on the web. particularly impressive is the wide representation of sinclair's pioneering "net chicks" and their various fields of work. [9] because the general tone of _net chick_ is playful, tongue-in-cheek, the advice given by many of these women ranges from the silly to the pragmatic (how to "flame" back) to the radical (how to subvert commercial technologies). chapter one: "sexy," begins with lisa palac, "the cybersex chick" who, in the early '90s, was editor of _future sex_, "the only magazine devoted to the fusion of sex and high-technology" (16). in _net chick_, palac and marjorie ingall give humorous and practical tips on online dating. another of the interviewees, in chapter three: "media freak," is rosie (x) cross, editor of the "first cyberfeminist zine," _geekgirl_ (88). this interviews reads very much like a situationist manifesto. cross, also known as rosiex, became involved in digital culture because she thought it was a "subculture" (89). unlike sinclair's american "net chick," cross, from australia, prefers the term "geekgirl." when asked to describe these "geekgirls," cross says that they "like machines, 'specially computers. they wanna get history straight, they wanna subvert the mainstream.... they investigate the murky and sometimes mean worlds of postmodernity and the obsession with technology" (88-89). this slightly anarchistic sentiment is further echoed in jude milhon's interview in the same chapter. milhon, a.k.a. st. jude, former managing editor and columnist for _mondo 2000_, is described as "the patron saint of systems programming" who "was hacking computers before the word 'hacker' was even around" (94). her interview nicely parallels the short bio of 19th-century mathematician ada lovelace, whom sinclair bills as "the world's first hacker" (190-191). [10] some of the other interviewees include rene cigler, jewelry designer for the film _tank girl_; reva basch, "data sleuth" and cybrarian; debra floyd, program coordinator for a nonprofit internet service provider, institute of global communications (igc) (200) and director of african american networking (http://www.igc.apc.org/africanam/africanam.html); and jill atkinson, who undertook the first ph.d. in electronic publishing at the rochester institute of technology. atkinson is also the creator of a rather racy website, "bianca's smut shack," which has information, interactive chat, and "activities" in every room. these interviews are supplemented by descriptions of sinclair's favorite personal home pages, which are "hand-picked, based on a high level of creativity, frankness, sex appeal, or plain old charm" (74). [11] from the interviews and some of the home pages covered by sinclair, one can conclude that these pioneering "net chicks" experienced difficulty breaking into once male-dominated cybercareers; that many of them are self-taught internet explorers and creators; and that, by and large, most of them have some connection to electronic publishing. interestingly enough, sinclair and her "cyberbuddies" are convinced that the electronic industries' gender imbalance is shifting because of the relative accessibility of the internet. [12] spence, in her candid "foreword," argues that since "cyberspace is a world ruled by knowledge" (xi), women who know how to maneuver within it can gain access to knowledge and power through this and other media. furthermore, she contends that the internet connection is "all about communication, power, equality" (xi). for spence, as well as sinclair, to get online is to "seize power" (xii). more women online, for both these writers, means the addition of more grrrl-connections to calibrate the gender and power imbalance of the net. and fundamentally i don't disagree. nevertheless, i take issue with both spence and sinclair for offering unsubstantiated new-agey essentialist nonsense like "the feminine energy now flooding the internet" (3) and "the root forces driving this medium [the net]--communication, community, and creativity--are inherently feminine. they are things women innately excel at. plainly put, this means we were built to do this" (xi). pop feminism or not, i don't think that anyone is "built" for sitting and surfing the web. [13] important to this guide, however, are sinclair's attempts to come to terms with the specificity of cyberculture. she endeavors to describe through her research (evidenced in the multiple and overlapping lists, reports, and interviews) that what the web can hold and contain, all at once, is exactly that postmodern capacity to specify and generalize simultaneously, to show concurrently singularity and difference. sinclair's valiant efforts to disclose the nature of cyberspace in print are this book's greatest strength, but this also opens up my major critique of her book. there is an inherent irony in describing the complexity of genderless electronic media while purporting to provide "femme only" sites and addresses. perhaps more than ironic is the particular impossibity of singling out what makes a site a "grrrl-site" or a "chick-site," especially when many webpages are collaborative projects or are produced by--gulp--men. kristin spence, section editor of _wired_, echoes this concern in her "foreword" to _net chick_ when she acknowledges that "[w]hile, it is always tremendously affirming and empowering to hang with your own posse, such a ghettoization of the net would be a tragic step backwards" (xi-xii). recognizing the irony and heeding spence's warning, i was none too anxious to continue on my "estrogenic journey" (3) through online "femme" culture. confession [14] after cruising the web for over five hours checking out some "hot sites" listed in "chicks and flicks" (117-121) and surfing through others, from "tank girl," incidentally created by a man, (http://www.oberlin.edu/~jdockhor/tg/default.html) (91) to "women homepage" (http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/sorokin/women/index.html) (207), honestly enjoying myself, i began to feel keenly self-conscious of my own privilege: computer equipment, ethernet connection, and time to spend (waste). it was at this point that i realized that sinclair's guide, while claiming accessibility as the path to empowerment, also unknowingly raises questions about basic accessibility that simply are not addressed. supporting spence's opening comments on online equality and power, sinclair maintains that "cyberspace, the net, is an equal space" (72) and that "everybody has equal access to the same global soapbox" (9). but the word "privilege," not "equal access," comes more easily to mind when i think about computer culture. sinclair, although well-meaning, is underestimating the real costs of such communication both in hardware and time. equally naive is sinclair's statement that the net is "[a]n anarchistic means of expressing oneself to the masses" (9). to which "masses" are we expressing ourselves? contrary to cybertopian predictions of a growing cadre of decentralized information workers, _left business observer_'s doug henwood cites cashiers, janitors, and retail salespeople as some of the occupations with the greatest projected growth over the next ten years (2). i cannot stress enough the importance of having an online connection, but i also know that it isn't currently as materially accessible as the telephone. [15] inasmuch as both sinclair and spence believe that our contemporary techo-web world is post-feminist, one wonders why the need for all of their ersatz feminism, or what i called above "nonsense." the problem for me comes back again to the very fact that sinclair, while claiming this post-feminism, enumerates, catalogs, and calls for woman-, female-, grrrl-centered web space and communication, in order to counterbalance the male-dominated fields within cyberculture. it would seem that in sinclair's "post-feminist" world, problems of power imbalance just wouldn't exist. and yet feminists recognize that the scales of knowledge and power are still (and not always just a little) tipped in gender-, class-, race-, and sex-advantaged directions. [16] getting informed and staying active on the internet is sinclair's net grrrl credo. after surfing through many of the websites sinclair suggests, i now realize just how implicated i am in this culture. and especially implicated when i feel that coming back to the printed text is a bit of a let-down. acknowledging my preference for the "point, click, link, and go" of the endless space of the internet--a space the book can't possibly duplicate--feels like a freedom. at the same time, however, i certainly know that i am not liberated from the vise-grip of postfordist anxiety when corporate and electronic media america (microsoft and nbc) announce that they will collaborate on a new online project: msnbc, an "innovative" live news series that, as jeff yang reports, has been critically received by some as an "experiment in small-d media democracy" (39) for the technoliterate. but that is the split condition of living in a culture where information and communication are increasingly becoming the common (and only, perhaps) currency. [17] being a net chick therefore is not only about getting "empowered by access" (6): it is also about using that accessibility to try to figure out a way to provide it for others. this being the case, sinclair's book is a positive attempt at providing information for people who, with the right kind of opportunity, can get connected and make the internet a source and object of everyday use. works cited: frauenfelder, mark, carla sinclair, gareth branwyn, will kreth, eds. _the happy mutant handbook: mischievous fun for higher primates_. new york: riverhead books, 1995. hahn, harley. _the internet yellow pages_. 3rd ed. new york: osborne/mcgraw-hill, 1996. haraway, donna. "a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s." ed. linda j. nicholson. _feminism/postmodernism_. new york: routledge, 1990. 190-233. henwood, doug. "work and its future." _left business observer_ 3 april 1996: 1-3+. (http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/lbo_home.html) _microsoft bookshelf internet directory_, 1996-1997 ed. redmond, wa: microsoft press, 1996. _new riders' official world wide web yellow pages_. summer/fall 1996 e. indianapolis: new riders, 1996. sinclair, carla. _net chick: a smart-girl guide to the wired world_. new york: henry holt and co., 1996. st. jude, r.u. serious, and bart nagel. _cyberpunk handbook: [the real cyberpunk fakebook]_. new york: random house, 1995. "virtual futures." _australian network for art and technology newsletter_ 24 (1996): 10 pp. online. internet. 7 march 1996. yang, jeff. "joined at the n." _village voice_ 6 august 1996: 39. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------white, 'nietzsche at the altar: situating the devotee', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-white-nietzsche.txt archive pmc-list, file white.995. part 1/1, total size 102437 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- nietzsche at the altar: situating the devotee by daniel r. white gert hellerich university of central florida university of bremen postmod4u@aol.com postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by daniel r. white, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. not only is there no kingdom of *%differance%*, but *%differance%* instigates the subversion of every kingdom -jacques derrida, "%differance%" (22). [1] *narrator* (in peripatetic mode, a little paranoid about the possibility of being hit by a cabbage flying from the pit): to do something so peculiar as to place the greatest critic of christianity at the altar, especially in the electronic age, may require some explanation. to write about a philosopher who rejected traditional philosophical style -argumentative exposition in expository prose - and the epistemology that goes with it in favor of a more aphoristic and staccato mode requires special considerations. how to "understand" a thinker who pointed out that "to understand" means, "to stand under" and so to become a "subject," a stance which this very "author" rejected? to write about an author who rejected "authority" as a species of "subjectivity" and so of slavery, or mastery, in a hierarchy of underlings and overlords, and in trying to "understand" "him" become "authors" ourselves, borders on the ludicrous -amusingly absurd, comical -requiring the power of play. we have decided, therefore, to be serious only when necessary to keep our textual "play" centered enough to be "understood" by the sane: a questionable act in itself, given the fact that nietzsche's preferred persona seemed to be that of a madman whose language was not particularly ego or otherwise "centric." "our" rhetorical strategies ("we" are becoming a little schizoid in honor of our mad teacher) thus include both traditional "exposition" ("laying out" as when one reveals one's "hand" in poker, a metonym for the five cards one masks from others) and "play." our play includes nietzsche, of course, and some of his recent friends, including ourselves, all chatting about some of the more irksome qualities of western civilization, epitomized by christianity and its devotees. because "we" are part of our own play, the ensuing drama is inevitably %recursive% -rewriting itself like those m.c. escher hands -but so is that nietzschean historical milieu in which we currently live: the postmodern-ecological condition. so, please bear with us. [2] traditional academic discourse requires a "subject" in more ways than one. the latin roots %sub% plus %iectum% (past participle of %iacere%), hence %subicere% -literally "cast under" -suggest the subject's function. initially, it seems the discourse must be "about" something, have a theme, which presumably is the underlying substance or substratum, for aristotle %hupokeimenon% (literally "an underlying thing") which serves as the logical "basis" upon which or the "center" around which various other ideas may be predicated. nietzsche, whose writings on religion are the principal "subject" of this text, was a critical traditionalist, a classicist, who well understood aristotle's need to write in terms of clear subjects which were ultimately grounded in "substances" (things) or the metaphysical referents of substantival terms which possess qualities just as linguistic subjects possess predicates: the origin of "things" is wholly the work of that which imagines, thinks, wills, feels. the concept of "thing" itself just as much as all its qualities. -even "the subject" is such created entity, a "thing" like all others: a simplification with the object of defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all individual positing, inventing, thinking as such. (_will to power_, sec. 556) he also resisted a discourse so grounded, preferring to reject a univocal style grounded in a unitary subject in favor of a polyvocal one with constantly shifting subject "matter" as well as a constantly shifting authorial subject. he apparently wrote in this way because he thought that style implied a metaphysic and an epistemology -a theory of reality and of knowledge -and he didn't like the western episteme (picture a bust of aristotle) or its underpinnings (its pedestal). so, to the best of his ability he shattered it, writing in an unorthodox style to which academics typically have to attribute a subject, not to mention an author, in order to "understand" it - subject it to their own modes of discourse. [3] this appropriation of nietzsche's writings to traditional western style, however, ends up making nietzsche a "subject" of the king of the academy, aristotle, whom nietzsche, the ever-inventive class clown, was inclined to bombard with bubbles, little aphoristic exploding bubbles, like viruses, to bring down the information edifice of apollonian learning. if aristotle were head of fbi, he would probably view nietzsche as the polybomber. [4] so, how to write in the spirit of nietzsche, to invoke that recalcitrant shade in the mode of information, offer him a modem as a sling, and let him cast stones at the strange new christian goliath -a.k.a. jesse, jimmie, pat, newt - that has supplanted what nietzsche would think of as the genuine evangel (who had the guts both to claim he was god and to act like it) with an evangelical capitalist overlord who lives not in heaven but in electronic space? we have tried bundling up little power-packets of our mentor, along with some spit balls from some of his recent historical friends (bataille, bateson, cixous et al.) and hurling them at the digital statues of power that stand at the intersection of christianity and capitalism in neoimperial america. we are riding in a new automodem, soon to replace older forms of transportation and prefigured by darryl louise's (dl's) car in _vineland_, "a black '84 trans-am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary ramon la habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents" (pynchon, 105), in which we have been cruising the ruined cities of late modernity, wandering through the strip malls, looking for event-scenes (reported by kroker's canadian gang), and tossing explosive bubbles, as we head for a nine inch nails concert. accompanied by this estranged yet critically engaged collection of personae -nietzsche and his friends, our _thought gang_ if we may steal the tag from tibor fischer's recent novel parked on our shelves -we find ourselves on a new road. [5] the mode of information (poster, 1990), already an emerging super-highway leading to one more utopia, the electropolis just beyond the millennium, provides a main artery from which the contours of our text may be drawn. we understand "information" not in the usual sense, as a noun referring to the digital "bits," the boolian shifters, zero and one, out of which logical syntax and hence, subjects and predicates and deductions (the purest form of argument) may be constructed. instead, we understand %in-formation% as a verbal noun (a gerund -like %differend%) depicting a process. the english term "form," has been widely used to represent the greek term %idea%, used by plato and aristotle in reference to the fundamental metaphysical principles that organize the world of "nature." boethius translated aristotle's %idea% as %species%, utilizing a latin term that would stick with the western tradition down through darwin and even into the present. but if "information" is understood as having verbal force, then it becomes not the "thing" to be explained or quantified - "how is it that we have a certain range of 'species' making up the biosphere and how many of them in what quantities constitute its biomass?" -but rather a process of production of forms: differentiation, morphogenesis. in this sense information becomes isomorphic (insofar as this is possible) with bateson's definition of idea (or %idea%) as a "difference which makes a difference" and derrida's %%differance%% -"the name we might give to the active, moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science" ("%differance%," 18). information taken in this sense becomes the basis of an %infodynamics% (salthe, 1993), which does not rely on "subjects" or "substances" independent of the discourse-productive processes of evolution: the play of %%differance%%. [6] our argument, in a nutshell (that infinite space over which hamlet would have been king if it were not for those embarrassing bubbles of primary process, his dreams - _hamlet_ ii, ii), is that the works of nietzsche, bateson, cixous, bataille and others provide a cross-disciplinary language which may provide, upon analysis, a "substantive" (apologies to nietzsche's critique of our faith in grammar) strategy for cultural politics: critically to situate and creatively to rewrite the combination of christian devotionalism and capitalism with science that characterizes modernity. an especially formidable dimension of the opposition is in the metaphysics and epistemology of what salthe calls baconian/ cartesian/ newtonian/ darwinian/ comtean (bcndc) science, which is central to devotional scientism. this christian-capitalist-industrialist creed is situated within the technological-historical architecture of what mumford called the pentagon of power. mumford's pentagon, like foucault's panopticon, is a metaphor for the imposition of the bcndc creed via technology on the biosphere, enveloping cultures and other life forms as surely and confidently, with as much moral reflection by court philosophers and poets laureate, as disney devouring abc. to engage this monolith, nbcbn writers agree, is vital to the what mumford called the conduct of life. (nbcbn is an acronym for the next merger of secular and sacred broadcasting, which is, fortunately, made up of bateson, bixous and bataille surrounded by nietzsche, and indicates our hope for a new discourse.) [7] nbcbn criticism is defined both by what it engages -the forms of what mumford called sun worship in the temples of advanced technocracy -and the kinds of rewriting it suggests. just as nbcbn critique encircles the pentagon with incantations -wafting little explosive bubbles that drive the generals (all played by george c. scott) ripping mad, and the presidents (all played by peter sellars) to the hot line. (that famous phone is now, by the way, connected to the control center at epcot in the tourist mecca of america, disney, that projection of the neoimperial imaginary, where all of the presidents gather their virtual presences to plan the take-overs not only of nbcbn but also, if they [in pynchon's paranoid sense] haven't already, washington.) so nbcbn discourse is identifiable by the style of its rewriting: recursively ecological. in the ecological writing of our nbcbn colleagues, polyform, heterogeneous, metaphoric, metonymic strands of discourse intertwine in a mindful web of %in-formation% that envelops the disney-pentagon; it wraps the generals in silk strands, jangling their medals and their jewels, tickling their skin, provoking, for a moment even here, spontaneous laughter. in what mumford called, in his last section of _the pentagon of power_, "the flowering of plants and men," this biomorphic diversity provides a living matrix out of which even the reductive strategies, the monological discourses of "normal" subjects are drawn, like cups of water from a bottomless well; it is the language potential of what bateson calls the ecological mind. its authorship produces not only flowers and trees but language-using organisms, self-designating - %recursive% -personae called "human beings." nbcbn writers respect the diversity out of which their ideas grow and to which they contribute; they don't mind sharing authorship with the biosphere. nbcbn writers agree, moreover, that there is a central illusion of modernity: the subject, heir of the christian soul turned entrepreneur, conceived as a metaphysical entity who seeks "control" over a world of objects. this subject is "transcendent" because it is not (so its practitioners believe) recursively constructed out of a set of communicative life practices -language, kinesics, paralinguistics, play, mime, metonymy, metaphor. foucault saw this %imago%, what lacan posited as the "self-image" in the _stade du miroir_ ("mirror stage"), as typifying all those subjects who were subject to, subjected by, modernity since the enlightenment. [8] nbcbn criticism and theory therefore require, as an alternative, an infodynamic idea of the "subject," in all senses of this term: a "human being" constructed out of the multilevel dynamics of play: a mask which may be worn, like your narrator's wizard hat, only with the knowledge that it is, after all, an artifact, so that we become, as haraway says, "cyborgs" (as opposed to, say, robots), the living artifice of the ecological mind. hence the hilarity with which nietzsche views the legions of the serious - those penta-goners, the living dead -who make up what he thinks of as the "herds" of modernity. these are the ones who, like pynchon's thanatoids (_vineland_, 170 ff.), have watched too much disney on abc (or vice-versa, we anticipate future history here) and have come to believe that the mouseketeers -like the ones in _vogue_, _cosmopolitan_, _gentlemen's quarterly_, and the glossy rock idols of _spin_, not to mention (for traditionalists) castiglione's _the courtier_ -%are% themselves. laughter, we conclude, provides a dynamical structure analogous with %differance% which breaks out of the traps of metaphysics, disciplinary reason and imposed personae, opening the possibility of %jouissance% as cultural practice (white & hellerich, 1996 [forthcoming]). [9] in a smaller nutshell: postmodern-ecological (nbcbn) discourse provides a critical/creative alternative to its modern (bcndc) predecessor. the alternative utilizes the polysemic strategies of play, metaphor, and metonym to construct a semiotic technology that envelops and (we hope) transforms the monological pentagon of power that characterizes modern discourse: the language of the dead. by situating the infodynamic production of form - %differance%, "the difference which makes a difference" - at the interface of entropy and information, the alternative creates a living simulacrum of evolutionary ecology: the language of the living. the alternative, moreover, is sufficiently powerful (in nietzschean terms) to construct not only sciences, information technologies, literatures and the like but also authors and characters, self-images, personae, including "man" and "god." nietzsche's critique of religion in general and christianity in particular, opens the way toward a new %zen% of cultural practice in which these characters, including "self" and "god," become the poetic constructs of writers -"you" and "me" -whose religious sensibility is best expressed by laughter (white, 1996 [forthcoming]). [10] being members of a thought gang -taking a critical-theoretical position -in a world circumscribed by messianic entrepreneurs and collapsing ecosystems, leaves us (as the sight of seeing a peasant woman scramble to collect feces dropped from his aristocratic elephant did aldous huxley) feeling, in spite of the consolations of philosophy, a bit pensive. nevertheless, as was aldous, we are not too glum for laughter at our collective condition, even if "we" -increasingly the "middle" and "working" classes of what jencks calls the new "cognitariate" and coupland, perhaps even more appropriately, calls microserfs -are increasingly the ones scrambling to pick up the manure. this is our materialist interpretation of "trickle down" economics. it's not so amusing, however, when you are the one scrambling and not riding on high. academics have more or less been on the elephant for some time, but with the pervasive migrant worker (adjunct) economy emerging in academe, the cognitariate and the proletariate increasingly have a lot to share. it is this materialist political stance in the mode of information -call it a nietzschean-marxian inclination to "talk back," especially via electronic media, to power -combined with the infodynamic confluence of arts and sciences in interdisciplinary critical theory -call it %recursive epistemology% (harries-jones, 1995) -that animates our work. now, meet some members of the gang. [11] bataille, the great nietzschean erotic-demonic rebel, offers a reading of his mentor that aptly engages the merger of christianism, capitalism and statism -the pentagon in its various forms with all its religious significance -that has contributed so much to the blood feast of modern history. bataille commented appropriately, as he wrote his preface to _on nietzsche_ in 1944, "%gestapo% practices now coming to light show how deep the affinities are that unite the underworld and the police. it is people who hold nothing sacred who're the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus." bataille is speaking about "run of the mill doctrines" of anarchy "apologizing for those commonly taken to be criminals" (xxv). this kind of "anarchy" is best represented, ironically, by the devotees who take food from the school children of others (especially people of color), and wave their yellow ribbons during the national anthem under god while the bombs fall on other children abroad, all the while vehemently proclaiming that they are prolife: for these folks, only self-aggrandizement is sacred. bataille's analysis of the reduction of religious ideas, supposedly transcendental and therefore beyond appropriation for human purposes, to the very temporal goals that they are supposed to transcend, clearly indicates what has happened in the religions of modernity: the quite temporal and material objectives of wealth and power become deified by hoards of believers who imagine that jesus actually wants them to make money and launch the f15s against the enemies of "our" oil -the "bombs and jesus crowd," as hunter thompson calls them, who feel sanctified in the pursuit of profit and military hegemony. this is the most vocal and disturbing strain of americanism -gleefully resounding in congress these days -the criticism of, let alone the resistance to, which is branded as demonic. bataille nicely situates this mythos,revealing its operative logic -its stage mechanics -and so the self-serving idolatry that generally passes nowadays for religion in "america." [12] unfortunately for all of us, these personae are them-selves, identities mass produced and distributed from the magic kingdom in consultation with the command and control network linking epcot, washington and madison avenue. are you one of them? are we? the result is a pervasive cultural coding that inscribes the monologic of subjectivity and correlative objectivity on a population who are increasingly programmed to be mouseketeers, to wear yellow and cheer and sing songs of christian devotion as the bombs fall on the iraqis; or for that matter, since academics wore a lot of yellow during that tv series too, to turn out academic papers on, and by, the usual subjects, insuring the trivialization of the american "intellect." trivia, of course, brings up the function of modern academic research within the pentagon, a point that bateson -another member of our gang -makes at length in "the science of mind an order" (_steps_ xvii-xxvi), a key work in the nbcbn corpus. he argues that any discourse not cognizant of the axial difference between entropy and information and their associated fundamentals -namely the bcndc creed -can tell us little about the evolution of our world or the niches of various communities, social or biotic, within it: hence it is trivial (cf. salthe, ch. 1). in contrast, it is precisely at the meeting of these two realms -at the difference which makes a difference - that the strategies of life are formed and the significance of signification is created. this interface of entropy and information is none other than the %differend% -the productive disagreement between dionysus and apollo that nietzsche saw animating hellenic civilization. [13] cixous, in whom we see an uncanny resemblance to that radical gangstress of comic book and recent film, tank girl, appears here interposed first amidst the text of derrida contemplating nietzsche on women (_spurs: nietzsche's styles_), as the cybernaut who steers the ship of %l'ecriture feminine% on a differential course, riding the whirlpool that forms at the interface of entropy and information, dionysus and apollo. here, where we would situate the %differend%, is the meeting place of what bateson called, following the gnostic jung, %pleroma% and %creatura%: "the pleroma is the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no 'distinctions.' or, as i would say, no 'differences.' in the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference" (_steps_, 462-463; also see hoeller, ch. 2). in theological terms, we suggest that pleroma and creatura are analogous to what otto called %numina% and %phenomena%: the numinous being the mysterious realm of the "holy" about which "we" can only surmise. "we can study and describe the pleroma, but always the distinctions which we draw are attributed %by us% to the pleroma" (bateson, 462). the play of discourse is phenomenal, discursive, yet its force, its power, is numinous. it is precisely the role of the daimon -mind, as in maxwell's demon -to produce the differences that constitute living forms. here we would situate bateson's ecological idea and derrida's "%differance%": "'older' than being itself, such a %differance% has no name in our language . . . . this unnameable is not an ineffable being which no name could approach: god, for example. this unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect %differance% is itself %enmeshed%, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system" (derrida, "%differance%" 26-27). cixous' writing and the %daimonic% sorceresses and hysterics that inhabit it, we suggest, are the embodiment of this demon of difference, which the priests and psychiatrists have long tried to exorcise. characterized by her mad laughter, she is the template for the cybernetic creatura envisioned by haraway as for the emergence of new natural-cultural formations - metaphors -in terms of which the dance of life -the %tarantella% -can be articulated. [14] we situate the nietzschean post devotee right here, at the whirling interface of pleroma and creatura where cixous sails: not the course of god but, rather, of the %differend% out of which gods are created. we situate the christian capitalist devotee, in the spirit of reagan and bush and their heirs, in a box seat on the 50 yard line at the super bowl. [15] returning to nutshells, a narrator friend of ours, attributed to an "author" named conrad and a text called _heart of darkness_, but seemingly with a life of his own, once remarked about a yarn spinner, marlow, situated on the moonlit deck of a sailing ship bound for africa, on the thames: the yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. but marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (19-20) so we situate ourselves, your narrator, and our argument amidst the spectral illumination of our characters, not presuming to "subject" them to our theories but to let them speak, interposed with our own pronouncements. hence, now, an intertextual dialogue among our hero-heroines of discourse, who all have appeared, situated miraculously in various forms, with yours truly, amidst the riotous set of a nine inch nails concert, during the gulf war: a perfect setting for the emergence of nietzsche's favorite character. event-scene i: [16] *the situation:* electric dionysian theatre: god comes back to split the mt. of olives on cnn: nine inch nails emerge. filmic time-lapse images, projected on skeins enveloping the band, of a rabbit decomposing, of nuclear explosions and the atomic wind, of corpses hanging by the neck, frozen in the bosnian winter, of the growth of stems and leaves and the turning spirals of the jet stream, metamorphoses of global and microscopic dimensions, the dance of life and death. "if i could kill you and me i would," lead singer and writer, trent reznor, intones: "the pigs have won tonight/ now they can all sleep soundly/ and everything's all right." the skeins fade to reveal the asymmetrical architecture, the broken bombed skyline, of the set, band members perched here and there among vaguely suggested, jagged rooftops, and columns standing at crazy angles to form a fractured cityscape both ancient and modern, under ghostly images of light on fine netting, like the skein of stars that envelops human conduct in aeschylus' _oresteia_. in the pit, reveling fans form a living social body, human waves pulsing phosphorescent across its surface toward the thundering stage. suddenly, a spectre from the electromagnetic spectrum appears on stage left, a philosopher sculpted from light: [17] *nietzsche* (speaking out of memory, in a resounding voice): *the madman:* have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "i seek god! i seek god!" as many of those who do not believe in god were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. why, did he get lost? said one. did he lose his way like a child? said another. or is he hiding? is he afraid of us? has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? thus they yelled and laughed. the madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "whither is god" he cried. "i shall tell you. %we have killed him -you and i%. all of us are his murderers. . . . who will wipe this blood off us? what water is there for us to clean ourselves? what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it. there has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us -for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history hitherto." . . . it has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his %requiem aeternam deo%. let out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, "what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of god?" (_gay science_, sec. 125) [18] *narrator* (who appears to be a nietzsche fan, and whose wizard hat now glows): in this famous passage from nietzsche's later writings, striking images confront us, biblical in tone, apocalyptic in perspective, yet iconoclastic in effect: a madman lighting a lantern in the bright morning to proclaim the death of god, his accusation that we have killed him, his conjuring of blood rite, baptism, religious festival, his challenge to us to become gods in compensation, his vision of churches as "sepulchers of god," darkly alluding to and transforming the gospel story of the empty tomb from which christ has arisen into a parable about our own reawakening as divinities trapped within the tomb of christendom. this emergence from the grave brings the devotees into a new, "higher history," one not circumscribed by the master narrative of christian eschatology, with beginning middle and end like a good tragedy. rather, the new history is to be radical, without a metaphysics, without a transcendental %aeternitas% to provide the reference point against which to measure time and change. this is to be a history of %immanent activity% not transcendent verities, a cultural mode whose signs and symbols, whose %semeiosis%, is generated not from a transcendental signifier or signified, in saussure's terms, but from %communicative practices%, the self-writing of a new generation of %ubermenschen% and %ubermadchen% (the latter to write a higher "herstory") who are not so much "atheists" as the old god reincarnated and pluralized in a diversity of new personae, heralding a new religion of the living instead of, as nietzsche would say, the traditional worship of the dead. [19] in this regard nietzsche has turned religion back into theater, or theater into a religion, in which the mask, the constructed persona, is the only persona, in which the theoretical pose, the transcendent gaze, of the philosophical critic too becomes revealed as a mask through the genealogy of criticism, so that both the ultimate substratum, god, and the human subject who would worship or know him, become no more than actors on the stage of europe, the realization of which makes it closing time for the west: the grand play, the force of which required the suspension of disbelief by the audience, is now revealed as a farce with pretence to tragedy, revealed by nietzsche just as the wizard of oz is sniffed out from behind his curtain by toto. yet, where could this possibly leave audience and actors who have apparently transcended the play of their civilization, only to find themselves still in the mood for self-transformation? is there any show left after nietzsche's madman steals the stage? has the "self-overcoming" that, as charles e. scott says, ". . . defines the movement of the ascetic ideal as well as the movement of nietzsche's genealogical account of that ideal," an overcoming that " . . . is primarily not a theory but a discursive movement that he identifies in western thought and practice as well as in his own writing," rendered former devotees of the narrative mere phantoms, as their lack of substance would suggest? does nietzsche's writing, as well as the culture it genealogically deconstructs, finally become ". . . a mask of appearance without reality, a movement that we undergo as we follow his discourse" (226)? what is left amidst the ruins of the civilization that has killed its own ideal, its god? is it "the omnipresence of power," as foucault has it, "not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another" (_history of sexuality_, i, 93)? are we then left with a world in which "politics is war pursued by other means," or at least in which a "multiplicity of force relations can be coded -in part but never totally -either in the form of war' or the form of politics,' . . . a strategic model, rather than a model based on law" (93, 102)?. yet for nietzsche as for foucault, the ultimate aesthetic of power is not one of war but, we think, of love, not the platonic-apollonian variety -the love of death, "the separation of the soul from the body," as socrates in the _phaedo_ (64c4-5) defines both the terminus of the philosophical quest and the act of dying -but rather the joyous awakening of soul and body fused in the act of living-as-creating: dionysian ecstasy. [20] *deleuze* (breaking in): will to power does not mean that the will wants power. will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification of essence. will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is %the one that% wills in the will. power is the genetic and differential element in the will. this is why the will is essentially creative. (85) [21] *narrator* (trying again): in bateson's terms, nietzschean will is thus "the difference which makes a difference" that proliferates into the mindful patterns of the living world (_steps_, 272, 381 ff.); in derrida's it is %differance%, the generative power producing the differentiation of discourse per se. will to power, "difference which makes a difference," difference: at the convergence of these ideas lies a new joyous science, and what we shall call the philosophy of laughter. yet joyous knowledge is heretical, both to the orthodoxy of "modern" science and to its traditional antagonist, the christian establishment. could these two team up to form a new inquisition of "blue meanies," as the forces of enforced platonism are called in the beatles's film _yellow submarine_, whose heaven looks suspiciously like disney world and whose hell is baghdad? [22] thus that practitioner of joy, foucault (arising like a specter from the underworld below the stage), poses a counter-practice to the christian worship of death stemming from the socratic separation of the soul from the body, as well as to the "ruses" of repressive desublimation, control through sexuality, in a consumer economy: we are often reminded of the countless procedures which christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious. moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless talk of forcing its secret, of extracting the truest confessions from a shadow. (_history of sexuality_, 159) it is between the fanged scylla of christian asceticism and the swirling charybdis of commoditized desire that a nietzschean %frohliche wissenschaft% must steer, and the kybernetes ("steersperson," "cybernaut") best able to steer her ship through that chasm is dionysus: [23] *nietzsche* (wearing a cross in his ear, just like one historic version of madonna): in contrast to the pauline crucified jesus, who exalts death over life -who is close, but not identical, to the jesus who wanted life without facing death - dionysus confronts death, certain of the over-fullness of life and his own recreative power. "the desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be the expression of an over-full power pregnant with the future (my term for this, as is known, is dionysian')" [_will to power_, sec. 846] (valadier, 250). [24] *narrator* (recalling a memorable bout of shopping): the worship of death, disguised as the otherworldly kingdom in christianity, has been transformed in the capitalist modern era into the pursuit of deferred gratification, the foucauldian economy of sexuality, through the fetishization of commodities, the church of the consumers, as we have described it in "nietzsche at the mall" (white & hellerich, 1993). for, as max weber astutely observed in _the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism_, the protestant work ethic which supplied the basic norms for european capitalist culture was a materialized version of the old medieval quest for salvation. the new ethic became "god helps those who help themselves," meaning, in effect, that those who work hard and save will eventually achieve the kingdom, not of the old transcendental heaven above but rather of a materially abundant future attainable through progress. with the advent of consumer capitalism in the twentieth century, the work ethic became conjoined with what might be described as the "pleasure ethic," the virtually religious pursuit of commodities by nearly everybody. thus the old monotheistic god is made imminently available in the myriad forms of concretized desire that make up the idols -the brands and shapely surfaces -of the marketplace. or, as the westminster shorter catechism says, "man's chief end is to glorify god and enjoy him forever" (cited in fullerton, 11). [25] *kristeva* (wanders out of a huge digital mirror rolled on stage, dragging along benveniste as pozzo drags lucky in beckett's _godot_): after reviewing the various etymological interpretations, he [benveniste] argues that from the beginning %credo%/ %sraddha% had both a religious meaning and an %economic% meaning: the word denotes an "act of confidence implying restitution," and "to pledge something on faith in the certainty that it will be returned," religiously and economically. thus the correspondence between %credence% and %credit% is one of "the oldest in the indo-european vocabulary" (kristeva, 30). [26] *narrator* (after a commercial break, rejoins): it is in the context of late nineteenth-century capitalism and industrialism that nietzsche wrote his famous madman passage, and it seems clear now that he was more %describing% the actual religion of europe than attacking traditional theology (which he of course does elsewhere). he is certainly shattering the illusion of transcendental spirituality that still functions as an ideological justification of capitalist culture: those who are wealthy are so because god has smiled on them for their hard work, and the poor are being punished for their laziness, a sentiment worthy of ronald reagan or of his devotee, presidential-hopeful pat buchanan. at the same time, however, he is challenging the devotees of the power and progress, and the church of the consumer which would emerge from their faith, to offer an alternative to their alienated idolatry. [27] *bataille* (enters from the same sub-stage sepulchre as foucault, humming nine inch nails' "closer," in french; erotic dancing breaks out, along with an extraordinary laser light show, in the audience, which appears in the ghostly light of the beams and skeins, as a complex web of reveling shadows, like so many organelles pulsing to the musical heartbeat; he begins by citing nietzsche): "the majority of people are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. in this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them . . . ." but what does that fragmentation mean? or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? . . . whoever acts, substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is glory of the state or the triumph of a party. every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. a plant usually doesn't act, and isn't specialized; it's specialized when gobbling up flies! . . . (_on nietzsche_, xxi-xxii) [28] *bateson* (appearing instantly projected on a stage skein by the nin laser light apparatus, raising a lucky strike, interjects): consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. it is organized in terms of purpose. it is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical and causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a beethoven sonata; it may be sex. above all, it may be money or power. (_steps_, 440) [29] *narrator* (offering him a light): so the operation of what you call "conscious purpose" is akin to the machinations of instrumentalism whose grammar depends on the bifurcation of subjects and objects: the self, the subject, delineating objects which it desires and appropriating -making use of -them technologically to achieve its end? [30] *bataille* (thumbing a copy of richard klein's _cigarettes are sublime_): the fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object . . . each of your moments becomes _useful_. with each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal -what's normally called living. similarly, if salvation is the goal. every action makes you a fragmentary existence. (_on nietzsche_, xxvii) [31] *bateson:* (ruminating on adam and eve's discovery of conscious purpose -the linear logic of objectification - and its ecological consequences.): adam and eve then became almost drunk with excitement. %this% was the way to do things. make a plan, abc and you get d. they then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. in effect, they cast out from the garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic nature. after they had cast god out of the garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared . . . (_steps_, 441) (stops to take a draw on his lucky) [32] *bataille* (aside, to bateson, "could i have one of those?"): the use of the word god is deceptive therefore; it results in the distortion of its object, of the sovereign being, between the sovereignty of an ultimate end, implied in the movement of language, and the servitude of means, on which it is based (%this% is defined as serving %that%, and so on . . .). god, the %end% of things, is caught up in the game that makes each thing the means of another. in other words, god, named as the end, becomes a thing insofar as he is named, a thing, put on the plane with all things. (_the accursed share_, iii, 382-383) [33] *bateson* (laconically): be that as it may. adam went on pursuing his purposes and finally invented the free-enterprise system. eve was not, for a long time, allowed to participate in this because she was a woman. but she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate. (_steps_, 442) [34] *narrator* (intoning chorally): amen. event-scene ii: situation: war rages a neon sign blinks on and off at the rear of the stage, signalling the band's return after a break: the neocapitalist imagology of the sacred or bush does baghdad: the tv mini-series taylor and saarinen ( sound biting their way out of a bubble): media philosophy rejects analytics in favor of communication. explosive, outrageous communication is the lifeblood of hope in the world of simulacra, bureaucracy and collapsing ecosystems (_imagologies_, 9). nietzsche (glowing demonic red as he prepares his anti-sermon): i %condemn% christianity. i raise against the christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. it is to me the highest of all corruptions. . . . to %abolish% any stress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it %created% distress to eternalize itself . . . . parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anemia, of "holiness," draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed - against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, %graciousness% of the soul, %against life itself%. (_the antichrist_, sec. 62) also sprach reznor (apparently regarding his uncle, sam): he sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see he tries to tell me what i put inside of me he has the answers to ease my curiosity he dreamed a god up and called it christianity your god is dead and no one cares if there is a hell i'll see you there he flexed his muscles to keep his flock of sheep in line he made a virus that would kill off all the swine his perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain demands devotion atrocities done in his name . . . "heresy" (nine inch nails, _the downward spiral_) [35] *narrator* (feeling uneasily like an academic sheep on the way to the slaughter): the images of christian sanctimoniousness conjoined with those of capitalism, technological power and american beneficence, abound in the united states today, and do a great deal to shape the imaginations of the public. the more subtle consumer iconography of the mall we have already described, but the explicit imagery of fundamentalist christianity is worth focusing on, for it is the bastion of perhaps the chief antagonist to creating a culture devoted to life - "conservatism" - the euphemism used to describe the radical brand of corporate empowerment and public impoverishment that is now avidly sweeping the people of the us into that bin of victims and exploitees called the third world. the spirit of what nietzsche would see as the religion of death is nowhere more apparent than in george bush's orchestration of christian devotion in support of the tv opera, "the gulf war," aptly described by baudrillard as "pornographic" in a _der spiegel_ interview. [36] *kellner* (is led in chains by the texas rangers, since he has been associated with a drunken frenchman speeding through the tumbleweeds and making dubious pronouncements about their beloved america; even though kellner protests that he is mostly a critic of the mad frenchman, this distinction is lost on the rangers, who, in the meantime are suspiciously eying the book, _the persian gulf tv war_, which is almost mistaken for a special issue of tv guide: then kellner begins to read aloud): a minister appearing on cnn's sonia frieman show after the war on march 1 [1991] properly said that it was literally blasphemous for bush to invoke the name of god in favor of his murderous war policies. but bush continued to play the war and religion theme, telling the annual gathering of the southern baptist convention on june 6, 1991, that he recalled praying at camp david before ordering the start of the gulf war. according to the _new york times_ (june 7, 1991), bush wiped tears away from his eyes as he described praying before ordering the bombing that began the war against iraq and the 23,000 delegates roared their approval, stood up and shouted "amen!" bush was on a political trip, trying to cement alliances with "conservative, church-oriented republicans whom he and his advisers see as crucial to his political strength" [_nyt_ a7] (kellner, 279-280, n. 15). [37] *narrator* (trying not to make all christians feel like unabombers): clearly, not all christians are worshippers of death, as nietzsche's analysis of the evangel indicates. but the virulent american strain of "conservative church-oriented republicans" clearly find the death, at least of officially demonized others, quite appealing. thus kellner also details the imagological demonization of saddam hussein, as part of bush's sanctimonious warmongering, with the full compliance by major media whose function chomsky appropriately describes in his title, _manufacturing consent_. [38] *kellner* (reads on, in spite of the fact that a burly ranger from waco is approaching him with a roll of tape): from the outset of the crisis in the gulf, the media employed the frame of popular culture that portrays conflict as a battle between good and evil. saddam hussein quickly became the villain in this scenario with the media vilifying the iraqi leader as a madman, a hitler, while whipping up anti-iraqi war fever. saddam was described by mary mcgrory as a "beast" (_washington post_, aug. 7, 1990) and as a "monster" that "bush may have to destroy" (_newsweek_, oct. 20, 1990, and sept. 3, 1990). george will called saddam "more virulent" than mussolini and then increased hussein's evil by using the saddam-as-hitler metaphor in his syndicated columns. _new york times_ editorialist a.m. rosenthal attacked hussein as "barbarous" and "an evil dreamer of death" (aug. 9, 1990) . . . _the new republic_ doctored a _time_ magazine cover photo on saddam to make him appear more like hitler. . . . saddam's negative image was forged by a combination of rhetoric, popular culture demonology, and manichean metaphysics that presented the gulf crisis as a struggle between good and evil." (62-63; see kellner's note 1, p. 104, on the "manichean frames of u.s. popular culture.") [39] *said* (rather tattered and powder burned from an untimely visit to friends in iraq, though he seems as one used to being stepped on, like that storybook palestinian jesus, who had a similar view of roman power; he arrives smoking a camel and wearing a placard saying, riding elephants is egotistical, and reads from his tome, _culture and imperialism_): historically the american, and perhaps generally the western, media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural context. arabs are only an attenuated recent example of others who have incurred the wrath of a stern white man, a kind of puritan superego whose errand into the wilderness knows few boundaries and who will go to great lengths indeed to make his points. yet of course the word "imperialism" was a conspicuously missing ingredient in american discussions about the gulf. (295) [40] *narrator* (who has just bought a virtual pachyderm, which he has ridden confidently on stage, proclaims righteously): the worship of death and the "christian" obligation to support the blood-feast of massacre, demonstrably felt by bush's "conservative church-going republicans," is the expectable outcome of a cultural persona that is committed to imposing its language-of-self on a world of others of whom it is paranoid (another glance to the pit here) so that it sees its mission as one of imperial self-defense: orwellian double speak par excellence! (resounding silence, then . . . ) [41] *bateson* (wanders back on stage from the dark, in flannels and smoking another lucky, muttering "seventy some years on this fucking planet are enough"' he challenges the audience, still reverberating from _the downward spiral_, to take an "ecological step" and see here the cultural expression of a religion that is projected down to the fundamentals of western "science" -especially to the darwinian selection of the "unit of survival" in evolution as "the individual or set of conspecifics" instead of the communicative organism-environment relationship): if you put god outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. and as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. the environment will seem to be yours to exploit. your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. (_steps_, 468) [42] *plato* (apparently roused from 2,000 or so years of stony sleep by the unbearably earthly tone of bateson's remarks, not to mention by the irritation of all the nin din, arrives from outside to offer his longstanding view that mind and body, "god" and "nature" must be kept separate, for the object of the philosophical quest is precisely the separation of the soul from the body): therefore is death anything other than the separation of the soul from the body? and [is it not so] that death is this, the body becoming separate from the soul and alone by itself, as well as the soul coming to be alone by itself separate from the body? (64c4-8) [43] *narrator* (trying now to improve on the ancients, yet disaffected from the moderns -who may as well be seen as gangs competing for intellectual turf -attempts to explain, from a newly constructed post on the frontier of modernity, simply represented on stage by a soap box): plato's language -one which separates %soma%, "body" from %psyche%, "soul" indicates etymologically that the religion of death is already here: for, as snell points out in _the discovery of the mind_, the original meaning of %soma%, in homer, is "corpse," the inert body devoid of life. %psyche%, congruently, means "breath," and hence "life breath," and is often translated by the latin %anima%, at the base of words like "animate" and "animal": living things (snell, 16-17). the separation of the one from the other, so that each is alone by itself, is, as we pointed out earlier, the apex of the socratic-platonic philosophical quest: to die, to exist as an entity alone by itself. this is the culmination of the western, ultimately the american dream, externalized as the utopian republic of disney to which, prophetically, the visionary neoimperial epithet "world" is added. so the neochristian genie of the living dead produces a new evolution of faustian creatura: synthetic replicants, event-scenes, robots, creations without originals, simulacra in ever more fantastic and insidious forms, including in part your manichean narrator, programmed to serve their idol: the spectral self in its utopian %politeia%. nietzsche, as a classical scholar, saw all this clearly, and had the foresight to reveal it genealogically right down to the deep cultural logic of platonic software. [44] this imageology of the neocapitalist sacred is wrought subtly and insidiously in the realm of information technology, especially artifical intelligence and virtual reality. for as the television mini-series _wild palms_ tried to indicate, the image-generating and intelligence-projecting power of these new media may be used for the most diabolical ends: the conjuring of "immortal" "leaders," "commanders,"a new priesthood that fulfills in the key of high technology the traditional priestly mission as described by nietzsche. it is the role of the priesthood to maintain themselves, their unilateral, hierarchic power over the populace, particularly by manipulating the imagery of the sacred which is actually a projection of their own egotism, their own acquisitiveness, into the absolute, so making it unassailable. "religion has debased the concept man,' nietzsche writes, "its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through the act of grace --" (_will to power_, sec. 136). this "grace" is mediated, dispensed, by the priesthood, in the old church between god and man, in the new capitalist information order between the mysteries of nature, the genie-like powers unleashed from the electromagnetic spectrum through the architecture of cybernetic minds, into the public sphere as a series of technological breakthroughs, "miracles," the demonstrated powers of the scientist magicians who work for the priesthood and affirm their power. "priests are the actors of something superhuman which they have to make easily perceptible, whether it be in the nature of ideals, gods or saviors" nietzsche continues, ". . . to make everything as believable as possible they have to go as far as possible in posturing and posing," projecting their personae in the forms of pseudo public officials, epitomized by ronald reagan, who read the word handed down by the priests from a script designed -literally by market research -to be a stimulus for statistically predictable responses from the image-consuming public. [45] those who doubt this need only watch bill moyers' four-part pbs series: _the public mind_ (see especially part 2), where the transformation of the electorate from citizens into consumers is detailed. who are the alleged priests of the late capitalist information order? one need look no farther, initially, than a frontline documentary, "the best campaign money can buy," released just before the last us presidential election (october 27, 1992), which deftly shows that both the democrats and republicans successfully courted many of the very same interests for campaign funding. the script of the new order is read by republican or democrat, yet the play is very similar. the drama of the christian right, however, threatens to unleash a new level, even a new quality, of repression "at home," very similar to that practiced by the us and its sympathizers abroad: a monological game of self-righteously exploiting or destroying the other: from the iraqis to nicaraguans to any and every living being that would hinder the manifest destiny of the chosen religion; to act -employ american christian terrorism -to translate the biosphere into sprawling urban real estate -the suburbs and ghettos of the multinational new atlantis epitomized in terry gilliam's film, _brazil_ and, for ubermadchen particularly, in margaret atwood's _the handmaid's tale_ (novel and film). hence we feel obliged to write the "acts of the electronic apostles," a book chronicling the sanctimonious behavior of the new christian right, in the _techno-evangelical scriptures of the new totalitarian ordo saeculorum for terror and ecclesiastical racism through the orwellian news ethernet_ -testosterone (_studies in post christianity by the orlando circle_, i, authors, forthcoming. we are considering -instead of ordo saeculorum, which means "order of the generations" or, as in rome, of imperial succession, hence suggesting the new world order -employing the phrase ordo saecularium, which would be the order of the secular games as in the late empire: we take this to suggest the super bowl.) [46] *kellner* (hearing all this talk about the imperial games, blurts out, his voice muffled by tape which the rangers have thoughtfully, if incompetently, put over his mouth - a trick they learned from watching reruns of the chicago seven trial and the taping of bobby seal -manages to blurt: "during the super bowl weekend of january 25-26 [1991] patriotism, flag waving, and support for the war were encouraged by bush and the media." spitting the tape out altogether, his anger giving him almost the power of the %ubermensch%, kellner intones): the football fans at home, in turn, were rooting for the troops while watching the game. one sign said: "slime saddam" and a barely verbal fan told the tv cameras that "he's messin' with the wrong people," while fan after fan affirmed his or her support for the troops. one of the teams wore yellow ribbons on their uniforms and the football stars went out of their way to affirm support for the troops and/or the war. halftime featured mindless patriotic gore, with a young, blonde aryan boy singing to the troops "you're my heroes," while fans waved flags, formed a human flag, and chanted "u.s.a.! u.s.a.!", reminding one of the fascist spectacles programmed by the nazis to bind the nation into a patriotic community. (258) [47] *baudrillard* (driving on stage in his cadillac with overblown tires, borrowed from hunter thompson, with whom he studied in las vegas, still a little tipsy from his foray across texas and on the run not only from the rangers, who luckily for baudrillard have got the wrong man, but also from the moral majority whose mythic persona has recently been renewed as a kind of halo around congress, manages to say): we live in a culture which strives to return to each of us full responsibility for his own life. the moral responsibility inherited from the christian tradition has thus been augmented, with the help of the whole modern apparatus of information and communication, by the requirement that everybody should be answerable for every aspect of their lives. what this amounts to is an expulsion of the other, who has indeed become perfectly useless in the context of a programmed management of life, a regimen where everything conspires to buttress the autarchy of the individual cell. (165) [48] *narrator* (trying to deflect the attention of the rangers from one of his (their) favorite post-philosophers, fearing his mouth will be taped shut, raises a question he hopes will resonate in police ears): but are the "captains" of multinational corporations really in control of their dominions -notice that the new atlantis of _brazil_ and _handmaid's tale_ is contested by forces of rebellion -or do they work for new, emerging entities that are truly godlike insofar as they transcend the powers of their priests fully to understand and conceivably to control them? [49] *mumford* (who is rolled onto stage sitting in the top story of a skyscraper, with barred windows, where he's been imprisoned by the inquisition of "the priests of the megamachine," as he calls them, stewards of the emerging powers of cybernetically controlled megatechnology after word war ii; he voices his concerns about the genies of technology): the new megamachine, in the act of being made over on an advanced technological model, also brought into existence the ultimate decision-maker and divine king, in a transcendent, electronic form: the central computer. as the true earthly representative of the sun god, the computer had first been invented . . . to facilitate astronomical calculations. in the conversion of babbage's clumsy half-built model into a fantastically rapid electro-mechanism, whose movable parts are electric charges, celestial electronics replaced celestial mechanics and gave this exquisite device its authentic divine characteristics: omnipresence and invisibility. (_pentagon of power_, 272-273) [50] *narrator* (helpfully chorusing): the megamachine is nominally run by two classes, the technical specialists or technocrats and the presidents of corporations or commanders, the magicians and priesthood of celestial electronics. [51] *arthur kroker* (of the canadian gang, arrives in the digital mirror but, like a poltergeist, from the other side, to recount his recent visit to the research labs of the emerging technology, a euphemism for the fields of the dead): to visit these labs is a singularly depressing experience. singularly astonishing to realize how sophisticated the development of demonic power in the hands of the technocrats has become; and singularly depressing to realize that the technocrats are immensely pleased to abandon their selves, abandon their bodies, abandon any kind of individuation of emotion as quickly as possible. these are really dead souls. but at the same time they are dead souls with real missionary zeal -because they equate technology with religion and they call it freedom. (82) [52] *narrator:* what is even more disturbing is the expansion of religious awe on the part of the public, at least the believers, to the realms not only of the arts, which is understandable in a culture otherwise bereft of meaning, but into politics and science as well. [53] *nietzsche:* the wealth of religious feeling, swollen to a river, breaks out again and again, and seeks to conquer new realms: but growing enlightenment has shaken the dogmas of religion and generated a thorough mistrust of it; therefore, feeling, forced out of the religious sphere by enlightenment, throws itself into art; in certain instances, into political life, too, indeed, even directly into science. where one perceives a loftier, darker coloration to human endeavors, one may assume that the fear of spirits, the smell of incense, and the shadow of churches have remained attached to them. (_human, all too human_, sec. 150) [54] *narrator:* these are the new altars where the new priests stand, their technocrats staging televised, even virtual, miracles, altars outfitted with cellular telefaxes, to get the word directly from headquarters, and the artificial intelligence inside, before whom the ceo's sit, fused with their terminals, trying to embody the cybernetic spirit of the times. [55] but it's just possible for hackers armed with nietzsche to slip a few alternative texts into the "mind" of this cyberbeast, to loose a little creative chaos into its programmatic ideals, liven it up a little, so that the words appearing on the telefax have a different ring, and the priests, the technocrats and, yes, the herd of devotees in the telechurch will be shocked back into life. as taylor and saarinen observe, "foucault is right when he notes that the western tradition is unusual in its limitation of art works to external physical products that are exhibited in museums. media philosophy insists that one must take his or her life seriously as being-for-the-other in the space of spectacle. you speak to others and to yourself through the media" (9). so we do not suggest spreading computer viruses and other forms of infosabotage--the tools of literal-minded war. we prefer, instead, an electronic renaissance inspired not by the distanced observer of linear perspective around whom the arts, sciences and religion of modernity were centered, but rather by the jouissance commensurate with recognizing "ourselves" as participants in the dionysian-appolinian creativity of the ecological mind. this daimon is well played not by god but rather by none other than nietzsche, just arriving at the electronic altar. event-scene iii: the dionysia the devotee of life or god quits moralizing, gets a gender change and cultivates a sense of humor zen buddhist: "the miracle is to walk upon the earth." reznor: i want to fuck you like an animal my whole existence is flawed you get me closer to god (nine inch nails, "closer", _downward spiral_) [56] *narrator* (as the music fades to a faint pulse): the god of the european tradition was an imperious moralizer, looking down on his children below, pointing a threatening finger at sinners, handing down the law, allowing no revisions. the specter of god the father has haunted european culture like the ghost of hamlet senior, compelling it to violence and retribution in the oedipal cycle of the patriarchic nuclear family: male struggle for power within hierarchic structure, one king dominates kingdom just as one god rules the cosmos; one father, in heaven as in the family, ruling over his wife and children; a son who must in turn overcome the father to take his own position beside the surrogate mother, his wife or queen, to complete the cycle of the generations. the transformation of social relationships by the deconstructing of traditional oppositions, the rewriting of the cultural text in terms that are immanent and differential instead of hierarchic and classificatory, is precisely nietzsche's goal in his critique of religion. it is furthermore to this oedipal religion that nietzsche, significantly, counterpoises the genuine evangel: [57] *nietzsche:* in the whole psychology of the "evangel" the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. "sin" -any distance separating god and man -is abolished: %precisely this is the "glad tidings."% blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality -the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. the consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. it is not a "faith" that distinguished the christian: the christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently. the life of the redeemer was nothing other than this practice -nor was his death anything else. he no longer required any formulas, any rites for his intercourse with god -not even prayer. he broke with the whole jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation; he knows that it is only in the practice of life that one feels "divine" . . . . (_the antichrist_, sec. 33) [58] *otto* (wearing one of those t-shirts with a tuxedo serigraphed on the front, on one lapel of which, in bright green, appears the word "numinous," and on the other in a comparable hue of pink, appears "pleroma," and on the cummerbund, bright yellow, lights "predicate," which from its flashing we take to be an imperative, like "fornicate:" think "pleroma is numinous;" on the back of his t, invisible to the audience and even to one of our personalities, flash "phenomenal" and "creatura," with a similar imperative): the truly 'mysterious' object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently 'wholly other', whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. (28) [59] *narrator:* this conception of the holy as "wholly other," as ever "beyond" (%epekeina%), as it appears in otto's analysis, is isomorphic with the christian notion of a godhead transcending the limits of the human, before which the devotee is stricken with awe, not only with wonder but often with the power and presence of majesty, and so with chill and fear; as rilke remarks in the _duino elegies_, "every angel is fearsome [%schrecklich%]." [60] all of this makes nietzsche's challenge to traditional theology, to the idea of a transcendent god, of extraneous numina, even more radical. he would, on our reading, deconstruct the "wholly other" of the divine, the semeiotic bifurcation and opposition of devotee and god, soul and almighty, earth and heaven, evil and good, to present the priests -of the catholic church as of multinational corporation (which includes the varieties of protestantism, as their ultimate catholic form) -with a startling challenge: "quit pretending that you are on one side of the semeiotic divide between phenomena and noumena, altar and its divine reference, and god is on the other: realize that you are none other than him (her?) pretending not to be! true power is not the use of the holy to wow the congregation but to wake yourselves and them up to the presence of mystery, of unlimited creative power, here and now. 'you' and 'god' are characters in the play of culture, and now that the secret is out, yes, god is dead as a separate entity, so the art of world making, become the art of culture making (%kulturmachen%), resides in the communicative activities of "human beings" who are self-designating numina." this is the meaning of the zen maxim with which the section begins, "the miracle is to walk upon the earth." nietzsche's visit to the altar brings god, the gods, the angels, crashing down onto the pages of the holy telefax, revealing them as the communicative signs of an extraordinary mind whose been having trouble with alienation for a couple of thousand years, so badly that he went into business and tried to forget his troubles via material gains, and when he failed at that tried to commit suicide by creating industrial civilization, and has been trying to e-mail himself to a heaven conjured by the new christian information network (cin), but who now may be obliged, with his life flashing before his eyes on the divine video monitor (right next to the holy fax), to wake up. [61] *bataille* (who, inverting the logic of clinton, inhales his borrowed lucky without smoking it): fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there's no separating anything now. an entire human being is partly a clown, partly god, partly crazy . . . and is transparence. (_on nietzsche_, xxix) [62] *narrator:* an evangel, beyond, *including*, good and evil? god and the devil in a new, immanent polymorphous %savoir%. [63] *bataille:* i've already said it: the practice of freedom lies within evil, not beyond it, while the struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. to the extent that life is entire within me, i can't distribute it or let it serve the interests of good belonging to someone else, to god or myself. i can't acquire anything at all: i can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyone's interest. (_on nietzsche_, xxvii) [64] *narrator:* so you are the evangel? hypocrite! [65] *bataille* (giving a bow of thanks to the narrator for this praise of his acting skills): apparently the moral problem took "shape" in nietzsche in the following way: for christianity the good is god, but the converse is true: god is limited to the category of the good that is manifested in man's utility, but for nietzsche that which is sovereign is good, but god is dead (his servility killed him), so man is morally bound to be sovereign. man is thought (language), and he can be sovereign only through a sovereign thought. (_accursed share_, iii, 381). [66] *derrida* (appearing as a cheshire apparition on a skein, croons of nietzsche on language, truth, art, dissimulation -and women): here i stand in the midst of the surging of the breakers . . . -from all sides there is howling, threatening, crying, and screaming at me, while in the lowest depths the old earth shaker sings his aria . . . monsters tremble at the sound. then suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before the portal of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant, -a great sailing ship (%segelschiff%) gliding silently along like a ghost. oh, this ghostly beauty! with what enchantment it seizes me! what? has all the repose and silence in the world embarked here (%sich hier eingeschifft%)? does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier ego, my second immortalized self . . . as a ghost -like, calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping neutral being (%mittelwesen%)? similar to the ship, which, with its white sails, like an immense butterfly, passes over the dark sea. yes! pass over existence! (%uber das dasein hinlaufen!%) that is it! (_spurs: nietzsche's style_, 42-45) [67] *narrator* (mock heroic in tone, here, and split into two voices): who is that at the wheel of nietzsche's dissimulating schooner, traversing the middle way between %creatura% and %pleroma%, self and other, life and death, information and noise, order and chaos, so gracefully on the differential waves of semeiosis? it is none other than the _femme de l'ecriture cybernetique%, the steerswoman from hell -who? [68] *cixous* (whose nin t-shirt now lights with the day glow letters, %l'ecriture feminine%, and when she turns to look astern, lights, in english, with tank girl): "writing offers the means to overcome separation and death, to give yourself what you would want god-if-he-existed to give you'" (_coming to writing_, 4). [69] *derrida* (peering at cixous' fluctuating image, and the magnificent ship she commands, remarks): woman, mistress, nietzsche's woman mistress, at times resembles penthesilea. (_spurs_, 53). [70] *cixous:* and she, penthesilea, cuts through his [achilles' - nietzsche's?] armor, and she touches him, she finally takes her shining bird, she loves it mortally, it is not a man that has come into her bare hands, it is more the very body of love than any man, and its voice as well, which she cruelly makes her own . . . she hurls herself wildly toward the end of love; eating achilles, incorporating him, devouring him with kisses. the space of metaphor has collapsed, fantasies are carried out. why not? (121) [71] *narrator* (a little embarrassed by all those devouring kisses, drawls): sounds like cixous says of achilles (nietzsche?) what nietzsche says of schooners (women?): "i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together," as john lennon, then wearing a walrus suit, once remarked. [72] *cixous* (after a remarkable rendition of "goo goo ga joob" %au francais%): yes, all is well, beyond history. where achilles is comprehended within penthesilea, whom he comprehends beyond any calculation. . . (aside to nietzsche, and reznor): how to love a woman without encountering death? a woman who is neither doll nor corpse nor dumb nor weak. but beautiful, lofty, powerful, brilliant? without history's making one feel its law of hatred? so the betrothed fall back into dust. vengeance of castration, always at work, and which the wounded poet can surmount only in fiction. (121) [73] *reznor:* . . . my whole existence is flawed. [74] *bataille* (apparently commenting both on nine inch nails' and cixous' writing practices): eroticism is the brink of the abyss. i'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). the abyss is the foundation of the possible. we're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. from this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. this is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. (_guilty_, 109) [75] *narrator:* yet, the woman, like nietzsche's madman, is surrounded by believers in the almighty's transcendent word whose seriousness is unassailable. nevertheless, as clement says of the sorceress & hysteric who is a template for "the newly born woman:" but she, she who made satan, who made everything - good and evil, who smiled on so many things, on love, sacrifices, crimes . . . ! what becomes of her? there she is, alone on the empty heath . . . ." and that is when she takes off -laughing. (_newly born woman_, 32) event-scene iv: encore the philosophy of laughter: or adam flushes money and eve ditches bridge when they discover jouissance [76] bateson* (in a story-teller fashion that he learned both at home and in new guinea): dunkett's rat-trap: mr. dunkett found all his traps fail one after another, and he was in such despair at the way the corn got eaten that he resolved to invent a rat-trap. he began by putting himself as nearly as possible in the rat's place. "is there anything," he asked himself, "in which, if i were a rat, i should have such complete confidence that i could not suspect it without suspecting everything in the world and being unable henceforth to move fearlessly in any direction?" "drain pipes," [came the answer one night in an illuminating flash] then he saw his way. to suspect a common drainpipe would be to cease to be a rat. [so] a spring was to be concealed inside [of the trap], but . . . the pipe was to be open at both ends; if the pipe were closed at one end, a rat would naturally not like going into it, for he would not feel sure of being able to get out again; on which i [butler] interrupted and said: "ah, it was just this which stopped me from going into the church." when he [butler] told me this i [jones] knew what was in his mind, and that, if he had not been in such respectable company, he would have said: "it was just this which stopped me from getting married." (jones, _samuel butler: a memoir_, vol. 1; cited in bateson, steps 238) [77] nietzsche* (twirling one end of his, even in longinian terms "awesome," moustache): to laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh %out of the whole truth% -to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that. even laughter may yet have a future. i mean, when the proposition "the species is everything, %one% is always none" has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only "gay science" (%froliche wissenschaft%) will then be left. (_gay science_, ch. i, sec. 1) [78] *bataille* (looking up from a stage copy of _tank girl_ comics): nonmeaning normally is a simple negation and is said of an object to be canceled. . . but if i say %nonmeaning% with the opposite intention, in the sense of %nonsense%, with the intention of searching for an object free of meaning, i don't deny anything. but i make an affirmation in which %all life% is clarified in consciousness. whatever moves toward this consciousness of totality, toward this total friendship of humanness and humanity for itself, is quite correctly held to be lacking a basic seriousness. (_on nietzsche_, (xxx). [79] *nietzsche* (throwing a spitball at a poster of hobbes, ". . . that philosopher who, being a real englishman, tried to bring laughter into ill repute among all thinking men . . . ," hanging off stage): i should actually risk an order of rank among philosophers depending on the rank of their laughter -all the way up to those capable of golden laughter. (_beyond good and evil_, sec. 295) [80] *narrator:* it is significant that umberto eco, in _the name of the rose_, represents medieval christendom as being dependent on the suppression of laughter, which would be validified by the discovery of a secret manuscript, the work on comedy written by the ultimate authority of the gothic church, aristotle. if any qualities most distinctly mark nietzsche's critique of the christian cultural text, they are iconoclasm and laughter. eco aptly describes the subversive power of aristotle's lost work on comedy, particularly his remark in the _poetics_ that the comic mask distorts the features of characters it represents: jorge feared the second book of aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. (491) [81] *clement* (smiling as she recalls her sorceress-hysteric): "she laughs, and it's frightening -like medusa's laugh - petrifying and shattering constraint" (32). [82] *bataille* (chuckling, possibly at _tank girl_ as a "hysteric" with the %nonsense% to fight back): to destroy transcendence, there has to be laughter. just as children left alone with the frightening beyond that is in themselves are suddenly aware of their mother's playful gentleness and answer her with laughter: in much the same way, as my relaxed innocence perceives trembling as play, i break out laughing, illuminated, laughing all the more from having trembled. (_on nietzsche_, 55) [83] *narrator* (uncompromisingly serious): if the semeiotics of laughter require that it transform - in aristotle's language, "distort," in clement's "shatter" -the truth it represents, how does it accomplish its task? structurally, laughter is akin to play, and the kinesic sign, "this is laughter" may be compared to the sign, "this is play." in gregory bateson's language, the latter sentence may be translated, "these actions in which we now engage, do not denote what those actions %for which they stand% would denote." or, in other words, "these actions do not mean what they would mean if they were serious." this indicates that "this is play" is a metamessage about communication at a lower level of abstraction, a lower logical type, and that the effect of the metamessage is partly to negate, undermine, "distort," the meaning of the behavior referred to. so play fighting is not real fighting, the "nip" is not the "bite," as bateson remarks, though it uses identifiable aspects of the bite as an abstract sign indicating a metacommunicative bond, an understanding, between the players (_steps_, 180). if bateson is right the paradoxical shift of the messages of literal behavior into those of play, which require the constant oscillation between the literal message suggested by the nip and its negation (the nip is both bite and not-bite) is fundamental to the creation of social life and culture. as anthony wilden points out, regarding levi-strauss, the familial roles established by the incest taboo in the development of human society are in fact forms of play in bateson's sense: a "brother" is a male who is not a male, a mate, for a "sister," who is a female who is not a female, a mate, for her brother, and so on (_system & structure_, 250-251). so, what about laughter? in "our" (admittedly schizoid and to this degree ecstatically narrative) view, extending nietzsche's and eco's, and possibly aristotle's, representation of the matter, laughter performs a role closely related to that of play: to laugh at the literal behavior of other characters in the social drama, is to change the truth value of what those characters do so as to undermine its seriousness, its claim to veracity, to authority, and so to call it into question. one must not laugh in church, or at the emperor, for this would undermine its/his claim to power. "laughter breaks up, breaks out, splashes over . . . ," says clement (33). this is why dunkett's rat trap is taken as a metaphor for the "trap" of metaphysics by butler: the closed drain pipe of transcendent truth and the indissoluble bonds of "church" and "marriage"; yet the humor evoked by the story disarms the trap. so, also, to laugh at oneself is to undermine one's own claim to seriousness, one's claim to know the truth, to be substantial. yet it is also to become a fabricator, a maker of new forms, in haraway's view, to become a medusan "cyborg." [84] *haraway:* inhabiting my writing are peculiar boundary creatures -simians, cyborgs, and women -all of which have had a destabilizing place in western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. these boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the verb to demonstrate. monsters signify. . . . the power differentiated and highly contested modes of being of monsters may be signs of possible worlds -and they are surely signs of worlds for which "we" are responsible. (22) [85] *narrator:* to laugh at "the truth," as nietzsche would have and, what is more, "to laugh out of the whole truth," is "monstrous," signifying the shortcomings and the creative possibilities of civilization; it is ultimately to proclaim the indeterminacy, the paradox, the constantly shifting meanings of play, as the %condition humaine%: to be human is to play; that's how character and culture are formed. the sudden recognition of this, as in the story of dunkett, provokes laughter. as nietzsche says in _human, all too human_, referencing (laughing at/with?) plato: "%seriousness is play% . . . . %all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless% . . . "(sec. 628; plato, _republic_, 10.604b). to practice this philosophy is to ally wisdom with laughter to produce the unfettered self-writing that cixous and clement call %jouissance% or, in nietzsche's terms, %die frohliche wissenschaft%, the "joyous science." this has important implications for the devotee, as well as the philosopher, for laughter is not only to be allied with wisdom as with the holy, but also with "you" and "me." [86] *nietzsche* (straight faced): zarathustra says, so %learn% to laugh away over yourselves! lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher! and do not forget good laughter. this crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, i throw this crown. laughter i have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh! (_thus spoke zarathustra_, iv, sec. 20.) 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"feminist theology as survival literature." _women's studies quarterly_. 1993. nr. 1,2. pp. 143-152. snell, bruno. _the discovery of the mind: the greek origins of european thought_. trans. t.g. rosenmeyer. new york: dover, 1982. stone, oliver. _wild palms_. prod. michael rauch. created by bruce wagner. capital cities/ abc video publishing. 1993. valadier, paul. "dionysus versus the crucified." _the new nietzsche: contemporary styles of interpretation_. ed. david b. allison. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press, 1985 (orig. published by dell, 1977). weber, max. _the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism_. trans. talcott persons. new york: scribner, 1958. white, daniel r. _postmodern ecology: communication, evolution, and play_. new york: suny press, 1996. forthcoming. ----and gert hellerich. _labyrinths of the mind: the self in the postmodern age_. new york: suny press, 1996. forthcoming. -----. "nietzsche at the mall: deconstructing the consumer." _ctheory_ vol. 17, nos. 1-2 (spring 1994): electronic text. wilden, anthony. _system and structure: essays in communication and exchange_. 2nd ed. london: tavistock, 1980. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------swiss, 'music and noise: marketing hypertexts', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-swiss-music.txt archive pmc-list, file review-4.996. part 1/1, total size 22231 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- music and noise: marketing hypertexts by thomas swiss drake university ts9911r@acad.drake.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by thomas swiss, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, the institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: eastgate systems, inc. [1] given that musical references are common in the critical literature about hypertext, i begin with jacques attali, ^1^ whose criticism poses a challenge not only for music and musicians but for other artists as well, including writers working in hypertextual mediums. considering sound as a cultural phenomenon, attali argues that relations of power are located on the shifting boundary between "music" and "noise." music is a code that defines the ordering of positions of power and difference that are located in the aural landscape of sound; noise, on the other hand, because it falls outside of a dominant musical code, transgresses this ordering of difference. for attali, then, music is tamed noise. [2] by many accounts, hypertextual witing aspires to the condition of noise, not music. it means to jam the normal literary frequencies, create a disruption, some useful static. said in a rawer, more openly political way, it "overthrows" "all kinds of hierarchies of status and power"; it is "radical," "revolutionary"--or so the best-known arguments go. ^2^ but how radical is hypertextual writing in our current age of the web? how committed is any of it, to borrow attali's terms, to producing an appreciation of noise (as opposed to music) that transgresses the dominant order of difference? [3] why "review" eastgate? because we only know eastgate through its representations of its aesthetic and intellectual enterprise--the way it has conjured itself discursively. the way it has conjured itself *as a text*. in this brief review, i want to offer in impressionistic fashion (and with the support of a few hypertext links) some observations about eastgate, a pioneering publishing company which has managed to create a kind of "local" scene for hypertext writers. of course, as is often the case now with the wide-spread use of e-mail, news groups, and web pages, locality here is less a place than a space: a network that brings people and their ideas together. in particular, i want to pose some questions about the evolving discourse surrounding literary hypertext, including certain conflicts and contradictions at work in the field of hypertextual production and promotion. at eastgate, this discourse finally positions the company and its authors as both advocates of noise (meant to overthrow the literary mainstream) *and* music (meant to enter the mainstream.) [4] based in watertown, massachusetts, eastgate specializes in "serious hypertext." that last phrase, used in the company catalog, web site, ads, and other promotional materials, appears to mean something like "academic" hypertext as opposed to, i suppose, much of the hypertext one finds these days on the web: "the dickens web" as opposed to "mike's cool links." i don't know how big the market is yet for hypertextual criticism, fiction, and poetry--my own order for eastgate's fiction was a first for my university library. judging from the number and increasing frequency of hypertexts that eastgate publishes, however, the news must be fairly good. if it is, i suppose eastgate is in an enviable position: it practically owns the franchise. its stable of writers includes such influential authors and critics as george landow, michael joyce, carolyn guyer, and stuart moulthrop. [5] in the area of hypertext and--is it too early to use the phrase?--"hypertextual studies," eastgate resembles certain other "niche" publishers of avant-garde work. like city lights books in the 1950s, which provided the beat writers an early home, or roof press, which still provides a publishing outlet for "language poetry," eastgate appears to offer hypertext writers close attention, good company, and (for a small organization) sophisticated marketing. using the tag line "serious hypertext," for example, is a clever marketing move as it marks out a "high" literary space for everything eastgate publishes. thus tennyson's "in memoriam" and humphrey clark's "the perfect couple" (described in the eastgate catalog as "a new age couple discovers the secret of perfect love") get to travel together under the same umbrella, although they reflect--to say the least--different literary values and practices. but claiming for your authors' work a certain (if undefined) seriousness seems mostly a pre-emptive strike on eastgate's part, an attempt to disarm those critics who refuse to take *anything* composed in hypertext seriously. [6] the relationship between software and digital writing is indeed a complicated one. at the textual level, it obviously affects both writer and reader. that is, it alters the composition and influences the "readability" (and symbolic meanings) of a text. at eastgate, where the discourses of (computer) science routinely meet those of literature and literary theory, this relationship can be difficult to express. which metaphors will suffice? in the following passage we hear a certain--and sudden--awkwardness as michael joyce offers the "reading instructions" for his new (and very interesting) hyperfiction from eastgate, *twilight: a symphony*- when you begin a reading, you will see an open text window that looks like this one. if you want to shape this reading in something of a dance involving our common intentions and momentary whims, you can click and go on (here or anywhere) and the text will take you, or you it, where either you or it are going... (enough poetry, you say, bring on the praying mantises! so be it...) behind each open text window is an arrangement of titled boxes with arrows among them which represent their links. each box (or space) contains text and/or graphic images. many of the spaces also contain more text boxes. that is, each space can both contain text and images and hold more spaces like itself. ^3^ [7] in this particular case, the passage into and through various lexicons, however discordant ("praying mantises"?) or conflicting, can be part of the reader's pleasure in the text. what begins here sounding like an overly-ripe lyric poem concludes by sounding like an instruction manual--the sort of movement you might find in the work of john ashbery and others. [8] but some representations, including graphic ones, of the ways in which software and serious writing interact can be confusing or contradictory at eastgate. is hypertext more like literature or science? music or noise? commerce or art? [9] take the cover art on the catalog, which appears to reproduce a nineteenth century drawing. in the drawing, two bearded men in suits are gazing at or into telescopes while two boys in the corner converse at a desk. cover of eastgate catalog, spring 1996 [image available on www version] [10] i'm not sure how we're supposed to read this illustration. are the men programmers and the children writers? that hardly seems right. why are there no women involved in this mysterious enterprise? eastgate publishes a fair number of hypertexts by women. minimally, we see that the image foregrounds the "science" of hypertext as opposed to its literary elements. what about the full name of the company? eastgate systems. "systems"? or the text of the brochure which includes a "welcome" from mark bernstein, "chief scientist," who begins his message with the resonant phrase: "dear friends in hypertext." [11] now where are we? in the church of hypertext? well, sort of. there is a lot of hyperbole surrounding hypertext, a kind of utopian (and sometimes evangelical) rhetoric that springs up, as martin spinelli points out in a recent essay on radio and the internet, among devotees of emerging mediums.^4^ thus we find george landow, for example, talking about "hypertext visionaries" in the eastgate brochure. landow's comment is a blurb for a software program called storyspace which is sold by eastgate and which happens to be the software of choice for many eastgate authors. [12] nothing wrong with that, except that the relationship between storyspace, "a hypertext authoring system for the personal computer," and the hypertextual writing that eastgate publishes may be misleading. that is, hawking the software, as eastgate prominently does in all of its materials--even in the jackets of the hypertextual "books" they publish--may suggest too strong of a connection between the software and the quality of the work itself. the better the software the better the writing? eastgate appears to promote this linkage in the brochure: storyspace is used to write serious hypertext nonfiction--such as david kolb's _socrates in the labyrinth_ and _cyborg: engineering the body electric_ by diane greco. storyspace is also used to write creative and experimental hypertext fiction and poetry, like award-winning author edward falco's _sea island_, and michael joyce's _afternoon, a story_. [13] eastgate's claim, while a common one in the world of advertising, means very little; it's like knopf developing a line of pens and paper and then crowing: it's the same kind of writing apparatus toni morrison used to write _beloved_! maybe so, but so what? of course, i am exaggerating here. yet what animates this claim is something that currently remains under-studied and under-conceptualized: the relationship between the production of literary hypertext and the market. some questions we might ask include: what are the ways in which we might consider the political economy of hypertext? how does the market impact the technology of hypertextual production and the practices of hypertext authors themselves? how do we conduct an institutional analysis of a company such as eastgate? like many "indie" labels in the music business, eastgate often professes an oppositional discourse and yet needs, in some measure, to be understood not as "noise" but as "music" in order to survive economically. storyspace browser [image available on www version] netscape browser [image available on www version] [14] at any rate, no matter the claims made for it, i find both the storyspace authoring program and the storyspace reader software rather cumbersome myself, though the design has improved somewhat over the nearly ten years they have been on the market. on the positive side, the quality of display is very good, as are the shapes and locations of the windows, even if one often wishes that the boxes could be enlarged by the reader. but i find the information structure tricky to learn, and the navigation tools in the storyspace reader--in the age of the easy-to-use netscape web browser--could use both re-locating and a new set of icons for clarity's sake. [15] my comments raise familiar concerns about the difficulty for "independent" companies like eastgate to compete, especially in the area of technology development, with mega-companies like netscape. of course netscape itself was only a few years ago employing a version of counter-hegemonic discourse as it competed with the first widely used graphic browser for the internet, mosaic. what difference would it make if eastgate's hypertexts were written not in the programming language of storyspace, but in html and then bundled with the netscape browser? how would this change eastgate's notions of independence and its representation of hypertextual fiction and poetry? would the work be any more or less "serious," "experimental," "noisy," or "musical"? [16] storyspace has been written about--both described and theorized--most prominently by landow, but also by its multiple creators, including michael joyce in his rich collection of essays, _of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics_. joyce's book is the best single-author collection of work in the field of hypertextual studies at this time. he calls the essays "theoretical narratives"; they cover a lot of ground (a number of issues are provocatively raised) in what might be described as an original and elegant style--unusual in such a book. while the title of the volume is meant to refer to the "two minds" of hypertext pedagogy and poetics, it seems to also signal something of the competing positions or mind-sets that a number of hypertext writers and theorists are caught between. by way of an example, let me note that while joyce can be an astute commentator on the *aesthetic* implications of hypertext, he also writes (in a chapter on pedagogy): indeed, hypertext tools offer the promise of adapting themselves to fundamental cognitive skills that experts routinely, subtly, and self-consciously apply in accomplishing intellectual tasks. moreover, hypertext tools promise to unlock these skills for novice learners and empower and enfranchise their learning. ^5^ [17] this analysis springs from cognitive psychology as adapted by some of the "writing process" advocates of the late 1970s. ignoring the social (and political) processes that decide who learns what and how, joyce essentializes learning by reducing it to "skills." there's no consideration here or elsewhere of such issues as how a student's home environment and community shape learning and what counts as "knowledge." there's no consideration of gender barriers as they relate to technology, and as they are inevitably played out in the classroom, etc. in this passage and others, joyce constructs learning as a static set of skills that can be "unlocked" by the lucky novice with the right "tools." [18] in their critical writing eastgate authors are sometimes constructivists; at other times they are cognitivists. even in those essays framed in poststructuralist terms, there can be a heavy reliance on the classic "encoding/decoding" model of communication and culture. thus while hypertext is sometimes lauded for its "revolutionary" power, here it is promoted as another (new and improved) route into the mainstream. [19] as majorie perloff notes in her work on language poetry,^6^ the early critiques of most avant-garde movements--and the literary hypertext community is that--draw heavily on that movement's own statements of intent as represented in various essays, interviews, and manifestos. the eastgate stable, while certainly not the only community of hypertext authors out there doing interesting work, has been particularly visible and vocal. thus what thoughtful commentary there has been on hypertext, with the exception of sven birkerts' ongoing (and retro-romanticized) critique,^7^ has generally relied on what perloff calls the "exposition-advocacy model." landow's two ground-breaking books from johns hopkins, _hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory_ and his edited volume _hyper/text/theory_, are good examples of this model at work--eastgate authors are routinely cited; their work is praised, explained, and theorized for a readership presumed to be just developing an interest in hypertext. unsurprisingly since its authors are well-represented in these books, eastgate distributes both of them. [20] in part, i am suggesting that the sponsorship structure of eastgate has contributed to what, in my view, is a surprising consensus among hypertext theorists. last winter, for example, i attended a conference which brought a number of eastgate authors together in keynote panels. there were no fireworks, not even any real disagreements. instead the writers articulated a loose set of common goals, procedures, and habits. much of the talk about hypertext, as usual, was about its relationship to post-structuralist thought: in this case, the foregrounding of textuality; the "interactiveness" between reader and text; praise for collage and fragmentation, for multiplicity and collaboration. what one did not hear repeated, happily, were some of the early claims made for hypertext: that it would somehow strengthen democracy, that the linear straightjacket of ink on paper would be liberated by hypertext, which was itself more natural or more representative of how humans (or intellectuals) think ^8^. still, though the conference was more interesting than most, the presenters seemed, at least in this context, mostly of one mind. [21] more emphasis on the differences between the writers might have proven more exciting--more "noise" and less "music." but i suppose it is necessary to remember that we are fairly early into the story of hypertext and hypertextual studies; it is likely to be awhile before these writers get past the initial phase of advocacy and instruction and begin a rigorous (and public) self-critique. [22] given the time-delay mechanisms of literary politics, issues that eastgate authors have been bravely raising explicitly for some years (in essays and talks) or implicitly (through their fictions and poems) are beginning to be augmented and seriously debated in other forums, and by a widening group. the least interesting of these discussions, as i have said, are debates painted in broad strokes ("classic print vs. the pixel"), and usually come with apocalyptic warnings on both sides. more compelling are those discussions about literary hypertext which foreground the possiblilities of either disjunctures or continuities through generations of language innovations and across cultural forms. a few of the best examine both. it is not only literary theorists who are increasingly publishing essays and books about hypertext, but also reading specialists, psychologists, and information and computer scientists.^9^ [23] still, what has been largely ignored is the discourse surrounding literary hypertext and its relation to the market as well as to pedagogy--in ways that include the social realities of education. in the context of both increasingly available "commercial" literary hypertexts and (especially) the growing number of "free" internet-available hypertextual essays, poems, and fictions, the terrain is shrinking upon which a hypertext company like eastgate may still articulate a "revolutionary" stance. the concepts of "serious" and "experimental" hypertexts, in flux like the concepts of "noise" and "music," are in need of continued critique. notes ^1^jacques attali, _noise: the political economy of music_ (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1985). for a discussion of attali in relation to pop music, see thomas swiss, john sloop, and andrew herman, _mapping the beat: popular music and contemporary theory_ (cambridge: blackwell publishers, forthcoming 1997). ^2^george p. landow, _hypertext_ (baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 1992). see the back cover of the book. ^3^michael joyce, _twilight: a symphony_. (watertown ma: eastgate systems, 1996). ^4^martin spinelli, "radio lessons for the internet," _postmodern culture_ 6.2 (january, 1996). http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/ pop-cult.196.html ^5^michael joyce, _of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics_ (ann arbor: university of michigan press ann arbor, 1995) 40. ^6^majorie perloff, _radical artifice_ (chicago: the u of chicago p, 1991). also see bob perelman, _the marginalization of poetry_ (princeton: princeton up, 1996). ^7^see the hypertext roundtable, "dialog," in the inaugural issue of the web-based magazine feed. the url for the site is http://www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html. ^8^joyce, _minds_ 57. ^9^jean-francois rouet, jarmo j. levonen, andrew dillon, and rand j. spiro, _hypertext and cognition_ (mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, 1996). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------amato, 'personal effects, public effects, special effects: institutionalizing american poetry', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-amato-personal.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.596. part 1/1, total size 37834 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- personal effects, public effects, special effects: institutionalizing american poetry by joe amato lewis department of humanities illinois institute of technology amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by joe amato, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: jed rasula. _the american poetry wax museum: reality effects, 1940-1990_. national council of teachers of english. 639 pp. isbn 0-8141-0137-2. hardcover $42.95. [1] judging by its sheer heft, its blurbs, and its bulk of carefully-detailed appendices, one might expect that _the american poetry wax museum_ represents a major intervention in the ongoing struggles over american poetry. the second title in ncte's refiguring english studies series, it bills itself as an "innovative and irreverent" book that "oscillat[es] between documentary and polemic." the inside book-jacket bio of rasula details a curious trajectory, involving a ph.d. from the university of california at santa cruz's history of consciousness program, a "stint as researcher for the abc television series _ripley's believe it or not_," and a relocation to ontario, canada, where the now expatriate author teaches at queen's university. [2] front matter includes a brief mission statement of this ncte series, which aims to provide "a forum for scholarship on english studies as a discipline, a profession, and a vocation." the series editor, stephen m. north, is himself author of _the making of knowledge in composition: portrait of an emerging field_ (boynton, 1987), the first truly comprehensive attempt to survey the field of composition studies. north's emphasis on and validation of "practitioner lore" launched a provocative challenge to then-prevailing notions of researcher expertise, and substantially bolstered the status both of composition studies and of its practitioners. [3] rasula's book thus emerges from a curiously recombinant domain of publishing practices within the english industry, a domain whose academic lineage is marked by the rocky ascent to legitimacy of composition studies, and with it the corollary effect that writing practices as such, including poetry, are a suitable subject for institutional interrogation. which legitimation has in turn been reinforced by the present popularity of cultural studies - specifically, critical reception theory, an enterprise focused on unveiling the various social and cultural apparatuses of textual consumption. with north as custodian, then, and under the imprimatur of ncte, we might expect from this unconventionally situated author a renegade challenge to prevailing orthodoxies. [4] and to a considerable extent, the book delivers on its promise. i'll begin at the beginning, synchronizing my commentary with the text rather closely through chapter two to give some idea of its conceptual progression. a "polemical preface" provides rasula's motivated macro view of what he is up to: his is "a study of the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of american poetry since world war ii," a "field of productive tensions . . . which are foreclosed prematurely by denials that they exist." concurring with don byrd's appraisal that "'poetic' self-expression" has proliferated to the point of being a "cradle to grave opportunit[y]," rasula alleges that it has been "anthologists and commentators" who have legislated this state of denials, compiling and categorizing in the service of a graven-cum-waxen image, "the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject" (4). [5] chapter one: though i found the opening salvo a bit mechanical and digressive in places, rasula's modus operandi is comprised of equal parts erudition and rhetorical aplomb, and a penchant for mordant observation: in accord with the ncte series title, he %refigures% american poetry anthologies as museums of wax simulations whose "carceral" condition is such that each "talking head" is forced to "speak" courtesy of the wonders of voice-over technologies (yes, baudrillard looms large in all of this, as do the lesser known philip fisher and neil harris). poets along with their poetry are thus reduced to ventriloquial ploys employed by their curators both to pander to public taste and to promote various not-so-hidden, but often complex social-qua-literary agendas: my concern, in elaborating this thesis of a poetry wax museum, is to suggest that the seemingly autonomous "voices and visions" of poets themselves have been underwritten by custodial sponsors who have surreptitiously turned down the volume on certain voices, and simulated a voice-over for certain others. nothing defines the situation more succinctly than the police phrase %protective custody%. (33) [6] for rasula, the "figure of the poet as cyborg" (another refiguring, incidentally, one owing to the work of uc santa cruz scholar donna haraway) signifies but one of many facets of a cultural imbrication best captured in buzzword. "for some time now," he writes, "we have been citizens of a cybernation," the pun serving to connote an american collective consciousness construed as a "mental homeless shelter that harbors dan rather, roseanne barr, and bullwinkle" (47). the wax museum is in fact itself transfigured, courtesy of further conceptual correspondence, into an orphanage "where mute icons of imaginative authority are sheltered along with the voices just out of their reach" (48). chapter one concludes with a "coda" that transfigures again (or perhaps prefigures) the wax museum to evoke the greenhouse; in particular, roethke's invocation of same in "child on top of a greenhouse." "greenhouses are controlled environments, sites of artificially induced vegetal animation" (53). etc. given its scholastic medium, the message of chapter one is guaranteed both to illuminate and to exacerbate the public disputes that have lingered on among neoformalists, antiformalists, language poets, and others (where "formalist" is itself understood as a highly conflicted term). by the end of his first chapter, rasula emerges as something of a latter day pound, sans pound's annoying self-righteousness and unforgivable bigotry. [7] chapter two, "the age of 'the age of'": part one of this two-hundred-fifty page chapter constitutes the beef. rasula begins with a summary overview of louise bogan's correspondence, arguing that, because she was a "fastidious observer," had "significant contact with many of the more famous personnel of the poetry world," and "was generationally situated so as to have a dual perspective on both the modernist and subsequent generations," bogan's letters help to provide an accurate "sense of poetry in america as lives lived" (58). well, yes. someplace along the way, though, bogan's intimate voice recedes rather quickly into the background (to resurface at irregular intervals) as rasula gradually builds his case against, as one might have expected, the new critics and their new criticism -to simplify enormously, a southern agrarian, religious, somewhat autodidactic collective led by john crowe ransom, cleanth brooks, allen tate and robert penn warren. a quick paraphrase of rasula's argument might go something like this: whereas many have illustrated how the new criticism shaped the way english studies came to be practiced during the thirties, forties, and fifties, few have emphasized sufficiently the overarching, extratextual imperatives and consequences associated with this latter's "public relations" role in servicing a constraining literary-academic enterprise, an establishment initially rooted in trade press publication and eventually forced underground -where, however, it has continued to shape academic practice. [8] my professorial mortarboard began to tip to one side as it grew increasingly clear to me in reading through rasula's careful indictment that new critical hegemonic effects are yet unconsciously with us (i.e., us academics), the source of numerous anxieties and tacit alliances. here rasula indicates incisively, and with unprecedented historical clarity, how new critical textual practices reinforced and informed more organizational motivations. new criticism is successful in the postwar world precisely because this baby-booming "age of sociology" -an age in which "introspective compulsion" grows increasingly susceptible to an external, "managerial temperament" -demands %explanation% (122, 126). "poetry fared well in the age of sociology," rasula observes, "because new critical pedagogy constituted a veritable explanation industry, reassuringly in the hands of 'qualified experts'" (127). ultimately it is the "romance of technical efficiency" that validates and is validated by new critical close readings and the like, a damaging "functionalism" that reduces and trivializes the "traumas of history." among the most significant of such "traumas" in coeval literary terms was the awarding of the bollingen prize to ezra pound in 1949, following as it did on the heels of treason charges against him (which were ultimately suspended on the grounds of insanity). rasula's analysis of "the pound affair" manages to capture the contradictions manifested by the fellows in american letters (who presided over the award) without wishing away either the evils or the ambiguities of pound's actions, symbolic and otherwise. [9] one might argue that rasula's elaboration of new critical influence itself %contributes% to such influence, that he has "paid homage" to the new critics by accusing them of such far-reaching and pernicious effects. to be sure, there are other histories to be written, histories that have more to do with writers and artists whose work has never been regarded as "central" to prevailing academic or cultural orthodoxies. any critique of orthodoxy risks a certain sort of reification, a reification of the center. one antidote is to introduce, as rasula has done, a presumably marginal figure such as louise bogan -though bogan's marginality as a poet per se belies her access to poetry power brokers. and as i have indicated, bogan figures into rasula's argument only irregularly after her initial appearance. one would therefore expect some resistance to rasula's argument from those who have an interest in revising historical "realities" to reveal the imposition of a center as a fiat of historical method. [10] rasula's evocation of the "age of sociology" includes a brief survey of those institutional consolidations (high-cultural, pop-cultural and geopolitical) that (re)constitute the american bandwidth. part two of chapter one situates in the midst of this bandwidth those poetic imperatives that conspired throughout the fifties to promote the ascendancy of robert lowell as the "poet who personified the postwar american bard" (247). auden's arrival in new york and subsequent naturalization as a us citizen provides immediate sanction for the then current, now sometimes retrospective view that this marks the "age of auden" (and in subsequent mimicry, the "age of lowell"), an age initiated, in rasula's caustic formulation, by auden's "demonstrating to americans how to import a poetry culture, much as horticulturalists imported french vine stock to get the california wine industry going" (148). auden's presence and influence worked to reinforce the "pedagogic and scholastic advocacy" of the new critics, while the formation of a "centrist" position cleverly concealed its more avant-garde modernist roots (145). to his credit, rasula suggests a "nonaesthetic" reason for this development: race. if lowell had been elected the prodigal son as if by default, it was certainly not without regard for the fact that he was a white christian (male), whereas many of his contemporaries -zukofsky, reznikoff, oppen -were jewish. anthology-wise, this was indeed the age of the wasp. [11] expertly weaving poetry and criticism from the fifties with critical studies of the period, rasula chronicles the twists and turns of fifties establishment/ counter-establishment mores and poetic positionings, warts and all. the advent of the widely publicized and popular beat movement, along with the controversies that ensued from its high profile, are viewed by rasula as the historical springboard for the decade's notorious, and defining, literary culmination: the "anthology war" inaugurated by the release in 1960 of donald allen's _the new american poetry_ (revised and rereleased in the late seventies as _the postmoderns_). the beat and black mountain harshness that gives offense to the status quo of the academic elite is shrewdly and accurately cast as a function of these presumed upstarts' collective tendency toward "theorizing a poetics" -and in this formulation rasula offers us a convenient way of understanding the historical present of poetic practice. as for lowell, he emerges under rasula's scrutiny both as id and superego of "criticism, inc.," his life punctuated by genteel self-aggrandizement and manic outburst even as his poems themselves ultimately reveal the self-tortured persona grata and non grata congenial to conformist culture. in the terms he borrowed from virginia woolf in his acceptance of the national book award -terms which, as rasula indicates, resonated well with establishment skepticism - lowell may be seen with some sympathy neither as cooked nor as raw; he was simply overdone. in any case, i found rasula's contrasting of lowell's poetic self-construction with charles olson's "maximus" (to the latter's advantage) instructive, if not altogether convincing; one is tempted simply to observe in this connection that boys will be boys. [12] chapter two's concluding section is entitled "conformity regained," the ironic evocation of milton signaling an establishment coup de grace in this veritable epic of american poetry's various struggles and perturbations. the section begins with a cursory review of "previously formalist poets" whose work underwent "dramatic stylistic and procedural changes" (269) as a result of sixties instigations -merwin, wright, kinnell, wilbur (not much change here), bly, eshleman (publisher of _sulfur_) and baraka. with baraka, rasula's historical overview becomes the occasion for a sustained meditation on multiculturalism. i must admit to having felt a bit uneasy at first, what with rasula's observation that, given "the present conundrum of a revised canon in which it is %essential% that minorities be included" even as "their minoritarian features must not be essentialized," "we now see the shameless opportunism of a curriculum designed to reflect political correctness" (279). what initially troubled me here was less the insight itself than rasula's adoption of "political correctness" as an easy pejorative, which gesture mirrors precisely the current conservative jeremiad against "(il)liberal" education. [13] but my discomfort was quickly dispelled as rasula derived an alternative to such "tokenism" from a close reading both of baraka's process orientation and recent critical work by nathaniel mackey (another member of the uc santa cruz faculty). rasula discusses in a footnote why mackey's concept of "creative kinship" has not caught on, suggesting that the influx of continental theory, among other factors, has produced a "scholarly climate in which the admissible terms of affiliation are legislative, not creative" (282). in demonstrating the value of seeing the poet as subject of creative kinships, rasula once again seizes on olson as a powerful example, and throughout his discussion of ethno-aesthetic complexities he suggests that jazz and its history might serve usefully to reorient our thinking and our curricula. after some further exploration of the specifically waspish ethnic character of the new critical hegemony, rasula concludes this chapter with a reference to robert duncan's spirtual reading of poetic warfare, calling for poets and anthologizers not only to admit the "multiplicity of convictions at work in poetry," but to "be at strife with [their] own conviction . . . in order to give [themselves] over to the art" (305). [14] chapters three, four and five together comprise a progressive illumination of the present situation of poetic practice in general and poetry anthologies in particular. rasula borrows chapter three's title, "consolations of the novocain," from karl shapiro to indicate that american poetry suffers from the application of critical anesthesia. after surveying the relative dearth of informed studies of postwar poetry, rasula diligently dissects what he calls the "default mode" of literary criticism in this period, whereby "readings are so 'close' that the critic's own claustrophobia permeates the text" (318). he explicates the textual reduction (and subsequent redaction) of poetic practice to luxuriating lyrical egos, a reduction which produces a fatal(istic) reading of poetry as a social art to the extent that "the lyrical ego condemns itself to a prison of its own making" (329). [15] in chapter four, "politics in, politics of," rasula mounts a complex overview and critique of poetry's material basis vis-a-vis the ubiquitous and normative medium of television. rasula's argument throughout is predicated on his view that "poetry is not a linguistic oasis, and is not immune from the discursive norms of society at large" (366). hence the question becomes one of how best to address such norms without ignoring materialist concerns. "insofar as poetry has become synonymous with the free verse lyric," he writes, "'poetry' is in dangerous competition with television," for "the inscrutable rhetorical foundation of free verse abandons all the immunizing paraphernalia of prosody" (366). poetry is apt to come up short if it aspires to the flashier projections of the tube. after a brief and enlightening foray into typography, rasula turns his attention to the "mind-cure theology" of "industrial-communications society," the exemplar of which becomes televangelism. "watching television is keeping the faith," he writes, and this leads to his most oracular, and enigmatic, assertion: "poetry, unlike television, is not contingent on belief" (373). he is at some pains to show, largely through a 1942 essay by welsh poet david jones, that the art of poetry, unlike the art of war, is a "path of charities" (374). building on the work of manuel delanda and paul virilio to the effect that "we have inhabited an 'eternity' of war," what virilio calls "pure war" (374), rasula offers a peculiarly sociobiological version of a crisis in the arts: "the lapse of poetry is more serious than any supposed competition with television suggests, for what is at stake is not simply cultural displacement but the erosion of a species' [sic] trait" (377). [16] this would seem to accord very nearly with the radically empirical view of language practice evident in the work of william burroughs (and others), where language becomes a viral social machine of self-replication akin to our genetic substrate. although rasula is quick to distinguish between poetry "as public event, which is to say commodity" -the only "kind of event recognized as public in the u.s." (379) -and the poetic concerns of olson and williams, he nevertheless seems to allow precious little %non-poetic% space for resistance against the encroachments of popular-cum-militarized culture (the more hopeful elements of michel de certeau's work come to mind here). it would seem that rasula wants to safeguard a kind of political efficacy for poetic practice which he will not grant more popular media, and this despite his stated disavowal of any special status for poetic agency. this represents a curious romantic deviation from what is for the most part a pessimistically foucauldian reading of the postwar technological era, a reading in which, to take one example, the movement of the humanities online is seen in part as an extension of the "military communications network" (376). [17] rasula's discussion of political poetry and language poetry warrants a few specific remarks. in a brief foray into the poetic thematic of war, rasula invokes duncan once again to the effect that his work exemplifies "the old and venerable journey" of "resolving public crisis in spiritual autobiography" (385); it is clear that rasula feels a special affiliation with the olson-duncan lineage. he offers little here in the way of anatomizing specific examples of "topical" political poetry; as he puts it, the "risk run" by such poetry is that "it may prove to be expendable after its suit is resolved" (389). yet the same may be said of more (and less) aesthetically-motivated work, finally, such as that of lowell & co., much of which clearly steered away from direct political confrontation with dominant fifties rhetoric (rasula's gist throughout much of chapter two). i would have preferred here more active consideration of war-oriented poetry, such as that of (viet nam war poet) w. d. ehrhart (whose work, though hardly popular in demographic terms, is nonetheless predicated in large part on first-person experiential narrative); in fact, some discussion regarding the "literature of trauma" in general might have been to the point. [18] with this question of political poetry as a prelude, rasula intervenes in the past two decades of controversy over language poetry-writing (term used advisedly -it's a "fuzzy" construct, as rasula indicates). situating language writing over and against "low mimetic realism" - this latter marked by "the unexamined urge to find the soft emotional center of its issues" (393) -he emphasizes the "community of %readers%" that constitutes perhaps the signal achievement of such work (397). rasula summarizes several of the aesthetic liabilities foregrounded by (and often in) language writing: that it "risks reifying distraction in a new complacency" (398); that, "once the soft lyric voice has been deconstructed or deposed, the remaining linguistic material is susceptible of further unforeseen subordinations" (410). although "it is apparent from the existing body of language writing that poetic praxis and theoretical examination have rarely been so intimately bound together in american poetry" (405), the customary "separation of theory and practice" evinced even in language writing anthologies has resulted in a certain measure of "isolation and apparent autonomy" (405). hence such poets have thereby "courted the spectre of preciousness, art for art's sake, and esotericism" despite their theoretical assertions to the contrary (405). i would argue, on the other hand, that language writing may well have blurred the theoretical initiative as such, despite actual distinctions evinced by its various practitioners and anthologists; time will tell. citing maria damon's and michael berube's studies of marginality, rasula concludes by aligning, in brief, excerpts from charles reznikoff, bob perelman, and david antin (this latter's "skypoem") to suggest that documentary "witness," deconstruction of "the rhetoric of expert testimony," and "a refusal of monumentality," respectively, comprise evidence as to how "the most vital american poetry has operated %on% those margins that it has conscientiously allied itself with, rather than haphazardly submitted itself to" (408-413). [19] a critical establishment enamored of its capacity for celebrating the lyrical self provides the backdrop against which rasula identifies and dismantles one of the real targets in his book, canonical method. rasula's frustration with scholastic inertia becomes the source of perhaps his most contentious remark, that "poets may be justified in thinking of scholarly critics as educated halfwits" (317). he finally squares off against the orthodoxy by addressing what ron silliman has coined "canonic amnesia or vendler's syndrome" (qtd. in rasula; 333). named after its chief purveyor, helen vendler of harvard, vendler's syndrome refers to the hegemony of "tastemakers" who authorize the who's who of literary anthologies, and do so "imperiously presum[ing] unanimity (of taste) where none exists" (334). rasula demonstrates how, in vendler's case, this assumption of edict coincides with a certain infantilization of students as well as those deemed unworthy of the editorial task (such as jerome rothenberg and george quasha!). in truth, rasula does have an axe to grind with the vendler-harvard university press establishment, which he reserves for a footnote (334); his remarks on this score are candid and unflinching. "the cost of those left out of the game is hard to assess," he writes, and what is refreshing here, in my view, is his resistance to any "polite" appraisal of the poetry power center(s), his willingness to see indoctrination and oppression for what they are. rasula elucidates the editorial and critical myopia of daniel hoffman's _harvard guide to contemporary american writing_, and continues his critique with a summary dismissal of jay parini's _columbia history of american poetry_, which he calls "literary history as calculated (or -maybe worse -casual) obscurantism" (355). as he puts it, this kind of official literary history "inevitably reproduces private life as public event without accounting for its %social% (and sociable) dimension" (360). because this failure is closely allied, in cary nelson's words, with a "collapsing of modern poetry's wild diversity" into a homogeneity that "mirrors the most simplistic of 1950's north american political world views" (360), the only "solution" that presents itself to rasula is to refrain from "thinking of solutions as happening only once" (361). tactics of resistance, in this as in other areas, must be conceived as regular and ongoing practices. [20] the critical denouement represented by rasula's decimation of vendler et al. is followed later in the text by an examination of four recent anthologies: j. d. mcclatchy's _vintage book of contemporary american poetry_; eliot weinberger's _american poetry since 1950_; paul hoover's _postmodern american poetry: a norton anthology_; and douglas messerli's _from the other side of the century: a new american poetry 1960-1990_. of the four, only mcclatchy's book fails (like the vendler, hoffman and parini anthologies) "to be explicit about the strategies of consensus building" (464) -which is to say, only mcclatchy's relies on "awards and prizes" as the %implicit% measure of inclusion. but the crux of the matter here, for rasula, is a "disabling nostalgia" that he finds "symptomatic of all four of these recent ambitious anthologies" (461). mcclatchy's nostalgia is simply a case of vendler's syndrome -a yearning for the false consensus of the past. but for weinberger, hoover, and messerli, the nostalgia is one which neutralizes the "practice of outside" by absorbing it into a "reverie of the outside, the experimental" (461). as rasula asks, rhetorically, "what purpose is served by making an orthodoxy of the unorthodox?" (463). [21] "it's now possible," rasula writes, ". . . to summarize the genealogical contours of contemporary american poetry" (440). in five or so pages, he presents an historical precis -the climax of his documentary narrative -which serves to demarcate what he calls the "four zones" of the contemporary american "poetry world": the associated writing programs; the new formalism; language poetry; and "various coalitions of interest-oriented or community-based poets" (440). rasula is careful to note that these four zones are "utterly disproportionate" in resources and the like, and that the fourth zone is "more heterogeneous and fluid than the others" (440). [22] as an alternative to current anthology practices, rasula proposes, tentatively, a "certain cunning and guile" (464): to align more familiar, (let's say) awp writers with (let's say) writers from the fourth zone. crossing zones, that is, would seem to be the only provisional answer he can muster to this question of how best to generate a compilation, as opposed to a representative collection or display, and one that can challenge the authority of the awp. such an approach is undeniably viable, though it, too, is vulnerable to the more agonistic impulses of poetic discourse. anthologists would invariably be open to the charge of "rigging" poetic "confrontations," of "unfairly" deforming a given work's contextual (not to say aesthetic) aims. moreover, this charge would likely be leveled by %all parties%, not simply by those who enjoy privileged status (however this latter is defined), simply because there are no guarantees that more "experimental" work will fare well in readerly terms when compared and contrasted with more "accessible" samplings. one can already hear cries of "meet the new boss/ the same as the old boss." [23] rasula's final chapter, "the empire's new clothes," begins with an examination of how poetry has "successfully been quantified and integrated into the marketplace" through the "vast domain" of (m.f.a.) writing programs operating largely under the aegis of the associated writing programs (awp; 419). though "the workshop demeanor can hardly be said to derive unmodified from earlier poetic models of selfhood" (421), it is nonetheless the american "self-help" tradition, as this latter "readily settles into cultism," that provides the social glue for more obscurantist workshop posturing (421). elaborating on the recent critique of creative writing programs one finds in the work of writing specialists such as eve shelnutt (but with no mention, curiously, of wendy bishop's substantive criticism of workshop format), rasula argues not surprisingly that "we need to rethink the social role of creative writing" (424). yet instead of emphasizing a revision of writing practices per se, rasula addresses himself to the broadly "discursive function distributed throughout this network [that] requires a steady focus on the purported 'needs' of selfhood" (425). because "poets speak only for themselves" in the prevailing mediocrity, statistically averaged, of the workshop environs, critics can no longer resort to "nominat[ing] representative figures"; hence the proper "critical vocabulary" for the present state of affairs "necessitates a shift from the aesthetic to the sociological and political" -rasula's study itself obviously serving as an example of such a shift (426-427). [24] rasula turns his concluding gaze to "the case of walt whitman" as "curiously appropriate to the topic of anthologies" (472). perhaps not so "curious," for whitman has in the past forty years been made to seem "appropriate" to just about everything peculiarly american. whitman's self-proclaimed "new bible," _leaves of grass_, is elucidated in the abstract as an anthology akin to the bible itself, which latter text rasula regards as "at once the most encompassing ontology in the west, and the definitive anthology" (473). drawing on john guillory's work on canon formation and alan golding's study of nineteenthand early twentieth-century anthologies, rasula discusses the "nationalist rhetoric" underwriting anthology production, against which whitman's notion of "ensemble-individuality" potentially augurs some relief. because whitman "secures the linguistic act" to "his sociopolitical prospect," _leaves_ becomes a revisionary self-anthology which, unlike postwar american anthologies, constructively surfaces tensions owing to the "experimental" deand self-regulation of its author-subject-citizen (474-5). here i have but one reservation. speaking as a poet myself, and to state the matter somewhat contortedly: however idiosyncratic or mediated (or appealing!) the gesture, recourse to a poetic past grounded in no less a figure than whitman, coming as it does at the end of a sprawling historical study, sanctions a (conventional) historiographic %first cause%. we end where "we" -"we" poets, many of us -believe "we" each began; received poetic wisdom is reinstated, and in our end is our beginning. this kind of traditional reassurance seems to work against the critical thesis with which rasula concludes his book, the thesis that "poetry can -and %should% -be our term for a language in crisis" (482). [25] whatever my reservations, this is an extraordinary work. there are few punches pulled here, and almost nothing of the sort of connoisseur-based preciosity (not to mention self-indulgent tastemaking) that typically mars such treatises. indeed, one sometimes gets the feeling that rasula's intervention in the scene of american poetry is less a historical blow-by-blow than a contemporary coming-to-blows. rasula evinces at times more than a touch of noam chomsky's investigative resourcefulness, unraveling establishment machinations and covert disinformation practices with unrelenting rigor, and regardless of the culprit's publicly-endowed prestige. in fact, one of the unintended side-effects of rasula's remarkable effort may be that his disputatious, lengthy history proves %too% daunting, that its sheer scope and depth discourage even specialist readers. yet this book should be studied, and restudied. its very existence bears witness to the stubbborn durability of the ancient alphabetic art. just as a certain anarchic anxiety (or pretension to same) may explain poets' vociferous resistance to viewing poetry as a symbolic technology, an allied impulse toward vatic self-authorization prevents many from confronting the institutional bases of their calling in concrete and critical terms. rasula's book provides an occasion for poets and critics alike to reexamine their contiguous, conterminous, and often conflicting word processes. given its critical unmasking of the discourses and institutions of canonization, the book itself stands as counsel against the panegyric impulse to label it a masterpiece of historical research and analysis. perhaps one might observe, though, that the book also stands as an exemplar of applying to scholarship what rasula calls poetry's "privilege" -its "insouciant disregard for the exemplary pose" (483). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------estevez, 'theorizing public/pedagogic space: richard serra's critique of private property', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-estevez-theorizing.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.196. part 1/1, total size 21203 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- theorizing public/pedagogic space: richard serra's critique of private property by minette estevez hofstra university engmam@hofstra.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 minette estevez, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford unversity press. review of: richard serra. _writings/interviews_. chicago: university of chicago press, 1994. if artifacts do not accord with the consumerist ideology, if they do not submit to exploitation and marketing strategies, they are threatened or committed to oblivion. -richard serra [1] _writings/interviews_, a collection which spans the 60's through the early 90's, makes clear the depth of richard serra's commitment to art as a critical intervention, as an inquiry into the social contradictions that unfold in the dominant discourse. though his politics are most concretely visible in those essays and interviews detailing the battle over _tilted arc_, this volume demonstrates that serra's grasp of the repressive nature of bourgeois aesthetics has always been a major component of his work. while his earlier minimalist and process art practices were specifically directed toward the commodification of art and "creativity," his recent encounters with the legalities of intellectual property rights has succinctly focused his work on the politics of public space. this places serra's work within some of the most contested of discursive spaces. given the current world-wide efforts at the reprivatization, the concept of "public" itself has become one of the most densely layered sites upon which the superstructure of a new world order is being erected. [2] the continuing controversy surrounding the u.s. government's destruction of serra's sculpture _tilted arc_ has made it one of the most publicly visible of contemporary battles over intellectual property law. though serra's contract, like most contracts for public art work, sought to guarantee the sculpture's maintenance in the site it was commissioned for, the government was able to break the contract, moving, and subsequently destroying, the work. serra argued that the government's actions were a violation of "free artistic expression, but the final court ruling held that any rights of artistic "free speech" were not violated since as owner, the government also owned the "speech" of the art work. property rights take precedence. as serra learned, "the right to property supersedes all other rights: the right to freedom of speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to protection of one's creative work."(215) [3] what lends the work of artists like serra their particular political resonance, a resonance that goes beyond the mere affirmation of "free expression," is that they do not abandon the institutional spaces of artistic practice - the conceptual apparatus of "high art" as well as its museums and galleries -for a supposedly unmediated contact with their audience. thus, such work begins from an implicitly materialist assumption about the institutional structuring of experience. in this way it makes possible the important argument that institutional spaces cannot simply be abandoned but must be worked with and transformed. these concerns are spelled out in serra's earlier writing and interviews, such as the 1980 interview with douglas crimp in which serra highlights the importance of context in thinking through the potential of any public sculpture. "there is no neutral site," he remarks. "every context has its frame and its ideological overtones" (127). for serra, then, one of the functions of any public art should be to make those "ideological overtones" visible and accessible to an audience. public space thus becomes a pedagogical space where citizens can become students of, in the words of serra's contemporary robert smithson, "cultural confinement." [4] serra rightly links the attack on _tilted arc_ to a larger conservative agenda. in his essay "art and censorship," he details the effort of politicians like pat buchanan and jesse helms to conduct a "cultural war." it is important to recognize the extraordinary ideological mileage conservatives have gotten out of recent "arts" crises. the battles over the nea are only one of the domestic sites touched by multinational capitalism's reprivatization efforts. but the nea struggle is functioning as an exemplary test-site for the dismantling of public institutions and the ideological remaking of notions of "the public" generally necessary for the creation of a post-cold war ideology. with the collapse of communism, the evil threat from "outside," new enemies must be manufactured to legitimate a "new" political agenda. reprivatization is being sold as a "moral" or "democratic" attack on stifling and oppressive bureaucracy, with the "beneficiaries" of bureaucracy pictured as the "real" oppressors of society: welfare queens, incompetent blacks, arrogant elitist artists, and other perverts who undemocratically demand "special treatment." through the creation of this cast of "outsiders from within," defending the public becomes the pretext for an all-out evacuation of the public sphere. [5] serra also examines how this agenda is underwritten in the work of art critic hilton kramer. kramer justifies highly-stratified hierarchical social relations through a defense of "the aesthetic": those epistemological categories which have historically provided one of the most powerful guarantees of bourgeois property relations. in his attacks on serra, kramer is not defending the universal rights of individuals, but is instead defending the rights of bourgeois governments and institutions to suspend individual rights at whim, and the legitimation of such suspension of rights through appeals to the "public" and the "common man." the struggle over _tilted arc_ was not the struggle of "the little people" against an "authoritarian" artist, as it has been represented by hilton kramer, donald kuspit, and then district attorney rudolf giuliani. it was in fact a struggle over the responsibility of powerful institutions, like the united states government, to live up to their contractual obligations, and the rights of "little people" to dispute and redress contractual violations. it was also a struggle over public space: a struggle over what interests are represented by the uses these spaces are put to, in fact, a struggle over what "public" means, who the "public" is. [6] that hilton kramer should seem to be a defender of "the average joe" is more than a little bizarre since in all his work he assiduously strives to stave off the barbarian hordes from the sacred portals of high art. however, kramer's faux populism in the case of _titled arc_ is not so strange considering the kind of adversary serra is for kramer. the reason serra's work is so threatening to the position represented by kramer, is that it contests the notion of a "pure" aesthetics, one where art has no necessary connection to anything else in the world except self-reflexive aesthetic categories: form, space, weight, etc. from this vantage minimalist sculpture would seem to embody the essence of "art" itself. but "minimalism" is not the idealized category that bourgeois criticism would wish; in fact, in order to represent minimalism in this fashion the history of its development must be suppressed. and no figure more aggressively gives the lie to a "pure" minimalism than that most political of minimalists, richard serra. in fact no other contemporary american sculptor has so consistently and relentlessly challenged not only traditional notions of pure art, but also traditional notions of political art -that politics amount to a "content" held in an aesthetic container. [7] the theoretical category of the aesthetic defended by bourgeois critics emerged with the historical transition to a capitalist mode of production. it is a by-product of the processes by which cultural production becomes "autonomous" -severed from earlier social functions. as autonomous artifacts, art objects can be incorporated into the marketplace as commodities. this idealization of the autonomous or "self-reflexive" art object suppresses an understanding of its materiality, its production through historically specific labor relations, and instead glorifies it as an individuated, self-contained "thing." art derives its value then from its status as a commodity: a singular and precious item that can be sold, bought and owned. the notion of "autonomy" this brand of aesthetics protects is necessary to the rationalization of bourgeois property relations as it regards the idealization of the commodity as a natural, ontological condition of existence. from this perspective, ideas and objects naturally belong to the separate and discrete cultural domains they have been historically "found" in. thus a critic like kramer can insist on the absolute restriction of things and ideas to their proper realm -art can be divided from politics, morals from business, and so forth. [8] serra's art practices have always resisted the epistemological and political divisions that lie behind these aesthetic categories. his early process art pieces, such as splashed lead sculptures, challenged the collectibility of the art object and the market and patronage system which demands art's availability as private property. his site-specific sculpture also resist the notion of art as exchangeable objects; they are designed to exist as art objects only in one place, incorporating as artistic elements all aspects of the site of their installation, from the formal to the social, historical, and political. the interdependence of work and site in site-specific work forces connections between the formal and the political to the surface and makes difficult the re-separation of these categories attempted by art critics such as hilton kramer and rudolf giuliani. in capitalist society what makes art "art" is its status as private property, its capacity to be owned. so it comes as no surprise that in bourgeois law, property rights, defined as the rights of owners, are more important than the rights of producers. and the copyright laws derived from this understanding of "property" don't just limit the circulation of ideas, they place the ownership and control of ideas in particular hands, they render intellectual property the private property of certain classes, and so are inimical to the free access of %all% individuals. [9] the current ideological reworking of "private" and "public" achieved through the alignment of conceptuality with authoritarian domination, while representing itself as a progressive "protection" of "individuals" and "individuality," in fact, quite neatly corresponds to the global restructuring of public institutions under the pressures of privatization necessitated by the late capitalist crisis in productivity. far from offering some space beyond and therefore resistant to the encroachment of power, such constructions of the "inviolability" of the self and the "interiority" of public space are in fact necessary to their inscription within a transnational political economy which requires not the abolition of existing transpersonal boundaries but rather their reworking -the category of the autonomous subject and its position within a single world order is rendered more flexible, but still intact. what is being defended is %bourgeois privacy%, a space beyond the limits of the public inquiry and contestation. this makes a political rereading of the controversy surrounding _tilted arc_ all the more urgent since it has become a standard touchstone in debates over "the public." for example, _tilted arc_ is the central art work discussed in _critical inquiry_'s special issue on public art. virtually all the articles accept the "official" version of the controversy, that is, the version of conservative officials. by unquestioningly accepting those terms of the discussion, the participants leave unchallenged the theoretical concepts which structure conservative discourse on art, most importantly the concept of "the public." thus, in his essay, w.j.t. mitchell, who would undoubtedly not represent himself as a conservative of any sort, ends up pretty much subscribing to the same understanding of reality as jesse helms. mitchell can make such statements as the public is "fed up" with "tolerating symbolic violence against religious and sexual taboos," and talk about "the public, in so far as it is embodied by state power and public opinion," without asking how the public may be considered embodied by such things or without considering other publics -the public of intellectuals, artists, blacks, gays who are "fed up" with tolerating the real violence of exploitation and oppression. [10] in a similar vein, john hallmark neff uses _tilted arc_ as evidence that public art has "failed" because of the absence of shared beliefs and common interests between artists and the public. in his essay art is imagined as little more than the icing on the cake of consensus, and unsurprisingly, "difficult" or "avant garde" art is dismissed as elitist. that difficulty and rigor are not essentially elitist is beyond neff, who never bothers to ask whether it might not be more elitist to contend that the "common man" cannot handle rigor and difficulty than to give him the opportunity to do so. and in michael north's essay the work of vito acconci is smeared as authoritarian. in acconci's work _fan city_, viewers participate by unfolding banners printed with slogans, "so the viewer is made to wave the flag of a faith he or she may not share . . . the viewer is in fact entirely helpless in the hands of the sculptor." setting aside his conflation of sculpture and sculptor, north seems to believe that the temporarily uncomfortable awareness of oppressive structures of power which works like _fan city_ and _tilted arc_ encourage is somehow commensurable with the relentless economic and political helplessness many americans are subjected to constantly. mitchell and north, and possibly neff, would all see themselves as opposite numbers to hilton kramer, yet it is striking that "aesthetics" allows them a ground on which to agree: democracy is a formal assemblage of free individuals and their "feelings," rather than the particular organization of institutions which limit or allow public access to the resources which create and satisfy those feelings and desires. [11] the discrediting of artistic practices like serra's is ultimately not just an issue for the art world. the prohibition of avant-garde practice found in traditional arguments as well as in postmodern ones is connected to a dismantling of systemic critique and revolutionary opposition currently sought by both conventional conservative forces and by postmodern neo-liberalism. what is specifically under attack here is the notion of "public" as a %pedagogic% space. the "difficulty" of work like serra's comes from its challenging of "simple" and common sense modes of understanding "art" and its relation to anything else -in other words from the work's ability to %transform% subjectivity, to serve a %criti(que)al% pedagogic function. a criti(que)al pedagogy requires a self-distancing from its object, from the common sense, from "the common man," and all other conventional understandings of a common public, precisely in order to interrogate and transform those conceptual series. in this regard criti(que)al pedagogy contests liberal humanist notions of the public as simply an extension of private individuals -a space where people get together to take care of interests they have in common, a space to mediate conflict and make sure that nobody transgresses the private boundaries of anyone else. criti(que)al pedagogy argues instead for a notion of public space which doesn't rest content with a basis in the private individual. it wants instead to transform private subjectivity in order to produce a public individual -one who is interested in enabling the transformation of the global distribution of resources and capable of setting into motion collective modes of institutional organization. [12] an unexamined humanism explains the hostility to avant-gardism, or indeed to any art which is not immediately accessible to everyone at the same time and in the same way. such a standpoint assumes that art works and other texts have direct and immediately appreciable politics "in" them as opposed to producing their meaning in their various uses within concrete contexts. theories of the empirical immanence of meaning correspond to and reinforce the "interiority" of the liberal public space and the homogeneity of the private individuals who constitute it. in both cases criti(que)al pedagogy appears to come from "outside," and seems apocalyptically threatening. and in a sense it is, since criti(que)al pedagogy is an attempt to exacerbate the very contradictions which the "inside" attempts to suppress. the political effect of this suppression, however, is to exorcise from the community any rigorous consideration of its social content, of the purposes or uses that it does or might serve. given this set of circumstances, a criti(que)al pedagogic practice, in "art" or any other social space, must place a critique of institutionality at the center of its practices; a critique which does not imagine that one can abolish public/collective institutional effects and "free" the private and individual. [13] in other words, far from being an alien intrusion from "outside," as radical strategies are commonly understood (i.e., serra is "forcing" a restrictive art work on the "free" movement of the public), the resources for revolutionary opposition are also produced by those institutional contradictions, between forces of production and social relations which in marx's words comprise "two different sides of the development of the social individual. [they] appear to capital as mere means . . . for it to produce on its limited foundation. in fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." the interiority of the individual subject, then, is no more than the position of this subject within the interior of capital. a criti(que)al pedagogy brings the cultural "outside" (in all its vanguard and avant-garde forms) to bear on the "inside" in order to disrupt the formation of subjects as interior forces of production and force the possibilities for collective transformation. in this sense it is truly a practice of %public pedagogy%. throughout this volume, and of course in all his work, serra argues for an understanding of the artist as cultural critic, a stance which may seem "old-fashioned," but still flies in the face of business as usual in a time when, as serra puts it, "criticism in the united states has become for the most part a promotional exercise, a pseudoadvertisement to enhance sales" (226). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------frost, 'signifyin(g) on stein: the revisionist poetics of harryette mullen and leslie scalapino', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-frost-signifying.txt archive pmc-list, file frost.595. part 1/1, total size 99711 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- signifyin(g) on stein: the revisionist poetics of harryette mullen and leslie scalapino by elisabeth a. frost department of english dickinson college frost@dickinson.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by elisabeth a. frost, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. how can one be a 'woman' and be in the street? that is, be out in public, be public--and still more tellingly, do so in the mode of speech. --luce irigaray[1] [1] a 1984 anthology of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e group of poets included a section in which the writers commented on their contemporaries--most of whom are still unfamiliar to readers of american poetry. rae armantrout wrote about susan howe, barrett watten about ron silliman, charles bernstein about hannah wiener. there are 56 of these entries. at the head of this section, announcing what might be perceived as a principal source for the positions on aesthetics (and politics) in the various selections that follow, the editors chose a single text for several of the poets to respond to. that text was stein's _tender buttons_.^2^ [2] the entries in the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book's "readings" section--all appreciations of _tender buttons_ and all written by men--bear witness to stein's importance to this particular "movement." yet among what i will call feminist avant-garde poets--writers who make use of experimental language to distinctly feminist ends--stein's influence is just as potent, even inescapable. a number of recent feminist avant-garde poets linked to l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e writing owe a debt to _tender buttons_, and stein's work in general remains a subject of homage. but at the same time, many of the changes working their way through feminist discourse in america appear as well in feminist avant-garde writing. in particular, recent feminist avant-garde poets don't simply acknowledge stein's language experiments, as the contributors to the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book did, but contest them--and her--as well. [3] over the eighty years that have elapsed since stein wrote _tender buttons_, a number of experimental women poets have reexamined the connections between the symbolic domain of language and the subjective experience of sensuality that stein pioneered in her erotic, and other, poetry. stein's language experiments in _tender buttons_ serve as a fundamental influence. but stein's tendency to isolate intimate, personal experience from the public sphere is being revisited by recent feminist avant-garde writers who perhaps have more ambivalence toward stein's politics than some of their male colleagues. poets like susan howe disrupt conventional language in writing that conspicuously combines an awareness of gender with public discourse--in her case, actual historical documents form the backdrop to an examination of the gendering of language, history, and nation.^3^ in recent years, feminist theorists like luce irigaray and monique wittig have focused on the social implications of language and sexual difference, challenging women writers to create a distinctly feminine writing or to eliminate the "mark of gender" altogether on female speech.^4^ unlike stein herself, these theorists stress the political implications of speech in the public sphere, the impossibility of separating the symbolic realm of language from the social realities language reflects, a conviction that surfaces in writing like howe's and in that of feminist avant-garde artists working in a variety of media, from barbara kruger to karen finley. while stein is not the only source for feminist avant-garde writing today, her body of work, particularly _tender buttons_, remains a source to be reckoned with for a range of artists who see stein as among their most important, and sometimes troubling, predecessors. [4] in what follows, i examine the influence of, and divergence from, steinian poetics in two writers whose feminist avant-garde agendas lead them back to, and in contest with, this formidable woman forebear. both harryette mullen (who has published three books of poetry, and is soon to issue a fourth)^5^ and leslie scalapino (author of nine books of poetry, prose, and criticism) use a fundamentally steinian language yet voice differences from stein's politics by engaging with questions that stein tended to avoid in her poetry--issues of race, class, and inequity in american culture. in their recastings of stein's "modern" vision, mullen and scalapino merge public speech and "private" experience--the language of the public spheres of the street and the marketplace with the experiences of intimacy and the erotic. in this writing no intimate experience is ever strictly "personal"; mullen and scalapino blur the border between public and private discourse that stein relied upon in order to reveal (and, paradoxically, *not* reveal) her lesbian sexuality in a revolution of ordinary domestic language. the body as public, in public--this idea is at the core of both mullen's and scalapino's growing body of work. each one revisits and, in adrienne rich's term, "re-vises" stein's poetics to illuminate language as a locus of the political *and* the erotic, attacking and altering both eroticized and "public" language as signs of a culture in need of a fundamental awareness about the relationships between our most private and public acts.^6^ [5] stein attempted to make us self-conscious about consciousness--to make us think about how we perceive the world--by challenging the forms of written language. in this respect both mullen's _trimmings_ (1991) and scalapino's _way_ (1988) are indebted to stein's earlier project. _trimmings_ is mullen's second book, and her third, _s*perm**k*t_ (1992), employs the same distinctive form and a similar play with the signs of american culture. in the more recent work, her target is what she calls "the erotics of marketing and consumption"--the supermarket that is, in a remarkably altered form, her title.^7^ _trimmings_, however, is more explicitly indebted to _tender buttons_, borrowing elements of stein's feminine landscape and her oblique relation to femininity itself. here mullen first combined african-american speech and blues references with a similar sort of word-play to that of stein's prose poetry in _tender buttons_; and here, too, she "tries on" stein's fascination with the erotic charge of feminine objects. mullen's prose poems, like stein's pioneering language experiments, work mainly by association, and in this they plumb the richness of the spoken and written word. [6] by contrast, scalapino, a writer with ties to the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e group, is interested less in speech than in perception, as experienced and recorded on the page. but in her considerable body of work she also interrogates the politics of the erotic, employing allusions to what she calls "the erotica genre" in refigured forms. sometimes she redeems and "re-genders" erotic fantasy itself (as in _way_, the text i will focus on), and sometimes she uses a deliberate dead-pan to critique the mechanism of disengaged or voyeuristic "watching" on which some pornographic images depend. throughout her work, she makes use of an essentially infinite or "serial" form, with no defined beginning, middle, or end. in _way_ this seriality is a means of demonstrating how language and the experiences of the body are connected. while in mullen's work language proffers a multiplicity of meaning that bears witness to the subtlety and evocativeness of both the spoken and written word, in _way_ scalapino develops a more visually-based poetics in which small blocks of text represent moments of perception or feeling, even as the language itself remains provocatively flat in its tone.^8^ but despite pronounced differences in both form and preoccupations, both poets inherit one of stein's most fundamental interests and make use of it in singular ways: exploring the relationships between language and sexuality. [7] while stein is certainly not the only source for either poet's growing body of work,^9^ my own reading of _trimmings_ and _way_ makes it clear that mullen and scalapino both take up stein's fascination with the link between the erotic and ordinary, everyday language. yet that connection doesn't mean that mullen and scalapino adhere to a similar view of either world or text. in fact, both poets challenge stein's famous hermeticism in the interest of bringing closer together the two poles that denise levertov has called, simply enough, the "poet" and the "world." for _tender buttons_ is an unabashedly closed text. all three sections ("objects," "food," and "rooms") evoke a world not simply of ordinary domestic objects but of private associations. in the view of scholars like william gass and lisa ruddick, stein uses this hermetic space to create a private language of lesbian experience, in which particular words function as clues. as only one example, the name "alice," for alice b. toklas, and her nickname "ada," appear in numerous versions--"alas," "ail-less," and "aid her"--that exploit sound-play to suggest stein's own intimate, erotic life. individual words also function as codes for sexual experience (the color "red" or the word "cow"), as elizabeth fifer and others have documented.^10^ and, as i have argued elsewhere, stein's fetishization of language both exalts language to the status of a material object and participates in disguising the erotic "content" of _tender buttons_ as a whole.^11^ [8] such readings as my own "decode" the poem, and in the process assume that meaning does, in fact, inhere in stein's apparent non-sense, that there is a profoundly important symbolic process at work. yet the opposite approach has also been taken to stein's difficult text. charles bernstein, one of the most prolific theorists among the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, argues that stein's greatest achievement in _tender buttons_ is in fact that she abandoned the signifying function of language altogether, evoking instead the sounds, the *non*-referentiality, of words, "the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of somewhere else--a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language" (bernstein 143). as he sees it, the desire to decode stein's writing merely reflects the reader's urge to "make sense" of the poetry--an impulse that counters the most radical aspects of stein's project. it is the non-referentiality in stein, bernstein implies, that has become her most important legacy to the present, especially to poets, like those of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e group, who attempt to use their texts as a means of bringing the whole mechanism of reference to the foreground of writing and reading. [9] these approaches constitute the two ends of the steinian critical spectrum--the desire to push her text toward sense, especially (in recent years) a feminist one, and the urge to embrace the radical non-meaning of her experiments with language. yet both of these interpretive positions, for very different reasons, ultimately support the view that the "rooms" of stein's domestic domain barely leave the door ajar to the world outside.^12^ clearly a private erotic language threatens to shut that door, and, indeed, this significant aspect of stein's text required a host of feminist critics, bolstered by the advent of theorists like helene cixous, luce irigaray, and julia kristeva, to break the code.^13^ and, on the other hand, in bernstein's view of the radical non-signifying of _tender buttons_, the reader is kept at a deliberate, perhaps infuriating, distance. breaking the rules of syntax, denotation, and logic, _tender buttons_, by either approach, surely qualifies as what we might call a "subversive" text, overturning linguistic conventions and forging a distinctly new form from the seemingly intractable material of everyday words. yet stein's poetic experiment remains separate from the social and political realms that avant-garde artists of her day addressed in their highly polemical and disorienting art and manifestoes. one need only compare _tender buttons_ to any number of marinetti's pronouncements, or to apollinaire's "merveilles de la guerre," or even breton's first surrealist manifesto, to see the extent to which stein insisted on the privacy of her language. [10] in their own ways, mullen and scalapino have both entered into this debate about and with stein, each from a distinctly feminist point of view. in embracing a feminism that doesn't make recourse to polemics or to personal utterance--that is more deeply interested in the kinds of subjectivity language creates--their work is profoundly indebted to stein. yet the best indication of each one's re-vision of a steinian poetics lies in the other influences on that work. for mullen, these include gwendolyn brooks, margaret walker, and the writers of the black arts movement. for scalapino, george oppen, robert creeley, and philip whalen are crucial influences, along with the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e writers of the san francisco bay area where scalapino lives. for both mullen and scalapino, the other sources that have helped form their poetics are distinctly *more* engaged with the articulation, and theoretical awareness, of a social/political vision, or an engagement with history in general, than stein ever was. as a lesbian poet, stein relied on the privacy of her "codes" precisely to construct a radical language of difference. mullen and scalapino have pushed her language in the opposite direction from the one she chose--back to an awareness of the social construction of identity, and the complex relationships in american culture among race, sexuality, and economic privilege. in short, the erotic can no longer be perceived as private. the unmasking of the politics of sexual experience is at the core of both _trimmings_ and _way_, and in this stein is both the mother of their inventions and the predecessor who needs to be taken to task in the interests of a feminist avant-garde that clearly cannot stand still. [11] obviously an understanding of both mullen's and scalapino's work requires that each be seen in a broader frame than that provided just by examining their various debts to stein. yet, tracing stein's pronounced influence on both of these poets--the more striking because of their stylistic divergences--sheds light on changes among a number of recent feminist artists. if mullen's and scalapino's work can be taken as any indication, one group of feminist avant-garde artists has moved toward a different sort of exploration of sexual politics.^14^ in contrast to a writer like howe, whose explorations of the gendered nature of history and nation involve no recourse to the erotic as subject matter, mullen and scalapino both inherit from stein a fascination with pleasure and a reluctance to dissociate pleasure from language. in the process, though, the burden of their poetry is precisely to situate this pleasure in a landscape that sometimes seems as bleak and violent as howe's puritan america. adapted by mullen and scalapino, stein's innocent eroticism, and her pleasure in parody, become more self-conscious as well as more conscious of the social forces that eroticism is inevitably shaped by. [12] in _trimmings_ (fittingly published by a small press that is, in fact, called "tender buttons"), mullen takes stein's 1914 text as a provocative point of departure. operating through association rather than logic, sound-play rather than denotation, mullen's pun-laden prose poems take the domestic landscape of _tender buttons_ and "trim" it down to a central trope: feminine clothing. the "trimmings" of mullen's title suggest a re-stitching of stein's project, as well as a focus on the odds and ends, the scraps, of contemporary culture. but the most prominent meaning involves the politics of women's clothing. "trimmings" can be both adornments and things discarded; the word can imply both frivolity and violence. in the poems there are belts, earrings, stockings, hats and purses, not unlike the petticoats, umbrellas, and shoes of stein's poem. as stein does in _tender buttons_, mullen uses linguistic play to hint at the relations between the physical sensations of the body and the experience of using language. like stein, she suggests that the female body and the word need not be divorced, as much recent theory insists. (even kristeva's opposing categories of the semiotic and the symbolic imply that soma and symbol are in constant battle, an opposition stein--and mullen--expose as unfounded.)^15^ as in _tender buttons_ as well, mullen plays with words to release the reader's own associative powers. there is, indeed, great pleasure for the reader in the process. [13] among the briefest of the prose poems in _trimmings_ is one that consists of just two lines: "night moon star sun down gown. / night moan stir sin dawn gown" (tr 23). in this paratactic list, vowel shifts (rather than syntax) bear the burden of reference. there are certainly associations and near-meanings (sundown and evening gown can be easily teased out), and the possibility of a setting (the romantic moon and star), yet the larger implications (for instance, that come "dawn," the "sin" will be "done") are merely hinted at, left to the reader's own associative powers to piece together. the poem moves from word to word by generating relationships among sounds and creating localized meanings, rather than by employing linear logic. these tactics that skew and defer meaning, even if somewhat less disjunctive, are overtly steinian, resurrecting stein's fascination with repetition and circularity, with what she called "knowing and feeling a name" and "adoring [and] replacing the noun" in poetry (_lia_ 231). like stein, mullen signals the erotic without directly treating it as subject matter. but she also critiques the erotics of our attire. consider the very shortest of mullen's poems: "shades, cool dark lasses. ghost of a smile" (_tr_ 62). charged puns ("dark lasses" conjuring "glasses"; "shades" as sunglasses for the stylish and as a racist word denoting african-americans) render the final, simple phrase ("ghost of a smile") ambiguous: the smile might suggest a pleasurable memory or an invitation, but it is also inseparable from the implication that "shades"--in the racial sense--are "ghosts," invisible presences in a culture bent on cover-ups, on hiding behind its own, often rose-colored, glasses. [14] in this way mullen uses a steinian linguistic play to address not just the pleasures of language and clothing, but their larger social implications, the very issues that stein most frequently avoided. _trimmings_ removes _tender buttons_ from its hermetically sealed locale and, so to speak, takes it out of the closet and into the street, by underlining the conjunctions between racial identity and gender in a semiotics of american culture. in choosing stein as intertextual companion, mullen uses what henry louis gates identifies as a strategy frequently employed in african-american writing: the elaboration of repetition and difference. "signifying," gates says, is the playing of various kinds of rhetorical games in black vernacular, and it can mean "to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie," as well as "to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point" (gates 54). signifying contrasts with the "supposed transparency of normal speech"; it "turns upon the free play of language itself, upon the displacement of meanings" (53). there is a political, and not just a formal "play" here that applies to _trimmings_: signifying involves a "process of semantic appropriation"; words are "decolonized," given a new orientation that reflects a rejection of politics as usual. according to gates, this double-voicedness is associative, and it employs puns and figurative substitutions to create an indeterminacy of interpretation (49, 22). [15] strikingly matching gates's theory of signifying, mullen's version of steinian writing involves an assertion of difference. mullen encodes cultural and racial specificity into her word games, in deliberate contrast to what i see as stein's *private*, largely hermetic codes. allusions to contemporary life are everywhere, mixed in with more lyrical, "poetic" language. commercials, for example, are not shut out, precisely because such references are, all by themselves, a commentary on american culture. here is the subject of clothing-become-laundry and, more specifically, laundry detergent: heartsleeve's dart bleeds whiter white, softened with wear. among blowzy buxom bosomed, give us this--blowing, blissful, open. o most immaculate bleached blahs, bless any starched, loosening blossom. (tr 31) in rich and lyrical language (especially the outburst, "o most immaculate. . ."), mullen bears witness to some un-lyrical truths--that the struggle to attain the "whiter white" (a redundant operation of either language or color) raises questions about america's obsession not just with cleanliness (the subject of tv ads) but with the valorization of what is as light as possible, in shirts or skin-tone. here the poetic tradition of the beauty of clothing, of feminine or other attire, has to confront the "immaculate bleached blahs" that represent mass culture "bleached" for a white audience. [16] the poems insist on such meetings of the ecstatic and the drab in women's lives (as in the title for mullen's most recent work in progress--"muse and drudge"), whether the act in question is hanging clothes on the line or watching tv. whenever tv seeps into women's lives, in fact, there is both the urgency created by commodification and the potentially lobotomizing effect of the medium. of nylon stockings mullen writes, "the color 'nude,' a flesh tone. whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan . . . body cast in a sit calm" (16). the issue of what color "nude" is--the fact that the "model" for this neutral skin tone is an anglo one--is too often taken for granted by white women. at the same time, any woman whose "whose flesh unfolds barely" has become a commodity, like the many items sold on tv, where viewers, too, are objects in front of a screen, "body cast in a sit calm," static and passive, as though *in* a "body cast," under an unidentified injunction not to move. other tv allusions, such as one to the evening news, suggest the banality of women's lives: "mild frump and downward drab. slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog" (49). words, just barely altered from their "originals" in a tv or radio weather report, testify to women's representation in the mass media, the source that may well affect whether or not they see the morning, or themselves (the "drudges" in question), as "dingy" and "drab." in this processed language, all of us hear a horoscope for the day, our lives; in such representations, we are--and this applies especially to women--caught in our own "mild frump," as though our routines were items we would prefer not to purchase. [17] yet mullen makes it clear that, however potentially controlling, mass media don't obliterate culturally specific language. mullen marks her text with both "mainstream" speech and the black vernacular in what she calls a "splicing together of different lexicons" that would be hard to see in stein's defamiliarized language in _tender buttons_. in one such gesture, mullen appropriates cliches linked to african-american culture and forces us to ask what "black" and "white" culture actually consist in--where the lines are drawn: her red and white, white and blue banner manner. her red and white all over black and blue. hannah's bandanna flagging her down in the kitchen with dinah, with jemima. someone in the kitchen i know. (tr 11) the "bandanna" and the jemima figure suggest stereotypes of black women. mullen has suggested to me that even though such images are most likely drawn from the white minstrel tradition, they constitute nonetheless a powerful "pseudo-black folklore" that has shaped views of blackness in america. by refusing to exclude even these representations from her own language, mullen implies that there is an important source for this language, one that needs to be traced: such images get constructed both from our "red, white and blue" national identity and from the politics of violence ("all over black and blue"), also based on color. in the "blues" alluded to here, another kind of "folklore" is also conjured, one that may seem more "genuine" or "authentic" than that of hannah and jemima. but mullen's text refuses to make clear distinctions among the sources for what she calls her "recycled" language. this word-play reclaims all and any expressions that concern women's cultural "place" (literally, the "kitchen," repeated twice in this brief passage) in the service of an explicit critique of those words that serve as designations to divide black from white--and different women from each other. [18] in some of the poems, mullen "signifies" on stein even more overtly. there are several instances where mullen infuses the very diction of _tender buttons_ with her own agenda--an investigation of the ways in which racial and gender identities are constructed in and by language. stein has a dialogue between "distress" and "red" which mullen recasts as an excursion into black vernacular speech, with steinian intonations: when a dress is red, is there a happy ending. is there murmur and satisfaction. silence or a warning. it talks the talk, but who can walk the walk. distress is red. it sells, shouts, an urge turned inside out. sight for sore eyes. the better to see you. out for a stroll, writing wolf tickets. (tr 34) the most immediate steinian source is the heading "this is this dress, aider," and the text of that "tender button" reads: aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher, munchers. a jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let. (tb 476) one of the most frequently glossed sections in _tender buttons_, this passage has often been read as punning on "distress," as well as on the notion of "aid" and one of stein's nicknames for alice, "ada" ("aider, why aider . . ."). the passage is crucial to readings that emphasize that _tender buttons_ is really about female sexuality. for some, this involves a critique of the "meadowed king" who rises at the expense of "her," as ruddick suggests; among others, gass sees an explicit (and joyful) sexual scene; and, as i have detailed elsewhere, i believe that stein provides a typical double perspective here--that of lesbian eroticism and a patriarchal observer's panic *about* that eroticism.^16^ for all these readings, sexuality provides the backdrop for stein's polyvalent language. in mullen's appropriation, however, a double perspective about sexuality and language alerts us instead to the *social* construction of the sexual moment. there is a different sort of doubleness at work--that of black america itself, the experience of a division that w.e.b. du bois first called "double consciousness" and which black arts writers in the 1960s and 1970s converted into experiments with a specifically black consciousness in radical new forms.^17^ [19] mullen's own revisionary feminist dialogue with stein is clear from the start. the short, uninflected questions ("is there murmur and satisfaction," for example) are reminiscent of _tender buttons_, and so is the diction--the mixture of simple monosyllabic words ("dress," "red," "talk") with words describing states of consciousness ("happy," "satisfaction," "urge"). but clearly mullen's "talk" here is not just words exchanged between lovers but the specific language of a whole culture: "dis" both alludes to the sound of "this" in black english, and to the verb "to dis," or "disrespect," someone, echoed in the competition of "talks the talk." a similar conjunction is that of european fairy tale (red riding hood's "better to see you") and black english ("writing," instead of "selling," "wolf-tickets"). but the primary question is what happens when the seductive "red dress" is donned; is there "satisfaction" for flirtatious partners, a desire to shout with joy, or is there fear of violence--silence, warning? as mullen points out, _trimmings_ is a "compressed meditation on the whole idea that how a woman dresses is responsible for how she gets treated in the world": "is there a happy ending" for any woman's cinderella-like transformation "when a dress is red"--when she puts on a piece of clothing that signifies passion and seduction, or availability and provocativeness? how is such a color "read" by male on-lookers? without providing any simple or polemical answers, mullen links sexuality, clothing, violence and desire, even as she forces the literary tradition of stein to confront the vernacular traditions of african-american speech and writing. [20] mullen's dialogue with stein in _trimmings_ has everything to do with the exclusion of questions of race from feminist criticism that has recently been the subject of passionate critique and rethinking.^18^ mullen has described her desire to "get a read on stein and race," and at the time she was writing _trimmings_ she was reading both _tender buttons_ and "melanctha," whose overtly racist and classist images are the subject of reappraisals by critics as diverse as sonia saldivar-hull and charles bernstein.^19^ mullen's play on stein's famous "rosy charm" is perhaps the most striking instance of her recasting of _tender buttons_ so as to explore questions of race that stein didn't take on in her poetry but made all too clear in "melanctha": a light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air, pale compared to shadow standing by. to plump recliner, naked truth lies. behind her shadow wears her color, arms full of flowers. a rosy charm is pink. and she is ink. the mistress wears no petticoat or leaves. the other in shadow, a large, pink dress. (_tr_ 15) stein's text is "a petticoat," and it reads, in its entirety: "a light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm" (_tb_ 471). the passage is most likely about female creation, both on the page and of the body. as ruddick convincingly argues, the white of a woman's undergarment is connected to the blank page, and the stain of blood to the writer's ink, a "rosy charm" whose power stein asserts.^20^ mullen has described this passage as her opening into _tender buttons_--perhaps even the point of departure for _trimmings_ as a whole. mullen sees stein's text as an allusion to manet's provocative painting "olympia"--the white woman staring boldly at the viewer, in a state of "disgraceful" sexual permissiveness, with the near-by "ink spot" (a black servant) waiting behind her. mullen encodes the painting into her response to stein, calling up the representation of the nude white woman reclining luxuriously on a couch, while behind her the black woman in "a large, pink dress" holds a bunch of flowers, presumably a love-token, in a position of attentive servitude to her mistress. [21] mullen's take on "olympia," and on "a petticoat," concerns the supposed "disgrace" of sexuality in conjunction with her awareness about the difference of blackness in a culture in which femininity is equated with the naivete of "pink" and the skin color "white." this motif of color pervades the book. mullen writes that in _trimmings_ the words pink and white kept appearing as i explored the ways that the english language conventionally represents femininity. as a black woman writing in this language, i suppose i already had an ironic relationship to this pink and white femininity. (_tr_ "off the top") throughout mullen's work, evocations of the blues tradition and african-american speech confront the deficiencies of conventional language in representing blackness. yet in her "rewriting" of the painting "olympia," the very ownership of sexuality is at stake: the transgressive eroticism--of the sort stein championed and manet supposedly celebrated--is, in manet's depiction, available only to the "light white" woman, not to her "shadow standing by." while clearly a feminist reading of olympia" might suggest that manet "owns" (or names) the white woman's sexuality as well, mullen's own attention is drawn to the dynamics between black and white: there is implicitly a problem not just for the black woman depicted here, but for the african-american woman writer as well. the "ink" of blackness is literally "in shadow" (the word is repeated three times), as the white woman, clothed in what mina loy called "ideological pink"--in this case nothing more than her own pink skin--"wears an air."^21^ in another section of _trimmings_, girlhood and the color pink are also associated ("girl, pinked, beribboned. alternate virgin at first blush" [_tr_ 35]). this passage uses the same technique of multiple meanings and the connotation of innocence conjured by the color pink to point out the disturbing "naked truth": "pink" is "a rosy charm" in the white world only when it's worn by someone "pale," "white," and "sugary." the one whose skin is "ink" remains in shadow. she is, literally, incomplete: the word "pink" minus the "p" gives us "ink." and yet, she still has the power to signify--after all, writing is produced with "ink." it is this most important "signifying" on stein's text about the "rosy charm" of female sexuality, a celebration of the erotic that nonetheless reveals considerable limitations to any black women reader, that produces the revisionist poetry of _trimmings_. [22] far from innocuous, the "pale," "sugary" femininity that mullen unveils is also part of a culture that, in addition to privileging whiteness, condones violence against women in covert, as well as overt, forms. mullen uses steinian disruptive language to expose this violence, which lurks just beneath accepted standards of femininity. even seemingly harmless items, like the feminine attire of the pocketbook, are emblematic of theft, assault, rape: lips, clasped together. old leather fastened with a little snap. strapped, broke. quick snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by hook or crook. (_tr_ 8) the purse is metonymic for female genitalia; on one level, getting "into her pocketbook" is the male game of conquest. yet the puns on currency ("strapped," "broke," "green," "relief") show the close ties between money and desire (as in some men's ability to purchase female companionship) and allude to the ways women are frequently economically exploited--simply put, ripped off. there is double-meaning as well in the word "snatch," and the covert violence of "snap," "strapped," "clutch," and even "chased" (traditionally, women are sought after, or "chased," if pure--"chaste"). the word-play and subject rhymes, in familiar idioms and rhythms, convey the very real violence women are often subject to, whether by the "thief" (purse-snatcher) or the man intent on sexual assault.^22^ [23] this violence is, then, insidious even in its less obvious forms--jewelry, to take another example. of earrings, mullen writes: "clip, screw, or pierce. take your pick. friend or doctor, needle or gun" (_tr_ 40). earrings carry a weight beyond their immediate function; these small items refer to more profound mutilations of the female--and male--body. there are choices among modes of violation here ("clip, screw, or pierce"), yet the "pick" is merely between "friend or doctor," figures of betrayal, whether personal or institutional. and, most significantly, the intrusion into the black body is metaphoric of social exploitation and the prevalence of the "needle or gun"--drug-use and other violence. here a simple female "adornment" can no longer be seen, or written about, as innocent. mullen evokes a semiotics of clothing, the language that is revealed in those items women decorate their bodies with ("such wounds, such ornaments," as mullen concludes in this "trimming"). this language reveals, however subtly and covertly, what mullen calls ironically a "naked truth"--that black women and men are, still, psychologically and otherwise, subject to violence and mutilation, symbolized by the very objects women use to make themselves seem different, to meet our culture's standards of beauty. [24] mullen has written that "gender is a set of signs which we tend to forget are arbitrary. in these prose poems i thought about language as clothing and clothing as language" (_tr_ 68). in the final poem of _trimmings_, mullen links her interest in literary signification with the importance of a poetic utterance that remains conscious of how the signifier functions in the public sphere: thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. a veiled, unavailable body makes an available space. (_tr_ 66) placed at the end of the book, this "trimming" serves as mullen's %ars poetica%, the explanation for her use of the trope of clothing. that which is "veiled" shows through language--the "unavailable" or often invisible "body" of the black woman "makes" its own space. moving away from simply being "veiled in silence" is precisely _trimmings_'s project. it is a goal that diverges from stein's "play," which, however radical an expression of its time,^23^ is nonetheless kept safely indoors. stein tended to abstract the objects she wrote about from their specific contexts, to see them in formal terms, which is one reason her work is often associated with cubism. she wrote of the process of *looking* at objects as the inception of the poetry of _tender buttons_; she focused intently on an object in order to name it without using its name. while mullen also uses words to "re-name" objects, her interest lies not just in form but in a semiotics of american culture. each gesture, each belt or buckle, reveals the society that created it. less arbitrary than the "signs" of language, the semiotics of clothing reflects women's position in the culture at large. signifying on stein, as well as playing by some of her rules, mullen makes it clear that she cannot simply "use" stein's poetic language uncritically. in fact, by simultaneously inhabiting and altering stein's non-traditional language, mullen encodes in stein's own hermetic diction the divergent perspective provided by an african-american woman. stein's codes must, indeed, be broken; to have social significance, linguistic "play" has to evoke aspects of a shared, social identity, and not simply constitute an idiosyncratic, private language. in part, _trimmings_ is indeed homage to stein, a writer whose poetry attempts to change consciousness, and even our own relation to our bodies, through a changed language. yet for mullen, the experiment now appears too circumscribed. her "signifying" on _tender buttons_ lays down a challenge: women's dress (their "distress") constitutes a social semiotics, the "language" of a culture whose racial and sexual politics we would do well to change. [25] in contrast to mullen's dialogue with stein, scalapino's is less exclusively linked to _tender buttons_. instead, it is as closely tied to stein's philosophical writings--most of which (with the exception of "composition as explanation") appear in _lectures in america_--as it is to stein's erotic codes. yet scalapino focuses just as sharply as mullen does on developing a steinian poetics in which the erotic is inseparable from what i might broadly call the public sphere. scalapino draws from the objectivist tradition that includes (in addition to stein) oppen, robert duncan, creeley, and, more recently, many l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e writers.^24^ these poets agree on a central issue: they dispute the primacy granted to the ego--the experiential, the psychological--in more romantic-derived american poetry, seeking instead to reflect a greater scope than the self in meditation that marjorie perloff (for one) associates with stevensian romanticism.^25^ [26] yet, as i see it, scalapino also owes a particular debt to stein--to a poetics that first made repetition the stuff of poetic knowledge. scalapino's writing consists of diverse fragments organized in what joseph conte describes as serial form--in scalapino's case, discrete units, often with involved repetitions and permutations, that are potentially infinite in number rather than structured by either generic constraints or the more basic linearity of a definable beginning, middle, and end. this is the same sort of form stein associated with "the natural way to count"; that is, "one and one and one and one and one" (not needing to make two). this sort of counting, according to stein, "has a lot to do with poetry" (_lia_ 227), particularly the poetics of repetition, as in "a rose is a rose is a rose."^26^ through an epigraph to her book _way_, scalapino likens this infinite serial form to the principles of theoretical physics, quoting physicist david bohm. bohm describes "the qualitative infinity of nature" and asserts that because there is "no limit to the number of kinds of transformations, both qualitative and quantitative, that can occur," it follows that "no . . . thing can even remain identical with itself as time passes." stein's studies with william james and her later work in medical school reflect a similar orientation toward both science and epistemology. yet, while stein applied her musings about numbers, grammar, and the passage of time mainly to the realms of literature and the imagination,^27^ scalapino elicits in her serial poems--poems about both "the qualitative infinity of nature" and about private sexual experiences--the pressing question of how individual desire is situated within existing social categories. [27] scalapino's primary debt to stein has to do with the very notion that there might be an epistemology of composition.^28^ in an essay entitled "pattern--and the 'simulacral,'" scalapino writes about the poet michael mcclure, in whose work the "self" becomes a simulacrum identified with an infinite universe: "the author or the sense of self and the investigation of its desire is the pattern, which is neither present time nor past time. it is potentially infinite in form and number" (_phenomena_ 28-9). i believe the notion here is that subjectivity, its pattern, assumes an infinite form, which the text mimics. scalapino culls this epistemology of form in part from stein, whose essay "composition as explanation" is the starting point for scalapino's observations. stein asserts a radical subjectivity: "the composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition"; consequently, "the time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of the composition" (qtd. in _ph_ 27). scalapino explains that she is drawn to the notion of the "continuous present" stein posits, a kind of composition that leads to individual acts of perception that need not be connected in linear fashion--in other words, an infinite series, with attendant combinations and permutations of elements. she summarizes her position elsewhere: "i am concerned in my work with the sense that phenomena appear to unfold. (what is it or) how is it that the viewer sees the impression of history created, created by oneself though it's occurring outside?" (_ph_ 119). the central notion is how perception, informed by the internal narratives of subjective experience, creates the history we attribute to what occurs "outside."^29^ [28] this steinian epistemology is experienced through the text itself, often in writing that adapts the forms of pop culture.^30^ particularly in her trilogy (_the return of painting_, _the pearl_, and _orion_), scalapino explores "writing which uses the genre of comic books" (_ph_ 22). in scalapino's work--in contrast to andy warhol's or roy lichtenstein's silk screens and paintings--the "frames" consist solely of language. they take the form of small windows of text that scalapino finds congenial to exploring our experiences of the present moment, its individual, disparate acts of perception, as though in cartoon-sized boxes. in the trilogy, scalapino plays with the images of film noir (one character is "a sort of tight sweater version of lana turner" [63]) in conjunction with more conceptual reflections, reminiscent of stein's writing in _lectures in america_: "to not do rhetoric--so that it is not jammed in on itself." or: "to have a convention--not the way it is spoken, but the way it is heard" (54). scalapino has said of stein: i took her writing as having to do with wanting to be able to write the essence of something, of an emotion or a person [or] an object, and that's impossible; she's fully aware that it's impossible, so she's in a mode of conjecture about things, a curiosity and experimentation. in both her trilogy and in _way_, scalapino embarks on similar projects--inviting a "mode of conjecture" about poetic language and perception itself. [29] yet however linked scalapino's serial form is to theories of perception, scalapino also inherits stein's fascination with erotic codes, which stein articulated through the "continuous present" and the "infinite form" that scalapino finds so intriguing.^31^ for scalapino, seriality is, in fact, inherently erotic. while some might find the pre-determined structure of a romance novel--or a sonnet--both comfortingly accessible and erotically charged, scalapino associates closure (literary or otherwise) with entrapment. without what she sees as the enforced structure of pre-determined forms, "you can feel comfortable and relaxed in something"; whether in pop culture incarnations like soap opera or in poetry like her own, scalapino finds that serial form "has to do with just pleasure, the notion that we generate certain things that are pleasurable."^32^ differing from pound's serial yet epic _cantos_ (pound's definition of epic being--very much like his _cantos_--a "poem including history"),^33^ scalapino's serial form, like that of _tender buttons_, emerges from pleasure--the pleasure of not ending.^34^ [30] "the floating series" is one of several "infinite series" that make up _way_. the most erotic of its sections, "the floating series" consists of brief, thin poems--visually, the inverse of mullen's "_trimmings_." small lines of type meander down the page and abruptly end, with dashes or no punctuation, to continue on the facing page. these various comic-book-like "frames" of words and perceptions are overtly erotic in their subject matter, as i will show. yet the form is minimalist in the extreme, and the language stylized in a _way_ that hearkens back to _tender buttons_. like stein, scalapino suggests both the eroticization of ordinary objects, culled from daily experience, and a playful means of using poetry to allude to the female body. like stein's codes for alice, or her use of words like "milk" or "cow" to signal sexual experience, some of scalapino's individual words--used repeatedly--take on sexual connotations, particularly the motifs of the "lily pad" and "bud": the women -not in the immediate setting -putting the lily pads or bud of it in themselves a man entering after having come on her -that and the memory of putting in the lily pad or the bud of it first, made her come (_way_ 65, 66) the figures of the bud and lily pad recall icons of sexual organs (reminiscent as well of the buddhist "way" used in scalapino's title): in taoism, jadestalk, swelling mushroom, and dragon pillar represent the male; while jade gate, open peony, and golden lotus denote the female. it is possible to praise god through a celebration of these sexual parts, both playful and pleasurable.^35^ scalapino explains that her purpose in using the recurring words "lily pad" and "bud" was to "imply things about the female body that are pleasurable" through terms that are both sensual and deliberately not anatomical. as stein does in _tender buttons_, scalapino eroticizes language; she employs an iconography of her own in a clearly sexual context, from the woman's point of view and, in the very notion of a "floating" form, she alludes to the potentially amniotic experience linked to the female body. the lack of syntactical markings here and the isolation of particular words defamiliarize their meanings, even down to the articles and prepositions which stein found so fetching.^36^ in this passage (like many others in the permutations of "the floating series"), the attention to a stylized but explicitly sexual physical experience makes the female body the subject of meditation. yet this detailing of what resides "in" or "on" the female body in the moment of orgasm is also accompanied by an analogous attention to language as physical presence: the deliberate highlighting of prepositions and conjunctions ("in," "and," "after") on single lines permits us to pay heed to the connectives of language, to focus on words as words, and to think of language, too, as a material, immanent force. in this way scalapino makes language material, employs it for the pleasures of its textures and sounds--and this is very like stein. [31] yet the nature of this sort of erotic--and linguistic--experience in scalapino is problematic. there is an apparent lack of affect in this and other passages, a flattened tone, and a deliberate vagueness in phrases like "immediate setting" and "in that situation." marjorie perloff points out that scalapino's seemingly ordinary, transparent language typically breaks down and turns into deliberate artifice that highlights the surface of language rather than its referent (_radical artifice_ 50-1). in the passage i quoted, the "he" and "she" are engaged in an anonymous act of intercourse (which is repeated, with changes, later on), yet it is one that also defamiliarizes the "act" and focuses as much on memory and language as on sensual experience. scalapino's comments on the work of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poet ron silliman illuminate her own practice: "a series or list of simple sentences creates simple states of being, requiring that consciousness exist only in the moment of each sentence, i.e., in an infinite series of succeeding moments" (_ph_ 30). clearly it is not just the sexual coupling of these bodies that concerns scalapino, but also the very nature of perception and repetition, the concerns stein elaborates in "portraits and repetition" and in her poetry. hence the stylistic spareness, the minimalism that emphasizes small permutations, the use of repetition and difference. how should we reconcile these philosophical and formal preoccupations with the specifically sexual motifs of "the floating series"? [32] however much scalapino's interest in stein has to do with epistemologies of composition, as i see it scalapino's invocation of charged erotic material also involves her in a further dialogue with stein's erotic writings. one of scalapino's goals is clearly to provide a contemporary alternative to the long-standing literary conventions used to portray sex, much as _tender buttons_ succeeded in doing. and in creating her own poetic grammar and using it to elaborate a sexual motif, scalapino also destabilizes masculine and feminine positions. her permutations enact a textual version of the "gender trouble" or indeterminacy that judith butler endorses as perhaps the most threatening of all social/sexual gestures to an established heterosexual culture.^37^ the lily bud, which initially suggests the penis, eventually suggests as well the clitoris--or, in more general terms, the sexual exchange itself, as though neither party had to be defined in terms of difference: having swallowed the water lily bud -so having it in him -when he'd come on some time with her (_way_ 85) the indeterminate "water / lily bud" represents the *process* of sexual exchange, more than a bodily part. scalapino has even suggested that the "bud" represents a way of imagining pregnancy as though from a child's point of view--as a growth within the body. this shifting of symbols within the text is appropriate, given scalapino's views of her work as a particular kind of feminist enterprise--the sort that strives to conceive of gender itself as ideally "not being in existence--the idea that there is no man and no woman, that that's a social creation." for scalapino, contemplating gender perceptions entails "a process of unravelling the hypothesis and the conclusion" of supposed gender difference. clearly, then, scalapino's phenomenology of composition is not simply a philosophical game. to the contrary, it has everything to do with a reconceptualization of gender itself, a process that can be compared to stein's exploration of lesbian sexuality in _tender buttons_ and "lifting belly." [33] for scalapino, however, even indeterminacy needs to be placed in context, and that contextualization is part of scalapino's project to situate sexuality within a broader socio-economic picture. most significantly, scalapino uses a steinian elusive language not to cover over the sexuality that is her subject (as in stein's private codes) but to expose its relation to prevalent social conventions between men and women, reflected as well in literary forms. in "a sequence," a serial poem in scalapino's earlier book _that they were at the beach_, men and women are, in flattened diction, identified as having leopard parts, and in this way the body appears as objectified in moments of arousal ("the parts of their bodies which had been covered by clothes were those of leopards" [57]). here, scalapino says, she tried to be "completely dead-pan, flat," and in fact to create something "not palatable erotically." her intention in this disorienting series is to reveal the workings of domination in erotic representations, whether in the photographs in mass market magazines or in the involved plots of historical romances. [34] in _way_, however, the erotic is *not* flattened out; as in stein's text, it is pleasure itself that emerges. but in contrast to stein's eroticism in poems like _tender buttons_ and "lifting belly," this pleasure is not disjunct from, but part of, a broader context, which includes daily interactions in the public sphere. in fact, the "convention" scalapino explores in both _way_ and _that they were at the beach_ is not simply literary or formal--and here is one of the points at which she parts company with stein. for scalapino, as i will show, rethinking literary conventions about everything from syntax to portrayals of sexual experience necessarily entails engaging as well with the particulars of economics and class in the public world as they exist *outside* the confines of the erotic exchange. but for scalapino this broader context is already connected to the erotic--through the very notion of convention. for what scalapino calls, in general terms, "social convention" is also embedded in literary forms, including those devoted to what she calls "the erotica genre." in _tender buttons_, stein left her erotic clues in a mesh of seemingly non-referential words, focusing on language and thwarting literary convention at every turn, but leaving the broader sweep of public experience largely out of the equation. scalapino, taking a different tack, allows us to see the interdependence of various aspects of our social selves and that most "private" aspect of our lives--our sexual acts.in _way_ and other texts (from the early _considering how exaggerated music is_ to the more recent _crowd and not evening or light_), scalapino uses a steinian method--to a distinctly non-steinian end. [35] the method involves fragmentation, juxtaposition, and repetition. the goal is to inscribe in her text the socially-defined nature of private, erotic experience.^38^ the first clue precedes a reading of the poem, yet typifies scalapino's technique. the cover of _way_ shows two photographs by andrew savulich, who placed them together on a postcard which, scalapino told me, she saw and later decided to use for the cover of the book. one is labeled "couple dancing in bar," the other, "men fighting on sidewalk." the poses are remarkably similar--the possibilities of homoeroticism in fighting, and of violence in sexuality, emerge through the juxtaposition, which succeeds in linking two acts that we are sometimes invested in perceiving as culturally dissimilar, yet which in fact are intricately linked. the use of juxtaposition as technique subverts the possibly "erotic" content of the one photograph while eroticizing the other--thus using form itself to expose a romantic mythology that would have us separate erotic and overtly violent struggle.^39^ [36] this is the device that emerges, in linguistic terms, in "the floating series" in _way_. as the poem continues, any doubt we might have had about its function as "just" erotic writing, an eroticism disjunct from a larger context, quickly dissolves. while the first several sections concern the repetition of a sexual encounter, at the very point when the form starts to seem familiar, we move outside the parameters of the "genre" scalapino has taken care to establish: we move outside the bedroom, beyond the couple; as in _trimmings_, we leave stein's flat at 14, rue du fleurus far behind. the first such instance is jarring but vague: people who're there already -though the other people aren't aware of that (_way_ 68) the writing is open-ended: *what* people? people other than the "he" and "she" of the couple? and who are the "other people" whose awareness is lacking? the secrecy of the sexual encounter seems to be challenged--one thinks of a primal scene, a child walking in on parents in a compromising position, or a couple unaware that they are being observed in a restaurant or car--a position on the fringe of the "outside" world. yet there is a political implication to the "people who're / there / already" underlined in the next fragment: "not / being able to / see the / other people." the possibility of colonization is made more likely in that people don't "see" others because they are in various ways culturally invisible, whether because of race, class or other hierarchical systems that delineate privilege. the trope of invisibility and difference has, of course, long been a presence in african-american literature and theory, from w.e.b. du bois and james weldon johnson to ralph ellison and, more recently, michele wallace.^40^ in white america, there is seeing and not seeing, awareness and its lack, depending on one's position as subject or object of the gaze. a few sections later, we come across a reference to "the city," with more "people having / been / there," and "others not / aware of them" (_way_ 70). without a doubt, we have moved from the conjoining of two--seemingly without specific context, focused instead on the "convention" of erotica--to a larger public context (in this case, an urban scene), an increasingly imposing structure far from the private relation that recurs, as well, throughout the series. [37] scalapino continues to juxtapose these two sorts of scenes in the rest of the series--the woman and the man, using erotic language, and the anonymous "people" of the unnamed city. the juxtaposition inevitably comes down to money and politics. new elements enter into the play of scalapino's permutations, including the words "livelihood," "jobs," "high rents," "public figure," "small store," "race," "means," and "not enough." such linguistic allusions to economics and to public enterprises and interactions alternate with the motifs from the first few passages--the symbolic lily pad and bud, the woman and the man. one passage suggests the very real presence of class barriers: having the high rents with an attitude that they shouldn't live in this place -who're poor (_way_ 76) suddenly the man and woman engaged in their own *private* experience are seen in context, as only one element in a larger, socio-economic picture. in isolation, this passage has nothing to do with sexuality, but its juxtaposition with the other passages about the man and the woman underlines a central point: that our sexual exchanges need to be contextualized, however resistant we are to that notion, as the two within the couple might well be. the space of the poem, then, has moved from indoors to out, from the private to the public sphere. scalapino suggests that there is in fact a corollary to the phenomenology of composition, which concerns the space we inhabit, and the "conventions" (social and linguistic) that we impose on it. scalapino makes a direct analogy between space, political structure, and poetic form: "as (spatially) infinity is all around one, it creates a perspective that is socially democratic, individual (in the sense of specific) and limitless" (_ph_ 119). "style is cultural abstraction" (_ph_ 28), scalapino writes, meaning, i believe, that style "speaks" for its culture, just as, for mullen, clothes "speak" women's lives, and, in scalapino's hands, a disorienting style can also be a means of critiquing the very culture it emerges from.^41^ [38] the minimalist writing in _way_ addresses the conventions of language and sexuality as *social* conventions. there are two phrases scalapino links in her essay: "[t]he process of creating convention--the description of ourselves as a culture" (_ph_ 32). the link here demonstrates the reason for this poetry of repetition and juxtaposition. while stein's interest in composition as explanation takes her into the realms of epistemology, linguistics and sexuality, scalapino forces all these fields to confront the businesses opened, the rents unpaid, the unnamed "people" we encounter in the public space of the street or marketplace. in this respect, scalapino opens stein's erotic discourse in poems like _tender buttons_ to the public sphere, one that women have frequently been excluded from, and that women poets, in efforts to combat the lack of value placed on affect and the "personal," have sometimes deliberately shunned. just as stein rejects referentiality, scalapino rejects the "confessional" or personal tradition of women's writing, even when that writing is politically engaged--and she rejects this mode as dramatically as any poet today.^42^ scalapino has defended the erotic, attacked by some as "quintessentially subjective and egoistic" and by others as "inherently sexist." for scalapino, separation of the erotic from socially engaged writing is neither efficacious nor desirable in any way: "if eroticism is eliminated, that leaves only that social context, which has 'seen' it as sexist; there is no area existing for apprehension or change. we are split from ourselves" (_talisman_ 47). for scalapino, then, the erotic is related to "social context" in a way stein never felt the need to explore. [39] whether those relationships involve the "city" (its mass of individuals) or the "man and woman" in their most "private" lives, scalapino's poetry is fundamentally about things in relation. the buddhist influence in _way_--the notion of "the middle path, meaning something that's totally in the center and has no point of vantage," what scalapino calls "the motions of experience"--converges with the physicist david bohm's theory of the transformation of time and matter, which i quoted earlier, concerning the nature of identity. for scalapino, both take on a political charge, since neither one is disjunct from economic and other social marks of difference, like the "high rents" and invisible "other people" who inhabit _way_. the "span" of perception scalapino includes in her text differs from mullen's explorations of the way language constructs individual identity and social categories--the way that the clothing that is language creates both what we are and how we are perceived. yet to make vivid the relationship between identity and language, scalapino, like mullen, evokes the connections between eroticism and violence, along with the very real pleasure that words afford. however different stylistically, these texts share a central goal: to forge a disjunctive language that will direct our attention to both sexuality and the public sphere--to illuminate, in a feminist avant-garde poetics, the inevitable link between our public selves and our most private acts. [40] neither of these writers' recent works would be possible without stein's ventures into the relationships among language, consciousness, and sensuality. it is precisely this series of relationships which is constantly changing, as culture and speech continually shift, and as new voices take on new forms of various experimental "traditions." for writers concerned with feminine subjectivity, with race and cultural politics, and with opening up the boundaries of language, stein's linguistic experiments remain a source, yet one that needs revision, that cannot go unchallenged. such rewriting is a testament to both continuity and change in feminist avant-garde writing by american women. for mullen and scalapino, the task is to bring stein's often insular discourse to the language of the world outside. that two poets as different as mullen and scalapino both turn to stein--to contribute to an existing poetic discourse and to alter its orientation--bears witness to the strength of women's commitment to experimentation with language and consciousness and to a feminist avant-garde poetics they hope will alter the landscape of american culture. notes: ^1^ luce irigaray, _this sex which is not one_ 144. ^2^ see _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_ 195-207, a reprint of entries from the journal _l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e_ 1-3. the writers in the section on stein were michael davidson, larry eigner, bob perelman, steve mccaffery, peter seaton, jackson mac low, and robert grenier. see also _in the american tree_ for what is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e writings, both poetry and theory. ^3^ this is particularly true if howe's _articulation of sound forms in time_, republished in the collection _singularities._ but howe has made use of historical documents throughout her poetic texts, from the early _defenestration of prague_ through the more recent (and highly scholarly) "melville's marginalia," in _the nonconformist's memorial_. ^4^ the "mark of gender" is wittig's phrase, borrowed, of course, from linguistics. her emphasis on *eliminating* the difference encoded in language (even more pronounced in french than in english)--and her marxist orientation--is in marked contrast to a theory like irigaray's, which assumes that western culture has in fact never truly acknowledged feminine difference in the first place, relying instead on a logic of "the same," whether in plato, freud, or other thinkers. she is also critical of marxist rhetoric. see irigaray's _speculum_ for her elaborate critique of the entire western tradition. criticisms of marxism appear in _this sex which is not one_, particularly 32 and 81. ^5^ like _s*perm**k*t_, the new book, _muse and drudge_, will be published by singing horse press. ^6^ i am indebted to the notion of "writing as re-vision," in the path-breaking 1971 essay "when we dead awaken: writing as re-vision" by adrienne rich. ^7^ interview, march 26, 1993. where not noted otherwise, citations from both mullen and scalapino are culled from unpublished interviews with the authors. ^8^ concerning _that they were at the beach_ , scalapino describes the attempt to arrive at a sort of "neutral tone," a dead-pan, that would elicit responses from the reader precisely because it's flat: "it doesn't have depth, and because it doesn't have depth you have a reaction to that" (interview). ^9^ this essay is an adaptation of the final chapter of a book devoted to feminist avant-garde poets from stein to the present. as the book begins with _tender buttons_, i use this final chapter to focus on stein's continuing influence on recent feminist avant-garde poets. while i would hardly minimize the other important sources for both of the poets discussed here (such as brooks's considerable influence on mullen), that broader look at each poet's creative sources awaits a slightly different study. ^10^ see fifer's "is flesh advisable," as well as gass's book and stimpson's "the somagrams of gertrude stein," among a wealth of other such criticism. ^11^ see my "fetishism and parody in stein's _tender buttons_." ^12^ michael davidson, in the "readings" section of _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_ (196-8), makes a similar point. for him the breakdown is between the idea that "her writing is all play" and the view that "stein is a kind of hermetic symbolist who encodes sexual and biographical information in complex verbal machines." for davidson, the commonality between these two is not that they are both fundamentally "private" but that they both "operate on either side of a referential paradigm." what we need to do is "learn to read %writing%, not read %meanings%." in this, he re-instates the formal, closed, nature of _tender buttons_ itself. ^13^ marianne dekoven, in _a different language_, is particularly influenced by kristeva, as is ruddick. most significant among other critics who also have explored stein's erotic codes are stimpson and gass. see my "fetishism and parody" for a detailed account of this approach to _tender buttons_. ^14^ in terms of moving the discourse of the "private" or erotic into the public sphere, in often dramatic ways, performance artists karen finley and annie sprinkle come to mind as offering new versions of feminist avant-gardism, ones that make the body a site of public display in overtly polemical fashion. both merge polemical texts with enactments involving their bodies, naked or outrageously dressed up. see _re/search: angry women_ for more examples of feminist performance art. a good deal of earlier feminist theory--and poetry followed (or perhaps preceded) this tendency--focused primarily on valuing the private sphere, including personal or "confessional" discourse. this tendency shifted value from public "event" to affect and qualities labeled "feminine," as evident in those anglo-american theorists who emphasize difference, among them carol gilligan and nancy chodorow. a divergence from this philosophy of difference, toward a critique of gender dualism itself, is evident in the work of several feminist conceptual artists in recent years (many influenced by french psychoanalytic theory, particularly jacques lacan), including, most notably, cindy sherman and barbara kruger. teresa de lauretis, elizabeth grosz, and judith butler are among those more recent theorists who call for gender ambiguity and critique feminine difference as a basis for gender theory. ^15^ in _revolution and poetic language_, kristeva outlines this opposition in detail. while the semiotic can, for all speaking subjects, only be experienced *through* language and never (after the pre-oedipal stage) in its "pure" form, it is nonetheless at continual odds with the symbolic functioning of language, threatening to break down its rational, semantic relationships. poetry pushes language toward the semiotic, thus proffering both pleasures and dangers readers rarely experienced--except in madness--in other types of language. ^16^ ruddick's most important argument along these lines is in her "a rosy charm." for my argument on female fetishism, see my "fetishism and parody." ^17^ see du bois' now-famous passage from _the souls of black folk_: "it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . . . one ever feels his two-ness--an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body" (5). gayle's _the black aesthetic_, among a number of anthologies from the early 1970s, provides some of the most important theoretical writings of the black arts movement and the revolutionary impulse to change both the political and psychic realities of african-americans. ^18^ the work of barbara smith, gayatri spivak, trinh minh-ha, bell hooks, and gloria anzaldua come to mind as just a few of the theorists and critics who have reshaped the feminist thinking that first emerged in the 1970s with attention to issues of postcoloniality, racial difference, and the neglect of women of color among earlier feminist writings. smith's "toward a black feminist criticism" (in _but some of us are brave_, mentioned below) is now a classic of the many pioneering works that critiqued early feminist criticism and voiced the need for a black feminist criticism. see also spivak's _in other worlds_, minh-ha's _woman, native, other_, and hooks's _feminist theory_ for particularly influential and important explorations of feminism and race in the u.s. and in an international frame. anthologies that emerged in the 1980s have been crucial in collecting and disseminating revisionist feminist work by women of color. see especially _this bridge called my back_, edited by anzaldua and cherrie moraga; and _all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave_, edited by gloria t. hull, patricia bell scott, and barbara smith; as well as the more recent _coming to terms_, edited by elizabeth weed, and _in other words_, edited by roberta fernandez. ^19^ saldivar-hull argues that the racism in _melanctha_ has been either excused or ignored altogether by critics--even feminist critics--in their commitment to championing stein's radical experimental style. see saldivar-hull and bernstein, "professing stein/stein professing." see also milton cohen for a reassessment of stein's racial politics. ^20^ see ruddick's "a rosy charm" for her fine reading of this passage. ^21^ the phrase is from loy's mythological and autobiographical epic, "anglo-mongrels and the rose" in _the last lunar baedeker_ 124. see my "mina loy's 'mongrel' poetics" in the forthcoming book _mina loy: woman and poet_ for a treatment of loy's racial and gender politics. ^22^ teresa de lauretis addresses this issue in her essay "the violence of rhetoric: considerations on representation and gender," in _technologies of gender_. ^23^ see bernstein's "professing stein" for a discussion of _tender buttons_ as a radical expression of its time. ^24^ in _how phenomena appear to unfold_, and in other uncollected articles, scalapino has written about ron silliman, charles bernstein, alice notley, and hannah wiener, as well as about duncan, creeley, h.d., and stein. ^25^ see perloff's "pound/stevens: whose era?" for one account of the divide between a poundian object-oriented, historical poetics, and the more meditative, essentially romantic, stevensian mode. taken on its own terms, the distinction holds true. the dichotomy implies, however, a false dualism. in this particular piece, perloff seems to hold either that these two "modes" were in fact the only ones present in the early part of the century, or that writers with other concerns--harlem renaissance poets were at work at the same time, as were avant-gardists with preoccupations sometimes quite divergent from pound's--somehow fit neatly into this one central divide. ^26^ see conte's _unending design_ for a detailed account of serial form in writers including creeley, duncan, jack spicer, and others. ^27^ see, in particular, "what is english literature" (_lia_ 11-55) for stein's personal version of english and american literary history. ^28^ see robert grenier's identification of stein's "phenomenological" preoccupation in _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_: "_t.b._, as early 'phenomenological investigation,' is interpretative/as it is revelatory--the whole storm of passion, discernment, definition, feeling//carried by language" (205). ^29^ for comparison, note stein's statements about her understanding of english literature in "what is english literature." stein invokes the same sort of dialectic between subjective and objective experience, as a dance of mysterious origins, one that itself becomes the subject of inquiry: "there are two _way_s of thinking about literature as the history of english literature, the literature as it is a history of it and the literature as it is a history of you" (_lia_ 12). and later: "and so my business is how english literature was made inside me and how english literature was made inside itself" (_lia_ 14). ^30^ wendy steiner's fine introduction to _lectures in america_ likens stein's experiments with repetition to those of andy warhol and roy lichtenstein two generations later, in the pop art movement. steiner argues convincingly that both stein and the later visual artists revel in their own culture's versions of mechanism and structural repetition, adapting them to new art forms in defiant, and celebratory, ways. see _lia_ xiii-xv. ^31^ the serial writing of ezra pound, william carlos williams, and other male writers was in fact preceded by stein's, and in her hands, such seriality emerged with a distinctly erotic--and feminine--perspective, especially in _tender buttons_, "lifting belly," and her other erotic poetry. for historical comparison, one might note that the first three of the _cantos_ were published in june, 1917, in _poetry_ 10. ^32^ scalapino discussed in our interview the serial forms of pop culture and mass media, including tv news and soap operas. while she acknowledged the possible appeal of the sit-com or soap opera as serial form, she herself can't stand either one: "there is something interesting about the serial form almost as if it were soap opera. except i hate soap operas and i never look at them, they're terribly boring and irritating. but it's the idea that something could go on and then start again and keep going, and it would always reproduce some of the information that's core information so that you could come into it at any point. it implies that there's no end to this and also that people are attending to very intricate but essentially delicate small things that they're doing. there's something about that that's satisfying, but definitely not at all satisfying in soap operas." ^33^ ezra pound, _literary essays of ezra pound_ 86. ^34^ scalapino briefly mentioned in our interview her feelings about the possibility of writing in closed forms, one that indicates the depth of her discomfort with being boxed in: "writing a form that implies closure in conventional works that i've heard or read--i find that completely stifling. you feel that you're trapped and dead. i have a reaction of total claustrophobia." ^35^ see avis for a brief and general account of these symbols in taoism. ^36^ see "poetry and grammar" (_lia_ 212-14) on the "interesting" role of articles, pronouns, and conjunctions--particularly articles, which have the power to "please as the name that follows cannot please" (212). ^37^ in particular, scalapino seems to attribute the "bud" to both the man and the woman as the poem progresses, so that its phallic association is either "lent" to the woman or redefined as a female quality. ^38^ the last series in _way_, "hoofer," works to very similar ends. that series begins with a scene on a bus and moves to a sexual motif, though in markedly non-erotic language: the first appearance of a sexual phrase is: ". . . women / in their being licked / between their legs" (139). the imagery that likens the sexual to the animal hearkens back to _that they were at the beach_ , but the over-all form--juxtaposing the social "scene" with a sexual moment--coincides with the same structure in "the floating series." ^39^ scalapino may even be responding to the prevalent soft porn poses explored by annette kuhn. the most frequent poses avoid any disorientation of the spectator's direct experience of the "object" photographed, most often through the use of realistic poses, as though the viewer had just happened upon a scene in which the woman is, usually, unconscious of the viewer's gaze. scalapino implies that, as a formal strategy that disrupts the way we would otherwise receive each image, juxtaposition of two or more images (or pieces of text) can indeed destroy the "realism" of the medium and thereby challenge us to see things differently. see kuhn for a detailed analysis of poses and the position of the gazer in different types of pornographic representations. ^40^ i am thinking, in particular, of johnson's _the autobiography of an ex-coloured man_, an important precursor to ellison's _invisible man_, in which the narrator's race is "invisible" insofar as he can "pass" for white--with the price of a blurring, even denial, of identity, that makes him both tortured and, ironically, unsympathetic. in other more recent treatments of the idea of invisibility, toni morrison in _playing in the dark_ raises the issue of the construction of "whiteness," as well as blackness, in american culture, most often dependent on an unacknowledged black "other." wallace, in _invisibility blues_, a collection of her essays, argues that frequent visual representations of african-american women (and other women of color) in fashion photos is accompanied by the conspicuous absence of their voices in the influential spheres of public discourse, both political and academic. see her introduction for a full account of the issue of "visibility" and language for african-american women. ^41^ see stein's important recapitulation of her arguments in "composition as explanation" at the opening of "portraits and repetition": "in composition as explanation i said nothing changes from generation to generation except the composition in which we live and the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear" (_lia_ 165). scalapino's insistence on the relationship between a culture and its "style" is clearly an articulation of a similar position. yet, significantly, scalapino takes the extra step (one typical of avant-gardist attitudes toward language) of using a disorienting or disruptive style of her own precisely to alter the entrenched traditions that artistic conventions reflect. see burger's _theory of the avant-garde_ for the most complete treatment of the issue of stylistic and cultural revolutions. ^42^ in particular, the privileging of personal experience and language in the writing of such poets as anne sexton and sharon olds comes to mind, in contrast to the more outward-looking and "historical" poetry of other feminist writers, such as audre lorde and adrienne rich. yet, despite a similar orientation toward social and political issues, scalapino rejects the mode of this sort of politically engaged poetry because it, too, has most often been voiced in relatively traditional forms. works cited: andrews, bruce, and charles bernstein, eds. _the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e book_. carbondale: southern illinois univ. press, 1984. anzaldua, gloria and cherrie moraga, eds. _this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color._ new york: kitchen table, women of color press, 1983. avis, paul d.l. _eros and the sacred._ harrisburg, pa: morehouse publications, 1990. bernstein, charles. 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"black brutes and mulatto saints: the racial hierarchy of stein's 'melanctha.'" _balf_ 18 (fall) 1984: 119-21. conte, joseph. _unending design: the forms of postmodern poetry._ ithaca: cornell univ. press, 1991. du bois, w.e.b. _the souls of black folk._ new york: penguin, 1989. ellison, ralph. _invisible man._ new york: vintage books, 1972. fernandez, roberta, ed. _in other words: literature by latinas of the united states._ houston: arte publico press, 1994. fifer, elizabeth. "is flesh advisable? the interior theater of gertrude stein." _signs: journal of women in culture and society_ 4:3 (spring 1979), 472-483. frost, elisabeth a. "fetishism and parody in stein's _tender buttons_." _sexual artifice: persons, images, politics (genders 19)_. ed. ann kibbey, kayann short, and abouali farmanfarmaian. new york: new york univ. press, 1994, 64-93. ---. "mina loy's 'mongrel' poetics." _mina loy: woman and poet._ orono, me: national poetry foundation, forthcoming. gass, william. _the world within the word._ new york: knopf, 1978. gates, henry louis. _the signifying monkey: a theory of african-american literary criticism. _ new york oxford univ. press, 1988. gayle, jr., addison, ed. _the black aesthetic._ new york: doubleday, 1971. gilligan, carol. _in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development._ cambridge: harvard univ. press, 1982. hooks, bell. _feminist theory: from margin to center._ boston: south end press, 1984. howe, susan. _defenestration of prague._ new york: the kulchur foundation, 1983. ---. _the nonconformist's memorial._ new york: new directions, 1993. ---. _singularities._ hanover: wesleyan univ. press, 1990. hull, gloria, and patricia bell scott, and barbara smith, eds. _all of the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave._ new york: the feminist press, 1982. irigaray, luce. _speculum of the other woman._ trans. gillian c. gill. ithaca: cornell univ. press, 1985. ---. _this sex which is not one._ trans. catherine porter. ithaca: cornell univ. press, 1985. johnson, james weldon. _the autobiography of an ex-coloured man._ new york: hill and wang, 1960. dekoven, marianne. _a different language: gertrude stein's experimental writing._ madison: univ. of wisconsin press, 1983. kristeva, julia. _ revolution in poetic language._ trans. margaret walker. new york: columbia univ. press, 1984. kuhn, annette. _the power of the image: essays on representation and sexuality._ boston: routledge, 1985. de lauretis, teresa. _technologies of gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction._ bloomington: indiana univ. press, 1987. levertov, denise. _the poet in the world._ new york: new directions, 1973. loy, mina. "anglo-mongrels and the rose." _the last lunar baedeker._ ed. roger l. conover. highlands: the jargon society, 1982, 109-175. marinetti, f.t. _selected writings._ trans. r.w. flint and arthur a. coppotelli. new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 1971. mihn-ha, trinh. _woman, native, other: writing postcoloniality and feminism._ bloomington: indiana univ. press, 1989. morrison, toni. _playing in the dark._ new york: random house, 1992. mullen, harryette. unpublished interview with the author, march 26, 1993. ---. s_*perm**k*t._ philadelphia: singing horse press, 1992. ---. _trimmings. _ new york: _tender buttons_ press, 1991. (abbreviated _tr_ in the text.) perloff, marjorie. "pound/stevens: whose era?" _the dance of the intellect._ new york: cambridge univ. press, 1985. ---. _radical artifice: writing poetry in the age of media._ chicago: univ. of chicago press, 1991. pound, ezra. _literary essays of ezra pound. _ ed. t.s. eliot. new york: new directions, 1935. _re/search: angry women. _ san francisco, re/search publications, 1991. rich, adrienne. _on lies, secrets, and silence: selected prose 1966-1978._ new york: norton, 1979. ruddick, lisa. "a rosy charm: gertrude stein and the repressed feminine." _critical essays on gertrude stein._ ed. michael j. hoffman. boston: g.k. hall, 1986, 225-240. saldivar-hull, sonia. "wrestling your ally: stein, racism, and feminist critical practice." _women's writing in exile._ ed. mary lynn broe and angela ingram. chapel hill: univ. of north carolina press, 1989, 181-198. scalapino, leslie. _how phenomena appear to unfold._ elmwood, ct: potes & poets press, 1989. (abbreviated _ph_ in the text.) ---. unpublished interview with the author, july 9, 1993. ---. interview with edward foster. _talisman: a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics _8 (spring 1992), 32-41. ---. _the return of painting, the pearl, and orion: a trilogy._ san francisco: north point press, 1991. ---. "thinking serially in for love, words and pieces." _talisman: a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics_ 8 (spring 1992), 42-48. ---. __that they were at the beach_ --aeolotropic series._ san francisco: north point press, 1985. ---. _way._ san francisco: north point press, 1988 silliman, ron, ed. _in the american tree._ orono, me: national poetry foundation, 1986. smith, barbara. "toward a black feminist criticism." _but some of us are brave,_ 157-175. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. _in other worlds: essays in cultural politics._ new york: routledge, 1988. stein, gertrude. "composition as explanation." _selected writing of gertrude stein._ ed. carl van vechten. new york: random house, 1962. ---. _lectures in america._ new york: random house, 1985. (abbreviated _lia_ in the text.) ---. _tender buttons_. _selected writing of gertrude stein._ ed. carl van vechten. new york: random house, 1962. (abbreviated _tb_ in the text.) stimpson, catherine. "the somagrams of gertrude stein." _critical essays on gertrude stein._ ed. michael j. hoffman. boston: g.k. hall, 1986. wallace, michele. _invisibility blues: from pop to theory._ new york: verso, 1990. weed, elizabeth, ed. _coming to terms: feminism, theory, politics._ new york: routledge, 1989. wittig, monique. "the mark of gender." _the straight mind and other essays._ boston: beacon press, 1992. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mackenzie, '"god has no allergies": immanent ethics and the simulacra of the immune system', postmodern culture v6n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n2-mackenzie-god.txt archive pmc-list, file mackenzie.196. part 1/1, total size 46654 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "god has no allergies": immanent ethics and the simulacra of the immune system by adrian mackenzie sydney university adrian.mackenzie@philosophy.su.edu.au postmodern culture v.6 n.2 (january, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by adrian mackenzie, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. "[t]he science of life always accommodates a philosophy of life."^1^ [1] conventional approaches to bioethics long for a purified set of principles in order to guide the application of scientific knowledges of the body -the life sciences - to individual "cases." in the realm of bioethics, the possibility that these knowledges might themselves constitute entities such as the individual, or the possibility that the individual body might itself be something other than the more or less governable a-historical object of technoscientific action, awakens a kind of %horror autotoxicus%. nor do the prevalent modes of ethical discourse react kindly to the possibility that the "living" body of an individual is also a self, an actor within a complicated set of narratives, codes and apparatuses whose various registers -medical, economic, racial, sexual, religious, and so on -intersect. in short, conventional bioethical discourses refuse to acknowledge that, as emmanual levinas has written, "the body is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of `giving meaning' to each thing; it lives as this contestation."^2^ [2] traditional bioethics disappoints us insofar as it overlooks the ways the body contests the prerogatives of consciousness, contests reason and self-identity. instead of opening onto the possibility of divergent %ethea%, bioethics' universalizing adjudicative principles legitimate the biomedical normalization of differences by trying to deal only with the moral rights of the rational self and by leaving the differing character of embodiment -a most profound aspect of the ethical habitat -aside. in its separation of scientific theory and "ethical" practice, and in its unwillingness to transit any borders into the epistemological territory of science, conventional bioethics misapprehends the active and ambivalent role of technoscientific intervention, an intervention which both %produces% these crucial differences in embodiment and participates in their effacement. traditional bioethics allergically responds to %the% ethical issue -the maintenance of %ethos%, of embodied differences, of the character and habits of individual bodies. %bios: nomo% "now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion."^3^ [3] foucault's well-known description of a shift during the last two centuries from sovereign to disciplinary power or "bio-power" implies a displacement in the substance of ethics.^4^ in diverse discourses and domains, it becomes increasingly obvious that the presumed exclusion of ethics from the theoretical-pragmatic complex of science itself, from the very concrete operations and forces of technoscientific discourses engaging living bodies, significantly limits the relevance and effectiveness of the traditional notion of ethics.^5^ [4] as donna haraway describes it, "the power of biomedical language . . . for shaping the unequal experience of sickness and death for millions is a social fact deriving from on-going heterogeneous social processes." ^6^ the morality-displacing power of biomedical discourse and practice does not confine itself to sickness and death, but branches out into the normalization of whole populations. at many different scales and under different aspects - birth, death, sexual relations, work, fitness, stress, leisure, and so on -life is targeted by the vectors of biomedical intervention. [5] again, foucault makes this point succinctly when he writes of the emergence of bio-power: "for the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time; amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention."^7^ the propagation of bio-power - designating "what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life"^8^ -powerfully challenges any responsive ethics to address the realm of physiology and to reframe the ethical substance to include the embodiment of biomedical materiality. in other words, so-called "physiological" or "biological" questions increasingly raise ethical issues in ways that cannot be disentangled from the historical conditions of life as a locus of power relations or, conversely, solved through an a-historical ethico-moral calculus. under the auspices of bio-power, biological knowledge increasingly presents itself as the ground of self-realization and governance in relation to life in general. it is difficult to suggest a more obvious example of the explicitly biomedical complications of ethics than the response to hiv/aids over the last decade: the rhetorics of defence and exclusion comprehensively blur the borders between scientific representations of disease and the institutional and "ethical" responses. [6] in the course of this translation, which constitutes biology as an object of power, a concomitant conceptual and representational shift has occurred in biological understandings of the body. "the body," as the object of biomedical discourse, no longer displays the hierarchical unity of organs and structures which projected it as subject to the rational self, master of its own self-reflexive truth, the presupposed self of traditional ethical codes. in a shift that correlates with the shift from sovereign power centered on the speaking, judicative subject to the statistical, dispersed technological networks of disciplinary power, the living body can no longer be thought of as the "unambiguous locus of identity, agency, labour," as haraway stresses in her reading of the immune system as "icon." rather, the living body is symbolized and operated on as "a coded text, organized as an engineered communications system."^9^ from the standpoint of bio-power, it is difficult to decide where, if not everywhere in the corpus of life, difference and identity reside. certainly it no longer gravitates towards the constellation of reason as consciousness of self. [7] hence two inter-related problems are at hand: (%i%) the need to dislocate the locus of ethical concern so that it is not simply excluded from the discourses of science, or confined to the instrumental regulation of their application; (%ii%) the issue of how to formulate such a relocated ethics when the new locus of embodiment turns out to lack stability because it "emerges as a highly mobile field of strategic differences."^10^ together they suggest that an ethics of embodiment must concern itself with the attempts of biomedical discourses exhaustively to code differences. such an ethics calls for an account of the irreducibility of individual differences that goes outside the traditional assumption of independent selves standing in the solitary light of reason, illuminated by transcendent interior values. at the same time, if we seek differences conducive to heterogenous %ethea% in the face of ever-extending processes of bio-political normalization, we cannot rule out the possibility that strategic zones of difference reside within science itself. immunity and alterity [8] in the context of immunology the major stake is indeed the irreducible difference and self-identity of individuals. a contemporary textbook of immunology asseverates: the central question in immunology has always been, how can the immune system discriminate between "foreign" and "self."^11^ immunology proffers itself as the science of bodily self and non-self recognition. varela and anspach write: "[w]hat is the nature of the body identity when a syndrome such as aids can cause its breakdown? this leads us directly to the key phenomenon of body identity: the immune system."^12^ haraway also cites a number of reasons why the study of the immune system stands out as an exemplary and strategic site in the biomedical coding of differences. first, immunological discourse increasingly tries to determine who or what counts as the "general population."^13^ the diagnosis of hiv-aids has, for instance, created a new population group with different legal, insurance and employment status to the general population. in a more direct negotiation of differences, immunology now supplies anthropological field study with the means to conclusively determine ethnic groupings.^14^ as an already fertile field of biotechnological activity, the practical importance of immunology continually grows as the technology of monoclonal antibodies infiltrates diverse industrial, diagnostic and agricultural practices. [9] secondly, haraway proposes that the immune system be viewed as representative of the denaturing processes mentioned above which have translated the body into an explicitly decentered and dynamically structured object. she writes: "my thesis is that the immune system is an elaborate icon for the principal systems of symbolic and material `difference' in late capitalism."^15^ the use of the word "system" is not incidental in this context because one of haraway's main concerns is to show how biomedical representations of bodies now resort to the conceptualities of signal and logic derived from communication "systems."^16^ immunology, according to haraway, is one of the principal actors in the re-staging of the body as a biotechnological communications system. [10] the corporeal negotiations of material differences carried by the immune system intimately determine what is properly one's own body; they regulate a body open to and capable of responding to an indefinite variety of "others" -living, non-living, or on the borderline between the living and the dead (e.g. viruses). thus we can identify a particularly apt biomedical figuration of "ethical" interest in the immunological figuration of the self, where "practically all molecules in the universe are antigens," ^17^ that is to say, where almost any kind of matter potentially elicits an immune system response, and where there is no simple borderline between what is foreign and what is recognized as belonging, no simple dividing line between between drug and toxin, nourishment and parasite. the triumph of an icon of the self: the self as icon [11] how can the promise of an ethics which does not place itself beyond the material effects of a biomedical discourse such as immunology be fulfilled? in what mode would ethics permeate the supposedly value-resistant fabric of the science of immunology? by dwelling less obsessively on values and orienting itself more towards an ethics understood as "a typology of immanent modes of existence."^18^ the natural properties of bodies are steadily being diversified and complicated by immunologically sophisticated organ transplants, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, by practices of corporeal grafting and by all the inflorescences of matter to which the flesh is currently heir. if it wishes to account for the specificities of %ethea% -the dwelling places of living things -for the character, habits and habitat of localized bodies, ethics must begin to register the contours of difficult terrains such as the immune system on a map of embodied difference. [12] in part, as i have said, ethics must show how biomedical discourses such as immunology actively produce rather than merely describe differences. can the biomedical sciences be shown always to be doing more than describing the origin of bodily differences? can they also be seen as actively elaborating differences? if they can, we may assume that immunology not only describes how the immune system differentiates and secures self from other, but that immunology, in constituting a self immunized against others, also performs an ethically charged immunizing operation. (certainly an obsession with severing obligation or connection to others runs strongly through the isolating treatment accorded to people infected with hiv-aids.) counter to haraway's thesis that the immune system is an icon of symbolic and material differences, immunology could be read as a discourse of immunity which attempts, as the latin root %immunis% suggests, to free or exempt the self from obligation to others. [13] immunology, like nearly every science, does indeed present itself as "merely representing" rather than actively producing differences between self and non-self within the contemporary social field. in this sense it remains, along with most other sciences, platonist. but unlike many other sciences, immunology explicitly allies itself with platonism -the western tradition's most persistent and wide-ranging discourse on representation and the judgment of representation -in its foundational paradigm, the principle of clonal selection. because this foundation is no longer even questioned by immunology it is not, as golub's textbook points out, referred to as clonal selection %theory% but merely as clonal selection.^19^ experiments do not test this foundation; they only test hypotheses consistent with it. clonal selection purports to explain how the body's immune system is able to discriminate and respond to "foreign" material (%antigen%): antigen does not instruct the immune system in what specificity to generate; rather, it selects those cells displaying a receptor of the appropriate specificity and induces them to proliferate and differentiate, resulting in expansion of specific clones of reactive cells.^20^ the "founding father" of this theory, niels jerne, conveyed clonal selection in the following terms: can the truth (the capacity to synthesise antibody) be learned? if so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned it must be acquired. we are thus confronted with the difficulty to which socrates calls attention in _meno_ (socrates, 375 b.c.), namely that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know one cannot search for since one does not even know what to search for. socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. the truth (the capability to synthesise an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent.^21^ [14] can this overlapping of the clonal selection theory and the platonic theory of knowledge as a recollection which needs nothing from the outside and which is exempt (immune) from obligation to the unknown be regarded as anything more than a fascinating but purely rhetorical invocation of a philosophical text as metaphor? yes, if it can be shown that the platonic investment descends beyond the play of `mere rhetoric' into the deep structure of immunological theory, or, more significantly, that the rhetoricity of this platonic explanation of the possibility of an immunological self could not be completely expelled from the body of immunological theory. a logic of decontamination [15] in "plato and the simulacrum," gilles deleuze claims that the founding motive of platonism has always been the effort to secure the domain of representation on a model of sameness. the dialectic and myths of plato's texts are read by deleuze as providing a founding model for distinguishing and selecting proper claimants from false claimants. proper claimants are copies which have some claim to truth, knowledge and the good because of their internal resemblance to the idea on which they are modelled; false claimants constitute the simulacra whose apparent resemblance to truth and the good conceals an "interiorized dissimilarity."^22^ this founding model is thus designated as the model of sameness. only representations or copies that have an internal relation to the essential idea of the good, beauty, or virtue possess the authentic resemblance or likeness which delineates the domain of philosophical representation. i will return to the issue of the simulacra and the false claimants to be excluded because of the absence of any proper relation to the same. but first, i would roughly contextualize jerne's fortuitous encapsulation of the foundation of immunology in platonic terms within the broader framework of platonism. [16] varela and anspach are explicit: "formulated another way, the organism %learns% to distinguish between self and nonself during ontogeny".^23^ the idea of knowledge as recollection of the differences inscribed earlier (during embryogenesis) is understood as the immunological parallel to the immortality of the soul which plato consistently introduces into his texts under the guise of a myth. these myths claim that only because the soul (and by analogy, the immune system), prior to its current embodiment (that is, during embryogenesis), has contemplated the eternal forms or ideas beyond the mundane world, can knowledge approximate in recollection the truth which the soul has seen (that is, one's body can recognise what belongs to it and what is other). while the myths of the _phaedrus_, _symposium_, _republic_, _statesman_ and _meno_ which present the eternal life of the soul might all be regarded as interruptions or digressions in the course of the dialectic, deleuze argues that the ironic play at evasion (the myths are always explicitly advertized as heuristic fictions by socrates) only conceals the deeper motive of methodically dividing the faithful claimant from the false claimant in order to protect a line of succession from same to like. "the myth, with its constantly circular structure, [i.e. souls circulating between mundane and extra-mundane life, contemplating the forms in eternity] is really the narrative of foundation." ^24^ it permits the claims of representations to be founded by determining which claimants may share in that which the unsharable, imitated idea possesses firsthand: eternal, unchanging being. without that share, claimants are nothing but those impostors known as simulacra. [17] the philosophical schema and principle of selection of platonism -and hence of any knowledge system such as immunology which purports simply to describe or represent differences -can thus be formulated as "only that which is alike differs." the same always returns, insofar as it generates good copies, faithful imitations, paternally authorized by the %logos% of reason. it instates a hierarchy descending from the same to like, from being towards becoming. (hence the hierarchy of copies of the bed -idea, artifact, painting -to be found in book x of _the republic_, 596b-602b.) the method of recognition and selection by division constitutes "an exact definition of the world as icon." ^25^ this world-schema, within whose parameters science at least sometimes moves, does more than represent what is known. it actually selects or excludes various copies and representations on the grounds of their affiliation or non-affiliation to sameness. the mundane world, a body, or an immune self is thereby selected and affirmed as an icon or good representation of that which it copies: the same. [18] in this respect, haraway's ascription of %iconic% status to the "material-semiotic actor" of the immune system shares in the platonism of the determinations of self she so cogently reads in the text of immunology. if the immune system is read as an icon of difference, it pictorially represents more or less truthfully an imitated referent which exists elsewhere. read as icon, the immune system is condemned to remain within the hierarchical lineage of good or truthful claimants in the domain of mimetic representation.^26^ in its allegiances to platonism, this is also the operation of the immune system as constituted by immunology in its fundamental problematic of self and non-self. the immune system, insofar as it is governed by clonal selection (and insofar as it can be represented in the very ideal of a %system%), is said to function in order to exclude anything whose claim cannot be traced through a lineage of recognizable likeness founded in the complex genetic locus known as the major histocompatibility complex (mhc).^27^ the immunizing operation of immunology transpires through a theory that faithfully copies the platonic operation of selecting among claimants, of bringing differences within a hierarchy of models and copies dominated by the model of the same. [19] this way of looking at the immune system (and the world) has always cost dearly: it tends to preclude any relation with the outside other than the %allergic%. indeed derrida has argued that for platonism in general, the immortality and perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside. that is the case with god (cf. _republic_ ii, 381b-c). god has no allergies. health and virtue . . . , which are often associated in speaking of the body, and analogously, of the soul (cf. _gorgias_, 479b), always proceed from within. ^28^ [20] in conformity with clonal selection, immunological research privileges processes of selection that expel internal differences. through an innumerable series of mouse-obliterating grafts, transplants, exchanges, extractions, and the patient isolation and exclusion of immunological diversity through selective breeding (for instance, the "nude mice," lacking a thymus, often used in immunological work), immunologists have begun to map the complex molecular interactions of the immune system in terms of "marks" or coded traces. the guiding assumption: all the principal immune system cells involved in the immune response can recognize molecular markers on other cells, and these markers -%mhc antigens% -are elaborated by or refer back to genes in a certain region of the individual's mhc gene complex. no proper immune response against antigens is to be expected unless all the participating cells display appropriate markers of self derived from the same genetic source. indeed this attribute is now accepted as the operational basis of self in the immune system, although as golub admits, "we do not now how non-reactivity to self is maintained." ^29^ mhc restriction entails the platonic provision that the immune system can only react to "foreign" by recollecting an older, interior "self," ultimately sourced in genetic coding. unless "foreign bodies" are accompanied by the markings of "self," they will pass unnoticed. the immune system's reaction to antigens is therefore not an absolute barrier against all comers, but a selective response: only those outsiders who can be marked as "foreign" by self-identical mhc markers will elicit a response. like the soul who has gazed on the truth prior to the earthly phase of its cycle, immunology has argued that the system's marking begins prior to the body's nativity (during embryogenesis mhc markers are already starting to mark every cell in the body as self ^30^) and gradually accretes a memory of alterity through exposure to the infinite variety of antigens. difference within? [21] in the platonic world, the domain of faithful representation is demarcated and defended by the methods of selection and exclusion which determine the legitimacy of the copy or the representation by either establishing its hierarchical position in relation to the model of the same or excluding it from knowledge and reality altogether. similarly the general orientation of immunology has been towards understanding the immune system as maintaining a defended bodily self, brought about through processes which recognized antigens related to the same mhc and dealt with foreign (allogenic) bodies marked as without an internal resemblance to the same by reacting defensively against them. this approach, carried out by the platonic method of division and selection, is reproduced both in the inscriptive practices of immunology -the carefully controlled breeding of immunology's laboratory mice essentially ensures that all offspring-copies are purged of hidden genetic differences -and in the theoretical formulation of the hierarchical mechanisms of cellular interaction in the immune system: the mnemic self of clonal selection. clonal selection in conjunction with mhc restriction distinguishes those claimants with proper internal resemblances from the diseased, pathogenic and purely factitious resemblances presented by antigens. a false claimant -a %simulacrum% -within the field of recognition of the immune system initiates the proliferation of good copies (antibodies in particular) which will expunge interiorized dissimilitude. [22] this platonist commitment of immunology, although it permeates contemporary immunology and therefore needs to be taken into account, does not fully saturate it. another dynamic is operative there, and it threatens the overthrow of platonism. deleuze expresses it directly as "only differences are alike."^31^ another possible reading of the immunological potentialities of the body can be linked to this other-than-platonic rendering of the world. jerne, who formulated the strongly platonic motif of clonal selection which we have been following, also proposed a reading of the immune system that threatens the unity and %telos% of the system and the model of the same it is employed to support. the %network theory% describes a regulation of immune response in which clonal selection would be undercut by the incessant reverberations of internal differences. [23] the theory specifies that all possible antigens of the outside world are able to be recognized by the immune system because they reverberate with interactions between elements internal to the immune system. because every antibody within the system can interact with every other in a straightforward antigen-antibody reaction, i.e., every antibody can potentially mimic an antigen for some other antibody, the immune system will function through an unceasing cascade of internal responses. of the roughly ten million or so different antibodies of the body (each antibody responds to a single specific type of antigen), "a vast number of responses are going on all the time, even in the absence of foreign antigen."^32^ the equilibrium state of the immune system is a highly dynamic balance generated in a continual flux of differential relations. antigens, ostensibly pathogenically entering the body from the outside world, are internally imaged by antibodies acting as %defacto% antigens. the immune system is capable of responding to the immense diversity of natural antigens because the part of the antigen (the %epitope% or antigenic determinant) internally imaged by an antibody acting as antigen (in this role, it becomes an %idiotope%) is shared by a relatively large number of epitopes. the confrontation with a foreign body takes place not in the mode of a defensive mobilization but in terms of a reverberation or resonance with some element of the system already sounding its own glissando of response. varela and anspach write: %[t]he immune system fundamentally does not (cannot) discriminate between self and nonself.% the normal function of the network can only be perturbed or modulated by incoming antigens, responding only to what is similar to what is already present.^33^ an epitope would normally attract the response of a number of antibodies (an antibody acting as antibody in the network is called a paratope) because only part of it is imaged by a particular idiotope, and conversely, a specific paratope would most likely not be the only possible response to the epitope. a proliferating number of never fully equivalent paratopes respond to any particular epitope.^34^ [24] in consequence, the humoral "self" maintained by the immune system in responding to foreign bodies would not be a matter of selection and exclusion according to criteria of internal relation to identity. rather the identity of immune "self" would be produced as the effect of internal reverberations of disparate elements. the introduction of differences from the outside would thus effect nothing more than an amplification of certain reverberations already in play. as haraway puts it: in a sense, there could be no exterior antigen structure, no "invader" that the immune system had not already "seen" and mirrored internally.^35^ [25] the difference in response between "foreign" and "self" would be measured by the degrees of this quantitative amplification. the network theory implies that the immune system includes within itself the angle or point of view from which differences and distinctions between self and others are made, rather than having division imposed from above by a principle of selection based on resemblance to a foundational identity. thus, the immune response (insofar as it concerns the generation of antibodies) takes on that very same simulacral aspect which platonism has always, according to deleuze (and derrida), sought to exclude: in short, folded within the simulacrum there is the process of going mad, a process of limitlessness . . . a constant development, a gradual process of subversion of the depths, an adept avoidance of the equivalent, the limit, the same, or the like: always simultaneously more and less, but never equal.^36^ [26] interpreted as a simulacral entity, the immune system functions on the basis of internal disparities rather than on the basis of an internal likeness derived from a mnemic-genetic self. what immunology in its most explicitly platonist inspiration regards as the recognition of external differences, can be understood as a sign that "flashes between two bordering levels, between two communicating series,"^37^ a prolongation of the on-going interaction that is the functioning of the network. immunology's admission that "it is possible for an individual to make a productive antibody response against its own idiotypic [i.e. uniquely marking the individual] determinants" ^38^ shows that (lymphocytically expressed) self-identity cannot be the ultimate foundation of the immune response against which all claimants, foreign or otherwise, are to be measured. rather, the work of the simulacrum is a production of resemblances -between inside and outside, idiotopes and epitopes -through the resonance of divergent series. the effect of resemblance arises because the simulacrum (the sign generated between communicating series) "includes within itself the differential point of view."^39^ these resemblances can no longer be selected on the basis of their hierarchical position in relation to the same, because the system operates so as to render the notion of hierarchy between same and likeness infinitely reversible. there can be no order of model and successively degraded copies because everything -the resemblances, the relation between elements -begins in differences, in mobility, not in the sharing of an unsharable same. exclusion and selection of difference we ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.^40^ [27] how, in the pursuit of "resemblances" between platonism and the dominant immunizing strain of immunology, between the overthrow of platonism and a largely latent simulacral immunology, can biomedical ethics begin to assert the primacy of an ethical concern affirmed as embodiment or %ethos%? [28] the locus of ethical concern is ineluctably drawn into considering embodiment by virtue of the increasingly refined and comprehensive investments staged by bio-power around the management of living bodies. immunology is likewise confronted by a disintegration of the underpinnings of its disciplinary object -the immune system considered as a mode of self-identity. in the case of immunology, any bioethics that recognized the constitutive effects of biomedical discourses and practices in producing the self would have to accommodate an equivocal production: the simultaneous naturalizing of bodies as a self modelled on interior sameness and the denaturing of bodies across a mobile and contingent field of communicating but divergent series of differences. on the one hand, through the "myth" of a remembered exposure to identity (clonal selection) maintained by exclusion and division, immunology affirms platonism and lays down the laws of an immune system belonging to a world bound by the hierarchy of same and like, defended against representations without the proper internal resemblance. on the other hand, the problem of the %regulation% of the immune system's response produces an inversion of the principle of hierarchy, a mirroring confusion of borderlines between inside and outside and a corresponding complication of the lines between self and nonself. while the platonic motif suggests an attempt to maintain a bodily order and integrity in the face of the chaos threatening from the outside, against the foreigners that might insinuate themselves, the anti-platonic motif -read sympathetically -suggests the possibility of subverting the drive to master chaos by allowing resemblance and recognition only through internal dissimilitude, through the constantly decentered responses of divergent series.^41^ [29] aligning immunology to "whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure,"^42^ entails two principal but uncertain outcomes. first, the simulacral impulse in immunology uproots any single identifiable locus in which, finally and with certainty, the immune self could be located. in addition, the ethical substance of the immune self would, in the interplay of divergent series of mirrorings and reverberations between disparate elements placed in contact, appear as in experimental relation to alterity rather than as a conclusive ordering of likeness and divergence. [30] the primary characteristic of such an experimental orientation would be to augment the legions of nude mice and hybridomas currently employed by immunological laboratories with a version of the self able to affirm the complication within itself of heterogeneous series through real experience, whether this be of infection, disease, auto-immune reactions, allergies, grafts, transplants and so on. it is precisely the internal reverberation of divergent series that characterizes the simulacrum, and, i would argue, the simulacral processes of the network theory of immunity. in constantly generating a plethora of paratopes in response to the endless variety of idiotopes, the cascading activity of the immune system unravels any putative identity or unity of the embodied self. reframing the deracinated bodies of contemporary biomedical discourse within an ethical anti-platonism enables an immunological ethics that neither severs obligations to others (since its regulation would take the form of a "resonance" between differences that cannot be definitively divided according to interior self and exterior other) nor defends an immured self through a self-assertion that always regards differences as allergic. [31] the %ethos% of a self inhabited by interior differences would be more like the "window of vulnerability" that haraway speaks of: a mode of dwelling in which boundaries between individuals are hard to fix (this is not to say there are %no% boundaries, only that they are complicated), in which inside and outside are traversed by a non-identical self generated in the scintillations and reverberations of divergent series. immunology thus suggests that ethics need not begin and end in the privilege of an immune self. [32] moreover, if this self inhabited by differences is to assert itself over the iconic self, it cannot maintain the immune system (contrary to haraway's reading) or any other systematization of living bodies as an %icon% of symbolic or material differences. read as icon, any system, no matter how de-naturalized or differential in its operations, stands ready for re-incorporation in the world of representation, along with all the distinctions (model/copy, essence/appearance) and exclusions mobilized there. it is precisely this world, the world of representation, that the simulacrum calls into question by showing that the resemblance and identity which purportedly legitimize the icon are the outward effects of perhaps small internal differences. not selection, but the simulation of resemblance and identity; not hierarchy, but the "condensation of coexistences."^43^ under these conditions, the %ethos% appropriate to the biopolitically-sensitive immune self would not seize on postmodern icons but would evaluate sameness as the always contingent resonances and harmonics of divergent series. notes: ^1^ jacuqes derrida, "autobiographies: the teaching of nietzsche and the politics of the proper name," _the ear of the other_, trans. c. mcdonald, ed. p. kamuf (lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1988) 6. ^2^ emmanuel levinas, _totality & infinity_, trans. a. lingis, (pittsburgh: duquesne up, 1969) 129. ^3^ michel foucault, _the history of sexuality_, trans. r. hurley, (hammondsworth: penguin books, 1981) 138. ^4^ foucault 139-140. ^5^ two papers about bioethics strongly influence this discussion: rosalyn diprose, "a `genethics' that makes sense?" in r. diprose & r. ferrell, eds _cartographies: poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces_, (sydney: allen and unwin, 1991); and donna haraway, "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse," _differences_, 1.1 (winter, 1989). ^6^ haraway 1. ^7^ foucault 142. ^8^ foucault 143. ^9^ haraway 14. ^10^ haraway 15. ^11^ golub, edward s., _immunology : a synthesis_ (sinauer associates, 1987) 416. ^12^ varela, francisco and mark anspach "the body thinks: the immune system in the process of somatic individuation" in _materialities of communication_, trans. w. whobrey, eds. h.u. gumbrecht and k.l. pfeiffer (stanford: stanford up, 1994) 273. ^13^ haraway 37. ^14^ golub 67. ^15^ haraway 2. ^16^ haraway 14-16. ^17^ golub 380. ^18^ gilles deleuze, _spinoza: practical philosophy, trans. r. hurley (san francisco: city lights books, 1988) 23. ^19^ golub 1. ^20^ golub 1. ^21^ golub 9. ^22^ gilles deleuze, "plato and the simulacrum," _october_ winter 1983: 49. ^23^ varela 278. ^24^ deleuze 46. ^25^ deleuze 52. ^26^ see deleuze, 47-48. ^27^ "each person has a group of genes, the %major histocompatability complex or mhc%, which codes for self-antigens." see l. sherwood, _human physiology: from cells to systems_ (st paul: west publishing company, 1989) 391. self-antigens mark each one of a person's cells, thereby allowing the recognition of cells as proper to the individual. a more technical explanation states: "major histocompatibility complex (mhc). mammalian gene complex of several highly polymorphic linked loci encoding glycoproteins involved in many aspects of immunological recognition, both between lymphoid cells and between lymphocytes and antigen-presenting cells." see _the new penguin dictionary of biology_, 8th ed. (hammondsworth: penguin books, 1990) 340. also see, for an even more disconcertingly technical explanation: golub chap. 17. ^28^ jacques derrida, "plato's pharmacy," _dissemination_, trans. b. johnson, (chicago: u of chicago p, 1981) 101-102. ^29^ golub 481. for that matter, non-reactivity to self isn't always maintained, as the multifarious auto-immune reactions show. ^30^ golub 222, 421. ^31^ deleuze 52. ^32^ niels jerne, quoted by golub 384. haraway 22-23 provides a clear explanation of the network theory. ^33^ varela 283. ^34^ this diversity of possible responses to a given epitope is accentuated by the fact that "antibodies seem to recognize the three-dimensional configuration and charge distribution of an antigen rather than its chemical make-up as such." _the new penguin dictionary of biology_ 33. ^35^ haraway 23. ^36^ deleuze 49. ^37^ deleuze 52. ^38^ golub 386. ^39^ deleuze 49. ^40^ friedrich nietzsche, _the gay science_, trans. w. kaufmann (new york: vintage, 1974) s319. ^41^ on these different relations to chaos, and the connection they have with two different types of eternal return, the platonic and nietzschean, see deleuze, "plato and the simulacrum" 54-55. ^42^ jacues derrida, _positions_, trans. a. bass (chicago: u of chicago p, 1981) 36. ^43^ deleuze 53. works cited: deleuze, gilles. "plato and the simulacrum." _october_ (winter 1983): 43. ---. _spinoza: practical philosophy_. trans. r. hurley. san francisco: city lights books, 1988. derrida, jacques. "otobiographies: the teaching of nietzsche and the politics of the proper name," _the ear of the other_. trans. p. kamuf, ed. c. mcdonald. lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1988. ---. "plato's pharmacy." _dissemination_. trans. b. johnson. chicago: u of chicago p, 1981. ---. _positions_. trans. a. bass. chicago: u of chicago p, 1981. diprose, rosalyn. "a 'genethics' that makes sense?" _cartographies: poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces_. sydney: allen and unwin, 1991. golub, edward s. _immunology: a synthesis_. sinauer associates, 1987. haraway, donna. "the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse." _differences_ 1.1 (1989). nietzsche, friedrich. _the will to power_. trans. w. kaufmann. new york: vintage books, 1968. ---. _the gay science_. trans. w. kaufmann. new york: vintage books, 1974. scott, charles e. _the question of ethics_. indiana up, 1990. sherwood, l. _human physiology: from cells to systems_. st paul: west publishing company, 1989. varela, f. and m. anspach. "the body thinks: the immune system in the process of somatic individuation." _materialities of communication_. trans. w. whobrey. eds. h. u. gumbrecht and k. l. pfeiffer. stanford: stanford up, 1994. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------helmling, 'jameson's lacan', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-helmling-jamesons.txt archive pmc-list, file helmling.996. part 1/1, total size 39402 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- jameson's lacan by steven helmling university of delaware helmling@brahms.udel.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by steven helmling, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. [1] fredric jameson's career-long engagement with jacques lacan begins in the pages on lacan in _the prison-house of language_, with the declaration that lacan's work offers an "initiatory" experience rather than an expository account. it is in the spirit of that experiential or "dialectical" emphasis that jameson proposes an off-standard response to what (he says) most people receive as lacan's "programmatic slogan," that "%l'inconscient, c'est le discours de l'autre%": this seems to me a sentence rather than an idea, by which i mean that it marks out the place of a meditation and offers itself as an object of exegesis, instead of serving as the expression of a single concept. (_phl_ 170-1) in this essay i want to indicate what seem to me to be the parameters of lacan's importance for jameson. i begin with this passage, in which jameson discriminates lacan's "idea" from his "sentence," in order to emphasize that lacan and jameson share a central problematic: the indissociability of what lacan calls the "spirit" that motivates an enunciation and the "letter," at once spirit's vehicle and its betrayer, of the %enounce% that "*it* speaks" (%ca parle%). i aim not to bracket "meaning" here, but to highlight what seems to me lacan's most immediate interest for jameson, namely his sense, both as a problem for exposition and as the condition or "motivation" of his gnomic, enigma-mongering prose style, of what jameson calls "the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language" (_phl_ 169). [2] jameson subsequently elaborates this "mystery" into the antagonism between the inevitability of "meaning," its social, collective, constructed, conditioned, and thus (for jameson) *ideological* character, and a cartesian ideology of the self or "subject" that is rooted in and implies a speaker's desire (futile perhaps, but only the more poignant for that) to "mean" things that haven't been meant before, to make new and "original" meanings, to escape the entrapment (what jameson calls the "ideological closure") imposed by the "order of the signifier." at issue are the ways in which *how* "it" is said may change or affect *what* is said--an issue, or "motivation," fundamental to the deliberate, self-conscious, and exorbitant "difficulty" of both jameson's *and* lacan's notoriously idiosyncratic prose styles. for jameson, lacan's writing is exemplary in not merely enacting, but inflicting upon the reader, all the dilemmas (inside/outside, same/different, surface/depth, written/spoken, temporal/spatial) to which highbrow postmodernity finds itself returning like a dog to a bone. reading lacan, your bafflement can't decide whether you are trying to gain entry to something, or effect an escape from it--even if (indeed, no matter how many times) you've already surmised that the best model this prose offers of itself is the lacanian "real," whose definitive measure is the success or failure with which it "resists symbolization absolutely." this is a prose in which the law of non-contradiction does not prevail, a medium solvent enough to diffuse, but also stiff enough to suspend, every precipitate released into or catalyzed within it.^1^ [3] jameson accesses the multifold issues entangled here by way of a term he borrows from the opening pages of barthes's _s/z_, "the %scriptible%"--not the "culinary" pleasure of "the %lisible%," the "readerly" text so consumably written that (so to speak) it does your reading for you, but rather a "writerly" kind of writing that is (jameson's word, not barthes's) "dialectical": "sentences," as jameson puts it in "the ideology of the text" (1975/6), "whose %gestus% arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own (_it1_ 21; "sentence" here, as elsewhere in jameson, is a code-word for "the %scriptible%"--as in the quotation above, "a sentence rather than an idea"). the notion of "%gestus%" here suggests something physical, somatic: textuality as not a condition or premise of writing or language as such, but, more contingently, an energy, a contagion of excitement that prompts an "emulation" evidently free of the "anxieties of influence" so potently featured in harold bloom's conception of literary transference. what is in question is not a point-for-point verbal "imitation" of distinctive stylistic effects, tics or mannerisms, but a sympathy at once libidinal and intellectual. [4] barthes's "%scriptible%" opposes itself to "the %lisible%" as one style to another style; only by implication does "the %lisible%" encode a wariness of too lazy or complacent a reception of the usual "other" of "style," namely "content." hence, jameson cautions, another "repression" encoded in the "%scriptible/ lisible%" binary, that of "content" itself, which, in an older critical discourse, functioned as the term polar or binary to "style," style's "other." much of jameson's effort has been to probe the possibilities of finding base-and-superstructure linkages between what he calls the "logic of content" in a given work and the "ideological closure" it enforces. (despite his wariness of "our old friends, base and superstructure," jameson's work cannot help continued deployment of spectral versions of them.) jameson's insistence on "content," on the "referent," is one of the larger themes of his critique of "the ideology of structuralism," or any "ideology of text" that would "reduce" everything to textuality, %ecriture%, "textual production" or representation; and in this jameson is happy to find support in the nominally "structuralist" psychoanalysis of lacan. structuralist linguistics projects the binary of "signifier" and "signified" as recto and verso of (a third term) "the sign"; but between them the three terms delimit a domain strictly coextensive with the field or problematic of "representation," with no access to (or, in some structuralisms, interest in) any reality beyond it. by contrast, lacan's linguistics-influenced, saussurean, and to that extent structuralist account of mental processes nevertheless situates their range from "imaginary" to "symbolic" *within* a larger extra-representational (and, indeed, extra-psychological) field, that of "the real," which (for jameson) guarantees the "materialism" of marxism and psychoanalysis both. jameson argues for a marxism-friendly lacan when he grandly pronouces of "the real" that "it is simply [!] history [capital h] itself" (_it1_ 104; recall here as well jameson's enthusiasm for slavoj zizek, whose project might be summarized as the attempt to elaborate a specifically lacanian %ideologiekritik%.) [5] thus does jameson enlist lacan in his "materialist" critique of structuralism, and the danger that he regards as inherent in its linguistic or textual focus, of entrapment in its own central metaphor, so that "language" becomes a "prison-house."^2^ this negative, or critical, deployment of lacan remains constant in jameson from _the prison-house of language_ (1972) through the major essay, "imaginary and symbolic in lacan" (1977), and beyond. a more positive use of lacan appears in _fables of aggression_ (1979) and _the political unconscious_ (1981), especially the latter book's third chapter, "balzac and the problem of the subject," which jameson would later (1986) call an effort at "lacanian criticism."^3^ by this jameson meant a criticism capable of achieving mediations between the social and the individual that could draw on psychoanalysis without reducing the social to the categories of individual psychology. for jameson's purposes, that is, lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis holds out the prospect of an analytically potent psychology *not* grounded in categories of cartesian subjectivity, and thus (although jameson nowhere puts it quite this way) able to fulfil althusser's stipulation in being a psychology "without a subject." jameson seeks a psychology that would render the representation of "character" in works of fiction amenable to issues of literary history as "genre" and "form," and would thus invite the sort of politically and socially informed attention called for in jameson's famous imperative, "always historicize!" (_pu_ 9). [6] the success of jameson's "lacanian criticism" may be assessed in _fables of aggression_ and _the political unconscious_; but i want to pass to another, more complex issue at stake for jameson, especially in the latter book, and best introduced by citing that book's subtitle, "narrative as a socially symbolic act," which encodes the premise that fictional (and other) narratives are "symbolic" of forces, tensions, contradictions in what jameson calls "the vast text of the social itself," and thus that there must be some access (again, on something like the base-and-superstructure model) between the novel and "history itself." but the corrolary of this claim for "narrative as socially symbolic act" is that narrative cannot *escape* determination by what jameson calls an "ideological closure." the more potently "symbolic" it is, the feebler becomes its potential as a liberatory "act." which raises, implicitly, a question very close to jameson's quick indeed, that of whether critique can escape "ideological closure" any better than narrative can. to ask the question another way, must "socially symbolic" mean "ideological"? can it ever escape reduction to "ideology"? can it ever mean or achieve anything else? (note that the possible comforts of such a notion as "relative autonomy" count for nothing in jameson's all-or-nothing dramatization of the issue.) [7] the question takes various forms, and tilts in the direction of various answers, in _the political unconscious_--suspended, and agitated, in jameson's inimitable fashion. but the general drift of the book is melancholy: his very premise presupposes a negative answer--though never, to be sure, unequivocally negative; the prose always evinces that "dialectic of utopia and ideology" named in the title of the book's concluding chapter. but among the largest hopes the book entertains for critique *or* for "narrative" is one cast in specifically lacanian terms: that, somehow (unspecified), it might become a "socially symbolic act" in a fashion that would merit capitalizing the s in "symbolic": that would merit, in short, taking narrative's or critique's power as "symbolic" in a specifically lacanian sense. most of the book functions, that is, as if "narrative as a socially symbolic act" encodes narrative's "closure" *within* ideology; but at certain moments, especially at the close of the balzac chapter, jameson seems willing to talk as if the term "symbolic" might indicate the condition of a possible critical escape from the prison-house of ideology, a break-out from the "ideological closure" the book protests. as if, in other words, "narrative [or critique] as a socially symbolic act" [capital s] would mean surmounting a more normatively (and inescapably) ideological condition or closure in which cultural production could function only, inescapably, by definition, as "socially *imaginary* act"--and from which any critical or utopian "escape" would therefore be sheer ideological (or "imaginary") delusion (see especially _pu_ 183, where the locution "symbolic texts" [capital s] is played off against "imaginary" [capital i] in a fashion to make the lacanian freight unmistakable). [8] we will shortly consider why jameson's binary of "ideology" and "utopia" cannot be simply "transcoded" into lacan's "imaginary" and "symbolic." but his fitful readiness to hope that it might encodes another of lacan's attractions for jameson, namely his hegelianism--a recurrent, if undeveloped, theme in "imaginary and symbolic in lacan." it is shrewd of jameson to have noted that lacan's freud is a hegelian freud, in contrast to the (normatively) nietzschean freuds "theory" has mostly generated; but i think jameson overplays his hand here: lacan's "imaginary" and "symbolic" don't quite bear the freight he wants them to carry; though jameson's own caution against deploying the passage from "imaginary" to "symbolic" as a version of the levi-straussian nature-to-culture motif perhaps says all that needs saying in anticipation of my reservations here (_it1_ 97). but the (hegelian) point is that for lacan *and* jameson, the "imaginary/ symbolic" binary encodes a *narrative*, modeled on the hegelian course from "immediate" to "mediated," of transit from a "lower" to a "higher" state, in which the "lower" is %aufgehoben%, transcended yet preserved, in the "higher." lacan, in my view, plays the hegelian dialectic ironically; hence the continual %schadenfreude% of his textual voice, the continual irony at the expense of "the symbolic" itself in its very aspiration ("stoic" and/or "tragic," to use jameson's terms of praise for lacan [_it1_ 98, 112], but either way, doomed) to disintricate itself from "the imaginary." [9] however all that may be, jameson takes lacan's hegelian (and other) flourishes more straightforwardly, and thus finds in lacan's "imaginary/symbolic," notwithstanding the essay's earlier denunciation of "ethics," something like an "ethic"--"an implicit ethical imperative" (in jane gallop's words), "to break the mirror...to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach the symbolic.'"^4^ indeed, the quasi-or crypto-hegelian narrativization of this ethic projects a scenario of change and progress, development and %aufhebung%: it provides, in other words, for the continual coming-into-being of fresh perspectives, different from or "outside" of those preceding them, and thus allowing for "critical" reconsideration of them--in the context of this discussion, allowing one of the larger "desires" (or more hegelian hopes) of _the political unconscious_, that the word "symbolic" in its subtitle can mean the genuinely "critical," and not merely "ideological" in sense of "an imaginary solution to a real contradiction." [10] but where hegel was, there shall heidegger be--"there," above all, in the field of what solicits jameson's interest as a specifically lacanian "%scriptible%." and since, for jameson, "interest" is proportional to problematicality, we must again acknowledge--indeed, insist on--the inextricability of lacan's "%scriptible%" from his "content." this sketch so far, for example, has required brief exposition of "arguments" or "positions"; likewise jameson's own discussions of lacan, except (of course) much much more so. it's arguable, in fact, that of the many high "theory" figures and issues jameson has written about none has so forced him into the "expository" mode as lacan. lacan's prose is calculated to confound every possible logic of "argument" or "position," yet jameson is not alone in the dilemma that discussion of lacan is obliged to ascribe something argumentor position-like to him in order to conduct itself at all. hence the ironic quotation marks with which jameson refers to "lacanianism" (_it1_ 95)--a term, indeed, that gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. we return herewith to the problem announced at this paper's opening: the desire of the "speaking subject" to speak (or write) a way out of the entrapment, the necessity, the "ideological closure" of "meaning," or what the later jameson calls, in a term borrowed from paul de man, "thematization"^5^--a term, in jameson's usage, for the form (or threat) of "reification" specific to intellectual work, and to properly "dialectical" projects like his own (if, indeed, the word "dialectical" isn't simply an apotropaism, the sign of a project's self-consciousness of the danger of, and its desire to escape, "thematization"). [11] "thematization," indeed, could serve as the "other" of "the %scriptible%"--its "other" in the pointed sense of its antagonist, or its special pitfall or danger. jameson's sense of the energies of "the %scriptible%" in doomed agon with "thematization" may be read as another version of his "dialectic of utopia and ideology"; it can also be read as a version, indeed, a less "irreversible" (i.e., less narrative, and less hegelian) version, of his account of "imaginary and symbolic in lacan." but my point here is that quite apart from any paraphraseable doctrine or portable "thematization" of lacan--from any "lacanianism," in short--jameson discerns in lacan's oracular and evasive, but also ingenious, witty, and energetic prose another instance of a %scriptible% well worth "emulation," another exemplar of the effort to evade or disable in advance the "thematizations" any discourse, however "dialectically" written, must suffer in an age of "consumerist" reification. [12] as noted above, jameson in one of his aspects is an enforcer of "content" on those who would evade it; but his stress on "content" means to facilitate analysis and protest, perhaps even exorcism of, or breakout from, its pernicious "ideological closure." the motif of "the %scriptible%" encodes this protest against "the logic of content," this hope or desire to escape the constraints of "ideological closure," at its most utopian and libidinal. and so it is as a prose stylist that i want to feature lacan's interest for jameson in what remains --well aware as i do so that for many readers, precisely the impenetrable prose of these two figures is the primary stumbling block for any approach to their work. such readers suppose, or hope, that the value of a jameson or a lacan is in a "content" that would be available *after* the difficulties of "style" have been obviated. but it is part of the appeal of "the %scriptible%" for jameson to confound any such "thematizing" habit of reading that would aim at an instrumental extraction of content from a stylistic skin that, once evacuated, can be properly left behind. it is one of the marks of "the %scriptible%" in jameson that he does *not* judge its exemplars on the propositional "content," or "argument," of their writing --as witness two of his favorite figures, wyndham lewis and martin heidegger, notoriously "right," and at times explicitly fascist, in their politics. the presence of heidegger in lacan's work, of course, is evident; jameson links the two as exemplars of a twentieth-century critique of subject-object dichotomizing, "identity" thinking, correspondence or "adequation" theories of "truth," the devolution of %techne% into technology, the instrumentalization of knowledge as "mastery," etc. (_it1_ 103-5). [13] in "imaginary and symbolic in lacan," jameson gathers these heideggerian concerns under the lacanian rubric, "the overestimation of the symbolic at the expense of the imaginary" (_it1_ 95, 102; cf. _phl_ 140). heidegger an lacan (and jameson himself) thus stand as petitioners for the claims of "the imaginary" *against* those, already over-esteemed in our reifying culture, of "the symbolic." and here we abut jameson's twin enthusiasms for the sublime nutsiness of lyotard's _libidinal economy_ and for the deleuze-guattari thematic and practice, in _anti-oedipus_, of the "schizo" and the "delirious."^6^ both of these enthusiasms align with, though they can appear at times to displace or eclipse, jameson's announced admiration for lacan. and although neither lyotard, on the one hand, still less deleuze and guattari on the other, are exactly fans of lacan, jameson's mediations proceed at a level--that of "sentence" rather than of "idea"--where their substantive dissents from each other can remain in abeyance. in _fables of aggression_ and _the political unconscious_ the libidinal and the schizo are assigned the burden of the heideggerian-lacanian alternative to "the symbolic"--in creative or imaginative writing, of course, but as the examples of lyotard and deleuze and guattari (and lewis, if not quite so unreservedly heidegger and lacan themselves) insist, in critical writing as well. in the program chapter to _postmodernism_, jameson will project these affective properties as "sublime," and as such, both a program and a problem for his own work. [14] yet above, the very possibility of critique, the very possibility of its power to escape "ideological closure," was figured as its potential to surmount "the [ideological] imaginary" and ascend to "the [critical] symbolic." here, jameson valorizes a desire to head in the other direction. here, "the symbolic" itself is the "ideology" from which escape is hoped for, by way not of the stratospheric mediations of critique, but rather of the affective immediacies of "the imaginary." i alluded above to the difficulties of "transcoding" lacan's "imaginary/symbolic" binary into jameson's "ideology/ utopia"; part of what obstructs that "transcoding" is that it requires, on one side of the bar, an equation of "utopia" with "critique" that feels counter-intuitive, insofar as "utopia" says pleasure and the libidinal, and embraces the collective; whereas "critique" implies a cerebral %ascesis% that will necessarily, even in utopia, be the concern of specialized elites. to put it more schematically: on one pass (call it the hegelian), the lacan's "imaginary/symbolic" binary seems to align with jameson's "ideology/critique," implying a liberatory narrative of progressive possibility; on the other (the heideggerian), it aligns rather with that of "utopia/ideology," a story in which what masqueraded (and seduced) as progress eventuates at last, ironically, in decline, loss, nostalgia, and abjection before the exactions of %ananke%. in short: if "ideology" is our starting point, is the passage to the "schizo" a flight or a fall, an ascent or a descent, a progress or a regress? [15] this difficulty (not to call it a "contradiction") indicates much of the conflictedness jameson registers when he describes the lacanian "ethic" as "stoic" and "tragic"; it indicates as well the ambitions of, the mediations proposed in, and the contradictions bedeviling the jamesonian "%scriptible,%" a prose whose potency is at once analytical and libidinal. "imaginary and symbolic in lacan," indeed, ends by inferring from lacan something like an ethic or ethos for "cultural intellectuals," one which would eschew the "symbolic" critical "mastery" of "subject" over "object" in favor of a more *intersubjective* "articulated receptivity," for which jameson enlists the lacanian "discourse of the analyst": the "discourse of the analyst," finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. like the "discourse of the hysteric," this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter's existential urgencies--in a fashion more dialectical than ironic. the "discourse of the analyst," then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire's subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). this is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority...; rather it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (%l'ecoute%), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the other's desire. the active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts. (_it1_ 115) this "active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial of this final subject position," forecasts jameson's later recommendation that critique now must conduct itself "homeopathically," from the inside, suffering ideology's own virulences the better to turn them against it.^7^ [16] the ambition operative here, however, is for a mediation of "imaginary" and "symbolic" in an %ascesis% at once active and passive, of "listening" attention that can achieve contact with "the real," which jameson has equated, "simply," with "history itself." here the demands jameson makes of critique, and of his own critical practice, rely less on lacan's categories than on his example as a writer, on that peculiar lacanian "%scriptible%," so elusive and yet so evocative of a "real" that, as lacan says, "resists symbolization absolutely"--a formula in which the word "symbolization" bears not only the full lacanian charge, but also obvious affinities to "thematization," the condition jameson hopes his own writing practice may disable if not altogether prevent or escape. (lacan's cagy prose, we may note by the way, resists "thematization" more effectively--or resists "symbolization" more "absolutely"--than jameson's own.) granted that critique, that utterance of any kind, cannot "resist thematization absolutely"; such is lacan's stoic-tragic, but also comic and even sarcastic theme. jameson's later prose derives its effects from making much, the most possible, both of the (imperative) attempt, and of the (inevitable) failure. much: but what exactly?--a "socially symbolic act"? a "socially *real* act"? in _the political unconscious_, jameson will elaborate "history itself" ("what hurts") as "absent cause," and thus as "unrepresentable" and "unsymbolizable" in ways that, in _postmodernism_, will require or justify, or "motivate," a rhetoric of "the sublime"--a designation apt, i think, for at least some of the grander effects of the later jameson's tortured "%scriptible%." lacan's terminology permits us to indicate the anxieties often powering these passages by way of the question, can jameson's critical "sublime" escape "the imaginary" and broach "the real"? the difficulty, of course, is how to know the difference--or even how to know whether the difference itself is "imaginary" or "real." [17] oddly, however, although lacan's prose is much more "difficult" than jameson's, these particular difficulties, signally, feel much more "difficult" in jameson's prose than in lacan's. for all lacan's sarcasms at the expense of "%le sujet suppose savoir%," it is just such a "knowingness" that lacan's prose projects: a knowingness, notably, from which the reader is excluded. ("the reader" here, of course, means *this* reader, who is happy to project himself, in the context of reading lacan, as %un sujet suppose ne pas savoir%.) the agitations of jameson's prose, by contrast, project its "difficulties" as difficulties reader and writer have in common, dilemmas incurred by the shared desire to know confronting the insecurity, or the anxiety, incurred by jameson's and our own critical scruples. to this extent lacan suggests one way of getting a handle on the "motivations" of jameson's notoriously agitated prose. jameson often alludes to a "dialectic of utopia and ideology," but also operant in his writing, as we have seen, is that other dialectic, that other binary, which projects as the "other" of "ideology" not "utopia" but "critique." can critique ever ascend beyond the closure of the "socially symbolic" to "act" upon the elusive, absent, unsymbolizable "socially real"? that is the form in which lacan enables jameson to dramatize the ambitions, or agitate the desires, both critical and "writerly," of his writing. notes: ^1^ it may be helpful here to observe that jameson and lacan share an alignment programmatically rejected by many, most saliently derrida, for whom any talk of "the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language" would be almost too caricaturally deconstructible. hence at least some of jameson's evident wariness of derrida, from _the prison-house of language_ (1971) through "marx's purloined letter" (1995). of special relevance in the latter essay are the pages in which jameson improvises a genealogy descending from hegel for the problem of how philosophical/critical writing is written--a problem manifesting in derrida as "a certain set of taboos" enforcing "an avoidance of the affirmative sentence as such," and, hence, a prose "vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent to avoid saying something" ("mpl" 81). jameson goes on to insist that somehow or other, nevertheless, "content [is] generated" in derrida; but despite his mildly ironic tone at derrida's expense, the problem is one that he elsewhere, in connection with other writers, stages as quite an anguishing one (see, e.g., the pages on "dialectical writing" in _marxism and form_ [xii-xiii and the adorno chapter, %passim%]; the passage on barthes's "writing with the body" in "pleasure: a political issue" [_it2_ 69]; the lament against "thematization" in _late marxism_ [_lm_ 183]; the plangent reprise on the barthesian %scriptible% in _signatures of the visible_ [_sv_ 2-4]. i have written about some of these problems at greater length in "marxist 'pleasure': fredric jameson and terry eagleton," _pmc_ 3.3 [may 1993]). other marxists (e.g., eagleton) complain that derrida is "apolitical"; jameson's take seems to be that derrida's proscription of "metaphysics" secures some of its gains a bit too facilely: for jameson, the largest stakes, the success or failure, of theory or critique are at play only when ideology and metaphysics figure not as mere errors, or false consciousness (as if banishing false consciousness were as simple as calling it "false"), but as fated burdens: "sublime object(s)," or desired/hated "symptom(s)," in zizek's cheerful, cheeky lacanian terms, whose "closure" critique can only fitfully protest--with the further irony that the very protest only confirms them. jameson seems to me to miss the degree to which derrida has recently begun to spin his longstanding motif of "affirmative deconstruction" in ways that suggest a greater hospitality to such patently "metaphysical" constructions as "the mystery of the incarnation of meaning in language"; i'm thinking especially of the motif of "the undeconstructible" in _the gift of death_ (trans. david wills [university of chicago press: chicago, 1992]) and _specters of marx_ (trans. peggy kamuf [routledge: new york, 1994]). "the undeconstructible" encompasses such terms as "god," "responsibility," "spirit," "justice," and "a certain experience of the emancipatory [elsewhere, "messianic"] promise..."--motifs you could fairly call "specters of (late) derrida." ^2^ for marxism and psychoanalysis as "materialisms," see _it1_ 104-5; for this critique of structuralism, see _phl_ %passim%, especially (for lacan) 169-73. ^3^ _it1_ 97, and 195 n45. note that jameson does *not* nominate _fables of aggression_ as an example of "lacanian criticism"--perhaps because though it deals with the problems he regards as belonging to "lacanian criticism" (the insertion of the subject into ideology), he foregrounds lyotard's "libidinal apparatus" rather than any lacanian vocabulary. (in like manner, as we will see below, deleuze and guattari displace--or sublate: simultaneously "cancel *and* preserve"--lacan in the opening chapter, "on interpretation," of _the political unconscious_.) lacan persists in _fables of aggression_ mostly via the mediation of althusser. still, the elision of lacan, only two years after the programmatic claims based on him in "imaginary and symbolic in lacan," is at the very least surprising. ^4^ for jameson's denunciation of "ethics" in "imaginary and symbolic in lacan" (1977), see _it1_ 58, 87, 95; cf "criticism in history," %ibid%., 123-6; _fa_ 56; _pu_ 59, 234. (jameson more accommodatingly reconsiders "ethics" in "morality versus ethical substance; or, aristotelian marxism in alasdair macintyre" [1983/4], _it1_ 181-5). for the jane gallop passage, see _reading lacan_ (ithaca and london: cornell up, 1985), 59. gallop and jameson acknowledge each other's work, and make some show of taking exception to each other, but on this their views are quite similar. ^5^ for a suggestive jamesonian deployment of the term "thematization," see, e.g., _late marxism: adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic_ (1991), 182-3: "proving equal to adorno...doing right by him, attempting to keep faith with the protean intelligence of his sentences, requires a tireless effort--always on the point of lapsing--to prevent the *thematization* [jameson's italics] of his concept[s]..." ^6^ the most relevant lacan texts in this connection are "the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious" (1960) and, to a lesser extent, "on a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis" (1958), in _ecrits: a selection_, trans. alan sheridan (new york: w.w. norton, 1977), 292-325, 179-225. ^7^ "to undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself, to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what i have called substitutes for history." jameson in a 1986 interview with anders stephanson, "regarding postmodernism," in douglas kellner, ed., _postmodernism/jameson/critique_ (washington dc: maisonneuve press, 1989), 59. works cited: _fa_: _fables of aggression: wyndham lewis, the modernist as fascist_. u of california p: berkeley, 1979. _it1_: _the ideologies of theory: essays 1971-1986, volume 1: situations of theory_. u of minnesota p: minneapolis, 1988. _it2_: _the ideologies of theory: essays 1971-1986, volume 2: the syntax of history_. u of minnesota p: minneapolis, 1988. _m&f_: _marxism and form: twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature_. princeton up: princeton, 1971. "mpl": "marx's purloined letter." _new left review_ 209 (january/february 1995), 75-109. _phl_: _the prison-house of language: a critical account of structuralism and russian formalism_. princeton up: princeton, 1972. _pu_: _the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act_. cornell up: ithaca, 1981. _sv_: _signatures of the visible_. routledge: new york, 1992. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------gross, 'disorder of being: heroes, martyrs, and the holocaust', postmodern culture v5n2 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n2-gross-disorder.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.195. part 1/1, total size 30619 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- a disorder of being: heroes, martyrs, and the holocaust by alan g. gross department of rhetoric university of minnesota-twin cities agross@maroon.tc.umn.edu postmodern culture v.5 n.2 (january, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by alan gross, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] i am looking at a photograph of a double line of children--girls before, boys behind--waiting patiently for their %mikvah% or ritual bath. all the boys are dressed in suits and all wear hats, mostly men's felt hats with brims. one boy in the rear foreground turns toward the photographer, roman vishniak, who takes the picture with a hidden camera. (these are orthodox jews who object to photography on religious grounds.) it is a sunny day in 1937 in carpathian ruthenia in an area that was to become a part of hungary two years later. [2] by 1945, by the time these boys and girls would have reached their late teens, they were, in all likelihood, dead at the hands of the hungarian fascists or the nazis. their survival was possible, too; lucy dawidowicz estimates that thirty percent of the hungarian jews survived the war (403). but the point is that the war did not merely disrupt, it dislocated their lives, whatever the event. even had they happened to survive, they would have had no lives to return to. jewish life on the european continent, which had survived fifteen hundred years of anti-semitism, did not survive five years of nazi rule. thus the collection of which the photograph i have described forms a part, is entitled, appropriately, _a vanished world_. [3] the significant distant between disruption and dislocation can be measured by comparing the recent steven spielberg film, _schindler's list_ with an incident recounted in langer's _holocaust testimony_. in the film, the ending is managed so as to give the impression that the jews freed by the allies were in fact free, that is, after an extended episode of incarceration, they experienced the pleasure of anticipation that a return to their normal pre-war lives would mean. this would have been especially true of the schindler jews, who had been protected during the war by their eccentric industrialist-benefactor. in reasonably good health, and reasonably well-fed, they are poised on the threshold of their new lives. in such a state, naturally, they bestow upon their erstwhile benefactor the gratitude he deserves. at the film's end, real-life schindler jews who have happened to survive enact the jewish ritual of placing small stones on his tombstone, a gesture of respect, even of homage. [4] the reality of the schindler jews is another matter altogether. in the fortunoff video archive for holocaust testimonies at yale there exists the testimony of the son of two actual schindler jews, menachem s. in 1943, his parents, fearing the worst, smuggled the five-year-old out of a polish labor camp in the hope that he would survive the war under the protection of some polish christian family. his parents promised to retrieve him after the war, a promise that they managed to keep, since they survived under schindler's protection. nevertheless their reunion defeats all of our expectations of a happy ending. both parents are emaciated; the six-foot tall father weights only eighty-eight pounds; his rotted teeth hang loosely from his gums. [5] menachim s. sees little resemblance between these people and his memory of his parents and, not surprisingly, he does not recognize them. in a scene ironically and accidentally reminiscent of odysseus's recognition by his old servant at his return, menachim s. holds up the picture of his mother given to him at their parting. recognition, however, does not ensue. "i just couldn't believe," he says, "that they were my parents." for some time he calls them mr.and mrs. s, rather than father and mother. [6] lawrence langer, whose account of the incident i have so far been paraphrasing, gets the meaning of this episode exactly right, one more insightful analysis in a masterpiece of analysis: the bizarre spectacle of an adult speaking of a seven-year-old child remembering his five-year-old self as an unrecapturable identity reminds us of the complex obstacles that frustrate a coherent narrative view of the former victim's ordeal from the vantage point of the present. . . . memory functions here to discredit the idea of family unity and to confirm an order of being--or more precisely, a disorder of being--that appears to the witness to have been the unique creation of the holocaust experience. (111-112) [7] this contrast between hollywood and reality reveals just how spielberg has betrayed the memory of holocaust survivors like menachem s. he has concealed beneath the veneer of a conventional narrative of separation and reunion the uncomfortable truth that the conditions of captivity rendered such conventional narrative impossible. [8] what could have permitted such a desecration of character? to some, it may matter that the victims of the holocaust were diaspora jews, trained to survive by passivity. they should have known, they should have struggled actively against their oppressors. for those who say this, these sentences translate into: *i* would have known, *i* would have struggled to maintain my sense of self. in _surplus of memory_, yitzhak zuckman, a survivor of the warsaw uprising, shows the flaw in this self-serving view. of foreknowledge of the holocaust, he says: we read in _mein kampf_ that hitler would destroy the jews; we read his speech in the reichstag. but we didn't take it seriously. even today, who would consider every expression of anti-semitism? we saw it as rhetoric, not as the expression of something he intended to carry out. the idea was %iberleben%--we'll get through this. (69) on the question of the link between traditional jewish passivity and the holocaust, zuckerman does not mince words: when i talk to young people, . . . i explain that you can turn people of any nation, any race or religion into "jews"--make them behave just like jews. my comrades and i were lucky that we were always on the other side of the barricades. but those who fell into the hands of the germans--and this time it was the poles--behaved just like the jews had. in a short time, in weeks, the germans turned them into loathesome, humiliated, fearful people; and keep in mind, the poles weren't starved for years like the jews in the ghettoes. [9] if zuckerman is right, we have discovered something, not about diaspora jewry, but about our ability to make our fellow human beings so wretched that, while they do not cease to live, their lives cease to have meaning. if zuckerman is right, habermas's view of the holocaust becomes immediately relevant: there [in auschwitz] something happened that up to now nobody considered as even possible. there one touched on something which represents the deep layer of solidarity among all that wear a human face; notwithstanding the usual acts of beastliness of human history, the integrity of this common layer has been taken for granted. . . . auschwitz has changed the continuity of the conditions of life within history. (quoted in friedlander 3) [10] if zuckerman and habermas are correct, we have learned from the holocaust that a life robbed of meaning is possible, and that the task of creating a world in which that theft is impossible may be beyond our powers. if zuckerman and habermas are correct, the examination of the effects of dislocation on the surivivors of the holocaust tells us something about the difficulty of this daunting task. this difficulty is evident both in private and in public memory: in the testimony of surviving jews and the the monuments we have built commemorating the experience to which they testify. [11] for the jews, it is generally agreed, captivity meant passivity because those in the nazi grip were granted virtually no freedom of action. they ceased to have their own story; they were forced, rather, to act out the story their captors had written for them. it is a story in which human beings were reduced to the moral status of sheep marked for slaughter. by actions for which they must be held responsible, the nazis turned people into machines for survival, into men and women who cannot be held responsible for their actions. [12] since the causes of the passivity of the prisoners of the nazis were the conditions of captivity themselves, they cannot really be overcome: "any brave fighter," says zuckerman, "was liable to wind up in treblinka. so the distinction many people make between the fighters and the masses 'who went like sheep to the slaughter,' was artificial, absurd, and false" (261-262). [13] in his brilliant allegorical novel, _badenheim 1939_, aharon appelfeld dramatizes the gradual descent into passivity that leads the jews to their destruction. at the novel's end, an engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. its appearance was as sudden as if it had arisen from a pit in the ground. "get in!" yelled invisible voices. and the people were sucked in. even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog--they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. nevertheless dr. pappenheim found time to make the following remark: "if the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go." (147-148) [14] that there is no jewish story after captivity--no coherent, morally satisfying narrative--is a problem for anyone who wants to represent these victims and their victimization. raul hilberg's masterly historical account of the holocaust and spielberg's popular film share this problem. it is *schindler's* list; it is schindler who has control. hilberg entitles his book _the destruction of the european jews_, a passive construction that reflects in its grammar the central fact of the camps. the jews have no story, or rather they have only one story, the nazis' story about them. [15] the actions and lives of the incarcerated jews are, in a strict sense, meaningless. from the point of view of the jews, nothing that they do, or can or cannot do, makes sense. in _survival at auschwitz_, primo levi makes the point in a memorable anecdote: driven by thirst, i eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand's reach. i opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. "%warum%? i asked him in my poor german. "%hier is kein warum% (there is no why here)," he replied, pushing me inside with a shove. (29) the german means that there is no *why* for levi (or for any prisoner.) the jewish search for meaning in camp life is bound to fail. [16] a chief consequence of this absence of meaning is the decoupling of action from its usual consequences. according to the testimony of one survivor, he left his daily ration of bread in the care of a companion while he went off to the toilet. the companion ate the bread and the man complained. "look, i asked him to look after my piece of bread, and he ate it up." the kapo [the inmate supervisor] said: "you took away his life. right?" he said: "well, i'll give it back this afternoon, the ration." he [the kapo] said: "no, come outside." at this point the kapo orders the offender to lie on the floor, places a board across his neck, and stomps on it, breaking his neck (quoted in langer 27). to grasp the "meaning" of this episode, we must imagine a world in which stealing bread is a fatal offense, murder a casual act without consequences. [17] in this world in which acts and their consequences are so mismatched, filial piety fares no better than complaint. arriving with his family at auschwitz, abraham p. finds that his parents and youngest brother are sent to the left, to death, while he and two older brothers and a younger brother are sent to the right. abraham p. recalls: i told my little kid brother, i said to him, "%solly, geh tsu tate un mame% [go to papa and mama]." and like a little kid, he followed--he did. . . . i wonder what my mother and father were thinking, especially when they were all . . . when they all went to the [gas chamber]. i can't get it out of my head. it hurts me, it bothers me, i don't know what to do. (quoted in langer 185-186) [18] this disproportion disables normal moral judgment. ordinarily, we would expect a mother to care for and to comfort her children in distress; normally, we would label as self-sacrifice the gesture of a stranger who ignores danger to comfort a child in trouble. but in the world of the camps, what looks like callousness may be helpless terror, and what looks like heroism may be despair. on the ramp at auschwitz where, upon arrival, the first "selections" were made, a ten-year-old girl refused to go to the left (toward death). she kicked and stratched and screamed to her mother, who was standing by on the right, among those temporarily spared. she pleaded with her not to let the nazis kill her. one of the three ss men holding the young girl down approached the mother, asking her if she wanted to accompany her daughter. the mother refused the offer. was the ss man showing compassion? did the mother lack compassion? merely to ask these questions is to show the inadequacy of our moral vocabulary in this instance. in making sense of a world that makes no sense, onlookers on concentration camp life are as disadvantaged as participants. [19] during a selection at birkenau mrs. zuckner, another mother, held fast to the hand of a little girl she knew, a little girl destined for the gas chambers. mrs. zuckner's daughter, esther, recalls, "this was the last time i saw my mother. she went with that neighbor's child. so when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero: a woman who would not let a four-year-old child go by herself" (hartman 242). was mrs. zuckner a heroine? we must tread delicately here so as not to dishonor her memory. but, equally, we must not do the unknown mother on the ramp the injustice of making her responsible for her conduct. the truth is we do not know how to judge in these cases, to distribute praise or blame when human beings are reduced to choices such as these. we could only know, perhaps, if we came to be in a similar situation, and we can only hope that we never do. [20] as langer says, we view holocaust testimony "expecting to encounter heroes and heroines, [but] we meet only decent men and women, constrained by circumstances, reluctantly, to abandon roles that we as audience expect (and *need*) to find ingrained in their natures" (25) we can see this need operating in the following interview, presented verbatim with interpolations by langer in square brackets: interviewer: you were able to survive because you were so plucky. when you stepped back in line . . . hanna f: no dear, no dear, no . . . no, i had no . . . . it wasn't luck, it was stupidity. [at this, the two interviewers laugh deprecatingly, overriding her voice with their own "explanation," as one calls out, "you had a lot of guts!"] hanna f.: [*simultaneously*] no, no, no, no, there were no guts, there was just sheer stupidity. (63-64) in his commentary, langer points to the contrast between the heroic thesaurus rifled for such terms as *pluck* and *guts* and hanna f.'s impoverished thesaurus containing only the single word, reiterated, *stupidity*. he points out that the interviewers exhibit an anxiety over hanna f.'s judgment so extreme that they deny hanna f. her own experience. [21] the tension between hanna f.'s insistence on her deflationary version of the past and the interviewers' insistence on their inflationary one is evident also in the public memory, the way in which nations and future generations choose to remember their past. it is these tensions and the reconstructions and appropriations to which they lead that are the subject of james young's _the texture of memory_, his excellent book on holocaust memorials and their meaning. young's presentation of nathan rapaport's ghetto monument in warsaw and the jochen and esther gerz's _monument against fascism_ in hamburg provide us with a contrast that illustrates the strength of young's methods and the validity of his insights. they also illustrate what i take to be his chief weakness, an attitude of "scientific" objectivity, of %tout comprendre, tout pardonner%. however understandable on so potentially an explosive topic as holocaust memorials, this attitude, unfortunately, also inhibits young from carrying his best insights to their natural conclusions. [22] in his discussion of rapaport's _warsaw ghetto monument_, for example, although young notices the classical proportions with which these representatives of jewish defense force are sculpted, he does not notice that they do not look like the actual jews who fought so heroically against impossible odds. youn also notices that the heroic figures in front are complemented by a bas relief of the martyrs of the jewish people at the back of the monument, but he does not notice the significance of this placement. it was the martyrs who actually predominated, not the heroes. moreover, those who predominated in the ghetto were not martyrs in any real sense, but victims. [23] young notices the irony that the memorial is built with stones meant for a monument to nazi victory. its sculptor was to be arno brecker, hitler's favorite sculptor. but young fails to notice that the style of the warsaw monument is eerily remiscent of the style of the nazi sculpture for which brecker became known (merker 246, 292). despite the fact that young notices the semantic fungibility of such monuments, used at one time to justify israel's struggle against its arab neighbors, at another to justify the struggle of the palestine liberation organization against zionism, he does not notice the glorification of war inherent in the dramatization of military heroism, no matter how honorable the cause. [24] in contrast, the gerzes's _monument against fascism_ is proof against inappropriate appropriations. a tall hollow aluminum pillar covered with soft lead, it is set in a pedestrian shopping mall in a commercial suburb of hamburg. attached to the pillar is a steel stylus, to allow the citizens to inscribe their names. on the monument's base is the following inscription: we invite the citizens of harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. in doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. as more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. one day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the harburg monument against fascism will be empty. in the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice. (30) [25] instead of an orderly list of names--a sort of self-constructed vietnam memorial--the monument proved to be a site for graffiti, from stars of david to swastikas, from "%jurgen liebt kirsten% (jurgen loves kirsten)" to "%auslinder raus% (foreigners, get out!)." the artists approved of the "desecration," and local newspaper made the crucial point: "the filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures. the inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column" (35-37). [26] like the _warsaw ghetto monument_, the _monument against fascism_ has been misused by onlookers, but the difference is significant: while the _ghetto monument_ is incorporated into hostile fantasies with frighting ease, the _monument against fascism_ incorporates these fantasies, making them part of its trenchant message. young does not notice this. [27] young notices the appropriateness of this "counter-monument" to the event it commemorates: "how better to remember forever a vanished people than by the perpetually unfinished, ever-vanishing monument?" (31). but, in the economy of his exposition, countermonuments do not occupy the central place they deserve. their analysis forms only the first chapter of a book whose organization is concentric. young's book moves from germany, where the mass murders were planned to poland, where most of the murders took place, to israel, whose founding relates directly to the holocaust, to america, whose jews were untouched by the holocaust. in the book's economy, therefore, the commentary onthe countermonuments forms an anomolous prelude rather than a resounding climax. as a consequence, young fails to notice the irony that the _monument against fascism_ in the heart of germany is more deeply respectful of the diaspora dead than the _warsaw ghetto monument_ at the center of jewish heroism. we cannot respect the dead by misrepresenting them, no matter how flattering the misrepresentation. [28] we must face the unpleasant truth that the european diaspora was a failed experiment in jewish accomodation. the relative absence of heroism during the holocaust is in part a function of the combination of deception, efficiency, and murderous purpose hatched in the deliberations of nazi leaders, shaped at the wannsee conference, and perfected in the death camps. but is also a function of jewish life during the european diaspora, a philosophy of %iberleben%, of living through persecution. we would therefore expect that jewish heroes, if they revealed themselves, would manifest a personal history far different from the diaspora average. [29] this was indeed the case if the testimony of yitzhak zuckerman is to be believed. _surplus of memory_, his recorded testimony, is not a book but a rambling account, not history, but the raw material of history. it is not meant to be read but to be mined. though zuckerman's account must be treated with the skepticism appropriate to any reminiscence, it is nevertheless a moving depiction of the birth and biography of a hero. [30] zuckerman was no ordinary jew. he was a zionist, specifically a leader of the he-halutz ha-tza'ir (young pioneer) zionist socialist movement, one of a collection of youth movements striving to realize their ideals on %kibbutzim% (collective farms) in %eretz israel% (the land of israel, then palestine). it was this disciplined idealism, this task of leadership, that brought zuckerman *back* to the ghetto from which he had escaped, to organize educational efforts for the young. but by 1942 it was clear that these efforts would be hopeless, that the jews were marked for destruction. in zuckerman's words: in july, the idea of uprising was remote for me, because i didn't know how to build a force. the question then was only how to announce, to alarm. this was the execution of hundreds of thousands of jews. the question wasn't uprising or treblinka [a death camp]. there was only treblinka. the question was how to make the jews resist going to treblinka. (217) [31] from this time on zuckerman harbored no illusions: "we knew we were going to die. the question was only *when* and *how* to finish" (266). in january of 1943, there is a prelude to the uprising that occurred in the middle of april: the january fighting taught us something . . . . the germans were routed because their situation was worse than ours. first, they were surprised; they were organized in small platoons. they were always below, and we were always above them. . . . the first time they came with the knowledge that these jews were like all other jews; after all, they had seen so many jewish youths that it didn't occur to them that any jews were armed. . . . so it was beyond all my expectations and i was very happy. the first time we killed germans, we felt that this was the final battle. but there was no drama, no heroic outbursts; except for one case of hysteria, there was nothing exceptional. after that, we no longer felt like people going to death. (zuckerman 288) [32] zuckerman is under no illusions about the military effectiveness of the uprising. but the uprising has a more general significance: if there's a school to study the *human spirit*, there it should be a major subject. the really important things were inherent in the force shown by jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: treblinka or uprising. i don't know if there's a standard to measure *that*. (xiii) [33] the literature on the holocaust has become, understandably, a jewish industry. each year sees the publication of dozens of books on the subject: memoirs, fiction, history, literary criticism. we might all be excused--gentile and jew--if we said %genug% (enough is enough). nevertheless, the best of this work that i have come across--claude lanzman's _shoah_, appelfeld's _badenheim 1939_, levi's _survival in auschwitz_, langer's _holocaust memories_--is fine by the highest standards of its various genres: film, fiction, memoirs, literary criticism. [34] each of these masterpieces enables us to encounter and better to understand perhaps the most disreputable incident in our checkered human past. it is a story about the conditions under which the human spirit can be dismantled beyond repair. it is also a story about how this same spirit can survive (in isolated cases) despite such massive degradation. so long as we live in a world in which "jews" continue to be created--in bosnia, somalia, and ruanda, in the occupied territories (where jews create "jews")--the literature of the holocaust cannot, unfortunately, cease to be relevant. works cited: appelfeld, aharon. _badenheim 1939_. trans. dalya bilu. boston: david r. godine, 1980. dawidowicz, lucy s. _the war against the jews: 1933-1945_. new york: bantam, 1986. friedlander, saul, ed. _probing the limits of representation: nazism and the "final solution"_. cambridge: harvard university press, 1992. hartman, geoffrey h., ed. _holocaust remembrance: the shapes of memory_. oxford: blackwell, 1994. hilberg, raul. _the destruction of the european jews_. new york: holmes and meier, 1985. levi, primo. _survival in auschwitz: the nazi assault on humanity_. trans. stuart woolf. new york: macmillan, 1993. merker, reinhard. _die bildenden kanste im national sozialismus: kulturideologie, kulturpolitik, kulturproduktion_. cologne: dumont buchverlag, 1983. vishniac, roman. _a vanished world_. new york: farrar, straus, and giroux, 1983. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.996. part 1/1, total size 97188 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. editor's note: if possible, please prepare announcements in hypertext markup language. we may choose not to publish announcements that need extensive reformatting. ----------------------------------------------------------------publication announcements + essays in postmodern culture + new river + pynchon notes + red orange + science as culture + free associations + mit press conferences, calls for papers, invitations to submit + ciber@rt '96 + ecologies + aulla + ready.to.ware + blast 5 + online conference on postcolonial theory + unscientific psychology + perspectives on science + sfra/eaton conference + uniting academic disciplines + networking the humanities + sociologies of cyberspace web sites and other announcements + hartman center travel grants + human relations, authority & justice + australian humanities review + hawaiian education literacy project + u. wisconsin document technology series + electronic publishing bibliography + misq discovery -------------------------------------------------------------------------- * essays in postmodern culture: an anthology of essays from postmodern culture is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern--from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound), 0-19-508753-4 (paper) to order a copy by e-mail, click here --------------------------------------------------------------------- * the new river: a hypermedia archive sometime later this year, the english department at virginia tech, in connection with the blue penny quarterly, will launch the new river, a revolving archive of hypertext and hypermedia literature and art. i'll be editing the new river, and consequently i'm interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished hypertext and hypermedia. i would like to see lyric and narrative art that exploits the computer as a site for creative work. since the new river will be a web-based archive, work produced in html is preferred. however, stand-alone hypertext/media will also be considered--to be published, perhaps, as work available for downloading. information on submission procedures for the new river is available from the blue penny quarterly: http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/guidelines.html ed falco english department virginia tech blacksburg, va 24061-0112 phone: 540.951.4112 --------------------------------------------------------------------- * pynchon notes o "the most trustworthy repository for the finest pynchon scholarship"; "ahead of other journals and university presses in charting new directions"; "the most forward-looking work ...appears in pynchon notes." --american literary scholarship o "a delight to read"; "an unusual, useful addition that should be in american literature collections"; its editors are "blessed with almost as much imagination as the focus of the journal." --library journal pynchon notes is published twice a year, in spring and fall. submissions: the editors particularly welcome manuscripts submitted in electronic form (ibm-compatible preferred), but also accept hard copy. convenient file formats include dca, wordstar, microsoft word or rtf, and wordperfect. manuscripts, notes and queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to john m. krafft. subscriptions: north america, $5.50 per single issue or $10.00 per year (or double number); overseas, $7.50 per single issue or $14.00 per 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http://web.syr.edu/~rcymbala/redorange.html you can also browse introductory excerpts from all essays in the first issue through our web site. they provide a feel for what we're trying to achieve through publishing red orange. a yearly subscription (two issues) is $15.00 or receive the inaugural issue for $7.00--prices at the "student" level for everyone. i think you'll see that this journal is written for citizens interested in social change in society-at-large--even if seemingly "jargon"-filled please consider mentioning the availability of this new opportunity to whomever you know, within and beyond your own discipline, who might take an interest in theory, politics, and the everyday. red orange a marxist journal of theory, politics and the everyday dear friend of the left: red orange is a new journal devoted to marxist critical and theoretical inquiry into contemporary life. at a time when most left journals have retreated into a broad liberalism, red orange offers radically transformative analyses of capitalism today. these analyses give the reader a coherently integrated knowledge of seemingly disparate contemporary practices by locating these within the context of the dynamic, structured, concrete global capitalist social totality in which these practices make sense and from which it becomes possible to conceive of and work towards the realization of substantial progress in the struggle for emancipation, justice, and equality. red orange goes against the liberal grain to explain the determinate interconnections among such seemingly discrete problems as racism, ethnocentrism, and imperialism; patriarchal sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia; ecological degradation and destruction; and the exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization of labor in the increasingly transnational organization of production within an ever more thoroughly computerized and totally electronic international workplace. red orange thus critically intervenes against localist understandings of these issues, supported by dominant directions within postmodern theory, that will not contribute to significant forms of progressive social change. social change is the goal of red orange. all of the texts published in the journal relate directly to this overriding goal: how to construct a society founded upon meeting the needs of all people such that "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." red orange, therefore, crosses established academic-intellectual boundaries and publishes essays in diverse fields and in various modes--from theoretical essays to analyses of the everyday; from investigations in global economics to sports and media studies; from long discourses on such questions as u.s. foreign policy and current tendencies in the sciences, to shorter pieces on, for example, the politics of shopping and consumption. the interest of red orange is global and thus it will deal with problems and issues not only in the u.s. and europe but also in the middle east, africa, latin america, and asia, and it will draw connections across regional, national, cultural, and subcultural borders. there is no publication similar to red orange at the present time in the u.s. what is, however, more disturbing is that the official stories--circulated by the dominant media, and by mainstream social theorists, philosophers, and government officials--maintain that the need for such radical journals and for such coherent understandings of the contemporary world no longer exists. according to these comforting narratives, not only is marxism dead, but in fact the advanced capitalist west has arrived at a post-historical moment in which virtually all forms of radically transformative politics are seen to be anachronistic and even atavistic residues of the past. postmodern life is, moreover, understood to be too complex to yield to systematic analysis, and, therefore, contemporary (post-)liberal capitalism is said to have marked the end of the viability and the legitimacy of all radically transformative forms of critical-oppositional praxis. in order for us to be able to provide coherent social analyses useful for emancipatory ends in such a climate of oppression, we need the help of all workers, thinkers, activists, writers, and teachers who are committed to work collectively towards the construction of socialist society. we would like to ask you to consider making a contribution towards the publication of red orange. if you are unable at this time to do so, we would like to suggest that you become a charter subscriber to red orange and help us with this project for transformation of social life here and around the world. in solidarity, robert andrew nowlan editor, red orange pob: p.o. box 1055, tempe, az 85280-1055, usa phone: (602) 804-1151 fax: (602) 804-1151 #1 e-mail: rcymbala@mailbox.syr.edu web home page: http://web.syr.edu/~rcymbala/red_orange.html ("web" not "www") *********************************************************************** name: ___ address: ___ telephone number: (___) ___ e-mail address or fax number: ___ i would like to become a charter subscriber to red orange and am enclosing a check for $20.00. in addition, i am enclosing my check for: $25 $50 $75 $100 $200 as a tax deductible contribution towards the publication of red orange. *********************************************************************** * * * :::::::::::::: yours, :::::::::::::: robert cymbala managing editor, red orange a marxist journal of theory, politics and the everyday -----> po box 1055, tempe az 85280-1055 http://web.syr.edu/~rcymbala/red_orange.html rcymbala@mailbox.syr.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- * science as culture volume 5, part 4 (no. 25) has appeared in the us and will soon elsewhere. contents "the water closet: public and private meanings" by marja gastelaars "sex in the age of virtual reality" by slavoj zizek "naming the heavens: a brief history of earthly projections, part i: nativizing hellenic science" by scott l. montgomery "farm pollution as environmental crime" by philip lowe et al. "contested expertise: plant biotechnology and social movements" by derrick purdue reviews: media freedom: the contradictions of communications in the age of modernity by richard barbrook, reviewed by john barker contested technology: ethics, risk and public debate,, edited by rene von schomberg reviewed by alison j. hill juvenile violence in a winner-loser culture by oliver james reviewed by vincenzo ruggiero sac 26 will include: "reducing aids risk: a case of mistaken identity?" by simon carter "the californian ideology" by richard barbrook and andy cameron "a spoonful of blood: haitians, racism and aids" by laurent dubois "naming the heavens: a brief history of earthly projections, part ii: nativizing arab science" by scott l. montgomery sac 27 will include: "the corporate suppression of inventions, conspiracy theories and an ambivalent american dream" by stephen demeo "death comes alive: technology and the re-conception of death" by karen cerulo and janet ruane "inoculating gadgets against ridicule" by mike michael "sperm stories: romantic, entrepreneurial and environmental narratives about treating male infertility" by kirsten dwight in future issues: "designing flexibility: science and work in the age of flexible accumulation" by emily martin "healthy bodies, healthy citizens: the anti-secondhand smoke campaign" by roddy reid "israel's first test-tube baby" by daphna birenbaum carmeli 160pp. science as culture is published quarterly by process press ltd. in britain: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/gpp/process.html and guilford publications inc. in north america: info@guilford.com. for information about subscriptions and a list of back issues (half price to subscribers), go to: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/gpp/process.html#science the journal has an associated email forum: science-as-culture@sjuvm.stjohns.edu. to join, send message to: listserv@sjuvm.stjohns body of message: sub science-as-culture yourfirstname yourlastname a web site associated with the journal and forum holds articles from back issues of the journal, as well as submissions under consideration (not obligatory), whose authors may benefit from constructive comments for purposes of revisions before the hard copy is printed, as well as longer piece not suitable for the email format which forum members may wish to discuss: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/sac.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- * free associations free associations: psychoanalysis, groups, politics, culture volume 6, part 1 (no. 37) has appeared in the us and will soon elsewhere. the editors hope that members of this forum will be inclined to subscribe and to contribute to the journal and the internet forum and web site associated with it. contents the free associations interview jonathan pedder talks to paul gordon and robert m. young features "psychotherapy in the british national health service: a short history" by jonathan r. pedder "the fifth basic assumption" by w. gordon lawrence, alastair bain, and laurence gould special feature: art and psychoanalysis "olympia: a study in perversion a psychoanalytic pictorial analysis of edouard manet's painting" by jeanne wolff bernstein "the image in form" by eric rhode "otto dix (tate gallery, london, 11 march-17 may 1992)" by robert snell "mondrian and his art: a non-pathographic perspective" by patricia a. lipscomb "the simple expression of the complex emotion: reflections on the painting of mark rothko and richard diebenkorn" by paul gordon document psychotherapists and counsellors for social responsibility book reviews psychodynamic technique in the treatment of the eating disorders, edited by c. philp wilson, charles c. hogan, and ira l. mintz. reviewed by em farrell when nietzsche wept, by irvin d. yalom. reviewed by gary winship jean laplanche: seduction, translation, drives, edited by john fletcher and martin stanton. reviewed by chris oakley feminist psychoanalytic psychotherapy, by charlotte krause prozan reviewed by jean white 158 pages. free associations is published quarterly by process press ltd. in britain: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/gpp/process.html where there is a full list for information about subscriptions and a list of back issues, go to: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/gpp/process.html to correspond with the uk publis a web site associated with the journal and forum (psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk) holds articles from back issues of the journal, as well as submissions under consideration, whose authors may benefit from constructive comments for purposes of revisions before the hard copy is printed, as well as longer piece not suitable for the email format which forum members may wish to disc the forum, web site and journal are associated with the programme of research and teaching at the centre for psychotherapeutic strudies, university of sheffield. for full information about the centre, its staff (cvs and some writings) and programmes--including distance learning ones in psychoanalytic studies; psychiatry, philosophy & society; and disability studies--go --------------------------------------------------------------------- * the mit press "examining an area too long leonardo & leonardo music journal regarded as a fringe by both scientists and a large part of the the official publications of the art world, the journal seems international society for the especially relevant as more and arts. sciences and technology more well-known artists take up (isast)roger f. malina, executive investigations of new technology in editor their works... http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/ leonardo/home.html leonardo is an international, always stimulating, this journal scholarly journal for anyone deserves shelf space beyond interested in exploring where the research libraries, particularly in arts, sciences, and technology larger public and college libraries converge. ranging from digital with fine art collections." imaging to dance and computers to --library journal electronic opera, leonardo's articles, perspectives, reviews, and forums cover the spectrum of art-science-technology interaction. recent special issue (28.5, october 1995): leonardo third annual new york digital electronic salon computer-art exhibition almanac select 1996 articles and special sections: published monthly on the internet paris reseau: paris network, karen craig harris, executive editor o'rourke; theoreticians, artists and leonardo electronic almanac is a artisans, paul feyerabend monthly, edited journal and special section--a radical electronic archive published on the intervention: the brazilian internet by the mit press for contribution to the international leonardo/isast. lea is an electronic art movement international, interdisciplinary art, archaeology and gestalt, forum for people interested in the robert wenger. use of new media in contemporary artistic expression, especially five times a year, leonardo's involving 20th century science and pages present eclectic inquiry technology. material is contributed into the arts. once a year, by artists, scientists, leonardo music journal--which philosophers and educators, and comes with a compact disc- developers of new technological chronicles innovations in resources in the media arts. multimedia art, sound science, and technology. 1996 rates leonardo/isast members 1996 rates (5 issues plus 1 $15 leonardo music journal issue): non-leonardo subscribers $25 $70 individual; (5 issues w/out canadians add additional 7% gst. lmj/cd) $55 individual; $320 institution; $45 students (copy of current id required) and retired. send orders to: outside u.s.a., add $22 postage journals-orders@mit.edu and handling. canadians add please include full mailing address additional 7% gst. prepayment and account number, visa/mc/amex required. send check or money information, telephone and fax order-drawn on a u.s. bank in u.s. numbers, and e-mail address. funds, payable to leonardo, mc, issn: 1071-4391 visa, oramex number to: mit press journals 55 hayward street, cambridge, ma 02142 tel: 617.253.2889 fax: 617.577.1545 journals-orders@mit.edu published bimonthly. issn 0024-094x journals from the mit press leonardo www url: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu /lea/home.html leonardo electronic almanac www url: http://www.mitpress.mit.edu/lea/home.html browse through mit press journals online catalog via the following url: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- * ciber@rt '96 ciber@rt '96 first internacional conference on virtual reality call for contributions november 4-7, 1996 valencia, spain. ciber@rt '96 is an annual international conference that has risen from the need of creating a space open for discussion and reflexion about the non-stopping evolution of new technologies and its relation to the art & communication world. the present edition is fully dedicated to virtual reality, its social and artistic implications, its practical applications and the development of new interaction proposals, as well as the emerging phenomena of virtual communities. conference format: ciber@rt '96 will start on monday november 4th, and it will be developed during the three following days (november 5,6 and 7). four masterly presentations and an undetermined number of communications will be presented. electroacustic music concerts, performances and virtual art exhibitions will extend the programme to create a wide interdisciplinary spectrum for theoretic and creative brainstorming, debate and discussion. every presentation will include simultaneous translation to english and spanish. communication sessions will be run in sequence, avoiding parallelism. the conference will be a part of ciber@rt, 'second international show on new technologies: art & communication', where infographic works from schools and universities from all over the world, as well as special presentations, will be held. call for communications the participants interested in presenting communications should send a summary to the conference address, containing: title of proposed communication author(s) personal data (name, address, e-mail...) institution (if any) and position addressed area (see list below) abstract of communication (500 words maximum) brief curriculum vitae of author(s) technical equipment requirements for presentation this summary, including all documentation, can be delivered by ordinary or electronic mail (in the first case, a pc or mac formatted diskette with the text and a hardcopy should be enclosed) before the reception deadline. the text of the communications and the speech can be in english or spanish. no previously published communication will be accepted. all accepted communications will be edited and published by the universidad politecnica de valencia after the conference. deadlines summary of communications reception: july 25, 1996. acceptance notification: september 10, 1996. advanced registration: october 15, 1996. selected authors will be informed of the deadline for the final version submission. registration and fees advanced registration fee for participants in the conference will be 20,000 pta., and 15,000 pta. for students. this fee will give the right to attend all activities of ciber@rt'96. selected communicators will be exempt from the registration fee. participants will receive a certificate expedited by the universidad politecnica de valencia. the number of participants in the conference is limited, so that early registration is encouraged. registration after the advanced deadline wil have an increased fee. masterly presentations jaron lanier (usa) visionary programmer, postminimalist music and cyberculture philosopher, he is one of the few persons in the planet that can be proud of having started a new industry. he developed in 1980 a new symbolic programing language, and in a few years he became a famous 'cyberenterpriser', owner of one of the world's strongest companies in the field (vpl). he sold its cyberglove to the nasa, and he begun to use the term 'virtual reality' in 1982, being one of the first persons to design virtual equipment. nowadays he is associated to the university of columbia n.y (usa) leading several robotics and telepresence projects in the field of medical applications. philippe queau (france): "virtual presences" telecommunication engineer and research director at the ina (the french institute de l'audiovisuel), he is one of the best international specialist in the study of synthetic images. he is also the responsible person for the imagina festival programme at montecarlo, one of the most important festivals in the european field of new images. brilliant theoretician, he has written books as "eloge de la simulation de la vie des langages a la synthese des images" (1986), "metaxu: theorie de l'art intermediaire" (1989) y "le virtuel: vertus et vertigues" (1993). monika fleischmann (germany): "me and you: new dialogues in the cyber-age" artistic director of the department of visualization and design of media systems (vmsd), and responsible of the area of computer art of the gmd(sankt augustin, germany), one of the most important european research centres in the field of computer sciences and information technologies. she was co-founder in 1988 of the institute of interdisciplinary research on art and new technological media art+com. presently, monika shares her work as main responsible of the cyberstar festival, oriented towards the search of interactive proposal for tv, with the realization of virtual reality projects and interactive installations that question the sensorial perception of the spectator. zush (spain): "the augmented reality" highly reputed comtemporary artist, part of his art work has been developed as a collaboration with the massachussets institute of technology (mit). he is presently creating images for the web, producing a cd-rom based on his work, and he is also involved in an interactive project of the instituto del audiovisual of the universidad pompeu fabra named 'arte para curarte'. suggested areas for communications 1.virtual reality and social imagery new markets and new ways of social control generated by synthetic realities. which types of virtual hallucinations and visual drugs are generated by virtual reality?. virtual environments and mass-media. economical and social impact of digitalization and virtualization of information. which role does cyberspace plays in colective consciousness?. might it be a new dogma?. do virtual techniques help us to better understand and apprehend the world?. virtuality and cultural modeling. 2.virtuality vs. reality essence of virtual worlds. the virtual concept and our sense of reality. new representation systems. are virtual realities metaphoric realities?. in the experience of virtual worlds, which roles do the image and the model play?. fanciful spaces and symbolic world: the nature of virtual environments. which are the psychological impacts of virtual worlds?. the potential nature of virtuality. 3.virtual communities what is a virtual community?. televirtuality and telepresence. symbolic representation of human identity in the cyberspace: clones, avatars, aliases, ghosts, daemons... which are our responsabilities in the virtual communities?. mask games in cyberspace: private vs. public personality. cybersex: which is the role of the body in the virtual worlds?. has cyberspace its own life?. does it scape from human control?. new algorithmic techniques for network control. virtual labyrinths and vertigos. hyperimages and hypertext. autonomy and tyranny of the cyberspace. 4. practical applications of vr practical applications of interaction technologies. new application horizons of these technologies in the field of art and communication. experience obtained in existing work environments from the technical point of view. which is the present state of simulation techniques and what do they consist of?. do they offer a real and practical advantage beyond the mere exhibition of technology?. are the real time image synthesis techniques capable of becoming tools that allow new ways of world representation?. do they produce a deep influence on our way of working, inquiring or amusing?. 5. interaction technologies up to which point a simulation of natural stimuli has been achieved?. what is the reason for the present limits?. devices?. our ignorance about psychological mechanisms of interaction?. the computer systems that should interpret and produce the stimuli?. what does the digital adaptation of audiovisual and telecommunication technologies involve?. which are the interaction and real-time synthesis technology advances that allow us to feel immersed in a virtual environment?. what are the navigation techniques?. 6. art and virtual reality have the new horizons of virtuality produced a radical revolution in the conception of art?. has the object idolatry finished?. does virtuality generate new art languages with specific properties?. which challenges does virtual art bear?. interactivity and the artist-public relation. what is the role of the galleries and the critics when the creative offer can become almost infinite?. the new distribution streams. the museum in the age of virtual reality. does virtual art have a potential nature?. what do we call life of an artwork?. is the virtual artist an 'intermediate' artist?. esthetics and policy in virtual art. selection of communications the evaluation and selection of the communications will be carried out by a selection committee and a scientific advisoring committee, composed of the following experts: scientific advisoring committee: xavier berenguer (universidad pompeu fabra) josep blat (universidad de las islas baleares) pere brunet (universitat politecnica de catalunya) javier echeverria (universidad del pais vasco) santos zunzunegui (universidad del pais vasco) selection committee: salvador bayarri (universitat de valencia) josep gavaldat (universitat de valencia) jose m. iturralde (universidad politecnica de valencia) angela molina (director ciber@rt'96) emilio rosello (universidad politecnica de valencia) jenaro talens (universitat de valencia) ciber@rt '96 production & organization angela molina: director / chair fernando carrion: coordinator cesar fernandez: coordinator jimmy entraigues: media manager aurea ortiz: technical advisor conference venue ciber@rt '96 will be held in the conference room of the faculty of fine arts (facultat de belles arts) of the universidad politecnica de valencia. sponsors universidad politecnica de valencia (upv) vicerrectorado de cultura (upv) facultat de belles arts (upv) supporters generalitat valenciana direccion general para la modernizacion de las administraciones publicas institut valencia de la joventut (ivaj) cinema jove valencia universitat de valencia eg (uv) k-tuin (apple valencia) iberdrola telefonica fundacio bancaixa cyberdrac ------------------------------------------------------------ registration form first name(s):_______________________________________ surname:_____________________________________________ passport number:_____________________________________ job title:___________________________________________ official education:__________________________________ university:__________________________________________ department:__________________________________________ address:_____________________________________________ post zip code:_______________________________________ city / country:______________________________________ phone no.:___________________________ fax no.:_____________________________ e-mail:______________________________ date:________________________________ payment payment for registration is required in pesetas and will be made by bank transfer, indicating your name and "ciber@rt '96 registration fee", to the universidad politecnica de valencia. once arranged the payment, please send us a copy of the bank transfer by ordinary mail or fax to the centro de formacion de postgrado. bank: caja de ahorros del mediterraneo account no: 2090-2832-640002-10 cancellations: in the event of cancellation, and provided that written notice is received 20 days prior to the event, a refund of 50% of the registration fee will be made. no refund will be made otherwise. information and registration ciber@rt '96 universidad politecnica de valencia centro de formacion de postgrado camino de vera s/n 46071 valencia. spain phone: +34 6 387 77 51 fax: +34 6 387 77 59 e-mail: ciberart@cfp.upv.es www: http://faeton.eleinf.uv.es/ciberart96.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- * ecologies call for papers interdisciplinary graduate scholarship conference ecologies: rethinking nature/culture the center for the critical analysis of contemporary culture (ccacc) is announcing a call for papers for its annual graduate scholarship conference, scheduled for november 15, 1996. the theme this year is "ecologies: rethinking nature/culture." this conference seeks to explore appropriate redefinitions of "ecology" by focusing on the politics, theoretical implications, cultural analysis and intellectual history of the nature/culture divide. ccacc encourages graduate students in all disciplines to submit papers that investigate a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: urban ecologies, limits of "nature as discourse," possibility of scientific objectivity, domination of nature or the production of nature, rewriting nature writing, socio-biological restructuring of "race," ecologies of social reproduction, political economies of development, indigeounous people's ecologies, ecofeminism and feminist environmentalism, environmental racism, etc. papers should be 8-10 pages in length. please send 4 copies of your paper, a cover page that includes your address, telephone number, and departmental/institutional affiliation, and a one-paragraph abstract (4 copies); relevent media (slides, audio/video tapes) should be noted. panel proposals will also be considered. deadline for submission: september 30, 1996 send papers to vanessa a. ignacio, ccacc, 8 bishop place, rutgers university new brunswick, nj 08903. or for more information call (908) 932-8426. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * aulla *call for papers* australasian universities language and literature association 29th congress university of sydney, australia 10th-14th february 1997 "remaking the tradition" language and literature studies in the age of multimedia offers of papers of 20-40mins duration in any area of language and literature studies are welcome. please send abstracts as soon as possible to: brian taylor, convener language centre brennan bldg a18 university of sydney nsw 2006 australia fax: 02 9351 4724 email: aulla.xxix@language.su.edu.au for further information aulla invites you to visit our homepage: http://www.arts.su.edu.au/arts/departs/conf2/home.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- * ready.to.ware greetings, i am the publisher and managing editor of a new pop culture history and criticsm electronic magazine called "ready.to.ware," located at: http://www.tir.com/~rtw/rtw.htm we are currently looking for articles -900 to 1,500 words -on any topics regarding pop culture and american culture history, with an eye toward consumer artifacts. some ideas we particulalry want to currently explore include: the disappearance of the station wagon in american family culture retrospective on classroom safety films of the 50s and 60s you kind of get the idea. best thing to do is to check out what is currently online at "ready.to.ware" (best when viewed with netscape, and even better with version 2.0). keep in mind that we try to approach our research with a sense of humor, as well. while we do not pay for submissions, we will provide bylines, short author's bios, and hypertext links to your email and/or website (although websites are subject to review before linking). it's a great way to get some web exposure for your work. if you are interested, (or if you have any questions) please query to either this message or email me at: rtw@tir.com look forward to hearing from you soon, regards mike kassel --------------------------------------------------------------------- * blast 5 **call for participation** blast 5: d r a m a we invite you to develop a scenario for blast 5. we are looking for submissions that make use of our contemporary experience of stories. these stories, increasingly nonlinear and hypertextual, contradictory and irresolute, are built upon an ever-expanding multiplicity of media, their lines of continuity networked into complex webs. the blast 5 project takes the form of a year-long drama composed of scenarios, intercutting real life, artificial life, scripted life, telematic life, and afterlife. the setting for blast 5, "crossroads," appears below. in some manner, your scenario should engage this setting and the blast 5 drama that departs from it. your scenario can take any form, but we encourage those that evoke action. the developing storylines will be hyperlinked and can be accessed at any time through the blast 5 "theater of operations" site on the world wide web (http://www.interport.net/~xaf/), or they may be relayed to you by someone who is participating in the project. some form or aspect of your scenario--such as a score, script, recording, recipe, game, diagram, index, drawing, letter, plan, prop, map, mask, code--can be included in the blast 5 "vehicle" and/or in the various blast 5 "stage sets." these vehicles and stage sets are environments where the scenarios are played out. they provide a way for participants to engage your scenario and possibly assume roles in it. scheduled stage sets include the sandra gering gallery in new york in late 1996, and the "blast_stage" on the pmc-moo [telnet: hero.village.virginia.edu 7777] at various times. the blast 5 theater of operations site on the world wide web may also operate as a stage set (or a part of one), and other stage set locations may be announced. the blast 5 vehicles are portable stage sets that individuals may buy or lease. they will be available for purchase at galleries (through sandra gering gallery) and bookstores (through distributed art publishers / d.a.p.). to submit a proposal, please send a short informal summary of your project to blast, 334 east 11 street #2b, new york, ny 10003 usa, tel (212) 677-8146, fax (212) 505-6562, email xaf@interport.net. the project begins on february 1, 1996, and continues for a period of at least one year. proposals may be submitted at any time during this period, however editorial review meetings are held on march 1, may 30, and september 1. we encourage you to contact us first to discuss any questions you might have before you submit your proposal. a conference will be scheduled to coordinate with the stage set at the sandra gering gallery in late 1996. we are also requesting papers for presentation at this event. please inquire as to themes and deadlines. blast 5 is produced by the x-art foundation, a nonprofit artmaking entity based in new york. blast is an art publication that involves its participants in new experiences of reading and content production. for information on the xaf and blast, please visit http://www.interport.net/~xaf/ or contact us for further information. editors: marlena corcoran, jordan crandall, ricardo dominguez associate editors: sean bronzell, antoinette lafarge, heather wagner, adrianne wortzel *** setting sixth avenue's nothing but old highway six as it passes through town. by some bad roll of the dice, i live at 1212, the intersection of highway six and the train tracks. oh, it's not a bad neighborhood. there is no neighborhood. it's just where the line from the north pole to the gulf of mexico crosses the line from the george washington bridge to the pacific ocean. something called a town. at night when the trucks roll down so-called sixth avenue, i hear them coming from far away. the noise peaks and becomes a rattle as the truck passes. the bed settles as the truck pulls away. for a long, long time it gets fainter and fainter. at last i know it's gone and left me lying here in the wide midwestern night. the doppler effect. we drew it on graph paper in school. we didn't learn to calculate how it feels when a bell curve of loneliness peaks at your front door. on rainy nights sometimes the lightning strikes the rails out on the prairie. the jolt travels many miles, setting off warning signals all along the way. ding, ding, ding, flash. before i learned better, i'd wait for the train. why sleep now, i'd think, when any minute a distant rumble will turn to a grinding, shrieking, slow train crawling across sixth avenue. ding, ding, flash. nothing. rain. "it's nothing," mumbles my husband. "lightning on the tracks." i think of the pioneers who laid this grid on miles and miles of nothing. not all of them made it. what about that fiddler from bohemia. they buried him at the crossroads. i shake my husband and make him promise one more time. if i die, don't bury me here. --stay, "crossroads" --------------------------------------------------------------------- * online conference on postcolonial theory ----------------------------------------------------------------------- first international online conference on postcolonial theory ----------------------------------------------------------------------- attend an international conference while remaining at your campus or at home! ------------------------------- call for papers ------------------------------- papers are invited for the first international online conference on postcolonial theory. contributions can be on any aspect of postcolonial theory, especially with regard to its practical consequences in the analysis of society, literature and history. a self-reflexive area or perspective which is strongly encouraged arises from the nature of this conference itself: the fact that it will be conducted in cyberspace. in this connection amongst questions which can be asked are: * what will conferences or other communicative acts of this kind do to the reality of the contemporary postcolonial situation? * will the difference between the haves and have nots with regard to acessibility to the information superhighway lead to a new configuration in postcolonial studies, where the division between east and west or north and south no longer prevails, but is replaced with a new configuration which may subvert the status of what was the powerful and powerless? * because the internet is a largely western phenomenon and the main language used is english, what do these two factors do to the survival of non-western cultures, and of the status of english as an international language? * what will the internet do to the status of the 'old guard' in postcolonial theory, some of whom are less conversant in the new medium than younger scholars? the above points are suggestions and are not intended as the official sub-themes or threads for the online conference. all papers on other themes within the purview of postcolonial theory will be considered. ------------------------------- submission of abstracts ------------------------------- if you are interested in submitting a paper, please send an abstract to the organiser of the conference, ismail s. talib, at the following e-mail address: poco@nus.sg. the abstract should not be more than 300 words. the deadline for the submission of abstracts is the 30th of november 1996. the abstract should be written in ascii characters (i.e. saved as a text file) with the '_' character being used if you want to emphasise certain words, or indicate that they should be italicised (for example, _orientalism_). ------------------------------- selection of papers ------------------------------- although we intend to have as wide a selection of papers as possible - considering that this is the first conference of its kind in this area and that definitions of 'quality' quite often display western prejudice of what is academically 'acceptable' -there will be a selection committee which will determine the suitability of the submitted abstracts. the selection committee will, it is hoped, ensure, as in more conventional conferences, that the likely papers will be of a sufficient degree of academic merit -defined in a broad sense -or, at least be of sufficient interest to generate further discussion. papers which are deemed to be racially sensitive or racist, or are designed to hurt the sensibilities of people of either sex or of a certain culture, will not be accepted (even if they purport to pass off as a 'critique' of the field). the organiser reserves the right to reject papers even after their abstracts have been selected, especially if they deviate in significant ways from what was originally indicated in their abstracts. ------------------------------- submission of selected papers ------------------------------- all selected papers should be submitted by the 15th of february 1997. papers should be between 2,000 and 5,000 words in length. papers which are received after the deadline, or exceed 5,000 words, will not be accepted. ------------------------------- nature of conferencing ------------------------------- all selected papers will be mounted on a web site; its url will be announced in due course. as such, the papers can be read by anyone who has access to the world wide web. however, if you want to discuss any of the papers, you should subscribe (free of charge) to the conference's electronic discussion group. information on how to join the group will be given shortly. pre-conference announcements will be made in the discussion group. it is therefore advised that participants, whether they be potential paper writers or discussants, join the group as soon as an announcement on how to join it is given. it is anticipated that the conference will be held through the month of march 1997; specific dates will be given on when it is best to discuss specific papers or groups of papers. the electronic discussion list will also be used for post-conference announcements and for further or late discussions of papers after the official dates of the conference. ------------------------------- form & format of submission ------------------------------- all papers should follow the latest mla style specifications, although either american or british spelling can be used, so long as it is consistent. they should be sent via attachments to e-mail messages and should be in ascii characters (for most wordprocessing software, saving your document as a text file will do the job). knowledge of html is not necessary. however, it would be appreciated if minimally, at least the following html tags are included: <p> to indicate paragraph breaks, <i> to indicate italic characters with </i> to close the set of italic characters. all papers should be written in one electronic file. the use of frames is therefore discouraged. all footnotes should be found within this single document. hypertext anchors to footnotes are not essential, and it is left to the writers to make these themselves if they want them to be included. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * unscientific psychology unscientific psychology: conversations with other voices a two day conference on progress and possibilities in creating a cultural, relational and performatory approach to understanding human life june 14-15, 1997 edith macy conference center briarcliff manor, new york sponsored by the center for developmental learning of the east side institute for short term psychotherapy with each passing day, psychology's inability to provide solutions to critical questions history has raised as we approach the 21st century becomes more apparent. just about everyone -theoreticians, practitioners, policy makers, consumers and the general public -is growing more and more disillusioned with psychology, as it fails to understand or deal successfully with pressing issues such as the nature of human sociality and anti-socialness, emotional pain, violence, identity, sexuality, prejudice and bigotry, creativity, depression, learning and educational failure, memories false and true, to name just a few. from the postmodern vantage point, the current crisis in psychology and the related fields of psychotherapy and education is rooted in misguided efforts to emulate the natural sciences: human-social phenomena simply cannot be understood with the tools and conceptions that are used to study nature. subjecting psychology to postmodern deconstruction, contemporary psychologists and philosophers find it to be a complex interweaving of the modern science paradigm with centuriesold philosophical presuppositions. psychology's core conceptions -such as development, behavior, the individual, the self, stages and patterns, rationality and irrationality, normality and abnormality -are themselves rooted in philosophical-scientific assumptions about what it means to understand and to know. the challenge to psychology is equally a challenge to the modernist conception of understanding and knowing and its commitment to deeply-rooted methodologicalphilosophical biases, such as truth, objectivity, causality, duality and linearity. understanding human life, some leading postmodern voices argue, demands a new epistology. creating a new epistology -an unscientific psychology -is the activity of making new meaning. it is an emergent conversation created by and out of diverse voices who speak more poetically, culturally and historically than analytically and taxonomically. it is a conversation about persons (not minds), about relationships and relationality (not environmental influences on self-contained individuals), about human activity (not behavior), about narratives and stories (not truth), about creating new forms of life (not adapting to forms of alienation). what is emerging is an approach to understanding human life as emergent, activisitic, relational and performatory. the invited presenters are leading voices in this conversation. the combination of rigor and creativity in their scholarship and practice is a provocative challenge to orthodox psychology. erica burman is senior lecturer in developmental and educational psychology at the manchester metropolitan university in manchester, england. her recent works are deconstructing developmental psychology and the forthcoming deconstructing feminist psychology. she is also editor of feminists and psychological practice and co-editor (with ian parker) of discourse analytic research. lenora fulani is on the faculty of the east side institute's center for developmental learning and a therapist at the east side center for social therapy. as a developmental psychologist and political activist, she has been a key player in the movement for independent politics in the us. she introduces diverse audiences--from community activists to politicians to inner-city teens--to the postmodern challenge. she is editor of _the psychopathology of everyday racism and sexism_ and a contributor to erica burman's forthcoming deconstructing feminist psychology. kenneth gergen is the mustin professor of psychology at swarthmore college in swarthmore, pa. he is the author of three of the most influential postmodern discussions of the social sciences: _toward transformation in social knowledge_; _the saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life_; and _realities and relationships: sounding in social construction_. mary gergen is associate professor of psychology and women's studies at pennsylvania state university. her scholarship concerns postmodern and feminist theories. she is editor of _feminist thought_ and the structure of knowledge; and co-author (with sara davis) of the forthcoming _conversations at the crossroads: social constructionism and the psychology of gender_. lois holzman was on the faculty of empire state college, state university of new york for seventeen years. she is currently director of the center for developmental learning and the barbara taylor school (a vygotskian laboratory elementary school), both in new york city. she is author of schooling for development: some postmodern possibilities (forthcoming), and co-author (with fred newman) of _lev vygotsky: revolutionary scientist_ and _unscientific psychology: a cultural-performatory approach to understanding human life_. john r. morss is senior lecturer at the university of otago in new zealand. a leading critical developmental psychologist, he is the author of _the biologising of childhood: developmental psychology and the darwinian myth_; and _growing critical: alternatives to developmental psychology_. fred newman is a practicig psychotherapist, artistic director of the castillo theatre, and director of clinical training at the east side institute for short term psychotherapy in new york city where social therapy, the performatory approach he founded, is practiced. his recent books include _let's develop!_ and _performance of a lifetime: a practical-philosophical guide to a joyous life_ and (with lois holzman) _lev vygotsky: revolutionary scientist and unscientific psychology: a cultural-performatory approach to understanding human life_. ian parker is senior lecturer in social and abnormal psychology at manchester metropolitan university in manchester, england. parker is the author of _the crisis in modern social psychology--and how to end it_, co-author of _deconstructing psychopathology_, and coeditor of _deconstructing social psychology, psychology and society: radical theory and practice and discourse analystic research_. john shotter is professor of communication at the university of new hampshire. his most recent books -c_ultural politics of everyday life: social constructionism, rhetoric and knowing of the third kind_; and _conversational realities: studies in social constructionism_ - explore the dialogic realities of the lifeworld. the conference is designed to be informal and in-depth, with ample opportunity for participants to explore issues with the presenters. saturday breakfast morning session lunch afternoon session (workshops and/or dialogues with individual presenters) dinner evening session party and performance sunday breakfast morning session (workshops and/or dialogues with individual presenters) lunch afternoon session participants: the conference should be of interest to a wide range of people, including university faculty, graduate and undergraduate students; clinicians, social workers, educators, health and mental health workers. costs: conference registration: $100 accomodations and meals: $200 (double occupancy saturday night, 3 meals on saturday,2 meals on sunday) for information and/or to register, contact: east side institute 500 greenwich street new york, new york 10013 phone: (212) 941-8906 fax: (212) 941-8340 email: esiesc@aol.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- * perspectives on science i am currently soliciting articles for the next, and future, issues of the journal perspectives on science: historical, philosophical, social the journal publishes studies of science, medicine, and technology that integrate historical, philosophical, and/or sociological understandings of the topic(s) being addressed. the editors of perspectives believe that publishing interdisciplinary studies on specific scientific, medical, and technological topics will help scholars gain a more comprehensive understanding of the broader subjects of science, medicine, and technology. the journal has been published for five years by the university of chicago press. past articles include: "the resolution of discordant results," allan franklin "rationality among the friends of truth: the gassendi-descartes controversy," lynn s. joy "towards more secrecy in science? challenges to an ethics of science," mathias kaiser "cordelia's love: credibility, validity, and the social studies of science," steven shapin "looting, reparation, and stewardship: ethical issues in archaeology," alison wylie "the political cartography of the human genome project," brian balmer. articles on all topics related to science, medicine, and technology, written from all perspectives, are welcome. each issue of perspectives includes case studies, theoretical articles, and historiographic essays. for more information on the journal in general, or about submitting articles specifically, please contact me at the address given below. thank you. ed lamb managing editor perspectives on science department of philosophy virginia tech blacksburg, va 24061-0126 ph. (540) 231-7879 fax (540) 231-6367 email lamb@vt.edu, pos@vt.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- * sfra and eaton conferences calls for papers the 1997 annual conference of the science fiction research association the 1997 j. lloyd eaton conference on science fiction and fantasy literature to be held concurrently at the queen mary, long beach, california, june 23 26, 1997 "worlds enough and time: exploring the space time continuum of science fiction and fantasy" sfra conference topic: "space" to the dismay of many, "science fiction" is often equated with "space fiction." for that reason, fanciful tales like lucian's true history often figure in histories of science fiction; one popular symbol for science fiction is a rocketship; and fact based films like marooned and apollo 13 are still described as science fiction. this persistent association does raise immediate questions: why does this connection exist? should it exist? how might it be sundered? however, one could also embrace this relationship and see space travel as a central expression of the genre's impulse to acquire knowledge and achieve progress although the venue of space also enables many writers to critique that impulse, as the vacuum of space and alien planets become new backdrops for analysis of human hubris in the face of the unknown. the very ways that we describe space, as a new ocean or new frontier, demand analysis; even in the earth-bound fantasies of the new wave, space travel figures as a metaphor for personal exploration of "inner space," as well expressed in j. g. ballard's famous statement, "the only alien planet is earth"; and the now-common description of computer networks as "cyberspace" again suggests that space travel has today become both an everyday activity and a powerful icon, in science fiction and in life. we welcome proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of this topic, or related topics. please send papers or proposals by april 1, 1997 to: gary westfahl the learning center university of california riverside, california 92521 westfahl@pop.ucr.edu eaton conference topic: "time" humans have always been fascinated with time. heraclitus taught that we could not step into the same river twice, but brigadoon somehow touches our world once and again. the nineteenth century introduced the possibility of time travel, as mark twain took us into the legendary past, and h. g. wells built a machine to explore the distant future. edgar rice burroughs's the land that time forgot underscores the intimate connections between changes in the nature of time and the production of different worlds, as also suggested by stories of parallel universes. modern fantasies offer powerful images of time slowing down, moving at different rates, or even submitting to the control of the individual will. such explorations of time have occurred in fantasy and science fiction literature, fairy tales and myths, film and rock opera. the vicissitudes of time, a motif central to science fiction, create worlds without ends, as in jorge luis borges's "the garden of forking paths," and worlds without beginning, as in robert a. heinlein's "' all you zombies '." and, as we approach the end of this millennium, we reflect on other moments when time itself seemed about to stop or fundamentally alter the universe; at the end of days, will we confront a paradise regained or pamela zoline's "the heat death of the universe"? we welcome proposals for 30-minute papers on any aspects of this topic. send papers or proposals by april 1, 1997 to: george slusser, curator, eaton collection rivera library university of california riverside, california 92521 slus@ucrac1.ucr.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- * uniting academic disciplines call for papers connections: uniting academic disciplines a multi-disciplinary pop culture conference friday-sunday, february 7-9, 1997 the second university of kentucky graduate conference explores popular culture from the perspectives of multiple disciplines. graduate students in english, film, history, sociology, psychology, music, theatre, and other disciplines pursuing cultural studies should submit glimpses of pop culture phenomena from the perspectives of their particular disciplines. panel sessions will pair papers from various disciplines to promote cross-disciplinary discussion in the interest of making connections between our fields. scheduled sessions include: presentations of academic papers, film screenings, informal discussion groups, poetry & prose readings. submissions might include, but are not limited to: critical analysis of popular culture, music or theatre performance pieces, mass culture, regional culture, popular music and theatre performance, pop culture and psychology, trends in pop culture, historical antecedents of current phenomena, popular culture of the past, and popular fiction and poetry. abstracts of no more than 300 words should be mailed by oct. 31st, 1996 to--connections conference, university of kentucky, 1218 patterson office tower, lexington, ky 40506. for questions or more information please e-mail geoff dennes at gcdenn0@pop.uky.edu or rebecca weaver at raweav1@pop.uky.edu. panels now sceduled include appalachian culture and civil war re-enactors. the panel on re-enactors will be preceded by a documentary film screening, and the producers of the film will be on the panel along with several members of the kentucky orphans brigade re-enactment group. we're deliberately keeping costs low to attract as many participants as possible. the registration fee is only $20.00, which includes refreshments at a reception friday night, breakfast on saturday and sunday, and light snacks and beverages on saturday afternoon. we're also offering limited accomodations in the homes of our graduate students. we want the connections conference to be friendly for first time conference participants. we encourage submissions from first-time conference participants or people who don't claim popular culture as a specialty. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * networking the humanities networking the humanties: technologes, communities, globalization. the annual conference of the consortium of humanities centers and institutes. friday october 25, 1996 2:00 pm globalization and the nation: toward a multicultural feminist critique ella shohat, city university of new york-graduate center 4:00 pm emerging global perspectives in the humanities, arts, and cultural studies dina iordanova, university of chicago panivong norindr, university of wisconsin-milwaukee andrew wernick, trent university, canada 5:30-7:00 reception saturday october 26, 1996 1:00 pm bodies electric: or, the modern scholarly prometheus (our hideous progeny) jerome mcgann, university of virginia 2:00 pm virtual collections martin meuller, northwestern university robert morrissey, university of chicago robert bruegmann and peter bacan hales, university of illinois at chicago 3:30 pm virtual communities wendy plotkin, univerity of illinois at chicaog janet smarr, university of illinois at urbana-champaign james sosnoski, university of illinois at chicago cosponsored by the institute for the humanities, university of illinois at chicago with support from alice berline kaplan center for the humanities, northwestern university; center for twentieth century studies, university of wisconsin-milwaukee; chicago humanties institute, university of chicago; college of liberal arts and sciences, university of illinois at chicago; office of the chancellor, university of illinois at chicago. for additional information please contact: linda vavra conference coordinator lvavra@uic.edu at 312/996-6354 --------------------------------------------------------------------- * sociologies of cyberspace call for papers sociologies of cyberspace the board of the virginia review of sociology invites the submission of candidate chapters for a special volume titled "the sociologies of cyberspace." this volume will address whether and to what extent cyberspace represents, presents, or conduces social change of significance that is, the manners in which and the degrees to which cyberspace is different from other social arenas, and whether and how this is sociologically significant. for purposes of this volume, we conceive cyberspace to include all forms of computer-mediated and -enhanced communications and interactions. we will give preference to those submissions that advance methodological approaches to, explicitly account for empirical findings about, and develop theoretical understandings of cyberspace. we are particularly interested in papers that go beyond a psychological and individualistic analysis, and particularly encourage those submissions that make comparative use of several online services and/or social groups. we hope to include a variety of empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to cyberspace, and intend to emphasize the possible diversity of such approaches. possible topics include, but are not limited to: patterns of social life online, including demographic distributions as well as patterns of social control, boundary enforcement, role enactment, community building, resource allocation, and collective behavior; political, economic, and other determinants of online social life; and political, economic, religious, and other social consequences and implications of cyberspace, particularly including interactions between online and offline social life. manuscripts should be submitted in triplicate, printed in double spacing on only one side of each page. citations and references should conform to that system prescribed by and for the american journal of sociology. submissions should have a target date of october 31, 1996. any acceptance of submissions beyond that date is at the discretion of the volume editor. we would appreciate a brief notice of intent by september 30, 1996. comments and queries are welcomed and encouraged. for further information, or to submit a paper, please contact the editor of the volume j. ellington ("ellis") godard, cabell hall 539, university of virginia, charlottesville, virginia 22903 (jeg5s@virginia.edu). the faculty advisor for this volume will be thomas m. guterbock, and the series editor is donald black. the virginia review of sociology is a series of volumes published by jai press, and coordinated and edited by the graduate students and faculty of sociology at the university of virginia. each volume explores and reflects current empirical and theoretical development within the field of sociology. themes of previous volumes have included law and conflict management, and cultural conflict in modern america. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * hartman center travel grants john w. hartman center for sales, advertising, and marketing history special collections library duke university travel-to-collections grants three or more grants of up to $750 are available from the john w. hartman center for sales, advertising, and marketing history, special collections library, duke university to: 1. graduate students in any academic field who wish to use the resources of the center for research toward m.a., ph.d., or other postgraduate degrees 2. faculty members working on research projects 3. independent scholars working on nonprofit projects funds may be used to help defray costs of travel to durham and local accommodations. in addition to the regular ttc grants described above, the hartman center will fund three j. walter thompson research fellowships. each fellow will receive a stipend of $1000 during their stay in durham. fellowships are available to researchers planning to spend a minimum of two weeks at duke doing research in the j. walter thompson company archives. the major collections available at the hartman center at the current time are the extensive archives of the j. walter thompson company (jwt), the oldest advertising agency in the u.s. and a major international agency since the 1920s, and the advertisements (1932+) and a moderate amount of agency documentation from d'arcy, masius, benton & bowles (dmb&b). the center holds several other smaller collections relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and marketing, supported by a growing number of books, periodicals, films, and videos. for more information about the hartman center collections, visit our www site at http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/ requirements: awards may be used between december 1, 1996 and december 31, 1997. graduate student applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a postgraduate program in any academic department and (2) must enclose a letter of recommendation from the student's advisor or project director. please address questions and requests for application forms to: ellen gartrell john w. hartman center for sales, advertising and marketing history special collections library, duke university box 90185 durham, nc 27708-0185 phone: 919-660-5836 fax: 919-684-2855; e-mail: hartman@mail.lib.duke.edu deadlines: applications for 1996-97 awards must be received or postmarked by october 15, 1996. awards will be announced by late-november. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * human relations, authority & justice human relations, authority & justice: experiences and critiques hraj on listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu human relations, authority and justice: experiences and critiques this is an open, unmoderated forum designed to encourage the application of psychoanalytic and related psychodynamic approaches to the understanding of group, institutional, cultural and political processes. the forum is related to an electronic journal of the same name based at http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/home.html. there is also a us mirror site for ease of accessing and downloading writings from the web site: http://rdz.stjohns.edu/human-nature/hraj/home.html most of those who are working on this project are based in london, england and sofia, bulgaria and work in the helping professions, organizational consultancy and group relations, while some work with ethnic minorities, crisis intervention, sexual abuse and other applied spheres. what brings them together is in the conviction that primitive, unconscious, irrational processes play a much larger part in human relations than is usually supposed and that unless full account can be taken of these processes and unless ways can be found to understand and contain them, improved relations are unlikely to ensue at any levels of human interaction from the individual to international relations. in particular, the group has made extensive use of the approaches to human relations developed by wilfred bion and others at the tavistock institute of human relations, summarised in his _experiences in groups_ (london: tavistock, 1961) and the tradition of group relations and organizational consultancy which has followed on from that work in the tavistock and elsewhere, in particular, in group relations conferences at leicester and elsewhere, e.g., america, israel, germany, australia, india. other approaches, both psychoanalytic and systemic, are also drawn upon, in particular, on the normal role of psychotic anxieties in contributing to problems in groups and institutions. group relations events were held in sofia in 1992 and 1996, and there was a founding conference of the project in 1995. those who have been taking part in this programme now feel that it is time to share our work and work in progress and to invite others to join in and to discuss similar projectsa and ideas, whether in eastern europe or in other parts of the world. archives of hraj mail items are kept in monthly files. you may obtain a list files in the archives by sending the command index hraj in the body of e-mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu on the internet. to subscribe, send the following command in the body of mail to listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu sub hraj yourfirstname yourlastname for example: sub hraj margaret thatcher owner: robert m. young you can send any technical queries about the forum or web site to: ian pitchford i.pitchford@sheffield.ac.uk or i_pitchford@msn.com list of initial contents of www site: human relations, authority and justice: experiences and critiques http://www.human-nature.com/hraj/home.html 1. announcement re: email forum, journal and web site 2. papers from conference on group relations and organizational behaviour, new bulgarian university, 14 may 1995: w. gordon lawrence, "the presence of totalitarian states of mind in institutions"; robert m. young, "mental space and group relations"; david armstrong, "making absences present: the contribution of w. r. bion to understanding unconscious social phenomena" 3. writings of toma tomov: toma tomov, lecture delivered at the 143rd annual meeting of the american psychiatric association, new york city, may 12-17, 1990. toma tomov, "psychoanalysis in a post-totalitarian society," paper delivered to seventh annual conference on "psychoanalysis and the public sphere," university of east london, 12-13 november 1993. toma tomov, "social violence and the social institutions," paper written for the seminar on social violence, october 14-15, 1995, prague, to be published, ed. keitha fine. toma tomov, "the politics of mental health in bulgaria: is there a civic role for psychiatry?," paper delivered to symposium on "the role of the professional psychiatric associations" (gip sponsored symposium); 25 august 9.00-9.30 a.m. x world congress of psychiatry, madrid, 23-28 august, 1996. 4. bulgarian psychiatric association, "toward the liberation of mental health: a reform of bulgarian psychiatry." 5. papers from 1992 psychoanalytic week: robert m. young, "guilt and the veneer of civilization"; robert m. young, "psychotic anxieties in groups and institutions." 6. robert m. young, "racist society, racist science." 7. report on first group relations conference, sofia, bulgaria, 18-22 december, 1992 by robert m. young. 8. programme of second working conference on group relations, sofia, bulgaria, 29 july 2 august 1996: "individual, group and organisation: experiencing authority, leadership and management in institutions." 9. haralan alexandrov and maya mladenova, "report on leadership and management training with bulgarian gypsies, april-june 1996" 10. list of publications of dr toma tomov, professor of psychiatry, medical university of sofia, written in english. 11. reading lists: w. r. bion, groups and institutions, racism and virulent nationalism 12. papers which should be on-line in a day or so (from 21 aug. 1996): toma tomov, maya mladenova and haralan alexandrov, "psychodynamic approaches to training: the experience of group work with minority leaders"; toma tomov and nikolai butorin, "views held by psychiatrists of their profession: are there differences between east and west?" 13. forthcoming papers (to be put on web site when they have been scanned in and edited): toma tomov and evgueni guentchev, "post-traumatic stress disorder among victims of violence: a report from bulgaria"; david armstrong, "the "institution in the mind": reflections on the relation of psycho-analysis to work with institutions"; david armstrong, "names, thoughts and lies: the relevance of bion"s later writing to experiences in groups"; w. gordon lawrence,"won from the void of the infinite: experiences of social dreaming"; w. gordon lawrence, "signals of transcendence in large groups as systems"; w. gordon lawrence, alistair bain and laurence gould, "the fifth basic assumption." --------------------------------------------------------------------- * australian humanities review australian humanities review is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal and is published every three months under the auspices of the australian vice chancellors' committee. two issues are already available with articles by leading academics and writers on a range of topics, moderated feedback and discussion, information and links. in this second issue, dennis altman considers the globalisation of homosexuality and provides a critique of "queer theory" in the article "on global queering" with responses from gary dowsett, donald morton and michael tan and christopher lane. aboriginal activist marcia langton writes about government disrespect for sacred "women's business" in "how aboriginal religion has become an administrable subject", while kerryn goldsworthy looks at jane austen mania. australian playwright david williamson's latest play "heresy" is the target for meaghan morris and paul mcgillick and academic history takes some stick from greg dening and stephen muecke. helen daniel attempts to define the public intellectual and graham seal explores the cultural tradition of the outlaw hero. there is an e-muse section for open discussion on the articles carried. the good oil section carries information on important upcoming conferences and seminars with electronic addresses for follow-up information. australian humanities review is free to all who come across it. i hope this new e-journal will be of interest to your humanities department and you will bookmark the site for future access. trish mckeown for cassandra pybus (editor) the issue for august 1996 is now finished and available on url http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/ahr --------------------------------------------------------------------- * hawaiian education literacy project hi, just a quick note to tell you about the hawaii education literacy project a non-profit organization and our efforts to promote literacy by making electronic text easier and more enjoyable to read. given that we're both in the reading biz, i thought you might be interested. readtome, our first program, reads aloud any form of electronic text, including web pages, and is free to anyone who wishes to use it. the "web designers" section of our home page tells you how your pages can literally speak to your audience. actually, all you need to do to make your pages audible is to add the following html code: hear this page! requires readtome software... don't got it? get it free! a beta test version of the program can be obtained from http://www.pixi.com/~reader1. i encourage you and your readers to download a copy and take it for a spin. thank you for your time, rob hanson rhanson@freeway.net hawaii education literacy project --------------------------------------------------------------------- * u. wisconsin document technology series the university of wisconsin's department of engineering professional development announces its october-november 1996 course series in document technology. all courses will be held in madison, wi. for more information on these document technology programs, contact richard vacca, program director, at: +1-608-262-4341 or +1-800-462-0876 +1-608-263-3160 (fax) vacca@engr.wisc.edu implementing an sgml publishing system october 22-25, 1996 intended audience: sgml implementors such as managers of information technology and publishing groups, analysts, programmers, and applications developers fee: $1,095; 3 or more registrants from the same organization, $930 each url: http://epdwww.engr.wisc.edu/brochures/6896.html integrating and managing on-demand print october 28-29, 1996 intended audience: managers, supervisors, and staff in duplicating and printing operations, documentation and publications, or production and distribution fee: $645; 3 or more registrants from the same organization, $550 each url: http://epdwww.engr.wisc.edu/brochures/6897.html managing documents as information resources november 4-5, 1996 intended audience: managers and staff in is/it, publications and documentation, or other departments where document development is intensive. fee: $645; 3 or more registrants from the same organization, $550 each url: http://epdwww.engr.wisc.edu/brochures/6895.html implementing electronic document distribution november 6-8, 1996 intended audience: managers and staff developing electronic publishing and distribution systems and web sites; content developers, document creators fee: $895; 3 or more registrants from the same organization, $765 each url: http://epdwww.engr.wisc.edu/brochures/6899.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- * electronic publishing bibliography url:http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n1/bail6n1.html version 25 of "network-based electronic publishing of scholarly works: a selective bibliography" is available. this updated pacs review paper presents selected articles, books, electronic documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the internet and other networks. most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. where possible, links are provided to sources that are available via the internet. the bibliography has the following sections: 2.1 economic issues 2.2 electronic books and texts 2.2.1 case studies and history 2.2.2 general works 2.2.3 library issues 2.2.4 related electronic resources 2.3 electronic serials 2.3.1 case studies and history 2.3.2 critiques 2.3.3 electronic distribution of printed journals 2.3.4 general works 2.3.5 library issues 2.3.6 related electronic resources 2.3.7 research 2.4 general works 2.4.1 related electronic resources 2.5 legal issues 2.5.1 intellectual property rights 2.5.2 other legal issues 2.5.3 related electronic resources 2.6 library issues 2.6.1 cataloging, classification, and uris 2.6.2 digital libraries 2.6.3 general works 2.6.4 information integrity and preservation 2.6.5 related electronic resources 2.7 new publishing models 2.8 publisher issues 2.8.1 related electronic resources the bibliography can be searched. --------------------------------------------------------------------- * misq discovery is it a journal? is it an e-newsletter? is it superman [superperson??]? misq discovery, whose first 'issue' [?] has just emerged after a 2-year gestation period, provides a valuable discussion of the nature of such entities, at: http://www.misq.org/discovery/about.html unsurprisingly, the very first paper 'published' is of interest to linkers, on teledemocracy, at: http://www.misq.org/discovery/articles96/article1/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------schaffer, 'disney and the imagineering of histories', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-schaffer-disney.txt archive pmc-list, file schaffer.596. part 1/1, total size 72241 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- disney and the imagineering of histories by scott schaffer programme in social and political thought york university sschaffe@yorku.ca postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by scott schaffer, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [1] recently, the walt disney company abandoned its plans to develop an american history theme park near manassas, virginia, the site of a major battle during the american civil war. part of the reason for this decision, according to the company, was that the citizens of manassas and surrounding areas had fought the development of the theme park, claiming that the "true" history of not only the civil war, but also of all of america, would not be told there. at the same time, _the globe and mail_ reviewed disney's new live-action film, _squanto_, stating that it was historically inaccurate; however, as the _globe_ notes, "history is written by the winners, and you can't get much more victorious than daddy disney" (5 november 1994, p. c14). it is surprising that these are some of the first public, i.e. non-academic, protests against disney's perversion of local histories in the creation of its products, as this process is the entire basis of the disney company's corporate production. that is, the walt disney company co-opts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the company's own, and sells them to disney's customers as markers of american political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. this co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the disney company's products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the "small world" of the disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the disney company's transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify american imperial power. [2] the first section of this paper will explore how the animated films of the walt disney company (wdc) treat local stories and histories as fodder for "'the rapacious strip-miner' in the goldmine of legend and myth,'" (kunzle, in dorfman and mattelart 1971:18) and attempt to sell those who have their stories taken a perception that they are supposed to have of themselves -that of the cultural other of america. to do this, i argue that wdc appropriates local stories, reinscribes them in the discourse of american imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, and sells the stories to all as portrayals of american cultural and political others, revising old stereotypes in the current terms of american imperial expansion. i then argue, in the second section, that this reinscription process deprives the stories of their particular local geographies, and allows them to therefore be coopted and placed in ahistorical, ageographical ways in the creation of the disney theme parks. this, in effect, allows wdc to set up representations of the world in the way that disney would have wanted to see it -as an allegorical representation of the power of the united states. hence, the guiding metaphor for the disney theme parks is the ride, "it's a small world," where all the "children" of the world are brought together in one place to sing the annoying song of cultural imperialism, all brought to you by bank of america. in the third section of this paper, i turn to the way in which this cultural hegemony produced by the animated films and the theme parks maintains and perpetuates itself through marketing strategies designed to make these products seem timeless, and therefore the story they tell of american greatness seem to last for all time. in all, i would argue that the united states government no longer has the monopoly on the touting of america's conquest of the world; mickey mouse and the other disney characters do it for them, making imperialism that much cuter. *american "distory" through film: creating disney's world order* [3] making the conceptual stretch from examining disney's animated features to talking about the inscription of american cultural imperialist discourse seems to be nothing more than a senseless attack on one of america's -and the world's -most loved cultural icons. however, exploring those "myths" -and here i use myth in the sense of cultural stories that provide a structure by which society and narratives for social action can be constructed (lincoln 1989:25) -is important, and especially for the walt disney company's (wdc) myths, because wdc is ideologically bound up with the american governmental apparatus, and has been since before world war two. officially, wdc became involved with the american government as a matter of finances, due to the near bankruptcy of wdc, thanks to walt's mishandling of funds and the war in europe, which cut off quite a large market (and a popular one -king george apparently refused to go to a film unless a mickey mouse short was being shown, and disney himself was received by benito mussolini during a visit to italy in 1937). the disney studios in burbank, california, became "the most extensive 'war plant' in hollywood, housing mountains of munitions, quartering antiaircraft troops, providing overflow office space for lockheed personnel. by 1943, fully 94% of the footage produced at the studios was war-related. disney had become a government contractor on a massive scale" (burton 1992:33). in addition, wdc was hired by nelson rockefeller, who was then (1940) director of the office of the coordinator of inter-american affairs, to produce a series of documentaries and motion pictures about the latin and south american regions, providing a way for the united states to "ease any remaining tensions with south american governments in order to maintain hemispheric unity as a bulwark against foreign invasion," as well as to "show the truth about the american way" to those who lived below the rio grande (burton 1992:25). as well, wdc prodded the government of the state of florida to allow it to set up two cities that encapsulate the walt disney world theme park so that it would have the ability to manage its own governmental affairs as well as have more clout with the florida government when trying to get permits, development funding, and the like. ideologically, wdc portrayed itself as being the bearer of true american values to the world; as one piece of disney publicity circa the opening of disneyland (1955) put it, disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created america. and it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world. disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. it will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. and it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives (in sorkin 1992:206). and, metaphorically, wdc sees itself as interchangeable -or at least exchangeable -with the us government; its disney dollars, available from the theme parks, are exchangeable currency with the us dollar at a one-to-one ratio. [4] as a way of looking at the films and theme parks of the disney company as agents of legitimation for american imperialism, i would like to start with a simple premise: that the media works to affect and effect what fromm called the "social character" of a society. in fromm's conception, the social character is formed by the educational and cultural apparatuses of a society. there is also another level of the character of society, the social unconscious, which fromm says functions as a "socially conditioned filter," through which "experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter" (fromm 1994: 74). i would argue that within american society, the social character, formed as it is through the surface-level political discourses of liberty, equality, and freedom, is counteracted in some sense by the need on the part of the social unconscious for an other -not in the levinasian sense of a face to face encounter, but rather as in the sense that durkheim refers to the deviant -as the defining moment of membership. this is not uncommon or unnoted: hegel claims that the recognition of the self by another is the defining moment of humanity (_the phenomenology of mind_), and i would, following bauman's discussion of exclusionary strategies of social group membership (1994:237), extend this into the realm of the larger social order as well. in other words, at the level of the social unconscious, the self (namely, the american society) can only be defined in terms of denoting the boundary between itself and others that it interacts with in the world system at large. [5] disney plays a part in this boundary denotation, in that it allows for the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes that portray, albeit in a "cute" way, the otherness of the areas of the world that the united states has come to dominate, be they politically, culturally, or economically. it does this by utilizing stories from the past -from traditions, generally those of other countries -in such a way as to reinforce the values and cultural practices of america. disney's intention as a corporation is to portray life in the places that it depicts in its products in the way in which america either %was% like or %should have been% like, regardless of the historical specificity of the situation it attempts to portray. my analysis here focuses upon this use of tradition as a mechanism for social boundary maintenance, and i analyze the products of the disney company in such a way so as to highlight the imputation of these boundary maintenance mechanisms into the original stories that are depicted.^1^ as bauman notes, "rejection of strangers may shy away from expressing itself in racial terms, but it cannot afford admitting being arbitrary lest it should abandon all hope of success; it verbalizes itself therefore in terms of . . . the self-defence of a form of life bequeathed by tradition" (bauman 1994: 235). while the disney films do not explicitly argue for neo-tribalism in their content, i would argue that their past history as propagandists for the united states during world war two, as well as the messages of their films and theme parks, combined with their marketing strategy regarding the recycling of films and the recontextualization of their contstructed geographies in the theme parks, provide sufficient reason to claim that their function %vis-a-vis% the social character is to construct a boundary between america/"americans" and the rest of the world and its citizenry, even within the united states. [6] one might argue that this analysis is one-sided, that there may be a critical distance between the constructed messages behind the disney parks and films and the reception of them by the "guests" of the parks or the viewers of the film. while i do not dispute the possible existence of this critical distance (if i did, this paper would be impossible, for example), i would argue that these subtle messages have the potential to work their way into the social character of the united states. the disney products function as cultural legitimations, which serve to make normal conceptions of the differences in access to power (fjellman 1992:30). following fanon, i would argue that the products of the walt disney company provide american society with a collective catharsis, a way of having all of the internal contradictions and aggression, both within its members and within the social order, externalized and played out before and away from them (fanon 1967:145). problematically, though, disney's catharsis marks out its aggressions from the perspective of the american hegemon. that is, its portrayals of the stories that it takes from the world rewrite them from the point of view of what fanon would call the "neurosis of the colonizer"; in other words, i would argue that the master/slave dialectic that fanon observes in colonial africa in regard to the relationship between colonizer and colonized reappears, though in a much cuter guise, in disneyland and in terms more appropriate for american society. in doing so, the disney company's products serve to construct a "white" (or, in other terms, an american imperialistic) pathway for its consumers from which to perceive the world and themselves. as itwaru notes, in regards to the "into the heart of africa" exhibit at the royal ontario museum in toronto, it is assumed in this premise that our thinking must necessarily be realized within the occupier's frame of references, that these perspectives should govern the ways we reflect on our condition. and in so doing to not pay heed to the fundamental differences in the circumstances in which we are deemed subordinate, our realities subservient to the principals as well as the principles of the super-ordinating imperial order. (itwaru and ksonzek 1994:23) put another way, cultural products naturalize the political and economic conditions within which they were created, and in the construction of cultural messages or legitimations presume a point of view that does not necessarily coincide with the place of the consumer and in fact, as itwaru puts it, makes the consumer "faceless" and placed under the control, at least at the level of the political unconscious, of the creator of the cultural product. in doing so, imperialist discourse can ingrain themselves not at the level of normalcy, but at the level of the political unconscious (itwaru and ksonzek 1994: 59, 94), making critical reflection upon the messages embedded in cultural commodities even more difficult. [7] having made clear the impetus for the critical examination of disney animated features and theme parks for their depiction of american cultural and political imperialism, i turn now first to the films themselves. *_the three caballeros_: the monroe doctrine's %pinata%* [8] _the three caballeros_, produced in 1945, was the direct result of a request by the american government to produce films that would represent the goodwill of america towards the latin american region, as well as depict the american way to them. combined with an extensive comic book production, _the three caballeros_ and its two predecessors, _south of the border with disney_ and _saludos amigos_, were intended to ensure the solidarity of the western hemisphere against the possibility of enemy attack during world war two by portraying americans not as colonizers (as they had been since the monroe doctrine in the early nineteenth century), but rather as %companeros%, joined in the enterprise of enjoying life. [9] _the three caballeros_ is a three-part cartoon, presented as a birthday "package" that arrives for donald duck. this package is designed to represent all of the best elements of latin american culture and geography, and does so in the form of the "travel book" -the kind of book that is designed to give the entire experience of "being there" surrogately without ever having to leave one's home. it tells three of these "travel stories": one of pablo penguin, who decides that the cold of the south pole is no longer tolerable, and decides to move north to warmer climes; another of joe cariota, a brasilian parrot, who takes donald to baia, brazil; and the last of panchito, a mexican parrot who escorts donald and joe cariota to the resort cities of mexico. in all of these stories, the underlying theme is domination: pablo ends up enlisting a turtle in his service while lounging on the sands of a pacific island; donald attempts to dominate the women of south america, but is foiled by the "potency" of the local men^2^; and the portrayal of these scenes in the form of "travel books" dominates the locales in the sense of showing only what is commodifiable about the locations (i.e. the %fiesta% aspect of life in these areas). [10] while originally contracted for and touted as a true representation of what latin america and latin americans were "all about," _the three caballeros_ ends up becoming what i see as the standard pattern of disney animated features^3^ -a legitimation, or the "distorifying" (taking off from fjellman's concept of distory, or disney's history), of the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the united states. the intention of the film was to show the american movie-going public what life was like in latin america, much in the same way that disney's nature films showed what "wildlife" was like. as well, as burton points out, it was to convey the idea of the american way to latin americans, and to show that the us was not solely out to colonize their neighbours to the south. however, this is precisely what happens in the three caballeros: the different mediums by which donald duck (and us, the viewers) is shown the way of life in latin and south america (a film, two books, and a pinata) are all easily commodifiable forms in which the story can be consumed and the life can be colonized in the same sense that mitchell outlines; i will return to this later. the film, which tells the story of pablo penguin moving north from the south pole, introduces donald to the allure of the exotic "other" of the islands off of the pacific coast of latin america, and sparks donald's desire to "live the life" of latin americans. the story then moves to joe cariota's transportation of donald to baia, where donald meets the stereotypical brasilians: partying men and women, dancing and enjoying life, seemingly without worry. after partaking of the life of brazil, donald and joe are then joined by panchito, who transports them to old mexico, where donald partakes of the life of christmas and %fiesta%, wanders with %hombres% who are barefooted, wear %serapes% and sleep under their %sombreros%; and falls in love with %conquistadoras% who appear from cactus fields. in the cases of both baia and mexico, donald's participation in the festivities is only possible when the local music and dance begins to sound like american traditional (i.e. broadway musical genre or dixieland music); that is, donald the american's participation is only possible when there are american elements dominating the cultural practice. for example, donald can only join in the %fiesta% when the %mariachi% band begins playing dixieland-style jazz. hence, like a mcdonald's restaurant in beijing, _the three caballeros_ privileges the flattening-out of local cultures and their americanization, making it possible for something this "foreign" in these strange places to be consumed. *_the jungle book_: the bare necessities, made in india* [11] _the jungle book_, released in 1967, is a most problematic film in terms of deciphering its unique colonial content, as separate from that of the story upon which it was based. unlike _pinocchio_, which was a local traditional story (whose perversion by disney was litigated against by collodi's grandson; forgacs 1992:371-72) and _the three caballeros_ (an original disney story), _the jungle book_ originally comes out of a highly imperialistic context. kipling wrote the original book during the height of the british rule of india, and many have commented on the colonizing aspects of this novel.^4^ i would argue that the use of this story by disney allowed for its translation from one imperialistic context -the british rule of india -to another, the american war against viet nam. [12] _the jungle book_ was released in 1967, well into the so-called postcolonial era; however, some of its earlier, more british colonial tinges remain, most often in the accents of the characters: the elephant colonel hathi, recipient of the victoria cross "for service in the maharajah's third pachyderm brigade"; bagheera as mowgli's "nanny"; shere khan, with the thickest british accent of all of the characters, as the "ruler of the jungle" (referred to as "your highness"); and the vultures, who seem eerily like the beatles. the film, though, functions as an allegory of the transition from british to american imperialist power; baloo, sounding and acting strangely like the duke, john wayne, ultimately wins the battle to the death with shere khan. it is unseemly that this "shiftless jungle bum," in the words of bagheera, could become the ruler of the jungle; however, as the americans have unfortunately shown since world war two, one does not need to have the propriety of the british in order to rule the world, and baloo's character seems to embody this rather well. [13] a second inscription of american imperialism would seem to be the treatment of mowgli, the human boy who is raised in "the wild" by bagheera and baloo (the two imperialistic parents, of british and american voices/origins). first, mowgli is never identified particularly as "indian," as he was in the original _jungle book_ stories; instead, only his dark skin marks him off as "foreign," and without any other identifying physical features, he becomes a generalized other for americans, one who could live anywhere in "the jungle." mowgli is also referred to variously as "man-cub" or "boy," and in fact these become interchangeable throughout the film. the portrayal of this dark-skinned person (who, in the newly-released live-action version of _the jungle book_, grows from age five to an adult while in the jungle) as "boy" brings up issues of diminutiveness, which are also prevalent in imperialistic discourse: a boy is a male child below the age of puberty. but the term "boy" was also used to designate a servant or slave (especially in colonial or post-colonial africa, and india, and parts of china, as well as in southern parts of the united states); in other words, "boy" functions as a term of domination, a term to designate an inferior, to create a distinction between or among men -of any age (garber 1992:89). conflating these two markers of inferiority, mowgli becomes a universal other to imperialists (of either british or american ilk), much in the same way, as i will describe later, that adventureland in the disney theme parks becomes the land of the others who are "anywhere outside north america and western europe." so, it would seem that _the jungle book_ becomes a marker of the expansion of american political imperialism into southeast asia, especially with the advent of the viet nam war. at the time of the film's release, the american army was doing "relatively well" (at least in military terms) with the war, and i would argue that this film reflects the projection of america's pride in the "body counts" onto "the jungles" of the region. [14] a footnote: disney recently released a live-action version of _the jungle book_, starring jason scott lee, an actor of chinese descent. this story stays more closely with the original kipling stories, and attempts to show a "kinder, gentler" version of the story told in the earlier animated version. instead, the film is changed so that mowgli is an adult -and can be taught (see the discussion of _aladdin_ below) -and triumphs not over the colonizing forces, but only those who wish to take ancient treasures from secret cities. here, the portrayal of the colonial british forces runs something more along the lines of benevolent patriarchs who provide education and industry for the local natives. still, the conflation of ethnicities and locales -the actor who plays mowgli is chinese, and the film was shot mostly in south carolina -sends a relatively clear message that the accurate representations of local stories and histories are fluff when compared with the profit margin. *_aladdin_: a whole new (old) world* [15] in _aladdin_, disney's 1992 release, we find another expansion of american cultural and political imperialism, this time into the middle east. contemporaneous with the persian gulf conflict, this film re-marks the traditional story of aladdin's lamp and the genie with overtones of american power, as well as reinscribing it with the cultural commodities of disney, making the film self-reflexive, in that disney's own cinematic history is written into the distory of _aladdin_. [16] as in _the jungle book_, disney begins the film by marking off its subjects as the cultural other for america. the theme song that runs over the opening credits sums up the barbarity of this place: "oh i come from a land / from a faraway place / where the caravan camels roam / where it's black and immense / and the heat is intense / it's barbaric -but hey, it's home." originally, though, these lyrics portrayed a much darker, more evil portrait of its subjects, one which arab-american groups protested heavily. since then, disney has rewritten the lyrics to make the place, but not the people, seem barbaric; previously, the fourth and fifth lines, the offensive ones in the original theatrical release, read "where they cut off your ear/ if they don't like your face" ("it's racist, but hey, it's disney," _new york times_, 14 july 1993, a18). hence, the barbaric "nature" of arabs in this film remains; however, it becomes disguised in the nature of the land in which these people live; as the editorial notes, "to characterize an entire region with this sort of tongue-in-cheek bigotry, especially in a movie aimed at children, borders on barbaric" (loc. cit.). [17] the barbarism of arab justice (both in the removal of one's ear "if they don't like your face," as well as the removal of the hands of thieves) also harkens to the portrayal of western capitalism -those who steal from the king (and here, as jafar points out when disguised as a prisoner so as to lure aladdin into taking him to the cave of wonders, where the genie's lamp is stashed, "whoever has the gold makes the rules") deserve to have their hands removed. aladdin, though, has to wonder -"all this for a loaf of bread?" -thereby giving voice to what could be called the proletariat. however, here the proletariat is definitely not glorified; instead, aladdin is portrayed throughout the film as "nothing but a street rat," and has to use the power of the genie in order to make himself appear appreciable to the local gentry, in particular princess jasmine. but, there is another allegory of american capitalism here -the desire to throw off the chains of royalty -and indolence -and become an "everyman," or in this case, where princess jasmine runs off from the castle and goes into the marketplace, "everyperson." in a sense, then, we can see that the film gives the message that neither of the two typifications of arab society -the egregiously wealthy or the "street rat" peasant -are acceptable within disney's arabia; instead, what is needed are self-made individuals (a la _pinocchio_), who have the ability to judiciously live within, throw out, or rewrite tradition as it suits their needs. in _aladdin_, this becomes aladdin's use of the genie in order to make himself noticeable to the princess; the princess no longer taking orders as to whom she shall marry, and her act of convincing her father to rewrite the law so that she can marry aladdin; and the genie desiring to become his own master. all of this, though, is still inscribed within jafar's and marx's maxim (to paraphrase), "whoever has the gold makes the rules," as it is still the king who enables princess jasmine and aladdin to be married. hence, the rules of capitalism still hold, even in the strange, barbaric place that aladdin calls home. [18] unlike the three films i have discussed above, or any of the other animated features that i have chosen not to examine, _aladdin_ marks the first time that wdc has inscribed its own history into the history of the film. as fjellman points out, "the company has managed to insinuate its characters, stories, and image as good, clean, fun enterprise into the consciousness of millions around the earth" (fjellman 1992:398), and the sublimation of disney products into the consciousness of the viewer makes it easy for the same process to occur in the telling of the story, even though it takes place well in the past. at one point, the genie catches aladdin telling a lie, and briefly transforms his head into that of pinocchio's, complete with foot-and-a-half long nose. in another scene, once aladdin, posing as prince ali ababwa, has won the heart of princess jasmine, is asked by the genie: "what are you going to do now?" in the same manner as wdc has commercials with victorious sports teams and miss america beauty pageant winners responding to this question with, "i'm going to disneyland [or walt disney world, or tokyo disneyland or eurodisney]." finally, at the end of the film, when the genie is released by aladdin and becomes his own master - in other words, when he wins the battle of capitalism, having been in servitude for thousands and thousands of years, only to finally make himself his own boss -he %is% going to disneyland, or at least walt disney world; dressed in an obnoxious tropical print shirt, carrying golf clubs, and wearing a goofy hat, he looks as if he is headed to one of the theme parks, with the intention of partaking of all of its leisure activities. hence, disney's own history, being bound up with the %collective conscience% of the world, also gets bound up with the local stories of the world, regardless of how far away those locales might be. [19] overall, then, we can see that the guiding pattern behind disney's use of local stories or histories, or their creation of stories that are meant to represent local ones (as in the case of _the three caballeros_), is the story-telling of the expansion of american political, economic and cultural imperialistic power in the second half of the twentieth century. _the three caballeros_ intends to export the "truth" of the american way (at least as nelson rockefeller and walt disney saw it) to latin and south america; instead, the truth that gets told -and it is a truth of the american way, even in the era of nafta, where chile and brazil are two of the most important trading partners of the us and are first in line to join the free trade agreement -that latin america is a commodifiable good, one which can be consumed by the distant visitor (through films, travel books, and the like), but is under "no threat" (at least not sexually, as burton points out) from america, because, just like donald duck, we are all engaged in the process of enjoying life. _the jungle book_ allegorically transplants the original colonial story from british-ruled india to viet nam, and conveys a story of the success of american military troops in the region at that point in time. it also begins to more concretely display america's attitude to the rest of the world that lay outside of north america and western europe: whereas in _the three caballeros_ america was portrayed as %un amigo% to the region south of the rio grande, the films from _the jungle book_ on show its subjects as cultural others that are in general inferior, either morally or politically, to the united states. _aladdin_ does this by showing the barbarity of a place that would cut the hands off thieves who steal a loaf of bread -without admitting that the capitalist system does the same thing to the proletariat, and instead only respects those who play on the catch-22 of capitalist society: it takes capital to get capital. [20] an additional point on this matter: disney seems to be legitimating, in the sense of providing justifications of the way that the world is, the cultural, political and economic oppositions that the united states government sets up for itself. as fjellman points out, "legitimations come in many shapes and sizes. . . . they help people -both socialized old-timers and especially newcomers such as children or immigrants -to understand daily life in a locally correct fashion. at the same time, legitimations justify the world. they tell us not only %what% our world is like but also %why% it is, and perhaps should be, as it is" (fjellman 1992:27). and as lincoln advises, "they [agents of either social order or social change] can advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth or modify details in its narration and thereby change the nature of the sentiments (and the society) it evokes" (lincoln 1989:25). with the "ever-changing" world typified by the changing formations of the production of capital, as well as its organization both economically and politically throughout the world, there needs to be some sort of legitimating mechanism by which the political arena can be made to seem "natural," or at least naturalized, to the citizens whose government feels need an enemy -or at least a cultural other to demarcate themselves from. in _the three caballeros_, the opposition is clearly a north-south opposition, one which restated the geographic claim made in the monroe doctrine a century and a half before the film came out that latin and south america were clearly in the realm of the us -if not politically (as most of the us's puppet regimes were falling apart by that point) then at least economically, in the sense of being commodifiable and commodifying. _the jungle book_ clearly makes the civilization-"jungle" opposition; mowgli is always running from civilization, primarily under baloo the (american) bear's direction to stay away from the "man-village," and is only drawn into it by the "civilizing" effect of the girl, who appears at the end of the film singing about her own servitude.^5^ _aladdin_ reiterates the civilization-barbarity opposition, but this time also inscribes a christian-islam opposition, one which in the context of the persian gulf conflict, as well as margaret thatcher's recent comments in toronto that "islamic fundamentalism is a threat that is equal to if not greater than that of communism," further serves to demarcate an enemy that can be rewritten as equal to or greater than hitler. hence, we can see that disney's animated features, in their appropriation of local stories and histories, reinscribe them with the current political, economic, cultural, and ideological discourse about america's place in the world order. [21] an argument could be made that, instead of reinscribing these local stories with the discourse of american imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, that instead the opposite process occurs. that is, that with the expansion of american political power into different pockets of the world, such as viet nam, the middle east, and africa, that interest in these stories is peaked because of the interest in the news stories about these regions, and that therefore wdc, instead of offering these animated films up as justifications for american imperialism, are merely responding to a perceived need. this would then place wdc in the light of being a "good capitalist company," in the sense of answering the needs of the consumer with a commodity, instead of being an ideological arm of the united states government. whereas historical work done on the early films produced by the disney studios, and especially _the three caballeros_, has shown that wdc was recruited by the us government to provide ideological support for the expansion of political power,^6^ there is little or no recent evidence (save the charge that walt disney himself served as a "special informant" for the federal bureau of investigation after world war two, which appeared in marc eliot's 1993 unauthorized biography, _walt disney: hollywood's dark prince_) that wdc has since been involved with the us government. yet, i maintain that the disney company -not only in its animated features, but also in its live-action films and its theme parks, to which i turn next -is instrumental in providing in commodity form what fjellman and lincoln have both called "legitimations" for america's position in the world order and its depiction of its cultural others, which are intended for consumption not only by those who would be most likely to believe these legitimations, but also by those who "need" to internalize these depictions. as dorfman and mattelart put it, disney's films define their -america's -cultural and political others as the us wishes to see them as well as the way in which"the local people are supposed to see [it] themselves."^7^ i turn now to another of the ways in which viewers -or here, visitors -are supposed to internalize disney's view of the world: in the theme park. *"it's a small world, after all:" disney's "historicidal" ride* [22] again, conceptually making the leap from textual analyses of disney animated features to a structural analysis of the disney theme parks, especially disneyland in anaheim, california, and the way in which they convey, in easily consumable ways, allegories of the american view of the world, of history, and the way in which people should view themselves seems to be quite a leap, one akin to the "lover's leap" of lore. the mutual advertisement of disney's products by other divisions (for example, advertising the theme parks in print ads for films), as well as having the disney films be the basis for many of the attractions within the parks, allow me to make this jump. as well, the usage of the world's fair as a model for the disney theme parks (sorkin 1992: 216) provides with me the ability to analyze the disney parks (and here, i focus only upon disneyland, as i was an employee there for eighteen months and know it best; i will later make reference to the other parks, all of which are based upon disneyland) as portrayals of the continuation of the colonial world order. similar to the way mitchell notes that the placement of buildings provides a meaning to those buildings, i would argue that the placement of attractions, in combinations that are neither geographically, politically, or temporally similar, imbues them with disney's meaning: in the order of an exhibitional world, such as lyautey's rabat, each building and each object appeared to stand for some further meaning or value, and these meanings appeared to stand apart as a realm of order and institutions, indeed as the very realm of the political. the effect of meaning, however, as we might expect from the discussion of language in the previous chapter, actually arose not from each building or object in itself but out of the continuous weave of buildings and objects in which an individual item occurred. . . . to create the effect of a realm of meaning, this differential process was to mark every space and every gap. (mitchell 1988: 162-63) in the construction of the disneyland theme park, then, the gaps between places, politics, and times disappears, and is reconstituted by the imputation of american imperialist discourse, masked by the cuteness and the production of fun. [23] the same process that i have described in regard to disney's animated features -their appropriation from local situations, reinscription in american imperialist discourse, and resale to "the locals" (as will be described below) - also occurs with regards to the attractions at disneyland. many of the attractions are based on the animated films, so that the decontextualization is bound up directly with the creation of the rides, and is subsequently enhanced with the inclusion of only the most exciting aspects of each story. hence, the pinocchio, mr. toad's wild ride, and others are all further decontextualized when brought into the theme park, as only the most exciting or dangerous (in the disney sense) elements of the story are brought into the ride. however, the majority of the attractions at disneyland, as well as at the other disney theme parks, are not based on animated films, but are rather based upon distorified versions of aspects of american history or of its perception of the world around it. hence, there is no literary or cinematic basis for them -and therefore no direct history that they must refer to -and the rides can thus construct any type of history, or in this case distory, that the imagineers (those who design the rides, films, etc.) wish; and these rides can be combined geographically in order to present disney's vision of the world as it should have been -with him at the centre. [24] rides like pinocchio, splash mountain (based on the film _song of the south_), and star tours (based on the _return of the jedi_ installation in the _star wars_ trilogy) all deny their origins, and are thereby recontextualized in whatever way wdc wishes geographically. the placement of rides in fantasyland -which includes all of the old "fairy tales" and legends of europe, such as "the sword in the stone" (the legend of king arthur), _alice in wonderland_, _peter pan_ (disney's version, not barrie's; forgacs 1992:369), and mr. toad's wild ride, a depiction of the intrusion of the automobile into the british countryside -inscribes these histories as being in the land of"fantasy." as well, splash mountain, based on _song of the south_, which contains the line, "this is how the niggers sing,"^8^ disguises its origins in the lore of american slavery, and instead exists in the fantastic realm of critter country. and star tours, which oxymoronically lies in tomorrowland, since the _star wars_ films took place "long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away," is removed from its "historical" context, and placed in the land of tomorrow (which, thanks to its dating as being the land of 1984, is now the land of yesterday). [25] other rides, not based on the animated features, also are grouped without regard to their political or geographic context. the jungle cruise, for example, puts together "scenes" from southeast asia, india, and the african veldt and rain forests, connected by the irrawaddy, congo, and nile rivers. this ride is located between the enchanted tiki room, a 1950's-style, don ho-genre depiction of life in the south pacific through big-band translations of some local music; aladdin's oasis, a restaurant and broadway-style dinner show based on the _aladdin_ film; and the swiss family treehouse, a six-story cement tree showing scenes from the film which took place off the caribbean coast of south america. another ride has been built in adventureland. _the indiana jones and the temple of the eye_ ride is based on the _raiders of the lost ark_ film (now licensed by wdc), and entails the same sort of trip through a mayan pyramid, except in 1930's-style german troop transports. all of this, grouped under the heading of "adventureland," completely ignores the geographic contexts (and instead becomes "everything outside of north america or western europe-land"), and ignores the political context of the locales represented -all of the areas presented here either were or, in the case of the middle east, are coming (as i have described above) under the strong-arm of american imperialism. [26] in fact, in all of the lands that make up disneyland time becomes the defining nature of the land, as opposed to space. as fjellman notes, at walt disney world, where the themed lands are different from those at the california park, each part of the magic kingdom has a temporal theme. liberty square represents colonial america and the war of independence. frontierland glosses the nineteenth-century american west. main street usa gives us a turn-of-the-century small town. adventureland alludes to the history of empire -from the spanish main to the african safari. even fantasyland is about time, suggesting simultaneously the timelessness of fairy tales and children's stories and the romanticized medieval castles of central europe with a bit of king arthur thrown in. (fjellman 1992:61) i would go even further than this to argue that the spatial organization of disneyland, based as it is on space-as-time themed lands, organizes the history of the world which disney encountered and arranges it in such a way that history becomes the way he wanted it (fjellman 1992:59). there appear to be two temporal eras represented in disneyland -the past and the future, combined to make the timeless. main street usa, frontierland, new orleans square, critter country, adventureland, and fantasyland combine to make up the lands of the past; and tomorrowland is designed to be the land of the future, but because of its 1984 dating loses that designation. to be precise, all of these lands, when taken out of all of their respective temporal settings and political geographies, become timeless, and are only given a temporal designation at the hands of wdc. an example: until 1994, the jungle cruise was one of the more contemporary rides. it had opened with the park in 1955, and had, through various updatings of its scripts, maintained its contemporaneity; it even featured jokes such as "now we return you to the biggest jungle of them all -the california freeway system." however, with the addition of the 1930's style indiana jones ride, wdc wanted everything restaged so that the entire area of adventureland would be set in the 1930's. in order to achieve this, disneyland redesigned the facade and queue area of the jungle cruise ride so that it would go through a pithy colonial governor's mansion, as well as docks of this era, making apparent the political temporality of this ride, while reducing the meaning that this would give the ride through the pithiness of its decoration. while this expresses a seemingly new-found concern for the temporality of its staging, it also shows that within the terms of disneyland all things - even time -are under the control of uncle walt.^9^ [27] we can see that the temporal and geographic setting of various world locales becomes seemingly arbitrary for disney in disneyland. however, as i have shown above, this setting is not wholly arbitrary; it instead conveys a very strong message not only about the power of disney, but also of america. all things that are included within the park fall under the allegorical purview of the united states' imperialist power, be it political, economic, or cultural; and disney has the power to organize them in such a way so that this power seems to disappear. as mitchell points out in regards to the presentation of egypt in various world's fairs, as well as the colonial restructuring of egyptian cities, the orient is put together as this "re-presentation," and what is represented is not a real place but a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seem to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these. (mitchell 1988:31) and it is well-known that disney did not explore at length the areas which he chose to represent in the parks; unlike the nature films that wdc produced, which take painstaking detail and magnify it (although they misled people worldwide into thinking that lemmings are suicidal), most of the other films are no more than a series of quotations from first impressions or from "travel books," as in _the three caballeros_.^10^ these quotations are then organized in the way in which disney would have wanted them to appear had he written "history," and are presented as a legitimation of the world order and america's place within it. the ordering of these political, cultural, and geographic fragments are then ordered by wdc in such a way that it provides a hierarchy, in which, as fjellman notes, disneyland and america are presented as heaven, with all else below (mitchell 1988:60; fjellman 1992:317). disneyland then becomes an exhibition of american cultural, political, and economic power, with walt disney and mickey mouse at the centre of the exhibition, and serves as a cultural legitimation of american power. as fjellman points out, legitimations often exist for those who are new to a society, either children or recent immigrants (fjellman 1992:27); and from nearly 18 months of fieldwork within disneyland, i have found that the greatest numbers of people who come to disneyland for the first time (disney placed the california park where he did so that he could attract repeat business from those who lived nearby in the burdgeoning orange county) are either children or visitors and immigrants from foreign countries. as i have noted above (p. 4), disney desired to represent the american way so that it would be timeless -or, in other words, so that his representation of america's position in the world would last for all time. this, then, is the way in which consumers (or "guests," in disney parlance) come to the disney products - as if they are timeless, and are therefore easily consumable in whatever temporal or spatial context one is in. i turn now to the marketing of this timelessness of american cultural power, presented by the walt disney company. *"it's a small world," for all time: selling the american way* [28] examining the way in which wdc sells its products, namely the theme parks and the films, must begin with the animated films. however, as i have noted above, each of disney's products sells all of the others, so that we could start anywhere in their product line with this analysis. but, the theme of timelessness is paramount to the understanding of disney's marketing strategies, and nothing better offers this up than the animated films of disney. so, it is there that i will start, and then turn to the theme parks, which are the embodment of this timelessness; and it is the recycling of both of these products for the consumption by disney's "guests" that allows for the timelessness of the product, as well as these timeless products, to exist for all time, thereby perpetually reselling the timeless hegemony of the united states. [29] as i have already written above, wdc has the effect of producing a de-temporalization of its films, primarily by removing them from the original political and geographic context, but also, as in the case of _the jungle book_, by translating stories already inscribed with imperialist discourse into non-indigenous locales, which also has the effect of making these films seem "out of time," or at least not governed by time. this process does not work as well for the live-action films, primarily because film quality, as well as topical interests (such as the _davy crockett_ chronicles, which were hugely popular in the 1950's), make these films seem somehow "older" or at least "dated," and so interest in them seems to disappear. [30] another way in which wdc maintains interest in the animated features is by periodically recycling them in and out of circulation. wdc has a hard-and-fast policy that dictates how many of its films may be in video stores at a time and how long each of them may remain there (approximately two to three years). additionally, wdc periodically re-releases feature films into theatres, giving new generations a chance to see disney's self-declared classics. in doing this, wdc plays on a sense of nostalgia that parents have for the films (as they seem to be able to relive their childhood through them), and increases the drawing power of the films by making them available "for a limited time only." wdc thus creates a sense of excitement about the ability to see the film, something which often prompts parents to purchase the film so that they can hold onto it for all time, showing it to their children, grandchildren, etc. as forgacs notes, it is remarkable that in this process of recycling and global rereleasing the animated features do not seem to age. they just do not look as old as other films do. in reality this magic of eternal youth has a lot to do with the way the films are promoted and publicized. disney is very skillful at presenting its old films as "classics," at once perennial, timeless fantasies and the standard versions of the stories they adapt. (forgacs 1992:368) another aspect of the removal of the past from disney's temporal repertoire is the absence of parental figures in the animated features. there are no parents in disney's films: gepetto is an uncle figure to pinocchio; both donald duck and mickey mouse have no children, but are instead also uncles; and even bambi's mother gets killed in the process of bambi's growing-up. by doing this, as dorfman and mattelart argue, wdc can create a world in which there is no reference to the past, and therefore no history; i would take this further to argue that, by the distorifying process, whereby everything bad that has happened in the past is erased or elided, everything that could be "historical" is instead rendered timeless, and therefore always already temporally there (dorfman and mattelart 1971:34). by removing the possibility of temporality from the animated features, wdc makes it possible for ever-increasing numbers of generations to consume its animated products, thereby allowing wdc's messianic message of the hegemony of the united states to be recycled throughout time. [31] since all of disney's products sell each other (in the sense of everything being cross-marketed), i would argue that this also works for the theme parks. in other words, the message that history, geography, and politics do not matter when it comes to the fun that disneyland and the other theme parks delivers, captured in the ordering of the conceptual space that governs disneyland (centered as it is around walt disney himself, both conceptually and geographically), is constantly consumed and reconsumed by countless generations. by refining older rides, such as "the jungle cruise," which was recently turned into a 1930's-era colonial governor's home and dock (making explicit for once what "colonialism" was really like -cute, punny, and over in eight minutes), as well as introducing new rides and lands periodically, disney attempts to constantly remake itself so that it appears bigger and better. at the same time, though, the messages that disney sends out about america's place in the world do not change, as the geography of the park cannot change, as cannot its de-temporalization. hence, the idea that anything that involves adventure has to take place outside of north america and western europe, and therefore in the realm of america's cultural others, can be always consumed by new "guests" to disney's social order, and thus america's cultural, political, and economic hegemony are constantly re-legitimated for the benefit of those who are new to "the wonderful world of disney." [32] as i have said above, the guiding metaphor for disney's theme parks, and its products more generally, is that of the "it's a small world" ride. in it, audio-animatronic dolls from all over the world dressed in "native" clothing sing in harmony the most maddening of songs, "it's a small world after all," which is occasionally interspersed with countermelodies such as "hava nagila" and "the mexican hat dance." here, though, the geographic message that disneyland delivers in a more disguised fashion is made clear; as fjellman puts it, "it is as if a forest -any forest -is chosen cavalierly to represent the idea of a place and time, and then infinite energy is directed toward the scrutiny of each leaf and each piece of bark on each tree" (fjellman 1992:87). this, then, is the message of disney's portrayal of geography, and with it the politics, economics, and culture that is elided in the name of american imperialism: "if there is anything to be learned by this average citizen about geography -cultural, political or otherwise -[walt disney company] will teach it" (fjellman 1992:224). [33] one question that arises when considering the ability of the theme parks to sell the message of american dominance of the world and its relevant political perspective that i have highlighted in this paper concerns the relative success of the disney theme parks around the world. disneyland and walt disney world in the us are fanatically attended, to the point that disneyana conventions, held to allow collectors of disney paraphenalia to trade and amass further stocks of the trinkets, become madhouses, and on the average day disneyland has a population greater than probably sixty percent of the towns and cities in north america (its average daily attendance hovers around thirty thousand people; personal conversation with guest services, disneyland park, march 1995), while walt disney world's population hovers around one hundred thousand per day. tokyo disneyland is also well attended and successful. however, the eurodisney park near paris is a near failure; reports consistently appear highlighting its financial troubles. one might ask why this phenomenon has occurred. i would argue that the eurodisney park is placed within a political culture that is hostile to imperialist intentions as well as the "small worldization" of its local cultures (within the context of the burgeoning european union, france, for one, is highly critical of the flattening of national differences in the name of a common european identity and society), while the political culture surrounding tokyo disneyland is a recent artifact highly influenced by the american reconstruction of the japanese political, economic, and social systems after world war two. even considering japan's historic isolation and resistance to efforts aimed towards its colonization, i would argue that the reconstruction of japanese society by the american military, coupled with the highly commodified culture that both japanese and american societies share, prove to be rich ground for the propagation of disney's messages regarding the place of the united states in the world. [34] given the colonizing effects of the messages that disneyland, as well as wdc's other products, most notably the animated film features, it is not surprising that people who lived around manassas, virginia, were up in arms about disney's america theme park that it wanted to build. they were afraid of losing the actuality of the lived history of the civil war -a heritage that lived on in the area, though not in the same fashion as history in most of the rest of the world (silberman 1994:25) -to the dehistoricizing effects of "daddy disney." as the previews for disney's latest animated feature, _pocahontas_, run through my head, they were correct in fearing this. pocahontas is portrayed in the preview (an actual musical number from the up-coming film) as an earth-loving, submissive woman to be won by the heart of the colonialist john smith, something quite strange to have said about someone whose name, given by her father, meant "mischievous." disney's overall policy towards the past, the present, and the future, as well as toward the world around him, was to turn it into the playland that it never was. disney's goal was to rewrite history "the way it should have been" (fjellman 1992:31). and, as barbara crosette's _new york times_ article (12 february 1995:e5) suggests, it appears that the future disney wanted for america came true, as it appears that, even though "it is all but impossible to find a hegemonistic bone in any body in washington - republican or democrat," one is no longer needed, as the imperialist messages of disney, as well as those of the american government in general, have been well received by so-called third world countries, looking to the united states to become the hegemon it wanted to be, hopefully without the us allowing the further exploitation of histories in the course of the exploitation of countries. i can only hope that, for the sake of those who have had their histories taken from them by the "'rapacious strip-miner'in the goldmine of legend and myth" (kunzle, in dorfman and mattelart 1971:18), that it can begin to rewrite its own history as %it% should have been -indebted to those who had history before, and will continue to have a history well after, walt disney and his imagineering of history. notes: 1. while i do not make explicit reference to the original stories, the original stories used in the films that are discussed here -_the jungle book_ and _a thousand and one arabian nights_ --are relatively well-known, and i presume a knowledge of these original texts in my analysis. 2. burton, "don (juanito) duck," p. 35: "the disney team apparently felt the need to reassure their latin american counterparts that they need feel no threat to their sexual hegemony from this north american neighbor who, for all his quacking up and cracking up, is clearly incapable of shacking up." 3. as well as all other disney films: i chose to examine the animated films here primarily because they are my "favourites"; as well, they are also the most accessible, in the sense of being able to rent them at video stores. part of the reason for this, as i will discuss later, is that the animated features seem "less dated" than the live-action films, and therefore are better "sellers," in the sense of being accepted by a larger paying audience. however, the live-action films serve much the same function as the animated features; they continue to play up the political, economic, and cultural primacy and hegemony of the u.s. 4. many of the _subaltern studies_ group have commented at length on the colonizing writings of those who were associated with the british rulers or the %raj%. i would argue that kipling would be part of this group. 5. i have written on this, as well as the imposition of an american nuclear family structure on the text of the film, elsewhere. see schaffer, "the bare necessities: family structure and gender inversion in disney's _the jungle book_" (unpublished). 6. burton's essay in _nationalisms and sexualities_ provides extensive evidence of the linkages between the disney studios and the us government during and just after world war two. however, the walt disney studios' archives have become over the years increasingly more difficult to obtain access to, and inquiring writers must have their projects approved by wdc in order to gain access to the archives. 7. kunzle,"translator's preface," in dorfman and mattelart, p. 19. burton also points out that _saludos amigos_, the precursor to _the three caballeros_, "became the first hollywood film to premiere in all latin american countries before opening in the u. s." (shale, donald duck joins up [ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press, 1987]:40) the only complaints received during the tour of this film were from uruguay, which was not represented in the film. the gauchito sequence in _the three caballeros_ resolves this problem. (burton 1992:40n10) 8. an interesting anecdotal note: due to this line, as well as its general portrayal of the myths of african-american slaves, the disney company has removed _song of the south_ from the shelves of video stores in the united states. i have recently been asked -by a current disney employee - to send copies of this film to the united states from my residence in toronto. 9. until 1984, wdc owned even the airspace rights over disneyland, so that no plane or helicopter could fly over the magic kingdom without the permission of the company. in 1984, michael eisner sold the airspace rights in order to put more liquid cash into the company's coffers. 10. burton, p. 40 n11: here, burton comments on smoodin's comment on the "flawless calculus of cultural imperialism" that allowed "walt disney, a representative of the united states, could tour a foreign culture [actually, %several% different cultures and subcultures], come to understand it in just a short time, and then bring it back home, all with the blessing and the thanks of the culture he had visited." (from smoodin, _animating culture: hollywood cartoons from the sound era_ [1994: new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press]) works cited: bauman, zygmunt. _postmodern ethics_. oxford: blackwell press, 1993. burton, julianne. "don (juanito) duck and the imperial-patriarchal unconscious: disney studios, the good neighbor policy, and the packaging of latin america." in andrew parker, et. al., _nationalisms and sexualities_. new york and london: routledge, 1992. dorfman, ariel and armand mattelart. _how to read donald duck: imperialist ideology in the disney comic_. new york: international general, 1971. fanon, frantz. _black skins, white masks_. new york: grove weidenfeld, 1967. fjellman, stephen. _vinyl leaves: walt disney world and america_. boulder, co: westview press, 1992. forgacs, david. "disney animation and the business of childhood." screen 33:361-74 (1992). garber, marjorie. _vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety_. new york and london: routledge, 1992. itwaru, arnold and natasha ksonzek. _closed entrances: canadian culture and imperialism_. toronto: tsar, 1994. kunzle, david. translator's preface to dorfman and mattelart, _how to read donald duck: imperialist ideology in the disney comic_, 1975. lincoln, bruce. _discourse and the construction of society_. oxford: oxford up, 1989. mitchell, timothy. _colonising egypt_. berkeley: u of california p, 1988. said, edward. _orientalism_. new york: pantheon books, 1978. silberman, neil asher. "the battle disney should have won". _lingua franca_ 5: 24-28 (1994). sorkin, michael. "see you in disneyland." in sorkin, ed. _variations on a theme park: the new american city and the end of public space_. new york: the noonday press, 1992. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------shepherdson, 'intimate alterity of the real a response to reader commentary on "history and the real" (_pmc_ v.5 n.2)', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-shepherdson-intimate.txt archive pmc-list, file shepherdson.596. part 1/1, total size 156742 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the intimate alterity of the real a response to reader commentary on "history and the real" (_pmc_ v.5 n.2) by charles shepherdson pembroke center brown university engcs@mizzou1.missouri.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by charles shepherdson, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. to: dr. shepherdson from: hescobar.datasys.com.mx (hector escobar sotomayor) subject: comments on your paper in internet about foucault and lacan dear dr. shepherdson: i'm a mexican student of philosophy and now i'm working on my thesis devoted to an archaeological study of psychology, considering the relation foucault-lacan so i'd like to get in contact with you and to interchange ideas. if you like, i could send you a copy of my thesis (in paper or by e-mail) (it's in spanish). my proposition is that according to foucault in _the order of things_ we have reached a new epistemic period that can be defined as a postanthropologic one, in which is neccesary to leave the notion of the human being and replace it with the notion of the subject of desire. the importance of lacan's work is obvious mainly in his idea of %jouissance% ("goce" in spanish), which opens a new line of philosophical arguments. please, as you can see, my written english is not very good, but i think we could establish a communication. my adress is hescobar@datasys.com.mx. thank you very much for your attention ------------------------ pmc reader's report on shepherdson's article on "history and the real": dear mr. shepherdson: i'm a psychoanalyst and i'm on my way to mastering desire [in] psychoanalytical theory. i read your paper "history and the real" and really "enjoyed" it, even knowing very little about foucault. but there's one thing that called my attention in such a special way, that i want to discuss it with you: under your topic nr. 42, you wrote: "(. . .) the element of lack that destablizes the structural, symbolic totality." it then seemed to me (i may be wrong) that you suggest that the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow. i've found close concepts to this (which i'm not sure if it is what you intended at all) [in] many earlier lacanian authors. now, this is a very hot question. for me, it is much easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself; in other words, what is prohibited is part of the structure, and what makes the prohibition be is also a part of the structure. the lack of the structure is also [in] the structure and, futher, it's only because of its lack that the structure can be . . . (i'm not being original at this point: i think you know g. deleuze's paper "%on quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme%?"). well, i also must say that this interests me because i didn't find any answer which could be conclusive. what do you think about that? yours, marcus lopes marclop@omega.lncc.br dear mr. lopes: [1] thank you for your questions on my article "history and the real," which _postmodern culture_ recently forwarded to me. it is always interesting to me to hear from practicing psychoanalysts, and from others in the medical profession who have an interest in lacanian theory. in the united states, of course, interest in lacan has mainly arisen through philosophy, or literary theory and cultural studies, so it is not always recognized that in europe and south america -as well as in australia and mexico - lacan has a much greater impact on clinical circles. i say this only because, if you are looking for clinical material, there is much more information in french and spanish than in english. but i am grateful for your question, and i will do my best with it, because it gives me a chance to try to clarify -even for myself -a difficult and important issue. [2] you asked in your letter about the concept of the "real," and especially about its relation to the symbolic order. you say i suggested that the real is "outside" the symbolic structure: "the structure (and this must be a subjective structure) has something out of it which causes a kind of effect on it somehow." and you say it is "easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself." these are interesting and difficult questions. many readers have asked me a related question: "is everything really a 'discursive construction,' a product of the symbolic order, and if not, how can we speak of an 'outside' without returning to a naive realism?"^1^ this is one of the most important problems in contemporary intellectual life, and it might be said that one's response to this single issue is enough to define one's theoretical orientation today. [3] a map of postmodernism could even be drawn on the basis of the answers that are given to this question. it would have three major areas: in the first, we find an emphasis on the "symbolic order," and certain theories of "social construction"; in the second, we find a reaction against "post-modernism," and a return to "positive" and "empirical" investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, and endocrinological accounts of consciousness, behavior, and sexuality; in the third area, we find an effort to think %through% the "linguistic turn" -not to react against the formative power of representation, but rather to think its %limit%. this is where i believe the most interesting contemporary work is being done, and this is the problem that is held in common by foucault, lacan, and derrida, though they do not elaborate the issue in the same way. there are many ways to approach the question, as it concerns lacan, and i will therefore try to touch very briefly on a whole range of directions in which your question might take us. i will loosely organize the discussion under three headings: "inside/outside," "the limits of formalization," and "two versions of the real (judith butler and slavoj zizek)." *1.1. inside/outside* [4] first, concerning the idea that the real is "outside" the symbolic. as you probably know, jacques-alain miller developed the term "%extimite%" from lacan, suggesting that the real is not exactly "outside," but is a kind of "excluded interior," or an "intimate exterior" (see miller, "extimite"). in _seminar vii_, for example, in the chapter "on the moral law," lacan says of the "thing": "%das ding% is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded" (svii 71). and again in the chapter on "the object and the thing," he speaks of what is "excluded in the interior" (101), noting that this exclusion presents us with a "gap" in the symbolic order -something that escapes the law - "a gap once again at the level of %das ding%," which indicates that we can "no longer rely on the father's guarantee" (100). however much one may stress the notorious "law of the father" in lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real (or between language and %das ding%) involves a certain failure of the law. we must therefore take account of this element that "escapes" the symbolic order, or renders it "incomplete." the problem remains as to how exactly this "excluded object" should be conceived, but we can already see that it is not simply "outside" the structure, but is missing %from% the structure, excluded from within. so your question is: just how we are to understand this "belonging" and "not belonging" to structure, this "intimate alterity" of the real? *1.2 topology* [5] lacan often drew on topology in his attempts to describe this peculiar "extimate" relation between the symbolic and the real. one could thus approach the question in geometrical terms. for the usual relation between "inside" and "outside" that exists in euclidean space (a circle, for example, has a clearly defined interior and exterior) is disrupted by topological figures such as the klein bottle, or the torus (the figure shaped like a doughnut, which is structured around a central hole). even with the mobius strip, it is difficult to say whether it has "one" side or "two" -the usual numerical ordering is disrupted. juan-david nasio has a very good book in which he argues that each of these topological figures is meant to address a specific problem within psychoanalytic theory. thus, (1) the torus describes the relation between demand and desire, (2) the mobius strip describes the relation between the subject and speech, (3) the klein bottle describes the relation between the master-signifier and the other, and (4) the cross-cap describes the structure of fantasy, where we find the subject's relation to the object. there also is a fine short book on these issues by jeanne granon-lafont. *1.3 being-toward-death* [6] without developing these points in detail, it is easy to see this material at work in lacan's text. even in the familiar "rome discourse," lacan says that the human being's relation to death is unlike the "natural" relation to biological death, and that death is not a simple "event," a moment "in" chronological time, but rather the very opening of time, its condition of possibility. instead of being placed at the end of a temporal sequence, as a final moment in biological time, the relation-to-death is placed at the origin, and understood as the "giving" of human time, the opening of possibility, of time as a finite relation to the future and the past, structured by anticipation and memory. death thus involves a peculiar link between the symbolic and the real, presenting us with a sort of hole or void in the structure of meaning -a void that is not a deficiency, but virtually the opposite, an absolute condition of meaning. the human relation-to-death (discussed in such detail by heidegger) is thus in some sense at the "origin" of the symbolic order -not represented "in" language, or entirely captured by the symbolic rituals that seek to contain it, but rather "primordial" to language: "so when we wish to attain in the subject . . . what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death" (e 105). the topological reference to a "missing" center (added to the text in 1966) follows: "to say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure . . . it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as an annulus." he adds, "if i wished to give an intuitive representation of it . . . i should call on the three-dimensional form of the torus" (e 105). i won't go into this matter in detail, but one can easily see that the relation between the symbolic and the real cannot be approached if one begins with a dichotomy between the "inside" and "outside." it is rather a matter of a void "within" the structure. this is of course what the theory of "lack" in lacan tries to address. and this is why those for whom "lack" is foreclosed -those who "lack lack" -are in some sense deprived of access to language. *1.4 the structure of the body* [7] lacan's topological formulations may seem esoteric, and many commentators have ridiculed them, denouncing his "pseudo-mathematical" interests as chicanery or mysticism or intellectual posing. but if one thinks for a moment about the body -about the peculiar "structure" of the body, and all the discussions in freud about the "limit" of the body, the difficulty of "containing" the body within its skin, or of determining what is "inside" and "outside" the body (the "relation to the object," the mechanisms of "projection" and "introjection," and so on), it becomes obvious that the space of the body is not really elucidated by euclidean geometry. the body is not easily "closed" within itself, as a circle is "closed" with respect to the "outside." the body does not "occupy" space as a natural object does. when it comes to the "body," the relations of "interior" and "exterior" are more complex and enigmatic than one would suspect if one began by regarding the body as an "extended substance" in cartesian space, or by presupposing that space is structured by euclidean dimensions, and that the "place" of the body can be delimited in the same way that the natural object can be located by spacial coordinates in euclidean geometry. so the discussion of topology may seem esoteric, but it addresses problems that are obviously fundamental to psychoanalysis. freud speaks, for example, of the "orifices" of the body as points of exchange with the "outside" -points where the "limit" of the body is most obscure, where the relation between the "inside" and "outside" of the body is unstable and problematic. all the analytic problems having to do with "incorporation," "mourning," "abjection," and the "object-relation" - even the themes of "aggression" and "love," and the entire question of the "relation to the other" -can be put in terms of the "inside" and "outside" of the body. *1.5 from the "imaginary body" to the symbolic containment of the void* [8] these observations are very brief, but they should be enough to indicate that the "body" in psychoanalysis is not simply an "imaginary body." to be sure, freud speaks of the "ego" as a "bodily ego," and lacan says that the body is an "imaginary body." and this bears not only on the "space" of the body, but on "external" space as well: in the "mirror stage" he notes that the imaginary order allows the world of objects to appear, calling it "the threshold of the visible world" (you may know kaja silverman's recent book by this title). but discussions of the "imaginary body" have tended to obscure the fact that the symbolic and the real also play a crucial role in the constitution of the body. furthermore, if we speak of the body as "imaginary," we will tend to regard the "symbolic" as if it were a purely "linguistic" matter, a domain of speech and "representation," and not a matter of our embodiment as well. i remember visiting a clinic in boston once -a halfway house for schizophrenics. many of the patients had specific materials -scarves or string or favorite hats - that they would attach to their bodies. without these things, they became extremely anxious and refused to go outside, as if the body were not "unified" without this external prop. the body does not automatically cohere by nature: it holds itself together as "one" entity, and is able to move through "space," not naturally, with the physical coherence of an objective "thing," but only with the help of imaginary and symbolic props that give space and time their consistency. so we could say that the relation between the real and the symbolic -the formation of a "structure" which also includes the real as an "interior exclusion" -allows the body to move, and gives coherence to "external space." this human "space" -the space of desire and human movement--cannot be grasped in terms of euclidean space, and the space of the "body" therefore cannot be adequately conceived through the usual geometry of "inside" and "outside." thus, while we are often told that the "body" is an "imaginary body" for lacan, the constitution of the body also depends on the inscription of the void, the symbolic "containment" of lack. i have tried to make this argument in more detail (partly in reference to anorexia), in "adaequatio sexualis." *1.6 demand and desire* [9] the relation between the symbolic and the real can also cast light on the distinction between demand and desire. in a famous -but still notoriously obscure -passage in "the meaning of the phallus," lacan distinguishes between demand and desire, calling desire an "absolute condition": "for the unconditioned element of demand," he writes, "desire substitutes the absolute condition" (e, 287). demand is "unconditioned" in the sense that it simply designates the general "deviation" by which human demand comes to be separated from animal "need" (which is "conditioned" by the requirements of survival and reproduction). we thus have a "deviation in man's needs from the fact that he speaks . . . insofar as his needs are subjected to demand" (e, 286). this has a clear impact on the "object-relation": for unlike the object of need, the object of demand is symbolic, and is therefore subject to metonymic displacement, losing its natural specificity in a movement along the signifying chain that makes the object a "substitute," a signifier of the other's recognition. in lacan's words, "demand annuls (%aufhebt%) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love" (e, 286). demand is thus not only perpetually displaced, but also projected to infinity, always seeking "something more." as marx also says, human life loses its foundation in nature, in a movement of "excess production" (the arena of "supply and demand") that goes beyond all biological need and has no natural limitation. [10] consequently, at the "symbolic" level of demand, there is a further requirement for a "limit," and it is precisely desire that emerges as this limit to the infinite displacement of demand, giving a finite shape to the otherwise endless play of symbolic substitution. thus, as lacan says in "direction of the treatment," "desire is produced in the beyond of demand (e, 265; see also sviii, 246), and introduces a "limit" to the displacement of the signifier. as derrida also notes in "structure, sign, and play," the free play of the signifier is %in principle% unlimited, but %in fact% is always brought to a certain tentative closure, and thereby grounded in a peculiar "center." "and as always," derrida writes, this "point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible . . . expresses the force of a desire" (279). we can also see here why lacan claims that although the "particularity" of the object of need is lost when we pass to the level of symbolic displacement ("demand annuls [%aufhebt%] the particularity of everything that can be granted"), he also insists that "the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand" (e, 286). thus, the "reversal" or transformation that characterizes the shift from demand to desire is accomplished precisely by the institution of a lack, a void or "obliteration" that is not symbolic, that escapes the dialectical movement of "productive negation," but is nevertheless constitutive of the subject. this "void," therefore, has an "effect": it leaves a "remainder," a "relic" that is regarded as a "power" -"the force of a desire": "by a reversal that is not simply the negation of a negation, the power of pure loss arises from the relic of an obliteration" (e, 287; see borch-jacobsen's very useful discussion of this text in _the absolute master_, pp. 199-212, where he also corrects some deficiencies in the english translation). we thus return to the "mortal center" of the "rome discourse" -as if language were opened by a mark of death that haunts it, but cannot be inscribed or reduced to a symbolic phenomenon. this not only explains the link between "death" and "desire," but also suggests why lacan claims, in "the meaning of the phallus," that psychoanalysis goes beyond hegel precisely insofar as it is able to give theoretical precision to an element of "lack" that is not dialectical -a lack that is not "inscribed" in the movement of symbolic production, but rather makes it possible. this is the "absolute condition" that "reverses" the "unconditioned" character of demand, allowing it to acquire a local habitation and a name. *1.7 the "invention" of the body* [11] before we close this initial "topological" approach to the problem, the historical aspect of these remarks should also be stressed. it is often said that psychoanalysis is simply ahistorical, and that it promotes a "structuralist" position, a version of the "law" that is inattentive to different social and historical conditions. there are at least three points that should be stressed in this regard. first, "classical" structuralism was in no way simply "ahistorical" (as piaget pointed out, and as derek attridge has recently emphasized). it rather sought to elaborate a model of historical transformation that would not immediately have recourse to the familiar, diachronic and quasi-evolutionary models of history that had characterized the philology of the nineteenth century. for saussure, it is obvious that there are "living" and "dead" languages, and the "laws" of the symbolic order do not ignore this fact; they simply seek to account for shifts and displacements of the structure -for what one might call the historicality of language -without automatically presupposing a "natural" time of "growth" and "decay." second, if -having recognized the historical dimension of structuralism -one then turns from the strictly "structural" conception of the "law" (saussure and levi-strauss) to lacan's concern with the relation between the symbolic and the real, one can see the problem of the real as precisely an additional temporal problem -since it bears on the incompleteness and thus the destabilization of the law. as slavoj zizek has rightly said, psychoanalysis is not simply "ahistorical," but it is "anti-historicist," insofar as it entails a conception of time that differs from the historically linear, chronologically sequential time of "history" as we usually understand it. third -to return now to our initial problematic -if one recalls that topology was invented by leibniz in the late 17th century, as "analysis situs" (a theory of "place" that cannot be formulated in terms of "space"), one might be led to consider that the freudian theory of the body could only emerge after the "classical," euclidean conception of space had been challenged. in short, psychoanalysis is not simply "ahistorical"; on the contrary, it explicitly engages the question of the historical conditions of its own emergence. indeed, as the reference to leibniz suggests, lacan, like many "postmodern" thinkers, is profoundly engaged with the enlightenment, as a historical moment whose "end" we are still experiencing. [12] the "body" in psychoanalysis is thus conceivable only on the basis of a certain history. this is why lacan talks so much about "measurement" and "science" and "kepler" and "copernicus." even without going into lacan's account of the history of science, one can see that the relation between the "real" and the "symbolic" is concerned with the theory of space (or rather "place"), and is such that the real is something like an "interior exclusion" -not simply "outside," entirely unrelated to the structure, or completely foreign, but -quite the opposite - "contained" by the particular structure which excludes it, like an internal "void". many writers have recently taken up this problem -notably irigaray, in her article on aristotle, but also heidegger, whose famous analysis of the jug is intriguing here, since he insists that the jug is not an "object" in euclidean dimensions, but rather a structure that contains the void. as heidegger says, the "gift" and "sacrifice" that one encounters in the face of the "thing" cannot be understood unless we see that the jug is not reducible to the "object" in cartesian space ("the jug differs from an object," he writes in "the thing"). as with the "real" in lacan, the void or "nothing" that is "given a place" by the jug is not a "natural" void (nature abhors a vacuum), but an unnatural "nothingness," a "lack" that arises only %through% the structure, and only for the being who speaks: it is a lack that is produced in the symbolic order. *2.1 the limits of formalization* [13] let us now leave these topological matters aside, and take another approach to your question. we have seen that the real is neither "inside" nor "outside" the symbolic, but is more like an "internal void." this can be clarified through topological figures, but we could also put the question in a more general way, as a question concerning the "limits of formalization." this would oblige us to clarify the way in which psychoanalysis goes "beyond structuralism." many people condemn lacanian psychoanalysis for being "trapped" in structuralism, committed to a "science" of the subject and a doctrine of the "law" that claims to be "universal," and does not adequately attend to the "contingent" historical and cultural specificity of human existence. there is indeed a commitment to a kind of "logic" or "formalization" in lacan, and an emphasis upon the "law" of the symbolic, but one must recognize it as an effort to theorize the %limit% of the law, the incompleteness of the law, the fact that the law is "not all," and that it always malfunctions. slavoj zizek has insisted upon this point more than anything else in his writing. in _for they know not what they do_, he claims that the link between hegel and lacan should be seen in this way: hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational totalization ultimately fails . . . his wager is located at another level . . . the possibility of "making a system" out of the very series of failed totalizations . . . to discern the strange "logic" that regulates the process. (99) the task is therefore to grasp what derrida has called "the law of the law," the "logic" which governs the malfunction of the law, showing us why the classical position of structuralism is unstable, and allowing us to see in a clear, "rational" and quasi-leogical way what lacan calls the "mystical limit of the most rational discourse in the world" (e, 124). in this sense, lacan is a "post-structuralist": the "real" can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that "does not belong" within the structure, an "excluded" element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion. *2.2 cause and law* [14] at this point, we could also take up your question concerning the "cause." for when you ask how the real, if it is "outside" the symbolic order, can possibly have an "effect" on the symbolic, it seems to me that you have expressed the position of classical structuralism (and perhaps the position of "science"). for if we think of "cause" in terms of the usual "scientific" model -in terms of a "lawful" sequence of causes and effects ("the same cause always produces the same effect") -then we may suppose a %continuity% between "law" and "cause." if we can account for the "cause" of a phenomenon (the cause of disease, for example), we have begun to elaborate the "laws" that govern it. now it is precisely here that lacan introduces a "%discontinuity%": there is a "cause," he says (in the first chapter of _seminar xi_), only where there is a %failure% of the law. to speak of the "cause of desire" is always to speak of a certain excess or deficiency in the relation between the subject and the other, a "lack" that cannot be grasped at the level of the signifying chain. from here we could obviously go on to explore the very complex question of whether psychoanalysis is a "science" or not, and how it can claim to be "scientific" while questioning the usual notion of "causality." and yet, many thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have followed husserl in arguing that the scientific attitude is a construction that cannot simply be taken for granted as a starting-point, but must be explored in its philosophical presuppositions and its historical conditions of emergence. lacan addresses these issues explicitly in _seminar xi_, where he asks, not whether psychoanalysis is a "science," but what "science" would have to be, in order to account for the "cause" as a disruption of the "law." this is the problem of the "subject," the problem of a "desire" that is normally excluded by "science": "can this question be left outside the limits of our field, as it is in effect in the sciences?" (sxi, 9). *2.3 the other and the object* [15] for lacan, the very concept of the "subject" cannot be understood without this split between "cause" and "law." we thus circle back to the "limits of formalization." for if we start with the saussurean position, we can elaborate the "law," but we will not reach the "cause." according to saussure, the "laws" of the symbolic order function "internally," on the basis of the relations between the elements, which are defined "diacritically" in reference to each other, and not to any "outside." from this perspective, one can indeed claim -as you do in your question -that it is "easier to understand the cause for the structure as being the structure itself." as piaget has very clearly shown, this is entirely correct from the standpoint of saussure: it is impossible to understand the structure, or indeed any of its "elements" (a particular "signifier" for example), except on the basis of the whole. it would be a mistake, from saussure's perspective, to regard a particular signifier as having its "cause" outside the system -as though the signifier were based upon designation, and could be derived from "outside," grounded in an external "reality" which it represents. on the contrary, we must recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the "system" is not an atomistic accumulation, and cannot be derived from its elements considered individually. (foucault makes the same point in _the order of things_, locating this shift in priority from designation to system at the end of the enlightenment: "in the classical age, languages had a grammar because they had the power to represent; now they represent on the basis of that grammar" [237]. on this basis, the entire philosophical problematic of "clear and distinct ideas" is replaced by a doctrine of "expression," "inheritance" and "national identity.") contrary to common sense, the system is not built up, piece by piece, on the basis of designation, but rather the reverse: the very possibility of naming is "derived" from the system itself, which is thereby presupposed, since it makes meaning and designation possible. the entire system can thus be regarded as the "cause of itself." a quasi-theological view, no doubt, in which one cannot seek further into the "origins," since the system is "always already" in place, arising as it were "in the beginning." [16] from lacan's point of view, this is not altogether incorrect, and it is indeed the case that we cannot derive language "naturalistically," on the basis of designation ("there is no other of the other"). but we cannot stop with this observation: we must go on to note the incompleteness of the system, the fact that the other functions only by the exclusion of a peculiar "object," such that the smooth, consistent functioning of the law is disrupted, destabilized by what lacan calls the "cause" - among other things, the "cause of desire," which is not the "object of desire" (in the sense of an actual thing "outside" language), but rather the "object-cause of desire," the "lack" that gives rise to desire, and yet is not present "in" the symbolic order, or situated at the level of "signifiers." lacan makes this explicit in "the meaning of the phallus," when he notes that if we may use structural linguistics to clarify freudian doctrine, we must also recognize that freud introduces a problem of "lack" that goes well beyond saussure: "during the past seven years," he writes, i have been led to certain results: essentially, to promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to the signified, in modern linguistic analysis. freud could not take this notion, which postdates him, into account, but i would claim that freud's discovery . . . could not fail to anticipate its formulas. (e, 284) we must not stop here, however, as if freud simply refers us to the structuralist "theory of language," for lacan adds that "[c]onversely, it is freud's discovery that gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications," by raising the question of a certain "outside," or an "interior exclusion" that has effects on the body which linguistics does not try to address. as he puts it in "subversion of the subject": "[i]f %linguistics% enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, %analysis% reveals the truth of this relation by making 'holes' in the meaning . . . of its discourse" (e, 299, emphasis added). with this reference to "holes" in the meaning," we see the step that takes lacan beyond classical structuralism, to the "limits of formalization," the element of the "real" that escapes symbolic closure. the "cause" is therefore "outside" the law as saussure presents it. *2.4 the subject and the real* [17] this notion of "cause" should also allow us to situate the place of the subject as real, and not simply as "symbolic." we often hear that for lacan, the subject is "constituted in the symbolic order," but the subject is not entirely "symbolic" (as is suggested by some accounts of "discursive construction"). if we think of the autonomous sequence of signifiers as governed by the "internal" laws of the symbolic order, the diacritical relations between the elements (s1-s2-s3), we can consider the "subject" ($) as a "missing link," a "place" that is marked, and that can be located %through% the symbolic, but does not actually belong to the chain of signifiers (s1-s2-[$]-s3). we must be careful here to note the peculiar status of this subject, which is partly symbolic and partly real. in freud, this "place" of the subject can be located in specific symbolic phenomena -the lapsus, the dream, free association, and so on -which reveal the repressed "unconscious thought." we find here the "symbolic" aspect of the unconscious, where certain "slips of the tongue" indicate a "discontinuity" in the chain of signifiers, a disruption of conscious discourse, and a sign of unconscious desire. this is consistent with the famous lacanian thesis that "the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other." we must be careful, however, if we are not to reduce the unconscious to a purely "symbolic" phenomenon. we must stress that although the "place" of the missing link is marked or "filled in" by certain symbolic formations, the "subject" does not belong to the chain, but indicates a point of non-integration or malfunction. this is why lacan insists on the "bar" that divides the subject ($): the subject of the unconscious is "represented" in the symbolic order (through the dream, or free association, or other symbolic forms), but in such a way that something of the "being" of the subject remains excluded -"absent" or "barred," but nevertheless "real" -and not without a certain "force," an ability to have "effects." in "subversion of the subject," lacan says, "we must bring everything back to the function of the cut in discourse . . . a bar between the signifier and signified" (e 299), adding: "this cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real" (e 299). *2.5 formations of the unconscious ($), formations of fantasy ($ <> a)* [18] we thus see more clearly how the "object a" emerges in lacanian theory: lacan introduces the "object a" precisely in order to distinguish between the subject as "real" and the subject as manifested through the symbolic order. thus, among all the "mathemes" and "formulae" that we find in lacan, we can take our bearings -as marie-helene brousse has suggested -from two basic forms: generally speaking, the "formations of the unconscious" (the lapsus, dream, symptom, parapraxis, etc.) reveal the "subject" in a symbolic form (the unconscious as "discourse of the other"), whereas the "formations of fantasy," by contrast, provide us with a relation between this "subject" and the "object a" -that peculiar "object" which does not appear in the signifying chain, but which marks a point of pathological attachment, bound to the "real" of the body, a point of libidinal stasis where desire is lost. accordingly, we find these two aspects of the subject linked together in the formula for fantasy ($ <> a), which concerns the relation that binds the "split subject" of the symbolic order ($) to a certain "real" element (a) that exceeds the symbolic order. in a manner that is similar to fantasy, the "object of the drive" designates a point of bodily %jouissance%, a "libidinal attachment" which does not appear at the level of the signifier, and is irreducible to the "symbolic" order. this is why freud speaks of the "silence" of the death drive -the fact that (unlike other "symptomatic" formations) it does not emerge in speech, and cannot be resolved through "free association." we must stress here the peculiar status of the "object," for the "object" of the drive, as "real," is not a matter of biological instinct ("it is not introduced as the original food . . . the origin of the oral drive" [sxi, 180]), but it is also irreducible to language, since it concerns a "remainder" or "excess" that escapes the symbolic "law" ("this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void," lacan says, "can be occupied, freud tells us, by any object" [sxi, 180]). it is therefore not a matter of a "prelinguistic" material that is simply "outside" language and prior to it. it is rather a question, as judith butler has said, of the particular "materialization" of the object -the specific "occupation" of the void being unique to the individual subject. the problem is therefore to define the relation between the other (the symbolic order) and this object which is "outside" the law. and we can regard this problem in terms of the "limits of formalization" - that is, in terms of a certain failure of the law. *2.6 a new division: free association and transference* [19] once this distinction between the "symbolic" and the "real" has emerged, we are led to a radical shift in psychoanalytic theory, a splitting of the transference -a sudden division between "transference" and "free association." for at first, in the period of the "rome discourse" (which is perhaps canonical for the secondary literature), lacan relied heavily on the symbolic order, stressing the difference between the imaginary (the ego) and the symbolic (the "subject divided by language"). the great battle against ego psychology was thus presented as a "return to freud," a return to the unconscious, presented as a "discourse of the other." the "subject" was marked by a "split" that could not be overcome, though the ego always tended to conceal this division, in the name of imaginary unity. this argument is condensed into "schema l." on this account, analysis could be presented in a "classical" freudian manner, as grounded in free association, which would reveal the discourse of the other in the symbolic form of symptoms, dreams, the lapsus, parapraxis, and so on. the difficulty arose when the symbolic order encountered an impasse, something that was in principal beyond the reach of symbolization (the "silent work" of the death drive). this is where we first find lacan claiming that the transference is no longer simply a "symbolic" matter, an intersubjective relation governed by speech, and aiming at the "discourse of the other." instead, the transference suddenly presents us with an "object" - something "outside" the symbolic order -an object that marks a point of impasse, a sort of "affective tie" that stands as a limit to symbolization. freud spoke of this when he characterized the transference as a form of love, and noted that this "love" could actually be an impediment to the patient -an impasse to analysis rather than a means. the crucial point for lacan is thus to recognize that this dimension of "transference-love" (identification with the object) presents us with a form of identification that is %opposed% to symbolic identification. [20] we thus reach a split between free association and the transference, a split between the symbolic and the real. in _seminar xi_, lacan is explicit, insisting that we must now confront something "beyond" the symbolic order, "precisely what one tends most to avoid in the analysis of the transference" (sxi, 149): in advancing this proposition, i find myself in a problematic position -for what have i taught about the unconscious? the unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech . . . the unconscious is structured like a language . . . and yet this teaching has had, in its approach, an end that i have called transferential. (sxi, 149) we are now faced with a dimension of bodily experience that cannot be reduced to the symbolic order, a problematic division between "language" and "sexuality." lacan returns here to freud's persistent claim that the unconscious always has to do with "sexuality" -that "the reality of the unconscious is a sexual reality." in spite of his emphasis on language, lacan cannot ignore this claim, since "at every opportunity, freud defended his formula . . . with tooth and nail" (sxi, 150). this is a crucial shift in lacan's work: if the classical method of "free association" once provided access to the unconscious (as a "symbolic" phenomenon), it now appears that some aspect of the transference disrupts that process, and works precisely against "meaning" and "interpretation." in lacan's words: "the unconscious, if it is what i say it is," can be characterized as "a play of the signifier" (sxi, 130), and the relation to the analyst should allow this play to unfold; and yet, we must now recognize that "the transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again" (sxi, 130). "i want to stress this question because it is the dividing line between the correct and incorrect interpretation of the transference" (sxi, 130). the same claim marks the very beginning of the seminar as a whole, so its importance is unmistakable. there lacan rejects "the hermeneutic demand," which characterizes "what we nowadays call the human sciences" (sxi, 7). in explicit contrast to this "hermeneutic demand," then, we find psychoanalysis insisting on the limit of the symbolic order, a certain dimension of the "real," an aspect of the unconscious that is linked to the "body" and "sexuality," and not to the symbolic order. viewed in this light, the first sentence of _seminar xi_ (written afterward, in 1976), could not be more of a challenge: "when the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious" (sxi, vii). *2.7 against hermeneutics* [21] a similar shift can be found in freud. initially, it seemed to freud that free association, as a relatively loose and uncensored mode of speech, would allow the unconscious to emerge, permitting analysis to gather up the unconscious associations and construct the logic of this "other" discourse in which the subject's destiny was written. but as freud himself observed, there often comes a point at which analysis encounters something "unspeakable," a center that cannot be reached by analysis: there is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. this is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. (se 5:525) we have here precisely the relation between the symbolic and the real. faced with this "absent center," analysis is suddenly confronted with the prospect of becoming "interminable." the transference, guided by free association and a "symbolic" conception of the unconscious (as "discourse of the other"), is suddenly insufficient. something else must come to pass, some non-symbolic element must be grasped, if analysis is to reach its "end." the "aporetic" point described by freud -the "nodal point" that resists symbolization and "adds nothing to our knowledge" -leads lacan to the concept of the "object a," which can be understood as a point of identification that is %opposed% to symbolic identification. as he says in _seminar xi_: what eludes the subject is the fact that his syntax is in relation with the unconscious reserve. when the subject tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs this syntax and makes it more and more condensed. condensed in relation to what? in relation to what freud, at the beginning of his description of psychical resistance, calls a nucleus. (sxi, 68) some analysts regard this "psychical resistance" as a phenomenon of the ego, calling it a "defense" and suggesting that analysis must "break down the resistance" and reveal the unconscious. in lacan's view, however, such a procedure amounts to imaginary warfare between egos. he therefore insists that "we must distinguish between the resistance of the subject and that first resistance of discourse, when the discourse proceeds towards the condensation around the nucleus." for this nucleus is not a "content" or "meaning" that might be reached through the symbolic order, if only the ego were not "resisting." on the contrary: "the nucleus must be designated as belonging to the real" (sxi, 68). the fundamental issue of _seminar xi_ could be reduced to this single point, where it is a question of elaborating the limit of the law, the peculiar relation between the "symbolic" subject and the subject in the real. all of the chapters -on the "gaze," on "sexuality," on the "transference," and so on -could be seen as different perspectives on this single problem. *2.8 identification with the object* [22] the "object a" thus emerges in lacanian theory at the moment when the "symbolic law" no longer has the final word. this is the point at which we can "no longer rely on the father's guarantee" (svii, 101). we are thus led to what jacques-alain miller calls "the formula of the second paternal metaphor," which "corresponds point by point to the formula of the name-of-the-father," but which adds a twist that "forces us to operate with the inexistence and the inconsistency of the other" (85). in fact, miller locates this moment in the development of lacan's thought between seminars vii and viii (the ethics and transference seminars). in the former, we find "the opposition between %das ding%, the thing, and the other," but it is "worked out enigmatically" and remains "wrapped in mystery"; in the transference seminar, however, "this opposition is transformed into a relation," giving us "a revolution in lacan's teaching" (80). however one may date this shift in lacan's work, the question it entails is clear enough. we must now regard the transference as bearing on a certain "affective tie," a certain "libidinal investment," a dimension of "identification" that cannot be reached by the symbolic work of free association -an "attachment" to an "object" of %jouissance% that is not reducible to the symbolic order, and is linked to the patient's suffering - to the symptom, and the body, insofar as they are irreducible to the symbolic order. this is where the question of "sexuality" (of the drive and libido) emerges in a certain "beyond" of language. in the seminar of 1974-75 called _r.s.i._, he will take this question up in terms of "affect." "what is the affect of existing?" (fs, 166); "what is it, of the unconscious, which makes for ex-istence? it is what i underline with the support of the symptom" (fs 166). "in all this," he adds, "what is irreducible is not an effect of language" (fs 165). *2.9 the "end" of analysis* [23] the question of identification -and, to be precise, identification with the object, as distinct from symbolic identification -introduces a limit to the process of symbolization. if something about the transference suddenly distinguishes itself from the labor of free association, it is because the endless labor of speech (the "hermeneutic demand") cannot reach the "rock of castration," the point of pathological attachment that binds the subject to a suffering that will not be relinquished. if analysis is suddenly faced with the prospect of becoming "interminable" -if it cannot simply proceed by resting on free association -this means that the "end" of analysis requires a certain "separation" between the subject and the "object a," insofar as that object is understood to entail a bodily %jouissance% that works %against desire%, a "suffering" akin to what freud called the death drive. _seminar xi_ closes on this very topic: "the transference operates in the direction of bringing demand back to identification" (sxi, 274), that is to say, by revealing the link between the unending series of demands and the singular point of identification that underlies them. but the "end" of analysis requires a move "in a direction that is the exact opposite of identification" (sxi, 274), a direction that amounts to the destitution of the subject. this act of "crossing the plane of identification is possible," lacan says, and it is what one might call the "sacrificial" dimension of psychoanalysis. it is therefore the "loss" of this pathological attachment that marks the terminal point of analysis: "the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation," lacan writes, "is the maintenance of the distance between the i -identification -and the a" (sxi, 273). these details are perhaps somewhat technical, and warrant further discussion, particularly with respect to the problem of the relation between the "symbolic order" and "sexuality," but i will not pursue them here. i have discussed the problem in "vital signs" (following some remarks by russell grigg), where i have tried to show how the "limit" of the symbolic order (and the question of "sexuality") has consequences for lacan's reading of the case of anna o. *2.10 aporetic sciences* [24] let us now turn from the "internal affairs" of psychoanalysis and try to sketch the intellectual horizon it shares with some other domains. our remarks should be sufficient to show that the "unconscious" cannot be reduced to a purely "symbolic" phenomenon, and that the theory of "sexuality" and "jouissance" will only be understood if the relation between the symbolic and the real is grasped -in such a way, moreover, that we do not simply return to familiar arguments about the "real" of sexuality as a natural phenomenon, a libidinal "force" that is simply "outside language." it is often said that lacanian theory places too much emphasis on the "law" and the "symbolic order," and we have suggested that this is not the case. but if we refer to the "real" (to "sexuality" and the "drive"), does this mean that we are now returning to a "prelinguistic reality," a "natural" aspect of the body that is "outside" the symbolic order? is this evidence of the "biological essentialism" that is often attributed to psychoanalysis, in spite of its apparent emphasis on the "symbolic order"? this is what many readers have concluded, and yet "everyone knows" that lacan rejects the biological account of sexuality. in what sense is the real "outside" the symbolic order, if it is not an "external reality," or a "prelinguistic" domain of "sexuality"? this is the point at which the "logical" aspect of psychoanalysis and the "limit of formalization" becomes especially important. for it allows us to elaborate the "real," not as a "prelinguistic reality" that would be "outside" the symbolic order, but precisely in terms of a lack that arises "within" the symbolic order. the "object a" is this element put forth by lacan, not as an object "in reality," an "external thing" that is somehow beyond representation, but as a term that designates a logical impasse. jacques-alain miller has this problem in mind when he writes that, with the "object a," we are dealing with a certain "limit" to presentation, but a limit that cannot be grasped by a direct approach to "reality": if there were an ontic in psychoanalysis, it would be the ontic of the object a. but this is precisely the road not taken by lacan . . . where does the object a come from in lacan? it comes from the partial object of karl abraham, that is, from a corporeal consistency. the interesting thing is to see that lacan transforms this corporeal consistency into a logical consistency. (85) without following the theory of the "body" further here, we can nevertheless see that the general form of the question can be posed in terms of the "limits of formalization," thereby recognizing that psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the "law" in the manner of classical structuralist thought -in the tradition of saussure and levi-strauss. in view of this, we might try to make this "aporetic" point more concrete by referring to a "paradox" that takes a similar form in various disciplines. *2.11 incest* [25] in anthropology, the "incest taboo" is not simply a "law," but a logical aporia: it functions as a sort of "nodal point" where the symbolic and the real are linked together. as is well known, the incest taboo presents us with a peculiar "contradiction": on the one hand, it is a "prohibition," a cultural institution that imposes "family relations" and kinship structures upon what would otherwise be the state of nature; at the same time, however, this "law," because of its "universality," is also defined as something "natural," since it cannot be ascribed to a particular social group, or located in a single historical period. levi-strauss and others have stressed the "paradox" or "scandal" of the incest taboo in just this way: "it constitutes a rule," levi-strauss says, "but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character." citing this passage in "structure, sign and play" (283), derrida has stressed that this impasse should not be reduced to a mere "contradiction," but must be given its own theoretical precision. it is not a question of eliminating ambiguity by determining, for once and for all, whether this law is "cultural" or "natural" -whether it is "really" a human invention, or a biological principle that insures genetic distribution. the "scandalous" or "paradoxical" character of the incest prohibition is not an ambiguity to be eliminated, but must rather be taken as the actual "positive content" of the concept itself: it suggests that, properly speaking, the incest taboo must be situated prior to the division between nature and culture. in derrida's words, the incest prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them -probably as the condition of their possibility. (283) like the nodal point of the dream, the incest taboo thus isolates a singular point which "reaches down into the unknown," a point "which has to be left obscure," which cannot be interpreted ("adds nothing to our knowledge of the content"), and yet is absolutely indispensable to the organization of the dream. we thus return to the "limit of formalization," an impasse in the symbolic system of cultural laws, but on which, far from being a "mistake," is curiously imperative, irrevocable, and necessary -as if it were somehow integral to the law itself. [26] the crucial point, however -and the connection between this "logical" impasse and the "object a" -is to recognize that this scandal somehow "materializes" itself. for the prohibition is not only a "paradox"; it has the additional characteristic that it "condenses" itself into an enigmatic "thing" -what freud calls the "taboo object." is this not the crucial point of _totem and taboo_, this peculiar relation between the "symbolic" system of totemism (the system of the name), and the taboo "object" that somehow accompanies it? indeed, as derrida points out in speaking of the "limits of formalization," it is not simply a matter of "aporiae"; if we are confronted with an "impasse" in the concepts of nature and culture, "something which escapes these concepts," it is because "there is something missing" (289). this "missing object" entails a certain "materialization," but it cannot be clarified by a simple empiricism, a simple reference to "presymbolic reality." for there are two ways of asserting the impossibility of formalization. as derrida notes, "totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style." this would consist in pointing to an empirical diversity that cannot be grasped by a single "law" or "system," an external wealth of historical differences that cannot be mastered by any theoretical glance. the other way consists in recognizing the intrinsic incompleteness of the theoretical gaze itself, the fact that the "law" is always contaminated by a "stain" that escapes the system: if totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field -that is, language and a finite language -excludes totalization . . . instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. (289) psychoanalysis can be described as the theory which tries to grasp the bodily consequences of this fact, the physical effects of this "object" on the structure of the body. it is not a theory aimed at describing the connections between a supposedly biological "sexuality" and the symbolic codes that are imposed upon this original "nature," but rather a theory which aims at understanding the corporeal materialization of this "impasse," the concrete somatic effects of this "excluded object" that accompanies the law of language. *2.12 the gold standard* [27] in economics, a similar "nodal point" might be found, which seems to be both "inside" and "outside" the structure. if one speaks of money as a "symbolic order," a conventional system of representation governed by certain internal laws, a "formalist" or "structuralist" account would say that it is not a question of what a particular amount of money will buy (what it "represents"), but a question of purely "internal relations." precisely as with the "signifier" in saussure's account, we are concerned not with the relation between the "sign" and "reality," but with the "internal affairs" of the symbolic order -with relations between the signifiers, and not with what the signifier "represents" outside the system. accordingly, "ten dollars" is not defined by what it will buy, or by its relation to external "reality." that is a purely contingent and constantly changing relation -today it will buy three loaves of bread, but next year it only serves as change to ride the bus. if we wish to define ten dollars "scientifically," we must therefore take a "formalist" perspective and say ten dollars is "half of twenty," or "twice five," and then we have a constant measure, in which the definition is given not by any (contingent) external reference, but rather by a (lawful) "diacritical" analysis, which places it in relation to the other elements in the system. [28] nevertheless, there is a point at which the structure is paradoxically "attached" to the very reality it is supposed to exclude. although "ten dollars" has no fixed or necessary relation to anything "outside" the system, but should rather be defined "internally," in relation to five dollars or twenty, the system itself is said to rest on a "gold standard," a "natural" basis that guarantees or supports the structure. "gold" is thus both "natural" and "symbolic" -or perhaps neither, since it has no natural value "in itself," and yet also no place "within" the system of money that we exchange. on the one hand, it is a pure "convention": unlike bread (which we "need"), gold has no value in itself, but is entirely "symbolic" (a pure "signifier" without any "use value"). on the other hand, it is not an element "within" the symbolic system of money, something we might define in relation to other elements: instead of being a signifier in the chain (s1-s2-s3), it is a "ground," a gold "reserve" that stands "outside" the system of exchange, giving value to the symbolic elements -whose purely formal relations are supposed to operate precisely by excluding any such "outside." we are faced here with the same "enigma" we encounter in the incest taboo. and again, it would be a mistake to think that we have simply found a "contradiction" or "inconsistency" in the concept; we should rather be led to recognize this "scandalous" and "paradoxical" character of the "object" (gold), not as a confusion that might be removed (for example, when we finally "come to our senses" and realize that gold is "merely symbolic"), but as its "positive" content: it is to be understood (in derrida's words) precisely as "something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition" (283). "gold" thus functions as a kind of "nodal point," a paradoxical element that is neither "inside" nor "outside" the structure. *2.13 supplementarity* [29] at this point, however, we must again (as with "sexuality" and "libido") be careful not to define this "external" element too "naively." if it seems at first glance that gold is a "natural" basis for monetary value, the bullion in the bank that guarantees the "purely symbolic" money that circulates in exchange; if gold presents itself as the one element that is not symbolic, but has value "in itself" and thus serves as a ground (insofar as money "represents" it); this view is precisely what we must reject. for like the nodal point in the dream, it would not exist except "through" the system that it is "naively" thought to support. the "enigma" of gold as a "quilting point" is that it has no value "in itself," but %acquires% its status as a "natural value" from the system itself, not in the sense that it is simply an "element" within the system, another "symbolic" phenomenon that might be placed at the same level as the money which circulates in the market, but in the sense that it is a "surplus-effect," a "product" of the system which expels it from the chain of "representations," and buries it in the earth, where it can be "found again." strictly speaking, therefore, the "natural" and "foundational" character of gold, the fact that it was "already there," apparently "preceding" the monetary system and providing it with an external ground, is an illusion, but a necessary illusion, one which the system, in spite of its apparent "autonomy," evidently requires. as a result, it cannot be a question of simply denouncing this illusion, and asserting the "purely symbolic" character of "value," its arbitrary, conventional or "constructed" character. the task is rather to understand just how the system, which at first appeared to be "autonomous," governed by purely "conventional" and "internal" laws, nevertheless requires this peculiar "object," and requires that it have precisely this enigmatically "natural" status, this apparent and illusory "exteriority." [30] in _tarrying with the negative_, slavoj zizek suggests that this peculiar aspect of the "object," as a surplus-effect of the system, a "product" which is not simply symbolic, but concerns an excluded object that must take on the illusion of naturalness (of "already-being-there-before," so that it can be "found again"), can be clarified by reference to a famous passage from the _critique of pure reason_, a passage from the "transcendental dialectic," where kant speaks of "delusion" -not of empirical delusion (a mistaken impression of the senses, which can always be corrected), nor indeed of merely logical error (which consists in the commitment of formal fallacies, a "lack of attention to the logical rule" a296/b353), but of an illusion proper to reason itself. it is %proper% to reason in the sense that, as kant says, it "does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed" (a 297/b353). it is thus not an ambiguity to be avoided, but "a %natural% and inevitable %illusion%," an "unavoidable dialectic" which is "inseparable from human reason," and which "will not cease to play tricks with reason . . . even after its deceptiveness has been exposed" (a 298/b354). it is not that reason (the "symbolic order") falls into "contradiction" by some error that might be removed; rather, reason would itself be, as kant says, "the seat of transcendental illusion." but how is the lacanian "object a" related to this illusion? how are we to understand the claim that kant recognizes not only that the idea of "totality" gives rise to contradiction, but also that it is attended by a peculiar surplus-object? for this (the "sublime object") is what the "antinomies" of kant's "dialectical illusion" imply, according to zizek. the point can be clarified by reference to "sexual difference. for kant, "there is no way for us to imagine the universe as a whole; that is, as soon as we do it, we obtain two antinomical, mutually exclusive versions," two propositions that cannot be maintained at the same time. in lacan, moreover, this "structure" is precisely what we find in the symbolic division between the sexes: it is not a division into two "halves" of a single species, or two "complementary" parts which together might comprise the whole of "humanity." on the contrary, the division between the sexes makes them "supplementary" (lacan: "note that i said %supplementary%. had i said %complementary%, where would we be! we'd fall right back into the all" fs 144). in zizek's words, the antagonistic tension which defines sexuality is not the polar opposition of two cosmic forces (yin/yang, etc.), but a certain crack which prevents us from imagining the universe as a whole. sexuality points towards the supreme ontological scandal. (83) the status of the "object" is thus clarified, for if an object appears to fill this gap, offering to guarantee a harmonious relation between the sexes (sometimes this object is the child, which "sutures" the parental bond), it can only do so as the "prohibited" object, the product of "dialectical illusion." we thus see more clearly the relation between the logical aporia that accompanies the symbolic order (the "real" of "incest" or "gold"), and the "object a." *2.14 the time of the object* [31] before we close this discussion of the "limits of formalization," we must stress the peculiar temporality of this object. we have identified the peculiar character of the prohibited or incestuous "object": unlike the abstract "signifiers" that circulate in the community (diacritically or synchronically), gold is a "product" or "effect" of the system, but a "symbolic effect" whose precise character is to "materialize" itself, separating itself from all the other elements of exchange, in order to "appear" as if it existed before the system ever came into being, and possessed its value "by nature." its function is to dissimulate, to "veil" itself -to hide its own nature, we might say, if it were not for the fact that its "nature" is just this "hiding" of itself. we must therefore link the "paradoxical" or "contradictory" character of the object to the peculiar "time" that governs it. it is not enough to stress the "contradictory" character of this object -the paradoxical fact that it belongs to both "nature" and "culture" (or more precisely to neither, since it precedes this very division) -or to recognize that this "paradox" is not an ambiguity to be removed, but rather constitutive of the object itself. we must also recognize that its peculiar temporality is such that it comes into being through the system, but in such a way that it must have been there "before," so that the system might emerge on its basis. this is why the "incest taboo" always refers us to an earlier "state of nature," a time of "unrestricted sexuality" that was supposedly limited "once upon a time," when the "law" was imposed and a certain "object" suddenly came to be prohibited. since the "taboo object" is not a "prelinguistic reality," but the place-holder of a lack that only comes into being through the law, we are forced to recognize the purely illusory character of this supposed "past," as a past that was never present. this temporal aspect of the taboo "object" was clearly identified by lacan in _television_ when he wrote that "the oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure" (30, translation modified). if we now wish to clarify the relation between this "object" and the system of representation in freudian terms, we might say that gold is, in relation to the system of money, not so much a "representation," as the "representation of representation," the "primal signifier" that grounds signification, but whose essential feature is that it had no such status as "ground" prior to the system which is said to be based upon it. in short, gold is the "name-of-the father": as the "quilting-point" of the system, it is not one signifier among others, but the "signifier of signifiers," the ground of exchange that appears to precede symbolization and guarantee its basis in nature, but is in fact a "by-product" of the structure itself -not an element in the structure of exchange, but peculiar "object" which comes into being to "veil" the lack which inhabits the structure itself. needless to say, the "phallus" has precisely this status in lacan. the phallus is a veil. *2.15 the phallus* [32] to set out from the "limits of formalization" would thus allow us to see why the most common debate over the phallus is fundamentally misleading. for it is often said that the concept of the phallus confronts us with a crucial ambiguity: on the one hand, the phallus is a "signifier," and as such demonstrates the "symbolic" construction of sexual difference; on the other hand, the phallus is by no means "arbitrary," a purely "symbolic" function, since it clearly refers to anatomy. we are thus led into a familiar debate, in which some readers "defend" lacan, asserting that the phallus is a "signifier," and that psychoanalysis rejects any biological account of sexual difference, while others readers insist that in spite of protests to the contrary, the phallus is the one element in the theory that unmistakably implicates psychoanalysis in a return to "biology," perpetuating the "essentialism" of sexual difference, and securing a certain "privilege" on the part of the male, and a corresponding "lack" on the part of the female. accounts of psychoanalysis are numerous which vigorously defend both these positions, but in fact neither is accurate, and the entire polemic could be seen as actually concealing the theory it pretends to address. for the phallus is not biological, and does not refer to "prelinguistic reality," but neither is it purely symbolic -one signifier among others, an element contained within the system. as a "signifier of lack," it marks the "impossible" point of intersection between the symbolic and the real, the introduction of a lack which allows the mobilization of signifiers to begin their work of substitution, a lack which is the "absolute condition" of desire, but which "can be occupied, freud tells us, by any object" (sxi, 180). the phallus is this "veil" ("it can play its role only when veiled" [e, 288]), the singular mark of signification itself, the paradoxical "signifier of signifiers" which (as in the case of gold) only functions through a substitution that dissimulates, allowing it to appear in imaginary clothing, as "gold," a natural ground "guaranteeing" signification -a materialization that, in presenting itself as "already-there-before," veils its status as a surplus-effect, a non-natural lack in the structure that has been "filled in" by this extimate object. as in the case of "gold" and "incest," then, it cannot be a question of finally determining whether the phallus belongs to "nature" or "culture," to the order of "biology" or the order of the "signifier." such efforts will only circumvent the "logic" of the "nodal point" which this paradoxical concept is intended to articulate. and insofar as the phallus is also bound up with the imaginary body, one can see that the concept requires clarification in all three registers, as imaginary, symbolic and real. to ask whether the phallus is "biological" or "symbolic" is thus to refuse the very issue it addresses. *2.16 material aporetics* [33] we have stressed the fact that with this "paradox," it is not simply a question of a "logical" contradiction, a "term" which belongs to both nature and culture -or, more precisely, which escapes this very distinction -nor only a question of time, but also a question of a certain "materiality." for gold is also an "object," unlike the "signifiers" that are said to represent it, but also unlike the purely natural "things" that might be said to exist independently of any language. need we add here that in the case of the incest taboo, we are also faced with a certain "materialization" of the taboo object, the "thing" that is excluded from the "totemic" order of the name? and is not psychoanalysis the theory which endeavors to articulate the consequences of such "materialization" in terms of our bodily existence? discussions of lacan that insist on the "linguistic" or "symbolic" character of his theory (whether to denounce or celebrate it) only serve to conceal this enigmatic logic of the body. our general claim is thus given some concrete clarification: every effort to establish a structure "on its own terms," by reference to purely "internal" relations (money, kinship, language), will encounter a point at which the system touches on something "outside" itself, something that has a "paradoxical" status, being simultaneously "symbolic" and yet also excluded from the system. the "real" in lacan is a concept that tries to address this enigma. readers of derrida will of course recognize that many of the fundamental derridian terms -the "trace," the "supplement," and so on -touch on precisely the same problem, the "limit" of formalization, an element that "founds" the structure while being at the same time excluded from it. one day, someone who knows something about both these writers will develop these issues in more detail. *3.1 two versions of the real* [34] let us now attempt a final approach to your question, by distinguishing two versions of the real. this will allow us to develop the concept in slightly more detail. one of the difficulties with the concept of the real in lacan is that it appears in several different forms as his work unfolds. without exploring all the detailed transformations, let us simply isolate the most important development in his use of the term. it is this: initially, the "real" seems to refer to a "presymbolic reality," a realm of "immediate being" that is never accessible in itself, but only appears through the "mediation" of imaginary and symbolic representation (in this case, it tends to correspond to the common meaning of "reality"); later, however, the term seems to designate a "lack," an element that is missing from "within" the symbolic order, in which case the real can only be understood as an "effect" of the symbolic order itself. one might thus speak of a "presymbolic real" and a "postsymbolic real." in the first case, the real precedes the symbolic and "exists" independently, while in the second case, the real is a "product" of the symbolic order, a residue or surplus-effect that "exists" or comes into "being" only as a result of the symbolic operation that excludes it. it is perhaps this very duality in the concept that leads you to ask whether the real is "inside" or "outside" the symbolic order. *3.2 a parenthesis on "being"* [35] these two versions of the real will have two different modes of being, for in the first case, one can say the real "exists" independently, and then go on to ask whether we can have any "knowledge" of it, independently of our "representations"; but in the second case, we are led to speak of the "being of lack" -thereby initiating a whole series of apparently paradoxical claims about the "being" of what "is not," reminiscent, perhaps, of theological disputes concerning the "existence" of god. as lacan says in _seminar xi_, "when speaking of this gap one is dealing with an ontological function," and yet, "it does not lend itself to ontology" (sxi 29). in distinguishing these two versions of the real, we must therefore recognize two different "modes" of being, since the "existence" of the presymbolic real is not the same as the "being" of the "lack" that characterizes the postsymbolic real. anyone who has read heidegger knows how complex these questions concerning "existence" and "being" can be. one has only to think of heidegger's account of kant's thesis that "being is not a real predicate" -a thesis discussed by moustafa safouan in _pleasure and being_ -to see how many philosophical issues weigh on the discourse of psychoanalysis. apart from the question of whether (and in what "mode") the real "exists" -"inside" or "outside" the symbolic -it may also be necessary to distinguish between real, imaginary and symbolic modes of "existence." on a first approximation, one might say that the imaginary is a dimension of "seeming," the symbolic of "meaning," and the real of "being" (though as we have suggested, this last term can be divided further, into two forms). if, moreover, we recall lacan's claim that "the real is the impossible," we would have to consider the other categories of modal logic as well. lacan seems to have followed heidegger to some extent in speaking of the "impossible," the "contingent," the "necessary" and the "possible" (categories which have been discussed in some detail by robert samuels in _between philosophy and psychoanalysis_). *3.3 "reality" and "lack"* [36] the significance of the distinction between these two versions of the real should thus be clear: we know the concept of "lack" is central to lacanian theory, and that it cannot be adequately grasped in terms of the "symbolic," since it is closely bound up with the category of the real. much of the secondary literature on lacan, however, characterizes the "real" as a prediscursive reality that is mediated by representation -the reality that is always lost whenever we represent it. this does in fact capture some aspects of lacan's work, but if we wish to understand the relation between the real and lack, it is not sufficient, for the concept of "lack" points us in the direction of a void that cannot be understood by reference to prediscursive reality, as tim dean has argued. thus, even if there is some validity in regarding the real as a dimension of "immediate existence" which is always filtered through imaginary and symbolic representations of it, we will not grasp the concept of "lack" in this way, but only if we turn to the real in its second version, as an "effect" of the symbolic order, in which case we can no longer regard it "prelinguistic." let us therefore consider these two versions of the real more closely. *3.4 the "pre-symbolic" real* [37] the first version of the real -the "presymbolic" real - provides the more familiar account. one often hears that, according to lacan, the real is "organized" or "represented" through images and words that do not actually "capture" the real, but always "misrepresent" it. human life is thus subject to a fundamental and irremediable "misunderstanding," such that the "real" is always already "lost" -figured or disfigured in some manner. such a conception, however, makes it difficult to understand what freud means by the "reality principle" or "reality-testing," and it completely obscures the concept of lack, since the real, understood as a prediscursive reality, is "full." nevertheless, lacan himself sometimes used the term in this way, and it cannot be entirely rejected. we thus face an apparent conflict between the prediscursive real (which is "full"), and the real as a "lack" which arises %through% the symbolic order. one recalls the lacanian dictum, based on our "first version," that "nothing is lacking in the real" (a phrase often cited in reference to the supposed "castration" of women, which, on this account, is not "real" but strictly "imaginary" castration). one can already see here that %symbolic% castration (lack) cannot be understood through this account of the "imaginary" and "real," which circumvents language in order to enter a debate between "imaginary" lack and a "reality" in which nothing is lacking. let us develop the first version somewhat further, to see why it has played such a prominent role in the secondary literature -for despite its deficiencies, it has a number of virtues, and lacan's own text provides some justification for it. [38] in the first version, the real is construed as a domain of immediate experience, a level of brute sensory "reality" that never reaches "consciousness" without being filtered through "representation" -by memory, by the ego, or by various internal "neurological pathways" that mediate and organize our sensory experience. this is a familiar motif in freud, who often speaks of "consciousness" and even of "bodily experience" (sensory stimuli) as being fashioned or channeled by past experiences, anticipation, projection, and other forms of representation, which allow %some aspects% of our experience to become "present" to us, while others are not registered, and therefore remain "absent" even though they are "real." a correlation would thus be made between two different modes of "presence" (namely, "imaginary" and "symbolic"), and a real that remains "absent," insofar as it is inaccessible. robert samuels uses this notion of the real when he speaks of the subject as the "existential subject" (7), that is to say, the subject in its brute "existence" prior to imaginary and symbolic formation. the "real" subject (s) would thus designate what lacan in the essay on psychosis calls a level of "ineffable, stupid existence" (e, 193). this notation, in which "s" designates the subject "in the real," is useful insofar as it encourages us to separate real, imaginary and symbolic definitions of the subject - distinguishing the subject as "real" (s), from the ego as formed in the imaginary (the "a" of schema l, which designates the "moi" as a correlate of the image or alter ego), distinguishing both of these in turn from "$" -the "split subject," or the "subject of the signifier." [39] richard boothby's book, _death and desire_, gives an excellent account of this argument, in which the "real" is a dimension of "immediate existence" or prediscursive reality that is never actually available to us as such, but only appears %through% the intervention of the imaginary or the symbolic. he shows how lacan's theory of the imaginary -and above all of the imaginary body -allows us to understand what freud means when he says that even sensory experience and bodily excitations do not provide direct contact with the "real," since even our most concrete, bodily experience or "perception" is organized and shaped through the imaginary, which "translates" or "represents" the real, thereby also distorting it. as boothby says, the imaginary is a dimension of narcissism that maintains its own "world" by "defending" itself against the real, "recognizing" only those aspects of the real that accord with the interests of the ego. boothby stresses the imaginary, but one could also speak of the symbolic here, as another level of "representation" that organizes the real, "presenting" it by translating or mediating it. for as lacan says, "the symbol is the murder of the thing"; it "mediates" our contact with the real, "negating" the thing and replacing it with a "representation," and thus with a "substitute." it is important to recognize that imaginary and symbolic presentation (or representation) do not function in the same way, but in any case, the concept of the real as an immediate or prediscursive "reality" is clear. eventually, we must come to see why lacan gave up this notion, why he came to regard this account as inadequate, and was obliged to develop a different conception of the real. but let us not go too quickly. *3.5 the "return" of the real* [40] for it is important to observe that, on this view, the real is not absolutely lost: on the contrary, one can speak of the "real" as sometimes "asserting itself," or "disrupting" the systems of representation that have been set up to encode and process it. as boothby suggests, certain bodily experiences can be characterized as "real" if they threaten or oppose the imaginary system of the subject: the narcissistic structure "refuses" or "defends" itself against the real, which is "excluded," but which nevertheless sometimes "returns," disrupting the structure by asserting itself. this is in keeping with freud's observations in the _project_, where he notes that the bodily apparatus, its neurological pathways, act partly by "blocking" certain stimuli, which are in some sense "felt," but not actually "registered" by the subject. one can then regard the sudden "rupture" of these neurological blocking mechanisms as an "encounter with the real." a number of freud's metaphors appear to work this way, as if the "system" of the body were a system of "pressure" and "release" in which a particular threshold must be crossed before the "real" is allowed to "register." the advantage of this account is that it allows us to see that the body is not a %natural% system of "rivers" and "dams," governed by a biological force of "pressure" and "release," but is rather an "imaginary" system, in which "force" is the expressly non-biological force of representation. such an account allows us to explain the "return of the real" as a disruptive or "traumatic" event, while also showing us why the "body" in psychoanalysis is not a biological system. this is why boothby insists on the "imaginary" structure of the body, and on the fact that the "energy" freud speaks of is not a natural or "physical" energy, but rather "psychic energy" -whatever that means. as freud himself says in his late text, the _outline of psychoanalysis_, "we would give much to understand more about these things." *3.6 beyond mimesis* [41] this is the most common understanding of the "real," but it has one great disadvantage, in that it tends to equate the real with "pre-linguistic reality." on the basis of this conception, psychoanalysis is immediately drawn back into a number of traditional questions about "mimesis." starting with the idea that there is a "symbolic order," or indeed an "imaginary" system of representation, we may ask whether it is possible to have access to an outside "reality," but we will never be able to clarify the concept of the real. we will be able to enter a whole series of familiar debates about "representation," in which two alternatives appear to dominate. some (the "postmodernists") say that "everything is symbolic": we have no access to "reality" in itself, for reality is always given %through% some historically specific "discursive formation"; it is not a question of "reality," but only of different symbolic systems, different "representations" which compete with each other, and which succeed in becoming "true" either because they are "persuasive" (rhetoric), or because they are formulated by those in power (politics), or because they have the authority of "tradition" (history), or for some other reason -in short, "there is no metalanguage," no discourse that can ground itself in a non-discursive "external reality," since the only thing "outside" discourse is . . . more discourse. others (the "positivists") say that in spite of these symbolic codes, there is a "reality" that asserts itself, or presents itself to us: we may try to ignore it, or refuse to give it any symbolic importance, or we may construct certain "fantasies" that seek to circumvent reality, or highlight only certain features of reality, but it is still the case that symbolic systems have a more or less adequate "purchase" on reality, and that some discourses are "more true" than others. these arguments are familiar, but they will not take us very far towards understanding lacan. *3.7 reality and the real* [42] this is why, if we wish to understand lacan, we must distinguish between "reality" and the "real" (thereby moving towards our "second version"). in "the freudian thing," for example, lacan explicitly refers to heidegger when he discusses the classical definition of "true" representation ("adaequatio rei et intellectus," the correct correspondence between the idea or word and the thing), saying that the freudian account of "truth" cannot be grasped in terms of the problem of "adequate correspondence." freud's "truth" cannot be approached in terms of "true" and "false" representations, or in terms of the "symbolic order" and "reality," for "truth" is linked to the "real," and not to "reality." lacan even coined a word to suggest the link between "truth" and the "real" - %le vreel% (a term that has been attributed to kristeva, but came from lacan). to address the relation between the "symbolic" and the "real" is therefore quite different from engaging in the task of distinguishing between "reality" and the symbolic or imaginary world of the subject. [43] let us note, however, that the distinction between "reality" and the "real" must be made in a specific way, according to lacan. for it is perfectly possible to accept the distinction between "reality" and the "real" while at the same time sustaining the first version of the "real" (as a pre-discursive reality). in this case, "reality" is defined, not as an unknowable, external domain, independent of our representations, but precisely as the product of representation. our "reality" is imaginary and symbolic, and the "real" is %what is missing from reality% -that "outside" which escapes our representations (the "%ding-an-sich%"). the "real" thus remains an inaccessible, prediscursive reality, while "reality" is understood as a symbolic or imaginary "construction." many commentaries have taken this line of argument, distinguishing the "real" and "reality" while nevertheless maintaining our "first version." as samuel weber writes, the notion of reality implied in the imaginary should in no way be confused with lacan's concept of the "real" . . . in lacan, as in peirce, the "real" is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation, including cognition. it is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary. (106) if we turn to jonathan scott lee, we find the same distinction: all language allows us to speak of is the "reality" constituted by the system of the symbolic . . . because "there is no metalanguage," the real perpetually eludes our discourse. (136) the same conclusion appears to be drawn by borch-jacobsen, who expresses profound reservations about lacan's apparent "nihilism," and writes that the "truth" ultimately affirmed by lacan is that we have no access to the "real," but are condemned to live in a domain of subjective "reality," a domain of subjective "truth": lacan's "truth," no matter how unfathomable and repressed, remains none the less the truth of a desire -that is, of a %subject%. it could hardly be otherwise in psychoanalysis. isn't the patient invited to recount %himself% -that is, to reveal himself to himself in autorepresentation. (107) the real is thus a prediscursive reality that is always already lost (a thesis tediously familiar to us, borch-jacobsen says, from a certain existentialism): "thus the 'real,' as kojeve taught, is abolished as soon as it is spoken" (109). or, in another passage: for lacan -agreeing, on this point, with kojeve's teaching -truth is essentially distinct from reality. better yet, truth %is opposed% to reality [since] the subject speaks himself by negating, or "nihilating" the "real." (107) the peculiarity of this formulation is that it seems to %equate% the real and reality, but this is simply because we are to understand "reality" not as the constructed "reality" of the subject (what borch-jacobsen here calls the subject's "truth"), but as the external reality that is always already lost. in all these cases, we can distinguish between a "real" (or "prediscursive reality") that remains outside representation, and "reality" as "constituted" by the subject, while retaining the first conception, in which the "real" is an external domain that precedes representation and remains "unknown." *3.8 "the innermost core of the imaginary"* [44] how then are we to pass beyond the familiar problem of "true" and "false" representations, the classical problem of "mimesis," the dichotomy between a prediscursive "reality" (which is permanently lost, or which occasionally "returns" in the form of a traumatic disruption of the representational system), and the network of imaginary or symbolic "representations" which either capture or simply replace that "reality"? how are we to move to our second conception in which we arrive at the concept of "lack" -a "void" that is not reducible to the imaginary or symbolic (that remains "absent" from representation), and yet does not exist in "external reality"? clearly, the real, insofar as it is connected with lack, can only be grasped through this second formulation, as a "post-symbolic" phenomenon, a void that arises %through% the symbolic order, as an "effect" of the symbolic order which is nevertheless irreducible to the imaginary or symbolic. [45] at this point, we can return to the question of the trauma, the "return" of the real, in order to see why the first conception of the real is inadequate. for one might well say that certain "experiences" or "encounters with the real" (momentary ruptures of our "defenses") are traumatic or disruptive, but this is not simply due to their "nature" -as if it were a direct, unmediated encounter with some traumatic "reality." the "disruptive" character of the real, regarded as a dimension of experience that disturbs the order of representation, is not due to the real "in itself," but is due to the fact that it is unfamiliar. the "real" is traumatic because there has been no sufficient symbolic or imaginary network in place for "representing" it. it is "traumatic," not "in itself," but only in relation to the established order of representation. we must return here to samuel weber's formulation. for if he claims (following our "first version") that "the real' is defined by its resistance, which includes resistance to representation," and that "it is, therefore, in a certain sense at the furthest remove from the imaginary" (106), he immediately adds a curious twist: "at the same time, one could with equal justification describe it as residing at the innermost core of the imaginary" (106). obviously the freudian concept of "repression," as something "contained" (in every sense) by the subject's "representational system," would come closer to this conception of the "real" as an "innermost core," rather than an autonomous, "external reality." consequently, the "real," even if we wish to characterize it along the lines of our initial approach, as a disruptive element that "asserts itself" and threatens the usual expectations of the ego, cannot be understood as "pre-existing reality," but must rather be understood as an "innermost core," an "inside" that only acquires its repressed or traumatic character in relation to the familiar order of representation. as early as the "rome discourse," lacan stressed this aspect of the "trauma," distinguishing it from any simple "event": to say of psychoanalysis or of history that, considered as sciences, they are both sciences of the particular, does not mean that the facts they deal with are purely accidental . . . [or] reducible to the brute aspect of the trauma. (e, 51) *3.9 the phobic object* [46] in "the story of louise," michele montrelay provides a remarkable account of a "traumatic" event, one that obliges us to see the real not as pre-discursive, but as an effect of symbolization. she speaks of the onset of a phobia, describing it as a particular moment in the history of the subject, a "moment" or "event," however, which is not a simple "present," and which consists, not of the "immediate experience" of some traumatic "reality," but of an experience in which two chains of signifiers, previously kept apart, are suddenly made to intersect, in such a way, moreover, that in place of "meaning," a hole is produced. "this hole opened by the phobia is situated in space like a fault around which all roads would open . . . except that all of a sudden the ground vanishes" (77). instead of a "metaphor," a "spark" of meaning, something "impossible" suddenly emerges from this intersection of signifiers, a "hole" or "cut" in the universe of meaning, a cut that is linked to an obscure "knowledge" that louise suddenly acquires about her father -a "forbidden knowledge" that remains excluded the moment it appears: knowing is contained not in the revelation of the "content" of a representation, but in a new and impossible conjunction of signifiers. two signifying chains created a cut or break. that is, they marked the place of an impossible passage. . . . the chains, suddenly brought into proximity, created a short-circuit. (81) an additional observation is necessary here, if we are to grasp the "object," as well as this "cut" in the symbolic universe. for we must also note that the phobia dates from this "moment," this symbolic intersection, this oedipal crossing of the roads, which is to be understood, not simply as producing a "hole" in meaning, but as having an additional "effect." such is the genesis of the "phobic object" in the story of louise: a fish has come to fill the place of this void that has suddenly opened at the subject's feet, giving it a "local habitation," a specific place among all the things spread out across the extended surface of the world -a place that is prohibited and can no longer be crossed. (other places become contaminated, too, for thereafter, louise will no longer enter the library, where her father taught her to read.) one day, louise, who was preparing dinner in the kitchen with her mother (the domestic space is not a matter of indifference), goes to the dining room, and watches while this fish-object (its eye still looking up) is transferred to the father's plate: "louise, who was watching the fish cooking without saying anything, begins to scream. nameless terror. she refuses to eat. the fish phobia has declared itself" (79). the daughter, who had always been clever and mature, becomes dizzy and speechless, to the bewilderment of her parents. she can no longer occupy space as before. as lacan says in "the agency of the letter," between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject . . . a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. (e, 166) the traumatic "fact" or "event" in psychoanalysis thus acquires its status not as an encounter with some autonomous, pre-existing "reality," but only through the network of representation in relation to which the particular thing in question acquires a traumatic status. *3.10 retroactive trauma* [47] the "trauma" can therefore no longer be understood as a simple brute "reality" that is difficult to integrate into our symbolic universe. zizek notes this when he corrects his own account of the trauma in _for they know not what they do_. in a "first presentation," he referred to the trauma as a sudden, disruptive experience of "reality" that is not easily placed within our "symbolic universe." but this notion is soon modified: "when we spoke of the symbolic integration of a trauma," he writes, we omitted a crucial detail: the logic of freud's notion of the "deferred action" does not consist in the subsequent "gentrification" of a traumatic encounter by means of its transformation into a normal component of our symbolic universe, but in almost the exact opposite of it - something which was at first perceived as a meaningless, neutral event changes retroactively, after the advent of a new symbolic network . . . into a trauma that cannot be integrated. (221-22) thus, in place of a "pre-symbolic reality" that we might regard as traumatic, and that we must eventually "accommodate" into our symbolic universe, we have a trauma that emerges retroactively, as an effect of symbolization. one might think here of contemporary efforts to re-write the literary canon: for many years, most literary critics regarded the canon as"full," as a list of "great names"; but after a shift in the "symbolic universe" (which consisted in acknowledging that there might possibly be women who also happened to be writers - %mirabile dictu%), the past suddenly appeared as traumatic, as "false" and "slanted" and full of "holes" - holding great vacancies that needed to be occupied. here, the "traumatic event" must be clearly recognized for what it is -not the immediate contact with an external "reality," the simple encounter with a historical "reality," the "discovery" of women writers, but a new signification that has retroactive effects on the past. obviously, this model of the "event" does not fit the "popular" examples of "traumatic events" -the "brute experience" of violence or war that must gradually be given a place in the symbolic universe. in this second version, where the structure of symbolic retroaction is stressed, we are in fact closer to the sort of "trauma" induced by foucault, whose writings have the effect of making a neat, coherent and familiar past (the "grand narrative") suddenly emerge as "mad" and "deceptive" and "fictional" -and thus in need of reconfiguration. this is why i have argued that foucault's work cannot be understood as a "historicist" description of the past in all its archaeological strangeness and contingency, but must rather be understood as aiming to produce effects, by negotiating te relation between the symbolic and the real. [48] given this account of the "trauma," we are led to shift our account of the real slightly, and ask, not so much about the real "in itself" -the direct, unmediated "reality" that is always distorted by representation -but about the %relation between% the real and the order of "representation" (symbolic or imaginary). it thus becomes clear that our initial view of the "real" as a "prediscursive reality" cannot be entirely precise, since the real only acquires its "unfamiliar" and "disruptive" status in relation to the symbolic and imaginary. even without considering the temporal factor of "retroaction" introduced by zizek, or the peculiar "event-structure" of the symbolic overlapping discussed by montrelay, we can already see in the account given by boothby that the disruptive emergence of a "real" that violates the normal order of the ego -the sudden "rupture" of neurological pathways -cannot be characterized simply as a moment of contact with external "reality." as boothby suggests, the "real" is constituted in relation to representation, and thus appears as an "innermost core of the imaginary" (or symbolic) itself. we must therefore drop the idea that the real is "presymbolic," that it is an "unreachable" reality that exists "prior" to language (the "first version"), and recognize that the imaginary, symbolic and the real are mutually constitutive -like the rings in the borromean knot, which provide us with a "synchronic" and "equiprimordial" structure linking the imaginary, symbolic and real in a single set of relations. *3.11 the "post-symbolic" real* [49] we are thus brought to a second account of the real in lacan, in which it is no longer regarded as "prelinguistic" domain that is never available to us, or that occasionally "returns" to disrupt our representations. in its "postsymbolic" form, the real designates something that only "exists" as a result of symbolization. on this view, the symbolic order is structured in such a way that it produces a kind of "excess," a "remainder" or "surplus-effect," that is not at all equivalent to "reality," but is rather an "effect" of the symbolic order, though not reducible to it. this refinement of the concept of the real is one of the major interests of lacanian theory. at this point, however, a new complication arises (we have seen it already in the phobic object), for with this second version of the real, two related problems are now introduced: first, we are faced with a concept of "lack," a void that cannot be clarified by references to prediscursive reality (which is "full"); and second, we are faced with the "production" of an object, a "surplus-effect," in which the symbolic order gives rise to a certain "excess" it cannot adequately contain. the real, in this second formulation, would therefore seem to be simultaneously "too little" and "too much" -something "missing," but also a certain "materialization." the "object a" is lacan's effort to resolve this issue: it is a construction that seeks to address the link between the "void" and this "excess," by establishing a relation between "lack" and this peculiar "surplus-effect." before turning to this enigmatic "splitting" within the second conception of the real, let us characterize the "post-symbolic" version more precisely. *3.12 butler and zizek* [50] for in distinguishing these two versions of the real, we may cast light not only on lacan, but also on some recent discussions of lacanian theory. consider judith butler's recent book, _bodies that matter_ (routledge, 1993), which contains a chapter called "arguing with the real." in this chapter, butler touches on both versions of the real when she observes, in reference to zizek, that it is unclear whether the real is to be understood as a prediscursive, material realm, a hard "kernel" located outside symbolization, or whether it is to be understood as a product of the symbolic order, "an effect of the law," in which case we would be concerned, not so much with a "material" real, but rather with a "lack." such is the ambiguity butler points to in zizek's work, noting that the real appears in two forms, as both "rock" and "lack." she writes, the "real" that is a "rock" or a "kernel" or sometimes a "substance" is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, "a loss" [or] a negativity. (198) according to butler, we thus find a certain equivocation: the concept of the real "appears to slide from substance to dissolution" (198). as "substance," the real would seem to implicate lacan in a reference to "prediscursive reality." lacanian theory would thus cut against the grain of most "postmodernism," for if we assert the "discursive construction of reality," stressing its contingent, historical formation, the "real" would seem to be a limit, an external domain that is untouched by symbolization. but as "loss" or "negativity," the real would seem to bring lacan closer to the thesis that "reality" is "discursively constructed," though with the additional complication that the real implies a "lack" that remains in some enigmatic way irreducible to the symbolic -"beyond" discourse, though not simply "pre-discursive." in view of our distinction between two versions of the real, we might see this "sliding" from substance to dissolution, not as confusion or self-contradiction, but as the simultaneous articulation of two forms of the real. *3.13 beyond "discursive" postmodernism* [51] in her discussion of zizek and the real, butler focuses on the fact that the concept of the real amounts to a critique of the "postmodern" thesis asserting the "discursive construction" of reality. this is indeed the crucial point. butler notes that the real presents us with a "limit" to discourse: zizek begins his critique of what he calls "poststructuralism" through the invocation of a certain kind of matter, a "rock" or "kernel" that not only resists symbolization and discourse, but is precisely what poststructuralism, in his account, itself resists and endeavors to dissolve. (198) at this point, however, the distinction between our two versions of the real is crucial: for we must ask whether zizek's critique of "poststructuralism" -conceived (rightly or wrongly) as a theory of "discursive construction" -amounts to a "naive" appeal to "prediscursive reality" (a "rock" or "substance") or whether it concerns the "failure" or "incompleteness" of the symbolic order (a certain "lack" or "negativity"). in the latter case, as i have suggested, the lacanian account of the real would be very close to certain questions formulated by foucault and derrida concerning the "limits of formalization" -the supplement, or transgression, or "madness" for example. it is because of this second possibility, moreover, that butler does not simply reject the concept of the real (as a naive appeal to "reality"), insisting on an equally naive account of the "discursive construction of reality" (a thesis that has often been wrongly attributed to her). [52] on the contrary, she regards the concept of the real as a genuine contribution, an effort to address a problem that contemporary theory has to confront, if it is to pass beyond certain inadequate formulations of "cultural construction." for those of us who wish to insist upon an anti-foundationalist approach, and develop the claims of a postmodern tradition that recognizes the contingent formation of the subject, the concept of the real is not a stumbling block, or a naive reference to "reality" that must be rejected, according to butler, but rather a concept, or a theoretical difficulty, that must be confronted and adequately developed. the question of the body and "sexuality" is one arena in which this issue is particularly important, and which psychoanalytic theory has done much to develop in a clear way, since the "body" and "sexuality" oblige us to recognize the limits of "symbolic construction" without, however, appealing to any "presymbolic reality." if psychoanalysis has taken on an increasing urgency today, it is precisely for this reason, for psychoanalysis has perhaps the clearest conception of the "real" of the body, as a material dimension of the flesh that "exceeds" representation, yet does not automatically refer us to a "natural" domain of "pre-existing reality." as i have suggested in "the epoch of the body," debates as to whether psychoanalysis amounts to a form of "biological essentialism," or whether it asserts the "historical construction" of sexuality only conceal the theoretical difficulty it seeks to address. [53] thus, butler does not simply reject the "real." on the contrary, the importance of this element "beyond" the symbolic is unmistakable, since it is crucial to recognize the "limit" of discursive construction, what butler calls the "failure of discursive performativity to finally and fully establish the identity to which it refers" (188). thus, she agrees that "the category of the real is needed" (189), and notes that if zizek is right to be "opposed to poststructuralist accounts of discursivity," it is because we must provide a more adequate account of what remains "outside" discourse, what is "foreclosed" from the symbolic order -since "what is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject" (190). on the other hand, while stressing its importance, she focuses on the ambiguous status of this "outside," this "foreclosed" element, which remains paradoxical insofar as it is difficult to say whether it is a prediscursive "rock" or "kernel" that is simply "beyond" representation, or an "effect" of language itself, a "lack" that would be produced by the symbolic order, instead of simply preceding it. butler thus identifies a certain wavering, an apparent duality in the concept, a "vacillation between substance and its dissolution" which is evident in the fact that the "real" is simultaneously "figured as the rock' and the lack'" (199). whatever the details of the discussion between zizek and butler may be, i have tried to suggest that this difficulty can be clarified by distinguishing between two quite different conceptions of the real, a "presymbolic" real, and a "post-symbolic" real, which would take us in the direction of "lack." *3.14 the anatomy of criticism* [54] on the basis of butler's remarks, in fact, one might even undertake an "anatomy of criticism," a map of contemporary responses to postmodernism, distinguishing "two interpretations of interpretation" in contemporary cultural theory. one is a "reactive" response that has gained force recently, and that amounts to a "return to reality" -in the form of a call for concrete, historical and empirical research, a virulent rejection of "theory" (which is more and more characterized in terms of "french influences" and regarded as "foreign"), and also in the rise of genetic and biological explanations of "consciousness," "behavior," and "sexuality." the other response is an effort to pass "through" postmodernism, to correct certain deficiencies in the theory of "discursive construction," and -without returning to the "good old days" in which discourses were thought to be true when they secured non-discursive foundations for themselves, and without appealing to a "subject" or a "human nature" that might be regarded as independent of historically contingent discourses or practices -to develop an account of the limit and insufficiency of discourse, thereby doing justice to the concrete, historical effects of symbolic life, not by disregarding language in favor of a "return to the empirical," but by recognizing the material effects of the malfunction of the symbolic order itself. this is precisely what is at stake in psychoanalysis, and particularly with respect to the "body." for in speaking of the "real" of the body, psychoanalysis does not simply endorse a return to biology, or to a prelinguistic "reality" (the "reality" presupposed by bio-medical discourse, which focuses on the %organism% and not the %body%). if, however, the "body" in psychoanalysis is distinguished from the organism, it is not because it is simply a "discursive construction" or a "product of language," but because it is a peculiar "structure" or "phenomenon" that is not governed by nature, but is at the same time irreducible to the "symbolic order." *3.15 the object -"prohibited" or "lost"?* [55] let us now take a final step. having distinguished two versions of the real, we must now return to the problem noted earlier, namely, the fact that the second, "post-symbolic" conception of the real gives rise to two different, apparently paradoxical or contradictory results, since it leads us to speak not only of "lack," but also of a certain "remainder" or "excess." as a peculiar "remainder," the "real" is a "surplus-effect" of the symbolic order -a "product" that cannot be explained by reference to "prediscursive reality," but that is also distinct from the idea of a "void" or "lack." we have indicated that the "object a" is lacan's attempt to provide a theoretical resolution to this problem, by establishing a relation between "lack" and this peculiar "remainder." is this not in fact the "paradox" of the term itself, the "object a," which allows us to speak of an "object of lack"? [56] in order to clarify this final point, let us return to the argument of robert samuels, who speaks of the "subject in the real" as an "existential" subject, prior to any imaginary or symbolic mediation - the purely "hypothetical" and always already lost subject of "unmediated existence." with this "subject in the real," we would seem to return to our first version of the real, a level of immediate "reality" that is never accessible as such. beginning with this "prediscursive" conception, samuels argues for a link between the real in lacan, and the freudian account of "auto-eroticism" and "infantile sexuality." he establishes this link by suggesting that a primitive, more or less chaotic, "polymorphous" and undifferentiated "infantile sexuality" comes to be ordered and unified by the formation of the "imaginary body." we can therefore regard consciousness, narcissism, the ego, and the body (as imaginary), as a set of related functions that impose unity on the "real" of infantile sexuality. as samuels puts it, we have an "ideal form of unity that gives the subject the possibility of organizing its perceptions and sensations through the development of a unified bodily image" (18). there are good grounds for this link between the "real" (thus understood) and "infantile sexuality" in freud, who writes in "on narcissism," it is impossible to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego can exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to develop. but the auto-erotic instincts are primordial; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism -some new operation in the mind -in order that narcissism may come into being. (se, 59) on this view, the "real" subject of "existence" and infantile "autoeroticism" is an "original state" that is lost with the arrival of the imaginary body, and lost again (twice, like erotic) with the advent of symbolic mediation. but this "pre-discursive" conception of "infantile sexuality" will soon be complicated. [57] later, in a chapter on _totem and taboo_, samuels returns to this formulation, but in such a way that the question now arises as to the possible "resurgence" of the "real" in the unconscious, what samuels also regards as a form of "incestuous desire," outside the symbolic law: "in the position of the real," he writes, we find "the subject of the unconscious and infantile sexuality who exists outside the symbolic order" (81). one often hears that the lacanian unconscious is simply a "symbolic" phenomenon, the "discourse of the other"; but by stressing the "subject of the unconscious" as "real," samuels indicates that he is concerned here with something "beyond" the symbolic order, something that concerns the body, a sort of remnant or "trace" of "infantile sexuality" that persists in the unconscious, in spite of the symbolic law. it is this "persistence" of the real, this "trait" of incestuous desire within or beyond the advent of the symbolic order that we need to clarify, and that will lead samuels to shift from our "first version" of the real to a "second version" (though he does not mark the shift in the manner we are suggesting). for we must now ask whether the real that "returns" beyond the law, after the imaginary and symbolic have "lost" it, is "the same" as the origin, the initial "infantile" state, or whether this "trait" or "trace" that exceeds the symbolic order is not rather a product, an effect of the law itself -in which case we can call it "infantile" only by a certain metaphorical displacement, a ruse that pretends to locate this incestuous desire %before% the law, when it is in fact a "product" of the law itself. the consequences are obviously decisive: if we believe that "infantile sexuality" is a "prediscursive" state of "existence" that is gradually organized and made "lawful" by representation (what foucault calls the "repressive hypothesis"), we may regard the "return" of infantile sexuality as a sort of "liberation." but if the "return" is in fact a "product" of the law, and not a "pre-discursive" state of nature, then this trait of incestuous desire can only be an effect of the law itself -not a form of liberation, but a surplus-effect of the symbolic order itself. this is in fact lacan's thesis, developed in particular when he speaks of "pere-version," a "turning toward the father," a "trait of perversion" that accompanies the father of the law. on this view, something in the very operation of the law "splits" the paternal function into two incompatible parts, one of which bears on the inevitability of "symbolic mediation," while the other bears on a certain "trait of perversion" that -far from designating a resurgence of "natural" sexuality -in fact designates a suffering that accompanies the law itself. this is what the concept of %jouissance% seeks to address. *3.16 the incestuous object* [58] this is also the point at which we must introduce the concept of the "object a," as a lack that entails a "surplus-effect," a certain materialization. according to samuels, this persistence of the real of infantile sexuality "within" or "beyond" the law, is precisely what lacan addresses in terms of the relation between the symbolic order and the object a. thus, in addition to distinguishing between the subject as "real" and "symbolic" (s and $) -while recognizing, of course, the ego as imaginary -we must also confront the problem of the "object," as that which allows us to give concrete, bodily specificity to the dimension of "incestuous desire" that remains alongside, or in excess of, the "lawful" desire that characterizes the symbolic order. samuels makes this additional development quite clear in his discussion of _totem and taboo_: we not only have an opposition between the "symbolic" subject (who enters into "lawful" kinship relations, governed by exogamy and "symbolic exchange") and what samuels calls "the real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father" (82); we must also develop a conception of the "object," the "prohibited" object that somehow "returns" in spite of the symbolic law. as samuels puts it: "implied by this dialectic between incest and exogamy is the persistence of an incestuous object in the unconscious of the subject" (82). such is the relation, not simply between the "real" and "symbolic" subject, but between the other (symbolic law) and the "object a." as the "prohibited" object, the "lost" object, the "taboo" object, or the object of "lack" (and these may not be identical), the object a allows us to locate "the real subject of the unconscious who rejects the law of the father and presents the existence of incest within the structure" (82). the "polymorphous perversity" of infantile sexuality is thus designated as a "real" that is lost with the advent of the imaginary body, "renounced" when the subject passes through the mediating structure of the symbolic law, and yet a "trace" or "remnant" of this lost world remains, and is embodied in the form of the "object a." [59] thus far samuels's account appears to coincide with our first version of the real: in speaking of an "existential subject" (s) that is distinguished from the ego and the "split subject" of the symbolic order ($), he seems to rely on the idea of a prediscursive "real," prior to its having been filtered and organized by representation. this is the "real" of "infantile sexuality" and "immediate existence" that is always already lost, "repressed" or "mediated" by the imaginary, and by the symbolic order. the problem arises, however, as to the possible resurgence of the real, which is "lost," but nevertheless able to "return" within the symbolic order, and somehow "present itself" -as a traumatic "return of the repressed," as a momentary breakdown of representation that is due to a sort of "direct contact" with an unfamiliar "reality," or in some other form of "presentation" that remains to be clarified. according to samuels, the "object a" in lacan designates precisely this element, a "real" that is not %represented% in symbolic or imaginary form, but is nevertheless %presented% somehow. it is not a "past"that has been lost, but something that "presents itself" in the present: the object (a) represents the presence of an unsymbolized real element within the structure of the symbolic order itself. (81) obviously other writers have taken up this "disruptive" presentation, a certain "concrete" remainder that exceeds symbolization -as kristeva does for example with the "semiotic," and as kant does with the sublime, which is the "experience" of an excess that disrupts both sensory and conceptual presentation, that cannot be contained by images or concepts, that disrupts the very faculty of presentation (the imagination), and yet somehow "presents" itself. at this point, the real is no longer a domain of "immediate existence," a "reality" that is "always already lost," but a peculiar "presence" within the symbolic order itself. [60] this is where matters become complicated, and we are confronted with a certain "paradox." for one thing (to put the point in a logical or structural way), it is difficult to say that the object a is a "presence," or that (in samuels's words) it "represents" something like infantile sexuality, if we have claimed that all "presence" and all "representation" are imaginary or symbolic, and that the real is inaccessible, always already lost, impossible or absent. if the symbolic "law" means that all of the subject's experience and desire is organized through representation -if the most concrete content of our bodily experience is given to us through an imaginary unity that is in turn filtered through the symbolic order -then the "object a" would be an element that does not fit within the imaginary or symbolic structure, that is "abjected" from the order of images and words, but nevertheless persists in "presenting itself." this is the "structural" aspect of the problem: the "object a" is a "presence" that does not belong to the system of presentation, an element that appears without "appearing," emerging "inside" the structure, without belonging to the structure. as samuels points out, we thus face "the paradox of the analytic attempt to symbolize that which cannot be symbolized" (83-4). [61] in spite of this apparent "paradox," we should not be too quick to dismiss the question on "logical" grounds: we should perhaps be prepared to consider the possibility of a "real" that is "beyond" representation, an aspect of the subject that is "outside" the symbolic order, but would somehow present itself, or have an "effect" on the system of representation. freud appears to have something like this in mind when he speaks of unconscious "residues," which remain present without the subject being aware of them, residues which have an effect on the subject's life, even when they are excluded from the field of representation. butler appears to have something similar in mind when she writes that we must not reduce the "subject" to a purely "symbolic effect," or regard the subject as a "discursive construction": zizek is surely right that the subject is not the unilateral effect of prior discourses, and that the process of subjectivation outlined by foucault is in need of psychoanalytic rethinking. (189) but if the concept of the real is indispensable, we cannot ignore the problem of its "presentation." as i have indicated, jacques-alain miller's approach to this difficulty is a "logical" one, insofar as he does not take an "ontic" approach to the "object," but claims that the "object" is a construction, a concept that arises as a way of addressing the structural "impasses" of the symbolic order. as an "object," moreover, it is not simply a "logical" issue, but should allow us to give concrete, bodily specificity to this "aporia," without appealing to a "prediscursive" conception of the object. obviously, the relation between lacanian theory and object-relations theory is extremely complex at this point. it is clear, however, that we can no longer sustain the first version of the real as a domain of immediacy that is always already lost, and that we must instead consider the "object" as "an unsymbolized real element within the structure of the symbolic order itself." [62] if we stress the temporal aspects of the "return" of the real, we can put the "paradox" in a slightly different form. in this case, it is not simply a matter of "representing" what is beyond representation, or of "presenting" the unpresentable. it is rather a question of the "return" of an "original" state within a structure that was supposed to reconfigure, prohibit, or transcend it. the example of "infantile sexuality" is particularly important here, for if we begin by characterizing the "real" as a "primitive" domain of disorganized "polymorphous" experience -if we claim that the ego and narcissism are imposed (together with the structure of language) upon the original chaos of the "real" body, in such a way that this "original experience" is lost -then the question concerns the return, in the "present," of a lost origin. at this point, a temporal twist is given to our "paradox," for it is clear that %what returns% is not the same as this supposedly original state. what returns, "within" the system of representation (as a "rupture" or "unsymbolized element"), is not in fact an initial condition of infantile sexuality -the memory of a past that is somehow preserved in all its archaeological purity -but rather a "trait" that emerges %from% the symbolic order, and yet -this is the crucial point -%presents% itself as the remnant of a past that has been lost. we now see more clearly why the "object a" can only be understood in terms of our "second version" of the real, but also why it appears to be conceivable in terms of the "first version": this trace, designated as the object a, is not the origin, a "left-over" that remains from the past, or the "return" of an original state, but the temporal paradox in which we find the "return" of something that did not originally exist, but only emerged "after the fact," as an %effect% of symbolization. its apparently "original" status is thus strictly mythical. for the "thing" only came into being for the first time when it "returned," hiding itself or disguising itself as an "origin," while it is in fact a product of the symbolic order, an "effect" of the law itself. [63] we are thus brought to our final observation: the importance of this second, temporal formulation is that it obliges us to recognize a %split% between the "object a" and the "real" as an initial, presymbolic condition. samuels puts the point as follows. speaking of unconscious "fixations" -what freud calls "the incestuous fixations of libido" (se 1913, 17) -samuels writes: the fixation is %not the existence of infantile sexuality (jouissance) itself, but rather a rem(a)inder% of the primitive real within the structure of the symbolic order. (83, emphasis added) the conclusion is clear: we now have a split between the "primitive" real of an original infantile sexuality, and the "rem(a)inder" that appears in the present, "within" the symbolic order. as samuels puts it, there must be a separation between what lacan calls the primitive real of jouissance [infantile sexuality], which is placed logically before the symbolic order of language and law, and the post-symbolic form of the real, which is embodied by the object (a). (83) that remainder, the object (a), is no longer identical with the "original" jouissance it is said to embody or represent. the "object a" is rather a "product," the concrete materialization of an element of transgression or %jouissance% that does not submit to the symbolic law, but that, far from being an original state, a moment of natural immediacy, is precisely a "product" of the law, a surplus-effect of the symbolic order, which disguises itself as an "origin." where the first version of the real allows us to maintain the illusion of a "lost immediacy" (together with the hope of its possible return, through "affect," or "transgression," or "liberation," or in some other way), the second account, based on the "object a," recognizes this "state of immediacy" not only as a "myth," a retroactive construction, but also as a peculiar "materialization," a product of the symbolic order itself. [64] we thus see more clearly what the status of the "prohibition" is in psychoanalysis. it is not an interdiction that prohibits a possible "pleasure," compelling us to accept the standards of civilized behavior, but rather a "no" that veils an impossibility. it does not banish us from a state of nature, but rather erects (the word is used advisedly) a barrier to cover what is originally lacking. the object a is therefore not so much a piece of "infantile sexuality" that remains "latent" in the subject in spite of the laws of civilization, a piece of "libido" that refused to sign on to the social contact, a biological "id" that resists the "symbolic law," but rather a "construction" that accompanies the law itself -the trace of a "past that was never present" as such, but only comes into being for the first time when it "returns." lacan touched on this difficulty in the "rome discourse" when he observed that the traumatic "event" is not an original "reality" (the "brute aspect of the trauma") that might be located in the past, but a later condensation or "precipitation" of the subject, and that psychoanalysis is a science of "conjecture" in this precise sense, since it has to "construct" the object rather than simply "discover" it. freud drew a similar conclusion about the peculiar, "conjectural" status of the prohibited object, when he observed that when primitive tribes are asked about their "taboos" and "prohibitions," it is difficult to get a clear grasp on the "object" that is prohibited, since every account "always already" falls back on symbolic "rituals" and other presentations that amount to misrepresentation. as freud remarks in his brilliantly offhand way, these "primitive" cultures are in fact "already very ancient civilizations." [65] the "taboo object" is not a thing that is itself dangerous or contaminating, but a representation, a symbolic form, a ritualized displacement of a terror that, in itself, remains "unknown" and "obscure," like the nodal point of the dream. thus, when we ask about the "reason" for the prohibition -why this particular thing has been chosen as the forbidden act or object -we reach what we might call an "original displacement." in lacanian terms, the taboo object is a veil thrown over a void. this brings us to the strictest definition of the prohibition: what is "prohibited" is actually "impossible" or "originally lost," but the prohibition produces the illusion of a possible possession -either in a mythical past, or in a promised future. the prohibition (and perhaps morality as well) thus reveals its status as a veil: we pretend to "restrict ourselves," or to elaborate ethical standards of "civilization," in order to "refuse" what is in fact unavailable -the very structure of the veil that zizek sees in wittgenstein's famous conclusion to the _tractatus_: "what we cannot speak of, we must leave in silence." why, it might be asked, is it necessary to %prohibit% what in fact cannot be said? because "that is the law." as freud observes, the so-called "primitive" tribes make this "original displacement" especially clear: "even primitive people have not retained the original forms of those institutions nor the conditions which gave rise to them; so that we have nothing whatever but hypotheses to fall back upon, as a substitute for the observation which we are without" (se 109). the prohibited "object" thus acquires a %strictly mythical status%: it is not a thing that was once possessed (in infancy or pre-history), but a thing that came into "existence" through the law, but as the lost object. the idea that this object was once possessed is strictly a retroactive fantasy -but an illusion that is inseparable from the symbolic order itself, and does not cease to have effects, even when its "non-existence" has been demonstrated. we must therefore recognize its "post-symbolic" status, but also do justice to its ability to create the "illusion" that this object derives from an "origin," that it somehow "represents" a past which was once possessed (not only in the patient's past, but also in the past that always haunts theoretical work as well, including psychoanalytic theories of "infancy," "maternity," and other "origins"). notes: ^1^ elsewhere in this issue, see chris semansky's satirical allusion to this problem in "youngest brother of brothers" [ed.]. works cited: se: freud, sigmund. _the standard edition of the complete psychological works_, trans. and ed. james strachey et. al. (london: the hogarth press, 1953). 24 volumes. references will be by volume and page number. sz: heidegger, martin. _being and time_ (new york: harper and row, 1962). references follow the pagination of the seventh (and subsequent) german editions, _sein und zeit_ (tubingen: neomarius verlag, 1953), given marginally in the english text. e: lacan, jacques. _ecrits_ (paris: seuil, 1966). a portion of this volume has been translated as _ecrits: a selection_, by alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1977). references will be to the english edition. svii: lacan, jacques. _the seminar of jacques lacan, book vii: the ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-60_, ed. jacques-alain miller, trans. dennis porter (new york: norton, 1992). sviii: lacan, jacques. _le seminaire, livre viii: le transfert_, ed. jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 1991). sxi: lacan, jacques. _the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis_, trans. alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1978). fs: _feminine sexuality: jacques lacan and the ecole freudienne_, ed. juliet mitchell and jacqueline rose, trans. jacqueline rose (new york: norton, 1985). t: "television," trans. denis hollier, rosalind krauss, and annette michelson in _television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment_, ed. joan copjec (new york: norton, 1990). works cited: attridge, derek. "language as history/history as language: saussure and the romance of etymology," _post-structuralism and the question of history_, ed. derek attridge, geoff bennington, and robert young (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987), pp. 183-211. boothby, richard. _death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in lacan's return to freud_ (new york: routledge, 1991). borch-jacobsen, mikkel. _lacan: the absolute master_, trans. douglas brick (stanford: stanford university press, 1991). brousse, marie-helene. "la formule du fantasme?" _lacan_, ed. gerard. miller (paris: bordas, 1987). butler, judith. _bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex"_ (new york: routledge, 1993). dean, tim. "transsexual identification, gender performance theory, and the politics of the real," _literature and psychology_, 39:4 (1993), pp. 1-27. derrida, jacques. "structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences," in _writing and difference_, trans. alan bass (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1978), pp. 278-93. foucault, michel. _the order of things: an archaeology of the human science_ (new york: vintage, 1970). granon-lafont, jeanne. _la topologie ordinaire de jacques lacan_ (paris: point hors ligne, 1985). grigg, russell. "signifier, object, and the transference," _lacan and the subject of language_ ed. ellie ragland-sullivan and mark bracher (new york: routledge, 1991), pp. 100-15. heidegger, martin. _the basic problems of phenomenology_, trans. with introduction and lexicon by albert hofstadter (bloomington: indiana up, 1982), 27-76. ---. "kant's thesis about being," _thinking about being: aspects of heidegger's thought_, ed. robert w. shahan and j. n. mohanty (norman: university of oklahoma press, 1984), pp. 7-33. ---. "the thing," _on the way to language_, trans. p. hertz and j. stambaugh (new york: harper and row, 1971), 165-86. irigaray, luce. "le lieu, l'intervalle: lecture d'aristote, _physique iv_, 2, 3, 4, 5," ethique de la difference sexuelle_ (paris: minuit, 1984), 41-59. "place, interval: a reading of aristotle, _physics iv_," _an ethics of sexual difference_, trans. carolyn burke and gillian c. gill (ithaca: cornell university, 1993), pp. 34-55. kant, immanuel. _critique of pure reason_, trans. norman kemp smith (new york: macmillan, 1973). laplanche, jean. _life and death in psychoanalysis_, trans. jeffrey mehlman (baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 1976). lee, jonathan scott. _jacques lacan_ (new york: g. k. hall, 1990). miller, jacques-alain. "extimite," _lacanian theory of discourse: subject, structure, and society_, ed. mark bracher, marshall alcorn, jr., ronald j. cortell, and francoise massardier-kenney (new york: new york up, 1994), pp. 74-87. montrelay, michele. "the story of louise," _returning to freud: clinical psychoanalysis in the school of lacan_, ed. stuart schneiderman (new haven: yale up, 1980). nasio, juan-david. _les yeux de laure_ (paris: aubier, 1987). piaget, jean. _structuralism_, ed. and trans. chaninah maschler (new york: harper and row, 1970). safouan, moustafa. _pleasure and being: hedonism from a psychoanalytic point of view_, trans. martin thom (new york: saint martin's press, 1983). samuels, robert. _between philosophy and psychoanalysis: lacan's reconstruction of freud_ (new york: routledge, 1993). shepherdson, charles. "vital signs: the place of memory in psychoanalysis," _research in phenomenology_ [special issue, "spaces of memory"], vol. 23 (1993), 22-72. ---. "the role of gender and the imperative of sex," _supposing the subject_, ed. joan copjec (london: verso, 1994), 158-84. ---. "adaequatio sexualis: is there a measure of sexual difference?" _from phenomenology to thought, errancy, and desire_, ed. babette babich (dordrecht, the netherlands: kluwer, 1995), pp. 447-73. ---. "history and the real: foucault with lacan," _postmodern culture_, 5:2 (january, 1995). ---. "the epoch of the body: need, demand and the drive in kojeve and lacan," _perspectives on embodiment: essays from the neh institute at santa cruz_, ed. honi haber and gail weiss, (new york: routledge, 1996). silverman, kaja. _the threshold of the visible world_ (new york: routledge, 1996). weber, samuel. _return to freud: jacques lacan's dislocation of psychoanalysis_ (cambridge: cambridge up, 1991). zizek, slavoj. _for they know not what they do_ (new york: verso, 1991). ---. _tarrying with the negative_ (durham: duke up, 1993). -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------mcmurry, 'slow apocalypse: a gradualistic theory of the world's demise', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-mcmurry-slow.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.596. part 1/1, total size 58900 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- the slow apocalypse: a gradualistic theory of the world's demise by andrew mcmurry indiana university, bloomington jmcmurry@mach1.wlu.ca postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by andrew mcmurry, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. the startling calamity. what is the startling calamity? how will you comprehend what the startling calamity is? al-qur'an [1] were you expecting the sun to wink out, the heavens to open, the beast loose upon the earth? or maybe you imagined a ragnarok of more cosmopolitan origins: nuclear war, bioengineered plagues, alien invasion, supernova. in any case, it's pretty clear the last days are upon us, but given the laggardly pace at which this doomtime is proceeding we simply haven't yet grasped its contours. we adapt well to changes not sudden, swift and terrible, and just as we come to terms with the incremental decay of our own bodies and faculties, we learn to overlook the terminal events of our time as they unfold, gather, and concatenate in all their leisurely deadliness. we have wrongly expected the end of the world would provide the high drama we believe commensurate with our raging passions, our bold aspirations, and our central importance to the universe - we are worthy of a bang, not merely a whimper. and let me be blunt: by holding out for that noisy demise, we can pretend we haven't been expiring by inches for decades. [2] clearly, this accommodation to the ongoing apocalypse is in large measure the result of our limited temporal perspective. in terms of recorded human history, the span of a few progressive centuries since our medieval torpor is brief indeed. on the geological clock, the whole of %homo sapiens'% rise and spread over the earth is but a few ticks of the second hand. yet how seldom is this %belatedness% to the cosmic scene granted any significance! how, in our ephemerality, is it even comprehensible? does a mayfly grasp that its lifetime lasts a day? from our blinkered, homocentric perspective the decade of the eighties is already a bygone era, the fifty years since world war two an eternity. our neurological incapacity to hold in our minds with firmness and freshness anything but the near past and the now allows to us to file away history as rapidly as we make it. thus, absent a hail of icbm's or seven angels with trumpets, the apocalypse can have been upon us for some time, may abide for another lifetime or more, and not until those final, tortured moments may it dawn on us at last that the wolf has long been at the door. [3] but how does one tell the tale of an apocalypse that was so long in coming and promises to be as long in going? where to begin and, more importantly, where to end? given its impalpability, its lubricity, can this protracted apocalypse be grasped, or only sensed faintly as we slip listlessly through it? oh, and by the way, is this apocalypse real, or merely a rhetorical device to be activated by millenarians, debunked by critics, and ignored by everyone else? is "apocalypse" but a way to connect a vast constellation of other metaphors, whose referents are themselves finally just the vague grumblings and grim presentiments of a culture perennially fixated on the chances of its own demise? [4] oddly, this apocalypse seems harder to deny even as its metaphoric dimension expands. might it thus be real and constructed at the same time? that would be the most interesting possibility: an apocalypse so profoundly wrapped in its own apocrypha that it remains unrecognized even as its effects become massively known. a stealth apocalypse, then, plodding camouflaged among us, hiding in plain sight. inured to its many signs and omens, the risk is that we can never be sure when the hard substance itself has heaved into view, and even as we peel away the rumors and lies that disguise it we fear our own voices may only be adding new tissues of obscurity. so before we speculate as to why some await so serenely the new millennium, while others hunker down bravely, smugly, or resignedly, let us gather together some of these discourses of doom, and then consider as best we can the indications that indeed we are already living in, and living out, the slow apocalypse. *prophecies* [5] traditional interpretations of the various scriptural revelations of apocalypse have drawn on millennial expectations, notions of inexorable decline, the implicit moral bankruptcy of humankind since adam and eve, or linear or cyclical visions of history. projected across the basic model of the human life, human civilizations have been seen to manifest the attributes of infancy, maturity, decline, senility. the apocalypse could be likened to the death of civilization, ominous to be sure, yet also the beginning of an "afterlife" when history is completed, all contradictions resolved, profane human time replaced by the sacred time of god. more recently, "apocalypse" is the name applied to any global catastrophe, with the idea that out of the rubble emerges a new and better order de-emphasized or abandoned. the apocalypse becomes in its secular manifestation just the end of the world as we know it. [6] the specific features of the apocalypse have been explored in jewish, christian, and islamic theology, in norse and nazi mythology, by edgar allan poe, oswald spengler, ingmar bergman, and david koresh. ronald reagan, too, made frequent references to the end days. he once explained, "you know, i turn back to your ancient prophets in the old testament and the signs foretelling armageddon, and i find myself wondering if -if we're the generation that's going to see it come about. i don't know if you've noted any of the prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we're going through" (quoted in brummet 5). well, reagan said many things the left took as signs of an impending apocalypse (especially since he had the power to put theory into practice), but this statement shouldn't have been construed as one of them. reagan had merely put his finger on the pulse of the times, the fact that the portents pointed to a clear and present decline. of course, his reliance on a mish-mash of christian literalism, nancy's zodiacal bent, and the cold war rhetoric of the "evil empire" led the already confused former g.e. pitch-man to get his timetable and mechanisms all wrong. the apocalypse wasn't just around the corner -it was already proceeding apace, furthered no doubt by the retrograde foreign and domestic agendas of his own administration. [7] with a more nuanced rhetoric than reagan's, and like arnold, yeats and lawrence before him, robert frost had some things to say about the end of the world: some say the world will end in fire some say in ice. from what i've tasted of desire i hold with those who favor fire. but if i had to perish twice, i think i know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. (220) actually, frost's meditation on the caloric coefficient of the final cataclysm registers an ambivalence that has echoed on down through the ages. fire, ice, famine, flood, man against man or god against god: it hasn't mattered so much how the world ends, but rather that there are plenty of ways it can go, all nasty, and all fitting, considering the wide range of human moral failures that apocalypses always serve to punctuate. for example, science fiction has developed an entire sub-genre to explore the myriad shapes the apocalypse might take, and not surprisingly, these books and movies about teotwawki form a catalogue of disaster scenarios that replicate perfectly the seven deadly sins: nuclear "anger" in _a canticle for leibowitz_ and _the day after_; the "lust" of overpopulation in _soylent green_ and _stand on zanzibar_; "coveting" nature's power in _the stand_ and _the andromeda strain_; ecological "gluttony" in _nature's end_ and _the sheep look up_; "slothful" unmindfulness of the alien threat in _footfall_ and _invasion of the body snatchers_; "prideful" technological fixes which go wrong in _terminator_ and _terminator 2: judgment day_; and the "envy" which causes speciesist chuck heston to blow up the world in a fit of sour grapes in _beneath the planet of the apes_. add to these the idea of cosmic contingency (ignorance) in _when worlds collide_ and _the day of the triffids_ and entropy (powerlessness) in _the time machine_ and _the dying earth_, and the litany of human frailties as embodied in the apocalyptic narrative is pretty much covered. [8] it may seem passing strange to learn that science fiction has devoted so much verbiage and footage to doom and gloom, especially since some people still think of it as a genre comprised of clean, shiny surfaces, gleaming towers and silent monorails, authored by dreamers, utopians, and trekkies. but most sf authors seem well-versed in the greek concept of hubris: it's not what you don't know but what you %think% you know that will kill you. take the work of william gibson: embraced as a prophet of cyberspace and virtual reality by everyone from william s. burroughs to _wired_, gibson has repeatedly made the point that his novels describe a future he himself hopes never materializes. corporate thuggery, techno-onanism, ecological breakdown, and a high-security, class-based information economy: _neuromancer_ or _virtual light_ come across not so much as "scientifictions" but as simply the technical embellishment and literary intensification of the current contradictions of late capitalism and the limits of instrumental reason. robert silverberg also sets his recent novel, _hot sky_ at midnight, on a near-future earth when corporations have effectively superseded the nation-state, and where the ability to add to the profit margin has become the only criterion for social advancement (hardly science fictional yet!). global warming has drastically altered weather patterns, ice-bergs provide the only source of potable water; the american hinterlands are a dead or dying moonscape, and the entire planet appears to be a few years away from total biotic meltdown. the only optimistic note is sounded near the novel's end, when the protagonist draws on the gaia hypothesis to imagine a recuperated world of a hundred thousand, maybe a million years, in the future. "the planet had plenty of time. we don't, carpenter thought, but it does" (325). the future histories silverberg and gibson convincingly construct trace the last gasps of a dying world. according to the gradualistic theory of apocalypse, we're in our middle gasps already. [9] this idea that the world is already moribund gets picked up in mainstream writer paul theroux's disturbing futuristic novel, _o-zone_, which once again is really just a hypertrophic version of today. when the billionaire hooper allbright thinks about his own era, and then waxes nostalgic about ours, we realize that if the future is ill-fated that's because it's merely a playing out of the present: it was a meaner, more desperate and worn out world. it had been scavenged by crowds. their hunger was apparent in the teethmarks they had left, in the slashes of their claws. there was some beauty in the world's new wildernesses, of which o-zone was just one; but its cities were either madhouses or sepulchers. %fifty years ago% was simply a loose expression that meant before any of them had been born. it meant another age. and yet sometimes they suspected that it had closely resembled this age -indeed, that it was this one, with dust on it, and cracks, and hiding aliens, and every window broken: smoke hung over it like poisoned clouds. (13) in the america of _o-zone_ what is more frightening than the routine round-up of economic refugees, the death-squads, the degraded environment, and the national "sacrifice zones," is the casual acceptance by everybody that this is the way the world must be, perhaps has always been. in theroux's vision, the real horror lies in the way the slow apocalypse is normalized, the %unheimlich% made %heimlich%, murder and mayhem become healthful pastimes. [10] there are other writers who are sketching out the details of the end of the world, and they aren't even fabulists. a recent spate of articles in no less liberal organs than _the atlantic_ and _harper's_ take the first tentative steps down a road that should soon make earth's deathwatch a mainstream topic of journalism. robert kaplan's "the coming anarchy" looks at the third world's accelerating social, political, and environmental breakdowns, and their potential effects on the first world in the coming century. the scenario of _o-zone_ might have been drawn from kaplan's analysis: resource wars, massive migrations, climate change, tribalism and disease. kaplan's case study is west africa, where these stresses, clearly exacerbated by the legacy of western imperialism and post-colonial development policies, are producing "criminal anarchy." "the coming upheaval," he suggests, "in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering . . . africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence" (54). not just africa will be affected, of course, for many of the problems there are endemic to the balkans, latin america, and much of asia. as the state disintegrates in the third world, the first world is destabilized by the chaos beyond its borders, borders it can no longer effectively control. federal authority, incapable of dealing with regional problems, finds itself ceding powers to ever more isolated local communities. [11] that isolation will likely find itself playing out along predictable fault lines, as michael lind previews in a recent _harper's_ article. in lind's view, the growing unwillingness of economic elites to support education, income redistribution, and health care, along with their retreat into the protected, privileged spaces of the neo-feudal society, combine to spell the end of the broad middle-class. the new underclass (which dares not speak its name due to its allegiance to the myth of egalitarian society) poses no threat to the economic royalists at the top, because as the war of all-against-all is felt particularly sharply at the bottom of the food chain, the various sub-groups that reside there can be counted on to perceive each other as the more immediate source of their problems.^1^ lind sees a two-tiered society in the making: an upper tier, provided with work, security, comfort, hope, and insulation/protection from a disenfranchised, fragmented, and squabbling underclass, which faces a hard-scrabble existence with little chance of improvement. the proper image for the new world order with its international moneyed class: an air-conditioned, tinted-windowed, bullet-proofed limousine gliding safely over a pot-holed, squalid, dangerous street in lagos -or new york or toronto. [12] paul kennedy, historian and author of _preparing for the twenty-first century_, presents a wealth of evidence to support his own grimly compelling vision. even as he performs the appropriate genuflections to the logic of the market and does a journeyman's work in ranking countries' "competitive advantages" as they face the road ahead, unlike his ebullient contemporaries alvin toffler or bill gates kennedy has the good grace not to elide the incredible suffering that is going to occur in the third world, and the honesty to admit the possibility of a no-win scenario all round. kennedy also understands the importance of %scale% when it comes to thinking about human history, which in turn suggests the need to consider whether we are justified in thinking our past success in overcoming adversity provides any sort of basis for believing we are up to the challenges that now confront us: this work also asks whether today's global forces for change are not moving us beyond our traditional guidelines into a remarkable new set of circumstances -one in which human social organizations may be unequal to the challenges posed by overpopulation, environmental damage, and technology-driven revolutions and where the issue of winners and losers may to some degree be irrelevant. if, for example, the continued abuse of the developing world's environment leads to global warming, or, if there is a massive flood of economic refugees from the poorer to the richer parts of the world, everyone will suffer, in various ways. in sum, just as nation-state rivalries are being overtaken by bigger issues, we may have to think about the future on a far broader scale than has characterized thinking about international politics in the past. even if the great powers still seek to rise, or at least not to fall, their endeavors could well occur in a world so damaged as to render much of that effort pointless. (15) unfortunately (for all of us), kennedy's book goes on to prove that the tone in this introductory passage is entirely too tentative. [13] in general, apocalyptic scenarios take place against the prior and persistent conceit that human culture does truly move to culmination, that there is a larger goal or a target toward which time's arrow is moving. like children inferring mommy and daddy will always be there because they have always been there in the past, we project our history forward under the presumption that the human presence on this planet is a durable one and, no matter how or why, purposive. we can't imagine an alternative. but while in cultural development there has been innovation, differentiation, and amplification, such changes can no longer be taken as evidence for an overall direction or telos. for there is no teleology at work here, let alone an eschatology, a dialectic, or even a simple logic. in fact, it is precisely the absence of any point to our history that makes this apocalypse unreadable except as an accretion of systemically deleterious effects which, incredibly, have become indistinguishable from progress. skeptical of totalizing theories, postmodern intellectuals are reluctant to prophesy doom, but without coherent oppositional narratives to clarify such effects those who profit from the positive spin have the stage to themselves. thus every sign gets read as its opposite, every trend that points to a decline is seen as the prelude to improvement, and every person becomes a shareholder in the fantasies of the boosters. in this environment of doublethink, the now-routine failure of corporations or nations to provide even short-term security for their members can be glossed as bitter but necessary "medicine," or as the "growing pains" associated with increasing economic "rationalization." we are left in the paradoxical position described in game theory as the "prisoner's dilemma" and in environmental thought as the "tragedy of the commons": the incentive for individuals to ignore the evidence for unqualified disaster far outweighs the personal risks involved in seeking to slow it. everyone proceeds according to this same calculation, indeed is encouraged to do so, and everyone suffers minimally -that is, until the collective moment of reckoning is reached. *four horsemen* [14] what is the hard evidence that taking the long view reveals an apocalypse already in progress? to keep our metaphor intact, we could speak in terms of the "four horsemen." there are the usual ones -war, famine, disease, pestilence -but to put a finer point on the apocalypse i'm describing we are better to call our riders 1) arms proliferation, 2) environmental degradation, 3) the crisis of meaning, and, crucially, 4) the malignant global economy. i [15] armaments are the world's single biggest business. john ralston saul notes that "by any standards -historic, economic, moral, or simply practical -in a healthy economy arms would not occupy first place unless that society were at war. even then, such prominence would be viewed as an aberration to be put up with no longer than events required" (141). the permanent war footing of the earth's major powers, and the rapid military build-up of many others, constitutes an aberration that has ascended to normalcy, so much so, in fact, that most american taxpayers now understand military expenditures to be more vital than health, education and, especially, welfare. indeed, on the far right, military spending is seen as the only legitimate use of taxes by a national government. because the american body politic has obligingly allowed itself to be perfused with upwards of 200 million personal firearms with no signs of saturation in sight, the extent to which the psychological need for "self-defense" informs all segments of policy, foreign and domestic, should come as no surprise. [16] in the wake of the oklahoma city bombing, certain questions are more easily entertained. what effect, for example, might all that personal firepower -and the willingness to use it -have in times of severe social disruption? imagine, as umberto eco does (drawing on roberto vacca's _il medio evo prossimo venturo_), a giant traffic jam and blackout in the northeast us during a blizzard which leads to: forced marches in the snow, with the dead left by the wayside. lacking provisions of any kind, the wayfarers try to commandeer food and shelter, and the tens of millions of firearms sold in america are put to use. all power is taken over by the armed forces, although they too are victims of the general paralysis. supermarkets are looted, the supply of candles in homes runs out, and the number of deaths from cold, hunger and starvation in the hospitals rises. when, after a few weeks, things have with difficulty returned to normal, millions of corpses scattered throughout the city and countryside begin to spread epidemics, bringing back scourges on a scale equal to that of the black death . . . (489) . . . and on it goes, with a decline in the rule of law and a general disintegration of modern society into neo-feudalism. now eco's point, highlighted by this rather dramatic scenario, is that in a sense we don't need a disaster to inaugurate a new middle age for, to make the point yet again, in many respects we are already living through one: "one must decide whether the above thesis is an apocalyptic scenario or the exaggeration of something that already exists." [17] of course, advanced weaponry is not necessary to kill whole peoples, as the horror of rwanda has shown. the rhetoric of the n.r.a. may then be largely correct, with only an addendum necessary: guns don't kill people, people kill people -guns are just a way of creating "added value." given the underlying tensions between ethnic and national groups, religions and classes, arms sales become simply a method by which the first world cashes in on the simmering results of its own colonial adventures and the world's myriad internecine feuds. even the nuclear arsenals in the making in israel, pakistan, india, or iraq, which now bring these countries near-universal opprobrium, were unthinkable without the prior transfer of necessary bootstrapping technologies by the west to these, the earth's most lucrative hot-spots. [18] in general, the multiplication of arms throughout the third world means that the struggles which are likely to arise ever-more frequently in the decades to come (i.e., nationalist and ethnic wars, and wars for resources) have the potential to be fought at increasingly high levels of ferocity with concomitantly high levels of collateral damage to infrastructure and environment. as the persian gulf conflict amply demonstrated, modern warfare not only targets military personnel and civilians, but also aims to reduce the capacity of the ecosystem to support the survivors. ii [19] about the degradation and exhaustion of the planetary biosphere, again not much needs be said. most of us are benumbed by the statistical evidence that points to our gross long-term mismanagement of the earth's resources, its biota, and its atmosphere, soils, and water. the _state of the world_ reports from the worldwatch institute in washington, for example, provide disturbing yearly round-ups of the various obstacles the planet faces in its "progress toward a sustainable society," as the reports' subtitle judiciously puts it. yet that "progress" toward sustainability still awaits confirmation. worldwatch director lester brown and his associates lament in their 1993 foreword, "one of these years we would like to write an upbeat _state of the world_, one reporting that some of the trends of global degradation have been reversed. unfortunately, not enough people are working yet to reverse the trends of decline for us to write such a report. we are falling far short in our efforts" (xvii). as a sequential reading of the reports quickly shows, not only are we "falling short" but the decline becomes ever more precipitous with each passing year. typical articles try to put a brave face on unmitigated disaster: "conserving biological diversity" discusses the earth's declining biological diversity; "confronting nuclear waste" explores the technical incapacity of humans to deal with nuclear waste; "reforming forestry" documents the annihilation of the earth's forests; "reviving coral reefs" describes their worldwide decline. (one wonders what an analysis of canada's former east coast fishery might have been called: maybe "keeping the cod stocks healthy.") [20] environmental apocalypticism is by now a familiar part of the landscape, but all the anxiety in the world does little to moderate our destructiveness. just as smokers or alcoholics do not perceive the ongoing catastrophe in their cells and tissues and can therefore project the day of reckoning far into the future, so too is our devastation of the environment a problem in observation. the social system has not evolved to recognize environmental perturbations in a preemptive and amelioratory manner; in fact, it is constructed precisely on the basis of ignoring such stimuli as it pursues its own self-organization (see luhmann). environmental problems are endlessly recontextualized, analyzed, debated, and circulated through bureaucracies to the point where environmental protection consists largely in changing the definitions of "wetlands," "allowable catch," or "toxic limits" to comply with a state that already exists. indeed, from this systems theory paradigm, it is questionable whether society is any longer capable of drawing a useful distinction between sign and referent at all. iii [21] this brings us to jean baudrillard, who must be the crown prince of apocalypse theory, although one suspects the actual mechanics of the world's undoing would for him be nothing more than the messy and mundane details of a crisis far more profound and far more interesting, one that occurs at the level of meaning, purpose, the sign itself. that crisis appears simultaneously as both an excess and a scarcity: it is as if the poles of our world were converging, and this merciless short circuit manifests both overproduction and the exhaustion of potential energies at the same time. it is no longer a matter of crisis but of disaster, a catastrophe in slow motion. the real crisis lies in the fact that policies no longer permit this dual political game of hope and metaphorical promise. the pole of reckoning, denouement, and apocalypse (in the good and bad sense of the word), which we had been able to postpone until the infiniteness of the day of judgment, this pole has come infinitely closer, and one could join canetti in saying that we have already passed it unawares and now find ourselves in the situation of having overextended our own finalities, of having short-circuited our own perspectives, and of already being in the hereafter, that is, without horizon and without hope. ("the anorexic ruins") with baudrillard the apocalypse is long played out, old news, so one shouldn't panic. how can you panic about an apocalypse that precedes you, exceeds you, defines you? baudrillard long presaged r.e.m. by announcing, "it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)." while i agree with him that we are now moving through a signscape made unnavigable by its own excrescences, baudrillard's emphasis is, as always, on the futility of resistance. emerging out of the seventies and eighties as a theory of what is beginning to look like the final flowering of the welfare state, baudrillard's post-scarcity semiotic is no longer so timely: we are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal. everything is there. the heavens have come down to earth. we sense the fatal taste of material paradise. it drives one to despair, but what should one do? no future. nevertheless, do not panic. everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. the explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. what more do you want? everything has already been wiped off the map. it is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place everywhere. armageddon by surplus meaning, a drowning in honey. not exactly what the prophet st. john had in mind. for the many victims caught in the slow torture of the ongoing apocalypse, this aesthetisization of the endgame would be nothing short of obscene. the more natural stance toward this mess is one of anger, indignation, and defiance: as a friend of mine puts it, "sometimes you have to pick up the cue by the narrow end and start swinging." that's pool-hall politics, but in the face of baudrillard's incognizable hyperreality it's either that or lapse into numb acquiescence as the velvet jackboots are put to you. [22] whether one resigns oneself to the seductions of hyperreality or falls into sheer animal panic, the point i think baudrillard makes very well is that there is no longer a clear imperative to do anything at all. perhaps the apocalypse is upon us, but so what? unless or until a critical mass of desperation is reached, it seems unlikely the advanced nations have the collective will to acknowledge their own precarious situation: that they have at best shunted the ecological ramifications of their industrialization onto the rest of the world; that they can provide meaningful work to fewer and fewer of their citizens; that they have no moral authority to tell any other country how or at what pace to develop its economy; and that their political structure is fast devolving into a policy clearing-house for international capital and its movers and stakeholders. iv [23] this latter point brings us to the final horse, and let's for a moment imagine, as do some biblical scholars and most economists and politicians, that this particular horse is the white one, the one which the savior himself is said to ride. the savior in this secular interpretation would be liberal democracy and capitalism, which along with the lowering of trade barriers through international agreements such as gatt and nafta and the application of market principles to ever more forms of human interaction, marks the sublime phase of our political and economic development. this optimistic reading is embraced by people like milton friedman, newt gingrich, and francis fukuyama, whose _the end of history and the last man_ is a hegelian treatment of the apotheosis of liberal democracy and capitalism, or "lib-dem-cap" as i'll call them to signify the conflation of the political and economic implicit in fukuyama's thesis. the victory of lib-dem-cap is the outer limit of human socio-economic evolution, rational self-interest quenched and hardened in the smithy of democratic institutions. [24] in fukuyama's view, although the voyage to lib-dem-cap has been a difficult one, the many horrors of the twentieth century have been but a few rapids in the inexorable flow of history, not evidence of a basic flaw in his (or hegel's) teleology. this think-tank idealism's blithe elision of the manifest empirical facts of our time prompts jacques derrida to write: it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (85) must it now be that to reach the golden age promised in revelations, hugo gernsback, and _the jetsons_ we must first pass through an extraordinary period of "structural adjustment" that for most will be no different than a living hell? stock markets rise and total output increases but, as if it were some bloated parasite drawing off our nourishment, improvements in the fortune of global capital generally mean a diminishment in the lives of the people an economy is supposed to serve. a rise in the stock market means the stock market has risen; an increase in gdp means exxon wrecked another oil-tanker and boeing fired ten thousand workers. somehow, irresponsibility and profit-taking by corporations can accrue to a country as a net gain. coddled and coveted by liberal democracy, big business was celebrated as the goose that laid the golden egg of employment, but stateless corporations and financial institutions now steal their eggs along with them as they head for greener pastures. capitalism has always had to destroy so that it could create more capital, but global capitalism destroys so that there is little left %but% capital. soon, the new trans-national economy, with its elite class of knowledge workers, money-movers, and their subordinates, will rise and circulate like a warm, pleasant zephyr above the miasma below, where laissez-faire will still obtain, but only as method of enforcing the stratification. [25] in the conclusion to his book, fukuyama marshals the image of a wagon train of nations at last entering a new frontier town to symbolize the arduous journey to the liberal capitalist utopia at history's trail-end. but the image rings hollow in today's by no means kinder and gentler world. fukuyama seems to believe the "rich north atlantic democracies" (to borrow richard rorty's phrase) are destined to be history's john waynes or glenn fords; but there is nothing in the brutal present and recent past to think so, and plenty to think they might be better compared to the clint eastwood character in _unforgiven_, whose only heroic quality is that he doesn't kill the whores. if lib-dem-cap as currently constructed represents the best of all possible socio-economic arrangements, there may not be world enough and time to see it come to fruition across the globe. *revelations 6:17* [26] yet even this dismal portrayal of lib-dem-cap has a darker dimension. for what if the gathering storm is in some sense and in some quarters gamely anticipated? what if there are those who not only understand precisely the kind of fix we are in but actually view it as a confirmation of their ideology -and an opportunity to exploit? i do not mean the jehovah's witnesses, who already started the apocalypse clock running in 1975, or their assorted ilk, who are no doubt preparing for a judgment day in the year 2000. nor do i mean the various cults and survivalists who stockpile supplies and munitions against nuclear war, totalitarian government, or forestry service workers. no, i'm simply talking about those who have always had an interest in chaos, the folks who think that just as with kennedy's rising and falling nations, life divides people into winners and losers -and it's best to be among the winners. in the halcyon days of supply-side economics the rhetoric from these cash-value pragmatists said that in open market competition even the loser wins. but now the news is less rosy. it turns out that in the new economy we won't all be driving cadillacs. in _o-zone_ even the millionaires and billionaires are worried: "you think just because there hasn't been a world war or a nuclear explosion the world's okay. but the planet's hotter and a whole lot messier, and that leak was worse than a bomb. and look at crime. look at the alien problem. look at money. forget war - war's a dinosaur. the world is much worse off." "i'm not worse off," murdick said . . . "neither are you." "willis, what kind of a world is it when there are some simple things you can't buy with money?" hooper added, "i hate that." (13) life in the future looks more and more like a zero-sum game, and as any investment consultant will tell you, you must prepare yourself for a pay-as-you-go economy in which only the savvy and the diversified will survive. [27] in this sort of milieu it's only natural to subscribe to the chicago gangster theory of life, as andrew ross names the rising tide of social darwinism after the genetic model of richard dawkins: "like successful chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases, for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. this entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. i argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. this gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior" (quoted in ross 254). ross is quick to point out that the "gangster" is an ill-chosen metaphor for absolute self-interest, because there is just as much or more basis for the opposite view, that gangsters, like everyone else, are embedded in social networks that bind them to their families, friends, communities, and so on. but while i agree with ross that dawkins' theory is part and parcel of the hobbesian world-view that sociobiology often seems to underwrite, our manifestly inequitable and unjust social order doesn't require a dawkins or a darwin to justify itself (although it could use a new dickens to describe it). it now gets along quite well with no justification at all. the "way things are" seems to have become its own excuse, and the regurgitation of this or that bio-ideology is simply a prettying-up operation of power structures already secured by the fact that they can "get away with it." [28] so what can be done about the secular four horsemen? the short answer is: nothing, really. an apocalypse, even one that moves like a tortoise, does not admit of correction, mitigation, or reversal. taking on each of these catastrophic developments alone might bear positive results, but even assuming they were seen as tokens of impending doom instead of the price of progress, their total magnitude poses a challenge only a concerted effort by all responsible nations could even begin to deal with. some technophilic wowsers suppose that what man has unleashed, he can, so to speak, re-leash. but as the apocalyptic forces have had decades, centuries perhaps, to gain momentum and have, too, insinuated themselves into the physical processes of the planet and the mental furniture of the human animal, the organizational apparatus, technical control, and collective good faith required now to bring these forces to heel seem to defy plausibility. [29] but then (and to borrow a term from biology that specifies evolutionary experiments that are freakishly maladapted to non-extraordinary environments) what are humans but "hopeful monsters"? one group of ragnarockers who call themselves "doom, the society for secular armageddonism," express their faith in the coming apocalypse this way: this conviction is based not on religious prophecy, but on observance [sic] of a multitude of critical world threats, including nuclear proliferation, chemical/biological weapons, terrorism, ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, acid rain, massive species loss, ocean and air pollution, exploding population, global complacency and many more. we believe the magnitude and number of these threats represent a movement toward a secular apocalypse that has gained such momentum it can no longer be stopped. the situation is hopeless. %in the face of this coming cataclysm, the society feels that the only viable remaining option is immediate emergency action, across the board, against all global threats. such action is imperative if there be any chance of delaying the inevitable, of staving off, however temporarily, our imminent doom.% (_apocalypse culture_; my emphasis) that's the thing about apocalypses: they offer no hope, no hope at all, but humans just won't seem to throw in the towel. in that light, we can take equally cold comfort from the distinguished economist robert heilbroner, who wrote twenty years ago in his _inquiry into the human prospect_ that: in all likelihood we must brace ourselves for the consequences of what we have spoken - the risk of "wars of redistribution" or of "preemptive seizure," the rise of social tensions in the industrialized nations over the division of an ever more slow-growing or even diminishing product, and the prospect of a far more coercive exercise of national power as the means by which we will attempt to bring these disruptive processes under control. from that period of harsh adjustment, i can see no escape. rationalize as we will, stretch the figures as favorably as honesty will permit, we cannot reconcile the requirements for a lengthy continuation of the present rate of industrialization of the globe with the capacity of existing resources or the fragile biosphere to permit or to tolerate the effects of that industrialization. nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind, individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of lifeways that foresight would dictate. if then, by the question "is there hope for man?" we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenges of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: no, there is no such hope. (162) predictably, despite this dismal prognosis heilbroner manages to find the silver lining, or at least, in a tough-minded way, how we (and i tend to think "we" is properly understood as the "west,") might construe the coming disaster as a test of our mettle: the human prospect is not an irrevocable death sentence. it is not an inevitable doomsday toward which we are headed, although the risk of enormous catastrophe exists. the prospect is better viewed as a formidable array of challenges that must be overcome before human survival is assured, before we can move %beyond doomsday%. these challenges can be overcome by the saving intervention of nature if not by the wisdom and foresight of man. the death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence -one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on a basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition. (164) in other words, if we don't discipline ourselves nature will do it for us. either way, what doesn't kill everybody makes the survivors stronger, to place heilbroner's views in their properly nietzchean philosophical climate. [30] as these two examples show us, following the typical apocalyptic narrative structure seems almost as unavoidable as the apocalypse itself: "we're screwed, no getting around it, but . . ." so it is that doomsayers, for all their dire warnings, like to hold out the note of hope, the chance that maybe things could turn out differently if only we'll listen to them more attentively. this carrot-and-stick strategy helps us see that apocalyptic rhetoric is always an invocation of power: do thus and so, or else suffer the consequences. even those, like the jehovah's witnesses or pat robertson, who are firmly convinced the judgment day is at hand, have a practical agenda in the here and now to gain adherents and compel obedience, and clearly the apocalypse scenario is a useful tool.^2^ the only thing more predictable than apocalyptic pronouncements is the scoffing with which they are greeted, yet the apocalyptic frame of mind is never impressed by the fact that doomsday has always failed to manifest itself decisively. in truth, apocalypticism depends on the asymptotic inability of the world to ever reach conclusion; the perpetual pregnancy of the apocalyptic moment is what keeps its metaphoric appeal so strong. what good is the apocalypse once it begins? as ross notes in his discussion of dawkins, the notion of "scarcity" -whether in terms of time, food, wealth, or heavenly seating-room, and whether based on ecology, economics, or the gospels -is a powerful means by which to limit freedoms and naturalize repressive social orders. perhaps this is another reason why it is difficult for us to entertain the notion that we are already moving through the apocalypse: to admit to such a thing would be to drain the "threat of doom" of its potency, and would allow the symbolic value of scarcity (mobilized so effectively by fiscal conservatives and religious zealots alike) to be effaced by a more coercive and brutal set of exigencies. yet perhaps if we owned up to these disastrous exigencies we would at least be better prepared to discuss openly the socio-political bases for shortage, which so far are labeled by economists simply as "the distribution problem." [31] having said that, it might now seem appropriate to acknowledge my own unspoken agenda, to call out for an end to arms sales, genuine environmental protection, renewal of civic society, guaranteed incomes to redistribute wealth, and so on. in posting that agenda, i would also be heading off the charge that my theory is irresponsible precisely because it describes an apocalypse that is ongoing, overwhelming, and %a fortiori% not susceptible to correction. admittedly, there is a point at which cynicism should draw back from fatalism. yet i only wish my subject left me cheery enough to believe such introspection would amount to more than an exercise in fashionable self-reflexivity. [32] so let me instead conclude as despairingly as i began. we know that "history" consists of grand narratives arranged over past, present, and future events. we learn from lyotard that metanarrative is now moribund. but we simply cannot go on without internalizing at least one metanarrative, for today, tomorrow, and the days after that: the narrative that takes for granted the world %will go on%. we all get up each morning and pursue our private lives as if they fit into this larger story, which is, granted, a story without a defined resolution, but still one we hope is not without a plot, at least not as far as it concerns us personally. doesn't everyone who raises a child believe, with bill clinton, in "a place called hope"? isn't hope another name for the implicit belief that time is taking us somewhere, that things can only get better -even if now they are quite bad? don't we tell our children that things always have a way of working out? [33] well, what if things don't have a "way" of working out; what if the notion that our world works at all is based on a sample too small to be predictive, a nose taken for a camel? suppose our hyper-complex civilization is nothing more than an evolutionary blind alley. this is not a new idea, but let us place it an even more sweeping context. recent discoveries of planets around nearby stars have upped the odds of non-terrestrial life, but at the same time led some in the seti community (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) to suppose that were there many enduring civilizations in the galaxy we would have detected one by now, considering that %our% bubble of electromagnetic semiosis announces %our% presence for more than fifty light years in all directions. yet any fellow sentients remain, contra _the x-files_, tellingly silent. some conclude that a paucity of eti can be explained only if advanced civilizations have a relatively brief life span, so that by their technological zenith they are already senescent. to be sure, such a theory is as unfalsifiable as can be imagined. but if nothing else it reminds us of how facile, too, is the opposing theory, the one we have never relinquished, the one that assumes rather than having a foot in the grave our world is only now learning to walk. [34] ours may be understood as an apocalypse without origin or destination. it may have begun to unpack with the advent of the junk bond, the a-bomb, the concentration camp, the internal combustion engine, the corporation, or even the scientific method; and it may cease only when most of those things are no more. so then: is this apocalypse i have described really an apocalypse, or just the motion of history itself? for the multitudes who have died, are dying, and will die under modern history's heavy feet there is no significant difference. perhaps it is time to ask ourselves the questions we have foolishly assumed this same history has already settled. who says the human presence on this earth was ever sustainable? why do we continue to believe so strongly in our competency to manage the risks we compound daily? where is this secret heart of history we trust has been beating? what precisely leads us to believe our world is not perishing? why isn't this the apocalypse? notes: ^1^ in that vein, another _harper's_ article finds canadian david frum, the latest synapse in the pan-national neo-con brain-trust, demonstrating one of the sly, %faux%-populist containment strategies by which the elites and their spokespeople help single out the currently unemployed underclass as the approved scapegoat for those %not currently% unemployed: "people are tired of the constant moaning they hear about the poor. a lot of middle-class taxpayers feel they're paying more and more for the poor and the poor are behaving worse and worse. and people are not sure that they're as sympathetic as they used to be" ("a revolution." 50). ^2^ editorializing in _he new republic_ robert wright seems somewhat puzzled by the conspicuous paradoxes in robertson's apocalyptic rhetoric: "first he uses climate chaos as a recruiting device, amassing money and power by calling it a sign of the apocalypse. then he uses the money and power to decry policies that might reduce the chaos and forestall the apocalypse. talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!" but of course the whole point is that robertson's supporters don't %want% to him do anything about the apocalypse save to check off its signs and help them prepare for the end. the apocalypse they envision is simply prelude to salvation, and the only danger would be to have a soul unfit for the millennium. to send money to %block% the apocalypse would be like paying dr. kevorkian to %not% help expedite your demise. works cited: ali, ahmed, trans. _al-qur'an_ (the koran). princeton: princeton up, 1984. 548. "a revolution, or business as usual?" _harper's_. march, 1995: 43-53. baudrillard, jacques. "the anorexic ruins." _looking back at the end of the world_. dietmar kamper and christina wulf, eds. new york: semiotexte, 1989. 29-45. brown, lester, ed. _state of the world, 1991_. new york: w.w. norton, 1991. ----. _state of the world, 1992_. new york: w.w. norton, 1992. ----. _state of the world, 1993_. new york: w.w. norton, 1993. brummett, barry. _contemporary apocalyptic rhetoric_. new york: praeger, 1991. derrida, jacques. _specters of marx_. trans. peggy kamuf. new york: routledge, 1994. eco, umberto. "towards a new middle ages." _on signs_. marshall blonsky, ed. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1985. 488-504. frost, robert. _the poetry of robert frost_. ed. edward connery lathem. new york: henry holt and company, 1969. fukuyama, francis. _the end of history and the last man_. new york: avon, 1992. gibson, william. _neuromancer_. new york: ace, 1984. ----. _virtual light_. new york: bantam spectra, 1994. heilbroner, robert. _an inquiry into the human prospect: looked at again for the 1990's_. 1975. new york: w.w. norton, 1991. kaplan, robert. "the coming anarchy." _the atlantic_. feb. 1994. 44-76. kennedy, paul. _preparing for the twenty-first century_. toronto: harpercollins, 1993. lind, michael. "to have and have not." _harper's_. june, 1995: 35-47. luhmann, niklas. _ecological communications_. trans. john bednarz. chicago: u of chicago p, 1989. parfrey, adam. ed. _apocalypse culture_. los angeles: feral house, 1990. ross, andrew. _the chicago gangster theory of life_. london: verso, 1994. saul, john ralston. _voltaire's bastards_. toronto: penguin books, 1993. silverberg, robert. _hot sky at midnight_. new york: bantam, 1994. theroux, paul. _o-zone_. new york: g.p. putnam's sons, 1986. wright, robert. "trb" column. _the new republic_. july 10, 1995. 5. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.596. part 1/1, total size 83583 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu -----------------------------------------------------------every issue of _postmodern culture_ carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. -----------------------------------------------------------publication announcements * essays in postmodern culture * the new river * works and 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of essays from _postmodern culture_ is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern -from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound), 0-19-508753-4 (paper) ------------------------------------------------------------* the new river: a hypermedia archive sometime later this year, the english department at virginia tech, in connection with _the blue penny quarterly_, will launch _the new river_, a revolving archive of hypertext and hypermedia literature and art. i'll be editing _the new river_, and consequently i'm interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished hypertext and hypermedia. i would like to see lyric and narrative art that exploits the computer as a site for creative work. since _the new river_ will be a web-based archive, work produced in html is preferred. however, stand-alone hypertext/media will also be considered -to be published, perhaps, as work available for downloading. information on submission procedures for _the new river_ is available from _the blue penny quarterly_: http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/guidelines.html ed falco english department virginia tech blacksburg, va 24061-0112 phone: 540.951.4112 ---------------------------------------------------------------------* works and days call for subscriptions to works and days since 1994 the new series/the second decade/the next generation 1994--2004 in its 1994 "the geography of cyberspace" issue, works and days looks into the future of literary and rhetorical studies. far from abandoning the journal's longstanding concerns for cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, its editorial collective sees the need to address these issues in the light of recent technological developments. this is our commitment for the 90's and beyond. works and days 23/24 the geography of cyberspace edited by david b. downing and james j. sosnoski 1994 contributors: john barber, jay boersma, peter childers, paul delany, david b. downing, paul fortier, gail hawisher, norman n. holland, michael joyce, fred kemp, ian lancashire, james mcfadden, charles moran, stuart moulthrop, helen schwartz, leroy searle, cynthia selfe, james j. sosnoski, gary lee stonum, michael wojcik. works and days 25/26 cyberspaces: pedagogy and performance on the electronic frontier guest edited by charles j. stivale 1995 contributors: lynn cherny, ethel enstrom, allison fraiberg, leslie harris, cynthia haynes, david hogsette, michael joyce, kim fedderman, william millard, lisa nakamura, fridirick pallez, charles j. stivale, randall woodland. works and days 27/28 cultural studies and composition: conversations in honor of james berlin edited by keith dorwick, david b. downing, and james j. sosnoski hypertext edition edited by keith dorwick 1996 contributors: joanne addiison, kris blair, michael blitz, beth campbell, david b. downing, patricia harkin, teresa henning, c. mark hurlbert, lisa langstraat, janice lauer, libby miles, sushil oswal, tina perdue, james j. sosnoski. works and days seeks new subscribers. individual subscription rates are $15/year. you can subscribe by sending a check to: works and days english department 110 leonard hall indiana university of pennsylvania indiana, pa 15705. indicate which issue you wish to begin with; multiple subscriptions = no. of years x $15. institutional rate: $25/year support the cause! become a "friend of works and days!" if you donate $25 or more, you will be listed on the "friends of works and days" page of each issue. inquiries welcome. email: downing@grove.iup.edu world wide web: http://acorn.grove.iup.edu/workdays/wdhome.html -----------------------------------------------------------* media ecology beginning summer 1996 media ecology http://raven.ubalt.edu/features/media_ecology/ _media ecology_ is a journal of intersections. published here are works that examine techniques and technologies of transmitting messages, the content and meaning of those messages, and cultural interactions with the technologies and the messages. a place is also reserved in the journal for creative works that make use of new technologies. intersections of theoretical and disciplinary positions are welcomed and encouraged. submissions may be informed by semiotics, rhetoric, pedagogy, critical theory, and other positions that consider the manner in which culture, communications systems and technologies function together. _media ecology_ is a journal that seeks to make an intersection between traditional refereed scholarship and serious non-academic critique. it will provide a home for important work originating in many different sectors. departments understanding new media a mcluhanesque review of new technologies. the lab a laboratory for creative work utilizing hypertext. the law consideration of the legal ramifications of new technologies. paradox consideration of unrealized potentials, nasty inconsistencies and irresolvable dilemmas. reviews & announcements publication _media ecology_ will have a rotating publication schedule on the world wide web. annually our sister publication, _readerly/writerly texts_, will publish the _media ecology review_, a print collection of the strongest pieces translatable to print. sponsorship _media ecology_ is sponsored jointly by the institute for language, technology, and publications design of the university of baltimore, and _readerly/writerly texts_, published at eastern new mexico university. call for submissions please send submissions electronically (mla format where applicable) to stephanie b. gibson, editor. send for further guidelines and information: sgibson@ubmail.ubalt.edu. -----------------------------------------------------------* pynchon notes o "the most trustworthy repository for the finest pynchon scholarship"; "ahead of other journals and university presses in charting new directions"; "the most forward-looking work . . . appears in _pynchon notes_." -_american literary scholarship_ o "a delight to read"; "an unusual, useful addition that should be in american literature collections"; its editors are "blessed with almost as much imagination as the focus of the journal." -_library journal_ _pynchon notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and fall. submissions: the editors particularly welcome manuscripts submitted in electronic form (ibm-compatible preferred), but also accept hard copy. convenient file formats include dca, wordstar, microsoft word or rtf, and wordperfect. manuscripts, notes and queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to john m. krafft. subscriptions: north america, $5.50 per single 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prevalent hearing culture that has marginalized deaf people. author wrigley plainly states his intention to disrupt "normal" thought about the popularly considered condition of deafness as a physical deficiency. >from his decade of experience working and living in the deaf community in thailand, he uses wide-ranging examples to go beyond disputing conventional theorists for their interpretation of deafness as the lack of a sensory function. by calling attention to the different lingual potential created by the instant visual expression of cyberspace, he explodes orthodox conceptualization of the nature of language as serially ordered and dependent on sound. in bold style, this provacative work poses the relationship of the bodies physical and mental of deaf people as subject to a form of "colonialism" by the dominant hearing culture. it proceeds to expose and attack presumptions and practices that derive from and descend upon deaf bodies. related analysis also addresses tensions little noted in the current literature on deafness and on the popular move to reconstitute deafness as a global culture. through displacement of logistical anchors, ironic stances, and disconcerting perspectives, _the politics of deafness_ practices a form of de-naturalization to demand space within and between the normalizing frames of daily lives. by doing so, it offers an insightful and intriguing perspective on the meanings of deafness, the politics of deaf identity, and what is costs to be "unusual." owen wrigley is a consultant with the united nations development programme and an advisor to the national hiv/aids control and prevention program of the union of myanmar. isbn 1-56368-052-1, 6 x 9 hardcover, 304 pages, illustrations, references, index $49.95 publication date: june 1996 to order fast, call toll-free 1-800-451-1073 -----------------------reservation form--------------------____ yes! please send ___ copies of _the politics of deafness_ by owen wrigley, at $49.95 each plus 10% 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-----------------------------------------------------------* the denver quarterly editors: john williams, founder 1966-70, burton feldman 1970-75, gerald chapman 1975-76, burton raffel 1976-77. 1966 denver 1996 quarterly volume 31, number 1, summer 1996 30th anniversary issue featuring highlights from the first thirty years poetry fiction and essays by john ashbery, joan didion, john hollander, heather mchugh, alice walker, william wiser, rosmarie waldrop, william matthews, david mus. jan gorak on njabulo ndeble, laura (riding) jackson on poetry and truth. early charles wright and marjorie welish & others. $15 for one year subscription, $28 for two, $35 for three denver quarterly department of english university of denver denver co 80208 enclose payment or ask to be billed ($7 for the single issue) --------------------------------lee chambers 1977-83, eric gould 1983-85, david milofsky 1985-87, donald revell 1987-94, bin ramke 1994-----------------------------------------------------------* suny press _postmodernism: local effects, global flows_, by vincent b. leitch through informative, original, and incisive case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, this book demonstrates that disorganization and disaggregration characterize postmodern times. postmodern phenomena, leitch argues, resemble imploded geological formations with historical strata in kaleidoscopic disarray, and neither economics, nor politics, nor culture escapes this novel form. among the influential figures analyzed are roland barthes, jean baudrillard, john caputo, jacques derrida, sandra gilbert, susan gubar, henry giroux, stanley aronowitz, linda hutcheon, fredric jameson, j. hillis miller, pentti saarikoski, and julian schnabel. 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________________________________ state ______ zip ________ country _______________________________ send invoice ____ __ visa __ mastercard account no. __________________________ expiration date ______________________ signature _____________________________________________________ (needed for credit card orders) -----------------------------------------------------------* the centennial review [image] -----------------------------------------------------------* public culture celj best new journal of the year, 1992 editor associate editors carol a. breckenridge arjun appadurai, co-editor michael m.j. fischer lauren berlant dilip gaonkar, marilyn ivy _public culture_ has established itself as a field-defining cultural studies journal. _public culture_ seeks a critical understanding of the global cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth century. the journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. coming attractions . . . + cities and citizenship guest edited by james holston, winter 1996 + public environments and global health guest edited by sharon stephens and janelle taylor, fall 1996 shaping the debates about local public cultures and global cultural flows in a diasporic world. one year subscription rates: $30.00 individuals, $20.00 students, $75.00 institutions. outside usa, add $5.00 for postage. -------------------------- the university of chicago press journals division, p.o. box 37005, chicago, il 60637 usa fax 312/753-0811 -----------------------------------------------------------* call for hypermedia submissions to _postmodern culture_ with the continuing interest in the world wide web and other distributed information systems, hypermedia projects have become both more numerous and more sophisticated. _postmodern culture_ will continue to publish important offerings in hypertext and hypermedia, presenting works that extend and redefine electronic expression. we especially invite conceptually challenging projects: texts/programs/performances in which multiplicity of discourse serves as more than an auxiliary for traditional language and forms. scholarly as well as creative projects are welcome: this call goes out to philosophers, historians, ethnographers, and other researchers as well as artists in all media. guidelines o projects created for the web (html/http) are preferable, but we will consider other systems and media. o submissions must not have been featured in other electronic publications and should have had minimal network exposure. copyright if any must be held by the author(s). to offer your work for consideration, please send letter or e-mail briefly describing your project. include url if your text is accessible via the world wide web. for further information, contact stuart moulthrop, samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu. -----------------------------------------------------------* neh: teaching with technology ......................................................... ......................................................... grant opportunity announcement -please repost ......................................................... ......................................................... teaching with technology ** a national endowment for the humanities special opportunity ** neh's division of research and education programs announces a special, three-year opportunity for support of teaching with technology projects designed to strengthen education in the humanities in both schools and colleges by developing and using today's rapidly evolving information technologies: including digital audio, video and imaging, hypertext and hypermedia, video-conferencing, speech processing, the internet, and world wide web sites. the endowment seeks to increase the number and usefulness of technological resources with rich, high-quality humanities content; to improve the effectiveness of such resources by shaping them around sophisticated, creative, and engaging approaches to teaching and learning; and to increase greatly the number of teachers who can integrate these humanities materials into their daily teaching. successful projects will be of national significance and will extend the potential benefits of educational technologies to a broad range of those studying history, literature, languages, and the other humanities disciplines in schools, colleges, and universities. any u.s., nonprofit, tax-exempt organization or institution dedicated to improving humanities education is eligible to apply for support through this program. ** types of projects ** at the teaching with technology deadlines, the endowment seeks proposals that address one or more of the following categories: 1. materials development: projects that plan and design interactive educational software with excellent humanities content. 2. field testing and classroom applications: projects that design and field-test innovative classroom uses of existing materials or those being developed. 3. teacher preparation: projects that enable school and college teachers to integrate specific technologically innovative humanities materials and approaches into their teaching; these may be national summer institutes or collaborative projects among teachers in the same or neighboring institutions. applicants are encouraged to be as creative as possible in proposing uses of newer technologies and innovative strategies for using information technology in humanities teaching. ** deadlines for receipt of applications ** + initial teaching with technology deadline: april 5, 1996 + following the initial deadline, applications for teaching with technology may be submitted against the following regular program deadlines: + humanities focus grants: sep 16, 1996; jan 15, 1997 + other education development & demonstration projects: oct 1, 1996; oct 1, 1997 + national summer institutes & seminars: mar 1, 1997; mar 1, 1998 guidelines and applications may be retrieved from the neh world wide web site: http://www.neh.fed.us (under guidelines) for further information or to request guidelines and application forms by surface mail: division of research and education, room 302 national endowment for the humanities 1100 pennsylvania avenue, n.w. washington, dc 20506 education@neh.fed.us -----------------------------------------------------------* katharine sharp review call for papers katharine sharp review gslis, university of illinois issn 1083-5261 (this information can also be found at http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review) this is the first call for submissions to the summer 1996 issue of the _katharine sharp review_, the peer-reviewed e-journal devoted to student scholarship and research within the interdisciplinary scope of library and information science. all submissions should be received by monday, may 13, 1996. although it is not required for submission, we would appreciate an abstract (of 150-200 words) or indication of intention to submit. submitted articles must be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words. for more information, including instructions for authors, please see the ksr webpage at http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/ review/call.html or email us at sharp-review@edfu.lis.uiuc.edu. kevin ward editor the katharine sharp review sharp-review@edfu.lis.uiuc.edu http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review -----------------------------------------------------------* virtual masquerades: electronic textuality and on-line personae call for papers a special session at the annual meeting of the pacific ancient & modern language association (pamla) university of california, irvine on november 8-10, 1996 many have commented on the emotional volatility of e-mail, newsgroups, and listserv correspondence, and on the compelling -if not addictive -qualities of interactive hypertext and hypermedia. what is going on in this textual exchange? how are these effects achieved by electronic writers; how are these effects received by electronic readers? who are these mobile, fluid, multiple -if not mutant -subjects precipitated by on-line texts? where are they? and how long do they last? this session invites papers that speculate on the literary formation of on-line ethos; on the rhetorical exchange of electronic texts; on institutional or other resistances to such a creative metamorphosis; on implications of hypertext fiction; on new hybrid hypermedia genres exemplified by "games" like myst; or on other related issues. please submit a 1 page abstract (a paper may be included) by april 1, 1996 to: the electronic text collective c/o ellen strenski 200 hob-1 department of english & comparative literature university of california, irvine irvine, ca 92717 queries or abstracts via e-mail to: mark mullen, cclegg@pepperdine.edu. (dues are $20 regular, $10 student or emeritus.) -----------------------------------------------------------* gender and space: south/southeast asia call for papers we invite critical essays for an interdisciplinary anthology on the conceptualization of space in south and southeast asian contexts in the 19th and 20th centuries. the emphasis is on a feminist analytics of women's and men's experiences of space in such topics as political, social, and/or psychic cartographies of imperialism, nationhood, urbanization, technological production (cyberspace, etc.), (e)migration, enforced/ chosen exile, and cosmopolitanism. papers might also consider how narratives (visual, written, spoken, enacted), spatial designs, and sociocultural practices configure race, class, gender (also transgendering), sexuality, religion/spirituality, and the politics of public and private realms inside, between, and outside predetermined boundaries. countries: thailand, malaysia, myanmar (burma), nepal, india, laos, indonesia, singapore, pakistan, afghanistan, bangladesh, sri lanka, vietnam, cambodia, and the philippines. we look forward especially to submissions on countries other than india. send 2-3 page proposals or 25-30 page papers by may 31, 1996 to esha niyogi de (ucla) or sonita sarker (macalester college) at idr2end@mvs.oac.ucla.edu or sarker@macalstr.edu. or mail to s. sarker, macalester college, 1600 grand avenue, st. paul, mn 55105. -----------------------------------------------------------* iass-ais sixth congress 1997 first call for papers semiotics bridging nature and culture la semiotique: carrefour de la nature et de la culture la semiotica. interseccion de la naturaleza y de la cultura 6th congress of the international association for semiotic studies --association internationale de la semiotique iass-ais guadalajara, mexico -july, 13-18, 1997 this is already the 6th congress of the international association for semiotic studies (founded in 1969). the five previous congresses were held in milano (1974), vienna (1979), palermo (1984), barcelona & perpignan (1989), and berkeley (1994). theme: the development of science during the last decades has shown the need of an interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars investigating nature and culture in the different corners of the world. semiotics has shown that it has an important role to play in this scientific intercourse: it provides a sign-theoretic basis for the coming together of anthropologists, linguists, literary critics, communicologists, mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and others, in an open debate to increase our knowledge about ourselves in our relation with nature and culture. objective: this is an international academic event open to all scientific communities which will permit to get in touch in a direct manner with recent developments in the field of semiotics and neighboring disciplines. since it is the congress of the iass-ais participants are invited to join the association (for membership information see below). plenary speakers: * mieke bal (the netherlands) * jean-claude gardin (france) * junzo kawada (japan) * floyd merrell (usa) * michael o'toole (australia) languages: english, french, and spanish (plenary sessions will have simultaneous translation). participants should send the title and an abstract of 200 words in any of the three official languages. screening committees: * the title and abstracts from europe, africa, australia and oceania should be sent to the european screening committee (chair): dinda l. gorlee, van alkemadelaan 806, nl-2597 bc den haag, the netherlands; phone=fax +31-70-3586745, or e-mail to rene jorna: r.j.j.m.jorna@bdk.rug.nl * participants from north america, south america and asia should send their abstract and title to the mexican screening committee (chair): adrian gimate-welsh, pacifico 350 h-103, los reyes, coyoacan, 04330 mexico, d.f., mexico; fax +52-5-5495764, phone +52-5-6895686 (weekdays), fax +52-22-430418 (weekends), e-mail: agw@xanum.uam.mx registration give your name, affiliation and mailing address, and indicate the mode of payment. send it together with a brief description of your line of research and photograph (the organizers plan to prepare a brochure of all participants) to: adrian gimate-welsh, pacifico 350 h-103, los reyes, coyoacan, 04330 mexico d.f.,mexico. fees: * before march 1997 us$ 75.00 * after march 1997 us$ 100.00 this includes registration, congress materials, cocktail reception and a dinner-concert. to pay your fees before march 1997, send a bank money order to the account number 50075176-10 of the commerce bank of california (bank code aba-122233645) through any us bank. the money order should be made out to marta regina jimenez castilla and/or adrian gimate-welsh and sent to mexico by mail to: pacifico 350 h-103, los reyes, coyoacan, 04330 mexico d.f., mexico. you can also make a direct transfer from your bank to the given account number. honorary executive committee: jose sarukhan kermez, rector unam julio rubio oca, rector general uam andres lira, president el colegio de mexico jose luis gazquez mateos, rector uam-i edmundo jacobo molina, rector uam-a guillermo smidhuber de la mora, secretary of culture, jalisco bureau of the iass-ais: executive committee of the president/president: mexican association of roland posner (germany) semiotics and organizing vice-presidents/vice-presidents: committee of the 6th john deely (usa), congress president: adrian gerard deledalle (france), s. gimate-welsh (uam-i) solomon marcus (romania), honorary presidents: jose lucia santaella braga (brazil), pascual buxo (unam) eero tarasti (finland) vicepresidents: secretary general/secretaire rebeca barriga villanueva general: (colmex) jeff bernard (austria) gilberto gimenez (unam) assistant secretary general/ secretary general and secretaire generale adjointe: treasurer: gloria withalm (austria) regina jimenez-ottalengo (unam) treasurer/tresoriere: communication and culture magdolna orosz (hungary) coordinators: assistant treasurer/tresorier ma. rayo sankey garcia (buap) adjoint: juan manuel lopez r. (uam-a) richard l. lanigan (usa) editor-in-chief of semiotica/ scientific committee: redacteur en chef de semiotica: the bureau of the iass-ais and thomas a. sebeok (usa) the following scholars: takashi fujimoto (japan), pierre pellegrino (switzerland), vilmos voigt (hungary), rosa ma. ravera (argentina), horst ruthrof (australia) european screening committee: mexican screening committee: chair: dinda l. gorlee (the chair: adrian s. gimate-welsh netherlands), (uam-i), jesper hoffmeyer (denmark), cesar gonzalez (unam-iif), rene jorna (the netherlands), jose pascual buxo (unam-iib), sandra schillemans (belgium), renato prada oropeza (uv) membership information: the annual fees for individual membership amounts to us$ 25.00; membership benefits include: two issues per year of the _iass-ais bulletin-newsletter_ (iass-ais news, congress calendar, upcoming events) and the _iass-ais bulletin-annual_ (the yearbook of the iass-ais with reports on conferences, recent publications, tables of contents of relevant journals, semiotics on the web, theses, research projects, etc.). please send your name, home & office address, phone & fax numbers and e-mail together with a check or money order, payable to the iass-ais, to: (all countries except north & south america:) magdolna orosz (treasurer of the iass) tiszaors u. 20, h-1171 budapest, hungary; fax: +36-1-3435062, e-mail: orosz@osiris.elte.hu (north & south america:) richard l. lanigan (assistant treasurer of the iass) dept. of speech communication, southern illinois university, carbondale, il 62901-6605, u.s.a.; fax: +1-618-453-2812, e-mail: rlanigan@siu.edu for any further information on the iass-ais please contact: jeff bernard (secretary general), gloria withalm (assistant secretary general) institute for socio-semiotic studies isss waltergasse 5/1/12, a-1040 vienna, austria phone & fax: +43-1-504 53 44, e-mail: gloria.withalm@hermes.hsak.ac.at -----------------------------------------------------------* sociological studies of telecommunications, computerization, and cyberspace call for papers: edited collection of articles for book publication sociological studies of telecommunications, computerization, and cyberspace original sociological articles on cyberspace, information technology, and computerization are requested for publication in an edited volume. the edited collection will present original research on the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of cyberspace and telecommunications systems. the materials will be organized around relevant and significant sociological themes and issues, and will examine the emerging social transformations associated with information technology, globalization, and cyberspace. as it is historically understood that new instrumental technologies have significant social consequences in conditioning and limiting human freedoms, this collection of articles will contribute to increasing our understanding of the social changes and new forms of political controls and social relations that accompany the creation of electronic communications in cyberspace. submissions may focus on social relations, identity, and privacy in cyberspace, political, legal and ethical issues, social inequalities, work place transformations, globalization, property rights, and subcultural manifestations associated with computerization. the unique and necessary quality of this collection is that it would be edited and organized from a sociological perspective and emphasize the theoretical and conceptual issues that have been historically developed by sociological investigators and theorists. unlike many current publications, the goal is to avoid futuristic hyperbole, positive and negative, and to include empirical studies of social relations and social structure. this volume is intended not as a mixed bag of popular, technical, business, educational, and philosophical writings, but is planned to offer systematic sociological investigations. articles should not exceed approximately thirty double-spaced pages, including all tables, illustrations, endnotes, and references. two copies of the article should be sent to prof. joseph e. behar, department of sociology, dowling college, oakdale, new york 11769. inquiries are welcome. e-mail: jbehar@igc.apc.org telephone: 516-567-0356. publisher: dowling college press. series: studies in the humanities and social sciences. publication distribution: state university of new york at binghamton. early 1997. deadline for submissions: june 15, 1996. -----------------------------------------------------------* calls for papers in english and american literature for the last two years, the english department at the university of pennsylvania has kept a collection of calls for papers, conference announcements, etc., on english and american literature, on penn's english web and english gopher. to facilitate the exchange of information on upcoming conferences and publication opportunities, penn english has created an electronic mailing list, cfp@english.upenn.edu. we encourage conference or panel organizers and volume editors to find the largest possible audience for their announcements by posting them join this list. announcements can include upcoming conferences, panels, essay collections, and special journal issues related to english and american literature, and can include calls for completed papers, abstracts, and proposals. the boundaries are flexible: all english-language literatures, cultural studies, queer theory, bibliography, humanities computing, and comparative literature (even when not concerned specifically with english or american literature) are within the pale. conferences or panels devoted exclusively to literature not in english, to music or art, to history, etc., are excluded unless they are relevant to students of english and american literature, as are lecture series, regular meetings of small local societies, fellowship opportunities, etc. ---------- subscribing ---------- to subscribe to the list, address a message to listserv@english.upenn.edu do not send subscription messages to cfp@english.upenn.edu. the subject line can be anything, but the body of the message should read subscribe cfp there should be nothing else: no name, no e-mail address. you should receive a confirmation message after a few minutes. if you have any questions, contact jack lynch at the address below. ----------------------- archive of announcements ----------------------- those interested in the calls for papers need not subscribe to the list directly. the announcements will be archived (within a few days of their posting) and available on the world wide web at http://www.english.upenn.edu/cfp/ and on the english gopher at gopher://gopher.english.upenn.edu/11/announce/cfp there they'll be grouped under rubrics (such as renaissance, american, theory, gender studies) to make browsing easier. they'll remain there until the conference has taken place. please check to see whether they've been posted already before sending additional copies. -------------------- posting announcements -------------------- all panel organizers and volume editors are encouraged to make their calls for papers or proposals on cfp@english.upenn.edu. calls can take any format in the body of the message. the subject line, though, should be as informative as possible (to enable browsers to find relevant announcements quickly), and should take the following form: cfp: topic of conference (deadline; conference date) messages that don't conform to this standard may be rejected. the subjeect line has to fit in 67 characters, so be both brief and clear in describing the topic of the conference. some tips: o rather than a cryptic panel title like "imagined encounters," use a descriptive entry like "new world in 16th c." o put dates in numerals, in american notation (month/day). specify the year only if the conference is more than a year in the future. include both the deadline for submissions and the date of the conference. o in the case of major conferences where the name of the conference will be more useful than the dates (e.g., mla, asecs, nassr, kalamazoo), specify that instead. o if the conference takes place outside north america, or if it's a graduate-student conference, note that as well. some examples: cfp: communities & communication (10/2; 12/1-12/2) cfp: inst. for early am. hist. & culture (9/30; 5/31-6/2) cfp: improvisation & virtuosity (3/1; mla) cfp: 18th-c. short story (8/18; asecs) cfp: romanticism in theory (denmark) (2/1; 6/28-6/30) cfp: meaning in middle ages & ren (grad) (6/30; 9/29-9/30) -------- etiquette -------- preface the subject lines of all announcements with "cfp," and make the descriptions as clear as possible, to enable subscribers to sort through incoming mail. please check to see whether announcements have already appeared on the list before sending additional copies. remember, it may take several days for an announcement on the list to appear on the english web or in the english gopher. in order to keep traffic to a minimum, the mailing list is strictly for announcements, not for discussions of conferences. advertisements of commercial products or services not directly related to the purpose of the list are forbidden. ------------ other matters ------------ to unsubscribe, address a message to: listserv@english (not cfp@english.upenn.edu!) reading just "unsubscribe cfp" (don't include your name or address). if you have any questions, write to jack lynch at: jlynch@english.upenn.edu -----------------------------------------------------------* literature and ethics *************************************************************** ********************* call for papers ********************* *************************************************************** literature and ethics an international conference university of wales, aberystwyth, 4-7 july 1996 "[t]he word 'ethics' seems to have replaced 'textuality' as the most charged term in the vocabulary of contemporary literary and cultural theory" (steven connor, _tls_, 5 january 1996). speakers to include: simon critchley (u of essex; _the ethics of deconstruction_), geoffrey galt harpham (tulane u; _the ascetic imperative_, _getting it right_, "ethics" in the new ed. of _critical terms for literary study_), dan jacobson (university college london; south african novelist and critic; _adult pleasures_), laurence lockridge (new york u; _the ethics of romanticism_), ian mackillop (u of sheffield; recent biography of f r leavis), christopher norris (u of cardiff; _what's wrong with postmodernism_, _truth and the ethics of criticism_, etc.), ricardo miguel alfonso (u rovira i virgili), anne cubilie (georgetown u), andrew gibson (u of london, royal holloway), juliet john (u of liverpool), willy maley (glasgow u), norman ravvin (u of toronto), valeria wagner (u de geneve). papers are invited from all points-of-view within this currently lively area of debate. you may wish directly to relate literary texts or theories to the discipline or discourses of moral philosophy, or you may wish to examine literary study, itself, in terms of engagement or social value. sessions may include: theories of literature and ethics; ethics-oriented readings of specific texts; ethics and post-structuralism; the state of humanism; ethics v. politics; ethical criticism and queer theory; literature, ethics, and feminism; texts as reflections of moral concern or agents of moral change; the author as moralist; criticism and current human crises. please send abstracts (200-300 words) by 15 march 1996 to the following address (to which any enquiries should also be sent): dr dominic rainsford department of english university of wales penglais aberystwyth dyfed sy23 3dy uk direct line: (01970) 622213 / +44-1970-622213 fax: (01970) 622530 / +44-1970-622530 e-mail: dcr@aber.ac.uk abstracts may be submitted by mail, fax or e-mail. extensive information about aberystwyth, the university, and the department of english is available on the world-wide web: http://www.aber.ac.uk/ -----------------------------------------------------------* film/culture/history conference announcement & call for papers film/culture/history 1996 marks both the 100th anniversary of film in scotland & the 50th anniversary of the edinburgh film festival. to commemorate these events, aberdeen university cultural history group are pleased to announce a major international conference from the 26th to 28th august 1996, to be run in association with the drambuie edinburgh film festival (11th-25th august). the major aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the relations between film, culture & history, but it will also extend the theme of this year's drambuie edinburgh film festival films that changed the world. proposed areas of discussion include: film & subversion; film & national identity; gender, race & film culture; non-narrative traditions; questions of european cinema. further suggestions are welcome. abstracts for papers, which should be no longer than one page in length, should reach the conference committee at the address below by the 15th march 1996. further information can be obtained from: colin whatford, conference director, film:culture:history cultural history group old brewery aberdeen university regent walk aberdeen ab9 2ub scotland uk tel: (int+44) 01224 272457: fax: (int+44) 01224 272369: e-mail c.whatford@abdn.ac.uk ----------------------------------------------------------- * cultural violence interdisciplinary conference, 7-8 march, 1997, the george washington university. keynote speaker elizabeth grosz. conference organizers welcome both specific and broad interpretations of the conference theme. innovative and interdisciplinary forms of presentation and collaboration are also welcome. one page anonymous abstracts must be submitted in triplicate, along with separate listing of name, paper title, academic affiliation, address, telephone, and e-mail by november 15, 1996. inquiries to jeffrey a. weinstock, program in the human sciences, the george washington university, washington, dc 20052; (202) 547-9437; fax (202) 547-9437; e-mail: jaw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu. more information available at our web site: http://www.gwu.edu/~violence -----------------------------------------------------------* the epiphany institute announcing the epiphany institute: mapping new rhetorical spaces and building bridges from current to new technologies june 9 14, 1996 virginia commonwealth university richmond, va ================ institute goal: to develop a plan with specific strategies for change at the participants' institutions in an atmosphere of collaboration and shared knowledge-building. guided by national leaders of the computers and learning movement, participants will discover ways new technologies pervade culture and impact teaching and learning. at the end of this participants will have: o gained an overview of the impact of and theoretical implications of technologies on culture and pedagogies; o modified and richly annotated a traditional syllabus, brought with them from one of their institution's courses, to create an information technology-rich syllabus. o drafted a plan for coordinated faculty development and change on a departmental level; and o acquired a wide array of computer skills and resource information. daily schedule sunday -june 9 3:00 4:00 leaders' meeting for epiphany team 4:00 6:00 registration; special session for "newbies" 6:00 10:00 whole group: welcome gathering and dinner; introductions and orientation; distribution of materials. monday -june 10 8 8:30 registration; continental breakfast; newbie help as needed 8:30 9:30 small group formation with facilitators: "mind-stretching" 9:30 11:00 whole group: new writing environments: the web; enfi; hypertext; moos, etc. 11:00 12:30 web; enfi; hypertext, continued. 12:30 2:00 lunch. (we'll encourage daily "working lunches" with small groups. epiphany team leaders will meet during lunchtime.) 2:00 3:00 groups -devising a workplan for the week. 3:00 4:00 group work 4:00 5:00 whole group: reports back from small groups 5:00 6:00 lab or group time 6:00 10:00 open labs; dinner on your own; readings/assignments. tuesday -june 11 8 8:30 continental breakfast 8:30 9:30 whole group: the making of knowledge in the age of electronic text; and stories; inkshedding. 9:30 11:00 concurrent sessions 1 (demos, presentations, workshops) 11:00 12:30 small group meeting with facilitators 12:30 2:00 lunch. 2:00 3:00 concurrent sessions 2 (demos, presentations, workshops) 3:00 4:00 concurrent sessions 3 (demos, presentations, workshops) 4:00 5:00 whole group: discussion of readings & progress reports 5:00 6:00 lab or group time 6:00 10:00 open labs; dinner on your own; readings/assignments. wednesday -june 12 8 8:30 continental breakfast 8:30 9:30 whole group: discussion of readings connected to course redesign 9:30 11:00 concurrent sessions 4 (demos, presentations, workshops) 11:00 12:30 concurrent sessions 5 (demos, presentations, workshops) 12:30 2:00 lunch. 2:00 3:00 5-minute presentations on redesign of syllabi (in computer labs) 3:00 4:00 00 5-minute presentations on redesign of syllabi cont. (in computer labs) 4:00 5:00 whole group: campus and departmental structure and support for technological change 5:00 6:00 lab or group time 6:00 10:00 open labs; dinner on your own; readings/assignments. thursday -june 13 8 8:30 continental breakfast 8:30 9:30 whole group: 9:30 11:00 concurrent sessions 6 (demos, presentations, workshops) 11:00 12:30 concurrent sessions 7 (demos, presentations, workshops) 12:30 2:00 lunch 2:00 6:00 open labs or r & r (tours of richmond, or whatever) 6:00 10:00 banquet. featured speaker: randy bass, georgetown university friday -june 14 8 8:30 continental breakfast 8:30 9:30 whole group: summing up the themes and setting an agenda for change 9:30 11:30 preparation time for afternoon presentations 11:30 2:00 lunch. 2:00 3:00 group presenations on syllabus redesign 3:00 4:00 presentations by groups continued 4:00 5:00 whole group: new directions; final thoughts; evaluation who should attend? team members could include any or all of the following: department leaders * collaborative learning specialists * composition theorists * literary studies and writing teachers interested in pedagogical, rhetorical and cultural changes resulting from technologies * writing-intensive/writing across the curriculum leaders * writing center directors and coordinators * others interested in computers and making changes to infuse classroom practice with new technologies topics to be covered include: an overview of literature and resources in field of composition and computers including both theory and practice. translation of composition theory and practice in an electronic environment including collaboration theory. synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (cmc) local area networks (lans) wide area networks (wans) hypertext as writing and presentation medium email networked classrooms and groupware the world wide web as a site for teaching, research and publication html programming moos (multi-user dimensions, object-oriented) and the composition in cyberspace program presentation software portfolio and webfolio assessment strategies for creating a technology-rich curriculum lo-tech ways to emulate high tech applications additionally, we will address specific needs of individual institutions. the epiphany project epiphany is a two-year project, started in summer of 1995, funded by the annenberg/cpb project, gallaudet university, and george mason university, but it is also sponsored by the alliance for computers and writing and affiliated with the american association for higher education, meaning it will continue after the two-year period of the grant. also participating in the development and implementation of the epiphany project are sri international, virginia commonwealth university and the university of richmond. the epiphany project mission statement: to introduce structures and strategies for pedagogical change in the age of electronic text and to develop a package of methods and materials to support teachers in taking advantage of those changes. epiphany resources will include: * workshop designs * plans for teacher support * case studies * an electronic syllabus archive and an electronic syllabus builder * a world wide web home page * guidelines for campus coordination * descriptions of the rhetorical shifts in our culture * a video for workshops and * a field guide to 21st century writing, the epiphany project resource workbook. institute leaders: trent batson, gallaudet university elizabeth cooper, virginia commonwealth university ron corio, virginia commonwealth university joe essid, university of richmond dona hickey, university of richmond michael keller, virginia commonwealth university donna reiss, tidewater community college greg ritter, virginia commonwealth university sydney sowers, virginia commonwealth university judy williamson, george mason university anne woodlief, virginia commonwealth university institute fee: the cost to attend the epiphany institute is $500. attendance for the full program is expected. institutions are encouraged to send teams of individuals. registration includes: conference materials; computer lab access and training sessions for 5 days; a welcome dinner on sunday evening (june 9); a banquet thursday evening (june 13) with a speaker, and continental breakfasts monday through friday. participants will be provided with: a workbook of exercises to help in thinking through a plan for departmental change that addresses information technology and faculty development; a copy of the epiphany guide book, a field guide to 21st century writing: ample resource material for organizational and corporate connections; demo versions of software for classroom use; copies of readings. institute participants need to bring: a syllabus from a writing class where technology was not used along with copies of the catalog description and related curricular material for the course. accommodations -participants are responsible for making their own lodging arrangements. lodgings below are within walking distance of vcu facilities. you can choose between a vcu residence hall and hotels. more information is below. return the dorm reservation form (below) with your registration. (note: dorm reservation deadline is may 1.) register now. enrollment limited -we will try to give priority to teams of individuals who are interested in becoming epiphany sites, but also anticipate being able to accept others who want training. registration confirmation: when we confirm your registration, we will send information about parking (for which there will be an additional fee), institute readings to be done in advance, and other details. we will also send two forms to help us plan to meet your needs -these need to be mailed upon receipt of your registration confirmation. registration form please print this application for the epiphany institute and send it by u.s. mail to: michael keller, vcu english dept, p.o. box 842005, richmond, va 23284-2005. include a check made out to for $500 for each participant from your institution. register early -limited to 40 participants. registration deadline: 20 may 96. (if you wish to stay in a dorm and have linen service, however, the registration deadline is may 1. see below.) you will receive confirmation of your registration, and other information by u.s. mail. important -application packet: this form along with two others will be part of your application packet. please return, upon receipt, the two forms that will be mailed to you with your registration confirmation -these are the mankato internet skills rubric and a survey about your teaching practices and computer experience, and they are essential for planning purposes to help leaders best meet needs of participants. (please print) name_____________________________________________________________ title _____________________________________________________________ institution________________________________________________________ mailing address __________________________________________________ city ______________________________ state _____________ zip________________ phone _______________________ day _______________________ evening fax # ________________________________ email address ____________________________________________ your url if you have one ____________________________________________ is your campus an epiphany site, or did your campus apply to be an epiphany site? (please indicate which.) ___________________________________________ list other members from your campus who will be attending this institute with you: ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ============================================================ ***** residence hall reservation form -deadline may 1 **** name: ___________________________________________ sex m / f (circle one) institution: ___________________________________________ phone: ___________________________________________ e-mail: ___________________________________________ arrival ___________________________________________ (date/time) departure ___________________________________________ (date/time) gladding residence center -all rooms are located in four bedroom suites with a shared bathroom between two bedrooms. one-time delivery of linen is provided by an outside contractor for $5.00 per person (needs to be reserved by may 1) for the length of the stay. (pillows are not provided.) the gladding residence center is equipped with laundry facilities, pay phones (in the lobby area) and a vending area but does not provide items such as ice, clock/radios, pots and pans, or dishes. $12.50 per night per person (sharing a room). $25.00 per night for a single. single room $25.00 x ____________ nights ____________ shared double $12.50 x ____________ nights ____________ roommate's name________________________ one time linen delivery $5.00 request blanket y/n ____ (reserve by may 1st) total housing $___________ make checks to vcu. mail check and form to michael keller, vcu english dept., p.o. box 842005, richmond, va 23284-2005. ****** off campus housing information ******* participants who are staying off campus are responsible for making their own lodging arrangements. lodgings below are within walking distance of vcu facilities. you should mention vcu affiliation when registering in order to get special rates. holiday inn (historic district) -single/double $45 (vcu rate) 301 w. franklin st., richmond (804) 644 9871 linden row inn -single/double $66 (vcu rate) first and franklin st., richmond (804) 783-7000 -----------------------------------------------------------* college literature _college literature_ a triannual refereed journal of scholary criticism and pedagogy kostas myrsiades, editor the leading journal for students and teachers of literature call for contributions on the following topics: anthologies and the teaching of introductory literatures inter-american literatures: theories and practice ethnographies of teaching literatures the interpellation of subjectivity in the literature classroom teaching popular cultures electronic/cyberspace editorial institutions and the profession of literature subscriptions academic $18/year; regular $24/year; institutional $48/year college literature, philips 210-211 west chester university, west chester, pa 19383 610-436-2901/2275/2276 collit@wcupa.edu -----------------------------------------------------------* jac: a journal of composition theory postcolonial and composition studies call for submissions _jac: a journal of composition theory_ invites articles for an upcoming special issue devoted to composition theory and postcolonial studies. this special issue will explore the ways in which these two areas of study may most productively inform one another as well as the ways that theories of composition are -or are not - responsive to the issues raised most persistently in postcolonial studies. articles should focus not on critiquing literary texts or on describing particular classroom techniques, but rather on analyses of how concepts articulated within postcolonial studies affect, or can affect, writing and reading processes, theories of composing, theories and practices of literacy, the history and politics of rhetoric and composition, or other related issues. articles should be 3,500 to 7,500 words in length and use current mla style format. please submit two hard copies and one disk copy by january 5, 1997 to andrea a. lunsford and lahoucine ouzgane, c/o department of english, ohio state university, columbus, ohio 43210. -----------------------------------------------------------* cultural cartographies conference prize _postmodern culture_ is pleased to present the cultural cartographies award to tim watson (oxford university) for his paper, "eyre apparent: imperial inheritance after morant bay." the paper was delivered at "cultural cartographies: surveying the postcolonial body," a graduate student conference held on march 29-31, 1996, at north carolina state university in raleigh. the award carries an honorarium of $100. presenters at the conference were invited to submit their papers for an essay competition, to be judged by the conference organizers and by the editors of _jouvert_ and of _postmodern culture_. work presented at the conference was considered overall to be very strong, indeed no one work can be considered to be the best offered for our consideration. we would like therefore to list other papers that were also judged to be very good: * christopher breu (u.c. santa cruz), "practicing disruptive economics: the remapping of the economic space of the americas in maryse conde's _moi, titiuba, sorciere . . . noire de salem_" * william bossing (nc state u), "the familiar" * kathryn romack (syracuse u), "from 'teaching nonsense' to the disappropriation of foe" tim watson's essay brings historical conflict and the conflict of ideas together to bear on constructions of inheritance in the british empire. it connects the literary with the political so that the two do not so much appear in debted to one another as functions of an historical situation. literary and intellectual conflict in england then appears part of the larger intellectual entaglement of colonialism. the essay is also particularly well written. --eyal amiran the conference will be held again in 1997. -----------------------------------------------------------* hss web server the history of science society has recently established a web server. the address is: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~hssexec/index.html bob o'hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu) -----------------------------------------------------------* 19th century american women writers web the 19th century american women writers web (19cwww) is a world wide web site devoted to the study and appreciation of 19th century american culture, especially women writers of the period. the site is located at http://www.clever.net/19cwww/. what's new on the 19cwww: o the mary eliza tucker lambert page has been added to the 19cwww e-text library, a growing archive of digitized versions of women's poetry, fiction and historical material. lambert, who historians believe was of mixed african-american and caucasian ancestry, edited the st. matthew's lyceum journal. the 19cwww is pleased to present over 30 poems from lambert. (special thanks to janet gray of princeton for her donation and digitization of these materials.) http://www.clever.net/19cwww/vlibe.html. o the multimedia exhibit of 19th century art from the carnegie museum is in its last week! view highlights of the museum's collection, listen to real-time audio narration by the collection's curator, and register for the chance to win hundreds of dollars of art-related computer software that we'll be giving away at the end of the month. http://www.clever.net/19cwww/exhibit.html. o learn details of our upcoming exhibit to commemorate women's history month, an original internet program about 19th century women and the labor movement. check out our description, a link for which is available under the "what's new" banner on the opening page to the site. ****************** volunteers needed! ****************** feel free to distribute the following information to your colleagues, students and friends. ------------------------------------------------ the 19cwww is run by a group of volunteers who feel that bringing 19th century american women's studies to the web is a very important project. even though the site has won awards (including being ranked by independent rating guides in the top 5% of all web sites and in the top 3% of all sites, based on content, graphic design and overall experience), we'd like to make the site even better. if you think such a project is worthwhile, we'd love to have you join us. the amount of time you devote to the 19cwww can be up to you. we need help in the following areas: o page editors. there is a huge amount of public-domain material that needs to be put into electronic form. if 19th century women's literature isn't digitized, it may be left out of the emerging "digital canon." other digitizing sites like project guttenberg and wiretap aren't digitizing these works. someone has to. we need folks to be page editors for particular authors or subjects (suffrage, abolition, temperance, labor) and to lead the digitizing of materials. o links editors. while the 19cwww appears to be the largest site devoted to this subject, there are other sites on the web with materials to offer. if you like to surf the web, scavenging in virtual corners for information, why not put your talents to work for a good cause? your mission would be to search out information that you think would be interesting in furthering the site's mission, "the study and appreciation" of women writers of the period. o grant writers. the 19cwww is attempting to raise funds for various projects, first among them is an attempt to digitize materials pertaining to 19th century african american women, something that is severely lacking on the internet at this time. i have a pile of perspective grant information -people are needed to query granting agencies and, if they fund projects such as the 19cwww, to write proposals. please contact me at editor@clever.net if you need more information on the above or (especially!) if you'd like to help us in our efforts. tyler m. steben editor, 19cwww --------------end of notices.596 for pmc 6.3--------------------------------------------cut here -----------------------------mann, 'stupid undergrounds', postmodern culture v5n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v5n3-mann-stupid.txt archive pmc-list, file mann.595. part 1/1, total size 174171 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- stupid undergrounds by paul mann department of english pomona college postmodern culture v.5 n.3 (may, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by paul mann, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. zone [1] apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more.... why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds? what is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? why wade through these piles of nano-shit? why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? why insist on picking this particular species of nit? why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of cultural objects? why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural criticism? no excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. [2] then if one must persist in investigating these epi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some critical fashion (no doubt already out of vogue), perhaps merely out of an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupid underground back to all the old undergrounds, back to the most familiar histories? why not cast it as nothing more than another and another and another stillborn incarnation of an avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believe its own obituaries, and that one has already wasted years considering? why not just settle for mapping it according to the old topography of center and margin, or some other arthritic dichotomy that, for all their alleged postness, the discourses we are about to breach always manage to drag along behind them? why not simply accede to the mock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion, resistance, etc.) that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don't have the strength to shake; or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality, diversity, etc.), as if all one needed was to add a few more disparate topic headings to break the hold of a one that, in truth, one still manages to project in the very act of superceding it? nothing will prevent us--indeed nothing can save us--from ransoming ourselves again and again to the exhausted mastery of these arrangements; nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward every difference by means of the most tattered maps. but at the same time we must entertain--doubtless the right word--the sheer possibility that what we encounter here is not just one more margin or one more avant-garde, however impossible it will be to avoid all the orders and terms attendant upon those venerable and ruined cultural edifices. we must remain open to the possibility that this stupid underground poses all the old questions but a few more as well, that it might suggest another set of cultural arrangements, other topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that might be. in any case, whatever vicarious attractions the stupid underground offers the bored intellectual groping for a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever else we might encounter here, it is important to insist that you will not find these maps laid out for your inspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy and charm. no claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, no one offered up on the critical auction block as the other of the month. there is nothing here to choose; all the choices have already been made. one can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural space for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken it and slow one's passage through it, and, as always, to render criticism itself as painful and difficult as possible. indeed, let us suggest that this tour of the stupid underground is above all else designed--according to a certain imaginary, a certain parody, the curve of a perfectly distorted mirror--not to give us an opportunity to rub elbows with the natives and feel some little thrill of identification with them, but to expose to criticism its own stupidity, its impossibility, its abject necessity. why go there at all? to pursue a renunciation of culture past the limit, where it precisely leaves us behind, where criticism can no longer observe it, no longer recuperate it; and at the same time to witness the turning-back and collapse of the critical into the very form and function of everything it would seek to distance and negate: a double negation that will end up--what else?--reinvesting in the stupidity of culture. no venture could be more idiotic. shades have been distributed, the bus is leaving, our stupid-critical theme-park tour is about to begin. trajectory [3] in what one could call, not without historical cause if perhaps too casually, the standard modernist map, the relation between hegemonic center and oppositional margin is more or less constant. marginal groups are suppressed almost to the point of invisibility, or at least to a theoretical *position* of "silence"; centers might seem to disintegrate, and parties consigned to the margin in one generation might rise to power in the next; one even speaks of multiple "sites" (all women are marginalized, although caucasian women are more likely to occupy a hegemonic position in relation to women of color; one can be white-male but gay, straight-female and asian, etc.); but the general structure of center and margin remains in a sort of hypertense steady state.^1^ the limited exclusion of the margin constitutes the center's defining boundary. margins exist insofar as they are held in an orbit, placed at the constitutive limit of whatever power the center consigns itself. we are hardly breaking any new ground in stating that this dialectical topography underlies almost all of our cultural criticism, often in the most tacit manner; it has been exceedingly difficult for anyone to propose more sophisticated models. it is here that we find the first relevance of the stupid underground. while it readily lends itself to this topographical reduction, it cannot be simply constrained to an orbit. it is deployed--but by what force? by some hegemonic "power" or by another, undetermined order of cultural physics?--as a means of carrying every mode of cultural activity past its limits, to its termination. at times this termination seems merely symbolic, as they say: an end-point that might indeed be fatal but is nonetheless reflected back into the cultural economy as a series of still quite spectacular and profitable images. the death of painting as a mode of painting, etc. and yet the trajectory of the stupid underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather uncertain. one is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk past the edges of the world. cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child's nightmare, and yet marking the place of an unimaginable destruction, of the invisible itself. not marginal spaces, strictly speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely beyond the limit: but at the same time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction, if you would rather, to the very adventure of marginality. the stupid underground is not only the newest post-avant-garde, it is also, beyond that, the very image--quite critical, in its way--of the imminent and perhaps immanent suicide of every marginal project, a suicide that is not a demonstration, a gesture accompanied by notes to the other, but the most rigorous renunciation of the symbolic order.^2^ we move from the masterpiece to avant-garde art-against-art to non-art (folk, *brut*, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects generators (survival research laboratory, psychic tv, non) to utter silence; from rock-tour t-shirts to skinhead fascist costuming to criminal disguise and disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to pornography and soft or "theoretical" s/m (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to pedophilic aggression to the consequent "knowledge" of the most violent sexuality carried out in the strictest secrecy.^3^ the stupid underground is the immanence and extension *to fatality and beyond* of becoming-sound, becoming-animal, becoming-libidinal, becoming-machine, becoming-alien, becoming-terror; it is the exhilarating velocity through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. we should also note that even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this deleuzian rhetoric of becoming-x its most abiding cultural form: becoming-%cliche%, becoming-stupid. in the stupid underground any innovation can be, at one and the same time, utterly radical and worthless in advance. the trajectory past %cliche% is at stake here as well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the repetition of a cultural adventure long after its domestication, but as if it were still an adventure. the trajectory is thus seldom a straight line into the beyond, a singular line of flight through becoming-imperceptible, into the invisible. the complexity of these movements suggests four trajectories, or four dimensions of the trajectory as such: to the apotheosis of stupidity, as sublime becomes ridiculous as if without transition; to the violent limit of the tolerable, the very limit of recuperability; to disappearance past the boundary of cultural representation, a disappearance so critical that it gives the lie to every other form of criticism; and to what turns out, in the very midst of an innovative frenzy, to be stupid repetition, an autonomous, automatic repetition that drains cultural forms of every meaning, even that of parody: the stupefying force of repetition, which, we are told, is the very trace of the death drive. vertical [4] the horizontal extension of the trajectory tilts along another axis, much older, much more deeply embedded, much more stupidly anthropomorphic, and precisely the logic that gives rise to the term *underground.* the space of tunnels and hence also of communication--subways, fiberoptics, sewers--and of escape under the walls; of burrowing animals and carriophagic worms; of roots and imminent growth, and at the same time of death, indeed death as eternal punishment. underground lies fecundity and decay; the foundation and everything that would erode it; the deepest truth or exclusion from the light; eternal torment or libidinal indulgence and its threat to repressive order. all of these habitual and mutually cancelling tropes attach themselves dumbly to the stupid underground, even in its most brilliant elaborations. bataille, for instance, cannot avoid what one might cautiously call a metaphysics of verticality in his very attempt to construe the basest materialism: the piston of fucking turning the earth; the burst of orgasmic laughter from the upturned pineal eye of the *jesuve*; the descent from the head--or from the blank, acephalic space left by the decapitation of reason and the king--down through the obscene, grotesque comedy of the big toe digging in the mud; the descent from the rotting flowerhead of the heliotrope into the obscenity of roots and marx's "old mole." in bataille's formulation, one might say, the proletariat becomes revolutionary by being stupid, by being blind: the marxian mole at the opposite pole from enlightenment reason becomes, for bataille, the figure of revolutionary criticism itself. for bataille, in other words, despite every attempt to go beyond good and evil, to ruin the very order of morality itself, everything depends on an inversion that retains the structure of the moral axis, and, indeed, repeats its *historical* reversal: the repressive ethical order of the straight world versus the perversion and hence pleasures of hell, or at least of bohemia. evil be thou my good; perversion be thou my knowledge. but the inversion is never constant. it is never a matter of simple reversal: the poles are not stable, value is determined by opposition alone. either pole can be good, either pole can be evil: up and down are indiscriminately positive or negative, so long as they remain counterposed. the fixed form of the vertical axis provides for a certain abitrary migration of value up and down the line. it is a question of what one blake critic calls "perspective ontology."^4^ in blake's terms, "the eye altering alters all"; an angel consigns us to the inferno of his own imagination, which becomes a pastoral paradise if we believe it so; heaven is thus recast as an oppressive zone of paternal law. "they became what they beheld," but what they beheld is what they projected, either through an active or a reactive imagination. what one must emphasize here is not romantic faith in the power of the imagination, which one might well find rather dubious, but the pure phenomenality of this binary mapping and the ease with which, it appears, the poles can be reversed, flipped back and forth endlessly from hell to heaven to hell, from suffering to pleasure to suffering (a masocritical vacillation in its own right), from *ressentiment* (and hence complicity) to revolution and back to the order of the same. the stupid underground is available to any ontological or ideological reformulation, and hence a place to test the following paradox: all cultural zones are both overdetermined and blank. on "stupid" [5] intelligence is no longer enough.^5^ we have witnessed so many spectacles of critical intelligence's dumb complicity in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer have the slightest confidence in it. one knows with the utmost certainty that the most intense criticism goes hand in hand with the most venal careerism, that institutional critiques bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in their discourse, that every position is ignorant of its deepest stakes. each school of critical thought sustains itself by its stupidity, often expressed in the most scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of willed blindness about its own investments, hypocrisies, illusory truths. and one can count on each critical generation exposing the founding truths of its predecessors as so much smoke and lies. thought, reading, analysis, theory, criticism has transported us to so many laputas that we should hardly be surprised to encounter a general--or perhaps not general enough--mistrust of intelligence as such. what is most "subversive" now is neither critical intelligence nor romantic madness (the commonplace is that they are two sides of the same enlightenment coin) but the dull weight of stupidity, spectacularly elaborated, and subversive only by means of evacuating the significance of everything it touches--including the romance of subversion itself. to abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or built such grandly inane intellectual systems might seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if rejecting intelligence is rejecting too much, never underestimate the stupid exhilaration of *too much*; and flying babies are a nicely stupid image, quite suitable for a record cover. let us insist that we are not arguing for poetic madness breaking out of the prison of reason, nor for the philosophical acephalism of bataille and his university epigones, still helplessly playing out the dialectic of the enlightenment. the rationalization of unreason is not much of a remedy; that is why we took the trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical evacuation of bataille. what confronts us in the stupid underground is also the rationalization of unreason, but it is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity posing as value, as the last truth of culture, value without value, and an irresistible lure for suicidal reason. that is, for us, the value--precisely worthless--of the expansive, aggressively sophomoric network of the church of the subgenius, of these exaggerated revolutionary claims for a few noisy cds and nipple piercings, or of the posturing of the so-called hakim bey: "i am all too well aware of the 'intelligence' which prevents action. every once in a while however i have managed to behave as if i were stupid enough to try to change my own life. sometimes i've used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. on a few occasions i have attained some degree of success."^6^ the only undergrounds that surface any more are moronic: cross-eyed obfuscators, cranks, latahs,^7^ deadly-serious self-parodists, adolescent fraternities of deep thinkers riding the coattails of castoff suits. [6] what animates the stupid underground is not merely heroic madness or libidinal ideology or a drooping iq *against* reason, although we still have to listen to all of that repeated, precisely, past the point of endurance; it is something like stupid intelligence, the manic codification of the inane, the willingness to pursue, absolutely at the risk of abject humiliation, absolutely at the risk of making oneself a perfect fool, lines of inquiry that official intelligence would rather have shut down. the dismissal of some dubious scientific fact or method by official intelligence is taken as a clear sign that the powers that be are hiding something important, and that by this very means assumes the status of truth. enormous labors will be devoted to unlocking its secrets and locating it in a worldview that is as logical as it is laughable, and that sustains the force of truth in large part by giving the lie to official truth. reactive research, parody of science. or of the mission of art and cultural commentary. once it was crucial to separate high and low, art and kitsch, for the very good of the human spirit; then one tried to "transgress" these distinctions, without quite managing to get rid of them. but to copy comic books on vast canvases or laminate a few thriftshop tchotchkis and exhibit them in a major museum is not what used to be called a critical gesture, no matter what the catalogues say. it is not a critical reflection on the commodification of art, but a means of rendering the very distance required for such reflection null and void; not a "deconstruction" (sic) of the institution of art but the evacuation of criticism itself. in this zone, criticism is stupid, hence only stupidity can be critical. the illogic of this proposition cannot entirely eliminate its force. we are caught up in culture's inability to purge itself of the inanity utterly native to it. the patent stupidity of certain postmodern works of art, and of the commentary that tags along behind them, is a symptom of a virulent truth that infects everything and everyone, the holy blood of van gogh, cezanne at his sublime labors, the sistine chapel englobing a void, empty frame after empty frame, vast libraries of special pleading, the whole dumb hollow of culture. [7] criticism as stupidity; the inanity of intelligence and the intelligence of inanity; the absurd hybrid of critical theory and blatant foolishness that today constitutes all that is left of the critical. one must assess the force of this stupidity without simply reasserting for oneself, however tacitly, the superiority of critical intelligence. *stupid* is no more a term of derision here than it is a term of praise; it is crucial not to mistake this epithet for a gesture of rejection, an attempt to mark out and claim for oneself any critical distance. it indicates a cultural condition that can hardly be embraced but that the pathetic enterprise of criticism is powerless to overcome by the application of more rigorous intellectual tools. we are pursuing a logic for which we have no taste; it binds and tangles one's writing in the most maddening ways; but ultimately the stupid underground constitutes a critique of criticism that must be taken up, however aggravating it is, precisely because it is aggravating. the spectacle of the masocritic trying to give stupidity its due while thinking it through with all the proper rigor, using it to judge himself judging, to judge judgment itself, humiliating himself, elaborating his own discourse as the vehicle of a death that is anything but heroic or sublime: let us take this as the true spectacle of criticism. stupid vigilance, resistance to what one has already made certain would occur, and would have occurred in any case. such a project will appear to you merely frivolous, self-indulgently self-defeating, like the course of the fabulous bird that flies in tighter and tighter circles until it disappears up its own asshole. masocriticism must not defend itself against this perfect and proper charge. what it seeks is precisely guilt by association, stupid abasement. if it is therefore impossible for me to be either on the side of this essay or at any remove from it, that is, for me, its "value." its ethical value: its stupid value. nihil [8] one might find it amusing to assume the pose of someone who states problems with brutal simplicity. as in this little nugget: every historical form of cultural and political revolt, transgression, opposition, and escape has turned out to be nothing more than a systemic function. the notion of recuperation has encountered a thousand alibis and counter-tropes but still constitutes the closest thing cultural study has to a natural law. collage, antimelodic high-decibel music, antimasterpieces, romantic primitivism, drunkenness and drugs, renegade sexuality, criticism itself: it is amazing that a single radical claim can still be made for any of this, and entirely characteristic that it is. every conceivable form of negation has been dialectically coordinated into the mechanism of progress. the future of the anti has not yet been reconceived. that is why it is ridiculous to accuse some poor kid with a bad attitude or some putative grownup with a critique but no "positive program for change" of being nihilistic: strictly speaking, nihilism doesn't exist. what was once called nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral function of a culture that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than the most vehement no. nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than the positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical cliche), and all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. as for the ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective. it is merely *ressentiment* in one or another ideological drag. and how can anyone still be deluded by youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? even the young no longer believe their myth, although they are quite willing to promote it when convenient. punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity itself. you should not credit malcolm mclaren with having realized this just because he was once pro-situ. all he wanted was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy with the flashiest *ressentiment* sells the most rags. and if he wasn't bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us? [9] it would seem ridiculous to sentence oneself to yet another term of *ressentiment*; bad enough to risk promoting it by the very act of considering it. perhaps only a masocritic would subject himself to the humiliation of doing so. and yet in the stupid underground the logics of recuperation and *ressentiment* are turned, so to speak, on their heads. everyone there knows all about recuperation and it makes no difference. one can display the most stringent self-criticism about the impossibility of revolt and the next day proclaim the subversive effects of noise, as if one were russolo himself, russolo in the first place. the stupid underground is marked by the simultaneous critical understanding of the fatality of recuperation and a general indifference to the fact; it ignores what it knows, and knows it. it acts as though it forgets, until it virtually forgets, what it always recalls. it responds to every critical reminder, even those it throws at itself, with a *so what, fuck you.* but this very feigned stupidity, this posture of indifference to its own persistent critical knowledge, is the trace of another trajectory. for if the euphoria of punk nihilism is entirely the nihilism of the commodity, by this same means, at certain unpredictable moments, it represents the possibility of nihilism turned loose, driven suicidally mad, *ressentiment* pushed to the brink of the reactive and becoming force. inane energy, brute energy, energy without reason, without support, even when it is caught up in what otherwise poses as a critical project. this is not to say that the euphoric frenzy of the punk or skinhead is the sign of something new and vital: the energy released by the stupid underground is never anything more than an effect of its very morbidity. it is marketed as novelty, but that is not its truth. nor will it ever constitute a base for opposition: it cannot be yoked to any program of reform, nor serve any longer the heroic myth of transgression. it is merely a symptom of order itself. everything has been recuperated, but what is recuperated and put to death returns, returns ferociously, and it is the return of its most immanent dead that most threatens every form of order. the repressed does not come back as a living being but as the ghost it always was, and not to free us but to haunt us. it returns as repetition; when we see it in the mirror, as our mirror, we pretend not to recognize it. the fury of the punk or skinhead is the fury of this stupid repetition, and it is far more destructive than the most brilliant modernist invention. it ruins everything and leaves it all still in place, still functioning as if it mattered, never relieving us of its apparition, never pretending to go beyond it, draining it of value without clearing it away. that is why one cannot dismiss it according to the logic of the new, whereby the only admissible revolutionary force must conform to the movement of progress and innovation. the rhetoric of innovation is parroted by the stupid underground, because it still obeys the superficial form of the avant-garde. but it obeys it long after it is dead, and as if that death didn't matter, as if history had never occurred in the first place, as if everything retro just suddenly appeared, in all its original vacuity. as if it were even better, more powerful, once it is dead, so long as one insists that it is and pretends that it isn't. it is the blind repetition of every exhausted logic far past the point of termination that generates the most virulent negation. the stupid persistence of the dead has taken the place of the critical. croatan [10] nothing could be more quintessentially american than the stupid underground. it is more basic, more historical, than all the structures and pseudo-guarantees of liberal democracy. if america as such can be mythologized as a nation of dropouts and a shadow underground of europe, it also immediately begins to generate its own dropouts--a subunderground that is the "first" of the stupid undergrounds, of those who went "native," which is to say: disappeared. the stupid underground is the latest bordertown, the liminal scene of this disappearance, and of the becoming-imperceptible of american history itself. this history has always moved simultaneously toward the spectacle and toward the invisible; that is why there is a familiarly native intensity to the figure of the solitary, hermetic hacker jacked into the so-called net. it is also why two stories could be told by those who found this legend carved into a tree at roanoke: *gone to croatan.* the standard history text tells us that no one knows what "croatan" means, that the settlers disappeared. but other accounts claim that everyone knew croatan was the name of a local tribe, and the message quite clearly stipulated that the settlers had gone to join it; the official suppression of this fact is only a sign of the sort of racism that was as likely to execute people who had lived with indians as it was to "rehabilitate" them.^8^ it is as if someone stood before that tree and deliberately misunderstood its message, didn't want to know or admit where the colony had gone. we have, in other words, two thin myths: the racist one and the romantic-racialist one, wherein going native and mixing races is by itself a kind of rousseauian good. now it will be argued that the revisonary account is not only truer but better, since it liberates a suppressed fact and casts the native *other* in a more positive light. but perhaps we should not abandon the old textbook version too quickly. if it functions, at one level, merely as further proof, as if we needed one, of the racist suppression of the facts of american history, it remains, in another way, quite seductive: it might once have been possible to disappear from the screens of history, to leave only an indecipherable trace, only the mark of a secret that points toward an invisibility that we should not be too quick to correct. but once again critical intelligence has stupidly closed off an exit. subliminal [11] the stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable psychotopography: it is a zone of the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a pathological site giving rise to all sorts of pathogenic surface effects, and a therapeutic matrix, a place where impacted energies may be guided toward a proper sublimation. the stupid underground presents itself as both a symptom of the disease of capital and an indication of the direction of its cure. but in the stupid underground, as in so many other sites, the direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the cure itself turns out to be nothing more than a symptom. for instance, in the terms of one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the pathology of other, of the symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic's prodigal son who is so repelled by his father's disease that he can only end by becoming an alcoholic himself; at the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions and defenses, a way to reconceive the social world by means of, indeed as a psychosis. perhaps merely the critical equivalent of lining your hat with aluminum foil to protect yourself from alien radiation or government microwave transmissions (often: the same thing); perhaps a more radical form of schizoanalytic political action. [12] as both symptom and therapy, and by these very contradictory means, the stupid underground also indicates the trauma of order itself, of everything it finds above ground, marking a place for the circuitous return of the real, the nonsymbolic, the nothing around which the symbolic is formed and in whose black light it is revealed as nothing but symbolic.^9^ again: one employs this psychoanalytic vocabulary with considerable uneasiness, at least as much as one feels with any critical vocabulary: since psychoanalysis is the very disease for which it proposes to serve as a cure (kraus), since it is the most pathological (and therefore irreducible) manifestation of the hermeneutic circle, this vocabulary is a set of symptoms to the very degree that it is a therapeutic lexicon. one must further insist that what is at stake for us in this psychoanalytic tropology is not the postulation of a monadic, centripetal individuality preliminary to culture, any more than one should say that neuroses are simply an effect of social inequities that, once resolved, will immediately dissolve them. neither individual nor society can be privileged because the distinction between them is faulty in the first place. hence, in part, the real interest of the stupid underground: it is liminal even as it is subliminal, mandated by a pathology that blurs the boundaries of this gross organization. it is neither molar nor molecular but a symptomatic space, marking the trauma out of which this very division has been projected. if it were possible to think of the symptom as a passage between what deleuze and guattari call "planes of consistency" or intensity, between what is called the social and what is called the subject, it would be entirely proper to this occasion. the stupid underground, the subliminal itself, is located not beneath the established order but between the social, the symbolic, the law, the subject and the subject, blurring the division between them in its own psychotic and quite veridical manner, distorting and still providing terms for their constitutive inter-interpellation, marking by its inane repetitions the trauma that is their mutual point of departure. [13] the stupid underground as symptom thus also conforms to what derrida calls the *trace*, and which he explicitly links with the freudian *nachtraglichkeit.* let us pursue it here along lines elaborated by alphonso lingis, as "an element that is . . . found only within the human economy, without being a sign." perhaps: a stupid sign. the analogy he draws conforms nicely to our purposes: the criminal, whose telos is the perfect crime, and not simply the release of unsocialized or barbaric force, acts to break an established order, and depart from the scene of the crime. but the disturbance itself remains, and can function as so many signs indicating a malefactor and expressing, to the detective, the identity of the act and of its agent. the criminal then acts to cover up his traces, so as to depart completely. but the deed passed into the real, and the precaution taken to wipe away the traces of the deed itself leaves traces. the traces a criminal leaves in covering up his traces are traces neither in the pure or purified sense we can now reserve for this term. they are neither signs nor indices, and they are not inscribed by an intentionality; the criminal meant neither to express nor to indicate anything by them. they are not made in order to be recognized and repaired. for him who comes upon them, they will mark the loci at which an order has been disturbed. they refer to a passing, that acted to pass completely from the present, to depart from the scene completely. the one who detects them recognizes something strange, not about to present and identify itself and not representable, but that concerns him by virtue of this disturbance and violation of the layout he inhabits. (145) if we were able to conceive of these criminal traces not only as an aftereffect of the disruption of the scene but as proper to its very construction, in something like the derridean sense of non-originary origins, we would be close to the traumatic relation to and originary return of the real that the stupid underground poses to the culture of repression. one must, in other words, imagine that the criminal stupidly repeats the scene of origination (which is not to say origin as such) in the very act of seeming to transgress its order, and the traces he leaves reveal not only his own crime but its absolute identity with the arche-crime, the primordial disruption, that is the real itself. net [14] over and over again we are offered new models that turn out to be the resurgence of everything they presume to leave behind, that exhaust their force even as they grind on in the stupidest, deadliest, and hence perhaps most critical repetition (all that is left of the critical), and yet still hold out the lure of new ways of thought and new modes of existence. the net is a perfect instance of this perfectly functional contradiction. the intensity of current interest in the net as a new form of social organization both demonstrates its importance and serves notice that the future is unfolding along quite different lines. net-talk is everywhere: all one's social and professional associations instantly conform, with a numbing thrill of recognition, to cybernetic patterns. it is now impossible to fly over any metropolitan area at night without thinking of video representations of integrated circuits and imagining oneself living inside them, and the feeling of futurity this experience lends is already a thing of the past. mail-art networks (themselves increasingly on-line), listeners to those feasts of disinformation called talk shows, late-night radio call-in programs for solitary consumers of new-age homeopathy and conspiracy theories, compulsive dialers of 900 numbers, tourists and denizens of virtual communities (muds and moos) springing up along the so-called information superhighway (the phrase has already passed into the afterlife of cliche), pirates of "temporary autonomous zones" (bey) strung like pearls on the filaments of cyberspace (still another byte that has lost its bite). catalogue services like amok or loompanics that serve as distribution points for masses of stupid information--fringe science, pop cultural theory, terrorist, sadomasochistic, and libertarian handbooks: a stupid, how-to pragmatism abounds here: how to build bombs, collect paedophiliac pornography, live without money, perform autopsies on car-crash victims, go insane, leave the planet, dilate anal sphincters from a distance of two hundred yards (as it turns out: tough to do without dilating one's own), commit murder, decode disinformation (i.e., *their* information), become invisible--model, chaotically, the social space of those who use them.^10^ the net is a rhizome, the structure of the general text, the disseminative "space" of all information and of those who attach themselves as functions to it, an atopic utopia, a skein of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies; the net is also a device for catching gullible fish, and profit after overhead in the counter-culture industry. at one and the same time, the net is cast over us as a liberated zone in which the proper fantasy of virtual existence can be played out as real, and a technology already appropriated by apparatus of control.^11^ the computer terminal is both an embarkation point for the new human and the end-point (nb: stupid-critical pun) at which we ourselves finally, fully become apparatus, the very medium in which the state pursues its own becoming-rhizome. the net is a liminality that further inhibits the distinction between individual and society and belies the autonomy of both on the vastest scale; it is the projection of a "new" hybrid of individual and social in a space and mode of existence neither has inhabited before, and yet reproduces all the old relations of dominance and subordination in the very act of superceding them, and yet disrupts them in the very act of preserving them in a disguised form. the exhilaration of these disintegrating boundaries has already been preceded and prepared for by a remapped capital. virtual [15] the invention of vr goggles and gloves lags far behind the vast array of prosthetic subjectivities that already exist, and helps to conceal the insistent possibility that whatever is offered to or claimed by us as reality has never been anything but virtual, a matter of surrogation. as always, the fact that everyone already knows this has not in the least prevented everyone from pretending to forget it. the invention of specific appliances should not blind us to the fact that virtual reality is already epidemic, that it is the bacillus of the real itself. the place for vr was secured in advance by the very medium of culture. what we encounter here is the tendency of everything in culture, every one of its structuring principles, to rise, eventually, to the level of the device, either theoretical or technological, or, in this case, both; and then to be marketed, with great success, as radical, the moment after it ceases to be critically relevant. but if the technology itself is a bit tardy, the notion of the virtual will serve, quite accurately, for at least a few more moments, to blur yet another useless distinction: that between fantasy and reality, between the ideal and the material. once upon a time the academy gave itself over to "thinking" the simulacrum, the general text, language as truth (hedged with all the necessary skepticism). now, after this bad bout of theorizing, a kind of stupid empiricism is all the rage. this history should by itself be adequate proof that both fact and theory are on shaky ground. the passing fashion for a theory of the simulacrum--one could say, for a simulacrum of theory itself--is hardly improved on by the new materialism, the new historicism, the new cognitive psychologism, etc., none of which ever quite answer the charge that they too are entirely virtual. cultural criticism, for all its showy documentation, is the latest unwanted and generally unnoticed proof that the critical itself is fantasmatic; at the same time, the now nearly universal claim that what once seemed material (sex as biology, for instance) is entirely a cultural construct, virtually guarantees that, in a few years' time, the material (biological, etc.) claim will return, with a vengeance, as the newest salience of the critical. empiricism is just another fantasy and our fantasies are utterly material. each is the necessary model for, proxy, and antithesis of the other. we cannot protect a single one of our views from either charge; the empirical and the hypothetical are reduced to economic forces that collide and cancel each other in a general and quite material economy of surrogation. [16] the stupid underground further complicates this sickening bind. it is a double surrogate, a mirrorand hence reverseimage of the cultural maps it proposes to leave behind, and a sort of pre-simulation, a virtual model of the revolutionary new world it hopes to achieve, but which it thereby eclipses, displaces, at times actively debases, and always renders surrogate in advance. we might call it a theatrical space--a second world, if you will, but one that already begins to disorient any exit to the world offstage, making it rather theatrical as well, curiously fulfilling the avant-garde ambition of bridging the gap between art and life in an unexpected register. contra benjamin: to aestheticize politics and to politicize aesthetics have turned out to be, if not exactly the same thing, then at least coordinated functions of the same mechanism. the stupid underground is thus both a regressive trap and a delusive utopia for those who mistake their play for a revolution that has already occurred. one could say the same for every program of social change. this bind is irreducible; there is no going beyond the delusion to reality and real political agency, any more than garden variety neurotics like yourselves can escape reality and live entirely in delusion. the empirical fact is invisible without the model, but at the same time the model eclipses it without releasing us from its demand. the map and the territory, the model and the real, the fantasy and the fact constitute each other as each other's excluded precondition. revolutionary virtuality constitutes the very condition of the revolutionary project and guarantees its utter impossibility. the surrogate both constitutes and belies its truth, grounds it and undermines it, and the stupid underground offers a particularly stark instance of this vertiginous spiral of surrogations. quack [17] what should one think of a nobel laureate who proposes, quite scientifically, the theory of "directed panspermia": that the nucleic proteins from which "life itself" arises were sent here from another star system? or the notion that, since the biochemical structure of psilocybin spores resembles nothing else on earth, they too were exported, as the very seeds of consciousness, from somewhere out there? or the proposition that language itself is a virus from outer space, or that time can be controlled by cutting up audio-tape and projecting images on top of one another? how to comprehend experiments in brain expansion through stimulation by electronic implants, or drugs; or what proposes itself as research into nanotechnology, in which tiny robots will someday patrol our bloodstreams scrubbing out cholesterol deposits and gunning down incipient cancers; or cyberprosthetics; or life extension through the ingestion of massive doses of vitamin compounds and amino acids?^12^ or, to address our specific instance, what shall we make of reports of red and black rains, of frogs, fish, and highly-worked stones that fall from the sky? charles fort: "i have collected 294 records of showers of living things. have i? well, there's no accounting for the freaks of industry."^13^ it would not, after all, be so hard to accumulate masses of such "data": one would simply have to collect newspapers and magazines from around the world and devote all one's time to poring over them, filing, collating, cross-referencing, in a certain sense indiscriminately. in time one could produce a whole new world-view, or at least the apparent eclipse of an old one, without ever having to look up. several years, while riding a bus, i found myself across the aisle from a famous humorist-conspiracy theorist (as we have here before us a "humorist-scientist"), who spent the entire time tearing strips from the newspapers piled beside him and inserting them in various file folders. did he miss his stop? it couldn't have mattered; and he would doubtless claim that i had missed several stops far more important. how then should one comprehend these precipitous frogs, these crocodiles that turn up in england, this cow that gave birth to two lambs and a calf, these boys dropped suddenly into a boat in the middle of a lake, miles from the place they last remembered? perhaps the fish fell from a "super-sargasso sea"; and to postulate such a sea may have one main motive: "to oppose exclusionism" (47), the elimination of aberrant possibilities by rationalist methods that seem, from this perspective, nothing more than paranoid symptoms. what about these inscribed stones? maybe they are just freaks of industry, of fantasy, a strange game against certainty itself. or perhaps they really--*really*--do signal the existence of new lands, hyper-laputas floating in an atmospheric warp somewhere above the earth's surface. the truth is up there, out there, way down there, concealed from us by government intelligence agencies, by conspiratorial elites, by the powers hidden behind the powers that be, by extraterrestrials, none of them efficient enough to prevent the freaks of industry from prying loose a glimpse of their traces. and what about the strange cloud-form trailing a sort of hook, sighted by one capt. banner of the bark _lady of the lake_ (by implication: a trained observer): "i think we're fished for," "i think we're property" (50-51). what about this woman burned to death on an unscorched bed? an instance of the "possible-impossible" (107), of "certainty-uncertainty" (119). the hyphenation is crucial: it marks what fort calls "alleged pseudo-relations" (98). everything *might be* connected; to speak here of coincidences--as bataille might, in a copula-tion that dreams of polluting the entire universe--is already to cede too much to a scientism that would exclude what is not demonstrable by the given logical means, to relegate it to the exo-real, the margin, the underground of non-fact, of chance, of the unexplained and still-to-be-dismissed. everything is connected: "the attempt to stop is saying 'enough' to the insatiable. in cosmic punctuation there are no periods: illusion of periods is incomplete view of colons and semi-colons" (52). but in exactly the same manner, it is futile to search for singular and fundamental laws: if one refuses to exclude or suppress unclassifiable data--unexplainable phenomena presented to our senses, which in some sense know better--one always comes to "bifurcations; never to a base; only to a quandary," what one might otherwise dismiss as mere contradiction. "in our own field, let there be any acceptable finding. it indicates that the earth moves around the sun. just as truly it indicates that the sun moves around the earth" (61). just as truly? how can one say something so ludicrous? it is one thing to churn out reports of unexplained events, a few of which might actually have occurred, even if one will probably end up explaining them in rather more mundane terms; or to pick out foolish errors in the most rigorous scientific reasoning, which is perfectly capable of dismissing what will someday be widely accepted; but it is another thing to propose seriously--that is to say, with the most rigorous laughter--that the sun revolves around the earth, or that there is no velocity of light ("one sees a thing, or doesn't"), or that "nothing that has been calculated, or said, is sounder than mr. shaw's determination" that the moon is--*is?* what is the status of the copula here?--thirty-seven miles away from the earth"(58-59). shall we even bother to ask about the point of all this? not quite frivolous, nor yet quite serious; a critique of scientific certainty not without its own games of certainty; not even, necessarily, quackery, if the quack is one who takes himself utterly seriously about things no one in his right mind would believe, and who can produce a mountain of evidence to support what are clearly insupportable claims; who builds this mountain obsessively, one pebble-fact at a time, as if everything depended on it; who is convinced beyond doubt that he has in his hands some sort of key--to secret laws of physics invisible to terrestrial math, to cures for cancer or aids driven south of the border by the drug industry, to alien technologies kept not-quite-secret by the cia--and remains devoted to this research for decades; who believes he has survived despite the most terrible danger, that extraordinary precautions must be taken, vast forces are being marshalled against him, he is being followed, they are reading his mail, he will pursue his heroic quest until they finally eliminate him. or not so spectacularly paranoid, only theoretically so: what is in danger is not one's personal well-being, but in some sense the truth itself. [18] as humorist-scientist, fort both aligns himself with all scientists, making them guilty by association with him--they're quacks too, anyone driven to belief by a system is a quack--and always leaves himself a few curious exits: i go on with my yarns. i no more believe them than i believe that twice two are four . . . . i believe nothing. i have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of the ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation i am given to bizarre hospitalities. i shut the front door upon christ and einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. i believe nothing of my own that i have ever written. i can not accept the products of minds that are subject-matter for beliefs . . . . it is my attempt to smash false demarcations: to take data away from narrow and exclusive treatments by spiritualists, astronomers, meteorologists, entomologists: also denying the validity of usurpations of words and ideas by metaphysicians and theologians. but my interest is not only that of a unifier: it is in bringing together seeming incongruities, and finding that they have affinity. i am very much aware of the invigoration of products of ideas that are foreign to each other, if they mate. this is exogamy, practiced with thoughts--to fertilize a volcanic eruption with a storm of frogs--or to mingle the fall of an edible substance from the sky with the unexplained appearance of cagliostro. but i am a pioneer and no purist, and some of these stud-stunts of introducing vagabond ideas to each other may have the eugenic value of some of the romances in houses of ill fame. i cannot expect to be both promiscuous and respectable. later, most likely, some of these unions will be properly licensed. if anybody thinks that this book [_lo!_] is an attack upon scientists, as a distinct order of beings, he has a more special idea of it than i have. as i'm seeing it, everybody's a scientist. (94-5) note the passage from skepticism to perverse hospitality. doubt becomes belief, without even a bump of transition. it is not really skepticism, since uncertainty itself is "intermediated" by the hyphen that connects it to certainty: "my own expressions are upon the principled-unprincipled rule-misrule of our pseudo-existence by certainty-uncertainty" (119). and not belief, since it is belief itself that fort wishes finally to undermine. it is a matter of infinite possibility strictly beyond the limits of knowledge, a certainty (not a belief) that human certainty, all the maps and models by which we organize the real, precludes what must still be true beyond it. these days, one might object, the two lambs and a calf are more likely to be the progeny of staff writers for the _national enquirer_, who also see, at least until they meet their production deadline, satan's face in the whirling clouds of a hurricane: stupid science is a business, the market for snake oil has never been better. but one should not be too quick to assume that those who produce such facts do so out of utter cynicism, not even the cynicism of capital itself; nor should one be too quick to dismiss the consumers of such facts as simply gullible. one might find a few rather fortean researchers among the writers and readers of these tabloids. *in any case,* what is valuable is the outlandish, the secret affinity between incongruities, and it is valuable because it so stupidly gives the lie to what is so blatantly and banally true, because *everyone knows* that the real truth is suppressed, held back, that knowledge itself is a conspiracy and every little perversion of it points toward a greater truth, a truer truth. we are indeed in a zone where one must, but cannot quite, discriminate true from false truths; nor can one prevent these stupid truths from seeping up from their underground domain and saturating thought itself. maso-science. [19] let us also, finally, mark out a place for a whole range of more or less stupid appropriations of new science, stupid deployments of scientific metaphors--fractals, chaos, strange attractors, fuzzy logic, black holes, cyberthis and cyberthat--as even more abstractly metaphorical terms in cultural criticism. they are nothing but the ornamental fringes of critical fashion, and yet they indicate the possibility that one might begin to conceive of culture as a space regulated by strange *natural* (and still quite technical) laws concealed beyond the reigning social and political terms, and at the same time cloud over this possibility with the toxic vapor of myth.^14^ stupid gurus [20] the fashionable mathematics of fractals, precisely in the reduced form pilfered by what once were humanists and who know virtually nothing about it, provides us with the figure of a sort of zeno-graphically receding infinitesimal repetition--the sub-cell reproducing the topography of the whole organism, which can therefore no longer be defined simply as whole. a fractal and still quite vulgar marxism is there to translate this process into the most familiar critical terms: the market reproducing itself morphologically in the stupid underground, as the base always reproduces itself, but in its movement into that alien space also mutating, deformed, transformed.^15^ so also a fractal etc. psychoanalysis could translate the same movement into terms grounded in the structures of identification. we find this fractal descent, for instance, in the cult or fandom, which reproduces the ideological body of the leader or hero through specific sorts of identification, in the beliefs, clothing, and ritualized gestures of the disciple, the wannabe, the wannabelong. there would be no underground if someone did not lead us down there, if we were not conducted by a desire to be and belong to the one we recognize there, behind whom even more shadowy and indeterminable figures and forces are concealed. we would not be driven there if the underground did not offer us a stupid imaginary, the delirious hope of parasitical symbioses, vampiric feasts (of course the arrangement is reciprocal: leader and follower feed off each other), spectacular plagiarisms, personality implants, image clonings, synthetic transference, absolute interpellation, stupid communion with the one. [21] but this communion is not a matter of recognizing oneself in a fixed image, identifying with an ontologically consistent other: the body of the stupid guru, the cult leader, the rock star, the media fantasm, is itself a fractal deformation. that is to say, one must be careful not to reduce identification to any simple dialectic between stable and determinate entities, between isolable masters who are either true or false and slaves who are or are not about to become free. kenneth dean and brian massumi argue that the body of the leader (in their case the despot) is a "body without an image," and its "infinitization" is also its disintegration, its evacuation.^16^ their claim is that one's relation to that image is not a matter of strict identification, since one attaches oneself to increasingly fragmented gestures, features, images, that never add up, never amount to a whole body, an identity, that are always partial arrangements of a social apparatus that is absolute without being singular. the stupid guru too is this one who is not one, and who stands for the one that is nothing, the constitutive nothing around which, according to a model we have already employed, the symbolic is organized; who dissolves into a thousand points or pixels of light distributed across the screenscape of certain economies (subcultural economies that are themselves fractal homomorphs of larger symbolic economies), and serves as a loose network of junctions or terminals to which stupid disciples may attach themselves. in psychoanalytic terms, a thing. as zizek writes, "while it is true that any object can occupy the empty place of the thing, it can do so only by means of the illusion that it was always already there, i.e., that it was not placed there by us but found there as an 'answer of the real'" (_la_ 33). not a body, then, but a sort of vapor catching the light of an oblique projection that conceives of itself as a mechanism of discovery. and it is no different for you: any cultural (political, philosophical, critical, artistic) activity orbits elliptically around such null points: one is a freudian, a marxian, a derridean; a shakespeare, dickens, austen scholar; one becomes a new historicist not only for considered methdological reasons but because one has *already* recognized something of what one might call oneself, were it so conscious a recognition, in reading greenblatt or mcgann; one becomes a performance artist because, sitting in the audience during a performance, one saw without seeing (through a fundamental *meconnaissance,* through stupid recognition) oneself on stage, as the other of one's desire. stupid saints, *das ding* in incarnations from william burroughs to charles manson, loom up everywhere in the stupid underground. there is no culture without these relays, catapults, necessary points (*de capiton*) of stupid transference. one might suppose that any spiritual leader worth his salt would devote himself to blowing this vapor away, revealing the empty spot where he stands, for the disciple, in place of an object that doesn't exist, awakening us to the emptiness of the real. for the guru, however, this is often the very order of the impossible; and it is also why i would argue, if you want to call it an argument, that the stupidest guru is better than the most enlightened master. i once attended a talk given by quite a prominent spiritual teacher who exhorted his audience not to see him as a guru, but to be their own gurus, and they all assented: yes master, i won't take you as a guru, i will be my own guru. one would have to be an enlightened being not to go mad from frustration and humiliation over a career spent in such futile gestures. nor could it be otherwise: the thing will not be divested by asking us to divest it. then will it be divested through critical means? dean and massumi propose such a critique of the body-without-images of reagan or bush, but in their work too criticism reverts to the illusion that reason itself might someday establish a secure distance from the thing. the stupid underground, however, in one of its most characteristic gestures, abandons criticism and embraces the same body, plays the same game, relates to the stupid guru through an aggressively stupid affirmation. one might call it a parody of identification, but parody suggests its own sort of critical-ironic distance and thus is not a term precise enough for this procedure. the church of the subgenius, for instance, explicitly rejects the suggestion that what it does is a parody (of religion, commerce, art movements, the american family, etc.). it insists on its truth. it demands that we take it literally even as it elaborates the most exorbitant absurdity. psychoanalysis might recognize in this insistent absurdity the functional truth of fantasy, the empty truth of the thing; it is presented to us here as empty, but without offering any pretense of distance from it. hence i wish to insert here two figures, two hollow-core gurus, two things as thing: monty cantsin and j.r. "bob" dobbs, the stupid gurus of "neoism" and of the church of the subgenius.^17^ [22] the thing called monty cantsin is an explicitly empty figure, a name open to occupation by anyone who wishes to stand in the stupid guru's place in order to see that it doesn't exist. there is, in fact, no such individual as monty cantsin; he is a pure alias. in principle, anyone who wishes to adopt this false identity, this identity as falsehood, and for whatever motives, whether it be to preserve the strictest anonymity or from the most venal band-wagon opportunism, can claim to be cantsin. canadian 'total media artist' monty cantsin is something between an enigma and an institution. he is a being around whom a vast contemporary mythology has accumulated. nemesis seems to dog his footsteps; retribution is incapable of tracking him down. he is voracious of appetite, prolific of explanation, eternally on the brink of affluence yet forever in the slough of debt. he is, moreover, a prince among parasites, a model of optimism, and a master of obtuseness. he can achieve more, and at less cost to himself, than a gypsy. he is as ancient as the hills, as genial as the sunshine, as cheerful as an expectant relative at the death bedside of wealth. he is unthinkable, unforgettable, unejectable, living on [in] all men for all time. nations die and rise again; kings come and go; emperors soar and fall ... but monty cantsin lives on and on.^18^ the stupid guru is always a locus of exaggeration: a "vast mythology" surrounds the leader of even the tiniest sect. here, the purposely vacuous description could apply to any guru, and that is its point: it is offered as a null set, and hence as the proper set of the guru himself. he lives on and on because he never existed, just as no guru, no king, no pop star has ever existed. but that is not to say that one can ever go beyond him. in the very act of evacuating this figure, his sovereignty is reconfirmed. the history of neoism demonstrates that once one stands in his place one can easily forget one is standing nowhere: cantsin becomes a disputed figure, as certain neoists claim to be the real cantsin in the very act of inviting others to partake of cantsin's persona (a rather messianic offer: this is my body), as if mere contact with this name was enough to erase the memory that there is nothing at stake in the name, that emptiness is all that was ever at stake in it.^19^ one is reminded of the wars for possession of the term *dada,* equally vacuous and equally invaluable. thus cantsin is not only an anarchistic be-your-own guru, a figure of a *poesie fait par tous,* but both the attempted subversion of this structure and the immediate failure of that subversion in a proprietary struggle. [23] dobbs, the all-american salesman messiah, the avatar of modernist simony, is constructed in that same empty place, but by a sophomoric priesthood who pretend-believe that he is real and never either abandon the illusion nor mistake themselves for him. he is always other and never a joke, no matter how ludicrous the limits to which he is pushed, because those who promote his absurdity insist on its literal truth even at those moments when they are most outrageously at play. subgenius claims that dobbs is the only truth, and indeed he is. stupid force, stupid necessity. what i wish to mark here, in part, and as usual, is a perversion of criticism itself. although everything one needs for a critique of the stupid guru is noted in the dean-massumi critique of the despot and leader, here we find none of the distance, separation, and rejection traditionally necessary for even so radical a criticism as theirs. the stupid guru of subgenius is the image, the juncture, of criticism as dumb embrace, a delirious, mocking, hysterical, literal, fantastic embrace that in effect squeezes the life out of the other (dobbs has been assassinated at least twice) without ever admitting that it does so (he never quite dies); the cult of dobbs crystallizes a rabid overparticipation in the stupid spectacle of the real that goes far beyond any "blank parody" or "postmodern pastiche."^20^ [24] we cannot leave this icon without noting another of its elements: the serial character of the stupid guru, the rock star, the "role model": never an absolute master, because he can be exchanged at any moment for another figure, another other; he is a place holder for a rapidly shifting field of empty, ephemeral, and tenuous attachments. no viable cult will ever grow around him, only an ever-shattering hall of mirrors, a high-velocity phase-space of weak and yet perpetual narcissistic identifications. one surfs through stupid gurus, as one surfs through cable channels or the channels in the video-porno booth, in a process that is the very model of the entropy of such attachments, always in search for the next one, the true and proper identification, which never arrives, which the process itself realizes as unrealizable, until desire is distributed and dissipated across the entire field. i have on my desk a volume entitled _threat by example_, a series of brief interviews with "inspiring" figures from the "punk underground."^21^ the format of the book--pictures and interviews lasting no more than a page or two, followed immediately by another, and another, and another--formalizes the linear movement of this narcissistic guru-surfing: continuous deferral to the promise of a greater imminent satisfaction that never occurs, until the velocity of selection itself becomes the empty signifier of the other. the accelerated substitution of figures of power, authority, and identification reveals, by a kind of cinematic effect, the hollow at their center, but without thereby releasing us from their hold. the fabled abyss is flattened out, but it is no less fantastic or fatal. conspiracy [25] the stupid underground is the home of the mutant hybrid. what would have seemed to be--what, we are told, a prior cultural order labored to preserve as--distinct, conflicting, contradictory ideas and values are tossed together; categorical boundaries are blurred by rapid movements across them. sin, pleasure, political subversion, *nostalgie de la boue,* heroism, adolescent self-indulgence, the most rigorous critique of reason: anything might converge with anything else in a network of intersections, or rather points of stupid conflation, for errant bits of commerce, science, sexuality, politics, religion. no separation of church and state (not even in order to make a religion of the state and a state of religion); no marxists taking the pledge to abstain, one day at a time, from the opiate of the people. the habitual dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is inadequate in this zone. even more important: the convergence of apparently incommensurable truths or systems is taken as an unerring sign of another, greater, even more orderly order hidden behind the given one. for instance, the stupid underground does not entirely disagree with a certain stupid president's apocalyptic vision of world affairs, his hysterical application of the book of revelations as a foreign policy white paper. the quasi-dispensationalist policies pursued by his administration are signs not just of dangerous eccentricity but of something essential in american history, in the organization of power as such. [26] the general fascination with conspiracy theories too represents the *knowledge* that the surface separation of spirit and matter in american culture belies a deeper connection. close attention to what another perspective would take to be the most random names and numbers that constellate around the kennedy assassination reveals that it was not only an anti-communist plot--already a wild stretch of the imagination for those in the possession of official knowledge--but a masonic ritual scapegoating, a mystical sacrifice, a symbolically overdetermined "king-kill": president kennedy and his wife left the temple houston and were met at midnight by tireless crowds present to cheer the virile "sun god" and his dazzling exotic wife, the "queen of love and beauty," in fort worth. on the morning of november 22, they flew to gate 28 at love field, dallas, texas. the number 28 is one of the correspondences of solomon in kabbalistic numerology; the solomonic name assigned to 28 is "beale." on the 28th degree of latitude in the state of texas is the site of what was once the giant "kennedy ranch." on the 28th degree is also cape canaveral from which the moon flight was launched--made possible not only by the president's various feats but by his death as well, for the placing of the freemasons on the moon could only occur after the killing of the king.^22^ the 28th degree of templarism is the "king of the sun" degree. the president and first lady arrived in air force one, code-named "angel." the motorcade proceeded from love field to dealey plaza. dealey plaza is the site of the masonic temple in dallas (now razed) and there is a marker attesting to this fact in the plaza. important "protective" strategy for dealey plaza was planned by the new orleans cia station whose headquarters were a masonic temple building. dallas is located ten miles south of the 33rd degree of latitude. the 33rd degree is the highest in freemasonry and the founding lodge of the scottish rite in america was created in charleston, south carolina, exactly on the 33rd degree line. dealey plaza is close to the trinity river . . . .^23^ all this can readily be collated with massive amounts of evidence attesting to masonic influence in the trilateral commission, in the "neo-nazi" bilderberg meetings of european political and financial leaders, in the rockefeller family, in the founding of the united states, in whatever institution one has in view; it can also be collated with evidence of alien intervention, the shadow of the ufo, either behind the masons or in their place; or collated again by those who would put alongside these masons and ufos a few satanists and jews. no accounting for the freaks of industry. if one wished to bother, counter-freaks could disprove most of this evidence and conclude in the knowledge that there are no such connections. but we will not be too quick to dismiss them here: there is always a truth to the stupid underground, even if it is a stupid truth. [27] or to be more precise, a methodology: stupid hermeneutics. all these facts can be collected, indexed, cross-referenced, glossed and reglossed, woven into the dense fabric of the final truth, the big one, the gnostic big evil behind all the little viral evils that flicker across the archivist's screen. everything is evidence for a truth that lies elsewhere; the slightest friction between a number and a name can indicate the deep encryption of a truth that holds the key to a truth that must be organized with other truths that indicate this missing totality. without the slightest doubt the trajectory of evidence leads to the certain proof of clandestine connections between people in power and, what is more, between seemingly distinct orders of reality: common, household tools conceal super-advanced extraterrestrial technologies linked with the real systems of power behind the apparent political structures, and all these are linked with the dark magic, the secret laws of nature behind those that science pretends to offer us. everything and everyone is controlled from the outside. everything is a matter of coding and decoding: a semiocratic delirium. what bataille calls, in deadly earnest, *parody* as copula as the illicit copulation of facts: this = this = this.... the chain of evidence is endless and at every point it adds up to the missing one. [28] conspiracy reflects, or shadows, the hybrid character of the stupid underground itself. it is the place where things that don't belong together do, and it projects-discovers these relations, these transformative maps, under the centers of power as well. it finds the other of its own marginality out there, secretly in charge of the visible forms of authority. if you want them, we already have at our disposal psychoanalytic tools for diagnosing this fatuous hermeneutics. zizek: the common feature of this kind of ingenious "paranoid" story is the implication of the existence of an "other of the other": a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great other (the symbolic order) precisely at the points at which this other starts to speak its "autonomy," i.e., where it produces an effect of meaning by means of a senseless contingency, beyond the conscious intention of the speaking subject, as in jokes or dreams. this "other of the other" is exactly the other of paranoia: this one who speaks through us without our knowing it, who controls our thoughts, who manipulates us through the apparent "spontaneity" of jokes. . . . the paranoid construction enables us to ignore the fact that "the other does not exist" (lacan)--that it does not exist as a consistent, closed order--to escape the blind, contingent automatism, the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order. (18)^24^ the stupid underground comes closest of all to the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order. we should always be careful, however, not to conclude that therefore one can live without this error, by a kind of decision, for the subject who would make the decision is constituted in the first place by its relation to this empty order, this hollow other. and who's to say what's really out there? who's to say that something utterly other really doesn't exist? why not demonic saucer masons encoding the destruction of political power into the very symbology of american democracy? why not the fucking hand of god? zizek himself repeats the old joke about the man who complained to his analyst that there are crocodiles under his bed; when he doesn't turn up for an appointment the doctor assumes it is because he has achieved a cure, only to discover the man was indeed eaten by crocodiles in his sleep. perhaps the notion that the other does not exist is the other of psychoanalysis. isn't the whole point that there are only *points de capiton,* never a total truth on which to anchor something more real than the real--that one cannot, in any sense, claim to have possessed the real, not even by means of a symbolic-rationalist dispossession? the stupid underground, once again, proceeds along this line not by analytical distance but by frenzied overdetermination: the only reality is the apocalyptic plot, and the plot is always at one and the same time hidden and omnipresent, vaporous and thick, future and present ("the end of the world is over"), ridiculous and serious, unacceptable and unavoidable, the most grotesque, most immediate, and most conspicuously absent truth. stupid undersound</h2> [29] everything significant takes place below. nothing has changed: in the most primordial epistemological topography, truth has always been subsurface. one must dig down for it, one must not be distracted by superficial effects. power itself works subversively, under cover, indeed under the cover of one's own consciousness. it burrows under one's skin, insinuates itself parasitically within the human organism, eating away at its autonomy and transforming it into a parasite as well, affixing it symbiotically to the host apparatus. one must be vigilant without rest: in the slightest lapse of attention, the slightest weakening of one's defenses, at the very moment when one thought oneself alienated to the point of immunity, some viral bit of advertising, some invisible hook, some cultural lure one had never even noticed before expropriates ones's desire and turns one forever into one of them, lusters after supermodels, foreign cars, stock portfolios, leather jackets, sculpted delts and pecs. it is always the case that one swallows the lure before one notices that it is a lure; and that is why the mechanisms of the lure, reaching into us under our defenses, tunneling under every critical maginot line, must be decoded and catalogued relentlessly. it is here that we encounter the other sense of the subliminal: not only the zone of the id, the unconscious, the underground itself, but the subliminal means that what we call capital uses to colonize us, its technologies of suggestion. if stupid research is especially alert to mechanisms of subliminal manipulation, it lags behind the christian fundamentalist who knew years ago that satanic lures were coded into the lyrics of the pop albums spinning endlessly in their teenagers' rooms, driving them to drugs and suicide, which of course their parents could never do. whole court proceedings have hinged on the possibility of turning these fleeting backwards messages into hard evidence; and no doubt the paranoid projection of such messages onto what may in some instances have merely been noise--though it is axiomatic in the stupid underground that there is no such thing as simple noise, that signal to noise ratios are absolutely overbalanced, that noise, indeed the unheard, the interval between noises, is dense with information that has simply not been decoded yet--no doubt the imagination of such forms of subliminal suggestion only inspired bands and recording engineers subsequently to put them there, in the technique referred to as "back masking." and long before judas priest went from marketing satan to paying his dues, muzak christmas carols droning in mall elevators indicated to certain hypersensitive ears that the most banal is also the most insidiously powerful--more terrible because of its prevalence than the vague threat of criminal violence, always there, eroding our self-control, indeed our very being. "we managed to get hold of some muzak records..., and they had the whole chart of frequencies and tempos and things like that you should use at particular times of the day."^25^ key words can be distributed fractally through a cover text in such a way that you are manipulated by messages you don't even know you are reading. sexual organs and the mere word *sex* are not-quite-hidden in billboard gestalts all along the freeway, in commercials, in magazine ads, perhaps in the textbooks you once brought home from school. the certainty that these messages are out there trying to get in puts the stupid underground on a particularly aggressive defensive, caught up in a perpetual double reading and double interpretation of an already overloaded screen, subjecting itself to the ceaseless vigil in which absolutely nothing can be taken for granted lest, in a weak and passive moment, the crucial message gets in and reduces one to an automaton of the commodity (which in any case has long since occurred), or of even more nefarious and perhaps extraterrestrial forms of mind control and body snatching. there is an extraordinary recurrence of this theme in fanzine interviews with a certain cohort of musicians (throbbing gristle/psychic tv/chris and cosey, spk, non, cabaret voltaire, monte cazazza), who therefore take it as their mission to alert listeners to the menace of subliminal overcoding, and to provide strategies for countering it. actually, only a few specific strategies are ever proposed: adaptations of the william burroughs-brion gysin method of cutups ("cut word lines . . . trailing to the better half," rearrange control texts at random in order to disrupt them; here we are not very far from the avant-garde belief in the subversive agency of collage, which is difficult any longer to support); a kind of *%detournement%* in which one reseeds the semioscape with one's own anarchic messages (a project now entirely without effect); or experiments in subor hyper-sonic transmission. one might find mark pauline or genesis p-orridge or members of cabaret voltaire poring over obscure technical journals (where, they report, burroughs believes the only creative writing is to be found) for information on the construction of subliminal-effects generators. there is in this something like the acephalic materialism of bataille, a sense that control and its disruption happen not only ideologically, by semiotic dissemination, but also in the form of the drone, the too-high or too-low frequency, that communicates viscerally before one even knows one is hearing it, purely, one might say, at the level of the signifier, indeed of sound that cannot strictly speaking be called a signifier because it has no direct relationship to a signified, to a concept other than the mechanics of control itself, since it encodes its relation to power in another form altogether. "subliminals" are thus both overcoded and empty. self-control is obtained by breaking control, by wresting oneself from it, by a rigorous discipline of subversion. the conspiracy is vast, the signs penetrate one faster than one can resist them; even so, that never inhibits one from stupidly exaggerating one's outlaw autonomy. [30] let us recall that we have already encountered the subliminal in the form of the *trace,* which is not the source of control but there in its place, obscuring access to it, covering over a ground that cannot even be said to exist, "there," according to a certain now-standard logic, only as the supplement of an originary differance, neither absent nor present but the constitutive space (and time) between them. disruption of control is a reaction to a control grounded on its own disruption. behind the record company, the government. behind the government, satan, or the extraterrestrial. there is always some crime, some transgression, something deeper and more primordial than the forms of control one manages to discover. the absolute is out there, down there, indicated by the very fact that one can disrupt *this* level of control, or *this* one. no matter how deeply one penetrates, absolute control lies deeper. subliminal transmission demands it. loud [31] there is a certain justice to giving the task for discovering the silent forms of control to those whose primary mode of operation is enormous volume. the trajectory from loud rock music to even louder industrial music (boyd rice/non plays too loud even for much of the stupid club scene) to experiments in subliminal sound is continuous. there is, in a certain sense, no difference, no line between sound so loud it is all one can hear and sound so deep and pervasive it cannot be heard at all. loud is critical. or perhaps we should put the same matter differently: if we have taken *critical* to imply a certain distance, a certain non-identity with the object, loud proceeds, as the stupid underground always proceeds, in the opposite direction. rock music, after all nothing more than the prattle of a banal hybridization of capital and adolescent (male) fantasy, becomes, in *intensity,* at the most extreme volume, the stupid reduction of that constructed reality, the limit of its tolerability. critical then not through distance but, as we have seen, through proximity, through what would appear to be the most uncritical embrace. here again zizek is helpful: "although functioning as a support for the totalitarian order, fantasy is then at the same time the leftover of the real that enables us to 'pull ourselves out,' to preserve a kind of distance from the socio-symbolic network. when we become crazed in our obsession with idiotic enjoyment, even totalitarian manipulation cannot reach us" (128). zizek's example here is precisely popular music, the inane ditty that anchors the fantasy, that runs endlessly in one's head; what one wishes to add here is the criterion of force, of intensity, of sound so loud that, even though it is a cultural product from top to bottom, it nonetheless enfolds the audience and isolates it within the symbolic order. the intensity of loud drowns out the other. it is the limit of the symbolic, its null point, experienced in the very onslaught of its signs. perhaps we could appropriate a lacanian term for this fantastic volume that goes beyond fantasy: the *sinthome.* zizek calls it "subversive," but that, unfortunately, is to offer it to those who wannabe subversive, to see themselves seen as subversives, to be (to fantasize being) political agents in an older and ever more current sense.^26^ let us nonetheless pursue the concept for a moment. zizek: [t]he signifier permeated with idiotic enjoyment is what lacan, in the last stage of his teaching, called *le sinthome.* *le sinthome* is not the symptom, the coded message to be deciphered by interpretation, but the meaningless letter that immediately procures *jouis-sense,*"enjoyment-in-meaning," "enjoy-meant.". . . [w]hen we take into account the dimension of the *sinthome,* it is no longer sufficient to denounce the "artificial" character of the ideological experience, to demonstrate the way the object experienced by ideology as "natural" and "given" is effectively a discursive construction. . . . what we must do . . . on the contrary, is to *isolate* the *sinthome* from the context by virtue of which it exerts its power of fascination in order to expose the *sinthome's* utter stupidity. . . . [it] produces a distance not by locating the phenomenon in its historical totality, but by making us experience the utter nullity of its immediate reality, of its stupid, material presence that escapes "historical mediation" . . . . [i]t is a little piece of the real attesting to the ultimate nonsense of the universe, but insofar as this object allows us to condense, to locate, to materialize the nonsense of the universe in it, insofar as the object serves to represent this nonsense, it enables us to sustain ourselves in the midst of inconsistency . . . . (_la_ 128-29, 134-35) one might be used to the leaping and screaming frenzy of rock concerts, but unless one has experienced, at the same time that one experiences its destructive frenzy, the utterly euphoric, calming, peaceful effect that electric music at extreme volume can produce, one cannot grasp the possibility that it might fall into this category. what is merely social, the stupidest string of pop signifiers, becomes intensely material, becomes an exaggerated idiocy, a sub-ideological cocoon, a tear in the fabric of the social world within which it might still be possible to endure it, if one can endure the volume itself. what we must ask, then, is whether, at its most intense, loud is a thought.^27^ day job [32] best of all, furthest along its trajectory, is "zerowork," the refusal to work, the refusal to bid for equal alienation, disappearing from the tax rolls, from the very category of the unemployed.^28^ but how then to survive? by hook and crook, and the stupid underground is rife with pipedreams and proven scams. loompanics press offers the libertarian illusion, at least, that one can get by in the american economy without ever having to hold a job, and they'll send you info on how-to (theft, phony credit, welfare scams, scrounging freebies, various black market economies). or maybe you'll try dealing drugs (too many down sides). or being in a band, the archetypal boy-dream of play as work (as it turns out, too many down sides as well: venal managers, if you can even get one, larcenous promoters, an overpopulated market, weird compromises with industry and stupid audiences, and, after all, too much work). not working isn't easy, no matter how hard you work at it. hence, as has always been the case for the underground, the phenomenon of the day job. a perfect epitome of stupid. [33] in a slightly older bohemia, the artist's dream: uninterrupted time for the real work. or rather, what came to be seen as the real work, that painting or writing which was by force an avocation in a world where one was slave to the day job. each day demanded the most intense struggle to steal or conserve time from the world of the job for yourself, your spirit, your art. you came home from the shop or office exhausted, gulped down some dinner, fought off fatigue and drove yourself to canvas or clay or rehearsal or page for a few hours of real work; you labored so far into the night that the next morning you could barely drag yourself back to the office or kitchen or ditch. the cycle was constant and increasingly enervating, a losing battle. laundry piled up, appointments were missed, one skimped on meals and exercise and risked one's sanity and health. what are called, in an exemplary generic coinage, *relationships* also suffered: lovers felt they had to compete against art for your attention, however much you tried to reassure them, and you tacitly resented their demands for your time; intimacy itself had to enter the strictest economy. you learned not to take trips or wish for a better apartment or attend films or buy new clothes because every dollar could be invested for a few free months later on, before you had to submit to the next day job. a thousand petty tasks and distractions staged endless raids on your energy and attention, until it seemed that art itself was at war with everything else. the pitiable heroism of each momentary victory--each painting or poem finished--was belied by the triviality of its manifestation in a world in which, after all, a poem is merely a poem, and therefore a sign that a much more pervasive defeat had already occurred. you came to hate those born wealthy enough to avoid this struggle, although you also tried to persuade yourself that their work must be impoverished because they did not have to come into daily contact with the hard common truths of a world that, in this instance, you decide to call "real," as if these grotesque burdens could still be seen as sources of enlightenment; you also hated those romantic demons like van gogh who (you told yourself) were more committed than you, willing to sacrifice more, to suffer more, to give up their last few francs for tubes of paint even though they were starving. in either case, accusations you continually brought to bear against yourself for having to live an ordinary life in the midst--in *spite*--of grander aspirations. [34] the horror of the day job was thus the violence of life divided in half, a violence that cut through art itself and lent it a shadowy existence, made it the ghost, the phantom limb of what you might have accomplished, had you only been able to devote yourself to it entirely. the awful dissymmetry of this arrangement summons up a variety of analyses, most of them passing through historical marxism. the deadly drudgery of alienated labor is there grasped dialectically: although one suffers at the master's hands, although one's very humanity is denied, history is on the side of the worker no less than on that of the hegelian slave; if wage slavery is oppressive, degrading, destructive of everything that it means to be human, it is also ennobling insofar as the truth seized from this alienation informs a struggle against the power it represents. the immersion of the artist in the world of common labor was thus both an indictment of a society that steals time from the true mission and real work, and a means by which day job and real work came into another sort of relation that the wealthy and the dropout could not possibly express. but the compromises of this division could not be so neatly resolved. one continued to hope for future resolution, for a life of art; or one abandoned art and lived its imaginary and no less painful loss; or one tried to accept one's divided condition through some kind of self-hypnosis, through the image of a resignation one was persuaded to identify as maturity;^29^ or one turned the struggle itself into the subject matter of a series of neocritical art commodities; or one "succeeded" in the artworld enough to establish some sort of sinecure (steady royalties, corporate patronage in the form of commissions, a university appoinment), under whose aegis one had to force oneself to remember that even though the labor wasn't as bad as it once was, the day was no less divided. if the working class romantic bored you with creaking cliches about the dignity of labor, if the idea of total sacrifice for one's art grew embarrassing even for those who pretended to believe it, sinecured artists, however "critical" they remained, through an ability to set aside the material conditions of their lives even in the act of seeming to account for them, bored you even more. furthermore, the division of day job and real work, of alienated and integrated labor, frequently gave rise to another sort of collusion. the day job provided an alibi for the poverty of the so-called real work one actually managed to accomplish ("if only, if only..."), and the real work provided an alibi for slacking on the job. failure in each was the champion of the other. the division between them also produced the fantasy, in its own way quite functional within the reigning economy, that integration is really possible, that if only we could abandon the day job fulfillment would be ours; what is concealed here is the alienation attendant upon artistic production itself, both in respect to its social position and, even more fundamentally, insofar as it is a form of sublimation, a practice of culture as surrogation, through and through. all jobs are day jobs. [35] that is why, in the stupid underground, work embraces its stupidity. bike messenger, cappucino puller, cabbie, purveyor of used books and rags, health food bagger, record store peon, hip waiter or fast food shoveler, proofreader, phone-sex hustler, sub-programmer, security guard, venal rock-band manager, nouveau-entrepreneur: the day job still means a life carved in half, but now without the old cachet of noble struggle, without the slightest belief in fulfillment somewhere down the line, without the slightest romance of labor, however dialectical the sweat of thy brow, and with the certainty that the other half is permanently missing; one rarely bothers to yearn for it any more, and when one does, it's usually as a joke. even the consolations with which one tries to beguile oneself for having to work are aggressively inane. the only bonus offered by fringe subsistence is stupid proof that one really is fringe (i.e., happy confirmation of one's *ressentiment*), an alibi drained from the outset by the certainty that fringe employment is central to the economy. shit work is never anything but: the sheerest experience of personal waste, slow torture, indeed slow murder of limited time and energy that might be given over to music or art, but that is now precisely to say: to nothing at all. for art has become shit work too, and anyone who still falls for its false gratifications is merely and perhaps willfully blind to the fact that the apparent division between day job and real work only concealed a deeper unity, between art and society, on the very ground of alienation. that is why the avant-garde's committed refusal to work as a means toward self-realization--in the language of berlin dada, "poetry demands unemployment"--gives way to the dully heroic limbo of slacking. the revolutionary fades into the slacker, itself now the figure of a widespread and, for the moment, profitable cliche; a figure who haunts even the most energetic promoters of the old paradigms of critical resistance and new world vision, and whose own most prominent lunge toward that new world amounts to not much more than erasing a few files on the boss's computer. for every genesis p-orridge still clamoring sub-revolutionary enthusiasms about the power of pop there is a bob black or hakim bey insisting, in terms quite as archaic, that one must also renounce art; and for every one of them there are a million kids staring off into space while some industrial band drones in the background. the avant-garde's notorious attempt to bridge the gap between art and life on art's side of the line, or the committed artist's desire to bridge the gap on the side of the real world of politics, are displaced by blank exercises in reactive art and workplace "sabotage," usually nothing more than the pettiest acts of vandalism. there is now, in fact, a considerable literature devoted to chronicling these acts of worker micro-aggression.^30^ office supplies are pilfered, hard-drives purposely crashed, man-hours lounged into oblivion, fast food rendered even more inedible than usual. the pointlessness of such revenge on the boss and whatever forces he is presumed to represent is mitigated by the fact that it feels good, for a moment, to indulge it. any surviving luddism about grinding the machine to a halt or the revolutionary implications of hackers' viruses is merely window dressing for the immediate and miniscule satisfaction of ripping off the owners, slowing down the assembly line, or actually (horror of horrors) giving the customers what they want. nearly invisible gestures of *%detournement%,* pilfering, waste, explorations of the limits of employer surveillance, petty cruelties intended to alienate the boss's clientele, tiny experiments in polluting work with play, all of these acts are promoted with a sort of lukewarm, half-hearted rhetoric of resistance, as if the practitioner not only didn't really believe the rhetoric but secretly wanted to show how inappropriate it was to the occasion. the notion that the american work force at large is given over to acts of sabotage, slacking, and stealing to get by focuses the stupid underground's resentment and serves as an apology, which no one believes for an instant, for working at all. the violence that labor inflicts on the individual justifies microscopic destructions that pass the time until one punches out and goes home to squander one's time on one's own. cultural negation, where it still exists, seizes on the opportunity to turn stupid labor into a political opportunity, but the stakes turn out to be so low that the stupid saboteur cannot sustain the effort. it's all just a spasm of resentment; in the end, one would rather be in a band. and not even that, really. nomad, rhizome [36] intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. the exits and lines of flight pursued by deleuze and guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. by now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. the nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever deleuze and guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the state, in the sort of dialectical operation deleuze most despised. and the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. it is perhaps true that deleuze and guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of breton's indictment against rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, claudel's recuperation of him as a proper catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. the work of deleuze and guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. the problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, bwos, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. in deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). what is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the *fantastic* possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. in the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). it is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. to pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. it is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of deleuze and guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. one pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. the stupid optimism of every work that takes up these figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. one must pursue it still. si revenant [37] today you can purchase a copy of _the society of the spectacle_, now precisely a *mythic* text, newly translated by a professional scholar to purge it of those pesky inaccuracies that made earlier versions so difficult for all those pseudo-pro-situs to understand, and published in hardcover by a university press, for about $20. a souvenir edition. there is hardly a sign left in what has become, unhappily, we must suppose, a classic, that it was once translated by people who circulated it in a thousand illicit ways, without copyright and often for free, and stupidly presumed to put it to use. the new edition arrives at a moment when the notion of the spectacle has never been more dominant, when the most exorbitant utopian and dystopian claims have been made about the screen, when the commodity has long since assumed the dimensions of the entire society, to such a degree that one no longer seems to be saying anything when one resurrects this critique. hence also its utter irrelevance: the si's critique of the spectacle reveals its utter poverty and offers what even now proposes to be a new wave of critical energy to the spectacle itself. just as nothing came of the critique of the spectacle but a spectacle of critique (the marxian chiasmus was, after all, the si's favorite rhetorical form), so also nothing will come of the current neo-revolutionary era but another set of imaginary gratifications. and in fact not much more is proposed. as for the renewed interest in the situationist international itself: now tenured former pro-situs can engage in the pettiest and, in terms of their bio-bibs, most profitable and narcissistically stimulating squabbles with pop critics who would gladly reduce debord and vaneigem to a footnote in the history of a few rock bands, the most important of which was a front for a clothing store. if not articles of clothing, then critical articles. this, in a way, is the fate of every criticism: to be replayed and replayed until its only force is the force of stupidity in the face of criticism itself. and all of this was already there in seed form in the neo-stalinist antics of the si itself, with its central committees, its purges, its campaigns of ideological reeducation, its failed imitations of political diplomacy with other groupscules. in its own way, the si paved the way for its own spectacle through its stupid devotion to purifying its position, to defending its ideological identity through factionalism, alliances, corrections, and expulsions. the *position* constituted the si as a spectacle of criticism. and now its true destiny is bearing fruit in countless formal analyses, colloquia, and career opportunities. one should have predicted that the %derive% would end up leading us only through a few footnotes; nothing is left of the withering negation that gave the si all its energy. skin [38] how much can be made of a brightly colored scar? only yesterday the tattoo was presented--and who was there who would have bothered to argue against it?--as a radical form of self-expression, an intense and immediate means of repossessing the body, taking it back from all the social systems that, one believes, have stolen it. in various claims, developed more through repetition than through thorough investigation, the tattoo is a risk, an adventure, a gamble with permanence (although these days, laser treatments may make even that decision reversible, if you can afford them); it resexualizes and resacralizes the body and is hence an attack on a desacralized culture, a culture that separates spirit and body, purity and sexuality; it is transcendentally abject (so much going down to go up!); it is a provocation aimed at the straight world (we could begin to speak of something like *critical atavism*); it is a way to link those who have undergone the ritual of tattooing in a sub-community, and therefore a mode of communication as well; it is also, as we shall see, a peculiar and stupidly characteristic instance of fun. or so it is claimed. but for all its "modern primitivism," for all its stupid rousseauism and wannabe identifications with fringe subcultures (biker, carny, sailor, con), it is quite likely that the resurgence in the late '80s of the tattoo and the piercing--within a few years adorning insurance brokers and high-schoolers in the most fashion-remote suburbs--owed its genesis most of all to the t-shirt. the proliferation of tattoos followed upon the proliferation of insignia and logo clothing, the t-shirt emblazoned with band or team trademarks (functionally, the rock band and the sports team are quite close: fantasy identification with groups of ersatz heroes to which one does not in fact belong), art reproductions (the dissolution of benjamin's aura taken to its limit), kitsch signs, slogans, and cliches, tourist-sites, commodities, etc. one attaches oneself by means of this insignia to the apparatus of fandom; every t-shirt is the sign of an advocacy, even if one is not particularly invested in the product. one is identified with a product or image, one feels oneself so identified in the eyes of passersby and it is not, after all, so horrible a feeling. one is *recognized*, even if it is by proxy. it might even be amusing to associate oneself with a product one loathes, or to lend one's image to the debasement of a product (imagine skinheads wearing polo shirts). the t-shirt is thus a dream object for culture critics, what they would call a space or surface of mediation between the individual and mass culture (have we discovered interactive advertising?), and hence, according to the logic of cultural criticism, a site for its %detournement%. we could refer here to dick hebdige's notion of "confrontation dressing" (actually, vivienne westwood's phrase), epitomized by the punk swastika, riot grrl grunge, and middle-class girls decked out in the "sluttiest" gear (hooker chic, or underwear worn as outerwear, made famous and hence evacuated by the stupid icon named madonna).^31^ one submits to the objectification of the human body by the fashion industry but, in hebdige's view, exaggerates it and thereby "detourns" it. that nothing comes of this confrontation and reversal goes, for the moment, without saying. such projects are still caught up in a completely unconsidered modernist mythology of media manipulation and image subversion, and of the dialectical exposure of truth. however uncomfortable a few london punk girls managed to make a few pillars of the city during rush hour on the tube, business went on as usual; the confrontation was ephemeral and proved nothing but the inanity of both parties, who a few hours later were happy to forget that the episode ever occurred. in the great ocean of t-shirts, a few with swastikas cause an uproar only if it is convenient for all parties that they do so; and in the end, what difference does another uproar make in the spectacle? surrogate revolt meets surrogate shock in a "space" that has already shrunk to nothing. [39] in the movement toward the *sub* of all signs, t-shirt and skin converge. despite all the claims are made for the neo-tattoo--again: that it is a way to repossess one's alienated body, that it connects one symbolically with more integrated societies, that it is a sacralizing sacrifice, that it is a spiritual record, that it is a protective charm against spiritual and political demons, that the subjective intensity of the experience subverts cultural anaesthesis--the very proliferation of the tattoo indicates that, like just about everything else proposed as an exercise of difference, it too links the individual with the "economy of signs" in his or her most intimate dimensions. if we have not yet been subjected to the tattooed corporate logo, its time is doubtless imminent. nor should we underestimate the way stupid inflations of the sacred serve finally to trivialize it, and guarantee it for this economy. that is perhaps the real importance of the influential handbook that gave us the phrase, _modern primitives_: it signaled the end of the radical tattoo simply by announcing its appearance. skin is *marked* as yet another staging area for recuperation. at the same time, however, one should not dismiss the tattoo as merely recuperated. the tattoo, like the t-shirt, transforms the body into another agora, a corporeal mini-mall, but for what we might call *fuzzy capital,* part of the same "black market," the underground economy shuttling at a dizzying velocity between dreams of high finance and vows of poverty, that we witness in small scale drug dealing, in marginal rock bands, in various parasitical recycling enterprises (used clothes, used cds), in the distribution of stupid "knowledge" (amok, loompanics, et al.), in stolen technologies, in freelance sex-industry workers. fuzzy capital is an economy that is neither simply capital nor effectively subversive, neither recuperated nor liberated, but the collapse of any dialectical tension between them. the tattoo retains none of the critical distance someone like hebdige or orridge would like to claim for it, but nonetheless this peculiar embrace of the apparatus of recuperation, forcing oneself down the maw of commerce as if one were really indigestible, is not the production and circulation of a commodity like any other. the tattoo makes the skin a zone in which capital thrives under the aegis of its subversion and mutates even as it survives. lingis proposes a distinction between western or japanese tattoos that turn the body into a sign and those "savage," scarrified, african bodies on which tattoos are not signifiers, not semiotic, but forms of intensification that extend or distend the body's surface.^32^ the rhetoric of the stupid tattoo, however, as played out in _modern primitives_ and a burgeoning fanzine and e-mail network, may render such distinctions unstable. it is no longer simply that, under capital, everything becomes a commodity and hence a sign (as in baudrillard), nor that the underground is a space in the interstices of a power that is no longer hegemonically absolute but fractured and therefore open to the oldest sorts of oppositional agency and resistance; it is a question precisely of stupid space, fuzzy space. the tattoo is recuperated as a commodity, a sign, and yet it indicates that there is something primitive and non-signifying about the sign, something utterly atavistic about the commodity; stupid signification and stupid intensification converge and, by this means, inhibit an outmoded political critique. is the girl on the tube subversive or recuperated? hebdige would have us believe the former, in part because in his critical imaginary he wants to identify his own "radical" discourse with her lipstick; someone else would see her as a mere pawn of the culture industry. but what if she is both at the same time, and neither? a strange sort of disruption occurs. it is not revolutionary; it is trivial, utterly inane; and yet the moment the banker's eyes attach themselves to the tattoo of the rose (it is never much more than a rose) on this girl's breast, a stupid liminality dissolves, just for a moment, the clarity of a certain historical opposition, a certain recuperation and a certain critique. if the critical has always relied on the clarity of distinctions, on "exposing contradictions," it gives way at this moment to a sign that is not a sign, a disruption that is already smoothed over by capital, a fuzziness with which no criticism has yet been able to contend. fuzzy fun [40] it is notable how often the interviews in _modern primitives_--stupid interviews in general--resort, even while describing the most extreme practices, to the category of fun. the subjective analogue, the affective dimension of fuzzy capital might be fuzzy fun. stupid fun. piercing is fun, drunkenness and drugs are fun, sexual excess is fun, hyper-loud sound is fun, theft is fun, staying up for days is fun, *je m'enfoutisme* is french for fun. all of them together, what could be more fun. stupid fun is not simply pleasure, even in a complex economy in which pleasure and pain are inextricably linked; it is rather the intensity that binds them indifferently together. stupid fun is intensity itself: anything intense is fun. stupid fun is quite serious; it is also "political," we are told, by being the subversion of the serious, the practical, the useful, the profitable. at the same time it participates in (if only by stealing from) the general industrialization of amusement. one can buy it, ingest it, for a while have it; it is even imminently obsolete, just like the commodity; but it also floats free of the objects to which capital would like to fix it, which are just as likely to lapse into boredom in an instant, to eclipse the dull aura and useless utility of the commodity even as they seem to announce it, to turn against the user and denounce the use. fun is difficult, after all, to exchange. it obeys peculiar laws that are refracted by capital but are not precisely economic. if earlier avant-gardes sought to break down the apparent boundary between art and life, so the stupid underground seeks the dissemination of fun past the demarcation of entertainment centers, the permeation of fun into all aspects of life, or else. fun is the register of the total aestheticization of experience. the rock band is a fantasy conjunction of work and fun; the day job is sabotaged because it is not fun; drugs are fun until one ends up in a recovery program, which will insist to you that you can have fun now without drugs. it might be a force of revolt in a world where the work-ethic dominates, but such a world no longer exists. fuzzy fun socializes pleasure, removes it from a strictly libidinal economy, pressures capital to satisfy us when it is clear that it cannot, and dissipates the gravity of its potential critique in the most critically trivial acts. sur la plage [41] 1. plagiarism has etymological roots in kidnapping, specifically the stealing of slaves or the enslavement of freemen. the %plaga% too is a net. 2. in 1987, an "international festival of plagiarism" (actually just a few venues in london and san francisco) announced the coming-out of sign-theft.^33^ what had always been characterized as the most obscene, insidious, pathetic attempt to pass off someone else's text or authorship as one's own now wrapped itself in the heroic banner of anarchism and marched forth as a fierce political and moral attack on the aesthetic economy. perhaps the very depth of the cultural revulsion against plagiarism guaranteed its eventual adoption, its stupid privilege, as a weapon of choice. this neo-plagiarism claimed its noble lineage from ducasse's "plagiarism is necessary; progress demands it"; from the bakunist line that "property is theft"; from the situationist economics of theft and gift and its strategies of %detournement%; from a highly conventional critique of the rather convenient specter of authorship as "bourgeois individualism" (stewart home: plagiarism is "collective creation"); and from the rise of various technologies for that greatly facilitate image recycling, such as electronic sampling (the bard of the '60s gives way to the recording engineer, the dubber and mixer, the dj of the '90s).^34^ plagiarism announces itself as the most modern of all compositional modes, since it recognizes (i.e., it sees itself uncritically in the theory) that everything new is old and that, at bottom, reality itself is just a flimsy patchwork of recycled images. plagiarism is an attack on art, but less on either its form or content than on its political economy, on the medium in which it circulates. plagiarism challenges the reduction of art to exchange: since only differences can be exchanged--since, as marx indicated, one cannot maintain an economy by exchanges of linen for linen ("a = a is not an expression of value") --plagiarism proposes to undermine economic and *hence* cultural value as such. and in any case, only wimps use quotation marks (richard hell). 3. on the cover of one of her books, kathy acker's picture is accompanied by the following advertisement: "this writing is all fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and not read any of it": a transparent dare, a patent lure, one designed precisely to entice the stupid reader; and yet she also insists, inside the book, that nothing is simply copied, simply stolen, everything is changed, reprocessed, creatively "detourned" (_lecter_). the plagiarist as robin hood: one cannot just steal and redistribute cultural wealth anonymously, in some sense one's own cultural and political "agency" must be reasserted as thief, or at least as critic, even as one tries by this theft to expose the very notion of the creative subject, even as one incriminates the originals as thefts. so sherrie levine's reproductions of edward weston nudes famously undermine weston's own purported originality: his photographs are seen to have quoted, without quotation marks--no wimp, he--a range of classical sculptural forms; and at the same time levine establishes her own reputation as what functions in the contemporary art market as an original, commanding, critical presence. perhaps then we must be careful in attributing too subversive a role to the plagiarist: perhaps authorship now begins to extend its privileges through the very critique of its operations; perhaps the familiar nimbus of individual agency now enshrouds the various bricoleurs who claim prominence in the name of subverting all forms of individual creative identity. but even so, even if plagiarism cannot free itself from the economic apparatus it claims to attack, even if it is only an alibi for the stupid resurgence of an even shallower notion of authorship, neither can it be altogether reduced to a position and an identity. rather, one might wish to measure in it forces that disrupt the very integrity of the textual "body." even the neo-plagiarist's hypocrisy contributes to the evacuation of this nearly extinct organism. 4. is this not one of the reasons why traditional denunciations of plagiarism so often deploy the rhetoric of rape, treat it as a perverse and vile crime against the text's quite physical integrity? thomas mallon and other pathologists of plagiarism register an almost visceral loathing for the sacrilege that the plagiarist inflicts upon his victim. one would like a pathology of this rhetoric as well, some investigation of the way body and cultural property are collapsed into a single sign, an assessment of the notion of plagiarism as a primal transgression of the body of the work, of language and culture. perhaps, when you tear a bit of text from the body of authorship, it is the law itself that screams; and perhaps it is in this scream that the plagiarist hears the interpellation of his own subjectivity. 5. if plagiarism is driven by more than critical will, if it is driven also by some order of desire, it is a desire to exploit (ruin, destroy) the other for the sake of one's own identity. to be someone over someone else's dead body. plagiarism is demonic posession, echolalia, speaking in tongues and hearing oneself in what they say. in this sense, plagiarism resembles what some would hold to be the essential poetic experience, in which the "poetical character" is vacated in order to be invaded by and to speak in the other's voice (keats's "negative capability"), and then scandalously claims that the creation is its own. when the crime of plagiarism is exposed, when we discover the other in the plagiarist's place, we see that the plagiarist has abandoned himself, sacrificed himself, fatally emptied himself to make room for his predecessor. the sympathy that the plagiarist is able to attract, noted with surprise by so many critics, might stem from this realization of how little the plagiarist turns out to be, how much he has enslaved himself to his master even in the act of stealing the life from him. plagiarism is a perverse transubstantiation: it presumes that to incorporate the word of another is to become, in effect, like another; the perversion lies in the fact that one suppresses this identification even as one asserts it; but subsequent diagnosis reveals that all one has suppressed is oneself. we should also note that, according to a popular line of analysis, plagiarists are always eventually exposed, and the reason given is a familiar one: the plagiarist "wants to be caught." *who i am* becomes me, in a sense, not only in the peculiar act of possession by which i am possessed, but in its cancellation at the vertiginous moment when it is revealed as false. we might also recognize here the father's murder by the primal horde that is one of freud's myths for the founding of culture, in which the destruction and consumption of the precursor reconstitutes it as an ineradicable and insatiable law, a myth that, for us, is a general figure for the secret, ferocious return of everything one imagines one has destroyed and surpassed. plagiarism is the return of the repressed of literary authority. at one and the same time: the constitution of cultural identity and its exposure--its reconstitution--as a lie. 6. neo-plagiarism takes up the situationist economics of theft and gift. it exposes property itself as theft and returns the text to a more "primordial" economy. we are familiar with claims that art is, or ought to be, a gift, both in the sense that genius is gifted and that the great work is donated, freely, for the good of all mankind. but to denounce someone as a plagiarist, to say "you stole from me," is, curiously, to contradict the notion that the work of art is a gift from the author to posterity. it reclaims the gift from the reader: it says, you can have this gift only so long as i still get to keep it, only so long as the conditions and privileges of ownership are sustained.[35] the charge of theft exposes the lie of the gift. what is more: it suppresses the essential link between theft and gift (according to the plagiarist's claim: all art, like all property, is theft), and refuses the gift that neo-plagiarists, who are entirely candid about the stolen goods they are circulating over their signatures, would present to all readers by ignoring the restrictions of property. but beyond these gifts and counter-gifts, beyond the bickering about whether authors or thieves are more generous, plagiarism is that violent expropriation whereby both insemination and dissemination, property and gift, authorship and its theory-death are revealed as interdependent, twin gears in the same machinery, and summarily negated. plagiarism negates authorship by grotesquely parodying it; it negates the limits of the text by exaggerating them in the very act of transgressing them; it negates the romance of dissemination by proving that nobody finally buys it, that eventually everyone wants to be recognized as some kind of author, even if only the author of a crime; it negates the romance of the death of the author by provoking our possessiveness about the corpse. only in the double transgression that reveals property as theft and belies the gift is the deepest economy of the work of art revealed. plagiarism is nothing more than the appearance of this economy. that is why it must be suppressed. 7. "all culture is plagiarized." to constitute it thus risks normalizing the crime and challenging culture as value, culture itself. that is why a certain order of plagiarism must be isolated, scapegoated, ostracized, treated with the utmost revulsion, reconstituted as a taboo. here again we encounter at least some of the reasons why victims of plagiarism feel polluted, why those involved in a case sympathize and identify with the transgressor even as the crime repels them, why plagiarists are often the most vehement defenders of literary property rights. plagiarism is the necessary exclusion of the founding crime of cultural capital. hence the real threat of plagiarism would lie not in the act itself, but precisely in its normalization, by means of which the crime would no longer be isolated and cast out, the pollution would remain general. by participating in the romance of the merry plagiarist, however much it indicts the crime of literary property, the stupid underground only reinforces, in reverse image, the singularity of plagiarism. one therefore dreams of a far more anonymous and widespread plagiarism, an epidemic of nameless plagiarists (is such a contradictory figure even conceivable?), of a magnitude and virulence prefigured but already immunized by the stupid underground. 8. implicit everywhere in this account is the masocritical dimension of plagiarism. if plagiarism as repetition can be recruited into a critique of originality--a critique that is already rather dated, already in the process of being forgotten, a critique that may be said only to have paved the way for the amnesiac resurgence of the expressive subject, the historical agent, the creative genius, for a new plague of critical autobiographies--the methodical repetition that characterizes the plagiarist is also a trace of the death-drive. plagiarism implies progress, which is also progress toward a death already immanent in every repetition. everything doubled is dead. as we have noted, if plagiarism destroys the integrity of the authorial and textual body, it also destroys itself in the process. moralists like thomas mallon frequently refer to the plagiarist's secret desire to be caught, and diagnose it as a "death wish" (34-37). behind the robin hood mask is a suicide in the making. plagiarism is the perverse cancellation of oneself as author, a pathological emptying of authorship in the very act of trying to mimic it. one gains an identity by having none, by taking up a persona that is soon exposed as false, as already dead. one must therefore imagine a plagiarism that pursues this double evacuation as it were purposely, assiduously, that steals not in order to gain but precisely in order to lose, and to make any further repossession impossible. the fiercest plagiarism would laugh off the whole critical melodrama of the death of the author and pursue a death without heroism, with nothing authentic to take the place of the one who died. i desire the body of another in order to live as a corpse. i desire the corpse of my writing to be exposed. i desire to expose the carrion feeding frenzy of all writing. i desire to embody and illuminate, in a kind of fire or language, the death of all discourse. kulture krit [42] is this what "adorno" had in mind? all this armchair *ressentiment,* other-envy, hyperactive *nostalgie de la boue* lapped up by university presses and colloquia? all these literary critics and social scientists demonstrating their irrelevance in the very process of asserting their political engagement, extending their great critical powers to prove, at enormous length, what everyone already pretends to know about ideology, about power, about resistance; projecting their imaginary agency into a cultural field already rendered a pure space of surrogation by the agency, the economy, of cultural discourse itself? and does this essay offer anything different? does one presume here to reinvent cultural criticism, to find a worthier object for its attention, to invent a truer truth about culture or a more subversive critical agency? the pitiable spectacle of the cultural critic, the entire hoax of engagement in fact already diagnosed by adorno, here gives way to a masocriticism that pursues this course only in order to run it into the ground, that wants nothing more than to expose the hoax by identifying with it completely and suffering its perfect abjection. masocriticism is stupid criticism, guilty by association with its worthless objects of attention, collapsing its distance from everything it purports to analyze, throwing itself into the arms of anyone who promises to unmask it. secret [43] we have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the culture of resentment, of a strict, self-indulgent, and self-evacuating reactivity, lamely proposing "new" models and modes of existence that nonetheless can never be entirely reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they sacrifice themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics into a suffocating embrace and cancel critical distance itself. but there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential contradiction. here we will follow the line of what deleuze and guattari call *becoming-imperceptible* toward an underground beneath the underground, one that does not make itself available to the critic's screens, a strange disappearance from discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an *ars moratorii,* a withdrawal or disengagement from the discursive economies than render null and void a thousand pretensions to resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning away, an internal exile (in all the complex associations of that interiority), a secret that the critic must finally postulate precisely in the absence of all evidence. if, in one sort of analysis, as we have noted, everything now is coming up signs, everything is rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene, we must assume that there are at least a few who have learned their lesson, a few for whom the lacerating parodies of the stupid underground no longer suffice, a few who have cancelled all bets and turned themselves out, declined any further reactivity and gone off the map. we should note here that, for nietzsche, the *man of ressentiment* is a man of secrets, one who is "neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. his soul *squints;* his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as *his* world, *his* security, *his* refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."^36^ for zizek, too, this overt obedience and covert refusal is the mark of a cynical reason that is the proper product of enlightenment reason itself. kant's opening of free liberal argument conceals a deeper obedience to the law, one that is not so much reversed as extended by the cynic: "we know there is no truth in authority, yet we continue to play its game and to obey it in order not to disturb the usual run of things."^37^ this, for us as for zizek, is in fact the normative model of criticism, and it is found most of all in the very place where kant situated it: faculties of liberal arts, philosophy departments, and so on. critical distance is belied by the deep obedience epitomized in the discursive economy itself, in the consistent material forms by which intellectual commodities are produced and exchanged whatever their ideological claims to difference; at the level of the intellectual product, there is clearly no difference between the strictest radical and the wooliest conservative. the stupid underground is attractive to criticism because it is a mirror in which criticism can see itself as it is, as a secret order of cynics, even if it does not always recognize itself there, even if the convenience of its denials drowns out its truth, shining through like the truth of the analysand. [44] it is noteworthy that even as nietzsche challenges the secrecy of *ressentiment,* he also sees the philosopher as a "subterranean tunneler, a mole, one who has returned almost from the dead."^38^ and it is this other secrecy that finally concerns us here: not the one that scarcely hides and serves merely as a weak alibi for perfect collusion, but one past *ressentiment,* a forgetting of culture. the stupid fascination with cults, networks, and conspiracies is a horizonal phenomenon, a coded desire that gestures toward another disappearance in which--*it is our duty to propose*--one is always about to become, and may finally achieve the empty lucidity of, a transparent fish.^39^ if the stupid underground is the indeterminate boundary, the blurred and therefore uncritical liminality of the cultural subject and the social world--of critique, resistance, recuperation, and perpetual complicity--it is also, along another frontier, a limit of cultural visibility itself, and serves as a launching stage for the ballistic invention of the sub-ject, one cast beneath the reach of critical illumination. the familiar logic of encoding and decoding out of which so much of the semiotics of the stupid underground is generated itself encodes the primacy of the secret. indeed, one becomes an "agent"--these days, a virtual synonym for the cultural subject--by one of these two transformations of the factum. one is either employed in the manufacture of cultural signs or presumes to decode their ideological truth; one either encodes the ideolect of the counter-culture or interprets it for the knowledge industries. we have never deviated from the argument that these two modes are interimplicated: the stupid underground, like every presented mode of resistance, functions as secret, encoded cell partly through the decoding and circulation of "information" encoded by the conspiracies it projects; and it is by this very means--and with the help of critical agency itself--that its secret marginality is economically recoded. but we must imagine, in reading the loompanics catalogue, for instance, that there are former artists and writers who have sent away for and taken seriously these how-to books on disappearance, on false identity, on survival without participation in the main chance; who are fasting to burn off cultural toxins and, even though they will never be entirely "free" of all discourse, have disappeared from *our* screens and hence pose a peculiar threat to critical industry as such. we might even take the stupid underground as a sort of decoy, a particularly blank marker for other sorts of communication and secrecy that are not visible in the least: the stupid underground is a sacrificial goat, offered up to us, pretending to be the real secrecy, while another, deeper refusal explores the smooth space of an exteriority entirely hidden and still entirely within the boundaries of daily life; deep-cover agents who, even as earlier avant-gardes pursued experiments in the form and content of art, engage in what one might call an *experimental economy* in which the very status of discourse and its modes of circulation are reconstructed. the conspiracy is the secret withheld from the observer; so too we conceive the stupid underground not as the site but as the threshold of another secret; we conceive it here in order to project a depth, a sub-stance, a becoming-imperceptible that will ruin us, masocritically, as critical observer, that will make a mockery of a critical distance that still claims to possess its object, its other. as this distance collapsed in contact with the stupid underground, so here we are left entirely behind; and it is this constitutive loss that we desire most of all. worse and more seductive than the angry contempt of the punk is his no-show at a later date, once performance no longer interests him, once he conceives recuperation and its stupid parodies more severely, once he cedes his critical intelligence and offers us absolutely nothing. in not appearing he thereby restages his appearance as the thing, if you will, the strange attractor of a now luminously empty real, the ruinous telos of our critical game, a perfect lure for the exposure of our symptomatology, a frustrating goad that draws out the humanist's humiliating aggression, a truth that is true so long as it fails to appear, and even if it did appear, even if it were possible to track it down and drag it out into the light, could only fail us and give way to another. what we ourselves stage here is a certain paranoic autoaggression, the disaster of discourse, a speech act on one hand calling into being the exteriority of discourse and on the other sealing it off from our own intrusion. a ghostly other who remains other and eternally returns by never appearing. the inaudible and commanding echo of discourse's repellant law. let us claim this secret other as our founding secret, a passage to which none of us holds the key because we ourselves destroyed it long before we ever conceived the door. desert [45] why so much stupid-critical fascination with the desert? foucault dropping acid in death valley is the perfect journalistic figure of the final cause, if you will, of theory itself. you go out into the desert to escape the social world, have visions, go native, clear a space to begin again, look into whatever abyss, encounter gods, escape in order to be able to return, die in order to be reborn, fast, find yourself, find the secret government installations that indicate the truth of power, wait for ufos, make art that is immune, for a few seconds, to galleries, write a book about america to sell back in france. the desert is at one and the same time the national park or disneyworld of the stupid underground, and the sublime landscape of critical theory. the only plants that grow there are fear and the ideal, twined gracelessly around one another. everything is preceded by its negation, even negation itself. the desert is the atopic capitol of nomadology, the smooth space of the erasure of cultural space, the very ground of the zone. it is the parenthetical frame of every topology. it is unconquerable, the purest outside, and identified with a range of heroic colonial subjects (native-americans, africans, arabs) with whom critical theory currently wishes to associate itself; it is also, by this very means, the incorporation and hence cancellation of every one of these figures. its flatness, however mountainous, makes it the perfect modernist surface; its emptiness and marginality, the perfect postmodern one. as the deadest of lands, its sublimity is far more productive than the most picturesque alpine declivity. it is sacred and empty, the illimitable locus where waste is inflated into a spiritual value; even god goes there to die. it is the expression, the sentence, of silence. a figural silence, first of all, but also the possibility of an actual cessation. all one's dreams of rigor run aground there. everything dead goes there to die again. a place to write hysterical essays on the end of criticism. and a place for dead vows: nothing further obliges you to return to criticism. an end to it. notes: ^1^ derrida's crucial effort, from his earliest work, to deconstruct the facile relation between inside and outside reproduced in this cultural model has had no final effect: for the most part it has merely reinforced the model with a certain rhetoric: one can now make exactly the same assumptions in the very act of pretending one is criticizing them. by the way, wanna write stupid-critical theory? lesson one: attach the prefix *hyper* to every third adjective or noun. ^2^ see slavoj zizek, _enjoy your symptom: jacques lacan in hollywood and out_ (new york: routledge, 1992), 38-60, for an elaboration of the distinction between these two suicides. ^3^ we should also note trajectories that stop short of disappearance but are so destructive that one cannot speak simply either of their recuperation or their escape: from representations of the body to "body play" (organ-piercing, ritual suspension, etc.) to out-of-body experience to self-mutilation, autocastration, and suicide; from rock macho to punk aggression to a fascination with murderers (a certain journal called "murder can be fun," sold through amok and research; john wayne gacy's clown paintings for sale on melrose avenue) to brutal attacks on fans (gg allen, serving time in prison). for instances and glosses see, for instance, adam parfrey, ed., _apocalypse culture_ , (rev. ed., portland: feral house, 1990). ^4^ donald ault, _narrative unbound: re-visioning william blake's the four zoas_ (barrytown: station hill press, 1987). ^5^ in the critical rhetoric of "no longer" there is always an implicit "nor was it ever": everything closed off by such an analysis tracks itself back to its very origins. in _the theory-death of the avant-garde_ (bloomington: indiana university press, 1991), i pursued an analysis, along similar lines, of the history of the avant-garde: obituaries of the avant-garde tend not only to declare it dead now but in effect to claim it never really existed; its death is taken to prove that it never had any truth or force in the first place. ^6^ hakim bey, _t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism_ (new york: autonomedia, 1991), 77. ^7^ the latah, one might say, is the pure imp of the imaginary. burroughs: "this citizen have a latah he import from indo-china. he figure to hang the latah and send a xmas tv short to his friends. so he fix up two ropes--one gimmicked to stretch, the other the real mccoy. but that latah get up in a feud state and put on his santa claus suit and make with the switcheroo. come the dawning. the citizen put one rope on and the latah, going along the way latahs will, put on the other. when the traps are down the citizen hang for real and the latah stand with the carny-rubber stretch rope. well, the latah imitate every twitch and spasm. come three times." _naked lunch_ (new york: grove press, 1987), 79-80. ^8^ ron sakolsky and james koehnline, eds., _gone to croatan: origins of north american dropout culture_ (brooklyn/edinburgh: autonomedia/ak press, 1993). ^9^ on this "stain of the real" and its return, see slavoj zizek, _looking awry: an introduction to jacques lacan through popular culture_ (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1991), 39-44. ^10^ _amok, fourth dispatch_ , po box 861867, terminal annex, los angeles, ca 90086-1867; loompanics unlimited, po box 1197, port townsend, wa 98368. ^11^ for a consideration of means to disturb this control, see critical art ensemble, _the electronic disturbance_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1994). ^12^ francis crick, terence mckenna, william burroughs and brion gysin, interview in _re/search_ 3, any given issue of _mondo 2000_ , durk pearson and sandy shaw. ^13^ louis kaplan, ed., _the damned universe of charles fort_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1993), 79. further citations from this book appear in the text. ^14^ the distinction between nature and culture is so dominant in cultural criticism that one can bank on the fact that it is about to be overturned. it is probably only a matter of minutes before that absolute staple of gender criticism--that gender is strictly a matter of culture, not nature--gives way to a naturalism entirely unlike anything gender criticism ever predicted, and still the return of the same. ^15^ as it used to be said, the real "counter" in counter-culture is the counter in the record store, on which you place the same money, to buy virtually the same commodities. ^16^ kenneth dean and brian massumi, _first and last emperors: the absolute state and the body of the despot_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1993), 137-41. ^17^ on dobbs, see the subgenius foundation, _the book of the subgenius_ , (new york: simon and schuster, 1983); or join up yourself, by writing to the foundation, if it still exists, at p.o. box 140306, dallas, tx 75214. ^18^ pete scott, "what's there to smile about? the neoist cultural conspiracy," vague 18/19, 119. see also stewart home, _neoist manifestoes / the art strike papers_ (edinburgh: ak press, 1991). ^19^ stewart home, _the assault on culture: utopian currents from lettrism to class war_ (london: aporia press and unpopular books, 1988), 88. ^20^ standard terms of postmodernism from fredric jameson's standard account, "postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism," _new left review_ 146 (july-august 1984). ^21^ martin sprouse, ed., _threat by example_ (san francisco: pressure drop press, 1990). ^22^ at this point you too are beginning to participate: cape canaveral was for awhile, cape kennedy, and houses the kennedy space center. ^23^ james shelby downard, "king-kill / 33:," adam parfrey, ed., _apocalypse culture_ (first edition; los angeles: amok books, 1987), 242. for analogous documents see, for instance, _research_ 1; pieces by tim o'neill, gregory krupey, and james shelby downard in _apocalypse culture_ (revised edition, feral house, 1990); _the book of the subgenius_ , e.g., 91-105; "the mark of the beast" in _semiotext(e)_ usa (1987), 304-5; _vague_ 18/19; robert shea and robert anton wilson, _the illuminatus trilogy_ , (new york: dell, 1975); jim keith, ed., _secret and suppressed: banned ideas and hidden history_ (portland: feral house, 1993); or any of thousands of documents about communist-satanic-jewish conspiracies from other wings of the stupid underground. ^24^ power beyond power is necessitated in part by the fact that visible power is so finite and inefficient. as zizek elsewhere notes: "the fundamental pact uniting the actors of the social game is that the *other does not know all.* this nonknowledge of the other opens up a certain distance, so to speak, i.e., that allows us to confer upon our actions a supplementary meaning beyond the one that is socially acknowledged" (_la_ 72). *supplementary* is, of course, quite a loaded term, and might indicate that whatever is allowed us is also there in the place of an originary prohibition that restricts it, "so to speak" absolutely, from before the very start. what links many of the actors of the stupid underground is the certain knowledge that behind this failed other there is a more powerful one, the totality as the strictest if most invisible fact. the distance of this ultimate other collapses the distances of the social game. ^25^ interview with chris carter, _vague_ 19/20, 143. see also genesis p-orridge, "muzak," _vague_ 16/17 (1984), 176-78, and sordide sentimentale interview, _industrial culture handbook, research_ 6/7 (1983), 82-91. for techniques of counter-subliminal subversion, see for instance cabaret voltaire interview, _research_ 1, or cazazza, rice, and pauline interviews, _pranks: research_ 11. ^26^ see especially _le seminaire, livre xx: encore_ (paris: seuil, 1975). ^27^ see, for instance, various interviews in _industrial culture handbook_ and charles neale, _tape delay_ (harrow, uk: saf, 1987). ^28^ bob black, _the abolition of work_ (port townsend: loompanics, 1986); black, _friendly fire_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1992); black and tad tepley, eds., _zerowork: the anti-work anthology_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1993); john zerzan, various books, including _future primitive_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1994). ^29^ claims have been made by artists of a slightly earlier generation that the necessity for work was neither resented nor romanticized. philip glass, discussing his need to continue driving a cab even after he had attained his first international fame, said that he had no resentment--that he found most artists simply accepted the necessity of being a waitress or cabbie, without any ill-feeling. *no one asked me to be a musician,* he remarked. indeed; nor did anyone ask him to drive a cab. as if either were a matter of choice. and does he drive it still? no doubt, as soon as it could be abandoned, it was. it would be interesting, for a moment or two, to consider what he thinks of cabs now that he only rides in the back seat. if, in one sense, his adjustment to the facts of his life was the mark of a good attitude, what one calls a *mature* attitude, in another sense it was merely self-deception. in any case, what is at issue here is not simply a matter of attitude: day job and real work constitute a phenomenon, a constant experience, of dividedness that affects both, whatever anguish one manages to repress or sublimate; a *significant* violence in the organization of daily life. ^30^ chris carlsson, ed., _bad attitude: the processed world anthology_ (london: verso, 1990); martin sprouse, ed., _sabotage in the american workplace_ (san francisco: pressure drop press, 1992); _ben is dead 15, revenge_ issue (october-november 1991); _research_ 11, _pranks_ (1987); p.m., _bolo'bolo_ (new york: semiotext(e), 1985), 41 ff. see also _gone to croatan_ for accounts of workers' riots in the early history of the united states. ^31^ dick hebdige, _subculture: the meaning of style_ (london: routledge, 1979); also cited in _research 12: modern primitives_ (1989), 192-93: "girls have begun playing with themselves in public: parodying the conventional iconography of fallen womanhood--the vamp, the tart, the slut, the waif, the sadistic maitresse, the victim-in-bondage. these girls interrupt the image flow. they play back images of women as icons, women as the furies of classical mythology. they make the sm matrix strange. they skirt around the voyeurism issue, flirt with masculine curiosity but refuse to submit to the masterful gaze. these girls turn being looked at into an aggressive act." ^32^ alphonso lingis, _excesses: eros and culture_ (albany: suny press, 1983), 19-46. ^33^ stewart home, ed., _plagiarism: art as commodity and startegies for its negation_ (london: aporia press, 1987; repr. sabotage, 1989). see also _home, neoist manifestoes / the art strike papers_ (edinburgh: ak press, 1991); lautreamont, "poems," in _maldoror_ , trans. paul knight (london: penguin, 1978), 274; kathy acker, _hannibal lecter, my father_ (new york: semiotext(e), 1991), 11-18; john oswald, "plunderphonics, or, audio as a compositional prerogative" in robin james, ed. _cassette mythos_ (brooklyn: autonomedia, 1992), 116-25; karen eliot, "no more masterpieces manifesto," in james, 154-55; john yates in martin sprouse, ed., _threat by example_ , 57-61; mike bidlo in research 11: pranks, 54ff. for general remarks on plagiarism, see, for instance, thomas mallon, _stolen words: forays into the origins and ravages of plagiarism_ (new york: ticknor and fields, 1989), and peter shaw, "plagiary," _american scholar_ 51 (summer 1982), 325-337. ^34^ while kathy acker and others link neo-plagiarism to the "appropriationist" art of the 1980s, epitomized in the work of john baldessari, sherrie levine, and haim steinbach, who appropriated photographic work and sculpture or commodities into their own work as a kind of "subversive" quotation, others--stewart home, for instance--are anxious to distinguish plagiarism from appropriation: whereas "post-modern [appropriation] falsely asserts that there is no longer any basic reality, the plagiarist recognizes that power is always a reality in historical society," and incites it directly through acts of theft and *%detournement%* (home 5, 10), thereby speeding up the "decay of capitalism" (8). ^35^ on art as gift, see lewis hyde, _the gift: imagination and the erotic life of property_ (new york: random house, 1979) and various attempts to appropriate bataille's notion of expenditure for normative aesthetic exchange. ^36^ friedrich nietzsche, _on the geneaology of morals_ , trans. walter kaufmann (new york: vintage books, 1967), 38. ^37^ zizek, _enjoy_ , ix-xi. ^38^ nietzsche, _dawn_ , cited in john sallis, _crossings: nietzsche and the space of tragedy_ (chicago: university of chicago press, 1991), 10. ^39^ roland barthes, _michelet_ , trans. richard howard (new york: hill & wang, 1987), 33. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------ippolito, 'whose opera is this, anyway?', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-ippolito-whose.txt archive pmc-list, file review-3.996. part 1/1, total size 13224 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- whose opera is this, anyway? by jon ippolito guggenheim museum, soho ji@guggenheim.org postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by jon ippolito, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: tod machover and mit media lab's interactive _brain opera_, performed at lincoln center, nyc, july 23-august 3, 1996. [1] composer and mit media lab professor tod machover believes anyone can make music. at least that's what it says on the cover of the glossy brochure for his _brain opera_, which premiered last july 23rd at lincoln center in new york. part science exhibit, part music recital, the _brain opera_ promises its audience a chance to play electronic instruments in an interactive lobby and then hear a 45-minute performance based on their impromptu riffs and recitatives. the fact is, however, that the _brain opera_ doesn't exactly deliver on this promise--which makes machover's professed faith in his audience's ability to make music a bit less convincing than his brochure would have us believe. [2] i had been told in advance that the _brain opera_'s interactive lobby contained a battery of 40 or so computer workstations that produce sounds and video based on visitors' inputs. since for me "a battery of computer workstations" conjures up phosphorescent screens set into sleek metal consoles with shiny right angles, i was a bit surprised upon entering the lobby to find myself in a dark jungle of amorphous pods, plastic toadstools, and oversized potatoes hanging from the ceiling, all interlaced with vines of computer cable. it seems that machover and his collaborators hoped that a touchy-feely room of bouncing legumes would allay the public fear of technology. judging from the crowd's reaction, there was some justification for this hope: visitors streaming in the door eagerly hopped from pod to pod, thumping rubber protrusions to play crude rhythms or leaning their heads inside plastic cowls to chat insouciantly with videos of artificial intelligence pioneer marvin minsky. [3] it was not just the somewhat chintzy-looking plastic tubers that were designed to appeal to the computer illiterate, but also the way that these "hyperinstruments" responded to the audience's presence. a particularly successful example was called the singing tree, though it looked more like a giant plastic mushroom: by singing a pure tone into a microphone found under the mushroom's canopy, i was rewarded by a slightly delayed wash of sound harmonized to my voice, accompanied by the image on a video screen of a hand opening. the experience was unexpectedly gratifying--certainly the most intimate encounter i've ever had with a computer. the gratification was even more immediate with the _brain opera_'s other hyperinstruments. waving my hand in front of the gesture wall, for example, triggered a big splashy sound that i was told was the consequence of my hand interrupting an electric field generated by the gesture wall's bud-like protuberances. the trouble was, when i placed my hand at different points in the field to map out the way the sound was affected by my hand position, i found that no matter where i placed my hand or how fast i moved it the music sounded pretty much the same. ironically, the same mechanism that enabled me to make a sumptuous sound easily--a computer algorithm generating musical phrases based somewhat loosely on my hand position--prevented me from understanding, and hence controlling, the sound i was triggering. the result felt a little like having a conversation with a schizophrenic: it's hard to tell whether he's listening or not. [4] i felt this frustration at many of the hyperinstruments in the first room of the opera, whether i was drumming plastic protuberances, waving my hands in front of video screens, or listening to marvin minsky respond to my questions with non sequiturs. with any interactive work, the important question is not how to make it interactive--which is relatively easy with today's technology--but how to make the interaction rich and meaningful. this "quality of interactivity" problem is especially acute when the object of interaction is simultaneously billed as an artwork and an instrument (or "hyperinstrument"). one approach is to make an instrument that is highly underdetermined, something like leaving a guitar in the gallery for visitors to play. by plucking a few strings or strumming a few chords, they'll be able to figure out how it works quite easily; the problem is that it takes a lot of practice to produce something really interesting. the alternative approach is to give the responsibility for making interesting sounds to the machine, as exemplified by the _brain opera_'s hyperinstruments, which respond to visitors' gestures with entire phrases rather than individual notes. machover may have chosen this latter approach to ensure that visitors would not be intimidated by instruments that are too hard to learn. and his instruments do succeed in momentarily entertaining visitors flitting from station to station--it's just that they fail to interest them in sustained learning. the sounds are rich; the interaction is not. [5] after a half hour of hyperpummeling and hyperwaving, the audience moved to a theater for a performance featuring two hyperinstrumentalists, a conductor, contributions from the internet, and a lot of prerecorded sound and video. the result was a multimedia cocktail containing something to please every taste: more or less three parts minsky-esque aphorism ("the mind is too complicated to summarize"), two parts bach fugue, and one part each nasa photograph, bill viola video, and luciano berio soundtrack. there was even an ingredient added by the audience: we were told that sounds made earlier by visitors playing hyperinstruments would crop up in the performance, and that remote players joining in from the world wide web could exert some control over the sounds heard during a short section of the opera. perhaps the most important instruction in machover's recipe was to blend the contents thoroughly. for unlike the abrupt transitions found in more discordant postmodern compositions, machover's careful engineering of the overall sound mellowed the potential cacophony of all the contributors, with the result that his concoction became surprisingly "easy listening"--especially in comparison to the sonic anarchy of horn-honking taxis and chattering crowds that greeted me when i stepped out into lincoln center plaza after the performance. [6] the _brain opera_'s attempt to embody bottom-up programming--to make the work accessible to listeners by incorporating their own contributions--was in explicit homage to marvin minsky, whose 1985 book _the society of mind_ described a mind consisting of countless agents contributing to the daily upkeep of the psyche. in its mode of composition, however, the piece was an implicit homage to a composer who advocated a bottom-up approach long before minsky: john cage. cage pioneered a number of methods for throwing authoritarian control out the window, including mathematical determination, chance operations, and indeterminacy. in an indeterminate composition like _music for one_ of 1984, the score gives the players leeway as to when and how long to hold certain notes. cage called the unintentional montage when performers play overlapping sounds "interpenetration without obstruction," a phrase he borrowed from the _avatamsaka sutra_ of mahayana buddhism. [7] cage's decision to incorporate the choices of others into his work was a reaction against the model of an authoritarian conductor telling the oboe player when to play a c-sharp and how long to hold it. the _brain opera_ seemed to aspire to a similar democratic ideal--but then what was the conductor doing on stage during the performance, digital baton in hand, pointing at various players and inputs to emphasize certain voices and suppress others? and how much influence did the amateur hyperinstrumentalists and net musicians really have over the music, once their unruly contributions were blended into seamless music by the opera's engineers twiddling knobs and setting levels? to be sure, minsky's "society of mind," the model invoked in the _brain opera_ brochure, places a greater emphasis on cooperation and competition among agents than does cage's ensemble of autonomous musicians; if cage's society is anarchic, minsky's is more of a representative democracy, albeit a tangled "heterarchy" with agents at lower levels influencing the outcome at the levels above. nevertheless, what machover has realized is not minsky's representative democracy, but an oligarchy that subsumes the voices of the masses into a preconceived aesthetic program. as i took in its deftly modulated voice-overs and carefully synched video images, the _brain opera_ seemed to have less to do with the startling juxtapositions of cage's acoustic experiments than with a commercial for muzak i had seen on tv years back, in which technicians in white lab coats twiddled dials while a voice-over touted the benefits of "scientifically engineered music." perhaps machover has succeeded in engineering music that appeals to a broad audience. the irony of his achievement is that in order to prevent the listeners from being alienated by a truly "bottom-up" performance, the artist and his collaborators had to wrest control of the performance away from them. unfortunately for the _brain opera_, what is user-friendly for today's audience will probably sound hackneyed and sentimental for tomorrow's. somewhere in all great music there is a gap, a gap the listener must leap across to find meaning. if the _brain opera_ had such a gap, its ingratiating sound-and-light show made it all too easy for the audience to slide right over it, walk outside, and never think about the piece again. [8] that's why the most successful moments in the _brain opera_ were unmediated by a preexisting idea of what sounds or looks good. the melody easels in the lobby were video screens with abstract images reminiscent of the surface of a pond; by running a finger across the screen, a visitor could create wave effects rippling across this surface. one of the melody easels, however, produced a bizarre rectilinear wave when stroked, a pixellation that was definitely at odds with the natural motifs developed in most of the other hyperinstruments. i later learned that this effect was an "artifact"--the unexpected result of an algorithm gone bad. the fact that this melody easel was also most interesting to play confirmed for me the power of bottom-up programming over a preconceived aesthetic. [9] from new york the _brain opera_ is scheduled to open in linz, austria, followed by select venues in europe and asia. as this mobile composition tours the world, it would only be consistent with the _brain opera_'s stated ideals for it to evolve in response to feedback from its listeners. so here's mine: don't be afraid of the sparks that fly when algorithmic composition meets audience participation; present the unfamiliar noise produced by their encounter raw, without sugarcoating. john cage regretted that his work was not appreciated by a larger percentage of the general public, but he refused to dumb down his ideas to match the public's taste. the _brain opera_'s organizers have a real potential to achieve their goal of bottom-up programming--but to do so they will have to be satisfied with a stronger experience for the few rather than a weaker experience for the many. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------miles, 'hyperweb', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-miles-hyperweb.txt archive pmc-list, file miles.596. part 1/1, total size 4441 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- hyperweb by adrian miles http://www.ss.rmit.edu.au/miles/ department of communications studies rmit, copyright june 1996 postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher. ["hyperweb" is composed primarily of hypertext images and links, which cannot be reproduced on this site. it can be viewed on the web, using netscape 2, at url http:// jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.596/hyperweb/ index.html. (see contents or abstracts for further instructions.)] ------------------------------------------------------------- this is an experimental hypertext site using html. it is an essay about what hypertext is, and it performs what it says. while making use of various images it is text driven, and like all such projects is a combination of the personal, the contingent, and the theoretical. it relies on netscape version 2 or greater. this is *not* my usual policy in www publication and design, but this site is less about the www and much more about hypertext per se. as far as i'm aware these pages are html 3.0 compliant, and they make use of gifs and jpegs (depending on which yields the more economical file). netscape 2 seems to do the best job of the browsers i'm familiar with of dealing with the html elements contained on these pages. what happens... the web pages that make up this site use the html <meta> tag to provide a client side pull where pages are loaded serially. you can attempt to intervene at any point by clicking on an image, a word, or a letter. in most cases where a link is available it will randomly place you back into the series, however in some cases the hyperweb 'expels' the reader. if you simply let the pages cycle then the hyperweb will take about 6 or 7 minutes to return to its beginning (if you've already loaded the graphics see below), but if you intervene you can end up anywhere. making it work these pages require netscape (http://home.netscape.com/) version 1.1 or greater. version 2.0 is recommended. to speed delivery of the pages you can download a page that has all the images this site uses, then move into the site proper. this is advantageous because netscape caches these graphics, which means that it delivers them as needed; thus the pages will run as they're supposed to. you should make sure that you have netscape configured to load images automatically. ftp if you have downloaded the hyperweb via ftp to your own computer then you do not need to preview all the images manually. simply enter the hyperweb, making sure you have your browser set to load images. technical specs the pages were written in storyspace v.1.3 (eastgate systems [http://www.eastgate.com]) then exported as html files. they were edited substantially using pagespinner (http://www.algonet.se/~optima/pagespinner.html)and bbedit (http://www.barebones.com/). all work has been done on a macintosh quadra 630 (20mb ram, 500mb drive) and a macintosh duo 250 (12mb ram +ramdoubler, 200mb drive). an apple colour one scanner was used for the graphics, graphics editing by photoshop, and that's about it. * the graphics page (http://jefferson.village.virgnia.edu/pmc/ issue.596/hyperweb/images.html) * the hyperweb (http://jefferson.village.virgnia.edu/pmc/ issue.596/hyperweb/1_151.html) ------------------------------------- copyright adrian miles 1996 department of communication studies media studies rmit ------------------------------------- -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------sherwood, 'millennial poetics', postmodern culture v6n3 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n3-sherwood-millennial.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.596. part 1/1, total size 18348 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- a millennial poetics by kenneth sherwood department of english state department of new york at buffalo sherwood@acsu.buffalo.edu postmodern culture v.6 n.3 (may, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by kenneth sherwood, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. review of: rothenberg, jerome and pierre jrosi, eds. _poems for the millennium: the university of california book of modern and postmodern poetry (volume one: from fin-de siecle to negritude_. berkeley and los angeles: u of california p, 1995. pp.xxvii + 811; 35 illustrations. paper, $25.00. [1] the newest entry in the long-running debate over the scope of modernism and its relation to postmodernism is neither a discursive essay nor a scholarly book. rather, jerome rothenberg and pierre joris reveal the "experimental modernism" at modernism's core via an anthology which, through its form and range, exhibits the continuity of poetries "that wouldn't so much describe the world as remake it, through a vital act of language" (189). their _poems for the millennium_ maps out just this expansive a project, one certain to be transformative of criticism and the hermetic world of literature anthologies. with a "global" reach that transgresses the conventional narratives of aesthetic movements or national literatures, the book performatively demonstrates twentieth-century poetries' exploration of language -the common term -in relation to: consciousness; desire; performance; dialect; technology; politics; and play. the resonance between these concerns and those of post-structuralist criticism illuminates the editors' contention that "at the core of every true 'modernism' is the germ of a %post%modernism."(3) [2] this first of two volumes embraces poetry "from fin-de siecle to negritude," crossing more than twenty national borders and nearly as many languages. an unusually expansive project in many respects, _poems for the millennium_ rejects the retrospective stance toward the literary canon typical of the standard anthology. it posits a formulation of new literary relationships rather than the further reification of accepted ones. of its eleven sections, only half respect conventional historical movements: futurism, dada, surrealism, objectivism, expressionism,and negritude. these are interspersed with three "galleries" and bounded by sections of "forerunners" and "origins." on either end, then, the temporal bounds of the anthology's period frame are strained at -as if to recall william blake's "poetry fettr'd, fetters the human race!" [3] in the initial "forerunners" section, which begins fittingly with blake, one first notes another aspect of this project's effort to survey without succumbing to the homogenizing and containing habits of the conventional anthology. instead of being presented in typeset "translation," the poems of blake and emily dickinson are presented in holograph. partly as acknowledgement of recent scholarship emphasizing the significance of the visual materiality of these authors' texts by susan howe and jerome mcgann, the visual reproduction respects the fact that blake almost exclusively self-published his poetry in handmade, illustrated books and dickinson meticulously bound her handwritten, eccentrically formatted poems into notebooks, holograph reproductions of which are the only adequate representation of her generally bowdlerized poems. [4] representing these and many other works in their original and often visually striking typography does more than make for varied perusal. it more accurately reflects the divergent activities taking place within what is too easily termed modernism. the reductive groupings of literary historians, their tracings of the anxious lines of influence, is aided and abetted by anthologies which themselves visually homogenize such writing. the materially conscious presentation here dramatizes the connections between nineteenth-century practice and the highly visual texts of futurism and dada, which are also presented in a sample of reproductions (leading in later years to the concrete poetry and book arts sure to be represented in the upcoming second volume). moreover, by reproducing something of the heterogeneous visual forms these poems originally took, the anthology argues for a consistent, historical interplay between poetry and visual art through the twentieth century while, at the same time, urging the reader to keep in mind the particularity of the remaining poems presented in the volume's default, thirteen-point sabon font. [5] the "forerunners" section that introduces the volume forces the reader of modernism to bring baudelaire, whitman, lonnrot, hopkins, lautreamont, and holderlin into consideration, but the book's closing frame, "a book of origins," is even more frame-breaking. consisting largely of "ethnopoetics" texts, it leaves modernism doubly open-ended. perhaps the most often overlooked dimension of twentieth-century poetry, the traditions which ethnopoetics encompasses are simultaneously ancient and contemporary. early efforts at ethnopoetics anthologies by blaise cendrars and tristan tzara (incidentally translated by joris in the 1970's) and its influence on poets like apollinaire, pound, olson, and rothenberg tell part of this story. unlike the conventional account of modernist visual art's appropriation of african traditional forms, "a book of origins" wants to see the poetries constituting ethnopoetics as themselves -apart from their important influence within euro-american tradition -essential dimensions of modernism. hardly meant to be comprehensive or even adequate, it points to the extensive body of rothenberg's previous anthologies. [6] for readers from the english departments certain to provide homes for many copies of this anthology, the "negritude" section will be particularly important. selections from aime cesaire, rene depestre, leopold sedar senghor, and leon gontran damas provide proof positive of the creative vibrancy of what kamau brathwaite subsequently termed "nation language." given the number of recent multi-cultural anthologies, most of which seem to assume that multi-cultural values require a narrative, formally "approachable," identity-based poetics, the acquaintance or reacquaintance with cesaire's poetry will invigorate. senghor's polemical claim to write a "natural african surrealism" should productively raise some eyebrows. but the placing of "negritude" against "surrealism" as defining twentieth-century movements begins to perform the reimagining of modernism that has been _millennium_'s proposition. [7] the four largely european movements presented -futurism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism -are most familiar, if not canonic, as rubrics applicable to the visual arts. believing that the "history of twentieth-century poetry is as rich and varied as that of the century's painting and sculpture," the editors emphasize the crucial roll of poetry in all four, exemplified by the work of painter/poets like kandinsky, schwitters, picabia, arp, and duchamp; it turns out even dali and picasso wrote some poetry. with notable exceptions in johanna drucker's recent work and that of marjorie perloff, it does seem that "the academic strategy has been to cover up that richness" (8). the special collusion between modernist art and poetry, through radical typography, is here convincingly illustrated through the careful reproduction of numerous typographical collages; works by marinetti, picasso, and carra, and max ernst's amazing visual/verbal collage "the hundred headless women," challenge the borders between literature and visual art. not to let the visual dominate, futurist performance poems and sound poems like schwitter's "ur sonata," which have existed primarily as curious footnotes to literary history, or in the colorful anecdotes of cabaret voltaire performances, are thrown into the mix. progressing by such contraries, the compilation of these divergent pieces substantiates experimental modernism, not as another monolithic "ism," but as a constellation of varied and serious activities. [8] the devotion of a section to "objectivism," the primarily american 1930's non-movement whose few verifiable members almost immediately denied the term's application to themselves, may be the most controversial of this anthology's gestures toward the canon. zukofsky, oppen, reznikoff, rakosi, and occasionally lorine niedecker are usually grouped among the objectivists (though often, as here, the older pound, williams, and the british basil bunting are also included.) their work shared an interest in the "historic and contemporary particulars of language," notably influencing black mountain and language poets as well as some contemporary french writers. yet what recognition they have received came as late as the 1960s. their early work, including oppen's first book _discrete series_, here reprinted entire, was often self-published and little circulated. the specificity of their language, the dense lexical and acoustical patterning of their work, particularly zukofsky's long poem "_a_", are just now being engaged by scholars. the (re)introduction of an anti-symbolic literalism -an ordinary-language poetics conceptually if not formally comparable to that of gertrude stein -may be the single most important event of twentieth-century american literature. [9] the unsettling of established literary niches is just part of this anthology's particular generosity. ultimately, it is less interested in challenging the constructions of literary history than in presenting individual poems so that they can be read on their own terms. the three remaining sections, termed "galleries," are interspersed through the book and together comprise nearly half its 800 pages. taking a cue from modernist collage, rothenberg and joris construct the galleries by placing poets in juxtaposition. each gallery presents a series of poets arranged chronologically, but the galleries themselves are not sequential. so the first begins with mallarme (b. 1842) and ends with huidobro (b. 1893); the second begins with yeats (b. 1865) and ends with lorca (b.1899); the third begins with akhmatova (b. 1889) and ends with paz (b. 1916). the resulting composition complicates any simple taxonomy of influence. has any other anthology ever dared to place william butler yeats beside gertrude stein, following her with rainer maria rilke, with an excerpt from james joyce's _ulysses_ beginning just five pages later? the arrangement and immense range take this anthology beyond the documentary presentation of what %has happened% to ask and begin to answer the question of what poetry is worth %bringing across% into the next century. in this sense, it wants to set aside genealogy to suggest the importance of interrelations and shared concerns among often historically disparate artists and traditions, as well as the larger, shared forces potentiating such works. [10] with respect to teaching, other anthologies may sometimes seem to satisfy the requirements of a given class. this is the only one i know which might actually stimulate the design of a course to fit it. for students and many teachers of poetry, the wealth of this book will bewilder. readers of modernist poetry will have heard of the dadaist tristan tzara's cabaret voltaire performances, but few if any will have considered the near-dada poetry of yi sang (korean) or j.v. foix (catalan). langston hughes's poetry is almost always addressed in relation to the jazz idiom or black english; but how many anthologies facilitate a comparison with the transcribed blues lyrics of doc reese, or with the complementary efforts of hugh macdiarmid to reinvent a scots dialect? [11] this raises the question, who is competent to teach such an expansive book? perhaps only rothenberg and joris. but the question itself highlights the guiding principle of more conventional anthologies: the transmission of a stable, contained network of representative and teachable texts. that it might raise such issues is this book's, shall we say, insouciant charm. it is not, of course, a perfect book. certain poets are badly represented, and many critics will want to descry the travesty done their favorite. a sadly out-of-print mina loy is represented by a hacked-up version of the "love songs" sequence; worse, the ubiquitous and tin-eared misprint of "sitting" in place of "%sifting% the appraisable /pig cupid" is again perpetuated. one has to wonder, if langston hughes's _montage of a dream deferred_ innovates the "segue," a serial motion between riffs and poems (as the commentary has it), why did the editors choose to present a scattering of ten poems from various points in the book instead of a sequence, without even indicating the ellipsis or otherwise giving indication of the classic repetition of riffs throughout the volume? and while we're at it: are "negritude" and "objectivism" -each given a section - more legitimate or significant movements than the harlem renaissance? is hughes the only "harlem renaissance" poet worth inclusion? how about sterling brown or james weldon johnson? williams's _spring and all_ (excerpted) makes remarkable use of prose and poetry; but so does jean toomer's _cane_, published in the same year. [12] the book's critical apparatuses are minimal; no intrusive and condescending footnotes clutter the text or waste space. poets are instead accorded a brief commentary (often partial quotes from period criticism or the poet's own statements) after the work. the section introductions and brief commentaries appended to most selections carefully eschew a sense of scholarly comprehensivity to turn back toward the work itself. the saved pages allow the quiet, white space of mallarme's _a throw of the dice will never abolish chance_ to play out over a full twenty pages; "the prose of the trans-siberian railroad," a two-meter-long poem/painting collaboration by blaise cendrars and sonia delaunay (designed so that its original 150 copies would reach the top of the eiffel tower) appears in reduced facsimile. [13] while granting the value of an uncluttered format,any reader without motherwell's _dada poets and painters_, all of marjorie perloff's books, the full run of _sagetrieb_, and a healthy selection of rothenberg's previous anthologies next to their desk will experience frustrated moments. was oppen's _discrete series_ originally printed three poems to a page, each separated by horizontal rules? who was/is maria sabina? where can i find further translations of catalan experimental poetry? why not mention that joris's complete translation of tzara's proto-ethnopoetics anthology (here excerpted) appeared in the journal _alcheringa_? for readers fascinated by the tantalizing two pages of "ur sonata," why not mention that the complete translation of schwitters (by none other than rothenberg and joris) is now available? since all the selections are necessarily meager and these editors, more than most, want to avoid the illusion of "comprehensivity," basic bibliographic and critical "links" to further resources should have been provided, at least to help the newcomer find more of the poetry. in an anthology as determined as this one to open up the domain of poetry,it is a shame the reader is not given more of a roadmap. [14] inevitable defects and petty complaints aside, as anthologies go, this book can fairly be called "revolutionary." its international scope reflects the global aspiration of poetry; its visual presentation testifies to the beautiful pragmatism of recent textual theory; the unconventional organization enacts a concern for the life of poetry, to conserve not embalm it. all told, it is a book unique among its kind. just to look at it is invigorating. to read it is an intellectual pleasure. no one who seriously engages it will leave the encounter with their view of poetry or modernism intact. in fact, this reader is on the brink of springing for the clothbound copy! to be able to say: "i am in the book. the book is my world, my country, my roof, and my riddle. the book is my breath and my rest." . . . the book multiplies the book. -edmond jabes -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------linetski, 'poststructuralist paraesthetics and the phantasy of the reversal of generations', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-linetski-poststructuralist.txt archive pmc-list, file linetski.996. part 1/1, total size 189137 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- poststructuralist paraesthetics and the phantasy of the reversal of generations by vadim linetski postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by vadim linetski, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. i. what is wrong with the oedipus complex?--the oedipus complex and "the foundational fantasy of the ego's era" (brennan) [1] these days it would certainly amount to a dare to propose that the oedipus complex is the very core of patriarchal/logocentric discursivity. every attempt to--consciously or unconsciously--(re)inforce oedipus (sprengnether 1985) is bound to be regarded as a reactionary enterprise. however, it is precisely such reinforcement that underpins the most advanced versions of poststructuralism. this paradox cries for a merciless treatment, for only thus can we hope to break the self-perpetuation of tradition, i.e. to attain the goal which the celebrated critics of logocentrism have justly posed but drastically failed to achieve. [2] to be sure, the task of surpassing oedipus is not an easy one; it implies real and not a conventionally rhetorical shift of paradigms.^1^ on the other hand, there are no actual reasons for pessimism.^2^ to substantiate our claim we must closely attend to the genealogy of this pessimism, that is, to start with the question, "what is wrong with oedipus?"--however trite it might appear to the poststructuralist eye. [3] fortunately, the triteness happens only to be ostensible. consider, for instance, one of the basic feminist charges against the oedipal structure(s), that "the oedipal chauvinism...for which freud's theory of the girl as 'little man' manque was exemplary" (benjamin 1995: 118). chauvinism is, of course, an expression of the unconscious fear of castration, which, in its turn, gives rise to aggressivity, to the "drama of rivalry and aggression" that, according to brennan, defines the "ego's era"--the era of a self-contained patriarchal subject aspiring for (absolute) mastery and knowledge of the other (brennan 1993: 53). as the postructuralist saying goes, historically, this abstract subject has found a talented impersonator in the father of psychoanalysis. witness freud's strategy with his patients, governed as it was by the wish to evade and obscure "the legacy of the pre-oedipal period," "the flexible identificatory capacities of pre-oedipal life" (benjamin 1995: 119, 117). it is with the latter that feminism (and poststructuralism in general) has placed its stakes. hence the vogue currently enjoyed by the "notion of recapturing over-inclusive structures of identification...by decentring our notion of development and replacing the discourse of identity with the notion of identifications" (118). at first sight it may actually appear that the decentering pluralization of identifications offers an economic solution to our problem. since, as derrida has taught us, there is no absolute 'beyond' to any logocentric structure, one has to work from the inside in the manner of "pharmakon." as we shall shortly ascertain for ourselves, this view of deconstruction drastically limits its scope, making it a purely rhetorical affair, and unfortunately not in the de manian sense. [4] theoretically, the pluralized identifications should enable us to circumvent the rigid oedipal identifications which form the coercive structure of patriarchy and in so doing to merge the parental figures into the "father of individual prehistory" who can be dubbed the mother as well (cf. kristeva 1987: 33; 1989: 13-14).^3^ in kristevan terms, this mergence allows the semiotic to emerge into the symbolic, the former acting as a "pharmakon" to the latter. the result is that "we plunge...into the representational flux--the rolling identifications and wrappings of self and other--of fantasy itself" (elliott 1995: 48). put otherwise, "the construction of interpenetrating consciousnesses" (cf. dorval and gomberg 1993) should guarantee that the concomitant construction of the "libidinal space" (elliott 1995: 45) would be purged of the aggressive rivalry (brennan 1993: 53). thus, the way for the post-oedipal non-patriarchal sexuality (not in the developmental, quantitative, but qualitative sense) freed from coercive relations of power seems to be cleared, so that nothing prevents us from assuming that the "foundational fantasy" of the ego's era which excluded the woman (49) has been successfully displaced and replaced by a more progressive fantasmatization (cf. castoriadis 1995). however--and be it only as a tribute to common sense--i think it would be unwise to purchase a new commodity while taking its difference from the old at face value. in other words, the underpinnings of the fantasy acted out by poststructuralism remain to be seen. ii. the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism-"literature is psychoanalysis" (spivak) but is psychoanalysis literature?--parapsychoanalysis (telepathy) and paraesthetics (intertextuality) [5] in order to proceed with our inquiry in a most succinct way we will be well-advised to focus on the implications which the developments sketched above have for literary theory. far from being fortuitous, this focus is implied in the subject we are discussing. not only because, psychoanalytically, the notion of fantasy is bound up with the problem of human creativity (i.e., with such questions as repression, representation, sublimation, etc.), but first of all because poststructuralist decentering of fantasmatical constellations underpinning the oedipus complex is aimed at a subversion of the status of psychoanalysis as science conceived as an embodiment of the logocentric urge for absolute knowledge and truth. this subversion initiated by derrida's critique of lacan (1988, 1975) and n. abraham and m. torok's works (1976, 1978) has by now become a rather conventional affair. literary theory adds nothing essentially new to the notion of intertextuality being, at most, another illustration of how the author's (freud's) ashes can be disseminated.^4^ nevertheless, it is precisely from this (para)psychoanalytic point of view that the (para)esthetic notion of intertextuality fundamental for poststructuralist theory in all its existing versions and applications can be most fruitfully questioned. the patient reader will soon see why. [6] the most recent attempts to undermine the psychoanalytic edifice foreground the notion of telepathy and in doing so promise to bridge the notorious gap between psychoanalysis and literary theory by trying to utilize precisely the alleged logocentric blind spots of both domains (n. royle 1991, 1995). after the studies of s. markus (1985), n. hertz (1985), to say nothing about derrida, we are inclined to take for granted that psychoanalysis has mistakenly taken itself to be a science, whereas it is actually nothing but a fiction, a sort of literature (certainly, a first-class one). however, it remains to be proven that literature is psychoanalysis--and, more importantly, not "a perfect psychoanalysis" (spivak 1994: 64), but also not entirely a failure.^5^ whence the appeal of telepathy, which "connects by disconnecting" (ronell 1989: 132), retaining %the supplement of copula% precisely by crossing it. "there is no 'and' between telepathy and literature" (royle 1991: 183). "it is difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. they can be neither confused nor dissociated" (derrida 1981: 11). however, if we are to believe poststructuralism, every attempt has been made in the history of psychoanalysis to sunder both theories. not so much by freud himself, who was "mad" enough "to speculate on telepathy" (spivak 1984: 64), but by his followers, especially by ernest jones, who in derrida's narrative comes to play the role of a scapegoat. the irony of the matter is that, in derrida's own terms, this scapegoat is precisely the role of a subversive "pharmakon," for the excluded other inevitably spoils the coherence of the system unable to accommodate its "prodigal son." as we shall shortly see, such is the case with ernest jones, whose intuitions were obscured and ignored by the psychoanalytic edifice for just the same reasons which now guide derrida in his search for the guilty party. iii. the prodigal son of psychoanalysis--the notion of "aphanisis" [7] given the current troubles with constructing feminine identity and articulating a theory of "ecriture feminine," troubles which, according to sprengnether, boil down to inability of leading feminist theorists to free themselves from the spell of lacanian thought (1995: 147), it is indeed surprising that jones's contributions to psychoanalysis remain in abeyance. for it is nobody other than ernest jones who has provided us with a set of valid tools for solving the aforementioned problems. my contention is precisely that a genuinely new theoretical model can be elaborated on the basis of jones's legacy. i think this assumption will be sufficiently substantiated if we succeed in demonstrating that the model in question can account for textual reality more adequately than the models propounded in the wake of deconstruction, the "telepathic" model included. [8] as a theorist, jones is best remembered for his notion of "aphanisis," that is, of the disappearance of desire. that thus far no one has ventured to rethink this notion is another example of the "lacanian spell" to which the postructuralist thought remains subject.^6^ the result is a drastic misunderstanding of jones's notion. witness an entry in laplanche-pontalis's dictionary, an entry, which, totally ignoring the most intriguing implications of this notion, can be said to give a faithful account of it only insofar jones really "evokes the notion of aphanisis in the context of his inquiries into feminine sexuality" (1988: 40). jones himself is at least partly responsible for the vicissitudes of this concept: certainly, there is no articulated theory of aphanisis of which to speak. our present task is to remedy this deficiency--not only by drawing all the consequences from jones's remarks, but also by connecting these remarks with a number of heideggerian and bakhtinian intuitions which point in the same direction. iv. aphanisis and telepathy [9] our first step will be to point out that aphanisis, central as it is to jones's thought, has a profound connection with his attitude towards telepathy, which, contrary to derrida's assumption, has nothing to do with logocentric biases. in fact, just the opposite is true. witness jones's paper on "the nature of auto-suggestion" (1950). certainly, jones is unequivocal regarding the fundamental impossibility "to combine the two methods of treatment...those of psycho-analysis and suggestion" (291), equating suggestion with hypnosis, telepathy and analogous states (275-277). however, upon closer inspection, the train of thought leading to this conclusion proves to be a radical subversion of logocentrism, and thereby shows derrida's precarious complicity with the latter. [10] what should alert us that things are not just so simple as derrida would like them to be are two facts in jones's paper which, far from being suppressed, come to the fore of the author's attention. on the one hand, jones is quite willing to acknowledge that "it is extraordinary difficult to draw any sharp line between heteroand auto-suggestion...the former process may prove in most cases in practice a necessary stage in the evocation of the latter" (284-285, 289), stressing, on the other hand, that "we can no longer regard the subject as a helpless automaton in the hands of a strong-willed operator; it is nearer the truth to regard the operator as allowing himself to play a part, and by no means an indispensable one, in a drama constructed and acted in the depths of the subject's mind" (277). both points play a prominent part in derrida's celebration of telepathy,^7^ which can be regarded as an attempt to "resurrect" poststructuralist intertextuality by deploying the formalist device of "defamiliarization" ("making strange," "%ostranenije%").^8^ the effects of auto/hetero-suggestion as a disseminating process for the dislocation of subjectivity are described by jones with sufficient objectivity to find derrida's approval and to conclude that hypnosis and psychoanalysis are opposed as "the eastern and the western methods of dealing with life" (293); these are a patent example of ethno/logocentric prejudices that border on a real outrage since both methods are equated with the difference "between infantilism and adult life," respectively (293). unfortunately, such an evaluation provides all too easy sailing, for the invocation of infantilism has much more to it than a deconstructive eye is willing to admit. [11] it is obvious enough that a problem of knowledge is at stake. far less obvious is which "method of dealing with life" that knowledge should be aligned with and what attitude should be regarded as its opposite. the first part of our question can be found without transcending jones's corpus, the second part requires an enlargement of our field of inquiry. [12] given the poststructuralist view of psychoanalysis as a bulwark of logocentric scienticity and the subsequent efforts to undermine it by reading freudian theory as an "auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic" (derrida 1977: 146) "paraesthetic" narrative, one will be certainly inclined to assume that jones's refutation of hypnosis and telepathy stems from his concern that psychoanalysis retain the status of a science. this is why it is so surprising to find that the real concerns of our author lie elsewhere. even the most superficial reader cannot fail to notice that the controversy between hypnosis and psychoanalysis is judged from a purely pragmatic point of view, i.e., not as a theoretical problem but a practical one. if the methods based on suggestion are undesirable, it is because they fail to alleviate the symptoms (292). this explains why, in the last resort, the question of hypnosis boils down to the question of lay analysis.^9^ put otherwise, psychoanalysis is to be preferred not on scientific grounds, i.e., not because of the insights into the content of the unconscious which it achieves--jones is quite unambiguous regarding the fact that both techniques uncover the same complexes and fantasies (287-288)--but solely because, contrary to hypnosis, it can free the patient from his/her symptoms (292). however, this is not to say that the question of knowledge is absent from jones's discussion and therefore can only be imported into it by the reader. v. paraesthetics and the infantile sexual theories [13] the irony of the matter is precisely that knowledge makes its appearance under the guise of infantilism which is attributed by jones to techniques akin to suggestion. so long as knowledge, to slightly alter derrida's dictum, is that which returns to the father, jones's constant emphasis that, contrary to psychoanalysis, paratechniques (hypnosis, suggestion, telepathy, etc.) inevitably bring about the return of the father figure^10^ point to the heart of our problem. [14] this return is bound up with the reactivation of primary narcissism, which defines the hypnoid state (286). however, in order to tease out all the implications from this statement which at first sight appears hackneyed and uncommitted, we will be well-advised to take a step backwards, that is, to return to the stage in freud's development at which what has lately come to be known as ego-libido was still--and, as we shall see, more adequately--theorized as ego-instincts or instincts of self-preservation. for this return not only presents the sole possibility of solving a number of fundamental quandaries but also ultimately of precluding the desexualization of psychoanalysis,^11^ the desexualization, which, paradoxically enough, was an unavoidable corollary of the introduction of narcissism. [15] in other words, the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse is bound up with the reactivation of infantile sexual theories. it is precisely this "infantile" grounding which prevents deconstruction from reaching its goal. since we would like to make this goal our own, our first task is to identify the particular infantile phantasy underpinning derrida's theorizing. however, this identification is impossible without a reconsideration of the psychoanalytic attitude towards the sexual theories of children in general. [16] insofar as the infantile curiosity concerning sexual matters can be viewed as the very foundation of psychoanalysis,^12^ it is surprising to discover that it finds no separate entry in laplanche-pontalis's dictionary of psychoanalytic terms. that the authors have chosen to subsume our problem under the rubrics of "phantasy" and "sexuality" is a good example of the direction taken by post-freudian psychoanalysis. and it is this direction which, throwing its retroactive shade on freud himself, makes of a psychoanalysis an easy prey for poststructuralist attack. vi. sublimation and its discontents--sublimation primal and secondary [17] what is at stake here is the very possibility of an exchange between psychoanalytic theory and humanities in general, literature in particular. for such an exchange, i.e., the existence of applied psychoanalysis, cannot bring any worthwhile results so long as psychoanalytic theory remains haunted by the ghosts of unsolved problems which bear directly on the foundational principles of psychoanalysis. more concretely, it is "the lack of a coherent theory of sublimation"--the lack which is not simply "one of the lacunae" but the lacuna "in psycho-analytic thought" par excellence (laplanche and pontalis 1988: 433)--that in the last resort is responsible for that precarious state in which psychoanalysis currently finds itself. [18] the reluctance to thematize the link between sublimation and infantile sexual theories is quite understandable, for such a thematization will immediately expose the resemblance between the psychoanalytic edifice and the tower of pisa, inevitably exposing the profound complicity between poststructuralism and its logocentric adversary. and this is due to the fact that the architects have disposed of the very cornerstone of their construction. put crudely and bluntly, freud's legataries have got him completely wrong. [19] to clear the path, let us start from the very beginning --of freud's development as well as of a human being's. [20] the basic premise of psychoanalysis is that sexuality develops anaclitically: "the sexual instincts, which become autonomous only secondarily, depend at first on those vital functions which furnish them with an organic source, an orientation and an object" (29). since "the instinct is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted towards a new...aim" (431), we can conclude that the emergence of sexuality is the first sublimation--the sublimation of self-preservative instincts. on the other hand, so long as freud took considerable pains to keep sublimation distinct from repression as two different vicissitudes of the drives (cf. freud 1915: 219), we can propose the notion of primal sublimation in contradistinction to the notion of primal repression allotted such a prominent role in lacan's semiosis. thus we have laid down a foundation for an alternative model that will allow us to escape in one stroke all the logocentric preand post-oedipal vagaries. [21] "the primal repressed is the signifier," says lacan in a passage which notably ends with a famous dictum: "desire, in fact, is interpretation itself" (1977: 176). all attempts to rethink the notion of primal repression in order to purge it of logocentric overtones (cf. kristeva 1987: 26-27, 33; laplanche 1987: 126-128, 137) have wound up reconfirming lacanianism: "whatever the radicalizing possibilities of primal repression and identification, identity requires meaning, and therefore symbolic law...relation to the other, and therefore to cultural, historical and political chains of signification. the entry of the subject into socially constituted representations secures the repetition of the law. for these reasons, it makes little sense to understand the psychical processes organized through primal repression as signalling a 'beyond' to symbolic law" (elliott 1995: 50). the irony of this excerpt is twofold. for one thing, it comes as the conclusion of a discussion in the course of which kristeva et alia have been criticized precisely for failing to signal as "beyond" to symbolic law (45). on the other hand, the alternative propounded by elliott--a view of primal repression as "*the representational splitting of the subject*" (50; his italics)--corresponds neatly to that with which every reader of lacan is familiar. however, elliott deserves our full appreciation for his unusual candidness. the straightforward equation of primal repression with identification (45, 51) and the concomitant foregrounding of empathy is precisely the discursive move which produces the (para)esthetic telepathic interpretive attitude of derrida, who is certainly far from admitting, as elliott does, that the result is the perpetuation of the law/tradition grounded in the notions--intersubjectivity, intertextuality, etc.--which are so dear to poststructuralist's heart. unfortunately, elliott's candidness does not extend far enough to lay bare the mechanism of the deconstructive perpetuation of tradition. hence his resentment regarding the impossibility to reach a "beyond"--a resentment which characterizes the current theoretical scene. the propaedeutic value of our analysis is bound up with the comprehensive demonstration of how and why poststructuralism has cornered itself into the impasse which it now bemoans. [22] despite its tone, the preceding paragraph is far from being a polemical aside, for it has established one fact essential for our inquiry. the recent celebrations of primary repression qua pre-oedipal identification(s) show the impossibility to differentiate it from the secondary repression--from the oedipal repression of the name of the father. at most, they differ quantitatively, the latter reconfirming the former. it remains to be seen what implications that this train of thought has for the project of "critical narratology," parading as another attack on logocentric oedipal metanarratives and taking its cue from derridaean dictum: "writing is unthinkable without repression" (1978: 226). [23] the unification of the notion of repression allows us to assign it a more definite place in the history of the subject's development.^13^ in fact, repression is nothing other than a secondary sublimation which differs in kind from the primary sublimation. what deserves our full attention is the fact that defining sublimation qua desexualisation and by the same token firmly grounding the concept of repression has become possible only after the introduction of narcissism: "with the introduction of narcissism and the advent of the final theory of the psychical apparatus freud adopts a new approach. the transformation of a sexual activity into a sublimated one (assuming both are directed toward external, independent objects) is now said to require an intermediate period during which the libido is withdrawn on to the ego so that desexualisation may become possible" (laplanche and pontalis 1988: 433). taken at face value, this passage gives no reason for panic since it seems to be in perfect accord with the generally accepted view of the ego. unfortunately, this first impression is misleading. sublimation conceived within the framework of narcissism turns out to be nothing less than a subversion of psychoanalysis %in toto%--or, to be more precise, of psychoanalysis equated with the theory of libido. [24] the first paradox that immediately leaps to mind bears on the obvious impossibility of reconciling the desexualization of libido through its withdrawal onto the ego with the general definition of the latter agency "as a great reservoir of libido" (freud 1923: 231). certainly, this paradox has not escaped freud's attention. this explains why the notion of the super-ego becomes indispensable, appearing with the logical necessity of derrida's "supplement."^14^ in effect, the super-ego, which, as a matter of fact, was introduced in the very same year as the cited definition of the ego,^15^ allows us to circumvent our quandary, but only confronts us with a more troublesome dilemma. vii. the production of oedipus [25] so long as the super-ego is conceived of as the differentiated part of the ego itself,^16^ it becomes possible to surmise that it is the former locks onto itself the libido withdrawn from the outer world (cf. 1916: 431-433). this means that sublimation within the framework of narcissism inevitably introduces the melancholic situation that it was designed to preclude by freud as well as by kristeva (freud 1916; kristeva 1989). the irony of the matter is that those who criticise kristeva for her conviction that "to deny the power of the imaginary father is to risk depression, melancholia and, possibly, death" (elliott 1995: 45) propound the model of melancholia as an anti-oedipal alternative (cf. abraham/torok 1978; sprengnether 1995) grounded in the notion of pre-oedipal identifications which, as everyone tolerably versed in psychoanalytic theory knows, have exactly the same desexualizing outcome as the introduction of the super-ego described above.^17^ whereas, according to the proponents of melancholically-telepathic hermeneutics, the melancholic model should enable the construction of non-oedipal sexuality. the paradox is resolved since the process of desexualization foregrounds all the essentials of such a construction. in effect, the instinctual diffusion resulting from identification is nothing else than the return of the celebrated infantile polymorphism (cf. deleuze/guattari 1972; lyotard 1993; benjamin 1995) which, however, happens to have nothing to do with sexuality. and it is hardly surprising, for the process we are discussing is aimed at undoing the primary sublimation that has transformed anarchical polymorphous instincts of self-preservation into sexuality. put otherwise, the secondary sublimation is the non-hegelian negation of the primary sublimation. and this is precisely what allows us not merely to equate secondary sublimation with the lacanian notion of repression which triggers off semiosis, but to place the latter in its true light. [26] the reference to hegel was meant as a caution against those cursory readers who at this point may be inclined to wonder whence all the sound and fury of our analysis, since it is certainly nothing new to say that repression is by definition a repression of sexuality. however, this argument is valid only if we take lacanian statements at face value. such naivete has been made impossible precisely in the wake poststructuralist appropriation of lacan's legacy, an appropriation that, more often than not, takes pains to stress its faithfulness to the "absolute master." [27] as we have seen, pre-oedipal identifications have exactly the same effect as the oedipal ones. and yet to conclude that we have already hit on the very reason of the poststructuralist inability to do away with oedipus would mean not only to treat poststructuralism rather leniently but also to miss the most interesting part of the whole story. for the gist of the matter is that identifications are in themselves neither pre-oedipal, oedipal nor post-oedipal since the oedipal structure does not pre-exist identificatory activity but emerges as its inevitable result. in other words, the discursive movement of telepathy and/or melancholy is a movement not of a reconfirmation/repetition but of the original production of oedipus. and it is at this point that the infantile sexual theories come in, enabling us to spell out all the implications of the proposition we have just advanced. [28] given freud's rank of an honorable structuralist, it is rather surprising that in the matters that interest us here he remains at the thematic level of analysis.^18^ this is even more true in case of his disciples.^19^ this sufficiently explains the general neglect and obtusion suffered by infantile sexual theories and corresponding fantasies. as was already mentioned, for freud these fantasies were the main evidence for the existence of infantile sexuality. this explains why he was reluctant to thematize the obvious fact that the impetus of infantile curiosity is provided by circumstances which are more likely to activate the instincts of self-preservation. i refer, of course, to the birth of a brother or sister. from a conventional, i.e., libidinal point of view--incidentally the one adopted here by freud--this event gives rise to envy and jealousy in the elder child(ren). but obviously there is no necessary connection between these feelings, however intense, and an urge to penetrate into the "secrets" of mother nature. moreover, the stronger the envy and jealousy, the less likely the appearance of an "intellectual" attitude: as common sense would have it, jealousy makes us blind. equally problematical is another conventionally libidinal interpretation which tries to reduce fantasies produced in the course of the child's inquiry to a plainly defensive affair and to make the inquiry itself a deployment of a defence mechanism. however, this interpretation begs an explanation of how a fantasy can protect a child from the repetition of a painful event and/or alleviate his/her current troubles. evidently, the omnipotence of thought also has its limits, and the child of course is not such a dope as to believe that his notion of "where the children come from" can have any influence on their actual arrival.^20^ the arrival of a sibling is certainly experienced as a threat, but not a libidinal one. if "the development of a child is materially influenced" by this event (boehm 1931: 449), then this is precisely because the problem thus posed is an epistemic one: it is a question of %hermeneia% and not of %filia%. put otherwise, the whole affair becomes traumatic because the child discerns in it not the possibility of the decrease of his/her share of parental love (here all depends on an actual familial setting) but the threat of losing contact with parents, of being excluded from communication with them.^21^ semiotically, the birth of a sibling represents an instance of diffusion, rather than confusion, of tongues between the child and adults (cf. ferenczi 1980, 1933). this suggests that trauma,^22^ representing as it does a rupture of a dialogic intersubjective relationship, can be reinterpreted in a way which will furnish us with a genuinely alternative model which will effectively transcend the logocentric (oedipal) binarism that is reinforced by postsructuralist ensnarement within the dialogue vs. monologue framework.^23^ [29] there are two ways out of the traumatic impasse in which the child finds himself or herself. but first of all it should be stressed that the impasse that prompts the secondary sublimation qua desexualization/repression^24^ is prior to any kind of oedipality to which it may or may not give rise.^25^ put otherwise, oedipus is a matter of free choice. [30] on the one hand, the child can try once again to deploy the mechanism of primal sublimation, i.e., to sublimate the upsurge of self-preservative epistemophilia into sexuality. if he succeeds, the diffusion of tongues referred to above becomes irrevocable and the child establishes a discourse of his own, beyond all patriarchal tradition. in other words, he spares himself the problematic of castration/oedipus simply by taking another route. this is what we will term the normal development without repression.^26^ significantly, the textual reality is a telling example of such a development. [31] on the other hand, the child can pursue his researches and become entrapped in the oedipal strictures. he will (re)invent the oedipal complex as the only means to ensure the possibility of communication. this obviously results in the perpetuation of tradition. it is far less obvious that this result crowns the efforts of those who make the undermining of tradition equated with power/knowledge/meaning/truth their battle-cry. we are left with a thorough misrepresentation and safeguarding of tradition; the targets of postsructuralist attack listed above (along with their derivatives) have nothing to do with the mechanism of tradition transmission. significantly, these same motives are responsible for the direction taken by the post-freudian psychoanalysis (lacan's version included), effectively robbing freud's teaching of its subversive potential. [32] consider the problem of the construction of meaning. as derrida would like us believe, deconstruction exposes the traditional claims for what they actually are, that is, an unsustainable effort to restrict the disseminating flow of significations. meaning is undecidable. to think otherwise is to fall prey to the logocentric fallacy. witness freud and his oedipal complex, a structure which "does not permit much flexibility" (sprengnether 1995: 143). hence the hope that the situation of "women differently within this general structure" (143) is ultimately of no avail: oedipus has to be "interrogated at its core" (143). as we have already ascertained for ourselves, this task, however valid and laudable, in poststructuralist discourse boils down to a declamation of %ceterum censeo carthaginem esse delendum%. if carthage nevertheless still flourishes, this is because the (para)esthetic discourse of empathy/telepathy which foregrounds desexualizing identifications cannot help but promote the oedipal structures and thereby unwittingly prove that these structures are far more flexible than generally assumed. this certainly does not make them less dangerous. to the contrary. [33] to return to our little explorer: having succumbed to the urge for knowledge, he has the choice between the negative and the positive versions of the oedipal structure. given the alleged impossibility of surpassing the oedipal conflict, it is quite logical that the poststructuralist way of dealing with it boils down to privileging the negative version. whereas the latter articulates patriarchal knowledge as grounded in rigid sexual difference which, in its turn, presupposes the recognition of the woman's castration; "pederastic identification" implicitly "challenges the binarisms of sexual difference" by making the male subject "alert to further syntagmatic possibilities" (silverman 1988: 172-173). these possibilities inscribed in the primal scene allow the conception of the latter as "perhaps most profoundly disruptive of conventional masculinity in the way it articulates knowledge" (157): "...it would seem that to the degree to which the primal scene phantasy acknowledges castration it cannot help but generalize it by making it a consequence not of anatomy, but of a subject position" (166). this seems to explain why the knowledge with which the primal scene confronts the male subject comes to be repressed within the patriarchal paradigm, anchored in the positive oedipal structure that "fortifies the male subject within a paternal identification by renouncing his oedipal desires" (157). [34] the irony of silverman's account is that it leaves no place for infantile sexual theories. in effect, from the libidinal point of view, there is knowledge inscribed in the primal scene. however distorted, ignored or repressed, however belatedly understood, this knowledge remains active in shaping the subject's destiny. hence there is nothing to give impetus to infantile theorizing. at most, the child's brooding will be confined to the issues of activity/passivity and aggression/caress. it follows that the poststructuralist theorizing itself remains entrapped in logocentric binarisms and therefore drastically underestimates the intellectual capacities of children. this is not to suggest that infantile fantasies transcend the patriarchal discourse. what justifies our interest is the fact that the child can act as a subversive "pharmakon" precisely because of its innocent ignorance, both in respect to patriarchy and its alleged adversaries. it is sufficient to adopt the child's point of view in order to gain a vantage point for a genuine deconstruction. [35] as psychoanalytically informed poststructuralist feminist critics would have it, sexuality is pregnant with knowledge, and not the other way round. hence the role assigned to the notion of repression. silverman's reading of henry james is just another attempt to prove that without repression neither patriarchal discourse nor its deconstruction are possible. what is repressed is the woman, especially empathic identifications with the mother figure. the trouble is not so much that deconstruction consequently mirrors the construction of patriarchy, coming under suspicion of being a simple reversal of signs, but primarily that femininity and the strategy of its recovery through removal of repression are at odds. to expose this paradox means to show that the notion of repression,^27^ at least regarding applied psychoanalysis, is unsustainable and has no practical value. on the other hand, so long as femininity is equated with writing/style (derrida 1979: 37), we are left with a challenging task of thinking *writing* without repression. the generally accepted view of henry james as a patent example of *writing as repression* of unconscious desire ^28^ stamps him as a good frame of reference for our theoretical elaborations. [36] however, we are not as yet finished with these latter deliberations. so long as poststructuralism has already made the choice on behalf of our little explorer, let us see what the option in favor of the negative oedipus looks like from the point of view of the child itself. epistemologically (and it should be remembered that the child's concerns lie in this sphere), this option is obviously an ideal one. for, as freud puts it, "%pater semper incertus est%, while the mother is %certissima%" (1909: 229; his italics). all the child's broodings "over the question played by the father in the genesis" of the sibling (boehm 1931: 450) are doomed to be of no avail. hence the hermeneutical value of the identification with the mother; in identifying with her the child guarantees the automatic arrival of knowledge without any effort on its own part: all it has to do is to wait and see what the father will undertake with the mother.^29^ put otherwise, everything speaks in favor of the "pederastic identification" and, by the same token, nothing can explain why this identification should suffer repression.^30^ hence to assume that repression nevertheless takes place--and it is on this assumption that the whole critique of logocentrism apparently hinges--means to make the identification with the father a much more puzzling issue. [37] the paradox of the matter is that, in the poststructuralists' own terms, it is impossible to explain the existence of the positive oedipus, to wit, the very possibility of logocentric production of knowledge and ultimately, the existence of patriarchy itself. to be sure, all these things are hard realities, but poststructuralism is unable to account for, let alone deconstruct, them. and what is worse, this inability cannot help but unwittingly promote all that is ripe for subversion. [38] on the other hand, from the child's standpoint it is quite clear why he privileges the identification with the father. his motives have to do neither with the problematic of activity/passivity (silverman 1988: 171) nor with master/slave dialectic (brennan 1993: 53-55).^31^ for at stake for the child, and by extension, for logocentric tradition, is not knowledge per se, as derrida et alia take pains to convince us, but knowledge as a means of communication, by necessity a distorted knowledge. the epistemic certainty promised by the identificatory empathy with the mother has the same effect as total ignorance. and it is this janus-like threat which, as we remember, prompted the quest of the child traumatically desexualized by the birth of sibling(s). to be sure, in cases of the child and of tradition alike, to identify with the father means to make a virtue of a necessity. but precisely by force of this fact, deconstruction, which exposes the devices of tradition's transmission, in turn offers tradition an invaluable service. [39] as russian formalism has amply proved, the exposing device is an act of resurrection, of promoting to the second life that which by its own means is doomed to perish. it follows that derrida is quite correct in assigning to his "supplement" the status of the "discourse of support" (1981: 324-330) remaining blind regarding its supportive effects. the supplement adds itself to the discourse which needs support in the movement of "+ n" (cf. 1987: 122-180). this movement certainly has nothing to do with polysemy/knowledge (1981: 252-253); it (re)confirms by doubling the communicational setup. this means that the necessity of the "supplement" (and of all the other derridaean notions which are arranged according to the substitution/supplementary logic) is intrinsic to the logocentric discourse only inasmuch as it is historical, i.e., inasmuch as human being is subject to exhaustion, to economic aphanisis.^32^ put otherwise, derrida's supplement is a neat counterpart of the formalist strategy of "making strange."^33^ whence the status of pleonasm as one of the two master tropes of deconstruction. in order for there to be meaning one should guarantee a non-meaningless communicative substratum constituted by the overabundance of pure signifiers which tend to overflow all boundaries. whence the celebration of gossip which communicates nothing, but by virtue of this fact can be regarded as a pure instance of communication as such (cf. spacks 1985: 3-24, 258-265). notably, along these lines gossip comes to be aligned with telepathy and other (para)esthetical forms (cf. forrester 1990: 243-259). however, this grounding requires in its turn to be grounded itself. and it is the latter act concealed by tradition and its deconstruction that the recourse to infantile sexual curiosity allows us to divulge for the first time. viii. the fantasy of the reversal of generations and what is implied in it [40] the effect of identification with the father is the fantasy of the reversal of generations. already referred to by freud (1931: 421), it remained an aside in his teaching. the thread was picked up by ernest jones, who devoted to the subject a separate paper (1950). what this fantasy boils down to is the belief, "not at all rare among the children, to the effect that as they grow older and bigger their relative position to their parents will be gradually reversed, so that finally they will become the parents and their parents the children" (407). the correspondence between this fantasy and derrida's strategy of subversion of logocentric values, primarily of the notion of origin(ality), is striking enough to require no painstaking elaborations.^34^ on the other hand, it can be easily shown that the same fantasy underpins the discourse of poststructuralism as such. whence the necessity to investigate these matters more closely. [41] the conventional interpretation is satisfied in seeing in our fantasy an instance of the drive for mastery.^35^ paradoxically, to adopt this standpoint would mean to treat poststructuralism all too leniently and to miss the implications which highlight a real path beyond current theoretical predicaments. [42] significantly, jones himself hints at a possibility of a more fruitful approach. since our poststructuralist tutors have drilled us to see in the drive for mastery the rectification of the position of the logocentric subject, it is rather invigorating to hear that the effect of this fantasy on "the child's own personality" is that of distortion. it is precisely this effect that makes the reversal fantasy an essential mechanism "in regard to the transmission of tradition" (411). certainly, this corroborates what was said above about poststruralism's complicity with the tradition which it sets out to deconstruct. however, in order to pass from the deconstruction of an alleged deconstruction to the deconsruction of the tradition itself, that is, in order to launch deconstruction of the second degree and in doing so to propose a veritably alternative mode of thought, it is necessary to spell out all the consequences of jones's intuitions. [43] first, it should be noted that whereas freud evokes the reversal fantasy in his discussion of female sexuality, jones, for all his interest in the problem, chooses to speak in connection with our fantasy of a neuter "child." however, what at first glance is bound to provoke a fashionable rebuke for genderless thinking proves upon closer inspection to be a genuine starting point for a construction of feminine as well as masculine identity beyond oedipal strictures. [44] apparently, the reversal fantasy reduces lacanian accounts of the subject's entry into the symbolic order to its most schematic form.^36^ it is the reversal (%verkehrung%) of the drive which produces the split alienated subject of the symbolic--the subject "which is properly the other" (1977: 178 et passim). nevertheless, there remains one issue that seems to radically divorce our fantasy from the symbolic: the question of castration. the latter, as every student of lacan knows, is the crucial difference--and not only between the imaginary and the symbolic which otherwise tend to be conflated. the point of regarding this problem with the eyes of our innocent little investigator is bound up with the fact that this perspective shows beyond any doubt that the notions of castration and repression (the two being closely interrelated) are unnecessary for setting the mechanism of signification/tradition transmission in motion. the function of castration/repression is precisely that of derrida's supplement, a means of discursive revitalization.^37^ unfortunately, far from exempting lacan from feminist critique of phallogocentrism, this fact exposes a precarious complicity of feminist theorizing with its enemy. [45] as we have seen, the identification with the father does not promote mastery, but even less does it lead to the denigration/exclusion/repression of the woman. the mother figure remains essential; it grounds the patriarchal discursivity--precisely because it is not repressed and therefore is not made to represent "castration as truth" (derrida 1988, 184).^38^ the paradox of the identification with the father is that it suspends the problematic of castration as an access point to truth. significantly, thus far no one has given proper attention to a crucial moment in freud's description of the castration complex which notably appears in a discussion of infantile sexual theories. the feeling provoked by the sight of feminine genitals is an uncanny, unbearable one. hence the first reaction of the male child is not to deny or repress the perception but to assure himself that "the girl also possesses the penis, although a small one; but in due time it will grow. only when the consequent observations prove the unsustainability of this surmise, the child assumes that the penis was cut off" (1910: 164-165). the identification with the father effectively spares the child the necessity of relinquishing his initial hypothesis. and this is precisely because the transition from the passive to the active position drastically diminishes the cognitive dimension, however phantasmatical and hallucinatory the latter may be. to become an actor, one has (at every moment to be ready) to act and not to wait to be acted upon. but there's the rub! for the child still remains in darkness as to what the father does with the mother, still remaining excluded from communication with the adults. whence the value of the initial hypothesis (the penis will grow in due time) which allows him to escape from this predicament that has proven to be unsurmountable by means of identification alone. the identification with the mother promises an absolute knowledge that can only result in silence, whereas the identification with the father prompts the communicative deployment of the knowledge which is lacking. the assumed possibility that the penis will grow effectively negotiates between these extremes, introducing a temporality which grounds hermeneutics as such. however, the advent of deconstruction coincides with the exhaustion of the potential of this temporality and by the same token of the resources of the western hermeneutic tradition. [46] the infantile sexual theory we are discussing substitutes discursive certainty for the linguistic one. only the former can ground communication as an intertextual exchange. the child gives woman and her penis time to grow, but it is equally true that the woman gives time to child's curiosity to unfurl itself without the pressure of temporal handicaps.^39^ therefore neither the child nor the woman strives to be "waited upon" (brennan 1993: 91); both wait (for one another). and it is this mutual waiting which grounds the intersubjective dimension of "energetic" exchange (110, 116), the dimension in which the temporal pressure is sublated by the potentially meaningful ones,^40^ to wit, by the narratological suspense. put otherwise, temporality underpinning the fantasy of the reversal of generations is exactly the same as that which derrida elaborated in _donner le temps _(1991). ix. the guilt of gift, the gift of guilt [47] according to derrida, the giving of time is the impossible possibility both of the recit and gift (1991: 46-60). the paradox, however, is that it is not only the tradition which cannot account for and accommodate the notion of the gift subversive of all restricted economies (21-29) but derridian discourse as well, for the structure of gift as described by derrida corresponds neatly to the hermeneutical structure of guilt developed by heidegger.^41^ this means that the real "debts of deconstruction" are more profound than samuel weber would like to make us believe. [48] weber's paper can be classed as seminal in as much as it represents the most overt effort to "domesticate derrida" (godzich 1983), that is, to suppress derrida's striving to surpass the paradigm derived from his work.^42^ starting with derrida's refusal to accept a telephone call, weber draws the connection between this act and derrida's wonder at the ease with which freud refuses his debts to the predecessors (cf. derrida 1980: 25-26; 280-281) in order to reject derrida's intuition that it is possible to abolish intertextual/intersubjective indebtedness (derrida 1980: 415). what is striking is that weber classifies this intuition as "no longer deconstructive" (1987: 121). as we shall see, it is precisely this intuition which leads directly to the real deconstruction and not to what thus far passes under this name. [49] since the telephone call was supposedly from heidegger or from his ghost, weber draws upon heidegger in order to show the impossibility of repaying debts. for %dasein%, says heidegger, is always already, primordially guilty (heidegger 1962: 325-335; weber 1987: 129-131). now whereas heidegger takes pains to show that guilt and debt differ qualitatively just as, say, the irrational and an attempt to rationalize it (heidegger 1962: 329), with equal consistentcy, weber is bent upon equating both notions (120 et passim). and it is hardly surprising, since a strict adherence (a plain acknowledgement of indebtedness) to heidegger would immediately rob weber's exegesis of its raison d'etre. [50] in effect, that debt and guilt are not one and the same means that it is possible to requite debts so long as one assumes a primordial debt. hence the crucial question is whether it is this operation which derrida has in mind. or, to generalize the problem, will the proposition still hold if we reverse its terms? an answer, on which the fate of deconstruction hinges, provides the last recourse to the fantasy of reversal of generations. [51] the only explanation of derrida's conduct which weber can think of surmises that the rejection of the call was prompted by the lack of certainty as to the identity of the caller, of his/her "proper name" (130). obviously this solution does violence to the thought of heidegger and derrida alike. both men agree regarding the impossibility of unambiguously identifying a speaking subject--be it sender or receiver. witness heidegger's dictum "dasein's call is from afar unto afar" (271). this means that the fantasy of the reversal of generations amply exemplifies derrida's and heidegger's semiotical models. on the other hand, weber's view signals the semiotic closure implied in the identification with the mother. in other words, weber unwittingly exposes the ultimate fate of all versions of dialogism, for a most thorough (para)esthetic telepathic confusion of tongues cannot help but return to its "maternal" origin. [52] witness bakhtin, whose legacy is regarded as a theory of dialogism par excellence. throughout his mature works, utterance is constantly defined by the change of the speaking subjects, i.e., by a discursive reversal (1979a: 254).^43^ in its turn, this change presupposes a "minimal degree of discursive closure which is necessary in order to make a response possible" (255). however, this closure has nothing to do with the "understandability of utterance" (255), i.e., with epistemology proper (knowledge, truth etc.). de manian deconstruction provides a neat counterpart to bakhtins's theory. in de man's view, the epistemologic impasse, the celebrated undecidability of meaning, is a result of a clash between incompatible readings inscribed in a given text, although in itself each reading is complete ("finalized," to use a bakhtinian term) (cf. de man 1975: 29). this means that the undecidability of meaning/identity of the speaking subject essential to the dialogic project has an unpleasant corollary in the decidability of the place, of the position from whence the utterance comes and whither it goes. put otherwise, in order to remain forever uncertain about who is speaking, poststructuralism has to comply with certainty regarding the whereabouts of utterance.^44^ it is precisely this commerce that underpins the reversal fantasy, for in identifying with the father and giving time to the mother the child substitutes topological certainty for an epistemic (un)certainty. whence the distortive effect of this fantasy on the child's personality, which remains unaccountable and puzzling within the conventional interpretive framework. x. the law of (oedipal) return [53] by the same token, the reversal fantasy turns out to be not just a version of oedipus complex but the very locus of its production. in effect, the structure of oedipal law is traditionally described in genuinely derridaean/de manian terms. the law of oedipus is the concurrent contradictory demand: "you must and must not be like the father" (cf. laplanche 1980b: 284, 353, 401-402, 405, 409). conventionally, the acceptance of this law is equated with the dissolution of the oedipal conflict. but, as we have seen, precisely this allegedly post-oedipal impasse characterizes the child's reversal of the order of the generations. moreover, the acceptance of the (post)oedipal law turns out to be dependent on the maintenance of oedipal structures, achieved by the suspension of the core castration problematic. [54] the contradictory nature of the oedipal law seems to make it a perfect example of a bakhtinian double-voiced word. paradoxically, at the very moment when the (para)esthetic confusion of tongues reaches its acme, it becomes impossible to maintain intertextual telepathy. to make matters worse, it is none other than bakhtin who has pushed the paradox to the fore in a work which is generally regarded as a most inspired precipitation of poststructuralism. [55] i refer to _marxism and the philosophy of language_, in which the direct speech equated with discursive mastery as repression of "resisting voices" (hajdukowski-ahmed 1993) is opposed to indirect speech as a decentring dislocation of identities. in bakhtin's terms this is the opposition between linear and picturesque style (1993a: 130-131). the picaresque is characterized by a thorough confusion of tongues between the author and hero and therefore by the suspension of the inside/outside border (131).^45^ it comes as a surprise to hear that in russian literary language, where "as is well known, the syntactic patterns for reporting speech are very poorly developed," where "one must acknowledge the unqualified primacy of direct discourse" (136) the precedence of the picturesque style has remained unchallenged throughout the modern period of russian literature (from classicism up to symbolism). given that the definition of utterance cited above is reconfirmed in this book (137, 143) as well as in the alleged "classic" of dialogism (cf. _problems of dostoevsky's poetics_ 1979a: 300-301), one is bound to conclude that the literary text has either nothing to do with utterance/intertextuality or else that intertextuality is the very opposite of dialogism. however disastrous this paradox is for the postsructuralist project, it is not the weakness we are seeking. the great irony of our story is that dialogism is not bakhtin's main contribution to humanities just as the libidinal theory of repression/castration is not the quintessence of the freudian legacy. the alignment of both thinkers is far from being fortuitous. only in tracing the hidden interconnections can we show that bakhtin and freud have effectively spared themselves the subversive consequences of the mentioned impasse with which poststructuralism is doomed to end. [56] in effect, the paradox of intertextuality we have highlighted is the paradox of psychoanalysis conceived of as an (unrestricted) libidinal economy, that is, as the process of (intertextual) signification (lyotard 1993; deleuze/guattari 1972). however, as our interpretation of the reversal fantasy has amply proven, this view by necessity leads to a thorough desexualization for the simple reason that the disseminating meaningless libidinal flow of signifiers as an infinite supplementary movement, which according to derrida underlies and grounds every signification making of it forever an unstable and undecidable affair, needs to be grounded in the oedipal law precisely because its contradictory structure has a paralyzing, restrictive effect. put otherwise, two master tropes of deconstruction--the pleonasm/catachresis of *supplement* and the chiasm/oxymoron of *hymen*--are radically at odds. and it is precisely this self-deconstructive clash illustrated by our reference to bakhtin which brings about the aphanisis of desire, an aphanisis that replaces the structure of repression/castration with that of sublimation. xi. sublimation qua aphanisis of hermeneutic desire [57] certainly, lacan was the first to acknowledge that desire which is "in fact, interpretation itself" (1977: 176) should not be subsumed under the rubric of sexuality (45). the immediate consequence is the contradiction which we are already acquainted with. this explains why, in the course of the same seminar, lacan is forced to give two incompatible definitions of desire. on the one hand, we are urged "to figure desire as a locus of junction between the field of demand, in which the syncopes of the unconscious are made present, and sexual reality" (156). on the other hand, he suggests that we "place ourselves at the two extremes of the analytic experience. the primal repressed is a signifier.... repressed and symptom are...reducible to the function of signifiers...their structure is built up step by step.... at the other extreme, there is interpretation.... desire, in fact, is interpretation itself. in between, there is sexuality. if sexuality, in the form of the partial drives, had not manifested itself as dominating the whole economy of this interval, our experience would be reduced to a mantic, to which the neutral term psychical energy would then have been appropriate, but in which it would miss what constitutes in it the presence, %dasein%, of sexuality" (176). whereas the first quotation represents the official image of lacanianism which poststructuralism takes pains to maintain (desire as the contradictory structure of the oedipal law as an articulative effect of the deconstructive clash of two signifying entities/readings, i.e., chiasm/oxymoron only arbitrary superimposed upon the catachretic additive flaw of signifiers), the second quotation subversively reverses the first. and this subversion is even more thorough than our foregoing analysis would seem to suggest. [58] at first glance, the second excerpt only reinstates that with which we have already become sufficiently familiar. in order to function in the articulative mode, sexuality should be decomposed. since signifiers are formed "step by step," i.e., since the structure of signification is additive, it is necessary to surmise "that sexuality is realized only through the operation of the drives in so far as they are partial drives" (177). this means the desexualization of sexuality, or, in our terms, the secondary sublimation as the subsumption of sexuality under the model of the ego-instincts which are basically and inescapably partial.^46^ and yet this is not the whole story, for the articulative/ intermediary function assigned to desexualized sexuality in the second quotation remains totally unnecessary since sexuality is said to mediate between desire and that which has already the same additive structure, the edifice of signifiers. to reiterate the formula proposed above, we have another instance of the radical diffusion of tongues when their intertextual (para)esthetic confusion seems to reach its acme. [59] yet lacan is not as blind as he might appear to be. in fact, the separation of desire and sexuality bears witness that lacan, all his derisory jokes notwithstanding, has taken jones's theory of aphanisis seriously enough to regard it as a major threat to the semiotic libidinization of psychoanalysis. lacan's theory of desire, central as it is to his teaching, is a clandestine response to jones. in effect, the semiotical extension of psychoanalysis is impossible so long as we maintain, as freud and jones do, that desire is synonymous with sexuality for the obvious reason that the semiotization of sexuality (as a transformation into the (infinite) network of signifiers) is attainable only through its disseminating fragmentation which would involve the desire itself. whereas the maintainece of the indestructibility of the latter is essential in so far as this indestructibility guarantees the undecidability of meaning. put otherwise, the interplay of two master tropes of deconstruction- pleonasm/catachresis and chiasm/oxymoron--on which the deconstructive strategy as such hinges becomes impossible. this means the impossibility of a discursive revitalization by means of a supplementary (intertextual) interpretive act. we are left with the exhaustion/aphanisis of intertextuality/dialogism inscribed in the very structure of the latter. xii. the poststructuralist return to jung [60] whereas there is no possibility to preclude this outcome along the lines of literary theory proper, a psychoanalytic extension seems to offer a loophole. however, the price to be paid is a bitter one, namely, understanding the lacanian "return to freud" as the "return to jung." what is striking is the readiness with which poststructuralism pays this price. [61] as we have heard, only the intermediary/articulative function of sexuality can preclude the emergence of "the neutral term of psychical energy" (lacan 1977: 176). lacan's inability to maintain this function means that the ternary structure of signification (the symbolic order) collapses into a dyadic structure peculiar to the imaginary. one need not be a marxist to acknowledge that dualism is a veiled monism. this explains why freud's attempts to maintain--in pique to jung--the dualism of drives were from the outset doomed to fail. witness the very title of the paper in which the instinctual dualism receives its final articulation. instead of opposing the death drive to its "natural" "beyond"--libido--freud suggests seeing in it the beyond of the pleasure principle. this boils down to an implicit acknowledgement that there is only one "neutral psychical energy" that functions dualistically--either in the regime of pleasure or of unpleasure.^47^ this is, of course, exactly the jungian point of view which derrida's deconstruction of the death drive cannot help but make its own. in the same manner, feminist theorizing proceeds along lacanian lines. witness brennan, who ends with the energetic intersubjective model grounded in the notion of the unified energy (48, 64).^48^ this model particularly clarifies the ultimate--jungian--point of convergence between derrida's and lacan's theories, and thereby considerably facilitates our task. [62] brennan is candid enough to admit that her energetic model begs two crucial questions. for one thing, it remains unclear "how it is accumulated" (48). likewise, "the mechanism of transmission" (110) remains obscure. regarding the second problem, brennan suggests (albeit the term does not appear in her book) that transmission can happen only telepathically (cf. 72). on the other hand, the accumulation of energy presupposes a kind of "dam" (48),^49^ i.e., an inhibition. hence we have precisely the structure which, as was shown, by necessity leads to the subversion of dialogism. however, far from multiplying evidence for evidence's sake, our detour presents us with the last attempt to solve the poststructuralist quandary and thereby allows us to appreciate its full scope. [63] in effect, it appears that the demise of dialogism stems not only from the diffusion of two master tropes, but is already inscribed in the structure of one of them, namely, in the structure of *supplement*. and once again only the (psychoanalytic) translation, in a (para)derridaean way, can allow us to see what is really wrong with the (semiotic) original. [64] the unrestricted disseminating flow of unified energy should be semiotized/articulated. for only fragmentation can allow the supplement to play its discursively revitalizing role. put otherwise, the inhibition becomes a structural necessity.^50^ psychoanalytically, the basic form of inhibition is of course the threat of castration. however, there seem to be two, apparently incompatible, ways to conceptualize inhibition/castration. traditionally (i.e. logocentrically), castration leads to the resolution of oedipal conflict, that is, to "normal" sexuality and conventional gender identity. however, as we have seen, this patriarchal option, unacceptable as it is to oststructuralism, is unsustainable, semiotically prompting a regress from the signifying triadic structure to a nondifferenciated monism via imaginary binarism. and yet it is precisely this reduction which gives poststructuralism its last chance. for viewed energetically, i.e., conceived along jungian lines, castration/inhibition is profoundly linked to the mother figure.^51^ therefore, castration acquires the new meaning of separation. now the problem is that separation should not lead to the denigration/repression of the woman (otherwise the result would be the same as the conventional patriarchal castration). despite the separation without which there would be no articulation, the link with the mother should be maintained. the contradictory nature of this demand makes poststructuralist energetics/telepathy a neat counterpart of the oedipal law. this means a transformation of the catachretical/supplementary structure of (empha/telepathic intertextual) revitalization into the oxymoronic/chiasmic structure that should be revitalized by means of the former. hence the reversal, exemplified by our infantile fantasy, becomes unavoidable. however, only now can we fully appreciate its consequences. [65] for the poststructuralist castration, far from being a naive replica of the patriarchal one, exhausts the semiotical resources of the latter. and this is what allows us to see in the infantile reversal fantasy the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism. [66] in effect, castration/inhibition conceived of energetically places the woman in exactly the same position which she is assigned by the child who decides to wait for the penis to grow. this decision obviously has nothing to do with the repression of the "maternal origin" (brennan 1993: 167), but precisely because of this dismissal of repression it becomes the very core of patriarchal discursivity. to surmise that the penis will grow means to guarantee the male supremacy more effectively, ingenuously and unequivocally than is possible by recourse to repression. to put it bluntly, the male child automatically becomes older than the woman and hence secures all the privileges which this position implies. what patriarchy boils down to is not the rigidity of sexual binarism but generational binarism: the woman/wife is always younger than the man/husband and should be treated accordingly.^52^ [67] in heideggerian terms, the woman becomes the very locus of the "potentiality for being" (1962: 333-335). the notion is basic to heidegger insofar as it grounds the very possibility of understanding/interpretation as such. potentiality obviously means the openness, over-inclusiveness, in brennan's words, the "accumulation of energy." thus, the woman becomes the accumulator or the reservoir of energy. these are not one and the same. [68] the positioning of woman as an energetic reservoir in "the economic space of the debt" (derrida 1980: 415) means precisely that the debt becomes "immensely enlarged and at the same time neutralized" (415). in other words, the neutralization is possible due to the libidinal monism. however, the unrestricted accumulation of libidinal energy has a paradoxical effect. jones's theory of aphanisis tries to provide an answer to this paradox. [69] according to jones, it is precisely the accumulation of libido that provokes its own disappearance^53^ with the result that the sense of guilt comes to the fore. within the confines of the libidinal economy it is impossible to make either head or tail of this s tatement, for if there is no sexual desire of what can one feel guilty? however, if we remember that the libidinal economy operates with the desexualized libido, the two lines of our inquiry will merge in a most fruitful way. [70] the accumulation of libido is triggered by the privation of sexual satisfaction, and this privation is already an inhibition just as guilt is. this means that the pleonasmic structure of supplement is actually a restrictive structure, an oxymoron/chiasmus of the oedipal law. therefore, the collapse of dialogism becomes inevitable and total because only the device of dialogically intertextual discursive revitalization reveals its structural identity by means of the already exhausted discourse. [71} according to heidegger, guilt is interpretation itself as a limitation imposed upon the (signifying) potential of %dasein% (1962: 331). whence derrida's stress on debt rather than guilt, dictated by his concern for safeguarding the existence of tradition threatened by every interpretative act.^54^ the same concern guides the child in its sexual quest. in both cases the aim is to maintain communication/tradition and to ward off the revelation of meaning/truth. it is the contradictory nature of this demand which, paradoxically, prevents the child and derrida alike from attaining their objective, for the narrative/sexual quest takes the self-subversive form of the reversal fantasy underpinned by the trope of oxymoron/chiasmus. our analysis has proven that the undecidability of meaning stemming from the contradiction of the oedipal law is ostensible inasmuch as it calls for the supplement to ensure this suspension. but to add is to interpret. this explains why the supplementary structure can only double/mirror the structure that does not need the additive interpretive doubling but non-interpretive revitalization. the irony of communication is precisely that because it requires a delay/suspension of (the arrival of) meaning, that is, a mutual act of time-giving. but this act cannot help turning against itself: the more time one gives, the more the danger of exhaustion/aphanisis of temporality itself.^55^ witness a mythological parallel of the reversal fantasy: the errancy of ulysses. xiii. the ulysses complex and its oedipal representation [72] the value of this parallel for our discussion is twofold, for it allows us to ultimately connect both strands of our discussion and thereby to end a critical part of it with a paradoxical conclusion opening directly onto a more positive task. narratologically, the errancy we are speaking about clearly demonstrates the unsustainability of the notion of the "infinite text" (cf. m. frank 1979) which is so dear to the poststructuralist's heart.^56^ however, the textual infiniteness becomes unsustainable not due to the crude fact of the return,^57^ but because this return, and therefore the denouement of meaning, becomes a structural necessity only by virtue of the delaying technique deployed by penelope and telemachus. that this time-giving is fully conscious amounts to saying that, psychoanalytically, the postsructuralist model, dependent as it is on the notion of repression, fails to accommodate its own premises in exactly the same way as the logocentric discursivity.^58^ this means that the oedipal complex cannot ground psychoanalysis, for at the moment of its final unfurlment in the reversal fantasy it reveals another structure that is its condition of possibility. and it is hardly surprising since the quest for meaning exemplified by oedipus is secondary in respect to the quest for communication for which ulysses provides a master plot. [73] to sum up the results of our inquiry aphoristically, the inability of poststructuralism to surpass oedipus stems from the fact that techniques deployed to this end reinforce the very structure which makes oedipus possible. hence the suggestion to rename the oedipus complex, since it is far more adequate to speak of a ulysses complex. [74] the effect of renaming is twofold. for one thing, it enables us to radically place freud outside of the logocentric paradigm and in doing so to divulge a profound convergence between freudian and bakhtinian intentions.^59^ the result will be an outline of genuinely psychoanalytic narratology.^60^ but this outline cannot help but contain the seeds for a theory of sublimation, an elaboration of which would require a thorough reformulation of psychoanalysis within a kantian rather than hegelian framework.^61^ [75] lacan's failure to sustain a ternary structure and the concomitant collapse into dualism (ultimately a monism) is unavoidable within the confines of libidinal economy closely tied to notion of repression as a regulatory principle of the latter.^62^ as we have seen, the same monism underpins the poststructuralist (para)esthetic discourse of telepathy. narratologically, the result is not only the exclusion of the third party (the hero),^63^ but the inevitable evaporation of the dualistic disguise itself, so that the communicative act comes to have only one protagonist.^64^ the paradox is that the other is not missing, assimilated, "objectified," "pacified" (brennan 1993: 58-59) or repressed, but held in suspense--just as the penis supposed to grow, providing thereby a potentiality necessary to ground interpretation. this sufficiently proves the convergence of monologism/dialogism opposition--the ultimate fate of all logocentric binarisms. what saves freud's theory from sharing this fate is not the dualism of the drives but the ternary structure of psychic agencies, precluding the monistic collapse of instinctual dualism. and it is here that reference to bakhtin can effect the necessary maximization of the psychoanalytic screen and thereby furnish us with the vantage point for a cross-fertilizing reassessment of both legacies. and this is significant because perhaps the most notorious failure of post-freudian psychoanalysis is the failure to maintain the ternary structure of agencies.^65^ in this respect, lacan's substitution of the signifying triad for the triad of the agencies should carry the lion's share of the blame. [76] the bakhtinian insight that points beyond the logocentric binary of dialogue/monologue opposition is his (untheorized) distinction between the subject to whom the utterance is addressed and the subject whom it answers (1979: 174-177). according to bakhtin, this distinction is fundamental to the structure of utterance. what is particularly pertinent to our discussion is that both positions fall together in case of the speech genres where the cognitive function prevails over all others (176). [77] to fully appreciate the subversive impact of this distinction it is necessary to correlate it with the narratological model elaborated in bakhtin's early essay "author and hero in aesthetic activity" (1979a),^66^ for otherwise bakhtinian triadic structure can easily suffer confusion with the dualistic monism of poststructuralist intertextual narratology. indeed it is all too tempting to collate the receiver and the addressee of bakhtin's utterance with the reader/writer-successor and writer-predecessor, respectively. the result, then, will be the reappearance of the "family romance" and the reversal of generations, its foundational consequence.^67^ however, bakhtin's thrust goes beyond the familial horizon,^68^ for only thus can one hope to conceive of relationships outside of the monologue/dialogue dyad. xiv. the debt of madness [78] far from being rigid, the "elemental structures of kinship" allow considerable "room for manoeuvre," i.e. for all kinds of "double-voicedness" such as hybridization, meticulization, etc.^69^ therefore derridian "genealogical scene" (1977: 129) is a constructive act of elaboration of the blind spot of levi-strauss' theory--not in order to subvert the latter but to improve it. as we have seen, the result is the exposition of a (communicative) structure (of ulysses complex) that grounds the oedipal structure of meaning. put otherwise, there is no reason to oppose deconstruction to hermeneutics,^70^ for the former is a last attempt to furnish the latter with a secure foundation. however, the poststructuralist strategy of thinking out the un-thought axiomatics of logocentrism cannot help but turn against itself. far from subverting logocentric rationality by exposing the layer of "madness" which, allegedly, underlies it (cf. foucault 1967), deconstruction brings about the rationalization of "madness" that logocentrism places at the very fore of its discourse, and does this precisely by reinforcing the genealogical framework upon the parentlessness of the traditional discourse. witness the problematics of guilt/debt. in heideggerian hermeneutics, guilt functions as an irrational foundation of understanding (1962: 325-335). heidegger is quite conscious that to maintain irrationality is essential if we wish to secure the communicative transmission of tradition (193-194, 209). however, it is precisely the lack of familial underpinnings^71^ that prevents heidegger's attainment of his goal. by virtue of the simple fact that outside of the family every debt is basically a rational affair: it can be repaid by definition. only a familial debt can be said to subsist in the irrational way of a lacanian symptom/signifier. whence derrida's obsession with genealogy. but the irony of the matter is that this familial irrationality depends vitally on another rationality, to wit, on the purely rational, mercantile character of relationship between the members of the family.^72^ but by the same token, the irrational (communicative) impossibility to repay the debt suffers a (meaningful) restriction.^73^ this amounts to saying that the whole affair boils down to the warding off of the true irrationality of familial structure--of love as the possibility to transcend the problematics of guilt/debt by a perfectly gratuitous arbitrary act of forgiving. now it is precisely love that, according to bakhtin, defines the relationship between author and hero in aesthetic activity. [79] the value of the emerging model is that it allows us to radically transcend the biologism inherent in the poststructuralist familial (para)esthetics, which reduces literary production to the question of the relation of father/author to his son/work and thereby leaves no room for the conception of the literary text as the very locus of construction of feminine identity.^74^ to be sure, our assumption begs an immediate justification, for bakhtin's statements taken at face value are rather misleading and bound to provoke contempt on the part of even the softest of feminists.^75^ in effect, the hero according to bakhtin, is basically feminine (1979b: 80-81, 86). but this femininity seems to be notoriously patriarchal since it is constantly equated with passivity (110). however, the *gender trouble* is not bakhtin's. it is sufficient to abandon the dialogical perspective which reduces the aesthetic event to the encounter between the text and the reader in order to solve the optical predicament thematized by de man. [80] what makes the early work of bakhtin so puzzling to the poststructuralist eye is the bracketing of the very item that we are accustomed to focusing on. the text (and by the same token the reader) remains in the background, whereas bakhtin's interest lies with the author and hero. the latter is said to depend vitally on the former, for only an aesthetic intervention can alleviate the tension to which the hero remains prey as a "potentiality-for-being" (94, 100).^76^ the salutary effect of this aesthetic act stems from the author's excess of vision over the hero (89-94). what is surprising is that the hero also possesses an analogous excess over the author (173). [81] instead of avoiding this paradox^77^ and/or discarding it as a logocentric birthmark (naturalization) which was not yet washed off at this early stage of bakhtin's career, i am going to argue that we are dealing with one of the most profound and fruitful intuitions which, however, can be discerned and utilized only within a psychoanalytic setting. for the paradox is bound to evaporate the moment we recognize in it an aesthetic counterpart of jones's aphanisis which, in its turn, can be rectified only from a narratological perspective. jones certainly said and did all he could to preclude the possibility of making of his notion a starting point for the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchy. not in the least because within the confines of libidinal economy he was free to speak only about the fear of aphanisis, instead of investigating what aphanisis actually meant as such. xv. aphanisis qua sublimation and the construction of the feminine identity [82] the fear of aphanisis is jones's answer to the question: "what precisely in women corresponds with the fear of castration in men?" (1950c, 438). the paradox is that, in jones's own terms, the answer is invalid, since it is a "fallacy...to...equate castration with the abolition of male sexuality...we know that many men wish to be castrated for, among others, erotic reasons" (439-440) whereas aphanisis is exactly "the extinction of sexuality" (450). fortunately, jones himself is not as blind as his interpreters (lacan, laplanche and pontalis included) would like him to be. quite conscious of the contradiction, he proposes two solutions: one more or less explicit (to conceive of male sexuality beyond the problematics of castration^78^), the other clandestine but all the more challenging, namely, the suggestion to see in aphanisis not the cause of repression of sexuality but precisely the condition of its emergence through the sublimation of the polymorphous instincts of self-preservation, primarily the %wiestrieb%. within the confines of libidinal economy aphanisis leads toe the impasse of the oxymoronic/chiasmic restriction of revitalizing additive supplementarity, but the view advanced here allows us to transcend the ulysses complex and its oedipal representation and to do so, paradoxically, by deploying exactly the derridian strategy of operating from within the discourse to be deconstructed, if only more coherently than derrida has ever attempted to do. xvi. what james knew [83] at this point the reference to textual reality becomes indispensable. the reasons for selecting henry james, specifically his novel _what maisie knew_ are obvious enough. only with the advent of poststructuralism has james's interest in feminine psychology, his predilection for feminine protagonists, been thematized along the lines of (para)esthetic discursivity, which foregrounds the notions of tele/emphatical unconscious identification between author and hero and attempts to explain the textual production as an effort to repress this identificatory desire. the irony of the matter is that poststructuralism could not have chosen a more unfortunate example to substantiate its claims. [84] in case of henry james, the paradox of (para)esthetics is at its sharpest. first, it remains completely unclear what the notion of repression of "pederastic identifications," which allegedly structures james's textuality, has to do with the latter, since james himself was the first to consciously acknowledge it (see his prefaces). secondly, to concetrate on repression means to make the question of knowledge a central issue. this is not to say that interpretation by necessity becomes a traditional search for a particular meaning, but that it becomes synonymous with the epistemic attitude.^79^ as a corollary, the denigration of aesthetics is equated with an attempt "to posit an idealized world that is nonconflictual," with "a withdrawal into a private, idiosyncratic universe" (przybylowicz 1986: 18, 23).^80^ the resulting distortion of james's textual strategy in particular and of the subversive potential of literature in general is especially drastic in the case of this novel, which we will discuss briefly. [85] given the poststructuralist biases, it is not surprising that in her study of james's heroines, v.c. fowler does not devote a single word to maisie. the example of maisie considerably problematizes the very premise of fowler's analysis, according to which james's "american girls" are defined by "the fear of knowledge" (35). the only way to accommodate our girl within a (para)esthetic framework would be to say that her fearless knowledge is exactly that which the author takes pains to repress in order not to become a (castrated) woman (cf. evans 1989, l. frank 1989). witness freud's attitude towards dora, with which james's relation to maisie has been equated (hertz 1985). ironically, it is precisely the narratological extension of psychoanalysis that makes this explanation untenable. psychoanalytically speaking, to become a woman means not only to become castrated/dead, but also to achieve clairvoyance in the process, i.e., to bring about the revelation of truth (ferenczi 1980b, 243-244). so long as clairvoyance is inscribed in the notion of telepathy, we once again end up wondering how the latter can undermine logocentrism. inasmuch as "james's realistic fiction" of which _what maisie knew_ is exemplary is said "to reveal a noncontradictory and homogeneous world of truth" (przybylowicz 1986: 25), we must conclude that james has many reasons to consciously identify with his heroine. in other words, to interpret our novel (para)esthetically we have to part with the notion of repression which grounds this mode of interpretation; that is, we must no longer view repression as a force that structures textual reality. [86] paradoxically, by acquiescing to this option poststructuralism gains more than it loses, at least at first sight. upon cursory reading, the novel seems to reenact the foundational fantasy of poststructuralism- the fantasy of the reversal of generations--and what is more to do this on both levels of discourse--of author and heroine alike, allowing us to conceive of tele-empathy as a genuinely discursive phenomenon. [87] in effect, in the course of the narrative, which coincides with the process of growing up, maisie's status undergoes a characteristic reversal that it is not too far-fetched to be described as a generational one. the divorce of maisie's parents, with which the story starts, positions the child as an entity the parents desire "not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other" (1966: 13). hence from the outset she functions as a means of mediation. however, the older she grows the more consciously she deploys this role "of bringing people together" (54-55, 66-67, 233) for which she developes a kind of talent if which she is quite proud (264-265). however, this reversal, far from being an instance of "art for art's sake," is fostered by maisie's need to feel secure in an unstable situation, which is governed by the instincts of self-preservation.^81^ notably, this movement from activity to passivity is caused by the aphanisis of the parents' desire to harm one another. [88] the reversal which apparently structures the recit is paralleled by the discursive reversal, by the interplay of the two tropes for which james has an obvious predilection. these tropes are the master tropes of poststructuralism. hence, as is easily foreseen, the outcome of the interplay between oxymoron and pleonasm^82^ is the same interaction with which our analysis has sufficiently acquainted the reader. the impossibility of discursively revitalizing what vitally needs revitalization would be especially disastrous in james's case, amounting to the author's failure to attain the aim that he has posed himself, namely, to endow the heroine with the power to transform "appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough" into "the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art" (7-8). the whole jamesian project boils down to this particular aim. put otherwise, it would not be enough for maisie "simply to wonder...about them" (8), for within the (para)esthetic libidinal framework of aphanisis, especially when doubled, is at odds with this task. to worsen matters beyond any possibility of repair, discursive tele-empathy between author and hero, especially for novel that by its very title foregrounds the question of knowledge, would make the author an easy prey to logocentrism, positioning him either as the subject who knows, or, what amounts to the same, as a victim of repression. as the study of przybylowicz amply proves, this is precisely how poststructuralism (mis)reads james. fortunately, on an unbiased reading, james turns out to be not such an easy mark. [89] put paradoxically, for all their suspicion regarding the author's overtly stated intentions, poststructuralist critics interpret james's preface and not the text itself. if read alone, james's preface allows us to speak about repression and thereby stage an interpretive act as an intertextual affair between the author (who in this perspective should have committed suicide in order to attain clairvoyance) and the reader. [90] such a view leads to a dialogically-conventional (mis)reading of bakhtin, especially of his notion of emphatically grounded *exotopy* as a privilege of the author. the unnoticed irony is that on these terms it neither makes sense to speak of dialogism as a textual characteristic^83^ nor, and this is the point we are drawing, of the dialogicity of interpretive encounter with the text, of course, if we continue to use the term "dialogism" as a synonym for subversion. [91] the result of the one-sided excess of vision is that the author-hero relation comes to be conceived in terms of amplification and supplementation of what the hero(ine) does not see/know. as tony tanner has put it, "in a sense the book hinges on what maisie does *not* know" (1965: 288). however, it is precisely this "*in a sense*" that makes all the difference in the world. [92] although james is the first to foreground supplementarity of the auctorial discourse^84^, he is also the first to notice that this exotopy is at odds with his task, but which is more profound than the preface's phrasing may suggest. james's task is not the dialogical revitalization--technically impossible and morally deplorable^85^--but the de-victimization of his heroine, the transformation of her (and thereby his own) discourse into *the discourse of innocence* free of intertextual guilt/debt. the task is a nietzschean one, for despite all the poststructuralist efforts to make of nietzsche an avatar of primordial (intertextual) indebtedness, nietzsche himself was quite unambiguous regarding the priorities among (re-evaluated) values: "in this way the gods served in those days to justify man...in those days they took upon themselves, not the punishment but, what is *nobler*, the guilt" (1989: 94). since the justification/de-victimization of man/hero can be achieved only through the other, it follows that the model nietzsche had in mind represents a 'beyond' of logocentric monologue/dialogue dyad which reinforces indebtedness. this means that nietzschean views correspond neatly to the bakhtinian model of aesthetic activity aimed at ensuring the discursive innocence. [93] characteristically, the very title of james's novel undermines all attempts to situate jamesian textuality within the dialogically-intertextual (para)esthetic framework. the rough fact is that within this framework the title makes no sense at all. [94] the supplementary nature of the one-sided excess of vision indebts the author to the reader by in turn indebting the reader to the hero(ine). so long as maisie is conceived as the subject supposed *not* to know, it follows that the author's task is to provide the reader with the answer to the question posed by the title. certainly, the author becomes a possessor of knowledge but, since he is indebted/obliged to pass it to the reader, his possession is only a provisional one and has nothing to do with absolute mastery.^86^ however, james is reluctant to acknowledge this debt.^87^ [95] ironically, from the poststructuralist standpoint, the answer to the question of *what maisie knew* is doomed to remain in abeyance, albeit without this answer no interpretation can be regarded as complete.^88^ certainly, this incompleteness itself may be interpreted in favor of a poststructuralist stance as evidence that the central concern of james is to perpetuate the transmission of tradition. for, in effect, james is quite unambiguous about the communicative point, to wit, about *how* maisie knew. that her knowledge is acquired by (para)esthetic means of empathy and telepathy, if not by hypnotic clairvoyance, lies at the surface.^89^ this should already suggest that matters may eventually be a bit more complex.^90^ and in effect, on second glance, we are bound to concede that the title of james's novel relates to the text in a way which is apparently more "conventional" than the one envisaged by derrida (1991: 123). nevertheless, it is precisely this conventionality that proves to be an actual subversion of tradition promoted by derrida's communicative supplementarity of which the title is a privileged example. [96] appearances notwithstanding, the real question on which the narrative hinges is not the "how" but the "what" of maisie's knowledge. not for nothing is the text punctuated by confirmations coming from the author as well as from the other personages that maisie actually *does* know, albeit the content of her knowledge remains unrevealed. this means that james grants maisie an excess of vision over himself equal to that which his status of the author provides him with. put otherwise, if the "how" presupposes the (para)esthetic one-sided excess of authorial vision, the "what" grants the same excess to the hero(ine), thereby introducing the dimension of mutual discursive dependency between the author and the hero which effectively abolishes the intertextual indebtedness to the reader promoted by the one-sided exotopy. but to make our model of the aesthetic event fully coincide with jamesian textuality and unfurl its subversive potential, a final step remains, which will reveal its implications for the construction of feminine sexuality closely tied with the process of sublimation. [97] our description of mutual dependency between the author and hero can still be reappropriated (para)esthetically so long as its temporal dimension remains unspecified. one may argue that mutual dependency boils down to a mutual act of tele-empathical time-giving as the precondition of interpretation as such. the result would be a communicative re-naming of james's novel. in other words, we still have to prove that the title of the novel has much more to it than the postructuralist reader is willing to concede. [98] fortunately, this proof provides the notion of aphanisis that within the (para)esthetic setting can be experienced only negatively as an always already present danger of communicative exhaustion which can be warded off only by recourse to the device that brings it about. this vicious circle is effectively broken by jamesian narrative. [99] witness the final scene of the novel, the scene of maisie's departure with mrs. wix. this departure, since it is a matter of free choice on maisie's part, is essential to the proper understanding of james's relation to his heroine and the appreciation of the subversive force of his textuality. for, in choosing to depart, maisie effectively disentangles herself from the network of indebting relationships which, paradoxically, she herself has helped to establish by means of her empathetical identifications. to depart means to renounce the (para)esthetic strategy and the knowledge accumulated by its means. this proves that there actually was *something* that maisie knew. and this renouncement makes it impossible to define our novel as a %bildungsroman%, that is, as a passage from innocent ignorance to knowledge--a structure underpinning logocentric discursivity as the mechanism of tradition transmission (%rites de passage%).^91^ for that we are left with is the return of innocence.^92^ [100]the return of innocence should not be confused with the return to the monistic myth of pure origins. paradoxically, (para)esthetics promotes this myth by conceiving of the aesthetic event as a relation between text and reader which becomes *motivated* by primordial indebtedness. on the other hand, bakhtin's theory corroborated by jamesian textuality makes the bond between author and hero a purely arbitrary one and thereby for the first time provides an opening for the deployment of saussurean linguistics without betraying its essence. but by the same token, we have a chance to solve the psychoanalytic quandary about super-ego and sublimation. [101]the trouble with the concept of the super-ego is derivative of the fundamental psychoanalytic trouble with temporality. the basic structure of temporality with which psychoanalysis operates is that of %nachtraglichkeit%, of belated understanding. it is precisely these hermeneutical concerns which hinder a genuine psychoanalytic narratology. [102]paradoxically, the same %nachtraglichkeit% grounds both views on the emergence of the super-ego. according to kleinians, the super-ego is already present at the pre-genital stage, whereas in the more conventional perspective it is the heir of the oedipus complex. appearances notwithstanding, both views are complimentary, representing an instance of the patently lacanian signifying see-saw between too early and too late. for both theories converge at one fundamental point, i.e., both view the emergence of the super-ego as the result of introjection, that is, of the transformational movement from arbitrariness into motivatedness, the latter the precondition of interpretation. this explains why the relation between ego and super-ego is unanimously considered to one of indebtedness, guilt and fear of aphanisis. put otherwise, the excess of vision is one-sided. [103]from the poststructuralist standpoint, the semiotic correlate of the super-ego is the reader and the ego correlates with the author and/or the text. the result is the perpetuation of tradition, the inability to disentangle logocentric strictures. [104]however, bakhtinian theory and jamesian textuality suggest that it is far more adequate to conceive of the aesthetic event as structured by the mutual dependence between author and hero. psychoanalytically, this means that super-ego is equally and to the same extent dependent on the ego as the latter is on the former which boils down to saying that the relation between the two agencies is that between loved and beloved (cf. schafer 1960). semiotically, the relationship thus conceived is purely gratuitous and arbitrary, for the super-ego is the ego's product, the result of the renouncement of the claims of the instincts of self-preservation,^93^ of the actively performed aphanisis %qua% sublimation leading to the emergence of sexuality. it is this sublimating process which structures james's novel, making it the very locus of the construction of feminine identity beyond patriarchal oedipality. [105]according to freud, the weakness of the super-ego stemming from polymorphous identifications places women in a dependent position (1925: 29; 1933: 138). therefore, we can conclude that the basic problem of feminism is the strengthening of the super-ego, which, as our exploration suggests, has by definition a feminine gender. [106]significantly, only on these premises can we hope to allot the notion of sublimation the place in psychoanalysis that it deserves, and thereby offer a theory of culture that escapes the notorious fancifulness of psychoanalytic accounts. the trouble with sublimation is that, so long as one conceives of it as a desexualization, it remains impossible to account for the existence of subversive art. in the conventional perspective sublimation is a synonym for conformism and compliance with received cultural norms. sublimation becomes the very opposite of any genuine creativity, which is subversive by definition.^94^ however, certain psychoanalytic accounts of creativity suggest that it has nothing to do with repression of sexuality (cf. lowenfeld 1941: 119-121) and that the self-preservative instincts, epistemophilia being the most prominent among them, interfere with creativity.^95^ witness freud's study on leonardo.^96^ in other words, if we are to continue to align sublimation with creativity, we must redefine the former as the process of sublimation of ego-instincts.^97^ [107]in its turn, this redefinition paves the way for a relationship between psychoanalysis and literature which will not lead to mutual reductivity. textuality receives a firm psychoanalytic grounding in the ternary structure of psychic agencies. if the aesthetic event is an affair between author/super-ego and hero/ego, then its product --a text--is the id itself.^98^ this explains why it can only be repressed, distorted, misread by the super-ego aligned by post-structuralism with the reader. [108]witness the poststructuralist repression of jamesian textuality by an interpretive confinement within the framework of the ego's fantasy of reversal of generations which james's discourse on maisie effectively subverts. notes: ^1^ put otherwise, it is not enough just to add the prefix "anti-." unfortunately, in the wake of deleuze and guattari theorists are quite content with this option. ^2^ cf. "...no absolute transcendence of the oedipal is possible. it is no more possible to get rid of the omnipotent aspect of the oedipal position than it is to get rid of the pre-oedipal fantasy of omnipotence. (or rather, it would only be possible in a world without loss, envy and difference--which would be a wholly omnipotent world.) rather, the point is to subvert the concealed omnipotence by exposing it, as well as to recognize another realm of sexual freedom that reworks the oedipal terms. to be sure, this realm depends upon the other face of omnipotence: the over-inclusive capacities to transcend reality by means of fantasy, which can be reintegrated in the sexual symbolic of the post-oedipal phase" (benjamin 1995: 119). it remains to be seen whether the equation of envy, loss and difference, on the one hand, and of fantasy, over-inclusiveness and sexuality, on the other, can be sustained. the testing of these equations is one of the aims of our present inquiry. ^3^ i do not think that this is a simplification or a misreading. speaking pre-oedipally, there is only one combined parental figure (a notion which falls under the rubric of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis). hence an attack on kristeva for reinscribing gender stereotypes within the pre-oedipal phase (cf. cornell 1991: 69-71) is rather puzzling from the psychoanalytic standpoint. however, since this attack focuses on kristevan phrasing, it corroborates our assumption about the conventional rhetoricity of postsructuralist strategies. ^4^ cf. j. hillis miller 1984; a. ronell 1984, 1989; n. rand 1988, 1989; e. rashkin 1988, 1990; m. sprengnether 1995, among other examples. ^5^ both views converge in a most paradoxical way, representing two ways to the same notorious impasse of applied psychoanalysis which constantly misses its target (text) hitting either too low or too high. "a perfect psychoanalysis of literature" (the one performed in derrida's view by lacan) reduces the text by treating it as a symptom which itself is a failure (too low). on the other hand, harold bloom's "anxiety of influence" undermines the very possibility of psychoanalytic explorations into the arts. bloom deals only with "strong poets," that is, with those who have successfully overcome the influence of predecessors. this obviously means that there are no traces (symptoms) of this influence in their texts (too high). it is precisely this paradox of bloom's intertextuality to which n. abraham's elaborations address themselves. every text hides a "secret" ("truth", "symptom"), but this secret cannot be located in any concrete text save that of the interpreter (a most lucid example of this strategy is abraham's "the phantom of hamlet or the sixth act," 1988). the interpreter comes to occupy the middle position assigned by derrida to "pharmakon." this means it is impossible to maintain that logocentrism undermines itself prior to any deconstructive intervention. further it means that an act of interpretation boils down to the production of the "aesthetic object," the production that, as we have shown elsewhere (linetski 1995), in bakhtinian theory is an activity of the reader as a fictitious other. ^6^ i refer the reader to lacan's eleventh seminar where he invokes "aphanisis" only to make fun of it as a phantastical notion (cf. 1977: 207). ^7^ cf. "it is always difficult to imagine that one might be able to think of something in separation, within one's interior space, without being surprised by the other...this puerile belief of mine, in part mine, can only stem from a foundation--sure, let's call it unconscious...." (derrida 1983: 212). the last sentence exposes the link between the two excerpts from jones's paper and in doing so exposes lacan as a mediator between jones's and derrida's views on the unconscious, for it was up to lacan to define the unconscious as "the presence of the analyst" (1988: 159). that is why already at this point we can precipitatingly hint at two conclusions of our analysis. the telepathic unconscious propounded by derrida is profoundly similar to the logocentric one of lacan because both guarantee the possibility of understanding and make the presence of the analyst/interpreter indispensable (one cannot help but wonder what the unconscious telepathic discourse "repeated in large letters to avoid all misunderstanding" has to do with the basic assumption of deconstruction concerning the primordial impossibility to deliver any "truth" whatsoever at its hermeneutic destination). this makes the unconscious an "aesthetic object" that, according to bakhtin, is a product of interpretative activity of the reader as a fictitious other. whence the jones-bakhtin connection, for the former also defines the operator as a dispensable figure. and this prompts us to equate the unconscious conceived along the poststructuralist (telepathic) lines with fetish qua freudian "(para)esthetic object" par excellence--a theme to be pursued elsewhere. ^8^ as we shall see, the reference to russian formalism is a far cry from being simply a figure of speech. derridian narratology, primarily thanks to the concept of "supplement," has incurred a debt to formalist theory--a debt which, given derrida's view of structuralism and its russian precursor as adhering to the logocentric paradigm, no one is willing to notice, let alone to requite. ^9^ "one may lay down the dictum that if the patient is not treated by psycho-analysis he will treat himself by means of suggestion, or--put more fully--he will see to it that he will get treated by means of suggestion, whatever other views the physician may have on the subject" (291). ^10^ cf. "perhaps, incidentally, this is the reason why it is so difficult for the hypnotist to give effective suggestions that obviously conflict with the father-ideal, such as criminal and immoral suggestions" (287). ^11^ cf. "a general philosophical category is imposed, leading to a curiously asexual (and affectless) psychoanalysis" (macey 1995: 81). although macey is speaking about lacan and his commitment to hegelian categories, the formula also applies well to psychoanalysis in general. the only point where a correction seems to be necessary is the linking of asexual and affectless. as our investigation will prove, psychoanalysis comes to be threatened with ultimate and unambiguous desexualization precisely in the wake of the poststructuralist foregrounding of various models grounded in affectivity, the telepathic model being the most illuminating example. ^12^ paradoxically, psychoanalysis not only boils down to this problem but, in the last resort, stands or falls with it. in effect, the theories of neuroses and psychoses alike hinge on the notion of sexual traumatic experiences of childhood. but the assumption of the sexual nature of these traumas presupposes that there is such a thing as infantile sexuality, the main evidence here being precisely the infantile sexual quest. ^13^ the point of view advocated here allows for the first time to really merge structure and history- a task which remains unaccomplished despite all efforts undertaken in this respect from saussure to derrida. and this is because sublimation is not an arbitrary moment (a dominant psychoanalytic view) but a necessary and unavoidable stage predating repression/oedipality. the quandary regarding sublimation is precisely the inability to conceive of it temporally. this leads to the structural misconception of this notion. ^14^ that psychoanalysts and poststructuralists alike prefer to turn their eyes away from this logic is quite understandable, for to expose it means to undermine the famous notion of the mirror stage as a first step in acquiring an identity by an attempt to unify anarchical sexuality through the reference to the other. ironically, to relinquish this notion means not only to part with the lacanian version of dialogism but also with the very %point d'appui% of a postsructuralist attack on patriarchy which, as brennan has made sufficiently clear, has to postulate the existence of a self-contained ego (cf. brennan 1993: 12-25). ^15^ see "the ego and the id" (1923). ^16^ it seems that this is the only indisputable point in the psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego. ^17^ cf. quite a random example: "with *every* identification, freud points out, there is a desexualization and at the same time an instinctual diffusion. the libidinal cathexis no longer binds the destructive tendencies which now find expression in the severity and punitiveness of the superego. this diffusion is particularly evident in melancholia" (sandler 1960: 134; italics mine). ^18^ witness his attempt to provide an intertextual symbolic framework for the rat man's fantasy or for dora's imagery--an attempt that received a full elaboration in shengold (1980) and kanzer (1980). but the most notorious example of psychoanalytic thematicism is certainly "character and anal eroticism" (1908). ^19^ it is not an accident that the obfuscation of infantile sexual theories is paralleled by the interest in primal fantasies, for the latter foreground the notion of repression problematized by the former. ^20^ in point of fact, if the child's concerns were defensive ones, he would have had all reasons to accept the explanation furnished by the parents, and this precisely because a stork or its substitute *can* be hindered (at least phantasmatically) from coming. the parents' aim is not so much to deceive, but to console the child who--unexplainably--does not want to be consoled. ^21^ "perhaps we have not always noted sufficiently in our analyses that this is when children begin to divine that their father and mother can do something that they themselves cannot, namely, can produce children together" (boehm 1931: 449). as we shall see, the apparent familiarity of this statement evaporates the moment we try to read it semiotically (i.e., to treat the parent's "doing" as a performative). however, in our case the deployment of this patently poststructuralist mode of interpretation will immediately subvert the claims of its propagators. ^22^ it is worthwhile to adumbrate one of the "remnants" of our analysis which proves its fruitfulness by highlighting the scope of reassessments to which it can give rise. from the point of view advocated here it is possible to resuscitate one of the most abused items from psychoanalytic archives, namely, rank's theory of the "trauma of birth" which turns out to be indispensable for tackling a number of contradictions that freud's rejection of rank's intuition has left us with. but, in order to make rank's notion an effective weapon, one has to view the traumatic birth as the birth of a sibling. ^23^ thus far only one author was candid enough to at least voice suspicions that *perhaps* dialogism *may* be a purely logocentric affair (cf. calinescu 1991: 163). needless to say, to pursue this train of thought requires more independence than the average theorist can muster. ^24^ obviously this begs the question of how we are to conceive the development of a child who is spared the society of siblings. the question is crucial since, on our own terms, the secondary sublimation is a necessary stage. although an answer requires a large amount of original clinical work, we can assume that the situation in both cases is basically the same. a single child is prompted in his quest by comparison with his more (un)fortunate playmates. one can even go as far as to surmise that his quest will be all the more compelling since in addition he has to grapple with the puzzle why "there are too few...persons involved" (fenichel 1931: 421). ^25^ however idiosyncratic or paradoxical it may appear, this thesis is the only solution to the contradiction which haunts psychoanalytic theory in matters of infantile sexual curiosity. as we have already pointed out, the whole problem is central to freud's teaching. but the irony of the matter is precisely that within the oedipal framework which is postulated as preexistent, the infantile sexual theories can be conceived of only as an arbitrary phenomena unable to influence child's development in any significant way. in effect, if the incestuous wishes are primordial, if they preexist the traumatic situation we are investigating, it is impossible to understand what influence the arrival of sibling and the fantasies which it fosters can have upon them. ^26^ in the wake of foucault and derrida, we happily take for granted that semiosis as such is grounded in repression. against this background, the recent study by kincaid (1992) is bound to appear more innovative than it actually is. kincaid's critique of foucault and the questioning of the notion of repression deserves our full appreciation especially because it comes as an introduction to the study of the period (victorian culture) which is conventionally regarded as a patent example of the workings of repression. unfortunately, kincaid's introductory remarks lack consistency, being a far cry from a theory of *writing without repression*. ^27^ this has corollaries, the notion of the primal scene being the most formidable among them. paradoxically, within the libidinal framework we have to make an unpleasant choice between the notion of the primal scene--as a real event or as a fantasy, it matters little--and the concept of infantile sexual curiosity. according to freud, the primal scene is already a result of sexual curiosity while at the same time it is said to awaken sexuality (freud 1925: 24 et passim). on the other hand, sexual curiosity is an ultimate proof for the existence of infantile sexuality. ^28^ cf. silverman (1988), przybylowicz (1986), rashkin (1990). ^29^ as a reminder to the reader with an all too stark reality complex: the whole story is played on the fantasmatic/hallucinatory plane, the plane on which the (para)esthetic tele/emphatic discourse of poststructuralism deliberately operates. ^30^ especially if we grant pertinence to the poststructuralist assessment of logocentrism as a culture which places (absolute) knowledge above all other values. ^31^ thus far poststructuralism has not managed to get beyond these two--complementary--solutions in its attempt to account for the "ego's era" in the history of human knowledge. ^32^ therefore derrida's critics, whose main target is the alleged a-historicity of deconstruction (cf. lentricchia 1985: 105-106; brennan 1993: 195) obviously miss the point. the paradox is that deconstruction's *inherent* historicity is a purely self-deconstructive affair. ^33^ cf.: "in art, material must be alive and precious. and this is where there appeared the epithet, which *does not introduce anything new into the word, but simply renews its dead figurativeness*" (shklovsky 1973, 43; italics added). ^34^ the most lucid example is certainly derrida's _la carte postale_ (1980). according to derrida, the postcard depicting plato behind socrates corroborates his views on textuality/writing which by definition is incompatible with the notion of stable origins. writing by virtue of the reversal it stages makes it impossible to grant hermeneutic supremacy to any particular structure: "...the oedipal trait is only a rection for the leading thread of the spool" (362), "only *one* figure among *others*" (weber 1987: 106). this explains why the generational reversal has become a poststructuralist strategy par excellence: "everything has to be read in reverse" (derrida 1986: 74). allegedly this is "a new attitude towards knowledge" directed "against the traditional model of research" and by the same token against the continuity of tradition grounded in the belief in "an irreversible heritage" (ulmer 1985: 133, 136). however, an attempt to apply grammatology more or less coherently immediately exposes the real state of affairs. i refer to endeavours of abraham, torok and their imitators. the aim to be attained is the one mentioned above: to prove that the symptoms are more varied and complex, are not reducible to one common source (oedipus/castration) but that they have multiple origins (cf. rashkin 1988: 32-34). but the result is the substitution of one general structure for another: instead of oedipus we have the genealogical reversal structure which comes to be regarded as an explanatory structure "par excellence" (abraham/torok 1978: 395). the irony is twofold. for one thing, the search for (textual) secret which declares itself free from oedipus/castration but nevertheless stresses its psychoanalytic character, by necessity boils down to equating psychoanalysis with the most general structure of scienticity which poststructuralism attempts to undermine by means akin to those of abraham and torok (this logic is especially lucid in torok and rand 1994). this means that precisely within the conventional psychoanalytic framework oedipus/castration is only one figure among the others. however, this is not to say that we are dealing with another instance of the paradox of the cretan liar sufficiently thematized by poststructuralism as the universal fate of discursivity. the gist of the matter is that the famous critique of barbara johnson (1977) is no critique at all, for derrida is the first to admit that it is impossible to escape the law(s) of the genre one sets out to deconstruct. but by the same token our analysis can lay claim to being the first sustained critique of the shortcomings of deconstruction, and this because only from our standpoint does it becom possible to show that deconstruction does not repeat the fallacies it has pointed out but tries to secure the mechanisms which tradition itself has failed to shield. ^35^ "the 'reversal' fantasy then gratifies this by placing the child in the imagination in a position of power over the parent" (jones 1950: 411). the same interpretation is reiterated by brennan, who evokes the fantasy in her discussion of the "ego's era" but significantly breaks off the discussion at the point where further investigation threatens to undermine the accepted views on patriarchal discourse (1993: 96-97). ^36^ one goes even as far as to say that the notion of reversal is *the* lacanian concept par excellence. it is the reversal which underpins the imaginary as well as the symbolic. witness the famous scheme of the concave mirror (1977: 145; 1978: 132-134; 1988: 77-79) or the definition of transference illustrated by reference to "a famous song by georgius %je suis fils-pere% ('*i am son-father*')" (1977: 159), or, last but not least, the reversal underpinning the celebrated interpretation of the freudian dictum "wo es war, soll ich werden" (1988: 232). ^37^ although i see no point in multiplying evidence, it may be worthwhile to make an exception for a corroboration which comes from the lacanian camp. paradoxically, an attempt to develop lacanian theory has led laplanche to reformulate the problematic of castration in terms of a conflict between fathers and grandfathers (1980a: 226-227) which is precisely the conflict foregrounded by the reversal fantasy (to posit oneself as a father of one's own father means to adopt the role of the grandfather). ^38^ hence brennan's account is in itself an example of discursive reversal: "in making the woman... the repository of his truth...the man is directing his urge to control and his belief in something beyond himself to the same object. he has no reference point for his 'i' that is distinct from his ego, in that he has no grounds for separating that to which he defers (the woman as truth) from that which he seeks to shape" (1993: 74). as we shall shortly see, some bakhtinian intuitions applied to the textual reality offer an effective solution to this self-imposed poststructuralist quandary. ^39^ cf. "...the slower time becomes, the greater the ego's need to speed things up, its anxiety, its splitting, its need for control, its 'cutting-up' in its urge to know...and its general aggression towards the other" (brennan 1993: 181). according to brennan, these are the consequences of the acting out of the foundational fantasy of patriarchy. as our analysis shows, the failure to identify the foundational fantasy leads not only to the misconception of patriarchy but to the theoretical acting out which reconfirms what it intends to subvert. ^40^ characteristically, brennan speaks of the "energetic *attention*" as "the cornerstone of my theory of an intersubjective economy of energy" (110; italics added). however, this allegedly innovative theory is what patriarchal discursivity boils down to. ^41^ hence the controversy derrida vs. heidegger, deconstruction vs. hermeneutics which continues to trouble theorists (cf. allison 1982; hoy 1982; behler 1991; krell 1990) proves to be a tempest in a teapot. ^42^ this is not to subscribe to the view expressed in an equally seminal paper by r. gasche (1994) who thinks that derrida and derridians are simply and bluntly at odds. in my view, the appropriation of derrida's theory by literary critics is faithful enough. the real problem is not the one of misreading but of ignoring instances in derrida's work where the author is at odds with himself. these contradictions have nothing to do with de manian dialectic of blindness and insight, being far closer to the freudian conflict between conscious and unconscious strivings, save that in derrida's case the conflict seems to be a hysterical one, i.e., the conflict between two consiousnesses which, according to freud, comes to the fore in hypnotic and similar paranormal states (cf. freud 1885: 91). needless to say, it is precisely these instances that can furnish the starting point of a real deconstruction. ^43^ all the apparent "parergonal" confusion of tongues (polylogue) notwithstanding, derridian polylogue cannot escape from this basic bakhtinian rule: the speaking subjects remain distinct and do not merge (cf. 1987: 340-343, 358, 377). ^44^ witness derrida's style, his obsessive question "where?" followed by an immediate unequivocal reply: "there" (cf. among many examples 1987: 361, 366, 372). which means that derrida's and heidegger's concerns are fundamentally the same. cf.: "while the content of the call is seemingly indefinite, the *direction it takes* is a sure one" (heidegger 1962: 318; his italics). place and direction establish an elementary communicative network. in respect to the latter the content of the"call" (heidegger)/"missive", "letter" (derrida) is secondary, but by the same token it is only *seemingly* indefinite. notably, abraham and torok's paraesthetic cryptonymie operates precisely within this heideggerian setting: "it is understandable that, in contrast to other cases, this type of work requires a genuine partnership between patient and analyst: all the more so since the construction arrived at in this way bears no direct relation to the patient's own topography but concerns someone else's" (abraham and torok 1978: 290). ^45^ it is towards this model that most advanced versions of poststructuralism are oriented: "the standpoints of kristeva and laplanche are flawed in respect of...the outside as constitutive of desire itself. by contrast, i suggest that we must develop a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity which breaks with this inside/outside boundary" (elliott 1995: 45). derridian "parergonal logic" is another unavoidable point of reference especially since its fullest elaboration is to be found in the study of visual representations (derrida 1987: 18-121). ^46^ interestingly, our interpretation is corroborated by lacan himself who cannot help but acknowledge that sexuality proper "shows a natural functioning of signs. at this level, they are not signifiers, for the nervous pregnancy is a symptom, and, according to the definition of the sign, something intended for someone. the signifier, being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier" (157). this holds so long as "repressed and symptom are homogeneous, and reducible to the function of signifiers" (176) on the other hand, it is the name-of-the-father in lacanian theory that should suffer repression; it follows that, on lacan's own premises, sexuality can be defined as precisely that which has nothing to do with repression. the repression therefore stems from the dynamic of the instincts of self-preservation, from the a-sexual search for knowledge. characteristically, lacan's formulations just cited may be attributed to torok and abraham. but the paradox is that these authors cannot help ending with an implicit demise of the notion of repression, since the "secret" to be uncovered by means of cryptonymic reading is far more likely to be withhold consciously (cf. abraham/torok 1978: 236 et passim). ^47^ notably, only within this framework does the notion of repression become indispensable. the irony is that derrida advances this profoundly logocentric model as the 'beyond' of logocentrism (1980: 287-290). ^48^ the interest of brennan's explorations stem from the fact that they make particularly lucid the profound similarity between derrida's and lacan's models by exposing the ultimate--jungian--point of their convergence. ^49^ it should be stressed that far from being a perversion of lacan's teaching, brennan's energetics (which is another name for telepathy) faithfully follows in the steps of the absolute master. whence her reference to a recent study by boothby (1992), whose aims are those of a modest exegete (48). ^50^ a number of derridian concepts--hymen, blanc etc.--clearly have an inhibitory function. ^51^ it is not a question of who actually issues the threat (lacan has amply proved that the fact--already pointed out by freud--that the threat more often than not comes from women has no bearing on the emerging structure), but precisely the question of structure. ^52^ hence the irony of brennan's appeal to "generational time" (1993: 189) which, within the energetical empha-telepathetic framework, is actually the time of the generational reversal. ^53^ it may well be that jones himself would have rejected this formula. however, the latter is the only feasible conclusion to be drawn from his elaborations and at the same time the only possibility way to to bring coherence into his rambling theorizing. in effect, jones has done everything to obfuscate the subversive potential of his theoretical insight by trying to force his notion back into the narrow confines of the libidinal economy. however, within the framework of the libidinal economy, the notion of aphanisis is unsustainable. it is the privation of sexual gratification which provokes in the child the fear of the "extinction of sexuality" (450, 442), although, logically speaking, privation should lead to the accumulation of an undisposed libido. fortunately, jones's break with logic is not thorough enough. witness his remark that in order to ward off "the dread of aphanisis," "the wishes that are not destined to be gratified" are damped down(442) or redirected. this is of course a conventionally libidinal view of sublimation which however implies that first of all libido should be accumulated. ^54^ cf. "...an undissolved transference, like an unpaid debt, can be transmitted beyond one generation. it can construct a tradition with this possibility in its entrails" (derrida 1987: 353). the same concern, stated almost in the same words, underpins abraham and torok's cryptoaesthetics (1978: 395-400). ^55^ obviously, this is a strictly materialist point of view. interestingly enough, despite all derrida's theorization of time-giving postponements (cf.1984) which affect his style itself (thus far nobody has paid due attention to the fact that derrida's texts are punctuated by hymens like "let's take our time", "no, no, or at least not so quickly" (1987: 281, 288).) in rare moments of candidness he cannot help admitting that there may emerge a (hermeneutic) impasse when "no one will have any more time" (1986: 117). significantly, this impasse is somehow (for derrida drops the intriguing thread) related to the construction of feminine identity. ^56^ derrida has made the fate of deconstruction directly dependent on the "unlimited textual propagation" (1980: 351-352). ^57^ it may be argued that every closure is an arbitrary affair which therefore has no essential impact on the textual infiniteness (cf. lyotard 1988: 2). ^58^ the full scope of this paradox becomes evident only when we evoke the defensive measure envisaged by derrida, who certainly does not turn his eyes away from the shortcomings of his theory, to counteract the sort of critique just advanced. the failure to accomodate/account for the conditions of discursive possibility, says derrida, is implied in the very definition of discursivity. hence it would be a miracle if deconstruction has succeeded in exempting itself from this universal rule. and what is more deconstruction, according to derrida, has never tried to do anything of the kind: one has to comply with the law of the genre which one sets out to deconstruct. but the great irony is that in actual fact that deconstructive theory as well as practice runs counter to this basic rule of deconstruction, and this due to the central role assigned to the concept of the supplement. for the supplement is nothing else than a radical attempt precisely *to account for* all that which makes discourse (im)possible. to say nothing about the fact that due to the suspension of the inside/outside opposition the conditions of discursivity by necessity become invaginated. it follows that the supplement and repression as the exclusion of the unthought axiomatics are at odds. put otherwise, derrida's own writing seems to escape from the predicament of all writing said to be inextricably bound with repression. ^59^ the freud-bakhtin connection remains rather a murky question. the awkward _freudianism_ (1993b) seems to ward off any attempts to seriously broach the subject. add to this the happy ignorance of bakhtinians (and slavists in general) in psychoanalytic as well as all other matters pertinent to the theoretical advancements of the last half century. with this in mind it is no wonder that the rare discussions of our problem remain either superficial (byrd 1987) or address the question from a particularly unfruitful angle (pirog 1987). the most recent effort to situate bakhtin within the psychoanalytic context (handley 1993) reiterates dialogical commonplaces and thereby effectively forecloses the possibility to divulge the most promising intuitions of bakhtin and freud alike. ^60^ the volume _lacan and narration_ (1985) remains representative for the current impasse of psychoanalytic narratology which is hardly avoidable so long as the narratologists continue to use the notions of repression, transference and the opposition of manifest/latent content. up till now no one's imagination has reached beyond this framework. ^61^ to this task we address ourselves in a paper "the sublime innocence" (forthcoming). ^62^ despite all the assurances of deleuze and guattari to the contrary, repression as well as oedipus structure their economy of desire. witness the machines of desire which by definition are destined to perpetual malfunctioning (1972: 332-365). however, malfunctioning is precisely the principle of interpsychic economy as exemplified by a symptom (which is always a failure) unconceivable without the notion of repression. ^63^ recently, this exclusion has attracted attention of a number of authors (cf. states 1993). unfortunately, they fail to propose anything worthwhile, confining themselves to a critique (actually a dismissal) of deconstruction, whereas, as we shall see, the consideration of this problematic can help deconstruction to the butterfly's second life as opposed to the miserable caterpillar of contemporary deconstruction. ^64^ this is precisely what happens in the most advanced--derridian--version of poststructuralism. at the outset we have the familiar reversal: now it is the reader (receiver) who guarantees the text. however, this role presupposes "the death of the author", or, in derridian terms, the dissemination of the author's name (cf. derrida 1984). the paradox is twofold, for sometimes, notably in respect to freud, derrida is quite close to unambiguously stating that the reader in question is in fact the author himself (cf. 1977: 121, 136). this, in derrida's own terms, can only mean that there is no reader. on the other hand, if there should be a reader, his/her task boils down to collecting the scattered fragments of the author's name. the result would be the revelation of the meaning in its most patent form: that of the proper name. this is of course quite a logocentric enterprise. however, it is precisely this enterprise which currently has come to be known as cryptonymie. derrida's admiration for torok and abraham's stance can speak for itself. ^65^ one example is what sandler with unusual candidness calls the "'conceptual dissolution' of the superego" (1960: 130). ^66^ recently this work has attracted the attention of feminist theorists: "bakhtin's earliest work is potentially the *most radical* and relevant for feminists" (pollock 1993: 238; italics mine). however, thus far nobody has attempted to profit from this potential. the reason is that the reappraisal is conceived along the familiar lines of telepathic/empathic dialogical (para)esthetics which is too narrow for bakhtin's thought: "...aesthetic activity is essential for understanding the social nature of individual consciousness. true aesthetic activity--and i think that for bakhtin aesthetic activity is any shared, disinterested semiotic activity--consists of a double motion of *empathy* and 'finding oneself outside'--which bakhtin calls 'vnenakhodimost'" (238; italics added). an attempt to transform bakhtin's aesthetics into poststructuralist (para)esthetics can lead only to a misunderstanding of the notion of exotopy (vnenakhodimost) central to bakhtin's thought. however, this misunderstanding has become a commonplace, if not a dogma, in baktinian studies (cf. morson and emerson 1990). ^67^ a striking fact which, nevertheless, remains unnoticed is that the theories of literary history propounded in this century boil down to the reversal model. there is a reversal between the formalist notion of "indirect descendence" (a generational reversal of sorts) and the latest model of harold bloom which represents a double reversal starting as it does with the reversal of formalist views in order to endorse the reversal on the rhetorical level. this means that the celebrated "double bind" turns out to be nothing else than the double reversal in respect to the structuralist predecessors, with a purely hegelian result. ^68^ "this other person--'a stranger, a man you'll never know'--fulfils his functions in dialogue *outside the plot*.... as a consequence of such a positioning of 'the other', communion assumes a special character and becomes *independent of all real-life, concrete social forms (the forms of family, social or economic class, life's stories*)" (1979a: 264; italics mine). an astute reader need not be prompted to recognize in *this* kind of dialogism only a conventional phrasing, a more than transparent disguise of a beyond of monologue/dialogue dyad. ^69^ this equation of family and language is another derridian appropriation from hegel (derrida 1986: 7-9), and, as our analysis suggests, not at all deconstructively. ^70^ a common demarche which, logically enough, cannot help but end with more than modest results. cf. behler 1991. ^71^ "family" is the heideggerian blind spot par excellence: the reference to it is completely missing from his oeuvre, which is all the more puzzling given his focus on "everydayness," "care," etc. ^72^ in order for the capitalist economy to function accounts cannot be settled. crediting is a perfect economic counterpart of the semiotical act of time-giving, without which there would not be any capitalism to speak of. whence the fundamental law of capitalism: "the poor become poorer, the rich--richer." it is worthwhile to note that, according to marx, the crisis of capitalist economy stems from an oxymoron (over-production leads to impoverishment)--and therefore corresponds neatly to the crisis of the libidinal economy of (intertextual) (para)esthetic signification for which jones's notion of aphanisis provides an ample description. it remains to add that for quite understandable reasons that neither lyotard (1993) nor derrida (1991; 1994) have anything to say about these obvious interconnections despite their interest in the semiotic extension of the problematic of crediting. ^73^ an astute reader has already recognized here the outcome of the interplay between two master tropes of deconstruction discussed above. ^74^ the notion of *dissemination* is in itself a sufficient proof for derrida's entrapment in traditional biologism, or, to be more precise, for the deconstructive reinforcement of this biologism. for, as we have amply ascertained for ourselves, it is the disseminating fragmentation of sexuality (as a result of the secondary sublimation) which foregrounds the questions (of knowledge, truth etc.) essential to logocentrism. this explains sufficiently why derrida's attempts to introduce the problematic of gender into his discourse (cf. especially 1985: 52-53) cannot help appearing as a concession to the prevailing trend. ^75^ this is a major obstacle for the feminist theorists interested in bakhtin (cf. o'connor 1993: 247-248). fortunately to remove the obstacle it suffices to read bakhtin more closely and independently, that is, to approach him *not* as an avatar of dialogism. ^76^ although at the moment of writing the essay bakhtin has not read heidegger, the description of hero's condition *before* the author's intervention is a perfect echo of heidegger's description of *dasein* in its throwness (1962: 219-225). despite the fact that the bakhtin-heidegger connection is anything bu a neglected subject (in fact heidegger is the thinker most frequently evoked in connection with bakhtin), its real nature remains undivulged owing to the dialogical commitments of investigators as well as to their stance (shared by bakhtinians with slavists in general) to see in theorizing a bogey. ^77^ thus far no one has bothered to pay attention to it, let alone to ponder over its implications. ^78^ cf.: "the male dread of being castrated may or may not have a precise female counterpart, but *what is more important* is to realize that this dread is *only a special case* and that both sexes ultimately dread exactly the same thing, aphanisis. the *mechanism* whereby this is supposed to be brought about shows important *differences* in the two sexes" (440; italics added). ^79^ it is impossible to speak of repression without evaluating positively knowledge as such. which means that grammatology grounded in the notion of repression is *not* a "science that functions as the deconstruction of science," as its fans would like it to be (ulmer 1985: 12). ^80^ this anti-aesthetic, to wit, (para)esthetic stance is one of the most striking characteristics of poststructuralism. cf.przybylowicz 1986: 2, 13-14; norris 1988: xii, 86. ^81^ hence her need to be reassured that she actually brings people together (67). ^82^ cf. james 1966: 51, 65, 180, 200, 209. ^83^ this point is readily acknowledged exactly by those bakhtinians who bother to take account of what goes on by way of theory around them (cf.hirschkop 1989: 24-25). however, far from questioning the concept of dialogism as such, they assume that the dialogicity of the reader's response is unproblematical. ^84^ "...our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies" (6). ^85^ for the discursive revitalization presupposes that the hero(ine) is put to use by the author in just the same manner as maisie was at first used by her parents to indirectly communicate in quite a poststructuralist way. ^86^ so long as postsructuralism chooses to see in jamesian textuality an instance of logocentrism, the poststructuralist claims exemplified by derrida's account of the letter's itinerary in poe's tale have been always already deployed by tradition. ^87^ this rectifies the general view of intertextuality. the primordial debt is not the debt to the predecessor(s) but to the reader. the first being a meaningful, the second a communicative one. the theories of intertextuality obviously privilege the first (the reader-response criticism is exactly the *criticism* and therefore can allow itself the franchise of ignoring theoretical issues) but in doing so unwittingly undermine the very foundations of intertextuality. for this stance amounts to a mute acknowledgement that virtually any author rejects his debts to the reader, whereas only these latter make reading possible. ^88^ the less prejudiced the reader, the more likely he/she is to avow this deficiency. ^89^ cf. 67, 92, 132, 144, 152-153, 172, 214. ^90^ it is by no chance that precisely in the case of james, poststructuralism is compelled to make an exception from its basic postulate not to trust the textual surface. ^91^ alternatively, we can rethink the genre of *bildungsroman* beyond logocentric metanarratives which, as we have seen, are dialogical in essence. ^92^ certainly we are not the first to recognize in innocence the very core of jamesian textuality. unfortunately, far from elucidating matters, the book-length treatment of james's thematization of innocence (g.h. jones 1975) has rather obscured them. this is not so much due to the fact that the study in question is a pure instance of thematical criticism. despite the structuralist and the postsructuralist denigration of the latter, i would rather subscribe to jones's view that the thematical description is in the last analysis also a structural one (285, 287). but the gist of the matter is that jones strikingly fails to establish the continuity between theme and structure. this means that the real trouble is primarily that of misreading in its most trivial sense. and it is this misreading which is responsible for the ultimate convergence between the poststructuralist treatment of james and the one advocated by jones who is bent upon preserving his theoretical innocence (the fashionable references are totally absent from his study). instead of examining the jamesian meaning, jones is satisfied with the traditional view of innocence as essentially a process of loosing it (287). this view makes of innocence a mechanism of tradition transmission (144, 149). jones's study is a particularly telling example of all the paradoxes to which an attempt to accommodate innocence within the framework of western logocentrism gives rise. the first to emerge is the narratological impasse. put bluntly, jones fails to show that innocence is "the premise from which evolves the conflict in a novel or tale" (285). and it cannot be otherwise so long as innocence is conceived of in a traditional way as "abundant time, timeless time" (286), or, in derridian terms, as an act of time-giving. whence the recourse to generational/genealogical model. the dialectic of innocence (innocence--a thesis, responsibility--an antithesis, renunciation--a synthesis) which is said to represent jamesian master plot suffers a diffusion with the result that each term comes to be represented by a group of texts. that this implies a certain reversal of chronology is obvious, for the dialectic is a development of concept and not of an individual. in other words, instead of dialectic of innocence we have a hegelian dialectic of desire which, as lacan is the first to remind us, is essentially a negativity (1988: 147). what comes to be renounced is the desire. this renouncement promotes the tradition (277). this means that the mechanism at work is that of repression. jones's description of innocence is strikingly similar to the poststructuralist (lacanian) description of desire: "innocence itself...is absence or vacancy; it is limitation; it is negation" (285). and once again the distortion of textual reality is particularly obvious in case of the novel we are discussing. witness jones's summary: "maisie has lost her innocence because of all that she knows" (10). the recovery of innocence in which jones is interested is to be sought in other texts. however, it is not be found, for the renunciation (and jones is quite astute to recognize in it the gist of the problem) affects desire and not knowledge. put otherwise, thematical criticism cannot help relinquishing thematicism in favor of theoretical model which tallies perfectly with the poststructuralist one. however, this reversal, in its turn, comes to be reversed. the paradoxical result is the resurrection of the buried author. the cue for jones study provides "a letter in which henry's older brother william describes him in middle age as 'dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling henry'. what, i wondered, does *innocent* mean if it applies equally to a writer...and to the characters he conceived as well?" (ix). but in the course of his study jones has nothing to say about the innocence of the author's discourse. jones attempts to remedy this deficiency in a brief section (288-295) appended at the very end of the study in which james's own innocence is treated in purely biographical terms. this uncanny return of the referent is paralleled by the same outcome in the poststructuralist discourse on the uncanny/sublime. to sum up: it is precisely the innocence that, despite the apparent foregrounding of the purity of origins, subverts the tradition said to privilege these origins. for it is tradition and its postsructuralist indian summer and not jamesian textuality which is "*haunted* by innocence" (ix). however, to account for this subversion as a discursive event played out between the author and the hero(ine) one has to adopt our perspective. ^93^ paradoxically, only by acquiescing to this interpretation can one maintain the view of the super-ego as "a pure culture of the death-instict" (freud 1923: 283), which, as we have seen, is unsustainable from the libidinal standpoint which by necessity implies the reversal between the ego and the super-ego as regards the function of accumulation of libido. ^94^ witness the interpretation of _what maisie knew_ advanced by przybylowicz who treats maisie's development as an instance of conformism (27). the textual misreading stems from the psychoanalytic, from treatment of sublimation as synonymous with repression (19). the paradox of this kind of exegesis is that it cannot help but end with the reversal of the subjects of repression. now it is not the author who represses his/her unconscious knowledge but the hero(ine). however, even the most cursory reader is bound to admit that the latter assumption is strikingly at odds with jamesian textuality. cf. for instance: "what helped maisie was that she exactly knew what she wanted" (263). ^95^ significantly, despite all his attacks on the "ascetic ideal" equated with sublimation *and* the "will to truth" (1989: 143-146, 160) as the very core of western tradition, nietzsche seems to be the first to discern the subversive potential of sublimation. witness his opposition between ascetic castration and genuine *vergeistlichung*--the real enemy of tradition (88). derrida mentions tis opposition but only to quickly drop the theme which threatens his paraesthetic stance (1979: 91-93). the value of our theory of sublimation is that it allows us to account for narrative structures without privileging the avant-garde ones. precisely this privileging and the concomitant inability to deal with traditional narratives is what all attempts to crudely equate sexuality and textuality are bound to wound with (cf. lingis 1983: 101 et passim). that poststructuralist theory takes its cue from avant-garde textual practice is another point in favor of our standpoint. for, far from being a subversion of oedipal patriarchy, the avant-garde thrust to always be ahead of its time corresponds neatly to the assumption implied in the reversal fantasy, i.e., the assumption that the male child is older, ahead, of the woman--the foundational premise of patriarchy. it follows that the traditional narrative is the real touchstone for the validity of theory. ^96^ cf. freud 1910: 193. it can be said that the very thrust of freud's study is to show how epistemophilia equated with the father figure impairs art. interestingly, laplanche picks up freud's discussion to ultimately dismiss the notion of sublimation from psychoanalytic vocabulary (1980b: 119, 191). a telling example of epistemophilia promoted under the nickname of postmodernist paraesthetics. ^97^ this redefinition emerges as the only feasible solution to the paradox that freud's musings on "the future of an illusion" have left us. on the one hand, freud admits that "every individual is virtually an enemy of culture," which remains puzzling so long as the attainment of the cultural ideal is said to provide a narcissistic satisfaction (1927: 345). ^98^ i propose this definition in contradistinction to the paraesthetic theory of "the unconscious *of* the text" (cf.bellemin-noel 1979; davis 1985; schleifer 1985) which by necessity equates textuality proper with the ego. works cited: abraham, nicolas. 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"fetishism and object choice in early childhood." _psychoanalytic quarterly_ 15 (1946): 450-471. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------foti, 'representation represented: foucault, velazquez, descartes', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-foti-representation.txt archive pmc-list, file foti.996. part 1/1, total size 51098 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- representation represented: foucault, velazquez, descartes by veronique m. foti the pennsylvania state university postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by veronique foti, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. [1] in _the order of things_, rene descartes--the early descartes of the _regulae ad direcetionem ingenii_ (1628/29)--is, for michel foucault, the privileged exponent of the classical %episteme% of representation, as it initially defines itself over against the renaissance %episteme% of similitude.^1^ the exemplary position accorded to descartes (a position that is problematic from the "archaeological" standpoint, since exemplars belong themselves to the order of representation) is complemented as well as contested by the prominence foucault gives to a visual work: diego velazquez de silva's late painting _las meninas_, completed some eight or nine years after descartes's death. foucault understands this painting as the self-representation and self problematization of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core. specifically, _las meninas_ demarcates the empty place of the sovereign, the place that will, in the %episteme% of modernity, be occupied by the figure of man. since the place of man, his announced and imminent disappearance, and the character of a thought that can situate itself in the space of this disappearance (the space of language or %ecriture%) are the crucial concerns of _the order of things_, the discussion of _las meninas_ is both inaugural and recurrent; the painting is not placed on a par with the two works of literature, cervantes's _don quixote_ and sade's _justine_, which problematize, respectively, the renaissance and modern epistemic orders. [2] foucault maintains a puzzling silence as to why he finds it necessary to turn to a %painting% (rather than perhaps a work of literature) to find the %episteme% of representation both revealed and subverted. the question concerning the relationship between painting and representation gains further urgency since foucault, who rejects phenomenology, does not concur with maurice merleau-ponty's privileging of painting as an antidote to cartesian and post-cartesian representation.^2^ does he then treat painting as simply a special type of "the visible" which, as gilles deleuze points out, is for him irreducible to the articulable without, however, contesting the latter's primacy?^3^ does painting simply belong to the non-discursive milieu or form part of the visual archive without having any power to challenge discursive configurations? [3] in order to address these questions and to carry forward the dialogue between classical representation and painting that foucault initiates, i will first discuss the role of descartes in foucault's %episteme% of representation, then interrogate his analysis of the structure of representation in _las meninas_, arguing that he is not fully attentive to the materiality of painting and to its resistance to discursive appropriation but remains, strangely, bound to a cartesian understanding of vision and painting. i will, in conclusion, consider the implications of renewed attention to the materiality of painting for theories of representation, and the importance, for genuinely pictorial thought, of the irreducibility of painting to a theoretical exploration of vision. descartes and the %episteme% of representation [4] foucault perceives clearly that, in classical representation, as inaugurated by descartes, universal %mathesis% as a relational science of order and measure takes precedence over the mathematization of nature (which is emphasized by husserl and heidegger).^4^ descartes notes, in the _regulae_, that mathematics is merely the "outer covering" (%integumentum%) of the pure %mathesis% that is the hidden source of all scientific disciplines.^5^ [5] for descartes, the cognitive order of the %mathesis% is not a representation of any pre-given, ontological order, but a free construction of the human intellect or %ingenium% (which, in the _regulae_, is not subordinated to divine creation). representation does not function here as a replication, in the order of knowledge, of a reality that is independent of and withdrawn from the apprehending mind (a replication that typically seeks to disguise its own secondariness or shortfall). rather, if %mathesis% can be regarded as a prototype of representation, it is one that boldly re-invents reality in the autonomous order of thought. the intellect reflects and contemplates only itself in the order of nature. [6] given his constructivism, descartes insists that the limits of human knowledge must be scrupulously demarcated and respected. he notes, for instance, the futility of postulating occult qualities and new types of entities to account for the phenomena of magnetism. if one can explain the phenomena entirely in terms of "simple natures" that are "known in themselves" (because their simplicity is not absolute but relative to the apprehending intellect), and of their necessary interconnections (which is to say, by %intuitus% and %deductio%), one can confidently claim to have discovered the magnet's true nature, %insofar% as it is accessible to human knowledge.^6^ even in his classical works, where the epistemology of simple natures is superseded by that of innate ideas, which are not necessarily comprehensible to the finite mind (the idea of god is a notable example), descartes continues to emphasize that the limitation of human knowledge is the price of its certainty. [7] although foucault does not explicitly discuss descartes's strategies of limitation, he indicates the "archaeological" configuration in terms of which they can be understood. he points out that the indefinite profusion of resemblances characteristic of the renaissance %episteme% of similitude becomes finitized once similarity and difference are articulated in the order of %mathesis%. infinity becomes the fundamental problem for classical thought, and finitude is understood privatively as shortfall or limitation. infinity escapes representation. by contrast, modernity relinquishes the unattainable standard of the infinite and thinks finitude "in an interminable cross-reference with itself."^7^ in his exchange with derrida, foucault brilliantly analyzes the problem of finitude in descartes's _meditationes_ with reference to madness and dream as afflictions of the finite mind.^8^ in the _regulae_, however, the intellect or %ingenium% is not situated in relation to the infinite but is granted autonomy, so long as it can conceal its own usurpation of the position of origin. it translates its experience of finitude into the parameters of scientific construction.^9^ [8] foucault does not pay heed to the anomaly of the _regulae_ in relation to the classical %episteme%; but he discusses two orders within which an effacement of the position of origin (and therefore also of its usurpation) can be accomplished: signification and language. he observes that "binary signification" (which conjoins signifier and signified without benefit of a mediating relation, such as resemblance) is so essential to the structure of representation as to remain generally unthematized with the classical %episteme%.^10^ the sign must, however, represent its own representative power within itself, so that the binary relationship immediately becomes unbalanced, giving primacy to the signifier over the signified or the phenomenon. this concentration of representative power in the signifier tends also to obscure the role of the subject as the originator or representation, which is precisely the obscuration or ambiguity that the early descartes needs. [9] language, in the context of the classical %episteme%, abets this obscuration, in that it takes on an appearance of transparent neutrality, becoming the diaphanous medium of representation. discourse interlinks thought (the "i think") with being (the "i am") in a manner which effaces the speaker's finite singularity. for this reason, foucault finds that language as it functions in classical representation precludes the possibility of a science of man.^11^ [10] the function of classical discourse is to create a representational table or picture which is schematic and pays no heed to phenomena in their experienced concreteness. in the case of the visible, which is at issue here, phenomenal features that resist schematization, such as color, or perceived motion and depth, are ascribed to a confused apprehension of intelligible relationships and are therefore denied any intrinsic importance. the classical %episteme% recognizes no significant differences between thought and a vision purged of its adventitious confusions (those that accrue to it due to its immersion in sentience). purified vision is understood in terms of geometry and mechanics. representation self-represented: foucault's _las meninas_ [11] foucault analyzes _las meninas_ as a referential system that organizes mutually exclusive visibilities with respect to a subjectivity or power of representation which remains incapable of representing itself, so that its absence interrupts the cycle of representation. as john rajchman observes, foucault, in the 1960s, was practicing a form of %nouvelle critique% which views the work of art as abysmally self-referential: in each work, he uncovered a reference to the particular artistic tradition in which the work figured, and thus presented it as the self referring instance of that tradition. _las meninas_ is a painting about painting in the tradition of "illusionistic space"...^12^ [12] in _las meninas_, the attentive gaze of the represented painter reaches out beyond the confines of the picture space to a point at which it converges with the sight lines of the infanta, the %menina% dona isabel de velasco, the courtier in the middle ground (thought to be don diego ruiz de azcona), and the dwarf maribarbola.^13^ foucault takes this point to be the standpoint of the implied spectator, converging with that of the implied actual painter gazing at and painting the represented scene, and with that of the model being painted by the represented artist. the hand of this represented painter is poised in mid-air, holding a brush that he may have, a moment ago, touched to the palette. it will presently resume its work on a surface invisible to the spectator to whom the monumental stretched and mounted canvas reveals only its dull, indifferent back. his eyes and hands conjoin spatialities that are normally disjunct: the space of the model, excluded %de facto% from the composition, the space of the spectator excluded %de jure%, the represented space, and finally the invisible space of representation, the surface of the canvas being painted. in the allegorical dimension, an unstilled oscillation is set up between signifier and signified, representative and represented, leaving the one who has the power of representation (the painter who, as represented, has momentarily stepped out from behind the canvas and who, in his actuality, remains invisible) both inscribed and concealed in the referential system. [13] foucault observes that the source of all the visibility in the painting, the window opposite the painter's eyes, through which pours "the pure volume of light that renders all representation possible,"^14^ remains similarly invisible, both by its near-exclusion from the composition, and by being, in itself, a pure aperture, an unrepresentable empty space. the light which it releases streams across the entire foreground, casting into relief or dissolving the contours of the figures, kindling pale fires in the infanta's hair, and sharply illumining the jutting vertical edge of the represented canvas. since it must also illuminate this canvas's unseen surface, as well as the place of the model, it functions as the common locus of the representation and, in its interaction with the painter's vision, as the former's enabling source. similarly, the cartesian "natural light" is the unitary but hidden origin of representation. it remains hidden in that "to make manifest" is understood as meaning "to represent;" for, as already indicated, it cannot itself be represented. it is not, to begin with, a positive value in the economy of presence and absence. [14] at the far back wall of the interior that _las meninas_ (re)presents, the focally placed yet disregarded mirror startingly reveals what the represented painter is looking at and what so fascinates the gaze of the various figures (including that of don nieto who, standing in the open back door, both reflects the spectator and opposes his dynamic corporeity to the spectral mirror reflection). the image in the mirror shows the royal couple, king philip iv and his queen mariana, seemingly posing for a double portrait (such as velazquez is not known to have executed), but also gazing incongruously at their unseen real selves with the s ame rapt attention shown by the various figures. in their invisible and withdrawn reality, they function as the center of attention and reference; but their reflection is the most "compromised" and ephemeral aspect of the represented scene. were the %menina% on the left, dona maria agustina de sarmiento, to rise from her kneeling position, the ghostly sovereigns would at once be eclipsed; and the mirror would show only her carefully coifed wig with its gossamer butterflies. the mirror's superimposition of seer and seen, and of inside and outside, is emphatically unstable, accidental, and transitory. as if to emphasize this point, the superimposition which the mirror allows one to extend to the entire picture (insofar as it is "looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene") is, as foucault observes, uncoupled at its two lower corners: at the left by the recalcitrant canvas that will not show its face, and at the right by the dog, content to look at nothing, and peacefully relinquishing itself to just being seen.^15^ [15] whereas the mirror reflection functions as the painting's effective yet disregarded center, the *visual* focus is on the head of the young infanta, situated at the intersection of the main compositional axes, bathed in a flood of golden light, and emphasized through the positioning of the flanking %meninas%. the lines of her gaze and the gaze of the royal couple converge at the point of the model/spectator and form the painting's sharpest angle. the superimposition marked by this point of convergence is, however, dissolved within the represented scene into its three components: the painter, the model (in reflection), and the spectator (in the guise of don nieto). natural vision seems to be as inept in holding together the schema of representation as is the mirror image. [16] within the cycle of the "spiral shell" of representation, which foucault traces from the window to the attentive gaze and the tools of the painter, to the implied spectacle, to its reflection, to the paintings (hung above the mirror), to the spectator's gaze, and finally, back to the enabling and dissolving light, the sovereign place of the author as well as of the one who is to recognize him/herself in the representation is inscribed as a place of absence. in marking this place, _las meninas_ indicates the necessary disappearance, within representation, of its own foundation. [17] for foucault, the absence inscribed is essentially that of man, so that the interruption of the cycle of representation reveals the impossibility of developing, in the disclosive space of the classical %episteme%, a science of man. only with the eclipse or mutation of this %episteme% and the ascendancy of analogy and succession over representation can man show himself as both knowing subject and object of knowledge, as "enslaved sovereign" and "observed spectator." he then appears, as foucault points out, "in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by _las meninas_."^16^ _las meninas_ in question [18] foucault's analysis of _las meninas_ is compelling because it attests equally to theoretical originality and sophistication and to an acute visual sensitivity. subsequent discussion, however, has called some of the underlying assumptions of foucault's analysis into question. moreover, one can ask whether his analysis exhausts the extraordinary visual and symbolic complexity of the painting. before returning to the questions raised at the outset, i propose, therefore, to engage in another reflection on _las meninas_, one that is mindful of these issues without being subservient to a pre-conceived agenda. [19] in response to john r. searle's construal of the painting as a paradox (and, implicitly, a cryptogram) of visual representation, joel snyder and ted cohen have shown the incorrectness of both searle's and foucault's guiding assumption that the (re)presented scene is viewed from the perspective of the model who is reflected in the represented mirror.^17^ since the painting's perspectival vanishing point is at the elbow of the figure of don nieto, the point of view must, theoretically, be directly opposite it; but whoever stands along this axis or at this (not entirely specific) point could not possibly be reflected in the mirror. snyder and cohen establish that what the mirror reflects is not the hypothetical model, but rather a centrally located portion of the face of the represented canvas.^18^ as jonathan brown notes, antonio palomino's well-informed discussion of the painting in _el museo pictorio y escala &oacute;ptica_ of 1724 "is confident that the mirror image reflects the large canvas on which the artist is working."^19^ palomino's testimony (important, in part, because he was able to consult most of the represented persons) thus corroborates snyder's and cohen's analysis. [20] the painted mirror image is strangely ambiguous. its frame assimilates it to the paintings shown on the back wall, but the line of light around its edges and the sheen on its surface mark it off from these and indicate its purely optical status. the image it shows is quite obviously not a glimpse of life, but rather an artful composition which gives every indication of being shown in reverse. the red curtain, for instance, looks incongruous when placed, as shown, in the upper right corner but would be visually effective if placed in the upper left, as it is, for example, in other paintings by velazquez, such as _the rokeby venus_, _prince baltasar carlos_, or _las hilanderas_. the relative heights of the king and queen as well as the customary practice of reading the graphic articulation from left to right (with its implicit hierarchization) suggest an artistic %composition% shown in reverse, which would then be superior both to the real-life scene that it represents and to any mere optical artifices of representation, such as the mirror. [21] art-historical consensus has, as svetlana alpers points out, come to view _las meninas_ as a visual statement concerning the status of painting in 17th century spain.^20^ spanish painting was striving at the time to emulate the prestige of the venetian school, and philip iv, a noted %connoisseur% and patron of the art, significantly advanced its standing. madlyn millner kahr concurs with this interpretation. she points out that velazquez places his own head higher than those of the other foreground figures and that the represented paintings (which depict the contests between apollo and marsyas and, as in _las hilanderas_, between athena and arachne) extol human creativity and thus symbolically place painting on a par with music.^21^ palomino suggests that velazquez immortalized his own image by associating it intimately with that of the infanta.^22^ jonathan brown, in contrast, thematizes the painting's relationship to the figure of the king who, as kahr points out, could not have been directly shown in an informal setting. given that philip iv had the painting installed in the personal space of his summer office and was its sole intended spectator, he could, when he faced it, see his own reflection and the effect of his presence on the courtly gathering. if, however, he withdrew from it, the painting could again be construed as focused on the figure of the infanta, with the mirror reflecting the painted canvas.^23^ [22] a key difficulty in both foucault's analysis and that of snyder and cohen is that they construe the painting as perspectivally univocal and systematic, so thatr their analyses resort unquestioningly to an albertian understanding of perspective for which, as norman bryson points out, "the eye of the viewer is taking up a position in relation to the scene that is identical to the position originally occupied by the painter," as though they both looked "on to a world unified spatially around the centric ray."^24^ bryson notes the ineluctable frustration of this ideal system (and of the more encompassing ideal of %compositio% in which it functioned) by its inability to allocate to the viewer not just an axis, but a precise standpoint. in consequence, he remarks, the perspectival vanishing point becomes "the anchor of a system which *incarnates* the viewer" and renders her visible "in a world of absolute visibility."^25^ bryson's analysis here is essentially congruent with foucault's in conjoining the articulation of a system with its immanent subversion. he does not, however, take the full measure of what it means to incarnate the viewer--not only to give her a precise standpoint or the body of labor and desire, but also to inscribe her into a radically differential articulation, to inscribe her into indecidability. the secret privilege of painting, acknowledged somewhat obscurely by velazquez and foucault, and more lucidly perhaps by the late merleau-ponty, is its power not only to *represent* a certain %episteme% together with its intrinsic difficulty, but also to deploy the resources of representation (traditionally assigned to it) so as to *disintegrate* the representational schema in favor of an articulation that is non-systematic and not subservient to any dominant %episteme%. [23] to return to _las meninas_, it is clear that the painting addresses itself to the discontinuity of what bryson terms the "glance," rather than to the syncretic and durationless "gaze."^26^ if this discontinuity is disregarded, one comes up against difficulties such as the one snyder and cohen confront in realizing that, since mirrors reverse, the represented mirror image cannot reflect its implied counterpart on the unseen face of the represented canvas, even though their positions correspond. a double reversal, that is, would simply restore the aspect of the original. [24] it is not enough to note, as brown does, that in creating numerous focal points, velazquez followed "the restless movement of the eye," leaving perspectival relationships deliberately ambiguous.^27^ velazquez not only *allows* for ambiguities and undecidability as if these were surds of natural vision, but he also actively *stages* them and does so in multiple pictorial registers. to begin with the compositional and perspectival staging: in albertian perspective, the viewer is invited to take up the standpoint of the painter so that her vantage point is anticipated and acknowledged by the represented figures and scene. the viewer's situation in _las meninas_, however, is rendered problematic and undecidable. yes, the viewer is seen by the figures of the composition (and even curtsied to by dona isabel), but only because her position coincides with that of the implied model, not the represented painter. moreover, the "model" functions as such only for the mirror reflection (given that the canvas being painted by the represented painter is not of suitable size for a double portrait); yet, the reflection is ambiguously mediated by an unseen painting. the viewer confronts the unseen painter and does not merge with him, so that the positions of seer and seen are marked out in an inter-encroachment that both anticipates and radicalizes the analyses of merleau-ponty.^28^ [25] it is interesting to consider that in jan vermeer's _the painter in his studio_ which bryson foregrounds as breaking with "the privileged focus of the spectacular moment," the spectator stumbles, as it were, inadvertently upon a scene in which the represented painter is shown from the back, and the model with downcast eyes is retreating into a condition approaching that of the sartrean in-itself--no doubt in "bad faith."^29^ the disruption of the "spectacular moment" enacted here is straightforward; it virtually advertises itself. _las meninas_ is more subtle, for it consummately employs the resources of representation to render its seemingly lucid relationships aporetic. in short--and therefore with a certain element of exaggeration--i want to suggest that _las meninas_ problematizes representation in a more complex and "postmodern" way than foucault's analysis suggests. [26] whereas, as bryson points out, the "realist" tradition of painting, subservient to the gaze, strives to fuse the three-dimensionality of the "founding perception" with the flatness of the canvas and the duration of viewing (reduced to the pure moment), and to cover its traces, _las meninas_ frustrates this %telos% in both its spatial and temporal registers, highlighting the insuperable incongruities that subvert it. [27] leo steinberg notes that sight lines sustain the painting's compositional structure, and that the diaphaneity emphasized through eyes, aperture, and mirror serves to open up opaque matter to vision and light.^30^ the light in the painting seems to ascend from below, from the material plane on which daily life deploys itself, to the hall's lofty spaces. on the lighted foreground plane, the billowing forms of the ladies' extravagant crinolines create a massive and soothing undulation, a wave that folds in on itself with the sleeping dog and retreats along the axis of the figures in the middle ground, contrasting throughout with the austere geometry of the pictorial space. throughout this silvery wave pattern one can follow a procession of reds--from the red curtain in the mirror reflection or the cross of santiago to dona maria's cheek and proffered %bucaro,% to the adornments of the infanta, washing over the shoulder and front of her dress in a crimson glaze, then on to the bows and shimmer of dona isabel's costume, finally coming to rest in the muted red of the outfit of nicolasito pertusato. the relationships of form and color lack univocal meaning; they are not ancillary to subverting the %episteme% of representation, yet they are no less crucial to the painting's articulation than the geometric relationships that foucault emphasizes. [28] one needs, finally, to attend not only to ideal and geometric relationships, but to the painting's materiality and inscription of process. as yve-alain bois points out in the title essay of _painting as model_ (the essay being a review of hubert damisch's _fenetre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture_), there is a "technical" model of painting that remains irreducible to the "perceptive" model; and the "image" beloved by existentialist (and much of post-existentialist) thought is, after all, only a surface effect.^31^ a theory of representation that is informed strictly by geometry does not give due weight to the materiality of painting. indeed, achieving a weightless ideality is part and parcel of its still metaphysical agenda. [29] in _las meninas_, quasi-material form is given visual existence by means of the sketchiest touches of the brush, so that under closer scrutiny manifest identities dissolve into pigment and trace. even the beige ground is hardly a ground, for it is applied with such translucency as to allow the canvas to assert its grain. velazquez's brushwork is particularly sketchy and thin at the painting's visual focus, the head and torso of the infanta. such freedom of the brush, momentarily evoking light, form, and the similitude of life out of accident, requires the spectator's participation and is therefore not univocal. moreover, as joel snyder has described, there was a sophisticated tradition, consonant with an exaltation of painting, of visually interpreting the seemingly accidental mark: in addition to seeing a %borron% [stain or mark] from the proper distance and in the correct light, the viewer needed learning, experience, and sensitivity to decipher the painted code. to the initiate, the successfully decoded message carried a sense of heightened reality, a revelation...of profound and near-divine truth.^32^ [30] here also, however, _las meninas_ deploys the resources of a certain "code" so as to problematize it and to place it, so to speak, %en abime%. it offers no univocal message to be disengaged but brings the viewer up against the ineluctably differential and an-archic character of perceptua and interpretive coherence. illusionary form and materiality are equally compelling, so that which commands primacy is indecidable. one cannot acquiesce in the idea that one's sophisticated perception unveils the painting's "truth," for one's perception may be part and parcel of a procession of illusions and simulacra. the autonomy of painting [31] foucault's selection of a painting to problematize the %episteme% of representation reflects his characterization of that %episteme% in terms of order, simultaneity, tabulation, and taxonomy, which is to say, foucault characterizes the episteme of representation as an essentially %spatial% conception. by contrast, he characterizes the epistemic order that begins to assert itself at the close of the 18th century as informed by an awareness of time, genesis, and destruction. when things begin to escape from the order of representation, they reveal "the force that brought them into being and that remains in them," and the static schema of representation is robbed of its power to unite knowledge with things.^33^ the way is opened for the hegelian system and for the philosophies of finitude that subvert it. [32] whereas the arts of language are suited to reveal epistemic orders that are fundamentally dynamic and temporal, for instance, through allusion, irony, or narrative structure, traditional western painting seems, for foucault, to be privileged in thematizing the schematic and spatial order of representation, due to being an essentially spatial art. as soon as this point is acknowledged, however, the advantage gained (that foucault's analysis of _las meninas_ reveals its logic) is offset by a serious difficulty: painting, made into an art of spatial projection, is inherently and from the outset conformed to the procrustean bed of classical representation, modeled on geometric projection. in consequence, it is deprived of autonomy, becoming simply, as it were, a shadow-writing in the wake of philosophy. its history, moreover, becomes obscure and problematic. if, for instance, one accepts yve-alain bois's apt characterization of abstract expressionism as "an effort to bring forth the pure %parousia% of [painting's] own essence,"^34^ this essence sought for (however questionable the notion) can clearly not be the long exhausted schema of representation. or, to use a similar example, bois suggests that mondrian sought to accomplish an abstract deconstruction of painting (in response to the "economic abstraction" of capitalism) by analyzing "the elements that (historically) ground its symbolic order," and which are not limited to formal relationships, color, luminosity, or the figure/ground opposition.^35^ yet, the full extent of mondrian's desconstructive effort cannot be grasped if classical western painting is reduced to representation. [33] in his study of rene magritte's _ceci n'est pas une pipe_, foucault addresses the history of western painting. he characterizes it as being governed, from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by two principles, the first of which mandates a dissociation of depiction from linguistic reference together with the establishment of a hierarchical relation of designation between them, while the second makes "resemblance" the criterion of representation.^36^ he then traces the subversion of these principles, respectively, to klee and kandinsky. it needs to be noted that "resemblance" is conceived here in terms of the logic of representation and is contrasted with sheer likeness, with the mimetic order which foucault terms "similitude." as magritte notes in a letter to foucault (and as the latter acknowledges), ordinary language does not distinguish between resemblance and similitude. on foucault's distinction, however, "resemblance" is instituted by thought, whereas "likeness" is encountered spontaneously in experience.^37^ [34] foucault's characterization of the history of western painting in terms of his two principles is strangely cartesian; for descartes strives to eliminate natural and spontaneous likeness (which he calls %ressemblance%) from representation. in the _optics_, for instance, descartes argues that likeness is neither necessary nor even useful for representation: ...the perfection [of images] often depends on their not resembling their objects as much as they might. you can see this in the case of engravings, consisting of only a little ink placed here and there on the paper....it is only in relationship to shape that there is any real likeness. and even this likeness is very imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies varying in relief on a surface that is entirely flat...^38^ for descartes, painting is essentially drawing, conceived as the creation of representations that elide likeness. it functions, for him, as an extension of vision which is itself a masked form of mathematical thought. in virtue of this assimilation of painting to drawing to vision, the codes of recognition that govern representation are taken to be universal and timeless, rather than intrinsically historicized. although foucault provides precisely what cartesian thought rules out, namely a historical interpretation of representation, his interpretation remains bound to a cartesian understanding of vision and painting as well as to their cartesian assimilation. [35] curiously enough, this assimilation continues to be accepted by theorists as diverse as snyder and merleau-ponty. for merleau-ponty, painting is the self-interrogation of vision (a self-interrogation that, %ab initio%, distances itself from cartesian representation), throughout its history. in contrast, snyder points to the inseparability of the perspectival construction of space from the rationalization and schematization of vision.^39^ in his view, the perspectival system of depiction offered a mirror in which vision could almost miraculously contemplate itself, so long as it accepted its own schematization. [36] foucault rejects the schematization of vision since he subjects both visibilities and discursive practices to "archaeological" analysis. as deleuze notes, foucault upholds the specificity of seeing, denying a schematic isomorphism between the visible and the articulable.^40^ at the same time, however, he resists merleau-ponty's effort "to make the visible the basis of the articulable," and thus to give vision a quasi-transcendental primacy. in foucault's analysis of _las meninas_, his commitment to the "specificity" of vision is, at best, imperfectly realized--of the major registers of visibility, such as color, form, depth, or light, he devotes almost exclusive attention to the last two; and even one of these, namely light, becomes for him, as deleuze puts it, "a system of light that opens up the space of classical representation."^41^ [37] to avoid this impasse and to accord to painting an autonomous (though always historically contextualized) power of invention or differential genesis, what is needed is a theorization of what bois calls "the mode of thought for which painting is the stake"--a genuinely pictorial thought that is irreducible to "visual thinking" or to a visual exegesis of vision and visibility in the manner of merleau-ponty.^42^ although merleau-ponty's study of vision, carried on in part through the resources of painting, is insightful and important, his commitment to the primacy of perception, and particularly of vision, leaves him unable to address abstract painting, which is importantly concerned with "disturbing the permanent structures of perception, and above all the figure/ground relationship" (as to which merleau-ponty still notes in his late work that it is insurpassable).^43^ to theorize the "mode of thought for which painting is the stake" will allow one not only to do painting more justice, but also to relate it meaningfully to developments in postmodern thought. [38] one thing that is requisite for developing a theoretical understanding of genuinely *pictorial* thought is, as already noted, a painstaking attentiveness to the materiality and hence also the technicality of painting. philosophical analysis--even of a contemporary and postmodern orientation--has tended to pass over the materiality of painting, unaware that such a move bespeaks an enduring bond to the oppositional and hierarchical mode of thinking that, in the wake of heidegger and derrida, has been termed "metaphysics," a mode of thinking that privileges, in particular, the supersensible over the sensible. as concerns painting, such a move generally takes the form of attending to the pure image and of being oblivious of marks, pigment, or support. these, nevertheless, are thematized not only in contemporary painting, but also by classical painters such as velazquez or goya. one cannot approach a contemporary painter like mondrian without understanding that he strove to "neutralize" painting's proper elements, being aware that a bare rectangle of canvas is already "tragic," in the sense of having *in its sheer materiality* symbolic and expressive charge.^44^ this charge, however, is neither straightforwardly transposable into discourse nor into what bois calls the "perceptive model," as contrasted with the technical and other models of painting. [39] whereas foucault's study of _las meninas_ bypasses the painting's materiality in favor of its quasi-mathematical (perspectival) intelligibility (affirming here philosophy's own mathematical model, from which the schematization of vision derives), the painting, by contrast, calls attention to its own materiality: it presents itself as other than the geometrically analyzable mirror reflection; its own perspective is illegible; the represented canvas, which is given monumental proportions, presents to the viewer only its bare backside and the labor of its stretching; and both the light and the gestures of the brush are allowed to deliteralize form and to unsettle the hierarchies and protocol of court life, the political emblem of the order of representation. over all of this, the represented painter presides, brush and palette in hand, his searching gaze indissociable from the inventive engagement of his hands. [40] if the painter elevates his art, as discussed earlier, to the recognized status of music or poetry, he does so without passing over its materiality; rather, he makes evident that its materiality and technicality are of another order than those of the skills and crafts to which it had traditionally been assimilated. they function in the context of an autonomous order of %poiesis.% for, as damisch writes in a searching analysis of balzac's _the unknown masterpiece_, literature can *say* the indescribable and declare it to be such; painting "can only produce it, by the means that are proper to it.^45^ with respect to balzac's figure of frenhofer, this opacity of painting renders it necessary to choose between seeing the woman and seeing the picture, at the risk of both of these disappearing, as happens here, in favor of sheer painting... [which] brings with it no information that could be translated into the terms of language, that could be declared, nothing that could be understood, apart from *noise*.^46^ [41] as soon as this opacity of painting, refractory to sheer perception as well as to intellectual and linguistic constructs, is grasped one not only can begin to understand the exigency that drives it, in its historical course, toward abstraction, but one can also draw on its specific order of %poiesis% for addressing the issue of difference that remains in focus in postmodern thought. notes: ^1^ michel foucault, _the order of things_ (translation of _les mots et les choses_), alan sheridan, trans. (new york: pantheon, 1970), referred to hereafter as ot. descartes's works are referred to in the standard edition, charles adam and p. tannery, eds., _oeuvres de descartes_, rev. ed., 13 vols. (paris: vrin, 1964-1976), and in the english translation by j. cottingham, b. stoothoff, and d. murdoch, _the philosophical writings of descartes_, 3 vols. (cambridge: cambridge up, 1985-1991). these sources are referred to as at and csm, respectively. translations from the latin or french are mine throughout, unless otherwise indicated. ^2^ maurice merleau-ponty, _l'oeil et l'esprit_ (paris: gallimard, 1964). english translation by carleton dallery, "eye and mind," in james edie, ed., _merleau-ponty: the primacy of perception_ (evanston: northwestern up, 1964). my references are to the french edition, cited as oe. ^3^ gilles deleuze, _foucault_ trans. sean hand, (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1988). see pp. 48-69. ^4^ see edmund husserl, _the crisis of the european sciences_, trans. david carr (evanston: northwestern up, 1980) part ii; and martin heidegger, _die frage nach dem ding_ (tubingen: niemeyer, 1975 [1962]). ^5^ at x, 373-378; csm i, 17-19. ^6^ at x, 427; csm i, 49f. ^7^ ot, 318. ^8^ m. foucault, "mon corps, ce papier, ce feu;" appendix to _histoire de la folie a l'age classique_ (paris: gallimard, 1972), 582-603. there is no english translation of this appendix which is a response to jacques derrida, "cogito and the history of madness," in _writing and difference_, trans. alan bass (chicago: u of chicago p, 1978) 31-63. ^9^ see here jean-luc marion, _sur l'ontologie grise de descartes_, 2nd ed. (paris: vrin, 1981). ^10^ ot, 65. ^11^ ot, 311. ^12^ foucault argues that, when talking about painting, one needs to erase proper names, so as to keep open the relationship of language to vision (ot 9f). i do not agree that proper names foreclose this relationship; therefore i continue to use them. ^13^ ot, 6. ^14^ ot, 14. ^15^ ot, 312. ^16^ joel snyder and ted cohen, "_las meninas_ and the paradoxes of visual representation," _critical inquiry_ 7:2 (winter, 1980) 429-447. ^17^ "reflections on _las meninas_," 441. ^18^ jonathan brown, _velazquez_ (new haven and london: yale up, 1986) 257. ^19^ svetlana alpers, "interpretation without representation; or the viewing of _las meninas_," _representations_, i:1 (february, 1983) 31-57. ^20^ madlyn millner kahr, _velazquez: the art of painting_ (new york: harper & row, 1976) 172-185. compare also elizabeth de gue trapier, _velazquez_ (new york: the hispanic society of america, 1948). ^21^ as quoted by brown, _velazquez_ 259. ^22^ brown, _velazquez_ 260. ^23^ norman bryson, _vision and painting: the logic of the gaze_ (new haven: yale up, 1983) 104. ^24^ bryson, %op. cit.% 106. ^25^ see the chapter "the gaze and the glance," in _vision and painting_, 87-131. ^26^ brown, _velazquez_ 259. ^27^ see maurice merleau-ponty, _l'oeil et l'esprit_ (paris: gallimard, 1964), and the new translation by michael b. smith, "eye and mind," in galen a. johnson, ed., _the merleau-ponty aesthetics reader_ (evanston: northwestern up, 1993) 121-149. ^28^ on vermeer's painting, see bryson, _vision and painting_, 111-117. ^29^ leo steinberg, "velazquez's _las meninas_," 19 (oct., 1981), 45-54. ^30^ see the title essay of bois's _painting as model_ (cambridge, ma: mit p, 1993) 245-257. damisch's collection of esssays is published by editions du seuil, 1984. ^31^ g. mckim smith, g. andersen-bergdoll, and r. newman, _examining velazquez_ (new haven and london: yale up, 1988) 23. ^32^ ot, 312. ^33^ bois, _painting as model_, 230. ^34^ _painting as model_, 240. on mondrian, see also the chapter "piet mondrian: _new york city_." ^35^ m. foucault, _ceci n'est pas une pipe_ (paris: fata morgana, 1973), ch. iii. ^36^ magritte to foucault, 23 may 1966, in _ceci n'est pas une pipe_, 83-85. ^37^ descartes, _optics_, discourse iv, at vi, 113; csm i, 165. ^38^ joel snyder, "picturing vision," _critical inquiry_, 6:3 (spring/summer, 1980), 499-526. ^39^ deleuze, _foucault_ 61. ^40^ _foucault_, 57. ^41^ _painting as model_, 245. ^42^ merleau-ponty, _the visible and the invisible_, alphonso lingis, trans. (evanston: northwestern up, 1964), 197. ^43^ damisch, "l'eveil du regard," _fenetre jaune cadmium_, 54-72. ^44^ _fenetre jaune cadmium_, 45. ^45^ _fenetre jaune cadmium_, 25. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------[editor], 'announcements and advertisements', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-[editor]-announcements.txt archive pmc-list, file notices.995. part 1/1, total size 190179 bytes: -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------announcements and advertisements postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------every issue of postmodern culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. if you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in pmc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------special announcements * cultural cartographies conference award * pmc call for hypermedia work ------------------------------------------------------------------------------publication announcements * essays in postmodern culture * college literature * lit: literature, interpretation, theory * re-thinking marxism * october * rachitecture * rachitecture 1.4 * doom patrols * coded messages: chains * electronic antiquity * feminist majority * i/o/d two * imagination * the katharine sharp review * "lx," interactive short story on the internet * buzznet * the poverty of dialectical materialism * modern fiction studies * speed * in some unrelated land * gruene street * women in french studies * project muse * desktop publishing * directory of electronic journals * newjour announcement list * public-access computer systems review ------------------------------------------------------------------------------conferences and events * nasig conference * theories and metaphors of cyberspace * evolving or revolving * patheticism * french feminism * queer coalitions * international assoc. for philosophy and literature * the good, the bad, and the internet * society for literature and science * technical and skills training conference * access '95 www conference ------------------------------------------------------------------------------calls for contributions * assault: radicalism in aesthetics and politics * conduites * computers and writing xii * trans/forms * electronic journal on virtual culture * the missing as cultural discourse * comparative drama scandinavian issue * visual behaviors/digital productions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------other announcements * the black poetic society * steven a. coons award * gypsy lore society * e-zine survey * asian american media mall * teen smoking ------------------------------------------------------------------------------publication announcements * essays in postmodern culture an anthology of essays from postmodern culture is available in print from oxford university press. the works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern - from aids and the body to postmodern politics. writing by george yudice, allison fraiberg, david porush, stuart moulthrop, paul mccarthy, roberto dainotto, audrey ecstavasia, elizabeth wheeler, bob perelman, steven helmling, neil larsen, david mikics, barrett watten. book design by richard eckersley. isbn: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound) 0-19-508753-4 (paper) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * centennial review [image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * college literature [image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * lit: literature, interpretation, theory [image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * re-thinking marxism [image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * october [image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * rachitecture 1.4 rachitecture v.1#4 rachitecture is my version of architecture on the internet. as a 'net based newsletter, it's only function is to get you out there to have a look around. of course, what is out there is always changing, and what seems interesting does too. in keeping with last month's architectures without the conventional plan and section, i must recommend a site put up by joseph squier called the place. why i think this place is architecture, or at the very least inhabitation, is told eloquently in his manifesto. if we are to wonder about cities we must think about the people who live in them and record them. but be warned, the images are large and even after you've loaded them some of these pictures will take you a long time to look at. the last few releases of rachitecture have largely focused on the theoretical implications of digital technologies on making cities and buildings, largely to the exclusion of buildings and cities themselves. fortunately, in the last few months, the number of architecture firms on the net has increased, bringing with them images of their work, as well as concreted examples of current digital practice. the range of approaches that architectural firms are taking toward the net range quite far a field. julie eizenberg, of koning eizenberg has created a portfolio of their work at ucla's school of architecture and urban design. north american stijl life, on the other hand, has a website devoted to their work in different mediums, and their practice has come to include design work ford websites as well. then there are the renegades, architects and designers who now devote considerable attention to work in digital media. one of the most notable firms doing this is io/360. most firms, however, are treading the line between virtual and real, using each to illuminate the other. a good example of this is space and light, whose use of radiance software has allowed them to model lighting effects in complex spaces like james stewart polsheck's inventure museum. simon crone has also done some work with radiace that shows off a little more detail. other good examples of the radiance software, may be found at the the school of architecture, property and planning in aukland, nz (home of matieu carr, whose work we have profiled before). due to new zealand laws, their server is in danger of being shut down to international traffic, if this concerns you and you'd like to help, see their site. the lighting research center at renssaler is the world's largest university-based research and educational institution dedicated to lighting, and its pretty technical. for a slightly more poetic approach see graphica obscura's: properties of light for that non-pixel kind of light, the interior of the new building for the san francisco museum of modern art by mario botta, pays very close attention to the use of natural light, both in the main public spaces and in the more intimate gallery spaces. things feel so transitory on the web lately, you are probably running out of time to see terence chang's architecture thesis as he will graduate this summer, but check it out. his project was to create an architecture for a virtual school of architecture, and the work is impressive both conceptually and in it's final expression. someone needs to hire this guy and hire him soon. if you can finagle access to a vrml browser (that's a virtual reality modeling language), like sgi's webspace, check out terence's vrml models. they are the best use of vrml i have seen so far!! so there it is. comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. rachitecture is available through email subscription at webworks@sirius.com, if you want to subscribe or be taken off the mailing list write me and on the subject line write "rachitecture." webworks@sirius.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * rachitecture rachitecture is my version of architecture on the internet. as a 'net based newsletter, its only function is to get you out there to have a look around. of course, what is out there is always changing, and what seems interesting does too. there are hundreds of architects out there who are working with computers but not doing "architecture" per se, what are they doing? what are they thinking about? where are the new technologies taking them? at first blush, the work of young architectural refugees seems to be just that -the work of refugees. stephen perella speaks to the "homelessness" of the architect in the digital realm, in hypersurface architecture, a paper he presented at the doors of perception 2 conference. homeless or not, architects are not without skills. at columbia, eden muir and rory o'neill have started to ask questions about the role of the architect in this strange new world in the quality of life . . . online. it's about time that architects start to view computers as more than just tools. malcolm mccullough has looked very closely at how architects use computers and how these uses have led to new ideas about practice in his book digital design media. more recently he has been thinking about the implications of this new medium in abstracting craft. (malcom is heading off to xerox parc soon, so these pages may not be up for long). while the materials in digital design may be different from the materials of architecture, the essential issues are shared across both disciplines. structure, circulation and the detail are all necessary to create compelling web spaces, or to say it another way, a building must have a good interface. architects are good at creating interfaces, its what we are trained for. the problems faced by web designers are very similar to our own problems. in barking up the wrong hierarchy, nick routledge points out that the most difficult part of web design is navigation. navigation, action, perception are all within the provinence of the architect. in hypertext and hypermedia, the importance of these design issues is often hidden by the apparently associative way in which the reader "creates" the text. but the underlying structure still exists, much as a building becomes the background in which occupants trace their own paths of circulation. regardless of how accidental it may appear, the space of the interaction still has to be designed, as nathan shedrof of vivid studios points out. with the advent of vrml -virtual markup reality language, and the promise of hot java, the need for carefully designed physical models of navigation and action will come to the fore in web design. and according to mark pesce, one of the creators of vrml, this is not a job for the technologist but for the designer. while the initial uses of vrml have been in more refined replications and representations of the of the physical world - be it architectural or chemical -vrml also suggests the possibility of creating three dimensional information spaces, which is to say zones of information you can move around in (in three dimensions) a la william gibson's vision of cyberspace. this is a curious inversion of architectural theory in which edifices will be literally be constructed from text -and information will be clustered in a manner that we can actually navigate in and manipulate with our hands. the media lab at mit has been sponsoring a lot of work in this area. earl rennison and lisa strausfeld, have spent a great deal of time investigationg these ideas at the visual language workshop. unfortunately you need an sgi onyx to see their work. some of their peers at the media lab are investigating similar themes and have examples that you can see on the web, check out the work of david small and robin kullberg. all of this is not say that i think architecture is dead. it's just that the practice of architecture is getting bigger. computers are giving us new projects to work on as well as changing the ways that we work on "traditional" projects. at basilisk, they're paying attention to these things. greg lynn's studio form is using computers to generate new forms. and in "instrumentalities and projects," ed keller describes how computers are leading to new approaches to architectural production. this was the first release of rachitecture devoted entirely to other architectures. there are hundreds of architects who aren't doing architecture on the web -but what they are doing is changinging the way we think about the web and the way we think about the practice(s) of architecture. rachitecture is interested in these transformations and is sponsoring a forum devoted to ideas, writings and projects about the work of the architect in the digital realm. submittals or suggestions should be sent to webworks@sirius.com if you miss physical buildings, don't despair, rachitecture will continue to devote its attention to architecture on the web in all its forms, from the virtual to the real. and in case you were afraid that we were leaving the real world behind, check out how christo and jeanne-claude have been wrapping the leftovers. so there it is. comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. rachitecture is available through email subscription at webworks@sirius.com, if you want to subscribe or be taken off the mailing list write me and on the subject line write "rachitecture." webworks@sirius.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * doom patrols i'm writing to announce the internet publication of my new book, doom patrols, which may be of interest to readers of spoon collective mailing lists. doom patrols is a 'theoretical fiction' about postmodernism and popular culture. its subject matter ranges from comic books to muds and moos, from pornography to sociobiology, from william burroughs to my bloody valentine to dean martin. its theoretical references range from deleuze and guattari to marshall mcluhan. overall the book is an attempt to rethink many of the debates on postmodernism and on critical theory that have been so prominent in recent years (and that have certainly figured on many of the spoon collective lists). the book has been published in its entirety, and (for the time being) exclusively on the world wide web. it can be accessed at the url: http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * coded messages: chains new site on the www coded messages: chains coded messages: chains is at once the most visceral and the most conceptual hypermedia found today on the world wide web. these unique pages feature breathtaking images, sounds, and video clips from the groundbreaking intercultural collaborative performances of the same name. step into the midst of a remote african village. step into a slave trade castle. step at once into history and into the future. chains web will connect you and tradition in a new, continuous present. the chains pages raise provocative questions about the power of language and communication in traditional and post-modern society today. they connect our friends in ghana (where there is no internet service at all) and web surfers who can hop around the world at the click of a mouse. as a visitor to the chains pages, you will experience the power of "the code" with every page and link. come visit coded messages: chains today, and add your voice to the site that grows everyday! point your browser (netscape 1.1 is required) to the following url: http://found.cs.nyu.edu/andruid/chains.html e-mail inquiries and comments to: andruid@slinky.cs.nyu.edu or mlang@eagle.wesleyan.edu coded messages:chains is hosted by the nyu center for digital multimedia (http://found.cs.nyu.edu/cathome_new.html) and courant institute media research lab (http://found.cs.nyu.edu/mrl/) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * electronic antiquity electronic antiquity: communicating the classics issn 1320-3606 peter toohey (founding editor) ian worthington (editor) editorial board jenny strauss-clay (virginia) elaine fantham (princeton) joseph farrell (pennsylvania) sallie goetsch (michigan) mark golden (winnipeg) peter green (austin) william harris (columbia) brad inwood (toronto) barry powell (wisconsin) harold tarrant (newcastle, nsw) (01) list of contents (02) articles alexanderson, b., "ad jacobi de voragine legendam auream adnotationes criticae" (03) reviews when the lamp is shattered: desire and narrative in catullus by micaela janan reviewed by jacqueline clarke greek rational medicine: philosophy from alcmaeon to the alexandrians by james longrigg reviewed by mark timmins the athenian cavalry by ian spence reviewed by j.k. anderson (04) keeping in touch accommodation in uk didaskalia supplement 1 conference: aspects of power in the ancient world australian national university, 12-14 july 1995 (abstracts) electronic forums & repositories for the classics by ian worthington (05) guidelines for contributors electronic antiquity vol. 3 issue 1 june 1995 edited by peter toohey and ian worthington antiquity-editor@classics.utas.edu.au issn 1320-3606 a general announcement (aimed at non-subscribers) that the journal is available will be made in approximately 12 hours time over the lists as a subscriber you will be automatically contacted in advance when future issues are available. the editors welcome contributions (all articles will be refereed, however a section positions will exist for those wishing to take a more controversial stance on things). how to access access is via gopher or ftp or world wide web. the journal file name of this issue is 3,1-june1995. previous issues may also be accessed in the same way. gopher: o info.utas.edu.au and through gopher: o open top level document called publications o open electronic antiquity. o open 3,1-june1995. o open (01)contents first for list of contents, then other files as appropriate ftp: o ftp.utas.edu.au (or info.utas.edu.au) o > departments o > classics o > antiquity. o in antiquity you will see the files as described above. world wide web: ftp://ftp.utas.edu.au/departments/classics/antiquity/3,1-june1995 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * feminist majority the feminist majority online -http://www.feminist.org in the two weeks we have been up, the feminist majority online has received over 50,000 hits, been named best non-profit women's site for 1995, added hundreds of entries to our feminist faculty network, and received many messages of support and encouragement. thanks to all who have visited and helped to spread the word, as well as provide suggestions for further improving the site. one of the most common requests was that we make it easier for interested users to be informed of major additions to this large site, such as this week's detailed table of women's issues mailing lists. in addition, many users expressed a desire to stay informed on key issues. thus, the feminist majority online would like to announce a new, important expansion of our commitment to using the internet to fight for women's equality. beginning immediately, we invite you to join our feminist alert network. we have set it up as an informational mailing list -to subscribe, send an email message to: majordomo@feminist.org with "subscribe fem-alert" in the message body. alternately, you can sign up directly on our site, at http://www.feminist.org/action/femalert.html. while there, be sure to take a look at our field notes from beijing, as mentioned in today's washington post. thanks for all your support ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * i/o/d two "most current multimedia takes it as read that our eyes are desperate for stimulation: like rotten fruit, they'll collapse inwards gushing foul liquids if they don't get enough feed. deprivileging the eye in multimedia offers us a chance of rediscovering synaesthesia after the bureaucratisation of the body into organs" -from the editorial. i/o/d 2 is an investigation of the physicality of multimedia. destroying notions of a 'transparent' interface, blacking out the screen, dragging the user into the machine it is the first interactive work to use a sound-led interface. against a background of a multimedia culture that is content to be just a minor branch of behaviourism, i/o/d is commited to experiment. issue two includes: "addictionamania" by the critical art ensemble is a history of narcotics, addiction and excess. "if it weren't for you i wouldn't be here" by peter plate instructions to be used when hit by a rubber bullet during a budget cut protest "home sweet home" by maxine boobyer embroidery as digital imaging. "sound" by the 12th sonderkommando extreme speedcore assault, a sound based operating system i/o/d is produced by: simon pope, colin green and matthew fuller i/o/d is aided and abetted on the nets by calum selkirk. contact: post: i/o/d, bm jed, london, wc1n 3xx, uk e-mail: cselkirk@freenet.columbus.oh.us or matt@axia.demon.co.uk where is i/o/d available from? i/o/d 1 and 2 are available for downloading as an easy-to-decrypt binhex file from the following sites. o via world wide web at the i/o/d home page: + http://mcjones-mac.wca.ohio-state.edu/i_o_d + http://www.uio.no/~mwatz/i.o.d/ o i/o/d is also available on a disk by post within the uk for ps3 per issue. cheques and postal orders to be made payable to 'cactus' from: i/o/d, bm jed, london, wc1n 3xx, uk. technical requirements: i/o/d comes by post as a self expanding archive (sea) containing a macromind director player and attendant files on one high density disk. it is also available on various networks (see above) as a binhexed sea. i/o/d requires a mac with at least eight megabytes of ram, quick time and a 14 inch screen. unfortunately, faster is better this is something we're working on. further details about the producers: simon pope and colin green are interactive designers from cardiff, wales. their unique and iconoclastic approach to interface has won them international recognition. matthew fuller is the editor of the key anthology of critical cyberculture unnatural, techno-theory for a contaminated culture, and an editor of the paper underground. further details about the contributors: peter plate is a san francsico based novelist. his latest book is one foot off the gutter, published by incommunicado. 12th sonderkommando are 'soundtracks for an insurrection' recorded by jason skeet of dead by dawn technoparties and dean whittington of fist magazine. critical art ensemble are a collective of six artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory. their widely acclaimed book the electronic disturbance was published last year by semiotext(e). maxine boobyer is an artist working in cardiff and london. her work is focussed on playful disruptions of the commonplace and mundane. issue one is also available from the above sites and from directly from us by post. it includes: "eschatology" by mark amerika, a frenetic collapse of suposedly discrete narratives which finds madonna and nikola tesla fighting their way out of each other's skins. "black capital" by stephen metcalf is a convulsive reading of burroughs that traces the trade routes of disintegration. recordings by scanner forming a random archaeology of the telephonic voice, to seep sporadically into your cranium. "filth" by graham harwood is a bug-eyed sequence of anti-interactive graphics that drags the digital into the bacterial and back. future issues will include material by: ronald sukenick and technet ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * imagination imagination is a non-profit international e-journal proposed by a group of students in bogazici university as a sub-project of imagination project, whose objectives are: o to show the importance of imagination in our lives o to encourage people to explore their imagination o to encourage people to make use of their imagination in their daily lives o to explore alternative theories and their applications for current problems in various fields by combining knowledge and imagination imagination e-journal is planned to be created by a voluntarily international staff. we have already published our first issue by the efforts of the initial staff. we are growing with new contributions. if you would like to take a look at imagination e-journal just navigate to imagination web at this address: http://www.busim.ee.boun.edu.tr/imagination/ in addition, we have opened a discussion list as a playgorund for people to imagine and share their imagination with many other people by means of their e-mails. if you would like to take a look at the current discussions held in imagination discussion list, you can subscribe by sending this command to listproc@boun.edu.tr: subscribe imagination your_name we want to meet with other e-journals which have already started their adventures on internet. i would be happy if i could get some info about your e-journal. if you have any ideas/suggestions or critics feel free to send me an e-mail. ersin beyret editor, imagination e-journal bogazici university 80815 istanbul/turkey e-mail: beyret@boun.edu.tr address: bogazici university, bebek-istanbul/turkey imagination, the skill to dream the different one... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the katharine sharp review the katharine sharp review issn 1083-5261 http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review the katharine sharp review, the premiere review of student scholarship in library and information science, announces the publication of its inaugural issue! ksr is published by the graduate school of library and information science at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign and showcases student authors writing about issues that range from those that affect the core of contemporary librarianship to new concepts in network administration. come take a look! articles are available in both html and pdf formats. http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review table of contents: o louise f. spiteri the classification research group and the theory of integrative levels o peter mccracken disaster planning in museums and libraries: a critical literature review o shannon crary, jane darcovich, tracy hull, & anna maria watkin the advances of technology: a case study of two midwest academic slide libraries o steven e. egyhazi a study of interlibrary loan of video at indiana university, bloomington o michele freed, arthur hendricks, robert sandusky, & jian wang a higher level information tool for network administrators o robert schroeder access vs. ownership in academic libraries o david saia advocacy for bibliographic instruction: a challenge for the future kevin ward editor the katharine sharp review review@edfu.lis.uiuc.edu http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/review ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * "lx," interactive short story on the internet steinkrug publications have created an interactive short story which uses the hypertext capabilities of the world wide web to achieve multiple narratives. the purpose of the work is to demonstrate the flexibility which can be achieved once the restrictions of printed mediums have been removed. it also provides an indication of how multi channel mediums, such as cable television, could revolutionise drama, soap operas and even advertising. "lx" is the story of four people who, despite coming from different backgrounds, find their paths crossing during the course of a day. each character's view of events is in the form of a separate web page. the reader is able, therefore, to retrieve the characters they are interested in and read their story off line. each account forms a self contained story. however, within the text there are hypertext links to other characters and these can be selected if the reader wishes to change the viewpoint or to follow the character to another scene. hypertext markers, other than names, link to descriptions of memories and fragments of media output which influence the way the character reacts to, or perceives, events. using the approach adopted in the creation of "lx" it is possible for other authors to introduce characters into a particular scenario. also, regardless of which web site they reside on, characters are able to 'interact' with each other. "lx" can be accessed from flames magazine on the world wide web at: http://www.gold.net/flames/ "lx" key characters: o alex lane is a post graduate who has reached the end of his current research and is undecided as to whether he should continue as an academic or move into the media industry. he is faced with prospect of considering both options during the same day when an interview with the advertising company, media lines, coincides with a conference at which he is a speaker. o lana thompson is also a postgraduate. but she, unlike alex, is committed to continuing her research. for the past three years she and alex have been close but in recent weeks differences over their work have had an impact on their relationship. o jack nettles is the owner of media lines, an advertising agency which has been in decline since the end of the 80's. jack is still trying to come to terms with a rapidly changing attitude to advertising which, for the most part, he doesn't understand. o jane reed is media lines' creative manager. although she is on the verge of leaving the company she still sees the of recruitment of a new employee as a possible route to getting a new company car. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * buzznet the fourth issue of buzznet is now up on the internet at http://www.hooked.net/buzznet. in this issue of buzznet, readers can explore san francisco's burgeoning ambient music scene with colin berry, a contributor to wired and author of the recently published 'a pocket tour of music on the internet." they can also get up close and personal with the japanese band pizzicato five and their los angeles worshippers, and get the scoop on sfo2, an annual showcase of san francisco's best unsigned bands. buzznet also covers fiction, visual arts and sports with the same cutting-edge sensibility. up-and-coming writers survey the best in underground comics, and a buzznet sports writer sits on the bench with infamous sportschannel/westwood one talk show host scott ferrall. starting soon, buzznet will list its readers homepages in the hive. if you have a homepage, please email the url to info@buzznet.com or use the handy dandy form which can be accessed from the cover page: http://www.hooked.net/buzznet. buzznet was started in august, 1994, by san francisco twenty-somethings anthony batt, marc brown, alistair jeffs and mike levin. "we started buzznet because there were no magazines on the web we wanted to read," brown says. "so we built our own." the first issue of buzznet went up on the world wide web in january, 1995, mainly to document san francisco's third annual noise pop festival. "we printed pictures of the festival and put them on-line the day after they were taken so people all over the world could see them," jeffs says. "since then, that's been done by the macintosh music festival, but they had a few more dollars behind them." if you've missed past issues of buzznet, don't worry. the fourth issue offers access to back issues. buzznet can be found by setting a world wide web browser such as netscape to http://www.hooked.net/buzznet/. for best results, buzznet should be viewed with netscape 1.1+, but the site offers a "text-only" index as well as its "full graphic assault." contact: marc brown or alistair jeffs info@buzznet.com buzznet, 461 second street suite 207, sf, ca 94107 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the poverty of dialectical materialism by eric petersen in these days of post modernism everyone is taking another look. here is "another look" that is long overdue. eric petersen critically examines a century of received wisdoms and questions the prevailing line on nature. dialectical materialism is an often mentioned but little understood attempt to confirm the political theories of marxism with the discoveries of natural science. does it deserve to be better understood, or does it deserve to be ditched? this book aims to rescue marxism from attempts to elevate it to a superuniversal ontology and restore it to what it was originally: a guide to human liberation by socialist revolution. cover designed by steve irons synopsis chapters. (1) the marxist tradition has never completed a comprehensive statement of its philosophy. consequently, dialectical materialism has wrongly occupied centre stage. (2) philosophy is the vanguard of science. (3) the dialectic, as postulated by philosophy, is a process of constant change and development which is driven by internal contradictions and present in all things. (4) marx and engels based their political theory upon the dialectic of history, and (5) speculated that identical processes were present in nature. (6) most marxists have thought that nature is dialectical and that marxism is a theory of politics and nature. (a) plekhanov first coined dialectical materialism and popularised the view that marxism was a guide to nature. (b) the second international de-humanised marxism's social philosophy. (c) lenin restored human creativity in social philosophy, but popularised plekhanov's view of nature. (d) stalinism turned dialectical materialism into an authoritarian state religion. (e) mao used dialectical materialism to justify stalinist politics in china. (f) trotsky used dialectical materialism to misunderstand stalin's counter-revolution. (g) most trotskyists are loyal to trotsky on this point, even though it doesn't assist their politics. (h) not all marxists agree, but none have formulated a coherent critique of dialectical materialism. (i) it is necessary to assault dialectical materialism on its own terms, and test it against natural science. (7) natural science is the best guide to nature. (8) dialectical materialism does not assist natural science. (9) human society is based upon conscious human labour; it obeys laws that are fundamentally different to natural laws. (10) the materialist conception of history is a guide to history and political science. (11) dialectical materialism is useless in politics. (12) the associated marxist philosophy of nature is: materialism, atheism, and support for the potential of natural science under rational human control. appendices. (a) dialectical logic is useful in political theory. (b) engels' attempts to apply dialectics to nature were a product of the marx-engels relationship. (c) marx and engels applied historical materialism in their practical politics. (d) trotsky, when not talking dialectical materialism, made major contributions to marxism. publisher this book is published by red door co-op, a group of independent artists set up to publish and market all forms of art for artists who have no other outlet for their work. red door are happy to receive enquiries from other artists. how to obtain the book you may obtain the book by ordering it from red door co-operative limited or alternatively if you wish i can send you sections of it via the internet on request. the book retails for $18.95 but preview copies can be obtained at a discount rate of $15.00. to obtain a copy of this book, fill in the preview copy order form and send to red door, 24 morris street, summer hill nsw 2129, australia phone: 61 2 798 6074. fax: 61 2 798 6786. preview copy order form: name:.......................................................... address:....................................................... ............................................................... petersen,eg dialectics of materialism no:...................... barcham, j through the keyhole no:...................... amount enclosed $....................................... also published by red door just out jeff barcham, _through the keyhole_ poetry by a promising young sydney artist with a review by prominant australian poet geofferey lehmenn and 13 pen and ink. illustrations by steve irons review copy price $10.00 "can a lung forget to breathe?" a review of jeff barcham's poetry _through the keyhole_ reviewing a book of poetry that promises to deal with a young man's own sexuality? in this feminist world, such a project must be approached with caution. there are too many examples of where similar projects have fallen in a heap of guilt or wallowed in the mire of quasi feminist substitutionism or, even worse, of subdued anger trying to 'reclaim the night' from the girls ("after all, we men have feelings too" they whine in careful indignation). this book, _through the keyhole_ by jeff barcham (red door, 1995, $12.00 academic preview $10.00) is a book about the sexual feelings of a young man. but search as i might, i find no cause for alarm. the title prepares me for the poet's main subject, which is his own feelings, particularly feelings about his sexual experiences. but reading the work, i find a refreshing honesty and openness, as a young man comes to terms with his inner world. a stunning, exciting and frightening world of anger, lust, passion and grief. no urge to be politically correct here, just an honest portrayal of such things as jealousy, fear, hatred and his own form of sexual experience. the work is not polluted by the urge to promote a correct view of the world or, alternatively, by a hatred of women. on the contrary, the book is more an insight, a window onto someone else's world. the fact that this world happens to be the secret world of a man, is an accident of birth, and of the personal need of that man to grow to maturity in twentieth century fin de siecle. this is jeff barcham's first published book of poetry. nicely presented, with original drawings by steve irons and a foreword by well-known sydney poet, geoffrey lehmann, at $10 it's a steal. the book is published by red door, a new co-operative venture promoted by independent sydney artists. this may make it hard to locate, as normal outlets are not in the habit of promoting such work, but i've heard on the grapevine that a simple phone call to red door will secure a copy. the book is in four parts. the first part appears to be an attempt to capture moments of experience in a few unrelated words. these early works take their lead, i am sure, from haiku, the traditional japanese poetic form that presents a complete idea in a few syllables. not always successful, they nevertheless are a smart way to begin, for they prepare the reader for what is to follow: naked, supine, open watching with lust, your pleasure soar, into mine part two is a series of stories. these stories cover a range of experiences, from the lust for the girl in the michael jackson video, the guilt felt as the phone rings 'a regular twenty minute interval' to interrupt thoughts about an illicit interlude that has just ended, to obtaining porn at school from a budding entrepreneur. the last three works in this section are major pieces of work. the first describes in tactile detail the experience of losing a lover to a stupid car accident, the feeling of anger, of being betrayed, of being under siege, as remorse shuts out the rest of the world. the second describes the 'sympathy of friends' as they try to relate to the grief felt by the poet and fail. the third relates the experience of watching a friend die momentarily, before his eyes, in a grand mal: look, and see, alive and breathing the fate of us all, as age overtakes youth, mire and incontinence rasp away decades of careful sculpting and decoration part three, is about love. much of it is unrequited. the poet deals with his desire and pain and weakness and lack of courage. later in the chapter there is the excitement and soaring elation of romantic love, only to be dashed again in a true love that can never be. a love that is real, but lost 'in an instant': nor will it fade with time, as if the come and go of days could make a lung forget to breathe! with the sweet memory comes too the aching hole inside, and even to fill it in would not suffice. part four is passion. the sexual reality of hot flesh, porn, masturbation, homosexuality, suicide and lust. the poem "closet industry" describes in livid detail the reality of the public toilet for gays and prostitutes. _through_ the keyhole: not for the prude or the weak hearted, but definitely worth a look. review by barrington bateman 2/3/95 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * modern fiction studies mfs: modern fiction studies now has an active web site. our url is http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/mfs/ patrick o'donnell editor, mfs patrick o'donnell professor of english and editor, mfs ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * speed we're happy to be linked from pmc and have returned the favor. we have a web site of our own now, that we think looks a lot better than the "gopher" version. see if you agree: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/~speed benjamin bratton editor, speed. e-mail: 6500benb@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * in some unrelated land pilgrim press announces the publication of its first online serial, in some unrelated land, a novel with art on the world wide web written by martha conway. http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/~mang/title.html in some unrelated land is berkeley, california, where twenty-two year old jane brandt moves after her parents die in an accident. with few friends and no money, jane tries to set up a new life: she gets a trial job working for a new-age publisher in his basement, moves into a communal house, and divides her wages among rent, beer, and drugs. in some unrelated land chronicles one summer in jane's life, a time of unusual liaisons and hand-to-mouth living -it is the freefall of someone waiting for "real" life to begin. the novel will be published in nine parts on the world wide web. each part is divided into 7-10 short linked files, with art incorporated into the text. in some unrelated land is complete, and will be published over the next twelve weeks. publishing schedule: sept. 4 i get a job sept. 15 drugs sept. 29 i learn more about many things oct. 6 day rides and night rides oct. 13 the cat dies oct. 20 and i escape to new york oct. 27 lucy and henry nov. 3 after the met nov. 10 home about the author: martha conway is a published writer and book reviewer living in the san francisco bay area. her work has appeared in the quarterly, the carolina quarterly, puerto del sol, folio, enterzone, mississippi review web, and other publications. she is currently working on her next novel. this novel is being published on the shareware model, but if you are interested in a free review copy, please contact mona mang at pilgrim@eworld.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * gruene street literary e-journal announcement & call for submissions the premiere issue of gruene street: an internet journal of prose & poetry is now available online from the following sources: o the online literature project at virginia tech: http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/gs/gruene.html o the e-text archives: + gopher://gopher.etext.org/11/zines/gruenestreet + ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/zines/gruenestreet if you are unable to access these sites, drop us a note and we'll forward you a copy of the first issue & submission guidelines. submission guidelines are included within the ascii version of the journal and on the masthead page (near the end of the first document) in the web version. we are currently accepting submissions of poetry, short fiction, essays, criticism, and reviews to be considered for issue #2. the deadline for submission is 1 november 95. ******************************************************************* g r u e n e s t r e e t: an internet journal of prose & poetry ******************************************************************* volume #1, issue #1 summer 1995 ******************************************************************* editors amelia f. franz matthew franz ******************************************************************* * * * * c o n t e n t s * * * * ******************************************************************* ---p o e t r y --- autopsy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . leilani wright spoor the gun of a dead man three mile island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . janet mccann coming back from okanogan. . . . . . . . . . . george perreault vespers dancing naked on the mesa temporary meaning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . james cervantes neighbours. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . colin morton ---f i c t i o n --- the way you swim in dreams. . . . . . . . . . . douglas lawson the jew's wife. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . thomas hubschman from _oceans apart_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . colin morton ---e s s a y s and c r i t i c i s m --- on collaboration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sherry lee linkon the writing on the bijou wall: . . . . . . . steven g. kellman cinema and post-literate culture ---r e v i e w s --- gabriel garcia marquez, _strange pilgrims_ . . . douglas lawson kay cattarulla, editor. . . . . . . . . . . . amelia f. franz _texas bound: 19 texas stories_ ******************************************************************* (c) copyright 1995 issn pending ******************************************************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * women in french studies http://www.fln.vcu.edu/wif/foyerwif.html women in french studies is an annual publication of women in french, open to all wif members, with a special women in french graduate essay prize. articles deal with women in literature and culture in france and francophone countries. info: chall@acad.ursinus.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * project muse project muse is the fruit of johns hopkins university's effort to publish all forty-odd of its journals electronically. jhu's system boasts several interesting features: hypertext bibliographies, a search engine, a convenient and straightforward approach to subscriptions and licensing, and more. last i checked muse offered three or four journals, with more anticipated soon. you can find out more at jhu's web site [url not provided with this notice]; look under the icon for the university's libraries. geoffrey paul eaton world bank publications geaton@worldbank.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * desktop publishing http://www.demon.co.uk/cyber/dp/dp.html a magazine for prepress and design professionals. issues can be browsed onlined via www, or downloaded in .pdf (adobe acrobat) and enhanced text formats. current feature articles o operating systems andy hornsby gives an overview o grid expectations the importance of the grid and its recent development o print futures is ink and paper publishing doomed? o scanner selection andy hornsby on compromises that must be faced o image enhancement how to put life into pictures that fall below par o points and picas why traditional measurements have their place contact: webweaver@greened.demon.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * directory of electronic journals directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and academic dicussion lists, 5th edition, may 1995 (gopher edition) an abridged version of this resource is available on the arl gopher as of june 30th, 1995. the url is: gopher://arl.cni.org:70/11/scomm/edir here is the path to the gopher version: yourprompt> gopher arl.cni.org scholarly communication directory of electronic . . . 1995 . . . this version contains a significant subset from the full database version available via the printed edition, including: introduction, foreword, a link to charles bailey's e-publishing bibliography, and the titles/descriptions/contact information for nearly 700 internet serials and 2500 discussion lists. the journal and newsletter entries were compiled by lisabeth king, research assistant at arl; the gopher version was compiled by douglas lay, research assistant at arl. the e-lists are coordinated and maintained by diane k. kovacs and team, kent state university. the resource was made available on the arl server by dru mogge, electronic services coordinator. for those of you who link to our resource, the 1994 files have now been dropped and your links to us may no longer work. please update them, and if you have questions, please contact dru mogge (dru@cni.org) for electronic information about the printed edition and how to order it, please contact: osap@cni.org phone: 202-296-2296; fax: 202-872-0884 ask for patricia brennan, communications services coordinator ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * newjour announcement list newjour is an electronic announcement list that updates the arl directory of electronic journals and newsletters between its annual, formal printed and networked editions. as of june 1995, it has 2,000 subscribers from all seven continents and posts on average ten new networked serials per day. "new" titles are either brand new creations or titles that are newly discovered for the arl database of e-serials. newjour welcomes your interest and announcements and hopes to offer enhanced services before the end of 1995. to subscribe to newjour, send a message to: majordomo@ccat.sas.upenn.edu leave the subject line blank and in the body of the message type: subscribe newjour direct postings of new serials should be directed to: newjour@ccat.sas.upenn.edu newjour was created in summer 1993 and and provides a place for creators of new electronic journals to report their plans and announcements to potential subscribers. it is also updated by postings from the arl staff as they routinely discover new internet serial titles (journals, newsletters, magazines, zines, and other formats). this electronic conference began on server space provided by the american mathematical society. in january of 1995 it relocated to a site offered at the university of pennsylvania's center for computer analysis of texts, a group that offered service and support for our growing enterprise. the complete set of backfiles of newjour postings is updated daily it is a fully searchable archive and can be found at: gopher://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:5070/11/journals/newjour the list is co-moderated by: ann okerson/association of research libraries james o'donnell/professor of classics, university of pennsylvania happy serial cyber-hunting to you all, ann okerson/association of research libraries washington, dc ann@cni.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * public-access computer systems review --------------------------------------------------------------- the public-access computer systems review volume 6, number 3 (1995) issn 1048-6542 ---------------------------------------------------------------- communications roderick d. atkinson and laurie e. stackpole, torpedo: networked access to full-text and page-image representations of physics journals and technical reports the naval research laboratory (nrl) library and the american physical society (aps) are experimenting with electronically disseminating journals and reports over nrl campus networks. the project is called torpedo (the optical retrieval project: electronic documents online). it involves storing and disseminating two aps journals (physical review letters and physical review e) as well as the nrl collection of unclassified, unlimited distribution technical reports. these paper-format journals and reports are scanned at nrl to create ccitt group iv image files, the image files are converted to ascii files using ocr, both types of files are associated with bibliographic information, and they are imported into a client/server-based commercial imaging system. a variety of retrieval techniques are used: full-text searching using fuzzy logic, bibliographic searching, and hierarchy browsing. client software is provided to display page images of journals and reports at workstations running microsoft windows, macintosh os, or the x window system. o html file: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n3/atki6n3.html o ascii file: gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/00/articles/ e-journals/uhlibrary/pacsreview/v6/n3/atkinson.6n3 o list server: send the e-mail message get atkinson prv6n3 f=mail to listserv@uhupvm1.uh.edu. columns public-access provocations: an informal column walt crawford, (for)getting it: toward small solutions convergence is a crock. the virtual library is a real impossibility. grand solutions don't work. the real future is one of many small solutions pointing in many different directions. o html file: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n3/craw6n3.html o ascii file: gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/00/articles/ e-journals/uhlibrary/pacsreview/v6/n3/crawford.6n3 o list server: send the e-mail message get crawford prv6n3 f=mail to listserv@uhupvm1.uh.edu. ---------------------------------------------------------------- editor-in-chief charles w. bailey, jr. university libraries university of houston houston, tx 77204-2091 (713) 743-9804 cbailey@uh.edu associate editor, columns leslie dillon, oclc associate editor, communications dana rooks, university of houston associate editor, production ann thornton, university of houston editorial board ralph alberico, university of texas, austin george h. brett ii, clearinghouse for networked information discovery and retrieval priscilla caplan, university of chicago steve cisler, apple computer, inc. walt crawford, research libraries group lorcan dempsey, university of bath pat ensor, university of houston nancy evans, pennsylvania state university, ogontz charles hildreth, university of oklahoma ronald larsen, university of maryland clifford lynch, division of library automation, university of california david r. mcdonald, tufts university r. bruce miller, university of california, san diego paul evan peters, coalition for networked information mike ridley, university of waterloo peggy seiden, skidmore college peter stone, university of sussex john e. ulmschneider, north carolina state university list server technical support list server technical support is provided by the information technology division, university of houston. tahereh jafari is the primary support person. publication information the public-access computer systems review is an electronic journal that is distributed on the internet and on other computer networks. it is published on an irregular basis by the university libraries, university of houston. there is no subscription fee. to subscribe, send an e-mail message to listserv@uhupvm1.uh.edu that says: subscribe pacs-p first name last name. circulation pacs-l@uhupvm1.uh.edu: 9,392 subscribers in 71 countries (pacs-l is estimated to have 10,000 additional usenet subscribers). pacs-p@uhupvm1.uh.edu: 3,287 subscribers in 58 countries. electronic distribution each article is initially distributed in both ascii and html formats. ascii files are paginated. they are available from the following servers: o list server: send the e-mail message get index pr f=mail to listserv@uhupvm1.uh.edu. o ascii: gopher://info.lib.uh.edu:70/11/articles/e-journals/ uhlibrary/pacsreview html files are not paginated. html files may have linked gif files. html files may have internal links, external links, or both. the editors do not maintain external links. html files are available from the following server: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pacsrev.html in consultation with article authors, the editors determine whether an article is updated, whether both ascii and html files are created for updated articles, and whether all prior versions of an article are retained. print distribution the first four volumes of the public-access computer systems review are also available in book form from the american library association's library and information technology association (lita). (volume five is in process.) the price of each volume is $17 for lita members and $20 for non-lita members. all four volumes can be ordered as a set for $60. to order, contact: ala publishing services, order department, 50 east huron street, chicago, il 60611-2729, (800) 545-2433. copyright the public-access computer systems review is copyright (c) 1995 by the university libraries, university of houston. all rights reserved. copying is permitted for noncommercial, educational use by academic computer centers, individual scholars, and libraries. this message must appear on all copied material. all commercial use requires permission. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------conferences and events * cultural cartographies conference award postmodern culture is pleased to present the pmc cultural cartographies award to matt devoll (tulane university) for his paper, "the new england puritans and post-colonial crises of faith." the paper was delivered at "cultural cartographies: mapping the postcolonial moment," a graduate-student conference held on march 24-26, 1995, at north carolina state university in raleigh. the award carries an honorarium of $100. presenters at the conference were invited to submit their papers for an essay competition, to be judged by the conference organizers and by the editors of postmodern culture. work presented at the conference was considered overall to be very strong; indeed no one work can be considered the best offered for our consideration, so much so that wewould like to list all the finalists for the prize. they are: jill bradbury (brown u), "mapping revisions: postcolonial studies and the canon" joel l. coleman (u of georgia), "one hundred years of sand: translation, text and marginality in l'enfant de sable and cien aqos de soledad" meredith goldsmith, "of masks and mimicry: the making of a black male subject in bloke modisane's blame me on history" christian a. gregory (umiversity of florida), "rhythm and algorithm: seriality, capital and the post-colonial aura" afshan hussain (university of virginia), "salman rushdie and islamic fundamentalism" touria khannous (brown university), "where can we find her? the beur woman as a postcolonial fugitive in france" matt devoll's essay shows particular inventiveness and original use of scholarship. it theorizes through the postcolonial instead of addressing recognized postcolonial subjects or reading postcolonial works. in this way it extends and reaffirms postcolonial theory as a discipline and a way of thought. -eyal amiran the conference will be held again this academic year. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * nasig conference 11th annual nasig conference (1996): call for papers, workshops, and preconferences "pioneering new serials frontiers: from petroglyphs to cyberserials" the north american serials interest group (nasig), an organization that serves the interests of u.s., canadian and mexican members of the serials information chain, will make a stop on scenic route 66 in 1996. our eleventh annual conference to be held june 20-23, 1996 at the university of new mexico in albuquerque, a city which balances the prehistoric past with a high-tech present. nasig's annual conference provides a forum in which librarians, publishers, vendors, educators, binders, systems developers, and other serials specialists exchange views, present new ideas, proactively seek solutions to common problems, and discuss matters of current interest. the proceedings are published in serials librarian and in electronic format on the nasig gopher. nasig's program planning committee invites proposals for plenary papers and preconferences that deal with "big picture" aspects of the theme. we are especially interested in papers or preconference ideas that will explore the pioneering boundaries and relationships of nasig's various constituencies. examples: o a new generation of multi-media serials publications o can electronic serials be adequately preserved/archived? o the role of preprint databases in scholarly communication o emerging roles for libraries, publishers and vendors o the development of strategic alliances between commercial firms and non-profit institutions o how scholars and the academy view the serials frontier o is access in lieu of ownership really working? o the end-user as selector or "collection manager" o what kinds of serials do users want? o aacr2 and the information age: is the code still relevant? o will the world wide web replace the online catalog? the committee also invites workshop and preconference proposals that will provide practical ideas and assistance in dealing with an information world which combines both print and electronic serial publications. examples: o cooperative serials collection development projects o cataloging electronic/multimedia serials/the internet o reorganizing to meet new customer expectations o educating/retraining serialists for emerging information roles o serials processing/cataloging resources found on the internet o how to obtain customer feedback o new technologies/services/software packages/standards o writing successful grants o internet use by publishers and vendors o techniques for preserving electronic/paper serials nasig invites anyone in the information community to submit proposals and suggested topics/speakers. the program planning committee reserves the right to combine, blend, or refocus proposals to maximize program breadth and relevance to our membership. as a result, only one presenter from proposals submitted by teams may be invited to participate. since proposals are reviewed competitively, please include complete information for maximum consideration: o name, address, telephone/fax numbers, and e-address of the proposer(s) program title o a 200-300 word abstract clearly explaining the proposal and, if appropriate, its relevance to our theme o a prioritized preference for the proposal: plenary, workshop, or preconference proposals should be submitted -via e-mail if at all possible -no later than august 1, 1995 to susan davis, nasig secretary, to receive consideration. send proposals to: susan davis head, periodicals university at buffalo lockwood library bldg. buffalo, ny 14260-2200 fax: 716-645-5955 email: unlsdb@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * theories and metaphors of cyberspace call for papers symposium: theories and metaphors of cyberspace modelling the cognitive and social implications of global networking as part of the 13th european meeting on cybernetics and systems research emcsr '96, vienna, april 9-12, 1996 symposium url: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/cybspasy.html about the symposium: a symposium organized by the principia cybernetica project (pcp) will be held at emcsr '96. chairpersons are f. heylighen and s. umpleby. the objective is to better understand the implications of the present explosive growth in global computer networks, like the internet or the world-wide web. we wish to develop models of how these networks will further develop and how they will affect individuals and society on all levels. soon, the whole of human knowledge will be directly available to any person with access to a networked computer. moreover, communication between individuals will become much easier, faster, and more transparent. "smart" computer systems will allow novel applications (virtual reality, intelligent agents, distributed processing, automated indexing . . .) that no one ever would have dreamt of. these changes will affect and deeply transform all aspects of society: education (distance learning, electronic universities), work (telework, groupware), commerce (electronic cash and banking), the media, government (electronic democracy), health, science and technology . . . . it seems as though society's collective intelligence will increase and diversify, perhaps producing an evolutionary transition to a higher level of intelligence. as these developments are so fast, and so difficult to predict, precise models are usually not possible. in that case, comprehension may be helped by using analogies. examples of such metaphors for global network functions are the "information superhighway," the network as a "super-brain," which emphasizes the collective intelligence of all users and computers connected by the network, jacques vallee's notion of an "information singularity," which notes that networked information becomes instantaneously available everywhere, and "cyberspace" itself, which visualizes networked information as an immense space through which one can "surf." metaphors, however, only express a few aspects of a multidimensional phenomenon. therefore, we should move to more detailed and comprehensive models, which can be tested by observation, implementation or simulation. cybernetics, as a theory of communication, information and control, seems most directly applicable to such model-building, but valuable insights may come from the most diverse domains: sociology, futurology, ai, complex systems, man-machine interaction, cognitive psychology, etc. our emphasis is on concepts, principles, and observations, rather than on technical protocols or implementations, although existing systems may provide a concrete illustration from which more general implications can be derived. the conference: the european meetings on cybernetics and systems research are possibly the most important and best organized large congresses in their domain. though they are called "european" by tradition, they really bring together researchers from all continents. among the distinctive features are the high quality, well-distributed proceedings, which are available at the start of the conference. therefore, papers should be submitted quite a while before the start of the conference. submission of papers: full papers on the above themes should be directly submitted to the conference secretariat (mentioning you wish to submit to symposium l), not to the symposium chairs. however, we would like you to already send a 1 to 2 page abstract of your paper to f. heylighen (fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be), so that we can tell you quickly whether this topic is suitable for the symposium, and so that the abstract can be made available on the world-wide web for other participants to read. we would like to receive the abstract well enough in advance so that you would be able to get your full paper ready by the october 12, 1995 deadline. (note that acceptance of the abstract does not necessarily imply acceptance of the full paper.) about principia cybernetica: the principia cybernetica project (pcp) is a collaborative attempt to develop a complete cybernetic and evolutionary philosophy. such a philosophical system should arise from a transdisciplinary unification and foundation of the domain of systems theory and cybernetics. similar to the metamathematical character of whitehead and russell's principia mathematica, pcp is meta-cybernetical in that we use cybernetic tools and methods to analyze and develop cybernetic theory. these include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic mail, electronic publishing, and knowledge structuring software. they are meant to support the process of collaborative theory-building by a variety of contributors, with different backgrounds and living in different parts of the world. pcp thus naturally develops in the "cyberspace" of interlinked documents on the world-wide web. pcp's web server can be found at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/. pcp is being developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual network. the basic architecture consists of nodes, containing expositions and definitions of concepts, connected by links, representing the associations that exist between the concepts. both nodes and links can belong to different types, expressing different semantic and practical categories. as its name implies, pcp focuses on the clarification of fundamental concepts and principles of the broadly defined domain of cybernetics and systems, which includes related disciplines such as the "sciences of complexity," ai, alife, cognitive science, evolutionary systems, etc. concepts include: complexity, information, entropy, system, freedom, control, self-organization, emergence, etc. the pcp philosophical system is to be seen as a clearly thought out and well-formulated, global "world view", integrating the different domains of knowledge and experience. it should provide an answer to the basic questions: "who am i? where do i come from? where am i going to?". the pcp philosophy is systemic and evolutionary, based on the spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control (metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural selection. it includes: a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological primitives, b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed by the subject or group, but undergoing selection by the environment; c) an ethics, with survival and the continuance of the process of evolution as supreme values. philosophy and implementation of pcp are united by their common framework based on cybernetic and evolutionary principles: the computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the philosophy. pcp is managed by a board of editors, presently: v. turchin [cuny, new york], c. joslyn [nasa and suny binghamton] and f. heylighen [free univ. of brussels]. contributors are kept informed through the prncyb-l electronic mailing list. further activities of pcp are publications in journals or books, and the organization of meetings or symposia. more information about pcp is available at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/, by anonymous ftp to is1.vub.ac.be, directory /pub/projects/principia_cybernetica, or by email request to pcp@vnet3.vub.ac.be. about emcsr '96: cybernetics "the study of communication and control in the animal and the machine" (n.wiener) has recently returned to the forefront, not only in cyberpunk and cyberspace, but, even more important, contributing to the consolidation of various scientific theories. additionally, an ever increasing number of research areas, including social and economic theories, theoretical biology, ecology, computer science, and robotics draw on ideas from second order cybernetics. artificial intelligence, evolved directly from cybernetics, has not only technological and economic, but also important social impacts. with a marked trend towards interdisciplinary cooperation and global perspectives, this important role of cybernetics is expected to be further strengthened over the next years. since 1972, the biennial european meetings on cybernetics and systems research (emcsr) have served as a forum for discussion of converging ideas and new aspects of different scientific disciplines. as on previous occasions, a number of sessions providing wide coverage of the rapid developments will be arranged, complemented with daily meetings, where eminent speakers will present latest research results. sessions + chairpersons: a. general systems methodology g.j.klir, usa b. new developments in mathematical systems theory y. rav, france, and f. pichler, austria c. complex systems analysis and design j.w. rozenblit, usa, and h. praehofer, austria d. fuzzy systems, approximate reasoning and knowledge-based systems c. carlsson, finland, k.p. adlassnig, austria, and e.p. klement, austria e. designing and systems, and their education b. banathy, usa, w. gasparski, poland, and g. goldschmidt, israel f. humanity, architecture and conceptualization g. pask, uk, and e. prem, austria g. biocybernetics and mathematical biology l.m. ricciardi, italy h. cybernetics and informatics in medicine and psychotherapy m. okuyama, japan, and g. porenta, austria i. cybernetics of socio-economic systems and of country development k.balkus, usa, p.ballonoff, usa, and s.a.umpleby, usa j. systems, management and organization g. broekstra, netherlands, and r. hough, usa k. communication and computers a.m.tjoa, austria l. theories and metaphors of cyberspace f. heylighen, belgium, and s.a. umpleby, usa m. knowledge discovery in databases y. kodratoff, france n. artificial neural networks and adaptive systems g. palm, germany, and g. dorffner, austria o. theory and applications of artificial intelligence v. marik, czech republic, and e. buchberger, austria submission guidelines: acceptance of contributions will be determined on the basis of draft final papers. these papers must not exceed 10 single-spaced a4 pages (maximum 43 lines, max. line length 160 mm, 12 point), in english. they have to contain the final text to be submitted, including graphs and pictures. however, these need not be of reproducible quality. the draft final paper must carry the title, author(s) name(s), and affiliation (incl. e-mail address, if possible) in this order. please specify the symposium in which you would like to present your paper. each scientist shall submit only one paper. please send four hard copies of the draft final paper to the conference secretariat (not to symposia chairpersons!) electronic or fax submissions cannot be accepted. deadline for submission: october 12, 1995. submissions received after the deadline cannot be considered. notification of acceptance/rejection: authors will be notified about acceptance or rejection no later than december 11, 1995. successful authors will be provided by the conference secretariat at the same time with the instructions for the preparation of the final paper, which will also be available via ftp and world-wide web. final papers: the final paper will be limited to a maximum of 6 pages (10-point, double column). camera-ready copies of the final paper will be due at the conference secretariat by january 29, 1996. acceptance of the final paper will be based on compliance with the reviewers' comments. presentation: it is understood that each accepted paper is presented personally at the meeting by one of its authors. conference fee: as 2800 if received before january 31, 1996. as 3300 if received later. as 3800 if paid at the conference desk. the conference fee includes participation in the thirteenth european meeting, attendance at official receptions, and the volume of the proceedings available at the meeting. please send cheque, or transfer the amount free of charges for beneficiary to our account no. 0026-34400/00 at creditanstalt-bankverein vienna. please state your name clearly. hotel accommodations will be handled by oesterreichisches verkehrsbuero, kongressabteilung, p.o.box 30, a-1043 vienna, phone +43-1-58925-118, fax +43-1-5867127. reservation cards will be sent to all those returning the attached registration form. scholarships: the international federation for systems research and the austrian society for cybernetic studies are willing to provide a limited number of scholarships covering the registration fee for the conference and part of the accommodation costs for colleagues from weak currency countries. applications should be sent to the conference secretariat before october 12, 1995. the emcsr organizers cannot handle applications for participants to obtain support from other sources. chairman of the meeting: robert trappl, president, austrian society for cybernetic studies secretariat: i. ghobrial-willmann and g. helscher, austrian society for cybernetic studies a-1010 vienna 1, schottengasse 3 (austria) phone: +43-1-53532810 fax: +43-1-5320652 e-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at ----------------------------------------------------------------------- emcsr-96 thirteenth european meeting on cybernetics and systems research please return to: austrian society for cybernetic studies schottengasse 3, a-1010 vienna, austria (europe) e-mail: sec@ai.univie.ac.at o i plan to attend the meeting. o i intend to submit a paper to session ..... o i enclose the draft final paper. o my draft final paper will arrive prior to october 12, 1995. o my cheque for as ....... covering the conference fee is enclosed. o i have transferred as ........ to your account 0026-34400/00 at creditanstalt vienna. o i shall not be at the meeting but am interested to receive particulars of the proceedings. name : address : city : country : email : if you wish to present your paper in the session l, "theories and metaphors of cyberspace", please send a copy of this form and a 1 to 2 page abstract in ascii or html by email to fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be. (the abstract should not be sent to the vienna address above). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * evolving or revolving evolving or revolving 25 years of electronic information the eusidic annual conference 1995 october 17, 18, 19 huis ter duin hotel, noordwijk aan zee the netherlands on april 20th 1970 a small group of organisations set up an association to "further the interests of operators of data tapes." thus was founded eusidic, the european association of information services. over the last 25 years eusidic has grown to include a unique mixture of major players from all branches of information, including major users, publishers and distributors from virtually every country in europe west and east, and beyond. eusidic is the largest association of its kind in europe and can claim to be the representative of the widest set of interests in what is prospected as the 21st century's major industry. the 25th anniversary conference will review the state of the art and introduce new ideas, a still valid formula which was at the heart of the founders requirements. programme & application tuesday 17 october '95 a.m. the keynote speeches robert hall, former president, thomson information/publishing group frau ebe ilmaier, head of information & systems, shell international, the hague hermann pabbruwe, president, wolters kluwer. p.m. barriers to information use toby chaum, digicash, on the prospects for secure, anonymous, electronic payments richard black, personal library software, will discuss interface strategies for different markets douglas armati, on the problems and possible solutions for intellectual property management jak boumans, on dealing with multiple 'document' types, medias and formats. wednesday 18 october '95 a.m. mass markets patrick gibbins, maris multimedia, uk christian bruck, europe online, luxembourg hans dinklo, it & electronic media, nl eudald domenech, servicom, barcelona. . . . will describe their experiences and analysis of the "mass market" for information products & services. p.m. information managers elisabeth gayon, elf aquitaine and professor albert angehrn from insead will discuss "who manages information" in today's organisation." they will debate the issue with a distinguished panel of information managers. at the end of the afternoon there will a report and discussion on eusidic's activities and work programme. thursday 19 october '95 mergers & acquisitions the commercial development of the information sector, in particular the tendency to concentration, and the development of strategic alliances, will be the subject of papers by rosalind resnick, editor of interactive publishing alert; harry collier, founder editor of monitor, liz sharpe, well known as a 'company doctor' in the field and max henry of information access corporation. the changes in roles on thursday afternoon there will be a session entitled "the information chain a paradigm lost?" it will include presentations by bonnie lawlor, formerly of isi; prof. stevan harnad author, and editor of electronic journals; sally morris, a director of wiley, on the publishers role and prof. charles oppenheim, who will examine the new roles of the information professional. location: the conference will be held in the 5 star grand hotel huis ter duin, on the coast about 20 km from amsterdam and about 15 kms from schipol airport. transport will be arranged for delegates, to and from schipol and amsterdam. hotel reservations: eusidic can make reservations for delegates at the special conference rate of 141 ecu single; 155 double, per night. reservations are firm and payable unless cancelled by 15 sept. substitution is permitted. application form name: organisation: address: post code: country: tel: fax: wishes to register for the eusidic conference in noordwijk, 17 19 october 1995. fees: eusidic members: 350 ecu ($ 470) non-members: 550 ecu ($ 670) invoices will be issued; they are payable, at latest, by 1 october. your vat (tva, mwst, etc.) number: hotel bookingplease reserve accommodation for: saturday october 14 sunday october 15 monday october 16 tuesday october 17 wednesday october 18 thursday october 19 friday october 20 other dates (specify): hotel bills will be paid directly by delegates, on departure. signed: date: send to: eusidic, po box 1416, l-1014 luxembourg fax: (+352) 250 750 222 email: nuala.mahon@dm.rs.ch ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * patheticism the patheticism conference is free and open to the public. all question and answer sessions will be recorded and included within the manuscript submitted for publication. ____________________________________________________________ friday 18 aug 1995 trinity college dublin swift lecture hall a _____________________________ 2:00 p.m. -opening remarks 2:15 p.m. -pathos, the pathetic, 'patheticism' peter heslin classics department, trinity college dublin "pathos in greek drama and its nachleben in latin epic" j.e. mahon department of philosophy, duke university "ruskin and the 'pathetic fallacy'" fadi abou-rihan philosophy dept., university of toronto "silence x scattered, (un)finished thoughts" 3:45 p.m. -pathetic personae gavin budge english dept., university of central england "affect and impersonality: hume's pathetic egoism and the dissolution of the author in sentimental narrative." beth elaine wilson art history dept., suny college at new paltz "andy warhol and the pathetic persona" mark shiel british film institute "the sublime and the pathetic: godard's pierrot le fou" 5:15 p.m. -pathetic performers pamela thurschwell cornell university/university of cambridge "coma as you are" kasey hicks english department, stanford university "'i don't understand what you did to my dog': they might be giants' antironic recuperation of the pathetic" 6:15 p.m. -infantile regression david strauss english dept., new york university "sun ra: jazz and the infantile infinite" maria walsh art history dept., chelsea college of art and design "from empathy to extimacy" 8:00 p.m. -conference reception ___________________________________________________________ saturday 19 aug 1995 trinity college dublin swift lecture hall a _______________________________ 10:30 a.m.-pathetic america sally jacob english department, cornell university "anachronistic humanism and journalistic voyeurism notes from the margins of the culture industry" t. hugh crawford dept. of english, virginia military institute "textual anorexia: 'bartleby,' latour, and deleuze" michael booth department of english, brandeis university "patheticism, the press, and the right wing terrorist" 12:00 p.m. -mourning and melancholia part 1 mary bratton uwcc cardiff "me or not me the lost object?" desmond maurer classics department, trinity college dublin "lucian and the immorality of funerals, or the failure of the late greek critique of grief" 1:00 p.m. -lunch 2:30 p.m. -mourning and melancholia part 2 brian dillon school of english, trinity college dublin "the attenuated sublime: pathos, grief and abandoned being" eva heisler history of art dept., ohio state university "fragmentation in kiki smith" 3:30 p.m. -pathetic resistance joanna rakoff english dept., university college london "unreality bites: american ideology and the so-called 'dirty realists'" edward m. lorsbach school of english, trinity college dublin "'bubble and scrape': lo-fi resistance" simon tilbury darwin college cambridge "'this curious obliteration': failure, hostility and laura riding's abdication from the canon" 5:00 p.m. -revenge of the object stuart mclean anthropology dept., columbia university "some explorations in the (anti-) social life of things" alyce mahon courtauld institute of art, university of london "theory, garbage, stuffed animals: mike kelley and patheticism" david wheatley school of english, trinity college dublin "'mute phenomena': derek mahon's post-subjective poetry" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * french feminism conference announcement there will be many great papers on french feminism presented at the 1995 spep (society for phenomenology and existential philosophy) conference this year. the conference will be held at depaul university in chicago on october 12-14, 1995. if you are interested in any of the following topics, please plan to attend this exciting conference. here is a list of the papers dealing specifically with french feminism: 1. special session on tina chanter's book, ethics of eros -thursday, oct. 12 from 1:00-3:00pm (room will be announced at registration) 2. kelly oliver, "defending irigaray against kofman's freud: freud's fear of birth" -saturday, oct. 14 from 9:00-11:45 am 3. ellen t. armour, "theorizing desire between women" -saturday, oct. 14 from 12:00-2:00pm 4. anne caldwell, "fairy tales for politics: un-working derrida through irigaray" -saturday, oct. 14 from 12:00-2:00pm 5. michael j. monti, "nature and poiesis in an ecology of sexual difference: irigaray and ecofeminism" -saturday, oct. 14 from 12:00-2:00pm 6. morny m. joy, "passionate involvements: luce irigaray and an erotics of ethics and hermeneutics" -saturday, oct. 14 from 12:00-2:00pm the beauvoir circle will also be holding a special session on thursday, oct. 12 from 9:00-12:00noon. the following papers will be presented: 1. eleanore holveck, "beauvoir and sartre: novel approaches to ethics" 2. william mcbride, "philosophy, literature, and everyday life in beauvoir and sartre" 3. kristana arp, "willing others free: the evolution of an idea" 4. thomas anderson, "beauvoir's influence on sartre's first ethics -and vice versa" the society for the advancement of american philosophy will also hold a special session to discuss pragmatism, feminism, and continental thought on thursday, oct. 12 from 9:00-12:00noon. the following papers will be presented: 1. lenore langsdorf, "common sense and possessed sense: dewey and husserl on knowing from the inside" 2. charlene haddock seigfried, "re-weaving the social fabric" there will be many other papers on all subjects in continental philosophy presented at this conference. this is the annual conference of spep and is the largest conference on continental philosophy held in america. if you are interested in attending, or want to know how to join spep, please read the following. registration for the 1995 spep conference will be inthe depaul center, beginning at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 5:00 p.m. each day of the conference. full conference schedules, including room assignments, will be available at registration. abstracts of all papers will also be provided. the official conference hotel is the blackstone hotel located on michigan avenue at balboa street, chicago il 60605. the conference rate is $99/single, $109/double, and other rates. reservations must be made no later than september 14 to obtain these special rates. when making reservations, please mention that you are part of the spep conference. the telephone number is 1-800-622-6330. the hotel is located within a short walking distance of the depaul center, where the conference will take place. if you need any other information about the conference or about spep, please email kristin switala at kswitala@cecasun.utc.edu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * queer coalitions the 6th annual national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transidentified graduate student conference miami university, oxford, ohio april 4-7, 1996 call for papers/presentations through panel presentations, performances, conversations, and cultural events, queer coalitions offers a forum that builds bridges across disciplines. queer coalitions seeks to create communities across traditional barriers. in november 1992 in cincinnati, ohio, located 50 miles south of miami university, cincinnati city council passed a human rights ordinance prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. this ordinance protected cincinnati citizens on the basis of race, gender, age, handicap, marital status, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, or appalachian identity. exactly one year later a group known as "equal rights not special rights" called into question the category of "sexual orientation" in the human rights ordinance and brought it to cincinnati voters on the november ballot. sixty-two percent of the voters passed this charter amendment known as issue 3 denying protection to anyone on the basis of sexual orientation. in addition to the defeat at the polls, cincinnati city council voted this past march to repeal "sexual orientation" from the human rights ordinance that originally protected queer cincinnatians. and on may 12th the united states sixth circuit court of appeals in cincinnati upheld the anti-queer initiative, issue 3. at present, cincinnati's issue 3 is waiting to be heard by the united states supreme court. what occurred in cincinnati is by no means an isolated series of events. other communities have been devastated by such legislation; for example, the passage of proposition 187 in california. communication across racial, class, and gendered barriers has been wounded by this series of defeats. queer coalitions invites students, activists, performers, and artists from a variety of disciplines to engage in collective discussion of new approaches to building bridges inside and outside of queer communities. the conference planning committee requests abstracts and/or proposals (1-2 pgs.) for papers and presentations that discuss, interrogate, and contest these and other issues in "queer" studies: o activism/academics o aids related research o gender reassignment technology o collective kink politics o building movements o transgender o transexuality o sexuality and cultural nationalisms o queer politics o homophobia in health care o lesbian and gay parenting o artificial insemination research o chicano/a sexuality o lesbian feminism o sexuality in ethnic studies o legalizing same sex marriages o bisexuality o domestic partner legislation o lesbian and gay sexuality in the african diaspora o post colonialism and queer sexuality o lesbians with aids o safe sex o s/m o pleasure and sexuality o asian american sexuality o lesbian and gay histories o anti-queer legislation o violence/abuse in same sex relationships o health care reform for queers o politics of sexuality in ethnic studies o pedagogy o queer sexuality in the social sciences o queer geographies o lesbian bereavement o queer film o heterosexism o queer theory please send submissions and queries to queer coalitions, c/o marcy knopf, miami university, department of english, bachelor hall, oxford, ohio 45056 deadline: january 16, 1996 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * international assoc. for philosophy and literature the international association for philosophy and literature (iapl) is holding its 20th anniversary conference at george mason university from may 8-11, 1996. plenary speaker: rosi braidotti, univ. of utrecht, "figurations of nomadism" paper submissions are being accepted for the following sessions: 1. agonistic imagination: literature and philosophy in the postcommunist restructuring of eastern europe 2. between acts: masculinity as performance 3. the claims of culture 4. culture as agon, culture as ritual: east-west perspectives 5. the cultural drama of madness: descartes, derrida, foucault and the appropriation of mental illness 6. the cuture of the theatrical/the theatricality of culture: the early modern experience of the stage 7. dark horizons: recovering from philistinism and consumerism 8. the drama of masochism 9. dramatic/traumatic agon: poets and thinkers on greek tragic art 10. drastic measures: staging law, agency, persons 11. the echo of the original: translation as arena for the drama of culture 12. gifts and goods: bodies of work 13. history and repetition: the first time tragedy, the second time, farce 14. jocasta, mary, madonna: otherdom, motherdom, eroticism 15. media-culture: on the verge of the drama 16. the performance of nationhood: citizens in their (im)proper places 17. postcolonial perspectives on southern africa 18. provisional theaters: becoming-other at the end of the millennium 19. transculturalism in contemporary art if you would like to submit a paper on one of these topics or receive more information about the conference, please contact one of the conference directors: wayne j. froman wfroman@gmu.edu john burt foster, jr. jfoster@gmu.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the good, the bad, and the internet a conference on critical issues in information technology october 7 & 8, 1995 chicago circle center, university of illinois chicago 750 south halsted chicago, illinois http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/discussions/cpsr/annual/index.html new technologies have been appearing at a dizzying pace. the use of these technologies affect all of us, and the questions about what technologies get developed and how they are deployed are too important to leave to the government or to the private sector. periodically we need to step back and take stock of where we are. are the "right" technologies being developed? are they achieving what we want? what are we gaining, and what are we losing? and on the eve of a major election year, what issues should be raised in upcoming national and local debates? these are the questions that will be explored at "the good, the bad, and the internet" in chicago this fall. the goals of the conference are: o to educate the broad public, especially in the midwest, about what is at stake today in the major debates around computers and information technology. o to provide a forum where the people concerned about the impact of computer and information technologies can assess the current state of affairs and discuss strategies for democratizing technology, especially in light of the upcoming 1996 elections. o to share experiences and skills in making computers and access to digital information available to the broad public, and especially to communities that have historically been blocked from these new technologies. to accomplish these goals, the first day of the conference will include four panel discussions that highlight what is at stake, what is the current state of affairs, and different ways that people at the community level are taking the initiative to make the technology live up to its potential. the titles of the panels are o democratizing the internet o privacy and civil liberties: what's happened? what's next? o technology and jobs: what's happened? what's next? o the good news is: local initiatives in democratizing technology day two of the conference begins with a plenary discussion on election year 1996 and will feature representatives from various technology fields identifying the key technology issues for the 1996 election year. various workshops, including hands-on demonstrations and how-to discussions will help conference attendees acquire the skills to put the ideas from the panel discussions into practice. the conference will conclude with the cpsr annual meeting, at which cpsr members can discuss how computer professionals for social responsibility can and should move forward on the issues raised at the conference. the conference combines discussion of national issues with a look especially at efforts in the midwest to broaden access to new technologies. anyone with an interest in access to the future -whether it be access to jobs, access to information, access to audience, or access to community -is encouraged to attend. conference program saturday, october 7 8:30a.m. registration, coffee 9:00a.m. welcome 9:15a.m. 10:45a.m. panel i -democratizing the internet the internet has come a long way from its beginnings as a network for scientists working on military projects. today, with the number of worldwide users estimated at up to 30 million, the internet has been construed, alternatively, as a means for providing universal access to the world's knowledge, as a powerful new marketing and retailing tool, as pluralistic information commons, and a pipeline for pornography into the playroom. while the net is still a vibrant, multifaceted and continually evolving new medium, its future shape is far from certain. the rapid growth of commercial activity on the internet, and recent legislative attempts to control its content will change its shape. the soul of a democratic net is still up for grabs. this panel will survey the state of net, and help us to map out its evolution as we movetowards the 21st century. 10:45a.m. 11:00a.m. break 11:00a.m. 12:30p.m. panel ii -privacy and civil liberties: what's happened? what's next? new technologies have made possible new and frighteningly efficient means of data collection, surveillance, and control. more and more interactions in daily life leave a data trail. that data is accumulated in various databases and the information in those databases is passed around. given this enormous collection of data by both government and corporate marketers, is "private life" becoming an anachronism? in the new technological arena, the concept of "civil liberties" is also being redefined. this panel will bring conference attendees up to date on the state of privacy and civil liberties and offer a look at what options lie ahead. 12:30p.m. 1:30p.m. lunch 2:00p.m.3:30p.m. panel iii -technology and jobs: what's happened? what's next? along with technology revolution came an economic revolution. the application of the new technologies of computers, digital communications, biotechnology, and smart materials in an economic climate of competition and cost-cutting has led to "downsizing" and "restructuring" -euphemisms for eliminating jobs in traditional industries. the full-time worker is being replaced by the part-timer, the temp, and the contractor, and overall wages are falling. at the same time, new industries are emerging. will they absorb the displaced workers, or are other steps needed. the relationship of computer technologies to jobs is a complex issue that reaches into the heart of our assumptions about society. what are the responsibilities of the people who design these new technologies? this panel will continue this critical discussion, both from the point of view of case studies in particular industries, and an overview of the overall process. 3:30p.m. 3:45p.m. break 3:45p.m. 5:15p.m. panel iv -the good news is: local initiatives in democratizing technology far from the corporate board rooms and halls of congress, hundreds of local projects around the country are pushing the envelope of access to information and computer technology. these innovative projects are forging new uses for the technology, uses that generally have little or no commercial potential, but meet the special needs of different communities. out of these efforts, the real potential of the new technologies is being realized. this panel looks at local efforts underway in the midwest that demonstrate creative, human-scale use of information technology. 5:15p.m. announcements and recess 8:00p.m. the guild complex presents cybercabaret (tentative) sunday, october 8 8:30a.m. coffee 9:00a.m. 10:30a.m. panel v -election year 1996: towards a technology platform the 1996 election promises to be an especially important election year. this panel assembles representatives of various areas of technology to discuss the current state of affairs on their respective fronts, vis-a vis technology policy, and add a plank or two to an ideal technology platform for 1996 candidates. 10:30a.m. 10:45a.m. break 10:45a.m. 11:30a.m. workshop session i 11:45a.m. 12:30p.m. workshop session ii two workshop periods will allow conference participants to look at how the ideas developed in the preceding plenary sessions can be put into action. these are intended to be hands-on, practical, skills-oriented sessions. proposed workshop topics include o hands-on www o hands-on pgp o grassroots organizing around technology issues o community networks o follow-up on the local projects o legal issues o how to set up a technology & jobs conference o raising money for computer projects o participating in the electoral process 12:30p.m. 1:30p.m. lunch 2:00p.m. 3:30p.m. cpsr annual meeting this conference is being held in conjunction with the cpsr annual meeting. this session will build on the information presented in the plenaries and workshops and help to guide the work of cpsr over the coming year. 3:30p.m. closing remarks 4:00p.m. adjournment conference sponsors: computer professionals for social responsibility, chicago coalition for information access, center for research in information management at the university of illinois chicago, acm chicago chapter, acm university of illinois student chapter, library and information technology association (lita),(others to be announced). the virtual conference the discussion starts early. participate in the virtual conference in the weeks leading up to october 7 and 8 via the world wide web. tune your browser to: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/discussions/cpsr/annual/virtual.html to participate in online discussions of the issues being raised at the conference, and also to find the latest information about the conference. and if you can't make it in person to chicago, participate virtually - discussion on the issues surrounding the conference will be accessible from the page before, during and after the conference. registration form please pre-register as soon as possible to ensure a space at this exciting meeting. registrations at the door will be accepted as space allows. please send in a separate registration form for each individual attending the meeting. and please note that the saturday night banquet is not included in the price of the meeting. name ____________________________________________________________ address _________________________________________________________ city ______________________________ state ________ zip ________ telephone ____________________ e-mail __________________________ cpsr or ccia member: $55 _____ postmarked after september 20th: $65 _____ nonmember: $75 _____ postmarked after september 20th: $85 _____ new cpsr membership ($50 value) + registration: $95 _____ postmarked after september 20th: $105 _____ low income/student: $25 _____ postmarked after september 20th: $35 _____ additional donation to further cpsr's work: _____ total enclosed: _____ if paying by visa or mastercard please include the following information: _____ visa _____ mastercard card number: ________________________________ expires __________ scholarships are available. for more information contact cpsr at (415) 322-3778 or cpsr@cpsr.org. send the completed registration form with your check to: cpsr, po box 717, palo alto, ca 94302. other conference details directions to the conference can be found on the conference web page (its url is at the top of this document). the chicago circle center is easily reached by public transportation, but parking is also available on halsted, across the street from the center. hotels: the quality inn (800-221-2222) at halsted and madison is about 5 blocks from the conference. the inn at university village (800-662-5233), at 625 south ashland at harrison, is on the campus of uic, and runs a shuttle service between the hotel and other campus facilities (it's about a mile away from the conference). downtown chicago is a short cab ride away, and is served by most major hotelchains. airline: united air lines is the official airline of the conference. when making your plane reservation, mention code 561zp to get the conference discount. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * society for literature and science tentative program 1995 meeting of the society for literature and science los angeles, california november 2-5, 1995 plenary speakers: sharon traweek, associate professor in the history department and director of the center for cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine at ucla, studies variations in the international high energy physics community's craft knowledge, research styles, learning and pedagogic practices, disputing processes, social structures, and political economy; she also explores their strategic uses of national, regional, class, and gender differences. her work is situated at the intersection of cultural, feminist, and rhetorical studies. her first book is beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists (harvard univesity press, 1988, paperback 1992). steven pinker, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at mit, conducts research on visual cognition and on the acquisition and structure of language. he has won several scientific prizes, and his book the language instinct was named one of the 10 best books of 1994 by the new york times. currently he is on sabbatical at uc santa barbara, writing a new book called how the mind works. thursday, november 2, 4:00-8:00 pm registration (through sunday) thursday, november 2, 6:00-7:00 pm plenary session (followed by reception) sharon traweek: "crafting cultural studies of science" friday, november 3, 8:30-10:00 am a. metaphor and science i amir alexander: "the imperialist space of elizabethan mathematics" paul v. anderson: "thomas de quincey, immanuel kant, and lord rosse's telescope: optics as metaphor and metaphor as optics" marianthe karanakis: "on metaphor and measurement" julie a. reahard: "a particularly pleasing model: mathematics as shaper of scientific metaphor" b. the technological invasion of the living space charles bazerman, organizer charles bazerman: "the turned-on home: incandescent lighting and changing domestic imagery in the early edison years" laura holliday butcher: "techno-culture in the kitchen" patrick b. sharp: "post-atomic home/lands: representations of the bomb in north american minority literatures" c. autobiographies and biographies of scientists carolyn a. barros, organizer diana b. alteger: "the scientist as text: the sense of self in the writings of robert boyle" johanna m. smith: "discourses of exploration and colonization in francis galton's memories of my life" carolyn a. barros: "chain reactions: science as politics and the recollections of eugene p. wigner" livia polanyi: "constructing the scientist as figure: constructing all others as ground" d. science and 19th century literature lawrence frank: "'mr. vestiges': bleak house and a crisis in narrative" donald m. hassler: "anthony trollope and philosophic radicalism: a case for newness" martin kevorkian: "nineteenth-century particle metaphysics: hawthorne's puritan lucretius" goldie morgentaler: "preformation and other theories of heredity in the novels of charles dickens" e. visions of the feminine body nancy cervetti: "rewriting the rest cure: medical discourse, female bodies, and charlotte perkins gilman's response" ellen esrock: "is the mental gaze of the reader male? francis galton vs. luce irigaray" rebecca merrens: "bodies of evidence: theater, the feminine, and the production of anatomical knowledge in jacobean culture" teresa winterhalter: "le corps lesbien and the politics of love under a microscope" f. the human genome project i: re-thinking the genetic paradigm alan wasserstein, organizer alan wasserstein: "molecular biology and the notion of self" richard strohman: "limits of a genetic paradigm in biology and medicine" john wells: "non-darwinian evolutionary biology" friday, november 3, 10:30-12:00 noon a. reproduction and gender kristina busse: "mothering medusa: desiring the other in octavia butler's xenogenesis" leonard r. koos: "for medical use only? the rhetoric of abortion in turn-of-the-century france" lili porten: "a dream of parthenogenesis, an equation of two unknowns: the metaphor of artistic parenthood in the nineteenth century" susan squier: "reproductive technologies and the new fetal/maternal relation" b. science and the romantic sensorium carl stahmer, organizer katharine m. hawks: "the separation of the senses: visual technologies and romantic poetry" carl stahmer: "scientific humanism: cognitive modeling and the romantic conception of human subjectivity" vince willoughby: "romantic writers and poetic automation" c. charles lyell lee sterrenburg, organizer lee sterrenburg: "processing information: darwin's galapagos archipelago revisited" anka ryall: "agents of change: charles lyell, harriet martineau and the niagara falls" elizabeth green: "visualizing the interior in pre-darwinian scientific narratives" d. diagrams and discourse: reading maps of knowledge paul a. harris, organizer paul a. harris: "diagrams, houses and cities: between arche-text and architecture" sydney levy: "pictorial knowledge" philip kuberski: "hieroglyphics and cinematics: before the beginning and after the end of the letter" brian rotman: "grams, graphics and other thinking machines" e. the new pedagogy robert chianese: "ecological seeing and the interdisciplinary field trip" laurel brodsley: "student poetry-video as tool for social and scientific consciousness" michelle kendrick: "playing with fire!!: hypertext and the harlem renaissance" f. chaos and complexity i emily zants, organizer; thomas weissert, moderator randy fertel: "strange relation: the rhetoric of literary improvisation/the rhetoric of chaos science" julie c. hayes: "chaotic enlightenment: automata, weather systems, and the europe-machine in l. norfolk's lempriere's dictionary" james leigh: "four figures for a future reading of perec's _laife, a user's manual_" emily zants: "proust, poincare, chaos, and complexity" friday, november 3, 1:00-2:30 pm a. theory w. john coletta: "the food chain of signification: postmodern evolutionary ecology and the question of disciplinarity" helen denham: "the frankfurt school and critical theory: exploring themes of science, nature, domination, and emancipation" samantha fenno: "changing the object: (post)structuralism, scientism and disciplinary validation" van piercy: "raymond williams on culture, nature and the 'transcendental social'" b. the cultures of thermodynamics bruce clarke, organizer bruce clarke: "the selected poetic works of james clerk maxwell" john g. hatch: "images of the evolution of the universe: thermodynamics in the art of kazimir malevich" stephen j. weininger: "thinking big, thinking small: the introduction of entropy into chemistry" martin rosenberg: "complicity and the counter-culture of thermodynamics: ostwald, spengler, and pynchon" c. aids in nonfiction and film carol colatrella, "the other as savior: race and aids in lorenzo's oil" james w. jones: "brother, lover, patient, friend: gay men with aids in non-fiction by care givers" deborah lovely: "the novel is the most subversive form: leprosy as aids in time to kill" carol reeves: "french vs. american: contrastive rhetorics of science in the aids virus hunt" d. singing in the brain and the body electric paul harris, organizer richard doyle, "cryonics, comas and the promised body" alan e. rapp: "forgoing friction: digital words and the new entropy" vivian sobchak: "beating the meat: baudrillard's body" e. science & faith thomas l. cooksey: "a voyage to the world of cartesius: descartes, science, and censorship" stuart peterfreund: "bacon's puritan epistemology, the crisis of representation, and the way of natural theology dale j. pratt: "science, faith and reference: cajal's cuentos de vacaciones and palacio valdes's la fe" friday, november 3, 2:45-4:15 pm a. science fiction and ethical speculation david e. armstrong, organizer marilyn gottschall: "ethics without gender" david e. armstrong: "brave new waves: the ethical rhetoric of constructivist postmodernism and science fiction" aditi gowri: "'not doing' as ethical social policy: null-a and alexander technique in science fiction" sara l. miskevich: "where none have gone before: ethics and science fiction in popular culture" b. visual images i: photography and painting anne frances collins: "digital photography and visual paradigms: a new look" hugh culik: "a womb of his own: diego rivera, frida kahlo, and the collaborative body shop" stephen hartnett: "'the truth itself': how whitman, hawthorne and agassiz employed the daguerrotype as scientific proof" karl f. volkmar: "the crystal, character, and culture: essentialist structures as informational structures and the representation of gender and class in the impressionist paintings of camille pissaro" c. responses to darwin greg foster: "the ape-man in the mirror: t. s. eliot's sweeney poems as a satire of human evolution" cyndy hendershot: "masculinity and the darwinian feminine" alan rauch: "'see how the fates, their gifts allot': the emergence of darwinian sensibility in gilbert and sullivan" gary willingham-mclain: "darwinian space" d. medicine and illness i: the body and the mind kerry m. brooks: "free to be you and me?: the prozac debate" leslie dupont: "oliver sacks as rhetorician: metaphors for neurological disorders" marilyn chandler mcentyre: "what's borne in the body: william, henry and alice james and the mystery of psychosomatic illness" christine skolnik: "gender, neuropsychology, and aesthetics" e. technology, pathology and the cultural politics of the emotions kathleen woodward, organizer kathleen woodward: "prosthetic emotion" david crane: "plotting the paranoid text: conspiracy and communication in _sorry, wrong number_" amelie hastie: "revolution on the border between emotion and cognition: freud's 'rat man' and the x-files" angela wall: "'first, you cry': coming out stories and the emotional politics of breast cancer" f. the art of reflective science sidney perkowitz & jeffrey sturges, organizers peter brown (guest speaker): "writing about science for non-scientists: an overview" k. c. cole: "science writing and complementarity" jeffrey sturges: "reflective science writing" sidney perkowitz: "changing quantum physics into an essay: can it be done?" friday, november 3, 4:45-6:15 pm a. the normative discourse of health andrew mcmurry, organizer david cassuto: "healing the land: mary austin and the logic of reclamation" andrew mcmurry: "'the health of human culture': wendell berry's agro-poetic revision of robert frost" william major: "challenging the discourse of biomedicine: anatole broyard and audre lorde" roddey reid: "healthy families, healthy bodies: the politics of speech and expertise in the california anti-second hand smoke campaign" b. technology and narrative joe tabbi, organizer joe tabbi & michael wutz: "technology and 20th-century narrative" geoffrey winthrop-young: "mann's magic media: a case study in literature and media change" linda brigham: "our bodies, our selves: activating the percept in virilio and robbe-grillet" john johnston: "mediality in vineland and neuromancer" c. internet communities paolo a. gardinali, organizer; bob nideffer, commentator paolo a. gardinali: "discipline and punish in the cyberspace: usenet sanctioning and social control" joann eisberg: "high energy and hypertext: or if electronic publication brings democracy to physics, what else comes too?" wayne miller: "professional exchange in the age of chaos" d. the birds and the bees stephen germic: "early ornithology and racial mobility: anxieties of becoming ethnic in 19th century science and literature" yvonne noble: "rex, the microscope, and the construction of the female body: honeybees in the 17th and 18th centuries" susan sterne: "anthropomorphism in a feminist collection of entomologists" e. s-f and fantasy subhash c. kak: "strange echoes: parallel imaginations in old indian literature and modern physics" donald j. mcgraw: "where men and microbes met: tale the first: 'plot'" (a short story) frances d. louis: "acknowledging the tiger: savaging science and society in gulliver's travels, the stars my destination and roderick" elmar schenkel: "anti-gravity: matter and the imagination at the end of the 19th century" f. the future of literature and science--a presidential forum lance schachterle, moderator lance schachterle: "how we got to ten years (plus) at sls" stephen j. weininger: "where do scientists fit into sls" mark greenberg: "reorienting the practice of literature and science" james j. bono: "history of science and the future of literature and science" n. katherine hayles: "cultural studies and the future of literature and science" friday, november 3, 7:30-8:30 pm plenary session (followed by reception) steven pinker: "the language instinct" saturday, november 4, 8:30-10:00 am a. narratives of non-human others i: narratives of great apes nicholas gessler, organizer francine patterson (guest speaker): "the evolving narratives of koko and michael: generative language use in an 'emergent literature'" joanne e. tanner: "responding to necessity: invented narratives of the great apes" patricia greenfield: "language, tools and brain: the ontogeny and phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential activity" b. science and society i: fictional and real dystopias luke carson: "veblen's idle cause" barbara hyams: "entropy, dystopia and nostalgia: zamyatin's we, musil's the man without qualities, and the spirit of mephistopheles in modern fiction" alvin c. kibel: "the machine stops: forster's virtual reality" richard s. wallach: "captain ahab, judge holden, and the iconography of science in 19th century american nation building" c. cyberplaces: engendering space for a place/time continuum nancy a. barta-smith, organizer nancy a. barta-smith & sarah stein: "cyberspace/cyberplace: making sense of information technology" jaishree kak odin, "hypertextuality and postmodern subjectivity" d. medicine and illness ii susan connell, "the champion athlete: when rare personal achievement and modern science collide" laura otis: "bleeding for health: gide and freud" downing a. thomas: "corps sonores: music and medicine in eighteenth-century france" kate nickel: "the company we keep" e. chaos and complexity ii emily zants, organizer; thomas weissert, moderator yves abrioux: "foucault, chaos, complexity" f. paul cilliers: "complexity and postmodern knowledge" richard d. davis: "model metaphors: mimicking chaos theory in the humanities" torin monahan: "the labyrinth of jealousy: the chaotics of robbe-grillet's postmodern novel" f. delivering the male: biological determinism and the institution of masculinity geoffrey sharpless: "making bodies, making history" stuart glennon: "why johnny likes guns: assessing recent work on the biological determinants of masculine behavior" hilene flanzbaum: "the incredible shrinking man: sexual dysfunction in modern literature" ross shideler: "darwinism and displacing the father in scandinavian literature" blake allmendinger: "mother lode: technology, male midwifery, and gold-mining literature" saturday, november 4, 10:30-12:00 noon a. medicine, gender and virtual technologies robert markley, organizer; laura sullivan, chair anne balsamo: "monsters and heroes, mothers and fathers, children and the state" timothy r. manning: "computer mediated understanding of health threats" molly rothenberg: "virtual body, virtual mind" robert markley: "the patient's two bodies: medicine, simulation, and productivity" b. knowledge and power cynthia appl: "heinrich schirmbeck: literature and the ethical use of scientific knowledge" david brande: "general equivalents and contingent knowledge: ideology and the desire for sense in literature and science" gene fendt: "the purposes of literature in the culture of science" terrance king: "writing and knowledge as historical correlates" c. sustainability: postmodern neo-ecology (panel discussion) robert chianese, organizer robert chianese, w. john coletta, laura dassow walls, carl maida and christine skolnik, panelists d. metaphor and science ii stephen ogden: "outflanking gross and levitt on the right: how a robust approach to radical metaphor by the literary culture can debunk the scientists' own higher superstitions" teri reynolds: "just metaphors: why we shouldn't ask for a literal use of science in interdisciplinary studies" elliot visconsi: "a prophecy of escape: science and metaphor in pynchon's _gravity's rainbow_" andrew russ, "killing, dying, and surviving in the mathematical jungle of physics: some examples of metaphorical terms in the culture of a science" e. embodied discourse: the role of narratives and visual images in scientific talk and theories i n. katherine hayles, organizer; brian rotman, respondent timothy lenoir: "machines to think by: visualization, theory, and the second computer revolution" stefan helmreich: "artificial life on the edge of inevitability" n. katherine hayles: "gender and game theory" f. technology and utopia crystal bartolovich, organizer crystal bartolovich: "cartopia" paula geyh: "women on the edge of technology" camilla griggers: "women and the war machine" saturday, november 4, 2:00-3:30 pm a. visual images ii: rhetoric in visual format julian bleecker: "morphs, matrices, mixings: visual analytics and the computer graphics special effect" raymond harris: "archimedes' mirror: cinema as sensual assault" miranda paton: "seeing how to listen: constructing a form of listening in early phonography" b. entropy, information, misinformation and noise james r. saucerman: "entropy as a source of terror in the tales of edgar allan poe" lance schachterle: "low entropy and worse communications in pynchon's vineland" eric white: "signifying noise: the crop circle phenomenon" jay a. labinger, "the reader at absolute zero: entropy as time's (double-headed) arrow in stoppard's arcadia" c. the human genome project ii karyn valerius: "genetic consciousness? sequencing the genome and reconstructing ourselves" paula haines: "popular science: controlling the truth in the human genome project" val dusek: "dna as language: essence vs. deconstruction" d. narratives of non-human others ii: narratives of artificial intellects and cultures nicholas gessler, organizer michael dyer: "computer understanding and invention of textual narratives" marc damashek: "implications of ignorance based processing: a language-independent means of gauging topical similarity in unrestricted text" ken karakotsios: "making new friends: the impending exocommunication conundrum" nicholas gessler: "generating automatic narratives in artificial cultures" e. a guest session with octavia butler frances louis, organizer and respondent octavia butler (guest speaker): "furor scribendi" f. symmetries: teaching, writing, literature, science robert franke, organizer robert franke: "changed outcomes in science-based courses when using literature and writing" larry coleman: "writing in science courses" mary ellen pitts: "writing process and the teaching of science: two theoretical points of convergence" clive sutton: "awareness of the figurative in science" saturday, november 4, 3:45-5:15 pm a. "make it new": modernist artistic and literary responses to early 20th century science linda dalrymple henderson, organizer barbara j. reeves: "scientific modernism--modernist science linda dalrymple henderson: "representing the invisible: the 'playful physics' of marcel duchamp's 'large glass'" k. porter aichele: "jean perrin and paul klee's 'atomistic' cubism" allen thiher: "proust and poincare" b. languages of early modern science: children and childbirth richard nash, organizer eve keller: "representing reproduction in seventeenth-century england" debra silverman: "mary toft's hoax: narrative desire, medical genius and female imagination" richard nash: "feral children and 18th century language instruction for the deaf" c. popularizing science jennifer swift kramer: "infotainment a la gobineau: notes on a gentleman in the outports" mark schlenz: "the greening of 'gray literature': instrumental rationality and communicative action in writing for environmental studies" laura dassow walls: "'where there is light, there will be eyes': the theater of popular science" jeffrey v. yule: "critiquing science and its transmission: information as noise in don de lillo's white noise" d. ai and cybernetics ronald schleifer, "norbert wiener, information, and postmodernism" phoebe sengers, "the implicit subjects of artificial intelligence" elizabeth wilson: "'loving the computer': cognition, embodiment and the influencing machine" e. embodied discourse: the role of narratives and visual images in scientific talk and theories ii n. katherine hayles, organizer; brian rotman, respondent kenneth knoespel: "diagrammatics in mathematical discourse" sally jacoby: "co-constructing visual narratives in scientific practice" barbara m. stafford: "the new imagist: visual expertise in a transdisciplinary multimedia society" f. theory, history and narrative patrick w. o'kelley: "gilman and the creation of a new empiricism" lucia palmer: "what is new in the new historicism of comtemporary literature, philosophy and science?" f. irving elichirigoity: "historical narrative in the age of machinic vision and computer simulation: the emergence of planet management as a case study" scott m. sprenger: "balzac, archaeologist of consciousness: the case of louis lambert" saturday, november 4, 5:30-7:00 pm a. language, epistemology, and the cognitive sciences i f. elizabeth hart, organizer f. elizabeth hart: "the chaos of language: orderly disorder in the system of language and its implications for literary analysis" phillips salman: "cognition, poetics, and the nous poetikos" david porush: "telepathies: the advent of the alphabet as a model for the transformation of communication promised by vr" b. the old new physics: quantum mechanics and relativity henry mcdonald: "narrative uncertainty: wittgenstein, heisenberg, and narrative theory" timothy s. murphy: "beneath relativity: bergson and bohm on absolute time" stephen potts: "the muse of uncertainty: empirical psychology and scientific modernism" david l. rozema: "representation in science and literature" c. the ontology of science and the arts koen depryck, organizer koen depryck: "art as interdisciplinary discipline" karel boullart: "ontology, triviality and metaphorization" ilse wambacq: "the arts and sciences in education: bridging partial ontologies" d. machine visions, body slices and video memory ramunas kondratas, organizer ramunas kondratas: "imaging the human body: the case of ct scanning" joseph dumit: "functional brain imaging, personhood and the many literatures of neuroscience" barry saunders: "rituals of diagnosis in the age of noninvasive cutting" e. feminist theories of biology in fact and fiction (panel discussion) susan a. hagedorn, organizer roger persell, shoshana milgram and susan hagedorn, panelists f. nature, landscapes, and voyages vranna hinck: "chaos and christo" janet bell garber, "for fear of increasing the confusion: early 19th century attempts to make sense of the natural world" alice jenkins: "landscapes of ignorance: metaphors, narrativity and the organization of knowledge" philip k. wilson: "mechanistic and vitalistic perspectives of the body in enlightment voyages to new worlds" sunday, november 5, 8:30-10:00 am a. cybernetics in literature: subjects and subjectivities kevin lagrandeur, organizer kevin lagrandeur: "who sounds the thunder?: prospero's 'machine' and the anxiety of agency" vivianne casimir: "pascal and frankenstein: a new subjectivity" sarah higley: "scientists and their androids in science fiction: edison, dennet and hawking" b. the role of anecdote in science (panel discussion) frank durham, organizer and moderator marcella greening, thomas j. high, kathryn montgomery hunter and linda layne, panelists c. the female body in medical discourse and literature carol colatrella, organizer and respondent tanya augsburg, "resisting diagnosis: staging the female medical subject in contemporary women's performance" johanna x. k. garvey: "'and she had made herself!': (re)generation of 'woman' in acker, weldon, and carter" roger persell: "human eating disorders: the drama of clinical and literary discourse" linda saladin: "the rhetoric of surgery: narratives for patient well-being" d. bruno latour: pre-modern, modern and non-modern t. hugh crawford: "mapping migration: some thoughts on moby-dick, matthew fontaine maury, and bruno latour" philip lewin: "latour and the image of the human" ned muhovich: "bringing pym home: structure in poe's the narrative of arthur gordon pym" e. science and society ii: ethics, conscience, ideals thomas martin, "dostoyevsky's grand inquisitor's vision of science as the necessary source of miracle and mystery for the subjection of man" john bragin, "scientific witness and moral visionary: primo levi and the culture of the nazi holocaust" raphael sassower: "post world war ii technoscience" yvan silva: "mahatma gandhi: the armamentarium of non-violence" sunday, november 5, 10:15-11:45 am a. poetry and science beth browning: "'there is neither up nor down to it': anti-organicism in the poetry of marianne moore" william crisman: "humphry davy and john keats: romantic redefinitions of matter and mind" cynthia guidici: "'hand in hand with science': the frame of tennyson's the princess" donna mcbride: "incantory magic: female images of alchemy and the sacramental in the poetry of lucille clifton and jane kenyon" b. language, epistemology, and the cognitive sciences ii jefferson faye, "the birth and growth of the cognitive novel: joseph mcelroy's plus" maria l. assad: "poetic obscurity and dynamical discourse theory: the case of mallarme" joseph carroll: "an evolutionary theory of literary figuration" c. constructing and deconstructing the body jacqueline m. foertsch: illness as metaphor metaphor as illness: a critique of susan sontag's influential theory" barbara a. heifferon: "deconstructing colonial america's first medical compendium: a surprising heteroglossia" jamil m. mustafa, "constructing degeneration: dracula, henry maudsley, and the lunatic asylum" d. 17th century science sylvia bowerbank: "science and the self-technologies of early modern women" tom kealy: "the poetics of life: natural history and literary traditions in the seventeenth century" robert e. stillman: "metaphors, monsters, and natural philosophy in 17th century england" douglas l. hollinger, "the new enfeoffees: staking claims to nature in early modern english science" e. "worth a thousand words": documentary photography and the problem of proof positive stanley orr, organizer stanley orr: "documentation and detection in antonioni's blow up" beth rayfield: "documentation and desire: popular anthropology and the stereographic representation of the sexualized racial other" james goodwin: "documentation in black and white: the american south and the depression" michael l. merrill: "jacob riis vs. eugenicists: a visual rhetoric of biological reductionism" f. "you just don't understand": talking across the boundary at sls (panel discussion) thomas p. weissert, organizer thomas p. weissert, david porush, artie rodgers and jay a. labinger, panelists sunday, november 5, 12:00-1:30 pm sls wrap-up session: the future of sls ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * technical and skills training conference update to technical and skills training conference american society for training and development astd has released an update of scheduled activities for the 1995 technical and skills training conference & exposition, september 13-15, 1995, in philadelphia, pennsylvania. o joe h. harless has been added to the program as opening general session speaker. his latest book, the performance improvement process, is the first complete curriculum for performance technologists. attendees will gain from his insight into the current movement from training to performance, and examine an organization model that addresses such a transition. dave ulrich will be the closing general session speaker, addressing the impact of human resources on organizational change. o a third technical tour has also been added. participants wishing to tour lukens steel on thursday, september 14, in conshohocken, pennsylvania, may purchase tickets on site (the tour is limited to forty participants). other conference topics for 1995 include: o instructional design and delivery o self-directed work teams o using technology to improve performance o designing multimedia training o distance learning technologies o accelerated learning in regulatory and technical training o cbt and epss a videoconference on "interactive training for enhanced learning and performance improvement," with speaker pamela robbins, will be broadcast via satellite from the conference on september 13. to participate in the conference or to receive the videoconference, please call 703/683-8100. american society for training & development astdic@capcon.net information center 703/6838100 1640 king street, box 1443 alexandria, va 223132043 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * access '95 www conference web conference announcement access '95 world wide web conference on gateways and publishing dates: monday, oct. 23 wednesday, oct. 25, 1995 a single stream conference for 170 participants hosted by the university of new brunswick, fredericton, new brunswick, canada wu conference centre, university of new brunswick conference home page: http://www.hil.unb.ca/library/conference/ conference focus: the web is opening up to an increasing number of people looking for information, and web browsers are becoming the clients of choice for accessing a variety of resources. library related vendors, such as sirsi and silverplatter are developing web gateways to their products. gateways based on standards, such as z39.50, are in the public domain and are starting to be used by libraries to access local and commercial data bases. there are exciting developments with web browsers, such as sun's hotjava. in 1993 the university of manitoba hosted the international conference on refereed electronic journals. the development of the web and browsers during the past two years have redefined issues of design, production and distribution. what will the next two years bring? the university of new brunswick is hosting this conference to explore these issues. some of the speakers: keynote speaker: clifford lynch, university of california electronic publishing: david seaman, university of virginia; todd kelley, johns hopkins university; terry r. noreault, oclc; john teskey university of new brunswick; john black, university of guelph; aldyth holmes, national research council. gateways and web browsers: harold finkbeiner, stanford university; slavko manojlovich, memorial university; art rhyno, university of windsor; steve sloan, university of new brunswick; mark leggott, st. francis xavier; neophytos iacovou, university of minnesota. government and data: walter piovesan, simon fraser university; tyson macaulay, consultant, canadian cybercasting company / industry canada; chris leowski, university of toronto. commerical: sirsi corporation; silverplatter, sun microsystems hotjava. cost: $145 (canadian) or $115 (us), including 3 lunches. how to get here: the fredericton airport services flights from toronto, montreal, boston and halifax. we are a three hour drive from bangor, maine. to register and for more conference information, see our web conference page: http://www.hil.unb.ca/library/conference/. or contactalan burk: 506-453-4740 voice 506-453-4595 fax burk@unb.ca funding generously provided by teleeducation n.b., the emerging technologies interest group, canadian library association, and cacul, canadian library association. alan burk, associate director of libraries university of new brunswick / box 7500 / fredericton, n.b./ e3b 5h5 voice 506-453-4740 fax 506-453-4595 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------calls for contributions * hypermedia work for postmodern culture with the recent surge of interest in the world wide web and other distributed information systems, hypermedia projects are becoming both more numerous and more sophisticated. postmodern culture will continue to publish important offerings in hypertext and hypermedia, presenting works that extend and redefine electronic expression. at this point we would especially like to see conceptually challenging projects: texts that are genuinely multiple and whose multiplicity of discourse constitutes more than an auxiliary for traditional language and forms. we welcome both aesthetic and discursive approaches. this call goes out to philosophers, historians, ethnographers as well as artists of word and image. projects in html and other web environments are preferable, but we will consider other media as appropriate. submissions must not have been featured in other electronic publications and should have had minimal exposure to date. copyright if any must be held by the author(s). to offer your work for consideration, please send a letter or e-mail containing a brief description of your project. please include a url if your text is accessible through the world wide web. for further information please contact stuart moulthrop, samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * assault: radicalism in aesthetics and politics call for papers assault: radicalism in aesthetics and politics a conference at duke university march 22nd-24th 1996 what is "radical" in the contemporary cultural, political and aesthetic situation? "assault" will focus on radical aesthetics and politics in an international frame since world war ii, though recognizing earlier models and genealogies. particularly, we intend to look at radicalism as a confrontation with the problematics of violence and representation. on the one hand, we invite analyses, theorizations (and performances) of specific aesthetic practices that enact a radical politics through disruption of representational containment. on the other hand, we encourage papers on social and cultural movements that seek to challenge representational or "formal" political systems by asserting "real" participation and the immanence of autonomous self-constituency. throughout we wish to maintain our dual emphasis on both aesthetic and political radicalisms, in so far as they engage with the question of violence and the "crisis" of representation -without taking such a crisis for granted, and without assuming that the question of violence is not perhaps suffused with a nostalgia for the material. topics might include: the possibility of desirability of the avant-garde; the legacy of the new left and movements of '68: autonomia, situationism . . . ; representation, violence and self-determination in the third world or postcolonialism; the possibility of disturbance in late-capitalist cultural absorption; aesthetic terrorism and anarchist aesthetics; transgressive sexuality, gender, and radical political action; postmodern avant-garde shock and cyberspace, surrealism, dada . . . ; terrorism and civil rights; the power of non-violence . . . we welcome suggestions for alternative areas of interest and for individual panel topics. we encourage interdisciplinary approaches and proposals from comparative literature, languages, gender studies, postcolonial and ethnic studies, political science, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, the social sciences, media and communication studies, cultural studies. . . we are further interested in proposals for performances or other experimental presentations (video, hypertext and so on). possible speakers include: kathy acker, franco beradi, hakim bey, judith butler, harry cleaver, jim fleming, donna haraway, bell hooks, sylvere lotringer, sadie plant, avital ronell, michael ryan, richard slotkin, werner sollers, gayatri spivak, ronald sukenick, susan suleiman. . . please send one-page abstracts by november 15th, 1995. for further information, please contact: jon beasley-murray or svetlana mintcheva the literature program art museum 104 box 90670 duke university durham, nc 27708-0670 usa (919) 688 5059 jpb8@acpub.duke.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * conduites a journal of contemporary interdisciplinary studies conduites is an interdisciplinary journal on postmodern cultural theory, literary studies, feminist theory, politics and identity, multi-disciplinary studies in the sciences, postmodern aesthetics, art, and architechture. conduites is an attempt to provide a forum for critical reflection on these contemporary issues. conduites is accepting papers for the fall 1995 issue. we invite papers on topics in aesthetics, feminist theory, technology, cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and literary criticism. the theme of the next issue will focus on apocalyptic tropes in philosophy, the arts and sciences,and social sciences, as we approach the fin de millennium. all interested in having their papers considered for publication should sen a typewritten copy to the address listed below. also, papers and abstracts may be sent via e-mail to the address below. papers should not exceed 4000 words and should be double-spaced. manuscripts should be accompanied by 3 1/2 inch computer disk. macintosh, microsoft word is preferred, but other popular word processing applications are also acceptable. all submissions should also include a one page abstract, name, address, and phone number. all those who have submitted to our earlier post should know that we have received their material and are greatful for wide participation and interest in this edition. we have extended the deadline to oct. 15, 1995 in order to include more submissions from those who couldn't make our last deadline. conduites p. o. box 642568 san francisco, ca 94164-2568 nai@sfsu.edu deadline for submission: oct 15, 1995 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * computers and writing xii the twelfth computers and writing conference may 30-june 2, 1996 utah state university logan, utah 84322-3200 the twelfth computers and writing conference: technology & change (to be held may 30june 2, 1996, at utah state university in logan, utah) invites proposals that pertain in some way to the uses of computers at any level of writing education. theme: technology and change the rapid acceleration of change in the area of computers and writing causes some consternation -but also considerable exhilaration -among educators at all levels. the conference will highlight our attempts to cope and to stay current with the potential for technology in the writing field. this unique conference brings together educators from all levels and types of educational institutions who have a common interest in the uses of computer technology for writing instruction. invitation: send in your proposals we invite proposals that pertain in some way to the uses of computers at any level of writing education: k-12 to all types of post-secondary educational institutions. we especially welcome proposals for hands-on sessions, demonstrations, or any other interactive format. concurrent sessions will accommodate individual 20-minute "talks," panels with three to four speakers, or one-and-a-half hour interactive presentations or demonstrations. ongoing "poster" sessions for demonstrations throughout the conference are also possible. furthermore, we are looking for half-day workshop proposals, to be offered both preand post-conference. standard networked pc and mac equipment will be provided. suggested topics: classroom uses, collaboration, distance education, networks, hypertext & hypermedia, virtual classrooms, impacts of the internet. proposals must be postmarked or dated october 1, 1995. notification of acceptance will be by january 1, 1996. mail three copies of a two-page (double-spaced) abstract for a paper, panel, poster session, demonstration, or workshop (or e-mail one copy to the address below.) please include the name, affiliation, address, e-mail, and phone number of all presenters. please note: abstracts become the property of cwc96 and may be published in other venues, including a web site. send e-mail proposals to: computerwritingconference@writectr.usu.edu send print proposals to: christine hult cwc96 program chair department of english utah state university logan, ut 84322-3200. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * trans/forms trans/forms: insurgent voices in education the spring 1996 issue of trans/forms, "constructions of knowledge/activations of desires will consider the knowledges that get produced in institutional sites such as the family, law, academia, medicine, popular culture. we are interested in submissions that explore the social, historical, economic, political conditions under which knowledge gets produced; who and what influence these conditions; the effects of subject location(s) on knowledge production, how knowledge production informs/constructs different subject positions; how and why bodies have been theorized in the aforementioned sites; how knowledge about bodies is organized, authorized, and marginalized; how cultural and institutional sites construct and regulate articulations of bodily desire; how desire is silenced/punished in knowledge production, the kinds of investments and desires that mobilize, and are mobilized in the production of knowledge. suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following: o knowledge as a site of resistance o embodying desire/representing desire o 'experience' as a site of knowledge o the politics of (re)presentation (eg. as related to aids) o marginalized sites of knowledge (eg. queer studies, postcolonial theory, anti-racist pedagogy) o desiring education/(re)educating desire o subaltern bodies/ social spaces we welcome essays, short fiction, poetry, book/art reviews, autobiography, (maximum 2000 words) and visual works. please submit 4 copies of work (including one on disk) in apa format for peer review to: trans/forms ontario institute for studies in education (oise) university of toronto suite 8-105, 252 bloor st. w. toronto, ont., canada m5r 1v5 e-mail inquiries to: kobrien@oise.on.ca deadline for submissions: october 15, 1995 trans/forms, a graduate student journal issued out of the ontario institute for studies in education, publishes original, refereed works on a broad range of issues in the area of transformative education. it provides a forum for addressing relations of so cial difference as they inform educational theory and practice. trans/forms welcomes submissions dealing with all areas of education for social and global justice including first nations politics, feminism, post-colonialism, anti-racism, afrocentrism, anti-ableism, class politics, lesbian and gay politics, community activism, popular education, media and cultural studies, critical global education, and critical pedagogy. % ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * electronic journal on virtual culture call for articles special issue: diversity in virtual cultures issue editor: nina wakeford department of sociological studies sheffield university great britain n.wakeford@sheffield.ac.uk the december 1995 issue of the ejvc will be devoted to diversity in virtual culture. following a special issue of the ejvc on gender, at this time articles would be of interest which document or theorise differences, which might include those of race, sexuality, religion, age or region, for example. what kind of presences are emerging which are notstraight/white/male? where are these presences found? how are they linked to activism within feminism, anti-racism, queer and radical politics, or elsewhere? how is the oppression or empowerment of diverse peoples managed in virtual culture either by individuals or institutions? articles concerning experiences of diversity in an international context would also be welcomed, as would theoretical concepts around diversity, such as issuesof identity, community, and boundary. n.b.: the issue editor encourages correspondence about proposed contributions before submission by sending electronic mail with the subject line ejvc issue to n.wakeford@sheffield.ac.uk. deadline for submission of articles: october 15, 1995 deadline for revisions: november 15, 1995 publication of special issue: december, 1995 contributions will be peer-reviewed by the journal's normal editorial process before final acceptance for publication. articles may be submitted by email or send/file to: diane k. kovacs, editor-in-chief, electronic journal on virtual culture ejvcedit@kentvm.kent.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * the missing as cultural discourse submissions are sought for a collection of essays on the missing as cultural discourse. the editors are interested in a range of approaches to a variety of texts and media, but would particularly like to receive essays that focus on how lost or absent individuals function as sites for negotiations of desire, difference, material history, representation, and social power in contemporary american culture. essays might address, but are not limited to, the following topics: missing children (in the news, on milk cartons, in suburbia); missing mothers (or fathers or children) in made-for-television movies; missing media stars; missing fathers in neo-conservative representations of the welfare state; missing fathers and the men's movement. please send two copies of abstracts with bibliography or completed essays by 15 october 1995 to either amanda howell, dept. of english, university of rochester, rochester, ny 14627 (aho2@uhura.cc.rochester.edu), or andrew schopp, dept. of english, rhodes college, 2000 north parkway, memphis tn 38112 (schopp@rhodes.edu). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * comparative drama scandinavian issue comparative drama is planning a special issue on scandinavian drama for spring 1996. articles may be submitted to the editors, comparative drama, english department, western michigan university, kalamazoo, mi 49008. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * visual behaviors/digital productions call for work the little magazine vol. 21b, an extension of the volume 21 cd-rom project, is now accepting work suitable for electronic publication on the world wide web. we are looking particularly for writing (poetry, fiction, criticism, theory or multi-genre work), visual and sound art conceived as multi-media: visual/verbal/aural/textual and hypertextual collaborations. the proposed theme of the up-coming magazine is visual behaviors. please feel free to stretch and manipulate this theme to suit your purposes. send work from september 1, 1995 through february 1996. sooner is better. for info: bg1640@cnsvax.albany.edu or litmag@cnsunix.albany.edu. these comments are from: www editorial collective. the email address for www editorial collective is: litmag@cnsunix.albany.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------other announcements * the black poetic society greetings and respect, the black poetic society has gained recognition as a cultural student organization at cleveland state university in cleveland, ohio. the black poetic society is an african american troupe who verbalize black life and culture through a poetic medium. we are a grassroots organization responding to the need for youthful, honest, black expression in the university setting. bps is a mixture of men and women who are college students and community leaders. our purpose is to spread positive messages to our contemporaries. our intention is to motivate and guide those who experience us towards positive paths in life. we would like to visit your campus and deliver the heavy black poetic experience . we generally require an honorarium and expenses to assist us in "spreading the word". our honorarium is negotiable, but keep in mind that fees are necessary to continue our work. if you are interested in having the black poetic society perform at your university, please contact: the black poetic society, african american cultural center u.c. #103, cleveland state university, cleveland, ohio 44115, (216) 590-1440, d.hoston@csuohio.edu. we hope to hear from you soon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * steven a. coons award the 1995 steven a. coons award will be presented to prof. jose encarnacao for research in computer graphics, for his leadership in the international graphics standards efforts, and for his leadership in projects applying computer graphics to a broad range of industrial and medical applications. this prize, which is the highest awarded in the important field of information technology, will be presented to prof. jose encarnacao in los angeles, usa, during the siggraph conference for computer graphics on wednesday, the 9th of august, by acm siggraph. you will find more detailed and timely information at the www-server: http://www.igd.fhg.de/www/pr/index.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * gypsy lore society the gypsy lore society has a home page, on which information about the journal of the gypsy lore society is included. the url is http://metro.turnpike.net/r/rtracy/index.html sheila salo phone/fax: 301-341-1261 journal of the gypsy lore society e-mail: ssalo@capaccess.org 5607 greenleaf road cheverly, md 20785 usa ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * e-zine survey as editor of in vivo literary magazine on the world wide web, and as a writer trying to get published on the internet, i've found a dearth of information relating to which publications are really looking for work, and what they want. john labowitz has the most comprehensive listing of e-zines available, but his is geared more toward the readership, rather than the "writership." to help writers find publishers, and to help on-line publishers increase the number of appropriate submissions, i'm developing an on-line writer's guide for submission. i encourage any on-line publishers -fiction, poetry, and non-fiction -to add their submission information using the on-line form i've created at url: http://www-wane-leon.scri.fsu.edu/~jtillman/dev/zdms/ you can add extra information, such as artwork guidelines in the extra information section. links are welcome within the multiline entries, but please refrain from graphic references to avoid overworking the server. if you don't have web access, just use the form at the end of this message and return it. please use the web if you can! **please, only the people who actually do the publishing should fill out these forms!** your entry will be added to a datafile that can be browsed and searched. i will be verifying the entries as best i can, but the main advantage to this method will be that *you* control your listing. the listing is and will always be free to everyone. the search engines aren't fleshed out yet, but anyone is welcome to drop in and browse the listing. i will be notifying most editors and publishers by e-mail individually. if anyone knows of another service like this, save me some trouble and let me know. otherwise, stay tuned! james tillman, editor in vivo magazine --------------------------------------- -e-mail form -fill out and return - --------------------------------------- magazine name: description of magazine: editor or contact: url: http:// gopher: gopher:// ftp: ftp:// e-mail (for subscription): e-mail (for submissions): percentage of freelance material: number of submissions received per month: pays (on acceptance, on publication, not at all): replies within: --fiction- accepts?: type accepted: length requirements: # manuscripts accepted per month: pay: --poetry- accepts?: type accepted: length requirements: # manuscripts accepted per month: pay: --non-fiction- accepts?: type accepted: length requirements: # manuscripts accepted per month: pay: best way to submit: tips on getting into your magazine: james tillman editor, in vivo magazine in vivo magazine: http://freenet3.scri.fsu.edu:81/users/jtillman/titlepage.html homepage: http://www-wane-leon.scri.fsu.edu/~jtillman ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * asian american media mall this new mall has more than just media. it is meant to help empower the asian american presence on the internet's world wide web. the asian american yellow pages which are available from the mall is part of that agenda. strictly for entertainment sites are available from the mall as well. http://www.stw.com/amm/amm.htm asian american media mall stephen quinn web master srq@stw.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * teen smoking pmc reader's report on teen smoking what we can do.: teen smoking -selling our children to the tobacco companies the simmons market research bureau's booklet, targeting today's teens, and its accompanying report on 60 national magazines indicates that many publications, purportedly targeted for adults, are also read by millions of teenagers. what's disturbing about this report is that magazines such as cosmopolitan and life, which exclude these figures from their public promotional materials, are privately quite aware of this collateral drawing power and exploit it to deliver an eager and impressionable young audience to major advertisers -the cigarette companies! they are quietly, insidiously touting this "hidden" market so not to draw attention. cosmopolitan's advertising and press kits are filled with self-appraisals of their friendliness and benevolence to their young, mostly female, readers (ages 18-34) with phrases such as "we are the young woman's best friend." they deliver, according to their audit figures (average paid circulation) 2.6 million subscribers, 85% women. but, in private their ad reps are selling an additional audience (quoting the simmon's report) of 1.3 million teenagers, mostly girls, ages 12-17! you can bet the tobacco companies are acutely aware of this. even if a magazine didn't intentionally encourage tobacco companies to consider these demographics, you'd think the staff of cosmo, those "best friends," would recognize their moral responsibility toward children (their future readers) and stop assisting the tobacco companies in selling their deadly products to innocent youngsters. don't we all agree that the tobacco industry needs to reach young people in order to effectively create new smokers? isn't this where we should launch a vigorous counter program of education and expose the reality of these hidden youth markets? research shows that if a child doesn't smoke before age 20, she will never smoke! the tobacco companies know this all too well. why would they be so interested in cosmopolitan magazine? non-smokers over 20 aren't going to start. and research shows that brand-switching is rare, otherwise, why would phillip-morris pitch three of its major brands against themselves in the same issues: benson & hedges, parliament, and marlboro? let me reiterate: cosmopolitan magazine is deliberately selling their teenage readers over two million girls aged 12-19 to the tobacco companies. they are delivering our children into the hands of the tobacco industry to satisfy their greed for advertising dollars! and cosmopolitan staff members are predominately women! where are their ethics, their concern for their young sisters? doesn't anybody care? it's time we realize this is exactly where future habitual smokers are recruited. right under our noses! these are innocent teenage girls being shown that beautiful women can smoke and be healthy and successful. it's no surprise we find ourselves asking why kids start smoking. the tobacco companies, with the unconscionable, selfish, and willing help of magazines like cosmopolitan, are reaching our children where we aren't looking! the teen market helps support the ad rates; the ad managers may not wish to admit it, but everyone in the industry knows the undeniable truth. the tobacco lobbyists are telling the press and the president that they don't place ads in magazines which have an readership consisting of more than 15% teenagers. if true, these well-researched figures by the simmons research bureau, which shows that up to 44% of cosmo's readers are under 20, demand that the tobacco companies be held accountable to their own claims and remove cigarette ads from cosmopolitan magazine! the tragedy is that cosmopolitan magazine is fully aware of these facts and aggressively seek tobacco advertisers -in fact, they are actively selling this impressionable demographic group to all their advertisers! millions of young girls and young mothers are being shown that smoking is part of the glamorous, healthy, successful, beautiful, modern woman's lifestyle. we may not be surprised, but appalled, that cosmopolitan has never written a critical article about smoking; and by their own editor's admissions edit articles to reject references linking smoking to health problems. in cosmo's health reports, they will list numerous factors contributing to heart disease and breast cancer but not one word about smoking ever appears. how do you think cosmo's readers (who are mostly women, 40% with children) would react to these figures -that they are helping the tobacco companies deliver their deadly message to our children and not even warning them? how can cosmopolitan dare claim to be the young woman's best friend? would readers continue to buy cosmo if they knew the truth? congressman charles rose (who is defending the tobacco companies) on a nightline program, said he and the president are united with the tobacco industry "to do everything humanly possible to keep children from being exposed to tobacco". let's hope he and the tobacco interests are sincere and challenge them to start by taking notice of these important statistics. i'm fearful that the tobacco industry is hoping this issue remains quiet and underground (discussed in closed marketing meetings with their ad agencies and prospective publications' reps). have you been aware of the simmons reports and the efforts of magazines to covertly sell products to children that would otherwise embarrass the magazine if the truth were known? can you do anything to help? two other magazines which are delivering a teen audience to tobacco companies are sports illustrated and life. life's ad & media kits make the magazine out to be a national treasure for the american family. how many children use life in school and education projects we can only guess, but the tobacco companies realize an ad in life magazine is going to reach millions of children -future new smokers, if they continue to have their way. sports illustrated has been asked by several congressmen to voluntarily pull their cigarette ads. norman pearlstine, editor-in-chief of time inc., which publishes sports illustrated has been urged to put"the health of our children ahead of . . . corporate profits." george gross of the magazine publishers association said "no one tracks teen readership of magazines." he and pearlstine are obviously unaware or ignoring simmon's comprehensive study which also reports that 6.7 million teens read sports illustrated. does si have more than 45 million readers to give them their arbitrary 15% cushion? for many americans, to whom the ubiquitous ads selling si subscriptions on tv during the christmas holidays suggests the magazine wishes to be considered a wholesome product designed to enrich the entire family, the percentage of teens reading such a widely read publication is a lesser point -nearly seven million teens in america alone are being exposed to these sophisticated and highly effective cigarette ads! millions of teen-agers who read sports illustrated to follow "the lives and achievements of their sports heroes . . ." are literally bombarded by advertising promoting the virtues of smoking. consider the ads for camel cigarettes featuring the infamous cartoon character "camel joe" urging readers to "collect all 10" camel cigarette collectors' packs. is this r.j. reynold's (maker of camels) idea of an ad designed to get current adult smokers to switch brands, as the tobacco companies continue to claim? who's kidding who? what can we do? what can the 78% of adults in america who do not smoke do when the industry continues to outspend and out-lobby opponents at every turn? non-smokers can simply stop supporting these magazines! the publishing companies have been evading the issue by absolving their hands of responsibility, not willing to acknowledge the key role they play in the whole process of delivering a deadly product to consumers. they hide behind their concept of "market principles" but in reality they are confident that either their readers are unaware of the connections, or believe themselves helpless and powerless, or wouldn't act out of conscience. what would happen if the subscribers and stand buyers realized they, themselves, are the most important and potentially the most effective force that can be wielded against the tobacco/advertising industries' considerable power and their legions of lawyers and lobbyists? if, for example, only 15%, one in seven, of cosmopolitan's women readers canceled or refused to renew their subscriptions, returning the renewal offers with an counter-offer to resubscribe only when tobacco ads are removed, cosmopolitan would lose more revenue from lost readership and a lower ad rate base than all the money they reap from accepting cigarettes ads! guess what their next move would be? would they continue to insist tobacco companies have a right to advertise to anyone? would they be so "principled" to sacrifice for the rights of tobacco interests? hardly. this example underscores the truth: magazines such as cosmopolitan are only motivated by the money; if it's profitable, children's lives and our nation's health care costs must not be considered. the solution may be right in our hands! couldn't some of the enormous resources and funding, now being thrown futilely into court costs and legislation, be better spent informing the non-smoking public of the one tactic they can use immediately to break the frustrating, costly impasse and help win this battle? we needn't wish to hurt the publications, just help people understand the collateral damage of which they unwittingly are a part. ultimately, its the consumers who power the market's engines. but the tobacco interests are driving the cars! readers need to understand how they can wrestle the steering wheel away by simply turning off the gas. remember the tuna boycotts to save dolphins? the analogy is similar. we recognized how we contribute to a problem when we buy products that hurt animals. americans were able to get moral action from a reluctant industry by showing their resolve. we proved we can act as individuals and help save the dolphins. can't we do the same to save our children? of course, all this pain could be avoided if the magazines can be persuaded to stop accepting tobacco ads. are there any real, compassionate, ethical, caring people working at these companies? we can only hope so. please reply, if you can, and advise me of any other groups or individuals i should contact. or please forward this message to anyone you think can help. i'll appreciate any assistance to help our young people. though i'm single and childless myself, im certain we have no greater duty in life. i'm organizing an action group, interested parties please e-mail mlobato@ix.netcom.com. thank you, matt lobato. these comments are from: matt lobato the email address for matt lobato is: mlobato@ix.netcom.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ end of notices for september, 1995 -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------collins, '"head out on the highway": anthropological encounters with the supermodern', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-collins-head.txt archive pmc-list, file review-2.996. part 1/1, total size 18960 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- "head out on the highway": anthropological encounters with the supermodern by samuel collins american university scollin@american.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by samuel collins, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. review of: marc auge. _non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity_. new york: verso, 1995. [1] does it matter that we spend substantial portions of our lives in a netherworld of highways, airports, supermarkets and shopping malls? are these just liminal moments between other events and places that have more meaning to us, or do these sites warrant some attention in their own right? marc auge's _non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity_ elevates the atm machine, the airport lounge and the superhighway to the status of high theory through a discussion of the interrelationship (and dissociation) of space, culture, and identity. along the way, auge takes anthropology beyond its sometimes theoretically moribund fascination with the borders between tradition and alterity, pre-modern and modern, and authenticity and commodification. instead, %non-place% is the very nexus of raw and undistilled advanced capitalism, space shorn of all its cultural and social polysemy. but this does not mean that anthropology and ethnography in general are doomed to increasing irrelevance as some have forecast. in fact, auge's book is not about the dissolution of the anthropological object under the dubious sign of "crisis." rather, auge locates *non-place* in a tradition of *anthropological place* and suggests that our understanding of the social relations and practices evident in more traditional *anthropological places* may help us to understand the different constellations of self and other evident in *non-place*. [2] until quite recently, most anthropologists were inclined to view the encroachment of the *modern* (and the many modernisms that it implies) on the people they studied with considerable ambivalence, either with dyspeptic and patronizing elegiacs ("they're losing their culture") or with a sort of master-cynic's irony ("they're watching _star trek_ in bangkok!). of course, with the violent displacements, forced migrations and military maneuvers common to late-twentieth century life, these ambivalences are probably quite warranted. however, both approaches ignore *modernity* as meaningful social practice in the lives of people around the world, whether we mean the entrance of small societies into the wage nexus or the proliferation of commodified media forms in far-flung places. with the exception of the often-ignored work of urban anthropologists, "culture" has usually delineated small, bounded, isolated, and "authentic" societies. in anthropology, ideas of culture have always traveled from the exotic periphery to the metropole. like english gentry returning from a stint with the east india company, anthropologists and their theories accrued both power and prestige in the colonies. the modern functioned only as a diluvial benchmark for the loss of the "real," the fall from the allochronic "cultural" spaces of the exotic orient to the "non-cultural" rational present of the occident. [3] with the advent of several major critiques of anthropology's guilty past, most notably talal asad's _anthropology and the colonial encounter_ and johannes fabian's _time and the other_, anthropologists began their long journey towards redressing their fear of the modern with an innovative series of baudelairean meditations on the dialectics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, simple and complex. from anna tsing's _in the realm of the diamond queen_ (1993) to michael taussig's _the devil and commodity fetishism in south america_ (1980), many ethnographies in the 1970s, '80s and '90s explored the interstices *between* the pre-modern "exotic" and the modern quotidian, focusing on the interpolations of western forms into "native" places (and vice versa). [4] as innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there is a pungent whiff of recidivism about them. as innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there's a pungent whif of recidivision about them, as if the phrase "authentic primitive" has been crossed out only to be replaced by "subaltern peasantry"? these days, it seems, ethnographies are fairly redolent with the image of the plucky subaltern, stubbornly appropriating the reifying and alienating discourses and institutions of the colonial for their own more native, egalitarian, and sometimes utopian ends. haven't the ontological foundations for cultural theory in anthropology simply shifted from exotic authenticity to exotic resistance? in any case, the modern is reduced to a series of "occidental texts" forced on people from the outside. most anthropologists have yet to reconcile themselves to a *lived* modernity. [5] but "modernity"--even without the adumbrations of "post"--does not end (or begin) with "western europe." anthropologists owe it to themselves, the people they study, and to their reading audience to theorize the modern in its worldwide manifestations of affect and effect. as a fieldworker with experience in both west africa and france, ranging from the study of ritual to the sociology of science, auge, perhaps, is in a particularly good position to tell us something about the world's varied modernities without stepping into either fanciful abjections of the other or narcissistic reflections on self. [6] malinowski begins his 1922 _argonauts of the western pacific_ with an abjuration to *imagine*: "imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails out of sight" (4). many ethnographies begin with a similar invitation to place oneself in the midst of a %tableau vivant% composed of village, atoll, and grinning natives. it's also instructive to note that as anthropologists have shifted away from their obsession with the primitive so have their static descriptions of museum dioramas given way to dynamic, more piecemeal narratives. but the propensity towards these %in situ% evocations are characteristic, auge suggests, of *anthropological place*, the identification of culture with geography. "the ideal, for an ethnologist wishing to characterize single particularities, would be for each ethnic group to have its own island, possibly linked to others but different from any other; and for each islander to be an exact replica of his neighbours" (50). "anthropological place" describes the (imaginary) interpolation of individual into culture and culture into geography that auge believes lies at the heart of both mauss's *total social fact* as well as equally ideological tales of autochthony and belonging advanced by peoples to legitimate their own territorial interest while weakening those of their neighbors. "illusory" in the sense of a convenient fiction embraced by both anthropologist and informant, "anthropological place" is the "transparency between culture, society and individual" (49). [7] this is an important distinction. critiques of "orientalism" (edward said), condemnations of reified, "billiard ball" notions of culture (eric wolf), and exhortations to write about culture as complex movements of transnational identities and local understandings (homi bhaba, arjun appadurai), all protest the hypostatized "native under glass." but what auge means is somewhat less than the perfect interchangeability of geography, culture, and people. for although the ethnologist can hardly help being tempted to identify the people he studies with the landscape in which he finds them, the space they have shaped, he is just as aware as they are of the vicissitudes of their history, their mobility, the multiplicity of spaces to which they refer, the fluctuation of their frontiers. (47) rather, "anthropological place" is the essence of *belonging*, the ethnological object conceived as a series of homologies between peoples, places, and practices, reminiscent of bourdieu's discussions of kabyl architecture in _outline of a theory of practice_. [8] it is this fit between identity and identification that is overwhelmed by what auge calls "supermodernity." "we could say of supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of a negative" (30). rather than the slippage of meaning and signification associated with modernity, "supermodernity" refers to their abundance. that is, supermodernity does not signal the *negation* of narrative and identity, but to their histrionic multiplication in a deluge of space, time, and event. under a condition characterized by general *excess*, anthropological place gives way to the clean, cold lines of *non-place*, the %imaginaire% of the other to the imaginings of the super-modern. [9] if "anthropological place" is a series of isomorphisms drawn between being a person, acting as a person, and inhabiting a place, then *non-place* describes a situation where these have been dispersed and people act fundamentally *alone* without any particular reference to their common history or similar experience, each occupying a discrete seat in the airplane or lane on the highway: "if a place can be identified as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place" (77-78). if *anthropological place* describes, say, a small breton village with its monuments, its one cafe, its old homes, its church, its harvests, and its remedies for common ailments, then *non-place* is driving down an interstate past the village only to stop at a gas station to glance at postcards and road-maps that form, perhaps, the merest trace of village life. like m. dupont in auge's opening narrative, we read about places and people, exotic cities and geopolitical calamity in magazines and see them on cnn, but we are, in the end, thrown back on ourselves, cradled in the bosom of *non-place* and assured that, no matter what sticky "places" in which we find ourselves embroiled in after we land or exit off the interstate, we are, for the time being, "nowhere," reclining in a self-referential *non-place* with nothing to do but reflect on the idyll of a world happening *outside* us. "for a few hours...he would be alone at last" (6). [10] this is the key difference between the modern %flaneur's% urban wanderings and the supermodern's commute. in *non-place*, all of the events and relations that structure experience and underlie history disappear over the horizon; they are a fleeting trace. the victorian traveler defined (him)self against a succession of others: the urban other, the racial other, the sexual other, the cultural other and the historical other. walking across town was (and still can be) an engagement with the totality of history: the imperial order with its carefully maintained typologies of master and slave was (and still *is*) a visible feature of the landscape. in the squeaky-clean world of the *non-place*, however, these features are consigned--if they are acknowledged at all--to an in-flight magazine or a brochure for a tour. [11] we do not always dwell in the supermodern, nor, perhaps, will we ever. rather, we *traverse* *non-place* on our way to the innumerable places that make up the sum of our lives; our time spent in the commuter lane on the trans-atlantic flight is time (and space) *between*. even as the airplane takes off and our past selves recede along the runway, we know that our identity--along with the sometimes unbearable fullness of *belonging*--is only temporarily suspended, to be picked up later along with our luggage and our relatives waiting at the gate. this fleeting quality is the most fascinating aspect of %non-place%. "place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten" (79). indeed, what's potentially most interesting about *non-place* is this failure to erase the traces of "anthropological place," this failure to "subject the individual consciousness to entirely new ordeals of solitude" (93). like the "return of the repressed," all of the iniquities of purely *modern* identity--race, class, gender, and so on--reappear at odd, jarring moments in *non-place*, belying this perfect reflection of the individual upon the other of the self. [12] once we've paid our ticket, according to auge, we surrender our *self* at the gate, so to speak, becoming, for the duration of our travel, a non-person in the strict, maussian sense of the word. or at least thatis how auge would have it: "he becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver" (103). but this is not really true, as the many rodney kings of this world will tell you. perhaps we would like to believe in this level playing field of non-identity that auge is describing, but people seem quite capable of re-inscribing all of their stereotypes on the *non-place*, keeping their cultural baggage even as they check their physical baggage. to some extent, auge has provided for this in his aforementioned description of place and *non-place* as a dialectical play rather than a strict opposition of terms. but the idea that a bigot becomes less so on an airplane seems ludicrous nevertheless and threatens to overturn all that auge has advanced so far. [13] the biggest difference between *place* and *non-place* is not so much that one is relational and historical while the other is not, but that *non-place* continues the relations and identities of *anthropological place* in highly commodified forms. for example, in his _migrancy, culture, identity_ (1994), iain chambers writes about his pleasure and surprise in buying "beer-can art" from a black man on a new york subway. he celebrates this as one of a variety of tactics employed by the dis-located and disenfranchised to "cope" in the increasingly labile heterotopia of the city. while this may be true, i couldn't help but think of the shallow and highly artificial quality of their encounter. what did chambers really understand of that man's world by buying a five dollar beer-can sculpture? what truths had he discovered about "coping" and what "tactics" had he unearthed? should we be celebrating or eulogizing human beings reduced to (comparatively) meaningless exchanges on subway platforms? the moral here is that chambers believes he's encountered "authenticity" in a commodity and that the "relationships" engendered by the exchange of commodities are somehow key to our survival in a world of varied, transnational scapes. [14] henri lefebvre's _the production of space_ (1991) is an eloquent warning against collapsing the varied spaces around us into the *mental* spaces figured in metaphors of reading: when codes worked up from literary spaces are applied to spaces--to urban spaces, say--we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level. any attempt to use such codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce that space itself to the status of a *message*, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a *reading*. (7) this is, of course, exactly what *non-place* encourages us to do: reduce a world of embedded histories and relationships to a sign on the highway. in this way, the whole of the civil war, for example, with all of its unresolved contradictions and painful truths, can be reduced to a billboard welcoming us into historic gettysburg. [15] what is most interesting about auge's work is not so much that *non-place* exists, but that we would, on some level, *like* it to exist and that, moreover, it always fails our expectations of non-identity and atomized relations. while *non-place* may reduce history and social life to a passing road-sign, it does this in highly temporary and unstable ways. as an anthropologist, i believe that the abrogation of *non-place*--that moment when *anthropological place* rears its head again--seems key to our understanding of the supermodern. like m. dupont, we must arrive at a destination. works cited: auge, marc. _non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity_. trans. by john howe. new york: verso, 1995. chambers, iain. _migrancy, culture, identity_. new york: routledge, 1994. le febvre, henri. _the production of space_. cambridge, mass.: basil blackwell, 1991. malinowski, bronislaw. _argonauts of the western pacific_. new york: dutton, 1922. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------meek, 'guides to the electropolis: toward a spectral critique of the media', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-meek-guides.txt archive pmc-list, file meek.996. part 1/1, total size 43366 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- guides to the electropolis: toward a spectral critique of the media by allen meek massey university ameek@massey.ac.nz postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by allen meek, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. [1] one of the most compelling sites in which the methodologies of psychoanalysis and marxian cultural theory intersect in contemporary critical writing is in the figure of the ghost. the political significance recently ascribed to this figure suggests a paradigmatic shift in cultural studies taking place where the poststructuralist death of the subject encounters both the collapse of soviet communism and the "revolution" in global telecommunications. the historical situation in which western critical theory finds itself at this moment has called for a renewed engagement with psychoanalysis, attentive to questions of mourning and collective memory. as particular examples of this project i will cite jacques derrida's _specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international_ (1994), margaret cohen's use of the term "gothic marxism," and ned lukacher's notion of a "phantom politics," all of which work in the intertexts of psychoanalysis and politics, history and literature, but none of which are focused explicitly on what derrida has called the "*spectral* effects" (derrida, 54) produced by electronic media. [2] while derrida's reading of marx "conjures" (derrida characteristically enumerates the various meanings of this word) the specters of marx, taking care to reveal marx's commitment to and ambivalence toward this figure, cohen shows how the question of the spectral in marx's text has developed in those who have followed him and inherited from him, particularly andre breton and walter benjamin. derrida interrogates the figure of the specter at the "frontier between the public and the private" that is "constantly being displaced" (derrida, 50) by technology. cohen's genealogy of gothic marxism reminds us that this frontier has long been the subject of research at the experimental front of marxian cultural theory. between cohen's and derrida's respective discussions lie also the legacies of psychoanalysis, including freud's primal scene reconstructed by lukacher as a methodological invention of continuing historiographical and political significance. it is in the psychoanalytic notion of "working over" that a spectral critique of the media comes into focus. [3] in the face of the multinational corporate media's claim to transmit all significant "world events," a spectral critique would seek to confront those ghosts who call into question the legitimacy of this representational system and its ideologies. the globalization of electro-tele-presences seeks to usurp the place of, as it carries with it the traces of, a more general phantasmatic economy. flows of electronic images and information allow for the proliferation of what marx called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity capitalism, amidst which the conjunction of spectral imagery i am pursuing here begins to accumulate another kind of value and currency. in _specters of marx_ derrida pursues a "*politics* of memory, of inheritance, and of generations" (xix) arising out of a sense of responsibility toward the ghosts of our collective histories: the victims of war, imperialism, totalitarianism, and political, social, and psychological oppression in all of its forms. for derrida it is this sense of responsibility that we inherit from marx that will help us "to think and to treat" (54) the spectral presences made available by global telecommunications. so for those who today wish to be rid of marx and marxism once and for all (the particular example of this position under investigation by derrida is francis fukuyama), his and its ghosts always threaten to return. it is a condition of the so-called "end of history" and the ends of marxism that they will never have arrived--and this is also the condition of their messianic promise and of the ethico-political imperatives that they precipitate: "not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever" (75). [4] the emancipatory impulse that should guide cultural critique is called forth in the form of a ghost: one who will challenge the hegemonic claims of the corporate media and unsettle the world order it seeks to impose. the ghost recalls those forgotten or repressed histories that compose the collective unconscious of our mass mediated society. cohen's reading of breton and benjamin conjures the ghosts of revolutionary struggles that haunt the streets of paris amid the phantasmagorias of an emerging consumer society. derrida's specters are called forth on the stage of our own contemporary global politics. what are the legacies of the surrealist experiments of the 20s and 30s and how can they be approached in the sphere of the new transand multi-national electropolis? to begin to answer this question we need to consider derrida's and cohen's specters in the context of critical theories of the media. [5] derrida's specters of marx should not be made equivalent to that "other scene" of politics and eroticism submitted to rigorous ideological analysis by the marxian school of %cahiers du cinema%. i will argue that derrida's application of intertextual montage in pursuit of specters implies a different ontological order to that of the materialist histories made available by althusserian criticism which, while it helped us to understand that ideology was not simply a phantom to be dispelled but itself a mode of operation with its own structures (harvey, 90), did not offer a model for a therapeutic encounter with the specter or for what derrida understands by the work of mourning. if althusser's analysis of ideology as an imaginary process enabled marxian cultural analysis to depart from a crude model of culture directly reflecting the material basis of social organization, derrida's insistence that "mourning is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought to reconstruct the very concept of production" (97) demands a reconsideration of the practices of cultural studies. [6] indeed the range of interpretive strategies and critical approaches loosely collected in the anglo-american academy under the rubric of cultural studies employs various syntheses of marxian, psychoanalytic, and structuralist theories, but there remains very little work in that field that acknowledges the full scope of derrida's methodological critique of those theories. the critical response to the media that emerged amid the uprisings of may 1968 in france has had an enduring effect on the development of film and television studies, primarily through althusser's application of lacanian psychoanalysis, but (with a few notable exceptions) derridean deconstruction has had a much less direct influence on critical media studies. now derrida has published for the first time an extensive meditation on marx, inviting renewed speculation about the place that deconstruction might have in the context of marxian theories of media. [7] important precedents for considering how such a critical practice might proceed are made available by margaret cohen's and ned lukacher's work. cohen's _profane illumination: walter benjamin and the paris of surrealist revolution_ (1993) sets out to reconstruct a neglected politico-aesthetic tradition which she calls "gothic marxism," or "the first efforts to appropriate freud's seminal twentieth-century exploration of the irrational for marxist thought" (2). she inquires into the intertexts of french surrealism and walter benjamin's historiographic application of montage in the arcades project. benjamin's relation to surrealist texts, on one side, and soviet experiments in cinematic montage on another, continue to suggest forms of critical engagement with a mediatized culture that remain largely unexplored. derrida explicitly cites benjamin's messianic interpretation of marx as a precursor text to his own project. both cohen's and derrida's excavations of the ghosts of marx are anticipated in lukacher's _primal scenes: literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis_ (1986), which elaborates a "phantom politics" based in the freudian reconstruction of the forgotten event and marx's period underground after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. cohen shows how surrealist novels like breton's _nadja_ present a mode of counter-memory that haunts the facade of the modern state-supported consumer society which emerged after 1848. but where is the possibility of such an alternative tradition in the mediatized society after the interventions of 1968? or the challenges to state communism of 1989? [8] in the context provided by derrida's discussion of marx, i will attempt to situate cohen's notion of a gothic marxism by comparing it with anne friedberg's _window shopping: cinema and the postmodern_(1993). taken together with cohen's _profane illumination_, _window shopping_ helps to pose the question of what an application of gothic marxism to the postmodern media environment might be like. what is initially striking about the juxtaposition of these two books, however, is that in friedberg's analysis of shopping mall culture we witness the disappearance of those darker social forces that form the political unconscious of postmodernity but which it is the project of gothic marxism to make visible. through a comparative reading of cohen's and friedberg's books, in the intertextual space that these two theoretical works define, i aim to bring the project of a spectral critique toward a more direct application with regard to the imagery of electronic capitalism and to show how the critical force of psychoanalytic reconstruction can be reconsidered in the postmodern culture that presents history as a perpetual re-make. genealogy [9] a spectral critique takes its place between the experimental practices of the %avant-garde% and the marxian analysis of capital and in the context of the dissemination of new audiovisual technologies. freud's experimental reconstructions were contemporary with the invention of cinema, both of which share a prehistory in all of the picture puzzles (rebus, anamorphosis) and visual machines (zoetrope, stereoscope) that had already accumulated throughout the modern period. the revelations of psychoanalysis were first thought in conjunction with the appearance of film and, as benjamin suggested with his notion of an "optical unconscious," the filmic zoom, close-up and the development of montage extended this parallel attention to the microscopic details of everyday life. the conjuration of the hidden picture and the other scene could be understood as either an unconcealment or a contrived illusion, or both. the ghost-effect (think of melies' celebrated inventions) takes place at the seam between two texts, in the overlay of different discourses, the encounter between different modes of representation, or at the interface of different media. for derrida between _hamlet_ and _the manifesto of the communist party_, for cohen between benjamin's arcades project and _fantomas_. [10] a spectral critique would seek to redirect the insights of psychoanalysis regarding the therapeutic value of mourning toward a politicized critique. but what needs to be mourned? cohen's gothic marxism is positioned as a response to a "post-revolutionary" situation and a sense of the failure of communism that she claims is anticipated in benjamin and breton's responses to stalinism (11) and she wants to revise vulgar marxist notions of a direct causal relationship between base and superstructure as a way of explaining ideological meanings manifest in cultural artifacts. althusser provides her with the systematic theorization she finds missing from benjamin's notes on the dialectical image (19). in this way she can reformulate benjamin's psychoanalytic marxism in the following phrase: "the ideologies of the superstructure' express the base in disfigured products of repression" (33). [11] in contrast to althusser's "scientific" marxism, however, benjamin's method is "therapeutic" (37-38). cohen lists the positions of gothic marxism as the following: (1) the valorization of the realm of a culture's ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a culture's detritus and trivia aswell as strange and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique moving beyond logical argument and the binary opposition to a phantasmagorical staging more closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy, privileging nonrational forms of "working through" and regulated by overdetermination rather than dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the epistemological privilege accorded the visual in the direction of that integration of the senses dreamed of by marx...; accompanying this dehierarchization, a practice of writing of criticism cutting across traditionally separated media and genres...; and (5) a concomitant valorization of the sensuousness of the visual: the realm of visual experience is opened to other possibilities than the accomplishment and/or figuration of rational demonstration. (11-12) one might speculate briefly, without reverting to a mcluhanite determinism, on how many of these positions would serve as effective critical responses to media culture, with its collapsing of fact and fiction into a general flow of electronic text. yet cultural studies, particularly as it has inherited the birmingham model, has rarely incorporated any such experimental practices into its methodologies. [12] with a similar attention to therapeutic practices as offering an analogy for a critical method, ned lukacher's _primal scenes_ brings together freud and heidegger's practices of intertextual reconstruction as a response to the postmodern problematic of mourning and history. in lukacher's readings of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, intertextuality takes the place of the transcendental ground of history and memory. freud's listening for repressed memory in the speech of his patients and heidegger listening for what is left unsaid in the western philosophical tradition serve for lukacher as precedents for a new historiography. freud's construction of the primal scene in the famous wolf man case was never able to be verified by the subject of analysis himself: the patient could never remember if it actually "happened." so the theoretical scene, constructed from an intertext of the patient's dreams, remembered stories, and anecdotes from his own experience, assumed the place of "true" memory over the subject's conscious attempts to remember. in lukacher's discussion, freud's term "primal scene": comes to signify an ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive free play. (24) freud's ontological revolution can now be seen, retroactively, as an anticipation of (post)historical consciousness in the global cultural economy made possible by, among other things, telecommunications. as arjun appadurai has noted, popular perceptions of history are now characterized by a "nostalgia without memory" (appadurai, 272) in which a global audience looks back on a past they have learned to identify with through contact with american media culture. disparate peoples everywhere now "remember" a collective past that only ever took place on cinema and tv. just as freud constructed the primal scene at the interfaces of orality and literacy, of childhood and folk memory with the forms of memory and analysis made possible by alphabetic technologies and methods, historiography today needs to engage with the penetration of individual and collective memory by electronic media if it is to excavate its political unconscious. [13] the implications of such a problematic for contemporary marxian cultural theory suggests that a materialist analysis would not be adequate unless it confronted spectrality in all of its electronic mutations. as frederic jameson has commented with reference to derrida's _specters of marx_, it is "the problem of materialism, its occultation or repression, the impossibility of posing it as a problem as such and in its own right, which generates the figure of the specter" (jameson, 83). jameson argues that dialectical materialism needs to be understood as a set of strategies, a critical praxis, or "an optical adjustment" (87) rather than an unquestioned ideological position: materialism can learn from deconstruction. here the practices of gothic marxism listed by cohen also provide a set of valuable leads. lukacher argues for an historiographic practice in which "the subject of history is not the human subject--whether defined as an individual, a class, or a species--but rather the intertextual process itself" (13). the tasks of redefining a "new international" in a "post-communist" world would include the invention of such an historiographic practice that would contend with the ways that data banks, information networks, and electronic communication technologies are transforming collective memory. [14] the intertext through which derrida inquires into the primal hauntings of european culture takes place between literature and politics, between _hamlet_ and _the manifesto of the communist party_. the appearance of the ghost in _hamlet_ provides the scene by which the legacies of marxism can be (re)staged; or, as lukacher puts it, "the intertext is the medium through which history gives itself to thought" (237). mourning, writes derrida, always involves "*identifying* the bodily remains and...*localizing* the dead" (9). the problematics of mourning in the new world order include the ways in which the experience of cultural identity is increasingly displaced and national boundaries are reconfigured or subverted by flows of information and capital. new forms of agency need to be invented in the virtual spaces that increasingly define our public sphere (or the absence of it). the ghost becomes a signifier for such structuring absences as problems of mourning. [15] the intertext of _hamlet_ and _the manifesto of the communist party_, then, allows derrida to re-present the specter of communism and to remind us that "this attempted radicalization of marxism called deconstruction" (derrida, 92) is unthinkable without marx or shakespeare and without _hamlet_ as the founding literary text staging the modern european encounter with the question of the unconscious. lukacher names the deconstructive radicalization of marxism a "phantom politics" (lukacher, 245) in which the reference to tragedy signifies a certain rejection of politics conceived as conscious self-interest and opening instead onto an encounter with ghosts. [16] another example of this deconstruction of the boundary between literature and politics is when, through attention to intertextuality, cohen reveals marx to be not only a master theoretical voice guiding benjamin's excavations of paris but marx himself a reader, alongside baudelaire, of poe (cohen, 226). indeed benjamin's 1938 essay "the paris of the second empire in baudelaire," is full of references not only to poe but also to james fenimore cooper's influence on the french novel of dumas, hugo, and sue. the forerunner of the postmodern subject of history, the nineteenth-century reader's imagination was stocked with fictionalized experiences of the americas. the long term effects of this mass cultural imagination could be seen in the nazi deployment of myth and are now to be found in cases like the militia in post-communist yugoslavia dressed in outfits derived from american movie remakes of the vietnam war (denitch, 74). _rambo_ not only remakes history as film but history also remakes _rambo_ as history. [17] lukacher compares the theoretical status of benjamin's dialectical images to freud's primal scene. if the primal scene constructed in psychoanalysis can never be ultimately verified by conscious memory, it can nevertheless have a powerful explanatory and potentially therapeutic effect. in the same way that freud investigated the origins of the wolf man's psychosis through a network of signifiers derived from the patient's dreams and memories, benjamin sought to recover from the dream images embodied in archaic forms of commodity culture those voices that had been excluded from official histories (lukacher, 277). for example, in his essay on baudelaire, benjamin discusses how the atmosphere of cooper's novels of the american west is borrowed by french writers in their early detective novels (benjamin, 41-42). the direct comparison of the streets and avenues of paris to the prairie and the woods imbued the urban market place with exotic appeal. such exoticism masked fundamental anxieties provoked by the conditions of modern urban life; so benjamin cites baudelaire: "'what are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?'" (39). in this situation, the popular *physiologies* provided journalistic stereotypes to simplify the bewildering strangeness of the city. french authors invoked the figure the indian tracker to describe the vigilant detective in an alien landscape. contained in the wish image of the american west was a displaced memory of colonialist genocide. through attention to the intertextual construction of urban experience, a political unconscious registering the global catastrophe of capitalism becomes manifest as an image. this image of the native american, however, is not as much *dispelled* in benjamin's historical investigation as *conjured*, appearing as a guide to the ideological territory that benjamin is traversing. guides noires [18] in order to bring the ghosts of our collective histories into visibility on the postmodern scene we can assume, as the legacy of freud and breton, that the practices of everyday life make their way along the royal road to a collective unconscious. benjamin's insight was to understand the paris arcades as an entry into the repressed memories of high capitalism. one of the more provocative observations in _window shopping_ is that the design of the bibliotheque nationale (where benjamin worked on the arcades project) served as a precedent for the shelving in department stores (friedberg, 79). while the nineteenth-century shopper adapted the browsing practices of the scholar, studying displays of commodities like titles arranged on library shelves, the postmodern cultural theorist has been made-over in the image of the tv viewer, with shopping channels and the internet today conspiring to make the activities of writing and consumption identical. [19] both friedberg and cohen account for their respective projects through chance encounters in everyday experience that put the present and past in startling conjunction. for friedberg this encounter is seeing a hollywood remake of godard's _breathless_ in an l.a. strip mall (xi). for cohen it is coming across "at a sale of used french books...a card advertising the services of one eugene villard, private eye, dressed in a fantomas outfit and holding a key" (75). the image of this detective--with its caption "%qui suis-je%"- triggers for cohen an association with the opening line of breton's _nadja_. friedberg sees her geographical move from new york to los angeles in the mid 1980s participating in a shift of greater historical significance--new york being "the quintessential *modern* city (capital of the twentieth century)" and los angeles "the quintessential *post*-modern city (capital of the twenty-first)" [xi]--which frames her transportation of benjamin's %flanerie% in the paris arcades into the motorized landscapes of southern california and the phantasmagoric spaces produced by electronic technologies. [20] the original title of friedberg's book, _les flaneurs du mal (1)_, installs a palimpsest--baudelaire/benjamin/ friedberg--in which her precursor figures are summoned as guides conducting passageways between the nineteenth century and the present. baudelaire's %flanerie% presents for friedberg an early form of what she calls the "*mobilized virtual gaze*" (2): an experience of locality and identity made possible by the technological simulation of travel through time and space. cohen's _profane illumination_ also begins with the figure of the guide, in this case tourist guide books. cohen notes the existence of a special genre of guide book, the %guides noirs%, "guides to the gothic sides of familiar places" and relates this mode of tourism "devoted to the irrational, illicit, inspired, passional, often supernatural aspects of social topography" (1) to the set of practices she calls gothic marxism. [21] cohen confronts these practices most directly in her interpretation of breton's _nadja_, a surreal "novel" which she compares to the discourse of the analysand in psychoanalysis (66). breton investigates his own subjectivity as haunted, opening onto a realm of ghosts. cohen discusses tourist guides to historic paris and uses _nadja_ as a counter-example of %flanerie% devoted to the bizarre and marginal, as opposed to the most official, monumental sites of the great city. nadja serves as breton's guide to the *noir* sites of paris. for cohen, _nadja_ provides a significant example "of writing surrealist historiography by applying a freudian paradigm of memory to collective events" (80). cohen's juxtaposes passages from early twentieth-century tour guides against the sites of breton's surreal explorations, drawing attention to the bohemian and lumpen populations that have haunted them and reveals paris--as benjamin's essays on baudelaire do also--a memory theater containing a revolutionary history around every corner. [22] the value of comparing cohen and friedberg's different approaches to the arcades project lies in their mutual exclusiveness. friedberg demonstrates, in her translation of the arcades project onto the contemporary loci of the shopping mall and freeway, how the postmodern moment suspends historical consciousness. the memory theater of the urban streets that cohen's gothic marxism aims to make readable strikes one as impossible in the world described by friedberg: "the mall creates a nostalgic image of the town center as a clean, safe, and legible place, but a peculiarly timeless place" (113). the mythic topos of small town america encloses (as does tv in the domestic space) and services the desires of an insulated middle class that has effectively removed itself from the public sphere as a domain of political contest and struggle. benjamin "asserts that baudelaire cannot bring the urban crowd to direct representation but rather occults it, much as the neurotic represses a formative psychical trauma" (cohen, 209). this mode of reading, informed by psychoanalysis, is not at work in friedberg's study of los angeles shopping malls. [23] yet the mall is not ghost-free, for it is certainly haunted by what jameson calls "sheer class %ressentiment%" (jameson, 86), the hatred that the dispossessed feel for the privileged and that the dead feel for the living. the malevolent spirits that emerge in the wake of the endless series of catastrophes that benjamin identified with the advance of technological progress appear in friedberg's book as the zombies who invade the deserted shopping malls in the cult film _dawn of the dead_ (friedberg, 116-117). as jameson notes, these figures are not identical to derrida's specters, who embody a "weak messianic power" something akin to benjamin's angel of history. derrida's specters demand not revenge but social justice. so a gothic critique would not aim to give voice to this primal %ressentiment% but rather to open global tele-capitalism to the enigmas of visibility that call us back to our fundamental social and political responsibilities: to the unand underemployed and represented, to non-citizens and to all of those whose civil liberties are diminished or annihilated in the new world order. remake [24] three years before the completion of benjamin's essay on baudelaire, sergei eisenstein discussed precisely the same transplanting of literary imagery as he sought to define the principles of montage in film. shifting, like benjamin, from a discussion of the "science" of physiogonomy to the french fascination with cooper, eisenstein briefly notes how the ideology of private property that informs the detective novel is underwritten by a narrative of colonial imperialism (eisenstein, 128). both benjamin and eisenstein were interested in this example of literary influence for the same reason: the political significance and pedagogical potential of archaic wish-images. for if behind cooper's narratives there lurked the realities of ethnocide, there was also in the dream of a faraway landscape a desire--repressed, or redirected into colonizing aggression--to return to the utopian society that the discovery of "primitive" peoples had presented to the european imagination. like freudian psychoanalysis, benjamin's dialectical images and eisensteinian montage are interested in repressed memory, but they apply this interest to collective memory which they seek to awake for the purposes of inspiring historical agency. as freud had attended to images derived from fairy tales half-remembered from childhood, benjamin looked to the origins of the detective novel in images of tribalism. the images that made the novels of cooper and dumas so popular we recognize in the classic hollywood genres of the western and %film noir% as they continue to be recycled by our contemporary electronic media. [25] this recycling process tends to produce effects of arbitrary equivalence rather than historical consciousness. the postmodern signscape in which "the hammer and sickle is equal to marilyn" (friedberg, 173) leads friedberg to consider the cinematic form of the remake as both an expression but also potentially a critique of the nostalgia industry (174-175). but the question of the remake in her argument (one of her examples is the early _fantomas_ films) lurches toward a paradoxical %mise-en-abyme%: consider, for example, a victor fleming film produced in 1939, set in 1863, but shown in 1992 (_gone with the wind_). or a film produced in 1968, set in 2001, but shown in 1992 (_2001: a space odyssey_). or more exactly, a film made in the city of paris in 1964, set in a future world, but seen in 1992 in the city of los angeles (_alphaville_), or a film made in los angeles in 1982, set in los angeles in 2019 (_blade runner_), but seen in los angeles in 1992. (177) or an historiographic experiment produced in paris in the 1930s, set in paris in the 1850s, not published (in german) until the 1980s and read (about) in america in the 1990s? the passage demands that we consider friedberg's relation to benjamin's work, as she comments at one point that the arcades project might be best compared to "a film never completed" (51). is her own book to be understood as a remake? if so, how does the temporality of the postmodern as it is explained by friedberg shape her own critical project and its attendant historical and ethical responsibilities? [26] on this point an illuminating contrast to _window shopping_ is provided in a very different study of l.a., _city of quartz_ by mike davis, which offers a social and political history of the city in terms of race and class war--from its exposure of local business interests overtaken by offshore investment, to its analysis of the fortress mentality of the white middle class and a new underclass decimated by unempolyment, drugs, and gang-police warfare. the criminalization of the poor in "post-liberal" l.a. that davis documents provokes a far more bitter and frightening vision of postmodernity than that of _window shopping_: contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating "postmodern space," or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan "galaxies" has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at street level. (davis, 223) indeed the l.a. of _window shopping_ does not provide any account of the historical or social space described in _city of quartz_: those spaces are not to be traversed as much as escaped through the modes of virtual travel which friedberg explores. the technological mediation of the social transforms the very notion of a geographical site or a public sphere. and as long as the social other reappears only on the screens inside the fortress, one wonders about the viability of a spectral critique that might return the ghosts of the new world order to consciousness in ways that can more effectively challenge the postliberal imaginary "reciprocally dependent upon the social imprisonment of the third-world service proletariate" (davis, 227). _city of quartz_ provides the analysis of social struggle absent in _window shopping_, as davis argues that the restructuring of urban space in l.a. is a direct response to the race riots of the 1960s (224). the l.a. mall is to 1968 what the paris arcade was to 1848. [27] %guides noir% to l.a.? given that the ambition of friedberg's book is to redefine the postmodern in terms of the central role that cinema and other modes of technological simulation have had in shaping that moment's perception of its own historicity and spatiality, it should be noted that for mike davis, %film noir%--that mix of american and exilic european sensibilities that left such a mark on classic hollywood--"sometimes approached a kind of marxist %cinema manque%, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism" (davis, 41). forties detective fiction in some respects assumed the place of the abandoned project of thirties socialist realism. and while the chandlerian detective that cruises the %noir% landscape of california might not serve as an exact analogy to the baudelairian %flaneur%, he is surely a mythic--and highly ambivalent--type in whom a spectral critique would discern a site of redemptive possibility. what the juxtaposition of friedberg and cohen's books offers is a hope of such a critical vision: one that can negotiate history in its mediatized forms and thereby as a ghost history. to begin to write this history will demand attention to the intertextual migrations of our cultural legacies. friedberg's book is inspired by her encounter with a remake of godard's _breathless_--itself a remake of both hollywood %film noir% and italian neorealist forerunners. more recently, godard offers us an image of a post-communist landscape haunted by cinematic ghosts in _germany year 90_, featuring lemme caution, his %noir% detective hero (resurrected from _alphaville_) wandering the ruins of cold war europe. like benjamin and eisenstein before him, godard has invented a montage practice that works with hybrid images from european and american traditions but that stages a critical vision of the dominant mode of representation. [28] the primal scenes of oedipus and the wolf man, the %mise-en-abyme% of _hamlet_, the social critique of %film noir%, all serve as precedents for a spectral critique which must learn to confront and to mourn the catastrophic losses that haunt the scenes of our collective memory; they displace the subject of history with a series of intertextual encounters and overlays that include both the interfaces of our various technological media and the legacies of the liberational struggles to which we remain indebted; they teach us to recognize our historical situation as formed by the contradictions of becoming post-communist, -literate, -modern, -metaphysical, but not yet agents of the social justice that we must strive to bring about. [29] in godard's film an aging man with a suitcase, a refugee, crosses the borders of east and west: like benjamin's %flaneur%, part-detective, part-exile, bearing testimony to the ruins of both totalitarian communism and consumer capitalism. likewise, between friedberg's _breathless_ and cohen's _fantomas_, between psychoanalysis and cultural studies, emerge images of those whose labor supports but is rendered invisible by the smooth surfaces of %fin-de-siecle% consumerism: the unemployed, the migrant, the homeless--the specters of our electronic arcades. works cited: appadurai, arjun. "disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy." _the phantom public sphere_. ed. bruce robbins. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993. 269-295. benjamin, walter. _charles baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism_. trans. harry zohn. london: verso,1983. cohen, margaret. _profane illumination: walter benjamin and the paris of surrealist revolution_. berkeley, los angeles, london: u of california p, 1993. davis, mike. _city of quartz: excavating the future in los angeles_. london, new york: verso, 1990. derrida, jacques. _specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international_. trans. peggy kamuf. intro. bernd magnus & stephen cullenberg. london, new york: routledge, 1994. denitch, bogdan. _ethnic nationalism: the tragic death of yugoslavia_. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1994. eisenstein, sergei. _film form: essays in film theory_. ed. and trans. jay leda. san diego, new york, london: hbj, 1977. friedberg, anne. _window shopping: cinema and the postmodern_. berkeley: u of california p, 1993. harvey, sylvia. _may 68 and film culture_. london: bfi, 1980. jameson, frederic. "marx's purloined letter." _new left review_ no 209 (jan/feb 1995): 75-109. lukacher, ned. _primal scenes: literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis_. ithaca & london: cornell up, 1986. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------garelick, 'outrageous dieting: the camp performance of richard simmons', postmodern culture v6n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n1-garelick-outrageous.txt archive pmc-list, file pop-cult.995. part 1/1, total size 33609 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- outrageous dieting: the camp performance of richard simmons by rhonda garelick department of french and italian university of colorado at boulder postmodern culture v.6 n.1 (september, 1995) pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu copyright (c) 1995 by rhonda garelick, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, oxford university press. [this is a hypermedia project, containing both images and video clips. both can be viewed through ftp, through jefferson.village.virginia.edu by ftp, in: /pub/pubs/pmc/issue.995/images or /video. (see contents for further instructions)] [1] the scene opens with diet guru richard simmons wearing old-fashioned driving goggles and an aviator scarf. he is driving a 1930's style convertible roadster. winking at the camera and his audience he tells us that he is on his way to pay a surprise visit to one of his clients or customers, a woman who has overcome serious obesity through his diet program. the roadster, after driving by some pasteboard scenery, arrives at a suburban middle-class home in what appears to be a midwestern state. we witness the woman's shock and joy as she discovers simmons at her door. inside, they sit together in her living room holding hands. together they weep over an old photograph of the woman, taken when she weighed over 250 pounds. they weep over the pain and humiliation she once felt, lacking the confidence to date, unable to buy clothes. simmons empathizes with the woman; he too was once obese, he says. sometimes the woman's family is included in the scene, but they do not cry. this is a synopsis of a scene routinely played out in television "infomercials" for richard simmons' "deal-a-meal" fitness program. [2] i would like to examine richard simmons' camp performance, its relationship to the women he works with, and how this curious blend of queer sensibility and shopping mall culture functions. one obvious and important departure point for my argument will be the marginalized space shared by obese woman and gay men -the space eve sedgwick has aptly called the "glass closet," a prison with transparent walls. specifically, i'm interested in the relationship between simmons' performance and the commercial and sexual economies into which, i will argue, this performance reintegrates the obese woman. (i should add here that while it's true that richard simmons does use some men in his exercise videos and television programs, his main "clientele" is female and his reliance on a mise-en-scene of domesticity and the kitchen codes his realm as female.) [3] as a rule, camp connotes a certain radicalism, an attempt to expose -through parodic theatricality -society's highly constructed fictions of identity. camp always "exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture and consumerist culture," writes david bergman, "the person who can camp and can see things as campy is outside the cultural mainstream" (bergman, 5). and despite its frequent loudness, furthermore, camp in mass culture cannot be discussed; it remains a private, oppositional irony. if we accept this definition of camp, richard simmons' performance and his tremendous success become problematic. how can simmons be camp when he is plugged directly into middle-american consumerism? what do we do with someone whose camp performance works to reintegrate people into the mainstream? first, we will need to look at how this reintegration takes place. as we will see, simmons has invented a clever combination of dietary economics and theme park capitalism. [4] simmons' elaborately constructed persona is part cheerleader, part father confessor, and part broadway chorus boy. his two uniforms are striped gym shorts and tank top and the red baron-style ensemble of goggles and scarf i just mentioned. with his androgynous look, his bitchy humor, and his exaggerated physical affection toward men and women, simmons cultivates a very recognizable theatrical style. he is unmistakably camp. we can't miss his campiness when he sings love songs to barbra streisand with "linda richman" (a drag character, played by mike myer) on _saturday night live_, or when he announces -as he did recently -that he has commissioned a doll in streisand's likeness, which he plans to revere since the real barbra refuses to meet with him (letter, 24). we see simmons camping it up in his newest exercise video, entitled "disco sweat," which is performed entirely to 1970s disco music.^1^ during the video's first several minutes, simmons struts along the same bensonhurst street down which john travolta paraded at the beginning of _saturday night fever_. this delectation of travolta's leather-clad machismo ("i'm a woman's man, no time to talk," go the background lyrics), coupled with the uncharacteristic reference to urban ethnicity (simmons' target audience is strictly middle-america) make "disco sweat" simmons' most "out" video to date. [5] but camp is more than just satire. richard dyer sees it as "hold[ing] together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. . . intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a depreciating sense of its absurdity" (dyer 1994, 143). christopher isherwood observes that camp involves "expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun, and artifice, and elegance" (qtd. in bergman, 4). and indeed such extremes are constantly present in any simmons performance. although his tears are real when he confers with his clients^2^, for example, the infomercials and exercise videos also showcase an ironic simmons doing the cha-cha or tango-ing to 1950's and 60's music (figure 1), or doing exaggeratedly serious ballet stretching exercises (in his gym shorts) to classical music. figure 1 (video clip) [6] the study of camp has become something of a political battleground, with the main issue being whether camp is exclusively queer. since its beginning -arguably around the turn of the nineteenth century -camp has been associated with a male gay sensibility and counter-cultural discourse. with the goal of uncovering culture's constant, insidious process of naturalizing normative desire, camp puts on a grand show of *de*-naturalized desire and gender. since 1964, however, when susan sontag published her now-famous "notes on camp," the term has expanded to include a broader, less politicized meaning. sontag's essay seemed to authorize the use of "camp" as an adjective for objects, artworks, and styles seen merely as ironic -to be appreciated for their retro-charm, their nostalgia or their flamboyance -but not necessarily as political gestures. "notes on camp," it has been argued, allowed camp culture to shade off into pop culture. in a recent, manifesto-like essay, moe meyer has lamented what he calls "sontag's appropriation" of camp, which "banished the queer from discourse, substituting instead an unqueer bourgeois subject under the banner of pop." "it is this changeling," writes meyer, "that transformed camp into [an] apolitical badge" (meyer, 10). meyer, and others,^3^ want to reclaim a politics of camp, to establish it as an agent of "the production of queer social visibility," specifically as a performance (not an object or a style) "used to enact queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility" (11). [7] meyer's article takes up many other important and polemical issues, (there's an argument against andrew ross here as well as against sontag^4^) but for my purposes, i'd like to borrow from him this one essential notion: that camp or queer parody is a performance that lends or produces social visibility. i focus on this issue because simmons' audience -persons usually at least 100 pounds overweight -share (paradoxical as it may seem) this powerful need for social visibility. the paradox of the obese is that they are hidden in plain sight, all too painfully visible but not "perceived" properly, not absorbed properly into the social, sexual and commercial economies. but there is little in the way of a style of performance that could restore visibility to the obese (heterosexual) woman, while remaining particular to her. there are, of course, political groups of obese women which are fighting for the right to remain fat and be recognized, but in many cases the public performances of these women are perceived as camp -perceived, that is, as belonging somehow to a queer, male sensibility. furthermore, obese women in middle america do not really yet comprise a political entity; they are, rather, stigmatized and isolated - pressured constantly to transform their bodies. figure 2 (image) [8] interestingly, in simmons' television talk sessions, the process of bodily transformation, of losing the weight, is referred to as liberating the thin person hidden within the fat person. the thin person is waiting to "come out," to proclaim her true identity (figure 2). and so, while simmons' campiness may well announce his queerness, when the camp performance lends itself to the obese women, the goal is reversed. the woman's identity is not affirmed, this is not her liberation. the fat woman's "coming out" can only be accomplished by rejecting her current body. (she does not come out *in* her body; she comes out *of* her body.) her social visibility depends upon her becoming less literally visible, and, as we will see, upon her becoming less a visually obvious "consumer" and more of a smoothly circulating element in the capitalist machine. [9] in writing this i realized that i'd been having a hard time coming up with the right word for these women -are they simmons' audience? his clients? his customers? his patients? his congregation? the reason for this difficulty is that his relation to them comprises at once the theatrical, the commercial, the medical and even, the religious. when simmons leads the women through the narrative of their overeating and subsequent weight loss, he is physician, priest, and shopping consultant. but in all cases there are secrets to be told. and the secrets belong to the women, never to simmons, for although simmons' queerness is immediately apparent through his camp performance, it remains nonetheless an unspoken and unacknowledged matter. his sexual persona, while openly celebrated in his non-diet industry appearances (such as on the david letterman show^5^), is never alluded to in any way in his deal-a-meal performances. unlike, say, paul rubens' erstwhile character pee wee herman whose television program featured a "playhouse" of campy friends (including a macho, bare-chested cowboy, and a drag-queen "genie" in a magic box), simmons plays his gayness straight, leaving it in plain sight of his middle american target audience without ever pointing it out. the overt "coming out" is done by the women. his performance leads them to thinness, their confessions obviate his. [10] richard simmons did not begin his career as a camp diet consultant. his first break in show business came in the late seventies, when he won the role of a male nurse on _general hospital_. that this soap opera connection remains a part of simmons' persona will become clear if we consider for a moment some of the factors peculiar to the genre. soap operas are a unique form of entertainment in that they incorporate themselves into the daily, domestic lives of their primarily female audiences. tania modleski sees the soap opera as melding with and mimicking the daily stop-and-start rhythms of the housewife at home, accompanying her throughout the day as she performs her various tasks.^6^ i would add that, more than film or nighttime television, soap operas also blur the line between fiction and reality. it is soap opera viewers who write to their favorite characters as if they were real, warning them of impending disaster or congratulating them on their marriages. soap fanzines easily blend the characters' onscreen stories with the private lives of the actors. and the fantasy that a "star" will visit you in your own living room and make you famous is much more powerful in daytime television's mythology than anywhere else in mass culture. [11] simmons' modus operandi clearly recalls this easy crossing over from screen to domestic space. he continually stages himself striding right into the living rooms, kitchens, and high school gymnasiums of his viewers. this is a soap opera move and the connection may help us understand the relationship between simmons and his confessees. writing of confession in mass culture, modleski has pointed out that, unlike the confessional scenes of classical melodrama in which the revealed secret sets the plot right and ends the narrative, the confession of the soap opera depends upon on a continual re-encoding of secrets (modleski, 107-109). soap operas rely upon their non-teleological quality for their survival; they must, by their very nature, continue endlessly. no revelation, therefore, can set the plot right, because that would end the story line. instead, the tell-all moment of the soap opera usually enchains a still more buried secret ("i have amnesia, but what you don't know is that the baby is not yours"). soap opera confessions resemble the foucauldian, medicalized confession, the confession of the doctor's office or the analyst's couch. unlike the catholic version, these confessions contain no possibility of absolution, they are endlessly repeatable performances. [12] the simmons confession operates more like the soap opera confession than the traditional melodrama confession. the women confess but he doesn't, and that enables his domestic entertainment to continue indefinitely. as in soap opera, what subverts total, finite confession is consumption, the need to continue to sell things. simmons' secret is still apparent, but never becomes the overt confession that would surely end his diet empire and the domestic drama that is its vehicle. instead, the confessional narrative draws out endlessly a double discourse. it produces first the performative discourse of simmons' sexuality, which is at once provocative and socially acceptable to america's prurient but homophobic culture.^7^ the second discourse produced is that of consumerism, the extra-narrative determinant that subverts any possible telos to the confession. [13] female obesity has a longstanding and highly charged relationship with commercial consumption. this is the relationship parodied and exploded, for example, in percy adlon's 1990 film _rosalie goes shopping_. the film follows the outrageous adventures of the brilliant rosalie (played by marianne sagebrecht) who makes a career of shopping on endless credit, without ever paying up. the overextension of her credit represents a delirium of overconsumption, just as her abundant flesh represents an overconsumption of food. the film's fascination lies precisely in the unchecked quality of both rosalie's body and her spending. and this point brings me to details of richard simmons' diet system itself, which suggests the intimate relation between women and shopping (a relationship that dates to the nineteenth century and the birth of the department store^8^). [14] with "deal-a-meal," simmons is a pedagogue of corrective consumption. the system cleverly teaches food rationing using a wallet and a pile of stiff-backed coupons or "foodcards," with the goal of training overeaters to consume restricted amounts. deal-a-meal divides foods into their major groups (fats, carbohydrates, proteins, etc.) and offers color-coded cards for each group. every day the dieter may eat as many servings of a given group as there are cards for it in the wallet. each portion of food eaten corresponds to a "spending" of one or several foodcards. when she has no more yellow cards left in the unspent portion of her wallet, for example, the dieter may consume no more fats -she has spent all her "fat" cards. the goal is to learn to apportion one's eating so that one has enough cards to "cover" a day's "spending." the system presumes that its built-in rewards and punishments will reinforce its behavior modification lessons, so that the dieter will learn early on not to gorge herself at breakfast or she will be left with no cards to "spend" by midday. [15] the most obvious aspect of this system is its twinning of shopping and eating. the whole idea of the "consumer" becomes quite literal here, since the shopper actually ingests what she buys. for obese women, the issue at stake is often not just excessive food consumption but also inadequate commercial consumption. the fat woman, that is, often cannot participate fully in commerce. in _tendencies_, eve sedgwick discusses the difficulty facing the obese female shopper. she writes: to that woman [the fat woman] the air of the shadow-box theater of commerce thickens continually with a mostly unspoken sentence, with what becomes under capitalism, the primal denial to anyone of a stake in the symbolic order. `there's nothing here for you to spend your money on.' like the black family looking to buy a house in the suburbs, the gay couple looking to rent an apartment . . . this is the precipitation of one's very body as a kind of cul-de-sac blockage or clot in the circulation of economic value (sedgwick, 217). [16] the notion that fat women represent the stoppage of the commerce system is perpetuated regularly in mass culture. on television's _married with children_, for example, hapless shoe salesman al bundy finds exceptional personal torment in the number of fat women who come to his shopping mall store. for al, the fat women, whose bodies suggest over-consumption, paradoxically signify a distasteful and total cessation of the system. alone in the shoestore, al waits for a thin, beautiful woman onto whose delicate feet he might slip shoes, but he is condemned largely to catering to fat women, who, he clearly believes, have no business in the shopping mall, and who, furthermore, can never find shoes that fit. [17] in addition to the promise of slimness, then, deal-a-meal offers a reintroduction to ritualized spending for those whose culture promotes it heavily, but whose body type can make it very difficult. using this diet system, the simmons customer relearns the management skills necessary to negotiate consumption for both the space of the body and that other spending space: the commercial clothing store. she learns to consume *less* food in order to be able to consume more of the other luxury commodities. the deal-a-meal system allows its participant to reestablish herself as part of the flow chart of capitalism while she waits to join the crowds of spenders outside. [18] furthermore, as if to reproduce more exactly the specific kind of shopping from which obese women are barred, deal-a-meal operates as a kind of credit system. the middle-class shopper, after all, rarely pays for food or groceries with credit cards; credit cards live in the domain of the department store. for the obese woman, exiled from the utopic capitalist themepark of the suburban mall, the deal-a-meal coupons and the sleek wallet they come in offer a practice model of our credit card-based culture of luxury buying. the coupon cards resemble credit cards both visually and functionally. looking closely at simmons' package, one sees that the coupons fit, like credit cards, into special slots on either side of a wallet. as the dieter "spends" the foodcards, she moves them -just as she might arrange credit cards -from slots on the "uneaten" side of the wallet to slots on the "eaten" or "spent" side. and like credit cards, the deal-a-meal cards trade against a future resource, simulating buying on time. in this case, however, the dieter does not trade against next month's paycheck, but against next month's future, thinner self, the self who will be less of an embolism in commerce and more of a participant. [19] but deal-a-meal is only one part of the multilayered simmons program. another aspect is his low-impact exercise system, detailed in a series of videos entitled "sweatin' to the oldies." the videos feature simmons leading groups of mostly female exercisers through simple, choreographed movements to music from the 1950s and 60s. the exercising takes place on lavishly decorated sets that recreate amusement parks or high school gymnasiums. simmons refers to his each of his several sets by the same name: "sweatin' land." these backdrops (figure 3) typically feature such nostalgic memorabilia as carousels, ferris wheels, bandstands, and colored balloons; and the obvious evocation of other oneiric "lands" (disney, wonder, never-never . . .) cannot be avoided. according to simmons, sweatin'land is a place where no one is an outcast, no one suffers embarrassment because of her weight, and exercise is simple and fun. the various sweatin'lands offer a series of fictional, nostalgic spaces, "demilitarized zones" for the persecuted obese. they act as alternatives to the delirious, commercial wonderland of shopping malls - "lands" whose main escapist pleasures are denied to the obese. sweatin'land (figure 4) represents the high school gym class revisited, with none of the torment that an overweight girl or a gay boy might have experienced there; it is the amusement park trip for which you have, at last, a date to sit next to on the ferris wheel.^9^ figure 3 (video clip) figure 4 (video clip) [20] but the heavily nostalgic component of these videos has other purposes as well. the evocation of the 1950s and 60s is not limited to the exercise videos; it is a consistent element throughout simmons' whole system. as i mentioned earlier, in his infomercials, simmons arrives at the home of his clients behind the wheel of a vintage roadster convertible, the dream date vehicle in countless movies of the 1950's and 60's. and just as in those movies, this visit represents the triumph of the story's heroine and her entry (or re-entry) into marriage and heterosexual society. this is made especially clear in the infomercials when the women's husbands thank simmons for repairing their marriages, for "giving them back" newly desirable wives. in a sense, then, richard simmons' de-eroticized television romancing of these women enacts a return to an earlier, idealized femininity: a date in a convertible, a gentleman caller, a high school dance or a carousel ride and, finally, the apotheosis of the heterosexual couple. simmons just adds one extra step: instead of entering into the heterosexual couple himself, he "delivers" the woman back to her already extant couple via his camp performance.^10^ [21] moe meyer complains about "unqueer appropriation of queer praxis with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the ontological challenge of camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation" (meyer, 5). the straight appropriation of camp, he says, "casts the cloak of invisibility over the queer at the moment it appropriates and utters the c-word" (10). does this apply to richard simmons? is simmons' performance an example of queer sensibility selling itself out to straight culture which then appropriates and defuses it? in fact, the answer, i think, is no. but what actually happens is even more troubling. simmons' camp works well. it does, certainly, lend him social visibility as a queer; and in this respect it adheres to the most politicized version of the performance. at the same time though, it fulfills a second purpose: its lends social visibility to the obese woman. *this* form of social visibility, however, is far from radical. indeed, it may simply be a slightly different kind of "invisibility cloak." while simmons' camp makes his gayness apparent, it reincorporates the obese woman into the dominant ideology. his difference is expressed and dramatized; hers is obliterated. his spectacle is celebrated; hers is erased. [22] contemporary critics of camp have vilified susan sontag as a symbol of straight culture's appropriation of camp. i would argue that the phenomenon of richard simmons proves that sontag's understanding of camp may not, in fact, be so destructive to it. in fact, her "notes on camp" essay might simply have been *registering* the degree to which camp can be appropriated by other causes, not itself *causing* this reappropriation. it may not be straight culture exactly that takes over camp, but consumer culture. simmons' performance can at once affirm his queer identity and help bolster the identity of consumerist capitalism. the surprise is that camp--even while retaining its political, sexual valence, even while resisting one kind of naturalized desire -can function as an agent for the renaturalization of consumerist desire, accomplishing this via a reinscription of women into the capitalist culture of suburban life. all of which proves that capitalism is still stronger than anything, even a good camp performance. notes: ^1^ for an analysis of disco's camp effect see richard dyer's "in defense of disco" in _only entertainment_. ^2^ richard simmons' over-the-top, lachrymose performances lead one to ask whether he is, in fact, only mourning the suffering of the obese. to see a gay man crying so publicly over a disease of *too much* flesh makes one wonder whether this might be a displaced lamentation over that other disease, the disease that emaciates. to my knowledge, simmons has never mentioned aids publicly or associated himself with any gay political causes. ^3^ two recent anthologies, _the politics of camp_ (1993), edited by meyer and _camp grounds_ (1994), edited by david bergman, have refocused attention on the connection between gay politics and camp. ^4^ meyer takes issue with andrew ross's influential 1989 essay, "uses of camp," which maintains that the camp effect occurs "when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste" (ross, 58). meyer believes that ross's argument "defuse[s] the camp critique . . . relocating the queer to a past era by defining him/her as a discontinued mode of production" (14). "situating the queer's signifying practices in the historical past," writes meyer, "creates the impression that the objects of camp no longer have owners and are up for grabs" (15). ^5^ last year, while appearing on the letterman show, simmons asked letterman to "teach him to smoke a cigar." the arch banter that followed involved much campy irony about all the implications of knowing the right "cigar-smoking" techniques. ^6^ see tania modleski's _loving with a vengeance: mass-produced fantasies for women_. ^7^ "from the christian penance to the present days," writes foucault, "sex was a privileged theme of confession . . . the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it . . . for us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of anindividual secret" (61). in the case of simmons' confessions, one bodily secret -the narrative of closeted overeating and the subsequent guilt -holds the place of the other, more explicitly sexual secret of simmons' gayness. ^8^ when the department store was born in the late-nineteenth century, the medical establishment was quick to diagnose and identify an attendant female malady: kleptomania. simple thievery was transformed from a crime into an illness of body and mind when middle-class women succumbed to it. see rachel bowlby's _just looking: consumer culture in dreiser, gissing and zola_, nancy armstrong and leonard tennenhouse eds. _the ideology of conduct_, and michael miller's _the bon march: bourgeois culture and the department store 1869-1920_. ^9^ i would like to thank gregory bredbeck here for helping me to see the particular significance of simmons' stage decor. ^10^ it is not surprising that simmons achieved his greatest success during the three republican administrations. the implicit view of womanhood promoted by his system jibes perfectly with the ideology of a pat robertson or a marilyn quayle. works cited: armstrong, nancy and leonard tennenhouse. "introduction." _the ideology of conduct_. eds. nancy armstrong and leonard tennenhouse. new york: methuen, 1987. bergman, david. "introduction." _camp grounds: style and homosexuality ed_. amherst: u of massachusetts p, 1993. 3-16. bowlby, rachel. _just looking: consumer culture in dreiser, gissing and zola_. new york: methuen, 1985. dyer, richard. _only entertainment_. new york: routledge, 1992. -----. _the matter of images_. new york: routledge, 1993. foucault, michel. _history of sexuality_. vol. 1. trans. robert hurley. new york: vintage, 1990. meyer, moe. "reclaiming the discourse of camp." _the politics and poetics of camp_. ed. moe meyer. london and new york: routledge, 1994. 1-22. miller, michael. _the bon marche bourgeois culture and the department store 1869-1920_. princeton: princeton up, 1981. modleski, tania. _loving with a vengeance: mass-produced fantasies for women_. hamden, ct: archon books, 1982. _richard simmons discosweat_. videocassette. prod. richard simmons and e.h. shipley. 1995. 60 min. _richard simmons get started_. videocassette. prod. richard simmons and stuart karl. karl-lorimar home video, 1985. 60 min. _richard simmons sweatin' to the oldies_. videocassette. prod. richard simmons and e.h. shipley. deal-a-meal corporation, 1988. 46 min. _richard simmons sweatin' to the oldies 3: tunnel of love_. videocassette. prod. richard simmons and e.h. shipley. goodtimes home video corporation, 1993. 60 min. ross, andrew. "uses of camp." _yale journal of criticism_ 2, no. 2 (1988). (rpt. in bergman, _camp grounds_. 54-77.) sedgwick, eve kosofsky. _tendencies_. durham: duke up, 1993. simmons, richard. _interview_. david letterman show. cbs. 15 february, 1994. -----. letter. _vanity fair_. 58 (january 1995): 24. -----. infomercials for the deal-a-meal corporation. prod. richard simmons, 1987-1995. susan sontag. 1964. "notes on camp," _a susan sontag reader_. new york: vintage, 1983. 109-119. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------rauch, 'saving philosophy in cultural studies: the case of mother wit', postmodern culture v7n1 url = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v7n1-rauch-saving.txt archive pmc-list, file rauch.996. part 1/1, total size 68704 bytes: -----------------------------cut here ----------------------------- saving philosophy in cultural studies: the case of mother wit by angelica rauch hobart and william smith colleges amr18@cornell.edu postmodern culture v.7 n.1 (september, 1996) copyright (c) 1996 by angelika rauch, all rights reserved. this text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of u.s. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, institute for advanced technology in the humanities. [1] in an attempt to ground the metaphysical nature of humans in form, immanuel kant pursues the possibility of a framed image without content. he calls this postulated state or mental product "purposiveness of representation." what he means by this is that when you are faced with the beautiful what happens in your mind is the process of forming an image with the crucial exception that this image never achieves completion, you can never quite grasp in a conscious, representional image what the beautiful is. it is in a way like the story of sisyphus, who rolls his rock up the mountain only to have it roll back downhill just as he reaches the summit--and so on, over and over again. this kind of repeated, and uncompleted, effort is the same activity as the mind games of imagination. the power of imagination is responsible for creating the image of the beautiful, and it has to start forever afresh in its attempt to build a new image whenever the previous is aborted just before it reaches closure--or, as kant says "form" or "schema." full form would turn a complex and fragmented image or figure into a conscious representation of a concept. but this is precisely what does not happen in the aesthetic experience. (kant asserts in the third _critique_ that imagination, when in reflexive play, "schematizes without concepts.") what happens instead, is the production of vague images which, in my interpretation of kant as the first postmodern thinker, i will call intuitions rather than images. [2] kant's postmodern status pertains to the difference between representative image and figure that figures according to internal, unconscious laws. it is in jean-luc nancy's words "not a world nor the world that takes on figure, but the figure that makes world."^1^ nancy compares this indeterminate figure to dream of a narcissus who does not know the surface he is looking at, who is oblivious to the matter and composition of the sign he interprets. it was the merit of kant to associate affect with the judgment of the beautiful. the aesthetic sign that elicits a feeling of pleasure, in this case also a libidinal affect, is first of all a presentation. and as nancy elaborates, nothing plays itself out but the play of presentation in the absence of a concrete, represented object. the imagination is only encouraged to fill in the void of the object and, as i will show in the following, to associate memories from the subject's unconscious history. these memories, as they are fleetingly touched by the play of imagination, are not subject to the general logic of representation; they do not have to appear as a reconstructed image of a concrete experience as if to be communicated to another person. rather, they contribute to the primarily affective state of the present aesthetic experience where concepts and logic are banned. it is here that psychoanalysis has completed kant's struggle with imagination as a non-representative power of thinking and with the status of feeling as judgment. since in my argument feelings are memories and therefore insert history into the process of thinking, kant's apparent formalism can be ammeliorated by his unacknowledged contingency on history and experience when it comes to the matter of imagination, or, as kant himself suggests, to "mother wit" in the question of taste. [3] kant's treatise on the aesthetic judgment tries to reformulate the question of the beautiful as a question of formality: how can beautiful form be reflected or be constituted in the mind so that its subjective judgment can find universal consensus? kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment gradually funnels into an analysis of the "power of imagination"(%einbildungskraft%) rather than imagination as sensuous representation, as concrete image content: how can imagination produce form if it does not work with concepts? it does not come as a surprise that kant needs to abandon an empirical, body-bound concept of imagination for a so-called "transcendental" power of imagination that will not be contaminated by a sensuality through which the body would enter into representation. the putative power of this transcendental imagination produces pure intuitions, representations of mere *possibilities* of experience. the question is whether the idea of transcendence can indeed dislodge human cognitive faculties from physical contingencies, and hence from one's body and sensations as they are also influenced by cultural objects. [4] insofar as transcendental imagination is contingent on the subject's existence, the implications of transcendentality for subjectivity would indeed be an affective determination of cognition. here kant's change in definition of the transcendental power of imagination from "a function of the soul" (in the first edition of the _critique of pure reason_) to "a function of understanding" (in the second edition of the _critique of pure reason_) is crucial for an investigation into the meaning of transcendence in metaphysical speculation about human nature. today we would say, the distinction between soul and reason is important when we investigate the process of meaning formation in psychological terms. in other words, it is the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processes. in the discourse of the 18th century, the authority of the soul attributed to imagination a separate and autonomous faculty of imagination. in the case of imagination being a function of understanding, it loses its creative and unconsciously fueled status; in this latter definition, imagination can indeed not transcend the control of understanding. kant's notion of transcendental imagination is therefore a purely formalist concept, one that must repress the body in judging aesthetic experiences and aesthetized and pleasurable cultural objects. [5] kant's (insurmountable) task in the _critique of judgement_ is to rationally combine a *definition of taste* with a concept of form that is not cognitive. it is his precise definition of the judgment of taste, for example "this rose is beautiful," that it is not a cognitive statement, and a cognition of the beautiful and the work of art is not achieved. why? because the judgement of taste is based on a feeling, he says, the feeling of pleasure, and i would like to warn my reader, kant is anything but a hedonist: this feeling of pleasure is one of "disinterested pleasure." (kant was clearly not a sensuous man; one only needs to read his biography). the funny thing about this subjective feeling of disinterested pleasure is that it is, as he claims, "attributed to everyone," anyone can or could feel this "disinterested pleasure" in the realm of the beautiful. i will get back to this paradox later. right now, i am concerned with kant's formalism in the aesthetic judgment of taste which is not supposed be cognitive. for, if the judgment of taste does not cognize anything, then the form of mental representations must be a non-cognitive form. this means, that the form of representation in the case of the beautiful cannot be issued by the faculty of reason because it would then have to be an "idea," that is a completed and framed and cookie-cut representation. instead, it must be a form that is an "intuition" of pure formality, or merely the experience of transcendence as a mental state. since the judgment of taste pertains to the feeling of pleasure, the problem naturally lies with the objectification of this feeling in representation. [6] transcendence and feeling are the two states that need to be represented to the mind. so, how then do you represent a feeling to the mind? feelings are first of all body-bound. kant is forever in a bind when he needs to make his move from the sensuous to the conceptual realm, from matter to form. his way out is to simply focus not so much on the form as on the process of forming a representation itself. this mental preoccupation with the process of form, of forming as such, ties up imagination and diverts its attention away from the body, from the sensuous realm, and from physical pleasure, and, as i will argue, away from the unconscious memory of the body of the mother. for it is the maternal body that supplies the infant subject with its first experience of wholeness, of absolute pleasure, and therefore of a libidinal subjectivity. [7] this formal/material impasse in the process of representing the beautiful reveals philosophy's ambivalence towards imagination as a sensuous and intellectual faculty. the point of mediation between the sensuous and the intellectual would be *affect*, or rather a presumed *affective* character of imagination. this impasse proves that thinking the "imaginative" state, what kant calls the purposiveness of representation, is impossible, precisely because it serves no purpose in the psychical economy of affective cathexis and emotional investment. although an essential part of creative imagination is the capacity of wit, wit has to be excluded from the philosophical paradigm of cognition. kant actually mentions the subcategory of mother wit (%mutterwitz%) to stress that wit cannot be acquired or learned, but that it has to be inherited, presumably from the mother. and only what can be learned can also be cognized. mother wit however belongs to the category of intuition, of a non-representational imagination that is linked to the body and to affect. here one goes purely on intuition, and on feeling, as our still current turn of phrase suggests. but this exclusion, on kant's part, of the intuitive knowledge of wit and mother wit means coming to terms with neither the *phenomenon* nor with the *feeling of creativity*. kant cannot come to terms with creativity because the implicitly acknowledged source of creativity in intuitive wit is the nurturing body of the mother; and this body has to be explicitly suppressed for the sake of glorifying the enlightened individual, whose undividable status is warranted by reason alone. (for, what makes us a common species and legitimates the right of equality is the fact that we all have in common the power of reason and rational thought.) by inhibiting the desire for merging with an other, the unconscious mother, the obscure feeling of a dependency and the experience of imperfection which accompanies the separated and individuated self is also eliminated. the inevitability of this desire for an other manifests itself only negatively, in an attempt to split off the affective nature from the cognitive self as a way of denying one's dependence on something prior to consciousness. once the foundational (m)other is killed off in the self, the possibility for relating to a social other on existential grounds diminishes. kant's reference to the "natural talent" of %mutterwitz% serves him well if he wants to reflect the psychological structure of a %mimesis% in which the imaginary body of the mother not only produces a concrete sense of relation but also the intuition of the mere *possibility* of a sensical relationship between radically different things. kant explains the capacity of mother wit as one that lets us compare unrelated and apparently different things; mother wit creates in the mind a new context for separate, cultural objects which then take on a different meaning. this facilitating, creative, and utterly subjective mental capacity in %mimesis% seems to resist further abstraction and must legitimate itself indeed as a natural talent; otherwise, imagination needs to rely on the fictional canon as providing necessary examples for grasping human nature through symbolized representations in language. [8] with respect to affect as the material base of experience, kant's critical move must aim at abandoning, if not repressing, affect altogether if he wants to define imagination as the formal power capable of detaching itself from the body. such isolation of imagination from the body and from sensuous experience shifts the power of imagination towards the faculties of understanding and reason. yet, bodily experience, namely sensation and affect, is what supports imagination and makes it an effective power for self-experience. experience supplies the material for an imaginative translation into meaning. and it is this translation that represents the central issue in aesthetic judgment. for, what follows the feeling of pleasure, which supports aesthetic judgments, is a reflection on the mind's relationship with feeling. such reflection should, according to kant, result in a "feeling of being alive," a %lebensgefuhl%. through feelings, the body has an impact on self-consciousness. it mediates between self and environment. one might be prompted to wonder "what might have determined the self" until this moment of self-awareness purely determined by feeling. an answer to this question would suggest that the subject does not decide the meaning of past experiences until they actually coalesce in a name for the feeling involved. (hence, psycho-therapists always want to label the "feelings" that disturb you.) without previous experiences, preserved in unconscious fantasies about the mother/other, the present experience could not motivate the subject's imagination to produce an intuition. past experience is needed for the creative power of imagination to draw on. without recourse to history and an awareness of the past, the very concept of experience loses its cognitive validity. and now i should state my thesis: experience only has significance because of its genealogical and erotic structure. [9] if the judgment of taste does not rest on experience and history, as it surely cannot when it is regarded as the result of an abstraction from feeling and body, then it represents little more than a conceptual construct of an intellectual feeling and a heuristic device for mediating imagination and understanding. kant's understanding of (aesthetic) experience results from a separation of mind and body. his reasoning is caught in opposing the categories of materiality to those of formality. he is therefore unable to link these categories plausibly without the insight into a third "category," the category of an unconscious translation, or what walter benjamin calls "correspondence" (which benjamin extracts from the poetry of the french poet baudelaire "correspondences"). this third category of mediation, the correspondence, calls attention to itself only in the case of aesthetic judgment; for in the aesthetic judgment, the faculties are not preoccupied with cognizing the (beautiful) object. what is cognized can perhaps be summarized as the impact of the past upon the present, or even as history as a condition for consciousness. [10] if reflection on feeling were to bring about a cognitive judgment, an understanding, then it would have to evoke a lived past for an assessment of the present experience. a hermeneutical process of the mind would thus indeed bring about an understanding of the self as a historically constituted being. kant, seemingly handicapped in this case by an epistemology of universal reason, cannot allow such subjective, and necessarily historical, understanding of the status of cognition. his aesthetic philosophy, however, manifests an attempt at combining the subjective category of experience with the universal truth of beauty. he follows through in this attempt by analyzing the function of various cognitive faculties generally involved in experience. this maneuver, necessary for postulating the universality of the judgment of taste, exposes kant's ongoing struggle with the concept of knowledge, as he is unable to theoretically separate knowledge from cognition. his bias towards an objective, universalizable knowledge, a knowledge that results from %a priori% logical categories of consciousness, prevents him from recognizing a hermeneutic process of cognition. when he associates materiality with sensation, which is variably subjective, he means by "reflection" only the formal, mental movement that is at stake when a phenomenon is apprehended into a representation, a formally closed, sensuous, and stable image. the mental process in *reflective judgment* leads to an accord of the faculties, which kant stresses to be the same psychological result in everyone. it is here that kant's moral underpinning of the aesthetic judgment shows through. since the mind's interest does not lie with the object but with the subject's feelings, kant can come up with the idea of a "disinterested pleasure" of the beautiful. [11] since for kant, reflection only implies an apprehension according to form, the question remains: what is the form of a feeling? feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. these images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain. in the case of the beautiful, it is not the mental representation of a rose that is pleasurable but the images remembered along with the subject's affection by the rose. [12] a temporal differentiation of affect and feeling suggests that there are actually two pleasures at stake, the pleasure of the original which creates the affect, and the pleasure that results from many fleeting images associated with that pleasurable feeling. this pleasure of a pleasure relies on the (formal) power of imagination to continuously create and dissolve images for the purpose of keeping pleasurable feeling alive. no *one* image can do justice to the beautiful experience. the fuel for this ongoing process of imaging is supplied by the memory of pleasure to which, equally, no one (framed) representation does justice- why? because the memory is preserved in the material of *feeling*, not in a memorable *image* or, as benjamin would say, a "souvenir." if kant has problems with the evaluation of feeling and affect as concerns their part in knowledge, he is all the more aware of the seminal role imagination plays in the mental process leading to cognition: "every reference of representations [to imagination], even those of sensations, can be objective...but not the reference of [the representation of] the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, whereby nothing is signified in the object, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation."^2^ crucial for the judgment of taste is the subject's (meta)affection by a representation of his being affected with pleasure. being affected by representation means being affected by one's imagination which brings about the feeling of being alive (%lebensgefuhl%). this feeling, in turn, calls for another representation. but the feeling of being alive exceeds representation; thus, feeling occupies a heterodoxical status in knowledge. the discrepancy between feeling and representation impels the production of art whence intuitions derive their visual material. the visibilities rendered by art affect the subject anew each time. [13] the significance of (kant's mention of) "mother wit" may be greater yet if we cite the psychoanalytic feminist vantage in the physical premises of knowledge and desire.^3^ a feeling of pleasure that stems from a primary experience with an other, i.e. the mother-child union, will unconsciously preserve the memory of this (m)other as a condition for feeling good. the relation between the child and the mother (read: the concrete object of pleasure) becomes a memory by which the developing subject recognizes a similar relationship to an object of pleasure in the future. whereas the mother at this later point has become a fantasy of the object at hand, the feeling between self and other has remained the same; hence, the feeling could guide the subject's conscious imagination to a creative interpretation or assessment of any object at hand. this kind of pleasurable connection and unhampered transference of the mother's body onto the object to be cognized could engender the capability of mother wit. through such transference the object becomes a "transitional object"^4^ as a means of coping with desire and the experiental difference between real and ideal. such libidinal coping via transitional objects materializes the passage of time--until the nurturant (m)other returns to the abandoned child--into subjective history. [14] a "witty" interpretation of an object always works on the object's form, a form that receives its impetus from some previous representation that supplies the interpreter with an intuition. for kant, "mother wit" suggests the natural gift of forming an imaginary connection between concrete experience and abstract knowledge. we might conclude that the capacity for wit in general develops through the use of mother wit, the correlation between feeling and intuition in aesthetic representation or judgment. %mutterwitz% seems to comprise the creative, or flexible, part of imagination which in the process of judgment transforms the past and arrives at a cognizable intuition of the present. [15] this natural ability to judge with mother wit does not need recourse to a conceptual frame in order to effect an understanding. we might say, kant unconsciously utilizes a concept of the subject whose self-containment is not guaranteed from the start. yet, if the subject were merely constituted by %a priori% mental faculties, its self-sameness could not be in doubt. instead, the kantian subject finds itself engaged in a process of developing first its various faculties, especially the skill for interpreting its experiences. essential for such experiences, and consequently for interpretation and the production of sense, is an *other*, as both source of stimulation and as "surface projection" for the subject's ego formation. in the very first stage of human development, the other is the family of care givers who provide the child not only with its first experiences but also with the first meaning (i.e. language) to be associated with such experiences. the family mediates and thus manifests knowledge for the child. kant, however, does not reflect upon this onto-genetic aspect of knowledge and the development of faculties. though a reflection on the meaning of the conventional wisdom of %mutterwitz% might have yielded such a developmental, if not historical, insight into the constitution of the subject as well as of knowledge. what should not be forgotten here is the fact that the other provides the support in the development of faculties, because the sensuous experience of an other, and of the subject's own body via this other, provides the context for mimetic development. in this physical rather than meta-physical construction of an origin, experience testifies to its material ground, a ground that is not easily left for the purpose of some sort of *formal experience*. for matters of philosophical representation alone, the body provides the necessary metaphors in explaining unimaginable phenomema. [16] in an effort to rehabilitate the body for a critique of the dialectics of enlightenment, hartmut and gernot bohme (two german literature professors who wrote an important book called _the other of reason_) have traced the human body in kant's scientific discourse about the universe. they emphasize that kant's ideas are not supportable by laws of physics but only by his own body experiences.^5^ the experience of touch, pressure, and jolt which causes the body to resist the "onslaught" of an other evidently motivates kant to imagine the formation of spheres in space. kant defines the structure of matter as an antagonistic relationship of polar forces: attraction and repulsion. particularly repulsion is made out to be a basic force because it balances the force of attraction so that bodies, their volume, are "closed off by definite boundaries."^6^ at the body's boundaries, the forces of repulsion and attraction are equal. the body's limits are extremely important for the protection of their form, and we could say also for their identity. intruders have to be warded off if the body's identity is to be maintained by its boundaries: "the force of impenetrability is a repulsive force keeping off [limits] any exterior being that might further approach."^7^ yet it is through the play of competing contracting and expanding forces that bodies, or rather spheres, delimit their shape.^8^ hartmut and gernot bohme demonstrate in their investigation into kant's pre-critical writings how kant searched for comparable phenomena of conflicting forces in the intellectual, psychological, and moral realms. kant's examples are indeed those of pleasure and displeasure, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, etc. these are all polar forces of repulsion and attraction, because *one* force cannot simply be annihilated by its logical negation, but only by the *effect* of an existing, polar other. kant explicitly states that there could be no difference in spiritual/mental matters and in the forces operative in the physical world: these forces can only be compensated with another, opposing force: "[a]n inner accidence, a thought of the soul cannot cede to exist without a truly active force exerted by/in the same thinking subject."^9^ [17] the parallel structure in patterns of thought between this "physical" kant and the biologically grounded sigmund freud for the purpose of analyzing human consciousness is striking. this similarity in thought almost forges a new kantian paradigm, "the process of unconscious repression necessary for unity of thought," or what freud has defined as consciousness, "to know and not know at the same time." the participant of an unconscious is kant's unacknowledged paradigm of cognition. he had no recourse to the category of the unconscious, but in effect he is arguing for the necessity of repression which is only lifted in the non-cognitive judgment of aesthetic experiences. [18] protecting the unity of the self through a model of consciousness requires an activity of thought in discernable images, in formed representations. to guarantee the form of being or its framed perception by the subject, the excess of matter, the memory of a limitless cosmic mother, has to be repressed. while the subject's ego is still linked with the mother/body in its affective capacity of wit, both ego and (m)other are transformed into a self-contained cognitive subject that takes its stand (%gegenstand%) against "mother nature" from which it forms its objects. professors bohme assume a similar kind of development of the philosophical subject when they analyze the philosophy of memory "as a reconstruction of the original detachment and emancipation of the ego from the symbiosis with mother nature."^10^ kant can only admit cognitive status to what *is* and *can be* formed and framed in a mental image, because otherwise the force of the (m)other of matter %per se% cannot be overcome: the force of fear (of being engulfed by a noncognizable other) cannot be compensated with the force of (objectifying) reason. kants says: "in dealing with nature, only the legitimacy of the %cogito% now prevails which has purified itself from its traditional fusion with nature."^11^ [19] traditional practices of communicating with nature- e.g., caring for nature, experiencing one's dependency on nature, acting out in ritual one's fear of nature as well as one's gratitude--are no longer accepted as an enlightened form of being. these practices are not, in principle, guided by reason. nature becomes that which must follow the laws of scientific reason. such is the revolutionary turn in the conception of nature that kant institutes alone in his conceptual shift from his pre-critical to his critical writings. nature is no longer considered a maternal nature, a %natura naturans%, but a product, %natura naturata%. the human body is transformed into a "body of reason"^12^ for the purpose of its cognition. [20] priority of the intelligible turns the body into a surface for reason's projections; projections are those images that cover up the body's "wounds" inflicted by social inscriptions^13^ (i.e., the process of social conditioning) preventing individuals from being *in touch* with their own, physical experiences. therefore social community loses its immediate ground in the body, and in a common physical history. community is instead artificially legitimated in mediated ideologies and *images* of social existence and social cohesion. the subject no longer perceives his or her body directly but through representations in which "the subject affects himself in an intuition %a priori% and becomes its own object according to a principle of synthetic representation %a priori% of transcendental cognition."^14^ [21] no matter how material or maternal experience may be, in the conscious mind the mother has to leave. afraid of the indeterminability of matter, kant not only insists on the formality of knowledge, he also insists on the formality in the judgment of the beautiful. only the formality of experience, purified of any sensuous aspect, "admits of universal communicability."^15^ kant even construes the formality of judgment as analogous to the theoretical and conceptual power of understanding. since such an analogy to conceptual cognition necessitates the abandonment of the body or the other, the judgment's task is to overcome the body in the feeling of pleasure; otherwise, it cannot claim its universal validity.^16^ in psychoanalytic terms, the separation from the (m)other has to be reinstigated with every judgment of taste. the avoidance of being captured by affects or passions--unconscious offshoots from the ego's desire for the other--indeed requires what freud calls %trauerarbeit%, a labor of mourning. the work of mourning is the conscious effort of giving up the fantasy of the mother, a fantasy that sparked the subject's *interest* in feeling pleasure. in this light, mourning is necessary for clearing the subject's mind and preserving the freedom of reason. [22] with the concept of the *sublime*, which is avowedly part of the aesthetic experience and particularly of post-modern experience, kant explains the mind's transformation of the impact of the other, the affects of terror and fear, into a reflection on the power of the human mind as such. the mental capacities supply the subject with the possibility of transcending the terrifying other in imagination. awareness of one's imaginative capacities re-enforces the will to dissociate from that threatening other. the sublime ultimately rests with the subject and his mental superiority to the seemingly sublime and hence overwhelming particularity of the object. a psychologically based sublime thus safeguards the affection from becoming passion and from swaying the ego to surrender to the power of the other. [23] in his treatise on the sublime, kant struggles to find a justification for dissociating reason from affection. the latter upsets the mind too much and motivates it to seek a purpose for this affection. but reflective judgment does not produce a purpose; it only proceeds according to the "principle" of purpose and produces *the sense of an ability* to represent affect. this sense of one's ability for representation, the purposiveness of experience, would have to be contained in the resulting feeling of pleasure if the latter is to be an intellectual feeling. for the mastery of the initial sublime affect, however, the intellectual transformation does little more than merely suppress the other's alterity. it seems as if the subject's desire to know has been curtailed with an insight, instilled by reason, that whatever the unknowable quantity of the other may be, the subject *qua consciousness* is always bigger than "it." [24] the evocation of an unknowable "id" should be less a matter of homophony than a psychologically conditioned move, on kant's part, toward maintaining uniformity of the mind. since the unknowable affect or nature threatens to split consciousness, kant must retroactively efface the initial sense of the affect's purposiveness (read: the affect's knowability) by denying all cognitive content to the power of judgment (which includes the value of aesthetics and pleasure) and by positing its similarity to understanding in grammatical *subjunctive* only.^17^ since the universal form, the concept, is not given in the beautiful, its reflection in the mind must entail a process of deformation that merely becomes manifest in and as the analytics of the *sublime.* by force of the mind's incapacity to represent the beautiful, and we remember it is only the beautiful's affect that is reflected, the beautiful itself is always already sublime in its "non-form." reason performs a therapeutic and moral task for the mind, which is to keep the affect in check and guarantee the equilibrium of faculties in the aesthetic as a *sane* mental state. the sublime portion of the aesthetic is determined, for instance, by the affect of enthusiasm. but such a strong affection, which no "sensible representation" can capture, thus causing the imagination to run wild, endangers the "noble mental state," the only (natural) state that kant admits as truly sublime. kant is thus forced to eliminate affection from aesthetic pleasure altogether: "but (which seems strange) the absence of affection (%apatheia, phlegma in significatu bono%) in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason."^18^ [25] what should have become evident in my exposition, is that kant nonetheless starts out with the sense impression of the beautiful object and with nature, even though he dwells on the mental processes which bring about the formality of aesthetic judgment. both sensation and nature--precisely because they resist subsumption under concepts and hence constitute an unknowable other in the aesthetic judgment--need to be regulated by laws of representation. the establishment of such laws force kant into a concern with the formality of representation. this focus on formality rather than the *physical* support or context of reflection prevents him from taking into consideration what novalis and friedrich schlegel, the major figures in the philosophy of what could be called proto-freudian romanticism, have called "the subject's inner sensibility," its sensitivity, which affects the subject's power of intuition. %sensibilitat%, or sensitivity, is a requirement for perception and aesthetic experience. hence, perception names a capacity that is patterned after the subject's past. this view subverts a concept of taste which reduces taste to its formal properties in judgment. such a reduction of taste to its mere form demonstrates kant's avoidance of historical considerations for conceptualizing the subject's experience of the present. if i had the space, i would show my reader how kant's epistemological innovation of criticism (%kritik%) is, after all, grounded in history, the history of taste, rather than in a "transcendental aesthetics" that analytical philosophers opposed to cultural studies like to pursue. the method of critique takes as its object the particularity of taste, one that is contingent on the capability of discrimination. [26] in a nutshell, you cannot arrive at a judgement of taste or the statement that you like something without the ability to compare the present sensation to a previous one. or, in other words, if you don't remember your pleasurable mother, you will not stand a chance of finding this pleasure again in things beautiful. [27] in the 18th century, this comparing, transferring agency of the mind was conceptualized as the faculty of wit or--at least in the first half of the century--as spirit (%geist%), which were both regarded as very distinct from reason. reason represented scholarly bound (that is, coherent) thought, whereas %geist% generated free roaming and creative thought. by this definition, %geist% is no different from the concept of fantasy fashioned by european romantics in relation to thinking. before the romantics placed their emphasis on fantasy as a power of thinking, 18th century philosophers of aesthetics acknowledged a mental capacity or talent in wit (which never occurs separately from %geist%) which was responsible for the psychical translation process and its rhetorical representation in language. the presence of wit in a person accounts for the translation of %vorstellung% into %darstellung%. this conception of wit foreshadowed the aesthetics of "genius" to which kant fully subscribed. philosophers before kant reflected on the connection between psyche and language, and interpreted wit as a faculty that was contingent on language to express its power: wit creates metaphors in language. language, in its sensuous power of expression, reflects a certain knowledge of human experience, otherwise it could not affect the reader or listener on the level of feeling or imagination. this affection only happens if the faculty of wit has previously assembled the signifiers of language in such a way--i.e. in a text--that the receptive mind can easily compare different things that otherwise might never be compared. with reference to benjamin, this comparison may only be possible by means of a tradition in which language and individual psyche are related in history. tradition presents itself as what benjamin has called the "canon of non-mimetic representation" in language.^19^ the capacity of wit turns written signifiers into figurative signs. wit was acknowledged as a significant power of artistic representation in the burgeoning critique of aesthetics.^20^ [28] wit came to represent an ingenious faculty to perceive similarities in different things. again, benjamin's notion of %unsinnliche ehnlichkeiten% (non-mimetic similarities) in his essay on the mimetic capacity lends itself to an interpretation of wit as that mimetic capacity. such a rendition of wit inevitably ruptured the mimetic model of representation which had been established on the premise that appearance resembled identity. wit interferes in the mirror relationship of %urbild% and %abbild%, distorting and distracting imagination in its attempt to represent the object. wit causes imagination to be creative and to assemble the various parts of the object in different and unexpected ways so that different things can be compared and subsequently associated with one another in the perceiver's mind. the experience of surprise resulting from the unexpected relations survives in today's meaning of wit in german as "joke."^21^ when freud elaborates on the commemorative power of joke, he points to an "ingenius" faculty of the unconscious mind in understanding a joke. wit suggests an unconscious knowledge of relationships between things. for reasons of cultural taboos, this knowledge can only emerge in an oblique or non-mimetic linguistic representation. the fact that consciousness of the tabooed meaning is accompanied by explosive laughter shows the repressive tension involved in the socio-cultural reglementation of thought and meaning. by analyzing people's mental constructions, freud has also demonstrated that conscious thought requires the repression of certain similarities between experiences. the joke's effect does not stem from an innovative connection between things but merely reveals an already cognized but repressed familiarity with tabooed ideas attached to these things. finally, freud's notion of the uncanny (%unheimlich%) expands on this phenomenon of an unconscious familiarity in the feeling of fear. [29] associating very different things in the linguistic representation of an object is made possible through the creation of seemingly artificial similarities; artificial, because artistic representation rests on the rhetorical quality of language which initially produces such similarities between things or signs. from this vantage point, language exerts a psychological power by prompting additional meanings that would otherwise be forgotten in the reference or mirror function of linguistic signs. this latter utilitarian concept of language prevails in the science of linguistics not dissimilar from the view of texts in the positivist assumptions of historicism. the antidote to such a constrained view of language is comprised by the realm of the aesthetic, or an assumed literariness of texts, which is decried for poetic license confined to this realm. this antidotal status of so-called literary texts was, in the history of aesthetics, finally cancelled by benjamin. his critique insists that for the purpose of building historical consciousness aesthetic and allegorical strategies are necessary. these strategies of representation (%darstellung%) parallel the psycho-analytic transference and essential temporality in the formation of thought (%vorstellung%). the similarities produced by the rhetorical and figural power of language can be viewed as examples of a belated intuitive connection supplied by wit. wit thus proves indispensable for imagination as a cognitive power in aesthetic representation. [30] contingent on mother wit, aesthetic judgment, even in its reflective component does not act arbitrarily (freed from certain universalities) but finds its support in a subjective history of desire and feelings. kant's notion of transcendental power might have to be abandoned in a psychology of subjectivity which seems to be expressed and analyzable in the aesthetic realm. we may, however, read transcendental power as merely a philosophical term for an 18th century theory of invention. invention was held to be the result of absolute creativity and not a function of memory, or forgetfulness; this memory aspect nonetheless resounds in the german word %er-findung% and in english might be associated in the term dis-covery. but if wit is responsible for something new, it might only seem new to consciousness when it is represented as art.^22^ if this is the case, then the novelty rests merely on the feature of the-finally-becoming-conscious of what had already been latent but could not be cognized. we remember that freud found the wittiness of a joke to consist of the unconscious meanings of words which had been commonly repressed in accordance with a cultural taboo. in this view, what underlies wit is an unconscious knowledge that is un-covered in an imaginative, witty use of language. this cognitive-creative structure, reflected in newly detected similarities between things, seems to fit the 18th century use of the concept "soul" with which the notions of wit, spirit, and imagination are almost interchangeably linked. all these notions designate an activity of the psyche that interferes with a presumed %a priori% distinction of subject and object, displacing and even dispersing both into a new constellation in representation. an unconscious agreement between subject and object is articulated in the repetition of signifiers. in the temporality of this repetition, previously contiguous or associated features of an experience are recombined in the conscious emergence of a single sign. the analytical-philosophical (that is, nonlinguistic) approach of metaphysics always denied this temporalized and historically significant liaison between subject and object while insisting on their definite distinction. [31] what sets this activity of the psyche in motion? why would the individual, encountering textuality, "see" something differently than before? and why, when looking at separate things, would the subject indulge in a vision of their similarities? such questions aim at identifying the motivation of wit and fantasy. they try to address the e-motional relationship between the subject and the object. the process starts, again, with affect. depending on its force, affect triggers an emotional interest in the objects and motivates the subject to perceive similarities. the knowledge supporting the perception of similarities can emerge only once affect has set in motion the mental translation process, the movement of %meta-phora%, that turns affect into images and reflected feelings. the power or rather the intensity of affect depends upon the impact of experience in the subject's past. the past experience is unconsciously repeated along with the sense impressions of the current object. the subject's disposition vis-a-vis the object is thus influenced by the past as it engages the subject's desire. this animated desire ultimately forms the subject's vision of the object. it is this desire-driven vision that constitutes the basis for a value judgment, such as "this rose is beautiful." given the view that the past is represented only in feeling, what the mind compares is not so much the particularities of various objects, as it compares the affect with an unconscious desire. to what degree this desire is satisfied by the present experience determines whether the contingent affect is reflected now as a feeling of pleasure or pain. if there is pleasure, the affect has satisfied the desire for self-completion, for the imaginary experience of being whole. in the _critique of judgment_, kant recrutes this kind of pleasure as a basis for the judgment of taste. [32] my elaboration of the feeling of pleasure and pain as originating in the past may suffice to suggest an analogy between the creation of metaphor in both language and the mind. the %tertium comparationis%, which functions as the reference point for a comparison of different things, may indeed be provided by the capacity for pleasure and pain in the psychical apparatus. in kant's theory of aesthetic judgment, the feeling of pleasure imports a subjective purposiveness (%zweckmassigkeit%) into mental representation.^23^ purposiveness precedes the cognition of an object and sets in motion the psychical activity of comparing the affect with the unconscious desire in the subject. the activity of comparing will "find," i.e. create (%erfinden%), similarities between the pleasurable experience in the past and the one in the present, all projected at first outward, enveloping with fantasy the world of objects. the creative power that finds and has traditionally always found such similarities is the artistic genius in aesthetic representations. but in our postmodern culture where objects have turned into aesthetic icons, the aesthetic effects in popular culture are triggered by a fantasy of loss and remembrance of things past. everyone resorts to wit to assemble into a pleasurable configuration and familiar life context the cultural debris of history and aesthetic tradition, to which the objects-turned-icons allude. [33] since the object is of no cognitive concern in aesthetic judgment, it is the subject's sense of familiarity and connectedness with her past that is being challenged in the beautiful. this appears as a familiarity for which she has no concept or representation but only a feeling of pleasure that expresses the connection with the past, a feeling that lingers while affecting the person's mood. mood calls attention to itself in the lingering of the feeling and the contemplation of the beautiful. kant defines this mood (%stimmung%) as a state of inner harmony with all faculties in playful accord (%ubereinstimmung%). (the semantic identities in the german words for mood and accord already suggest a "sensible" correspondence between mental and physical phenomena.) such a mood might also be analyzed as a harmony between unconscious drive and conscious reality. but reality here is the irreality of the imagination. in the beautiful, the experience is not one of objectivity or exterior reality but of the formation of subjective intuitions. the intuition of the beautiful is an intuition of feeling. in this state of intuition, the subject is made to reflect upon her own %gemut%, her state of mind, her *mood*, through which she gains a sense of life, %lebensgefuhl%. [34] if wit stands for the capacity to compare an unconscious past with its similarity in a different medium such as language, it must itself be partly unconscious and partly conscious. indeed, because of this ambivalent status, wit was conflated in the philosophy of the 18th century with equally ambivalent, non-conceptual but nonetheless potentially cognitive and creative powers such as %geist% and imagination (%einbildung%). the unconscious component in these faculties, which i have developed here as an aspect of history with respect to the form of representation and feeling, actually does surface in kant's critique of imagination, specifically in his discussion of genius as related to %geist%. if the unconscious not only makes itself felt in the aesthetic experience as a feeling of pleasure but also determines the latter's cognizability in the judgment of taste, then kant's term %mutterwitz% for the *natural* talent of judgment already invokes a connection between an unconscious and a conscious faculty. intuition of the beautiful relies on the mediating capacity of such a natural talent; this talent is all the more important for the transformation of an intuition into a mental representation. if mother wit performs the switch from intuition to representation, then the exact status of imagination in representation remains unclear, is it indeed a formal power (i.e transcendental) or an archive of image content (i.e., empirical)? is it an %einbildungskraft% (power), and thus possibly an extension of the force of desire, or a phenomenon and thus a phantasy (%einbildung%) about the form of the object, i.e., the other? [35] if the aesthetic judgment consists of a process of reflection where imagination is free to produce intuitions, then it seems to be based on an %a priori% (unconscious) knowledge of pleasure. in german, %vermogen%, the term for mental faculty and mental capacity, is semantically related to the word %vermachtnis% meaning "legacy." legacy implicates the past as an active agent in the present, and this is made explicit in the incorporated noun %macht% (power). in the signifying capacity of humans, the power of legacy transpires in the idea of tradition, understood as both translation and inheritance. as a mental activity, this legacy or tradition asserts itself in the capacity of wit. if the faculty of wit is inherited from the past as %mutterwitz%, wit cannot be a formal category of consciousness but must be a capacity of formation that is unconsciously derived from the *mater*-iality of the primal experience of completion and its resulting pleasure. in the cultivation of genius (%bildung%), an appeal is made to this inheritance that constitutes the subject's nature which kant claims gives the rule to art. the universality that kant ascribes to the judgment of taste can only be based on a concept of nature that does not exist in opposition to culture, but that is above all derived from culture and hence developed from the formation of individuals (%bildung%). what cannot be "cognized" in aesthetic judgment--the aesthetic judgment is not a cognition in kant's view- is the appropriation of the past as nature itself, because this nature only manifests itself in representations of an experience. thus, it is tradition that has to be invoked in the formation of the individual by appealing to his or her inheritance which *builds* genius as the capability of translating experiences into images. and the use of tradition is what distinguishes a postmodern experience from a modernist experience. the past is after all not dead, never in the individual psyche that is always confronted with new specimens of a seeming present. notes: ^1^ jean-francois courtine, jean-luc nancy, et al., "the sublime offering," _of the sublime: presence in question_ (albany: suny up, 1993) 29. ^2^ "alle beziehung der vorstellungen, selbst die der empfindungen, aber kann objektiv sein...nur nicht die auf das gefuhl der lust und unlust, wodurch gar nichts im objekte bezeichnet wird, sondern in der das subjekt, wie es durch die vorstellung affiziert wird, sich selbst fuhlt." _kritik der urteilskraft_, 115. ^3^ psychoanalytic feminism disputes the patriarchial mode of separation and brings evidence for a psychological, specifically male, need to repudiate the primary identification with the mother in order to arrive at a sense of individuality. nancy chodorow in _the reproduction of mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender_ (berkeley: california up, 1978) has argued that this assertion of (male) difference rests on a denial of the mother as dependence on the other as well as commonality with the other. in _reflections on gender and science_ (new haven: yale up, 1985) evelyn fox keller departs from this psychological dynamics and critiques the resultant dualism in western scientific thought where only one side is always idealized at the expense of subduing the other. this idealization of the autonomously thinking subject is typical in all modern social activity and forms of knowledge which projects the irritant (m)other outwards in order to dominate it/her, as jessica benjamin argues in "authority and the family revisited; or a world without fathers?" (_new german critique_, 13 [winter 1978] 35-57). in a more recent article benjamin elaborates the importance of intersubjective space for the recognition of desire and its resultant sense of self; the body of the mother provided the first space of this kind and the fantasy of the mother's body can be called up any time via "transitional objects" that are then identified as causing pleasurable experiences. cf. "a desire of one's own: psychoanalytic feminism and intersubjective space," _feminist studies /critical/studies _ ed. theresa de lauretis (bloomington: indiana up, 1986) 78-102. ^4^ cf. d.w. winnicott, "transitional objects and transitional phenomenon," in: _through paediatrics to psychoanalysis_ (london: tavistock, 1958). ^5^ "his [kant's] theory of bodies (spheres) is not a physics of the exterior of bodies, but from the interior of an organic body (leib), one's own sensibility. as such it is however repressed--excluded from the discourse of metaphysics and is nonetheless its hidden other." harmut and gernot bohme, _das andere der vernunft_ (frankfurt: suhrkamp, 1985) 103. ^6^ immanuel kant, _der gebrauch der metaphysik, sofern sie mit der geometrie verbunden ist, in der naturphilosophie, dessen erste probe die physische monadologie enthalt_ in _vorkritische schriften bis 1768_, vol. 2 (frankfurt: suhrkamp, 1977) 549. (in the following i shall refer to this text as _monadologie._) ^7^ kant, _monadologie_, 547 ("die kraft der undurchdringlichkeit ist eine zuruckstossungskraft, die jedes au ere von einer weiteren annaherung abhalt.") ^8^ cf. _monadologie_, 547-553. ^9^ kant, _versuch den begriff der negativen gro en in die weltweisheit einzufuhren_ in _vorkritische schriften_, 804. ^10^ cf. _das andere der vernunft_, 145: "wenn die geschichte des selbstbewusstseins zuruckgeht bis zu jener primaren unabgegrenztheit, die abgelost wird durch den dynamisch gerichteten organismus, von dem her sich die unterschiedenheit von objekten wie die einheit des selbstbewusstseins bilden--: wenn dies so ist, dann kann die philosophie der erinnerung als rekonstruktion der ursprunglichen ablosung und emanzipation des ich aus der symbiose mit der natur/mutter gelten." ^11^ bohmes,_ das andere der vernunft_, 140. ("im umgang gibt es nur noch die legitimitat des cogito, das sich von jeder traditionellen vermischung mit natur gereinigt hat.") ^12^ bohmes, _das andere der vernunft_, 109. ^13^ cf. dietmar kamper's critique of the "body's graphism" that engenders a different sense of historicity as well as of community mediated in the physical memory of pain: "on the basis of regularities in the similarity, correspondence, and sympathy with the pain of the other, a unique embodied temporality can emerge from all the metamorphoses of wound, scar, memory trace, pattern, sign." _zur soziologie der imagination_ (munchen: hanser, 1984) 159 (my translation). ^14^ kant, "wahrnehmung ist die empirische vorstellung wodurch das subjekt sich selbst in der anschauung a priori afficirt und sich selbst zum gegenstand nach einem prinzip der synthetischen vorstellung a priori der transzendentalen erkenntnis macht..." _opus postumum_ ii, in _kants gesammelte schriften_, ed. koniglich preusischen akademie der wissenschaften, vol. xxi/xxii (berlin, leipzig: de gruyter, 1900-1955) 461. ^15^ kant, _critique of judgment_, 60; cf. _kritik der urteilskraft,_ 140. ^16^ "thus the principle of judgment, in respect of the form of things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the purposiveness of nature in its variety. that is, nature is represented by means of this concept *as if* an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the variety of its empirical laws." kant, _critique of judgment_, 17; cf. _kritik der urteilskraft_, 89 (emphasis mine). ^17^ kant derives the principle for judging from the "universal laws of nature" which "have their ground in understanding, which prescribes them to nature...," thus it assumes a unity that the undetermined particularity of the object has with the determined laws in the faculty of understanding. in this same passage, kant continues to, however, by denying such a cognitive process: "not as if, in this way, such an understanding really had to be assumed (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle--for reflecting, not determining); but this faculty gives a law only to itself, and not to nature.)" _critique of judgment_, 16/17. translation modified according to sam weber's introductory essay to his book _institution and interpretation_ (minneapolis: minnesota up, 1986). in this essay he excavates the problematic status of "purposiveness" for an aesthetics that cannot come to terms with the status of feeling as other. "the purposiveness of nature," kant says in the same place, "is therefore a particular concept, %a priori%, which has *its origin solely in the reflective judgment*" (my emphasis). ^18^ kant, _critique of judgment_, 113; _kritik_, 199. ^19^ elaborating on the cultural history of mimetic capacity, benjamin compares language to astrological figurations to show how non-sensical similarities can be produced in imagination: "jedoch auch wir besitzen einen kanon nach dem das, was unsinnliche ahnlichkeit bedeutet, sich einer klarung naher fuhren la t. und dieser kanon ist die sprache." "uber das mimetische vermogen," _angelus novus_, 97. ^20^ cf. alfred baumler: "wit shows itself mainly in the happy invention of a 'flowery manner of speaking' [%verblumter redenarten%], i.e. metaphors, through which we are brought to [recognize] similarities among things, as metaphor is only a 'short allegory.'" in _kants kritik der urteilkraft. ihre geschichte und systematik. (das irrationalitatsproblem in er asthetik und logik des 18. jahrhunderts bis zur kritik der urteilskraft)_ (halle: niemeyer, 1923) 148. ^21^ "eine zweite gruppe technischer mittel des witzes--unifizierung, gleichklang, mehrfache verwendung, modifikation bekannter redensarten, anspielung auf zitate--la t als gemeinsamen charakter herausheben, *da jedesmal etwas bekanntes wiedergefunden wird*, wo man anstatt dessen etwas neues hatte erwarten mussen. dieses wiederfinden des bekannten ist lustvoll, und es kann uns wiederum nicht schwerfallen, solche lust als ersparungslust zu erkennen, auf die ersparung an psychischem aufwand zu beziehen." sigmund freud, "der witz und seine beziehung zum unbewussten," _gesammelte werke_, vol. 6, 135 (emphasis mine). ^22^ "wit discovers something new by tracing similarities between things.... similarities have to first be found, they are not obvious to everyone." baumler, 148. ^23^ "but the subjective element in a representation, which cannot be an ingredient of cognition, is the pleasure or pain which is bound up with it.... the purposiveness, therefore, which precedes the cognition of an object and which, even without our wishing to use the representation of it for cognition, is at the same time immediately bound up with it, is that subjective [element] which cannot be an ingredient in cognition. hence the object is only called purposive when its representation is immediately combined with the feeling of pleasure, and this very representation is an aesthetical representation of purposiveness." kant, _critique of judgement_, 26; _kritik der urteilskraft_, 99/100. -----------------------------cut here -----------------------------